Every cause throws up it’s kitsch. The most apparently benevolent, but benignly evil ideologies excel at it. Consider Stalin’s many images of happy workers swinging their scythes, singing to the sky.

            Those of you who think kitsch is no more than Burns night and shortbread tins have yet to learn the totalitarian impulse behind such images. Kitsch, as once exiled Czech author Milan Kundera proclaimed, crosses many ideologies but always has the same image – that of children smiling in the sunshine, singing of some prefect future. Kitsch moves some universal, sentimental need in us and that is why it is so dangerous.  Those smiling kids in their cornfield have propped up ideologies as diverse as Communism, Fascism, Christian Science and the Moonies. I recall, with horror, one of my attempts to escape from the modern world, at the New Age community in Findhorn, looking up from our group-sharing-workshop to see the image on the wall of children of many races smiling in that same damned sunlit cornfield.

            Maybe the reason I hate kitsch so much is that my childhood was full of it. Endless photographs of me, aged four, running wild through fields while Joni Mitchell sang ‘We are stardust, we are golden, and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.’ The hippie dream was a lie and years later I learned that similair projected utopias led to the gulag and Auschwitz. Behind the image of the smiling child was a desire to overthrow the known world and start again. Pol Pot and the hippies had much in common.  I came to fear the singing children.

            Imagine my horror then on hearing my children sing to me a song they had been taught at school.

            ‘You and me, we can save the world.’

            It was an eco- song, to be sung at assembly, all three hundred of the little innocents chanting along.

            ‘Lets recycle our bags and tins and clothes and things and you and me, we can save the world.’

            ‘That’s very nice,’ I said to my kids who wanted some appreciation, for at least their singing capabilities, if not their grasp of ideology. ‘So really, who made you sing this?’

            The lecture on the evils of kitsch and the YouTube images of diggers shovelling corpses I thought could wait another five years or so. But as I packed the kids back off to their mother’s I was haunted.

            As Kundera said in The Book Of Laughter and Forgetting, it was children under the regimes of Stalin and Pol Pot who were taught to spy on their parents and report them to the authorities for breaches of correct behaviour. These children who were then orphaned for the information they gave.

            From now on would my kids be taking note of whether I put the used tuna tin in the metals recycling bin? Would they think me evil and hell bent on the destruction of the planet if I put the weekend colour supplement in the trash? Would there be some study at school in which my kids would tick boxes on my recycling habits?

            My children are not mature enough to understand my doubts about the whole eco-politics project, which I am coming to see as yet another apocalyptic inverted utopianism; of how there is no real crisis, only the ongoing march of our mass desire to reduce politics to something so plainly good and evil that a seven year old could grasp it and enforce that childish ideal on adults.

            I am now in fear of my eco-children.

It’s a hard, undeniable fact of life, and one that is crucial to accept in reaching a mature understanding of oneself: Most of us are not going to make it as film stars.  For that matter, the majority of us will be lucky to get a walk-on part in a low-budget straight-to-video remake of a story about someone else’s run-of-the-mill existence. It is wise to accept such things.

So, a few months ago, I decided to finally discard all vain ambitions and become an ‘extra.’ I signed up with an agency and hoped to get paid £50 a day for being one of a hundred standing around in period costume in the rain while eight hundred yards away the lead actors kissed in close-up before the camera. The polite term for extras these days is ‘background artist.’

Signing up with an agency is easy but surreal. The most important thing is your photo, as a casting directors pick you, not on your knowledge of Ingmar Bergman - but on the shape of your nose. But then there’s awkward questions like : Hair style? And - Body type?  ‘Bohemian’ and ‘scrawny’ were not among my available tick boxes. Then the whole CV thing had me flumuxed. The truth was I was hiding the fact that I had rather a lot of experience working in TV, but on the wrong side of the camera – as a director. Why would a control-freak Hitchcock-type want to be an extra? Had my life hit rock bottom? A mid-life crisis? Truth was, yes, my career as a director did bomb about five years before and I was nostalgic for being on-set. In the box under the question of TV experience I ticked ‘Some.’

A few weeks later, I was thrilled get my first job offer - A 19^th century period drama. I was given a time and address for a costume fitting. I located and entered a vast warehouse and said my hellos to the dozen or so other waiting extras; mostly men in their late forties. One stank of cigarettes, another was an incurable chatterbox. There was a twenty-something girl there reading a magazine and all the men, excluding my good self, kept ogling her.

Chatterbox was trying to impress the girl with his extensive walk-on experience, listing his many TV appearances – River city, Taggart, an advert for the Rubik’s cube. I couldn’t help but meditate, during the long wait, that this was the tragedy of extras – Pushing fifty they’re still waiting to be spotted and hit the big-time. When I heard chatterbox recount the last of his CV, I froze.

‘A staff training video on the evacuation procedures at Glasgow Airport.’

Unfortunately, at a particular low-point in my career, I had directed the unfortunately titled, ‘Evacuate.’ I recalled that I had been under extreme pressure at the time and had been spectacularly rude to as many as a hundred extras, shouting at them with a loud hailer.

‘You, the fat on -You’re running the wrong way!’ ‘Hey baldy-guy, try to act natural!’

I feared that chatterbox would recognise me and that the truth would be … evacuated.

So that was what I did - I turned and walked swiftly to the nearest exit, and walked swiftly away from the building to safety. The agency never called me back.

To fail at being a film star is understandable. But to fail at being an extra! Such is my fate.

My father hates fathers day – “Another bloody American invention to make us waste more money”, he once declared. David Morrison, 68, of Wick, Caithness – poet, librarian, nationalist, romantic, drinker, friend of tinkers, drunks and passing strangers, painter of abstract landscapes, survivor of a dead rebellion.

            Growing up with a hippy idealist as a father posed strange problems for me in childhood. Most kids get to rebel against their boring, reactionary fathers, but how can you rebel against a rebel?            

            In the 1970’s it was not an uncommon to see ‘big Dave’ marching round the quiet insular town of Wick, with long hair and beard, in sandals, handing out flyers for his home-grown festival of Poetry Folk and Jazz. He once got into trouble with the kirk for going round with a megaphone on the sabbath, shouting: ‘come and meet the poets in the pub!’ Our home was a haven for escapees; for women who looked like Joan Baez and men who ranted like Ginsberg. There were banjos and squeezeboxes, whiskeys and weeds, and strange mornings when I would wake to find the living room floor covered in sleeping bodies. In this, my father hey-day, people exhausted themselves in celebrating their own idealistic hand-made culture. My father believed in something which thirty years later seems almost impossible to grasp - that Scotland could, through faith in it’s own culture, gain pride enough to grow and become independent. He believed this could be achieved in a battle against the homogenising forces of the British Empire and American Capitalism. He believed that Scottish poetry could overthrow Elvis Presley.

            I say ‘believed’, because the story of my father’s life after the seventies is one of a heroic but failing struggle to keep alive an ideal, that in hindsight was doomed.

            My father failed at this life-project but succeeded in small ways. His energy has had a lasting effect on all he met, even, his sceptical son.

            One of the things that disturbs me about the world now is how banal it has become in its victory over rebels like my dad, and how very few people of conviction we come across these days. And I have learned something from the old hippy - its better to believe in the struggle, even if it seems hopeless, than it is to sit back and passively accept this mass-produced monotonous culture that stretches round the globe. Scottish poetry is actually better than Elvis. So will I be purchasing a fathers day card this year? Will I hell. Here’s to you big Dave.

            The iPhone 4 is going to change the world, again, apparently. The advertising slogan - 'This changes everything. Again' is not simply Apple boasting about their inventiveness, as in 'hey, look we did it, again'. It is in quite blatant non-ironic language, a statement of an acceptance of planned obsolescence, it is actually selling us the concept of planned obsolescence as a trendy status signifier. It says: 'we know that you know, that secretly you love buying the same things over and over again - it makes you feel hip, ironic, sophisticated and up to date.' The ad says 'we know you are going to enjoy parading your new phone in the full knowledge that we have just made your last iPhone obsolete, because it has also made everyone else's obsolete. Only, you are one ahead of the pack - Again '. Why, you may ask, are apple buyers not insulted by the picture of them that is being painted here?

The reasons this advertising works for the generation it is aimed at is that they have a unique relationship to the concepts of mass produced waste and recycling. They seem to believe that innovation for it's own sake, is ethically justified and politically beneficial, as long as you recycle the things that you have just thrown away. On a subconscious level, they seem to understand, something only futurologists are talking about -  that recycling is good for the economy. That in fact, recycling is going to save Capitalism.

This may seem pardoxical, as it is now beyond question that Capitalism profits from it’s deliberate production of waste. For this paradoxical statement to work as a proposition a third element must be entered - Generation Y. Perhaps the original line should then read ‘The recyling behaviour of Generation Y is going to contribute to a massive leap forward in the profit margins of Capitalism through rejuvenating it to beyond the point of it's inherent systemic entropy.’ Let me explain.

            Generation Y are twice the size of their predecessors GenX and have almost three times the spending power (US population stats - Gen X 43 Million, GenY 82 million). Gen Y have just very recently arrived on the scene as CEOs, homebuyers, investors and spenders. Their arrival spells, for many analysts, a new boom time which will last well into the 2030s. GenY are ‘into’ recycling and shopping and they do not see the two things as opposed or paradoxical. For them eco is part of the word economic. One need only look at their iconography: the recycling symbol is perhaps the paradigmatic emblem of Generation Y. Talking to GenY-ers, who very often cite New Age beliefs and imagery, the very idea of recycling may (for them) have some relationship to the emblem of the serpent eating it’s tail in ancient Celtic mythology, or of the infinite circle in Buddhism. Over and above this eclectic mysticism GenY see themselves as recyclers on a foundational level: their recycling habits are in many ways the ‘jiminy cricket’ good conscience of their consumption-selves. Recycling enables them to feel politically active while doing nothing more than shopping then taking half an hour a week to sort out their garbage.

Gen Y 'believe' in Recycling. Consider the following from popular GenY magazine REALL. ‘If it's true that we are all from the center of a star, every atom in each of us from the center of a star, then we're all the same thing. Even a coke machine or a cigarette butt in the street in Brixton, is made out of atoms that came from a star… they have all recycled thousands of times, as have you and I. We are the things we consume.’

            Taking this credo to it's conclusion - Imagine if you will a utopian recycling city. The people who work in the malls - shop in the malls, and the waste they produce is recycled to make the products that are sold in the malls - and entirely self-enclosed world in which even waste is turned into worth.

            What is the problem with this picture?  Stasis. If an economy doesn’t grow, it dies. How does it grow? It has to have higher demand for commodities, hence more commodities, hence greater waste.  This creates a problem which posits ecology and consumerism as irreconcilable. Put quite simply – Growth is caused by waste and debt, it is people spending more money than they have and using more resources than they have before. (To boost consumption, and ideal hypothetical culture would take all of it’s possessions at cyclic periods, and throw them into a pit and burn them. The best way to achieve this, as Orwell and Benjamin both stated, would be to live under a state of war, but of course, as close as we are to this, this would be unacceptable to today’s consumer). So we inhabit the contradiction - The ecologists want us to consume less, and the retailers want us to consume more at the expense of ecology. Gen Y recycling is the third way.

            Paradoxical as it may seem recycling has proven a boon to consumption in existent retail outlets. Two malls in Holland, with extensive recycling facilities (including electronics bins, furniture drop-off zones etc) have demonstrated increased consumption as a result of their green policy. Furthermore psychographic studies on a sample group of C12 consumers (Mackenzie 2009), has shown that increased recycling leads to heightened consumption. The reason?

            Rather than fixing or making do – recycling is an active destruction of commodities, which nonetheless has a positive ethic attached to it – the consumer can feel they are ‘doing good for the world’ by disposing of out of date equipment, fashions etc ‘so that other people less fortunate can use them’ or ‘so that the materials can be broken down and re-used’.  The ‘do-good’  factor allows the consumer to ‘feel-good’ about themselves which then allows them to ‘treat-themselves’ to further new commodities.  Furthermore the idea that new products are ‘more energy efficient’ or ‘made from recycled materials’ makes the purchase of new commodities even more attractive, makes consumption in fact an ethical positive. (Irrespective of what the real eco-implications of recycling on such a vast scale are – these facts being hard to access and also of little interest to consumers). To paraphrase Brave New World -

            ‘Consume today – use it up and throw it away.’ Again.

This is not fiction however, the merging of planned obsolescence and recycling is already well underway. Retailers in Germany are now taking note of these stats and developing comfortable drive in recycling zones as a major part of their restructured shopping centres, not as an afterthought stuck on the edge of the car park ( a phenomenon which still blights so many British malls). In Stuttgart, an innovative arrangement has seen the privatised formerly local council waste facilities relocating and working in tandem with a regional mall – the result was an almost total recycling of waste - including food for composting, recycling of paper, bottles, cans, plastic packaging, electronics, mobile phones, laptops etc – and all of this at a drive-in point at the end the Mall. The ‘re-life-zone’ is ultra modern, hi-tech (and apparently odour free) and has turned recycling into a sociable, fun, activity as opposed to a burdensome obligation, or an activity for penitents – as it is often seen in the UK.

            Since the instigation of the mobile-phone-bin, sales from the adjoining mobile phone retailer showed an 18% increase. An innovative venture with a certain multi-national clothing manufacturer ( who we shall call 'G')  has also shown how profits can be increased through recycling. In 2009, G initiated it’s ‘colour bins’, whereby consumers could gain loyalty card points by recycling specific coloured clothing. Four points for yellow, three for orange etc. By cleverly setting the colour point scale G increased the discarding and recycling of the preceding seasons colours, encouraging and rewarding consumers for disposing of their wardrobe quarterly. Thus if last seasons colour was Cerise, then maximum points were awarded for the cerise bins. This has proved so successful that plans are afoot to awarding even higher points for the discarding of ‘this seasons’ colours.

As for Apple, there is now iPhone exchange, which turns the trading in of certain materials, deemed by Californian law to be toxic waste, into an active and positive eco-experience. (Even the advertising round the iPhone 4 seems to have been recycled from past ads - a revolution in communication. Again.)

Between mall recycling and recyclable phones such 'innovations' have provided solutions to the old the conflict between retailers and ecologists - A way past the old ethos of ‘waste not, want not’ towards ‘waste and want’. Now consumers can have their cake and eat it too, then recycle it and eat it all over. Again.

Wait, doesn't that sound like something thats not actually cake?

EWAN MORRISON 2010

No matter how many times I’ve ranted against the damaging influence of lowest common denominator entertainment media and the spiralling of the world into wilful amnesiac ignorance, I finally have to admit, it’s not Jordan, Jade or Russell Brand who are the symbols and symptoms of stupidity - it’s not the outside world that’s getting dumber, but me. I have somehow, in the last year, become progressively, spectacularly brainless.

            This has become apparent in a wide range of social contexts: a dinner party, a pub, a meeting with an old friend, an interview. In the arena of polite, enlightened, middle-class chatter about the usual range of subjects on which we are expected to hold an opinion I have consistently drawn blanks. I have become the one person grinning inanely at the back of the room like some Alzheimer’s-ridden grandfather who’s been accidentally invited to a conference on the science of memory. Perhaps I am prematurely developing senile dementia. Is this possible when I haven’t yet started balding? Did I accidentally give myself frontal-lobe damage last month when I showed my son how I used to head bang to AC/DC in 1982?

            In an attempt to save myself from the onward plummet into lobotomy-like vegetation I have started to draw up lists of things I know nothing or embarrassingly little about.

            These include: The Roman Empire, the First World War, photosynthesis, how a mobile phone works, the correct use of semi-colons and where, roughly, one can expect to find Malta on a map.

            I have to do this so that I can avoid talking on topics that will publicly expose me as a fraud and ignoramus. In conversation last week, fearful that I had nothing to say on the given subject of Polish food, I found myself rabbiting on about how Poland has very few fish dishes because it’s a landlocked country - thus somehow overlooking the existence of the Baltic Sea. There was an awkward silence and some pained facial expressions, then the subject shifted to something else I knew nothing about and so I started grinning and nodding my head, like one of those toy dogs in the back of a car.

            Days later during an attempt to prove myself a scholar of Post-Marxism, I found myself using the word ‘thingymybob-whatsisname-withthebighair’ in place of the name ‘Trotsky’.

             Have I spent too many years absorbing tiny fragments of media info only for the connecting fabric between those bits to decay, leaving each stranded alone to die? Is it because there’s no financial value in having knowledge on anything beyond my immediate career and I tend to leave everything else up to specialists? Or is it that my generation knows more about Homer Simpson than Homer’s Odyssey? Doh! The prospect of spending the next few decades in stupefied silence is terrifying.

            But then it struck me – perhaps I am not alone in my ignorance. Maybe it’s actually a widespread phenomenon and a closely kept secret. Perhaps middle-class conversation is nothing more than the art of hazarding ‘educated guesses’ over vast chasms of ignorance.

            This makes me feel much better because now I look like I’ve got something to say on the subject of ignorance. I could be come an ignorance specialist and wax lyrical about how stupid we all are. I could even quote that guy in the toga that said something like ‘the most intelligent thing to admit is that we know nothing.’ You know, whatsisname with the white beard and sandals who took the poison and was in the Bill and Ted movie. Doh!

Email is dying. Well, at least mine seems to be. In the last month I’ve noted a steady decline in the number, length and quality of communications in my mailbox.

            Maybe no-body likes me anymore (which is credible). Or maybe it’s a product of the last recession and the fear people now have of losing their jobs. Folk who used to send me big chatty emails about what they were eating and listening to on their i-pods while they probably should have been just answering work queries are now sending me things like.

            Sorry, no time, will get back to you before end of week.

            Maybe it’s to do with layoffs, down-sizing and multi-tasking, or it’s part of some surveillance-of-the-workforce clampdown by IT departments, but four out of the ten emails I got last week were variations on the same rather surprising message:

            Let’s arrange a time to talk.

            Are we seriously returning to a time when we prefer to use the phone? Or one when we have to talk behind our employers backs?  Or have we reached information meltdown and just decided to turn the clock back? Studies show that under 21s consider email of use only when talking to ‘Old people’ (which must mean me). Of course they are tweeting and poking and sending each other virtual flowers and virtual beer bottles and not really communicating at all, but studies are showing that, perhaps due to almost unlimited call times on new phone deals, even the tweetiest teen is actually starting to 'talk'.

            There may be some good reasons for ‘the return to talking’. First of all is the protracted email misunderstanding (PEM). I don’t know how many times I’ve sent someone something then had to endure days of silent waiting only to receive a reply like:

            What did you mean by ‘my big fat American butt’ ?

            Twenty five email apologies are then sent in which I have to make it clear that, yes, this was a joke, that it was based on a popular expression and perhaps should have been placed in quotation marks so as to make the ironic intention clear; that the person in question actually has a very lovely butt and so on and so on. The whole problem could have been avoided in the first place by just picking up the goddamn phone.

            Worst of all is the king of all email faux pas. A thing I call the CC-F-up (not to be confused with the F-Cup, which is a bra size). How to do it, and get caught by IT and then into serious, legal trouble is as follows: First you do some chatty email banter with your e-buddy, some of which expresses your personal opinions and maybe a bit of flirty bitching about some fellow colleague by the name of Ted (let's call him that). You and e-buddy exchange many emails and to save time you hit REPLY each time you do it rather than COMPOSE. So you are both replying to each others replies or ‘ping-ponging’ and so the email gets bigger and bigger. And Ted becomes this running joke between you both.

            Then one fated day you are pressed for time and you get a message from e-buddy which is serious and work-related, but nonetheless has all of your twenty witty exchanges at the bottom of it. You don’t notice this and so in replying to her serious question and having to CC it to heads of department, one of whom is Ted, 25 people get an email that half way down it’s 40 pages contains the line.

            Yup, I swear Ted jerks off in the office toilets.

            Let’s just say that something very like this once happened to me, and livelihoods, including my own were placed at risk, and I do have a tendency to encourage this kind of exchange in others. Maybe this is why no-one emails me anymore.

Or perhaps the email has returned to it's original usage as a kind of dull inter office memo and real life happens elsewhere. Email was a bastard hybrid anyway, somewhere between a letter and a short-hand text message. It shall, no doubt, end up in the bin of history along with other half-way inventions such as carbon paper and microfiche.

I shall miss it.

Please CC this to all heads of staff.

P.S I will miss you

 An advert on a Glasgow bus shelter stopped me in my tracks. It had a picture of spaghetti with Bolognese sauce in the shape of a heart. Until I read the slogan, I thought, delicious, great idea, why not turn the mince I’d just bought into Bolognese. My mince was standard Scottish stuff and had cost me 1.99.  The lean meat option had been a pound more and that was why I hadn’t gone for it. The slogan said: ‘Simply using leaner mince can help reduce saturated fat intake.’

            ‘Damn you,’ I thought. Do I look stupid? Everyone since Jack Spratt knows lean means the opposite of fat!

            I got even madder as I realised the advert was by Healthier Scotland and the Food Standards Agency. It was all about heart disease. My taxes had paid for an advert that was telling me how to eat and accusing me of stupidity while at the same time trying to save my life which it had diagnosed as threatened by my own ill-informed shopping choices.

            The Bolognese on the bus shelter mocked me and I got to wondering if these adverts were up in the housing schemes and how they must really be pissing people off if they were.

            About five years ago I made a video for NHS Scotland. In Springburn I found there was a weekly supply of fresh fruit which mothers and kids could buy at reduced prices at the local health centre and kid’s nursery – The reason was there was very little access to fresh fruit in the area. It was the same in Possil, due to disastrous town planning in the 60’s and 70’s and the closing down of local grocers; it was extremely difficult to buy affordable quality fruit and veg. The problem was literally in concrete. In Springburn, a walk to Sainsbury’s involved negotiating an industrial estate and motorway to get to the nearest banana. With the fruit project, local people, with help from the local council and NHS were bringing fruit in as if it were rations to a war zone. As one of the women who ran it said ‘You should have seen the kids faces when they saw their first pomegranate.’

            Imagine how insulting it would be to be living in a fruit deprived area and to witness a government poster telling you to eat more fruit, given that they invented the stinking scheme they stuck you in on the edge of fruit oblivion in the first place. I recently discovered that the fresh fruit market in Possilpark had been reduced from a weekly market to once a week. This is Govt  Health planning.           

            These  heart-shaped ‘consciousness raising adverts are deeply insulting to the populace. They give the illusion that the govt is doing something, and that it’s really the populace’s ‘choice’  to change their ways, but all that’s really happening is that govt agencies are getting fat on telling us to get slim. Not everyone in the country can even afford to take the advise of the Health elite. Goddamn it, I am not poor but I can’t afford ‘lean mince.’

            On the bush shelter to the rear of the Healthier Scotland advert was an advert for MacDonald’s: 1.29 for a double cheeseburger. I hate MacDonald’s but at least it wasn’t patronising.

            If the government wants me to eat lean mince, then let it give me a quid to buy some. Failing that perhaps it could mail it to me directly. I’m sure the cost of express-posting mince to everyone in the nation would work out cheaper than the cost of the Healthier Scotland project. Their adverts are mince anyway.

I have found a solution to the problem of Internet addiction. What problem? You might ask - The internet is a liberating force; Global information exchange is multiplying at an exponential rate; billions of bites are moving round the globe, connecting the previously unconnected, bringing about a golden age of information, knowledge and freedom. To which I reply – shut your moronic mouth you twittering twit. Forty five million daily Twitter messages all saying - ‘Hey everybody, look at me, message me back to let me know I exist’  - are not liberating anyone. Far from it, such things are ushering in an era of consensual conformism and technology dependence; engendering new insecurities and paranoias..

            Over the last month my addiction to email and twitter was making me ill. I was checking every ten minutes to see if anyone had sent me a poke or a kiss or a word or even just a letter or exclamation mark. On a day in which no-one contacted me at all, after having checked perhaps fifty times, I was close to tears with rage and self pity. ‘My God, I may as well be dead, I am no-body in cyber-space!’

            As I say, I’ve found a cure to the problem of Internet surfing addiction – and it is beach combing.

            I’m currently living by the banks of a remote Scottish Sea Loch on a writer’s residency and it takes an uphill hike to a distant building to get connected to the net. This was hard to accept at first, and I went through Internet withdrawal symptoms (pacing, nail biting, swearing at walls etc) but after a week of running up and down a sheep-covered hill every fifteen minutes, I realised that, in the name of sanity, I had to have a routine, a ration. I now log-on twice a day for thirty minutes. Nine a.m and six p.m. I still get the same number of messages but I have eight hours less stress. I’ve even come to dread the time when I have to log-on.

            What has helped me go cold turkey is a total change in routine. I start the day now, not running to my laptop, but strolling down the to the beach. Rather than trawling through emails and sending fifty in the hope of getting one in return, I breathe in cold clean air, look out at the mountains and gaze among the rocks and shells to see what accidental objects the waves have brought me.

            Several hundred pieces of coloured glass, half as many of blue-glazed ceramics, the gears of a rusty bike, sun-bleached silver birch sticks, razor shells, a single Adidas trainer, a marker pen (that still works) - I may just be picking up crap that previous generations dropped or threw out (I harbour no illusions that I’m finding jewels from sunken galleons), nonetheless the daily process of sifting is profoundly calming and helps me focus on the days work ahead. What will I do with all these objects? Who knows? Girlfriend is making object d’art and jewellery out of them. As for me the process of collecting is enough in itself; even if I was to throw all my stones, glass and ceramic bits back into the estuary, I will have achieved a meaningful goal - To stay away from the internet as long as possible, to try to be calm and to remind myself that different things and ways of life were here long before the internet - that I exist even if no-one has sent me a message.

I have become a flat-sitter. By this I do not mean someone with a square bum. No, I am taking care of someone else’s home in their absence. This is not any ordinary flat, but that of a man who is infinitely better-off than myself. It is practically a palace, what with it’s Victorian ceiling paintings, parquet flooring, grand piano and parades of priceless antiques.

            That I landed this responsibility, is rather surprising, as anyone who knows me will attest, I am not known for my cleanliness and things of value of tend to fall apart when I touch them. Nonetheless, for a month I have been solely responsible for the upkeep of this mansion and have taken well to the job of janitor.

            Over and above the list of things to do (water plants, set burglar alarm, set heating to level three etc) I have learned,  however, that there are many unwritten rules to flat-sitting. For example, since part of the plan is to make the place look occupied, by having lights on, the TV on, etc (to keep burglars away) it is important to spend some time in the flat doing these things. Herein lies the first unwritten rule: Don’t get too relaxed – you do not actually live there.

            This I have found very unsettling, as just after having watched a movie and staggering towards bed I realise that I am not in fact in my own home, and so have to face a two mile drive back to my own bed, through the cold dark night.

            The second unwritten rule involves bathing. My own flat is infamous for it’s lack of space. People get shown round, then stop in there tracks after I’ve shown them the living room/ kitchen/bedroom (which are actually one room). ‘Oh, is that it?’ They ask ‘but where’s your bathroom?’ I have a toilet pan but no bath, until someone invents a bath that can be taken vertically I shall have to do without. Imagine then the temptations I have had to face in the palace with it’s extra-wide, Jacuzzi style, gold tapped all- singing-all-dancing constant-hot-water antique porcelain bathtub.

            Suffice to say I have got into the rather odd habit of travelling miles to bathe and have spent entire days luxuriating in steaming ecstasy. But herein lies the most important lesson.

            When flat-sitting do not use up all of the owners bath products.

            At first it was the fruits-of-the-forest scented bath bombs, then the champagne shampoo. Various lotions and potions then followed as I lay back in the suds reading from the aphorisms of Oscar Wilde.

            It was only when I realised that the true property owner was due to return within a week that I discovered the full extent of my trespass. There was no way I could hide the fact that I’d used up every last drop of bubble bath and ea de toilette. I made an inventory of what had to be replaced, taking careful note of the labels and brands. Of course this being the home of a rich man with considerable style, he had not been one to skimp on bathing materials. So it has been that in replacing all that I had used, I am out of pocket to the tune of one hundred and fourteen pounds.

            Such is the price of decadence.

            I’m just hoping that the owner will not notice the slight discrepancy between the brands of champagne scented bath bombs. For the life of me I was damned if I was going to fork out another fifty quid on the Vintage Bollinger version.