Comrades –

I think it’s fair to say I was a rather sensitive child. I recall the spiteful Mister Adams, the then-deputy head of my secondary school (vile selective grammar in the heart of the Cotswolds with aspirations to the culture of an Etonesque boarding school for toffs combined, unhappily, with the bitter self-loathing of a non-fee-paying  institution that never quite sent enough people to Oxford nor the other place) remarking to another colleague as I was having a panic attack in the gym one day — “he’s a rather sensitive child” — the words spat out rather too loudly in order that I not only heard but also felt them and their implications of weakness, lily-livery and general divorce from masculinity, but also that the rest of the class would be clearly apprised of my position on the sensitivity scale (top right) and the corresponding position on the pecking order for the remainder of the educational experience (bottom left). Without fuss or noticeable effort charts were plotted and graphs extruded, and the mimeographed results passed around the year, detailing one’s position on the Physical Violence Index (A reasonable but improvable 3rd). Due to my increasingly undisguised contempt for the institution and its inmates this position steadily climbed over the years until I hit the heady heights of Number One — while my head was being highly hit — and let me tell you from painful but character-building experience that it is a true test of one’s ability to adopt an air of withering disdain when being dragged by one’s feet down four flights of concrete stairs by thirty braying schoolboys (although those of you that know me well will be unsurprised to hear I believe I succeeded). What smarted more than the tone and the volume was that this spiteful and malicious remark, like all honestly hurtful and malicious remarks, was actually the cast-iron truth. I was a rather sensitive child.

And while my sensitivity may these days be rather masked by powdery foundation of sneering cynicism and a brushed-over application of quick wit, there is one area where all the quick quips and the rambling run-on-sentences fail to reach. My deepest darkest sensitivity, that cannot be masked or hidden or helped in any way — is doubtless something more physical. It still occasionally surfaces despite my best intentions. It regularly and often hurriedly and without warning rises to the surface and is ejected violently from my body. My sensitivity, my friends, is constitutional. It is also eruptive. Often quite spectacularly so.

However despite the unpleasant nature of feeling my last meal rush with burning intensity through the delicate membranes of my nasal passages and spray into the toilet bowl, shimmering through my tears below me, I have been fortunate enough to have endured the trials of a vigourous vomiter in a number of hopefully instructive and/or amusing circumstances. And so in the first of what may turn out to be a reasonably long series of infrequent story posts, I present to you the following charming and heartwarming tale.

A Shaggy Dog Story

I was, I believe I may have already mentioned, a sensitive child. Certainly too sensitive to be sent to a Catholic primary school run by craggy bitter old nuns from the local convent, but given the absence of any other outpost of humanity within half a day’s walk, this was to be my lot. The school was at the other end of the village* — just past the phone box which in any other circumstance was just beyond the outer limits of my prescribed play area, despite its passing resemblance to a conning tower from which to shoot down the Millenium Falcon piloted by Han Solo (played with vigour and some good mouth-based blaster effects by Stuart Whitman) and Princess Leia (my sister, playing the role somewhat grudgingly, however it appears there really are no roles for women and she was stuck with it). The school had decided -– doubtless after a few dozen cases of severe life-long trauma –- that at the tender age of 5 we were too young to be confronted with a bony harridan in a blue habit with a face like a worried onion and we were gently led –- some would say inducted under false pretences -– into the world of the school by a homely woman called Mrs Bennett, all woolly jumpers and curly hair, with a tissue for every occaison and the ability to turn a deaf ear whenever a nascent pupil inadvertently called her ‘mummy’ for the fifth time that day (although she fell somewhat in my estimation when she once tried to call me ‘Jerry’ – let me tell you my fury knew no bounds that day, but that’s another insurance claim). We liked Mrs Bennett. Mrs Bennett liked us. She particularly liked me, because I was a smart kid, and so I went on The Clever Table. I’m not really sure that The Clever Table was a bona fide educational tool, and I’m equally uncertain that this sort of binary streaming at five years old is really the best sort of educational practice, but these were the 1970s and, well, I was on The Clever Table and thus didn’t give a fuck, lording it over the other (non-clever-table, normal table, stupid table) kids — a Mentally Magnificent Miniature Mussolini. Amazingly this didn’t turn me into a figure of loathing (it took years of developing what I have in place of a personality for that to occur). One possible reason for this is that I had Zebedee.

Zebedee was an Old-English Sheepdog. People in Australia have no idea what one of these is, even when prompted with the line “You know, the Dulux dog” or the possibly-even-more-helpful “You know, like Digby, The Biggest Dog in the World”. He was a big beautiful shaggy friendly dog that was my favourite companion (although until I went to school it was pretty much the dog or my sister, and the dog stole my Lego a bit less often) and at the end of the day he would appear in the classroom-length picture windows as my mum walked into the playground to collect me. All the other kids would look at him covetously and I would glow with the special kind of unearned pride that is familiar to anyone who’s ever had a famous friend. I loved him to bits (and I was later to discover that I owed him a great deal: however shitty and aspirationally-middle-class the name ‘Jeremy’ is, ‘Zebedee’ is a fuck of a lot worse and would have been my name had the dog not arrived a mere month before I was born).

All of Class 1 knew that Monday was going to be a bad day. For a start, The Clever Table were split up, forced to sully our pencil cases among the dribbling neanderthal classmates we generally used as footrests. For a second, Mrs Bennett was ill. Which meant Sister Alexis, with a face exactly like the old woman disguise the Wicked Queen adopts in Snow White, was taking her place. Sister Alexis was a five foot tower of terror who would brook no talking, no fidgeting and no smiling. You would certainly never refer to her as ‘mummy’. And she was making us do dictation. Now, I realise that the concept of making 5-year-olds do dictation is ridiculous, and I realise it could never ever in any real-world-scenario happen. But after years of working this through in my head, there really is no other explanation for it other than it actually happened. Five-year-olds, pencils wobbling precariously like cabers in their tiny hands, tongues poking delicately from the sides of their mouths in solid concentration as Sister Alexis read us some tosh about John the Baptist and we attempted to a) hear what she was saying through her thick Irish brogue b) spell the words and c) not get cramp. Still we did it, because Sister Alexis was scary as fuck. And we didn’t talk, or fidget, or smile. We just wrote.

Or rather most of us just wrote. One of us was sat there in a tiny blue chair (the red ones were less good, for some reason) with a little yellow dot on the back (this meant it was Even Better) sitting very still, holding in his hand a broken pencil. I could have just put my hand up and walked up the the front desk and sharpened it but as I have mentioned, Sister Alexis was scary as fuck. So I sat there and thought about pencils and thought about drawing and thought about cartoons and then the true horror of the situation  came crashing down around me: I was now so far behind everyone else that I was never going to catch up. Trouble the painful likes of which I had never known would befall me in the terrible shape of Sister Alexis’ hideous wrath (a bony finger between the shoulder blades).

And me, a guiding light from the Clever Table. Oh the humanity.

So I devised a plan. A plan so cunning and foolproof and devilishly clever that sensitive children throughout time have pressed it into action only when the situation absolutely demanded it, such is its power, adaptability and utter effectiveness: I started to cry.

Slowly, the plan worked. Around me my concerned classmates became aware of my silent sobbing and a murmur of “Jeremy’s crying” started to bubble about the room. This was enough to pause Sister Alexis who promptly swooped over to my desk and asked me what the matter was.

This created a problem. I was suddenly and starkly aware that in the cold light of ‘the facts’ I was crying because I had a broken pencil. Even in my despair, I realised this was a pretty fucking weak excuse to be crying. I needed something better. I needed something bigger. I needed a reason so big my almost completely empty page would be utterly overlooked. And it came to me, as if John the Baptist himself had reached out from his heavenly veil and popped it like shiny 5p into my ear.

Zebedee had to go.

“My dog’s died!”, I wailed, obviously rather convincingly, because Sister Alexis put her arm around me and gave me a hug. I saw my histrionics reflected in the empathetic eyes of the non-Clever Table children around me, and I knew that my old pal Zebedee had saved my life by giving up his own. But he had done far more than that. The entirely-fabricated death of a family pet had enormous unforeseen benefits. I was excused from dictation. I was allowed to play in the quiet corner. I was allowed to play in the quiet corner while everyone else had to continue working, which is like playing in the quiet corner, squared. It’s that good. But the best was yet to come.

Lunch followed, and despite all the bad press kids get about being cruel, they can also be incredibly kind and generous. I have no idea who the first child was to give me a piece of their lunch, maybe some raisins or a KitKat finger, a piece of Curlywurly or a Texan bar, but pretty soon, like a bunch of flower-bearing chavs making their way down to Whitehall in the wake of Princess Diana’s death (good riddance, the evil cow) they showered me with an embarrassment of edible riches.

Not being particularly grief-stricken, I wolfed down every last bit. I was in a Wonderful World of Disney crime caper movie, except instead of the plucky teen investigator, I was a criminal laughing and rolling around in piles of ill-gotten loot. I was trying my damnedest to look sad on the outside but inside I was in heaven. Actually, inside, things were about to get pretty hellish.

About fifteen minutes into the afternoon classes, when the sound of my retching echoing round the Class 1 toilet was distracting even the deafest pupil in the school, Sister Alexis decided that grief, overfeeding and vomiting was probably the limit of what a young boy should be put through in one day and called my mum to come and collect my grey, tear-streaked, wracked little body and return me to the comfort of my home. Mum rushed to the school as quickly as she could, and through the picture windows that ran the length of the classroom the whole class saw her arrive through the gates and onto the playground.

With the dog.

Who was clearly not actually dead.

“It’s a miracle!”, I should have cried, as St Joseph’s Catholic Primary is probably one of the few places in the world it might have worked. But I’d been expelling Double Deckers, birthday cakes, bits of apple, Jaffa Cakes and fish paste sandwiches for the last half an hour and wasn’t at my best, I fear. The horror of walking out of the door and feeling the disappointment and confusion of my classmates mist up along the picture window behind me was a terrible weight to carry. The guilt stung the back of my neck. The shame was like lead in my shoes. I have never forgotten the horror of that moment. But it taught me a very valuable lesson:

I needed to get a lot fucking better at lying.

Jeremy Saunders is in Paris.

* the village being Nympsfield in Gloucestershire, for those of you planning a coach tour of Places Jeremy Saunders Encored His Lunch

“Chapter one. He adored New York City. He idolised it all out of proportion. Uh, no. Make that, “He romanticised it all out of proportion. To him, no matter what the season was, this was still a town that existed in black and white and pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin.”

Uh… no. Let me start this over.

Woody Allen, Manhattan

Comrades –

New York is my kind of town. I know, I know, this is in all likelihood not the first time you’ve heard that said. I know, I know, it’s your kind of town too. I know, I know, that it’s safe to say that if you have any kind of town at all, if the oxygen carried through your blood doesn’t feel quite right without a certain sooty residue, if the sound of silence at night less soothes you and more creeps you the fuck out, if the placid grandeur of nature at its most fundamentally natural leaves you feeling even the tiniest bit guilty as you wonder where the hell you’re going to get wi-fi access from, if in fact towns are your thing on any level at all, then it’s probably true that New York is your kind of town. Sure, there are prettier places, there are crazier places, there are busier places and god knows there are friendlier places, but none of those places are New York, and without wanting to get overly tautological about it, only New York has the New Yorkness, the New Yorkitude, the New Yorkacity, that makes it New York.  It is, I trust I’ve made clear without in any way labouring the point, New York, and that is my kind of town.

Quite why New York is my kind of town is somewhat harder to fathom. Or it was until I chanced upon the hurlyburly and hullaballoo that comprises the peculiar facade parade charade that will hereafter be referred to as New York Fashion Week (because that is its name). After ambling through the city on my way to MOMA (closed on Mondays, it may save you some shoe leather to be informed) — and ambling being the appropriate word, clad as my size 11′s were in some newfangled footwear that replaces the sole with something that looks like an overturned fruit bowl affording me both increased comfort (style be damned, if I’m walking for 7 hours a day I’d rather not be crippled by it) and a valuable 2 inches to my height (and as you can imagine anything that increases my stature to something approaching that which my Over-Complimentary Internal Monologuist feels I deserve is welcome, although the harbour at Rhodes as yet remains un-Jemmed, so to speak) — I was forced from the paveme- er, sidewalk by a morass of black-clad, sunglasses-shod, heavily accessorized crows jostling and heaving and squawking  into cellphones as a tiny man in a nice suit was escorted to a waiting limousine. I have no idea who the tiny man was. It wasn’t Alexander McQueen or Jean-Paul Gaultier or that weird German guy with the pony tail and the little dog, and I think Yves Saint Laurent is dead, so it likely wasn’t him, or if it was, well, it rather becomes him. As you can tell from this incisive insider insight and a quick glance through my wardrobe, I am something of a doyen, and so it was with no small umbrage that I realised that NYFW had started and simply no-one had thought to inform me.

As anyone who has had the terrible misfortune to attempt to have a conversation with me while Kylie Minogue is in the room will attest, I am perhaps-not-quite-as-secretly-as-I-would-like a terribly distracted fame whore. Entirely coincidentally, therefore, I decided that perhaps a nice coffee in the park overlooking the backstage entrance might be just the cup of tea, so to speak. ‘This’, I thought to myself as I kicked a small child from its pram and poured 12 fluid ounces of scalding hot soy latte into the lap of a pensioner in order to occupy what I quickly perceived to be the prime vantage point, ‘is my kind of town.’

And almost immediately, birthed from the distended folds of the backstage tent, blinking dewy-eyed into the sunlight and tottering on emaciated legs like sticky foals, came the models, surrounded by a phalanx of old men (with — to a man — really terribly badly styled and dyed hair) holding cameras inches from their faces. Querulous cadaverous children with blank lost eyes and the quick birdlike movements of the recently unmedicated gingerly made their way through the flashes and shouts and calling of names and over here‘s, faces frozen in an blank internalised expression that I can only imagine otherwise occurs when (for instance) a previously amusing intimate night with a rugby league player becomes something other, something horrifically off-the-menu. Frozen, angular and clearly ill-at-ease despite their learned postures and poses and poise, they played the game, attempting — I’m guessing — to transcend the situation. Striving to become. To become Christy, or Naomi, or Kate or Tyra or whoever, something beyond simply being a tall skinny kid with great cheekbones and a simply fantastic bob. The effort was distastefully apparent. And then another model appeared. And then the photographers moved on with a roar. And then the suddenly solitary model changed. For a few brief moments, freed from their prisons of poise — at least until they made their way through the park (where one can only imagine their captors were waiting to lock them away from sunlight, food and education until Terry Richardson next called for a grope) — they fit. They fit New York. They fit New York perfectly. Why, will — inevitably — take a new paragraph to explain. (footnote¹)

In one of his terrible books (I think it was You Know What? Mad People are Funny and Also Sad and For Some Reason They Never Sign Confidentiality Waivers) Oliver Sacks talked about a client who couldn’t go shopping on 5th Avenue (or similar) because she had a fear of heights. Not that she was shopping on the top floor of Macy’s, but the sheer vertiginous verticality of the place, the forward momentum of the people and the traffic burrowing along the concrete trench carving its beeline towards Greenwich Village led to a terrible all-consuming fear of falling. I find it hard to accept that she was in any way mad. The walls of the canyon bounce bristling static from all directions, it’s so busy, we’re too small, it’s too narrow, there’s no sky, there’s no purchase and if we stop for a moment goddammit we will leave the earth and drift rootlessly. And there are no handholds, no footholds. There is no vista. Or rather, there IS a vista, but it’s not a widescreen landscape one, it’s a portrait one. Everything flows upwards, and when you’re at the bottom it feels like a long way to fall before you hit the tiny patch of blue above. Which is why the models, suddenly freed and relaxed, made perfect sense. Only they could negotiate this beggar’s canyon and make it through amongst the womprats (apologies for the Obvious and Stilted Popular Culture Reference, it’s really late). Maybe you do have to be six foot six and willowy of frame to just make it down the street safely. Maybe, further from the ground, it feels safer. It certainly looks safer. It looks correctly proportioned and oriented with these stretched and angular beings sashaying through it. This was my theory and I was going to put to the test with my new bouncy shoe contraptions. Noise and excitement and people and The World Is All Right Here aside, it occurred to me that it’s this perpendicularly skewed vista that makes New York my kind of town.

I mean, look what I do for a living, sort-of embarrassingly: it’s all portrait format. Look at any photo I’ve taken with your camera at a party:  Portrait. Virtually every photo from my current trip: Portrait. Magazine and book design: Portrait. Every painting I have ever painted ever ever ever: Portrait. Even my still-not-even-finished-the-script difficult art film: Portrait format. This is how I see the world. And, although it’s kind of hard to accurately gauge in any way, my optometrist suggested recently that it actually might be the way I see the world. Or at least, I might not see the same kind of widescreen vistas that you do. No-one’s really sure what happens with an astigmatism that comes and goes to a medium strength, as mine is, but with extreme fixed astigmatisms, the brain simply ignores the ‘lazy’ eye and processes the 2D image from the healthy eye, so it’s likely that something similar is happening to me, particularly as I get tired. And I have been so tired. As you may be able to attest if you’ve found yourself in a sweaty nightclub with me at 5.30 in the morning, it can be distressingly obvious to all that my brain has given up controlling my left eye and has sent it to bed for the night. So it’s not unlikely that I am generally only seeing  70% of the width of the world that you are (and probably only infrequently in 3D), resulting in a visual range that, while it might not be portrait, certainly isn’t going to be able to appreciate the widescreen desolation of the Yorkshire Moors or the rooftops of Florence on quite a fundamental visual-processing level.

You may not be entirely surprised to hear that #1 on my 101 Things list (see last week’s bout of unintelligibility) is

1) get your eyes fucking sorted out

so I will be getting that ‘fucking’ sorted out when I get back, despite my being emboldened and empowered (and not tripping up over nothing quite so often) by my current jaunt through a city that feels like it was built especially for me, and for all the other cripples like me.

So, to sum up, finally: unless you have a similar disability, then frankly you can take a fast flick at a flying fuck if you think New York is your kind of town. Me and New York, we see things the same way, and you can tell that to the judge. We’ve got the same outlook, so put that in your pipe and smoke it, buster.  We have the same perspective on things, buddy, so stick that up your big fat ass. New York actually is my kind of town.

JEM OUT

*    *    *

Footnote ¹ Purely to be uncharacteristically clear at this point:Just in case this sounds in any way like I’m being catty, I have nothing but sympathy, admiration and a whole bucketful of you-go-girl for these symmetrical young things who I couldn’t help but suddenly feel immense fear for, along with — I’d be remiss not to mention it — a vague and honestly rather unhealthy-feeling attraction. Given a hypothetical and entirely unlikely buffet-style line-up I would generally plump (an entirely inappropriate choice of phrase)  for the skinny tall cigarette-shaped girls every time. Don’t blame me, I’m a caucasian male conditioned from a tender age by advertising and something paradigm something ‘beauty myth’. (footnote ²). I think Lucy Mclure put it most confrontationally when she recently asked during a rather precise discussion about nipples, “If, what you’re looking for, Jezzle*, are the hips of a young boy, and the nipples of a young boy, then there might be an obvious alternative [to women my own age] that you have overlooked.” And then she laughed cruelly and I kind of felt a bit exposed, and quite rightly too. Anyway, let’s move on.

Footnote ² Hey, footnotes within footnotes. Either this is a pretty coarse David Foster Wallace pastiche or I’m kind of wriggling around a bit under my self-administered microscope. Just to acknowledge that, for those of you flicking through your mental rolodex of my previous partners and kind of failing to come up with anyone who matches the description just proffered, well, there’s a whole lot of stuff I could mention about appeal vs. instinct vs. a-finely-honed-personality but I can’t be arsed and you don’t care.

* Don’t even think about it.

Comrades -

I’m currently sitting in a rather average hotel room in Los Angeles after spending the day sauntering (yes, Jeremy saunters, very good) around the architectural-hodge-podge-cum-racetrack that is West Hollywood. Sadly despite the radio station’s proclamation on my journey into the megalopolis from the dusty oppression of Palm Springs, that this was ‘the cultural capital of the world’ – a statement which inspired incredulous guffawing for whole minutes from a man who is frankly a stranger to guffawing, wouldn’t recognise guffawing if it (laughing heartily, naturally) punched me about the nuts and took my picture – culture, other than atrociously photoshopped billboards plastered with the upcoming delights of the New Shows for the Fall Season, has been thinner on the ground than the gold that once led people here in their thousands… Or maybe it was oranges that led people here…? Was scurvy a major issue for the weary travellers on the Oregon Trail? If it was, then that metaphor slips from ‘weak’ to ‘terminal’, and in the interests of sparing us all another dreary family-huddled-around-the-hospital-bed-scene let’s pretend it was gold and history be damned. To be honest, if you’re looking for historical accuracy, then I think even at this early stage it is safe to say that your best interests would be better served elsewhere. Likewise, brevity. Off you pop.

Which is not to say the Angelinos are lacking in the opportunities for culture – one of the joys of such a huge population (with the associated cumulative wealth that comes with them, even the poor downtrodden ‘illegals’ on whose brown, bent backs the entire shaky edifice of Modern American Capitalism totters uncertainly, creaking and groaning) is that, regardless of who you are or what you want, however arcane or perverse or outlandish or queer your whims and desires and requests, you can likely find it here. In fact it’s possible that what you want can only be found here. In which case then, bring me your huddled masses, for I have found three shops in the municipal district of West Hollywood that can sell you Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake on vinyl, in its original tin, for a surprisingly reasonable price. Come, travellers of the world, for here – and only here – can you find a stage production of naked men on motorbikes producing a version of The Sound of Music set entirely in San Francisco. O give me your poor, tired and oppressed, for the thing that ails you – the lack of PVC nurse outfits for girls of all sizes – can be cured in moments by at least three conveniently located and helpfully-staffed boutiques on Santa Monica Boulevard alone. All you need is a credit card number and ideally a girl to wrap the outfit around (and probably some talcum powder, but we’re moving some way from the point here). Perhaps it’s this which makes America such a (seemingly, natch) alluring and (apparently, natch, again) inclusive place. And so, on one’s travels: diamonds, cultural diamonds, occasional and hard to spot yes, but that’s what makes them precious.

All of which is a characteristically long-winded way of saying: Hey! I found a fantastic bookshop this morning! Imagine how long that introduction would have been if I’d have found something really interesting.

And in the bookstore (which I can’t really claim to have discovered, incidentally, it being the most famous bookstore in the whole of the West Coast, although having wandered around it for over an hour and having shockingly failed to be hit upon by either Adrian Grenier or Zooey Deschanel I can exclusively reveal that The Movies Are Full Of Lies, Just Lies Goddammit) amongst the ten-foot stacks of wonderful and varied and extremely reasonably priced art books all of which were regretfully passed over on account of being too heavy to put in my suitcase, I wandered happily in the wonderful muted quietude that only occurs when surrounded by piles of compressed paper. See also libraries, archival storage rooms and Staples Office Supplies (or rather ‘hear, also’).

Swiftly, without warning, and with some force, Mark Twain leapt out at me and hit me on the back of the head. This was something of a surprise and I fear I may have Let Australia Down Overseas with an exclamation in coarse vernacular. A quiet but extremely concerned apology came from somewhere above me. A Man With Excellent Hair was atop one of those wonderful sliding ladders that run along bookshelves in old stately homes (although I have to confess the last one I recall seeing was in a pornographic clip and it certainly wasn’t used to any educational benefit), holding in his hand a book I couldn’t make out, blurred as my vision suddenly was, but I’m assuming it was someone whose name, alphabetically, was rather close to Mr Twain’s. All pain aside, this was something of a fortuitous incident, and loathe as I am to incline toward any notion of fate or divinity, was certainly a happy if rather painful coincidence, for Mr Twain has been rather on my mind recently, and having him briefly connect with the other side of my skull was not entirely unwelcome.

As anyone who appreciates wit and wordplay will gladly inform you, Mark Twain is without a shadow of a scintilla of a sliver of a doubt the wittiest and wordplayiest of them all. He is also a gifted observer of society and a storyteller of no small import. Additionally he is someone whose work I have not really read as much as I pretend to have, but all that I have read I have loved, and so to fill this Mark-Twain-shaped-hole in my personal literary jigsaw puzzle I took the slightly dented copy of The Portable Mark Twain (possibly not quite portable enough, as the throbbing in my skull would attest) to the cashier and, with a fumbling gesture familiar to anyone who’s ever tried to quickly figure out what the difference is between any of the denominations of US currency, purchased it. Leaving the store I looked back, partly to check if I could remove the sudden piercing crick in my neck, only to see the Man With Excellent Hair still frozen atop his ladder, one hand raised in the universal gesture that says ‘It was an accident, I’m terribly sorry, please please please don’t sue me‘. If I were half the humanist I claim to be I should have run back to the store and wrapped my arms around his legs screaming ‘Thank you!’ however that would be moving back towards the pornography clip again and I thought we’d drawn a discreet veil over that so let’s move on.

The reason Mark Twain has been on my mind is due to recently reading an excellent new Australian novel called Jasper Jones. Written by Craig Silvey, it’s as delightfully and idiosyncratically Australian as one could ever hope a book to be without falling into some dreadful ocker pastiche, and part of its careful balancing is I’m sure based on Mr Silvey’s textural and structural referencing of the works of Mark Twain throughout (in addition to some rather graceful allusions to Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird). So even if you’re not tempted to read any Mark Twain, then I can happily attest to having a very enjoyable couple of days sitting around a pool in the company of some wonderful characters who were in many ways more vivid and certainly more fully realised than the moneyed geriatrics I physically found myself with. When I say I physically found myself with them, well, take your mind out of the gutter at once, such thoughts do you no favours. In short: consider it recommended, it is a much easier, funnier and more satisfying read than, say, this rubbish. Try it here. The book was a gift from A New Special Friend, of whom more interminably later.

Reading the introduction to The For All Its Claims of Portability Still Rather Heavy And Sharp Mark Twain while pressing an ice pack to my head, a key phrase caught my eye -

“Mark Twain’s genius was constitutionally eruptive, and for that reason much of his best work is to be found in his short fiction…”

- and with a tingle I thought, ‘Bloody hell, Jem, that’s you, that is’, although I should state at this point that my internal monologuist has a somewhat higher opinion of me and my work than anyone else does or should, and even I was quibbling with him about the use of the word ‘genius’, although equally I should state at this point that I wasn’t quibbling too hard because one doesn’t want to fall out with one’s internal monologuist, as then Doubtless Bad Things Will Happen.

Okay, so it was just the phrase ‘constitutionally eruptive’ that lingered and curled around my mind like cigarette smoke around a femme fatale’s silhouette. That lack of persistence, that inability to See Things Though, that unsticktuitiveness, that wasn’t a curse – it was gift! A gift! The gift of ‘constitutional eruption’! Spew out an idea and forget it; like a New South Wales premier, there will be another along in a moment. But for those brief moments trapped in the sterilised room with the bloody thing thrashing about, tenderly reaching over to smack its bum so it learns how to cry, well, it can occasionally be magic. And yet these moments are lost, like Rutger Hauer’s tears in the rain.

Which returns me – actually vaguely appropriately – to A New Special Friend*. See, New Special Friend (who hereafter will be lumbered with the not hugely romantic acronym NSF for purposes of reducing this already ridiculously longwinded post by the barest amount) is something of a planner, not really a skill I’ve ever acquainted myself with and if I’m terribly honest something I have on some level always equated with ‘obligation’, which in turn is something that my family will tell you I have an almost psychopathic aversion to – actually it’s probably more correctly a sociopathic aversion but we’re splitting the hairs on the head of a lunatic here. Anyway NSF has recently started a list of ’101 things to do in 1001 days’ which sounded like a hell of a challenge, not least of which was finding 101 things I wanted to do in the rest of my life, let alone in the next three years. Still, boredom and jetlag make for strange bedfellows and so I embarked with optimism and vigour on writing out a similar list.

I made it to 19. Number 19 was ‘Find 82 things to do in the next 1001 days’ which I think either turns the whole idea into a recursive loop from which I will never escape, or is possibly just cheating.

One of which, number 9, was

stop fucking about on facebook and write a blog or something

(Aside: Obviously I am much more concise when in private, so to speak. Plus as you can tell, a lot more stern. It really is amazing I still manage to achieve so little)

And, with a flourish to rival The Worst Magician Ever pulling an entirely-expected-and-actually-often-glimpsed-beforehand rabbit out of a threadbare hat, here we are.

All fluster and bluster and flimflam and jibberjabbery aside, the last 1600 words can quite neatly be summed up in the phrase ‘This is my new blog, and it’s called Jeremy Saunders Is Constitutionally Eruptive‘. Some of the posts will include hilarious and heartwarming stories of throwing up, so it’ll work on a whole number of levels. Well, two levels. And two is a whole number. I may not know much about ‘math’ but, well, I know what I like.

JEM OUT

*Although, and I shouldn’t really have to mention this, but NSF is NOT Rutger Hauer.