There's posh for you

The right outfit for the right occasion - that’s the ticket! Attending a funeral dressed as, say, a jockey, might cause comment (unless the funeral is Shergar’s) and the rules for dress-down-day in the office only go so far - men wearing skirts that finish above the knee are frowned upon, fur may draw tutting and dressing up as a Borg may lead to a ruck in the loo with the Klingon from accounts.

It’s odd that in a time of apparent plenty, there’s so little evidence of choice of dress being exercised. This statement is drawn from a random sampling of the youth/chav hybrids on display outside MacNasty’s. They appear to have been produced from the same jelly mould, all wearing ‘leisure wear’, mobile ‘phones and acne.

My invite for dinner at the Savoy stipulated black tie or cocktail dress. As my cocktail dress had been partied beyond repair during the curious incident of the tequila in the night time, I opted for black tie. Black tie actually consists of a matching jacket and trousers, a shirt without the name of a sports team on it, shoes that do not do up with velcro and the finishing touch - a bow tie.

The ready-made bow tie is the last refuge of the cad and scoundrel. Naturally, when equipping myself with a bow tie I went for the self-tie version. Got myself a mirror, a set of instructions and had ‘how to look like a paedophile/wear a bow tie’ on youtube running on a loop. An hour or so of solid practice, freestyle swearing and sweating and I had the tying of the tie down to a fine art. Ready, I thought, for the big night.

Come the big night and as I’m going straight from work I’m in my office attempting a Mr Ben-like transformation from suited drone to elegance on legs. Hummn, bow tie is proving somewhat tricky. Ten minutes later it was clear that wardrobe-elves had somehow changed the tie, my neck or my thumbs. It would not knot.

Over the road to a handy clothes shop, moving so fast I left a trail of fire like the DeLorian in ‘back to the future’. Did they have a ready-tied? Yes! Result! Oooh, two choices, one in black but with little sparkly bits on it that will make me look like the compare of Britain’s gayest nightclub OR a red one. The only time you wear a red bow-tie is when you are having whitewash poured down your trousers every night and twice on Saturdays, so, easy choice.

Grab tie, fit tie. The look is ‘I am a homosexual and everyone knows this but me’. Jettison chances of pulling a bird at dinner and decide it will leave me free to concentrate on food and booze - great! More confident, I am actually impressed with my snug knot, I look every inch the cad and bounder - Terry Thomas would be proud.

I looked, I have to say, eminently suitable for the occasion. I discovered why dinner jackets are sometimes referred to as ‘penguin suits’. It’s partly because of the black and white theme but also because everyone meets at the reception before the dinner in a big room and mills around like flightless fowl on a floe. I grabbed a glass of champers, headed for the corner and kept a wary eye out for walrus.

As for dinner, I sat next to vegetarian who, I’m pleased to say, I managed to cure by the end of the evening. I simply explained that the best way to show your concern about the ethical treatment of animals was to buy free-range, organic meat. Indeed, why not adopt or sponsor a beast, so that when your cuts come they are accompanied by a booklet showing Gerald the cow frolicking happily in pasture and living a happy life - right up to the moment they meet Mr Volt and Mr Bolt.

The food? Not bad, but mass catering will never be as good as locally sourced, in season food cooked for a small party in a kitchen a few yards from the table. Even got a gift! How cool is that - like a posh happy meal. Service was great though. Wine? Free! Hoorah!

YooHoo!

With time to kill while I waited for my kebab and chips last night, I saw a few minutes of the Money Programme about YouTube.

Of course, I’ve visited YouTube before, in those rare moments when my browser hasn’t been pointed at porn or Star Trek sites, and on (very) brief examination it appeared to be video blogs by people too dumb to write.

However, the programme featured Old Man Who Became Famous, whom I had heard of. This is a grandfatherly chap who recorded some musings and memories and got more hits than a paraplegic in a boxing ring. The reason for his success is, I reckon, pretty obvious – he’s a family figure on tap.

With the fragmentation of the family, geographically and in terms of relationships, it can be hard enough to connect with a parent, never mind a grandparent. Into the breach totters this guy. He looks like he’s stepped out of a storybook, he’s proper granddad material, bald, hair in ears and, I swear, if you get close enough to the screen you can smell the boiled sweets. He’s charming and, importantly, does not smell of wee or spout racist outrage, like many real old people do.

They also featured a girl called Kate, (or Katers17), who has lots of hits. No surprise really, I spent half a hour last night watching her posts and mostly laughed myself silly. Naturally I’m drawn to that kind of enthusiasm, youth and creative ability like some sort of vampire.

What strikes me about both cases is their lack of inhibition about putting themselves out there. I try to be fairly anonymous (partly because my blog is now too big, and I am too lazy, to check thoroughly to ensure that I have not accused somebody I know or work with of, for instance, touching kids).

I’d put it down to youth, but there’s Old Guy. Truth is, I want to be free to write whatever I want without fear of consequence or, even worse, being found out.

VD cynic

There were, I thought, two types of people on St Valentine’s Day. Actually there are three, but florists are excepted as they spend the entire day grinning widely so you can’t tell if they are lucky in love or not.

The first is the type of person that realises that the whole thing is simply a cynical commercial exploitation of affection.

The second type of person is one who receives a card.

Espousing this theory, I had it modified by a fellow office drone. He suggested there is a third, the sort of person who comes home to find that their girlfriend, who up to this point has shown every sign of being a rational human being, has bought him a card and is eagerly expecting a card, chocs and more flowers than an East End gangster funeral. Said man is then put on spot.

There’s only one thing to do, pretend you left the card somewhere and get one from somewhere, anywhere. Do not, under any circumstances, attempt the ‘cynical exploitation’ defence or you will never have sex again.

So does this third group really exist, yup, they are called ‘men’ and they can be found every February 15th in the town of Dumpsville – population – you!

Scuttlebut

I’m shocking at being concise. Really, never use one word when a dozen will do and have had to disable the ‘run on sentence’ judgement on my grammar checker. (Which I was bloody disappointed by when I first encountered it - I expected it to say something like ‘weet old lady smelling of cough drops and cats - yes, it’s a grammar’).

That being the case, I love it when other people are concise. Anyone else think Clint was just a chatty Cathy in those ‘fistfull’ films? Which is why I love haiku.

One thing I have noticed about haiku though is that, well, sometimes they really could benefit from one line more, or one line less. For instance, when the poet nails the sensation of the sharp smell of snow on the slopes of Mt Fuji, but still has a line left, is it really necessary to bang something in about goats?

I was thinking of things Oriental this morning as, emerging from the station, I was confronted with hundreds of umbrellas being opened against the rain. They looked for all the world like an image from a Hiroshoge woodcut, no wonder he called it ‘the floating world’, or a B&W reproduction of the lilies lying in Monet’s pond.

A poet would have a phrase for it, me, I just thought it looked for all the world like a scene from one of those films where the Romans lock shields and storm some city. This being the real word, the umbrellas do not interlock to provide a dry space measuring ten feet by ten feet, rather, the rainwater is channelled down gullies and valleys until it decants in a torrent down the back of some screaming, incredulous commuter.

I, of course, wear a hat. I need to have both hands free.

The other image to assault the senses in the station is the number of glossy magazines there appear to be about celebrities. When I say celebrity I mean somebody in a soap. I think I finally reached saturation point with trivia when a story about a singer going into rehab for the umpteenth time made it to the main news.

I suggest that every time some twat editor proposes an ‘entertainment’ story, the idea is ditched in favour of a story with local importance, like a school or hospital closing, or a dangerous stretch of road, or a local cricket team that’s been shaved to raise money for charity or something.

It’s entertainment stories, bread and circuses, that allow Government to do sneaky shit. That’s why I think that scuttlebutt mags should carry a warning lable, like fags ‘warning - this magazine can severely affect your mental health’, or ‘For the same amount of money you could have bought a really big bar of chocolate - tittle tattle will not make you happy, chocolate will!’.

Sound and fury

An excellent example on Saturday night that noise is not just about volume. It’s also about situation. For instance, shouting to make yourself heard in a crowd or when a train is rumbling past, that’s acceptable. Shouting to make yourself heard when, say, Nazis are searching the house and you and your family are essentially hiding behind a cupboard - not such a great idea.

Noises get louder the darker it is. Possibly this is because the little oiks on their farting scooters only race around my neighbourhood after dark, or possibly because when you’re lying in bed your senses strain at the sound of odd noises - especially the tell-tale rustling of a fox reading his newspaper as he takes a leisurely dump on your lawn.

However when, on Saturday night, there was a crack of thunder so loud that for a moment I actually thought I had gone to sleep in a cloud, then it was the perfect storm of noise and surprise.

It wasn’t that loudest thing I’ve ever heard, God no, that, without doubt, was the Unexpected Fart In Company, but it was close.

The next rumble was somewhere further away, almost relaxing really and I fell asleep to the sound of rain hitting the windows, formulating a plan to attach copper rods to foxes.

The weed of crime

Fat Dave has revealed that he’s not just a lover, or a joker, he’s also a midnight toker. Not content with the legitimate fun available at Eton such as buggery, latin and torturing scholarship boys, he’s revealed that he smoked cannabis while at school.

What’s great about it though is apparently it’s okay for him to break the law and still want to become PM because, ‘politicians are entitled to a private past’. Okay, so, it’s fine for a paedophile to have a legitimate expectation of becoming Minister for Children is it?

Everyone is entitled to a private past, but not everyone is an MP. Basically you’re asking people to vote for you, to put their trust in you - and when you reveal that your standards are not the same as theirs, how can you expect them to still support you.

Drug use is a sign of being morally lax, and I should know. But I’m not asking people to vote for me.

What I really liked was that no other MP censured him, even the opposition. Clearly one rule for the self-appointed ruling classes, another for the plebs. The biggest joke was the Home Secretary, John ‘slasher’ Reid, intimating that if we weeded out the users, abusers and boozers from the world of politics, those left would be anaemic. Since when did being a twat high on weed become a pre-requisite of wanting to enter public service. I’m sure there are many people out there who care a lot, do good and are not, and never have been, relentless egomaniacs who think that they should be allowed to indulge their vices without consequence.

What I keep coming back to though is that entitlement of a private past. How far does that extend? Caught wanking in your car? Probably get away with that. Caught wanking in your car with a magazine open to show a picture of a steam train? You’ll probably be okay. Caught wanking in your car with a picture of a traction engine - perfectly normal. Caught wanking in your car using a picture of a diesel loco? You bloody pervert.

Of course, most deviants normally go straight from the al fresco self love to the body in the boot stage but, hey, apparently that’s okay, because we’re all entitled to a private past.

Turkey lurgie

Bird flu has come to Britain and, predictably, it’s kicked off in the sheds of Bernard Matthews or, as you might refer to them if you’re a turkey, Mordor.

I’ve never understood intensive farming. Lock a turkey in a shed with seven or eight thousand other turkeys and surely any disease is going to spread like a rumour at a girl guide camp. Shouldn’t turkeys all be free range, free to freeze their arse off or be savaged by foxes, sure, but free all the same?

Originally Bernard Matthews were trying to pin the arrival of bird flu on contamination by a wild bird? WTF? How does that work, do wild geese fly down the air-intakes of these sheds like those ‘precision’ bombs from the gulf war? That’s a grainy video I’d like to see on YouTube.

How does a wild bird get into the population? Do the BM team go out at night and kidnap migrating geese to make up the numbers of the turkeys that have expired from lack of fresh air and sunlight?

More likely is the emerging explanation, that the infection arrived with a load of semi-processed bird-bits. Semi-processed bird bits are popular because you can do vile things to birds abroad, then finish the process by giving them a crumb coating or whatever and this allows you to say the produce is British.

A lorry-load of bird-bits from Hungary is being fingered as the source.

More likely it’s the driver. Long distance lorry drivers all probably start off normal but endless hours on the road can do things to a man - and turning him into a serial turkey-fucker is not the worst of it. I don’t know how you’d keep cheerful on the road, but looking forward to ten minutes behind the sheds with a turkey might just do it. They should search his cab, if they find bird-seed and gaffa-tape, he’s the culprit.

Of course, this raises the spectre of BM supervisors knowing about this sort of thing, God knows if there is an offence of ‘turkey-pimping’, but there should be.

The only thing that should go into a turkey is sage and onion, and then only when you’re sure the bloody thing is dead.

In public?

As a defence mechanism, my office door was shut this lunchtime. This is because, while I was ‘enjoying’ some fruit for lunch, a colleague right outside my office was tucking into pie and chips, with the chips swimming in vinegar. Itsh maching mesh schlivate juscht thinksing about it. The consumption of hot food at your desk is discouraged in the building, possibly because it will mean people enjoying themselves in a work environment, a clear health and safety issue, possibly because, as the delightful smell intoxicated me, I considered vaulting his desk, rendering him unconscious him with a monitor and stealing his lunch - also possibly a health and safety issue.

So what is acceptable in public?

Reading a blog post the other day about Public Displays of Affection on public transport, I chuckled and considered whether to plagiarise shamelessly. (Interestingly, that blogger has since pulled the post. I wonder if they were concerned about coming over as the Scrooge of SVD)

Certainly the sight of a couple attempting a dual tonsillectomy using only their tongues is one that might cause one to roll one’s eyes, or clench, or tut or wonder if they are married and if so, to each other? Others think that seeing snogging is sweet. Interestingly, those same people don’t half make a fuss if they discover you indulging in a spot of ‘self-love’ in the waiting room to while away the time if the train is late.

I could list the things about my fellow travellers that get right up my nose (body odour for instance) but that would probably degenerate (?) into a frothing rant that would mark me out not as an acute observer of life on public transport, but as a candidate for exorcism.

So lets just (ringtones, mobile phones in general, obstructing the doors, getting on before I’ve got off, having children, being dull, being old, being young, being there at all, reading the ‘Daily Mail’, being fucking cheerful early in the morning) concentrate on one example, the cough.

Now I don’t mind somebody who has a sniffle having a bit of a cough, as long as they get their hankie to their mouth in time. God knows, if they’ve eaten Bernard Matthews in the last few weeks, they are probably more disturbed about their cough than I am. No, what I object to is the person who coughs. Then sits, then coughs again, then sits, then coughs again and continues doing this for ages, like they are making no real effort to either cough or stop coughing. Why? It’s not as if they are miners or something and so have a right to have an annoying cough, it’s as if they are too lazy to sort it out with a huge coughing fit that gives the lungs a good solid work out and results in them teary-eyed, gasping for breath but feeling oddly light and pleasant - like sex…but with more tissues.

The Big Dump

And snow it did.

Not in the quantities required to strand me at home, but enough to have the headline writers hit ‘ALT-TC’ on their keyboards to generate the headline ‘weather brings travel chaos’. My train was a bit late, but not that late, my biggest disappointment was the train company still doesn’t fit snow-ploughs to the front of trains.

Depending on your mode of travel, the snow was either good or bad news. Bad news for those hurrying with purpose, good news for those hurrying with no purpose - like the teenage girls I saw going somewhere with a sledge.

At least I think it was a sledge. When I think of a sledge I think of Rosebud, something that you could confidently attach huskies or at least younger siblings to for power. Something which, and this is important, gives you the illusion of steering.

It is an illusion, when you’re speeding on snow you are obviously not in charge of your own destiny. All you have to do to see this demonstrated is watch any snowy sport - there’s a reason downhill skiers wear helmets you know. There’s nothing quite so satisfying as seeing some athlete dressed in lycra pulled super-tight over muscles you’ll never, ever have, hammering down a slope just, as it turns out, a bit to fast to react to a bump. The next moment the guy is either the centre of a growing snowball or is creating a hugely satisfying shower of snow before his progress is arrested by friction, the crowd or, if he’s unlucky, a pine tree. And these are the experts!

The sledge this girl had was circular and had a couple of handles. What’s the point of that? Is going hell-for-leather down a snowy hill not exciting enough, does she also want the thrill of revolving slowly so that she can’t see that she’s about to be decanted onto a busy road?

Possibly this is a sensible approach but I prefer to tug uselessly at the sledge controls and at least have time to start weeping before something substantially dreadful happens and my transport goes from sledge to splinters in seconds.

Of course the real reason I prefer solid, robust sledges (yew for preference) is that unlike a svelte teen, I can’t fit on a tea tray.

Snow, maybe?

I'm waiting for snow.

Clicking on the 'forecast' section of the weather (as opposed to 'I am too lazy to open a window or look outside...what's it doing at the moment?') I was charmed to see an animation of vigerous snowflakes.

This animation has yet to transfer to reality outside, but I'm braced. I've got a shitload of tea, biscuits and videos and I'm ready at a moment's notice to pretend to work from home.

Question is, how big a dump is required? Certainly we're looking at enough to stop the trains and so halt my commute, which means enough to stop my train drivers getting to work...which means a frosting in their driveways.

What has always bothered me is the relationship between trains and snow. Trains = 8,000 screaming tonnes of metal with its own engine. Snow = something you lark around in. Surely the invention of the commuter train snowplough is overdue? How cool would that be, it could be heated! On time and a return to the age of steam in one go.

Offaly bad verse

All you need to know is this - Haggis tastes great!

I actually stopped drinking for an evening in order to be up at dawn the next morning for a haggis hunt.

I have to say, I was amazed to see snow - really rare on these occasions and of course making it a lot easier to track the Haggis. I chose this year to do things the old fashioned way, instead of a team of beaters, a pack of hounds and a selection of the finest samples from the Vickers 2008 catalogue, it was simply me, my man McNasty and our faithful hound.

Long was the trek. Deep was the snow. Up to the sporran in places.

Predictably it came down to close quarters, a blast of haggis shot that left McNasty bloodied and apologising for getting between me and my dinner and myself and the hound rolling over and over in the increasingly bloodied snow as fought a desperate battle with the beastie.

Finally, bleeding only from the shoulder, groin and knee (an improvement on last year) I got home, speared the beastie and, best to honour him, ate him.

There are many ways to cook the haggis, none of them remotely civilised. You can boil it, broil it, bake it and bugger it, you can even microwave it.

Microwaving food is a bad idea. If you tell your dinner is ready because it goes 'ping', then that's probably a sign that you watch too much telly and need to get out more. If you can tell your dinner is ready because your smoke alarm goes off it's probably a sign that your flat is not ready for cajun cook-outs without pre-installing a Ventilair 6000 extractor-master. If your dinner is announced by your butler...welcome to my world.

The haggis is announced with a poem. This is followed by many other poems, each interspersed with a toast, of scotch. The evening ends with a full stomach, an offal headache and, if you're lucky, a hangover worthy of verse.

Great chieftin' o' the puddin' race
Ach, noo, I ken, ah'em aff my face
My beastly microwave has pinged
Meh dinner's buggered , burned and singed
There's anly one way you ken cook
The national dish and that's ta look
Oot a glass, ye ken ye can,
And pour yerself a healthy dram.

Snow and steam

I've not been in a Starbucks in years, and it's not just because their coffee tastes like it was gathered, by time machine, from a leper colony bilge in the middle ages. It's because, as I rediscovered the other day, corporate coffee saps your will to live.

If you are as infantile as me, you'll have a special sense hard-wired into your brain that tells you when it's been snowing. The (special, clean) sunlight hits the snow, rebounds and lights up the bedroom, penetrating curtain, duvet and eyelid and going straight to the part of the brain that has, only in the last few years, evolved from announcing 'Ice-Age!' to 'snowman!'.

Indeed, that special quality of light was caused by it being deep, and crisp, and even. I woke up with a sense of wonder rather than dread and made my way outside.

For this was indeed real snow. The snow of youth, the sort that is light and feathery until you fashion it into a snowball shape, when it becomes a deadly ball of ice that is capable at being launched at around the same sort of speed as a comet. Like comets, the centre of snowballs are often solid, formed as they are not around iron but around a decent sized stone, rock, half-brick or, if you're like me, rapidly thawing fox-shit - that is about to be delivered at speed to one of those little oiks that no doubt contribute to the litter in my front garden.

Little known fact - you can throw a snowball at a kid and, when he turns round in angry confusion, he looks right past the adult - who is actually clearing snow from the top of his car! - and look for another kid. How stupid are these kids? Certainly, they are stupid enough to smell of fox-shit once their anoraks thaw.

So three inches of powder brought joy to me but transport misery to millions. To be honest, it also brought transport misery to me. The first thing you lose when you skid on snow and fall on your ass...it's not keys or tissues or your brief-case...it's dignity.

I had made it about three yards from my front door...that's EXACTLY the length of time it takes to think 'good traction', before your ass is making Issac Newton proud. My law of shame = angle incident causes you to vary from vertical x number of witnesses. So falling on my ass in front of three school girls was somewhat shaming.

Mincing my way to the railway station was not a problem as, thoughtfully, most trains were cancelled. This gave me time to go get a coffee.


A new coffee place has opened in the village. Previously we've had independent places but, obviously realising that there's money to be made in a place with this many 4x4s, Costa has moved in.

I went in expecting great things. In the summer I had tried the frozen coffee thing they do and discovered that caffeine and sugar, combined in sufficiently high doses, can actually be more fun than alcohol...and crack.

I left a (much) older and wiser man, swearing to myself that if I did call at this place again, it would only to be to urinate through the letterbox.

The barrista was so slow it was painful...and this is an issue. It's an issue because everything to do with coffee should be FAST! (if not instant) and it's an issue because being slow near one of those big, hissing, steaming machines that spit coffee is a crime.

It's all about steam.

Let me explain.

Men love steam. We love it so much that we sit in rooms of it with other men, dressed in towels. But most of all we love steam when it's under tremendous pressure hurling several thousand tons of locomotive down a track. That's steam, it's important, steam powered the industrial revolution and is the reason that Britain is what it is today...the greatest country on the face of the globe. We can't help it, we had a head start.

So, when I see a chap in front of a great steaming, frothing, spitting machine I see a man, a footplate, a hungry engine, 200 tons of coal, a shovel and the London to Edinburgh land speed record to break. In short, if you are a barrista you are master of the steam, you juggle, you dance. Cups of coffee are conjoured. The nozzles should be spewing like a lactating pig and the the air should be filled with Spanish oaths as the barrista scalds himself theatrically.

However, in a world filled to bursting with Continental types, they have chosen to hire local talent. This means minimum wage. This means somebody that, until last Tuesday, did not know what coffee was.

(NOBODY in this country knows what coffee is until they hit thirty. We all drink tea, it's great, it's better than coffee. The only reason we all start drinking coffee at thirty is either to appear sophisticated, because we can't be bothered to wait until the water infuses our tea because we need out caffeine NOW goddamit, or because we're thirty and, as we can't get hold of any crack, coffee if the only thing that's going to lift this hangover and get us through the morning. The first time you taste proper coffee is when you go abroad.)

Proper coffee comes in very small cups and has a half life.

Meanwhile, 'Pronto' is moving at a speed so slow that I actually think that the next Ice Age is upon us and that, acne apart, this chap is the tip of a glacier. I eventually got my coffee, it's a wonder it wasn't cold.

He betrayed the spirit of the steam.

I love steam engines. The smooth, oiled cylinder plunging, the hiss, the noise, the heat the thunder. Growing up, going to see them was a treat (steam fares, not an unnaturally prolonged life-span starting with the industrial revolution) and they always meant the same thing - excitement!

This excitement lives and breaths again as my espresso jug twitches and dances on the hot plate every weekend and that's why coffee is fun - because it's the product of alchemy.

As for Costa, I'm beginning to see why their speciality is cold coffee. I'll stick to my local independent - volcanic coffee at a strength you can trust at a speed you like.

Being cool

Spotted this weekend in a supplement to my newspaper - a feature about working from home. This was illustrated with a picture of a young woman with a coffee (possibly a latte, she looked the type) sitting crossed-legged in bed working on her laptop. No matter how I angled the magazine, I could not peek down her vest-top. This has been a constant frustration ever since I became aware of a) women and b) just how sexy vests are - cf Ripley about to kick alien ass in 'Aliens'. Vest, gaffa-taping guns together...I'm surprised that the backs of cinema seats throughout Britain in the 80's were not doused in spontaneous eruptions of teenage lust. Possibly they were and there was a cover-up. I sincerely hope that the cover-up in question involved sterilising fluids.

Now, it could well be that this woman owned a porn site, and was working a specific section of the market that catered for men wanting to watch women in argyle socks and vests drinking coffee - and Christ knows society is ready/sick enough for that - but being the nerd that I was, all I could think was OVERHEAT!

That's right, sit your laptop down on anything other than some sort of naturally non-conductive surface, like a formica table at the Cafe Montmarte, and you've got an eruption in your lap...as might the viewers of the woman's site.

Obviously the picture was posed, but I'd like to think that all of my work-from-home colleagues are young, thin and drink latte...then again, if they are, it's a pity they are not in the office - where the dominant force are tea-drinking old farts.

There's a famous picture, painted by mono-lugged impressionist Van-Gough, of a Parisian cafe under the stars. Folk sit and enjoy their coffee, oblivious to the fact that if they were but to walk over to the painter and offer him 50 francs for his painting, their ancestors would have bloody worshipped them. But where are today's version of that iconic image? Would anyone be tempted to commit a scene in Starbucks to canvas?

Maybe...Edward Hopper was famous for his ability to convey isolation and alienation in an urban environment...alone in a crowd. One of his most famous paintings is, of course, 'Night Hawks'. Customers sit in a diner late at night. Anyone who has seen the painting kind of wishes they were in the booth in the corner reading Camus, but is also kind of glad that they are too well adjusted to end up like that. Hopper would have painted a good Starbucks scene I think, and not just because he liked using green and white - incidentally the colour of money.