Zak Asgard

Last month, the tech startup Orchid introduced its personal AI assistant to the world. The launch video has been viewed over 27 million times on X. It begins with a young couple. A jaunty instrumental version of ‘Valerie’ plays in the background to remind the viewer that Orchid is completely normal and not the by-product of an unrelenting cacotopia. The hapless boyfriend, Sam, has forgotten their anniversary. What a loveable klutz! The girlfriend — who isn’t afforded a name — texts Orchid, the couple’s incorporeal personal assistant, to ‘fix’ the situation. ‘Wayyyyyy ahead of you,’ replies the amoral software masquerading as a gal pal. ‘If this works, he owes me dinner too.

When I think of my childhood summers, I think of Mr Whippy. I think of those familiar, distant Pavlovian chimes, carrying the promise of frozen, sugary goodness. I think of the zombified children sprinting across the common towards a tutti frutti Mercedes-Benz Sprinter. I think of 99 Flakes with all the toppings, of oyster delights half-dipped in chocolate, of plastic cones filled with radioactive-blue soft serve and gumballs… The ice cream van has been dying a slow death these past 30 years. In the halcyon era of the soft-serve automobile, it was estimated that there were more than 30,000 ice cream vans roaming the UK. Today, that figure sits at around 2,500, with some estimates as low as 1,500.  If the ice cream van is a rare sight, its siren call is even rarer.

So you want to live forever? Excellent. You’ve come to the right place. Here at Gilgamesh-Makropulos Limited, we know a thing or two about immortality. First, we need to track your metrics: biological age versus chronological age, average number of erections per night, metabolic health, maximal oxygen consumption, heart rate variability, stool volume and colour and salivary flow rate. Sound good? My assistant will fetch the paperwork.  This might seem like the beginning of a potboiler sci-fi rip-off. But it’s actually closer to our reality than Bernard Williams would have liked. While we still haven’t achieved immortality, the cult of ‘longevity’ has become something of a gold rush in recent years.

In September 2018, I started my undergraduate degree in English and Philosophy — a useful vocation, I know. My mother and I drove from London to Bristol in her green Mazda2, walked through the rain to my student digs, blu-tacked my Johnny Cash poster over the fist-shaped hole in the wall, embraced and then said goodbye.  And so began my university experience. Three years of debauchery. Three years of dangly earrings, unwashed pants and forgetting to call my mother. Three years of pitta and chips, irritable bowel syndrome, mullets, £2 cider, sanctimonious student theatre, lecturer strikes, Covid Zoom calls and missed deadlines.  And then it was over. I was no longer a student. I was a graduate. And what did I have to show for it?

It’s 11 a.m. and the letting agent is late. As I wait outside an apartment block for my viewing, I watch as two drunk men fight over a packet of Wotsits. By the time the agent arrives, one of the drunk men is motionless on the floor. The other sits on a bench, licking orange Wotsit dust from his fingers. ‘Great location!’ says the agent. ‘Couldn’t get closer to the station if you tried.’ Once inside, I immediately cover my nose. ‘What’s that stench?’ I ask. ‘It smells like someone microwaved a used nappy in here.’ The agent shrugs. He shows me the rooms, of which there are few. I point at the mould in the bathroom which is beginning to take on a humanoid form. The agent shrugs again. We finish the tour in the kitchen.

It is 2089. My grandson tugs at the hem of my musty corduroy trousers. ‘Pop-pop,’ he says. ‘Were you alive during the Great Pret Pickle Shortage of 2026?’ There is an almighty crash of thunder. A gust of wind throws open a window. A scream can be heard from outside. I look down at my hands, which are visibly shaking, and compose myself. ‘I was there,’ I whisper. ‘I was there when Pret lost the jambon beurre. Man and sandwich were never the same again.’ I’m being facetious, of course. I couldn’t care less about Pret A Manger’s ham, pickle and butter roll going MIA. The coffee giant claims the sandwich has gone missing due to a temporary cornichon (pickle) shortage – much to the dismay, we’re told, of its loyal, city banker target market.

Last week I dreamt I was a cowboy. My name was Billy ‘Toothpick’ Pickett, and I was the fastest pistolero east of Whiskey Row. I dreamt of robbing stagecoaches. I dreamt of playing three-card monte with Toothless Dan down by Granite Creek. I dreamt of owning a Smith & Wesson and shooting buffalo. I dreamt of riding a buckskin stallion named Tex. I dreamt of vintage Americana. And then I woke up.  This was the third cowboy dream in a fortnight. Once again, I had fallen asleep watching videos of cowboys on Instagram and paid the price. For months, my algorithm has been inundated with visions of a neo-Wild West. Videos of Monument Valley and the sandstone rocks of Utah. Young men with mullets camping in the Sierra Nevada.

Do you remember the Cereal Killer Café? The year was 2014: a time of sleeveless plaid shirts, Mr Pringle moustaches, man buns and undercuts. This was the era of proto vapes and misplaced millennial hope, of the indie band Vampire Weekend and trilby hats mistaken for fedoras. When the Cereal Killer Café opened in Brick Lane that year to sell cereal and milk for stupid prices, it signalled the acme of hyper-gentrification and the ‘peak’ east London aesthetic. Many of us saw its pandemic-related closure in 2020 as a sign that sanity had returned to the capital’s restaurant scene. We were wrong. The Cereal Killer Café might be gone but the public’s credulity for overpriced Instagrammable restaurants is piping hot.

Man on the television says you’ll never pay off your student loan. Lady on social media says the UK has the worst unemployment crisis since 1932. Politician says you’re off to war. Sally from HR says the company is ‘restructuring’ and fires you over a Microsoft Teams meeting. Science guy on Instagram says there’s a new disease in India. Ex-girlfriend says you’ve let yourself go and your body looks like dropped yoghurt.  In short, you’ve got a lot going on. So, what can you do about it? Well, according to some, the answer is simple: spend. Spend what you don’t have. Spend on what you don’t need. Spend until your overdraft is gasping for air, and then spend some more.

‘Do you want to stream something?’ my girlfriend asked me. It was 5 p.m. on a Saturday and I’d had a horrendous week. I’d caught one of those mutant viruses that you learn about in nursery rhymes or at the London Dungeon. The cough was the worst part. It was the sort of cough that evacuates a Tube carriage. It was the sort of cough you hear in a western before the protagonist says: ‘Old Billy Boy got consumption. There ain’t a darn thing we can do ’bout it. Doc says he got weeks. Poor bastard. He ain’t never gon’ make it to Montana.’ In short, I was feeling out of sorts. And as such, I was ready for some mind-numbing television. ‘We can watch something,’ I said. ‘What do you fancy?

If OPM had released an antithetical response to their 2000 magnum opus ‘Heaven Is a Halfpipe’, I’m certain it would have been called ‘Hell Is a British Service Station’. Had this song been made, I think it would have gone a little something like this: ‘If I die before I wake / I’ll spend eternity in a Welcome Break / ’Cause right now on earth, I can’t do jack / I’m at a service station and my tyre’s flat / Now hell would be a Roadchef / With a Costa bacon bap / And hell would be the toilets / After a curry at Watford Gap.’ Admittedly, the lyrics could do with some workshopping, but you get the point.

Let me introduce you to the performative chef. The performative chef is a man. He is between 23 and 29 years of age. Both of his arms are covered in fine-line tattoos. His favourite tattoo is a quote from Philip Larkin that reads: ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.’ His parents are in fact lovely people, but he’ll never tell you that. He sports a mullet (or buzzcut depending on the season). He rides a fixed-gear bike to work. He exclusively wears oversized clothes. He talks to every stranger that will listen about getting an eyebrow piercing. He studied classics at a Russell Group university, not that it matters; he did the degree just because it was something to do.

I’m 11 years old, and I’m crouched inside the broken shell of a former London bus. It’s my friend’s birthday party. He turns 12 today, and he has just been shot. Not by a real bullet, of course, but by a paintball. I look over at his father, who is busy reloading his gun’s hopper. ‘This is my paintball gun,’ he murmurs. ‘There are many like it, but this one is mine. My paintball gun is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it…’ Without warning, his father springs up like a sleeper agent given their activation trigger and unleashes a barrage of bullets (paintballs) on a fleeing group of squealing ten-year-olds. ‘Ooh-rah!’ he shouts. ‘Get some!’ Welcome to the strange world of paintball parties.

I’m standing at a bar in a car park on the rooftop of a shopping centre. I ask the bartender if the beer on draught is big or small. ‘That depends on your definition,’ he says. ‘What is big? What is small?’ The oonce-oonce of German trance music makes it hard to hear, and I’m distracted by the solitary figure on the dance floor wearing all black and contorting her body into the shape of a pretzel. ‘Is the beer groß or klein?’ I shout. The bartender – who is well over 50 and has the fashion sense of a Green Day groupie from 2005 – just smirks and says, ‘That’s for you to decide.’ I order the beer anyway. It is small (klein). I don’t tip. This is Berlin. Berlin is big.

Visiting Ikea is one of life’s inevitabilities. There’s an Ikea on every inhabited continent, 487 across 63 countries. But Ikea is more than a furniture retailer. Ikea is an idea, an abstraction, a way of life. No other shop has captured the hearts and minds of the public in quite the same way, at least not in the UK. Argos is a fate worse than purgatory; Woolworths has gone to the great retailer in the sky; John Lewis is for the Chelsea tractor drivers among us; WH Smith is only bearable when you’re at an airport, and their drinks taste like they’ve been stored in lukewarm bathwater; and Curry’s is selling AI fridges (I don’t want an AI fridge, thank you – I’ve seen 2001: A Space Odyssey; I know how this ends.

Don’t get me wrong: London’s transport system is still one of the best in the world. I’d sooner have a backstreet dentist with jittery hands pry my right molar out with a rusty wrench than wait for a bus in Naples or attempt to understand the New York subway map. But that doesn’t mean Transport for London is without fault. The mere thought of the Central line during rush hour is enough to turn the sanest of commuters into a babbling, dribbling, catatonic mess.  TfL customers are dissatisfied: staff are nowhere to be seen; criminals use the Tube network like a labyrinthian tunnel system, evading prosecution at every turn; and strikes and service disruptions have driven a wedge between commuters and transport workers. But it’s not just the Tube.

I’ve been having this recurring nightmare recently that involves James Corden. The year is 2045. Society has collapsed and London is under quarantine. There is no transport in the city, so survivors get around on foot – though, for some inexplicable reason, TfL workers are still on strike. I live in a bin and survive on a diet of eggshells and cold Rustlers burgers. In my nightmare, I am abducted by a gang of Mad Max-inspired bandits who take me to the Asda Superstore in Clapham Junction and torture me for information. My constitution is strong. I refuse to tell them where I’ve hidden my scarce supply of mango-flavoured vapes. One of the bandits produces a laptop and says, grinning, ‘This will get him talking.’ They pin my eyes open and place the screen before me.

When I was a child, all I wanted to do was talk. In fact, it got so bad that my primary school teachers were forced to give me a ‘wriggle cushion’ – an inflatable seat designed to pacify hyper children. I’m sure there’s a diagnosis in that somewhere. And as the years went by, I became known for my loquacity. Teachers at parents’ evenings would look at my mother with compassionate eyes and say things like, ‘My, my, our Zak is quite the communicator, isn’t he?’ Translation: your son is a gabby little monster. It was only when I reached maturity that I realised over-talking is a serious affliction and not a commendable virtue. It’s a sure-fire way of ostracising yourself from others.

Hello and welcome to my podcast Are you a high agency individual? My name is Muscle McSteroid Face, but my friends call me the Beast for short. Please enjoy the next 135 minutes while I talk about myself and make you feel inadequate. I am a high agency individual. I was born this way, but you can learn my skills for an introductory offer of $59.99 a month (link in my bio). A high agency person is a risk taker. We are mavericks. We are the writers of our own destiny, the authors of our own story. We are leaders. We make tough decisions. If you were stuck in a rancid prison cell on the corner of some godforsaken slab of land, who would you call? You would call me. When a bouncer tells me that I’m too drunk to get in, do I simply walk away and go home? No!