Andrew Reid: Curb Your Enthusiasm

For the last 6 months a man called Dave has been trying to organise a communal party in my flat.

On his Facebook group and A4 poster ads stuck around the lift entrance, he calls for the community to come together like they did when our grandparents were young.

Spare a thought for those people now they’re in their 80’s. Most of them now live alone and are largely ignored.

Anyway, Dave got his way at Halloween, with 4 friends and his wife turning up in the court yard. To give him credit, he did a good job with the lights and costumes. I am sure poor Dave was not oblivious to a hundred warmly lit faces peering out toward his socially embarrassing fail of a party, but the fact that 50% of the residents chose to stay in the warmth of their own living rooms rather than socialise in the cold of the court yard cannot be understated. The other 50% visited the dark piss swept landscape of Manchester for a knees up, where danger lurks on every corner, where there are shadowy Albanians selling fluffy bunny ears and there are roving knife equipped teenagers stabbing you for no reason at all.

So clearly comfort was not an issue. But why wasn’t the allure of building bridges with a set of complete strangers at Halloween whilst dressed as a witch not so appealing to 100% of the residents in The Linx?

Well, in the olden days of our grandmothers, they lived on terraced streets.

Now we live inside contemporary art installations or battery cells which power local government offices like a hamster wheel.

Purely by design, there is no chance community spirit is coming to The Linx. I once walked up 4 flights of stairs to avoid someone in a lift.

Stepping into the silver metal box must have seemed like being in a David Bowie space rocket inspired music video for our grandparents. For us, it is a 5 second conversation initiation machine. Our grandparents, when not cheering on spitfires, did not have to shout ‘hey up’ at their neighbour only for two giant steel doors to separate them moments later. So now I have taken to bring completely silent in the lift. It is a far cry from when I visited my friend at the top of a tower block in Crewe populated almost entirely by people over 90.

He did, I admit, live on the 10th floor, which gave us more time to talk, but there was a genuine warmth of conversation and a genuine pleasure in interacting with an old person who smelt of piss. There wasn’t the same self conscious ’shall i say anything…nah’ feeling you get in a modern apartment lift. You’d simply mention the weather and feel happy. But now most people in The Linx lift of doom are pretty morose anyway, like they’ve just come home from work. If I rode the lift up and down 7 times completely naked I doubt it would elicit much of a reaction from somebody if they’d just been numbed by slowly reading emails and Facebook for 8 hours solid.

But things are getting a bit dicey in the Western World. The collapsed economy combined with the fact that I keep dropping the hard drive which stores the last 10 years of my life has taken the fun out of everyday life.

We need some way of bringing back some semblance of being human. Because at the moment, I feel like a set of fingers and a big arse with a seat welded to it. Soon I might even feel completely at one with the wheels on my office chair and start taking it for rides down the street, or adopt it like a dog and fling it around on a lead.

Dave has clearly been driven mad as well. He prints his self important Facebook posters with a reference number in red ink at the bottom. Why? So he can track his operation like a communications department would coordinate the election of an US president?

In the olden days we also used to have a relationship with the postman. And I don’t just mean in terms of next door’s MILF sucking his cock. If you had that impression from ‘relationship’ than I’m afraid you’ve been using the internet too much. There is nothing wrong with having a relationship with the postman.

Unfortunately my postman changes so often, the last time I answered the door I shuck my head from side to side and went ‘bububububububa’.

For a few days we also had a postman who looked like Bin Laden delivering small bombs. He scared me so much I once refused to let him in when he appeared on the video intercom like an impromptu News24 statement from Al Qaeda, despite the fact he had the reassuring Royal Mail crown behind him on his van, it looked more like an Afghan flag with crossed swords.  There was something about his demeanour that made it almost certain that he would one day run into an airport terminal on fire.

Our grandparents didn’t have to put up with frightening characters like this, with a whole news story driven backstory attached to their faces like the imaginings of a rambling paranoid schizophrenic xenophobe.

When the milk bottles were delivered by a Pakistani, they didn’t have to worry that he was part of a terrorist cell in East Germany. They said hello and began a conversation about the weather. Then over the next 30 years the Pakistani milkman had a family who were subject to constant racial abuse and the innocence faded from his immigration experience.

And now Muslims are being tarnished with the brush used to paint the backdrop to the Al Qaeda videos.  Ironically, any sense of patriotism to the UK is being tarnished with a brush held by Nick Griffin. When the US were attacked on 9/11 they salvaged the scrap metal from the twin towers and built a warship called USS New York from it. When the UK was attacked with bombs on the London transport network, we shot a Mexican electrician.

None of this makes sense. And with the disintegration of the state comes the breakup of Coronation Street.

Life has become to resemble the buildings built to accommodate it.

We each have our own little box and as long as it’s alright, the box next door could be on fire and we wouldn’t care.

Dave is depicted as a looser when in actual fact he’s fighting like Braveheart for what he believes in.

And you haven’t seen the half of the battle yet. Human-kind isn’t going to drown under a sea of concrete, junk and computer screens without a fight.

Or, for that matter, a quick stop and chat about the weather.