Driving (Pogging)

I’ve been meaning to write something about driving and how bad I am at it for a while. Somehow I never got round to it, but last week, as I gazed at the dented and scratched paint work of the man I’d just rear-ended, I knew the time was right. So, here we are, in the wake of what I can only assume is the first of many, many insurance claims; written intermittently between filling out forms and having sympathetic but essentially mercenary claims processors phone me - a blog about how dreadful I am at driving.

I’m going to say that like learning languages and dancing, a lack of driving talent is probably innate. It’s taken four years to overcome that natural inability and the first one was almost entirely spent battling my complete lack of knowledge about cars or how to move them in a forwardly direction.

“No, no” my instructor would patiently explain ‘No, you can’t enter the right hand lane here - because this isn’t a duel carriage way. That’s not a lane over there, that’s just the other side of the road.’ or ‘No, no, what you are doing there is you’re trying to find your bite point with the brake. Just - move right a bit - yes, there we go.’ 

The confusion I had between the accelerator and the brake. That should have been the warning sign. I should have stopped then.

Another additional and really quite pronounced problem was the fact that driving itself is fantastically boring but that my driving instructor was one of the most incredibly entertaining and interesting people I've met.

She would start almost every conversation we had with the words “I think I’ve told you but -” and what would follow was something that no one could have possibly told me, ever. As in... 

“I think I’ve told you but I’m training my cat to use the human toilet, she’s up to ‘the amber stage’”

or 

“I think I’ve told you but sometimes I get these migraines and unless I take painkillers and lie down immediately one side of my body goes completely limp.” 

or 

“I think I’ve told you but my sister works on one of those soft erotica phone-in channels on TV, sometimes I tune in to see what she’s up to.”

I’m not saying that these conversational gambits directly effected my ability to focus on the road, but I’m not sure, looking back, that they enhanced it.

We spent about three months trying to put our collective finger on why, as a fully functioning adult tasks like ‘keeping the car in the centre of the road’ and ‘judging relative distances’ were so beyond me, before one day she turned and declared...

“I’ve been watching you and think I finally know what’s wrong!”

“Yes?” I said, trying to ignore how much this sounded like a psychiatric assessment.

“You love to pog, you love a good pog you do!”

“I... what?”

“You know pog, to pog, like - staring. You just stare at things we pass, people, dogs, anything that isn’t the road really.”

Apparently this is common slang ‘down my way’ but I had literally never heard it before in my life. 

To pog. It sounded obscene.

It would probably have been easier to curb my pogging habit if the driving instructor herself hadn’t frequently drawn my attention to things she felt were ‘pog-worthy’.

“Look!” she would cry suddenly as we practiced maneuvoures “Look! it’s that homeless man who dances at traffic lights!”

“Who?”

“Don’t you know him? He’s a local hero. Someone made him a facebook page and everything. He wanders around the Medway Towns and when he comes to traffic lights, or level crossings - he jives!”

Or...

“Look! That woman has a pram - but instead of a baby she’s strapped a melon into it!”

Or...

“Look! It’s that plumbers van that has a toilet with the face of Hitler on the side!”

We devoted some considerable time to this one. Any actual driving fell by the wayside as we tried to unriddle it. Why was the plumbers logo a toilet with the face of Hitler and was it pro- or anti-Nazi for a start. Because on the one hand you are equating Hitler with a toilet, quite a negative sentiment. But on the other hand - why bring the fuhrer in to your signage at all?

In the end we decided it was a clever marketing ploy designed to draw subconscious parallels and that all over the local area families were sitting down and saying...

“You know darling, ever since I saw that toilet with the face of Hitler I have been thinking about our own toilet and the almost dictatorial control it exercises over our family! What do you say I call that visionary young plumber and we can finally put our toilet in its place?”

“Yeah a peoples revolution!”

“I’ll phone him now and pay up front.”

Between the Hitler toilet, the dancing vagrant men, and the amount that my gay driving instructor would point at straight couples on the street and satirically mutter...

“Dis-gusting, I don’t mind them doing it in there own homes, but this is in public!”

... it was an uphill struggle. Imagine having your attention drawn one by one to each these things, and then told ‘Right, now, don’t focus on any of that curb-side freak show, nor any of the bizarre and brilliant things I'm telling you. Instead just focus on boring old driving - but don’t actually focus on driving, otherwise you’ll crash!’.

This was the other big lesson, to focus consciously on any one part of driving (ie. checking mirrors, which I would frequently attend to above all else, staring deeply and interminably into them as if in the midsts of some dreadful existential crisis) was and is a recipe for disaster. Instead you had to 'focus completely on driving, but not focus on it at all'. 

This advice was imparted to me as if it were a very simple technique and not at all the sort of thing that people spend years in the Himalayas with monks learning how to do.

It took a further 24 months before I was forcibly blinkered enough to drive without getting distracted either by external sources or the constituent parts of the driving process itself.

My test seemed to have been tailored to assess just this. I don’t know if my instructor made some sort of sign to the examiner - gave her the hand signal for ‘this one’s a pogger’ but everything the examiner did seemed designed to draw my brittle attention from the road and towards her. For one thing she looked identical, and I mean identical, to Caroline Quentin.

‘Are you actually Caroline Quentin?’ I hissed mentally as she got in to the car, and every so often I'd glance at her ‘Maybe this is research for a role, maybe something dreadful has happened to Caroline Quentin and this is what she does on the weekends now.” This sounds like I was looking for distractions but it was actually uncanny.

Secondly, she added things to herself as we went round the route. It was a warm, overcast day, but about half way round she put on a jacket, then a while later a silk scarf, and then bafflingly a large pair of sunglasses - Bono-like in their inconspicuousness. I could almost see her thinking ‘Ok, that’s the extra layers on, and the distraction sunglasses - no, she is still focusing on the road. Right! It's time for the fez!”

I let these things wash over me and passed (I should point out this was the fourth time I'd taken the test, I don't want you getting any false ideas).

There was a great sense of mourning in the period immediately following the test. The tiny period of time in which I was a good driver. I'd been given the gift of driving but horribly deprived of the ability to stare at the world. The prospect of everything I was missing haunted me. This was worse when friends were in the car. ‘Nuns!’ they would cry declamatorily, pointing just outside of my field of vision, as I focused on not focusing too much on anything, and wept inwardly. 

As time went by though, this began to slip, little by little I started noticing the nuns, the unicyclist, the person riding pillion on someone else's mobility scooter, the dancing vagrant man... again, who once you’ve become aware of his existence is actually very hard to miss. He covers a lot of ground. This was great news for me, though ultimately bad news for the person I recently collided with.

In my defence - it wasn’t just a case of staring at some oddity and ploughing into the back of him. We were at traffic lights. He broke suddenly, and in accordance with general principles I too broke suddenly. The difference between us was that I had a book on screenwriting on the back shelf of my car which flew under my chair and came to rest near the peddles.

What I should have done, looking back, was keep looking ahead of me and use my handbrake to stop.

What I did was look down, worried that it would lodge under the foot brake, and just stare at the book in panic.

I love a good pog. 

The heavily be-eyebrowed face of the authour Robert McKee pogged back up at me, I tried to shove it away from the break peddle with my foot. I looked up. In the brief seconds available to me before I made contact my years of training unravelled and when I looked down again I focused consciously on driving, desperately trying to remember which of the two peddles I needed to press to stop this situation.

Brake... accelerator... brake... they looked so similar.

In the end I plumped for the right one, but by that point I'd spent so long focusing on them that it had very little effect and I rear-ended him anyway.

To be honest, I'm surprised I lasted as long as I did. I've basically been on borrowed time since the start. And while rear-ending someone because a book got jammed near your pedals could potentially happen to anyone, it's definitely a blessing that "are you a pogger?" is conspicuously absent as a tickbox on these insurance forms.

Last Requests

Hospital radio is popularly considered the kind of light hearted charitable pursuit that you ought to do aged about 16 if you one day want to work in media. It fills a valuable place on your CV above paper round and below production company intern, but that isn’t the reason I started doing it, and it isn’t the reason I continue to. 

To broadcast on hospital radio you first have to go round the wards and collect requests from patients. This is at once the most horribly sobering and incongruously hilarious thing to do. It’s hilarious because what you are asking is so entirely out of place. People look up at you, as they lie there, dying, and you have to cheerily enquire what sort music they would like to hear this evening. Many of the ones that are relatively well will ask for something, but most of the time they just shake their heads sadly, sometimes they will actually laugh in a hollow, derisive way as if to say “Here I am with a few precious weeks left and you are asking me if I want to listen to The Beach Boys? Get out, just get out!”

I go through this whole darkly comic musical charade one a week and as a result I am now an expert on the various labyrinthine wards of my local hospital. It’s part of radio policy that you aren’t supposed to know what each ward caters for, but eventually you start to pick up clues. The amount of pink and scrunched newborns on the neonatal ward, for example, that’s a big clue. The lack of limbs (and profusion of iodene covered stumps) on the amputation ward, thats a big clue. What all the wards seemingly have in common, though, regardless of specialism, is pipes.

I am now an expert on the varieties of plastic piping that can come out of any one individual. I’ve seen so many pipes. Pipes from mouths, noses, sides of throats, pipes disappearing ominously into torsos, and each one filled with viscous liquids of interesting and organic colours ranging from your standard red to a hideous bile-y green. I don’t know if these pipes are syphoning things off or pumping things in - but they are probably doing both. At first I tried not to look at the pipes as I found them actively distressing but now I can’t stop looking at them. Equally, what you learn over time is that the pipes themselves are excellent conversational fodder. “Nice pipe” you can say to a patient who is trying to remember the name of that singer they like. “Thanks” they will say, and sometimes they will lift up their gown to show you some more of their pipes, or the raw, scared surface of their stomach “Heres the operation I had done at Guys” they will say proudly, and after the first few times you will be able to say “Oh! That’s interesting.” rather than just veering away and blindly retching. 

Oftentimes the pipe-people, or patients as they prefer to be known, will try to communicate with you on a subject that isn’t music. This is a bad sign. Many of these pipe-people are old and heavily medicated and their conversation is surreal at best and often full of anger. You just have to vaguely listen to their ramblings and try to back away at the first available opportunity. The other day a woman spent a good ten minutes (though it felt infinitely longer) just rambling vitriolically on. I couldn’t pick much sense out of it. But I think she might have been asking me to avenge her death. She spent a good deal of time talking about the Medway Crown Court system, and how they had wronged her family. She had written down the names of wicked judges on a napkin and tried to get me to take it so I could track them down and - I suppose - kill them.

Another man, before I could even open my mouth to say “Hospital radio, can we play you a song tonight?” screamed...

“I’m not mad!”

Retrospectively, this should have been a huge clue. That and the fact that his feet were fastened to the bed with cloth loops.

There followed a five minute exchange in which he offered the immortal words...

“Have you seen the ghost what walks around this hospital? Some say he is massive and covered in black hair but others say he is small and completely hairless!”

Well, one or the other...

The most worrying thing is that these people aren’t even mentally ill, or rather, they aren’t first and foremost mentally ill. There is a whole other area given over to those who are. Diamond Ward... 

Because one of my most persistent fears is that I will one day go completely mental and end up in a facility like Diamond Ward, I try to avoid collecting the song requests of its residents. On the few occasions that I’ve gone in I’ve seen myself reflected in their sedated, chemically-glazed eyes, as well as in their fondness for Joni Mitchell (who I love and who, if requests are anything to go by, is now the Grande Dame of acute mental illness) My decision to steer clear of the ward was cemented when a radio-collegue breezily recounted the following...

“I was in Diamond Ward and one of the patients had got into the hallway and was crawling on all fours, but backwards, with her back arched and her head towards the ceiling, just making her way along the ward towards the hall, screaming quietly to herself.”

I couldn’t imagine how someone could scream quietly and I didn’t want to.

“So I went and told one of the nurses “I think we could do with your help out here, one of the people in your care is traveling crab-wise into the outside world” and she just nodded at me and said “Oh, don’t mind her, she is just having her ‘funny five minutes’”

I would have said that once you have been admitted in to a NHS psychiatric facility and are crawling about exorcist fashion the phrase ‘funny five minutes’ doesn’t fully encompass the seriousness of your situation any more. But then, I’m no doctor.

The studio from which the radio show is actually broadcast is deep within the bowels of the hospital itself and while I want to say that it is much less unnerving than the wards, it really isn’t. 

For one thing they built it next to the morgue.

On the other side of the morgue is the cafe. 

I wish I were joking.

Sadly, you aren’t really allowed to reference the morgue during the show itself. It’s difficult to know how to close each broadcast and while I usually end on a Leonard Cohen song (to ease patients into the evening and also to finish off any stragglers) I spent ages trying to convince co-workers to let me end the show with the line “That’s it from the request show tonight, I’ve been Anna Savory and I’ve got to go now as I can hear movement from the morgue...” But there were no takers. Too disturbing, they said. 

The irony of this, though, is that the phrase ‘too disturbing’ takes on whole new levels of meaning once you have been exposed to the radio station jingles, which are, really, deeply distressing. Call to mind the incredibly grating and nerve-jangling affairs that are professional radio jingles. And then try to imagine amateur versions of those. These jingles rub against your soul.

The jingle that precedes my show explains the fact that people (ie. me) will be coming round the wards to collect song requests, but rather than just saying “People will be coming round the ward to collect your song requests” a pre-recorded mock-cheerful voice proclaims “look out for our representatives around the wards who will be armed with their highly dangerous clip-boards and dodgy smiles”

If all of your essential organs didn’t twist in on themselves while reading that you may be unembarrassable! What exactly is a dodgy smile? And why does it make me sound like a colossal pervert? Why are clip-boards dangerous? That doesn’t even make sense! It is all said in a really jocular way as if to imply ‘Ha, ha, of course our workers would never leer in a faintly sexual fashion at you and then beat you to death with their clipboards’ But whose mind goes there anyway? Who needs to be reassured that that won’t happen? Why even imply it? Every time I hear the jingle it makes me long for the chance to compose my own.

Admittedly it would just be a few ukelele chords and then an 80s style female backing group singing “Look out for Anna, she’ll be starin’ at yah pipes” but in a way isn’t that vastly superior and more accurate than what is currently in place? I can’t really complain though, it’s entirely voluntary work, I could leave any time if I genuinely found the jingles too painful, or the patients too cryptically disturbing or Diamond Ward too unsettlingly familiar. But it is good fun, in a faintly ghoulish way, and also sometimes you discover new music... or new information about pipes.

Anyway, I must go now, I hear movement from the morgue.

Not Yet Dead

This new year I find myself unexpectedly alive.

For reasons I can no longer remember I've been convinced for almost half my life that I wouldn’t live to see 2013. Not in any serious way (and certainly not to such an extent that I spent 2012 doing anything useful or having memorable experiences), but in a dull, nagging, back of the mind sort of a way that every so often wormed its way horribly to the forefront.

I would consult calendars for important dates and then mentally whisper to myself...

“Right George’s birthday is the sixth. Oh! and look... only three months left now till you’re dead.”

Similarly, I would often look at my debit cards and seeing that they had to be renewed in 2013, inwardly dismiss it. 

“Ah, well, that doesn’t matter, I’ll be dead by then.”

The most worrying thing about my ever encroaching death (besides the manifest worry of the entire situation) was that I didn’t know what form it was going to take and I was really very keen for it to be something dignified - like a mafia shoot out or a ceremonial bonfire - and not something stupid and posthumously embarrassing like an severe allergy to a certain type of latex, or one of those toilet related deaths. 

I mention this because I do have a considerable track record in this area... 

Once, aged five, I almost killed my self with a Cadbury’s Creme Egg. This sounds unlikely and baffling but I was an unlikely and baffling child. Some one passed the egg back to me on a long car journey and, overcome by its sudden glorious appearance, I jammed it whole, into my mouth - where it lodged. Tiny jaws forced open around the confectionary, unable to talk or breath, I looked around in frenzied panic. I tried to cry out but the egg just got in the way. Eventually, alerted by my muffled screams my sister clambered into the backseat and jimmied the egg free with two biros. (I am still of the opinion that Cadbury’s subsequent “How Do You Eat Yours” campaign, in which the option “by cramming it whole into my maw” was conspicuously absent, was designed to reduce the number of complaints the corporation received from the mothers of terminally greedy children.)

A few years later while playing with my second cousin off the coast of the Isle of White I almost killed myself again but this time with a novelty floatation aid rather than with an chocolate egg. We had devised a game wherein one of us would hold a rubber ring up and the other one would dive through it into the water beyond like some kind of beautiful human dolphin. Dolphins were, at the time, very much in vogue among the eight year old community. You wouldn’t give the time of day to someone who didn’t have at least one dolphin themed item about their person. I think I may even have been wearing a dolphin adorned swimming suit at the time. Our respective parents, foreseeing injuries, had banned the game but since it allowed us to emulate our animal idols we willfully ignored them.

“Dolphins don’t need safety, Shannon” I said to my cousin “and they don’t care for rules.”

Convinced, Shannon, ever lithe and graceful, managed to clear the hole in the centre of the ring without touching the sides, and a few seconds later she surfaced - chattering - more dolphin than girl. Driven by jealousy I thrust the ring into her hand and positively launched myself at it. Possibly screaming whatever I considered to be the dolphin war cry to be. Sadly though I did not have the physique of a dolphin but rather the physique of a girl who habitually crammed creme eggs into her face. I got halfway through the ring and there I lodged.

In shock, or more probably, amusement Shannon let go and the ring slowly toppled forward with me crammed helplessly inside it so that I was plunged upside down into the water, my head and torso submerged and my legs feverishly beating the air. 

During the long minutes that followed Shannon never once tried to right me. I don’t know why this was, perhaps she had always hated me, or perhaps the image of me upside down trapped, drowning in a rubber ring was so hilarious as to impede any useful actions on her part. Maybe she had just mentally wandered off into her own happy dolphiny thoughts and wasn’t really looking at what I was doing. We were eight after all. Either way things were looking distinctly grim, and my increasingly paniced thrashings (though dramatic and heartfelt) were effective neither in righting me nor releasing me from my inverted rubbery prison. 

I would like to say that eventually my sister waded in and jimmied me out of the ring with two massive biros, but what actually happened was that a wave caught me, dashed me painfully against the sea bed and I came up the right way round, hit Shannon (no, I didn’t, but retrospectively I really should have) prized the ring from me, and swam for land making a mental note to end my love affair with dolphins. For the next four or five years I opted for horses instead. Horses do need safety, I reasoned, and they care very much for rules. 

Horses - those most cautious and reasonable of animals.

Naturally there has never been a horse that wasn’t stark staring mental. Everybody who has ever ridden one has a considerable arsenal of almost-death anecdotes, but here is the difference... anyone can fall off a horse, or nearly decapitate themselves riding fast under trees, or have their horse bolt, but to be hit in the head with the cast-iron shoe of the horse you are riding... that’s like the start of a joke. But such was my third near miss.

I could perhaps understand being hit with the shoe of a horse in front of you, that's undignified but at least logical. Take a moment to calculate the physics of what happened to me. A shoe comes off under a horse and yet rather than just staying buried in the mud or being flung backwards, it flys, presumably with a boomerang-like trajectory, almost directly upwards, before curving sharply and unnaturally round and catching the rider of same horse hard across the temple. The most baffling thing was that, when I rode back to the stable with a gashed and heavily bleeding head and a now slightly off balance horse they told me that all their animals were very well shod and what I had probably been hit with was some ‘regular (flying!) scrap metal’ - or possibly - they were willing to conceed - a small piece of hoof.

To me this was a strangely telling statement “No, I don’t think he lost a shoe, we take very good care of our horses feet and they are all immaculately shod - it might have been a bit of hoof though - despite us caring for our horses hooves very well sometimes they do just crumble away. It’s one of those things with horses, occasionally their hooves fall apart.”

Anyway, the point of all this is that it is at present 2013, and the more perceptive among you will have noticed that I’m not dead, either by the ridiculous means that my track record implies were likely to finish me off or by other more pedestrian methods. My death neither took the form of embarrassing toilet/egg/shoe related misdemeanor nor dramatic mafia show down, because it didn't come at all.

This is, on the whole, good news, but it's also slightly disorientating in that I have to come to terms with the fact that I was wrong. Here is 2013 - I’ve been mistaken in my beliefs for about ten years. I feel like I’m coming out a cult.

Perhaps, in the grand scheme of things any one of the above events was supposed to kill me and I simply dodged the pre-destined bullet. I'm glad I did because “Asphixiated by a creme egg”, “Drowned upside down nr Shanklin” and “Stray horse shoe to the head” don’t look dignified when written up in an obituary notice. But it makes you think, doesn't it? 

Well perhaps it doesn't, either way. I don't really have the time to philosophise at any great length as I now have to renew all three of my debit cards.

Anyway, Happy New Year! 

Dancing (or things I'm really bad at Part Two)

When I was four years old my mother enrolled me in a local ballet class.

Three weeks later I dis-enrolled.

This was a wise choice for everybody involved and I haven't looked back since, but it always disappointed my mother who I think had hoped to live through me. Not for any great length of time and not in a way that would affect the quality of my life or turn her into one of those warped stage mothers but just a little sojourn into living through her daughter - something shorter than a childhood but longer than three weeks. Once a keen ballerina herself she had been told aged twelve that her 'loud knees' were just 'too faulty' to continue, and assuming that I had inherited my father silent stealth-joints she thought I should give ballet my best shot.

My best shot was dreadful. It ricochetted off the walls wounding other children, I'm speaking metaphorically here but I might as well be speaking literally. It was apparent even before the first session ended that raising my arms, positioning my feet in different directions, and bending without toppling over were all activities beyond my modest ken. It was really quite perverse of me to stick at it as long as I did.

In many ways my lack of skill was a blessing in disguise as it turns out I didn't inherit my fathers click-free joints and now (even at the moderately spry age of twenty-one) am basically a human-version of one of those Noise-Makers that people whirl around at football matches. I can't move without clicking. If I draw a circle in the air with my hand my wrist sounds like a cement mixer, and my neck (which I crack often and violently in order to dissuade people on public transport from sitting next to me) makes a noise akin to someone breaking a bundle of stiff twigs in half. If I were to do ballet now it would sound as if I had castanets hidden about my person. What a stroke of luck, then, that I couldn't do it.  It would have been galling to have discovered a genuine talent and then suffered the same knee-based fate as my mother. In all likelihood it would also have left a dreadful legacy as I, in turn, forced my daughter into ballet in the hopes that she could live the dream, only to discover that she in turn was entirely comprised of click and would have to press her own daughter into it... who would also be clicky. And the horrible cycle would continue ad infinitum, each Savory woman marrying not for love but for the supple qualities of her husbands click-less knees in the hopes of breeding out what would come to be known as "The Curse".

Anyway, joints aside, the point of all this is I can't dance and I should have realised this aged four rather than aged eighteen when, surrounded by gyrating, hair-flicking strangers on my first and last night of clubbing, I attempted a sort of bear-like shuffle and noticed that they were politely averting their eyes.

"So you dance like an arse" my friends said "Just get drunk. You are too self-aware that's all".

They were wrong.

I can get fantastically drunk, completely separate my mind from my body, and at no point does it imbue me with the ability to dance. It is not a matter of inhibition it's a matter of skill.

"Just listen to the music and move with the rhythm" recommended hateful well-wishers. This is equally useless. It's like saying "just put your lips together and blow". It sounds simple, but it only makes sense if you can already whistle. If you don't know how to whistle and you actually put your lips together and blow you just spray spit everywhere through your closed lips.

My dancing is very much the choreographic equivalent of spraying spit everywhere through your closed lips.

I really can't do it. Not only can I not do it but I actually don't like doing it. If I could do it, I wouldn't. Ever. This general aversion is probably the reason it took me so long to discover the full extent of the problem. There was a fourteen year gap between ballet and clubbing and I spent the entire time refusing to dance.

We had dance classes at my school but, fortunately for me, they never involved anything that you could actually call dancing. Other schools taught their students to waltz or cha-cha, but not us. Looking back this may have been due to what I can only describe as 'the fervent anti-lesbianism measures' put in place by the leather-clad Head. On arriving she observed that a small number of us, out of either natural propensity or possibly boredom, were having relationships with each other and decided that the best way to deal with this (rather than just letting it happen) was to impose a series of sanctions on that famous homosexuality inducing subject - Performing Arts. We were not allowed to put on plays that included romantic plots (think about it - that is most plays) because of the drag and subtle girl-on-girl undercurrents so it stands to reason that they wouldn't have wanted us slow dancing with each other either. Eventually The Head just banned drama and dance outright, but for the first few years that she was there the school opted out of traditional dance and replaced it with something more akin to half an hour of creative flailing.

For your flailing lessons you needed no rhythm or syncopation but you did need that sort of unabashed gusto and cheerful disregard for looking like a tit that comes so naturally to self-aware pubescent girls. You didn't need a partner (who you might accidentally start to find attractive) either. Creative flailing was an entirely solo pursuit. Sometimes you might be asked to band together with five or so other flailers and all flail around each other. But not often.

At the start of each lesson we would assemble surly and poe-faced around the edge of a mobile that smelt strongly and unpleasantly of our own feet, and after a few dreadful stretches set to whatever song was popular at the time, our 'dance' teacher would give us a sort of brief. This was usually a situation like "marooned in the tropics" but sometimes it was just a noun like "cat" or "tree". We would picture these things, and then we would 'dance them'.

I think they were hoping that we would lose ourselves in this enchanted world of imagination, and give completely free rein to our natural flailing instincts. Whirling off around the room like acid-eating dirvishes lost in our colourful minds and completely at one with our expressive abilities.

This never happened. Well, at least not to me.

On one occasion our dance teacher, (who was actually a P.E teacher and clearly considered the lesson more than her jobs worth) bought in a C.D of the sound track to War of the Worlds and gave us a more detailed brief...

"I've brought some music in and I have choreographed some dances for you. You can take one of two roles..."

She took us through the roles, and the dances. I say dances, it still wasn't dance, not really, it was something like mime but with more repetitious stepping...

"Pretend the aliens are coming and you are working your regular jobs. Perhaps you are an office worker, in which case you do two steps forward, type on your imaginary computer, two steps back, turn, drink your imaginary tea. Housewives, two steps forward, peg out your imaginary washing, two steps back, pretend to chat to the other housewives. When the music changes register that is when you see the crafts hoving into view, ok? And then I want you to do two steps forward, FEAR, two steps back...."

I remember opting out of the office worker or housewife scheme. Instead for the duration of the War of the Worlds I 'danced' a role of my own creation - Gravedigger. Two steps forward. Dig an imaginary grave. Two steps back. Dig a second imaginary grave positioned two steps behind the first one. Two steps forward... and so on. When the 'crafts hoved into view' rather than pointing or crouching dramatically like my classmates I leaned on my grave diggin' spade and had a contemplative cigarette, watching the saucers with the Stoic calm of a man who knows that this invasion will ultimately be very good for business.

It is testament to how little our 'dance' teacher cared that she never once asked what I was doing. Maybe she thought I was giving free rein to my natural flailing instincts. In a way I suppose I was. My natural instincts were anti-flail and the gravedigger was a very still and thoughtful character, his flailing kept to a bare minimum at all times. He became a sort of vehicle through which I subtly expressed my hatred for the indignity that is dance.

The thing about actually hating dancing though (as well as being crap at it), is that it makes me a bit inhuman (just a bit). Dancing, like eating and hugs, is something people are hard-wired to enjoy. All cultures dance. It's one of those things. It is, also, a sort of social shorthand for 'everything is great'. So far in life my no dance policy is going quite well but I am very aware that there is every possibility I might get my self into a situation in which I am socially obliged to dance in order to show my happiness/approbation/joy/what have you and if I don't I will be implying that "everything isn't great" which will look quite rude. Other peoples weddings is a good example of one of these situations. My own wedding is a better example.

I've got that one sorted now though. I think for my first dance I'm just going to reprise the gravedigger role. If I've married the right man (ie. married him for love rather than for his knees) he will go along with it or, better, mime a corpse. Me in white with my imaginary cigarette staring stoically at the sky and him prostrated and motionless at my feet. Both of us together as the guests look on. Beautifully still. Expressing our perfectly static love with a jubilant, celebratory lack of movement.

Terminally Unemployable

A month ago (against my better judgement) I graduated from university. Life since then, rather than being the blur of champagne and cakes that I envisaged, has been an endless procession of people, some of whom I hardly know, asking me questions that are, at once, vague and horribly all-encompassing. The kind of things that, in any other circumstance you simply wouldn’t be able to lead with in polite conversation...

“So” they say “what exactly are you going to do with that life of yours?” 

and 

“Will there be a job? Or will you just be a burden to family and state from here on in?”

I generally try to spit, subtly, at these people but perhaps I wouldn’t be so thorny if I could present them with an actual plan. The fact is I have nothing sensible or realistic to tell them. I haven’t seriously aspired towards any sort of job for about seven years, and I will tell you for why.

When I was in year nine my entire class took an online aptitude test that provided you with a list of all the possible professions (I do mean all of them, French Horn Polisher was an option) and ranked them in terms of suitability based on your answers to a series of questions. These professions were marked with either a green tick (for those jobs that would bring you great happiness and advancement) an orange circle (for the ones you weren’t suited to but could basically muddle along in without anyone noticing) or a red cross (for those jobs you should never under any circumstances enter in to, ever). Unlike the majority of people who second-guessed and calculated their way through the exercise, wanting to be reassured that whatever profession it was that they had their eye on was indeed the one their personality marked them out for, I answered the aptitude questions with complete honesty. 

For my efforts the computer rewarded me with a long list of red. 

I had one orange (Snake Milker, no really, which seemed unviable.) 

It was sobering.

A lot of people were unhappy with what the computer had determined was their ideal career, and sat long faced for the remainder of the PSHE lesson ruminating on their grey futures in poultry wrangling or the professional horn polishing business, but I didn’t even have that to look forward to. At my most open and honest, and with what was surely the most comprehensive list of professions ever compiled to choose from, I had been deemed terminally unemployable. Sure, I could struggle through with the snake milking but I would always know that I was only hanging in there by the skin of my teeth. The other snake milkees, the ones that had got a green tick next to Snake Milker, the ones for whom The Milking was a calling that had ‘chosen them’, would look down on me, and rightly so. 

This all stuck in the craw to such an extent that I basically gave up on aspirations and decided to dedicate what remained of my life to reading. It was working well until a few months ago when my mother pointed out (forcefully) that this was never going to make me any money, and my sister had to sit me down and make me work out exactly what it was I wanted to do. “Satire?” I said after a while this was dismissed as about as viable as the snake milking “Give me a break, Jonathan Swift” my sister said “what did you want to do before you became a posturing and delicate soul?”

I can’t remember exactly when I became a posturing and delicate soul, as I think it was quite a gradual process but I can remember incredibly clearly all the jobs I wanted to have before actually having a job was a possibility. As a child I was very clear cut about my (at that point, distant) future (it would be a concerning joyless child who wasn’t, really, “What do you want to be when you grow up Timmy?” “Oh...pfftt....something in an office?”)From the ages of four to eight professional acrobatics was my sole aim. My parents had already prepped me for the role by naming me Anna.

Anna the Acrobat!

Alliteration, I had observed, was the key to the profession. As long as the name caught on my lack of coordination and general dudities would be overlooked. 

I could just see it.... 

Anna The Acrobat - wrought in bright colours on posters peeling from dry-cleaners windows. Anna The Acrobat - for one night only! Watch her walk the high wire using only her own massive head as a ballast! Marvel at her feats of daring-do and pause only briefly to allow her some quiet time with her inhaler between acts!

I have no idea where all this came from, as far as I can remember I never saw any particularly inspiring acrobatic displays as a child, I don’t even remember going to a circus. The notion just arrived fully formed in my soft child-head one day “acrobatics - that’s the thing for me”. My parents, ever supportive, installed a trapeze, hand-crafted by my father above my bed, and I practised each night with the sort of fervent self-disapline that has been entirely missing from my life ever since. If only I hadn’t expended it all on that damn trapeze, maybe I would actually have a real job by now.

Anyway, in spite of this initially fervour at age eight acrobatics was left in the dust as I slowly progressed through the dictionary of professions to acting. I was to play Belle in my infant schools production of Beauty and the Beast, opposite James, a flamboyant boy that teachers had decorated so that he resembled a gigantic horned slug. My beast.

Because the role was far too sustained for any one eight year old to tackle singlehandedly they split it between three of us. Other, less talented girls played Belle in the first and third act when she was either flacidly underdeveloped and innocent, or flaccidly developed and rightous, I on the other hand played her in the second, when, captured by slug-James, she went from pure provincal virgin, to Stockholm Syndrome sufferer, to committed lover. To my mind it ranked highly in the list of most complex roles in the western dramatic cannon.

I don’t want to sound boastful but it was staggeringly well received. People threw roses and the such like, asked for my signature, copied my hair cut. I was a hit. The amusingly named Mrs Badger took my parents to one side and suggested that they take me out of main stream education and enrole me in drama school. I knew they would because they had been so supportive with the acrobatics dream and it would be inconsistent of them not to be behind me in this - my true calling. 

When they didn’t take their youngest daughter out of school at the age of eight and sentence her to a life of child-acting with all its attendant mental trauma, I started a long campaign of hate against them, pointedly sulking and not speaking to them for days in a way that I hoped would highlight my natural propensity for drama. Looking back I’m really not sure they noticed. Desolate and seeking comfort I turned to television (I still do this, by the way) and spent long evenings watching the Real Actors. Hating them. With that hard knotted hate that only children are really capable of. Fortunately after a while this subsided, but I kept on with the television watching and, in time, repeated exposure to Rolf Harris, who would leer grotesquely over dead or dying animals every evening at 6.30, suggested a new career path.

Along with every other nine year old in the county I spent the next three years discovering to my horror that you didn’t just become a vet. You couldn’t stride into your local practice and begin magically healing animals like St Francis of Assissi until someone decided to pay you for your trouble. Instead the preparation for the role involved really quite offensive amounts of science and by age twelve, realising that even small amounts of science offended me, I called it a day on vetinary surgery. From then on I floated about, fixing on various professions for short periods of time until year nine, when, as we know, all professions (bah one) were entirely ruled out.

Usually I like to tie up these blog entries in some way, but I still don't have a job, so I can't. I want to say that one computer run simulation doesn't genuinely dictate what jobs you can do, I think that is probably true, but I have no proof of it. I haven't been an acrobat, or an actor, or a vet, or a glass eye maker (that was on the cards for a bit) or a satirist even. I've been an Avon Lady for two hours but they fired me before it began. So far in life all the evidence points to the computer aptitude test being right on the money. I am terminally unemployable.

So I'm going to conclude, desolately, with an image.

Heres to the future...

(You were imaging real milk, weren't you!)

She actually looks quite expert, I wouldn't be that good, that snake would have become tangled in my hair by now, or I would have broken the glass or the snake by holding them too tightly.

Seriously though, if anyone needs a satirist, do let me know.