Afternoon of the living dead

(Originally posted on 19th August 2007)

It's after lunch on a Saturday that shopwork really starts to grate. The ill-tempered and witless seem to move onto the high street en masse: another afternoon of the living dead. By about half three, most of us on the servile side of the counter become convinced that surely anything would be less soul-crushing: working in an abattoir for kittens perhaps.

And being Duty Manager for the day just makes it that little bit more... well, even Roget can't help me here, but it's bloody relentless, whatever it is.

Competing for the day's star customer accolade were the Russian woman who accused a member of staff of stealing the bag she'd actually left on a different floor, and the student who kept trying to get a refund to which he certainly wasn't entitled and who only gave in when he realised that it would me who'd be called upon to adjudicate at whichever desk he went to and that I was quite prepared to play the game of saying 'no' in as many different ways as possible without hesitation, deviation, repetition or just telling him to sod off.

This week's cavalcade of the clueless seems to have made me a soulmate in misanthropy of Michael Bywater, the recent paperback publication of whose Big Babies, Or Why Can't We Just Grow Up?, has been my Tube reading for the last few days.

Essentially, his argument is that we live in a culture whose sole aim is entertainment, passive and puerile, baby food for the brain. (He doesn't like marketing's fancy for alliteration so perhaps I'd better modify my rhetoric here.) From the vacuity of musicals and reality television to the patronising pictograms of warning signs which proliferate in every public space, we are discouraged at every turn from taking any responsibility about the way we live.

I came across a perfect example of such a sign at London Bridge station this week. A poster drawing attention to the hazards of unattended baggage juxtaposed a picture of a bench with a lone suitcase beside it with one identical but for the presence of a man sitting next to the bag: the first had a big red cross beside it, the second a tick.

Being a slightly fusty alumnus cambrigiensis, he does occasionally misfire when laying into certain pop-culture phenomena: his tirade against The Spice Girls, while of course nobly motivated, did rather need a copy editor to point out that he was taking a step too far outside his realm of expertise. And his assertion that "good sex shouldn't be fun" does rather fly in the face of the field research of millions.

I've been listening to Talk Talk's Laughing Stock while writing this, a speculative purchase of a band whom I had hitherto only encountered when marginally misshelved in the Talking Heads section of record shops. I can't remember now what provoked my investigating them, but they certainly have their passionate adherents on Amazon. (Mind you, so does everyone on Amazon, but Talk Talk's reviewers seemed mostly to have at least a familiarity with polysyllabism and the concept of punctuation).

I'm at a loss as to how to describe the album: woozy blues, classical mithering, a vaguely ambient jazziness at the abstract end of the Eno scale and the sort of wilful atonality which Scott Walker has spent the last couple of decades honing. Anyway, I'm enjoying being confounded by it.

I've not had any particularly memorable contributions to Photos of Dinosaurs in the last few days. But I did unearth one of my own that I'd forgotten about.

Where do you have books on music and rock stars from the sixties?
- Up in the music department on third floor.
Then why does it say 'Books and Music' over there?
- Because that's Borders over the road. It's a different shop.

That's what Saturday's like. All bloody day.