Chipped Mug

We all have our little things, don’t we? One of my little things is my constant use of a chipped mug for my tea.

(I can see you now, online-reader, shuddering and flicking away. You could be reading the oddly divisive reviews of the new Alien movie or even just checking the latest sad news from around the globe. Why stay to read this microcosmic rubbish? Why indeed. See you next time maybe.)

Still here? Okay, let’s do this.

I drink from a chipped mug, and I am quite interested in why I continue to do that and what impulse drives me to do that. But, before we think about all that, let’s do a little more on the minutia of this chipped mug thing.

(Some more of you off? I quite understand. See ya!)

We have nice mugs. Denby, classic blue colour. The tea tastes good out of them. Well, we think so anyway. It is Barry’s Tea so that probably helps. A couple of these mugs have got chipped over the years. It happens. There are plenty of unchipped ones but the chipped ones are still too nice to throw out.

I will always (always) have my tea from one of these chipped mugs. The other mugs will sit there in the cupboard, pristine and willing, but I will pass over them. I will reach into the back and find one with a tiny chip out of the rim and then I will be happy.

But why? Why?

Let me say quite clearly that I don’t actually know why I persist in doing this. So don’t expect some insightful resolution and the end of this piece. (I know, it’s shaping up to be a real doozy, this week, isn’t it?) All I can do is explore and theorise. Explore and theorise…

Firstly, and rather obviously, I take a chipped mug because I will never give Trish a chipped mug. That’s a no-brainer. If there were only chipped mugs left on the cupboard shelf (it happens) then I would wash an unchipped one for Patricia. She is the star of this house, and she won’t ever sip from a chip while I’m here and retain my power to control the delph. So that’s an easy and accesible reason why I take a chipped mug. If there’s one chipped and one unchipped then the distribution is obvious and unarguable. Job done? Well, no, not even close.

Suppose I’m in the house by myself and I fancy a brew, and the cupboard is replete with recently laundered mug ware. And 80% of the mugs on offer and intact and unchipped. I, me, alone in my house, will work through the mugs and will find a chipped one and I will use that.

Why? That’s what we’re seeking, isn’t it? The reason why. Well, it’s what I’m seeking. You’ve all gone at this point and God bless you on your way. As for me, I’m going to poke at this conundrum a little longer. I’m going to propose three possible theories and see how they look when they are written down.

Theory A – I am not good enough for an unchipped mug.

There is probably something to this theory. I go through life with the occasional sense that every single person in the world is equal to me and that the vast majority of them are considerably better and more interesting than I am. It’s not a painful thought. It just seems to make sense. I’m okay, but I’m not all that great. My use of a chipped mug reflects that view. Before you start to feel sorry for me, there is another, compartmentalised, part of my brain in which I am the absolute fucking best thing since sliced bread. I told you I didn’t have any answers.

Theory B – I am punishing myself by the use of the chipped mug.

Although raised as a Catholic, and, to quote Michael Caine, I might well still help out if they were short-handed, I don’t really subscribe to the notion of confession as a realistic way to purge wrongdoing. Deep in my heart, I just think it’s a cop-out that you can do something really bad and then go and tell it to your priest and he will let you away with it. Nah. Deep in my heart, amends have to be made somewhere. Nothing is free. So maybe there’s a bit of that. I drink tea out of an inferior receptacle as penance for that time I double parked outside Penneys. It’s a theory; in fact, it’s Theory B.

Theory C – I just value damaged things.

I reckon there’s something in this one too. As a slightly damaged thing myself, I welcome broken things and even surround myself with them. (Trish is an exception, because she is quite perfect.) I never seem to be entirely comfortable with things that are pristine and new. I’m never totally settled among the enviable.

Perhaps this last one is the one that is closest to the truth. The more I think about it, the more I feel that I just like to celebrate and involve the slightly damaged things I encounter in my life. After all, we are all damaged goods to some extent. Life chips at us and roughens our surface. It cracks us all a little. 

We all have our little things, don't we? Sometimes it’s good to reflect on them and the whys and wherefores of how they are the way they are.

Then again, sometimes it’s nice to simply leave them alone and just have another cup of tea.

So cheers, big ears.

The Fifty Percent Man

On Friday evening, I came home from work and got out my spade and my brush and a worn-out plastic Tesco bag that I couldn’t, in all conscience, ever bring into a supermarket again. I made my way to the pavement along the front of my house, and I set to work clearing the weeds that had grown up along the verge.

This caused a minor stir in the neighborhood. One lady in a passing car showed and rolled down her window and said, “Well done.” A good neighbour came across from his house and loaned me an implement he had for the specific task I was about. Much better than my spade, I was assured. This activity didn’t really surprise me. I’m not the world’s most active gardener and general maintenance person and my unusual spate of early weekend horticultural activity was a surprise to all of us, not least myself.

This irregular burst of activity can be attributed to the man who lives up around the corner from my house. I don’t know his name but, in my head, I’ve taken to calling him the Fifty Percent Man. He is a bright, low-slung fellow who always has a cheery hello and an interested query about the progression of your day. I see him most days and he sees me. It is a mutual-apprehension situation.

The key to this man’s presence in this piece of writing is that he cleans the weeds from the edges of his own pavement very regularly. He also mows the grassy strip between the pavement and the road. We don’t have a grassy strip on our street, and I am thankful for that because heaven knows what it would look like by now.

The man can be seen regularly, out working on his pavement edge and his grassy strip. Fair enough. But regular readers will know that it takes more than that to get into the pages of these annals. A mere trimmed verge will not normally make the cut. So what is it about this guy that sets my typing fingers a-twitchin’ this rainy Sunday morning? The answer is simple. He doesn't just trim his own verge, he trims everybody else’s as well. Well, not everybody else’s exactly but, still, an astonishing percentage of the neighborhood gets their verges trimmed by this excellent gentleman.

One day last week, I was amazed to see him miles down the road of the adjoining street, working full tilt on the verges of people he could hardly know. From where I was standing, he was a mere dot on the horizon but still I recognized his low-slung profile scraping and brushing, cleaning and making good.

I met him the day after and asked him about this. I opened the conversation by telling him that I thought he should be awarded a medal for the work he did on the local verges. He said that it gave him pleasure to keep things tidy. How much did he do? I asked him. How far did he go along all the houses did he go in his quest for suburban orderliness? His answer was memorable.

He said that he was happy to do fifty percent of all the houses so long as other people did the other fifty percent.

I thought that this was as close to being a definition of an actual saint as I would ever hear in the real world. An act of pure charity combined with an act of pure faith, both in equal measure. I will do a full half of everything, if everybody else will look after the other half.

The low-slung man does not operate on my street. We live in a slightly different practical and metaphysical domain to his. We are not a tangible part of his percentage equation. Nevertheless, after speaking to him, I felt a tacit responsibility to seize the tiny percentage of the remaining work that could only be viewed as my own personal responsibility. As a result, as soon as my week’s work was done, I resolved to make good my own verge.

It's out there now in the August rain, my verge, gleaming and weedless. A seamless continuation of all the other clean verges on my street. At least some of them, I am sure, having been inspired, like I was, by the man who would do half of all the work if only we would all do our bit.

Here's to him. The low slung, fifty percent man. Long may he weed, trim, and continue to inspire me to play my own small part. By doing far too much, all by himself.

l'importance du Public

We watched the entirety of the Olympic opening ceremony on Friday evening. This post will be mostly about that. The title of this post translates as ‘The Importance of the Audience.’ and that’s kind of how I feel about the opening ceremony. So there, you’ve had the gist of the post now, just in case you haven’t sufficient time to read on.

Our viewing of the opening ceremony was by no means an edge-of-the-seat affair. There were a few beers and some rice and noodles and other takeaway things. There was a good Friday night vibe in the Armstrong living room and the opening ceremony did nothing to dilute that. It provided a spectacle, a show, an event. There were some memorable things and some less memorable things. I think it will succeed better in memory than it did in real time. I could be wrong. I am wrong more than 50% of the time, according to my scientific calculations. So be sure to take that into account.

The horse.

I think the horse will live in my own memory in the same way that the rising chimney stacks of the 2012 opening ceremony does. It was a wonderful iconic image, replete with both social and cinema history. I can never bet on what will stick in my rather fluid mind, but I think that horse might. Of course, it outlasted its optimum time in the ceremony by a long, long way, as so many of the items did, but it was still quite something to behold.

What else will remain with me?

Rafa Nadal’s smile as he accepted the torch from Zidane. I think I’ll remember that. And Celine. I’ll remember her too, I reckon. She was amazing and she is also the key to why I think the opening ceremony, though ambitious, did not quite succeed. Celine is the key and that’s why I’m going to come back to her in a moment. Celine and the audience too.

Let’s cut to it. I think the lack of the presence of a coherent audience is one of the key reasons why the opening ceremony left some people a bit cold. Of course, the weather did not do what it ideally should have done, and that was a shame. Although perhaps I’m just being ‘contrary’ when I say that the rain may have added something valuable and unpredictable to the pot. The pianist on the bridge was somehow more present and more ‘there’ for being absolutely drenched, the lid of his instrument bubbling with huge residual droplets. The rain was a problem but not as big a problem as the audience. Or lack thereof.

For therein lay the rub. The lack of a visible audience.

For much of the three-and-a-half hour run time, there was no sense of a live audience partaking in what was unfolding. Of course, they were there but they were remote, perching on the distant banks of the river. The absence of a visible audience made the whole thing feel like a television programme rather than a live televised event. Perhaps that’s a subtle difference but I think it’s a valid one.

Let me try to explain what I mean. Lots of television these days likes to create an impression that it’s ‘real life’ and that its events have unfolded in the same way as we are watching it. This stuff is often branded as ‘Reality Television.’ It’s real, except it’s very much not. Take ‘The Traitors’ for instance. It sets itself up as a bunch of people having breakfast and going on an adventure and then voting each other out while, in real reality, the participants are all running around filming inserts to be used at various times in the show. They recline in beds they never sleep in; they traverse corridors and climb stairs for no other purpose than to create an illusion of reality. And, critically, there is no audience to all this "léger de main" because there couldn’t be. It is mostly an illusion, a made-for-TV drama. Strictly does similar things. Guest singers appear, huge dance numbers slot in, both often recorded many months before.

The absence of a tangible audience in the Paris opening ceremony heightened the effect that this, too, was just some kind of a televisual drama, rather than a true live event. Even though, slightly perversely, it was a true live event.

The audience often serves a key role as our witness to an event. The audience can reflect our remote emotions right there in the room and we can tell that there is no major trickery going on because they are right there, checking everything closely on our behalf.

In Paris on Friday evening, there was trickery galore and without any visible audience to represent me. I felt quite detached from it all. It was a TV show rather than a live TV event. The journey of the flame to the cauldron, for instance, was disjointed and unconvincing. It was as if one of the most revered ceremonies of the Olympics was subverted for mere spectacle and effect. The masked runner was obviously a long series of masked runners, tricked out to look like one person. Did these ‘trick people’ actually pass the ceremonial flame to each other or was that also conveniently set aside? I didn’t see it happen and the audience didn’t see it for me, because neither of us were there.

Of course there is always trickery. I know that. I’m not that much of a fool. The Queen didn’t really skydive into the London Stadium in 2012. There are always tricks. But what I am saying is that, on at least some primitive level, the presence of an audience seems to make some level of gentle duplicity acceptable. Like with Strictly or the Sky-Diving Queen. On Friday, the absence of that same audience made certain moments seem somehow sneakier and more underhand.

That’s a negative example of the importance of an audience. Let me give you a more positive one in conclusion. Back we come to Celine Dion. She was utterly fabulous, and this opinion is coming from someone who wouldn’t really have given two hoots about her in previous years. So why did I care now? Two reasons. Firstly, I knew something of her backstory. I knew a little of what she has suffered in recent years, and I knew a little of what it had taken to get her to this magical place, to sing her amazing song. And secondly, there was an audience to witness her live performance on my behalf and to react as I might have reacted had I actually been there. Compare this to the performance of Axelle Saint-Cirel from the top of the Grand Palais. Her rendition of La Marseillaise was right up there, and arguably even beyond, Celine’s wondrous turn. It was amazing. But she was all alone on that deserted roof, just her and the millions of us sitting here at home. As a result, it wasn’t the same.

As the final host of Olympic flame carriers made their way through the quiet city, it was almost as if everyone had given up and gone home to bed. Then, more than ever, we needed the crowd to be excited on our behalf.

This is just a point of view. I’m not even sure if I believe it myself. Like I said, I’m wrong far more than 50% of the time. The Paris opening ceremony was great, but it foundered a bit in the rain and in the extraordinary overrunning of many of its key sections. These things played a part in the difficulties it had.

I just think that the audience, by not being more of a part of it, was a part of that too.