Precipitation and Cocktails

Strolling around Parliament Square yesterday I see that the tented village on the green has expanded, no doubt some revellers from Glasto stopping off for some shopping at Harvey Nicks before buggering off home. If these types want to treat the place like a camp site, then surely the council should too.

If a farmer expects to charge campers a tenner a night to camp in a soggy field where facilities begin and end with a stand pipe and which still shows signs of its being a location of the pyre formally known as his herd until the foot n’ mouth epidemic, then I think that a hundred quid a night is a reasonable price to charge campers in London.

Either that or re-designate their tents as ‘facilities for use by the public’. Believe me, those campers in the Blair Witch Project would be considered having got off lightly compared to some pissed-up reveller crashing into a camper’s tent in the wee small hours after several cocktails too many and thinking the place was a superloo.

It started to rain as Fat Andy and I wandered round the Square on our way to cocktails, I was minded to dodge under canvas and wait it out but Andy did the impossible and flagged down a cab for hire. Ten minutes later we were sitting in the Royal Festival Hall’s new bar ‘Skylon’, watching ballet dancers doing their warm-ups, disconcerted that the waitresses were wearing retro sci-fi uniforms and deciding which exotic beer to try first.

There were cocktails that night, mixed with verve and style in the unlikely setting of a pub. It looked like the sort of place where they consider a lager top to be a cocktail but this place had a shaker, tequila and an impassioned bar staff.

After that things got a bit hazy, but suffice to say it was a last train home situation and a breakfast this morning of paracetamol and temperance thoughts.

In praise of...Cat Deeley

It was only what a couple of surveyors from the Ordinance Survey turned up and started debating whether my pile of clothes awaiting ironing was properly a hill or a mountain, that I realised I had been neglecting sartorial chores. (The correct term is, of course, a ‘mound’ of ironing, not just because in shape the piled-up clothes resemble a barrow or grave-site of a warrior-king, but because, like ancient burial-sites, such mounds often contain treasure, such as that excellent party shirt you’ve been looking for for weeks.)

There was no snow on the peak, a sure sign that things had got beyond the point of recovery and where the only sane option is to start flogging lift passes and hope that ‘crumpled’ becomes the look for the season, but action was required.

I wrestled the ironing board into position, set the iron to ‘steam like the Flying Scotsman on the Edinburgh - London run!’ and turned on the telly.

Watching a recorded programme about the history of the Victoria Cross passed the first hour very agreeably (tee shirts, boxers and assorted casual wear). This came to an end just as I finished shirts, so I flicked channels, alighting on foul-mouthed cook Gordon ‘fucking’ Ramsey presenting a programme about how to cook things - the self-confidence of anyone in his kitchen being roasted for instance.

He appeared to reserve most of the spice in the kitchen for his language, with more effs than a kid with a stammer doing a reading of a Famous Five book. The odd thing was that, talented armature as he was, he occasionally missed the opportunity to slip in an eff where a professional might of done so. Ideally, when swearing, I like to slip in an eff between every syllable of every word, a practice that makes the ordering of ‘haricourt beans’ in a restaurant something of a chore.

The format was GR in the kitchen, GR dropping in on people who think that a dinner part is five pot noodles and a kettle in the middle of the table and saving them from ready meals and so on. They also have a restaurant with celeb guests - tonight’s was Cat Deeley.

I remember Cat when she used to present SMTV with Ant and Dec and, after initially thinking ‘what the hell?’ and ‘ah, something for the dads’, realised that anyone who could present live telly for two hours on a Saturday morning with every sign of obvious enjoyment was pure tee vee gold.

What it boiled down to is here’s somebody who appears to be very beautiful, Brummie and proud, poised and elegant and STILL manages not to be up herself. For instance, on the show last night, she did a champagne challenge where, for instance, she picked the best champagne in a blind tasting, then picked the vintage champagne and then picked the champagne that was a supermarket brand that was considered superior to a ‘name’ brand. Pure. Class.

The corker was though when she removed the top from a champagne bottle using a sabre! What a girl! She was then invested into the order of people who can decapitate magnums!

Okay, not the hardest job in the world, but I can’t think of any other celebs who would be quite so unpretentious - or could swing a sword like that. Every fantasy geek watching must have been hitting the ‘video capture’ button on their remotes.

I, of course, was too busy ironing.

Another balanced contribution to the religious debate

I see from the press that some of the more bearded members of the lands beyond these shores, known as ‘foreign’, are exercised about Salman ‘unforgetabubble’ Rushdie getting a knighthood - presumably for services to the countryside hideaway and disguise industry. This has led to spluttering bearded outrage and lots of threats to avenge this week’s insult to Islam which must, I think, be the most sensitive religion on the planet.

Islamists blowing up innocent people, while at the same time sulking every time somebody does or days something they consider to be even slightly critical of their cult, indicate the mentality of a teenager. This is why, I suppose, so many militant Islamic types are teens themselves. It’s like the emo movement but with others-harm instead of self-harm.

So, how to deal with these book-burning, bombing, bearded militants?

My approach is fairly straightforward. I carry about my person at all times a bottle of lighter fluid and a box of ‘England’s Glory’ matches. On encountering a spouting cleric, I douse, light and, after the initial shrieks have subsided and the body fat catches, lean over and ask ‘where is your god now, you beastly little mohammedan?’

Byways

I am composing this while standing up. Not, as you may reasonably assume, as a homage to Hemmingway (one must always be ready to pay homage to Hemmingway, but one must also be suspicious of anyone who is not a blood-relative and asks you to call you ‘Papa’. This is surely a step away from calling a family friend ’uncle’ and those inverted commas mean only one thing - ‘special cuddles’, years in therapy and never being able to properly enjoy Christmas again!), nor because it is the feast day of some Saint martyred by standing, nor even through misdirected patriotism (this manifests itself in beatings of ethnic minorities after dark).

No, I am composing this standing up because my arse feels like that of a buggered bum-boy after a Barrymore pool-party.

The reason? I was out on my bicycle this weekend. The weather was glorious and it seemed quite the thing to do to bike over to the park, point the trusty steed off the path and onto one of the trails through the trees and meadows and see where a sense of adventure, a lot of peddling in low gear and a great deal of sweat could take you.

It’s not that big a park, but by the simple method of criss-crossing it, it turned into quite a long ride - enough to justify a stop for refreshments at the tea shop and at least two occasions when I thought my front forks would end up pointing towards the heavens over my prostrate corpse. I think that the illusion of size is brought about in part by the screening off of the traffic noise and by the planting. At the moment everything is in leaf and so nature screens meadow from meadow. As for the meadows themselves - the grass is long (not as long as the grass used to conceal the ‘raptors in ‘Jurassic park III’, or I would have gone home for a cup of tea and a biccie until the trembling of fear passed), but long enough to contain fumbling couples, sullen teens sitting alone (that’s not just by themselves, which anyone can do, but ‘alone’, the exclusive preserve or the teen), as well as not-so-sullen teens, sitting with a book in the middle of a meadow and apparently enjoying the sunshine and solitude.

Tracks marked and unmarked, paved and unpaved, cross the park. Some of them are mere dirt tracks, other are lost byways - obviously roads at some point, paved in concrete but now - forgotten, overgrown, the branches of the bordering trees interlacing above them to form a tunnel of damp green gloom - an ideal spot to stop your bike and wait for your heart rate to return to normal.

And the arse? Well, despite the best efforts of a gel-filled saddle, I think I may have been somewhat too enthusiastic when riding. It’s great fun rushing down a trail at high speed, hammering over rough ground and tree-roots but, that evening, when I re-mounted to go and visit friends - it felt as if somebody had brought a cricket-bat to bear on my tender portions!

Obviously, if I am to enjoy the rough stuff this summer, I will need to toughen up, or learn to peddle side-saddle.

Flushed with irritation

I think I can finally see the attraction of web places like myfacebook, mysite, oursite, shitesite and so on - they allow you to shriek at the telly and for the telly to notice. I’m becoming more and more selective of my viewing of television recently - one reason for this is that I’ve stopped drinking, so much, during the week, and as a consequence my ‘entertain me’ threshold has not been dropped, at a drunken angle, so I no longer find the home shopping channel amusing in a post-modern ironic way. Rather, I find a lot of stuff irritating. More precisely, I find certain personalities irritating. More precisely still, I find arseholes on the news or on reality programmes irritating, and so shout at the telly.

Entertainment is no problem, you can’t get upset about entertainment - if you find yourself screaming ‘but they didn’t have ruffs in 1642’ at a period drama, it’s time to get back on the horse tranquilizers. Finding yourself irritated by modern life is, I suppose, part of the modern human condition - at least for those of us that live in an information-saturated age, drink too much caffeine and think yoga is at best a waste of time and at worse some sort of evil eastern plot we should be all be suspicious of.

I bet those guys in the Greenpeace dingy buzzing the coast of the resort where the G7 summit was being held were irritated…but not half as irritated as they were when the security forces parked their rather bigger dingy on top of them! I laughed my arse off when I saw that, not just because it was a clear case of ‘well, really, what did you expect?’ but because the picture of two inflatables knocking hell out of on another was a little bit ‘it’s a knockout’ - if Greenpeace were serious troublemakers, they could have punctured the security forces boat with a corkscrew and been on their way, laughing.

The blogosphere is an environment where you can have a spirited debate with like minded people (or, much more fun, unlike minded people) and not worry about consequence, much. At worst you are exposed for all the world to see as an idiot holding unfashionable views who can’t hold an argument together (try starting a blog entry with ‘say what you like about Hitler…’ and see how far you get. But at least it allows you to vent and then vent at those who would close your vent.

For all that people write about irritants, there must be stuff lurking under the radar, minor irritants, background irritation. Like your local McDs, you know it’s there but you can’t be arsed to do anything about it, when you know that ten minutes with a flamethrower would make the world a better place.

In my case the minor irritant is the loos in our new office. The new office is, itself, spacious. Using the loo, you realise what they sacrificed to get all that space. Okay, the loos in our old office were not huge, they were not the sort of superloos that increasingly one is reading about migrant families living in (rather than tramps spending the nights in a stall at a local public loo on, as it were, a B&B basis, we seem to have a case developing of poor people using loos as cottages almost, much to the alarm of people wanting a pee and homosexualists wanting to cruise for sex), neither were they vast ceramic and mahogany palaces of the Victorian era, where a diet low in fibre required a loo to match - a seat comfortable enough for long sittings and a space wide enough to open up a broadsheet newspaper to read cover to cover, all concluded with a flush like the Zambizi in spate.

Our loos are rather cramped. Whatever architectural genius thought them up obviously never used them. Because of the positioning of the way the door opens and the loo-roll holder, in several of the stalls one has to basically stand in the cistern to open or close the door - hardly a boon to relaxation.

The other issue is that the stalls are in pairs rather than trios. Trios of stalls are important. With none occupied, you take the one on the left or right. One occupied, take the one on the other extreme left or right. Middle one occupied? Exit the toilet, the man in the middle stall is obviously some sort of pervert.

Research has, however, paid off. One of the stalls is easy to gain entry to and rush from. This is good because it means that I now have a favourite stall, which, I think, is something every chap needs, but a minor irritant when it is occupied. Naturally because this is real life and not a blog or television, I do not yell as a result of irritation, rather, I tut softly and plan revenge.

Rage!

There seems, to me anyway, to be a lot of rage around these days. I think one of the reasons for this is that people feel victimised by nebulous forces of oppression beyond their control and that, when they get something to focus their aggression on, they turn from a seemingly normal person into a red-faced screaming quivering bundle of pressurised vileness, spittle flying from mouth, one step away from peeing themselves in anger or developing a nosebleed.

The other day walking across the railway station concourse, I saw a swearing young woman rushing in that way women do in high shoes, a sort of clip-cloppy run, knees bent and arse out as a counterweight to maintain balance, pursued by a ticket inspector who was trying to stop her without actually grabbing her by the boobs.

The scenario that fell into my mind was that she had caught a train but been unable to buy a ticket and, on getting to her destination had thought better of queuing to pay a penalty fare for the privilege of standing for twenty minutes on an overcrowded train that was running late and smelled of wee. Those exit barriers became the focus of all of the bottled resentment about public transport.

The problem is that there is no direct redress for the indignities we cannot escape from. That’s why blogs are so full of bile, vitriol and shite - we’re punching fog.

For example - the documentary about the death of Diana. (Why is it even on? Educating people or cynical exercise in rating grabbing - what the fuck are they trying to prove? ‘And so, we see, it really is safer to travel by pumpkin coach if you are a princess!’) I was fairly wound up by there being a(nother) (bloody) documentary. Then wound further up by the documentary team showing photographs of a dying young woman. Then wound even more up by their refusing to pull the photographs even though the woman’s young sons asked them too. But the capper was undoubtedly the defence that ‘her face would be obscured’.

What. The. Fuck.

That’s okay then is it - face obscured so it’s okay to show the pictures.

Well. I’m taking direct action. I considered chartering a Lancaster bomber loaded with 12 tonnes of horse shit and charting a course for the C4 building but, finally, decided on a boycott. That’s it for Channel 4 and me.

Actually, this is not so much of a sacrifice. The C4 schedules appear to be solid Big Brother for (checks paper), er, the rest of time. Still, must be easier than actually, you know, thinking up a programme idea.