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[This entry of StrangeReality has been deleted by yours truly...]
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[This entry of StrangeReality has been deleted by yours truly....]
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[This entry of StrangeReality has been deleted by yours truly...]
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[This entry of StrangeReality has been deleted by yours truly...]
strangereality126
[This entry of StrangeReality has been deleted by yours truly...]
strangereality125
I have been digging around in my hard drive over the past few days, preparing to back up all of my most critical files. It’s over a year since I got this PC, and only now am I getting around to making backups. Disgraceful, really disgraceful. Is it any wonder that I - no. Stop. Back to the point.
Whilst digging around on my hard drive, I found a chunk of 17,000-odd words called The Fourth Person. I had no idea what it was, so I went in for a look-see. It was an aborted novel of mine, one of many, that I began in a spurt of ‘creativity’ back at the start of October when I was commencing my months-long sick-leave spree. I read it, this fragment of a novel that would have been called The Fourth Person… I read it, and then I made a decision (which you will appreciate the bleak irony of, if you read it all the way through to the end).
This was the decision: I will post the fragment here, in StrangeReality. I will publish it unedited (apart from correcting typos), and using square brackets [like this] to obscure and/or explain portions that are too autobiographical. So here it is, all laid out below - or above, I should say. Over the next 24 hours I will post the text in its entirety. And a word in advance about the text: it is very playful, shockingly awful/pretentious/confuse d in parts, and doesn’t go where you think it’s going. If you’re confused by some of the shifts in authorial voice that occur later on in the fragment, then my apologies. I will never ‘do’ postmodernism again, I promise.
Remember: I did not write this fragment to be read by anyone, and am posting it ‘as is’, straight off my hard drive. In this respect it vastly differs from my last little ‘experiment’ in writing-on-the-blog thing - that time, as some very few readers may remember, when Lord Strange acquired a double who took over his life…. That was an intentional, polished (as far as it was), considered series of writings. What follows is more private, more scruffy, and as you will see if you read the whole thing, quite ill-considered….
Postscript: I have since deleted The Fourth Person. I do not have to give a reason.
strangereality124
There's a very wise saying: never say never again. I believe they made a film of that title once. A James Bond film, starring an elderly, and frankly bald, Sean Connery. To conceal his baldness he wore a preposterous wig that resembled my armpits. And he was so blubbery in that film. And Timothy Dalton is so unappreciated as James Bond that it isn't true, and Pierce Brosnan runs like a girl and I'm happy he got the boot from the role, and, and...
Suffice to say that Lord Strange has returned, a la Sean Connery but sadly without the hairpiece. Something is in the wind, I think. Something big. I will keep you posted.
strangereality123
The Last Post - ?
This 'strangereality123' is the last one ever... maybe. Lord Strange is moving on to other things. It's been an interesting 10 months or so, with one or two highlights (some of them sadly lost forever in the apparent purge of pre-April postings). There's been some laughs along the way, I hope. Writing for a (probably imaginary) audience sure does focus one's mind on what one wants to say and how best to say it. But I have become less and less enthusiastic about the whole 'blogging' concept, as the falling frequency of my recent posts demonstrates. And looking back over some of my old posts, it seems that all I ever talked about was going to the shops, and drinking, and the unreality of reality. There has to be more to life than those and my other pet subjects, surely? So it is time to bring strangereality to a graceful end. Everything ends, whether in blood, sweat, or tears, and an online web journal that has limped on well past its prime is a ripe candidate for the slaughterhouse. Thank you to all those who dropped in occasionally and recorded one or more of the 22,000-odd hits. (Did you honestly read any of the rubbish I was writing?!) Ladies and gentlemen, this reality we inhabit is both strange and populous. There are more worlds under our noses than we know what do with, or even to notice. Until we may cross paths once again in the dislocated subreality of cyberspace, I bid you farewell. The rest is silence.
strangereality122
The Big City
Part 3 of 2
The taxi hadn’t reached the bottom of the hospital driveway before the driver turned his head in that awkward way they all have (looks damn uncomfortable, doesn’t it). He said: “I was in that place for 3 weeks, you know.” His Big City accent confused me for a moment: his pronunciation of ‘place’ sounded like ‘ployce’, and ‘weeks’ sounded like ‘woykes’. So I hedged my bets, not really having a clue what he’d said, and I just went: “Hmm”.
“I had prostate cancer,” he said, swinging the vehicle out onto the main road. (I settled back: this was going to be one long journey to the station.) “I went to my doctor and he said, ‘Bill’, he said, ’you’ve got prostate cancer,’ and I said ‘So what are you saying?’ and he said, ‘Bill, you need an operation’, and I just like nearly sat down and cried. I did have a cry when I got home, I’m not too proud to admit…” He turned his head fully around to fix his eyes upon mine, challengingly, daring me to be anything other than understanding. I nodded seriously and he went on (his eyes now properly on the road ahead): “But do you know what? There was a bloody waiting list of 2 months on the NHS… Disgraceful.” (The National Health Service (NHS) is the public health system I described in the first paragraph of Part 1. I hope you were paying attention.) “So I ended up going to that place,” he said, jerking his thumb back at the private hospital, which was now receding behind a photogenic line of chestnut trees. “Eleven hundred pounds it cost me. One thousand one hundred quid. And there’s me paying my national insurance for thirty years. I mean, what is the country coming to….?”
And then it all degenerated into the kind of ranting social commentary for which taxi drivers the world over are both famed and feared. I listened not so much to the words as to the verbal tone, and when the tone demanded it, I said “Right” and “Really?” and “So true” and “Hmm.”
He dropped me at the bottom of the rising walkway that led to Big City Station. I paid the fare and he sped away. I turned around. On this bright and cold day a few weeks before Christmas, the streets of Big City heaved with human traffic. I pushed slowly through a crowd walking in the opposite direction. I wanted to get out of Big City as soon as possible. I passed a busker who sat cross-legged on a green tarpaulin sheet on the ground. He hugged a battered and peeling old guitar and he sang ‘Yesterday’ in a quiet but tuneful voice, almost as if he was singing only to himself, for his own pleasure. I looked down: his sheet was liberally sprinkled with coins of all sizes. I looked up: the busker was looking at me whilst he sang the line, “Why she had to go I don’t know, she wouldn’t say.”
And then I was past the busker, and my stomach rumbled once, twice. I had eaten nothing since breakfast, which was one sloppily-buttered slice of toast, consumed 4 hours ago. Coming up on the left was a McDonald’s, a Big City version the size of a small football stadium, with a serving area the width of an ocean and 2,000,000 seats for the customers. I exaggerate only slightly. I went inside and approached the nearest free server (what is the right term for somebody who takes your order at a McDonald’s? There must be an official job title but ‘server’ is the best one I can think of). She was a young black woman with dreadlocked hair. I ordered a cheeseburger and a tea. As she tapped buttons on the panel in front of her, she looked at me sideways and asked: “Are you from Little City?” I was surprised that my accent was so instantly placeable; although there are differences between the Big and Little City accents, they’re not that noticeable, really. I said that I was from Little City, and she said: “My boyfriend’s from Little City. You sound just like him…” And she laughed very musically, and fetched my cheeseburger and my tea, and I said: “Thank you.”
I found a seat. I ate my food, and I drank my tea, and I moved my chair out of the way to let a blind man tap-tap his way to the exit, and then I got up and left. I struggled through the unnatural crowd scene and got to Big City Station, and caught a train, and came home.
strangereality121
The Big City
Part 2 of 2
If you have been paying attention over the past several months, you will know that Lord Strange is feckless, idle, alcoholic, churlishly unambitious, compulsively foul-mouthed, sociopathic, constantly on the verge of a mental and/or physical breakdown, addicted to frivolous games and to chilli, weak-kneed, work-shy, and a total coward. As the tall towers and steaming recessed pits of Big City zoomed past the train window, I had to wonder just what I was doing here. I will admit, I was scared. My hands trembled as I closed the unread book, while Big City Station slowed to a graceful halt outside. It wasn’t long - nary a minute or so - before I saw them, the Big Citizens. I vaulted the stairs two at a time, bursting out to the street. And there they all were. The various hustlers, buskers, pimps, crackfiends, shopkeepers and whores of this metropolitan Babylon. Not for the first time in my life, I wished I was the kind of character in a film or book who effortlessly interacts with people. Not people of any particular kind, you understand. Just people.
The time was 9:30 precisely: the time of my appointment with the doctor, at a hospital just over a mile away. I climbed into a taxi and told the driver to take me there. He nodded and said ‘Right’ in an encouraging kind of way. At the first set of traffic lights I got out my mobile phone, shook it a couple of times to ensure it was still working, and called ahead to the hospital.
“Good morning, Kim speaking, how can I help you?” said, presumably, Kim.
“This is Lord Strange,” I said. And I explained the situation.
She was impressed, let me tell you. My old job in a call centre taught me how to unashamedly schmooze, how to pitch my voice just so. I used my best telephone voice on her, the one that made even the angriest female call centre complainer go weak at the knees.
“That’s fine,” said Kim, undoubtedly gasping for breath and fanning herself with her hand.
“We’ll see you when you get here.”
I got there at 9:45, only fifteen minutes late. Kim was nowhere in sight. A plump, bustling, bespectacled, friendly old lady at reception directed me to a room on the first floor. I went up. The hospital was clearly a converted Victorian school or prison or insane asylum. 21st Century wiring and fittings sat incongruously with the solid red brickwork and low ceilings and graceful arches. (Pah. See those last two pre-parenthetical sentences? I hate that kind of observation in any piece of writing. It is so journalistic. But I will let it stand.)
I found the room and went inside. It was a waiting room with padded chairs placed around three walls, a table bearing newspapers and magazines in the centre, and another reception desk along the spare wall. Behind it sat the plump, bustling, bespectacled, friendly old lady’s twin. “Lord Strange?” she said. I had to nod; it was my name, after all. I took a seat.
The doctor’s name - his real name - was Doctor Smith. He appeared at a side door and greeted me like an old friend. I followed him to the surgery, wondering how many Lost In Space-referencing gags I might be able to get away with (“Ohh…. The pain!” might have worked). None, as it turned out, because due to some or all of the characteristics listed in the opening sentence of this piece, I didn’t try any. Doctor Smith sat me down in the surgery and proceeded to quiz me on the ailment that has kept me off work for most of these past two months. “What are you anxious about?” he wanted to know. Nothing. Everything. But who would understand? I said: “I don’t know.” He seemed to smirk at that, as if thinking: Hah! Caught another malingerer. I improvised: “When I am sitting quietly, suddenly out of nowhere I feel that I can’t breathe.” You might think this would prompt a fucking doctor to whip out a stethoscope or bathyscope or something on the spot, but old Smithy didn’t move. He wrote something on a blank sheet of paper and said: “Go on.” I extrapolated freely, and truthfully, for the most part, on the theme of anxiety. After fifteen minutes he wrote something else on another sheet of paper and handed it to me. “Ask your doctor to prescribe you some of this drug. It’s a type of beta-blocker that’s formulated to release itself into the bloodstream very slowly, over the course of 24 hours. There shouldn’t be any side-effects.” I thanked Doctor Smith. I folded the paper and put it in my wallet. I had, and have, no intention of asking my doctor to prescribe me anything at all.
Doctor Smith walked me to the waiting room door. I asked him: “So when do you think I should go back to work?” To my great disappointment he, the company’s doctor, said: “Immediately.” He held out his hand and I shook it. And I outgripped him, the quack.
Outside in the fresh air I wondered how I would get back to Big City Station. It looked like I would have to walk it. Then a taxi, a friendly black taxi, pulled up in front of me. Its passenger got out and ran into the hospital, and I made eye contact with the driver. “Can you take me to the rail station?” I asked him chummily. Looking stunned with happiness, the taxi driver nodded. I got in.
Tomorrow in Part 3 of 2: A Taxi Driver Describes His Prostate Cancer To Me, And At McDonald’s I Make A New Friend In Big City
strangereality120
The Big City
Part 1 of 2
What was today all about? What? Today, I said - Wednesday, 8 December 2004. Just a couple of weeks to Christmas and all that. I have been off work sick for a couple of months now, and the company I work for arranged an appointment for me to see a private doctor, at a private hospital. In the UK there is a sharp distinction between the public and private sides of medical services. This is now turning into an infomercial, but it gets sexier, I promise. Public medical services, from local doctor level to hospital level, are ‘free’ (i.e. paid for via a mandatory element of general income tax called ‘national insurance’); whereas private medical services, as the term suggests, have to be bought-into by the individual via their own insurance arrangements. I have never seen a private doctor nor attended a private hospital in my life. I think they’re exclusively for rich bastards. My latent Marxist tendencies are offended by the very concept. When the letter from my employer bounced on my hairy doormat a few weeks ago, I noted the date and time of the appointment, snorted derisively, and stuck it away in a drawer. Let the prism-bright future look after itself, I thought.
Well, today was the dread day. I had to be at the private hospital by 9:30 a.m. - a wholly theoretical time for me just lately, as it is some three or four hours before I’m accustomed to getting out of bed. And the location of the hospital? Not conveniently just down the road; not even on the other side of town. I live in a large city by UK standards, but the private hospital was in the region’s largest city - hereafter called Big City - a 20-minute train journey away. I would have to leave the house at 8 a.m. to ensure arriving on time, which in turn would mean that I would have to get up, actually up, out of bed, no later than 7:30 a.m.
This made me unhappy. There was no choice about attending the hospital and seeing the doctor; it was a requirement. The letter didn’t say as much, but I felt that there might be consequences for my broadband-supporting salary if I didn’t attend.
So I bit the bullet and knuckled under and all the rest of it, and climbed out of bed this morning at 7:20, after approximately 2 hours sleep. Dazedly, I ate tea, drank toast, brushed orange juice, washed my teeth, and sprayed my arse with deodorant. I caught the bus. It was 8:05 a.m. After one or two stops, my seat was surrounded by braying schoolchildren. One stomach-twisting moment occurred when the bus gave a random lurch to the right, and a schoolgirl toppled into my lap and sat there for a moment, looking back at her mates and leading the giggle chorus. As my pigtailed Lolita got up, without ever having once looked at me or said ‘sorry’, mind, I wondered if any of the other passengers might think I was a greasy-loined paedophile. I looked at them, those fellow passengers: and they all looked like paedophiles. I got off the bus near the train station and walked down. I was really on my way to Big City.
The queue outside the ticket office was about 30-deep. Now, I am very fond of queues and of queuing, as even irregular readers must know. Ordinarily I love nothing more than to confront and engage the uber-dimensional existential monotony of staring at the back of somebody’s head for minutes on end, whilst slowly shuffling forwards. But there was no time: I had to get on that train, the one standing right there, on Platform 2 where I could see it, or I would be late. And I am never late; punctuality is my trademark.
I wandered around the station concourse. Waves of people swept past me and through me. One of those random eddies deposited in front of me a young woman who momentarily stopped and looked right into my eyes. I looked into hers. She was dark-haired, attractive; she wore a brown scarf and a leather coat. Was this it? You know, it? Cue the music… But no, we sidestepped in unison once or twice, I chuckled ruefully, and then she was gone. I didn’t look back. I wonder where she was going, and where she is now.
I got my ticket from an R2D2-like automated dispenser, where there was inexplicably no queue at all, and headed for Platform 2. As my foot landed on the first step of the stairs leading to the platform, I heard the guard’s whistle. By the time I reached the platform, the Big City train, my train, my train of punctualityness, was a receding line in the middle distance. The platform was empty. I sat down on a bench and pretended to read a good book.
The next train was the 8:56. It would get me to Big City at around 9:20 - but then I had to get from Big City Station to the hospital which, according to the grainily photocopied map that had accompanied the letter, was just over a mile from the station. I would get a taxi outside Big City Station, I thought, and just make it in time. I felt smug.
The 8:56 train turned up on time; thankfully, it was almost empty. I found a window seat in a rear carriage and resumed pretending to read my book. When the train pulled away I glanced up to watch the platform moving off behind, and the scenery give way to industrial yards and factories, and then to neat rows of houses and gardens, and then to open countryside. I peered ahead, to the horizon. A glint, a puff of smoke. That was Big City, and I was on my way.