the stubborn one

You know this is sick, right?

Because after all, after everything, he was still a human being. And Christ said that an eye for an eye should not be so, and Gandhi was right that it'll leave the whole world blind.

Because you can see the videos of the noose being dropped round his neck on CNN. And you can see pictures of his body in the Daily Mail, and it's so dark and such gossip, God, how we love to be sickened by shit like this because nobody knows that it is sickening. This is what makes us sick.

And if you say it out loud, perhaps suggest that maybe this was wrong all you'll get is raised voices, a fight to see who can say 'genocide' the loudest, that righteous fucking indignation, as if arguing his right to live is condoning the things that he did. As if by pitying him you somehow become him.

So I'll just say it like this: nobody, nobody, nobody has the right to take the life of anyone, anyone, anyone, no matter who they are or what they've done unless it's self-defence. If Saddam Hussein ran at me or anyone I care about with a knife and I happened to be the gun-toting hillbilly I secretly dream of, I'd pop the bastard.

If I thought he might try to pop me first.

But you see, I don't think Hussein was really all that much of a threat any more. He was broken. He killed hundreds, thousands of people and committed war crimes that I can't even name, but he was caught, he was stopped, he was, for want of a better word, neutralised the second he was found eating Mars bars in a hole in the ground and some cocky American soldier told him that President Bush sent his regards.

He was the world's biggest joke, unmanned and finally harmless. And now he's a martyr, and more dangerous than he ever could have been alive. It just seems to me that it's this sick fascination, it's this glamour that makes dead leaders so appealing. Seems to me if I'm looking for a hero, a scruffy little nobody in a cell isn't half as sexy as the man they sent to the gallows. Perhaps it's just me but doesn't it seem like the more we try to destroy the things we hate, the more power we give them?

So congratulations to all of us. We can rest our superstitious little heads now that we've seen his broken neck on YouTube, that he definitely won't be coming back. Now we've seen him stepping onto the trapdoor, we can sleep easy. We won. I mean we didn't just win, we really really won. It's almost like we won twice because we didn't just stop him, we really fucked him up.

We like that. We like it so much we're gonna watch it over and over and it'll be on the internet forever and ever and maybe one day we can show our kids and say this is what it was like, back when we were civilised.

best yet

A list of reasons why this is the best Christmas ever is really just an inversion of all the reasons why the last two sucked.

No members of my family died this Christmas.

No members of my family contracted weird, 24 hour vomiting viruses this Christmas (like the last two years running).

My remaining grandmother, technically the last grandparent I have, was and still is in wonderful health this Christmas. There was no medicine, no breathing machine, no fear of death this Christmas.

I was not unhappy this Christmas.

I did not fantasise about getting run over by Santa's sleigh this Christmas.

Like the last two years I did end up sprinting around Basingstoke at quarter to 4 on Christmas Eve trying to buy last minute presents, however I managed to get everybody things they liked this year and the incredible pathos didn't quite kill me this year.

This year, this difference is not just the circumstance, the notable absence of terrible bad luck. This difference is about me.

If it had happened again, the annual sojourn into family chaos, the half-hearted celebration overshadowed by the fact that everybody feels like shit - if that had been my Christmas I'm not saying I wouldn't have hated it. I'm not saying the inner child wouldn't have gotten the better of me and had to sneak me off for a cry after lunch. I'm saying that it wouldn't have broken me this year.

Maybe I feel stronger because December didn't shit on me; maybe December waits til I'm good and broken before he drops his daks.

Maybe. Maybe.

Or maybe fortune was on my side and this Christmas when I feel happy just happened to turn out ok.

This Christmas when I feel happy.

I'm ok. And it's been what, 6 years? since I felt that, felt uninterrupted and whole.

Sometimes, unmedicated and relatively sober, godless and loved, I can hardly remember what the Bad Place felt like. But I know that things aren't simple, that habits old and bad die hard and slow, and depression is the oldest and baddest one I know.

Perhaps that's why. Other than this incredible need to say thank-you, perhaps it's that fear that sends me itching for church.

Perhaps it's just the time of year.

acoustics

You know, if you've ever recorded yourself speaking, how awful it sounds when you hear your voice played back to you. You can't really explain why, or what about it is so creepy, but you just know that it doesn't sound anything like you.

I'm doing a module on radio playmaking this year, so to get rid of the collective stage fright, we talked about this first. You don't really hear yourself speaking so much as feel yourself speaking. The words come bouncing back at you off walls and people but mainly, you feel them, shaking up through your chest and your skull, ricocheting off your teeth on their way out. The world doesn't know what that sounds like, only you do. The world only hears what the tape shows you. That really is what you sound like.

For most people, once they've realised this, it's fine. We do these excerpts and improvisations, edit them on computers, add some zany sound effects and play them back to the class and, most of the time, it's not quite the ordeal you think it's gonna be.

Writing is different. The words sound different in my head, not because of the way they bounce around my chest and up through my voice box, but because of how they sound in my actual head. As in, right up here in my skull. The reverb must be different up here or something, perhaps it's the dust or the hangover. They sound fantastic. They echo and harmonise and variate and it's like a lovely symphony of all the things I want to say. Sometimes I'd swear there's even instruments.

But then they come out here - and they sound dead.

Not just dead but embarassing, like someone not only hearing you sing in the shower but knowing exactly how good you think you are and vehemently disagreeing. Letting them out of my head, not even the sounds but the words themselves, onto paper or computer screen - it's mortifying.

Maybe it's the acoustics out here. Maybe the internet is just plain unflattering for a voice like mine.

Or maybe they didn't actually sound so good to begin with.

disparity

The conversation is racing on, faster than I can write this.

Double bed, feet touching. He watches the ceiling, I face the sheets until breathing gets difficult; I only turn my head when I have to. There's space enough in here for conversation, room between the sheets to talk about the big thing, that real thing, the who and what we are. And it starts with the past, which I love, and the thought that it doesn't really matter, which I hate.

I shouldn't care, we think, about anything other than this moment. What led up to it, the infinity of glances and words that brought us here mean nothing now that here has arrived. But how will I know where I am if I've forgotten all the street names I've taken?

We set the fire to the third bar, we're miles from where we are. I tell him I want to staple these moments down, to pin something and keep it, to read it again and get something back. So I can know where I once was, and see myself from years away not lessened by perspective but as big and bold and awful as I used to be.

And, and I don't see what's wrong with using the internet to do that.
But it's a little bit egocentric, Don't I think?

*****

At work, I become Chen's token white friend, immerse myself in the language issues and ask him why every Asian volunteer at the shop has asked me - the painfully English teenager whose job it is to train new starters - about films above anything else.

I try to explain that in all of my relationships, all of my conversations, Hollywood has never been so discussed.

He tells me, in English, exactly what it is to try and break through the divide and make friends with a native Westerner like myself, how it is to be dependent on someone being patient enough to speak slowly. How much effort it takes on both sides to do that.

I tell him how incredibly stupid I feel when him and Li break into impenetrable Chinese mid-conversation. He asks me how I think it feels when I banter with English customers, who make jokes that I then have to explain to him, how patronising people can be.

They were told by their tutors that the best way to make and hold conversation with someone who knows nothing of your language or culture, is to find some common ground and in Die Hard, Tom Cruise, Pearl Harbour we have something to talk about.

And I tell him that that's sad, that I don't want to talk about that with him or with anyone, I don't want that to be the way my culture is defined. I don't want the fact that the culture I belong to is slowly taking over the world to be the basis of our shared experience.

I want to know about your family, and what you want to do, does it rain a lot in Shanghai and what do you reckon to Communism, does it make you sick or glad to be here?

I guess I just want to have a conversation with you.

*****

We smoke in bed, dotting ash into a glass vase, and I try to communicate the vastness of it, how overwhelming it is. How this experience of mine is so meaningless and so transitory, and yet so mine, and it's not that I think my words so special that I want them preserved, it's that this gigantic world, this mass culture, this loss of self - it terrifies me. And the only way I can see of getting round it is to try, in some small way, to defend myself. To staple a little bit of what I feel to some great technology, and how that makes me feel somehow safer.

I tell him that everybody has the right to tell their story, and that they should, because all we really ever learn from is each other. Everything you know is the result of everybody else, as if every thought were a grain of sand pushing the heap upwards.

I could cry, but it sounds so pretentious here in the dark, with miles of sheet between us, and when I move my foot away, the gulf of opinion in the bed seems somehow larger than language could define.

*****

What he doesn't know is that I wake up later to watch him sleep and I realise how stupid I am. I want to know about experience and other people's thoughts and here it is next to me and I just won't listen.

Nine times out of ten the 'otherness' I'm obsessed with only matters when I agree with it, and he'll wake to find me over on his side much sorrier.

The conversation carries on while we're speaking, but I'm the arse because I'm just not listening.

He's definitely not right about the ego thing, though.




Hell no.