20 Questions with Ian

[sam]

...Why can’t we all get along? Everyone wants to be right, but sometimes to the exception of ever being wrong, which can too easily become a fundamentalist pursuit. Then the tribalism, perpetually caught in an approval spiral with your peers, so concerned to step out of line that you are forced re-script reality. That often winds into modern ridiculousness online, and probably warheads and bullets in the real worlds. There's a sunk cost. I try to be wrong five times a day. It's not as hard as people think.

Well this fell nicely in my lap: are you willing to share ±5 things you've been wrong about? Can place in order of wrongness if you wish.

[finestre]

I'll hand over to Finestre, the Demon of Such Things, and my demonic alter ego and general expert on Bad Things.



This is a difficult one because nothing is entirely wrong (other than some people on the internet), but right and wrong are one the most part an issue of perspective rather than white or black.


Thus murdering people is generally wrong and I've not done it and if I had, I wouldn't confess, and it's not like anyone will find the bodies. Thinking about getting the intent for bloody paw and maw is OK, some people earn the fantasy demise. Mostly, I will settle for boiling their eyes like eggs. I'm not a monster though, I would remove them first.


There are other definite wrongs, I’m sure: raising demons (without prior arrangement), using nuclear weapons without a good reason, and karaoke.


I will own up to the latter, especially as it was Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. Had we known that before we arrived on stage, things might have worked out better, and I apologise unreservedly to the people of Boca Raton and the surrounding area for that incident which somehow surpassed both the localized emanation of evil and the use of a small-yield nuclear weapon in a suburban enclave. There were people in the audience praying for firey oblivion. Reap as ye shall sow.


I will grade the last couple of Marvel movies as wrong today. Also drinking wine on a roller coaster. I mean it's fun, but really your shirt isn't never coming back from that.

[sam]

To celebrate the arrival of your alter ego, let's revisit hell, shall we? Is Ambrose Bierce downunder for writing The Devil's Dictionary? That's also rhetorical. Of course he is, gathering material for The Devil's Thesaurus ~ there are 6 million words for fire, for a start. Who else do you expect is in residence killing time,

perhaps having been granted access to its antonym but found it a holy yawnfest that cramped their style?

[finestre]

Hell is a bit different from the literature these days, and perhaps always was. Since the corporate buy-out of Heaven, it's become a bit of a Shoreditch-on-Styx, a Hadian Hackney, awash with diabolical design agencies and metastatic marketing campaigners. Fiery damnation doesn't put a dent in them and the occasional flaying, well, after the first few times, it's just part of the job. It's a hard job for the damnation department executive to think of the good stuff. Back in the old days, damnation was easy, a few hot pokers and a fuming lake of molten brimstone, and that was the good proportion of eternity filled with the cheerful symphony of screaming. Nowadays, they want to know if that lake of brimstone is triple-hopped and whether damnation can be delivered on a four-day week.


In short though, no and no, and they're going to be using Powerpoint a lot. That's what Ambrose is doing. And he has to animate every slide. That's not damnation though, damnation is having to sit through all these, day after day. These are the people who created adverts for YouTube.


Hell is basically choosy these days, refugees boating across the Styx – property prices are through the roof. No one wants to be in Heaven, it's an asset-stripped afterlife full of the people you didn't want to meet when you were alive, and the only benefit was they might have given you the gift of dying before you.



Hell does have a programme to eject the influencers though, Heaven can have them.

[sam]

In what ways would life have been different if Labour had been in charge lo these many years?

[ILLUSTRATION WITHDRAWN]

And how many more penises does this election cycle hold?

Here boy.

[finestre]

A Labour counterfactual? It couldn’t be worse than the current circus of clowns, though marginally less interesting. But that’s interesting like medical case studies in a urology journal are interesting. He put what, where? No. [Twists head to look at picture]. Oh. Unsee that you cannot.


We’d have missed the bloviation of Boris, I suppose. The face-off of Truss versus a lettuce. The non-event that is Sunak, who is what’s left after you’ve finished scraping the bottom of the barre that has already been scraped several times. The intellectual equivalent of wood shavings.


These are times that you’d have rather read about than live through.


So, yes, Labour would have delivered competence through fewer clowns. This really ought to have been their manifesto pledge, something to get behind, rather than the lukewarm sense of non-commitment. The country might not feel so run down, where deciding to see your GP feels like committing to run a marathon. With the plague.


The Penis Wars. I do think Starmer is being cagey on being called on this, the lawyer in him knows to evade and elude. He’s not smart enough to know that these days we gave up the right to silence and anything you choose not to say might be used against you. It says something that modern life requires subservience to nonsensical purity statements and performative progressiveness, even though they’re hardly majority positions. We swapped the enlightenment for preferred pronouns. So I expect we’d still have that, Labour or not. Fewer clowns though, and for that we should be thankful.


Vote Fewer Clowns!

[sam]

I don't know which to ask first, so I'm going to ask both, though they're entirely unrelated.*

Do you have any phobias?

As per Shania Twain, the best thing about being a woman is the prerogative to have a little fun. What's the best thing about being a man?

*Aside from things popping out, followed by shrieks.

[finestre]

I am not scared of clowns. Which sounds defensive. I don’t especially like them and I certainly wouldn’t want to be trapped in a lift filled with them and I mostly avoid the places where they lurk which are predominately circuses. Or parliament, I suppose. I don’t recall ever going to a circus though. My childhood was misspent on fairgrounds and carnivals where tattooed men would compete to make you sick by giving every dervishing machine an additional shove in the hope that a further provocation of angular momentum would prove purgative. Most of the rides were potentially homicidal, held together with grease and good luck. I have carny heritage though which is why I’d never ride a bike I’d fixed. Not unless you like clown-car disassembly. I do have a toolbox from Ikea that is secured on the top shelf by my wife, in the way that sensible Americans keep their guns (“hold on, home invader, I just need to – erm – get something from the wardrobe, I’ll just need that stool from over there…”) lest I reach for the hammer and lay a welcome to expensive repair mayhem.


Phobias, almost none in the real sense. I don’t like deep murky water where I can’t see my feet or other lower extremity. Things might be down in the depths. I blame my mother for this entirely reasonable fear as she – in an effort to discourage childhood excursions to the local canal – told us there were sharks. This isn’t as mad as it seemed, because it was peak Jaws fever. Alas, as is the nature of young boys, the threat of the shark was more of a promise. What if? Let’s find it!


Pretty much the only benthic perils in that canal were skeletal shopping trollies and the rusted remnants of bicycles. I made money as a teenage supermarket operative recovering shopping trolleys from all manner of miscreant-enabled predicaments, quite often in that canal. Trolley recovery operations were a good way to get paid for summer Friday evenings that would have been spent Sisyphus-like stacking shelves for the Saturday shoppers.


And finally, and I won’t penalise you for a second question because at this point I’ve never been keeping count, the best thing about being a man? I don’t suppose I have a benchmark of being anything else (a seemingly rarer circumstance these days). I don’t really have to spend a lot of time contemplating what being a man is which I suppose might be that best thing. I could be doing it wrong though as I don’t own a pick-up trick and I do take a fundamentalist attitude to errant hair (in fact my dedication to Tidy Hairedness does necessitate a weekly hair roundup).

[sam]

I won’t penalise you for a second question because at this point I’ve never been keeping count

That's good to hear, as [checks clipboard] we'll be running over. I wasn't going to confess the title was bait-and-switch till later. My choice now is to either give the thread a new title ("Interview with the Vampire" would've been nice had you gone that direction – so close), or keep the original in place and hope nobody notices.

Thanks, but I'm just here for the title

I’d never ride a bike I’d fixed.

Pretty much the only benthic perils in that canal were skeletal shopping trollies and the rusted remnants of bicycles.

Time to get a few cycling questions in. What brought you to such forums in the first place? Were you in need of assistance, or simply attracted to arguments about helmets? And as long as we're not counting, what bike(s) do you ride,* and

I have a carny heritage

would you rather own and operate an elephant instead? It might be cheaper.



*Perhaps controversially, "none" is an acceptable answer.

[finestre]

I’m sure no one will notice. I didn’t.


In my lore, Finestre is CEO of Hell, executive level demon of such things, resident of Dress Down Friday, Hell’s most prestigious neighbourhood. Jess is an undead ex-librarian with a taste for blood and a fraught homicidal relationship with archangels. She lives in Elephant and Castle and hangs out with three morally expeditious exiled angelic assassins and a ghost named Julie. It’s complicated.


Cycling. My wife makes me wear a helmet, though I confess if she’s not watching, I’ll abandon it to the garage. Though I can’t say I actually have an opinion on the matter, not one worth arguing over.


I grew up with a bike, one of the cohort of BMXers who spent every spare hour bashing his Mongoose (pads removed, of course, though I don't suppose it sounds any better) around tracks until one day it broke in half (a casualty of the summer we spent building bigger and bigger ramp to jump into a disused boating lake, I think by the end of that six weeks we were close to attaining orbit – or the nearest A&E. Got a Super Burner to replace it, though by that point I was slipping into cider and sideways looks at uninteresting girls, such is the wend of male adolescence. Girls were (and probably aren’t) – for reasons – not swept off their feet by rad bike skills. Leastways if they were swept off their feet, it was likely in an inadvertent rencounter of metal and limbs. Or possibly too much Woodpecker.


After that, I was a practical cyclist, I bumped back and forth between flat and university campus on a salvaged Raleigh Arena, suicide brakes and fossilised gearing. It was a pleasant way to get around. Then, one fine day, I was dead for a brief while and came back with a more attuned sense of mortality and a strong disincentive to get on a bike. About twenty years back, I thought I’d give it a go again, I was walking daily from home to what was then the Ladywell Pool and now is identikit flats (33 metres and a Turkish bath, alas there’s inefficiencies to rooted out of every splendour) and it occurred to me that I could condense that 40 minutes of bipedalism into 10 minutes of pedalling. So, one Saracen Rufftrax later, that’s one I did. One Sunday afternoon, I had a meeting at the Royal College of GPs by Regents Park and what the hell, I cycled there, and then became a regular commuter from the steppes below Crystal Palace to the glinting glamour of Hatton Garden. Around that time, it became necessary to replace a pedal on Mr Rufftrax. I tried. My wife tried. The big Nigerian from across the road tried. Him and his friend tried. The entire street tried. That pedal was in it for eternity. For every problem, there’s a solution, and sometimes that is to be found on the internet. Ah ha, look cycling people! In their natural online environment. Who better to ask?


So anyway, I was nudged toward a bike shop in Honor Oak, where a nice gent with the aid of a large vice and the leverage of the entire bike managed to loosen it. Admittedly it was touch and go whether I’d be adding another snapped bike to my collection.


After that bit of advice, I think I stuck around for no good reason other than it was a random group of people who, were it not for the internet, I wouldn’t have met otherwise.


I cycle rarely these days, maybe the more pungent whiff of mortality in my nostrils, but the days of gladiatorially circling (the now tamed!) Elephant & Castle roundabout are behind me. I have a few bikes in the garage, but I mostly only use the Brompton these days as I can escape the tyranny of local roads via the train.