Believe in Blather

For an organisation purporting to be a communications company, Sky appear to have a poor grasp of the working of the Telephone Preference Service, a scheme that allows you to opt out of receiving marketing telephone calls, the audio equivalent of junk mail but without the occasional benefit of a free pen or handy blank envelope to write a shopping list or to do list on.

One of the consequences of working at home is that you are at home during the day.  If you watch television you will know that the sort of adverts aimed at the at home during the day demographic are heavily skewed towards health plans for the elderly, or sedate cruising, the holiday equivalent of two spoonfuls of Benzedrine stirred gently into your Horlicks.  It also means that marketing people call you and you pick up the ‘phone because you think it might be something important, or at least not something that is either going to sap your will to live, descend into a blazing row, or both.

I don’t have Sky for a number of reasons, some practical, some principled.  For instance, I don’t enjoy association football very much, but if I am interested in knowing how a match is going, I’ll tune into Radio 5.  I also don’t need any more encouragement to watch any more television.  My sporting needs are well catered for via the wireless, thanks to Test Match Special, and my drama needs are taken care of thanks to box sets and binging.

I also don’t like Murdoch products, and although I have not seen Sky programming, I have no reason to think that his television programmes would be any different to his newspapers.

Finally, I don’t like the way in which Sky’s commercialisation of football and sport generally has eroded the social value it has, with kick off times for footie matches now arranged around the teevee schedule.  Football matches kick off at 3:00 on a Saturday.  This gives the fans time to get to the venue from wherever, have a pie, watch the match, and get home.  A footie match that finishes at 9:00 at night is bugger all use to anyone facing a five hour journey home.  Likewise, test cricket should be on BBC 2.  Like a nuclear deterrent, I might not ever use it, but it’s bloody good to know it’s there if necessary, for instance to be deployed during summer holidays in England.

The lad who called me was obviously working off a script, and the script included the many, many objections that I have to Murdoch in general and Sky in particular.

I was told that Murdoch does not own Sky, or much of it, the details were unclear, anymore.  Presumably the people that own the controlling interests are not megalomaniac despots, although if this is indeed the case I am baffled as to why and how they could acquire a controlling interest in a global communications company.

The lad extolled the virtues of the product and the programmes.  Fair play to him he did a good job.

However, what he was doing was arguing with me.  He just would not take no for an answer as he more of less rebutted or corrected the many objections I trotted out as to why I didn’t want Sky.

Eventually, I just went nuclear.  I don’t want Sky, I said, because ‘A Game of Thrones’ is one of my favourite books, and the television adaptation is poor by comparison.

Silence in the call centre.  Now, it is true that GoT the teevee show is great, I am not denying that.  Got the box set, love it.  But it is not as good as the books.  Moreover, I resent the hell out of its popularity.  Before the teevee adaptation, if you saw a stranger reading A Game of Thrones you could strike up a conversation with them.  In England.

There was no rebuttal.  Sky Lad must have known that for somebody to say something so provocative meant that there was no hope of selling the package.

Also, and I am not an expert, but having an argument with a prospective customer is unlikely to seal the deal.

Improving your Broadband

Broadband has brought us many benefits.  Let’s take porn.  Back in the dial up days, your images would load slowly, from the top down and of course with porn, unless it was some really twisted stuff, it was only one third of the way down the image when things started to get in any way interesting.  Now, thanks to advances in technology, porn is right there, in your face, on demand.

Despite what the cretins at your IT support department would have you believe, technology is not magic.  However, self-appointed techno-wizzards do share a trait with priests and physicians and other professions that seek to create an air of mystery about their activities, that is, they have their own language.  And at least you have to credit those whose job is, let’s face it, half a rung up from being the guy who changes the toner cartridge for at least invention their own language (‘babble’), rather than the priests, who basically asked if anyone would mind if they used Latin because nobody else was anymore and, the Roman Empire not having as many branch offices as it did BCE, there were surprisingly no objections.

Maintaining technological infrastructure takes time and effort.  I recently learned that the internet is an actual physical thing, just like Roy and Moss’s box in ‘The IT crowd’, but bigger and more plural.  The internet is distributed among many many ‘server-farms’, that are kept in secret locations, but normally near water for, not power as you might think, but cooling.  And people have to lay fibre optic cables and so on and so forth.  Basically, there’s a lot more work requiring high-viz jackets in the technology industry than you might think.

None of this mattered when my broadband went off earlier in the week.  Even after power cycling the magic box, nada.  So, called up the company and got a message telling me that because of improvements they were making to their broadband, I might be experiencing problems with my broadband/’phone/telly, until three in the afternoon.

There is nothing quite like being told you can’t have something to turn an inconvenience into a raging desire.  Luckily, I used up all of my emotional energy fuming about the inconvenience and never got as far as desire.  An upgrade, in the middle of the day?  Really?  If I had been able to Google for my emotional state, I might have got ‘incredulous’ back as an adequate description.

Things could have been a lot worse.  First of all, the interruption was only for about 45 minutes, secondly, I was able to use this time to have lunch in front of the telly, which was working fine.  And thank God because you know what they say, mankind is only three lunches and one missed episode of ‘Loose Women’ away from savagery.

I was wondering what the hell they were doing that couldn’t be done overnight, and I have to say that I didn’t notice a hell of an improvement to the broadband speed although, really, what was expecting, that ‘House of Cards’ now plays at the same speed as the Keystone Kops?  And at least Virgin haven’t taken the Apple route of ‘upgrades’, by making sure that their customers know there’s been an upgrade because a) your iPhone home screen looks a bit different and b) your iPhone home screen is the only fucking thing that works on your iPhone now.

Still, I suppose that vital maintenance to ensure increased security and resilience, together with replacement or even modernisation of infrastructure will result in downtime.  Then again, so does turning the internet off and turning it on again if there’s a glitch and, frankly, the image of a bloke in a high-viz jacket and a hard hat standing next to a fuck off huge lever and counting slowly to ten before jacking it back upright again is one that’s surprisingly hard to shake.

UKIP if you want to

There’s something or other that bit different about the United Kingdom Independence Party.  I say ‘something or other’ because one senses that to use the conversational French expression for that phrase would be inappropriate, and might provoke something of an Anglo Saxon response from any UKIP member.

And what is the right title for a UKIP party member?  ‘UKIPper’ sounds a bit too upbeat for a collection of people that, whenever they appear on the telly, appear furious about something, usually about having a camera pointed at them come to think of it.  ‘Kipper’ then?  ‘Kipper’ sounds about right as, if they are anything like their fuming Beloved Leader, they are no strangers to smoking.

So what is it that’s just that bit different about Kippers?  Well, they are probably not alone in starting sentences at dinner parties with ‘I’m not a racist but…’ but they are probably alone in having conversations like that before the first course is uncorked, and talking about that sort of thing to the exclusion of everything else.

These are the sort of people who make it very clear that they get on very well with foreigners, and make a point of telling you that they know the name of the lady who cleans their office, and she’s foreign.  One presumes.  Never spoken to her but she wears a headscarf.

The Kipper worldview is that things were a lot better in the 1950s.  This is, of course, utter tosh and if anyone wants to argue, I advise them to first pop back to the mid-50s in the time machine of their choice and try to stream Netflix.

By the way, the time machine of choice is always the Time Machine from the classic film of the same title.  Blue police boxes are fine, as are gullwing sports cars, but any time traveller who decides to fling themselves into an uncertain future at a rate greater than the standard one second per second, and does so in a machine built around a comfy armchair, deserves huge respect.  Indeed, a comfy armchair is a reliable way to travel into the future in the conventional way, meaning you arrive at your destination, say lunchtime or when the pub opens, refreshed and ready for action.

To the media, the Kippers are an amusing distraction posing no real threat.  Unlike conventional far right political movements that shave their heads and beat up ethnic minorities, Kippers are usually sedate right up to the point when they say something so unbelievably racist your arse clenches so hard it squeaks.  Then they keep on talking as if nothing had happened.

There is a school of thought that Kippers are not racist at all, and that they just consider that the EU is a failed project that the UK would be better off out of.  Judging by what’s reported however, that’s far too sophisticated a school of thought.  The school of thought occupied by UKIP is not one, one feels, that would be highly rated by Ofstead.  More likely, Kippers consider that the EU is a failed experiment of the type usually devised by mad foreign scientists in old Universal movies and the UK, or more precisely the paler parts of the UK, would be much better off out of it.  It would mean we could pass our own laws, eat whatever cheese we wanted, and birch homos without some jumped up foreign judge who has never touched cheddar in his life.

The media bloody love Kippers but I’m not sure what’s more dangerous, taking them seriously or not taking them seriously?  A sixty minute programme about the economic impacts of EU policies on, say, fish, would hardly make for riveting viewing, but a slightly overweight woman with views even more worrying than her hairstyle, who is not afraid to express those views?  Now we’re talking, usually about forigners.

The interesting thing is that all the mainstream political parties dislike UKIP, either because it poses a threat to their share of the vote or because their policies are repugnant.  Part of the English national character is to side with the underdog, and maybe that’s part of the appeal of being a Kipper, and proud.

Bottling It

Let’s be clear, I am not some sort of rabid anti-capitalist.  I don’t much like Tesco because, well, need I go on? and I don’t really like the idea of the exploitation of children manufacturing garments, because in the age of the sewing machine, you don’t need tiny hands to sew small stitches and, if you do, hire some fucking elves.

Indeed I like shops.

I like my local greengrocer.  Obviously I don’t buy my groceries there, because Waitrose is more convenient and, frankly, I find his purple sprouting broccoli a mite intimidating. But I certainly buy my Christmas tree there, and last year hauled it home myself.  This turned out to be slightly more effort than I had anticipated.  It took fully twenty minutes for a) feeling to return to my fingers and b) my opinions on child labour to self-right; if I had seen a couple of kids on the way home, I’d of bribed them with Haribo to cart the bloody thing to my door.

One of my favourite shops is the petrol station I gas up at prior to coming home from visiting family.  It’s the last stop before the motorway and so obviously the place where I load up on diesel and wine gums and, if I’m feeling flush, a Costa from the machine.  (Fuck Nespresso, when I win the lottery I am having the ultimate bean to cup machine, a full sized Costa vending machine in the hall.  Where else?  The kitchen?  You need a vended coffee when leaving the house.  If I want a coffee in the house, I’ll get the model I’ve had re-trained as a barrista to make it.  In this fantasy, I’ve won the lottery, remember?)

It’s a fairly interesting place.  As well as dispensing much needed four star or whatever to local white van men drink, it does a roaring trade in those other staples of white van man life, porn and sandwiches (a sandwich being a lunch you can conveniently eat one handed in a secluded layby).

Below the porn though, are an interesting selection of magazines.  How many petrol stations stock ‘Horse and Hound’?  I suspect what we have here is a corner shop with pumps.

This would explain why whenever I’m in the queue, the people ahead of me are greeted by name, and why they are buying booze, and why they walk off the forecourt rather than drive.

Obviously, I buy my bottled water there and obviously, I try to avoid that filthy French stuff, meaning I go for the own brand, ‘Spar’ mineral water.

Putting aside for one moment the delicious irony of a shop called ‘Spar’ selling water, let’s settle the whole bottled water thing.

I was pretty much convinced it was a sign of the end of days when I saw that you could buy mineral water from Fiji in the supermarket.  Now, I don’t know much about Fiji, but I didn’t think fresh water was something they had in abundance enough to export.  I may be wrong.

Certainly, there are those that bang on about the health benefits of mineral water.  I’m not so sure, especially when it comes to that glacial water stuff made from, well, glacier ice that is supposed to have formed before the industrial revolution and various exploding volcanoes made the atmosphere as dirty as a Yewtree suspect’s past, as it may also contain traces of stuff our ancestors were immune to, but we’re not, like smallpox or racist remarks at the dinner table.

The virtue of the mineral water bottle is that you buy it, and then refill the bastard from the tap for the next year.  I have been doing this for a while now and really must remember to give my bottle a good clean, the rim has probably got more culture than BBC4 on it.

But I love my Spar bottle of tap water.  It says ‘Man of the people’.  And ‘hydrated’.

It also makes me feel somewhat smug when I see the tribe that have gone one better than the mineral water carriers; the people who make their own mineral water.  Have you seen them?  They have a bottle that looks far too much like a Tommee Tippee toddler drinking cup for my liking, which has a filter in it.  This is, presumably, to strain out the worst of the pigeon essence that is an essential, accepted part of any water tank in an office building.  They are also ruinously expensive.

The one thing I’ve learned about filters is that you have to change them.  And in this case, it’s pointless.  It’s turning water into…water.  What the fuck is the filter actually trapping anyway?  Unless the water company are putting plutonium in the supply, how worried should we be?

So, until they invent the Jesus filter, that turns H2O into ViNo, I’ll stick with my water, direct from the Spa(r).

ITDB

The chaps who invented IMDB.Com deserve a Nobel Prize.  I’ll get to why in a moment.

The internet has now been around long enough for apocryphal stories to grow up about it.  I don’t mean web pages that record camp fire stories or folk tales or any of that nonsense, or eBay selling haunted crap, I don’t know much about the paranormal but I do know that if there was an artefact that proved beyond doubt the existence of the supernatural, it would not be on eBay.  It would be in the cellar of the Pentagon with all the alien stuff.  What I mean is stories about the internet that are only possible because of the existence of the internet.

One such story is how IMDB revolutionised the dating scene in LA.  Prior to the existence of IMDB, any asshole with a Porche an a wrap of coke could hit on a girl in a club, tell her he’s a producer or something, and try to get her to sleep with him in the expectation that she would get a guest spot on Magum P.I as ‘Pool Girl 2’.  Only afterwards would the ugly truth emerge, that he works in a Porche dealership in Sacramento (should such a thing even exist).

Thanks to IMDB.Com, girl goes back to her place, makes an excuse to lock herself in the loo with her laptop and after a brief search, finds out that ‘Gary Hairful’ has no production credits and so will not be getting sex that night.  He will, however, get tasered in the nutsack while she films it on her ‘phone, or whatever they do in Hollywood.

The International Movie Database, or IMDB, is an internet success story the way that all success stores about tech should be success stories.  Apparently, IMDB was started by a couple of blokes (disclaimer: women can be tech giants too), probably in their bedrooms, that probably smelled of socks and Lynx, and was basically a listing of who starred in what movie and who the best boy, key grip and gaffer were.  I have no idea how they got this information but I really, really hope that one sat hunched over a keyboard and the other one read the credits as they rolled on a TV screen as a VHS tape played/paused/played/paused.  The truth is probably less romantic and no doubt involved less Pot Noodle than I imagine.

Fast forward and IMDB is now the definitive resource of who did what on movies and television.  That’s why the inventors deserve a Nobel Prize.  While others win the Prize for curing disease, these guys have cured the awful suffering of recognising an actor, and wondering where the hell you have seen them before.  ‘The Bill’, it’s always ‘The Bill’.

So, IMDB, is a force for good.

So why not another definitive and comprehensive source of useful information that could be used in social situations?

Why not an International Tattoo Database?

Just a few years ago, tattoos were a relatively scarce commodity per square inch of human flesh.  Before blokes started getting Maori markings to show their tribal allegiance to Oswestry and women started getting Cantonese symbols because they liked Number 38 on the menu or whatever, you got a tat if you were in the military, where part of a tribe, had been in prison or had been in a concentration camp.

Before tattoos became fashionable, they used to mean something.

Now, you’re in a bar, your hitting it off with a young woman and you notice her shoulder tattoo.  Does she like mystical symbols, or hot and sour soup, is she a committed lepidopterist of renown, or a sex worker, or is it a curiously shaped birthmark and she is the rightful Queen of Wessex?  A discreet visit to the ITDB and you can decide whether the evening is going to end with you already thinking about what to name your kids, or exiting the venue now via the lavvy window.

Likewise a lady can establish whether that coat of arms on a fella’s forearm is a distinguished regiment, C Block HMP Chelmsford, or even worse, a minor public school.

ITDB, a force for good.

Red Wine

Aggghhhhhh!

Can I just assure you that the above is an exclamation of my mixture of frustration and anxiety at having spilled red wine over my laptop.

You know what this means?  I no longer have to take the ‘Which Big Bang Character Are You’ test twelve times to get to ‘Sheldon’.  I’m Penny.

And it’s a merlot.  A variety that, as was pointed out to me this very evening, is so detestably rough that it has its own scene in the movie ‘Sideways’.

It was bound to happen one day.  Lets face it, the amount of food and drink that falls into the average keyboard could probably feed a family of five for a week and merit its own cookbook and C4 show; ‘Cooking with QUERTY’.

I was expecting one of two things; the final reel of a 007 movie style explosion, or the insides of my laptop fusing into some sort of pissed AI.

Maybe I’ve been saved by the age of the laptop.  Let’s just say that if I used this bad boy in a Starbucks, I would not be mistaken for somebody working on their screenplay, rather I would be taken for somebody trying to e mail 1997.

I bet you couldn’t do that with the new Powerbooks.  Anything short of Petrus spilled on them and they would probably restore to factory settings, meaning you’d have to delete that bloody U2 album all over again.

Rembrandt in the Cellar

There is a notion that is trotted out, reliably, by commentators, possibly not informed commentators, possibly self appointed commentators, but commentators none the less, every time a famous or at least expensive painting is sold, that the painting will never be seen again by ordinary folk.  That it will, instead, spend the rest of its existence in a vault, or in the Secret Basement Gallery of the wealthy purchaser.

Art is an investment, and it is often bought by banks and other financial institutions in the hope that the value of the piece will appreciate and it can be flogged on.  In the meantime, banks do what banks do, and store their wealth in a vault.  Probably a nice vault, but a vault nonetheless.  This causes consternation among those who espouse the view that famous art should reside in a public gallery, preferably near them, where it can bore schoolkids and never be seen by those ignorant sods who have the poor taste to live some distance away.

Special resentment is reserved if the buyer is suspected to be an individual.  In such a case, commentators choose to ignore the evidence of the countless little plaques placed discreetly beside works of art on temporary or permanent display that read ‘On load from’ and instead intimate that the artwork will now reside in the Secret basement Gallery of the wealthy buyer, possibly illuminated by a single spotlight, while the new owner squats in a leather armchair facing the art with a glass of brandy in one hand and his cock in the other as he feverishly goes to town on himself like a lusty gibbon, drooling over a classical nude.  Or a Pollock, there’s no knowing with these perverts.

Rich people, it would appear, love an underground room, be it wine cellar, art gallery, panic room, murder room or simply a well appointed sex dungeon.

The message of the commentators though is that art should be for the masses and should not be hidden away in dimly lit rooms.

This despite the fact that the masses prioritise other stuff above art.  Do huge crowds go to their local art gallery every Saturday?  No.  Do they go to watch the footie?  Yes.  Even if this means travelling long distances, which is more than most people would do to get a glimpse of a painting, even of sunflowers.

Art began in dimly lit rooms.  Banksy’s ancestors painted the walls of a cave, not with Neolithic Farrow and Ball but with pictures intended to bring luck to the Woolly Mammoth hunt.  And there is good reason why some art is exhibited in dimly lit rooms.  This is not because the owner is a Bond villain.  Well, not always.  It’s because some images, such as watercolours, fade over time with prolonged exposure to strong light.  Watercolours, it would appear, are intended to be viewed in a Victorian drawing room, either by gaslight or by daylight filtered through windows tinted with the smoke of industry on the outside and the smoke of enthusiastic pipe smokers on the inside.  The best way to preserve a watercolour painting is to cover it in tissue paper, put it in a cardboard folder, and put it in a draw.  Then close the draw.

This provides problems exhibiting the piece.

As a result, delicate drawings are usually exhibited in artfully lit galleries for short periods.  This is done to preserve the piece and so prevent the embarrassment of having to hand back to the lender of the artwork a blank piece of paper on which once resided a delicate watercolour, probably of a canal.

The National Gallery in London takes measures to avoid just such an embarrassment by placing their Rembrandt exhibition in the basement, of the annex.  It was not quite a case of descending a rickety staircase with a torch, there is after all a brightly lit gift shop.  And the exhibits themselves are magnificent, if you like unsmiling folk in ruffs, which I do.  Also on display are delicate sketches of landscapes, mostly canals and cottages, occasional tree, which look as vulnerable to sunlight as vampires.  A good thing then that they are secure in this art bunker.

Remember

For a nation that frequently declares itself conservative in its tastes when it comes to matters of art, there’s nobody quite like the British when it comes to bestowing ‘beloved’ status on what appears to be a challenging piece of art.

If you looked at top tens and public polls, you’d probably conclude that the nation’s favourite artwork was either ‘The Haywain’ or ‘The Fighting Temeraire’.  And the first clue about just how unconservative the Brits really are is there, because whilst the former is a traditional and bucolic scene, it’s more usually photoshopped to show what it will look like with a windfarm in the background than it is seen in its original state these days, and the latter is both an impressionist masterpiece and a melancholy statement of declining power.

In the analogue age, you could guess the nations favourite art by the number of reproductions of images sold.  That’s why it’s fairly certain that up to a few years ago, the nation’s most beloved artwork was either that tennis playing bird scratching her arse, or ‘The Singing Butler’.

Recently, the best gauge of the popularity of an image has how many times it is reproduced in media.  Judging by the number of times the same picture has appeared on television and in print recently, the nation’s favourite image would appear to be a gurning twat with a pint in one hand and fag in the other photographed in a pub the morning after a by-election.

Until this week.

The British really do embrace the new.  Apparently, originally, it took some convincing by a lone Gateshead councillor to persuade everyone that ‘The Angel of the North’ was going to be sensational.  Now we can’t imagine Britain without it.  It was probably the same when one lone crazy druid was trying to convince everyone that a stone circle on Salisbury Plain would be really cool.  This is the country that produced the YBAs, who may be on their way to being OAPBAs but without doubt had an impact on public taste.

Which brings us to the poppies at the Tower of London.

What brought me to the poppies at the Tower of London was a taxi.  I’d always intended to visit them as close to 11 September as possible, when the moat would be full of poppies and the installation would be complete, before being (rightly) dismantled.

888,246 ceramic poppies fill the moat, one for every British and commonwealth soldier killed in the Great War, a war where my Grandfather took a German sniper bullet in his open mouth and out his cheek (interesting scar) and where, stretchered into a field hospital, he was looked after by his own brother, a medic, who apparently gave him his own medal for bravery explaining ‘you deserve this more than I’.
In the taxi, the traffic ground to a halt around the Tower.  London traffic (taxis, busses, white vans) was slowly supplanted by coaches and people, people people.

We bailed out early and walked the last stretch.  The last time I was in a crowd like this was the Olympics, where you have people walking towards something, in that case the Stadium, with a sense of expectation and people walking away from it with a look on their faces that meant they would never be quite the same again.  So it was here.

The crowd.  The Crowd.  The crowd are as much a part of the installation as the poppies.  Quiet, respectful, immense.  There’s no pushing or shoving, there are only a couple of people in hi-viz anoraks and even they just stand there.  Everybody just sort of knows.

Then you see the moat, a river of blood pouring from the windows of the Tower and, because it’s not Armistice Day yet, volunteers still planting.  Another poppy hammered in, another life snuffed out.

And it’s right that it should go.

Never mind that people have already bought their poppies, that’s not the point.  The point is that the impermanence reflects the frailty of life, that it is special because it is temporary and because it teaches us to cherish precious, fragile things that are not forever.

It’s extraordinary, humbling, marvellous and magnificent.

Write on cocktails

Famously, Laurie Lee, one of the nation’s most beloved novelists, wrote ‘on wine’.  Whether or not he was ever drunk in charge of a typewriter is unclear but one has to entertain the possibility that, as a poet, he typed without due care and attention.  He did his writing in the Greek Islands, presumably because in the days before bargain booze, affordable New World wines or even Blue Nun, this was the only way he could become sufficiently inebriated to welcome the Muse should she come to visit.  Also, proximity to Mt Parnassus may have helped.

Rock stars smoke, inject, inhale and presumably occasionally insert for inspiration.  Writers drink.  Christ alone knows why, as excessive booze normally leads to feelings of alienation from the world and a profound sense of being under-appreciated and misunderstood, all of which is achievable through the simple act of publishing a slim volume of verse.  Alcohol also inhibits early morning creativity, and certain writers famously were at their creative peak at first light.  Presumably this meant they could post the latest chapter of their novel off to their publishers at eleven in the morning on their way to the pub.

However, in the spirit of enquiry G&P is embarking on a five-part special to explore the effects of various types of alcohol on writing, beyond those of not being able to remember that fantastic idea for a novel you had last night (something about a boy wizard?) just before you passed out, or not being able to decipher the notes scrawled on a beermat that could be a poem, or somebody’s e mail address.

We conclude with...cocktails!

There are two types of cocktails, divided along gender lines, like the literature that they inspire.

First, let's deal with cocktails where alcohol is mixed with soft drinks and fruit drinks to the extent that the drinker can no longer taste the alcohol.  This is quite different to the drinker no longer feeling the effects of the alcohol, unless the drinker is the sort of person who lifts up her shirt to show the room her bra after three glasses of seven up anyway.  Fruity, or 'long' cocktails were invented with the express purpose of getting ladies drunk without their confronting the reality of downing hard liquor.  If Elizabeth Bennett drank cocktails, the woman would hammer Long Island Ice Teas.  It's fruity fun in a bonnet.

Honourable exception must be made for cocktails like Cuba Libre (rum and coke if you're an American), where liquor is mixed with a soft, often sweet, sometimes fizzy, drink.  If the drink is made correctly, that is equal parts spirit and mixer, then it's not for the bonneted classes.

Likewise, certain classics are exempt from appearing on the 'girls night out' two for one laminated (for easy cleaning) cocktail list at your local cocktail lounge or Wetherspoons.  These are gin and tonic because of its medicinal properties in warding off malaria and sobriety in an increasingly torrid world, and also Bloody Mary or, as many refer to it, 'ahh, thank God, breakfast!'.  The Bloody Mary is at the extreme end of the exemption scale, not only is it a famously tasteless spirit mixed with an overpowering and sweet juice (although vegetable, not fruit, so it's practically a smoothie) and then further disguised with a fish based condiment, but served correctly it also has half a hedgerow shoved into the glass.

Cocktails with things protruding from them are an indication that this is a ladies' beverage.  Again, there are exceptions, if the glass in front of you is home to, as well as something smelling alarmingly of strawberry, either a cherry or a lit sparkler, then you had better be wearing a sparkly dress when consuming it.  If it has an olive, olives or any other form of vegetation that nobody honestly eats for pleasure, then it's a mans' drink.

Which brings us to the second sort of cocktail.  This is where one sort of spirit is mixed with another sort of spirit and served in a special sort of glass, usually a small one, for the very good reason that knocking back three trebles in thirty minutes is something that is usually only done by on-duty darts players, yet when liquor is presented thus in a dainty glass, it's socially acceptable.

Mens' cocktails taste like petrol.  Although the second one always tastes better.  This is because the idea of what Matt Groening described as a 'sophisticated adult beverage' is to remind you that you, an adult male, are having a drink.  The taste is not unlike the first drink of beer you had as a child, awful.

That's why these drinks are often served chilled, if your tongue is numb enough then you may be able to drink your first one quickly enough to make more seem like a great idea, without feeling the need to rinse your mouth out with Irn Bru and move onto something with a cherry in it.

They are also served up with dashes of things.  This is to make something that tastes toxic taste even more toxic, but in an aromatic way.  Bitters are sophistication in a bottle.

The purpose of olives is to line the stomach.

Broadly, if you are drinking a strawberry concoction, you are likely to write, and read, literature either about feisty independent women who have social and sexual misadventures but manage to land the perfect relationship and job by the last chapter, gay friend optional.  Please note though a worrying trend of such female characters meeting for coffee rather than shots to discuss the state of their love life.

If you are drinking something that tastes like aftershave made from olives, then you are likely to write and read fiction about spies, honourable criminals or knight errant charming bastards.  These men also drink coffee, but only to shift hangovers the size of Mount Olympus, when on stake outs, or when in exotic foreign locations and the coffee has the taste and consistency of tar, in a good way.

Sweeping generalisations certainly, but the cocktail is no place for subtlety.  For all that has been written about 'mixologists', sloshing together some booze like a toddler with access to a mini-bar is less the recipe for something to delight the senses and more like the precursor to a night of some poor life choices.

But it also produces fiction that, in different ways, hits the spot.

Review - The Dancing Floor

I had this review from W_.  We were both guests at a friend’s place and, Scottish weather being Scottish weather, the haggis hunting that day had been postponed due to the traditional sleet and snow that typifies Spring in the Highlands.  Seeking distraction and entertainment, I wandered to the library hoping to find at least our host’s selection of plainly bound pornography.

W sat by the fire, both were smoking.  Beside him on a small table rested an oversized decanter.  The glass was in his hand.  W was known to bring his own supplies on these trips, having once being forced to spend a weekend snowed in on the moors with only the host’s blended scotch to pass the time.

‘You’ll want the Buchan.’  He advised, gesturing to a bookcase with his foot.  ‘To your left, second shelf, yellow dust jacket.  ‘The Dancing Floor’.  That’s what you want.’

He topped up his glass and, without invitation, began.

‘The Dancing Floor may not be the greatest book ever written, but it’s the greatest adventure story I’ve ever read.

Its construction is superb.  Its author’s audacity breathtaking.  It begins with an admirably short introduction where the writer explains that this is a story he heard from a friend as they both passed the time when taking civilized refuge from an unseasonable climate.  By the end of that first paragraph, one is hooked.

The astonishing thing is that, for a novel of adventure, so very little happens for so very long.  Buchan shows exceptional nerve, and prodigious skill, in maintaining, and building, tension, moving inexorably towards the climax, where a lot happens in a very short period of time.

The premise is intriguing.  The first portion of the book deals with the storyteller’s friendship with a young friend of the family, and how this singular young man is visited by an annually recurring dream.  Surely, the reader thinks, this must be the key to the adventure and not just mystical tosh.

It’s a measure of Buchan’s confidence that the Great War is briefly explained as an wholly unexpected interlude offering adventure and excitement.  One cannot but help admire Buchan’s mastery of understatement here, as both central characters are clearly profoundly affected by their experiences at the front, most markedly in it being confirmed to them, on a grand scale, that when beastly things are in the offing, a British gentleman is justified in grabbing a pistol and the initiative and jolly well sorting things out, no matter where this might take him.

Then the book takes a most unexpected turn, the young man and his strange dream all but vanish from the narrative and we are introduced to a rare and exotic bird, a young and, naturally, beautiful woman who is far braver than any of the male characters.

Her somewhat shocking behaviour in London society is explained away by her growing up abroad and, page by page, we learn more about her background, and the terrible fate that awaits her.  She is determined to make amends for her father’s misdeeds at the family home on a remote Greek island.  The islanders however, think that this can best be achieved by torching said home, and her.

And so the book races towards its conclusion, but not before Buchan pulls off a masterstroke, changing narrative perspective at a crucial point but in such a way as to excite the reader rather than to frustrate.

This is a masterpiece.  Its depiction of London pre and post Great War is superb and Buchan’s depiction of the effect of the conflict on even the stoutest of English hearts is surprisingly compassionate in a tale of high adventure.  He is also gifted in describing the society of the time.

The Dancing Floor is a tale of high adventure, dazzlingly well written.  It is about destiny, self determination, family, friendship, conflict and Bad Blood.  It even manages to combine a dash of mysticism with what some might consider heroics, and what other will recognise as the British gentleman at his best, under pressure, with nothing but his wits and a firearm to save the day.

An astonishing tale of high adventure, astonishingly well written.

Anyway, you should read it.’

I bought my copy of ‘The Dancing Floor’ in the Brazen Head second-hand bookshop in Burnham Market, North Norfolk.  This book is the epitome of why it is simply wrong to own a Kindle.  It’s hardback, it’s got its dust jacket and it’s in fairly good condition.  I’d guess from the ‘reprinted’ history at the front that it’s the June 1938 edition.  Knowing this, it’s not too much of a stretch to think that somebody may have been reading this very book, a thrilling tale of high adventure that includes a passage on the characters adventures during World War One, whilst World War Two raged about them.

What really thrilled me though was when a bus ticket fell out of it as I read on and turned the page.  Then a few pages later, another appeared.  Two tickets, both dated July, one for 9:23, another 10:49.  A return trip…where?  To enlist?  Was some young man reading this book as he bumped to and from an appointment with destiny?

What could make this better?  Only one thing, the tickets have an advert for ‘Turners quality sausages’ and ‘Turners pork pies’ on the reverse!

Those tickets have remained there for what must be decades, and one can only speculate why.  I certainly hope that whoever originally owned the book finished it.

I do know this.  It cost me £4 and it is now the most precious volume in my possession.  The bus tickets still sit inside it, holding place.

You don’t get that with a Kindle.

And as we’re discussing war, the other thing you don’t get with a Kindle is stopping power for a bullet.  It might hold 20,000 books, but the only way a Kindle is every going to feature in a ‘I’d have been a goner if it hadn’t been for my hardback copy of ‘Reform School Girls’ I always carry in my breast pocket’ story is if they bring out the Kindle Kevlar.