things move around

I was talking to a bloke at work about how humanely-raised meat typically tastes better than meat which has been raised in a tiny cubicle with feeding tubes stuck down its gullet. I said I thought you could really taste the happiness of free-range chickens when you ate them - roast, for example - compared with battery chickens. Even with the eggs, which don’t range at all in themselves, you can tell they had a good life, after the fashion of eggs.

John agreed with me and illustrated the point with an anecdote. A friend of his is a shitkicker of some sort and one of his cows gave birth to a calf with no forelegs. Apparently the farmer, whose name was Colin, decided to take advantage of the poor creature’s immobility by feeding it intensively with the aim of producing an extra meaty and succulent roast, to feed all the family, and farmers even today have bigger families than ordinary people. But the plan failed, because the veal was tasteless. The misery of the calf’s life had transmitted itself to the meat in an evolutionary attempt to deter harsh treatment of animals, especially invalid ones.

Obviously what Colin did with his calf was extremely cruel, and would have been so even if the meat had been the tastiest conceivable. If I had been Colin, I would have used my noggin and fitted a pair of wheels, on braced crutches with soft leather straps, where the forelegs should have been. Then I could have charged people admittance to view the merry beast (John didn’t know if Colin ever named it) gambolling around its own little paddock, and later (but not too much later) on, once it had lived a life of ease and society, insofar as wheeled calves are able to, I could have savoured it.

I had dinner at the Gypsy - the only good place to eat (or drink) in Calgary, where the goulash spackles your insides like a constellation made of beef and paprika - reading my book, listening to an anaemic blend of Piaf-a-likes and eurojazz, and then, reluctantly, I left.

As I approached the revolving door of the hotel, the doorman, jumping to’t, set the revolving door aspin for me and called me “sir”. Why? It’s clear that I can spin my own doors, and I am not a knight.

I’ve never liked being called “sir”. I hate the obsequiousness of commerce - the way every lowlife who walks through the doors is automatically a higher lifeform, and more to the point, the implication that I, when buying a drink or availing myself of a minuscule but free tube of toothpaste from the front desk, desire that limp honorification, that I will think better of someone because of it.

Now I’m listening to The Smiths. Never been an apostle of the Smiths or Morrissey, but this has always been one of my favourite lyrics:

If a double-decker bus
crashes into us:
to die by your side is such a heavenly way to die;
and if a ten-ton truck
kills the both of us:
to die by your side, well the pleasure and the privilege is mine.

Canada is the largest state of the USA by area, but only the second largest by population, and the 53rd largest by electoral votes.

Calgary is a dusty, thrusty city at the edge of the edgeless prairie, populated mostly by jerks and misfortunates, with only one good place to eat, and ten thousand oillionaires who couldn’t care less.

My hotel is old by Western Canadian standards, and I get a little shock every time I hit the elevator button or the lightswitch.

In the evening the hotel is full of bozos: business boozers, beldames bearing hatboxes, gauche conference-goers guzzling canapes; I’ll leave it to you to divine which category encompasses me.

The bar is a large saloon whose furnishings aren’t as comfortable as they look. Every time I’ve been there I’ve been served impeccably by the same bartender, an East Asian (possibly Korean) woman of indeterminate age, with butch hair, and a Continental brusqueness.

The restaurant is ridiculously priced. I dined there once and the food wasn’t really worth the abuse my boss gave me when I gave him the expense. My boss is a weasel of a man, obsessed with probity.

On the wall of my room, directly in front of me as I type, hang two Victorian-looking watercolours signed George Wright, depicting scenes from an unidentified polo match, with the italicised titles A Question of Pace (two horses, sinews abulge, abreast, their moustachioed masters hoisting their mallets aloft) and A Backhander stops a rush (you get the idea). Only the English Indians could invent the sport of polo. Team golf on horseback, for cunts.

I’ve nothing against horses, but I don’t like golf, or cunts.

UPDATE: Disgruntled comments correctly that polo was in fact invented by the Indians, not the English. The English invented Polo mints, which according to this blurb are formed under the pressure of two elephants jumping on them. Whether Indian elephants or not, it doesn’t say.

Alexander Pope
lacked scope,
and even though his superiors were various,
some thought him hilarious.

London’s posh bog made the TV news recently, here in this forgotten cranny of the Americas. For five quid, any woman can wazz into a sweet-scented bowl while contemplating fresh blooms in a spacious, spotless cubicle, before receiving a sensuous hand-massage by way of adieu, all the while bathing her spirit in the luxury of the latest lab-generated chillout muzak. And ghastly as that sounds, it still beats squatting in a dingy cloacal ginnel, as the ladies of London have hitherto been obliged should their decency revolt (as it certainly should) at the prospect of the middens which pass for public conveniences in that city.

So, yes, a fine idea. As a man not living in London, I’m even more envious of women living in London than I was before. They are, after all, everything I am not, and now they can relieve themselves in ways I can only dream of. I note however that the posh bog closes at 9 o’clock on a Friday night, so after that time I expect my jealousy to moderate to its usual level. Actually I don’t understand why they’re not open later; surely this is a lost opportunity? If there is one time they ought to be opening, it’s two till three thirty in the morning, not only primetime for pissing but also for emptying the stomach of excess alcopops, sticky liquers and zinfandel. If I were WC1 I would be taking appointments: “That will be lovely, Miss Slapperton. We’ve got you booked in for two twenty at the loo and half past for the vomitarium. See you Friday!”

——————

On a plane this morning. I was in the aisle seat, trying to hold back my rage and contempt for the ungracious (from his one-word drinks order) suit in the window seat, whose fingers didn’t stint from fondling his blackberry for the entire flight, except to conceal it from the flight attendant on the pre-take off and landing checks. But that wasn’t the reason for my seething animosity: I have come to loathe whoever I sit next to on planes. It doesn’t matter who it is, what kind of a person, how amiable or otherwise the disposition, I find them contemptible from the moment they settle in. I have no explanation for this species of enmity; I’ll have to think about it some more.

This week at work I read Dead Souls, which is a novel of two halves, as they say in football. Book I - marvellous - a panoply of fools, gluttons, brutish serfs and mincing barins. Book II - Gogol starts moralising; made bearable by the brief presence of a dog by the name of Yarb.

I don’t think there has ever been a better-named character than Yarb. He doesn’t do much - he’s only there for a scene or two, and he’s just an ordinary Russian sporting dog - but he’s Yarb. A perfect name for a dog, or indeed an internet persona, mad professor, or end of level boss in fighting game. The very fact that he has a name, when he could just as easily be “the dog”, shows that Gogol, for all his lunacy, liked animals.

But not such a good name for a glamour model, priest, or cat.

Slept like a log last night. Like a top. Like a baby, sitting on a log, playing with a top. Dreamt I had breasts. Awoken, as usual, at 7:30 by serene warbling noises from the next room: Baby E’s morning monologue.

I enter her room stealthily, at which she immediately jumps to her feet, performs knee-bends, and gurns at me over the side of her bed. I change her diaper; a task I have performed so often I no longer need to engage my conscious mind. I put her on the floor and she lurches away in search of her mother, bouncing off walls for a few seconds while she remembers how to walk.

Shaving, I lop off a couple of incipient whiteheads. I have two disposable razors on the go: one for each hemisphere of my head. Each hemijowl. My shower is uneventful. I divide six kisses between K and E, and walk to work, naked as the day I was born.

Just heard Shostakovich’s 15th symphony: an old, sad, wild river of music, full of froth in the first movement, and then the oxbows and estuaries of horn and cello and double bass in a graceful lament, the raring scherzo of the third, and the long finale, the strings eddying into an indeterminate sea, and always the ticktock-percussion: snares and rims and woodblocks, knockkneed, grim and dutiful, buoylike, raw.

So far this year I’ve managed to eliminate the need for all the work I might potentially have had to do. Sometimes I worry about eliminating my job entirely and getting fired, but then there’d be nobody to eliminate the need for my work.

Instead I’ve been reading “Of Human Bondage”. Kate suggested I read it, I think as a joke, but the joke’s on her: I’d be a perfect beast if I didn’t admit that I’m finding it rather jolly.

Rudely awakened at 7:10 this morning by the fire alarm. A bleary slew of renters, too poor rather than too smart to buy into the housing bubble, oozed down the stairwells and pooled in the lobby like a huddled mass.

The alarm was syncopated, avant-garde. Urt urt urt. Urt urt urt urt. Urt urt urt urt. Urt urt urt. Urt urt urt urt urt. And so on. We huddled. Baby E wriggled from my arms and stood on the floor, cuddling her polar bear, whose name is John Lewis, and smiling and yabbering at a youngish couple who perhaps looked friendlier than Kate and I.

A bloke I work with, who lives in the same building, told me later that the alarm had been set off deliberately by a strange little man who lives on the 13th floor. Resident weirdo. Apparently he was running round banging on all the doors on his floor at 6:00 yesterday morning. I think they’ll take him away after this one.

Big bowl of borscht for lunch - which is also the sound you make when you eat too much of it. They could make a fire alarm out of that - borscht, borscht, borscht. And so on.