stories « Article Magazine

Bike Shop Freemasonry
stories

As a kid the bike shop in my town excited me, I would walk past often, peering through the windows, glimpsing shiny bikes and related paraphernalia. Venturing inside, however, was a different matter. I wanted to, to inspect the machines and initiate myself into the ways of the proprietor and patrons but I couldn’t. The bike shop was a forbidding place where grown men discussed the intricacies of serious cycling in a language I didn’t possess. Serious cycling was what I aspired to and having convinced my parents to buy me a Trek rather than a Halfords bike I’d hoped I might be halfway there, but I was still way off. Leaping into the unknown, entering the bike shop with its array of gadgets, alien lingo and Lycra clad leg shavers was too daunting an undertaking for this self-conscious teeny-bopper: both literally and metaphorically I didn’t have the bollocks. read the rest

Obama T-Shirts
stories

Walking into a Wal-Mart in any American small-town is a daunting experience, entirely uniform. As you approach across the parking-lot, heat radiates off the pavement hitting the underside of your chin. Looking around, you see people walking to and from their enormous cars, laden with countless shopping bags full of easy cheese, fishing line, televisions and cheap t-shirts. Upon reaching the entrance, there is a whoosh sound as the automatic doors part. And then the cold hits you. The penetrating refrigerated cold, exacerbated by the complete exclusion of any natural light and the hum of the deep freezers. The ceiling reaches up, cathedral like, higher than could possibly be needed. Ornamentation adorns only the packaging of the products and nothing of the vast utilitarian selling space. This is Mecca. This is home. Every two years or so, I go to visit my aunt and uncle in West Virginia, and we always go here. read the rest

Morris Dancing
stories

Summer is nearly here! It’s time to take up smoking again and sit on benches drinking cider, watching improbably thin shirtless idiots parade around with their crap friends and occasionally eat salad. In fact, I often find the summer so innocuous that I long for everyone wrap themselves up in scarves and return to the grey genderless days of winter when it’s easier to concentrate on things other than people’s arses and weird tan lines. At least it gives me some time to escape the country and head to northern Europe where people don’t suddenly turn into complete idiots when the temperature gets above 15 degrees.

I often think back to my childhood summers when we hardly ever went abroad. I was dragged from pub to pub by my parents being forced to stay up late listening to loud repetitive music, often spending weeks on the road whilst their friends fed me far too much beer for a ten-year-old. Having spent most of my teenage years hiding the photographs whenever my friends came to visit, I will now admit proudly that I was a Morris dancer, my summers spent at folk festivals with men with beards. read the rest

Paranoia
stories

The paranoia increased a few days ago when I awoke to find workmen ‘on orders’ to fix a leak drilling into the wall, stealing my bath, and returning it a few hours later. I know what you’re thinking, what could you possibly do with a bath? The answer is to behave suspiciously with it. These men destroyed our bathroom and then told us that there was no leak. Bastards. But who on earth were they? Did my neighbour (also head of the building committee) order this? What did they do to the bath?

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Irish Summer Camp
Issue 5, stories

Stepping off the bus into an indecisive Irish drizzle the first thing you are confronted with is a seven foot tall football player with the eyes of a homicidal maniac and the arms of an irate silverback. This man is built like a brick shit-house. He doesn’t have a face, per se, more of a neck with pupils. As you pick up your luggage from the bag compartment, the man gives you a stare that you will remember for the rest of your life. He does the same to each child. Then he starts barking at you in another language. read the rest

Bikes and Barricades
Issue 3, stories

I hitched a ride from Munich to visit my friend Clark in Lyon. So I sat for nine hours in the back of a Volkswagen Golf on what must have been one of the hottest days of the year. My driver had been raving about the galleries of Lyon and Dijon, the other passenger, a seventeen-year-old chain-smoking French girl had been nodding in agreement. Not sure what to expect when I got there and not wanting to get booted out of the car, only to be stuck in a service station near Stuttgart, I agreed that I must see the Cathedral and everything else. I didn’t tell them that I wasn’t really going to see any cultural monuments, so to speak. At least not old ones. I stepped out of the smokey sauna at the metro station Clark had told me about. read the rest

Hurdy-Gurdy Fest
Issue 4, stories

In a temporary drought of genuine sociopathic postmodern activity—with which my life is usually filled—as a genuine punter I attended a hurdy-gurdy festival. It was somewhere in the Peaks, sometime before this summer and not fictional.

This is a Hurdy-gurdy.
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I Was A Child Roundhead
Issue 4, stories

The smell of gunpowder that a recently discharged canon gives off has a particularly strong resonance for some. It reminds them of the weekends of their childhood; when mentally unstable adults forced them to don breeches, hose and jerkins in order to take part, against their will, in an act that is at best bizarre and at worst perverted: re-enacting the English Civil War.

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Deceit, Lies and Facebook
Issue 4, stories

wedding-square

The purpose of staging a sham wedding was, surprisingly for some, not deception. The St. Petersburg tradition of a newly-wed couple touring famous monuments and drinking several bottles of champagne along the way is all too evident upon walking through the centre of the city (on a Saturday afternoon I once counted 18 brides in my field of vision). We thought this looked like fun and so decided to have our own ‘wedding’. We went to a flea market and bought a second-hand dress for about £30 with hideous puffy sleeves and netting I wouldn’t even use as curtains. Most of the morning was spent applying layers of make-up to my bride to make her appear as Russian as possible. read the rest

End Of The Line
Issue 4, stories

suicide-man

Even amidst today’s globalised cultural homogeneity thanks to which there is a branch of Starbucks in the Forbidden City and even previously uncontacted tribes of the deepest Amazon recognise the Golden Arches, Japan has somehow managed to maintain something of the exotique about it. Even though on the surface Japan is one of the most ‘Westernised’ of Eastern nations - fully industrialised, modernised and capitalised, and boasting the highest concentration of McDonald’s restaurants anywhere in the world (26.2 per square mile in central Tokyo) - Japan remains somehow fundamentally ‘different’ enough from anything we can experience here on our quiet little island that the appeal of the Mystic Orient is still strong. It is this strange attractive force that drives otherwise sane and normal men and women to waste months, even years of their lives slavishly watching the endless streams of vapid anime cartoons that Japan generates, masturbate over images of animated schoolgirls being elaborately befouled by many-tentacled aliens/mutants/demons, and even to dress as their favourite characters from said anime series or cartoon rapefest and attend conventions for like-minded Japanophiles where they will (presumably) re-enact some of their favourite incest/rape/tentacle orgy scenes together. read the rest