Trump dumped

Much is made in mainstream media (you know, that part of the media that is accountable, reports fact and does not consider a racist rant or a picture of a kitten ‘content’ (although also the media that reports misinformation and hacks the telephones of schoolgirls, so pretty creepy all round, if you want quality journalism, stick with ‘Look and Learn’ ‘Blue Peter’)) that Li’ll Donnie is not going to visit London to check out the new US Embassy.  The prize goes to the London Evening Standard for their headline ‘Trump won’t go south of the river’.

You can slice this story a number of ways.  It’s either a snub to the UK, or Don Trump is, sensibly, not keen to visit a city where his presence is likely to be met my protesters who are protesting not about his policies, but because he is, apparently, just a terrible human being.

Either that or he has a report on his desk about the likely cost of getting the limo clean afterwards.

Typewriter 2.0

I am once again in a hotel, and I am once again thinking about journalism in general and war correspondents in particular.

It’s a rather pleasant hotel.  It’s in the centre of London, with a view out over the docks to the city (and there is almost everything you need to know about London, if you wrote that on the back of a postcard from the past anywhere else in the world, you would have the mental image of a place of transit smelling of desperation and mackerel, populated by wanton types with earrings, and that’s just the sailors.  The only boats bobbing in the dock here are Sunseekers and the city is the City, proud to leave all the lights on in their huge office blocks to create the impression that everyone is still hard at it after dark, shouting into telephones, Like In The Movies).

The air conditioning is hidden and efficient, there is no lazily rotating ceiling fan that can cross fade to become the rotating blades of a helicopter.  Maybe it’s stealth?

Nevertheless, there’s something about being in a hotel and not being on holiday that makes me think about journalism in general and war correspondents in particular.  I’d like to say it’s the mutual incompatibility of pool toys and AK47s that make any holiday hotel a haven, but sadly that’s no longer true.

So on the strength of my previous post about ambient soundtracks, I should probably be putting together the faux war correspondent soundtrack, era by era.  Let’s start with the 1970s.  Busy traffic, foreign murmuring, farting scooters, the occasional mooing of an ox, the whup whup whup of a Huey passing overhead and the clackity clack (‘don’t talk back!’) of the typewriter.

Vietnam was, I have read, the first televised war.

There have been plenty since.  I remember ITV reporting Afghanistan.  Film reports of Sandy Gall sitting in a cave somewhere in Afgan, breaking (unleavened) bread with the Taliban, who were off to beat back the Russians. 

And of course the Falklands.  ‘I counted them all out, I counted them all back’.  A Union Flag waving from the top of an aerial as a squaddie yomped to Port Stanley and Victory.

Gulf War I and Gulf War II.  Gulf War I was night vision cameras on tanks streaking across the desert.  Gulf War II took things to the next level, that next level being vertical as we were treated to footage of the nosecone cam of a bunker buster.  Not to mention the ‘shock and awe-shit there goes that little place that does great falafel’ of the opening night bombardment.

Gulf War II was the last television war.  Now, conflict plays out on snapchat and Twitter, barbarism on Youtube.

What the medium of the next Big One will be I’m not sure.  Possibly when the nukes start flying, the next war will be recorded by the cave paintings of the survivors but actually I think a more realistic prospect will be that the next major conflict will be reported by ABC when it’s a throw down between the Red and the Blue, rather than the Grey and the Blue.  I think Blue won last time?

Vietnam was certainly a reporters’ war.  It also produced memoirs and collections of reportage and, of course, a load of great movies (although the greatest war movie ever made is ‘Where Eagles Dare’, followed by ‘The Eagle Has Landed”, followed by ‘Heartbreak Ridge’.  Basically, if it has ‘Eagle or Clint, it’s all good).

As previously reported from the front line in Salisbury, I’m pretty sure that my ancient Powerbook could stop a .303 round that would take down a Decepticon, but I would rather like it if the keyboard sounds could be set to different themes.  Obviously ‘space’ and ‘rainforest’ or similar would be popular, but I’m attracted to the idea of ‘quill’ and, of course ‘Imperial typewriter’.

For the (written) record, I once owned an electric typewriter, a Brother, once plugged in and placed upon a table, typing generated a report like a fucking artillery barrage.  Hardly the sort of thing to write tender love poetry upon, that ladies could then read, and frot themselves senseless to.

Remember

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

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

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

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

Until this week.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And it’s right that it should go.

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

It’s extraordinary, humbling, marvellous and magnificent.

Hampton Court Palace Flower Show

Bloomin' trenches!

The 2014 Hampton Court flower show was, as always, fantastic.  The stand out garden had to be the WWI shell-crater garden, complete with actors explaining what life was like in the trenches (shite!).

A man appreciating art.

It’s crowded this year.  It takes more than low cloud the colour of lead and the sort of humidity normally associated with latitudes and morals that make it socially acceptable to drink gin at/for lunch to put off the RHS faithful, but the promise of good(ish) weather has brought out, well, the fair-weather show-goers too.

Accordingly, you need to be mindful of personal space.  This is not just because every second person appears to be dragging a small plastic trolley behind them, like the horticultural equivalent of the wee wifie out for her Saturday messages with her tartan shopper, but also because many people have plants in bags.  The bags themselves contain just an average plant pot with soil, but the plants can extend up to three foot and more, and swing along beside their owner like fragile metronomes. 

(The etiquette on accidentally beheading what was, five minutes ago, a prized purchase is to act casual, use the damaged flower as a buttonhole and deny all responsibility, explaining that you were by the Pimms tent when this tragedy must have happened.  For this reason you must always be drinking Pimms).

Pimms makes the crowds tolerable, that’s why it’s the perfect summer drink, it also makes spectating at summer sporting events bearable.  If your team loses at cricket, it takes five days for this to happen.  That’s a long time to travel from a state of anxiety to disappointment.  Pimms is the HS2 of mood enhancers, it takes you straight from anxiety to relaxed without all that faffing around at weepy, depressed and angry.

Also part of the crowd this year, mobility scooters, chariots of dire. 

Now, I am all for people who would not normally be able to enjoy events being able to enjoy them to their fullest, but isn’t that what telly is for?  I’ve never been to the British Grand Prix, but I’ve watched it on telly and, unlike anyone who actually went along, I was home opening a beer just as soon as the winner crossed that finish line. 

More needs to be done on integrating these things into crowds I think, as a muted peeping noise is just not enough warning that some sod driving what appears to be a small car is barrelling up behind you with a sense of entitlement and a small child on their lap.  Maybe they could double as plant porters next year.

Scarecrow?  Or cunning device used to fool German prison guards?  For months at morning parade they thought this was 4287623 Private 'Pinky' Brown.

The plant porters were much in evidence this year, youths with wheelbarrows ferrying around purchases for folk.  But really, plant porters, must you all snooze in your wheelbarrows when not working?  Just because it forms a stock shot on the BBC show coverage each year doesn’t mean you have to recreate the scene.  This is an RHS show, not Titchmarsh cos-play.  It’s like some twisted Anne Geddes tableaux.  Worse, a gangling teen asleep in a barrow just looks like another Friday night when the agricultural college students have drunk themselves insensible.

As well as the more ordinary examples of show-goer, there are some rare blooms, that special breed that leave their garden only a few times a year, this being one of them, and are identifiable by having dirt under their fingernails so old it will form the basis of a ‘Time Team’ special later in the year, and by having at least one garment fastened using something normally used in the garden, such as twine, or a dibber.

Over at the growing tastes marquee, one thought occurred – I fucking hate the recession.  Back when Tony Blair or Gordon Brown was PM, you could come here and be insensible of free samples of gin within the hour.  Now, the cheese samples resemble the crumbs left over when one has had one last go at the cheese-board on Christmas Day.  One bloke was even handing out samples of cheese with tweezers.

Also, parents, just because young children get into the show for free does not mean that you are required to bring them.

Two wheels good

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

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

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

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

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

Come on Tim!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The eyes do follow you round the room...

Much like an STD, paranoia takes a little effort to acquire but, once you have done so, it's an absolute bugger to shift and it will affect the way you interact with others. Having been a regular visitor to the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition over the last few years, I had a pretty reasonable set of expectations of how I would feel when I finished wandering round this year's; uplifted, slightly testy at the inclusion of some sub-art club daubs, possibly a bit pissed due to frequent visits to the champagne bar and resolving that I really should enter something for next year, because if Tracy Emin can get that crap on the walls, then a doodle on a post it note should get me inclusion, a red dot and everlasting fame no bother.

I did not expect to leave the place unsettled and more in need of a drink than when I went in.

It all started out so well. There was an expected theme, the Olympics that overtly or otherwise penetrated a lot of the display. In the architecture room for instance there were models and photographs of the Olympic village, the stadium and of course the velodrome and quite right too, as they are remarkable buildings. There was also a larger than usual number of cartography based paintings, drawings and collages on display, reproducing either real maps or maps of imagined places, or of real places reimagined.

This world askew view contributed to a growing sense of unease that had been kicked off with a black and white lithograph titled 'the gamble', a picture of the entrance to an underpass. Anyone who has ever used one instantly recognised the scene and the significance of the title, you could almost smell that distinctive underpass odour of damp, piss and cider.

Thereafter, I wondered if either the entire exhibition had been curated with a sinister theme, or I was just noticing the sinister paintings more than most, or indeed if I was quietly having some sort of episode and imbuing quite innocent paintings with a sinister quality. In fairness, the did seem to be more than a normal number of paintings featuring deserted houses and so on, although even innocent pastorals took on a sinister tone, a green thick hedge might be lovely, but also provides ideal cover for a waiting pervert, or homicidal maniac - flasher or slasher, I'm not sure which was the most intimidating. Suppose it depends on the length of the weapon.

Then I wandered into the gallery with the chair made out of chicken bones, which stank, and the question was settled, and settled beyond question when I caught sight of a large painting of a fish shop front with the proprietor's name - 'Dagon' displayed in large red letters above the shop. The theme was now officially sinister or I was being paranoid, the paranoia being brought on by the sinister theme. Time for more champagne while I pondered why everyone was looking at me, might be the paranoia, might be the 'meep' noises of distress I was making.

In the sculpture rooms, the was a welcome return to normality. What a load of absolute tat. The place looked like a cross between a house clearance of a deceased hoarder who had perished beneath a pile of yellowing leaflets for his local curry house and a charity shop for one of those charities that normal people are reluctant to donate to, like the cats' protection league or the society to provide broadband to peados or something. There was a bright yellow litter bin in the room which was obviously an exhibit but provided both a neat statement on the rest of the junk on display and a powerful temptation to make use of it.

As poor as the sculpture was, it did at least have the virtue of not being a video installation, the last resort of anyone who aspires to be an artist, but can't draw, sculpt or even take a decent photograph and so fakes a career out of producing a grainy three hour film of what looks like a colonoscopy, calls it 'turmoil IV' and prepares to be misunderstood and unappreciated.

Jubalympics

The Duke of Edinburgh, one suspects, had the right idea. When the Auld Trouble flared up (possibly brought on as a result of a pavlovian reaction to once more being in the uniform of a sailor) the old boy enjoyed the jubilee from the comfort of a hospital bed, watching the coverage and self administering morphine whenever Fern Cotton appeared on the screen while being intravenously fed quail puree.

Actually, the Duke did very well to stay upright and show every sign of enjoyment during the river pageant, but then I suppose one of the benefits of being in it was that he didn’t have to watch it. There has been, it’s fair to say, some criticism of the BBC’s coverage but it was always going to be something of a huge ask, making small boats on a large river look interesting without involving sinking any of them. My suggestion would have been to outfit a fleet of peadallows with cannon and other suitable nautical paraphernalia and stick some celebrities in them, after telling them that last man floating gets to be a judge on the next series of Britain’s Got Talent. Seeing Freddie Flintoff bellowing ‘ramming speed’ while bearing down on Bill Oddie would have been a jubilee highlight.

Certainly high and certainly alight were the beacons lit across the land to celebrate the jubilee and, following the latest round of civil defence cuts, test the country’s new invasion early warning system. The beacon was lit on top of the Malvern Hills and, rumour has it, the last revellers trotted down the hill about four in the morning. Like the faces of anyone standing too close to the beacon thinking it is essentially an enormous patio heater, one suspects that the Queen was thoroughly toasted.

Being allergic to, and suspicious of, organised fun, I planned to take refuge from street parties and bunting by dodging into the RA and taking a peek at the Summer Exhibition. The RA is, of course, on Picadilly. Which was closed off. For a street party. Apparently Prince Charles and Camilla were there, sitting at a trestle table, chatting with the locals and presumably hoping that none of their ‘neighbours’ would try and borrow their groundskeeper of whatever the royal equivalent of a strimmer is.






If you wanted to eat like a Prince then for seven quid you could buy yourself The Highgrove Burger (eight quid for Highgrove Burger with bacon) from the Fortnum and Mason burger bar, situated next to their champagne bar. For me the burger bar didn’t quite hit the right note. The chefs lacked the easygoing confidence that you find in the proprietor of a proper roadside burger bar, who is able to maintain a relaxed calm while a seldom cleaned grill simultaneously spits fat and flame at him and the large canister of gas under the counter. It might have been posh but it lacked charm. It didn’t lack customers, well heeled locals in their Hunter wellies and wax jackets ate their pricy burgers and washed it down with plastic flutes of champers. I suppose if you had to celebrate the jubilee anywhere, somewhere within easy reach of quality beef, fizz and heir was the place to do it.


On the train home the train was full of people who had been to the river pageant and it was then that things took a very un-British turn as strangers took up conversations with one another. It was easy to see who had been to the pageant, as they were all damp and they all had Union Flags with the ‘Hello’ magazine logo on them wrapped round them. The carriage looked like a celebrity endorsed BNP rally. What people were keen to tell you was that it hadn’t rained much and that the event was fantastic. It’s true that these folk did have a better time than most, as they didn’t have to suffer Fern Cotton.

The concert? Didn’t really watch it. Much, I imagine, like the Duke, who at that point was probably acting as all unsupervised husbands do, which means that any day now DVD box sets from Amazon of classic telly will arrive at the Palace.

Croydon Tours - on the other hand

Every town should have a tour. Every village, hamlet, postcode and tree should have a tour. When a country like Great Britain gets to be the age it is, something interesting has happened in just about every square yard and if an area is so dull that nothing has ever happened there, then it is likely to be the birthplace of somebody famous, who left at the first opportunity because the place is so dull.

I love guided tours around towns, and the more obscure the better. That's why there are so very few straightforward city tours. The benefit of city tours is that so much has happened on more or less the same spot that it's essentially multi-story history and you can enjoy a fifty minute lecture about the varied history of an area, roman to space age, without having to walk more than about twelve yards. Also, most major historical events in cities are chronicled in guide books or plaques on walls, leaving little room for the guide to make stuff up, surely the only reason to be a guide. That's why alternative tours tend to take place in cities, like ghost walks, or pub crawls. These allow one to actually see something of the city while learning unusual things, such as what pickled egg is actually made of.

Tours of towns are a different proposition. More intimate, one suspects that any tour of a town will contain about 30% fact, 30% folklore and, depending on how much attention the out of work actor taking the tour paid during maths class, 40 to 70% bullshit or, as it's been rebranded recently, civic pride.

And I love the idea of actually having to turn up in person to take a tour of a town. Anyone who has ever seen 'The Rough Guide' on BBC2 would probably agree that that there is a place for a travel programme presented by hopeless fact and talent deprived armatures and I'd love to see a Youhoo channel where folk upload shorts about their favourite street, car park, post-box or building which are then stitched together into a wee documentary about a place. Eventually, no village no matter how small would be without a tiny tourist information video with some chap in a blazer (what else?) standing in front of a road sign and explaining how in the thirties it was turned round to confuse the Nazis, then revolved again to confuse the tourists, then again to baffle the immigrants and most recently to place Doubt in the minds of those who follow sat-navs unquestioningly.

If the BBC can continue to use the same piece of landscape as the backdrop to slightly different programmes, for instance 'Coast' and that new one with the bloke from 'Outnumbered' for people who find 'Coast' too difficult to follow, then it stands to reason that the same town can support more than one tour. So the history tour starts at six, the ghost tour starts at six thirty, the alternative tour starts at seven and the 'they film some of Morse here' tours run all day.

Surely, Croydon can support more than one tour. For a start, there's the unexpected Croydon tour, where people are led along leafy side streets and quiet residential areas, marvelling that somewhere like this can exist so close to a city centre that is now forever linked in the national consciousness as the eye of the riot storm of 2011. The only drawback to taking this tour is that when stepping backwards to take any photographs you have to take great are not to be creamed off by a passing tram that also, against all reason, appears to trundle down leafy side-streets.

For the more adventurous, there is the city centre tour. What a lot of people overlook is that Croydon actually has a busy and quite built up town centre. It has the UK headquarters of Nestlé foods and their office block is easy to spot as its the one with the giant flaming eye at the top of it.
I would dearly love to do a ghost tour of Croydon. OK, there would be initial problems because that staple of ghost tours - violent death - is not in short supply but basically boils down to shot, savaged by dog and hit by tram (make sure you get the right era, was it last week or last century) and so some inventiveness is called for - poisoning is always good (the day e coli came to Tennessee Fried Chicken) as is death as result of tragic romantic misunderstanding (Darren got a txt intended for Wayne and as a result went out, got a tat proclaiming his true love for Kristie and their son/daughter 'name to be added' and contracted septicaemia. How often have we heard that sad tale).

It's easy to knock. And if the rest of that sentence was 'Croydon down with a bulldozer' then the world may indeed be a better place but it it certainly a better place when the sort of person who is running Croydon Tours actually has enough faith in being able to make the town interesting that he's willing to put his job seekers allowance at risk and make a go of spreading the word about the delights of Croydon. Eight quid for five minutes though, is that not a bit steep?

Croydon Tours

Croydon has, for many years, closely resembled downtown Kabul after a heavy night on the bombing. Driving a tram link through an already deeply unlovely environment left the place littered with the sort of water and twisted metal filled craters that one expects as the result of a laser-guided MK 12 'beardbuster' warhead, not the installation of a light rail link. Now that the dirt has settled and the tram is actually in place, Croydon still resembles downtown Kabul due to the large number of unemployed people milling about, the amputees (the tram link runs along the street and the locals have yet to learn how to dodge) and the violence, looting and burned-out buildings.

Tough to say when the rot set in, after all, the used to be an aerodrome here, the last word in glamour and being a target for the Luftwaffe, but even flying Nazis couldn't do as much damage as the council, who sealed the fate of the place when they removed all of the trees from the town centre and replaced them with a howling sense of hopeless desolation.

Put it this way, the crushing negative energy of Croydon is such that even M&S can't escape it's pull. Croydon is the home to rather a large M&S and, usually, such stores are a place to purchase a prawn sandwich and restore ones sense of equilibrium. If, on a shopping trip anywhere, one is feeling buffeted by the winds of fashion, typhoons of commerce or just struggling with the suspicion that the store has fitted a web cam in the changing cubicle to prevent shoplifting and provide the staff with hysterical footage of 'really I am a size twelve' women trying to struggle into a pair of size twelve jeans without the aid of thigh corsets, magic or being slathered in lard, then you can always pop into M&S to regulate your breathing while stocking up on sensible pants.

Not so in Croydon. The best way of describing the M&S in Croydon is to liken it to one of those KFC wannabe places, a fried chicken shop that can't quite meet the the exacting standards of KFC ('never more than 30% beak') but wants to attach itself to the idea of a brand (see also, any drink with the word 'cola' in it, and yes, I mean you Pepsi, you real deal wannabe you - the acid test: who ever asked for a rum and Pepsi?) so that drunk people will wander in by mistake. The M&S in Croydon is like a flagship experiment by a company that specialises in a homogenised brand dedicating at least 30% of their marketing, signage and shop floor look to reflect the locality, instead of the usual M&S shop design strategy (copy John Lewis). Unfortunately, the local look is 'Croydon', and so the store is shabby, crowded and overrun with morlocks.

H G Wells lived in South London and the influence of the area is plain to see in his works. Who has not returned from a trip to Croydon and not thought that it could really benefit from being levelled by a Martian heat ray? Croydon 2012 is pretty much all the evidence you need that H G Wells did actually possess a time machine, travelled forward in time to M&S, took one look at the creatures shambling around in the gloom, jumped back on his chrono-cycle, pedalled for home like Victoria Pendleton when she has forgotten to set the video to record 'come dine with me' (she's a massive fan, that's Victoria's secret) and started writing. It's a testament to his creative skill that after a visit to Croydon 2012 he wrote an entire novel and not just the word 'fffffuuuuuuuuuuuuuccccckkkk!' stretched over 200 pages.

That somebody is offering tours is heartening. After all, they do Jack the Ripper tours in the East End, and ghost tours in York (and why, if ghost tours are so bloody authentic, do they never go through walls?), why not tours of Croydon? Directions to the station where trains leave for London every twenty minutes must be worth eight quid of anyone's money.

Student protests, round three, 9 December

Or...the revolting masses vs the surprised to be ruling classes

Kettling. That's an odd word, isn't it? It may sound like a quaint Victorian custom involving fine bone china, parlours, hot infusions of tea, corsets and enough repressed sexuality to power a dreadnaught, but in fact it has a very different meaning. It's a tactic the Met use to keep demonstrators packed together in one spot, usually away from any site where they might influence what they are protesting about, or any valuable cars or property.

Kettling is not one of those words that has had it's meaning changed in recent years by changes in the lifestyle followers who have adopted it, like 'twitching', but rather is a freshly minted new word. And because it's been thought up by buracrauts rather than Charles Dickens, it's a bit crap. It's also far more sinister than it sounds. Like tea bagging, which if you Google you will discover has nothing to do with preparing a refreshing cuppa, although that's exactly what you'll feel like after you've read what the practice actually is.

But surely we should be weaving a reactionary language in response to having words like this foisted upon us. If being kettled is being held by a cordon of police in a spot with no toilets, no view and no decent public wi fi network, then surely the term for escaping said cordon is spouting. Or is the term for transferring from one kettled zone to another decanting?

One word we can associate with kettling is 'unsuccessful'. I may not be an expert on law and order but I would say that rampant civil unrest at the doors of Parliament is a pretty good sign that your plan to contain the protesters in a back street in another location, preferably in Wales, has not worked.

This was student protests 3, the final act. MPs were voting on the measure to have students pay for their education and the students, seeing their tuition fees rise and so putting a dent in the disposable income they would have to spend on pot noodle, porn, crap music and ironic art to decorate their flatshares, were not happy. Like all franchises, the producers were hoping that better special effects and more money being spent on the production would disguise the fact that the plot was a re-run of student protest and student protest 2 and that the law of diminishing returns meant that the public has less and less time for this sort of nonsense.

The forces of law and order were faced with a problem. This was that if they actually wanted to keep law and order, the way to do it is to soak the crowd with a water cannon and then taser the lot of them in one big jolt. Then CS gas anyone that is still standing. The problem with this is that stamping on a protestors face is also stamping on the civil rights of the public. So the thing to do is to push back when you are pushed by a student. Very much like some sort of playground argy bargy. But with less hair pulling.

Still, the reports of the more spirited acts of violence against public property did make one wonder if perhaps now wasn't the time to stop faffing about and start beating the shit out of anyone who climbed on anything.

A few years ago, protestors made the discovery that it didn't matter if they turned out in their thousands, they still only got a few minutes on the news and that segment was usually spoiled by their spokesperson being some ugly bloke or shrill woman with ill-judged hair standing in front of a banner which, if it were painted by a student, were probably miss-spelled. Hence they started fielding a dozen or so protestors, including ugly bloke or shrill woman, arranged a time to meet the media to protest, filmed their interview and then took the rest of the day off.

Now, the media don't have to be at the protest. That's because the students are filming themselves protesting and then uploading it onto Yoohootube or other social networking sites. This is the protesting equivalent of a new parent telling you about their child's potty training; unpleasant to hear about and a baffling source of pride and enthusiasm to the person originating the information.

Surely the mainstream media's reliance on poaching mobile 'phone clips of some bloke kicking a car is going to result in the hoax of the year, with shocking images of civil unrest frame-grabbed and repeated on the front pages of every newspaper in the country, only to be exposed as actually being filmed in somebody's bedroom using a set made of old cereal packets decorated with poster paint and glitter, and a cast of protestors drawn from some action figures and old toys, hence the baffling scenes of one of the aliens from the Star Wars cantina stiffly beating a tellytubby.

The print media, meanwhile, are frothing with excitement. Journalists have worked out that not only can they tweet in up-to-the-minute updates about their experience in the crowd but unlike the visual media they don't actually have to produce footage of being a the actual location of the protest. All they have to do is watch the live footage from the news helicopter, monitor the twitter feeds of a couple of protestors and invent the rest, all from the comfort of their own front room. Key phrases to throw in are the bravery of the children on the protest, a disruptive element in the crowd, the heavy-handedness of the police and the commitment to continuing the struggle. Also, make sure to make constant reference to the fact that this is very much not your normal day in the office. Too right, you are currently sat on your arse on the sofa, in your pyjamas, drinking tea.

Social media and instant communications have changed a lot of things. It used to be for instance that if you reported from a war zone you actually went to that war zone, coming back with an amazing story and enough shrapnel in your leg to set off every airport metal detector you will ever go through again. If you don't come back from an experience of conflict with an eye watering story of desperate struggle and a pretty serious booze habit, then maybe you should be working at a garden centre.

I wonder what the peace protestors on Parliament Square made of it all. The peace camp, either an eye so or a symbol of democracy depending on your point of view (I tend to the latter) has been there for years now, with one bloke maintaining a vigil in all weathers. Oddly, it makes me proud to be British that somebody can protest in such a spot without being murdered by the state. I wonder what such a chap makes of people who set things alight not because of a brutal war, but because they are being asked to fund their own three year course in media studies and politics, hence meaning that they can only afford to travel to Europe on their gap year, depriving the people of South America and South East Asia the opportunity to meet yet another opinionated middle class tosser from the home counties who plans to travel the world and seek out new experiences but only if he can do it while updating his Farcebook page and film the ping pong ball trick in a bar in Thailand.

In fact here's how to eliminate the student debt problem and the gap year issue all in one go - geT a job in a chicken tendering plant in East Anglia on leaving school. Not only will you meet people from all over the world, but you'll come back with some top stories about foreign food (like the week you were on the tikka masala ready meal production line) and bird flu. How authentic is that?

Student protests, round 2, 24 November

Ding dong! Round two of the student fees demos. Like many sequels, this one had essentially the same plot as the original, but a bigger budget and better special effects.

Last time out, a few protestors had kicked in the windows of an office block and the police had been criticised for their response. Just what the logic is of criticising the police I'm not sure, as I can't recall seeing a copper booting the crap out of a window. Possibly the criticism was that the police should have done more to stop the violence. What more could be done was not specified, but the sort of people who usually call for a tougher response tend to have lots of books about the war, own shares in a company that makes water cannons and have theories about the dispersal of crowds based on news footage of protestors taking a beating by coppers in some brutal regime.

The protesters' tactics had changed though. Previously, they had been kettled. This is a term the police use for surrounding a group of protesters' and keeping then together in one place for a few hours. Normally this is done in the street or a square rather than, say, a rather nice coffee shop or indeed anywhere with adequate toilet and snack facilities and the idea is that not only does it remind the mob that they can protest for as long as they want, as long as they do it in a side street where they don't cause any disruption, it also provides much needed overtime for the Met in the run up to Christmas.

To avoid tea potting, or whatever, the protestors broke up into small groups and rushed around the centre of London, like some sort of militant tour group.

This is not at all how schoolchildren should behave when out in public. They should form a long crocodile, and hold hands. If you are a boy walking next to a boy you don't hold hands properly but rather simply touch a single finger, because you are not whoopsies. If you are a boy walking next to a girl you hold hands with even less contact, because you don't want to be known as the sort of boy who likes girls; mysterious creatures who are a well known source of trouble and, probably, warts. Or you hold hands properly, all the time experiencing a rushing, gushing sensation in your tummy that signals a cauldron of hormones about to come to the boil. Then you go to the Science Museum.

These students had not come to London on a coach to further their education, unless they were drama students practicing their rushing about for their upcoming production of the farce ‘oops vicar is that your cock?’.

My nephew is entering his teens and hence is developing an interest in current affairs, partly because he wants to have a greater understanding of the world around him, partly because he wants to act more grown up than his brothers and this requires sitting at the grown ups table which in turn requires knowing who the government are so you can understand all the moaning being done, but mostly because it makes radio four comedy shows interesting and they are the best places to hear the word 'knob' spoken aloud by an adult before the watershed.

He has also picked up on his parents starting to say the word 'university' not with hopeful expectation but rather with a sense of gloom of a couple who are going to have to sell a kidney to finance the further education of their offspring.

As a result, he took to chanting 'no ifs, no buts, no education cuts' for the afternoon. After fifteen minutes of this I felt like reaching for the CS gas, so it's understandable if the coppers want to do some kettling, tea bagging or whatever it is when confronted by an unruly mob doing same.

Student protests, round 1, 10 November

Panic on the streets of London as some disaffected students, confronted with actually having to pay for a service, riot. Well, I say riot, they actually broke a few windows and burned a few banners. Their own banners, actually. One wonders at the sort of intellect that decides to burn their own property.

The French do a good riot, as do the Greeks and as a result their police have a reputation for brutality and no sense of humour. The Americans rarely riot but when they do it's spectacular, like a big budget remake of a European art house movie. The only problem is that Americans riot in their own neighbourhoods. This is always a mistake as the benefits of not having far to tote your looted wide screen tee vee are offset by pitching up at your favourite breakfast place the next morning and finding it a burned out husk...and yet the juice bar is still standing!

The students attacked Conservative party offices. Security in that building looked daunting, consisting of two very nice ladies behind a desk. To be fair, the desk looked pretty substantial but lacked an AK 47 in the top draw that would have been more useful than a book to ask the rioters to sign in.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the argument about fees, one thing is for sure; if you kick off some trouble in the centre of London you should expect water cannon and police with badge numbers removed. As it was the police response was somewhat feeble and some rioters got away. The plan is to set everyone an essay titled 'what I did on my trip to London' and arrest anyone who makes reference to any activity other than 'caught coach to demo, dipped out of protest and went to see Billy Elliot instead'.

Currywurst

Like many Premiership footballers, I enjoy taking pictures of my sausage with my 'phone.

Ever since I saw a ‘close up’ feature about currywurst on the BBC’s news web site (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8408716.stm), I’ve been excited to a degree best described as ‘juvenile’ about the prospect of trying this exotic new dish.

Apparently the Germans have the same enthusiasm for curried sausage as they do for lederhosen, beer and war. The origin of the dish is that a German Housefrau in 1940s allied occupied Berlin obtained some curry powder from British troops and created the curried sausage and the lucrative sex-for-food trade at the same time

Currywurst is available in London at Kurz & Lang, 1 St. John Street, Smithfield, London (www.kurzandlang.com). They are, apparently, a German sausage importer and the shop has a small café attached. And by café, I mean griddle in a room.

The café itself is a monument to white tiling, like a better class of public convenience. There is a shelf running along the front windows and at this you can sit up on stools, watching the world go by while passers-by look in end envy you your hot sausage and cold beer. Those having their wurst inside get it on a china plate, those who wish to sit outside at the small tables on the pavement and fag up get paper plates.

Inside it’s a cosy and warm place to be on a winter’s evening. The hiss and sizzle of sausages cooking on the griddle complete with the banging tunes coming out of the radio, more commercial rock than oompah. It wasn’t in the least crowded but there was an atmosphere, which by my reckoning was never less than about 70 per cent pork fat and occasionally took on an almost solid appearance not unlike one of my more enthusiastic weekend fry-ups.

There are a variety of sausages on offer, all cooked by an authentic German chap sporting a rather unfortunate beard. I went for the posh end of the wurst experience; currywurst, sauerkraut, fried potato and a roll. In truth all you need is sausage and sauce and roll.

The currywurst is a sausage, smothered in a spicy brown sauce and then sprinkled with curry powder. Seeing curry powder shaken over sausage and sauce was truly a cultural shock and something of a taste sensation. Curry powder in British cuisine has the reputation of being used timorously by housewives in the late 1970s to bring a touch of the exotic to the dinner table. But not too exotic - lest one inflame passions that, in an era heavy on man-made fibres and material, might lead to chaffing, or tremendous static discharge. No, you used just enough to have you reaching for your glass of blue nun.

It was quite a surprise to see that it’s curry powder that gives the currywurst its kick, not so much a curry sauce, Curry sauce is, of course, a staple of after hours cuisine in the Midlands where, smothering chips, it is often the last, desperate throw of the dice to try and head off a hangover. It’s probably possible to work out where you are in Britain by what people put on chips, curry sauce means Midlands, chips and gravy means t’north and chips and cheese is, of course combined with a glass of white wine to constitute the ‘ladies special’ at the Café Piccante in Edinburgh. (www.cafepiccante.com). God knows what they serve further north than that; maybe the national dish of the Shetlands is chips and sheep dip.

To drink? An excellent lager – pauliner in this case, but there was quite a selection. It was such a shock not to be grossly overcharged for decent German beer that I quite forgot to steal the glass as a souvenir.

Also on sale was Jagermeister (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%A4germeister). This was sold in a bottle (from which you pour a shot), a little bottle (from which you pour a shot), and in a test tube (and if you’re drinking from that, it’s time to go home). I’m wary of drinking anything from a test tube as a search of literature shows this inevitably leads to transformation into Mr Hyde. Unleashing an inner beast without conscience usually happens when I drink stella anyway.

In addition I’m made aware that there’s a practice called Jagerbombing, surely the preserve of somebody hell bent on self-destruction, you drop a shot of Jagermeister into a glass of red bull and end up hammered but unable to sleep it off. It’s exactly this sort of behaviour that makes you hellish grumpy and sets a nation down the road of fascism.

Fast food, convivial atmosphere, with booze! Surely this is the way forward.

At least he didn't drop it far

Walking to work this morning I witnessed a small anti-social act, somebody ripping the cellophane cover from a packet of fags and tossing it to the pavement. I suppose pocketing it would have delayed their ripping open the packet itself to get their precious nicotine hit.

Usually I just tut and don’t reprimand the litterer, this is because I know that from psychopaths are more likely to litter than normal folk and I hate being knifed first thing in the morning.

On this occasion though there was absolutely no way I was going to confront the fellow.

This was because he was a dwarf on a mobility chariot.

I did briefly think of saying ‘smoking stunts your growth’ but was worried that his battery might be freshly charged and he would run me down, like Ben Hur, but shorter.

God alone knows why he needed a mobility chariot although with legs that size it must be faster than walking and I have no problem with him smoking, but why litter? Does he not realise that if everyone did that, the stuff would pile up in drifts. Okay for me, but by the time it was up to my thighs he’d need a snorkel.

I think what really put me off remonstrating, apart of course from a paralysing fear of any sort of confrontation, was that there was just no way it was going to end well. Nobody but me had witnessed the litter and folk on their way to work in the morning walk quickly and heads down, so what they would have been presented with was, no doubt, an altercation where a bloke was shouting at a disabled dwarf. There is no way I am coming out of that well.

In fact for the remainder of the walk to the office my rebel brain and sadist imagination ganged up on me. This is the same imagination, by the way, that steadfastly refuses to come up with the plot of a novel that will depose Dan Brown from the top of the bestseller charts and have me acknowledged as the Jane Austin of my generation (or should that be Dickens…which one wrote about bonnets?) Anyway the most likely scenario, according to my brain (which, truth be told has not had a track record of reliability in this sort of thing, especially during my twenties where, despite all the evidence of previous weeks and months, it kept convincing me that that girl over there would dance with me if asked and not result in yet another bout of humiliation) would be me and the bloke rolling in the gutter, my hands round his neck, his teeth clamped on my ear while a selection of collegues who happened to be passing watched aghast as they saw me trying to kill a dwarf, something that is usually the preserve of ringwraiths.

One and Other

If you live in the city, you’re surrounded by statues. Look around you, at the angels and the dragons, at the lions and the unicorns. Clinging onto the corners of buildings, adorning arches, winding sinuously around pillars and porticos, so much part of the architecture that we no more notice them than we would a door or window. No wonder they look down on us.

If you live in the countryside, even the smallest hamlet, then you surround, rather than are surrounded by, statues. Don’t believe me? Go to the church, every village has one. There in the guttering, that chap with the spout in his mouth? On there, right up in the vault of the ceiling, a carving of the priest who underpaid the masons, with his cock up the bishop’s arse or something. Medieval masons may have been master craftsman, but their sense of humour was anything but subtle.


Any town will have a statue of some worthy, normally standing on a plinth, normally looking constipated, which is as close as a sculptor can get to ‘noble’ if he’s not Michelangelo. Still, even if the statue is constipated, the pigeons normally are not.

The Victorians loved a statue. Usually of Queen Victoria. Under the Victorians, Civic Art made its mark on the landscape of Britain, well, on the landscape of its market squares anyway. Like the Romans before them, what the rich and powerful really thought would enhance any spot was a bloody big statue of themselves. This is why there are so many statues of men with beards looking constipated, often pointing at things just out of frame, like bronze or marble catalogue models.

The other way to be commemorated was to die heroically in the service of your country, hopefully leaving behind a country named after you, or the Monarch of the time, and a kill ratio of 1,000 natives to one Englishman.

Times changed and as this century progressed statues of people faded from fashion as abstract sculpture became the civic art of choice. This was for two main reasons. The first was that instead of one person making the decision about the funding and erection (snigger) of a statue of, usually, himself, town councils were now responsible. A body of men and women who didn’t even like one another, let along unify in their admiration of somebody long enough to have them cast in bronze. The second reason was that in the late half of the twentieth century, the abstract embodiment of ideas was popular, especially if that idea was ‘ugliness’ and ‘cheapness’.

All that has now changed. Somehow, statues of people have become popular again. More than that, they are recognised as important. It probably started with Anthony Gormley’s ‘Angel of the North’ when, as a nation, we took one look at something that we were supposed to resent the hell out of and…fell in love. The Angel of the North is probably the most instantly recognisable landmark in Britain after the London Eye, Stonehenge and Big Ben. It will probably remain so until the Kelpie Heads in Scotland are finished off.

Trafalgar Square has some excellent statues. There are the Landseer lions, which are staggeringly beautiful and there’s Nelson himself, of course. Then there’s the fourth plinth. I think it’s a monument to Britishness itself that the fourth plinth has remained vacant, because nobody can agree what to put on it. It took the visionary Mayor of London ken Livingstone to decide to have many temporary exhibits on it instead of a single statue (although one of Ken’s not a bad idea).


By far the finest piece of work to inhabit the plinth to date was the statue of Alison Lapper. It had everything, it was beautiful, with curves like a Henry Moore, it was modern, yet perfectly at one with the rest of the statues on the square, especially at one with Nelson because both were statues of disabled people. It was also possibly the most serene piece of sculpture I’ve ever seen.

For the next 100 days the fourth plinth is occupied by a different person every hour. This is Anthony Gormley’s ‘One and Other’ project, where people drawn from a lottery can stand on the plinth for an hour and do, almost anything really, as long as it’s not illegal (bets on whether we go a week before the first proposal?).

It’s not the first time that ordinary people have been used to create art and it won’t be the last but it is the most important. This is happening right in the centre of Trafalgar Square and will live on in, well, how many tourist images? Millions?

It turns the statue into the statme. People will get on that plinth and if they have something to say they will say it, and if they don’t, well, that’s okay, most statues don’t say much.

The chap I saw seemed to be shouting about something, in full Town Crier’s rig. I don’t know what he was shouting about, I didn’t unplug my iPod (best of ELO, very good) and that, I think, is what it’s all about. As soon as a piece of art goes on display it no longer belongs to the artist, it belongs to whoever is looking at it. The artist may be trying to say something but if the viewer wants to misinterpret it, that’s their prerogative. Which is why you may have people going up there to make a point about worthy causes, but the judgement will be made about their hair or why somebody carrying a little bit too much weight would choose to wear that outfit. Think the human race is not that shallow? Somewhere out there I’m sure ‘Plinthwatch’ has started and I’m also sure that ‘Plinthbabes.com’ has already been registered.

Bring on Puss in Boots for God’s sake!

The widening of the media funnel, to allow more effluent than ever to wash up in our front rooms, like King Augeas' stables or, you know, a Sheffield sitting-room, has had the effect of democratizing celebrity to the extent that anyone can be a celebrity. Now, we need classification of celebrity, A list, B list and, er, the rest.

It probably didn’t used to be like that. Either you were famous, or you weren’t. If your fame went beyond your village, then your fame was probably deserved. Famous in your own village = a reputation for lifting cows or buggering ducks. Famous beyond your own village = sank an enemy fleet, with your breath.

Now, you have people who are famous, people who are ‘famous’, people who are stars, superstars, megastars and so on. I guess what it boils down to is this – if your name is above the title, or bigger on the book jacket than the title of the book – you’re famous. Anything else, you’re a celebrity, whether it means you act in a soap or did something amusing with marmite on a reality tee vee programme.

There’s nothing odd with people wanting to be famous – what is odd is that people appear to set their sights low these days and see real currency in being a celebrity. It’s shocking – people have realized that there is no way they can be Jack Nicholson (and let’s face it, it must be pretty hard being the sort of ageing, fat actor who’s finest moment was gurning like a drooling fool through a doorframe) so they want to be the sort of celebrity pictured dismounting from a limo with no knickers on – and that’s just the blokes.

The currency of celebrity of being spent at present by Boris ‘tosser’ Johnson, the shambling idiot that occasionally breaks cover as an MP long enough to make tactless remarks about grief while bending lithesome colleagues across his desk at the rag he ‘edits’. Many a journo has worried about being ‘spiked’ by Boris. Apparently he thinks that bumbling loonery and the occasional appearance on telly is enough for him to be considered a candidate as mayor of London.

Mayor…of London. So, Boris, what would your reaction be to a terrorist outrage in the capital? Getting a f**king haircut would be a start.

Boris is an excellent example of the media saying something so often: in this case – ‘he’s really clever’, that the addled twat must believe it himself. The problem is that we will now be subject to his deranged rantings during the election.

Still, I bet the media are loving it. Shame for Londoners – Ken will be re-elected no doubt, but it would be good to see the opposition parties put up a decent candidate, Dick Wittington’s cat, for instance?

Precipitation and Cocktails

Strolling around Parliament Square yesterday I see that the tented village on the green has expanded, no doubt some revellers from Glasto stopping off for some shopping at Harvey Nicks before buggering off home. If these types want to treat the place like a camp site, then surely the council should too.

If a farmer expects to charge campers a tenner a night to camp in a soggy field where facilities begin and end with a stand pipe and which still shows signs of its being a location of the pyre formally known as his herd until the foot n’ mouth epidemic, then I think that a hundred quid a night is a reasonable price to charge campers in London.

Either that or re-designate their tents as ‘facilities for use by the public’. Believe me, those campers in the Blair Witch Project would be considered having got off lightly compared to some pissed-up reveller crashing into a camper’s tent in the wee small hours after several cocktails too many and thinking the place was a superloo.

It started to rain as Fat Andy and I wandered round the Square on our way to cocktails, I was minded to dodge under canvas and wait it out but Andy did the impossible and flagged down a cab for hire. Ten minutes later we were sitting in the Royal Festival Hall’s new bar ‘Skylon’, watching ballet dancers doing their warm-ups, disconcerted that the waitresses were wearing retro sci-fi uniforms and deciding which exotic beer to try first.

There were cocktails that night, mixed with verve and style in the unlikely setting of a pub. It looked like the sort of place where they consider a lager top to be a cocktail but this place had a shaker, tequila and an impassioned bar staff.

After that things got a bit hazy, but suffice to say it was a last train home situation and a breakfast this morning of paracetamol and temperance thoughts.