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:
Sunday 30 May 2010
Sunday 23 May 2010
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.
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.
Sunday 16 May 2010
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:
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:
- 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 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:
Monday 10 May 2010
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.
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.
Saturday 1 May 2010
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.
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.
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