[ Blue Man Sings The Whites ]

[ Sunday, August 24, 2003 ]

[ Walking On Sunshine ]

Well. It’s that fucking time of year again.

People with no minds of their own say that summer is their favourite season. Like Christmas, it’s a time of year when you’re supposed to be happy for no better reason than the date on the calendar.

Alright, alright, I suppose that Christmas has a few compensations to balance out its myriad irritations and annoyances and, on the whole, probably comes out at roughly a score draw - the early goal by Probably Get Some Funky Presents cancelled out by two quick strikes by How Come Showing Goodwill Toward Men For One Day Cancels Out Being Generally Shitty The Other Three Hundred And Sixty-Four and Christmas Fucking Singles, although an injury-time equaliser scored by Two Weeks Off Work means that the two sides share the points.

I had a point earlier, I must have put it down somewhere... oh, yeah. Summer. With no gift-related upside to rush to the rescue, pretty much every aspect of the three miserable months (or, if you’re British, one-and-a-half miserable weeks) sucks the sweat off a dead man’s bollocks. I think though, gentle reader, that you know me well enough to know that I wouldn’t expect you to just take my word for it without even a sliver of supporting argument.

Oh no.

Please bear with me, then, as I try to once and for all set the seal on my reputation as an utterly joyless bastard, and present a series of short pieces playfully entitled Why The Summer Can Just Fuck Off As Far As I’m Concerned, Part One Of Two.

Sunshine
There are things that are improved by getting a better look at them. I am most assuredly not one of those things. Like most people, I look great in the dark. Failing that, I'd pass for normal by the jaundiced light of a streetlamp, and at least human by the comforting glow of a cathode ray tube. However, the very last thing that humanity needs is to be able to see me - and, so that it’s clear that this depreciation is not entirely of the self- variety, each other - properly.

Formative years we've spent in front of the TV and the cinema screen have taught us that everyone in the world - whether lead, supporting actor, or simply extra - is beautiful. It naturally comes as a bit of a shock when the summer arrives to banish the flattering veil of gloom, and suddenly there's no way of escaping the plain and simple fact that 90% of the people we share our planet with are utter trolls.

And we really, really don't want to have to deal with people being able to see that we're 90% troll, too. Mankind cannot bear very much reality, as T.S. Eliot said.

Personally, I'm looking forward to the day that the human race finally pulls its collective finger out and really gets down to evolving into a race of albino Morlocks who carve out a feral existence beneath the surface of the Earth away from the sun's deadly, scorching rays.

Oh, go on. I've been practicing shrieking "My eyes! My eyes! The light is too bright for my huge, over-developed subterranean eyes!" and everything.

Holidays
I’m a man of profoundly simple tastes. Give me electronic devices that go “beep” in entertaining ways, a handful of CDs, a nice comfy sofa and a fridge close at hand and I’m sorted. I’ve gone to a lot of time and trouble to get all the beeping things I want set up how I want them.

The idea, then, of paying vast sums of money to spend time in places where I have fewer things that beep, seems pretty inherently flawed from where I’m sitting. No matter how many books I take with me, no matter what CDs make the journey, the one I’ll desperately want to read or hear is one I’ve left at home.

The main thing about holidays that causes them suck so utterly is without question the lingering sensation, ever present throughout the whole time you’re away, that because you’ve forked out so much cash that you really ought to be having a good time. You can’t rid yourself of it. If you’re not enjoying yourself, the tedium and annoyance is deepened even more by knowing you could have just as bad a time for free at home. And if, by some miracle, you manage to fight through the nightmare of packing, organisation, interesting local ailments, bureaucracy, natural and man-made disasters and somehow actually achieve the stated aim of actually having a decent time, it’s overshadowed by the constant, nagging question of whether you’re having enough fun.

Work sucks. But some cunning ruse of the ruling class has ensured that being away from work sucks even harder. Nice work, Shadowy Socio-Economic Cabal Manipulating The World To Your Own Unfathomable Ends!

Sport
Sport is, and should be, ritualised warfare. It’s about rival gangs of big, burly men (or big, burly women) getting together under the nominal and tenuous control of a weedy-looking chap in zebra-stripes and then smashing into one another again and again and again until there’s only one side left standing to uphold the greater glory of their country/town/pub.

What sport isn’t about is a bunch of middle-class wankers getting dolled up in the whites that their mum has washed for them and knocking a fuzzy ball backwards and forwards over a hair-net with a phenomenally expensive stick. Neither is it about a bunch of middle-class wankers getting dolled up in clothes Liberace would have turned his nose up at as too garish and paying vast sums of money to chase a little white ball up hill and down dale for half a day, occasionally pausing to swipe at said ball with one of a range of different but, lest there be any misunderstanding, still phenomenally expensive sticks.

Summer “sports” are hell. Especially in an odd-numbered year with no World Cup or European Championship to distract in the dark, dark days between May and September. Summer “sports” mean Test Matches and the Open and the Henley Regatta and fucking Wimbledon Fortnight - tedious, ludicrously long-winded, purposefully-obtuse class-ridden bastions of comfortable snobbery and prejudice. But they’re not the biggest turds in the bowl, oh no.

Because summer “sports” also mean the fucking Olympics.

Only once every four years, thank Christ, thank Buddha, thank the Prophet, thank every God you can muster up even the faintest sliver of belief for – but who do I have to write to to get the bloody things put back to once a decade? I mean, not only does the fucking event have as its centrepiece the single most boring, pointless “sport” of the lot – athletics (no, I really couldn’t give a toss which steroid-riddled halfwit can reach the finish-line one microsecond ahead of all the other steroid-ridden halfwits), not only does it bring to my screen events that at any other time I’d gouge out my own eyes to avoid watching (oh yes, rowing, it’s you I’m talking about), not only does it conspire to somehow fuck up the couple of good sports it does actually include (yeah, okay, for the football all the players have to be under 23... except the ones who aren’t. And Britain aren’t allowed a team. Hah!), but it also manages to wrap up the whole rotten package with a load of paper-thin huggy-kissy, mutual-back-slappy, ain’t-humanity-neat “Olympian Ideal” bullshit which would stick in the craw even if we didn’t know that the IOC wasn’t a group of money-grubbing plutocrats willing to sell out the reputation and integrity of the Games to the highest bidder.

Three months of that lot, and even the Premiership starts to look like the inevitable triumph of the working man.

Music
You know the bloody summer’s arrived the first time you hear Katrina And The sodding Waves on the radio. I don’t think I need to add anything more.

Stick with me. I’m not anywhere near done yet. But while I pause to replenish my supplies of vitriol, just a quick apology – a couple of posts ago I was off on one regarding conspiracy theories and theorists, and in the process linked to a very good piece on HangingDay regarding Blair and Campbell’s Dodgy Dossier. Just to make things nice and crystal – I didn’t in any way mean to imply that the good people at HangingDay are Fox Mulder’s less cynical brothers, which may have been the impression given by my crappy editing. Apologies for any confusion that might have been caused by my habit of waiting until I’m about to fall asleep, guzzling enough caffeine to have me bouncing off the walls then attempting to write. And thanks very much to Alan at HD, whose extraordinarily pleasant e-mail had me temporarily feeling like some sort of Internet celebrity.

Or at least someone whose blog is being read by people other than members of his immediate family. Either’s good.

Soundtrack to today’s outburst -
Iggy Pop, “Lust For Life”
(1977)

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