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.