The Idler

MONOGAMY AND THE CITY

Men drink beer and moan at one another in Matthew De Abaitua’s sparkling new column.

The Washing Machine

“I am stupid.” We were sitting in the George, on the corner of Wilton Way, Hackney.

“I know what you mean,” said Walter.

“I am becoming stupider by the hour,” I continued.

Walter put his glasses aside, revealing eyes trimmed with a thin frame of exhausted blood vessels. “I am too.”

You expect ageing to be an accumulation of experience, a daily accretion of ballast against the unknown. You don’t expect time to beat the smarts out of you, to mercilessly reprogram you with its weary cynicism, until you become a quarter of the man you once were, even though that was only half the man you wanted to be.

“Yes,” said Walter.

It’s our fault. We both sold out. Cut it any way you want, neither of us have ideal jobs. We’re doing something much stupider.

“It’s not just us,” Walter had a starred first in English Literature, with a Distinguished Masters from LSE, where he was trying to unify post-colonial literary theory with supply-side economics in a way I can’t even begin to understand.

Now he spends his evenings having Heat magazine explained to him by his twenty five year old lodger.

Walter was still talking. “Work does not demand intelligence, just perseverance. The people who do well are the ones who keep their heads down, bide their time easing up the corporate hierarchy. In fact, the higher up you go, the stupider everyone seems to get. Their minds have drawn tightly about their career; there is no space for anything else. In my line of work (television) a certain ignorance is an advantage. It shows you are in touch with the audience. In fact, applying your ignorance to a subject is pretty much the definition of a successful television programme.”

I nodded in recognition. “You feel daft.”

“I used to be a genius. Now I’m an imbecile. They took it from me.”

Walter squinted, squashing his thoughts into some kind of cohesion. “I went to a dinner party the other day.”

In the past I would have mocked him for this confession. Now it didn’t seem to matter, being middle class. It made no difference. In fact, I was curious to hear about it. “Did anyone say anything interesting?”

“I don’t know. All I remember is long periods of silence punctuated by this other guest, a woman who looked just like Tony Blair, talking about peas. She liked the smell of them, ‘like freshly-dug soil’. Every now and again I’d try and talk about creative stuff.”

“Creative stuff?”

“You know, the arty things that everyone reads and chats about?”

“Oh. Culture.”

“I didn’t have the energy. Holding a glass of wine, holding an opinion. Couldn’t be arsed. ‘Have you seen the new exhibition at the Tate? It’s very good. The new exhibition at the Tate. We went last weekend, very thought provoking if a little showy. The new exhibition at the Tate.’ You know how it goes.”

Certainly ideas had lost their lustre of late. In our bohemian salad days, we had been quick with ideas, believing success and self-esteem could be constructed out of one good idea. But theorising is so callow. Experience teaches you that ideas get you nowhere. For example, a friend of mine invented the one shoulder-strap backpack, pass?� now, but still so ubiquitous in young metropolitan circles. Has he seen a penny from his idea? No, of course not. It was pinched, copied. Ideas will get you so far, but money, nepotism and plagiarism will get you a lot further.

I’m not bitter about that, in the same way I’m not bitter about gravity. Sure, they both hold you back, but what can you do?

I was hungry to hear about the dinner party. I hadn’t been to one for nearly three years. Four couples staring at one another over a little bowl of black pepper, talking about the food while eating the food. God I miss it.

“She looked just like Tony Blair?”

“Yes. Exactly. But with a bob. There was a basket of raw pea pods in the middle of the table. She picked one out, split it with a run of her thumbnail, and took a hefty whiff. Someone was talking about all that state of the nation, government stuff-”

“-politics.”

“It was her boyfriend, he was talking politics, or rather, he was paraphrasing a column from The Guardian when she interrupted him – which was a relief, we’d all read it and didn’t particularly need a cover version – to comment on the peas. She rolled one between her thumb and index finger. ‘It smells of earth, when you turn it over’ she said, with a look of amazement. She held the pod out for me. I took one and gently raised it to my nostril. I sniffed. She watched me with the most unnerving grin. Slowly, I put the pea onto my tongue, bit it, and swallowed. An erotic charge passed between us, we shared a moment over the pea. Her boyfriend’s doing Guardian karaoke. We thought briefly about fucking.”

“Did anything happen?”

“No, of course not.”

We both have long-term girlfriends. Monogamy And The City. All the women seem to be having sex, while the men are having monogamy. Certainly Walter and I lack the wit for infidelity. We are too tired, exhausted by stupid work, the days spent rolling around a washing machine of nonsense, pulled on by thoughtless centrifuge.

Walter was still wearing his suit at 9pm, while the rest of the patrons in The George were all chunky jumpers, roll-ups and community art projects. Citizens of Old Hackney, loony left Hackney, carved wooden Buddha Hackney, unemployable bohemians subsisting on the burgeoning equity in houses sought after by people like us, New Labour Hackney, consultancy and media Hackney.

“In work today,” said Walter, “I had a meeting with the composer of this big new documentary series we’re editing. I had to make some changes to his score.”

“What was wrong with it?”

“Nothing. But insisting on changes is my job. I asked him if he could fit another chord in.”

I laughed. “Good one.”

“He had to go back and rewrite and re-record the whole thing. It really cut into his profit margin. I didn’t know what else to do. I had to say something.”

“Don’t you normally ask for ‘more warmth’?”

“That was getting tired. It was time for a new change. ‘Can you fit another chord in there’ will keep me going until at least October.”

I had to say it. “Your job sounds really stupid.”

“It is. I ask for changes to things I know nothing about. It doesn’t matter if it’s music, comedy, or drama, or a documentary, or the news or a soap opera. If it’s edgy, I tell them to make it more mainstream. If it’s too mainstream, I tell them to add more edge. One of my presenters used the word “corpulent” in a link: I tore a strip off him. “Corpulent” is not a ‘now’ word. I made them reshoot a game show because the set was the wrong colour. It should be hot pink, because research shows that hot pink is the colour of entertainment. Of course, you laugh and say it is stupid, but I don’t see why I should be singled out. Most jobs are stupid. The only exist to keep us busy.”

“I am very busy at the moment.”

“Everyone is very fucking busy. This morning, I heard a DJ announcing that he was keeping it busy. On pirate radio! Even the people at Radio Crackhead are failing to manage their work/life balance! Something is really wrong with us, with the people…with…”

“Society.”

Walter and I were both very busy. You could plot the exponential curve of our stupidity against this ceaseless activity.

Busy-ness is nothing new. The Victorian patriarchs were particularly keen on it, especially if they had worked their way up from the sweat of their brow. After the Napoleonic Wars, the Liverpudlians making munitions were unemployed. A retired tobacco merchant, Joseph Williamson, spent his entire fortune paying them to build tunnels for him. He had no design, no plan, but his caves still honeycomb Edge Hill. There are chambers seventy feet long, twenty feet wide, thirty feet high. Tunnels were bricked up as soon as they were completed. Rooms were built without doors. Men worked underground by candlelight, to no purpose.

After his wife died, Williamson threw himself into the construction of his labyrinth, he stopped going above ground, preferring the dark riddle of this improvised maze. He died in 1840, on
May 1st, International Worker’s Day.

Known in his time as the King Of Edge Hill, his name lives on in Williamson Square, the site of Liverpool’s notoriously useless three hundred and thirty five foot St John’s Beacon, the tallest building in the city. The Beacon began life as a dead posh (but it ain’t) rotating restaurant, but after a fire in the nearby shopping centre, it was declared unsafe. Derelict for twenty years, a symbol of failure looming over a dying city, it was mercifully taken over by Radio City, the local station. Now it is lit up at night to match the whims of the DJs.

It goes pink for “Love Hour”.

It is the most stupid building I have ever seen.

Similarly, banker John McCaig commissioned a version of the Rome Colosseum to be built on Battery hill overlooking the Scottish town of Oban. He wanted to give the stonemasons something to do off-season. Work started in 1897. Five grand and three years later, the lower circle was constructed. Its empty arches still lord over the port. After his death, McCaig’s will instructed that some two to three thousand pounds per annum in perpetuity be set aside “for the purpose of erecting monuments and statues for myself, brothers and sisters on the Tower or Circular Building called the Stewart McCaig Tower”. This plan was foiled by his sister, Catherine, who challenged the will. It is a groundbreaking case in Scottish law. One Lord Kyllachy ruled in her favour, declaring that McCaig’s plan: “If it is not unlawful it ought to be unlawful, to dedicate by testamentary disposition…the whole income of the large estate to objects of no utility, private or public, objects which benefit nobody, and which have no other purpose or use than that of perpetuating at great cost, in an absurd manner, the idiosyncrasies of an eccentric testator”.

In other words: it was stupid.

History only records the men who funded these follies, it says nothing of the men who built them, presuming they were overjoyed at such philanthropy, content merely to draw a wage in hard times. But the essential stupidity of what they were doing could not have been lost to them. Even if those “men who worked by candlelight” were being pushed to their upmost, (Joseph Williamson is recorded bellowing out his orders, driving the workers on in his entirely deranged enterprise) I feel that the stupidity of it all could not have been lost on them. “What did you do today, darling?” asks the wife of a worker chalked with dust, “I bricked up the tunnel I finished yesterday,” he replies, no wage compensating for the bewildered black look in his eyes.

I used to walk to school across a park. In the morning, YTS (that’s Youth Training Scheme, a forerunner of the Jobseeker) boys would dig up its hollowed basin.

Walking home, there would be another shift of unemployed lads filling it in. The stupidity of the task rubs off on you. Better to sit around doing nothing than doing something stupid. At least when you are idle, you are preserving yourself, holding your abilities in reserve, not expending them on fruitless endeavor, however philanthropic the intent behind it.

Walter and I spent the rest of the evening trying to work out if our work was directly descended from these rich man’s follies. Were we merely being kept busy by the some rich man, who was worried that we might get into trouble if he couldn’t find us something to do? If so, who was he, and how did we contact him? Could we possibly tell him to stop? I would say to him “Stop. It’s all right. We’ll survive without the stupid work, just give us the money and we’ll be on our way.” Walter and I laughed, and drank five more pints.