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Into London today to interview George Monbiot about his fascinating and terrifying book, "The Invisible Doctrine" at the Royal Geographical Society. They sent a cab to pick me up from the station and it was a Tesla, which seemed an ironic choice to take me to an event where shady billionaires were going to have their motives questioned.
Should I attempt to set the car on fire in order to protest?
Maybe once I'd got out of it.
I've never been in a Tesla before and in spite of myself I was pretty impressed with the sat nav system, which not only showed you where you were, but added in the vehicles around you and the cyclists coming up behind you and even the pedestrians passing by. It wasn't faultless - people appeared and disappeared like ghosts and occasionally a bus showed up as a lorry, before morphing to the correct shape. But all in all I loved it. I am not sure if I had that in my car if I'd ever look at the road.
At the moment all the people and vehicles are just animations, but surely the tech will develop so that everything is rendered in video and you'll be able to access information about the people passing by and shout their names and addresses at them out of the window.
Once at the venue I took off my hoodie and realised that I didn't recognise the shirt I was wearing. I'd grabbed it out of the wardrobe pretty quickly and checked the label to make sure it was one of the larger shirts that I have to wear currently due to my failure to lose weight. It was from H and M, which did confuse me momentarily as I didn't remember shopping there, but I had other things on my mind and the shirt fitted.
Now I looked at this linen shirt on my corpulent frame I did start to wonder if it was actually mine. I have my nice shirts washed and ironed at a dry cleaners so I look OK on stage and once before they had given me some shirts that weren't mine (but I'd noticed and returned them immediately). Was it possible that someone else's shirt had slipped into my pack of shirts?
It was quite an unsettling thought to be wearing someone else's clothes, especially at a gig where you have to feel like a hyper version of yourself on stage. Obviously the shirt had been cleaned (though there was a slight stain on it still) but even so. I certainly hadn't worn this shirt recently and the only other possibility was that it had been deep in my laundry basket for months and years and I had somehow not spotted it (my dry cleaner does a deal on 5 shirts, so I don't always take all of them when I am going in).
If it wasn't my shirt then whose was it? And did they have one of my shirts? Should I just be pleased that I had a nice shirt that fitted me? Or what if it was my shirt and me not recognising it was just another sign of the fading of my cognitive functions? I haven't shopped at H and M since the 90s when I found it a good source of the overly complicated colourful shirts that I wore in Lee and Herring. It couldn't be mine.
I managed to put the shirt mystery to the back of my mind and had a nice Thai takeaway with George and prepared myself to talk about Neo-Liberalism (or hopefully mainly listen to him talking about it).
The chat went well and I didn't have to do very much as George was very much on top of the subject. I tried to throw in some counterarguments to give him something to rub up against, which worked well. It was an enjoyable gig and it was recorded too so we'll put it up as a book club either this week or next.
I felt a bit ikky about wearing another man's shirt. Until I got home and remembered that we had shopped at H and M in Stevenage two or three years ago and it was possible, if not likely that I'd bought a couple of shirts. And thinking about it, this shirt was probably mine after all. The fact it had a stain on it that could not be removed by professional cleaners had certainly been the clue.
But what a confusing shirt-based ride it had been.
RHLSTP with Larry and Paul (do check out their stuff if you don't know it)
is now up in usual places. Series 31 motherfuckers! Episode 555 fatherfuckers! (though actually including “specials and Edinburgh shows it’s probably more like 800)
Two weeks to go on the kickstarter and we've hit £15,000, but still a long way to go. It's the only way to get a DVD and though we may sell downloads afterwards, we won't be able to do that unless we film it. So if you want to see the show and can't get to see it live,
then please consider backing the project. These rewards will be rare enough that there's a good chance they will go up in value.*
* investing in novelty underwear is a risky business. Value can go down as well as up. Especially if you wear the pants.
