Goggle Box

News just in: TV has eaten itself and it is still hungry. Actually this is old news. In the heady days when people spoke about postmodern this and postmodern that (the 1980s and 90s – such talk was probably killed off by the millennium bug) TV was always eating itself. Shows like Max Headroom on the newly convened MTV and films like Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure seemed to be as much about TV as about the world. The wonderful Royle Family from the late 1990s seemed to herald the final move; here we – the audience – were positioned as if we were the TV watching a family that was looking back at us. A sort of mirror poking through the back of the TV into another room with a family looking back at the screen and getting on with life. Not a window on the world, then, but a mirror reflecting back the domestic setting of TV.

But the Royle Family was not the endgame of such self-reflection, it was merely the last time that it seemed exceptional. Now we have Goggle Box where couples and families offer commentary on TV programmes. They too are positioned facing the screen and we view them from the TV. And in case anyone was failing to get all the references to the Royle Family, Goggle Box is narrated by Caroline Aherne who wrote and starred in the Royle Family. What is significant about Goggle Box is not the strange tautological fact that you are watching people watching TV on TV, but that this seems perfectly fine, as if this is exactly what TV is all about. And TV does seem to be about the watching, about the chat, about the comfy sofa as much as about the programme. Friends always understood this: the characters always seem to be watching any-old-thing – the enjoyment came from the furnishings, from each other.

Goggle Box though doesn’t present a hermetic TV world. It offers us the pleasures of connecting to other ‘just like us’ who are also watching TV, chatting, poking fun at some of the shows, discussing others, sleeping through the occasional one or two. When you watch Goggle Box there is no need to think ‘but I could do that’ – you are doing it, already. Ta da. Goggle Box is the materialisation of TV seen under conditions of social media. What is odd about it is that people just seem to be watching TV and talking; where are the mobile phones? Where are the tablets? Goggle Box has incorporated the pleasures of social media into its format and returned it to us as something like a sit-com with the emphasis on the sit.

Etch-A-Sketch

The Etch-A-Sketch toy came onto the market in the 1960s. I was trying to imagine what was going through André Cassagnes’ mind when he invented the device. The first thing that came to mind was that perhaps he felt that drawing, using pencil or some other mark-making equipment and paper, was just far too easy. What was needed was something to make it a lot tougher. Etch-A-Sketch is first of all an impediment to drawing. As a toy it is a drawing frustrater, an un-drawing machine. What makes those scenes so fabulous in Toy Story and Elf, where an Etch-A-Sketch is used to conjure finely-rendered images and maps is that in reality it takes ages just to write your wobbly initials.

My second thought was that this updated version of the ‘mystic writing pad’ plays on the glamour of the TV set. You have to cast your mind (or your browsing searches) back several decades to get to TVs where you had to tune them in to one of three channels using a dial. The dialling of knobs is the key. The endless twiddling as you run through the wavelengths is put to some sort of productive use in the Etch-A-Sketch. It is hard to see old TV sets as glamorous, but in the days of dial-tuned TVs, three channels and shut down at about midnight, a TV was an enchantment. We, as kids, tried to make our own by cutting holes in shoe boxes and sticking photos from magazines inside.

In the short history of electronic image technology it is perhaps fitting that a drawing device tried to look like a TV. Devices, electronic or not were always mimicking other devices – they still are. In the 1940s TV looks like giant cabinets, perhaps for holding drinks and glasses, for making cocktails. When microwaves came on the scene they took their look from the 1970s TV. Today it is not so much TV that is the form to mimic but the mobile phone, the laptop, and the iPad. The illuminated advert casings that you find at bus stops and along the street now look like giant iPads and iPhones. The Etch-A-Sketch anticipated the laptop and the tablet computer in the way that playing it felt like having a TV-like thing that could be used horizontally rather than vertically and was small enough to place on your lap. It is fitting then that one of the shells that you buy for your iPad is a shell that makes it look like an Etch-A-Sketch toy, and it seems right that someone would make a felt Etch-A-Sketch phone cover for their iPhone. 

Avocado Roulette

  

          For a while, in the 1970s, one way of recognising the signs of middle-class bohemianism was to spot sad looking wood-like balls, pierced with cocktail sticks, sitting over glasses of water, waiting to sprout or to rot, on windowsills. These were the seeds or stones of avocados. It was a practice driven by hope rather than experience. Perhaps some of these stones did sprout roots, and then perhaps a leaf formed, but as plants the avocado had little future in the inclement British weather. Someone somewhere said that 'knowledge, is knowing that a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is knowing not to include it in a fruit salad'. The fruit of the avocado tree is a berry (botanically speaking, or rather Wikipedially speaking) made up of a single seed. Someone somewhere played a mean trick on those new to avocados by calling the ‘fruit’ of the tree an ‘avocado pear’ and then laughing when you didn’t treat it as a salad vegetable. Apparently when the shop Marks and Spencer first sold avocados in the early 1970s people would buy them and eat them with custard and then complain that they didn’t taste very nice.

            Avocados in Britain are a hit-and-miss affair. As a regular purchaser of avocados I’d say that 30% of the ones I buy are inedible (either they’ve gone bad or are rock-hard); 60% are good-bad (they have bits of string in them, some black bits, but also some parts that look OK); 10% are perfect. That’s not good odds. But it means that when you’ve snagged a perfect one you feel as if you’ve hit the jackpot (avocadally speaking). We have a tea-towel with the legend ‘the Seven Stages of the Avocado’ written on it. Underneath the legend are seven identical pictures of avocados and underneath the pictures are the words: ‘not ripe, not ripe, not ripe, not ripe, not ripe, not ripe’, and then under the last avocado, simply ‘bad’. But buying an avocado is not just a gamble in trying to find an edible one, it is playing roulette with your taste. I love the 10% of perfect ones (I can’t think of any foods I love more), but the vast majority of avocados all have something that fills me with disgust, makes me shudder and nauseous and threatens to make me give up on them.

            But I stick with the imported avocado. My favourite avocado dish is very simple. For some reason in this house we call it ‘the taste of California’. It was passed on to us by old friends. It is made up of a simple dressing (white wine vinegar, Dijon mustard, good olive oil), some good oranges (skinned and sliced and pips removed), a couple of perfect avocados (peeled, de-stoned, and sliced) and a big clump of fresh coriander leaves (chopped). Just throw it all together, or arrange in a pattern. It is fresh tasting, and lovely. In the last months of my dad’s life the only thing he really enjoyed eating was avocados. Not ‘the taste of California’. Just cut in half, with some French dressing in hole where the stone was. Eaten with a tea spoon. Thanks avocados.  

Coveted Coats

The first coat I really coveted was a Parka. In the cul-de-sac where we lived Parka-wearing older boys swaggered about on autumn evenings, smoking fags and looking like they owned the place. I was probably seven years old, perhaps eight or nine. It’s hard to be precise. Amongst my gang I learnt that there were rules about wearing a Parka, about whether you did it up or not and what you did with the strange stringy flappy bit at the back. Now I think about it the fixation of my coat-envy shifted as the seasons changed and as those kids around me altered. By spring the Parka was no longer my ideal. Something glorious had arrived on the horizon to take its place: the tonic Harrington. The tonic (burgundy-colour was the standard) Harrington was an object to covet: it looked like it had been woven from the eyelashes of peacocks. The two-tone tonic Harrington glinted and glimmered like a new kind of metallic cloth that changed colour as it shimmered across a palate of purples and greens. A few winters later my envy was fixed on the friends of my teenage sister who wore Afghan coats. I remember tagging along on a trip to watch a theatre production of Jesus Christ Superstar with my sister’s, probably religious, youth club. This was the first time I met an Afghan coat and the first time I saw and heard an electric guitar being played live: it was a heady night.

My taste in coats and jackets had little to do with the wider world of fashion and little to do with youth subcultures. I knew nothing about mods, about skinheads, about hippies. I doubt if many of the people wearing them had that much of an idea either: I imagine that they too were emulating older siblings and their milieu rather than donning themselves purposefully in the garb of a specific tribe that came with a set of cultural meanings and values. Having a taste for a Harrington or a Parka or an Afghan coat meant little to us as a symbolic statement that could talk to a wider world.  

Did I really want those coats? What was the form of my envy? Surely if I really wanted a Parka, for instance, I could have petitioned my parents and eventually got one – if only as a Christmas present or birthday gift rather than as essential clothing? Perhaps my mum was disdainful – seeing it as common, frivolous, cultish, rough. But I’m not sure I did really want one. I think I knew that it wasn’t so much the coat that I wanted as to have the sort of gravity that would be needed to pull off wearing one. I wanted to be someone who could wear a Parka, or a Harrington, or an Afghan without looking like a kid playing at being someone who might wear such a coat. I wanted the chutzpah and swag that it would take to wear it well.

Perhaps a lot of taste is like this. Not so much aspirational or acquisitive but as a way of measuring your own weird gravitational density. Perhaps the tastes that matter most are the ones you never quite act on. Do I still covet coats? Let’s just say that I can occasionally can be found lurking amongst racks of distressed leather jackets, weighing them in my hands, sometimes trying them on, knowing I’ll never buy one.

An Easy Touch

I was ten years old in 1971 when Britain went decimal. Out with the old money (twelve pence to the shilling, twenty shillings to the pound) and in came the new. It seemed like a good time to collect coins. It was a short lived craze that I probably shared with thousands of others who saw 1971 as an opportune moment to quickly amass a sizeable collection of newly worthless coins (though my avaricious little mind imagined untold riches in the future). Pennies, halfpennies, threepenny-bits, shillings, half-crowns – some worn thin with use – were quickly accumulated. The constant touching and sorting of coins was a slightly queasy affair: your hands quickly began to smell of money – a sort of acrid metallic sweat. My favourite job was dipping the coins in vinegar to clean them.

To ‘touch’ someone, in a vernacular sense, can mean to extract money from them, so that to be an easy ‘touch’ is to be someone who lends money easily but with the inference that you are not so much generous as just a little bit gullible. The person putting the ‘touch’ on the other is the operator; the person being ‘touched’ may never get their money returned. To be touched can also mean to have a mental disability, though I don’t think anyone has ever quite associated chronic gullibility with mental impairment (but I could be wrong here). Touch and trust, touch and money, touch and mind. One of my favourite sentences in the whole wide world is a question that the Mass-Observation team used to ask in the 1930s (quickly and amidst a barrage of other questions): “do you welcome or shrink form the contact by touch or smell of your fellow men?”

At some point between decimalisation and today the manner by which cashiers gave you your change changed. It used to be that cashiers and shop-keepers would count the money into your hand, starting off with the lowest domination and working upwards. You could pocket the money as you went along. Then someone must have decided that this was not the way to behave. Perhaps people just shrank from placing coins into hot sweaty hands; perhaps it was a security measure; perhaps it was an efficiency drive. At any rate something changed. Today when you pay for some sweets with a ten-pound note you will receive your change as one packet: a five pound note with various coins stacked upon it. I used to find this particularly awkward as I tried to pick the coins out while holding the note and trying to stop the coins sliding off, but now I’ve learnt to bend the note so as to shape into a funnel so that I can pour the coins into my purse: one less touch of flesh and metal money. 

Silver service and tears

I think if I wrote a novel it would have to be set in a hotel, or perhaps the story would revolve around a restaurant. After I left school I spent a number of years waiting on tables in hotel restaurants and then later in restaurant-bars in London. I generally enjoyed it and always had a sense of the theatre and mystery of such places: who were the nervous couple giving off such a strong sense of trepidation; who was the woman eating alone with such a singular expression?

When I first started-out I worked in a smallish provincial hotel that thought of itself as rather posher than it really was. Waiters had to learn ‘silver service’: a system where every part of the meal was served separately by the waiter onto the customer’s place. This meant that you turned up at the customer’s table with a trolley with a large variety of serving dishes. First you would spoon on the main element of the dish (usually some greying meat and gravy), and this would be followed by a myriad of vegetables. By the time you had finished serving everyone the one thing that you could be sure of was that the food was now at best lukewarm. The danger was with anything gloopy like mash-potato: because you were serving one-handed (the other hand held the serving dish) you had to flick the serving spoon to get the mash to leave, which could then hit a puddle of gravy which in turn could splash onto the customer. I was taught silver service by a man who had first worked as a waiter in a restaurant in London in the 1940s where waiters didn’t get paid. Instead they paid a small amount to the maître d and lived entirely off their tips.       

There is one day of waiting on tables that is etched in my memory. I was working in a trendy new restaurant on the banks of the Thames. It was a very busy Sunday lunch with over a hundred covers booked. At some point, early in the service, the chef and the sous chef had a fist fight. The manager sent them both home and stepped in with a junior chef to take over the cooking. Meals were taking over an hour to get to the tables. We were giving away free drinks. The customers were furious. My job consisted mainly of apologising and trying to placate the customers. For three hours I sucked-up all their fury, all their frustrations, all their indignation. At the end of the service one table said I had done a brilliant job. That was too much. I went and sat by the river and sobbed big fat tears that fell in the Thames and were washed out to sea.

Wooden Legs

            I was always fascinated by my grandfather’s wooden leg. It seemed to have various switches and catches, and perhaps some gears. When he sat down he would click it into place, by moving a latch just above his knee and to the side. But just as I was fascinated by his prosthetic leg I was even more in awe of his absence of leg when he wasn't wearing it. When he came to stay he would come down for breakfast not wearing his artificial leg, and this would involve a good deal of hopping while holding on to the banisters, and then the use of crutches when he arrived downstairs. I can’t remember what he did with the loose and empty leg of his pyjama bottoms: perhaps he knotted one leg, or just tucked the loose material into his waist band.

            Having only one leg meant that he had to drive an automatic car – something of a rarity in late 1960s Britain. His car of choice was a Ford Zephyr with a bench seat and amazingly (for the time) electric windows. I can’t for the life of me think why he needed or wanted such an enormous car. He was the least ostentatious person you could meet: a small-town vicar with an evangelical streak that got wider and wider as he got older (he used to talk-in-tongues when we visited him – which was as scary as it sounds). The car was exotic: everything about it seemed to articulate another world of movement. It wasn't just that the windows moved up and down with a slow purr rather than a jerky hand powered movement: the car itself seemed to move differently. Perhaps it was the way it was driven. My grandfather was the sort of driver who terrified his passengers by his indifference to basic road safety and by his willingness to be distracted. If you sat in the back you would never ask any questions because he would just turn round and start talking to you, forgetting that he was belting along a Norfolk road.

            Of course his leg wasn't wooden. It was, I would guess, mainly plastic with some metal and some textile fastenings. It made him move about in a slightly unpredictable manner – as if he needed more room for turning, as if he required more warning time if he was expected to stop. It was the same with the car: he would let it swing round corners in a manner that felt like a slingshot, and he was always slightly soft when breaking at lights. With the leg and the Zephyr (and perhaps the evangelicalism) there was a sense that he was moving in a different medium to the rest of us, more like a boat manoeuvring in water, or a satellite docking in space. Or perhaps more accurately like a fish out of water.