X rated – we rate it and review so you don’t actually have to go

There’s probably scope for a publication full of nothing but critical reviews. While wicked reviews are fun to read, it would perhaps lead to a dearth of quotable review soundbites for movie posters. There are already signs of desperation with some posters, if your quote is ‘loved it’ but comes from Zoo, Nuts or Heat rather than Tattler, then you have to wonder about the quality of the movie.

Of course, if your movie is so shit that you can’t even get a decent quote from Heat, you need to start trawling the niche publications, making sure you have ‘loved it!’ in very big print and ‘Hedge Worrier Quarterly’ in very small print. Because the more specialist the magazine, the less natural authority it will have – ask anyone who would rather read about a new miracle diet pill in ‘Heat’ rather than the article in the ‘Lancet’ that advises that the same pill has the unfortunate side-effect of making you sexually irresistible to bears.

If you’re reduced to the local press; ‘They sure use some fancy words in this movie!’ – Cotswold Advertiser, then you’re in real trouble. And the day you see a quote on a movie poster for an explicit erotic thriller along the lines of ‘it made me feel funny in my tummy *****’ – Thatford Junior School Newsletter, you know things have gone too far.

As for the audience for a publication of wholly negative, bitter and wickedly cruel and uninformed reviews, that’s easy, it’s lazy men who would rather spend their weekends and evenings on the sofa than dragging round some art gallery or counting down the moments to their intermission gin infusion at some ghastly theatre. A terrible review, in print, has far greater authority than any internet review and, properly wielded, can secure that all-important boozy night on the sofa.

The perfect title, of course, for any collection of reviews about disparate matters is: ‘X rated’. Not only does this allow for ‘X’ to stand for anything at all, so it can be pot noodle rated, sandwich spreads related, biscuits related and so on, it also has the smutty association and just the right nostalgic touch to make it a natural go-to site on the internet, not to mention all the blokes that will find it by mistake because they have Googled ‘X Rated birds’ and the first return is a review about custard. Having said that, there’s no reason smut can’t be rated and reviewed too.

Overall, criticism has a role to play. One of the great things about the internet, along with being able to order stuff without having to leave the house and being able to look porn from many lands, is that just about everything is reviewed and I love the idea that just about anything and everything can be reviewed. It used to be that the only things that were reviewed were films and plays, art exhibitions and restaurants in the city where the paper was based. But now everything from hotels to instant mashed potatoes are reviewed. OK, so it’s sometimes by somebody with more opinion than talent, but occasionally it’s by someone with a real passion for what they are reviewing. If you’ve reviewed a dozen types of instant mash potato, chances are you are going to be an enthusiast. And single.

There must be more scope for reviewing everyday stuff and there must really be an audience for stuff that others find fascinatingly awful and a little bit common, like cider, or caravans.

(Full disclosure, I’ve eaten instant mashed potatoes and enjoyed them greatly. Used to eat them with fish fingers and canned creamed mushrooms. Naturally I’d not dream of doing that now. I’d use fresh mushrooms.) (No I wouldn't, I'd use tinned, cite nostalgia as an excuse and then hop on line and find a tinned creamed mushrooms forum to share my profound opinions, and pictures.)

Criticism

What purpose does criticism serve? If you’re a child then the criticism you encounter is likely to be fairly unsophisticated; for instance a playground of kids chanting ‘Janet smells! Janet smells!’. Later in life you might start to encounter criticism of your creative efforts, as your work is branded ‘bland and lacking the essential element of whimsy prevalent in many of his contemporaries’, which is a bit fucking harsh given it was the first time you used finger paints and you were only five. Still later and one gets used to the knocks of opinion, which is useful for when you develop romantic feelings for somebody, go out with them and suddenly find yourself on the wrong end of a ‘it’s not me, it’s you’ conversation during which your insensitivity is mentioned no fewer than seven times before you realise you are being dumped. But don’t worry, you will eventually find somebody to settle down with who will criticise you but not leave.

There is a danger that criticism sometimes just seems like an excuse for the critic to show how clever they are by being both cruel and amusing, all the while demonstrating that they are not as talented as the person they are criticising and making a pretty good case for the argument that critics are just frustrated artists.

But people like to read reviews, because tickets are expensive and going to the theatre is time consuming. So you don’t want to waste your time and money seeing something that is crap only to discover afterwards that every critic was united in their opinion of its crapness. Of course worse still is coming out of a show thinking it was crap and not understanding the rave reviews. This is especially true of foreign films, which reviewers invariably praise because they are worried that if they say that a three hour documentary about an Armenian orphanage lacks even one decent car chase, they may be accused of being shallow.

Postcard from New York - Food

I don't know if they are representative of Americans in general, but New Yorkers seem to have an odd relationship with their food, testing it more like fuel, or something to be suffered, than something to be savoured and enjoyed. While were were there there was a programme on the telly called 'Man vs food' where the premise is that the presenter travels around America taking part in the various eating challenges that exist there. Not of the 'how many hot dogs can you gulp in a minute' variety but rather the ones run by eating places where, if you eat the enormous sandwich, you get it and a ride to the hospital for free sort of thing. I can say that the American approach to food hinges on portion size. The first place we ate in, 'The Edison', apparently specialised in theatre dinners and I thought we would be OK for a quick meal. Not quite. Look, it might be fancy in NYC to cook proper chips instead of spindly French fries, but knocking up something that any self respecting pissed up Glasweigan could do in an instant on any night of the week and passing it off as a speciality is taking the piss. As were the tinned vegetables.


Americans seem to equate portion size with how good a meal is, rather than quality. A friend who spent some time in the city commented afterwards that they learned that the less that was on your plate, the better the food was going to be. My plate was piled high with turkey smothered in gravy. Even after going at it for half an hour I had barely made a dent. Partly because there was just so much of it, partly because it wasn't great. Obviously, I would be crap as the presenter of 'Man vs food' (which has in it's titles a graphic of a man punching a sandwich. Cute.). Unless, of course, 'Man vs food' is cleverly edited so that he always wins. Maybe I'm not the target viewer, but i don't see that the object of visiting a restaurant should be a struggle to clean your plate. What I would like to see is if the fat fuck exploded or destroyed his loo or something the next day, or a combination of the two. Death by exploding arse. That would make me watch, host mortality.

The odd thing is that you walk past loads of delis that are stuffed with exotic oils and decent looking food. I assume that, lacking a supermarket in the centre of this busy city and having seen no grocery delivery vans puttering around, New Yorkers do a daily rather than a weekly shop from their local grocer. In a space constrained city, this would also make sense as it means that you don't have that particular English affliction of a fridge and freezer full of food after the Saturday shop, and a fridge devoid of anything tasty by Friday.


One place we ended up eating in turned out to be one of a chain of organic restaurants. The decor is all stripped pine, school chairs and refractory tables where you may have to sit down side by side with a stranger. It's odd that the decor should reflect the food in a way that suggests that just because something is organic, its austere and almost a form of punishment. Obviously these people have never tried an organic bacon double cheeseburger.

Postcard from New York City - Staten Island Ferry

Ah, the heady smell of diesel, commerce and commuting. Commuting by ferry brings a touch of glamour to what can be a very mundane process, especially of your journey takes you past an iconic landmark such as the statue of liberty, on a journey to or from an iconic skyline.


You can tell who the locals are. When I caught the hydrofoil across the bay of Naples from Naples to Sorrento I was running around like a loon with my camera, trying to capture the views. The locals were more interested in their books. So it was the case here also. Tourists rushed from port to starboard and back again to take in the view, while real commuters either sat inside in the warm or were content to sit in the chill winter sunshine ignoring the view.

Riding an iconic piece of transport immortalised in movies past one of the most famous landmarks in the world, you realise that the city is genuinely woven from a collection of landmarks and icons. All that was missing was a giant monkey.

At Staten Island everyone rushed off the ferry, round the terminal and straight onto the next ferry back. The ferry out had a hurricane deck, which is something you don't expect to see on a commuter ferry, the one back did not, so everyone was on at the open space at the front. It was so cold that I lost all feel in my head and had to keep touching my nose to see if it was running, for fear of an icicle forming. And the ferry is free! I was astonished. I wasted five minutes looking for a ticket office at the terminal, not quite believing it.

The weather the whole time was cold and with brilliant sunshine. The mains of the snowfall were piled up in Cental Park. You could tell it had really, really snowed here.

Walked back uptown via the site of the World Trade Centre, which is at once bigger and smaller than you'd think. Smaller because everything around it now is so neat and tidy, you can't imagine it was the site of such destruction. And people live there, continue to live there, in the neighbouring streets. That amazed me. We were sat at a cafe and a school bus stopped and let off the kids, and they looked ordinary kids, not rich kids, living in apartments one block from the most expensive property in Manhattan. This happens in London of course, with council flats dotted around the centre of town, but you just wouldn't get ordinary people living next door to the city skyscrapers. It really came home that when the towers came down, there was nowhere to run to. If you ran for a minute you'd be at a river. Best haul your ass uptown and don't stop for Starbucks. And it's bigger because, once again, New Yorkers are seeing just now many skyscrapers the can put on one block. The answer here is 'a lot'. Apparently there are so many skyscrapers in the because New York is on granite. London is on clay, hence spreading out rather than up. Try building a skyscraper on loam and before you know it you have a bungalow with a lot of basements.

Stopped at the 9/11 gift shop (yes, really) and picked up the obligatory NYPD and FDNY tee shirts. Bought wrong size, XXXL. American XXXL at that. The bloody thing could have sheltered a family of five, or a Rangers fan.


Back to exchange the next day, the last in the city. This gave me an excuse to check out Greenwich Village, the only area of the city not to be laid out in a grid, meaning I promptly got lost. This was, I think, one of the nicest parts of new York, it has a more intimate and laid back atmosphere.

Postcard from New York City - sport

As well as doing a suicide dog, another tick box experience was to go an see a Rangers game while in New York. Ice hockey always looks so dangerous and glamorous and what could be better than seeing a local team in action. The reality was that by eight o clock in the evening I was knackered and so was flopping on the bed with barely enough strength to flick the remote, never mind scream encouragement or abuse at ice skaters while using the word 'puck' as often as possible because I like the way it feels in my mouth. The Rangers game was actually televised and maybe it was the jet lag but the reality of an ice hockey game is: loads of blokes in body armour, zooming about randomly chasing a puck that is too quick and too small to be seen, while the goal is defended by a bloke with shin pads so huge that when he brings them together, they form a perfect seal over the goal. With no real sport to be had it is no wonder that the players seem to spend most of the match attempting to beat up on one another. This in itself is pretty comical as they all have huge mittens on and are all wearing more body armour than a medieval knight. Still, it's the thought that counts.

The actual Rangers fans I saw outside Madison Square Gardens ahead of the game though, looked like the real deal. These guys were wearing their replica Rangers shirts which fitted them snugly despite them not wearing any body armour at all. They were the size of trucks and looked like they had real jobs, the sort that result in nicknames. Jobs like punching the cows to death in the slaughterhouse when the humane killer is out of order, so earning themselves nicknames like 'The Bolt'.

Postcard from New York City - Modern art

The Museum Of Modern Art is one of the must sees of NYC. It's an interesting visit, even if for the European visitor the two top floods are a waste of space, containing as they do a collection of impressionist works that are better curated in the shows they visit in London. Still, in a city of strangers it was good to see a familiar face or two (or a familar bottom or two in the case of the Rubens) and, to be fair, there is at least one exceptional Barbara Hepworth on display.

The oddest thing about American galleries (after you get over the fact that you don't have to pay for an audio guide, which I think is great and a policy UK galleries should adopt at once - having coughed up thirty quid to peer at a daub through a crowed of other visitors, I'm not sure I am in the mood to fork out a fiver to hear John Nettles giving me a lecture on how the artist expired of syphilis in a Danish brothel), is that the public are allowed to take photographs of the pictures. As long as they don't flash, which is good because there are quite enough nudes on the walls as it is. And people do. They not only take pictures of pictures, but take close ups of pictures, presumably to be used as one of those 'what famous painting is this a detail from' questions in their pub quiz, or have pictures of themselves taken standing beside a painting, as if you would beside any other landmark.

The gear delight of the museum is the collection of Warhols. I've never really appreciated Warhole before but, having spent even a little bit of time in the city you can see that they have the same sort of cheeky energy as the city itself, a mixture of commerciality and icon.


Not to be outdone by the smaller Whitney across town, the MOMA had it's own disturbing painting: 'Christina's world'. No wonder writers flock to New York, you are never stuck for inspiration. Every street corner would fill a notebook and a visit to a gallery is not unlike flicking through the bumper book of creative writing questions where you have to compose a short story based on the picture above.

The cafe on the top floor of the MOMA delivers a new twist on catering to hungry gallery goers. Because it's in close proximity to the paintings, they don't cook hot food! Luckily, soup was a loophole. I was betting that even new Yorkers couldn't screw up soup, especially with so many paintings of the damn stuff hanging downstairs, and was right.





It was delicious, and very orange. As was my beer, which had a slice of orange in it also. Which was interesting.


The beer on draft was your typical che che artisan brewery type light beer, which the Americans do very, very well, turning out seemingly endless versions of beers with a distinctive flavour that are a pleasure to drink in a way that six pints of Stella on a Friday night are not. But the wedge of orange on the glass? Were they taking the piss?


Highlight of the MOMA was the trio of pictures detailing how the 'I heart N Y' logo came into being. Lowlight, a painting that was black. The audio guide then told you to look at it and you could see it was different shades of black. Indeed it was, you could make out different shades of black if you looked at it for about thirty seconds. That's half a minute of my life wasted, because even when you can see the different shades it's still a black painting and it's still toss. Suspect the artist was crap and painting flowers.

Evening comes early to certain sections of NYC. If you are in the shadow of a skyscraper (and unless you're on an even taller skyscraper, almost everybody is) you can expect to see your last sunlight around about the same time you finish your breakfast.

Postcard from New York City - Iconography

NYC is enormous. Although you can walk a block in a minute, there is block after block after block, and the city expands vertically as well as horizontally. Other cities may have their showpiece spires and single tall buildings but New York has hundreds of the bloody things. Block after block after block of skyscraper and money. Each block looks, if not the same, then similar. When I visited many New Yorkers looked the same too, in that they had enormous puffa jackets, scarfs and hats on. This is not a fashion statement, New York is a coastal city on the Atlantic with no Gulf Stream to keep it cosy and is bloody cold.

Each corner has a hot dog cart on it and although I had promised myself that I'd have a hot dog off a street vendor in new York as an 'experience', the phrase 'suicide dog' kept going through my head and I bottled it.

One of the most constant images in new York, on it's way to becoming an icon like the yellow cab or statue of liberty, is the Starbucks coffee cup. Not only was every second person in the street walking along with a bucket sized Starbucks cup in their hand, but our hotel was 'proud to serve' Starbucks coffee in the restaurants and even the tea making facilities had Starbucks paper cups, well, beakers more like, rather than china cups. New Yorkers love their Starbucks so much that they actually take their Starbucks coffee into restaurants. In two places I saw people sitting eating with a Starbucks coffee beaker next to them. That's one trend that I can't see catching on in London, although having tasted the food in NYC I can see the attraction of taking your own food and drink into a restaurant and treating it as you would a picnic area.

On the sidewalks though, every second person has their Starbucks in their hand as they walk along. Actually, it's more like amble along, strolling to work at half nine in the morning. This might give a clue as to why America's title as an economic superpower is slipping. While the suits are walking down Forty Third street to work, slurping from their their bucket of latte, Shen Zhao has been at his desk for ten hours already. In fact he doesn't sleep, he doesn't have a bucket of coffee, he's got a bucket of black market amphetamines supplied to him by his bosses.

Postcard from New York City - Art

The hotel charges for wi fi! Where the hell are we, Paris? In the wooly wilds of Norfolk you go into a pub with wi fi and ask for the password and you get it, here in the Westin you are expected to pay an extra charge? That might have been acceptable, just, in 1998 but not today. At least the view is free. The Mandarin Oriental has a much more enlightened approach, simply asking you for your room number and password. If it works like it did in the hotel in Dublin, wi fi is included in the price of your room.

Or possibly I'm missing something. New York is all about making money after all and if you gave away your wi fi you'd not only lose out on that charge but also on any money you might make charging for your adult entertainment channels. A hotel, I suppose, has a right to ensure that they can continue to make a dime from those traditional bastions of adult entertainment, porn flicks and kickbacks from hookers.

Walked through Central Park. There are play areas dotted around the outside edge so that New Yorkers don't have to walk across the park to let their kids have a go on the swings. Presumably this means that the kids are in no danger of mixing with kids from other, potentially rougher, neighbourhoods. Because Christ alone knows it's bad enough that your toddler has started using Romanian it's picked up from the nanny without learning Spanish curse words too.


The Alice in wonderland statue is impressive and also surprisingly sinister, the Mad Hatter in particular looks like a demented ken Dodd, with enough teeth to give an ivory poacher a hard-on for a month. The giant mushroom is shiny at the front, where millions of children have polished the bronze with their bums.


Spent the morning in the Whitney gallery, home to the largest collection of Edward Hopper paintings in the world. Seen in the flesh, or rather in the pigment, the paintings are astonishing. Previously I'd only seen them in books, post cards or posters. The custodian gave a broad grin when the lift doors opened and I gasped at the size of the paintings, no doubt sensing a rube among the sensitive bohemian gallery goers that normally frequent the place.

They were all impressive, but also had that subtle Hopper menace. Not just a sense of isolation or loneliness, but the real sense that waiting, just out of picture, is a serial killer. Of course such a sensation is unfounded, unless Hopper himself was the malign presence always just out of shot...except in self portraits. Much more likely to be a serial killer is the sort of person who goes fluently to the exhibition pretending to be a sensitive bohemian.


Of course they were not all disturbing. One painting totally devoid of menace and instead suffused with charm was 'Early Sunday morning', a picture of a typical street in a small town anywhere in America. The painting is to art what Ray Bradbury's stories are to literature, evoking a nostalgic time, a golden age in the life of small town America that may or may not have actually existed but, mythical or not, is instantly recognisable. Hopper blurred the writing on the storefronts in a deliberate act of making the street anonymous. He did such a good job that I think the place resembles not only a small town I passed through once on a visit to Colorado but also a little place I know in the Cotswolds.

The gallery is also home to early photographs of New York city, antique black and white images of steam and skyscrapers that could have been taken yesterday.

As well as Hopper, the are contemporaries of his exhibited here also. The Charles Burchfield paintings were of shopfronts and streets in the snow, essentially depicting the sort of towns that H P Lovecraft used to write about, looking like they were pictured just before everything kicked off in the tentacle and madness department. He's in good company here. If Hopper's early paintings are Ray Bradbury, his later ones are Stephen King. All that's missing from 'Gas' is the shadow of a Lurker. The paintings are fascinating to look at, but I'm not sure I'd want one hanging in my house, they are definite candidates for the sort of pictures that the owner starts to notice disquieting changes in and are usually purchased from Peter Cushing in a portmanteau horror film from the 1970's.


Top prize for disquieting painting? 'Blue evening'. The image alone is terrifying enough, with the scariest clown ever in the centre of the composition, smoking (what's the only thing scarier than a clown? A clown with a fag on), but my travelling companion managed to ratchet up the tension by asking: 'did the audio guide mention a clown? I don't think it mentioned a clown. What if we are the only people that can see the clown, what if when they make reproductions of this thing there is no clown, just an empty chair? Why are you crying?'.

Can you see the clown? If so, it doesn't mean that everyone can see the clown, it just means that you can see the clown too!


The other curious painting is one of a shop with an unclear purpose. Hopper's wife called it a 'blind pig', that is, a shopfront that was essentially camouflaging a speakeasy. Of course, let's have a sinister term to describe what was, up until I heard that, a rather good picture of a shop in the sunshine.

Postcard from New York City - Times Square

Times Square is magical, an amazing place where the city begins to cast a spell. The billboards are not just electronic, or tickers, they are moving images the size of tennis courts. Recognising its charms, it has a viewing platform where you can watch the advertising billboards, like a show. Best time to go is sunset, when the light drains out of the sky and the neon wash becomes more pronounced. With all this clutter, advertisers work hard at getting you to look at their billboard, one having the genius idea to have a camera rigged to a huge screen that puts the crowd in the picture and then superimposes a giant woman walking into the square. I have no idea what it was advertising, I was too busy taking the photograph of my pixalated image, waving and expressing shock at the attack of the fifty foot woman.



Possibly the reason that al the bars in the city are so gloomy is because all the energy, or light bulbs, is being used in Times Square. Certainly, looking at the place, you would think that America doesn't give a shit about the energy crisis. So there's me using my energy efficient light bulbs at home, with the result that my front room looks like it's being viewed underwater, while here in this city they have decided to go down the route of conspicuous consumption. And they do love their gloomy bars. Even the lobby of our hotel was apparently lit my a single forty watt bulb. Is this to save on electricity, or cleaning? Some bars I can understand being dimly lit but surely every single one can't be used of illicit assignations? And what if you spend twenty minutes flirting with somebody before you realise that they've been talking to the wrong person?


This is a city of sights no doubt, but also a city of smells, the most common being burning pretzel, closely followed by frying onion and falafel coming from just about every street corner where the hot dog cart vendors have branched out. The pretzels are truly amazing. New Yorkers have taken something that is supposed to be a bar snack and turned it into a main by the simple expedient of supersizing it until it's the size of a steering wheel of a small car. It's also a city of sound, the predominant one being a local shouting into a mobile phone, always sounding more like an opinion than one end of a conversation.

NYC is also city of proximity, close proximity. In NYC even the buildings huddle up close to one another, the streets are never less than crowded and the cars pass one another with barely enough space for an extra coat of paint, sometimes passing so closely there must be friction.


You can see why anyone coming to the city would think that it is special, but New York needs to be careful that it does not turn into the theme park version of itself. Helping to keep a sense of reality is that the city is very much a place to live as well as a place to work or visit. Real people live in the heart of the city. It's possibly the reason why the city also appears to be totally devoid of litter, a feature which only adds to the theme park appearance.

And it's odd to see so many British bands transposed here, Pret is here, as is HSBC meaning the street features familiar corporate colours. In the New York Pret they have adapted the business model to take account of the free refills that American coffee shops offer, the coffee sits in the middle of the shop and you help yourself to refills. Can't see that catching on in London.

Postcard from New York City - Hot dogs

The hot dog cart guys are a piece of work. They stand on the street corner all day, after wheeling the carts through the NYC traffic in the morning. Apart from lunchtime, I never saw anyone, ever, buying anything from one of these guys, and even between twelve and two there was hardly ever what you'd call a queue, like you see in the movies.


What I love though is the optimism of anyone who thinks that somebody is going to want to buy a hot dog loaded with chilli sauce and onions at nine in the morning.

Postcard from New York City - NYC first impressions

Now that the twin towers have gone, when you come over the bridge from JFK and catch your first sight of the city, you are confronted with heavy metal bridges, gothic architecture and art deco skyscrapers. These are reflected back in the more modern, but smaller, steel and glass towers that intersperse them. If the heyday of a city is marked by it's tallest structure then this is a city in decline, the most prominent architectural features were built in the nineteen twenties and thirties, in the last depression.

The riveted girder bridges are an interesting contrast to the modern, elegant swooping arcs that form modern bridges in Europe. Possibly the bridges need to be on steroids because everything is bigger in America, including the super sized lardy arses of the drivers of the huge and heavy cars that pass over the structures.

Also visible in the heart of the city are vacant lots, something you would just never see in London, where construction on a new building is started the second the dust settles from the demolition of the previous one. One ingenious use that vacant lots are put to is car parking. But, this being New York, it's not just a case of a few shoddy square yards of mud and gravel being used as park up a few cars. Rather, instant multi-story car parks pop up, basically static car transporters where cars sit on, for the want of a better word, shelves. Usually a simple double decker arrangement, I did see one with three levels. Ingenious.


The entire city appears to be constructed of iconic images, every one a mini landmark. Steam venting out of the street, cops as wide as houses, yellow cabs, hot dog carts on every corner and steam pipes in the street looking like cat in the hat hats.




But the defining feature is the skyscrapers. They may have been surpassed in height elsewhere but the sheer density and variety of tall buildings here is staggering. You really do walk around constantly looking up, you can't help it. Other cities may have a single showpiece tower but New York has hundreds of the bloody things. It's quite a sensation to sit on the twenty fourth floor in your hotel room and look down on the tiny dots of people below, then look up at the distant tops of towers above.


The incongruity of the modern and antique, small and large, side by side is most pronounced when you see a church sandwiched between two skyscrapers. Churches are not small buildings, but here they look tiny. One expects the tower or spire of a church to be the tallest structure, especially if you are familiar with English villages, where a spire pops up above the treetops every few miles, dotting the countryside, ready to annoy the hell out of any nearby second-homeowners by having a two hour Sunday morning peal that starts at dawn. Not here, here the churches sit between office blocks. But somehow still manage to look imposing.

Yet New York is built on a human scale too, at least on street level, with the street vendors plying their trade with hot dogs, pretzels, gyros and halal food. And also selling children's books. One guy just had children's toys sat there on the sidewalk, with clockwork cars and helicopters whizzing round in circles around him. Maybe they do need to polish their sales technique however, as the chap drumming up trade on the sidewalk for his barber shop screamed 'shave and a haircut goddamit!' into the faces of passage by. I was so shocked I nearly went in for a bit of male grooming.

Postcard from New York City - Welcome to America

On arrival at JFK we were fingerprinted and photographed. They make you take off your glasses, which is odd because everyone knows that if you want to assume a secret identity, you keep your glasses on. There must be millions of photographs of short sighted tourists squinting to try and work out where the hell the camera is so they can peer into it. Once fingerprinted and photographed we were awaiting the secret police kicking the door in at three in the morning. Actually the immigration guy was polite enough but I thought this was a country with a reputation for welcoming anyone - except Mexicans - so this was a bit of a shock.

Postcard from New York City - Virgin Atlantic

Recession is obviously biting even the hitherto glamorous world of transatlantic air travel, with only one glass of wine per passenger the whole way. Must be because we were in economy, or because it was a dawn flight and not many people do an entire bottle of chardonay for breakfast. Instead of booze, passengers are kept pacified with the bewildering amount of entertainment available in the seat back. Not just the in flight magazine, airplane safety card and complimentary sick bag, but a mini multiplex showing films and telly programmes. Watched 'The King's Speech'. With all the hype I was a little worried that it would disappoint or at least not meet expectation. It's not as good as the hype, it's better. It's so good that it makes you want not to watch another film again that's not as good, as true, as moving or as well acted. Sitting in the middle of a crowded aircraft sobbing was probably not the best way to enjoy it but you just know that the BBC are already desperately bidding for the rights to broadcast it, scheduled for ten past three on Christmas Day if they have any imagination.

Sat belted into a seat watching movies, you become a sort of pleasure prisoner. Virgin recognise this and one of the annoying adverts that play before the movies is of a bloke sat in his seat remarking to the same sex travelling companion he refers to has his 'son' that he would very much like this sort of thing in his front room. The 'son' then goes on to extoll the virtues of Virgin media, explaining that he can get endless entertainment piped into his telly. The advert finishes before the 'dad' can correct the other fool and explain that what he really wants is to be brought endless booze and snacks by a camp steward and sod the movies.

However, there is a glimpse into a better life. One disembarks the aircraft from the very front, so you have to walk through the long and crowded corridors of economy, through the slightly less crowded premium economy until you come to the bar, and business class, and then it's forward still until you get to the first class section. Here there are not so much seats, but little pleasure pods where one can curl up in like a pampered pooch and, presumably, be brought endless glasses of champagne and swans blood while dining on cruel food. This, I think, is supposed to make you think 'next time I will upgrade'. However, having seen the upgrade prices and the cost of a first class ticket across the Atlantic, I would expect not a plastic cot but rather a four poster bed with it's own plasma telly, not so much a bar as a pub, and at least a ten minute go in the cockpit.

Surely a compromise might be reached. If the small seats in economy are the cheapest, is there not scope for further saving by simply sitting on a bar stool the whole trip?

Comment on: 'The UK census, it's just a big box of ticks'

Comment on: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/mar/19/lucy-mangan-uk-census-politics

As anyone who, after a simple misunderstanding, has had their binoculars confiscated by a magistrate can attest, the English are peculiar about their privacy. At the start of the century it was predicted that the largest single issue facing the on-line community was going to be privacy. And that prediction was right, but in exactly the opposite way that the bearded social scientist crossed with Mystic Meg making it intended. Instead of us all jealously guarding our privacy, there seems to be a rush by certain people to push the details of their private lives at anyone that will pay attention or, to give it its technical name, Facebook.

The Government could save a fortune by getting Facebook to undertake the census rather than Lockheed Martin (a company more recognised for delivering ballistic missiles than forms that allow you to consider yourself quite the wit by listing your religion as 'Jedi'). Not only would this allow everyone to list their personal details, but to make the exercise self financing this information could then be sold on to marketing companies the next time Facebook updated its privacy settings and all the users ticked the 'I accept these terms and conditions - even the one about using my photographs as 'before' images in adverts for weight loss pills, face creams or self help books on fashion and grooming' box, without reading them first.

Not only that but social networking gets into a lot more detail than: 'How many VHS box sets of 'Buffy the vampire slayer' do you still have knocking around?' or whatever else they are asking in the census this time round, and in real time too. If the Government wants to know how many people are: 'in a relationship, but increasingly irritated at my partner's habit of sucking Quavers until they dissolve while watching telly, and building up to Do Something about it', right now, then social networking can deliver.

Of course, while people are quite happy to share their snapshots, opinions, thoughts and details of their relationship status with the world, they are rightly reticent to share any personal details, at all, with the Government. This is for two reasons. The first is the fear that the data will somehow fall into the hands of an twisted megalomanic and be used for evil. This is an entirely reasonable fear if you substitute the treasury for the undersea volcano base that said twisted megalomaniac resides in. The second reason is that the government will collate the name and address of everyone in Britain in a handy DVD form that can be left on a train, where it will be found by somebody who works in marketing and, as a result, you will spend the rest if your life receiving direct mail about yoghurt.

The biggest problem with the census in it's current form though is that it has no feature that allows you to include a photograph, or even a simple line drawing, of yourself. This ironically neatly illustrates the gulf of understanding that exists between the snoopers and the public. The government values a census because it provides data on who lives where and so on. The public values a census because it not only gives middle class people who are researching their family tree hours of fun and an excuse to use the internet for reasons other than download money-off coupons for biscuits but, vitally, is key to producing that moment in every episode of 'who do you think you are' where a well spoken but slightly irritating thespian discovers that they are directly descended not from Latvian nobility as they always believed, but a instead from somebody who was common as muck and who spent a spell banged up in Strangeways for Lurking Near Duckponds.

Such a moment is always accompanied by a grainy snapshot of some cross eyed rickets riddled bloke in a battered hat and disgrace boots and that's what the census lacks, a chance for us to record now for posterity the images that might pop up centuries hence to mortify our ancestors. And if you can sport a huge stove hat and whiskers while doing so, then so much the better.

The search for a decent picnic basket

The search for a decent picnic basket, no, I'll correct that, the search for just the right picnic basket is something that has been occupying me for some months now. There is much more to it than simply Googling 'picnic basket' and filtering out the pictures of Yogi Bear. I'm just glad that the term has not yet been adopted by the deviant community to define some repulsive sexual practice that leaves you with wicker marks on your arse.

What I'm looking for is something traditional, with six plates, six bowls, six side plates and six cups and saucers, cutlery, seasoning containers and plenty of space for tubs of food and so on. I am prepared to concede that a separate basket will be required for beverages, or possibly two extra baskets, one for red, one for white. It does not seem that tall an ask.

I also realise that it would probably be beneficial if it came on little wheels and possibly had a small motor to power it.

But there seems to be a dearth of decent picnic baskets, especially ones that come with a separate linen compartment. Possibly this is a gap in the market that I can plug with some sort of cottage industry, bespoke picnic baskets. Get the baskets of various sizes woven in China, or even better somewhere where there are lots of neurotics who look on basket weaving as therapy, like the Home Counties, then outfit to the customers requirement.

Of course, the thing to do would be to run a bespoke service. This would mean that you would not give the customer what they asked for, but what they really needed. Thus somebody who thought that they wanted a four piece traditional set up would, after a brief consultation, be presented with a basket that contains a wine rack, a cork screw, compartments for glasses and a small space for bar snacks. Who could ask for more?

I still think that the ultimate picnic basket could be mode by adapting one of those wicker coffins that they use for green burials (don't they, well, leak?). You've got space there for a dinner service, lamps, a small stove, a larder and a wine cellar, and best of all it's got handles all the way round so the six of you it takes to carry the bloody thing can all get a good grip.

Shackleton's scotch

Ah, the delights of camping food. Modern camping food tends to be the sort of thing that, as a lad I thought astronauts, or people from the future, ate all the time. Freeze dried and packed with artificial flavour and artificial colouring, it is instead actually the sort of food that kids with ADHD eat all the time, hence the ADHD.

You see it in camping shops, on the same shelves as the wee stoves, one size up from the ones that Outdoors Barbie uses. Foil packets of bricks and powder, all with unconvincing pictures of, to be fair, pretty horrible looking food on the front that is supposed to be the final result of your efforts, which consist of dumping the contents of a foil pouch in hot water and stirring relentlessly until your spoon bends with the resistance of the gunk in the pot.

What these meals have in common; chicken curry flavour, stew flavour, chilli con carne flavour, slurry flavour and so on is that at home you'd think they would only be good for tile adhesive, fox poison or ballast and little else, yet half way up a frozen tor, they taste delicious.

Adventures and explorers from a previous age knew a little about provisioning for an expedition too. Essentials back in the age when more of the map was blank than filled in were; many, many cans of meaty stew, bovril and, that most important of kitchen implements, a bloody huge gun. This was because where others saw jungle, explorers saw a larder.

You know that scene in 'Predator' where the guy with the mini gun lets rip in the jungle, shooting at a shadowy figure, then the rest of the special ops team join in, and they let all hell cut loose with many types of automatic weapon, essentially levelling an area of rainforest? Well, your seasoned explorers would expect to achieve the same effect with one barrel, then wander into the devastation to see what hadn't been vaporised or liquified in the blast and was still fit for the pot.

But first and foremost, your explorer equipped themselves with a crate of scotch.

In tough times, when the jungle is closing in, the crevasse is closing up or the lost city refuses to be found, scotch can be a great comfort. No other drink is quite so right for a crisis. In an emergency, one does not drink gin, that's for later when, at your club, you are explaining the loss of your arm while standing on your new tiger-skin rug. Nor is wine acceptable. The only time a gentleman has anything to do with wine is when he is either plying a lady with it, or he is using a magnum bottle to crush the skull of some castle guard prior to shimmying down the drainpipe, across the moat and to freedom. No, scotch is a man's drink. Just look at the face of any man taking a gulp of the stuff. There's no beatific grin, no smile, instead its the grimace of a man who feels the chill finger of doom pressing on the tightening sphincter of his fate.

Scotch has many flavours. Peat, wood, bracken, grass, heather, moss, rain, granite, coo. Essentially a long list of things that drink is not supposed to taste of. If humans enjoyed the taste of the stuff that Scots throw on the fire, coke would have brought out 'catholic cola' years ago.

Paradoxically, because it is so...challenging, scotch makes certain dishes taste better. Not anything already palatable, obviously; a decent spag bol is not going to be enhanced by downing a tumbler of the true water alongside it. But it certainly makes any sort of frontier fodder, such as husky, pony, seal or penguin, tolerable. If scotch can make even Scottish cooking edible, then it's the perfect accompaniment to a plate of baboon's arse.

Despite their backpacks, sledges and tartan shopping trollies or whatever, today's explorers travel light, comfortable in the knowledge that nowhere today is that far from a Tesco.

But back in the day when men had whiskers like the sort of shrubbery a convention of flashers could hide in and you could still get rickets on the national health, explorers travelled heavy. This is because they had discovered that great secret of the British traveller abroad, that the only thing you can rely on in foreign parts is what you take with you. This extends to food, drink and religion but honourable exception is made for native gals and exotic tropical diseases, both of which were instead brought back to England and shown to your horrified family.

Equipping for an expedition, you'd send some junior off to buy a shedload of rope, brass instruments and wooly undergarments while you would spend the morning purchasing cannons and visiting various food and drink emporiums to secure provisions. The trick was to buy the food before the drink, or you'd end up with twenty crates of booze and a packet of twiglets.

So you had your ship, your crates of booze and your wild destination. Obviously, at some point, things are going to go wrong. There are, after all, no famous successful British explorers, so it's just a matter of how things are going to take a turn for the worse; wild animal attack, extreme weather event or, our old friend, unexpected native. At which point, hopefully before the sky falls in on the whole enterprise, you bury the booze.

This has two effects. The first is to give you peace of mind that at least nobody else will be tucking into your crate of twelve year old Glenglacier. The second is that nothing reminds a chap of the location of a camp in an otherwise featureless environment quite like a crate of buried scotch and, should you have to find your way back there, at least you won't need to worry about a drink on arrival.


The great polar explorer Earnest Shackleton apparently buried his stash as well. We know this because it was recently dug up and shipped back to Scotland for tasting and testing. Apparently the intention is to try and blend a whiskey that tastes the same or similar. But surely the thing to do is to drink the actual stash rather than keeping it as some sort of museum piece, or attempting to clone it like an alcoholic Jurassic Park. We'll never see men like Shackleton again so why do we need polar explorers scotch? Is the idea that we drink it and feel like an adventurer? If you want booze and adventure I suggest that you off a bottle of value vodka and walk the streets of Govan after chucking out time in a Celtic shirt. That'll give you all the adventure and excitement you could ever crave.


With the holds of their ships full of corned beef, handy recipes for cooking penguin and crates of scotch carried by bearer, pony or raft, it seems to me that what most of these chaps were really searching for was a decent picnic basket. And they’re are not the only ones.

Comment on: 'We're in a right state'

Comment on: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/mar/12/disability-britain-society-lucy-mangan?commentpage=last#end-of-comments

Partial repost.

Society ascribes a sliding scale of deference to illness and infirmity. If your inability to rise from your bed is caused by, for instance, that genius idea you had at half nine the previous night to switch to shorts, and your symptoms include headache, nausea, 40% proof perspiration and the nagging thought that you did something dreadful in your left shoe last night, you are unlikely to get much sympathy. Consideration for others should, however, be extended to those who have trouble getting about, ranging from those struggling with three bags or more of rebellious shopping, through those with sticks or crutches and wheelchairs, all the way up to speeding ambulances or creeping hearses.

The possible exception is when one sees a tanned, fit looking sort with a colourful cast on his foot and you briefly wonder how deserving of sympathy is somebody who may have just stubbed their toe when pissed out their skull on schnapps during their recent skiing holiday.

Social attitudes towards illness and infirmity have changed significantly over time. A hundred years ago, there was a simple scale; standard-issue ‘healthy’ was upright and able-bodied, but afflicted by any number and combination of maladies that stunted your growth, gave you sores, caused you to walk funny, caused you to look funny, or caused people to look funny at you, throw rocks at you, or in extreme cases hound you out of the village with pitchforks.

If you were ‘poorly’ this normally meant that working eighteen hours a day in a factory or down a coal mine had left you with the sort of cough that would shake a lesser man apart at the seams and a talent for producing different coloured phlegm to order, including multi-coloured on bank holidays.

‘Badly’ was a description of the after-effects of a threshing accident. Today we would say ‘in a critical condition’ or ‘has anybody found his head yet?’ In the huge open plan mills of the industrial revolution, being caught in a loom and accidentally woven into the pattern of a carpet was so common that the drama was downplayed. Likewise, farming and industrial machinery consisted of overheated boilers, spinning flanges, swooping sharp bits and, of course, flywheels driving exposed belt-loops designed to catch not just extremities but bonnets, frilly shirts and other stunningly impractical clothing of the age.

Luckily, we now have advances not just in health and safety, but tight clothing and, of course, medication. But even the cure can be tricky. For instance, not long ago I decided to treat a sniffle by trying an allegedly ‘non-drowsy’ berry-flavoured drink. What I remember is a sensation of hot ribena and then waking up at two in the afternoon feeling a bit queer and not at all surprised that housewives get hooked on painkillers, it makes the dull bit of the afternoon go quicker than two sherries and an episode of ‘antiques roadshow’.

But at least it was a proper chemical cure. When faced with a complex problem or illness there’s nothing worse than these quack cures that homoeopathists peddle - shoving a banana up your arse to cure a headache or whatever (peel it first - you don’t want to look stupid). The purveyors of quack cures should, at least, be honest in their trade, possibly by ditching the white lab coat and simply rolling into town in a horse-drawn wagon, pulling up in the town square and putting on a medicine show flogging ‘Professor McTeeths all-nachural-snakebite-liniment’, a patent cure-all for warts, coughs, lost limbs, teenage boys playing with themselves and, if you drink the stuff, sobriety.

Of course there is a school of thought that you can treat just about anything with alcohol. For instance the belief that a ‘hot toddy’ can have a positive benefit on a cold is so widespread that it’s a wonder you can’t get Glenfiddich on the NHS. Certainly there’s a time and a place for alcohol in the treatment of illness; having a drink to celebrate your hangover dissipating or knocking back an enormous gin while you tell your friends the tale of how you came to lose your arm, while standing on your brand-new tiger skin rug.

(Painful pelvis sounds like a right pain in the arse…and hip, and whole pelvisish region. Hope you are once more able to frolic like a spring lamb on speed soon).

Decanters

What could be better than a drink? I'll tell you, a drink poured from a decanter. In truth, some people choose a wine because it's got an interesting looking label. And it's a natural assumption to entertain preconceptions about the quality of a drink based on what it's poured from. If it comes out of a bottle, shiny cocktail shaker or tartan thermos flask, you are probably in for a treat. If it's being poured from some sort of novelty bottle, that is, a bottle in the shape of a landmark, fruit or, God forbid, a naughty clergyman, then sip with trepidation. If it's being poured from something labelled 'value' or 'evidence', best avoid altogether.

If it's a decanter, chances are you're at home or, if not actually at home, making yourself at home.

Decanters perform two vital functions, they smoothly pour spirits into a large glass and they make it socially acceptable to have a lot of booze piled up in the front room, readily to hand yet looking elegant in a way that a clustered field of bottles would not.

Moreover, they can be a piece of history. The best place by far to obtain a decanter is your local charity shop, where you can not only ironically make a contribution to the fight against, for instance, liver disease but can give an important artefact a new lease of life. That's why one of my decanters has 'Terry's team 1985' engraved on it. I have no idea who Terry is or what his team did in 1985 to win that decanter but I enjoy speculating as I chase down the level of booze in the thing of an evening.

Current theories include something to do with golf, armed police response or transplant surgery.

It's a straightforward square job that normally holds enough sherry to stun a cart horse or point eight of a vicar but at Christmas is pressed into use as reserve port decanter. The other reason decanters are so useful is that one can serve visitors drinks from them without the visitor seeing the label that adorned the bottle used to fill said decanter. That's the other reason why it's important to know your various different engraved decanters, one must always know which is the good stuff and which is the 'visitors' brew'.

Yet to be acquired; the ship's decanter. One of those enormous ones with a fat bottom and a thin neck that looks like an unfortunate princess. These are rather harder to come by as, I suppose, sailors are not soon parted from their vessels, especially their booze vessels.

Of course decanters have their place and that place is in the home, one's club or, on those rare occasions when needs really must and the rebels are in the embassy compound, the front line. I have seen, in a rather chi-chi shop in Burnham Market in Norfolk, picnic decanters. These were plastic replicas of their lead crystal or glass models and, while I am of course now kicking myself for not buy several, at the time I took a rather purist approach and decided that if I was going to decant on a picnic, I'd bloody well do it from a crystal jobbie. If I had been thinking clearly I would have realised that the weight saving of a plastic decanter allows another bogle of wine to be carried to the table. Moreover they would make excellent combat decanters, light and durable they would be just the right thing to bring a touch of elegance to one's fox hole as one spends the evening guzzling scotch and loosing off the occasional volley at Terry Taliban. Naturally if one were to take prisoners, one would have to have two decanters, as even the Geneva Convention does not insist on having to give the enemy the good stuff when offering him a drink.

Manchester by rail...standard class!

Ahh, the romance of train travel! Clouds of steam, assignations in the dining car, genteel murder, stoking, assignations in the luggage car, gin, amusing incidents in the sleeper compartment, bribing the border guards and, of course, thanks to terrorists and strict border controls, it's still the best way to smuggle smack or shooters into the country.

Modern day train travel has much to commend it. There's the quiet carriage, where mobile phones and, apparently, loudly rustling your crisp packet is frowned upon to the point of Paddington hard stares or second degree tutting. There's the buffet car, with it's cornucopia of snacks meaning that some offer up to three flavours of crisps to compliment your twelve cans of Stella.

Recently, I had to travel up north for work. I love the train journey up north. You go through what is now a deprived area of the country but what was once a glorious industrial powerhouse. That's one of the reasons why there is a railway track there at all and also the reason why for so much of the journey the railway runs alongside the canal network. Railways were laid alongside the canals they would eventually replace because the navvies had already done all the hard work of levelling the area, building embankments, finding the best pubs and composing folk songs.

Previously I'd done the trip first class. Not this time though, this was austerity Britain and I was under the distinct impression that my class of travel was one above having to shovel coal into the engine for 200 miles. Or whatever.

The view, however, was still first class. England was in the grip of winter and there had been a hard frost that night, now the same clear skies that brought the frost let the sun illuminate it in dazzling style. You could see the cold, the white countryside, the breath of the cattle and, in the canals, a thin skien of almost ice on the iron dark chill waters.

Inside all was jolly and warm. First class travel means that you get fed and watered. Tea and coffee and coffee and tea and a hot breakfast. Not so in standard class. Luckily I am a man of immense resource and enviable pic nic skills and so using only the most basic of amenities; a M&S simply food, a coffee shop and an artisan bakers, had cobbled together a light three course breakfast.

Then, as we left the station, came the announcement that because the catering crew has missed the train, there would be no catering, at all, on the journey. The howls went up from first class while, sitting in a fug of smug, I debated whether to eat my BLT or auction it.

I ate it, of course, and enjoyed the view. But I wonder if future travellers will have that same opportunity. The canals today are used for holidays and colourful narrowboats putter along, a reminder of a time when the world moved at a slower pace. I can't see the holiday makers of the future getting away from it all on a motorway cruise, although journey times might be similar.

One of the more colourful sights was, in the middle of an expanse of what at first appeared to be suspiciously well groomed countryside but was, of course, a golf course, two golfers striding forth across the frozen fairways. Colourful trousers making an impression in the black and white surroundings, clouds of breath steaming over their shoulders like the puffs that would have come from my train decades ago. They must really love their game, or have really shit home lives.

It was refreshing, at journey's end, to see the northern city I was visiting in the sunshine for the first time ever. No kidding. The place looked transformed. But no wonder they shot 'life on Mars' there. It was like going back to the 1970s. Everyone was smoking (remember smoking?) and everyone was overweight, probably due to the wheezy queue that seemed to be a permanent feature outside the door of Greggs. Not that I blame them, if I hadn't of feasted on a BLT that morning, I might of joined them.

The international day of: Insert Name Here

International days are a fine idea, international days celebrating something are a great idea, international days castigating or berating something or someone? Less of a great idea.

In truth, days where something is berated rather than celebrated tend to be on a national rather than international level, examples including Denmark’s annual ‘the-Goons-weren’t-actually-that-funny’ day, Argentina’s annual ‘No! to broccoli’ day and of course our very own forthcoming national ‘I do not fully understand Alternative Voting, but I don’t like it. Is it European?’ day (May 5th). Indeed just about the only international day of condemnation is: ‘is it just me, or is ‘Black Swan’ a bit over-rated?’ day (37 countries signed up so far (on Facebook at least) and counting).

As a species, we like to celebrate things. It brings us closer as a community, and by a community I of course mean as a collection of people who like a drink. That’s the great thing about The World, everyone in it likes a drink; I don’t care if you are in the desert or at the Poles, somebody somewhere will find a way to ferment their way to a fun time and invent a national beverage, even if it means adding clear spirit normally used to clean your snowmobile spark plugs to reindeer piss (known locally as a ‘vodka Red Nose’).

Of course, for real disagreements you have to go ultra local. Look, the fact that an individual can be undecided about something as simple as the purchase of a pair of purple socks (Don’t! the scarf was a mistake, let’s not compound things), essentially having an argument with themselves means that humans can have an argument at, basically, the cellular level. This is what allows two rational people to have a falling out about who’s turn it is to load the dishwasher and share the same bed while still seething with principles (but, importantly, not stabbing one another with cutlery…well, not until it’s clean).

Siblings and spouses can argue, as can villages; a few years ago there was a case of keen competition between two neighbouring villages for the regional title of ‘Britain in Bloom’. One morning, the villages of Little Twatting (or whatever) came out to find their blooms blighted. Skulduggery was suspected and, although nothing was ever proved, the subsequent success of Great Twatting (or whatever) coupled with the fact that the B&Q at Great Twatting (or whatever) had totally sold out of weedkiller the week before cast rather a shadow over what had, up until then, been a rather jolly affair.

Organised fun is no fun at all. Just look at ‘The Wicker Man’. That’s why the calendar if stuffed with Saints days and feast days and other forgotten religious festivals, mostly observed by only the most pious and an increasingly bitter clergy, who want their flock to understand the message of St Fistima (feast day 17th March, message: Romans have no sense of humour whatsoever about their gods).

If you want to have your local, regional, national or international day observed and celebrated, you’ve got to have a gimmick. You don’t even need alcohol, although it helps. You can mark a day of celebration with a pancake, or chasing a fast cheese down a steep slope (and if that doesn’t mark St John’s day, it should). It also helps if you can get the card and confectionary markets on side. In my more heretical moments I often wonder of Christianity was a scam cooked up by Cadbury’s and Hallmark to shift some product at an otherwise quiet time of year. And the initial launch went so well they decided to repeat the whole thing in a few months later and call it Easter. Proof positive will come when they announce that in addition to his birth and death, the church have decided to mark that other important rite of passage in a bloke’s life and that henceforth, 17 September shall be ‘Christ’s First Pint’ day.

It’s good to celebrate something positive. It was world book day this week and I celebrated the world flavour of this by reading a Chinese book. Untranslated. Didn’t understand a bloody word (pictogram, whatever) but I rather hope that somewhere in Liang Shang Po province some farmer stopped killing snakes in his paddy field long enough to read a P G Wodehouse short story, also untranslated…but then laugh half way down page two anyway. Some things really are universal and cross the language divide, and your valet disproving of your choice of cravat is one of them.