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.