Money, Vanity & The Dentist

I’ve never handed over hundreds of pounds for anything as saddening or defeatist as a new television, or a sofa, or a deluxe latte maker simply because I cling churlishly to the Marxist dogma that material wealth does not equate to happiness. Well, that and the fact I have no where to put anything.

Instead, on the odd occasions that the God of Chaos stumbles drunkenly into the game of my life, rolls a hazy six and I end up with expendable money (as the God of Grinding Fiscal Normality storms off in a huff) I’ve always proudly squandered the coins on ‘experience’.

‘Experience’, of course, adds up to little more than getting drunk somewhere different to normal – at a music festival, or in a Cuban youth hostel, or between the prickly thighs of a nameless prostitute on a bed of desecrated tulips in a Turkish graveyard (never again…).

A wreck less, selfish bout of sententious whimsy comes over me whenever I receive a windfall – I always want to defy the significance of having money by immediately blowing it, not on something tangible and practical, but on something I romanticize as being ‘better’ or ‘more important in life’ than the dough itself. It’s the same idiotic rebellion that causes me to stuff fivers in charity boxes when I know I’m approaching the end of my bank balance - I think I try and defy money because I’m afraid of it ever controlling my life, a high-minded notion I hope I outgrow long before I come to reproduce.

How exactly this daft relationship with money applies to today’s visit to the dentist is something I’ve been pondering, mouth in hand, ever since I left the sour-faced receptionist counting out my two-hundred sheets onto the tabletop of her unfulfilled, Formica-studded life.

I’ve had a dead tooth in the front of my smile that’s been bugging me for years – winking at me in the mirror and gate crashing flash photographs and making me look, to all intents and purposes, like I’m chewing a dead wasp. It’s ground me down, over time, and so it was vanity, simple vanity, that lead me to spend such a princely sum on what can be considered a ‘commodity’ for the very first time in my short, shabby life.

God knows, lying back in the dentist’s chair as a pair of distant eyes ground my front tooth to a sharp spike ready for its new ‘cap’, I knew that for once I hadn’t paid for ‘an experience’ – unless the experience was the novelty of getting a woman that close to your mouth without first listening wide-eyed to her hopes for the future and subtly plying her with Chardonnay.

As an experience, it was vile – as a commodity, it will function to make me feel more complete and attractive as human being. A shiny new tooth. Is it really any different to purchasing alloys for my (non-existent) car, or a touch-screen mobile phone, or a pair of sunglasses with Somebody’s initials built authentically into the frame?

Where do I go from here, now I’ve entered the murky waters of cosmetic improvement? When Chaos next kicks me some money, will I find myself cruising the aisles of a nose supermarket, or flicking woozily through a penis-enlargement catalogue? What happened to the man who has been previously so resistant to aesthetic improvement that he’d bought no new clothes in two years, and regularly denounced bars of soap as part of the ‘beauty industry conspiracy’?

Maybe it’s the first step in developing a mature relationship with money. Now, rather than impulsively spunking any I have on the slippery notion of living a life worth living, I’ll use my new tooth as a building block to bigger and better things.

‘Things’ being the operative word. As shaky recollections of unremarkable hedonism dwindles, tangible wealth will sprout up around me like the well-kept blades of safely fenced lawn.

Food blenders, and digital cameras and nice suits will keep me indoors to bask in their warming presence. As the digits in my annual salary steadily roll upwards they’ll unfurl an infinity of glistening trinkets to sooth the natural impatience of my soul.

And at the centre of this circus of objects, I’ll be grinning, with my two hundred pound tooth wedged firmly in my big, empty head, as the Gods roll 6, 6, 6...

The Ambivalent Agony of the Fashion Show Gawker

If the ratio of beautiful to average-looking people that existed in the basement of our student’s union the other night (80:20) were to somehow ripple in sultry waves out of the doors and spread to the real world, we as a population would be sentenced to years of ugly civil violence within a generation.

While the lucky majority who would suddenly resemble the attendees of the Fashion Rocks fashion show on Thursday night rejoiced, allowing industry to grind to a forgotten halt as they fawned over each other and masturbated furiously in hastily-arranged rooms of fresh mirrors, the 20% left without shapely noses, straightened hair or adequately rimmed sunglasses would be driven underground like the proles in 1984 (I mean the ones from the book, not miners) to squander a decade in confused self-loathing before a unifying average-looking leader (later played by Mel Gibson) emerged to lead them to a bloody coup. The beautiful people would provide resistance by their number but ultimately capitulate via their reluctance to blemish their perfect faces with sweat. Beautiful heads would roll.

Stood in a £2 Primark t-shirt (with a shandy stain on the left sleeve) I contemplated this dystopia and my probable role in it as before me, on the ‘cat-walk’, another 9-foot monument to mankind’s aesthetic potential strutted and pouted in some sort of dress I was vaguely aware I was supposed to notice.

On one of those evolutionary scales that shows a monkey gradually getting his shit together and becoming a man, this girl would occupy a space six places to the right of the first straight-backed one, two spaces to the left of a great swirling orb of transcendental purity so beautiful and true it can only be seen by babies in the first 30 seconds after they emerge from the labia. ‘She’s hot’ was my dry-mouthed observation – as adequate a summation of a person as it would have been to tell Hitler: ‘you’re a bit of a tinker Adolf, aren’t you…’

There is no ambivalence quite like that which afflicts a man when he is confronted by a woman so unattainable she might as be perched on top of a 300 foot high greased pole, boxed in a force field of searing agony and orbited by angry crows.

Far be it for me to reduce people to merely the sum of their looks, but when seen for the first time from an unassailable distance that is precisely what people are - and so perhaps it is not too trite to compare a beautiful man or woman to a wave breaking on rock dappled by the first ascending shadow of dawn, or a summer breeze snaking through the tips of a corn field, or a really, really nice tree. They all make the same eloquent case for a God, after all.

The problem for men is that in the case of seeing the beautiful woman (rather than the wave or the wind or the tree) is that seeing is not enough: the compulsion to ‘capture’ resonates suddenly in your core with an aching jolt. Herein lies the ambivalence. You never feel simultaneously more alive or more dead than at the sight of a woman you know wouldn’t give you any more than a bemused smile if you ever hiccupped your way over to talk to her.

This isn’t because she’s shallow, unapproachable or even necessarily that put off by the fact you obviously only own one pair of jeans. It’s because the sheer disparity between her physical beauty and yours would manifest its self in negative ways: in my case, most likely, a cringing effort to over-compensate with abstract gags and lots of animated shuffling, like a tearful crab trying to make its self walk like all the other animals.

Best not to try. Best to stand in the basement of the union, a crude chip of slate strewn upon a glistening infinity of bright, colourful pebbles, washing back the ambivalence with a plastic cup of beer, gazing up in a suspended sigh at beautiful impossibility, silently thankful that the ratio is the freak, not you.

Roller-skating: another one for life's two great lists...

They tell you the world’s your oyster and you think - great, they must mean life is a merry jaunt beset with luxurious possibilities. They don’t. They mean it’s a never ending sequence of anticlimaxes slurped from empty shells in which you can always see your own, crying reflection.

Don’t get me wrong - I enjoyed the Roller Disco last night tremendously, it’s just here I am, reaching with an arm both black and blue for that eternal list of things that I’m rubbish at, ready to add yet another entry. And yet - I was so sure I’d be good at it. I mean, why wouldn't I be?

I tied up my roller shoes and approached the skate rink with all the surly confidence a boozed up moron enjoys, only to witness my legs flay out in front and behind of me like the spindly pins of a newly born giraffe, who would have at least have had simultaneously becoming aware of its own empirical consciousness as a sort of excuse -

‘Fair play Spotty - you might have been gash at skating but you were experiencing experience for the very first time, so you’ll hear no more on the matter from us, son. That daft student with half a mullet on the other hand had no fucking excuse…’.

Not matter what combination of leg-pushing, weight-shifting or composed launching I tried, I either startled forward like a horse you’d just prodded up arse or wobbled out for half a yard like a toddler playing in a pair of its Mum’s high-heels.

Occasionally, in the waves of fluid motion that had formed like a jeering carousel around me, I’d pick out a friendly face and latch to them like a tragic middle-aged divorcee who’d entered the desperate final third of a night out on the lash.

Like her, I wanted answers – answers to why life is so cruel, why it is so hard, why you can give and give so much and get so little in return – but it wasn’t love or even a kebab that I was after, it was simple motion. To experience, just for a brief moment, a successful glide across the floor, to fan the beads of sweat from my face in a breeze created by my own ability to cascade.

Instead, I’d generally bring them tumbling down with me. That was the only move I perfected in two hours.

And so as my stubborn, outraged mind tried to get its self around the concept of being monumentally shit at something an entire room of people were performing with general competency, I began to cling to the thought.

The thought that while spinning around on the spot, leaping off stuff or just going quite fast are impressive aesthetic feats in the world of drunken roller-skating, there is another, somehow more honourable move in the reportire that I could hold my head up high and say I was good at.

Falling on your arse is easy, but managing to get back up quickly, and to not seriously injure anyone or yourself on the way is certainly not.

And so while I must have spent at least 20% of my time clinging on at the sides – in the line up of the shamed that is the roller disco’s equivalent to the queue at the GUM clinic – the other 80% was spent honing the art of the relatively painless tumble in which remarkably few people were up-ended by my pathetic flailing.

So although I may well be reaching for that list of things I’m shit at to add yet another of life’s simple activities, the list a fragile ego keeps to console a simple man is only ever just folded up somewhere in another pocket, ready to restore your faith in yourself - and in a world of oysters, if needs be.

The One Entirely Recession Proof Industry. Being Broke.

I don’t know about you, but I’m enjoying the Credit Crunch tremendously.

I have no savings – never had. Once I collected a King’s ransom in fifty pence and pound coins for the NSPCC by taking my cherubic visage door-to-door (risking exposure to paedophiles whilst raising money for children was an irony lost on me at the time) but that money was never my own - although I must confess - and please don’t judge too harshly – I dipped into it from time to time to aid my Arthurian quest to find the Newcastle United shiner in a packet of football stickers (the only conspiracy theory I fully believe is that Merlin deliberately distributed the David Ginolas and Phillipe Alberts South of the great divide and sent the Klinsmanns and Viallis in other direction to ensure 10 year old boys kept spending, charity fraud or no charity fraud).

I have no assets – never had. I don’t mean anatomically, where girly eye-lashes and a chopping-board stomach serve me reasonably well, but in terms of tangible things like property, or cars or signed first prints of any Harry Potter novels. I got so far once as to photograph odd bits of junk that lay around my room (a pocket calculator, a book on palm reading, an Our Lady Peace album) to sell on Ebay, caught in a similar rush of capitalist fervour that falls over people when playing Monopoly, only to be overcome swiftly by a crippling existential numbness as I contemplated the prospect of actually posting the silly things to Norwich all to make a couple of quid. It was too depressing, so I left the site and have never returned since, though I suspect my approval rating is the one area in which George W. Bush and I could empathise with one another.

I don’t drive so the price of fuel doesn’t bother me, don’t play the stock market so Sesame Street still seems more pertinent than Wall Street in my eyes (incidentally, I wonder how The Count is dealing with the downturn…). ‘When you aint got nothing, you got nothing to lose’ said Bob Dylan, presumably referring to the period before he was given the responsibility of embodying liberal social protest, something he’s seemed keen to try and shake off ever since. Well I still stumble through the final days of each month borrowing tenners from tolerant friends and have absolutely no mythical status as the embodiment of anything – I wonder if old Bob is jealous, in his own private way.

I have, however, adopted the parlance of the Credit Crunch, much like people who normally don’t have a clue which football club Wayne Rooney plays for suddenly had a line or two about his metatarsal and enduring significance to the England set up during the last World Cup.

I’ve been spraying banal conversations with the same guff about ‘things being as they are’ and ‘everyone being affected by it at the minute’ as everyone else (bollock by the way: I’m not affected, the Queen’s not affected, that bloke who wears newspaper for trousers and pushes a shopping trolley down Northumberland Street isn’t affected…), all delivered in that peculiar cadence that seeks to imitate a world-weary global businessman, rather than someone to whom the ‘FTSE Index’ sounds more like a brochure for frottage aficionados than something to do with finance.

If anything, the whole palaver seems like a good thing for my current situation. One thing I do find interesting is the concept of ‘this only happening once in a life-time’ – gives the whole thing a glossy touch, does that, like a nice quote on the front of a DVD. If it only happens once in a lifetime, then I’d rather it happened now before I have any dosh, assuming I ever manage to sell the novel I’m planning to write this summer (boy meets boy, boy loves girl, girl sleeps with other boy, boy cries) and see it turned into a moderately entertaining British film (starring Martin Clunes as my Dad – sorry, the Dad – sorry, Dad).

The person I feel most sorry for is all Barack Obama, who seemingly couldn’t have a worse shit-storm to enter for his first term as the sexiest, coolest (and certainly blackest) American president of all time.

Well, best of luck to him, and best of luck to all of you. For me it’s just another day whistling cheerfully, wading through my own rubbish bin.

Lower Molar the 2nd

Last week, when Lower Right 2nd Molar began to strop petulantly around the scarlet mess of my gum, I did - through the fog of my glum agony - fleetingly equate myself to a televised war-victim stumbling about with a piece of shrapnel woven into my lower jaw. The extent of a man's self-pity, of course, knows no depths.

Unfortunately, having never bothered to find myself a private dentist since leaving home, it was a stagger up to the Trainee Dental Clinic for me - forlorn eyes bared in vague hope of communicating the depths of my pain to the production line of indifferent passersby, none of whom so much as stopped to pat me sympathetically on the back as I headed to have my mouth altered for free by an amateur. Even the people stood smoking in gowns attached to tubes and trolleys outside the hospital - usually the target of my nose-raised derision - were treated to a feeble glance as I shuffled past them.

As I sat in the trying to imagine what sort of fumbling child-dentist was behind the door ready to bleed me to death, a radiant and perfectly calm young student called Emma suddenly emerged into the resigned gloom of the waiting room to call out my name instead. She let me away, looked at my x-ray, tapped away at Lower Right 2nd Molar with something sharp and concluded calmly from my subsequent bleat that it was time to numb up and yank out...

Unfortunately, it turned out that in world of gum-numbing drugs, I'm something of a Lemmy from Motorhead. If I had a handle-bar moustache, climbed on a stage with a bass guitar and started bellowing out 'The Ace of Spades', a teenager standing near the back with a Jack Daniels and Coke would almost certainly lean in to his mate and say 'they reckon he injected porphyria into his face for three days straight once and didn't lose a single tooth...' as the other nods in quiet awe.

She kept sticking it in and sticking it in (the needle that is), each time causing an involuntary spasm in my left foot, each time waiting a few minutes before clasping Lower Right 2nd with a pair of pliers (for that, despite a fair old time passing since the Vikings first discovered the downside to meed, is precisely what they still use), each time causing me to experience pain that surely only a face and a variation of a vice can together produce.

It got to the point where her self-assurance began to wane, and I, in a twisted parody of a oddly-familiar bedroom scene, felt obligated to embark on a round of 'this kind of thing has never happened to me before' platitudes... to which she went stiff, turned around and informed me: 'I'm only legally allowed to give you one more injection - then I have to send you home.'

At this point a senior dentist popped inside my room. He listened to Emma and nodded sympathetically, then frowned at me. 'It's time to try something stronger', he said, in the voice of a man relishing words he felt he'd never get to use. Evidently there is a reserve of 'heavy stuff' in a dentist's tool kit that requires an even more monstrous needle - the kind you could hitch a flag to, wave above yourself and head unselfconsciously into a protest march. 'You shouldn't feel a thing' he said - the standing joke of the last two hours - as I very much did.

Thankfully, the end of my tolerance was reached and Emma, with palatable relief emanating from behind her plastic goggles, wrestled Lower Right 2nd Molar out of his bed-sore dwelling before plonking the ugly thing next my face as I 'rinsed' (the polite term we use in these situations for 'dribble').

As I made my way back to work two hours late, with Lower Right in a little paper envelope in my pocket and my mouth set in a cruel mimic of Marlon Brando's Godfather, there seemed no discernable cosmic signal to read in my toothy ordeal.

No symbolism to see in it, no truth to extract - except perhaps a reminder that life - if you're lucky - is part-stroll/part-fumble over cobbled path, that the quotidian is a pantomime in which we all must sometimes play the fool, and that you should always, without excuse, brush your fucking teeth.

Lessons Learnt #5 - The Parents Are Alright

At some sullen point in our adolescence I’m sure we’ve all shared a similar fantasy: what if I’m really adopted?

My biological parents (not those excruciating clowns downstairs) might be sat in a studio somewhere in Montmartre, or in the Congo bottle feeding parrots, or Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf…

Alas for me the fantasy was always quashed under foot: my own foot, that is, as the toes on each are divided equally between a broad knobble identical to my Mothers and a arching hook identical to my Fathers. I wear proof of my DNA on the ends of my size 12’s that pitter-patter ‘yu-mum yu-dad, yu-mum yu-dad’ as I walk down the street.

Still, being at university seems to have been as much about reconciling me with my past as with my future, as much about giving me the space to come to terms with the ‘rents as giving me the gumption to start planning a life without them.

The first thing you realise after getting to uni how wonderful it is to not see them all of the time, not to have them around put limitations on what you can do and when.

The second thing you realise is that your Mum must have been doing a hell of lot of tidying up back there, cos this place looks like a nuclear fallout in there and it’s only the third day in (not to employ crude and outdated gender stereotypes here: it may well have been your Dad who washed the curtains and moved the dirty plates, but by the end I only lived with my dear Mum and I’m pretty sure my Dad’s gaff resembled the average Fresher flat anyway).

They say an atheist is only truly tested in his or her belief when the axe is about to swing: the theory that, in the end, we all pray to some thing. I think the extent to which we have become independent from our parents is similarly tested: it’s when you’re getting court threats from the credit card companies, or you’ve gotten someone pregnant, or you’ve accidentally mowed down your tutor on your way to your dissertation meeting that you suddenly find yourself phoning ‘home’ for help. When the shit really hits the fan, you want the people who dealt with your shit in the first place.

For their part, my Mother’s doting optimism and my Father’s world-weary pragmatism have both served me well as I’ve spent three years trying to fashion a life for myself: from the shaky bit in first year when I thought I might have to drop out to change my course, to the nerves that went with putting the first pieces of a magazine together, to the present day anxiety of not knowing what’s going to happen after graduation. Their lives were very different to mine at twenty-two – harder, more responsible - but they advise me, as best they can.

Their reward is to watch me gradually turn into a version of them: procreation, the ultimate vanity project. I am approaching an average sneezing fit of eleven ‘atishoos’, just like my old man, and I have obsessive-compulsions that stop a yard shy of making me a weirdo, just like my old ma.

I value politeness, am vigilant in wearing seatbelts and insisting others wear theirs, will try anything once and still can’t grow a beard. I imitate my Father’s easy charm, and my Mother’s resilient romanticism.

I am, I have discovered, the compound of their strengths and weaknesses, the composite of their quirks: the chemical reaction in the crucible of their love and the marriage between them that worked.

Now, if those adoption papers were to turn up, I’d probably just want to throw them away. Who could be bothered to come around to a whole new set of parents, after how long it took the first time? Unless, of course, my real parents are millionaires. Or movie stars. Or player scouts for Real Madrid…