What the hell...is 'water cooler television'?

Micro docs (not, as the phrase might imply, a reference to the number of health care professionals likely to be left working in the NHS after Capita get a hold of the health service, nor dwarf GPs, but an entirely new concept in educating the attentionally spanned impoverished and the subject of last Saturday’s blog post) are, possibly, a breakthrough in water-cooler friendly television. 
Whatever that is.
Ten minutes on the internet turns up LOADS of porn, but also that ‘water cooler television is an outdated cultural reference to television that people talk about when they gather around the water cooler, rather than television featuring water coolers nor television programming for water coolers.  Although, if you want the sort of people who spend a lot of time hanging around the water cooler discussing your programming, then lots of programmes about water coolers, including a soap set in the room or corner of the office where the water cooler is located, is not a bad idea and, for those who are really frequent visitors to the water cooler, a sister channel about toilets.
Thinking about it for a couple of seconds, which is a couple of seconds too long, who the fuck wants water cooler loiterers talking about their programmes anyway?  If your aspiration is to have your body of work watched and then criticised by the sort of people who use hydration as an excuse to hang around a large bottle of H2O in the hope the pretty girl on work experience has to come by to change the paper in the bottom draw of the nearby photocopier (because you arrived early to empty the tray to engineer such a visit), then aim higher. 
What does success look like? 
It looks like a BAFTA award.
But also, well, on a commercial channel it looks like people watching your programme, then talking about it down the pub, then coming home drunk and instead of playing on-line poker until they have to put their kidneys on eBay to cover their debts going on line with a credit card and purchasing whatever crap was advertised during the commercial breaks in your programme.  In other words, 50 Malibu Barbie’s arriving at the home of a man with no idea why the fuck he ordered them, delivered by a man who is already thinking ‘peado’. 
On the BBC, success looks like people watching your programme, then talking about it down the pub, then coming home drunk and instead of playing on-line poker until they have to put their kidneys on eBay to cover their debts going on line with a credit card and purchasing the same jacket your lead character was wearing in a crucial scene after visiting the sort of web site that gives that sort of information.  In other words, a North Face parka arriving at the home of a man with no idea why the fuck he ordered it, in July, but, as it’s a North face parka, is really pleased and practically has to wrestle it away from delivery guy.
Fuck the water cooler tribe, they don’t even pay for their drink, we want the pub people.
So, what do people talk about down the pub.  Teevee obviously and, because the pub is the parliament of the people and hence a place where you want to always appear smarter than everyone else, you talk about the documentary you saw last night on some diverting subject, rather than the afternoon you spent watching back-to-back Ballamorys in your pants working your way through a Pot Noodle three for the price of two pack you bought on a whim that was supposed to last you a month.
Hence the need for micro docs.  You can’t get cooler telly.

Micro Docs

Documentaries.  Here’s the thing…who’s got an hour to invest in a, no doubt worthy, show about Jupiter’s moons, French caves or weird foreign shit when all you really need is the bit that makes you almost summon your wife from doing the washing-up to ‘see this shit!’?
And let’s be clear about what constitutes a documentary.  A programme about nature, the planet, other planets, how hard life was back when things were black and white and anything to do with caves are fine.  War documentaries are OK, but only if the subject of that documentary is anything other than Hitler Was Bad.  Any series featuring a profession and a recurring character is not. a.  fucking.  documentary.
In short, you want to 1: Reveal astonishing fact about bees/Jupiter/Clouds.  2: Have somebody snort ‘No fucking way’ when you tell them about it down the pub.  3: state ‘it’s true’.  Follow up fact, slam dunk and mine’s a pint of Large and a packet of pork scratching please Neville.
The thing about documentary makers is that they spend a looooooooooong time, and suffer quite a bit of discomfort, making their programme.  If it’s a nature documentary, it’s all about sitting freezing your ass off on a remote hillside trying to get a picture of an animal that, let’s face it, probably doesn’t even taste good so why is it so rare anyway? before trekking seventeen hours to the nearest village with an internet café, firing up something with a Pentium 486 and finding out, through a heavily censored Facebook, that your girlfriend has updated her status not to ‘single’ which you were worried about during this period of separation, but ‘married’, to a bloke that looks a lot like your brother.  Then, once you have your hundreds of hours of footage, you have to sit alone in a dark room for weeks in order to edit it down to a manageable 60 minutes, which these days includes ten minutes of ‘how we made this’.  By the way, that shot of you having a breakdown in that internet café in Nepal…BAFTA love shit like that.
The solution; micro-docs.  If John Lewis can, as they did last Christmas, essentially put together an advert that in 30 seconds had the same emotional effect on the weak-minded as other seasonal animated offerings (Snowman and Snowdog excepted, they are still the supreme Christmas offerings.  As is the ‘Doctor Who’ episode ‘The Christmas Bride’.  Or any of the Robert Powell M.R. James ghost stories for Christmas), then all the relevant information, or, at least, enough for you to wing it in the pub, can surely be achieved in a 45 second long documentary.  Plus 15 seconds of how we made it.
Example.  Volcanoes.  Everybody knows volcano basics.  If they don’t, what in the name of a green fuck are you doing talking to somebody who is so culturally impoverished that they have not seen ‘Dante’s Peak’.  So, in 45 seconds, the documentary would explain the pyroclastic flow.  The 15 seconds ‘how we made this’ would be the film crew, in a Land Rover, going 80 mph (improbable for a Land Rover I know but it’s downhill with a superheated cloud of death also propelling the vehicle) screaming ‘Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiittttttttttttttttttttttt!’ apart from one guy at the back who is so terrified he is simply sobbing.  Nor THAT I’d watch.
And the great thing is, you can have loads of micro-documentaries about an over-arching subject.  Vents, and people who live near FUCKING VOLCANOES are just two subjects I’d like to see covered in 45 seconds, the first because hey, geology is always fascinating, and because it would have to feature the public and 45 seconds is not long enough for anyone to become a ‘break out star’.
Of course, you have to be a bit sensitive, and avoid the trinity of subjects that should never be ‘taken lightly’, Yewtree, Titanic, Hitler.  Oddly enough, FGM is the perfect fit for a micro doc as not only is 45 seconds the upper limits of the ‘oh Christ turn over!’ threshold on that subject, but if you haven’t got the message about FGM in 45 seconds, maybe somebody should be making a documentary about you.

The obvious joys of Radio 5

The controller of Radio 5 was grilled recently on Radio 5 and defended his station against accusations that it was ‘Radio bloke’ by pointing out that it has a lot of female presenters.  It certainly does, and very pretty they sound too.  The genius of Radio 5 is threefold.  Firstly, where a Radio 4 interview with a politician may last two minutes, on radio 5 they have nothing but time, and so interviews turn into conversations.  It’s fantastic to hear people whose media training means they have developed the skills to put their point in ninety seconds have to discuss matters in depth and, in truth, one gets the sense they actually enjoy it.  Secondly, as mentioned in a previous blog, it keeps middle-aged men off the streets, in this case the sheepskin-swaddled commentators that sit in media boxes at football grounds around the country, reporting into the mother ship back at Broadcasting House.  And of course, thirdly, still with middle aged me, gives purpose to those that call in to share their thoughts with their presenters and, quite incidentally, with the nation.  One thing I have noticed is that Radio 5 sports presenters treat their listeners with respect, and if you mention that you’re a season ticket holder, you can espouse whatever view you want, no matter how unconventional, no matter what subject.
What radio 5 has done is build a community.  If Radio 5 were a village, it would probably be the sort you only stop in long enough to realise you should be getting along, but for the people that live there, they wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.
And it’s worth mentioning that Radio 5 Extra is, of course, the home of Test Match Special.  Not for nothing was the original inscription above the door of Broadcasting House intended to be ‘Nation shall speak cricket commentary and remark about cake unto nation’ before somebody realised that wouldn’t fit and that cricket commentary and cake can be summarised simply as ‘peace’.
I am increasingly drawn to Radio 5.  I even occasionally listen to shows about soccer, a sport I know nothing, and care even less, about.  But it’s lovely to hear the presenters and the fans get excited about it, and heartwarming when some poor sod whose team has just had a six nothing thrashing starts by congratulating the opposing team before going on to describe how his team’s manager really does need to be beheaded, ‘Game of Thrones’ stylee, on the centre spot at the start of the next home game.

The Book Barge

Gentleman & Player loves bookshops, and second hand bookshops in particular.  G&P also loves canal boats.  So, you can imagine the suffusion of joy that inhabited every fibre of G&P’s being when on the BBC web-site there was a wee four minute documentary about ‘The Book Barge’, a second hand bookshop…on a canal boat.

That’s right, for those of you who find the environment of a traditional second hand bookshop just too stressful, there is a place where you can browse for literary bargains in the relaxing environment of the riverbank or canal.
The documentary reveals that the people who visit the Book Barge often end up paying for their book by offering the owner a bed for the night or a meal or both.  I think the hosts get the better of that deal, as they not only get a slightly-foxed copy of ‘Rural Rides’ but get to tell all their friends for the next three years about the night they gave a ‘stranger’ hospitality. 
Owning a second-hand bookshop is, as has been remarked upon before here, an indication of eccentricity, as it tends to lead to carpet slippers being considered business attire and opening hours being from ‘when I feel like it’ to ‘when I feel hungry/thirsty/sleepy’.  However, putting eccentricity on a barge makes it adorable, and so socially acceptable.
The only way in which the story of a second-hand bookshop being based on a barge could possibly be improved is if the owner also solved literary-themed crimes.  Maybe Sunday evenings?  I smell format!  Somebody get me ITV3 and tell them I have their first original afternoon drama series ready.  They can get that river-cruise company to sponsor it.
It also makes one wonder what other business models can be adapted to the barge model.  Pub is the obvious one, and how wonderful if it could be the riverbank that was tethered to the pub on the boat, rather than the more traditional arrangement.  It could be like one of those dreadful ‘party boats’, but with a fine selection of real ales and, best of all, no room for morris dancers.
The proprietor (can we say ‘skipper’, I think we can) of the Book Barge acknowledges that she does not shelve her books by subject.  This is an approach to stocking the shelves of a second hand bookshop that G&P heartily endorses.  G&P holds the view that a good bookshop is not stocked, it is curated, and taking this further would like to propose that while stocking by subject in a sort of half-arse Dewey-decimal system may be appropriate for a behemoth like The Book Barn (indicating a corporate warehouse-sized discount bookshop that occupies three postcodes, rather than a bookshop in a barn, possibly also occupied by horses, pigs, and other animals with a literary connection, which is an excellent idea), true second hand bookshops adopt the serendipity method. 
The curation method is to place books in proximity that, although not of the same subject, complement one another so that in choosing one book and looking the regulation six inches to the left and right of the now empty space on the shelf to see if there is anything else of interest, the browser will see a book on an entirely different subject that will be of interest.  For instance, any ‘Star Trek’ or ‘Doctor Who’ novel would be shelved in proximity to ‘Cooking for One’, and any book about Hitler would be shelved next to, well, frankly, more books about Hitler – one thing you soon realise about people who read books about Hitler, they rarely have just one book about Hitler.
The serendipity method is curation by instinct rather than design.  People need to know about the hidden meanings in pub signs, and they also need to know about the Opium Wars, they just don’t know they need to know it.  But one visit to a serendipitously stocked bookshop, and they leave on the path to enlightenment, and probably also with a novel by Jilly Cooper.
One question though.  The proprietor has written a book about her experiences; ‘The Bookshop that Floated Away’, but it’s a new book.  So can she sell it?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-27065292
http://thebookbarge.co.uk/

The mysterious joy of Radio 3

Digital radios are fantastic.  I remember when I first got one and span up and down the dial (I have yet to adapt to digital terminology) amazed at the sheer number of stations there were out there that programmed soft rock and adverts for air-sprung mattresses. 
Of course, back in the day, one of the most popular stations was ‘test signal’ featuring birdsong, a single track endlessly repeated, which is obviously where ‘Magic FM’ got their programming philosophy from and where Radio 4’s immensely successful ‘tweet of the day’ can trace its genetic heritage to.
The internet, of course, really has opened up the world of radio, allowing one to listen to stations from many nations.  I like to listen to French radio because it makes me feel like I’m on holiday, because hearing Madonna’s hits introduced in French never gets old (unlike Madonna), and because it’s like Eurovision every day.
Given the number of channel choices, presetting presents some difficult decisions.  I like to keep it classic.
1 – Radio 1.  Listening to Radio 1 is a little like visiting a pub that you used to drink at all the time and used to be really great, but has been taken over by a chain, is utterly crap and yet is full of young people drinking stuff you don’t recognise.  You drop by now and again, but leave quickly realising it’s no longer for you, but not before you have picked up enough contemporary cultural references to be able to drop them into conversation with young people to demonstrate that you are still down with the kids.  This is how I learned that ‘Selfie’ was not a new girl band.
2 – Radio 2.  This is where you live now.  Radio 2 used to be as solid and respectable as a granite headstone, but essentially it has gone to hell since Jimmy Young and Wogan left.  Only Ken Bruce remains, like a Tower raven.  Radio 2 is now a life raft for former Radio 1 jocks.
3 – Radio 3. I’ll come back to this.
4 – Radio 4.  Jesus fucking Christ.  Why I even bother I have no idea.  I also have no idea what they put in the tea at Radio 4 but I’m guessing that it is some sort of spin-off of a failed pharmaceutical trial for a confidence-enhancing pill that actually takes the user past ‘cocky’ and buries the needle of the arrogant-o-metre.  A typical ‘Today’ programme interview doesn’t even start with a cordial ‘good morning’ now.  As for ‘Woman’s Hour’ – they’re always talking about their feelings, FFS.  Of course Radio 4 used to be famous for its comedy, but now the rule appears to be ‘who cares if it’s funny as long as it’s clever’.  Once they broadcast the last ever ‘Cabin Pressure’, I’m off.
5 – Radio 5.  Worth the license fee alone.  Without Radio 5 befuddled middle-aged men everywhere would be wandering the streets.  That applies to listeners and presenters both.
6 – Wildcard.  Used to be Radio 4 Extra, before they turned their output to all Hancock, all the time.  Obviously not Radio 6 or 6 Extra, both of which are the radio station equivalent of that kid at school who used to be into music that nobody had ever heard of, because it’s shit.  I suspect that when the BBC eventually set up a national Folk station, that 6 preset will see a little more action.
So, why do I present Radio 3?  No idea, as I like my classical music to have been used in a poignant scene from a movie, or an advert, and interspersed with adverts fro Volvo dealerships in the local area.  In short, broadcast on Classic FM.
The appeal to Radio 3 is obvious to anyone who has listened to it – they broadcast based on the assumption that nobody is listening.  Indeed, sometimes they broadcast stuff that actively makes it hard to listen.  Did you know that a lot of classical music is quite quiet?  The other day I actually thought the radio was off and nearly choked on my mid-morning sherry when I heard the presenter boom ‘and that was Prada’s ‘ode to a nice night in’.’  The music they play is varied to say the least, from jazz to choral to chamber to ‘early’.  (‘Early’ music is not, as I had always presumed, stuff played on the breakfast show, but rather tunes from early on in the development of music, essentially anything after two rocks being banged together up to the formation of the Beatles in, judging from the way Paul MacCartney looks these days, 1762).
But that’s just the stuff I’ve (largely accidentally) heard.  Christ alone knows what else they broadcast.  For all I know Radio 3 is the nation’s premier ambient trip-hop broadcaster and the only radio station where presenters are allowed to n-bomb.
One strongly suspects that the vision statement for radio 3 is ‘niche’.  With such a varied programme it may well be the only station where people tune in for certain programmes, rather than just leave it on all day.  One can imagine that radio 3 listeners listen to their favourite programmes in their shed, that shed being lined with acoustic dampeners and liberally stocked with the better kind of stereo, sherry and beard grooming paraphernalia.
I have Radio 3 on my pre-set for two reasons.  Firstly, because I am massively OCD and numbered presents on radios are an obvious invitation to assign those buttons to the correspondingly named stations (a stroke of marketing genius by the BBC who all those years ago might have been criticised for lack of imagination in naming their first national radio station ‘1’).  Secondly, because I like to think I am the sort of person who has radio 3 on their preset because I live in hope of one day catching an unsuspecting presenter unawares and discovering that ‘The Bach Hour’ is actually used to broadcast the theme tunes of classic children’s telly serials.
‘Oh white horses’ or ‘You’ve got to fight for what you want…’, either way, that’s quality public broadcasting.

Review: Black Coffee

The English love tradition, this being the only plausible explanation for the continued tolerance of Morris dancing in public places.  The English also love a good murder, by which I mean one that takes place in mysterious circumstances, in genteel surroundings and could have been committed by any of a number of colourful characters, each with a hidden past or dark secret, rather than the sort that takes place in a pub car park and is unquestionably committed by the thug in the mismatched tracksuit holding a hammer and a grudge.  And the English love their Queen of Crime, Agatha Christie.
And of course Malvern, or rather Malvern Theatre, is always happy to play host to the better sort of murder.  That is why Agatha Christie is still very much a welcome guest in the town, with dramatic adaptations of her work returning to thrill and enchant year after year.  ‘Black Coffee’, as with previous productions from this company, played to a packed house, and with good reason.
Black Coffee is very much an ensemble piece but as soon as the curtain rises, it’s clear that one of the principal players is the set itself.  Dominated by a large window that looks for all the world like a spider’s web, in Act I it frames a sky full of what can only be described as lowering clouds, and a privet hedge (by the end of Act I even the hedge looks suspicious, can one really trust a hedge that well groomed?).  The set is a large drawing room and library in the sort of country house that attracts murderers and eccentric detectives the way normal houses attract junk mail.  The set provides enough space for the cast to huddle in corners, perch nervously on sofas but, and this most importantly, for Poirot to prowl.  The room is described at the start of the play as a rat trap and at one point, with knowing amusement, by Poirot himself as a ‘mousetrap’.  For the audience though, it’s a window into the 1920s, into the world of the country house, into the world of Agatha Christie.
In this ensemble piece the spotlights on the stage follow the spotlight of suspicion as it moves from cast member to cast member, each with their frailties, each with their possible motive, each in sequence falling under the gaze of the diminutive Belgian detective.  Summoned to the house to investigate a missing formula, he remains to investigate something far more sinister.
The production hits exactly the right note, drama, a little melodrama, real tension and moments of comedy that are pitched perfectly.
An ensemble piece then, but Robert Powell is unquestionably the star.  This is an actor so confident in his performance, and those who have played Poirot before him have surely cast long shadows, that he occasionally appears to almost, very nearly, acknowledge the presence of an audience.  Perhaps for Poirot there is always an invisible audience he performs to, when his companion Hastings is unavailable.
Certainly with an Agatha Christie play featuring the famous detective, it’s a reasonable expectation that the audience will be familiar with the subject matter, and a little playfulness is allowed, even expected.  Theatregoers watching a performance of an Agatha Christie play will expect red herrings, dapper dressers, country houses, butlers and suspicious privet.  This is an audience that is probably familiar with the work and undoubtedly intimate with this detective, or at least they think they are.  Poirot has been a regular fixture on film and television for years, indeed so pervasive is his presence that when the curtain came down between Acts, I expected to see an advert for river cruises appear.
The play is staged over three Acts, with two short intervals.  A cynical attempt to double the gin revenues at the bar, or an excellent mechanism to increase the tension between each Act, as the audience has exactly the right amount of time for gin-fuelled uninformed speculation and swapping of theories before launching into the next round of revelations and red herrings?  Or both?
The play also asks some interesting questions about the English attitude to foreigners, of which Poirot is, thankfully, the acceptable sort.
Exceptional.

Black dogs

Steerforth, Dickens’s dark and moody fatally flawed hero, referred to that not-quite-afternoon/not-quite-night period of a Sunday twilight as a dreadful, mongrel time of day.  Of course, Steerforth resided in an age when gentlemen spent their Sunday pms indoors in gloomy rooms, watching the sky gradually get darker, lounging on a sofa, and having floppy hair, all key contributors to a gloomy mood in an age when the only distraction available was poking the fire, and even then you had the servants do that.  (Poking the servants on the Sabbath was frowned upon).
In these more enlightened times, Sunday evenings mean ‘Countryfile’, where a gurning twat in a fleece holding a lamb is all the assurance you need that things go better when you’re perky.  For the modern gentleman, thanks to Jamie Oliver, the period of noon to bedtime is spent, if you really know what you’re doing, in the kitchen preparing, then cooking, then consuming, some sort of roast bird, whilst others are left to wonder why your marinade requires two bottles of surprisingly really rather decent Australian merlot.
Churchill fought depression as keenly as he fought the Nazis, calling his gloomier periods ‘black dog days’.  If ever a man had an excuse for being a little very dark blue now and again, it was surely the man leading the lonely fight against a truly evil foe in the darkest days of the war.  Churchill knew then what we all know now, if the Nazis had won, there would be no ‘Countryfile’.  The Nazis famously abhorred brightly coloured fleeces, lambs and perkiness of any sort.
It’s unkind, and unfair, to characterise depression as a canine feature.  Dogs may be many things, but they are not really an animal I associate with not being cheerful, especially when you show them a tennis ball.  In these days of NHS cutbacks, when people are seeing somebody they sincerely hope is actually their doctor via Skype, we’re probably a whisker away from having puppies prescribed rather than lithium as an antidepressant.
The most famous black dog is of course Black Shuck, the Norfolk Hell-hound the legend of which inspired ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’.  Again, not an animal that one associates with depression.  Fear, terror and a tourist board wondering how to turn a folk tale into a plush toy, yes, depression, no.
Indeed apart from humans, it’s almost impossible to think of an animal that characterises depression.  Even that donkey from the Pooh stories has, thanks to the merchandising machine that is Disney, become a beloved toy cherished by toddlers everywhere.  Like all childrens soft-toys, as soon as it’s out of the carrier bag it becomes largely drool, but that’s a sign of affection surely.

A little bit on the side, or on the top

I adore chips.  I adore their many varieties.  There’s your basic chip, essentially a (thick) slice of potato, deeply fried.  Then you have your french fry, and finally, for the aesthetes in the crowd, the crinkle cut.  The shape of the chip is just the start of the journey, as it’s the preparation that makes such a difference.  Rule of thumb, the more of an animal you use in the preparation of a vegetable related product, the better the outcome.  That’s why double-dipped larded fat-and-grease loaded chips, cooked in cow, are the best sort of chips.
Of course, some see chips simply as the enabler of the main event – salt and vinegar.  Salt is of course essential for human life, as without it food would be bland, leading to the sort of ‘what’s the point’ ennui that may not be destructive on its own but, when combined with floppy hair, poetry and the ready availability of laudanum, can prove disastrous.
The chief role of vinegar as a dressing is to be sluiced over hot chips with the resulting cloud of scent wafted into a confined area, making everyone in that area want chips.  Now!
As a result of being deeply fried, chips formally cease to become vegetables and are granted honorary ‘actual food’ status.  But we should acknowledge that vegetables do have a part to play in the world of dressings and sauces.  That role is to assist delivery of thousand-island and other brightly coloured, tangy, vegetable-taste-disguising dressings.  Naturally, certain protocols have to be observed.  Stood at a salad bar with a spoon, wolfing down ranch?  Freak.  Stood at that same salad bar using a stick of celery to scoop and swallow?  Better.  But do remember to bite the end of the celery off rather than sucking the sauce off of the end and going back for more.  Such double-dipping can result in lifetime bans, even from a Harvester.  At a Berni Inn, it simply results in a good shoeing ‘out the back’.
Cooks occasionally get bent out of shape when a customer salts their food before even tasting it.  They should of course realise that this is infinitely preferable to the strangled cry of ‘agggh, this is shit!’  >sprinkle sprinkle< ‘Mummmm, much better.’ from the dining room.  If salt wasn’t so important we wouldn’t have fought wars over the stuff, and Waitrose wouldn’t sell seven different varieties of what is, at the end of the day, tasty aggregate. 

There’s nothing wrong with prepping your plate in anticipation of your meal.  Any sort of meat dish requires mustard, of course.  Coleman’s English Mustard to smear on the edge of your plate, French wholegrain to remain securely in its jar until the end of days.  Lamb is a game-changer, as you are now able to add mint-sauce to your greens to taste.  That taste should be ‘largely mint sauce’.
Pepper is an oddity.  The place for pepper is usually in the preparation rather than the consumption.  Back in the seventies pepper came in the form of a dust so fine it was one step away from being best applied by aerosol.  A spirited session with a pepper shaker could produce a cloud of the stuff that, if inhaled, led to the sort of reaction unseen since the Regency period when a new consignment of ‘Stonkers’s Very Strong Gentlemen’s Snuff’ landed on the docks.  Now pepper comes in chunks as folk wrestle with their grinders before giving up and reaching for the salt.  The only place where pepper is successfully served is in certain restaurants, where a man with, usually, tight trousers will sidle up to you and, holding an object which if it were coloured pink would see him arrested for indecency, will discretely grind to your satisfaction.
In an age when food manufacturers seek to pre-load edible excitement by helpfully including 125% of our daily salt, fat and sugar requirement in one portion of ready meal, we still love a dollop of sauce.  That’s why I live in hope of one day being offered the sauce menu when taking my seat in a restaurant and, when deciding on ‘the Daddies’, having the waiter murmur ‘excellent choice sir’.

A dusting of weather

Saaaannnnnnnndddddstooooooooooorrrrrrmmmmmmm!  Sandstorm.  Sandstorm!  Sandstorm.  The Red Death is upon us!
Well, it is if you believe the newspapers.  Apparently the good people of England have awoken to find strange deposits on their cars.  Hardly a novelty if you habitually park underneath a tree, but in this case it’s a thin film of dust.  And not just any dust.  African dust.
Luckily, since the inexorable rise of the UKIP, Daily Mail readers have been trained how to react, instinctively and without thinking, to any threat originating from overseas.  And this is the worst kind of overseas threat, a threat from Africa that has travelled through Europe and crossed the channel to arrive in England, possibly simply to settle on the cars of hard working families, but possibly to claim benefits, or even possibly both.
Apparently the wind (already, along with his villainous cohort the rain, an element as unwelcome in England as a fox turd in the fondue) has picked up some of the Sahara, blown it across Europe and evenly distributed it across the Home Counties. 
Now the English, by and large, know how to react to sand being blown about the place.  Christ knows, any English holidaymaker who has spent time on an English beach is used to eating sandwiches that are at least 7% mineral deposit thanks to the summer ‘breeze’ whipping along the beach.  The correct reaction to a sandstorm is to erect a brightly coloured windbreak, hunker down and drink flask tea until it’s time to go to the pub.
Reality, of course, fell a little short of the full-on award-winning CGI FX that people were secretly hoping for (after this winter’s storms, England has become a nation of not so much storm chasers, but people who are chased by storms and have a smartphone and a desire to get their footage on Sky, the BBC or at least YouHooTube with the tag ‘weather fail’).  As it transpired, this was hardly the sort of weather event that caused the arse of even the most nervous camel to snap shut.
As a weather event, it did give one a sense of perspective, billions of grains of sand blown across two continents, before ending its journey on the windscreen of a VW in Essex.
And it did indeed result in a thin film of dust on many a car, so resulting in many an Englishman taking his car to the local Romanian hand car wash – a foreign import the English are happy not to moan about.