Several years back I went to see Ricky Gervais try out some new material for a forthcoming tour. Despite it being billed as a secret gig, it was held in a west end theatre which did little for Mr G’s bashful intentions and the place was packed with his ardent fans.
It was the first time I became aware of a very on-trend phenomenon – your world as viewed through a camera lens. Back in the first half of the twentieth century Christopher Ishwerwood wrote “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking” but it took another sixty years or so for almost everyone to take his words to heart. Seated up in the dress circle we were almost the only people watching the then rather tubby star do his thing. Practically everybody else found the experience more fully appreciated through the lens of an iPhone. Blurry snaps were being taken and videos, too. No doubt all to be uploaded to Facebook or YouTube and never watched again by their creators. But it would be there. As proof. Proof of attendance and evidence of a life lived fully.
With each new generation of the iPhone, its camera has become a greater part of its must-have charm. Capable of capturing the very minutiae of our lives in increasingly refined and often boring detail, many competitions have sprung up to exploit this naval-gazing habit and you can submit your efforts to all manner of contests to see if your close-up and moody snap of a closed-down branch of Woolworths 
is of greater artistic merit than somebody else’s. It puts me in mind of an odd little story I was told recently of some such type and his efforts to win a prize.
Having read about one of these very competitions a man called Jez Arnold was prowling the shabbier streets of Islington looking for subjects to capture on his camera. Turning round from having been illicitly snapping a crying baby he suddenly found himself engaged in a conversation with an elderly, dishevelled looking chap sporting a t-shirt emblazoned with the word Baywatch and a image of Pamela Anderson in a bright red bikini. The man began to talk as if they were continuing a conversation that they had been having for some time: “…It’s my corns, if I don’t get them seen to now, they only get worse. Of course, they seem to have gone now, but I’ve been caught like this before. They haven’t gone at all. Just in abeyance. So, I’m seeing the chiropodist now to nip it in the bud.” A little wary of this rambling, smelly and slightly wild-eyed man Jez felt that after a few moments of this dreary conflab he had put in the requisite time of faux-companionable interest to ask if he can take his photograph. He was unlikely to see a similar subject any time soon and he wanted to take advantage of the situation.
“You’ve asked and that’s the main thing,” said the old man, “many people don’t ask and that’s when I get very cross. Very, very cross.” The man then proceeded to pose in a quite unexpectedly coquettish way – his chin resting on his fist as if in thought; coyly touching his ear in a ‘I can’t hear you’ position; once even peeking back over his shoulder; and finally in a stance struck as a boxer mid left-hook. After thanking him, Jez explained that he needed to pop into the fried chicken shop across the road to get something for his lunch and made his escape.
Returning home he looks at his camera and discovers that while the illicitly taken but, as it happened, rather unusable photos of the baby are all in sequence not one of the pictures of the old man appears to have been saved on his camera’s memory. Confused but furious with the technological wizardry in his greasy hand, he decided to visit the chiropodist to see if he can track him down but with no luck there he began to trudge back to his flat when, as luck would have it, he spots his quarry. Incongruously the old man is now standing at the door of a nail parlour. Recklessly dashing across the traffic, Mr Arnold caught up with him and fastening his hand on the man’s withered arm he said, “I’ve been looking for you,” trying to catch the annoyance in his voice as he says the words.
“Really?” replied the man with evident surprise.
“Those photos I took of you never came out. Would you mind if I tried again?”
“I’m terribly sorry but I believe you must be mistaken; we’ve never met. I would most certainly have recalled making the acquaintance of such a, err, tired little man.”
Mr Arnold is taken aback. Not only has he just been insulted but the man seems to have changed his voice. Earlier, the voice was shoddy and aggressive but with just enough of a hint of mental instability to bring out a patronising whiff of concern in him. And yet now the tones he hears are more supple, lighter even, slightly posh. Jez does the patronising in this part of town and he feels slightly wobbly now that the boot is on the other foot.
“I’m terribly sorry,” he insists, “but it was less than an hour ago that we met, we discussed your corns, and then you asked me if I wouldn’t mind taking your photograph.”
The old man raises a doubting eyebrow at Mr Arnold’s recollection of who asked whom what.
“Corns you say,” said the Baywatch man, “that explains why I’m here,” he said pointing through the door of the shop to a long room full of Chinese girls wearing masks over their mouths as they attend to nails of an equal number of young women, all of whom are much fatter than the workers. Slowly and deliberately he speaks now, as if addressing a stupid child: “You must have met my brother. Whatever he does I am compelled to do something similar. I have no control over it. He really is quite malicious.”
“But he said he had corns,” said Mr Arnold
“Oh, that old chestnut,” he replied obliquely, “whether he has corns or not if he goes to the chiropodist I find myself at the door of Nailtique. I’m sure half the bloody time his feet are absolutely fine. He only does it so that I’m obliged to go round like this.” He flourishes his hands in front of Mr Arnold. His hands are that of an old man but the nails are long, patently false, some with images of the moon and stars on them, the fourth fingers of each hand have tiny holes drilled through them and thin chains looped through the holes. Another has the image of an antelope in a sunlit dell raising its head as it sniffs the air for danger. Suddenly, the antelope comes to life, all on the miniature canvas of the man’s finger nail, and looking about it runs off into the forest. The nail is now only trees and dappled sunlight.
Jez Arnold blinked and his brain fizzed and popped as it tried to compute what to say in response to a such a ridiculous yarn about a man who forces you to have your nails done, to say nothing of the antelope taking fright. Filling the silence, the old man explained, “my brother is a ghost, you see, and a bloody awkward one at that.” Through the blur of his synapses Jez heard the man and his nonsense and then became aware of a greater commotion approaching from down the street.
“There he is, the bloody pervert,” shrieked a woman, pushing a pram in front of her as if it was a battering ram.
“Get him,” yelled her consort, an enormous bald man in a football shirt.
The woman bellowed again, “I’ll get his bloody camera and shove it where the sun don’t shine.”
“Friends of yours?” asked the old man? Jez just blinked.
The pram-wielding monsters were very close by now, a couple of pound shops away at most, and for the first time Jez realised that running might have some merit as a plan. But by this point the father had him by the lapels and was pushing him up against a wall. Trying to delay the inevitable moment of physical violence he attempted to point at the insignia on the man’s shirt: “Crystal Palace,” he managed to squeeze out through his strangled vocal cords, “you don’t often see that this side of the river.” He hadn’t been at all sure that the logo belonged to Crystal Palace but he thought it worth trying to buy some time but his attempt at blokey chit-chat proved not to be a great idea and his enormous foe dropped Mr Arnold to his feet better to swing his arm back and punch him in the guts. “Tottenham, you dick.”
“Why don’t you take your ugly pig of a child and wife and leave us alone?” came a voice to Mr Arnold’s left. He’d practically forgotten about the old man but amazingly he hadn’t scarpered. The couple began to lunge but a split-second after that they were gone. Gone, gone, gone. Not simply walking away but they’d disappeared as if they never had been. The only clue as to their presence were some pram tyre skid marks on the pavement. “What the …?” Mr Arnold began to ask when the old man shushed him with an imperious wave of the hand. “Mr brother maybe an awkward sod but anyone who photographs him – with his consent – is granted three wishes. As I said, he’s a ghost. It’s the sort of clichéd, but not unwelcome, thing ghosts do. I made the executive decision that one of your three wishes would be to see the back of that monstrous family before you had your lights punched out.”
“Yes, yes, yes, thank you, yes,” squeaked an out-of-puff Jez Arnold. Then it dawns on him, “So, I’ve still got two wishes left?”
“Yes. Do you know what you want?”
“Winning the competition would be nice,” he said and immediately regretted it as one awful waste of the chance of a lifetime.
“Done,” said the old man, “and your third wish?”
“Could you make Apple bring out its proper iPhone 5 within six months rather than wait over a year next time?”
“I’ll try,” came the reply, “but unfortunately in this instance I can’t promise anything.”
This week my column on London Confidential, I can quite honestly say, has quite a chunk about food in it. In fact, one of my favourite food topics – fish and chips. Specifically my blather is of The Fryer’s Delight in Holborn. Anyway, you’ve practically read it now but if you fancied it in the full unexpurgated form here it is.
