ishouldbeworking

Getting Out Of It

2012-01-23T12:29:00.000Z

I've been quite the busy bee, making up for all that time lost to the sofa and the Slanket while I wasn't well. It's a huge relief to have some energy again and I'm trying to make the most of it without cleaning myself out financially in the process.

So a pair of free tickets from the BBC, for a recording of Henning Wehn's new comedy show,were very welcome. He's been around the circuit for a few years now, and is doing increasing amounts of TV and radio, but for anyone who hasn't come across the German Comedy Ambassador before he's a force worth checking out. A sly outsider's take on the idiosyncrasies of British life, and a man not afraid to issue deadpan reminders of where we as a nation continue to get it wrong, delivered in an extraordinary accent that's a kind of Bremen/Balham hybrid. He's a clever chap who doesn't shy away from much - there's certainly no coyness on his part about 'the war' - and manages to do it without simply pandering to the average liberal metropolitan comedy audience. As he is keen to remind us, when he still lived in Germany he was a member of the Christian Democrats, which makes him a Merkel Man, and not a cuddly Green. Anyway, the show starts on Radio 2 next month, and if he's playing near you, give him a go. Last time we saw him down here, I took along a friend who'd never heard of him, and he laughed so much he had an asthma attack. Could there be higher praise for a comedian?

There was no danger of mirth-induced asthma, sadly, at Rich Fulcher's London show on Friday night. I used to love Rich Fulcher's madcap abandon, which to me hinted at a streak of genuine angry derangement, and I'd been loosely following his comedy career for many years, since he first turned up as a bulging-eyed Scientologist on a long-forgotten late night show called Comedy Nation in the mid-90s. I was thrilled for him when he landed Bob Fossil in the Mighty Boosh (he was particularly good in the radio version), and I had high hopes of his new solo show, based on '100 ways to stick it to the man'. On the night though, it was a massive disappointment; a show that just didn't get going. His 'ways to stick it' proved sadly unimaginative - getting the audience to write a joint letter to Richard Branson just gave the drunks an excuse to shout 'willies', inviting moans about bosses fell largely flat, and the supposed 'climax' of sending a pissed-up girl from the front row across the road to a Chinese herbalist, and filming her while she asked the polite and baffled man behind the counter if he had 'anything for huge fannies' just seemed puerile and a tad racist. This was dull, lazy stuff that didn't reflect his talent at all. Give it a wide berth unless you're really easily amused. Most of the audience weren't.

But, win some lose some. Saturday night picked up the average in spades, with Henry Rollins' spoken word gig at the lovely De La Warr Pavilion in unlovely Bexhill. While I never had much time for the boneheaded antics of Black Flag, and back in the day found the young Henry a bit ludicrous with his exploding pecs and chiselled head, he's now the age he was always really meant to be. Far more impressive as an angry fifty-year old than an angry twenty-five year old, and with far more to say that's actually interesting. And he's grown nicely into that body.

I don't know many performers who can march onto a stage (I don't think he 'strolls' anywhere), pick up a mic, and talk non-stop without notes or - get this - a single sip of water for two and a half hours, without losing pace or interest. Henry's way is that he spends one year 'inhaling' - travelling the world, usually to places that his government wish he wouldn't, like Syria, Pakistan and Afghanistan - and the following year 'exhaling' - travelling the world to tell people what it was like. It's left him a strange and fascinating blend of the deeply humane and the permanently furious. Fortunately he's also funny and articulate enough to fire the whole lot into your face without leaving you feeling like you've just been cornered by a nutter at a party. Though what it would be like to be in a relationship with Henry doesn't really bear thinking about. His favourite observation seems to be '...and that was intense', though I get the impression that he lives his whole life at such a pitch of intensity that for most of us, his average day would prove an ordeal of such emotional and physical laceration that we'd be bleeding from our eyes by bedtime. Henry does it, so we don't have to. And unfortunately, Bexhill was his last night in the UK, so unless you can catch him in one of the other fun places he's propelling himself through this year (if you can, you should) you'll have to make do with YouTube, or his writing.

I came away feeling like I wanted to give him a cuddle. But as I didn't get to, I'm going to find a six foot steel girder and cuddle that instead, just to see what it feels like.

Stinker

2012-01-12T16:56:00.000Z

Have you ever had to tell anyone that they smelled? Or worse still, been on the receiving end of a kindly/humiliating or cruel/humiliating comment on your personal hygiene?

I'm fairly confident that I would have been a moderately malodorous teenager, as my convent school operated a particularly neurotic policy towards the gym shower block, namely that it was out of bounds to all but the Sixth Form (who presumably were deemed mature and sensible enough to take post-gym showers without danger of spontaneous Sapphic orgies, whereas the rest of us, much as we might reek to high heaven after a cross-country run on a warm September day, could not be trusted with the fatal combination of hot water, soap and mass nudity.). Presumably we all smelt as terrible as each other, so the impact of our individual stench was lost in the mass fug, but by Sixth Form college we could all shower as often as we liked, so that smelly bodies stood out, and were unkindly hunted down. I cringe as I remember an unfortunate girl called Roxana, who had a terrible problem and would be followed down the corridors by packs of girls screeching "Roxana...you don't have to put on the Right Guard...". I suspect her problem was more to do with her diet, and having terrifying parents who belonged to a peculiar religious sect which banned the use of cosmetics (presumably including soap.).

At University, some of the girls in my Hall of Residence were given shared rooms - a terrible idea at the best of times and a catastrophic idea when one of you is new to the concept of feminine hygiene. A girl on my floor drew a particularly short straw with a room mate who owned two outfits, which were alternated and hung back in the wardrobe "to air' between wears, and both of which involved tights worn under jeans. By week four the situation had become intolerable and we all gaped in shocked admiration as the suffering party confronted her fetid chum with the (quickly immortalised) words: "I'm going to the Woolco. Shall I get you some deodorant?" "Yes please," replied the fusty lass, apparently without surprise or rancour. It may well have been a turning point in her life - two weeks later she got her first snog, so it was definitely win-win.

I've had a few clients who have left me with the problem of having to explain to the person after them that the stench in the room is actually a leftover from the previous occupant and not me - this has not happened often as I keep a supply of a very good French room spray, and can usually open the window for ten minutes between clients, but there have been one or two whose personal musk has hung around like an invisible cloak for hours afterwards. And I have had one colleague who knew he smelled dreadful and would freely acknowledge it, but blame it on his weight problem which he swore was 'glandular' (and therefore rendered his armpits immune to the effects of soap, apparently.).

My current olfactory dilemma involves my mother-in-law, a lady whose own sons will freely acknowledge as historically 'casual' in her attitude to personal and domestic cleanliness. When she got a couple of hairy dogs who remain 'lovably' untrained ("They've got strong personalities and that's how I like them" is the standard response, as her pets ritually mount all visitors and bay Pedigree Chum Breath into their faces), I knew neither mutt would ever see the inside of a bath, and years down the line the house has developed a Quatermass-like coating of pulsating, organic matter composed mainly of a dog-hair base emulsified with canine spit. If you enter the house, it will attach itself to you by stealth, and by the time you leave you will have miraculously 'grown' a whole new layer of skin and clothes covering, which you will have to peel or gouge off once safely home. And it's best to refuse any offers of food, unless you like it seasoned with a chewy topping of matted fur, saliva and Pal. Heston Blumenthal would be proud, and what's more the special aroma will follow you around for days.

And now she's preparing to put her home on the market and move to a smaller property. Which is going to mean viewings, and more worryingly, smellings. While the house I live in now was a bit of a wreck when we moved in, and smelled musky and unloved, I knew it would be freshened in the course of decorating and airing it, but with M-in-L's house, the odour is embedded in every fibre of carpet and every inch of soft furnishing. Only the noseless could fail to be affected by the stink, and as modern antibiotics have proved quite useful in preventing nose-rot, most prospective buyers will, it must be assumed, be in possession of functioning olfactory systems.

It fell to the eldest son to 'have a word' (the youngest one having promised 'to back you up' and then having hightailed it into the garden at the critical moment.). "It might be a good idea," Eldest Son ventured, "to get the carpets cleaned before you put the house on the market."
"Oh, I don't think so. That just seems like a waste of money to me."
"Well... the thing is...the house does smell a bit doggy."
"Well it would, I've got the dogs."
"Well yes. But not everyone likes dogs, and some people might notice the smell if they're not used to them."
(slightly plaintive sounding) "But they're lovely dogs. And they don't really smell. I can't smell them."
"No, but you're used to being around them..."
(steely tone appears) "I'll buy a Glade air-freshener, then. You can get ones that plug in. If you're going to make a thing of it." (folds arms)
(resignedly) "Ok then. That should take care of it."

Didn't she get off lightly, compared with poor Roxana?

Fashionably late to the ball...

2012-01-09T15:53:00.000Z

Not wanting to appear too eager about 2012, I'm starting it a week after everyone else. So a Happy New Year to you (even to my 'unwanted but inexplicably persistent' reader from up the road - see October 10 2011 - you just can't keep away, can you?). The messages left after my last post were exceptionally kind.

So let's get the ill-health stuff out of the way before resuming the idiocy. I promise to keep it free of gore, and for added value there is a small cautionary tale involved for anyone who might need the services of their local hospital one day. The moral of my tale is "ask lots of questions, and don't waste time trying to get your consultant to like you." Had I wasted time not doing the former and doing the latter, I would almost certainly not have got off with the relatively minor surgery I underwent last week - I'd still be laid up in bed, either a hospital one or my own, with big bits of me missing and weeks of recovery ahead, rather than back at work slightly tired and a little sore, but well and truly on the mend.

I've never had much to do with hospitals as a patient, and though I've worked in a few the jobs tended to be in secondary care units attached to Psychiatry and Clinical Psychology departments, so well away from the stethoscope- swinging, nodule-palpating end. And I've had very little contact indeed with actual surgeons. Nonetheless as a veteran of fifteen years' NHS service, I did feel fairly confident when I was first referred into 'the system' that I would be skilled and adept at working my way though it, knowing instinctively which questions to ask, and that I would easily build up a mutually respectful rapport with my consultant within which concerns could be aired, heard and discussed in an intelligent, clear and concise manner.

All that confidence evaporated in a matter of weeks, during which time I saw at least five different doctors, the first of them a Junior Registrar whose bedside manner consisted of repeating the word 'faaaantassssstic!' very loudly to each question I answered, even my name, and who aroused my personal ire by calling over my shoulder to my hubby (who'd come with me to the initial appointment) 'don't worry! I'll make sure I bring her back!"( I'm sorry...??). With every doctor I saw, the scale of what they proposed to 'do' to me got heavier and heavier, but the justifications got lighter and lighter, until the end-game argument which amounted to something like "we think you should have some radical surgery that will mean three months off work, not because your actual condition is life threatening but because at some future point you might get a life-threatening condition, even though nothing in the tests we've done indicate there's anything like that going on." When my chuckling consultant introduced me to his student as "the lady I told you about, the one who doesn't like surgery" (oddly, I've yet to meet my nemesis, the "lady who can't get enough bits cut off her", though I am sure she's out there somewhere, bouncing around the Munchausen's scale) I felt all my hope and fight drain away, and knew I was not going to get out of his theatre without leaving some of my very self in the sluice - and not just the bit that wasn't working. As I bargained with him about maybe taking this but leaving that, I could all but hear the clink of metal on metal from under the desk as he metaphorically sharpened his knives. I came out feeling that I'd done quite well to get away with a moderate amount of interference, and that though I was in for some pain and lost income, it would have to be worth it and at least it would just get the damn thing over.

So when an earlier appointment came up which meant travelling to a different hospital twenty miles away last week, I grabbed it with both hands. I felt incredible relief - not only had I managed to beat the surgeon down from his original plan to disembowel me, I was getting in almost three weeks early. What could be better? Though the designated morning was foul, with a huge angry storm raging right across the South of England, I was happy to make my way around the fallen trees and debris at 6.30am to the slowly-waking hospital where post Christmas staff were greeting each other and comparing their New Year weight gain as they checked the patients in. I was on the lookout for my consultant, who I was sure would be roaming the corridors like Sweeney Todd, stropping a razor thoughtfully on a leather strap in preparation for a good morning's cutting and chopping. I put on my tasteful backless hospital gown, climbed into bed, and waited.

When a small, confident woman in surgical scrubs put her head round the screen an hour later, I assumed she was looking for someone else. But there was my name on her list, and she was holding that list because she was the surgeon conducting all the procedures in Theatre 2 that morning. Only she wanted a word with me first. She couldn't understand why Sweeney Todd had opted to remove quite as much as he had. Was there some new information about my condition that she wasn't aware of? Because if there wasn't, it seemed most sensible to her to restrict the procedure to one which would deal with the actual original problem that my GP had found in the first place, back in June, have a look around, and if there were no other problems, to leave everything else alone. How would I feel about that?

How would I feel? I felt like kissing her. And so it was that I left hospital that evening, walking like a dowager and out of my mind on morphine to be sure, but with the 'problem' removed and all other anatomical parts still sitting snugly in my abdominal cavity where they belong. I spent much of last week asleep or watching crap TV under a slanket, but compared to what I thought I was in for, and thanks to this amazing, intelligent woman, I've got off lightly. What I'm left with is immense gratitude to her, but a certain residue of despair that the likes of Sweeney Todd are still roaming the corridors of, one presumes, many a hospital, looking for things to chop. As a friend who's a nurse told me some time ago, "you have to watch it with some surgeons. They're born to cut, and if they don't get maximum cutting value out of every intervention, they end up feeling that their time's been wasted." It's great to know there are other kinds of doctor out there, but disturbing to know that your chances of getting one may come down to simple factors like who's on the theatre rota on any given day. It could all have gone so differently. So, if you find yourself in a similar situation, don't be scared to ask question after question about why certain clinical decisions are being made. It was my body all along, but for a good few weeks there it certainly didn't feel like it.

Now, on with 2012. Doesn't it feel different from 2011? No? Oh.

With a Song in my Heart...

2011-12-19T11:44:00.000Z

Right, I damn well WILL get this down, even if I still don't much feel like writing. Everyone gets to do an end-of-year round up, don't they? So here's mine.

2011 was the year in which I understood that it is actually possible to overdose on 'interesting times' and to end up feeling that you're standing on a rickety fairground ride which hasn't been maintained properly for thirty years, and in which all the moving parts are suddenly vibrating at great speed. You've paid your money to the greasy geezer in the booth so you've no prospect of getting off until the ride's over, but you can't help noticing that certain nuts and bolts are starting to fly off the main chassis, and there's a horrible clanking noise coming from deep within the engine. I dare say you know the feeling, if you've lived through this last year and read a newspaper occasionally.

I've little to say here about the redemptive possibilities of 2011's Arab Spring or the scientific riches heralded by the Higgs' Bosun - you'd have to take me to the pub for that - but at a micro level, the level on which most of us live and experience daily life, it all feels rather serious, sour, and 'stuck'. I know that one friend's memories of 2011 will be defined by the moment (last week) at his firm's Christmas dinner, when he glanced at his phone to check an email that had just arrived, and found it contained notification of his redundancy. His boss was seated beside him at the time, and apparently stared fixedly ahead at the cracker on the table between them. Who hasn't got a story like that to tell now? If it wasn't you, it will have been someone you know.

For me personally, there've been some great moments in 2011 which I wouldn't have missed for the world - among them driving across the Mojave desert in an open-topped car with Link Wray playing full blast - but quite a few other moments which were not so great, most of them unfortunately arising from the sudden, serious expression on my GPs freckled summer face when she uttered the heart-sink phrase "I'm afraid there's something there...". And though there is indeed 'something there', it now looks like it's not the worst kind of 'something', so though I don't feel great right now I'm up for some surgery in a couple of weeks which should get me back to normal. But it's been a bit of an anxious, slow-mo time, which probably explains the gradual tailing off in blog activity as the months of 2011 went by. I certainly didn't want to write about feeling unwell, but as that's most of what I've been doing, I was a bit stumped.

It also explains - partly - the relatively paltry number of gigs I've been to this year. There've just been too many evenings when standing in a crowded venue seemed like the very last thing I'd have wanted, or have been able, to do. I'm still grieving for a few I had optimistically bought tickets for but been unable to go on the night, chiefly the sublime Wooden Shjips who were playing the Scala in August. They come round these parts so rarely, and they're never less than brilliant. I'm just hoping they'll be back after January is out, so I can catch up with them and their far-out noodling.

But proportionately, the gigs that I have attended in 2011 have been of very high quality so overall I'm pleased. Kraftwerk's 3-D show in Munich was akin to a spiritual experience; the word 'gig' just doesn't come anywhere near it. Killing Joke in April were an almost visceral re-introduction to the pleasures of being pinioned to the wall by the sheer force of sound, as were Mogwai on that warm night in July at the De La Warr Pavilion. On a much more low-key note, Pete and the Pirates were my new 'find' of the year, and the growth in confidence they showed between my seeing them first in February and then again in September this year was a joy to behold. In fact, I've rarely been to a gig as genuinely cheering as that second one of theirs - a night where even the coolest Brighton hipster in the room left the venue beaming with pleasure at just how good they'd been. Similarly, those lovely Electrelane women played a blinder to an adoring home crowd here in Brighton in July, and put many a smile on a pretty girl's face.

An amusing experience of being completely out-of-sync with an audience who were, to a man-jack, appearing to be having a great time was provided by Adam Ant's spring gig, which apart from a sense of uneasy embarrassment, left me cold while all around me were rekindling the pirate fires of their youth. And I'm not sure I'll be bothering with The Fall again for a while, as their audience nowadays is largely composed of middle-aged men who fart constantly and don't wash.

But I'm still in the market for gigs and songs, and though this lot disappointed me live, the song below will sum up the contradictions of the 2011 in my tiny insignificant corner of the world. As I sat listening to it on my headphones a few weeks ago in a sparse hospital waiting room, trying to self-soothe before an unpleasant appointment, I remembered that the time I'd listened to it before that had been from a huge swanky bath in a huge swanky hotel room in Napa, California. The windows had been open, the room was full of sunshine, and I had a California Girl's tan. The irony made me smile.

Life keeps changing, we just have to try and keep up. Thanks for reading my blog, and have a good End of Year Thing, however you choose to spend it. Pip pip.

Here's the song that proved to me that I'll never escape my 80s roots.

Blankety blank

2011-12-12T15:20:00.000Z

I am strangely unable to string a sentence together at the moment (although I realise that I just have.). I keep having half-ideas for posts that don't coalesce into anything satisfying or concrete. It's either terminal laziness, or the winter blues at play. I want to write, but can't.

This too will pass, and I'll find something to say. Honest.

Everyone's dancin' their troubles away...

2011-11-30T11:35:00.000Z

Are there any songs which invoke such an overpoweringly negative reaction in you that you will literally cross the room to turn off the radio at the sound of the very first note? And what is it about those jarring tunes that make your emotional hackles rise? An actual tonal aversion to the tune itself, or an emotional association or memory which the blameless song innocently evokes? And is it possible to ever feel differently about such a song, once it has been tainted by such a foul association (the 'Gary Glitter Effect'?)

I muse on this because I just idly revisited a song I absolutely loathed when it came out, to test my own emotional response with the passage of time, and to my surprise my blood not only failed to boil, it didn't even gently simmer. When I was twelve the sound of Mac and Katie Kissoon's frankly harmless minor hit 'Like a Butterfly' would have me falling on the radio spitting venom. I would grab the set and run down the garden with it, so that my Mum (who rather liked the little tune) couldn't put turn it on again until I knew the song was safely finished. My Dad cottoned on to this, and in the manner of all Dads he thought it was great sport to physically restrain me with one hand (easily done) while ramping up the volume with the other so that I could be forced to hear the hated song at maximum impact. I once became so genuinely distressed during this aural waterboarding that he had to relent and let me go, screaming and crying, and I can still remember the surprise on his face that anyone could really hate a song so much (which given his own reaction to the Sensational Alex Harvey Band was a bit rich.). But listening to the song just now, it sounded at worst rather weedy and bland - hardly worthy of the murderous rage it once provoked in me. I wonder what it was I was hearing back then?

Easier to connect with are a couple of tunes from early adulthood which still make my bile rise and have me running for the exit. 'Sisters are Doin' it for Themselves' reminds me of every dire Womens' Disco I ever went to in my twenties, where the disapproval of the 'real feminists' for those of us gender traitors who wore makeup and fraternised with the Enemy (men) was made manifest, and where this was the one bloody song you would be physically forced to dance to. And as it's a completely undanceable tune anyway, you were on a hiding to nothing from the word go. Those evenings were among the least 'sisterly' experiences of my life, and as for that song I certainly didn't need a smug bunch of rich international chanteuses who looked like they'd never met before, dancing badly together and reminding me to 'ring on my own bell', thanks. Terrible.

And while I'm picking on Annie Lennox, let me add 'There Must Be an Angel' to the list. Some of my friends actively adore this song, and find it playful and whimsical. Yet my hand is reaching for the off-switch of the radio at its very mention, and it's not even playing. From the first time I heard it, that painful yodelling intro embodied the sound of a crazy old lady being taken away in an ambulance under a Sectioning Order, warbling desperately in an effort to self-soothe, as the orderlies tightened the straps around her arms (yes, that literal.). And the bit where she goes "... and it's playing with my heart, YEAH" is one of the most horribly delivered lines ever committed to song. If it turns out there's actually a hell, and I've done enough bad deeds to get sent there, I just bet I'll be spending eternity plugged into a device that pipes this unforgivable noise around my brain.

It's also possible that my real musical bete noir might just be Duran Duran's 'The Reflex'. A vacuous piece of jarring self-aggandisement, devoid of melody or wit, this is cocaine set to music. And accordingly, it's as ugly as the era that spawned it. You play this near me at your own physical peril.

At least I've warned you. Which is more than my poor boyfriend of the time was able to do back on that night in 1983, when he came into his kitchen where I was sitting, and 'All Night Long' by Lionel Ritchie came on the radio. A generally benign and laid back individual, he surprised me by calmly opening a cupboard, taking out a claw-hammer, and smashing the radio to bits. As the hammer rose and fell, he kept muttering "fucking fiesta, eh? Fucking fiesta...", until Lionel yielded to silence. It turned out that this was the first song he'd heard after leaving the hospital where his mother had just died. And as she had only been dead a fortnight when the assault on Lionel took place, his Manchurian Candidate reaction does at least have a context. I don't imagine he'll ever be neutral to 'All Night Long', but I do hope he just turns off the radio and tuts if he hears it now.

©Ishouldbeworking 2011

Oh Yee of little faith

2011-11-24T12:35:00.000Z

I've had a back problem since my mid-teens, and having been notoriously resistant to anything involving sport or 'games' at school ('games' was always the ultimate misnomer - what could be remotely playful about getting hit in the face with a wet netball on a freezing February afternoon?), I didn't find out until my early twenties that regular exercise was actually my friend, and a means by which back pain could be kept at bay. This handy revelation also got me out of having to wear the delightful built-up shoe I'd been instructed to wear aged 19 (yeah, that got a lot of wear on my nights out at at Le Beat Route.).

I've stuck with exercise ever since, somewhat grimly at times, and it's served me well as my back is under control and my weight hasn't varied much from when I was twenty. I tend to combine a bit of everything; gym work, a few classes, running (short distances these days, but still), Pilates here and there (it gets boring), and yoga. I've never been too interested in the 'spiritual' side of yoga; for me it's first and foremost a good all-over stretch that keeps me flexible and keeps my muscles strong. I can see that focusing on the postures makes it hard to worry or think about too much else, so it's definitely got a relaxation element, but for me that's a Brucie Bonus. I'm not too worried about my chakras, or where my prana might end up during the more complicated asanas.

I know that's not the case for everyone who does yoga. A discipline which has its roots in the Hindu belief system is naturally massively informed by that philosophy. While I respect that, I don't necessarily wish to explore it, and I'm pleased that I've been able to cherry-pick the elements of yoga that are helpful to me without feeling pressurised to sign up for a whole 'enlightenment' package.

So when I went on holiday in September, I even bought a yoga DVD to take with me, so I could get a couple of sessions in while I was away. This may sound obsessive but I know from experience that different hotel beds and pillows can set my back off, and if this happens then an hour of yoga will usually see me right. I looked around on Amazon and found one practitioner to be very highly praised. Rodney Yee is a Japanese-American ex-ballet dancer, who has been practicing and teaching yoga for twenty years, and who frankly has the sort of body that such a pedigree would suggest. His DVDs, while not for beginners, are clear, thorough and easy to follow. And they feature an awful lot of Rodney, wrapping himself around himself by a waterfall or folding himself in two on a Hawaiian beach. Whatever improbable sequence his body might be moving though, Rodney's face remains as calm and as serene as the Buddha. If he's thinking of anything earthly at all, it couldn't be anything more corrupting than perhaps his next cup of miso soup or green tea. He looks like a man who has evolved beyond all base earthly needs.

Being so impressed with his DVD and all, and possibly even being slightly drawn to his commanding air of simple composure, I did something unusual for me and Googled him. His CV is certainly impressive, as is his business acumen - yoga has made him a very rich man, and has given him a predictably wealthy, famous and self-obsessed number of followers (the roll-call of models, actors and female singers who have embraced Rodney Yee is quite something.). Unfortunately, it appears that he's also a sexually incontinent serial shagger, who sent ripples round the international yoga community a few years ago when the extent to which he'd been releasing his groinal energies with his students became scandalously clear. Then he left his (presumably long-suffering) wife and three kids to shack up with an ex-model yoga filly who had, their self-penned legend has it, caused a seismic shift in his consciousness not to mention his trunks, by placing her hand on his Third Eye while they were taking a post-class dip in a hot tub together (for those who don't know or have tawdry minds, the Third Eye is reputedly located in the forehead, not the Other Place.). It seems for all his outward composure, our Rodney is as seething a mass of internal impulses as the Man on the Clapham Omnibus.

I was terribly disappointed and then enormously amused by Rodney's tale. And not remotely surprised. The cult of gyms and 'fitness' is heaving with narcissists seeking guru status, and with all that proximity to bare, glowing flesh the possibilities for a hard-bodied type with a roving eye can be almost endless. One of the most fertile hotbeds (literally) of generalised lust and relationship disaster that I know of has been the 'Hot Yoga' schools which sprang up over here about ten years ago, which provide a natural stage-set for ill-advised sexual meandering worthy of a classic 1970s Swedish porno. The classes are held in a steamy room kept permanently heated to 105 F, and at a humidity level of 40%. You run through 26 postures wearing few clothes as you can get away with, at the mercy of a strutting yoga muse or satyr who will be clad in a crop top and clinging yoga pants at the very most. I've never been to a swingers' club, but for the gauche, indiscriminately sexualised atmosphere I'd imagine there, a Hot Yoga class could give them a run for their money. And if I had a quid for every relationship I personally know of, that has skidded off the rails on a patch of patchouli-scented sweat through a Hot Yoga 'flirtation' getting out of hand...well, I'd have about thirty-six pounds.

Me, though, I went to Hot Yoga twice, and the second time I went I got pleurisy. Germs and microbes off all kinds mutate in those fetid rooms, you know. So guess I'm just not cut out for the cult of Fitness Shaggery, but it does make me grin, from a distance. I'll keep doing my Rodney Yee DVD, as it does the job and keeps my back in check, but the next time I see that self-possessed smile as he eases himself into Cobra pose, I'll be all too aware of the hormonal volcano ready to explode behind it.

Namaste, everybody.

©Ishouldbeworking 2011

50 Year Old Man

2011-11-18T13:27:00.001Z

It was my birthday yesterday, and by happy coincidence The Fall were playing five minutes' walk from my front door, so that was the evening's entertainment taken care of.

Going to a Fall gig is always a gamble; they can be truly great or deliberately, insultingly bad depending on the whim and chemical intake of Mark E Smith. For example, in 1996, we travelled all the way up to London to see them at the Astoria; unfortunately the gig coincided with the infamous England-Germany game of the Euro 96 tournament, and many of the audience didn't arrive at the gig until after the match, when there was a sudden and unwelcome influx of pissed-off footie fans (Germany had trounced England.). Mark E Smith took a very dim view of their disloyalty to him, in putting a football game before his lovely gig, so to make a point he swanned off to the dressing room with his mike, and performed his vocals from there. And on the way home, our car got set on by a bunch of very unhappy England 'supporters' in Trafalgar Square because it was a VW Golf. A fine evening.

But we've seen The Fall so many times before and since that you learn to take the rough with the smooth. And as it turned out, the Fall's performance last night was not the 'rough' component of the evening. No, that was the unbelievable smell of the audience.

You know by now that a Fall audience will be 90% male, 80% over forty, and 60% bald. That's just their demographic. What had I'd never noticed until last night - and it hit me as soon as I entered the building - was the smell that emanated from their massed, packed bodies. The venue smelt like a pet shop, and one that Trading Standards might have been interested to visit. It might have been that every audience member had a hamster strapped under each armpit, and that several of the poor creatures had already asphyxiated. It might also have been that most of them now just have the one 'gig t-shirt' left that they can get into, and that it doesn't get a wash between outings. Either way, the stench was medieval. And to add to the carnival atmosphere, there was a constant. almost competitive stream of community farting. A great, dense, evil miasma penetrating the already poisoned air. I have been going to gigs for over thirty years, and I have never smelt anything like it, from the Guana Batz to the Meteors to bloody Motorhead, all of which can be sweaty affairs. This wasn't the healthy, excited sweat, though, it was rancid old pants filtered through wee-drizzled denim and tinctured with sticky bum. If most of those men are single, they damn well deserve to be, and if they've got partners, they must all have had their noses removed. Give me fag smoke over that any day, even with the inherent health risks. Any man who allows himself to smell like that should be deeply ashamed.

I remember well, in the days before male grooming (for which include 'regular showers') took off, how atrocious many British men smelled. All those journeys on the Central Line with my nose pressed into some malodorous, stained armpit, almost dislocating my neck as I tried to avoid the puffs of halitosis from the mouth-breathers. Grimy black-rimmed fingernails casually inserted into nostrils for a bit of public exploration and extraction. There might have been an excuse for it then (though I never thought so), there isn't one now. Farting all the way through a gig for which you have arrived smelling like a dead rodent isn't rock'n'roll, it isn't big, and it isn't clever. If you think not washing is a statement of class solidarity, you've really missed the point, lads. And you'll never get a girlfriend.

And what were the band like? They were...Ok. That's all.

©Ishouldbeworking 2011

Head On

2011-11-17T10:58:00.001Z

I resisted going anywhere near HBO's 'In Treatment' for ages, as I was sure it would irritate the hell out of me. We shrinks are like politicians, actors and doctors in believing ourselves to be the most fascinating people on the planet, but even I wondered how much interest could be sustained from an entire series based around a series of professional encounters between a typically malfunctioning middle-aged white male therapist, and a small selection of his patients. By definition, all the 'action' takes place elsewhere, and is merely reported and ruminated on by Himself and his unhappy charges. Who outside of the Tavistock Institute could care?

And then there was the presence of Gabriel Byrne, as the therapist. Lovely, rumpled, owl-faced uber-Celt Gabriel Byrne. I really wasn't sure I could cope with him, physical reincarnation that he is of my father's late crony 'Jags' Herffernan. Jags was a dipsomaniac surgeon from Dun Laoghaire, who once ate a human placenta for a bet. He would turn up at our house at random hours, oblivious to the fact that his hospital shifts did not often coincide with our family routine, and he would sit and stare at my Mother with the same crinkly eyes and doomed melancholic smile that have served Gabriel so much better. I was terrified of him, especially when he scooped me onto his knee and threatened to lock me in the back of an ambulance and take me back to Ireland to see my grandfather, who I hated. Hence the sight of Gabriel has always signified 'psychotic butcher' to me rather than 'tormented shrink', so I knew I was going to have trouble believing in him.

But of course, as it turned out, I was gripped and captivated. My projective identification needs were fully met as I eagerly recognised, in Gabriel's five tormented and conflicted patients (one warring couple, one damaged teen, two destructive singletons) some eerily familiar variations of individuals who have passed through my own consulting room over the last twenty years. And of course, some of Gabriel's own responses (thankfully not all), both personal and professional, brought an uncomfortable heat to my cheeks once or twice. Fortunately my clinical supervisor is nowhere as annoying as his seems to be, nor do I have quite as confused a relationship with them, but as a portrayal of what it's like to do this kind of barmy work, it was as honest and as accurate as I've seen.

Of course in getting so engrossed I've only borne out my own narcissistic point about how easily we shrinks get captivated by our own reflections, but as a control in this experiment I can offer my hubby, who works in a mercifully unrelated field and has about as much interest in my working world as I do in his. On the agreement that he would watch In Treatment with me on the strict condition that I would not utter a single word along the lines of "I'd never do that", or "I can see what he did there", he was as gripped as I was. And I mean him no disrespect in revealing that he even shed a tear during one of the later episodes. Good casting, tight, believable dialogue, and some top quality acting all helped the series along - Mia Wasikowska was particularly striking as the tough-talking, heartbroken teenage gymnast - and Gabriel himself was relatively restraining in laying on the twinkly Irish charm. Jags Heffernan was almost banished from my mind.

If you've ever been a messed-up teen, unhappy singleton or part of a warring couple, you'll find something to hold your interest in In Treatment. And if you're a shrink like me, you'll find yourself in the biggest Hall of Mirrors since the County Fair last came to town.

It's winter. We all need box sets. You could do worse than this one.

©Ishouldbeworking 2011

Ravishing

2011-11-09T10:25:00.000Z

As the regular reader of my blog may know, I am a little shy about having people who know me in 'real life' read my stuff. My reticence is largely born of experience; family members querying my choice of subject matter and suggesting I replace it with "something a bit more cheerful" (my mother-in-law, straight from Central Casting), chums finding it amusing to pop up on my blog and leave their own unique brand of witty comment (Mr Edwards, Mr Bell, both long since banned), and the tiresome risk of professional cross-over, boringly relevant in the job I do (in which I am supposed to if not embody at least represent a fairly neutral presence whose private scribblings and rants are best kept out of the consulting room. The patients really don't need to know what I think of Lance Armstrong, clowns or Yan from British Sea Power.).

So, my blog goes out under an admittedly rickety pseudonym, as do several of the short stories I've had published over the years. I don't get the glory but I get left alone, which means I'm not very often asked to justify or explain, in deeply personal terms, why I've written something. I like it like that.

Not everybody feels the same. Many people, all probably more confident souls than me, publish freely and fearlessly under their own names, presumably uninhibited by concern that their readers may, perhaps quite unreasonably, read their work and look on them with altered, maybe even slightly fearful, eyes.

Let me illustrate. A few weeks ago I was sent the opening chapters of a self-published novel by a work associate of my husband's which, the author was very proud to announce, was tickling the lower reaches of the Amazon charts at number 9,948 ("that puts us in the top 2%".). I've never met this man but somehow ended up on his email list which included hundreds of other names, many of them people as peripheral to his life as me, but others very clearly close colleagues, junior staff, a full spectrum of business contacts, and quite possibly the bloke who gave him two fifty pence coins for a quid when he needed to feed the parking meter outside his Mum's house in Chorley six months ago. We were all asked to buy his book, which he assured us was a 'high spirited chase through the glamorous underworlds of London and Marbella, including loveable rogue character's (sic) you'll feel you've known forever and with some of the more ravishing aspects (his italics) undiluted for an eye-opening read!! (his screamers.).

How could I resist? I opened the document and was propelled straight into the lushly carpeted and tasteful Spanish hotel room of Gavin, who was just in the process of helping the luscious Saskia out of her clothes. Hmm. Let me précis here...."unleashing....firm...wondrous mounds (wondrous mounds??)....straddling... easing herself expertly... huge.......groaned hoarsely...arching her back... those wondrous mounds (he really does like them)... yeah babe... moving in unison... roaring climax... wept with gratitude and the force of the spasms in her uterus (too good to leave out.)."

Well now. All this from the imagination of a fifty eight-year old West London businessman. Maybe it's not imagination, though. Maybe there's a lot more to him than meets the eye. Maybe the Old Rogue has a ravishing past and a knack with the ladies? And maybe, even, a dangerous side? I read on, as far as the part where Saskia, her Wondrous Mounds at liberty once more, is performing an impromptu penile examination on the 'tethered and helpless Ramon' using, imaginatively, a corkscrew. It's not always easy to incorporate the word 'urethra' into a work of literary fiction but as Saskia's uterus can testify, our author favours biological realism. A crude slang term like 'bell-end' would be too general. This is forensically detailed description that would shame a sloppier writer. I'm too overawed to read any more.

I'll never know how the author was greeted when he arrived at his office the day after his 'taster' was circulated, but I would give anything to have been a fly on the wall (though he'd probably have swatted me, "expertly and with lightening reflexes, reducing the succulent insect to a pulsating puddle of scutum and anterior mesoplutum". ). I know that in the outer reaches of his business world, he has certainly acquired legendary status - of a kind - and that marvellous phrase 'wondrous mounds' has been eagerly adopted and heavily used at the slightest and most childish excuse. People are looking at him in a whole new and revised light, wondering about him and his past and his life, and his very state of mind. Which, presumably, is just what he wanted?

Hmm.

©Ishouldbeworking 2011

Vanity project

2011-10-27T10:31:00.001+01:00

I've been immortalised. An acquaintance from way back, who has done quite well for himself in a very specific field, has just had his autobiography published. And there I am, a minor character reduced to one of a collective as part of a group of young women he apparently describes as 'The Lovecats'.

I haven't seen the author in question for many years, but curiously he's someone I have from time to time considered for a blog post. In the end, though, I always decided that he was material too good to be shared, and which I could better use elsewhere. Now he's used me in his writing. The rat beat me to it.

Am I curious to read his book? Yes, I am. I'm sure he's a completely unreliable narrator and so completely self-absorbed that I'm almost amazed there are any other characters in it at all, but I do want to know what he's written about me. So I might wait a while and pick one up for a quid on Amazon. I'm assuming it won't become an international best seller and that he won't have to worry about negotiating the film rights. But supposing he does... I wonder who they'll get to play me? Me, me, me, me.

©Ishouldbeworking 2011

Best and Wurst

2011-10-20T18:16:00.004+01:00

Ever been to a foreign city and find yourself surprised or disappointed that it didn't match the (probably quite crudely stereotyped) preconceptions you'd arrived with? Well, you need have no such worries about Munich. If you imagine German cities to generally involve an architectural melange of beamed and pitched-roofed medieval whimsy alongside spare postwar brutalism and Nazi relics, that the wide, litter-free roads hum with the restrained melody of a thousand shiny Audis, Mercs and Porches driven by clear-skinned, prosperous blonds and blondes respectively toting steel-rimmed specs or sunglasses worn on head, all en route to their executive boxes at Bayern or a spot of naked sunbathing anywhere there's a patch of grass, after which they will quaff a few steins of top-class beer while eating their bodyweight in pig-based products, regularly shouting 'PROST!' and listening appreciatively to an oompah band, before they go home to their tastefully modernist apartments to watch startlingly unattractive but vigorous pornography before having sex involving no fewer than ten different mutually-gratifying positions...yes, if that's been how you always imagined Munich, you're spot-on because that's exactly what it's like. I'm surmising a little about the last bit, but I know I'm right.

No wonder the Germans are fed up with the Greeks. Anything that threatens such a discreetly opulent standard of living is not going to be happily received, and if you're a comfortably-off Municher (there don't seem to be any other kind), you have a hell of a lot to lose. For a start, if the German economy really does falter, you might not have as much money to spend on food, and boy do they like to eat. I always thought the Spanish were good eaters, rambling from one tapas bar to the next on a paperchase of delicious morsels, and the Italians do a fine job of sitting extending a meal over several hours of course after mouthwatering course. But tapas are tiny - that's the whole point - and even the most decadent Italian banquet is basically healthy, and will at some point involve a salad.

Not in Bavaria. They want mainly flesh, in roasted or sausage form, supplemented with a blob of carbohydrate (dumpling or potato, or best of all, potato dumpling), and vegetables heavily disguised in a searing vinegar pickle. And they want lots of it - no meagre portions here, not even for children. In the Augustiner Keller - a vast cavernous beerhall where waiters with hands like shovels dance between benches carrying six or eight steins and balancing steaming plates - I had the 'Poultry Platter' which comprised a half-chicken, most of a duck, and a quarter goose, and I ate it feeling like Henry the Eighth at a banquet, helped on by the unbelievable roaring of a hundred Bayern Munich fans, celebrating a 4-0 win that afternoon like they were trying to enter Valhalla and raise the old gods (yes I know that's Norway but you know what I mean.).

If you should start to flag while wandering the city streets - which it's very good to do - you're never far from the amazing Viktualienmarkt, which has been stuffing the natives of the city since 1807. I have never been anywhere quite like it. It's like an adventure playground devoted completely without pretention to eating and drinking. At the Munchner Suppenkuche, a tiny bustling stall that sells nothing but knockout soup, you can splash 4 Euros on huge warming bowls of goulashsuppe, 'red meat soup', or my favourite Leberkaese, which translates attractively as 'Livercheese' and contains a huge floating lump of soft liver sausage. Don't knock it till you've tried it; it I didn't need to eat again for hours. Nearby there are stalls selling thick crusty rolls packed with brown shrimps or herring, prune cake soaked in brandy if you have a sweet tooth, and in the middle a seated area where the sausage selection of your dreams can be yours. Everyone is drinking beer, and it's good beer, clean-tasting and crisp.

The friendly, chatty atmosphere was only spoiled briefly by a woman in her sixties who climbed off her bicycle and began a spirited angry rant in which the word 'Islam' featured heavily. What could have been dismissed as a random nutter of the kind you can find anywhere, took on a different and more uncomfortable air when we walked back to the central square to find a very creepy anti-Islamic protest underway, with two burka clad figures (one astride a white horse) silently brandishing placards which (I later worked out) said, under a picture of a mosque and another burka-ed form, "I'm a Municher, get me out of here". The watching crowd were mainly passive, though there were a few cries of 'bravo', but the next morning there was a full-on right-wing demo in full swing, with an angry ranting man yelling from a stage over the counter cries of the anti-fascist counter-demonstators. The police presence was heavy and seemed highly organised, and once again the watching crowd seemed passively curious rather than being whipped into a nationalistic (or, regionalistic - Munich is Bavarian first, German second), but given the city's history as the nursery of National Socialism, it was troubling to see the active Right so evidently alive and well, with a new target group to hate.

All that apart,we found the people we met to be amazingly friendly and anxious for us to have the best experience of their city. A couple of blokes who'd just come from the Bayern game guided us through the selections of beers in the Augustiner, and were very concerned that I should not restrict myself to the wheat beers I'd been (really really) enjoying, but should try a litre stein of what they were having. As they left, the younger expressed his regret that we were only there for a few days. "I would show you real Bavaria", he said regretfully, having already taken a great deal of assuring that we knew our way back to the hotel and didn't need him to drive us. Another young medical student I got talking to in the enormous Hoffbrauhaus was more concerned about our narrow perception of Munich. Looking round at the oompah band parping away on the podium, and of the tables of old men in lederhosen and hats with badger parts waving from the brim, he shook his head. "Please do not think that this is all there is," he said. "People think Germany...sausages, beer, oompah, prost, Bayern Munich. BMW, Porche, Mercedes. Nothing more. There is more. Maybe you see it in Berlin. Maybe not so much Munich. But there is more."

And so I've come home and written a piece about sausages, beer, oompah, prost, Bayern Munich, BMW, Porche, Mercedes. Oops.

Of course there's more. The Kraftwerk Exhibition, for a start, which runs until November 13 and is unmissable if you've ever more than liked them - you can lose a couple of mesmerising hours there. And the Residentz Museum and Gallery, packed with more antiquities than any European plunderer had a right to make off with. There are a clutch of other, huge, important galleries that we didn't even get to, which may be reason enough to go back some time. But my veins need a bit of time to de-fur themselves after the kilos of protein and fat I gorged on while I was there. I'm on lemon juice and lettuce for the rest of the week, but it was worth it. And a good swan-song, as that's going to be it for a while with me and travelling now. I'm just going to have to amuse myself here.

©ishouldbeworking 2011

Every Woman Adores a Robot

2011-10-18T17:43:00.002+01:00

If it were any other band but Kraftwerk, I'd probably scoff at the idea of going to see a group that only has one remaining original member. But Kraftwerk were never like any other band in any respect whatsoever, and they don't come out of hiding very often, and they were playing on our 15th wedding anniversary, and it was their new 3-D show, and it was in Munich, and we shouldn't really have gone, but I wouldn't have missed it for anything.

I last saw them about ten years ago when Florian and Ralf were still buddies; since then Florian has gone his own way, announcing that he was 'leaving the band' in 2009 ( was there one single, terrible row, during which Ralf threw a circuit board at Florian's head and Florian tried to stab him with the stylus from his own Stylophone? God I hope so.). But we are all replaceable units, and Ralf has three appropriately anonymous-looking electro droogs alongside him when they take to the (relatively small) Alte Kongresshalle stage on the stroke of midnight. We all have our 3-D glasses on, and as the giant arm of the Ralf Robot on the screen behind them sweeps out across the crowd, people are ducking. It's fabulous, and it's all uphill from there. We get two and a quarter hours of the very best, a resounding 'Computerweldt' you can feel thumping in your chest, a transcendent 'Vitamin' with exploding effervescent bubbles appearing to pour out over the auditorium, a messianic 'Radioacktivity' which is HUGELY well received by the awestruck crowd - remember, this is the home of the 'Atomenergie? Nein Danke!' sticker - and of course, a sublime 'Autobahn', with its little trundling VW Beetle graphic bringing the song to a perfect close when it follows the 'exit' sign off the motorway. The audience applause is rapturous, but during the songs there's a respectful studiousness and not much movement beyond some serious nodding. The single pilled-up twit wandering around trying to engage new friends to join him in his Gibbon Dance is, predictably, an English bloke. Everyone else seems to be there for the music, and the event. Ralf eventually makes a great show of grappling in the half-light to look at his wristwatch, and then tucks his palms under the side of his head to tell us that he's getting a bit tired. We've all of us had a big night, and after such a value-for-money set it seems fair enough to let him go off to whatever it is robots do at an aftershow party. I would have been thrilled to hear my adored and prophetic 'Computerlove', but it's not on the list and I wonder if they've regretted letting Chris Martin get his anaemic hands on that riff, for his bloody awful "Ta-aaa-aaa-aaalk" song.

Whatever, I leave the venue lighter than an electron and happier than Mr Data when he got his emotion chip.

And, Munich is out there, waiting to be explored. More follows.

©Ishouldbeworking2011

2011-10-18T14:58:00.001+01:00

Coming very soon, Kraftwerk in Munich. But first, and far more everyday, a little vignette of modern British life I was party to about half an hour ago.

I nip into Morrison's for some onions, and then wait for my bus, on a Brighton Street fairly well-known for its cast of 'local characters'. A fat red-faced man in a tracksuit has just been accosted by an old chum, a beige skull with blue-glaze junkie eyes and knee-socks. "I seen you here on Saturday morning", says the Skull, as the bus arrives and we all begin to board.
"You never seen me, not Saturday," says Fatty. "Cos I took the big overdose on Friday night!" He announces the last sentence with a certain amount of pride.
"Why ain't you dead, then?" asks the Skull.
"Cos I took too much to kill me!"
"That's bollocks, 'ow can you take too much overdose to kill you?What you take?"
"Them pills I been on seven years. Strongest ones you can get! I took twelve packets and it was too much too kill me, they said."
"What were they, then? Temazepan?"
"BOLLOCKS were they Temazzies! I said they was the strongest ones you can get! Temazzies, shit."
"Tramodol, then? Anyway it's bollocks, why didn't you jump off Beachy Head? If you wanna kill yourself, that's what you wanna do, jump off Beachy Head."
"I shouldn't be bleedin' ALIVE! Cos I took twelve packets and I drunk 36 fackin' CANS an' ALL!! 36!!"
"Well you must have been sick all over yourself and pissed like a fackin horse."
"Then I got knocked down by a car, yesterday."
"You got bleedin' knocked down? What you break?"
"NAFFIN. it never done a bleedin' thing."
"You're fackin unlucky, mate, you are. I ain't sittin next to you."

And so the Skull adjourns to the front of the bus and gives the female driver full low-down about the skank who just ripped him off for a tenner that her gave her to buy tobacco, and when he chased her she went al schizo and screamed and that, so he got his hand in her bag and pulls out a Halifax Gold card that she must have ripped off some punter last night, so nice one, in the end, as it happens.

Fatty sits miserably alone, but as I get up to ring the bell for my stop he leans across the aisle to me, and very quietly, he wolf-whistles.

©Ishouldbeworking 2011

Thanks...but no thanks

2011-10-10T08:41:00.001+01:00

I have to do this periodically, it seems....via the miracle of Statcounter it has come to my attention that I have a few new readers. Which is great, apart from the fact that unless I'm much mistaken, one of you actually knows me in 'real life'. Which is, for the purposes of this blog, where we must part company.

As I've maintained since I started this blog nearly five years ago, this is a bit of space for me (someone who listens to other people for a living, and who even in the pub will not be the first to get their story told.). It's my scratchpad, my draft file, my outlet, my shout-out into the ether, and what I still love about it is that the people who read my ramblings don't have any history with me beyond this blog, and in all likelihood never will. There's something very freeing about that, for me.

So on the occasions where I've let slip to friends that I keep a pseudonymous blog, and their eyes have lit up ("great, I'm going to come on it and leave lots of silly comments" was one predictable response), I've always asked them quite politely not to. From time to time, a couple have seemingly been unable to resist the lure of my incredible talent and my trusty Statcounter has outed them to me. I've made my feelings known again, and they've backed off as I asked.

So now I'm asking again, my 'chum' up the coast. You've got the whole of the rest of the Internet to choose from - give my silly little blog a swerve. Even my own husband doesn't read it, because he gets what I mean when I say I like the freedom to write for a far-away 'audience' (or just as often, for no audience at all). Even if you don't get that, and think I'm being precious and petty, just do me a favour and move on. I'm afraid I'll know if you don't.

As for the rest of you, you're all most welcome. I'm grateful to anyone who bothers to read this - and I'm always amazed at how long some of you 'lurkers' have been around. Thanks. Isn't it nice to keep it this way?

©Ishouldbeworking 2011

What's a Greek Urn?

2011-10-07T12:16:00.002+01:00

And of course, the answer is "not very much at all; their economy's on the verge of collapse". Feisty little Crete, however, will be entitled to hold a referendum in 2012, a hundred years after union with Greece, to see whether or not the Cretans still wish to remain part of the Hellenic nation. If I were them I'd take my chances and go it alone.

Weaving towards check-in at 6.30am on a grey Gatwick morning, stuck behind a sextet of drunken English male goons of the type we export so well ("oy, Gav! Where you been? Taking it up the arse from that poof in the blazer? Ah HAH HAH HAH HAH") and selfishly praying that they would peel off to the left-hand gate and the Barcelona flight (they did), I was ready as ever to get away to more gentle climes where I could deny my nationality and vanish into the anonymity of the all-purpose tourist identity (though I was very pleased that every time I did get approached in Crete by someone hoping to sell me something, they assumed I was French. I've been working on that one for years. Hah.).

We headed first for Rethymnon (which gets easier to say the longer you're there) and had a fantastic four days; we stayed here - a perfect, relaxed location for exploring the medieval heart of this rather refined, easy little town with its winding sprawl of sturdy fourteenth-century houses and its sweeping Venetian harbour. By all accounts, neighbouring Heraklion has taken the biggest hit in terms of ugly 70s overdevelopment and massive block hotels - Rethymnon has none, and so attracts quieter, smaller groups of visitors looking beyond the need for cheap cocktails and boil-your-own-body beaches. It managed to be busy but quiet at the same time, and we never saw a single drunk or heard a raised voice apart from the altercation in the taverna opposite our hotel, when the owner sacked the chef in what sounded like a single, unbroken sentence of unbridled fury that went on without audible intake of breath for at least thirty minutes. The following evening we had a reprise, when the cook's wife turned up to make her feelings known in a similar but even louder fashion. The Police were eventually called, and the broken glass was cleared away resignedly the same night. I guess losing a job in any part of Greece at the moment is particularly bad news that would provoke strong reactions in anyone.

From Rethymnon we were able to drive to the incredible ruins of Minoan Knossos ( although Heraklion is much nearer we didn't fancy staying there), and to get used to Cretan driving, which seems to be based around a video game in which you get to your destination using as much weaving, at speed, in and out of the traffic as you possibly can - and don't go cheating by using your indicators, now. The roadsides are dotted with permanent memorial shrines, photos of dead drivers gradually fading in the strong sun, and the corpses of numerous cats and dogs. If you've not got much of a stomach for flattened domestic pets, keep eyes-front while on the road.

Knossos was wonderful, helped along even more by the fact that we hung back until after 3.30 pm to go in, by which time all the coaches and their occupants had gone and there were only a few dozen other visitors left in the whole massive complex. We felt very mean and uncomfortable declining the rather desperately-toned offer of one of the English-speaking guides to give us a tour ("it is only five Euros, sir! Not very expensive at all, you see?"), but I always prefer to take these places at my own pace as I'll usually get captivated by something obscure and want to spend half an hour staring at it. In this case it was the overgrown section of the oldest paved road in Europe (come ON!!), which runs from the back of the site back into, it seems, antiquity, and which none of the other visitors seemed at all bothered about. Just me, then. Ah well.

From Rethymnon we headed along the coast to Chania via a detour to Vamos, as you can't not grab a bit of lunch in a town named after a Pixies song. Vamos turned out to be full of British ex-pats, most of whom seemed to be braying and guffawing and squeezing the thighs of each other's wives ("...isn't it, SHEILA (squeeze, smirk)?") and who reminded me handily of the perils of emigration. It was good to be back in Chania and to return to the hotel we'd stayed in last year when L was still recovering from his accident and was very low in himself. This time felt happily different.

Chania has been there forever. Minoans, Romans, Byzantines, Venetians, Turks - they've all passed through and left their mark, and the atmosphere is appropriately steeped in history, everywhere you look. It nestles behind it's Venetian harbour in the stunning Soudia bay, which saw a lot of action in WW2. Allied forces, mainly British and Kiwi, took their best shot at defending the island against the incoming German occupation, 'best shot' being quite literal as many of the German troops were picked off like flies as they parachuted in. A doctor I used to work with, now long-retired, mentioned shyly to me once that he had 'seen some action in Crete' as part of the SBS (Special Boat Service - aquatic equivalent of SAS). I didn't realise until reading Antony Beevor's history of the Battle for Crete that his role had been pivotal, and incredibly dangerous, stealing out to German ships at night in tiny dinghies, to attach explosives to them. He lived to tell the tale, but the clusters of orderly war cemeteries bear witness to the ones who weren't so lucky.

We found site after site of archaeological excavations, often after a tyre-threating roll down some rocky pitted track or other, and usually had them to ourselves, clambering over 3,000 year old structures and finding the ground strewn with thousands of pottery fragments that are gradually working their way free as the dry ground gets worn back by wind or sea (did I bring one home with me? I'm not saying.).

The beautiful beaches on the South coast were murmuring with sparse September crowds (though I'm told they're rammed in July and August), and at Elafonnisi we waded out through a knee-deep channel of turquoise water to the tiny islet where you can lie on a sand dune and pretend to be in a Bounty advert. Our last full day involved a sweltering hike over a very narrow, VERY high track cut into the cliffs and rocks along the coast to tiny, isolated Loutro - you either do the hike or take a boat; it's inaccessible by road, though that didn't stop the Romans building a fort there. As we marched along the halfway point of Sweetwater Bay, where fresh water springs bubble up though the sand on the beach, we noted the varieties of pubic topiary on display from the Northern European naturists who like to get their all-over tans there, and by the time we got to Loutro how we envied them their lack of clothes, as we were both half mad with dehydration and had spittle like gelatine. I knocked back 1.5 litres of water in three minutes and spent the rest of the afternoon worrying that I'd drunk it too fast and would drown my brain, like those kids who died after taking Ecstasy. I didn't though. Phew.

Anyway, it was a great break and the few extra days of unseasonable heat we had back here last week made it a little easier to return. Now, though, it's definitely autumn and though my legs are still brown, they're hidden under 30 Denier tights. By the time they see sunlight again, they'll be white as milk and probably horribly hairy. What a terrible thought. I'll leave you with it.

©Ishouldbeworking 2011

I just perform...

2011-09-14T21:44:00.003+01:00

I'm off to catch a bit of late-summer sun, after the coldest and most understated English summer for a long time. Before going, though, I knew it was time for my annual viewing of 'Performance', a film which has thrilled and horrified me simultaneously for many a year now.

Only a sadist nutter like Lars Von Trier would bother trying to commit such a psychological bear pit to celluloid these days, and my guess is that with all his smirking knowingness, he'd ultimately fail to scrape the depths of disturbance that this forty - forty! - year old flawed masterpiece would achieve. You can almost smell the singed afghans and burning patchouli oil, as the flower children committed suttee on the pyre of 1960s idealism that this film effectively became, with Mick Jagger - by all accounts the only member of cast or crew to emerge relatively unscathed (apart from a Dolly Gip operator who retrained as a vet and lives happily in Cheam) - sneering down on them all like a diabolical Bonfire Night Guy.

I'm sure everyone knows the plot, such as it is - gangster (James Fox) on the run takes refuge in the house of a half-crazy former rock star and his ménage of ladies (Anita Pallenberg, with her big generous Northern European body and her drawling junkie drivel, reminds me of every woman I've ever known who's hung around with rock stars) and a jailbait French waif (the seemingly vanished Michelle Breton, who seems to have been freely used and abused by passing members of the production team before being abandoned in Paris by co-director Donald Cammell, who would go on to take his own life (indeed, Keith Richards, whose ire was famously raised by the cavortings of his lady Anita and his Best Buddy Mick, sourly observed that Performance was "the best thing Donald Cammell ever did, apart from kill himself.")).

Fox and Jagger are both washed up, jaded and morally spent, and over the course of the film, aided by Anita's Special Mushroom Omelette and a load of nude wriggling, their characters collide and merge. The dénouement is predictable and surprising in equal measure, and it's a hell of a ride to get there. My own fascination with this film is, I'm sure, not entirely healthy and quite voyeuristic; always too canny or scared to delve very far into psychedelics (barring a couple of mushroom trips which were wonderful but left me feeling disinclined to push my luck), I suppose I'm left with a small residual curiosity about what it must be like to turn your own psyche inside out, and watching this film brings me as close as I'd probably want to get, now. Anyway, it never disappoints me, and will always remind me (as though I needed it) of why I will always be a Stones girl and never a Beatles girl. Imagine John Lennon having a go at Jagger's role, and managing to inject it with anything more that his trademark snide contempt. Jagger might well have been a comical little geezer, but he was the only one for this part.

And speaking of mind games (as I was, sort of), I found myself following an electronic trail to a curious little indie film called 'Ticket to Heaven', which though I only finished watching it an hour ago, has already vanished from YouTube* (as I was told it often does... pricks up ears after hearing imaginary knock on front door and anticipates 'courtesy call' but a pair of weirdly-smiling psychos from 'the organisation'...). It's a 1981 low-budget Canadian piece about an amiable bloke in his late twenties, David, who, finding himself at a bit of a professional and personal hiatus, takes a trip out to California to clear his head a bit and spend some time with an old friend who's settled out there.

Only, as we quickly find out, his mate has joined a cult (not actually called The Moonies, though they have a South East Asian leader who turns out to have a nifty eye for real estate and gold-plated crockery). And his mate has been sent, along with some pulchritudinous female companions (a eye-bulgingly perky pre-fame Kim Cattrall) to ease his passage into the Light. There are no great surprises in the linear plot of cult engagement and (possible?) disengagement, but what keeps you hooked are the depictions of psychological manipulation and deconstruction used to break down and 'convert' the most cynical novice. Lack of sleep, physical overstimulation, protein-free diet, relentless physical overstimulation, endless repetition and insidious infantilising will, in the 'correct' proportions, induce psychological and emotional helplessness in all but the most rigid (or well-trained) human being, and of course it's only a matter of time before malleable David is getting down to the glassy-eyed chanting with The Gang. It's well-acted, understated stuff with an ambiguous ending (fantastic final frame), and worth 90 minutes of anyone's time if you're interested in how certain mass movements operate. For me it was especially poignant, as a kid I knew when I was 17 joined the Moonies and effectively vanished from the world for almost fifteen years, only to emerge a shattered and terrified individual who lived in such genuine fear of his life that his family moved with him to another continent. If you can find it, give it a go, but don't tell anyone I sent you.

And my last word - The Hurt Locker. A tense well-acted war film, but with a ludicrous central premise. They don't take the loosest cannon, the most vainglorious thrill-seeking, grandiose egomaniac, and put him in a job (in this case, bomb-disposal unit commander) where team work and keeping a cool head under immense pressure, are absolutely crucial. Believe me, they don't. The main character in this film undermined the entire enterprise.

Always nice to see Guy Pearce, though.

Right, I'm off to boost my Vitamin D and sort out the Greek economic crisis by buying lots of taramasalata. Don't nobody mess with my blog while I'm away. Yatsou!

*here's the link I used. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoavV7D74BU

©Ishouldbeworking 2011

Bask

2011-09-09T16:11:00.000+01:00

I sometimes think I need a complete career change after nearly twenty years of sifting through the contents of people's heads. It's not always nice in there, even if the outcomes are usually good after the sifting has been done. But I'm tired, after clocking up over 15,000 clinical hours, and worried that I might be getting a bit cynical.

Little moments like the one that just happened do help though. I was stopped on the seafront by a woman I last saw nine years ago, when I worked in another town. She'd been a long-term patient and I'd got to know her very well - and from time to time, as you do, she'd cross my mind and I'd wonder how she was getting on with her life.

Very well, it seems. She looked healthy and happy and was full of the energy that had been sapped from her by repeated life knocks when we first met. "And I never, ever forgot the things you said to me," she told me, "especially when you advised me to sort out the situation with my sister and warned me things would get much worse if I didn't. They did get much worse, but because I'd taken on what you said and sorted it out, the damage was about a millionth of what it might have been. I just wanted you to know that."The situation with her sister had been serious and dangerous and very, very strange. It had taken some getting to grips with, for her and me (and, her sister).

So she shook my hand and went back off to resume the rest of her life. And I came home and put the kettle on, and felt a bit better about what I do for a living. Helping people to kick-start their lives has its place after all. On days when I feel like retraining as a Particle Physicist, I must remind myself.

Through a Distant Mirror

2011-09-02T16:26:00.000+01:00

A damp cool English summer has meant more evenings indoors than usual, and increased consumption of box sets (whatever did we do without them?). So, as a little 'compare and contrast' exercise, I thought I'd try and run a couple of sets in tandem, their unifying characteristics being that they were both British made and set in England between the wars, although one - Dennis Potter's Pennies from Heaven - details the experiences of a working class couple, and the other - Brideshead Revisted - those of a bunch of toffs. I'd also watched them both when they first came out, a very long time ago, and not seen them since. This meant I could also monitor any changes in my own reactions, because if it's not at least a BIT about me, it's no good at all, right?

I'd estimate that a good 50% of Pennies from Heaven zoomed right over my hennaed head, when I watched it as a schoolgirl in 1978. I'd enjoyed the unexpected dance routines and the semi-comic lip-synching (and of course Gemma Craven's rouged nipples remain a heavily-parodied legend to this day) but the personal nuances and sense of absolute tragedy that winds itself stealthily around the doomed hero and hapless heroine from Episode One, were largely lost on me. More compassionate and slightly less bitter than a lot of Dennis Potter's stuff, what shines through the whole series like a dirty light bulb in a Kings Cross B&B is the characters' sense of hopeless, thwarted, stunted desire and aimless yearning for escape.

No wonder Bob Hoskins' Arthur Parker takes refuge in the thrilling forbidden world described in 1930s jazz and escapist Hollywood fantasy. A thwarted romantic despite his innate coarseness, all he wants is a girl who loves him and is 'up for a bit', and to be his own boss on the fringes of that glamorous music business. Sadly, his wife Joan is as squeamish about her own desires (until they're jolted awake by a visit from an unfeasibly young Nigel Havers) as she is about Arthur's, so it falls to Cheryl Campbell's innocent libertine schoolma'am to become Arthur's muse, and ultimately his undoing. The whole cast is incredible, but Cheryl Campbell's metamorphosis from wet-lipped innocent to hardened tart really did it for me. Whether she's rolling on the floor of her father's farm kitchen with Arthur or straightening her seams on Hampstead Heath, you never lose sight of her vulnerability and sadness. And though everything has been said about Bob Hoskins performance, I'll add my own two 'best moments', the first being when he and the Accordion Man (who moves through the series like a one-man Greek chorus) suddenly embrace each other, crying, as though they've each recognised the despair of the other, and - at the other end of his emotional repertoire - when Arthur does a little wolfish grin to camera just as he's about to take a local prostitute to the back of his car for a bit of the other. His face is perfect, and that's not something you get to say often about Bob Hoskins.

So, while the English working classes were enduring lives of doomed and constrained misery between the wars, you might just imagine that the toffs were having all the fun. And to a large degree, they were. Brideshead Revisited seduces you like a rampant cad with that first, opulently beautiful episode, laying out like a picnic blanket a world where everyone is so damn gorgeous that you barely begrudge them their appalling behaviour and overprivileged lives, and then, like a cad, it destroys all your illusions over several hours of some of the best TV ever made. When I first saw Brideshead I was between college and University, and by the time I got there the series had influenced everyday life so much that you could easily spot the idiot youths drifting around my own city campus, pretending to be Sebastian Flyte or Anthony Blanche (a chorus of jeers from the punks in the canteen would usually signal their arrival.). I can admit now to having been so dazzled by Anthony Andrews' beauty that I barely noticed anything significant about the plot themes when it was originally screened, but hey, I was young and very shallow.

It all felt much more coherent and interesting this time around, and though I was still very impressed with Anthony Andrews' curl-ruffling and sulking, I did manage to look beyond it and see that he - Sebastian - was, albeit in a far less materially miserable way than Arthur Parker, an equally trapped and doomed character. As the second son of a declining aristo family, he knew he was almost literally useless, that he would never inherit the power and status that would fall to his pious older brother, and that once his beauty had faded he would have no effective value whatsoever. His steep, unstoppable decline was inevitable, a slow suicide. Also interesting now, though dismissed by me at first showing as a ghastly posh tart, was Diana Quick's performance as his sister Julia, who by contrast falls apart in slow-motion, unable (despite her convincing exterior as a hard-headed modern gal) to shake off her deep-rooted Papist certainty that she has doomed herself for eternity by committing adultery. We were all very mean about Diana Quick at the time, because of course we were jealous of her, but watching her now she struck me as dramatically beautiful, and her scene by the fountain where she finally unravels was almost agonising.

Also lost on me in 1981 was the pernicious, passive-aggressive nastiness of their mother Lady Marchmaine, a woman held together with self-perpetuating rage - if there's a villain of the piece it's her, for all her having been wronged by Larry Olivier's dapper, frail Lord. I was pleased that I at least remembered that brilliant comic interplay between Jeremy Irons' Charles Ryder and his father, played with evident relish by John Geilgud. At least I did watch the bits without Anthony Andrews. And so many strong supporting performances, my favourite Nickolas Grace as the stuttering glamour-queen Anthony Blanche, and Donald Sinden's son Jeremy, now dead, as the hopeless 'Boy' Mulcaster. Who knew that Nickolas Grace was Alan Bates' long time partner, back in 1981?

Anyway, running these two gems from the Golden Age of British TV drama alongside one another worked a treat, and I'm glad that one of the advantages of getting older is an ability to see the darker, deeper layers and to not just get dazzled by the pretty faces and nice songs. Though pretty faces and nice songs certainly have their place. Here's a nice song to end the week. Let's all foxtrot.

The End Of The World As He Knew It (and I felt fine)

2011-08-25T15:43:00.001+01:00

This has been on my mind for a good couple of weeks, and I thought it would just go away but it keeps on coming back as an earworm, so... I will discharge it for once and for all here on the blog. Now, I'm not seeking to encroach on the format that Blog-Buddy 'Peake of the Pops' is executing so well over at his place - but I do need to pinch it, just this once.

June 1976. I was thirteen years old and was in the throes of an epiphany by which I had come to understand that I finally knew EVERYTHING. I had a stack of my sisters' old Cosmopolitans and Harold Robbins novels which had given me the full lowdown about sex, I knew everything about football from standing behind the goal at Upton Park and shouting at Mervyn Day with my mates, I knew exactly why my middle sister was still single and living at home at 35, and I'd survived a tragic affair with Eric Stewart from 10cc who had broken my heart by not writing back to me after I'd seen him on TOTP singing "I'm not in Love" ( I'd known he was singing directly to me.). I even knew all about suffering, you see.

Top of the Pops was the same ritual inter-generational battleground in my family home that it was in thousands of others all over the country, in 1976. My Dad, lodged so firmly into his armchair by this point in his life that it was hard to tell where he ended and where Parker Knoll began, kept up a low-level generic grumbling throughout the programme which was as gratifying as it could be irritating (though like all Dads he would lapse into slack-jawed silence when Pan's People were on.). Generally speaking he didn't get too agitated about the acts he was 'forced' to watch by his overwhelmingly female household - so things up to this point had rarely got more animated with him than a passive generalised disapproval.

But emotions ramped up very suddenly within my Dad when the Sensational Alex Harvey Band appeared on TOTP. It wasn't the song that upset him, though Boston Tea Party was a strange and eerie dirge and Alex Harvey's delivery was a drunken impertinent sneer. It wasn't the fact that most of them looked as shambolic a bunch as you might meet around a bottle of sherry in a bus shelter. It was the fact that the guitarist was dressed as a clown. While for many this might seem less of an outrage than David Bowie embracing Mick Ronson or Steve Priest appearing as a transvestite Nazi (both features on earlier TOTP editions which had gone largely unremarked upon), it was the sight of a guitar-playing clown which seemed to convince my father that society had finally tumbled into the very precipice of philistine savagery. He sprang up, raging at the television and the oblivious grinning harlequin, and issuing the most outraged and violent threats to the man's whitefaced head. "Jayzus....look at the bleddy state of him...grinning...I'd take the grin off his face, alright...that takes the bleddy biscuit. A bleddy...bleddy...clown," he ranted. "I've seen some things, but that's the worst bleddy thing I ever saw in me life. A bleddy stupid bleddy clown."

I was fascinated and absolutely thrilled to see my father so helplessly, hopelessly rattled. In truth I'd always been a bit disappointed in how restrained he was over TOTP. Teasing me that Jimmy Osmond was my 'boyfriend' and pretending to dance to The Hustle didn't really cut it. But now he was genuinely beside himself, and though it was not my doing at all I felt a measure of victory. I knew, as I knew so many things, that it was now my sacred task to make sure that his agony continued.

"I think they're really good, and I'm going to buy that record at the weekend," I salvoed.
"You are, over my dead body. We've enough troubles in this house without a bleddy clown in it,"
"The clown's the best one in it. Shall I tell you his name? He's called...Zal."I countered triumphantly.
"His name's Bleddy Eedjit, that's what it is. A bleddy disgrace, a grown man and all..."
"He's GREAT! And it's a really good record and you're just OLD. I'm going up to Smiths on Saturday and I'm BUYING it. And you can't stop me." Up to this point I'd had no intention of spending 37p of my precious 50p pocket money on a SAHB single, but now it had become an act of highest principle. In my mind, I was already queueing at the counter with my sweaty cash in hand,
"If you bring that piece of bollicks into this house..."

And that, reader, is how I came to own a single by the Sensational Alex Harvey Band. Though I don't think I ever payed it more than twice because if truth be told, I didn't really like or understand them. And I hated clowns anyway. But the anguished procedure which led me to own it would have been recognised by Freud as an essential stage in my adolescent psychological separation. And I think my poor old Dad knew it as well.

Zal must be in his sixties now. Please GOD nobody tell me he still goes on stage dressed as a bleddy clown. I bet his daughters, if he has any, are mortified. ©Ishouldbeworking 2011

Go East...life is peaceful there

2011-08-18T12:15:00.000+01:00

The East of England is little-known to me. I mean the proper East, not just London's gobbling sprawl, which consumed the area where I grew up and has continued to chomp on out into what had once been the leafy villages of Essex. As a teenager, I knew that once you got past Chelmsford, things took on a new pace and strangely-named villages like Salty Whupbone and Mangy Banjo appeared on the map. Nothing had ever happened since the Domesday Book, and everyone married their cousin at thirteen. There were no pubs and nobody had ever heard of Clock DVA or Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschafte. It was best not to go there, so we all got on the number 25 bus and headed straight into the West End of London instead, where there was better sport to be had.

So I'm a little late in catching up, and though many of my contemporaries rave about the rarified delights of Southwold and Waldeswick (host to the annual World Crabbing Championships, crustacea-freaks!), last weekend was my first real excursion into the Fens. We'd been given a couple of free day-passes for the Leicester Summer Sundae Festival, which took us a fair way north and a tiny bit east, so from there it was an easy run on tiny roads over to Ely, stopping only for a huge hit of nostalgia outside my old hall of residence where I was a spiky-haired and slightly lost student, a very long time ago. The old place looked eerily unchanged, and looking up at the open window of my old room I could almost smell ghostly Anais Anais and Consulate smoke wafting from inside, and hear a scratchy 'Butterbean' by the B52s pounding through the feeble speakers of my own long-deceased record player.

I was a bit quiet for a while after that, but perked up as Ely Cathedral rose magnificently into view a little later, a vast chess piece on the board-flat landscape. If you've never been here, then you've never seen anything like it. The seven-hundred year old Latern tower is like nothing else, a triumph of art and engineering, and you must not leave without forking out a few extra quid to climb up inside it and see the thousand-year old timbers that hold the lot in place. Your also get to have a good clamber about on the pale-leaded roof outside, and look out across a virtually uninterrupted landscape towards Cambridge, or the far coast. This is countryside where a disabled ramp virtually counts as a hill. In the spirit of flat earth, we made a small detour to stand on the lowest point in Britain, wondering if we'd get a nosebleed from whatever the opposite of altitude sickness is. We didn't. It was quite safe.

We stayed overnight at a nearby town, which I will not name in fairness to the restaurant where we had dinner. It was a pleasant place with young, friendly staff serving good unfussy food, and it looked to be ticking over nicely with lots of full tables and a party going on in the nearby function room. As our main courses arrived, so did a small wiry man in a suit, who had a face like an angry lightbulb. He was escorting a woman in her forties who spoke very quietly, in contrast to the man, and who kept pulling her thick blonde hair around her face. It was a bit like watching the Renee and Renato 'Save Your Love' video from years ago. They didn't seem to know each other very well, and from the conversation it sounded like a very early Internet date. The man was absolutely dominant, and held forth fearlessly on a variety of subjects including The Germans ("never trust 'em. Even when they elected a bird, she looks like a bloke. Bet she's got a little moustache when you get close up"), judicial solutions to the rioters ("birch each and every one of 'em till they scream for mercy, then castrate all the men"), and Alex Ferguson ("who, frankly, knows nothing about football when all's said and done"). Her replies were inaudible, and probably irrelevant, and she continued to tug her hair across her face as he talked.

When their food arrived, he stared at it for a long time, frowning, before picking up his fork and cautiously combing his mashed potato. He rolled a forkful around his mouth, pressing it with his tongue with little smacking noises, before throwing down his cutlery and breathing heavily upwards with his hands clasped in front of him in a prayerful attitude. "God help us," he exhaled. "This is instant mash. Are they having me on here? This is instant bloody mash."

A waitress was called, and the owner demanded. Unfortunately said hapless owner was also hosting the party that was on in the function room - obviously that of a family member - but she gamely entered the dining room in her party dress and attempted to deal with the outraged man. "I can absolutely assure you that we never use instant mashed potato here," she said. "this will have been made from scratch by one of our sous-chefs."

"Not good enough,"said the man firmly. "Why should I take your word for that? I want to come into the kitchen and see for myself."

"I'm not quite sure what you mean...what is it you want to see?" The owner was genuinely puzzled.

"I want to see 'em being peeled, boiled and mashed. And I want to see a pot with them in. Want to stick my finger in the pot and test for myself."

The owner's smile was becoming very fixed. "But we don't cook each individual order of mashed potato from scratch," she said. "A quantity of mash is made up earlier in the service and portions are taken from that and heated as needed. If we cooked each individual portion from scratch, you'd have to wait twenty minutes every time. All restaurant kitchens operate like this with their potatoes."

"SO!" crowed the man, "so it IS instant mash! Not bloody fresh at ALL! SEE! SEE?" He banged on the table and knocked over his water glass. "You're a bunch of bloody liars. On the Internet it say very clearly "all food cooked to order from fresh locally-sourced produce. Only it isn't, is it? Reheated mash, which in my book makes it instant mash. Your Internet is lying. You'll be telling me next you use a bloody microwave to reheat it."

The owner sealed her fate. "But microwaves are universally used - they're the most efficient way of.."

"GAAAAH!!" yelled the man, clawing at his throat as though he'd been offered hemlock. "You're palming your customers off with microwaved, instant bloody mash, and you're lying to them, having a good bloody laugh at our expense, and I come along here in good faith with a lovely lady, trying to create a lovely impression and give her a lovely time, and I get this... I tell you what...."and his small head was bucking on his twitching, corded neck now, "I tell you what...I'm...I'm...I'm used to fine dining, me! And now this!!! " Flecks of his spit were landing in the wretched mashed potato. He looked in serious danger of suffering an aneurism.

At this point, we moved to the bar for more drinks, so I never found out how the matter was resolved. We saw the man pay, somewhat subdued, an hour or so later so assume he was placated with a massive reduction to his bill but not a total freebie, and then he left, sweeping grandly out of the bar with his arm around the anonymous woman, who was still pulling her hair around her poor face. How the date went after that is anyone's guess - perhaps she was impressed by his masterly handling of the situation, and they'll be married and honeymooning at Sandals within the month. And then divorced within the year when he catches her using a microwave.

As for us, we spent the next day criss-crossing the peaceful, empty fens and peering at carved wooden angels with pikes from Cromwell's iconoclastic bully-boys still embedded into them (St Mary's, Mildenhall), other-wordly Abbey gardens with 18th century houses built into Medieval ruins, and the site of John Peel's memorial service (Bury St Edmunds), and the 15th century stained glass windows that gave Tenniel his vision of the Red Queen for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Long Melford). And we had a pint in the smallest pub in England, so there's not much to complain about here. It was perfect. Just don't get me started on the mash.

©Ishouldbeworking 2011

When I was a kid...

2011-08-15T11:18:00.001+01:00

...ALL parks in England looked like this, give or take the odd cathedral. It's nice to see that at least some of them still do. Here's dear little Bury St Edmunds on a Sunday afternoon in August. As far from battle-scarred London as you could wish to be. Kids wrestling with melting ice-creams whilst feeding the ducks just out of shot. Indie teens lolling contentedly on the grass. Old people watching from their benches in the shade. Breathe it in.

London's burning

2011-08-09T12:29:00.001+01:00

I wasn't necessarily expecting reenactments of the 1981 Riots to celebrate their thirtieth anniversary, but look what's happened. How did we get here again? Same route as before?

It's been interesting to note the change of tone on some of the UK press 'comment' sites as we reached Night 3 and yet another working-class neighbourhood was trashed and cleaned out of plasma screen TVs and trainers. Triumphalist crowing about 'manning the barricades' and the 'inevitable end of capitalism' seems to have been overwhelmed quite quickly by voices clamouring for water cannon and rubber bullets, which were of course deemed good enough to use on the Irish thirty years ago, but have never (yet) been brought out on 'mainland Britain'. Is this wretched government going to distinguish itself, among its other notable features, for being the one to finally break that particular taboo? And who would want to be the copper who fires the rubber bullet that hits the eleven year old kid, whose parents are too pissed or stoned to notice that he hasn't been home much recently but that his room is full of Nike boxes that smell of smoke?

David Cameron has finally torn himself away from his £9,000 a week Tuscan villa (but, hey! He took an Easyjet flight, lest we forget that we really are 'all in this together'), and will presumably emerge at some point to congratulate the 'ordinary hardworking communities' getting together this morning with buckets and mops to try and pick up the pieces of their shattered high streets. Maybe he'll even cite their efforts as 'real evidence' of his famed Big Society, though he may well swallow his own tongue as he does so.

So, how did things sweep round in such an apparently neat circle from 1981 to 2011? Let's see. In 1981 we had mass youth unemployment after a protracted period of economic recession, a right-wing government intent on drastic reduction of public spending, an unregulated, inward-looking police force which had been shown to be infected with corruption at many levels (and which would be used by the government in a quasi-militaristic role four years later during the Miners' Strike.). So far, so familiar. But other factors came into play in the interim, which for me at least, means that this is more complex than a simple revolution of the historical wheel.

Easy credit - not available to virtually anyone in 1981 - slid into the market in the mid to late 80s, and fuelled many a fantasy lifestyle. How many really flash cars were around in the early 80s, and how many by the end of that decade? Of course, it was all on tick and nobody could really afford it, but you could look like you were living the life, being the man, and that was all that mattered. Credit meant that you didn't have to wait, or save, for the things you wanted. Working class lads have always like a bit of flash, a bit of charisma, but now there was no need to restrain yourself or restrict yourself to just one decent suit that you paid off before thinking about the next one. Competitive acquisition became the new leisure pursuit. Shopping became a viable hobby.You are what you own, even if you don't really 'own' it because you haven't yet paid for it. Look at that rich twat! You can be just like him, you know. But you want it now. You're not going to demean yourself by grafting at some low-level job to get it. That's for losers. If you've got to try at something, break sweat at something, risk struggling with or failing at something, you're going to look a fool. Maybe lose respect. Can't have that. Luckily, there's a burgeoning drugs trade springing up in parallel, and you can maybe find a bit of status there, or at least use the products to pump up your ego and inflate your sense of entitlement and grandiosity. That wasn't as easily available in 1981 either. Yeah, relationships suffer when you're living that life, and life becomes a bit cheap, but it's dog eat dog, innit?

Because, up above, you see the 'real rich' getting away with it very nicely thanks. Crooks like Jeffrey Archer and Johnathan Aitken serve a bit of time and get reintegrated into the bosom of wealthy society. Fraudsters like Ernest Saunders stage miraculous recoveries from Alzheimer's and go on to make a(nother) fortune on the business consultancy circuit. The very financiers who helped cause the Sub-Prime crash in the USA are rewarded with jobs by Obama. Back over here, the Metropolitan Police are found to have been operating a healthily competitive trade in factual information with the UK press, the same ones who'll be reporting without irony on the criminality of last night's looters and thieves. No wonder there's a mass cynicism out there. The Labour government that promised so much in terms of promoting social equality and opportunity pissed it all up the wall chasing big business, while the education system fell apart, with teachers frantically chasing statistics for meaningless government 'targets' while the kids smoked skunk and got each other pregnant.

And no, this isn't a Liberal apology or approval of what's been going on in London for the last three nights. The pictures I've seen make me angry and sick. The kids who've wreaked all this stupid destruction are unlikely to be the refugees, the rough sleepers or the chronically ill who are really at the bottom of the pile in this country. What I suspect you have on the streets is mob expression of bored, grandiose, nihilistic, generalised resentment, with the added temporary thrill of conferred 'outsider status' (always an enticing hook for immature males) as they pose for the cameras with their hoods up and their baseball bats raised. They're not attacking Louis Vuitton or Harvey Nicks, not that I'd applaud it if they did - their expression of contempt for capitalism seems confined to destroying their own communities. I doubt many of them were on the 'Stop the Cuts' march in the spring, or that they give a toss about government policy. They don't care. But then again, who does?

And that, folks, is what twenty years as a practicing psychologist has taught me.

©Ishouldbeworking 2011

Ouf.

2011-07-29T12:58:00.001+01:00

This week has vanished in a welter of work, reports, and speculative meetings that may or may not yield work which I (eventually) may or may not get paid for. A dull frustrating sort of week, in other words. But it can't all be dancing girls, can it? And last week was good, so it all evens out.

A two-gig week is rarely a bad thing, especially when the pair of gigs in question are top-notch. On Wednesday, Brighton greeted the return of its lost daughters Electrelane, who have been absent from the stage for over three years for reasons unknown (and probably irrelevant) to me. I first caught this quartet of serious and gifted young women playing in a community centre when they were all still schoolgirls, albeit schoolgirls with a curiously precocious and commanding presence. Their urgent, cinematic electronica makes a deep bow to the likes of Neu! and Stereolab, and all four boast musical skills which fully justify their (slightly po-faced) confidence, though Head Girl Verity's voice sometimes lets the side down - it's the driving instrumentals that are their real forte. If never quite 'hotly-tipped', they certainly provoked more than lukewarm interest from the critics some six or seven years ago, but never seemed to follow through in terms of sales or larger venues, and as I say, they packed up touring a few years ago. But they were welcomed back to Brighton like conquering Amazons, and pulled off a blinding set with no trace of nerves or vulnerability to an adoring audience, composed largely of the loveliest young gay women in Brighton (oh, and their Mums and Dads, who have loyally turned out to (and probably helped finance) their live performances since the early days of the community centre. Aah.). If a bit of European Electronica is your thing, have a listen on Spotify. Maybe they'll come and play in a town near you.

They also proved a perfect warm-up for the mighty Mogwai, who commanded the gorgeous De La Warr Pavilion - the unlikely jewel in Bexhill's crumbling Formica crown - last Friday night. One of the best gigs of my life was the time I saw this lot in a tiny venue in Brussels on a boiling hot June night; condensed Belgian sweat was pouring from the ceiling and people were being carried out with their fingers in their ears as Mogwai's vast and unrelenting soundwaves speared through their heads. A certain proportion of the Bexhill crowd similarly failed to make it to the end last week, and several staggered past me looking dazed and confused just two or three songs in - presumably members of the 'Friends of the De La Warr' who get a concessionary rate on all events and who therefore turn up to everything without necessarily having researched beforehand whether or not they'll enjoy it (God knows what they'll make of Henry Rollins in January). But that just left more room for the rest of us, and as anyone who's ever experienced a Mogwai gig knows, the band will fill every square inch of space with full-on noise. Most exciting of all was the encore, a full twenty-minute version of the awesome (in the genuine sense of the word) 'My Father My King', which I had never seen them perform live before and which all but pinioned me to the mixing desk (I always stand in front of the mixing desk.). I came out with howling ears, a sweaty back, and an enormous sense of wellbeing. Lovely.

A spooky drive across a pitch-black and sinister Romney Marsh followed, as we were off to Paris the following morning and had to pick up the Eurostar at Ashford 'International' Station at 7.15am. Easy. Despite an unpleasant night's sleep in a Holiday Inn room that smelt of feet, by 10am we were in Paris. By 11, we were excitedly exiting our hotel in search of brunch and cheap thrills. With the current exchange rate, no thrills in Paris are exactly cheap at the moment, but it doesn't cost much to wander round and soak up the atmosphere, so that's what we did. The Porte St Martin area with its canals and Venetian bridges is vibrant, laid-back and fascinating - very much a residential neighbourhood despite being only a fifteen minute walk from Gare du Nore or the Pompidou Centre (where we spent most of the late afternoon, as unseasonable rain clouds rolled in.). There's easy access to the Marais district, with its wealth of Jewish bakeries and (relatively) cheap middle-Eastern restaurants (try Chez Marianne for a reliable, delicious lunch). In the evening we headed down through St Denis, where the astounding array of prostitutes were arranging themselves for the night - one of them a lady in her seventies with medicine-ball plastic boobs, who looked like she just could have been Iggy Pop's Mum. We tried 'French' Indian food for the first time in the Passage Brady, and though it tasted good we had to conclude that though the French might have nailed it in terms of Le Cool, and Paris might well be the most beautiful city in the world, they've not learned to cope with a decent spicy curry yet. Yeah, they can do cheese but they can't do a decent Jal Frezi.

Sunday's happenings were the real purpose of our visit, though, as the Tour de France swept back into town carrying the lucky survivors of some truly grim accidents and spills along the way (poor Bradley Wiggins succumbed on Day 7 and broke his collarbone, and as for Johnny Hoogerland...ow.). We found our usual spot by the side of the Tuilleries, and got grandstand views of the Peloton whizzing past in a Lycra blur, then a quick dash up to Place de la Concorde just in time to see Mark Cavendish launch himself into his final victorious sprint. By the next morning, when we passed through again, almost all trace of this massive, epic sporting event had been packed up and moved on. It always feels a bit like the summer's over when the Tour de France ends, though it's been so cool and damp here you could say it's hardly got going in the first place.

I've been to Paris lots of times and feel I know it reasonably well. I know about some of the hidden extras - the romantic trap of sipping your Leffe or café au lait at a pavement table will cost you more than twice what you'll pay if you go indoors and drink it standing up at the bar. But I didn't know that if your hotel orders a taxi for you, to take you to the station, the taxi can add a 15 Euro surcharge so that you end up paying 22 Euros for a five-minute trip ( the same trip you'd paid eight Euros for on arrival, when you took a cab from the rank at Gare Du Nore.). It was a sour note to end a good trip on, and the least I can do is pass it on so that anyone reading this can avoid the same pitfall. Flag down a cab on the street; you'll pay the normal rate. Bloody cabbies, I hate 'em. Together, we can defeat them though.

©Ishouldbeworking 2011

Silver Medal

2011-07-18T11:32:00.001+01:00

I'm still bandaged up with an arm that looks like a giant pork scratching, but hey ho, it's stopped hurting and I can just about type again. Hoorah. It's been a funny old couple of weeks (actually it hasn't), but today's a day for unmitigated joy as I celebrate 25 years of being with my Top Chum and Consort. 25 years! We were just children when we got together, though of course we thought we knew it all. Photos from our early days how a pair of unlined apple-cheeked faces, my Paula Yates blond quiff like a giant attention-seeking antenna and his pipecleaner legs hanging tragically below the scuffed leather jacket that was already the veteran of a thousand moshpits. How 'rock' we look (though secretly I spent much time reading books on medieval history, and he only owned up to his MENSA membership after I found the card in his wallet and laughed at him.). Beneath all that leather and bleach, is a couple of nascent stiffs. Time will tell.

But in the meantime there I am cooking dinner in our tiny kitchen with the wood-effect wallpaper, using those cheap light saucepans that would burn immediately but which were all we could afford when we moved into our overpriced Brighton flat. We'd end up spending nine years there, because we got stuck in negative equity and were hit by 16 percent mortgage rates. We sat on deck chairs for months while we saved up for a sofa, and we scrubbed and scrubbed the bathroom floor with bleach to try and get rid of the pungent smell of the last occupant, a 90-year old man who had been 'missing the bowl' for years, and who left us four packs of his pile ointment as a moving-in present. The sound insulation in the flats was non-existant and we could hear the man in below us shaking his duvet when he made the bed. On the one night he got lucky and brought a boyfriend home for a bout of unusually noisy and imaginative sex, my 70-year old Irish mother was staying, and we'd given her our bed. "I don't know how they'll be able to walk today," she commented with some restraint, over breakfast.

We travelled to Soviet Russia, three weeks before the Berlin Wall came down, and looked into the tired, malnourished faces of the Muscovites on the Metro while they stared right back at our clear skin and shiny hair with miserable, exhausted envy, and we felt lucky despite our cheap saucepans and second-hand furniture.

Then we took a deep breath while I gave up my relatively well-paid media job and retrained as a therapist, eking out batches of chilli and spag bol to get us through the week, and keeping our till receipts so we could work out where every penny was going, on a Friday night. I was lucky enough to find work straight away when I finally qualified, and in a need to remunerate I took on three jobs, locking up the NHS unit I worked evenings in at 10pm after the last patient had gone. I don't remember how tired I felt, but the photographs show a very thin girl. We got back into going to gigs, as guitar bands crept back into vogue and live music reclaimed its rightful place. All around us friends were having babies, but we weren't. Too busy, too much else to do. Our friendship groups changed, shifted shape. Some forgave us for not joining them in parenthood, others didn't.

With inevitable births came inevitable deaths, and we saw each other through. Marriages - other people's - came and went and we offered our sofa ( a new one, now) to friends in crisis while they took relationship breaks that sometimes turned out to be permanent. Unblighted by cynicism, I proposed one February 29th and he accepted (to my amazement), so we had a shoestring wedding that friends still reminisce about fondly, and which my mother's developing Alzheimer's still permitted her to enjoy. Then we moved to the house we're in now, and he shuffled awkwardly round the kitchen finding more dead slugs and patches of damp while I sat weeping, having painted 'WHAT HAVE WE DONE' on the greasy kitchen walls. Thirteen years later, it's still not finished, but it all feels less urgent. I don't do three jobs any more, but his work has changed to 13-hour days. The time away from work feels more and more important. I don't define myself by my job any more, and I'm reading those history books again. We've both got proper walking boots and we look at medieval churches at weekends. I still dye my hair blonde but I own a cagoule. He's got a fifties' quiff but goes on rambling weekends. The Stiff Gene will not be denied.

Are we still the same people after 25 years? Yes. No. Sometimes. We've thoroughly tested each other's patience and cut each other the required amount of slack, and we've continued to make each other laugh and find each other interesting. He gave me Radio 4, I gave him an appreciation of literature, and helped him lose his inverted-snob scorn. We've travelled the world, been to hundreds of gigs, seen hundreds of films, filled our house with books. You could say we've grown up, to a degree, but really we've accepted that we're both quite immature. That's fine. It's got us through 25 years.

And though I don't even really like this song, it sums up a moment, driving through the Blue Mountains near Sydney in 2002, where I think we just both felt very content. Hope you know what I mean. Cheers. ©Ishouldbeworking 2011

Offblog

2011-07-06T11:07:00.000+01:00

I shan't be blogging for a bit as a particularly stupid, potato-related injury* has made typing more than a few words at a time difficult. Those of you who know me in Real Life will have to put up with Facebook updates; those of you who don't can use the time you'd have wasted reading my blog to get some jobs done around the house.

Just watch out around those potatoes. They can cause havoc.

*while straining a saucepan of spuds, I tipped scalding water down my arm. The added starch has caused some particularly interesting effects...let's just say my career as a hand model lies in ruins. I am bandaged and blistered and bad.

Mad Dogs..

2011-06-27T16:31:00.001+01:00

We've had nearly 48 hours of warm sunny weather here after weeks of greyness and drizzle, and people have abandoned their inhibitions and their need for personal dignity accordingly. I've just walked along the seafront behind a young bloke, his skin a livid pink beneath a web of tattoos. He'd obviously not reached the requisite shade of puce yet because his shirt was off inviting a further broiling, and in the charming fashion of the day his trousers were the low-slung kind, hugging his hips ever more precariously as he marched along the front.

As the trousers worked their way stealthily downwards, the washed-out brown waistband of his 'grunts' begin to emerge, and beneath that, a shock of faded black cartoon hair and a pair of cartoon eyes. Gradually but steadily, as I walked along behind the youth, a familiar face began to reveal itself like an unbidden peep-show. By the time I had reached my turning, Fred Flintstone's grinning face was eyeballing me cheerfully from the youth's right arse cheek, and what could only have been Barney Rubble was almost fully formed on his left. Judging by their faded and bobbled state, these are a pair of grunts that have seen many a boil-wash - poor Fred and Barney were really looking their age.

I realise they are fictional cartoon characters with no independent lives or sentience, but I didn't half feel sorry for Fred and Barney. Even cartoon characters deserve some respect in their later years, don't they?

Well hello Adam, where you been?

2011-06-23T18:37:00.001+01:00

I've been mostly in the past this week, revisiting bits good, bad and indifferent. And I've returned to the present reflecting that the further back you go, the better it really does get.

That's why my visit to the Museum of London was such a hit - you can't go back much further than they do there, and many of the best bits are to be found in the prehistoric section. It's hard to remain indifferent to the vast mammoth skull dredged up just a mile from where I was born in the Essex/East London hinterlands, and it just goes to show it always was a dangerous old place. The selection of trepanned Neolithic skulls nearby is also pretty impressive, and I lost myself so completely in the Roman and Medieval rooms ( I must have spent ten minutes admiring a thirteenth century suede mitten) that we ran out of time and will have to go back to do justice to the Tudor, Victorian and Blitz eras (not the nightclub, though if I had my way there would be a dedicated room, containing a stuffed Steve Strange and one of Rusty Egan's old crimping irons.). The Museum of London has always suffered from a bit of a modest profile, being sited on a fairly unlovely section of one of the 1970's elevated City Walkways that were supposed to help propel us all into a high-rise future but which quickly became empty eyesores loved by few apart from muggers and sleeping tramps. But once inside, there's thousands of years worth of entertainment and whimsy to be had - and all for free (though you are a low-born scrote if you don't make a donation.). There's an exhibition of London Street Photography running there until September, and that alone would be enough to draw me back even if I'd managed to get round the permanent collection. Go along and give yourself plenty of time. You can't lose.

It was going to be a tough act to follow, but I was pretty confident that in nipping across to the Barbican for a bit of theatre, prospects of an anticlimax would be minimised. Especially as the theatre group we were seeing were Ridiculusmus, a hitherto bold, brash and inventive pair of theatrical misfits whose anarchic productions we've loved for the last 15 years. Sadly, their last one - a misfired comedy about the dialogue between a pair of competitive sex-tourists - hadn't quite worked, but this one - Total Football - promised a return to form. Sadly, it seems as though the form they returned to was the 'hasn't quite worked' one. Total Football seemed like watching a promising but flabby first draft, over which I wanted to scrawl, in red pen, "some good gags and pertinent points being made, but need to sharpen up the main characters considerably and get rid of the crude stereotypes like the idiotic, grateful Albanian cleaner and the 'Mind Your Language' Asian Lady. Rewrite." It was dull, lazy stuff. I've been in audiences where a raised eyebrow or sprayed drop of spit from one of Ridiculusmus could provoke genuine mass hysteria; this time around the collective pitch never rose above a restrained snigger, and the actors looked confused and embarrassed as they came back at the end for a second bow and found most of the audience already out of the door (including the bloke next to me who, with a maddening degree of stealthy crackling, snaffled an entire family-sized bag of Minstrels, one by one, during the show despite my glaring and tutting. Inconsiderate jerk.).

So far, past and present are running neck and neck, one hit, one miss. The decider would come with the Adam Ant gig I unexpectedly received a ticket for on Tuesday night. I hadn't thought of going along, not at all. Though there's no way of saying this without sounding like I'm just trying to be cred; I liked their early stuff, but by the time he turned into an Navajo and then a pirate I was already too old (17), and looked down on the Ants' vast commercial success as being 'kids' party music'. I certainly never wanted to be an Ant Person, and I do recall with a degree of shame a load of us nasty little hipster clubbers ripping the royal piss out of two of "the Ants" as they tried to walk down Charing Cross Road one Friday night in 1981. Sorry, lads. We knew no better.

Anyway, I went along to the gig with no particular preconceptions but a little trepidation, having read Adam's troubled autobiography a few years ago and being aware that his most recent brush with the Mental Health Act was only just over a year ago. I didn't want to feel sorry for him - he's an intelligent, talented man, and given the life of psychological torment he's endured I wouldn't begrudge him a moment of trying to squeeze some glory and cash out of his old back-catalogue. But I did end up feeling sorry for him, terribly, terribly sorry, and by the end of the gig - which everyone around me seemed to love - I kept wanting to avert my eyes and pretend I wasn't there.

Maybe it wouldn't be apparent to anyone who doesn't work in Mental Health, but it was obvious to me how heavily medicated the poor bloke is. Most of the major antipsychotics cause muscle stiffness or spasms, especially in the neck, and his range of movement was so limited I can only assume he's on some powerful stuff. Consequently he was pretty static, and (presumably) to provide a bit of distraction a couple of dolly bird 'backing singers' were brought on, who were swiftly stripped down to their underwear and worked their predictable pole-dancer moves as Adam did his best alongside them. It rendered the whole thing a bit Benny Hill, frankly, though whether the girls are required to 'be nice to Uncle Adam' as Benny used to ask his Hill's Angels, is anyone's guess. Adam may have had more prosaic concerns - he must have been sweating like stink in his brocade coat and outsize pirate hat. The hat was never coming off, but unfortunately by the end of the gig all Adam's top layers had been shed, revealing a 56-year old's torso that should best have been concealed.

The setlist was a surprising and pleasing excursion into the ancient corners of his vault, though; I hadn't banked on hearing old faves like Deutscher Girls, Beat My Guest or Catholic Day (the lyrics of which drew some horrified looks from the couple next to me with their white nose stripes, who had obviously never heard it before.). He's still got a reasonable voice left, to be fair, hitting and holding most of the notes, but the segment where he took over lead guitar and cranked out a dodgy 'solo' was painful, as was the agonising cover of 'Get It On' among the encores. Then his last t-shirted layer came off, and it was time to go home. I don't think I've ever felt as out of kilter with an audience as I did at this gig.

So, overall the past lost, 2-1. I'll never see Adam again and probably won't see Ridiculusmus, but I can at least dip back into the Museum of London any time I like. So, it's a win overall for me.

Get Back

2011-06-16T16:35:00.000+01:00

I got to have a bit of a dance over the weekend. I don't seem to do it that often any more, which is a shame as given the right tunes and the right vibe I can happily cut a rug all night. And as dancing is one of the rare occasions where women definitely continue to have the edge over men as we get a bit older, I'm keen to get out there and shimmy when the chance arises. With the blessed exception of The Divine Gene Kelly, no man over the age of forty ever gave a decent account of himself on the dance floor, and that's a documented fact (just documented here, by me.). We ladies get to shine on, because (as a gay male friend of mine informed me), it's OK for us to keep on wiggling our hips well into middle age and beyond, whereas men just start to look a bit disturbing when they try that, so just settle from moving their weight from one foot to the other and back. It's all in the hips, lads.

So I was quite happily twirling and stepping away in my own little corner, somewhat lost in music, when a (male) friend joined me. He's a nice lad but his humour tends to rely heavily on stating the bleeding obvious; lots of his wisecracks start with the line "I couldn't help but notice...". Anyway, no time for that when you're jumping to the beat (jump), so we danced without chatting for a while, and then went to the bar. "I couldn't help but notice," he began, as we waited for drinks, that you sing along when you're dancing. But only to the backing vocals. You never sing along to the lead. What's that about, then?"

Damn him. He's right. That's just what I do, and just what I've done for decades - since my attempts to sing lead vocals were savagely beaten out of me by the twelve-year-old girl who was my Best Friend at the time. I loved going to her house as she had loads of animals, a glamorous French mother and several very cool, slightly older brothers and sisters, one of whom had a red Triumph Spitfire (a few years later when I'd stopped being hideous, he would pick me up from the bus stop in it and give me a lift to school. Imagine the kudos.). Her sisters had a great record collection, including a wealth of Motown classics, and they were incredibly generous about allowing us free access to their vinyl treasures on rainy days in the holidays when we were cooped up indoors. Naturally, my Bestie and I would work out incredibly cool and sexy dance routines to the Motown tunes in front of her full length mirror, and with a Denman hairbrush apiece as microphones, we would rehearse them time and again until our moves and spins were faultless. If the producer of Soul Train had been passing through Dagenham on a wet Tuesday in 1975 and seen us dance, we'd have had been gyrating in Afro wigs behind David Bowie as he did 'Golden Years'. No question.

The price I had to pay for all the sensory abandon was that I was NEVER allowed to sing, or even mime, lead vocals on any of our performances. She would be watching me in the mirror with a cruel and proprietorial eye, and if I so much as dared to mouth a bar of anything but the backing vocals, she would stop the routine, drag the needle screamingly across the record, and punish me by bending my little finger back to breaking point. If I transgressed a second time in any session, I was warned, she would pinch me on the neck "so it'll look like a love bite and your Mum will go mad."

It didn't take long to train me. And once trained, the habit remained, even long after she and I had finally fallen out and stopped talking in our last year at school. I still sing along to backing vocals, though having had it pointed out to me again, I'm going to make a concerted effort to move up to lead next time I'm out on the floor. She can't have it all her own way you know. It's just not FAIR.

If there's one song that takes me right back to that little room in Dagenham, that Dansette record player, and my throbbing little finger, it would be this one. Who'll dance with me? And do the backing vocals?

Don't know when I'll be back again

2011-06-09T18:57:00.002+01:00

It's nearly time to head home, but not before we've given our livers a bit more of a treat in the Napa Valley. We're feeling a bit generally grubby now, after nearly three weeks of packing and re-packing every few days, so we've chosen a moderately poncey 'boutique hotel' (gah!) in Napa itself, which promises much but turns out to be a bizarre mix of the overwhelmingly deferential and the hilariously inept. Messages have not been passed on, things requested by us have not been done...all most at odds with the incredible service we've had everywhere else. But there's enough comedy value in the ineptitude to get us sniggering, and our room is big and comfortable with a tub you could fit a football team in, so we're not feeling particularly hard done by overall. I chat with one of the bell boys in the lift and he tells me he's recently returned from a stint in Kenya, where he's been rescuing children from sex traffickers for a charity. He is matter-of-fact and completely without self-aggrandisement as he describes his dealings with some of the most dangerous and cruel criminals in that country, and as he is not more than 25 years old I wonder what more remarkable things he will have achieved by the time he gets to be my age. An incredible young man.

We're heading out for the evening and have booked a table at Morimoto, a dream come true for me and a great indulgence, but hey, we're only here at all because in a few weeks we will have been together 25 years, so this meal is the icing on what has been a very special cake. We have a little time to kill so we wander round Napa trying to find its beating heart, only to conclude that it doesn't really have one. It's a strangely sterile place, and strolling along its main street I keep wanting to check behind the buildings, to see if there's anything behind the frontage or if it's actually just a film set. More promising is the beautiful 1930s theatre we spot a block or so away, as there are at least some lights on there and a few signs of life - as we get nearer, we can even hear music coming from inside. The song sounds familiar, and at the same moment we look up and see the huge letters above the doors announcing 'Tonight: The Psychedelic Furs'. And indeed, what we can hear is a cracked voice pleading 'Luuuuv moi WAAAAAY, it's a new row-woad...". They are literally playing Our Tune.

We hover outside for a while, weighing up the pros and cons of sacking off Morimoto and trying to get into the gig, which has been going for a while, but what we can hear from outside doesn't sound great and there seems a very good chance that Rick Butler in early old age could by now resemble a singing vibrator, so with a certain sense of shame we turn our backs on rock & roll and head off for our poncey meal. Which turns out to be one of the best either of us have ever had. It's hard to imagine that even on old-school top form, the Furs could have provided a musical equivalent - sorry, Rick. And around 10pm a sudden influx of what I think are known as 'Cougars' at the restaurant bar announces the end of the gig. We are surrounded by silicon and teeth and hair, though luckily none ends up in our food.

In the morning, the Cougars are bedecking the lobby of our hotel, looking a bit the worse for wear, and I wonder if The Band have actually stayed among us. That cadaverous old man coughing his guts up at the next breakfast table might actually have been Rick Butler. Is there any chance I wouldn't have recognised him? I used to have his picture on my bedroom wall. I'll never know, and anyway we have to go out and drink wine now so there's no point dwelling on it.

We have to be creative with the time we have left, so we plump for one winery with an accompanying art collection (the incredible Hess Winery, where we love the artwork, take a tour, and hate the wine), and one without art but with wine we've had before (the lazily genteel Frog's Leap, where we love the house, grounds, wine and everything.). We buy a bottle of the fine Petite Sirah to smuggle home, and after a generous tasting on the broad, handsome verandah we enviously stroll around the beautiful gardens admiring the flowers. The sun is gently hazing over above us, crickets are cheeping nearby, our backs are warm and the wine in our glasses is like ruby nectar. All we need is the loud droning voice of the broad moustachioed man occupying the swing seat on the verandah, as he gives the fright-permed woman beside him the benefit of his experience and advice concerning the tricky question of which firearm she ought to buy. As he intones incongruously on the relative merits of Colts versus Smith and Wesson versus Uzi, the warm hazy atmosphere tightens up into something far more brittle and unattractive, and we decide it's time to go.

We pass our last night in Napa guzzling more delicious wine in the John Anthony wine bar; these wines are the best we've tasted in the entire trip, and it's a great way to round it all off. We strike out over to little Sonoma the next morning and it's a far more warm and personable place than bland old Napa. There's an air of old-time charm and ease about the place, with its surviving old (for America) buildings and elegant Hall of justice, and despite the profusion of Yoga establishments it doesn't feel so terribly up-itself. If I ever go back for more wine, I would stay at Sonoma and give Napa a swerve. After losing a little time taking a guided tour of a public building where our guide was an elderly lady with marked memory loss (whose previous tour party had snuck off mid-tour and left her), we have a huge farewell Mexican meal with huge farewell Margaritas, and then head back across country to a chilly, fogbound San Francisco where we drive across the Golden Gate Bridge and have a last round of 'Carl Malden and Michael Douglas Driving' up and down a few of the steeper hills.

The mist is closing in around us as we head back out to the airport. "Maybe the flight will be cancelled," says L. It isn't. Hours later, we're back in Brighton with a bad tempered cabbie dumping our bags on the pavement.

He doesn't get a tip.

The Great Dominions

2011-06-06T18:37:00.002+01:00

Ok, let's press on. Time's running out. Yosemite has been slow to shed its winter coat this year, so even though the May sunshine is doing its best to coax it away, there's still a thick, photogenic layer of snow over much of the ground. We are staying in a B&B a few miles outside of the Park, so we stop nearby for lunch, attracted by the restaurant's boast that its Pulled Pork is second to none. I've always wanted to know what Pulled Pork is, so this is irresistible.

Inside, a TV is on in a side-room, tuned to the kind of speculation-as-news programme that we're all so accustomed to these days. The speculation is, predictably, concerned with the final moments of Osama Bin Laden's time on this astral plane - did he fight back? Did one of his wives scream as his head exploded? - and in front of the set sit two vast and uniformed representatives of the County Sheriff's Office. They are working their way, with choreographed intensity, through two suitably piled trays of food, while not removing their eyes from the screen. It's an almost irresistible photo-opportunity, but given the psychological atmosphere and the size of their firearms, my camera stays in my bag.

Pulled Pork turns out to be a sinfully delicious concoction akin to Chinese shredded duck; I can't bear to imagine the calorific content so I just eat as much of the mountain I've been served as I can, along with a good few scoops of L's mouthwatering, spicy Jambalaya. A quick trip to the supermarket for insect repellent ( I LOVE American supermarkets), and it's on to our B&B just along the road. For those of us Brits tormented by childhood memories of crackly polyester sheets and cracked handbasins in UK B&Bs, this is a real departure - our place turns out to be a beautiful modern house resting among meadowland by the side of a creek. Our comfortable room is flooded with sunlight, and the friendly owners seem to have thought of every possible comfort the traveller could need, with dispensers of free snacks and soft drinks, a vast DVD library, stacks of relevant local information and a beer fridge to hand. They had eight feet of solid snow in the worst part of the winter, and a sizeable drift is still piled up against the side of the house. We freshen up and then head into the Park, where we're greeted at the gate by a man who belongs in a Yogi Bear cartoon (yeah I know that's Jellystone, but indulge me, I'm excited.).

The drive up to the Park has already caused several intakes of breath, as the Half Dome, El Capitan and the Bridal Veil Falls appear suddenly as we emerge from a tunnel, and in the Mariposa Groves we quickly run out of ways to say 'wow' as we stride through the snow among some of the oldest and biggest trees on the planet. Some of these boys are nearly three thousand years old - you've got to show 'em some respect. Having a try but falling a bit short is a man in his late fifties who is there with his wife, and who has the broadest New Jersey accent I've ever heard. "I dunno," he says, looking suspiciously at the famous Grizzly Giant (in the picture above). "I kinda thought it'd be bigger." His wife rolls her eyes in a manner that suggests she could have predicted this comment. "Lou," she says, "Yuh NEVAH saddisfied." Lou is a bit crestfallen and turns to us for backup. We get chatting and he tells us he and Mrs Lou have driven the length of the country in an RV to celebrate their early retirement. "Cos I ain't from this part of the States," he tells us. "Jersey?" I offer. His wife roars with laughter. "Every time I open my mouth..." mutters Lou. We end up having quite a chat, and he shares a little bit of his philosophy of life, and death, with us. "I ain't seeing it out in no home, sitting in some stinking chair weeping over what I used to be able to do and can't do no more. That's just sad. It'll be a handful of pills and a short goodbye for me, and believe me I'll know when the time's right." Well, I hope that time's a way off yet, Lou. Live till you die, and don't ever try and change that amazing accent. We liked Lou and Mrs Lou.

We manage a good five miles through the drifts up to the top of the Grove and back down again. It is magically, majestically beautiful. As we are about to leave a busload of Russian tourists arrive, the men with set stone faces and the women done up to the nines, teetering though the snow in their six inch heels towards the massive tree trunks, where they arch their backs against the bark for a photo. After a few minutes of pouting and thrusting, though, all the women turn to face the trees and silently embrace them, flattening their palms and foreheads against the ancient wood for a private meditation that's all the more endearing for being so absolutely unexpected.

We stop for dinner at the Wawona Hotel, a beautiful plantation mansion where the staff are amiable and relaxed despite the vast numbers of grubby-booted hikers and visitors they must process every day. Then it's another bottle of that fine Coppola wine back in our room. The next day we head up to Bridal Veil Falls, where groups of teenagers are getting particularly excised by the sight of one another in wet clingy clothes, and we make an excursion up to serene Mirror Lake and back down through the cool woodlands to the upmarket but friendly Awahnee Lodge, where we get a light supper while trying a couple of glasses of California's finest, before ascending again up to Yosemite Falls. The abundant snowmelt is feeding the falls beautifully, and the noise is deafening and exhilarating as we approach the thundering cascades and step out on the walkway beneath them. What with the noise and the mist and the two big glasses of wine I come over all Californian for a moment, and I dance along the walkway like an unreconstructed hippy, getting soaked in the spray and having the time of my life, immune to the pursed lips of the stoutly-shod couple of ladies coming the other way. A lovely, typically blonde Californian woman is sharing a bottle of wine with her husband on the other side, and she comes running over to me. "What you just did there was the CUTEST thing," she says. "You were just adorable. I hope your husband got pictures." And he did, but there's no way I'm putting them up here. It was my California moment. Don't judge me.

Back in our room much later, it strikes us that we may not have drunk quite enough wine yet, and as we are due to fly home in three days (WHAT??), we'd better head off to where they make some, and try a bit.

Winding your way down on Bakersfield...

2011-06-03T10:11:00.000+01:00

If you want to get from Death Valley to Yosemite, you are at the mercy of the Tioga Pass. It doesn't matter a bit that it's so hot you could fry a tamale on the Valley floor; up at Tioga the snow lays thick upon the ground well into June or sometimes even July. And as it's only early May, Tioga will not be graciously opening up for us or anyone else. We are going to have to go the long way round, and make an overnight stop at Bakersfield. We also considered Fresno, but were warned off it by a few friends who'd had the Fresno Experience and didn't necessarily recommend it.

So if Bakersfield is the more pleasurable alternative... well, poor Fresno. The drive itself is great, more wide empty roads fringed by luscious abundant fruit groves and meadows. Photogenic Fifties diners with original signage do brisk business with the drivers of the huge, shiny juggernauts on the highways. Near Lake Isabella we stop at the tiny Cottage Grove Cemetery, nestled into the crook of a hill, and look at the simple memorials to fallen cowpokes and farmers' wives who turned up their toes a hundred years ago (this is practically an archaeological site by North American standards; along the route we giggle at the shell of an 'excavated' building which bears the date 1906. Our house is thirty years older than that, if anyone wants to come and do a little dig.).

We arrive at Bakersfield by mid-afternoon and immediately realise that we could easily have pressed on and got to Yosemite - long way and all - by evening. Darn. But we're here and we're going to make the best of it, though the bunches of dishevelled men slurping from paper bag-clad bottles on the forecourt opposite the hotel are a bit distracting. The town itself is a standard small-town grid-format affair, probably quite neat and prosperous in its day, but its day was a good half-century ago.

Half the shops on the main drag are empty and boarded up. There are handsome Deco buildings, of the kind so beautifully and proudly constructed in 1920s America, but now scarred with ugly modern fascias or simply neglected and crumbling. One little enterprise is functioning quite nicely though; 'Sensations', a neat little shop selling 'Lingerie and Pipes' (that's crack pipes to you, folks), and by the demeanour of the 'assistants', possibly also providing services to the motels out by the freeway. The beautiful Woolworth emporium is a 'five and dime' - a flea market - though a good one, selling bits of post-war Americana I could have filled a fresh suitcase with and brought home. The original 1940s diner there has been preserved with its gorgeous chrome and leather fittings, but sits forlornly as though waiting for bobby-soxers that will never come because they're old ladies now, and anyway they're too scared of getting robbed to go out much.

Around the corner the stunning Fox Theatre remains (My Chemical Romance are coming in a few days time, which seems about right.). It's a jaunty symbol of long-gone civic pride now completely at odds with its surroundings. We go into a camera shop across the road to buy a new memory card, and chat with a friendly bloke in his late twenties who treats us with a kind of amiable curiosity. "What brought you here to Bakersfield?" he asked, his supplementary "you had the whole of California to choose from" unspoken but palpable. Poor old Bakersfield. However many recessions it has known, it is clearly bearing the brunt of this one with some strain.

And all of this makes the raison d'etre of our hotel even more impossible to fathom. The Padre reopened a year or so ago after decades of abandon and neglect, during which it apparently enjoyed an incarnation as a 'halfway house' for, quite possibly, some of the men across the road with their liquor bags. No wonder they don't feel like moving very far.

The new owners took a look at what is admittedly a very fine 1920s building with some beautiful original features, and with no concession to taste they threw a ton of money at it. Then another. Then another. The result is a gilded gin-palace of a hotel, like a luminous bordello from another planet where everyone is colour blind and a gentle hallucinogenic is added to the tap water. Flock wallpaper so textured you could lose a hand in it, hot pink drapes the colour of bleeding gums, and most bizarrely, a giant glass (that's clear glass) shower cubicle in the centre of your room, with optional opaque curtains which can be drawn for modesty, or pulled back if you happen to want to watch your loved one washing the grime of the day from his parts. The general air is that of a soft porn movie set, and it is no surprise to read some of the reports which speak of the Padre as a centre of entertainment for the more adventurous adult and his good lady wife. There's a man in the bar who appears to be taking notes, but I can't be sure if he's Stephen King or David Lynch. Either way, he's in the right place.

I have one of the most broken night's sleep here I can remember, partly because the air conditioning in the hall outside is so loud, and partly because I wake up twice convinced that someone has pulled my hair. When I look over at L he is sound asleep on the other side of the football-pich sized bed. While tying to find out when Padre was built, for the purposes of writing this post, I came across a site that reports the Padre is haunted. Well, its decor continues to haunt me, that's for sure.

We check out early next morning, keen to be away, and note a huge pile of debris outside the room opposite which is mainly composed of empty Mumm Cordon Rouge bottles. Someone had been having a fine old time in the 'Farmer's Daughter Suite' across the hall. Yee haw, as they say. While L is getting the car, I chat to one of the young blokes on the door. "Heading out of town?" he asks, a little redundantly. "I been here all my life. Born and raised. And just looking for a way to leave."

Yosemite....

We gonna BURN

2011-06-02T13:08:00.002+01:00

You don't have to travel far from pampered little Santa Barbara to realise you are in a quite different California; one of flatbed trucks, baseball caps and endless roads lined with dubious-looking motels (our favourite was the Bun Boy Motel, sited alongside the world's biggest thermometer out at Baker, a mean-looking conurbation hugging the highway where the scrubland begins to give way to desert.). New exciting varieties of salty snacks are purchased and sampled (chilli and cheese corn chips prove a big favourite), and cold bottles of root beer swigged until I look at the label and read that each one contains a tooth-rotting 40g of sugar. Forty grammes! It's back to water for us. I've already gained four pounds since leaving home and am continuing to battle with the portion sizes, both of myself AND my food.

That doesn't stop me from eating a Taco Bell on Route 66 though - a genuine guilty pleasure - and we bomb along the heat-hazed road with Link Wray giving it his very best on the car stereo. Local radio stations seem to favour a strain of country rock which does not tickle the European ear, so we tune in instead to some of the religious stations, and after grimly persevering with a thirty-minute discussion on the wider implications of the Biblical phrase 'salt of the earth ' (they concluded it means pretty much what you'd imagine), we find a fire-and-brimstone preacher who feverishly predicts our imminent eternal roasting in fairly graphic terms. The Mojave Desert around us seems a suitable warm-up, in all senses.

Much of the heavy traffic around us peels off towards Las Vegas at Baker, so we strike out on the last leg to Death Valley almost alone, a speck on a hot ribbon of road. We detour briefly towards Pahrump to admire its name if little else ( have a look at Ted Binion's tale if you want some local scandal), and then, passing the extraordinary opera house at Amargosa , the landscape spreads out around us and we've reached our destination.

We're staying at Furnace Creek Ranch, one of the three resorts located inside the National Park, and as we arrive there's an almighty roaring which heralds the arrival of 138 massed Harley Davidsons, ridden mainly by newly-retired American Baby Boomers who are having the time of their lives. They are surely the last generation who will ever know a retirement like this - relatively young, in good health and financially secure - and they seem as cheerful about it as they should. They are also, as everyone here is, overwhelmed by the desolate, unforgiving beauty of Death Valley's vast natural miracle. Later, reading up a little on the experiences of the Chinese labourers and desperate prospectors who lived short, brutal lives and died long miserable deaths mining borax or attempting to push through in mule trains in the 45 degree heat, a hundred years ago, I can't help but wonder at the contrast in perception there must have been between 'us', now, and 'them', then. They probably didn't have much time to look at the scenery, what with one thing and another (rattlesnakes, thirst, displeased Shoshone natives, a daily lungful of borax.). Another reason to beware of too much nostalgia for 'good old days' that were anything but for most people.

So, as a pampered 21st century First Worlder, I count my blessings and get stuck in to the contemporary desert experience. Death Valley is genuinely mindblowing, in scale, majesty, atmosphere and beauty. And it changes all the time in the ever-shifting light and wind. We stride out on salt flats so vast that once you've escaped the other visitors (who all seem to venture no further than a few hundred metres) you feel you are standing alone on the surface of a new planet. We drag ourselves up huge dunes of soft but resisting sand and look out on a seemingly endless Saharan vista from the top. We watch the sun begin to sink from Dante's View, thousands of feet above where we'd stood the previous day. We spot deft Kangaroo Rats and grumpy lizards. And we see The Running Lady, three times.

The Running Lady first appears at around 11am as we are making our way from the Devil's Golf Course to Badwater Basin in the car. It's already 36 degrees and we are spreading more Factor 50 on our foreheads when she appears on the horizon, a stick-drawing of a human inside what looks like a bee-keeping outfit, her head covered by a white baseball cap with a cotton hood over the top. As she gets closer we can see she has long plaits and looks a bit like Lene Lovitch. There is nowhere, it seems, that she can have come from and nowhere where she could easily be going; we are a good 18 miles from anywhere habitable, in any direction. But she passes us without a glance and certainly does not seem to be in trouble.

At 4.00pm we pass her again on our way to the Dunes, many miles in the opposite direction. She is running at the same pace, the same small water bottle in her hand. Has she been running since 11 am, or even much earlier? The third time we pass her is over three hours later, as we head back from a brief foray into neighbouring state Nevada where we've filled up with cheaper petrol. She is still running. Is she still running now? Was she a mirage? If she wasn't a mirage, what was she?

We spend three very happy nights at Furnace Creek (its springwater pool is perfect for a few hours' lazing if you want to avoid the more brutally hot hours in the Valley and earwig on the conversations of some of the off-duty staff, many of whom sound like they've been in the desert too long...) and we leave with some reluctance, after a Last Supper of Fried Chicken which involves several dismembered fowls ("there's more chicken in the kitchen if you'd like!" beams our waiter, an inexplicably slender Southern Indie-boy. MORE? Are you MAD??). We leave through the far side of the Valley, via more enormous salt flats and desolate beauty which gives way to another endless highway studded with the odd ravaged-looking mining settlement. Facing the eerie Trona Pinnacles is a splattered collection of rotting but inhabited cabins, and a federal building where the Stars and Stripes is flying. Beneath the flagpole sits a wheelchair-bound man with a long grey beard. He looks like an archetypal Vietnam veteran, and I wonder what on earth he is doing there. A few miles further we are passed by a biker flying three enormous flags on a pole from the back of his bike. Even by normal standards, there are suddenly an awful lot of flags around, and we wonder if it is a public holiday that we didn't know about.

We've had no Internet access for three days and didn't put the TV on, so it's not until we arrive in Bakersfield that we hear Osama Bin Laden is dead. That explains the flags, then.

There were plants and birds and rocks and things

2011-05-31T15:35:00.000+01:00

Nothing but interruptions and daftness this last week, hence no time to blog. It's driving me mad, as I need to get the USA stuff written down. I have set aside time on Thursday when I will not be distracted, and I will finish it all then. In the meantime, here's a photo of me, in Death Valley. It was hot.

My aura smiles and never frowns

2011-05-24T10:30:00.001+01:00

The drive out from Big Sur to Santa Barbara demands still more superlatives, being largely along a heavenly clifftop stretch of Highway 1, unbroken apart from where several large chunks dropped into the sea just a few weeks ago. We have to swing inland and take a mountain detour, which is no less stunning, with California Condors swooping gracefully overhead and deer springing through the roadside thickets.

This land is almost ludicrously abundant; pistachio groves give way to almonds, which give way to cherries and apricots, until by the time we're approaching Santa Barbara we're almost used to the thick scent of orange blossom rising from miles of plantation land and perfuming the air. No wonder there was a certain amount of squabbling over this place. Everyone must have thought they'd found the Garden of Eden. A bit like our very own Adam and Eve, the Brit couple we stumble across on our way up to a viewing point. Eve is right on the point of destroying Adam's innocence as she perches kneeling on a boulder with her skirt up and her norks out, while he shakily points his nice new camera at her nethers. All being terribly British, of course, we keep on walking with a cheery 'Afternoon!' before getting round a corner and collapsing with laughter. And lo, they realised they were naked, and verily they were ashamed. We just drove on.

Santa Barbara is an amalgam of every California cliché in the book; sweeping beaches of clean soft sand, surfers hotdogging in the foam, palm trees, joggers, skaters, bobcats rooting through bins, symmetrical pearly teeth, an abundance of suspiciously large and uniform bosoms, Mexican domestic staff on 12 hour shifts, destitute men sleeping on benches. People are amazingly friendly, stopping us in the street to enquire if we're enjoying our stay and suggesting things we might like to view before we go. It's a comfortable 28 degrees and you start to believe that the sun shines all the time. The Scientologists are in town, along with a scattering of obscurely-denominated fringe churches, but it's evident that down here Yoga is the prevailing religion. You can combine it with anything. There are cafes offering yoga, restaurants offering yoga, clothes shops offering yoga, food shops offering yoga. You can have Hatha, Astanga, Bikram, Iyengar, Hokey-Cokey Pig-in-a-Pokey Yoga, whatever you want, just make sure you're doing YOGA. I thought Brighton was bad, but this is insane.

The food here is great; the best Japanese food I've ever had at bustling, upbeat Arigato and delicious, embarrassingly massive portions of creole food at The Palace Grill. A strange ritual takes place here as the restaurant fills up; laminated booklets are given out to each table, and we are asked not to open them until requested. Eventually all the staff come round, each holding a glass of wine, we are asked to open our booklet which turn out to contain the lyrics to 'What a Wonderful World'. The song is played over the P.A, the staff go around with their glasses and clink a toast with each guest as all sing along with Louis Armstrong. It's certainly an icebreaker, unfortunately for me that song is one of the few that makes me cry each time I hear it, so I don't do so well with the singing. What would have been wrong with 'Gertcha'?? Anyway, the soft shell crabs and Jambalaya are delicious and the owner, who came and had a chat with us, is a lovely man (though he ought to think again about his maitresse d', an aspiring model who looks as though working at such a populist establishment was several degrees beneath her. The rest of the staff are typically helpful and friendly..).

We watch cable TV for the first time while sinking another welcome bottle of Francis Coppolla's wine, and watch them flogging off a fascinating array of Wills and Kate tat, for they are to marry on the morrow. We're quite taken with the Waltzing Will and Kate dolls on their revolving mahogany-effect platform, but just don't have room in our luggage. And we sleep through the whole wedding, not being too inclined to get up at 4am and join in. So far, nobody but the restaurant owner has mentioned it to us, and he gave the distinct, possibly untypical impression that he was fairly indifferent to the antics of the Windsors. Who could blame him, living where he does?

As we head out of Santa Barbara, priming ourselves to start driving South on Interstate Five (yes, I line up the song and play it as we do so, any Wedding Present fans out there), my teeth begin to straighten and whiten, my hair lightens a shade, and even my chakras feel, like, totally realigned. I might even be a little macrobiotic. But now we are preparing to walk in the Valley of Death. To see whether we survived, be sure and tune back in.

Homage to Ramon

2011-05-20T10:30:00.000+01:00

Monterey, where you has jazz, jazz, jazz. Fortunately, you don't has it till September when the Festival starts, so we were in no danger of being free-formed to death in what is otherwise quite a small and sedate California town. We spent Easter Sunday at the massive Monetery Aquarium; not my usual kind of thing but this one is a bit special, and not just because it's where they filmed Spock mind-melding with Gracie the Whale in 'Star Trek: The Voyage Home' (my favourite ST film.). You can easily lose a long afternoon wandering between the Sea Otters, Sea Dragons, and myriad other Sea Creatures. It's vast without being overwhelming, informative without being too preachy, and beautiful inside and out, being sited on a headland where you can watch seals and sea lions playing and barking in the sea outside. Excited, extended Mexican families held their tiny black-eyed children up to see the sharks, and even the local hard lad with the tattoos and tramlines could be heard admitting to his girlfriend that 'the rays were kind of cool.'

Cannery Row, which you'll recognise if you've ever seen Play Misty for Me, is a bit of a soulless tourist trap where we didn't stay long, being hungry and a bit tired after walking San Francisco for nearly three days. We ate at a Chinese restaurant where the food was good but the portions again distressingly vast, and where the staff were so concerned at our poor European appetites that they insisted on boxing up the mound of leftover food for us incase 'you eat later'. We found a bin a decent distance away, and guiltily placed it there.

The hotel beds were huge and comfortable, and we slept well. Around 6.30 am I woke to hear a quiet but distinctive voice outside my window. "I appreciate what you did last night, Dan, and that naturally the problem required resolution. Naturally you took the initiative and that in itself is no bad thing; HOWEVER, I am your manager and as such I am available to you 24/7.... no, regardless of my off-day... I am available, repeat, 24/7 should problems of this nature arise again. Rest assured, Dan, that I am not castigating you at this point, however I feel I do need to reiterate that your brief in this kind of instance is to directly involve myself. Nonetheless I appreciate your motivation for witholding that action was of the highest, and I will therefore now seek to resolve any remaining issues directly with the customers. Yes I appreciate that Dan. No, you need have no such fears. Have a wonderful day, Dan, and thank you."

I wasn't quite sure whether I'd been listening to a recorded message or a real human being, but once we got down to breakfast I quickly identified the source. Ramon Olafsson* moved between the tables as though on small cushions of air, seamless, graceful, almost dancing in his double-breasted suit and polished black shoes. His hair was a symphony; a waterfall of bubbling black curls, parted in the centre and tumbling to chin-level in glossy waves. A small clipped moustache lent an air of adult authority to a very young face. His mouth parted in a smile, tiny white teeth flashed, "Good morning to you, welcome to breakfast and may I ask how your night's sleep was?" he recited. I complimented the quality of the beds. "That is wonderful news, I am SO happy to hear it," he assured me, sighing as though a great load had been lifted from him. My hubby asked for a teaspoon. "JUST a teaspoon, sir?" asked Ramon, seeming disappointed at the paucity and brevity of this request. "But of course."

Two English couples in their early sixties arrived in a bundle of beige, and Ramon was immediately at their side almost before we'd noticed him move. "Good morning to you welcome to breakfast and may I ask how your night's sleep was?" They nodded and grunted a bit, but Ramon was already ahead of them. "Now, I am extremely concerned to hear that you experienced a problem at dinner with us last night," he said, bending down with an expression of sweetest concern. "Aye, well," said one of the men, "It were just that your menu said Turkey, but what we got were pressed Turkey breast, you know, not the real thing at all. It were a bit disappointing, but your chef were very nice and..."
"Indeed." said Ramon. "I am aware of the issues around this matter and let me say that I share your concern and disappointment. Let me also add that I have naturally deducted the cost of dinner from your bills, that to include all drinks and beverages purchased at the bar prior to and following, your breakfast this morning shall naturally be at my pleasure, and I do hope that you will allow me to personally assure you that all details of this unfortunate and disagreeable experience will be reported in full back to our head office in Santa Monica. I also place myself fully at your disposal this morning should you require any additional assistance in planning your onward journey..."

Unfortunately we had our own onward journey coming up, and had to leave. When we came back down from our room with our bags ten minutes later, Ramon was still there at the table of the English couples, hovering, offering, and making good. The four of them looked a bit stunned. For all I know, they might still be there. That'll teach 'em to mess with Ramon.

It was onward to take 17-mile Drive coastwards towards Carmel; a stunning stretch of coastland dotted with rocky islets and outcrops covered in basking seals. Tiny ground squirrels dodge in and out of sand holes or approach you warily for food. Landward, some of what is surely some of the most expensive property on earth; huge gated mansions, some hideous, some spectacular, all of them inhabited for at least some of the year, by the Ultra Rich. Finding pompous little Carmel plonked at the end of it all seemed like the ultimate full stop. We spent 45 minutes at Carmel, enough to conclude that with its endless grid of twee gift shops, overpriced eateries and air of general snobbery, it was not somewhere we needed to be. We were at Big Sur by mid-afternoon, watching the blue jays and having our minds gently blown by the incredible natural beauty of this coastal forested region. No wonder the bloody Beats went mad for it. Everyone said it, but Big Sur does have the kind of haughty beauty it's almost hard to describe (as you can see. I'm not doing much of a job of it here.). On Pfeiffer Beach we watched the sunset while getting blasted with sand, and imagining what a fuss Elizabeth Taylor would have made about that when filming The Sandpiper here with Burton. We ate dinner at the Big Sur Roadhouse and were massively relieved when owner Tony served us up some normal sized portions of good Mexican food. Back in our cabin we drank a bottle of Francis Coppola's wine, and life felt good. We spent two days here and I could happily have stayed much longer.

Next would be the full-on California Coast experience, over at Santa Barbara. Can you bear the suspense?
*names have been changed to protect Ramon Olafsson.

Normal service, being resumed.

2011-05-19T15:30:00.001+01:00

Let's get the America stuff out of the way, so I can get back on with my usual dull and spasmodic blogging.

I knew I was at the right departure gate by the number of men in the queue who looked like members of Supertramp (though there was a fair smattering of David Gilmours, heading back to 'the vibe' in crumpled linen and accompanied by their Ladies, many of whom had braided a few extra decorative plaits into their long grey hair. Flowers might well be added on arrival.). We were going to San Francisco, and from there, off out into California on a road trip.

San Francisco.
The American city nobody ever seems to have a bad word for, and even given my contrary nature, I don't have one either. Even the bloke who checked our passports and fingerprinted us on the way in, was a mellow dude (on the surface; his charming yet incisive questions about the purpose of our trip didn't have ME fooled for a moment, no sir. ). Spotting the Bay Bridge from the airport taxi provoked a couple of excited squeals, but then we drove through the Tenderloin district where they appeared to be shooting a new series of The Wire, and we both went a bit quiet. Smacked-out bodies slumped against derelict buildings, crack whores staggering out of demolition sites looking for their next john and/or fix...it was like Bubbles and Johnny had got tired of the cold Baltimore winters and headed out West with all their friends. Such a concentration of people, living in the most grim hopelessness. I'm sure every city in the world has its equivalent district, but the scale of this was horrifying.

Moving uncomfortably back to my privileged touristic perspective, let me resume. San Francisco IS beautiful, fascinating and vibrant, even when the fog rolls in (which it does, a lot. If you have a perm, it'll go frizzy there in no time.). With just a couple of days there we had to use our time well, which meant foregoing the obligatory cable car ride as one of the lines is closed for maintenance and the queues to get on board at the remaining two would have lost us a couple of hours. Instead, we walked. From Union Square (no great shakes) to Chinatown (very great; you'll believe you're in Shanghai), then up to Telegraph Hill where I decided I want to live, preferably in a perfect Tales of the City house with loads of interesting neighbours and a view of the Golden Gate bridge. Outside Cafe Trieste, where Coppola is reputed to have drafted his script for The Godfather over a single decaf full-fat latte, sits a screaming fried shell of a hippy blowing madly into a mouth organ. He howls and honks until he's got a bit of attention from the passers by, then berates them yelling "YEAH!!! LIKE I GIVE A FUCK!!" until they look away, whereupon he cackles happily, vindicated by their bourgeois revulsion.

We climb on up to Coit Tower, at the apex of still more beautiful streets, and read about fascinating Fannie Coit (a 19th century enigma with a bit of a thing about firefighters, who also liked to pass herself off as a man so she could slip in to gambling dens, even shaving her hair off for extra authenticity. Naughty Fannie.). From there we can look over the beautiful bay to Alcatraz, though we won't be going as it's a full half-day out of our precious schedule, and apparently is never less than shoulder-to-shoulder packed. Nah.

The higher you go in San Francisco the richer it gets, and by the time we reach Pacific Heights and Broadway we can barely afford to breathe the air. The pedestrian population is restricted to the Mexican gardeners and concierges tending the large, immaculate Victorian mansions, though a couple of expensively-clad joggers do pass us with a cheery 'Hi'. They can afford to be cheerful; anyone who lives up here will almost certainly be living a charmed and gracious existence and will never have known a moment's unhappiness or doubt in their entire lives. Probably.

Not quite as vertiginously wealthy, but still doing very nicely thanks, is the area around Haight Ashbury - still more spacious, lovingly restored Victorian piles in paintbox colours, whose air of arty gentility belies some truly murky pasts. Janis Joplin's old place is surely the home of a successful architect, The Grateful Dead's pad that of a liberal but very well-paid lawyer (who is possibly still finding grains of good acid in the floorboards), and it's anyone's guess who lives opposite, in the house once occupied by those nasty Hell's Angel boys (yes, the ones so wisely commissioned by the Stones at Altamont), but unlikely to be any of the original tenants. And what would you do if Charles Manson's old 'Family' home was just around the corner? Do you go and glance at it, or not? And did we? I'll leave it to you to guess. Haight Park is lovely, live with woodpeckers, jays and jogging Moms with three-wheel strollers and Springer Spaniels in tow. The paths are lined with broken gravestones where you can find inscriptions to long-dead Hatties and Mary-Beths. It's all rather groovy and gentle.

Haight Ashbury itself is a predictable sham; a road to nowhere trapped in its own past, with a supporting cast of bitter old hippies glaring at the tourists for being gauche and phoney, and tourists glaring back at them for being old and bitter. The tatty array of bong shops and psychedelic 'memorabilia' has little to detain, though worth a stop is Amoeba Music, a vast barn of a record emporium, where you can literally hope to find your heart's desire, musically speaking. But we're not in a shopping mood and head on into Golden Gate Park, where at the Haight end at least, there's a permanent massed gathering of tramps. They leave you alone, mainly arguing among themselves, though one of them is just hoiking up his pants after adding his own soft offering to the flowerbeds in what might also be a gesture to the breadheads passing by. It's a large and lovely park but payment is expected if you want to enter the Japanese or Botanical Gardens, and instead we jump in a cab and have the full Karl Malden White Knuckle Ride down the length of the city to the waterfront. I have never experienced such driving. At one point, as we hurtle vertically downhill, we are both convinced that the driver has not seen the red light up ahead and we expect to be propelled through the windscreen. But he knows what he's doing and deposits us safely.

We stroll back and book dinner at John's Grill, which Dashiel Hammet liked so much he gave it a cameo in The Maltese Falcon. The 1920s ambience outstrips the food, which is so-so, but it's an enjoyable experience and the staff are friendly and helpful. I tune in to a couple in their late Fifties drinking at the cocktail bar; the woman has engaged the man next to her, who is about the same age and alone, in a vigorous and flirtatious conversation, during the course of which she swivels her whole body around on her stool 180 degrees until her back is to her husband and her face is very close to his. When the waiter calls the couple to their table, she shakes the man's hand and holds it for a second too long. He orders another drink and I notice him take a paper napkin and start writing on it. After fifteen minutes or so he suddenly starts up and marches over to one of the booths, where I notice the woman is sitting, although her husband has obviously gone to the 'rest room'. The man thrusts the folded napkin and its message into her hands - she takes it silently and puts it quickly in her bag - and the man strides back to the bar, pays his bill, and leaves. I catch his eye on the way out and he looks defiantly back at me. I'll never know for sure what it is I've just witnessed, of course. The barman has also spotted the whole thing but doesn't so much as miss a beat with his shaker. He's seen it all before...

Which brings me to: The California Service Ethic. I'd expected to be irritated by the relentless perkiness, and I still get thrown by the ubiquitous "Hi, how ya doin'" as an all-purpose greeting (are you supposed to answer that? And if so how? "Yeah, not bad, bit of a cold?"). But by Day Two I'm completely sold on it; I'd rather have some acknowledgement and helpfulness and the sense of being served by someone wanting to do their job well, than the grunt and glare we get over here, being served by someone who only hates you a fraction more than they hate themselves for ending up working in retail or catering, because we once had a bloody empire and still bloody should (not John Lewis staff, obviously.). I never thought I'd say it, but the Yanks have got it right. From the desk staff in the hotel, offering us a crib sheet with the quickest route out of town the next morning, to the car hire staff measuring our suitcases to make sure they'll fit in the back of the car we've hired, everyone is endlessly helpful without being obsequious. Whatever else we might import from the USA, you can bet that this is the one that just won't catch on.

Before we leave for Monterey we have breakfast at Lori's Diner; vast plates of blueberry pancakes and Huevos Rancheros that will get us right through till mid-afternoon. I am shocked and a bit appalled at the size of the portions. Who actually needs to eat that much? Nearby, a woman in her Thirties with two teenage sons has caused a bit of consternation as she's brought one of the tramps from the street inside and is buying him breakfast, insisting that he joins them at their table. The man looks mortified but is ravenous and understandably not about to refuse a hot meal, and the woman's eldest son, who is around fourteen, wears an expression midway between shame and resignation. You get the impression than Mom often does crazy things like this. And as one who doesn't often do crazy things like that, I'm in awe of her. Not something you'd see someone do in Brighton very often.

Anyway, Monterey. Oh hell I was only going to write a couple of paragraphs about the whole trip, but I see I need to get it all out. And since nobody's reading this anyway, I may as well take my own sweet time over it and do it how I want to. Don't miss Monterey and the Ramon Olaffson anecdote, coming up right after these messages...

Monarchy Frottage Avoidance Strategy

2011-04-20T19:40:00.000+01:00

I'm conducting my own highly politicised boycott of the "royal wedding" by hightailing it to California for a couple of weeks. California, where I will probably encounter more royalists then if I'd stayed at home, but it's the angry rebellious gesture that counts.

And how I'd longed to post about the selection of gigs I've attended in the last ten days, but time's run out and I have to be on my way. So, to paraphrase brutally, Pete and the Pirates were great, Steve Reich's 'Drumming' was astounding, Fujiya and Miyage were, amazingly, the best and least sourfaced I've ever seen them, and Metronomy were... OK. They're definitely the next medium-sized thing. It's been a fun-packed couple of weeks, and I'm hoping for a couple more to follow.

Back on May 9, if the urge to blog on the road doesn't get the better of me. Nobody touch my stuff while I'm gone. And play nicely, now.

One Day in Hell

2011-04-12T12:13:00.000+01:00

There are a few markers that come around every year in the world of sport and let me know that the winter is over, among them the Grand National and the Paris-Roubaix bike race. Most years, you'd find me at home having a flutter on the former ( I've just about come out on top over the years), but this time I was a long way from home, eating a dust-encrusted baguette by the side of a cobbled road in a northern French field, surrounded by some very excited Belgians.

Paris-Roubaix is a legendarily punishing one-day race*, not because of its length (258 km, that said, so not quite a quick jaunt) or gradient (the Franco-Belgian frontier is not known for its mountains), but because significant stretches of the course are ridden over cobbles. Some relatively well-maintained, some pitted with more gaps than a speed-freak's teeth, and all of them ready and waiting to take full advantage of the thin race tyres on the riders' five-grand titanium bikes. A sustained pounding of the male soft parts over several hours is guaranteed for all - Sean Kelly has said that he was unable to wee without pain for three days after the race on the year he won it for the first time (even that wasn't enough to put him off, as he won it again two years later.). Although if conditions are wet, as they often are in April, a set of squashed appendages might be the least of your troubles. More collar bones, noses and layers of fresh skin have been sacrificed on those stones than the most vengeful god could possibly demand. It's primitive, unpredictable stuff.

Which might explain why Bradley Wiggins was looking so pensive on the starting line on Sunday morning, silent and withdrawn while the other riders chatted and joked all around him. We had never expected to get so close to the line, let alone end up right alongside him - I mean, that's Bradley Wiggins, four feet away - so we couldn't let him ride off without calling out 'good luck', feeling a bit conspicuous as all the French and Belgians nearby turned around to regarde les Anglaises. He took a long, slow look at us and then gave a long, slow smile, the best you could hope for from a man who is just about to lower his arse into a saddle from which it will not rise for several hours, and who will be swallowing industrial quantities of dust along with his energy gels and Gatorade in this year's exceptionally dry conditions. And as luck and cobbles would have it, he came to grief on the stones in the Arenberg forest along with many others. No broken bones, but on a body as astoundingly slight as his - he appears to have no body fat whatsoever - there's little to cushion a fall.

We caught the race three times after they set off, once as a cloud of dust rising half a mile away as we mis-timed our arrival at the fabulously-named St Python (but at least I got to go to St Python), once as it cut through the green corn ten miles up the road, and again on the cobbles about 15km from the end, by which time the remaining riders, some of them in shredded kit where the stones had brought them down, were covered in so much black dust that they looked like they were clocking off from a shift in t'Pit.

And by this point in the proceedings the riders weren't the only ones who were the worse for wear. A legion of Belgian 'Fun Buses', fully equipped with a never ending supply of Belgian brew and crammed with huge Flemish men in glitter wigs and bras, had been following the race all day. And by mid-afternoon, they had set up an impromptu Belgian disco in the square of the small village on the course, and were getting on down to an interesting Flemish version of Laura Brannigan's 'Gloria', most of them stripped to the waist and slapping one another on their sunburnt backs. When one carouser got a little too close to one of the race riders who whizzed through the square, two Gendarmes with faces like thunder bore down on him, though ran into a bar and tried to get his mates to hide him under a table. And when the news came through that a Belgian rider had come home first, just up the road in the Roubaix velodrome, there was a Belgian roar that could have raised the dead. As we drove out of town, they were clearly settling in for a long night, and we were invited to take part - "Come and join us! Belgium is finished!" - but we'd seen enough carnage for one day, and were off to the Tunnel to get our train home.

A fine weekend. Spring has most definitely sprung.

*I highly recommend a viewing of 'A Sunday in Hell' (1976), a no-frills documentary about the race, made in the days before titanium bikes, lycra and energy gels even existed. Even if you hate race cycling, it's a fascinating bit of social history.

Sacred and profane. And noodly.

2011-04-04T13:18:00.002+01:00

Several trips to London this week, in hot pursuit of culture and entertainment. I hadn't been to Westminster Abbey since I was sixteen, and wanted to see if I could navigate my way from memory alone, to the tomb of twenty-eight monks slain by the Black Death, which had made an impression on the fledgling goth that I was back then. And, though I can never remember where I put my keys these days, my long-term memory is as sharp as a tack - I found the dead monks, no problem at all. They're all still there, rattling around in their pit full of plague-germs, and not likely to be moving out now after 600 years. I felt strangely reassured, which I'm sure they'd have liked.

The Abbey is packed with more history than anyone can digest in a single visit. Despite the soaring ceiling vaults which draw the eye upwards, at ground level it's a dense imprint of the British class system in all its greedy finery; your entry is almost blocked by a set of demanding, ostentatious marble tombs wherein lie the robber barons of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with fawning inscriptions proclaiming their 'most wyse and generous service' to institutional plunderers like the East India Company. Further in lie a fine selection of the canny (or less so) monarchs who sent them on the heels the marauding monks and knights of the Crusades out into the world; from Edward the Confessor to George II you can find most of the crowned heads of the Kingdom. Elizabeth I lies for eternity with her half-sister Mary: possibly not what either of them would have wanted in life, but you don't get a say when you're dead. The Lady Chapel where they lie is stunning nonetheless, a perfect sisters' boudoir.

Poets Corner holds the tiny tomb of Little Geoffrey Chaucer, honoured more in his lifetime for his work as a senior Civil Servant than for his 'hobby' of chronicling social morés in bawdy, witty verse. And a few yards from the Unknown Soldier (who is apparently not above making a shadowy appearance if you believe the ghost stories) are the unassuming slabs of Clem Attlee and Ernest Bevin. The Chapterhouse is rich with incredible medieval painting, including a wonderful bestiary ('crocodyle' meets 'kamyl' in an unlikely tableau), and thick with ancient atmosphere. And if you are wise enough to go along on a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, you have access to the amazingly large and pleasant gardens at the far reaches of the Abbey complex, where the monks once grew the fruit and produce which ensured they were fatter and more well fed than the vast majority of the scrofulous population outside. Most of the tourists never bother (or have time) to venture this far off the main drag, so you can stare up at Big Ben* surrounded by flowers and birdsong, and almost forget you're right in the centre of London until the Westminster chimes remind you. Then go and have a couple of pricey but well-kept pints in the Westminster Arms around the corner, and spot the back-bench MPs boozing and bitching at the bar. Sometimes it's good to be a tourist in your own back yard.

To provide a bit of phantasmagorical contrast with all that ecclesiastica, what I needed most was a Killing Joke gig, and fortunately they were opening the Ether Festival at the Royal Festival Hall on Friday night. If you like your music subtle or uncontroversial Killing Joke will probably never do it for you, but I've always had a massive soft spot for their knowing grandiosity and bludgeoning apocalyptic prophecy. There really is nobody quite like Jaz Coleman, his endless repertoire of scary faces and messianic zeal can make Iggy Pop look fey at times, and the thing is he means it, man - he's here to save us, or at least to give us one last chorus from the Necronomaton as we all go down. Here is not a man who has mellowed with age, though I was broken hearted to see that the sublimely cool Geordie, an earthbound god who could hack out vicious guitar riffs while seeming barely to move, has grown a ponytail which he wears with a funny hat. There's no excuse for that, nor for bassist Youth's white linen suit, which made him look like one of Mike and the Mechanics.

Luckily after I'd been pinioned by the sound assault which has always been the standard Killing Joke live experience, I stopped noticing both ponytail and linen. Apart from a couple of relatively stodgy moments in the middle (I'm still getting to grips with the most recent album, 'Absolute Dissent'), they were pure white-hot noise, all underpinned by Big Paul's incredible drumming, and I threw myself into it like most of the sweating old lags around me. Many of them looked like they'd fought well in the punk wars and were still fighting, even if they didn't know what or whom. I'm not quite sure about the Festival Hall as a rock venue; it's too light and too open, and I wanted to enjoy Killing Joke like I always did, crammed up against some psychobillies in the dark. But I coped, though I still hate 'Love Like Blood' as much as ever. I came out hot and happy, and nineteen for a while.

Last night was a more rarified affair and far more appropriate for a Sunday night, with the Cologne-based record label Kompakt's one-off performance of ambient Krautrock at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. Mesmeric selections of electro-noodling before a backdrop of meandering visuals; I couldn't hum you a single bar of anything I heard apart from the single sly distortion of Bruce Springsteen singing 'I'm on Fire' above some footage of a burning log cabin, but as a sound meditation it was absorbing and relaxing, and my mind wandered pleasantly through it all . The audience were as still and reverential as the Killing Joke audience had been frenetic and adoring, and the contrast proved a fine way to wrap up the weekend. It's the time of the season for gigging. Oh yes.

Agit Prop

2011-03-29T12:16:00.001+01:00

Sometimes I think my personality just got cemented when I was seventeen. I was on my way to the second day of a conference in Central London on Saturday morning, when I had to weave through a massive parked convoy of Police wagons, the kind with wire-meshed windows and heavily reinforced chassis. The occupants-to-be stood around in surly lines doing up each other's flak jackets and checking their gas masks. They were clearly preparing for the TUC march against the public sector cuts, and as I watched them polish their night-sticks, my inner seventeen-year-old popped right out of my psyche and whispered in my ear "why on earth do you want to sit around in a lecture theatre with two hundred white middle class academics, talking conceptually about mental health? If you don't get out there and shout with the others, there'e even less chance of there being any mental health services left for the academics to waffle on about."

And so there I was, sneaking out at noon, phone in hand so I could contact various chums and ensure I wouldn't be marching on my own in that crowd of 200,000. It had been a long time since I marched, but back in the day I was a regular. From Reclaim the Night when I was just 16 (but had read The Female Eunuch) to multiple Anti Apartheid rallies and Rock Against Racism gatherings (the free live music on hand always an extra inducement but never - honest!- the main reason for being there), I would take to the streets and shout my stuff happily. In the main, they were positive experiences with friends old and new. In the Midlands I got to scream at Maggie Thatcher from a distance of four feet, reflecting even as I did it that it felt like the Three Minute Hate from '1984', and that the copper who was glaring at me really looked as though he was just about to hit me (he did. I complained. Another story.). On a small Troops Out march in 1983 I felt in genuine fear that I would be lynched as 'Provo Scum', while wiping onlookers' spittle from my coat sleeve. And I still can't decide if I'm proud or not of having been part of a conga line that danced around the perimeter of Nigel Lawson's front garden in 1985, singing 'Nigel's fat and ug-LY, Nigel's fat and ug-LY, la la la laaa..."(it's possible, though not very likely, that just inside the window of their double-fronted Georgian rectory, the young Nigella might have been quaking and self-soothing by pretending to fellate a trifle, much as she does for a living now.). But in the main, we were well behaved, just full of noisy certainty.

As were the overwhelming majority of protesters on Saturday's march. Not that it was hard to spot the poseurs, out to show off in front of their mates by tying scarves around their faces and scaring the staff at Fortnum and Masons. They were striding annoyingly round Trafalgar Square as the march came through, swigging beer and handing out leaflets inviting all to join them for the night there (to somehow, apparently, form a parallel movement with that underway in Egypt, and the other middle-Eatern countries in upheaval). The best rebuttal I heard came from an elderly posh lady in stout shoes and dangly earrings, an old-time Hampstead Socialist who firmly planted the proffered leaflet back to its owner while pronouncing "That's just bloody SILLY!". The 'anarchist' was so affronted he had to take his scarf off his face to answer her back. "It's not silly," he said, "It's part of an international movement for civil rights and political freedom." She was having none of it. "It IS silly. We don't live in a military dictatorship whatever you might like to think, and to imagine we do is to make a false parallel and to trivialise the real risks the people in Egypt have taken. It's also an act of terrible narcissism on your part, and I'm afraid it IS silly." And she marched on, smiling at the impromptu round of applause she'd drawn from me and a few others. I wondered if she'd bunked off from the same conference I'd been at.

Anyway, despite having paid for a conference I missed a third of, I'm glad I was there on the march and I did the Right Thing. I gave the NHS the best years of my working life, and as the current government complete the dismantling work that began under Labour, I still care enormously. How we will miss the NHS when it's gone. No matter how loud I shouted along with those 200,000 others, it won't have been loud enough to save it. But at least I did shout.

20th Century Boys

2011-03-22T12:00:00.000Z

The gig season down here really takes off in a few weeks' time, and with the coming of extra daylight I'm looking forward to getting out and about again, maybe even exposing my porridge-coloured skin to the sun. Until then, though, I'm not wasting time and am continuing my quest to fill in at least some of the myriad potholes in my film knowledge. The last selection I watched formed a loose theme, quite unconsciously, that if I were 20 and desperately looking for an easy dissertation theme could be called 'Cinematic representations of the crisis in masculinity of the 20th century white middle-class North American male.' Let me expand, thus.

Days of Wine and Roses is the earliest of the trio, hailing from 1962 and starring Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick. When I add that the film is directed by Blake Edwards, you might reasonably expect a warm, lighthearted and witty romantic comedy with moments of contrasting gravity and pathos. What you'd actually get is a bleak and unflinching portrayal of a young couple's descent into chronic, abusive, destructive alcoholism. Jack Lemmon is cast against type (though the knowledge that he was in life an alcoholic makes for even more uncomfortable viewing) as the self-deluded addict who will sacrifice family, career and dignity for his relationship with the bottle, and Lee Remick gradually casts off all traces of her Walmart Grace Kelly froideur as she joins him and eventually outstrips him in her determination to self-destruct. There are some genuinely horrible scenes of degradation and betrayal which anyone who has ever lived with an alcoholic (my father was one) will recognise, and though it slides now and again into melodrama it's useful to remember that, of course, most alcoholics are melodramatic. Jack Lemmon's character is complex and contradictory enough to keep you watching to the inevitably disappointing ending, and his acting together with Lee Remick's gutsy performance carries the film, though it's by no means an easy ride.

While there's another dysfunctional couple at the heart of Five Easy Pieces, made eight years later, their relationship amounts to little more than ballast in what is really a showcase piece for the young Jack Nicholson to display his Method-enhanced skills. For all his sinewy pacing and animalistic grimace, though, I found this film an absolutely deadening experience, which may for all I know have been the whole point. Jack's a regular guy holding down a grimy oil-town job, his girlfriend Rayette is an idiot, as are most of the woman he encounters. He plays bowls with his work buddy, also married to an idiot, and they shag some more idiot women until his buddy is taken away by the cops for that grocery-store hold up he forgot to mention at his interview. Then Jack gets a call from home and it turns out his mate is not the only phoney in the film; his rich patrician father is dying up North, and his improbable family of snobbish musical genii, from which Jack escaped after goofing up at the Conservatoire, are gathering the clan. Jack has to go back to his cultured roots. He unwillingly takes now-pregnant Rayette along for the ride, but she's too embarrassing so she has to be dumped in a motel. They pick up some more dreadful and irritating women hitchhikers along the way, and Jack gets his revenge on dreadful women in general by kicking off at a prissy middle-aged waitress in a diner. Then he shags his brother's snotty wife, cries a bit over his father and how unfair it all is, and abandons Rayette at a garage while she's fetching him some coffee. I can't remember if he pays for the coffee - he might just have been too tortured, lost and complex to have the right change. And you can tell it's the start of the 1970s as all the colours are snotty green and grey. The fun times were over.

By 1993, though, when 'Falling Down' was made, colours were back and they were brash and hard, like life. And brash and hard like Michael Douglas's bogbrush hair in this everyday story of personality-disordered folk. It's hard to say, when you're as crazy as the nameless antihero, whether every day really IS as littered with irritants as this one, or whether it just seems that way because your own level of tolerance is so depleted. Either way, we catch him on the day it all goes haywire, though by the end of the film despite the fact that we have followed him gingerly though his avenging dark angel's rampage over rapacious immigrant shopkeepers, vicious immigrant gangbangers and screwball homegrown neo-Nazis, we are no nearer knowing who on earth this character with the white shirt and briefcase full of artillery actually is. The facts we are given, that he works in 'defence' and has separated acrimoniously from his wife, provide little in the way of insight or psychological illumination, as though they themselves should somehow be 'enough' to explain his meltdown. To say this film lacks subtlety would be like saying that there aren't many chuckles in Shoa. But it thunders and blunders ballistically away for nearly two hours, thick with ham-fisted devices like the interweaving of nemesis good-guy Robert Duvall's decent cop, who spends his last day at work before retirement gently, wisely, almost compassionately tracking down his last case - the guy with the bog-brush hair and the fully activated sense of grievance. It's like they're Yin and Yang, y'know? Y' KNOW??

Anyway, having watched these three films in fairly close succession they seem as much as anything else like examples of a gradual loss of directorial control, characterisation and nuance over three decades of American cinema. Days of Wine and Roses succeeded as a character study despite some overwrought scenes, and much as I disliked Five Easy Pieces I could see what they were trying to do with Jack Nicholson's petulant brat of a protagonist. By the time you get to Falling Down, though, you are left with a cypher, and a poor one at that. If you ever identified with the main character in this film, you've essentially identified yourself with an angry space. Albeit one with bogbrush hair. Still, it filled a gap.

Mental Skas

2011-03-08T12:11:00.001Z

Anyone who came of age in the late 70s/Early 80s in the UK can't fail to have been touched by the two-tone tonic hand of the ska revival. Everything went briefly monochrome and we stole our grandmother's kitten-heeled slingbacks to dance in. A handful of albums made by kids who looked and sounded like us formed the soundtrack to a hundred teenage parties - the opening salvos of 'Oh Geno' alone will always bring the taste the taste of cider and Consulate smoke to my lips, even though I haven't smoked in years and give Magners a wide berth.

But last Friday night it was pints of cider all round - it had to be - as we were offered a couple of tickets for The Beat, supported by The Selecter. I never saw either band in their heyday, and ordinarily it wouldn't have crossed my mind to go and see them now, but it was a Friday night and we were feeling frisky (and it was free and five minutes' walk from my front door.). I knew Dave Wakelin had long since departed from The Beat and was flogging the brand around the USA, leaving the band's Chas Smash equivalent Ranking Roger, and his son Ranking Junior (really) in charge. A dad and son combo? The last multigenerational band I saw who pulled that stunt were the unforgivable Mystery Jets and it took me weeks to get over the experience. And Pauline Black always had that terribly earnest thing going on...my expectations were not high.

But I cheered up when I saw the place was rammed with men in Fred Perrys and trilby hats (for once not worn in the Shoreditch Hipster-Twat style but planted defiantly on their pink sweaty heads); hats that had seen action in the violent bouncer-punter confrontations that were a regular and horrible feature back in the day. It's hard to imagine a venue full of fanatical Beat fans - I remember them as a brilliant pop band who it was almost impossible to dislike, and who produced virtually perfect album in 'I Just Can't Stop It', songs whose bright chirpy arrangements were often underlaid by darker and more complex lyrical undertones. But I never felt they were a band you'd follow to the ends of the earth. Some of the men at this gig, though, very obviously had done just that, and for them it will always be 1980. There was an incredible amount of coronary-baiting moonstomping going on from the first bar of The Selecter's support set, and most of them didn't stop it or didn't dare stop it, or just couldn't stop it, until the final note of the night. The middle-aged body odour was astounding, but fair play to these old lags. There were a smattering of genuine kids, a few making creditable efforts at reprising the style of the time (which of course was a rehash of the original 60s style our own parents and big sisters had invented and cherished. This mean there are now third-generation mods out there. Who's have thought it?).

Performance-wise, The Selecter simply stole the show. Pauline Black looks absolutely beautiful (I got down the front and had a good look at her) and still moves like your dream fifth-year date (that's Year 11 for all you youngsters). She's absolutely irrepressible, still belting out all the classics like 'On My Radio' and 'Too Much Pressure' with a freshness, humour and energy that a twenty-year old would kill for. Joined now by the band's original toaster (not the Morphy Richards sort) Arthur 'Gaps' Richardson, and backed by a fine old selection of musos who look like they've seen it all and probably have, there was no sense whatsoever of this lot just going through the motions to make a bit of cash - though I hope they do. They were the genuine article, with not a whiff of mothball coming from those sharp Crombie jackets.

The Beat had some work to do in following on, and while they acquitted themselves to the evident satisfaction of their hard-core, statin-popping fanatics, for me they drifted a little. While Dave Wakelin's voice was never the strongest, Ranking Roger seems to keep all his muscle for his torso and not his vocals (when he took his top off at the end, there were audible gasps all round. How the hell do you get a body like that at his age? His poor son, who obediently followed his dad, just got a few sympathetic chuckles.). Their set lost pace in the middle and meandered around, with the songs everyone had come to hear not always enhanced by Ranking Junior's obligatory rapping. But still, it was far from bad overall and we all came out steaming into the night air feeling like we'd had our money's worth (especially me as it hadn't cost me a bean.).

This was the first night of the tour, apparently, so they may well be coming to a town near you very soon. If you're not busy and you fancy a decent nostalgic night out, go along. You may not stay for the whole of the headline band, but the support act will make your week.

I've lost that lovin' feeling

2011-03-01T12:12:00.002Z

Ever been able to pinpoint the very moment when you knew your feelings for someone had irrevocably changed for the worst, and things could never be the same again? With a long-ago boyfriend, it was the time he shoved a whole rock cake into his mouth followed by half a pint of milk, and then pretended to projectile vomit the contents over his Dad's patio 'for a laugh'. With my mother-in-law, it was the second time I met her and she set her dog on me. And with British Sea Power, it may well have been last Wednesday night, when I realised that I envied all the people around me who'd decided to go home after the first half hour of their set at Brighton Komedia.

I've been going to see this band for years, from their wacky Club Sea Power nights at the tiny (sadly missed) Free Butt to their oddball location gigs at the Whitecliffs Cafe and the Natural History Museum, and I've loved their indulgent, silly, bucolic, Laurie-Lee-meets-William-Burroughs meanderings and thunderings, their foliage and their frantic guitars. I've loved their odes to melting ice shelves, their ditties to Fyodor Dostoevsky, the 'Albatross' grandeur of their Man of Aran soundscape. But I worried subliminally with each album, that I was also hearing the slow ebb of power and commitment beneath their reliable chords and overlays. I had wondered how long it could last before they eventually, inevitably, produced an album which would end up sounding like a homeopathic dose of their former potency, and for me they arrived at that point with the current 'Valhalla Dancehall' - even the title seems half hearted and predictable, and as for the artwork...oh my. Having listened several times and found no thread, no unifying theme, just a weak collection of almost identical tunes, toe-curling lyrics and a baffling amount of off-cuts, I sadly concluded that they really had spent the last two years off their heads in a cottage by the Long Man of Wilmington, and that the Long Man had failed against all odds to infuse them with the necessary dose of pagan inspiration (the Long Man isn't properly pagan anyway - he's only been there 400 years. He's a fake...).

So when the gig last week failed to ignite beyond some bad-tempered moshing, when the highpoint was the film backdrop of curlews going over cliffs, when Yan's* new top wasn't even enough and when we ended up watching the encore from the bar (unthinkable!), it felt like the end of an era. They seemed tired, bored, and a little sour (what was going on between Nobby and Yan? It can't just have been the new top.), and it's only the early days of the tour. I guess all bands run out of steam at some point - similar questions are being asked of Radiohead in the wake of their new release, which I haven't listened to yet - but unlike my acquaintance with Radiohead, which has been restricted to a couple of (admittedly blinding) early-ish gigs and inevitable records purchases, I was almost in from the off with BSP, and I'm sad.**

That said, Gruff Rhys was unexpectedly brilliant just three days later down here, so I cheered up again. I'll be OK. Really.

*He's still dreamy, mind.

** I've been informed that BSP have cancelled their European tour at very short notice. Oh dear, it looks like it's the start of the breakdown. Need a therapist, lads?

Modern Parenting

2011-02-25T14:14:00.001Z

A coffee shop in Brighton, earlier today. A large man in his mid forties wearing an expensive leather jacket which does not suit him, has been railing for fifteen minutes about his ex-wife and her partner, with whom his own two sons (from his marriage to her)both live. He is clearly and selfishly very jealous of the good relationship both boys appear to have with both their mother and their stepdad. Our Man does not rate them as individuals, however, as Stepdad has a lowly job in insurance and Mum is 'still a bloody school secretary after fifteen bloody years'.

By contrast, Our Man has a hugely responsible and important media job in London, and recently even did a cookery course in South West France recently, where Raymond Blanc took one of the classes. Apparently The Boys both adored his Bouillabaise on their last access visit. But their return to reality was cruel.

" ...and then I dropped them off at 'hers', and she offered me a cup of vile coffee, and while she was making it I had a poke around her kitchen cupboard. You'll never guess what was in there - Tesco Value Brand tinned tomatoes! Those really cheap ones! When I see things like that, I have to wonder about the quality of her parenting, you know..."

No wonder she left him.

Theresa May, Theresa May, you got your body in the way...

2011-02-22T11:20:00.000Z

It's been a celebrity-packed few days down here. In fact I'm packed with stardust like sand in a clam. Indulge me. First off it was Tiny Jimmy Somerville, buying proper adult-sized portions of fruit and veg in my local greengrocers', and a more pleasant and engaging chap you couldn't hope to have giggling loudly in the queue behind you. Then it was Dark Lord of the Bain-Marie Heston Blumenthal, spotted entering an anonymous building in Berkshire with his band of supporting commis, very serious and purposeful and looking for all the world like a sort of culinary Radiohead about to step out on stage. Then a woman driving a car who looked exactly like Samuel Pepys* - which was very distracting - before rounding off with a sighting of banana-faced love-god Lembit Opik and his latest Young Niece canoodling rather horribly in a West Country bar.

And in between them all, was the Home Secretary. Seated at the next table in the pub where we'd stopped for lunch, and identifiable by her bossy voice and stupid animal-print shoes, I give you Theresa May. And I had a crisis, my crisis being that I was munching my way through a delicious, posh Scotch Egg at the time (the sort that's served hot, with crisp panko breadcrumbs, tender yielding pork and with a soft-cooked quail's egg oozing beguilingly in the centre.). I was in raptures over this morsel but still had a good half left when I realised it was her, and I knew immediately that the right thing to do would have been to lob the Scotch Egg, either into her carefully blow-dried nest of hair or at her naff, desperate, 'look at me I'm a strict sexy Tory dominatrix' leopard skin pumps, splattering them with soft yolk and sausagemeat. And yet I kept on munching, dissuaded either by my own greed or by the presence of three wiry (and wired) security men hovering nearby - I'll never know which. Either way, Theresa May got off with a strong look from me. I'm ashamed, a bit.

But it was the right thing to do, because not having been hauled off by MI 5 and forced into an orange jumpsuit meant I was still at liberty to attend the magnificent Mogwai's wonderful, uplifting gig in Bristol on Saturday night. It's hard to believe I've been seeing this band regularly for almost fifteen years and that they're now effectively veterans with seven albums behind them. Their symphonic, hypnotic soundscapes have been backing tracks to so many freeze-framed life scenes for me, from a fantastic electrical storm in the French Pyrenees ('My Father, My King') to the time I nearly choked on a broad bean ('Ex-Cowboy'). One thing that has never changed about them is the absolute confidence of their live shows - this lot know exactly what they're doing, know they do it bloody well and know that you, the audience, have chosen well and are fortunate to be there. Which is why it was a shame, yet again, after most of the audience had been happily floating towards the ceiling during crowd-pleasers like 'Mogwai Fear Satan' and 'Helicon 1', it was necessary for Stuart Braithwaite to inform the chattering, coked-up minority that their gabble was 'distracting and really rude', and to make a plea for them all to 'go to the loo and take a really long piss'. Sadly, they didn't. If anyone ever reads this blog who goes to gigs and makes a habit of nattering loudly to their mates when the band is on, could you just take a minute and let me know why you think it's OK to do it? I'd really love to try and understand your reasoning. And I'd like to throw more than half a Scotch Egg at you, you selfish idiots.

Mogwai's tour lasts another few days. Catch them if you can, and don't miss support band The Twilight Sad, for a bit of extra Hibernian-noise-intensity. My ears are still ringing 48 hours later.

*She's probably not famous, but she didn't half give me a start.

The Perfect Day

2011-02-14T15:29:00.000Z

Strange times here. Last Thursday was a case in point; I had a(nother) medical appointment I wasn't looking forward to and as I made to head off across town for what awaited, it seemed all traffic had ground to a halt for miles around, as a man had been shot and killed by armed Police just a few minutes' walk from here. I was oddly unsurprised that something had kicked off, as I'd been in a restaurant right at the site of the 'incident' only the night before, and had remarked to my companion (the correct term for someone you are eating out with, I believe) that there seemed to be an awful lot of plain-clothes coppers around. "It's like they're doing some sort of stake-out," I innocently remarked. Seems they were, and they got their man (now being referred to in the local press as 'Killer Mick'. Good old Brighton Argus.).

So thanks to Killer Mick and his various antics, I ended up with a long, slow rainy haul across town to somewhere I hadn't wanted to go to in the first place. By the time I got there my trousers were soaked up to my knee, my hair was a wet frizz and I felt like an abandoned Christmas Staffie. I then underwent Something Unpleasant, much as I'd feared I would, and came reeling out into a fresh rainstorm two hours later, sore and shaky and hell-bent on getting home as quickly as possible for hot chocolate laced with consoling rum.

I flagged down a cab. There are often times when I dread a chatty cabbie, but on this day I wanted to be distracted so I engaged with the man, who told me with a mixture of rage and resignation that he had just been ripped off for a ten quid fare by a woman who he'd foolishly trusted enough to wait for while she ostensibly went into her apartment block to 'grab some cash' (and who had promptly vanished.). He was often scammed, he told me. There had been the man at Gatwick who swore he'd just had his wallet pinched and needed a fiver to get his car out of the car park (he'd seen him scamming another family as he drove away) the woman at the hospital who told him she only had three quid when it was an eight pound fare, because she'd bought her dying Mum a copy of 'Hello' that had Cliff Richard in it (he'd seen her with her Mum coming out of a pub the same evening), the man he'd picked up outside the vet's with the empty collar and leash who claimed he'd just spent his money getting his dog put to sleep (he'd seen him walking his dog a week later). The driver was disappointed but philosophical; he felt that in trying to do small good turns for these people his own conscience was clear and he was living up to his religious beliefs, but that they, in their turn, would be judged and held to account one day.

I sympathised terribly with the man, working hard, long hours trawling back and forth across Brighton's crowded, maddening, irritable roadways so that he could put bread on the table and send his kids to college. I felt disgusted with the mean spiritedness of those who could abuse his trust and good nature, which really did not seem to have suffered under such exposure to human unkindness. I wished him well as he dropped me off, and tipped him more than I otherwise would have done.

As I opened my front door and looked down at the coins that he'd given me, I realised that he had short-changed me by a quid. I refuse to be cynical.

The Bloody South

2011-02-08T14:57:00.001Z

I suppose nobody (apart from people with Munchausen's Syndrome) enjoys going to the doctor's, but I was particularly unhappy to be back at mine for the second time in a week today. Maybe if I'd just been popping in for a holiday jab or a nice new surgical truss I might have felt differently about the piped music (Rolf Harris, doing an inexplicable and unforgivable version of 'If I Was a Rich Man'), but regardless of my ailment the woman sitting opposite me in the waiting room would have had the same effect.

"Coo, what a lot of right miserable faces,"she observed, as she settled in one of the plastic chairs like a fat hen about to lay an egg. The pale youth in a Slayer t-shirt next to her made the mistake of giving her a watery smile, which she took as an invitation to hold forth. "I mean," she continued, tapping him conspiratorially on the arm, "we're all of us here cos we're not right one way or another, but I'll tell you summat, son, if this were Yorkshire you'd not find anyone sat with a gob on 'em like this lot in here. We'd all be having a chat, passing the time of day. You don't get that down here in the bloody South, do you, son? I don't know why I moved down here, I don't, when I look round and see a load of faces like these."

A couple of old ladies looked shamefacedly down at their hands, and a pale grey, exhausted-looking man tipped his head back and closed his eyes, tapping his index fingers together carefully. The woman snorted. "I mean, I don't mean to sound bad taste or owt, but would it kill 'em to crack a smile? If this were Yorkshire, we'd all know what each other were here for by now!" The youth nodded, staring straight ahead, his face a frozen terrified grin. "Bloody South," added the woman, to fill any semblance of a pause before the next verse of her tirade. I gave her what I hoped was a 'strong look' and she stared defiantly (and quite delightedly) back.

There's no denying that we are a long way down South here, and as I sat trying to drown out the sound of the woman's relentless voice I wished fervently to be, say, just another ten feet South, so that I could perhaps be behind a wall and inside my GP's office with the door firmly shut. I wished for Rolf Harris to be cranked up to eleven and for his cover of 'Stairway to Heaven' to come on. I wished for sudden onset deafness (in me) or sudden onset pharyngitis (in her). But wishes seldom come true, and it was not until I'd endured a further ten minutes of her unsolicited broadcast on the shortcomings of the Bloody South versus the Glorious North, that my name was called.

If she turns up at the clinic I've been referred on to, I swear I will perform surgery on her myself, right there in the waiting room.

Party out of Bounds

2011-02-01T15:38:00.000Z

Who loves to party? I don't. I knew this about myself many years ago, but it wasn't a socially acceptable truth for anyone in their teens and twenties. Hence the countless nights when I found myself stuck in East Acton or Hatfield Peverel at 2.30am, fishing fag butts out of a plastic cup of Cinzano Bianco while some bloke called Glen from Gravesend droned in my ear about the time he'd "read Steppenwolf and spent the next three days curled in a ball under a table" before moving in with his tongue out for a (smartly rebuffed) snog.

I've only ever made one lasting friendship from a chance meeting at a party, and that was only three years ago, when me and the other non-parent female in the room bonded in a corner over our criminally fruitless wombs. Whenever I've given parties, I've hated every minute due to the inevitable crippling anxiety about whether everyone is having a lovely time ("oh god, I never knew Mick went out with Sarah fifteen years ago and that they hate each other's guts because he sold her Gran's mobility scooter to buy weed with an now they're both HERE..."), whether the food is ok ("oh god I put an anchovy in that dip and Sam's new vegan boyfriend just ate a whole bowl of it, do I tell him or not?") and whether compilation tapes I spent the last three weeks painstakingly and (I thought) wittily putting together will work ("oh god, Vic and his mates have just unravelled the lot, pissed on my copy of 'The Sun Rising' and stuck their bloody Leather Nun album on again.."). The following day, the house is full of sweaty people I've never met before trying to get back to East Acton or Hatfield Peverel, and small piles or puddles of unwanted human emissions keep cropping up in corners or under rugs for weeks to come. Why would anyone want to have or hold a party?

The last one I was forced to go to was a 40th where I knew nobody but the host. It was held over sixty miles away requiring a long drive and an overnight hotel stay. It was also, to add to the fun, a themed party, the highly unoriginal theme being 'Grease'. I was initially keen to smear my head with lard by way of a costume, but was talked/ordered out of that, and compromised on a set of 'vintage' clothes I've had since I was an 18-year old rockabilly girl (and which still fit me, HA!). On arrival at the party, which was in a freezing rain-lashed marquee in the enormous, muddy garden of a large and horrible house, I noted that most of the other women - Home Counties fillies almost exclusively named Emma - had opted for the 'Oliva NJ Finale Outfit' and were sinking up to the tops of their black lycra trousers as their six inch spikes were sucked into the mud. The men, who all seemed to be called Cameron or Piers, all looked profoundly unhappy beneath their shiny Elvis wigs, and turned up the collars of their sons' leather jackets (all at least three sizes too small) as though to hide their jowls. Something called a 'Vodka Luge', which in this case was a hollowed-out ice sculpture of a naked female torso, into the top of which neat vodka was poured so it could be amusingly supped from the sculpted genitals where it emerged, glowed coldly in one corner. Sneery looking girls called Tilly from the local public school sixth form wandered contemptuously around with trays of champagne - the only drink on offer - and miniature cones of sausage and mash. The DJ in the corner, who was rumoured to have once been in the Barron Knights, put on 'You're The One That I Want' and there was an explosion of astoundingly bad dancing.

It was, in short, a vision of hell. To pass the time I made endless round trips from the marquee to the house, using a different bathroom each time for a wee I didn't really need, and pausing on the way back to pretend to laugh at the looped rerun of 'Grease' which played on a giant projector television. Inevitably I drank far more than I wanted to and the acidic fizz left me with heartburn and a headache by midnight. Then a man who looked like a cross between a lizard and Nigel Havers (ie, he looked like Nigel Havers) popped up alongside me. "I've been watching you," he told me importantly. "You seem very independent, for a wife."
"Independent of what?" I asked, genuinely not understanding what on earth he could mean and briefly wondering if I'd gone back in time, like Kathleen Turner in Peggy Sue Got Married.
"Of your chap," he said. His arm had snaked around my waist and I removed it. I felt terribly tired.
"I have no idea what you're talking about, and even if I did I suspect I wouldn't want to pursue the conversation," I said. He wasn't to be dissuaded.
"We hear that you and your chap are pinkos," He said. "Is that true?"
"I'd really like you to go away," I said.
"Because you think I'm a capitalist pig?" he said, and suddenly to my absolute amazement, he started crying. "I AM a capitalist pig. I've made a fortune doing nothing remotely worthwhile and I hate myself for it. I've got spoilt children and a wife who'd clean me out if we divorced. It's all pointless."

I'm not hard hearted, and I'm generally quite good at listening to people in distress, but my head was hammering, my mouth was dry and furry, and besides, he was a self-pitying, self-important tosser.
"I hope you find the help you need," I said, and went to get my coat and my 'chap'.

Ten minutes later, as our taxi arrived and we headed - almost ran - out to find it, I passed the man lying on a sofa, slurping at a bottle of champagne. He looked up at me. "Can I give you some advice, darling?" he asked. Before I had a chance to reply that he probably couldn't, he did. "Get some elocution lessons," he said, going back to his bottle. For a moment an old fantasy of the Glorious Day stirred in me as I visualised him up being tried by a Court of the Proletariat. But then I just told him he was a wanker, and went to find my taxi. What a swelegant, elegant party it was.

And at the weekend just gone, I declined an invitation to another 40th party with a dressing up theme. I shall decline all such invitations from now on in. Unless you can promise me that yours really will be 'different'.

Solid Gone

2011-01-31T15:09:00.000Z

Oh dear, another Sixties legend has become stardust. John Barry, whose film themes were part of any child's soundtrack when I was a nipper, has died. He seems to have lived a life as impossibly glamorous as the plot of any film he scored, squiring many of the beauties of the day (mainly along Chelsea Embankment in a red E-Type Jag, I'd like to think.). And what a body of work he's left behind. Here's one of my own favourites - better recordings are available, but you really need the opening credits, depicting a home-grown Brit Bardot frugging in a cellar, to complete the ambience. It makes me want to pull on my white vinyl go-go boots and join in, but for everyone's comfort I probably won't.

Thanks for the tunes, Mr B.

Man, it was mean

2011-01-28T13:26:00.000Z

Here's a curio. I hadn't heard this song for decades, but as a twelve year-old I memorised every word of it together with my little bunch of spoddy friends, and we'd sit on a bench in the playground and sing the whole thing, probably imagining we were the blonde girl on the Cockney Rebel album cover (who was she?) and not a massed tangle of skinny legs and blackheads. Hearing a snatch of it coming from a car this morning took me right back there, and having played it again at home it seems a very odd choice of song for a bunch of 'pre-teens' (which we were, though the term had yet to be invented) to have latched on to. It's an evocative song, but one evoking a murky world of sexual obsession and random jealous violence which none of us - not even Jackie O'Shea, who'd already had a REAL love bite - had encountered in life. Maybe it was all the heavy Spanish imagery. Spain, after all, was a place where our big sisters went on holiday to get their hearts broken by DJs and waiters. Just the mention of it conjured up the promise of dangerous adventure.

Anyway, listening to it now the song comes across as rather contrived and a bit pretentious, but perhaps that's just my own cynicism getting in the way. What a shame I'll never be able to listen to it again as a twelve year-old, and rediscover what it was that captivated me about it in the first place. Though it's still a damn sight better than that tuneless racket they listen to nowadays, I'll say that for it.

Good Thing

2011-01-25T10:17:00.000Z

I'd like to think I take the trouble to let someone know when they've done something that has made me happy - a nice waiter, pleasant shop assistant, or the friendly woman I bought a parking permit from last week will all get a special thanks from me. But I'm sure I don't do it as often as I should. Years ago I wrote to my old 'A' level history teacher, who I haven't seen since for decades, thanking him for the encouragement and kindness he showed me as a mixed-up kid, and for turning me on to a subject I've loved wholeheartedly ever since. His reply took six months to reach me (I'd moved house in the interim) but was full of mildly stunned delight at having his work acknowledged by someone so long gone from his life. I was even more pleased to have acted on the original whim that made me write to him.

And this morning, I received an email from an organisation I sometimes work for, to say that a patient I discharged at the end of last year had written to their Chief Exec about me. Excuse me while I unpack my own trumpet, give it a polish on my sleeve, and put it to my lips. The patient wrote "this is an absolutely amazing, insightful, professional and top class therapist. It was the first time I have felt supported for months...thank you so much."

I get a bit cynical at times about work, but this gesture instantly warmed me to my gnarled and prickly core. That person took the time and trouble to do something they didn't have to do. Thank YOU, so much.

Who's here? I'm here...

2011-01-17T19:02:00.002Z

I've given over most of this month to having a few dull but productive weekends, in which worthy but uninspiring 'things get done' - paperwork, planning, that sort of thing. The weather's miserable, it's dark, and I'm fed up with wearing winter layers, which means I don't much feel like going out.

Luckily, there are always films to be watched. I revisited a very strange one yesterday, one for which I queued aged seventeen with a boyfriend who (possibly because it 'raised a few issues' for him) was much more uncomfortable with the viewing experience than I was. When I found out a few years later that he'd spent a proportion of his first trip to the USA in a San Francisco bathhouse, his fidgeting and coughing during 1980's 'Cruising' suddenly made a lot more sense.

Cruising doesn't feature a bathhouse - they were a West Coast phenomenon, incongruous perhaps in the damp, grubby late 70s New York where this film is set. The sub-strata of gay life depicted here is as low-down dirty and dangerous as the streets outside though - heavy duty leather bars, where legions of largely identical men with big hairy faces slap their big hairy 1970s arses together on tiny packed dancefloors. In the background a passively curious crowd forms around a naked man tied to an X-frame, whose boyfriend is advancing on him with a freshly greased fist. You can almost smell the amyl nitrate - these boys would give Caligula a night to remember. And if they've all got to be up for work in the morning, they don't seem terribly worried about it. They don't even seem worried about the growing collection of male corpses which have recently been dragged, in several matching chunks, from the East River, or found trussed and freshly slashed in a couple of nearby motels.

But NYPD cop Al Pacino has a boss who's worried, and noticing the dominance of a certain physical type among the victims (musclebound and swarthy though none have bubble perms as bad as Al's), he persuades him to leave his Best Girl and her lovely, light, feminine apartment behind, and to head on down to the fleshpots in an undercover mission where he will be fresh bait to tempt the killer. Al doesn't know much about gay S&M but a job's a job, so he gets himself a new leather jacket and a collection of dodgy black singlets, and off he goes.

And from there on in, what's actually going on is anyone's guess. We know Al has to feel his way (sorry, clunky double-entendres are inevitable here) around the 'scene' a little until he works out the rules and codes; in the early days he seriously pisses off (sorry again) a charmer in chaps by inadvertently indicating an interest in water-sports (not the kind you need jet skis for) by misplacing a yellow handkerchief in the wrong back pocket. However he gets the hang (yeah yeah) of things quite quickly, and after a while he's strutting his stuff on the floor with a noseful of poppers, prompting an extraordinary dance scene where he looks exactly like Jaz Coleman.

What we never find out, though we know the strain of his mission is beginning to tell because he starts shagging his girlfriend quite roughly, is whether a) Al's latent tendencies as a leather queen are beginning to make themselves known b) Al's latent tendencies as a maniac are beginning to make themselves known c) the guy the cops eventually arrest, though definitely a leather queen and a bit of a maniac, is actually the main maniac. It's all a crazed jumble of impressions, blind alleys and contradictions. But for all that, or maybe because of it, and despite Pacino's oddly detached performance, I still found the film strangely gripping.

No less gripping is the film's actual background - based on real events and the memoirs of the former cop assigned Pacino's mission in real life, it seemed to divide New York's gay community of the time, with the protesters who turned up to disrupt filming almost matched in number by the leather boys who queued up to feature as extras. Those against accused director William Friedkin of depicting the gay community in a brutal, negative and reductionist way - and it's true that there is very little differentiation or significant characterisation among the regulars at the clubs. The only substantial gay character is Pacino's neighbour, a gangling, sensitive, gentle man whose 'light' could not be in greater contrast to the mass 'shadow' of the creaking leather clones (but whose life ends under equally sordid and uncertain circumstances, possibly implicating Al himself.). There is certainly precious little subtlety in 'Cruising'. But as a depiction of a pre-Aids, post-Stonewall world in which urban gay communities were beginning to emerge and define themselves, it retains a certain nostalgic punch. I think its flaws lie in naivety, and a broadly cack-handed approach to what are hugely subtle and compelling subjects, but despite those flaws it's more of a strangely affecting 'head' film than it's been given credit for. Oh damn, I said 'head film'. I didn't mean...ah, YOU work it out.

Right on Mum

2011-01-09T22:34:00.000Z

A small shop in Brighton, staffed by two amiable women in their sixties. A woman in her mid thirties, who is obviously a regular customer, enters with her toddler daughter in a sling on her back, and her son aged about four, holding her hand. The women behind the counter coo over the children, especially the little boy who is a sweet, shy child doing lots of sideways smiles and raised eyes. They ask him how he's getting on at school, and he proudly tells them he stayed behind to help 'Miss' at break time the other day.
"Isn't that lovely," says one of the older ladies to his Mum. "When he's grown-up, he'll be lovely to ladies and he'll always help his wife around the home."
Mum pauses for a moment. "He MIGHT help his boyfriend, not his wife at all," she snaps. "We can't start imposing gender stereotypes on him at this stage in life, can we?"
The older ladies shuffle like they've been caught out telling a grossly insensitive joke. "Well, that's true of course." One of them says. "I wasn't trying to...it's just he's such a nice boy and...sorry."

Nice one, Mum. You showed 'em, eh?

New Year, New Me. Not.

2011-01-06T12:39:00.000Z

So, fashionably late, here's my take on the end of 2010. It wasn't one I felt sad to see the end of; the last twelve months seem to have been grim for almost everyone I know. Several deaths, a couple of serious illnesses (not me but close friends), one serious accident (hubby), a major career mistake (me that time), all interspersed with humdrum but unwelcome domestic happenings and the odd family feud. My usual quota of life-saving gigs has been well down, due to knock-on effects from all the above, and my usually restorative French retreat in September was wasted (by me) due to my preoccupation with one of them. Unusually for one who scorns and spurns the usually meaningless rituals around the change of year, I was actually looking forward to this New Year's Eve.

I was looking forward to it most because I knew I'd be spending it in my own bed, after just having had ten days spent mainly laid up with flu in a Madeira hotel, a thousand miles from home. And to ice my cake, the poor island was experiencing some of the most ferocious Atlantic gales in its recent history throughout my stay. It all seemed roughly in keeping with the established pattern of the year, somehow. As I lay shivering and sweating in my bed wondering if the windows were actually about to blow in on me, I felt strangely calm and detached. A tits-up holiday to round the year off, madam? Why not. The only time I cracked was when the internet access went down and I couldn't listen to Radio 4, otherwise I was positively serene (apart from the rib I cracked from coughing.).

So though I can't report extensively on Madeira as a holiday destination, having seen a limited amount of it and not really having had what you'd call a holiday there, I can vouch for its reputation as a dramatically beautiful, vertiginous, cliff-enclosed outpost of Europe, exiled strangely in the Eastern Atlantic. Funchal is the oddest capital city I've ever been to - a sort of sleepy Sunday afternoon feeling prevails there even on the most supposedly frenetic day of the year (Christmas Eve) and legions of translucent and spidery septuagenarian Brits wander like ghosts-in-waiting through its crumbling streets, looking baffled and desperate for the balmy climate they had no doubt been promised. Once away from the 'city' you are almost instantly in the wilds, with banana plantations hugging the steep roads until they suddenly give way into desolate moors of prickly gorse and scrub. In the tiny huddled villages, men sit on walls staring aimlessly at passing cars, wearing clothes which put me in mind of the Undertones on the cover of their first album. With high unemployment, low wages, a struggling rural economy and isolated communities (a couple of which were only accessible from the sea until the 'new road' was built 25 years ago - everyone has the same profile there), Madeira felt strangely like Southern Ireland in the mid 70s. And like that country, its troubles are not over yet. Portugal, as we know, is not having a good time, and if a changing climate means the Northern Europeans stop choosing Madeira for their winter breaks, there won't be enough walls for all those aimless bored men to sit on. It doesn't bode well for the place.

The funniest moments of my stay were inadvertently provided by the large German man in the room below, whose plans for levada walks and hearty hikes were largely foiled by the terrible weather. He found an antidote to his boredom by developing an obsession with a small white cat, one of the semi-feral hotel troupe which roamed the grounds angrily, earning their keep by controlling the local rat and vole population. I had excellent sport observing the unlikely duo from my balcony, having been alerted by the German man's beseeching warble "mietzekatze...mietzekatze...psss, psss, psss..." from the lawn below. And there the man would be on all fours, arse raised towards me, creeping slowly towards the impassive cat which would invariably allow him to get, say, six feet away from it before rising, spitting at him, and scampering away. From inside the room I would then hear the man's wife call out, in a tone of weary resignation, "HANS! Die katze ist nicht..." and the man would slink indoors. Every day he gamely completed his ritual, the cat contemptuously allowing him a few more inches each time, until one day the animal obviously decided it had had enough and sprang towards him, embedded its claws in his forearm, and ran for it. The poor man gave a terrible shriek which evidently brought his wife to the door, where I could hear her screaming with laughter while he ran inside, clutching his bleeding wound. I am not proud of myself when I admit to laughing just as loudly as his wife. Forgive me my malice, I was ill.

Anyway, though it's wet and cold here and we still have a fair bit of winter to come, I feel thrilled to have got 2010 out of the way, and have started 2011 in a new, fresh spirit of optimism, creativity, and all-round breathtaking loveliness. Can't you tell?

Happy New Year, all.

Beat My Guest

2010-12-07T15:02:00.000Z

Guests, like fish, tend to go off after three days. That's what the Scandinavians believe anyway, and I'm not about to contradict them. Living in a popular seaside town (oh, and being a generous and fascinating hostess), people are often coming to stay, though I did make a conscious effort to rein it in a bit after a run a few years ago where I did seven weekends on the trot, and almost developed an anti-social personality disorder.

Generally speaking (and in-laws apart) it's fine. I know most of our friends very well of course, though having them to stay can shine a light on all sorts of idiosyncrasies.Who knew, for example, that one friend has developed a verbal tick only activated while watching TV, and which consists of repetitive exclamations of the word 'Po!'. And who could have predicted that another friend's new squeeze would be so keen to share his experience of receiving oral pleasure from her (as evidenced by his bellows of 'Aw, yeah babe, yeah, you do that so GOOD babe' from upstairs, while I scrambled eggs for them both in the kitchen below.).

But more recently, another guest's antics really lowered the bar of human anthropology. This is a very old, very good friend who lives many miles away and who we're always thrilled to see. Knowing he was in town for a night, we reserved a table at a mildly pretentious but quite good restaurant, where we passed a very agreeable evening swapping tales and reminiscing over dinner and a modest amount of booze (we all had work the next day). We were home by midnight and he happily decamped to the spare room, refusing a night cap and looking forward to a good night's sleep (with three young kids, he doesn't often get one.). What a lovely evening, I remember thinking, as I snuggled down in my bed. What a shame we don't see more of him.

In the morning, I was first up and as soon as I headed downstairs (to the bathroom) I was struck by the incredible, almost palpable fug of human ordure throughout the house. It was an olfactory assault which spoke of rotting, ulcerated bowels, curdled digestive tracts and outraged sphincters, a hellish demonic distortion of last night's amiable meal, a bodily abomination made miasma. Breathing through my mouth, I poked my head around the bathroom door. I noticed the loo with its seat up like a gaping mouth, and an empty roll of toilet paper, but everything else but the stench seemed in order.

I flipped the window open. Cold fresh air poured through, but the smell continued to pulsate invisibly but insistently around me. It seemed to have a centre, a heart, a nucleus, and as I pulled back the shower curtain and peered inside I saw immediately where it's dark soul lay. The shower-gel puff that hangs from the tap had been used, but not for the innocent act of lathering up a blob of Dove. From it's ghastly hue and demeanour, it had been put to far more vile purposes, around one part of the body alone. And it could never, EVER be used again. It was violated, ruined, beyond all redemption. Reader, it was covered in fresh cack.

Grabbing a rubber glove and a bin, and with no small amount of reflexive gagging, I managed to detach the defiled puff from its hanging place and contain it, then swept the whole unholy package down to the outside bin-store where I deposited it as though it were nuclear waste. On my way back up the stairs, I met our guest coming down in a sleepily benevolent haze of bonhomie. "That was the best night's sleep I've had in six years," he said contentedly. "Are you making any toast?"

The hours of his life immediately preceding that morning greeting will probably always remain a mystery (unless we have a very frank conversation indeed), but I can only assume that they involved a trip to the loo in the wee small hours, an unexpectedly rapid and violent elimination of last night's meal, a running out of toilet paper, an inability to find a fresh roll, and a half-asleep, improvised 'solution' which involved the nearest thing to hand - a shower-gel puff, which was then (in an insane delusional act) hung back on its hook and immediately forgotten, as his longed for sleep in the quiet, comfy, small-child-free bed was resumed. I have to assume this as I can never ask him, not without letting him into the secret that he once embedded his own excrement into his friends' shower-gel puff, and then meticulously popped it back where he'd found it, presumably under the impression that nobody would ever be any the wiser. I can never ask him because it would cause him pain and embarrassment and I'm still very fond of him.

I could only do one of two things, in order to come to terms with this terrible episode. It was either blog about it, or pick my nose over his toast. I think I chose the more noble and mature option, don't you?

"It's staring at me..."

2010-11-26T11:24:00.000Z

There've been some spooky goings-on down here this week. Chief among them were a couple of hair-raising films (one old, one relatively new) which made their way into my dreams on subsequent nights and hung around me like moorland mist during the day (get on with it.).

For old-time thrills and bloodless spills, get your hands on a copy of 1963's classic 'The Haunting'. The perfect haunted house tale, this will have you checking under the bed for weeks to come without having spattered you with a drop of blood or speck of bile. Four strangers, two male and two female, come together to spend a night in a reputedly haunted house as part of a psychic study. The men are diametric opposites - urbane anthropologist Dr Markway up against snub-nosed playboy Luke (played true to form by Russ Tamblyn), and the women too are shadow and light - Sapphic sexpot Theo (a ravishing Claire Bloom, decked out in finest Quant) and repressed hysteric Eleanor (a breathily labile Julie Harris). When darkness falls and they each repair to bed, all hell quite literally breaks loose. Of course we never know if it really IS the tormented spirit of the House's previous occupant, or just the fevered projections of Eleanor's fragmenting psyche that brings on the mayhem, but either way Whatever It Is makes its unhappy presence known in the most assertive terms. Fabulous, frightening, stylish and truly Gothic, my only regret was not having seen it on the big screen - there are some wonderful wide-angled shots which were wasted on my TV.

Following on its cloven heels was a modern European offering, the equally unsettling "Ils" (2006). This is a tight, compact, almost sparse film which wastes little time with preamble or scene-setting, but propels you brutally right into the action almost from the very first frame. There's a brief respite while we then meet the main characters - a young French couple, renting a (big old spooky) house in the Romanian (remote, densely wooded) countryside. They're an attractive, likeable pair (though not ludicrously so) and as they settle down for an evening in front of the TV your concern for them grows, as the sounds and shapes outside take on a more real and menacing form around the house. From there on in, it's pretty much Game On as the pair become the quarry and the hunt begins. When the hunters' identity is finally revealed, it's stomach-churning for reasons you might not expect at all.

Filmed in grainy 35mm, this film is almost an exercise in fat-trimming as nothing is wasted, not a pattering raindrop, silhouetted tree or barking dog, and the final image is as horrifying as anything you'll ever see despite an almost total absence of blood. My one gripe with the film was its assertion that it is 'based on a true story', which when investigated (well I've looked around online a bit) seems to be stretching it a bit. Though on the other hand, as that is likely to mean that the 'quotes' claimed in the closing titles are fictitious, I'm rather relieved.

It's going to be a cold weekend; why not chill your bones with these two?

Oh, PLEASE, Madam...

2010-11-15T12:18:00.000Z

I just sat (four seats) behind a smart young woman on a bus, and was treated along with most of the top deck to some particularly intimate details of her life. With a lack of self-consciousness rare in anyone over six months old, her broadcast to the nation ran thus:
"Oh no, I was tested for all those very recently. Yeah, all three. Herpes, chlamydia, and syphilis, yes. The HIV test was a month before that. Yes, I have, sure. No, not unprotected this time. Sure. So, can you tell me how long it will take to fit my coil? You're sure? As long as that? Oh, I see...I need to be able to feel the threads, sure. But what's the policy on coil fitting while I have my period? I came on yesterday. Moderately heavy, yeah. Ah I see. Well is there anywhere else I can go that will do it anyway? Oh that is VERY silly, don't you think?"

Sadly we arrived at a natural parting of the the ways at this point, as I'd reached my stop. I'll never know if she managed to find a place that will do her an IUD, while she's bleeding like a stuck pig. But it's nice news about the chlamydia test, and if nothing else getting an all-clear for herpes bodes well for a Merry Christmas. What a generous young woman, to share so much of herself and her life with a bus-full of strangers. I really feel like we bonded.

Hit me baby, one more time...

2010-11-09T18:35:00.000Z

I try and restrict my viewing of Ridley Scott's 1977 masterpiece The Duellists to just once every two years. Like my own Yiddish Cheesecake, it's a treat, and like all the best treats my appreciation of it grows stronger every time. And anyone who hasn't seen it before is missing out on the most sumptuous cinematic indulgence.

The plot, such as it is, centres around a pair of Hussars - the unlikely casting of Harvey Keitel against the more obvious Keith Carradine - who encounter one another during the upheavals of Napoleonic France. Keitel is a pugnacious, enthusiastic swordsman (in all senses of the phrase), and when the more languid, sympathetic Carradine outrages him by a minor breach of social etiquette, Keitel is presented with the perfect excuse to embark on a campaign of his own. Over the course of some fifteen years, in cellars, meadows, and on the freezing steppes of Russia, the pair of them pursue one another across Europe, crossing paths now and then to duke it out with swords (there are some fantastic scraps, lads) sabres or pistols. The origin of their quarrel vanishes into the mists of time as they circle each other compulsively again and again, the actors' contrasting physical styles making it seem at times like watching a Jack Russell fighting a Borzoi.

And all filmed with such regard for beauty that you won't be able to tear your eyes from the screen, even when Carradine makes your toes curl momentarily by pronouncing the word 'doo-el'. Shot on a tight budget, with a small number of extras and no studio scenes (the whole thing, it seems, was made on location in rural France and highland Scotland), Ridley Scott makes the very most of what he's got - some great acting by Keitel, sparse dialogue, a brilliant cinematographer (Frank Tidy, genius), and the stark, misty beauty of the Dordogne in late winter. For a very particular take on the tale of Tweedledee and Tweedledum, you shouldn't miss an opportunity to see this film. Me, I've got to wait another two years now.

It's all white...

2010-11-02T11:54:00.000Z

I'm prone to bouts of cynicism about Brighton sometimes - for all that it's a vibrant, interesting place to live, it can also feel like living with the civic equivalent of a smug, image-obsessed nineteen-year old, who'll take a spare outfit with him when he goes out for the night, just in case the one he's wearing goes out of fashion before he gets home. Certain elected (and non-elected) representatives of the 'community' have done little to rein in the compulsive preening, and there's still many a 'vanity project' on the books, such as the already-dated 'i360' viewing tower planned for the seafront, which will apparently now rub shoulders with a spanking new permanent ferris wheel, just at the juncture where the skeletal wreck of the poor West Pier points sadly out to sea like a ghostly wraith.

I've stood on the seafront so many times, shivering and blinking at yet another municipally-funded train wreck (such as the unique performance of The Tempest which involved the shipwrecked sailors being parachuted on to the beach, a neat plan foiled by the prevailing wind, which refused to take stage directions and swept them out to sea instead.). So on Saturday night, I nearly gave the White Night Festival a miss, expecting not much more than a few light bulbs and a drag queen on stilts with dayglo make-up on. However, this one was a definite hit, and one which probably didn't cost a fortune. The town was illuminated, to mark the end of British Summer Time, and a rolling schedule of playful, funny themed events ran all around town, keeping the crowds (amiable, excited but well-behaved) moving and keeping all the bars, pubs and restaurants packed with cheerful customers.

A Martin-Parr curated photography exhibition at the Fabrika Gallery provided a suitably weird indoor interlude, but the mild evening made outdoor strolling equally appealing. My favourite things were the mock-up Studio 54 nightclub where men could (and did) queue up to be made-up and photographed, and the huge 'anti-gravity' globe (which wasn't anti-gravity at all as it was attached to a crane) but which floated eerily over a happy crowd to the sounds of Underworld and Holy Fuck!. A man dressed as a zombie Michael Jackson (fresh from the afternoon's Halloween Zombie Walk; there were hundreds of Zombies about) herded his mates into a pyramid so he could climb up on them and try to touch it. It was all very silly, good-natured, and funny. And at midnight, a few hundred runners in head-torches set off through the town on a half-marathon. It all rolled on until three or four in the morning, though I was tucked up long before that. It was great to see so many people just having a really nice time before the worst of the winter sets in. As one who hates the long dark evenings, I really appreciated the thought behind it all.

I'm sure if I didn't live here, I'd really want to live here. Sometimes I think I just get a bit ungrateful. This town can be way, way up itself, but I need to forgive it for being a shallow show-off now and again, and just go along with it.

What a State...

2010-10-25T18:08:00.000+01:00

My Reading Mojo is back in gear which feels great, as I was worried that I'd lost the ability to vanish into a book, along with my ability to whistle (though my Mum always told me that every time a woman whistles, the Virgin Mary blushes. "She must have a great big red face, then," was my slap-baiting ten-year old reply.).

Anyway, I may never pucker up and blow again, but I've got though some good books recently. Key in getting my interest in fiction fired up again was John Medd's excellent recommendation, "The Maintenance of Headway" by Magnus Mills. On one level, this is an agonisingly detailed account of the working minutiae and preoccupations of an urban bus driver, and on another level it's a study in futility and basic human strife that Beckett would have been proud of. There's a plot and a narrative and a denouement of sorts, but it's sly, dry, unconventional stuff that's almost autistic at times in its spare tone and lack of 'writerly' artifice. I finished it in an afternoon and immediately wanted to read it again, which in time, I will. What a brilliant mind he has.

But I'm still largely engrossed in non-fiction, and have just finished a fascinating pair of volumes which seemed to act as nicely symmetrical examples of how badly things can go wrong for any nation with a) excessive and repressive state intervention or b) complete abdication by a state of any appropriate level of 'check and balance' government. On the one hand, we have North Korea, as described in Barbara Demick's horribly fascinating 'Nothing to Envy', and on the other we have the Land of my Forefathers, The Irish Republic, as described in Fintan O'Toole's just as horribly fascinating 'Ship of Fools'.

Of course, given the choice of the two, I'd still plump for having my roots in Ireland. The overwhelming chances of having been born in North Korea at any time in the last hundred years and managing to achieve anything like a satisfying or comfortable life, are negligible. State control at grotesque levels only dreamed of by the deadening, sinister East Germans or Soviets has been the order of the day since the Kim family swept to power on a War Hero's ticket, and managed to almost hermetically seal the country from the outside world (not including the Soviet Union. Although when the cheap Russian exports dried up almost overnight after the collapse of the Communist system in the early 1990s, the Beloved Leader was faced with the tiresome problem of how to feed his people. His solution was to buy more warheads, and stand well clear as the population starved to death in their millions.).

Demick describes the grinding monotony and psychological stultification of life in North Korea through six compassionate (but unsentimental) intertwined studies of individuals, who lived through the worst of it all. Their resilience is amazing, but the degradations they withstood are so appalling that at times I didn't want to read any more, because I didn't want them to be put through any more. Did you know that frogs are extinct in North Korea? They were the last bit of protein that could be relatively easily accessed, if your guts just couldn't take any more boiled tree bark and grass. Tuck in.

Meanwhile, in Ireland, they were cracking open another case of tick-bought Bolly, and toasting themselves and their tame Celtic tiger. "Put a beggar on horseback and he'll ride to the Devil" was yet another of my Mum's favourite sayings, and one that couldn't have been more apt for the lamentable recent history of her country. I've always had a slightly uneasy relationship with Ireland, where I spent almost half my life as a kid and was exposed to the unsavoury layer of hypocrisy, bigotry and 'begrudging' that lay beneath the slightly sickly surface of sentimental ballads and relentless 'craic'. I noticed things changing as far back as the Seventies, when the first cluster of horrible hacienda-style bungalows began to appear, squatting harshly on the soft green hills with their wrought-iron signs announcing 'Southfork' and 'Tugra d'Or' to the world. Within twenty years, the countryside was blistered and pitted with hundreds of vast, hideous developments - hotels which went unfilled, housing estates in bizarre, unsuitable locations - all thrown up in a feverish building frenzy, fuelled by government grants and tax breaks which were almost force-fed into an industry that quickly became bloated and moribund. Run on cronyism and corruption, the new political classes 'looked after their mates' in the way a French foie-gras farmer might 'look after' his geese.

When the bubble burst, as it had to, most of the worst protagonists seem to have climbed into their Swarovski- studded helicopters, and swooped off in the general direction of Guernsey or Lichtenstein. The everyday saps who got swept along in it all are left holding their trousers up with string, and wondering what the feck happened. It's a good question.

The last time I was back in County Cork, we stopped at a little market town that had a small hotel where, as a kid, we'd often stop for Sunday lunch on our way over to Killarney. We popped in, and were proudly shown the new €25,000 glass sculpture that hung incongruously over the bar like a guillotine, and went largely ignored by the cloth-capped old farmers who slurped their Guinness in long, silent lines at the bar just as I remembered them doing when I was a kid of eight or nine. The little tableau was like a symbol of clashing, alien cultures and I remember thinking that I didn't really like or recognise this country any more, for all the smell of peat fires and the old adverts for Galtee cheese. I wonder if that glass sculpture's still there, or if it got snapped up as part of the liquidation sale when the hotel went out of business two years ago.

Anyway, Fintan O'Toole picks his way through the plaited mess of his country's shame with a mixture of incredulity and rage that I can only sympathise with and share. Reading his book straight after Barbara Demick's, the best I could say for Ireland is that it's not North Korea. Hmm.

PS. I am having problems uploading images from GoogleImages. I used to be able to select a picture, then cut and paste the URL to have it appear on my blog. Now the URLs are so enormous that nothing will upload. Is this just my own ineptitude? Any kind passer-by have any ideas?

Fiends of Western Buddhists

2010-10-13T20:50:00.000+01:00

Right now, I'm seething because I don't seem to be able to download pictures from Google Images any more. I know I'm seething because my heart rate has gone up, my breathing has become shallow and I want to lash out at an inanimate object. I'm in the grip of a corrosive and spiritually exhausting emotion, and there's not a damn thing I can do about it.

Although there is. I could work my mouth into a hard, thin line of a smile, make my eyes go completely vacant as though they know that my mouth doesn't really mean it, and say something to myself like 'if it's so, it's so,' before heading off to chant in front of my Brighton-bought Buddhist shrine until I have achieved a state of oneness with Google Images, and the entire universe. Then having checked carefully that nobody's looking, I can sneak into the back yard and give next door's cat a swift kick for good measure.

Because Western Buddhists - usually white middle-class professionals raised in the drab Church of England, and so denied even the delicious S& M ecstacies of Catholicism, then 'enlightened' on their first trip to Thailand before finally getting up the nerve to dip into the Patpong bars - Western Buddhists are among the angriest, most passively aggressive, judgemental, self-justifying, self-serving and self-obsessed people I have ever met. And it's always the ones who brandish their 'spirituality' in your face, with little exhibitionistic clues and props like a tiny Buddha statue on their desk, a set of Japanese Shinto glass beads twirled and clicked infuriatingly during meetings, a Ravi Shankar* ring tone, and a selection of lunchtime vitamin pills pulled sanctimoniously from a small alabaster pillbox with a Ying-Yang lid, who will be capable of feats of hypocrisy and cruelty that would make a Christian Brother blush.

I speak as one who is just emerging, somewhat bruised and bloodied but still full of fight (which I consider a healthy emotion because it might be spiritually corrosive but at least it's bloody honest) from an encounter with a Western Buddhist who, although they would never couch it in such drearily prosaic tones, will make a point of remaining my enemy for life because I challenged them.

Challenge a Western Buddhist, especially one in a position of power (which they often seem to be despite all the 'humility' guidelines), and you'll see an interesting and immediate physical response. The eyes will flash, registering danger, but then immediately go dead as though the spiritual energy generator has been tripped, while the mouth arranges itself into the requisite mirthless line that is the Western Buddhist Smile. A platitudinously defensive remark such as 'I note a little anger in your tone; perhaps you'd like to talk about that' will be uttered in a Hal-like voice, all low-range reasonable menace, and then you see the cold, night-vision light flick on in the eyes and you know you are in peril.

Because your Western Buddhist can do anger without breaking sweat, meeting you with an ice-wall of superior, seasoned, absolutely livid reserve, and will bounce back at you again and again the emotional content of what you are saying ("you seem angry"..."You are upset and emotional" "Your tone is now plaintive" "You have your hands around my throat") without engaging directly with you on any of the issues you are getting plaintive and emotional about. It's not a million miles from the techniques the Scientologists were caught using on Panorama last week, but delivered in a patronising monotone rather than bawled repeatedly into your adversary's face.

You'll never beat a Western Buddhist in an argument because of course they won't argue with you, not directly anyway. But they'll take you through ten rounds of the most skilfully avoidant, non-contact kicking you'll ever experience, and, as you stagger away at the end wondering how you sustained all those broken ribs when you never felt them land a punch, the fuckers will bow to you. This makes them, to my mind, the most dangerous creatures in the spiritual garden. Give me a labile, messed up Catholic, a dull but worthy Anglican or a neurotic Jew any day. I'll embrace them all, because I get them all. But keep me away from the sinister smile of the Western Buddhist. That smile mean a knife is being inserted between your ribs, and you won't know a thing until you hear the last drop of your own blood splash to the floor.

(I'm sure Eastern Buddhists are lovely. They invented the bloody stuff, so they've had a lot longer to figure out what to do with it.)
I know Ravi Shankar isn't a Buddhist, but he doesn't half attract them.

As a matter of fact, I'm (properly) back...

2010-10-13T12:55:00.000+01:00

It's been a whole month since my last blog entry, and a month packed to the rafters with grimness. Put as objectively as I can manage, I have had the most ghastly time of my entire professional life. How I wish I could spill the beans, name the names, list the crimes... but knowing that if I do, the whole lot will come back at me like a slingshot full of shit, is enough to impose restraint on my itchy keyboard fingers. You'll just have to take my word for it that there are some bad, BAD people out there, and often where you might least hope and expect to find them (or, for the cynical reader, exactly where you might have predicted they'd be lurking.).

But I'm back, with a whole fresh raft of thoughts and opinions which need airing, and today's the day to get back up and running. Hold on tight for my upcoming rant on 'Western Buddhists' later. It's the only place I can possibly start.

Now that feels better already.

As a matter of fact, I'm back.

2010-09-13T19:04:00.001+01:00

Here's a little bit of my holiday for you to share. It's much bigger when you get up close to it though - go and have a look sometime.

So, two weeks away gone in a flash, and unfortunately I've come back quite cross with myself for allowing a work situation to occupy my mind far more than it had a right to do while I was away. I'm normally pretty good at switching off completely, but I didn't manage it this time. Which just goes to show yet again that we therapists often fail to practice what we preach (not that I imagine anyone who reads this blog was ever fooled.).

But all was not lost, and despite too much fretting I managed to have a very good time in the middle of French Nowhere. The Baronnies is one of the most depopulated parts of the entire country - you can drive for miles on its dusty country roads and not meet more than a handful of rusty Renaults or clapped-out Citroens containing the odd red-faced farmer on his way to the Annual Pig-Impersonating Festival at Trie-sur-Baise. The pace of life is appropriately gentle, and the people friendly (though I've never found the fabled French froideur to exist much outside of Paris, which I still think is friendlier than bloody London.). The cuisine - evolved over centuries of massive farm-worker appetite - is hearty and meaty, and we stocked up with oxtail and rabbit on our first morning at the brilliant Toulouse indoor market before heading for the wilderness. "Avec la tete?" asked the butcher, hacking our chosen bunny into chunks. I looked at the small peeled skull and wild eyes and declined - though it was probably once a great delicacy, fought over at the Sunday lunch table by little boys who are now old men.

Toulouse was a great place to start and end the trip. With it's rose-coloured stone and stocky brick architecture, it's a robust, muscular place with a slightly feverish, Southern feel. By September it's become a bit of a meeting point for every Euro-Crustie still trying to eke out the Festival Circuit, all seemingly running low on cash for weed and getting a bit resentful about it, so expect a certain amount of whiny hassling from the White Dreads and their smelly dogs.

If you then feel like confronting your arteries, go for bust at La Cave au Cassoulet and have the house special. If I say it's beans, meat and sausages largely cooked in fat you must not be put off - this is food fit for a king, ideally a great big fat king with lard flowing through his veins. I'd have it as my Last Supper, anyway. If you want a slightly (not much) healthier option, though, wuss out and go for the amazing French roast chicken at Restaurant Pategrain, and if the manager feels like it, he'll throw in some top-quality French flirtation (ladies only, I'm pretty sure.).

Then head out into the countryside and lose yourself. The Pyrenees will be there in the background, watching you wherever you go, and you'd do well to pay them the respect of an up-close visit. If you're really feeling fit, take a day and climb up to the astounding Breche de Roland, from Gavarnie. My photo (taken a week ago) at the top cannot do justice to this natural wonder, for this where a vertebra in the spine of mountains between France and Spain has been removed, leaving the most perfect gap that can be reached quite simply, by two hours of climbing up waterfalls and sheer shale banks and then crossing a glacier (crampons a very good idea.). Take enormous amounts of food, and some emergency TangFastics for when your legs feel as though they're going to collapse beneath you. Your reward will be to stand on the roof of Europe, with one foot in each country. This is easily one of the three most beautiful places I have ever been, and I will go there again, if you'd like to join me.

If you then feel in need of a reward, get yourself down to one of the region's other specialities - a Thalassotherapy spa. You could do worse than try the newly-opened Edenvik Centre at Capvern Les Bains, near Tarbes. For 8 Euros you can have an hour in the beautiful mineral pool, with its currents and massage jets, then sweat like a pig in the Viking Sweat Lodge before the inevitable high-pressure shower in freezing Pyrenean snow-melt efficiently closes up your spotless pores. Guy, the friendly and enthusiastic manager, clad in his regulation Small Bathing Trunks, will show you the ropes and mime any bits you don't understand when your French runs out.Then pad around the corner in your robe and get a massage. My hubby has been under the weather so I let him have the really flash 80 Euro one with the hot stones, which was an hour and a half long and which sent him out semi-comatose and with an idiotic grin on his face (I'm dismissing any thoughts of Happy Endings and just assuming he felt very relaxed.).

The only thing you really need to watch out for when holidaying in the Baronnies are the farm dogs. In the main they're not tethered, it's their gaff, and if they don't really appreciate you dropping by, they will not be shy about letting you know. Hubby has an unsavoury-looking gash on the back of his right leg where he was bitten very thoroughly by a mean-looking terrier with no self-esteem issues, who resented our presence in 'his' lane. Luckily, rabies has not set in so far and he's showing no signs of lockjaw so we can rule out tetanus too, but be aware - take a stick or a bottle full of stones when you go walking, and don't be shy about brandishing either or both at marauding chiens.

Anyway, this remains one of my favourite places in the world, and I've been around a bit. I want to advise everyone to go there, but if they do it'll fill up with people, and it's the lack of folk I find so restful. So maybe don't bother - but if you do, you won't regret it.

And now, real life recommences. Grrrr.

I'd like to help you in your struggle to be free...

2010-08-24T20:03:00.001+01:00

I'd like to conduct a piece of highly scientific research via my blog. If you'd like to take part, please don't be shy - just answer this simple question. What is the shortest time you have ever held down a job, before resigning? And what made this particular job so unendurable?

There'll be some sort of prize for the answer that makes me feel best, and possibly a follow-up post explaining why I asked in the first place. I told you it was scientific.

Nickers

2010-08-13T16:53:00.000+01:00

I had a phone call earlier this week from a woman I met when we both attended a Creative Writing group a while ago. I've done several such groups over the years, and will almost certainly not be doing any more, partly as I'm not sure how much I've actually ever learned from them, partly because they always entail having to sit through some truly awful pieces of writing (my own included), but also because of matters arising from the conversation I had with my friend.

The group we were in back then was a mixed and unusually lively one, which made it good fun at times and stopped it from getting too mimsy. It was almost evenly divided between men and women (searing memories of other groups, dominated by retired ladies from Lewes who wanted to write gentle poems about their grandchildren, still haunt me.). Among the men was a slightly dodgy geezer called Graeme, who was 'in antiques' and who looked like a younger Dan Cruickshank, with a spray of greying hair and rather lupine teeth. Strange themes of animal cruelty and adolescent humiliation ran through his writing, and one or two of the younger women actively avoided small-group work with him due to what one of them called 'the indecency of his gaze', which all sounds a bit Jane Austen but is a fair reflection of the air of generalised, undischarged lust he emanated.

I got on OK with him, once he figured I was married and stopped bothering to flirt with me, but I was always struck that, whether I'd worked with him in on a piece in the group or not, he would seek me out after every meeting and specifically request a copy of whatever I'd been working on "because I'm a big fan of your stuff." I always felt slightly unhappy at handing the sheets of paper over to him, though it was perfectly legitimate of him to have asked, as all work brought to a group automatically slips from the private into the public domain. But I never felt quite comfortable, or as flattered as I might, by his attention.

When my friend mentioned quite early in the phone call this week that she had bumped into Graeme at a party, I knew he was the real reason she had contacted me. "He was very pleased with himself," she said, "As he'd just won first prize in a short story competition and he was saying that he'd really found his voice, so he expected more to follow." Then she paused. "I thought you might like to have a look at his story. It's online at the moment..."

And so I found my way to the predictably self-important 'literary' website she'd mentioned, and I read Graeme's piece. And while the plot, involving adolescent humiliation and a litter of abandoned puppies being eaten alive by worms, was not mine, there were my phrases, my expressions, my character observations, sprinkled like glitter among the dark stodge of Graeme's prose. He had grafted my writing on to his, and created a Frankenstein's Monster of a piece which had somehow managed to attract the attention of a judging panel, and win him enough cash for a nice little buying trip to Brittany (I would estimate.). I can only assume that - having had them in his possession for a good four or five years now - the short stories of mine which he plundered would have been spread out on his desk, reminding him as he tapped away that he was engaged in a joint effort with me, albeit one of which I was totally unaware.

I haven't cheated at anything since I 'won' my Mum five pounds in the school tote when I was nine, by fixing my numbers with the aid of an ink-eraser and a magic marker. I remember how crap I felt when my form teacher twinkled 'well done' at me, as she handed me the cherished little envelope with its fouled booty inside. I knew I didn't deserve it, and that my Mum's delight in her five pound prize would be tainted with my own dishonesty. There might have been a point just before Graeme hit the 'send' button when his conscience gave him a jolt and caused him to reconsider. But my guess is that any such jolts would barely have registered. My words would have long-since become his, by virtue of his creed that 'possession is nine-tenths of the law' - a phrase that probably comes in handy for a man 'in antiques'. In that respect, I handed them over like an old dear accepting a pittance for her late brother's war medals. But I won't be joining any more Creative Writing Groups. And you'll only get the REALLY crap stuff in my blog from now on. I wonder if anyone will be able to tell the difference?

Wild Bore

2010-08-01T17:19:00.000+01:00

A Sussex country pub, Friday evening. We've already stopped at two which have been too horrible to contemplate eating in, and we're starving. This one is obviously popular, its carpark crammed with a selection of Country Money-People-Carriers crammed cheek-by-jowl into the car park. Inside, the Country Money-People themselves (mainly couples in their fifties and sixties) are crammed cheek-by-sagging jowl into the bar. The women, several of whom have an unnerving amount of darkly tanned flesh on display, are out in their finery, while the men sport a narrow variety of checked short-sleeved shirts, and trousers with waistbands that are beginning to thicken and creep upward. It wouldn't normally be the sort of of place I'd fancy stopping to eat at, but hunger makes you do strange things sometimes.

A couple have just finished eating and have left a small table by the window, which I grab. I'm vaguely aware that the table behind me is occupied by a pair of men - the waitress is just removing an empty bottle of claret for them and replacing it with a full one as I pass. But they are mainly a blur of beige and grey, and I take little notice. Until I am bombarded by The Voice. "IT'S ESSENTIALLY A MATTER OF JURISPRUDENCE," the man furthest away from me bellows, in the full, fearless, cut-glass tones of the educated elite. His friend is a far quieter man (though up against that delivery, Ian Paisley himself could have appeared quite taciturn) with a North American accent and the slow, over-deliberate air of a man who knows he has had far too much to drink but hopes to disguise it. "Oh, jurishprudence, shhure,"he agrees. The Voice continues."WHEN CONFRONTED WITH A Q.C, EVEN IN CASUAL CONVERSATION, ONE'S INSTINCT IS OFTEN, REGRETTABLY, TO DEFER, HOWEVER ONE FINDS AS ONE GETS OLDER THAT THE DEFERENCE INSTINCT IS NO LONGER ONE'S DEFAULT POSITION!"This revelation is rounded off with a great bray of self-congratulatory laughter which must surely have caused his friend's dentures to rattle. I glance back over my shoulder with what I hope is a sharp look that will be read and understood, and will result in a drop in volume.

Of course, it is not. This is a man who, in the confines of his own head at least, is an orator, a gnostic, an inculcator of wisdom, a bon viveur and a top-class wit, and who is therefore performing a public service by never delivering his thoughts and opinions in anything in less than a full-on bawl.
Throughout our meal, waves of The Voice wash over our table like a sonic tsunami, each more self-reverential, pompous and vain than the last. "OF COURSE, THE FAMILY FOLLOWED WILLIAM BARBAROSSA INTO GERMANY IN THE 12TH CENTURY. ONE THINKS OF CHARLEMAGNE (naturally pronounced 'Charlemang-YE' with a Gallic roll) AS SYNONYMOUS WITH THE ROLE OF HOLY ROMAN EMPEROR, AND YET IT WAS BARBAROSSA WHO INTRODUCED PREMOGENITURE WHICH MAY ACCOUNT FOR A SUDDEN BURGEONING RESPECTABILITY AMONGST 'THE FAMILY', WHO, PRIOR TO THIS DATE ALAS, SINK INTO THE MIRE OF 'PLEBS PLEBIS', AS FAR AS ANTIQUITY CAN AS YET ASCERTAIN."

His friend offers the odd grunt and semi-verbal response, and almost gets as far as half a sentence once or twice, but in the main all I hear from him is the sound of a glass being repeatedly filled and drained while the deluge of pomposity continues unabated. But then, there is a sudden change in mood, perhaps the inevitable effect of at least two bottles of strong wine drunk in quick succession. The tone of the Voice (though not the volume), drops. "ONE'S HOPE...ONE'S FERVENT AND SINCERE HOPE, AND THAT WHICH I PRAYED FOR WHEN WE VISITED THE CHURCH...IS TO CONDUCT MY REMAINING DAYS ON THIS EARTH IN A CHRISTLY SPIRIT OF LOVE...AND HUMILITY. HUMILITY AND LOVE. I STRIVE EACH DAY FOR HUMILITY...(and at this point The Voice genuinely cracks a little)...AND LOVE."

His friend sighs. "I'M BORING YOU NOW." The Voice suggests. "Naw, naw. Not boring me. I was thinking of...her." The Voice perks up slightly. "THAT WOULD BE THE LADY SOPER-CLARKE?"Another sigh from across the table. "Fiona, yes. You know, I never stopped loving her, not for a minute, not for a second..." Now his voice is cracking. The Voice has the answer.
"SHALL WE CALL FOR THE BILL?" He yells.

Ten minutes later, they leave. I study them closely as they thank the bar staff effusivley, two men in their late sixties wearing their check short-sleeved shirts and high-waisted trousers. The older, American man is visibly weaving and almost flies backwards as he overestimates the weight of the bar-room door. I watch them take the steps down to the pavement slowly and deliberately, and as they cross the road unsteadily, I see The Voice put his arm around the sagging shoulders of his friend. The sun is setting in front of them, as they head off to the West.

Crying Over You

2010-07-30T10:26:00.000+01:00

There's much discussion around at the moment about Toy Story 3, and its irresistibly lachrimation -inducing effects (in other words, it makes you cry.). I haven't seen it yet as I hate going to the cinema, but I have a feeling that I won't actually blub when I do - especially not now with the weight of expectation hanging over me. There are however a few select scenes from certain films and TV shows that I only have to think about for my eyes to prickle. They include Tom Conti and Takeshi Kitano's final scene from Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence, every single second of Dumbo, the bit in 'The Singing Detective when the Asian man in the next bed dies and Michael Gambon weeps, and....this. One of the best and most affecting pieces of acting that I have ever seen. His fifteen-second stare to camera before the quietly delivered pay-off line, is the point where the tears just have to come. It's a beautiful sunny day, and it's the end of the week. Why not ruin the mood and watch this?

Happily Stiff

2010-07-26T15:11:00.000+01:00

Look at the face of this poor chap. He's been holding up the archway of Coombe Church in Sussex since the early 1100s, so it's no wonder he's not very happy. But he's doing a grand job, as the sturdy little building is still very much intact, hugging a sheltered, secluded corner of the South Downs for dear life. I spent a quiet hour there recently, in the company of a group of ornithologists who were getting the full guided tour, and were more than happy to let me sit in as a typically enraptured guide talked us all through these strange, ancient frescoes that were uncovered here in as recently as the 1940s.

Sussex is full of these curios, and I always love stumbling across a new one. The Normans didn't waste much time flinging up as many churches and castles as they could once they got here, putting their architectural stamp on the land, but there was plenty going on before they arrived and a surprising amount of it can still be found with a little research. I'll never know what kind of stinking, pox-ridden congregation huddled together in Coombe Church under those eerie, dung-coloured paintings when they were first unveiled, but in those pre-literate times the message was clear - life's not about enjoyment, it's nasty, brutish and short, and the chances are you're all going to hell, so get down on your pus-encrusted knees and PRAY. And in an era where you could scratch yourself on a thorn one Thursday and be dead from blood poisoning the following Tuesday, I'm sure they took the message pretty seriously.

I've been reading a lot of Medieval history recently, and it's inevitably visceral stuff. Though I did go off on a linguistic tangent with David Cowley's book 'How We'd Talk If The English Had Won in 1066', which is fine for anyone fancying a quick rummage around in the dusty attic of pre-Norman English. For me, though, it all strikes a bit of a sour note when Cowley starts eulogising about 'reclaiming' 'our' 'original' 'English' words, and sure enough his book is linked into some predictably sorry websites with 'patriotic' themes. I personally like the fact that this island history has ensured a rich pudding of a language, where for example 'kingly' (Danish) 'regal' (Latin) and 'royal' (French) can all be used interchangeably to mean the same thing. But Cowley and his ilk would restrict us to what is actually a variation on a simple low-German dialect, which would mean missing out on an awful lot of wonderful European and Asian words. Which does not distract from the fact that I enjoyed the use of his book.

And that brings me to my other point. In common with my blog-buddy Cocktails, I can't seem to read fiction any more. I've picked up at least a dozen novels this year, and got no further than the first chapter with ten* of them. It coincided with not being able to sleep well any more, though I don't think the two are necessarily related. Does this happen to everyone, and if so do you get your Fiction Mojo working again sometime? I'd like to think so. Though I'm happy with my History and my Politics for now, I'd still like someone to entertain me with a story in the future.

*I did write eight chapters of my own novel, before I decided it was rubbish and dumped it.

A Perfect Tour

2010-07-14T13:19:00.001+01:00

So, is everyone having a good Tour de France so far? If you've not been seduced by the whirr of the pedals or the scrape of flesh on ashphalt, you're missing out massively. This year's Tour is turning out to be the most interesting and pundit-defying for years. It's been packed with surprise and incident, from the incredible pile-up last week (where it looked as though a force field had suddenly descended across the front of the pack) to Mark Cavendish's sobbing face on the podium, and the final inglorious demise of Lance Armstrong.

And it may just be that the anti-doping battle is finally winning out, with the race mercifully free from its sadly-established pattern where previously mediocre riders grind along robotically towards a dull, EPO-choreographed succession of improbable, repetitive 'victories'. This year we're actually seeing some racing, with individual idiosyncratic styles suddenly revealed, making for a less predictable and far more exciting three weeks. And we're only half way through.

The ITV4 coverage has, as always, been excellent with Paul Sherwen providing high levels of unintentional comedy as he recites yet another yearning eulogy to his beloved 'big Jens Voight'. The dapper and fabulously sarcastic Gary Imlach, now in his twentieth year of service, does his bit for trendy shirts. Ned Boulting, presumably straight off the plane from South Africa after the World Cup, pops up to shove his mic in the face of poor Cadel Evans, almost in tears (despite sporting the Maillot Jaune) with a broken elbow.

I'm sad for Bradley Wiggins, too, whose emaciated body (he's currently boasting a horrifying 4% body fat, a tactical experiment aimed at enabling him to fly up mountains) is letting him down on the peaks where he was tipped to excel. His chances of making it on to that final podium in Paris on sunday week are looking as slender as his sparrow legs. If I were him I think I'd be tucking into a plate of cassoulet by now - sod the diet.

You may well equate all things bike-related with the maddening arrogant 'urban warriors' who cut you up when you're driving or slice past you on the pavement when you're not. If so, all I can say is try and see past all that. With the Tour de France you'll see that cycling can be beautiful, and I speak as one who's never owned a bike. Happy Bastille Day.

Sucking a Sherbet Lemon

2010-07-02T16:43:00.000+01:00

I live in a corner of town where there are still lots of small, locally-owned shops. We've got a butcher, a greengrocer, a florist, and a shop selling stupidly expensive dressing gowns and shower curtains which has inexplicably ridden out the recession (so far). But I noticed this morning that the Old Fashioned Sweet Shop has bitten the dust after less than a year of trading, and all that remains are its neat shelves which used to house rows of humbug jars and coconut mushrooms, and its cheery bright yellow shutters, now forever closed.

I felt a bit sad and guilty. I don't have much of a sweet tooth (Cherry Ripes apart), but I felt sorry for the jaunty man who spent all day in the long narrow shop on his own, rearranging the jars and dusting the till. You've got to sell many, many quarters of Sherbet Lemons before you even break even, let alone start making a profit, and though I popped in a few times for a bag of Rhubarb and Custards, they would more often than not end up coated in fluff and lint at the bottom of my handbag. I just didn't need that many sweets. More than once, I took a circuitous route when it would have been quicker to pass by the shop, as the jaunty man would wave out the window if he caught my eye, and I imagined his tail dropping (though he didn't actually have one) when I hurried by without stopping for another bag of Cough Candy. Recounting this sadly at home earned me a certain amount of scorn, and the words 'Laughing Dogfood' were mouthed at me.

I bet everyone has a Laughing Dogfood of their own. When I was a student I would go and visit a friend from home who was at another University about 30 miles away. The coach would pass a small neat factory bearing the logo of a little laughing dog, the proud and literal emblem of the Laughing Dogfood company. I used to wonder about the history of Laughing Dogfood, and about the people who got up early every morning to get to that factory, no matter what, to turn out tins and packets of Laughing Dogfood, each one a David to the Goliaths of Pedigree Chum and Winalot. My friend had noticed the factory as well and had exactly the same thoughts. If we ever got dogs, we decided, we would lobby our local supermarket to stock Laughing Dogfood. We'd accept nothing less. "You don't sell Laughing Dogfood? Well, I'm not shopping here again."

Then one weekend I passed the factory and noticed the letter 'L' had dropped off the sign, in true Sunshine Desserts fashion, so it now read 'aughing Dogfood'. It stayed like that for over six months, during the worst of the Eighties when businesses were closing everywhere, and we fretted that this inability to afford a new letter 'L' might indicate they were nearing the end of the line. Laughing Dogfood became a sort of emblem for naive, stoical optimism, madcap ventures and stubborn, soon-to-be-shattered dreams. Like sinking your savings into an Old Fashioned Sweet Shop "because everyone loved going to the shop for a quarter of Rainbow Drops!' I've seen dozens of 'em over the years, and I've duly made efforts to support several in their brief lives, forking out for hand-made paper I've never used, or tins of stuffed vine leaves that are still at the back of my cupboard.

However, it's not all bad news. I take great consolation from the fact that Laughing Dogfood is still trading after all these years. Imagine that. And as I never did get a dog, they managed it with no help from me whatsoever. Which leaves me more room for feeling guilty about the jaunty Sherbet Lemon man, his life in pieces and more Coconut Ice than he'll ever know what to do with.

Family Fun-Gun

2010-07-01T10:56:00.001+01:00

I was clearing out a desk drawer yesterday, and to my huge excitement I found a fantastic orange Dymo Label Maker tucked away at the back. Alas, there was no tape to go with it, or I should have embarked on a splattergun spree of print-related mirth.

The Dymo was ostensibly a stationery tool, on which you could (if you were a stiff) restrict yourself to printing out individual sticky-backed labels for your Latin folder or Geography file. However in reality its function was as a handy device for producing bespoke scripts about the personal habits of friends or family. These could then be slyly attached to the subject's back, so that they could walk around all day wearing a neat label which proclaimed anything from "Stand back - I fart a lot" to "I'm carrying Roy North's child". I once scored maxi-points for planting one on my brother-in-law's back just as he was going through the turnstile at Upton Park, which read "I love Milwall". It was well into the second half of the game before a spoilsport behind him alerted him to the reason why he hadn't made any new friends on the North Bank terraces that day. Simple pleasures, but we made our own in them days.

Long since rendered obsolete by the advent of "home computers", I'm sure that Dymo Labelmakers are no longer manufactured, and that I will never get another reel of shiny orange tape for my own little model. But I can't quite bring myself to throw it away. There must be many more sophisticated modern devices available now, on which I could make and print hilarious labels to stick on my loved-ones' backs, but my Dymo has a special place in my heart and my memory. It's gone back in the drawer, tapeless and forlorn. I feel too sorry for it to throw it away.

©Ishouldbeworking 2007-2011

Watch The Birdie...

2010-06-29T11:48:00.001+01:00

I'm clearly in a strange mood, as after the fleshly excesses of the Wellcome Collection last week, I followed up with a couple of hours' gawping at Tate Modern's equally uncomfortable 'Exposed' exhibition a couple of days ago.

This gritty collection of loosely-linked themes deals with the dilemmas and ethical conundrums raised by covert or unbidden photography. So, beneath its wide umbrella we have the now-familiar war photographs of napalmed Vietnamese children, nineteenth century American philanthropists depicting grimy flop-houses in an effort to show the thick crust of poverty at the bottom of the great Melting Pot, and then Kim Novak causing every (male) head in the diner car to swivel towards her, as she slides innocently into her seat. Papparazi shots of Taylor and Burton snogging blissfully on their yacht rub shoulders with Kohei Yoshiyuki's dimly-lit parade of night vision shots, in the next room, where ghostly Japanese couples are snapped having perfunctory sex before their unseen (by them, but not by us) spectoral audience of voyeurs in a Tokyo park.

To say there's not much commonality among the subjects is perhaps to miss the whole point - though for me it was hard to see what the war photographers of the sixties had in common with their Stateside paparazzi cousins, from whom Jackie Kennedy, hair flying, was snapped fleeing across Central Park. Of course neither subject - The Widow, or the Napalmed Girl - had given permission to be photographed, but beyond that fact the motivation of the respective photographers involved would seem to differ entirely. Or maybe that's not important, or even true - is it all just entertainment?

Either way, it makes for an interesting, sometimes amusing, sometimes repellent couple of hours. As one who avoids cameras at all costs, I would be furious and horrified to see myself 'captured' in a moment of pensiveness or even (especially) vacancy, and yet the sneakily-captured images of 50s women in movie theatres or on the subway (the whole exhibition has a massive American bias) were often beautiful and fascinating. And the banality of a Cold War spy, snapped in the midst of his 'dropoff', was disconcerting in its ordinariness. The one which managed to put my back up was a cold little piece in which, as you pass in front of a monitor a previously invisible image of a lynching appears, with you, the viewer, temporarily framed within it as one of the spectators. This just struck me as a sanctimonious piece of Lacanian pomposity, but that's just me - you might love it. After all, we're all voyeurs, aren't we? Why not go along and have a look. Remember, though, while you're looking, that you're being watched.

Meanwhile...

2010-06-22T10:24:00.001+01:00

An odd couple of weeks indeed, and I'm not even talking about the football. I found out that a former patient of mine, who I'd seen on and off over a period of years, had died in the most heartbreaking circumstances at the age of just 28. She'd been in poor health from childhood but her death was not on the cards, and though I hadn't seen her for many months I was devastated. I've done well over 10,000 hours of clinical practice, and seen hundreds of different people - most of whom I remember well and fondly, but with the inevitable detachment that enables me to do the job. However, she was one of the really outstanding ones, a rare and wonderful young woman who had absolutely no idea of how rare and wonderful she was. What she'd had to endure in her short life would have made a perfect Misery Memoir, but she was the last person who would ever have wanted to parade her triumph and tragedy tale before the world. She had dignity, intelligence and grace way beyond her years. And while I'm glad to have known her, I'm deeply sad that the bright, promising future she'd begun to create for herself was cut so terribly short. Make hay while the sun shines, kids, make hay.

So with that in mind I made a little bit of hay of my own, and accepted a job I'd been wooed for, which feels scary but good and which I'm now quite excited about. I also got off my arse and went up to the 'Skin' exhibition at the Wellcome Trust in London's Euston, which if you are in striking distance of London, I urge you to see. In fact, take a whole afternoon and have a look at the amazing permanent collection in the museum upstairs. This place truly has something for everyone. For a start, quite a lot of the 'Skin' exhibition is fascinatingly gross. Ever wanted to see a short film of a skin graft being harvested? You can see it here (or pass by your local kebab shop and watch them slicing the hunk of all-purpose 'meat'. Not dissimilar.). And did you love squeezing your spots when you were a teenager? Were you only sorry that nobody was there to film it in slo-mo? Well, now you can relive those special private moments. And when you've had enough Skin, you can head upstairs and see Disraeli's death mask, some dainty Japanese 19th century glass dildoes, a Chinese doctor's trade sign made entirely of human teeth, and some terrifying/enticing (depends on your taste) English anti-masturbation devices from the early twentieth century. And it's all free! This is a wonderful, eccentric, eclectic place full of curios and things to make you go 'hmm'.

And mooching around Skin with his beautiful wife, was none other than David Bailey. Now quite frail and vague-looking, but still with the sniggery, scratchy East End voice of his cocky twenty-year old former self. I thought he looked fantastic, actually, though I was ashamed that he caught me looking at him. Still, I've held the gaze of a man who's slept with Catherine Deneuve, so that's got to be worth a bit of embarrassment.

And as for the football...

"And he looks me in the eye when he shoots..."

2010-06-10T12:41:00.000+01:00

So, is everyone looking forward to the football, then? I realised a few days ago that my neutral stance had shifted, when I declined a Saturday night invitation "because I want to see the match". I shouldn't be too surprised, really, given my memories from '94 when I was screaming on the sofa while Jackie Charlton, like a crazed Mother Goose, tried to deliver bags of water to his dehydrated boys on the Atlanta pitch. It's hard to stay out of it. And though Ireland are really 'my team', I'll make do with England this time around (sticks pin in Thierry Henry voodoo doll.).

It was not always thus. For several key developmental years in my early teens, football was a genuine obsession, and my relationship with West Ham United (in those days 'the West Ham Academy of Football', oh yes) eclipsed almost all others. For me and my little girl-gang, it began as a broadly wholesome appreciation of sporting prowess in our twelfth year, when we paid 50p at the 'Boys Entrance' to the North Bank and stood bravely behind the goal sipping Bovril, and pretending not to be shocked at all the swearing going on around us. Within a year, though, our hormones were in full flood, the claret and blue scarves were worn tied around our skinny hips rather than our wrists, and our appreciation of the action on the pitch was of a very different kind. We had realised, without realising it, that a 22-year old full-time footballer presents a physicality so far removed from the pigeon-chested youths we knew in real life that they could have been a different species altogether. Our blood was up. We began to hunt West Ham United.

I must make it clear that we were not completely indiscriminate. West Ham in 1978 still retained a strong core of what we called 'old men' - players over the age of 26, like Trevor Brooking, Billy Bonds, Tommy Taylor, Frank Lampard ('Snr'), and the inexplicable Bryan 'Pop' Robson. These veterans were all very pleasant and would happily sign your programme (I still have a stack of them in the loft) after a game, but they were sensible and married, and some of them even had kids. Our sights were set among the younger squad members, some of whom had cars like Triumph Stags and Ford Capris (though we could never understand why Alvin Martin drove that horrible old Datsun.). And our 'hunting' of them took the form of hanging around the ground whenever we could, and repeatedly getting their autographs. I own so many examples of Mervyn Day's signature that these days, I would be suspected of planning an identity fraud. Back then, it was simply a crazed attempt to get noticed and then - what? None of us really wanted to 'go out' with them. They were simply transitional objects by which we learned to cope with feelings of agitated lust. And secretly, we suspected they might not be all that bright.

Then one day, things took an odd turn. We'd discovered the new team training ground at Chadwell Heath, and on a warm day at the close of the season, four of us slid onto the edge of the pitch to watch John Lyall (R.I.P) take the squad through its paces. I was getting a lot of nudging as The One I REALLY Liked had asked me my name the week before, suggested that I give him my autograph "for a change"(if you can conjure up the sound of a fifteen-year old's insane high-pitched giggle/shriek, you can insert it here), and then winked at me. As we sprawled on the grass in a loose line the following week, The One kicked a ball towards us, and amazingly, it bounced perfectly over each of us, one, two, three, four, before he ran over to retrieve it to the applause and laughter of his team mates. There was another wink for me, and a lot more nudging from my friends. I was crimson and thrilled. The training session ended and the players headed for the shower block, but within a few minutes, The One appeared at the door, hands on hips, nonchalantly gazing in every direction but ours and naked apart from a small white towel around his waist.

None of us had ever seen a real naked man before - we were working out the male anatomy by trial and error, strictly through clothes at parties and school discos - and the 19-year old professional sportsman confidently displaying his perfect body 50 yards away was simply more than we could handle. We lay on our stomachs and gaped at him in silence, though I remember Gill whispering "Jesus Christ", which seemed somehow appropriate. From the door, he turned, looked and winked, before strolling back inside. Without a word, we all got up and left. And though it was never discussed, we never went back. We stopped 'hunting', and the football in our lives found its way back onto the pitch. A couple of the others still have season tickets at Upton Park to this day, I believe, but no longer collect autographs.

Music took the place of football in my life, and I moved off in a different direction. But on the night of my seventeenth birthday I bumped - literally - into The One at a nightclub in East London. I looked at him, he looked at me, and there was immediate mutual recognition. I didn't even wait to see if he winked. I turned around and walked away. Some things should just stay as they are.

So, I'll be watching the World Cup, but probably not in the same feverish spirit that I once enjoyed football. And whoever wins, it won't have much of an impact on my day-to-day life, thank god. It is, after all, only a game.

Raki 'n' Roll

2010-06-03T17:09:00.001+01:00

Like a spoiled brat, I'd felt a bit lukewarm about travelling to Crete. 'Circumstances' forced us to cancel a longed-for hiking trip to the Picos de Europa in Northern Spain, so it felt like a bit of a compromise break, which indeed it was - the main aim was to get some sun and for L, whose recovery from his accident in January has not been good, to relax and get some rest. I wasn't expecting much beyond reasonable temperatures and some good fish (and I was fearful of ending up surrounded by puce British narwals in Manchester United Speedos bawling "Oy, Zorba" at all the waiters and vomiting ouzo into the gutters. You know what I mean?).
But, I eat my words along with the sea urchins. It's a beautiful, fascinating island with more history (natural and quite unnatural) than you could shake an Anthony Beevor hardback at. It was the perfect environment for me to relax into the knowledge that I am, in middle age, happily becoming a complete stiff. A long afternoon gaping at the tiny, perfectly-blown, three thousand year old Minoan glass bottles in the Chania Museum of Archaeology? I was there. Get up at 6am on a Sunday, to travel up a windy mountainous road for two hours on a bus (with a plastic bag which didn't half come in handy when the inevitable travel sickness kicked in - I was eight years old again), to walk a massive, stunning and deserted gorge for three hours? That was me. Finish four books? Oh yes. Just call me Marjorie and get me into those Crimpelene trousers. I'm there.

So along with my strong endorsement of Crete, its people (friendly, humorous, laconic - "Do the right thing. Pay us off for the damned Elgin Marbles. Hand us over the cash, and you never hear from us again."), its grub (simple, fresh, delicious), and its culture (Greece just peaked too early, that's all), here are a few memories:

1. The tall serious German man who arrived at breakfast sporting a t-shirt which bore the slogan "CRACK! UP! BOOM!". What are they ON?

2. The arrival of an American honeymoon couple, she sporting the largest pair of knockers (NOT bestowed by Mother Nature) that I've seen since my old friend directed me to her Facebook album (past post). As she stalked along the beach in her bikini, blocking out the sun, she left a trail of identical and hilarious reaction - double-takes, giggling, male eyes popping out on stalks, and an outbreak of comedic slapping and scolding from the wives of the older couples.

3. A huge shaven-headed Teutonic brute, striding through the streets of Chania in full fatigues and wearing a t-shirt bearing the slogan 'Luftwaffe 1946', eyes darting back and forth eagerly as he waited to see if anyone would bother to challenge him. The invasion and subsequent battle for Crete (read Beevor's excellent book) had been commemorated by surviving veterans and families in Chania just two days earlier. Shits happen, everywhere.

4. Eating sea urchins. Urchins...ummm.....

5. On the last night, we opted for a quiet visit to a local village where the taverna did great roast meaty dishes. There was a power cut just after we arrived and the waitresses dashed around apologetically with candles while the chef wrestled with the food by torchlight. There was shouting in the darkness, and I assumed a Cretan 'Uncle Loco' was probably entertaining his nephews and nieces with silly faces and a bit of roaring. Then women's voices joined in and there was the sound of slapping. A babble of angry voices poured into the square. As the lights came back on one of the women was framed slapping her husband, who looked to have just landed one on her. The restaurant owner went over and shooed at them in a 'I'm trying to run a business here' way, and got a mouthful of something colloquial from another of the women. With a lot more slapping and jabbing the violent parade moved in procession around the square, until an old man decided he'd seen enough and hit the Main Man over the head with his walking stick.
This was a cue for wild-west style explosive violence. Within five minutes, three vans of riot police and four police motorbikes roared into the square, and there was something of a full-on battle. The old man was bellowing. his victim (slicked back hair, black open-necked shirt with medallion, portly and punchy) was bellowing back with a selection of gestures, and the women were now united in a shrieking Greek chorus of outrage that their Man was about to be taken away by the rotten old cops. The restaurant owner sank down on a stool and shook her head as they cuffed the defiantly wriggling villain. "Always same." she told us, "always same. He rent house from old man, they drink, he say he not pay rent to old man. Always same with Bulgari." I don't think she was talking about the jewellery firm.

By the time we got back to our hotel she had rung the owner, to tell him of her disgrace and fury that guests of his (and customers of hers) should have had to witness such terrible events. We were more preoccupied by then by the lousy punk who'd thrown a traffic cone at L from a passing scooter, and had hit him on the leg. The owner's grief abounded. "But,"he admitted, "In Greece it is never boring."

So take pity on the poor Greeks, and if you're looking for a great break, think about Crete. They really need your Euros, and a lot of the entertainment is free.

Love to Hate

2010-05-21T18:01:00.000+01:00

Don't you hate it when one of your all-time hate figures does something you really like? For example, I've always been intensely relaxed about loathing Michael 'Polly' Portillo. He's been a perfect pantomime villain for me since the 80s - that cruel, conquistador's face with its liver lips, beneath the cockscomb pompadoured quiff - in his diabolical prime, Polly always seemed like a man who had just heaved himself off a whore, before heading off to feed live kittens to a crocodile for sport. How I bayed at the television every time he popped up, smirking, behind Thatcher or Major (who at least had the sense to refer to him as one of the 'bastards' in his Cabinet), and how I laughed with the rest of the country when he lost out to Stephen Twigg in 1997 and chewed the inside of his face as Jeremy Paxman invited him "to drink hemlock".

But now the swine has confounded me by presenting a fascinating, balanced and intelligent three-parter on Democracy, on Radio 4. I've listened to the two pieces which have already gone out twice, and was astounded to hear an apparently wiser and more humble Polly than I could ever have imagined admit that he got it wrong in the 80s, by failing to appreciate the socially and economically disasterous consequences that the inequalities generated by the unbridled capitalism of his political era, were bound to cause. He didn't even sound like he was smirking when he said it. And it's not just his personal 'hair shirt moment' that has made the series so riveting - it's well-researched, relevant, and thought-provoking. I've always felt strongly that Government and Politics should be a compulsory subject up to GCSE level in schools - the prospect of a supposedly educated electorate arriving at voting age with, in the main, barely a clue about how political institutions work, or how political ideas evolved, is to me a nonsense and a waste. Programmes like this remind me again of how absolutely bloody right I am. And I mean that in a benevolently despotic sense. Ask Plato.

Anyway, whatever next? Nigel Havers reveals himself to be an absolute sweetie? Shirley Porter gives back all that money? Thatcher has a deathbed conversion (just the deathbed bit would do it for me, as it goes.)? Please don't deprive me of any more of my villains. We all need our hate figures.

And with that, I'm off on holiday until June 2. If anyone messes with my blog while I'm gone, I'll know.

Pip pip.