Dork Turnspit

Dork	noun: pejorative term to describe someone with specialised interests.
Turnspit	1. noun: a rod on which an animal is skewered for rotating while it cooks over a fire.
	2. noun: a breed of terrier-like dog that no longer exists. In the early twentieth century they were used to power butter churns or other kitchen equipment.

My mouse hovered over the link. Did I really want to look at a website about women and dogs? I was certainly curious; I wanted to know the nature of the googlewhack I’d found. I looked over my shoulder to make sure no-one else was in the room – which is particularly cautious behaviour for a man who lives alone – and then, throwing caution to the wind, my finger pulsed on the mouse and the world of women and dogs opened up before me.

I needn’t have worried. What I found was, by turns charming, intriguing, naïve, funny and, well, bizarre. The site, it appeared, was run by a man called Marcus whose hobby was to collect secondhand photographs of women and dogs. There was nothing distasteful about the photos – absolutely nothing there you wouldn’t show your mum. In fact your mum might well be in some of the photos because they were largely domestic snaps of homely women sharing a frame with man’s best friend. It might be a big jolly gran petting a dog in some anonymous 1970s high street, it might be a young girl swamped by both an armchair and a border collie or it might be a mysterious skirted figure walking a dog in the distance. So long as there was both a woman (or girl) and a dog (or puppy) in the photo then it counted.

Marcus didn’t take his own photos: what he loved to do was find them and this seemed to be an important part of it to him – he wanted to have the actual photo, he didn’t want to find images of women and dogs online because then he couldn’t own them. As hobbies go, it seemed a strange one. At first glance it was just that I suppose: strange. But as I worked my way through the collection of photos I found it to be quite enchanting. Each photo was, in itself, incredibly ordinary and while the idea of collecting other people’s mundane, domestic ephemera might appear odd, when viewed as a collection it seemed to take on some kind of meaning.

Or was it just bizarre? And funny? Marcus provided a line of commentary to accompany each snap. In one picture a woman crouches in her garden holding the dog steady for the camera. The caption read simply: ‘Her red shoes suggest that she is lively!’ Surely it’s sites like this that make the internet so endlessly fascinating.

More than the site itself, I found myself becoming strangely fascinated by Marcus. What kind of man was he? What drove him on? Why, of all things, did he collect photos of such a specific and yet abstract nature? Did he know that people found it funny? Did other people find it funny or was it just me? Not that I felt I was laughing at Marcus because I really did find something touching and beautiful about the site, about the normality it portrayed and celebrated. As I read Marcus’s notes on the pictures in which he wondered not just about the correlation between shoe colour and personality but about who these women were and how they lived I found myself sharing his sense of wonder.

As I examined every corner of Marcus’s site I found myself getting sucked further in to his world. Before I knew it another day had evaporated and Chapter 1 remained unstarted. I saw Marcus’s email address on one of the pages and I knew what I had to do. Stevo had emailed me to tell me that I was a googlewhack, so surely I should show Marcus the same courtesy.

From: Dave Gorman

To: Marcus

Subject: Googlewhack.

Hello Marcus,

Did you know that you are a googlewhack?

Dave

Marcus replied to my email. Unsurprisingly, he wanted to know what a googlewhack was. I wrote back explaining it as best I could and the news seemed to delight him.

Dave,

Being a googlewhack seems to me to be a wonderful thing. If I understand it correctly it’s a one in 3 billion chance and who wants to be one of the 2,999,999,999 in this world? Not me!

Which I guess is what you’d expect from a man who collects pictures of women and dogs. And I had to agree with him. I had enjoyed Francophile Namesakes for much the same reason: I enjoyed my own little bit of uniqueness, I wasn’t one of the crowd, oh no, I was a googlewhack.

This was the beginning of a correspondence between Marcus and myself that would last several weeks. I liked Marcus immensely although I could never quite work out how self-aware he was. He possessed great charm, intelligence and a wonderfully dry sense of humour. Whenever I saw his name loitering in my inbox I was sure to open his email first as I knew it would provide something of a chuckle. Here was a man with diverse interests and opinions on current affairs, politics, sport and art. I couldn’t help but wonder what part of him had developed such an obsessive interest in secondhand photos of women and dogs? I knew I found Marcus funny, but I couldn’t tell you if he knew his website was funny. Was it a serious hobby to him or a deliberately arcane collection intended to amuse? I didn’t know the answer and I never plucked up the courage to ask him directly for fear of causing offence. After all, he seemed to take his website very seriously. But maybe that was part of the joke? I had come to value his friendship too much to risk losing it by delving too far in to precisely where the real Marcus began. Even though our friendship only existed in email correspondence it wasn’t long before the odd nature of how we had virtually ‘met’ was virtually forgotten and I stopped thinking of him as a mere email buddy. He was a friend, plain and simple, and that was good enough for me.

Incidentally, during this time my progress as a novelist was still nil. You’ll be glad to know however, that I painted the kitchen. Then some other work arrived to provide me with a more genuine distraction. I had a few engagements lined up in theatres. This pleased me greatly because it meant I was no longer failing to write the novel, I was just doing something else. It was a small tour and along the way it would take me to the Warwick Arts Centre for three nights. The Warwick Arts Centre is a peculiar name for the venue because it tends to give people the impression that it’s in Warwick when actually it’s in Coventry. Mind you, if I was based in Coventry I might not be quick to admit it either. Anyway, I was going to be staying in Coventry for three nights and seeing as it was only 20 miles from Birmingham (and 10 from Warwick) I thought I’d let Marcus know I was nearby and suggest we meet up. I sent him an email to tell him I was going to be in town and gave him details of my hotel, my mobile phone number and so on. I thought it would be nice to put a face to the emails.

Marcus didn’t call. I returned from Coventry and checked my email but there was no reply. Weird. He seemed to have disappeared. I was worried that I’d scared him away. Had I crossed some kind of line? Maybe internet buddies were meant to remain just that. Maybe he only wanted to exist within the confines of the world wide web where he could be whoever he wanted. Oh well. I shrugged my shoulders and carried on. I obviously didn’t know him as well as I thought.

Back in London, I returned my attention to the novel. Or rather I tried. And failed. Instead life became a series of self-imposed distractions, my flat a temple dedicated to the God of displacement activity and I its high priest. My mantra: ‘I’ll crack on with Chapter 1 just as soon as I’ve … vacuumed the carpets or cleaned out the attic or ironed my smalls or archived my photos or changed the sheets or mopped the floor or …well, or displaced my activity.’

The one thing I can say for displacement activity is that you sure do get a lot done. It’s just that the one thing you don’t do is the one thing you’re supposed to do. In my case, the one thing I’d been paid to do. I didn’t have the guts to own up. I didn’t have the guts to admit defeat. I should have called Jake, said I was having trouble starting, asked for help, advice, guidance. I didn’t. I remained convinced that when I actually got round to starting it would flow. Every day I failed to put any words down, I convinced myself that the words were there somewhere, building up inside me. One day, I reckoned, the dam would burst and a complete novel would flow out of me in a torrent.

I’ll crack on with Chapter 1 just as soon as I’ve cleaned the oven.

I’ll crack on with Chapter 1 just as soon as I’ve done these accounts.

I’ll crack on with Chapter 1 just as soon as I’ve done this crossword.

I had a freshly brewed pot of tea on the go and the Sunday papers spread out on the floor around me. I was whiling away the afternoon by slowly working my way through the Observer’s cryptic crossword. With cryptic clues the solutions are often a little obtuse and, as there was no theme to this puzzle, the words were unrelated to each other; the only thing they had in common was that they happened to share a crossword grid.

As I put more of these words down I found a theory forming in my head. I hadn’t thought about googlewhacking for weeks; my curiosity had been sated when I found my first ’whack but for some reason on this lazy Sunday it entered my consciousness once more. It occurred to me that two obtuse but unconnected words were the basic ingredients for a googlewhack. Perhaps a cryptic crossword might turn out to be a treasure trove of ’whacks? Word disassociation was clearly the order of the day. After all, if two words are connected in some way, the chances are they will inevitably share many a page on the internet. We all know that pizza and pineapple shouldn’t go together but, like it or not, they are connected and if you search for the two words on Google you’ll find hundreds of hits as a result. But word disassociation is a difficult game for the human brain to play; the moment you have one word lodged in your brain, all manner of connected words clamour for your attention. In a crossword, however, someone else has done the disassociating for you. Here before me was a collection of unconnected, obtuse words. Here was a checkerboard full of words that must surely be ripe for googlewhacking. My theory, Gorman’s First Theory of Googlewhacking, was that a cryptic crossword would be a good googlewhack generator.

I’ll crack on with Chapter 1, just as soon as I’ve finished this crossword and tested Gorman’s First Theory of Googlewhacking.

A couple of hours later I found myself with a completed cryptic crossword. This was a rare achievement for me but I think I must have been especially motivated by the whack factor. There were 26 words within the crossword and I set about trying them out in various likely, or rather unlikely, pairs. My first few goes didn’t yield a ’whack, but they did return low numbers: 7 hits, 4 hits, 2 hits, far closer to the elusive one than I had achieved with my first wild stabs in the dark all those weeks before.

But then, before my very eyes, a ’whack appeared. I’ll admit that there was a little manipulation on my part: 3 down gave me varsity and 17 across gave bonnet. Varsity Bonnet wasn’t a ’whack in itself, but with a little pluralisation from me … Varsities Bonnets: whack! My theory held water.

I looked for more: 7 down gave me nutter. I wasn’t sure a slang term like that would be in dictionary.com but it had to be worth a go. I tried pairing it up with 23 across, rarebit. Hmmm, four hits, but at least both words were ‘legal’. I tried pluralising again and … whack! Rarebit Nutters did the job: one hit!

I kept going, trying different combinations and pretty soon the crossword yielded its third and final ’whack: Termagant Holbein. I was wary of including the name of a German painter but Holbein was underlined so I knew it was in dictionary.com. I was more than happy to allow my doubts to pass and international googlewhacking rules to prevail.

Twenty-six solutions had given me three googlewhacks and it had only taken a few minutes to find them. My theory was correct: a cryptic crossword was an excellent googlewhack generator. I had discovered, nay, invented, a googlewhack engine. I was delighted! No doubt I was experiencing the same rush of excitement shared by all the great scientific pioneers. Alexander Graham Bell probably felt exactly like this when he invented the telephone. Except I was alone and I imagine Bell had someone to share his excitement with and if he didn’t, he could always call someone … and so could I.

I picked up my mobile phone and scrolled through the stored numbers wondering which of my friends would be most interested in this exciting revelation. When I saw DannyW highlighted my thumb moved to the green button. Of course, Dan would like this kind of thing.

I lowered my thumb but in the very instant that I hit the button my phone rang. Instead of dialling my mate, I found myself answering a call. I looked at the screen to see who it was but there was no name, just a number. 0121 something; Birmingham.

‘Hello?’ I said, tentatively.

‘Hellow Dive, it’s Marcus!’

I was astounded. I hadn’t thought about Marcus in weeks and I hadn’t thought about googlewhacking for even longer. It was as if I’d somehow summoned up the googlewhack genie.

‘Oi just wanted yower advoice?’

It might have tallied with his phone number but the strength of Marcus’s Brummie accent still took me by surprise. Now that I knew his voice, reading his emails would never be the same again.

‘My advice?’

‘Yuss.’

‘Roit.’

‘What?’

‘Right,’ I said, correcting myself.

I suffer from Wandering Accent Syndrome at times. My own origins lie in Stafford which, while in the West Midlands, refuses to cave into the familiar twang of the region. What it does have is a wishy-washy sort of non-accent. Southerners always think I’m from the North and Northerners always think I’m from the South. Midlanders never have a clue. It’s such a blank canvas that, when it’s confronted by a strong accent, it sometimes gives in and I end up adopting the accent of whoever I’m talking to. If I’m not careful it can sound like mockery, a fact that once saw me running faster than I’ve ever run before through the streets of Newcastle Upon Tyne. Or Noocassel! ’Pon Teen! Mon!, as I think I’d called it.

I won’t continue to try and type Marcus’s words in a Birmingham accent by the way as it always seems unfair to readers from Birmingham when that happens. I’m assuming that if you speak with a Birmingham accent you must read with one too, so you’ll be reading ‘Hellow Dive’ with a Birmingham accent squared and no-one needs that in their life. I’m sorry, the rest of you will just have to use your imaginations.

‘Look, I’m coming down to London in a couple of weeks’ time, for the weekend, like. I thought you might want to meet up,’ said Marcus.

Well, that was a bit rich! When I tried to arrange a meeting on his patch, he just disappeared!

‘OK. We’ll play your rules,’ I said, a note of sarcasm entering my voice.

‘What?’

‘Nothing. Forget it. It’d be good to see you. Have you anything in mind?’

‘Well, is there anywhere near you that would be good for photos?’

‘Photos?’

‘Of women and dogs,’ he said, seemingly surprised that it wasn’t my first thought. ‘You know, for my collection.’

I had no idea where to buy secondhand photos of women and dogs and I didn’t really fancy placing an advert. I thought about it for a moment.

‘We could try Spitalfields market?’

‘Do you think they’ll have some?’

‘Well, there’s lots of secondhand stuff,’ I said, hedging my bets. I looked around me. On the wall directly in front of me was a large dented metal sign reclaimed from some old office supplies company. It was now screwed to my wall and acting as a magnetic noticeboard. To my right, on the kitchen wall the word ‘eat’ was spelt out in two-foot tall 3D letters that had once been part of a car dealer’s shopfront. The underside of my coffee table was illuminated by a lightbox, originally designed for viewing x-rays but long since removed from some hospital wall. This was all junk I’d bought from Spitalfields in order to decorate my home (and delay the start of Chapter 1) so there was no telling what could be found there.

‘Look, I can’t promise you there’ll be any photos, but of all the places I know, it’s the most likely.’

‘Wicked!’ said Marcus.

He took a long time on the word ‘wicked’, filling it with zest, taking the two syllables to their limit, stretching the word from Birmingham to London and back again. If it’s possible to hear someone giving you a thumbs up, I think I heard it then.

There were no photos of Marcus on his website, which wasn’t surprising as he was neither a woman nor a dog, but it did mean that when we met two weeks later I had no real idea what to expect.

We had arranged to meet outside Liverpool Street Station, at a small Starbucks coffee shed. So, what would a man who collects secondhand photos of women and dogs look like? What should I expect? Maybe he’d have greasy hair and bad teeth, wear a dark suit with brown shoes? Or would it be a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches? Surely the voice that delivered that ‘wicked’ must have emerged from a round rosy-cheeked face, a jolly butcher, a clean-shaven Santa. Potential Marcuses flicked through my head and every time someone approached the coffee counter I weighed up the possibility that this was my man.

‘You must be Dave.’

I knew the voice immediately and shook the hand that was being offered. He’d appeared from nowhere, managing to get from the station door to me without being picked up by my radar. In his late thirties, Marcus had neatly trimmed hair that had greyed before its time. He was wearing a navy blue sweatshirt with the words ‘Warwick Castle’ written in mock gothic script and neatly pressed blue jeans that he wore like smart trousers that just happened to be made out of denim. He had a small canvas rucksack, which I assumed he’d used to carry the electronic cloaking device that had so effectively disabled my radar.

Within the walls of the market, Marcus was like a laser guided missile. He paid no heed to the organic vegetables, the health drinks, the handmade soaps, antique mirrors, imported exotica, circuit-board lampshades, leather jackets, retro track suits and ironic T-shirts and instead walked directly to a stall loaded up with military memorabilia, 1970s tennis rackets, a battered oboe, three shop dummies and a box full of Rubik’s Cubes. Beneath the table, in a fruit box, covered in a tea towel was a collection of photos. I don’t know how he knew they were there unless he could smell them, but he went straight to them without pause, crouched down and started riffling through the box.

I stood and watched, amazed at the speed with which his fingers worked. There must have been several thousand photos in the box and Marcus gave each one a cursory glance, taking in the essential facts in the blink of an eye. I watched as black and white images of strangers, most likely dead strangers, flashed by. I saw the same faces repeated over and over – this must have been one family’s collection. I saw kids grow up and parents age and wondered what journey they’d been on to land here in a market, somebody else’s memories for sale. Then the hypnotic, repetitive flicking of fingers and flickering eyes paused. Marcus pulled a photo out of the box and, with a tiny punch of the air exhaled a breathy ‘Wicked!’

He passed the photo to me and I held on to it while he returned to the search. I looked at the photo, at the woman and her dog. I guessed from her clothes and demeanour that both she and the twentieth century were in their forties when the picture had been taken. The dog stared blankly back at me. I hoped that photos of my nearest and dearest wouldn’t end up for sale to strangers, but if they ever did, I hoped they would be bought by someone like Marcus. He cared for his photos, he gave them some kind of value at least. This woman and her dog would be better served as treasures in Marcus’s collection than they would in this box beneath a table in a damp East London market. A second photo emerged moments later and then a third and, with each one, Marcus grew more excited. And the strange thing was, so did I. Somehow I’d become a part of this world. For a few brief moments the idea of collecting these snaps, these moments from other people’s lives made complete sense to me. The search became sport and each photo Marcus thrust in my direction was a goal scored. A fourth photo was passed to me.

‘Wicked!’ That was me this time. Marcus didn’t bat an eyelid.

The fourth photo turned out to be the last and I watched as Marcus handed over some small change in return for his quarry. He was clearly delighted and I was delighted for him. And, in some strange way, I realised I was delighted for myself too.

To celebrate I treated Marcus to Sunday lunch at my local, the Approach Tavern, a marvellous free house that serves great food. It has an art gallery upstairs that I’ve never been to but I find the food tastes better knowing it’s there.

‘I’ve had a great day, Dave,’ said Marcus, supping from his pint of bitter.

‘So have I, mate,’ I said. Because I had.

‘It’s amazing, isn’t it? That something this good can come from something so random? You’re a googlewhack and I’m a googlewhack and here we both are!’

‘Francophile Namesakes and Dork Turnspit.’

‘They must be almost impossible to find, these googlewhacks.’

‘Well, they’re not that hard,’ I said because, of course, I knew that a googlewhack engine was printed in the newspaper each day.

‘They must be. I mean it’s one in three billion’.

‘Yeah. But there must be lots of them,’ I said. ‘Google indexes three billion pages, but there might be millions of ’whacks out there.’

‘Do you think?’

‘Tell you what, if you want, you can try and find one now. See for yourself.’

‘Sugar?’ I asked, pushing the plunger of the cafetiere down.

‘No ta, Dave.’

We were back in my flat. Marcus was sat at my desk staring at Google, trying to think of two whackable words. I passed him his coffee.

‘How’re you doing?’

‘I’m still thinking.’

I decided that a bit of showing off was in order. I left Marcus’s mind to wander through the extremes of his vocabulary and sat myself down on the sofa. I picked up the Observer and turned to the crossword. Oh yes, I’d fill this baby in, let Gorman’s First Theory of Googlewhacking take over and the resulting haul of whacks would be sure to impress.

I looked up and saw Marcus sitting at the computer, tip-tapping away at the keyboard. I felt a small pang of guilt. I knew that that chair should have been filled by a 31-year-old aspiring novelist with a ginger beard. I knew that all of this, this meeting, this day, this demonstration of googlewhacking, all of this was really just another way of putting off the novel.

I shook the guilt out of me and tried to refocus on the crossword, but somehow, knowing what was really going on in the back of my mind rather killed my enthusiasm. Maybe it was the lunchtime pint but try as I might I couldn’t concentrate on any of the clues. It didn’t matter if I did the crossword or not, it was all just play-acting. The only thing I was really doing was not writing. My mind started to wander instead and my eyes drifted around the page. And then I saw something remarkable. Something that made me leap out of my chair in celebration.

‘WICKED!’ I shouted, but it sounded odd.

My voice seemed to have an echo. The echo seemed to have a Birmingham accent. I turned to see that Marcus was also out of his chair and in a similar state of celebration. He stood with one arm aloft, like a cricketer acknowledging applause from the pavilion. We had both leapt to our feet in celebration at the same moment but for completely different reasons.

My celebrations were inspired by something on the page. Besides that week’s crossword was the solution from a week before and beneath that were the names of the winners from a fortnight ago. And I was one of them! D Gorman, London E2; there it was in the middle of the list of five names. I was a winner!

Now you might well feel that winning the Observer cryptic crossword competition doesn’t really merit a hands-in-the-air-shouting-out-wicked style celebration, but bear in mind that earlier that day I had been almost as excited by the discovery of a photo of a woman and her dog. I was clearly highly susceptible to celebration that day.

At the foot of the page it explained that the winners would receive the New Penguin English Dictionary worth £15.99 but that wasn’t what excited me. In fact, I didn’t even realise there was a prize to begin with. I was just genuinely delighted to be a winner. Winning felt good! Sixteen quid’s worth of dictionary was neither here nor there, I’m not normally one of life’s winners and sampling a taste of victory was … well, it was wicked.

Excitedly I explained my excitement to Marcus while excitedly he explained his to me. The cause of his celebration was the discovery of his first googlewhack: Unconstructive Superegos. I looked at the Google page a bit closer, taking in the details. It obeyed all the rules, it was clearly a legal ’whack.

‘Well done, Marcus, nice one,’ I said patting him on the back.

‘Well done yourself, Dave, that’s very impressive, that is,’ said Marcus nodding in the direction of the newspaper.

‘Let’s have a look at the site then,’ I said and Marcus moved the mouse and clicked on the link in one swift move.

The website opened up, and what I saw made me feel uneasy. Gradually, I was consumed by an eerie feeling, as if I’d seen a ghost. I felt like I’d been to this website before, I suppose what I was experiencing was a sort of online déjà vu only it was stronger than that. I didn’t just feel like I’d been there before, I knew I’d been there before. But that couldn’t possibly be true, could it? Marcus was a googlewhack, which meant that he represented a one in three billion chance. If a one in three billion chance sits in your living room and takes another one in three billion chance, the result just should not be what you’d call familiar territory.

And yet I couldn’t shake that sense of familiarity. www.LearningMethods.com didn’t ring any immediate bells but I scoured the page looking for evidence, determined to confirm for myself that I wasn’t imagining things.

And then I saw it.

At the bottom of the page I saw the copyright information with the name of the site’s owner. Not only had I been to this site before but, I was stunned to discover, I knew the man responsible for creating it. I knew him well. His was a name I would never forget. Unconstructive Superegos led to www.LearningMethods.com and that led to … Dave Gorman.