My readers are launched spectacularly; propelled without warning, pinwheeling, temporarily free of the bondage of gravity. They ascend to a vertex, appearing to pause for a fraction of a second. It is long enough for me to recall and appreciate being upsold on ‘safety features’ several times over in Specsavers. Then they tumble out of the air like the antelope’s thigh bone at the end of the opening section of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
In this instance my specs trace a passage through space like a sine wave, their passage through their entire existence is more difficult to describe. I shuffle about, the planet spins and circles, the solar system sweeps about the distant Sagittarius A*, there is a more disturbing level of movement above this. They are a spirographic scratch, a pleasingly migrainous, yet infinitely tiny filigree in space time. Seen up close though, this journey seems chaotic, not a sine wave, not a notional roulette, it’s just white noise, stepped random voltage at best.
It’s finally too much for the bouncer. His teeth unclench: “I fucking warned you. Get out NOW.”
It is six years ago and my friend Lisa has asked me to DJ the afterparty to her amazing festival Supersonic. It’s something of a tradition but the venue is always different. This year it’s in a BrewDog-style bar where all of the staff have straight-off-the-wall-menu tattoos of straight edge razors, lucky eight balls, dice, anchors, hourglasses, topless mermaids. They call me buddy and matey as I start setting up. They seem fairly energised like they were geared up for a different event entirely – one which I have interrupted: “…thing is buddy, it’s a Sunday night, so we’re closing soon. So you can only have 40 minutes matey. Is that OK buddy?” The last clause is definitely a statement edging towards the threat end of the scale.
It’s been a swelteringly hot day and a lot of the men in the bar are still stripped to the waist even though it’s after 11pm. Several of the women in our party joke that they’re going to do the same and suddenly the atmosphere shifts, a security guy propping up the bar starts huffing and puffing: “Well, you’re not gonna do that. If you do, you can all get out.” He has an a la carte tattoo of a topless woman, palms placed languidly behind her head, scratched onto his pulsing neck. “You’ve been warned”, he warns us all through gritted teeth crowned with flared nostrils.
“Fuck this”, I say to my DJ partner in crime Sister Anthea, “Don’t play anything below 140bpm. These guys are just looking for an excuse to kick us out. Let’s get stuck straight in. Immediate dambusters.”
I manage to play about ten tracks in total – definitely Lochi’s ‘London Acid City’, Chrome Hoof’s ‘Tonyte’, Underworld’s ‘Moaner’ and I think ‘One Night In Hackney’ – before a couple of women in our party strip to their waists and start lassoing their tops over their heads. Then everything happens all at once. More women join in. Some bouncers pile over to tell them to get their clothes back on. More people, men and women, start stripping off. Everyone’s leaping up and down. I’m headbanging so frantically my glasses go flying off.
Less than ten minutes later we’re all stood outside of the bar, laughing our heads off, the evening’s over. Short but sweet. We start pouring away from the venue towards various hotels. Supersonic done for another year.
My sense of triumph lasts until I get to my hotel in the Bull Ring at which point I realise I can’t see my phone well enough to read my room number off the screen and there’s no one else to ask. I turn round and walk back to the venue with slightly less bounce in my step. Inside – and I swear this is true – the bar staff are all trying my glasses on and doing some kind of weird comedy walk up and down the floor of the bar. They are screaming laughing. Naked woman neck tattoo guy looks like he’s about to explode, Scanners-style. I bang on the door: “Hi, it’s me, sorry, but can I have my glasses back please. I’m lost without them.”
It’s six years later and I’m in Lanzarote, climbing down a shallow but rocky, aa-strewn lava cliff face, gingerly making my way towards naturally formed volcanic bathing pools. Stern Atlantic waves batter the coast of this Canary isle with such strength that water is forced through tiny sections of lava tunnel and sent jetting into the bright blue air like coastal geysers. I love swimming in natural pools with no one else in sight, as much as I hate bothering to do research into high/low tide and sea conditions. The idea is you find a large natural dip at the foot of a cliff and you can swim around in it as huge waves break against the outer edge, soaking you, introducing you intimately to the awesome power of lunar gravity, but essentially leaving you oceanically unmolested. That is the idea anyway.
I notice that the water in the pool, during the short scramble down the rocks, has turned from pleasingly vibrant and clear teal to opaque and angry creamy grey. The waves crashing over the outer lip of the pool are much bigger than I’d anticipated. “I’ll just get in quickly, then get out again”, I reason. After all, it’s taken me ages to walk here, the sun’s really hot, and I’m a half-wit.
It happens within five seconds of immersing myself in the water. There is enough time to think, “I’ll grab firmly hold of these two juggy bits of rock and I’ll be fine”, before an appalling conservatory-sized slab of water romps over the edge of the pool and over my head. The weight of the wave, which recedes just as quickly as it appeared, is massive, detaching me instantly from the cliff base and rapidly out toward the outer edge. I hit rock and immediately start swimming manically back toward the cliff.
The sound of the wave is incredible. Like the upper storey of a gravel factory giving way and spilling its contents onto the several thousand snare drums stored on the floor below; immediately followed by the fierce slap of water against rock and then the thirsty sucking in of air to fill the vacuum it leaves behind when it rapidly disappears. I get back to the rock and the whole process happens again but this time really heaving me hard into the angular lava surface. “This is it”, I think. “This is how it happens.”
But it is not it and it doesn’t happen, and on the next sweep back in I grab hold of some rocks fairly easily and scramble upwards, wheezing and laughing, until I reach my neat pile of trainers, trousers, shirt, sunscreen and mobile phone. I fish for my glasses out of the pocket of my swimming shorts and pull out one half. The impact has broken them perfectly in two.
I’d always wondered what it would take. I had this pair when I got knocked off my bike by a vehicle speeding the wrong way down a residential street seven years ago. I came round half under the car that hit me, a floor level view of broken glass, but none from my readers. My cycle helmet was shattered, but my glasses were just fine. The recuperation of full cognitive rest, the memory loss, the personality change, depression, chunks of my then healthy writing career just crumbling away in front of me. An initial two weeks became four weeks then became eight weeks: no reading… not books, not comics, not websites, not newspapers. I felt fucked. My glasses? Not a scratch, just slowly accruing dust.
I spend the last 24 hours of my trip to Lanzarote with one of the lenses used as a makeshift monocle clamped in place by a constant Popeye-like facial contortion. I phone the opticians on the way to the airport. I’m not sad to be leaving this time. There’s nothing like a vague intimation of mortal danger on the last day of a holiday to draw a line under it and get you looking forward to getting back to work. “Hello! What’s the soonest you can fit me in for an appointment? It’s my readers! I’m lost without my readers!”
