So, how will the London Olympics be remembered? For the East End's own Mo Farah, kicking at the last bend to leave a phalanx of Kenyans in his wake and sprint gazelle-like for 10,000 metre gold? For cute young Daley, nervelessly triple-spiralling in an ultracalibrated split-second aerial display of Red-Devilesque intensity before dissappearing, splashlessly and triumphantly,into the clearblue depths? For the beach volleyball? For the dressage (or, as it was known in our house, the Wierd Posh Horse Dancing)? For the daredevil breakneck indoor cycling, strapped into featherlight bikes with no brakes, hurtling without due care and attention along the sheer sides of what were to all intents and purposes brick fucking walls, if you don't mind?
Well all that was very impressive. But for me, the home Olympiad will always be associated with having my scooter nicked, from right outside the front door, while I was esconced in the back kitchen with the radio on at top volume, taking in the early stages of the 3000 metre steeplechase while preparing a tortilla de patatas (a very good one, I hasten to add; if there were medals for the midweek domestic concoction by allcomer non-Spaniards of staple items of Iberian peasant fare, then we would have been in with more than a sporting shout) .
In this summer of broken records, it is perhaps appopriate that the theft establishes a new all-time high of 5 (five) for the number of wheeled items of my posession which have been stolen or broken into within the confines of our street- a rate of just over one item per three years of residence . Although admittedly I am stretching the point a bit by including in the list our wheely bin, which was unceremoniously retired from active service one sunrise by overzealous employees of Manchester Corporation, leaving only its wheels (which had during the previous week fallen off, quite without warning or other preamble) behind.
The theft of my means of transport has taken me to the pages of Autotrader, where I have spent way too much time lusting over alluring images of a 2004 Piaggio 125cc model in cream and tan, advertised as located just 4 miles from my crime-ravaged postcode. A bargain at £750, the would-be vendor reckons, even taking into account the fact that it the engine has steadfasstly refused to start since returning from its last MOT. 'Just a quick fix, probably', the advertisement ends, not altogether reasurringly.
So far I've managed to keep my chequebook in my pocket, and am travelling to work on the trains and trams. Which means I get to stare out of the window at the passing views of Manchester's Fashionable Westside, and also to read a book (which is something I only seem able to do nowadays while on public transport- I've occasionally considered buying a return day train ticket to Aberdeen, just to enable me to finish one of the many volumes that lie around the house, their authors shooting me accusing glances from their yellowing back-covers).
The book in question is by Georges Perec, a French-Jewish writer of the 1950s to 80s who I had never come across until his collected writings arrived through the letterbox (a present from Abby, who specialises in slim volumes by little-heard-of Europeans). The fellow turns out to posess an unrivalled genius for the description of the everyday and the banal, decanted with an unerringly light touch in aperitif-short accounts (many of which began life as articles in fashionable and long-defunct Parisian magazines) with headings such as 'Brief Notes on the Art and Manner of Arranging Ones Books' or 'The Apartment Building'.
This morning (perhaps because I was on the way to work) I was particularly taken by a description of the archetypal Directors Office, which contains 'nothing that might recall the harsh realities of Office Life or the complicated ins and outs of bureaucracy: no typewriter, no pending files, no staplers, no pots of glue, no false cuffs (which, come to think of it, can't be so very common in our own day). For here it is a matter simply of thinking, of conceiving, deciding and negotiating, and this has nothing to do with all those subordinate tasks that the faithful carthorses will carry on scrupulously on the floors below'.
I would have stayed on the tram and kept devouring such timeless and finely-poised prose until the terminus, but, faithful carthorse that I am, instead descended at my appointed platform somewhere in the far southwestern suburbs and hurried off to my workplace, pausing only to nearly get run over by a Council truck as I attempted to finish the chapter containing the afore-quoted passage while crossing a busy rush-hour 'B' road.
Which would have at least made a more interesting excuse for my habitual 'Summer of Sloth' lateness than 'points failure at Timperley' and I am sure that Perec himself would have approved. Although perhaps not, the drama of a pedestrian collision being too far removed from everyday banality to merit his attention (he'd be more likely to pass over the mangled human and automotive wreckage entirely, in favour of a painstaking account of the suburban guttering system, or the patterning and interspacing of the bollards in the parking bays, or the fact that the former drycleaners at number 34 had been closed down, and appeared, if appearances were to be trusted, to be being prepared for a new incarnation as a boutique).
Fair play to him I say. And fair play to anyone who notices, celebrates and elevates into art the everyday, even if they do occasionally get me nearly run over by Council trucks. A small price, in my view, to pay for genius (which, like false cuffs, are in our own day not so common, not so common at all).
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