Hymn

Nail It

You don’t get to see much on the Tube.  Obviously being underground doesn’t help but often it’s so cramped you can’t even look down the carriage:  the best you can hope for is a relatively plain shirt or jacket in front of your nose.  If the pattern’s too busy your brain starts constructing one of those disturbing 3D images that eventually form out of apparently random dots. You end up travelling from one side of Town to the other staring at a black and white pineapple floating on a stranger’s back.  Once all I could see from Shepherds Bush to Baker Street was a close approximation of Janet Street Porter’s head bobbing gently off the sleeve of a short Polish man.  Today however, I looked up not down, at the hands wrapped with white knuckles onto overhead handles.  I could see seven or eight hands probably.  Every one had immaculate, I mean immaculate, nails.  Men’s as well as women’s.  Beautifully manicured and shaped, not chipped, not uneven, not a bitten one among them, not a shoddy cuticle in sight, no varnish, no tips, no dirt, nothing but perfection.  Forty-odd fingers and thumbs - all faultless.  Then five ragged, torn and filthy ones.  Mine.

Hooray

He left a newspaper in the crowded carriage as a marker while he bought a drink.  With ice.  At teatime.  He blustered back in a fashion that only Money can afford.  Loud and brash with the finest plum in his mouth and talking at a volume that ensured the whole carriage was engaged in his conversation, he launched into probing, insensitive, interrogation of his unfortunate seat-mate.  “What do you do?”  “Are you a lawyer?”  “So you’re a solicitor?”  “In the City?”  “For local government?”  “Are you married?”  “Living with someone?”  Just as it was becoming excruciating, another bloody Hooray-Henry piped up from across the aisle.  “Work in the City?”  “Yes, married twice.  First time to an Aussie.  Family into cattle.  God, it was awful.”  It was like two fucking seals barking at each other.  The conversation charged from money to marriage to football (rugby of course).  It wasn’t so much a dialogue as the proclamation of opinions.  The second’s Spanish Guitar ring tone interrupted the proceedings.  Spanish Guitar.  Ringtone.  I suspect he was being delightfully continental.  Or a twat.  Unfortunately, this exposed the poor girl caught between them to another piece of inspection under the Class microscope.  “Where do you live?”  “What does your boyfriend do?”  It all felt jolly fun.  I’m sure they’ll laugh about it when they return to First Class.  In a show of muted solidarity, we proles shared a silent cheer when he got orf.

Down the Tube

I hadn’t noticed it before - how the underground perfectly demonstrates motion.  Not in the obvious trains-moving way: no, in a curious fluid sort of way.  If you watch us poor commuters struggling on and off the carriages it’s rather like pushing an empty bottle underwater.  When you open it submerged, air escapes in great bubbles while liquid pours in in gulps and fills the void.  It just like that on the Tube and often just as wet.

Walk in the Park

Brilliant.  Utterly brilliant logic.  Take a piece of industrial wasteland, clear it, shoddily, allow it to become the den of drug dealers, vandals and thieves then call it a car park.  Wait until desperate commuters have hardened themselves with Dunkirk-spirit then quadruple the charges overnight, driving all the users onto the side streets.  Paint double yellow lines on all the neighbouring roads and employ twelve new traffic wardens to police them.  Close car park because of lack of use.  Install thousands of meters to pay wardens’ wages.  Piss off just about everyone.  It’s easy when you think about it.

Appropriate

I noticed the guard’s name badge.  Oh, I thought, what a shame.  What an unfortunate name.  It’s even worse because she’ll have had it long before it was associated with and stained by the talentless whore now gracing our newsstands and televisions.  I know ‘whore’ is sounds harsh, I’m sure she is a lovely lovely person underneath it all, but the description is, at the very least, semantically accurate.  Of course, when the guard was named, I guess it was a pretty unusual, rather exotic, moniker.  Now because of the publicity and our perverse obsession with celebrity, there’s a rash of little ones, saddled with parental ambition to follow in those ugly footsteps, who have this loathsome woman as a role model.  At least in future, if these babes in arms behave disgracefully they’ll have an appropriate name but still I’m sorry that it’s been appropriated for such an ignoble cause.

Moth Man

It’s a secret and slightly twisted other world.  Town, actually.  Oh, on first glance it looks normal enough: that’s part of its spell.  It’s like the optical illusion where all the apparently parallel lines aren’t or the waitress with a sticky-out Adam’s apple and hairy hands.  Bands of oriental triplets roamed the high street; geriatric mothers milled around outside bankrupt haberdasheries and none of the dogs had more than three legs.  Just when I thought it couldn’t get any more weird, I was attacked by an imaginary moth.  A great big thing it was.  It landed on my neck before fluttering upwards, horribly flapping its wings against my head and brushing them against my hair.  Horrible.  Horrible.  Horrible.  Except it wasn’t.  I just turned into a madman waving his hands above his head and swatting thin air.  Fitted right in.

Hold It

Damn bloody stupid things.  Oh, you’re so clever, you Interior Designers. So so clever.  With your shiny chrome and your seamless mechanisms.  Have you ever tried to use one?  Have you ever had a crap?  Never, ever, before have I needed instructions just to change a toilet roll.  Ripping it from the wall is easier than removing the empty cardboard tube.  Believe me, I know.  Flies well too.

Heal

I knew I’d pay for my bit of adventure.  It felt pretty painful as I yomped up but there was never any question of stopping or going back.  Besides, my lift home was waiting on the other side.

Back at base though, there was no alternative to having a look.  The blood-soaked socks should have been a warning.  The uncomfortably large disk of detached skin should have prepared me.  It was still a shock.  I have the biggest blister I’ve ever seen in the whole world.  Virtually covers my entire heel.  And do you know what? It kinda stings.

Good healthy exercise - there’s nothing like it.

Passing Out

I celebrated the ascent in my usual fashion with a bowl of the finest shag.  But, of course, I’m not a particularly frequent smoker and wholly inexperienced in the art of mountain-top puffing.  It took an age, huddled behind the paltry shelter, and most of my lighter fluid to get the damn thing lit at all.  Now here’s a tip: when on the verge of hyperventilating through attempted lighting up, do not stand up into howling gale, pipe in mouth.  The highly concentrated tobacco smoke blown directly into starved lungs, can, I am reliably informed, feel suspiciously akin to the playground game of holding your breath for 30 seconds then having a ‘friend’ punch you really hard in the gut.  It’s really quite unpleasant.  Still, traditions are traditions.

In-flight Meal

What an odd place the summit is.  A man landed a plane here in 1726 or some such year.  Apparently the first to land on a mountain.  While I was there I watched four rooks attack a black sheep - they kept landing on its woolly back and pecking.   Hard.  I thought these birds were meant to wait until their food was dead before tucking in for dinner?