Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant. Joel Golby
but the entire concept of what you are offering to do to me – ostensibly for my wider health! – fills me with such an overwhelming dread that I literally consider death a smoother and more hassle-free option—
XVII.
You open your eyes in the shower and there is a figure in there in the bathroom, with you, either standing in the shower or just standing in the room, reflected gauzily in the steamy mirror, and they are cloaked, the figure, and holding a knife of some sort – either a to-the-point sort of hunting blade or instead a curved hook or scythe, and they raise it, and for a brief second you wonder which part of your soft naked flesh they are going to slice into first – and sometimes that is a fear, irrational as it is, one that has me with my eyes tightly wound while I shower, afraid to open them and see, as if the figure there is lurking and waiting for me to recognise them before slashing my throat open, to death, that is a fear, I suppose—
XVIII.
That one day my bank will phone me and in a stern voice tell me exactly how many consecutive days I have been in my overdraft.
I recently lost three-and-a-half stone, 22 kilos, and in doing so went from an Adult Size Large down to an Adult Size Large. This pissed me off enormously: fat melted from the wattle around my neck, my torso leaned out and became slender, my entire waist melted down through two (two!) entire jeans sizes, and my top half inexplicably remained the exact same dimensions according to the t-shirts I was buying in every single store on earth. Reader: what the living fuck.
My friend Sam is an Adult Size Large, and yet he is at least 60% more lean than I am through the torso, perfectly proportioned limbs and body, BMI so immaculate it could be holy, perfect example of health and beauty, capable easily of fitting into anything down to a size S and up to an XL. He is essentially a shop mannequin model with kind human eyes. He wears the same size t-shirt as I do, and I feel like I am staring at a blackboard full of calculations that lead to an equals sign followed by a question mark. Here is my central thesis: how is this man the same size as me according to our tee? I am like twice as wide as him, torso-to-torso. It makes no sense.
Or, so: my sister came to me recently. My sister, like yours, has got into exercise lately. Everyone’s sister eventually gets to this stage. Everyone has a healthy sister. Perhaps your sister is a brother, or an aunt. It does not matter: they are running a half-marathon this autumn and want your support. My sister, like yours, got into triathlons, then just cycling and swimming, and now just swimming. She went insane at a running store and bought a load of unused all-black exercise wear. Would I like it, she says, to sit around the house motionless and typing. ‘It is Adult Size Large,’ she says, and offers me the pile. There is some good stuff in here, man. Nike and et cetera. I take the running gear, which fits me like a glove.
One night I came home drunk off the back of an exceptional Arsenal win and found my then-girlfriend like a tiny long-limbed creature in my bed. ‘Put this Arsenal shirt on,’ I said, staggering into my wardrobe. ‘You know I have lingerie,’ she said. ‘Like: loads of lingerie. You never get me to wear it.’ It does not matter what lingerie you have: the single sexiest thing a naked woman can put on is i. a man’s work shirt, with the half smell of the day still on it, rendered flower-like and fragile by soft moisturised skin and the everlasting dint of breasts, ii. an Arsenal football shirt with ‘ARSHAVIN 23’ across the back, Adult Size Large.
I do not understand this. If you are on a bus or a train look around you. Many, many people wear clothes the wrong size for them. Men’s jeans are fantastic for this, because they have the exact size of them printed on a visible label on the back of them: I recently saw a man rocking 36-inch waist jeans with an (at a guess) 30-inch waist proper, so he had to cinch his belt blood-stoppingly tight around him so the jeans would fit properly. But on top: Adult Size Large. Or: men buy jeans that balloon out from the calves and somehow envelope their entire shoes. Men wear jeans, but do not understand them. They buy coats they can get their arms in, no more thought goes into it than that. And they all buy Adult Size Large, and they fit into them, and unless they are particularly unbroad or bird-chested it fits them more or less fine.
And I am screaming at the night sky, now, outside, so my breath turns to fog on the cold of it: if we are all Adult Size Large, then why do we have so many differences? I feel that somewhere in the grey unknowable magic of this size there’s something approaching peace: Adult Size Large transcends race, and sex, and gender, and age and height and weight. Adult Size Large is the t-shirt that more or less fits everyone. Can we not come together and appreciate that? Put down your guns, brothers. Unprime your bombs. Deep down, we are all the same. Come, unite with me, in the fields of peace. There is no need to fight anymore. We all have more or less the same-sized torso. I don’t understand how but let’s try and work it out.
I’m staring at a poster in the camel museum. At the centre of the poster: a large, cartoon impression of a camel. Out from the camel, in little squiggling offshoots, photos of camels pulling various different-but-extremely-similar camel faces. Gaze into the eyes of a camel and you will see nothing but glassy tranquillity staring back. Gaze into the eyes of a camel and it will calmly blink and chew cud. But no, this poster says. Camels contain multitudes. ‘APPEAL OF CAMEL PERSONALITY,’ it reads. ‘Family Bond’, ‘Sensitive’, ‘Loyal’, ‘Smart’, ‘Defending’. The next attribute is portmanteaued into one with a backslash: ‘Bossy/Leaders’. And there, hovering up around the original cartoon camel’s ear area, a single word, in rigid black: ‘Fear’.
Everything is camels and camels are everything, here at … the King Abdulaziz Camel Festival, Saudi Arabia!
* * *
CALL: Why were you at a camel festival in Saudi Arabia?
RESPONSE: Because it was there, and when something is there, it is human nature to go and look at it.
CALL: What is a camel festival like? What is a camel festival?
RESPONSE: I don’t know exactly because the camel festival I went to started being constructed in March 2017, i.e. six weeks exactly before I arrived in Saudi Arabia to come and look at it, so necessarily was entirely incomplete, and actually on balance I saw far fewer camels than you might have expected me to, on the whole, seeing as I flew all the way to Saudi Arabia to go and see camels,
CALL: What actually was it then?
RESPONSE: It was basically just a big car park with a load of camels in it. I flew seven hours and drove two. That’s what it was. It was a car park full of camels, in Saudi Arabia.
CALL: Would you highly recommend the camel festival as a fun continental tourist retreat?
RESPONSE: No I wouldn’t go so far as to say the word ‘highly’, no.
* * *
So I am in a tent, later now, trying to understand the appeal of camels. At my feet: a discarded tray-plate of grilled chicken, Gulf Sea prawns, rice, fruit, om ali, a pudding that is essentially cornflakes soaked in milk and warmed up with some cashews in it; to my right, a small cushion-plinth on which is resting two (two.) disposable paper cups of Arabian coffee and a larger plastic cup of sweet chai. The sun is blurrily setting and the sky turns dark from blue. There is a boy whose job in the tent is seemingly to bring me tea and coffee whenever I hold up a hand to say ‘tea’ or ‘coffee’. When he is not bringing me tea and coffee he just stands on the balls of his feet, staring covertly at the TV. There is something unusual about seeing a huge, clean-new HD TV plugged into a tent: in amongst rugs lining walls to deflect the searing heat of the sun, one perfect clear window, a slash of tech amongst the sand. On the television is an old BBC Two show where modern-day families live