Ah, it’s that “comment and I’ll give you some interests from your profile list to write about” thing.
I got these from
v15u4l_3rr0r ages ago, finally got around to finishing it.
Blue PlaquesA week or so ago, as the sounds of a Simon and Garfunkel album floated in from the next room, I heard “Homeward Bound” start during a lull in the conversation and so filled it with “There’s a blue plaque at the train station where he wrote this. It’s in Widnes.” I love that.
I love that if you type “blue plaques” into a little autocompleting google search bar like the one I have in my browser, all the suggested phrases have the name of a city after them: London, Manchester*, Bristol, Leeds, Oxford, Leicester, Belfast. How lovely, I imagined, to be planning a trip to Oxford or Belfast and want to know what blue plaques you might see there. It’s the sort of thing that gives me warm fuzzy feelings about humanity.
Of course the fact that a lot more people are probably searching for interracial midget three-way foot fetish porn is better left unnoticed when I’m feeling warm and fuzzy like this.
Most blue plaques commemorate people and places that seem dry and obscure to me, but there are a few that mean the concept of a blue plaque has a special place in my heart. Willie Rushton has a blue plaque in Mornington Crescent tube station. Sherlock Holmes has one, at 221b Baker Street, of course. But now that I think about this, the story about Paul Simon’s blue plaque doesn’t fit, and while there is some kind of commemoration there, it is not a blue plaque (I confirmed this in
thisarticle, which is full of all kinds of pub-quiz level trivia on the subject of musical landmarks).
Though I didn’t mean to deceive, my story was believed. It’s the kind of thing you’d expect a blue plaque to be for, when they’re not pointing out the home of some long-dead architect or horticulturist, and that’s why I like them so much.
Curmudgeonsit has long been my professed ambition to become a curmudgeon when I grow up (sometimes specifically an old man from Yorkshire, which isn’t the same as being a curmudgeon, but it does overlap).
And yet sometimes i worry about sounding too much like one.
Especially if you stick me in a room with a television. I am hopeless at watching TV, after so long away; the commercials baffle and irritate me in equal measure (lots), and my friends’ tendency to watch the cacophony of music video channels (I hereby nominate “cacophony” as the
collective noun for a group of music video channels) doesn’t help either; I hate almost all the songs, and I hate the things that come out of my mouth even more. Listening to myself makes me sound like your classic Old Person Who Doesn’t Get It, and I’m 27.
But they
do all sound the same to me! And they’re all rubbish. I’m sorry. That’s just the way it is.
I think I’m already geared up for being a cranky old person because so much that’s modern zips over my head. I am antagonized by people trying to sell me tiny phones with no buttons that do everything but make your tea for you, when all I want is something with buttons I can push one at a time and with text I can easily read. I am buffeted by people for whom video games are a staple of life, when I stopped being interested in them around the time of Tetris and Oregon Trail. I listen to Alan Bennett while I’m knitting a jumper; I feel curmudgeonly to the point of being a chronological oddity already. And of course this makes me grumpy!
EccentricsOne day when I was in high school my mom remarked that a friend of mine, who years later ended up being the first real love of my life, was lucky to have a driver’s license. “They don’t usually give them to... people like that,” she said. In subsequent conversation, uncomfortable on her part and thoroughly baffled on mine, I learned that she’d always assumed that this kid, one of the most intelligent people I know, must have been mentally disabled in some way. He was so strange she couldn’t think of any other way to explain his silliness, his cheerful nonconformity, his oddness... and perhaps oddest of all the fact that he clearly didn’t care what anybody thought of him at an age when most people’s lives are completely devoured by seeking the approval of their peers.
Thus started a fondness in me for eccentrics which continues to this day. There are people who are lucky enough to be not too crazy and probably smart enough to keep from being any more ostracized than they want to be. I think the appeal of the nonconformist, of being around people who are always challenging the way I think about things and the things I think I know, is one of the reasons I’ve ended up with so many people one might describe as “difficult” in some contexts or “on the autism spectrum” in others, but I find them no more difficult than anybody else and the rewards in some cases are a lot greater.
EtymolgyI remember Robert Anton Wilson once, in an interview, saying that Chinese words are like fossilized poems, because of the way distinct ideas can be put together to inform, describe, or otherwise comment on the word we translate them to mean (though unfortunately the only example I can think of right now is the apocryphal one about
the word for “trouble” being two women under one roof). It’s the same in German, another language known for mixing together words to make completely different concepts out of them (I remember being delighted to learn that the word my German textbook taught me for
refrigerator was in fact just the word for “cool” and the word for “cupboard” or “closet” put together).
It’s often more subtle in English, but the incredible variety of sources from which we take English words has taught me a thing or two about all kinds of other languages about which otherwise I would know nothing. One of my proudest moments was winning an argument with Andrew about what the word
calculus meant; he made a relatively small error (thinking “stones” instead of “pebbles” because he’d missed the diminutive marker) but I got it right through sheer brute force rote memorization, having read it in enough stories of Newton’s discovery.
Gonzo JournalismI still haven’t read as much Hunter S. Thompson as I’d like, but I’ve read more than enough to learn the phrase gonzo journalism, and I immediately fell in love with it. In my case it will never involve anything like as much sex, drugs and rock-‘n’-roll, but the notion that a writer is inextricably linked to her subject and talking about yourself isn’t the bad thing they told you it was in school, where “I” was banned from your essays (though admittedly most people would’ve used it in such phrases as “I think” or “I guess” whereas in my case I’d always prefer “I stalked the mutant hedgehog through the unfamiliar urban landscape, decrepit now after so much neglect following the Killer App Wars” or something.
While my stories are always going to be more Garrison Keillor than Hunter Thompson, I like to think the style can owe something to the latter great man.
Tube WalksI was a great admirer of tube walks, first from afar, when I never thought they’d have anything to do with me, but then the second time I came to the UK I flew to London (for reasons that escape me now) rather than Manchester and stayed with the lovely
miss_newham back when she was still in Newham, I think, and watched the first episode ever of The Welsh Series (that’d be new
Doctor Who to the rest of you but it has a different name in this house these days...) and the next day went on a Tube Walk!
Tube walks already loomed large in my legend, and they work like this. A bunch of people meet up at a tube station and walk to a tube station adjoining it. There is a huge list of all the stations in the order in which they are going to be done; it’s very impressive. It was dreamt up by a man of many LJs, but who was always known in this house by the one which showed his identification with this popular phenomenon,
tubewalker. Though he has since bowed out of them himself, leaving the endeavor in the capable hands of Ewan (the navigator) and Jo (the blower of the official Tube Walk Whistle that starts and ends the walks, and also the one who writes down everybody who attended), tube walks go on.
They’re a great chance to see some bit of London or other, whether it be urban wasteland or the beautiful Epping Forest (I did that one, and it was ace). There are many tube walk regulars but always a few randoms (on my first one I became The Person Who’s Travelled the Farthest for a Tube Walk, a title I held until someone came to London from Australia) and always a different combination of people. The walk invariably ends with a pub and/or curry, as much a part of the tradition as the great transport network itself, and now that I’ve reminded myself how great they are I’m a bit sad that I haven’t done one in almost four years.
JuxtapositionI know I added this to my list of interests for a specific reason, but of course I cannot now remember what it was. Still, I do know that I delight in strange juxtapositions of all kinds, like the time The Archers’ theme music played and then a friend asked me what I thought of S&M. My life includes many seemingly-contradictory bits, like everyone else’s I imagine. When the small, rural, conservative-in-all-ways community I grew up in is important to me, and my current crop of friends include a lot of bi kinky poly pervs (delete as appropriate), I may as well delight in the juxtapositions as be staggered or confused by them.
And, as is the way of these things, I shall be happy to ask you about some of your professed interests, if you want.
* On Manchester’s
blue plaque website you can “nominate your hero or heroin.” Having personally no better way to choose a nominee, I’m going with Golden Brown, because I like the song.