Pointy Things

Ame commented yesterday how she misses sushi in Piccadilly Circus.
Well, spring is here, and with it come the fucking tourists, so Piccadilly Circus is now a no-go area and I take my sushi down the road to Green Park.

Here you go, Ame.

Last week I popped back to the British Museum to check out the revamped Japan section, which was closed when Ame and Bear were there.

I couldn't open the cabinet and nick this lot, which is a shame as it would be perfect for wearing on the tube.

Looking closely at these 刀 (Katana) it is easy to see the difference between them and the crappy pressed steel replicas that you can buy these days.
These are fucking scary!
Arse-tighteningly so.
Click on 'em and marvel at the craftsmanship.

I love that scene in Kill Bill above Sonny Chiba's sushi bar, where he unveils the sword he has made for Uma Thurman. These are like that only better.

Check this out:
This is the oldest still usable sword in the Museum's collection. It was made by Sueyuki in the 1100s and is a 太刀(Tachi), or the longer of the two swords carried by Samurai.
It is still in perfect condition and looks so sharp I had to hide my fingers behind my back when I stared at the blade.
Yikes!

Monday Melee

Hokay, who drugged my latte? It's Fracas Monday Melee and my ranty gland's malfunctioning. I'm sitting here as happy as a dog with two cocks.
Hey ho.

1: The Misanthropic.
(Name something - about humanity - you absolutely hate).
This week I have been mostly hating all the usuals, but for some stupid reason I'm in la-la land this morning and have lost the will to rant so I'll forgive the lot of 'em.

2: The Meretricious:
(Expose someone or something that's phony, fraudulent or bogus).
My office telephone. Since last year the answerphone message on my direct line states that I'll be out of the office until September the fifth.
Neither I, nor any member of IT can get it so save any updated message, so if anyone needs me I'll be out of the office until September the fifth.
Please leave a message after the tone.
At least it's right once a year …

3: The Malcontent:
(Name something you're unhappy with).
War. HUH! Good God, y'all. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing (sing it again).
Well actually it's pretty good for arms sales but I'm not exactly happy with that either.

4: The Meritorious.
(Give someone credit for something and name it if you can).
Jake and Dinos Chapman for making me laugh out loud in the Tate Gallery. Their new exhibition involves brains, prosthetic genitalia and rubber chickens. Go see it.

5: The Mirror.
(See something good about yourself and name it).
I have astonishingly good finger vibrato.

6: The Make-Believe:
(Name something you wish for).
The return of Disco.

Willy Wonka's French Whore

So, to Simpsons' of Piccadilly (now yet another Waterstones; they are the Starbucks of the book world … Bastards) for a book signing by Young Frankenstein himself, the very wonderful Gene Wilder.
He's also very blurry in this photo as the stupid bookshop people wouldn't let me take flash photos.
Hey ho.

His new book is a lovely little tale called "My French Whore". Unfortunately it is a nice, funny love story and not a steamy account of fornication with a cheese-eating surrender-monkey.
And that's not his French whore, but his publicist, as he was at pains to point out.

This is really just a post to make Robyn jealous because we are both such huge Gene Wilder fans and I got to meet him. Hee hee hee …

For a frail old guy just out of chemo with new baby hair growing on his head, he has still got the old sparkle in his eye and is an utterly charming and funny man.

So now I've got a triple bill of Gene Wilder DVDs for the weekend: The Producers, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein. Bugger the housework, I want to laugh.

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 …

Not More Bloody Buildings …

On a slightly less curmudgeonly note, my semi-underground theatre at the back of Wimbledon High School is finished at last (see here and here for early boring guff).



I didn't have a wide angle lens with me this morning, so you'll have to figure it out for yourselves.

By the way, the man walking across the playground has the best name in the world; he is the improbably magnificent Dick Goodenough (I kid you not). What better name could you give a guy in charge of a girls' high school?
Hey ho.

Monday Melee On A Tuesday (again)

It's Tuesday morning.
I'm back in the office after five days without an internet connection.
I'm not sure I should be doing a Fracas Monday Melee as all I want to do is kill every member of British Telecom, but I will try to be calm and rational …

1: The Misanthropic.
(Name something - about humanity - you absolutely hate).
This week I have been mostly hating British Fucking Telecom (calm and rational enough for you?).

2: The Meretricious:
(Expose someone or something that's phony, fraudulent or bogus).
I've said it before (twice now) and I'll say it again: that shitty little bit on your broadband agreement that says "service may vary according to your location and the distance from your exchange" which means that you pay through the nose for fast broadband and get a worse than dial-up speed, when it connects at all.
British Fucking Telecom, I am going to kill every last one of you bastards. And your families. And your pets.

3: The Malcontent:
(Name something you're unhappy with).
See 1 and 2 above. Only with more swearing. And guns.

4: The Meritorious.
(Give someone credit for something and name it if you can).
Fuck off!

5: The Mirror.
(See something good about yourself and name it).
I am remarkably calm and easy-going.

6: The Make-Believe:
(Name something you wish for).
An internet service provider who provides an internet service (fat fucking chance).

Disconnected

Bad news.
I'm still alive.
I have been totally unable to get a connection for the past three days, and now that I have one it is glitchy and keeps disconnecting me.
Fuck!
When I get back to London on Tuesday I will be able to catch up on your blogs.
Until then, here are some wisteria in St.Giles churchyard this morning.

And some more.

Normal service will be resumed on Tuesday, unless by some miracle I can get online before that.
Meanwhile, here is some light music … dum dum di dum diddly etc …

Thirsty

Well, it's now been forty-one blue-skied and sunny days since it rained in my village and I'm beginning to get thirsty.
Global warming sucks big fat hairy arse.

I like rain; it keeps the fucking tourists away.
I'm getting kinda nostalgic for last summer.
This is a river trip we took from Westminster down to Greenwich last July.
This is what a British Summer is supposed to look like.
Four miserable people sitting in the rain with beer.
If ever there were an appropriate time to use the word "party" as a verb (which there is NOT), this would not be it.

It was quite breezy, too. This is Kaf enjoying a Traditional British Summer.

I could never live in California.
I need to be moist.
Bring on the rain.

Yeah, I know it's a crappy filler post but I'm kinda busy today, juggling twenty-six huge and bellowing headmistresses, several building contractors, interviews for Cad-monkeys and hassle from all quarters.
Work can be fun but it fucks up my blogging.

Maria's Blogville

Yesterday morning I was cruising your blogs at coffee time when I came across Maria's excellent post on blogging, "Blogville".
Go read it. It's a doozy.

She starts by comparing her blogpals to her "real" friends and is somewhat shocked to find she has blogpals whose politics have crawled straight from Satan's arse … "Republicans". Yikes!
I remember the same shock (and some hilarious swearfests - me being not merely a pinko fag but a full-on Marxist) on finding some of my own blogpals - who are wonderful people - are politically so far to the right they would be counted as neo-nazis over here in lefty Britland
(hi, Prudence, proud Republican and hi, Rich, who's more the "Patriotic American").
Yet because I like them and respect them so much I find I can actually listen to their side of things, and welcome their views as a balance to my own Socialist ranting … Thanks in particular to Dear Prudence I have discovered that Republicans are people, too.

Prudence is so gonna whup my patronising Commie ass for that one!

Then Maria goes over her reasons for starting a blog and asks us for ours.
Hokay …
I came across blogging by a somewhat odd route.
As most of you know, I design girls' schools for a living (it's a dirty job, but … etc.) …
We had a memo come round last year saying our schools were banning the use of MySpace and personal blogs for fear of pædophile grooming.
My first thought was "What the fuck's a blog?"
So I Googled it and came up with Blogger, took a look and thought … Hmmm … That looks fun.
Here's my first post, which kind of doesn't explain anything, except that I found ranty posts boring … then two posts later I started ranting and have not stopped since. To start with there was just me and my "real" friend Peahen, and my baby brother, but it was fun.
I just tootled along, writing any old crap (a method which still serves me well) and eventually a stranger dropped into my comment box (hi, Sassy), who, by sheer fluke happened to be an intelligent, lefty American. I was hooked!

Of course, once you've got one blogpal, the whole thing opens up and sucks you in. Through Sassy, I discovered that a bunch of us had started blogging at exactly the same time and I've stuck with them ever since. What a curious and diverse bunch they are, too:
There's Sassy: the voice of intelligent America; a fellow lefty ranter who is more fun than a busload of monkeys let loose in a nunnery;
Robyn: writer, artist and horn player; at first glance a quiet and lovely Christian wife and mother, but "Holy Crap" (as she would say), a real rebel underneath;
Old Knudsen: the sweariest, porniest, funniest cesspool on the web;
and Rich: handsome Boston medical man and coffee addict who'd be great in a TV hospital drama.

Of course, these are only their blog personas.
Just as Dive is a fictional creation, most bloggers only let a certain amount of themselves out into the public domain.
There is a secret underworld of emailing and instant-messaging that goes on beneath the blog-surface, too. Things that could never be revealed in a blog are furtively whispered or passed under the desk. Now some of you are going to be worried, thinking "Who's he talking to? What are they saying about me?", to which I reply "hee hee hee."

And new blogpals arrive all the time.
My lovely Very Personal Assistant, 外人ガールさん provides me with the poop on Tokyo, Kate and The Groover with the lowdown on Down Under, from both sides of the sexual divide. Dear Prudence from the beautiful lakes of New Hampshire and many more … (if you've not been namechecked, think yourself lucky).

Blogpals come by strange routes; one day Lynn dropped into my comments box.
That was an odd and scary day. I liked what she had to say so followed her profile and found the first chapter of her novel. Back then, however, the little minx hadn't labelled it a novel; it just looked like a very public suicide note. It took a few confused exchanges and some considerable relief to realise this was not the case. I'd spank her for it but I know she'd enjoy it too much.
Through Lynn came the Daily Photo Blog mob, including Monsieur B and the lovely Ame, with whom I had a ball when she came over to England (see the "Baps and Peepees" link toward the bottom of my sidebar if you're a newbie).
And talking of newbies, I always check out new commenters on blogpals' sites and usually they are worth an occasional browse, but sometimes someone comes along who is just too cool not to go in the sidebar, as has just happened with both Terroni and Maria, whose idea I stole for this post.

So … these are the strange denizens who currently inhabit the Lake Wobegonesque small town that is Dive's personal Blogville.
Pop across and visit one another if you don't already.
Rich has sent out to Rosa for coffee and Robyn's done some baking. Sassy's bringing "The Stuff" …
Welcome to Blogville. Enjoy your stay.