The Everyday
The Big List Of Fevered Mutterings (2009-2010)
It’s been nearly a year since I accidentally deleted my blog and had to start all over again.
Here’s everything that’s happened at Fevered Mutterings (v4.0) since that glorious day of rampant stupidity for which I am rightly proud. A year’s worth: most of it original, some stolen from my archives; some of it carefully considered, some written wildly from the hip; and some of it incomprehensible, even to me.
If you decide to read on…well, best of luck.
An Uncomfortable Truth
Earlier in the week, I was enjoying being uncomfortable again.
Comfort is a concept I’m not…comfortable with (damn my language and its grammatical quicksands). Comfort is a state of being you should probably only dip into, to enjoy with a contrasting experience in the forefront of your memory. You stamp the snow off your boots, you rub your numb hands in front of the fire, and then you press your nose against the window. It’s cold out there, you whisper comfortably.
Over the last month or so, I haven’t traveled far and I haven’t stretched my muscles enough. I’ve grown lazy and comfy. And now there I was, dragged yet another suitcase of books I still hadn’t read after 3 years of lugging them around York, rumbling across town to my new house for the second time that week (of five such trips)…and enjoying how tired I felt.
It’s a fact. I liked being that tired. There’s a kind of joy that accompanies pushing yourself towards a physical limit – usually accompanied by the humiliation of how far you’ve let that limit slip back recently. Luckily (now I know this will sound weird)…luckily I now get to walk 40 miles a week, to and from work. All I need is my new mp3 player to arrive and get teaching me colloquial Greek and everything will be perfect.
My thoughts were interrupted as a suitcase wheel caught on the kerb, flipping the whole thing over and nearly wrenching my arm out its socket.
Yeah, I giggled into the sky, bring on the discomfort. I want it. It’s good for me. I’m ready for it.
The reply in this little exchange between myself and the Fates came a few days later, when I was struck down with the worst food poisoning I’ve ever experienced (or possibly it was the Norovirus – in which case, the piece of mackarel I bought from Morrisons is blameless and I apologise to it unreservedly).
As I lay on the bathroom floor for 6 hours under a warm coat I’d managed to drag over myself, too weak to stand, shaking so hard I couldn’t press the buttons on my phone to ring work to let them know I wouldn’t be turning up, and occasionally dragging myself a few feet to visit my two friends Ralph and Huey, I realised that actually, discomfort can be a bit of a bitch.
New Perch
Location:
In my new house, somewhat to the west of York, a brisk and not overlong walk from the train station, surrounded by shops, five of which are charity shops which have already supplied me with 3 perfectly-fitting work shirts and some expensive-looking work trousers for the price of a standard paperback book from Borders. (Alas, Borders. *dabs at eyes*).
In the dining room, cables snaking everywhere, one of them to my phone which is siphoning the Internet out of thin air at a surprising lick and squirting it into my laptop (thanks, T-mobile – your web’n'walk is a wonder).
Status:
Weary from shifting possessions and from walking 36 miles in one week, 18 miles carrying rucksacks and dragging suitcases bulging with stuff I’d forgotten I had until I dragged it out from under the bed.
Slightly sick, from eating things I maybe shouldn’t have from the Italian bakery stall at the food fair in the middle of York today. (For example, sugary flaky cream horns, stuffed with Nutella. “Yeah mate, it’s-a One Pounds and Ninety Fives per 100 grams – so *weighs* that’s Eight Hundreds and Twenty Three Pounds Fifty, mate, grazie mille.”
Slightly scared of the amount of books I have to read and move along to the local charity shops before I can see the floor of my new room. (Oh, and my new housemates/landlords have almost exactly the same reading tastes as me, right down to owning the other half of a travelwriting series of books I’d recently started collecting – so I’ve got their books to read too).
Feeling like:
I’m in the right place, at the right time. This is a good place to go home again…and to leave it behind for a while.
Coo.
Image: no, I’m not a pigeon and my new house is much nicer than that. This chap is perched on Monk Bar – a bit out of my price range, but this house has central heating and I know where I’d rather be in Winter. Ta.
It’s All In The Delivery
“Oh, we can’t guarantee when he’ll be delivering the new dishwasher”, they told my Mum. “Sometime on Thursday, definitely. But the drivers make up their own schedules to inflict maximum inconvenience on their customers. We can hear them giggling over the radio as they work them out. It’s an ugly sound, yet strangely compelling, like the sound of sweet young dreams being crushed under the jackboots of experience. You can pay an extra £25 and that will guarantee that he will turn up at a specific, 100% guaranteed time, give or take 12 hours either side for unforseen circumstances. Or can I interest you in collecting it yourself from our depot in St. Kilda?”
A Fine Decade I’ve Got Me Into
“Yes?”
“Hello. Uh….well, I’d like to turn myself in.”
“You’d what?”
“I’d like to report a crime – namely me, stealing from you. Ten years ago.”
“Well….uh…”
“The name’s Mike. Hi! And I’m a thief. Not generally – just in your case. I’m your thief. Your own personal thief. You and me, joined by crime. It was yours, and I took it and then I ran like the clappers. Sort of. In 1999!”
“I don’t…?”
“And it’s time I confessed. It’s been eating away at me!” I said brightly.
The desk clerk, against everything I believed I knew about human facial mobility, managed to look even more nonplussed. “I’ve…it’s been…what?”
So I bared my soul on the table before him – just like I’m about to do with you, dear reader.
A little over ten years ago, my criminal record was squeaky-clean. I might have occasionally taken the odd extra chip-fork here and there, built the occasional bit of scaffolding with breadsticks so my Pizza Hut buffet salad could scale heights that wiped out any profit they might have made from me…but on the whole, I was a law-abiding peep.
All that changed one evening in 1999, at Hornsea Library. That evening, I maxed out my library card in the usual way (the full six books, five of which would remain unread but apply such pressure of my peace of mind that I’d be compelled to get through the sixth before it was due back, and only have to pay fines on the other five).
One of those books was Europe by Norman Davies: comprehensive, witty, superb value for money, mind-opening, mesmerizingly written…and built like the side of a house. In fact, this is the kind of gravity-lensingly tome that often lurks in my bookcase for a decade, waiting for that glorious moment when I have Finally Cleared My Pile Of Books Waiting To Be Read. It’s a Desert Island kind of book – except for the fact that no boat could carry it out there, barring perhaps the Knock Nevis.
A book that’s hard to miss in every sense – mainly the physical one. But here’s the thing – I did. Because in 1999, I stopped living in Hornsea. I’d been going to A-level college in Hull as a mature student since 1998 – but ’99 was where I truly cut all my ties with the East Yorkshire town I’d lived in since 1982. I was focused on other things. University was my escape plan, my lifeline, my rumour of scientists in the Azores. I was forward-looking to a fault. I’d put Europe under some manky badminton shoes in a cupboard, and promptly forgotten it was there. Then I moved to York.
And that’s how I missed all the gently reminding, insistently reminding and stiffly threatening letters that the Hornsea Library kept sending me about returning Norman Davies to where he belonged. My Mum received them, piled them up, and I was always in too much of a rush to read them.
Sometime in 2003, I finally sorted through my backlog of mail and discovered my crime. I retrieved Europe (now smelling of gym rubber) and checked the ticket. It was true. It was terrifying. Thirty pence a day, for 4 years. £438! Of course, what they actually charge in these cases is the original price of the book (about £30), but terror had driven out common sense – something of a pattern in my life.
And then cowardice kicked in. (Again with the pattern thing). I couldn’t go back! I just…couldn’t. They’d judge me. Possibly using a jury – a rural jury. This is East Yorkshire, where ducking stools are still regarded as modern technology gone mad. Stealing a book? Fornication with demons! I’d be lashed into a Wicker Man and burnt as one of the highlights of Hornsea Carnival. No – in York, in spitting distance of a rail-link to the Continent, I was safe, or at least I had a damn good chance of escaping if they came after me.
But gradually my conscience blackened and festered. Norman looked down at me from the back cover of Europe, his scholarly frown turning gradually to a sneer of contempt. Wretch! he seemed to say. I didn’t write my book to have you besmirch it with your pathetic criminality! (Or on days when I was in a hurry, twat).
And last year, it all became too much for me. I knew that however belatedly, I had to do The Right Thing.
“What was the title again?” said the library’s desk clerk.
“Europe” I said with the air of Gandalf spitting out the language of Mordor. “You can’t miss it. You’d have had a gap in one of your shelves. Or maybe an empty shelf.”
“There’s no record, I’m afraid. No record of you neither, Mr Cowdung,” (I didn’t correct him, just in case he found a computer record flashing MARKED FOR EXECUTION) “but that’s not surprising after the upgrade.”
“Upgrade?”
“Oh yes, marvellous it is. All the East Yorkshire libraries are now organised around a centralised computer network called the East Coast Computerised Logical Electronic Systemic Collection And Keepership Edifice (ECCLESCAKE) which keeps everything running smoothly. We don’t need to issue fines nowadays – no, the computer identifies likely suspects or “Pre-Finers”, and the police drops in to check how far through their bookmarks are. It’s elegant and progressive. And according to ECCLESCAKE you don’t actually exist – and neither does that book you’re holding. Probably best you both leave before that changes, eh?”
And that’s how I managed to get out of a £1094.30 library fine. And all it took was 10 years and a mixture of commendable technical efficiency (theirs) and staggering bureaucratic incompetence (mine).
If you’d like to search for some moral or spiritual lesson in all of this, be my guest, but I’m afraid I can’t join you right now – I’ve got a book I really must read.
Images: Johnny Grim and luxomedia.
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