The Subaltern

This Must Be The Place #6: 2.0

‘We’re tribes,’ he tells me. ‘We’re a collection of tribes. The digital experience has done that to us. We’re a collection of niche interests. No one worth their salt is trying to get blanket 1 million copies sold.’

I admire his language. He has emailed this to me with such a force of confidence, I reply with something positive. Extending the metaphor, I ask him where home is for an online tribe. He replies a day later, such is the back and forth of email debates with industry professionals with a busy list of objectives.

It used to be email, he proposes. It was supposed to be Facebook and Myspace and all that stuff. ‘But we abused both of those things with our need to be liked by as many people as possible, now we’re all linked.’ At some point, I reply, tribalism will return and we’ll go back to our villages and hang out online with only our close friends and family. And that, he says, is the only time you’ll see each other.

I know it’s true. So I don’t reply. We haven’t emailed since.

The Subaltern list 14.5.12

1. ‘Driving Jarvis Ham’ by Jim Bob is a hella funny roadtrip book told with an eccentric verve and many zingy one-liners. I haven’t read a book this funny since Sam Lipsyte or something.

2. I’m judging some CityRead competition. I get to read lots of books about London.

3. I deejayed a friend’s wedding this weekend. Apart from Blur and Michael Jackson, the biggest floor filler was ‘I Knew You Were Waiting for Me’ by George Michael and Aretha Franklin. Stop pretending you don’t love this tune.

4. ‘The Blind Giant’ by Nick Harkaway is the best book I’ve read thusfar about digital platforms, social networks and web 2.0 and how they are all moulding our brains to recondition our human experience and interactions with each other.

5. ‘Veep’ the new HBO Armando Iannucci show is still finding its feet but is still very enjoyable. Same with ‘Girls’, which is so well written it’s a shame the characters who aren’t played by Lena Dunham are so uncharismatic I don’t care for them very much.

This Must Be The Place #5: A single moment

I have my feet up on the footstool you bought for me as a joke in the charity shop. I’m drinking the coffee you accidentally double-filtered and didn’t confess to, thinking I wouldn’t notice. The paper lies on the floor unread. We both agree that a newspaper is a morning activity. The afternoon is for shaking off the shadow of doom a newspaper has cast over your morning. I look around at the home we’re building and realise something. This is it now. I live here. I live in this house.

I ask you if I’m now a Bristolian. You laugh and tell me I’ll always be a Londoner. It’s the first time you’ve admitted I’m a Londoner. Whenever I would tell people I was from London, you’d snort ‘Harrow’ to cause confusion and embarrassment.

It’s a single simple point, this realisation of where you’re at. I spend a lot of my time in transit at the moment. I am caught in 3G and wi-fi blackout spots on the M4 or a train between London and Bristol, with only my thoughts or a book to occupy myself, and I feel most comfortable on those seats because they are all I know. But this single simple moment of realisation of where I am and who I am in that space, it’s enough to fill my heart with ten homes and an infinite parade of stillness. It’s you. You’re here. And that’s where my home is.

This Must Be The Place #4: Tethered, Together

The taxi driver turns to me and says the name of the school I went to. This draws my attention away from Twitter. He tells me he was in the year above me. He asks if I remember certain teachers. I don’t remember him. He remembers me. I’m surprised because I was anonymous at school, no discernible personality or quirk to set me apart from everyone else.

He asks if I have moved back home. We are on the run between the train station I grew up near and the house I grew up in. I say no but spend some time at home two days a week for work. I live in Bristol. I don’t tell him about my mum. Not everyone has to know anymore. He tells me about moving home, about losing his job, about taking work as a taxi driver. He sounds embarrassed because he tempers his life story with tales of job interviews and skillsets.

We’ve both come home. To where we grew up. And it doesn’t feel the same. I tell him that the two days I’m in my dad’s house, I regress into being a teenager. He says that I must be a man, for my wife’s sake. Act like a grown-up. He calls me sir as a I pay and I tell him not to. We’re both just some guys who’ve ended up where we’ve started. Temporarily, I stress. He offers me a chocolate mini roll and I take it so he doesn’t call me sir anymore. I’m not better than him. I’m not his ‘sir’. We eat our mini rolls in silence. I say goodbye and he tells me to ‘be lucky’. I wish him luck in his interviews. I walk into my dad’s house and feel like a visitor.