The highly distressing case of the man who was hated by cats.

To this day we don’t know what made the cats hate him. The police records indicate that the victim had no memory of wrongdoing against the feline community. 

In the Autumn of 1997 Sam Lancaster, a twenty-four year old website designer, was leaving his flat to meet friends at his local public house. It had been an exhausting week: WebWinners had lost a major client and the dotcom bubble was beginning to rear its ugly iridescent head. Sam’s girlfriend was moving out and he’d had to cancel his holiday plans after forgetting to be administered the essential injections.

Walking along Penrose Avenue, Sam saw Marmalade sitting in the middle of the road. A car had stopped in front of the ironically-named Persian Blue and the driver was blasting her horn metronomically. Henry thought it amusing that this cat had stuck itself so resolutely in front of the Renault Clio. The driver clearly had no intention of leaving the vehicle and so Sam took it upon himself to manually remove the cat from its path. Marmalade was a lot heavier than he had expected; he could feel its guttural purr. He would later liken that sensation to placing one's hand on a washing machine door during a spin-cycle. The driver waved her thanks and drove on. The Persian mewed quietly as Sam finally set her down on the pavement. He stroked her head and continued on to the pub. 

When he arrived it was his friend Simon who would be the first to notice Marmalade. She jumped up to the barstool, onto the bar and, resting her forepaws on a pump of Stella Artois, fixed a stare on Sam. Everyone agreed that it was LOL - worthy and in some small way Sam was flattered by the attention. He explained that he had just saved the cat from the path of a Renault Clio; naturally the cat now owed him lifelong servitude, he joked. Except that’s not quite what happened. Sam sensed that Marmalade disapproved of the story.

After the initial surprise was over, the Landlord asked Sam to kindly escort his cat off the premises. Sam, feeling a certain degree of guardianship, scooped up the persian and took it back to Penrose Avenue. As he lowered her to the pavement she shifted in his grip and began to cling to his arm. The nails were drawn, just enough to hook into his shirt. The cat purred heavily. Sam gently teased her claws from the shirt material and pulled the cat down onto the pavement. Marmalade rolled across the pavement and righted herself to her feet. She pounced and clamped to Sam’s leg.

Sam would not return to the pub that evening. He would spend the rest of the evening knocking the doors of Penworth Avenue and surrounding streets in a search for the cat’s owner. It was only at the final door that a resident asked how he knew the cat was called Marmalade. The cat didn’t have a collar, there was nothing to suggest that she should be called Marmalade. But Sam just knew. Smiling wanly, the resident slowly closed the door on Sam and Marmalade.

On Monday, Sam would arrive at work with Marmalade sitting victoriously on his shoulder, and in their wake Mildred, Sampson, Milan, Tigger and Fleapit. They had gathered over the weekend.

“Why haven’t you called pest control?” exclaimed Sam’s team leader.

Sam sucked at his lip. Marmalade and Fleapit were on his shoulders, providing rump ear-muffs. 

“I don’t know. I think it’s because they have names.”

“Why have you given them names?”

“I didn’t give them names.”

The Team Leader tickled Fleapit’s chin. “I think there are probably some health and safety concerns here. You know - for the workplace. I think you really need to get rid of them.”

But they kept gathering. And they all came with names: Byron, Tiffany, Ziggy, Ginger, Malcolm. They established themselves in Sam’s flat, turning it into a fluff-nest of svelte nimbleness. They were surprisingly well-domesticated and made their own meals. Like a furry typhoon they slurped Sam up in a vortex of love. In a week or so, Sam made the decision that he would need to take drastic action: he left his flat and moved into a childrens’ playground. 

It was at this point that the police became involved. Sam was becoming a public nuisance. The local media called him the Cat-Lover but Sam didn’t really love the cats, he only felt a degree of responsibility. And still the cats continued to amass. Imagine iron filings around a magnet. It’s a pretty basic metaphor but it captures the impossibility of severing the connection. The playground was cordened off as the clowder swelled around Sam. The fire department were eventually called in to brush the cats off Sam but they defended their territory (Sam) with slashings and bitings. 

I won’t be able to go into detail here but the necessary action was undertaken. 

Sam was shaken, and for a brief few weeks he was fully alone. The cats stopped coming. They knew death as well as anyone else.

In the next few months the owners would finally come forward. A graphic designer from Shoreditch, was the first to knock at Sam’s door. He sat opposite Sam and rubbed his eyes: “Fleapit was a kitten when my sister dropped him off. You know, I fed him. He was a good cat. But you know how busy things get.”

Byron: “We’d bought him for Dad, for companionship, after Mum died”

Tiffany: “I’d always wanted a cat. You know we weren’t allowed pets as kids?”

Ginger: “When the children left for University...the horses took up most of our time.”

Malcolm: “We travelled a lot.”

And so each of the owners visited Sam’s flat in pilgrimage. 

The final visitor was the driver of the Renault Clio: “I just couldn’t return Marmalade’s love. She was so needy. I thought cats were supposed to be independent. She needed so much of my attention.”

The cats had ruined Sam's life; he was a broken man. It was easier to admit that they had hated him. 

The 100s of things I won't do before I die

What follows will be my personal take on experiential materialism. I will begin with an evocation of the cultural artifacts both indicative and promotive of such a disposition, attempt a little insight, drop some drole remarks and end on a metadiscursive throw-away.

As many of you who will read this sentence know, I am a thirty year old man. In my life so far I have done some existing: this has been largely unavoidable. 

When I was twenty-three I worked in Waterstones - at that time a concession in one of London’s favourite corner-shops, Harrods. Owing to its popularity as one of London’s favourite corner-shops, the store attracted many celebrated customers. While televised personalities were content to drift about in non-exciting ways; the foreign dignitaries demanded a degree of pomp and circumstance, tuggings of forelocks, etc. No one really took it as seriously as I think we were supposed to. Luckily, there was a shitload of dignitaries so we had plenty of practice: look impressed, don’t smile too much. 

It was on a Sunday afternoon and I was already woozy with celebrity; I had earlier heard Rod Stewart sneezing over a walnut table in the antiques department. Later that day, our manager speed-walked in and speed-whispered, “The *** of *** is following behind me. Best behaviour.” I'm not referring to the *** of *** because I intend to keep his real name anonymous, I simply can't remember. I believe he was from Saudi Arabia.

Several minutes later, the ‘*** of ***’ sandalled in, looking insistently ridiculous in blazing Nike finery and wrap-around Bono shades. After breathing-up the store he made a beeline for a thick stack of books, the ‘1000 *** to *** before you die’ volumes arrayed on a centralish podium. While he rifled through them, his assistant selected a column, their personal shopper picked up the column then shuttled that column across to a trolley attendant. Though of course the *** of *** could have inspected the merchandise in some luxurious grotto deep down in the building he clearly felt the need to stretch his legs. Something of interest caught his attention at the till. It was a copy of ‘Crap Towns’. Though I couldn’t see his eyes, he seemed irritated. He called his assistant over and they leafed through the book, stopping to point at the names: Luton, Corby, Bath. His assistant looked to be attempting to appease him and finally and quickly took the copy of ‘Crap Towns’ and added it to the 1000 column.

Now, I didn’t know what was going on exactly. I didn’t know why  the *** of *** seemed so upset by this compendium of disappointment, so much so that he needed a copy; he seemed personally affronted. The full title was Crap Towns II: The Nation Decides. I looked it up on the stock-checker: the first edition of the series was entitled Crap Towns: The 50 Worst Places to Live in the UK. 

Had he felt compelled to visit the 50 worst Places to Live in the UK? He had exhibited a familiarity with the '1000 *** to *** before you die series (I think he might have just been buying the column for friends and family). Maybe he thought the 50 worst Places to Live in the UK was part of the series. Maybe he had visited each of the worst places and now, with heavy heart, accepted this new edition's unspoken command to visit the sequels. With sufficient wealth, it really wouldn’t be beyond one’s means to actually do all that stuff before you die. 

Luckily, my level of affluence is such that I can only really dream one hundred dreams before I die. I can also completely disregard any intention suggested by a single sentence.  Like most normal people.

Light-hearted Extinction Event

In the film 'The Day After Tomorrow' it gets cold real quick. It’s very exciting.

In the film 'Climate Change’ (working title), the temperature rises 2 - 4 degrees over the course of several decades and features a multitude of heroes who, over the course of 80 years, carefully recycle their waste and ensure that electrical appliances are turned off when not in use.

Michael Fassbender will star as a white goods salesman burdened with the insurmountable task of selling energy-efficient refrigerators to fast food outlets. Tom Hiddleston - his antagonist - will command a group of loft-insulation saboteurs. 

It will be directed by M Night Shyamalan and will feature a surprising twist.

I’m not going to spoil the twist but it will probably be along the lines of ‘we’re already dead’.

Because, in many ways, ‘we’re already dead’.

Already dead because we’re too stupid to save the world from mass extinction.

And why are we too stupid?

I don’t know. I am too stupid.

“Daddy, what did you do in the Great War against global exinction?” my imaginary future daughter asks as I dandle her on my knee. I stare wide-eyed into the distance, a barren land of powdered death and emptiness. 

“I wrote a mildly amusing blogpost.”

Her brow wrinkles, “What’s a blogpose?”

“Post,” I correct her.

She giggles. 

I had not realised that in her precocity she was deliberately punning and suggesting that my blogwriting was little more than intellectual posturing and, as such, symptomatic of the largely individualistic basis of capitalism, the result of which prompted the demise of our environment and species. If only it was that simple.

I begin to hack off my arm for dinner.

Why your body hates you

Clickbait. That’s why. 

But, no, seriously. Your body hates you.

And this is why.

You keep using it for stuff. Observe:

As soon as you are washed up onto the beach of wakefulness, it drags you across the wet sand and slaps you up a dune. “Now what?” it screams at you “I’ve got you this far. What now?”

You direct it to push you from your bed, onto the floor and to work. You’re heading out of the door and it whispers “there’s something I have to do first.” You sit there, waiting a while.

You’re soon on the bus and it’s keeping you fixed in position on a seat. You think it’s easy, sitting there, your enplumped middle anchoring all your cavities and levers. Sure. it’s easy, when you haven’t got other shit to deal with, by which I mean ‘everything else’.

The only break it really gets from you is when you’re sleeping. That’s when you’re left alone with your mind, which entity has a bit of a freak-out and tries to entertain you with some stuff it heard earlier.

But before that reprieve it is subjected to a full day of commandeering by you. Occassionally they talk, the mind and the body, they talk about you behind your back and around your ankles. The mind says “hey, this guy has totally gone beyond the duality of mind and body, he thinks he must have an existence beyond us.”

“Totally,” says the body as it squeezes a bolus into your stomach “I remember when it was just me and you.”

“Yeah, I was supposed to be the seat of the soul and all that important stuff. But now…”

“Now, it’s all “oh the body and mind are one and the same thing”. Screw that.”

“Sure….,” the mind wanders.

The body tenses, “So, if we’re one and the same, what’s left?”

“…something inexplicable”

“Well, that’s the easy way out,” splutters the body.

The mind boggles. 

The Heaven Clause

I’m sitting in my apartment drinking milkshake from a rug. It’s the year 2055 and forty years have passed since my last post. You probably think I’m producing this post via some direct neural interface. Sorry to disappoint, but these words are being chicken-pecked into a keyboard beneath a ‘curved, ultra-wide monitor’. Not much has changed, apart from maybe the fad for drinking milkshakes through rugs. These are made especially to be desirable.

You may ask why am I writing this from the future and should’t there be an entire Bruce WIllis of hurt for the time-space continuum? Well, I’m no expert.

Another question you may ask is “Future John, why at the grand age of seventy are you returning to post in a blog that you abandoned once your readership tired of your dense wordmanship and sesquipedalian excess?”

Since you asked, I’m here to warn you of the Heaven Clause. 

You will no doubt be familiar with the inexorable onward sprint-march of technology and its implications for society. Automation has afforded us the freedom to outsource all tasks too mundane for our attentions to our better-understood, mechanically-obvious counterparts. And this trend is now close to reaching its logical conclusion. We’re close to Utopia. Machines - and I should note that they are pretty damn sophisticated - have been babysitting the least fun aspects of our humanity for some time now. 

Our laurels bear the imprint of our collective buttocks. The steady stream of dystopic sci-fi novels stressed that we wouldn’t reach this point, that there would be some underlying dark conspiracy to get our teeth stuck into. But there really isnt. Life is just great now and the robots are not going to rebel. We didn’t really solve climate change and a lot of people have largely stopped being alive but ultimately, civilisation got its shit together. These rug milkshakes come in so many different flavours.

But I still think you should know about the Heaven Clause.

The heaven clause has never been codified, it’s more a catch-all name for a few general principles.  It concerns a critique of the concept of heaven. Many people when asked about whether they would like to go heaven will say ‘No, I will get bored.” While they may have a more religion-inflected conception of heaven, the more philsophically neat concept of ‘a place where you will be happy’ could not admit of your boredom, unless it was necessary for happiness. The heaven clause is that heaven is a happy place, you have no choice in the matter.

Another interesting thing about heaven is that the entrance fee will cost you your arms, legs and all other essential body parts. When we have achieved utopia on earth we will have created a more immediate kind of heaven, one in which admission is more affordable. And it will be a happy place, you will have no choice in the matter.

So, why am I warning you about an ideal? 

Because as I mop-up these last few remaining droplets of this chocolate jute I nonetheless feel that something is missing. What’s worse is that deep down I know that this is probably the ideal, that I wring sustenance from this feeling that I have this essential part of my humanity that is being denied by the perfect material circumstances. Thats a dystopia I can get behind.

So, seriously, what is the heaven clause?

The heaven clause  - in my aged and withering view - stipulates that we can progress to the point where each of our human needs are answered and attended to yet in some way you will be dead, no matter how much you’re enjoying yourself.

It’s probably ridiculous to even get worked up about it but it’s been forty years since I posted and everything else was just too perfect to mention.

Flecks

When this afternoon I found my fingers settle on the keyboard in readiness to flick some spittle at a disagreeable commenter on an online forum I paused for a moment. Did I really want to commit to this? 

Fluddy_Beads could have been anyone. 

I had been watching a teaser trailer for upcoming film The Martian starring warm-hunk Matt Damon and some other people. This was to be a survivalist yarn following Mr Damon’s travails after he is stranded on the moderately-forgiving planet, Mars. The viewing platform was YouTube, known scourge of fingerwagglers of ill-repute. Though I rarely slipped down into the comment thread I needed to know how warm-hunk Damon was being received.

And after two rolls of the scroll-wheel I came across:

Fluddy_Beads - 1 hour ago

I'm sorry, but the parallels to Interstellar may throw people off. It even has two of the same cast members.

A primitive lobe of my brain found itself engorged with thought-giving blood. “Right, that’s it,” it rasped “No more films set in space because Fluddy_Beads has deemed that the scenario may give rise to confusion amongst watchers of moving images. And actors must limit themselves to one film of each genre lest there be the assumption that they are playing the same character in different films, telling details notwithstanding.”

My fingers twitched on the keyboard. Fluddy_Beads should be made aware of his silliness.

But Fluddy could have been anyone.

A man is walking from work. He carries a briefcase in one hand and a shopping bag heavy with woodshavings in the other. There is a small tear in the shopping bag and flakes and coils of the shavings flit out into the street without him realising. Their exit is so timed that no noticeable pile accumulates in the bags’s wake.The spillage is so gradual that the loss of weight is imperceptible. 

The man arrives at a dour-bricked, semi-detached on the edges of the commuter belt. Pricking his way through the overgrown garden he tugs a key from under a breezeblock. Studs of ants bristle and filter out. One of them climbs the key to his finger where he holds it to his eye - the greylined horizon behind. He watches the ant’s antenna probe its options. After a short while it retreats down the man's finger and across to his arm where he forgets about it. He pushes the key into the door and pushes the door into the house. 

The place is dark and smells of damp tins. He climbs the stairs - his knees now sore on the inside  - and walks across the landing to a small bedroom. He puts his briefcase on the floor besides a chest of drawers and sits on the edge of the bed. Only then does he see that the shopping bag is down to only a fistful of shavings. He curses under his breath and carefully orients the bag to prevent any further spillage. He smooths it out flat on the floor. That might be enough.

The man takes off his shoes and feels the still, soft carpet on the soles of his feet. His old secondary school textbooks are fanned out next to the pillows, as he left them. He’d always intended to return them but after thirty years, even the gesture, what would he mean by it?

He lays back onto the bed and closes his eyes.

The house didn’t feel quiet, not anymore, not after the silence off his youth. Everyone had to respect each other, that was the way a house should be run. His father would sleep with earplugs, he could at least trust the sound of the blood flow in his own head. They had even tamed the house: it wouldn’t shift in the night or stretch out in the summer. Maybe his father wondered how long it would take for the sounds to return. When he finally left.

The man opens his eyes.

Looking to the window he meets the empty glare of his gerbil on the sill below. It is bolt upright in its glass tank and preening its whiskers. It had finished all the dry food and water. It had reduced toilet rolls to napkin rings and mulched down an empty packet of after eights. 

Fluddy sinks back into his bed and rubs his eyes with his thumbs. The gerbil scurries its forepaws frantically against the glass of its tank. Fluddy watches it. How long would it take for a gerbil to dig through glass?

He pulls out his iPhone and watches a teaser trailer for The Martian.

Rambling

I have reached the early years of an old young man. 

As I go about the world I tread on a ground warm with familiarity yet strewn with bracken and foliage the latin names for which I have not yet mastered. A ducampopinus here, a monilophyta there. As I traverse this metaphorical forest of temporal reflection I meet the eyes of newly-minted young men. They are scampering impishly and playfully testing their mettle against the edges of our leafy reality. We walk on together for a while; my tread is light and careful so as to not spook them. We pause at a clearing and in the fading beams of the summer sun they look up at me with a mixture of awe and respect. They see in my skin the slight loss of elasticity and notice about my eyes the shallow trenches of dermal wisdom. I breathe out and scratch the back of my neck. I feel my voice erupt quietly from my throat: “What? What do you want?”

Their leader - he has this alpha-male vibe going on - steps forward. He glances over his shoulder; his friends urge him on. Turning back to me, he says “You do realise that the Oculus Rift and Samsung Gear VR are going to revolutionise cinema?”

“Yes, I think you’re right.” They are startled by my sudden reply.

The leader takes a moment to compose himself : “You know, it’s going to be like being there right in the action?”

I nod, “Yes, it’s going to be really good, isn’t it?”

A couple of the young men start grinning and walk to their leader’s side. The one to his immediate left, the one with the too-manly face, says, “so, you think you’re ready for three-sixty degree storytelling?”

I take a step towards them, they hold fast.

I speak: “We’re not just talking film, we’re talking about the irreversible marriage of gaming and cinema."

Manly pauses and purses his lips, “So, you’re saying that this unity of film and cinema will preclude the artistic need for non-interactive narratives?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” I say with strutting confidence as I replay his statement in my head, scanning it for sense.

The leader turns to manly-face “and so we’re not put in an external position from which we can empathise with the character’s plight?”

“Because we’d be too busy, engaged in our own narrative?” suggests manly. 

The leader splutters, “Well, isn’t that just the same as life? How am I not empathetic towards you?” he asks. 

The young men have now formed a circle and are trading observations on cultural heuristics. I edge away, happy as I am to let them reach their own conclusions. I hope they tell me when they have the answer.

I smile faintly and pick up a frond.

An Apology

And I of course mean an apology in the ancient greek sense; none of this modern kind of apology gift-wrapped with palpable remorse. This apology will be a pre-emptive justification for what follows. So why mislead by intending the less frequently-used definition of the word? Because I'm a writer who seeks in-the-moment-self-validation, that's why - and that comprises the apology. Now, lets move on.

You may have observed a semi-colon at the top of this piece. I honestly don't know whether it was necessary but it just feels right. In previous times that semi-colon would have stalled this post in development hell. No longer will I be held hostage by punctuation marks and their inferiority complexes.

Aside from the in-the-moment-self-validation, this blog will also serve as an aide-memoire. I have now reached the age of thirty and owing to the fact I live the life of a shut-in I don't have a great deal to talk about at parties. Many interesting things happen in the world everyday. I dutifully ignore and forget most of it because it isn't immediately relevant to my circumstances.

This week I learned that you are likely to eat less of a meal if you have made that meal yourself. The theory is that you 'pre-consume' the meal during the preparation stage and so your appetite loses interest until you crack open a packet of Rich Tea biscuits. I would try manufacturing my own Rich Tea biscuits if it wasn't so deliciously complex.

The information presented in the previous paragraph has been around since 2013 and is not especially novel, but it is new to me, and that is all that matters, to me. Me me me me me me.

Me.

So far I haven't said anything particularly engaging apart from that note about appetite, that was OK.

Some one-sentence reviews of films I watched this last week:

Contagion - An outbreak of a lethal and virulent disease affords several well-known actors the opportunity to commit selfless acts of altruism apart from Gwyneth Paltrow who dies in the first fifteen minutes, selfishly.

Ex-Machina - An intelligent attempt at intelligent sci-fi which I enjoyed succinctly.

Kill List - A rather pleasing affair of soldiers turner hired guns and their assured allegorical destruction.

Big Hero 6 - This film really is meant for kids and so I probably have no place remarking on how surprisingly dull it was.