I Miss Lockdown

I miss lockdown.

For a whole year there were only three of us (folk whose interweb was so bad we couldn't work from home) in a four-storey office block.

We had a floor each, with our own kitchen, loos and shower and on sunny days (of which there were a lot that year), PB, our Norwich chief partner (on the right above) would use the office entertainment account to lay on picnics for us. After all, we certainly couldn't entertain anyone else.

Any of the work from home brigade who tested negative for Covid (to a maximum of three to keep to the guidelines the government ignored on a daily basis) could come along to these socially-distanced picnics on the balcony overlooking the river; that's Luke and Adrian joining us in the picture above.

l-r: PB's son, Lucy the labrador, (Teal is lurking under PB's chair, on the lookout for any opportunity to steal people's food), PB, Old Dive, Jill and Adrian.

PB and me being seafoodies, every picnic involved a combination of oysters, lobster or crab, salmon and mussels, plus lots of antipasti and fresh bread and cakes from the bakery on the corner. Oh, and plenty of beer, wine and hand-sanitizer.

 

In the evenings, PB had his drum kit set up in Reception and I had an amp and guitar; Rob the Structural Engineer would bring along his bass and we'd have long, socially-distanced jam sessions. 

Just as well the surrounding office buildings were deserted as Jill said she could hear us a few hundred yards away on Station Bridge.

Somebody better kick-start the next pandemic soon because I'm getting picnic withdrawal symptoms.

We All Scream For Scary Larry

After yesterday's comments I'm off to Boise to track down Scary Larry, the ice cream man. Many thanks to Ms.M for enlightening me as to his existence.
I can't beat that for a creepy name; the best we can do around here is "Mister Whippy" which - sadly - is not an S&M ice cream franchise but merely one of those who peddle that sloppy gunk that looks like wet poo (and hence never comes in chocolate flavour).

About as far from real ice cream as … er … sloppy poo, the stuff is an aerated froth of high fructose corn syrup, water, powdered whey, mono and di-glycerides, calcium sulphate, cellulose, guar gum, polysorbate emulsifiers, a gelling agent made from seaweed (of which I approve), magnesium hydroxide (usually used as a laxative or a deoderant, it is used here to bleach the product), plus a whole lot of stuff from a chemistry set; all of which is excreted (there can be no other word once you've seen it) from a tube. Purportedly a dairy product, very little of it has ever been near a cow's udder and indeed most of it is air or stuff that you would never naturally choose to put in your mouth.

I don't know about the Colonies, but over here the stuff only comes in "white" (neither a flavour nor a colour, merely a chemical bleaching to stop it looking too much like poo) and if you want chocolate, they stick a Cadbury's Flake in it and call it (for reasons beyond the ken of mankind) a "99".

In case Flakes are only sold over here and not across the pond, a "Flake" is history's most pornographic chocolate product.
In the late 60s and 70s they used to advertise them on TV using scantily-clad (and backlit) beautiful young girls - usually in fields for some reason - who would peel back the plastic foreskin and - accompanied by a jingle litigiously akin to the "Aaaaah, aaaaah, aaaaah …" bit from The Beatles "A Day In The Life" - would then proceed to fellate the thing in close-up.
Yum!
Rampant prudery put an end to the adverts, which was a great shame as they were the only easily accessible form of soft porn available to my spotty, adolescent self. They left me with a permanent hankering for as certain shape of lip … Sigh.

When I was a kid, we had Dairyland and Paravani ice cream vans vying for our attention. Mister Softee then invaded and pushed the traditional ice cream sellers out. Foolishly we craved the sloppy gunk that was so addictively sweet it burned our mouths.

As for real ice cream, I do seem to remember a tiny place down on Blyburgate when I was very little. It had a pair of those lovely plaster figurines in the window; half-sized children with rosy cheeks and inappropriate lederhosen who looked for all the world like props from some Hitler Youth propaganda movie.

As far as I can remember, we walked in to someone's tiny living room and sat down and were served real ice cream in a bowl, made in the kitchen by an Italian immigrant family. From cream! I remember strawberry flavour and biscuitty wafers (not the crap you get in ice cream vans) and not much else.
Of course the place is long gone now but perhaps Mum can help me on this one? What was it called? It's on the tip of my tongue, but - like the flavour of the ice cream they made there - I can never quite recall it.

And now I've got Frank Zappa's "Flakes" stuck in my head. Hey ho; at least it's a considerable improvement on yesterday's song …

Tom Purdew Pt.6 - Television Trauma

À la recherche du …

A cautionary tale for young musicians.

It is sometime in the early eighties.
R__, a BBC TV producer who frequents our local pub and brays a lot, unexpectedly turns up at one of my gigs and afterwards sidles up to me to ask if I'd like to do the theme tune and incidental music for a new prime-time TV series he has commissioned.
It's a half-hour quiz show to go out at seven PM.
It is called "Commuter Quiz" and involves teams solving Times crossword clues (the irony of my leaving music to become a commuter and do crosswords on trains is not lost on me). Not the most exciting of prospects but there's money involved so yeah, right; like I'm gonna say "no" …

"Right on, man." says R__, as ever ten years behind in street talk.
Oh, I forgot to say: the man is a dick. He is so full of himself that he leaks out and leaves a trail of slime wherever he goes. You know the type: "big" in regional TV, sports car, young girlfriend, sad bastard; the sort of guy who will grow up to become Alan Partridge. A prize twat.

At the gig, however, I know him merely as a loud asshole name-dropper who happens to be a TV producer. I have yet to discover the "useless tit" side of him.

A week goes by and he tracks me down and informs me that the studio is booked and tells me the place, date and time. He is vague about what precisely I will be recording and with whom but I don't mind that; I love coming in to a band or studio cold and being thrown in at the deep end. It's more fun that way.

The appointed place at the appointed hour.
Seagull Studios in Lowestoft. I've recorded here before and know the engineer (who happens to be blind but a damned good engineer regardless of that), so we chat away over coffee and wait for the rest of the musicians and for R__ with the music.

After a little while, in walks Ian L__, an old friend who is a top banjo player. We do the huggy, greety thing and start to relax. At least with Ian there I know that we are likely to be playing something country or bluegrass tinged and so can get in to the right mindset. I've brought my Martin acoustic as well as a load of electric gear, so no problem there.

Aha … HERE is the problem … R__ …
In he walks, fashionably late (we have already set up and sorted levels and are jamming away happily).
Walking nervously behind him is a very, very young girl. This turns out to be B__, his friend's daughter whom R__ wants to get in to bed and who has not only never sung over headphones before but has never been in a studio or even sung into a microphone. Never mind the fact that she looks about twelve.

It is then that R__ informs us that:
(a) There are no other musicians booked. He knows we are both multi-instrumentalists and so can save some of his budget by getting us to play everything ourselves;
(b) B__ is not a kid he has brought along to watch, but will in fact be singing the theme tune, and;
(c) There is no music except a vague concept in R__'s tiny head.

What he has instead is a small scrap of paper on which he has written some of the most trite and embarrassing lyrics ever penned. Lyrics that squirm with shame before we can even finish reading them; lyrics that neither rhyme nor scan without suffering serious torture.

He then makes things worse by singing them.
R__ cannot sing or write music any more than he can write lyrics.
Ian and I wince at one another, then go into a huddle in the drum booth while R__ attempts to interfere with the unfortunate young girl in front of the blind engineer (this is all absolutely and cringe-inducingly true).
We make a terrible decision.
We can simply pack our gear and leave, but - being young and foolish - we decide "Hey, the money's good; let's just record the fucking thing and get the hell outta here."

So …

I set up the drums and Ian picks up my acoustic in the other room and we lay down a basic track.
R__ is ecstatic.
We take the minimum amount of time to overdub guitar, banjo, keyboards and a few little fills of twiddly lead guitar between the lines.
Then we grab more coffee while poor B__ is stood, shaking with nerves in the vocal booth.

She cannot sing.

B__ actually has quite a pleasant little voice sitting in the room with us, running through the lines and trying to force them to scan, but put her in the vocal booth and sheer terror takes over.

I say to R__ "Let us record an instrumental version while B__ gets used to singing to foldback", in case the show needs incidental music.
But the pervy twat is so desperate to finish up in the studio so he can have more time to pressure B__ into sex before he has to get her home to her parents that he vetos that and forces the money into our hands.
Ian and I pack our stuff and hit the road.
We cannot look.
That poor little girl. After the terror of the vocal booth she will have to face the unutterable horror of the predatory R__ on the drive home.

Naturally, Ian and I assume that the results of the night's "musical" debacle will be scrapped but we have been paid, so we are happy bunnies.

Yes, you know full well what happens …
R__ turns up a week later all full of smiles and congratulations.
Que?
The TV series is due on air in a few weeks time.
WHAT THE FUCK?
I mean, we didn't actually record anything remotely usable. There was no incidental music for a start.
Don't worry, says R__; all that has been sorted out, and he saunters off, smiling proudly.
Oh fuck.

So here we are, sitting in front of a TV with a bunch of people waiting to see just what R__ has managed to do. Has he come to his senses and hired another bunch of musos and let them record something worthwhile?
Has he fuck …

"Nationwide" with good old Sue Lawley fades into the credits and the BBC East logo comes up. The announcer introduces a new series and there's a piece of twiddly guitar that is definitely me.
And then.
Poor B__ must have died a million deaths that night … and every night afterward for the entire run.

Oh dear …
The engineer has done his best. He has artificially double tracked B__'s voice to beef it up and has cut short the wavering notes, filling the gaps with reverb to cover the faltering pitch …
Actually, our playing is fine and as long as you aren't fussy you may not notice the fact that this poor little girl has never used a proper mic before. I just pray that she hasn't made her nightmare complete by succumbing to R__'s odious advances.
And so, after an initial cringe, the show turns out to be quite watchable until …
… the scores come up between each round and all R__ has done is to put on the backing track to the theme tune with the vocals taken out.
No incidental music, just a boring backing track with little filigree lead guitar fills at the end of each glaringly empty line.
It would have taken me no more than ten minutes to put down some instrumental fills, but no; R__ just wanted us out of the studio so he could work on poor B__ …
I try to burrow my head through the solid floor in shame. This goes on for the whole series.

And to pile on the agony, the damned programme is brought back for another series …
And another …

Alas and alack, for verily the gods of shame and embarassment do crap in mine hat and do squish it down upon mine head.

Epilogue:
Shortly before the programme airs, B__ informs R__'s girlfriend of his behaviour and she leaves him, taking his sports car.
The girlfriend phones me and tells me that R__ has trousered at least ten times what we were paid as his budget for session musicians.
We tell him - somewhat forcefully - how we feel about this.
R__ leaves town.
I learn never to accept TV work except through my agent.
I learn to use aliases when recording for other people.
Thankfully, we notice that the credit for "Music" at the end of the show has R__'s name, not our own (phew).

True story.

Tom Purdew Pt.5 (cont.)

After yesterday's post and the subsequent comment-fest about Peter Gabriel and my cock, a quick rummage in the attic produced these:
Good old Pete at Knobworth in '78.

"Oi! How come my microphone smells like your cock?"

"And did you piss on my shoes?"

Hey ho. I'll have another rummage at the weekend. I'm sure there are photos of Zappa and the Boomtown Rats and the Tubes somewhere in the attic.

Tom Purdew Pt.5 - The Dukes Of Dork

À la recherche du …

I never did get the thing with the madeleines …
Sure, I appreciate that you can trigger past memories by biting into something or sniffing stuff (well not the latter with me, being anosmic); it was just the madeleines I never got my head around.
I mean what's with the bun shaped like a shellfish? Eh, Proust, you wanker?
If it's shaped like a shellfish it should taste like a shellfish. Shouldn't it?
That's what pisses me off about Guylian chocolates, too. I'm expecting whelk and I get chocolate truffle. That's just not right …

But I digress.

The year is 1978.
This one comes flooding back because my iPod is on shuffle on the way in to work and Zappa's "Zoot Allures" is followed immediately by The Tubes "White Punks On Dope".
So … cue swirly thing and Twilight Zone music as we are zapped back to 1978 and a very noisy Knebworth Park.
On the "Knobworth" Festival bill this year (from what I remember) are Wilco Johnson's Solid Senders, Dave Edmunds' Rockpile, The Boomtown Rats, Peter Gabriel (in his baldy phase), Frank Zappa and The Tubes.
I am extremely drunk and rather foolishly am in the very front row, squashed up against the security barriers. Paul and I have spent the morning fighting our way here and we know that if we move away for any reason we will never get our places back.
We also know that the men's "hygiene facility" at Knebworth (back in those days, anyway) is a large corrugated iron swimming pool full of piss set delightfully in half an acre of slippery piss-mud. So we simply yank out our todgers and let rip on the grass area in front of the stage.

For sustenance, we have provided ourselves with two, five-litre plastic containers which we have filled with cheap red wine. The typical student diet of the day. And a bag of spliffs.

And it doesn't rain!
Glory be!

The Rats are actually pretty good. Geldof leaping about the stage in red jeans, swearing almost as much as he does these days at the UN.
Peter Gabriel is excellent. Just before his set, the roadies in front of us are joined by a bunch of bald guys in hi-vis jackets. Turns out this is Gabriel and his band. He very graciously shakes hands with me, standing unwittingly in a pool of my wine-scented pee before taking the stage for an excellent set of his spiffy early solo stuff, having recently come to his senses and leapt from the sinking ship of Genesis before they plunge shrieking into the fœtid pismire of Phil Collinsdom.

Next up is the guy I've come to see: Uncle Frank. Woohoo!
As this is 1978, however, the massed ranks of punks behind us start up a constant barrage of piss-filled cans and bottles. As these rain down on the stage, Frank gives the piss-bottlers the finger, turns his back on them and plays a twenty minute solo, which only enrages them more.
I am in hog heaven. The guy next to us goes down when a party-four full of piss hits him on the head and the security goons drag him away, leaving us more room to stagger. Zappa's set is one of my life's bizarre little highlights, made even better by the fact that I am wearing a Zappa "Titties and Beer" teeshirt and Frank himself is wearing a brown, old-ladies' cardigan.

Then it's The Tubes. Nobody seems to remember them now but for a few months in '78 they are pretty awesome; hilariously taking the piss out of the punks and themselves. They play an immaculate set that includes fifteen-inch platform shoes, massive codpieces, huge dancing cigarettes, a pink Cadillac and some lovely gimp suits and whips during the splendid Mondo Bondage. A delightful evening's diversion …

Which brings me to the Dukes of Dork episode …

During the firework display everybody rushes for their cars. Somehow we find Paul's Mini (which manages to survive this incident only to burst into flames and expire the following month at a gig at the UEA) and join the static queue for the single bloody exit.
On our way to the exit, we both notice that the line of cars seems to be skirting all the way round three sides of a huge field. We are both very, very drunk. We decide that it would be a good idea to simply cut across the middle of the field and push in to the queue at the exit.

Paul guns the throttle and we lurch off at a very unwise speed, bounding over the bumps and tussocks, the Mini ploughing its own somewhat foolish furrow through the long grass like an out-take from the Italian Job.
Oblivious of the massed car horns and jeers all around us we find ourselves suddenly flying …
Not so much the Dukes of Hazzard as the Dukes of Dork.
There is a large drainage ditch crossing the field.
We hit the other side of it and roll into the ditch in an extremely undignified manner …

I remember a huge round of applause. Probably the biggest one of the day.
I remember trying to find my glasses in the footwell and a girl named Sue, who we seem to have acquired and who has been asleep on the back seat, now laying, giggling across the inside of what is left of the windscreen.
We are dragged from the car and given a severe bollocking by the security guards as the crowd of laughing drivers rolls the car back onto its wheels and hauls it out of the ditch.
Amazingly the car starts and even better, we are allowed to cut across the rest of the field and - in the words of the security guards - to fuck off.
Having no windscreen kind of keeps us awake for the two hour drive home, where we eat coffee 'til we puke.

Were those the days?
I really have no idea …

Tom Purdew Pt.4 - Teachers

À la recherche du …

We have to wear caps when we're in uniform.

And if we are in uniform but outside the school, we are required to doff said caps to teachers, parents and governors.
For a kid just starting grammar school, who wouldn't know a governor from a hole in the ground, this is a bit daunting.
We do, however, miss having to wear gowns by one year. Which is a bit of a swizz, because they're great for playing Batman.

The Big School is huge, like a scary city, with places we're forbidden to enter and others we're just plain terrified of. Our little gang gets lost for the first few weeks. We get bullied. We get yelled at and hit by the teachers and præfects (yes, Latin is mandatory to O level) for just standing there looking confused.

The teachers' corporal punishment armoury is formidable. There's the cane, of course. And Mister White has his slipper; Messrs. Montacute and Fosdyke are all too ready with a heavy wooden blackboard eraser to the head. There are rulers to the hands, chalk thrown at the head, all manner of slaps and punches to head and body … and Mrs. Gardner, the deputy head, rules by sheer pants-wetting terror.

Oddly, nobody is afraid of Old Slump, the half-dead headmaster who sleeps, toad-like in his study all day. He is a master of delegation.

For a kid who has been teacher's pet in primary school and shoved forward a year for being a girly swot, the Big School is a real smack in the face with reality. Suddenly there are other kids smarter than me. There is a pecking order and I'm not at the top.
Arse!

The teachers come in two basic flavours:
Flavour one is the old guard. Hardened and embittered old disciplinarians; they will all retire when we leave after our seven year sentences as the school is due to become a "comprehensive" under education reforms and will be filled with filthy little oiks.
The old guard are determined to take it out on the last year of grammar school kids … us.
Flavour two is the young, wide-eyed and innocent wave of liberal, anti-corporal punishment, caring educators. We love their classes for the first few years; it is only after we realise they haven't the balls to beat good grades into us that we start to turn against them.

I find as the years pass that the most terrifying and the harshest teachers are the ones I come to like and respect far more than the wishy-washy drips who let us run riot.
In fact, in my final year as a præfect I am best friends with the child-eating gorgon Mrs. Gardner who, as I've said before, shares a passion for avant-garde music, lets me wear my hair long and wear my dope-stinking old afghan coat, and lets my rock band play school concerts (unheard of back then, when guitar was not allowed in music class).
And I get through all seven years without being caned once …

Special mention in the teaching awards goes to:

Miss Mc.Carthy (English Grammar) and Miss Jackson (French). A couple of elderly spinsters of uncertain sexual proclivities, who share a small bungalow in the town and who make an excellent cup of tea for a student who has been out gigging all week and so needs to be watched over (at their bungalow) while he catches up on his homework.
Miss Jackson is ex. French Resistance and goes understandably apeshit at any mention of Germany; which must be uncomfortable in the modern languages staffroom …
Miss Mc.Carthy is without a doubt the best teacher I have ever had. Bless her wrinkly old stockings. She instils in me a love of books, a love of learning and a pedantry beyond all reason.

"Fifi" Harcourt; another elderly French mistress and apparently a bit of a goer in the nineteen-twenties. Imagine Margaret Rutherford after being dead twenty years, yet behaving in an unnervingly frisky and flirty manner, and you will get Fifi.

Bernie Culpin; the only one of the new breed to garner any respect from me, probably for introducing me to the Communist Party; though marks deducted for not accepting an essay on John Lennon and the peace movement (JL is very much alive at the time, and so not of "historical significance").

Mr. Phillips; for seducing Andy P. and getting kicked out (not for the seduction, but for the brazen flaunting of their relationship).

Mr. Stuart, a Scotsman madder than Old Knudsen, who makes a damned good athlete out of me by shouting a lot and hitting my shins with a hockey stick (his constant companion).

Mr. Grove (Religious Education); for producing more kids than he actually teaches. We all feel sorry for his poor, permanently pregnant wife.

And finally, Miss Moore, Head of Art (Hi, Priscilla), the micro-skirted and admittedly hot school tart; for leaving her knickers hanging on the mirror of her sports car, and for leaving me in sole charge of the art department all through my final two years while she fucks her way assiduously through the sixth form register; which results in
(a) me winning the school art prize and
(b) copious sex with Judith F in the art office …

Happy days? I honestly can't remember …

Tom Purdew Pt.3 - Dad

À la recherche du …

Remembrance Sunday.
Always gets to me …
In the family, up until recently, it was usually centred around dad's brother Tony.
He was a tailgunner. Just nineteen in the closing months of the war, his plane was shot down and crashed into the side of a hill. Nothing you could do if you were tailgunner. No room in your turret for a parachute …

We lost dad four years and a week ago, so this time of year I really miss him.
But lately, I've been scanning in lots of mum's old pictures for her, so to cheer myself up a bit before my rotten forty-eighth birthday tomorrow, here's a bunch of silly ones to remind me of dad:

When Elvis ruled the world …
Dad makes sure the fields and trees hear the good news that rock and roll is king.
Me and Phil got the old Dansette when mum and dad bought a radiogram in the sixties. You could load stacks of LPs on it and just let it play for hours. That's dad's box of 78s, which we still have. Early Elvis, Little Richard, Jerry Lee, et al … Wonderful.

This is the reprobate who somehow romanced mum (before the RAF mended his ways). Handsome devil, isn't he?


And this one cracks me up. Mum when she was around ten, wearing what looks like some old curtains, and with a table mat on her head. Somehow, these two were allowed to breed …

I like this one. This is dad in Mdina, Malta, a few miles from where I was born. He served in Cyprus on 39 Squadron nuclear bombers, but the wives were based in Malta and he certainly looks happy to be here.

And this is him in Cyprus. "Active service" they called it … Hmmm … Very active.
This, kids, was our nuclear deterrent at the height of the cold war. Tremble in your boots, mighty Soviet armies!


And this last one I've put in, not just because I'm in it (ain't I cute?), but because it's the only photo of my childhood nemesis, filled with spiders and darkness, the terrifying outside privy!

That's it: the door on the left (the door on the right is the coal shed). It looks quite benign in the daylight, doesn't it?
Don't be fooled. On a cold winter's night it was the most terrible place on earth to me … Brrr … I shudder even now to think of it.

So that's dad in his youth. He was great and I miss him loads.

Tom Purdew Pt.2 - Cold War

À la recherche du …

1964 …

Hey! That's me! Down there on the left. Little brother Phil on the right. And doesn't Mum look way cool in her hornrims and home-made coat? Dig our cute shoes and cheesy identical costumes.
And those strange little labels … What's that about?Well, kids; here's some history: this is what happens in a nuclear war. Really! Her Majesty's Government has decreed that we are to take part in a nuclear war evacuation exercise! Woohoo!

It's early morning. Several streets of our sleepy little town are abuzz with unusual activity. Mums are laying out the sunday best. Dads are dusting off the Box Brownies. Hyperactive kids are flying round the house, making airplane noises and bumping into things. Our mum is making sure we all look our best, because the TELEVISION PEOPLE will be there! Note the rag she carries (in Phil's hand) for emergency spit-washes.

By mid-morning we are all out on the pavement, the mums checking out one another's clothes. Everyone is decked out in their finery, ready to get nuked. The whole street! This is so weird.
Nobody talks above a whisper. We might miss the siren. Tension mounts as the clock ticks toward the hour …

There it is! The unearthly rising tone wailing out from the church tower, telling us we have FOUR MINUTES until the bombs hit us. Four minutes …
The same siren sounds every sunday morning, telling grown-ups everywhere to send the kids out to play while they furtively fumble for four minutes; the added thrill of pretending it's the real thing. But this day is different … This day the bombs are coming … We might even be on television!

As the siren wails on, wardens tell us to walk slowly to the top of the street, keeping in order like it's a school trip. Then we file along the main road to the coach station where we spend around twenty minutes being loaded up, street by street, into lovely old fifties charabancs, gleaming with strips of chrome. They judder into life and we're off, excitedly staring out of the windows at the spooky streets of our partially depopulated town, wondering the same thing we wonder every day: if we will actually get to see a mushroom cloud or if it will all be over in an instant, just a big flash like lightning …
And where do the government plan to send us when the bombs rain down?
We are headed, rather curiously, to Reydon School, a forty minute drive away.
From the coach windows, we can see across Sole Bay to the Sizewell Nuclear Reactor. There are American airbases dotted around the region. Some dads point out that at least it will be quick, being evacuated into a target area.

Too young to understand that this is the way our government intends to protect us during the imminent nuclear armageddon, we troop into the assembly hall and tuck in to lukewarm banana custard, served by school dinnerladies with lots of make-up and new hair-dos. The banana custard will obviously have some miraculous anti-radiation effect. The school dinnerladies, like the coach drivers, will no doubt be there at work during the apocalypse … After our curious meal, anticlimactically, we file back onto the coaches for the long drive home.

We do get on the telly that night. Crowded round the little wooden cabinet, doors open to reveal the flickering, almost spherical nine-inch screen … Look! There's mum shoving us back on the coach. Not her most dignified moment, but at least it was us and not somebody from the next street …

Back in the real world, that morning, our four minutes are up before we even reach the top of the road.
KERBLOOEY! The big light comes on, then all the lights go out, including yours and mine.
This is living every day with the very real terror of MAD. Mutually Assured Destruction (it's okay that all our people get killed, because all of theirs will be dead, too) …

I kinda miss the old Cold War. That Dr. Strangelove frisson … Hearing the rumble of the Soviet Bears, their long bodies full of bombs, flying down our coast every day, shadowed by our fighter planes. The thrill of wondering if you actually need to do your homework when you could well be dead by morning …

And now here's today's homework. The Bears don't fly any more so you have to do it.

Today's phrase you must use in your next telephone conversation: Mutually Assured Destruction.

Today's track to track down: New Frontier by Donald Fagen, who obviously misses the romance of the Cold War as much as I do.

Today's reading assignment: When The Wind Blows by Raymond Briggs. Send a copy to George Bush; it's a comic strip so he might be able to understand some of it. Get a kid to read him the longer words.

Today's fact: Uranuim is actually a vegetable.

Tom Purdew Pt.1 - Ana

À la recherche du …

We are sitting eating lobster in a Portuguese square. It's some time in the early nineties.
It's a big table; there are a lot of us. We sit apart from the tourists; we are laughing noisily and chattering in Portuguese. It's getting dark but the heat of the day still burns in my skin. Ana is there, and me, and Julie and Cherry and Nigel and Carla and João. I don't see Jorge, perhaps he's back in Lisbon. Carla's little girl Raquel plays under the table, surfacing only for her tumbler of red wine or to grab something off someone's plate.
Blue ceramic pots of açorda; their hot steam twisting up into the darkening sky. Lobster detritus scattered like shrapnel. Clams. Tomatoes. Laughter. Wine … lots of wine.

The table has a paper cloth. Raquel has some felt pens. I start to draw.

As the evening grows around us the picture of the square spreads across the table, oozing outward in all directions. I swap chairs to chase it. Plates and bottles fill any empty spaces. More food. More wine. João makes the corno and laughs at his likeness. Ana pouts at hers. The waiter wants to be in there, too.
Later, the tourists are gone, replaced by cicadas. Alone now in our little pool of light, we drink and laugh. In the dark distance, fireworks sparkle across the bay …

By the early hours, the whole square is there on the table, with the swirling sky above. It covers the entire thing, dotted with small islands of bottles and glasses and bowls of olives. We are all very drunk and very happy. I sign the tablecloth and they pin it up in the restaurant. It's still there the next night, covered in wine stains and bits of lobster. It's good. I didn't go to art college just to screw and smoke dope.

À la recherche du …

A few years later, the usual things happen and that which we love is lost …

Everything comes and goes
Marked by lovers and styles of clothes
(Joni - Down To You, from Court And Spark)

I'm posting this picture of Ana because she turned up in my dreams last night, and so today I'm missing her. Até logo, bonita …

And because I like the picture …

And because I want to …