Not Quite Real

How I Ended Up Playing A Piano Accordion in an Empty Tube Train

Somebody once said that “a gentleman is one who can play the bagpipes, but chooses not to”, and I think that probably holds true for the piano accordion, too. It’s one of those instruments that only really works well in two places, and they are:

a.) The Amelie soundtrack. 

and

b.) A raging inferno.

Why I happen to own one, then, is a mystery even to me. Even more of a mystery is that I can sometimes manipulate its horrific bellows in order to make a sound. Sometimes it makes a nice tune, and sometimes it makes a noise like a goat giving birth, and frankly it’s pot luck as to which emerges. I tend to roll a dice and hope for the best. Usually, I don’t had much need to play the thing, but I’ve been enlisted to play in a band of sorts with some friends who (perhaps unwisely) think they need a piano accordion. To give them credit, it actually sounds really nice with the guitar and the piano when I’m not cocking up the arrangement, or accidentally hitting one of the buttons on the side wrongly. 

For those of you who have never had the privilege of carrying a piano accordion a long distance, consider yourselves lucky. They are a very strange shape, and there is literally no container on earth (other than, I suppose, a piano accordion case) that you can put them in. I found myself embarking upon a train journey a couple of weeks ago with a piano accordion slung across my back. You bump into things a lot with something like that. You bump into people and apologise profusely, before being roped into conversations about why you have a piano accordion on your back. You bump into doors as you go through them. You rather worryingly clonk the accordion to a level where you’re not sure if it’ll play, and secretly pray to the gods that it won’t. 

Carrying the accordion on the tube is a completely new circle of hell. There is no dispensation for special treatment - on the tube, you could be carrying a euphonium, dressed as a rhino, whilst on fire and not be noticed. All the novelty disappears to be replaced by “a man is hitting me with something, I say fellow, remove him from the train”. Imagine my glee, then, my unrestrained elation, when I found myself on a train with only two other people down the other end of the carriage. And come the next station, they got off, leaving me along in the carriage.

This was one of those times, I thought to myself. I could either sit in silence, and regret it in the future, or I could play a piano accordion in a deserted tube train, between Edgeware Road and Marylebone. 

So I did. And I enjoyed it. I played the Amelie theme. It felt strangely melancholy, until the dice of fate came up unfavourably and I made the goat noise. 

Thoughts As You Realise Youre Not Going To Sleep

The first sign is that seditious little buzzing in your head. It’s probably the cup of tea just before bed. I mean, it’s not a good idea to have those things just before you go to sleep, is it? Milk would have sufficed, or just a glass of water, or nothing really. Why do I need a drink anyway? 

I guess looking at my iPhone hasn’t helped, too. All those flashing lights. I guess people back in the 1800s slept a lot better than us because they weren’t constantly hearing their phone buzz, although I hear that fighting the Crimean war/campaigning for the vote/oppressing the colonies wasn’t exactly conducive to good sleep. I wonder what they thought of as they drifted off, those men and women in 1836? 

The buzzing doesn’t go away. And unlike usual, it doesn’t seem to go away when I put my head on the pillow. This is the point where that dreadful sinking feeling starts to happen - the sudden realisation that tonight is going to be one of those nights where one lies in bed disconsolately until five before sleep comes.

I can’t sleep. How can I sleep? I spent the last hour before bed looking at a massive piece of writing about the making of the movie Moon, and now my head is full of thoughts of these cold angular facilities. Moon is a film that you really need to see. You might find that you only want to see it once, but it’s compulsory.

It’s one of those films where it is crucial that you don’t know anything going into it other than this:

There is a man, whose name is Sam Bell. He’s working on his own on a facility on the moon, where he is a miner. Something goes horribly wrong.

And that’s it. That’s all you should know. If you like Sci-Fi, watch this. If you don’t like Sci-Fi, watch this. If you like horror, you’re sure to find something in here for you. If you don’t like horror, don’t worry! It’s not scary, just deeply, deeply moving. 

And I assure you, it’s visually so stunning that you’ll - 

But here I am. Lying in bed at three in the morning wondering when I’m going shuffle out of the world of the waking, and it’s just not happening. 

After a while I start to realise how silly this is. I mean, it’s only three. In London, people are spilling out of clubs and bars. In Ronnie Scott’s jazz club on Frith Street, Michael Mwenzo is just finishing the late late show. He’s probably dancing up through the seats at the moment. The South Bank will be cold and empty. 

But there’s something rather different about being in bed at this hour and wanting to sleep. A despondency descends behind the buzzing of my head and it doesn’t really go away. When it’s late and you can’t sleep, you forget that the morning is going to come. I don’t mean that in some sort of pretentious way - it just happens. It seems that the night is going to stretch on and on forever, and your only hope is to ride it out. 

Arise! Arise! (And Windy Weather)

Blogs and I have had a long and troubled relationship. One minute we’re deeply infatuated, the next - well, I’ve forgotten about them. No doubt this one is going to go the same way, but I really don’t want it to. Dammit, I’m going to write this thing, and nothing is going to get in my way. 

Not even the Pirates of the Caribbean 3-esque storm that is rocking England at the moment. It’s kind of blown over here at the moment, but man, last night it was the sort of weather that causes good men and women to don sou’westers and steer fishing boats through rolling waves. I love rough weather. Something about the sound of rain against the window and wind blowing around the building awakens the pirate in me, and I lie in bed listening to it and dreaming up stories. 

Or I go outside and immediately regret it. Windy weather is fine, but wind and rain is a special kind of pleasure for the person inside, but a special kind of torture for those travelling. A kind of soggy camaraderie develops at bus stops and in lobbies of buildings where people shelter from the rain. The most pitied are those with large bags, which one imagines are full of non-waterproof goods. Expensive technology, or prized manuscripts, or… soap are turning to nonfunctional goop while the poor person lugs them around the rainy city. You watch them avoid puddles like landmines, and walk with the brisk panic of someone cold and wet and late and worried. 

Then there are the parents and children. The parents are tired, and the children are either deeply miserable about the weather, or relishing in it like only a small child can. The former involves crying, and repeated pleas to be carried, and the latter involves splashing, and raincoats, and jabbing passers by with small umbrellas, and hasty apologies from the parents. They seem to be in a lose/lose situation, and can’t wait to get back to a warm house and cup of tea and small muddy wellington boot prints all over the carpet which they just cleaned yesterday, and getting a child out of a raincoat (which seems to be a spatial puzzle of Escher like proportions) and oh god the work and stress and why didn’t I listen to Julie when she said never have kids and why didn’t we just stay inside and watch Bob the Builder I think I could have coped with that. Poor parents. 

We sit at the bottom of the pity hierarchy. Bedraggled, wind blown, tired. We slump in tube trains with a desolate silence somehow even more miserable than the usual one. We slip on the wet floors. We emerge from tube exits and raise our collars and sigh as our umbrellas are blown inside out. 

All over the country people are having days like this. Sure, we get cold and wet and miserable, but there’s something a little more dramatic about it than dreary grey days. We’re brought together by zippers and galoshes and umbrellas and footprints on slippery floors, and “I’m sorry I’m late, have you been waiting long” and packed coffee shops and brief moments of warmth and dryness. 

Being outside isn’t so bad, perhaps. 

Photo: A Storm at Sea, Pietro Muler

Is It Wrong To Dislike Inception (And Other Stupid Questions)

This is the latest thing. When people exhaust talking about Antenna Issues or Facebook privacy concerns or the Oil Spill they move onto talking about Inception and Contrarianism. “Is it wrong to dislike Inception?” they ask. Certainly some of the reviews published have been deliberately contrarian. Roger Ebert recently rounded the argument up in a blog post written far better than mine, so I suggest you read his, but he pointed out some of the more contrarian approaches. I have a problem with this. What I don’t have a problem with are the people who eloquently, carefully, and objectively point out flaws and weaknesses. I don’t want to write a review of Inception, and the closest I’m going to get is coming later, so I don’t want to go into details, but there’s some very clever deconstruction and interpretation by critics that leads them to suggest that Inception is flawed and… 

I can’t go on. All of the above was me wearing my Movie Reviewer Hat, which is infinitely inferior to my Movie Watcher Hat, complete with popcorn holder and ‘person-in-the-row-behind-annoyer’ *. And while what I said above was probably correct - was certainly correct, my heart and soul is screaming a different answer to the question ‘Is it wrong to dislike Inception?’

Yes! Yes! Of course it is! The movie is fucking amazing. It’s brilliant. Every bit of it is brilliant. The bits where they fight are brilliant. They bits when they talk are brilliant. Di Caprio falling off a chair into a bath is brilliant. Spinning tops are amazing. As are worlds that fold. It’s got Ellen Page in, for goodness sake! The score is brilliant! The ending is doubly brilliant! 

And clearly people who say otherwise are stupid. 

* It has three floppy daisies on the top made of foam, and a tinny speaker that plays the first three bars of La Marseillaise. It’s great. 

iPhone Antenna Issues

The man’s face glistened in the firelight as I approached him through the underbrush. I’d heard that this was the man to see; that he had all the stories to tell; that he’d heard them all. As I came closer to him, I saw that the damage had taken it’s toll. The skin around his eyes was loose and dark, and his thin emaciated face told me more about his past than I perhaps wanted to know. I sat down. In an old, cracking voice, he began to speak. 

“Antenna Issues? Ha! What are they talking about? What do they know? Oh, when these recent troubles kicked off they ran into the desert like they didn’t know what had hit them, but I’ve seen worse. Far worse. People are associated these problems with the iPhone 4 - nonsense! I have problems of my own.”

He leant forward. 

“It was worst a couple of years ago - it was what finally drove me into the state I am now. I lived in a house outside most signal coverage, a fact that some would argue was my own fault. How could they say that? It was fate that brought me to that house in the first place. And it was cruel fate that taught me of The Spot. The single spot, where, hunched next to the window, holding the phone close to the wall, I could receive from the blessed hands of the Gods one meagre bar of signal. But this was only the beginning. Suppose I wanted to send a text. First, I would have to type in the message outside of The Spot, which filled me with a deep fear that it would be deleted by the time I came to send it. Then I had to walk to The Spot, and, holding the phone up like an offering, hope that my prayers were answered and the signal would trickle down into my phone. Of course, it took longer than expected, longer every time. Just when my knees began to hurt, and I got up to go, would I see the signal flash once, then disappear. So, prostrate, I would offer it up again to receive it. When I opened the SMS app, the signal would go again, and would only re-appear - would only re-appear - if I tilted my head to one side and closed the app. Once that happened, I could safely open it again and breathe a sigh of relief.”

A muscle in his left eye twitched.

“And then it got worse. I found that the signal would be more likely to disappear the closer I was to the phone. I could not let it fall to the floor, because that would be outside The Spot, so I continued to hold it to the wall with the pad of my outstretched little finger, and then moving my body as far away as I could, I would hit the send button with the finger on my other hand.”

“And then, and only then would it send. My troubles would be briefly over.”

He fixed me with a gimlet stare.

“Don’t talk to me about Antenna Issues, my boy.”