Two wheels good

The men’s Olympic road race runs out from and then back to the centre of London but on Box Hill in Surrey it dos eight circuits of the Hill. This is the place to see the race.

Which is obviously what the thousands who lined the route thought. The crowd was divided into two broad camps, those who were there to get close to an Olympic event, and cycling fans. You could tell the cycling fans, they had come on their bikes, in lycra. Middle aged men should not wear lycra, no matter how sport appropriate it is, it’s not age-appropriate. The only way to make a middle aged bloke with a gut look worse than he would naked is to put him in a skin tight lycra tee shirt and shorts that are brightly coloured.

The event itself was breathtaking. Just as you have no appreciation of what a horse race is like until you have stood against the barriers and felt the ground tremble as the horses thunder home, so you have no idea of the speed and scale of a mass cycling road race until you’ve seen it up close, and it does get close, with cyclists passing inches from the tip of your nose and the wind from the rushing peleton rippling flags and banners as they sped past.

Encouragement came in cheers and applause for the riders, as well as good luck messages of encouragement scrawled on the tarmac. I’m not sure what they say about Britain in Iran, but when the Iranian cyclist, who was a little behind the pack on his own, goes home his image of the Great British Public will be loads of people clapping and bellowing ‘come on Iran!’. We may not like their nuclear programme, but we like a plucky cyclist.

Also starting to wonder if there is some sort of nickname index for how posh a sport is. Basically, if your name is shortened and ends in ‘…ers’, it’s a posh sport, like cricket (Tuffers). If it ends in ‘…o’, it’s a bit less posh, like cycling (Wiggo, Cavo). And if it ends in ‘..ker’, you play football.

Twittering on Facebook

Social networking, isn’t that just grunting ‘alrig?’ to one of your neighbours as you pass them on the street?

Apparently not. The internet has revolutionised the way in which we communicate (some features, such as ‘Chatroulette’ more than others). A decade or so ago for example, if you wanted to bore somebody into displaying narcoleptic-like symptoms with your holiday photographs you had to paste them into an album or, holy God and fuck preserve us, pitch up at their front door with a screen, a slide projector, two carousels of 35mm slides and a pointer. While if you wanted to share your random innermost thoughts with everyone, immediately, you dressed in a filthy raincoat, shit your pants, and shouted them to strangers on the street.

Happier, simpler, times.

Now, through the magic of the world wide whatever (which, don’t get me wrong, has given us much, like being able to book flights on-line and seeing Porn Of Many Lands) we can subtly bully people without ever having to leave our fetid pits.

This is because, thanks to Facebook changing their privacy settings faster than their users can click ‘don’t accept’, users can ‘let’ everyone see their photographs, including the many, many holiday photographs of the view from their hotel balcony of cats and construction sites, while twitter means that we can now share our bigoted views of, for instance, BBC coverage of a national event, or somebody featuring in a documentary about disabilities (‘She may have type 2 diabetes but she could still wash her hair’) and so on, immediately.

In an age when you bored your neighbours with your photographs, slipping in a nudie pic of your wife or cock shot every twenty snaps or so to see if they were paying attention and were possibly swingers too, you at least had to make an effort for your audience, practicing your patter such as the drunken argument that you and the missus had about whether or not she had enjoyed that dance with the waiter a little too much.

Twitter seems free of quality control. Reading tweets is like being cursed with telepathy and seeing into the mind of the nation. Randomly browsing, what seems to be ‘trending’, that is, being mentioned the most by the sort of fucking people who tweet, are the following subjects:

1. Biscuits (well, actually, I’m with them there, biscuits are not only important but make up around 30% of my waking thoughts, 70% of my subconscious ones).
2. Outrage about removing Blue Peter from BBC1. Again, have to agree with this. I know that since the digital switchover there is no reason not to relocate BP to CBBC, but by the same token there’s no reason not to relocate the Royal Family to fucking Salford, except that IT WOULD BE WRONG!
3. A celebrity. Unless any celebrity has been caught fucking a jar of marmite that they have warmed specially for the occasion, then anything they are doing is not worthy of comment. Commenting on new albums, hairstyles and celebrity relationships is what God invented forums and teenagers hanging around bus stops for.
4. What that bitch Alison said to Jason about me, yea? An odd one this but it appears a disagreement about romantic intentions in a comprehensive school in Rotherham is drawing worldwide comment.
5. Eastfuckingenders. I’d rather discuss Alison and Jason’s problems.
6. The Olympics. Trying to ignore it is like waking up on Alderan, seeing the Death Star in the sky and pulling the curtains in the hope it will go away.
7. Shredded Wheat. People love Shredded Wheat, or shredded wheat. I am as yet unable to determine if this is a reference to breakfast cereal or a depraved sexual practice. Likewise…
8. Kicking the back doors in. Thought this was a misquoted reference from ‘The Italian Job’. It’s not. Don’t Google this.
9. Trevor Eve.
10. Facebook privacy changes warnings.

While Twitter has been credited with helping organise democratic uprisings (‘Tanks on lawn. LOL’) it also appears to be the main communication method of despots (‘Just sweated through Levinson evidence session. :-0’). Not so much how users use the tool, but how the tools use it.

Drink! How much is too much?

Prior to my visit to Masham the best beer I ever tasted was a drink of IPA* in Napa, California, USA, which is west of Ireland. I have no idea what made me order a beer in the middle of wine country, possibly it was because I was sitting in a pub with a micro-brewery attached and thought that if they were as serious around here as they seemed to be about ladies’ drinks, then they might take blokes’ drinking just as seriously, more probably because I like beer and I am an optimist.

I like micro-breweries or, as they were known a few decades ago, breweries. It’s really not that long ago that pubs used to brew their own beer and certainly the idea of site specific booze is appealing when one begins to tire of breweries the size of refineries and with about as much soul. Surely brewing should be about a lot more than just combining chemicals and adding a sachet of flavouring at the end. I’m not expecting actual magic but some alchemy would be nice.

Where we seem to be is huge multi-national corporations throwing together beer the same way they might throw together fertilizer, with about the same result when it comes to taste. There are other brewing companies who are more interested in being property developers and screw over their tenant landlords so that they can sell the pub to become…what exactly? Not a bank, that’s for sure, which in a way is a shame because in most cases turning a chain pub into a bank would simply be a case of looking out the old sign and putting some safety glass up at the bar. Then there are smaller breweries that sell to local areas and massive supermarkets.

And it’s the supermarkets where the problem with booze lies, because next to the bottles with the labels by a local artist and the beer by a local artisan, sit crates of beer brewed in a megabrewery. Go into the drinks aisle at Tesco or Asda and it’s like that scene at the end of ‘Raiders of the lost ark’ but with cases of Carling and Strongbow instead of wooden crates, there’s so much of the stuff.

One buys it cheap and drinks it as one would consume any discounted product – quickly and with little respect. This is why the Scottish Parliament’s idea of minimum alcohol pricing is such an excellent idea. It impacts on the sort of person who likes to drink cheap, coloured cider so often that for them ‘bluetooth’ is a medical condition rather than an option on their Nokia, but doesn’t touch the committed drinker, because he’s already paying well over the odds to booze anyway on something that was made using traditional methods (usually outlawed in conventional food praparation and involving a sheep), hence all the health and safety warnings on the bottle.

Minimum alcohol pricing, we are told, will not impact on those drinking in any pubs that still remain open, nor on the social drinker who likes a bottle or two of red with their lunch. It is aimed to impact on the sort of chap who considers that the correct beverage to have with lunch, or actually instead of lunch, is a bottle of supermarket cider. Claims that this is a tax on the poor has been vigorously denied, although a sneak peek at next year’s budget revealing a tax on shell suit bottoms, tattoos and saying the word ‘fuck’ on public transport do all point to a strategy of social engineering.

The correct, though unlikely, response to a minimum alcholoh tax is a micro-brewery movement producing not artisan beers, but artisan discount cider. One can imagine that around the country, illicit micro-breweries will be churning out ‘tru-blu’ artisan sippin’ cider and carpet cleaner.

* Not a pint, some sort of 330cl measure. Shocking, I know the colonials overthrew the yoke of British oppression but, really, they could have kept the pint as the standard measure of all that is right and just and true and godly. Honestly, without the pint measure, how do you know how hungover to feel the next day?

The joy of sets

A few years ago, 6th November 2006 to be precise, as recorded here:

http://gentlemanandplayer.blogspot.co.uk/2006_11_01_archive.html

I saw a woman buying a ‘Sex and the City’ box set. I recall that she was out shopping with her mother and that she looked excited at the prospect of going home and binging on Carrie & Co. I made the confident prediction that in a few years we wouldn’t be buying box sets. Well, the amount of the bloody things on display on the shelves of HMV would seem to indicate that I am crap at predictions, but at least I didn’t predict that she would remain a Sex and the City fan until the end of time, as I strongly suspect that for most Sex and the City fans, appreciation ended at the closing credits of the second movie.

While you can buy whole series of TV on iTunes, you can still buy a bewildering amount of stuff in box set form these days, not just television series, but sporting events. You can get the Ashes, or the Formula 1 season on DVD. Now, I like having boring sports on in the background as much as any bloke, but I draw the line at springing thirty quid, cancelling all engagements and settling down to watch an entire season of curling or something.

Sporting DVDs are, if I may be permitted a sexist generalisation, for men. Not aimed at men, for men, there’s a difference. Computer games are aimed at men but women play them too, but there are two things that no self respecting woman would ever purchase, a DVD box set of a sporting event, and a Jeremy Clarkson book. The male market is why there are DVD box sets ‘special editions’. Same product, on sale two months after initial release, but in a tin! Must have!

Binging on box sets is such glorious luxury. If you can ignore the ironing and the way your carpet is starting to crunch underfoot, then you have the moral fortitude to shirk the housework and spend Sundays on the sofa with the curtains tightly drawn, eating wotsits and viewing an entire series of your new favourite programme in one go, and, given the trends in box sets that are selling at the moment, learning a new language, probably Swedish, Dutch or Icelandic, probably the vocabulary that would allow you to converse more easily with a pathologist than a children’s entertainer. You hope.

Of course women buy box sets too, and not just as presents for men. In particular women buy ‘Downton Abbey’ box sets. Male fans can be seen hanging around the doorway of HMV, offering women money and asking if they will buy them a box set of Downton on their behalf.

And of course while spunking thirty quid on a box set is tremendous fun, there are on line alternatives. iPlayer catch-up is a glorious use of a Sunday. One can seek out charming and marvellous programmes that lurk on BBC2, 3 and 4 and end the evening a more educated and erudite person than you entered it, it’s like the science of the ‘Eastenders’ omnibus, but used for good.

Particularly worth watching at the moment is ‘Great British Rail Journeys’ with Michael Portillo, a man who has reinvented himself more thoroughly than Dr Jekell ever did. Before Beeching butchery, he would, like the Olympic flame, have travelled within 97% of the population of Great Britain. Now, he is confined to travelling on charming, picturesque stretches of line through beautiful countryside, occasionally stopping off to visit cheese makers or glass blowers and the like.

Unlike most rail journeys, one simply doesn’t want this to end. Possibly there are another couple of series in it before they are forced to move to ‘Mediocre British Rail Journeys’ and then ‘Shite British rail Journeys’ which will at least have that glorious television moment when many viewers recognise their own carriage or stretch of commute.

A binge on this series is like a holiday from home and that, together with our intolerance of having to wait a week for the next episode, means box sets are here to stay. (Disclaimer – that might be total bollocks).

BBC Volcano Live

The BBC do event television very well. Timeslip television has been with us for decades now, with video recorders giving us dominion over when we watch our programmes, a process that has become acute as bigger and better set top boxes give us more or less a free choice of when we watch telly from the last week, the next innovation probably being a premium rate service to watch telly from the future.

Timeslip telly put paid, for a while, to everyone watching the same flickering from the idiot lantern at the same time on the same night and then discussing it in the workplace, playground or prison exercise yard the next morning. Now, if you want to make sure that everyone is sitting comfortably at 8:00 on a weeknight you have to create event television.

This is done in a couple of ways. The simplest is to have each episode of your programme include a plot development so important that people will not be able to resist blurting it out the next day in the presence of somebody standing with their hands over their ears, singing the ‘nar nar nar’ song and wearing a badge reading ‘Don’t tell me who Lord Sugar fired’. This applies to sporting fixtures as well, and indeed formed the plot of an episode of ‘The likely lads’.

The second way to produce event television is to make it interactive. ITV do this by making troubled souls caper for your entertainment and charging you to vote to keep people in a talent show or be sent home with, presumably, the consolation hamper of a bottle of vodka and a handful of pills. You feel you can determine the outcome of the show by watching live and voting, although recent newspaper reports on vote rigging revealed that the only way you could actually influence the show would be to dive bomb the studio in a 747 loaded with flaming horse shit.

The BBC route to event television is the simple formula of live television with a large element of unpredictability and interaction via e fail and Twatter. Previously they have done this with Springwatch Live, where the unpredictable element was bashful badgers, and Starwatch Live where the unpredictable element was the British weather.

This week they went for seismic event television with Volcano Live. Guess what was unpredictable? This featured Kate Humble in trademark fleece and some Scottish bloke in a variety of checked shirts broadcasting from the lip of a live volcano in Hawaii, trying not to display their shit eating grins that conveyed to a shivering nation back home that they had seen the forecast for England, were broadcasting this at seven in the morning their time, and were about to spend the rest of the day on the beach.

The programme, over four weeknights on BBC2, was actually very good. As well as live reports from Hawaii there were film reports of geologists travelling to some truly remote and exotic places, visiting areas covered in ash, lava or rebel fighters. There were also reports from Ed Byrne in the lab, which showed lots of interesting experiments to explain the science but also demonstrated that if you bulk buy groceries that if mixed together in the right quantities can go boom, yet wear a white coat, this lends respectability and prevents you going on some sort of watch list at Tesco.

There was also a clear choice made not to try and make science fun. Instead, they made it bloody terrifying. Volcanoes are mountains that explode, then fall on you, on fire. Top that!

The other point of note, among the stunning footage, the always fabulous films of experts enthusiastic about their subjects and the slightly uneasy feeling one gets when confronted with the raw power of nature, is that some thirty years after ‘Magnum PI’ ended, all the men interviewed on Hawaii had moustaches.

An Englishman's garden

The English have a particular relationship with their garden that perhaps nobody else in the world shares apart from the Arabs. In a desert climate, greenery and water are signs of luxury. Sharing your garden is, in an inhospitable climate, a sign of hospitality. How wonderful to spend the day underneath a tree, shaded from the sun, listening to water flow while pondering if one was sitting on vast reserves of oil.

So too, for the Englishman, the garden is intrinsic to his ideas about hospitality, and water is at the centre of all he does. This is not a trait shared by the Scots, who mainly cultivate heathers of different colours and creatures that can graze heather which can then be deep fried. Nor the Welsh, who due to their climate are expert at growing two types of flora: those that look good when shaped by a prevailing wind and so are better at growing horizontally rather than vertically, and mould.

In the late nineties and early part of this century, a conspiracy between the BBC and those that owned 90% of the world’s supply of decking introduced the garden makeover programme and with it the idea that your garden could be just like another room in your house. For the English, a race particularly fond of getting as far away from members of their immediate family as possible, this seemed like a great idea, even if it essentially meant decking a two foot square at the top of the garden and retiring up there with a chair and some beer.

It was odd that this love of gardening ever needed reintroducing. The English have always loved to tame nature, especially if they show off by ripping up the landscape and then replanting it to look ‘natural’. Or just show off, with naughty topiary, or knot gardens (presumably beloved of Elizabethan sailors). In terms of hospitality and gardens, nobody does it better than the English, by adopting the practice of digging a bloody huge trench in your garden and filling it with water. It is an accepted convention that an Englishman’s home is his castle, and if that means a moat to deter double glazing salesmen and boiling oil for carollers, then what could be more English?

While the majority of houses are today tragically un-moated, it’s also true that the majority of houses with gardens are inhabited by those whose attitude towards hospitality is ‘come safely to my place of rest and eat a burger that will, in four hours, make you just shit your kidneys’. The barbeque, very much an outdoor event, allows the Englishman to combine beer and naked flame, two things for which he has both a fascination for, and no control over. Cowslip, new mown grass, petrichor – these are all the smells of an English summer but are any of them as representative as the smell of lighter fluid and charcoal as the inpatient chef commences combustion on another marinated masterpiece?

While fire may be the measure of the hospitality of the English host, water is at the centre of the world of any English gardener. The interesting thing about a water butt is that it is absolutely no bloody use at all when it is full, because filling it requires the heavens to open. And after a few days of dry weather, it’s empty, unless one is the sort of gardener who is able to make Sophie’s choice about which of your thirsty plants are going to get a drink today.

The reason that the English react so badly to hosepipe bans is not because they like to wash their cars themselves. In this age of metered water it is now actually cheaper to go to a municipal car park where half of the bloody spaces have been taken over by some blokes with a shitload of fairy liquid and a jet wash and have them do it for you, but rather because they genuinely cannot fathom why, when rain seems to fall, for free, out of the sky every single fucking day, water companies can’t hold on to some. Have these incompetent arseholes tried putting out some buckets? No? Why not?

Come on Tim!

There is an argument that the best way to enjoy any sport is to watch it on telly, especially if the coverage is on the BBC and so uninterrupted by adverts featuring models from the ‘ordinary looking people’ books of model agencies, i.e. ugly kids enthusing about chips. The best way to watch Wimbledon, I have always considered, is to pack a picnic, place the telly at the end of the bed and watch from beneath the comfort of a duvet, occasionally shaking the covers to remove pork pie crumbs. Tennis being a sport so dull that it’s best to watch it in conditions safe to doze off in.

Unless, that is, you are lucky enough to get tickets. This means that not only do you have the impetus to actually attend (f**king how much for a ticket?) but you don’t have to queue, the queue for tickets famously being like the ones normally associated with an Asda check out the week before Christmas, or outside a polling booth at a newly democratic country’s first free elections since the General was shot.

And Wimbledon is an experience. Forget the tennis, that’s the least of it. What you have is a sprawling complex, like a Village, which is clean and tidy and full of happy and courteous people. The person I went with described it as being ‘like an enormous Waitrose’ but I’d go even further and describe it as a place where the normal rules of Englishness are suspended, in that people speak to one another.

Moreover, in a world-turned-upside-down way, the ground staff are incredibly helpful. Not just polite, helpful. If they see a couple doing that thing where they squeeze together and the bloke holds the camera out, wishing he had the reach of a gibbon so he could get some more background in, a member of staff will offer to take the photograph and will not even attempt to run off with the camera. Can’t see the staff on my local railway doing that.

The Village is comprised of tennis courts and snack shacks and picnicking areas, and people wander from one to the other, gazing and grazing. My first impression was somewhat influenced by being hit by a tennis ball (on the elbow, where else) two minutes after stepping into the place, and I barely had time to consider whether it was worth recovering the thing as evidence to use to sue whoever the tosser was that couldn’t keep his serve inside a court, swiftly working out that anyone that crap at tennis would not be worth suing, even if they were playing at Wimbledon, when some blazered official swooped and ran off with it. I later learned that they sell the used tennis balls. I have yet to determine whether this is to legitimate tennis fans, or pandering to some hitherto undiscovered extreme form of fetishism.

Centre court itself is like a crucible. Sitting high and looking down, it resembled a cross between the Emirates Stadium, a boxing ring and a church. Make no mistake, this is the site of fierce sporting competition played out in a theatre the design of which has remained largely unchanged since the days of the gladiators, but the crowd here at least hush when somebody serves. And there are less lions.

Was there ever such a game? Even cricket doesn’t come with this much ritual, personnel and obscure rules and scoring attached to it. There is an umpire sitting in some sort of pulpit, there are line judges, there are ball boys and ball girls and looking over it all is the all-seeing ‘hawk-eye’. Oh, and a couple of players.

In this case, Victoria Azarenka and Serena Williams. Every time she exerted herself, Miss Azarenka made a noise like some sort of whooping bird, of the type that you would not wish to have nesting outside your bedroom window. She let out a whoop like a spooked mule and the crowd really did seem to enjoy it. She lost to Miss Williams, who looks like she was put together from off-cuts from Arnold Schwarzenegger and who merely grunted whenever she thrashed the ball.

As these two battled it out on the balding lawn of centre court, there were other distractions for the crowd. Sir Cliff Richard was in the royal box, tanned to the point of mahogany and proof that after a certain point cosmetic surgery can leave you looking like a cadaverous bull’s testicle, wearing the dodgiest syrup seen outside a puppet theatre.

As polite and relaxed (glasses and bottles chinked, cans hissed as they were opened) as the crowd were, a scene unfolded in front of us that resembled a Bateman cartoon that may well have been titled ‘The woman who took a mobile ‘phone call on Centre Court’. Never has a child so mastered the art of pretending not to be with the mother sitting right next to them as the boy in front of me did.

The English love an underdog and Tennis provides something of a tricky challenge for them as the upper hand in the game can go first one way and then the other. There were chants of ‘Come on Serena’, then ‘Come on Victoria’, then the occasionally drunken attempt at intimacy with ‘Come on Vicky’ and finally the crowd wag with ‘Come on Andy’. I resisted the temptation to bellow ‘Come on Tim!’ as being bottled to death by tennis fans as a result seemed a real possibility.

Everyone was turned out immaculately, the players even exhibiting style with two balls tucked into their pants. The Ralph Lauren styling however, makes the line judges look like sinister extras from The Great Gatsby.

More than the tennis, the day is about the experience. If it was all about the sport, the courts would be packed and the bars deserted. This was certainly not the case. But panama hats off to the All England Lawn Tennis Club, one is allowed to take in a picnic, including a ‘reasonable’ amount of booze, which was quantified this year as a bottle of wine per person. Notice that they did not mention spirits and in the spirit of making the most of the day by drinking heavily at lunchtime, I managed a half bot of champagne (Christ, I sound like Bertie Wooster), followed at various intervals by cans of ready-mixed gin and tonic or Pimms and lemonade. It made the whole thing very watchable.

But I don’t want to give the impression I put together an irresponsible picnic, I also packed several pork pies.