Alpha Neighbour Theory

(Archive - Thursday 16^th December 2010)

One of my favourite pieces of post of all time was a card sent to me by a Cowgirl.  The card was pretty funny but the best thing about it was the envelope.  It had been a long time since an envelope had meant so much.

Envelopes used to be meaningful in the first year at boarding school.   They were sent to you by girls (or to girls by you) and often they were the only way of communicating with any degree of comfort.  When you met face to face or talked on the phone, both of you would stammer and say ‘er’ a lot and ask the other several times how they were without ever really listening to the answer.  I can understand why, eventually, we all took to kissing with such enthusiasm as it was by far the best way to fill these oh-so embarrassing gaps.  It was probably a hell of a lot easier if you went to a mixed school.

However for the thirteen year old-single sex schoolboy or girl, the only time you had the confidence to unbend was when one of you was in North Yorkshire and the other in South Berkshire and you were writing a letter.  That was when you really let yourselves go in a torrent of adolescent rhetoric that passed for articulacy.  Why say ‘I love you’ just once to that boy you met at the White Thistle Disco when you can scrawl it repeatedly over the page in a manner reminiscent of Jack Nicholson’s manuscript in the Shining?  Why confine yourself to, ‘you’re really horny’ (which, by the way, meant ‘good looking’ in those days) when you can get ten of your friends to add their comments on the subject in different colours and angles of writing?  Why send a letter when you can send a ‘work of art’?

The way to identify these artworks was their envelopes.  Yes, there would always be the familiar loopy handwriting with the little hearts over the ‘i’s on the front.  But it was the back that was the masterpiece.  Although the letter had been cunningly cobbled together from half a dozen different sized and coloured bits of paper, there was always a final thought to be scribbled in biro on the envelope, just a little something hurried and embarrassing enough to make the postman’s day and make your housemaster pause to read it before handing it to you, grinning, over breakfast.  Above the thought was always a set of letters, an acronym.  ‘SWALK’ meant that the billet doux had been ‘sealed with a loving kiss’.  ‘HOLLAND’ meant that the sender, who would probably take less than half a term to forget your name, was saying ‘Hope our love lasts and never dies’.  I’m too embarrassed to translate ‘ITALY’ and ‘SWAMP’, and ‘POLO’ was strictly for the older kids, especially the drawing that often accompanied it.

I discovered with a shock, when stalking my agent to find out if she’s still alive, that she has among her Facebook friends a girl with whom I used to exchange such letters back in the late ‘80s.  This girl is probably now one of my agent’s successful clients.  She probably writes enormously sober treatises on macro economics that clever people think are brilliant.  If I wait a couple of years she’ll become a junior member of the Treasury and then rise and rise until I can use one of her old letters to blackmail her into abolishing the tax on petrol or something.  If only I still had it.  Mind you, she might still have one of mine and that really doesn’t bear thinking about.

In those days, a letter with writing on the envelope was an exciting event - a red letter day if you like.  It has been many years since I was thirteen and as many since I received a letter with writing on the envelope and felt that excited little leap that you feel when you know that a girl who hardly knows you is going to get a bunch of other girls who have never met you at all and write a load of things that you know they can’t possibly mean but are still rather lovely to hear and frankly the closest thing that you are going to get to a fulfilling romance in your single sex boarding school without being cursed forever to make the sort of comments about your education that some of Richard Curtis’s characters make.  And yes, I do mean that guy who was at school with the bride’s brother Bufty…

It was also the writing on the envelope that made this letter from Cowgirl exciting to me.  You’re probably expecting it to be an invite to a hoedown or a rodeo or to come and help brand cattle and you would be forgiven for assuming this.  It’s what the name Cowgirl seems to suggest. 

However it’s nothing of the sort.  Cowgirl’s real name is Katherine and she’s from Guildford.  She owns infinitely more headscarves and pashminas than she does Stetsons or ponchos.  She is training to be a private client solicitor and is far more likely to say ‘what ho’ than she is to say ‘howdy’, unless she is indulging me, as ‘Cowgirl’ is a nickname I gave her several years ago and one she hasn’t been able to shake since. 

Her husband’s name, to a gratifyingly increasing number of people, is Hank (although it says Martin on his birth certificate) and that’s mainly my fault too.  I’m afraid the two of them are victims of the strange compulsion I have which prevents me from being able to call people whom I like a lot by their proper names.

I can’t help it.  It’s not my fault.  It’s simply that, as someone who over the course of his life been known variously as ‘Nico’, ‘Curly’, ‘Spooky Joe’, ‘the Pook’, ‘Count Nickolai’, ‘The E’, ‘Lensen’, ‘Leonardo’, ‘The Leopard’ (gosh I loved that one), ‘Lenny’, ‘Spliff’ (I had a pale face and used to daydream a lot, okay), ‘George Leonard-Leonard’, ‘Nick-Nocks’, and (to the delight of my flatmate Carl whom my mother mistook for me on the phone that fateful day) ‘Nickerbocker Glory’, I feel I have the right to impose the odd minor variation on people’s names.  No one minds.  Ask any of them.  Ask Cowgirl, Hank, Guido, Ezzums, Ian the Fijian, Fifa-fifa-fifa-fi, The Chomp, Spongecake, El Jeffe, Crimson Jihad, Schloss the Flopps…  Ask Koodle-Doodle-With-Hair-Like-A-Poodle.  They love it really; Cowgirl particularly.

Cowgirl has always been good at indulging me my peculiar ideas, especially when we lived together in Number 29 for two happy years.  She embraced the first phase of Amish-geddon when we eschewed all technology at home and spent a month listening to the radio and Shakespeare talking books over jigsaw puzzles by candlelight while the TV slumbered silently without its fuse which had been sealed in a signed envelope and lodged with my brother over the road.  She indulged my desire to pretend to be Italian while cooking spaghetti and even supplied me with an opera CD to lend verisimilitude.  Most significantly, she instantly grasped the point of Alpha Neighbour Theory and helped me to practise it and to perfect it.  And, four years later, the envelope which puts such a smile on my face shows that she is still practising it.

Alpha Neighbour theory probably started at university.  I had an awkward relationship with the mother of one of my housemates, known to me (and practically no one else) as the Vibester.  I was terrified of her – Ma Vibester, I mean.  I was slightly frightened of her daughter too but that’s a different story.  Ma Vibester had this knack of making me feel like I was the worst kind of slovenly carbuncle on the face of decent society - a wastrel and a scrounger and a layabout.  All this, she could convey with a single raised eyebrow. Not only that but she always managed to catch me at my worst possible moments, like coming out of the shower in my dressing gown at four in the afternoon and would cement my disgrace with a throwaway comment like, ‘Oh, I hope you didn’t get up especially’ before I could explain.  She would walk in when I was standing in the bathroom doorway, threatening to use pages from the phone book in an attempt to persuade someone to go to Safeway’s and buy some loo roll.  She would catch me telling a weak joke, made even weaker when the disconcerting effect of her appearance made me forget the punch line.  Every time I saw her, something conspired to make sure she saw me at my worst.  Of course, it would be easy to say that that was me in those days - that I was always telling awful jokes and getting up mid afternoon and combining the Yellow Pages with our plumbing.  But I’m sure that’s not fair.  She only saw a part of me and, with unbelievable consistency, she always saw the very worst part.  I’d love to go and explain this to her now but I don’t think her restraining order would allow me that close.

Imagine though (and this is what I said to Cowgirl) if someone could only see your best part.  Imagine if, whenever they saw you, you were doing something good, positive, impressive, interesting.  Imagine if you were doing something that showed you to be an alpha human being.  Cowgirl imagined it and could see what I meant.  Imagine, she said to me, if you could do all this in front of your neighbours.  Thus Alpha Neighbour Theory was born.

We targeted two particular neighbours, the ones in the house next door.  I had unfortunately lost all credibility with both sets of neighbours in my building when my old Christmas tree had blown off my balcony, smashed half the tiles on my middle neighbour’s roof and then had to be retrieved from the garden of my downstairs neighbour.  A reasonable accident, you might say, and one that could happen to anyone, but the thing that lost me credibility was that it happened in June. 

So our Alpha Neighbour exercise was aimed at the couple from next door.  I’ll call them Des and Daphne.  They feel like good names for neighbours. 

Cowgirl and I kept a mental tally of occasions where we looked ‘alpha’ - when we passed them early in the morning wearing gym gear, when we were able to tell them we were jetting off somewhere exciting on holiday, when they saw us saving small children from runaway horses on the street.  ‘Gosh, look at us,’ we’d say to each other with glee, covered in mud from head to toe while returning from a British Military Fitness class. ‘I hope the neighbours see us.  We’ll get so many alpha points’. 

Every positive occurrence or small achievement in our lives - getting signed by an agent, getting engaged, making it home from Kilimanjaro, etc – became an opportunity to display evidence of alpha-dom to the neighbours.  And conversely, every time we were caught leaving the house scruffy with baseball caps pulled low over hungover brows or coming home with Lidl’s shopping bags straining with own brand cider, we would be horrified with ourselves and deduct rafts of alpha points from our imaginary totals.

It got silly. We struggled to find new ways to win points.  Every postcard we sent each other from every holiday we went on would be written with half an eye to how it would be interpreted were it accidentally to be delivered next door.  Instead of bigging up the après ski carnage from Villars, I found myself reporting imagined skiing triumphs with records and achievements listed in an attitude of faux modesty.  Cowgirl’s naughty weekends in rented cottages with Hank became sojourns at Lady So-and-so’s country seat, with imagined messages of love and respect from the greatest and most glamorous in the land.  We knew that, in the unlikely event of even one of these postcards going to the wrong door, our neighbours would be far too polite ever to read them but we hoped that one word, one star-studded name might leap out and command their attention, their respect, the alpha points they would so unwittingly bestow.   Hank moved in and joined in and wilder and wilder schemes were hatched.  Constant debates were held over the question of who, if you could hire any look-a-like, would be the best person to send to their door looking for you, claiming to be a close friend of yours or to be in need of your urgent help.  Who?  Bob Geldof?  George Clooney?  The entire Nobel Prize Committee?

Cowgirl moved out four years ago but I’m thrilled to see that she still practices Alpha Neighbour Theory, at least as far as Number 29 is concerned.  She still sends cards like the one above and just like those breathless excited school-girl letters, their envelopes are scribbled with last-minute messages from well-wishers.  But instead of ‘my friend Jo says you’re horny’ and ‘Tanya wants me to say hi’, these ones say things like ‘Madge and Guy said their party wasn’t the same without you’ and ‘very well done saving those orphans – what with attending BMF, the opera and training polo ponies I am amazed you had time’.  Instead of making my housemaster grin, these have a more serious purpose.  They are to ensure that my next door neighbours think that Cowgirl and I are still interesting people; that we lead exciting and positive lives; that we are Alpha Neighbours.

The Alpha Neighbour campaign is coming to an end as I’ve sold the flat and in January we will move out of there.  The experiment has been a complete success and although something like this would usually be hard to measure, I think the evidence here is pretty incontrovertible.  So consistently Alpha have we shown the Number 29 lifestyle to be, that Des and Daphne have found it impossible to resist and have voted with their feet to give the campaign their ultimate seal of approval.  Des and Daphne have bought my flat.  A mantle has been passed over.  They will become the new Alpha Neighbours.  Cowgirl and I wish them luck.

I don’t feel ready to give up the campaign just yet though.  Surely one last act of alpha neighbour-dom is called for?  Imagine if, on their first day in Number 29, Des and Daphne were to answer the door to a certain someone.  Just suppose that certain someone claimed that he was a friend of ours, that he was looking for us, that he’d lent us a couple of dining chairs or his lawnmower or his spare football boots?  How alpha would that be?

Has anyone got a phone number for David Beckham?



Excess Baggage

(Archive - Tuesday 19^th October 2010)

Consider this morning a typical one, just like any other.  I wake at 7.15am, fresh from eight solid hours of unbroken dreamless sleep after a very pleasant evening of teetotal merriment with a couple of friends.  It would be an exaggeration to say that as I leap out of bed there is a song on my lips and joy in my heart but there may be a gentle rhythm stirring somewhere and there’s definitely a certain inner perkiness.  I tip down a pint of lukewarm water with half a lemon squeezed into it while juicing together several carrots, apples and a hunk of ginger and sprinkling banana slices and fresh frozen blueberries over a bowl of home mixed muesli, which I fill with rice milk and chase down with a variety of vitamins and supplements designed to do all sorts of wonderful things to my brain, heart and assorted innards.  I leap energetically on my bike and pedal several miles up the road where I spend two hours twisting myself into odd positions in a room heated to over 100 degrees (that’s Fahrenheit before you start pricing wreaths and wondering who gets the Wodehouse collection).  I am now back at my desk enjoying a cup of nettle tea and the combined natural sugar rushes of three different pure fruit juices.

Does any of this sound odd to you?  Aside from the fact that anyone who has known me more than five minutes will find the whole thing utterly bizarre and inexplicable, there are actually two points of peculiarity here.  The first is that, while you might consider such healthy living behaviour to be typically (even stereotypically) Californian, I am no longer in California.  The second is that I didn’t behave anything like this while I was in California either.

Checking in for my flight home at San Francisco Airport, I am told that I am overweight.  I am surprised.  Americans can often be quite personal in their comments but the ones I’ve met are usually more encouraging than this.  I realise that he means my baggage.  It is my suitcase that is straining round the middle and tipping the scales at twenty pounds more than luggage its height and age usually should.  To avoid an excess baggage fee, I am made to open the case and decant half of its contents into a cardboard box, to be checked in as a second piece of luggage.  This is done in the middle of the check-in hall, surrounded by queues of travellers on all sides.  It is the very last time I pack all my dirty shreddies anywhere near the top of my suitcase.

I am surprised at this increase in baggage weight.  Sure I have stuffed my case with all the Kelsey Port that HM Customs will allow me to carry but I hadn’t realised that it would weigh that much.  Perhaps it’s the Denver Broncos pyjamas for my brother-in-law.   I am taking away more from California than I expected. Probably thanks to too many nights enjoying the lavish hospitality of the Central Coast’s wineries and hostelries, I seem also to have brought home the desire to detox and to be healthy.

I’m sure it’s just a phase I’m going through and I’ll soon grow out of it but, for the moment, and probably the next few days even, I am emanating the healthy Californian stereotype: eating well; pushing aside the pints and puddings; declining the dairy; hanging out in health food shops and having meaningful conversations with the staff about supplements; juicing things that should normally be roasted and serving up things that should normally be left out for squirrels; drinking more water than a desert full of dromedaries and refusing to make a decision without considering the ramifications for my omega 3 levels.  I am going everywhere on my bike and, of course, there is the yoga.  You can’t get more Californian than yoga.

It is Marianne’s sister Gabriella who talks me into Bikram Yoga.  She arrives from Mexico two weeks into my stay in San Luis Obispo and immediately begins to join Gary on his regular visit to SLO’s steamiest studio.  The two of them come back every evening, flushed and utterly sweat sodden, with deep satisfied smiles on their faces and tell me how Bikram Yoga is brilliant, how I should do Bikram Yoga, how Bikram Yoga would be so good for me, how Bikram Yoga will change my life, until I am nearly sick of them and profoundly sick of Bikram bloody Yoga.  Despite this, something somehow gets through and I begin to feel slightly tempted…

However, it is also Gabriella who thoroughly puts me off ever ever ever doing Bikram Yoga in SLO, by reinforcing all the reasons my imagination offers me as arguments against doing it.  I’ve had a couple of lamentable forays into the world of contortion-as-exercise before.  A friend called Brian invited me to join a Men’s Beginner Yoga class he set up a few years ago, in which a bunch of us guys wobbled and tottered and pulled muscles in front of Brian’s friend, a newly qualified dainty blonde yoga instructor, before going off to the pub and discussing how much we fancied Brian’s friend and undoing any possible good we’d done.  A few years later I tried again at the Pilates class in my gym where I discovered to my horror that, despite being the youngest there by some twenty years, I was no more flexible than Abu Hamza on the subject of topless sunbathing.  How would this inability be received in San Luis Obispo?

The answer, I suspect, is not well.  In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king but he’d feel a bit of an idiot showing up somewhere full of 20/10-visioned supermen with X-ray eye sight and a couple of spare eyeballs in the backs of their heads.  This peculiar metaphor sums up how I feel about my fitness when compared to the people around me. 

Consider the maths.  San Luis Obispo has a population of 37,000.  This is split between 17,000 students and 20,000 normal people.  Obviously, at thirty six, I’m older than all the students.  If our allotted span can be considered to average out at three score years and ten then I’m halfway through that, making me older than 50% of the normal people.  But Californians are not normal.  Most of them are considerably younger and fitter than their years.  That should probably skew a few more of them, say 10%, to functioning as younger than an English thirty-six year-old.  If you then say that I’m not even the fittest of Englishmen, that probably shunts me up another 10% in the reckoning.  So this extra 20% means that I’m effectively older than 70% of the 20,000 regular Californians as well as all 17,000 students. Reach for your calculator and you’ll see that this makes me functionally older or considerably unfitter than 84% of the people in SLO and if you’re in the oldest most unfit 16% of a city, you’re hardly likely to be going to Bikram Yoga, are you?

In my mind, any Bikram Yoga class in San Luis Obispo would be filled with people much younger and/or fitter than me.  They would have spent their lives in pursuit of the Californian ideal (not quite the same as being in pursuit of the ideal Californian).  I’m not sure what their combined reaction will be to someone so obviously antithetic to everything they hold dear but I’m pretty certain I don’t want to find out.  My only hope is for this somehow not to be true, for the class to be full of people good-naturedly falling sideways on one leg or having to tuck their tummies in before they lean forward.  But Gabs’ enthusiastic Latino gushing about her fellow Bikram classmates squashes that hope flatter than some of the stomachs she is describing in such gleeful detail. 

‘O’seya, that guy was pretty dam hot today, the one with the tattoo on his bell-ly.  Such maah-sulls.  And his friend is so HANDsome.  Mmm, I have never seen abs like this.  So good-loo-king.’  From the impression she gives, most of the men do yoga in nothing but scary Speedos and a sheen of sweat over their toned tans while the women (‘So séx-see.  Ay yay yay.  So yaang’) are all eighteen and blonde and spend the whole time checking out the men.

I decide that Bikram Yoga in SLO is not for me.  I cannot hold my own among a group of hyper-fit Californian Peter Pans, sweating good health and meat-,

wheat-, gluten- and dairy- free diets from every pore and radiating disapproval of me - disapproval of my balance and my tummy and my inflexibility and my hideous old age - from their outstretched fingertips, down in a perfect line through their mahogany brows and their concrete concave stomachs to a single precisely pointed big toe on which they are perfectly balanced.  I cannot do it.  I need to be in a place which celebrates the underdog; which makes a fond joke of difficulty; where you can topple over onto the person next to you and make it all okay with a wry and awkward grin…

So I take up Bikram Yoga in London, trying out a place off Chiswick High Road and it’s perfect.  There are people who are very good at yoga and there are people who are very toned, some even tanned.  A few of them manage all three but very few look at me while they are doing it.  I am free to get on with it, slowly learning the poses and sweating into my T-shirt and towel, chickening out of a second Eagle pose or slurping water during the Camel pose.  I’ve discovered that I am particularly talented at a pose called ‘Savasana’ but before you are too impressed I must admit that it is also known as ‘the dead body pose’ and doesn’t involve much more than lying on the floor with your hands out. 

Of course plenty of people do it bare-chested; men that is.  But somehow there isn’t the same sort of posturing attitude that I’d imagined.  It’s not the way of things.  Not usually.  There was one distasteful transgressor who turned up, toned and mahogany tanned, and performed a range of poses on the mat right in front of mine, wearing a pair of what my friend Carl would describe as ‘budgie smugglers’; what’s more, budgie smugglers that he’d obviously borrowed from a younger brother as they were stretched tighter than torture and had small twinkly stars at the waistband.  A few of us more right-minded thinkers gave him such a dirty glare as he sat in the changing room afterwards, still sporting the horrifying briefs and ostentatiously drinking tea, that I haven’t seen him since. 

‘Good riddance,’ I said to a rotund and bespectacled man in his early nineties, ‘his sort don’t belong here.’