that looks nice. You’ve chosen that in an attempt to stand out in a good way.’ That’s why, although I was pleased to become fitter from all this walking, and secretly a bit pleased to look it, the down side is feeling self-conscious about how often it’s triggered the question, ‘Have you been dieting?’ All I ever want is for my clothing, weight, haircut and smell to go unremarked on. I don’t think I’m particularly handsome or particularly ugly – if I’m to be deemed acceptable, or even likeable, it won’t be because of my appearance. So my aim is that my appearance should in no way be noteworthy. But then again, not so un-noteworthy as to be in itself noteworthy.
That’s how I ended up with this haircut. I was issued with it as a child. I used to have a standard kid’s ‘bowl cut’ and then, at some point, it was combed into a parting – and I’ve stuck with it. Not because I like it, or hate it, but because to change it at any point would have provoked comment and, even if it was kindly meant, that would have made me cringe.
But now the fact that I’ve never changed it and it looks so old-fashioned (or indeed Hitlerian, as some people say) itself provokes comment. So I’d probably have evaded more total comment in my life if I’d bitten the bullet ten years ago and changed to something less self-consciously unstylish. And all of this means that I’ve spent more time thinking about my hair than I either want to or consider consonant with being a man.
This is no good. I’m going to have to stop again and see who those e-mails are from. I pause in a slightly stressful bustling bit of pavement outside the West 12 shopping centre, which now looks across nervously with its ’80s shabbiness at the gleaming modernity of the new Westfield. Or maybe with pride: perhaps West 12 was the vanguard, and now here comes Westfield, the mother ship.
Hooray! They’re spam! Too much spam can be annoying but a little bit, every so often, can give such a welcome reprieve. You think you’re going to have to reply or in some way leap into action but you can just ignore them – lovely. I mainly get spam from malt whisky websites as a result of my habit of buying my grandfather a bottle every Christmas for most of his nineties. I also get regular correspondence from the Islington Folk Club where I once went to a ‘Ukelele Orchestra of Great Britain’ concert. Yes, I’d got the hang of dating at last. No, Robert Thorogood had organised a trip as research for a screenplay he was writing about a Hawaiian guitarist. (I think this is a guitarist with a ham and pineapple topping.) It was one of those places where, for reasons of their licence, you have nominally to join the club in order to be admitted once. They must have asked for an e-mail address. I hope the updates I’m ignoring aren’t draining their resources too much. I pocket my phone and continue towards Shepherd’s Bush Green.
Magic though the iPhone patently is (albeit a dark magic performed by thousands of exhausted Chinese fingers), Rob and I have reason to resent it. I’m pretty sure it’s what put paid to our Apple advertising contract. We were hired to make the British version of their ‘I’m a Mac, I’m a PC’ online campaign to raise awareness of their computers’ merits. But, when the iPhone came out, all focus swivelled to that. Computers and differentiation from PCs became a sideshow. They didn’t seem to want us to do an ‘I’m an Apple, I’m a Blackberry’ series of ads, which is a shame as the costumes might have been funny.
Rob and I got quite a lot of shit for doing that campaign, which genuinely surprised us. We thought adverts were just something that actors and comedians did to subsidise their income. You shouldn’t advertise something immoral, we thought, but everything else, whether you used the product or not, was fair game. And actually we did use Apple products – we’d both always had Macs, although I was nervous saying that in our defence because I wanted to make clear that I would have equally happily advertised Microsoft; it’s an honest company and I’m an actor for hire.
I was annoyed when people accused us of ‘selling out’ because I felt they were projecting onto us anti-capitalist