Meatloaf

My brain is mischievous. It constantly seeks to fill itself up with information that is of no real practical use. It handicaps me by deleting information regarding the location of car keys or the correct way to wire a plug and replacing it with detailed knowledge of Beatles recording sessions or whole segments of the stand up routines of Bill Hicks. I am sure that this is a source of constant amusement/bemusement/frustration (delete where applicable) to friends/family/work colleagues (ditto), although my contribution to the success of quiz teams has been duly, if reluctantly, noted.

There is no pattern to the storage of this material in my brain, no equivalent to the Dewey Decimal System that might help me make some sort of logical sense of these thought processes. Instead, random snippets will leap unbound from my subconscious and unleash themselves without prior permission on an unsuspecting world.

This brings me to Meatloaf. Not the foodstuff so beloved of our American cousins, but the corpulent musician and actor known to his parents as Marvin Lee Aday. A man who has sold quite a few records over the years, all of them, without a single exception, shit. Of course I am aware that taste is subjective and that this is what makes music such a wonderful, powerful thing. But my dislike of Mr Loaf (I won’t be so forward as to address him as Meat) is deep-rooted and can be traced back to my teens.

I am 14 years old and on a coach heading for Austria on a school trip (the purpose of this excursion has vanished from my memory over the years, but I still have a smattering of German, along with a morbid fear of both lederhosen and National Socialism). The content of the coach comprises around forty teenagers, two teachers and a huge bag of combustible hormones. This being the dark ages (or as some people prefer to call them, the 1980s) the available entertainment is limited – no telly or DVD players for us – but there is a radio/cassette player, which should save us from listening to accordions and oompah music as we travel through France and Germany.

Unfortunately, following a brief survey, it soon becomes apparent that there are only two cassettes on the coach. The first is a 90 minute recording of that week’s Top 20 radio show and the other is Bat Out Of Hell by Meatloaf. The Top 20 cassette does not prove popular among the more conservative elements of our travelling contingent, containing as it does the quite marvelous but not entirely tuneful “Flowers Of Romance” by Public Image Limited, and so begins two weeks of sightseeing around Tyrol, with Mr. Loaf’s “masterpiece” comprising the lion’s share of the soundtrack.

Now I’m all for giving something a fair shake before deciding if I like it or not, but frankly this was tantamount to child abuse. At first the album sounded histrionic, humourless and bombastic and it just got worse on repeated listens. Around and around Austria we travelled, Mr. Loaf’s charmless caterwauling providing the perfect ambient backing for the sounds of teenage gossip, furtive backseat fumblings and motion-induced vomiting.

Trapped in this mobile Hades, I was repeatedly subjected to this enormous pile of testicles masquerading as music for 14 days, to the point where the opening bars of the title track would reduce me to helpless sobs. My teachers clearly misunderstood the cause of my distress and believed me to be merely homesick. I took this as further evidence of their barbarity, alongside their insistence on me studying Jane Austen. On my return to England, I wrote an impassioned letter to the United Nations, describing the abuse I had suffered and suggesting that those responsible should be tried in The Hague. Answer came there none. I can only assume that Kurt Waldheim did not receive my missive.

I am well aware that many people like Bat Out Of Hell, and the sales figures stand as testament to its popularity – it still sells 200,000 copies every year and has sold an estimated 43 million copies worldwide since its release in 1977. All of which is merely another dent in my battered faith in my fellow man. I had always suspected that folks were daft, but this is self-harm taken to extremes.

Bat Out Of Hell is Spector without the sass, Springsteen without the soul. It is a horrible, horrible record. To bastardise Billy The Bard “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Remarkable trouser difficulties

Ah, Tesco on a Saturday. Is there any finer way of passing an hour than to spend it cheek by jowl with your fellow man, each one of you united in that ancient hunter-gatherer ritual that has sustained our glorious species for many millennia?

Of course there is. Any semi-intelligent person could furnish you with a comprehensive list of activities that rank above traipsing around this brightly lit consumer bedlam; licking the underside of a dog, for example, or dipping one’s arse into a bucket of scorpions.

However, Tesco on a Saturday is where I find myself, soaking up the myriad sights and sounds like a bored sponge, while my daughter tries to spend what little money I have on useless plastic tat (possibly made by children younger than her). I am surrounded by the beautiful people – even a misanthropic ball of spite and disgust like me cannot fail to be overawed and humbled by the parade of Übermensch that sashay up and down the aisles of this shopping Mecca.

Take, for example, the gentleman in front of me. He is shaven-headed and overweight, although I do not hold this against him, given that I am less than hirsute myself and certainly no sylph. Instead, what grabs my attention is his backside. It is a thing of malevolent magnificence.

Now, before we go any further, you should know that I am not an admirer of male bodies. I find nothing about them attractive and in my wilder flights of fancy have seriously considered the notion that both heterosexual women and homosexual men are suffering from the same freakish ocular handicap that renders the ridiculous male form in some way inviting. But this man’s bumcakes are mesmerising, holding my gaze like Khan the snake held Mowgli’s.

The cause of the problem is clear to even the most nonchalant observer and can be traced to the absence of two items – the first of these being a belt. The gentleman’s jeans are heading south or, at least, have been heading south and have now come to rest, halfway down his not insubstantial buttocks.

Now I am, presumably much like you, aware of a style of dress among young idiots in which the trousers are deliberately worn in just this way, seemingly to demonstrate the wearer’s arse, in the manner of a female baboon offering up her rear end to a tumescent male. But the possibility that the man in front of me is among this particular band of morons is emphatically ruled out by the absence of a second item of clothing – to wit, his underpants.

Of course, he could well have been wearing something beneath his Florence & Freds but, sadly, whatever was there was not immediately visible and my eyes and brain were being assaulted by the sight of the top half of his naked gluteus maximus, which now seemed to be making a bid for freedom, straining against the bonds of its denim prison like an angry, hairy blancmange. Indeed, there was more hair on the fellow’s sit-upon than could be seen on his head - although, in the same way as my previous mention of his weight, this should be taken as an observation rather than a criticism (people in glass houses etcetera).

The problem I now have is that I have become sucked into the drama of these remarkable trouser difficulties and now I can’t stop looking, simultaneously intrigued as to what will happen when the trousers hit the floor and terrified of what will be revealed. Surely his lumbering gait will serve to persuade his jeans to continue their downward trajectory? Or will his powerful mudflaps serve to keep them where they are?

Watch this space for the next (possibly quite exciting) episode…

Lists

It’s very strange (and slightly unnerving) the way our relationships with our parents change over the years and how, almost out of nowhere, they start behaving in a way you find either amusing or infuriating, depending on your caffeine levels.

My parents split up last year after 45 years of marriage and my Mum has found herself unexpectedly living on her own. And when I speak to her now there are certain traits I’ve noticed which I could have sworn weren’t there a year ago.

To pluck one example from the top of my head, she lists things. Not in the same way that you or I would write a shopping list, or a list of household chores, or errands, or a list of famous people we would like to see crucified on live television. Not those sort of, you know, useful lists. My Mum’s lists appear unbidden during conversations, arriving out of the blue and hanging around for much longer than they really should.

Not only that, but the lists often seem to breed, forming lists within lists and providing the listener with more detail than is absolutely necessary.

For example, I spoke to her the other day and she related to me the sad tale of the death of her freezer. Just before she went away on holiday, she noticed that it wasn’t working and assumed, like we all would, that it had reached the end of its useful life.

“That’s terrible,” I opined, trying to sound as interested as I could while simultaneously playing Football Manager on my laptop, “you had loads of stuff in there, didn’t you?”

“Oh yes,” she replied, “I had that ratatouille in there, some courgette and tomato soup (you know, the one I added butterbeans to, it was absolutely delicious), some sausages from the farm shop up the road, some fish fingers, some veggie sausages, two packs of skinless chicken breasts…”

“Oh dear” I attempted to interject, like a fool.

“A packet of mince, some frozen peas, some of those onion rings that you like, some fish, you know breaded fish (the fish with breadcrumbs on it), the Ark of the Covenant, Shergar’s front legs and the last of the Mohicans.”

I made a noise that I thought conveyed a convincing mixture of interest and sympathy. It went “Hrrrrum?”

Anyway, it turns out that the demise of this cold storage unit was directly attributable, like so many things nowadays, to the actions of my father. He still pops round to Mum’s to do stuff like clear the guttering and mow the lawn (driven, I can only assume, by guilt and a desire to feel that his family are still a functioning unit). He had done something to the wiring in the shed where the freezer lives and he had, basically, forgotten to do an additional electrical thing that turned out to be quite important.

You will, dear reader, forgive my vagueness with regard to the work undertaken by Dad. My Mum did try and explain to me exactly what had happened but I suffer from an affliction which I hope and pray affects others too. This takes the form of not being able to concentrate when anyone is saying anything to me that involves DIY or any of its bizarre spin-off activities. I am not, as many will attest, a practical person. I have friends and acquaintances that have built extensions to their houses, installed kitchens in said extensions and know their way around a combustion engine. Me? I have never even put up a shelf. DIY is a strange, cult-ish world that holds no appeal to me at all and, when people are regaling me with tales of its myriad perversions, it takes approximately three seconds before their voice turns into that of the teacher from “Peanuts”, my eyes glaze over and I find myself mentally transported into a warm and welcoming fantasy world of my own.

So, anyway, I digress. As it was his fault that my Mum’s food supply for the forthcoming apocalypse had been irrevocably destroyed, he had promised to replenish said stocks while Mum was away on her hols.

“I bet he hasn’t” she said, “let’s have a look.”  And off she went, cordless phone in hand, to the shed.

“Oh he has, look.”

A strange sense of foreboding began to permeate my subconscious.

“There’s some mince.”

Oh God…

“And some pork chops, some sausages, some fish fingers, a steak pie, the collected works of Friedrich Nietzsche..."