Where's Malty?

I miss him terribly.

Binegar (Gurney Slade), Foreign Office, Chancellors

I haven’t been able to write much this week, first because my business is to a large extent based on a mountain of work around the Budget, and second because I spent yesterday driving to Dorset and back on the rain-blasted A37, a road of constant accelerations and decelerations, tiresome enough to break any man’s spirit were it not enlivened by the yokel-sounding village names, such as Farrington Gurney and Binegar (Gurney Slade). Love those brackets. Pertinent to Gaw’s recent musings I did enjoy the scrawled but massive handwritten Somerset sign “Cider Here”, conjuring visions of a swimming-hole full of the stuff with gleeful rustics plunging.

I did catch a couple of political programmes on the gogglebox. The Great Offices of State is my kind of politics – long, long views, in which the politicians of the day are but passing pests in the night while faceless, rigid-backed civil servants run the country. This episode was about the Foreign Office. Old Etonians prowl dark leather rooms, patriotically formfilling, standing on burning decks, keeping Britain British in a hideous, irrational world. Frowning, they sift dud intelligence from the lamplighters and pavement artists (The only problem with the TV adaption of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is that it took the action out of Le Carre’s timeless shadow world and put it in a real one with cars and hairstyles). Robin Cook as Foreign Sec was remembered as a vandal who removed a big old painting from King Charles St in the name of ‘modernisation’.

Douglas Hurd noted a notable thing in the discrepancy between perceptions of Britain at home and in Europe. When he goes off to Brussels, the Foreign Secretary leaves the country as a craven compromiser, all too eager to sacrifice British interests to his Eurocrat cronies. He arrives in Europe as a bully and wrangler, wily, suspiciously well-briefed and determined to protect British interests at all costs and hang the rest.

Channel 4’s Ask the Chancellors ‘debate’ proved that we are living in a golden age of Tinkering Politics in which there is absolutely no ideological distinction between any of the main political parties. Vince Cable had nothing to lose and was therefore in the strongest position, but he blew it by admitting that even he, the great Lib Dem sage, couldn’t have predicted the scale of the banking collapse, even as the monkeys in the audience were poised to applaud him for predicting exactly that. He should have milked it – most people want to believe that people can predict things and therefore we can blame those who don’t, because they cannot compute the brute fact that we live in a hideous, irrational world. Anyway, it doesn’t really matter who wins the Election in the long run but you should vote Tory because they’ll have a second Budget and I’ll be quids in.

We're men. Men who like cupcakes.

The ever-vigilant Worm points me to yet more evidence that the cupcake movement started on this blog has jumped the shark gone to Prestatyn.

Butch Bakery in New York proclaims the following Mission Statement:

Our objective is simple. We're men. Men who like cupcakes. Not the frilly pink-frosted sprinkles-and-unicorns kind of cupcakes. We make manly cupcakes. For manly men.

I imagine the Butch Bakery boys intend the above to be uttered in a booming bass Voice of God. In fact, it is impossible to recite it without turning camper than Larry Grayson and Alan Carr in a two-man tent. In fact, it couldn't be camper if it concluded with "Now chase me!"

100 Japanese schoolboys

Via this comment by Tim Newman I find the following video on James Hamilton's blog, in which a professional J-League team take on 100 schoolboys. James admires the way the pros figure out a way to overcome this unusual problem; for myself, I just find the sight of the boys charging through midfield in impossible swarms very funny.

Approaching the Piglets

Scandalously, my Alpaca film only managed third place in the 2010 Yo! Sushi Award for Film and Sculpture Exploring Issues Around Identity in a Powerful Way.

Banksy won it, of course, with a video of a day glo orange Guantanamo inmate holding a megaphone but with his mouth taped up, entitled An Obvious Gag.

However, such is the emotional and aesthetic force of my next piece, Approaching the Piglets by the Side of the Lane, that I’m considering saving it for the Turner. I won’t patronise you by explaining the meaning – it speaks for itself.

A doss

‘The Exmoor’ is the longest compulsory school cross-country run in Britain. A ‘character-building’ eight mile walk to the start then a ten mile run back to the finish (there’s Devonshire logic for you), an eternal hill and mud-blighted slog that instilled in me a deep loathing of the English countryside which it took years to shrug off. There were three possible approaches to the ‘race’:

1) take it seriously and try to run as fast as you can all the way
2) huff and puff along inoffensively doing a bit of running then a bit of walking when you get a stitch or lose a trainer in one of the innumerable bottomless swamps.
3) treat it as an out-and-out doss

Schoolboys who took approach 1 were all prefects and suchlike, insufferable flaxen-haired toadies doubtless now employed in large banks and driving beamers. Those who took approach 2 now vote Lib Dem. Naturally I was a dosser. In our parlance, to doss (v) = to mess about to no aim or purpose. A doss (n) = anything that permitted dossing, eg. a field trip, a free period or a lesson with a teacher unable to maintain discipline.

We all moaned like hell about the Exmoor but an 18 mile nearly-unsupervised ramble about the country - walking, rolling, throwing stuff and talking twaddle - was a prime doss. Fellow Exmoor dossers are still firm friends now. Blogging is a doss and dossing has made me the blogger I am, just as ZMKC’s letters to Dewsbury-Briggs have made her the blogger she is. Character-building.

The British are now too good at cooking

From the Guardian:

Official: British are better at cooking than the French

…A poll has undermined France's reputation as the home of unrivalled culinary excellence with results that suggest the British cook more often, for longer, and produce greater variety than their French counterparts.

As the French television station TF1 put it: "They trounced us at Trafalgar. They whipped us at Waterloo. Now the English have scored their ultimate victory: they are better at cooking than us … we, the self-proclaimed kings of nosh."

The survey, carried out by the French magazine Madame Le Figaro and the BBC's food magazine Olive, has produced an agony of French soul-searching – and a certain amount of disbelief – over the apparent erosion of the country's most celebrated heritage.

…Marilyn Jarman, 36, a French marketing manager, has lived in London for 15 years and admitted she had noticed a huge improvement in British food. "When I first arrived in Britain, chicken kiev was about as adventurous as it got. Now there are farmers' markets and gastro pubs and we eat really well. French food is good but it tends to be very traditional and the same. My mother's a great cook but it's always the same dishes: sautéed veal, wild boar stew, cannelloni with cheese, fish soup."

Mmmm… wild boar stew. Anyway, this isn’t really surprising at all because the French have no interest in variety or culinary adventure or anything other than the eternal repetitions of a nice if stifling monoculture.

Meanwhile, no cliché about the British is more outdated than that we can’t do food. Never mind the farmer’s markets and gastropubs, which are often rip-offs anyway, the major British supermarkets are exceptionally good, both for ingredients and for readymade stuff. We don’t appreciate this because it has crept up on us. Americans think we eat nothing but liver and custard, but while the States is great for eating out deliciously and cheaply – and their lack of a clear distinction between junk and non-junk food is enjoyable for a bit - they have no notion of reasonable portion sizes and the supermarkets are terrible.

The other day I went to a low-key house party where the hosts served up a buffet lunch. When I was a kid the fare at such events would have consisted of pineapple chunks and plasticy cheese on cocktail sticks, thin ham sandwiches and grisly sausage rolls. On Saturday we loaded our plates from a table holding a platter of seven different continental meats including a quite remarkable chorizo, six cheeses none of which were remotely plasticy, olive bread, two homemade breads, two kinds of olive, a delicious homemade chilli and tomato chutney, a bespoke satay curry rice thing with peanuts which I couldn't stop scoffing, homemade Spanish tortilla and many other such pleasing items, washed down with a few glasses of the host’s homebrewed Weissbier, which wasn’t half bad.

This is normal now in the middle classes (see Channel 4’s hard-hitting social documentary Come Dine with Me) but if anything it’s gone too far. I’m pretty tired of turning on my TV to see somebody trying to serve up grilled monkfish on a bed of puy lentils against the clock while stern-faced judges look on and wait to pronounce on the seasoning. Perhaps Sophie Dahl’s new Nigella-ish show is the sharkjump. The campaign for spaghetti hoops on Mother’s Pride starts here.

Zang

This morning as I munched my brekkie (and swiftly followed it up with my lunch, a la ZMKC) in front of Sky’s coverage of the Bangladesh-England Test, I’m sure I heard Nick Knight say of debutant spinner James Tredwell:

“He’s bowled well; he's got plenty of zang off the pitch…”

I doubted myself immediately of course, but it did sound like ‘zang’. He emphasised the zang, and emphasis is a good way to give any noise a bit of meaning.

Perhaps Knight thinks of zang as the yang to zing’s yin.

Saunton Sands

Saunton Sands in North Devon ought to be more famous really, it’s one of the Great bits of Britain. A vast, empty, undeveloped beach, normally only glimpsed by the grockles as they drive by on their way to the smaller, crowded, developed beaches at Croyde and Woolacombe.

Three miles of sea spray, wind and light – Eau de Cheryl is instantly blown to nothingness on Saunton Sands.



I’ve just found the above picture, which I took with my phone in January last year, I think it was. The tiny figures in the distance were in our party, but walking on Saunton Sands is like that: pause for a moment to look at the sea or the dunes and suddenly a great space has somehow appeared between you. Saunton Sands is absolutely crammed with spaces.

Hell, handcart news: the Relics of Cheryl Cole

Last night on an episode of Channel 4’s hard-hitting social documentary Come Dine with Me, a young lady uttered the following profundity: “You know, I would really love it if Cheryl Cole brought out a perfume.”

This struck me as an unusually frank admission by a consumer that the quality of the product is not only secondary but irrelevant compared with the value of the celebrity endorsement.

Have we then reached the stage where a celebrity is no longer used as an excuse to sell pieces of merchandise, but where merchandise is used as an excuse to sell pieces of a celebrity?

Or is it only certain celebrities? And is it a new thing or has the Relic element always been there at the extreme end of the fame and tat-flogging business?

One quarter of human misery...

...is toothache, as Thomas de Quincey or someone like that possibly said some time in history. I can dig it; a miniature molar is currently forcing its way through Brit Jnr’s infant gumline. That tooth is a terrible strain on us all.

De Quincey’s estimation also tallies with the Study of Human Misery I’ve been conducting on behalf of Gallup. My survey showed that 25% of human misery is indeed dentistry-related. 13% is airport security, 11% is Tuesday and 6% is the feeling that it’s getting too late to catch up with contemporaries who appear to have been more successful than you. Christmas accounts for 4% of human misery, the Go Compare adverts for 3% and the remaining 38% is Paris Hilton.

This last seems grossly unfair. Few realise that beneath Paris Hilton’s veneer of Slutty Attention-Seeking beats a sold gold heart of Exhibitionist Promiscuity, and I for one would gladly don helm, visor, comb, gorget, pauldron, breastplate, plackart, fauld, rerebrace, couter, vambrace, gauntlet, greave, cuisse, fan-plates and sabaton, mount my charger and, with flamberge and spetum slay any number of Black Knights or dragons to defend whatever paltry scraps remain of what we might laughingly call "Paris Hilton’s honour".

If ebony and ivory…

...can live together in perfect harmony, side by side on my pyaano keyboard, O Lord, why can’t these alpacas on the alpaca farm* down the road from my office?




This film is my entry for the 2010 Yo! Sushi Award for Film and Sculpture Exploring Issues Around Identity in a Powerful Way. I feel that, in a powerful way, it explores issues around identity.



*not llamas on a llama farm down the road from my office, as I previously thought in my goddamn ignorance

On albums and filler

In one of his occasional bursts of iconoclasm (previous targets have included Roald Dahl, who never did me any harm, and Dylan Thomas), the great Nige slates the Floyd for their preciousness about single-track downloads, and for their concept albums. Nige mentions in particular Dark Side of the Moon but I can’t agree with him on that one – Dark Side of the Moon, like the movie Casablanca, is surely one of those self-justifying cultural artefacts for which, by various flukes and inspirations, everything came together and it just works. Besides, the ‘concept’ is pretty loose compared to the more overt ones in later Rog Waters-led records such as Animals, which doesn’t make a lick of sense, and The Wall, which is, alas, in retrospect, a load of whiny old twaddle. In fact, downloading the handful of good tracks strikes me as being the only sensible approach to The Wall.

But leaving aside the badness or otherwise of concept albums, nonetheless I can’t help feeling regret at the threat of the iTunes culture to straightforward album albums. All music lovers prefer proper albums to compilations because they appreciate the LP as the unit in which musicians serve up their artistic efforts at particular stages in their careers. This is why, for example, Astral Weeks is better than The Best of Van Morrison. Of course, Astral Weeks is one those rare and cherished records devoid of filler, but the aficionado’s preference also applies to albums of uneven quality, these naturally being the vast majority. When one has spent a good deal of one’s spotty, repulsive youth hunched in one’s bedroom with headphones and lyric booklets, one becomes highly attuned to the art - which has survived the two-side format of vinyl and cassette and still exists in CD releases - of album sequencing, ie. tucking away the crap.

There are various approaches to dealing with album filler. There is the frontloader with all the best bits coming crash bang wallop at the start of Side 1. Nevermind, Funhouse, Gold by Ryan Adams and REM’s latest, Accelerate, to pick just a few off the top of my head, all follow this format and it does have advantages for the listener – there is absolutely no reason at all to listen to the second half of the Killers’ debut Hot Fuss, for example, which saves messing about. The backloader is a rarer but not unknown gambit (Magical Mystery Tour, Bringing it all Back Home, Ocean Rain by Echo and the Bunnymen), the middleloader rarer still (Exile on Main St, Trompe Le Monde) and is probably usually accidental.

But most albums are much more calculating in their filler-placement, and follow a familiar sequencing method with the strongest songs opening (lead and follow-up single perhaps), track three an anthemic slowie and all the filler in the lower-middle order but interrupted by the third single to throw the listener a bone, a bit like having Shahid Afridi coming in to bat at number 8. The closing track will be an Epic or a memorable Incongruity (a slow song on a fast album for example). A variation is the use of a murky or quirky opener, with the lead single at track 2. Practically all Britpop albums followed this sequence, so we could call it the Morning Glory, or the Stanley Road or perhaps the Dog Man Star method.

To my mind it’s just plain wrong that the kids of today don’t have to work their way stoically through the filler and can instead gorge themselves on the sweetmeats alone. You need some rough with your smooth; this is why we must lace our Christmas dinner with sprouts. Mind you, a friend of mine did tell me about a friend of his who so loathed one particular track on an LP (Judas Priest or Saxon or similar) that he took a nail and (can this really work?) carefully carved a groove in the vinyl so that the needle would pass directly through it and on to the next number: I don’t want to listen to this song… EVER.

Telescope poem

Up at Clifton Down on Saturday the Suspension Bridge shone in the callow Spring sun, but I had eyes only for the poem which adorns the telescope outside the Observatory. It’s a heartbreaker.



Point the telescope & insert coin,
Turn and fully return knob.
Observe the View and at night the Moon.
Don’t look at the Sun. Hold child on stand.

Coin-operated telescopes are a rich source of found poetry. Who can forget the Yard’s analysis of the shattering Scopepoem at Well-next-the-Sea (“The second stanza makes hot tears spurt.”)?

The Clifton poem can surely claim to be in the same bracket. It hardly needs me to point out the reference to the Book of Ecclesiastes in the second line’s lyrical flourish (“Turn and fully return”) nor the hopeless ‘optimism’ of “and at night the Moon”. As for the double-blow of the concluding line, if there is anywhere in this world a man cold-blooded enough to read it aloud with dry eye and lumpless throat, I've yet to meet him and I'm not sure I'd want to.

A gift for Barack

Further investigation into the theory that Obama doesn’t like us very much has yielded the following information:

Mr Brown handed over carefully selected gifts, including a pen holder made from the wood of a warship that helped stamp out the slave trade - a sister ship of the vessel from which timbers were taken to build Mr Obama's Oval Office desk. Mr Obama's gift in return, a collection of Hollywood film DVDs that could have been bought from any high street store, looked like the kind of thing the White House might hand out to the visiting head of a minor African state.

This could escalate into an amusing battle. I suggest that the next time they meet (if ever), Brown hands over a bundle containing the following:

A small box of Quality Street chocs
Wild Swans by Jung Chang
The Full Monty (VHS)
Hollyoaks Babes and Hunks calendars
A CD of Classic TV Theme Tunes
Packet of Prawn Cocktail flavour crisps
A well-thumbed copy of Nuts magazine
A fridge magnet from the Guernsey Tomato Museum
Now That’s What I Call Music 11 (one cassette missing)
A pencil
An apple
A satsuma
Three or four Brazil nuts

These offerings should be presented in a plastic Tesco carrier bag (tied with a double-knot as the handles aren’t the strongest.)

Obama doesn’t like us very much

Over at Gaw’s place I mentioned my intuition that Obama doesn’t like us very much. I follow current affairs only in an idle sort of way because I don’t really believe in them, so this was based purely on reading the stars and tea leaves and the fact that I couldn’t remember any nice speeches about The Special Relationship etc. However, yesterday I spotted this article in the ST:

When the Washington Post columnist Jackson Diehl asked White House officials to name a foreign leader with whom Obama had forged a personal relationship, there was “a lot of hemming and hawing”, he said. To his astonishment, no one mentioned Gordon Brown. Instead the name proffered was Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president.

The British feel particularly miffed. Within days of becoming president, Obama removed the bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office. This, followed by Obama’s odd choice of gift to Brown — a box of DVDs including Psycho and Toy Story — prompted speculation of something deeper. In his memoir, Obama writes of how his grandfather was beaten by British troops in colonial Kenya.

A senior official from No 10, who was in Washington in December for Obama’s big speech on Afghanistan, was horrified that the president did not once mention Britain in the 45-minute address despite the presence there of 10,000 British troops.

We’re not alone though, as it appears Obama doesn’t like anyone much except the Russians, Chinese and Indonesians. The root problem, alas, seems to be that he is basically a bit of a jerk.

If one had been almost anywhere in Europe in the midst of all that cheering when Obama was elected and suggested that within a year or so the new President would have significantly worsened diplomatic relations with America’s traditional democratic allies compared to the Bush era, one would have risked a tar-and-feathering. Yet still people don’t listen when I observe the truism that everybody is always wrong about everything.