Fiesta de Mi Padre

Jon Platt, making up his rassoodocks with what to do with the morning.

If you were to take a cursory glance at my family unit, you might conclude that my dad is cooler than me. People have been saying as much for years. The first time anyone did was at a Damien Marley gig at Leeds University student union that I accompanied him to when I was twelve years old. At the end of the set the girl standing next to us inclined her dreadlocks towards me and yelled ‘Your dad is the coolest man alive!’ in my ear. I wanted to correct her – clearly she had no idea that he had printed maps of three alternate routes to the venue and a diagram of the parking situation folded up in his jacket pocket – but perhaps as a consequence of having spent two hours in a poorly ventilated room with a crowd of aspiring Rastafarians I was finding it strangely difficult to give a flying fuck about anything at all.

That I’m reluctant to agree with this assessment isn’t a result of believing I’m cooler than my Dad – since I once spent a good three months trying to bring back double denim I think it’d be a bit rich of me to assume I was cooler than pretty much anybody. It’s just that I don’t think ‘cool’ is a word you can use to describe him. He doesn’t fit on the scale of ‘cool’. He can’t be assessed by the standards of ‘cool’. It’d be like trying to measure a quantum singularity with a plastic ruler.

If my dad can be considered cool, it’s because, over the course of his adult life (and much like myself over the course of the Damien Marley concert) he’s gradually stopped giving a shit about anything. If you were to judge him based on photographs from his early adulthood in the late seventies and early eighties, you’d probably think of him as just another dignified, earnest ad man; dressed voguishly yet soberly in black turtlenecks and high-waisted trousers. Yet as the years have gone by and any pretence at conformity has drained away, he’s incorporated increasingly eccentric items into his wardrobe; to the extent that a tartan-pastel flat-cap and a Hawaiian shirt patterned with pictures of farting dogs are today firm staples of his repertoire.

It’s the same story with his music taste. Having grown up listening to prog rock bands like Yes and Jethro Tull, he sought to redeem himself throughout the eighties and nineties by jumping on the ‘Madchester’ bandwagon and becoming a devotee of New Order and the Stone Roses. By the noughties, however, he’d stopped seeking any kind of uniformity and instead started following anyone that took his fancy. Nelly, the Black Eyed Peas, Goldfrapp, La Roux, Amy Winehouse, MIA – all of them found a home on CD shelves in our kitchen. This cosmopolitanism is something I’ve learned to emulate, and though I'm not sure I’ll ever understand his affection for Fergie, nor he mine for Blind Lemon Jefferson, I like to think the ‘Home Sharing’ function on iTunes has benefited us both.

Last weekend I went with him and my little brother to Latitude Festival in Suffolk. It was my Dad’s third festival, and my third time going with him. The first time I was told this was happening (my mother booked him a ticket for his birthday, again to Latitude, after I’d already told her I was going myself) I threw a mild paddy. ‘How can I go to a festival?’ I protested. ‘He hates camping. And getting wet. And shitting into a hole with bits of pissy tissue dangling from the edges. There’s no way he’ll have a good time.’

But as it turns out, my dad was made for festivals. He has a belter. You see, he’s prodigious organiser, and as I discover to my detriment every year, festivals were designed for organised people. He spends several months beforehand gathering every possible bit of camping equipment he might need into a pile in the living room and calling me up every other night to ask if I’ve done the same. Once there, he buys a programme and spends each morning writing an exhaustive list of all the things he wants to see, then sticks to it religiously. He leaves the camp-site at ten am and returns at midnight having seen twenty bands, three comedy acts and a recital of anonymous poems composed during the 1984 miner’s strike (they have things like this at Latitude). Meanwhile, I spend virtually the entire festival curled up on the floor of my tent; hungover, soaking wet, and trying to muster up the courage to go for a shit. Though that didn't happen this year because he bought us all passes to the luxury toilets. The fucking hero.

As a consequence, I can’t really imagine going to a festival without my dad. Sure, it can be mildly embarrassing when he whips out his white man’s overbite in the middle of a set, but I feel like he’s earned the right (actually, given the number of years he’s been rocking the expression I’m not sure he didn’t invent it). That might be the crux of the difference between us. When I first started going to festivals, it was because I thought it would make people think I was cool. When he first started going, it was because he was cool enough not to care.

In tribute to this, I can offer you all an exclusive chance to experience a festival with my dad, since he’ll be going to the one they have up in Edinburgh every August to see a play I’m putting on (on from the 11th to the 23rd). I can't promise that you’ll see his white man’s overbite, but I can promise the chance to see three short plays about sperm – and who could refuse that?

No More Heroes

This Saturday was International Women’s day. Marked by events and demonstrations across the globe, it's a chance both to celebrate the ongoing political, social, and economic achievements of women and raise awareness of the myriad struggles they still face, and has been observed by millions the world over for more than a hundred years – in particular by those who advance and support feminist causes. I chose to do my bit by hosting an entirely apolitical shindig at my new London residence. You might think this sounds a little disengaged of me – a little enabling, a little supportive of the status quo – and you’d be right, of course. The problem is, I’m growing a bit suspicious of this whole ‘feminism’ thing. Being the paranoid man that I am, I’m starting to wonder whether it isn’t a movement designed solely to rob me of all my childhood heroes. For surely, the more active interest I’ve taken in gender equality issues of late has seen me shedding adolescent role models like a rescue dog sheds hair.

Take Alan Moore. Moore, the writer of Watchmen, V for Vendetta, From Hell, and other cast iron standards of the graphic novel canon, was one of the figures I navigated my sense of self by through the developmental hinterland that lies between the ages of thirteen and seventeen. I’m airing my dirty teen-geek wares by admitting it, but Watchmen changed me. I came away from it more politicised, more sceptical, more inquiring, and above all, with a greater empathetic concern for humanity (plus the illustrations were bloody stellar). So when I heard recently that Moore was retiring from public life, due in part to the strain of answering repeated allegations about ‘the prevalence of sexual violence towards women…[particularly] rape’ in his stories, I was all set to leap to his defence. Except then I gave the matter five minutes thought, and realised that, based on what I’d read of his works, he did seem to be somewhat fixated upon sex of a non-consensual persuasion. Indeed, if you happen to be a woman in an Alan Moore story, the chances are that someone is going to try and stick something in you without your say-so. The original Silk Spectre is raped in Watchmen. Evie nearly gets raped in V for Vendetta. The Invisible Man rapes a whole host of school girls in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. And From Hell, his epic re-telling of the Jack the Ripper case, is essentially 572 pages of unmitigated violence against women. Even Batgirl isn’t spared being stripped naked and photographed by the Joker in his Batman story The Killing Joke. Renowned for his ‘gritty reinventions’ of previously frivolous pop-culture works, Moore’s formula in this case appears to be simple; take out Ace the Bat-Hound, insert gratuitous sexual brutality. I’m only glad he never lent his hand to a Beano story; I’m not sure Minnie the Minx would enjoy herself very much.

Moore has defended this predilection by arguing that the amount of sexual violence in his work reflects the amount that takes place in the real world. It’s hard to understate this amount - one in five women in England and Wales has been the victim of a sexual offence or attempted offence, according to the Office of National Statistics – and bringing attention to it is always a good thing. But portraying violence against women to this extent is problematic since it becomes the defining experience of female characters in his work – to be a woman is to be a victim. The acts of violence and rape end up subsuming the identities and experiences of the figures who suffer them to the extent that they have no character, other than in relation to the act itself. Can you remember anything about Silk Spectre 1 other than that she was a 1940’s costumed hero pin-up who got raped (and who fell in love with her rapist, even more troublingly)? I don’t doubt that Moore’s intentions are good; if nothing else, his work is coloured by a deep concern for the marginalised. I’d even go so far as to say that his writing has gone some way towards making me the feminist I am today. But it reflects an attitude towards the lives and experiences of women that I can no longer gloss over or ignore. So he’s off the hero roster. Sorry Al, but you don’t cut the feminist mustard.

Then there’s been the recent Woody Allen debacle. I should say at this juncture that I haven’t come to any conclusion about his guilt, since I have no concrete evidence on which to make the call. But I will admit that my near-worship of much of his artistic output initially pre-disposed me in favour of arguments proclaiming his innocence – and thereby damning the testimony of his alleged victim, Dylan/Malone Farrow. I swallowed much of the Robert B. Weide article without question, and found myself bristling against the voices of those who seemed to have condemned him outright. But increasingly I began to question my own reasoning. Why was I believing the account of an alleged abuser, and not an alleged victim? Why did I think the words of a hugely successful male celebrity contained more veracity than those of a young woman who had testified to being the victim of a horrific crime aged only six years old, and who was still prepared to testify twenty-two years later? Why was my first instinct to question her motives (and those of her mother) rather than to listen to her?

The whole thing left me feeling unsure, conflicted, and generally sort of shitty. Which is about the only appropriate response, as those who chose to make different ones amply demonstrated. Stephen King, who wrote pretty much every single thing I read from the age of eleven up until I went to university (give or take the occasional cereal box or Alan Moore rape fantasy) and whose footprints I would formally have gladly licked, took to Twitter to opine that Dylan/Malone’s account had an ‘element of palpable bitchery’ to it. I hadn’t previously considered that a rape accusation could be ‘bitchy’, but if I was to continue in my unbridled hero-worship of the King, I would have believe so – so King was forced to leave the Platt Idol boot camp at my reluctant request. As for Allen, I finally concluded that, though I didn’t actively consider him guilty, continuing to tout him as an artistic influence and personal hero of mine would be to make a political statement that was antithetical to everything I currently stood for. Which meant that the picture of him I had on my bedroom wall should probably go. Until I find a replacement, he’s been flipped around to face the wall – staring into the blank face of ideological limbo.

It's ended up being quite difficult, all this commitment to gender equality. I used to think that being a feminist was easy. I thought that being broadly in favour of equal rights and opportunities for women was all that it required. That I could continue to chuckle ‘ironically’ at sexist jokes and to feel put out by any argument that too radically questioned my place in the sexual hierarchy. Hey, I was a liberal-minded, forward-thinking, stand-up guy – of course I was a feminist!  Instead, my choice to embrace the movement beyond a token, superficial level has caused me an almost unrelenting degree of mental turmoil and misery. Feminism has climbed inside my belief system and kicked seven bells of shit out of it. It’s made me question everything; my reading choices, my reaction to other peoples’ views, even my own writing (I mean, I made a pretty flippant joke about animal abuse at the end of the opening paragraph that’s only been left in as a marker of my growing self-awareness). It’s reduced me to a quivering, conflicted mess, thrashing around in my own acknowledged hypocrisy – and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I may have lost my love of Moore, Allen and King, but I’ve left the way clear for others to take their place – Joan Didion, Caryl Churchill, Alison Bechdel, Toni Morrison, and hopefully many more.

Still, it would be nice to come through the feminist crucible with at least one or two of my formative allegiances intact. If it turns out Bob Dylan ever molested anything other than the Christmas favourite ‘Must Be Santa’ then I may as well write off my childhood completely. 

Tube Crush

I love the Tube. Without caveat. Having used it almost daily for the past three months, I thought I’d speak up during this temporary cessation in its functioning to confess my unbridled affection for it. A bit like how you might declare your love for a comatose relative as they dribble into the pillow. Sorry ladies, but you’re off the radar for now. I've got a stonking great Tube crush.

I think this infatuation stems from childhood. One side effect of having been in single-sex education from the ages of five to eighteen is that I tend to understand the world primarily in terms of excretory metaphors. In light of this, there’s something pleasantly colonic about the Tube; merrily shunting impacted passengers through the bowels of the city and defecating them onto the pavement. Yes, it’s taken a lot of shit over the years, but you can’t fault it: it keeps London regular.

In addition, since I've only recently set up shop in the capital, I’m still struck by the Tube’s superiority to all the forms of transport I used during my younger years (discounting the quad bike I rode during a friend’s eighth birthday party, because that was off-the-scale bitchin’). Compared to Manchester’s Metrolink system – a transport network staffed entirely by drivers who take pleasure in waiting at the station as you hurriedly stuff your ≈ £17.98 single fare to Piccadilly Gardens into the ticket machine and then pulling off just before you’re able to get on – it’s a paragon of speed and convenience. Whilst the Tube is on the verge of introducing a 24 hour service and mobile contactless payments, the only major innovation the Metrolink has introduced in the last twenty years is the ability to travel to Droylsden. The wonders of the modern world, eh?

Its sheer efficiency astounds me. We’re talking fascist Italy levels of regularity. On average, passengers travelling in Zones 1 and 2 have to wait only two minutes between tubes. Compare that to the 38 hour wait I’m sure I once suffered at Cornbrook Met station and you begin to see my point. A few weeks ago my commute to work was diverted due to a line closure – the cause of which turned out to be a man having thrown himself under a train. Whilst this faceless individual preyed on my mind and conscience for the rest of the day, the TFL staff needed only half an hour with the power hose to completely remove him from the Victoria line. It’s enough to make Mussolini spin on his meat hook in his grave

Sure, there are downsides – overcrowding and a general lack of respect for personal space chief amongst them. But bemoaning the presence of other passengers is like complaining that your favourite obscure band has gotten too popular. Can’t we all just appreciate the role they play in our lives? Plus there’s nothing better than the vaguely ambiguous thrill you get when your crotch is forced up against the central pole during rush hour. Brrrrr!

Which is why I don’t resent the strike – if only for reminding me how good I normally have it. Actually, I support the strikers. If this miracle of modern transport is able to keep a 950-strong semi-redundant ticketing staff on its payroll, in addition to everything else it achieves on a daily basis, then I say good for it. I’m even a fan of Bob Crow. Partly because in this age of gormless PR inoffensiveness, he’s not afraid to seem unappealing in the eyes of the general public whilst serving the interests of RMT members, and partly because he dresses like a bloody champion. I mean, look at the top photo. Look at it and tell me that if his wardrobe was being worn by an ethnically ambiguous Parisian twenty-something it wouldn’t be stickied to the front page of The Sartorialist until the end of time. So here’s to you, Bob. And you, central pole. (Call me? X)

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. 

Ziggy Snowflake and the Glider from (A)Far

It's Christmas Eve, and since I've been neglecting you of late, and in lieu of a real gift or indeed anything of much actual substance to say, here's an anecdote about my day's listless internet surfing. Hey, notice how no one calls it 'surfing' anymore? It's probably because the sense of fun has worn off. Using the internet at the close of 2012 feels more like slowly drowning. By this point I can almost hear the rattle of water in my lungs.

But anyway, I'm here to talk about The Snowman, the classic Christmas family cartoon and staple of the late December TV schedule for the past thirty years. You might have heard that tonight a sequel is being shown on Channel 4, The Snowman and the Snowdog, which judging from the title promises to be an 'out-there' conceptual re-imagining of truly pedestrian proportions. I was reading one of those typically hand-wringing articles about it on the Guardian website when I discovered that The Snowman was once introduced in a short video opening by a peroxided David Bowie dressed in beige chinos and a pastel sweater. AND that the whole thing was available on YouTube. Christmas, for me at least, had clearly come early this year.

We see David pottering around a darkened attic, wistfully resting on an old rocking-horse and reminiscing about his childhood. He speaks about this using the pronoun 'we', suggesting either that a) he still lives with his parents, or b) he's suffering from some form of split personality disorder, both of which would go some way to explaining the beige chinos and paisley sweater. Then he pulls a Snowman-decorated scarf from a drawer and tells us he was given it by 'a real snowman', and we cut to the beginning of the cartoon. The implication is that the child in it grows up to be David Bowie, which is a brilliant idea. It lends what has previously seemed a simple tale about childish wonder and the loss of innocence a new and nutty layer of meaning; as he clutches the sodden scarf and hat of his deceased friend at the cartoon's close, is he already dreaming up the piano riff for Ashes to Ashes? Is Starman, his hymn to an elusive, mind-blowing celestial figure who refuses to visit him, simply a veiled reference to another magical 'man' he once knew?  It's a psychoanalytical goldmine.

What was even more satisfying than then video. however, was reading the YouTube comments (always a fertile breeding ground for genius insight) and stumbling across this one, by  user TheRealVeterans.

At first this struck me as an odd observation. Seeing as the Snowman never speaks, it seems difficult to determine what his attitudes might be - for all we know he could be mentally reciting his favourite passages of Mein Kampf or chuckling at the memory of old road safety videos in which toddlers are catapulted through windshields as he gallivants around in the snow. Thus the only clue we have to his attitudes come from his actions - which, as I don't need to remind you, mainly involve abducting a small child and flying him to Lapland in clothing patently unsuited to the freezing conditions. Indeed, at one point the Snowman flies showily low over a Mosque, as if to say 'Look at the broken state of the nation we're escaping', before whisking him off to a gathering attended exclusively by giant white men for a spot of ritualistic chanting and dancing. None of which is suggestive of a particularly tolerant, enlightened mind. 

And as a final marker of his sheer callousness, the child having developed an evident emotional attachment to him, the Snowman chooses to melt in his back garden, leaving the poor kid to wake up on Christmas morning to the sight of his watery corpse. Yes, I know that the coming daylight meant that he was doomed to die, but if we acknowledge that this same Snowman only moments before waving goodbye to the boy had the power to fucking fly, you'd think he'd have done the decent thing and nipped off to behind a bush before dissolving into a messy pile of coal and knitwear. It's the equivalent of an elderly relative who, upon sensing the end is near, chooses not to go quietly but curl up underneath the Christmas Tree so that the kids come down not to presents but to the sight of Grandma's dead, bloated face. It rather puts a crimp in the festive spirit.

The video opening only reveals the extent of the psychological damaged cause; the boy has grown up to be weird, lilting manchild, pottering around an attic, fondling childhood heirlooms and talking to no one. It only takes one night with the Snowman, the cartoon suggests, to turn you forever into a living Ken doll. I can't help thinking that more people possessing the Snowman's attitudes can only make for a more disturbing, pastel-shaded world.

But then I realised - this isn't any old freak in an attic and jumper, it's David Bowie; possibly the greatest and most innovative British solo artist in the history of popular music. Seen in this light, it all begins to make sense; it isn't hard to see how the attentions of a child-abducting, racist and sadomasochistic Snowman might lead to you wanting to wear make-up and write The Laughing Gnome, and my golly isn't the world better off for it. What with today's charts being as bland and mass-produced as they are, we could probably do with a couple more snowmen to liven things up. Just imagine how much more exciting Ed Sheeran might sound if he'd had to face a bit more dismembered slush as he was growing up. So hear hear, I say to the TheRealVeterans's diagnosis. Bring on the frozen kid-snatchers. The rebirth of pop starts here.