Akira the Don - I Am Not Dead (Yeah!)

Why wasn't this number one? It's a ruddy great video and a ruddy great song. I meant to go along and be a zombie for the video but I forgot. More fool me. Sod Coco Sumner and her pointless crowd - 2010 will be the year of Akira the Don.

The limpest of protests

Anyone moving into the Kennington area soon realises they have a decision to make that will define their time in the neighbourhood. Yes, the gang colours thing is important, and on behalf of the Oval Souljas I'd like to issue a polite warning to the K-Town Bludz that I don't want no more displayin' in my front yard. But there is a more fundamental choice to make - are you Kennington Tandoori (aka the KT) or Gandhi's?

Operating within a few doors of each other, they have very different styles. Gandhi's is an old-school curry house whereas the KT is more inclined to put your food on an oddly-shaped plate, drizzle unidentifiable red and green sauces around the corners and charge you 25% more for the privilege. The two compete fiercely for the custom of the local politicians and omega-list celebrities. Gandhi's scored a knock-out blow by being chosen by Alistair Darling to feed the late-night deliberations over the October 08 banking bail-out, but the KT seems to have the edge on the random celebs ("the best naan in London" - The Kaiser Chiefs).

In fact, Hot Stuff in Vauxhall is the best local bet by a mile but only has a tiny amount of seats, so my Plan B of choice is a vegetable thali at Gandhi's. I've generally found the service more friendly, the food equivalent in quality and the bill less cheeky. But the KT has been boarded up for weeks undergoing major internal surgery, and as I'd be remiss in my duties as a prominent local fatty if I didn't give the new incarnation a chance the missus and I popped along at the weekend.

The immediate impression is that they've increased the size of the restaurant by 20% and the number of seats by 40%. As before tables hug each side of the narrow space, but now a wobbly line of two-person islands form a thin spine down the middle, leaving two incredibly narrow tracks on either side for customers and waiters to walk down sideways like crabs. Sit as we did in the middle and you'll get a constant parade of crotches passing extremely close to your face as people squeeze past, sucking in their stomachs and apologising.

The food is exactly as competent and overpriced as ever, with the clip joint practice of charging £3 for two papadoms still especially vile. The service is exactly as piss poor as ever. My starter lagged ten minutes behind the missus's, and my desperate attempts to make eye contact with the waiter to hurry things along were complicated by the good old natter he was having on his Blackberry. It took four requests to get some tap water, although a paid-for lager arrived within seconds. The bill was full of fictional beers and after I paid a corrected version the guy wandered off with my credit card still hanging out of the chip and pin.

I paid the tip, of course. I'm English. Rather than take any kind of action at the time and risk causing a fuss I'd rather brood for a couple of days, then set out my complaints in tedious detail on a website the waiter will never read. I'll quietly boycott them in a way that they couldn't possibly notice until some social circumstance lands me back in the middle row, nose to groin with the same waiter as he calculates how to spend the tip he knows I'll give him whatever he does to me or my food because I'm such a completely craven pussy. Yeah, I'll show them good and proper.

There's no such name as Brabara

Having been a slavish devotee of the first series of Flight of the Conchords I was quite disappointed with the episodes that I caught of the second. The songs in particular had too much money and not enough chuckles thrown at them. That said, in a moment of chronically hungover iTunes weakness yesterday I bought the album of the songs from the series and there are definitely some gems that passed me by. Like this brilliant R Kelly pastiche:

Photographic evidence

In January 2003 I didn't have much going for me. I'd left university the summer before with a history degree and no idea what to do next at all. On realising that I was only directly qualified for a job requiring me to toy with the G2 crossword all morning and play Championship Manager all afternoon, and that such opportunities seemed scarce, I returned to my home village in Nottinghamshire and sunk into a deep malaise.

By January my parents were understandably weary of accomodating a bad-tempered, rarely employed and expensively hungry layabout. My father, then an executive recruiter, did some work for a woodchip factory in North Wales and in the course of the conversation learned that they needed a short term marketer. By the time he left they somehow had the impression he was harbouring an available and keen young man in proud possession of a marketing degree. I had no good excuse not to take the job, so I was signed up - for six months I would commute from Nottingham to Wales on Monday mornings and return on Friday evenings, staying with a local couple in the nearby village in the week. My job would be Marketing Assistant to the Product Development Manager, primarily helping with the organisation of a wood-based design show intended to showcase the factory's fine range of medium density fibreboard and associated other woodchip-based products.

The strangeness of those few months cannot be incorporated into one blog post, or possibly even one hundred. But last week I was remembering one of my stranger regular jobs and thought it might serve as a stand-alone snippet.

The woodchip factory was owned by a scary old Austrian millionaire. I know he was scary because all the very hard and manly men who ran the business were plainly all petrified of him. Living as he did in Austria but liking as he did to shout at people, he wanted a way to make sure his Welsh factory was being maintained to his own Howard Hughes-esque standard of cleanliness.

This meant me being dispatched every Friday morning to do a lap of the acres of factory floors and the woodchip yard with a digital camera and strict instructions to take photos of certain areas from specific angles. I would then paste these photos into a template and email it to Austria, where I like to think he poured over them with a magnifying glass in a darkened oak-pannelled study, slamming his wizened fist on the desk every time he spotted a stray pallet.

Unfortunately for him, his rigid process didn't really raise the average cleanliness of the factory. For the first couple of weeks I plodded around, striking a incongruous figure in my suit, long black overcoat, reflective jacket and hard hat, snapping away and no doubt getting a lot of the foremen a trans-European telling off. Then they all got wise to the connection between my Friday morning saunter and the earache, and I started to notice forklift trucks whizzing stray crates out of my way, people with brooms racing across the site towards me and large men appearing at my elbow to say things like "Hows about you takes this one so's that large pile of crap over there don't appear, know what I mean?" before cracking their knuckles and gobbing on the floor.

The risk calculation was clear and the scary but far away man lost out to the scary and quite close indeed men. So a travesty of a pantomime ensued for the remaining weeks of my stay where I would go to each point, wait patiently for a small area to be emptied and swept, dutifully take my photo and be sent on my way with a gruff "good lad".

I actually enjoyed that job. It meant the end of the week was almost here and got me out of the portacabin I worked in for the rest of the time. But of all the pointless tasks I've performed for money, it was certainly represented the most elaborate waste of time.

Written in the glow of office lighting

There's no Ho-Ho-Ho in my life at the moment, no matter how many times I see Jason Donovan warbling about prawn platters in a festive Iceland ad. Before I can clear off for Chrimbo I have to do my feeble best to plough through a work mountain so large that Ranulph Fiennes is tackling it from another slope.

I may be flat out but rest assured there's still time in the schedule for some serious self pity. Canteen yoghurt for lunch again. WHY AM I SO CURSED? All the sectretaries have legged it at 17.29 and 59 seconds sharp, as per bloody usual. WHY CAN'T I BE A SECRETARY INSTEAD? There's people moving around in the street outside who are laughing and smiling and happy. WHY DON'T THEY COME IN AND HELP ME?

This isn't helped by my brain increasingly becoming a morning person. Or brain. 7am - I'm on fire. 11am - cooking on gas. 2pm - oooh, slowing down. 4pm - starting to slur words. 6pm - white noise. Still I sit here into the night, gamely staring at dreary Word documents to no avail while a gentle snoring leaks out of my ears.

There's only one hope - the lottery. Operation Derren Brown Kidnap starts here. Who's in?

Parklife

Every morning I walk through Kennington Park on my way to work. It's usually quite pleasant - the squirrels scampering, the joggers huffing and puffing, the council estate devil dogs tearing across the grass, weights dangling from their necks as they train for their next cage fight.

Unfortunately whoever opens the various gates each morning has set up his own version of the laboratory experiment where a rat has to sniff out some cheese in a maze. The gate in is always open, but it's become a lucky dip as to which gate out will be unlocked. On Wednesday, already late for an early meeting, I was blocked at two exits and and ended up doubling back half the length of the park.

I assume I was being watched by a park keeper wearing a lab coat and perched on a tree branch, making notes on his clipboard. "Subject 17: grows increasingly panicked and kicks a pile of leaves in frustration. Other active subjects openly amused by this display of effeminate rage. Note: tomorrow, see if Subject 17 is fooled by fake Exit sign pointing towards pit filled with dog crap".

Bad Santa

Wandering around a grimly festive Tesco last week sparked a long-forgotten memory. I was shopping with my mother at the age of about 8, and my eye was caught by the cover of the Christmas Radio Times. It was a photograph of a chortling Santa sitting on a snowy log and brandishing his Radio Times. He looked pretty excited about the Birds of a Feather and The Russ Abbott Show seasonal specials, and rightly so.

So far, so unexciting. But then I realised what Santa was holding. The same magazine that I was! With the same cover showing Santa on a log waving a Radio Times. And in that picture, the Santa was holding a magazine with a cover showing Santa on a log waving a Radio Times. And so on until the final miniscule image of Santa's magazine was indecipherable.

Bear in mind that this was in the days before Photoshop or digital trickery, and that I had a tiny brain more used to thinking about Silly Putty and Micro Machines. I literally stared at it for about 10 minutes, trying to comprehend what this could mean. Was I dreaming? Did Santa travel in time? I asked my Mum how it was possible, and she said she didn't know. I felt unnerved and uncomfortable, and thought about it for days afterwards.

I think that was the first time I really wrestled hard with a problem that I couldn't make head nor tail of. I've obviously had plenty of practice since (the last episode of Battlestar Galactica recently provoked a similar reaction) but that was when my general ignorance in the ways of the world became brutally clear. Thanks, Santa.

Oi won’t harve it!

Don't worry readers - I survived the stag weekend. Phew.

The cult of the stag is presumably an invention of the International Drinking Games Association and the Guild of Strippers. Luckily the best man sensibly rejected the lure of the grottier parts of the easyJet empire and booked a house near Exmoor that could sleep 20-odd thirsty men.

My group arrived late on the Friday, having spent a while hopelessly lost in the depths of Devon's windiest lanes. At one point I went to a B&B for directions and had a bellowed conversation with the owners through the glass door. The wife wanted to let me in ("Oh, you poor dear!") but got extremely short thrift from her proto-Tony Martin of a husband ("Absolutely not - oi won’t harve it! Oi don't know 'im, see"). God knows how anyone actually gets a room there.

We made it in the end and had a boys night of booze, crisps and pool. But then Saturday dawned with black clouds and horizontal, thunderous rain. "Shame", I said to one of the stags, just about containing the glee in my voice. "We'll have to not go paintballing or quad biking. I'd been so looking forward to it. Drat!" I then just about contained the panic on my face as he reassured me that both are designed to be enjoyed in Somme-like weather conditions, and that there was no chance at all of a cancellation. "Hooray!" I croaked before going to my room and staring at the pitifully inappropriate selection of clothes I’d packed. I would be fully waterproofed, but only up to my ankles.

Hours later I was standing outside a portacabin in a dismal strip of wood. The other stags milled about adjusting their face masks and overalls, except for the husband-to-be who was dressed in a full-body fox costume. A distinctly feral guide whittled a stick into a spear and bragged about taking down a pheasant that morning with his trusty paint-firing penis extension. We ran around for a bit - well, some people ran. I took the coward’s option whenever possible of defending our flag which, due to the fact that the arena was a three-level crag that a mountain goat would find a bit tricky, was rarely in any danger from the other team.

For the last game I was sent on a diversionary run to draw the other team’s fire. The team captain cut an inspirational figure as he emphasised the critical nature of the mission, before re-adjusting his tail and grimly flipping back his nose and whiskers. This was war. I headed along a steep, densely wooded ridge, stopping only to fall into bushes and trip over roots. I heard a distant round of paintball fire and fired a few rounds in its general direction. After a short pause I was immediately shot at least five times in the chest and started the long stumble back to the portacabin, passing my fellow crack divertee as he howled in pain after a tussle with some nettles. Our captain may have over-estimated our capabilities.

I skipped the quad biking as I was literally 100% sure I would die, and probably take out a few other people, if I went anywhere near it. Then it was back to the ranch for a great night of steady boozing, including a simple drinking game based around rude words that led to a 20 minute argument about whether “hymen” qualified. The final say went to the most passionate objector, who thought that if a word could appear on the 6 O’Clock News it could not be construed as being rude. He then undermined his argument somewhat with the example “Bong! A female celebrity was today involved in a road accident. She may have injured her hymen.” The drinking game dispersed and I moved to the pool room where I was having a grand old time until around 4am when someone described Showgirl by The Auteurs as “boring” and skipped the track, whereupon I went to bed in a huff. I am 28 years old.

It’s the hen night this weekend. Rollerdisco. Girls are too smart for paintball.

Ambush dream

Sleepy girlfriend trying to remember what she was dreaming about this morning:

"It wasn't a nice dream - it was an ambush dream. Turned out Captain Kirk wasn't my friend after all. Hold on - I was Captain Kirk! Oh, no, wait - I wasn't."

Not a word of this is exaggerated for comic effect.

Duke Luke

I've written here before about my vast affection for Luke Haines, the evil rock genius behind The Auteurs, Baader Meinhoff, Black Box Recorder and a slew of bonkers solo albums. His new album, 21st Century Man, came out last weekend and the neighbours have been treated to it on a deafening loop ever since. I seem to remember my girlfriend shouldering her way out of the front door laden with overflowing suitcases around about Wednesday. She's left a letter, probably about how much she likes the album.

The problem with loving Luke Haines is that so few other people do, and despite everything he does being packed with melody and intelligence he can be a challenging prospect to the uninitiated. Alexis Petridis of the Guardian brilliantly described him as "a lavishly gifted songwriter, but never a man likely to dazzle onlookers with the bewitching symmetry of his features". His voice can be harsh and reedy on the first listen, and the humour in his pitch-black lyrics is an acquired taste (as shown by the banning of Black Box Recorder's first single, Child Psychology, from UK radio for its chorus of "Life is unfair / Kill yourself or get over it").

Haines gives every impression of being happy to be a cult concern. By the end of The Auteurs he was already resigned to not getting his due credit on songs like Future Generation ("The future generation will take me to their heart...the next generation will get it from the start"). He also takes a patrician approach to fan relations, which is either admirable or suicidal depending on whether you're his biographer or his accountant. The forum on his website used to be a brilliant place for his cabal of dedicated followers to bicker over top 10 lists of b-sides. Rather than nuture this ragtag platoon of committed product purchasers, he took umbrage about complaints over a solo tour featuring no band and a 30 minute set and closed the forum down, although not before announcing a "Whinger of the Month" competition ("The winner will receive a prize of Luke Haines playing a set in their living room/ stone they live under. This prize is not optional. Haines turns up whether you like it or not. He will play an excruciatingly short set".).

But if you do get the bug and starting exploring the back catalogue there is so much depth and quality to get immersed in. I suggest either Baader Meinhoff (a concept funk album about German terrorism filled with brilliant pop tunes) or - why not? - the new one as being ideal for the newcomer. The epic title track is below - go on, give it a go:

Mr Mop

The flat had become disgraceful. A few weekends away and the darkening evenings had halted all forms of domestic management. So I got up at 8am and started cleaning. And carried on cleaning. Floors were mopped, bathrooms were scrubbed, the fridge was audited (the prize find being a jar of ancient sun-dried tomatoes that had turned into candy floss). I was being so sensible that I even emptied the hoover bag without the usual mushroom cloud of filth erupting over everything I'd just cleaned.

My girlfriend was banished to the spare bedroom with a bin bag to start working through the tonnes of unwearable clothes that, as an inveterate hoarder, she insists on filing in a growing pile in the middle of the room. Progress was made, although I expect to be finding items from Topshop's summer 2004 collection hidden at the back of cupboards and under the bed for the forseeable future.

And now it's all done. We celebrated with a large brunch only slightly ruined by me following her every move around the kitchen with a dustpan and brush. There's still 3/4 of the weekend left and I've achieved so much already. That tricky debut novel should be polished off in time for Come Dine With Me.

Web £2.0

The newspaper industry is in a rare old tizzy at the moment. As the Evening Standard chucks caution to the wind and goes free, desperately hoping that coating London in a sodden blanket of gratis copies will give advertisers the chronic horn, Rupert Murdoch has kangeroo-hopped in the other direction. Old lizard-face apparently blames the internet for the modern expectation of news being on tap for free (as opposed to, for example, his decades of competition-slaying price wars) and will soon be charging for his paper's websites.

As the mack daddy of modern media mogulling he can, of course, do what he wants. Good luck to him, although I wouldn't pay a penny for any of his sites. But what if my beloved guardian.co.uk wanted a piece of my pie?

To say I love the Guardian website is an understatement. Tooling around its endless nooks and crannies is the purest form of addictive contentment. At some point in the last few years I've convinced myself that eating pomegranate daily is crucial to my short and long term health, to the point where if I miss a day I start to feel genuinely uneasy. The same goes for my mental health and the Guardian site. To put it another way, if I ever end up in a Tom Hanks/Cast Away situation on a desert island, all that will remain of me (aside from a half-eaten basketball) will be crude images of the site's masthead daubed in blood and tears on all the palm trees.

As befits a newspaper group run by milquetoast liberals, the paper doesn't actually make money. Once the hessian office windfarm and free copies of the Female Eunuch for the cleaners have been paid for they'll need to find some dosh from somewhere, and I imagine at some point it will be the site. So fine - just tell me where to send the blank cheque. If anything, it might weed out some of the more tedious Comment Is Free contributors who pop up under the blogs, endlessly whinging and slagging each other off (whilst getting hysterical if anyone slags them off in return). A typical exchange is:

Shithawk1976: Oh God, another Guardian blog about Big Brother? I've never seen it. I thought this was supposed to be be a quality paper???!?!!!

Sir Gavin of Burpsalot: IF YOU DON'T LIEK IT WHY BOTHER COMMENTING??

Shithawk1976: I'll comment where I want to. And the low brow nature of your reply has only confirmed my prejudices about all reality TV and the sliding standards at the Guardian. Good day.

Sir Gavin of Burpsalot: this comment has been removed by a moderator

Waiting for quad

Yesterday I spotted this almost demonically self-fulfilling headline on the BBC website: "Are nervous women cyclists more likely to be killed?". The main problem for nervous drivers is the vicious cycle of being permanently liable to panic and do something catastrophically stupid, and the knowlegde of this making them more nervous. The BBC suggesting that the grim reaper is in the passenger seat can only lead to ladies across the country hysterically veering into oncoming traffic, off bridges and through busy zebra crossings.

I speak as a nervous driver myself. I don't remember if it took five or six attempts to get my license but, however many it was, the process beat out of me any residual enthusiasm for motoring. I did vroom about for a while but hung up my string-back driving gloves after an ill-judged trip through match day traffic to see a Nottingham Forest game that left a car full of schoolmates visibly ashen. I've not turned an ignition key in anger for about 7 years.

Luckily, one of the many ways in which living in London retards maturity is eridacting the need for a car but there's a revving, chugging cloud on the horizon. In November I will be at a stag do where the eyebrow shaving and mooning will stop for a brisk bout of quad biking. I couldn't be more uneasy if the BBC ran the headline "Are nervous Gareths more likely to be ground into the mud by the enormous chassis of an upturned quad bike?". It's inevitable that I'll perform the full Brian Harvey and run over my own head. And if by some miracle Saint Jeremy Clarkson answers my prayers and I survive, the relief will be short lived as within hours I'll be having my balls shot off in a hail of paintballs. Which idiot invented the stag do?

So. What do you do?

My school reunion was supposed to be next weekend. Unfortunately, despite the best efforts of the organiser, it was crushed by only attracting four acceptances on Facebook and has been cancelled. I think there were two problems. One is the hideously public nature of the Facebook invitation system which encourages lurking on a massive scale, with dozens of people waiting for enough of their friends to break rank first. That’s certainly what I was doing.

The other is more fundamental. Facebook has killed the meaningful reunion. I am friends with at least 20 people on there that I haven’t seen since the glorious day in 1999 when I strode out of the school gates and became a man (-ish, given that I looked like a lesbian hippy. Ah, last day fancy dress - what a hoot). I’ve got Facebook friends from school that I couldn't pick out of a line-up containing them, my parents and the Cadbury’s gorilla. Why would I go all the way to Nottingham to eat sausage rolls with them? All I need to know is who has a better job than me and who is balder than me - I can find that out at home and sob over my own sausage rolls.

Just to prove I’m not the dangerous loner that the paragraph above suggests, I spent Saturday lounging around on Primrose Hill with my girlfriend. Seconds after I alerted her to the high-celeb count in the area we chanced upon Alexa Chung and a Geldof. Chung was beautiful of face and terrifyingly skinny of leg. The Geldof, with her peroxide fright-wig, fag hanging out of messy red lips and bovver boots, looked she was in a Saved By The Bell ‘issues’ episode about falling in with the wrong crowd and ending up looking like a picture of a punk drawn by a dog. I expected Zack and A.C. Slater to leap out of a car and bundle her off to that shit canteen for some magic tricks from the creepy owner. Obscene hereditary privilege - just say no.

The blog of doom

This week brought the sad news that Keith Floyd has finally conked out after a lifetime of drinking like a pissed fish and smoking like a laboratory beagle. I have previously written about my affection for the old git, which raises the question of whether this little-read snicket of the interweb has somehow become cursed. I often brush off the heather-flogging gypsies in Covent Garden - perhaps the angel of death has been summoned to use these ramblings as a shopping list? If Jarvis or Luke Haines go next then I'm calling in Doris Stokes.

By all accounts Keith's last TV appearance (which he was settling down to watch when my evil eye polished him off) being interviewed by that rancid bully Keith Allen was almost unwatchable. Obviously on death's door, he raged against the TV chefs that prospered in his wake while he, in his own addled opinion, got shafted. Whilst this is a sad last gasp for someone who made a genuinely significant contribution to British TV, better that be his final appearance than this assault on common sense:

Fundamentally unsuitable

I really need a new suit. My expensive blue one suffered an unfortunate rear-end trauma last year when I hitched a drunken ride on the back grill of a friend's bike. For a glorious few seconds we freewheeled down the street like E.T. and Elliott flying in front of the moon before, with a great crunch, the grill cleaved in half and the jagged metal drove through my suit trousers and into my poor unprotected arse. My bum healed but in the name of idiotic false economy I took the suit to the tailoring equivalent of a back street surgeon, whose repairs transformed a small hole into a deranged scab of stitching. That I still wear it says more about my utter lack of interest in my physical appearance than its social acceptability.

Sadly I work in a professional services environment where people do care about their own and other people's clothes. As I only have my (now) tramp suit and one other I need to diversify. But buying a suit is such a FUCKING CHORE, made worse even than getting a haircut or buying new shoes by the expense and general fannying about involved.

I really did try yesterday, though. I asked my smartest friends for recommendations in advance and set off grimly determined to do the deed. But then the Jubilee line was shut and buggered up my tube route. And then the Victoria line was shut and buggered up my plan B tube route. And then I got to Jermyn Street, jostled through the hoards of upper-class congenital retards in mustard cords and burst through the door of my first recommended shop. A Bob Hoskins lookalike with a tape measure slung over his shoulder took one look at my trainers and adopted a protective bouncer stance in front of the suit display. I reversed and went to the second shop, blankly fingered suit fabric for about three minutes and then blacked out. What happened next is a mystery, but when I came to I was handing money to the nice man in Fopp in return for a teetering pile of books, CDs and DVDs. And then I had to go home and try to simultaneously watch, read and listen to everything I'd bought whilst eating a cake.

Maybe next weekend. Maybe this week I'll win the lottery and can hire someone to do this sort of dreary cack for me. Or I'll use my winnings to quit my job and just wander around London wearing a barrel held up with braces and never be troubled by this nonsense again.

Rank amateur

Hmmm. Have just noticed that the name of this blog and the URL are different. That may stop this site becoming a viral sensation and making me a billionaire by Christmas. Oh well.

Oasis: Hitler speaks

I know Downfall parodies are incredibly old hat, but this one is brilliant:

A French toast

All over Paris the word was out. The greedy Englishman is coming. Snails cowered in their shells, eclairs hid behind the macaroons and herds of cows donned false moustaches and raincoats and stampeded to the first Metro out of town. Some got away - I was only there for four days - but it was a long weekend of massive consumption.

I was in town to celebrate both of my parents hitting pensionable age in August, and an extremely good time was had by all. Paris and Parisians were at their best in the cosistently excellent sunshine, and we gawped around the various sights in a high holiday spirits. It really is a bloody brilliant city.

An early highlight was seeing the unmistakeable figure of Jarvis Cocker hopping off the Metro at Pigalle, probably on his way to sample its notorious fleshpots and sex shops. Shortly after that I spent about five minutes staring at this poster trying to work out if it was an obscure pun on the words 'shopping list' (probably not):



The Parisians maintained the national hobby of providing an almost surreal level of poor service. A call to room service asking for a kettle resulted in, after a suitably surly delay, two tea cups being thrust through into our room. The breakfast buffet featured a man allegedly on omlette duty who, having clearly developed a conflicted relationship with the omlette making process, watched the buffet from a porthole window in the kitchen and sauntered out only when no guests were within 30 feet of his spotless frying pan. On our last evening a receptionist at the hotel cheerfully promised to book a taxi for us in an hour. Sixty minutes later the street was conspicuously lacking in cabs and the woman on reception had no record at all of our request. This would have been more understandable if she was not the receptionist from before.

When not beset with Manuel-esque incompetence, we were beseiged with beggars. Parisian street folk have clearly held a meeting on the emotional blackmail of tourists and come away with several key action points:

1) Babies
2) Kittens
3) Puppies
or
4) Babies, kittens and puppies arranged in a drugged pile

I assume that the kittens and puppies at least end up chewing a brick at the bottom of the Seine the moment they hit adolescence. Surely this shamelessness makes as many people less inclined to hand over money as it provokes the desired reaction in others? We also visited a horrfic pet shop straight out of an RSPCA recruitment campaign where dozens of traumatized stares peeked out of tiny glass-fronted boxes. A spaniel puppy had stood in his own muck and was folornly making a dirty protest on the glass of his cage, while nearby enormous game birds clucked in panic as their tiny bird brains endlessly re-learnt the fact that they were stuck in a space too small to turn around in. Hideous stuff, although probably no worse than the pet shops in this country until a few years ago.

One thing the French do have in their favour (and this is something of a gear-mashing segue) is that their enthusiasm for the work of the vastly underappreciated awkward rock genius Luke Haines has kept the old weirdo solvent for years. He is back with a new work of madness in November (21st Century Man/Achtung Mutha) full of songs called things like "Russian Futurists Black Out the Sun", but no music has yet leaked onto the interweb so instead I'll leave you with "Off My Rocker at the Art School Bop" from his last album. Enjoy, and be extra nice to the next animal you meet.

Airborne terror

In the silly season there is often a light relief news story about a bird that, having taken a seemingly random dislike to a particular person, amuses itself by swooping down on the poor wretch's head whenever they leave their house. This is hilarious because the story is often accompanied by shaky camcorder footage of said avian hooliganism as the victim screeches and flails. But I don't think it's funny. I think it's utterly terrifying.

I would happily stroke a snake, tickle a tarantula or mollycoddle a mouse. I'm happy with heights and cool with confined spaces. But I absolutely cannot bear anything with feathers. I hate their eyes, their beaks, their claws, their wings - particularly their wings. The sight and sound of them flapping.....euurrrgh. The idea of any physical contact with one makes me feel nauseous; the sight of deranged pigeon feeders swarmed head to toe with them has sometimes made me break into a near run. Once every couple of weeks I have birdmares - recently I dreamt that a large goose kept jumping into my arms whilst delivering a rather withering monologue.

The one thing I will say about birds is that they mostly do a good job of moving in the opposite direction of humans, I assume out of a sense of self-disgust at their intrinsic horribleness. But one kind of bird doesn't even have the decency to do that - dead ones. All the things I am repelled by splayed out on the pavement, beady eyes following me all the way down the road. I few months ago I came home to find a large pigeon had been ripped to shreds and flung around my roof terrace, which is equivalent to a claustrophobic waking up to find they've been walled into the chimney. I spent an hour or so gibbering before my girlfriend came home, took in the scene and strode outside with a bin bag, a dust pan and a grim expression as I babbled encouragement from the furthest part of the flat.

This unmanly neuroses has Freudian roots. My father was an award winning exotic bird exhibitor in his younger days, and for the first 12 or so years of my life kept birds in the house. They would occasionally escape and hurl themselves repeatedly at the nearest window until they smashed their heads in, which I maintain created my phobia. My poor Dad is understandably disappointed that one of his great passions causes his eldest son to nearly faint with terror.

I am happy to take suggestions on how to beat this. It's hugely inconvenient shrieking like a girl at every feathery corpse and I'm not sure I can ever own a cat, unless there are breeds that don't ever proudly drop my absolute worst nightmare on the kitchen floor. Please don't offer any solutions that involve any form of contact - hypnotism or magic pills only.

As this blog believes in the right to reply, here's Mr E of the Eels offering an alternative viewpoint. He's wrong.

Saturday Kitchen

Saturday Kitchen is on and there's nothing I like to do more to start the weekend than watch Saturday Kitchen.

I love the old cookery show extracts (particularly the Two Fat Ladies, which has not so much dated as turned sepia and started curling out of the TV screen). I love the pig-faced, pseudo-homely pushy alpha male edge that James Martin brings to every conversation with his guests, especially if they are a man of reproductive age. Plainly a terrible bastard. I even love the ridiculous wine expert, who has gradually developed into a cross between Beau Brummell and a gay provincial butcher.

But I love more than all of these any glimpse of Keith Floyd. With his leathery face and reptile glare even the most generous viewer would guess that he's trouble, even before noticing the compulsive wine slurpage. But he also has a brilliantly warm and compelling voice and real old school cad's charm. Apparently his cooking did all sorts of revolutionary things to a nation that viewed garlic and basil as poofy foreign muck. But I'm more interested in the stories of his various bankrupcies, rows and appalling behaviour. Like closing his restaurant halfway through the dinner service after a blazing fight with his wife in front of the entire, appalled dining room. Or his habit of wandering out of the kitchen to recommend an expensive wine, then joining the table of his starstruck customers, quickly knocking back most of the bottle and then being nowhere to be seen when it appears on their bill.

The old soak announced this week that he has cancer - perhaps not an enormous surprise after a lifetime of appalling living. But I hope that isn't the last we see of him.

Down with the kidz

I've just returned to the chicken bone littered streets of Oval after a thoroughly good weekend with friends in Devon. Having been outwitted by the local mackerel over a two hour fishing trip on Saturday, where the occasional scaly face could be seen grinning from below the surface of the water as we enthusiastically reeled in each other's lines and got fish hooks caught in our fingers, we headed to a field for some rounders.

I am not a sporty man. If this blog were a film a montage would now kick in of my speccy younger self being hit in the back of the head by footballs, being ground face-first into the mud by a heap of rugby-shirted adolescents and vomiting half way through 100 metre sprints. But despite having hand-eye coordination so poor that earlier civilisations would have burned me as a witch, I quite like mixed-sex rounders. My male friends, aerobically pristine specimens to a lean man, are forced to handicap themselves to the point where the girls can join in, and I can find my level in the slipstream of their chivalry.

As battle raged, two little boys aged about 10 in replica Arsenal and Man U shirts nonchalantly inched their way closer and closer to us. When they couldn't get any nearer without being brained by a bat, a whispered team talk was concluded by the blonde one marching up and asking if he could play, pointing at the other boy (now bashfully kicking the grass) and noting that "he'd like to too".

I was delighted. This could only increase my position in the sporting pecking order. Sadly, it became obvious that Cameron (fastidious blond quiff, polite, confident - will probably be my boss in 15 years) and Alfie (dark, pug-nosed, also well groomed but in a more proto-Club 18-30 way - will probably organise a burglary of my house on Twitter in 5 years time) were significantly superior athletes, a problem highlighted when Alfie ran me out within minutes.

My standing increased marginally with the arrival of James, a hyperactive 7 year old who treated instructions like "run!" by giggling and throwing himself to the floor. This may have been his age or evidence that he is a congenital idiot - having not met a 7 year old since 1988, when I was 7, it's hard to say. A game of football then broke out, where Cameron and Alfie unveiled a range of flicks, tricks and bicycle kicks and James demanded to go in goal, and then announced that he didn't like goal, before deciding to play in goal. My sporty friends played the groovy uncle role to perfection (one of them being asked by Cameron if he played football every day, whether in awe of his skills or in stern disapproval of his training regime we never found out), while I trundled happily around the edge of the action.

It should be noted at this point that their various parents were in a distant play area, seemingly unconcerned by their little treasures joining a dishevelled group of complete strangers. They didn't even bat an eyelid when we started giving them drinks and getting them to lie spreadeagled on the floor (to play sleeping lions, although to a social worker's eye it may have looked like the start of a ritual sacrifice).

It occurred to me that this was a glimpse of the future. I hope that I will be holidaying with the same friends over the coming years, which statistically are going to be bringing sprogs into the equation. It had been fun to hang out with the boys for a couple of hours. But as we packed them off in the direction of their parents and headed to the pub, it was nice to have that a little way off yet.

Ahead of my time

I was standing at a level crossing this evening, waiting for the lights to change. The song I was listening to needed changing (it must have gone past the first chorus - I now have the attention span of a goldfish with a head injury). While I was thoughtfully thumbing my iPod wheel I felt my Blackberry vibrating in my jacket. My company needed me. So I fished it out and checked the message with my non-iPod hand.

"Your mailbox has exceeded memory capacity". Important to know. As I was manipulating the two separate pieces of technology, one eye on each like an early adopting lizard, I heard a noise over the music along the lines of "WOCCCHAFINKOOUKUKIKE YOU WANKER!". I looked up at the gurning face of a chimpanzee behind an open window at the wheel of a white van. I glanced at the girl waiting to my right to check I hadn't imagined it. She was laughing. Not smirking, actually guffawing.

The lights changed, the monkeymobile pulled away and laughing girl pulled herself together. I crossed the road and started deleting the larger messages from my inbox.

What humiliation will happen on the walk home tomorrow, I wonder? Will my trousers fall down as I walk past the all-girl sixth form college netball court?

Merry Sven

The appointment of serial pay-off trousering horndog Sven-Goran Eriksson as Notts County's director of football has focused an unprecedented level of attention on the world's oldest professional team. God only knows how Colin Slater, BBC Radio Nottingham's famously prolix and hammy County correspondant, is coping with thrill of it all given how excited he usually gets about disputed offsides against Macclesfield Town. There has also been much speculation about how the famously urbane Eriksson will cope with the deprivation of living in Nottingham, a city noted more for its eye-watering crime statistics than for being a hotbed of chi chi metropolitan comfort.

Having grown up in a village near Nottingham and gone to school in the city centre, I feel it is my civic duty to suggest a few ways for him to spend his leisure time. True, I haven't been a full time resident since 1999 save for a few desperate post-university months working in a call centre, a period so distressing I had to go into exile at a North Wales woodchip factory for six months to get over it. But that's a subject for a different, much longer post. And some things never change, so here it goes:

Don't believe the rumours

A very popular myth is that Nottingham has a girl/boy ration weighted heavily in favour of the chaps. This has been often repeated in the media coverage of Sven's arrival given his reputation as a swordsman of some considerable prowess. Unfortunately, it's bollocks. On a Saturday night competition for the ladies is as fierce as in any other provincial town (and the ladies are considerably fiercer).

Don't go to The Tales of Robin Hood

This may now be a multi-media extravaganza where the sensation of wearing wool tights, eating nettles and getting inappropriately touched by Friar Tuck in your sleep are beamed straight into your cerebral cortex. Or, more likely, it's still a piss poor tourist trap where bored students in fancy dress listlessly mime child-friendly renditions of the Robin Hood myth. I had a friend who spent a summer as a merry man, and I can confirm that they spend far more time bonking each other than they do worrying about historical accuracy.

Go to Rock City

Ah, Rock City. Sticky floored, sweaty and dank. Like I'm sure thousands of others, blagging into student night with a phoney NUS card was my introducton into the world of clubbing, and aside from the even stickier Ziggys in York there's nowhere else that's come close since. Getting in was always a moment of pure elation, as my May birthday meant I was behind most of my friends in turning 18. I spent many an evening out nursing a mounting tide of panic that my baby face and amatuerish ID would ruin the night for everyone. But buoyed by Flaming Lamboughinis and Alien Test Tube Babies from RKOs next door I somehow always brazened it out. And then we were in, surrounded by goths, shabby student wankers and tons of other furtive school agers, all united by the the desire to hear Britpop played hideously loudly. They always had someone dishing out temporary tatoos, and a little cafe area to eat cheesy chips and make appallingly clumsy advances on girls in. That's where I imagine Sven would be - if he phoned ahead I'm sure they'd stock some Swedish meatballs. He and Tord Grip could have a snack, get matching Notts County badges etched on their forearms and go and jump around to Smack My Bitch Up.

That should be enough to see Sven through these nervous first days. Let's hope he turns County around and gets them in the same division as Forest so there can be a decent rivalry for the first time in years. As a Forest fan I'm bored of the rivalry with Derby and don't subscribe to it at all. After all, it's nobody's fault that there are so many lonely fans and sexy sheep in Derbyshire.

Neighbourhood Watch

The people who live in the parallel flat in the house across the road from me are wonderfully vibrant people. I sometimes look out of my window to see them dancing around their sitting room, often with a large number of chums. They have energetic Wii sessions and like a bit of a drink. They're like Jamie Oliver's pretend advert friends, with added bonhomie.

The only problem is that whenever I'm watching them cavort about I tend to be sad. Sad because it's 3am on a Tuesday and I've been lying awake listening to them shrieking at each other, even though there's two sets of windows and and AN ENTIRE FUCKING STREET between us. As I start another doleful midnight surveillance I'm always amazed that there isn't a trickle of blood seeping out of each of their trendy earholes - it must be like the inside of a 747 engine in there.

I slept through it last night, although my girlfriend didn't. Apparently I woke up sufficiently to mutter "bastards".

It's fun terrorism. It's a huge game of uptight chicken - who on the street will crack first and blu-tac a passive-aggressive note to their intercom? Or even march up to the door in their dressing gown and hem hem a "Do you know what time it is"? Not me - I'm a cowardly mouse of a man. If I complain they might go insane on recreational drugs, drag me into their flat and slaughter me on the Twister mat. Or wait until I've gone to work and butter the steps to my front door.

So I'll bide my time. They have to move out sooner or later.

Cruelty to grandmothers

It has taken ten years of dedicated Observer reading for me to notice how many of the very best things in it are written by one person - Lynn Barber. She may look like a snooty dowager from a weak 70s sitcom but from her interviews with a vast range of subjects she seems to be unshockable and completely fearless.

She breaks all the rules of a good interview by inserting herself and her own opinions into them to a pathological degree, but this results in a level of open disgust with some of her subjects that is all too rare in these access-driven times. Having spent a happy couple of hours wading through her archive at the weekend, it's almost hard to pick favourite moments. Perhaps making professional do-gooder Vanessa Redgrave cry by telling her she doesn't give a monkeys about people in Kosovo? Or getting Lembit Opik to describe an evening with his Cheeky Girl sex doll "discussing the concept of whether a perfect circle can exist in reality or whether it's only a conceptual construction"?

Both candidates, but it's hard to better these two:

1) Harriet Harman - from 1998 but pure savage gold. "If I were Tony Blair, I would keep her as a tasty morsel to throw to the lions much nearer the next election. It is quite useful for a prime minister to have the odd thick, docile, acquiescent minister to do the unpopular work of government."

2) Marianne Faithfull - "Marianne, in a black mac and fishnet tights, is sprawling with her legs wide apart, her black satin crotch glinting between her scrawny 55-year-old thighs, doing sex kitten moues at the camera. Oh please, stop! I want to cry - this is sadism, this is misogyny, this is cruelty to grandmothers."

Faithfull claimed after the interview that she behaved so badly because Barber asked her if she'd ever had it off with a dog. Barber denied all, but I bet she did.

More people should like Amanda Palmer

At Glastonbury last year my friends and I went to see Ben Folds play a poorly attended mid-afternoon slot. I was pretty bored as he insisted on playing songs that weren't Army. Hardly the festival spirit. But at one point he brought on a lady friend to play a couple of songs that were much livelier than anything the gun-toting, multiple-yokel-marrying Folds had been able to manage.

A few months later I heard a strange (but brilliant) Beach Boys-esque number about abortion and Britpop on the fatally flawed Guardian music podcast, but didn't make the connection between the two until my top pop chum Akira The Don started raving about Amanda Palmer on his site.

She's obviously barking mad, and has a suicidal disregard for commercial success (see the lyrics to Oasis below, the most accessible thing she's ever likely to produce). But her album (Who Killed Amanda Palmer) is chock-full of growers as well as showers like the singles below. Well worth anyone's money.

Oasis:



Leeds United:

My proudest moment

Let's see how long I can keep this up for

Me me me me. That's what the interweb needs. A page devoted to the oafish opinions and dull daily minutiae of one deeply average man, awash in an online ocean of other deeply average men (and maybe women too - you can't tell these days).

In case you somehow end up on this page through a Google search gone terribly wrong (FUCK SEX GAY KNICKERSMOUTH BUMFACE - that'll get a fun crowd in), I am a man who does dull things for a big dull company, lives with his girlfriend near the Oval in South London and has plenty of dreary opinions about stuff. Stuff I like (sometimes), stuff I don't like (often), stuff I'm not sure if I like or not so end up erring on the side of negative caution (most things).

This is the forum for all that stuff. Unless of course I get bored with this immediately and never come back. If so, this will drift for ever in cyberspace as a testimony to man's inifinate capacity for arrogance and sloth.