Scores On The Doors

Apparently, or so I’ve heard, the worst possible kind of smoker is the born-again, reformed, “Look at me – I’ve given up smoking” smoker. The stranger that sits in the corner and waits until you’ve taken your second sip of ale and lit your first cigarette of the evening before feeling obligated to let you know how he used to be a smoker too, until he managed to relinquish the dirty habit and preach the error of his ways: “Really! I don’t know how you could…it’s so unhealthy.”

I disagree, though. You see, if you want my opinion on the subject, the worst of the bunch is the smoker who is making an attempt to quit but doesn’t quite have the mental strength to carry their convictions through to the fresh air that awaits them on the other side. Don’t get me wrong – I’ve got no bones to pick with anyone who partakes in a good puff now and again. It’s just that smoking for me will forever be associated with spending my formative years in a smog-filled living room, hair and clothes reeking of stale nicotine and covered in a light smattering of dun ash, slowly half-choking to death. As for peer pressure, well, it was there but I had the mental fortitude to resist it because it wasn’t something I wanted to try.

Take the following incident for example. I was taking part in a course recently where one of the instructors was attempting to kick the habit. I happened to overhear him telling one of the other participants - another smoker, as it happened – that he’d woken up that morning and decided to give up. What’s more, to add further impetus to his cause, he’d gone the extra step of flushing his remaining cigarettes down the toilet. Surely there was no way back?

Two days later (it may have been one, but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt) I noticed him with a cigarette hanging from his lips. Incidentally, the other smoker had left by this point so I’m sure that peer pressure didn’t enter the equation.

“So, you managed to fish your fags out of the toilet then, eh?” I enquired, not without a slight hint of mocking sarcasm, if I’m being truthful.

“Fuck off” came the reply. It was more coy than harshly directed, delivered with the smallest sheepish grin; one that admitted it had been a poor attempt and that he’d caved in way too easily. He then proceeded with an attempt at justification: he’d been through a difficult patch with his girlfriend and he was feeling a bit stressed. I left it at that, musing over the fact that he’d decided to blame his partner for his own lack of self-control. Blame females because you have a penchant for breast ogling, but not for your own inadequacies…

Another incident (incidents might be more accurate) concerns someone a lot closer to home. Obviously I’d like to protect this person’s identity, so let’s just say that this person is my immediate boss, we share an office, and that he is a PE teacher in his very early forties who’s been struggling to give up smoking for quite a while now. He’s tried most things in his attempt to kick the habit: self-help manuals; climbing high mountains that have a tendency to induce hypoxia and breathlessness; smoking under water; smoking with his mouth closed; using three nicotine patches at once (which caused him to bound around the office like a chimpanzee overdosing on amphetamines)…The list goes on. He’s even turned to hypnotism in his quest to quit. This last method is quite promising, according to him. You pay someone a shit-load of money to let you sleep for thirty minutes, they play you an easy-listening CD that came free with the Sunday paper, while they tell you that smoking is bad.

Anyway, we’re a small and supportive group in our office – we knew that it must be difficult and so we offered to help by agreeing on a suitable incentive with the casualty. If he managed to complete a fifty day period of abstinence, then we would reward him with a fully-paid meal and drinks combo at a local eatery. Everything was agreed. The carrot was dangling from the stick and we all got stuck in to the task of supporting and nurturing our donkey through the tobacco-free tunnel of impending doom.

Six days passed. Everything appeared to be good. No major panics or withdrawal symptoms (or at least none that we could ascertain). Each successful day saw the previous day’s total ceremoniously wiped off the progress board, to be replaced by a bigger and better nicotine-less number. Spirits were high.

We all saw it coming but no one wanted to mention it or make a fuss out of it.

He was going away for the weekend for a football tournament with the lads. Meeting old friends, drinking beer, playing a bit of football…it was an inevitability according to him.

Monday morning came around and we all knew. A rhetorical question that could easily be the standard, by which, all other rhetorical questions are set. We got the trivial formalities out of the way to begin with:

“Good weekend?”
“Score any goals?”
“Nice weather?”

Then we asked the question. Anyone who’s reading this knows the answer. For the smoking fraternity amongst you, it was the usual response: “I only had a couple – it’s hard not to when you’ve got a beer, you know.”

Naturally, that was the predictable part. What came next was an attempt at reasoning that defied human belief and rational thinking. We commiserated the fact that he’d had a couple of smokes and silently congratulated him on his honesty and effort so far, vowing to continue with our support. However, sometimes weakness needs to be punished – look at how the Spartans dealt with their sickly young – and I wiped the number 6 off the board in one clean, forceful motion, muttering under my breath, “Disappointing, disappointing…” as though admonishing a youngster for failing to meet expectations.

“NO! NO! YOU CAN’T DO THAT!” His stricken response was immediate and resolute as he approached the board, picked up a pen, and inked the number 6 back on to its surface. His comatose demeanour had turned to fiery frustration through the simple act of removing a number from a white board.

“What do you mean?” I asked. “You did six days without smoking and then you had a couple of cigarettes. By my maths, that means you’re back to zero,” I explained.
“No! It doesn’t work like that,” he remonstrated with me. “It just means that I can’t add the days from the weekend to my tally, that’s all. It doesn’t mean that I go back to zero!”

“So, that means you can reach fifty days of ‘non-smoking’ by choosing to smoke every other day if you wanted – and you’d still get rewarded for it!” I told him. Surely it didn’t work like that.

All of us, apart from him, were in agreement, but the number stayed where it was, drying itself as we argued. I think that the smoking PE teacher irony was lost on him for a moment. Not the issue of him being a smoker whose job entailed encouraging children to lead an active and healthy lifestyle – for we all know that smoking cigarettes is a pre-requisite for PE teaching – but the fact that he’d altered the rules of the challenge in order to suit his short-comings. I hope his way of bending the rules helps him to give up.

Like I said before, I’m not anti-smoking at all. In fact, I think that smokers may be losing too many of their rights. Although I’m glad that many public places are now free of smoke and that I can go to the pub and wear my clothes again the following day, it can go too far the other way. If someone wants to smoke, then they should have a place to be able to do this, as long as it doesn’t affect anyone else. We all have our own individual vices. Mine include drinking Yorkshire tea and eating cake every day. I am hoping to give up the habits, mind you. I’m planning on reducing my intake by one hour at a time. If I succumb throughout the day, I’ll leave my hourly tally up on the white board, though. With the support of my peers and some good old mental strength, I shall conquer this terrible affliction.

(Previously published in Singapore's Idle Banter)

Raging Bicycles

Not for the first time today, I’d been cut up during my daily commute from work. I’m starting to wonder at what point the inevitable will finally happen and the cuts will become painfully literal. The heady concoction of German four-stroke precision engineering encased in a lump of metal, and what looks to be a local driver, pass within half an inch of my right elbow at a speed which doesn’t quite warrant the ‘Conducive to rush-hour safety’ label. It’s difficult to recognise any beauty in the form of a motor vehicle when it’s responsible for threatening your existence.

Nothing unusual there, you may ponder, and of course, you’d be correct in your assumption: that kind of action on the roads of Singapore is as ubiquitous as waking up here and getting a sweat on at some point in the day. No. That was normal. I wouldn’t say I’m delighted about it – I’m forever being overtaken by buses that give me a friendly beep of their horn that translates as, “I am now passing you so don’t hold me accountable for the fact that you will have ten mosquitoes’ width between the front of the vehicle and your bicycle, before I knock you to your certain death with the rear of my bus.” Or something along those lines (the double yellow lines, at that…)

I can’t condone this, but I’m sure my cycling compadres out there will concur when I say that it is actually the aforementioned manoeuvre combined with the emergency stop performed a smattering of yards in front of where you’re heading that is the cause of boiling blood. (Did I say ‘emergency’ stop? Sorry, I meant to say the emergency “I am now dropping someone off” stop.)

Getting back to my point, this is exactly what the BMW did as it rocketed past my shoulder, before cutting in sharply and giving my poor front tyre the scare of its life as it braked to a deafening and definite stop right in front of my handlebars. It was okay though; he did use his hazard warning lights once he’d come to a complete standstill.

I slammed on my brakes in an unmitigated response and made my way around to the driver’s side; his female passenger alighting, obviously in awe of his superior driving ability. I banged my fist on his window and mouthed through the glass, “WIND YOUR WINDOW DOWN!” (forgetting that windows don’t wind down very much these days, especially in flash BMWs). He inched it down, tentatively, about the same sort of distance he’d provided when he passed me in excess of the sound barrier several moments ago.
“Yes?” came the meek reply.
“What’s the difference between a BMW and a porcupine?” I queried, still agitated at his nonplussed expression.
“Sorry?”
“I’ll tell you!” I shouted at him, “The pricks are on the outside of a porcupine. Now stop driving like a tosser who thinks he’ll be invited to drive in the Formula 1 this year.”

Well, maybe not. But that’s how the reaction panned out in my mind in the few moments that followed the incident. The thought of physical violence also crossed my mind if I’m honest…as long as he’d wound down his window far enough. No, the truth of the matter is that if I did this after every unsavoury traffic transaction, I’d end up having to replace my brake pads on a daily basis, not to mention the fact that I’d never arrive at work or get home again, should I make it there in the first place.

My better half is currently reading a book entitled, Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff, essentially a self-help book on how not to let things such as the incident described above ruin your day. I even found the opening page reflected my daily traffic toil:

A stranger, for example, might cut in front of us in traffic. Rather than let it go, and go on with our day, we convince ourselves that we are justified in our anger.

Bollocks. I am justified.

A friend of mine refuses to cycle to work anymore as he thinks that, statistically – don’t ask me how he came by the maths – he will end up inside a body bag if he were to continue. I’m starting to see his point of view, irrespective of how accurate and reliable his data collection is. God help me if I ever end up requiring the services of an ambulance. The hazard warning lights of a taxi are given more priority than the sirens of an emergency vehicle out to save someone’s life. I’ll just walk to the hospital…unless my bike is still rideable.

(Previously published in Singapore's Idle Banter)

Meaty Graffiti

Graffiti – inspired and creative works of public art or a wanton act of vandalism?

Whatever your take on this contentious issue, it would appear that this underground cult has finally come of age and hit the big time…at least for one notorious graffiti artist. With Hollywood’s premier baby-rearing couple “Brangelina” having reportedly paid in excess of 1 million dollars for a piece of his work, the enigma known only as Banksy has reignited the debate surrounding urban art.

For me, graffiti, like any other art form, constitutes a variety of responses. This is commonly assessed based on my personal judgement of its quality: if all I see is someone’s tag (the individual calling card of the “artist”) then I’m not easily overawed. Whereas a multi-coloured mural of block lettering may not be to everyone’s taste, I can appreciate that the graffiti took a certain amount of panache before coming to fruition.

Many graffiti artists in the traditional mould might argue that Banksy’s work is over-hyped and underhand, since he often employs stencil sprays (enables a faster getaway, apparently) and his art has entered the mainstream – not the typical remit of your average spray can dauber. However, like many other pieces of work in the artistic domain, Banksy’s creative output is often imaginative, humorous, and more often than not, causes one to pause and think about something more serious.

But graffiti is almost exclusively performed on a canvas that belongs to someone else, irrespective of skill, quality, and thought provocation. Whilst some may reason that it is a method for disillusioned creative output or reclamation of public space, it still remains a crime: a blight that someone will have to clean up.

I was travelling on the ferry from England to France recently. On the back of the toilet door, I couldn’t help but notice one word, five letters in length, written in one inch high black ink: ‘FROGS’. Although the backs of most public toilet doors are festooned in a barrage of filth and smut, awash with contact numbers galore, it was the simplicity and isolation of this xenophobic outburst that had me guffawing to myself as I sat on a rocking toilet in the middle of the English Channel. Heaven knows what had caused him to write it (a stale croissant?) but I considered him to be a genius. Still, I’m sure that some unlucky French employee would have had to clean it off with a toothbrush at some point.

When I first arrived in Singapore nearly three years ago, I was – like many – struck by how clean and tidy it seemed to be. I would walk to the bus station by crossing the road via an overpass bridge, passing a playground and kindergarten on my merry way. The outside wall of the educational establishment was emblazoned with a hand-painted scene of tranquillity: trees, wandering cats, bright flowers, and characters from Winnie the Pooh. What struck me most about this lovingly crafted piece of legal artwork was why no imbecile had yet drawn some spectacles on Piglet or added a hairy penis to Tigger, that showed him ejaculating on to Winnie’s back… This, I often pondered to myself on the walk, was exactly what would have happened within three minutes of the painting being completed and left where I come from.

Maybe this says more about different cultures, although I am not entirely convinced. Often on my walk over the bridge, I’d notice a hastily scribbled name or rudimentary sign on the cream coloured panels. By the time I returned in the afternoon, the offending marks were either gone or were in the process of being eradicated by a local workman sent from some pugnacious department.

It might be tempting to think that vandalism and littering don’t occur in Singapore because of the threat of heavy fines or the brandishing of a rattan cane. But they do. It’s just that the authorities here seem to have a no-nonsense attitude towards it. They would appear to be strong advocates of the Broken Window theory: small nuisances, if left unchecked, can escalate in to more serious problems within society; but nipping things in the bud immediately, sends a definite message to any would-be-wrongdoers.

Still, whatever side of the fence you straddle in the discussion on grafitti, it’s not all destructive vandalism. A favourite of mine (that I’d like to claim as my own, but know I’m not intelligent enough to have conjured up) was once spotted on the back of a dirty van in the UK – usual residing place of ‘Clean Me’ and ‘Also Comes in White’, to name just a couple. Hand-written, in the filthy grime caked on to the back of the work vehicle was the following immortal phrase:

‘I wish my wife was as dirty as this van’.

Genius. Pure genius.

(Previously published in Singapore's Idle Banter)

Pacific Coast 101

It’s my turn to look after the bicycles whilst the other three see what sugary replenishment can be obtained from the supermarket. We could be in Washington or Oregon; I can’t remember which state. All I know is that we are somewhere on Route 101, en-route from Canada to Mexico. And we’re hungry.

An elderly gentleman parked up in his car passes the time of day and asks me where we’re heading. As I tell him, I ponder over whose idea it was to travel nearly two thousand miles as a small peloton of cycle touring novices, and, more importantly, how we drunkenly agreed to the challenge.

Musing over the madness of it all, he begins to explain how he’d been in a car accident a few months earlier and that he’d had to have his face reconstructed. “So,” I said, “you’re on the road to recovery then?”

“No,” he replied in earnest, “I live on that road over there (pointing behind the supermarket). Do you know where I mean?”

The phrase lost in translation springs to mind as I explain that I don’t…

The cycling itself is challenging and rewarding: sweaty ascents and sweeping descents that contour the ocean, the monotony of distance frequently interrupted by stunning vistas. Highlights are rife: sea kayaking amongst the San Juan archipelago; visiting sites of The Goonies film in Astoria, Oregon; replacing calories in the Tillamook Cheese factory; transported back in time through a haunting audio tour of Alcatraz; and being humbled in a cool evening breeze on the Avenue of the Giants, dwarfed by imposing redwoods.

Yet despite the dramatic beauty of the meandering coastline and the intrinsic reward that can only be gleaned from self-propelled transport, it is the people we meet that define and reward our journey.

There’s the affable young wine merchant and friends who we meet in a campsite perched atop the Big Sur shoreline, who invite us over to sample bottles of plonk and share their barbecue, whilst informing us that expense doesn’t necessarily equate to quality…

A professional photographer offers us a camping spot in his garden following a side-trip to Yosemite National Park, after we strike up a conversation on a garage forecourt. We are entertained with an evening meal, a breakfast including fresh oranges and grapefruit from his orchard, plus the promise of an acquaintance that can provide us with accommodation in LA.

And then there’s John, a local cyclist that we come across on our way in to the outskirts of San Francisco. We leave our bicycles locked up in his garden for a few days and when we return, there’s a note telling us that he’s had to go away unexpectedly with his wife for the weekend. The last line of the message has to be re-read several times by each one of us: I’ve left the bottom door open. Help yourselves to a bed and whatever you find in the fridge. Send me a postcard when you reach Mexico.

Sunsets in Santorini

A local man, hosepipe and broom in hand, scrubs vainly in an attempt to remove evidence of the donkey train that has recently passed by his employer’s hotel. The tarmac is hot and so is the offending mess that’s been left behind. We share a look and his sense of déjà vu is palpable across the road.

The capital’s narrow alleyways fare no better on the donkeys’ route to the caldera edge where their work begins. Ferrying tourists between the cliff-top town and the old port, a few hundred feet below, the animals feign an air of indifference, but their eyes tell a different story. An overpowering pong of donkey poo hangs thick in the air. The cobbled streets aren’t so easy to clean and their gaps yearn for the fastidious attention of the hotel man.

Still, it’s difficult to find the smell offensive when the landscape is so spectacular.

Santorini – or Thira as it’s also known – is arguably one of Greece’s most stunning sights. This southern most island of the Cyclades acts as a magnet to thousands of visitors each year who arrive in droves to experience its unique charm: traditional Greek buildings dazzling pearlescent against the Aegean Sea, perched atop a dramatic volcanic landscape.

This is Fira, our base for the next few days. Despite it being October, the tourists hum around the jewellery shops and bars that cling to each other so as not to tumble in to the sea below. The crescent shape of the island was caused by major volcanic activity during the Minoan civilisation, although the last eruption occurred in 1950. Either way, you get a sense that such a catastrophe today wouldn’t deter the hordes from their incessant search for a souvenir necklace.

At the northern tip of the island sits the small town of Oia, famous for its sunsets, and we decide to head here to flee the throngs of Fira. Having escaped the warren of streets, we march along the path hugging the cliff-top edge. The views are exquisite. The crowds are nowhere to be seen. We see several other people along the trail, yet I can’t help wondering if this five mile stretch around Mouzaki Bay is one of the most beautiful coastal walks in the world.

We reach our destination just as the sun begins to descend, funnelled along Oia’s white-washed streets amongst everyone else obsequiously following their guidebook or tour operator’s words of wisdom. Hundreds of people patiently wait for photos as the sun’s orange dilutes in to milky hues of red and pink. I ponder thoughts of the photographer’s paradox – do we truly experience the moment when all we consider is capturing the picture?

Two days later we see the same view from the traditional harbour, Ammoudi, at the bottom of the cliff. With local beers in hand and no jostling for vantage points, it’s an entirely different prospect. I don’t think I’d notice the smell of the donkeys, even if there were any…

Window shopping in Athens

I think that the Acropodopolis was closed. Or it was too expensive. Either way, who needs it when the modern art of the city is so refreshingly pointed and extensive?