I’m a somebody, please talk to me

It’s amazing how an inanimate object can make you completely approachable to strangers. Sometimes this is a good thing, sometimes bad. It’s a bit like wearing a T-shirt that says “I’m somebody. Feel free to talk to me”.

Normally that inanimate object is my cello. Ever since weekly train journey’s from Cambridge to Bury St Edmunds, travelling with a cello has made me never short of conversation. Normally I’d hear somebody’s tale of a distant relative who used to play the tin whistle, or how they wish they’d never given up on the violin when they were younger. Sometimes I’d get, “Oh you must know so-and-so from Aberdeen, they play viola too”. Ocassionally it’d become a two-way street, and there’d be long discussions about Menuhin or Yo Yo Ma. Some of them were clearly Gramophone reviewers who’d missed their vocations.

It’s the same the world over. I can remember someone talking to me on the ‘T’ in Boston, asking me why I was in the states and asking me about my schooling. Travelling by air is always a hoot – everyone on the entire plane will smile at me, most will say something (everyone but the person sat in front of me, who will try and fail miserably to recilne their seat throughout the entire journey). It’s like having a badge that says “I’m cool, friendly”. I now hate the anonymity of travelling without it. It’s boring, I’m like everyone else. Just queuing in line to go through security. No fuss. A Joe Nobody.

I think I’ve found a second object. Today I was getting some sunset shots over Bristol. Nothing unusual in me carrying my camera. But the lovely Sarah has bought me a tripod, and it would appear the tripod qualifies me as a professional photographer. Passing motorists smiled. Then, eventually, one guy pulled over and, lowering his window, said what a lovely sunset it was, how he hoped I got some good shots and remarked it was gettnig cold (maybe my blue hands were giving away the sub-zero air temperature).

That’s it. Eureka. When I can’t take the cello, I can carry around the tripod. I may never have to travel in silence again!

The Pursuit of Happiness

No, not the Will Smith thing (The Pursuit of ‘Happyness’), although that had been in the original plan today, but just general wellbeing.

I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again, I’m a definite countryside person. Okay, being covered in mud isn’t the greatest sensation, but I don’t need to have a clean car, and I don’t mind having to wrap up warm or the smell of horse pooh. All good qualifications for living in the countryside I think you’ll agree – they’re probably in list of top 12 requirements in a Horse and Hound editorial. Cycling around this green domain gives me an enormous sense of wellbeing, a bit like Phil Daniels’ buzz from feeding the pidgeons in that Blur ditty. There’s something almost poetic about cycling around in silence, ocassionally being interupted by a ‘moo’ or a ‘baa’. Apart from the odd ‘hello’ from passing fellow cyclists, horsists or walkists, you’re pretty much alone in the middle of nowhere around here, but being able to see Wales and the river Severn on the horizon.

I think it comes from my childhood, but cycle rides are measured in churches. Many a day was spent doing sponsored rides where each church would result in more money for a charity accompanied by a choccy biccy and a weak orange drink. Luckily this area has churches in abundance… and here’s two of them. I present my pictorial description of today’s serenity:

Short back and sighs

It was that terrible time again. Haircut time. I know it’s that time because a small child said to me, ‘I’ve never seen anyone with hair like yours before’. Although I don’t want to be the kind of person who is just like everybody else, I’m thinking blue-collar American here, I don’t want to stand out quite that much in a crowd.

The thing about my little town is that, at times, it can feel like it’s only populated by over-70’s. So I find myself in a salon surrounded by the kind of people who would play shuffle-board on a round-the-world cruise, or take one of those coach tours you see parked up at motorway service stations where everyone seems to act like South Mimms Services is actually a piece of Venice, misplaced just north of London. It’s not that I did anything wrong. I chose a trendy place with a onomatopoeic name, with young staff, primary-coloured walls, and loud music. It just happened to be full of older people. Older women.

So I’m having my hair washed, despite the fact I washed it in the shower 24 minutes ago, and I’m drawn into listening to the old lady next to me talking. I know all of her recent history, in over-heard shorthand. “Oh, I got a hire insurance car… some companies do that nowadays you know… lucky the car in front pulled away at the exact moment I got hit, otherwise I’d have been concertinered…”. Fantastic. Well, not for her obviously. I’m engrossed, and I miss the fact that my hair is now washed and clean, only 28 minutes after I stepped out of the shower.

I’m having my hair cut now, and unusually I’m saved from my salon social leprosy by my snipper starting a conversation. I know this because she talks rather loudly and accusatory because, apparently, I ignored her question about how my Christmas went the first time. I was engrossed. Old lady number 1 is now in the chair next to me, and still talking. “I had to come here first… I’m cooking for my club later… 12 of them… well, I’m not cooking… caterer… lady… Ham as the main course… except for the vegetarians… I think she’s doing some vegetables for them…”. Despite the constant worry in the back of my mind that I’m going to get a bad haircut as a result of my curtailing (and in many respects ignoring) my stylist’s attempts at engaging me in conversation, I’m gripped at this lady’s talking.
You see, old lady number 1 is having a busier social schedule than me. She’s having a busier schedule than me full stop. I’m going out for a quick ride before sitting in the car being chaufferred to Birmingham for a string quartet rehearsal. No dining, no dressing smart, no socialite ocassions with Forero Roche at all.

I try to cheer myself up that I’m actually a bit busy tomorrow. Unaware of my dismay, the lady in question continues to jiggle her feet, which don’t reach the floor from the height of her chair, in time to the latest reincarnation of a Paul Weller hit that some shiny young pop band is having played on Local FM…

New Deathcreem

I remember Eddie Izzard doing a stint of stand-up about cosmetics for men. Not cosmetics for men per se. No. Not men standing side-by-side at the mirrors with lightbulb surrounds in a ‘banging’ club in a metropolitan city applying blusher and concealer. No. Moisturisers. Although there are probably many men out there going, ‘but they’re not cosmetics’ (they sort of are), the suggestion was that companies should give up on talking about softness and cleanliness and just have an ad opening with the line, ‘new death cream for men’.

Proof that someone has taken that to heart with cycle accessories, I give the ‘Kryptonite New York Chain’. No, not some samauri-defeating street weapon for gangland violence involving outcasts from the Village People, but a bike lock. Firstly, ‘Kryptonite’. Surely the superman comics are the preserve of the bespectacled geek-boy who has grown into a sporty adult with disposable income (although possibly some infringement of copyright – I’d investigate that Action Comics). Well, Clark Kent’s not giong to be getting your bike, but I’d watch out for a Mr Luther. Then there’s the idea of it being a ‘New York’ chain. Images of violence, of Andy Sipowicz in NYPD Blue endless investigating the homicides of bicycle ‘crims’ all over Greenwich village and Lower Manhatten. Like you outdoorsey guy is going to go, ‘hey, if it can withstand an attack on the streets of New York where they have Nasa laser-guided bolt cutters, it’ll be fine outside my semi- in Halifax’.

I present to you, the new death cycle lock… for men. Obviously.

Fit as a butcher’s dog

Not that I saw a dog in the butchers today. That would be against every health and safety rule in the land. Every HSE rule except the one which should be created for the characters on the adverts late at night on TalkSport Radio, who fall off their ladders regularly instantly earning them a free holiday to Majorca as compensation.

No, what I saw was an absolutely bewildering array of stuff. Like the guy sent out shopping for ‘ladies things’ by his girlfriend, I get this amazing need when I walk into a butchers to pick something and get out as quickly as possible. Seriously, it’s like shopping in the butcher’s is my own personal SAS mission into a volatile situation. It’s sad really. My grandad was a butcher for a time, a curious job move from looking after horses on a farm but there you go, and I feel I should be more knowledgeable about these things.

You see the sad reality is that I’ve grown up choosing my meat from a display chiller in a supermarket, with all the cuts labelled and in bad-for-the-environment but good-for-disguising-the-fact-it was-an-animal cellophane packaging. I can browse, discover things for myself without looking silly, and then pay for it at the till manned by someone who can barely tell the difference between an apple and a kiwi, let alone critique by choice of lamb-shank. The butcher’s is full of little old ladies, or more accurately old men, who know exactly what cut of what kind of meat treated in what kind of way they want. I’m not like that. I can see the blackboard on the wall that talks about all kind of mystical stuff – special cuts with faniciful names, stuff in weights I don’t understand (damn those teachers who stubbornly chose to talk in imperial measurements at school!), but it may as well be written in Sanskrit for all the good it does me.

I’m sure there are untold wonders waiting for me to receive them, but I’m snowblind. I’m left staring blankly at the comparatively boring chiller display in front of me, choosing sausages in cellophane finding the exact change in order to aid a swift exit to the meatless safety of the High Street. Surely there must be somewhere I can find out about this stuff?

Actually, surely in this day and age we, the consumer, should probably expect a butcher to have a website to lead us through the botanical garden that is butchers-cut meats (such is the sad way of the world where we Google things rather than actually asking another human being). My local bakery has done it. You can see their site here. You can even mail-order bread, and receive it via ParcelForce the day after it was baked. It’s really good 100% organic bread. I recommend it.

Those who can…

I’m sure everyone by now has seen the government’s television recruitment campaign to encourage more people into teacher training. Tonight I saw the one for physics teachers which I recommend watching closely:

[Smart boy with RP accent, probably selective entry school]: “What would happen if we fell in a blackhole?”

[Smart secondary state school, mid-physics lesson, Estuary English with glottal stops] : “Huh? Maybe we should ask Einstein!” (laughter)

[Tall, thin, long but scruffy-haired school kid, RP accent] : “Is there such a thing as dark matter?”

[Slightly more scruffy uniform, with very broad regional dialect]: “Why does the water go down the plug in different directions in each hemisphere?”

I’ve no doubt it’s encouraging people to quit their immensely well-paid jobs and become teachers, but surely this is reinforcing stereotypes here?!? – The Prof. Hawkins-esque posh kids are into blackholes and dark matter whilst those in more rural parts are only interested in gazing into a plughole?

Still, I recommend this fun comparison of emotions in your job compared to a teacher…

Bogof Cycle Ride

When I was younger I would ride my bike everywhere. I would spend all day riding around my estate with my friend Dominic. It was one of those council estates with loads of steps, alleyways and tunnels joining houses where they had a bedroom over the top of the tunnel. It was award-winning, apparently, designed in the early 1960’s by the Great London Council to house those leaving London. It’s design rested on joining terraced houses the wrong way (placing doors in unusual places), and making optimum use of space by building the whole thing on the side of a hill. It made for a mean cycle track.

The thing was, I always had this unfortunate habit of making a pedal fall off my bike (most people remarked it was the result of my unusually large feet). This wasn’t so bad on the estate – there was always a hill to freewheel down – but was a nightmare when I started going further afield to Wratting, Finchingfield and Linton. Pedal off the bike = a long walk home.

Today I was lucky, in that I got to relive my childhood memories. Two and a half miles into my cycle ride (I must start talking cooler and call them just “rides”), and the pedal fell off. I love the spirit of the people where we live, always saying ‘hi’, but it made the experience so amazingly humiliating. There I am, with my sporty helmet and cycling stuff, pushing my bike along, with a pedal in one hand. The granny cycling past me was probably only smiling in sympathy, but it certainly felt like gloating to me…

Still, bikes are much easier to fix than cars, and 1 hour later I had my bike back, fixed for a fiver. So today I got a buy-one-get-one-free ride – ten miles in all, but 2.5 of those were walking carrying my delinquent pedal.

The Trial of Paddington Bear

Sorry. The Trial of Tony Blair.

There’s been a lot of rumbling and now it’s here, The Trial of Tony Blair on More4. Channel 4 finally takes its hands off the Big Brother cash-cow and Trumanshow-esque 24/7 Jade Goody show, and flexes its satirical muscles again. But I wonder how many people are tuning in hoping to see Tony suffer?

He was the hero of our generation. It was our first vote, and we used it to overthrow the many years of conservative rule our parents’ generation had bestowed upon the world. He was young, he had sparkling teeth and a seemingly moralistic view of the future, and we fell for it. Moreover, he had Oasis and Blur on his side – not even the NME could get them to appear within the same edition, but here our future PM had brought them together.

And tonight we’re going to see him brought to trial for war crimes in the Hague. There’ll be the T-shirt acitivists, I’m sure, sitting watching their Black-and-white sets screaming, “Hurrah! What I said would happen whilst I was at Oxbridge is finally coming true. See the people realise the truth!”. But Tarquin will be wrong. There will be no war crimes trial. There will be no seachange of public oppinion.

Reality will not be an echo of this programme for one reason. Politicians rarely come a cropper. Jeffrey Archer is still writing and enjoying his peerage perks, John Major is still seen as dull despite his ‘confessions’, and Tony Blair will still rattle on like an elderly subway train into the future. There’s kind of a neverending futility to it all. Jeremy Vine can have as many lunchtime phone-ins with ‘Angry from Essex’ spilling forth venemous bile about atrocities here and there, but the world will carry on. There’ll be another suited and booted shiny chap to take his place.

Let’s face it, it wasn’t Tony alone. If Teddy Kennedy can walk away from the ‘drowned woman in his own car’ Chappaquiddick, then what Tarquin will see on More4 is far from prophecy.

I’m a fan of Robert Lindsay. I enjoy reruns of him shouting “Power to the People” and “Freedom to Tooting” as Citizen Smith. His portrayal of Blair is better than Bremner or Culshaw, but this isn’t his two-fingered victory salute to New Labour. It’ll probably do more to help Blair than Cameron.

Forget the false-hope of political seachange. I’ll be watching Jack Reagon style police brutality, with handbrake turns in a vinyl-roofed granada with a backing track of Bowie and T-Rex with Life on Mars… a man transported back in time by a car accident – much more like reality.

Reasons to be country… Part 1

Just your typical Sunday here:

9am – Awoken by the church bells from across the road
10am – Breakfast looking through the french windows at Robins in the garden
11am – A bit of bicycle maintenance in the garden (saving the degrease til next week)
12pm – Off to the farmshop for pork chops and veg for the coming week
2pm – Set off on an 8-mile cycle greeting fellow cyclists enroute across the common and down the country lanes
4.30pm – Off to the pub for a pint of local ale

Who’d live anywhere else?

Tubthumping

Today, in quick succession, I heard Chumbawamba’s ’97 hit ‘Tubthumping’.

“He sings the songs that remind him of the good times,
He sings the songs that remind him of the better times.”

Like watching my life flash before me, or the season of Dallas that turned out to be Bobby Ewing’s dream, I was bombarded with colourful snippets. There was jumping up and down at nights in the University Guild – the song became an anthem for my generation of Uni-goers. There were the great times with my best friend Joel in that year. The large, life-size cut-outs of Scarey and Sporty Spice put in out flat’s common-room window with speech bubbles quoting Billy Bragg and philosophers at passers-by. There was our email being answered by the people building the Millennium Dome, where we asked what the volume of the dome was so we could estimate how many tins of beans would fit in it and they guessed the number for us. There was being inspired by Mark Thomas to seek out the artwork of those who side-stepped inheritance tax by saying it was open to the public – we never did see ‘portrait of a dutch girl’.

“I get knocked down
but I get up again
You’re never gonna keep me down”

There was writing sections of a ‘Have I Got News For You Spoof’ for the comedy society. There was juggling and plate-spinning with the circus society. There were the evenings drinking pints of tea and eating pizza and chips on china plates in front of washing machines in the laundrette. There were the afternoons spent under the shade of the ‘Old Joe’ clock tower in the centre of campus meeting friends and revising outside of the library. There was watching Mark and Lard support Slade at Music Live at the NEC. There were the wine-and-cheese Sunday diets, and the tub of lard bought to prove to other shoppers in Sainsburys that we really were the most unhealthy shoppers – it fitted nicely beside our vegetarian feast of Linda McCartney’s pies and sausages. There was going to a club on a whim, and being dumbfounded at the fact someone had made a club that was dark, with a black floor where no more than 6 consecutive square feet were on the same level (so many steps).
There was fun, naivety, spontaneity… and did I say fun?