So, banks. We all use them, right? I guess some people don’t. Some people probably don’t trust banks, and keep their cash in neat little stacks under the mattress (doesn’t that get uncomfortable?), but a lot of us use banks. They’re a necessary evil. And I’ve never met someone who was enthusiastically supportive of their bank. No one has ever said to me, “Yes! I LOVE my bank! They make things easy for me and they give me cake and whisky when I’ve been especially good at managing my money!” No one has ever even said to me, “Oh yeah, my bank, they’re pretty helpful, actually.”

People have often, however, indicated how terrible/horrible/painful/stressful the experience of using a bank is. They say things like, “Wow! It would be easier to saw my own left leg off with a butter knife than access my account online!” and, “Oh yeah! Last time I went into a bank, I waited seven weeks to talk to someone. It was really boring, but at least I finally got to see what I’d look like with a beard.”

My life is quadruply stressful, because I have a bank in the USA and a bank in the UK. Do you know how many things can go wrong when you have TWO banks to deal with? Especially two banks that can’t interact with each other, because there’s a magic force field halfway across the Atlantic which prevents transatlantic transactions?

Here are just a few of my favorite bank-related memories:

- That time I wanted to wire some of my own money from my bank account in the USA to my bank account in the UK. My UK bank was like, “Sure! We can do that, no problem! Just fork over a 50% fee, wait four weeks, and you’ll be on your way!” And my US bank was like, “Um, you want to send money WHERE? To ENGLAND? I think I’ve heard of it, didn’t we beat them in a war once?” And then, after a lot of hemming and hawing and looking up of obscure codes, they were like, “Ohhhh yeahhhh, THAT place. No problem. Just fork over a 50% fee, wait another four weeks, and you’ll be on your way!” Unfortunately there was no money left to send myself after I’d paid all the fees.

- That time I wanted to access my account online. In fact, every time I have ever wanted to access my account online. In order to do this, I need a pointless little keypad that I stick my card into to produce a code. Which means I obviously also need my card. But! That’s not enough! I ALSO need a special (very lengthy) code that’s written on a laminated piece of paper they once sent me in the post. These things allow me to successfully log in about 80% of the time. The remaining 20% of the time I get a little red error message that says, “Sorry! We’re unable to log you in because WE’RE IDIOTS you recently used the back button on your browser.” Yes, yes I did use the back button on my browser, once, in 2004. SORRY.

- That time my card got eaten up by the cash point outside my local Tesco. I asked an important-looking Tesco employee if he could help, but of course he couldn’t help, because the cash points attached to his store are nothing to do with him. He pointed out that a lot of people had lost their cards in those machines lately. “Maybe you should ring your bank!” he said. So I rang my bank. At first all they could say was, “Um, I dunno, we can’t really help you, have you talked to the store manager?” But finally they suggested I go into a branch the next day. As the next day was Sunday, I went in the following Monday, and was seen by a very friendly representative who could see that some unusual activity had been flagged up on my account, but who couldn’t understand what that unusual activity was, because the person who had flagged it up hadn’t put anything in the notes. Finally he looked through all my recent transactions and decided that it was probably because I had withdrawn some cash in Wales last weekend. He lifted the restriction on my account, and ordered me a new card, which arrived promptly three weeks later.

- That time my US bank cancelled my debit card. Luckily, I was in the US at the time, so I went into a branch and asked the lady at the counter, above which was hung a sign that said, “We’re here to help!”, if she could help me.
“Oh no,” she said. “I couldn’t possibly help you. You’ll have to call that number, see, on the back of your card? They can help you.”
So I called the number. I sat on hold for a day, maybe two, and presently I was put through to a chirpy woman who was able to identify the problem immediately.
“You went abroad without telling us,” she admonished. I felt like a child who has been caught doing something he knows he shouldn’t do but can’t help doing, like eating ice cream before dinner.
“But I live abroad!” I said. “You know this. You regularly send mail to my address in the UK.”
“No,” said the chirpy lady. “We have no record of any address abroad.”
“But you send mail to my address in the UK!”
“No,” said the chirpy lady. “We have an address in California.”

So now, every time I move an inch, I feel like I should call both of my banks and assure them that IT’S OKAY! IT’S JUST ME! SHIFTING POSITION A LITTLE, BECAUSE MY FOOT HAS FALLEN ASLEEP!

But if I’m honest, some of my aggression towards banks – maybe most of it – can be accounted for by the fact that banks are all about money, and money stresses me out, even at the best of times. Banks stand there, on high streets and in strip malls, like living monuments to mortgages, loans, debt, wealth, capitalism, materialism, social (im)mobility, long work weeks, the American dream, the credit crunch. They represent what we have but also what we don’t, what we can never, have. And they add unnecessary complication to an already complicated thing.

Maybe I’d be willing to live with a lumpy mattress after all.

❧

I just got back from a trip to New York. I’m one of those people who really enjoys the process of getting somewhere, particularly the bit where you’re not allowed to use your phone, or the internet (I’ve used wifi on a plane once; the thrill lasted approximately a minute, after which point I was a) frustrated with how slow it was, and b) annoyed that I could now see that I had a bunch of work-related emails that I was definitely not going to answer, because I was ON A PLANE, but was nevertheless going to worry about for the remaining three hours of the flight). I’d probably like it if you still had to take ships across the Atlantic. Think about it: two weeks (I’ve made that timeframe up, I have no idea how long it takes to get a boat from England to the USA) of uninterrupted reading, writing and thinking time, all set against the dramatic backdrop of the sea!

Anyway, the advantage of air travel (apart from, you know, the advantage of air travel) is that you get to watch films. As this is basically the only time I watch films, I have to cram a lot into a few hours, so I watched three on the way out. And I know I’m behind the times here, but Bridesmaids? Really?

If you haven’t seen it, it’s about a woman called Annie who gets picked as her best friend’s maid of honor even though her life isn’t perfect. I mean, other stuff happens, but I think that’s the crux of it, and I had been led to believe that it was some sort of brilliant, funny, clever example of how women can be brilliant, funny and clever in films. In theory I’m not much of a feminist, but I’m willing to get behind something that portrays women as independently hilarious and witty, and who doesn’t like to laugh?

So imagine my chagrin when, having reclined my seat back and asked for a glass of red wine to accompany my chicken and root vegetable mush, I discovered that I wasn’t laughing.

At first I thought maybe it was me. I was being judgmental, I needed to loosen up, my brain was too focused on worrying about whether or not I’d locked the back door and turned the gas off. Then I thought it was probably just a bit slow; maybe they were just getting all the bad gags out of the way before building up to a mind-blowing climax. But somewhere during the seemingly interminable “two bridesmaids trying to one-up-each-other-with-not-very-amusing-speeches-at-an-engagement-party” scene I began to think that maybe I was forming what might be called an Opinion.

Here’s what I see: this film is the female equivalent to something like The Hangover (by the way, I almost never read reviews or articles about films – which may make my writing about a film somewhat questionable – but I’m 99% sure that about a million more qualified people have already said that).

I don’t mean female equivalent in the sense that it’s taken the things that The Hangover does for men and adapted them for a female audience, I mean it’s exactly the same, but with women as the principle characters. Which is fine! It’s great, actually. I mean, I guess it’s great. I guess it’s great that it’s now okay for there to be a scene in a film during which a bunch of women vomit on each other’s heads and shit onto expensive dresses, or during which a woman gets wasted on a plane and the end result is not a questionable one night stand but a comedy tackle from an air marshall. So yay! Crass, heavy-handed physical comedy is now gender-neutral! But wait. It’s still crass, heavy-handed physical comedy, even if women are doing it too.

In fairness, there were a few good things. I really like Kristen Wiig. I wanted to give her a hug and then hang out with her. And it was pretty weird to see Sookie from Gilmore Girls not being Sookie (wow, I think this is the most times I have made pop culture references in a blog post, or possibly my life, ever).

My absolute favorite moment in the film happens when Annie, exasperated and exhausted, is sitting at a bar with her cop (boy)friend, talking about how her best friend from childhood is getting married and seems to have all her shit together. “I feel like her life is going off and getting perfect and mine is just like phrrr.. [makes sound of things going bad],” she says.

I don’t think I know anyone who hasn’t had a thought like that. I know a lot of people, myself included, who have thoughts like that a lot. That’s a good line. That’s a good moment for a film to have.

But it was not really a laugh-out-loud-funny film, not most of the time. There was too much noise and too much padding around something that was strong enough to stand on its own. I’m inclined to like a film about a woman who doesn’t really know how to make her life work in the way she wants it to. I don’t need a scene where her housemate’s Vicky Pollard-inspired sister (see! pop culture!) lifts up her tracksuit top to reveal that the huge tattoo she accidentally got last night is now infected to make me like it. I don’t need a scene where a bride-to-be shits in the street under cover of a merengue-like wedding dress to make me like it. In fact, as you may have gathered, these things make me less inclined to like it.

I keep wondering what happened to subtlety. Why is subtlety not cool? Why can’t we just make and enjoy a film that celebrates how funny it is that none of us have any clue how to be grownups, how funny it is that we don’t all have cup-holders in our cars or a lot of money or a job we like or a sense of what’s good for us? That stuff is funny, and it’s funny because it’s true, and because it’s a little painful but less painful when we realize we’re not alone, not because it resembles the cartoons we used to watch when we were kids.

❧

Oh, what a difference a year makes. And maybe that’s just it: maybe it’s circumstantial, maybe it’s related to the fact that a year ago I was there and now I am here, and everything, but also nothing, has changed.

But seriously, have you looked at the internet lately?

I know the internet is not just this Thing, this big mouth-breathing monster that sits in the corner and grunts occasionally and then looks back down at the keyboard. But indulge me for a moment. Pretend it is. And just look at the state of it! Greasy hair, stained t-shirt, dried spittle at the corner of a tea-stained mouth. It hasn’t been exercising enough; it hasn’t been realising its potential or even acknowledging it has worth.

Sometimes (okay, a lot of times) I don’t write rants on Sundays. Sometimes I don’t write anything, all day, which is not good when that is basically what I am supposed to be doing all day, every day. But honestly, a lot of the time I can’t actually pinpoint what it is I’m thinking, or what it is exactly that’s annoying me, even when I know something is annoying me. There’s so much noise. It’s like that scene in Arcadia (which I know I reference in every other blog post), when Valentine Coverly says “There’s just too much bloody noise!” and you aren’t sure if he means there’s too much noise around his data, or too much noise in the room, in general.

I am not going to do that thing I hate and blame the Internet Monster, and say that the reason I sometimes can’t write or sometimes can’t identify what it is that’s annoying me is that the Internet Monster has been mouth-breathing in my ear all day and I’m just so…wait, what was I saying? Because I still really, really hate that. I am not going to blame one of the greatest (for better or worse) technological and possibly sociological phenomenons of our age for the fact that sometimes I sit down at my computer and instead of banging out another 2,000 words of my book I look at photos of expensive chairs and impossibly beautiful women in Barbour coats on Tumblr. Because if computers didn’t exist and I was chained to a desk writing my book in my own blood with a stick I would still find ways not to write it. I can promise you that.

But. Part of the reason I don’t write, or I don’t know what’s bothering me, or I can’t figure out what the fuck my book is supposed to be about, is because lately – in the last year, or two, maybe – I haven’t been exercising that part of my brain that ignores everybody. Everything I read or see or hear that involves anything or anyone else in some way influences what it is I think I should be doing. Which isn’t right. And because I read and see and hear a lot, my sense of what I should be doing has been completely diluted by this sense that I’m not doing what they’re doing, how can I be more like them?

I am envious or jealous almost all the time because of what other people are doing. I don’t actually know what other people are doing, of course. The lives I see online are like little icebergs, and I will never collide with most of them, so I will never know what lies beneath. But I can extrapolate from an offhand comment – “what a great day”, for instance – and, because I like to invent things, and in a perfect world I would be inventing them on paper for an adoring public, not in my head for the sake of destroying my own self-esteem, imagine that what this means is that the person who had a great day is, at 24, already a bestselling author with a Booker nomination and a big house.

I guess the thing is, there’s just so much. Of everything. I’m drowning in everything. And it isn’t that I can’t shut it off and it isn’t that the Internet Monster is destroying the world. It’s just that I’ve lost my bearings. I’m stuck in a bad maze. I’m tired of a lot of things, which is fine, but I need to know how to find the things that excite me, rather than just encountering, again and again, in different incarnations, the things I’m tired of.

There’s just so much funny, for instance. There’s so much funny that none of it is funny anymore. It’s too near the bone, or else it means nothing at all. If I read one more girl’s clever blog about her slightly zany life (and, looked at from the right angle, whose life isn’t slightly zany?) that overuses capital letters, sentence fragments and exclamation points to drive home just how FUNNY! It all is! I will probably cry. (And am I guilty of doing this? Yes. Of course I am, sometimes. I’m as susceptible as everyone else, and I know it: that’s the point.).

Meanwhile, on Twitter, that medium for even more transient expression, there are all these jokes! These one-liners that, taken out of context, are mean or meaningless or both. And all this talk about television! Increasingly I wonder if Twitter is actually just a way for people who watch a lot of TV to feel like they’re part of a community. And they can #xfactor to their hearts’ content, and Caitlin Moran can make as many quips about the contestants as she wants, and other people can retweet Caitlin Moran’s quips about the contestants as much as they like (this is not a criticism of Caitlin Moran, by the way: she is a tremendous writer, both funny and poignant, and I have a lot of respect for her). But it’s still a Sunday evening and they’re all still sitting at home alone watching television and talking about how bad it is – or, even more depressing, how good it is.

Am I jaded? Yes, I am, a bit. I’m tired of smug people telling us what they ate and wore and accomplished today. I’m tired of self-referential Techcrunch pieces, self-referential Guardian articles, self-referential tweets. I’m tired of reading blogs about how to be more productive (why do these blogs never suggest “not spending your entire morning reading blogs about productivity” as a tip for being more productive?). I’m tired of feeling perpetually as if I’m not keeping up, even when I know that everyone else feels exactly the same way, because no one could ever keep up, even if they tried.

But I’ll say again: our imaginary Internet Monster, slobbering and abused in the corner, is not the cause of my angst. You know what the cause of my angst is? My self. My negativity. It takes a certain amount of energy and imagination to sift (or, perhaps, see) through a billion photos of well-dressed people standing in the middle of the street and a bunch of blog posts about that really awkward thing I did yesterday or that really funny thing that happened to me involving a bookcase, a dildo and a dwarf, but it can be done. No one says that books should be abolished because there are some really bad authors out there (maybe some people do say that, but they’d be wrong). And no one is standing over me forcing me to spend a few hours every day looking at things that, fundamentally, are making me depressed. I’m doing that all on my own.

What is making me angsty, therefore, is not that there is so much shit: it is that I am allowing myself the luxury of getting down about all the shit, instead of ignoring all the shit. I don’t have to read the things I read, and, more importantly, I don’t have to react negatively to them.

I think maybe a year ago I was too excited about everything to ignore anything, if you see what I mean. I think a lot of us were. But now we have the greatest freedom of all: the freedom to choose what we engage with.

So welcome to the era of accountability: in which the Internet Monster stops doing the work for us, and we have to be discerning enough to discover and promote the content we actually care about, instead of being forever mired in the content we resent. No one said it would be easy.

❧

Every Saturday we go to the farmer’s market. No, that’s not true. Every Saturday I go to the farmer’s market. We used to go together, but I think he got annoyed with the conversations we would have when we got there. “Do you want a chicken?” he would say, as we waited in the queue to buy eggs.

“I don’t know,” I would say. “Do you want a chicken?”
“It’s up to you!” he would say, trying either to be accommodating or infuriating, I’m not sure which.
“It’s up to you!” I would say back, because I am incapable of intelligent conversation pre-breakfast (and indeed sometimes post-breakfast, too).
“I don’t mind,” he would say, so I would not buy the chicken because it seemed to make sense to mask ambivalence with frugality – we don’t need meat to survive, we’ve already got bacon at home, etc etc etc.

But then, later, milling around near the vegetable stand, he would be at it again.
“Do you want some celeriac?” he would say.
“I don’t really know what to do with celeriac,” I would say.
“There are lots of things you can do with celeriac.”
“Yes, but I don’t really know what to do with celeriac.”

I would think maybe that was it, the end of the conversation about what vegetables we did or didn’t want in our house, the end of the string of humiliating admittances I would have to make about the gaps in my culinary knowledge (“You bought rhubarb?” “I thought it was celery!”, etc). But a few minutes later, he’d say something like,
“Is there anything else we need?”
“I don’t know,” I would say, because I really didn’t know: it’s impossible to know precisely what kind of fruits or vegetables are necessary for the week ahead, especially when weeks are so unpredictable, and you can’t even say for certain on which nights you’ll be dining in and on which nights you’ll be scoffing a quick sandwich from Sainsbury’s (BLT, reduced to clear, 49p) before a gig you’d forgotten you were going to.
“Well, is there anything else you want?”
“I don’t know. Is there anything else you want?”
“It’s up to you. Do you want some kale?”
“I don’t know. Do you want some kale? Obviously you do want some kale, since you brought it up. So just buy some fucking kale and stop asking me about the fucking kale.”

At which point we’d not only not buy the kale but also forget to buy bread, and later I would regret that we hadn’t bought a chicken but be annoyed at my impulsive decision to buy all of the broccoli in Oxford, now yellow and wilted and sitting in a tote bag on the kitchen table.

So anyway, as you can probably understand, I mostly go on my own nowadays.

I enjoy this. I like the ritual of it, and I like the bargaining power it gives me when I’ve come home with eggs and bacon and mushrooms and I get to say, “I brought home the bacon, you cook it!” And our local farmer’s market is held in a primary school behind the Tesco Metro on the Cowley Road, so I like cutting through the Tesco on my way to the market, using it as a public footpath, buying nothing in a mute display of smugness. I like listening to music on the walk. I even like that I’m always, without fail, quite late, so I often miss out on all the desirable goods (asparagus during asparagus season, cream from the local dairy, bagels from the bagel lady), because when I do get my hands on one of these items, it feels like a real victory for laziness. Look, I slept till noon and I have asparagus pee!

But there are some times when the experience is trying. It all depends on my mood. Some Saturdays, it’s like walking into a big warm fuzzy hug full of sunshine and cheese and dreadlocks. There are delightful youngsters smiling up at everyone, beautiful families pushing discreet prams, students stocking up on muddy potatoes, old eccentric women buying strawberries and garlic. Other days, though. Other days there are a bunch of kids screaming, and smug people who have successfully procreated pushing their prams over my unprotected toes, and students who still smell of last night’s cheap booze, and old women who snarl like hyenas if they sense you might be eyeing up the same pumpkin.

In particular, I resent the queueing system, or lack thereof. For a society so preoccupied with queueing, Britain really can get it wrong sometimes. For example: people tend to queue for the bread in such a way that they block the queue for the eggs and cheese. Why? They could easily queue in such a way that they did not block the queue for the eggs and cheese, but the one or two times I’ve tried to impose some order, I’ve been skipped over and eventually reprimanded for not standing in the right place. At the vegetable stand, standard practice is to select a number. This is ostensibly to make queueing easier (there’s much less stress if you know that, eventually, your number will be called, at which point it is your right to be served), but people don’t seem to understand that there’s no need to jostle or compete, and rather than stepping back to allow others to peruse the peppers, they hover near the tills, as if their constant presence can somehow change the order of numerals.

But the really annoying thing, the most annoying thing, is that it’s impossible to stay annoyed. Just as soon as I’ve decided to be grumpy for the rest of the day because I’ve missed out on the last of the milk and I don’t know where to stand so that I am actually in a queue for anything, let alone for what I actually want, the woman next to me, equally perplexed, laughs and asks if this is the queue for the eggs. Or the vegetable man smiles as he weighs my vegetables and helps me fill my bags. Or the guy at the bakery says, “see you next week”, indicating that I’ve been taken for a local, that my regular presence has been noted. And I can’t be grumpy anymore. I just can’t. No matter how grumpy I was. No matter how many prams have trampled my toes. No matter how many people are holding the exact same Guardian Hay Festival tote bag (including me).

Is this a rant or an ode? I don’t know anymore. Dear farmer’s market: give me my grump back. Or don’t. Whatever.

❧

This week’s is a day late, too. I spent yesterday outside in the sun eating food and drinking cans of gin and tonic and cycling along the river and generally pretending that I had no obligation other than to avoid obligations.

So I’ve been writing again. Not that you’d know it: the result of three straight days of working on one piece, for instance, was 3,000 words that, once finished, I wanted to immediately erase from both the page and my memory.

I’m not going to lie and tell you that I am waking up at 6 am raring to go and spending the next 10 hours at my computer writing furiously, even though theoretically I could be doing that, because theoretically – THEORETICALLY – I have time for that now. It would be unfair to give you the impression that I was doing that. I’m not doing that. I am mostly sitting and looking out my window, considering the particular Englishness of the greens and greys, wondering whether there is a way to rid a garden of elder, noticing that the hole in my favorite (or at least most worn) jeans is getting bigger, realising that I’m unlikely to replace them until they become completely unwearable, deciding what I really need is a cup of coffee: a cup of coffee will fix it (whatever it is)! And then, occasionally, spitefully, typing something, hitting the keyboard too hard because the sound of writing happening is so rare and pleasant.

I am trying to get up a bit earlier, though. That’s a lie. I’m trying to get up in a more normal way. Over the last year I’ve developed a seriously fucked up method of waking up, which involves setting my alarm for an hour, sometimes two hours, before I actually want to get out of bed, and then hitting snooze for that hour (or two). Every single day.

In a way I enjoy the sensation of waking up and dozing: of becoming aware of things, of becoming aware of the pleasure of going back to sleep. When you just sleep straight through, you don’t get to appreciate how nice it is to sleep. The flipside is that when you’re appreciating how nice it is to sleep, you’re not wanting to get up, which means you waste two hours every morning sort of sleeping but not really sleeping.

So I downloaded this app for my iPhone which supposedly wakes you up in a more natural way. You put the phone on your bed and it senses when you’re awakeish and that’s when the alarm goes off. It gives you a half hour window, and the snooze time varies. I’ve been using it for a few days. It seems to work, except for yesterday, when I was simply too grumpy to get out of bed, and the day before, when someone knocked on the door at 7:30 and I staggered downstairs in a dressing gown to discover it was a man asking if we could move our car, only it wasn’t our car because we don’t own a car, so I went back upstairs and then was retrospectively annoyed about the whole thing so went back to sleep for an hour.

But even so, even though I’m slowly and half heartedly trying to sort out my fucked-up waking up habits, I’m still not waking up and leaping out of bed and writing stuff for hours and hours.

No. This is what I do:

I say, “Oh, I’m going to write something today!” And I sit down in front of the computer and I think, “Oh, I’ll just read an article or two. To inspire myself.” And so I read an article or two, and I click on a few more links, and check Twitter, where everyone is more successful and interesting than me. Three hours later, I find myself hunched over my desk looking at pretty dresses online, deeply depressed because:

a) I can’t afford all the pretty dresses
b) I will never be able to afford the pretty dresses because over the course of the morning I’ve forgotten how to write
c) It doesn’t matter anyway, because even when I could write I was never as good as all the really good writers out there
d) So I don’t deserve all the pretty dresses anyway

So I eat some beans on toast to cheer myself up and watch Alain de Botton talk about architecture and freak out because I haven’t written anything yet and the day is almost over, even though it’s only 1 o’clock (it’s like that feeling on Sundays you get upon waking, that the day is almost over simply by having begun). So I write a few words.

And then I spend the next six hours doing it all over again.

❧