New shoe shuffle

Back at work on Monday after two weeks off and shoes are in a sorry state. Decide that it's time to get a new pair of work shoes and, after tense negotiation in shoe shop, get a pair I'm happy with. Wear in office all afternoon and am content, also content that i have broken them in.

Which is why i put them on this morning to go top work.

This was possibly a mistake. I've been wearing nothing but sandals for two weeks and my old shoes were, as I put it 'comfortable' and as the good lady puts it 'f**ked'. True, they might have a certain vagabondish charm, but they fit like slippers.

This is possibly why, half way to the station, my cosseted feet were squealing in protest. There was chaffing, there was a twinge, there was an uncomfortable sensation.

By the time it was time to walk home there was agony, the requirement for skin grafts in the heel area and a panic phone call to the good lady asking for a lift from the station.

Not just because of the feet situation either. The rain was coming down like stair-rods and the thunder rolled like a very loud climatic event. Britons are totally unprepared for any kind of weather...and this from a race that are supposed to carry their brollies everywhere. Certainly those without shooting pains in their feet and a lift on the way looked bloody glum at the prospect of walking home in a deluge, possibly because they had neglected to bring their paddles.

Dunno much about climate change but it's bloody wet. Mediterranean climate my arse, this was like f**king Bangkok. Made me want to slip into the 'Claret bar' and order a ladyboy, water by.

Right, I'm off to apply some sticking plasters to my affected areas and wring out the back-garden.

Anyone for tennis?

Or, love all, or, Wimblequeue, or, what the deuce, or, sprawl in the dirt like the bitch you are!

Mate,

Off to Wimbledon! Madness, obviously, but good lady insists that we have to leave the house and garden at least once during our break. I argue that we have all the comforts of home, and many of the pub, right here at, well, home and so why should we bother going elsewhere? My argument is lost and I fire up the interweb to investigate tickets to Wimbledon, or, more rightly, the English Lawn Tennis Association. Turns out that if one turns up after five in the afternoon when, apparently, the queues are less long than at other times, one can buy a 'grounds ticket'. This allows you oink status, that is, you can't get in to centre court or number one court. I believe this is entirely appropriate as no self-respecting Englishman would want to be seen on centre court where the final is played.

Hoping to at least see a couple of sweaty lezzers grunting, or failing that, tennis, I pack my storm brolly and a jam sandwich and we head off to pick up the nephew. I have to say that I was travelling lightly - I had feared that the WLTA was the sort of place that stopped you bringing in even your water bottle, making you, as in a Victorian jail, purchase everything once inside. Not so, in fact, one may take into the grounds 'a reasonable amount of alcohol'. I have a note from my doctor explaining my status as an alcoholic and pack three wine boxes. Once empty, the silvery innards double as pillows!

Pick up young nephew, who has abandoned love of all things Arsenal for a week to start the proper occupation of pretending not to be interested in women's tennis while playing with himself. We strolled towards the train in a state of great excitement, brought on by an outing and the consumption of half a pound of sherbet fizzers I had unwisely gifted the little fellow. I always feel a little uncomfortable taking children on public transport, as one never knows if one will sit next to some loony or Turet's type and the child will, at some point in the evening, come back from the trip to ask their parents what a 'm******f*****g c**ks***ing a**w***' is. The answer is, of course, the sort of uncle who exposes the child to this sort of language. Usually, of course, the loony is me, so that's okay.

Train loony free. 'Shuttle' from station to ELTA is in fact a double decker bus. Alight with one eye on child and other on clouds and make way to end of queue, which is about 80 yards long.

I thought.

Turns out this is the 'break' in the queue, which resumes over the road. It takes ten minutes to reach the end of the queue. Along the way one admires the many nutter's camping out in the hope of early morning tickets and one is drawn to the South African and Oz flags. I was also impressed by the entrenuperial zeal shown by some of the locals who had thrown a couple of barbies together in their front gardens and were charging a quid for a burger and 50p for a can of drink.

I of course would have charged a quid for the use of my loo, three quid for solids and a fiver for a shower...just be sure not to mist up the web-cam darling.

Not all the campers were shiftless colonial oiks. Some were middle aged types, sheltering under a cagoul and uncorking their second bottle of chardonay at five in the afternoon!

Eventually reached the end of the queue, where I was handed a certificate to say I had reached the end of the queue. This is to stop queue-barging (you can't enter the grounds without a queue certificate), although looking at the length of the queue I was confident I could auction mine on ebay and have it sold by the time I got to the turnstile to pass it to its new owner. You also get a glossy brochure, not the programme for the championships, but a programme for the queue. I kid you not. lots of tips about queue etiquette, maps and a small short story, 'the phantom queuer'.

Queue moves very quickly and, as the heavens open, we reach the turnstiles. Lightening flashes and thunder rolls as the stewards explain that it's unlikely that we'll see any play, that our tickets are non-refundable and that's ten quid each please.

It is, indeed, raining. The ELTA is very large, although many of the courts are crowded together. Centre court is huge, number one court is bigger (newer too), everyone is very polite and very helpful. Linen, when wet, clings to the arse of the posh bird wearing it.

Everyone was incredibly nice, all the stewards trying to make up for the fact there was no tennis by letting people in to centre court (where you can retain your seat if play re-commenced). Sadly, the rain drove on and it was soon time to go. Exiting, I approached a young female security guard and asked the way to the shuttle bus. I was expecting the usual grunts one gets in response to questions asked of those of minimum wage and lower IQ, but was forgetting that the ELTA recruits locally. A young lady with an accent that could cut teak and was obviously just doing this job to meet a rich husband or pay for her skank habit, pointed me in the right direction.

Secretly, I was glad that we saw no tennis. Obviously one's first reaction to seeing women's tennis is an act of self-pleasure. Fine at home but this might, watching live, have offended the person seated in front at the point of conclusion.

All in all, great fun. Considering the lack of, you know, tennis, nephew was thrilled to have visited ELTA and didn't kick up once. ELTA itself is an oasis in rip-off Britain. Nephew was not charged fare on shuttle-bus, nor charged entry to ground. Instead of leaving thinking 'well that's the afternoon and a tenner wasted then', gave serious consideration to returning at some point. Imagine, if that's how good it is without seeing tennis...it must be excellent actually seeing the stuff!

Although...are you allowed to scream 'sprawl in the dirt like the bitch you are' when the player falls over? Maybe just get a wide screen telly then. SNES tennis was better.

Picturing England

BBC are doing an excellent programme at the moment called 'A Picture of Britain'. It features Jonathan 'suppose I had better find something to do between elections and royal funerals' Dimbleby motoring around various scenic parts of the country in a Land Rover Defender, occasionally stopping to remark that this was where Constable painted the 'Hay-Wain', or some other landscape painter painted something else. The programme is excellent, as the picture of Britain is made up not just of painted landscapes but poetry and music.

To accompany the series, the BBC has launched a digital picture of Britain competition on its web-site. Enthusiastic snappers are invited to submit their photographs of Britain, to make up a gallery. It's interesting and heart-warming stuff - a sort of anti-happy slapping. Normally when one sees modern photography or a photo-essay about Britain, the photographer seems to go out of his way to get a picture of an empty crisp packet blowing across some scene of urban desolation, usually featuring a burned-out car. or, as it is more popularly known, Essex.

The photographs are pretty much of a mixed bag, although there is a tendency towards trying to capture photographically what the artists in the programme did in paint - not easy when they've built a shopping centre in most areas of outstanding natural beauty.

So I'm travelling with my camera these days, just in case I see something that would make a good landscape shot. This led me, yesterday, down the by-pass to where we have a McDonald's sitting next to a Tesco. I was trying to get a shot of the golden arches in the foreground with the blue and white fleecer in the background. Of course, this shot would be rendered perfection if the McDs car-park had been full of double-wide fatties waddling from their 4x4s to the burger joint, but no luck.

Got a couple of good shots, although this meant standing on the opposite side of the road and hence shooting over the roofs for cars stopped at the traffic lights. As I had my cycle helmet on (having cycled there rather than affecting to wear one at all times), I wonder if the drivers took me for some sort of green activist type. Why else would a cyclist be taking pictures of McDs? This would account for the scowls I got from the people in the 4x4 who were in one shot. The scowls only visible when I downloaded the shot to computer.

I can see now why people want to take pictures of lovely places rather than taking pictures of the McDs and Tesco that now, unfortunately, contribute to our landscape...they are ugly! Obviously these things are designed and manufactures in some factory in Guildford and then arrive in sections on flatbeds and are erected overnight. They lack any concession to the local environment, the McDs I was photographing looked like it would not be out of place in Arsehole, Kansas or Kowbutcherbaad, Ukraine. I imagine that some farmer can sign the sale agreement one night on his field and by the time he opens his curtains the next morning he's looking at the queue for the drive-through and somebody is asking him about happy meals.

So trying to capture corporate blah and shimmering tarmac was a bit of a bust. Instead, I decided to go in search of a photograph of something quintessentially English - the bowling green in the park over the road. Beryl Cook may make bowling greens look interesting in her paintings, but that's only because she populates them with randy Majors poking fat matrons up the bum as they bend over to take their bowl. While there's something lovely about a perfect square of close cropped grass, it makes for a very dull photograph. Okay then - next project...the allotments next to the park. Again, a bit of a disappointment. While we all know that allotments are places of danger, intrigue and cow-dung and that every shed hides a still and a collection of pornography so eye-watering that its use is forbidden in most of the EU, this is very hard to convey in a photograph. What was actually there were a few wheelbarrows, a few sheds and what appears to be the biggest crop of sweet peas outside of the main supplier for Tesco.

Cycling around these places at the moment is no fun, as the heat here in the UK this week is best described as punishing. The sun beats down relentlessly and the English seem to be as unprepared for this as they are for snow, rain and all other seasonal norms. Young girls walk by with shoulders the colour of post-boxes, office workers make a concession by shedding their jackers, all the better to display the damp patches they have been growing all day.

As for me, I'm in the second week of a two week holiday, spending it mostly sitting in the back garden alternating tea with cooling drinks and waiting until five o'clock when it's time to uncork dinner. The problem with this heat is that it seems to have an effect upon alcohol, the body or both. One glass of wine and the evening is more or less written off and it's the most one can do to sit there cursing the heat and discussing the origin of the word 'torpor'.

Have yet to spot my favourite blazingly hot weather sight, that of the aged chap who, in defiance of the heat, is wearing a vest, shirt, tie and suit. Pity that the BBC competition doesn't allow portraits of people because sights like that ARE the British landscape.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/apictureofbritain/

Home and gardening

On holiday this week, spending it at home so, you know what that means...a trip to the garden centre. Where once a holiday was an excuse to measure your length on the sofa and ward off DVT by exercising your thumb over the teevee remote and the speed-dial for 'Hang's House of Curry', thanks to Titmarch and his ilk, back yards all over the nation have been turned in to gardening gulags. So it was off to the Big Orange Fleecer to look for plants and so on. Left with some bamboo poles and a faint sense of disappointment at not having spent enough.

Decided to check out local nursery. Not the type that might have me breaching my ASBO, but instead one where they raise plants. It was excellent, basically consisting of lots of poly-tunnels lashed together and acres of shimmering greenhouses. There was free beverages and the front desk was un-manned. Trying to neck free beverages while loading up the car with stolen begonias seemed like a tempting idea, but in the end we pressed the buzzer for assistance, me hoping all the while that some buxom land-girl might ring up my lavender. Unfortunately, that was not the case.

The nursery itself was lovely, but was about as hard to reach as Brigadoon. It was at the end of a road lined with very posh houses. (It was also next to a riding stables. I suspect that the reason all the nursery plants are so big has a lot to do with the diet of the horses). As one turned off the main road, the houses were normal and close together. Then they started to spread out and grow bigger, as if, like plants with water, they needed to suck up more wealth to survive. This was 4x4 country, you could tell because the road humps were so big that two had snow on the peak and one gave me a nose-bleed the ascent was so sudden and steep.

I expected to see a sign saying 'private road', but the only thing there was a sign saying 'no pavement'. This was a warning, rather than an instruction, although I can see it being added to in the years to come 'no pavement, blacks, lefties, beardies, sandle-wearing Guradian readers, moslems, homosexualists or gurning'.

In between doing the heavy lifting while Lou flits from sunflower to sunflower in a floppy hat occasionally tying things to bamboo and telling me to dig faster, I managed to get two minutes with a cuppa and the Observer Food Monthly.

There's an excellent competition in it. Basically you have to take a photograph of some food! There are three sections, Reportage (shot of somebody butchering a lamb, or some toothless type inhaling a bowl of noodles through a cloud of steam), portrait (food porn) and still life (hard-core food porn).

This appeals to me. I especially like the idea of reportage. The example in the magazine was an ancient Vietnamise fellow with a basket full of what might be green leaves or knock-off Nike trainers. Intrestingly (well, for me), he was walking away from camera. This highlights one of the problems of reportage - how can one get a photograph of say, a fat sweaty overweight trucker about to sit down to a full English with double egg cooked in sump-oil without drawing attention to oneself, with predictable consequences and the chance to do a follow-up photographic essay on hospital food?

I may enter. A couple of ideas have already presented themselves. There's a bakery in the village and there's always a queue. Nothing sways a judge of a photographic competition like a group of old people queuing for bread - it takes them back to the glory days of fantasising about being picture editor of a national newspaper and sorting out the latest images of Soviet life. I'm composing the shot already in my head and I can almost smell the wee - and the bread, obviously.

Then again, every Friday in the village Tony's fish van sets up. Fresh fish from Hastings. He has a crew cut, and ear-ring and a striped apron. He's like the 6th Village Person! Ahhh, I can almost smell the halibut. Yes, it does indeed smell like victory!

Or, I suppose, I could go for broke with photoshop and apply a Burberry tint to a photograph taken in McD's of some fat kid doing something unspeakable to a chicken nugget. Believe me, being eaten is only the start of its worries. The great thing about taking photographs of people eating 'food' in McD's is that it counts as reportage AND still life!

I think I shall take some photographs and post them. Feedback welcome. The only problem is that the sort of things I am interested in photographing are the sort of places where the owner might associate a camera with the environmental health, a private prosecution or, worse still, inclusion in a 'Time Out' guide.

Enjoyed your e mail very much. You appear to be a having an adventure. My Brussels kit is packed and ready and I await your summons.

Pain killer!

Another heart-attack story in the press, this time about pain killers. This cased great dismay as I had just sent in two para to try and sort out the oom-pah band that had set up residency in my head, the result of revels last night.

Heart attack stories seem to be flavour of the month in the press and it would appear that if you have a dull job and a hangover, you're screwed. This is a pity because, like many people with dull jobs, I really like to drink, it's one of the ways to make the afternoons more interesting, and shorter.

Thinking back, I'm trying to recall the last time I took a pain-killers for anything other than a hangover. Thankfully, I can't recall. I suppose the reason is that if you, for instance, stub your toe, it's much more effective therapy leaping round the room like a whirling dervish, holding your foot and cursing all furniture in general and the article you've stubbed against in particular, than it is to limp to the medicine cabinet and pop a couple of aspirin.

What we're short of by way of balance if one of those stories about how something that is considered bad for you in excess (drink, salt, altitude) is actually quite good for you in moderation. For instance, one glass of wine is supposed to be good for the heart, while many, we now know, is bad because you end up necking half a bottle of Demerol the next day.

The ugly truth about pain killers comes only a few weeks after the revelation that ibuprofen causes stomach problems. Certainly when I used to wake with a force 7 hangover (gusting to force 10) and popped a nurofen or two, I often suffered from a queasy stomach. This though, could be down to the seven pints of foulbreath's old particular imbibed the night before, or the swaying of the carriage, of the realisation that you've left home not wearing socks.

The trick, of course, is to avoid sobering up at all!

Plumage

With the retreat of the glaciers and the lunch-time hoards descending upon the green spaces of London, tucking their skirts into their knickers and sunbathing while getting outside of an egg salad sarnie, early signs indicate a spell of warm weather.

This has led me to see if any of my summer suits are in a fit state to be worn. The sad answer is 'probably not'. Once, many summers ago, they were crisp linen creations that made the wearer cool. Now, having suffered the indignities of public transport, inner city grime, aggressive dry-cleaning and, it has to be said, the odd encounter with the bar-room floor, they resemble more the sort of thing that a sweaty villain might sport in one of your greasier film noir shockers, possibly set below the cactus line.

Still, something has to be done. My morning walk to the train station is increasingly ending in my arriving in a sweaty heap (no problem getting a double-seat to myself then!). This is in part the result of my having to dash the last 70 yards to the platform as I see the train pulling in, a sight that never fails to amuse: partly because of the way my jacket-tails flap, partly because of the way my briefcase bangs against my legs but mostly because I run like a big girl.

A woollen suit is not helping. Neither is getting up late, but the suit at least I can change.

Time to open up the Boden catalogue I think. While there are many irksome features to the catalogue (irritating habit of listing model's likes and dislikes i.e. Amy. Likes: kittens. Dislikes: getting loose clothing caught in threshing equipment.), it does at least steer well clear of the tradition of paying for clothes by instalments. This was an excellent idea in principle, but the dangers of the bank screwing up a direct debit leading to repossession of your trousers cannot be overstated!

Musings

An e mail from an ex-colleague, currently out in Spain, doing up some houses out there and intending to run a small cottage holiday/resort trail biking venture. All sounds terribly exciting. He's distinguished himself by being the only Brit abroad doing up property who does not have a teevee crew in tow and a book deal with Penguin.

Such adventure threw into sharp relief the mounds of paper on my desk and highlighted a scaremongering report on the BBC news web-site yesterday - that people in boring jobs are more likely to suffer heart attacks (possibly in surprise at being woken from their at-desk slumber suddenly?). This has caused some consternation here in the office and has put the wind right up me.

As a result I am currently bidding on a Russian army-surplus defibrillator on eBay. The 'AK4700 Defribski volt-jolter' was apparently used in Afghanistan and, as well as shocking civil servants back to life, can be used to heat borscht or torture insurgents! Other options in the on-line auction house include the 'iFrib', available in five snazzy colours and the 'Delux-ulator 2000', which comes with an MP3 player and has paddles that double as jump leads or nipple clamps!

Hello Boy!

Don't worry, I have not entered the Blogosphere - a mirror universe apparently populated by self-regarding, introspective, megalomaniac nerds. This web-site is not a platform for spoutings about biscuits, public transport, hairy women, hairy dogs, the congestion charge, star trek, star wars, stars in their eyes or staropramen.

Instead I thought that this was probably the best way to be able to drop you a line until you have an address or a working 'phone line or whatever. Crucially, it means that I can send you stuff when sat at my desk and not have to wait until I get home - by which time I'd probably have forgotten what I as going to write and, more importantly, where composing and sending an e mail cuts into the time I could be spending slumped on the sofa.

Hope that all went well with the move and that all is going well in a city famed for chocolate, beer, bureaucracy and now…you! I take it that you are already on your way to establishing yourself as a character, possibly by taking your Englishness to absurdist levels, or simply by urinating from your balcony every morning.

Or have you have assumed a new identity? A Welshman perhaps?

Worryingly, there is something about settling up a weblog that almost compels one to conform to 'blogging' conventions. I am strangely tempted to write a rambling discourse on biscuits, or detail the excruciatingly dull elements of my life in the mistaken belief that they will be of interest to anyone, then return every day to my 'blog' to be crushed that nobody has left comments. Still, it could be worse, I could have invested in a web-cam and set it up at my desk or, worse still, pointed it at something 'hilarious' and named it 'fridge-cam', 'beard-cam' or 'goat-botherer cam'.

I wonder what would happen if it were made a rule of 'blogging' that before a post was published, it should be edited by somebody selected at random?

It's a good job then, that I'm not the sort of character easily influenced by fads or fashion.

Doesn't look as though I will be getting to Rome this year. This is a shame. The reason is that I have spent the money that would have gone on travel on…carpet. As you can imagine, I am already planning how to get value for money out of it and so intend to spend the time I would have spent in Rome lying on my carpet instead.

It is a lovely carpet though. It's blue.

Most played on iPod at the moment: 'Copperhead Road'. As you once told me…it has EVERYTHING, it has cars, whisky, hillbilly family and he even manages to get Viet Nam in there! Mind you…I still make sure that I have 'we will rock you!' queued up for when I come into the office every morning.

Pip Pip