All The Life Coaches Have Life Coaches
Notes About Music, Primates, Bedclothes, Eggs And The Future Of The Universe
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Album titles and band names are the easiest thing in the world to come up with. I know, because I’ve invented dozens for the book I’ve just written. If you live with someone else who’s also always thinking up album titles and band names, it’s even easier. Ellie was away seeing her family a little while ago and, aware of what a demanding and stroppy nocturnal character our female cat Roscoe can be, she asked me how I’d slept. “Not too well,” I said. “Yet again I was bullied remorselessly by the night hag.” “‘Bullied Remorselessly By The Night Hag’ is what I’m calling my new album of stoner goth metal,” replied Ellie. A few days after that we spotted two donkeys in a field who appeared to be on intimate terms and we inevitably started speculating about their personalities and cuddling potential. “The Cuddling Potential was the infuriating novelty art rock band I formed after my dynamic adolescent garage punk outfit broke up,” I said. After a while it all started to get a bit out of control. “Would you like a cup of tea?” I would ask Ellie. “‘Would You Like A Cup Of Tea’ is the name of my fourth rate late period Britpop album from 1998,” she would reply. We have both toned it down a bit now. Even though it can be difficult, you sometimes have to face up to the fact that not everything is an album title or band name.
I’ve got a list of jobs as long as my arm today. Fortunately it’s written in really tall letters and just says “Drink wine and read a book in the garden”.
“Mad” and “weird” sometimes are genuinely employed to mean mad and weird but a lot of the time they’re just what people without an imagination call people with one.
My favourite cafe refuses to accept card payments. Customers who come in for the first time find the cafe’s stance hard to believe. The customers will be like, “Really?” And the cafe will be like, “Yes. Really. Fuck off to the cashpoint or you can’t have any salad or curry.” And the customers will be like, “But are you sure there isn’t a card machine lurking somewhere? I mean, have you properly looked? Under that big wok, for example?” The stubbornness of the cafe’s policy is part of what I love about it. Of course, cash isn’t something you can just find on the average street any more. The cashpoints many of us took for granted are gradually being replaced by extremely tiny tattoo parlours and nail salons. I tried to get some cash to spend at a rural car boot sale the other day and by the time I’d found a cashpoint to get it from and driven to the car boot sale, the car boot sale was over. It wasn’t even a car boot sale any more. It was just a field where one old man was loading some sickly-looking nasturtiums into the back of a 1990s Volkswagen Passat. And then of course there’s the perennial issue of Egg Money. This - as well as being the name of a fictional pub rock band who had their heyday in the years directly before my birth - is the important concept, drilled into me by my veteran hiker friend Keith, of always having some coins in your pocket in case you walk past a farm or house with a box full of eggs at its entrance. The drawback being that you then might have to carry some eggs - which are infamously tenuous - for several miles, when the whole point of your walk had been to feel less encumbered by everything, including protein. So in fact, as attractive as possessing egg money can seem, not possessing egg money can ultimately be a very freeing way to live.
I was on a long walk in the countryside and stopped at a junction of footpaths beside a small lane and consulted my map. A man wound down the window of a car and asked me if I was lost. I told him I was fine and was just checking my route. I have no idea why he wound down the window of a car since he wasn’t in it at the time. I have no idea if it was even his.
It’s often claimed that moving house and divorce are the two most stressful experiences in life. This isn’t true. The most stressful experience in life is trying to change a duvet cover when you’re very tired.
I will let you in on a little secret: I am absolutely brilliant at putting duvet covers on. My secret foolproof method means I can get it done in seconds, with no sense that the duvet is attempting to suffocate, drown or devour me. The above note is an example of a kind of empathetic “method” note writing, where I fully commit to putting myself “inside the mind” of someone who is terrible at putting duvet covers on and believes it to be worse than divorce or moving house.
Even though it’s scary, and I try my best not to, I do often think about the future. One of the years in the future I think about is 2034. Once I start thinking about it, it becomes quite vivid. I see it all, right there in front of me. 98% of the population of the planet is employed as a life coach. All the life coaches have life coaches. Life coaches decide to redouble their efforts, going in hard to all the last remaining outposts where people exist simply as people rather than life coaches or people striving to live their best life via life coaches. “Can I give you some life advice which will make you a proper person?” ask the life coaches. “Can you get out of my kitchen, please?” say the people. “I’ve already had six of you in here this morning, trying to tell me how I can be the ultimate version of me and unlock my true potential. I never asked for this. I just want to be able to live my most average, flawed life in peace and finish cleaning the oven.”
Some people go out of their way to seek what annoys them and revel in being annoyed by it. I’m not like that. I’m constantly looking for mossy burrows and gaps under ancient immovable boulders where I can hide from what annoys me. Many years ago, I spent a large regrettable chunk of time hanging out with people who liked being annoyed. “Come and see this,” they’d say. “It’s brilliant. 100% fucking annoying in every conceivable way.” But eventually they noticed me hanging back, being quiet, my attention wandering off into a daydream about things that were fulfilling and nice, instead of annoying. One day, my friends confronted me, with a hint of threat in their manner. “What is wrong with you?” they asked. “Do you not like being annoyed?” “Not exactly,” I admitted. “If I’m being honest, when I’ve got some free time I typically want to spend it being entertained by something really funny or unique or interesting or wise created by someone non-annoying who doesn’t speak to me like I’m a total fuckwit.” “Well, that’s kind of weird,” they said. “Each to their own, I suppose. Have you thought of seeking some help?” We have long since drifted apart. It happens, and life ploughs on, remorselessly.
I totally cleaned up at my local record shop over the weekend. I didn’t buy any records. I just noticed it never seems to get dusted or vacuumed so decided I’d help out
When they are sad, some people go out and get a mythical creature permanently inscribed on one of their shoulders or eat some posh chocolate. My method is different. When I am sad, I go out and buy some records. The problem is that when I am happy, or anywhere in between happy and sad, I also go out and buy some records.
My Liverpudlian Catholic great grandma had sixteen children. My nan, as one of the youngest of them, concluded this was far too many, and decided she would stick at just the three, since then there’d be more love to go around. I don’t feel quite this way about my record collection but sometimes, looking at it, I gain a greater understanding of my nan’s sentiment. One of the problems I have with my record collection is that I sometimes forget that I’m not a voluptuous Scouse woman born in the Edwardian era and my records are not my children. I’m not here to make sure I thinly and evenly spread my love between my records. I’m here to enjoy them in the way I choose. Sometimes I just want to put on something I know I massively love, like, say, my original American pressing of ‘Buffalo Springfield Again’ or maybe the other, identical original American pressing of ‘Buffalo Springfield Again’ that I also own in case of emergencies. Whatever happens, it’s invariably not too long until I end up playing ‘Streetnoise’, the 1969 album by Julie Driscoll, Brian Auger & The Trinity, especially its stand-out cover version of Richie Havens’ ‘Indian Rope Man’, which on some days, depending on the orbital rotation of the moon, is my favourite song of all time. When I listen to Julie Driscoll, Brian Auger & The Trinity’s version of ‘Indian Rope Man’ I am often reminded of a sunny day at this exact time in 1999, at the street market in Camden, London, which wasn’t the first time I heard ‘Indian Rope Man’ but was the first time I heard it and realised its symbiotic relationship to summer days and that it was music which had clearly been made on a far superior planet to the one where I live. Being pre-Google, that was back when I didn’t realise one of the lyrics was “retired layman looks on in scorn” and thought Julie Driscoll was singing “retired lemur looks on in scorn” instead, which - providing me with the image of a small stripy-tailed primate, kitted out in a cardigan like the one Richard Burton wore in Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf, gazing down through a monocle with contempt from the high branches of a tree at a rope and the mystical Bengali man holding it - made it even better. I remember that, as Indian Rope Man played in Camden’s snot-blackening air, I looked around me in every direction and saw cool-looking people in flamboyant clothes, including a charismatic man sporting a handlebar moustache and a bright purple velvet suit. I found myself instantly wanting to write a film for the man in the purple suit to star in, then possibly go on to direct it, using ‘Indian Rope Man’ to soundtrack its climactic scenes. Of course, if I had approached the man and he had agreed to be in my film, we would probably have run into problems: I almost certainly wasn’t ready to make the kind of film I wanted to, and would have struggled to raise the necessary budget. But who knows? Maybe everything could be different now. So when ‘Indian Rope Man’ plays in my house today I sometimes wonder where the man in the purple velvet suit is and imagine me somehow tracking him down. “I’m sorry but the individual you saw that day is long gone,” I imagine him protesting over the phone, when I finally locate him. “I have lost all my hair, I quit the band to become a personal injury solicitor and Sandra made me shave off the moustache years ago.” But, adopting a calming tone, I would reassure him that none of that mattered. “Don’t worry about all that surface nonsense,” I would say. “I believe in us. We are the same people we always have been, and we can do this.”
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My next book, 1983, will be published on August 8th. You can pre-order it here.
Apropos of nothing, here are a couple of photos of me jumping off a ruined building taken last Wednesday by (whose Substack you might also like to subscribe to).
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I have to admit to being an inveterate band name maker-upper, the one I'm most proud of is 'Nervous Germans' which I imagine were an 80s synth pop band. My talents also extend to pub names. I'm determined that I shall purchase and retire to a cosy village pub I shall name 'The Pig Tickler's Arms' where customers can indulge in this life affirming pastime whilst quaffing a pint of locally brewed ale. :)
This kind of post is why I’m here. 🌸