Inspiration

If you’re lucky, there’s beauty all around you.  If you are very lucky, it’s in the mirror too and you can make a living selling make up or clothes that normal people can’t afford or look good in.

There’s an art to appreciating beauty though.  In the appropriately titled film ‘American beauty’, there’s a scene where a boy shows a girl a video of a plastic bag caught in a breeze, endlessly circulating.  This, he breathes in solemn tones, is the most beautiful thing he has ever filmed.  This, 400 people in a cinema auditorium think, is a reflection on the need for American youth to get out more.  It’s at this point that you realise that any movie containing such a scene must be more up its own arse than a video of a rectal exam.  Anyone who has witnessed a plastic bag on the wing in the wild will know that they are not to be trusted and can attack, wrapping themselves round your leg or shoe and leaving you no option but to shake off said plastic bag by doing a ritual dance that, performed in public, makes you look like a one-man Morris troupe.

It does pose the question though, whether true beauty is to be found in nature, in mankind’s creation or, like a plastic bag in an updraft, in a combination of both?

Picture a new cathedral.  Beautiful?  Unlikely.

Now picture a proper Norman job, the sort that took a good couple of centuries to build, where you capped out the building your great-grandfather dug the foundations for and which has stood sentinel over the landscape for a good few centuries.  Fresh carved, gargoyles and grotesques are probably not best described as beautiful but, after a couple of hundred years weathering, the carving that was started by man is finished by nature as the lines and features of the stone are smoothed and, through architectural botox, a building becomes landscape.

And that’s just the outside.  Wait until you get to the gift shop and tea room.

Or not, the thing to do is head straight for the gift shop and pick up a guide to the cathedral, because if not you will spend the rest of your visit wondering what’s the nave and what’s the choir.  Like being able to name every wildflower in a hedgerow (ragwort, bramble, pornmag, tizercan) knowledge of the correct architectural terms for different parts of medieval buildings is something you think you should have, and feel guilty about not possessing.  Like an ethnic friend.

Places, and people, can be described as inspiring.  The Greeks, early market leaders in matters poetical and theoretical, outsourced inspiration to muses.  These creatures were capricious and could be found in various places, oddly enough frequently attractive places that were quiet and allowed a chap to think about what rhymed with ‘trireme’, or how to found a new branch of philosophy that would get you the girls, or just how to fuck goats.  That last one is a bit of a shocker I concur, but these were less sophisticated times and hanging around in a glade can get lonely.

Muses persist to this day.  Usually they are women.  Unusually they inspire men.  Usually they have really, really good cheekbones.  Rarely do they advise on advanced trigonometry or how to romance ruminants, and the world is arguably a poorer place for it.

Other places where inspiration can be found evidently include the bottom of bottles of alcohol, especially if one is a poet.  And stimulants appear to be a common feature, as, given the number of people sitting in coffee shops with laptops open in front of them with the phrase ‘SCENE ONE’ or ‘CHAPTER ONE’ on the screen, followed by a big white space, latte would appear to inspire.

Anyone who has ever picked up a bat, a ball, a pen or a brush has, at some point, probably been inspired by somebody or something.  It can be a moment of genius or a moment of heroism.

And some of those that have been inspired may go on to inspire others, and not even know it, like the master mason who carved the gargoyle.

Fatties and tatties

Summer is suddenly upon us. Not just any summer either, this is the summer of the Jubilee and of the Olympics. These events have gone from being some sort of vague, distant, slightly routine disruptingly annoying event on the horizon to being, well, here an now, without any apparent lead-up period, which is why everyone has panic bought bunting. I'm not kidding, the whole country is swaddled in red white and blue - its almost worth invading somewhere because the decorations for the victory celebrations are already in place.

One of the reasons why summer has suddenly sprung upon us like a flasher from a hedge is that since the instigation of the hosepipe ban it's been raining so constantly that getting those two pandas for the zoo looked less like a way to secure tourism and more like a sensible precaution while the construction of an ark was completed.

In a country with a healthy Celtic population (except for those living in Glasgow) the return of the sun after a drizzly winter, that lasted until fucking May, has unsurprisingly been met with ritual. Goats and virgins breath a sigh of relief as the ritual in question is less about disembowlment and more about disrobing, as the British greet the reappearance of the sun by slipping into something that doesn't cover them up enough.

The first sunny weekend of the year is the one for the national audit of fatties and tattles, that is, who has put on weight over the summer but has still squeezed into, and in some cases is being squeezed out of, last summer's clothes, and who has got themselves a new tattoo or two during those long winter nights.

In terms of fat, it's good to see that at least one sun ritual persists, as it looks like the legacy of those pyramid loving coca munching sun worshiping psychopaths the Aztecs is kept alive by young maidens apparently gorging on toblerone all winter.

In terms of tattoos it's interesting to track the developments of fashions as new tats get their first airing. There are, of course, some classic tats, such as the small oriental symbol that a young woman has in a discreet spot and you usually only find out that she's got a tramp stamp when it's too late, that is, when she's taken her top off and you will now have to be polite about a symbol you suspect she does not realise features on the label of a popular brand of soy sauce.

Also popular are the names of loved ones and family members along the inside of arms in a font that the wearer calls classy, the Tatoo artist called copperplate and the owners of the coca-cola logo call 'tm'. This is replacing the former trend of Sanskrit tats which largely fell in popularity because the wearers habitually forgot what the tat actually read and were panicked into saying it was their hotmail password.

For men this year, large and swirly Celtic tattoos seem to be the order of the day. Big blotches of black that first appear in outline form, and largely stay that way. Because a lot of blokes appear to be walking round with the outline of the patterns traced thinly on their arms, as if they go to the tattoo parlour first to get the outline drawn and then any subsequent visits, should they be drunk or stupid enough to make any, are a sort of tattooing by numbers. Judging from the number of fellows wandering around with an outline but no thick, black, heavy colouring in, the first experience of the needle has been enough to persuade them that another six sessions of intermittent fainting and vomiting in a chair while the girl with the pierced lip on reception sniggers at you is not how they want to spend their weekends.

As for this year's trend, I predict union flags and Olympic rings for the blokes and for the girls - beloved children's teevee characters so that in future, when she slips her top off, you will have to both be polite, and remain interested, when confronted with Postman Pat as a black and white tat.

Three, two, one...contacts!

The Great Contact Lens Experiment continues, with all the drama and pantomime you would expect from a man making a complete hash of jamming his non too clean fingertips into his increasingly bloodshot eyes in an inelegant attempt to fit a tiny disc of wet slippery plastic balanced on a wet slippery finger onto a wet slippery eyeball.

I expect the choice to try contacts instead of glasses is a vanity thing, so it’s good that the end result is that I look like somebody from a Wanted poster in the Wild West (Midlands?), with the wild, piggy eyes of somebody seen without their glasses giving me the appearance of a fellow who is both pleased and surprised at his recent successful bank raid in Fargo yet at the same time assured that he is one step closer to dancing the hemp fandango as a result.

Seen without their glasses, people look odd.

It can be disconcerting enough when somebody puts their glasses on to peer at something, especially if they are wearing a white coat and your trousers are crumpled round your ankles as you stand in a chilly consulting room, but its worse still if somebody takes their glasses off, particularly if you are on a first date and the restaurant was already 'romantically lit' (i.e. gloomy) in the first place.

They can change a mood as readily as they can change a face. They are a sign of imperfect vision yet are taken as a sign of intellect. They can look sinister, they can look cool and, with that iconic addition, the fist-sized lump of fabric plaster holding one leg to the front of the frame, they can identify you as a train enthusiast more readily than even standing at the end of a railway station platform in the rain with your notepad and smelling of crab-paste sandwiches going warm in tupperwear.

Because glasses are great. At the very least they allow you to see properly, and the choice of frame if, it’s the right one, can be far cooler than any haircut, haircuts being prone to damage by wind, hats and sudden changes in fashion which mean you go from cool to tool in a nanomoment.

So why contacts? Well, if I ever do go mountain-boarding again it would be good to know that if I pull off my signature move, the Epic Face Plant, it won't result in my specs being reduced to kit form, and it also means that I get to wear those really cool wraparound sunglasses that make you look young, hip and athletic. In my own head. If not actually on it.

A good look?

Fat face is a store that sells, essentially, surfing inspired apparel for middle aged people who are more likely to surf the internet or the teevee channels than any body of water.

In Ely recently. Appropriate attire in Ely is a farmer’s smock, or the skin of the incomer you’ve killed. This is a resolutely landlocked city in the heart of East Anglia so, the ideal place to locate a shop flogging loud shirts and cargo pants in case you decide to drive for an hour to the coast.

What gives the game away, though, are the sizes. I've seen surfers. Mainly they sit together on their boards, in little clumps, looking out to sea and talking no doubt about waves, cider or pot.

They also have flat stomachs and not a whole lot of fat. While you would think that a low centre of gravity would be an advantage on a surf board, it is obviously incompatible with looking good in a wet suit.

Fat Face sells cargo pants in a size 38 waist. The shop was full of middle aged people mistakenly thinking that they could pull off the shorts and loud shirt look for one more summer.

There comes a time when one has to realise that the correct summer attire is, essentially, a hammock and a pitcher of Pimms - and cargo pants if you must but at least have the good grace to call them 'pirate trousers'.

Vogue - part 1

Like many men, I have never looked inside an edition of Vogue.

Not even American Vogue because, apparently, there are many international editions and like McDonalds trying to appease the local market by introducing the McBlubber (Iceland), the McAntelope (Namibia) and the McSpitinyourbunyourcapitilistdog (N.Korea) each has its own take on fashion. American Vogue I imagine as glitzy and dizzy, like a cheerleader just about to stop vomiting because she has drunk too much and starting to vomit through an eating disorder. European Vogue has lots of little black dresses (apart from Italian Vogue, which has lots of big black dresses as worn by your mamma). Japanese Vogue probably has some totally weird manga shit happening and British Vogue is, basically, printed on tweed.

Not that I’m a stranger to a woman’s magazine. Oh no! I remember well one time at an ex-girlfriend’s place, chuckling to myself as I leafed through her Cosmo and noting that she had scored very low on the ‘are you ready for a relationship with somebody who still insists on playing Dungeons and Dragons with his mates one night a week’ quiz.

The next week, suddenly single, it wasn’t so bloody funny.

There are two reasons to love women’s magazines, the first is the personality quizzes (and the first question should always be ‘if you think this quiz will help you get through life, you need a) a dirty martini…NOW! b) a ride on a fairground ride, of any type, but one that pulls more Gs than NASA rate as safe is recommended and c) self-esteem). The second reason is scent strips.

Ever wondered why women always smell so good?

Men smell of the world. At least that part of the world that appears to be inhabited by rutting animals, scared animals, scared rutting animals, industry, steam engines, athletics, locker rooms, discount soap, teenage angst, laundry, fried food and, my own particular scent, a heady mixture of Star Wars and tears.

Women smell like…well…you know men are always doing that thing when they shove their nose in their loved one’s hair and just…inhale…the way that women do with laundry? Well, it’s not because we’ve got this thing for shampoo and it’s not because we’re weird (unless he’s a stranger). It’s because we can’t believe a human could smell that good.

I mean, if you saw a flying saucer having a space battle with a swarm of cyborg dolphins, on fire, you’d stare, no? That’s how alien the concept of smelling good is to men.

If we can drag enough of that smell into ourselves then maybe we can somehow purify ourselves – like that time you thought you could cure that hangover by sticking a garden hose in your mouth and trying to flush you hangover out of your pours through pressure (thank you, Harry Harrison for putting that thought in my head, ever since I’ve been soooooooooo tempted to see if it works).

But women’s magazines give some of the secret away and that secret is…scent strips! That’s right – scent strips. That stuff you buy your girlfriend or wife once in a while to make them smell purty, apparently they have people on magazine production lines spraying that stuff on pages and then gumming them shut at the factory, like camp umpa lumpas.

Christ, imagine that for a job – the guy that spritzes the scent strip? How long would it be before you wondered if that CCTV camera was a dummy and if it was time to do something fun, yet evil?

But that’s why women smell so good. An average woman buys what, forty or fifty glossy magazines a week? (She must do; I go to the news stand and there are THOUSANDS of the f**king things, so somebody must be buying them). So they have all of these scent strips. OK, so you start with some in the knicker draw, then the sock draw, then the…er, whatever draw (do women have things in draws, most of the women I know keep stuff on the floor or, judging by the errands I run, at the dry cleaners). But then you have more of them so; handbag, glasses case, anorak hood, purse, ipod keepie thingie, pockets, desk draw, gym locker, composter, CD case that was supposed to contain the original cast recording of ‘Oliver’, I mean, WTF! and, my personal favourite…sellotaped to me.

So that’s why women beguile. They smell nice because they surround themselves with strips of paper impregnated with musk. That, and they are made of sugar and spice and all things nice. Which I guess means bacon?

Teen Vogue

Oh my suffering Christ alive! Just what the world needs. Teen Vogue.

As proof that the devil is a real person and probably owns a publishing house, Vogue is pretty good evidence. If you had to sell the idea of Vogue to a Vogueless world then you could either make your pitch that you’d be launching a glossy, classy magazine featuring fashion in order to make the world a better, more stylish place and that hey, women are interested in handbags and shit right? Or, you could pitch that in a world full of image conscious and neurotic zombies that can’t think for themselves and will pay to read something that makes them feel like a fat failure and people would STILL invest.

But Vogue for kids? What the hell? I thought that teenage girls already bought Vogue, how else do they become dysfunctional and have eating disorders? Apparently though there’s money to be made from explicitly exploiting teens. It’s like grooming, but via the medium of the glossy mag.

Teen Vogue is essentially like weaponising anorexia.

But, you know, good luck with that, because I think teen girls have moved on from being impressed by photographs of other teen girls wearing scarfs and being informed that mittens are going to be big this winter. Is this really how teenage girls get their information these days, from a magazine? Certainly when I was a teenage boy they appeared to get their information like some sort of hive consciousness, by gathering in gaggles and chattering just below the range of human hearing, then all laughing at once.

These days I imagine that this has been replaced by texting and social networking, or hanging around bus stops drinking Merrydown cider.

Just what is the point of vogue anyway? To tell you what to wear, right? Okay, so somebody at Vogue thought that they’d be able to tell teens, well, anything? I tell you what, why don’t you have the next issue with a huge gatefold centrefold that has ‘clean up your room’ written on it, see just how much influence you have over the mind of the average teen. Unless your magazine is delivered in text form during the ad breaks for some dreadful ITV talent show, you’ve got no chance.

What are teen girls wearing? Leggings and Ugg boots. Always.

Fat girls

Obesity. There’s a fat word. That big round ‘Ooh’ at the beginning, and then the ‘bee’ which actually looks like the sort of people the word is describing in profile. The only way the word could better describe the condition was if it was longer and had an ‘oom-pah’ sound in the middle of it. In reality, this is not needed, as most people using the term ‘Obese’ follow through with the silent action of puffing their cheeks out like a startled fish and holding their hands two feet from their hips.

The newspapers recently made much of a decision by some school somewhere (I suspect the journalist was little better informed than I) to ensure that the word ‘Obese’ did not appear on any kids’ school report. This is, to a certain extent, a sensible move. After all, any parent irresponsible enough to let their kid get so fat that his size is appearing on a school report is unlikely to know what a word means; so better leave it at ‘tubby’ and move on. The question might well be; ‘what is a reference to the size of little Johnny’s arse doing on a school report in the first place?’.

Only two subjects have any real reason for addressing the subject, the first is physical fitness, where, let’s face it, anyone unable to commit themselves to playing football in blizzards, go into crunching rugby tackles with kids twice their size and three times their age, get to the top of the rope in the gym in under five seconds and achieve marksman standards of flicking arse with a wet towel is considered a ulist.

The second subject is home economics, where the report might explain that eating everyone else’s homework is unacceptable.

Why is size an issue? Unless the kid is actually so fat that his classmates can’t see round him to see the blackboard, or his mass has become a nuisance by attracting small objects into his orbit, then I don’t think a school report is the right place to inform parents that their kid is a fattie. This will already have been done in the caring environment of the school playground, where a (wide) circle of taunting kids will be chanting ‘porker’ around some quivering wretch. What the school, the parents and the fattie himself are unaware of is that these taunting kids are actually sponsored by the local corner shop in the sure knowledge that the kid will comfort eat his way through a dozen curlywurleys to get over this, thus assuring a healthy profit for the week.

A bigger problem than fat kids are fat adults. That’s because, with fat adults, there’s no chanting circle of evil sods to tell you you’re fat – unless you’re a fat bloke. That leaves the problem of fat girls, where, without honest friends, the only signs of your size being a problem are the lack of a boyfriend and the fact you own all of ‘Sex and the City’ on VHS and DVD. And a three figure weekly grocery bill.

That’s because, unlike fat kids and their school reports, taunting and ritual humiliation by sadistic gym teachers, nobody is telling fat people that they are fat anymore. Fat people are being told that being fat is normal. This has led to fat girls dressing like thin girls…with disastrous results. It used to be that to be an evil genius, you had to live in an undersea volcano base and plot to destroy New York with a giant robot or something. Now to be an evil genius all you need to do is design hipster jeans for fat girls. These, worn in combination with a tee shirt, are truly a sight to behold.

You want to know when you’re fat? It’s when people start using your arse as a landmark; ‘yes, carry on, take a left at the Red Lion, then a right at that girl’s arse, then you can’t miss it’. Oddly, this means that fat people are more useful than thin people, who are mainly used as warnings of what happens when you go vegetarian.

Worried you’re fat? Try Google Earth. On it? Start slimming. Fatty.

She’s in fashion

According to the calendar it’s July. According to my home weather station it’s the Book of Genesis, day three of the Flood.

Home weather stations are the cutting edge of cottage industry forecasting. All over the country, men of a certain temperament make their daily observance at the little cupboard attached to the side of a shed. Surely, this must be the one time when men can have their interest piqued by something outside a shed rather than within!

The Government has, in taking giant strides to become the sort of regime that renames the days of the week after the family members and pets of the Premier or only allows six state-sanctioned hairstyles, banned mercury barometers. This, they think, will make the world a more ecologically friendly place. Quite how they can dictate for that at the same time as giving the go-ahead for the building of new nuclear power stations is quite easy to fathom – nuclear power stations are built in places where people are poor and ugly and so one would never know if there was contamination.

Deprived of scientific instruments that have been around since the enlightenment, I’m more than happy to fall back on methods that have been around since the dark ages.

My home weather station consists of a bit of seaweed, a pine cone and a tattered notebook with a battered stub of pencil attached to it by a hairy string. The pencil is useful for recording information and, when let free to be blown horizontal, twisting and twitching on the end of its bit of hairy string, gauging wind speed and direction. To this arsenal of monitoring equipment I’m gradually adding the ache in my shoulder, but I can’t be sure if that’s dependent upon the weather or doing boxing on the Wii when pissed again.

There are two things that give a surge of pleasure to the amateur weather forecaster. The first is filling in another day’s readings. Once you have recorded rainfall, hours of sunlight, wetness of seaweed and what shape your cone is in, you can go to bed with the sense of a job well done. The second is writing letters that will never be published to national newspapers when you got a forecast right and the Met Office got it wrong.

As an adjunct to this, you can have hours of pleasure talking to people in pubs about the conspiracy between the Met Office and the Government that means your letters never get published. A word of caution, don’t follow this up with a declaration that the Met Office is actually a front for a secret Government project to control the weather, because people may think that this would be quite a good thing, or may even consider that things would be better if the Virgin Group ran the weather too.

Being a bloke, fashion passes me by, occasionally looping around me but never coexisting at the same time and place that I am in. I wear the uniform of my generation, tee shirt and jeans. Actually, that’s the uniform of the generation of the 1950s, invented by James Dean. Pity he didn’t accessorise with a seat-belt. I am dabbling a bit with fashion at the moment, challenging myself to root in the back of the cupboard (past the fur coats but before the snow) and picking out something I bought but have not worn in ages. The trouble is that being a bloke I consider it worth keeping a garment as long as it a) still has most of its buttons and at least bears a resemblance to the colour it was when I bought it and b) fits. Trousers appear to be shrunk by wardrobe elves. But only the waist.

My latest must-have accessory, my umbrella, is proving its worth already. Not because it keeps the rain off me but because it keeps the rain off everyone – it has talismatic properties. – simply carrying it means that it stays dry, or at least never rains enough to put it up. That’s why it should never be stored in proximity to my weather station – confuses the delicate instruments.

Postcard from Sorrento - slim fit

Sorrento is beautiful. It’s also on the cruise circuit. This means that every day, even off season when I was there, there’s an elegant cruise ship anchored in the Bay. It also means that the population of Sorrento, by size, is as follow: American, German, English and Italian. By volume, its American, German, car horn, scooter, Italian, English.

God alone knows what the place is like in high season, but the little medieval alleyways were already crowded with tourists. This does not stop mad-arse Italians on scooters zooming down them at speed. Obviously, they are practicing manoeuvres for bag-snatching before the start of the tourist season.

The Italians here are all turned out really well. I felt like a right scruff in jacket and jeans. Luckily, I was able to improve my appearance no end with the purchase of a proper Italian shirt. I had cleverly left my shirt I had intended to wear to the wedding at home. Along with my camera. Oops.

So needing a replacement shirt I wandered into one of the many clothes shops and selected a fine white one, 16½ collar. Great. The lady at the till looks at the shirt and looks at me.

‘Sleem fit?’
‘Er, no…I suppose not’.
‘Ahhhh, Eenglish fit’. Smirk.

Indeed.