Wishful Thinking

Did you see this? When it made Friday’s morning news I suspected that I was hallucinating thanks to the onset of hyperthermia.

But no, it’s true. Scientists might (one say, if we’re lucky and they’ve been concentrating really, really hard) be able to clone sabretooth tigers and/or woolly mammoths. But definitely not dinosaurs. Possibly.

What next? Breaking news: The Queen is not a transsexual? Big Ben not made of paper? The Internet is a gift from aliens using it to infect our brains with a techno-organic virus?

Okay, so it’s yet another example of non-news and even though there are now twenty-four hours of rolling news coverage to fill, occasionally not a lot happens.

It does, however, raise an interesting question: If you had the opportunity (possibly, maybe, in some dim far off future where everyone travels by jet-pack and has their own robot servant) to bring something/someone back from extinction, what would it be?*

Here are a few I came up with sheltering in the Wickham Arms on Saturday afternoon from the (apparently) minus eight temperatures:

1. Joe Strummer. Poor old Joe. Punk legend, probably a bit of a Machiavellian git, but sadly missed none the less. I once started writing a short story called “You Are Not Joe Strummer”, but I never managed to finish it. Probably because, deep down, I really wished I was. If I could bring him back to life then I could keep him the shed and bring him out when I wanted entertainment with a conscience.

2. Walthamstow Dog Track. The closure of dog tracks around the country is something of a tragedy if only because it’s the only form of gambling I’ve ever won any money at. Oh, okay, broken even. Once. More people need to get off their arses, chuck their Wii stick thingies in the canal and get down the dogs. There you will be able to drink watery lager, eat greasy chicken and chips served in their natural habitat of a basket and scream until you’re blue in the face at animals who really don’t have a clue what’s going on other than they really, really, really like running.

3. £1 Bus Tickets. When I first moved down to London bus tickets cost a pound. It was simple and straightforward. And cheap, which meant you didn’t feel too aggrieved when you remained motionless in the centre of Peckham for forty minutes, or lurked for nearly two hours in a badly lit shelter at the wrong end of Saturday morning. But most importantly you didn’t have conversations along the lines of “Single to St Pancreas, please.” “£4.13.” “How much?” It was a pound. It was always a pound. Now you need an Oyster card to avoid the extortionate fees which is just something else to weigh down your trousers.

Which reminds me, why is it called Oyster? In what was is slapping a piece of plastic on a scanner or spending hours on a totally un-navigatable website akin to shell fish, or like an aphrodisiac?

4. Red Dwarf. And make it good again. Come on, they did it for Dr Who.

5. The Seager Gin Distillery in Deptford. A marvellous pomp and circumstance building once converted into small business units and creative spaces. I used to cut through the yard on the way to the DLR back when I worked in Docklands. Now, it’s just a pile of rubble. Demolished for, what appears to be, just the hell of it.

Strangely, there’s a pub in Devon I’m struggling to remember the name of where the interior of the gents is covered with posters advertising Seager gin and the distillery features in most of the images.

6. Ward’s Bitter. Ward’s was a Sheffield brewery that closed down halfway through my time there. It was based with an enormous complex, but as near as I can tell only produced one beer – and what a rather fab session ale it was too. Plus I used to love the smell of roasted hops drifting on the morning air. When I drove back down to Birmingham I used to take the A38 as my clapped out little Fiat wasn’t reliable enough for the motorway and as I trundled past Burton I would often lower the windows to try and catch a waft of that smell from either the Bass or the Marston’s brewery, but it was never quite the same.

So actually, I might just want to move next to a brewery...

7. Children being banned from pubs. Seriously. People go to pubs to drink alcohol and talk rubbish for several hours. They are not child friendly environments. Look at their faces. They’re bored. Except you can’t tell because that’s the fifth bottle of New Zealand Chardonnay you’ve just opened.

8. Affordable Rents. The flipside of the housing market crashing is that the rental market’s booming. The irony being that any money that could have been saved with the intention of possibly buying your own place in the future is now flushed into paying increased rent. Or eggs. That plus the fact that bazillion percent mortgages no longer exist isn’t helping. Council Housing? Virtually non-existent. Thanks 1980s, one more reason to hate you and every person who prances about going on and on that they were marvellous.

9. Raymond Carver. Or to be more precise short stories. Carver was a master of the short story in which nothing really happened and by the end you feel as though you’d gone through the emotional mincer, but weren’t quite sure why or how. He died in 1988 just fifty years old yet his stories could be taking place tomorrow. Utterly timeless.

A good short story is, in many ways, more delightful than a good novel if only because the reader can have the complete experience in a single a moment.

Magazines used to publish short stories. Publishers would release anthologies with contributions from various authors. Whilst being a very different discipline from a novel they’re still an excellent way for writers to learn the craft because you don’t have to commit a couple of years to each one. But outlets for them are now extremely limited because, we are told, people don’t like them. A literary agent I was listening to last year said not to bother sending short stories in as publishers weren’t interested. He could only think of one author in recent years who had been offered a book deal on the back of short stories and that was Ian McEwan in the late
seventies.

Why don’t people like them, damn it? Oh, you do? Well, go and buy some Raymond Carver then and prove everyone wrong. Or something by Ali Smith, or Lorrie Moore, or Alice Munro, or William Trevor, or Tobias Woolf.

10. Steam Trains. Because they’re just so much more delightful, elegant and mystical than diesels or electric trains. They don’t need overhead power cables, that come loose in high winds, to work. Small boys (probably) no longer dream of being a train driver because now it just looks dull rather than exciting and that’s just a shame.

It might be a good thing if they ran on something other than coal, though.

11. Socialism as a mainstream political agenda. Come on, market capitalism doesn’t work. Look around you. There’s something fundamentally wrong with us when the world appears to go tits up because a bank leant too many unemployed legless people tens of thousands of pick-your-currency allowing them to buy a seventeen room mansion for them and their gerbil to live in. And what’s apparently the way out of this? Buy more shit you don’t want. Go shopping. Please. Okay, so I buy things too – mainly books and records – but at least those have a point. Unlike who-tall-are-you mirrors or testicle insulation or chocolate scrabble or wooden light bulbs or clocks that run backwards.

See? Hours of recession busting fun to be had. Feel free to post your own. The best ones win a prize.**

*: Yes Radio 4 fans, I know the News Quiz did something about bringing Morris Dancing back, but I started thinking this stuff up Friday morning pinned into the corner of a London Bridge bound train and only caught the News Quiz repeat on Saturday, so yah-boo-sucks to Sandi Toksvig.

**: Not really.