Something for the Weakened

Watching consumate professionals Tim Lovejoy and Louise Redknapp on the flacid neither-one-nor-the-other Sunday morning stodge Something for the Weekend.

Saving grace chef Simon Rimmer is explaining what he will be cooking this morning.  He starts with fish soup and moves on to mushroom pie.  But as the pre-recorded pie images appear Tim cuts in.  He isn't happy.

"I'm not sure about the fish soup, to be honest".

Simon is thrown.  This didn't happen in rehearsal, and he knows it looks shoddy to be talking about fish soup over a visual of mushroom pie.  He flannels.  Louise, sensing that the train is coming off the tracks and the need for extra input, deploys her unique brand of inarticulate repetition posing as insight.

"What gets me is, you know, it's fish......SOUP?"

Tim steps in and clarifies his objection.  Fish is wet, and soup is wet.  It's just not quite right.  We are now back to Simon, having seen every stock mushroom pie image in the BBC library.  He looks like he wants to cry.  He now has to cook fish soup for these morons.  When he does they don't like it - it contains coriander, which they both HATE.  They can't really explain why, though.

Ad hoc

Once upon a time I wanted to work in advertising.  I thought it was a way to get paid to think of puns.  This theory was shattered during a work experience stint at a flash London agency which largely entailed reuniting hundreds of video cassettes with their cardboard cases (except for the day I spent touring toy shops trying to find plastic tiger claws for a Frostie’s product launch - the equivalent of a sending an idiot apprentice out to fetch some tartan paint).

That wasn’t what put me off advertising, though.  What did it was someone explaining to me that the majority of people in an agency are battling to reconcile two opposing forces - the client and the creative team.

Take a commercial for ketchup.  The client wants a 30 second shot of the sauce slowly leaving a prominently logoed bottle and landing deliciously on a salad or one of the other healthy foodstuffs people generally put ketchup on.  The creative team don’t give a toss about sales of ketchup but do want to impress their mates and win awards, so suggest something surreal and nonsensical - a gorilla playing the drums, say - and promise that it will set Twitter ablaze.  Everyone else then has to find a way of combining art and commerce in a way that won’t get them fired.

This interplay has been playing on my mind recently because I’ve become completely obsessed with this omni-present tube advert for Cheltenham racecourse:


It has to be assumed that the client took the driving seat for this one.  Imagine the creative meeting.

Agency ponce: "OK, we’ve brought some samples of the tube ad and we think you’re gonna be rilly excited, guys - the creatives have really thought their berets off on this one.  We’re seeing a clean white background, big central image of a beautiful black racehorse - but what’s this?  That’s right - it’s got human hands holding banknotes instead of hooves!  And it’s wearing a fez and smoking a pipe!  I know, eye-catching or what?"

Client: "That’s very nice, Julian, but could you do something a bit more, I don't know, wife-beater-y?  Just off the top of my head, I’m seeing a florid complexion and a screech of self-loathing as the children’s trust fund gets blown on an 11-1 long shot.  Boozy simple-minded aggression.  This ad needs to be like looking in the mirror for every overpaid city worker with anger-management issues.  Are your guys up to the job?"

Agency ponce: "Hmmm.  Marcel is very attached to Tote the Gambling Stallion but I’m sure he’ll come up with something.  Just to clarify - you want an image that will put all right-minded people off ever visiting any racecourse ever again?"

Client: "Exactly."

Web 3.0

Akira the Don has a storming new website.  Check it out: www.akirathedon.com.

Going engagement ring shopping today.  My wallet is whimpering and hiding in the bread bin.

POST-SHOPPING UPDATE: I am also hiding in the bread bin.

The engaged tone

So, after 5 years together and three years of cohabitation I popped the question to the soon-to-be-official missus last weekend.  I don't like to be rushed.

I was perhaps dangerously unprepared, having arranged nothing but two expensive-error-avoiding Haribos rings (different colours for choice) and a weekend away in a Suffolk town I'd never been to before.  This necessitated on-the-hoof thinking.  I had to spot the appropriate moment and act immediately.  Whilst walking down a charming quay I saw a hexagonal Victorian rain shelter approaching.  Perfect - quaintly old-fashioned setting, plus no gawpers.  I manoeuvred her in and reached for my gelatine ring.  Her nose wrinkled. "This is a bit like a toilet, isn't it?".  The ring dropped immediately back into my pocket.

I eventually managed to find my moment at the end of the quay, creaking down to one knee as she turned away to film the view and berate me for not showing more interest in the local wading birds (not my preference at the best of times).  She said yes and the sky was black with hats.

It does feel somewhat like getting to the top of what appeared to be a large mountain only to find a much more enormous one towering ahead.  We are two chronically disorganised people who both really should be marrying someone practical enough to actually arrange it.  I am fairly relaxed about the content and theme of the wedding itself.  I fear she will be more exacting, and may have something like the following in mind.

She enters the enormous church on the back of her horse Stoney, who is serving as one of two best men and has transformed into a unicorn for the day.  She is serenaded down the aisle by a Madonna medley performed by Take That.  I am waiting for her dressed as she wishes I would always dress i.e. as if I've covered myself in glue and charged indiscriminately through Urban Outfitters.  She is wearing a dress so intricate and complicated it has had to be assembled in a shipyard.  The Very Reverend Gok Wan compliments her on her bangers and performs a beautiful service, during which the second best man ET presents the rings on a long glowing finger.

As we exit the church the Black Eyed Peas strike up one of their terrible hits, to the distress of both groom and congregation.  Jean-Luc Picard ushers us into the Starship Enterprise, parked illegally outside. The excitement of this means that she misses the commotion in the church as will.i.am is brutally gored by one of the best men.

Onboard the Enterprise her expertise is called upon to defeat the Borg, the Cylons, the Daleks and Darth Vader.  The occasionally tense atmosphere on the bridge is eased by the reformed Pink Floyd playing a few 4 hour song suites about despair and hopelessness.  We are then dropped off at the reception, which is being held at a stables filled with dressage horses carrying trays of drinks on their heads.  Neil Young provides the entertainment by playing 74 songs about his truck on a guitar with one string.  We dance as the flashlights of Grazia, The Stylist and Horse & Hound pop and flare around us.

If you don't know her, this may seem a confusing mix of influences.  It is, but I am reconciled to living with it all for the rest of my life - the future well-being of which, regardless of what wedding traumas await, now seems far more secure.

At the indie concert

Last night I lured Webby away from his all-salad diet to go and the see the Divine Comedy - aka Neil Hannon - play a solo piano-only set in a tiny room above a pub.  As I saw him at a full Roundhouse a couple of years ago I assume this was a one-off for The Word magazine rather than a sad indictment of his declining commercial fortunes.

It was ruddy brilliant, of course.  We arrived to catch the end of Lulu and the Lampshades, who we sneered and leered at complacently until they played an amazing tribal song on borrowed beer glasses that shut us right up.  A totally trolleyed Mark Radcliffe turned up for no particular reason to make a few gags about the Red Hot Chilli Peppers ("Ishn't their shinger called Anthony.....PENISH? Haaargh!") and then Hannon was wheeled on to be enragingly talented and amusing.

We timed our now traditional late gig charge from the bar to the front of the crowd - premiered earlier in the year at a Luke Haines gig when we skanked like crazy to Baader Meinhoff while dozens of dangerous loners scowled at us from beneath greasy fringes - in time to catch the excellent cover of Don't You Want Me which ended the show.  I then disgraced myself by fawning over an esteemed music journalist who just wanted to talk about how good the Divine Comedy were and didn't enjoy my creepy man love, born of years of reading Q and suchlike.

Anyway, this was outstanding:

Random dispatches

It's hard to be a blogger in this town when your main competition is the supernaturally prolific Webby.  It's been even harder to muster enthusiasm in a week of rotten developments at work and the death of Paul the Octopus.

But I refuse to let imminent poverty and a zeitgeist-surfing cephalopod stand in the way of goodness and joy.  Because it's not all bad.

Take books, for example.  In recent years I had almost totally stopped reading fiction, le Carré spy stuff aside.  I thought it was a sign that my decaying brain no longer had the capacity for anything requiring the slightest imaginative leap, and I consoled myself with an inexplicable fetish for Victoriana (biographies of Houdini and the Elephant Man, for example).  But in recent months, sparked by David Nicholls's superb One Day (see previous tear-drenched posts), I've been insatiable.

On the recommendation of a wise friend I chewed through the enormous A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz.  Now, if you possess the lazy assumption that there is a great novel in you waiting to emerge, but as yet shyly reticient about doing so, you read books like One Day or a Hornby and think "Ha.  I could do that.  It's just references to everyday feelings and cultural touchpoints everyone can relate to told in an amiably comedic tone.  This weekend I'm going to start writing one of these and I'll be on Simon Mayo's Book Club by Christmas".  You think this because a) you are a complacent, tragically misguided twat and b) because these books to give every impression of simplicity whilst actually being crafted masterfully.  A Fraction of the Whole is not like that.  The plot's all over the place, it drags in the last third and the two main characters don't have voices distinct enough from one another.   But every page has some utterly mad, funny, original bit of comic writing or a wonky viewpoint so unique you are left in no doubt that you could ever have written it. I assume that Steve Toltz is completely deranged, and I've no idea how he's got anything left in the tank to produce anything else, but it's worth the slog over 700 pages or so.

And from one brick to another - I'm now ploughing through Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, like every other Guardian-reading tube jockey was a year ago.  It's brilliant, obviously, although it's a damning insight into how little I know about history (embarrassing given that I have a history degree).  I'm spending a lot of time flicking back to the cast of characters and wondering why everyone had to be called Thomas.  Gareths are extremely sparse, strangely.  Maybe that was more popular among the Stuart nobles.

And, having put my brick to one side to type this, I'm also keeping an eye on the film of The Witches.  It's brilliant.  I first saw it at a tender age when staying with my parents in a grand old hotel in Scotland.  They packed me and my brother off to some kid's cinema night designed to give long-suffering oldies respite from our piping whinges ("But I don't LIKE onions, Mummy!"), and they showed it then.  It had a serious impact, given that it was set in exactly the same kind of hotel as the one we were staying in.  I kept a keen eye on the lady guests from that point on, ever-alert in case they tried to turn me into a mouse.

Oh dear.  It's just finished, and I'd forgotten how much of a cop-out the ending was compared to Roald Dahl's brilliantly bleak better-to-be-a-mouse-and-die-soon-like-grandma philosophy.  In tribute to the filmmakers, I will also end something badly - this post.  Toodle pip.

South London literati

Out at the brilliant Hot Stuff in Vauxhall last night for a friend's birthday.  A rousing rendition of Happy Birthday when the cake came out was accompanied by horse-faced novelist Will Self, who was standing nearby waiting for his takeaway, singing along but replacing the name of the birthday boy with "you fucking cunt".

I thought it was pretty funny, and showed an admirable commitment to living the Grumpy Old Man brand, but it annoyed my girlfriend who was already riled by him not returning her smile.  If it stops her reading his impenetrable books, and more importantly reading out gibberish sentences and making my brain melt while I'm trying to get to sleep, it can only be a good thing.

It wasn't all Duran Duran Duran Duran

Liking this - I Hate The 80s by The Vaselines:

"So, what are your weaknesses?"

For the first time in a couple of years, I'm preparing for a job interview.  It could be worse - it's for a different job at my current company, so a level of complication has been removed.  Still, the whole gruesome process is coming flooding back.  Wear a nice tie.  Firm but not too firm handshake.  Look them in the eye in a you-can-trust-me way and try to avoid the boggly I-start-fires way.  Would you like a drink before we get started?  Just a water please.  No problem, here you go.  Thanks, I'll just take that glass from your hand OH GOD I'm sorry it's gone all over you, gosh your trousers are drenched, let me just get this napkin and dab at your GET OUT OF MY OFFICE!

I've never had an interview experience quite that terrible, although there's been some low moments.  The Cambridge interview that started well and then spluttered into silence when I admitted that I didn't know who, what or when the Red Army was, for example.  In my defence, I hadn't technically been taught that yet.  In the University of Cambridge's defence, I had claimed seconds earlier to have a particular fascination with Russian history.  I unveiled another truly crappy performance at the final stage of a major advertising agency's graduate recruitment programme.  Having jumped through hoops with the elegance of a buttered seal during the previous submissions and interviews, I choked magnificently during the group presentation excercise.  I was 99% sure I'd failed, and the final 1% fell into place when one of my team "mates" stood up and gave me a consoling hug so patronising that I almost pummelled her with a brushed chrome executive mousemat.

But since I entered the corporate world I've spent more time interviewing than being interviewed.  You know that cliché about the interviewer making up their mind in the first few seconds?  Horribly, comprehensively true.  In that time I've already decided if you're too shy, too cocky, too noisy, too smelly, too laddy, too flirty, too scruffy, too crazy, too whatever.  I'm not saying I'm right - although I do think my hit rate is fairly high - but that's not the point.  I've made a knee-jerk decision and you're going to have to do something special to still my twitching knee.

So I'm focusing on the first five minutes of my interview tomorrow.  I'm going to be the most reasonable, presentable chap you could hope to meet.  I was going to do some planning for the rest of it as well but I accidentally knocked out this blog instead, so I'll have to rely on key memorised phrases instead.  "By the 1930s the Red Army was among the largest armies in history", for example.

In a spin

I had planned to write a scholarly analysis of why Ed Milliband is doomed to failure as the leader of the Labour party.  It would have been great, honest.  But then a man with a spanner infuriated me and I decided to wallow yet again in the minutiae of my domestic frustrations.  I wasn't joking when I named this thing.  Before I veer off, check out this article by Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell about why Ed's boggly eyes will be his undoing.

Right.  My washing machine broke a few weeks ago.  The frustration this caused was tempered by the rare thrill of knowing exactly what was wrong, like a real man who understands machines. The heating element was bollocksed. I know this because a) it wasn't heating up and b) exactly the same bit broke a few months ago.

I was almost looking forward to the man coming to fix it so I could impress him with my know-how.  Unfortunately it didn't go quite as planned.  We got off on the wrong foot when he tried to get into the flat by alternately leaning on and tapping the buzzer to my flat while I shrieked "Just push the door!" into the intercom.  A morse code expert may have been able to discern a message in the beeps.  "I will under no circumstances fix your washing machine", perhaps.

I got him in and proudly unveiled my heater theory.  He looked at me blankly and then looked at the washing machine even more blankly.  He opened up his case to access a laptop, and started to send emails to a person unknown.  They may have read "Man keeps pointing at large white box. What is this thing?".  He eventually decided he would have to drag the machine out of the cupboard, whereupon he almost crushed himself between the machine and the door behind.  Unable to bear watching him straddle the corner of the unit, trying to decide which way to topple, I left him to his own devices.

A little later he emerged looking triumphant.  All fixed.  No sir, your heater theory was wrong - the motherboard was broken and I've replaced it.  Hurrah! I said.  Guess I'm not such an expert after all!  As he left I put in a load of by now quite whiffy washing.  20 minutes later I was back on the phone to Indesit, breaking the news that it was still completely bollocksed.

Me: "Can the man come back and fix the heating element please?"
Indesit: "Afraid not, sir.  He's a standard engineer, and only senior engineers carry that part."
Me: "But...so...hang on, why did you send him in the first place then?"
Indesit: "Aha!  Well, we didn't think the heater would have been the problem.  You'll have to make an appointment for a different day."
Me: "But...I said when I called before what the problem was....hhhhnnggghhh....ok.  What's the tightest time-frame for a new appointment that you can give me?"
Indesit: "All of Monday?"
Me: "Maybe a touch tighter?"

And so it ended with an appointment for 8 days hence.  Bastards.  In the meantime I've acquired an expensive habit for having my shirts laundered at work.  To go back to my crease-tastic ironing style will be a hell of a blow.

The missing ink

I had lots of life administration to do last Sunday.  Personal finances management (ie pay council tax to maintain the binmen's weekly 6am performance of Stomp), flat cleaning (ie collect the clothing that the missus has strewn aroung the flat (socks draped over lampshades, handbags in the bath, trousers in the oven) and put it all in a big bag that she can shake empty over the following week, like an urban fox with expensive tastes).  I was even going to cut my increasingly alarming hair (the crappiest of all the chores).

Unfortunately two things got in my way.  The first was the inevitable Sunday morning hangover, which now renders me incapable of anything other than watching 17 episodes of Come Dine With Me with the curtains drawn.  But the real killer was this website: http://archivedmusicpress.wordpress.com, which I literally spent hours and hours and hours reading.

It's nothing more sophisticated than a guy putting up hundreds of scanned pages from the Melody Maker and the NME circa 1987 - 1996.  I can see why that wouldn't float everyone's boat.  But if, like me, you grew up completely dependent on the news and reviews in these cheaply printed, ink-smeared rags then it's an absolute treasure trove.

Going though the 1994-1996 vintage material on the site it's amazing how much I remember.  Last year I was forced to go through my childhood memorabilia after a flood from an exploding boiler gave my parents an excuse not to have to store three tonnes of maths exercise books and shoddy renderings of glaciers any more.  Other than a few colourful reminders of how much I used to enjoy drawing the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot (not interacting - I was a stickler for realism) I came across a review of the first ever gig I went to, carefully torn from the Melody Maker and preserved between the pages of a terrible essay on music as a metaphor for love in Twelfth Night.  I needn't have bothered - it's here.  As is the MM's excellently dismissive review of What's the Story (Morning Glory) ("Oasis are fallen, fallen short of the stars. They sound knackered").  They subsequently re-evaluated this position when it turned out that Oasis sold millions of copies when put on the cover and Gorky's Zygotic Mynci sadly did not.

The Oasis flip-flop is an illustration of what a different world the music press was pre-internet.  They could get away with it because if you missed an issue, you missed it.  You couldn't just type the name of your favourite indie concern into a seach box and flick through everything ever written about them.  And as there were no band websites or myspace the only way you could get any information was through the inkies.  I remember pouring over news articles about upcoming albums and trying to imagine what a song called "Pencil Skirt" or "Pull the Wires from the Wall" could possibly sound like.  There were albums I didn't buy because, having considered the tracklisting long and hard, I'd decided they weren't up to scratch.

The lack of concern about a permanent record really comes through in the writing, some of which is frankly terrible.  The journalists insert themselves into interviews and reviews in a manner in which even the author of this blog considers to be self-indulgent.  But this also means that much of it has a liveliness and individuality that is sorely lacking in the post-internet, post-comments-sections-and-trolling age.

One of the things that I assume is the same now as it ever was is the making of terrible predictions.  The press needs to hype to have something to write about, and the law of averages dictates they get it wrong 95% of the time.  Which means there's a lot of sneering to be done by someone reading 15 years (Christ) later.  Almost every page has a reference to a band that, after years of effort, reached the pinnacle of their career with a mention in the NME before sinking without a trace.  Tokyo Ghetto Pussy.  Pimlico.  Buxom.  Brassy.  The Amps.  These are the fallen, and this website gives them the ghost of a tribute.

Got to dash, I've just found a three page interview with the Tindersticks from 1995.  I've already read it, of course.  But I was 14 then, and I read things differently now.

A rare moment of sanity

Without wishing to go on too much more about my tragic Luke Haines obsession, I made a very grown-up decision last week.  In a move rather boldly described as an "art event" he released just 50 copies of his new album, each a unique one-off live home recording.  Apparently he answers the door to the postman in the middle of one of them.

I was obviously gibbering with anticipation, but then I saw the £75 price tag.  That's a lot when you might end up with the one he rushed through to catch the start of Sherlock.  So I bowed out.  I'm not a lunatic.

They've all sold out now, so he's got the loot.  If you own one of the copies please consider the ultimate act of charity and bung me a copy.  You can have a unique recording of me crooning any song of your choice in return.

Sneezy does it

Culture is terrible for your health.  In a burst of holiday vim I took myself off to the Rude Britannia exhibition at the Tate.  The exhibition itself was excellent (the Viz-curated room being a particular crass highlight) but I got lavishly soaked on both the walks there and back, compounded by a couple of hours in between of marinating in swampy dampness.

As a result I have been suffering from a catastrophic cold for the last couple of days.  I've been self-medicating like a sneezy Elvis, gobbling strepsils, sudafed, lemsip and paracetamol pretty much at random.  Sadly I also made the grave error of going out for a few drinks last night, condemning myself to a hangover/head congestion combination at 6am this morning that felt like someone had filled my entire skull with glue.

As the missus is away for the weekend I've resorted to a day of recuperation tragic even by my horribly low standards.  Having taken quintuple doses of every medicine in the flat I shuffled into the living room wrapped in a duvet, yanked out the sofa bed and spent the entire morning watching Spaced DVDs, swallowing satsumas virtually whole and creating an arctic blizzard of used tissues.

I then dragged my stinking carcass to a pub for a roast I couldn't taste before returning to the sofa bed base camp and seeing off the afternoon by snoozing raspily to my favourite football podcast for morons, the Sky Sports Sunday Supplement.  I love the porcine tabloid hacks passive aggressively squabbling over favoured contacts ("Of course, you'd know that from your little chats with Sir Alex, wouldn't you Tony?") and straining to suggest intimacy with millionaire players ("Let me tell you, Lamps/JT/Stevie G ain't happy with the situation Brian, not one bit") who in reality must absolutely loathe them.  I woke in a state of confusion and had to calm down by blowing my nose 14 times, watching the X-Files and eating a few more satsumas.

It's actually been quite an effective tribute to the endless school summer holidays that I frittered away goggling at the Big Breakfast, Saved By The Bell, Roseanne and Quantum Leap for weeks on end without feeling the slightest shame or compulsion to leave the house.  If only I had access to Championship Manager 1995/96 the replication would be complete.

Porklife

Am off work this week and bloody loving it.  I even took a jog around Kennington park this morning, accompanied by the steady hail of local squirrels dropping their breakfast nuts in disbelief.  Three startled pigeons slamming into tree trunks and an inadequate number of laps later I strode out of the south gate newsagentwards for my morning milk and Guardian.

Disaster, though - my favoured shop on Brixton Road had the former but not the latter.  I was forced to try the shop known to me and my girlfriend as Dog Piss Onions, after we reported to the owner that an enormous Alsation had just widdled all over his fresh produce and he responded with barely a shrug.  Rationalising that a similar attack on the newspapers would be easier to detect I braved it, and strode in brandishing my milk from the previous shop.

Me: "Just the Guardian please"
Dog Piss Onions owner: "I'll have to charge you for the milk as well"
Me: "You wag.  Here's the quid for the Gaurdian, cheers"
DPOO: "No, really.  You need to pay for the milk"
Me: "I just walked past you while holding it.  This plainly isn't your milk"
DPOO: "Sir, I NEED to charge you for the MILK!"
Me: (hotly) "You REALLY don't!"
DPOO: "Ha ha! I am joking of course sir.  You have a good day now"

This country.

Talking of this country, I spent last week in a totally different one.  The missus and I vacationed on the shores of Lake Garda in Italy, sharing our hotel with Germans wearing unironic moustaches and a frankly weird amount of lesbians.  Having accidentally booked a package holiday on lastminute.com we received a cultural overview of Italy on the coach from the airport ("Now, to order what I think we'd all call a "real" coffee...") and were given a welcome pack which included a definition of bolognese ("a meat and tomato based sauce").  Unfortunately the translations page omitted the Italian for "Thomas Cook are incompetent pricks", which would have been useful when we discovered that they'd taken our money and not told the hotel we were coming.  It's a real larf changing rooms three times in seven days, let me tell you.

Luckily the rest of the holiday was excellent, thanks for asking - sun, clear water, tasty food, foxy Italian wo many areas of historical interest.  And now I've got this week off too.  And a bank holiday weekend.  Lovely stuff.

brian harvey sausage rolls

A side effect of my summer blog design meltdown (see previous post for more griping) was that I temporarily disconnected myself from Google Analytics, the programme that tells me stuff about who comes here.  I was somewhat concerned when the entire internet, from my closest friends to strangers and spambots, simutaneously decided to boycott the site.  Discovering that it was a coding problem, and it is just the vast, vast majority of the internet population who don't bother dropping by, was a huge boost and inspired me to dig a little deeper than usual into the Analytics reports.

I was particularly fascinated by the one showing the Google searches that lead people to the site.  My favourite ten are below.  I hope the person who needed London Underground advice wasn't in a hurry.

• morrissey communicates with faxes
• new york sunset now
• famous wankers
• green wankers
• self-indulgence goat
• "luke haines" "old weirdo"
• wrongfucksex
• jubilee line closed
• self cruelty
• brian harvey sausage rolls

If it ain't broke...

Once upon a time a man had a blog.  Not being notably technologically savvy, he nicked the template from the blog of a friend.   It looked ok after he supplemented it with a nice picture for the header and he was perfectly happy with it for a while.

But after a few months he got bored with the template. There were too many columns and it looked all blocky and square.  So in a burst of activity he ditched the old template and installed a new one.

And then this happened.



Honestly, blog fans, it's been a real pain in the bum.  No one seems to like the new look, every time I change something another part breaks, and I can't stop fiddling with it.

Today started well. I found a picture of a lovely monkey for the header and, after much swearing and fiddling around in Paint (the premier editing software of the Jurassic era), managed to install it.  Then I noticed that although it's fine in Firefox, the new header appears for a few seconds in Internet Explorer before disappearing.

So if you read this on IE and are wondering what's going on, it isn't subliminal ape propoganda.  I don't know why it's happening or how to fix it.  If you do, please let me know.

London Colin

Just wasted an hour of my life watching Undercover Boss on Channel 4.

I can't remember the last time I saw something with such a fatally flawed concept.  The Chief Executive of Tower Hamlets, the catastrophically deprived East London borough, goes literally undercover to spy on unsuspecting departments to experience life on the front line of council services provision.  We see lots of shots of him in a suit, in meetings, looking out of a window while frotting his blackberry - he's a man in an ivory tower.  He needs to get out there and see what's really going down.

All he needs is a way of getting a realistic view of the coal face.  One that won't make people behave unnaturally around him.  The Channel 4 execs convene an emergency mind shower  before emerging triumphantly for an early lunch ten minutes later.  He will pose as a trainee trying out various council jobs and be mentored by a member of staff in each.  A 50 year old trainee who reads with glasses that cost more than the annual salary of his mentor and looks exactly like the Chief Executive wearing a week's growth of stubble, and who takes a camera crew everywhere with him.

The sheer pointlessness and artifice is demonstrated by the choice of mentors, heart of gold diamonds in the rough one and all.  Because if you need to choose someone to be on telly representing your department, you choose the most presentable.  After all, the Chief Executive might watch it.  That is if he wasn't shuffling around onscreen dressed as Colin the Hollywood Hobo and remembering to put on his northern accent every time someone asks where he's from.

He gets shown meals on wheels, pest control, a homeless advice centre, community coppers etc etc.  'Colin' can't believe his luck - every department of his council is staffed by professionals burning with zeal, compassion and unrealised potential.  The creak of the door to the storeroom containing all the sewer-mouthed tattooed mutants who failed the telly test can be occasionally heard as it groans against its padlocks.

So 'Colin' shaves off his bumfluff, has an erotic reunion with his blackberry and goes back to playing Sir Alan, albeit with a renewed sense of perspective.  But wait - there's one last twist.  He needs to reveal his true identity to his mentors.  The best of these meetings goes as follows:

Chief Exec: "Do you know who I am?"
Underling: "Yeah Chief Exec seen you on the internet innit."
Chief Exec: "So, I hear you had an interesting day yesterday?"
Underling: "Yeah showed a geezer round the market yeah?"
Chief Exec: [leans forward, slowly removes designer glasss]
Underling: "NOOOOOO! You is Colin!"

He tells them they're wonderful and gives them unpaid jobs on vague and uninspiring committees.  Well, except Malechi, a gentle young black man working in the homeless advisory service.  He's on a temporary contract.  The Chief Executive offers to become his permanent career mentor.  We learn during the voiceover that he "hopes to have a permanent job soon".  Shit mentor.

Just wasted 20 minutes of my life whinging about Undercover Boss on Channel 4.

The old plates of meat

As an old woman in an Alan Bennett play might say, I'm a martyr to my feet.  They give me all sorts of gyp.  They go through phases of throbbing agony which can only be dealt with by replacing a pair of shoes, except the shoes I have to replace never seem to have any similarities.

It's not so much Right Foot - that's quite stoic.  Left Foot is the big grizzly girl.  Things got so bad after a weekend stomping around a festival that I hobbled into the GP today to see what could be done.  One of the few perks of being a bottom feeder at a massive company is the private healthcare, so rather than an overworked Dr Whatever in the 64th hour of his shift I was greeted by a man who looked like Moss from the IT Crowd, if Moss was also in Vampire Weekend.

I assumed (hoped) he was a doctor as he only introduced himself as Nathan.  Nathan was a bit too cool for my liking, and didn't look at all enthusiastic when I whipped off my sock.  I gave my toes a little waggle to try to entice him but he was content to analyse the situation from a distance.  Anti-inflammatory pills plus an appointment to see a foot expert, who will conduct a 'gait analysis'.  Obviously I'm very excited about that bit, which I assume will involve walking up and down a catwalk while Louie Spence from Pineapple Dance Studios yells at me to work my hips.  I will keep you posted.  The letter that Nathan wrote to Louie on my behalf described me as "this pleasant gentleman".  If any doctors are reading, could you please let me know if this is accepted medical terminology for "this massive tool"?

On a related medical note, I saw a businessman reading a dieting book on the tube home today.  Sob Yourself Thin or similar.  I admired his commitment to reading around the issue, although feared for his resolve when I notice his bookmark was a menu for Yeung's Express takeaway.

The Piano of Temptation

Phew, long week.  Had to organise a work event on Friday/Saturday which meant the days before were grizzly.  I am not designed to work long hours.  My brain acts like a mobile phone - at peak capacity when I wake up and unplug it from the power supply of snores, it then depletes in power steadily throughout the day.  By 4pm I'm on two bars, and by 7pm can only make emergency calls.

Which means when I get home around 10pm, as I did on Thursday, I am in a burned out and uncommunicative state.  I beached myself on the sofa and turned on Big Brother.  I was just thinking what a shame it is that Shabby is so pretty and yet so utterly deranged when the front door slammed open.  A lady-shaped shadow loomed over me and leaned in for a boozy hello.  "How much have you drunk?" I asked nervously.  "Beer AND a wine!" she announced with slurry pride.  "And I was too busy to have lunch and I didn't eat dinner either!"

Code Red.  A mixture of drinks on an empty stomach.  As she crashed onto the sofa I could hear a faint crackling sound.  Sure enough, there were sparks shooting out of her nostrils and ears.  Complete lady brain malfunction.

Under usual circumstances this sort of situation requires immediate preventative action, such as finding an episode of Gok Wan's Fashion Fix for her to watch.  I was feeling foolishly obstinant, however.  Man work hard.  Man tired.  Man not need to deal with loopy lady.  So I focussed hard on Big Brother while she tottered off to make some tea.

The Tree of Temptation was involved, which I always enjoy.  The Tree is a dismembodied voice in the bathroom that doles out unpleasant secret tasks and is very rude to the housemates (to posh layabout Ben - "Oi, Brideshead!").  As I was considering the witty retorts I'd have up my sleeve to counter the Tree if I was on the show, a gruff voice growled up at me from floor level in the gap between the back of the sofa and the landlady's piano.

"Hello!  I am the Piano of Temptation!"  The Piano of Temptation sounded far more feminine than the Tree of Temptation.  "I have a secret task for you!"  Appalling news - I was much too tired for a task.  I grabbed a nearby towel and swatted it in the direction of the Piano, which yelped and was silenced.

A short time after my girlfriend re-appeared.  I considered telling her about the Piano of Temptation but her mood seemed to have taken a turn for the worse.  My lack of general chit chat then only worsened it.  Time for bed.

I emerged from the bathroom to find my girlfriend sitting up in bed with her arms wrapped around her knees, frowning hard.  If a cartoonist had drawn the scene, he would have found it difficult not to add a small storm cloud above her head.  I opined that she might be in a mood.

Several minutes later, as her footsteps stomped down the stairs and the spare room door crashed shut, the point had been forcefully made that she was not in a mood.  I lay in bed, trickles of blood seeping from my ears, and considered the theory that often the best approach is to do nothing at all.  The short term benefits were compelling, but experience suggested that this would not be the best overall strategy.  I went downstairs to retrieve her and found that the volcano, whilst still spitting out the occasional lump of burning lava, had largely burned itself out.

I got home yesterday to find the flat cleaned from top to bottom to a standard unprecedented in three years of co-habitation.  She knows how to appeal to my innner Kryten.  How long this contrition will last for is unsure, and I suspect it may have evaporated at about paragraph 2 of this blog.  Maybe the whole thing was a task from the Piano of Temptation.  Maybe I'll have to pretend to be drunk next week.

Anyway, I'll leave you with this, which iTunes tells me I've played 28 times in the last three weeks.

Glastolgia

This weekend should be brilliant.  The sun is out and the England/Germany match will either be a fascinating meltdown or a victory so thrilling we'll all wake up with terrible headaches and bulldogs tattooed on our faces.  But while my body is clumping about in flip flops around getting a sun burned neck, my soul is pining.  I shouldn't be here - I should be (to paraphrase Jarvis) somewhere, somewhere in a field in Somerset (alright!).

I am a latecomer to the festival phenomenon.  In my teens, when I devoured the NME weekly, considered Camden to be a mythical Zion and really knew my Delagdos from my Ultrasound, I really should have made the effort but didn't have friends with a similarly forensic interest in white boy guitar music.  As I got older my musical tastes calcified and I assumed I was too out of touch with yoof trends to be admitted to any credible gathering.  Plus the mid-2000's run of televised festivals blighted by monsoon conditions didn't give me any confidence that I wouldn't drown in my sleep or get forcefed ecstasy by warlocks covered head to toe in mud.

But two years ago I was bullied by less cowardly chums into buying a ticket for Glastonbury and had literally one of the best weekends of my life.  So I went back last year as well.  A lot of what makes it great is very simple pleasures - lashings of cider, unexpectedly brilliant food and music everywhere will all improve any event.  I've also never been there mid-downpour, which I assume sorts the men from the boys and would have me weeping and calling an air ambulance within minutes.  But the real key is the sheer pleasure of spending a long weekend in the company of 169,999 other people in a few large fields who are all incredibly cheerful, friendly and considerate.  Even when emerging from a medieval toilet or a performance by the Verve.

There are exceptions, of course.  Last year we were camped next to a mobile home full of Scousers who listened to mid-1990's trance until 7am and, when they heard a passive aggressive moan from one of our tents, shouted "FUCK OFF!" at us through a megaphone.  And my patience with the free chat ethos of the camp was sorely tested whenever it was my turn to hold the enormous Oxford United flag we used to identify our position for stragglers.  Invariably someone with three teeth and a caved in forehead would immediately appear in front of me and yell "Orlroight there boy, wort do yew reckon to next season then?".  "Actually, good sir, I support the men of Nottingham Forest" I would reply, before clasping a scented handkerchief to my nose and depositing the saucy cur into a sewage puddle with a sharp blow of the flagpole to his chest.  But these moments of bad vibes were rare enough, and who needs aggro when you could be watching a Mad Max style procession of fire-breathing motorcyles, or sitting in a leather armchair in the Guardian tent, or having your shakra realigned by a crystal-waving vegan from Brightlingsea?

But I'm not doing any of those things this weekend.  The tickets sold out in seconds before I or any of my friends even noticed they were up for grabs, and that was that.  Some of us are off to Latitude this year for a more genteel festival experience, but watching every available minute of the TV coverage this weekend has made me ferociously nostaglic.  Even Corinne Bailey thingy.  Even the useless BBC presenters.  I want in for 2011, and I'll bring a massive Forest flag this time.

OI! QUEERS!

It's been horribly quiet around here lately.  Busy weekends and week nights and the tectonic plates shifting under my feet at work have all contributed but there's no real excuse.

However, I've been spurred into action by the obituary of dead dandy Sebastian Horsley, who it turns out owned the door I spotted a few months ago.  Had I pushed it open I would have found a room filled with human skulls, a display case of antique syringes and a man old enough to know better dressed like the mad hatter and doing something terrible to someone terrible.  A lucky escape - I am a very suggestible person, and could easily have ended up being sucked into his flâneur lifestyle.  Which would have killed me within weeks but in the meantime livened this blog up no end ("Dull day. Polished tie pins, ate some opium, bummed by six Brazilians wearing horse masks, home in time for dinner (one exquisite peach) and James Corden's World Cup Live. Sebastian didn't wash up AGAIN").

I read poor doomed Seb's obit on the plane home from Northern Ireland, where I spent a long weekend with 11 chaps watching football, eating cheese and drinking Harp. The relentless sun and good humour even lured me into playing cricket, breaking out some killer bowling moves for  the first time since school.  The bails remained oblivious to my efforts.

We planned to celebrate our sporting efforts with a Saturday night out in Limavady.  We expected the locals would be charmed by our cute little metropolitan ways.  Then during an afternoon stroll three of our number were welcomed to the town by a car honking its horn and the orc-like driver screaming "OI! QUEERS!" out of the window.  We took this as a sign that we were simply too beautiful for our own good and remained in our compound.

And today back to work with nothing but a sore bowling shoulder and sunburned legs left of the weekend.

Meeting Jon Bon Jovi

I've written here before about my childhood affection for Bon Jovi.  Their ponderous poodle rock stirred the New Jersey steel worker in my middle class Midlands soul.  So imagine my excitement on Friday evening when I came across a Jovi-mentary charting their progress through a recent mega tour.  Already well-refreshed, I was thrilled at the thought of howling along to a few Keep The Faith era classics.  The slammed door and angry footsteps stomping up the stairs suggested that my girlfriend didn't share my enthusiasm, but no matter.  I had a can of lager to keep the evening alive - bring it on!  "Mother mother, tell your children....(FAITH!)"

It wasn't quite the blast I was expecting.  Shot in arty black and white, it was more a testament to Jon Bon Jovi's self image as a Very Important Business Dude than a hearty compilation of the classics.  The majority was images of huge empty arenas, stagey pre-show motivational shouting and the post-show scramble for hot towels and a nice comfy seat in a limo.  But it was all made worthwhile by JBJ's posturing as a deeply serious man, rather than (for example) a very silly man who wrote If I Was Your Mother, the creepiest love song ever.

"I've been the CEO of a multinational corporation for twenny years" he snarls down the phone in the lounge of his private jet, perhaps underestimating the contribution of the band's management and record company in the BJ 1980's heyday when his daily schedule was:

12.00:  Wake up
13.00 - 16.00:  Do hair
16.00 - 19.00:  Photo shoot with Playboy models and a hosepipe
20.00 - late:  Sing silly songs to packed arena, eat swan burgers with Playboy models

Even better is the part where he corners Tico Torres, the band's resolutely blue collar drummer, to moan that the US baseball authorities are prevaricating over letting him buy a team.  Like one businessman talking to another, he gives Tico his most earnest face.  "Thing is, man, it's not that they're bein' hostile or stoopid, they're just being naive, know what I mean?".  "Yeah, bawss, naive is what it is" replies Tico, eyes darting from side to side as he considers whether a fart gag or opening a bottle of beer with his teeth will lighten the mood.

All this reminded me of the time a few years ago when I met the band, sort of. I was at my previous company's global marketing director's meeting, spending a few days in a windowless hotel meeting room feigning enthusiasm for the finer points of online marketing stategy whilst filling an A4 pad with ever more complex doodles.  In the way of all lower-middle management droogs we hit the town in the evening, thirsty but ever-wary of saying something career-destroying, and eventually bowled into the entrance of a Knightsbridge hotel for some post-closing time drinks.

Due to some massive security failure that CEO Bon Jovi probably fired someone for, we stormed the entrance at exactly the moment that he and the band stepped out of their limo, meaning that for a few seconds we marched through the atrium as a little gang.  One of my US colleagues grabbed Jon's hand, claimed shared New Jersey heritage and got a stoney faced "How you doin'?" before the well trained hotel staff swung into action.

The boys from the band were ushered into a perfumed inner sanctum of champagne flutes and sticky sausages.  One look at our half-mast TM Lewin ties consigned us to a separate bar comprising two glass tables and no chairs in the corridor that led to the gents.  I don't remember much about the rest of the evening, except that I came home in a fug of £6-a-bottle beer fumes and while arranging my clothes for the next day treated my girlfriend to a noisy rendition of Living On A Prayer with new lyrics ("Ironing In My Pants").

I can't say I noticed any obviously envious glances from the band that night.  But, having seen the documentary, the thought occurs - JBJ was actually thinking "Wow - business guys.  These dudes have worn suits and talked about ROI and hit rate for the whole day and all I've done is eat caviar on the Concorde.  Where did it all go wrong?".

Rug rethink

Last weekend I had to have a haircut, the crappiest of all the chores.  I find the process so boring that I always put it off for several Saturdays beyond the point of no return, meaning I have to go to work with my wonky thatch plastered into a side parting and walk around at the weekend looking like Edward Scissorhands.

But as I sat in the squeaky leather chair, squinting at the mirror (I am very blind) and noting glumly that the pink blob seemed bigger than ever in comparison with the brown blob, I thought - well, at least I can do a blog on this.  Imagine my distress the next day when David Mitchell's latest podcast popped into my iTunes on exactly the same subject, only funnier than I would have been.  So rather than go through with a second rate version I may as well link to his:



No such chore trauma this weekend.  Was lured to the Tate Modern yesterday by more culturally curious chums.  It is obviously the reflex of a moron to look at modern art and say "Ha! A five year old could do that!" but I certainly felt my knee jerking at some points.  Particularly at the video of hippies rolling around in their pants rubbing themselves with raw meat and the entirely orange painting that had the aim of making me, the observer, "completely aware that I am where I am".  But, as my friend and I agreed, whilst we might not understand most of it and might even dislike a lot of it we're very glad it's there.

Now I'm pecking away at my laptop and trying to ignore the drivel oozing from the TV.  The missus has found an episode of Sex And The City to goggle at.  Horse-face has fallen out with the ginger lesbian, the tart is having a perplexing feud with a transexual, the brunette is having it off with the bloke from Showgirls and the guy in London on his laptop is wondering if he can pull the TV plug out with his foot without the missus noticing.

On the upside, the Divine Comedy are back and are still brilliant:

29 not out

Birthday today, and what a ruddy nice day for it. Spent a long time crisping up on the roof terrace, listening to appalling Europop flamenco from the flat opposite and aggressive motivational shouting from the community centre down the road ("You quittin' now bwoy? I AIN'T HEARING THAT YOU BE QUITTIN'!").

I'm too heat-wilted to blog extensively this evening, and I've got sun lotion in my eye which is hampering my concentration, but thought I'd share a nugget from last night.  The missus treated me to dinner in Wild Honey, which aside from sharing its name with an excellent Beach Boys song is a nice Frenchy restaurant.  After we'd ordered the waiter placed a piece of slate between us with great ceremony.  On it was a pale golf ball-shaped object.  Ah, I though knowledgably, the amuse-bouche.  I like to know what I'm eating, so I politely asked the waiter what exactly it was.  His mouth twitched.  "It's the butter, sir" he replied with a mixture of kindness and pity.

PowerPointless

A punishing weekend.  Out and about both nights and consumed by a work problem that began at 7.30pm on Friday with a request from my boss to find and send him an old PowerPoint presentation.  This has since become a mind-bendingly unpleasant quest worthy of a Peter Jackson-directed film adaptation.  Imagine Frodo Baggins spending much of a weekend:

• desperately checking messages on his hand-held magic message-displaying shard of rock;
• negotiating with the hideously uncaring Trolls of Weekend IT Support;
• howling with rage on realising that he can't access PowerPoint on his lap-crucible;
• making two separate, and futile, trips to the main place of work in the Shire to fax large amounts of paper that turn out to be the wrong large amounts of paper; and
• sighing as he gets yet another terse message on the rock from the Swedish hotel room in which Gandalf is fuming and drawing up a hobbity P45.

I have basically failed, so I could be blogging on the streets for loose change soon.

I did cheer up enough to do a little karaoke last night, which I like to do about every half decade or so.  The venue lost a huge amount of goodwill from me by employing a Bubbles-type character in the lavatory to bully punters into paying a quid to wash their hands and by squirted with water from a designer scent bottle.  "Don't get sprayed, don't get laid!" he leered as I feigned an important call coming in on my mobile.  It's a great way for bars to ensure men don't wash their hands.

I've also been listening to the brilliant new Indelicates album, Songs for Swinging Lovers.  They've done the Radiohead thing of offering it for as much as you want to pay for it, without the Radiohead comfort blanket of already being multi-millionaires.

This isn't really representative of the album but it's the only one on youtube.  They're usually much nastier:

Browned off

So, the dying walrus of British politics finally chucked in the towel today.  There's been a few articles recently describing Gordon Brown as a tragic hero, a fascinatingly tortured character and the like.  I think that's over-egging the haggis a little - being both very clever and socially weird is unfortunate but hardly unusual.  There's plenty of grumpy men in jobs they're not quite up to being mean to the staff.  Still, he's been part of the political furniture for so long (a large wardrobe perhaps?), doing that goldfish gulp and talking about prudence, that it's going to be strange without him.

I voted for the Pidgeon but she didn't have quite enough to carrier over the finishing line.  Hopefully she'll use some of her free time to get that crick in her neck looked at.  In a moment of election fever I also bought the cupcakes below from the lovely cake stall girl at the Oval Farmer's Market.  She's great.  Little smudge of flour on her nose, red cheeks from hours spent at a hot stove.  Sometimes I think I should run away with her to her gingerbread house and just eat hundreds and hundreds of cakes.  I mention this fantasy to my girlfriend most Saturdays but she doesn't seem overly concerned.  She thinks a relationship based on my appreciation of someone's buns is unlikely to flourish.

Anyway, I picked Brown (raspberry) for the missus and Clegg (passion fruit) for me.  I rejected Cameron on both ideological and taste (blueberry) grounds.

The French connection

I have recently undertaken a comprehensive review of what my readership like and don't like about this blog.  For larger media operations it would be a complicated and expensive process.  For a boutique concern such as this one, the research involved seeing the majority of my audience in the pub and him telling me what he thinks.  The conclusion was that you the audience want more words and fewer silly videos and pictures.  I'm afraid I will never lose my love of silly pictures, but I am nothing if not pliable.  So this one goes out to a man sitting in his office in the Square Mile, reading this while absent-mindedly signing bits of papers covered in very large numbers and made-up words.

Because apropos of nothing much, I was thinking recently of a disastrous French exchange that I undertook when I was 12.  I didn't want to do it at all and was horrified when I realised that my parents weren't joking.  Despite the best efforts of the famille Latour in the Tricolore text books, I was (and remain) terrible at all languages and the folks must have thought that total immersion would stun my second-rate brain into firing up a few new synapses.

So I was signed up and allocated Nicolas from Grenoble as my exchange partner.  We exchanged meticulously composed letters filling each other in on the age of our siblings and pets and the hobbies we (or at least I) pretended to have.  J'aime collectionner des timbres!  Things were going well so far.  Then I pitched up at a snowy mountainside farm house and actually met him.

It's not often that you meet an alpha 12 year old.  Nicolas was about twice my height, blond and ruddy cheeked, and played and excelled at every sport he could get his broad muscular hands on.  The first day was a scarcely credible montage of humiliation as he found me to be an inadequate opponent at football, tennis, table tennis and, finally, checkers.  "Theenk, Garet', theenk!" he scolded as he captured all my discs or whatever you do within seconds for the third or fourth time.

His disappointment with me intensified when, after some fairly awkward work with a map, we established that my home town of Nottingham was in fact quite a long way from Manchester and he would not be seeing his footballing idol Eric Cantona in the flesh on the return leg of the exchange.  We both went to bed quite clear that this wasn't a lifelong friendship in the making.

His family were perfectly nice and accommodating of the monosyllabic cuckoo in their nest.  They gave me tasty French food and tried early on to force me to speak French, although after one too many cheek-burningly awful exchanges we all tacitly decided that I was a hopeless case.  I had my first and only experience of skiing that week, which ended with me picking my way down a black run sideways, gibbering with terror all the way, after a directional mix-up when ascending the mountain.  I told Nicolas about it and his ruddy jock face expressed bafflement at the idea that going down a really scary mountain would be anything other than totally brilliant.

The other people from my school that I saw that week were the exchange partners of Nicolas' friends, most of whom I had no relationship with at all in everyday Nottingham life.  However, they were largely having as miserable a time as I was, which meant we were all desperately happy to see each other and ditch the Frenchies on trips to Grenoble.

On one of these trips I made momentous decision.  My music taste (largely Bon Jovi's Crossroads compilation on a loop) was palpably behind the times and needed freshening up.  One of my new enforced English buddies offered to guide me into fashionability and, as a first step, prescribed Nevermind by Nirvana.  This was scary stuff.  The coolest boys in my school - the ones with the longest, greasiest curtains - all wore the Nirvana t-shirt that said "flower sniffin kittty pettin baby kissin corporate rock whores" on the back.  If I was going to get into them I'd have to hide any such clothing from my Mum, which raised the question of how it would ever get washed.  Don't worry, said my new friend - just start with the music and worry about the rest later.  So I bought the album, heart thumping at the prospect of being ID'd because one of the song titles was Territorial Pissings, and stashed it proudly in my suitcase.  The minute I got home, I'd get into that and start to be very hip indeed.

The rest of the trip passed in a fug of moody silences between me and Nicolas and a very weary goodbye, both of us dreading his trip to England in a few weeks (of which I have very little memory, probably because I completely ignored him).  The atmosphere on the coach to the airport was jubilant.  I was about to give Crossroads another whirl when there was a commotion from the back row.  I turned around to see a two day old copy of the Daily Mail that had been left under one of the seats being passed around with great solemnity.  The headline read "American singer found dead".  "Does that mean there'll be no more Nirvana?" asked one of the cool kids plaintively as his friends chewed their fringes with angst.

I was absolutely livid.  I'd not even listened to the sodding album yet and it was already retro.  I knew enough about music to know that I'd now always be a nouveau Nirvana fan and nothing more.  When I got home I gave it a few half-hearted spins but it just wasn't going to work.  I resolved to stick with Crossroads until someone would get around to inventing Britpop.

Election section

We've been getting the usual election bumf through the letterbox.  It's all horribly badly written and poorly designed, so the only thing to do is to judge the candidates on their photos.

First up - Tory Glynn Chambers.  Glynn makes a big play of his Vauxhall connections in his PR guff.  Looking at his snaps, I suspect that's because he spends a lot of time with his shirt off blowing a whistle in clubs like Chunk and Horse Meat.  As a lazy liberal I'm very comfortable with this aspect of the local community - there's few things that make me feel healthier than the seeing drug-stunned zombies staggering around on a Sunday morning with their dog-skin caps pulled over their eyes as they try to chew their own faces off.  But - and I stress I couldn't bare to read his actual policies - Glynn may wish to tone down any pledges based around glowsticks for all or declaring the Royal Vauxhall Tavern an independent state.  The Tories aren't ready for it yet. (note - Glynn Chambers may in fact not be an aggressive homosexual)

Next up - Caroline Pidgeon of the Lib Dems.  This is tricky for me because I like the Lib Dems but I hate birds.  But on the basis of the photo this is one pidgeon I can trust.  Look at the empathetic head tilt.  Those limpid brown eyes.  The lego lady haircut is odd, but she's clearly a kindly sort.  If she met Glynn after he'd had one too many disco biscuits she'd take him home and give him tea and hob nobs.

Finally, Kate Hoey - the sitting Labour big beast.  I did actually try to read her leaflet but it's such totally pointless balls I had to stop and write this silly blog instead.  The most important thing about Kate that struck me is her frightening similarity to alien-hunting, Pentagon-baiting, going-to-prison-for-ever computer hacker Gary MacKinnon.

So that's that - election sorted.  Lovely Lib Dem lady wins.  Sorry Glynn, sorry Gary.

Nose, meet Mr Grindstone

Going back to work after a holiday is always something of a long dark week of the soul. I shuffle in on the first day expecting to be presented with a list of terrible blunders that have come to light in my absence, have my tie snipped off at the knot and be gently but firmly propelled back out of the door.  But somehow that didn't happen this week, and I was sufficiently busy in the first few days to not sink too deeply into desk-bound depression.  Still, the culture shock was sufficient that looking back at the studenty glory of the previous fortnight - newspapers, solo cinema trips, computer games, a couple of listless jogs, wreckless drinking - made me almost tearfully nostalgic.

I sit here now on Sunday, almost glowing with smugness having treated the missus to Nigel's cottage pie and Jamie's marmalade bread and butter pudding.  Here's the pie (note: photo has been subtly tweaked to preserve my anonymity):

Other than that, it's been a quiet weekend.  I found out that Lily Allen ripped off Akira the Don.  I found this David Cameron/Common People take-off which is pretty obvious but still funny ("He told me that his Dad was loaded/I said "mine too, we should run this country"/He said "yah"")



I also found this footballer's wag song, which also funny but utterly obscene ("I've been spit-roasted, in Grosevenor House, by the boys from Chelsea FC") so not to be watched with any elderly relatives in earshot.

Man blubbing

Just finished One Day by David Nicholls. See the post below for a bit more info on it, but just wanted to put on electronic record that no book has ever made me as emotional as a certain part of this did. I literally yelped with shock.

I checked out the Amazon reviews to make sure I hadn't gone completely mad. The majority agree with me, but as ever there are some haters. My favourite was this pearl from Master Shake (possibly not his real name), whose primary thoughts after ploughing through 400 pages of warmth and brilliance were:

"The period detail is also really problematic. Dexter presents a show called Game On in the mid-90s? when there was a sitcom of the exact same title running at the same time?...some of the clothing and actions of the main characters also seem very oddly placed."

This country.

Each sunset now is flecked with tears, and the tears are dripping into my beers

So the two week holiday just went by in about 20 minutes. I haven't covered myself in glory blogging-wise, but what can I say - I've been busy. Ish. A run of heavy drinking coincided appallingly yesterday with a two hour visit from the landlady. The lowest moment came with a lengthy and interactive tutorial on how I could optimise the performance of the dishwasher (you're supposed to put salt in?), which I hummed and hawed at like an utter moron, standing as far away as was politely possible to try to contain my tramp-like booze odour.

I did discover an excellent book - One Day by David Nicholls - which introduces two characters, Dexter and Emma, with a drunken bunk-up on their graduation day and revisits them on the same date every year for the next two decades. Brilliantly well-written, funny and readable. Much to the missus's vocal and violent disgust I was nose-deep in it until about 3am a couple of days ago, and when the light went out spent quite a while worrying about Dexter's creeping alchohol problem and Emma's terrible love life. I then forced myself to think about the real world, which meant I ended up re-running the horror show emails I'd seen on my Blackberry earlier that day. I decided I was much safer with Dexter and Emma and turned my full attention back to them. Not a viable option from tomorrow morning onwards, sadly.

I went to see the glorious Luke Haines playing live at The Garage in Islington on Thursday. Seeing him is always a double-yolker of a night, because as well as hearing music I love the whole experience boosts my self confidence enormously. LH attracts quite a specific type of dangerous loner, who tends to stand rigidly still and stare, unblinking, up at the stage and mouth the more alarming lyrics while somewhere in a bedsit far away the girl he trussed up that morning tries to fray her rope handcuffs on the edge of a VHS copy of The Matrix. It's rare that I'm in a room with 300 other people and am utterly confident I'm among the coolest 5%. It did mean I missed the electoral debate ("worst Kraftwerk gig ever" - Popbitch) but I imagine I'd have been making a cup of tea within seconds if I had been at home.

This is utterly brilliant - classic computer game characters destroy New York:



And finally, Adam Buxton sums up how I feel about the end of my holiday:

Broken Britain #2 - This is not a brothel

I'm getting into this citizen journalism thing. The below was spotted by my crack team (me and the missus) on a smart street in Belgravia.

It's fair to assume a fair amount of seedy late-night confusion led to the owner feeling the sign was necessary.

Broken Britain - The death of Scooby Doo

Yesterday I was walking down Clapham Road when I came across the post-apocalyptic scene below. Outside a council estate were the remains of a bonfire, and on top of the charcoal was an eviscerated, man-sized Scooby Doo costume.

I very much fear for the well-being of the last man to wear the costume.

Heroic indie failure #2

My enthusiasm for minority interest indie eccentrics has been covered here before. Wasted genius is endlessly fascinating. I was introduced early on to the king of them all, Lawrence, when his band Denim supported Pulp at my first ever gig.

They were too weird for my tiny little brain to cope with at the time, especially as my luxuriantly bushy curtains were probably interfering with my hearing. But subsequently I got into their album Denim On Ice in a very major way. It's literally a work of madness, divided into three roughly themed sections that I doubt anyone other than Lawrence has ever been able to listen to all the way through in one go. There's just so many ideas and musical styles on there, often in the same song; for example, brilliant eighties/Ultravox parody Synthesizers In The Rain has a Russian fol-de-rol interlude for no apparent reason.

Unfortunately Denim on Ice was as close to stardom as poor old Lawrence got. He fried his brain and ended up a methadone addict living in sheltered accomodation in Victoria, releasing appalling novelty records under the name Go Kart Mozart. There's some pretty distressing recent footage out there of him looking like an emaciated, NME-reading gargoyle. But in songs like Brumburger (below) he combined great pop songs with a genuinely odd outlook on life in a unique way. Any song with the lines "My mate's got a garage and it's full of stuffed animals / I snuck in there once and I stole a cat" deserves a certain respect.

It's a staycation, yah?

I am not very good at planning holidays, which means I am not very good at taking holidays, which means I realised in March that I had lots of time to take off work that would disappear at the end of April. Boo to that, so for the next two weeks I am Oval's stay-at-home blogger in residence.

It's now 9am on the first day where I'm not working and everyone else is (ie the best kind of day off). I've been awake since 6.40am as the missus showed a queenly disdain for the notion of setting her own alarm and letting me sleep. Phone alarms are too complicated for girls, apparently. No matter - the pleasure I got from forcefully ejecting her to start her deranged morning ritual, safe in the knowledge that I had nothing more stressful than a bath to get through, was better than a lie in.

Now I'm up and ready to P.A.R.T.Y. There is but one pleasure-destroyer lurking in the flat, ready to consume me at any moment. It may have a cheery name and wink its little red eye at me all the time, but it only brings misery. If you dare, look upon the flat, uncaring face of evil:

Oh hellish implement of eternal work, why dost thou torment me? Every new message is a potential day-ruiner. I could accidentally on purpose destroy it, but then the terror of the not-knowing may prove worse than the dull thumping reality of the knowing. I should ignore it, but I can't. Instead I will sit here, scanning the messages pretty much in real time. I may as well go to the office dressed as a ghost and sit at my desk watching my inbox fill up.

Enough of that defeatist talk. I'm not wasting my holiday. No, I'm going to drink a bottle of champagne clean the flat and then sample the seediest delights that Soho has to offer go to John Lewis to buy some lightbulbs.

If you can bare it, I will blog more than usual too.

The last gasp of yoof

Exciting times ahead. I've applied for membership of the bafflingly age-restrictive 20 Something Blogger network. I won't deny that my motivation is partially to enrage Webby, who having recently hit 30 is now too ancient and revolting to apply. Apparently, if he visits the site his screen will fill with live feeds to dozens of gorgeous 21 year olds retching and saying "No way, Grandad!" in an exotic variety of languages.

But aside from that, this could be my ticket to an Indian summer in my dying months as a 20 something. I want to lol and rofl and lmao with people who arrange parties in squats through MySpace and take meow meow and put pictures of their bums on Twitter. I'll befriend these dangerous, beautiful youths by never seeming to have the time to type the words "to" or "you" and raving about cutting edge (and entirely fictitious) bands. Hey fella, u clocked the Fridge Handbags yet?  They're like totally spudrocking.

Then this blog will become an enormous youth culture online sensation. I'll be like Belle de Jour but without needing to have it off with strangers in hotels for cash. I'll quit the day job and throw myself into the London celebrity scene, guided by my friends from 20 Something Bloggers on what to wear, where to wear it and what slang to say when I get there. I'll get a job with Channel 4 introducing episodes of Friends on Sunday mornings and appear in a Lady Gaga video dressed like a sexy robot lobster.
 
Then, on 23 May 2011, I'll be expelled from paradise. My 20 Something friends will turn their backs, disgusted by my decrepitude. Peaches Geldof will stop returning my tweets and I'll be replaced on Channel 4 by a talking cartoon syringe. My girlfriend will have left me and I'll die of bitterness and regret by Christmas.

On reflection, maybe I shouldn't mix with the youth of the internet. My membership status is pending, which must mean someone from the network will along soon to make sure I'm not an undercover OAP. 20 Something Blogger representative, I implore you - turn me down. I'm not one of your kind.