SUJUK WRAP

“And who decided on the Lebanese Bakery today?” asked Sammy when I got in. I had come home from Oxford, once again smelling as Lebanese as a cedar tree in blossom.

This must be how people with addictions feel, I said to myself very quietly. In truth though, it actually hadn’t been my fault. Not really.

“Look,” said I, “I’ll tell you how it happened.” She laughed but I protested on…

“Pedro stood up,” I recounted, “and he said ‘Do you want to go for lunch?’ And nobody said anything. Then they were all like, ‘Well Matt likes the Lebanese Bakery so how about it?’ and then I was like ‘well okay with me I guess,’ and I couldn’t stop them!”

“Mmhm,” she replied, eyebrow arched. But that really was how it happened. And now it’s seeping out of my pores.

The problem was that I had got so excited at lunchtime about the sujuk wrap and (most importantly) actually eating the sujuk wrap, that I hadn’t realised that a big dollop of Lebanese mayonnaise had squidged down me. It was messy. I cleaned it up as well as possible but the damage was done. Once that kind of thing has happened, the rest of your day is basically Hello Beirut.

My clothes, my skin, Sammy’s car (she picked me up from the station), the bathroom - even post-shower, are all currently reeking of Levantine cuisine, and, admittedly, if you like that kind of thing, that’s wonderful. If you don’t, I imagine it wears thin. I ate it about ten hours ago. It’s still repeating, still pulsing through my blood stream and escaping in my sweat. Poor Sammy.

I’m worried I’ll get banned from the Lebanese Bakery. It is nice but I can’t do it every Wednesday, especially if it causes so much atmospherics. I’m going to have to put my foot down, I think. But not with her.

“But Matt!” Pedro will say, “You love the Lebanese Bakery!”

“Don’t make us go to Marks & Spencer, Matt!”

“Matt, I thought you said you loved it so much you could never go to Lebanon just in case you never came back?”

I did say that. I said that today while biting into the sujuk wrap. Delicious. But some things, chaps, are more important.

Hmm. Wish me luck.

MORNING LEGS

I was walking to work this morning thinking about ideas for a podcast, when some lady in a doorway looked at me, saw I was wearing shorts, and just blurted out: “Morning, legs!”

People astound me sometimes.

This old lady, like a charlady on a break from cleaning some Victorian dining room in 1894, had simply appeared from nowhere and shocked me into laughter. She laughed too. And then, for something, anything, to say to acknowledge that a thing had happened, I just doffed an imaginary cap and said,

“And good morning to you!”

She laughed again. I’ve got no idea why I said that, or indeed why she found the whole thing funny. My guess would be that laughing relieved some of the awkwardness, or, if she cared, the embarrassment at essentially wolf-whistling a stranger. Laugh it off, say the builders and the scaffolders who were well practised at life in the 1970s, you gotta laugh it off; if anything mate, it oughta be a compliment.

Well let’s not get into the politics. There are better ways of complimenting someone than actively objectifying them. Not that I think that’s what this lady was up to. If I had to guess, I’d say she’s a verbal processor, who literally says what she sees. Ooh cheese! Coffee! Hurrah! Ah! Sunshine! Morning, sunshine! Morning, legs! I’m not certain a lecture about political correctness would have been effective - and anyway, lecturing isn’t really my style.

My podcast idea was just me rambling about life as I walked up the Oxford Canal to work every Wednesday morning, maybe tackling a few of life’s big questions, listening to the twittering birds, and enjoying the tinkle of cycle bells as I went.

The more I think of it, the more terrible it sounds. What an awful idea - I mean who would want to hear me rambling on on about nothing in particular?

But hey, on the bright side, I reckon I’ve got a great idea of what to call it…

KITCHEN KARAOKE WITH THE BUBLÉ

Michael Bublé joined us in the kitchen last night. Yeah. Singing Christmas songs, he was. I heard him from the next room.

“Jingle bells, j-j-jingle bells… jingle all the … way…” he crooned.

My wife blamed Siri for 'not listening properly'...

“That’s my job!” I almost said, but thought better of it right at the last second.

Apparently she’d asked her phone for something else, and Siri had just played whatever it thought was best - in this case, the Bublé and his warming tones of Christmas cheer.

You know, I’m not so sure it was Siri’s fault. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not accusing anybody of anything; I’m just saying there was more of Michael Bublé than you’d think if he were playing a gig by accident.

Gosh - imagine that. Playing a gig by accident! Sorry everyone, you thought you were here tonight to see Beelzebub’s Blitzkrieg but due to a scheduling mixup… well, it turns out you really do get so much more than you give, so please, raise your tankards and put down your pentagrams, and why not put your hands together as we welcome to the stage… the one… the only, Mr Michael Bublé!

It wasn’t quite that incongruous to get a little glimmer of Christmas in the kitchen - more like the smell of cinnamon, or the sight of a forgotten bauble that had rolled under the piano six months ago. It was a momentary flash of ‘Oh yeah - Christmas is a thing we like’ in the middle of summer. And to be honest, I’m not too bothered by that. If anything it’s rather comforting.

I think what bothers me is the starting in October and then peaking in the first week of December. And I don’t think we’re in danger of that just yet.

To shift gradually back to summer, I very sneakily put on the karaoke version of Frank Sinatra’s Fly Me To The Moon tonight while I was making tea. I sang along in my best crooner impersonation, finger clicks and everything. She loved it.

I couldn’t help wondering whether Bublé might be at home somewhere in his Hollywood mansion, doing exactly the same thing to the debut album from Beelzebub’s Blitzkrieg.

I doubt it.  

WHITE AND YELLOW ON GREEN

It’s Wimbledon again. Aside from my usual ‘Hope you’re enjoying it’ message to Paul (along with a funny pic of William Hague this time), I once again find myself very much liking tennis - for the usual two weeks, while players in white thwack a yellow tennis ball around a green court.

It’s so posh isn’t it. I mean it’s ties and jackets rather than bucket hats and beer glasses. It has a royal box like a theatre, and polite applause instead of chants and bawling. Sammy asked me if I’d ever want to go…

“Possibly,” I said. “I did take Luke to the tennis that time.”

That was the indoor ATP finals. I won tickets in a competition. I have a feeling Wimbledon would be a lot more fancy than the O2 Arena. Plus, we quickly calculated, it would cost us more than our holiday.

It’s not just posh though; Wimbledon’s nostalgic too. I think however old we are, we all have memories of coming home from school and watching tennis. I saw Boris Becker like that. And Pete Sampras. And Roger Federer (though admittedly, he was more post-university). And despite the rebuilt Court No.1 and the retractible roofs, somehow the deep emerald green of the All England Lawn Tennis Club is exactly as always it was.

Speaking of the retractible roof, I watched it last night. The BBC broadcast eight minutes of it closing - eight minutes of air time on a mechanical roof! The crowd cheered, the slit of pink sky grew narrow between the rafters, and very delicately, very quietly, the two halves of the impressive Centre Court roof clicked together above the tennis court. Beautiful.

I like things like that. I like figuring out how it works. The camera zoomed in on the slowly turning wheels moving along their track. Essentially the roof closes just like a pair of curtains! How much weight do those wheels pull behind them, and how are they powered? What regulates their speed?

The players emerged, carrying their tennis bags back out on court. Applause. The umpire announced a two minute warm-up, and quickly we were back to white, yellow and green.

THE WOODEN SPOON, OR, THE EVOLUTION OF CORRECTIVE MEASURES

 I’m listening to some parenting going on outside.

“You’re being emotional,” says a grown-up voice. “In a minute you’ll be heading for a time-out.” This person is talking like a dam holding herself against a screaming tide. I think it’s working.

Is the ‘time-out’ effective? It’s not my field; I came from the age of the wooden spoon, whose mere threat loomed over contraventions far more often than it was ever applied. The time-out here seems a lot less persuasive.

But in this case, I have to admit, it does seem to be working.

I think the TO must have evolved from the ‘naughty-step’. At some point, smacking became unacceptable (and virtually illegal - I’m not sure what the latest guidance is) and children, Millennial children as it turns out, were subsequently dispatched to sit on the lowest step of the stairs, where they could ‘think about what they’d done’. It wasn’t exactly Tom Sawyer - but for some kids the loneliness of that single rung of the naughty staircase must have been somehow effective.

Sammy tells me that you’re not really supposed to use the N word any more. ’Naughty’ is far too negative - you’re supposed to focus on the behaviour rather than the child, and so ‘naughty’ has been replaced with the word ‘challenging’ - which in effect means the same thing, but also invokes a sort of process, an understanding by which everyone involved knows things can, and should be, still redeemed.

I’d have thought about that if I had ever been sent to the ‘challenging step’. I’d have sulked about it too, but I wouldn’t have dreamed of moving from that well-worn carpeted stair, and I’d hope I’d be able to calculate what I could do to avoid that nauseous ten minutes from ever recurring. 

But I am naive, even now about such things. I’ve no idea whether I’d apply the same frame of mind to prison (which is after all, designed to do the same thing) - and I have no desire to test it.

Actually, if you extend the parallels it is interesting how corporal punishment has mirrored capital, isn’t it? Victorian culture focused on punishment for wrong-doing, even to the point of execution. Meanwhile in schools, masters would punish young transgressors with the cane. It wasn’t until much later that correction shifted focus to rehabilitation in both arenas.

The wooden spoon I knew was an overhang from that world - a descendant of the cane or the slipper or the belt. It’s gone now thankfully, and as education and correction have swung away from punitive where possible, so parenting has swung quite naturally towards the ‘time-out’ to rehab, and perhaps to even cleverer ways of developing better, more rounded young people.

It still seems exhausting out there. There’s a lot of boisterous fun and tears and emotion bouncing between the children. I always get the feeling that we’re living two decisions away from a nuclear meltdown. Someone’s being tickled, the tickler doesn’t know when to stop. Someone’s seeing how high they can jump on the trampoline, not realising that their kinetic energy is making their trajectory less controllable on the descent. It’s certainly lively, and there do seem to be some good boundaries in place.

As I say, it’s not my field. It is interesting to think about though.

THE FLOWER I GREW

Back to poetry at last. I tried to write one short poem a day but it was too difficult to keep up, so I thought maybe I should let myself be driven by the muses, rather than force them.

Then out of nowhere, a poem about lost love fell out. Don’t worry - it’s not a reflection of me at all, just a sort of poetic exercise, as you’ll see from the unusual rhyming scheme. If I ever get back to performing at the slam, or anywhere else for that matter, maybe this will make a melancholy experience for all those who say I only know how to be silly. Or perhaps this is just a different kind of silly. Though obviously don’t tell my poetry friends down at the slam; they take it all a bit more seriously.

The Flower I Grew

The flower I grew
In a terracotta pot
Was a gift for you;
Was a thing of beauty
I would not
Have quickly crushed
Or worse, forgot…
But the flower I grew
With its delicate glow
Was young and new
Those months ago

The flower I grew
With a watery eye
Was a thing that you
In some empty way
Let curl and die
And crisp and fall
And fade and fly
For the flower I grew
Now lost to a time
Was best I knew
Not yours, but mine

MY PROBLEM WITH LINKEDIN

I’m very tired. I don’t mean physically, though admittedly, I am very tired. It’s all the rest of it: the constant overthinking, having to calculate what to say, what not to say, how to be, around people. Life’s like a relentless act sometimes where we’re all playing our part and trying not to get found out.

LinkedIn’s bad for this. Everyone there seems to absolutely love their job and their chosen career. Day in day out they’re posting away about great achievements, or new learning they’ve discovered, or thrilling adventures they’ve been on. I don’t believe all of them. I’ve listened to far too many real people in real jobs to fall for the flag-waving superciliousness.

But you’re not supposed to say that. You’re supposed to be professional, a thought leader, a subject matter expert, to get yourself noticed by recruiters.

Not everybody is safe to be real with either. I made that mistake at work the other day - I answered the question ‘how’s it all going’ to someone who wasn’t asking for a deeply honest response. His awkward silence to me being ‘real’ was a tough moment.

Has social media made us all a bit like that? Kind of isolated behind a shiny facade? The person shoving railway tickets under a glass panel is surely not having a fantastic day, or probably anything close to the life they dreamed of. Yet they’re sort of forced to pretend they always wanted that stuffy box and starched uniform - at least while they’re in it. That’s the job; pretence. It is, when you think about, ludicrous.

And who benefits? Not the beavering linkediners. They post things like ‘fantastic news’ and ‘wonderful stuff’ on each other’s posts whenever they make a huge sale or they hit a big milestone. But it’s the 1% who rake in the reward; the business owners and shareholders, and I have a growing suspicion, forged by nothing other than dreadful scepticism, that those exalted people have no need for, and wouldn’t be caught dead on, LinkedIn,

I’m tired of all that. I’m tired of pretending I’m alright when I’m not, and I’m tired of pretending I’m good at my job. My engineering colleagues have to correct my writing; my missing full stops and my spellings like ‘importan’ and ‘assymetric’ and ‘ocassion’… it’s embarrassing. I don’t know what TLS or KDF is, I can’t define a library from a stack and I’m still not sure what a compiler does, what HTTP actually is or why key exchange works the way it does. I’m really slow with all that stuff and if I have any skill at all it’s blagging my way through and yes, pretending, acting as though I do.

I’m very tired. If you ask me how I am and I say ‘fine’… do me a favour: ask me again. Say, “Matt how are you really?” Or ‘deeply’ or ‘on the inside’ or whatever. Because I’m probably not, and step one on getting back to being ‘fine’ for me is to start talking about it. Because relationship, friendship, connection - realness - is what all of this has only ever been about, and I would trade in all my skills for those moments that matter between friends and people who genuinely care about me. So ask me. And I’ll ask you back if you like.

Just maybe not on LinkedIn though, eh.

FAREWELL JALAPEÑOS

My friend Matt is having a baby. It’s a big thing; bringing a brand new person into the world. From over here on this side of the fence, it looks kind of enormous.

I think Matt thinks so too. That’s why we ended up in the local Indian restaurant for what he called his ‘dad-do’, the paternal equivalent of the baby-shower. Him, his family and his friends, including me. And why not, I suppose.

Well, one reason is that it turns out I just can’t eat that kind of food anymore.

I used to love a spicy Indian; the rich flavours, the thick pungent aromas and the tenderly spiced meat that sank into the dish of tomatoes and chillis and long hot peppers. I would scoop it and stack my fork with pilau rice, just enough to balance, and then let the heat burst magnificently on my tongue, all washed down with a gulp of cool Cobra or Kingfisher.

Adam asked me a question from across the table tonight. I panicked, and felt my teeth crunch down on something I was now unexpectedly swallowing. It was long, thin, and in two pieces.

It was, I realised quite quickly, a green chilli.

The fire was instant. Actually I don’t think ‘fire’ is the best word for it - it was more like a bomb had gone of in my mouth and my throat had taken the blast. Eyes blinking, cheeks reddening, nose scrunched up, I did every single thing I could to contain the explosion but it was close to agony. My mind wandered to ambulances and stomach pumps and whether I’d see my family again. My head was bursting, and my throat was ripped to shreds. Water helped. I gulped some of that down straight away.

But I abandoned the rest of my plate after that. A quarter of a naan and a few scoops of jalfrezi were left uneaten. I wasn’t going back to it. Perhaps ever.

Could this be the day then, when I put spicy food behind me? Is this that point of no return, beyond which lie the korma and the tikka masala? Is it coconut curries from here on in, and a farewell to cayennettas and scotch bonnets?

I doubt Matt will have much time for this either to be honest. Pretty soon his life will be punctuated by the needs of his baby, revolving around a new kind of solar system where nights out to the local Indian are much fewer and further apart than they ever were for us as young men. I might not have been the only one bidding farewell to the jalapeños.

Anyway, I walked back to the car in the summer air. It was light, still warm, and balmy, in the way some summer nights just are. I don’t mind things changing, I realised. I don’t even mind the ‘suddenly’ moments. I guess the thing I don’t like so much is not being ready for a thing to change, and then only realising how not-ready I am for it, after it’s happened.

But that, I sighed to myself, is probably just the way life is most of the time. I’ll get used to it one day.