The Silent Death of John Smith

Recently a pal from University, who I’d lost touch with, tracked me down through a couple of Google searches and a hopeful phone message. The mobile number he left didn’t work, so I retaliated and searched for him in turn. Two hits later, turns out he’s now married, to someone from Southampton; is a hotshot lawyer; and is still the handsome devil he ever was.

It’s a familiar story. However, both searches were helped by the fact neither of us have particularly common names (makes you wonder how effective similar searches are in Wales). Which, coincidentally, is an emerging trend. As the lust after individuality which began in early modern times now licks its own mirror to the tune of our celebrity culture, parents are opting more and more for less obvious names. It’s thank you and goodnight for John Smith, and hello Sunshine Turtle-Harrison.

Which in turn will feed Facebook, Bebo - and whatever comes after them and makes them look like electronic post-it notes. The balloon of social networking gets punctured by the pin of a common name: put in ‘Peter Williams’ and you can hear it pop and deflate. Fortunately, even surnames are changing, probably more than they have for five hundred years. There are far more double-barrelled names, either through divorce, or a more equal divvying up of parents’ monikers; the double barrelled name now has nothing to do with class. Has it, Kylie Duncan-Flap?

In short, when it comes to names, you’re going to need something a little bit more individual if you’re going to play any part in mainstream society in the future (*licence for dubious argument pending). But never fear, largely because we’re more self-obsessed, vain and increasingly rubbish at marriage, individuality can be yours (in name, at least).

It’s often said that today’s “selfish society” could never fight a World War. Once conscription was announced, too many people would explain that war “wasn’t right for them” or that it “didn’t fit with their personal brand”, which of course would be fair enough. On a brighter note, assuming that were true, with our funky names and our social networks, at least it would be easy to make contact with the few survivors.

Anyone Seen My Chesterfield Sofa?

Every century has a genius for something. Our century has a genius for the fatuous.

This week’s jewel of irrelevance is the announcement they force train drivers to make on pulling into a major station: ‘Please ensure, when leaving the train, you take all belongings with you’. Who does that help, then, apart from box-tickers at the train company?

Do amnesiacs spring up on hearing such a reminder and yell, ‘Cripes! Nearly forgot the parakeet!’ Have the terminally absent-minded, perhaps lugging a Chesterfield sofa around with them, hastily leapt back on the train following such an announcement, to rescue the offending piece of furniture?

Has the train companies’ token thoughtfulness resulted in a net increase in marital bliss, perhaps, as couples heed the advice and, on average, forget each other less?

When leaving this blog, please ensure you take all your belongings with you.

Office blocks to lift the spirit

I note with a real sense of jubilation and relief that the new development outside East Croydon station (pearl amongst commuting stations) will include ‘Grade ‘A’ office space for 500 people’.

Thank God for that! At last. After all, if there’s one thing Croydon needs, it’s more office space. Some skyscrapers would be nice, for instance - some tower blocks and some office blocks to lift the spirit and gladden the heart.

Perhaps we can finally make ‘Croydon – the quaint, rural village’ the thing of the past. Perhaps we can finally banish our town’s reputation as a bucolic backwater and instead lurch, sorry, leap into the ‘white heat’ of the twenty-first century.

Gone will be Hobbledehoys, the Croydon village blacksmith. Away with Gristlegums, the village butcher, and Silas Snout, the wheezing village tobacconist. Away with PC Humble, the village copper; perhaps now our notoriously crime-free idyll can embrace the kind of fashionable crime levels you would expect from a twenty-first century metropolis!

As for the ducks in Croydon village pond, they can sod off as well. Let’s build some sort of dual carriageway through the village green, that’ll settle their hash (as they used to say in ‘Warlord’).

Vive la concrete revolution! More offices means more ‘thinking outside the box’, doesn’t it? And that can only be good, can’t it?

Can’t it?

Low Quality of Clouds Around Here

When water droplets condense, notoriously, something interesting happens. It’s possible that birds see clouds as nothing more than traffic jams. Birds are wrong.

However, if the sky is nature’s monitor screen – and I think we can all agree it is – then winter is a hell of a dull screen saver.

After all, one of the great pointless pleasures in life is to piddle about staring at archipelagos of clouds and imagining in them the faces of traffic wardens we have loved, or favourite doorkeys, or different parts of your own intestine. We've all done it.

You’d think that because winter, with its featureless grey skies, precludes such distractions, we’d all focus instead – ironically - on higher things; or at least on more obvious things. But as everyone’s too knackered, cold and broke to concentrate on anything other than sleep, and perhaps the odd slice of cake, higher things, whatever they may be, don't stand a chance.

So conjure up elusive spirits: cumulus, stratus, nimbus, cirrus...

New Year’s Resolutions for sale

It’s a pain in the cracker thinking up new year’s resolutions. Here at Quark Inc., we take the pain out of the process by creating some for you. Why not go for a bulk deal, and buy your resolutions for the next five new years? Volume discounts available.

Choose your New Year's Resolution from:

1. Invent a new jam
2. Launch new ways of pronouncing own name and convince 80% of friends to adopt them, however ridiculous, by 30 April 2008
3. Promote campaign for worldwide ban on middle names
4. Save World - or failing that, save £5 a week
5. Cure flatulence, but refuse to tell anyone on the grounds it amuses small children
6. Do one thing different every day (but maintain horrendously high levels of tea-drinking throughout)
7. Take up smoking in flagrant defiance of government legislation and prevailing cultural norms.

Each resolution costs just £7.50 (incl P+P).

You’ll be glad your new year started at Quark Inc!

Editing Love Songs for Sense and Style

When an author finishes a novel, typically the publisher then employs an Editor to go right through it, blowtorch together any gaping plot flaws, hammer out infelicities and shore up the more rickety of the metaphors. The novel’s then published, and despite this attention to detail, will probably be read by a few thousand people at best.

Songs produced by recording artistes, some of them destined for the orifices of millions, get slapped out into the market, their weakly thought-through lyrics preserved in all their inconsistencies and inadequacies for all of us to cherish. Why are there no editors in the recording business?

For instance, when John Farnham wrote his lumbering 80s pop anthem ‘The Voice’, why wasn’t there someone on hand to point out that ‘You’re the voice, try and understand it’ sounds an awful lot like ‘You’re the voice, dumbass, try and wrap your misfiring synapses around the concept, if it isn’t too much TROUBLE.’

And only lack of an editor meant Band Aid could get away with giving Bono the line ‘And tonight thank God it’s them, instead of you’. Unedited subtext: ‘Millions are starving in Africa. On the plus side, at least it’s not you or me, eh? Cup of tea? Slice of cake?’

Editors could also recommend that writers of love songs avoid on principle references to nesting birds as, like it or not, doves play only a very minimal part in people’s lives, and not nearly enough to justify their regular appearance in the bespattered streets and fetid public squares of Love Song Land. Doves: you only got the gig because you rhymed with something. If mankind had turned out differently, and enjoyed songs about say, kitchens, rather than love, you’d be nowhere, and we’d all have a thing about pigeons instead.

Altogether now: ‘I adore you as any man would his kitchen/Outside on the window ledge, there’s a ruddy great pigeon.’ Which is why this is a blog, and not a song.

Next week: why gloves aren’t any good as a metaphor, either.

What Technology Should Be For

The obvious drawback to highly advanced digital technology is that it often can’t be bothered to work. The more arcane drawback to it is that its principles, disappointingly, can’t be exported into real life.

How many of us, having said something crashingly tactless, or twatty, have searched in vain for the back button? How many of us, on the twentieth back-breaking press-up, have moaned to just cut and paste the last five?

And if only daily conversation worked like the shuffle does on an iPod. You’d never know what conversation you were getting – it’d be satisfyingly random. You might pop into the newsagents, ask for a copy of ‘The Daily Quark’ and perhaps a bar of tasty ‘Caramac’ – and instead be treated to a short verbal treatise on, ooooh I dunno, The Glorious Revolution of 1688. In meetings, when it came to the Ops Report, instead the ‘conversation shuffle’ might throw up a debate about ‘Photography – is it an art, or isn’t it? And either way, are my holiday snaps ready yet?'

After all, most of us seem fated to have the same conversation over and over again throughout our lives – or, at best, the same few conversations. ‘What is the point of this job?’ and ‘Why do I support this team again?’ and ‘You’re definitely sure this will support my weight?’ We need, my friends, the ‘conversation shuffle’, and I’d be grateful if one of you could invent it.

That said, I was sitting on a tube train last Wednesday when a complete stranger turned to me and tried to start a conversation about The Glorious Revolution of 1688.

Naturally, I told him to f*** off, the pointless freak.