Four days ago, my friend Stefanie Schmidt signed the lease on her new restaurant on Clapham Common. Last night, 14 of us went round for an informal dinner to christen the place. It was a lovely evening filled with delicious schnitzel, gallons of prosecco and brilliant company.
About 1:15 a.m., I grabbed a night bus from Clapham High Street and jumped off at Kennington Road. I walked towards Kennington Cross and turned into the side road at Cardigan Street. There in the bicycle lane, face against the tarmac, motionless, lay a small black woman.
I rang 999 and decided I was after an ambulance. This was not an easy decision to make after dinner and so many drinks, even though there was clearly a woman, who, on further inspection, may or may not have been breathing, lying with her face pressed against the road at 1:30 in the morning in Kennington, South London.
'Is she breathing normally?' the operator asked me. 'I can't tell. There's very little if any move-- Hang on, her head moved the tiniest bit!' And indeed it did, but the motion was simply upward a couple millimetres, very slowly, and back to the original position. She was alive. This is much easier to manage, I thought.
'Can you put your ear near her mouth and listen for breathing?' Can I what now? 'Errm... I'll try,' I answered. 'But I'll have to put my face against the road as well.' 'Please get as close as you can and see if you detect regular breathing. It's very important.'
I wasn't sure if he meant it was very imporant to detect regular breathing or the fact of regular breathing itself. I tried to move in as close as I could, but it was impossible to get my ear anywhere near her face without pressing my cheek into the pile of white paint, twisted into the shape of a bicycle, stuck to the surface of Cardigan Street.
I put my extended fingers in front of her mouth. I felt the tiniest bit of warmth flowing from her lips. 'She seems to be breathing, although it's very light, very faint, and I wouldn't call it "normal."'
'Ok. Next, could you try...' - at this I nearly put the phone down, threw it into a grate and ran home. I didn't want to know what comes after 'Put your ear next to her mouth.'
'...rolling her onto her back?' 'Why?' I asked. 'It will make it easier for her to breathe.' I put my hand on her shoulder and gave her a push.
Like a pixie sprinkled with magic dust, she popped to full consciousness in seconds, leapt to her feet, said she was fine, thanked me for waking her and trundled up Kennington Lane towards the Elephant. I stood with the phone to my ear, dumbfounded, trying to explain what was going on to the emergency operator.
I apologised for ringing in a waste of time. The man on the other end reassured me I had done the right thing. And, yes, of course I had. It's part of the contract human beings have with each other: we don't leave one another unconscious or dead in the middle of the road, or anywhere, because dignity is more important, at the end of all things, than any other thing.
As I hung up, I realised I'd tried, although it seemed involuntary, to sound as English as I could during the 999 call. I can't sound properly English, but I did my best. I suppose I thought it would keep things simple, perhaps ensure my credibility. I wanted to be taken seriously in what was, I was certain, a serious situation. The last thing I wanted was to sound like an hysterical, neurotic North American who rings up the emergency services on a whim.
What is true, and always will be, is the fact that I am a foreigner here. No matter how much I wave my British passport, nothing can ever change that. Something reminds me of it every day.
Tuesday, 26 February 2008
Thursday, 21 February 2008
Broadbandly speaking
I wanted to impress a new client. Customarily, there are two ways to do this: first, write well enough or a little better. Second, deliver on time. If the gods like you, the amount of time you'd like to spend writing and the deadline are balanced. Often, that's as good as the weather can get for a copywriter.
The brief was simple and sketchy enough that I could assume a few truths. I didn't exactly have free reign over the correct form the draft was to have taken, but I had a previous example to follow, or 'cheat from,' as it were. In short, what was required was to tidy up, sharpen up, and 'sales' up the 22-page manuscript. I had more or less two days to do it.
I really knocked this piece of work on the head. I did it without stress. I wrote at home on the couch in shorts and neglected my personal hygiene well into the early evening. I turned a downbeat brochure into a sales piece that was really going to move those apartments in Eastern Europe. And I did it without exclamation marks! A triumph all round.
What's more, I was satisfied with the copy fully 45 minutes before the deadline. This gave me time to read it through two more times and get it really, really tight. I even read it aloud the second time and tweaked anywhere I stumbled. I actually looked forward to sending the delivery email.
Then my broadband blew up. I over-dramatise: It simply stopped working. No warning, no fanfare, no on-screen gremlin, no virus. Like the sun, it simply and uneventfully went down, as though that was exactly what it was supposed to do at the end of the day.
I rang my client to apologise for what was surely to be a late delivery. He was understanding and had heard news that my service provider's servers were down most of the afternoon across most of the UK. You could almost hear 'the sound of chests being beaten up and down the country,' as he skillfully put it.
Still, I knew he wanted it on time. Every client does. I weighed my options, took a shower at long last, scooped up my laptop and headed down the road to the German pub. If there was a place in longest Lambeth guaranteed to have a working wi-fi connection, it would be an establishment run by Teutons.
I flipped open the computer, ordered a 'milchkaffee' and zapped the document through the air and down the phone line in seconds. Gott sei dank.
I went to bed that night certain that not even my crap ISP could screw me two days in a row. I clearly didn't give them enough credit.
What struck me most was the thoroughness with which the ongoing outage ruined my entire attitude towards life - not just modern life - for the next seven hours. I sat crippled on the couch for the first two hours, my brain scrambling to devise a plan that would accommodate all I wanted to achieve that morning and afternoon. Every timeline I concocted became perforated, a gap developing somewhere along the way that only a working attachment to the internet could fill.
Time was flying, and I was paralysed and helpless because I couldn't check my bloody email for edit requests or new work queries. (And before you ask, 'Why not just pick up the telephone?', let me say that you've missed the point if you so much as consider such an absurd solution.)
My first attempt to leave the house at 11a.m. ended in disappointment: the Germans wouldn't up tools until noon, so I came back home and sat on the couch some more. The cleaning lady was coming at 13:00. My carry bag with everything in it was just too heavy to lug around town all day. I was already sweating from stress. My head couldn't sort anything out. Eventually I bit down, packed my gym kit and laptop and made myself lug it all from the flat.
I took the 59 bus to Southbank Centre. Le Pain Quotidien, the French (or is it Belgian?) sarnie chain would have wi-fi, I was certain. And I was right, except that their service provider, I discovered after ordering a £7 sandwich, was also my service provider. I slowly shut the laptop, moped through my ham and sourdough and skulked next door to County Hall.
My gym is in a five-star hotel in County Hall. Surely a posh bloody hotel on the South Shitting Bank could accommodate my perceived need for wi-fi. They did have a wi-fi lounge, but it was hired out for a private business function. I tried connecting from the corridor just outside the room, cradling my laptop in my arms, but no luck. Pissed off, I went to the gym for a 30 minute aerobic grind, which made me feel marginally better.
I still hadn't connected to the internet.
I walked along the Thames and back to my neighbourhood. It was just after 3:00 p.m. A bowl of 'suppe' and a diet Coke later, the Germans had saved me once more. But it was a hollow victory: no edits, no work offers, no nothing except the usual shit Facebook wall posts and a dozen or so pieces of spam from my friends at the finer penis pill manufacturers of, I assume, greater Europe.
Then my battery died.
I arrived home five minutes later, plugged charger into laptop, turned on the broadband and everything was, as if by evil, ironic magic, back to normal. The service seemed to work even better than it had before the blackout. But that's what doing without will get you.
I poked Molly, Kevin, Adam and Matt on Facebook, and then I watched the Simpsons.
The brief was simple and sketchy enough that I could assume a few truths. I didn't exactly have free reign over the correct form the draft was to have taken, but I had a previous example to follow, or 'cheat from,' as it were. In short, what was required was to tidy up, sharpen up, and 'sales' up the 22-page manuscript. I had more or less two days to do it.
I really knocked this piece of work on the head. I did it without stress. I wrote at home on the couch in shorts and neglected my personal hygiene well into the early evening. I turned a downbeat brochure into a sales piece that was really going to move those apartments in Eastern Europe. And I did it without exclamation marks! A triumph all round.
What's more, I was satisfied with the copy fully 45 minutes before the deadline. This gave me time to read it through two more times and get it really, really tight. I even read it aloud the second time and tweaked anywhere I stumbled. I actually looked forward to sending the delivery email.
Then my broadband blew up. I over-dramatise: It simply stopped working. No warning, no fanfare, no on-screen gremlin, no virus. Like the sun, it simply and uneventfully went down, as though that was exactly what it was supposed to do at the end of the day.
I rang my client to apologise for what was surely to be a late delivery. He was understanding and had heard news that my service provider's servers were down most of the afternoon across most of the UK. You could almost hear 'the sound of chests being beaten up and down the country,' as he skillfully put it.
Still, I knew he wanted it on time. Every client does. I weighed my options, took a shower at long last, scooped up my laptop and headed down the road to the German pub. If there was a place in longest Lambeth guaranteed to have a working wi-fi connection, it would be an establishment run by Teutons.
I flipped open the computer, ordered a 'milchkaffee' and zapped the document through the air and down the phone line in seconds. Gott sei dank.
I went to bed that night certain that not even my crap ISP could screw me two days in a row. I clearly didn't give them enough credit.
What struck me most was the thoroughness with which the ongoing outage ruined my entire attitude towards life - not just modern life - for the next seven hours. I sat crippled on the couch for the first two hours, my brain scrambling to devise a plan that would accommodate all I wanted to achieve that morning and afternoon. Every timeline I concocted became perforated, a gap developing somewhere along the way that only a working attachment to the internet could fill.
Time was flying, and I was paralysed and helpless because I couldn't check my bloody email for edit requests or new work queries. (And before you ask, 'Why not just pick up the telephone?', let me say that you've missed the point if you so much as consider such an absurd solution.)
My first attempt to leave the house at 11a.m. ended in disappointment: the Germans wouldn't up tools until noon, so I came back home and sat on the couch some more. The cleaning lady was coming at 13:00. My carry bag with everything in it was just too heavy to lug around town all day. I was already sweating from stress. My head couldn't sort anything out. Eventually I bit down, packed my gym kit and laptop and made myself lug it all from the flat.
I took the 59 bus to Southbank Centre. Le Pain Quotidien, the French (or is it Belgian?) sarnie chain would have wi-fi, I was certain. And I was right, except that their service provider, I discovered after ordering a £7 sandwich, was also my service provider. I slowly shut the laptop, moped through my ham and sourdough and skulked next door to County Hall.
My gym is in a five-star hotel in County Hall. Surely a posh bloody hotel on the South Shitting Bank could accommodate my perceived need for wi-fi. They did have a wi-fi lounge, but it was hired out for a private business function. I tried connecting from the corridor just outside the room, cradling my laptop in my arms, but no luck. Pissed off, I went to the gym for a 30 minute aerobic grind, which made me feel marginally better.
I still hadn't connected to the internet.
I walked along the Thames and back to my neighbourhood. It was just after 3:00 p.m. A bowl of 'suppe' and a diet Coke later, the Germans had saved me once more. But it was a hollow victory: no edits, no work offers, no nothing except the usual shit Facebook wall posts and a dozen or so pieces of spam from my friends at the finer penis pill manufacturers of, I assume, greater Europe.
Then my battery died.
I arrived home five minutes later, plugged charger into laptop, turned on the broadband and everything was, as if by evil, ironic magic, back to normal. The service seemed to work even better than it had before the blackout. But that's what doing without will get you.
I poked Molly, Kevin, Adam and Matt on Facebook, and then I watched the Simpsons.
Monday, 11 February 2008
Vision Depressed
I don't mind getting older in principle. I'm prepared for it as I am prepared for the eventual breakdown and collapse of every electrical item in my home. Inevitability blah blah blah, entropy yadda yadda, and as Tom Yorke sang it, gravity always wins. Amen.
Most collapse is, mercifully, barely noticeable. Had I not squatted over a mirror recently to gauge the progress or decline (it was fortunately the latter) of a hard, nuggety thing that suddenly appeared immediately adjacent my anus, I never would have discovered the one centimetre-long skin tag hanging off me.
My GP, a very heterosexual, unsentimental, near-retirement NHS type who probably steels himself when he sees my name on the schedule, said there was really nothing to be done about it.
'You mean, you can't freeze it off?' I asked.
'There's no point' he sighed, confirming (a) that my body is simply and surely growing older and (b) that I could expect more small tentacle-like growths from god knows where.
It makes me envy those people who enjoy surprises. They must look at that piece of pinkish skin dangling from their earlobe one morning and cry 'Well, how about that?! Hey, Margaret! Come meet the newborn!'
I go to sleep every night fantasising about snipping the thing off with nail clippers. And I swear I would, but how do you dress that wound?
Thankfully, I neither smell, taste, hear nor see with my anus, so I don't think about it all day, every day. I do, however, look at things and read every day, and this is where my goat is convincingly getting got.
Last year, I was introduced to a new kind of spectacle called the varifocal. One prescription per pair of eyeglasses is no longer sufficient to satisfy all my 'seeing needs.' There are in fact three prescriptions tucked into the varifocal lens, and I must now remember to tilt my head up or down depending on whether I wish to see, say, the TV eight feet away or the soprano on stage eighty feet away.
What's really annoying is that, like most people, I prefer to wobble my head in any direction I please at any time I please. However, if I flop it back while watching television, the whole box goes foggy. Tilt downward while reading a magazine, and everything in frame stretches, without regard to proportion or the laws of physics as I (barely) remember them, in all directions. If I nod my head to indicate agreement, I feel as though I just stepped off Space Mountain.
The aesthetic is also compromised. Varifocal lenses don't fit just any old pair of frames. A huge plastic pair (think Jewish women, Long Island, 1970s) is the preferred nesting spot of the varifocal. So convert to the chosen faith today and save yourself some hassle and embarrassment.
Now, big spectacles with three prescriptions in each lens may sound bad enough, and it is. But last month, my optician told me that the reading prescription needed doubling in strength. So I had to pick out another bloody pair of giant, New World Ashkenazi frames and slap down £250. Last year's prescription has been relegated to a brownish 'distance vision' pair with a reading 'layer' that will no doubt cause extreme dizziness at the next roundabout.
Which brings me to the reason I'm really happy I moved away from Elephant and Castle a couple years ago. I remember back when ivory was bought and sold in velvet sacks...
(At least it won't be my hearing that goes next.)
Most collapse is, mercifully, barely noticeable. Had I not squatted over a mirror recently to gauge the progress or decline (it was fortunately the latter) of a hard, nuggety thing that suddenly appeared immediately adjacent my anus, I never would have discovered the one centimetre-long skin tag hanging off me.
My GP, a very heterosexual, unsentimental, near-retirement NHS type who probably steels himself when he sees my name on the schedule, said there was really nothing to be done about it.
'You mean, you can't freeze it off?' I asked.
'There's no point' he sighed, confirming (a) that my body is simply and surely growing older and (b) that I could expect more small tentacle-like growths from god knows where.
It makes me envy those people who enjoy surprises. They must look at that piece of pinkish skin dangling from their earlobe one morning and cry 'Well, how about that?! Hey, Margaret! Come meet the newborn!'
I go to sleep every night fantasising about snipping the thing off with nail clippers. And I swear I would, but how do you dress that wound?
Thankfully, I neither smell, taste, hear nor see with my anus, so I don't think about it all day, every day. I do, however, look at things and read every day, and this is where my goat is convincingly getting got.
Last year, I was introduced to a new kind of spectacle called the varifocal. One prescription per pair of eyeglasses is no longer sufficient to satisfy all my 'seeing needs.' There are in fact three prescriptions tucked into the varifocal lens, and I must now remember to tilt my head up or down depending on whether I wish to see, say, the TV eight feet away or the soprano on stage eighty feet away.
What's really annoying is that, like most people, I prefer to wobble my head in any direction I please at any time I please. However, if I flop it back while watching television, the whole box goes foggy. Tilt downward while reading a magazine, and everything in frame stretches, without regard to proportion or the laws of physics as I (barely) remember them, in all directions. If I nod my head to indicate agreement, I feel as though I just stepped off Space Mountain.
The aesthetic is also compromised. Varifocal lenses don't fit just any old pair of frames. A huge plastic pair (think Jewish women, Long Island, 1970s) is the preferred nesting spot of the varifocal. So convert to the chosen faith today and save yourself some hassle and embarrassment.
Now, big spectacles with three prescriptions in each lens may sound bad enough, and it is. But last month, my optician told me that the reading prescription needed doubling in strength. So I had to pick out another bloody pair of giant, New World Ashkenazi frames and slap down £250. Last year's prescription has been relegated to a brownish 'distance vision' pair with a reading 'layer' that will no doubt cause extreme dizziness at the next roundabout.
Which brings me to the reason I'm really happy I moved away from Elephant and Castle a couple years ago. I remember back when ivory was bought and sold in velvet sacks...
(At least it won't be my hearing that goes next.)
Monday, 4 February 2008
Take this job and: A love correspondence between Frank and Molly
Molly
Today at 7:41pm
So, I quit my job last week. I went down to 50% time this week, and I am set to phase out by the end of March, although I am tempted to just turn that into 2 weeks notice and move on. I consider your strange desire for employment to be an inspiration.
Frank
Today at 7:49pm
Ah, now I see the gap.
I'm not interested in employment AT ALL. I am only interested in MONEY. For without money, I cannot drink to excess, put things other than fingers up my nose or sleep in this lovely little box of a flat in which I've been waking for the past couple years.
I'm considering alternate routes: crack dealership (local demand is rather worthy), hanging a shingle in the red light district (would have to lose five pounds first.....next!) or getting in on the ground floor of the ultimate criminal activity of all time: banking.
I am, in any event, so happy to see that, after all these years, neither of us has changed much. I'd rather cut off my own leg, eat it, shit it, roll it in gravel and eat it again than work. And I'm sure you'd grab a spoon and join me.
Molly
Today at 7:54pm
I love you so much, Frank.
Frank
Today at 7:55pm
I love you more than my mother loves Bingo.
Today at 7:41pm
So, I quit my job last week. I went down to 50% time this week, and I am set to phase out by the end of March, although I am tempted to just turn that into 2 weeks notice and move on. I consider your strange desire for employment to be an inspiration.
Frank
Today at 7:49pm
Ah, now I see the gap.
I'm not interested in employment AT ALL. I am only interested in MONEY. For without money, I cannot drink to excess, put things other than fingers up my nose or sleep in this lovely little box of a flat in which I've been waking for the past couple years.
I'm considering alternate routes: crack dealership (local demand is rather worthy), hanging a shingle in the red light district (would have to lose five pounds first.....next!) or getting in on the ground floor of the ultimate criminal activity of all time: banking.
I am, in any event, so happy to see that, after all these years, neither of us has changed much. I'd rather cut off my own leg, eat it, shit it, roll it in gravel and eat it again than work. And I'm sure you'd grab a spoon and join me.
Molly
Today at 7:54pm
I love you so much, Frank.
Frank
Today at 7:55pm
I love you more than my mother loves Bingo.
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