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.