Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant

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Bridges. This one is justified: when I was an early teen I had a sit-bolt-upright-with-the-cold-sweat-dripping-off-you nightmare where – on an old grey concrete bridge that connects Chesterfield town centre proper to the train station nearby, one that runs over an A-road and so is extremely fun to spit over – I was walking along the bridge, in a dream, and then for whatever reason and in a perfect one-two-three motion I put one foot on the kerb of the concrete, grabbed the railing with both hands, jumped off the edge of it and exploded on the road like a melon. In the dream the remaining pulp of me got run over by a truck, one final indignity, and I don’t think it’s unrelated that ever since then I have been very cautious on bridges. This isn’t so bad: I just try my best to walk as close to the exact centre of it as possible, so whatever kamikaze autopilot that spins like a top inside of me at all times doesn’t tilt over and override all sense and logic and I just leap forever off the bridge, to death, but it does make me wary. If you can’t trust yourself, who can you trust? Who can you trust? But yeah: the main takeaway of that nightmare 17 years ago is I’m really very irritating to go for a nice meander along a canal with.

II.

Speaking of nightmares: for some reason the greatest and most frightening nightmare I ever had was when I was five years old and the blood-red velvet curtains that were in my bedroom (apparently I grew up in a fucking haunted Victorian mansion owned by an eccentric doctor and not, like, a normal terrace in a red-brick street in the Midlands?), so yeah the blood-red velvet curtains formed in their wrinkles a face, enormous and frowning, and in a deep voice the velvet face shouted at me for not tidying my room enough and for generally being a Bad Boy. I think it says a lot about my formative neuroticism that the main nightmare I had as a child was not a Frankenstein monster or some vampires but my own curtains telling me off for being naughty, but the result was the same, and that result was: I pissed the bed in fear and woke up screaming. This necessitated a particularly high-stress intervention by my father who had to unhook two heavy velvet curtains from the rings about my bed at 3 a.m. while shouting and surrounded by the ammonia-like smell of fresh piss, plus all the sheets needed changing, and though I’m not saying I’m scared of curtains exactly, I would say I am very careful around them, because I know now what they are capable of.

III.

Dogs. Listen: I am fully aware that dogs are fundamentally perfect wholesome little animals, essentially human hearts full of love and made dog-sized – just pure heart-meat, dogs, right to the core – and that being afraid of them is ultimately absurd when their primary function is to love and adore. I get this. However, when I was a small meek child at my mother’s knee on a rare trip back to London to see the old friends she had left behind there a decade before and introduce them to the grown child that had ruined her life in such a way that she had to leave them to raise it, I was taken to a large grand house where all the adults drank wine and smoked and laughed very loudly, which when you’re a small meek child is a high-stress situation anyway, because all you really have is a box of orange juice and you’re in the kind of adult house where they have absolutely no prearrangement for children (‘Oh you want … something to. Do. Okay: would you like to read this encyclopaedia?’). When I was there, amongst the smoke and the adult cackling, their medium-sized Rottweiler jumped towards me and barked, and I instantly realised that dogs aren’t hearts with fur on at all, they are pure prime muscles constantly ready and prepared to jump up vertically and bite you on the dick, and my instinctive reaction to this was to sob – obviously, I thought, the dog was going to gnaw my dick off in one smooth primal bite, and I would have to live a life without it, a sort of modern eunuch, and they would call me Dog Dick Boy – and then everyone had to stop drinking wine and smoking and instead calm the hysterical child down, and in the cab home there was definitely A Silence between my abruptly sober mother and I, and it was pretty clear that me being suddenly afraid of dogs had entirely ruined the evening, and I’m not sure our relationship ever truly recovered from that, really, and I have been cautiously wary of dogs ever since. Cute, yes, but very capable of biting you on the dick.

IV.

Maybe I just have a fear of losing my dick in some sort of dick accident, actually.

V.

Sudden rushes of fear were an oddly common phenomenon of my childhood. As a kid I deeply loved escalators, almost to the point of mania: every time we encountered an escalator, in a store or mall, I would demand to ride it up then down, then beg to go up then down again, a lone passenger on the world’s lamest rollercoaster. Then, one time at the big M&S in the centre of town, I sprinted towards the escalator filled with glee that quickly turned to horror: watching as my mother went up the machine ahead of me, I realised suddenly escalators were just stairs made of monstrous metal teeth, ferrying you unrelentingly towards the top of them, where you would be crushed and gnawed to death by the spiked outer workings of the machine, at which point I stopped abruptly, foot hovering over the killer belt beneath me, and started both yelling and crying at the same time, a little like this noise: ‘HUAAAAAAAAAH.’ I kept sort of yell-crying while my mother floated up away from me, bent backward screaming ‘WHAT?’ and ‘WHAT IS WRONG?’, until a kindly woman lifted me up above her head and carried me, gurgling and shouting and crying in one perfect triptych howl, to the top of the stairs, and the rest of the shopping trip passed otherwise without incident. Again: I’m not now afraid of escalators exactly, but I am very cautious.

VI.

(Other things I loved deeply as a child to the bafflement of everyone around me: hub caps, the protective-cum-decorative plastic shields on the wheel rims of cars, which I developed an encyclopaedic knowledge of when I was a kid because I liked cars but couldn’t see from my short height any particular part of them other than the wheels, an obsession that led to a point where I would collect discarded hub caps we would come across in the street and I was able to identify vehicle make and models only by their hub caps. Sample conversation from my childhood: ‘Hey Dad! Dad! This Volvo has newer hub caps than the one on our street!’ and my dad would say, wearily: ‘Yes’.) (I have since almost entirely gone off hub caps. They leave me cold.)

VII.

The way other people handle and prepare raw chicken. No judgement – I’m not exactly briefed on the correct code of hygiene around chicken myself – but quite often if I am watching amateur cooking shows I see people do things with raw chicken that strike me as ludicrous or insane, like using a wooden chopping board or rinsing it haphazardly under a tap, and it’s made me constantly on guard about how any chicken I have eaten has made itself to me. A useful question I like to ask before any meal I eat: has anything happened in the preparation of this food that might cause me, violently, to shit myself? It’s not a healthy way to live but it’s the way I choose to.

VIII.

I do fear wardrobes falling onto me and the subsequent coffin-like encasement in them and the obvious analogue for death that comes attached to it, after that time a wardrobe fell on me as a kid and it felt like my end had come. I remember feeling like I had died, but also very much feeling quite calm about that, but it’s made me afraid of precariously balanced wardrobes since, and I think that’s fair: I suppose we are, all of us, constantly shaped and smoothed by the fears we accrue as we age. A lot of our fears are completely justifiable, and as a result we hold them close around us, like rosaries.

IX.

One very specific fear I have is that a number of television personalities who I have spent a lot of my time detesting because of small perceived micro-aggressions against me – the guy from the GoCompare adverts, for example, or Jamie Oliver – are actually incredibly sound in real life and I would get on with them really well, and an ongoing fear fantasy is that I meet Jamie Oliver one day and he’s really nice to me – ‘Cor,’ he says, with that big tongue of his, ‘yeah you’re really sound – let me get you a pint!’ – and not only do I have to sit through the drink with him but I also have to admit, privately, to my biggest critic (myself) that I was wrong all along, and that Jamie Oliver is sound as fuck. I think that’s me projecting a fear, actually: I’m not afraid of Jamie Oliver being sound, am I? That’s simply impossible. I am afraid of being fundamentally, deeply wrong. I am afraid of the embarrassment that comes with backing down on an opinion I have that is only important to me.

X.

At the time of writing (Oct., 2k17) I am in the midst of a break-up, and while largely that is good, I suppose one enduring fear is the main one that comes with break-ups, i.e. the fear not that a person you shared tender words and embarrassing little nicknames and fragile plans for the future with now keeps texting you to call you a ‘dick’ or ‘dickhead’, but that the break-up – the final, actual act of breaking the bond of the relationship you are in – has now actually severed and deleted various alternative timeline futures for you, and the one you are left in is the one where you never know happiness again. So for example: one alt-universe timeline that has shot off into the infinite void was the one where you were happy and became married and had two perfect little cherub-faced children, and you spent your weekends barbecuing and doing maths homework with a toddler that looked like you both. Or: so for example the future where you both grew old and gnarled and knew each other perfectly because you had over the years hewn gaps out of each other that only the other could fit in, one bulbous old ying and one haggard old yang, so that in this (now deleted, forever) future you could communicate with each other without even words, just with gentle looks and hand touches and knowing nods, and you would die together, ancient hand in ancient hand, watching the gauzy sun set beyond you, rocking back and forth gently in armchairs on a porch. The fact is that there are now a hundred thousand timelines gone – holidays you had, drinks you enjoyed, expensive meals and cheap ones too, Christmases you will no longer have, birthdays that go uncelebrated, dogs and cats that lived entire wholesome lives within your joint care – because you basically had one argument over Netflix that got a bit out of hand. It is just you, now, alone as alone can be, that all future companionship has been deleted forever, from this point in your life onwards – so yes going off-piste a little but that prospect seems like a low-hum kind of constant soaring fear—

XI.

I mean not to be too drastic but I am 30, now, that age where friends around you suddenly morph and change from the young adults you thought you knew into sort of sincere and responsible, like, people, and some have bought houses and some have had weddings and some, even, have grown ripe like an apple and birthed a baby, an actual baby, an actual child, and named it something beautiful and interesting and unique, and now every time you try and see them now they are like ‘yes well but: but my child’ or ‘yes I suppose Tuesday at 7.30 on the absolute dot could do it, although I shall have to leave again at around 9 p.m., to feed as aforementioned my child’, and sometimes they hand you it, the child, and expect you to know how to hold it (I don’t!), and then they talk to you about child things – the child has teeth now, it can hold up its heavy torso, it grunts and makes noises. And you ask: how can you do it? How do you hold a child? And they explain: sometimes, they say, at night, when they feel at their absolute lowest – it is a full-time job, they say, on top of another full-time job, and then so of course we also need to fit that in with our actual, they say, full-time job – and they say that in the depths of these despairs, all those nights of staccato sleep, all those months without sex or friendship, all those pills and injections and doctors’ appointments and nappies and schedules and sometimes, the child, the child will just piss on you – in amongst all that one time there will be some moment of marvel, often at 2 a.m., they say, where the child is taking feed, and it is a quiet moment, just you and the child and a small sterile bottle of milk, both of you just cooing in the lamp glow (the lamp is a special child-friendly lamp, soft orange light, you cannot expose a child to a normal lamp, the lamp cost £49) and for a moment the child will look at you, up at you, and it will realise that it is you, who they are, that you are they and they are you, and you are the caregiver and the lifegiver too, and there will be this pure perfect moment of recognition, and the child will giggle, a little, and at once every hard edge in you erodes, and every moment you doubted who you were has gone, and you know, now, what it is you were put on earth to do, it is to raise this child, make it strong and wise and give it every opportunity, and love it so hard you grow to love yourself too, and they turn to you (you in this scenario being me), and they say, like, so when are you going to have one?, they say, any lucky ladies on the horizon?, and you have to admit that you ran out of Super Likes on Tinder this week so you haven’t spoken to a human woman in six entire days, and no it’s not going very well actually, life, though I don’t really want to talk about it—

XII.

You know like will I ever find someone to take on half the burden of my very specific mania, that sort of thing—

XIII.

Rats, mice, hamsters, gerbils, or essentially any small animal that it could be said ‘scurries’—

XIV.

Actually perhaps I fear the uneasy motion of scurrying – all those arms, those legs, whirring away, hands meet feet meet hands meet feet – than the actual animals themselves, though rat tails I’m not particularly a fan of either, those long rancid worms—

XV.

I read once that every muscle in your body has the potential energy to break the connecting bone it rests on – every muscle is primed with absolute strength, or something, and the only thing stopping that muscle clenching the bone within it to dust is your own brain – and that made me not just worried of every time I cramp up or over-clench a thigh muscle while stretching at the gym (although I am, deeply, afraid of that: how embarrassing would that be? To concurrently break every bone in my body while trying to plank at Fitness First? All the musclebound weightlifters around me wondering why I start screaming and collapsing at the same time? I just go down like someone deflating a sex doll? Nobody calls for help?) but also made me very aware that my body is essentially a high security prison that contains my brain and skeleton, and one fuck-up from me – if my brain malfunctions or I get too scared and just clench my entire body too hard – and I will kill myself, instantly, my legs, arms and ribs all clicking in two like twigs—

XVI.

Consider major surgery for a moment. Major surgery is this: medicine puts you into a deep and painless sleep that allows doctors in masks to open your body up with knives. Are you kidding me. At this point, I don’t even fear major surgery, I fear any illness or accident that might lead to me having major surgery, because I know already I’m going to have to explain in a plain and unwavering voice to whatever doctor offering to peel my body open and fix the mess inside of it that no, actually, at this point I think it’s going to be a lot easier for me to just die, rather than this, thanks very much for the offer though I appreciate it, but the entire concept of what you are offering to do to me – ostensibly for my wider health! – fills me with such an overwhelming dread that I literally consider death a smoother and more hassle-free option—

XVII.

You open your eyes in the shower and there is a figure in there in the bathroom, with you, either standing in the shower or just standing in the room, reflected gauzily in the steamy mirror, and they are cloaked, the figure, and holding a knife of some sort – either a to-the-point sort of hunting blade or instead a curved hook or scythe, and they raise it, and for a brief second you wonder which part of your soft naked flesh they are going to slice into first – and sometimes that is a fear, irrational as it is, one that has me with my eyes tightly wound while I shower, afraid to open them and see, as if the figure there is lurking and waiting for me to recognise them before slashing my throat open, to death, that is a fear, I suppose—

XVIII.

That one day my bank will phone me and in a stern voice tell me exactly how many consecutive days I have been in my overdraft.

(#ulink_3ba81731-e2d5-5fc9-854b-59676bec8190)

I recently lost three-and-a-half stone, 22 kilos, and in doing so went from an Adult Size Large down to an Adult Size Large. This pissed me off enormously: fat melted from the wattle around my neck, my torso leaned out and became slender, my entire waist melted down through two (two!) entire jeans sizes, and my top half inexplicably remained the exact same dimensions according to the t-shirts I was buying in every single store on earth. Reader: what the living fuck.

My friend Sam is an Adult Size Large, and yet he is at least 60% more lean than I am through the torso, perfectly proportioned limbs and body, BMI so immaculate it could be holy, perfect example of health and beauty, capable easily of fitting into anything down to a size S and up to an XL. He is essentially a shop mannequin model with kind human eyes. He wears the same size t-shirt as I do, and I feel like I am staring at a blackboard full of calculations that lead to an equals sign followed by a question mark. Here is my central thesis: how is this man the same size as me according to our tee? I am like twice as wide as him, torso-to-torso. It makes no sense.

Or, so: my sister came to me recently. My sister, like yours, has got into exercise lately. Everyone’s sister eventually gets to this stage. Everyone has a healthy sister. Perhaps your sister is a brother, or an aunt. It does not matter: they are running a half-marathon this autumn and want your support. My sister, like yours, got into triathlons, then just cycling and swimming, and now just swimming. She went insane at a running store and bought a load of unused all-black exercise wear. Would I like it, she says, to sit around the house motionless and typing. ‘It is Adult Size Large,’ she says, and offers me the pile. There is some good stuff in here, man. Nike and et cetera. I take the running gear, which fits me like a glove.

One night I came home drunk off the back of an exceptional Arsenal win and found my then-girlfriend like a tiny long-limbed creature in my bed. ‘Put this Arsenal shirt on,’ I said, staggering into my wardrobe. ‘You know I have lingerie,’ she said. ‘Like: loads of lingerie. You never get me to wear it.’ It does not matter what lingerie you have: the single sexiest thing a naked woman can put on is i. a man’s work shirt, with the half smell of the day still on it, rendered flower-like and fragile by soft moisturised skin and the everlasting dint of breasts, ii. an Arsenal football shirt with ‘ARSHAVIN 23’ across the back, Adult Size Large.

I do not understand this. If you are on a bus or a train look around you. Many, many people wear clothes the wrong size for them. Men’s jeans are fantastic for this, because they have the exact size of them printed on a visible label on the back of them: I recently saw a man rocking 36-inch waist jeans with an (at a guess) 30-inch waist proper, so he had to cinch his belt blood-stoppingly tight around him so the jeans would fit properly. But on top: Adult Size Large. Or: men buy jeans that balloon out from the calves and somehow envelope their entire shoes. Men wear jeans, but do not understand them. They buy coats they can get their arms in, no more thought goes into it than that. And they all buy Adult Size Large, and they fit into them, and unless they are particularly unbroad or bird-chested it fits them more or less fine.

And I am screaming at the night sky, now, outside, so my breath turns to fog on the cold of it: if we are all Adult Size Large, then why do we have so many differences? I feel that somewhere in the grey unknowable magic of this size there’s something approaching peace: Adult Size Large transcends race, and sex, and gender, and age and height and weight. Adult Size Large is the t-shirt that more or less fits everyone. Can we not come together and appreciate that? Put down your guns, brothers. Unprime your bombs. Deep down, we are all the same. Come, unite with me, in the fields of peace. There is no need to fight anymore. We all have more or less the same-sized torso. I don’t understand how but let’s try and work it out.

(#ulink_f958e50d-afe4-5ac1-8455-a2cfee0d5fb1)

I’m staring at a poster in the camel museum. At the centre of the poster: a large, cartoon impression of a camel. Out from the camel, in little squiggling offshoots, photos of camels pulling various different-but-extremely-similar camel faces. Gaze into the eyes of a camel and you will see nothing but glassy tranquillity staring back. Gaze into the eyes of a camel and it will calmly blink and chew cud. But no, this poster says. Camels contain multitudes. ‘APPEAL OF CAMEL PERSONALITY,’ it reads. ‘Family Bond’, ‘Sensitive’, ‘Loyal’, ‘Smart’, ‘Defending’. The next attribute is portmanteaued into one with a backslash: ‘Bossy/Leaders’. And there, hovering up around the original cartoon camel’s ear area, a single word, in rigid black: ‘Fear’.

Everything is camels and camels are everything, here at … the King Abdulaziz Camel Festival, Saudi Arabia!

* * *

CALL: Why were you at a camel festival in Saudi Arabia?

RESPONSE: Because it was there, and when something is there, it is human nature to go and look at it.

CALL: What is a camel festival like? What is a camel festival?

RESPONSE: I don’t know exactly because the camel festival I went to started being constructed in March 2017, i.e. six weeks exactly before I arrived in Saudi Arabia to come and look at it, so necessarily was entirely incomplete, and actually on balance I saw far fewer camels than you might have expected me to, on the whole, seeing as I flew all the way to Saudi Arabia to go and see camels,

CALL: What actually was it then?

RESPONSE: It was basically just a big car park with a load of camels in it. I flew seven hours and drove two. That’s what it was. It was a car park full of camels, in Saudi Arabia.

CALL: Would you highly recommend the camel festival as a fun continental tourist retreat?

RESPONSE: No I wouldn’t go so far as to say the word ‘highly’, no.

* * *

So I am in a tent, later now, trying to understand the appeal of camels. At my feet: a discarded tray-plate of grilled chicken, Gulf Sea prawns, rice, fruit, om ali, a pudding that is essentially cornflakes soaked in milk and warmed up with some cashews in it; to my right, a small cushion-plinth on which is resting two (two.) disposable paper cups of Arabian coffee and a larger plastic cup of sweet chai. The sun is blurrily setting and the sky turns dark from blue. There is a boy whose job in the tent is seemingly to bring me tea and coffee whenever I hold up a hand to say ‘tea’ or ‘coffee’. When he is not bringing me tea and coffee he just stands on the balls of his feet, staring covertly at the TV. There is something unusual about seeing a huge, clean-new HD TV plugged into a tent: in amongst rugs lining walls to deflect the searing heat of the sun, one perfect clear window, a slash of tech amongst the sand. On the television is an old BBC Two show where modern-day families live life for a day as either a slave or a lord in a Downton Abbey-style home, dubbed in Arabic. Earlier: a British nature documentary, where for some reason the monkeys in it were dubbed to have voices, and somehow, despite speaking Arabic, here, the monkeys have British accents. The refreshments boy brings me some more chai. I have been in the sun for ten hours and I am delirious. The monkeys are British and the camels are beautiful.

‘It’s like,’ the translator, Ali, is telling me. ‘It’s like … young men, you know? To show off they have some money … it’s like: a camel.’

I say: ‘Right.’

‘So it’s like … horses. Or: falcons. You have falcons?’

‘No we do not.’

He is incredulous.

‘You don’t have falcons?’

‘We don’t have falcons.’

‘Ahhhh: that’s why you liked the falcons.’

Earlier we saw some falcons and yeah, alright, I’ll be honest: I lost my shit about the falcons. I liked the falcons.

‘Huh.’

For a moment we both pause in the heavy, heavy heat, trying to think of a British equivalent to camels that aren’t horses or falcons. ‘I guess,’ I say, and I am thinking of Instagram, and how the people I follow who are in a good place in their life use it, and what they show off about, and how they might mark the occasion of their good fortune and express it through ownership of an animal. ‘I guess … dogs? Pedigree dogs? Like a bulldog?’