pandemian

16 April 2007

I can't watch soaps. Aside from any real though undeniably fustian aversion to the genre the most persistent memory of my childhood is hearing the music from Eastenders thumping up through my bedroom floor from the living room below, punctuated by the persistently annoying and unrelentingly aggrieved snarls of my father that this or that female character was a cow or a tart and should never have been allowed on television in the first place and now hearing someone in white footwear saying "Darren, little Rytalynne isn't your baby!" in even the mildest estuary accent is like chewing on tin foil.

I did try Big Brother once, but after fifteen minutes had to flee the living room shrieking from the deeply unpleasant sensation of having my frontal lobes enthusiastically rubbed with a nutmeg grater.

Blogs are okay up to a point, but after vigorous weeding for photographs of children, the use of the word 'wacky' or any of its synonyms to describe the author, text speak, dense and hysterically dreadful prose about how unappreciated the author is by their boss, partner or that bitch they sit next to in double Geography on Wednesday afternoons, thinly veiled whining about not having a book deal/Bloggie nomination or anything at all about actually having one, minute details about mowing the lawn at the weekend and the hilarious things that ensued with the rabbit or any one of another approximately one thousand five hundred things that are liable to annoy me about tiny people and their tiny lives at any one point, this leaves me with approximately 0.3% blogs I can read on a daily basis without succumbing to violence unimaginable. Obviously this is insufficient and by definition, the most interesting people give the least away.

It is for these reasons that I've had to take to satisfying my curiosity about lives other than my own by peering into the back gardens of strangers. If I were an outdoorsy type with perpetually pink cheeks and and item of clothing that was waxed this shameless peepingtommery would no doubt take the form of dark glasses and shoes that do not squeak; however I am an under the duvet on a cold evening with a bar of Dairy Milk in one hand and some well thumbed pornography in the other type and as such my spying is confined to speculative snooping as one of the trains I've recently spent a disproportionate amount of time on rushes me out of town.

From the back, all inner city terraced London houses look like slums. Painted white or respectable magnolia or Hint Of Gentrification from the front, the back walls are stained, sooty brickwork stolen straight from a particularly lively production of Oliver Twist, all jutting angles and afterthought bathrooms cutting into tiny, cracked concrete yards; like putting on your best party dress but forgetting to wipe your arse. I know these, they're my life; crammed full of random bits of luridly coloured children's plastic toys, heaps of forgotten charcoal briquettes and rusting slices of unidentifiable machinery. As the suburbs approach the green of blutacked flags on grimy glass gets replaced by the carefully displayed green of untouched Cath Kidson watering cans which finally gives way to large swathes of grass, yawning and stretching out from the railway line to meet their child's drawing houses; one door, four windows, nets twitching. These are the carefully clipped and neutered gardens of polished conservatories and city incomes, polite Boden-clad children on trampolines and whispered grievances behind the imported Spanish hardwood furniture.

Through choice, chance and inability, lives I'll never lead. And I could ponder for days what makes a gas fired barbecue and all that comes with it the pride and joy of someone's life without ever coming up with an answer that satisfies but all I'd really be doing is testing whether I can still examine these lives, or as much as their matching curtains and scatter cushions tell me about them, without regret.

So far, so good.