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.