Local Wonders For Local People

Oh, Robyn! You do set us some tasks. But I enjoy them all, so I'm not complaining.
Today, we have Robyn's Seven Wonders challenge. Seven small, local wonders from where you live.

I'd probably put the interweb as one of the big modern wonders, especially for saddoes like myself, but as for small local wonders for small local people. Here goes:

(1) The Norfolk Broads:
For reasons given in many a previous discussion.

(2) The Norfolk Coast:
Endless bird sanctuaries, nature reserves, lovely seals, mile after mile of golden sand and marram that's completely undeveloped, and we intend to keep it that way … Just stay away from it. All of you! It's ours!

(3) The noise in my garden:
Other than birdsong and rustling leaves, it is totally silent. When I get back home from the screaming howl of ear-battering decibels that is London, I can sit with a glass of wine and just let the stress fall away. Bliss.
I'm off flightpaths and well away from roads, and my wonderfully quiet neighbours are a respectable distance away. In such a crowded and noisy little island, it's priceless.

(4) Norwich Cathedral:
Started by Bishop Hubert de Losinga in 1068 as penance for having been a very naughty boy indeed, one of our oldest and most beautiful cathedrals; filled to the brim with Saxon/Norman splendour and thankfully overlooked by the massed tourist armies as we are such a determinedly grumpy and isolationist county.

(5) Ethelbert Gate:
The north-west gate to the cathedral close, not built by Ethel and Bert, but by the good peasants of Norwich as penance (once again - we're good at that) for having a lovely socialist revolt and burning the monastery down and kicking Norman butt.
Beautiful stone carvings, including a splendid dragon.

(6) Norfolk's churches:
For a time, around a thousand years ago, we were about the wealthiest little place on the planet. And what did we do with all that dosh? We gave it some mediæval bling.
We built churches; supposedly to the glory of God, but usually to the glory of the local landowner. Nearly one thousand of the things were put up. Most survive and over six hundred are still in use as places of worship. We have more Saxon, Norman and early mediæval churches than anyone else, so there!
While I was training, part of my job was to carry out quinquennial inspections on this lot. Probably the one thing I miss the least of all the pains in my life is hanging off the undersides of eight-hundred year old oak bellframes, rotted to powder, clinging to crumbling stonework, two hundred feet above a nice stone floor … Brrrr … I still shudder to think about it.

(7) A small, blue plaque set in the walls of the cathedral precinct opposite St. Martin's Church:
In 1549, bolshie lot that we are, Norfolk's peasants had yet another stab at socialist revolt.
This one was led by Robert Kett, and just outside Wymondham (that's 'Windum' to you foreigners) is the old oak under which he started to get a bit shirty.
Around fifteen thousand peasants stormed Norwich and set up camp on what is now Kett's Hill.

That's the view from it. Lovely.
Lord Sheffield, a particularly nasty and arrogant grasping landowner, came and besieged them with what then constituted the British army. They spent their time carousing in Norwich while Kett and his men simply walked around behind them and stole all their artillery …
… with which they proceeded to pound Sheffield's motley crew from the hill. Hee hee.
The best bit was when Sheffield got all shouty at them outside St.Martin's Church, fell off his horse onto his head and snuffed it. Treble hee hee's all round.
That's what the blue plaque commemorates.
Eventually, Kett was betrayed for money (as always) and hanged, but it was still a good try, and I still smile every time I pass the plaque …

So, the seven wonders of my part of Norfolk. Now it's your turn …

Uneventful Morning

Mondays … Why do I love 'em?

This morning the train is forty minutes late getting in to London (nothing new there); next we have a jumper on the tube, so it's "everybody off" and jog the four miles to Westminster.
I get in, have my second shower of the day, change my clothes (I keep a spare set at the office as this is a fairly regular routine), grab a latte from the Brazilian coffee shop and am about to start work when little Jo, my secretary sneaks up and digs me in the ribs, sending half the latte down my front.
Then the fire alarm goes off …

Oh joy.

At least I can get a top up for my coffee as we're all standing outside in the cold drizzle. And the firemen are a nice treat for the girls. False alarm, as always.
Nathalie in the coffee shop laughs at my re-designed shirt and advises me to try drinking this coffee, not wearing it.

Now I have to forgo the sushi bar at luchtime and go buy some new clothes …
Standing in the rain with my new coffee, my boss comes over to admire my stain and tells me she's put me up another pay grade, backdated to September.

Whether I am supposed to draw some moral lesson from these events is beyond me. But I'm left with the feeling that some mondays are just plain groovy.

Back Door Blog

I don't know quite what those "splendid" folks at Google are trying to tell us here, but I was just having a look at Old Knudsen's comments when I noticed this rather cute and cryptic message at the bottom of the window:


I know it's not unique to Old K's site; Robyn's does it too, but the old man seemed a more apposite association …

Fornication Invitation

I drove past Norwich's big, scary evangelical Christian church this morning. Or at least the building site, as somebody burnt it to the ground a little while back.
The rebuilding is taking place at an astonishing pace; perhaps we should award the construction contract for the 2012 Olympics to the evangelists, as the government are so pants that they will never get it built on time.

Now I have never really given much thought to the evangelists, to the extent that I'm still at a loss to know what branch of what church they profess to being (they're commonly known around here as "that big old cult [that's c-u-L-t-, Knudsen] place up on the ring road near Mousehold").
The only time their path crosses mine is the event of their annual cultathon (or whatever they call it), where they take over the football stadium for the weekend and bring the city to a standstill. The roads are gridlocked with tens of thousands of extremely polite Americans dressed like extras from the Waltons, which means I either avoid the city altogether or end up with smiley-noddy syndrome from all the excessive politeness.

Then it all changes …

I am travelling back from London on the train. It is packed as usual, but I manage to get a window seat and settle in for the long crawl back to Norwich.
Beside me is what can only be termed a lovely little old lady. Grey hair in a bun; old fashioned frock; reading quietly.
Halfway home; I've finished the paper and the crossword and am about to start on my book when along comes the trolley and the little old lady orders a coffee. Now, I've got a couple of free coffee vouchers in my wallet and, to reward her for not being a fat, elbowy businessman shouting into a mobile phone, I offer to treat her to coffee (big mistake).
She has a charming smile and thanks me sweetly as she accepts.
The trolley squeaks off down the aisle and she turns to me and says:

"That was really very kind of you. Are you a Christian?"

Not wishing to offend her with "Well I was brought up as a Christian, but when my brain started to work I rebelled and became the Godless heathen you see before you", I nod and say "Yes".

And suddenly people are turning and staring. A dozen faces all around me focus on my own. The blank eyes and rictus smiles of … uh, oh … evangelists!

"We're Christians" says the little old lady. "Which Church are you from?"
I start to dissemble. I'm stuck with these people for the next hour at least, and I really don't want to upset the little old lady, so I talk about my old church from childhood.
Luckily, she goes off on a long one about the lovely day they've all had in London at a "miracle ministry" or somesuch. I nod and smile in what I judge to be the right places. The scary faces are still locked on mine. Surely their necks must ache from being twisted round like that …

My heart sinks still further when she rummages in her bag and presses a bundle of tracts into my hand.
"You really must come along to our Church."
I hazard a guess: "Is that the big one up near Mousehold?"
I'm blinded by a communal BEAM from the surrounding faces.

The little old lady continues, but by now I am trying to make excuses, so she goes to plan 'B'.
She has noticed that I don't have a wedding ring and I fess up to my single status …
"This is my daughter, Emma."
And she waves to a drop-dead gorgeous girl in her twenties, who flashes me the kind of shy smile I wouldn't even get in my wildest fantasies.
"Emma is a member of our Church. She doesn't have a young man …"

WHAT?
I mean WHAT THE FUCK?

An increasingly surreal conversation follows, with the gorgeous girl smiling at me and her mad pimp mother telling me about all the young women who attend the Church, and how so many of them are reaching "marriageable age" with no "young men" of their own …

I want to tell her to look closely at me. I am a man in my forties. Would she really want me interfering with her daughter?

I want to yell at her; to tell her that in my experience, the Christian Church does not recruit members by offering strange, middle-aged men the chance to fornicate with the young women of their congregation.

The trouble is, Emma is … er … well, let's just say that she has got me all unneccessary. Even though I know that the beautiful girl's smile is the last thing I will see before the brainwashing starts and my bank account develops a Church-sized hole, I am almost tempted …

Somehow, I manage to last the rest of the journey without actually signing any banker's drafts, but the hard sell continues full force, and as I wave farewell to the group at the station and to the beautiful, smiling Emma, I realise I have agreed to attend a service there the next weekend. They certainly know how to prey on weak and lonely men …

Perhaps there is some kind of twisted deity watching over me, because that very week the big old culty Church burns to the ground …

And I T … W A S … N O T … M E !

Honest …

And even when it's rebuilt, there's no amount of gorgeous young girls gonna drag me in there!
I promise … Really … I do … er …

Hello Ian

It's around this time of year that old Dive gets a touch of the lonelies.

I don't know what it is about witches but they seem to cast a spell over me (sorry). Come All Hallow's Eve, and I'm filled with irresistible cravings:

• baked apples with loads of cinnamon;
• all kinds of squash (sorry, Robyn);
• sweet chestnuts straight off the tree;
• gleefully kicking leaves all over the garden instead of raking them;
• shouting at small children who buy their costumes instead of making them;
• shouting at small children, period …

… but most of all, that old annual ennui, the deep, deep longing for the woman in black …

Be it Willow Rosenberg, Jill Thompson's wonderful Scary Godmother (above), Connie Booth with a root vegetable over her nose in Python's Holy Grail … there's just something about a witch that's, well … bewitching.
They're just a little bit kooky and a little bit spooky, and I like that in a girl.

That said; from where I have breakfast on a saturday morning*, I can see what they call the "alternative lifestyle" section of Otto's bookshop (where they keep the books on Wiccan practices). Sadly, the modern witch seems to be a dumpy woman in her late thirties who has forgotten to have children and daren't come out as gay.

The decline in standards seems to me symptomatic of the modern world. A witch who pigs junk food and watches reality TV when she should be dancing naked round a yew tree or setting fire to Edward Woodward in a big old basket.

A plea, then: (I've always thought advertising yourself was for pathetic losers, but if Sassy can do online dating, then I can do online pleading) …
If there are any of the stripey-tights brigade still out there who are as skinny as death and as weird-looking and spooky as the Corpse Bride, you know where to find me.

*The coffee shop upstairs at what used to be Ottakar's but is now the new Waterstone's bookshop, Norwich; nine a.m. every saturday.

No pointing and laughing!

Politics, Religion And Death

Woohoo! The big three!

If anyone hasn't been over to Intelligent America today, we've been having a real humdinger of a day, poking Politics, Religion and Death with a stick and running away.

In lieu of a post of my own, Sassy's post "On Idealism And Compromise" has opened a real can of worms, provoking such a stimulating set of comments that I feel obliged to order those of my dear readers who haven't taken part to get over there and read it now.

Wrong

Thanks again to Taihae for pointing me at the Superdickery website.
Being a 1950s kid, raised on superhero comics, this has provided me with a lifetime's worth of cackling mirth and innuendo, crammed into a few sweet lunch hours.
What's left of the office (see posts passim) have joined the fun and sprayed their lunches over their monitors.

Go there.

Drink deep from the well of glee.

Much as I'd like to steal every single image from the site, I'll be a good boy and restrict myself to this:

Now there's wrong and there's wrong …
But surely, in the long history of wrongness, there has never been anything wronger than this.
Just plain wrong …

Having said that; I want one … eBay here I come …

Pretentious Twat

So, we blunder innocently into the self-analytical quagmire that is Robyn's soundtrack challenge.
Musical tastes decade by decade.
Are you all sitting comfortably? This could take a while; I've lived through an awful lot of decades …

Having been concieved and born to the sound of rock and roll (1958), my earliest musical experience must have been of dad's big box of 78s; early Elvis (I remember loving "That's All Right, Mama"), Little Richard, et al; blagged off US airmen while he was tooling around the Med on nuclear bombers in the fifties.

As for actual clear, childhood memories: I remember sitting on the floor of our dank little terraced house (the one with the outside privy, full of spiders and darkness, that haunted my early years), gazing up at the small patch of grey sky, just visible above the rain-washed houses over the road; lost in the sounds of Wout Steenhuis - a Dutch slide guitar player - and mum's LP of Hawaiian singers. The dream of escape; of sunshine; of something better.

We had a battered old upright piano in the front room. Mum and dad would belt out boogie woogie on it. Or mum would sneak up behind Tchaikovsky, then leap on him and the two of them would go head to head like a couple of sumo wrestlers. She was pretty good. She got the odd smackdown. Her mum used to sing and play piano for the silent movies and taught her well. Mum also played at the Sunday School in the old mission hall at the top of the road while we bothered God.
She tried to teach me piano when I was three, but then Uncle Bernie went and fucked up my life big time by giving me a little guitar …

First single bought with pocket money: "Message to Martha"; a Burt Bacharach song covered by Adam Faith. I also remember loving "Three Little Fishes" …
Then came The Beatles …
I was a fanatic. I had the little Beatles suit, all the records and nonsense that they released.
Then one day, I sat in front of the old Dansette, worked out the riff to "I Feel Fine", bought a pick-up for the guitar and an old valve amp and embarked on a life of reprobate behaviour.
The soundtrack to my sixties was The Beatles and Radio Caroline. They were a pirate station, operating off a trawler in international waters just down the coast from us, playing only album tracks. Until they sunk in the seventies, they were my food and drink. We even had our own pirate station for a while, with their help and advice. Radio Maidstone. Operating from above a friend's dad's chip shop in Lowestoft, playing mostly our own stuff. Heady days …

Then along came hormones and girls and kinda put a stop to all that.

In the early seventies, I was in prog heaven. Our band covered Yes and Genesis and Mahavishnu stuff (I played lead guitar; I was a precocious little bastard); while mum and dad filled the house with west coast rock and things were, well … groovy.
I also sung tenor in the school and the church choirs for a while (a cheap way to pick up girls); I can still remember most of Verdi's Requiem. But then came the almost physical shock of hearing Stravinski's Rite of Spring, and choir went straight out the window.

Back at school I was chummy with the deputy headmistress; we had a shared greed for avant-garde music and Japanese opera. Which was great, because while everyone else had to wear uniform, she let me wear my ratty old afghan coat and grow my hair long. She also let my band play gigs at the school, which was pretty unheard of back then.

Then along came punk.
I turned eighteen in '76 and it was a blast. Pistols, Clash, Patti Smith. I didn't really care that everybody suddenly hated virtuouso guitar playing; I managed my mate's punk band and headed off to college, where I discovered Bob Marley, dropped out, and then endless years of gigs and sessions followed in something of a blur …

There seems to be a big hole in my memory. I'll have to check through my vinyl when I get home and find out what happened in the eighties. Sitting here, I really don't have a clue. I do remember some really horrible things/bands/people/events, but that's probably best left in the box marked "Used Decades" and tucked out of sight.

The next thing I can remember is Pixies and Nirvanva and discovering Steve Albini and then Bongwater.

Robyn's right. The older I get, the more stuff I like. I still love anything extreme, but I'll listen to everything from country to opera to metal to rap … whatever … as long as it's the real thing: music from musicians who care about what they do.
The only thing I won't listen to is "product" … oh, and power ballads … and light operetta … but anything else goes …

I just read that back. Ye gods, I sound like a pretentious twat! Oh, well. Thanks, Robyn, for a self-revealing - and somewhat prolonged - afternoon coffee break.

Hee hee hee

Hee hee hee hee hee … etc.
This is just too funny not to post.
It's a link to I Framed Roger Rabbit's blog and it made me laugh so much I nearly threw up.

Thank you, Taihae.

4,8,15,16,23,42

Shitty shit.
I hate myself for being so sensible with my groats.
Tomorrow, half the office fly out to Fiji for Kaf's wedding; then on thursday, half the band and the inbred village of ––––– (see posts passim) fly out to bloody Hawai'i to see Rod and Sharon get nuptualised.
Me? I'm going home in the rain, because I've "sensibly" decided to put the money toward a much needed extension to the house …
Shitty shit …

If any one of them checks out their tan against my pasty English November complexion, they're getting a slap.
I just hope they have to crash land on some isolated bloody island with nothing but polar bears and boring flashbacks and some stupid tin box full of nonsense to keep them company …

I'm normally so happy on a monday, but today I feel like Morrissey's writing a song about me …

Ho hum …
Apropos of absolutely bugger all, Niall from IT caught me twirling my Wacom pen this morning as I was attempting to explain to him the relative usefulness of our IT department and a fishnet condom.
"Cool", he said; "How do you do that?"
I advised him to get out of IT and acquire a life. But it reminded me of that bit at the start of Buffy where she twirls the old wooden stake.
Being a totally sad goitre, I once slowed that bit down on the DVD to see how she did it better than me. What an idol-shattering moment …
She has a big fat rubber band wrapped around her middle finger and just opens her hand and lets the thing go! Check it out for yourself. What a swizz!
And yes, I have the big box of Buffy on DVD. I am that sad. That's where a classical education gets you; sitting home alone on a rainy saturday watching old episodes of Buffy …
And now it's monday. And it's raining.

I'm going to go home and slam every door in the house …
Shitty shit.

A Bit Of Perspective

As morning breaks, I'm still listening to the ethereally lovely Regina Spektor album Peahen sent me yesterday. Ms. Spektor has a way with words that betrays a love of twisting and playing with language, and which is both funny and occasionally startling.
The DVD is great, too; an endearing home-made feel to it.
A little bit kooky and a little bit spooky … Love it.

As I'm in the middle of a splendidly entertaining day's drudgery and chores, I don't have time to think of anything to write, so here's one of my favourite cartoons (I have a copy framed on my bathroom wall to put things in perspective when I'm still mentally screaming in anguish from having to get up in the middle of the night and set forth on the commute from hell; I find it very comforting). I hope it puts any troubles you might have in perspective, too.





Grovelling apologies to the great Kyle Baker for reproducing his work without permission. But, hey; this isn't for profit, Kyle; it's to persuade people to go out and buy your stuff.
Kyle draws my very favourite cartoon woman (outside of the world of Love and Rockets, that is): Anne Merkel, heroine of his wonderful book "Why I Hate Saturn". Go buy it today.
Jessica Rabbit eat your heart out. Anne is neurotic, drunk, clever, funny, and totally fucked up and she'll always be the cartoon gal for me.

Spiffy Present

I've just been dreaming up my own fantasy Santa for Robyn's mad weekend assignment.
For my Santa, I envisage a strange, skinny goth girl with scary eyes who lives under kids' beds and has PMS at Christmas and comes out and screams at them "It's Not All About You, You Little Shits!"

In an odd twist, it seems to have brought into existence a very similar, though not quite so shouty creature; a kind of personal birthday-santa; a real life tall, skinny, not-goth but still pretty odd girl who sends a present several weeks before my birthday, then calls me up and has me open it as I'm typing my fantasy Santa to Robyn.

I open the birthday package to find a picture of a strange, skinny goth girl with scary eyes.

I like it when this sort of oddness happens. It reinforces my view of the world as fucked-up, but occasionally delightfully so.
The picture is on the front of a CD/DVD by Regina Spektor called Mary Ann Meets The Gravediggers. It is utterly wonderful. Dark, sexy and very odd indeed. Ms. Spektor is very much a fan of the wonderful Edward Gorey. Lots of Gorey style illustrations throughout the little booklet. I'm listening to it rather too loudly in the studio right now and will probably just pour myself a nice glass of wine and let it play into the early hours.

So. Thank you Peahen, for an absolutely lovely present.
This is Peahen, sitting behind Helen. She'll hate me for posting this, but I like it, so there you go.

Lost In Translation

Warning: Very long and extraordinarily boring post about translators (it's a bugbear of mine).

Coming as it does after the news that foreign language teaching in British schools is declining at a suicidal rate, Robyn's delightfully silly post on wordplay gets me all 'thinky'.

First off, it reminds me how appallingly bad my Portuguese has got after ten years of neglect. So after yesterday evening's somewhat Pythonesque Japanese class, I go to bed with Luis Camõens (so to speak).

Jorge introduces me to Camõens when I'm struggling to learn Portuguese back in the eighties. He tells me I can never truly understand the "soul of Lusitania" until I know Portuguese history and culture, but especially Os Lusíadas. I immediately rush out and buy the Penguin Classic translation, "The Lusiads".
er … Jorge? … What's all the fuss about? This is as dull as ditchwater.
Jorge clips me round the ear and sends me off to buy a copy in the original mediæval Portuguese (we are in Portugal at the time; every bookshop has one). He has me stand and read aloud, helping me with any archaic phrases.
It blows me away. This is glorious, inspiring, truly epic. I feel as if I'm Prospero, raging at the Tempest.
Why had I not heard of the "Portuguese Shakespeare" before? Jorge points me at the translation; the primary source for Camõens in the English language.

As armas e os barões assinalados
Que, da Ocidental praia Lusitania …

… which the Penguin translation has down as:

This is the story of heroes who,
leaving their native Portugal behind them,
opened a path to Ceylon …

WHAT?
This is not so much a translation as a bad, sixth form commentary. Where is the poetry? Where is the stirring imagery? The rolling cadences? No wonder Camõens is so neglected here. The translation we have is an utterly uninspiring bunch of arse!
I acknowledge that there has to be a trade off between literal translation and poetic license, but this is so dire …

Luckily, some people still care about language. The great modern Portuguese novelist and Nobel laureate Jose Saramago has been blessed with probably the finest translator on the planet; the late and sorely missed Giovanni Pontiero.
O ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis is one of my all time favourite books, and Pontiero's translation is a work of genius. Go buy it (The Year Of The Death Of Ricardo Reis - warning: it's a bit 'modern' and bleak) and marvel.
Saramago can be a difficult bugger, even in Portuguese, but Pontiero's translation leaves me awestruck. Passages of such beauty that I have to stop and let them wash over me before I can read on. His translation of Saramago's The Gospel According To Jesus Christ is equally dazzling.

Vikram Seth is another one. Most people know him for "A Suitable Boy", his wonderful Indian epic. But for me, his masterpiece is "Three Chinese Poets" ISBN 0-06-095024-2; translations from the T'ang dynasty poets Wang Wei, Li Bai and Du Fu.
In his introduction, he gives an explanation of how he has translated the poems, using as an example, Wang Wei's "Living In The Hills: Impromptu Verses."
Seth gives us the original Chinese characters, with both a phonetic and a literal translation of each character underneath.
He then explains how he has rendered this into English, while retaining the original meaning together with the rhyme and structure. It is inspiring to read and a revealing insight into how much work goes into translating a piece into something which is valid both literally and artistically.
Here's one of his translated poems; Li Bai's "Listening To A Monk From Shu Playing The Lute".
Write it down, then go find a quiet space to read it a few times and let each word and phrase sink in.

The monk from Shu with his green lute-case walked
Westward down Emei Shan, and at the sound
Of the first notes he strummed for me I heard
A thousand valleys' rustling pines resound.
My heart was cleansed, as if in flowing water.
In bells of frost I heard the resonance die.
Dusk came unnoticed over the emerald hills
And autumn clouds layered the darkening sky.

If that doesn't lift your heart, then your soul must have been eaten by spiders while you slept.

Good teaching of foreign languages is essential, and our woefully underfunded Department of Education is likely to suffer more cutbacks after the next election, to fund tax cuts for the rich. If languages are neglected, how can people truly understand what is being said by others?
Tracking down and reading the original source material is the only way to find the truth behind any news story. If that source material is in another language, then, as we have seen, you cannot necessarily count on a translator of the standard of Pontiero or Seth.
This is especially pertinent when it comes to our relations with Islam. All most of us in the west know is based on hearsay or third-hand spin from so-called "authorities" and commentators.

I have a rule:
If I am to criticize something, be it Islam or US foreign policy or something as trivial as Shona's latest hair colour, then I must first know what I'm talking about; find the source material behind the stories.
For America (and Shona), this is fairly easy, but for Islam?
If you want to criticise Islam and have anyone respect your opinion, try this simple exercise:
First read up on the history. For anyone starting out on this path, Prof. Albert Hourani's "A Short History Of The Arab Peoples" is an easily accessible and balanced place to start.
Next, hit the bibliography and get online. Source material.
Read the Koran (again a Penguin Classic translation, but a better one than their Camõens) and the Life of Mohammad, visit your local mosque and talk to people.
If you want to, learn some Arabic:
Bismillahi ar-Rahman ar-Raheem …
(In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate) …
It's a beautiful thing to roll around your tongue.
And here's the important part:

With comprehension comes understanding.
With understanding, fear of the unknown disappears.
Ignorance breeds fear.
Here in the west, our governments keep themselves in power using the Orwellian theory of "Fear = Control".
Since 9/11, the US government (followed slavishly by our own, led by Bush's personal buttplug) has kept it's population permanently and ignorantly wetting their pants, while all hopes for peace, truth and understanding get flushed straight down the shitter.

Do something good. Learn another language. Help keep us talking to one another, rather than bombing the shit out of the innocent (that goes for both sides) …

End of rant.

Hmm … That kind of changed tack halfway through. Mister Shoutytrousers is never far away when I'm writing, but I fear he has a point in this case …

Gene Puddle

Rod phones to remind me that he's off to Hawai'i with Sharon next week.
Rod is the band's sound engineer, Sharon is one third of the best three girl backing-vocal group on this or any other planet. They are off to Hawai'i to get married on a beach in Honolulu at sunset, sometime early next month.

Bastards! What's wrong with Britain in November? What's wrong with horizontal sleet? What's wrong with sub-zero howling gales? Eh?
I'm just grumpy because they invited me and I stupidly decided to stay home (I'm on a saving frenzy, ready to extend the house next year and form a proper library before my thousands of stupid books reach critical mass and collapse into a black hole, sucking in all life on the planet).

So, copious and effusive congratulations overflow in Rod and Sharon's general direction.

We'll be having one hell of a party when they return. A little virgin sacrifice, some dancing with goats, hog wrestling, dwarf tossing … you know the kind of thing … Live and very loud music, quaffage on a Niagara scale, some serious cake abuse and maybe even some balloons.
Norfolk will be laid waste to an extent not seen since the Vikings got a bit frisky twelve hundred years ago.

Cue one of those swirly effect things as I invite you, dear reader, to pop back in time with me to the very first of Rod's parties …

Rod and Sharon are not Norfolk natives. They have the usual complement of fingers and un-webbed toes. Yet for some reason - probably a shared interest in evolutionary anthropology and a twisted sense of humour - they live in the remote countryside, just outside the village of –––––.
––––– is one of those tiny coastal villages cut off from the land by marshes for thousands of years. You remember the village in Hitchcock's "The Birds"? I get that same sense of creeping dread, of some nameless abomination stalking me as I crest the low ridge and stare nervously down at the wide, bleak sweep of coastline with the tiny and very isolated little community clinging to the dunes. The kind of place where they'd never marry a first cousin if a sister was available.
"Deliverance" is a walk in the park compared to rural Norfolk.

This is waaay back in the mists of time; the last flaring embers of a dying millennium …
Claire (another third of Sharon's vocal group) is turning eighteen and Rod decides to organise a surprise party in ––––– village hall. It's quite a feat of map-reading to even find the place, so I'm relieved to see Rod's car parked outside a long, low building.
Entering the hall alone and unsuspecting, I walk in to a scene which has provided more than a few sleepless nights in the intervening years. Before I get a chance to scream, something that might, in pre-Cambrian times, have been classed as female lurches toward me with a look that shouts "NEW GENETIC MATERIAL"!
It's "Dawn Of The Dead" with party dresses on!
In a desperate bid to keep our honour intact, Rod and I barricade ourselves in the kitchen and stay there for the rest of the night (this is one hundred percent true)!
The gene pool in ––––– is not Olympic sized … not even paddling pool sized … maybe not even a gene puddle … more of a genetic damp patch.
As for evolution: when you've struggled out of the sea and up into the dunes, why bother going any further?
These people never even made it up into the trees in the first place …

Rod and Sharon have since settled in there surprisingly well. They seem to be looked on as some kind of alien exotica by the Morloks (remember "The Time Machine")? I've even been back there myself on occasion. Whenever I get the slightest tingling of a nascent desire to produce offspring, a trip to the pub in ––––– is all it takes to kill it stone dead.
I have kept the name of ––––– a secret as I don't want to end up being burned inside a giant wicker man the next time I'm down that way …

But back to the present (cue: swirly thing) …
I have in front of me a glass of stupidly expensive, cask strength Islay malt whisky. Here's to Rod and Sharon. May they live ludicrously happily ever after.

Heartbreak Soup

For Sassy, here's that L'n'R poster in full:

It's an old 1992, ten year anniversary book signing poster. Dean and Lisa gave it to me when the comic shop (see links) moved from an indoor market to its current, more salubrious surroundings, as I'm their biggest L'n'R fan. So now it looms splendidly over my mixing desk.

Los Bros restarted the series a while back, so if you thought it was all over after issue 50, get on down to your local comic shop and catch up. If you can't get the originals, the latest collections are: Dicks and Deedees for Las Locas, and Luba in America for Palomar fans.
Heartbreaking. Hilarious. Real life as it should be, and still the best comic ever produced.

The Pit Of Sadness

This is for Robyn (Scout).
Thanks for humbling me with the pictures of your lovely tidy Cave. As threatened, this is the Pit of Sadness, where I post when I'm at home.


When the studio's up and running, this becomes the control / mixing room. It's all tucked away fairly "neatly" at the moment, but when there's a drum kit in the third bedroom and a load of mikes and wires trailing all over the top floor of the house it gets a whole lot messier (that's not counting a bunch of reprobate musicians and beer) …

That's Uncle Gabby, the sock monkey, sitting in the seat of power. He thinks he's the Jedi Master of the mixing desk, but I find his mixes tend to be a bit wooly (sorry) …

Whenever todos as familias are next in Blighty, you're more than welcome to come and add some hot horn to the mix. I promise not to roast squash in your presence …

Monday, Monday

I am the freak who likes mondays.

Well, I spent most of sunday doing housework, mowing the lawns, cleaning the car, washing and ironing and moaning, so this morning it's nice to get into "work" and play architect.
Lovely sunny morning again. Cool and crisp. Sun sparkling off the old Thames. Splendid.
Would I rather design buildings or do the ironing? Wash up the dinner things or dick around with 3D software? No contest. Hence, I'm the annoying guy who smiles all through monday morning's rush hour. Hee hee …

Carrying on from the Happy House post, this is what I'm getting up to at "work" at the moment:


This morning, I am working (working?) on a cod-Elizabethan art school. Why anyone should want to build a cod-Elizabethan art school in century twenty-one is quite beyond me, but it's more fun than ironing, so I'm not going to argue. These are some screen shots:

It's early stages yet. First off is big bits of paper and lots of felt pen scribbles, then this stage, where I try to hoodwink the planners. After that, it's working drawings, then arguing with builders on site, then gnashing my teeth and cursing at design awards ceremonies.
I'll be out on site tomorrow, shouting at the builders of my "stealth building" (basically, a performing arts centre with lots of odd roof planes that looks a bit like an exploding stealth bomber). If you don't behave yourselves, I might post some of that when the dust settles.


At this stage, I haven't added any stonework or textures, so it all looks a bit cardboardy, but I'll probably post some more when it's all done and lit and landscaped, like the ones in the Happy House post.


This, by the way, is my chair (hello chair). And my Mister Greedy collection of computers (currently 3 Mac G5s and a Powerbook, but I'm always hassling IT for more). This is where I'm sitting when I do a lot of my posting (like this one), as the alleged broadband exchange in my village is made from mud and straw and keeps cutting out halfway through sending stuff.


The G5 on the left and the one hiding under the desk I mainly use linked together for big renders, VR and animations; the laptop is great for watching movies (er … I mean working) on the train.


And this is my main squeeze. Japanese crib sheets stuck to the G5, boxes of green tea, headphones and iPod and my Wacom pad. And lots of lovely mess.
That's Pauline and Tim in the background. They are being really productive this morning and booking Pauline's flights to Fiji and Melbourne for Kaf's wedding.

Apologies for being boring and smug, but at least it's more wholesome than yesterday's perv-fest.

Train Stiffy

It's difficult to write when, five time zones and an ocean away, far beyond hugging range, someone is wandering around, picking up pieces of her heart and trying to reassemble them into something that works.

That situation is just too awful for words, so I'll be my usual facetious and offensive self and write about my embarrassing stiffy on the train.

It's last friday morning. This time of year, daylight gets rationed and it's dark for the journey to work. A girl takes the seat in front of me. Not a regular commuter. Pretty. Late teens. I'm dozing, in and out of sleep. Joan As Police Woman is playing on my iPod; that nice track where she duets with Antony, you know the one.
After Manningtree, the train is full as usual. Sweaty Bike Man sits next to me, engrossed in his sports pages. Mary Hopkin, Witchfinder General sits next to the girl.

Historical note: Manningtree is where Matthew Hopkins, self proclaimed Witchfinder General, started setting fire to any woman with an independent mind; a repulsive perversion which spread rapidly through this country, then across the water to Salem.
Mary Hopkin was a folk singer in the sixties with long, blonde hair. The woman who gets on at Manningtree looks just like her, hence, Mary Hopkin, Witchfinder General.
I know I'm not alone in giving other commuters nicknames (I dread to think what they call me). In my carriage, we regularly have have Spike, Wiggy (the toupée from hell), Underbite and Backspace (two dim sports fans from Ipswich), and A Woman Called Horse, among many others.

Anyway, back to the girl … (WARNING: My regular dear readers had better skip the rest of this post as it's unnervingly like porn and I'm deeply ashamed of it, but there you go. God, I'm disgusting. Old Knudson might like it, though) …
She has fake blonde hair and a pageboy bob. I notice that much as we pull out of Manningtree. When it's dark outside, the train windows act like mirrors (albeit filthy ones), and I gradually become aware that the girl in front of me is acting strangely.
She keeps looking all about her at the other passengers, most of whom are dozing like me, then turning furtively to the window. If she'd turn her head a bit further, she would realise that the bloke behind her has a life-sized mirror image of her, not eighteen inches in front of my face (and not just me, but all the blokes behind me) …
What she's doing is this: she is very furtively and alarmingly erotically, sucking her thumb.
She has flicked her hair round to cover her face from the front. Her thumb, already glistening and wet, slips between her lips and, well, she's sucking away like there's no tomorrow.
Normally, I would find this faintly nauseating. I am extremely disturbed, however, to find myself fumbling with my iPod in a desperate attempt to cover a whopping stiffy!
Luckily, Sweaty is more interested in England's dire football team than the trouser mayhem beside him, so I manage to cross my arms over it to hide my embarrassment.
Concentrating hard on the mental image of George Bush doesn't help. I cannot stop myself watching the girl. What the hell is a girl her age doing sucking her thumb? Every time somebody stirs, her head whips round to the front, wet thumb diving for cover. Then she's back again, putting on a private porn show for an old git who is discovering a perversion I didn't know I had. The pretty girl, her eyes darting nervously in every direction but mine, her wet lips, her thumb, the … er … sucking bit …
Suffice to say that, when the train stops at Liverpool Street Station, this newly pervy old man has to sit there for several minutes, rummaging through my bag, shuffling papers, thinking of George Bush and blocked drains and washing up, until my trousers are a more socially acceptable shape and I can walk to work without being pointed to and giggled at.
I am disgusted to discover that I'm a voyeur. Eww! I'm also ashamed that I didn't cough or something to let the girl know I could see her. Yet another justification for my self-loathing.
So mea culpa. A public confession of my pervdom. I throw myself on the mercy of the court …

The Goodbye Word

Okay, so now I've got to buy Jo a new stressball, but it definitely helped. Boy, those things make a mess when you tear 'em to shreds …

Back to reality (or what passes for reality on the Small Glass one):
Japanese classes are still going great. Like an acid induced sitcom called "When Languages Attack".
If I'm tired and trying to speak another language, I tend to lapse mainly into Portuguese, but with bad French and German mixed in (especially after a drink or three). It makes sense to me, but is complete gibberish to anyone listening.
Lin does the same. Mayuko askes her something in Japanese and her brain answers in French with added Spanish. Add in a classroom containing two Greek Cypriots, a Chinese guy and an Irish girl and poor Mayuko's in for a tough couple of years.
Which brings me to a sudden and strange realisation: I cannot speak my native language; or more accurately, the language of the country in which I was born. Strange and sudden because, even though I must have known this all my life, it only really struck me yesterday.

Back in the fifties, dad was based in Cyprus, serving in the RAF on 'V' bombers (our nuclear deterrent). The RAF wives were based in Malta, and that's where I was born in November, 1958. We flew home to blighty when I was a kid and I've never been back.

There's nothing to go back for. The land where I was born no longer exists. According to friends, our flat in Marsa was probably demolished long ago, to make way for a tourist hotel. My birthplace, the David Bruce Military Hospital, is now a housing estate (I've seen it on Googlemap).
I check online this morning, and find that Maltese is an Arabic/Semitic language, and the only one written in the Roman alphabet. I wonder if I should find out more, but decide that learning Japanese is tricky enough for my wizened and crumbling brain.

It turns out that I only know one word in Maltese. All through my childhood, whenever any of us left the house, my mother would shout out "Sahha" in a sing-song voice.
Sahha … The only word I know in my native language is the word for "goodbye" …
How fucking sad is that?

The Biggest Asshole

Heard some shit news this morning. About someone who really doesn't deserve to be shat on. In fact, she deserves chocolate, but I can't send that via Blogger, so triple bummers all round.
Suffice to say that there's a good chance George Bush isn't the biggest asshole in the US of A …

Normal service will be resumed when I've found something I can pound the crap out of …

Poster Boy

This one's for Sassy. Picture taken at Mansion House tube station this morning (sorry about the quality). Funny stuff: they got footage of Cheney at Reagan's funeral and tweaked it for a Bush eulogy. A big grin from start to finish.
When it comes out on DVD, I'll send you a copy. Better get yourself measured up for that orange jumpsuit.

Happy House

What a jerk.
I've just read back over some of my posts. From the end of August, I appear to have turned into a self-pitying, miserable wreck. For which I can only apologise, dear readers.
I say dear readers (plural) because there now appears, from your comments, to be two of you, which makes me very happy indeed.
In the vain hope that you might be remotely interested in the sort of thing I'm prepared to do for cold, hard cash, I thought I'd post a few pictures I made in my dayjob.


As one of you knows (well, both of you now), I design girls' schools for a living (it's a dirty job, but … etc.) …

When I'm not shouting at builders, arguing with planners, tearing my hair out and generally doing my architect thang, I get to play with my G5 and do 3D Cadmonkey stuff.
This is some of it.


This is a junior department in Wales, which would have won a bigger award last year if the bloody Cardiff Millennium Opera House had been finished on time and not strayed into my year (bastards)!


But the pupils who use it have named it "Happy House" which kinda makes me go all gooey-eyed and think that maybe it's okay being alive.

This one's a theatre extension we're currently building. The stone lettering around the far building is quotations from Shakespeare, my favourite being: "Can this cockpit hold the vasty fields of France?"
I really, REALLY want to see an all schoolgirl version of Henry V … "Cry God for Harriet, England and St. Georgina!"




… and this is a refurb of a lovely old Art Deco school, with a new extension (bottom picture).

Boring, I know, but that's what I do for money. And I managed to get through a whole post without moaning about getting old (fuck)!

Li'l Kim Go Bang

News this morning that at last the midget Elvis impersonator has joined our nuclear funhouse. We await with trepidation the arrival of Team America, World Police, to kick his vertically and sartorially challenged ass.
Will George the monkey hit his favourite button? The one with the picture of a banana on it? The one which triggers an insanely disproportionate retaliation, usually against the wrong target?
Probably not, as he has already vastly overfulfilled his production quota of bereaved American mothers.
Li'l Kim's neighbours are understandably upset with his deranged actions, especially Japan, as Team America carried out their own nuclear tests on the Japanese people, which gives them a somewhat unique perspective on events.
South Korea has already suspended an aid package this morning. Sanctions are an inevitable but stupid response, as Li'l Kim's starving millions stand no chance of bringing him down, so it looks like the long-suffering North Korean people will just have to suffer a bit more this winter.
The Americans love to use "targeted assassination" (murder), usually with Israeli gunmen; yet they seem reluctant to just shoot the fucker. Hey, Georgie! At least shoot his tailor … that would be a mercy killing, and make the world a slightly more tasteful place, if no safer.
Well, we can either sit back and watch the bickering or try to help the poor people crushed under Li'l Kim's jackboot. I'll be popping a note in to the South Korean Embassy on the way to St.James's Park tube station this afternoon - and every day until something is done - asking them to resume aid (they are on Buckingham Gate - Victoria Street end - just opposite a lovely old plane tree, should you wish to do the same).
I shall also be continuing my long-standing protest against American foreign policy by giving wildly inaccurate directions to American tourists (not helpful to the North Korean, Iraqi, Palestinian or any other people, but really, really satisfying).
Good luck, world …

Pointless Rant (With Lentils)

One thing that scares me about random searching in the blogsphere (and there are many scary things in here, especially American God-nuts with guns) is the sheer, mind-buggering volume of people who want to show the world photographs of their babies.
Please allow me to draw you good folks gently to one side and whisper a word of advice:
(a) Even your close relatives find your baby pictures teeth-grindingly boring.
(b) The planet doesn't want and cannot feed any more people. Stop breeding, you fuckers!
(c) Your baby is really ugly.
Apologies for the short, pointless and offensive rant, but I have a headache.
Ow!
Following on (equally pointlessly) from yesterday's post, regarding random blogging and food: I just came across http://karsonsinvestments.blogspot.com/.
And I quote: "Karsons Investments is a premier Lentils export firm strategically located in Africa’s Beans and Peas Market".
Not, on the face of it, the most immediately fascinating blog, but it does have some lovely pictures of lentils, which make me feel quite guilty about having fallen from my smug vegetarian pedestal into a vat of sashimi.
Note also that they are a "premier" and not a "second rate, slightly shabby" lentils export firm. So if you are feeling peckish, and find yourself reasonably adjacent to Africa's Beans and Peas Market, within which Karsons Investments are "strategically placed" (somewhere in Africa, but they don't give an address, so I'd start looking now if I were you), you know who to call.
This has been a public information broadcast by a sad, bored man with a really bad headache.
OW!

Egrets

The measure of a person can be judged by what they do.
Surgeons, astronauts, lifeboatmen, care nurses, single mothers … All heroic; all up there on the very top rank of peopledom.
You may be a volunter nurse, working with Medeçin Sans Frontiers;
You may be a freedom fighter;
You may sail single-handed around the world;
You may like to climb mountains (hi, Rog);
You may be a great writer (hi, Frances);
You may like to … whatever; you get the gist …
Me? I like to sit alone in the dark in my studio, clicking on the random "next blog" switch ...

Which is where I discovered Fluff (thanks, Sassy).
You can reach Sassy's blog by clicking on the "Intelligent America" link in the sidebar. There you will see a splendid series of photos of a biggish jar with the word "Fluff" on the front, on tour in Europe and America.
Fluff has even been photographed on Liar's Lawn, just round the corner from my office (that patch of grass outside the Houses of Parliament where the politicians get interviewed on TV).
Fluff intrigues me; I'm that kind of guy. I have to know more, and Sassy obliges with the revelation that "Fluff is a thick marshmallow sauce, sticky (unbelievably so … getting it off one's face is almost impossible) in consistency, and sweeter than anything on this Earth."
Now I was raised in England, not long after the end of rationing. I'm used to eating wet, overcooked cabbage, thin slices of grey gristly stuff, watery gravy, twigs and berries … Now I discover there is a substance like a black hole made entirely of sugar. And I can put it in my mouth! WOW! According to legend, it's only available in New England, not Old … Bugger!
I sense the atavistic urge for a quest …

We must have a specialist deli somewhere in London. We have shops where you can buy Japanese food, Portuguese food, Polish food, chips with gravy in a tray (corner of Strutton Ground Market in Westminster, if you're feeling peckish); why not an American deli? A magical kingdom where the staff are actually nice to you. And deep in the mysterious recesses, shelves bursting with exotic delights: alfalfa and sassafras; intoxicating cajun spices; pork bellies; hominy grits and Bazooka Joe (what the hell is a hominy grit?); and there at last, glowing with golden light: the holy grail: Fluff!

I've put some odd stuff in my mouth over the years, yet the box marked "Fluff" remains frustratingly unticked. When I get hold of some, it's gonna be Operation Dessert Storm! Let's dissolve some teeth.
I once spent fifteen years as a veggie, but wound up one day in a sushi bar where it all ended in tears. I've eaten things with any amount of legs/fins/tentacles/protuberances, though I try to steer clear of endangered species (except くじら; sorry guys, but I love it).
Egrets: I've had a few, but then again, too few to mention (sorry, Frank).
But なっと (natto) still defeats me. …
Natto: what the fuck is that all about? You get some soya beans, let them go really manky, then pour a load of two-pack epoxy glue over 'em. Stickier than a whole mountain of sticks, with an aroma like a tramp has wanked into a bag of dry roast peanuts. Life's too short to put that in your mouth.

Your homework this weekend:

I'm fed up with the telephone game. Play it amongst yourselves if you want, but it'll only appear here again when I can think of a really good one. In fact, the whole homework thing may come and go, depending on my mood. Anyway:

Today's track to track down: Hallelujah by Susanna and the Magical Orchestra. Weird Norwegian girl takes old Leonard Cohen song and holy fuck! This is GOOD!

Today's fact: Beetroot juice can be used to remove minor stains from upholstery and soft furnishings.

日本人彼女募集中。

Much relief for Sam and me in class this evening. Mayuko confirmed that my 日本人彼女募集中tee-shirt actually says what it's supposed to say. Hilton tells me that it has exactly the same meaning in Chinese as in Japanese ("Looking for a Japanese girlfriend"). More crucially, perhaps, Sam's kanji tattoo (all down his forearm) really does list the qualities a samurai should aspire to achieve.
Had it turned out to be something else entirely, he could have sent it to:
http://www.hanzismatter.com/
(a site which delights in showing just how stupid a misspelled kanji tat can look to a 日本人 or a 中国人)。

By the way, these posts about my Japanese classes are really just diary aides memoir to help my spongy old brain remember who's who and what we learn, so if you're here for posts like "The Truth About Everything", you can skip this, and any more with Japanese in the title.

Today, Mayuko has us going round the room, interrogating each another in Japanese about where we're from, how old we are, our birthdays, etc.
This is a great idea for the kids, but bad news for the old grumpy guy … Turns out I'm the same age as Hilton's dad. Whoop-de-doo! That makes me feel even crustier than usual. And when I find out that Louisa and Camilla are still only sixteen, and that I'm technically old enough to be their grandfather, I am plunged into a grey, wrinkly pit of despair. The news that Louisa is really into the はらじゅく and Gothic Lolita scene just makes me feel like a dirty old man, trying desperately not to picture her in a cosplay outfit …
More cheerful news from the other end of the room: Lin is actually a good six years older than I thought she was, and is almost old enough to hold a conversation with. Shona is going to try to dig up the blog of her Japanese trip to show me. And she's a Mac user (Yaay)!
I almost get as far as interrogating Gandy when we run out of time, so all I find out about him today is that he has another cool 'Hoax' tee-shirt on, but that he uses Windoze (uncool)!
And Sophia - knowing lots of Japanese - has been promoted to the big girls' class, so さよならto her. She was nice, but without her in the room, the rest of us now feel a bit cleverer …
Hey-ho. The joys of being a mature student.
On the plus side, it's great to have access to a subsidised canteen.

Oh, and Happy Mid-Autumn Festival to Hilton. Moon cakes all round! (Too rainy to see the moon tonight, though).

じゃまた。

Jean-Paul Sartre

Watch out. Mister Ranty is back.

Today's rant is prompted by yet another baroque headline from London's esteemed fount of misinformation (seen this evening outside St. James's Park tube station); together with a particularly shouty man and a bunch of screeching girls on the journey home (please see posts passim for details of my daily, seven hour commute from Hell).


Please don't let them punish this man. Please, please, give him a job on the London to Norwich inter-city train line. A Dirty Harry style ticket inspector may just be the only thing to save me from taking up America's current favourite hobby and boarding the train with a bag of handguns and a twitch.

Jean-Paul Sartre was right: "L'enfer, c'est les autres".

In the mornings, les autres display generally acceptable behaviour. In fact, most of les autres are fellow daily commuters who have to get up in the middle of the night, then try to catch up on their sleep on the 05:40 to London (my friend Will joined me one day and was astonished by the almost total silence - broken by the occasional grunt and snort - and the sight of hundreds of people slumped in their seats, mouths agape, peacefully drooling).
In the evenings, however, the carriages resemble the hellish offspring of a drunken hen night and a football riot.
So if you noisy bastards don't want one of us mild-mannered but burly six-footers going postal and spoiling your day in a terminal way, let's lay down a few ground rules:

Mobiles on commuter trains: fair enough; trains break down and you might need to let someone know you'll be late.
Kids on commuter trains … hmm … Okay, as long as they're bound and gagged and I'm allowed to carry a cattle prod (by "kids", I mean anyone over-excited and under the age of thirty-seven).

Now … heads up, mobile phone users. If you don't want to be wearing that thing up your arse, here's a little piece of advice (this is best read slowly and clearly, as if to a small child):

• First up: the concept of the "telephone":
If you speak into your "telephone", the person you're connected to can hear your voice coming out of their "telephone". Just because they may be miles away doesn't mean you have to SHOUT to make them hear you.
Related to this point: If you cannot hear them clearly over the noise of the train, shouting at them is unlikely to resolve the problem. They will, in all likelihood, be holding their phone at arms length because you're so fucking LOUD! It also causes other mobile users around you to stick a finger in their ear and raise their own voices, and is therefore counterproductive.

The urge to talk loudly if you cannot hear somebody else speaking is caused by "Basic Stupidity".
We now move on to "Advanced Stupidity".

• "Hi. It's me. I'm on the train".
Whoever is waiting for you at the end of your journey (and one day it might be me, with a nasty headache and a baseball bat), you need only call them if you MISS the train, or if it breaks down. Should your partner be so insecure and pathetic that they need to be constantly informed of your whereabouts, ditch them NOW and get a life. Grow up, for Chrissakes!

"Postgraduate Stupidity" includes the following:

• The constant, repetitive and loud barking of the word "Yeah" merely informs those around you that you are a moron who would lose a drooling contest with George Bush.

• Using your inane laugh as punctuation when you speak merely highlights the fact that the tedious drivel spewing from your mouth does SO not justify your whinnying cackle at the end of every boring sentence. If you were that funny, we would all be laughing. Look around you. We are not …

• Secretaries: If your boss fucks off early, leaving you slaving late in the office, then phones you from the train to ask about some email or tell you something he should have told you before he left: get a new job. He is a worthless piece of shit who clearly does not deserve you.

• In the thousands of train journeys I have suffered since the dawn of mobile technology, I could count on the fingers of one hand the words I have heard bellowed into phones that actually needed to be said. THINK before letting a carriage full of annoyed people know how utterly worthless your life is and how fucking BORING you are.

• Your ringtone is neither cool nor amusing.

As for children on peak time trains? Don't get me started on children … Really … Don't …

One minor fashion item to wrap up the rant (and this counts in ANY public area, not just trains):
Girls: those short tops that leave an inch or two of your midriff exposed?
Listen up:
MUFFIN TOPS ONLY LOOK GOOD ON MUFFINS! Not peeping out over your waistband.
Pull down that top and COVER IT UP! It's putting me off my lunch …
(The only possible justification for exposing/emphasising your bingo wings is as a deterrent from over-amorous males. Believe me; this fashion atrocity is guaranteed to give any man an erection as hard as a damp sock).
No matter how good you look otherwise, dressing like this makes you look ugly and stupid. Don't go there. It's just not right …

End of rant.

Today's homework: Shut the fuck up!

My Father's Face

Suddenly, it's October …

Arse!

I'm really none too keen on all this "time going forward" malarkey. Bugger physics! I'm much more of the opinion that Time should have just hung around in the mid-seventies, when I was a teenager with a six pack and a great band, and life was intercoursingly groovy.

As it is, so-called friends have been calling to ask what I want for my birthday, reminding me that I reluctantly turn forty-eight in a few weeks time (Blaaah).
So let's set the record straight: should anyone wish to get me anything, I'd like a teenage girlfriend and a Porsche 550 Spider, please; a nice vintage one like James Dean died in (the Porsche, not the girlfriend) … oh, and some socks.
I've been told those things are compulsory desires for a man my age (well, the first two anyway), though goodness knows why, as either of them would probably kill me.
And how the hell do you talk to a teenage girl? (advice, please: f.i.n? Bethany? anyone?). There are simply no cultural reference points (unless she's a history student).
There's a bunch of teenage girls in my Japanese class, and all we can talk about is JPop and how げんきwe're feeling … and I have to bribe them with Pocky to get that far …
Steely Dan were right … Hey, Nineteen; We can't dance together, We can't talk at all …

Another unwelcome reminder that Time, with gleeful malice, has hurled me onto a collision course with the saddest and most pathetic age of man, is that whenever I look in the mirror these days, my dad waves back at me.
Now as far as I understand death and stuff, dad should have been feasting and carousing in the halls of Valhalla for a few years now. Sure, he turns up in my dreams and does weird stuff that people in dreams do, and I like that. But to come back as my face? Please, dad. Stop it! It's too damned creepy.
To lob that kind of genetic time bomb at your kids is a cruel and unusual punishment and probably rates as child abuse.
Having said that; dad was better looking than me, so I guess I shouldn't complain too loudly.

Just lately, I've been thinking of dressing to emphasise my few remaining good bits. I'm reliably informed that I've still got a good bum and great legs, so perhaps just a nice pair of underpants and a bag over my head would suffice.
Or, hey! How about a mini-skirt length burqa? It would cover up my face and everything else likely to turn off a prospective date. I could start a new fashion trend: the micro-burqa: a kind of 'little black dress' for ugly people (and some of the more tolerant Muslim states). Look out, Jean-Paul Gaultier!

Fuck it. Enough moaning. It looks like I've got no choice but to grow older, but I'm damned if I'm going to grow up! Where's the fun in that? Bring on the teenage girls!

Here's your homework:

Today's phrase you must use in your next telephone conversation: Have you put on weight?

Today's track to track down: Jack Gets Up by Leo Kottke (from the album My Father's Face, somewhat predictably, and featuring the line: When you look in the mirror, it's your father's face).
Lugubrious. Weary. Funny. This sounds like Garrison Keillor after a particularly heavy night.

Today's reading assignment: The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde.

Today's fact: Fat is not caused by overeating; it is surgically injected into your body by little færies while you sleep.

Stop press! This just in:

Hoorah!

Mike (see "Some Stuff About Gravel" in August's archive) has at last decided to assault the blogshpere with his twisted mind. Click on the "Oh, Mikey" link in my Boffo Blogs to find out what strange, haunted planet he is currently orbiting.

For those who don't know him, his marzipan self portrait is astonishingly accurate.

Additional homework:

New project:
Make a self portrait from food and post it on your blog.