No.45: Knit

Knitting. Fundamentally it’s swearing with wool. But flancers love it because (a) it takes ages and you’re historically obliged to sit down with a cup of tea and Custard Creams while you’re doing it.  (b) Some glossy weekend supplement once stamped it trendy. So, even if you’re unemployed, depressed and covered in weeping malnutrition sores you can be trendy.  (c) You can make money by selling your knitted hell-forms to other flancers. Flancers LOVE peddling home-made shite to other flancers (see: jewellery that appears to be made from the contents of the local Toys-R-Us Hoover bag, greetings cards with fluff on or adventurously flavoured muffins) and thus contribute to a beautiful, self-sufficient micro-community, borne unsteadily along on guilt-purchasing and resentment (‘thirty pounds for one earring made out of a mini Weetabix and a Kinder Egg toy? I know she was in The Times magazine but really…’)

Knitting is quite hard.  One generally sees old people knitting because they are actually flancers who started the bobble hat they are working on twenty-seven years ago, devolved into Alzhiemers and forgot to stop.

On a side-note we must distinguish between this ‘trendy knitting’ lark and actual, proper knitting. Done by people who make their own clothes. Done by people who have an inner need to be at one with wool.  They eat oats and wear their spectacles on a chain.  True knitters  wear things they have knitted themselves and are also slightly mad. They resemble an alarming fusion of Sue Pollard, a drama teacher, a social worker and Grotbags from the Pink Windmill. They have a catty, house-planty aroma wear earrings with parrots on and also enjoy patchwork.

The difficulty of knitting does not deter the flancer.  They love a challenge. Indeed, a challenge that is something other than trying to avoid being caught out sniffing around the Tesco trolley park looking for rogue pound coins left hanging out of the anti-theft mechanism.

Knitting is supposed to be very soothing. The clack-clack of the needles, backdropped by gentle expletives issuing forth between spittle-flecked lips as you, once again appear to have knitted another hole into the very slowly progressing strip of mangled mohair that has been sitting in your lap for the past 17 days like a kitten from an animal rescue centre .

Also known as ‘a scarf.’

After day 18, the knitting will be abandoned (see post: 6)

No.44:Read Magazines

If you have ever flanced, the act of reading magazines for pleasure is cruelly snatched away and replaced with bitter misery.

You’re slightly sickened by the sight of what’s in front of you, but cannot tear your eyes away – like seeing really badly applied highlights. Reading a magazine to which you have not contributed is a curious, horribly addictive and depressive practice that makes the flancer feel subhuman and guilty.  In this sense it is very similar to stuffing thick slices of discount Cheddar cheese smothered with Ezysqueeze mayonnaise into your face before you collapse in a weeping heap of dairy.

First; the feverish scanning of the gutter, terrified that you might discover that the sniffy, bone-idle workie who used to make you coffee that tasted as if it had been filtered through a roadie’s sock,  is now, apparently features editor.

Then comes the absolute conviction that the magazine has seemingly ’stolen’ an idea that you sent them (in 1986) and got someone else cheaper and (obviously less skilled) to write it. Just to spite you, the flancer. You seethe. Perhaps you swear at the saucepan rack. Perhaps you write an email pulsing with vitriol and hate – smearing the keys with cheesy mayonnaise as you go.

 And then you delete it when your reason returns from its short holiday, leaving you vibrating with an unexpressed frustration that shrivels your very kidneys. You seek out more cheese.

Then!! Betrayal above all betrayals!! You spot a byline… and it’s one of your flancer friends, who swore she was as jobless as you! And she has two – TWO! – pieces in said magazine.

The betrayal bites deep and you will hold onto it for at least 7 months. She may as well have murdered your mother.  You don’t – of course – avail her of your feelings but simply but make all future interactions slightly chilly. You will meet her for coffee, but she is essentially dead to you.

At least this sort of extensive emotional session can waste many beautiful hours. Arguably, those hours would have been better spent coming up with new ideas to send to said magazine.

But anyway, their content has really gone downhill lately.  And Murder She Wrote has just started.

No.43: Consider Drinking Before 11am

Flancers have a nervous relationship with alcohol because flancers know that all their friends assume they are a closet boozer anyway.

Of course they do.   Loved-ones look at this person they know, who never has any money, with filthy hair, who eats odd things in sandwiches, who has sod all to do during the daylight hours and often shouts at strangers in the supermarket.

 And thus, putting two and two together they  get ‘raging alcoholic.’

People other than us cannot understand that we flancers generally operate on ‘Flancer Time’,  which, as pointed out in previous posts does not correlate with normal life. And associated hazards can, it’s true, result in alcoholic beverages being knocked back at hours that at best seem anti-social and at worse seem depraved.

 Living in Flancer-Time leads one to do any number of anti-social things, like clean floor tiles at midnight, drink coffee at 2am, maybe even carry out an interview in the kitchen at a birthday party at 11.35pm.  Because it’s an interview with someone in America and you couldn’t turn it down because it’s the first job you’ve had in five months.

As such,  the old internal clock gets somewhat dysfunctional.

And besides, we flancers quite enjoy shouting questions at a relationship experts at 11.35pm from atop a washing machine, with a finger in one ear to block out the carousing, trying not to put the notepad in a puddle of Tequila.

In conclusion, it is unavoidable that at some point, a flancer feels like a glass of wine or perhaps a half pint of Malibu at a time deemed socially unacceptable. 

 Oh, there will be guilt. But it all depends how you look at it, see? If you were up at 4am wondering if you’d ever work again before you die, you, the flancer,  have effectively been up for 8 hours. Which, if you’d risen at nine am would make the time 4pm.

Which a perfectly acceptable, non-alcoholic abuser  time to have a drink.

No.42: Cut your Own Hair

Cutting your own hair is an act of supreme risk, rivalling that of poking an angry tiger with a stick after being smeared in antelope meat or showering with a toaster. In this last instance, the coiffeurial result may often be the same.

For flancers of the male persuasion, the risk is somewhat less, as most ‘trendy’ gentleman these days like to wear their hair as if it has been cut with a knife and fork by a blind, thumbless imbecile anyway.

For the ladies however, very bad things can happen to their head, when, in the midst of Murder She Wrote (see post.40) they  decide that they can no longer stare at Jessica Fletcher’s nasty brooches and decide to distract themselves by investigating their split ends.  

The search for a cutting implement begins with a poke about for some very sharp scissors.  And often ends with the scissors being liberated from the sewing kit out of christmas cracker.

It starts with an innocent fringe trim. After an initially promising start the flancer will attempt to emulate the professional finger motions seen used by the likes of professional hair-changers and end up looking like Dave Hill from Slade:

Or Mr. Spock:

Alternatively, the flancer will start on the back. And after a few minutes trying to work out the angles, taking into the account that they are working backwards in a mirror with scissors from a christmas cracker sewing-kit, they will eventually resemble a young Paul Weller:

In real boredom-filled moments, the flancer will attempt something more ‘creative’ and end up with the exact same head furniture as that seen perched upon an Eighties teenager in their passport photo:

A colleague will enquire: ‘um…did you cut your own hair?’ and a hat will promptly be bought and worn for sixteen weeks.

No.41: Read Junk Mail

Junk mail was invented for people to move from their doormat, to the place where the phone lives, to their coffee table/kitchen table where it will still be found two years later.

For some bizarre reason it never makes it into the recycling. Perhaps only God knows the answer to this.  But even he might have to ask Jeremy Paxman.

People just tend to keep hold of it, despite a professed loathing for its unimaginative content, inanity, and desire to sell you large plastic items you might find useful in the bedroom. It is much like the young gentleman’s publication Nuts in this respect.

Perhaps an unsettling fear exists that the instant they throw it away they will need to urgently discover how much a Y-Shaped, microfibre banister duster is. Or where they can get a leather and fabric corner sofa ‘at super-crazy-knock down prices.’

Of course, the answer to this second concern is DFS, as their sale began in the Late Elizabethan period and has been on ever since.

Flancers, though, end up reading junk mail, as it acts (the parallels with Nuts magazine now positively piling up) as a mildly distracting, brain-numbing agent.  Such literature is marvelously suitable for short periods of waiting accompanied by mild nerves ie: dentists waiting rooms, in the company of people you don’t wish to make eye contact with but it would be rude to outright ignore, and putting off something that you know you have to do but could result in deeper misery. Like pitching an idea or waiting to hear if you have work this week, say.

There is something innately comforting perhaps about staring at ugly items that you didn’t know were so cheap (at a risk of stretching the Nuts analogy to it’s limit).  Key junk mail topics tend to be: stationary/office items, furniture, revolutionary kitchenware (like insulated gravy boats and things that cut a cucumber to look like the Eiffel tower), different sorts of chairs for old people and fashion lines no one has heard of. All with an easily detachable strip or pre-addressed envelope for some reason or other.

There are however, joyfully kitsch junk mail moments that truly break the monotony for the flancer. For example, those Faux Faberge eggs on a 22-carat faux gold stand, that rotate, open and play All Things Bright and Beautiful upon which you can have the name of your ‘dead loved one’ etched on a faux silver plaque on the front.

Or a plate with a Weimaraner painted on it (‘a limited number of 200,000 ever produced.  Only fifteen payments of £35.99!’)

Junk mail’s one plus is that it gives flancers something other than their old portfolios to flick though and feel depressed about.

No.40: Watch Murder, She Wrote

Bored Flancers LOVE Murder, She Wrote, despite the fact that finding yourself watching it has the same emotional resonances as  coming to your senses after bludgeoning someone irritating to death, blinded by red mist.  You never thought you were capable of sinking to such depths, but here you are, doing it without even realising, scarily looking forward to doing it again.

Even though MSW is a pedestrian, light-hearted series about a nice lady who catches nasty killers whist wearing a variety of large and unattractive brooches, as a TV programme it symbolises the very lowest levels of flancer self-loathing and worklessness. It’s jaunty theme tune is the clarion call to a life without purpose, Jessica Fletcher’s cheery busy-bodying a symbol of the mindlessness and frontal lobe deterioration brought on by this, the televisual equivalent of damp carpet. 

MSW has a strangely addictively quality, not unlike that of say, coffee, for example. Or smack. Except that MSW is harder to give up.

Perhaps it is because it is about writing that it appeals to highly so the flancer.

However, this is an overly- optimistic and unconvincing reason and the real truth is that watching MSW is a ritual of the elderly and the drop-out, reefer-sucking student, with whom flancers seem to share an alarming amount of common ground.

This love/hate realtionship is summed up most pertinently by the  perky theme tune, which both warms the cockles, inviting us to guiltily sink into the sofa with some hot, buttered toast and at the same time makes you feel like  throwing a puppy under an on-coming car.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWz9lpxv3NM

Perhaps most upsetting is that Jessica Fletcher would never watch MSW, because unlike the flancer,  she’s too busy working on a novel that will actually *get* published.

No.39: Have a Short Holiday

…which is what theweemo is currently doing, hence a slight halt in postings. Blogging will begin again in a week with:

No. 40: Watch ‘Murder, She Wrote’

… around about the same time I start getting bored again.

Regards,
twm

No.38: Make Your Own Christmas Presents

‘Waste time and save money? Show me the Sellotape!’ enthuses the flancer unfortunately for everyone they are considering giving a gift to this year. It was a flancer whom clearly invented the phrase ‘it’s the thought that counts’, stealthily insinuating it into the common belief system so that it would be the disappointed recipient of the shit, home-knitted doily who is the bad person - not the tight-arse that didn’t just buy them a £2 bottle of wine.

Like the Millennium Dome, hand-made christmas presents take ages to construct and tend to have no real purpose.   Aside from cluttering up the home of the recipient, who keeps the ‘frightening sculpture made of wood and covered with cut-out holly*’  fearing a deep and enduring guilt that plagues anyone who dares put a hand-made gift in the bin. 

Unfortunately, crafty presents made by anybody except really talented, arty types tend to be ugly and glittery and often sport inexplicable bobbles or tassels, like  something scraped from the bottom of an ageing transvestite’s make up bag.

However, from the flancer’s point of view, this present making lark is joy.  They are in their element, glueing and crocheting and weaving something from Santa’s reject bin of tat, listening to carols and swigging energetically from an £8 bottle of Lidl sherry.

They may – if you’re really unlucky -   decide to make their own cards as well. If a flancer gives you a Christmas card, best play it safe. Do not say, for instance:  ’oooh! how public-spirited you are buying those charity cards by disabled people who paint with their feet!  I love groups of nuns – how christmassy!’ as the flancer probably spent five hours at it and meant it to be a group of penguins.

However, any hand-made thingy is better than a body lotion/shower gel/bathsalts and shower poouf set**  because nothing says: ‘You’re irrelevant to me’  like one of them.

TODAYS FOOTNOTES

*Or ‘Festive Wine Rack’ as the flancer would have it.

**These sets always  smell exactly the same -  like a scented candle from a pound-shop.  And every woman has at least three shower pooufs hanging over a tap somewhere in their home, which never seem to dry out and probably take four hundred years to biodegrade.

No. 37:Cook Something Complicated

When flancers are busy with writing work, everything else in their lives goes to shit – particularly their diet. They don’t eat anything between paragraphs, other than food items prepared so that the only pre-consumption necessity is ripping off the packaging.  Anything goes – even meat peppered with blue hairy spots.

However, when the work dries up, flancers will spend their day at the other end of the comestible scale and fill their day with culinary complexity.  Think: making choux pastry (from scratch), venison souffles, pasta stuffed with soaked truffles, battered tongue, soda bread and their own cheeses.

Curries are massively popular with bored flancers because some of the more epic recipes take DAYS to prep, and come furnished with the added bonus that in order to collect every single obscure indian spice required, one must either  (a) visit the Indian supermarket (doubtless  situated on an industrial estate halfway to the moon.  Affording yet more delicious time-wasting). Or (b) visit India itself, to which the flight alone will waste an average of 22 hours.

Bread-making is another favourite, despite the fact that anyone who tries to make homemade bread ALWAYS ends up with something textually reminiscent of an over-sized, wheat-based Satanic Ferrero Rocher: ie crusty and hard on the outside, goopy in the middle and another mysterious, rock-hard lump in the centre that tastes of earth.

Yet the flancer will persevere with and attend to the loaf at every stage of its development like a first-time mum in her late thirties that’s been trying to conceive for the last eight years.  No-one will be allowed to touch the loaf or get involved with caring for it. The flancer may tearfully ring their mother for tips, at their wits end trying to work out what they should be doing to make the loaf a success (‘it looks so easy before you start!’).  Their partner will feel sidelined, possibly seeking relationship solace elsewhere. Any loaf deformities uncovered in the baking process will only cause the flancer to love the loaf more.

When not hyper-parenting their organic  kibbled rye plait, they will be lording it over their employed less-domestically inclined colleagues and forcing Tupperware filled with oat muffins, lentil dhal and beetroot and apple soup upon them.

If you happen to live with a flancer (you poor bastard), at least their workless weeks promise regular gastronomic experiences of Hester Blumenthal proportions. It may even result in your coming home to find a medieval banquet-style supper awaiting you – complete with stuffed swan – to say sorry for walking in on you in the bath to turn over the gorgonzola  ‘resting’ on the shelf above the medicine cabinet.

No.36: Alphabetise Stuff

Putting things in alphabetical order has been popular with the epically bored and  anally-retentive since the beginning of time – not that I’m for one instant obliquely suggesting that flancers are job-shy and of questionable mental stability.

Alright,  I am.  But the premise that ordering ’stuff’ is a symbolic microcosm of a person – unable to control the bigger, more important aspects of their own existence – attempting to access some kind of temporary spiritual relief via the control of pointless minutiae, isn’t just a psychologically relevant point. Oh, no. It is also  a wanky-sounding, convoluted sentence as well.

It is a little known fact that LP records, books and DVDs were invented simply to occupy the unsatisfied glut of bored flancers itching to arrange some tawdry possessions.  

It is also interesting to note that any flancer that has spent the best part of a month ordering their crap will always put it down to a much more inflated, less embarrassing reason than ‘because I had no work’. 

Instead, they’ll casually claim to be doing it because  it bore the sort of pressing urgency usually reserved for needing a poo half-way though a lengthy work presentation or an emergency kidney transplant.  As opposed to the real reason, which is: needing to feel back in the saddle of a life that had bucked them off into the  muddy puddle of jobless, pointless doom.

Best not voice this though - it may break the flancer emotionally.

Flancers, given enough lee-way, will end up alphabetising anything. Including the letters of the word ‘lee-way’ if physical objects are scarce.  Flancers will un-self consciously order their own shoes, the herb rack, the drinks cabinet and members of their own family in a sweating, twitchy fashion.  Often whilst rubbing at their own forehead like a Hollywood depiction of somebody autistic.

Rabid flancer: ‘No BOB!!! You CANNOT sit next to Keith! You have to sit between Anna and CLIVE!!

Unsuspecting family member: ‘Why?’

Rabid flancer: ‘BECAUSE!!!!!!!!!’ * [spirals off into a vexing fit of rocking and forehead rubbing]

Alphabetising after a strong cup of coffee is known as ‘Extreme Alphabetising’ and should only be attempted by experienced flancers. This dangerous practice consists of placing one’s chosen objects  in alphabetical order at tremendous velocity under the influence of caffeine whilst wearing a crash helmet. Anyone who gets in the way of the flancer deep  in the midst of extreme alphabetising risks suffering the same mangled fate as a finger placed in a  high-speed electric  blender.

If you know a bored flancer, never invite them over to eat Alphabetti Spaghetti as things can get quite tomatoey quite quickly.