Do other people lead more interesting lives than me?
A piece I wrote sixteen years ago.
Television having trained me to suspect if I wasn’t being shagged, sued or shot at that I was doing life wrong, I got to wondering whether other people led more interesting lives than my own..
Never one to merely let a question fester away unanswered, I decided to embark on a devious little scheme. Each day for a week I picked a random stranger, kept as polite a distance as one can when one is essentially stalking, and observed them going about their daily business.
What I discovered startled me. Not one person was doing anything nearly as interesting as trailing a stranger for research. Alas, having found the answers I sought, I was finding it hard to give up the sugar rush of stalking. I found myself sneaking out for a fix almost daily. But not to escape the crushing monotony and malaise of workaday life. More as a lens for self-reflection. Healthy reasons.
Eventually, I had the altogether next-in-line thought of wondering whether other stalkers were leading more interesting lives than me. There was only one thing for it. Having failed to become a comedian's comedian, I became a stalker's stalker.
Like someone who’s found a niche in the market, this brought immediate success. But success brought its own problems. One overcast Tuesday, the guy I was following it turns out, was also following me. We circled each other for three hours until the police broke us up and arrested us both for loitering.
In spotfires around London the same thing was happening. Pairs of committed stalkers, like codependent lovebirds were getting caught up in eddies of obsession, rounding on each other like gunfighters ready to draw. You saw it wherever you went. We were legion. Suspicious, paranoid, legion.
Four months into my sentence, I lay supine on my mothballed jail bed, batting the huge ramifications of my malaise around my head. From the cells across the way, I hear lively chatter.
I gaze beyond the parapets into the cells on the west side of the facility. What I see chills me to the core.
A murderer paints happily, a still life of his toilet bowl. A child pornographer is knitting what appear to be booties with a noticeably carefree air and a particularly contented looking ex-mafioso is constructing what to my squinting eyes looks like a ship in bottle.
I close my eyes, sigh sadly and wonder helplessly whether any or all of them are leading more interesting life sentences than my own.
Yianni Agisilaou - Some time in 2006
A timeless classic.