Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com Recommendations Understand Area Woman Better Than Husband
Once upon a time, and a long long time ago it was too, I made the mistake of admitting to Amazon that I owned a copy of Triumph of the Will. Since then, every time I log in to that website I am now cheerfully urged to “treat myself” to an unexpurgated first edition facsimile of Mein Kampf, or knowingly informed that 11% of customers with similar searches purchased The Illustrated Protocols of Zion, or greeted with a RealAudio fanfare of Panzer Corps marching songs. The only thing that Amazon insists on more assiduously than my fanatical devotion to the the basic tenets of National Socialism is that I like The Karate Kid III enough to buy it on DVD, VHS, Region 1, Blu-Ray AND box set. Bloody hell. Forget about deleting porn cookies from your browser history, if you want a dark, lurking secret to carry with haunted eyes to your grave, use Amazon to buy your niece High School Musical for her birthday.
I suppose my wish list is something closer to a respectable history of my inner life, but still. What a mess. My mum has kept my bedroom as it was when I left -i.e. a squalid and deprssing reminder of time squandered never to be regained- but it has less and less to do with me every time I go back, old photos, old diaries, application forms for old jobs. Sometimes I feel like a sequel to myself, lacking coherence and continuity, my life easily broken down into five or six episodes with no relation to one another other than their being about the same character, played by the same actor. Or like an old silent comedy series, “Thomas at the Races”, “Thomas in Trouble”, “All Aboard, Thomas!” And that, in all honesty, is how I see my life, an irresistible avalanche of petty disaster ushered in by monochrome title cards and a jaunty piano ragtime, the iris opening every day on the same scene, the chaotic domesticity, the jangling alarm clock.
The other day, someone asked me “How did you end up down here?”, meaning doing the job I’m doing in the place I’m doing it. I’ve been here for a year and a half. I couldn’t remember ever not having been.