I have a dirty confession. You know that ‘rudey’ book that everyone’s been banging on about (and to)? I read a bit. Yes – after weeks of ignoring the existence of 50 Shades of Grey – of not knowing the author’s name or anything about the ‘plot’ – I finally caved. A friend had a copy on them that had been thrust at them by their sister with the furtive urgent words “Read. It. Now.” and before I knew it I was turning to the first page of the best-selling book in British History, slavering with morbid curiosity. The Best-Selling Book. In British History. By an Unknown Author.

I had palpitations. (Pre-meat sweats?) Could I do it to myself? There was something in supporting the success of E L James’ already legendary tome that made me feel dirty, and I hadn’t even got to any of the fruity bits…

Before I go any further, I will state this plainly now: I am a bit of a book snob. I didn’t want to like the book that everyone is talking about. I suspected its meteoric fame had little to do with its quality. I made assumptions about the writing being poor. I hated the fact that of all the beautiful literature the English language can boast, the number one position had been taken (roughly, like a maiden in a haystack) by something which had been responsible for coining the term ‘Mummy Porn’. What? What is that? The literary equivalent of rubbing yourself up against the washing machine on spin cycle? (Oh. Yes.)

Here was the nation of Austen, Wodehouse, McEwan (a random clutch of accepted greats) – now throwing a new writer around on its shoulders – a lady openly admitting it was just a lot of words giving voice to her midlife crisis and unsated fantasies. It didn’t even have any wizards in it, like that other behemoth that divided the snobs from the mass consumers. At least Harry Potter looked at big themes – good, evil, redemption, mortality – and made poor picked-on ginger kids able to hold their russet heads up proudly. THE WEASLEYS ARE THE COOLEST KIDS IN THE WHOLE OF HOGWARTS. THEY’RE GINGER AND THEY’RE POOR, SO SUCK IT YOU BIG BULLIES. 50 Shades was promising nothing of this philanthropic work, and even seemed to have taken the representation of strong females back a few steps. Was I really about to do this?

In I went. As it were.

And I almost wet my pants (though not in the way most women seemed to be…)

I can’t quote the lines which made me fall about because The Echo won’t let me, but let’s just say there are some real delights in there if you choose to wade through the turgid oestrogen. Some real clunkers.

Given the fact that E L James is probably swathed in silk somewhere deep in the Arab Emirates right now picking out which desert she wants to build her new 20 storey shoe-rack on, I doubt she much cares about my reports on her prose. She’s doing alright, the poor rich cowbag. So I can say this: the fact that she has reached the top of the list is an absolute abomination in the heritage of beautiful words. The raping of a craft. BUT. It is wonderful news for the book industry. Because it means people are still buying books – still want to get lost in actual pages, still want to make paper go crinkly in the bath, still are sighing at the power of the written word. Like women sighed (and still sigh) at Charlotte Bronte’s Mr Rochester or Austen’s Mr Darcy. Like women sighed (and still sigh) at Darcy and Cleaver in Bridget Jones. Women are really digging this mysterious Mr Grey and his predilections.

Despite my personal tastes, and the fact I will never ever read any more of the saga unfolding like a cheap new shirt between uber-rich dirtbag Christian Grey and the formerly-virginal hard-buttocked Anastasia Steele – I am glad of anything which turns books and publishing into one of the biggest and most compelling stories in the media. I am glad that people are desperately riffling through pages before they get to work, their eyes racing along the lines of someone’s imagination. Reading is reading, and books are important, and must never be lost to technology or illiteracy. That intoxicating hunger you feel when you’re barely able to talk to others or do basic tasks because your nose is stuck in the sweet-smelling thighs of a book is a joy I wish everyone felt every day, and I congratulate E L James for creating it in others. I’m a bit jealous, frankly.

Actually, I might write some mummy porn myself so I can buy a new MacBook. How about some suffragette erotica? Who’s up for Emily Spankhurst tied to the school railings? Anyone?

As someone who has opted not to have a telly or internet at home it’s been quite tricky to keep abreast of the Olympics. From time to time while walking my dog I hear the occasional rousing group squeal coming from a nearby house – or that strange slow ascending “ooooaaarrrr” that humans do naturally in a moment of tension, which either ends in a victorious roar or a disappointed groan. I imagine a band of lithe athletes in white PE shorts running in slow-motion over a finishing line to the Chariots of Fire theme tune. I imagine stoic tears and fist-pumping galore on those wonky boxes that winners and runners get made to stand on. I imagine Michael Caine handing out a gold medal and saying “Nice one, me old mucker. Fancy a pint?” I imagine the Queen – streaking naked through a badminton hall with a string of bejewelled corgis waddling behind her. Bulldogs in Burberry. Wedgwood plates of cucumber sandwiches being passed round the crowds. Twiggy with red white and blue pom-poms. Freddie Mercury rising from a bunting-lined Branston Pickle-sponsored coffin to sing We Are The Champions.

I imagine a lot of what I imagine is not anything like the truth. Although from what I heard about the opening ceremony I wouldn’t be surprised at hearing any of this had taken place. Ok, maybe raising Freddy Mercury from the dead would raise an eyebrow of disbelief, but the budget was pretty huge so who knows – maybe the art of cryogenics got perfected for the occasion. Though they could’ve saved money by having a giant vodka luge in the shape of Princess Diana so people could actually drink her tears. An Olympic Lourdes, but instead of a peaceful French pastoral scene with Ave Maria, it would have been drunken Brits wailing in Stratford. Elton John could have worn novelty tennis ball glasses and changed the lyrics to Candle In The Wind again. To something about jock-straps. “And it seems to me you lived your life like a banana in my pants…” The world would’ve loved that.

When I’ve not been imagining all this nonsense I have been absorbing the actual Olympic news by osmosis – hearing of our many Great British glories via that rather old-fashioned medium – people’s mouths. Everywhere, people are talking about the events they’ve watched, the bits they’ve been able to watch when work hasn’t got in the way. (Bosses are probably legally obliged to provide Olympic Catch-Up breaks.) Friends who don’t ‘even like sport’ regale me for a good long while about some bird who won something that blokes are usually good at. Yes! WOMEN! WINNING AT SPORT! People talk about it constantly. The whole country has turned into one big over-the-washing-line gossip. People rejoice in the drama – the tension, the highs and lows of teams and individuals, the twists and turns of human stories unfolding live in front of the whole world – sport as a metaphor for life’s assorted battles being played out for everyone to identify with. Modern modest people imbued with classical god qualities – strength, agility, valour, honour, grace. We get to share it – the whole world, all at the same time. And what’s more, we get to join in more than ever before.

If you go onto Twitter the stream is clogged with staccato commentaries of live sporting events – people cheering on (or rather, typing about) brand new heroes who have been forged in history just a few seconds before. We’ve developed all these mediums to express ourselves, to share things through. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, TV & web news; instantaneous stories. Perhaps it’s my step away from technology – my not having internet (other than on my phone) or a television, that has made me observe more acutely how much everyone has come to rely on it. And it will never go backwards, it will keep on developing, we’ll keep finding new ways to do the things we can’t naturally do. Perhaps it’s why we so love our heroes – our Dianas, our Olympiads, our ordinary gods – because they are the human embodiment of what is possible. The things we could in theory all do, but in likelihood will not. We like to see these people doing it for us – and what a fine array of ways we have invented to do it. We can watch them, we can almost touch the gods.

It’s like the world has lost its true dimensions. It’s bigger – more diverse – because we fill it with endlessly growing science, but it’s smaller because we can traverse it in no time at all, sometimes as quickly as pressing ‘send’. Is the world becoming manageable?Anything is possible. The Brits are proving that. By winning for once. So people tell me. Repeatedly.

It was in trying to join in with the whole thing from my Luddite haze that I stumbled on a link to an article in The New Statesman about sexism in sport. It quoted Lizzie Armitstead (silver medalist in the women’s road race) as saying “Sexism is a big issue in women’s sport – salary, media coverage, general things you have to cope with in your career. If you focus too much on that you get disheartened.”

The article went on to remind us that not one woman was nominated for BBC Sports Personality of the Year 2011.
It informed us that the BBC gives more coverage to darts alone than all of the female sports events put together.
That between January 2010 and August 2011, men’s sport received 61.1 per cent of commercial sponsorship, and women got (wait for it) half a per cent. Half! I started to get a bit feisty & indignant.

Stella Creasey, MP for Walthamstow, thought that not only is the treatment of women in sport unfair, but that the coverage too is highly questionable. She questioned the beeb about it & had this to say: “The idea people don’t want to watch women’s sport has been blown apart by the audiences for our Olympians – whether on the football or hockey pitch, in the Velodrome, the swimming pool, indoors or on the track, Britain’s female sporting talent is big news. I just hope the Games will finally win the case many of us have been trying to highlight with broadcasters, to change their ways.”

Let’s hope that all this pomp & pride in our athletes pushes the hard work of women to the forefront. For even I realise that in all my imaginings of strength and glory I was picturing…men. Men racing, fighting, soaring. Men winning. Probably because I have been conditioned by years of seeing it on the telly. Surely the intelligent portion of the media has a responsibility to use its power to represent these women who also work hard all year round, slogging at their sport. They’re not just actresses who have been hired in to make the Olympics a bit prettier. Perhaps the budget should, instead of being pumped into a theatrical opening ceremony advertising our country as a holiday destination, have been pumped into promoting and supporting the future endeavours all the surprise heroines that might struggle to be remembered in a year’s time. The men, after all, will probably be in Nike ads. Smiling on billboards from behind a Gilette razor. Woodenly enjoying cameos in a Hollyoaks gym. And the women? Teaching PE? I hope I’m wrong.

Perhaps I’ll give in and get a telly. Perhaps in the next Olympics I’ll see our ordinary gods in action. Perhaps i’ll see that the brand giants Nike are staying true to the origins of their name by backing the goddesses of Victory. I hope I see that the victory smiles of the goddesses aren’t in defiance at a battle with a persistently unequal media, but in defiance at whatever personal battles drive them to win. Those are the stories which really inspire, not the wheezing dogged cling-ons to the barnacled bastions of sexism.

It was once my guilty pleasure to become friends with a man who said he’d like to wipe my fake tan off with his spunk.

This man was a comedian called Jim Jefferies, and I deserved it. I had just heckled him (I don’t remember what with, probably just a polite hello as he came on) and he decided on that particular occasion to respond by telling me that he’d like to take my make-up off with something less socially acceptable than Johnson’s Baby Lotion. I suppressed my inner grammar-school feminist, stomped on the part of my imagination that hoped his cock would burst next time he went for a wee, and I…roared with laughter. I roared because it was unexpected, it was gratuitous and vibrant and evocative, it conjured a surreal image, and because Jim Jefferies is very funny. I deserved it because I had piped up during a comedy performance in an environment that is famous for its celebration of freedom of expression by people who, frankly, are a bit mad to get up on stage to try and engender laughter from strangers using only the contents of their brains in the first place. Despite my laughter, some part of my cerebral reflex wanted to respond with a haughty “Actually, JIM, I am not wearing fake tan. If you look more closely you will see I am actually alarmingly pale, and feel no need to conform to cosmetic obligations thrust upon women by a uniformly cynical image-led media.” Why didn’t I? Because I’m not a complete douchebag, that’s why. And he was being funny. I even, shock horror, sort of fancied him. Even though he wanted to wipe his boy-fluid on my face to shut me up. Maybe even because. That’s weird, but what can you do.

Jim & I became friends soon after – we bumped into each other occasionally on the circuit and he made me laugh. He’s actually a bit of a puppy dog despite the jizz-smearing; we had nice chats. It was a couple of years later when I went to see one of his shows in Melbourne that he blew my socks off with a routine about a paedophile scout-master. It was vile, it was graphic, it was seemingly disrespectful to everyone – kids, parents, scout-masters, paedophiles, kids who were scouts and might one day be parents and/or paedophiles. But I almost wet my pants, because it was funny. And somewhere in that shameless laughter was that delicious seductive burn that we all feel when we laugh and it feels a bit wrong. Later on in his show Jim revealed that it was a true story, and that he himself had been a victim of this woggle-wearing nonce. All the people who had been squirming in their seats with either discomfort or disgust suddenly sat still. Ooh. This stage-pacing misanthropist seemingly without any warmth or regard for people’s feelings had earned his right to tell such ‘jokes’, because it was his story to tell, and his treatment of it – turning it from a thorny part of his history to that most mysterious ineffable thing ‘humour’ – was not only justified, but brave, and quite possibly even cathartic for anyone else who had shared a similar experience. Despite its harshness, it had a human warmth somewhere at its core.

Last week an American comedian named Daniel Tosh got filmed dealing with a heckler and it went viral pretty ruddy quickly. This ‘heckler’ was a woman who commented on a joke of his not being funny. This particular joke of his was about rape. He responded to her comment by saying something along the lines of “Wouldn’t it be funny if you got raped right now. Wouldn’t it be funny if everyone got up and started raping you right now?” Cue: a lot of fuss, and Daniel Tosh having to make a very public apology. I have googled the comedy of Mr Tosh and he is not my cup of tea. From the few clips I watched I found him a bit too generic ‘All American collegiate’ for my taste – a fraternity initiation rites instigator who knows how to talk his way out of trouble. Perhaps further delving into his online gems would prove more illuminating but I can’t be arsed. However, no matter how charmless his retort may have been, I don’t think he should be lambasted for daring to joke about rape. It is quite obvious the poor dear panicked live on stage and the first thing his average mind threw up as a come-back to this woman daring to question his comedic prowess was a childish “Get raped”. It had all the sophistication of a wedgie. Done with all the force of a kid calling another kid a poo-poo-head. Unfortunately for a lot of women, a mention of an aggressive act is tantamount to intent or future capability. Especially if that mention is in front of a mostly-testosterone-fuelled comedy club and fortified with laughter. The chances are a lot of women would feel small, offended, singled-out, foolish, nervous, possibly even physically intimidated. Just like I could have felt intimidated by Jim telling me he wanted to give me a spunk facial. Luckily for me, I didn’t. I think I’m a bit numb to comedy clangers now. But I would be an idiot if I denied other women’s right to respond in such a way.

The thing with going to comedy is that psychologically it’s a bit like inviting someone to throw stones at your stuff and seeing if anything gets broken. In fact, any consumption of an art or medium (good or bad) opens you up, makes you vulnerable. Your senses observe it, you take it in; it has an effect. A personal example of this. A few years ago my Dad committed suicide, and all of a sudden, references to suicide were everywhere, and for a good long while they felt deeply personal and horrendously unfunny. A casual joke “God – if I have to listen to Mavis drone on about her petunias anymore I am going to kill myself” – the kind of casual reference to wanting to end it all that we all say from time to time – was enough to make my insides feel like they’d been sliced with salt-laced swords. It hurt. I felt affronted, sad, insulted, singled-out for pain. The references seemed to be everywhere, for years. Even more oblique references hurt. Like when I found out “kick the bucket” stemmed from hangings – and people’s casual use of it for general death made me both livid with its incorrect usage and deeply tearful because I still ached over it all. Suicide was everywhere all of a sudden. But then, after a while, it started to fade. Time worked its magic. It stopped hurting as much. I even started to find aspects of it funny. Because Laughter is second-cousin to Survival. Now I bloody love a good suicide joke. A good one really resonates. Just the other day I was struck by the hilariousness of the pointlessness of my father’s inquest. We had to wait months for what was essentially a five minute meeting to announce he had died by hanging. No shit, Sherlock. Was it the fact he was found hanging from a doorframe by a noose that led you to such a surprising conclusion? By that point he’d been cremated and we’d sort of figured it out ourselves that he wasn’t coming back, probably because of the big old noosey-death thing. I laughed – genuinely, loudly – at the absurdity. Because every now and then I find it funny. Certain things about it. I laugh because I need to. I laugh because I’m not dead; laughter is one of the purest acts of grasping life.

I’m not saying I am totally immune to the pain a joke can cause. If a thoughtless cretin makes a bad suicide joke I am naturally more apt to fantasise about punching them full in the face than I am to chuckle with recognition – but each and every time I hear something which misses the mark of taste or intelligence, I know that it is imperative that they are entitled to say it. All sorts of people in all sorts of times and places have struggled for the right for us all to have the freedom to occasionally be offensive unfunny pricks. The freedom to say abominable stuff is just as important as the freedom to say beautiful stuff – never forgetting that there is no one empirical judge of any of it.

Context, in comedy as in all things, is everything. Jim Jeffries in his hour-long show has the time to take you on a journey through a construction of jokes during which are revealed back-stories or more developed points. You buy your ticket to see him specifically, you take a risk if you have not seen him before, you sit, you watch, and you make your mind up, you laugh, or don’t. But at a standard comedy club with a mixed bill you are signing up for an eclectic sack of performers you might not know and you might not like. The performers are doing shortened sets, in which they might crack out a tight script of tried and tested favourites, or have a loose plan of which material to stick to, or – more dangerously – just go out and improvise. Some jokes work, some don’t. Some need build-up, some need a twinkle in the eye. Sometimes comedians have an off night and don’t tell a joke properly; they are, after all, humans, doing jobs. (A lot of them, incidentally, are dire at it.) Neither can the audience be wholly accounted for. An ad hoc gathering of strangers. Some might be tetchy from a bad day or steeped in sadness and trying to plough on by doing something ‘normal’. Life bashes up against life and it doesn’t always fit harmoniously.

Daniel Tosh had no desire to make the woman feel threatened, he may not even had any real desire to see her put in her place as a member of the ‘lesser sex’. He just flicked through a not-terribly-well-stocked survival kit and pulled out something which sounded a bit shit. It wasn’t funny. Even the men laughing in the clip are only doing it because of some base reflex, some juvenile synapse in their brain which went “Ha! He joked about rape to a lady and because it’s something you don’t hear often, we’re going to laugh.” There probably wasn’t a glimmer of any misogyny in the room. I bet you Daniel Tosh went home to his girlfriend and felt like a total schmuck. He probably told her about it and she probably listened and just gave him ‘a look’ and a sympathy pat. That’s if Daniel Tosh has got a girlfriend. He might just have gone home for a lacklustre wank which finished limp and dry as he stared into a fridge of perfectly lined up bottles of Bud. Later, he may even have been inspired to write some better jokes so the whole darn mess will never happen again. Taken his jokes to a comedy club, tried them out, saw if the number of people who thought they were funny outweighed those who did not and decided to keep trying them. Sometimes jokes, like life, are also about keeping on trying; honing something until it is right.

In a comedy club, you might not get the beautifully crafted. You might not even get funny. But you will get a live performance, from someone with a pulse, a trier, because you chose to go out and hear people’s spontaneous thoughts instead of sitting in front of a screen of pre-prepared pre-edited pretty stuff signed off by a TV company solicitor. If you talk to the people on stage, they can talk back, and it might not be ‘nice’. But life isn’t nice, and it doesn’t apologise when it gets stuff wrong either.

A wise man just told me that a wise man once told him that a wise man once said “I don’t worry because worry’s a waste of my time”.

This wise man was Axl Rose of the mega-group Guns N Roses, and he should know. You can’t wail like that in a bandanna for a whole minute at the end of Sweet Child O’ Mine without knowing a thing or two about life. That wailing is loaded with lessons. It’s like Dylan’s harmonica, or Whitney’s warbles. Their life is caught up in there like bubbles in a glass of champers.

I don’t normally look to the tarnished pearls of wisdom from Rock’s hall of fame for a guiding hand, I’m more a sort of ‘smile benignly along to Mama Cass’ sort of girl, but lately I’ve been worrying. I’ve never been much of a worrier, I’ve always been one of these sorts who looks at dark clouds like they’ll soon rain down cute little droplets that will make the flowers grow. I’d tread in fox poo and instead of screeching “DEATH TO VERMIN” like a warrior in the street, I’d smile and remember a book called The Midnight Fox I loved as a kid. I’d probably think the poo was cute. Sweet little vulpine plop-plop. But things happen in life which make you start thinking “Er, hang on a minute, Life – that felt a little bit like you roughed me up there.” You get serious. You start to worry. Perhaps it’s growing up. Perhaps it’s knowing you have less time than you had before to get stuff right. That you’re in a constant state of ‘having less time’. There’s never a plateau you reach where you think “Right. This is the perfect mix of existential panic & objective positivity, ever. I am like Sartre on happy pills. I think I’ll kick back & know that I know the most I can know. Sorted. Now, someone make me a mojito.”

I found myself last week stomping around in a huff, getting annoyed with people who dared to slow me down in the street by having a limp, people who took too long to pay in shop queues, barking out my replies instead of using a friendly tone. I had a lot going on last week, and obviously I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t get a bit grumpy from time to time. But it was as I found my face frowning as I walked along, actually crinkled in irritability – not even for any particular specific reason, just the badge of my default mood that day – and I stopped walking, and I told myself off. (In my head – I’m not one of those Tennants Super dudes who shouts at themselves outside Tesco. Not yet.)

I told myself off, not because I was feeling irritable – that is permissible, it is natural. I told myself off for allowing the irritability to affect how I was approaching people, and for letting it infuse my whole day with a general black air. I was not having a bad week. I was not doing something I hated. I was not planning my Nan’s funeral like one of my dearest friends was. I was merely busy. Busy running a comedy festival. That’s supposed to be fun, right? I got to see nice people, and laugh, and put up bunting, and see my comedy chum Terry Alderton do sillies. That’s fun. So I told myself off. Because allowing worry to swirl around you on the inside, and take over your demeanour on the outside, without pulling yourself up on it is a slippery slope. If you start letting the small stuff become big stuff, the big stuff gets bigger, and you eventually stop spotting that this is what you have let yourself become. We have a choice.

As if I needed a footnote to this realisation, I apologised to a friend for being a bit clipped, and he said ‘Keep smiling and bathe in these words of wisdom someone gave me once when I was feeling upset – “I don’t worry because worry’s a waste of my time.”’

I knew he was right. I thought of my trivial issues. I thought of the person I’d like to be in my life, and the person I might become if I let my frowns go unchecked. I thought of my friend who was sad because of his Nan, and the fact his Nan didn’t have any time anymore. It was the first time I felt enlightened by a quote from one of Hard Rock’s nutjobs. I hummed the only Guns N Roses song I know – the karaoke favourite Sweet Child o Mine, and I remembered the last time I sang it – which oddly enough was in Melbourne, with Terry and our dear karaoke-addict friend Tim Vine. (Who has seriously got a real problem if anyone knows of a Sing-a-long Therapist.) It seemed like the most perfect thing anyone could have said to me then, because it tied up memories, and friends from different parts of my life, and the old me, and the new me, and the importance of still having time, and not wasting it. And I stopped frowning and just got on with it, and had fun.

It’s not often you find yourself walking down the pier in a fluorescent jacket and a hard-hat, but this week I was lucky enough to feel just that sexy and alluring. I’d just had a blustery ‘mile and a third’ trek and my mascara was everywhere. It was like a Southend version of Sex & The City – not leafy 5^th Avenue, but the pier which keeps burning down. In this episode, Carrie (moi) was flanked by two men being unerotically whipped by their own ties and a council man with a cute bum I didn’t dare look at in case he whacked me up a tax band or two. We were there to check out the exciting new venue which will be the shimmering glorious stage for The Wave Comedy Festival.

Here’s a thing: I did something a bit despicable when I got to the end of the pier. Here’s another thing: what’s worse is – I’m proud of it. I did this. When the hurly-burly builder-boss looked me up and down and said I couldn’t go trotting through a building site in flip-flops, I sort of…just looked at him like I didn’t understand. I feigned stupidity. And here’s why. When I feigned stupidity, when I looked blankly at his ruddy cheeks like he’d just asked me to reel off the first hundred digits of Pi, he stopped talking to me. He looked despairingly around at the surrounding menfolk and walked off. So, I sort of…waltzed in anyway. (After I’d managed to wrestle the neon smock over my confused body. I swear they make those things with five armholes just to drive you mad.)

So there I was – helmet sliding down my dusty face, not even my newly wind-swept bouffant enough to hold it up Men half-looked at me (enough to make me feel like a girl on a building site, but not enough to make me feel like a girl being objectified on a building site) and I wondered briefly if in this PC crazy age they had to pass courses on not offending women before they even learnt how to mix a nice cement. “Bradley! She might be half-naked in a day-glo tabard but if you don’t put your eyes back on your bucket you’ll have this whole operation shut down faster than that No-Nails sealed up Gary’s Latvia hernia-burst. Sexism is frowned on now, remember. That’s why poor Gary had to go to Latvia for his Stag in the first place. You get fined in Brighton for lobbing chips at women now.”

What was I talking about? Oh yes. Helmets.

So I was wearing a helmet. I was tiptoing over screws like I was auditioning for Jackass for Girls. I walked around looking at scaffolding and went “hmm” a lot. I sort of scratched my head over how it’s going to be ready in time for the lovely comedy festival that you should all come to, but I maintained my optimism because that’s all you can do when you’re radiating the glow of fluorescent workwear like you’ve just pinged out of a plug socket.

Despite the dust and the builders’ tuts, and the inability to see which bit would end up being the floor, in my luminescent gabardine I began to get excited. This was a new place, being built on an old place, and it would soon be full of people, laughing. That’s a privileged stage to be a part of I think. Being in a building that hasn’t got its memories yet – putting your two-penneth worth in as to how it should all slot together. Here we were at the end of the longest pleasure pier in the world, with all of Southend’s history rippling around us, on our little speck of the Thames which has seen so much pass up and down its meandering curves – Viking settlers, warships and regattas – and we’re here, looking into its future. That’s the nice thing about looking into the future – it spreads out like a glistening thing before you, yet its not really there yet. An ungraspable sea.

We got a little train named Sir John Betjeman back to land and I had a rush of love for our town – its landmarks which crumble and reform, its people which come and go, and the laughter which becomes as much a part of its walls as the brick-dust itself.

The Wave Comedy Festival, Southend-on-Sea, is running from Thursday 19^th July til Sunday 21^st July.

Go to http://www.thewavecomedyfest.wix.com/thewave for more details.

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Southend Pier. Before it burnt down. (The first time.)

I wrote this, not because I wanted to write a blog about a bookshop, but because it occurred to me that if I didn’t jot down some of the things I think about bookshops I would regret it if ever we lose bookshops as we know them. Bookshops are changing, disappearing. Bookshops might one day not…be there. The word Bookshop might one day have the same arcane feel as Apothecary or Atlantis. These are just some of the things I thought last Sunday, in a quiet mood, on an autumn day, in a bookshop that has come to feel like home. I work in a bookshop. I have worked in this bookshop off-and-on, mostly off, for 5 years, dipping in and out as necessary in tandem with various writing and performing work, which obviously is the uncertain work of hopeful fools. I am a hopeful fool, and I love to do a lot of stuff. I also teach English, do a radio show, write sketches and plays, do comedy, bits of telly, host a raucous pub quiz, drink with friends, play with my dog, and plan to do stuff I’ll never do, like crafts and breathing, because I’m so busy doing all this other stuff. Some of it is for money, most of it is for fun. That is as it should be.

 

Sunday…

 One and a half days a week I play at selling books with the same earnestness with which I played at being librarian behind my cabin bed when I was a kid, with a rubber stamp and rigid filing rules (all the books were filed under my name, which was written in the front, so essentially it didn’t matter what order they were shelved in – I wrote them all, in my eyes. For they were in my eyes, and that’s sometimes all that counts with books.) One of the luxuries that come from playing at selling books only one and a half days a week is that it doesn’t get old. I know; I’ve played at selling books five days a week in the past and it got to be a bore, like everything which steals the majority of your time (even being an astronaut must get dreary once you’re used to it). But this, this is fun. Even the trivial corporate stuff like…Sales. The stationery like…paperclips. The haribo, the customers, the shouts of the public wafting in on the dregs of a McDonald’s fart, the mad people requesting books about Satan and their Nan (Napoleon) and bus journeys to the North Pole – all paraphernalia essential to the role, to the play, props in the dress-up. Like glasses mean you’re clever, or heels mean you have a vagina. All this stuff means you work in a bookshop. I stay for the words (ok – and the money – a girl’s got to drink). I stay for the words. For the idea of words. (A girl’s got to think.)

 For all these things…

There are words in all those books, you know. Sleeping words, which spring awake when you open the pages. Thousands of words in thousands of books, which means millions of words, which is officially a lot. So I stay for those words. For all the ideas I will never grasp, and questions I’ll never think to ask. For all the hard work that other people have put into stuff. For the comfort in knowing that better people have done all this for us, that worse people have done more than you and you could do it too if you pulled your bloody finger out. For the comfort of knowing some things (like love) last, and some things (like slavery, and the Spice Girls) pass. For all the wonderful things I will never find time to do, for all the things it will never occur to me to think about, like fishing and flying and finding mushrooms in your garden and furniture and philosophy and frogs and fucking up and being found and fog and freedom and finance. And Fleetwood Mac. And that’s just the Fs (and one Ph). It is all in there. (And what isn’t can be ordered, if you have the ISBN – and do bring the ISBN because we don’t want to do too much work, because we booksellers have very important things to do – like read Danielle Steele passages in a Polish accent to each other while wearing a hat made from elastic bands).

I feel like a tiny bug that crawled into the centre of a rosebud, being in my bookshop. I walk barefoot. I drink tea. I see friends’ books appear on tables and smile and think I really should try and write one myself one day, because anyone can write a book. Even Danny Dyer. Even the anonymous bastard that writes for Katy Price. Books are easy. Right?

Yes. I work in a bookshop. I have set hours shackled to my hangover days & get paid a couple of notches above minimum wage, yet feel rich and free.

Browsing…

One of the best things about a bookshop is the people which flit in and out. It may seem like browsing is one of the dullest things ever to witness, but it isn’t. I don’t mean the “coming in from the rain” browsing, or the “I’ve forgotten if du Maurier’s under D or M” *abashed literate chuckle* browsing, or the blank-brained browsing of people who dare to ask where Non-Fiction is (“Which particular ‘bit’ of Non-Fiction, you cretin?”, we never say, but want to). But true browsing, when you catch that rare moment of someone’s blankness – not in a stupid way – but a ‘being open to anything’ way. Clean white page people. Grazing the shelves with the thing children feel in the guppy-mouthed moments that come just a split second before wonder. The wonder bit before wonder – so small it’s almost nothing, but so great the possibility of it washing over you. True browsers go with it and almost don’t see the books anymore. Rubbish browsers read blurbs and think it’s just a book with one story. And put the books back in the wrong sodding place. True browsing, with the mind, can achieve an almost transcendental quality. True browsers can levitate around a bookshop and exit without even realising they’ve been in. True browsers can traverse time and space and science and regret. True browsers can forget. Browsing is almost Buddhist. Where does the browser’s mind go? If they’re doing it right they don’t know. It’s almost more apt that these buggers almost never buy anything, because they couldn’t choose from it all, because they almost weren’t there.

And all these people, these browsers, filter in from the street. The High Street. The main tributary of our lives. The Victorian buildings raped forever by fleeting corporate facades. Old pictures of the High Street leave us yearning for what it all once looked like, but you take a picture of the high street now and what now is ugly will one day be beautiful. Will be the amber-sheathed nostalgia, sepia-glazed, black and white sanctity that we wish it was now. Photos in the future will have colours and clarity we can’t yet imagine, and then too will acquire the poignant haze of age. All old things look beautiful. It is our gift in exchange for dying.

A Tom Hoyle…

So I work with books. Sometimes I slope off to tidy corners of the shop that have been forgotten about – cupboards and corridors, the disused disabled toilet, the poetry section. Last Sunday I holed up in the rafters and tidied the EPOS room. I have never known what EPOS stands for, or what is supposed to go on in there, and it’s a fucking mess, yet it’s gloriously quiet. It has a forgotten air. It’s like it’s been sealed for years and you’ve just accidentally broken in while looking for somewhere to snog a colleague. I nosed around while I tidied. Unearthed some old paperwork. Found a few old books which maybe made it up there while someone skived off for a cozy winter read. There was an ancient envelope addressed to a Tom Hoyle and I wondered if it was the Tom that used to work there about a decade ago, whom I’d heard was lovely, and had died sadly very young. I thought I should ask a friend who had worked with him because the act of someone talking about him would bring him alive again for a moment. I sent a text, asking. I imagined what he might have been like, and who had remembered to think about him that day.

On into old old company stuff, old logos and fonts, paper ghosts. And then I looked through all the CDs we don’t use anymore because we have a USB port box thing which receives pre-determined pumped-in head-office sanctioned-stuff (are all the staff in all the land on the same loop at the same time, like droids plugged into the mainframe? Do we hum the next tune preemptively, together? Is this unity in Paolo Nutini, or is it numbness?) All the pretty music we used to play, CDs our friends made, music which accompanied our days together, our choices mood-marked by sharpie-scribble (Lottie’s Summery Musicals! Don’t destroy, Claire! Anita’s Latino Extravaganza! Neil’s Last Compilation Ever!), music by people long dead – scratched Vivaldi, smeared Johnny Cash, a Johnny Matthis Christmas Collection which has been repeatedly smashed into something sharp and then bent for good measure. We’ve all moved on and it’s all still there. (You left it behind when you left, guys – I came back – I don’t mind going backwards – I just found an actual Opal Fruit down the back of the safe – don’t you want it?)

But these CDs are defunct. They will be thrown soon into black bags when we need the shelf for something dull like folders. No one will be arsed to put them all back in their relevant cases & do a charity shop run. Our songs will be crushed at the tip. We slowly erase our own mutual proof.

Dust. Old dust that never gets washed away no matter how much we clean, old skin, our skin, could be my Dad’s skin, he was here once – Norman Wisdom signed a book for him for me, he probably fell over and laughed and left a bit of laughter spittle too, Norman Wisdom’s skin, all mingled, still here while everything slowly changes. We trail dust in our wakes, leaving pieces of ourselves behind. Every seven years we have sloughed and morphed and regenerated cells so often we have left behind enough for a whole human.

Anyway. It was not that Tom, it was another Tom who as far as I know has not died, and is still shuffling around this mortal coil somewhere, probably in worn Converse, pushing glasses up his nose and talking about War & Peace (this is the Tom I have created). But it didn’t matter that it wasn’t the right Tom, if ever a Tom can be the right one to be dead, because the chance it could have been him had made me ‘be still’ and think all of this and then I went out and got pissed and forgot it all until the next time it was important to remember. That we are all going to die, and we must do some good stuff and try to be happy in the meantime.

Fuck the books…

Sales dwindle, and we now stock toys. We have a lucrative line in RP, which I think means Related Products. Which aren’t books. Apparently drumstick pencils, aggressive talking hamsters, and Marmite branded coasters are related to books. And really it is all just us (ok – bosses, the money, The Man) trying to figure out how to survive. Apparently books don’t sell that well anymore. People want stuff. Some people don’t read but we still want their custom. We want them to buy our stuff, even if it isn’t books. We don’t even care if they can read. We have aggressive talking hamsters. That repeat stuff you speak into their arses, but in a gangster style, cricetine Krays for kids for Christmas – perfect. We should get the hamsters to chorus on loop around the sound systems throughout all branches “Fuck the books. Buy our stuff, or we’ll cut you a permanent barcode.”

I work in a bookshop, which, despite everything, still has books.

We sell Sony e-readers too though. They are the terminator versions of these weak and papery fools we call books, except you can’t drop one in the bath, dry it on the rad and read on to the end – it’ll be fucked.

People come in and expect us to be able to show them how they work. We stand in silence, looking like morons, and give them a leaflet. They ask if Sony e-readers are better than Kindles. We die inside a bit and say we don’t know. We mutter something about Amazon under our breaths. They cast us hateful glances as they go out, as if we’ve stood between them and progress, as if we’ve cancered culture, as if we’ve flobbed in their face. They haven’t even seen the books. We stroke the books in consolatory sadness, and go and make more tea. If books could drink tea, we’d make them a cup, and spike it with a nip of something nice.

I feel a sad privilege working in a bookshop while everything’s so uncertain. I feel like one of the last men standing on the frontline. The sound of bullets piercing a sunset. Tiny parts of the business change, and big parts, and bulletins pierce through the ways we have been used to, and we clear shelves of books to make way for Hairy Bikers Merchandise. And sometimes it’s more than we can bear. We don’t want to fucking sell bottle openers as a token branded gesture to two fat dudes cooking ale pies in a field. We don’t want to do that. And sometimes it doesn’t matter, because the certainty of change in itself is soothing, because it reminds us that we all will be dust, business, books, us, and this certainty is our only protection against it all. It is a folded terror, with comfort the wax-seal at both ends. And with any luck we might even outlast the two fat dudes in the field. Their diet is fucking awful.