Anne Guish

I had a very vivid and troubling dream last night.  There was nothing nightmarish about the subject matter, but it was one of those dreams that could have passed for an actual memory.  Nothing supernatural happened, and I wasn't sat it the basket of hot air balloon with Brian May or anything.  No, all the events were played out in plausible surroundings with "real" human beings filling all the major leads.  It was so mundane in fact that the befuddled night manager of my brain thought it was real and flicked the "go" switch.  At this I started shouting and flailing, which is what I was doing in the dream.  Loudly and violently enough to wake my wife as it happens.  I thought being paralytic during sleep was supposed to stop things like this happening?

And so it was that this morning I woke up physically refreshed, but a little lateral in the noggin department.  And I've been at 6s and 7s all day since.  I don't know quite what prompted this whole thing, a combination of factors in all probability.  I may have eaten something that disagreed with me for a start.  Also the council in my locale has introduced a "mini-Holland" scheme to promote cycling, which is as condescending and cock-headed as the name implies.

They've closed a largely commercial street to traffic, much to the annoyance of local business owners, and decanted the cars to several residential streets instead - my own among them.  This has given home-owners to pip, as you can imagine.  The worst aspect of the whole idiot exercise for me is the fact that I am lifelong cyclist: commuting, touring, racing, utility-cycling, I do it all, and it has made my cycling life worse.  I now cannot cycle the roads that have become rat runs, due to there being too much traffic on them.  I also cannot cycle down the main street in my village (the one that was closed to traffic).  It is supposed to have been given over to cyclists, but the locals now think of it as having been pedestrianised, so it's always thronged with people window-shopping or simply staring off into the middle distance, like expensively-dressed pink cattle.   

So all-in-all it's been a colossal fuck-up.  This is what is annoying my mind.  I have a phobia about flabby, illogical thinking.  I work with a lot of marketing types.  Marketing tends to attract two types: people who think plugging, selling and hawking are a necessary evil but are good at it.  And those who actually think it's laudable, akin to being a healer or a prophet.  The first type are women and the second men.  The men also all think they can count and think clearly, when the actual fact of the matter is that they know shit and pretty much do shit for a living.  So I've developed quite a specific aversion to dunces throwing their fuck-nutted weight around.  Having some of their brain-storming ordure, still warm from the colon, dumped on my doorstep, then, has got right in among me.

I will rise above it, however

Aide de camp

The camping season is looming, and it's time for young men the nation over to nail their courage to the sticking place and get the Trangia and the tent out of mothballs.  Each year camping looks less and less appealing - the cold, the hassle, the inability to bring all your adult toys with you etc.  And yet to decline to go would be an admission of defeat, a kowtowing to the advancing years.  And we can't have that.  Rage rage against the dying of the light.

Unfortunately it's murder trying to book campsites these days as holidaying under canvas has become dead fashionable.  Years ago one could turn up without a reservation and still bag nine pitches and a kennel for the dog.  But now it's like trying to get into Studio 54.  This is only one area of many in which the zeitgeist has chased me down and helped itself to my hobbies.

Over the last five years or so most if not all of my interests or peccadilloes has become the thing for the fashionable young graduate about town.  All men under 40 who aspire to a certain intelligent otherness now wear tweed jackets, ride fixed wheel bikes, drink real ale, go camping of a bank holiday weekend and live in Walthamstow Village.  Yes - I invented that.

Whilst one doesn't wish to appear churlish, where were you lot in 2010?  I don't do these things to make a statement; I do them because I believe them to be pleasurable and/or worthy of my time in some other regard.  I happened across them not because the colour supps suggested I should, but because they appealed to me on a fundamental level.  That's the problem with fashion movements: they broker no dissent.  They don't allow for individual likes and desires.  You throw your lot in with currently fashionable pasttimes etc. whether you like them or not

When I was a boy, I was starstruck by the mod movement.  As soon as I saw a scooter, a sharp suit and a pair of desert boots, I was lost to it.  My little mates and I immediately became mods, and I can honestly say that this period was the most improbably exciting time of my entire life.  I lived being a mod, absolutely lived it.

Sadly for me, during the long summer holidays in 1981, all the former friends decided en bloc to become casuals.  Just like that.  I could not believe it.  I felt betrayed, but they couldn't see the problem.  "Everyone was a mod then, and everyone is a casual now."   The scales fell from mine eyes.  The aesthetics of modism meant no more to them than did the price of sherbet.  It just is what it is now.  We move on.

I resisted the move, and I still affect a certain mod look to this day.  I don't do this to make a statement or stand out.  You cannot choose with whom or with what you fall in love.  It chooses you.