Gentleman and Player

White van passengers

2012-01-21T14:30:00.000Z

Standing by the side of the road, waiting for the lights to change, one has plenty of time to survey ones surroundings. But sod that, it's much more fun to stare at the occupants of the cars whizzing by. Someday, somebody is going to author the definitive spotters' guide to the British diver, with descriptions and illustrations of the School Run Mum, The Commuter, The Angry Man, The Fun Car Driver, The Soft Toy Farmer and so on and so forth. Next month, they'll start work on updating the guide, that's how definitive guides work.

A particular sub-set of traveller is the white van driver. Lots has been, well, not so much written as said about white van drivers. True, the vast majority of it is not social commentary in the formal sense, but rather along the lines of immediate feedback on the white van driver's skill at, say, filtering, usually delivered by somebody in a neighbouring car to an audience of an empty passenger seat.

And while much has been said and shouted about the white van driver, less has been said about the white van passenger, which is a shame. Because I think this is a particular social type that could stand some examination. Looking at white van passengers, you can't help but think that there is a story there. They occupy a special place, and not just to the left of the hand break. Rather, like the girlfriend of a a provincial gigging DJ who keeps other women away from her man simply through the power of sullen glower, they have a purpose of their own. Often, of course, this will be to load and unload crates of fanta, but there's something else going on there too.

The passengers essentially break down into three types; mates, girlfriend, family. Mates are there to help shift stuff from the van or to the van. A mate can be identified not just by posture - they are happy to sit in companionable silence for long periods - but by the little nest they make on the passenger side of the van to reinforce their sense of identity even though they are not the driver. The base layer is constructed of coffee cups and tabloid newspapers, further than that it's at the discretion of the mate except that before the invention of the Internet there would always be at least one soft core porn mag.

The girlfriend is rarer, but easily visible when present because her posture manages to convey 'I want to spend more time with you and if I have to spend Saturday in a van with you, I will, although it will not be pleasant'. The van driver's originally chirpy mood will be ground down throughout the day, turning very bleak indeed when he realises about three o' clock that his planned evening of drinking cider with his mates is unlikely to happen.

The family member is about the best. Specifically, small boys and dogs. Small boys, or girls, in a van are always uplifting. Somehow taking your kid to work in a van goes beyond the normal 'I have fucked up the child care arrangements, again' that typify the appearance of a child in an office. The kid is normally excited beyond even the power of haribo to induce giddiness, because they are finding out what happens to their parent during the day and, when you're a kid, there's nothing quite like seeing your parent at work and realising that other people do not call him 'Dad' and riding high above the rest of the traffic. You conclude the day learning that his name is either 'Geoff' or 'wanker'. You also conclude with a free tray of fanta but you're not to tell anyone.

The only family member more pleased than a child to ride in the passenger seat of a white van is a small dog, usually a terrier, usually with its head stuck out of the window looking happy beyond reason because surely there is no greater thrill than accompanying your dad on a job, unless it's sticking your head out of the window and letting your ears blow about in the rush of wind.

Personal what?

2012-01-14T18:31:00.000Z

Back in the nineteen eighties, right wing newspapers reported that left wing councils were inventing jobs, or rather, inventing non-jobs, to give work to those who would otherwise be cluttering up dole offices and local unemployment statistics. The example I recall (probably the only reason I saw it was that it was on page two of The Sun) was that Liverpool City Council, at that time the sort of left wing regime more commonly associated with places that had just had a revolution, appointed a couple of chaps to be lamp-post counters.

This is very sensible for three reasons. Firstly, it gets people off the dole and into employment, with all the benefits that brings, including giving people public money in the form of taxable wages instead of benefits. Secondly, why shouldn't a council audit their assets - with metal theft so common now that 'signal problems in the Bingly area' no longer means engineering incompetence but is more likely to indicate that some scrote is even now legging it along the trackside with a few hundred yards of copper cable looped over his shoulder - knowing that you still have lamp posts and not chainsawed stumps along the length of Alma Road seems a pretty bloody good idea to me. Finally, just what the hell is a 'non-job' anyway and just who is the media to judge?

Looking back on royal appointments of centuries ago, we wonder just what the keeper of the King's quimsy did, although we can have our horrible suspicions. Might we not look back in future years and wonder exactly what an Executive Director of Resources does? I'm not all that sure that the Executive Director of Resources could tell you now, although I bet lots of other people in the organisation could, and that job description would include the words 'fuck' and 'all'.

Non jobs are an extraordinary feature of life at a certain salary level. The working classes have no such issue, you are either the guy that uses the lathe, the guy that cleans the lathe or the guy that drives the van and delivers lathed products to the place where they are bolted together into weapons. The middle classes have a bit more of a problem, but even there there are clear job descriptions to be found, you are the nurse that cleans up the lathe related injury, or the charity worker trying to stop the export of expertly lathed land mines to areas that have lots of schools nearby, campaigning instead for their safe disposal. But the is no doubt that among the middle and upper classes there are people who occupy salaried positions where it's not clear what they do, a conundrum muddied when it's reported that they still got a huge bonus even though their company performed badly, went bust or was closed down after what is now known as the 'Dorset dairy farm land mine dump horror'.

Surely the king of the non-jobs must be the role of 'personal shopper'. Why? Why does one need a personal shopper. This is, as I understand it, somebody whose job it is to help you shop. Who the hell needs help to shop? Here's the thing, if you need help to shop, you don't need to be in that shop. I am not talking about shop assistants, who are able for instance to tell you what a fridge does, or if a particular telly is the right one for you, which essentially boils down to 'if you want it now, how big is the car you are going to take it home in? A van you say? Excellent, let me introduce you to 'the mamothchav 8000!', no, I mean people employed by the store to help you pick the right cashmere scarf that you don't need.

If I wander into a model shop, I do not need to be told that I am going to go straight to the airfix kits for a Spitfire and I certainly don't need help in a bookstore. This is why real shops, like green grocers, don't have personal shoppers, because people do not need help purchasing carrots, they do not even need help purchasing kale. Can you imagine the reaction if somebody ponced over to you and suggested going for the organic cucumber instead of the one you were considering. You'd call the management, or the police. Yet it is apparently acceptable to tolerate this when purchasing a frock.

No, no its not.

Why would you even need a personal shopper in a clothes shop, to give you an honest opinion? Who wants that. If you want somebody to encourage you to buy those skinny cut jeans, then take a friend, your friend will tell you you look fabulous, immediately text 'OMG Judy has lost the plot' and, with luck, that will be forwarded to Judy before she has peeled herself out of the jeans that are cutting off the circulation to her feet.

Ok, maybe I can see why stores wouldn't go for that but surely, to drive the economy upwards, what we need are really crap personal shoppers, we need somebody who can't give an informed opinion about whether the blue or the red snood is the sight one for you, shrugs and just concludes 'get both'.

Or better still, your personal bartender. Booze in shops. Bringing all the fun and irresponsibility of going onto Amazon drunk, but in real life. It's long been rumoured that the next big development in computing will be a breathalyser with a USB attachment so that you won't be allowed on eBay if your blood alcohol level is at a certain level, say the one that leads you to think that paying a tenner for a slightly scuffed plastic 'Star Wars' pencil case is a good idea.

'Relaxed' shopping. It's the way forward.

A change of scene

2012-01-09T11:34:00.001Z

What between the riots, recession and no Downton Abbey on the telly on a Sunday night, one could be forgiven for concluding that things could be described as grim. And that’s just at home, when one turns on the idiot lantern to the BBC Speculation 24 channel (other ways of upsetting yourself and commenting on how a newsreader’s blouse is inappropriate are available) you let a whole world of misery flicker into the room. If it’s not the planet trying to make life difficult for people, it’s other people trying to do so.

Is it any wonder that people turn, in a variety of ways, to alternative realities? The great thing is that doing so does not require a huge glowing contraption that makes a whooshing noise and flings you to an alternative England where there are cool airships, the Crazy Frog ring tone was never invented and neither Hitler, Murdoch or Cowell attained positions of influence, rather people are constructing their own realities.

And they are well catered for. Stop in at any newsagents and, after you have bought your scratchcards and fags and noted down the number on the card in the window advertising a ‘large chest for sale’, you may notice the plethora of magazines that line the walls like a fresco pained by somebody with multiple personality disorder and a passion for part-works about quilting. The gateway to alternative worlds is here. Either different worlds altogether, inhabited by celebrities who although they notionally occupy the same planet that the public do, inhabit a different existence, or a minute focus on a part of the reader’s world, such as the one that collects lace.

And especially railway modellers. There are any number of magazines dedicated to modelling, military and civilian and by far the most populous of these are for railway model enthusiasts.

We have all, at one time or another, run a toy train around an oval track but, for the serious modeller, it’s much more than that, it’s the creation of a perfect world, where the trains have character, rather than being shaped like an articulated dildo and where they pull in and out of stations, normally small country stations, that have station masters and porters and are even probably manned at night.

Most importantly, the trains run on time. Because the modeller can write his (no ‘or her’ here) timetable.

This is indeed an alternative world, one in which the modeller has control of the rolling stock, every run and every shunt. Imagine the sensation of power and relief that a commuter must feel running their own train service. An alternative, preferable world, complete and to scale and never, ever, late.

Best. Broadcast. Evah!

2012-01-08T11:34:00.003Z

Live broadcasting. All the enjoyment of normal broadcasting but with the extra element of danger that one might hear the word ‘cunt’ on the television (thank you ‘I’m a celebrity’) or on the radio (thank you ’Today’ programme). You are of course, free to use the word yourself around the house (it’s best to do so in private, as public usage, say in a boozer, could land you in a spot of bother) as often as you like, repeating and repeating like somebody trying to learn Tourette’s using one of those language tape things.

Live broadcasting lets us look behind the curtain at the performance of presenters who, in pre-recorded programmes look shiny, slick and flawlessly professional. The only time one saw fallibility was on the occasional clip shows made up of out-takes, where one witnessed an increasingly distressed presenter trying to record a segment containing the word ‘topple’ without getting a fit of the giggles, or being attacked by an enraged gibbon. Hil-hairy-arse.

On live broadcasts, anything can happen and it’s a wonder that it doesn’t more often. The most common threat is somebody larking about behind the presenter as they report from the sort of place where the public have not had media training, such as a council estate. And how much fun would it be to see MPs or Peers misbehaving behind Nick Robinson as he reports from Parliament? If I was an MP I would at no time be without a cardboard sign that could quickly be unfolded and read ‘hello Mum!’.

Normally, live broadcasts are reserved for occasions where larking would be unsuitable, featuring a regional BBC reporter in a North Face anorak (please address your letters of complaint about product placement to ‘your composter, the end of your garden, Little England’) looking sombre in front of a flooded high street or an otherwise unremarkable stretch of street made tragic by the abundance of petrol station bouquets or, god forbid, soft toys that line the perimeter of the police cordon.

Sports reporting is the exception. Sport tends to be covered live and a particular breed of presenter has emerged – somebody that can talk with passion about twenty two overpaid nancy boys sex pests kicking around a ball for ninety minutes, or two blokes clacking balls around a green baize table for, well, forever in my experience or, my very favourite, commenting on a Grand Prix, where it’s acknowledged that the most exciting bit is the start, requiring the commentator to begin the commentary at a pitch of excitement that horse-racing commentators normally conclude with, then maintain it for the next two hours. The god-like presenters of ‘Test Match Special’ cope with a five day schedule by only occasionally remarking on the play, the rest of the time discussing the local wildlife, what they got up to last night, last week or last decade, cakes and so on.

Football commentary, on the radio, is perhaps the apex of live commentary. There’s a quote reported by the late, great, Alistair Cooke that radio was preferred to television because ‘the pictures were better’. Fair enough but that quote is from the late 1940’s and whoever said it plainly hadn’t seen a fifty inch plasma job. So football commentators on the radio know they have to work extra hard to compete with somebody who can watch the match. On the telly. In a pub.

This possibly explains the approach that BBC Scotland took yesterday in its ‘Sportsound’ programme, where, around five o’clock in the afternoon, when all the Scottish Cup football matches were ending more or less at the same time (injury and stoppage time staggering the final whistles over a few minutes), they kept an open microphone to all the commentators at all the grounds.

No matter how close a commentator at a football match presses their special one way microphone to their lips, you can still hear the roar of the crowd, including the occasional fruity wanker fuck and cunt. It’s like somebody organised a flashswear. In the last minutes of the Scottish Cup, where the fans were urging their sides to either score to go through to the next round or to equalise and get that lucrative replay, the sound of the crowd was such that having the radio on was like standing under a waterfall.

That was as nothing though compared to the excitement of the commentators, one of which, reporting from Firhill (home of the greatest football team on the planet – Partick Thistle), managed a textbook ‘curse of the commentator’ with the fabulous ‘the score here nil nil and likely to stay that way and Queen-Of-the-South have just scored!’. There was lots of this sort of thing and, frankly, it was probably the best ten minutes of live broadcasting I’ve ever heard. The anchor/presenter/ringmaster/conductor orchestrating the whole thing did a fabulous job and, I don’t know about him, but I was wrung out by the time it had finished and needed a sit down and a fag.

Glued to the box

2012-01-07T13:40:00.000Z

There’s a story about the very early days of cinema, when the Lumier brothers were showing footage of a steam train pulling into a station. The audience thought the train was about to run them over and fled as only startled French people can do. Looking back on this event, which is often used as an example of the shock of the new, one might be forgiven for using the term ‘quaint’ as possibly the most charitable response.

A century later and I’m in an electrical superstore, tinkering with the notion of a new telly. Naturally, one cultivates the reputation as somebody who entertains themselves via a good book or, if push comes to shove, the wireless. The truth is that books may furnish a room, but a 50 inch plasma telly would, in my opinion, enhance it still further. The problem, I discovered, is that I’d have to sell all of my books and possibly a kidney in order to afford such a telly.

But it was fun to browse. Many tellys these days come with a pair of dark glasses, not, as I thought, as some sort of ‘Blues Brothers’ gift pack, but because you can get three dee tee vee in your home. Some were better than others but, bloody hell, the LG one was something else. They were showing a showreel of various three dee things, like a baseballer hitting the ball at you, aeroplanes shooting past you and so on. And yes, I was dodging and shrieking like a girl, pointing and trying to swat away butterflies. This must have looked, to the casual observer, as hilarious as any fleeing Frenchman and trumped my previous triumph of making an arse of myself in a shop, which involved X Box Kinect and no sense of restraint.

The success of three dee tee vee is going to depend on the programming. Anything wonder of nature related is probably going to be good in three dee, especially if they rig up some sort of cheeta-cam fixed to the front of a big cat, although maybe the sight of running into a wildebeast’s arse at sixty mph is not tea-time viewing.

Sports events would be good in three dee. Sky already broadcast footie in three dee, to make the event immersive. Of course, to make it truly immersive, they should send round a hot pie at half time. Likewise, the final of Strictly was shown in three dee in cinemas. I really liked this idea, not the three dee but the idea of gathering together strictly fans in darkened rooms – it’s like the heyday of the gay club scene in NY, and the very definition of ‘fabulous’.

Indeed the future of television may not lie in three dee, smell-o-rama, rumblevision or any other gimmick, but in the collective experience of event television. And why stop at simply gathering together to watch your favourite programme? The next logical step is to develop the already established showing of certain films in certain locations and site specific theatre by developing site-specific screenings, or at least augmented screenings. For instance, which of the following would enhance your enjoyment of ‘Downton Abbey’; big tee vee? HD? 3D? Or watching it while wearing formal dining attire sat in a drawing room being served cocktails and repressing sexual longing for the girl in the flimsy dress who keeps stealing glances at you? Or no adverts?

Or maybe the future lies in interactivity, mashing up television footage with a games console. Can we really be that far away from a nature programme that shows us the wonders of the deep which and comes with a virtual fishing rod? Or the wonders of the veldt that comes with a virtual elephant gun? Actually, Ray Bradbury wrote an excellent short story about the interactive nature programmes which indicate that they are not always a great idea.

Of course, collective viewing of favourite television programmes might also mean that when somebody asks ‘what’s he been in’, an answer might be forthcoming without needing to fire up IMDB. This is especially useful in Dickens adaptations, where even the most familiar face can be buried under more whiskers than is sensible.

G&P Awards - Sport

2012-01-06T12:59:00.000Z

Sportsman of the year – it’s been a great year for sport, as long as you were not an England rugby fan. 2011’s World Cup saw the unnatural prospect of having to watch a rugby match with a cup of tea rather than a beer, then saw the startling development that you can drink beer first thing in the morning, it’s actually just social convention that frowns upon it. The tricky think was to get out of the habit when the World Cup ended, but after a few days most of us were back to nursing a beaker of coffee on the train rather than a can of Harp. While the rugby team were rather better at throwing dwarfs than the ball, there were notable successes in other fields, with records set in badger baiting and deer chasing. However, the award has to go to Richard Carello, the jockey who distinguished himself this year at meet at Chepstowe by starting on one horse and, when it started flagging, tossing another jockey off of a neighbouring horse and winning the race on his horse-jacked mount. Caarello was, quite properly, disqualified for improper use of the whip in unseating the other jockey.

G&P Awards - Science and Technology

2012-01-05T12:56:00.001Z

Innovation of the year – iSay! There was much excitement in the offices of G&P when ‘smartphones’ where introduced. This excitement was diminished when one actually started using one. They did not, it appears, automatically mute themselves during Opera. Nor did they automatically ring with an urgent, not to be ignored tone during the interminable second act of ‘De Fingermaus’, allowing one to slip away from the box and test the service at the bar. Worst of all, they did not self-erase browsing history or scramble text messages from annoyed mistresses. What, was the collective opinion, is so f**king smart about that? This all changes with the introduction of ‘apps’, an acronym of A Perfect Procrastination Solution, they are indeed supreme at wasting time. Previously, the staff of G&P thought angry birds were the ones one clipped but did not kill on a shoot, instead it turns out to be either a way for your sullen child to while away that difficult lunch when you tell him he can’t come home from Christmas after all because Daddy’s new wife does not like the way he looks at her in the hot tub, or you to while away the time during any meeting featuring a powerpoint slide with the word ‘vision’ on it. Occasionally though, there is a useful app. Such an app is iSay. iSay is an English translation app. Unlike other translation apps, that spits out tinny mechanised unintelligible versions of ‘can you show me the way to the nearest lavatory that features a Sturley and Armington flush mechanism’ and other phrases that one clearly needs abroad, it turns your phone into a PA system while at same time printing the message, dot matrix style, on the screen. So for instance, if one types in ‘would you mind awfully advising me where the railway station is please?’ it turns it into English Abroad: ‘WHERE. IS. RAILWAY. STATION!’ Now, this is doing nothing one cannot do oneself, but the clever bit is if one is having trouble being understood, one hits ‘repeat’ and gets, in this instance: ‘RAILWAY. STATION.’ ‘CHUFF CHUFF, YOU KNOW, THAT WE BUILT’ ‘Oh for fuck’s sake’. And thence on to the inevitable scuffle, local law enforcement involvement and appearance of British consulate. The G&P staff have used this in Wales and found it most effective.

G&P Awards - Food and drink

2012-01-04T12:55:00.000Z

Restaurant of the year – Lots of competition this year, from places owned by celebrity chefs that, because the celebrity chefs are off filming, shagging or filming their shagging, are actually quite good, to Modern French, which is always quite bad, from places doing simple things well to places doing complicated things well to little places that just do the best red snapper straight out of the sea. G&P has catholic tastes. That’s why honourable mention goes to La Deedah, Anton Fircups new place in Knightsbridge, simply because one can order ‘vodka luge’ as a starter and, if you book ahead, the luge is in the form of a statue of yourself, with the vodka emerging from spigot of choice. Congratulations on Anton for scooping the ‘fist date venue’ award at last month’s ‘Grazia’ awards. But we also love the family run restaurant on the Greek island of Krappos. Their red snapper recipe, which has no red snapper in it at all, is much appreciated by any tourist staying for more than a week where, because of bountiful shoals and a truly buggered economy, red snapper if just about the only thing left to eat. The winner is ‘Lennies’ on the A437 just outside Macclesfield. This unpretentious layby café serves the best bacon sandwich in England, meaning the best in the world. Lidl bacon on supermarkert value white means that the bacon grease is half way to your elbow before you have the sandwich half way to your mouth. What sets this bacon sandwich apart is the particulates from all the lorries trundling past. Try the ‘asthma attack on a plate’ the next time you are there.

Food of the year – hot scotch egg. Of course.

Drink of the year – tea. Yes, that’s right, tea. Here’s why: Beer is your go-to drink when you are feeling thirsty or it is still first thing. Red wine is fine but needs a decent roast dinner to go with it and one does not always have access to an Aga, a cook or a decent fowl. White wine used to have a reputation as being drunk by the rougher sort of homosexulaist. Now it has the reputation of being drunk by ‘Lambrini girls’. Until it is rehabilitated and it is safe to once again drink with the rougher sort of homosexulaist, it is off the list. Gin is all very well, in its place. That place is the bathtub where it is distilled and where it can also be pressed into service as dissolving evidence. Scotch is an alcohol beverage perfected by a race who have brought the abuse of their own bodies to a fine art. Think; if you wouldn’t have a piercing, a tattoo or a deep-fried mars bar inside you, why would you have any other tartan product? Other drinks are available but frankly, they are all variations on the above. Cocktails? Any of the above with enough vimto to disguise the taste. This leaves us with tea. Because; there’s a ‘phone ringing, in the White House, at two o’clock in the morning and if there’s a crisis brewing there had better be a cuppa brewing as well, when you are taking a decision about whether or not to deploy the special forces in a supposedly allied country, you do not want to be doing this with a beaker of Jim Beam in your mit, you want hot, fresh tea. And as we have been asked, the G&P blend of choice is English Breakfast with half a spoonful of camp coffee, a pinch of an OXO cube and just enough Bovril to give the beverage body. And three sugars.

G&P Awards - Culture

2012-01-03T12:53:00.000Z

Book of the year – ‘Only to be published in the event of my death’ by Christopher Hitchens is probably the most eagerly anticipated book in the Groucho Club, but in an otherwise rather dry year for publishing, where rumours of a hitherto undiscovered Stig Lasson pop-up book for children proved groundless the publishing event of the year was the publication, finally, of the last ‘Bellamy’ novel, many years after the death of the author of the Bellamy books, Deirdre ‘Dash’ Flintlock, RN. The discovery of the completed manuscript and its eventual use in the settlement of Flintlock’s estate by having one copy each sent to Flintlock’s creditors in full and final settlement was a unique approach to distribution and debt settlement. Given their relative rarity, even with the some-seventy copies that were sent to various wine merchants and pub landlords, the copies now trade hands at inflated sums, with anyone in possession of a copy of ‘Bagpipes point the way’ declaring it if not the greatest Bellamy story, then at least the equal of ‘The clockwork clergyman’, ‘Fear in the mobile library’ and even the accepted defining Bellamy novella; ‘The Smack of Skull on Willow’. Having been lucky enough to receive a copy in settlement of a debt as a result of a sporting bet (the same bet, ironically, that led to Flintlock’s untimely demise and the resulting ‘chamois leather affair’), G&P’s literary editor can confirm that in his final days, Flintlock was drinking heavily, smoking illegally and writing divinely.

Film of the year – the biggest story in film in 2011 year was that George Lucas did not release another edit of ‘Star Wars’. Possibly the campaign by fans to write down and then send Mr Lucas their most beloved childhood memories so that he can wipe his arse on them and send them back, forever corrupted, has ensured that he can now do this one a singular basis and no longer feel the need to do it collectively while at the same time destroying one of the best movies ever made. For G&P though, one film was worthy of special attention. Showing only in the small mobile cinema that travels round the few remote Scottish islands that do not consider cinema as witchcraft, the restored 1930’s documentary ‘Och Thatll Da’ (‘The Day the Herring Came’) is a silent, Celtic language, black and white documentary about the herring industry in 1930s Scotland. Unflinching in its depiction of fishing, gutting and the wearing of Fair Isle jumpers, for years the film was banned in certain parts of the world for its depiction of beards. Now though, with a new soundtrack by Philip Glass, the famous scenes such as the herring landing, the seagull attack and the infamous ‘two women go at each other with herring knives in a dispute over either a woodbine or a bloke, I can’t be too sure but Christ, she’s now topless and the other one is trying to drown her in a barrel of herring guts this is just wrong’ scene really have stood the test of time. The film, of course, went on to win the Golden Herring in Iceland as well as renewed bans in the sort of countries that have yet to accept Christ as their redeemer.

Television programme of the year – TOWIE, I’m a celebrity (note: check trades description act, benchmark: Su Pollard), the return of Big Brother. This really has been the year of ‘reality’ television. With budgets for scripts and high production values dwindling, the temptation to blow the budget on fake tan and hope for a double-page splash in ‘Heat’ was obviously tempting in 2011. A reality check on reality television this year came when one could not distinguish the ‘Iceland’ adverts that ran throughout ‘I’m a Celebrity’ from the show itself, because the people appearing in both were about as ‘famous’ as one another, and Iceland’s party platter looks like a bush tucker trial. Luckily, it wasn’t all dross. The CCTV and home-video-camera footage from the Derbyshire estate of the Eighth Duke of Monmouth’s of his gamekeepers’ seasonal battle with the poachers on the estate was perhaps the most compelling television seen on British screens for some years. Grainy, sometimes silent, occasionally narrated by either the clipped tones of a gamekeeper or the slurred voice of a poacher speaking around either a swollen mouth or a head injury, the series had many compelling moments, many of them in green night vision. Many of us learned, for the first time, that red arterial spray looks quite, quite black on light-sensitive camera. As well as the human characters – the gamekeepers such as Fowkes, Fellows, Mobb, the magnificently whiskered ‘Normal’ and of course the poachers; Scumm, Viles and ‘Agggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhmyleg’ there were animal characters, ‘Badgie’ the badger, ‘Dearie’ the dear and ‘Shipman’ the Staffordshire Bull Terror. Wonderfully anchored by Kate Humble, this was, to put it bluntly, worth the price of the license fee alone and in the G&P office gave rise to the catchphrase ‘Frozen Planet – you can stick penguins up your arse’. Not true, by the way.

Awards, rewards, honours and disgraces - people of the year

2012-01-02T15:28:00.001Z

It’s traditionally still just about the time of year where there are reviews of the past twelve months, and awards and honours are handed out to those that have made a positive contribution to society in general or the lives of the rich and influential in particular.

Here at G&P we, perhaps ironically, perhaps not, take a more egalitarian view about who and what should get an award or, shall we say, recognition. We are always pleased when somebody is honoured for outstanding contributions to the world of science, medicine or just having great hair, but do feel a little uncomfortable at the meaner awards and recognitions handed out by those who want to throw a spotlight on badness. This year, in particular, no such spotlight was needed, as bad behaviour was exposed in the full light of day.

So, in no particular order, the G&P awards for people of 2011 are:

Man of the year – lots of competition here, mainly in the shape of dead tyrants and terrorists who’s passing made the world either a better or simply a better groomed place. But without doubt G&Ps man of the year is Sconald MacDoon, the genius Glaswegian chef d’celebe who this year introduced the world to the hot scotch egg, a core of piping hot haggis surrounded by an egg, surrounded by whatever the hell it is that surrounds a scotch egg, and deep fried. The science has something to do with using the same technology that allows egg to be placed inside square pork pie and we understand that the hot scotch egg is to be official snack of the CERN team for 2012. Official snack for 2013 – Rennies.

Woman of the year – again, a year where women took centre stage, be it in CCTV footage showing a cat being placed in a wheelie bin (much more entertaining was the footage of the enraged cat being released) or Rebekka Brooks showing that you didn’t need to be smart or good looking in order to edit a national paper, all you needed was a readership slightly dimmer than you are. But the G&P woman of the year is Delcasier Fernandez, the Chipping Hombury housewife who, after a three year battle with her local council to have the street lights stay on longer and later to make the streets of her village safer for women, finally threw in the towel and instead opened a taser shop in the village. Sales have been brisk and in just three short weeks two flashers and a bloke who was out late hoping to see owls have been tasered in the goolies.

Animal of the year – while wheelie bin cat and Fenton (or to give him his full Kennel Club name ‘Fenton Fenton Jesus Christ Fenton Fenton Jesus Christ’) snatched headlines, G&P prefers to recognise working animals, be they the sniffer dogs that protect our troops in foreign parts, gun dogs of a different type that bring back the bird after a shoot, faithful hounds that savage hunt saboteurs or the weapon dogs that guard their masters’ crack dens. This year’s animal of the year is the regimental goat adopted by the Second Afgan Regiment of Foot as their mascot who, thanks to being tethered too close to a field kitchen one evening, was not just a source of regimental pride but also a sauce of regimental pride as, thanks to a bit of a cock-up in the catering department, ‘Belzie’ was served up as the winning dish in the regimental Masterchef cook-off the next day. Recipe available at www.passthesalt.co.af

G&P review of the year

2012-01-01T15:26:00.000Z

It’s traditionally the time of year where there are reviews of the past twelve months, and awards and honours are handed out to those that have made a positive contribution to society in general or the lives of the rich and influential in particular. So why not?

The Gentleman and Player review of the year.

It started off cold, with snow and stuff. It then got very warm very quickly. In May the temperatures were such that one was knocking around in shorts and tee shirts while away from the playing field or exercise class. Was this unseasonably warm weather early in the year the ‘Arab Spring’ that everyone refers to? Or is that because it made everyone dress like Mediterraneans? Either way, it was warm.

Which was good, because Summer itself, although not cool, did not live up to the expectation. I had enough barbeque gas stock piled in my shed to fuel a space shuttle launch, had NASA decided to continue with the programme. They didn’t and mankind took a giant step backwards, the space shuttle joining Concorde in the cabinet of things we used to be able to afford to run but can’t any longer. We now have to rely on the Russians to get stuff into space. This is the same people that we rely on for our supply of gas and, if their success at launching rockets is any indication of the quality of their products, it’s probably a good job I never got round to using any of the stuff to cremate some chicken legs.

Later in the year we had riots in England. The media at the time and since tried hard to suggest that the trigger for this was anger. Anger at the police, anger at the ‘haves’ by the ‘have nots’ and anger at society generally. What it seemed to be most of all was anger at plate glass windows of J B Sports shops.

The year rounded off with protest camping. Interestingly, the growth in protest camping and the need for equipment was not enough to stop ‘Blacks’, the high street camping retailer (and so presumably best placed of all to sell you stuff that would allow you to camp on the High Street) going into receivership. This demonstrates that either the campers were actually so angry with society that they looted their equipment, or they bought on-line, just like everyone else.

Oh shit, just realised that Blacks is where I buy my barbeque gas. Good job I stock-piled.

Buckle up!

2011-12-31T15:06:00.000Z

Ricky Gervaise. Not my cup of tea. Not even my pot of piss. Went to see him in Edinburgh a few years ago, where he was appearing doing stand-up in a show called ‘Science’. This has since become the benchmark against which all my other shite experiences that cost money and were profoundly unsatisfactory are measured against, replacing the previous benchmark of ‘My Crying Game Hooker Moment’. But, credit where credit is due, during one part of the show, just about at the point where it lurched from unfunny to unfunny and offensive, he used the term ‘buckle up’.

This has since passed into common…actually too common…usage in the household. Most recently it was used as the opening titles for the film ‘Girl with the dragon tattoo’ unfolded on the cinema screen.

Now, it’s probably fair to say given the popularity of the book that it was more likely that the audience for this film have read the book the film is based on than the audience viewing any other movie adaptation, apart maybe from the ‘Da Vinci Code’. But some, even most, does not mean all and looking round the theatre, there did seem to be rather a lot of ‘old dears’ in the audience.

I am not one to stereotype, I leave that to readers of the Daily Mail, but I’m guessing that if you were to ask a pensioner if they would like a trip to the cinema with their grown up children to watch a film which has been marketed as an intelligent thriller, they would say ‘yes please, and pass the Cadbury chocolate éclairs’. If, however, you asked them if they would like to come and see a film that has graphically depicted scenes of sexual violence towards women, they might choose something else to watch, or at least chew…my recommendation being a stiff sherry. By which I mean gin.

Anyone who has read the book knows about the violence, and you could sense the ‘buckle up’ moment coming as those who had read the book wondered how the scene would be dealt with. I was rather hoping for a ‘Reservoir Dogs’ style move the camera off scene, lots of horrible noises and let the audience supply the awful images in their imagination.

Nope. Instead it was full on awful.

What was odd was that the ‘revenge’ scene was just as brutal. Normally when some vile criminal gets his comeuppance, one punches the air. True, this is normally because it’s always fun to watch the Batmobile run somebody over, but also because the filmmaker understands that one goes to the cinema for entertainment, rather than trauma.

The argument for graphic depiction I suppose is that one should be unflinching in the depiction of the sort of vile act that makes the audience flinch. OK, but I think that if you are going to be graphic, you have to make sure it’s not gratuitous. The problem with the movie was that it wasn’t good enough to offset those scenes. If the rest of it had achieved the same intensity, then it would have been contextual, and for the shocked audience would have felt more consensual.

I’m not saying it was a bad movie. It’s not, it’s OK. It’s very uneven though, some actors have Swedish accents, others don’t bother. Daniel Craig is very good, and the other leads are good, the scenery is marvellous, even if it doesn’t look as good as the BBC or the Swedish ‘Wallander’.

Actually, there’s a lot of nastyness in the film, as there was in the book. As well as violence against women there’s murder, dysfunctional families, infidelity, catacide, torture and lashings of Nazis, and unrepentant Nazis at that. It’s just that it kind of gets buried under the on-screen brutality.

When the lights came up on a full house, everyone seemed fairly pleased with what they had seen. At least there appeared to be very little muffled sobbing. Maybe people do like to see adult themes tackled head on. I rather like to see Batmobiles tackle super-villains head-on and I know that’s not everyone’s cup of tea.

It’s a good film but, if you do go see…buckle up.

The Feast of Leftover

2011-12-30T14:28:00.000Z

The period between Christmas and New Year is, perhaps, the most orphaned time of year. By which I mean it is perhaps the time of year with the least significance attached to it, it is merely a period that we pass through, on our way to time of resolutions and renewed gym memberships.

This is perhaps because this slack period does not have a name. It is not really Christmas, nor is it New Year.

More probably it is because it has not yet been the work of a memorable piece of fiction. Throughout the year seasons and seconds are celebrated, especially so at this time of the year, where the simple wave of a remote control could summon any of the three versions of ‘A Christmas Carol’ playing, leaving you to settle on Alistair Sym, Patrick Stewart or muppets as your Dickens vehicle of choice. Myself, I favour Bill Murray’s outstanding performance in ‘Scrooged’.

New Year finds favour with filmmakers, featuring prominently in everything from ‘Radio Days’ to ‘When Harry met Sally’.

Or maybe it’s just the mood. Everyone is bucolic and possibly melancholic. Or maybe they are back at work and so sullen. It’s been days now since anyone had anything approaching a normal meal, featuring vegetables, and one is usually still in the process of trying to get through the Christmas booze so that one can be temptation-free come New Year and the inevitable detox.

Hence, I have decided to celebrate this time of year, which I christen The Feast of Leftover.

There are many reasons to be cheery during this period. The first is that cheeriness is not mandatory. The second is that one can lie on the sofa with one hand stirring a tin of Quality Street in the hope that there may be a toffee left among the wrappers, for hours, and not have this used as evidence in a speculative diagnosis of depression. The same goes for still sporting pyjamas and a dressing gown until well after lunch. Which brings us on to booze. It is acceptable, at this time of the year, to have a glass of port, or two, with a cheeky slice of fruit cake. On very few other occasions does such behaviour constitute ‘lunch’ but, on this occasion, one can get away with it.

Not that it is all sloth and inebriation. There are presents to be enjoyed, books to be read, high scores to be racked up and weapons and car upgrades to be unlocked.

Best of all, there is the Feast itself. If one is lucky enough to have surplus food one should also realise that it is a sin to throw away food. That is why this time of year features an unusually varied diet, as one seeks to use up all the food in the fridge before ‘normality’ returns. And it’s Christmas food too, leading one to question the wisdom of ordering so many picked walnuts. By which I mean any.

If you are excited by the prospect of having a cheese board for dinner, then this is the time of year to go for it.

The Feast of Leftover is also celebrated in our shops. This is the time of year to purchase your Christmas decorations and cards (tip: put them somewhere handy, not somewhere ‘safe’, so when you come to look for them in eleven months, there’s a chance you’ll actually be able to find the bloody things and not have to buy more), retail Christmas leftovers on sale at bargain prices or, actually, prices more suitable for what is a bit of plastic dipped in glitter. Tempting this year were the small artificial Christmas trees on sale for a couple of quid at a DIY store. I wanted to buy loads, take them home, set them up and then stomp through them pretending to be a giant, or recreate the Battle of Endor.

However you choose to celebrate this time of the year, be it with cheese, pickled walnuts or pickling your liver, may I wish you a very happy Feast of Leftover.

Now, having just seen a gap in the greetings card market, I’m off to fetch the card and crayons.

Enjoy Downton Abbey responsibly

2011-12-28T18:39:00.000Z

There are many ways in which a chap can explain his enjoyment of Downton Abbey, the reboot of the class war which aims for the grandeur of ‘Upstairs Downstairs’ in its heydey but, because it is intended for an ITV audience, is pitched rather more at a ‘you rang my lord’ sensibility and which, after all, is Julian Fellows’s attempt to do what Aarion Sorkin did with ‘the West Wing’; spin out a movie idea into a series.

As a Gentleman, one needs no excuse for watching quality costume drama, one can justify one’s close observation by criticising the wearing of a fob watch before supper, or explaining that a particular variety of gin was not actually available to the upper classes until a decade later than the scene depicted. As a gentleman however, you will need to have your excuses ready for watching a programme on ITV. Hardy dependables such as ‘my finger slipped’ or ‘the bloody remote’s not working’, such as are employed when one is discovered watching ‘babestation’ (an act of contrition if ever there was one as, has been remarked upon elsewhere, ‘babestation is essentially a reason for a complaint to Trading Standards if ever there was one’). Like late night viewing, one needs to keep the tissues handy, although one can always, when blubbing at an unexpectedly emotive scene (death of a beloved pet, anything involving rickets and a sickly maid), claim unexpected dust.

As a Player, one will be familiar with ITV. This is how you keep up with the football scores and know when Iceland have Pot Noodle on three-for-two. You will, however, have to have your excuses handy for watching a costume drama, as if discovered you may be accused of being a homosexualist, or educated. On such an occasion it does well to have a box of tissues handy, as one can claim to be knocking one out over the still lovely Elizabeth McGovan, prior to an evening of classic 80s DVDs featuring her when she was still tubby. On no account should you be caught crying while watching Downton Abbey, the shame will stick to you, like a dried tissue, forever.

There is though, one cast-iron excuse for watching Downton, and that’s the Downton drinking game.

There are two versions, ‘child’ and ‘adult’.

For the children’s version, you pick a single character and drink what they drink for each episode. I know what you are thinking – always choose a toff, as they drink more and better. A sound idea in principle, but sometimes a mistake. While a toff can do well in the cocktail and wine with dinner stakes, nobody gets through gin like a servant. Tip: if you know that the storyline may feature a maid who suspects she is pregnant, choose her and bulk-buy the Gordon’s.

The adult version takes a little more effort. You have to drink what everyone in the scene is drinking. This can involve shifting quite a few cocktails and glasses of wine, all the while ensuring that you match the servants gin for gin.

For the Christmas special I decided to go with the adult version, as this was the one time in the year that I had sufficient quantities of wine, spirits and no-work-the-next-morning to play the adult game. I think I was doing alright up to the shoot, but then I think there was drinking, or maybe it was one of the extras in the background having a snort? Was it a shoot or a hunt? I know that people drink an awful lot while hunting because a) without killing a fox you’ve got to get your jollies somehow b) nobody gets in the saddle and gallops over the countryside sober and c) when your horse rears and tosses you into some farm machinery that was parked the other side of a bramble hedge, it’s better to be pre-anesthetised.

The upshot was that the game was an unqualified success but I now need to watch Christmas at Downton again, as I fear I may well have missed a few, if not all, very major plot points.

(The alternative is to take a drink of your choice every time some costume drama incident happens. Depending on your character this can be, for instance, somebody saying ‘iPod’ instead of ‘gramaphone’, or downing a shot every time you spot repressed longing. If it’s poofs, that’s a double! If it’s lesbians…down the bottle and Game Over.)

From vine to wine, it's all fine

2011-12-03T13:41:00.003Z

This has been, in every way, a ripe year for British fruit. The harvest has been bountiful and the fruit itself, taking an invented figure, at least 20% plumper and juicier than average. On the Imperial measure, that's at least one third of a smiling child more than normal and on the Summerisle scale, it means that demand for virgin sacrifices is down one on previous years.

The branches have hung heavy with fruit and the hedgerows were busy with birds at first flitting from branch to branch, then lunging from branch to branch before finally crashing heavily from branch to branch as their now almost spherical forms provided inspiration for any passing app maker. While in the supermarket the bumper harvest brought about by unseasonable, unreasonable but very welcome warm Autumn weather went unnoticed because while more of a product should mean it gets cheaper, rocketing diesel prices meant that transporting the stuff from farm to shop was getting more expensive, it was very noticeable in the fields, in those little roadside stalls you get when you travel the back roads, in the increase in demand for sugar, glass jars and other jam making accessories (jam making kitchens, the crystal meth labs of the English middle classes), and in back gardens.

Especially mine. This was the year that Jeremy, my vine, came good.

Not to say that in previous years he's not tried, it's just that this year he's had help.

Previously, Jeremy has fruited, with tiny buds slowly turning into grapes and those green grapes turning a luscious deep, dark purple (causing me to look again at Jeremy's tag and try to recollect if I had intended to buy a white-wine, sorry, a green grape vine, and had accidentally grabbed the wrong stalk in the garden centre. Of course it may have been that three or four years ago I was going through a red wine phase, which would certainly explain both my choice and my inability to either recollect my intention or to grab the right vine if green grapes had been my intention), I looked on them with pride, turned my back, heard a grey whoosh and turned back to see no grapes and a grape-laden squirrel shooting up a tree, just out of twatting-with-a-spade range.

This year, however, a more relaxed attitude to regimenting the garden has led to the borders growing in a 'wild garden' fashion. The idea was to encourage wildlife such as butterflies and bees, while freeing up valuable drinking time by avoiding excess pruning or trimming. Have no fear though, my lawn has been kept in pristine condition and could, at any time, have been pressed into service as a surface to play croquet, bowls, cricket, polo or, after one particularly close pass with the mower, snooker, on. The move towards wild gardening has led to the arrival of sentinel cats who, apparently, like nothing better than to curl up in the long grass and snooze away the afternoon, watched resentfully by squirrels who are now too scared to enter the garden. Hence the vine has been unmolested and hence there has been a bountiful harvest of grapes.

The cats are tolerated not just because they are even better squirrel deterrent than me running round the garden in my pants swinging a shovel round my head and screaming my dread squirrel-slaying war cry of 'Die Tufty Dieeeeeeeeeeee!' but because they don't crap in the garden. I have nothing against cats in and of themselves, after all, spinsters need love too, but I do have an objection to animals that crap in my garden. Obviously, these cats are fastidious and have decided that nothing puts a cramp in your nap when you are entirely covered in fur quite like poo. This is plainly a view shared by the fox that also took up residence for a short spell this summer, and who could be seen snoozing in the sunshine, moving only when the setting sun threw a long shadow across the lawn and he was required to pick himself up, wander a few yards into the sunshine, and drop down again. I thought for years that foxes drew their energy from bin raids and leftover chicken tikka masala, but apparently they are solar powered. So an uneasy peace reigned in my back garden in the summer of 2011, with the fox, the cats and myself all studiously ignoring one another's existence. I've no idea if the truce will be last and fear some sort of fur, fangs and faeces version of a Tombstone showdown moment next time round.

For this year though, all was calm, the only sounds the uncorking of lunch, the occasional sizzle of a sausage on the barbecue and the sound of my tomato plants, and Jeremy, growing. If ever there was a year for growing tomatoes, this was it. It's amazing that water plus sunshine can equal fruit, and free fruit at that. The things grew even taller than I am, and by August I had had to construct a Heath-Robinsonesque framework of bamboo canes held together with gardening twine to support the vertical and horizontal growths. By the time the crop was done I think there was more bamboo than tomato plant but the result was pleasing not only in the sense of getting free food, but of course the blokish sensation of having built something. The tomatoes tasted great, although the choice to go with two varieties, one that is traditional red when ripe and one that is yellow, caused some early confusion in trying to determine when a yellow tomato is ripe - answer: when it's very yellow.

Getting back to vines though, lets be clear, a vine has but two purposes; shade and booze. In sunny countries, like England in 2011, they are just the job for curling around your pergola or hastily lashed together framework of bamboo canes in order to provide welcome shade. Shade under which one can, if one wishes, set up a table and some chairs, and perhaps serve some cheese, with the wine of your choice. That's breakfast sorted, now all that remains is to call into work with a croaky voice, kick back and make the most of the day. Jeremy is not quite up to this yet, he was curled around my shed instead, but he is up to making wine! With a little help.

I have a friend who makes wine. Well, let me clarify, I have a friend who makes alcohol and alcohol products. To him, nature is something to be washed, peeled, sliced and then put into a bucket with a pound of sugar and some yeast, left in a shed for a couple of weeks, strained, matured in a bottle for as long as his patience can bear, and then drunk. He has made alcoholic drinks out of cherries, pears, rhubarb and, rumour has it, on one occasion a fox that was not quite quick enough after crapping on his vegetable patch. But never grapes. His vine has, mysteriously, always failed to produce grapes, even this summer.

So, I had a harvest of grapes but no knowledge of how to make wine, and he has all the gear and a good idea, but no grapes. So it was that we entered into an agreement, I would harvest and supply the grapes, he'd do all the hard work and we'd split the result half and half.

The process of wine making only fuelled the expectation of the result. I delivered the grapes to my winemaker and left him to undertake the initial stages. This resulted, a couple of weeks later, in a large bucket of grape juice. We then spent an evening straining the stuff into another bucket, while the dregs were retained. My wine buddy had a plan for those. The resulting strained wine juice was added to another bucket, sugar and yeast was added, a mysterious instrument called a hydrometer was used, more sugar was added, the lid was put on the bucket and the whole thing was returned to the shed.

Sheds have featured largely. Jeremy put on a growth spurts this summer and wrapped himself around my shed, while the fruit has turned to wine in a shed. With this in mind, various names for the wine were considered and rejected ('Vin diesel', 'Van Bloody Ordinary', Vin-mto', 'Grim grape') before we settled on the inevitable 'Shed red'. I think that the close involvement of sheds at every stage has leant a certain something to the wine itself, as it fermented away I was imagining that it would have notes of compost, porn and creosote.

Of course, as with all this home made stuff, potency can be a problem. I tried a glass of his rhubarb wine on holiday and lost the power of speech after half a glass, the use of common sense after the rest of the glass and the use of my ability to climb stairs after a second glass. Good stuff. I think.

Come decanting day, we had moved out of the bucket stage, which was something of a relief. While the reality of actually making something usually demystifies the product, and while the sieving, pouring and standing well back as the yeast and sugar got it on was tremendous fun, there is only so much romance to be had from a plastic bucket. But glass demijohns and tubes - this was much more like it.

The resulting wine is actually a rose, a beautiful pink, like the blush of a convent school girl just having her first inappropriate thought about the captain of the netball team. This was rather unexpected considering how dark the grapes were and one wonders exactly how dark the grapes are that produce those really deep red wines, I suspect most of them are beyond the visible spectrum.

I was told by my winemaker that the result tasted like a Beaujolais nouveaux. This would make perfect sense, as that is a wine synonymous with being drunk practically before the corks are hammered into the bottles. The idea for shed red, like all home made wine, is that you make it, bottle it and then forget about it for at least a year.

However, given all the excitement about this vintage, we had to try it. I would say that the result is...interesting. It certainly packs a punch and resembles nothing so much as a light and fruity lunchtime wine crossed with battery acid and the sort of spirit that one buys at a car boot sale to clear your car windscreen of frost, or possibly a home made cure for removing warts, stubborn stains and all traces of life in any awkward family member. Having said that, we finished the bottle.

I believe the correct term for the resulting wine is 'young'. Like all wines it should be allowed to mature and I have to say that putting it away has already improved it tremendously, in that I don't have to drink the stuff. At present, it's enough to look at it, sitting there gathering potency, and feel a warm glow of achievement and not just a little frisson of anxiety about what the stuff is going to taste like in a years time.

The skins and stalks, by the way, were not wasted. Rather, this was used to make grappa. Grappa is, as anyone who has ever shuddered their way to a pulled muscle after sipping the stuff will know, notoriously vile. If it tastes goodj, you're not doing it right. It's supposed to be made of the leftovers when you have made wine and it is supposed to be rough as a mountain goat's arse in Lithuania's goat shagging season. Thus, the bar had not been set high, or had been, depending on your point of view. When the Shed Red was bottled the grappa was still in the bucket stage of the process, so we all trooped out to the shed for a sip. Itw was sublime. I think that served chilled, ideally so chilled that you don't actually taste it, it would actually be excellent.

Degas at the ballet at the Royal Academy

2011-11-19T19:21:00.002Z

The first thing you notice when you strap on your audio tour at the Royal Academy's blockbuster autumn exhibition 'Degas at the ballet' is that you have been mispronouncing 'Degas' for years as day-gah. Apparently, if you are qualified enough to record an audio tour for the RA then you are qualified enough to risk pronouncing it 'Digger'. Little did I know that this master of capturing movement and Parisian dancers is apparently the most famous Australian painter since Rolf Harris.

I love audio tours, and in this case, with the subject so often the ballet, the audio tour really lends to the sense of occasion. You have the ballet dancers on the canvas, ballet music in your ears and, by the time you reach the final gallery, every little girl in the place is attempting ballet poses, inspired by the images and dreaming of being the next Darcy Bussell or Angelina Ballerina, depending on cultural reference points or age.

Back on the walls, I was coming to the conclusion that Digger certainly had some chops. His paintings include devices to lead your eye around the picture, with figures and structures vanishing out of frame. My personal favourite was a painting of a night at a ballet about, this being France, naughty nuns. In the foreground of the picture the great and the; good bearded ballet goers sit and chat or watch the nuns whirling, their movements blurred in an uncanny anticipation of trying to capture fast motion on film. One of the patrons is in profile, holding a pair of opera glasses and directing his gaze not to the stage but sideways, out of frame to, one supposes, his mistress's box.

With its capturing of a moment in time, of society, of movement and music, it's a stunning piece of art, but if you had commissioned a painting of a famous ballet that included erotic nuns, and were presented with portraits of a bunch of old blokes, one might feel a little ripped off.

Digger's painting career was taking off at the same time as the development of photography, both still and moving, and the science of photography was just turning into an art. The exhibit was as much about photography as it was about girls in tutus and in terms of informing context, was excellent. What was also clear was the beauty of the cameras back in the early days, little mahogany cameras that were more furniture than something to snap your holiday photographs.

One of the things that most impressed was the 360 degree portrait. Surrounded by cameras, the subject was photographed from all angles simultaneously. It's a pity that they had to wait another hundred years before the technology would exist to animate these and project them as a film, as I reckon the Matrix movies would have been greatly improved if Neo was a portly gentleman wearing a top hat and a beard the size of a cumulus cloud.

The paintings were, though, magnificent. This was the greatest painter of the dancing figure painting at a time where the world of capturing movement was changing forever. Even more wonderful than the paintings were the sculptures, originally created as wax figurines for reference and private contemplation, cast in bronze they were simply stunning.

One could not help but wonder about Digger's sexuality. Luckily, for somebody who spent so much of his time painting young ballet dancers, he appears to have been a confirmed fan of musical theatre. At least I could see no reference to a marriage, then again, if I was famous, and with a flick of a brush make a ballet dancer famous too, why get married? Private in his habits, most of the pictures of him are from his own experiments with photography, showing him and his friends either sitting stiffly for portraits, or clowning around for the camera. The catalogue also has a photograph of him emerging from a gent's loo, the significance of this is not clear and parallels with former Wham! front man George Michael end there as, as far as I am aware, Digger never got out of his skull on weed and decided to drive his horse and carriage at speed into a photo booth or whatever it was.

My one complaint - it was not French enough (there were French people there, enjoying themselves, who had no doubt come by Eurostar to see how a really good exhibit is curated), although the final film, a ten second loop of Digger being papped on his doorstep, was good, the street was full of French people and signs for little bakeries and coffee shops, and it was so Parisian you could almost smell the dog shit, but the Van Gough exhibition was the equivalent of gargling with red wine and rubbing onions underneath your armpits, it was that French.

Pramping in St Paul's

2011-11-16T19:19:00.001Z

It's Occupied London are, I suppose, protesting about the dire dearth of decent public loos in the capital, and quite right too. It's bad enough that public loos are few and far between, with those super-loo monstrosities dotted around the place like, literally, a shit TARDIS, but one can't even be assured of a decent loo if one employs the popular tactic of dodging into a pub, pretending to be a customer and using the facilities. Even perfectly decent boozers seem seem unable to maintain a perfectly decent gent's. In the case of the place I was in last week, going to the gent's was like wandering into a coastal cave at low tide, it was gloomy, the floor was wet and there was a prominent odour.

Of course, there is also I believe a faction within the protesters who represent Occupy London. Like their hipster brethren across the Atlantic in New York, they are protesting that the banks have all the money and won't give it to people like them to, presumably, buy bigger tents. They are angry, but not as angry as the people who think that the architectural and spiritual magnificence of St Paul's cathedral is really not improved by being surrounded by quite a lot of nylon in jolly primary colours.

The prampers outside St Paul's cathedral are doing a fantastic job of drawing attention to how crap the Church of England are at taking a hard line on using a holy water cannon to wash the protesting scum off the streets, while at the same time neatly deflecting attention away from the bankers down the street who are fucking up the economy through their trademarked working methods of greed, stupidity and spending the afternoon wandering round in a coked-up daze after doing a couple of lines off of a sweaty hookers arse in the company car park during lunch.

The media has made much of the prampers. Apparently they go home in the evening, leaving their tents behind. I trust that the local homeless population are aware that a load of comfy middle class tents, presumably with iPod docks and cool boxes full of sustaining snacks and indifferent wines, are available for occupation at St Paul's. Let's see if the protestors are quite so happy to occupy a tent that has been used overnight by Dosser Dave and his incontinent dog Digger. And I hope that when the protestors do eventually pack up and leave, they check the tents first. Nothing would put a crimp in your first day at the Glastonbury festival quite like shaking out your two-man 'Mountain Master 4000' and discovering a desiccated tramp. And his dog.

Whatever you think of people who camp in the centre of the city, they are bloody irritating. The council, police and church all appear powerless to get rid of the tents. In my experience, the best way to remove campers is to start charging them exorbitant rents for their pitches. All St Paul's needs to do is become a National Trust property and it's problem solved.

The other way to remove tents is of course for the weather to turn bad, although I expect that foul weather in England in November is too much to ask for (and the ongoing mild weather could be taken as a sign that the protest has some sort of higher approval). Maybe they need an act of God. A few days of rain and I don't care how committed the protestors are, they'll soon beat the twat singing Coldplay to death with his own lute and buggered off to the nearest decent pub.

Beer beer beer

2011-11-12T16:26:00.001Z

Stopping in at the Adnams 'cellar and home' shop at Holkham, I had a revelation. When wandering the 'cellar' part (much more interesting, there is only so much excitement one can summon for napkins, while beer, wine and gin is a source of constant delight) I saw that their idea of preparing for Christmas was to try and flog more beer.

Rather than try the genius marketing trick I have always favoured when justifying loading the supermarket trolly to the point when the back axle is dragging along the floor of wondering aloud 'do I want to be forever remembered as the host of the party where the booze ran out?' (now though, with the 'Shed Red' sitting maturing in a cupboard, I fear being the host who's guests we reduced to drinking the home brew), they go for the straightforward 'a keg and a tray, it's the Adnams party way'.

That's right, a keg and a tray. Not a keg. Not a tray. A keg and a tray! I am now gravely concerned that without a keg and a tray, I won't be able to party the Adnams way, which I presume means falling asleep pissed behind the sofa at some point.

I have always rather liked kegs, one has has that fabulous need to finish the damn thing on the same night that it is tapped, or it loses fizz or turns to slurry or something. I suppose it harks back to when we had sensible licensing hours and drinking against the clock was a real and valued skill.

Also, one can get several kegs and pretend to be a landlord. Is their anything quite so satisfying as barring one of your own mates?

Fat Faced

2011-11-09T16:24:00.000Z

I have been accused of finding 'Fat Face' 'just in time'. I was going to deny the accusation, but as I sat there in my cargo shorts, tee shirt and hoodie all from the aforementioned shop, I think I would have been short on evidence, even if I was, as always, long on indignation. I decided to sulk instead.

Whoever came up with the Fat Face brand is a marketing genius. The business model is simple - make young persons' clothes in middle-aged persons' sizes, and staff the shop with young people who can keep a straight face when they see their hundredth bloke of the day holding in his gut as he tries on a shirt.

Their slogan is 'it's never too late to become what you've always wanted to be' or something. I hate to argue, but judging by the way I nearly passed out the last time I had to run for my train, it is now too late for me to do anything athletic enough to bring me the sort of success and recognition necessary to get lucrative sponsorship, a video game franchise and a fizzy drink or shoe named after me, so allowing me to stop doing whatever it was that made me sweaty yet wealthy and allow me instead to recline on the sofa, watching DVD box sets and eating cheese.

Let's be clear, cargo pants should not go up to a size forty waist. If you want to dress like a surfer dude, you should be willing to exercise, do crystal meth, or both.

As for me, whether I found it just in time or not, I am just happy that they always seem to have something on the sale rack, and that their clothes are so comfy, even if it means I do look like the shitest surfer ever.

VW camper of delight

2011-11-05T16:16:00.001Z

Like every normal adult male, the Lego catalogue drops through my door on a regular basis. A slim but gratifyingly glossy publication, it tends to shy away from listing the 99p minifigs and other pocket money sets widely available in the toy shops of the shires and focus more on limited edition monstrosities designed to appeal to dads who think their child could benefit from a Death Star large enough to pose a real crushing hazard to their toddler. These toys are only available in the community of Online, near I believe the settlement of Internet and connected with what I understand is termed a superhighway. Essentially the peak of mankind's technical achievements mean that you can get plastic brick kits that cost two hundred and fifty quid delivered to your door.

Sitting comfortably I flicked through the pages. It was the usual stuff designed to appeal to the adult Lego enthusiast, that is, anyone who is of an age lucky enough to count 'slave Liea' rather than Jar Jar Binks as a formative experience, and then...what's this? A VW camper van, in Lego. For only eighty quid!

http://shop.lego.com/en-GB/Volkswagen-T1-Camper-Van-10220

There is something slightly queasy about the ultimate symbol of anti-establishment freedom (most VW campers come ready spray painted with the CND symbol on the side, a Greenpeace sticker instead of a tax disc and a handy storage compartment to hide your weed) costing eighty quit in Lego form. Surely anyone with eighty quid is better of buying, as Malcolm Tucker put it 'a goat the whole village can fuck', rather than a Lego kit that, once assembled, is at best going to sit there gathering dust (and writing as the owner of a Lego X Wing, I write with authority...and yes, of course I love it, it's a Lego X Wing, when the house is empty I recreate the Death Star trench run in my hallway) and at worst is going to be a constant nagging reminder that you don't own a real one.

Men dream of owning a real VW camper van. It's the ultimate symbol of freedom and of picking up hippy girls and having uninhibited sex with them. Maybe though, the joy of the open road is best experienced as a journey of imagination. On the open road of the mind there are no speed cameras and no BMWs, there are loads of places to pull over and enjoy the view, there are still Little Chefs and there are still happy hippy hitch hikers.

Still want one though.

A bloggable offence - kebab couple

2011-11-02T21:22:00.000Z

So what goes in a blog? Easy, if you have a themed blog, reviewing sandwiches (especially exciting at seasonal holidays when festive flavours and 'special editions' are on offer, who can forget the 'Sandwich Nook' festive offering from Christmas 2008; the 'Lapland loaf' that, when the filling was discovered, became known as the 'red Rudolph' and known to parents as 'the reason my child cried to the point of dehydration'. Ill advised as it was to use an animal that appears on Christmas cards as a sandwich filling, that was as nothing to the fuss their 'Wind in the willows' triple decker caused. That, and the surprising discovery many made that lots of people are allergic to badger, is the reason you don't see any 'Sandwich Nook' shops on the high street any more) or something where your stimulus is supplied on a regular basis. More problematic where the blog is about as focused as a fog bank, but less of a problem if your supply of happy pills has dried up and you can find something to be articulately outraged about on a daily basis and use the blog as a therapeutic rant which doubles as an economic measure, relieving you of the necessity of purchasing a stamp to mail your paranoid ramblings to the Daily Telegraph, or more likely from the stress-inducing deadlines one faces as a columnist on the Daily Mail.

I like themed blogs. I love those blogs that review things, like toilet roll or instant pot meals, and really love the enthusiasm and delight that the writers convey when, having exhausted the supply of martial on the shelves of national chain supermarkets, they discover regional chains and independents selling different brands, then start buying foreign brands on the internet. I'm not sure what I'd like to review least, an instant pot meal from an unlikely country with a GDP measured in goats that hasn't had an election since the British packed up and left, or toilet roll from the sort of place where the President gets driven around in a stretch tractor and the currency is a root vegetable. All I know is, if I had eaten the former, I'd be grateful for a large supply of the latter.

Ultimately, when not blogging about something; a favourite television show, books, films, comics, chocolates, rabbits, hinges, wigs, shoes, ducks, being left handed in a right handed world, having one of those blogs where you record a something-of-the-day like your poo or your kids' paintings or something else that really, really, really, is only of interest to you and even then should not be of that much interest, or if you just post occasional pictures of kittens, then blogging tends to be about nothing. A random thought, experience or image captured forever and recorded for posterity.

Like the other night, in the kebab shop.

I like my kebab shop. I know the chaps, the chaps know me. We grunt our greetings and at Christmas exchange mumbled compliments of the season. I don't go to the kebab shop for social intercourse, I go to the kebab shop for a kebab, or occasionally a burger, and for chips. The kebabs really are excellent and I should clarify that they are not purchased when I'm drunk or consumed when weaving down the street leaving a trail of dropped onion slices, the snail trail of the kebab consuming inebriated, but rather provide a delightful alternative to cooking ones own dinner and, importantly, bring a touch of that 'going out for dinner' sensation but with the added bonus that one can eat dinner at home (and my idea, Dragons, is for a restaurant chain where the seating is not the traditional table and chair set up, but rather a sofa, a telly and a couple of trays, and which will serve customers who wish to wear pyjama bottoms).

This night the couple ahead of me in the kebab shop looked young, groomed, and in that stage of their relationship where personality kinks are endearing rather than bloody irritating. Giggling like freshly medicated loons and touching each other like a pair of grooming monkeys, they eventually made their choice of supper.

A kebab.

To share.

It was, I think, difficult to decide what it was about their behaviour that I found most contemptible, hence the blog entry, to order my thoughts.

That a man would share his kebab is bad. That any self-respect woman would be seen with a man who would share his kebab is bad. That when faced with the 'let's just order one portion and two spoons' challenge, the bloke folded, is bad - but understandable, he will learn later that it's better to put a stop to that kind of behaviour early on rather than have to explain at some later date that he ordered the cheesecake because he wants a slice of cheesecake, and that if she also wants cheesecake, then please tell the nice man with the order pad that she wants cheesecake, not an extra spoon, unless she intends to help herself from food from a neighbouring table, because she sure as hell isn't getting any cheesecake and...why are you crying?

Written down, I realise that my thoughts were as mean as they were unnecessary. On balance it's better that young couples touch each other in kebab shops and, presumably, feed each other morsels of kebab once home. I expect to find kebabs, burgers, chips, a warm welcome and slightly shameful fellow customers at the kebab shop, I don't expect to find romance. So maybe my reaction was shock.

But I maintain that it's a bad idea to share your kebab.

Postcard from Norfolk – Farm Shop again

2011-10-14T21:29:00.005+01:00

The final visit to the farm shop, to stock up on fresh, muddy, fruit and veg before going home. While I was there, fondling the apples so large one feels like a borrower, a delivery van pulled up. Nothing unusual in that but this was, if the sign painted on the side was to be believed, delivering 'rare breed cuts'. Getting rarer all the time I would say. I'm not sure if the best way of pressing a breed is to ensure that members of it are sliced up and served up with chips, but I guess the farmers know what they are doing. Maybe if we discovered tigers were delicious, farmers would rear them, although it would take one fucking tough dog to round them up.

Postcard from Norfolk – Burnham Market

2011-10-13T21:29:00.004+01:00

The Hoste is a good English pub selling good beer in a good atmosphere with good free wifi. The pub derives a good income from the drinkers, the guests in the hotel, the visitors to the new spa (the hot tub did look like fun, what's better than drinking cold champagne in front of a warm fire? Drinking cold champagne in a hot tub!) and the diners, but may well be on some sort of commission scheme with the traders in the town. Certainly, my resolve was weakened with the three pints of lunch that I enjoyed there, and on leaving I strolled back to the second hand bookshop to pick up the two books I had decided not to buy earlier in the day.

Only cost me a tenner and I am looking forward to reading the books, but I wonder if the same thing happens with those who want back to the more expensive shops. This might explain how cashmere shorts are sold.

Postcard from Norfolk – Sheringham

2011-10-12T21:28:00.006+01:00

A rare rainy day in North Norfolk. The principal attractions of North Norfolk are, if you like vast expanses of beach and waves, to be found outdoors. Indoor activities such as drinking are of course great fun, but can't be sustained beyond a few hours and are best enjoyed after a good walk. So when the rain came on, the alternative to soaking up the weather on a beach was to head for Sheringham for a trawl along the Hugh street.

Sheringham is the home of some rather excellent shops, although the second hand bookshop and the little grocers has gone, the former I don't know why and the latter probably a victim of the Sainsbury's that has opened up on the high street.

The town is also home to one end of the North Norfolk Railway. This is run by enthusiasts and runs steam trains up and down a length of line from Sheringham to Holt, although now that it is connected to the national network again, there is the delicious prospect of one day just steaming to Scotland for the hell of it. Certainly steam was up today, meeting with the low cloud. Despite the rain the sight of a steam train always gladdens the heart and the platform was crowded with, if I am honest mainly men, taking pictures of the train, the engine, the carriages and each other.

The NNR run specials, such as the Santa special and the Halloween special. Wheat I'd really love to see is the dinner special, where there is fine dining on a train rather than the usual grimly microwaved snack, or the thriller killer murder mystery specials here the whole train is a rolling whodunit mystery theatre. And what I'd really like to see happen is occasionally switching evenings around, so that half way through the soup course the diners are confronted with a body, and a selection of character suspects including a mysterious oriental gentleman, a femme fatal, an aristocratic big game hunter and a vicar. In the absence of a butler of course, the conductor would have to have done it.

Postcard from Norfolk – Postcards and bookshops

2011-10-11T21:28:00.006+01:00

Writing a postcard, by which I mean a real postcard rather than a self indulgent and self referential blog entry about how I such the salt off my chips before eating them, if something of an art. You have a small space in which to convey much, so there's a quandary; does one go for wit, or brevity, or both? Or does one attempt to condense a best selling travel book into the space allowed? Should one confine oneself to a weather report and, if so, how truthful should one be? Or should one simply go for something the postman will enjoy reading?

Longer than a tweet, shorter than a letter, the postcard is, along with the Christmas card, the analog version of Internet communication. Essentially, the modern craze for forwarding pictures of kittens in hats with captions heavy on the use of the letter zed is just a cheap and lazy modern incarnation of sending relatives a saucy seaside postcard.

Given the utter dominance of texting and the ability to send e mails and pictures from your smartphone,it's good that postcards continue to thrive as a edits of communication. This is, I think, because that are considered to be the same as Christmas or birthday cards, something that are sent as well as a text rather than instead of. Nothing conveys the message 'we are on holiday and you are not' like a card depicting a handful of picturesque cottages on the front and a message on the back about drinking lots of tea. I always make sure that I leave a red wine ring stain on the back of the card, I am actually thinking about having a special stamp made.

There are two approaches to postcard sending. The first is to buy a shedload on day one, go to the pub and get it all over with in one mail shot. This is environmentally sound, as it allows you to recycle the same remarks over and over to different people. The alternative is to go for the episodic approach, which means sending a postcard a day and developing a theme, such as a beer forecast, reviewing a different beach every day or, my favourite, explaining how you are developing a relationship with the pretty girl in the post card shop by buying one every day.

As much fun as sitting in the pub writing is, sitting in the pub reading is even more fun, which is why, despite it lacking a fish and chip shop, Burnham Market is fast becoming one of my favourite places to visit; one spends half an hour in the Brazen Head book shop, then repairs to the Hoste to flick through ones purchases, while drinking beer.

The second hand book shop is the home of the unexpected treat. Visiting today I picked up a Tom Wolfe book that I've never even heard of, and a NEL edition of 'Assignment in eternity'. I really do hope that you can tell a book by its cover because this one is a corker, showing a rocket blasting off from a city, in a bubble, on the moon! It is the perfect science fiction book cover. Who could resist?

It also prompted something of a revelation - I like books more than I like reading. Peering over the shoulders of people on the train I have been very impressed by the kindle e book reader. The screen can be read in direct sunlight and it is pleasingly small and looks comfortable to hold. If I liked readying, I would have one and download books to it at a reasonable price. But I like books. A book is an artefact, not a stream of electrons. Maybe I am a showing my age but surely anyone who has written a book dreams of it one day appearing in print rather than on screen.

More than that though, will there be a second hand market for e books? Even if there is, even if we end up with an on line store curated by some caring individual who groups the books in a manner conducive to e browsing that leads one to unexpected treasures, it's unlikely that inside the front cover will be somebody's name and age, or, my favourite, a slip of paper explaining that this copy of 'A Pilgrim's Progress' was awarded to somebody as a prize for growing the largest marrow in the school garden.

Kindle readers lack charm (the device, not the people). Worst of all, they lack covers - I like rockets, science fiction and cities in bubbles and I don't want to be deprived of looking at a dramatic depiction of same before opening up the book to continue the adventure.

Postcard from Norfolk – Amusements

2011-10-10T21:28:00.009+01:00

My friends have car pets. A stuffed toy pig and a stuffed toy donkey. When they give me a lift anywhere it normally takes me between thirty and fifty seconds to annoy them by simulating intercourse between the two and speculating about the resulting pigley or donig.

They have decided that I need some car pets too, as the assorted coffee cups, old newspapers and magazines and paperbacks that adorn any of the flat surfaces of my car are not, they think, conducive to soothing travel. I point out to them that I am a bloke and that a glove compartment full of wine gums is of much gather importance to me than a soft toy, but grudgingly admit that in a snoozing emergency, a car pet can play the part of a piggy pillow.

So it's off into Hunstanton to win some car pets which is, I soon discover, nothing but a very thin excuse to visit the amusement arcade on the seafront. Mo properly, the amusements are on the stub, which I believe is the correct technical term for the area where the pier joined the esplanade, until salt corrosion and a particularly stormy night turned Hunstanton's premier attraction into a scrap metal bonanza.

I love amusement arcades and, at this one a little bit of Vegas comes to Hunstantion. A very little bit. The arcade is small, but they have managed to fill it with a truly fit-inducing collection of machines that flash, beep and chirp.

There are many varieties of the traditional seaside game here. Like the grab claw, except you have to win an arcade game first before you can activate the claw. It was actually a lot of fun, and not a little tense because the skill was to try and wring at least thirty seconds enjoyment from the machine for your fifty pee. I was concentrating so hard that I forgot to breath, it was great.

There were also the traditional copper falls, where the suspicion is that they use magnets so strong this is where the guys at CERN came to study. I was, for a shirt time, in the grip of 'copper madness' (not the medical complaint suffered by those who steal signalling equipment and suffer one electric shock too many as a result but rather a delight in seeing your two pee start a little fall of coppers), with my pot of two pences and my stupid gambler's grin.

They obviously believe in starting them young here, as helpfully the management had provided stools for toddlers to stand on and gamble away their parents' benefits. It's a shame though that even standing on a stool, the kids are not quite on eye level with the tiny 'gamble aware' signs that adorn the gloomier corners of the arcade.

It did make you wonder though, with the prizes in the copper falls constituting mostly of lollies, sweets and branded children's television character toys, if the amusement is not being a wee bit cynical. Are they exploiting children, or is a casino for toddlers actually quite cool?

Nope, it's sinister.

Of course, there is the suspicion that the professions wait Neil you have loaded the copper falls to the point where the bloody thing has to pay out big time...but stubbornly refuses to, and then swoop in when you huff off in disgust. Nothing adds to that arcade experience quite like hearing a waterfall of coin and the whoops of delight of somebody winning on the machine you just vacated. There should be a technical term for it but until I learn it 'coinbagging' will have to do.

It was, though, tremendous fun. OK so the falls are probably rigged but how much fun were they? And for a quid you could have about ten minutes entertainment, longer if you win. And I finally know what to do with all of my loose change. The days of carefully bagging it up and heading to the bank to change it up, or of using one of those machines in the supermarket that charge you the sort of commission normally associated with boutique merchant banks to change it into notes are over. From now on I am taking all my coins to the arcade on my annual holiday, the only flaw in the plan being that I'll need the money to pay for the petrol to get my consequently heavier car there.

Finally, once you stagger out into the sunshine after gambli the afternoon away in the beeping twinkly arcade of delight, you can continue the Vegas theme by going to Anzam’s seaside boutique for your hooker shoes.

Postcard from Norfolk – Cider and crabbing

2011-10-09T21:28:00.006+01:00

It's common practice in Norfolk for any excess fruit to be left by your front gate on a little stall, with an old ice cream carton pressed into service as an honesty box. It was good to see this same practice extended to a grander scale when we visited Wells.

The Whin Hill cider shop at Wells is next to the town's big car park. I have parked many times but never been inside. This time, however, I was accompanied by some home brew enthusiasts. And when I say enthusiasts, I mean this chap will attempt to make alcohol out of anything. Cherries, pears, apples, all are rich sources of fermentation and eventual alcoholic delight. This is the chap who is turning my estate's grapes into 'shed red' this year, with the application of little more than ingenuity, yeast, a bucket and a shed. So naturally when he saw a real live car shop, he was off.

It was actually very pleasant, with that unpretentious air that surrounds any place that makes alcohol (does that explain whoso many places that sell it are pretentious, are they trying to make up for a perceived deficiency?), one shed held a cider press, the other a label printer. A third shed held a bloke, his dog, and some samples.

While my friends sampled the cider, swapped tales of booze making and stroked quite the fattest Labrador I seen in Norfolk (land of the vast beach and well walked dog), I took a look at the barrels of apples in the courtyard. This year has been, as all we wine makers know, a bumper harvest not just for grapes but for everything. The barrels were full of excess apples and a small sign invited you to help yourself. They were not for sale, just help yourself and if you want to make a small donation to one of the local charities, there are some collecting tins on the counter. I think that, apple for apple, I probably paid more for the half dozen I picked up that I've ever done in any supermarket. I think that, apple for apple, I've never tasted better.

We were in Wells to visit the chandlery, looking for toasty knit ware. To reach the chandlery, you walk along the quay, which was lines with crabbers. If there is any pastime that is the very definition of hope over expectation, it's crabbing. Standing there with a line dangling in the water and a bucket next to you, one wonders if, in the unlikely event of catching a crab, it would be a wise course of action to go on to convert the little fellow to a sandwich filling. Or possibly a hint of maritime diesel would provide zing. Or tang.

Or maybe I'm missing the point. I concluded long ago that fishing is less about landing carp and much more about sitting by tranquil water, listening to the rain pitter patter on your umbrella while drinking flask tea. Crabbing is, obviously, the seaside equivalent. It's just that I've always thought the bright orange crab line added a touch of excitement not normally associated with fishing.

The chandlery at Wells-Next-The-Sea sells all sorts of maritime essentials, from lengths of rope to belaying pins to attach your rope to. It also sells shiny brass instruments like barometers so that you know how much rope you are likely to need when hoisting things, ideal really because you can tap thee glass while you’re there and buy a few extra yards if needs be. It also sells cloths and, because these are maritime flavoured clothes, it is essentially just one bog dressing up box.

There are serious clothes with a serious price tag. Anoraks and outer layers that are designed to keep you dry in the sort of conditions that fish would think damp, made from the same sort of material they make deserts out of, so good are they at repelling water. Of course, not being stupid, the chandlery also sells authentic clothing in sizes other than ‘huge fisherman who has shoulders like a tractor from hauling on nets in storm force winds and the circumference of a family tent because of all the layers he’s wearing, due to his workplace being the North Sea, at night, in winter’. This also explains why the anoraks are available in colours other than ‘easily visible from the boat when worn by somebody flailing about in the sea and quite anxious to attract attention’, such as pink, for dainty ladies. Still, they do keep you snuggly on the beach.

In among the treasures of the tightly packed shop (including, in an adjoining room, a display of scale model traction engines) were sou’wester hats. (Hats rather than bonnets, Jane Austin heroines never set sail in search of mackerel).

Sou’wester hats are great, was there ever a piece of headgear so utterly associated with a single profession, other than an Imperial Stormtrooper’s helmet? Sadly, I was prevented from purchasing one by an attack of common sense, as my day-to-day life does not involve fishing from an open boat in a storm on anything like a regular occasion and, although undoubtedly the last word in practicality when it comes to waterproof hats, yellow can be a difficult colour to pull off. And it would make you look like a nutter.

I wasn’t even allowed to take it off the shelf, model it and take a quick photograph, as that sort of thing goes down ill with shopkeepers. Also, one does not wish to be accused of looking as if one makes a regular habit of sucking on a Fisherman’s Friend.

The thing to do, of course, was to buy the thing and to wear it constantly, until it no longer appears eccentric, or it starts a fashion. Possibly to lend that air of authenticity you could ask your friends to toss buckets of brine at you, and hurl herring.

The chandlery also has a notice board advertising boats and other nautical stuff for sale, like boats, all in various conditions but all offering the chance to be the master of your own craft and destiny. It also advertised Wells beach huts for sale, which is how I found out that they cost sixty grand a pop. Sixty thousand pounds. For a shed. On stilts. For sixty grand I'd expect not just cooking and sanitations facilities, I'd be looking for broadband and a butler.

Postcard from Norfolk – Farm Shop

2011-10-08T21:28:00.005+01:00

A few minutes' drive from the cottage is the local farm shop. One one side sits the orchards that grow the apples sold in the shop, on the other side are the Pick Your Own crops, with strawberries thoughtfully grown on tresses so one doesn't have to bend over.

The fruit and veg on sale looks good. It looks different to that sold in the supermarket for a few reasons. The first is that, like all farm shop food, there is the occasional vegetable that does not conform to the supermarket aesthetic, looking either like a prop from a sci fi film, or a prop from a porn flick.

The second reason is that the fruit and veg is authentically dirty. My tip is to make sure that you knock the larger clods of muck off of your potatoes before you get them weighed.

It was very busy, with folk pulling in and stocking up on this and that. A group of very posh looking blokes travelling in a BMW (middle class fancy gentlemen rather than gangsters one thinks) were ahead of us in the queue and the shopkeeper managed to keep a straight face when announcing that the bill for their two bags of shopping was 'three hundred pounds please'. Oh the hilarity.

The owner did, however, redeem himself with a small notice he had placed next to the RNLI Christmas cards on sale, apologising for having Christmas cards on sale in October, but explaining that it was a good cause.

On weekends, a mobile fish shop parks up in the car park of the farm shop. Naturally, I ended up purchasing quite a lot of cockles. Of course, one could purchase 'the kit' in any garden centre, a fork, some wellies and a bucket, but cockling looks like something of an art, the art being knowing where he cockles are. Moreover, my pace when walking the beaches of Norfolk is a cross between 'amble' and 'meander', what ive observed of cocklers leads me to believe that one must stride out with purpose.

Returning to the cottage, I collected some kindling for the woodburner.

I do not get on with woodburners. There is no point in having a fire that you cannot poke and, whatever safety or efficiency measures putting doors on the front of a fire might add, what they detract in terms of pokability make them more a frustration than a feature. When in Norfolk on a cottage holiday a real fire is important, when I unpack after the holiday I expect all of my clothes to smell of woodsmoke and I expect myself personally to reek like an Arbroath smokie. Woodburners are not romantic, one may as well cuddle up in front of a radiator, which produces an unfortunate, and not terribly romantic image, for anyone familiar with the Beirut hostage crisis in the eighties.

As it was, we were lucky to get the thing working at all, some genius had removed the handle that opens the front of it and it took the holiday cottage people a week to sort the issue. Luckily, last week was the week of the unexpected heat wave and so the fire wasn't needed. But it's the principle.

Kindling is, I should say,available for sale everywhere. But I balk at having to pay for the stuff when it's available for free on the ground if you can be bothered to stop, bend over and pick it up. Firewood is a little more problematic, but we do have a building site a few cottages away an I've noticed plenty of pallets stacked up. This might be an option for a dead of night pallet raid, although one has to be prepared to put up with watery eyes from the creosote burning.

Postcard from Norfolk – Hoste party

2011-10-07T21:29:00.006+01:00

The Hoste pre-pre-pre-pre (sounds like the call of a sand warbler) Christmas party is, essentially, a glamorous way to bridge the gap between sitting outside getting hammered on wine and sitting by a cosy fire inside getting hammered on gin. Last year the party was to raise money for Burnham Market's Christmas lights, and nothing sends people to the bar as regularly as drinking in a good cause. This year there was no good cause, but there was drinking and there was a theme.

And the theme was: old and new. The middle class, middle aged folk had arrived in good time to sensibly secure seats as far as possible from the excellent live music so that they could converse and drink freely. The younger crowd, who appeared to be local girls in spray-on dresses, stood around in groups listening attentively to the live singer, drinking blue cider and waiting until the DJ started before heading to the dance floor to bop enthusiastically to the sort of music they play on Radio 2, but played LOUD! I love a disco in a village, nothing appears quite so loud, not a metal festival, not an accident in a bell foundry, not the sort of seismic event that causes birds on the neighbouring continent to take flight. The music was pleasingly thumping and set off feedback howl in the hearing aids of the older folk.

This was also the first night to get some patio heater practice in. Patio heater proximity placement is something of an art, and one I have not mastered. Essentially one has to stand so near them to get any benefit that simply by turning your head towards them you can light your fag, while the side facing away is simultaneously chilled by being on the dark side of the patio heater.

Folk had dressed up for the evening, and I saw my first pair of cashmere shorts on a live person. Hitherto, I had only seen them displayed on mannequins in shop windows. Leggy mannequins, long mannequins. The lady who had chosen to wear them was not, I fear, what the designer had in mind; a tall teen with one of those sets of legs that don't touch until they connect at the pelvis. Shall we just say 'brave' and leave it at that.

Also wearing shorts, small silver ones, were the male staff of the Hoste, who joined in the fun on the dance floor and shook their thang with the guests. It was very much last days of Rome meets disco.

All in all a corking night. Disco, drinking, shorts and, also, shots. Last year the jelly vodka shots were a pound a shot and handed round by girls in Vegas showgirl costumes. This year there was no money raising so instead they were arranged in a pyramid shape, dozens and dozens of vodka jelly shots available for free, and because they were free, nobody was touching them - or maybe it was because they were not being handed round by Vegas showgirls. Once you've been handed your vodka jelly shot by a Vegas showgirl, it's very difficult to go back to having to serve yourself. Difficult but, I can assure you, not impossible - and it gets easier with practice.

Postcard from Norfolk – Holme-Next-The-Sea - night of the otter

2011-10-07T21:28:00.006+01:00

Lying in bed, in the dark, sensations, and fears, are somewhat magnified. As once wisely stated by Bill Watterson, night time is dark to allow you to worry without distraction. My particular concern last night was that the cottage was going to blow over. While the wind did not quite howl and shriek like a banshee (I understand Irish cottages have the monopoly on that) it did moan like a sulky teen, and there was the occasional high pitch whine as a gust picked at the vents in the double glazing.

I was wondering for a few moments if this was the Norfolk version of the end of the world. This is an area famous for flooding and a stiff onshore breeze combined with a high tide can be trouble. Luckily, despite the darkness and the holiday quantities of wine I had taken on board, I was able to make the connection between the view directly out to sea, the exposed position and all of the bloody wind farms dotted around the horizon and realise that this was, in fact, situation normal.

The only excitement came when, from the bathroom, came a noise exactly like little mouse claws scrabbling on the sides of the bath. Oh no! Scrabble scrabble! Upgrade from mouse to rat. Scrabble SCRABBLE! Crikey, sounds like an otter. SCRABBLE SCRABBLE! Badger, there's a badger in the bath! I sprang into action, ready to set to with a brush, mop or TB, whatever it is that badgers are intimidated by.

Putting on the light convinced that something was in the bath, I was surprised to see it empty. Oh no! The badger is out! Then rain-pitter pattering against the velux window with, in my defence, exactly the sound of a scrabbling rodent, solved the mystery. All that remained was to head back to bed and wait for my heart rate to return to normal. This took until dawn.

The next day was ideal for a stroll round the village. Holme qualifies as a village because it has the trinity of village requirements, pub, post box and telephone box. Oh, and a church.

The church was in fact rather lively, it was reached by walking past the pub's garden, where the winds of last night had redistributed the gaily coloured plastic patio furniture on the green grass in quite an attractive fashion.

We were all set to take a look inside the church when the Wedding March struck up, and then the bells began to peal, and then the bride and groom exited the church! It was a fabulous day for a wedding and everyone looked very pleased and excited, just as wedding parties should.

Wandering along the lane, we heard behind us the distant buzz of a scooter, turning, we were confronted by the vicar astride his moped, crash helmet on and cassocks billowing as he sped past at a mighty twenty miles an hour. From the look of expectant determination on his face one can conclude that nothing gives a priest a thirst quite like a wedding.

Looping back to take a look at the now empty and rather gorgeous church, I hit upon a realisation - if you are going to get married, make sure you do it at Harvest Festival time, because the church looks fabulous. As long as you don't mind the odd vegetable wound into the flower arrangements, you won't have to worry about anything apart from bouquet and buttonholes, and if you make sure your florist knows to weave some barley into the arrangements, you'll co-ordinate beautifully and save yourself a fortune.

If you do need fruit, it's available from many of the roadside stalls that line the roads in the village. Many of them have little roofs to keep the worst of the elements off and remind one a little of those roadside shrines that one sees in Greece, except they lean less to candles and rather more to honesty boxes made of Tupperware and cox's pippins in plastic bags.

Steve Jobs R.I.P

2011-10-06T21:37:00.002+01:00

Sad news today that Steve Jobs, top man at Apple and Messiah figure to the high priests, acolytes and devotees of the cult of Apple, has passed away. I wonder how many people, like me, found out the news while browsing the internet with Safari on their iPhone.

Film fans have their screen stars, music fans have their pop stars, geeks had Steve Jobs – who was a film star, a rock and roll god and techhie guru rolled into one. There’s no doubt that the Apple brand is, at the moment, all conquering, given the expense of the iphone their ubiquity is astonishing. Less expensive but more common is the iPod in its various guises. These days it’s odd to see somebody on a train without the tell-tale white wires disappearing into a pocket.

The close association between Jobs and the creation, and then revival of, Apple means that he’s probably linked more than any other individual to something that it would appear everyone carries around with them, whether they realise it or not.

From the images that accompanied the headline it appeared that little shrines had sprung up outside Apple stores. Apple fans are. Of course, no strangers to keeping vigil outside a store, although usually it’s because of the birth, or at least the release, of something rather than the demise of somebody. Rock and rollers have their shrines, like Jim Morrison’s in Paris, they even have their temporary shrines, like the bouquets, bottles and fags and candles left outside Amy Winehouse’s flat so it was entirely appropriate that Apple fans should leave offerings of apples with bites taken out of them or even messages written on them, along with their candles flickering on the screens of their iPads, iPhones and iPod touches.

Of course, everyone knows that geeks have a strong sentimental streak. Want to make one cry, just say ‘you have been, and always will be, my friend’ and have the tissues ready.

Goodbye Steve, and thanks for some truly amazing gear that really did transform lives. I’m not saying that the decision to ask my wife to marry me was entirely related to her buying me an iMac…but I’m not saying it was entirely unrelated either.

Postcard from Norfolk – Holme-Next-The-Sea

2011-10-06T21:28:00.007+01:00

An entire day spent in the cottage. That's right, given that we have endless beaches, shopping opportunities and not one but two enthusiast run steam railways within easy reach, we decide to spend the day in the cottage.

This is, in part, due to a new mania for jigsaw puzzles, or rather, one particular jigsaw puzzle that we took on holiday. I've never really seen the point of jigsaw puzzles, if one likes a picture, I can't see why having to assemble it from a thousand different components adds to the enjoyment. As an act of creation for an artwork, it seems to have all of the frustrations of actually painting something, without the benefit of that past time being a legitimate excuse to study naked women (although one can stretch this too far I guess, as having a pad and pencil is no defence after being discovered wedged into a locker in a woman's changing room at the gym).

Of course, after clicking the second piece into place and confidently predicting 'I can do this in an hour', the competitive juices start to flow and that gaming see-saw of frustration/accomplishment/frustration/accomplishment that has made Nintendo and others an awful lot of money takes over.

I have learned to greatly admire the elegance of the jigsaw. This one is of a painting of London, looking along the Thames. There are famous bridges and famous buildings and flags and cabs and red busses. It's rather marvellous to place the Union flag in the right place, and oddly satisfying to fit together four pieces of uniform blue sky.

So the day was spent gently clicking. And listening to albums. It's been years since I have listened to an album. Back in the days before the iTunes Store allowed you to cherry pick good tracks off of albums, iTunes let you build playlists. Before that one could use the track select on CDs to play the same track over and over - 'Low' by REM about 147 times if you had just broken up with somebody was I think the standard against which all other 'just one more time' plays were judged. But before that to select a track that was not track one, side one or two, meant carefully lifting and placing the stylus on the record, and who had the patience for that?

Tape counters? Yea, right, who had the energy and skill to whizz the tape back and forth looking at a counter? No, it was lift and play or nothing.

So it was really refreshing to listen to entire albums, a real luxury.

Finished the jiggy at half one in the morning.

During the day there was activity. The cottage is reached by a gravel road that runs on to a bird watching point, and there was a steady scrunch of bird watchers going back and forth, that intensified around six and at dusk (dawn and seek being the best time to watch birds as they are at their most active, six being a time everyone is out of work and doing a bit of birding before heading home).

We, meanwhile, we're busy watching the birds in the back garden, when we were not making tea, puzzling or bickering about who's choice it was to select the next album. The main residents seemed to be a pheasant and his harem, who spent the day lazily wandering around, waiting for the next pear to fall from the tree in the back garden, and some sort of sea bird that was so large that when it perched on top of the shed, I was simultaneously worried about whether the thing would keep standing, and excited about cornering the market in kindling.

There was also much excitement at the arrival of the post man, who dropped off letters at the house next door, racing along the gravel road in a manner that suggested he had a crash helmet, sponsorship ('Royal Mail' was written on the side if his van) and a bloke next to him bellowing 'left, right, easy left, hard right, fuuuuuuuuuucccccccck-tree! in Norwegian.

Postcard from Norfolk – Cley-Next-The-Sea and Holt

2011-10-05T21:28:00.006+01:00

Cley-Next-The-Sea is a small, charming village sitting on salt marshes on the coast. It's home to some locals, a pub, a pottery, a smoke house, an art gallery, a remarkably overpriced deli, a windmill and a bookshop with an owner who is a registered pervert. It's very popular with bird watchers, because the shingle beach and marshes are very popular with birds. Both flock to the village.

It's also the village I normally stay in when I'm in Norfolk, so it was odd to return as a visitor rather than a resident. Parking up at the village hall, it was good to see that the Scottish country dancing was still going. Scottish country dancing is to villages in England what salsa classes are to the cities, something that combines exercise and movement to music and has that exotic touch of foreign glamour and danger.

It was odd to park up at the village hall rather than just continue on to our usual cottage and there was an urge to see what interlopers were staying there (and possibly spend a relaxing few minutes chopping wood. There's nothing like chopping wood to relax you and relieve stress. If ever I get round to opening my man-spa, it will have a wood chopping room), and demand tea...and explain that one builds the fire just so, and pokes it there, there and the for maximum satisfaction.

If one has a lot of money to invest, one can visit the gallery. If one has an awful lot of money, one can visit the deli and discuss the purchase of a loaf of bread or, if your occupation is 'oligarch', open negotiations on a pork pie. But I always head to the pottery shop 'Made in Cley'. Is this the only example of a middle-class shop name pun? Such puns are normally encountered with hair salons, where a stylist running a business on the first floor of a parade of shops might call their store 'a cut above' and consider it Wildeian. I suppose in comparison to somebody called 'Carol' calling their place 'Carol's', it is. And it made me titter. Then again, so does 'a cut above'.

The place sells some pretty stuff, and some pretty ugly stuff. The thing about pottery is that for a lot of people, it mans 'traditional'. And 'traditional' means something looking like it has been dug up on an excavation of a monastery, and currently sitting on a table awaiting cleaning by a student with a toothbrush.

I bought a couple of goblets that did not look as though they had ever been used in a monastery, but might have spent some time in an inn in Middle Earth. They are from the light blue and white school of colouring, rather than ecclesiastical dark brown covered in privvy clay, with the three bands of blue reflecting the sky, sea and landscape that makes up any Norfolk horizon.

All that shopping works up a thirst. Recommended is 'The Feathers' in Holt. This traditional in sprawls across a number of levels and offers that most traditional, and least common, of English pub services - a warm welcome. Folk suck down pints or a coffee with equal pleasure. There is always somebody eating a bowl of hot chips and, most traditional of all, there is free wi-fi. I'm not sure if it's the pub's own wi-fi, because the pub is situated on the high street and backs onto a courtyard with lots of little businesses meaning that when you open your settings function to detect wi-fi options, you are presented with half a dozen options. Just go for the one with no password and away you go. 'Good beer, good food, good connectivity' as they say.

Finished the day with afternoon tea at Morston Hall. One has to book ahead and I was wondering just how much trouble it can be to arrange a pot of tea, an egg sandwich and a scone until afternoon tea was brought to our table and realised there was a little more to it than that. On a triple-decker cake stand the top plate contained the triple-decker sandwiches, the middle plate the tea cakes and scones (separate plate for jam, cream, butter, defribulator and so on) and the bottom plate the tarts and indigestion remedies.

The afternoon tea was something special. Morston Hall was lovely, and very posh - when you turn on the tap in the gent's loo a blue light shines out of the tap illuminating the water and your hand - to think that all these years I have been washing my hands without the benefit of a blue light playing on my fingers. The only issue is that the average age of the clientele can only be determined by carbon dating. There are other places to go with a younger, (i.e. middle aged) customer base, and one can't help but thinking that such places (like the Flying Kiwi chain) are more likely to do adventurous things with oysters...although not in a bad way.

Postcard from Norfolk - Wells-Next-The-Sea

2011-10-04T21:28:00.006+01:00

Wells-Next-The-Sea is experiencing an emposhment. It's the reverse of the process where high street shops close, or turn into charity shops, or fried chicken places that claim to be from southern states other than Kentucky. If a shop closes down in Wells, it is quickly replaced by one selling something lovely. The place has a (appropriately) tiny wee shop that sells doll house furniture, it's been there for years. What kind of a model business model works that well? Actually the shop is charming, as well as all the period stuff that people imagine in a dolls house, it's got little model plasma wide screen tellies and so on. I love the idea of a modern dolls house.

It's got everything a small town needs. It's got a grocery that sells everything, it's got a butcher, it's got two delis and loads of pubs, it's even got a shop that sells fishing tackle, crab lines, and guns! Fantastic, frustrated at not having caught anything? Pick up a pistol and unload that bad boy into the harbour like some piscine gangland drive-by.

It's home to French's, which is the best fish and chip shop in the world, and the Crown, which has seen off some pretty stiff competition to become my go-to pub of choice when in the area. It's big which means it doesn't get crowded, it's posh which means there is champagne by the glass and it has a huge sofa where one can stretch out and relax, all that's missing is a remote and a telly.

And because it's Norfolk, everyone has dogs, meaning that all of the pubs and the shops have dog bowls outside them so that when the dog owners are inside, the dogs tethered up outside an have a drink. The only place that doesn't have a dog bowl outside it is the pet shop, which has two dog bowls. In addition, the pet shop had the usual pet stuff for sale lined up outside the shop, which is what the merchants do with their wares in Wells. Placing a bird feeder along with the stock had probably seemed like a natural thing to do, sending a firm 'bird feeders for sale, more inside' message. To the local bird population however, the message was 'free food!'. Maybe the pet shop owner was counting on the crowds in the high street deterring the timid wildlife, in which case she had miscalculated just how bold the local avian population can get if there's the chance of a free meal, and then a bathe in a handy dog bowl.

The high street was busy though, everybody doing a sort of slow wander up one side, then down the other, or zig zagging from shop to shop, drawn to the displays depending on whether their interest is in art, books, meat or really large wheels of cheese. The high street is a jolly place to wander in generally, stretching as it does from the quay up a hill to the buttlands, that small square of green where folk used to practice their archery and home to three excellent pubs. Obviously feathering beer barrels gave you a thirst. The high street was festooned with bunting when I visited, no special occasion that I could work out, just bunting for the hell of it. Bunting does make a street look jolly and it makes you wonder why you don't see more?

Wells is also home to a fabulous beach and a string of beach huts. These come in a variety of shapes, sizes and ages and many, many different colours but all conform to the 'shed on stilts' school of architecture. A new feature this year is a 'to be raised' sign adorning the sheds that are apparently not on stilts. Obviously there are stilts under there somewhere, but the beach has risen and the sand now creeps around the doorway. New huts are put up to replace those that have finally fallen victim to the elements and one wonders how long it is before these will have to be raised too, the alternative is to mount them on stilts at some nosebleed inducing altitude, not really an option as nobody wants to spend their day at the beach in a beach watchtower, knackered from the climb up the steps.

Still, keeps the local beach hut specialist restorer and builder busy.

Postcard from Norfolk - Burnham Market

2011-10-03T21:27:00.004+01:00

Just driving over the parish boundary into Burnham Market increases your social class by several tiaras*. It is home to quite a lot of weekend people, but during the week the bustle is provided by shoppers drawn to its lovely shops, selling lovely things, at lovely and occasionally eye-watering prices. Make no mistake though, the shops are also catering for the locals. While you can buy lovely shiny twinkly things in Norfolk Living you can also buy a lovely shiny washing tub in the local hardware shop. It has to be said though, the opportunity to blow a load of cash quickly exists here.

Take Wellington boots. Wellington boots should be purchased from a tub out front of a shop. They should be plastic and be good for standard Wellington boot use until one of two things happen, either they spring a leak or, as a result of an over-ambitious or incautious paddle, they are swamped and they never quite dry out or smell the same afterwards. They should not cost a hundred quid, not even if they have little straps on the side to aid pulling up. The only time a pair of Wellington boots should cost a hundred quid is when they are attached to the hooker you are playing out your Jilly Cooper fantasies with.

It's a lovely village with lovely shops, many of which still have the lovely habit of closing for lunch. It is interesting to wander over to the door of a shop that looks like a likely place to pick up a twinkly trinket or panoramic postcard and be confronted by a locked door and a small cardboard sign explaining 'closed for lunch, back at two'.

The quality of the cardboard signs vary. The one in the stationary shop was, as one might expect, on lovely white card, while the one in the window of the counter of the post office situated in the newsagents was a classic of its kind, a flap ripped from a brown cardboard box, with the corrugation showing along the edge and the message written in biro, with each line of each letter stroked a few times for emphasis and legibility. Both signs share one characteristic, one corner so slightly discoloured from daily handling as, at twelve fifty nine, they are fetched from their resting position and popped up against the glass.

In such circumstances the only sane response is to repair to The Hoste Arms for a pint or two of lunch yourself.

When the shops are open, the shopping is good. There's a good fishmonger, a great butcher, a fabulous second hand book shop and the opportunity to buy some great clothing. One of the shops persisted in selling cashmere shorts, but my interest was in shop selling hats, appropriately, upstairs. While I was distracted for a moment with a fur lined flying helmet/deerstalker combination, the greatest temptation came in the form of a Stetson brand hat, more or less like the one Indiana Jones wears. Not sure if my eventual decision to put the hat back and back away slowly was the right one, but it was informed by the fact that I have an almost identical one at home.

Of course I should have bought it. One cannot have too many Indiana Jones style hats.

The village is the home of the Brazen Head book shop. If one were to picture a second hand book shop, this would be the image called to mind. At the front of the shop are the old childrens' books, Rupert the bear annuals and Enid Blyton, then through to penguins and on to genres, upstairs for non-fiction. Books stacked up higgildy-piggledy, newish, oldish, antique. Careful browsing yielded a really rather nice Pan edition of an M. R. James book, and a book by Tom Woolf that I'd never heard of. The 1970s cover of the Tom Wolf book is of a pair of ladies legs, crossed. Nothing quite like a cover like that to suggest to everyone on the train that you are reading vintage porn.

Books in one hand, laptop in the other, it was time to sit outside the Hoste and have a refreshing pint of lunch. It was another very mild day, though not so crowded as everyone was now back at work. It used to be that one sat outside the pub to enjoy the fresh air but now, of course, one has anti-smoking laws and the tables outside are where all the puffers come to indulge their filthy little habit, secure in the knowledge that anyone drinking at lunchtime is unlikely to look down on anyone indulging a craving.

The tables were thankfully free of smokers, who were presumably in the pub getting their fix from the secondary smoke of the wood fire, and I sat there reading and poncing off the pubs wi-fi in the traditional manner before a few spots of rain drove me inside.

As per usual, there was a dog owner in the bar, unusually the dog in question was a pug. Is there any dog as ridiculous as the pug? This example was one of those with a one-dimensional face. Eyes, nose, mouth, all occupied a totally flat plane. Even its tongue did not poke out or loll, but curled backwards like an unblown party streamer, it had that asthmatic pug breathing that leads one to believe that the breed actually breath through their arses.

Burnham Market is lovely. It's so lovely that it makes Chipping Norton in the Cotswolds look like a sink estate. It's true that it's full of cars, and tourists and people who only occupy their second homes at the weekend, but the are real people here too, real shops and real shopkeepers with a real need to eat lunch. I think as long as it retains that, and the pub, all is not lost.

* The tiara is the unit social class is measured by. Can’t be cars or property or, god forbid, money. Comes down to this, can you wear a tiara and carry it off? Yes, congratulations, your social class is measured at one tiara and you probably have a title, some land and pretty firm views on immigration. The tiara scale is different to most units of measurement in that the vast majority of it is firmly at the minus end of the scale.

Postcard from Norfolk - Hunstanton

2011-10-02T21:27:00.004+01:00

Saturday saw Wells crowded with folk enjoying one last weekend of summer sunshine (in October!) before the onset of winter, heralded by the first appearance in supermarkets of Christmas advent calendars. I have no issue with Christmas stuff going on sale early, it helps families spread the cost of an expensive season but, if you are going to sell advent calendars in October, have ones with three months worth of countdown doors on them, let’s start building the excitement and winter-weight early.

So, hoping to dodge if not the crowds then at least the traffic, I headed west for a few minutes into Hunstanton. ‘Sunny Hunny’ is famed on the coast because through a quirk of geography, it faces West, meaning it’s the only resort on the coast you can enjoy the sunset from without having to turn around or something. Certainly, the sunset last night was spectacular, I enjoyed it through the bottom of a wine glass in a desperate attempt to keep cool through constant application of cold white wine from the fridge. It worked. I think. Consulting the notes of my experiment my handwriting deteriorates sharply after a few glasses for some reason.

Hunstanton was, to use a tourist board term ‘busy’. The seafront was lined with cars and the sunbathers were lined with tattoos. In part, the cars were parked on the seafront because parking there is free, but also because all the car parks were full. In the end, we parked up at Tesco (as it was free, I was expecting the parking bays to be marked out with blue and white stripes; every little helps!) and walked into town.

The grassy parks, normally picturesque triangles of green in the centre of town, were now a modernist mix of green and pinky red as those who did not have enough energy to get to the beach, or who decided they wanted to be close to the attractions of the town (chips!) chose to relax in the parks and gardens along the seafront.

In Norfolk, everyone has a dog. This is because walking is the regional pastime and its best enjoyed with a dog, not because a good walk is made better if you have to carry a small bag of dog poo with you to the nearest red bin, but because walking on your own makes you look like a serial killer, a rambler, or a rambling serial killer.

Gundogs and hounds are favourites, they come when they are called and lope in an attractive, relaxed way when on the beach. Before depositing half of it in the back of their owner’s car. I know some dog owners who have to empty the sand and seaweed out of their cars with a trowel after a week of walking their dog on the beaches here. Terriers, too, find favour and not just with women but with men who are not afraid to be seen with them, because while a terrier in an urban environment is basically a yap on a lead, out here they fly across the beach like wind-up toys, bark with alarm at something (such as a wave, a seashell or a washed up bottle) and then bolt back to their master before doing it all again. They are also excellent for sorting out anything nasty in the woodpile.

In Hunstanton though, the locals and visitors seemed to favour breeds more muscle than brains, the sort of thing that one normally sees guarding a crack den, or fighting in a gypsy encampment.

Like Wells, Hunstanton has a little train. Unlike Wells, theirs does not run on rails but rather is some sort of converted milk float affair, painted a jolly, and very bright, yellow, pulling a train of carriages that also resemble milk floats, but with passengers rattling round in the back nested of bottles. Like Wells, the owners could have benefited from adding a couple of carriages. Hunstanton has a long sea front and it's a pleasant walk but an even more pleasant ride.

The bright yellow road train is something of a local landmark, even featuring on postcards. Obviously, when something is that striking (and that yellow) the only reaction is to embrace it. Hunstanton used to have a proper railway station, it's how the hoards of tourists used to get here for their holidays before the car became the popular mode of transport and unpopular clutterer of villages that it is today and so any link to that heritage, no matter how tangential, remains popular, this explains the little train and the signal in the town car park where the station used to be.

So popular is the train that I think for the next season the should think about developing it, nothing creates a profit on a train quite like first class accommodation, although a sleeper service along the coast to Cromer might be pushing it a bit.

It was good to see the town so busy, with the traders making the most of this unexpected end of season trade. As the tourists made the most of the late sunshine, the traders made the most of the late rush and anywhere that sold coffee or chips was doing very well. The little corner bakery that I stopped in at had a coffee shop tacked onto the side, and onto the pavement, and had discovered that core requirement of all good coffee shops, the twenty first century equivalent of a teenage girl in an awkwardly formal waitress uniform (although it had those too); free wifi. The password to the network for customers was, charmingly, not handed out like some secret code or printed on a till receipt (a hangover from the bad old days of having to buy your Internet by the half hour) but chalked on the blackboard along with the specials of the day. Casual passers-by who were not customers were deterred from using it by the simple feature of it being about fourteen characters long. Genius! By the time I had entered it correctly on my third attempt, I was more than ready for my coffee.

Hunstanton caters for the bucket and spade brigade, there’s plenty of shops selling beach essentials (windbreaks and so on), and the fun-fair was in full swing, the thrill rides being enjoyed by those unaware or uncaring about the effects that salt corrosion can have on the load bearing metal struts of a roller coaster. The odd thing is that there’s no tat end and posh end, rather the two co-exist in the town with a seasidy atmosphere that is the result of more than a receding tide and vinegar splashing on hot chips. The rest of the coast may be painted a soft sedge green, but Hunstanton is pink lit by neon and funfair bulbs, and gloriously so.

Postcard from Norfolk - Wells-Next-The-Sea

2011-10-01T21:27:00.005+01:00

The first day of October 2011 and the British weather is unseasonable to the point of unreasonable. Shorts and sandals are pulled out of the wardrobe for one last outing, barbeques are pressed into service once again as the air is filled with the smell of lighter fluid, charcoal and the smell of a million grills that were put away uncleaned after their last use, as temperatures reached those more closely associated with sunburn, binge-drinking and ill-thought-out holiday romances in some Mediterranean resort.

One of the great pleasures of being on holiday in Britain in October is that you get the place to yourself. That’s the deal, you will put up with occasional ‘dull’ days (on holiday lashing rain pushed ahead of gale force winds is never ‘foul weather’, it is simply ‘dull’) and in return not only do you get to see a different side of whatever resort you are visiting (that side usually being the ‘closed’ side of any seasonal attraction’s welcome sign) but you have your holiday experience heightened because you know that every other bugger is hard at work while you rise at the crack of ten, have a bit of a scratch and wonder what pub you are going to visit for a pint or two of lunch before fortifying yourself for the evening’s revels with an afternoon nap. There are no queues, no crowds, no parking problems and no issues getting served at the bar or the chippie.

So, in holiday mode (not thinking), I set off to Well-Next-The-Sea with the intention of topping up on some shopping and taking a walk on the beach.

The first sign that something was out of the ordinary was the crowd at the ‘station’. Wells beach is reached from the town by a charming little narrow gauge railway, which if it were any smaller would be mounted on chipboard in some lucky boy’s bedroom. This takes the tourists who cannot be faffed with the half hour walk from town to beach out to a little station situated in the caravan park by the beach. In October, it doesn’t run. Odd then that there are many, many people waiting, like the world’s most relaxed and ill-dressed commuters.

The little train was running. There were crowds walking along the path to the beach. Wells was mobbed.

In retrospect, I should have guessed that record high temperatures would have drawn everyone in Norfolk and, by the look of it, everyone in East Anglia, to the seaside. Still, there was a huge car park on the beach, surely that couldn’t be…ah. The car park was beyond full, there was a queue down the beach road to get into it. This is a car park that is usually so empty you can practically park on the beach.

Taking the attitude that I did not come on holiday to wait for a train, queue in traffic or endlessly circle a car park looking for a space (all things I come on holiday to stop doing), I turned around and we headed back to the cottage, where there was a beach three minutes walk from the front door that did not require queuing in traffic or a fixed light rail route to reach.

Thinking about the railway, the operator missed a trick this weekend. Looking at the crowds on the station and those who took the option to walk, it was clear that anyone who felt they could walk to the beach was already lithely striding along the headland, while anyone who waddled rather than strode had decided to take the train option. This means that all it took was one or two passengers to get into one of the wee carriages and there was already an overcrowding problem. The train people should have thrown a couple of extra carriages on to the end of the train (possibly requiring another engine) and, more importantly, stuck a dining car on there too, ideally selling chips. They’d have made a fortune.

We didn’t see the queue for the chippie but I strongly suspect it was like one of those you see in emerging democracies when all of the population turns out to vote for the first time.

Back at the cottage at Holme-Next-The-Sea, our holiday home really is next the sea. Three minutes takes you from the front door to the beach, and that’s the indirect route, respecting the back garden of the people next to the cottage. The route to the beach takes one between the 10th and 11th hole of Hunstanton Golf Club’s course. Signs implore you to check left and right for low flying golf balls, experience suggests that one should also check for golf clubs being hurled in anger by golfers swearing off the bloody game forever. This adds a certain charm and danger to the beach walk, and that to a certain extent is what sets Norfolk apart.

Postcard from the M25

2011-09-30T21:27:00.003+01:00

Motorway service stations are like little villages. The village idiot is usually to be found behind the stainless steel counter of a fast food franchise, wearing a name badge that lies ‘happy to help’, a nylon baseball cap in corporate colours, an expression that would curdle the milk were it not UHT and a posture that suggests to the world that they are not at all happy with their current employment status, and that their ambitions are either to throw themselves into the next X Factor audition or under the next HGV that passes.

Actually, such motorway service station village residents are a dying breed, and not just because they are too busy sulking to reproduce. Rather, they have been replaced by young keen people who have worked out that, very much like the British during the Victorian era, a few years in some far flung corner of the corporate Empire will allow you to make mistakes without anyone noticing, indulge in a spot of gin-fuelled vice and then transfer back to civilization with experience far beyond your years, at least one interesting scar, many interesting stories, something of a reputation and a salary band at least three grades above your contempories.

Such a one was the young manager of Costa Coffee at Clackett Lane Services on the M25. Her name badge hinted at a Portuguese heritage, her accent hinted at Portuguese citizenship and her desire to flog coffee accessories hinted at a desire to be sitting behind a big desk in head office before the age of 30. Yes, we did want coffee, no, no biscotti, no, no sandwiches, no, no soft drinks, no, no extra shots…actually, yes, we have a motorway journey ahead of us and I want to be alert to the point of wired.

The barrista was no less enthused (I was wondering if the staff had been overdoing it with Colombia’s second most stimulating export, or whether they just cut to the chase and bang off a couple of lines of the most stimulating followed by a bucket of espresso to take the edge off before each shift), trying to convince us that chocolate sprinkles were an essential addition to any coffee experience.

Such enthusiasm was stimulating and refreshing, the bloody coffee was going to have to go some to compete.

Out on the car park, the media were prowling. The RAC had just today issued a press release, possibly written in crayon for all the sense it made, suggesting that it would be a good idea to raise the speed limit on motorways to 80mph. As we sat in heavy traffic, in roadworks and in tailbacks, it was remarked upon that it might be a good idea to raise the speed on motorways to 40mph before we contemplate any further increases.

As we had pulled into the car park, we had noticed a clean cut chap and a less clean cut cameraman rushing after a middle-aged motorist. Such was their enthusiasm that we tried to see if he was famous, a politician likely to be caught with his trousers down, or a rogue trader. He was none of these, instead he was a middle-aged demographic for their vox-pop. This is where the media had come to record the opinion of the nation about the proposed increase in speed limit.

They didn’t ask us, no matter how slowly we walked or how media-friendly we looked. And I even had my ‘I look intelligent and trustworthy, like a doctor before that bastard Shipman spoiled it for the whole profession’ spectacles on.

The presenter sported a classic look. A sharply pressed blue shirt, neat tie and close shave above the waist, faded jeans and disgraceful but comfortable shoes below. This meant he was either a teevee type or a Divorced Dad Dating Again. The cameraman was the giveaway, unless he’s the subject of a new Channel 5 reality train-crash ‘Divorced Dads’ Dating Disasters’. Also a giveaway was the lack of producer, researcher and sound guy. Five years ago a bloke with a microphone and a bloke with a camera alone would mean that they were doing a piece for the service station’s in-house video show ‘Channel Clackett’. Today and thanks to falling advertising revenue and lack of investment, this was probably ITV or local independent news. You could tell it wasn’t BBC because they didn’t have the normal news crew of half a dozen including guide and interpreter for journeys outside central London. And you could tell it wasn’t Sky, they would have had a helicopter thundering overhead.

Obviously though, I was not pop, or possibly not vox, enough to make up part of this particular vox pop. Possibly they already had the demographic I fitted, we had seen them covering startled pensioners (reaction: it’s far too fast, bring back boys with red flags) and they had probably already covered teenage louts (there’s a speed limit?) and businessmen in BMWs (80mph is far too low) and, given that they want some extreme views, probably had their bases covered. Or possibly, because this was ITV, they considered my lack of tattoos as likely to intimidate their audience.

Review - Alzheimer's the musical

2011-08-28T20:34:00.006+01:00

Walked out of this one. Absolute shite.

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

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

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

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

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

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

2011-08-28T20:33:00.003+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

Review - Tearoom

2011-08-28T20:32:00.005+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Postcard from Edinburgh - Magnum bar

2011-08-28T20:09:00.002+01:00

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

Review - The Queen Art and Image

2011-08-28T20:06:00.002+01:00

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

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

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

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

2011-08-27T20:31:00.004+01:00

Flogging the format...to death.

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

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

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

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

Review - Andy Parsons: Gruntled

2011-08-27T20:30:00.007+01:00

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

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

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

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

Review - Stewart Lee - Flickwerk 2011. Work in progress

2011-08-27T20:30:00.006+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review - Secret Window, Secret Garden

2011-08-27T20:29:00.006+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Postcard from Edinburgh - trams

2011-08-27T20:07:00.001+01:00

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

Postcard from Edinburgh - geography

2011-08-27T20:04:00.003+01:00

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

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

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

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

Review - BBC Comedy Presents - Early and late

2011-08-26T20:29:00.003+01:00

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

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

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

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

This is still the best ticket in town.

Review - Ed Reardon: A writer's burden

2011-08-26T20:28:00.004+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review - Richard Herring: What is love anyway?

2011-08-26T20:27:00.003+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

Review - BBC Festival cafe

2011-08-26T20:26:00.003+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Postcard from Edinburgh

2011-08-26T20:23:00.003+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

Country Life - National Map Centre

2011-08-24T16:32:00.002+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

Postcard from Malvern

2011-08-22T16:51:00.004+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

And yes, the free stuff does taste better.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Road England

2011-08-21T16:54:00.002+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Postcard from Oxford

2011-08-20T16:57:00.001+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Airshow!

2011-08-20T16:55:00.003+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

Postcard from Blenheim Palace

2011-08-20T16:44:00.003+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stella madness

2011-08-18T16:33:00.002+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A right Royal show

2011-08-17T16:35:00.001+01:00

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

Courtyard

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

Raphael Revisited
Tom Phillips RA

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

China Dog, 2010
Humphrey Ocean RA

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

Four Vases, 1984
Lisa Milroy RA

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

Abergwoun (Fishguard)
David Humphreys

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

Said it all

2011-08-16T16:30:00.002+01:00

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

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

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

Not a great advert for Windows

2011-08-15T16:23:00.002+01:00

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

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

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

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

Hampton Court

2011-08-14T15:30:00.009+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hashtag trouble

2011-08-13T16:26:00.002+01:00

Panic on the streets of London, panic on the streets of Birmingham, I wonder to myself, could life ever be the same again?

Well it sure as hell wasn’t the same as it was before. In a week where civil unrest came to the shittier boroughs of our cities, the media and other commentators were left flummoxed by an apparent paradigm shift in civil disorder away from people being violent in order to make a point towards people being violent in order to make off with a new 42 inch plasma telly.

The one thing that stayed the same was that people chose to riot on their own doorsteps. Bloody hell, where do these people think they are going to be able to hang about if they torch the Tennessee Fried Chicken shop?

While the media took a few days to start using the term ‘underclass’, in a concerned tone, others were ready to tag the looters as ‘chav scum’ and move on. Were it not for the fact that they started looting in the daylight hours, I’d have just tagged them as ‘Morlocks’.

The politicians took a surprisingly long time to realise that it does not look great to be on holiday at your luxury villa in Tuscany while people are rioting every night. So they came home and everyone told them they were a complete waste of space and largely responsible for all this. You could see certain politicians standing there thinking ‘yesterday I was lolling by the pool, drinking wine that cost three euros a bottle and tasted great and working on my tan. Today I am in a neighbourhood with a post code I can’t pronounce and some woman is shouting at me while a bloody news team film the whole thing.’

While everyone was looking for The Cause Of All This Unrest (probably a complicated mix of a material society, people being told they should have certain things, unreasonable aspirations driven by television talent shows, a lack of realistic aspirations, a lack of education and a lack of enough coppers to administer a bloody good beating on the first night), it was interesting to monitor the social networks, Twitter in particular.

I’ve never really looked at it before, but Twitter is a microcosm of the internet, it informs and disinforms, because tweets appear as print they have the appearance of authority but can be unsupported by any evidence, there’s a lot of good stuff on there, there’s a lot of bad stuff on there and there is a hell of a lot of dull stuff on there, but there’s also the irreverent humour that the internet does so well. How long is the appropriate delay between an event and the first jokes about that event? With Twitter, that no longer applies because the jokes are being made while the event is still happening. Best example – ‘Greggs torched, hot pies in ten minutes’.

It was also the case that rolling news couldn’t really keep up with events, they were moving so quickly. Not as quickly as the police though, who by by Thursday were moving very quickly indeed to kick chav arse.

In the end, as with so much civil unrest, it was the rain, and a few thousand extra police, that sorted the problem. Good job the chavs were too busy looting trainers to bother with the umbrella shops.

A la radio

2011-08-10T15:56:00.002+01:00

The internet has brought us many things, social networking, anti-social behaviour organisation platforms, blogs, porn and a seemingly endless succession of pictures of pets dressed up.

It’s also brought us nostalgia. It provides a global platform for the heritage crisp enthusiast who wants to discuss childhood treats with others until the warm rosy glow of nostalgia almost covers the aching desperation of howling emptiness that his once promising life has become (also known as adulthood)…or maybe he just really likes snacks, who can tell?

The internet is becoming a museum of the everyday, with the mundane analysed and discussed with a refreshing curiosity. It’s fun to see a forum brimming with the same sort of enthusiasm for some plastic toy from the seventies that one normally sees exhibited by a professor turning up a roman vomiting pot or something.

It’s also provided a window on the world, as we can now see and hear instantly what others half a planet away are seeing and hearing. A part of this is internet radio, which allows you to listen to stations in far flung countries. And this cutting edge technology is somewhat nostalgic also.

Clicking your way through the international stations is a little like being a radio ham decades ago, sitting hunched over a machine, slowly turning the dial and occasionally through the static hearing a haunting song sung in a strange language as the signal bounces off of the ionosphere – only later do you discover you are listening to Radio Cardiff (you thought it was Viking).

Now you can wander the world one click at a time. My favourite station remains Allouette, the French radio station. They play a lot of pop and, even when they break for the news its not too bad, as I don’t understand French and so don’t know what they are talking about. Initially I thought from the way they were talking that there was a riot in Paris every night, then I worked out that it’s just that they are very excitable, then I worked out that there is a riot in Paris every night.

Other stations worth a visit are the Japanese and Caribbean ones. The benefit of visiting something in a very different time zone is that while all the domestic stations are trying to keep everyone calm and sane at drive time, it”s night time or even the wee small hours elsewhere in the world, and you can kick back to the soothing sounds of Caribbean Breeze – as soothing as a nice big cup of rum.

Sign here

2011-08-06T20:17:00.001+01:00

It should come as no surprise to anyone that as soon as the government set up a web site where one could start a petition for your pet subject to be debated in parliament, the thing has dozens of near-identical petitions all about bringing back the death penalty. I think the only difference between them is the way they have structured the sentence ‘bring back the death penalty’ and that some of them have named their favoured form of execution, such as hanging, which has seen a renewed popularity ever since Saddam Hussain was strung up on Youtube. Certainly, the petition does seem to attract the hang ‘em and flog’ em brigade (I didn’t see if flogging, birching or a bloody good seeing to with a cricket bat were also being suggested for lesser crimes, such as being foreign, as the site had, ironically, died under the weight of the hits it was getting) but I think it’s a certainty that when it comes to methods of dispatching criminals, nobody has started a petition that mentions a lovely Swiss clinic with some Bach, a comfy chair and some poisoned toblorone as the way they’d like to see justice done.

Anyone who has ever tried to get a petition going for anything constructive, like saving a tree or community centre, or getting a level crossing built, will know that it can be a bit of a slog. Everyone likes habitats for squirrels and being able to cross the road, but putting down your name can be a bit of a chore, no?

That’s why the internet is so good for these sorts of petitions, especially in terms of bringing back things that we used to have, such as hanging or rickets. Anyone who has visited one of the many web-sites devoted to explaining why crisps tasted better ion the 1970s (answer: the additives and flavourings they used back then are now illegal. Proper pickled onion flavoured Monster Munch was the only snack to have a scientifically recognised half-life) will tell you that nostalgia drives the internet.

That’s why as well as the usual bollocks about the death penalty and having some sock puppet children’s teevee presenter ushered in as Prime Minister, the most popular petitions are likely to revolve around passing a law that requires the reintroduction of some biscuit from the 1970’s, Top Of The Pops being back on telly every Thursday and all porn to be removed from the internet and instead replaced by proper jazz-mags, available only from garages or left in a slightly soiled condition under a hedge.

Railings

2011-08-03T18:47:00.004+01:00

Do the council install railings in a pre-rusted condition because they have some sort of deal with the company that makes tetanus shots?

Railings. Back in the day when cheap labour was available to sand and paint the damn things every year, they probably seemed like a good idea. Stout enough to stop larger animals wandering from field to field, aesthetically pleasing (not spoiling the view and with a pleasing symmetry) and of course they can let smaller animals like rabbits, foxes and badgers wander from field to field.

These railings, in a park, have become part of the landscape. Plants grow up around them, the soil flows up them and the brown rust makes them look more vegetable than mineral.

One wonders if they would be the bovine crowd-control device of choice today. In these health and safety conscious times, one wonders if a rusty iron impaling device is quite the right thing to place in a public area. Not only that but you might as well label every ten feet with its scrap value. Luckily the bogglingly dangerous nature of the thing is probably preserving it from the attentions of even the most determined ‘recycler’.

Graffiti

2011-07-30T18:49:00.002+01:00

Back in the 1980’s there was a baffling popular series of books by, I think, Nigel Rees, about graffiti. This was not some collection of academic tomes explaining why people feel the urge to daub their thoughts, names or marks on the public landscape, like dogs marking their territory, but rather a collection of amusing thoughts or phrases that had been left on the world in marker pen and spray pen.

So they avoided the sort of low-rent low-brow stuff you might see in urban areas, such as ‘(insert minority group here)s out’ and instead recorded things like ‘beware the dreaded limbo dancer’. The graffiti was shown in a series of cartoons and illustrations, the phrase in question being recorded at the bottom of a toilet door in a gent’s toilet (for those unfamiliar with public loos, in certain styles of toilet the door does not fit flush to the floor, rather a gap of a few inches is left. This is either designed to prevent dossers spending the night curled up on the floor of a cosy cubical or facilitate the easy passage of toilet roll from one stall to another should need press, I never quite worked out which).

With the benefit of hindsight, one can speculate if the entire contents of the book was indeed the result of painstaking research, with Mr Rees wandering the toilets of the land with pad and pen in hand. My recollection of graffiti in public toilets in the 80’s is rather less ‘don’t throw cigarette butts in the urinal, it makes them soggy and difficult to light’ and rather more ‘young cock wanted, be here at three o’clock next Tuesday’.

Graffiti has changed for sure. What used to be a simple message, showing dedication to a football team or fascist cause became a colourful expression of territory with the advent of tagging, and then the use of stencils as vandals restyled (resprayed?) themselves as artists.

At its heart though, graffiti is still about defacing something, changing it and leaving a message. That’s why the endless repetitive tags are so boring, why the self regarding social comment of a tosser with a stencil and a spray can is so bland and why something like this, a speed sign near a school defaced with a stencilled grenade at least genuinely begs the question – why did whoever did this do this and do they know that behaviour like this resulted in paperback books about graffiti moving out of the ‘humour’ section of bookshops and becoming coffee table tomes sitting shrink wrapped in the ‘art’ area?

Drinking in the dark

2011-07-27T18:54:00.002+01:00

What, apart from the temperature of the rain, differentiates summer in England from winter in England? One answer is possibly the increase in al-fresco drinking. Many alcoholic beverages seem designed to be consumed outdoors, this is possibly a result of their being adopted to make certain summer sporting events, notably tennis, bearable and to make certain other sports, such as cricket, even more enjoyable over a sustained period of spectating and drinking (drinking from eleven in the morning to seven in the evening over a five day period may be a ‘binge’ to the nanny state, but to anyone sitting watching a test match, it’s simply supporting your country). It also makes that other summer pursuit, talking to people about roadworks at barbeques, achievable.

Warm evenings mean that one is able to stay out and up when the sun has gone down. This means that one can finally press one’s collection of garden lighting, scented candles and so on into service, having the twin effect of giving enough light to drink by and drawing off any mosquitoes that have a taste for 20% proof O Negative.

After dark, any garden becomes a secret garden, and nothing adds a warm rosy glow like candlelight and booze. On a clear night one can sit underneath a canopy of stars (or, if you live in the city, a sort of fuzzy orange glow), fumbling for the last of the beer bottles swimming in the tub of tepid water that used to be a tub of ice like a poacher ticking trout.

Al fresco drinking also means that you can finally use that garden furniture that, hitherto, has either been hidden under the snow or stuck in the shed. Warning: a combination of comfortable garden furniture and making use of a blanket to eek out a few more minutes of nocturnal imbibing can result in you waking up with a start at three in the morning to be confronted by, depending on where you live, a puzzled fox or inquisitive deer.

G&P disclaimer on al-fresco drinking: if you drink cold white wine on a hot day while sat in an open space listening to songs in a foreign language, you are middle class. If you are drinking warm cider from a plastic bottle on a park bench listening to your companion muttering in an accent so thick it has actually crossed a linguistic line and become another language, you need to get up, get a bath and sort yourself out. Alternatively you are a teenager and you need to stop wearing so much eyeliner, stop texting and stop looking so bloody sullen.

Green and pleasant land

2011-07-23T21:32:00.001+01:00

The sunny Spring and wet Summer may have played merry hell with the cricket schedule (although given the years of training that the ‘Test Match Special’ team have had in talking about just about anything other than cricket, they were perfectly placed to bring the same world-class professionalism to bear on the ground staff rushing on and off with the covers that they do with the batting and bowling and to make it just, if not more, exciting), but it’s turned the garden into a den of plump lusciousness. My lawn has never looked so lush, nor the plants so…much like an out-of-control hedgerow.

While Jeremy, my vine, is looking promising, the tomato plants (grown from grafts, which is the plant equivalent of adopting a child once they are old enough top drive and buy you a pint, so getting around all that tedious business of raising them) are positively blooming. They are now taller than me, leading to my erecting a Heath Robinsonesque framework of bamboo and garden twine, anchoring the plants and keeping them upright. This is tricky, as they are loaded with plump tomatoes.

I put the growth down to their being grafts, regular watering, regular feeding and the blood of the odd stray cat.

I have a variety of plants, one grows traditional plump red toms, the other cherry tomatoes and yet another yellow tomatoes – and just out of interest how the hell know when they are ripe?

Ripening visibly are the grapes on Jeremy. They are turning from green to black and this year there’s a better than even chance that I will actually be able to harvest them. Previously, they have ripened and provided a feast for the local squirrels (or, as the Daily Mail would describe them, immigrants) but this year the cat population appears to have reached the tipping point where they have kept the grape guzzling critters at bay.

So this could be the year for wine. At last. This could be the year where the romance of wine making – throwing a load of fruit and chemicals into a plastic bucket, keeping it warm and hoping to Christ that it doesn’t explode or rot or result in the neighbours dobbing you in as brewing up a chemical attack – could result in something drinkable or at least the sort of thing that will remove stubborn stains.

What’s required, of course, is a decent name. Vin something and, in expectation of the taste, the front runner is Vin Diesel. I rather like Vin Shed also, or is that Vin Petit Chatau, or plain old Vin Shitoh! That said, why bother with any poncy French merde at all – I rather like ‘shedwine’, it hints of the exotic, a taste of porn and creosote.

Pop up fun

2011-07-20T22:10:00.001+01:00

There are, I have read (in the trendier left leaning newspapers and magazines that I do not of course buy, but find in the better class of train carriage or clap clinic waiting room), about pop up restaurants.

Pop up restaurants are not, it would appear, giant three dimensional cookbooks with seating for thirty and a turbulent chef hidden in the index, but rather restaurants in unusual places. Disappointingly, what is considered ‘unusual’ in these circumstances is anywhere well ventilated, spacious and in a trendy postcode.

When I hear ‘pop up restaurant’, I have certain expectations. I want to open doors to the most unusual places, I want to open the door to trap three of a public lavvie and find a candlelit table, two chairs and a hot plate there, or be climbing a tree, mountain or loft ladder and find a place at the top renowned for doing interesting things with ducks.

Of course, for those of us in the real world, we have known about pop up restaurants for years. They are layby cafes and they serve up the very best in greasy baps and tea.

Why though, draw the line at pop up restaurants? I rather like the idea of pop up libraries, swimming pools (okay, ambitious that one), cinemas (already being done through mobile cinemas), film studios (the next logical step) and, already here, pop up theatre in the form of site-specific theatre…but site specific theatre that you’d actually want to see – for instance you slip into your chair at your check-out for a nine hour shift and next to you is played out not some bloody monologue about feminist bar codes, but rather a feel-good musical rom-com! With lasers. And sequins.

Read, and hear, all about it

2011-07-16T20:36:00.001+01:00

Now that we have a bit of distance from the ‘phone hacking scandal, it’s clear to see that the whole bloody disgraceful affair is even worse than anyone thought. The thing was like one of those news shots of a natural disaster, such as a flood, you start out focusing on one bloke on the roof of his house and pull back to eventually reveal that shitty water stretches from horizon to horizon. Such a toxic lake has engulfed News International.

Back when the News Of The World phone hacking scandal engulfed people in film and television, the public took the suffering of glamorous people with a pinch of salt or stardust. The second, and I mean the second, it transpired they had hacked the ‘phone of Milly Dowler, you could almost sense a mood of national disgust. Like a mass tequila burp.

The players in the pantomime, NI execs, lined up to be castigated. What was interesting is that while the Murdochs and Rebecca Brooks-Wade have power, money and influence, nobody seems to envy them, and this is not just because they are now about as popular as meningitis, but rather because despite working in, despite actually being, the media, they lack glamour. More than that, they have reverse glamour. They are successful in the same way that Sauron was successful in Lord of the Rings. Undoubtedly powerful, but not someone you’d admire, and prone to torturing hobbits. And RBW looks like Lady Macbeth. A dragged-up Lady Macbeth from an all-tranny production, but Lady Macbeth all the same.

What was fascinating was that when news broke that David Cameron had had dinner at Christmas with RBW and Jeremy Clarkson, the response was not ‘how fabulous’ but rather ‘that’s the winning entry in the ‘name the dinner party from hell’ competition’.

In a desperate effort to deflect attention away from the phone-hacking scum at News International, News International have mounted a spirited ‘they’re all at it defense’ in the apparent belief that guilt is somehow diminished if shared. They want to see any enquiry widened to take in all the media (i.e. their competition too).

Will this include local press? Do they want to see the editor of the Titchwell Gazette giving evidence? That should be a hoot, perhaps that will allow the profession to restore some confidence and pride in the profession by explaining the art of gathering confidential information by propping up the bar at the Sheep Worrier's Arms like a traditional journo.

Shine a light

2011-07-13T20:19:00.001+01:00

In a fit of misguided horticultural enthusiasm as few years ago, I invested in a half dozen solar powered lanterns for the garden. I figured that we were at least five years away from genetically modifying plants to the extent that they would actually glow in the dark, so if I wanted garden lighting in the meantime, I had to get some hardware.

I have, on the whole, greatly enjoyed my little garden lanterns. I’m not sure whether they act as a deterrent for garden pests such as foxes, or whether the animals, instead of being driven away by the little circles of light, instead appreciate some lighting to see exactly where they are crapping, but it was fun at night to look out of the window and see the little twinkles (lights, not a slang term for foxes in the act of crapping).

A few summers of rain and winters of frost and snow took their toll however, and as of last autumn the solar panels were misted over and the rechargeable batteries denuded. My lanterns were nothing more than metal mushrooms sticking up from the edge of my lawn.

That was until a few weeks ago where, as a result no doubt of an unseasonably warm and sunny spring…one twinkled back into life. Excited beyond measure, I bought some fresh rechargeable batteries, gave the solar panels a wipe and awaited the result…which was a half dozen lanterns shining brightly.

That one lantern survived the winter is a very cheering thought, that all the rest did also makes me happier than anyone as raddled by wine and cheese as I has a right to be, but that I now have my lanterns back for the cost of a packet of batteries has me grinning every dusk as they wink on. It may be one step away from floodlighting the place like a goods marshalling yard but if it were up to me I’d have a dozen more of the things. As it is, I have restricted myself to the solar powered fairy lights that wind around my shed and which, in turn, my vine has wound around, so that come the evening it takes on the appearance of a plant glowing in the dark. Who needs GM?

Scooter Park

2011-07-09T23:01:00.006+01:00

Off to the village school summer fete. I thought that it was a joke when I was informed that there was a bar there. In fact, it wasn’t true. There were two bars, one flogging Pimms and lemonade, the other doing a roaring trade in beers. These already very popular refreshment tents (nobody drinks like a parent, want to know why? Spend ten minutes in the company of a child who has access to haribo) became even more popular when the rain came on. Naturally, as the school fete was being held on an English summer’s day, the rain was biblical.

It was, on the whole, cathartic.

‘Wet play’ at school was something of a drag, playtime traditionally being the time where there would be a tremendous release of all that energy that had been pent up daydreaming through a maths class. Not being able to tear round the playground pretending to be a Spitfire and instead being confined to a classroom with two dozen other fusty kids who smelled mostly of kids parka, but in an enclosed space, watching the windows steam up, is hardly the sort of stuff that is going to make it into the pages of ‘First period at Chalet School’.

More like misery lit.

But standing in a school playground watching the deluge while drinking beer…ahhhhh, this was much more enjoyable. Suddenly it became clear why so many teachers drink, it’s not just because they have a shit job, it’s because they had a shit time at school the first time round and by encountering it all again but amiably hammered, certain ghosts are laid.

Many of the kids had obviously come on that popular kiddie form of transport, the scooter. I was particularly pleased to see them parked up near a rail in the schools scooter park, looking for all the world like tiny tot versions of cowboy horses tethered at the saloon rail.

What I really liked was that I noted the same number of scooters coming out of the fete as I noticed going in there. Scooter theft from schoolkids must be one of the lowest crimes, and typified by a fat chav bending the board of a scooter, shooting sparks from the pavement, as he tries to make off with it.

This must go beyond a simple social compact not to steal a kids’ toys, I think this has to symbolise a recognition about the sort of thing that happens to people in prison who are convicted of scooter theft. Nonces and peados are one thing but somebody who is banged up in Strangeways for stealing a scooter, possibly from a disabled kiddy, has invited a special kind of hell.

So, you can leave your scooter in confidence that the nonces, the peados and the scooter sniffers will not touch it, all you have to worry about is another kid making off with your bespoke Barbie pink or Action man Camoflage scooter when the temptation becomes too much.

Protest camping...Pramping?

2011-07-06T10:14:00.002+01:00

Camping. It’s very popular, apparently. Of course, it’s always been popular with outdoorsy types, and poor people. But as the recession has bitten deeper, it’s also become popular with families who have worked out that the airport tax that it costs to get their three kids onto a flight to somewhere sunny will keep the parents in enough decent chardonnay to numb the pain of having to spend two weeks in a field with a dozen other families all coming to terms with the fact that in order to be able to help their kids with university fees, they are going to be spending less time sunning themselves and more time wondering why the shower block doesn’t have complimentary Molton Brown toiletries, and trying to out-do one another with barbeque marinades (my tip…lard, simple, elegant, and nothing says ‘campsite feast’ quite like the smell of frying lard).

By 2010, a holiday under canvas could be categorized thus:

Camping. Heavy canvas tents, featured in ‘Carry On’ movies, tents with a sense of history, the sorts of tents that the Empire pitched in jungles and artic wastes, the sort of tents a scout master was disgraced in, with guy ropes that are set like booby traps to trip the unwary. In recent years, advances in camping technology mean that entire tents are now made out of the same material that cagools used to be made out of, making them light, waterproof and ensuring that the inside of the tent usually has the same smell that the inside of a cagool.

Wild camping, used to be called trespassing, different to camping because while it still takes place in a farmer’s field, there's no stand pipe in the corner, just a cattle trough. (Nearby salt lick likely to deter middle class families on low sodium diets).

Glamping, a recreation favoured by middle class parents who can no longer afford to take their children abroad or the even more expensive alternative: centre parcs. Glamping offers the promise of a stay in a decent B&B or a boutique hotel. This is, of course, complete bollocks as, even if you stay at a Travelodge, your stay is unlikely to feature you treading in cow-shit as you make your way to a stinking toilet block in the dead of night. A tent is a tent, deal with it, be honest with yourself and embrace camping – it’s easy, just strike up a conversation with your camp-site neighbour about your journey to the site, sustaining a conversation about the perils of this countrys’ A roads for three hours before drinking enough wine to allow you to sleep despite your wife’s muffled sobbing and your eldest child’s stubborn refusal to exit the car. At all.

Festival camping - does not really count. Camping is all about pitching your tent, fetching your water, cooking your dinner and brushing your teeth in a communal toilet block next to a bloke who you are pretty sure sneaks looks at your wife’s breasts when he thinks nobody’s looking. It’s also about waking at dawn in the countryside far from the cares and distractions of the pantomime that passes for real life and having a cup of tea in complete silence before the business of the day – a punch up with your lusting neighbour and trying to tempt your kid out of the car – begins. It is not spending ten seconds sproinging your pop-up tent into existence, hoisting one of those fluttery pennants above it so that you can find your way back, realizing that every other bugger has a pennant just like yours and so fixing your position using GPS on your smart phone, then going and getting wasted for three days, doing all your sleeping in hedges or the St John’s Ambulance recovery tent/chill out lounge.

Previously, those were your choices. Let me add another:

Pramping - protest camping.

The tented village on Parliament Square has been forced from the grass on to the pavement. This, I suppose, tests the convictions of the protesters as it's one thing to camp on grass, but a different proposition entirely to pitch your tent on paving slabs six inches away from a bloody big bus belching diesel fumes. Also, it's harder to dig a latrine pit through concrete. I have always been perversely proud of the peace camp outside parliament, when it was a single bloke but bloody hell, a whole village?

One can’t help but have the sneaking suspicion that while Brian Haw was a committed protestor who embodied much that was great about England – taking a stand, commitment to a cause he considered just, defiance of authority – and while his presence there was a living embodiment of the other great English values – tolerance and fair play (can you imagine a protestor trying that in North Korea, or Italy? At least when they turned the water cannon on it would put out the flames from the burning encampment), I can’t help but wonder if any of the other campers are not so much there to protest but rather saving on a hotel room and spending their money on tickets for Madam Tussauds and the Phantom of the Opera.

I walked past the other day and there were so many tents I was wondering if there was some sort of festival on.

Pramping is, I think, here to stay. And I’d like to see more of it. We have many gorgeous civic buildings in this country, seats of power crafted by Victorian architects. But what those tall towers, high windows and splendid cornices need to set them off is a little village of tents in primary colours outside each one. Pissed off with your council cutting libraries? Pramp! Annoyed that your parish council have chosen to ignore your plea for a bus shelter with a roof for the third year running? Pramp! And why draw the line at democratic institutions? Who the fuck organises ‘Britain in bloom’ and why has your village never won? Pramp! Camelot…every week you buy a ticket but have you ever won? Ever had a sniff? No? Pramp!

And as for the ticket prices at Glastonbury…actually, no, your protest would, I’m pretty sure, go unnoticed.

Say no more

2011-07-03T18:08:00.000+01:00

They’re gone!

Is it a conscientious cleaner? Or is it a message. If so, what kind of message, a warning perhaps that this platform is no longer a safe place to trade cryptic confection communications?

Certainly some spook shuffling around in a wide brim hat and raincoat with the collar turned up, or a bummer, is a more likely bet than at railway employee with a rubbish bag and a spare half hour to beautify the station.

Or maybe I do the platform staff a disservice. The village station stop is by no means an inner city hub, where the litter consists mainly of sleeping tourists and tramps, so the errant crisp packet dancing in the breeze does rather stick out. I’m prepared to bet that the staff would leave the wrappers there as a temporary art installation until professional pride overcame art appreciation and they trashed the lot. At least they didn’t simply rearrange the lot to confuse the intended recipient.

I shall miss the colourful collection of wrappers. Not to the extent that I would want to add to them though, I am much more a folded fag packet sort of chap but I thought that in an age of communication saturation, where everyone is constantly communicating yet not really saying anything that it was interesting to see something that was public yet coded, highly visible yet narrowly understandable, and more letter than litter.

Say it one last time

2011-06-11T23:46:00.000+01:00

The flight jacket. Timeless. Classic. I remember when I got my flight jacket. A birthday present, it was everything that was great about a garment, it had sheepskin lining to keep you toasty, and a leather exterior to show I have a grudge against cows. I still have it, even though it has been unworn for twenty years, after an evening where I was thoughtless enough to wear it while also wearing chinos and was greeted with the phrase ‘alright flight commander?’ when I strolled into my local pub.

Two things – at least it wasn’t a ‘Top Gun’ reference but…it’s WING COMMANDER you arsehole!

My plan is to wear it in my old age. I am preparing the mission patches that I will have sewn onto it. I am tempted to get some made up along the lines of ‘Iraq’, ‘Lybia’, ‘Syria’, China’, Syria again!’ and of course ‘Syria…can we bomb it any flatter?’ but there’s also the temptation to have mission patches along the lines of ‘Narnia’ or ‘Mordor’.

The moment, and I mean the moment, I walked out of the shop with my new jacket, I started noticing all the other f**kers with their sheepskin flight jackets. Where the hell had they come from? There had, surely, not been this number of fighter-pilot wannabes when I was walking into the shop.

Once you purchase something, you start to notice others with the same or similar product. Once you start to do something, you start to notice that others do it too. This aspect of human behaviour explains the success of social networking on the internet. And dogging.

Most of us are too busy putting in a dazzling performance in the lead role of the production that is our lives to sit back and scrutinise the background. Once you do though, it’s like the Matrix, you start to notice weird shit popping up everywhere. Actually, it’s totally mundane shit but because you’ve noticed it and because you are playing the lead role in the movie of your life it has to be significant right?

I have, of late, been fixating on chocolate bar wrappers jammed behind a pipe on the train station I commute from. By focusing on this I can distract myself from what others describe as ‘real life’ but what I consider to be ‘a series of situations, problems and experiences so complex and horrible that I feel they can only be solved using an magic abacus made of beer’.

The point is, once you start to notice something, you can’t stop. Take for instance the chocolate wrappers. It’s fairly unlikely that they are actually some sort of message (unless it’s ‘this is the shittest Dan Brown plot ever’) and they are more likely to be a lazy, but tidy, kid placing the wrappers there every morning when he has his 3,500 calorie breakfast shortly before he presents his hyperactive arse at school to be educated.

So, on the train, I notice that there’s a carefully folded wrapper jammed between the table and the carriage ‘wall’. Normally I’d just think litter lout but, lucky me, because I have fixated on the secret society of public transport confectionary communicators, I am now panicking that by sitting next to a folded choccie bar wrapper I am somehow sending a message. I have no problem sending a message, I’d just like to know what it is.

For instance…

Mars Bar - unimaganitive
Chrunchie – your mouth will feel dirty afterwards
Dairy Milk – Oh God, so good, I want more, more, more. Feeling a bit sick now. More!
Marathon – problems accepting change
Curlywurly – eight inches of pure pleasure…but didn’t they used to be longer?
Frit and nut – satisfaction and it’s one of your five
Finger of fudge – too delicious to be used as a sex aid…twice.

Say again?

2011-06-11T23:08:00.001+01:00

Back when wireless internet networks were complicated, expensive and rare, they were usually to be found in commercial spaces. Geeks developed a secret code called war chalking to inform other geeks of where they could get free wireless internet. These days, mobile devices that can access wireless internet can also detect wireless networks but back in the day, you’d need some savvy software and a Pringles tube. It’s true, the Pringles tube, an aluminium cylinder, was a sort of cross between a metal detector, a radio triangulation device and a dousing rod. Quite how you mashed it up with your heavy-as-a-housebrick old school laptop I have no idea, but I bet chewing gum was involved.

So, geeks would prowl the streets, detect wireless networks with no security passwords and would then chalk on pavements or walls that a network was available. The war chalking was evocative of the secret signs that American vagrants would leave outside the homes of folks during the recession, signs that could be interpreted by others such as ‘food for work available’, ‘angry dog here’ or ‘wireless network will be available here next century’.

There have always been secret signs. The problem with most of them is that they are a one way thing. One by sea, two by land may be all very well, but does it allow for the recipient of the message to send something back along the lines of ‘I am standing on the beach frantically waving my towel because my cover has been blown and I want to come home right now!’? Possibly not.

Railways, of course, have plenty of signals. Famously, when they go wrong or don’t work at all, this can lead to problems. Just this week some criminals decided to steal a load of copper wire. The problem was that it was live and providing power and information to loads of trains that were supposed to be leaving Waterloo. The result was a lot of inconvenienced commuters. But signalling equipment is notoriously delicate. For instance, it freezes when, er, the temperature drops below freezing. Obviously the design geniuses who keep a national network of thousands of trains running simultaneously are too clever to consider slathering the signals in gose grease between November and April to ward off frosted signalling.

More informal signals have been spotted on the platform of the station I commute from this week. The mysterious message sent via strategically folded chocolate bar has been added to. A lone wrapper has appeared adjacent to, but quite separate from, the original wrapper totem. This, I think, is some sort of coded conversation. What does this new reply mean? Could it be an invitation, a warning or simply somebody thinking that this is how we dispose of wrappers now?

Whatever it means, the effect is that in addition to having to run in a manner so undignified it makes a squid being fired out of a cannon into a brick wall look like an exercise in coordination just to catch my train, I now have to build in time to se if any new ‘message’ has been posted.

Say what?

2011-06-09T08:06:00.003+01:00

I am, for the moment at least, currently commuting from a sleepy to the point of narcolepsy station that somehow escaped the Great Beeching Butchery, possibly because of it's very insignificance or possibly because he once has a bunk up in the Gents and formed a ramrod attachment to the place. The station could not be much smaller or simpler unless it was mounted on a board in an attic somewhere with OO scale trains running through it.

It does, however, retain a certain charm and the ability to spring a few surprises if you look carefully. Standing waiting for my train I noticed this collection of chocolate bar wrappers neatly folded and lodged behind a pipe on the platform. My first reaction was that it was a very neat litter lout, or a person too lazy to walk to the bin but with an obsessive compulsive disorder. (Why is it called an obsessive compulsive disorder, surely the condition of somebody who is compelled to have everything arranged just so or is a neatness freak should be an obsessive compulsive order?).

Or even a bored schoolboy.

Other explanations suggest themselves. The first is that it is as sort of message, either simply conveyed through folding the reports strategically to spell out a word on the vertical - this is a great idea but not secure and also limits you to the alphabet available at the confection counter. More probable is that the colours used are some of code, like signal flags.

As to what the message might be about, while international espionage or the doings of a secret order of the Knights Templar are possibilities, more likely is that it is a coded message used by the sort of gentlemen who wish to arrange clandestine meetings in railway stations ('Beechers’) and find simply recording the time and date of their next visit on the back of the loo door too risky, and that arranging assignations through txt, twitter or Facebook lacks romance.

Most likely it is a board schoolboy, but you just know that what started as an absent minded action has now developed into a challenge - how many wrappers can he lodge before they are removed or, worse, replaced in a different order?

Birthday cards

2011-05-29T10:30:00.002+01:00

There are certain reliable images that you can have for birthday cards. Cake is good, so is booze, and some kind of gaily wrapped prezzie is always an acceptable image.

Then you get the cards that break down on gender lines, or rather gender stereotypes.

For women, shoes feature a lot. As do those amusing cards featuring either a black and white photograph of some 1950’s housewife and an amusing caption along the lines of ‘Daphne knew she was growing old when she only got off her tits on ketamin at the weekend’, or a cartoon of a woman and a caption about binge drinking or binge chocolate eating being more fun than anal.

For men, sports are where you can traditionally turn. Vintage golfing images or images of footballers in long shorts and longer moustaches from the days when they were happy to play for half a crown a week and people thought ‘superinjunction’ was something to do with Crewe railway station.

Vintage is still big business, taking a vintage travel poster and slapping ‘happy birthday’ on it usually works a treat, because men, by and large, are genetically programmed to like trains, boats and young women in flimsy dresses drinking alcohol in foreign parts far removed from the restraining influences of vicars, aunts or anyone who knows your reputation.

Browsing the racks there’s another sort of card that appears as a genre – the image of a sports car racing the steam train. The sports car is usually in the foreground (winning the race?) with the train in the background.

This is the perfect card for a gent. He may not be getting a train set or a sports car for his birthday, but he’s got a card that shows both and he can imagine himself behind the wheel or on the footplate, as his temperament dictates.

Quick quiz – if you were presented with such a card, would you consider yourself to be driving the car, driving the train or as a passenger on the train? And what about the person who gave you the card?

It depends to an extent on the illustration. Is one alone in the car or does one have a lady companion? Does the train look like it might have a really good restaurant service?

a) I am driving the car. I have personal freedom and I like the smell of petrol. And I don’t mind paying lots for it. And I quite like petrol garage sandwiches. And porn.

b) I am a passenger on the train. I appreciate the idea of swishing through the English countryside knowing that, according to all the books I have read and films I have seen, it is only a matter of time before I am embroiled in a murder or an act of espionage. I will use that time to drink an entire bottle of claret.

c) I am the driver of the train. I am not on strike because it is a steam train and I am an enthusiast. I am also not on strike because as well as coal I am feeding into the boiler any evidence from the bank raid it took to fund the restoration of the steam engine.

d) This is the one I always go for. I am racing in the car to intercept the train at the next station, its final stop before it crosses the border. On boarding the train I will take my seat in the restaurant car and smile to myself as my car, now driven by a close associate who just happens to be a world class racing driver, sets off with some vile foreign agents in pursuit. The secret plans are safely in my possession, the wine list looks acceptable, my sleeping berth is a double and a woman who looks JUST like Gillian Anderson has just taken the last available seat in the restaurant car, opposite me.

I concentrate more on the idea that the woman looks JUST like Gillian Anderson rather than the fact that the seat opposite me was the last one to be taken.

Of course, thanks to a section of society that likes to take things that are great, and turn them into things that are shit, the last restaurant car on a regular service is now a thing of the past. Apparently first class passengers will now be served ‘airline means’ at their seats. I can see how this is cheaper than running a kitchen and providing tablecloths, service, china and civilisation, but it was interesting to note how everyone pronounced the words ‘airline meal’ in a certain tone.

I am sure that in business class and first class travel on certain airlines it’s possible to still get a decent meal with china and food you could identify. Personally, I love the idea that when you fly you get little trays of plastic with food in them, plastic cutlery, and sachets of salt and sachets of sauce. It adds to the novelty and, to be fair, nobody expects a working kitchen at 35,000 feet. But a train, a train is different, on a train the expectation rather than the exception should be a dining car.

(It’s got to be time to fight back and here’s how. First Class picnics. OK, you know your flight or your train or whatever. Waiting for you at check in or the ticket barrier will be your First Class picnic. A box of delights that will contain all you need to make your journey a transport of delight. For trains you get a small linen tablecloth designed to fit across your table or seatback tray, along with china and cutlery. For aeroplanes the only concession is plastic cutlery and that your bottle of decent red comes in the form of a dozen or so tiny plastic sachets that you can take through security.)

What the card does not show is the motor car racing a steam train across a level crossing – or trying to. A few tonnes of athletic metal and flesh vs several hundred tonnes of flaming, smoke-breathing steam train and heritage? Inside illustration: a single wheel, on fire, rolling down the road.

Say cheese

2011-05-28T16:47:00.000+01:00

What, I wonder, would cause the most unease if, during a dinner party, you revealed that you had purchased an artefact central to that dinner party second hand on eBay? Charity shops, of course, won’t take any kind of food processor or food preparation gear because no matter how well scrubbed, there’s always the danger that listeria bacteria lurks in the blender.

I reckon that a second hand barbeque has to be up there. God knows the grill of mine is ‘seasoned to perfection’, that is, has not been cleaned properly in months, my cleaning routine consisting of sterilising the thing with flame from the gas burners, relying on the gristly globules to burn themselves off and chipping off the worst of the smoking residue with a rusty prong.

But I think that the number one device that would case second-hand fear would be a fondue maker. (Maker? Machine? Heater?) It is that perfect storm of dairy in an unnatural form (melted…ugg), kitch association (if a couple own a fondue kit (Kit! That’s it, it’s a kit!) then it doesn’t automatically mean they also own a sauna and are swingers, but it’s a safe enough assumption), and the ghosts of a thousand sad cheesy meals that might have been cooked using that kit.

It also poses the fundamental question, what sort of person sells their fondue kit, and what sort of person buys it? The solution to the last question is – somebody who has invited you to dinner thinking you are the sort of person who likes fondue. Prey that that is the extent of their gross character misjudgement and that they haven’t assumed you also like ‘foudue’.

Volcano skies

2011-05-27T14:10:00.000+01:00

Another volcano has erupted over Iceland, causing budget airline owners to go on television and talk about ash, explaining how it is more important that they be able to fly incredibly complicated and fragile machines through volcanic ash clouds in order to ensure stag and hen parties get to their destination than it is to ensure the safety of anyone living underneath the flight path.

If aeroplanes can fly through clouds of volcanic ash with no ill effect, how come you’re not allowed to smoke in the toilets of these same aeroplanes? I mean, if they are robust enough to stay aloft in a cloud of volcanic ash, I presume that a single B&H sparked up in the bog is not that much of a big deal, right?

The volcano has once again spoiled ‘the big getaway’. Are we to take from this that volcano’s are seasonal? It even meant that President Obama had to leave Ireland early. Didn’t Air Force One visit Europe last year when there was volcanic eruption going on? Possibly volcanic eruption is the ultimate deterrent to stop other aeroplanes sneaking up on it or something.

Looking out the window, I’m not sure if I’m looking at a volcano sky or just a normal vivid, polluted sunset. Apparently when Krakatoa erupted the skies were crimson for weeks. If anything, the skies seem clear of anything remotely resembling a special effect. Which is a good thing, I’ve seen the pictures from Iceland and have no desire to spend day after day scooping sooty talc off my lawn.

Certainly, in terms of stopping air traffic an erupting volcano has done the trick once again. The secret volcano base is, of course, the lair of choice for the supervillan. Usually however their plot to bring travel chaos to the civilised world involves lasers, missiles, computer hacking and at least one tank of piranha fish rather than a straightforward eruption.

What’s interesting is that the people stranded at the airports seem to kip under red Cross blankets or the sort of tin-foil sheets used to wrap marathon runners or chicken. Between the climate and industrial unrest, I’m amazed that every airport doesn’t have a thousand of those foam camping mats stockpiled in a room somewhere. Air travel is supposed to be romantic and glamorous. Christ alone knows that the budget airlines are doing their best to dispel this image by charging you for a sandwich on a sixteen hour flight, but checking in the passenger’s suitcases so they a) have to fly with you but b) don‘t have a change of clothes when they wake cold and gritty on the airport floor is either supremely stupid or the sort of evil genius that is deserving of an undersea volcano base.