Trafalgar Green

It’s not often that I’m excited by anything on television that doesn’t have a ‘ten minute free view’ caption. But when I saw on the local news that they had turfed Trafalgar Square, my interest was piqued.

So one lunchtime I wandered up there. On telly it looked amazing, like one of those post-apocalyptic science fiction illustrations of a deserted London being taken back by nature. All that was missing were the creepers climbing Nelson’s Column and two types in haz-mat suits saying ‘This used to be a great city…called ‘Lon-don’’.

The reality was a tad disappointing. The entire square had not been turfed (fair enough, it’s vast) and while they had turfed a LOT, about half a footie pitch’s worth - it was just lost in the rest of the square and under the mass of pic-nicers on it. If they wanted to make a truly English park, they should have stuck up a load of ‘keep off the grass’ signs.

The turf was only there for a couple of days and the effect was very jolly. I can see way they only had it there a couple of days though, any more than that and it would have turned to mud, or worse, pikies would have moved onto it and littered the place with caravans, burned out cars and grazing ponies.

Could it be magic?

What image does the phrase ‘papal audience’ conjure for you? Possibly you have an image of some Francis Bacon type pope sitting on a throne in a room lit by flickering firelight and intrigue, with plenty of gothic woodwork for scheming cardinals to hide behind, while you, slightly off your tits from incense inhalation, do ring kissing and ask that he use his influence to shave you a couple of years off your time in hell. Or have your views been coloured by too many ‘an audience with…’ tee vee specials, and you expect a few anecdotes and finishing on a song?

For the parents of Madeleine ‘Maddie*’ Macann, it meant standing with the crowd, waiting until the ex-nazi in question shuffled down the line to them and then a few words and the blessing of a picture of their missing daughter. On the one hand, the ‘tapas two’ must be feeling pretty grim, on the other hand - think what that picture will fetch on eBay.

I’m not sure exactly what the audience with the Pope was meant to achieve. My only thought was, if you wanted to understand the mind of a paedophile, you’d do a lot worse than speaking to a bloke who runs an organisation chock-full of them. It’s a bit like Clarice Starling going to see Hannibal Lector in ‘Silence of the Lambs’ to gain some insight into the mind of a serial killer…and a serial overactor in the form of Anthony Hopkins.

The Pope apparently blessed a picture of the little girl. What this is supposed to achieve I’m not sure - it smacks of sympathetic magic straight out of the dark ages. If they are resorting to that, are they also visiting a voodoo priest who is jamming nails into the photofit of the suspected abductor?

* The family are at pains to call the little girl by her full name, the tab tabbie tabloids prefer to use the abbreviated form - possibly because they can save space to put it in bigger print, possibly because they can save space to advertise their ‘save three tokens and get a free can of lager’ promotion. Probably because they realise that their readers will only hear family members addressed by their full names on rare occasions - christenings, weddings and court appearances. For funerals the shortened version is preferred, as it’s far more economical to have a wreath spelling out ‘nan’ than ‘beloved grandmother’.

Disco roads

Technology has come to the village in the form of a couple of those road signs that light up with the words ‘slow down’ if you are driving at over 30 miles and hour.

Given the level of fuckwittage on the roads into and out of the village, the things are illuminated so often it’s like disco light show some mornings - bordering on strobing. I’m rather hoping that the signs are solar powered, because if not there will be a council tax hike to cover the soaring electricity bills the things will generate.

I like these sorts of signs. I first came across them in the US, years ago. Driving through the Rockies in the wee small hours, I was alert for the usual dangers of the road - carjackers, big rigs, nutters and sharp bends, I was alert for the local dangers as flagged in my guide book - bears, wolves, 17,000 tonnes of snow sliding towards you, I was even alert for the sort of dangers that you start to ponder on a lonely road in the dark, specifically - werewolves.

So when I saw a sign light up warning me I was doing over 55, it was quite a surprise and I adjusted my speed accordingly.

In recent years these signs have started popping up in Britain and I have to say I like them. There are quite a few in Norfolk, where the narrow roads are not really suited to speeds greater than a well laden donkey can manage. This does not stop hoorays in 4x4s driving like maniacs though. The specific problem there is that the women driving these cars can’t drive properly, and that they are laden down with so much booze and food for the weekend that once they get up momentum, they can’t stop.

The traffic going through the village and causing the sign to flash like a pervert in a park fell into two categories of speeder - school run mums who are simply too thick to realise that there is a speed limit, and chavs in ‘pimped out’ (i.e. a ten quid body-kit from Halfords) chaviots getting the sensation of driving really quickly by doing 40 in a 30 zone.

I think the signs need to be developed to do number-plate recognition and flash up the plate number while telling you, yes YOU, to slow down. Either that or they should get one of those cannons that the Predator has mounted on his shoulder and stick it on the top. Five miles over the limit gets your car shot with a paintball. Ten miles over the limit gets your tyres shot out. Anything more than that combined with tinted windows results in an energy burst that leaves nothing but a crater and a spinning, smoking Burberry baseball cap.

My mission before the summer is over - trip one of the cameras while on my bicycle. Strongly suspect it will have to be the one on the way out of the village, as the road there is downhill.

American Pie

Have finally got round to sorting out a new play list on iTunes. (this despite the fact that ‘Patience’ may well be the greatest record ever recorded, ever.) and loaded on an old CD favourite – ‘American Pie’ by Don Williams. Possibly the most perfect song of heartbreak ever written, bar none. Also, top value on the Juke Box as it goes on forever!

Saturday

I have no idea why there is nobody else on the allotments on a Saturday. Certainly, today, I might have understood it, for today is FA cup final day, and I drove past the Academy and noted that not only had they got blue and white balloons and bunting outside, but Chelsea flags too. Surely, like some sort of carnivorous plant, they should have displayed the ManU colours, so that they could have killed any fans who actually turned up?

Spent the day weeding on the allotment, listening to podcasts of readings of Sherlock Holmes stories. Am now watching the setting sun strike the spire of the church, towering above the bright, bright greens of the trees in the neighbourhood. I strongly suspect that there is no greater place than Great Britain, and there is no greater moment to live in it but now.

The sun colours the stone that particular shade of pink that lets you know that if you put ypur hand to what would normally be cold, grey, granit, it would be warm under your palm.

Sites of note

As it says in the B3TA newslatter - this is what it must be like to be God:

Flickrvision.com

Mobility

Why is it that with so many many many options for communication, what people actually say is dross.

The other morning on the commute (not quite hell, but I wouldn’t be surprised if one day Virgil and Dante were in the seat across from me, Virgil explaining that this is the Hell of the Procrastinators), a young woman spent the entire journey, and I mean 20 minutes, telling her friend that if the friend left the friend’s boyfriend, she’d ‘f**king dump her, right, because, right, it’s not right to treat people like that, right’.

I suspect that she’s actually shagged the friend’s boyfriend and that this is exactly the sort of thing that comes up during break-up conversations and our shouty mouthy phone fool doesn’t want that, as the last thing she needs is an assault from a former friend, powered by 20 bottles of WKD blue, holding the last two, broken, in each hand and about to try out some moves she learned from ‘Tekken’.

What struck me, other than that somebody can spend so much time on a conversation of so little import, was the poverty of the language on display. I think that this girl must have had a lexicon of about 200 words. No kidding, in her personal dictionary the entry for ‘right’ must be chuffing enormous, because it appears to cover just about every conversational possibility.

I’ve little doubt that to her, this was, right, really important right. I also suspect that I now know why mobile phone executives can afford such large yachts.

Right (!), off to what the Council term the ‘recycling centre’ but which I am still pleased to call the dump, to get rid of accumulated sacks of garden waste. This will be a bit tricky, as some of them have been in the back garden, basically composting in the rain. Oops. This means I’m going to have to try and transport sacks of stuff that are one step away from being declared ‘wetlands’ and protected as a habitat for damp and twigs.

Bachelor Boy

Monastic calm has descended upon the place, as my wife has decided to spend the weekend holidaying with her family.

This is not, I should point out, any indication of marital strife. Not at all. Indications of marital strife are easily identified as a kitchen knife embeds itself three inches deep in a door just next to my head with a thrumming sound like a ruler being twanged on a school desk and the farewell line ‘bloody well go to the bloody pub then’.

Rather, the dark spectre of caravanning raised its head this weekend. Not in the sense I always associate with the word – camels across the desert, the occasional arab and enough hashish to kick-start the economy of a small country or a decent album. Rather, we’re talking about a tupperwear box with substandard noise insulation and inadequate plumbing which has, through a marvel of acoustic science, the ability to amplify the constant drizzle associated with caravanning into a never-ending drum solo from hell that has you reaching for the bottle opener before realise none is supplied.

I have elected to stay at home. There is much that needs to be done on the allotment and, more importantly, I’ve not been watching nearly enough telly recently.

So what can we expect from a weekend spent flying solo. Well, obviously, I expect to destruction-test as much porn as possible, but even that gets dull after a while so I suppose it will be watching quite a lot of ‘Heroes’ via streaming pirated video.

And drinking.

We shall see.

Actually what I’m most looking forward to at the moment is my fried breakfast. I’ve bought a mountain of stuff from the supermarket. Bacon, sausage, egg, tomato, baked beans and liver. I predict that my arteries are going to harden whether I watch porn or not.

I also intend to post some entries. We shall see.

Startup? Slow down

I’ve got a great idea for a small business. It pushes all the right buttons for a true 21st century start up business. It’s internet based, it builds on-line communities and it’s about mental health. Basically, it’s ‘facebook’ for nutters.

The idea is to help neurotics and obsessive-compulsive disorder sufferers. Let’s say you need to turn around sixty times before you leave the house. But you’re already running late and you can’t afford to spend the time spinning and then dizzily crashing about as you try to negotiate yourself out of the front door. No problem.

You leave the house, catch your bus, go to work…and log on to:

Nuroses-swap?
Nutter-exchange
Bonkerspace?

Haven’t quite decided on a name yet but, you log on and list your mania. Spinning around like a loon. That’s matched, by others on the site, to something equally as odd - say disposing of your gum wrapper in a certain way. So, you arrange for the gum guy to spin around and promise that the next time you throw away a gum wrapper, it will be folded to resemble a bird, or a wine glass, or an amusing approximation of a willy.

The positive benefits are obvious. The afflicted can get on with their lives, knowing that somewhere in the world, somebody else with a spare five minutes is hopping around, or compulsively reciting a poem, or buying ‘Catcher in the Rye’ or something.

Downside? Well, previously quite well adjusted people with only minor personality quirks will probably start to behave quite oddly. It all depends on how you perceive mental health issues - is it like a virus, can you actually ‘catch’ neuroses from others or (my theory), are competing examples of eccentricity mutually exclusive: for instance would somebody doing a neuroses swap for a day feel like a complete loon because they have to brush their hair exactly 36 times, feeling that the guy who got their compulsion to only use alternate sheets of toilet paper got the best end of the deal?

So how does it make money? This is a site for obsessive-compulsives right? Can you imagine how many times a day they’ll be logging in? It’s an ad man’s dream!

Hugh Meanz Biznezz

A rather belated post here - I should have posted this a few weeks ago, when I had the idea for my Hero of the Week or Villain of the Week.

The Hero of the Week was Hugh Grant. The floppy haired ponce may have previously only barely cut it as the lead in a rom-com or two, but when he hurled those baked beans at that pap, he elevated his status to action hero.

There is something about gutter photographers that make you want to shove their cameras up their arses and hit the ‘zoom’ button. It used to be like organised crime, with a few paps sleazing their way around London, paying off bellboys and doormen to know who was staying where, eating where and sleeping where and with whom or what.

This was because you had one page in the paper that was to do with ‘showbiz’ and two magazines obsessed with celebrity, ‘Hello’ and ‘OK’.

Not any more. The papers are full of pages of photographs (well, maybe photograph is stretching it, grainy images is closer to the mark, I think we’re actually one step away from simply using Google Earth images of Madonna’s back garden and putting a red circle round the collection of shadows that might be her mowing the grass) of celebs.

Now it’s more like crimes of opportunity - photographic muggings. The photograph of choice a few months ago was the low level shot of women getting out of cabs. And the reaction…criticism that they were not wearing knickers. Have I missed something? Is not the reaction ‘hold on, who’s the pervert taking upskirt photographs. I’d like to see him try that on a crowded train.

That’s why the pictures are always grainy - because the celebs have stopped playing ball and are now playing ‘catch the tin can…in your teeth’.

Not that I read any of these papers or mags myself - it’s just that everyone on my train does and you occasionally can’t help but notice a shoddy picture of somebody you don’t recognise from some soap you don’t watch doing their shopping or something - that’s right, they have pictures of people shopping. The new low though is a mag I noticed that has, on the front cover, a promise to pay you for any celeb snaps you send in!

On the one hand I’m tempted to just go to Madam Tausaurds and make a fortune by putting a carrier bag in the hand of each waxwork (Madonna shops at Spar, Queen with a hold-all from Ann Summers). But I’m just as tempted to find out where the offices of the mag are and burn it down.

What I don’t like is this perversion of the role of the Citizen Journalist. It’s good that we all have mobiles with cameras, it’s bad that they can be used to photograph assaults on people in bus-stops or take pictures of shopping celebs.

If I’m ever shopping and see Hugh Grant lurking in the aisles, pondering what to have for tea, he may rest assured that I will not be pestering him for a photograph. Nor will I ask him to pass me the beans.

Plenty of nose

In a recent presentation (powerpoint, natch) to the French President, the impact of global warming was illustrated, not with images of stricken Banglideshi children flooded out of their Nike factories, but by the movement of the optimum weather for growing champagne grapes away from France and over to SE England.

Sacre Blu! Say the French.

Formidable, say I. I was especially tickled because I learned of this the week after planning a vine in my very own back garden.

Jeremy is now firmly embedded and, I hope, thriving. Indeed my next mission is to source some poles and stuff for him to climb along.

In the meantime, I am occupying myself by daydreaming about bottling my first run of Château Macnabbs and doodling logos for my ‘vineyard’. So far the leading designs are a stylised bunch of grapes or a Ford Transit bearing the words ‘Van Ordinaire’.

Something tells me that the combination of clay soil, together with contamination from cat pee and creosote from the nearby shed, will ensure my vintage will be rather ‘vin de table’ but, as long as none is actually spilled on the varnish of the table in question, I trust we’ll be okay.

Don’t know if I’ll actually get a crop this year but this has not stopped me from starting to look at wine making kits and preparing to say at parties that ‘I’m into wine production, in a small way’. Bloody small in fact. Indeed, I’ve promise a few friends a bottle of the Château Macnabbs ’08 and even then I think I’m pushing my luck although, thinking about it, maybe the answer is to go with those miniature bottles you get on aeroplanes.

HUmmmn, wonder if I can get a hop plant from somewhere? If I put my mind to it, I might become self-sufficient in booze!

Packaging is murder

http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/food/story/0,,2065214,00.html

This busted my WTF-o-meter so thoroughly that it actually invalidated the warranty.

The Observer Food Monthly is supposed to serve two purposes. Firstly, it is supposed to throw up the occasional interesting recipe, secondly, it is supposed to make Observer readers a bit more secure about paying exorbitant sums for ethically reared, hand-washed, home-knitted food by explaining that it’s really rather lovely, when we all know that if you want true taste sensation you have six pints of lager - after that you’ll think a Pot Noodle is the best thing you’ve ever tasted.

So what in the name of Greek buggery was a six page ad for ready meals doing there?

The perils of vegetarianism.

Vegetarians are morally repugnant. They claim to be concerned about animals, so that’s why they don’t eat meat. Bullocks! I love meat and I’ve done more than they ever have to ensure the ethical treatment of animals. Why? Because I make sure that I eat outdoor-reared (assume they can come in out of the rain though) meat that has been free to frolic, gambol, root, scratch, sniff, rut or do whatever it is that animals like to do - to have led a lovely pastoral and stress-free existence…right up to the point where somebody brains it with a seven pound lump hammer and starts cutting it up. I pay good money for my meat, money that’s invested in, oh, I don’t know…sheep dogs or something.

Cheap meat is raised in sheds and barns and probably forced to sew Nike trainers before being brutally murdered. So, if vegetationists don’t even buy meat at all, where is the investment to keep the ethical people afloat going to come from?

The only reason not to eat something is if you have a medical condition. (And I mean a real one. Interesting to see how long somebody with a peanut allergy pissed and whined about it if their jet crashed on a desert island and all there was to eat was a lifetimes supply of catering packs of KP).

Religious nutters are even worse. Why do so many people have it in for the pig? The monumental arrogance, in a world where people are starving, of actually not eating something ‘on principal’.

I was going to bang on about ‘the rule at my house is…’ but none of my friends have any kind of hang up about food, at all. Indeed, the trick when feeding some of them is to get your hands out of the way really quickly after you put the plate down.

And as for Lynda McCartney - she’d still be alive today is she’d had the occasional pork pie.

The McCartney/McCarthy meat witch hunt

Quite a few things struck me about the article. The first was how fucking miserable the McCartney’s looked. I can understand it, on the one hand, you’re going to have your tea cooked for you by Nigel Slater (great!) but, on the other, it’s fucking veg again (Agh!).

The second is that Heather Mills stood absolutely no chance at all of being happy. Usually it’s innocent kids and a wicked stepmother - this time the roles were reversed.
Cheer up love, you'd be quite pretty if you smiled once in a while...and ate properly

Tolitarian vegetarian and miserable - it’s like having the Taliban at the table.

This weeks recipe: pierce lid and heat for 2 minutes

It was the reference to ready meals that really got on my knob. Ready. Fucking. Meals.

Let’s not beat around the bush. Ready meals are designed for those people who can suspend belief that a plastic tray full of goo and chemicals didn’t start its life in a factory in Walsall, but rather each one is hand crafted in a cottage kitchen somewhere.

I admit, I buy them occasionally - they are great for pulling out of the freezer and putting into the microwave. Usually It’s curry. Actually, it’s always curry. And it’s always the same curry - Chicken Tikka Masala. And that’s my point - ready meals are designed for people who lack imagination.

But vegetarian ready meals? WTF? What the hell can you do to a vegetable that is so complicated? I tell you what you can do, you can add a load of packaging, you know, rather than the stuff that comes wrapped around a vegetable that you can compost - and you can make a fortune.

In this case the market is clear - vegetarian ready meals are suitable for easily led (vegetarian) food faddists (vegetarians) who don’t have the energy to cook a decent dinner for themselves. (Can you guess?).

I am now going to eat a pork pie.