Bang Bang

Dear Octopus,

Sorry for the delay in writing to you (again). Things have changed from my last letter (also again). But in a way this presents an interesting continuation of my point. If you remember my last letter saw me meandering senselessly around a Chinese supermarket in Hampstead, with the lovely Tango trying patiently to teach me the value of spontaneity, and how enriching it can be to make decisions on impulse. It turns out that I was a poor student. So poor in fact that I failed to see what was, I suppose, inevitably coming: the Tango's spontaneous impulse decision to live what will probably be an inestimably more enriching (but Squid-less) life. 

Maybe she just stopped caring. You'd have to ask her.

But here we reach an interesting juncture. The Tango's legacy, the lessons I choose to learn from her, and indeed the entire way in which she continues to live on in my memory, could just be the usual prosaic, quotidian shit that always fades with time. The detail - that little and lovely sea of personal imprints and imperfections that someone leaves on your life - aren't nearly as special as they or even you would have yourself believe. Her laugh can be thrown away just as easily as her toothbrush. 

But even so, I got the feeling that the lesson she wanted me to learn was more valuable. So fuck it. I went back to Devon. And when it became clear that the usually impish Inky Squid was sorely in need of a good time too, I saw an opportunity to put her curriculum into practice. 

I'll detail what happened in the style of the police alibi statement that I'm lucky I didn't have to produce. No frills. Just facts.

The long and the short of it, your honour, is that we crashed an eighteenth birthday party. Actually that's not the long or the short of it. So.....all of the kids were arriving and then leaving their alcohol behind a makeshift (make-SHIT) bar. Essentially I installed myself behind the makeshift bar, using the Inky Squid as my enforcer (known on the night-club / discotheque scene as a 'bouncer'), and proceeded to refuse the kids access to their own alcohol unless they produced sufficient identification. We then siphoned off elements of their alcohol (not stealing, I was very specific about it not constituting stealing) and produced a punch so potent in its destructive force that it could easily have palsied the liver of a sixty-five year old darts captain. We then introduced the kids to hard drinking games. That they played by buying punch. Buying punch made from ingredients they'd brought to the party with them. 

But we did stop the fight. So that can't be irresponsible.

I remember saying to the Inky Squid at the time, slurring nastily and highly inebriated of course, 'you never know where life is going to take you, right? Last weekend I was living a different life. Now I'm here, giving little Jeremy here his fourth tequila slammer in a row and dancing to Rihanna in the kitchenette of what is technically a government building. Fuck it. This is what life is all about, right? Things happen, you get shot down, you fucking move on, right? Who knows where life is going to take you next? It's exciting. Right??'

I should add that the repeated asking of the at-best-rhetorical-and-at-worst-absolutely-meaningless question 'right?' was only inserted here because I'm recording this statement verbatim, and I do sometimes need affirmation. The point is that it's only when you see a seventeen year old girl with A-level coursework to write the next day vomiting into a gutter that you realise everything with you really isn't that bad. And taking a journey is often a lot more fun when you've no fucking idea where you're going.

In that respect I suppose, the Tango leaves a good lesson. I doubt she's even thought if the decision she made was the right one. I hope for her sake that it was. It's good karma, for one thing.

Your loving friend,

Action Squid

The Mysterious Bream Of The Industrial Chinese Mega-Mart

Dear Octopus,


Two months, since I last wrote to you. Two months. The profuseness and profundity of my apology need not be extolled - knowing me as well as you do - but please don't think my holiday from these pages in any way related to a diminished regard for your welfare. I worry about you as always; in all the incidental nooks and crannies of solitude (late-night tube carriages, supermarket queues, the long drunken stumble down Penwith Road of a now-warm Thursday evening). I suppose I've just been thinking of the right thing to say.


Sunday saw some chink of inspiration, if not actual enlightenment, so seems as good a place as any to snatch up the meandering thread of my existence.


I was wandering the aisles of a Chinese supermarket in the Hampstead-area, in the company of the Regal Tang (or 'Tango', for short) whose hankering for a steamed pork char siu bao bun was so great that she couldn't be dissuaded by the fact that all of the buns' packaging was in Chinese, rendering it impossible for us to decipher what was pork or otherwise. Muddling along as were, we didn't know our gyoza from our cheung fun, so just selected items seemingly on Tango's loose aesthetic whim. And this bothered me. We could have been picking anything. In fact rather than revelling in the rich culinary opportunism that the situation presented, the whole process was - I'm now happy to admit - deeply disconcerting. What if the buns we were picking contained cyanide, oestrogen, or crushed up brick mortar? What if Tango ended up choking violently to death on the spinal vertebrae of an actual Regal Tang, because I hadn't adequately protected her through being able to read Mandarin Chinese?


It was then that I realised an inviolable truth. I am incapable of being impulsive.


To be fair, I sort of knew already. My mother, the sage and omniscient Vino Squid, pointed this out to me only recently in fact. Even as a child (apparently), I was annoyed when plans would change at the last minute, and would ask what we were going to be doing after making the papier mache Tracy Island before Vino had even opened the first tub of glue and laid down the newspaper. And since developing into what I suppose is technically an adult, things have only got worse. A dull obsession with having a 'plan' pervades every part of my day. I've even written about my enslavement by the Evil Dowager Countess of Routine to you previously, now that I think about it. Even that is becoming habitual. 


So that's that. Clearly I am the spontaneity black hole, the impulse vacuum. A grim and inflexible gargoyle attached to the lively church of life's wondrous diversity. So how to break the mould, and escape? Start taking ketamine on the District Line? Grow out my hair, learn to play guitar and starting trawling the youth hostels of Western Australia with a bumbag full of tedious, life-affirming anecdotes? Join a cult? Start a cult (even)? 


Even those things seem quite conformist now.


I will mediate on this conundrum this evening, and report back. Rest assured that I won't make any major 'life decisions' without consulting you first. Maybe I just need to become better at rolling with the punches, to changes and amends as things come up. Be better at living life on the so-called 'fly'. 


After all, a little bit of spontaneity is definitely a good thing. Our illegible dinner, for example, was not only wonderful to eat but all the more interesting for being an adventure.


Your loving friend,


Action Squid

Resolution #8,956

Dear  Octopus,


New Year's resolutions are practically an invitation for failure. I set a mere and trifling thirty of them last year, relishing the fearsome gusto with which I would tick them sequentially from the list as though they were items on a shopping list. How arrogant. How lacking in knowledge of myself. My performance in fact has been so miserable, so abject, that I have utterly failed to even remotely achieve one of them. Not. A. Single. One. 


I regret that, and have thought about it since the chimes of midnight (and cheery tunes of the vaudevillian accordion belonging to the band of gypsies frequenting the freezing beer garden of my parents' local pub, where I saw in 2012). It got me thinking about something someone said to me that night. Taking a break from teaching the local teenagers the value of premium German spirits, I took a quick visit to the rat-infested lavatory laughably supposed to be a den of solace for the town's more miserly alcoholics and predatory homosexuals. A man next to me at the urinals quite freely and extensively urinated on his own shoe, then shrugged. 'That was unlucky,' I tried to venture, as if to reassure him that this wasn't the Absolutely Unmitigated Disaster that it surely would have been for me. 'No regrets,'  he replied.


That phrase really, really bothers me. To have regrets, after all, is to care. To find oneself culpable for the mistakes you've made. People who say 'no regrets' seem to merely be saying that they find themselves incapable of wrongdoing. And that is arrogant, which is the worst of all human failings second only to unkindness.


The real reason it bothers me though, I suppose, is that I have a lot of them. A man urinates on and potentially ruins his own shoe (which admittedly appeared to be patent leather of the lowest quality) and doesn't regret it.....yet I regret the way in which I said 'after you' whilst holding the door open for him five minutes ago. I regret what I had for breakfast this morning. In fact I'd go so far as to say that I probably regret about 80% of all the decisions I've ever made in my life, at least a little bit. That's not to sound unnecessarily maudlin or melancholic just for the sake of a letter. The same is true (or should be true) for everyone really, to lesser or greater extents. I've met so may nice people, made so many interesting friends, and let them just slip away. I've been cruel and dismissive when I should have been fair, lied when I should have told the truth. Even in the last year, since the fabric of those flimsy resolutions was spun. There are so many things I should have done, but chose not because they were too hard, would have taken too long, or because I was too afraid.


This year then, it's just one resolution from me, with no frills or fancy. This year I will try to be a good person, and live without shame.


Easier said than done, I know. Give me strength.


Your loving friend,


Action Squid

Sleep In Heavenly Peace: Part II

Dear Octopus,


Not a long letter from me tonight. Back in Devon, among the warming seclusion of familial familiarity, my parents are brothers are out socialising and the house is suddenly quiet. A clock ticks insistently on the mantelpiece, but that is all. I think that the new and inestimably idiotic cat (Stardust Squid) might actually be stuck under the tree. Soon my parents will come home and will cook the Austrian Dinner (a permanent Christmas Eve fixture purloined from the long arms of our distant family now among the faithful departed), we'll slope down to the frosty beach and walk along it on our way to mass, and then come home to drink my father's best scotch and reminisce on festivities passed. Nothing spectacular by way of tradition, I suppose. But it is ours, and therefore much valued.


Send my love to your parents and grandparents, your sister and your friends, and maybe if necessary keep a little left aside for yourself. It's strange to think that I wrote you a similar note to this, on this same day of last year. So much has changed. So many people have come into my life, and some have sadly departed. The carousel keeps revolving, bringing with it witches and pirates, soldiers and Bond villains....but what forever remains constant is my hope that you are happy, wherever you are. You are my favourite person in the world.


Merry Christmas Octopus. I miss you, and think of you always.


Your loving friend,


Action Squid

Killepitsch (or: 'A Face On A Lover With A Fire In His Heart')

Dear Octopus,


This year I seem to have found the festive onslaught less pernicious than previously. Maybe it's the array of Christmas lights in the narrow streets of Covent Garden as I walk home, that were not to be found on the broad, crammed Strand of yesteryear. Maybe it's the miserly yet necessary rationing of Christmas music instigated around the office in order to keep things fresh; limiting us to only one or two renditions of Wham's Last Christmas per day. This is the first year in a while that I've had an advent calendar, now that I think of it. Maybe it's just that seasonal misanthropy can only keep a fellow happy for so long.


Whatever the reason, this unexpected swell of Christmas cheer lead us quickly onto the concept of throwing a party. Invites were sent (digitally), initially ignored (also digitally) and then finally confirmed (in person, due to unanimous digital apathy).


To be fair, our preparations were as detailed as they were far-reaching. Mistletoe on door frames. Fairy lights almost everywhere. Carpets cleaned. A fridge full of champagne. Pongo's delicious mulled wine simmering tacitly on the stove (cinnamon, nutmeg etc all included, no expense spared). A salad bowl full of kettle chips standing nonchalantly on every coffee table and bannister, mince pies with home made brandy cream lurking suggestively in every nook, crevice and cranny. I even straightened the living room rug. 


The halls were literally decked with boughs of holly. Such peaceful domestic bliss. Such serenity. I almost expected the Virgin Mary herself to knock timidly on the door, and for the Good Lord himself to be born in the gap between the vacuum cleaner and Honksy's stack of girly vaudevillian romance novels.


What descended upon the house was quite the opposite. What descended upon the house was something bestial, and from which I'm not certain I shall ever fully recover. 


Fortuitously most of the following events are scorched from my memory like the blackened grass of Hiroshima. Some things I do recall though are as follows:

• Pongo forcefeeding me four consecutive shots of Killepitsch Premium Krauterlikor, a thick, foul-tasting dose of human excrement with 42% alcohol content
• Parading around the kitchen wearing The Game Boy's turkey helmet
• Beer
• Apple sours
• Mulled wine
• Apple sours
• Beer
• Party Squid trying to cellotape a robin to his fingers to accentuate his bauble
• Unknown Party Guest #17 smashing his hand on a ceiling lampshade, said lampshade smashing on his head, Unknown Party Guest #17 being taken to A&E by Dutch's brother 'Sturgeon's Electro-Magnet'
• Killepitsch Premium Krauterlikor (for which I'd by now developed quite a taste)
• Hammering on my bathroom door to interrupt the two people either having sex or killing each other within
• The Bear and the Toad fighting over who had the worst Christmas jumper
• The Agent asking me if he was being 'too rapey' with the neighbours
• The hideously inebriated schoolteacher who crawled into my bed after I'd gone to sleep and demanded nastily that I 'move up'

The net result was that the next morning I awoke next to a girl who had no knowledge of requestioning over 75% of my bed space, nor the crude and insulting brand of temerity with which she had done so. She was suitably bashful, thankfully, and I ejected her from the room on stable enough terms. The situation awaiting me downstairs, however, was something far more difficult to set right.


...bottles. Cans. Mess. Squalor. Wretched puddles of toxic ooze. A man wearing a rudimentary head-bandage sprawled wildly on the living room rug (no longer even vaguely straight). Tinsel hanging forlornly from the mantelpiece. Cigarette butts trodden repeatedly into the carpet. A glove from our first aid kit hanging from a picture frame. A plate of vomit on the kitchen table. One of Pongo's best dinner plates. Probably Pongo's vomit...


On viewing this utterly heinous spectacle, the only thing left for it was to run.


I think I'm still running.


I miss you Octopus, and think of you always.


Your loving friend,


Action Squid

Young Jedi 'Inky Squid' Shown The True Nature Of The Force

Dear Octopus,


When we were children, my younger brother Inky Squid developed an appallingly hooliganistic penchant for writing on the walls. Admittedly he was only five; and his crime stemmed more from experimentation with crayons (and presumably a lack of suitable paper) than it did the senseless desire to deface public property under the guise of 'art', as currently propagated by the junior members of the future working classes. A dark time in our Devonshire abode, maybe, but now it makes for a good Sunday-night yarn which I hope you might enjoy.


Around this time (and forever since) our father Captain Squid had very specific guidelines on what he (and the police) might consider criminal infractions. To illustrate his policy on household lawlessness he would often quote his favourite phrase from his time in the navy. As follows: 'one mistake is an accident, two times is happenstance, and three times is enemy action.' In short, you're allowed to make a mistake twice. Just. But make it a third time, and your ass is on its way to the chokey.


Inky Squid ought to have known better.


Nevertheless, he's found something. And as childhood is all about pushing boundaries in order to find them, he finds a crayon and writes on the wall. His mother tells him he cannot do it. It is naughty. Walls are not to be written on, after all. Very few vertical structures are. He is told, in no uncertain or subjectively vague terms, not to to do it again. THE ACCIDENT.


The second time he writes on a wall, his mother is angry. She has reasoned with him before, she's told him why he mustn't do it. She isn't in the habit of repeating herself, nor should she have to. Little boys must listen to their mothers; a fact of science, a law of nature and rule of thumb. So this time there is a real and credible threat to household security. A counter-strike is required. She kneels in front of him. 'If you write on the walls again,' she says, 'you'll be smacked, and you'll have no tea, and you'll be sent to bed.' 


Smacked. 
No tea. 
Bed. 


The triumvirate, the holy trinity of unwanted punishments. This shit just got real. This is...THE HAPPENSTANCE.


A noticeable air of calm descends upon the house. Life awaits an outcome which never arrives. The bomb fails to detonate. Maybe he has learned. We, his two older brothers, look on in mystified awe. Maybe he has ascended to a higher plain of spiritual enlightenment. What then? Nothing? No final showdown? No fireworks? Apparently not. Life returns to normal. The three of us wait for Captain Squid to come home from work so we can ambush him in militaristic horseplay. And then, one day, mother notices that he does not come when he is called to his tea. Impatiently, she marches out into the hall. There he is; a small boy, hunched at the wall like a prisoner trying to discreetly chisel through it, red crayon in hand. Red-handed, so to speak.


Two words:


ENEMY


ACTION


'Right!' she barks in a Basil Fawlty-esque way that even now is so marvellous, grabs him by the top of the arm, marches him to the foot of the stairs, and proceeds to literally propel him up the aforementioned stairs by the sheer and repeated force of a heartily smacked bottom. Party Squid and I watch in silent, grim acknowledgement. We pass each other a glance which seems to say, 'this is what happens. Smacked, no tea, sent to bed. The holy trinity. The only way to subvert enemy action. Regular...as....clockwork.'


Mother slams the bedroom door, fuming. Inky Squid can be heard whimpering in his room. She storms downstairs, furious, and as she passes the spot where he was committing this last and most unutterably heinous of domestic offences, stops suddenly. We all look.


For there, on the wall, written in red crayon:


'I love my mummy.'


I suppose the moral of this story is that even if your intentions are good, you shouldn't break the law. Particularly when you're the youngest of three boys living by a strict naval disciplinary code. It is of little consequence now, I would suggest. Inky Squid turned out to be a fine man. I am proud to call him my brother.


Your loving friend,


Action Squid

The Only Way To Be Happy Is To Be Good: Part II

Dear Octopus,


Yesterday was a bleak and gloomy Sunday afternoon. As I sat on a rickety bench in our local Iranian laundrette, trying (and failing) to read a book over the repetitive watery thudding of various antiquarian machines, I thought: 'this is fucking grim.' And that made me think about the phases of our lives as they unfurl around us; some grim, some not so. I'd like to think - after all -that having lived in our nation's capital for five years now that I'd be above this sort of thing. The seed of this particularly abstract thought was planted by my mother Vino Squid, who told me recently that our lives are dictated by chapters; some short, some long, and as such one should never be afraid of ending one and starting another. Don't dwell on the past, was her point. I believe I made reference to it in Part I.


As anyone who knows me in anything other than passing should immediately realise, this situation called for a diagram. But with my sketching skills comprehensively and irreversibly depleted by the fact that I have absolutely no natural talent for it, my inadequacy forces me to make do with a description.


As follows:


2003-2006: The Apple Tree


Three years of university. Cereal, daytime television. X-Box. Beer, mixed with cider, mixed with blackcurrant cordial. Red biros circling illegible notes. Summers working in an actual office (how grown up), evenings drinking red wine (how grown up) and listening to the Toad play guitar under the apple tree. Road trips, elaborate drinking games, scourges of paranoia and a crippling lack of self-confidence. The Postal Service, Bright Eyes, Coldplay. Bright sunny days viewed from the bottom of an unusually dark hole.


2006-2008: The Bar Under The Bridge


London baby. University, but with money. Work hard / play hard our way to Inferno's: boozing inside, fighting outside, drudgery, a girlfriend, the lagging realisation that this is not just another semester between holidays. Ironing shirts of an evening whilst watching reality television. Our landlady's depressing painting hanging on the  kitchen wall. Cheap dates in cheap restaurants, cheap talk. Interim appraisals at the bottom of the ladder. Curries on neon Brick Lane, Sunday evenings on Peckham Rye. The art student who ran the shitty pub quiz in the Bar Under The Bridge, his stupid fucking haircut, getting asked to leave for calling him the c-word (he so was). Jamie T, Regina Spektor, The Perishers. The last vestiges of us all living together, now that we are here.


2009-2010: The Loft


A loft on Lydden Grove. New housemates. Saturday Kitchen, eating fish finger sandwiches. Lots of cooking programmes. Nights out in Artesian Well, being ignored. Social networking. A winter so cold there was frost on the inside of my window. A winter so cold I could see my breath when I was lying in bed. Chain-smoking with worry. A fear that something is changing, and can never be undone. Kissing on the Waterloo footbridge. Cat Power, The XX, Joan Armatrading. A book, a new life, and you.


2009-2011: The House That Love Built (And Forgot)


The shared house, the fallout. Strangers. A hospital of living. Bicycles stored in hallways, toilet roll in cupboards. The gradual osmosis of change; Honksy and Pongo sauntering in on a dry Saturday. Nicknames, takeaways, house parties spent mixing martinis for sweet, pretentious children. Lavatorial humour laughing on the sofa. Sunday walks in Wimbledon Park, sleeping under the trees. Dates with very lovely, very sad women. Promotions, roof terraces, nights at the theatre. Coming home from Hoxton Square warehouse parties in black cabs, sidling slyly through the peach-cream dawn. Bon Iver, Laura Marling, Grizzly Bear. Writing letters to someone who cannot read them, thinking it okay.


What next? 


(Whatever it is, I hope it doesn't involve that fucking laundrette. He keeps over-starching my collars and I'm just not standing for it.)


Your loving friend,


Action Squid