The Web of Evil

By train from London to Brussels, Brussels to Cologne, Cologne overnight to Copenhagen, Copenhagen to Gothenburg and Gothenburg to just outside Oslo^[1]. Sounds like a quick trip, doesn’t it? No, wait, not “quick”—what’s the other one?


( What I did on my holidays )

On the morning train down to Sussex there’s a group of men in light grey suits heading off for a day at Goodwood.

Man 1: When did you tell your wife you’d be coming home?
Man 2: Tomorrow. I told her she could cook her own dinner.
Man 3: My missus said to me, “Just don’t forget I exist”. When I go out on the lash I forget to call her or text her or anything, and then when I get home I get a right bollocking.
Man 4: Fuck her, she’s too needy!
Man 2: Watch your language, Phil. There’s kids in this carriage.
Man 4: Sorry. [To the woman sat opposite him:] Sorry about that. [She shrugs.]
Man 3: Yeah, watch that. We’re going to be in the posh esclosure today.
Man 1: Esclosure?
Man 3: Esclosure.
Man 1: It’s enclosure, Wayne. Jesus Christ.

A wedding where two of the bridesmaids were in their early 30s but the third was two years old, while the best man was the groom’s seven year-old nephew, was not going to be an occasion where “we respectfully ask people not to bring children”. Rather, the couple had gracefully accepted the fact that among their circle of friends there were at least 15 children of infant age and so held their reception at a country park near Havant that’s full of animals, meaning that years from now there will still be kids saying to them, “Oh my God you had the best wedding you had rabbits”. Also: alpacas, a Shetland pony and a two week-old pig in a bucket.

We were all gathered in a courtyard in the afternoon sun. A guest I had been chatting to said, “Excuse me, I’m going to find my wife.” He scanned the crowd of about 60 guests. “Or perhaps not,” he added, and looked around some more. “I have this knack,” he said glumly, “of failing to pick my wife out of a crowd. The most recent time, we were in a small branch of PC World. We had agreed that if we couldn’t find what we were after, we’d go into the shop over the road. I finished, looked around the place for her and couldn’t find her, so went to the other shop. There was no sign of her there either so I came out again, at which point Jane was just coming out of PC World saying, ‘Where the hell were you?’”

He hadn’t mentioned his wife’s name before; I had met her earlier. “Oh, you’re Jane’s husband?” I said. “Jane, who’s… just there?” She was indeed no more than five feet away from him, talking to my mother. “Oh God,” he said, “not again. Please don’t tell her.” Should I alert Oliver Sacks?

If someone more enterprising than me wants to wander along the apparently endless line of stationary traffic outside my flat selling shop-bought drinks at even a slight markup they’ll make a storming profit. Who knew water mains contained so much water?









The last time I saw my road cordoned and deserted but for emergency vehicles it was 21/7, so I'm quite glad that this time it was just for a burst pipe.

My father is notorious for being random with presents. God knows it can be hard to know what to buy someone, but his gifts can vary from “A Present From Norway” coffee-table books (because he’s Norwegian, incidentally; he’s not quite that random) to, for example, the time he sent me a whole salmon from Norway through the post, which would have been fine except that he decided it would be easier if he cut it in two, thus rendering the vacuum packing null and void and rendering me unpopular at the local sorting office when I was eventually able to go and pick up my parcel after a week.

He had apparently been mulling over my latest present for months, but the first I knew of it was when I saw him at my sister’s 40th in Fredrikstad on Friday evening. It’s a family heirloom—an antique wooden drinking bowl, once used for drinking mead, that used to hang in my grandparents’ dining room.


Antique Norwegian folk art drinking bowl (serving suggestion)

Although the first thing about it to strike you, the recipient, might be its size and how to go about bringing it back to England, it turns out that the most pertinent thing about it is the word “antique” in the previous sentence. As he was telling me about the fact that he was giving it to me and it was just outside in the car, my father produced the stamped certificate that he had gone and got from Norway’s national museum allowing me to take the bowl out of the country. “You will have to declare this at Customs,” he said. My brother and sister had also received drinking bowls, both of which were slightly more elaborate in design and thus, apparently, were far less likely to be allowed out of the country. I was both moved by the gift and slightly alarmed at the possible scenarios I saw unfolding at Gardemoen airport.

(The birthday party itself went exactly as birthday parties should. At 2am my sister called order from on top of a table in the restaurant, holding aloft a long turquoise scarf. “Something happens to you when you turn 40, both physically and mentally,” she announced. She stood on the scarf like a skipping rope. “Mentally speaking, wisdom is like a rubber band.” She accidentally tore the scarf in two, and regarded it thoughtfully. “It can be divided into two parts.” She waved the two bits of scarf vaguely over her head. “Wisdom is also like rhythm gymnastics,” she said.

“Come and have a drink,” cried someone in the crowd.

“Right,” agreed my sister, and she disembarked from the table.)

At the airport I had to ring for service at the Customs desk. “I’d like to take this out of the country,” I said, presenting the bowl. “Here’s the certificate saying I can.” “Right,” said the officer, uncertainly. “Just a minute.” He took the paper from me and went back into his office, saying the Norwegian equivalent of, “Oi, Terry, you know anything about this?” He returned a couple of baffled minutes later. “Yeah, that’s fine,” he said. Of course, sod’s law dictates that if my dad hadn’t gone to all that trouble, I would somehow have been spotted and hoiked in for questioning before I ever even made it to Duty Free and would right now be furiously demanding to call the British embassy.

No such worries at this end, though. Customs at London City Airport consisted of a red phone. “I’ve got something to declare,” I said. “Where are you?” said the voice. “The red channel,” I said. “Are you at Stansted?” said the voice. “No,” I said. “Ah. What are you declaring?” said the voice. “A wooden bowl from Norway. I have to prove I’m allowed to bring it with me,” I said. “Well, I’m at Stansted airport right now, but thanks for your honesty. Enjoy the rest of your trip,” said the voice. As I replaced the receiver I felt a bit guilty about not mentioning the heroin. Your suggestions are invited for an even more risibly ineffective method of Customs control.

Should you find yourself with Finnish art students living above you, it’s entirely possible that you will occasionally come downstairs of a morning and be faced with something unexpected drying in the hallway, like this:



(Golden turd, Finnish art student, clay and gold spray, approx 10" in width)

... And I’m back in the room. For nearly a week it looked as if my computer was dead and I was going to have to pay through the arse to resurrect what was left of its memory. However, psychonomy visited and performed his dark magic (students of the occult should note that the rituals seem to consist mainly of swearing), the result of which is that, as far as I can make out, my machine is out of its coma and its memory is unaffected. Apparently, I need do no more than (a) buy an external hard drive to properly back stuff up and (b) owe psychonomy approximately a vat of cider. This is all good.

I’ve wanted to mention a fair few things over the past week but for now I’ll merely mention this touching and inspiring story of a man who appears to have chased his dream and finally got what he had always desired:

Man who repeatedly jumped out at emergency vehicles killed by emergency vehicle

Over the years I’ve had difficulty persuading window cleaners to clean my windows, mainly because the windows that really need cleaning are a good 15 feet off the ground above 10-foot deep lightwells surrounded by spiked railings. Perhaps understandably, this arrangement appears to be window cleaner kryptonite. Nonetheless, surely there must be one or two out there who would know how to deal with this setup without, let’s say, dying, but every one that I’ve asked has all but fled screaming. So when a few years ago I found someone had put a post-it through the front door saying “WINDOW CLEANER” with a phone number, I was on the phone in less time than it took you to finish this sentence.

I think I know how this normally works. You arrange with a local window cleaner that they will come round to your house on or around a certain day, when you may or may not be in, and you then pay them soon afterwards on a basis suitable to both parties. File under “not rocket science”.

I found myself talking to the window cleaner’s wife. “When will he next be around?” I asked.

“It doesn’t work like that,” she said. “He doesn’t have a fixed schedule. He travels all over the place.”

“Oh, all right,” I said. “So how do I arrange this?”

“Well,” she said, “on a day when you’re going to be at home, you call in the morning and see if he’ll be in your area that day.”

“Seriously?” I said, after a pause. She became slightly defensive.

A couple of weeks later I found myself at home for the day. Out of curiosity I rang the number. “Is Steve going to be in south London today?” I asked.

“No,” said his wife. I haven’t bothered since.

So my question is: am I missing something here? Is this actually a fantastic business model I simply haven’t grasped? Have I just not understood how I stand to benefit here? I only ask because every six months or so I get another identical post-it through the door, so I guess he’s still making the window cleaning work for him. But how?

It is time to go to bed when you are flicking through the Freeview TV menu and you misread Sky’s “Secret World of Airports” as “Secret World of Armpits”.

Memo to me: If you hear what sound like big bloody fireworks going off in clusters at three in the morning, the noise ricocheting around the area but no flashes or bright colours to be seen, then of course it’s the sound of volleys of stun grenades as armed police storm an ex-Rasta temple which is also probably London’s biggest crack den and is, unbeknown to you, half a mile away from your flat. Honestly, it’s so obvious that it barely even needs pointing out.

As is often the way with wild surmising, my wild surmising the other day was way off the mark. My downstairs neighbour was not removed from the premises in a police van; what I happened to catch sight of was the uniformed driver helping a colleague climb in the back and closing the door behind him. My neighbour wasn’t even arrested, in the event, as he willingly co-operated.

“I went outside to talk to the workmen,” he told me. “They’d parked their bloody great vans on the pavement, four of them, and two cars. You could hardly get to the front door. I went and had a word with them—I’d had a bit to drink—and they got stroppy. One of them told me to fuck off. So I went inside, came back and threw a bucket of water over them.”

Three cars, a van, at least eight officers—for a bucket of water. “That sounds right,” said a police source. “At one in the morning, those officers will have had absolutely nothing to do. The call’s come in, a load of them will have thought, ‘There could be a fight... I’ll have some of that’, and they’ve all hurried round to yours.”

Best thing is that, for the rest of the night in question and the next, the tube workers crammed their several vans into the Underground station car park, where they all just about fit, but getting them all in and out must have been a logistical nightmare. If a bucket of water (with a consequent slap on the wrist) is all it has taken to persuade them to sod off from our bit of pavement, my downstairs neighbour may turn out to be something of a—yes, admittedly wayward and pissed—hero.