Heritage app

English Heritage have an app.  This is hardly a surprise.  Many organisations have apps, and not just organisations but companies and while it is quite understandable that large stores have apps that let you, for instance, find your nearest branch of Woolies or whatever, surely it’s about time that somebody invented an app to locate places that want to be KFC, but aren’t quite as classy.  Indeed apps are becoming so commonplace that it can’t be long before every shop everywhere has an app, not just to let you locate where the only branch of that store is, but guide you to the products within that store.

So, stuck in Chipping Camden and looking for porn and pie?  Fire up your Chipping Camden News app, locate Chipping Camden News, situated between the bookies and the bank, top shelf for gentleman’s literature and back of the shop for the Ginster’s and the microwave.  Job done.

And why stop at shops?  Surely people should have their own app, and not just celebrities, but everyone.  An app for the bloke in the street could mesh together their mobile, their facebook status and their twitter feed so you could see where they were, what they were doing and what they thought about it, all the time.  Colin Fanshaw App: Location: Chipping Camden, Newsagents, feeling horny and hungry, is there an app for that?  Luckily for Colin, yes, yes there is.

The English Heritage app has a feature where you can see where you are in Britain (a great feature at any time, especially if you use ‘pubfinder’ a lot) and suggest days out.  Some of them are substantial, for instance a visit to a stately home, with a car park, a gift shop and everything.  Others are more…surprising, shall we say.  They are still sites that are owned and operated by English Heritage but some of them, at least from the photographs and descriptions, look indistinguishable from, for instance, a field.

Take flint mines.  Now, you might think that a bloody big hole in the ground with a barrier up around it to prevent unwanted plunging is merely an interesting geographical feature.  But you’d be missing three things. 

Firstly, a couple of thousand years ago, primitive man (heavy of brow and with a beard, like that bloke in the Joy of Sex illustrations but actually wearing a loincloth) took a deer antler down a hole and started chipping flint out of the wall.  Of course, once he had chipped enough flint, he could tie the flint to the antler and use that to chip flint.  And as soon as he put the fire in his beard out, primitive man discovered a) chipping flint creates sparks and b) health and safety regulations, which lead directly to the invention of the goggle.

It also meant that he could wander over to the next village and beat the shit out of those backwards morons still using just antlers as weapons.  And so the stone age and the arms race was born.

Secondly, you’d be missing the laminated sign telling you all this, but with added fact and a lot less speculation.  However, I concede that there would probably a fat bloke in a cagoule blocking your view of the sign.

Finally, you’d be missing the car park.  The car park serves two purposes, the first being somewhere to leave your vehicle (or more likely to have a cheese sandwich and cup of tea in your vehicle while waiting for the rain to stop), the second as a community amenity or, as the Daily Mail calls it, a ‘dogging blackspot’.

It’s amazing just how many sites English Heritage have, including one which is a barn.  That’s right, a barn.  Oh, it’s Elizabethan and everything, but I have to take issue with any ‘day out’ that involves me stepping over a pile of horseshit to buy a fridge magnet from the gift shop.

Of course what’s really required is an integrated app that locates various interrelated services, so that one can increase one’s knowledge of British history, then eat some fried chicken before finishing the day with a decent pint and that particular heritage snack – the pork scratching.

The Feast of Leftover

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reflections on the royal wedding - the weather

Last Friday's Royal wedding gave the British a perfect storm of legitimacy to speculate about the weather, a Big Occasion on a bank holiday weekend. In terms of micro-climates, there was probably very high temperatures around the server that does the BBC weather Internet site as their weather page got more hits than a butt at an archers' convention, combined with a lot of hot air from folk gassing about the weather every time they met.

On the day, the weather was perfect, cloudy in the morning to keep the crowds cool and then, during the ceremony, the sun actually came out. This was because, it was explained to me, God is an Englishman. This actually makes a great deal of sense explaining as it does why so many previously inexplicably ghastly things happen to foreign people.