Call Off The Search.

Bored with the ‘Hat Game’? Tired of ‘Mafia’? Too old for ‘Spin The Bottle’?

Well, worry not, because Brede McDermott and I have invented the perfect parlour game. It needs no dice, boards, playing pieces or chips. No gambling is involved. It will not make people cry like ‘Psychiatrist’ or drunk like ‘I’ve Never’.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I am proud to introduce to you your new favourite game, ‘The Mirror Crack’d’.

NOTE FROM THE CREATORS:

If you are unfamiliar with the work of Agatha Christie, spoilers may lie ahead.

--- SPOILER EXCLUSION ZONE ---

Welcome back, the rest of you. Right. Here are the very simple rules of the game.

YOU WILL NEED:

2 players, a timekeeper, and some onlookers.

PLAYER ONE is Marina Gregg (Elizabeth Taylor, Claire Bloom, Lindsay Duncan)

PLAYER TWO is Heather Badcock (Maureen Bennett, Judy Cornwell, Caroline Quentin)

GAMEPLAY:

PLAYER TWO must engage PLAYER ONE in conversation for fifteen seconds, during which PLAYER ONE is not allowed to speak. PLAYER TWO must talk about being a huge fan of PLAYER ONE, but can otherwise say whatever he or she likes, in whatever accent(s) he or she chooses. PLAYER ONE must make appropriate ‘being talked to by a fan’ faces, and maintain eye contact.

At any point of his or her choice after the fifteen seconds, PLAYER TWO must mention the words ‘German Measles’. The moment the words ‘German Measles’ have been said, PLAYER ONE must immediately look away from PLAYER TWO, and stare at a fixed point in the distance for fifteen seconds. PLAYER ONE must at this point have a completely neutral expression- no smile, no laughing, no anger, no regret. His or her gaze must remain fixed. The neutrality of PLAYER ONE’s expression will be adjudicated by the ONLOOKERS, and the fifteen seconds timed by the TIMEKEEPER. During this time PLAYER TWO can continue speaking, saying whatever he or she wishes.

If PLAYER ONE maintains the fixed neutral expression for fifteen seconds, the mirror is crack’d, and PLAYER ONE gains a point, and vengeance. If PLAYER ONE’s expression flickers (for example by laughing) then PLAYER TWO doesn’t drink the poisoned cocktail and gets to stay alive (and also a point).

There are possible extra rules, but I will spare you those for now. They mainly involve poisoned hay fever remedies.

Anyway. Try it. It is the best game ever.

Happy New Year.

For Jer

Jer’s gone.
It’s only just struck me, that.
You’re Jerome now.
A Sunday name, full of reverence
And solemn-faced respect.

Just as I hadn’t called you ‘Jerome’
For I don’t know how long
Before that sod flicked you away-
Now, I can’t remember
The last time I said ‘Jer’.

Well, fuck that backwards,
If you’ll pardon the profanity
(NB: I know you will).
I want the joy back. And so
If I can’t talk to you,

Can’t have any new memories,
Then god knows
I intend to reclaim the ones I have.
Not the catheter ones,
Not the funeral ones,

Not the monochrome year,
The year you’ve missed,
(Although you’d be proud,
So proud, of your resolute, steely girl)
But all that went before.

From this moment I swear
That thinking of you will be fun.
I reject the twinge. I deny the wobble.
Everything of you is laughter.
Sleep well, Jerome. Hello again, Jer.

18 November 2011

None of the above.

I have had a very auspicious week. On Thursday, Facebook chose something I’d posted as one of its TOP NEWS STORIES for the last 15 minutes! I think Facebook’s rebranding as a rolling news channel is really going to propel it to a new level, although they may need to rethink their editorial policy if they’re going to lead with the remark I overheard at Willesden Green Tube Station.

Then, as if that weren’t exciting enough, the Mayor of London contacted me PERSONALLY because he is interested in what I think! This is incredibly touching, and feels as if it’s a recognition of a sort. I’m not hugely active in politics, but I do like to spout an opinion or two from time to time, and the idea that Boris wants me- me!- to help him decide on what policies to do is flattering and humbling.

Boris’ mailshot took the form of a questionnaire. I was very careful to answer as honestly as possible, because I could tell he was genuinely interested in my opinion- that’s why the page was headed ‘Tell Boris what you think!’ in a chirpy font. So, when section 1, ‘Local Issues’ asked ‘If there was one thing you could change in your local area, what would that be?’ I replied ‘A different mayor’. This was also the answer to ‘How would you improve transport in London?’ and I was beginning to think that I might have to write it in every single little blue box. But then Boris- perhaps thinking of the recent riots that took place in as many as four small pockets of London- took to asking me about crime. ‘Which area of crime do you think needs more attention?’ There wasn’t a little box for ‘a better understanding of the social and economic causes which lead young people to disengage from society’ so I just ticked ‘other’.

These questions had all been fairly generic so far, so I was pleased to see that Boris was keen to find out what I thought of a specific policy. ‘Since being elected’ he asked ‘Boris Johnson has quadrupled London’s rape crisis provision. Do you support his efforts to increase support for victims of rape?’

This was a real thinker. Like all humans, I am a massive fan of rape, and there’s nothing I hate more than seeing support for its victims increased. It was incredibly brave of Boris to risk asking for feedback on something where opinions were likely to be so polarised, when he could have asked about less controversial topics such as the 55% rise in bus fares in the three years since he came to power.

The next section, ‘Cost of Living’ pointed out that there was a huge increase in Council Tax under Livingstone, before asking what the mayor could do to help with the cost of living. Unaccountably, ‘stop raising the price of public transport year on year by loads more than the rate of inflation’ wasn’t an option, so I went back to the tried and tested and wrote ‘resign’. The next question showed a penetrating understanding of what is most important to Londoners in the current recession, with jobs being lost and services cut. ‘Boris stopped the production of Ken Livingstone’s propaganda sheet ‘The Londoner’ which cost London tax payers £3.1 million per year. Do you agree with this cost saving decision?’

Well, I hate propaganda, and I’m glad to see that Boris is so strongly against it, too. Unfortunately I never saw a copy of Ken Livingstone’s propaganda sheet ‘The Londoner’, so I’m unable to judge whether my c35p a year was being well spent.

For some reason I was feeling quite depressed and angry by this point, and my answer ‘Jump in the Thames’ to the question ‘what do you think the Mayor could do to make planning your finances easier?’ may have been a little churlish. I could hardly concentrate on the questions that followed, about the Olympics, and by the time I was asked how I’d voted before and how I would vote in future I was barely able to summon the strength to write ‘not for you’.

I can’t wait for my letter back from Boris, telling me how he’s going to be putting my suggestions into effect. Meanwhile, I’m going to have a very exciting weekend, courtesy of Ken Livingstone. You won’t believe this, but he’s emailed me- me!- to tell me that he’s announcing an important new policy on Monday, and, get this, if I click on the link he’ll tell me about it FIRST! At first I thought I must have misunderstood, but when I read again it was very clear: ‘If you want to be the first to know click here to sign up to receive a text before anyone else!’

I mean, that is huge. It’s like when Emma Willis tells you who’s nominated who, the night before the main show. I’ll tell you, if I’d clicked on that link I’d be swaggering around the streets of Cricklewood bursting with pride at the knowledge that I’d been told one of Ken’s flagship policies 48 whole hours before he released it to the press. I don’t quite know what I’d have been signing up to by clicking the link, but I bet it will have been awesome.

Boris Johnson and Ken Livingstone have always been known for the maturity and dignity with which they carry themselves, and I can’t wait for what is bound to be an elevated and sophisticated mayoral campaign. These first shots are very promising; wouldn’t it have been awful if they’d treated us like we were really, really, really stupid?

Madeleines? They're the little cakes, right?

I remember the moment I first realised that I couldn’t remember. I was talking to a friend about ‘Guys and Dolls’, a musical I adore. I think I might actually have said ‘I know every note of that score’.

Then I suddenly remembered, to my surprise, that I didn’t just know it, I’d performed it. In 1994 I played Benny Southstreet in a student production. Just so you know, Benny is the part to play if you enjoy fun and laziness. He has about twelve lines, every one of which is a belter. He sings solo, prominently, in three of the show’s best numbers- ‘Fugue for Tinhorns’, ‘The Oldest Established’ and the title song. There’s a bit of dancing- never my strong point- but hell, if you’re the klutz with twelve lines, nobody’s going to care if you look ungainly. If you’re rubbish, nobody will notice. If you’re good, they’ll notice.

I really, really enjoyed playing that part, all those years ago. But when- probably about three years later- I was quacking on about how much I loved the show, I was pulled up short. I had literally no recollection of having been in it. Not the rehearsals, not the performances, nothing. Something which had- presumably- filled my brain for- presumably- a few weeks, had slipped out of my mind and memory, never to return.

Tonight, watching a TV programme about Jamie Oliver taking his wonderful Fifteen franchise to Melbourne, the same weird realisation hit me. There were some shots of Sydney. Now, facebook tells me that I was in Sydney two years ago today. Intellectually I know that to be the case. There’s a stamp in my passport. I can just about picture Circular Quay, and the view of the Harbour Bridge and Opera House. But I have no visceral recollection of what it was like to be on the other side of the world. ‘What’s Australia like?’ you could ask me. ‘I don’t know’, I’d have to reply. I remember that I danced around my hotel room listening to Little Boots. I remember reading the football section of the sports news and thinking that it focused on people like Cahill and Schwarzer, Aussies in the Prem. I remember seeing Cate Blanchett in 'Streetcar', but that's just a 'watching a play' memory, not a 'being in Sydney' one. Those are my memories of having had the privilege of visiting the actual other side of the actual world.

And that’s the thing. I’m not an amnesiac*. Some things in life remain in glorious technicolour. There are countless, unimportant experiences in my life that I could recount to you in tedious detail. But how odd that some of the biggest- running a marathon, sitting by my father’s bedside in his dying days, being in love, going to the other side of the world, most of my undergraduate life- should be things that I only remember as a series of facts, things I remember because I know they happened rather than because I can recall how they felt.

I can tell you -without even having to furrow my brow- who was relegated from League Division Two in 1982 (Cardiff City, Wrexham and Orient, since you ask, and Orient weren’t known as Leyton Orient then, so there). My boundless memory for the little things remains intact. The big things- they’re in 2D. And I suspect I’m not the only one.


*hilariously, I had to google ‘amnesiac’ just to check it meant what I thought it did. Shush.

The Man Who Wasn't There

Some names in the following have been changed (I’ve always wanted to say that). You’ll see why; and you’ll see why that sentence resonates, too. Some people who read this will know the real names of the people I’m talking about; I ask those people not to reveal them. I have no desire to ‘out’ anyone and any reply that does so will be immediately deleted.

Other than the names, every word of what follows is true.

It’s ironic that I should find myself writing this so soon after my comments on the characterisation of the internet, in ‘Two Boys’, because this real-life story is a companion-piece to that work. It starts (or, my part in it starts) in early 2002, when, as a slightly late adopter, I started posting on the Popbitch website. I’d been reading it without posting for a while (‘lurking’, in internet parlance) but one day I spotted something inaccurate and unfair about an actor I’d worked with, and logged in to put it right. Then I stuck around.

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve spent a fair deal of time on messageboards, and have made a good many close friends as a result. They all sprang from Popbitch; in the early noughties, when PB became too lacking in genuine information, too desultory, and above all too spiteful, various former posters set up other discussion boards for those as were interested. Unlike PB, there was no need to have any ‘gossip’ if you wanted to post- conversations would ramble on nicely in any direction. More than anything else, it was an early form of social networking; the kind of thing you’d put on Facebook or Twitter is very similar to the kind of thing people discuss on this kind of board (not a chatroom; never call it a chatroom, because that’s a totally different thing. On a messageboard you can get easily immersed in an interesting conversation, it’s not just people shouting LOL! at each other. Or not always).

One of the people who migrated over to one of these offshoot boards was a poster whose username was MitheredMark. Although we hadn’t met, he’d been at Cambridge (several years after me) and this kind of common ground is meat-and-drink to online interaction. At this point, a friend of mine was dating someone who would have been MitheredMark’s contemporary at Cambridge, and I remember asking her if she remembered him, sketching in the not-very-many details I had about him. She couldn’t remember any such person, and I thought no more of it; there are a lot of students at any big university, after all.

But, as regular readers will know (another thing I’ve always wanted to say) online communities have a habit of becoming offline ones. A large group of friends (made up, as such groups often are, of various smaller ones) developed from the messageboard via post work drinks or mass-meetups. When you’re in your twenties and early thirties, it’s great to get to the end of the working day and write ‘Anyone fancy a pint after work?’ in the knowledge that as many as fifteen or twenty people- some of them already friends, some of them new ones- might reply in the affirmative.

And so, inevitably, I met MitheredMark in person. When asked for his name, he gave an eye-roll and deadpanned ‘Er, Mark’, making anyone who had asked feel a little stupid for having done so. He could be a little spiky, but he was witty, warm, generous, and immensely entertaining company; we became good friends.

Or rather, we became part of a wider, hugely supportive group of good friends. These are people who came to my sister’s wedding, and some of whom married each other. I ran the marathon in memory of one of them, with another. I’ve been on holiday several times with people from the board, alongside other friends to whom I’ve introduced them. At the height of our mild hedonism, before things like marriages and babies intervened, it wouldn’t be unusual for there to be post-work drinks three or four times a week, often- for god knows what reason- in the Phoenix on Charing Cross Road.

And Mark, who was now dating Andrew, another poster from the messageboard, would often be there. He had led a fascinating life- after Cambridge, he had studied journalism, as well as having a brief career as an actor, which he had abandoned despite being represented by one of the most prestigious agents in London. He’d also written, under a pseudonym, a couple of romantic novels. Given that he was 23 when we met, only two years out of university, this was an impressive CV.

But there was always an air of mystery about Mark, always a few things that were unexplained. Despite being a regular guest at various other people’s houses, invitations to the flat he eventually shared with Andrew were very few and far between. On one occasion I was chatting to the writer and performer John Finnemore, a friend of mine who, it struck me, must have been an exact contemporary of Mark’s at Cambridge. John didn’t remember him, an oddity which I recounted the next time I saw Mark. He was furious and, hilariously, even looked a little scared. ‘Don’t you EVER talk to John Finnemore about me again’ he said. Those of you who know, or who are, John Finnemore will agree that he is an unlikely casting for ‘terror-inducing nemesis’ but there was nothing I could do bar chalking it up on the list of ‘things about Mark I might never understand’.

During this period, roughly from 2004-2008, Mark was at the top of the list of my closest friends. If any social occasion were being arranged, he’d be one of the first names on the teamsheet. But after he split up with Andrew, a couple of slightly disturbing things started to happen. Firstly, a friend of mine checked the British Library listings for the titles of the two romantic novels Mark had written. They weren’t there, nor were they in the complete catalogue of the publisher he claimed had released them. On another occasion, he was invited by another friend to her work Valentine’s Party. He left early, in tears, after a cigarette break; while out on the balcony, two women had come up to him and homophobically abused him. My friend, rightly furious that such a thing should have happened to her guest, went straight to security and asked to see the CCTV tapes of the night before. And what they showed was Mark, alone on the balcony, calmly having a cigarette then walking back in. Other, smaller lies became noted; people just put it down to Mark being a little baroque when drunk. And if it ain’t baroque, don’t fix it. I’m terribly sorry for the previous sentence.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was when Mark split up with a chap he’d been dating. The dumpee was a smashing, gentle fella; everyone wondered why Mark had ended the relationship so abruptly. Then, shockingly, Mark told us why. I’m not going to spell out the reason he gave, but if it had been true then it would have been a matter for the police.

Of course, it wasn’t. When challenged by various different people, Mark told a variety of different stories, depending on who he was speaking to, so it soon became apparent that this was the deal-breaking lie. There was no big falling-out; I certainly never took the decision that Mark was someone I didn’t want to hang out with. But at the same time, he wasn’t the first person I dialled when I fancied meeting someone for a pint. Gradually, the friendship ground to a halt. I regretted this; he’s a clever, funny, warm, interesting man. But I’d been told more than enough things which weren’t true.

And that’s where it would have ended, were it not for a random tweet. I was aware that Mark and Andrew were back together, but hadn’t seen either of them for a while, when I saw on Twitter that Andrew had been promoted at work. I was pleased about this, so I had a look on his timeline to see how it had come about. And there it was: Andrew making a reference to ‘him indoors’ and someone else replying using a name I’d never heard before.

You’ve probably twigged by now. ‘Mark’ didn’t exist. Both his first name and his surname were entirely different to the name we knew him by. A quick google revealed that the person who had been my friend for eight years was a completely fictional creation. His family, his employers, the state, knew him under one identity; and the rest of us, under another. A lot of mysteries were solved by this, to be fair. Suddenly it was apparent why, whenever anyone called him at work, the operator wouldn’t have a clue who we were asking for. When he was headhunted we'd wondered what his new job was, and assumed it was another lie; in fact, the job was true but the name wasn’t. He’d swanked about using a credit card belonging to an ex; in hindsight, that was probably his own card.

I can understand using a different name when you meet people for the first time; I’ve even done it myself. What I can’t understand is continuing the subterfuge when you find yourself going to people’s weddings, meeting their families, becoming a part of people’s lives. In many ways, this final lie isn’t a big deal, compared with some of the others. ‘You thought I was called XY, in fact I’m called AB’ isn’t much of a betrayal in the grand scheme of things. But my god, it must have taken a lot of work. For year after year after year, Mark and Andrew kept the lie alive. Mark answered to a name he knew wasn’t his, from the mouths of his friends, thousands of times. He set up a facebook page under a false identity, accrued a hundred or so friends, commented on their posts. Even when he was drunk as a lord, somewhere he managed to maintain the deception. And that’s what is so odd, so hard to process.

I wrote much of the first part of this post a couple of months ago, when I’d just discovered the whole bizarre story. Then I thought better of posting it; I didn’t want to stir up a hornet’s nest. But, in the way of these things, there was no great drama. Mark and Andrew styled it out, replying to the various ‘What the FUCK?’ emails and tweets and texts with anodyne, ‘you don’t know the full story’ responses, followed by silence. Actually, I’m not wildly interested in knowing the full story, because I’d have no reason to believe a word of it. But, a few weeks down the line, it feels like such an extraordinary thing to have happened as to merit these few words. I had a friend. We hung out for the best part of a decade. We grew apart. Then I found out that he’d never been there in the first place.

Archiving.

A snippet of me singing 'Marry Me a Little' at Julia and Joel's wedding. Hosted here for storage purposes, etc etc.

Credit where it's due:

'Beached' to go ahead as planned clicky

Where exactly that credit *is* due, we may never know; but hurrah for the right ending.