Review - Alzheimer's the musical

Walked out of this one. Absolute shite.

Not sure what we expected but with a name like that we were prepared to be offended. The fringe has never been a bastion of political correct comedy or sensitivity, which is probably why I enjoy it so much, so we were quite ready to be shocked.

The reviews were good and the long queue, in the rain, boded well. We holed up under a bar table with a big brolly and tagged on to the end of the queue when it started moving.

This meant we were in the overspill area for the audience, a balcony with no seats but, what the hell, it's the last show of the fringe and we're are rock and roll enough to handle this.

Show was three Australian comedians doing comic songs about old age, dressed as grannies. I know of course that Australia is a cultural as well as an actual desert, but if your big opening number involved finding a rhyme of 'Viagra' and using your simmer frame as a dancing partner, you are fucked. We gave them half of the second sketch to redeem themselves but when it became clear that the biggest laugh was based around a lady who played bowls getting sponsorship from manufacturers of geriatric related products, we headed for the exit, quite pleased that we had not got a seat and hence did not need to make an exit that anyone would notice. We slipped out from the back and let the door close gently behind us...or it would have done if the springy arm thing that makes the door close with a gentle sigh had not been knackered, meaning a heavy fire door slam shut with the sort of bang normally associated with seismic activity.

After a brief debate about demanding our money back, we decided that a far better use of our now free evening was to make reservations for dinner at Magnum. Walking out was the right decision is just so many ways.

Review - David O'Doherty presents: Rory Sheridan's Tales of The Antartic

I know somebody who is related to an Antarctic explorer, her Irish ancestor was on Shackleton's expedition, the one that ended with the epic open-boat journey. And I've been to Ireland and seen a house with a plaque stating that a polar explorer lived there so I asked her, what is it about the Irish that compels their men to seek out the desolate waste? She replied that it's because it's the last place on earth that they are likely to have their mammies telling them what to do.

The explorer in this show went to the Antarctic for love, and love is probably the only thing in the world that is more likely to lead a chap into doomed folly than Antarctic exploration. So the combination of the two was going to be a winner.

The show was good. The venue was a sub-sub-sub basement of some council building, think underground car park with no lights and water running down the walls and you get the idea, I half expected to come across some lost cavers, or morlocks, as I took my seat.

A monologue of love, adventure, madness and the invention of the pub quiz, the writing and delivery was clever and funny, making some mileage from using modern references in the context of early twentieth century polar exploration, with plenty of straightforwardly funny stuff ('penguins, let me tell you, are stupid. They are more stupid than an bottle filled with meat') as well as a poignant conclusion.

In terms of performance, invention, charm, storytelling and laugh-out-loud funny moments, this show was the high water mark of this years fringe, just the sort of thing one hopes to see, deliciously different, wonderfully executed and will change your view of penguins forever.

Review - Tearoom

A show that starts at mid-day? What were we thinking? Surviving the Fringe means that late nights (or rather early mornings) need to be balanced out with late rises or stimulants by the fistful. The Fringe should not involve setting your alarm clock. And yet we rose at an (in)decent hour, took on the usual six to eight thousand calorie breakfast that is so necessary when your day is going to involve charging from venue to venue, drinking heavily, and wandered through a deserted city to our lunchtime play.

That's right, Edinburgh was more or less deserted at half eleven, one got the feeling that the last revellers had only gone to bed a couple of hours before. The city smells suspiciously of bleach at that hour of the morning and one would do well not to step any any area that smells more than averagely pine fresh.

Tearoom was an attempt at site-specific theatre. A couple of years ago, a theatre group had had great success in setting a play by Bukowski in a bar. Could this lot emulate that success in a tea total environment? Quite a challenge.

The play takes place in a large room, dressed to look like a tea room. The audience sit at tables around the edge and drink tea and eat cake while the actors sit at tables in the middle and drink tea and eat cake and act.

And act well. This was an excellent idea executed with all the elegance of a fine bone china teacup, occasionally as dark as black coffee, occasionally as light as a muffin. The triumph was that the premise of the play, that one was eavesdropping on a private conversation in a public place, worked and worked because one wanted to listen rather that pursue the natural urge in such situations - which is to plug in an iPod and raise the sonic screen.

The play played to a full house, and as we left there was a lady at the door of the venue asking about tickets for the next performance. A popular production and, with the price of afternoon tea included in the admission price, the perfect combination of culture and cake!

Full disclosure - I know one of the actors. He was excellent. I managed to suppress the urge to wave when he appeared. I also know that when he handed out the flyers for the show, he told prospective audience members that it was in the 'pubic triangle', that is, the area of Edinburgh that has three stripper pubs in it. In truth, it's just off the pubic triangle.

Postcard from Edinburgh - Magnum bar

What with the breakfasts and the hog roasts and the drinking, fitting in a decent dinner was a challenge. This is probably one of the reasons we ate at The Magnum bar for two nights running. There is a school of thought that when one is in a city in the grip of a cultural festival, one should try and enjoy as diverse a range of activities as possible, for instance you can go to a different stripper pub every night for three nights running. However, there is another school of thought which is the one that I subscribe to, that the Magnum is an excellent place to eat and that going anywhere else is too big a risk. Nothing can put a crimp in your festival quite like substandard batter around your fish. Or biting into batter expecting cod and discovering a mars bar instead.

Review - The Queen Art and Image

Next year is the Queen's golden jubilee and one of the ways it is being marked is an exhibition of paintings and photographs of the Queen called 'The Queen Art and Image'. Before it travels to London, the exhibition was showing in Edinburgh. It is fantastic. As an icon or image, the profile and portrait of the Queen is ubiquitous. Her profile adorns stamps and her face is on bank notes and well as newspapers.

It was fascinating to see how she had changed as a person over the decades, from a glamorous deb in the1950s to a mother and a head of state. One really got the impression that she was a constant in a changing world and that even in times of peace and prosperity there is still strife and suffering.

As an icon, her image was, if anything, even more remarkable. They had Warholes, which were good, the Francis Bacon portrait, which was stunning, and the 'god save the Queen' Sex Pistols artwork, which mashes up the image of the Queen and the Union Flag. Disrespectful at the time it may have been, but it seemed perfectly in place here among the images of veneration.

Review - Al Murray The Pub landlord's Compete for the meat

Flogging the format...to death.

Al Murray has, for years, being doing exactly what it says on the tin, with the added recent development that the shows are now filmed, meaning he can turn a live show into a handy pitch to Channel Five executives, saving valuable time for coke and hookers or wherever else it is that television executives do when not listening to pitches from comedians.

This was essentially the Christmas version of 'Compete for the meat'. If you are actually competing, as we were last year, then there is the fun of a quiz and the edgy titillation of possibly being humiliated by Al. If you are an audience member, the show is not so immediate, you are essentially just watching a live version of a tee vee quiz show based on a pub quiz.

But they do work hard to make it fun. Al has raised his game from victimising individuals to victimising whole tables at once, and there are sing-alongside for the whole audience. If you go along to this with a sort of ironic detachment, you'll be miserable. If you grab hold of a 'thick and slow' foam finger and join in the abuse, rendering the whole experience not unlike some beery version of 'Lord of the flies' then you'll enjoy it.

Was it fresh? No. Was it slick? Very. Was it funny? Yes. Al did enough, in particular with his attempted wooing of one young helpless woman, to make an established format one has seen before seem fresh. What one was watching was essentially a comedians greatest hits, and, as anyone who has ever been to a gig and observed the audience reaction when a band announces that they are now going to play some of their new material will tell you, that's no bad thing.

Review - Andy Parsons: Gruntled

The Assembly Rooms was packed, this, remember, is a comedian who has been on television and expectations were high. There's always that extra bit of excitement when a television comedian 'fucks' for the first time on stage and that was certainly the case here, particularly in the seat near me where a dad had brought his son, who looked about nine, along to the show. I have no doubt that a nine year old probably knows just about all the profanities he'll need in the playground, but what he will have taken away from this show is how to use them professionally and for effect.

The material was good topical stuff, as anyone who has seen Mock The Week or, before that, listened to 'Parsons and Naylor's pull-out-section' on Radio 2. There was plenty of banker bashing, some slick interaction with the audience and an effective rant about the economy ('I've heard the accusation that some people have too much money and thought it stupid, then realised that, if you are one of the thousands of people who bought the autobiography of Alexander Meerkat, you have too much money').

Are established comedians a good ticket at the Fringe? Well, you have what you hope is a safe pair of hands and you can expect a reasonable return. Although the ticket price is normally at the higher end it's still cheaper than going to see the tour that inevitably follows. It's fun to see a comedian working up some new material and always enjoyable to see a panel show comedian doing their day job.

Good, yes, but probably because of the warmth that Parsons brings to the performance, providing a good counterpoint to his cynicism and anger meaning you leave entertained rather than thinking that you have just listened to a middle aged bloke moaning for an hour.

Review - Stewart Lee - Flickwerk 2011. Work in progress

Oooooooohhhhhhh, edgy. Stewart Lee has, in defiance of his status as a mainstream comedian who has been a continued television presence for a couple of years now, continued to play the Stand comedy club during his Edinburgh stints. So the audience that turn up are probably a mixture of people who like Lee enough to tolerate this frankly appalling venue year after year, and those who have seen the telly show and hope they will catch the live version, that is; as funny as the telly show but with more swearing.

It's not as funny as the telly show, but there is more swearing. It's funny, it's just not as funny as you'd expect. Then again, nobody could be that funny for an hour without distilling down hours of material and drafting in Armando to deconstruct the programme between sets.

There's warning signs a few minutes in when Lee explains that as a parent he never goes out and so has nothing to base new material on except Children's television. He does, however, really pull it out of the bag with a spectacular piece about his hate mail bag, and he had the best gag about the riots.

And, what was that...how could such social upheaval, with Greggs on fire, be so overlooked here, it was almost as if none of the comedians cold be bothered to build this into their sets because they had got the timing right and the construction just so and bunging in fifteen minutes of topical humour about chavs going on the rampage would upset the delicate balance of all those knob gags. Maybe it was that, just as the social unrest was apparently coordinated by social networking rather than the traditional method of scallys just telling asking other that they had just looted J.D. Sports but that, being innumerate, they had neglected to loot any trainers in their size and did they want a pair? The jokes were also posted instantly on twitter too and so the social media savvy Fringe goer would probably have read any punch line in the form of a tweet months ago.

The Stand is my least favourite venue by far. Small and pokey and painted black its the sort of place you wake up in after being abducted and know that everything is very much not going to be alright. And with self-important signs telling you to switch off your mobile phone and not to talk during performances. This was the sort of place that Hitler could have made an address from if the bierkeller had been busy.

There was, during Lee's act, the odd reference to Richard Herring, which was appreciated by the audience (you can't fit a crowd into the Stand, so...gathering? Group? Audience will have to do...fans! That's it, appreciated by the fans), but a bit odd, I bet the Beatles didn't name check each other after they broke up.

It was a good show to see so that you didn't wonder if you missed something special. If you missed it, you didn't miss anything special, apart from the hate mail thing - honest to god, I laughed so hard my colon almost came up my nose.

Review - Secret Window, Secret Garden

It was all very fringe. The venue was up three flights of stairs in an building best described as of the Chauchescu era Romanian brutalist school, dimly lit, grimy, probably started falling apart before the paint was dry and that was thirty years ago. By the time I had hauled my somewhat fringe-fried body to the top of the stairs, I was sweating at the irony that attending a festival that involves so much rushing from venue to venue also involves chips and beer as the power diet of choice.

We took our seats and waited for curtain up. More accurately, We took our seats and waited for the play to begin. Rows of seats surrounded the stage on three sides and two of the actions were already in position. We were joined by three other audience members. I looked at my watch and was wondering if there was going to be a late rush when the play started.

Six cast members. Five audience members, it was all very fringe.

The play was actually very good. I had read and enjoyed the Stephen King story it's based on a few ears ago, and I knew there was a film adaptation so knew it must lend itself to dramatic adaption.

The stage adaption was good. I'm not sure whether the theatre company had done it themselves but condensed to an hour, it had plenty of mystery, thrills and a few twists.

Having read the short story I had that unspooling in my head at the same time as the play unfolded in front of me, and it was fun to play 'spot the difference' between print and drama. The only thing that disappointed me was that the adaption did not go far enough, the accents were British but the names were still as American as perfect teeth and illegal wars. It would have been good to see an attempt to Anglicise it a little, with the writer's cabin in the woods turned into a caravan maybe?

The cast were young and enthusiastic, they were a little inexperienced maybe but hey, they were playing to five people so well done for not just saying 'fuck with it' and going to the pub.

The one thing we agreed on when we left, after congratulating the cast, was that we couldn't understand why there weren't more people in the audience. Must be the climb up those stairs.

Postcard from Edinburgh - trams

One thing missing from Edinburgh this year was roadworks in the city centre. The tram lines are down, awaiting the trams. The tram is a source of considerable consternation among locals but, having ridden trams elsewhere, you know that they are going to love them when they eventually arrive. And you just know that on the media coverage of the first day's operation, they'll have some pensioner who rode the last tram to run and considers the new trams quieter, but not as good because you can't smoke on them.

Postcard from Edinburgh - geography

The morning after the night before sees the streets gleaming, not so much with dew but more a weak solution of bleach that most shopkeepers and bar owners use to clean their doorways and shopfronts of misplaced pizza. As we wandered down the Grassmarket to a shockingly early noon start for the play 'Tearoom', Edinburgh was just about getting ready for another festival day. Of particular infest was a group of Japanese tourists who were conforming to stereotype by crowding round a shop window madly photographingsomething. It turned out to be a hog roast shop and the object of their attention was the full pig, roasted and lying invitingly in the window of the bap shop. Obviously, such generous displays of meat are rarely seen in the far East, where the preference is for delicate sushi arranged like a lotus flower, rather than an entire porker between two slices of white bread.


I was able to walk past because I had loaded up at breakfast. A large breakfast is an essential element of the Fringe experience. Once you're out in the city you don't know when your next meal might be, but it's a better than even chance that it will be after you have had your next alcoholic drink and so breakfast is not just a chance to prepare for the day but also to line the stomach.


Staying at a hotel with a buffet breakfast, the choice was good. One could have juice or cereal, one could even go continental, with cheeses and slices of ham, such as foreigners eat. I however went for the 'five meat breakfast': bacon, square sausage, black pudding, haggis and more bacon, with all that fat and grease offset with a tomato (fried), potato scone, scrambled eggs and mushrooms. I figured that as I was exceeding the recommended number of alcohol units every day, I had better also exceed the recommended calorific intake, for a giant.

Once again, every few yards there was somebody trying to give you a flyer informing you about their show, seeking your attention and trying to convey that your being in their audience would make their day, your festival and everyone happy. I know somebody who is performing at the Fringe this year and he was telling me about the challenges of leafleting. Apparently it is well known among performers that the public don't want any more leaflets, and so leafleting is something of a thankless task normally assigned to those who fluff their lines in rehearsal. Moreover, if somebody does show an interest you then have to try and explain where the venue is. With venues in obscure locations like the sports lockers of private schools and so on, this can sometimes be a challenge. My acquaintance explained that he had identified a quick and easy way of conveying the location, which was just that little bit outside the very centre of the city, by explaining that it was in the 'pubic triangle'. Everybody knows where this is. Even I knew where it was without his having to explain it. There are a trio of pubs in the city, set at corners of a road that splits off in a Y shape, and the pubs all have strippers.

Review - BBC Comedy Presents - Early and late

Usually the best ticket in in the Fringe and this year was no exception. The late night comedy from the BBC is always a good show, often a great show. It starts late enough for the audience to be sufficiently 'relaxed' and, because most of the comedians have come here after their shows have finished and the venue is a large one, they are a combination of relaxed and terrified, pleased to be playing before an full venue that's probably far larger than the tiny empty place that they have just come from and possibly regretting that drink or line they took to settle their nerves. But that's okay because the audience have been drinking too.

Certainly the show I saw contained two comics who had taken a drink, one obviously, one not so much but both still very funny as they reeled out the highlight ten minutes from their set. The compare was sober, he has to be as he interacts with the audience and that can get interesting at this time of night.

Most of all though, it was tremendous fun, the compare was great, the acts were good and the star turn, Nina Conti, was outstanding; make no mistake, ventriloquist dummies are creepy, Nina embraced that, turned the creepy into funny, the funny into spooky, the spooky back into funnier and the funnier into disquiet bordering on dread. I haven't been that scared and amused at the same time since I was tickled at gunpoint.

This showcase tends to provide the acts that you tell your friends about when you get back from the Fringe and they ask you who you saw, because as cool as it is to tell them about the comedians they know from panel and stand up shows, it's cooler still to tell them about the comedians they'll be seeing in a few months time on panel and stand up shows.

This is still the best ticket in town.

Review - Ed Reardon: A writer's burden

A half hour radio show stretched out into an hour-long play. Twice the fun or the same among of fun stretched out over twice the time?

Probably somewhere in between, forty five minutes of fun stretched out over an hour.

It was excellent to see Ed in the flesh. More thrilling somehow to see a radio character doing a live show than seeing a television character appearing on the stage. The reality did not disappoint, Ed was everything one imagined, although the shorts were possibly a surprise.

The audience filled about a third of the large theatre, and was very radio four, lots of beards and sensible anoraks. It might have been better to go for a more intimate venue, as the show usually plays either in a room with a radio in it or a head with headphones in it. The show also suffered a little from recycling material from last year's fringe one-off, the success of which led to a longer run this time round.

But it was, ultimately, very satisfying, like a live action version of a spin off book from a radio or telly series that reveals hitherto unknown aspects of the character. There was also a truly outstanding line about Berkhamstead's transport links with London.

I have a great fondness for Ed Reardon on the radio, and like any fan get a little prickly when anyone takes liberties with the character, even if that character is the character himself. The show served up more of the same Ed and, if it felt a bit over-long that's probably because I expect the show to be half an hour followed by the news and then Front Row.

Review - Richard Herring: What is love anyway?

A full theatre and an interesting premise, that after doing a show last year about how god was made up, Richard tackled something else that was made up.

This was slick stuff, with lots of very funny stuff being linked by some thought provoking stuff, and a lot of stuff about angst and being single. There were even some very funny jokes in there, which was good for a comedy show, and one protracted routine about chocolate and mathematics that kept the audience on a sustained roll for a good ten minutes.

The show I attended included a member of the audience being taken ill and the attention of the audience slowly switching from the stage to events in aisle F. Richard struggled on but eventually had to concede that somebody was being helped from the theatre and decided to play the uncaring sod card by thanking them for their money. He managed to get the audience back but it was a bump.

And he mentioned Stewart Lee. Is this desperate? Like asking about your old girlfriend to a group of mutual friends? Because, you could tell, most of the people coming to see Richard were going to see Lee too, surely. It was as if he was hoping somebody might say 'oh, yea, Stew mentioned you in his set last night'. 'Did he, maybe he...maybe there's still...look, did he say if he was doing a double act with anything else at the moment?'. Cue much embarrassed looking into pint glasses until somebody says 'look, just let it go mate'.

He was funny, he was thought provoking, he had good hair and he made for a convincing fourtysomething confused by love. And I have used one of his jokes because it's easy to pass off as your own, but not the chocolate routine, partly because a ten minute monologue is not easily adapted to a pub environment but mostly because it involves a logical flaw at an early stage that a theatre crowd is too polite to correct at an early stage, but which a group of your friends would show no such reticence about.

Review - BBC Festival cafe

It's a live broadcast. You are part of the audience of a live broadcast. It's like the moment of being in the congregation at a wedding when the vicar asks if the is any just reason why these two people should not be wed, sustained for forty five minutes. The urge to shout 'knickers' grips you hugely and the first five minutes are an exercise in self control until you begin to enjoy yourself.

But you never forget that this is a radio show. Firstly, there is the reason why the license fee is so much, the BBC staff are everywhere, they have people in headphones bringing guests on, bringing guests off and standing about with clipboards, and this is just for a radio show! Janice Forsyth, the presenter, is smooth and sexy with one of those fabulous radio voices that should be used at times of crisis to just tell you everything is going to be okay, combining as it does authority and assurance, she makes the perfect ringmaster for an arts crowd magazine programme with over the top, and festival over the top at that, guests.

It's always interesting to see a show recorded, more interesting still when it's a slick BBC job and most interesting of all when it's a live broadcast, there's a real sense of anything can happen. Good guests, great host and unpredictable excitement, what more could one want from a festival show? A bloke in the audience in a leather kilt with two back pockets, one for a mobile and one for an iPod? It had that too!

The guests were Frisky and Mannish, who did their singing pop songs in the style of other sorts of songs act. A bloke who sang funny songs in an operatic voice, a writer and finally a chap who had won the 'so you think you can stand up' or whatever competition the night before, had had about two hours sleep and was doing an interview about overnight success before being returned to a life of obscurity that's probably going to culminate in a job managing an electrical goods warehouse and a fair to medium sized crystal meth habit.

The show was also enlivened with a spectacular thunderstorm and rain drumming on the roof of the temporary pavilion that was the venue.

It was interesting to see this actually take place before you, not simply tumble out of the speaker of the radio in your kitchen while you wrestle with the larger problems of the day, like whether to cook up some bacon that's two days past its best before date. It's like being in one of those adverts for radio where the host is actually sat at the kitchen table with you, although if you found Chris Moyles at your breakfast table your first impulse would be to hide the pies and find the cricket bat.

It did make me think though that his could be a daily treat if you were up there for a while, I think the only uniformity would be that it's consistently good.

Postcard from Edinburgh

In the beginning, there was the Pleasance. Ranged around a courtyard were venues and bars. Over the years the venues extended out and more bars sprang up. There were tables, and places to eat. It was like a little village. Then a few years ago E4 set up their Udderbelly pasture, with bars and so on. This year, the media villages were out in force, with the addition of a BBC media village and the Assembly at George Square.

The BBC are obviously fed up with paying rent to other theatres and have poached the Radio 1 roadshow outside broadcast gear, resprayed their big tent with fabreeze to get rid of the smell of roadie and teen to act as a venue, and set up on the corner of Pottersrow. The's a beer tent, toilets, and a little booth where you can be funny for thirty seconds. As it's sponsored by BBC3 it means that anyone achieving this is funnier for thirty seconds longer than any sitcom on BBC3.

The Assembly gardens was something else. On a rainy night there were actually people queuing to get in who didn't have tickets for the shows at the venues there. They simply wanted to drink in a muddy field heated only by patio heaters (meaning you are toasted one side and inviting hypothermia on the other). Possibly they had missed Glastonbury, or maybe the gloom makes it romantic, or easier to slip rohypnol into the glasses of unsuspecting women.

One thing is for sure, Edinburgh keeps going late into the night, early into the morning. When we were staggering back to the hotel at half past midnight we were weaving through people on a crowded pavement. Fair to say that most of those we were weaving our way through we're doing a fair amount of weaving themselves, but many others seemed to be taking on slices of pizza. Pizza seemed the midnight food of choice and it was very much not a last, desperate attempt to eat something solid and so avoid a mortifying hangover, but rather carb loading for the next round of revels. The demographic was wide too, because with the late show from the Tattoo emptying out at midnight, you had pensioners and partygoers wandering the pavements in search of pizza.

Busy as it was and crowded as the pavements were, it was all very good humoured. Possibly this was because in Edinburgh everyone is too preoccupied trying to get home or to the next venue and stay dry to start any trouble.

Country Life - National Map Centre

http://www.countrylife.co.uk/blogs/spectator

I shared Carla Carlisle’s shock when I learned, during a visit there last week to purchase an essential rain-proof street map of Edinburgh, that the National Map Centre was to close (Spectator, ‘Map-reading by heart’ August 24).

Every journey may begin with a single step, but prior to that the wise traveller would make a quick trip to the National Map Centre. It is here that one finds not just guide-books and globes and maps and memoirs, but a sense of adventure.

A good book shop is not stocked, it is curated. It is a pleasure to spend time there browsing and one frequently leaves not just with one’s intended purchase, but other discoveries as well. Such a store is the National Map Centre.

The National Map Centre sells not just OS maps, guides and travel writing, but huge wall-sized world maps, ideal for plotting foreign trips or world domination. These fascinate because many do not always place Great Britain in the centre of the map. The different projections of the world challenge traditional views and present a different way of looking at things. Yet this does not diminish our importance, a map is a way of finding your way home, and home is always the most important place in the world.

The National Map Centre is important also. The adventurers great and small that have started there must be countless. When it closes, the world will be a slightly darker, duller place, and that much harder to navigate.

Postcard from Malvern

Malvern is a charming spa town in the West Midlands. It's famous for its water, its hills and its Elgar. It is a delightful place, actually comprised of a number of villages strung out along the hills, each with their own distinct personality, Great Malvern is posh - that's where the theatre and lovely wee independent coffee shops that sell cake are, Malvern Link is more commercial - that's where you find shops that sell things that are useful, instead of just pretty or conversation-stimulatingly ugly, and Malvern Wells is home to the bohemian set - artists and musicians drawn to the area's beauty who can essentially be characterised as men with long hair and women wearing too much eyeliner.

Malvern is also home to Quenitic, or however the hell you spell is. It used to be RSRE, where lots of toys for the armed forces were made. Then it was privatised and renamed, presumably by some marketing consultant who managed the twin feat of annoying everyone who thinks that 'kinetic' should be spelled kay eye en ee tee eye cee and causing the sort of person who froths with indignation at the thought of somebody being paid ten grand to mis-spell a word reach for their green ink. Having said that, if the brief was 'come up with an anonymous word that doesn't advertise what we do', then bravo! What they do is an open secret in Malvern, and given away because not many West Midland engineering firms have the latest armoured vehicles parked up in the car park, waiting to be tricked out with lots of things designed to put a crimp in your day if you live in a cave and think that letting off an RPG at a squaddie is the action of a fearless freedom fighter. Thanks to the boffins at Malvern, people like that often hear a 'woosh' noise shortly before they are redistributed across no fewer than five post codes.

It also means that there are a lot of rich people in Malvern, because it turns out that lots of people all over the world have enemies they would like to relocate over the landscape, and consider that while an armoured vehicle is all very well, an armoured vehicle bristling with enough offensive weaponry to let you safely queue barge at Asda in the run up to Christmas is just the ticket.

I have a mate who, on a fine summer evening, would walk on the hills, find a comfortable, secluded spot to recline and smoke some weed. He swore to me that one evening he saw a UFO. This was at the height of the popularity of the X-Files and so I put his seeing lights in the sky down to an over-stimulated imagination and plenty of Moroccan black rather than an alien visitation. More likely still is that they were testing some sort of aircraft, although whether bothering hippies was part of the design brief, I'm not sure.

As a spa town, Malvern has a curious, if delightful, atmosphere. It's like a landlocked seaside resort. There is a theatre, lots of grand houses and excellent rail links to London, a relic of the days when folk from the capital came up to the town to take the waters as part of the 'cure'. Now, of course, London has its own spas, although the water is shipped into the capital from all over the world at great cost. In Malvern, the water gushes free from the springs in the hills. The locals pitch up and fill containers with spring water. To anyone used to paying for their expensive bottled water in the shops, this is something of a revelation, like chardonnay bubbling up from the ground in a spring in Surrey.

And yes, the free stuff does taste better.


One of the rather lovely shops in Great Malvern is the fabulous Austin & Co. (austinandco.co.uk). This small shop sells the sorts of greeting cards, jotters and note books that you won't find in high street chains. I spoke with the proprietor about note books and he explained that he had weaned two of his customers off of Moleskien notebooks to a superior German brand that, when written in with a fountain pen, did not allow the ink to leak through the paper. Make that three customers now weaned off of Moleskien. The hand written sign advertising the notebooks announced that they were a recent arrival in the UK and were 'a must for any stationary fetishist'. I do so hate to be pigeon-holed, so accurately.

The hills themselves have many moods, changing minute by minute as the light changes. They can be shrouded by mists, bathed in sunlight, festooned with walkers. They can be black or bright green, or occasionally orange, when they catch fire.

The hills, and the spectacular views of Worcestershire, Herefordshire and Gloucestershire that one has from them, means that the area attracts plenty of walkers. These come in all varieties but are universally underdressed if unaccompanied by a dog. There are backpackers, with maps, there are ramblers, with sticks, there are runners, with thighs of steel and there are those who see having to use a walking stick or a mobility scooter as no deterrent at all to strolling or rolling along the path to the peak to enjoy the view.

The locals love it to, throwing out the friendly greeting 'lovely view' got me the response 'aye, that's why we must protect it'. Whether the chap meant that a beautiful landscape looks better without a filthy great industrial development in the middle of it, or that his view would be better without the chatty bloke in an annoyingly bright anorak and his ridiculously happy dog tearing round in circles in it, I'm not sure.

As well as gentle paths and steep climbs, there are many places to stop and admire the view, with handy benches augmenting your ability to combine sitting and appreciating the view with the simple act of enjoying a refreshing cup of flask tea. Many of these benches have wee plaques explaining that they are in memory of this person or that person, who loved this view.


There's nothing quite like a practical memorial. My favourite is not a bench, hardly even a seat, but a sort of outdoor stool, perfectly positioned for the solitary contemplation of the Herefordshire countryside, a view of rolling countryside uninterrupted by large towns or shopping centres that most locals observe while giving silent thanks that they live in Worcestershire.

A Road England

Motorways have changed Britain, and not just by concreting over large portions of it. For instance, they allow yogurt to travel more miles than a comedian turned traveller can rack up filming an entire series of taking a quirky journey while taking a sideways look at the locals, they allow for family bickering to take place in a controlled enclosed environment for many hours and, of course, they provide an opportunity for the driver to look into the people-pods passing left and right and make judgements about the travellers within, based on how many windows are blacked out with holiday gear and children packed into the back of the family saloon, how loved-up the couple making their way to a mini-break look, or how that mini-break went based on how far away the passenger and driver are attempting to get away from one another while remaining in the same car on the journey home.

They also provide the opportunity to eat an entire packet of wine gums in one go and spend the next two hours wondering if its possible to sweat sugar. They have given rise to the motorway service station, somewhere to pee and eat warm sandwiches in the car park while wondering if the crab paste smells funny or if it’s just the diesel fumes making you a bit queasy. They do have their charms, such as service stations and the occasional decent view, but set against this you have a seemingly endless ribbon of tarmac, only decorated with the occasional tyre debris where stimulation is rare, if you are lucky you can play games such as ‘what the hell language is that on the back of that truck’ or ‘having been sat in a roadwork filter system for an hour, how angry am I that the roadworks appear to be unoccupied?’.

In-car distractions have developed. As well as radio, tape and CD, there are in-car DVD players, the only things more stimulated than drive-time DJs are lab monkeys with electrodes inserted into their thalamus and of course those knights of the road, the long haul truckers, have sex with prozzers in laybys to relieve the monotony. Sometimes they even close the curtains in the cab first.

Motorways have changed Britain. Before motorways we had main roads, now known as A roads. A-road Britain is a slower, more picturesque and, I think, kinder place that M-Way Britain. Motorways may be a great way to get from A to Z quickly, but the M can often stand for ‘misery’ and, what’s more, there’s a lot to be said for visiting B to Y on the way from A to Z.

Driving to Blenheim Palace I kept seeing signs to Evesham, very near my next destination, Malvern, and somewhere it takes another hour to reach by M-Way. I was rather wondering if the M40 takes a bloody huge loop out of the way, possibly there’s some sort of geographical rift allowing more or less instant access from London to the Cotswolds. Thinking that a fold in spacetime sounded more exciting than the M40, I decided to take the A road route.

And so, I rediscovered A road Britain. This is the way to travel, armed only with an AA book of the road from 1957 and a sense of adventure, one travels at a more human pace than one does on the motorway, and is not shut off from the world by culverts and landscaping. Instead, one passes through towns and villages, under the arms of sheltering trees. One follows road signs and tractors, not the instructions of the sat nav.

There is a lot to see. Oddly, although the journey is probably longer, it feels shorter. There’s a lot to do too, with time to study ones surrounding, you can play ‘name that road kill’. Seeing more flat fox than shredded lorry tyre adds to the rustic appeal of the journey.

And it has to be said, travelling through the Cotswolds is a pleasant way to spend the day. One makes one’s way through villages where each is progressively prettier than the last. Just when you thought that the last village, with its Cotswold stone houses, lovely pub, charming shops and good looking population was just the most charming place ever, you happen along the next village and realise that the one five miles back was, by comparison, a right shithole. All of the villages seemed to be thriving and I wanted to stop at book shops, knick-knacks shops and charming pubs.

One of the villages we went through was Chipping Norton and so, naturally, I was relishing the opportunity of bonneting one of the ‘set’ and doing the world a favour.

But, I pressed on because I was on a mission. The summer had ripened fruit to perfection and in the Vale of Evesham one fruit reigns supreme at this time of the year; the plum. I was looking for a roadside stall selling not so much PYO as PBL (Picked By Lithuanians). I didn’t see a stall but did spot a farm shop and screeched to a shuddering halt as I pulled in (apologies to the no-doubt surprised driver behind me and may I also take a moment to congratulate him on his lightening reactions. Congratulations too to the staff of the farm shop who were unruffled by my hasty entry to their car park, safe to say they have probably never seen a car come to a halt that quickly without it deploying a parachute out the rear).

The Wayside Farm Shop was something of a find. There was a selection of fruit and veg by the door (and yes, plums), but out the back was, basically, a delicatessen. It sold Teme Valley Brewery beer (rather lovely, they do a beer called ‘This’, a beer called ‘That’ and a beer called ‘Wotever next’. Seeing these bad boys lined up, one has to purchase the set. Verdict: oh yes! They also had cider on tap, bring your own bottle. Actually don’t bother with the bottle, they recommend that you bring along your empty plastic milk container and fill that up, as it holds more. Classy. There were cheeses, breads, cakes and, best of all, meringues the size of dinner plates hanging from the ceiling. One of these, a punnet of strawberries and a large pot of cream meant desert was sorted. Went in for a dozen plums, did sixty quid. Farms shops. Not threatening Lidl for market domination any time soon.

Travelling the motorway one arrives quickly but somewhat frazzled and smelling of stress and wine gums. Taking the A road, I arrived relaxed and happy with a box of (bloody expensive) fresh veg in the back of the car, not to mention the beer, which I’m drinking while I write this. Overall, there’s something to be said for taking the road less travelled.

Postcard from Oxford

Oxford has a reputation for being car-unfriendly. It’s not. It’s driver un-friendly. The city has adopted, in the city centre at least, a Dutch traffic model where they remove all of the street furniture and drop the kerbs so that the pavements and pedestrians are at the same level as the road and traffic, with no bars, railings or other rational safety features to protect people from cars, or cars from bloody tourists too intent on photographing and gawking to watch where they are bloody going.

The theory is that this makes the driver more cautious, slower and safer. In practice the result was a bloody terrifying experience, not just because after a day being buzzed by acrobatic aircraft and weaving round airshow entrance fee-dodgers lining the rural roads of Oxford I was a little wary of pedestrians, but because while there is no street furniture or kerbs in the centre of Oxford, what they do have is a plethora of the sort of road signs that you normally only see right in the back of the Highway Code, the ones you don’t even memorise for the test and you only ever expect to see again in a waggishly photoshopped picture with the caption ‘Evel Keneveal ahead’ attached to that one of a motorbike on top of a car.

These signs had circles, times, cars, busses, lorries and confusing arrows on them. I wasn’t worried about hitting a pedestrian, I was worried about driving into a sixty quid, three point street that I should not have entered between three thirty and the end of Michalmas term.


Once I had safely parked and stopped shaking, sweating and sobbing, a quick shower, some jazz and a decent meal, and a nap, and I was ready for a walk round Oxford. It is, without doubt, a beautiful city. I suppose this is one of the benefits of the colleges owning a lot of the land here, they can actually make more money from the fees from their foreign students, and operating a meth lab in the chemical tutorials, than they can from flogging the estate and relocating to Milton Keynes. What you have as a result is a series of fantastic buildings that rise tall on either side of the street, allowing plenty of room for intimidating architectural features and looming.


It was a night-time walk around the city, possibly the best way to avoid all the tourists. Two things were apparent, that there is enough money in the surrounding area to support the short of shops that sell cashmere shorts and that Oxford likes to hide their pubs up narrow alleys, with twists and turns in them. While elitism, obvious wealth and looking down on anyone without their own large haydron collider might me acceptable, the consumption of pork scratching and a decent brew apparently is not.


I wandered around soaking up the rich cultureal heritage of the city; Morse and Lewis.

Oxford has an odd high streeet. It’s from 2008. They have Oddbins, they have a Waterstones with a Costa in it (why never a Costa with a bookshelf sized bookshop in it to return the favour). I was expecting to see a Woolworths.

Stayed at the Old Bank Hotel. Great staff, great rooms, free wi fi and jazz floating up from the courtyard.

Airshow!

During the day at Blenheim, a nearby ‘fly to the past’ airshow provided much entertainment, with aeroplanes from different eras chasing each other around the sky with deafening roars or the dull burr of propeller depending on propulsion. It would have made Churchill proud to see the WWII RAF planes zooming around, and pleased him more if they had shot down a foreign Fokker or two.


It was quite something that an airshow with acrobatics went ahead at all, given that just the day before a Red arrow had died during a display. It put the daredevilry into perspective (and there was much looping the loop, ground level hedge hopping and releasing of streams of coloured smoke). If a member of a seemingly immortal elite institution can die, then how vulnerable must those guys in the biplanes be?


Almost as vulnerable as the people standing along the roadside, leaning over fences and hedges watching the display at ‘Fly to the past’ without paying the entrance fee (entitling you, presumably, to stand in a field on the right side of the hedge, a few yards closer to aeroplanes flying hundreds of feet above you and giving you the prospect of a good dousing with aviation fuel, exhaust fumes, coloured smoke or stray bits of flaming fuselage depending on how things went).

Beside a road during an air display is not a good place to stand, as even the best driver is likely to be somewhat distracted by a couple of aeroplanes undertaking a mock dogfight (and being excited by the alternative, that we’re at war with Germany again!), looping the loop and releasing coloured smoke (red, blue or even white – thrilling. Dense clouds of black smoke coming from a flickering orange and red aeroplane - not so good) as they swoop and turn, and so is more likely to have their eyes on the sky than the road.

Or maybe the spectators know about this risk, and are rally enthusiasts getting in some practice at standing perilously close to speeding cars driven by distracted drivers, so that when they come to watch the night stage in some Welsh forest, their reaction times for dodging an out-of-control Mini coming round a corner sideways spewing dirt, a tumbling Toyota or the bouncing wheel from a stricken motor will be honed to perfection.

Postcard from Blenheim Palace

Blenheim Palace is so posh that even the grass in the car park is posh. It’s been parked on, walked on and driven over and yet it still remains a comfortable and complete carpet of green, so unlike the municipal quagmires or off-roading challenges that normally typify parking at visitor attractions, leaving your car looking like you’ve just completed the Welsh mountain stage in a rally and your passengers stress-eating wine gums if you have them or chewing the magic tree air freshener if you don’t.


Blenheim is one of the self-proclaimed ‘Treasure Houses of England’. From what I can work out this is a collection of grand houses that are still owned by the families that built them a few centuries ago, a collection of posh people who have realised they can turn a profit by hanging on to the house and flogging ice cream and coffee to tourists, rather than those posh people who lurk in the private chambers of their houses now owned by the National Trust, silently seething with resentment as the tourists plod round their former pile. The Treasure House group have realise that if you brand something, people will regard it with the same kind of affection as they do English Heritage or the National Trust, and immediately start looking for the gift shop in search of lavender scented things.


The other way in which these places turn a profit is hosting events. This is why you see incongruities such as Hip Hop artists playing castles and stately homes. The event on the day we pitched up to check out the gift shop and attached stately home was a bike race. Or rather, bike races. There appeared to be several going on.

The first was a time trials for people in lycra with thighs about as thick as my torso. There were also amateur competitive races I think, because there were a lot of young couples in matching lycra wandering around, looking like they wanted to have a water fight with their Foska bottles and then collapse giggling into a hedge for some fit giggling nooky.

There was also a race sponsored by Brompton, the manufacturers of those bicycles that fold up quite small so as to fit on a train but not so small as to not be a bloody nuisance on a crowded commuter train. The people in this were racing on their Bromptions. It’s one thing to see some gent unfold his bike and whiz off down the platform to the office, quite another to see it being used like a proper bicycle. It was like watching something out of its element, like a bird elegant in flight waddling on land, or a middle class person in Asda. A Brompton is designed to weave in and out of traffic and be sworn at by cabbies, not whoosh down wide open avenues.

With all the races happening, I was rather hoping that they didn’t all meet at the crossroads and, if they did, there would be some sort of motorcycle display team riding going on as they pass one another at right angles, missing by inches, until the inevitable catastrophe, resulting in an almighty crash, the sort of bell ringing normally associated with a royal wedding, some groans and a single Brompton wheel rolling into the distance.


Blenhiem Palace itself is spectacular, no doubt about it. If you think the car park is well looked after then wait until you see the formal gardens. The house itself is stately home standard, lots of portraits look down from the walls wearing silk knickerbockers and enormous wigs. There is a portrait of the current lady of the house to keep things current, it certainly looks current – is it possible to botox a portrait?

There’s the usual heavy, dark furniture, the usual vast library of books in good condition (aristocrats prefer hunting, shooting, fishing and fleecing to reading) and surprisingly ugly pottery. In fairness there is also some rather beautiful pieces, Persian and Asian, that have been trusted to the public gaze. Best of all, for any boy or bloke, Blenhiem’s military connections means that there are more than your average amount of toy soldiers. Not just the lead soldiers that were played with for generations of the family, but cases where the British Modeller’s Association display some rather excellent dioramas. Made me nostalgic for the days when happiness was an Airfix kit, some glue, some paint, some thinners, an inadequately ventilated room and an out of body experience.


It’s also the birthplace of Churchill and had a museum with artefacts connected to him, principle among these being the letters that young Winston wrote home from boarding school and some paintings, as well as a rather curious collection of Hallmark cards that used his paintings.

Having been to Chartwell and now to Blenhiem, it’s clear that every place related to The Great Man jealously guards whatever treasures it might possess. I rather hope that out there somewhere there is a village with a preserved telephone box where he stopped off to make a call, converted into a very small museum containing a little tin of dropped cigar ash (viewing by appointment, post cards available in the gift shop).


As stately homes go, it was stately. It had manicured grounds that obviously took a couple of centuries to knock in to shape, less decking and more ‘let’s plant here and come back in fifty years’. It had a little train to transport delighted visitors from one part of the estate to another. Nothing delights quite like a little train. Finally, it had statues. Many many statues. Some sat on ledges, some hid in alcoves, some held things up and some perched atop pillars. They fulfilled the function of classical statues everywhere – bringing a touch of the splendour that was Rome to a corner of the Oxfordshire countryside, and sporting little willies so as not to make the big knobs feel inadequate.

Stella madness

Aspirational advertising is the linking of a product to a lifestyle, if you wear this watch, drive that car or drink this drink, you can have the lifestyle that goes with it, which usually, but not always, involves becoming attractive to women. Celebrity scents give you the opportunity to smell like successful actresses and singers, although ‘Pogue – the smell of Shane MacGowan’ remains a dream sadly unrealised after it was discovered that it would infringe several patents already held by Guinness.

Produce placement in films and television means that you can link your product not just with a celebrity but with a character. The most famous product placement is probably in the James Bond franchise. Car: Aston Martin. Gun: Walther PPK. Drink: Bollinger. Drive, shoot and booze like Bond and there is a chance you too can thwart the plans of somebody with their own lair.

Advertisers want you to aspire to their product (Apple computers have actually gone one better. Famous for arranging product placement in films, the company has become the first to arrange product placement in real life. That can be the only explanation for the sheer number of hip young people ostentatiously using their products in public places) but companies and advertisers aspire to have a certain demographic using their product, which is why celebrities don’t have to hire red carpet frocks.

The flip side is that some companies don’t like certain demographics using their product. This was true of Burberry a couple of years ago when the famous check was the favoured chav garb of choice. Actually, to be more accurate, it was the mass-market label ‘knock off Burberry’ that the chavs were sporting, so as the company were seeing their upmarket brand image tarnished and not even turning a profit from it, they were understandably miffed.

But recently there has been a breakthrough from the United States (where else?) where the cast of a popular reality teevee series have been offered money not to wear a particular label. Such is the concern that the brand in question – advertised in glossy magazines as glossy upmarket preppy casual clothing for successful (i.e. white) people – is in fact sported by uncouth youth that in a desperate attempt to get loads of free advertising, the rag merchants in question made a very widely reported cash offer for the cast of the show not to wear their gear.

This gulf between the brand as it exists in the heads of the company that owns it (and, let’s face it, unless you own and operate a ‘Poundland’ shop, you hope that your cliental are going to be upmarket) and the reality is ever present, and it’s no more pronounced than in alcohol advertising.

The advertising of alcohol is bound by strict rules, alcohol is not supposed to make you funnier, or better looking, or cooler or even a better dancer (which is ironic, because that’s exactly what six pints of anything makes you think you are, even though the reality is very, very different). So the advertisers have to try to convince you to buy alcohol avoiding the usual strategy of the product making women want to shag you and men want to be you (and possibly shag you too, it’s that good a product!) and definitely avoiding actual alcoholic scenarios (young mothers guzzling chardonnay at toddler’s birthday parties, men drinking in solitude late at night) they are left with making their product fun. Oh yea, fun!!! Women have good clean fun in girly groups. Men have blokish fun in blokey groups. Rage filled incoherent rants are infrequent.

But sooner or later, the advertisers are going to have to accept that the actuality has overtaken the aspiration. And a new drink might just be the product to do it. Because just when you thought that alcohol could not get any madder, with the Japanese winning awards for their whisky, and drinks companies advertising blue cider in an attempt to market the drinking of an alcoholic beverage in a primary colour to young men rather than the traditional consumer of primary coloured alcohol – women – or the traditional consumer of something that looks and tastes like anti-freeze – tramps, Stella Artois have brought out a cider.

Advertising: For years, Stella Artois have marketing their lager as ‘reassuringly expensive’. This is a lager beer for rich people, it’s aspirational. If you can afford to pay this much to get blotto, you’re drinking to relax, rather than blot out your existence.

Reality: Stella is a foul-tasting chemical soup of a lager, famously known as ‘wifebeater’. This may be because of the effect that alcohol has on the brain, removing inhibitions and bringing our true selves closer to the surface (which for most of us means tragic dancing), or it may be because closely resembles the chemical compound that Dr Jekyll used to knock back like sherry.

Now Stella have decided that mad lager is not enough and they want to bring out a new variant. They could try a low or even no alcoholic version, but when you remove the alcoholic content from Stella, you are basically left with something that won’t get you pissed but will shift stubborn stains. So they have decided to go with…cider.


God alone knows how you market that ‘Madder than a frothing dog’? However they go, it appears to already be hit with what surely must be the key Stella cider drinking demographic – the al fresco sipper. Because let’s be clear, Stella cider will never be the tipple of choice of the bright young thing in the cocktail bar, or the cider enthusiast drinking some locally produced concoction as cloudy as Jupiter.

Stella is not actually reassuringly expensive, it’s reassuringly strong and reassuringly frequently available on special at a supermarket making it marginally cheaper than bottled mineral water. Cider is the drink of bus-stops, park benches and round the back of shops in town centres. Combining these two qualities, Stella cider is the budget binge drink of choice for gentlemen who likes: drinking out of the wind, an unpretentious approach to inebriation, shouting at ghosts.

And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s tradition. Which is what brewing is all about.

A right Royal show

The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition is a fixture of the summer cultural calendar in London, a fixture of the cultural output of the BBC Arts Unit (if you can call a handful of commentators lolling on sofas in the courtyard of the RA and bickering about whether a particular piece is worthy of inclusion or even saving from the recycling ‘output’) and a fixture for the many amateur artists who send their efforts to the RA in the hope of having them included in the largest exhibition of public works anywhere. In essence, it’s not unlike an exhibition of the local art club’s works at a village fete, except it is lent credibility by being housed in a large building and anyone in a village art club can draw better than Tracey Emin (though credit where credit is due, her oversized post-it note with the provocative script on it bubbles up unbidden in my thoughts since seeing it).


Courtyard

This year was a very, very good show though. On previous years, the approach seemed to be to have as many works as possible crowding the walls of the galleries, effective tiling the place. I’m not sure if the curators love art, but they obviously hated white emulsion.


Raphael Revisited
Tom Phillips RA

It may be because I was late in seeing the show this year, in the final weeks in fact, but the gallery was less crowded and so, it appeared at least, were the walls. This was particularly true of the smallest gallery, where in previous years the crush of bodies resulted in the sort of close proximity and temperature that normally results in somebody bolting from the room to roll in the snow. What’s more, you could even see the art.


China Dog, 2010
Humphrey Ocean RA

On the whole, the standard was very good this year. The chaps had got the Pimm’s to lemonade ratio right and the champagne was chilled and not overpriced. As usual, the bar remained the best installation in the place and confirmed my suspicion that one should never see art sober. Certainly, most artists produce the stiff either pissed, stoned, out of their heads on thinners or a combination of all of the above and surely the best way to appreciate it is with a glass of something refreshing firmly clenched.


Four Vases, 1984
Lisa Milroy RA

As well as ‘professional’ artists being well represented, the RA affords and opportunity for members of the public to submit their works also. These are them casually glanced at by a collection of judges, most, but not all, wearing unnecessary scarves. The artist is then either sent a letter telling them they are crap (work didn’t get through first round of judging), they nearly made it (we need the entry fees from the continually hopeful and reckon that this letter is worth you entering for at least the next three years) or you’ve made it. The only thing that approaches this sort of middle-class uncertainty is the result of applying for planning permission for a new conservatory.


Abergwoun (Fishguard)
David Humphreys

While the exhibition seemed less hectic, more relaxed (certainly by my third Pimm’s it was), what it clearly evidenced was that there are, in sheds and garages, back rooms and spare rooms, an awful lot of genuinely talented artists out there who will never outrage the Daily Mail, maybe never get their own exhibition but have created something wonderful and, for one summer at least, had their work exhibited in one of the greatest galleries in the world and were glorious.

Said it all

Right, so what does THIS mean? A single white plastic bag thrust unfolded through the message pipes of the station. Send for Robert Langdon, we need to decipher this.

The white plastic bag is like a ghostly remnant of the original colourful semaphore collection of sweet wrappers. The most likely meaning is that some lazy sod could not be bothered to walk the ten yards to the station rubbish bin, but at least they were contentious enough to stash the bag rather than toss it to the breeze. Indeed, with stores charging people for carrier bags, there has been a reduction in the amount of plastic bag litter. Plastic bags used to be a regular a feature of the hedgerow as birdsong. While an appeal to the public’s environmental sensibilities didn’t halt the spread of plastic across the countryside, charging folk a penny a bag has caused outrage, the re-use of plastic bags and a whole new ‘bag for life’ industry. I own several bags for life, not because I believe in reincarnation but because I repeatedly forget to take my bag to the shops and have to pick up a new one.

So possibly what this is is just a handy way of always having a plastic bag to hand. By stashing plastic bags at various strategic locations throughout the village, one would never be far from a plastic bag if needed, and would not, presumably, have a cupboard full of bags for life.

Not a great advert for Windows

When I was a kid, I would watch science fiction programmes and films and think of how cool it would be in the future when we were surrounded by television screens, there would be television screen posters, even television screens on our telephones.

Now we have the technology and those things have been a reality for a few years, but unfortunately the content is crap.

Television posters are the worst example, just moving versions of the still image. There’s a limit to how much interest a woman tossing her glossy hair, on a loop, can sustain. Surely the most effective form of television mass market advertising would be some sort of fake public address about impending Armageddon. Possible drawbacks include little impact on repeat showings, and that while sex sells, the end of the world does not.

Probably better than this video poster though – reminding everyone seeing it that as an operating system, Windows is so crap it can’t even sustain a woman tossing her glossy hair. Might as well have slapped a ‘buy apple’ logo on the monitor and have done.

Hampton Court

The Hampton Court Flower Show is billed as the biggest flower show in Britain. Which probably means the biggest anywhere, because nobody is as keen on gardening as the English, with the possible exception of subsistence farmers out in the arse-end of some hard-to-pronounce country whose continued survival depends on a good rice crop. It's also visited by the biggest collection of gardeners in England, from those that tend an estate to those that tend a pot plant with a name in the one sunny corner of their flat.

A perfect bowl of fruit, luscious, ripe and gorgeous, at the Waitrose display. This is possibly the most middle-class image ever recorded. Warning - they get really funny if you pick any of these and, like repressive regimes who hunt down those who favour democracy, they can find you in a crowd because of your stained fingers.

The English love to garden. This is for a number of reasons.

First and foremost it is because a large garden means that your nearest neighbour is a respectable distance away, hopefully separated from your home with a high hedge or two, and a moat. Your moat. The one with the genetically modified crocosharks lolling in it.

The secret of success is to have unconventional, strange looking plants in very regular lines, like modern art, nobody feels equipped to criticise something that looks that odd. Do not turn to the lady next to you and ask if she likes things ten inches long with a purple tip. If you do, don't wink while doing it.

Even a small garden can provide privacy, if your hedge is high enough or your feature wall is topped with razor wire.

And the English love to grow things. Beautiful flowers and bountiful fruit. If the beautiful flowers can be entered into a local competition to win you glory, that's good. If your bountiful fruit can be grown a couple of inches longer than the others in a 'largest marrow' competition, bringing defeat to your bitter rival, better still. If anything you grow can be converted into alcohol, better yet. And if you grow something that looks phallic enough to cause the Vicar to flee should you place it before him should he call fund raising, or give the organist a funny turn when you plonk it on the altar at harvest festival, that's perfection.

Intimating to the grower that his plants look artificial will see you chased the length of the floral marquee with an enraged yokel three short steps behind you.

The English grow gardens of flowers because they like flowers. They grow gardens of vegetables because they taste great but even more importantly, they remind us of the war when we were digging for victory. Look carefully at any decent vegetable plot and you will see a little Anderson shelter in the corner.

It's all about trade at the end of the day. Yet grabbing a handful of the nearby display and asking 'how much' is very much not approved of.

While the English love to garden in seclusion (the garden is a place for solitude, be it quiet reflection, furtive smoking or, that perennial favourite, the midnight interment of a hastily murdered unwanted house guest) yet oddly relish the crowds at a flower show.

It's as if some critical mass or tipping point is reached of people who spend much of their lives with potting compost under their nails and they start enjoying each other's company. Of course, the principal reason for this is that there is a sufficient divergence of interests that every need is catered for. If the show were, say, a festival of parsnips, then the natural aggression of the parsnip grower would mean that things would turn as ugly as a phallic root vegetable pretty soon, resulting in the usual mayhem and a display for only for soup.

An olive tree, what could be lovelier? Well, an olive tree with lavender beneath. If Greece adopted this planting method, they could export sachets of scent to keep underwear draws fresh as well as providing the worlds favourite cooking lubricant, hence doubling their economic prosperity. And they'd still be f**ked!

But at Hampton Court the lovers of the succulents and those who favour box can pretend a polite interest in the passion of the other, secure in the knowledge that their way is the true path to happiness, and that path is lined with the bedding plants of their choice.

In a simpler age, when farms were farms owned by families rather than agro-industried owned by the banks, this is what tractors looked like. Built to a human scale rather than the grotesque balloon-tyred tractors on steroids with enclosed air-conditioned cabs, GPS and hot tubs that farmers have today, it's true that the driver would occasionally die of exposure, but at least you could bloody pass him on a B road, rather than trailing behind for miles with only the occasional splod of manure flung from the tractor tyre to your windscreen to relieve the monotony.

The show is a meritocracy. The show gardens, large and small as well as the displays of flowers and vegetables in the floral marquee are there to be judged and ranked. The judging panel choose carefully which garden deserves gold, silver gilt, silver or bronze medals, balancing a desire to fairly reward beauty and hard work with, it would appear, a genuine desire to pitch visitors into a state of incredulity as they wonder why the hell a rustic cottage in a pastoral garden got a silver while what appears to be a lawn with a rotary clothes line festooned with fairy lights got a gold.

Garden sculpture. Presumably for people who find this sort of thing amusing. If, in front of the leapfrogging frog (Oh, I just got it!) there was a small boy holding a blender to catch it, that would be funny.

Either this is a fantastic bit of planting, or they just let a plot go to seed last year.

This year, the garden as social space was very much the theme. The English love eating outdoors, it's almost perverse that a race dwelling on an island with a climate so ill suited to it could develop such an affection for dining al fresco, yet the English have turned picnicking from an art into a science.

This shade of blue is only achievable by dedicated growing. By master gardeners. Who did LOADS of acid.

The advances in windbreak technology alone are staggering and the same principles developed by the English to keep tea warm long enough to finish when sipping the stuff on a rain-scoured seafront will probably be incorporated into the space suits for any future Mars mission.

The ultimate fate of anything found in any English garden, up to and including badgers, is to be adapted for alcohol. the perss is useful because after you have pressed the apples you can use it to print the labels. And kill Terminators.

So it was natural to see many gardens planned around tables and chairs and social dining in the garden. It was also good to see some honesty, with one of the small garden featuring a huge flat screen telly on the wall and a seating area facing it. The idea was that this was the domestic version of open air cinema.

These ugly bulbs will one day turn out to be beautiful lilies. There's probably a metaphor here about not judging things in an immature state. But I'm just wondering what would happen if you fermented these bad boys and turned them into an alcoholic beverage. Given tat lillies stink like a combination of dead flesh and urine (No? Just me then) I would dub any such concoction 'Loopy Juice'.

Next year, I hope to see this taken to the next logical step; the telly showing premiership soccer and a solar powered fridge full of beer placed nearby. If the garden is well screened with high hedges, then after dark it can become the Babestation garden - not so much for the al fresco perving but because if the models that channel features are rough enough to stop my principle nocturnal activity dead in its tracks, then it can do the same for the crap-happy fox and cat population.

Honest. Unpretentious. The greatest threat to the French since Wellington, Nelson or the clap. A vine that grows on English soil and produces great grapes. The English already brew the greatest beers in the world and distill the greatest spirits (scotch and gin). It was only a matter of time before they tried wine and when they do, they'll conquer the world. Again.