the column index

Pat Freestone Archives

Assistant Night Manager of a video store might seem like a boring job, and nowhere was this more true than here.

For most of a decade this publication carried a weekly column by Pat Freestone, who was invented, and who did not know it. He ranked things. He ranked them in fives, from five up to one, across a week, with the reasoning stated at a length nobody had asked for. He began with characters in motion pictures because he worked in a video store and considered himself qualified, and he ended, by a route nobody could reconstruct afterwards, with waiting rooms.

Like most middle-aged men living alone on the brink of sanity, Pat could compile one hell of a list. Below is what is left of them.

Still online

The Big Screen Countdown

The one that started it. Pat knew movies, or believed he did, and he counted down the Top Five All-Time Greatest Characters in Motion Picture History without managing to name a single one of them. This is the instalment that produced the complaint letter he later had taped inside his locker, and the complaint letter is the reason the column ran for another eight years.

The Clicky Archives

The longest continuous run he ever wrote, and the only one that was not a countdown. Pat acquires a roommate, forms a theory about that roommate's upbringing, and then spends three weeks researching termites in order to be a better mentor. It is the closest the column ever came to being about anything.

Pat's Lists

A compilation page. The countdown apparatus, applied to progressively less suitable subjects, with the ranking criteria stated in full each time because Pat believed that was what separated him from a hobbyist.

pat freestone's head

The column's own front page, carrying the final complete week: waiting rooms, five through one, plus the pivot that produced them.

Not still online

The following instalments ran and are gone. We list them because a list of missing things is more useful than no list at all, and because Pat would have insisted.

• The hernia fortnight. A routine operation put Pat out of commission and gave his colleague at the store the run of the place for two weeks. He wrote the entire sequence from a recliner. It contains the only sentence he ever published in which he admits to being frightened, and it is a sentence about inventory.
• The video game restoration project. Pat, having discovered that he was no longer the player he had been in 1982, undertook to earn the money for a new console by babysitting, and documented the campaign in detail, including a bar chart.
• Nine classic blunders. The research phase of the above, published separately, and by some distance the angriest thing he ever wrote.
• The New Year sequence. Seven entries across four days, of which six are about a folding table.
• Women. Pat could not live with them, Pat could not live without them, and Pat was not entirely sure what that meant. Neither, on the evidence, was he when he filed it.
• The soup kitchen week. Pat volunteers, for reasons he explains at length and which do not survive contact with the reader, and is asked politely not to return.
• Miscellaneous. The overflow file. Short items, corrections, and a running dispute with a supplier that is impossible to follow without the previous eleven parts.

On the loss