Dabbler Diary – A holiday from oneself

Some welcome June sunshine. We sat on a bench in the park with a cone each. Scoop of Walls vanilla and a flake, no fancy stuff, passing on a traditional British summer treat to the next generation. But the heat gave me yearnings for the Med or the Canaries and a week or two doing nothing somewhere really hot. What I like about the heat is that it simplifies everything. Nothing more is needed than a table, a chair, some water to swim in, a cheap restaurant. No furnishings except ceramic tiled floors and whitewashed walls. No snacks between meals or fussed up food – just coffee early in the morning, a beer at lunch, glass of wine in the evening, perhaps some grilled fish or chicken. Best of all you, can just sit and read or think, and when that gets too much, just sit. Heat dulls the brain, which is what I like best about it – it provides a holiday from oneself. A hot holiday temporarily silences the incessant internal monologue that is, in fact, the source of this very Dabbler Diary. But alas, no such holiday is currently in prospect, so on we go.

***

The M-Shed – Bristol’s museum about Bristol, situated in a former transit warehouse on the dockside – is a great free place to take the kids when at a loose end. Great, but achingly right-on. Being achingly right-on these days includes being ‘respectful’ towards all religions except Christianity. In the ‘Faith’ display are some bits about Bristol’s diverse religious communities. To give you an idea, here’s what it says about the Hindu community:

Ila Shrimaker regularly attends the Hindu Temple in St George: ‘When I first arrived in Britain I spoke no English and found that the culture was completely new to me. Going to the Temple was a chance to meet many like-minded people who helped me feel more settled and at home. The Temple welcomes everybody….It feels like a family so there is always support and people are never made to feel alone or isolated.’

There are similar positive messages about contemporary Islam, Judaism and so on. And quite right too. But here’s the equivalent ‘tribute’ to Bristol’s Christian heritage, verbatim and in its entirety:

The Church of England

Parishioners who were suspected of breaking church law were identified by ministers and churchwardens.

Offences included personal matters, such as this example from 1675 concerning an unmarried mother. ‘Wee present Mary Bevan on suspition of Fornication, shee having been of late deliverd a child and hath noe certificate of her marriage’. Offenders were ‘presented’ for judgement to the bishop or archdeacon and, if found guilty, they might be punished or humiliated publicly in church.

You’ve got to laugh at this stuff, because god knows you can’t laugh at political comedians these days, all of whom hold precisely the same set of views which may have been radical and iconoclastic in 1967 but which are now orthodox and, therefore, unfunny. Imagine the meltdown if they gave James Delingpole a slot on BBC Three to rant about how climate change is a myth. Delingpole can himself be a bore, but who could argue with this summation of the work of ‘satirical’ comedian Russell Howard:

What’s really irksome about Howard, though, is the mind-numbing, soul-sapping conventionalism of his politics. You just know that the first day he went to the subsidised bar on his economics degree course at the University of the West of England… he got handed the usual Middle-Class Student Wanker’s starter pack marked ‘This is what you think’. There’ll have been a long section on how bad racism is, probably the worst crime in the world; one on Tories (‘tossers’); others on Israel and Palestine, the great recession (all the fault of greedy bankers and tax-dodging corporations, basically), the environment (v.v important!!), and so on. And young Russell will have gone, ‘Hey, I like the sound of this. It means not only can I spend the rest of my life feeling morally superior over all the scumbags who don’t agree with the Middle-Class Student Wanker’s starter pack but also that I’ll never have to use a single one of my brain cells ever again.’

And he never has.

***

Interrupting the incessant monologue in my head is the occasional burst of a ‘song’ consisting of the single word ‘Daytona’. Or more accurately: ‘Daytooooooonnnnaaaaaaaaaa….’ This has plagued me since the mid-1990s, when I worked in an amusement arcade at a Devon holiday resort for three summers to help fund my degree. Daytona was a driving game, and it attempted to entice customers by shouting its name at them all day and all night.

The arcade was supervised by a septuagenarian called Barry. Every morning, without fail, Barry would greet me by saying “What’s the matter, wet the bed?” He would make many an unpleasant little ‘joke’ of this ilk, and compounded the irritation by going “Eh? Eh?” until you acknowledged it, by which tactic he denied you the natural defence of ignoring him. Barry was not good company. Even for a Devonian man in his 70s he was appallingly racist. He referred to all black or Asian people as ‘coons’. When I told him that I went to university in Bristol he remarked: “I used to like Bristol but it seems now that every time you turn a corner you see a black face.” I gave him no encouragement in this line but neither did I heroically speak out. One day he purchased, from God knows where, a set of repulsive Sambo-style figurines which he cheerfully placed into the 2p pusher machine as prizes and as he did so he sang a little song about “putting in the coons.”

Barry was lecherous, frequently quizzing me about whether things “were still free and easy” at universities. He leered as he did this. He was, surprisingly, married. Every couple of weeks a newsagent called Steve would stop by the arcade and drop off a large black bin liner, sealed with gaffer tape. This was Barry’s regular delivery of pornographic magazines. He also literally stank, exuding a greasy, idiosyncratic body odour which, it took no great leap to imagine, might have been manufactured by his bad thoughts. He died of heart failure soon after my second summer at the amusement arcade and I shed no tears upon hearing the news. I’ve no idea what they said in his eulogy but I imagine it wasn’t the above.

***

But Barry aside, it wasn’t bad summer work. Six days, with two shifts alternating weekly – an 8am to 4pm, and a 4pm to 11pm. I learned a few things, including the value of silence (there was nothing sweeter than flicking the Power Off switch at the end of the night) and the secrets of the 2p pushers and the teddy-grabbing machines (between you and I, if anyone tells you they’re ‘good’ at teddy-grabbers you can ignore them. The claws are rigged to only grip properly on a set percentage of attempts, within legally determined limits).

The late shift was more fun, with a steady flow of customers to pass the time, plus some good craic – we arcadians had a camaraderie with the boys in the chip shop (we’d give them free plays on the video games in return for gigantic burgers), being united in our opposition to the ‘ents’ team (prima donnas and luvvies) and especially the security staff (psychopathic bodybuilders and police rejects).

The early shift, meanwhile, was either intolerably busy if it was raining or spirit-crushingly dull if it was sunny and all the punters were on the beach. During these interminable sunny days you might, if you were lucky, get one customer all day, and that would be a strange tubby boy who preferred to spend his entire holiday mooching round the arcade waiting for rogue tuppences to drop from the pushers. I got into the habit of passing these long hours in the change booth by drawing increasingly elaborate cartoons on the backs of balance sheets. I still have the masterpiece: a sketch of a group of pig-headed punters gathered in the arcade, one of whom is vomiting a torrent of 10p coins over a drowning caricature of myself. I must have been feeling pretty misanthropic that day. Perhaps it was Sun week (that was the dreaded post-season week when the roughest Brummies and Bristolians would descend on the camp having saved up holiday tokens in The Sun newspaper). While shading some detail on the piece, a man came up to the booth for change and noticed the drawing before I could hide it. He was a bull-like Brum, in baseball cap and vest. “What yow drawin’ mayte?’ ‘Oh nothing,’ I said. ‘No, no, lit me av a look.’. My heart sank as this brute squinted at my satirical opus. I willed him to be gone. ‘That’s not bad, that,’ he proclaimed, eventually. And then, quite unexpectedly, he produced a small notebook from his shorts. ‘Oi do a bit of sketching meself, just stuff Oi see about the place, yow know.’ He opened it at the first page and I looked. It was a line drawing of the cliffs and the sea, with a pair of arcs representing swooping gulls – all done with a biro, simple, elegant and true.

Dabbler Diary is brought to you by Glengoyne single malt whisky – the Dabbler’s choice.
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16 thoughts on “Dabbler Diary – A holiday from oneself

  1. Worm
    June 10, 2013 at 13:42

    A bracing monday jaunt Brit! Arcades are funny places aren’t they- slightly menacing (at least to me) with a hint of Pinkie’s Brighton Rock about them. I have also to my shame never worked out the mysteries of fruit machines either, (which seems one of those sorts of things that ‘real men’ are supposed to know, along with how to change a tyre and put up wallpaper.) In the pub I once managed we had a fruit machine and various town reprobates used to come in on rotation and use it every lunchtime, and would invariably hit the jackpot within half an hour of playing. I did try to understand their method but it seemed very arcane

    • Brit
      June 10, 2013 at 20:24

      I don’t think there’s really any secret to them, any more than any other form of gambling – i.e. in the long run you lose.

    • becandben@gmail.com'
      Ben
      June 11, 2013 at 10:02

      The jackpot is in the handle on a normal fruit machine – or so Ian Dury claims. He looked like the sort of bloke who might know.

  2. nigeandrew@gmail.com'
    June 10, 2013 at 14:00

    But Brit, I must remind you that our greatest living philosopher, Alain de Botton, states authoritatively that the trouble with going on holiday is that the one thing we cannot take a holiday from is… wait for it… ourself. Profound stuff, I’m sure you’ll agree.

    • Brit
      June 10, 2013 at 20:22

      That’s tough, since if any man would need a holiday from himself, you’d think it’d be Alain de Botton.

  3. bensix@live.co.uk'
    June 10, 2013 at 14:32

    I was once standing in a library when I heard a friend mention Russell Howard. As I was feeling cantankerous, I said something along the lines of, “Russell Howard? He’s crap! I hate Russell Howard.” What they had said, of course, was, “Look behind you – it’s Russell Howard!”

  4. zmkc@ymail.com'
    June 10, 2013 at 14:34

    It’s been a long day so forgive the foolish question, but what’s the “ents’ team”

    • Brit
      June 10, 2013 at 20:23

      Entertainments. Singers and dancers and what have you – think Hi-de-Hi.

  5. peter.burnet@hotmail.com'
    Peter
    June 10, 2013 at 14:51

    I once took a holiday from myself. It was wonderful, but I was somewhat abashed when I returned ready to tackle the world, only to have my image in the mirror stare back at me and say: “Back so soon?”

    “Luv, I think I need a holiday from myself”.

    “Yes, I think I do too.”

  6. Worm
    June 10, 2013 at 16:18

    Not sure what this says about me but I live in the same town as Russell Howard. He’s probably our biggest local celebrity, along with Ian Beale from eastenders…

  7. Gaw
    June 10, 2013 at 22:06

    I do enjoy Stewart Lee’s full-on bitterness and fondly recall his assessment of Russell Howard’s charity efforts (reported here: http://www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-previews/stewart-lee-on-russell-howard-130214):

    ON Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, Lee analysed the figures of the three-day bike ride for Sports Relief and concluded Russell Howard would make more money by giving up comedy.

    “If Russell Howard would cycle all day, every day, for a year, he could make £13,357,014.30p,” he calculated. “And yet he chooses not to do that. He chooses instead to make £4m for himself.”

    He imagined the African village where the well had run dry and a father had to explain to his starving son that Howard had stopped raising money cycling because he had gone back to Mock The Week “to make jokes about Susan Boyle having a hairy face”.

    “Russell Howard’s as good as murdered those kids,” he sighed.

  8. hooting.yard@googlemail.com'
    June 11, 2013 at 08:13

    Mention of both religion and comedy brings to mind the impeccably “edgy” South Park duo and their hit musical The Book Of Mormon. While I suppose it is conceivably “edgy” to make fun of Mormons in the US, they are hardly relevant in the UK. This does not stop the bien pensants from having a good laugh. But of course there is one religion, with a significant presence in the UK, that it would indeed be “edgy” to hold up to ridicule. Odd how nobody dares do so.

    • Worm
      June 11, 2013 at 08:44

      methodists?

  9. henrygjeffreys@gmail.com'
    June 11, 2013 at 14:56

    Lovely diary. I like to think that all true Brummies have the soul of poets or have I been watching too many series with Timothy Spall in them?

    Worm – anything to add?

    • Worm
      June 11, 2013 at 21:39

      I wouldn’t know, I have never met an actual brummie. I drive through the city to my office in an armoured vehicle blasting the zombie-like populace out of the way with water cannons

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