Modern Dating

It’s become the defining feature of this blog that I am an embittered, sexless, lonely male prone to crouching in dark corners while clutching a rat-nibbled cauliflower with a smiley face drawn on with marker pen. The ugly truth is that, surrogate vegetable friend aside, I am far from alone. It seems that in the modern age, thousands of us are struggling to find the companionship that Disney films insist we require. And as the modern age rises up to meet this challenge with a swathe of alternatives to the traditional candlelit dinner/walk in the park/date rape, are we really helping ourselves, or setting ourselves up for a future of dysfunction?

Naturally, it’s the Internet that has stepped into the breach to shore up our dating woes. Without it showing me my very first pornographic photograph at the age of twelve, I might not even today know what a naked woman looks like. Unfortunately she was being mounted by a Doberman. And this is the problem with the Internet. Since its inception, misfits and social inepts have lurked around every virtual corner ready to pick your pocket or ejaculate on your shoe. How can you trust that any potential partner to which the Internet introduces you will not burn down your home and wear your scrotum as a coin purse? It’s only natural that, sooner or later, like an exasperated mother kicking her adult son onto the street and changing the locks, the Internet should try and foist these undesirables onto somebody else.

So what are the options? Online dating seems most prevalent. And amid the lurid softcore animations of uniformed lovers or unregistered sex offenders strumming the ukulele on train stations, it’s eHarmony that sets itself apart as the most successful (success presumably derived from number of dating site subscribers dredged from the nation’s canals, on average). eHarmony claims that it really gets to know you before matching you with a potential life partner. How well can an automated survey get to know you to be trusted with such a decision?

Beyond basic information, it asks me to rate my physical appearance based on my own, and what I imagine to be my friends’, impressions. The most recent comment I’ve received from the opposite sex is ‘weirdly tall.’ This isn’t an option. As for my friends, the survey isn’t too keen on letting me select ‘oversized sarcastic whinging prick.’ In the end I choose ‘Healthy.’ My matches won’t see that rash until it’s too late to turn back anyway.

After a never-ending parade of multiple choice options (none of which really describe me), from hobbies through to religion and moral fibre, the eHarmony gurus riffle through their pages of lovelorn women and throw up my closest matches. I have two.

-           Lindsey, 23, Nottingham.
Most Grateful For: The Twilight Saga.

Can’t Live Without: Wheetos cereal.

-          Denise, 26, London.
Religion: Devout Practitioner of Wicca.

Gee, eHarmony, you really worked out what I look for in a gal. It’s encouraging to know that soul mates really do exist.

Other alternatives include speed-dating, which, having survived against the odds outside of sit-coms, offers me the opportunity to be rendered mute and humiliated in the face of 25 women rather than the occasional one. On Freeview television the Rabbit and Gay Rabbit channels throw up an interminable gallery of men sucking in their guts, overweight women hiding behind doors or generous camera flashes, the sexually confused bewigged and slathered with more make-up than a pig in a testing lab. The archaic personal newspaper ad has so refined itself as to be the closest we’ve yet come to Orwell’s Newspeak. How much can you learn about someone from ‘Piers Morgan lkl wl2m sub bbw 4 fs rts dp dv da mbm’?

Impersonal dating is still a nascent method. It was reported recently that it’s now possible to hire an online dating personal shopper to do the legwork for you, like a smack-addled rock star thumbing through the latest Playboy. To put it simply, it makes me sad. These are lonely people setting aside what pride they have left to them in search of happiness. It makes me sad because I want every single one of them to succeed. It makes me sad because, unless something changes, it’ll be me putting aside my cauliflower companion and seeking love in the virtual world. And that’s something I hoped I’d never have to do.  

Music vs. Books. vs. Life.

I’ve been asked a lot lately (by myself) which I would pick in one of those contrived life or death situations upon which all of life’s trivial decisions seem to hang: which would you pick, music or books? As a man who frequently thumps his fat hands repeatedly against a keyboard to make words, it might be assumed that my default answer is ‘BOOKS MOTHERFUCKER.’ But just before the hypothetical gun-wielding master of reality can place the barrel against music’s head and pull the trigger, I suddenly imagine life without Pink Floyd. And that throws the whole issue wide open.


Music has the uncanny ability to penetrate life at every level. There’s the obvious one, like the CDs you buy, the downloads you steal, the X Factor singles you fumble desperately with the remote to avoid. Even for the quarter hour or so a day you’re not plugged into your iPod/iPhone/iLung those birds be chirping, those radios be playing, those feet be tapping. Even the click-click of a car’s indicator soon turns itself into a beat (don’t tell Rihanna or she’ll ruin that too).


Perhaps most poignantly, music ties itself to our memories in a way that books don’t. Everyone remembers the first record/tape/CD they went out and bought (mine was The Smurfs Go Pop. Don’t judge). Do you remember the first book you ever read? Chances are it was a right-wing didactic doctrine insistent upon the assertion that cows go moo. Maybe there’s a reason we’ve forgotten.


Remember what you were listening to around the time you got your first job? I had finally properly discovered The Beatles, and spent my 2-hour journey into and across Basingstoke rinsing everything from Rubber Soul to Let It Be. When my bus started passing roads called ‘Lennon Way’ and ‘McCartney Walk’ I feared for my sanity. Remember what you were listening to around the time you had your first serious crush? Blackfield had just released its second album. With the right earphone broken, I trudged home through Winchester in the rain after delivering a homemade Valentine’s card that would go unanswered. What song do you associate with that girl who you never quite managed to win over? ‘The World is Yours’ by Caravan.


http://youtu.be/mM8qS2rE0MA


(Listening to Caravan might be why I never managed to win her over).


Now, tell me what book you were reading during these rites of passage. It’s a little more difficult, isn’t it?


Reading a good book tends to be a more insular experience. While music blares away as a background to housework or masturbation, reading demands your attention. You settle down in a quiet moment and lose yourself to it. You snatch a chapter on a bus journey to distract you from the smell of the other passengers. Those moments remain self-contained. I read The Magus on a 9-hour Megabus journey from Leeds to Southampton. I read The Shining in year seven literacy class just to spite my teacher who didn’t believe I could. I read endless Peanuts comic strip collections at my Grandma’s house because the unusual bedroom made me too scared to sleep. From these memories I can piece together by association what was happening in my life, but the books in no way come to personify it. The experiences become fond memories in themselves.


This is where some kind of conclusive point should arrive. Unfortunately it’s not going to happen, as when I set out to write this the whole music vs. books conjecture was merely intended as a framing device for my more wayward personal memories. I’m sure there are countless people out there ready to disprove my theory with a shout of ‘Whenever I reread American Psycho I remember my days as a marauding axe murderer!’ Luckily those people will never see this blog and are hopefully in jail.


A conclusion... well, in line with social convention, let’s just say that if someone ever holds a gun to my face and screams ‘MUSIC OR BOOKS!’ I’ll lower my head further into my book to avoid the weirdo, and won’t hear the snap of the trigger through the Iron Maiden blasting in my ears.

Volunteer

It’s 6am, I’ve been awake for 24 hours, and I’m deep into a table tennis tournament with five homeless men. When I stepped up to the table I’d anticipated a comfortable victory. Like all the cool kids, ping pong is my game. As I tocked the opening serve over the net, I wondered if I should take a dive. After all, these guys are homeless, and as a volunteer it wouldn’t look good to school them in the art of miniaturised court sports. The decision is abruptly snatched out of my hands. My opponent, an overweight man in his forties who sleeps under a footbridge, blasts the ball full pelt into my crotch.

Running into the Forrest Gump of homeless men is hardly the first surprise of my few night shifts volunteering at the Crisis at Christmas rough sleepers centre. I arrived expecting a few damp-damaged rooms filled with thirty-or-so steel-framed beds and a close-knit crew of insomniac volunteers to ladle out tea and soup come morning. Instead the centre is spread across three floors of a disused office building and kitted out with a cafeteria, computers, a DVD area, giant chess and Jenga, and anything else to keep the sleepless guests distracted through the night. There are around 100 volunteers (which means over the course of my shifts about 100 conversations for me to make awkward) to look after 400 rough sleepers. The sleeping floors resemble makeshift field hospitals with their endless rows of camp beds and variety of troubling smells.

Throughout the night, as I move from post to post (and desperately avoid toilet duty), I meet guest after guest who seem to be competing in their efforts to defy my expectations.

I meet Marius, who, despite sleeping in a Kingston car park for the past 3 months, endlessly praises the virtues of England over his native Poland. Jobs there? ‘No good.’ Food there? ‘No good.’ Nice scenery? ‘No no no.’ A stolen passport prevents him from finding work or claiming benefits. He’s a qualified engineer. From his grubby raincoat he pulls out receipts for scrap metal that’s paid for his pair of smart phones charging under the table. Why two phones, Marius? A wide grin opens up beneath his moustache. ‘Because this is England!’

John, not much older than me and completely blind, engages me in a conversation about Bret Easton Ellis and J.G. Ballard too intellectual to follow at 3 o clock in the morning. Although his fondness for the debauched use of Habitrail hamster tubing in American Psycho frightens me a little, his critical insight into his reading (or rather, the few audio books stocked at his dependency centre) outstrips any university student I’ve ever taught in my classes.

Later on there’s Kris, who perseveres for what feels like hours in teaching me to make paper aeroplanes (I still can’t do it. Don’t tell him). At 4.30am he follows me on my outside duty with a kite composed of toilet roll tubes, cling film, and a long spool of decorative ribbon. We try repeatedly to get it airborne in the freezing wind blowing off the Thames docks until finally it swings down past my face like an axe and crumples on the car park tarmac. Kris deems it my fault and compares me to Charlie Brown. Later he tells me he made the kite because he’s frightened to go to sleep.

After all, these fun moments don’t paint a full picture. There’s the man who suffers an alcoholic fit and is taken away in an ambulance. Dylan (named after his Bob Dylan t-shirt) paces the car park for much of the night screaming at people only he can see. While I’m supervising a sleeping floor, one of the guests jerks awake and asks me, ‘Have you ever seen a dead alcoholic?’ It’s a tough question to deal with at 5.30am. He doesn’t go back to sleep, and begs me to stay near him.

Stereotypes of homeless people are no good here. Not only are they real people dealing with poverty, illness, and addiction, but they’re also struggling to align themselves with the rest of society. All over the centre phone chargers trail from electrical sockets. Guests pace through the night with headphones and Bluetooth headsets clamped to their ears. Every screen in the computer area is logged into Facebook or playing the latest YouTube video of an unfortunate looking cat.

One volunteer, this her fourth consecutive year, puts it into perspective. ‘Everyone is just one bad decision away from losing it all. It only takes one crisis.’ Gazing bleary-eyed along the rows of camp-beds, it’s difficult not to wonder what bad decisions brought all these people to this place.

The sun’s on its way up, and the first planes of the day are roaring what feels like inches overhead to land at London City Airport. I battle back from 4 match-points down to win the first table tennis game, then lose in the next round. As he celebrates with his friends, I shake the victor’s hand and make him a promise. I’ll be back tomorrow for a rematch.  

(He beat me again)

An Apology to My Future Children

A quick note before we start: this is written on the warm and fuzzy childhood assumption that all of us will, sooner or later, get married and have kids. In fact, it’s only recently that I have begun to prepare for a future of loneliness, obesity, and mass cat ownership. Perhaps this was the plan all along. I remember being the only one in general studies class to keep my hand down when asked if ever we’d marry. A muffin-arsed kid called Jeremy told me to stop being an idiot. He’d presumed I had purposely abstained, rather than merely accepted my fate.

As you can probably tell, I’ll forego the happy ending.

This blog operates on the notion that one day the parts of my DNA equipped with ejector seats will cut loose the sticky strands of their landing gear and claw their way to the ridge of some fleshy mountain where, to their dismay or elation, they will find uncharted territory; the insides of a woman.

Now, you may raise an eyebrow at such a contrivance. Here are three potential scenarios upon which to suspend your disbelief:

1. I paid a one-legged blind lady of the night to act as my ambulatory chalice.

2. The ice caps have melted, the sky has fallen, and inexplicably David Attenborough isn’t around to save us. After the second wave of disease, I am, in fact, the last male alive.

3. I leave a very messy toilet seat.

So, to my disease-ridden bastard children of the apocalypse, I leave this apology.

I’m sorry I never knew how to fix your bike. I’m sorry that when I painted your bedroom we all contracted botulism. I’m sorry that my personal food paranoia gave you anorexia. I’m sorry I couldn’t help with your maths homework. I’m sorry I stole from your piggybank to support my burgeoning muffin habit. I’m sorry I couldn’t be happier. I’m sorry I never made it to your super-important baseball game because I was sucked into Neverland. I’m sorry your mother left me.

I’ve had 3 best friends in my life. I’ve also known 3 girls that, on each occasion, I felt I was madly in love with. Each of those girls opted for one my best friends over me. This is the basis for my genuine and deep-seated belief that I will be cheated on and left behind. Not due to any bad nature of the people around me (I supported each of my friends when I found out). It will be due to my own shortcomings.

So, future children, I ask for your forgiveness. Don’t think too ill of me when you try to rouse my cake-addled bulk from the sunken half-pipe mattress that used to be my marital bed. Don’t curse my existence as you scrub cat piss out of your clothes, and find the last surviving member of my feline clan pancaked beneath me when I roll to grant you access to my festering bed sores. I promise I did my best, and that my intentions were good.

My life-savings are hidden in the floorboards. Spend it on something wise. A dinghy for the coming thaw, or a hit on your mother. You’ll find it packed into a box and wrapped in a family portrait, a reminder that, just for a while, I was very lucky.  

Smoking

My first cigarette was a second-hand stub retrieved from a flower bed in the park just outside my school. I was eleven. It was the last day of year 7, and what better way to celebrate than by sucking toxic smoke from damp tobacco through a filter saturated in a stranger’s saliva?

Despite this inauspicious start, smoking stuck. That summer I stole cigarettes (unused ones) from my Grandma’s stash and smoked them with a friend in the same park while riding our bikes in circles around the tennis courts and arguing which was best, Pokemon Red or Blue.

At eleven (or twelve, by the time the habit was in full swing) smoking was cool. It was the combustible equivalent of greased back hair, an inexorable erection, and a leather jacket with T-Birds etched in studs on the back. I was too fat to be cool for real. Smoking was the ideal facade. And it wasn’t long until my small circle of friends got in on the act.

The academic limbo of year eight arrived. On any given morning, if you’d disembarked from the 358 bus and strolled into the park, you would have found a group of twelve year old boys huddled together in the bushes, a cartoon raincloud of smoke suspended over our heads. We saw ourselves as outlaws; underage, targets for older boys hungry for cigarettes, and bound by the myth that some teachers patrolled the park before school.

The only part of this story I’m proud of is that, for once, I’m not the yellow-belly of the piece. I was the one who’d brave the scorn of corner shop owners to purchase lighters. It was me who, a few months after the smoking craze struck, took the next step and lit up my inaugural spliff. (Hindsight reduces the drama of this; they came at the cost of £2.50 each and were rolled in a bus ticket. For all I know I was smoking a refreshing cup of PG Tips).

It was my best friend at the time who couldn’t handle the pressure of our morning underbrush smoking club. Like me, he was in dire need of the cool points that came packaged with smoking. Only, deep down, he was too sensible for it. Every morning, despite what it had cost him, he would find any excuse to take the minimum possible puffs of his cigarette or spliff. Often he would just ‘enjoy the smell,’ before choking to the brink of regurgitation. Other times he’d very accidentally drop and step on it all at once, or simply express his satisfaction in ‘watching it burn down.’

One morning paranoia got the better of him. As we huddled in the bushes, a little Westie dog barrelled through the branches. My friend lost his shit.

            ‘I know that dog.’

We all peered down at it through the smoke.

            ‘I know that fucking dog. It lives across the road from me.’

            ‘So?’

His eyes were white and wide from fright. ‘What if it gets its owner?’

The Westie just stood there, looking around at us with its tongue lolling out between its teeth.

            ‘It’s not fucking Lassie.’

            ‘If the dog tells its owner they’ll tell my parents and they'll tell the school. Then we're fucked!'

He threw his lit cigarette as hard as he could at the Westie. It shook its head and dashed out from the cover of the bushes.

            ‘Shit!’

My friend ran too, in the opposite direction, before the Westie could wire up its enigma machine and blow our cover to its elderly owner.

I would have been smart to kick the habit then too. Due to the spreading epidemic of older boys threatening us with undesirable violence for our cigarettes, I took the genius precaution of hiding my supply in a small car-shaped biscuit tin. To protect the precious deathsticks, I clumsily lined the inside with padding and sticky-tape. It took exactly two days for my mum to discover the case and (quite rightly) kick the metaphorical shit out of me with perfectly executed verbal, mental, and, to my freshly purchased packet of twenty cigarettes, physical abuse.

This left me more time to work on my other crippling addiction. Binge eating was about to hit in a big way. No bushes required. 

The Ski Slope Mutiny

Each of us, now and again, should be allowed to indulge in moments of ostentatious heroism. In a lifetime spent being crammed to the brim with an aspirant cocktail of airbrushed romantic leads and real-world tales of unbelievable hardship and altruism, I would feel disenfranchised without the odd occasion of fabricated hyperbole. I’m too yellow-bellied for war, and I’m unlikely ever to find myself in a situation that demands my self-sacrifice in the name of destroying zombies/Nazis/the entire cast of The X Factor. Instead, such moments must be sought in the mundane, where inevitably they will go quite wrong.

My moment came on a school ski jaunt to Austria. With no previous slope experience, I opted for the snowboard. Snowboards are cool, and therefore I would be too. At the time I was too young to have worked out why businessmen bloated on their own wealth only ever split their weight between a pair of skis. It turns out that, with a circumference roughly equal to that of the Ghostbusters Stay Puft Man, carving the powder to the max (dude) on a board with any degree of competence is about as easy as resisting a third helping at the lodge buffet. To this day, informing people that I’ve been snowboarding feels a fallacy, as I spent far more time rolling uncontrollably head over man-breast than I did stood upright.

The first day on piste was dedicated to mastering the basics. I did not master them. The second day saw us unleashed on the beginners slope. I say unleashed; I never actually made it to the top.

The ski lift was an automated pulley with plastic harnesses to secure around your waist for a quick tug to the nearby peak. At first I wasn’t the only one to struggle. The beginners slope became a sort of slapstick montage, 14 year old boys bowling over furious Austrians, snapping harnesses and generally demonstrating to the world why our school had been officially classed as ‘failing’ for over a decade. Those that conquered the lift were soon painfully reacquainted with gravity.

After a morning of this, the mutinous murmurings began. We were being forced to learn too quickly. We were being pushed too hard. We had ice down our trousers. Snow was falling hard now, and we were getting fed up. I most of all. I hadn’t eaten for at least an hour, and was suspicious that all this might count as exercise. If only someone would raise an objection. If only someone were brave enough to stand up for the rights of these downtrodden...

A final conflict with the ski lift tipped me over the edge. In the process of falling over I managed to catch my ankle in the harness and was dragged ignominiously up the slope on my face. When I disentangled myself, I marched over to the instructor who was stood with the rest of the class.

With righteous anger I sternly informed him that we were not happy with how things were going. In fact, we were more than unhappy. We were sick of it! We demanded change, and we demanded it immediately!

For a display of ostentatious heroism to be successful, a certain level of solidarity is required. Like a wave of men raising up their voices to insist that they are Spartacus. Or a legion of sheep, raving and drooling, falling united on the necks of their canine oppressors. I believed that such support from my fellow disillusioned would be implicit. When my fevered rhetoric was complete, I turned, expectant of a cheer, a ‘hear hear!’, perhaps a smattering of applause.

The final rule is that, if your display has clearly not worked, take it gracefully. If your fellow boys are staring at their boots or taking a sudden interest in some non-descript vista of the white-out, don’t scream that they are all wankers and stomp away across the powder. Further, try not to cry and fog up your goggles to the point where, combined with the swirling snow, you become lost on your return to the lodge and spend two hours alone in -19c before you make it back.

By the next morning, each and every one of my betrayers had mastered the ski lift and the ability to reach the bottom of the slope in an erect and dignified fashion. I spent the rest of the trip secure in the lodge, rescuing those around me from early graves by heroically reaching the bottom of innumerable plates of chips, an alternative form of heroism far more suited to my natural abilities.

Hot or Not

In our mid-teenage years, when sex was still a lofty aspiration and movies like American Pie a romanticised self-help blueprint, my very small circle of friends (three of us, so more of a friendangle) explored any avenue that aligned us even remotely to the near-mystical realms of carnal pleasure. Predating these halcyon days of free streaming, we downloaded 20-second samples from porn sites and secreted them in hidden files on the family computer. We lit digital candles and flopped out our gigantic e-penis’s for frantic cyber-fornication in chat rooms. We stretched the boundaries of decency in answering the social measurement: a/s/l?

Typical answer: 18/Hot Guy/Up the bum?
Real answer: 13/Oh God Please/Not here, my mum’s watching.

We were three guys with newfound hormones trapped in the pubescent pressure cooker of an all boys’ school. We feared that if we didn’t satiate our desires we’d inevitably cross the point-of-no-return and bugger each other blind behind the sports hall. Fortunately, the perversions of the Internet always serve up a fresh humiliation to aid distraction.

Before MySpace and Facebook made it possible to lower your trousers in front of any girl in the world with only the persistent sting of shame as repercussion, Hot or Not encouraged us to pass judgement on people’s worth by rating their appearance from 1-10. No friends, likes, or interests. Just a parade of narcissism designed solely to inflate or shatter fragile egos.

It’s still going. Check it out: hotornot

It had its problems. The beautiful would undercut their rivals and the ugly amongst us would rally against the aesthetically gifted like a massacre at an Abercrombie & Fitch store. Still, nothing online at the time quite matched the heady thrill of rating these girls’ faces from the safety of a desk that hid the real reviews in our laps.

Quite what we hoped to achieve by throwing our own mugshots into the breach I’m not sure. Perhaps we felt that, robbed of the opportunity for real girls to laugh in our faces, we’d let the anonymous do it instead. More likely, we aimed to establish a hierarchy in our friendangle, like rutting stags comparing the size of their antlers.

So for one afternoon my front room transformed into a photoshoot. The other stags carefully shaped their hair with gel until, respectively, they resembled an underfed bird of prey and Chandler from Friends when Matthew Perry was in rehab. At the time, these were considered good photos.

Worthy of note, this was around the week or so that Peter Andre’s ‘Mysterious Girl’ was back in the charts. Possibly the most sexually ambiguous moment of my life is preening myself in front of two camera-wielding boys while this video played repeatedly on the music channels: Contains Gratuitous Homoeroticism

I was very much at my fattest, and unaware of the tricks the overweight utilise when being photographed (wear dark colours, take photo from high angle, pull a face that apologises to the viewer for scarring their eyes). I wore a shiny blue shirt, and decided to run my head under the shower to really capture that fetching ‘drowned wildebeest’ style that drives girls wild. I looked like an over-the-hill pornographer hoping to forge a career in heart disease prevention posters. At the time, it was considered a good photo.  

Our profiles went online. Each morning on the walk to school we discussed/gloated/commiserated over the results. I don’t quite have the heart to log in to my old account and check my score. The hierarchy had been established, and I was firmly at the bottom.