Kill Bill (Gates)

The other day I bought a fairly useless sort of book, telling myself that it was 'research' for my current novel, though I knew very well that it's not. The book is called The Encyclopaedia of Cult Children's TV, and the author is Richard Lewis. I suppose that my excuse about research has some validity, as the novel I am writing is about childhood and television, and particularly about children's TV. However, I knew that I was buying the book for reasons of pure self indulgence – nostalgia and humour. There is nothing intellectual or worthy about it. But then, is being worthy and intellectual really what life is about? Isn't what makes life worth living some indefinable emotion that we sometimes find in the heart of nostalgia (and other times in humour)?

There are some real gems amongst the entries of this book, but I am not going to share them with you today. No, today I only wish to refer to one particular entry in this book – Pink Panther:

He was thin, pink and very, very hip. He got into a kind of space-age racing car, driven by some grinning catamite in a crash helmet, who ran him around the corner to the TV studio where he got out. So what was that all about, and just who was that crazy pink guy? “It’s as plain as your nose”. He was the Pink Panther. The "rinky-dink panther", if you will. Either way he was the "one and only truly original Panther pink from head to toe".

Yes, for some reason the scent of shared experience, parochially precious beyond mere meaning, rises up from this description, and I see and feel it all again.

However, there was also a darker side to this hip pink cat cat.

It has been suggested to me, by someone else who remembers this cartoon, that the Pink Panther is a sort of animated version of Waiting for Godot. In each episode, our pink hero is imprisoned for the duration in a hell of existential, one might say Sisyphean, torment. He could spend the episode, for instance, trying, and failing, to kill a single mosquito that is playing with the remote control of his television set, or followed by a tiny cloud that rains wherever he goes. How can words describe the Modernist hell evoked by these mini-dramas? The anxiety creeps up over you in a distinctly Kafkaesque manner, until you feel that you are about ready to commit murder, if only you knew whom or what should be murdered, or thought that this might in some way alleviate your helplessness. For you realise, there is no way out of this hell, and no possibility of revenge.

Such a hell I have experienced over the past few days. You may be wondering about my relative silence – especially if you are one of my relatives. Well, I have been up until past five in the morning today and yesterday, hardly eating in the last forty eight hours, working on an editing job whose deadline I have failed to meet a number of times. (I am taking on scribe work from all comers at the moment.)

This job is not my idea of Elysium, but it means I can work from home, and gives me the opportunity to read what people have written in varied fields of human thought and activity. However, this task has been rendered, by the Evil of Mr Bill Gates and his empire of monopolising shoddiness, a nightmare similar in hue to those described above.

I recall, when I was holidaying in Malaysia some years back, that my brother and I became lost in a jungle, and, following a stream, happened upon two compatriots bearing a compass, who were similarly lost. Eventually we made it back to places where humans dwell, and had a meal together. It transpired that both my brother and the male half of the English couple worked in the same area, to wit, computers.

"Don@t you find," asked the man, "that if there are two new software systems on the market, and you think to yourself, 'Now, this one's really elegant. It's efficient, beautifully, designed, and a joy to use', and you think about the other one, 'This one's really shoddily knocked together', you know very well that in the market, the elegant one is going to lose and the shoddy one will have taken over the world in a year's time?"

This seems to be a universal principle of human existence.

Why? I do not know.

Anyway, the more I use Microsoft Word, the more I am convinced of the eternal triumph of Evil and Stupidity (the two go hand in hand).

I put a margin on one piece of text, and another, unrelated piece of text suddenly becomes double-spaced. I put it back into single spacing, and another, unrelated piece of text that should be centred suddenly becomes justified left. I centre it again, and the first piece of text loses its margin. I put the margin back and the second piece of text becomes double-spaced.

Oh, that's only the beginning. But it is such a hell of torturous tediousness that I do not want to relive it by telling of it.

However, during all this, a fantasy has come to me of a tortured pink feline who cannot take it any more. A 'groovy cat' – a gentleman, scholar and acrobat – who dons a black and yellow cat-suit and takes in his paws a samurai sword… And hacks a screaming and pleading Bill Gates into tiny pieces, starting with his extremities and moving towards the centre.