Our bodies are fiery stock exchanges. The gym is a colon, a colony of commerce, with a daily digestive index.

Elizabeth Knox, ‘Going to the gym’, The Love School

I wanted to see if I could write a poem about the gym. How to make such a vacuum of a place visible again?

If you go to a gym, you will know that often when you are there, you think about being elsewhere. The gym is a negative of a place, and the present moment is a void – it’s only ever people thinking about the past and future, above the looping of treadmills and ellipticals, the trickling and evaporating of sweat. I don’t think anyone really wants to go to the gym: they want to have gone to the gym. The point of going is to carry out the transaction then straighten your figurative tie and leave.

At the same time, I’m kind of fascinated by gyms, and I remember vividly every gym I’ve ever been to. The high school gym, of course, but that never really counted – it was massive and cold, really just a wooden floor and a high ceiling with a chewed rope hanging from it. My first “gym” gym, was Bruce’s Fitness Centre in Te Kuiti. What was I doing there? I was thirteen! Still, I would lift weights and go on the rowing machine, willing my arms to become wiry – I would’ve been the size and shape of a solitary green bean at that point – and sometimes I did Step Reebok. Step Reebok was taught by Yvonne, Bruce’s wife. Yvonne was a tall, fleece-suited woman with a swept-back puff of hair, the embodiment of brisk. I wonder what she does now. I liked her. Maybe she’s still there. (I just googled: she is.)

by Michael Carlebach via New York Times

Today the gym has become a Bermuda Triangle in which everything but my physical presence vanishes clean away. I’m a vacancy, a dead maw. For this reason I’m impressed by people who can socialise there. The other day, before a spin class, people were talking about chutney. Not just the flavour combinations they liked, but their experiences of making it. Apple, beetroot, tomato. It was formidable. At the gym I’m limited to smiling, and occasionally, if pressed, saying something about how dark it is in the mornings. But every morning now it’s a little less dark, so in a week or so I’ll change tack to how much lighter it is in the mornings. After that … my God, I don’t know what will happen. At the gym I am pretty much a terrible person.

Anyway, I tried to write a poem about the gym, and now I’m starting to think maybe I’ll do a series of posts about gyms. It may be fruitless. But a place that provokes such reactions – fear and loathing, fanaticism, a variety of boredoms – is worth exploring, I think.

Here’s the poem. Just like at the gym, the less said about it, the better.

Going to the gym (via This isn’t happiness)

The turning

At the gym today there’s a very old lady on a treadmill.
She hangs on to the rails and peers down at her slip-ons
padding along in earnest; they must think
they’re going down to the shops or the garden.

Her movement generates a mild panic
amongst her clothes – they muddle about and cling to each other
a floral shirt peeping
out behind the great tree of her cardigan.

Most days the gym is a lonely place. A human forest.
The high windows hold bars of sunlight.
In the distance people lift things up, put them down in silence.
Sometimes someone calls out, or a weight falls, but mostly
you have to keep to yourself.

Today while I’m stretching, I close my eyes
and when I open them, there’s the face of an old man:
“Oh!” His pixillated eyes, his veins, his nose at close range.
“I thought you must be having a turn.” He places
a shakening hand on my arm. “But you’re all right.”
And he asks me to strap his feet into the stationary bike.
I oblige. His sneaker is light as a bird.
“Not too tight … Jesus not too tight!”
And his knotted knees tremble.
“Not too tight, my lady; I’ll never get out.” He waves me away
and leans into the imaginary wind.

The very old lady on the treadmill has subscriptions
on her mind. She drifts as if down to the letterbox.
Her slip-ons reveal her heels, all splintered bark
but her varicose veins are pretty,
a tangle of forget-me-nots.

Deep into the spooling road, I used to
race myself. I believed I was shedding layers of myself
until only a facsimile of a person was left –
a fine lace of sweat, tailored to a ghost.

Davy Jones, street photographer

London is propulsion, it rewards those who push forward.

Craig Taylor

This weighty account of London is told by its people: the Londoners. Londoners: The Days and Nights of London Now – As Told by Those Who Love It, Hate It, Live It, Left It and Long for It (Granta, 2011) is the most absorbing, addictive book I’ve read for a pretty long time. It’s a great clamour of voices; each voice cuts straight through the traditional work of history to the quick of human story.

“There’s something about that hour when you don’t encounter a single lucid, sane person. People who are absolutely off their face and have been taken out of the club because it’s dangerous for them to be there, they will just sway. They’ll hold on to the barrier and they’ll sway and they’ll be in their own world, talking to themselves. It’s bizarre. It’s quite gross as well. … all the boundaries and rules that apply in the daytime are gone. And you can’t reason with people like that. People’s worst qualities come out at night.”

Emmajo Read, nightclub door attendant

“There’s this thing you’re supposed to be part of in London. But what is it? That’s the million-dollar question. Everyone’s there because they’re searching, aspiring. A very small percentage is actually living the dream. Ill, tired, unhappy, the rent is fucking loads, what is it you’re getting? The idea of it, or something.”

Jo the Geordie, who stayed in Newcastle

“Most of the doors in Docklands on the expensive flats, they’re basically made of cheese. One kick, and they’ll split in one of two ways: the door hinges will come off the side or they’ll split in half. They’ll say, ‘Somebody’s sawn my door off!’ I’m sorry to tell you this, but no, they haven’t. You have an incredibly cheap door.”

Paul Jones, home security expert

Craig Taylor has interviewed eighty citizens and strangers of London, and the result is an unromantic but seductive portrait of a city. These are often quiet lives: the banker, the bin-diver, the translator, the squatter, the artist, the real estate agent, the manicurist, the cabbie, the lost property attendant. Taylor’s mediation in each story is invisible, so each tale is like a soliloquy. Often Taylor frames an interview with one or two scene-setting details: “In the front room of his house, just off the King’s Road in Chelsea, there are photos of his family on the walls and drawings by his grandchildren on the door.” “He walks into a room in the Hoxton Square Gallery where his work of art, Crapula, stands by itself, surrounded by a few empty plinths.”

Even though these are other people’s stories, Taylor is at the foreground of the book. He’s the investigator, the skilled listener who transcribes and translates the ‘loose talk, asides, grumbles, false history, outright lies, wild exaggerations, declarations, mistakes, strings of anger hung with expletive, affirmations and sometimes revelations – so much that is, really, so little.’ In this way Londoners echoes the work of Studs Terkel and Ronald Blythe, both pioneers of the oral history.

When I finished this book, I felt rather bereft. I am someone who struggles with endings. So I hunted Craig’s details down and got in touch with him. He agreed to answer a few questions about the book.

Craig Taylor

AY: This book must have been a huge undertaking – five years in the making, and around two hundred interviewees whittled down to eighty. Was it difficult to sustain your energy and enthusiasm for the project?

CT: Yes it was.

Thankfully I worked with two excellent editors. Over the years the primary editor, Matt Weiland, took on a number of roles: terrifying task master, sympathetic friend, astute reader, judicious cutter, questioner, nudger, arbiter. ‘No you don’t’ he responded every time I sent him an ‘I need more time’ email. The book would still be a 960,000 word morass if he hadn’t waded in with his famous red pen.

How did you go about selecting people to interview? Did any interviews really not work out?

I made phone calls, emailed people, spoke to people. I tried to be open to what the city offered. Lots of interviews didn’t work out. The failure rate is stratospheric in this kind of work, but what works and what doesn’t often only becomes apparent much later. Of course, some interviews don’t work because the interviewee says ‘Fuck off’ and walks away.

I came across this account by Raymond Lunn (who in the book talks about his experience of being homeless in London when he arrived from Leeds) of an interview with you in a Soho pub a couple of years ago. He seemed quite affected by having the opportunity to tell his story. It made me wonder how other people reacted to being approached for an interview? For some it may have been a strange or exciting experience, to give an account of their lives in London. 

I’m sure there was a broad response. I hope for the interviewees it was a chance to mark this moment in time. I hope someday they’ll reread this book and reflect on their own extraordinary experiences of London. I was lucky to stumble across such incredible lives. They enriched my own.

One of my favourite interviews in the book is with the artist Henry Hudson, who talks about collecting clumps of human hair from the London Underground for one of his artworks. The hairball is this disgusting thing, but it’s also strangely wonderful and hopeful from an artist’s point of view. This paradox recurs in Londoners. There’s the dirt, the crowding, the hostility, but a kind of beauty radiates from it. In your experience, is this a general rule of all cities? Is it something London is particularly good at?

I liked Henry’s project because it reminded me of my own. Walking London, gathering, and hoping the parts would someday form a piece of art. If anyone gets through this book and thinks ‘I’ve just read the literary equivalent of a scavenged hairball head sculpture’, then I’ll know I’ve succeeded. London will always be a combination of beauty and horror; the two have always rested in close proximity, perhaps closer than other cities. The police officer in the book talks about Islington, where wealth and deprivation are often metres apart. I can’t see that changing anytime soon.

As a world centre, London bears a heavy weight: ‘the geography, the architecture, the great mass of London facts and figures, all its history’, as you say in your introduction. But I got the impression that many people you spoke to for this book didn’t necessarily feel that weight. They speak about the everyday, about living their lives in a city that is sometimes uncaring and difficult, sometimes forgiving and kind. And in fact, your approach is to make a distinction between the lives of the people and London’s weight of history and tradition. Why do you think it’s important to make this distinction?

There are enough books on London history. I love Jerry White’s books on London in the last two centuries. I love Mayhew, Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd and many others. I love Rachel Lichtenstein‘s work. I knew this book would have to be different. Thankfully, most people don’t push through London constantly thinking of its history — its a heavy weight to drag when you’re switching from the Victoria to the Northern. They’re thinking of survival. I wanted to speak to people about what they needed to do in London. Some saw their life in the context of history. Some — like one young man — said London history began with him and would end with him. In a way, he’s right.

Your account of life in Brixton in the early 2000s, as a newcomer to London, resonated with me. The pickpockets, the market sellers, the feeling of being pressed up against the windows of the 159 bus. And of course the ‘love, ambivalence and loathing’ when asked how you felt about London. What is your everyday London like these days? 

Much the same. Loving moments often outweigh loathing. I buy fewer phone cards than I did when I first arrived, but I still ride a lot of night buses with steamed windows. I haven’t been pickpocketed in a while, probably because of the sheer success of David Cameron’s Big Society initiative.

(The most depressing interviews were often with people working for vital London charities and social initiatives. After telling me about the work they’d been doing with youth in the area, or trafficked women, or isolated OAPs, they’d say: ‘But all our funding has just been cut.’ London’s going to look very different in the next few years.)

A part of you must have wanted to keep on collecting stories for this book (and there’s a nice quote by Diana Athill on the dust jacket: ‘It’s a wonderful book – I wanted it to be twice as long’) – but obviously London defies all efforts to capture it, just as it’s impossible to define a ‘true Londoner’. How did you know that the project was finished, how did you let it go?

My editor said: ‘You’re out of time.’ I could have kept going. I could have kept going forever and transformed into Joe Gould. (If you don’t know Joe Gould, please read the Joseph Mitchell book.) Diana Athill was kind to say she wanted it to be twice as long, but who would want to inflict that brick of a book on anyone, even a voracious reader like Diana?

Finally, do you have any inklings, yet, of what your next big project might be? (The marvellous Five Dials must be a lot of work in itself.)

Five Dials will continue. My next project is going to be called ‘Sitting In The Library Quietly Reading Books For As Long As I Possibly Can.’ After that, who knows? I’m often told I should head back to Canada so that I can start work on ‘Regina-ers: The Days and Nights of Regina, Saskatchewan, Now — As Told By Some Guy Named Blair At The Tim Hortons Out By The Highway.’

Craig Taylor is the author of Return to Akenfield and One Million Tiny Plays About Britain, which began life as a column in the Guardian. Both have been adapted for the stage. He is the editor of the literary magazine Five Dials. Londoners: The Days and Nights of London Now – As Told by Those Who Love It, Hate It, Live It, Left It and Long for It was published in November 2011.

Born in Edmonton, Alberta, Taylor grew up on Vancouver Island. He now lives in London.

Craig Taylor is on Twitter.

- Henry Hudson (in Londoners by Craig Taylor)

The Rake’s Progress by Henry Hudson via 20 Projects

There’s an artwork by Henry Hudson called Crapula. The centre of the artwork is a large hairball made from human hairs that the artist collected from the London Underground.

I was down in the Tube at King’s Cross, and I felt these gusts of wind and then there it was: the tumbleweed.

The hair tended to collect at the bottoms of stairs, wherever there was a lot of foot traffic. Hudson went round all the different tube stations, mostly King’s Cross from the Hammersmith & City Line, and the Metropolitan and Circle Lines, picking up people’s hair with his Marigold gloves and stuffing it into a Tesco bag or his dinner jacket. He got used to people looking at him edgeways. He made a big ball out of the hair. For a while he didn’t know what to do with it. It sat there in his studio. ’It was impossible, horrible. … I tried putting a comb through it. Impossible. There’s no way.’ Finally Hudson decided to make something out of it. He made a misshapen resin sculpture of his own head and put the hairball inside it. He put a lightbulb inside the hairball. The hairball glowed softly from inside the head, which was tilted slightly as if looking hopefully upwards. Hudson skewered the head on a rusty pole that stood inside a beer barrel. He called it Crapula, meaning, basically, hangover.

I don’t know London as well as I should by now, but I suspect that this artwork captures something of the paradox of it. There is the filth and crap that humans leave behind as they move around the city, and there’s the glumness and self-disgust that you can feel amidst all the excess of London. But something bright emanates from everyone being here. Despite the filth and depression, it’s filled with possibility – a light comes from that, and that light is addictive. We are it; it is us. That’s romance, I guess. Maybe it’s the romance of all big filthy cities. 

by bisybackson

For me, 2011 has been the Year of the Abandoned Idea. So many have lagged behind and have fallen: ideas for articles, essays, blog posts, poems, emails, and even – tragically – tweets. Only a few ever made it through to the other side, and by then they were virtually unrecognisable. Dazed and weary, coated in sweat and swamp scunge.

This blog post is a burial ground for a few of the ideas that really tried, that really struggled, but just never made it. I have returned to the sites of their downfall and gently carried them here.

• Different kinds of hungers/appetites reimagined as breeds of dog. Great Dane, whippet, dachshund, scraggly sea dog, and so forth.

• Poem about a nightmare I had in which a priest has his head blasted open by a man with an elephant gun. The hole closed up almost immediately, just like in Terminator 2, and the priest shook himself and continued on with his sermon.

• Poem in which I reimagine some people as punctuation marks. (“You were always the apostrophe, / defensive of all possessions, pushing them before you / like a supermarket trolley.”)

• In Search of the Peanut Butter Machine (that used to be in residence at Whanganui New World).

• Poem about a world in which similes do not exist, and what happens as the poets gradually lose their minds.

• An expository on my life of tea, which opens: “I’m disappointed with London’s tea scene. Of all the places in the world, I’d thought that this one would be the most accommodating to my needs.” (Possibly include anecdote about bringing in my own special tea to work, and how people commented that this was very strange, and how the next day the special tea was GONE. People actually couldn’t bear to look at it.)

• A poem that half-rhymes ‘crumpet’ with ‘armpit’. As far as I know no one has done this yet.

• Brain Shocks: a day-by-day account about going off anti-depressants; the piece concludes with an assertion of which reality is the truer one.

• Something about the tiny, aggressively-panting runner I used to pass each early morning in Mt. Cook, usually in the dark. She was the size and stature of a wild, wiry goat and her morning run seemed driven by despair. What was she like when she just walked? What was she like when she sat down with a cup of tea?

• Blog post about getting eyelashes stuck in my eye. (“Usually a lost eyelash works its way out as I sleep. Or it works its way to the back of my eyeball, swimming upwards like a fish into my brain.”) Possibly could be shortened to an orphan tweet, at the relevant moment.

• Essay about the history of the flaming skull image. I’ve always thought that if I ever have a book, I’d like it to have a flaming skull on the cover. I’m not saying this for shock value. I would really, honestly like this.

• A series of “An Afternoon with …” poems about EVERYONE I HAVE EVER MET.  Make a book called Afternoons and launch it with an afternoon tea party – inviting all of the people in the book – then try to write a poem about the afternoon tea. (So far I’ve written about afternoons with Jane, Simon, Matthew, and high-school teachers, but there are many hundreds to go.)

• An essay about the history of the headbutt.

• A poem called “Desire”. (“Don’t look directly at it / unless you’re wearing the special glasses.”)

• Something about a friend of mine who has several mind-altering phobias: capsicum seeds (too much like ovaries, which should stay internal, always), sleeping people (they make her feel very awake and very, very alone; there is no point going on when people are sleeping, it feels like they have given in, they have betrayed her), peach skin (the faint squeak of fur against teeth, as if one is eating a small animal), shiny shoes (no person should be able to see himself in his shoes), and unmediated banana (a banana should never ever be eaten unmediated, with the discarded skin close by like a rubber glove at the scene of a crime; bananas are only okay if they are IN things – muffins, cakes, desserts – where the fact that they have come out of a PEEL is disguised).

• An interview with Kevin McCloud, because he just seems like such a lovely guy.

• An interview with Pic Picot, maker of Pic’s Really Good Peanut Butter which comes in “an amazingly returnable jar” with a poem by the retiring, otherwise-unpublished poet Bill Smith under every label.

• An interview with the long-haired guy who sells The Big Issue on Shaftesbury Avenue. He wears a leather waistcoat with ‘Jesus Loves You’ on it and wishes every single passerby a good morning. He never seems to tire.

• An interview with one of my heroes, the cartoonist Tom Gauld.

• An interview with Tom Hodgkinson, co-founder of the Idler Academy.

• An interview with my boss. I’ve never been so confused.

The Nefeljcs Project at Budapest, via Colossal

Savage Eyes

On Wednesday after work I got on my bike and rode home. At an intersection on Brixton Road I pulled up behind a big red bus. It was dark, and I could see parts of my reflection in the bus. I have two white lights on the front of my bike; one light is flashing and the other is steady. I saw the reflection of the two lights. The lights looked like eyes in a face, looking straight into me, half-glaring, half winking. I saw that face as the face of death.

I was going to write about the joys of a newly serviced bike, but there’s only so far you can go with that. It’s not ever-present. Not like death is. Lately, the thing I’ve been thinking about a lot is getting killed while riding my bike.

In Wellington, I used to imagine picturesque, almost delicate deaths. I died by being blown by the wind into the harbour, or my brakes failed when I went down an 80-degree-angled hill. My imagined deaths are very different over here. In a roundabout snarling with buses and cabs, I find myself encircled by alternate universes in which I’m getting killed in all sorts of ways. Suddenly a lorry is whoomping overheard, or I’m being squeezed to death between buses, or the shape of my body is imprinted on the flung-open door of a car. I’m not sure if I’m really afraid. I think it’s that I have become habitually alert to the fact of possible death. The alertness has become this hyperactive caution. What might happen has become too vivid.

This year, as of Friday 2 December, sixteen cyclists have been killed in London, one on the road where I work. I have passed a couple of crash sites: the telltale sign of an ambulance and a discarded bicycle with an orange cone next to it. The orange cone.

One day a few weeks ago, my bike was at the mechanic, so I walked down to the tube. I was actually looking forward to taking the tube; it would be nice to sit down and read the paper, and just be motionless, not thinking of death. The tube is great for looking at things, too, like people’s shoes, and the books they’re reading. But there were severe delays that morning. (When delays become “severe” they basically become living beings.) We were sitting in the carriage for ages, not moving. Then the announcement came: “There is a body on the tracks.”

Everyone in the carriage groaned.

My brother Neil calls this “the existential groan”.

Death in the underground is tragic and horrible, and what makes it even more tragic and horrible is that it’s so routine. One can use it as a legitimate excuse for being late to work, and this excuse will be shrugged off by one’s boss. I wonder if the fact that death is so routine, often so banal, makes it hard for us to be constructively aware of it. By constructive, I mean an awareness that compels us to live more fully. I just realised it’s not really possible to write this without referencing Steve Jobs’s 2005 Stanford Commencement Address.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.

Illustration by Eddy Dukkers via 50 Watts

What I’ve been experiencing is not constructive, but a hyper-awareness of death. This is like a thin gauze of morbidity over my eyes. Traffic lights in disrepair have bags thrown over their heads, tied around their necks. The un-greased chains of advancing cyclists squeak like rats. Each bus is the gaping maw of death.

Yesterday I was talking about this with my brother Neil, also a keen cyclist. He described being run off the road by a speeding car whose driver was talking on a phone. “I heard myself let out this bellow of utter fear,” he said, “and I realised it was the death fear.”

I was going take some field recordings of the bellows of death fear, but I felt that it might distract from the purpose of this post, and maybe also be off-putting to would-be cyclists.

So, I need to relearn how to momentarily suspend my belief in death. Most of us do this automatically. Why else would we travel in cabooses 200 feet underground, practically in moving graves? Why else would we leave our houses?

The accepted wisdom for London cyclists is to ride like everybody’s trying to kill you. (As Homer says, peering into Bart’s face: ”People die all the time, just like that. Why, you could wake up dead tomorrow! … Well, good night.”) I’m all for defensive cycling. But I’m not sure that the they’re-trying-to-kill-you philosophy will help you feel good about being alive. We soon become pickled in our own rancid fear and loathing. It’s not easy to break out of this mindset. As cyclists we are more present in the ‘fearscape’ of the city than drivers, as this brainy article Fear of Cycling by Lancaster cyclist Dave Horton has it:

The city is full of fear, which is partly why and partly because people move in cars. Increasing car use can be seen as a retreat from the ‘public’ world of the city, a means of cocooning oneself and one’s family from ‘the outside’, from fear of traffic but also from dangerous places and people. Cycling puts the person back into this fearscape in a much less mediated way.

One strategy I’ve been trying out when I ride, purely to quell my morbid imaginings, is to construct an imaginary cocoon of safety. I do this by thinking of cars and buses as my friends. I’m like a suckerfish on the backs of the big friendly giants of the sea: the whales and dolphins. (Bear with me here.) I came up with this when I had the realisation, while riding alongside a bus, that the bus was shielding me from other traffic. It was also stopping pedestrians from walking out in front of me, because pedestrians are much more likely to wait for a bus than they are for a bike.

This strategy completely upends my usual way of thinking about traffic. It is clearly counter-intuitive, possibly foolish. But it momentarily calms my hyperawareness of death and puts me back in the landscape as opposed to the fearscape.

Sometimes, when a car is cruising along beside me, I think how much like old friends we are – just rolling along together, two benign species. At the end of the road, well, we’re both glad to be at the end of the road. We park our bikes or our cars and go into our houses and have dinner.

Libération by Jean-François Martin

Jean-François Martin, Le Monde des livres (‘The world of books’)

A good friend of mine recently applied for a prestigious writing course at a university. He’s had some things published, won some prizes, and done a couple of courses already. I was convinced that all of that was leading him to this fantastic moment of acceptance. They’d come around to his house with a marching band and lift him onto their shoulders and parade him through the streets (of the national literary consciousness). And then a year of digestive-biscuit-and-tea-fuelled workshopping would commence, after which he would basically blast through the roof (of the national literary consciousness) like Grandma in George’s Marvellous Medicine.

“I guess there was a sense of inevitability about it,” he said later. You can feel it already, can’t you. He DIDN’T GET IN.

It’s not like he’s died. But something has died.

“This must be how All Blacks supporters feel when they don’t win the World Cup,” he said. “Things are pretty damn low just now.” (He then segued, bleakly, into the outcome of the recent New Zealand election: “These are dark days indeed, and the future looks darker yet.” This interpretation – which many people I know would say is a fair observation in itself – was clearly an echo of his feelings at being rejected from the course. His happiness had hinged upon that result, and now a future wholly unwished-for must be comprehended.)

Yet being rejected is what writers do. At first, it’s a bit like getting dead-legged. The pain! but also the numbness. Until finally you can’t feel your leg any more. Your leg is so dead that you learn how to carry on walking with the dead leg just trailing along. You learn to keep in the back of your mind, at all times, that one day you’ll be able to tell the story of these rejections, and people will laugh with you about those crazy old unenlightened days. You will be a hero. You can look forward to the sweet moment of breakthrough that will give your suffering its inner richness.

Being rejected as a writer also helps you to gather an extensive repository of self-reassurances.

• I’ve told the truth, and they think their readers don’t want to hear it.
• They don’t know what shelf it would go on in the bookshop, or what category it would go under on Kindle, or whatever.
• I can make an artwork and/or wallpaper of my rejection slips, like that guy.

I’ve noticed a phenomenon to do with rejection letters. Apparently people want to hear about them – the crueller the better – especially when canonical authors are implicated. Is this the literary equivalent of celebrities with cellulite? There are many, many online articles – and lots of them seem to be cobbled together from other online articles – about legendary writers who were serially rejected. You can read quotes from rejection letters to writers like Faulkner (“Good God, I can’t publish this!”), Orwell (“It is impossible to sell animal stories in the USA”), Nabokov (“I recommend that this be buried under a stone for a thousand years”). You can go to the Rejection Wiki to see the form rejections that many literary journals send out, or visit that blog Literary Rejections On Display (good idea, but to my mind poorly executed). You can buy a book that celebrates rejection (The Rejection Collection by New Yorker cartoonist Diffee Matthew, or that one compiled by the guy who compiled Other People’s Love Letters – oh yeah, Other People’s Rejection Letters). Letters Of Note also does a very nice line in famous people’s rejection letters.

I guess we’re meant to feel better after reading all this. We can now say with certainty that it’s not just us: the world is a cold bastard. To be alive is to be disappointed. We have a more nuanced view of the names on people’s bookshelves (and successful people in general). It isn’t easy to gain acceptance, and in this we have things in common with Nabokov.

But what else can we take from the knowledge of all this rejection? I wonder if it’s anything more than: “Look how repeatedly and/or cruelly so-and-so was scorned, and how that person’s refusal to give up and/or sheer good luck all paid off in the end because they went on to change the world.” It’s the same old drum – some might call it a dead horse – that has led the empire of Chicken Soup for the Soul to its best-selling, bloated state.

Rejection might be universal but I don’t think there’s a universal message to take from it. It’s an experience particular to the individual. That’s what makes it universal. Which isn’t to say that we shouldn’t share our rejections. We should if we want. We should commiserate with one another and suggest useful defense mechanisms. We should buy each other beer and kebabs to be enjoyed in stoic silence.

Unfortunately, for my friend, whose writing I admire, being rejected from a creative writing course carries much deeper implications than rejection from a literary journal, magazine, publishing house, or competition. Rather than not fulfilling the possibly narrow criteria of one of those outlets, there seems to be a larger judgement here about his value and potential as a writer. He proposed that one reason could simply be that he doesn’t have enough demons, and wondered if he should acquire some.

Sarah Laing, New Wave

But he also feels that maybe, he just doesn’t fit the “good writing model”. His voice and his subject matter don’t tick the boxes. Something’s “going on”.

How do you argue with that creeping sense of alienation? These were my feeble commiserations.

• A course in creative writing is only one possible entry point into a writing career. For many people it’s the exit. It provides no certainty.
• You can write the book you’ve planned to write, course or no course. Nobody can stop you from writing and reading.
• It might’ve been the tiniest thing, the smallest glitch, that tipped your fate. In time, with practise, that thing will fade into oblivion.
• It might’ve been the biggest problem, the most fundamental obfuscation, that tipped your fate. In time, with practise, this thing will evolve into a compelling feature of your work, and the reason that it is compelling is because it should be wrong. [See rejection note to Ursula K. Le Guin: The book is so endlessly complicated by details of reference and information, the interim legends become so much of a nuisance despite their relevance, that the very action of the story seems to be to become hopelessly bogged down and the book, eventually, unreadable.]
• Or, just, there might’ve been tons of unusually great applicants this year.

I feel an urgent need to rescue my friend from bitterness. Because, first: even though bitter writers can be great writers, the shame is that they’re more often remembered for their misanthropy. (Bukowksi: “I do not like the human race. I don’t like their heads. I don’t like their faces. I don’t like their feet. I don’t like their conversations. I don’t like their hairdos. I don’t like their automobiles. I don’t like their dogs or their cats or their roses.”)

Second, I fear that the belief that there’s some kind of coterie – controlling everything from the inside out, high-fiving the privileged few and snobbing the rest – is ultimately very destructive for a writer. Even if it is true we should make every effort to not believe it. Instead we should imagine that the people who make the decisions are just readers. Maybe they’re looking for stories that light them up in some way. Maybe they’re trying to anticipate what other readers will see there. (It’s not necessary to say that in ten, twenty, thirty, forty years’ time I may well think differently about the business of acceptance and rejection.) It’s possible that they are.

Jean-François Martin, Les bananes

- Walter Savage Landor

from Robert T. Beyer, Sounds of Our Times: Two Hundred Years of Acoustics (1998). The first siren, invented in the late eighteenth century, was more of a musical instrument – it had a stopcock that opened and closed a pneumatic tube, and this powered the pipes in a church organ. A later, improved siren was able to be heard underwater. So it was officially named the siren, as an echo to the mythological Sirens of the sea.

My brother and I used to make sport of jumping out at my dad, who was brilliantly scare-able. His face would shake, his arms would flail, he would leap what seemed like metres into the air as if by jet propulsion. Our last but most triumphant scare was to creep up behind him as he sat at the computer and explode a fully inflated rubber Whoopie Cushion behind his head. He leaped off the chair, gasping. We whirled back, bracing ourselves. Then he let out a terrible roar. “DON’T DO THAT.” We fell silent and fled down the hallway. Our scaring days were over.

You can tell a lot about a person by the way they react to loud noises. I still think of my dad-scaring as revelatory moments of my childhood – they revealed an aspect of my dad I’d never seen before and hadn’t known he was capable of: pure rage. Likewise, my mother – Led Zeppelin’s ‘Your Time is Gonna Come’ played on the stereo too loud would so often have her shrieking from the garden that to this day I can’t hear that song without also hearing her voice, the phantom far-away cries of ‘Turn it down.‘

Every Friday at precisely 2:30pm, the fire alarm in the building where I work howls into life. It wails for thirty long seconds. This is a heavy-duty wail. The alarm seems to be situated right above my head. I can feel the sound throbbing in my internal organs. One or two people in the office find the alarm very funny. Others get angry. “Why do they have to do this every week? It is ridiculous.” But most of my coworkers don’t seem to hear it. They continue staring at their screens and calmly sipping tea.

Urban Fox III by Rachel Levitas

For some people hearing a siren is just like passing another face in the street. They’ve adapted to the city to the degree that sirens barely register on their audio landscape. Not me. I’ve devolved, and find sirens genuinely distressing. The only siren you heard with any regularity in Te Kuiti was the daily five o’clock siren from the fire station to mark the end of the working day, back then. It was a deep-throated soughing which set all the dogs in town howling, and which I now think of with sepia-toned nostalgia. But London is a siren city, and the sirens here are not only much louder than back in New Zealand but they’re also higher pitched, providing a more authentic representation of emergency: this sound says EVERYTHING IS OUT OF CONTROL. It’s the sound that occurs before the death rattle, a kind of death warble. When I hear one at close range, always an ambulance or police car or fire truck on my cycle commute in the morning or night, my defenses are blasted away, just as my brother and I cruelly obliterated my father’s defenses those years ago. My instinct is to drop my bike and drop to the ground, a hi-vis huddle.

Obviously this is not the way it works: it’s not really the point to think about sirens in terms of how they affect the lives of healthy passersby. The purpose of the siren is to remind us that someone, somewhere, is in a life-or-death situation and you can help by getting out of the way; or they are there to tell us that things are about to get a whole lot worse, as in the case of disaster sirens. I came across this 1980 clip that was produced to tell Londoners what warning sounds they should expect in the event of a raid on the city. The network of sirens was installed before World War II.

Most sirens mimic the sound of a person wailing, surely to tap into something primal within us that responds to another being’s distress. I’m always quite humbled by how quickly people pull over or shuffle their bikes into the gutter to let the vehicle pass. For a brief moment we’re united in our mission to create a safe path for someone else. These are the times when I feel, weirdly, the most connected with fellow road users. As the crying fades out, the pitch dropping off-key into the distance, the traffic ramps up and the ordinary honking, heckling, cutting-up routine resumes.

A couple of weeks ago I went to see a chiropractor. He has one of those door buzzers that is very loud and abrasive. While he was going over my bones, muttering things like “C1, L1, S5″ (I’m told these are the names of the individual cervical vertebrae) the buzzer blasted out again. I decided to say something about it, because I don’t have a very easy relationship with this chiropractor, and thought it would be possible to bond with him over this noise. So I exclaimed, “Wow, that noise must take ten years off your life every time.”

He stared at me blankly. “Well, maybe it would,” he intoned, “if I was the kind of person who thought about things that way.”

This bothered me. I’m still not quite sure why. Granted, telling someone they should technically be dead by now because of their door buzzer wasn’t a great way of breaking the ice. But it seemed such a joyless way of responding, so closed off to all possibility. It was as if he was saying, My reaction to that noise defines the kind of person I am. And that he believed he was clearly more self-possessed, more healthy of mind, than I was. I would love to give him a really massive fright sometime – maybe dress up in one of those chiropractic skeletons he has hanging around the room, and leap out from behind the door when he comes in. But I suspect that, like a cyborg, he is un-scareable.

As the population rises and the traffic thickens, I guess emergency sirens will only get louder and more high-pitched, or maybe audio engineers will need to develop new, more frightening sirens to keep the jaded and desensitised public alert. Or maybe a siren so hypnotically beautiful that people stand still in the street to listen to it, mesmerised, as the emergency vehicle tears through.

Some interesting sirens (via the wonderful London Sound Survey, dedicated to preserving the sounds of the street)

This siren at a maximum security hospital in Berkshire is tested every Monday morning. It starts off like a Radiohead song, then it’s like a wheezing accordion.

This burglar alarm in Brixton for some reason reminds me of a turkey.

This is my favourite siren: the Coryton oil refinery in Essex. It sounds at 25-second intervals – an eerie, bird-like scree across the sea. You can hear gas flares, birds, and insects.

Here is a a mounted police whistle in the Mall, London. The police officer is trying to clear pedestrians out of the way so a marching band can go through.

Read a poem I wrote called ‘Giving My Father Frights’

There came Ezra, dressed

To the nines in his velvet

Jacket, pants with equestrian

Seat, his cowboy hat, swinging

His silver-headed cane as he

Made for San Ambrogio, women

Applauding him from their

Windows. It was one of the

Sights of the town.

James Laughlin on Ezra Pound in the poem “Olga”, Byways: A Memoir

A shirt dress is ideal for daytime or work, plus you can catwalk it up with some ski pants and then totes nod to the tunic-trouser trend. Result.

Simon Chilvers on the Guardian

by Olaf Hajek via Animalarium

One.

This is an anecdote about some trousers.

It begins with a cry as I approach the school gates of Te Kuiti Primary: “Nightrider pants!”

A kid called Josh (he lived down the street from me and was famous for getting $40 a week in pocket money; in 1989 this was an unimaginable amount of money) was going past on his bike.

“She’s got Nightrider pants. Aue, she’s got Nightrider pants!” In this way he alerted most of the school to my pants. What the hell was Nightrider, and what was the implication of this reference? I learnt later that Nightrider was a character in the film Mad Max. Real name Crawford Montizano, Nightrider was basically a berserk motorbike gang member who was eventually killed in a high-speed chase with Max Rockatansky.

Up until that point I’d worn normal stuff from Ezibuy and DEKA – dependable leggings, trackpants, polar fleeces over turtleneck skivvies. Maybe I had no idea what fashion was, but I knew the difference between different and the same, and that it was always better to be the same. By this point, I knew that my pants were not just different; they were alien. When I walked they made a foreign whispering sound. When I sat down they puffed air. When I shifted they cried out. Pulling them that morning on I’d felt a slow dread, like I was about to go on a long car trip in a mountainous region. I don’t remember any pressure from my parents to wear the pants. But I felt a strong sense of obligation: the pants were a present, and it was my birthday that day.

Later that morning, the kid Josh sat behind me on the mat in class. With no explanation or preamble, he grabbed hold of my butt and wouldn’t let go. I remember the teacher reading a story – she had a long, stern face and was wearing two tortoiseshell barette clips in her yellow hair –  and I was too confused to move. The hands squidged my bottom almost mechanically. The teacher talked on and on. I remember staring into the strings of mobiles hanging from the ceiling, which drifted like seaweed in the air above our heads. The simplest solution – moving somewhere else on the mat – was not an option, because the pants would make a noise and people would look at me again.

After that interminable lesson, the kid Josh cornered me in the art room with a flat, frozen look in his eyes. He had quite a large head, and lush curly hair. He said robotically, “I love you.” Then he made a slow lunge for me, his bear arms outstretched.

I think I discovered the power of clothes that day.

Edward Gorey via Goreyography

Two.

Primark is a gigantic store full of cheap, on-trend yet readily disposable clothing. It has huge windows and featureless white mannequins. There are stories about people who go to Primark sales, and afterwards their shopping bags, stuffed to bursting, begin to shed clothes into the street, but the person just keeps walking because the thing they bought was only worth two quid anyway and it’s not worth the trouble of picking it up – economically, it’s actually not worth it. I don’t know if such stories are true, but they capture the Primark ethic: cheap, abundant, disposable. Before I came to London, I didn’t really know what consumption could look like.

via

Primark is almost comically depressing. Outside the Oxford Street branch on any given day, you can see rows of people slouched in rows on the purpose-built ledge. They’re waiting for their friends and partners who are still inside. Or they’re simply resting, re-orienting themselves. Many of the waiting people hold their heads in their hands, staring into their shopping bags as if each is a wormhole to another universe. All sit in exhausted silence. Primark has devoured their souls.

Anyway, this is all by the by. Here is the anecdote. The last time I walked past Primark, I saw a guy kneeling on the footpath in front of (I assume) his girlfriend. He seemed so engrossed in this act of kneeling that it was almost as if he were kneeling in a church pew, not in the greying, gum-splattered Oxford Street outside seller of “Future WAG” t-shirts and padded bikini tops for four-year-old girls, employer of sweatshop workers doing 80 hours a week in Bangladesh.

Then I noticed that he was re-positioning the tongue of each of the girl’s Nike shoes. He was pulling the tongues out so that they sat more neatly over her socks.

Then he was turning up the hems of her jeans so to make them into cuffs. He was arranging the cuffs over her shoes and patting them gently like a flower arrangement. The girl just stood there looking over the top of his head, a bit gormlessly. Then she took her phone out of her pocket and started texting. To salt the wound, she was chewing gum.

Maybe I’m reading too much into this. Maybe the guy cared more than the girl what the girl’s jeans looked like. He may have been obsessive compulsive. Maybe the girl paid the guy to do this and he was happy to do it, like someone I know who pays his girlfriend to cook dinner and then wash the dishes every day. “She enjoys doing it,” he says, “so what’s the problem?” God, who knows. More than anything I wanted to go over there and rough up those cuffs and stuff the tongues back into the Nikes.

Three.

Sometimes my parents still send me clothes. One year there was a Big Coat – a huge, engulfing coat in the shape of a wheelbarrow. When I wore it I disappeared and became pure coat. Another time there was a shimmery blouse that rasped and scratched and soon, unforgivably, became a window-cleaning rag.

This week, something new arrived – a long-promised Writer’s Cardigan. I’d made some flippant remark on my Facebook page that I needed a cardigan for the specific purpose of writing in, and my mum (look – I know, I know) read it.Her friend Margaret, she said, would knit a cardigan for me. Margaret is the lady who looks after our cat when my folks are away, and the lady who comes round to watch the rugby sometimes and falls asleep on the couch in solidarity with my parents.

Like the perfect pants, a Writer’s Cardigan is elusive. Under normal circumstances it will only appear to you when you give up and stop looking. It’s not something you wear to make you look like A Writer; it’s something you wear to actually do the dirty work in. It’s fusty and a bit threadbare and has large pockets, one of which is falling off. It’s usually brown – dead-leaf brown. There are big pilled bits growing all over it like lichen, some more like barnacles. You may have to wrestle the cardigan from a dog who wants to sleep on it. But it’s home; it’s the most non-judgemental, forgiving garment you will ever own – a bit like a dog itself, actually.

So the other day the knitted cardigan arrived – the garment that I hoped would become my writer’s cardigan. Gingerly, I unwrapped it. It took a while to unwrap.

Revealed was a vast, white, landscape of cable knit. My god, it was a cardigan made for David Attenborough on Frozen Planet. Three dark brown buttons were positioned low on the waist, as if to house an well-established belly. It was what they call in the trade a “statement cardigan” – a cardigan so conscious of its own cardiganness that everything about it, from the glazed buttons to the slight gather at the waist, is self-referential, nodding to cardigans past and future. It was pretty complex.

I put it on and faced the mirror. I looked to be in my mid-seventies and arthritic. I noticed that the garment actually restricted movement, like an upper-body plaster cast. For a second opinion, I showed my boyfriend Matt. He laughed and laughed, for ages, then he called it a “horrible thing”.

But I will not give up. I haven’t tried to write in it yet. I’m wearing some other, lesser cardigan right now. Anyway, I’ll report back.

And in short, I was afraid.

T. S. Eliot, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’

Bu bu!? by Simone Rea

Fur-lined Russian hats (Ushankas, or “ear hats”) begin to appear on the heads of tall boys all over the city, like streetlights.

You dream that it’s snowing heavily and you have no shoes. Your feet blacken and your toes fall off. You try to run to keep your toes but they snap off like pencil lead and you fall over in the snow.

Ralph Macchio, who played the Karate Kid back in 1984, turns fifty.

Spanish skies fill with migrating birds flying south. Hundreds of hunters in Castellón and neighbouring areas have set “parany traps” – copses filled with glue-covered twigs and spikes. The trapped birds will die and be served in tapas bars. In the ancient mosaics of Pompeii, there are images of parany traps. The hunters keep the tradition alive.

Aris Moore via Art Found Out

You receive emails from your boss all through the night: 12:40, 1:45, 2:52, 3:56, 4:30, 6:23am.

Your boss goes into hospital.

The emails keep coming.

On the ride to work, you get stuck behind a recumbent bike for ages. You just can’t shake him off, and every time you manage to pass him he catches up with you at the lights and takes over again, his yellow flag rippling. You overhear him talking to another cyclist at the lights, saying, “People just don’t look.” His eyes are so small and unhappy as he lies back down in his carriage.

Day after day, nothing happens. More leaves are on the roads than usual, though, the colour of wet golden retrievers. They continue to fall, lapping the ground.

On an envelope that falls out of the weekend newspaper: “This bear will be torn to shreds if you don’t open this envelope.” A photograph on the envelope shows a small brown bear lying in dirt.

Email from Mum: “Went to the A & P show, I always enjoy the horse jumping, Dad gets bored.”

A 71-year-old German cellist with profound amnesia, who can’t remember anything of his past and who recognises only his brother and a care worker (“He is living in the moment, more or less; he has lost his whole life” says his neurologist) suddenly learns a new piece of music. What is the piece?

Postcard from Mum: “People who hug a cat daily are 1/3 less likely to have a heart attack.”

A fashion writer writes: ‘Pencil skirts may seem forever in style but at certain times they come to the fore and epitomise the direction of fashion. Invest.’ Once, many people might have heeded this advice. But something has changed. No one can really be bothered to – firstly – take the trouble to locate, and then follow, fashion. One day, sensing a weird silence, fashion stops. It looks around. It’s standing in an alley. For the first time in its life it’s alone.

Suddenly your nephew turns four. He gets a green dinosaur cake with maltesers for eyes – they’re the first things to go. Your nephew tells you, “You’re a machine,” and says “Hello, hello?” into a banana. A vast bowl of luminous icing is left over and you’re terrified that you’ll be left alone in the room with it and will try to eat it all.

It’s dark by 4:30pm. You feel a bottomless hunger for the thickest, tarriest ale drank up at the bar with an old friend. You try to acknowledge the hunger by simply “observing” it: the way, when meditating or practising self-hypnosis, you’re supposed to “observe” thoughts as if they’re clouds being blown through the sky. Then you bike home in the dark, a determined recumbent at your wheels.

Guardando la televisione (Watching television) by Simone Rea

i.

The most prevalent road-rage gesture I see in London is the one I call the Seinfeld. It’s exactly the kind of gesture Jerry would make when saying: “What IS thaaaat?” It’s exasperation, outrage, bafflement. It’s almost an operatic sort of arm-sweep, sometimes with a bit of fist-shaking. The other day a scooter beeped at me while overtaking – I guess to suggest that I was too far out from the gutter and to get back in my place. I didn’t think I was unduly far-out, but I moved aside anyway. But not without giving him the Seinfeld. The gesture was quite mild, though – a query rather than an attack.

The scooter guy was looking back at me, evidently making sure I’d taken note of his beeping, and he immediately gave me his own, much more vigorous, Seinfeld in response, thus asserting his loftier status on the roads as the possessor of a motor and a pair of leather trousers.

This is the sadness of the post-Seinfeld age.

ii.

What do people think about as they’re cycling? A selection of cyclists I questioned responded:

• “Not getting run over.”
• “How not to get run over! Ha ha!”
• “I just look at the road. Once I caught myself daydreaming and I was like, holy shit.”
• “When I cycled I did a lot of counting and repeating of poems or lyrics.”

I used to wonder the same when I swam lengths regularly. What is everybody thinking about? What am I thinking about? Am I thinking about my own boredom? It’s just so boring, swimming in a lane. Nothing but lines on the floor of the pool, arms and legs swooshing by, the occasional flash of goggle-eye-contact. Cycling is a bit the same. There is not much blinking. Breathing is considered. Space is at a premium. I find that my thoughts never become coherent as I’m riding. It’s as though I ride with a leafblower in my head – the faster I ride the more aggressive the leafblower becomes and the further away my thought particles fly.

At the moment my thoughts are revolving loosely around the concept of boredom. This is because later this month I’m going to this thing for boredom enthusiasts, called the Boring Conference. Apparently “different things will be talked about by different people and you can listen to them and then go home.” Which is perfect – why aren’t more events like that? Last year an Interesting Conference was planned, but it was cancelled, so a Boring Conference was organised instead, and that was a success. Talks ranged from ”The Intangible Beauty of Car Park Roofs” and “Personal Reflections on the English Breakfast,” to tie collections (with accompanying PowerPoint presentation) and bus routes. There was also a three-year sneeze count with graphs and charts. Apparently the highlight of that talk was when the presenter reported that he had once sneezed while recording another sneeze.

The agenda for this year hasn’t been announced yet, but I’m pretty excited. And it’s actually interesting. What can boredom do to a person – can it be dangerous? What if human beings largely lose their capacity to tolerate boredom? Are we losing it already?

via Boring Conference

iii.

The clocks have gone back. The dark is loosening its tie and letting out its belt. God, it loves this time of year. Even when the day is not technically dark (ie. it is daytime), we still have a powerful knowledge that the dark was here and will soon return, as though it’s left behind some large territorial stain on the sofa – all this here belongs to the dark; the dark is its rightful owner.

I’m going to get one of those SAD Lamps. You know the ones. They emit a happiness-making blue-white light, and they’re meant to actually work – it’s so simple it seems miraculous. Light = mental stability. Wouldn’t it be great if we could adjust a dial on our necks (or somewhere less frightening) to flood our brains with mental-health-giving bright light when required? Unfortunately the SAD lights are expensive, and I’ve read warnings that if you buy a cheaper one, it will likely be a scam – you’ll end up with just an ordinary, emotionally-stable lightbulb. Ineffective! After thinking about the other treatment ideas from SAD.co.uk (“Eat fewer carbohydrates”, “Get more exercise”, or “Trim trees or bushes that block sunlight”), my solution is to save up for the lamp by giving up the daily but unnecessary purchases: a coffee here, a flapjack there, a beer here, a beer there. Make do with the less-fancy peanut butter, the less-schmancy bananas. This effort has some similarities to the Sober October campaign in which people were urged to give up alcohol and take what they had saved on beer down to their local bookshop to buy books. (The thing is, I’ve noticed that people who really, really love books tend to also really, really love beer. It’s very difficult to sacrifice one for the other and feel OK about it. I haven’t met a non-recovering-alcoholic grown-up yet who’s been able to do it, but I’d be really interested to hear from anyone who has.)

The problem is, even though it’ll be for just a couple of months, those months will hurt. Without the small daily pleasures, it’s that much harder to get through the day. Small frivolities provide relief from the burden of time passing and they soften your world view. They give you permission to stare blankly yet deeply into space. In the best cases (beer), they provide a little holiday from yourself. Still, as I write this it is 3:55pm and out the window the dark is already leeching its way into the sky, and the headlights have already started domino-toppling down the roads. So I know I’ll be very grateful once I’ve got my SAD Lamp.

via

iii.

The goal is to bike through the winter. What sort of mental and physical fortitude will it take? How hard does one need to be, and does one need metal-studded tyres and a neoprene face mask? Judging by the rictus my face becomes on early mornings on the bike, I’m hard but not hard enough; I am al dente.

London Cyclist says you need the following to succeed as a winter cyclist (in the interests of my research on boredom):

• base layer (a Merino wool top)
• mid layer (some kind of jersey/jumper arrangement)
• top layer (a waterproof and/or windproof jacket)
• pair of leg and arm warmers to stop joints from seizing up
• pair of serious, grippy gloves (must look bionic)
• thick waterproof socks
• waterproof cap-thing to wear under helmet
• maybe a pair of ‘overshoes’, made of wetsuit-like material (I have seen people wearing these; there’s something quite Robocop about them).

Right now my cycling gear is: a pair of pink long johns, corduroy shorts from Chinatown in Melbourne, and a custard yellow windbreaker that cost $5 from an op-shop in Hamilton. Also a holey thermal top from one of those Kathmandu sales in Wellington, and a road-worker-ish orange vest that I sometimes wear. From here it’s a long, cold road. And I find myself again having to make financial decisions that don’t seem quite rational, from a happiness-seeking point of view.

Tom Gauld

iii.

This morning I was maybe going a bit too fast down Brixton Road. I was hurrying because a double-decker was bearing down behind me. The sound of a bus at close range is quite terrifying – it’s a hollow, roaring exhalation, what I imagine the inside of a tornado sounds like. The light ahead turned from green to yellow. Without thinking, I sped up. At the last millisecond, just as I was hitting the stop box, the light turned red. But something in my brain refused to accept it. So I hoofed it straight through there.

Now, I pride myself on my lawfulness. I always stop for pedestrians at the zebra crossing. I don’t ride on the footpath. I turn on my bright lights when it’s dark. I do the little wave to drivers when they wait patiently to pass me on a narrow road. Most of all, I never, ever run red lights. So I don’t know what happened this morning. It felt like an out of body experience – there I was, floating above the road, watching this idiot run a red light.

Of course, I immediately flagellated myself. You fool. You could’ve crashed into a car. Into a pedestrian! As I was thinking these things I swerved to avoid a guy walking (jaywalking, actually) across the road. His mouth was moving. There was something a bit menacing about him – he was sauntering towards me as if he didn’t care if I hit him or not, and I heard him say, “YOU HAVE TO WAIT FOR THE FUCKIN’ LIGHTS TOO, YOU KNOW.”

I turned cold. My level of shame reached fever pitch. I was now “them”: the cyclists who “give us all a bad name”, who lend weight to the them vs. us divide.

At the same time, I felt a deep sense of unfairness, and the urge to enter into a philosophical debate. The ninety-nine times you do the right thing, well, none of those get remembered, do they! No one cares if you wait at the red light when there are obviously no pedestrians while other cyclists go torrenting past, and no one cares if you wait for the bus to go first rather than racing against it. But the one time you do something thoughtless, the one time, you get a guy snarling in your face. (There are parallels between this and proof-reading a thick manuscript. You won’t be remembered for all your marvellous corrections, the penetrating gaze that ousted whole bunches of misplaced commas, but for the one time you didn’t check the spelling of that famous castle and it was grievously wrong.) I just hated the thought that I’d cemented that guy’s opinion that all cyclists are dickheads.

But wait. The red-light-vs-cyclist issue is slightly more complex than “IF YOU DO THIS YOU ARE A TERRIBLE PERSON.” It is indeed breaking the law, and police regularly ticket cyclists who they catch in the act, especially in the City. They claim that public opinion demands such vigilance. But there are times when running a red light -with care and caution – can be safer for cyclists, in the current conditions. It can help them get through a particularly narrow road up ahead without impatient motorists trying to overtake them dangerously. It can help them to avoid being squashed by a bus or lorry when turning left. It seems to me that in many cases, cyclists running red lights are responding to bad infrastructure or the threatening attitudes of some drivers. Many cyclists would rather get ahead than get honked at for being out in the middle of the road because they don’t want to be doored by one of the cars parked on either side.

For now though, after my encounter with Angry Pedestrian Jaywalking, I’ll take pride in getting honked at.

Boris Johnson, probably running a red light, according to this Evening Standard article. I actually passed Boris the other day while riding to work. He was wearing a helmet this time and waving cheerily to a well-wishing bus driver. He was riding very slowly and his seat was much too low.