Ankle-losing Despondylitis

I took a brief trip to London at the weekend. Having spent half of the last three years living in the south of England, I'd pretty much divested myself of any residual provincialism inherited from countless generations of Cheshire Platts, so it was with some surprise that I had one of those mythically cataclysmic trips to the capital that my relatives had always warned me about. In the space of twenty four hours I managed to lose two jobs, the ability to walk, and the option of wearing anything other than a natty pair of pale blue NHS hospital ward trousers. As the feculant air of the underground billowed through my now permanently open fly, I began to think my grandmother may have been right after all; nowt good can come of such a place.

Basically, I've broken my bastard ankle. Having managed, if only briefly, to fly the coop, shack up in Cheltenham, and find gainful employment at a bloody book festival of all places (n.b. my very first post), I've ended up back home, re-unemployed, and unable to do anything other than write self-pitying blog posts and abortively attempt tasks such as making sandwiches or cups of tea. Call me pessimistic, but there's something about having to coax your dog to lick drips of PG Tips off your toes that makes the prospect of spending the next six to eight weeks in plaster seem less than rosy.

And to think, how romantic a broken bone used to be. How I used to long for a snapped fibula or a shattered metatarsal. To be pitied by friends and teachers, to be waited upon hand and foot, to have all one's courage and manly fortitude affirmed by one brief parting of bone...I ached to break something. It might well be the only reason I ever participated in team sports; every P.E. and Gym lesson spent failing to get out of the way of an oncoming ball or classmate. It was hopeless. I never broke anything, except maybe my father's heart.

But no, turns out a fractured ankle is an unmitigated chore. Turns out in the adult world you don't get to shirk your manual responsibilities for a few weeks as people fawn over you; you have to give them up, and the money they earnt you along with it. Turns out it's only the second time you're forced to ask someone to fetch something for you that they start on the endlessly amusing 'Ooh, aren't you the Queen of Sheba' routine. I sat next to one such elderly joker in the A&E after someone kindly gave me the seat next to him. He was even more pleased to see me being pushed past in a wheelchair through the corridor a half hour later. 'Still getting the royal treatment are we?' he joshed, chuckling to himself as he walked away on his two perfectly functioning ankles. The commoner.

So, here I am; housebound and tea-stained and vaguely ticked off at just about everything. To anyone who might read this, sorry; though I value your interest and attention, I much prefer being able to walk to every single one of you. Walking is fucking boss. Yes, I'll probably have cheered up in a day or so, and yes, I plan to be stacked as hell after 8 weeks getting around on my arms alone, but for now, permit me a bit of teenage sulking. Christ, even our copy of GTA V is broken. Truly, we live in a godless universe.

Et in Porncadia non ego

Commiserations, onanism fans (and judging by its backlog of content, I'm assuming you make up a large chunk of this blog's loyal readership); the days of an all-access, open prairie internet are numbered. No longer will every man or woman with a few bars of wi-fi signal be able to set out from the doorstep of the incognito search window and go tramping over the wilds of digitised adult content. For ever more, their right of passage will be policed by their internet service providers, who themselves shall be cowering under the kosh of the UK government. Yes, the porn-pastoral is dead; long live the age of internet feudalism. 

The testicle-faced puppeteer pulling the strings in this extended metaphor is our old friend David Cameron, who today outlined plans to block all access to internet pornography by UK household by default unless over-18 users choose to be allowed to see it. It forms part of a group of new laws relating to the regulation of internet use designed to prevent online pornography 'corrupting childhood'. Such measures are a way of combating the paedophilia epidemic that the conservative government seems to believe we're currently undergoing; a belief I was going to use this blog to caustically debunk, until I realised that the laws were unveiled on the very same day that the entire nation was breathlessly waiting for just one glimpse of a naked, gluey child to flash up on their screens. It seems we might have a problem after all. 

Outlining his plan at a press conference (where he was accompanied by a prominent NSPCC logo hovering in the background, in a display of moral symbolism so cloying it seemed to rival actual child pornography in the stockpile of sickening images), Cameron declared that the two major 'challenges' an open internet posed to the well-being of children were firstly 'criminal' - i.e. the availability of images depicting actual abuse - and secondly 'cultural' - i.e., children accessing 'damaging material at a very early age'. To his credit, Cameron did accept that the 'two challenges are very distinct and very different'. Basically they amount to the difference between actively seeking, producing or deseminating images of abuse, and simply ignoring the little parental guidance warning that pops up at the beginning of online porn videos. If you need further clarification, the former is a crime committed by a small number of disturbed individuals, and the latter a crime that your little brother has probably committed at least three times this very afternoon. 

Yet despite this, Cameron went on to argue that 'both these challenges have something in common. They are about how our collective lack of action has led to harmful and in some places truly dreadful consequences for children.' Now, I might be generalising, but I'd be willing to bet that even the most histrionic amongst you would agree that only one of these 'challenges' had led to objectively 'dreadful' consequences for children. Though its obvious that a large amount of legal adult material is somewhat morally questionable, its not really feasible for us to judge what effect such material has on the minds of those who view it whilst under the age-limit. Certainly it doesn't seem to have has a negative effect on me. Alright, perhaps that's a bad example.

Cameron argued that these measures single out the internet as a source of the corruption of childhood (whatever that might mean) since 'in no other market, and in no other industry, do we have such an extraordinarily light touch when it comes to protecting our children'; conveniently ignoring markets and industries such as those which produce children's toys and which, unlike pornographers, actively target children. Whilst, he continued, 'Children can’t go into the shops and the cinema to buy things meant for adults,' (sorry to burst your bubble of innocence, naive parents, but they can), they can access anything they chose if they bypass the relatively light strictures of the internet. 

(Now, at this point, I feel obliged to point out to any concerned parents or guardians who might be reading that it is entirely possible to put a filter on online pornography to prevent your child accessing it without the need to waste countless man-hours and money imposing a similar filter on a national scale, but seeing as you clearly possess enough intelligence to a) use a computer, b) read basic English and c) make it this far into the blog without once forgetting to breathe properly and passing out, I really, really hope that you knew this already. Similarly, I'd like to assume that you're in possession of enough subsequent intelligence to work out that installing such a filter is only going to lead to your child being forced to masturbate in the local library, or even over the family pet photograph album, and that as a result you may as well not bother. But I suppose this blog should cater to all types). 

Presumably it's out of Cameron's slightly skewed belief that it is impossible for a child to buy adult material in shops that he simultaneously refused to back a ban on topless images in the Sun newspaper. Never mind that the Sun is ostensibly a source of news and not of photographs of nude women possessing incongrously considered opinions on current events, and which has no age limit preventing minors from buying it; clearly redtube is the sole villain of the peace. Those who believe Cameron to far too pliant to the Murdoch whip can believe what they want, but its obvious to the rest of us that Moral-Indigancy Man, the UK's formost pink and polished superhero, has the best interests of the kiddies at heart. 

Seeing as the aforementioned adhesive baby has entered the world in the time that it's taken me to write this blog, it's entirely possible that my (hopefully) evident dismay at these regulations will be buried under a ream of my facebook friends's witty suggestions for the name, but if you have managed to read it, you can do your bit by signing this e-petition to get the measures revoked. In the mean time, I'm off to try and persuade my mother that my wanting us to opt-in to being allowed to access pornographic material is a form of political protest, and not just because I can't think of any other way to spend my Tuesday afternoons. And also that I'll start looking for jobs tomorrow.

The Lost Years

Let me tell you about Shakespeare. In 1585, Shakespeare is somewhat fucked. Not yet twenty one, he finds himself the husband of a woman eight years his senior and the father of three children, with little money and resources to speak of, seemingly destined to carry on in the family trade of glove-making and live out his days as yet another provincial tradesman and domestic provider. Which is not to say that such a life is a particularly tragic one; but, see, Shakespeare doesn't want to be a glove-maker. He wants to write plays. So the very fact that, in 1592, we find him living in London having established himself as a young playwright of some repute seems, in light of his situation seven years prior, something of a miracle.

How Shakespeare achieved this trick – how he managed to shrug off the strictures of a steady career and his obligations as head of a household to emerge, unencumbered, as a major player on London’s theatrical scene – is a question that has puzzled scholars for decades. It’s puzzling to me even now. How did he convince his wife and kids? Did he call a family meeting (possibly in one of those obscure Elizabethan rooms they don’t have any more, like the buttery or the dysentery closet) and declare his intention to abandon them?

“Well, err, so, I know the apprenticeship has been coming along nicely, and we’re just about able to make ends meet as it is, but, you see, I’ve been having a think about it, and I’ve decided the best thing for all of us is if I move down to London for a while and do my acting and writing and things. What do we all think?”

“Would we come too Dad?”

“Umm, well, no actually, I think it would be best if you all stayed up here in Stratford, and I went down and then sent you back money when I earned any. Of course, I can’t exactly say when that will be, so I suppose you’ll just have to cross your fingers and hope for the best in the meantime.”

“But Will dear, do you really think you’ll make enough to support the whole family?”

“Oh, I would imagine so. Besides, Hamnet’s clearly not going to last much longer, so we shan’t have to set aside much for him. Look at him. He’s all peaky.”

There are no extant documents from the period that account for Shakespeare’s situation or whereabouts in the years between 1585 and 1592, and thus these years are commonly referred to as ‘the lost years’. They have been the subject of considerable academic study and speculation, and are, at the moment, a major source of fascination for me personally since, being not yet twenty one and similarly living in the vain hope of moving to London and becoming a playwright, I’m desperate to know how the jammy bastard pulled it off.

True, Shakespeare was faced with several hurdles that I’m lucky enough to have avoided. I don’t have the wife and kids to worry about, and no matter how pessimistic you might chose to be about Britain’s transport system, it’s plainly much quicker and easier to make it down south via Virgin Pendolino that it is on the back of, say, a malnourished mare (even if the latter might offer you more legroom. Ho ho ho). Still, Shakespeare never had to endure twenty plus years of cultural conditioning in concepts such as ‘employability’ and ‘financial security’, and so the decision to up sticks and leave a steady job behind to try to make a living scribbling poetry was probably more tenable than it seems today. Put it this way; if getting stabbed to death in a tavern brawl or developing plague are realistic, day-to-day concerns, you probably don’t feel as much need to worry about whether you’ve got enough names on your CV for ‘Plan B’.

But as inconceivable as Shakespeare’s career trajectory seems to modern eyes, it gives me hope to think that, as he reached a position of some security, and from which the remainder of his progression through life seemed mapped and certain, he instead chose to become perhaps the least typical human being in British history. I find comfort in the notion that, as he stood at his workbench practising how to thread a welt through the seam of a fourchette, with the clamour of his wife and children ringing in his ears, his mind was not fixated on the burden of responsibility he shouldered, or on the many long identical years of labour he faced, but instead was bristling with ideas and poetic constructions; ‘a rose by any other name’, ‘to be or not to be’, all that jazz.

In this spirit, having left the prolonged gestation period more commonly known as higher education, I’ve decided to dub the forthcoming years of my existence ‘the lost years’. Partly to render any seeming setbacks or disappointments as somehow excusable, or even beneficial (‘Hey, it doesn’t matter that I’m twenty five and living in my parent’s basement, I’m in my lost years), and partly to convince/delude myself that, in all my aimlessness, I’m heading towards some eventual goal. Whatever it might be.

In the meantime, I’ve decided to give the blog a bit of a reboot, and will hopefully be updating it much more frequently than it has been in the past few months. If you’re a fan of this sort of thing, keep an eye out.

And if you fancy supporting me in my lost years, you could do a lot worse than to come and see the Edinburgh fringe show I’ve written (https://www.edfringe.com/whats-on/theatre/gabe-day), on from the 2^nd to the 17^th of August, which promises to be, at the very least, charmingly shambolic. Failing that, a ticket to Euston on a Virgin Pendolino would suit me just fine.