ILL IN BED

o

millions of years ago if i

was ill and lying in bed

you would be fucking

someone else on

our living

room

flo

or

FOOLISH ENDEAVOURS

It seems that one of the biggest faux pas one can commit online is to become the kind of "Grammar Nazi" who goes around pointing out the shortcomings of other people's spelling or punctuation. People will blame predictive text, character limits, and a whole host of other reasons before simply admitting that they made a mistake or just didn't know better.

So, when I got up on Saturday in a bit of a bad mood, and just happened to get highly irritated by a posting from my local town's data feed that we should enjoy our day "Whatever your doing" and felt the need to rant to nobody in particular about the apostrophe in "You're" being there to emphasise the point that it was a reduction of "You are" I was, quite rightly, knocked back by people who are fully aware of just how picky I was being, even though I was, of course, perfectly correct to point it out.

It happens all the time, and each time I see it, it annoys the hell out of me.

My English teacher, Mr Watson, would have been so proud.

I still remember his short and rather ranting lecture which he gave during one English lesson about the use of "It's" and "Its" in a sentence, and it's stayed with me all these years.

Just as I remember Mrs Machin's three bugbears which made it into her weekly spelling tests at primary school: N-e-c-e-s-s-a-r-y, I-m-m-e-d-i-a-t-e-l-y, and S-u-c-c-e-s-s-f-u-l...

And Mr Williams in History making a point of underscoring the second "a" in "parliament" every single time... although I never did understand another teacher's explanation of the sentence "Andrew had had had had had had his dinner..."

Some people really don't believe such things are important. Although, if you've ever worked in pre-press and advertising, and you've had to have your output proof-read, you'll perhaps have a very different point of view. After all, if you get a customer's telephone number incorrect, the whole point of their advertisement is somewhat lost.

I worked with a woman once who didn't think these things mattered, and she would stand around getting very shouty if anyone pointed out one of her errors. She'd been brought up in one of those schools which believed that "creativity" mattered far more than "accuracy" when it came to writing, and would tell us so in no uncertain terms.

Interestingly (and perhaps ironically), she left to train as a teacher before the "proof-reading" regime proper came in at work...

Of course, pointing out other people's grammatical errors is a mildly dangerous occupation when you are putting words out into the world yourself. Straight away you're setting yourself up for every Tom, Dick and Harriet to point out your own mistakes in that "pride comes before a fall" manner we seem to have culturally embraced to knock down anyone who tries to maintain that standards in grammar (amongst other things) are actually quite important if we are all to understand each other, and which, to my mind, demonstrates a recent trend towards, I believe, the wholesale de-intellectualisation of our society in general.

Which brings us to "Endeavour" the rather well-made "prequel" series to "Inspector Morse" set in the 1960s. We've recently been working our way through the DVDs and still enjoying them, despite usually remembering "Whodunnit" from when we first watched them on broadcast, and the misfit character of Morse triggering far too many parallels with my own particular lot in life for my liking...

The one tiny, almost insignificant thing that does annoy me about the programme, however, and has done since I first watched the episodes on TV, is the kerning between the letters "A" and "V" on the titles. The spacing really, really does need adjusting because the gap is visually just far too wide. It's a subtle thing, but it doesn't half irritate you once you notice it.

Well, if you're me, anyway...

I know that in this computer-led age, few people worry about such things now, but, once upon a time, such things used to be important, and my old Typography lecturers would have gone mad if I'd let that one go through in the days of Letraset, metal type or calligraphy.

Meanwhile, and on a totally unrelated note, the particular episode of "Endeavour" we happened to be watching, "Rocket", also triggered a conversation which went something like this:

"There's that actress Maimie McCoy, the one you said looks a little bit like our friend ____"

"Did I say that? I thought you said it..."

"No, it was definitely something you said..."

"Well, to be fair, it does sound like the sort of thing I'd've said…"

"...but, I mean, how would I know what she looks like now? I haven't seen her in person in nearly five years. Not since that time that she came to the house with her ____... I mean, I may have picked you both up in the car at some point since, although I'm pretty sure that I haven't, and I'm fairly sure that her visit here was the last time I actually saw her..."

This, of course, set me thinking about how many people I never get to see any more.

Okay, it's probably not the done thing to socialise privately with your partner's friends, but there are people who I consider to be my own "close friends" who I haven't seen in person in any year starting with the numbers 2 and 0, and there is one friend who I last saw on the day of the Concorde crash. There are people I know who are about to move into the second house they've lived in since I last saw them, and whose current home I've never been in.

So how does this sort of thing allow itself to happen? How can whole decades disappear without me managing to actually see the people I supposedly care about?

Maybe that's why I enjoy "Endeavour" so much... Perhaps one day I'm hoping to revisit my own past and watch my own "prequel" with the benefit of hindsight...?

OH DEAR LORD, NO!

There I was, the other night, idly sitting alone in my house, waiting for the telephone call asking me to meet the beloved off the late train after her evening’s shopping, when I heard the soft thud of the letterbox telling me that someone had just posted something through it.

“Damn!” I thought to myself, realising that this probably meant that I’d have to fork out myself and pay the window cleaner this week, losing this round in the little “lottery of life” game our household plays amongst itself.

Nevertheless I strolled downstairs to the back door and found a folded up piece of A4 paper which had been posted through.

“Oh no!” I thought “I’ve been found out!”

Now what might have been found out, I’m not entirely sure, but I tend to think that sort of thing out of habit anyway whenever something unexpected happens. I find that it kind of saves time and prepares my mind for whatever horrors or disputes are about to unfold. At least, I usually think, whatever it really is can’t be any worse than I can imagine it could be.

I unfolded the paper.

It was worse than I imagined.

After years of tolerating each other, trying to get along but, basically, leaving ourselves to ourselves, somebody along our remote, isolated little terrace has had what can only be described as “An Idea…”

Not only that, they honestly seem to believe that it’s a “good” idea, which, of course, perhaps it is. It’s hard for me to judge.

There have been conversations occuring and somebody has decided that they really would like to get to know their neighbours better, and the full horror of this is going to manifest itself as a “Terrace Jubilee Party” if they have their way. “A few barbeques on the go, a few drinks and a bit of socialising…” all of which, they will no doubt fail to appreciate, will combine into adding up to being something approaching the absolute pinnacle of my own personal idea of hellish torment.

So what do we do now…?

Do we have to spend the entire Bank Holiday weekend hiding out in our own front room…? Do we have to book into a hotel to escape for the duration…? Do we just go out for the day and spend the entire time wondering quite when would be the most prudent time to return…? Would this horrific notion of “fun” still be carrying on far, far beyond a time of the evening when I’d rather be tucked up in bed with a good book...? Will I instead be running the risk of being trapped in my parked car, hoping for a window of opportunity to slip past the partying throng and through my own front door, and hopefully managing to remain unnoticed by them all as I do…?

There will now follow a fortnight of trying not to catch anyone’s eye as I arrive home, or sitting indoors on whatever sunny evenings we may have, just in case someone takes the opportunity to ask us the question about our involvement directly. There will have to be a few mumbled non-committal replies, or long evenings spent wondering quite what the most effective excuse that we can come up with is likely to be. Not only that, but, when the day itself comes around, we will no doubt spend it overhearing the raucous sounds of dubious organised “fun” being had outside and feel unable to either venture outside ourselves, or be able to just choose to sit outside in our own little garden for fear of being forcibly dragged into the proceedings.

It’s going to be a nightmare.

I do, of course, recognise (of course I do) that, to a great deal of people, this would appear to be a very “nice” idea. I’m even prepared to recognise that it is, in fact, a “nice” idea. Getting to know your neighbours better and promoting a sense of community is a perfectly laudable thing to want to do. However, when it comes to it, it’s also something that I want nothing whatsoever to do with.

At least not in that way.

I’m perfectly happy to chat with people on my own terms, and I actually quite like chatting to most of the neighbours that I’ve met, but stick me into the middle of a party situation and my panic alarm will be ringing madly and they are, absolutely, likely to just never want to speak to me again and a whole row of “For Sale” signs are more than likely to then start to appear within days of this momentous event.

Watching television, later on that fateful evening, I saw, to my horror, that “Big Brother” was about to return to Channel 5, an event which I would usually pay no heed at all to. I did, however, seriously wonder, just for a moment, whether I could still apply to take part, as it seemed the perfect way to avoid both the Jubilee and the Olympics this summer. Unfortunately, I’d also miss the cricket, but I thought that it might just be worth it…

And so, some of those tiny little horrors of life continue to unfold around me, just like that innocent piece of paper. In disbelief I looked at it again, hoping that there’d been some mistake and that I’d read it wrongly and misunderstood it somehow. I even showed it to the beloved when she got home, and her horror at what seems to be unfolding was just about as bad as mine, which probably meant that I hadn’t.

We may have to move…!

That was also the moment, incidentally, when I noticed something far worse about this message from beyond our four walls - on closer inspection, the text was set in a “Comic Sans” style typeface…!

How on Earth could I possibly be involved with such an event after I had noticed that…?

(Well, when it comes to making up feeble excuses to get out of things, I have to go with whatever I can come up with...)

SIGNS

One of the things that I love about America is its signage. It can be so fiendishly complicated that it makes exiting the Freeway the most terrifying of prospects, and yet so fiendishly simple and direct at the same time. In marketing terms, no opportunity for a bad rhyming couplet is ignored so that a small town pizzeria, for example, will survive on the most excruciatingly awful punnery.

“We toss ’em… They’re awesome!” is the one that has stuck with me (which goes to show that it works…) but there were plenty more, and such techniques really become ubiquitous as even a little pizzeria like that will have signs bearing its slogan on the highway anything up to fifty miles away so that a silly little phrase like that one will have already stuck in your head long before you get to the town itself, and the familiarity of seeing it again and remembering it from when you were on the road is very effective.

We didn’t eat there of course, but I’m pretty sure we got some nice shots of the outside of their shop.

Wherever you go, some little shop or other will be doing its level best to draw attention to itself. That is, of course, only to be expected in a country which is so brutally led by market forces. Sometimes it seems as if every available surface has been covered with as much marketing material and signage as is humanly possible, and then they’ve added some more.

In Sonoma, for example, every sign we saw seemed to bear the logo “Sonoma Signs” in the corner, as if someone had personally made it his mission (or at least his job) to provide as many signs as it was humanly possible to do in one small town. Still, perhaps even in America there must come a saturation point where nobody else feels that they need any more signs, and if that were to happen, what would become of his small-town sign-making business?

More evidence of this could be seen in the central valley where every farm seemed to have a hand-painted sign in very similar style showing the name of the farm, a picture of the farmer and his family, and a picture of whatever fruit or vegetable they grew. It was almost as if a sign-painter had gone to every door of every farmhouse and asked them if they wanted a sign painting for next to the highway, which is, I suppose, precisely what did happen.

As we were strolling around the various small towns we visited recently, I became rather obsessed with the signage, and started pointing my camera and clicking at just about every sign I saw. Perhaps it was the latent graphic artist in me resurfacing, whilst I was supposed to be “off duty” (although can anyone who works in the visual arts ever really be “off duty”…?), but I did so much so that I probably have far too many of the dullest set of holiday pictures ever taken.

Interestingly too, I was mooching around in a gift shop towards the end of the trip, wondering whether the luggage weight allowance would allow me to buy a couple of books of old postcards which I was looking at when the proprietor of the restaurant attached to the shop came in and told the woman behind the counter that she was to allow the young girl with him to take anything she needed and charge it to him. Then he rather proudly gave his reason. This young girl was going to be creating their “new” signage in the near future.

He seemed very impressed, in that way older men can sometimes do when around a young girl, that she was able to recreate “By hand!” pretty much any typeface she wanted to. Even though I was inwardly snorting with derision at another example of a graphic artist convincing another customer that something that comes so easily to us is something deceptively complicated, on later reflection I realised that the old sign-writing skills are probably very rare in this day and age where much of the typography that you see is laid out, created and rendered on machines, and perhaps the ability to hand paint such things is far more unusual than it was in my day when hand lettering skills were ten a penny.

Certainly now, when I begin the endless trawl through all of those photographs that I took, I’m more aware of just how many old hand-painted signs there seem to be in the parts of America which I have visited, and they are the ones that I remember especially clearly, and on the old photographs in that postcard book that I did eventually buy and bring home, it is the old signs that speak to me of  old-time America and how different a “Go get ’em” world it seems to have been from the repressed, understated ways of old Europe.

I suppose that maybe, like a lot of holiday snaps which include certain things that might seem currently a little mundane, perhaps one day they’ll be seen as historically fascinating even if, at this precise moment, even I’m just looking through them thinking “Why on Earth did I take that one…?”

When it comes to my snapshots, for example, I can get quite irritated when a modern car sneaks into the frame but, in about twenty years time, perhaps I will look through them again and be intrigued by all those old cars and bizarre fashions that we once wore and have to remind myself why all the people who kept getting “in my way” were looking at tiny little screens as they walked along.

The potential for million “Channel 57” retrospective evenings about the first part of the century, with social observers, columnists and radio DJs burbling on about things like “Do you remember iPhones…? Yeah, I had one of those… I could never get it to work properly…” comes to mind and I shudder at the thought…

A WHOLE CAN O’ PEAS

I’ve said before that Graphic Design doesn’t generally kill people, but it can’t half conspire to make you look stupid every once in a while. The problem is that it’s so easily done. Sometimes you suffer from a kind of word blindness that is hard to explain, and it’s always worth remembering that context is everything. During my years in the small ads game, one of the more vital aspects of the job, especially as it moved over into electronic media, was getting the phone number and address right. Now you’d think that was kind of obvious, but you’d be amazed how easy it could be to get that vital bit slightly wrong.

Once upon a time there was a rather important report being sent from the office I worked in. You could tell it was important (although not actually secret or sensitive in any way) because some of us lowly and humble employees were asked to read it and check it for errors. At least three of us checked the copy of this once oh-so-vital report, the content of which is now long forgotten, but which might have reflected poorly on our office if it had been full of mistakes. It was only after we had all pronounced it to be ‘perfect’ and ‘error free’ that it was given a final quick cursory read through and it was discovered that an entire paragraph had been repeated. It was all spelt perfectly, so perfectly in fact that we felt we had to say it twice. We were looking at the individual words, you see, and not the bigger picture. You might have said that ‘you couldn’t see the paragraphs for the words’ and I probably would have done if I’d thought of it at the time (and wasn’t feeling so embarrassed at having missed it…). I had another colleague once tell me that, in a previous job, he had proof read an entire catalogue and approved it for print, and when it came back from the printers, all 5000 copies had to be pulped because he’d misspelled ‘catalogue’ in 72 point lettering on the cover. Or, come to think of it, was it a calendar?

There’s a road junction here in Lesser Blogfordshire with a set of traffic lights where the great and the good (or just those extracting the Michael…) tend to hang old sheets with messages painted onto them to help their friends, family or colleagues to celebrate the fact that they are “50 TODAY!” or some such. It’s a good spot. Very visible. Especially as many drivers have to wait at the lights for a couple of minutes. If you don’t want to know that the world already knows that you are in fact “50 TODAY!” it’s probably best not to go that way of a morning. Some of our more canny local business people have noticed what a good site it is and started to put advertising for their businesses there. I was sitting at those lights myself yesterday evening when I happened to notice this very banner hanging there and started wondering whether canapés were something of a mystery to the fine people of Lesser Blogfordshire…

“’Ere, Bri…?”

“Yeah…?”

“’Ow d’yer spell ‘canopy’? Can-o-py or can-a-py?”

“Why?”

“Had a customer on the phone, giving me the copy for ’er banner. Definitely made it sound like it ’ad an ‘a’ in the middle…”

“Probably a southerner. You know, from ‘Darn Sarth’”

“Maybe… Unless she meant ‘can of peas…’”

“Don’t be daft lad!”

“Yeah, but at least you could eat a can of peas. ‘Champagne and Canopies’ what’s all that in aid of then? Do they serve ’em drinks outside or summat?”

“S’pose so…”

“Seems a bit odd…”

“The customer is always right lad…”

A “PROPER JOB”, A MOMENTARY MELTDOWN AND REMEMBERING T.P.

Historically, apparently I’ve never had a “proper job”. Despite having spent twenty plus years sitting at various desks slaving away in the Graphic Design industry, this is apparently “just drawing” and is looked upon in much the same way as “art” seemed to be at school; Something that the “less than bright sparks” did to fill up their timetable. Obviously I would disagree, but it’s one of those prejudices that has come back to haunt me in recent months. It’s amazing to me how little respect the work I do gets from some of my nearest and dearest. I think because of the nature of my work, and where I happen to do it, they don’t think of it as a “real job” at all, that I can just drop everything in an instant and it won’t really matter. I must accept that very few people have actually died due to me failing to finish laying out my type, there’s still important work that gets done in this much maligned industry that, since the advent of the home computer, everyone thinks they can do nowadays, and whilst I must also agree that most people can knock out a flyer or an invite that does the job, it takes a different set of skills to do it well.

Another thing, maybe people do die if the graphics are wrong. If the text is too small to safely read, or if it’s been written wrongly, inaccurate packaging on medical products can prove fatal, and hazard warning graphics save lives. As do motorway graphics and a hundred other bits of design that we take for granted as just being there, and which surrounds all of us every day, not that anyone ever seems to realise that all this stuff has to be designed in the first place.

It’s always been the same. One of my lecturers told me the story once of how he proudly went home and presented his first professional design work to his mum and told her that he’d designed it. “What, you printed it?” “No, I designed it…” “You took the photographs…?” “No, I designed it…” and so on. I remember my grandmother asking me outright what Graphic Design actually was and despite pointing out that just about everything she actually had in her home had some sort of design involved in it, and that her kitchen cupboards were crammed full of products emblazoned with Graphic Design of varying successfulness, I don’t think that she ever really got it.

In fact I remember her quite blithely telling me once that “it’s not as if you have a full time job” because I happened in those days to finish at 4.00 PM, despite having done the same number of working hours as any other office worker, and after all those years I spent trying to explain what Graphic Design actually is she still never recognised what I did as being “work ”  as she understood it.

Well, I guess it’s hardly coal mining, is it?

Mind you, even in one of my previous jobs there was a sense that it’s really only “just drawing” (another hangover from their own schooldays I guess). In an effort to explain the disparity of wages in his development department one of my managers once explained that he had to pay the engineers more because they had to get “Professional qualifications, you know? Degrees and that…” to become engineers. I remember his absolute shock (and disbelief) when he was told that the artworkers they employed had to have qualifications in order to get their jobs as well, and some of them even had degrees in design. But then, apparently a design degree isn’t a proper degree it would seem – it certainly never improved the wages. Maybe they believed that we’d knocked the certificates up ourselves in some design software and printed them out on our laser printers…

In more recent years, whenever I spotted a youngster carrying those distinct portfolios we all used to lug around the country with us before it all got put onto shiny discs, I was so tempted to stop the car and tell them to choose another career. I never did, of course. That would have been freakish.

Respect the job. It’s only fair. After all, we try to respect everyone else’s. In that spirit, I’ve been given a rather excellent publication called “Just My Type” by Simon Garfield which takes the whole art of typography (one of the many disciplines that make up the profession of Graphic Design) and makes a rather lovely and very real actual book about it. I love the way that whenever he mentions a font, like Times New Roman, the text is then printed in that font. Subtle, but artful, and it probably loses a lot of its impact on an iPhone or as an Audiobook. I particularly enjoyed reacquainting myself with some of the terminology that I should have remembered but had forgotten over the years. Things like “UPPERCASE” and “lowercase” actually referring to the cases of metal type that we used to cast on, and where they actually were in relation to where the setter stood, because the lowercase letters were used more frequently and so needed to be more accessible for the setters, or “minding your ‘p’s and ‘q’s” referring to how similar they looked when you were casting them back off again. I’m (just) old enough to remember physical type-setting, and I seem to remember quite enjoying it.

Meanwhile, back at the coal face, I do worry some days that my sanity is unraveling and I sometimes think that my ability to cope is rapidly diminishing as I spiral on down with too many things to think about and too few things actually managing to get done...

Am I alright? Of  course I’m not alright! It’s bloody freezing in my house and I’m completely on edge waiting for the bloomin’ phone to ring for the promised release of my mother to happen even though I know it’s not going to be any fun... and I just noticed that I’ve been disconchumulated by one of my FizzBokkers, so my pathetically paltry number has now dropped back down to a slightly awkward odd number again (regular readers will notice here that I miss the even number and not whoever it actually was)... and the anxiety over the incoming workload that I’m trying to cope with has suddenly increased adding to the fundamental feelings of stressfulness which I’ve got hanging over me… so there I was, trying to do my job as various members of my nearest and dearest decide that they can keep on shouting “jump!” at me and I’ll blithely just ask them “how high...?” and I didn’t sleep... and I feel utterly, emotionally drained... and then I remember that my mum and dad never got to spend any of their marriage without the awful grandparents making their lives miserable because my dad didn’t outlive my grandmother and I’m sure as hell not going to let that happen to me, but then it seems that I’m 20% more likely to snuff it younger simply because I live in North Blogfordshire rather than South Blogfordshire... and that likelihood is on the increase again they say thanks to the NHS who aren’t in my best of books at the moment anyway…

Sorry, just a little stream-of-consciousness thing happening for a minute there… Calm again now…

Just when I was getting the idea that the day probably couldn’t get much worse, I clicked on the BBC News website to see what’s happening in the world and find out that T.P. McKenna has left this mortal coil. Not a household name nowadays I’m sure, but one of those faces that you would immediately recognize because he’d been in just about everything over the years, and was one of those actors who appeared in so many of those classic series of the 1960s and 1970s, although I remember him most clearly from his role as David Callan’s Soviet opposite number in the final series of “Callan”, most notably in the final trilogy of episodes “The Richmond File”. Once again, I feel a need to pause and to raise a metaphorical glass  - I don’t know, this time maybe of Jamesons? - to his memory.