Monkey spotting

“That bus has killed eleven people!”

There was excitement in the boy’s voice, but also respect.  He was looking at a vehicle which had hurtled up on the other side of the road.  Viruthampet is a dusty stop on the route between Katpadi and Vellore.  The boy was one of my pupils.  I think he could have told me something about each bus that came through.  I glanced along the side of the vehicle.  At the front there was no tally of kills, like a fighter plane, no painted shark’s teeth, but there was a definite energy about it, even when it was standing still.  In India, if a bus hits someone, the driver escapes on foot, or is beaten to death.   I wondered who was at the steering wheel today.

It’s not easy to get respect.  As for the teaching profession, and one teacher in particular – I’m not getting much respect in London right now.  Once upon a time, a tall, slim man wearing a dark coat and holding a black bag, like that poster for The Exorcist, would have made the little devils think twice before they misbehaved.  The big devils, too.  A head teacher actually laughed at me during a staff meeting before school.  It was my overcoat and briefcase.  No one else laughed, but it made me reflect on what the classroom held in store if the head teacher behaved like that. 

Parents don’t provide a refuge either.  Passing by me in the junior corridor, Mum and Dad laughed aloud when their little boy called out: “He looks like Mr Bean!”  No reprimand, not even the pretence of scolding him.  They thought he was being clever.  In a way, he was.  Then there was the woman who pulled my tie because her son claimed I’d shouted at him.  She pulled so hard she nearly ripped it off.  I should have been grateful.  She really wanted to punch me in the face.

I know a teacher who can’t spell literacy.  Perhaps we get what we deserve.  In some countries, people throw shoes at their leaders.  We all have our cultural traditions.   

Recently, scientists from Boston asked museum visitors to walk barefoot over a mechanised carpet that was able to analyse components of the foot.  They discovered that eight per cent of people have flexible, ape-like feet.  That does surprise me.  Only eight?  Many scientists believe that we’re descended from the apes. 

You can take off articles of clothing when you arrive at a museum.  A coat, a scarf, a walking stick.  But you keep most of your clothes on.  The cloakroom attendant will not usually want your shoes. No one will touch your tie.  A museum is not a school, or a prison.  You’re not likely to hang yourself when you get inside.  There’s no cavity search.  It’s not the back seat of the car on Friday night.  You’re not there to inseminate a stranger.  And it’s probably best not to.  

Truth v. Suction

The truth can do what it likes, but fiction must follow rules. 

In real life, even if we tried, we couldn’t stop bizarre things happening.  In fact, most people don’t want to stop bizarre things happening.  We love it when strange stories make the news.  What an odd old world we live in!  But fiction is not real life.  A lot of the fiction we read has not got much to do with real life at all.  It is reassuring and conventional.  That’s what fiction should be like, apparently. 

An amateur reviewer has found tireless: too bizarre.  Of all things, a fan of sci-fi, where you might expect bizarre events to be the norm; a genre full of incidents and characters too strange for us to come across in real life, at least for a century or two.  The War of the Worlds is an old favourite.  Remember the alien squid?  They’re not going to pop up on our radar anytime soon, but they did help establish a few rules.  The book is classic science-fiction.  The alien squid are normal now.

  

For the reviewer, tireless: is not just too bizarre.  It also imitates ‘decent literary satire.’  This raises an obvious question: what is decent literary satire?  Presumably in an effort to answer the same question, he started reading Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, a satire on Victorian society written in 1872, two minutes before he posted the review, according to the book club website. 

This literary satire has been around a while.  It must be decent literary satire.  Its alien squid have now become the norm.  Next day he gave Erewhon a three-star rating.  A pity Butler wasn’t around to watch.

Of course, our friend may be right; tireless: may be awful, but however perceptive a reviewer’s comments are, they still tell us more about the squid inside his own head than about the book in question.         

The Art of Persuasion

It was time to choose a pen name, something to put after Graham.  I had to scrap my first idea, Eye, as Google was suspicious.  When I tried to register for an email account, their website challenged me to prove that Graham Eye was a real person.  That was a kind of board game with robots which I could never hope to win.  In fact, I used to know a boy called Michael Eye.  I remember him very well, a quiet classmate in fourth grade.  I wonder how he’s coping in the digital age.  It’s not as though I chose Graham Arse, is it? I was disappointed.  Eye was good.  It’s a motif in the book I wrote.  Arse is, too, of course. 

In the end, I just stuck with the original, Spaid.   It’s hard to find the right name.  I don’t know what’s more difficult, though: getting people to believe you, or machines.  Children normally get what they want.  At school, we had French lessons at the top of a tower.  The master was an anxious Frenchman who has my sympathy now, although we tore him lovingly apart at the time.  One trick worked especially well.  When monsieur was looking somewhere else, a boy climbed over the window sill and down the drain pipe, then lay spread-eagled on the tar below.   It was a long way down.  His friends shouted and peered over the sill, calling on sir to come and look.  He did, then ran in horror down the spiral staircase.  I can still hear his stiff shoes tapping down the stone steps like a frantic, old typewriter.  The boy on the ground climbed back up the pipe.  We didn’t see the master’s face when he got downstairs, but we saw it when he came back up.  The young victim was at his desk again, and, for once, everybody was working. 

Here’s another difficult one – how to get people to give you money.  Buy your book, for example.  Or just hand over a coin.  In India, naked sadhus hang around bus stations, standing in front of well-off travellers with young children.  You pay them to go away.  One grey-beard I saw had tied a red string around his penis the way a girl binds up her pony tail.  The unexcited organ was at least six inches long.  It’s what we tell our pupils at school.  I mean, use the talents God has given.

 

Elsewhere, children who have never been to school do the same sort of thing.  Outside Rome’s Termini station, gypsy girls surround foreign tourists and lift their billowing frocks above their heads. You see little skeletons underneath a layer of skin.  Does embarrassment make people generous?  Some things must be true in every culture.  It could work on my reviewers.

More strange things, or Penis Riot’s Biggest Hits

It’ll be on the web.  Most of my ‘jokes’ are, well before I post them.  After seeing the recent headline Artist nails himself to Red Square, another hack like me must have read about the artist’s arrest, thought up Criminal nails himself and posted it before I did.

 

Pyotr Pavlensky nailed himself through the scrotum.  It’s not just another cock and ball story.  One part of Red Square has earned its name.  We saw the photos.  Almost.  In one shot, kind police have put a blanket over the naked Pyotr.  In another, some thoughtful editor has cut off, so to speak, the offending organs.  Genitals with nails in them might get us all into a mess.  The borders of good taste need to be defended.

 

PP, an artist, said his "fixation" was a metaphor for apathy in Russia.  Now that’s a metaphor.  His balls just sat there and let it happen.  He should have got a medal.  Instead, they carried him off to jail.  A fine name for an edgy boy band: Penis Riot.  Say hello to Pussy while you’re there.

 

Here’s the literal truth.  One of you will point it out anyway.  To say the criminal ‘nailed’ himself, that is, arrested himself, doesn’t make sense. To begin with, in this case no crime was committed before he literally nailed himself.  Ergo, no criminal, ergo, no arrest.  The artist only became a criminal once he had nailed himself in the cobblers. Cobbles that should read.  Who copy-edited this?  The police don’t normally arrest people before a crime has been committed, not this sort of crime.  He wasn’t plotting an attack on the Kremlin, not with a hammer.  And you can’t arrest yourself, can you?  Civic-minded criminals just hand themselves in – which brings me to my next pun.

 

The hammer and no sickle affair isn’t the only embarrassment of late for those whose job it is to handle extremities.  The press have taken up another artist and his physical integrity, Karipbek Kuyukov, and some different dangly things.  He was born without arms.  He was also denied a visa to enter the UK.

Handy publicity for the government, especially now that they’ve approved the building of a nuclear power station.  In the old Soviet Union, the Kuyukovs lived next to the main nuclear testing ground.  Karipbek was due to attend an anti-nuclear conference in Scotland.  After twenty years of campaigning, he must be an old hand at such events.

The excuse from the British Consulate in Istanbul, where he handed in his visa application: his “biometrics were of poor quality.”  Fingerprints blurred again?  Someone there needs glasses, because he made it clear on the form that he hasn’t got hands.  Just as well our failed visa applicant was not caught sneaking in through Dover, hanging on, somehow, beneath a lorry.  The bobbies wouldn’t have known where to slap the cuffs.  ’E looks ’armless to me.  (It must be on the net.  Let me know.)

Kuyukov holds the brush between his toes.  He also employs his mouth.  He is very skilled.  Most people use a hand if they are able.  But to judge from their work, a number of fully-equipped artists put their paintbrush somewhere else altogether.  I shouldn’t comment, though.  I don’t know enough about art.

What we think is strange

Foreigners do funny things, or don’t do everything that we do.

The North Koreans have their silent football matches. Spectators are not just silent, though. They’re motionless, as if their photograph is being taken.  Perhaps it is.  In the UK, crowds are monitored every week at every football ground.  Looking for hooligans.  But the BBC thought we’d find silent football strange, so they gave us a report about it on their website at the end of July, the heart of the football season in Panmunjom. 

I’m trying to guess the atmosphere inside a North Korean stadium.  Something like an art gallery or museum over here.  One lustreless nanny state will resemble another.  We just venerate our icons in different ways.  Men in shorts, I mean.  I’m not suggesting that visitors to art galleries in Pyongyang throw toilet rolls at the paintings or scream abuse at officials.  That would be fun to watch, of course.

Englishmen do funny things too.  When we listen to the news, we entertain ourselves by holding other people up to ridicule.  Some people make this pretty easy for us. Like the fellow in the Midlands who picked up a prostitute once too often.  Not the same one, mind.  Caught by police withdrawing £20 from a cash machine, he said that the colourful lady in the back of his car was showing him where to buy tomatoes.  He had to say something.  He was embarrassed.  But he just made it worse.  Woman on back seat.  £20 for tomatoes.  It didn’t add up. 

£20 for a woman doesn’t add up either. 

When we see the news, we want some colour.  The cash/car/coquette report included a generic photograph of boxed tomatoes.  This is strange.  We all know what these plump, red-faced little things look like.   Most of us have had the pleasure.  If we needed an illustration, why not show a tubful of prostitutes? 

There was more, juicy tattle a few days ago.  The police were at the centre of this mess, too.  Revellers dressed as comic-book heroes nailed a fugitive.  Happy tweets emerged from local police stations about the incident, which had ended up in a supermarket.

"Thank you to Batman, Robin, Robin's Dad, a Smurf, and the Hoff for helping us on Friday night.  Sorry about the toilet roll aisle."

"Robin assaulted, police called, collective assisted our foot chase, minor upset to shelving during arrest.  You couldn't script it!"

Is a new craze sweeping the precincts?  It’s not all film noir, obviously. 

Robin was the victim, not Batman, or one of the others, not even the Smurf.  That’s not strange, really.  He does get a bad press.  It’s always ‘Batman and Robin,’ never ‘Robin and Batman.’  The lad is a pinch precious.  A pedestrian probably thought he was asking for it.

It was all very entertaining.  A few punches, a pursuit, men in tights.  The cops may giggle at the irony, but if no one had dressed up in the first place, there would probably have been no crime. 

For our tutorial next week, bring along tireless:, or Style and Tone in Graham Spaid

I have a science degree in Zoology. I am also taking a degree in English Literature. I am 53 years old. At three o'clock last night I finished my dissertation on the godawful Duchess of Malfi. 

I'm sorry Graham but I didn't like your book and as to why I will relate here. I found the book confusing and at times garbled. This was due to the poor use of quotation marks; they were either missing or placed at the beginning of speech and then not added to the end of the speech or vice versa. Also the sentence structure, syntax and grammar was poor.

When relating a story by Jim you place this all to often in first person rather than second person.

Other notes I made are as follows,

- When you wrote of the fellow falling off the bus you wrote, "like a sheep crook or something had hooked his collar from behind and just jerked him off. (Aside: No Pun intended...)." For there to be a pun there has to be context somewhere in the previous sentence/s, there is none. "jerked him off" is certainly a double entrende but not a pun. Also the "or something" is superfluous.

- You write, "Jim made a gesture like d'Artagnan sweeping of his hat before the King of France." Firstly, how could Jim make this gesture when the bus was 'packed' according to what you wrote earlier in the chapter? Secondly, the gesture would be meaningless in India. Thirdly, the simile is too verbose.
- "A tiny wing of panic lifted up inside me, then was still. (My metaphor). There is no metaphor. A metaphor is a figure of speech in which an implied comparison is made between two unlike things that actually have something in common. 

- "pulled down an old shed which, like Tintern Abbey, was a pleasant ruin." Another poor simile. How could one compare a 12thC abbey to a garden shed. They are both ruins but that is as far as any comparison can go.

- You wrote, "I pulled a genuine shiny guffaw out of the box but stopped like finding out a gift is faulty and has been recalled." Another poor simile that doesn't make sense.

- "Every child in the class put up their hand without exception, including those at the table where I had just been sitting." The last part of this sentence is unnecessary. The words "without exception" means all inclusive. So, mentioning that other pupils are included in the action of raising their arms is unnecessary.

- "When I look at Olga, something moves inside me like a continent." So that movement inside you is imperceptible. Continents move so slowly to be imperceptible.

- "I won't get much sleep now", he predicted, rather optimistically." This should be pessimistically as the sentence relates to a negative.

- "the python, which was robustly, and, I hoped idly waving his ends around. 'Robustly' and 'idly' are contradictions in terms. Also, how did you know the sex of the animal? 

There are many, many more but I feel my points have been made. Sorry, to write so pessimistically but I always believe in being honest. I won't write a review on my blog, or Amazon or Goodreads.

Don’t let me bore you

At present there is just one man I allow near my teeth.  I won’t give his name.  He’s from South Africa.  A dentist of Boer extraction.  A likeable man.  Very patient-savvy.  He is also a skilled hyperbolist.  “You need a crown there.”  And, “You’ll need a crown there sooner or later,” adding, like auto-correct, “Sooner than later.” 

A visit to him usually involves pretence.  To protect my jaw, I have ready a gleaming row of white lies.  Like I now live abroad and am just here on holiday, a very short holiday, not long enough, unfortunately, for him to prepare, fit and provide after-care for a new crown.  

He has his own tray of professional tricks.  When I refuse the crown, he plays Marc Antony to my Caesar.  Then he offered it to him again, then he put it by again.  His repertoire includes an old favourite.  Before any complex treatment, he will talk down the chances of success.  A lot of dentists do that.  They’re a pessimistic crew.  

I’ve had a lot of dentists.  There was Dr Fang once.  Don’t laugh.  Long, white-haired Dr Fang.  I mean his hair was long.  He himself had no length to speak of.  I saw him in his Taipei shop, I mean surgery.  Next to the butcher’s. (Difficult paragraph, eh?)  It was just before Christmas.  When I think about that one visit, as I do quite often, I picture him sitting with his metal instruments, a row of nasty, sharp-nosed, little things, like toddlers queuing up for Santa.

In Adelaide, there was Dr Suave.  I’ve altered the surname slightly.  He made alterations to me.  I went to him several times in the 1980s.  He was the first of my tooth men to propose a crown. But I was leaving the country two days later – really – so he had to settle for a giant, leaden filling. How easily a life-long deception is born from one, convenient truth!  This filling, which he said could drop out at any moment, lasted thirty years, longer, in fact, than he did.  Don't laugh.

And Dr Thingy of Upminster, whose name I don’t remember.  (They’re all out of order, too.)  I sliced through a front tooth years ago, a corn chip bitten badly, and have been patching it up ever since.  Now there was an ugly gap again, not a good time to put off a crown.  Dr Thingy did one for me, half-price.  I don’t know why.  Perhaps he thought I was poor.  Perhaps I was.  I didn’t ask him for a discount.  You don’t haggle with a dentist over his fee.  I just found the meagre total on the bill. 

‘Twas not a crown neither, ‘twas one of these coronets.  It fell out a few weeks later.  It abdicated.  Now you can laugh.

Dr Thingy winced from time to time, doing the budget crown, as if he suffered from some inner pain.  I was fine.  I don’t know if he saw the irony.  He retired from his dental practice after finishing my treatment.  Again, I don’t know why.  It was probably just a coincidence.

Although there are several question marks over this man, I do know that I could make him angry.  I seem to annoy certain people without even trying.  Sometimes just by sitting in a chair.  The crown was a bit high.  At the follow-up appointment, I told him he had missed it.  The good Doctor winced and gave the old excuse.  The winces were like drawing pins, pressing down something inside.  His nurse looked aghast.  I hope he wasn’t too hard on her after I'd gone.