Life in the Freezer

Some old friends and I have a long running competition to nominate candidates for the world's worst job award. I believe that my inaugural entry, on behalf of the guy employed to scrape human faeces through a slot in the rear wall of a brick shit house on the shores of Lake Volta in Ghana, is ahead by a nose. My friend S avers that the equivalent of the graduate trainee position at the Addis Ababa abbatoir is worse. This post requires incumbents to haul the skeletons and inedible - even in Ethiopia, where bits of an animal are prized in exact inverse proportion to their comestibility - offal of slaughtered beasts to the top of a vast mountain of rotting flesh and bone. I suppose that in the end there is little to choose between these and countless other extraordinary affronts to human dignity and I sometimes think that the people who complain about hard working Eastern European immigrants taking 'our' jobs and doing them well and cheerfully for the minimum wage should be sent to do a stint as a toilet scraper in Kete Krachi. What it would teach them I'm not sure, but I'm sure they'd learn.

The closest I have come to being in a position to nominate myself for this prestigious gong came this afternoon when I embarked on a task I had unwisely been putting off for several days, emptying the contents of a chest freezer into bin bags and dumping the dripping, reeking sacks into several wheelie bins, most of them belonging to my neighbours. When you defer a task of this nature for several days, during which time the freezer is unconnected to a power source, it becomes infinitely more painful than it would have been if tackled while only the most superficial layers had begun to putrefy.

I considered, I confess, softly closing the lid and tiptoeing away. But in the end I decided that being responsible for pebble dashing the entire street with lumps of putrid flesh following an explosion caused by methane build up in the freezer would render me even less popular in the village than I am currently. As I worked my way swiftly through the Pleistocene, disinterring the remains of what had been a hare, several rabbits, a pheasant and various other still extant animal taxa, I concluded prematurely that this was going to be easier than I'd thought. Beneath the geologically recent deposits however, stacked as neatly as strata in the Grand Canyon, were layer-upon-layer of tupperware boxes containing solids and liquids identifiable only by virtue of the fading labels on their lids. As I reached, gagging, into the noisome pre-Cambrian depths of the cabinet I swear I could hear David Attenborough murmuring 'and here, in the unlikely setting of a dimly-lit garage in Wiltshire, are the astonishingly well-preserved remains of creatures never before seen by human eyes. To capture them on film, our crew had to endure conditions as extreme as exist anywhere on the planet.'

The worst, of course, was to come, for I felt bizarrely obliged to empty and wash the boxes. This experience resulted in the discovery that a deep freeze, while slowing the rate of bacterial multiplication, does not halt it altogether. I can report that a container of my wife's mussel soup, which smelt as bracing as Grimsby harbour in the teeth of an onshore gale when it entered the sarcophagus in 2006, had become considerably more pungent by the time of its exhumation. As an aside, and for fear of reprisals, I should add that my wife has many talents, including great virtuosity in the kitchen department, but her recipe for mussel soup (scrape all the revolting bits of molluscan gastro-intestinal tract left at the bottom of of bowl of mussels after the good bits have been eaten, add water and a tin of tomatoes and blitz) is an abberation. Just as I was sluicing the last of the deliquescing freezer contents down the plughole, my daughter came into the kitchen to complain that the program she and her brother were watching on TV was a bit scary. Since the channel in question was CBeebies, where the scariest thing that ever happens is Iggle Piggle having a domestic with Upsy Daisy, I decided not to invite her to look into the sink.

When Elsje grows up, I hope she has the good sense never to buy a chest freezer, the only function of which is to defer the feelings of guilt that accompany throwing away vast quantities of perfectly edible food. Whoever dreamed up the idea of freezing the stuff for years (decades in our case), thereby pointlessly consuming yet more of the earth's finite resources, must have been an evil genius on a par with the inventor of the Vacu-Vin. As I discovered this afternoon, guilt can be deferred but it can't, in the end, be evaded.

I can make you rue the day you met me.

Have you ever bought a 'self help' book? Given the popularity of the genre, it is surely surprising that there isn't an obvious surplus of intellectually satisfied working mums bursting with energy at the end of another exhausting day; well-rounded children entirely undismayed by their parents' divorce; kitchen-table entrepreneurs who have turned their off-the-cuff dinner party idea into millions and 'new' men who are fabulous lovers, caring fathers and never, ever forget their wedding anniversary.

It would be interesting to see a graph correlating sales of self help books per capita and some index of well-being by country. In the absence of data one could remain silent or one could speculate. So here goes.  According to this authoritative source, the self improvement market in the USA is worth $9.6 billion per annum; 40,000 people work as 'life coaches' and in 2005 $693 million was spent by Americans on self help books. That's $2.2 per capita, including children. The USA in 2011 ranked 31st among nation states in this quality of life index. Glancing at the countries flanking the USA in the survey: Poland, Estonia, Croatia, Lithuania, Chile, I guess that the self help book market in these places, while quite possibly flourishing, has not yet gone viral. As I said, I have no data, I'm just saying.

Is it just me or does everyone agree that $9.6 billion would do more good spent on, say, hunting down and exterminating, like the vermin they are, practitioners of female genital mutilation? Or even just sending about $1.20 to every human being on the planet, including many to whom that would represent a day's wages or more. Put differently, $9.6 billion equates to about 1.5% of the US defence budget, which gets you about a dozen dead Arabs, at the current rate of exchange.

Help me out someone. Why does anyone buy these books? In the self-esteem stakes, I'm up there with the unlucky inhabitants of Zimbabwe and Somalia but I have never sunk so low as to think that Paul McKenna, or any other loathsome charlatan can make me rich or even save me from poverty.

The Long March

The myth of Sisyphus is surely the easiest of all ancient parables to relate to. Every human life consists, in a sense, in waging an unwinnable war against gravity. From apocalyptic seismic upheavals to surgically unalterable sagging tits, the weakest of the universe's fundamental forces has her way with us all in the end. Still, it comes as a surprise - call me naive - to find oneself suddenly at the bottom of the anthill one has spent so many years laboriously climbing. I think in this situation it would be better to be an ant. I suspect that individual ants are fairly resigned to their lot in life, whereas I am not.

Mao Zedong's ascent to total power was enabled by the manner in which he turned a long series of defeats, retreats and retrenchments to his advantage. History has not, of course, been kind to Mao but he surely lived the dream in his own lifetime. It's not that I think I'm Mao or anything but they're not feeding me lithium yet, so I am still capable of fantasising that somehow I will yet snatch victory, or at least continence, from the jaws of defeat. Do I have the stomach, or the arsehole, for another assault on the anthill? I don't know.

Thank all the gods in whom I do not believe for giving me a hobby. When I was a child my profoundest wish was to be old and rich enough to be able to add a specimen of Conus gloriamaris to my shell collection. When I was old and rich enough, I found that I no longer wanted one. This constant failure of one's means to satisfy one's aspirations is another of life's bitter lessons. I have found however - and this may be my salvation - that the urge to collect, cultivate and share as many as possible of the world's plants has become a consuming passion that I hope will burn as ferociously as it does now, for the rest of my life.

Stability

I spent my childhood living in a war zone. Not literally, although until I was seven I lived in Rhodesia under Ian Smith's UDI government. The terrorists - sorry, freedom fighters - were never far from our thoughts or our doorstep. The war that did far more damage to me was waged between my parents, who hated one another with a passion that astonishes me to this day. I once asked my Dad why on earth he'd married Mum, given his obvious loathing of the very sight of her. 'Sex.' He said, loudly.

Dad was away most of the time, either on business or avoiding UK tax. I missed him desperately, viscerally and yearned for his return when he was absent. When he did come home I swear he was in a screaming row with my mother within an hour. It was always about money (he didn't give her enough; she was too profligate with what he gave her). I loved and still love my mother too and found it unbearably upsetting to witness the two central figures in my life at war. So I intervened, or tried to. I interposed my little eight-year old body between my enraged parents and begged them to stop.

So far as I recall, there was never any physical violence. Dad was a peaceful man, perhaps even a pacifist and Mum had better ways of hurting him than hitting him. But for me, they might as well have locked me in a cage and beaten me till I howled for all the joy I extracted from their parenting style.

It is fair to say that my childhood was miserable. The handful of happy memories that I have salvaged from my childhood are as tiny islands in an ocean of anguish. I could not wait to grow up - I yearned for freedom from the slavery of childhood - and it has been one of life's cruelest lessons that adulthood is even worse. Precisely because of my own miserable childhood, I did not want children of my own. My two children were both conceived unintentionally. One quickly realises, as a father, that the unconditional love that exists between a parent and a child is automatic. It requires no effort. So I did not have to decide to love my children. The feeling of their small, warm bodies clinging to mine in answer to some ancient primate need is enough to keep up bonded.

When Elsje, my daughter, was born, I was full of hopes, not only about how I wouldn't screw her up, but about how I'd help to raise her in a household full of fun, ideas, delicious food and love. She would spend her entire childhood in one house, a place she would forever think of as home.

Well, it wasn't to be. Elsje is seven and has had three addresses. Tonight she is spending her first night in her fourth home.  I cannot now recall whether I had lived at more than four addressed before I turned seven, but it wouldn't surprise me if it were true. Elsje and her brother, my son, Pieter are wildly excited about 'changing houses', for which they have Corinne to thank. In fact, Corinne is the rock to which their young lives are tethered and she deserves sole credit for the fact that they seem to be wonderfully well-adjusted, polite, friendly and ever-so-slightly mischievous young people.

I would have liked to give them the stable home that I craved when I was a child but they seem not to need it. In a sense, this was obviously going to be true. Providing them with solutions to my problems was never going to provide answers to theirs. In fairness to myself, I think this is not something most parents understand before it is too late. Or maybe that is special pleading from me.

What I mean to say is that I feel absolute anguish. I do not seem able to control the flow of events, except within a very limited purview, and I worry that my beloved children will end up as fucked-up as me, as a result of this failing. I have found a way of getting though the day, from the point where I emerge from a drug-induced coma, to the point where I sink into a drug-induced coma. But my children deserve better (or at least have done nothing to earn worse). Hey ho. Night night.

Value destruction

When I started writing 'Life in the Sauce', the predecessor to Alphatuosity, 15 months ago my hope was that writing about my catastrophe-prone random wobble through existence would prove cathartic. I also hoped that it would be funny, at least to anyone with an appreciation of slapstick and a guilty fondness for schadenfreude, that unloveliest but most distinctively human of emotions. In the first aim, LitS was a qualified success. I think the only reason I survived the darkest hours was that, when I was suicidal, I was often too busy writing to surrender to the mesmerising, beckoning call of oblivion. In the second aim I certainly failed and one unintended consequence of my blogging life has been the discovery that I possess one sick sense of humour. You, my friends, seem not to find my travails funny, for which I suppose I should be grateful.

In addition to my blogging, three other props have kept me limping along. The first and most useful of these is obviously alcohol, about which I have written more than enough. The second is the knowledge that, however far I fall, there will always be Christians, Muslims and other religious scum beneath me. Finally, there have been plants, thousands upon thousands of plants. Shortly before I went mad, when I was still forcing myself, in a daily effort of will that is now beyond my comprehension, onto the London train every day, one of my colleagues caught me browsing a plant catalogue online. 'Do your plants know you look at other plants on the internet?' He asked and I knew it was game over.

I do not, of course, think that a belief in fate is coherent but I do think that there are grooves and fissures in the landscape of possible futures down which real human lives flow like water on a beach. My recent life has been running through a particularly deep channel, a Grand Canyon snaking across the Arizona of alternative lives. This is not to absolve myself of blame. On the contrary, my precipitous decline has been entirely of my own making, to the extent we have any control at all. As a friend (sic) put it in an email, 'in the supernovae of fuck-ups, you are certainly one of the brightest and most admirable dead stars', one of the nicest compliments that has ever been paid to me.

Recent events have not so much been a case of decline and fall as turn turtle and plummet. At one time I flew across the Atlantic so frequently that I was briefly one of Virgin's most valued customers and in this capacity was invited to spend a night in a warehouse in Crawley with other gold card holders, testing out the new 'Upper Class' cabin. As experiences go, this was as surreal as they come without drugs (except alcohol, of which there was plenty), complete with piped background engine noise, which stopped momentarily every time the tape looped, causing me to awake in terror, imagining I was hurtling earthwards in a burning airframe. In the morning we assembled to provide feedback. One question we were asked was whether, if an airbag were incorporated into the seat belt (only in Upper Class naturally), we would feel safer. If you have ever felt envious of the fat cats at the front of the plane, reflect that most of my fellow panelists answered 'yes' and the airbags were duly installed.

The props that I've been leaning on these past few years feel as comforting now as an airbag between me and an uncontrolled descent into the sixth cordillera of the Andes. I'm going down and nothing, but nothing, is going to break the fall. Ironically, I'm no longer suicidal. Although death would be an eminently rational choice now (reproductive life over, children not yet fucked-up by alcoholic father, friends still abundant, not yet incontinent), I am too curious about what next spring might bring to top myself.

Today I signed a contract that wipes out my entire net worth. I sold my house for a loss of £650,000, which is what I was technically worth yesterday. I did this because there seems to be no choice. The day would soon have come when I could no longer pay the mortgage and the house would have been repossessed, leaving me bankrupt, with no house. At least this way my wife and children have salvaged enough money to start again, free of debt and the far more onerous burden of an association with me. I have some land and an awful lot of plants, around which I must now organise my life. There are also three stables, which I use for storage of pots and compost. It seems appropriate, at this time of year, to reflect that whereas Christ was born in a stable and went on to achieve immortality, I am likely to die in one and go quietly into the void.