It's Educational!

My name is John Doran and I write about music. The young bucks who run VICE’s website thought it would be amusing to employ a 41-year-old who remembers when it was all Fields Of The Nephilim round here.

In case you were wondering or simply too lazy to use urban dictionary, "menk" is Scouse/Woollyback slang for a mentally ill or educationally subnormal person, and is a shortened version of mental. As in, “Your Sergio Tacchini trackie is sick la, look at that menk Doran, he can’t even afford a Walker trackie. Let’s hit him with a brick and push him in the canal."

MENK 55: IT’S EDUCATIONAL!

I don’t have many regrets. Not because I haven’t wasted massive chunks of my life, made really terrible decisions, been a transcendental pain in the fucking arse and a colossal drain on other people’s patience and sanity, but because people with regrets are generally still time-wasting, bad-choice-making, pains in the fucking arse, well acquainted with draining everyone else’s patience and sanity. I’m now getting shit done and better fucking late than never. There genuinely is no point in crying over spilt milk as far as I can tell.

However, it has to be said, that I don’t have very fond memories of my time at university, and this does bother me. It doesn’t matter how you cut it: I could have spent my years in educational facilities better. I may have been the first person in my family to go to university but I was the first person in my family to get thrown out of it as well. A year or so after getting hoofed off my course for drunkenness and non-attendance, I begged the powers that be to let me sit my final exams and due to a last minute flush of diligence and a bunch of notes and essays borrowed from my friend Paula, I did manage to redeem myself slightly. But to be honest, most of the basic stuff I needed to know about English Literature for my exams I already knew from college.

Which begs the question: What did I actually learn at university?

Well, first and foremost I learned how to smoke cannabis resin through an empty coke can and then, later, an apple. I also learned how to say, “Fuck the Boer cunts” in Xhosa.

While it might seem obvious to you I learned the hard way that putting a traffic cone on your head is like fucking a sheep – you only need to do it once to entirely destroy your reputation. (On my way to a party down Beverley Road I came across a cone that was much bigger than any other I’d ever seen. I mean, it was like five or six feet tall. It was the uber traffic cone – the mother of all traffic cones, the Ur-cone. Looking back through the mists of time elapsed, the way I choose to remember the incident is this: it was such a massive traffic cone that I decided to put it on my head to take the piss out of students who put traffic cones on their heads, yeah? Because they’re such wankers, right? I was being ironic, yeah? By the time my friend Conn helped me get the thing over my head I looked like some very early drawing board design for a Dalek which was abandoned because there’s nothing frightening about a giant orange triangle with a pair of army surplus boots sticking out of the bottom of it. He led me in to the party where I started jigging about and shouting: “Look at me! I’m an idiot with a cone on his head.” Even though I could tell immediately before I started knocking drinks over that I’d made a massive faux pas, there wasn’t much I could do about it as I had a massive plastic cone jammed over my head that was stopping me from seeing anything, trapping my hands to my sides and preventing me from bending any joint in my body apart from my ankles. As I toppled over and waited for Conn and a couple of other people to pull me out by my feet, I suddenly realised that my future was sealed as that guy who turned up at that massive party going, “Look at me! I’ve got the world’s biggest traffic cone on my head!” before throwing himself off the Humber Bridge a few weeks later. It wasn’t just the fact that my entire peer group was at that party, so any lingering hopes I had of a career in the Home Office or at Faber and Faber had evaporated before my eyes but literally, now that everyone knew I was a fucking transcendental first class helmet, exactly what had been the point of reading all of that Franz Kafka and William Burroughs?)

I also learned how to spot when you’re having a nervous breakdown. If you ever see the video to "Nobody's Twisting Your Arm" by the Wedding Present on YTV’s

Calender

show and you start screaming because you’re wearing exactly the same paisley shirt and you think you’re David Gedge and trapped in the television and sending yourself messages from the future coded in the form of jangling indie pop, you may well be having a nervous breakdown. If every time you pass a TV set you can faintly hear the theme from

Raiders Of The Lost Ark

– whether it’s switched on or not – again, you may be having a nervous breakdown.

I don’t think it’s too much of a non-sequitur to follow this up by saying that I did not learn how to be successful at meeting women at university. My one and only attempt to chat a girl up was not an honours performance. On the encouragement of my friend Natasha to go over and “Just say something natural to her – it’ll be fine” I unleashed this Milk Tray Man classic: “Hey, would you like to hang out with me some time and listen to some reggae?” To be met with a fairly unequivocal: “Are you taking the fucking piss?” The phrase, “Hey, would you like to hang out with me some time and listen to some reggae?” echoes round my head every so often at which point I usually faint or punch myself in the face, even though it is now 23 years later. I was delighted to find out in 2001 while watching the film Ghost World that this is actually still the international gold standard test of douchebaggery in chatting up women and I am right to feel mortified. To be fair, another completely natural thing I could have said to her was: “Would you like to come back to my squat, smoke cannabis resin through a half-eaten apple and look at my Revolting Cocks picture discs, while I hum the Raiders Of The Lost Ark theme quietly to myself?” so things could have been worse. I think – Paula notwithstanding – that I actually learned more from TV when I was at university than any other source. I certainly spent more time watching TV than I did reading poetry or whatever during those years. (As I write this, I’m on a weekend away for a friend’s wedding and looking out of a cabin window at the damn fine trees of Birnham Wood in Scotland. They’re Douglas Firs, named after the Victorian plant hunter David Douglas, they grow much higher than the native Scots pine and are native to North America – thanks, Twin Peaks.) My favourite show – after Twin Peaks – was a German detective procedural called Schimanski. The show went out at about 3AM midweek on Yorkshire TV and all the main characters were fat sweaty alcoholics who seemed to spend all of their waking hours pouring their hearts out to prostitutes and getting into fist fights outside brothels. Schimanski himself was a moustachioed, foul-mouthed roaring oaf who was drunk, violent and smoking cigarettes at all times; and often wearing mirror shades and an army surplus jacket like a badass. But what really gave the programme its edge was how it was dubbed into broad regional British accents including Scouse, Welsh, Geordie and Cockney. During one episode, Schimanski asked his long-suffering boss what he was doing for Christmas only to get the reply, in rich Welsh dialect: “In my village near Cardiff, we get the fattest boy we can find, tie him to a lamppost, cover him in lard and taunt him with rats.” Due to this and the fact that each episode made less sense than a Thomas Pynchon novel, I began to suspect the people involved with dubbing it into English were taking their job less than seriously. After Schimanski ended at 4AM it was time for bed – unless you were on LSD and then it was time to start reading all of Ceefax. (Highlights: Bamboozle, music letters and the news. Lowlights: the cheap holiday pages and the weather.) If more than one person was on LSD, epic, bitter games of a card game called shithead would commence to see who would go to the 24-hour garage situated over our garden wall to buy cigarette papers, which were, when all was said and done, much easier to use than a can of coke or an apple when you were tripping. In August of 1990 when the Gulf War started, we watched a lot of it on low-grade acid. Television was just taking its first faltering steps towards rolling news. My black and white portable was taking its final faltering steps towards a skip, however. It had been in my family ever since I could remember (the mid-1970s) and I had a feeling it was even older than that. The casing around the screen was mainly built out of wood. I had to stop people from leaving lit cigarettes resting on it after it caught on fire once. I remember sitting there one night with Firthy and Stimmy listening to the match pre-amble from George Bush Snr while we were coming up, when the horizontal and vertical hold went dramatically and his head started stretching and stretching until he looked like Jabba The Hutt saying: “This is the new world order.” Firthy groaned in terror: “Why is George Bush talking about New Order?” Stimmy started laughing demonically. He was holding a smoking apple in one hand and jets of smoke were billowing out of his nose and joining a halo round his head as fractals and sparks shot out of his ears: “HA HA HA! It’s the war! On drugs!”

Previously: Menk, by John Doran – Wandering Stars of Whom It Is Reserved, the Blackness of Darkness Forever

You can read all the previous editions of John's Menk column here.