Architectural Genitalia

After my "Welcome To Hell" post last week from Norwich Castle Mall, Full reminded me about the "Vag Mall" and I said I'd take a couple of photos.

The Vag Mall is one of Mikey's buildings.
The idea was to incorporate the shape of a Viking longship to commemorate the Viking history of the site, but inevitable things got simplified a bit and the recurring motif throughout the mall is now not so much a longship as a vagina.

Hey, ho. It may not be anatomically correct but it is nicely welcoming nonetheless.

It's a shame that it's full of such crap shops when it's so nicely designed, but at least you can get inside out of the rain and wander round looking at vagina shaped openings.
It makes a nice counterpoint to Kate's cock-shaped building in Newy.

Matinée Idle

Rainy weekends … I love 'em.
It's Wimbledon fortnight so it's going to rain all weekend and instead of the tennis the BBC will show loads of trashy old movies.
Hoorah!
Whether it's Deanna Durbin singing "I Love To Yodel" or Gary Cooper or Doris Day or anything with Ray Harryhausen stop-motion monsters in it I'll be there, crashed out on the sofa with a big mug of coffee and a bigger grin.
I don't have satellite or cable and - living just beyond the middle of nowhere - my TV reception is so crappy that all I can get is four channels. And on a rainy weekend that means Old Movie Heaven.

Saturday Matinées at the Regal cinema were one of the great joys of my youth.
Every Saturday at tea time the peeling art deco façade would disgorge hundreds of shrieking children, all of us acting out the magic we had seen on screen … Mock swordfights for swashbucklers; mock gunfights (and unfeasibly large moustaches) for "Viva Villa", parting the local river for any Chuck Heston Bible-fest, and best of all: Doug Mc.Clure!

Woohoo! I have to admit I almost succumbed and bought the Doug Mc.Clure boxed set of DVDs the other day in HMV. Now that I'm (slightly) more grown up I can better appreciate CarolynMunroe running around with him in a fur bikini. Mmmmmmmmmm …

Bollocks to Spielberg! THIS is Movie Heaven

And those terrible, terrible supporting features … inevitably black and white efforts from the Childrens' Film Foundation, usually starring a young Melvyn Hayes and a bunch of kids in a bus chasing ne'er-do-wells around London; or Laurel and Hardy.

Of course, we only realised much later that our parents were not handing over their hard-earned thruppenny bits (the front seats were then thruppence - three old pennies - the thruppenny bit being a bizarre, multifaceted lump of brass, going up to ninepence as I got older) to finance our education in the history of cinema … Oh, no!
They were having sex!
All through the sixties, the shops and streets of our town were emptied on a Saturday afternoon, when every parent managed to dump their kids at the Regal for a few hours and take advantage of the "something for the weekend" bought at the local barbers' shop.
Back then, we never realised such things went on. We knew where babies came from, having seen wildlife documentaries, but figured our parents had only "mated" twice to produce little brother Full and myself.

But by the time we realised the awful truth we were hooked on bad movies.

In our early teens we graduated to Bungay Fleapit (Full has posted an educational photo taken in Bungay on his blog).
Bungay Fleapit was a filthy, fly-blown shit-hole with a faulty projector, run by two elderly and very cranky perverts. What made it a Mecca for underage movie freaks was:
- The old guys didn't give a shit how young you were, they just wanted your money;
- We could take beer in;
- Monday nights were all night horror movies;
- Thursday nights were all night sex movies.
Teenage Heaven. A cinema full of drunk fourteen-year-old boys watching exploitation and splatter movies in those glorious few years before they all got banned.
At some point during the Monday gore-fest the screen would go white and huge silhouetted fingers would fumble a 35mm slide into the projector. It would always be painted red (you could see the brushmarks) and have Thursday's movies scratched into the paint, complete with mis-spellings. Every expense spared.
We could then decide whether to fork out for such delights as The Virgin Witches, The Sex Twins, Swedes In The Snow or of course, the bestiality classic On The Farm.
They would also do softcore Russ Meyer nights for those whose interests ran to unfeasibly large breasts and nazi regalia (I remember David Neech fast asleep and snoring loudly throughout Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls while we decorated him with food and trash off the floor).

And you wonder why I turned out like I did …

So this weekend - like any rainy weekend - I will spend my afternoons in glorious black and white, re-living more innocent days.
Unless the tennis is on, in which case I'll watch girls in miniskirts leaping around and grunting.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

It's Thursday So It Must Be Crap

Talking of crap, here's another meme:
I found this one on Terroni's blog a few days back.
Or rather I found the bones of it.
It was pretty good but I felt it needed a touch of Dive to make up for its lack of cynicism and swearing.

It started with "What were you doing ten years ago", which - as the original meme was written by an extremely smart ten year old kid - is a pretty good question.
I felt his answer lacked not only anatomical correctness but graphic and disgusting detail … and possibly video … so I hi-jacked his meme.
Hey ho, here we go:

What were you doing thirty years ago?
Yikes! 1977!
Most of that year I spent naked with Judith Flaxman, going at it like there was no tomorrow. And playing in bands and going to punk gigs and managing a punk band (Hi, Mini. Where are you now, I wonder) and co-running Radio Maidstone and passing A-levels and going to college and smoking dope and hanging out.
Fuck me, that was a good year!

What were you doing one year ago?
Waiting for death.

Five snacks you enjoy
Onigiri.
Croissants.
Wasabi peas.
Edamame.
Clitoris.

Five songs you know all the lyrics to
Prayer To God by Shellac (easy as most of the words are "fucking").
Little Green by Joni Mitchell, for reasons of my own.
Fish Heads by Barnes and Barnes because it should be our national anthem.
Nightswimming by REM for the photograph on the dashboard.
Chicken Pussy by Bongwater for obvious reasons.

Without moving your sorry ass from your chair, look around and select one item within your reach and eat it. Well? What was it?
Dammit! There's no food in my studio you bastard.
At work I always have one of those fruity oaty bars that look like poo for just such an eventuality, but I just tore up and ate today's page from my Dilbert desk calendar. Ick.
Actually it tasted no worse than the fruity oaty poo bar.

Five bad habits (and no, masturbation is a good, healthy habit)
I'm a world class nose-picker.
I occasionally drink from the bottle; milk, beer, whatever … but hey, I live alone and hate washing up.
Caffeine addiction.
Sitting up all night watching old movies and crying.
Long distance commuting. That's the one that's gonna kill me.

Five living people who shouldn't be (at least one of whom you should know personally … c'mon; get bitchy)
Let's start with George Bush Senior. Take out that fucker and we automatically lose Dubya, too. Bonus! After all, without daddy, the twisted, throwback chimp-sperm that brought forth Junior would never have existed. That particular combination of proteins and enzymes could and should have gone on to become part of something far more useful, like a piece of cheese or an ant, or something oozing around in the digestive tract of a yak.
Bono … obviously.
Karl Rove … even more obviously.
Margaret Thatcher - spiritual Mother to Blair (like the Bushes, we take out two with one shot).
Me.

Five things you like to do
Walk along the Embankment every weekday morning, whatever the weather. Watching the Thames roll by as the city staggers out of bed and gets its ass in gear.
Sit on the bottom step of the stairs with my old Gibson Les Paul and see what it has to say.
Have sex with girls.
Sleep.
Blog.

Five things you would never wear again
Flares.
Hawai'ian shirts.
Tank tops.
Cardigans for men (what the fuck?).
Brüt (any Brits alive in the seventies will be gagging at the memory).

Five favourite toys
Guitars.
Macs.
iPod.
PS2.
Car.
So I'm a bloke! Go figure.

Five things you would never put in your mouth again
Lychees that have been left in an uncovered bowl in a "friend"s fridge overnight next to some iffy prawns and strong, French cheeses.
Ming The Menstrual's tongue (or any other part of her).
Pork cheese (don't ask).
Home-made wasabi chocolate.
My own cum (hey, it was in somebody else's mouth at the time). Ick!
Never accept a blowie off a mischievous woman!

Hey! You're a millionaire! Five things you'd do now you have all that money
Woohoo!
Move to Tokyo and sit outside Harajuku Station leering at girls.
Dress how the fuck I want (currently - looking down at myself - like somebody blew up a tramp and wore what was left).
Buy waaay too many books … er … hang on, I do that already.
Point and laugh at those less fortunate.
Be a complete and total bastard.

Five things you've done while drunk
Puked.
Had sex.
Played gigs.
Eaten sixteen raw scotch bonnet chilis.
Broken into Dunston Hall (now a hotel, but then a derelict Elizabethan mansion, all boarded up) one Halloween night with some friends and sat around in the dark telling ghost stories to scare the willies out of one another. We found an old harmonium and were playing horror movie style chords on it when there was a fucking great bang that came echoing down the empty corridors. Holy shit, did we run! It was only the board we had prised off the window falling down in the wind but Paul was sick and Sue peed herself. hee hee hee. Ah, drunken youth.

Name something (or someone) other than your poo that has been inside your bum
Gack!
An enema tube and a load of soapy water before my appendix operation. Luckily I was out cold but my mad aunt, Nurse Wratched told me all about it. Ewwww.

Five albums you own that embarrass you (be truthful)
Olias Of Sunhillow by Jon Anderson (appalling sub-hobbitry from Yes frontman … Hey, I was a hippy; these things happen).
Boston by Boston. Holy crap, it's time I joined Robyn's church and started smashing old vinyl.
Rising Force by Yngwie Malmsteen. What the fuck was I thinking?
Not Fragile by Bachman Turner Overdrive. Shit! I didn't even know I owned that. Take my advice; never look through your old vinyl shelves. Yikes!
The Eagles Greatest Hits. Kill me now.

Five criminal acts you've committed and have never been caught for
We blew up a telephone box back in my bomb-making youth. Woohoo! That was a doozy!
Sneaking into car parks at night and swapping round all the number plates.
Following a police patrol car around Norwich for a good twenty minutes while smoking a fucking HUGE spliff.
Driving under the influence of: drink/drugs/fellatio.
Stealing a load of traffic cones and shutting off a busy street for a whole Saturday.

Hokay. That's enough crap for today.
I won't tag anyone as we all hate memes, but if anybody feels in the mood, go for it.

Regime Change

I really shouldn't listen to the news while driving.
This morning, on my way in to the station the announcer provoked a coughing fit so severe that I almost put the car in a ditch.
Apparently, George W(MD) Bush has stated that "history will judge Tony Blair kindly".

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha …

So at last - and years overdue - the day of regime change is upon us and, not so much kicking and screaming but whingeing and lying the most reviled figure in British political history (and that's quite a feat in itself) is finally squeezed out of office like pus from an infected wound.

We had hoped he would fuck off to the US to wallow in the lucre'd mire of their lecture circuit but his sudden "coming out" as a Roman Catholic (the appalling "cash for honours" scandal being his attempted homage to the Medici Pope Leo X's selling of indulgences) appears to have alienated the WASP vote so the Yanks in desperation have packed the simpering cretin off to be their mouthpiece in Jerusalem and to add yet more despair to the plight of the Palestinian people.
An horrific DNA mutation between a chimp and a lame duck, Dubya may be a deranged incompetent and but he apparently still has a sense of humour. Bliar's appointment as an apologist for US/Israeli foreign policy could well be an even worse joke than WMD.

You may form the impression that I am not overly fond of the snivelling little shit, but believe me, I have made a superhuman effort to be balanced and fair in this assessment of him. My "Profanisaurus" simply does not contain words of sufficient splenetic rage to voice my true opinion.

Bliar; don't come back. You are not welcome here.

Heart Of Darkness

I've just come over from Robyn's blog, my head still reeling from her excellent but very scary post about how, when she was ten,
"… my church decided to host a kind of party to purge the youth in the congregation of their wicked, wicked, trashy, Hell-bent rock and roll records. The Devil's music. Everyone was encouraged to bring in their filthy trash and smash the vinyl up front by the podium. Each teenager was allowed to give testimony before smashing up their collection, with shards of black plastic spraying all over the floor. Amen."

Wow, Robyn!
Other than the fact that the way you were treated would count as child abuse over here, your post really brought back to me the feeling of stupefied disbelief in the UK after Lennon pointed out that The Beatles were probably better known than Jesus (which - given the huge chunks of the planet that are not Christian fundamentalist was probably right) and the Bible Belt began the Great Beatle Burning.
We looked on with jaws dropped in incredulity at our first sight of a fundamentalist "Taliban" at work. It was brought home to the whole world, gaping in front of our TVs that the US religious right were truly and spectacularly insane.

And that something had gone very, very wrong deep in the heart of America.

These were not simply cultural philistines, but overtly racist, too. As Robyn's sister wrote: "All the missionaries called it the Fertility Beat - just like the natives in the jungle. You would have thought we were going to get pregnant just listening to it."
This at the time those good ol' boys the God-fearing, white-supremacist KKK were blowing up black churches and killing children. Only a few years before, black men had been lynched for so much as looking at a white woman; now they were being beaten and murdered for simply registering to vote.
I wonder what it would be like even now for a black guy in say Selma, Alabama to walk the street arm in arm with a white woman … Or a same sex couple to walk the street at all … Or a pinko fag Marxist like me … What the fuck are they scared of?
Because it is ignorance and fear that drives them.

In a country where church and state are supposedly separate, the Republican party is the voice of the religious right and we have Patrick Henry College grooming bigots, racists, sexists, homophobes and fundamentalist extremists for government office. Fucking scary.

Robyn reassures me that most American Christians are as alarmed at this fascistic mob as the rest of us; they give true Christians a very bad name indeed.
She is right of course, but nice people worshipping in a nice church does not exciting TV make (just look at "Songs of Praise" … Yikes!), and outside the States all that the rest of the world sees on the news and documentaries are the extremists … the disgraced TV evangelists who screw around or who put the "con" in congregation or (gasp) come out as gay; the white supremacists, the bigamists, the bigots, the risibly oxymoronic "Moral Majority", the creationist nutjobs, and just lately cute little girls posing in GOD HATES FAGS tee shirts …
Actually, over here that's simply an anti-smoking slogan as a "fag" here is merely a cigarette (from "faggot", being a stick used for firelighting). How it became twisted to mean a gay man is beyond me. And what the fuck's wrong with being gay anyway? Hey ho.

So anyhoo; enough ranting and offending people for today … well, for this morning, at least.
Here's a question for the colonials amongst you:
What's it really like there now?

Monday Melee

Yet another rainy Monday.
I'm not as insufferably jolly as I usually am on a Monday because today I am using up a spare day's annual leave and am not waltzing along the side of Old Father Thames but sitting in the studio listening to the rain and can therefore just about work up enough of a grouch to fill in Fracas Monday Melee. Let's start the crap-fest:

1: The Misanthropic.
(Name something - about humanity - you absolutely hate).
This week I have been mostly hating fat, ugly middle-aged blokes.
They're all around me on my journeys across London. I look at them and think "Fuck! That's me!" It's disgusting and should be stopped. Kill us all when we cease to be beautiful (in my case, at about three years old).

2: The Meretricious:
(Expose someone or something that's phony, fraudulent or bogus).
The hilarious, red-faced, tongue-firmly-in-cheek, sick-making eulogies that the cabinet gave Bliar last week. Tragic.

3: The Malcontent:
(Name something you're unhappy with).
I can't sew for shit.
And instead of making me trim, manic cycling has merely provided me with thighs like hams that just split the leg of my last decent pair of trousers.
Hey ho.

4: The Meritorious.
(Give someone credit for something and name it if you can).
Both Kate and The Groover for posting photos showing that some people actually are beautiful.

5: The Mirror.
(See something good about yourself and name it).
I once ate sixteen raw scotch bonnet chilis and lived to tell the tale.

6: The Make-Believe:
(Name something you wish for).
A new pair of trousers.
Time to tool up and go shopping.

Welcome To Hell

Sign in Norwich Castle Mall this morning.

I think the full text reads "Hell Welcomes Incautious Shoppers".

Cold Pizza And Scotch

Good morning, groovy chicks and hep cats (and variations thereon, dependent upon gender / sexual orientation).

Don't worry; I'm not happy, merely sarcastic.

I had a weird nightmare last night. John Foster Dulles was still alive.
Brrrrr … I'm still shaking. If I ever visit Arlington I'm gonna stamp on that fucker's grave and make sure there's no soft earth where his nasty, grippy zombie fingers can claw their way free.
And stay the fuck out of my nightmares, you creepy shit! Get back to where you belong and burn.
Okay, so cold pizza and scotch was probably not the best recipe for a late supper …

However, this post is not about that.
This post is about scary witch-woman J…….
I put it off as long as possible but if I'm going to build the new junior school it's going to need Building Regulations approval.
Which means going back into the building where J…… now works as receptionist.
And where she hit on me a couple of weeks back.
And where I put her off with a jolly agreement to call her and meet for coffee.
And where, yesterday as I walked in the door every single line I was going to fob her off with fled screaming from my brain, leaving just the word "duh."

And after all that, she wasn't there.
So I stood in reception, grinning like a fool at her empty chair and suppressing the desire to giggle at my sheer dumb luck.
As quickly as decently possible I checked in the application with her colleague and sprinted back out of the door to the safety of the car park.
Where (you knew it) I bumped right into J…… coming the other way.

So … there I stood with my jaw flapping up and down and there stood J…… eyes shining; smiling fit to bust.

Did I take any of your sage advice?
Ha!
Did I buggery!
Instead, pathetic and craven dickwad that I am, I stammered and blurted out something about having to dash off to a meeting and escaped with no more damage than a quick hug and a peck on the cheek and a reminder to call her.

What the fuck is wrong with me?
I can run jobs worth millions of pounds; I can play on stage in front of thousands of people; I'm pretty good at this stupid "life" business …
And yet when it comes to telling a girl I'm not interested in anything more than coffee and gossip all I can do is blather and faff.

I'm forty-eight years old and terrified of dumping a girl.
What a twat!

Curious On The Toilet

Holy crap, I've got a connection!
As I'm at home in the village today, it'll probably cut me off after a minute or two so I'll just do a quick filler post.

Hokay: the perennial boring question: What reading material is in your bathroom?


Mine has - for the comfort and edification of visitors - a copy of "The Curious Sofa - A Pornographic Work by Ogdred Weary."
If there's anybody in the world who is NOT an Edward Gorey fanatic, this is one of his lovely little books.
Yes it's utterly disgustingly depraved, yet you can sit and read it to a two year old without fear of corrupting them. And look at the pictures, too. It's a cunningly written and coyly illustrated little tome that is only as pornographic as the mind of the person reading it.
It only takes a couple of minutes to read and I can judge how filthy a guest's mind is by their face when they return from their ablutions.

Buy it.
Read it.
See how disgusting you really are.

Crumbs

Here we go again.
I became the victim of another fragmentation grenade disguised as a croissant this morning. That's two consecutive mornings now where my breakfast has threatened to maim me.

Listen up, Caffè Nero! Croissants are not supposed to be dark chocolate brown and crunchy and they're definitely not supposed to explode into a billion pieces of baked shrapnel when you break them open, leaving no more than a pitiful morsel of edible bread in the centre.
Time to switch my breakfast shop …

And to plead once again to the world's bakers for somebody to develop a biscuit (and indeed a croissant) that is safe to eat in bed and will not - no matter how much clearing up after - leave a single, lurking, malicious and very sharp crumb somewhere in the middle of the bed to wake me with a yelp at two in the morning.
I'm sure I heard it giggling.

Is that too much to ask?

Humankind now has the technological nous to leave plastic American flags on the Moon; to teach a chimp to talk (and make it President); to enable you and I to look at photos of bum sex in the privacy of our homes and offices and yet …

Still no crumbless biscuit.

Lazy bastard bakers.

Adios Vilma

So farewell then, Vilma Espin, revolutionary and wife of Raul Castro.
Vilma was a great woman and a great Socialist.

I stole this from the BBC's website today:

Cuba's 'first lady' dies aged 77

Espin rejected her wealthy upbringing to join the revolution

Vilma Espin, wife of Cuba's acting president Raul Castro, has died in Havana, aged 77, state TV reports.

She was a key figure in the Cuban revolution and the long-standing head of the Cuban Women's Federation, which works to advance women's rights.

Born into a wealthy family, she fought as a guerrilla alongside Fidel Castro and his younger brother Raul in the Sierra Maestra mountains.

She married Raul in early 1959 and was often described as Cuba's "first lady".

Espin reportedly died after a long battle with illness.

The Cuban authorities have announced an official mourning period, which will last until 2200 on Tuesday (0300 GMT Wednesday), with national flags on all public buildings and military bases being lowered to half mast.

Her name will be linked eternally to the most significant achievements of Cuban women through the Revolution Cuban government statement

There will be gatherings in her honour in the capital Havana and her hometown, Santiago.

"Her name will be linked eternally to the most significant achievements of Cuban women through the Revolution," a government statement, quoted by the Associated Press, said.

The daughter of an executive at the Bacardi rum distillery, Espin grew up in comfort in the eastern town of Santiago.

Equality campaigner

She was one of the first Cuban women to earn a degree in chemical engineering and did post-graduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

However, she turned her back on her upbringing in the 1950s, joining the armed struggle against right-wing dictator Fulgencio Batista and adopting the nom de guerre Deborah.

She married Raul in 1959 after Batista was forced to flee and the rebel fighters made their triumphant entry into Havana.

The couple went on to have four children.

In 1960 she founded the Cuban Women's Federation, a mass organisation with the objective of achieving full equality for women, which currently boasts 85% of Cuba's women as members.

Espin was a member of the Communist Party's Central Committee since its creation in 1965.

So now you know.

Farewell Vilma, and thanks.

!Hasta La Victoria Siempre!

Lovely Personality

Poor Sassy had to endure the bane of the single adult, a family wedding at the weekend.
That brought so many horrors to mind, not least the fact that I have a wedding to attend in the Village of the Damned later this summer. Brrrr.

These days, at family gatherings I find it too much of a hassle to constantly go through the:
"Yes I do have a girlfriend, thank you."
"Well where is she?"
"Actually she's not from the Norfolk end of my commute and things are more than a tad complicated at the moment, so …"
"Huh! Aren't we good enough for her?"
So - like Sassy - I get the "whispers". Mad little Aunts' heads get conspiratorially close together when they see me across the room and the fact that I'm "not seeing anybody" gets tutted over.
Then I either get labelled as gay or paired off with a Morlok.

I don't mind the "gay" thing so much. After all, I'm a middle aged man living alone and anyone walking into my house is confronted with some of the gayest rooms imaginable, full of lovely books and paintings and Tiffany lamps and colours and textures and furnishings arranged with such exquisite taste that macho men run screaming out the door.
The sad fact is that I just don't fancy the bum sex. I like kissing girls. Hey ho.

It's the "Morlok" thing that pisses me off about family.
Ever since the end of my sixteen year purgatorial sentence living with Ming The Menstrual, family and friends have been charitably pairing me off with X's daughter or Y's sister.
These women are invariably described as having a "lovely personality".

Hokay, having met some of these - let's generously call them "females" - I find that some of them do indeed have a lovely personality. And they certainly need it.
As Mum said when trying to set me up with one of them, "She's a little bit chubby but she does have a lovely personality".
Mum, she's fat! And I mean fat like an American!
I'm not the world's biggest fan of fat … or facial hair or acne or personal hygeine problems, especially not in combination and definitely not on a date. Some people may find these things erotic but that pleasure has sadly passed me by.
And when it comes down to it, these women do NOT have a lovely personality; they are bitter and vindictive and are single for very good reasons.
So please stop trying to force me to breed with fucking Morloks!

Which brings me back to the Village of the Damned.
Every time I go to a party there (and I go quite often, to remind myself why people should never breed) it's as if I'm wearing a large neon hat that reads: "New Genetic Material".
The village of ---- is at first glance full of stunningly beautiful young girls and yet I know from watching them over the years (like Jane Goodall only with less intelligent subjects) that by the time they hit twenty they will have ballooned to sumo size, married within the family and developed the personal habits of a particularly vicious sloth.
These hideously inbred creatures loom out of the murk of the dancefloor with horrid graspy hands and reeking, toxic fag-breath laced with enough booze to fell a moose. A nightmare vision of yellow fingers and yellow teeth, plastic boots and mousy roots. Ick! If you follow the link you'll discover why I describe these evenings as "Dawn of the Dead with party dresses on".

Weddings are even worse.

At least I have a lovely personality to help me to cope with all this crap.

Happy Monday

What's not to like about Monday mornings?
I've just wandered in to work, strolling along the Embankment, watching the rain spattering into the Thames, twirling my brolly and embarrassing passers-by with an atrociously atonal mangling of REM's "The Wake-Up Bomb".
Oh, what a jolly thing is a moist Monday morning in old London Town.

I'm skipping the Monday Melee this week. It would only be the same old moan about the non-existent internet in my village which means I can only blog for the three days a week I'm in London. So bugger that.

The only thing to mar this lovely Monday morning has been Caffè Nero's pastry supplier, who somewhat perversely has made today's croissants from what I can only describe as fragmentation pastry. A billion tiny pieces of slightly greasy brown flaky detritus now cling to my clothes and everything around me. Hey ho.

To prove how happy I am, I just had a meeting with a guy from marketing and didn't throttle him.

So "Happy Monday" to all you miserable Monday-hating bastards.

Walking Disaster Area

Whatever you do, make sure you never stand about a hundred yards away from me. It's historically a pretty dangerous place to be.

Yesterday afternoon I was outside St.James's Park tube station when a building collapsed a hundred yards away. I swear I never touched it.
The traffic was so heavy that I didn't even notice it. I knew nothing about it until I got home and saw it on the news.
This morning, inevitably the gutter press were screaming about "Terror In Westminster" and people thinking it was "9/11 all over again" (I don't know what drugs they take in newspaper offices but they're pretty fucking hallucinogenic).

And the July 7th bomb at Aldgate went off on the train right behind me. I didn't notice that either (can you see a pattern emerging here?) … There was just a big bang and all the lights went out and we waited to get walked to the next platform.
Whatever people have said about it since, at the time everybody just shrugged our shoulders and thought "Hey, ho. Just another fucking day on the tube".
I walked the rest of the way to the office and checked the tube website to find an announcement of a power failure. It wasn't until my brother called a couple of hours later to see if I was alive that anyone in the office knew about the bombs.

Then the scary Church of Cult Sex burned down when I was supposed to be there, fornicating with the lovely Emma …

So it appears I am a walking disaster area. Or at least the area around where I'm walking is …
I think perhaps Kate, the Groover and Monsieur Benaut are at minimum safe distance from me but the rest of you better watch out.
If anybody's thinking of "doing an Ame" and visiting London this summer, bring a hard hat and some protective clothing with you.
Meantime I'm thinking of hiring myself out to the military.

More Trousers

Sam's dyed his hair pink.
He also opened the door of his ludicrously pimped, mirror-windowed, über-macho "custom car" to reveal a cute Hello Kitty air freshener.
Gandy's resprayed his entire car in the flag of the Imperial Japanese Navy.
And Groover's been seen in a dress.
It's been one of those weeks that reaffirms my faith in the power of Fun as an elemental force for good.

Another quick V…… story as we're on the subject of fun:
Lunchtime.
V……, Bruce and Dive again, wandering through the crowded streets.
V…… and Bruce decide to follow Dive doing that silly "walking as close as possible and keeping in step" walk.
Dive sees a huge, sloppy dog turd in his path and jumps over it.
V…… looks up at Dive, slips on the turd and lands on his arse.
Sloppy turd is thickly smeared all the way up the back of his trousers.
Much hilarity ensues.
V…… stands outside nearby department store while Dive and Bruce take his money and buy him a new pair of trousers.
We buy a horrid brown pair, waaay too short in the leg.
We drop the receipt down a road gully so he cannot change them.
He has to put them on in the street.
Much hilarity ensues.

I'm feeling frisky today so don't come too close to me.

Monday Melee

Woohoo! It's Monday.
I hate the weekend even more now I can't get a proper connection in the village. But for once I'm not going to moan about that in Fracas Monday Melee. There's a whole world of other crap to moan about. Here's some:

1: The Misanthropic.
(Name something - about humanity - you absolutely hate).
This week I have been mostly hating Lorraine.
Actually, she's not so bad but the old song was playing in a shop on Saturday and I misheard it. So ever since I've been singing "I can't stand Lorraine, at my window … etc."

2: The Meretricious:
(Expose someone or something that's phony, fraudulent or bogus).
Scooter Libby's character witness: Dick Cheney. Hee hee hee.

3: The Malcontent:
(Name something you're unhappy with).
The fact that "Late Junction", the only essential programme on music radio has been shortened and put back an hour to 11:30 as part of Radio 3's "dumbing down" agenda. Twats!

4: The Meritorious.
(Give someone credit for something and name it if you can).
Kate for her fabulous reportage photos of the shipwreck on her local beach. Brilliant!

5: The Mirror.
(See something good about yourself and name it).
I have nice hands.

6: The Make-Believe:
(Name something you wish for).
People who commute by train and tube to put on their fucking after-shave/perfume when they get to work and not to gag me with the stuff.

Students, Drugs And Arse-Gravy

Hokay.
It seems you lot are fixated on laxatives today (see the comments to the last post and Robyn's reply), so I'll take this opportunity to add my own (true) tale of arse-gravy mayhem.

This one involves V……, now a prominent local Architect who will never forgive me if he finds me relating this sorry tale on the interweb, but hey ho.

Way back in the mists of time, in celebration of completing our final Architecture exam, V……, Bruce and myself found ourselves in the shabby gloryhole that was Norwich's Golden Star pub (their proud boast: "Not so much a pub, more of a bucket"). It has since been cleaned up and "theme-pubbed" but back then was the real 'spit and sawdust' experience … except without the sawdust.

After a couple of pints of the finest effluent from their own backyard brewery (from memory it was called Royal Flush and had a cartoon of the Queen on the loo on the beer pump - classy), V…… was up for further celebrations.
Nigel - one of the local dealers - was in the house and V…… decided it was about time he discovered just why the rest of us liked the occasional spliff.
So … a quick chat with our Nige (my band played his wedding and the bride's father got out of his tree on hash cake but that's another story) and, suitably grassed up we sashayed down to the river to relax.

I'll get to the point eventually but let me set the scene a little first.
The riverside walk at Norwich is extremely pretty and as this was midsummer was crowded with holidaymakers. Alongside the river is a mediæval defensive tower called Cow Tower, a bloody great circular ruin. We lounged beside this and skinned up.
A few puffs later and Bruce and me lay happily on the grass watching the little fluffy white clouds. We passed the rest of the joint to V…… to try.

I have since discovered that it has this effect on a small number of people. But the first we knew of it, however, was when V…… leapt up, yelling at us that he needed to crap, REALLY urgently.
There are no toilets anywhere near there so I told him to go in the tower.
Panicking, he yelled "But what can I use for toilet paper?"
"Just grab a handful of leaves." I said.
So …
Roused somewhat from our reverie, we watched in mild amusement as V……, in a stoned panic, tore along the footpath to the nearest bush and yanked the whole thing out of the ground, roots and all before dashing into the tower, screaming at us not to look.
Well, what would you do?
We gave him a few seconds and wandered in … to find poor V…… squatting in an alcove, moaning loadly in the throes of a most impressive display of explosive diarrhoea.
Of course, we did what any true friend would do and grabbed his shrub and high-tailed it out of there.

We certainly learned a few new words and descriptive phrases from V…… as we rolled about on the grass in hysterics. Only to have to get up and run as V…… emerged from the tower, brandishing his trousers and informing the world - including a crowd of passing holidaymakers - that he had been forced to wipe his arse on his underpants.

Naked from the waist down he realised his predicament and dashed back inside the tower, followed (absolutely true) by the holidaying family's dog which was in turn followed by their little girl, who was inevitably followed by the bellowing father. V…… caught up with us as we ran, which was a difficult thing to do when you're laughing so hard you can't breathe and one of you is trying to put on his trousers.

Ah, shadenfreude.
Bloody students, eh?

Let that be a lesson to you.

A Cautionary Tale

Robyn's mouth-watering, chocolate-covered post reminds me of a cocoa-related cautionary tale of my own:

Where I used to work we had a guy who would cruise around peoples' desks and help himself to any chocolates that happened to be laying there. As you can probably understand, this kinda rankled after a while.

So anyway, Elaine had a chocolate making kit (one of those crappy mould things she got for Christmas) with which we spent an entertainingly disgusting evening creating a small batch of rather exclusive chocolates with … er … "exotic" fillings.
And drinking a lot.

The first one we made was a cube of cheese with a tiny pickle on top, lovingly encased in chocolate. It looked so damned good sitting there I almost ate it myself.
The next was a wad of cotton wool soaked in meths; again a rather enticing prospect when coated in the yummy brown stuff.
Another was a dead spider (quite a meaty one) enhanced with a dollop of tomato ketchup and gloopily enveloped in a dark chocolate shell (yum).
The fourth was tuna cat food.

We arranged our creations artfully in an old chocolate box and left them on the end of Elaine's desk the following morning, every one of us surreptitiously keeping a sly eye on events.
Sure enough, within minutes, Frank (hi, Frank) zoomed in and snaffled a couple, cramming them into his mouth with unconcealed glee.

Oh, joy unbounded!
He got the dead spider in ketchup and the cheese and pickle. And it took several seconds of self-satisfied grinning and chomping before his expression changed to one that is best imagined rather than described.

Ah, schadenfreude … Pointing and laughing is always such fun.
Unfortunately it didn't stop Frank's predatory ways but he was somewhat more circumspect as a consequence, only snaffling unopened chocolate bars.
We did offer him the meths and cat food chocs but he nobly declined.

Let that be a lesson to you.

P.S. Happy birthday, little brother!

Light

Wandering along beside the Thames this morning I got to thinking of Rich's Edward Hopper post. Thanks for the reminder, Rich.

I love Hopper; I have a couple of nice Hopper lighthouse prints over my bedroom dresser to cheer me in the mornings. They just fill the room with fresh air and a sea breeze (or it could be my open window and an easterly from the North Sea, but hey).

More specifically I got to thinking of the light in Hopper's paintings. That "hard" light he emphasises in his interiors.

London light is different. It's softer.
Like Venice, London is a city built on water; a lot of the old centre is reclaimed from marsh and estuary and the light which so delighted Monet is often diffused with mist, especially on my morning walks to work.
It's a sparkling, mysterious light.
A beautiful - if occasionally pestiferous - luminescence that washes over the morning city; the dome of St.Paul's is often afloat on it.

Hopper's light, on the other hand is harsh and almost solid.
I love it. Probably because we just don't see it here. It's a peculiarly American light.
Hopper paints that wonderful clear sharp light you see in movies like "Chinatown" and "L.A. Confidential".

There's a marvellous Raymond Chandler line that always reminds me of Hopper interiors. It's from "Farewell, My Lovely".
We're in Philip Marlowe's office …

"A wedge of sunlight slipped over the edge of the desk and fell noiselessly to the carpet."
I think I'm gonna go home and wallpaper my house with Edward Hopper paintings.

Monday Melee

Hokay, so I missed a Fracas Monday Melee thanks to the broadband connection in my village being deader than flares (no, if you wear them I really do not want to know). I'm on intermittent dial-up at the moment and can just about handle an email but it takes one look at my instruction to load a blog page and tells me to fuck off.
Hey ho.

Hence, I am only posting when I'm in London and I'm buggered if I'm sufferring that commute more than three days a week just so I can write drivel to you lot.

1: The Misanthropic.
(Name something - about humanity - you absolutely hate).
This week I have been mostly hating the fact that I go decades (millennia, actually) without a date and then out of the blue I am hit on by a pretty girl but she turns out to be a psycho.

2: The Meretricious:
(Expose someone or something that's phony, fraudulent or bogus).
Bush's assertion that America is at the forefront of the battle against climate change because "technology is on the verge of a breakthrough".
Come on, George; you're doing fuck all (apart from burning more oil) because acting to slow climate change would hurt your profits and those of your buddies.
The "fuck you lot, I'm gonna hit the lecture circuit and leave the mess for the Democrats" attitude simply adds more weight to the sack of shit that is your "legacy" and makes your country a pariah in the eyes of the world.
Twat!

3: The Malcontent:
(Name something you're unhappy with).
Claire's getting married in September and I can't fit into my stupid suit. Do I go on a crash diet or do I say "Fuck it. I'm a fat bastard" and buy a new one?

4: The Meritorious.
(Give someone credit for something and name it if you can).
Groover, for realising the value of great tone.

5: The Mirror.
(See something good about yourself and name it).
I managed not to vomit on the twat who sweated Lynx all over me on the tube.

6: The Make-Believe:
(Name something you wish for).
More bookshelves.

A Cheese-Loving Bibliophile Writes

I ooze my way over to young Robyn's Library Thing and am utterly astonished to learn that there are - incredible as this may seem - some 243,515 books more popular than the classic
"Great Grilled Cheese: 50 Innovative Recipes for Stove Top, Grill and Sandwich Maker"

I am aghast!

Let us right this injustice to the art of cheese-grilling without delay.
Hie thee to Amazon and order your copy today.

Witchy

Brrrrrrrrr …
It's yesterday …
I pop in to Building Control; always a handy favourite when I fancy wasting an hour with obfuscation and obdurate bureaucracy; it is a truly marvellous sink-hole of incompetent fuckwits.

The woman at the desk looks up and beams.
"Gosh! Hello, J……." I say, "How are you? Long time no see."
It's always nice to bump into an old friend and J…… had been my secretary for years, way back during prohibition.
We get chatting and everything is fine and dandy. Then after a few minutes she starts talking about how she's divorced now. I make conciliatory noises. I quite liked her husband; we had all been quite chummy back then and I'd been round their house a lot. J……'s a few years younger than me and slim and pretty but she had always struck me as just the teeeeensiest bit psycho. I wasn't surprised he'd left her, just surprised he was still alive.

Then she says "Laurie tells me you and ……… broke up."

I know, I know. I should see these things coming but I'm a bloke, for fuck's sake. The default setting for my brain is "duh."

"Yes, a loooong time ago. I live in Brundall now." says I in all innocence.
All the bells go off and the lights flash in her eyes. She squeals.
"I live in Brundall!"

I'm still as ignorant as only a bloke can be and quite happily agree that we should meet up for coffee as we now live in the same village. After all, we're old pals and have a lot of gossiping and bitching to catch up on.
Then she lowers her eyes for a moment before hitting me with full beam and a cute smile and a suddenly quiet and conspiratorial voice …
"I never said anything when I was married but …"

Somehow I manage to get away with just her phone number and address which go straight in the shredder when I get home. I am too flabbergasted to tell her I actually have a girlfriend. Besides, that sort of information is likely to elicit a hissy fit and possibly some form of castration with an imaginatively wielded item of office equipment.

How the fuck do I tell the woman "No, I won't meet you for coffee and I won't call you and I am SO glad I didn't tell you my address because frankly you scare the living crap out of me."?
How the fuck do I walk through the village to the local shop?
I like my village. I don't want to move.
How the fuck do I go back to Building Control, which I need to do for my work?
Brrrrrrr …

Advice gratefully accepted.