I must admit I was tempted when the Nintendo DS came out. I’d gone off games when they all started to involve getting De Niro-like into the mind of a traumatised Vietnam vet for three days before you were allowed the knife you needed to stab your way out a 3D jungle prison camp. But this new machine looked like fun, and was a pretty nice bit of product design.
When I finally did get to test a friend’s, it was for the greater part of a week after a big break up. I spent the whole time sat on a couch in a house in Sydney drinking chocolate milk and whisky, playing Advance Wars until I started dreaming in square arrangements of neon Panzer divisions. At the end of the week, I gave it back, and resolved to get on with life.
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I remember watching a film about a transsexual Muay Thai boxer on a Cathay Pacific flight once. The sensei character in this movie died not from a sneaky death poke or rabbit punch, but from developing cancer from his day job in a laundry. Now maybe I missed the finer points – and the dramatic purpose of this death was to establish the main character’s battle against the nemesis of well pressed, laundry-folded menswear – but the thing is, I ‘m starting to worry this is going to happen to me. Living, as most people I know do, in shared rental accommodation in London, I do not have a seperate utility room, and hanging pants over kitchen furniture is a little undemocratic – a scant step up from territorial pissing in the corners. And so washing ends up on a rack by the radiator in my bedroom. And in winter months, with the radiator blaring – I wake up every morning with heavy lungs, a sore throat and a newly stoked hatred of the vile smell of washing powder.