The Hell of It All (17 page)

If that sounds like a nightmare, don’t worry: you can still wriggle out of the squat-thrusts, provided you’re carrying a valid Laziness Licence, whose application process involves climbing a ladder to reach the forms (stored at the top of a 200-foot crane), ticking 900 boxes with a 7kg pencil, and finally posting it into a motorised mailbox that persistently runs away from you at speeds of up to 25mph. In other words, you still have freedom of choice. Provided you’re carrying a valid Freedom of Choice Permit, that is.

Getting your hands on a Freedom of Choice Permit is pretty straightforward. The application form requires only your name and signature. Admittedly, you have to deliver it in person to the Freedom of Choice Licensing Agency, which is open only between 4.15 a.m. and 4.18 a. m., and is based in an unmarked office in the Falklands, but nevertheless, thousands have already applied, if the queues are anything to go by. The current waiting time is a mere nine weeks, although you’d be advised to get there early and guard your place in line because there have been reports of disturbances.

Anyway, once you’ve got your Freedom of Choice Permit, you’re free to do as you please, within reason, provided you notify the Central Scrutiniser six days in advance of any unapproved activity, quoting your 96-digit Freedom of Choice Permit code in full, which isn’t printed anywhere on the permit itself, but is given to you once and only once, whispered quickly into your ear at the desk in the Falklands, by a man standing beneath a loudspeaker barking out other numbers at random.

The permit itself, incidentally, is shaped like a broomhandle, and is designed to be threaded through your sleeves at all times.

If you couldn’t be bothered with all that, you will just have to do as you’re told, which isn’t that bad, to be honest. There’s a compulsory exercise hour or five, and an approved list of foodstuffs, but that’s about it. You will still have at least 10 minutes a day to do as you please, although we’ve just banned violent videogames, which are bad for your head, and there are one or two ideologies we’d
rather you didn’t discuss with friends or on the internet, which is why we’re not issuing any Freedom of Speech Permits for the time being – although if you’d like to be notified when they’re available, simply book yourself into one of our underground holding pens and remain there until your name is called, or not called, or time itself comes to an end. Whichever takes the longest.

Once upon a time, in between scrawling allegorical fables about lions and wardrobes, C. S. Lewis said something prescient. ‘Of all tyrannies,’ he wrote, ‘a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.

‘The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.’

You can nod your head in agreement if you like. Once you’ve got your Nodding Permit. Don’t want you straining your neck, now, do we, citizen?

Shortly before writing this sentence, I literally punched myself in the head, because I’m unbelievably angry for no good reason. OK, for one good reason – I’m 24 hours into what must be my 20th attempt at quitting cigarettes for good (that ‘smoking permit’ horror story was the final straw – I’d rather quit now, on my own terms, thank you, not six months down the line when I’ve got to apply for a licence to keep on puffing, courtesy of some titwit advisory board).

I was what you might call a ‘furious smoker’ in that the very act of smoking annoyed me, and I tended to smoke when annoyed. Now that I’ve (hopefully) stubbed out my last one, the nicotine’s been temporarily replaced by a steady, swelling rage, which I can feel surging just behind my eyes even as I type, as though I’m preparing to transform into the Hulk at the slightest provocation. This is not a healthy state to be in. It’s a shame I’m currently single, because I’d like nothing better than a massive, pointless argument
right now – the sort that suddenly and unexpectedly blows up over something trivial, such as ‘Where did you put the towels?’, before rapidly degenerating into a self-righteous festival of bellowing that only comes to an end when one or both of you breaks down in tears out of sheer confusion, and winds up crawling around on the kitchen floor like a dog, wailing and howling, with a glassy pendulum of snot swinging off the end of your nose. I get misty-eyed just thinking about it.

Some people feel this angry all the time. I encountered more than my fair share of them back when I was a shop assistant – an alarming number of our fellow citizens who apparently walk around simply aching for a fight. Once a man strolled in, pointed to something behind the counter, and gruffly asked if he could have it for five pounds off. He was wearing tracksuit bottoms, and had one hand absent-mindedly stuffed down the front, playing with his balls, as he studied my face for a response. I politely explained that the price was the price, haggling wasn’t an option, and so on. He asked if I wanted to step outside. When I said I didn’t, he swore at me, kicked the counter, and stormed out. The entire exchange lasted less than 30 seconds.

A man that angry probably picks a fight with himself in the mirror each morning. God knows how he gets through life. He was about 27, with no visible scars. Miracle. By now he must be dead or in jail. Or possibly both: in a jail for dead people. Rotting in his cell. Turning to Porridge.

There ought to be a telephone service for people perpetually as furious as him – or temporarily as angry as me; a cathartic, anger-management equivalent of the Samaritans, which you can call 24/7 to vent your frustrations at a live human punchbag. The average conversation would start like this:

It would continue in much the same vein until you’d shouted your way back to normality. Sounds pointless, but I guarantee it would save lives.

It’s almost the time of year when the nation’s braying upper-middleclass idiot quotient collectively decides to stand up and go skiing. Good for them. Speaking as a control freak, I’m opposed to skis, snowboards, and skates on principle. I like to know where I’m going, how soon I’ll arrive there, and how quickly I’ll stop. I can’t imagine doing that on skis. They’re slidey. I don’t like slidey.

But that’s not the main reason I’ve never been tempted to go skiing: it’s the people. The moment anyone tells me they’re going skiing, I start to dislike them. This is because I’ve constructed my own imaginary version of a skiing holiday in my head: it involves a fistful of self-satisfied bastards called Dan and Izzy and Sam and Lucy sharing a chalet together, drinking wine while listening to Mark Ronson on Izzy’s iPod speakers, taking 15,000 photos of each other guffawing and pulling silly faces, and occasionally venturing outside to slide down a hill on a pair of glorified planks, at which point with any luck they hurtle headlong into a tree, snapping at least three limbs in the process, and the holiday ends with them lying on their back, twitching like a half-crushed spider, exposed shards of shinbone gleaming in the winter sun as they scream for an air ambulance at the top of their idiot lungs.

That’s my imaginary skiing holiday, and since it’s populated exclusively by bastards, I assume anyone who goes skiing in real life must be a bastard too. And at the time of writing, I’m yet to be proven wrong.

Today is my birthday. Let joy be unconfined. There won’t be a party. Too stressful. The trouble with birthday parties, in my experience,
is that you tend to group different friends into different pockets – you have work friends, and college friends, and various groups of random friends you’ve picked up along the way … and since they’re all quite different, you behave differently with them. I might be a swearing lout with one friend and an urbane sophisticate with another. Mix them all together in the same room and it gives me an identity crisis: suddenly I don’t know who I am any more, and I panic and smash chairs against the wall until everyone goes home.

So instead of holding a birthday party, I plan to mark the occasion by screaming and crying. That’s what I was doing the day I was born, so it’s fitting. And besides, I’ve got cause for tears: apparently, I’m middle-aged. I’d always assumed middle age began somewhere in your 40s – the
Oxford English Dictionary
defines it as ‘the period between youth and old age, about 45 to 60’ – but today’s ruthlessly youth-oriented Reich has shifted the entry point ever closer, while I’ve grown steadily older to meet it. As I turn 37, I have to accept that I’m yesterday’s news.

And just to underline how despicably aged I am, life has dealt me a small yet significant blow. For a while now, I’ve found that it hurts to type. Within moments of sitting at my keyboard, a headache-like sensation grows in my arm. The muscles creak. The elbow feels hollow. I’d always assumed that people with RSI were just making it up, the crybabies. Now I’m one of them.

So I’ve been seeing a physiotherapist. And, troubled by an apparent lack of progress on my part, she sent me for an MRI scan to see if there was anything going on in my neck.

Having an MRI scan is a barrel of laughs. First you sit in a waiting room, wondering why everyone else has (a) come in pairs and (b) looks so stressed. Then you realise they’re probably waiting to find out about life-threatening tumours, while you’re only there for an achy arm. This makes you feel a bit ashamed and unworthy, like someone simply having a go on the machine for a laugh. It also prompts you to contemplate your own mortality, or at least pull a face as though that’s what you’re doing.

Then you get changed, which simply means emptying your pockets and removing your belt, because while you don’t have to
be naked for an MRI scan, taking anything metal in with you will make the machine spark, fizz and explode, leaving behind a black hole into which all the matter in the galaxy will be slurped. ‘Destroyer of Universes’ doesn’t look good on a CV.

Next you’re led into a room occupied by a gigantic white machine with TOSHIBA printed on it. This is undeniably exciting, because you’re going to lie down and go inside the big white tube and everything, like people who are ill on the telly do.

You lie down on a motorised tray. A chirpy assistant places rubberised ear-mufflers next to your head (‘You’ll hear a loud knocking sound in there’), then passes you a tube with a squeezy bulb thing on the end of it. If you start freaking out, squish it in your fist and they’ll pull you out of the machine. ‘Ha!’ you think. ‘Why would I freak out in the first place?’

And then you go inside the machine.

You glide inside surprisingly quickly, to find yourself staring upwards into a universe of featureless white. And then the noise starts. It didn’t sound like knocking to me: more like an Aphex Twin gig. A series of stop-start electronic tones, buzzes, rumbles and alarms resonated through my head and neck.

‘This is what being a modem must be like,’ I thought, gazing into the bleached nothingness.

It lasted about 20 minutes: more than enough time for anyone to start feeling seriously weird. Soon I began to suspect I was in a sci-fi thriller, having my mind wiped. Two minutes longer and I’d have been squeezing the freak-out teat and babbling about seeing through the Matrix.

On the way out, they give you a CD with your images on it – like a souvenir snapshot from a ride at Alton Towers, except instead of being depicted grinning on a log flume, you’re dissected into slices. This is a bracing sight, and pretty good for kick-starting far deeper thoughts about your own mortality than the ones you were pretending to have earlier for the benefit of the people in the waiting room. As such, it makes perfect desktop wallpaper. Now, every time I minimise a window, I catch sight of my innards and contemplate death. This keeps me vibrant and alive and characteristically cheerful.

Anyway, the upshot of it all was, the scan revealed my neck is older than I am. That is, a combination of bad posture, bad habits, and bad everything means part of my cervical spine appears prematurely clapped out. If I’m middle-aged, my neck’s a pensioner. This is non-reversible, which means the resultant arm pain won’t go away any time soon. Instead, I’ll have to work round it, doing neck exercises like a codger. Age comes to us all, but I’ve managed to invite some of it to the party early, simply by not sitting correctly for 37 years. It’s a humiliating birthday present, not to mention infuriating. I’d punch the wall in despair, but that’d make things worse.

Perhaps I should hold a birthday party. After all, at my current rate of decay, next year’s will be a wake, so I’d best make the most of each remaining moment. Just don’t expect handwritten invites, okay?

I got caught cheating once. Actually, not strictly cheating – I’d split from my girlfriend at the time, but it was pretty soon after the break and there was still some doubt as to whether we were going to get back together or not, and then I met this girl, and … long story short, my ex was in the flat we’d shared together, picking up some of her things, when she spotted a pair of alien knickers on the radiator.

‘Whose are these?’ she asked.

‘They’re yours,’ I said, shrugging nonchalantly, like it was obvious.

‘I’d recognise my own knickers, for Christ’s sake. Just tell me whose they are.’

‘Ohhhh,’ I said, like it was all coming back to me, ‘remember I told you about that work trip I went on? Where we all went to Paris? Well, on the way back, a couple of people gave me their laundry, and I washed it, and it must’ve all got jumbled up with mine.’