THE NAMING OF PARTS

Time was when inventors made a rough stab at communicating what their gadget did, sometimes in plain English, as in say 'vacuum cleaner', sometimes by recourse to Latin and Greek. Tele phone to transport sound. Tele vision to transport pictures. Nowadays, you’re surrounded by things whose names give no clue to their function: iPOD, bluetooth, the verb to google. And there’ll be more. Young men’ll be braying into their mobile phones, going “Hi, yeah. We’ve just got yak-butter.” You’ll hear two guys in the office going, “Does your pinnacle have sex-fiend? Mine does two thousands corbetts a second.” The Future’ll be a bit like having had a stroke. Everyone under thirty will be talking complete cock.

A WRITER'S DIARY

Did another six hours on my novel today. It is a disturbing Dystopian novel about a future where civilization has broken down to such an extent that you can’t get Broadband on your mobile.

Did six hours on my novel today. V. pleased with self. Am writing disturbing counterfactual novel, which posits what Britain would have been like if Sunderland hadn’t won the F. A. Cup in 1973.

UNSUCCESSFUL CAR BRANDS

The Nissan Hitherto

The Fiat Verrucca

The Vauxhall Hattersley Espace

The Mitsubishi Scrotum

The Isuzu Hutu Militia

The Ford Poncewagon

The BBC have been running and re-running various shows about or with the late Sir John Betjeman, all of which remind that he was rather more kop as a TV presenter than a poet. Entertaining though he was about posh gels in tennis gear and the charm of English churches, he was also incapable of profundity or even noticing much. Still, it would be interesting to have him around today. What, I wonder, would he have made of the new album by the Arctic Monkeys or the road-holding ability of the Citroen Xantia? Would he have tried dogging? Alas, we shall never know.

IN THE TARDIS


Bar 38 down on West India Quay may be in a building that’s over two hundred years old but the toilet is like SO… modern, with like these like… CIRCULAR urinals. They probably won some design award. The guy who designed them probably lives in a loft conversion and drives a Porsche on the back of that toilet. And I recommend it. It’s the nearest you’ll get to having a wee in the Tardis. You know: that bit in the middle that went up and down whenever Dr. Who took off? It’s just like that. Of course, unlike the Tardis, it does smell of stale piss rather a lot, on account of the fact that with a linear urinal, you only have to smell the bay in front of you and the two on each side. Whereas when you’re pissing in the round, you’re within haling distance of everybody’s wee.

The washbasins are of a similar Time Machine design, and are clearly eco-friendly. In order to save water, for example, there isn’t any – or there wasn’t when I was there. Just what you need to put some truth into that urban myth about the nuts on the bar.


September 10th