An Unofficial Record of Ratings & Demographics of Minor Television Channels: May 2009

The drive home is never interesting. This is simply an accepted fact of the world we live in. The car is the same. The roads are the same. The rush hour, the route – our fellow coagulants of the arterial glut are the same. The gelatinous churn of traffic of the A roads and motorways turns us into philistine grunts. We ignore the geocultural ceiling sculptures carved from black cloud, that the sky has sweat rain for. The thousands around us are nothing to us: we reduce people’s entire lives, entire histories, entire lineages to a pair of Swedish headlamps. We ignore the bored crash barriers – I ignore them even as I drive past now – numbed by the monotony of our oversafe, over-produced cars as much as by lack of nerve endings. Not like the good old days! they’d say, if only they could be bothered. The destination is the same. Uninspiring pork sausage for dinner same. Even the road signs are bored of us now.

These are all facts we are all aware of. As I drive home now, I am set to crunch the blanched gravel at 6.17 after another identical journey, so I will perform two (maybe three) laps of honour at the local retail park roundabout to delay my arrival – every second after 6.17 will conjure searing, fabulous visions of all the all the positions and fetishes and toys and people and animals NOT animals and food and drink and abuse and pain and blood that I could be sharing with my secretary in my wife's mind (humiliatingly, my fantasies are more vivid in her mind than they ever are in mine). But this detour is not about her. It is about the man on the roundabout. John Ingram, I imagine he’s called. John is, it’s fair to say, a shell of a man – his haircut alone is testament to that. He wears what I believe is a burlap sack, which I will assume (for the sake of decency) has been stained by a very precise rain storm. It’s possible to be a good man without still having your youth, yes, but... I’m sure John was young once. No one stops for John. He forms no part of the roadway, so no one has need to notice him. He just sits. And he waits. And smells. I imagine.

John – I’ll tell you now how I met him – was the kind of man who had currency in this world. He had possessions. He had an education. He had a car. He was the owner of an Arden Blue Vauxhall Zafira, that had a layer of child grease from the family he always wanted and resented. He had dreams he would never pursue, for all the right reasons – work, money, responsibility, respectability. He could walk tall on Oxford Street – or if not tall, at least at average height. He fit, I mean. Sense of humour is such a hard thing to quantify, isn’t it? We’ll move on. A wife, he had; kids, he had; an affair, he’d had – no, John! I used to say, that scuff of a lady’s heel on the dash won’t come off no matter how much you prod it! Yes, here was a modern man. A modern man with a modern job, with a modern drive home past a Roman Catholic church that makes such modern men yearn for a taste of the past like they yearn for passport stamps or restaurant reservations.

His drive home was as it was for us all: same destination, same road, same dinner (though I always did have him down as more of a beef sausage man, myself – PRETENTIOUS, I mean to say). Everything that evening was as it should be: the seatbelt etched into the inner nook of his clavicle, the radio off out of principle, the shoe scuff scratching his attention. He successfully drove past the church. He successfully made the turning onto the A17. He successfully navigated the length of the A17 between his required slip roads. At the point of turn off, his steering wheel said, Subtle Left, Equal Right, Harder Right, Back To The Middle As The Flyover Takes Us Up, Above The Road We Just Left.

The Road Safety Campaigners would spit shit if they knew where his attention at that moment lay. The seductive curvature swayed towards him, like hips, and swayed away as smoothly. An altogether instant hypnosis. The road seemed to vanish. He had no explanation – he did not know. It was a road he had not driven on. Could not drive on – there was no exit.* So he turned his attention back to the road before him, and back to the drive home. He thought of beef sausage dinner. He thought of his wife. When he wasn’t thinking of the other road, he was thinking of his beef sausage wife.

[*When we find a road we have not driven on before, we naturally want to drive it. I believe that this is actually a repression of our deeper desire to achieve dominion over everything we see, which is, of course, the reason cars were invented in the first place – it is no coincidence that Henry Ford was both the pioneer of the auto industry and an outrageous tyrant. If I could, I would stand on every road ever laid and piss over every square inch – in this regard, we are all the same. The next dictator of this land will urinate in the original tarmac mix before the roads are even laid, and with the roads as his territory, England will be his. But what John felt was not the swelling of his bladder.]

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As with every time I come to visit John, my view of him is brief. Tonight, I grant myself three shots, three rings round the roundabout road before heading home. Now John is not a modern man; he is a dying man. But he is also the Desert Island Man: he has his book, the Ordnance Survey Map of Essex (and North-East London); his favourite eight tracks on his company-owned mobile, of limited storage capacity; and his luxury item, the mobile itself – reception has long since escaped him, but its physical existence alone comforts him. His blue shirt gets darker every day with vomit, sweat and pollution. His trousers, I believe, barely lasted the exhausting dash from their carriageway to ours, over the toughened turf and barriers. But the road map was clearly an impulse buy. Because his yellowing, corner-curled road atlas at home told him nothing when he checked it frantically that evening, showing only a thick black thread without landmarks, just hanging on that yellow page, connected to nowhere, anchored by nothing.

The crisp white road maps in the bookshops told him nothing. The gormless booksellers told him nothing. He’d shout and plead and gabble at his wife every night as she screamed and cried and wondered what had come of this man, this man who once was strong as Atlas and now could only froth at his mouth. He’d drive past drive past drive past that swaying hip night after night, the repetition of this single event becoming all he could remember of his working week.

What amuses me is how, in the right light, a distance of even ten or twenty yards can be made to look insurmountable. Ten or twenty yards of industrial turf, sandwiched between crash barriers no more than two feet high. But you just can’t cross boundaries like these – this is the whole point. This is what John learnt. His numerous holiday request refusal notices were the first certificates; the P45 was his graduation parchment; the decree absolute, his crowning glory. In the face of a blissful, self-assured body (that we believe, with all our hearts, WANTS us) we are all paralysed, so the warning stings from the tears and humiliations of your world falling about your ears don’t register. John – and I know this – is only just working off his debt to those warnings now, as he lays there, prostrate, appalled by the realisation that none of this was worth the loss.

As he fades away in my rear-view mirror, I can just make out his eyes. They retain to this day a depth of thought to them that you’d expect a dying man of regret to make his last place of rest. The subject changes every day but the eyes stay the same: all the days of those two childhoods that he’d fled from with no thought; all the wonder of this secret England that meant nothing to him; all the life with all those people he despised and yet adored. Cotton for burlap; hygiene for filth; pride for blame. In a time of terrible trading, these are surely some of the worst.

We all feel bad for John, much like we all love God – some of us just don’t realise it. I long to park up and scream the answer to his question in his haemorrhaging ears, but just as the traffic prevented him from simply pulling over on that first evening to look, so it prevents me from pulling over for him. England is scarred by self-contained road networks: hundreds of thousands of self-contained road networks that can’t be accessed. Sixty, seventy million. This is simply an accepted fact of the world we live in. “You mustn’t cross from one to another just because it dazzles you with surprise!” I’d say. “You mustn’t abandon yours for someone else’s because it looks different, or because you haven’t pissed on it before!”

I am nearly home now. And as for him, he will die in two days time, whereupon the refuse workers will chuck him in the truck, and no one will ever think of John Ingram again.

An Unofficial Record of Ratings & Demographics of Minor Television Channels

Thursday 28 May 2009

Harrison Ford

Wednesday 27 May 2009

Beef Sausage Desert Island Man (The Act of Intimacy Reimagined as Traffic Networks)

Monday 25 May 2009

The Brute - A Prologue

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