Everything Reviewed

Review: Tax returns

noreply@blogger.com (Eskimo) — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 18:04:00 +0000

This is a topical review, about a matter of national consequence, like a columnist writing about the war/any war/all wars. I am going to reveal, in chronological order, the sequence of thoughts I have during January:

1 January: “Look, a new year! During this year I will become more organised, wear more make up, develop a stronger work ethic, learn to walk in high heels, fall in love, take up a sport, learn to heal cancer through the laying on of hands, be kind to children and the disaffected young, finish my book and visit the countryside at weekends. And I will do my tax return on time. That is the most important thing. God, my head is killing me.”

15 January: “It’s mid-January and they’ve put up exactly the same ads as last year, the ones with JAN 31 in huge red letters and a man pointing at them with a subtly sorrowful expression on his face, like, ‘I know you will not meet this deadline, even though it is so big and red, but I want you to know that you will regret it for the rest of your life.’ Also, today is my ex-ex-boyfriend’s birthday. I will text him. No I will not. I will text him. No I will not.”

21 January: “If I do my tax return this weekend, it will be in on time in a way that isn’t even stressful and I’ll feel as though my life is working like a small, well-designed machine whose purpose is comfort – an electric fan, perhaps, or a pair of headphones.”

23 January: “Maybe I’ll go out instead. That will make me happier in the short term. It’s all about living in the moment. Yeah. The moment. The moment is like, a house, and I should just move in and, kind of, decorate.”

27 January: “They only fine you £100 for a late tax return. £100 isn’t very much to pay for the pleasure of having the tax return deadline rolled back until July, when they fine you again for having a ganglion where your brain should be.”

30 January: “Fuck, I don’t understand how to fill out this form and I have no money anyway and probably I don’t even owe any tax so it shouldn’t even matter.”

1 February: “My tax return is late. I don’t want to talk about it.”

Tax returns: How can I be this much of a moron and still manage to feed and clothe myself? 0 out of 10

Review: Shopping

noreply@blogger.com (Eskimo) — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 11:57:00 +0000

The things women say to help each other justify buying new clothes! It's enough to induce you to write an epic poem called 'On the Endless Wonders of Being Female' and have done with it. I was in a shop in Holborn the other day, considering a pair of shoes, and a woman was saying to her friend, "See, you could wear them with jeans OR with a dress. They're a bargain", as if wearing jeans or wearing a dress is pretty much the sum of all human experience, or the scale, and wearing jeans and a dress at the same time some kind of harmonious middle point where you feel your own oneness with the universe. I left empty-handed, feeling quietly superior, then went to Topshop and bought a pair of shoes that don't actually fit me at all in any way, though I keep on trying them on hopefully, in case my feet have shrunk in the night.

For a while after my Tragic Breakup (TM) (R), I was completely uninterested in buying new clothes and went around wearing glasses and a grey cardigan, for all the world as if they were sackcloth and ashes, and not making eye contact with anyone. But even at the best of times, I'm a pragmatic rather than a talented shopper. Go in, find stuff, buy stuff, leave. This is considered a male approach to shopping, by people who like to ascribe all rational behaviour (shopping sensibly, being good at maths, knowing how to fix things) to men, and all irrational behaviour (pointless giggling, heavy make up, envy) to women.

It deflates the heart to read about yet another female-oriented website/magazine that plans to exploit women's apparently limitless fondness for enthusiastic consumerism, as if that were the main interesting thing about being female. It makes me want to pretend to be interested in quantum mechanics and early Greek philosophy, although if I were being completely honest I'd have to say, "I totally reject your reductive analysis of me! I am interested in KISSING and READING NOVELS." And the proprietor of this fantasy magazine/website (basically I'm thinking of that ohsoyou thing that got profiled in the Guardian a while ago) would look at me, all aglow from a recent orgasm induced by someone mentioning the phrase Web 2.0 in front of them and making them feel, you know, YOUNG and ALIVE, and refer me to the 'Kissing' and 'Books' sections, all prepared and laid out like a boring fate.

Having said all this, my mother and sister share some kind of recessive shopping gene and can buy stuff for hours on end without any visible signs of boredom or exhaustion, unless it's exhaustion of the finite resources of the soul, which you wouldn't notice anyway against the general background of Oxford Street.

Something that would not be any fun at all, but is kind of interesting to think about (very similar in this way to listening to all the stuff on your ipod all the way through, nonstop, for six days, the idea of which occurs to me every time I look at my itunes... I'd be in a completely empty room, just me and my ipod, and people would bring food and water, and I'd keep a diary... "12.56am: Ice Cube (Greatest Hits): Surprised by a feeling of emptiness") is if you piled up everything you'd ever bought, ever, every T-shirt and chocolate bar and mobile phone and tin opener and plastic action figure, and just, kind of, thought about what you'd done. That would be interesting. More interesting than shopping, anyway.

Shopping: Spiritually impoverishing, materially rewarding. It's a toss-up. 5 out of 10.

Review: Being a bit rubbish

noreply@blogger.com (Eskimo) — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 01:53:00 +0000

I don't update this very regularly, do I?

Being a bit rubbish: Not something I'll think of fondly on my deathbed. Or at all, I hope. 0 out of 10.

Review: Reaching 40,000 on my hit counter

noreply@blogger.com (Eskimo) — Wed, 30 May 2007 17:27:00 +0000

Size isn't everything, apart from when it's the size of your soul, man, or the size of a malignant tumour, or the size of the number of hits that have hit the hit counter of your hit blog. Nearly 40,000! And only some of those (say, 5,000 maximum) are me admiring my own work! Many hits, for example, are directly attributable to my mother, my aunt, my grandfather, and perhaps even the odd brain-damaged boy who has taken an interest. I would like to thank you all. I wouldn't be here* without you.

Reaching 40,000 on my hit counter: It may take weeks, but I have faith. 9 out of 10.

*Editing a report about infectious diseases in an office with grey carpets, sickly lighting, and a lovely but essentially useless view of St Paul's out of the window on the other side from mine.

Review: Meeting the famous

noreply@blogger.com (Eskimo) — Fri, 25 May 2007 00:30:00 +0000

Meeting the famous makes ordinary, unfamous people do stupid things. If meeting the famous were an age, it would be three or four years old - past the canonical babbling stage but still retaining the tendency to fall over and/or wet yourself at the drop of a hat. If it were a foodstuff, it would be something exciting but nutritionally empty, like salami or a CheezeString. If it were an actress acting in The Vagina Monologues and talking about what her vagina would say if it could talk, then it would report that its vagina would say something totally unsexy like, "I really admire your work" or "Whoops! Dropped my drink." (Someone should make a riposte to The Vagina Monologues called The Silence of the Vaginas.)

I met Patti Smith the other day - not properly, I didn't bump into her at the supermarket or anything, I was at a festival and she'd just played - and I said some really embarrassing things, most of which I won't go into here, but at one point I said something totally stupid that I didn't even mean ("I feel like I'm talking to God"), and afterwards I felt ashamed of myself and my thoughts turned to my own stupid simile. If I had been talking to God, I hope I would have come up with something better than "Lots of people think you're great!" or "I really think it's brilliant how you made the heaven and the earth and, yea, divided the firmament from the waters and saw that it was good." God would be all like, "Yeah, I know." If you had one question to ask God* - I should point out that I'm an atheist - but if God existed and you had one question to ask him, clearly you'd screw it up and say something along the lines of, "Isn't this just the coolest thing ever?" "No," God would say, and there you'd be, hands in pockets, looking kind of shifty and feeling bad about yourself.

I was in the same room as Jude Law the other day (it was a crowded room. We weren't having sex. I don't think he was aware that I was in the same room as him) and the crowd was pretty equally divided between people pretending they hadn't noticed him and girls walking past with their friends and stage-whispering, "Did you touch him? OH MY GOD, you touched him. You touched Jude Law. Can I have sex with your hand?" I think what people really like about being in the presence of famous people is that it makes us feel like we're doing something vaguely interesting and worthwhile. There's a philosopher who developed a theory about how we all might be living in a virtual reality world simulation run by an advanced civilization, and his advice, if you want to hedge your bets in case his theory is true, is to basically be a good person and also hang out with as many famous people as possible, because then the advanced beings are less likely to turn your simulation off out of boredom.

There are no famous people in Seven Sisters. As far as even minor celebrities are concerned, Seven Sisters is a dead swathe of London, like an area on a post-apocalyptic map where the radioactive zones are marked. If a famous person did end up in Seven Sisters by accident, they would probably be met with a lukewarm reception by the Polish grocers and Somali internet shop owners, who would fail to recognise them and try to sell them internet for 50p an hour, or a boiled sausage. Maybe Lindsay Lohan should come up here for a fortnight's respite from paparazzi harrassment, give up drugs, put on some weight. We could advertise. You know it.

Meeting the famous: Like a little machine with a handle that you turn and anecdotes spill out of the other end. 8 out of 10.

*I'm imagining a scenario where there's a long line of people and God hasn't got time for a proper chat with all of them, like when my friend met the Dalai Lama and told him she liked his shoes, but I suppose that if God really cared then he could bend the rules of space and time so that as many people as possible could ask as many questions as they liked. The Dalai Lama cannot do that. Think about that, Buddhists.

Review: Alcohol

noreply@blogger.com (Eskimo) — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 11:05:00 +0000

Alcohol: destroyer of nations, builder of empires, etc. Or, as Beck says, in the song 'Alcohol': "Alcohol, please give me some."

I like a drink. Sometimes I like a drink so much that I have several (to any adulterers out there: this is a good argument to use when you're trying to persuade your wife not to leave you). Sometimes I have so many drinks that I end up having really stupid discussions about what stuff means, or chatting to the inevitable girls congregating inevitably in the inevitable girls' loos, or kissing someone and then spending the rest of the night giving him advice about his love life, or crying on a street corner as Camden crack addicts tactfully ask me for money, or sometimes all four in the same night, which is the height of depravity. "Alcohol, please take it away from me," as Beck did not sing, but should have.

There's an optimum level of drunkenness, where you feel at one with the world and like everything is probably going to turn out for the best, and you look around the table at your friends and think, "What lovely friends I have. And I bet everyone in the pub is admiring my hair." Sadly, by the time you realise you're at this stage, you've already moved past it by drinking another couple of glasses of wine or whatever you drink (don't want to offend any manly men by suggesting they might drink wine in public). If you were the Buddha, you'd be able to avoid this kind of slippage by being constantly aware of the present moment, but you also would be in the forest and probably you wouldn't be much of a drinker, being the Buddha and all.

Other people seem to enjoy being ragingly drunk. It's a license to sing in the street, flirt with good-looking people and shoplift mints from a 7-11 before trying to set fire to them with a lighter. I'm very rarely extremely drunk, partly because I don't approve of drunken vomiting and see it as a sign of weakness of character, although I'm often slightly drunk, because I don't approve of reality and see moderate drinking as a sign of strength of character.

Alcohol: Your life would be both much, much better and much, much worse without it. 6 out of 10.

Review: The internet

noreply@blogger.com (Eskimo) — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 12:11:00 +0000

Many of us worship at the altar of the internet, but we're not quite sure why. Does it save time? No. Any chance benefit to academics and schoolchildren who can now access information from the comfort of their desktops, rather than traipsing around libraries getting cancer of the brain from all the unread literature, has been entirely swallowed up by the minutes and hours, amounting to days and years, wasted by feckless online layabouts in googling people they knew 10 years ago, looking up the history of toast on Wikipedia, and crafting beautiful towering monuments to their own egos on MySpace. "I saw the best minds of my generation, destroyed by blogging..." as Allen Ginsberg kind of almost wrote. Millions of hypochondriacs who would otherwise have been content leafing through medical journals now have, at the touch of a few buttons, access to a whole world of anxiety, sleeplessness and ill-defined symptoms - did you know that a slight headache can be a symptom of AIDS? Did you want to know? Well, you do now, and never again will you be able to get a good night's sleep. Millions of bright, talented people spend their lives surfing the web into the small hours - time in which they could have been writing books, recording albums or touring experimental dance performances around the Netherlands.

Long after humanity has died out from bird flu, meteor strikes, catastrophic climate change or boredom, an alien race will accidentally stumble across the remnants of cyberspace, kept alive by one ancient server buried in the Nevada desert, and add a new entry to their Encyclopedia of Intelligent Life: Humanity, Earth - Deeply trivial. Mating rituals included shaving off all body hair and making yelping noises on camera. Very knowledgeable about haircuts.

The internet: Good for acquiring useless information, but otherwise pretty rubbish. 3 out of 10.

Review: The smell of bubblegum

noreply@blogger.com (Eskimo) — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 15:53:00 +0000

I was going to start this post with the sentence, "The world can be an exceptionally depressing place", as if I were comparing it to some other, less depressing place - the surface of the sun, perhaps, or the afterlife. The point is I stayed up till 5am last night reading a book called Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, about clones forced to donate their vital organs one by one. If you could sum this book up in a sentence, it would be: "What's the point of it all, when we're all going to die anyway?" When you think of how there are books by people like Dr Seuss and Jilly Cooper that can be summed up in really life-affirming sentences like "Food can taste nice whatever its colour" and "Look, here are some rich people having sex", it makes you wonder why you bother with proper literature at all.

I was in the shower several weeks ago (in Stockholm, which is a long story, a long story involving me living in Stockholm), lathering up a gloopy handful of bright green shower gel, and I realised I'd got it all wrong. All of it! The greatest cultural achievement of recent years isn't a book, or a film, or an album, but artificial bubblegum scent. It's the smell of happiness. The smell of innocence. The natural world has nothing on it. It's like Proust's little cakes crossed with that time in the garage forecourt on a long hot summer car journey with your cousins, when someone bought a pack of apple flavour Hubba Bubba and you blew a perfect bubble for the first time in your life.

I was really pleased with myself for making this discovery, until about two days later when my boyfriend told me that he hated the bubblegum shower gel and it was the least sexy flavour of shower gel ever. I was crestfallen. A few days after that, we had a huge fight and he made me move out for a while to give him some space. (Space?! Space???!!) I'm not sure the two phenomena are necessarily linked, but it's important not to rule anything out in this life (as opposed to all those other lives you'll have, in the afterlife or on the surface of the sun).

The smell of bubblegum: Loses points for lack of eroticism, but otherwise perfect. 8 out of 10

New blog

noreply@blogger.com (Eskimo) — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 13:02:00 +0000

I have a new blog, called A Subjective Guide to Europe. It's a subjective guide to Europe. Contributions welcome, especially for places like Slovenia and Romania, where I've never been. I would particularly love to hear from friendly web designers who would like to make me an interactive map.

Everything Reviewed is dormant but not forgotten: I have a lot of time on my hands right now and will try to start reviewing things again soon.

New blog: 10 out of 10.

Review: Earrings

noreply@blogger.com (Eskimo) — Mon, 05 Dec 2005 10:02:00 +0000

I had my ears pierced in a shop in Arusha. Between that and learning to drive, which I will as soon as I can get over my fear of the traffic in Dar es Salaam (aggressive 4x4 drivers, minibuses with fifty people inside, cows wandering across the road, potholes galore, headlights at full beam blinding you at night, and other exotic traffic paraphernalia), I am becoming a proper adult. As everyone knows, low-end mutilation in pursuit of beauty is an important aspect of female adulthood. But then, so is trying to make your mind up if your inability to find a boyfriend is because you intimidate men with your phenomenal beauty, wit and elegance, or because you need to lose some weight and stop talking about your childhood on first dates.

I can barely bring myself to discuss men with pierced ears. It reveals a tragically un-ambitious spirit of rebellion. If you want to show your disdain for convention, get the word FUCK tattooed across your forehead or set fire to a church or marry your sister. A single earring in your misshapen earlobe doesn’t impress me: in that respect, I am very much like Shania Twain. (“OK, so you’ve won a Nobel Peace Prize, reconciled the wave and the particle and discovered a new, clean energy source to rival oil / That don’t impress me much.” The woman is made of steel. I once read an article in a men’s magazine that listed reasons to look on the bright side after breaking up with your girlfriend. One of them was something like, “You no longer have to cower at Shania Twain concerts, convinced that a stadium of 50,000 women singing along to That Don’t Impress Me Much are talking about your penis.”)

Earrings make you look like you’ve made an effort, even when you haven’t showered. They also impress the girl behind the donut counter in Shoprite. I live to please her.

Earrings: Kind of anthropologically weird, but don't I look pretty? 9 out of 10.

Review: Cowardice

noreply@blogger.com (Eskimo) — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 12:14:00 +0000

I’m too scared to read the comments on my last, antique post, from several decades ago.

I am also scared of spiders, the fucking horrible malicious eight-legged bastards. If some spiders had put nasty comments on my blog, that would be the worst thing.*

I was talking about one night stands with my friend, who writes operas. “Why would you dig a trench in the same place twice?” he asked, rhetorically. “Because you wanted a deeper, more profound trench,” I suggested. He explained that there's no time for that kind of behaviour because there's a war on.

*It would appear in the top five Worst Things (Trivial) and possibly even in the top twenty Worst Things (Actual).

Cowardice: Fine, I think, as long as there’s not a war on. 4 out of 10.

Review: Gossip

noreply@blogger.com (Eskimo) — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 14:27:00 +0000

I love gossip, it lightens the otherwise tedious grind of over-emoting about psychologically decrepit Italian men and writing about tourist destinations. Until recently, I was convinced that men don’t enjoy gossip, for the same reason that they don’t share ice cream out of the same tub or compliment each other on their clothes – it contravenes the international code of heterosexuality. Actually, I was wrong. Given the slightest opportunity, men gossip like wolves.

Much gossip-worthy material flows forth from my colleague’s stupid girlfriend, who has the face of an angel and the brain of a very chatty slug. (Reader! In your opinion, would impersonating an idiot help me have a more successful and fulfilling love life?) We eye her beadily from behind our desks, waiting for her to do something ridiculous so we can pounce on it and pick it apart later. There’s a fine line between gossip and bitching, but we don’t care. Occasionally I am wracked by guilt. I feel the Gossip Sword of Damocles hanging over my head: not a day passes in which I don’t do something so stupid that I’m almost suicidal with embarrassment, and the thought that people will be analysing my faux pas with as much relish as I’ve lavished on theirs is deeply troubling.

I am reading a history of Africa, and it claims that something like 80% of human chat is about people who are not present during the conversation. This was useful when we lived in small forest tribes and scavenged elephant carcasses, but maybe it’s outlived its relevance. Gossip may well be an evolutionary hangover that we should have recovered from by now, like male nipples, double-jointed elbows and long-term relationships.

Gossip: Somewhere between a hobby and a religious practice. Happy Ramadan! 7 out of 10.

Review: The beach

noreply@blogger.com (Eskimo) — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 10:45:00 +0000

We went to the beach on Sunday. Apparently, this is the whole point of expatriate life in Dar es Salaam: you may be slowly losing your soul, but at least you can go to the beach at the weekend. I went on a speedboat with yet another Israeli, who played screeching rock while the Russian sprawled in the sun, like something out of Heat magazine. I chatted to our captain’s 12-year-old niece, who looked at me in undisguised horror when I revealed that I’ve never been water-skiing. “You haven’t even been normal skiing?” she cried, disgusted. She’s the scion of a family that sell very nice chicken liver wraps in the mind-numbingly anodyne Sea Cliff hotel. The expat children here are old before their time, confident as CNN anchormen and slightly deranged by the constant coming and going of their friends and schoolmates, who are mostly diplobrats whose parents do something pointless for the UN. We sailed on, dragging the girl’s brother behind us in a rubber ring. The fishermen watched from the beach, ruminating over their plan to charge us a week’s pay for one grilled fish.

My fiancée tells me that in the film The Beach, a wandering crusty informs his stoned and sun-stunned companions that travel is all about “the quest to experience something visceral, something real”. I don’t know about visceral, but I came back with a pretty realistic tan. I’m now adorned with a ghost bikini – I was toying with the idea of getting a tattoo of a bird, inspired by the dragon tattoo that decorates the Russian’s pudenda, but this will do for now.

I want to say that it’s impossible to be miserable next to the sea, but of course this is an outright lie – a talented miserabilist can be miserable anywhere. Maybe it’s just that you can’t be quite as happy inland. Inland isn’t really designed for human existence: leave the elephants to do what they will with it. (“A sort of chessboard effect developed, with people occupying one set of squares and the elephants another… The ‘elephant problem’ was a major concern of colonial authorities throughout Africa.” – John Reader.)

The beach: A blockbusting geographical feature from the God that brought you mountains, ponds and icebergs. 9 out of 10.

Review: Homesickness

noreply@blogger.com (Eskimo) — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 20:24:00 +0000

Me and my platinum blonde Russian flatmate who belongs in an eponymous biopic had breakfast in the Royal Palm the other day and the grass nearly made me cry. I had trouble squeezing my pastry past the lump in my throat: it was proper, green, tended and sprinklered grass like you might get in a dream vision of Regent’s Park.

I keep having these totally irrational attacks of nostalgia. Last night, I was dancing with an Israeli diamond dealer to the heart-wrenching strains of Haddaway’s famous epic poem What Is Love?, and it reminded me of being at university. But why? The human heart is like a drink-addled word association game.

Homesickness is often difficult to distinguish from existential angst and sexual frustration. In this respect it’s like many other emotions, e.g. confusion, irritation, romantic love. In the grip of homesickness, a girl finds herself asking important spiritual questions. Where am I? And why? What’s the point of me? Will I ever get laid again? Why did that funny Dutch man have sex with prostitutes on my bed while I was away looking at giraffes, when he had a perfectly serviceable bed of his own in the room next door?

Homesickness: Better than being sick of home. 3 out of 10.

Review: Monkeys

noreply@blogger.com (Eskimo) — Tue, 23 Aug 2005 16:52:00 +0000

All monkeys are wonderful, but some are more wonderful than others. The dancing monkey, for example, grinding her crotch into thin air. The angsty adolescent monkey, writing FUCK in Boots No 17 lipstick on the bathroom mirror. The monkey who is going through a ‘help, I’m 33 and from a Catholic country where everyone keeps banging on about how I’m the same age as Jesus when he died’ crisis and has to run around trying to have sex with teenage girls.

Mister Internet tells me that red colobus monkeys “belch in each other’s faces as a friendly gesture”. They also like to climb trees and watch the sun rise or set, “like messengers of God”, it says here, though it’s possible they’ve got it the wrong way round. Maybe the belches are the message from God, and the sunrise an embarrassing accident.

I went to look at some monkeys the other day, and they were very good monkeys, although all they did was eat leaves. I don’t know what I was expecting: a striptease, perhaps, or a traditional dance. These weren’t particularly expensive monkeys: colobuses are the crack whores of the primate world, costing only around $20 a go; chimpanzees are slightly dearer, although still a bargain at around $40. Gorillas are the primate equivalent of high class hookers, the kind that wear nice shoes and come to your hotel, and the relevant authorities will charge you $300 a day for the pleasure of stumbling around densely forested hillsides looking for them.

Baboons are free, like people who really love you or who are very drunk in a bar.

Monkeys: Man is a sad animal who combs his hair. 10 out of 10.

Review: Trainers

noreply@blogger.com (Eskimo) — Thu, 04 Aug 2005 22:53:00 +0000

I look down at my Adidas and I remember that the world is a beautiful place, that humanity is constantly striving to better itself and that all difficulties can ultimately be overcome with the twin weapons of an open heart and a firmly closed pair of legs. Or I used to, until last week, when I went island shopping down south. We were so busy tormenting the itinerant fishermen with our near-nudity and excessive photography that I failed to notice one of them stealing my trainers from under my nose. The government official who’d accompanied us to the island on a rickety boat, spending the journey entertaining me by looking terrified and saying repeatedly, “I feel that death is very near”, insisted on taking up the matter of the trainer theft with the head of the village. I cowered like an embarrassed teenager. Adulthood: will it never end?

Now I can take it easy for the rest of my life, knowing that I was responsible for introducing stripy sports shoes to a remote community in the Indian Ocean. My boss has now bought the island, so new flavours of corrupt western desire will doubtless be introduced as soon as is convenient for both parties.

My poor, lost trainers! What strange and unappreciative pair of feet are you on today? I’ll get over it soon: my fiancée, who isn’t really my fiancée, has promised to bring a new pair when she comes to visit. Coincidentally, a friend of mine used to have crazy self-pleasuring fun with a website that featured men wearing nothing but Adidas trainers. Apparently most brands of sportswear have a similar following. I suppose it was inevitable, given world enough and time, that humanity would start to develop a bizarre Pavlovian sexual response to brand names.

Trainers: Comfy, though, aren’t they. 9 out of 10.

Review: Anecdotes

noreply@blogger.com (Eskimo) — Tue, 19 Jul 2005 11:23:00 +0000

Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains and incapable of posting on her blog because of living somewhere that isn't particularly conducive to limply witty, semi-ironical commentary. Also, I was kept up all night by Christians across the road singing and praying until 5am, at which time no decent self-respecting god is awake anyway, so I'm tired and will have to write this in the style of Wittgenstein (famous author of the famous Da Vinci Code), as a series of mostly unrelated observations.

Nor have I sent any group emails, except to my family, who would be just as happy if I pdf'd over a signed and dated ECG reading showing that I'm still alive. By rights, I should be sweating anecdotes from my pores by now, but against a background of general strangeness, nothing shows up as particularly strange.

A few years ago I cack-handedly attempted a relationship with a man who was very good at anecdotes. They would always begin with him taking a deep breath and rolling his eyes up until the whites showed, before launching into a stream of exaggerations, embellishments and lies. He used to change the endings: all is fair, in love and the pub. Since then, I've become violently attached to a series of laconic men whose idea of a good chat is to stare into space, occasionally making an observation about someone's shoes. These men are like a chemistry set: the joy is in seeing what makes them react.

My boss is a fountain of anecdotes. He once had a fistfight with Pasolini outside a cement factory in Dar es Salaam. That's my favourite. The rest is silence. The safari park guides have millions of anecdotes, even the Elephant Man, but they all go something like: "And then we saw a lion crawl behind the tent!" and you quickly get used to them and can tune out while they're being told apart from the occasional "How scary! How brave!" Then everyone goes home happy, having successfully fulfilled their gender roles for once in their sorry, psychosexually complex lives.

I am missing the 'dotes of close friends, but my fiancee has promised to write all hers in a Word document, then copy and paste them into every email in order to recreate the repetition and enforced familiarity that I'd get over a normal weekend in London.

Anecdotes: Kids! Why not share your own favourites, on this handy Comments facility! 7 out of 10.

Review: Leaving the country

noreply@blogger.com (Eskimo) — Thu, 07 Jul 2005 17:54:00 +0000

Well, knock me down with a feather, but leaving the country is stressful. I thought it would be like going out on Friday, only with a passport instead of three bottles of white wine, but it's proper troublesome alright.

Anyway, please look after London in my absence and make sure it doesn't get blown up. Will be blogging more regularly on arrival in Dar es Salaam, reviewing things of increasing irrelevance to your tawdry western existence, eg brands of African beer and having a woman come in to do your laundry.

My flight is now boarding.

Leaving the country: Missing you already. 6 out of 10.

Science review: Radiation

noreply@blogger.com (Eskimo) — Thu, 23 Jun 2005 14:18:00 +0000

I didn’t think I knew very much about radiation, but I’ve suddenly become full of insight since a freak accident in which I was saturated by gamma rays, leaving me with the ability to bend space/time thus altering the rules of probability and endowing me with the strength of a KGB-trained leopard. Well, and also I have been writing biographies of Marvel superheroes for a living.

Radiation is great for the underdog: it really helps them blossom, growing muscles and a desire to devote their lives to fighting crime. (Why so many policemen among the superheroes? Jobsworths, to a man. The world of post-radiation superheroism is a quaint place, rooted in the 1950s. Everyone is married or existentially tormented, and I had to delete, for noble moral reasons of word count, a breathless reference to Elektra’s habit of “loving for thrills!”.) For everyone else, it’s rubbish, because it gives people diseases and makes their hair fall out and then they die either of radiation sickness or because of choking on toast in the kitchen while reading an article about Chernobyl.

I read a book called Brother in the Land when I was quite small, about the aftermath of nuclear war, babies being born without mouths and dead cities and no one being kind to children because childhood is a luxury you can only have when no one has dropped a bomb on you recently (similar in this way to other luxuries eg dark chocolate, quilted toilet paper, Versace ashtrays etc). The book was full of radiation sickness, it was like the common cold in Shakespeare. All this was very troubling to me – I was far too young for the book, it was my comeuppance for having the intellectual equivalent of eyes bigger than my belly. To this day, when I see a particularly lurid sunset, I scan the horizon for accompanying mushroom clouds.

Radiation: On balance, not that great, but useful for manufacturing half-men half-beasts with the agility of an Olympic gymnast, the sheer brute strength of a Sumo wrestler and laser beams for eyes. 4 out of 10.

Review: Big Brother

noreply@blogger.com (Eskimo) — Mon, 20 Jun 2005 14:56:00 +0000

It’s disgusting how lazy some people are, failing to update their blogs in favour of lolling around watching Big Brother and reading the Big Brother online forum and talking to people about Big Brother.

Jumping on the bandwagon late, as ever, I’ve fallen in love with reality TV this year. TV drama disgusts me now: as BS Johnson wrote, “Enough of all this lying!” Why make stuff up, when you can watch a cross-dressing teenager paint his toenails, an aspiring rapper from Leeds cornrow his hair and the most beautiful man on TV walk around in his pants? Why leave the house? I am furious that the weather is perfect: it’s eating into valuable BB obsession time.

Pearls of wisdom so far include, “I go for a girl’s personality as well as her looks – I know that makes me sound like a mincer”, “If a human touches a dolphin, it’s like putting it in acid”, and the revelation that there are people out there who have never gone without sex for more than 25 days. That’s what it’s like, when you’re an experienced sailor on the… OK, will give hilarious Relation Ship pun a rest for now.

Big Brother: I’ll miss it when I’m gone. Unless they have it in Tanzania, with Big Brother voiced by Bob Geldof and insipid theme tune composed by Chris Martin. 8 out of 10.

Review: Charity bracelets

noreply@blogger.com (Eskimo) — Wed, 08 Jun 2005 15:24:00 +0000

My little sister was reeling off a list of worthy plastic bracelets in her possession:

Little Sister: “I’ve got Make Poverty History, diabetes, breast cancer, cruelty to children, and another cancer one. I wanted to get a Live Strong one from Nike Town, but they’d sold out.”
Me: “What’s Live Strong?”
Little Sister: “The yellow ones.”
Me: “I know, but what are they for?”
Little Sister: “They’re for Lance Armstrong. He’s had cancer, so he’s a walking charity.”

As Chunky Munky observed recently, there’ll be hell to pay when the kids get sick of these plastic bracelets. I have a bright pink A Future Without Diabetes wristband, courtesy of Little Sister. Diabetes makes you eligible for disability benefit and free cinema tickets. My mother spends the disability benefit on designer children’s clothes for Little Sister. I once asked her why that was. “That’s what you’re supposed to do with it,” she said. Visions of women in wheelchairs comparing shoes: “They’re Marc Jacobs. I got them with my disability benefit. Best thing is, they’ll never wear out, because I can’t walk.”

Charity bracelets: I was thinking of creating my own, with Make Eskimo Rich printed on them. I am underpaid and drink too much, but am I a walking charity? 5 out of 10.

Review: The word 'Eskimo'

noreply@blogger.com (Eskimo) — Wed, 08 Jun 2005 10:24:00 +0000

Google teaches us that the word Eskimo is a term for the Inuit invented by the Southern Algonquin, God knows who they are, meaning “the eaters of raw flesh in the north”. People are forever making these wild, implausible claims for words in foreign languages, as you will realise if you have ever listened to a debate being translated into different languages. Once, I was listening to a Hungarian go on and on for what felt like hours, as they tend to, and when he stopped, our translator said, “He disagrees.” We were suspicious: there are long words in Hungarian, but not that long.

A list of racially sensitive terms in the Mayfield Handbook of Technical and Science Writing (with Google I’m like Moses with the commandments, I don’t judge, I don’t ask, I just chip away at the tablets because I don’t have a pen handy) notes that “in Canada the official term for local native people is Inuit rather than Eskimo. Many Alaskan natives also prefer this term.” Canadians are very pleasant people, very polite, although I find the books of Margaret Atwood disappointing. The Inuit for ‘Inuit’ translates as ‘real people’, apparently. In this respect, the Inuit are showing an upsetting lack of cultural sensitivity.

There is a scene in the film Heathers where Christian Slater underlines the word 'Esquimaux' in a girl’s copy of Moby Dick before making it look as if she’s topped herself. I liked that scene, as an impressionable child:

“Heather Duke underlined a lot of things in this copy of Moby Dick, but I believe the word ‘Eskimo’, underlined all by itself, is the key to understanding Heathers pain. On the surface, Heather Duke was the vivacious young lady we all knew her to be, but her soul was in Antarctica! …We'll all miss Sherwood’s little Eskimo. Let’s just hope she's rubbing noses with Jesus!”

Here is Herman Melville on the subject: “Only the most unprejudiced of men like Stubb, nowadays partake of cooked whales; but the Esquimaux are not so fastidious.” Maybe Herman Melville and the Southern Algonquin had some underhand and secret pact to muddy the good name of the Inuit.

The Eskimo language neither exists nor has an unusual number of words for snow. Here is Geoffrey Pullum, author of an essay called The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax, on the issue:

“There seem to be only a handful of roots that really are snow roots in the languages of the Yup'iks and Inuits, maybe four or five, not very different from the number found in English (snow, sleet, slush, blizzard).”

The word Eskimo: Statcounter tells me that someone arrived here recently by googling “naked Eskimo girls”. It breaks my heart to disappoint you, sir or madam. 9 out of 10.

Review: Being single

noreply@blogger.com (Eskimo) — Tue, 07 Jun 2005 12:06:00 +0000

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a girl in want of a boyfriend, must not shave her legs very often. Those with boyfriends might well reflect on how much time, energy, effort, willpower, water, and soap could have been saved had they showed a bit more restraint, instead of whoring around bars trying to find an occupant for their boyfriend vacancy.

There’s a page in Cosmopolitan called Why It’s Great Being Single or something where women celebrate the ways in which being single has freed them up to look for a boyfriend. I am not sure whether or not it is great being single. It’s a bit like asking a badger, “Is it great being nocturnal?” The badger would merely look you up and down, in that supercilious way badgers have, and go back to foraging for insects.

“First comes love,” as Chaucer observed in Troilus and Criseyde, “Then comes marriage, then comes the baby in the baby’s carriage.” Only, Criseyde runs off with another man, and Troilus dies, but apart from that it’s just as I said. The best thing about getting married is wedding lists. This is where people buy you stuff for no reason – like begging, or busking, but with matrimonial vows instead of Stairway to Heaven on an accordion.

My mother, who is vigorously monogamous, doesn’t really do being single. Here, nevertheless, are two of her important insights:

1. “I wouldn’t live with a man again, unless he had a separate flat in the same house and I didn’t have to see him except when I wanted to.”

2. “Men are disappointing.”

Being single: Yonge fresshe folkes, he or she, / In which that love up groweth with your age, / Repeyreth hoom from worldly vanitee. 7 out of 10.

Review: Race relations

noreply@blogger.com (Eskimo) — Mon, 06 Jun 2005 11:40:00 +0000

A friend of mine who works in South Africa went to the beach with some black people last weekend. Well done, friend!

I find her example inspiring and intend to spend the next few weeks making friends with black people who are not related to me. Next month, I’m moving to a country where everyone is black. Last time I was there, I received this brilliant summary of my racial identity, from a man in a market: “You’re white,” he said, “but a funny colour.” Thinking of the money I’d saved on buying books by Paul Gilroy, I bought a sack of rice for 20p.

A few years ago, my father, who is Jamaican-Irish, decided to rediscover his African roots. He took to wearing batik-print gowns and yin-yang necklaces, in a triumph of mixed cultural messages. Before dinner, we’d do a libation to the ancestors, which is where my dad went out into his Manchester back garden and poured a bowl of water on the tomato patch. Go the ancestors! Roots, I believe, should stay buried underground, where they can make themselves useful.

The benchmark for a truly inclusive society is an STA Travel advert in which a racially mixed group of attractive young people gambol around in a tropical paradise, raping the local culture. Advertising has always led the way in the area of race relations: when my brother and I were small, people in supermarkets used to congratulate my mother on her children, saying we were just like a Benetton advert. This was before the period when Benetton adverts featured Death Row inmates and AIDS patients. It seems obscene, now, that Benetton ads used to be culturally relevant. The 1980s were a desert, even worse than the Noughties.

Race relations: As a child, I was under the impression that we weren’t allowed to eat South African fruit because the man from Del Monte killed black people. Later, I worked in a bar with the daughter of the actor who played this heartless monster. True story! 6 out of 10.

Review: False killer whales

noreply@blogger.com (Eskimo) — Thu, 02 Jun 2005 15:58:00 +0000

"False killer whales share some characteristics with killer whales, though they are not as aggressive.

"Like killer whales, they are not actually whales, but dolphins."

-BBC News website, 2 June 2005

False killer whales: Glad we've cleared that one up. 10 out of 10.