Author: Rob Hearn

How Not to Be a Games Journalist

The comedian Josh Widdicombe once wrote, “If I could have lived anywhere at the age of 12 it would have been in David Baddiel and Frank Skinner’s flat”. 

At about the same age I would have chosen the Amiga Power offices at Future Publishing in Bath – or AP Towers, as it was vaingloriously described by the magazine’s writers: Stuart Campbell, Jonathan Davies, Jonathan Nash, Cam Winstaneley, Matt Bielby, Mark Ramshaw, and others. 

My obsession began around 1992, when I flicked through a copy of Amiga Format – a more grown-up, hardware-focused sister publication of Amiga Power – in my cousin’s bedroom during a visit to Thurso, on the bleak north coast of Scotland. 

As I recall it, the back of the magazine contained several pages of short, alphabetically ordered game reviews, no more than a sentence or two in length, each one bylined with the author’s initials. The only initials I remember clearly are JD – Jonathan Davies1. 

I’d love to verify all this, but I can’t find any Amiga Format PDFs online, after an admittedly cursory search. Amiga Power is available, and it contains a version of the micro-reviews I described above in a section called The Bottom Line, so it’s possible that I’ve got the two publications confused. 

In any case, that’s when it all started. When I eventually got my own Amiga A500, I quickly discovered that Amiga Power was the journal for me. It was self-referential, informal, experimental, and unashamedly erudite. Unlike EDGE, which eschewed all bylines and enforced a uniform house style, as though to create the impression of having been written by an infallible divine being, Amiga Power embraced the personalities of its writers and allowed them to run amok. 

This was most notable in the self-indulgent “concept” reviews of Jonathan Nash, which often took the form of strange, ostensibly irrelevant stories containing words that I had to look up. He once wrote that a character, “silked tenaciously”. Stuart Campbell, meanwhile, dispensed both scorn and praise with uncompromising, excoriating passion. Others like Jonathan Davies and Cam Winstaneley were milder, but no less entertaining. They were all funny and brilliant writers.

A few years later, long after the demise of the Commodore Amiga, a friend revealed that he had stacks of old copies of Amiga Power in his bedroom. I staggered home laden and devoured them, scanning first for my favourite bylines and then for the lowest scores, as those were usually the funniest reviews. 

Amiga Power was one of those magazines, like Viz, that are worth reading in their entirety, right down to the boxout containing the publisher’s address and the list of contributors. There were jokes everywhere, as well as references to arguments and discussions in the office, comments (often withering) about colleagues, and so on. AP Towers seemed like the funnest and best place imaginable. 

***

At some point in the early ‘90s I watched the documentary In Bed with Madonna in my bedroom and found myself being swept along in a pathetic fantasy of joining her entourage. It’s no exaggeration to say that my dream of becoming a games journalist felt just as outlandish. 

And, to be clear, this was a fairly realistic assessment of my prospects. Having devoted my years in education to daydreaming, defacing exam papers, and smelling bad, I left school with absolutely nothing and spent the next five years rattling around somewhere beneath the lowest rung of the socio-economic ladder. I did time in a succession of menial jobs, including six weeks sweeping the floor at a pastry factory, and two days putting labels on packs of smoked salmon. In those cases, and many others, I simply flounced out when I had had enough, and went back to signing-on.

Through A-level evening classes and several strokes of astonishingly good luck I wound up at university. I put myself forward to write for the student paper, and at an introductory talk the editor told a group of aspiring journalists how special it is to see your name in print for the first time, which it was. 

After graduating I applied for a job at PC Gamer, the spiritual successor to Amiga Power, and my new favourite magazine. I drove all the way from St Andrews to Bath in a Fiat Panda and stayed with my aunt. The interview took place on a hot day in June, and involved playing a game, writing a review, and speaking to the editor, Mark Donald, and the deputy editor, Ross Atherton. We chatted about Amiga Power, and Jonathan Nash. They called him a genius and told me, to my intense delight, that he still cut a dash in the bars and nightclubs of Bath. 

God it was cool.

While I was writing my sample review a freelancer called Jim Rossignol came into the office and grumbled about something or other. Matt Pierce, former editor turned publisher, popped in and said something about a holiday house in France. Both men were surprisingly posh2. I sat next to Mark Sutherns, the disk editor. He was listening to Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief, which wasn’t out yet but had been famously leaked, so all the cool people (e.g. me) had it. I glanced at the screen next to mine and saw emails from Kieron Gillen. Kieron Gillen! Somebody remarked that one of the writers – possibly Dan Griliopoulos – had absconded from the office to an outdoor table at the cafe across the street.

You may have heard of these people. You may not. You’re probably not impressed, but they were my Madonna entourage, and visiting the Future Publishing offices was like coming home. 

I didn’t get the job3. 

***

After that I enrolled in a Creative Writing masters, and then an IT diploma, which I bailed on, followed by a teacher training course, which I also bailed on, followed eventually by my first job with “writer” in the title.

MonsterMob, now defunct, was a possibly shady company that sold wallpapers, ringtones, and primitive mobile games. Those games needed reviews for some reason, and MonsterMob had been paying an outsourcing company an exorbitant fee to produce them. 

At this point, by the way, I’m going to stop using real names, since not everything I have to say is complimentary or fair4. 

The writer employed by the outsourcing company, Flip Dorkmeister, had been among the interviewees at my excruciating group interview, and when I was asked to edit his final batch of reviews on my first day I saw why the door had been slammed in his face. His writing was borderline unintelligible. This was a moment of schadenfreude-laced encouragement that I would experience often over the next few years, and which every half-decent aspiring professional writer can look forward to. 

Most people can’t write.

I had no oversight at MonsterMob, and I exploited this freedom to channel Jonathan Nash in my reviews, many of which took the form of silly, self-indulgent stories. One of them began, “Distant footsteps approach, voices tumble up the stone corridor outside, a key clatters in the lock. Daylight slices into the display room before the striplights flicker into life.”

You may vomit now. 

Another of my reviews contained the line, “playing a level in one life is the gentleman’s way,” which was inspired by a similar line in Jonathan Davies’s PC Gamer review of, I think, Codename Eagle. His line went something like, “there’s a quicksave option, but if you’re a gentleman you will not use it.”

There’s a very good chance that nobody other than me has ever read my MonsterMob reviews, and they were completely inappropriate for their intended audience: i.e., the sort of people who used to buy Crazy Frog ringtones for £2.99. 

The job at MonsterMob entailed a two hour commute from Liverpool to Lancaster, long days in a stuffy office, and tasks that bored or bewildered me. Even the writing component started to grate, since I wasn’t getting any feedback and didn’t fully understand the purpose of the reviews. After a couple of months I was asked to produce a SOFT report, which was the final straw. I dragged my heels for a few weeks and then left. 

***

But all was not lost. While working at MonsterMob, I had started writing reviews and features for a mobile gaming site that would become my home for the next eight years. 

The site was the brainchild of Chad Bossman, an ambitious and extremely astute publishing executive who understood, at least five years before anybody else, that mobile phones would eventually become a huge gaming platform. His board of directors consisted of senior ex-Future Publishing people and EDGE alumni. 

One of these, Rip Indigo, took me under his wing in the early days, saying encouraging things about my writing, giving me advice, and dispensing clear and firm feedback. I suspect he’s the cleverest person I’ve ever met, and I was intensely gratified by the interest he showed in me, though I doubt I ever made this clear to him. 

I left MonsterMob in January 2007, and went back to my old data entry job in Liverpool while freelancing on the side. During this period Rip Indigo offered me £500 a month to write and commission mobile reviews, and in August Chad Bossman offered me £1000 a month to work four days a week, before increasing this to £1400 for five. Thus commenced my pyjama years.  

***

Being a games journalist is great. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise. Every job has bad days and good days, and one of our limitations as a species is that we can only compare today with yesterday and, to a steadily diminishing extent, the days that preceded it. We don’t tend to consider all the alternative lives we could have been living. I often grumbled about work, but there’s no question whatsoever that the life of a games journalist is blessed in the extreme.

I got to do two of my favourite things – playing games and writing – all day. And as I climbed the ladder into the world of management I got to do another of my favourite things: delegating.

Plus, I found myself in the world of people I knew from page and screen. Mark Sutherns, the man I had sat next to at my PC Gamer interview, briefly joined the company. I shared a room with Dan Griliopoulos, the possible cafe PC Gamer office absconder, in LA. I gained Facebook friends (not real friends, but still) who had been my heroes since early adolescence. My diffidence mostly kept me from interacting with these luminaries, but I still enjoyed knowing that there was never more than one degree of separation between us, and that I was a member of the same tribe. 

Aside from the gaming, and the writing, and the hero-acquaintance-making, my job gave me a degree of freedom that most people in normal employment would struggle to comprehend. Soon after I joined the company I moved to Germany for a couple of months, and I was half way through this excursion before my employers were even aware that I had left the UK. One of my colleagues had decamped to Egypt, meanwhile, and frequently got time off due to the sun “melting” her internet connection. I worked in cafes and bars, drinking (in moderation) on the job, typing away in flipflops on sunny European terraces before closing my laptop and throwing myself into mid-afternoon capers.

Given the awful life of menial roadside toil that had once beckoned, my lifestyle represented an outrageous piece of good fortune, and I appreciated it every day. I showed my gratitude by being industrious. conscientious, reliable, broadly competent, and full of initiative. As insufferable as it sounds, I would have been pleased to have recruited someone like me. 

Alas, my promising career as a games journalist fizzled out and I left my job at the end of 2015 for another kind of life. There were several reasons for this, and for the most part my career change was nobody’s fault. 

But I have notes, which I present to you now in the spirit of a cautionary tale. 

  1. I Didn’t Love Video Games Enough

I’ve always played video games. One of my earliest memories is of me slouching over an Apple II, playing Lode Runner with a slab-like metal joystick that I’m pretty sure my dad made at work. I spent countless hours in amusement arcades, gawping at the impossibly beautiful graphics and absorbing the distinctive cacophony of chiptune soundtracks. My first act after getting a car in my 20s was to drive overnight from St Andrews in Fife to Bromley in Kent for a LAN party. My Creative Writing masters dissertation was about the game The Secret of Monkey Island – and it got a first

There can be no doubting my credentials as a video game enthusiast. 

But compared to the people I worked with I was positively indifferent. Everybody around me knew everything, and cared infinitely. Whenever we discussed a particular franchise or genre – which, as you can imagine, was often – I felt strangely ignorant about the medium that I had poured more time and thought into than any other. I liked video games, but it turned out I didn’t love them. I thought about them, but I wasn’t obsessed with them.

Naturally, this had an impact on my effectiveness as a journalist whenever I met up with developers keen to show off their wares. I suspect I was one of the first people to see Clash of Clans in action, at a conference in Hamburg, but I didn’t really know what I was looking at. I’ve never been remotely interested in strategy games, so I failed in my most basic duty as a consumer journalist: to tell the public about cool stuff. I just nodded blankly throughout the meeting and then ambled away with an empty head.  

This is indicative of two personal failings. The first is that I’m a dilettante, idly picking at threads without ever being able to commit myself to a single pursuit.

The second is that I hate myself. 

That may or may not be an exaggeration, but it’s true to say that I have a tendency to position myself against whatever it is that I’m doing. When I lived in Scotland, which I did for 20 years or so, I insisted that I was English. I objected to being described as Scottish so passionately that my friends used the label to tease me. Conversely, now that I live in England I describe myself as Scottish, and feel positively elated when somebody detects the faint Scots burr in my mongrel accent.

I took the same approach to being a video games journalist, assuming the role in conversations of a cynical, joyless, video game-hating sophisticate, looking down at the medium I had ostensibly devoted my life to. I suppose this trait is a defensive strategy, arising from a childhood characterised by multiple disruptive relocations and the sudden premature death of my father. It’s a cousin of defensive pessimism. I don’t care if this all ends, I tell myself, because it’s shit anyway.

I once described this contrarian aspect of my personality to my colleagues during an online conversation. Our video guy surprised me by saying, “Rob needs a hug”, instead of congratulating me for being complex and awesome. 

  1. I Was Shy

Distinct personalities were what made Amiga Power great, and this ethos survived in PC Gamer. The key writers even got their own little blurbs at the front of the magazine, one memorably describing deputy editor Ross Atherton as “expanding in the summer heat, like a souffle”. 

When I first joined the site I went on to run, I’m not even sure it had bylines – a product of the anonymous ethos imparted by the EDGE alumni who had designed it. I quietly campaigned to change all that, so the readers could form attachments to individual writers, just as I had with Jonathan Nash, Stuart Campbell, Kieron Gillen, Tom Francis, and others. 

And then social media appeared. Twitter, it seemed to me, was essentially those little biographical boxouts distilled and then magnified to a glorious scale. Not only did I now have my own autobiographical blurb on a real gaming website that people read, but I could exist as a sort of aspirational character whose amusingly imparted life events would entertain the public and inspire the next generation of games journalists.

No doubt Twitter is exactly that for some. But I was overwhelmed. Other people were already so relentlessly, reliably amusing on the platform that I didn’t dare so much as clear my throat in case I drew attention to myself and had nothing to offer in exchange for this unwarranted attention. Over the next few years I periodically tinkered with Twitter, but my mind would always become unpleasantly colonised by it, my brain working feverishly to translate every incident and thought into an internet-friendly witticism. In the end, I had to accept that I’m just not cut out for social media. 

My diffidence was a problem in real life, too. I frequently saw games journalists that I admired in press rooms or presentations, or had the opportunity to hang out with them socially. At least twice I was given a ticket to the Games Media Awards, which is the games industry equivalent of the Golden Globes, and decided not to go. The following day I would see the pictures on social media, and there they all would be – my natural allies, having fun and being normal together while I stood at the figurative window looking in. 

Like any community, the video games media rewards confidence and charm. Sadly I had neither. 

  1. My Stupid Life

Within a couple of months of starting to write freelance reviews and features, I was a section editor. 

Then Rip Indigo left the company. I was bummed, but life went on.

Soon afterwards I became deputy editor, and then editor, with responsibility for managing a team, hiring new writers, running a website, and doing businessy things with people in suits and smart clothes, always in London.

I had almost no training, but I didn’t need it. I was a natural.

Yeah, right.

***

As odd as it might sound, I didn’t really know what journalism was when I started. Only writing. When I was being groomed for the editor’s chair I had to put in a few shifts churning out news stories, and my preparation was simply a list of sites to copy from. It took me a shamefully long time to realise that NEWs is supposed to be NEW. Real journalists are people who make calls, chase down leads, and climb over each other’s heads for scoops. I was just rehashing.

This ignorance persisted well into my tenure as editor. At some point in 2009 I wrote a series of stories about a dispute between Tim Langdell, who owned a company called Edge Games, and Tim Papazian, the indie developer of an iPhone game called Edge. Langdell had enforced his purported copyright of the word “Edge” against not only Papazian but also a number of other companies, including Namco, EA, and Future Publishing. There was a carefully worded consensus in the games industry that Langdell was a “trademark troll”, and he was not popular.  

Off the back of these stories a lawyer contacted me to arrange a phone call, during which he explained – off the record – that he was part of a group of industry figures working to put a stop to Langdell’s egregious trademark shenanigans. I put the phone down not really knowing what to do with the information, and quietly forgot it. 

If I had been doing my job properly I would have pressed the lawyer for more information, asked him to put me in touch with other contacts who might be prepared to go on the record, and taken the story to my seniors for guidance. 

I came to love the thrusting, self-righteous urgency of newshounding and the challenge of coming up with new ways to present old material, but back then I was utterly hopeless. 

***

Journalistic failure notwithstanding, what I liked about Edge-gate was that it represented a battle between right and wrong. I didn’t have much journalistic ability in my early days, but I had an abundance of integrity that I would proudly advertise to anybody unfortunate enough to come within range of my pontifications. 

This attitude frequently brought me into conflict with Chad Bossman. After all, it was his job to build a business, and it was my job to run a reputable site. Sometimes the demands of commerce conflicted with the principles of good journalism. George Orwell wrote, “journalism is printing what someone else does not want published; everything else is public relations”. Needless to say, this formulation didn’t mean much to Chad Bossman.

I wasn’t powerful enough to eliminate all undue commercial influence, but I tended to put up a fight, normally resulting in some squalid compromise.

On one occasion Chad Bossman agreed to provide snippets of our published game reviews, along with scores, to a mobile phone operator. Since we were only providing excerpts, Chad Bossman reasoned, there was no reason why we couldn’t select the most positive parts of the reviews, to make the games more appealing and the operators happier. 

But this was misleading! I dug in my heels, and found myself respectfully disagreeing with Chad Bossman over the phone in the garden of my basement flat in Bristol. I paced up and down in the spring sunshine, feeling vaguely nauseated by my own intransigence. 

In the end we hit on a compromise: it would be done, but I wouldn’t do it. Some other chump could get his hands dirty. That’s definitely how integrity works. 

A while later, in that same garden, I took a call from an American PR person who was understandably unhappy with my decision to run a news story drawing attention to the fact that their company had used a song by disgraced musician Gary Glitter in one of its games. I took great pleasure in telling them, very politely, to fuck right off. 

***

When I first broke into games journalism, my plan was to become a freelancer. I wrote to Ross Atherton, now editor of PC Gamer. He replied to say that he was glad I had found a job in the industry despite the cruel blow he had inflicted on my aspirations five years earlier, and that he would be happy to hear any pitches I might have. I didn’t send him a single one. 

Soon afterwards, one of the freelancers I had hired to write mobile game reviews offered me the opportunity to write a review of Metal Slug for the retro section of Eurogamer. The fee was £90 – much higher that my company paid – and it was a major site. But, after a fairly perfunctory attempt at connecting my barely used Xbox 360 to the internet, I declined the offer. 

I did manage to get one piece of freelance work commissioned and published, on a reputable, artsy US site called The Escapist. But this was just a section of my creative writing dissertation on The Secret of Monkey Island, gently edited. A few months later I received a cheque through the post for about £150.

At some point in 2009 I managed, through circumstances I can’t recall, to get a byline in The Telegraph for a handful of small reviews syndicated from my own site. I stood at a newsstand and leafed through the paper on the day I had been told the reviews would be published, and eventually found my name. But I was curiously unmoved, and didn’t even bother to buy a copy. 

Then I more or less gave up the chase. Unlike many of my peers, I had no personal ambition to appear in EDGE or a major newspaper, and I came to realise that I’m just not cut out for the hustle, nor for the pressure of having to compete with people who are better than me at networking on social media, and more passionate about the subject matter. 

It’s possible that I’m too low on confidence. It’s possible that I’m too lazy. 

Obviously it’s both.

***

2008 to 2011 were my golden years. The company was smaller than it would go on to become and I felt totally in control of my part of it. I was also working unbelievably hard. One Friday evening after my daughter was born my wife, impatient for me to finish work after a long day of maternal tedium, yelled at me to go and buy yoghurt. I stood in the supermarket aisle and experienced my heartbeat as a pulsating whiteness at the edge of my vision. I was still thrumming with the stress of my job, and entirely happy.

What I wasn’t, however, was well paid. Games journalism is a notoriously unprofitable enterprise, since there are tens of thousands of eager young writers climbing over each other to do the work for free. My wife and I had decided that we didn’t want to send our children into nursery, and she was better paid than me by many orders of magnitude, so my career was always on a timer. 

At the end of 2011 I stepped down as editor and took on the part-time role of reviews editor. Suddenly I was spending the majority of my waking hours wiping things and seeking opportunities to surreptitiously sleep. My professional status was reduced, and in the meantime my company started to change its focus, acquiring more sites, producing video, running events, and so on. Lots of new people were hired, and I became a much smaller cog. 

After our second daughter was born in 2013 my wife took maternity leave, allowing me to spend more time working. I took on extra freelance work for the company, and then persuaded Chad Bossman to just take me back full-time. From there I managed to parlay myself into a more senior position than the one I had left, overseeing a number of site editors. 

Then, to my utter delight, my wife volunteered to take a career break, giving me two more glorious years of professional fulfilment, during which time I continued to rub shoulders with my heroes, harbour fantasies of serious journalism, travel all over the world, and generally live it up. Just as importantly, I got to enjoy the status and structure that a job provides, and which, I soon came to realise, should never be given up lightly. 

I was back, but it wasn’t the same. In some respects my work was now easier, since I wasn’t a site editor any more. Instead I was just a sort of floating brain, hiring people, helping with various projects, and managing staff as required. There was a lot of travel, a lot of meetings, and a lot of aimless chat over Slack. Whereas before, in my Golden Age, I was constantly busy and felt like I was in charge, now I existed in a sort of executive limbo

I desperately wanted to be effective, and felt sure that I knew exactly how to turn the company into a cool version of NewsCorp. But it was never possible to achieve anything. Every idea required sign-off from the directors, and the directors were naturally reluctant to dedicate resources to projects that they hadn’t come up with themselves. Even when they could be persuaded to agree that a project was necessary, they would tinker it out of existence by commandeering staff and inserting other tasks into the job list, citing necessity5.   

I don’t consider myself to be a hugely ambitious person, but over time my lack of autonomy and influence sent me into a chronic, disfiguring rage.

My (insufferably arrogant) perception was that I had grown, like a balloon filling with air, into a space that was too small for me, creating major discomfort and significant pop risk. The natural next step at a moment like this is to find another job, but there was never any prospect of that given my circumstances. Eventually I would have to stop working altogether, so it was hardly worth making a change. I was like a character in The Neverending Story, waiting to be swallowed by The Nothing. 

I had also come to rely on the flexibility that my company gave me. In January 2015 my wife was diagnosed with cancer. Her recovery involved several months of gruelling treatment, which not only necessitated my being around for childcare, hospital appointments, and so on, but also undoubtedly had a disinhibiting effect on my rage-fuelled behaviour. 

I was frustrated, scared, temperamental, and doomed to leave my job and become a full-time parent at the end of 2015 whatever happened, so I had nothing to lose. It’s a miracle that I managed to hang on till Christmas. 

Unsurprisingly, things soured with Chad Bossman. 

A fuse was lit when I decided, in a moment of rebellious self-care, to skip a Sunday event in San Francisco that he had suggested – but not insisted – that my colleagues and I attend. After that he never seemed to fully trust me again. I spent the week after Dinner-gate working long hours at a smelly conference, almost always alone. But I was sharing a hotel room with another staff member on Chad Bossman’s shitlist, so he accused me of shirking and carousing – not to my face, but to a third party who gleefully passed his comments along. 

For the next year and a half, Chad Bossman made it clear that he was dissatisfied without ever explicitly stating his grievances. Classic Chad. He was always prone to griping about people behind their backs, and now I knew for sure that he was griping about me. It was demoralising to be thought badly of, and this naturally had the self-fulfilling effect of making me even more impudent. 

I wasn’t the only one. Chad Bossman, no doubt due to the enormous pressure he was always under, alienated most of his staff by being variously mercurial, petty, frustrating, unreasonable, and stingy. This allowed me to assume the same role that I had assumed when writing about people like Tim Langdell and resisting Chad Bossman’s commercial overtures in my early days: the dissident warrior, though my enemy this time wasn’t editorial corruption or vexatious litigation. 

It was Chad goddamn Bossman.

***

In the end, Chad Bossman gave me a nice send off at my last Christmas party, and we had a constructive and conciliatory chat while swaying drunkenly in a doorway. I signed out of Slack for the last time and stepped into the void. 

A few months later a former colleague left the company to start his own rival media business and I, at a loose end, agreed to write for him. At around the same time, a parcel arrived. It was a book called Sick in the Head, by Judd Apatow, and it remains one of the most perceptive and thoughtful gifts I have ever received. Sender: Chad Bossman. 

In 2019, I went to a conference with my friend’s startup and, inevitably, was spotted gadding about with my colleagues on the streets of San Francisco by Chad Bossman. A mutual friend told me he was furious, calling us “snakes”. I laughed this off at the time, and changed the name of our group WhatsApp chat to “Snake Crew”. 

But deep down I was sad to have disappointed Chad Bossman, and to have severed so completely this link to the most exciting period of my life, when I got to live wherever I wanted, wear pyjamas all day, be at home while my children grew up, travel the world, and slowly discover a love of journalism – as opposed to just writing – that is now destined to go unrequited. 

***

I left the games industry knowing that there was no way back. The adventure was never going to last forever, not least because I didn’t deserve to be there in the first place. 

30 years ago. That was my time. I still believe I would have thrived at AP Towers, before the inexorable bulldozer of progress razed it to the ground. By the time I came of age there were too many games, too many types of media, and too much of all the stuff I’m bad at. 

That’s not to say I failed, of course. I was managing editor of an actual media company, and if I’m being kind to myself I can attribute most of my lack of further progress to the fact that I left the industry to become a full-time parent. My ambitions were curtailed by the countdown that loomed over everything I did. 

But I didn’t get the most out of my limited time, for all the reasons outlined above (idleness, cowardice, unreasonableness, lack of passion, etc, etc.) 

And while I have my postmortem scalpel in hand, I think the loss of Rip Indigo was a more seminal moment than I understood at the time. His departure accelerated my progress in some ways, but hampered it in others. He gave me an expedient void to fill, but left me without a mentor to rein in some of my stupider, lazier, and more self-indulgent instincts.

I was good at the outset, but I should have improved more. Most people are shit, but here’s the thing: many writers who were awful the first time I encountered them eventually became excellent, and went on to enjoy successful careers. 

Legendary film critic Roger Ebert once told a younger journalist, “Just write, get better, keep writing, keep getting better.”

As long as you do that, and you really care about the subject matter, and you’re determined enough to keep hustling, and you’re good at mingling with journalists and other industry professionals on Twitter, you’ll be fine. 

Even if, like me, you’re lazy, shy, arrogant, implacably opposed to all innovation, and you only sometimes care about video games, I can wholeheartedly recommend faking it. 

Games journalism beats real work any day of the week, even if you only know how not to do it. 

  1. Years later I was at a dinner with Jonathan Davies. He looked shy and grumpy, and left before I had a chance to get drunk and buttonhole him.
  2. There’s a striking preponderance of posh white men in games journalism.
  3. I like to think it went to Tom Francis, one of the very best games writers of all time.
  4. The fake names will be easy to distinguish from the real ones.
  5. I should stress that this is my own version of events, and I’m certain my former employers saw things differently.
Advertisement

7 Crushing Disappointments that Await Phil Connors After Groundhog Day

In the movie Groundhog Day, weatherman Phil Connors is forced to relive the same day over and over again, in the same town, with the same people, until he suffers a complete mental breakdown resulting in numerous successful suicide attempts.

His salvation begins when he comes clean with his producer, and romantic obsession, Rita. For the first time in his life, Phil Connors manages to achieve through honesty what he couldn’t achieve through cynical manipulation, and he devotes his time thereafter to philanthropy and self-improvement.

Then it happens. After pulling off the perfect day, culminating in a longed-for night with Rita, Phil wakes up on February 3rd. “Today is tomorrow. It happened.”

That’s Groundhog Day’s happy ending.

Except it’s not the end for Phil Connors — it’s the beginning of a whole new nightmare consisting of these crushing disappointments.

Heartbreak

Most of the items on this list are based on inference and guesswork, but we actually get to watch Phil Connors making his first big mistake in the closing moments of the film.

As Phil and Rita venture out into the snow, Phil says, “Let’s live here”.

Uh-oh.

To understand the gravity of this remark we need to put ourselves in Rita’s shoes. As far as she’s concerned, Phil Connors is a self-centred, demanding colleague who managed to behave himself for exactly one day. He may have spent decades* harvesting information about her likes, dislikes, and personal history without her knowledge, but as far as she’s concerned he’s practically a stranger.

So imagine her horror as Phil invites her to move in with him, many miles from her workplace, friends, and support network.

The relationship that Phil Connors spent half a lifetime preparing for is probably over before the credits finish.

Anticlimax

Even if Rita were to take Phil up on his offer, there’s no way Phil should move to Punxsutawney. In fact, he should never set foot there again.

Why? Because he’ll never manage to live up to the impossibly high standard he set on February 2nd, when he saved the life of a mayor, played virtuoso piano in front of a crowd of partygoers, and won the hearts of an entire town through a series of slickly executed acts of kindness and heroism.

As they wake up to a new day on February 3rd, the citizens of Punxsutawney have every right to expect Phil Connors to be the person he was the night before: a generous and charming visitor with a supernatural gift for anticipating crises and fulfilling private aspirations.

But that’s not who they’re going to get. On the day after Groundhog Day, Phil Connors will be useless. Children will fall out of trees, civic leaders will choke to death, tyres will remain flat, brides will pull out of weddings, and chaos will reign in Punxsutawney.

Unemployment

It’s true that Phil Connors should stay away from Punxsutawney, but he won’t find much solace in his resident city of Pittsburgh.

Not only will this teeming urban environment be overwhelming for a man accustomed to the predictable charms of rural life, but it’s likely that Phil Connors won’t be able to earn a living as a weatherman when he returns.

The job of a TV meteorologist is made up of two components: being on TV, and predicting the weather. To give him his due, Phil Connors has maintained his live performing skills, honing his delivery to the extent that, on the morning of his final Groundhog Day, he causes rival broadcasters to shelve their own reports and take in his monologue instead.

But there’s absolutely no chance that Phil Connors still remembers how to interpret meteorological data after a career break lasting up to 40 years.

Insolvency

For the duration of his Groundhog Day adventure Phil Connors has never had to worry about how much he spends.

He splashes out on coffees and pastries for his colleagues, buys Wrestlemania tickets for two youngsters he hardly knows, and signs up for a comprehensive life insurance package from his old acquaintance Ned Ryerson. He also pays an inflated fee for expedited piano lessons.

These are relatively small expenditures, but they all add up, and they embody a troubling attitude to money. With no job and no sense of financial prudence, Phil Connors is on the fast train to ruin.

Estrangement

Imagine not seeing your friends or family for decades. Unless Phil Connors was a hermit back in Pittsburgh, that’s exactly what he has experienced — total estrangement from everybody he knows other than Larry, Rita, and, weirdly, Ned Ryerson.

He hasn’t seen the sister that Ned hit on for nearly half a century.

During that time, Phil Connors has changed beyond all recognition, becoming empathetic, principled, and sincere instead of cynical and mean. He has also lost the knack of being with his closest friends, as anybody would after a long absence.

Phil Connors’s transformation is positive, but his new values and demeanour are bound to unsettle the people who know him best, and who, as far as they’re concerned, only saw him yesterday.

No relationship can survive the complete transformation of one party overnight. Phil Connors is doomed to a lonely existence, or at least a long ordeal of building a new network and putting down fresh roots.

Remorse

In several of the Groundhog Days that Phil Connors lives through, he takes it upon himself to rescue an ailing homeless man whom he finds keeled over in an alley. He tries keeping the man warm, feeding him soup, and arranging medical treatment for him. None of it works. In every instance, the old man dies.

So Phil Connors gives up. On his final day, and presumably countless days leading up to it, he chooses to spend his time showing off at the big Groundhog Day party and sealing the deal with Rita. Helping the old man to pass on in a warm place with a full belly no longer serves his needs.

This approach clearly pays off for Phil Connors. The universe rewards his decision to let nature take its course. But, having helped so many, isn’t it reasonable to suppose that Phil Connors will be seized by remorse — like Oskar Schindler at the factory gates — at not having done all he could to ensure that the old man’s final hours were as comfortable as possible?

Answer: very reasonable indeed.

Death

Before Phil Connors arrived in Punxsutawney, he was a man of advancing years. But his years stopped advancing on February 2nd, and he spent many decades not having to consider his own mortality.

Not only was he unconcerned with the passing of time, but he knew for a stone cold fact that death simply wasn’t possible for him. No matter how many times he tried to kill himself, no matter how elaborate the method, he always woke up in one piece, listening to Sonny & Cher.

The only real contact that Phil Connors has with death during his ordeal is the tragically unavoidable passing of the old man. This is a grounding event, but it’s still happening to somebody else. Phil Connors is immortal.

Until, that is, he finds himself back on the merciless conveyor belt of time.

Bill Murray was 43 when Groundhog Day came out in February 1993, which means he was probably 42 during filming. Assuming Phil Connors is the same age, that puts him right on the cusp of a mid-life crisis just as he’s facing unemployment, poverty, probable weight gain, romantic catastrophe, social alienation, and madness.

God help him.

*Estimates vary, but director Harold Ramis put the duration of Phil Connors’s stay in Punxsutawney at 30–40 years, so let’s go with that.

You might be Daffy Duck

Daffy Duck is the greatest character ever created, though it’s important to establish which Daffy we’re talking about. There are at least two versions of Daffy, and only one of them is great.

The original, non-superlative Daffy arrived in the 1930s as a righteous maniac with supernatural powers of mischief. Like Bugs Bunny, he could fabricate costumes and other objects out of thin air and bend reality around his japery. He once bonked Hitler on the head with a mallet, to keep everybody’s spirits up during the war.

daffy-hitler
Keeping spirits up

Though undeniably patriotic, this Daffy was just a dead-eyed kook, with no identifiable motive other than to be a nuisance. But over time he became more nuanced, and meaner. He shed his kooky scattershot vocal style and learned to speak with a sort of contemptuous eloquence. Though I have no intention of verifying this assertion through research, I’m fairly confident that he’s the only cartoon character ever to have a four-syllable word in his catchphrase (“you’re despicable”). Even Monty Burns can only manage three.

Unusually for a cartoon character, Daffy could play face or heel as the context required, and he was driven by complex human motivations like jealousy, vanity, and profound solipsism, often in conflicting directions. “I may be a craven little coward,” he said in one episode, before embarking on another bruising caper, “but I’m a greedy craven little coward.”

This is the Daffy that appears in The Looney Tunes Show (2011), a genuinely funny Seinfeld-esque animated sitcom starring comedy giants like Fred Armisen and Kristen Wiig in which Daffy and Bugs live together, have girlfriends, earn money, and get into hilarious scrapes. It is here that Daffy reaches the apotheosis of his self-knowledge. “You’re my best friend,” he tells Bugs. “You know me better than anyone. You see what a horrible person I am.”

Unfortunately, the Looney Tunes Show only lasted two seasons before it was cancelled and replaced with Wabbit, a Bugs-centric sketch show in which Daffy appears as his original, zany self, complete with Loki powers. I cannot overstate my disappointment at this move. The Daffy I know is a flawed but relatable person, twisted by a manifestly unjust universe into a resentful, mendacious monster who also happens to be the greatest cartoon character ever created.

When I talk about Daffy Duck, this is the one I mean – the one who was so bitterly determined to beat Bugs Bunny and win the audience’s adulation in Show Biz Bugs (1957) that he killed himself on stage.

This is also the Daffy that became a template for other great screen characters, including Eric Cartman, George Costanza, Basil Fawlty, Richard Richard, Phil Tandy Miller, Dennis Reynolds, and countless others. To some extent the success of those characters is a function of how closely they adhere to the Daffy formula.

What is the Daffy formula? It’s this.

To be a Daffy, a character must first and foremost be like Daffy. Not only must they be congenitally selfish, devious, grandiose, and craven, but all of these characteristics must be magnified to grotesque proportions by the pointed cruelty of the universe.

daffy-shot
The pointed cruelty of Daffy Duck’s universe

Daffy Duck is destined to be humiliated and thwarted in every ambition, so he has no incentive to overcome his negative impulses. He might as well go all in, pursuing every goal with single-minded determination and a total disregard for the rights and feelings of others. Daffy Duck would nuke a city to jump one place in a queue. This is the natural condition of every Daffy.

But to be his best self, a Daffy has to be modulated by two other character archetypes: a Bugs, and a Porky.

Daffy Duck’s relationship with Porky Pig is fairly straightforward. The duck looks down on the pig, and treats him like an ignorant slave. For the most part Porky is willing to put up with Daffy’s contempt because the universe ensures that he will always come out on top anyway, and Daffy will receive his just deserts without Porky having to intervene.

Most of this also applies to Bugs, who is happy to tolerate Daffy’s unbelievably selfish scheming because, at the end of the day, good things will always happen to Bugs and terrible things will always happen to Daffy. The difference is that Daffy looks up to Bugs, not down, and this grudging admiration fills him with jealous rage.

Both Bugs and Porky are necessary for Daffy to express his full spectrum of unenviable characteristics. Bugs brings out his tireless competitive antagonism, and Porky brings out his appalling imperious contempt, while the universe itself keeps him angry and frustrated.

Even so, it is the invisible hand of the anti-Daffy universe that makes his relationships possible. Nobody can resent Daffy’s unmerited victories, because he never secures any, and they all seem to know that he never will.

When Daffy Duck gives up his own life for applause at the end of Show Biz Bugs, his good-natured rival offers him some encouragement as he ascends to the rafters as a ghost. “That’s terrific Daffy! They loved it. They want more.”

“I know, I know,” says a plaintive Daffy. “But I can only do it once.” You can’t help but feel sorry for him.

daffy-ghost
The ghost of Daffy Duck

If you run through a list of characters based on the Daffy Duck template you’ll find they generally satisfy all three criteria, or at least two of them.

George Costanza has the basic personality of Daffy, but he lives in a world of Bugs Bunnys, including Jerry Seinfeld, who is Bugs Bunny incarnate. However, there are no Porkys in his life–nobody he looks down on. Nor is he particularly resentful or jealous, though he will stop at nothing to achieve his goals, however petty and selfish.

Incidentally, Larry David – the template for George Costanza – is another passable Daffy, though he’s too well-meaning to really qualify.

In the first season of Last Man on Earth, protagonist Phil Tandy Miller is a textbook Daffy Duck. He treats most people like Porkys, as means to ends rather than ends in themselves, and he will go to extraordinary lengths to get what he wants irrespective of the effect it has on those around him. He even has a literal Porky, in the form of Todd, and he’s at his funniest when he also has a Bugs to set off his jealousy and competitiveness. Phil Miller (2) is the first of these, followed by his brother Mike (Jason Sudeikis–like Jerry Seinfeld, a quintessential Bugs.)

Jason Sudeikis gets another opportunity to fulfil the Bugs role when he appears as Schmitty in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, coming up against Dennis Reynolds, Glenn Howerton’s version of Daffy. Here the issue is that Dennis has only ever lived among Porkys, and while it would be untrue to suggest that Schmitty is a true Bugs to Dennis, because Dennis doesn’t actually look up to him, his breezy confidence and unwillingness to follow orders has a destabilising effect on the group.

Basil Fawlty is another Daffy, consumed by selfishness, jealousy, and single-minded determination to get his own way at all costs (to other people). Polly, Manuel, and the majority of his downmarket, iniquitous guests are his Porkys, while every so often a Bugs comes along in the form of a guest with an elevated social status, such as a doctor or a lord. Such guests completely change Basil’s personality, turning him from an imperious bully into a snivelling supplicant and then a neurotic maniac–classic Daffy moves.

Of course, his greatest opponent is Sybil, and she is neither a Bugs nor a Porky, but rather a monster, or perhaps the gigantic, acid-drinking cowboy in Drip-Along Daffy (1951).

daffy-cowboy
A mean cowboy/Sybil Fawlty

Along with the season 1 version of Phil Tandy Miller, the most perfectly archetypal Daffy is Richard Richard, or Rich, co-protagonist of the sitcom Bottom. Rich has all the scheming, self-serving amorality of Daffy Duck, and the same delusional grandiosity, which is starkly at odds with his real status as an unemployed, perpetually filthy virgin. His primary Bugs figure is Eddie Hitler, and though, like Daffy’s wartime incarnation, Rich frequently bonks Hitler on the head, he is never able to escape swift and brutal retaliation in the form of getting hit with a pan or kicked right in the nuts.

Like Daffy, each of these characters is, “a kind of unleashed id”. If fiction is an outlet for wish fulfilment, then Daffy reflects our truest wishes. We may want to be selfless and brave like Luke Skywalker, but even more than that we want to be ourselves – selfish and cowardly – without constraint. It’s just plain easier. To self-centred creatures like us, watching Daffy on a caper evokes the sensation that a domestic dog must feel watching a wolf on the hunt: sheer awe at the spectacle of one’s own nature finding perfect expression in an infinitely superior relative.

“The Jerry Seinfeld”

Every Friday night after filming, Jerry Seinfeld and writer Larry Charles used to drive up to Laurel Canyon in LA and race from there to Sunset. Jerry (Porsche) would give Larry (Saab) a three minute headstart before tearing at “insane” speeds through LA to catch up with him. “I would risk the entire series,” he said later. “My whole life.”

It sometimes feels as though Jerry Seinfeld’s appetite for peril extends beyond motorphilia and into the realm of oratory, where he is un-woke, and oddly prone to putting his foot in his mouth for such a consumately controlled performer.

Let’s look at the evidence. In 2014, he responded to a question from Buzzfeed about the overwhelmingly white, male guest list on Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee by saying, “who cares?”

A flurry of opinion pieces and withering Tweets followed.

Then, perhaps irked by his previous run-in with contemporary sensibilities, in 2015 he told ESPN, “I don’t play colleges, but I hear a lot of people tell me, ‘Don’t go near colleges. They’re so PC.’”

More headlines.

Then he told Seth Meyers that there’s a, “creepy PC thing out there that really bothers me,” because he sensed that an audience disapproved of the term “gay French king” in one of his jokes.

And another flurry.

Jerry Seinfeld is obsessive about his comedy vocation. This is evident in the documentaries he has made, and in his fabled work ethic, and his reputation as a master technician. And more subtly in the way Judd Apatow describes his bare monastical LA apartment when they first met in the 80s, and how in Comedians in Cars he often stops to explain why the thing his guest has just said is funny, right down to the timing of hand movements. And how he openly struggles to speak to people who aren’t comedians. You can even see it in the way he recounts his late night street races – “series” comes before “life.”

Comedy is Jerry Seinfeld’s kingdom, and lately it seems as though he’s been developing a sort of philosophical armour of defiance against the encroachment into his kingdom of criticisms that he considers to be irrelevant, because they’re being made on moral rather than aesthetic grounds.

There’s the interview with Channel 2 in Israel in which he responds to a question about the #metoo movement by calling his female interviewer, Dana Weiss, “honey,” and the the fact that in his recent Netflix documentary, Jerry before Seinfeld, he delivers strangely archaic material about the differences between men and women. And there’s the equivalence he seems to draw in an interview with Stephen Colbert between Bill Cosby’s sexual assaults and Jerry Lewis’s seemingly capricious will arrangements.

Stop. Zoom. Jerry Seinfeld’s interview with Stephen Colbert last year is a milestone in the journey of Jerry Seinfeld. When Stephen Colbert asks him whether he can still listen to Bill Cosby records despite the allegations against him, Jerry Seinfeld says. “Oh yeah,” in his breezy high pitched voice, as if it’s the simplest thing to disregard multiple alleged rapes.

You can hear the audience hesitating, unsure how to respond to the strange spectacle of a beloved comedy legend not particularly minding that Bill Cosby is a rapist. How could the co-creator of the greatest ever sitcom be so out of touch?

Well guess what. Jerry Seinfeld isn’t out of touch. Probably. He’s not just another irritable old man objecting to attempts by the world to deprive him of the sanctuary of his own worldview. There’s a principal at stake, which is that comedy is the only thing that matters to him. As long as he behaves himself in life, thinks Jerry Seinfeld, he shouldn’t have to concern himself with anything else.

“Funny is the world that I live in,” Jerry Seinfeld told Buzzfeed in 2014. “You’re funny, I’m interested. You’re not funny, I’m not interested.”

The salutary aspect of this stance is that race, gender, sex, and so on are irrelevant to Jerry Seinfeld. He just doesn’t see those things, which is the textbook definition of somebody who isn’t a racist or a sexist. His only avowed prejudice is against people who aren’t funny, and that’s not a thing.

You can disagree about whether Jerry Seinfeld really is comprehensively colourblind in this way, but I believe that Jerry Seinfeld believes he is, and I for one believe him. If pressed, I expect he would acknowledge that the preponderance of middle-aged white men on his show is symptomatic of the unfair barriers that women and people of colour must overcome when trying to enter the kingdom of comedy. But that’s a downstream problem for somebody else to fix. All Jerry Seinfeld can do is ensure that he only ever judges the person in front of him in terms of how funny they are, and not their sex, background, or skin colour.

Unfortunately – but actually fortunately – Jerry Seinfeld’s armour is pregnable. In the next segment of his interview with Stephen Colbert, after the commercials, Jerry Seinfeld abruptly changes his mind about Bill Cosby.

It may be that Stephen Colbert leaned across to him while the cameras were off and urged him to repent, or Jerry Seinfeld may have felt in his waters that he had gone too far, at the wrong time, and a Twitterstorm was coming, which, after years of stumbling into controversies, he no longer had the resilience to withstand.

Either way, he hastily crowbarred a retraction into the interview as soon as the lights came on, rushing it out before Stephen Colbert had a chance to change the subject. There follows a slightly uncomfortable exchange in which the normally suave Jerry Seinfeld seems to flounder and Stephen Colbert gets all the laughs. The balance of power between the two men visibly shifts as Stephen Colbert steers Jerry Seinfeld towards a repudiation of his entire philosophy. Observed through metaphor-sensitive spectacles, Jerry Seinfeld would at this point dejectedly remove his philosophical armour and join the shuffling grey PC brigade, like Winston Smith professing his love for Big Brother.

The title of this video on the Late Show’s YouTube channel is, “Jerry Seinfeld Is Becoming ‘Modern’ Seinfeld”.

A confession. Following Jerry Seinfeld makes me nervous because I’ve been quietly rooting for him. While admittedly there are conspicuous differences between us, Jerry Seinfeld appears to have been going on the same emotional and intellectual journey as I have over the last few years.

“But should we separate it or shouldn’t we separate it?” he says to Stephen Colbert, in one last valiant effort to keep the flame of his rebellion alive. “The art, or the work, from the man?”

Though I hesitate to admit it, this is exactly what I spent the weekend pondering after Louis CK confessed to sexual misconduct last November. I know it’s not the story, and I know people got hurt, but I just couldn’t accept, and still can’t, that the appalling things Louis CK did in front of several women will permanently invalidate the edifying and hilarious things he said on stage – even though some of the things he said on stage seemed to originate in the things he did.

“It’s made up, it’s material, come on,” says Jerry Seinfeld, re Bill Cosby, to an unmoved Stephen Colbert, his last swing.

“I know that, but part of him was the charming fatherly figure too, and all of that is destroyed.”

[Applause].

“Alright. You’re right. I’ll change my mind.”

Earlier, in Israel, Dana Weiss asks Jerry Seinfeld about Louis CK. “It’s terrible,” he replies, before quickly moving on to the aspect of the affair that most preoccupies him. “I mean, these behaviours don’t even make sense sexually.”

Ever in lockstep with Jerry Seinfeld, I said this too. I simply don’t understand how masturbating in front of an unhappy woman in a semi-public setting could be enjoyable. But I’m aware that by saying that I’m sidestepping the collective narrative and fixating on a detail, which is also what Jerry Seinfeld is doing, because that’s the aspect of the scandal that interests us, or because we don’t want to feel as though peer pressure is dictating our views, or a bit of both.

You could argue that Jerry Seinfeld’s stubborn resistance to PC sensibilities is just a symptom of old age. Progress and fashion can turn uncontroversial beliefs into contentious ones almost overnight. When I was younger, the expression that most neatly summed up the relationship between the sexes for everybody was the book title. “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus.” Not only is this kind of thinking borderline hateful nowadays, but it’s not even clear that there are two sexes. Change like that can be discombobulating to a well-meaning person of advancing years.

But I don’t think that’s what’s happening with Jerry Seinfeld. I think he’s fundamentally a decent person. I don’t think he endorses the white partriachal worldview that’s under attack. “One door closes, another opens,” he told David Remnick at the New Yorker Festival. “There’s always a joke; you’ve just got to find it.”

But there it is, still. The opening and closing doors in this analogy are a reference to heroic activism following dreadful abuse and injustice, yet Jerry Seinfeld only seems to care which jokes can make it through. He can’t see beyond comedy. And with all the suffering in the world. Shame on him!

Except, that’s okay, isn’t it? Is it? I don’t know. I think so. He can get to Sunset at his own pace as long as he doesn’t crash into anybody. Maybe. Maybe not.

Mr Mom: an insider’s retrospective

Mr Mom (1983) is a major Hollywood film, starring Michael Keaton and Teri Garr, about a man called Jack who loses his job and ends up caring for his children while his wife, Caroline, goes out to work.

I like to think it couldn’t be made now. At this point there are enough men who are not breadwinners, or at least enough people who understand that this shouldn’t matter, that the premise no longer seems whimsical.

If anything, it’s a surprise that it could have been made as recently as 1983. I mean, watch this trailer.

“He became the lady of the house”? What the hell?

I have a special interest in Mr Mom because my life is approximately the same as Jack’s. That is, I’m a stay-at-home dad, but I wasn’t always.

The first thing to say is that Mr Mom is much more nuanced than its trailer suggests. While the cinematic trailer does indeed frame Jack’s predicament as an absurd and mind-boggling violation of the natural order, in the actual film he just gets on with it like a good sport and nobody really raises an eyebrow.

This more or less reflects my own experience. While it’s not always easy to be a “lady of the house” when you’re a man, nobody has ever ridiculed my lifestyle to my face. When I tell people what I do they tend to be indifferent, though older people are often effusively supportive, presumably to mask their deep shock.

Even so, I sense that assumptions are made about my competence as a male full-time parent, and I sometimes play up to these. My tacit role whenever I speak with the women who run the office at my children’s school is the hopeless, forgetful, congenitally useless dad, which suits me because that’s actually what I am. The widespread assumption that I’m a fish out of water – or at least my own assumption that that’s how everybody sees me – allows me to get away with not trying to appear competent, which is clearly an excellent perk of being a man which isn’t available to women, who have to suffer the burden of assumed competence.

Mr Mom gets this about right, with some dramatic licence. On his first day in charge of the home, Jack goes to the supermarket, clutching a shopping list that his wife wrote for him. His children knock over displays, he can’t decide which kind of ham to buy, and at one point he even loses his youngest child – a baby – altogether. His closest character analogue from the world of film is Corporal Upham in Saving Private Ryan during the battle at Ramelle. Watch.

Later on he tries to do the laundry. He overloads the machine with detergent and it judders ominously, before exploding. A TV repair person, a pest control person, and a plumber all arrive at roughly the same time and compete for his attention while he runs around trying to keep his children alive and his house intact. He succeeds, but only just.

Over time, Jack loses pride in his appearance. He wears his wife’s glasses for some reason (if they share a prescription, why doesn’t he have his own glasses?), along with a dirty old flannel shirt that he never washes. He puts on weight (like me), and grows a careless beard (like me), exhibiting the signs of a person in a state of mourning or deep depression (still me).

Obviously, this is a comic exaggeration of what happens when an inexperienced parent takes over the running of a household, but there’s a kernel of truth in it. When I took over I genuinely couldn’t work out how to get my eldest daughter ready for school in the morning. I went absolutely batshit on a daily basis as I scrambled to iron clothes, clean teeth, and brush hair within the time allowed. Every school run was a furious wrist-yanking speed march in time bomb conditions.

But that was then. Jack eventually learns how to run his house like a pro, and so have I. I now have to get TWO children ready for school, rather than just one, and I even have to make a packed lunch for one of them due to an ill-advised moment of indulgence several months ago that I cannot reverse. And it’s easy.

I was probably a bit more competent than Jack at the outset, and arguably a bit less competent by the end of the film, when Jack successfully runs the household for a day and prepares a gourmet dish for his wife after the children have gone to bed, which I have never done, nor attempted, and never will. But I think Jack and I went on more or less the same journey, from idiotic buffoon to proficient homemaker.

***

There are respects in which our stories diverge, however. Mr Mom has something to say about the dangers that await men and women who venture outside their respective habitats. When Caroline starts going to work in an office it soon becomes apparent that her male boss wants to seduce her, and his eventual attempt at this almost certainly constitutes sexual assault. Meanwhile at home Jack ends up in the sexual crosshairs of a glamorous divorcee, who bamboozles him with her cleavage and even climbs onto his bed.

Nothing of this kind has happened to me.

Yes, Jack is far more personable than I am, but the ease with which he integrates himself into the community of housewives and mothers is still a bit of a stretch. And I have to say the film loses points here in its gender politics, because he doesn’t just integrate. He dominates. Pretty soon his wife’s former friends are congregating at his house, where he shows them the error of their ways by teaching them how to play poker instead of the inferior, female game of bridge. His amorous pursuer turns on the charm, despite his hirsute appearance, unwashed clothes, expanding waistline, and the unappealing disorder of his home. (This isn’t a gender politics issue in particular. It just doesn’t seem fair.)

But there’s another striking gender politics misstep in Mr Mom, and it concerns Jack’s continued search for a job. Jack’s wife finds work before him, and it emerges that she’s at least as talented an advertising executive as he is an engineer. So, great, you’d think. The family is saved. The instigating problem – loss of household income – has been solved, and all that remains is for Jack to attain the level of competence and satisfaction in his new role as his wife once enjoyed.

That’s broadly the arc of Mr Mom, but something odd keeps happening. Even though Caroline is gainfully employed, Jack keeps going to interviews. Why? There are two possible explanations. A) Caroline isn’t paid enough in her advertising job to support the family. And B) Jack is a man.

According to Payscale.com, the median salary for an advertising executive is $43,653, while an automotive engineer earns $74,363 on average. Assuming the relative status of these professions hasn’t changed too dramatically in the last 30 years, this lends some weight to explanation A. But why wouldn’t the script make this clear? How hard would it have been to include an extra line of dialogue explaining that Caroline is working pro tem while Jack finds more lucrative employment?

For that reason, I suspect explanation B is correct. After all, there are numerous examples of fictional advertising executives earning a comfortable living (Bewitched, Friends, The Crazy Ones). For all that Mr Mom seems remarkably progressive, it still contains an underlying assumption that Jack will go back to work. In order to satisfy audience expectations in 1983, the absurd anomaly of Jack’s male worklessness must end.

As it happens, the film resolves this issue with a cleverly ambiguous fudge. Caroline quits her job after her boss sexually assaults her, but her boss shows up at her house and begs her to come back. At precisely the same moment, Jack’s former employer shows up and begs him to come back too. The credits roll while negotiations are still ongoing, so the audience can make its own mind up about how things pan out.

***

The scene in the film that best evokes my own experience is the one where Jack brings Caroline dinner in their bedroom and they have an argument. Here it is.

I’ve had pretty much this exact conversation, though my wife was nicer to me than Caroline is to Jack.

“My brain is like oatmeal,” Jack says. “I yelled at Kenny today for colouring outside the lines. Megan and I are starting to watch the same TV shows, and I’m liking them. I’m losing it.”  

Check, check, check.

I once had an idle conversation with my wife, to pass the time on a long drive, about how many anonymous people we’d be prepared to kill or let die to save our children. The answer, of course, was all of the people on Earth, anonymous or otherwise. As you would rightly expect, nothing matters more to me than my children, and, when I’m in the right mood, nothing delights me more. Yet I crave their absence almost constantly, and I’m certain that they have dulled my brain, shortened my life, and radically diminished me as a person.

Honey, I know what you’re talking about. I’ve been there myself, okay?

This is the bit that shames me. Whenever I go into a sulk, which is every day for between two and five hours depending on the Radio 4 schedule, I’m aware that the condition I’m bemoaning is the one that women have been expected to put up with for centuries. I didn’t really sympathise before. I do now.

Well if you were so unhappy why didn’t you say something about it?

Many women did, of course. I grew up watching the Carla Lane sitcoms that my mother watched, about disaffected housewives and underappreciated matriarchs. The sitcom Butterflies and the movie Shirley Valentine were about women who had given up work to look after their children. I have to admit that I played devil’s advocate back then. What about the husbands? I thought. Do you think they enjoy going out to work every day? Don’t you think they might like to stay at home and watch soap operas instead? What a fool I was.

Look, maybe I was a little confused. Maybe I was a little frustrated. But I knew what I was doing was important, because it means something to raise decent human beings. What saw me through was pride. I had pride in the kids. I had pride in this house, and I had pride in being Mrs Jack Butler.

This is great. This is exactly how a person should feel about staying at home and looking after their children. But for some people, maybe most people, pride is elusive. It’s a purely theoretical phenomenon, easily eclipsed by the actual boredom, anger, and frustration that giving up work to care for a small child can engender.

I wish I could see things the way Caroline does. It’s not clear whether Jack ever gets to, but he certainly seems happier by the time his former employer shows up to restore harmony to the universe by putting him back to work in a loud manly factory.

Is there a message about gender in the different ways that Caroline and Jack understand the role of full-time parent? Yes and no. Mostly no. Like many stay-at-home fathers raised in a patriarchal society, I occasionally feel embarrassed not to be out at work all day, providing for my family. But Jack is much more mature than me, and doesn’t seem to have that hang-up at all. He just struggles with the logistical and mental challenges of full-time parenting, like anyone – male or female – would if they were suddenly required to do it.

Eventually he starts to experience the perks. In one scene, as Caroline is about to abandon the family on Halloween to shoot a commercial in LA, Jack tells her, “Megan just cut two new teeth. I bet you didn’t know that. Alex is playing football. Remember Kenny’s security blanket? He doesn’t have it any more. He doesn’t use it. It’s gone.”

Jack is set up as the wisdom-dispensing good guy in this scene, but I find his remarks a bit unkind. Caroline, her eyes shining, is powerless to do anything about it. “You gave me some real good advice once,” Jack continues. “So now let me give you some of mine: it’s real easy to forget what’s important. So don’t.”

This is an oversimplification, of course. Family is important, but so is having an identity outside of family, and aspirations that are particular to your own sense of what you’re cut out for and what you can achieve.

Being a full-time parent robs you of all that. But it gives you other things in return, such as the (absolutely reprehensible) secret thrill of knowing that you are the primary parent – the one your child runs to after an absence, and seeks out after a nightmare.

The obvious conclusion is that it should be possible for both parents to be the prime, and for both of them to achieve individual fulfilment through work as well. 

But the nightmare thing is a decent consolation prize if you find yourself out of a job.

The Time Out Joke

316168-2

In the summer of 2001 I said something very funny.

I was working as a waiter at the time, at a small cafe in Berwick-upon-Tweed. The cafe was about to close when a Scottish family bustled through the door. “I’m sorry, we’re not serving any more,” I told them before they could sit down. Looking crestfallen, they quietly left.

It was obvious that the family was staying at the nearby caravan park, and given the lateness of the hour I guessed that they had only just arrived and were looking for a place to have dinner after a long and arduous journey.

After they were gone I turned to the waitress who was standing with me behind the counter, and it was at this point that I said something very funny.

It really landed. The waitress laughed so hard that she couldn’t breathe. Her cheeks turned red and she had to lean on the counter to prevent herself from falling over. Infected by her laughter, I beamed too, and we continued like this for more than ten seconds, until the other waitress who was working that shift emerged from the kitchen.

“What are you laughing about?” she said.

“I don’t even know,” said the first waitress. “I think I’m going mad.”

Going mad? The smile left my face.

The waitress was half right. It’s completely true that she didn’t know why she was laughing, but she was wrong to think that it was because she was going mad. She was laughing because I had just said something very funny. She just didn’t understand why it was funny.

I’ve thought about this episode many times over the last 15 years, because it perfectly crystallises an interesting property of humour: it’s not always easy to know why you’re laughing, even if there’s always an explanation. In this case, I happen to have the explanation, because it was me who said the very funny thing.

Here’s what I said, about the people who had come into the cafe:

“I feel guilty now, thinking of them all sitting in their caravan eating Time Outs”.

Let me just say, I know this joke probably didn’t make you laugh out loud. There are at least two reasons for this, and the first is very obviously that a joke on the page is not the same as a joke being “performed” in person. In delivering this remark I unconsciously used modifiers such as posture, gesture, facial expression, and vocal inflection to emphasise my weirdly judgemental disquiet, all of which are absent in this arena.

The second reason is simply that you weren’t there, and context really matters. So join me now as I finally deconstruct the joke in order to explain to an imagined version of the person who was there, my colleague, exactly why she found my remark so hilariously funny.

1) Contextual mood imagery. When the family came into the cafe it must have been about nine o’ clock, and there were no lights on because we were about to close. This photonic gloom naturally translated into psychological gloom as we imagined the dejected family together in their cramped caravan wordlessly eating Time Outs.

2) Incongruity. Chocolate is not a solemn foodstuff. It’s what a person eats for pleasure and indulgence. Therefore, the image of a disappointed family unhappily eating chocolate is innately incongruous, and therefore funny.

3) Thwarted ambition. It’s not entirely clear why failure is always funny, but it is. In this case a family has failed in its attempt to eat nutritious food in a comfortable setting, and so the image of them eating food with no nutritional content in an extremely confined setting contains a lot of humour.

4) Judicious specificness. I’ve experimentally run through this joke hundreds of times with different chocolate bars, and none of them is as funny as Time Out. Mars: too conventional. Galaxy Caramel: too indulgent. Toblerone: distractingly evocative of travel.

But in 2001, when I made the joke, the Time Out bar had been available in the UK for less than a decade, meaning it still had a very gentle frisson of novelty. Buying a Time Out didn’t exactly feel like a special treat, but it was still possible for most of us to remember a time when it did. However, the Time Out bar was also an inescapably ordinary chocolate bar. Some chocolate, some wafer. In terms of ingredients and mouth feel it was like a slightly more substantial Kit Kat. But some time in 1999 confectionary shoppers awoke to find a new contender on the shelves.

“What’s this? Kit Kat Chunky. Yes please.”

The Time Out had no place to run, and, as we now know for a fact, its days were numbered. The novelty, the agreeability, but also the tragedy of the Time Out made it the perfect ingredient of my very funny joke.

My colleague may not have known why she laughed so uncontrollably when, on that ordinary evening in 2001, I made a humorous remark about some unfortunate holidaymakers, but I knew, and now that I’ve finally shared my workings I hope that you too will be able to understand the deep, hidden forces that are at work when somebody such as myself says something which is very, very funny for reasons that are not immediately obvious.

The grief shark (or, you won’t believe what these 7 stories have in common!!!)

Warning: this post contains spoilers for Good Will Hunting, Rushmore, Dean Spanley, Telltale’s The Walking Dead, True Detective, Inside Out, and Manchester by the Sea.

shark

When I was 14 my dad died suddenly of a heart attack.

I was out at the cinema on the night that it happened. The last words I said to him were probably, “give me a fiver.” I don’t know what his last words to me were because he gave me the money without saying anything, and I took it without saying anything, and that was that.

I didn’t go to the funeral. I didn’t cry. I was too weird, angry, and repressed. I wondered later whether it was strange that I hadn’t grieved, but I figured it just came at the wrong time. I was too consumed by adolescent madness.

I pushed my grief down and now it lurks in me, like a shark. I never know where it is, but I’m pretty sure it can’t get out, and I don’t want it to. Even if I could de-shark myself, as though it were an abcess I could drain, which is another of the things it feels like, I wouldn’t, because this is all I’ve ever been and I don’t know how being fixed might change me.

Anyway, let’s talk about telly stuff!

After watching Manchester by the Sea a couple of weeks ago, and then enduring the massive bout of crushing melancholia this duly triggered, I realised that throughout my life certain films, television programs, and even videogames have got under my skin, by which I mean I couldn’t stop thinking about them after watching or playing them.

Having something get under your skin is different from just being emotionally affected by it. Kramer vs Kramer affected me, in that it seriously bummed me out. Ditto Awakenings, Room, and The Road, but none of these films got under my skin in the way that Manchester by the Sea did.

The stories that have managed to get under my skin, as opposed to just bumming me out, are mainly, but not entirely: Good Will Hunting, Rushmore, Dean Spanley, Telltale’s The Walking Dead, True Detective, Inside Out, and Manchester by the Sea.

Four of these came after I had children, and it’s pretty obvious that their ability to get under my skin had a lot to do with parenthood. It’s much easier to get under my skin now. The Walking Dead is all about looking after a little girl. True Detective is about a man whose daughter died. Inside Out is about a little girl going through a traumatic life experience. Manchester by the Sea is about a man whose children died in a fire. It’s possible that if I had watched Kramer vs Kramer and The Road after I had children they would have got under my skin too.

But I don’t think so. In all of these examples, parenthood just intensified the effect, in the same way that religion seems to intensify, but not cause, enmity towards others. Being a parent has made me more anxious and emotionally vulnerable, but that has only helped stories to do their work. Good Will Hunting, Rushmore, and Dean Spanley were able to get under my skin without the emotional accelerant of parenthood, so clearly there’s an objective, qualitative difference between stories that get under my skin and stories that merely bum me out, above and beyond the presence of sad children.

For the sake of brevity, I’m not going to give a synopsis of any of the films, games, and TV shows I’m about to discuss, so if you haven’t seen or played them you won’t know what I’m talking about.

The bit of Good Will Hunting that gets under my skin is, obviously, the bit where Sean tells Will that it’s not his fault.

See this? All this shit. It’s not your fault.

The bit of Rushmore that gets under my skin is when he’s introducing his play at the end.

This play is dedicated to the memory of my mother, Eloise Fischer. And to Edward Appleby. A friend of a friend.

The bit of Dean Spanley that gets under my skin is the ten-minute flashback at the end in which Dean Spanley describes the final hours of his previous life as Horatio Fisk’s beloved childhood dog.

I am put in memory of my son, Harrington. That is all.

The bit of The Walking Dead that gets under my skin is when Katja realises that Duck has reached the end of his life and Kenny, having been steadfastly ignoring the subject, finally concurs.

Kenny, it’s time.

The bit of True Detective that gets under my skin is when wheelchair-bound Rust tells Marty about his near death experience.

And beneath that darkness there was another kind – it was deeper – warm, like a substance. I could feel man, I knew, I knew my daughter waited for me there. So clear. I could feel her.

The bit of Inside Out that gets under my skin is when Joy and Sadness get back to the command centre and Sadness takes control of the console.

I know you don’t want me to, but I want my old friends, and my hockey team. I want to go home. Please don’t be mad.

These examples all use the same story technique, though in different ways. I call this technique ‘grief sharking’, and this is how it works.

First, at the outset of the story, or scene, the author establishes that a character – usually the protagonist – has grounds for grief. Then the story goes on to deal with other business that ostensibly has nothing to do with that grief. It disappears under the surface and swims out of view, reappearing only occasionally as a vague troubling shadow, before leaping out of the water and emotionally savaging the audience in the final act.

The technique is used in different ways. In True Detective, perhaps the greatest feat of narrative misdirection on this list, the grief shark barely makes an appearance in eight hours of television. In episode one, while drunk, Rust tersely reveals to Maggie over dinner that he had a daughter, but that she passed, and Marty raises this shock disclosure with him later by way of offering consolation. Much later, while being interviewed by two detectives, Rust mentions his daughter again, this time apparently trying to persuade himself, within his own pessimistic philosophical framework, that her death was a kindness.

I think about my daughter now, you know, what she was spared. Sometimes I feel grateful.

Other than that, she doesn’t really make an appearance until the final scene, when Rust discards his ultra-sceptical worldview and describes with wonder the moment he encountered his daughter’s soul in the anteroom to the afterlife, before dissolving into tears.

In an instant, every word that Rust has said throughout the preceding eight hours of television, his obsession, his nihilism, his rage, reveals itself to be a symptom of grief. The sceptical mindset he adopted was a way of containing that grief. The whole time he was on screen he was just really, really sad and really, really angry, and everything he did was a result of those emotions.

True Detective is an epic demonstration of highly disciplined grief sharking, but it can take place in a much smaller frame. In Telltale’s The Walking Dead it happens within a single sequence. First, Duck is bitten by a zombie. Then, he becomes ill. Then you spend some time walking around solving puzzles, while Duck’s father, Kenny, stoically refuses to contemplate the implications of Duck’s infection.

The sickly boy being comforted by his mother Katja is a raw wound in the chapter. I found myself looking away whenever I had to cross that bit of scenery, not really thinking about it but hoping on some level that Kenny was right, and, more prosaically, that Telltale wouldn’t kill off a child whom the player had got to know.

So when Katja said to Kenny, “It’s time,” I completely fell to pieces, precisely because up to that point I had been ignoring my grief. It was a grief shark, and it bit me in half.

The authors of Rushmore and Dean Spanley take a different tack, distracting you from the grief shark with whimsy. Early in both films we learn that a close relative of the central character has died. Then for much of the remainder of both films we enjoy a quaint story in which the protagonists develop strange obsessions, before those deaths resurface amid thrashing and blood in the final act.

In Rushmore, Max spends most of the film embroiled in a farcical love triangle with a teacher and a middle-aged man, but when he eventually takes to the stage and dedicates a play to his mother, Eloise Fischer, and to Edward Appleby, a friend of a friend, we come to understand that his infatuation with Miss Cross was never romantic. He just misses his mother, and wants her to be proud of him, and he mistook his craving for something else. (Side note: Wes Anderson uses grief sharking in a lot of his films. One of them, The Life Aquatic, is literally about a grief shark. See if you can think of any more examples of Andersonian grief sharking!)

In Dean Spanley, bereaved brother Henslowe Fisk spends the majority of the film trying to acquire dessert wine in order to coax a dean into admitting that he used to be a dog belonging to Henslowe’s father, Horatio Fisk, making him a brother of sorts. It is only when he succeeds in this enterprise in the presence of his father, who has so far exhibited indifference over the loss of his son, that we see what Henslowe has been getting at. Listening to an account of the final hours of his beloved childhood pet, Horatio is put in memory of his son – a place he has hitherto resisted being put. Dean Spanley leads us into the water and the grief shark lunges.

Inside Out uses a different approach. Instead of submerging grief it hyper-articulates it, showing us not only the outer effects but also the internal processes that underpin these effects. In shark terms, it uses a high definition underwater camera and GPS tracking beacon. Through the exploits of Joy, Sadness et al we know exactly what’s going on in Riley’s head as she copes with the double-loss of her childhood and previous happy life. It’s as if there’s a whole school of grief sharks on the screen, painted in primary colours and performing tricks.

Except that’s not what’s happening at all. The exploits of Joy and Sadness are just a colourful, mostly happy distraction. Nobody is at the controls, and Riley is numb. When Sadness finally puts her hands on the console to bring about the simple spectacle of a little girl in distress, the real grief shark breaks away from its rainbow school of decoys and rips your head clean off.

I think stories get under your skin when they articulate feelings that you can’t properly articulate to yourself. The story leads you down a neural pathway and into a mental chamber that you can’t, or won’t, find on your own, and it stays with you until you find your way back.

Stories containing grief sharks aren’t the only ones that take you into yourself like this. Manchester by the Sea doesn’t contain a grief shark, but it got under my skin more than any other story I’ve experienced. After a few weeks of sombre reflection I think I might even have worked out why, but the reason has nothing to do with sharks so I won’t go into it here.

Obviously, people respond to different stories in different ways. You may be invulnerable to grief sharks, because you’re not insane in the exact way that I’m insane, but you might be insane in a different way and susceptible to another kind of storytelling device. However, I would counsel against crowbarring this device into an animal metaphor and writing a blog post about it, because, as you have just discovered, that would be weird.

Complete glossary of Netmums acronyms

baby

  • AFAIK – As far as I know
  • AF – Aunt Flo (period)
  • AKA – Also known as
  • BBL – Be back later
  • BBT – Basal body temp
  • BFD – Biscuits for dinner
  • BIL – Brother in law
  • BITGOD – Back in the good old days
  • BRB – Be right back
  • BTW – By the way
  • CBG – Consumed by guilt
  • CS – Considering suicide
  • DD – Darling daughter
  • DF – Darling fiance/fiancee
  • DH – Darling husband
  • DMTAA – Don’t miss them at all
  • DP – Darling partner
  • DS – Darling son
  • DW – Darling wife
  • EOMCF – Envious of my childless friends
  • FAQ – Frequently asked questions
  • FIL – Father in law
  • FPM – Full parental meltdown
  • FWIW – For what it’s worth
  • FYI – For your information
  • GFBWTF – Getting fat but what the f**k
  • GFY – Good for you
  • GMTA – Great minds think alike
  • HV – Health visitor
  • IAC – In any case
  • IFAD – I fantasise about death
  • IFWIW – I’ve forgotten who I was
  • IIRC – If I remember correctly
  • IMCO – In my considered opinion
  • IMHO – In my humble opinion
  • IMNSHO – In my not so humble opinion
  • IMO – In my opinion
  • IMOBO – In my own biased opinion
  • ITIHMC – I think I hate my children
  • IWSMMFL – I wanted so much more from life
  • JTYWLTK – Just thought you would like to know
  • LOL – Lots of luck/lots of love/laughing out loud
  • LMAO – laughing my a**e off
  • MIL – Mother in law
  • OH – Other half
  • OM – Other man
  • OMG – oh my god!
  • OW – Other woman
  • PILs – Parents in law
  • PMSL – Peeing myself laughing
  • PMSS – Peeing myself sneezing
  • PND – Post natal depression
  • PTSD – Post tequila slammers depression
  • RERST – Routinely exceed recommended screen time
  • ROTF – Rolling on the floor
  • SATT – Sad all the time
  • SCP – Secret crying place
  • SF – Secret family
  • SFACC – Sexual fantasy about cartoon character
  • SIL – Sister in law
  • SLNIDTIWIAOWAOFCBBCP… AILI – So last night I dreamed I was in an orgy with all of the CBBC presenters… and I liked it
  • SO – Showering optional
  • TAFT – That’s a frightening thought
  • TBH – To be honest
  • TSBWTRBCGFH – That smug bitch with the running buggy can go fuck herself
  • TTC – Trying to conceive
  • WYSIWYG – What you see is what you get
  • WRT – With regard to
  • WTCISD – What time can I start drinking?
  • WTF – What the f**k?

Man ruptures colon after 3-hour search for toilet reading material

toiletA 42-year- old man has ruptured his colon following a three-hour search for something to read on the toilet.

Barry Turtle of Dorking, Surrey, suffered a massive internal hemorrhage last Tuesday as he attempted to locate his book of hilarious golf jokes while simultaneously suppressing a bowel movement. It is estimated that he had been putting off the toilet visit for as long as five days prior to the movement, hoping that the book would just show up.

Paramedics gained access to Mr Turtle’s property shortly after being alerted by concerned neighbours at around 5pm, and discovered the man lying unconscious in his kitchen with his legs crossed and a prominent reddy-brown stain on his gusset area.

He was taken to Dorking Community Hospital, where surgeons extracted around 4 kilograms of compacted faeces from his abdominal cavity and stitched up the tattered remnants of his bowel. Doctors are hopeful that Mr Turtle will make a full recovery.

Glorious afterlife

“Oh it was awful,” said next door neighbour Flora Threlfall. “At about lunchtime I heard him swearing through the wall, banging about, smashing things, stomping up and down the stairs.

“I knocked for him at about half three to make sure he was okay, and when he opened the door he was pale and sweating and standing very oddly, like a ballet dancer. He was looking right past me with this distant, glazed look in his eyes, as though he could see his ancestors bathed in light and calling out to him from the glorious afterlife.”

Relatives who examined the property after Mr Turtle fell unconscious report finding hundreds of books on the floor, as well as upturned and damaged items of furniture strewn throughout the house. In a sign of Mr Turtle’s eventual desperation, relatives even found bloody scratch marks in the carpet and walls where he had resorted to digging for the book with his nails.

The book – Golf’s Funniest Jokes, by Jim Chumley – was eventually found in the cupboard under the bathroom sink next to the cotton buds where it always goes.

%d bloggers like this: