Mr Malark

I recently had to buy cigarettes for someone in the supermarket. It was the first time I'd bought any in years and I was struck by what a shameful experience it's become.

The first thing that struck me was the price. Cigarettes are now extraordinarily expensive and you'll pay anything up to £5 for ten. That's shocking. As teenagers, we used to affirm, with mock solemnity, that we'd give up the moment the price passed £1.

We were now some way beyond that.

However, it was more the promotion of the product that disorientated me.

The cigarette kiosk was set away from the rest of the store and I walked up to see the rows of packets glimpsing out at me from behind a semi-closed cupboard door. They weren't even on display.

Even the cupboard door had a familiar look about it. It was bland and sterile, similar to the sort you'd expect to find in a mortuary, concealing a refrigerated cabinet stacked with bodies. Death. I was buying death.

I took a deep breath. I needed to control the experience. My imagination was getting away from me.

But there weren't even any prices. A sign offered to clarify the cost on request.

I started to feel like I was about to do a drug deal. I felt dirty.

The cashier, a small, weathered woman with deep wrinkles that belied her vivid rusty hair, stared at me blankly.

I shifted uncomfortably. 'Ten Marlboro Lights, please.'

She didn't respond for a second or two then she bent over and began coughing furiously. A hacking, wretched cough. Suddenly a pack appeared in her mouth. She stared at me with dull, lifeless eyes. 'I swallowed a hundred boxes this morning.'

I gingerly plucked the pack, coated in bile and yellowed saliva, from her hand and dropped it into a carrier bag. This was utterly vile. As I turned to leave, I heard a sharp thud from behind the cupboard door. My God, someone had been put away too early. I had to get out of here. The old cashier cackled and the thudding intensified as I took up a sprint for the exit.

Anyway, that's exactly how it went down.

I think I've inadvertently become addicted to this performance from The Voice UK.

 

 

I've watched it about 73 times.

I don't think I've ever been in a mood that this Elvis recording couldn't immediately snap me out of.

As far as contagions go, I'd love to see Laughter duke it out with Yawning.

I got into a strange spat last week that I didn't start and didn't entirely know how to end.

I was working from home because I had the two boys with me and I had set up in the front room with the laptop. However, as the evening sun shone in through the window, I noticed that the inside of the panes were covered in mini-sized handprints.

We have a guy who cleans the outside once a month but we're a little less attentive with our side so I decided to break out the Windowlene and give them a quick wipe.

Unfortunately, the timing could not have been worse. As I set to work, a gang of seven or eight teenagers walked past carrying armfuls of water balloons.

I could not believe my luck. I was suddenly the easiest mark in the world and the moment I made eye contact with one of the kids, a tall brown-haired boy who appeared to be the leader of the pack, I knew exactly how the story was about to play out.

The youth, with a malevolent grin, immediately feigned to throw a balloon and I did a quick calculation. I could either grin inanely as it splattered all over the pane, like George McFly, or I could tell him to move on. I could warn him not to.

I was conscious that he was no more than fifteen and a water balloon isn't the most serious weapon in the world but I was standing in the bay cleaning his target. What message would that send? What message would it send to my children?

So I gestured for him to move on. I suggested he keep walking, and, at least for a few yards, he did.

But as I continued cleaning the panes, I watched this bozo double-back and again threaten to throw a balloon. I once more indicated that he should carry on walking but I knew that it was too late. This kid had mentally committed to the attack and it was now just a matter of time. I also knew it would happen the moment I turned my back, and, predictably, the moment I turned away there was a loud splat! behind me.

This really fucked me off. It wasn't the water balloon that bothered me; you could throw water balloons at my house all day long and I wouldn't care less. But if I look you in the eye and ask you to stop and you carry on, we have a problem.

I made a move for the door, as if to make after this guy, and he and his cronies scarpered a short distance up the road. However, I wasn't going after anyone; I was on my own with two small children.

I think the gang interpreted this as a sign of impunity and, as I waited for my partner to get home, they took to casually sauntering back and forth outside the house.

I bristled and prowled the front room, waiting, until I heard the key in the lock. My partner had barely opened the door before I was past her on the doorstep with a perfunctory, 'I'll be back in a minute.'

I walked out into the pavement and saw the gang playing Knock-Down Ginger a few doors up. They were terrorising everyone...

Terrorise may be too strong a word. Water Balloons and Knock-Down Ginger. It wasn't even low-level crime. They were just being nuisances, and, as I turned to face them like some urban Clint Eastwood, I was aware that I was putting myself in a compromising legal position. This wasn't self-defence. This was retribution.

We stood eying each other while I considered the options on the table. With the matter finely-balanced, I recognised that I had a hand of cards that, played in a particular manner, would see me getting a knock on the door later that evening from a policeman. There was a Go Straight To Jail card there. Do Not Pass Go. It was therefore critical I had a clear plan.

With the clock ticking out, I began marching towards them without any sort of plan at all. I would just have to freestyle.

Fortunately, the gang members, having first turned to each other in bewilderment, decided to beat a hasty retreat down the road but they didn't go far enough and I carried on stomping after them. The teenagers retreated further, to no avail, until the guy who had thrown the water bomb suddenly realised I wasn't going to stop and took off at pace. The rest of the pack quickly followed.

All bar one. One member tried to extricate himself from the others by meandering along after them although he kept casting nervous glances over his shoulder and, as I closed in, he lost his nerve and ran off after his buddies.

However, his procrastination allowed me to see the side alley of a house he ran down. It was in the road next to mine and, as I approached the property, I saw a huddle of concerned teenage faces peering out at me from the back garden.

The curtains of the house were drawn and it looked to all the world like the parents weren't about. I stood there for a few seconds wondering whether I should knock then decided against it. The kids knew where I lived but I now knew where at least one of them lived and, content with that, I turned heel and walked home.

I don't know whether I did the right thing that day and I wasn't sure whether my reaction would provoke a campaign of water balloon attacks but I didn't think it would and, thus far, it hasn't.

It just struck me that the only other option was to do nothing, to cower or give way. But that would've eaten away at me and I didn't particularly want the gang taking up residence on my street. So I didn't do nothing and now they won't.

At least not outside my house. Ask the kids. A mad guy lives there.

The earlier slaying of a young soldier in Woolwich by two apparent Islamist terrorists has garnered huge volumes of attention in the media.

But this looks less like a terrorist attack as it does two schizophrenics trying to legitimise their psychosis by attaching it to a Cause. Because as far as I can tell, it isn't the public that need reassuring; it's the politicians.

Especially as, statistically, two people are murdered on average every week in London. Yet, shout a load of Islamist nonsense while you're doing it? The Queen gets woken up.

I had my ear syringed for the second time in a month yesterday.

The first attempt didn't go to plan. I had been asked to put olive oil in my ear every night in the week leading up to the appointment but I had let time get away from me and only bunged a load of oil in on the morning of the session.

Before she looked in my ear, the nurse had asked whether I had followed the doctor's instructions. I had explained that, unfortunately, I had only done it for the previous three days, so, you know, hopefully that would be enough... She warned that that wouldn't be enough at all and I sat there thinking, well. It's even less enough than you think, lady

Still, she gathered her instruments and set to work.

Now I think syringing gets a bad rap because it has a terrible name. I had visions of a great big needle being slowly pushed into my ear until it inadvertently punctured my brain and caused my body to go limp down one side.

The reality is that it's just a jet of warm water fired into the ear canal. The sensation of water hitting the eardrum is similar to the sound you will have heard whilst being driven about as a kid. It's the sound of air buffeting against parked cars. Except, also, the car is full of water.

I sat in the chair for twenty minutes that day but, despite the nurse's best efforts, she wasn't able to dislodge a giant chunk of wax that she likened to a house brick. I was ordered away to make a second appointment and to step the oilings up to twice a day.

I went back in yesterday, having again not fully fulfilled the very clear instructions laid out to me, and sat down anxiously to see whether my half-arsed efforts would be enough.

The nurse set to work and, to my relief, confirmed that things were finally beginning to shift. The glacier was on the move.

However, after fifteen minutes, my dull sense of hearing was much the same and I began to grow embarrassed at the nurse's ever increasing requests for feedback. I began to consider feigning an improvement, just to give her some encouragement, but, as the idea started to twist and take shape in my mind, there was a sudden seismic change.

A massive gust of air blew into my ear and I gasped in surprise. Suddenly, I could hear everything.

The nurse beamed knowingly. 'That's the sound I'm looking for!'

It was completely bizarre. I had surreal images of triumphant Channel Tunnel workers breaking through to their French counterparts, to the strains of Rule Britannia. It was as if someone had stapled a great, cavernous hall to the side of my head. Even my voice sounded different. Echoey.

Frankly, it was horrible. Harsh, hollow and horrible. It was like catching yourself on video and thinking, do I actually sound like that? I thought I was better-spoken?

I left the surgery yeaterday with the world massively amplified and it was almost the immediate death of me. I was crossing a clear road when a tin can, some twenty yards away, blew across the pavement in the breeze. The crystal-clear tinkle caused me to pause and look round in wonder but I turned back to find a van almost running over my toes.

If the van had hit me, I probably would've ended up entirely limp down one side. Ironic, really.

Anyway, until you improve your diction, Super-Hearing's less a blessing than a curse.

Someone gave me a blank memory key and I gave them one or two films I held in digital form. About a hundred of them.

The curious thing was, although the files clearly used up space, the memory key was exactly the same weight. Data doesn't seem to weigh anything?

That was a bit weird to me. So I delved a bit deeper and discovered that the whole Internet is thought to weigh about as much as a strawberry.

My two boys are lovely kids and get along very well but they probably have more differences than they do similarities. One loves fighting, the other's über-placid; one looks mischievous, one angelic; one's great with numbers, the other's great with words. They're like two sides of a 50ft ladder, with about four rungs between them.

But they love each other dearly and that's the main thing.

However, another schism came to the fore this weekend.

We were down in the stunning seaside town of Woolacombe, North Devon, and we took the two little guys into an arcade to kill fifteen minutes before dinner.

The arcade had those machines that edge coins forward on a tray until they eventually tumble off and we gave each boy a bag of 2ps to see how they'd get on.

My youngest son, Jake, began feverishly pumping his coins in. Whatever he won went straight back in and, when that was gone, he desperately scoured the room for more.

Whereas my eldest, Luke, would only put coins in until it paid out. The moment it did, he immediately stopped feeding the machine and carefully gathered up all his winnings in his little coin bag. He thereafter refused to put another penny in and was the only one who walked out of there with a profit.

That symbolic act gave me a glimpse of the future.

In thirty years time, Jake is going to be sleeping on Luke's couch. The heating probably won't be on.

It occurred to me recently that with each passing day, I'm the latest, most up-to-date version of me. I'm currently v36.8.3.

To be honest, I should be better.

A buddy on Twitter was talking about levels of intelligence earlier and it brought to mind my attempts to quantify my position in the great pantheon.

When I was fourteen, I decided to take a mail-order Mensa test. It was a series of logical, numerical and spatial conundrums and, after an increasingly taxing forty minutes, I sent my answers in.

The results came back a week later; I'd scored 143.

That put me in the top two percentile of the country. However, it wasn't enough to gain an invite to the Mensa top table. You need 148 before they even let you through the door.

I therefore made a calculated decision; I would leave it a decade before going back to re-test, confident in the knowledge that an extra ten years of life experience would be enough to comfortably put me over the top.

I buried the idea away but, as the years passed and the notion began to emerge from hibernation, I started to idly speculate what it would mean for my life. Evenings spent in the company of Carol Vorderman and Stephen Hawking, nodding along in blind agreement... are they even talking English?

However, I was enthralled with the idea that I would finally have some independent validation of the great mental acuity that academic exams had so singularly failed to extricate.

The advance in technology over the decade meant I could now complete the test online and obtain an instant result, so, I decanted to the bedroom, cracked my knuckles, and got down to business. Question 1...

It took me half an hour to discover I'd become quite considerably dumber.

Anyway, I'm not going back. I'm comfortable here, and, in any case, I'm trying to ignore the cheerful faces of Forrest Gump and Jade Goody over the way, beckoning me over to their table.

I've inadvertently stumbled into my very own version of the Walking Dead. A sickness is coming, and there isn't a darn thing I can do to stop it. Indeed, it lends itself to a log.

Day 1:
My youngest son is ill. He developed a temperature overnight and began vomiting this morning. He's been going all day. I didn't realise the poor guy even had that in him? Why wasn't it overflowing from his mouth in the lead-up?

Day 2:
My youngest monkey is still ill. The little he does eat just brings up twice as much in vomit. The physics of it is really something. My partner took him to the doctor and he puked all over her at the surgery. She took him to the bathroom to clean up but the vomit just blocked the toilet. The volumes are really amazing...

Day 3:
My boy appears to be coming through the worst of it and is starting to consume small morsels. However, my partner has deteriorated rapidly and is now extremely sick. There are unnatural sounds coming from the bathroom. I am aware that I'm in the eye of the storm and my immediate future is pretty bleak. I pray for the strength and forbearance the other two have shown when my time comes. Lord, let me be brave.

Day 4:
My partner continues to get sick and I'm beginning to feel decidedly ropey. I wonder this will be the last opportunity I get to update my log? I have deleted the "Installation Instructions" folder on the computer, so, I am ready.

Margaret Thatcher dies and lazy people across the land celebrate.

The reaction to her death accentuates the marked difference between the two sides of the political spectrum. The Left know the value of everything but the price of nothing whereas the Right know the price of everything but the value of nothing.

Mrs Thatcher, the grocer's daughter, made sure she knew the price of most things in the UK and, in doing so, she made the nation competitive again. That, in an increasingly globalised economy, is probably the principal reason that we didn't become Greece before Greece did.

Rest in peace, Iron Lady.

The left-wing press were getting into a tizzy last week because George Osbourne's police chaperone parked the company car in a McDonald's disabled bay after he'd got out.

Apparently this was another example of his complete disregard for the common man.

What utter horseshit. It isn't the ruling elite that flagrantly and routinely flout these parking by-laws. It's chavs.

About two years ago I went deaf in one ear for about a week.

I wasn't sure what had caused it so I went to see Dr Google. Page 1 suggested it might be a case of Glue Ear, a condition that often afflicts infants and blocks the Eustachian tube that runs from the middle ear to the back of the throat. It sounded plausible so I stopped searching, principally because you're never more than a few clicks away from some identical set of symptoms that'll probably kill you quite quickly.

The treatment for Glue Ear is either a grommet, a tiny tube that's fit in the eardrum, or just time. The problem usually dries out within three months.

I preferred the second option, and, as prognosed, my ear equalised and that was that.

A year ago I went deaf in the same ear. On this occasion, I had quite a heavy cold and I began to tie the two together.

A heavy winter's cold precipitates or exacerbates the condition.

That was my formula, with test tubes bubbling away in the background. Got... to... break... the formula!!

I again waited and, on this occasion, it resolved itself within a fortnight.

In December I went deaf again. This time it lasted three weeks before it began to ease. However, I inadvertently got water in it and I was suddenly deaf again until the New Year.

It was beginning to become a bigger problem but I was loathe to make an appointment to go to my local Medical Centre because you need to wait weeks to see a doctor who's even potty trained.

About three weeks ago I went deaf again. It wasn't a cold, it wasn't winter, it wasn't water, it wasn't anything.

I realised it was time to bite the bullet and I made an appointment to see a senior doctor at my surgery. I went in there yesterday and explained the context to my ailment. I was suffering from Glue Ear and the incidents of deafness were increasing both in length and regularity.

The doctor looked in my ear. However, she couldn't see the eardrum, for all the compacted wax.

Dear oh dear... We sat there in silence for a moment.

Anyway, there's definitely Glue Ear behind there, and we'll find it the moment my ear is syringed.

Man oh man. Wax. The Elephant in the Room.

Youngsters today appear to be a lot more fashionable than they have been at any time in the last thirty years.

They're all rocking that brightly coloured, big-glassed look and they all appear to be very socially conscious.

It's a sudden and significant swing from the chicken shop rats who were responsible for the rioting eighteen months ago.

I haven't seen any concentrations of moody teens in ages and it's as if they've been routed by an army of Where's Waldo's.

An entire generation have self-regulated.

About six and a half years ago I wrote about the unsettling news that Russian exile and British citizen Alexander Litvinenko had been assassinated in the UK by dark forces emanating from Russia.

It seemed only a matter of time before those same forces would get to the kingpin, Boris Berezovsky, and today he was found dead at his Surrey mansion. The police are describing the circumstances as 'unexplained'.

Maybe it was natural causes. Maybe it was suicide. Maybe it wasn't.

Alexander Litvinenko.
by Mr-Malark @ 24 Nov. 2006 – 07:51:43 pm

During the summer I was ordered in for Jury Service at the Royal Courts of Justice.

This was pretty much the last thing I wanted to do and I presumed I'd be forced to spend two weeks listening to some two-bit case involving a runt, a granny and a black eye. So I developed a plan to simply agree with all the other jurors, irrespective of personal opinion, and, fuck it, we're done here.

My disposition didn't improve when I learnt we were going to be hearing a libel case. And nothing glamorous either, a Russian libel case, originating from some obscure Russian debating show on some obscure Russian satellite channel that, as it was to be tried under English Law, it was likely only half a dozen ex-pats ever watched anyway.

However, the applicant and libelee was Boris Berezovsky, the exiled billionaire oligarch and the richest, and almost certainly most influential, man I'd ever sat in a room with. That record didn't last long though cos the defendant was the eminently wealthier Mikhail Fridman, Russian oligarch number two, multi-billionaire and President Putin confidant.

So I decided to tune in and ended up spending two of the most interesting weeks of my life sat in the box alongside eleven people I'd never met before listening to evidence and testimony of the most mind-boggling nature discussed for our sole benefit.

At the end of the evidence, we spent two days deliberating and reached a verdict.

At the moment however, the verdict is almost irrelevant.

Because as much as I didn't care for Berezovsky, one of his witnesses was a sad-eyed, softly spoken man who had been a lieutenant-colonel in the most secretive branch of the F.S.B. (aka K.G.B.) for twenty years. He had a distinctly haunted manner and spoke of his trouble corralling Russian ex-pats who had seen the aforementioned tv show to stand up and testify for Berezovsky for fear of reprisal. He appeared acutely aware of his own precarious predicament and spoke quietly of witnesses murdered on their way to testify at the Strasburg European Court of Human Rights.

Today that man, Alexander Litvinenko, a man who had recently become a British citizen, passed away. It was approximately three weeks since he'd been poisoned.

And that, frankly, is fucked.

This Government seem to have money to burn.

Two days ago they agreed to give all social tenants a £100k taxpayers' subsidy to buy their homes.

Now they've agreed to award West Ham the Olympic Stadium and use public funds to massively subsidise the conversion of the stadium. All this for a private enterprise that can afford to pay its employees upwards of £50,000 a week.

I hadn't realised we'd turned the corner? Have I been in a coma?

About eighteen months ago, a stock market trader, Alessio Rastani, appeared on BBC News warning of financial armageddon within a year.

The smooth-talking financier was of the blasé opinion that peoples savings would begin disappearing from their bank accounts within a year unless they took proactive steps to solidify their position.

It sounded absurd. The musings of a arrogant, moneyed dick. It would never happen.

At least that's what I used to think until the Cypriot government announced plans over the weekend to apply a a one-off 10% levy on their population's savings. The people would see a tenth of their squirrellings stripped away in one fell swoop. Just like that. And it was no good trying to withdraw all your money because 10% had already been frozen.

It was an incredibly troubling development from an EU member state. A government were, without consultation, going to start stealing money from people's personal accounts.

My alarm is only lessened by the fact that I have no savings. And 10% of zero is still zero -heck, take 50% if you want.

Until earlier today, I knew nothing about Queens of the Stone Age, other than they're an American rock band with a dumb name.

However, a person I respect recommended I try the video to their single 'Go With The Flow'.

Crumbs. It's completely brilliant. Completely brilliant. Indeed, maybe Queens of the Stone Age wouldn't be such a bad name for a third child?

The first meaningful tranche of Welfare Reform comes in next month with Housing Benefit being scaled back for claimants who under-occupy their homes and the Benefit Cap being phased in across the Capital.

But as much as politicians talk about the ‘squeezed middle’, they never talk about the ‘squeezed bottom’.

Probably because it would sound a bit odd.