Pleased to meat you (pun)

In Which: Our Hero Takes Note Of London Cuisine And Touts A New Business Concept - Investors Apply Herewith.

I saw this take-away in Lincoln the other day:


It seemed like a very new radical idea; a house for all your chicken needs, I found it quite a revelation. Then my good friend Niain (palindrome) informed me that in fact they are a chain, all over London! Well I attributed this success to the name, a chicken emporium, but with a countryside, homely feel.

So I started to think, maybe I could run a successful meat house chain. Here are my proposed names:

Pork Bungalow
Prawn Maisonette
Mutton Grotto

And then the other day, in Oval, I saw this:


Of course! How could I have missed it?! I had been setting my sights way too low. A palace! What kind of poultry wonders you could find in a palace!

Hence I propose my new chain of fast food restaurants. Be sure to look out for them in an inner city high street near you.

Bermuda

He saw the queen
unexpectedly
on a veranda
overlooking the sea
at the end of an
overpalmshaded
grey storm storm struck
back alley.

Tree in a park

Hair today, bald tomorrow.

In Which: Our Hero Laments The Loss Of A New Friend, But Hopes This Loving Tribute Will Help To Lessen The Pain Of An All Too Fleeting Flirt With Face Furniture


Today, in under a minute, I destroyed four months of my life. In one cruel swell, I removed from my person something which has taken week upon week of careful nurture, cultivation, care and loving. Gone. Just like that.

I should reassure you, before you get carried away thinking I may have put effort into anything and made some sort of achievement over the last half a year, for you would be quite wrong, I am talking about my moustache. Yes, that's right, it's gone.

I only really had it out, in full flare for a very short while, but I can tell you for nothing, it was singularly the most annoying thing I have ever had attached to my face. And being the dog that I am I have had a great many annoying things (if we count girls as being synonymous with annoying, which we do) attached to my face over the years. (LIE.)

And then I got a cold, which immediately made it the most disgusting thing ever attached to my face ever. (Same purile comment about girls etc.)

Somehow, surprisingly, I seemed to receive far less stick for it than I expected. Yes, there were a few detractors. My mother mainly. And given as she has an endless capacity to nag anyway, the fact that I had a creepy turd shaped growth straddling my philtrum left me with little hope. And I'm more inclined to get annoyed by constant whinging about my appearance than I am to be egged on by chummy encouragement. But honestly, considering the horrible reputation that moustaches have, there weren't many detractors. I generally had a very favourable reception. Perhaps I just happen to choose friends who are more accepting than most.

I probably should have given it more of a chance, I probably should have documented it more thoroughly. I received so much support from you all over the months, I received so many lovely comments, and for once in my life, I actually had people being jealous of me. Somebody even used the word 'envy' when describing my moustache. But I just couldn't cope with it.

So itchy! And it never went the way I expected it to. I can see why men used to smother their tashes in beeswax, because really lip hair is the most unruly of hairs! It didn't even wander in the same direction on either side - my right tash lobe seemed to curl up whilst my left seemed to cling up under my lip for dear life.

Oh, and the food. If you ever want to lose weight, I urge you to grow a handlebar moustache, because honestly, not one morsel can pass your lips, not one sip of water without you feeling the hanging residual knowledge of gobbling food and the accompanying guilt that it may be stuck to your upper in some way for at least the next hour. Every bite you eat you notice, and the gravitas of every snack, from the glutinous cheesicle to the lonesome shriveled pea is exaggerated tenfold. An acute neurosis overcame me for the last month or so as I could barely speak without having to rush to the lavatories in order to check whether a globule of spittle wasn't hanging awkwardly from my lip-bristle.

Actually, really, most of the above has been a pitiful excuse to myself for the fact that it wasn't rubbish, I did want to keep it, but there is one particular detractor whose opinion I actually care about enough to dispose of it. Apparently kissing someone with a moustache is phenomenally unpleasant...

Not in my experience!

But then I'm more accepting than most.

The results are in!

A few people have, quite rightly, commented lately on my facial hair. I think I should probably explain that I am cultivating, as we speak, a handle-bar moustache.

I assure you that I am only doing so on the advice of others. Before you leap to the conclusion that I may have misinterpreted my friends' and colleagues' joking (as I have done many times before - REF: bow-tie, nose job), I actually went to the length of conducting a feasibility study for my labial hirsutery.

I herewith publish the results of the following opinion poll, conducted on Facebook.

Is me growing a massive handlebar moustache...

a) The worst idea I've ever had.
b) What you've been waiting for the whole time you've known me.
c) I don't care what you do with your facial hair, you look like a prick either way.

a - 22%
b - 61%
c - 17%

I think even the most stringent statistician would have to agree that the whole concept is overwhelmingly popular.

I should also like to back up my decision with reference to the following appendix of useful imagery which supports the idea of handlebar moustaches as A GOOD THING. It also shows exactly the style of handlebar I am aiming to attain.

Frankly, in all honesty, to tell the complete truth, I think the only reason I am growing one is that I have lately noticed a lot of Shoreditch pricks sporting tiny hipster moustaches and I want to outdo them.

APPENDIX A - GOOD HANDLEBAR MOUSTACHES

When I am fully grown, I will have a place to go.








I included this image because it not only proves the indispensability of the handle-bar in modern culture, but it is also the most remarkably crap example of world cup commercial bandwagon pun-jumping.



This cheery cyclops is an American chap responsible for beer.

I got this from a fashion blog. That's right. FASHION.



APPENDIX B - EDUCATIONAL VIDEO

Some interesting things that have happened to me recently.

In Which: Our Hero Looks At His Life, Gives Away His Body, Examines His History, Evaluates His Style, Notices The Well-Dressed Of Norwich And Subsequently Realises That Most Of The Above Comprise A Stark Catalogue Of Failures And Gross Errors Of Judgement.


All sounds quite heavy doesn't it. Don't worry though, I shall break this down for you into two manageable chunks. The first is entitled: What Happened At Boots.

What Happened At Boots.

As some of you may be aware I went to Sydney recently. If you weren't, then please get in touch and I will happily phone you up and brag about it in depth. I may even post on here about it in time, because believe me, it's a WEIRD old place, and certainly worthy of a lengthy and calculated diatribe.

Having lost my trusty digital camera in London I took the only option open to me, and borrowed my dear mother's trusty old Olympus Trip 300. Several things about this camera are excellent. It's very easy to take really good photos, with little adjustment of controls, the light metering/exposure is automatic, it brought delightfully memories of family holidays of yore, and of course the simple tactile pleasure of loading a film and winding through the first few dud shots, then winding the film up once it reaches the end. I am also very keen on the mystery of not knowing what your photos look like until it's far too late, the inability to over-think shots and spend your entire holiday staring at your camera screen taking ten shots of everything to make sure one definitely comes out right rather than just taking a photo and getting on with and enjoying it.

There are several things about this camera that are fucking terrible. It's taken such a battering on old family trips that the light metering is broken, as are all the controls, so I had no idea that at least 70% of all the photos that I carelessly took (instead of spending a while lining up and making sure the shot was reasonable) have turned out over-exposed and blurred anyway, or just bright orange from where I hadn't wound the film up properly or loaded the fucking thing in the right way. Not to mention the memories of being dragged endlessly around backstreets of some dull coastal Spanish village searching in vain for a restaurant on old argument filled family holidays.

Whilst I was in Boots waiting for my pictures (if you could even call them that) to be developed, I was offered the exclusive chance to be part of their Advantage Reward Points Special Discount Reward Card scheme. Thinking I might be getting many more awful photos developed in the future, I agreed to fill in the application form. Bizarrely, one of the questions was whether I would like to donate some of my organs. I kid you not. Of course, I didn't want to jeopardise my chances of obtaining the limitless bounty that comes with an Advantage Special Money Points Help Loyalty card so I agreed. I am hoping that if this decision ever comes to being taken up, they will realised that every one of my organs is useless on account of being shrivelled/fatcoated/black/pickled. My dreadful lifestyle may just save my life.


What Happened Outside Of Boots.

On the way home from Boots I walked past a man wearing two different shoes. I mean that in the sense not of finding it unusual that he did not have both feet crammed into one shoe, more in the sense that his left and right shoe were from different pairs, one being white, one being black. I felt unsure as to whether this was absolutely the thing to be seen in this season, or a fumbled mistake in the dim light of early morning.

I can hardly talk when it comes to peculiar fashion decisions. Several people in one day told me I should wear a bow-tie. Only on doing so the next day did I realise that they were probably joking. Never mind though; I shall persevere - I think the days of old fogeys wearing bow-ties are sufficiently resigned to the catacombs of history to forgive their inclusion in the modern gentleman's wardrobe, with only the slightest hint of irony. I felt liberated, and I shall do it again.

I was also informed by a colleague that he could see my trouser luggage last week. I had never noticed (given my complete lack of propensity to stare at my crotch during the daytime). I suppose in reality this is entirely unacceptable. I'm really not sure what to do about it though. Perhaps I could stop stuffing socks down my pants with a view to making myself look averagely endowed... But then what would people think? I would seem less of a man. I think this alternative is far worse.

Anyway, I thought for a moment this shoe chap may have been making some daring and exciting fashion statement, until I took in the rest of his garb, which was an ill-fitting tracksuit. On closer inspection the shoes were in fact trainers, most likely Puma, I don't know, I can't tell. He was obviously what we used to call back in the 90s a 'rude-boy'. Is this what kids wear on the streets these days? Another inexplicable chav style idiom along the lines of wearing a hood over a baseball cap?

I would have taken a photo for you to judge the merits of his dress choice, but of course my camera had no film in it.

Celebratory Youthmovies Adventure Quest

In Which: Our Hero Travels To The Big Smoke, Encounters The Problems With A Place That Is Bigger Than A Square Mile, Hijacks A Friend’s Evening, Replacing The Last-Train-Home With An Expensive, Relentless Blistering Sleepless Night, And Returns Home, Bemused, One Camera Lighter, But With A Crème Egg In Tow

Those of you who know me well enough to be reminded about it on Facebook will have duly noted that it was my birthday last week. In celebration of this fact, I travelled down to London with Dan and Chris to see one of the last-ever Youthmovies shows. Feeling in rather fine spirits I decided that the most appropriate way to travel was IN STYLE. That’s right; second class carriage, with two bottles of whisky and a large tub of vanilla ice cream. Those of you who know me at all will be well aware of the fact that I very rarely make mistakes, however, my barely finished description of our choice of journey refreshment probably offers some explanation as to the following series of unfortunate lapses in judgement.

By the time we arrived at the gig I was effectively too tight to speak properly (or at all come to think of it), and thus I passed an enjoyable couple of hours swearing, stumbling, forgetting people’s names and hurling abuse at Youthmovies when they were onstage (I should point out here though, that nothing I said came close to Dan’s champion effort of telling Al, the guitarist, that he looked like he was wearing a fat lady’s tee-shirt).

Although we had a place to stay in London with someone who was at the gig with us, we decided at about eleven that it would be a tremendous idea to go and see another gig, having been invited for free by the lovely Cats In Paris. On the way we bumped into Iain making his way to the last train along Bishopsgate, so kidnapped him explaining that there was an excellent music show to attend, and he could certainly stay with our friends in Crouch End, no problems! We arrived, and were met with what I can only assume was the clerical gaffe of a distinct lack of our names on any guest list, but gladly paid money to get in, in such high spirits were we. We danced like massive pricks at the very front of the stage, in the most prominent and distracting position possible, in order to demonstrate to the band how much we were (loudly) enjoying the show. We probably hurled abuse again. I honestly can’t remember. All good things must end though, as I’m sure you are aware, and we eventually turned, tired and well cavorted, to make our way to borrowed beds in Crouch End.

Four hours and seventy-eight buses later, we arrived in the bright morning sunlight at Crouch End, hair be-drizzled, eyelids and limbs a-lolling. An odd thing happened on one of our many autobus journeys. Those of you who know my name will be aware that I’m not one to jump to conclusions, if we’re honest jumping is the kind of physical exertion I rarely stretch to, but I am quietly confident that the two charming [and when I say charming I mean incredibly intimidating] youths that specifically chose to sit either side of me for a period just long enough to offer me a selection of narcotics and accuse me of racism before alighting but 100m down the road from whence they came may have had something to do with the disappearance of one camera from my jacket pocket. Then again it could have fallen out. I’m not making accusations. Well, it was an ancient camera anyway, and full of pictures of my genitalia, so joke’s on them. Ha.


I would like to introduce to you now a concept which I have cleverly denoted by the word ‘blessaster’. The key here is the joining of the words ‘blessing’ and ‘disaster’ [I picked through a long list of words to join together there, for instance ‘plaster’ was a close contender] a neologism which I feel sums up that odd feeling of having been given the best and worst news ever, somehow bundled into one nauseating sentiment. For example, entering a pub to the words “Ben! Just in time, I’ve bought a round of drinks, here’s yours! Carling tops all round!” or perhaps discovering that the Beach Boys have reformed to support Keane on tour.

It is at this point in my evening that I encountered my first example of a blessaster, for as we finally arrived at our destination, with that welcoming door with warm comfortable sofas and beds nestled behind it in sight, we discovered Chris had not in fact been in contact with our supposed host since we left Hoxton, and moreover, he was not in contact with them when we were stood outside their rather grand house in a rather cold place miles away from anywhere I’ve ever been before.

We ambled back to the bus stop, whereupon we received the second dose of blessaster – we managed to stumble upon a bus that took us straight to just round the corner from Liverpool Street in about half an hour. It felt amazing to not have to trek around again for another three hours, but it certainly made the last four hours of brutal wandering seem all the more futile and misery-stricken.

Iain and I got off the train at Stratford, directly onto the platform of the next train departing for Brentwood. The home straight. But no, another blessaster, for you see, we had to wait TWENTY MINUTES for that train. Yes yes yes, it probably doesn’t seem a great deal to you now, but believe me it was very cold, and none of the shops were open so we couldn’t even stand around and browse through porn.

I got home at 8am and promptly slept for as many hours as I could squeeze into my head. Despite how much I am grumbling now, it really didn’t seem that bad.

That is until my phone stopped working, and when I returned home I found my now defunct camera charger. Boo.

Invisible Happenings

In Which: Our Hero Makes A Second Bonzo Reference, Performs Some 'Manual Labour' And As Such Demonstrates A Sympathetic Understanding For What Those Less Fortunate Than Himself Must Regularly Feel, Plays A Gig And Insults A Huge Black Dude From London.

Life's like that, isn't it? as I believe Vivian Stanshall once correctly remarked. One minute you're hauling birdshit covered rotting timber from a roof, the next you're destroying the valuable equipment of an unsuspecting prominent jazz bassist. And all via scoffing chocolates in a disused Prince of Wales kitchen, staring into the blank vessels of an anisotropically loved one's eyes, and reupholstering two sofas. I suppose I can understand when people tell me I have a multifarious or consistently 'interesting' job. Such a motley of novelties has its ups and downs.

Last night we played a gig with The Invisible. There wasn't a huge turn out, which was a shame (well only slightly; I was quite concerned before that a BIG TIME Not-Mercury-Music-Award-Winning-Band would entice a full house = me defecating masonry), especially since Norwich was the first gig of their tour, and opening to a room of silence is always slightly unnerving. I used to think the people of Norwich must appear tremendously respectful to artists playing at NAC, but having actually done it now myself, the fact that nobody makes a sound throughout performance is incredibly eerie and off-putting. Us being the kind of people we are, in the absence of heckling we find ourselves babbling senselessly about puffins or moustaches.

Anyway, we had a merrily fraught sound check in which neither my guitar, Chris's bass rig or The Invisible's bass rig worked, and lasted a rather hasty ten minutes (The Invisible of course arrived an hour before doors opened - you don't have to be on time when you reach the echelons of having your album chosen as the best of 2009 by the iTunes office).

Look at me, I sound spiteful. I really don't mean to. I have an enormous amount of respect for them, their live show was faultless, and an incredible show of mastery without the baggage of inaccessible jazz-wankery that so often surrounds such music. I have seen the bassist Tom several times before playing for Polar Bear (surely the best British jazz band at the moment) and have never failed to be impressed - what is most astounding is the ability of three jazz players to transfer that language into a tightly regimented pop format without losing any of the rhythmic diversity, melodic interest or groove. Their music is sparse in the sense of its indie-disco simplicity and tightly controlled structures, and thus almost vulnerably accessible (an approach completely different to ours, and frankly most jazz players, in which one throws as much as one can at a song so that in the likely event of things going wrong, nobody notices, owing to there being so much else happening, and you having played it so fast that by the time things go wrong you've already moved on to something completely different). Surprisingly though, they managed to improvise within this framework - their set ended with a huge ten minute post-rock mountain, building up and up in a weird frenetic disco.

But now who's wanking on? I'm almost finished, I promise. I spoke to the band when they'd finished, and told them how much I enjoyed their set, and how I'd found it surprising the extent to which they managed to create drawn out improvised sections and epic climaxes. I was returned strained smiles and polite 'thank you's.

Of course I now realise the reason for this is that I basically went up to them and said, "Hey guys I really enjoyed your set tonight, which was totally surprising."

Oh well.

On a lighter note, I'm going to Finland on Friday. How rad is that?!

Actually, no need to answer that question. I know how rad it is. Very.

The Future

I just watched a fairly interesting episode of 'Bottom Line' the Radio 4 discussion program. One of the guests this week was Stevie Spring, chief executive of magazine publisher Future Plc, and the basis of a lot of the discussion was the move of magazine publishing into the digital world. Evan Davis, presenter, made, I have to say, a bit of a shit effort trying to place her position in relation to the other guests, an outsourcing firm executive (obviously relevant) and the chief exec. of O2 mobile phones (completely unrelated). For some reason he was making a string of facile comments and questions about mobiles being able to provide magazine services, and the potential for magazines to be a completely online phenomenon in the next decade.

Stevie made a rather stoic effort to answer the questions, I thought, but really the idea that magazines will go out of print is absurd. The whole beauty of online media is not the ability to buy whole publications every week or month and read them cover to cover. Everyone hates reading things on a screen. If publishers aimed for that, sales would plummet. What Davis didn't seem to grasp was that the beauty of the internet is that it's an easily navigable research library. Magazines are moving online because it's easy to search for specific articles that you want to read.

The other important thing is that you need not charge for viewing on the internet, as direct marketing is so much easier. Being a business affairs program he seemed intent on pressing on the revenue from online sales - I think really the only effective way to make money from online publishing is specific and appropriate advertising. This is obviously something that free publications embrace fully, but with online media it is hugely easier. As Spotify has worked out, the internet being the internet, the effectiveness of any marketing campaign can be completely and accurately be understood, as viewing, search optimisation, and follow through can all be exactly measured. Of course the other very important factor is that almost all of the outsourcing related to publishing vanishes when you take printing and distribution out of the equation. Costs plummet. Why this did not come up I cannot think.

Online publishing is growing, and I'm very thankful for it, and as much as I hate to so mercilessly be a part of such a disposable capitalist society (that's a lie, I love it, I'm not a hippy), viewing adverts is, I think, a small price to pay for having a world of opinion and dubious fact at your fingertips.

By the way, Stevie is actually a woman with a huge mouth. Surprisingly.

That is all.

I WANT TO DRINK ALL THE WATER IN CHESTER

You can't have what you want
Because it's too far away and you've
No way to travel there.

And why would you be allowed it, so
Refined and keenly-thought?
It is for funny men
Che parlano altre lingue,
Remember people's names,
And know about clothes and marketing.

And It all belongs to somebody
Else so even if
You tried to attain a drop they would
Remove your hands and feet.
And maybe they would have used it a
More worthy way than you.

But there's a space upstairs
That can't be filled (with rain),
Til one day you'll buy a vehicle
With space and need no more
To sit and guard the house,
So you can fetch It all
And be at one at last.

CRYSTAL CLEAR YUM YUM YUM.

vibskov emenius

GO HERE YOU PRICK

I have watched this video three or four times today, it's absolutely beautiful.

These guys are amazing and make me think how impressive it is that two people can work so closely together and understand each other to produce such precise and clever art.

This is very funny if you have played in a brass or jazz band

And possibly funny if you haven't, I don't know.

Aliens and poisinous beasties.

In Which: Our Hero Sidesteps The Important Issues Of Natural Disasters In Favour Of Pretending-He-Knows-About-Natural-History.

The year took off to a disasterous start for the poor communities around Port Au Prince in Haiti: I believe the death toll is now over 200,000.

As horrific as it all is, I have no intention of adding to the swathe of well-wishes and call to alms, if you'll excuse the pun; I just want to briefly mention something unique to Haiti that I was reminded of by the country's prominence in our media.

The Haitian Solenedon is the world's only venomous mammal, bless it, a small nosey little thing with unkempt nails used to dig for insects. Functionally extinct, it exists in the mountains in the south, its numbers ever decreasing. Mercifully it will have been completely unaffected by the earthquake, continuing its pioneering work tarnishing the cuddly reputation of the mammalian family with its murderous toxicity.

In looking the little bugger up, I stumbled upon the following groundbreaking news:



It transpires it was in fact a very rare hairless sloth, obviously less likely than an alien invader, but you know, sometimes the truth is much more fantastical than CNN would have us believe.

Tea. Do we need it?

In Which: Our Hero Is Commissioned To Write An Article For A Magazine, And, Having Loosely Assembled A Collection Of Badly Flowing And Unsubstantiated Content Under The Influence Of Slightly Too Much Beer, Sits Patiently Waiting To Be Told It Probably Won't Be Published After All...


I don’t know about you, but I am now wholeheartedly going about the business of thrusting myself gaily into the second decade of this new millennium. But in our modern world of super cars and super fast foods, information motorways, 500 Gigabert iPhones and hourly Katie Price twitter updates, is there really still room for the staid traditions of afternoon tea? Who wants a cucumber finger sandwich when one can so easily pop into Pret and find a Dolphin unfriendly tuna mayo wrap? Why nestle in front of the fire with a mug of Darjeeling when one can already have picked up a low-caff half-froth semi-soya crappucino on your way home from the tanning salon?

Well I think the answer is this: Tea holds a special place in our history and our development as a society. Tea still invokes passion and delirium in people to this day - in researching tea I discovered an overwhelming amount of facts and figures, and I thoroughly recommend visiting www.tea.co.uk for a nauseating array of tea based puns and general information. Or in fact www.teapottery.co.uk for an even more nauseating array of still more nauseating novelty teapots.

With all this knowledge I could well go on to bore you with such factoids as how many cups of tea are drunk around the world every day, the inventor of the teabag, the percentage of our population who abuse their tea with sugar and so on and so forth*, but instead I am going to briefly go over some of tea’s more unlikely contributions to our history.

The Boston Tea Party sounds like a rather quaint festival or some such, but in fact was a riotous Colonial rebellion, against the Tea Act, passed in 1773 which taxed tea imports into the Colonies. Most outraged importers simply sent ships back to Britain without paying the duty, however port officials in Boston stood ground. On December 16th protesters boarded three ships at Boston harbour, emptying the contents – some 50 or so tonnes of tea – into the sea. Hurrah! How exciting! Although I think tea made with salt water would probably be even worse than tea made with sugar. Having said that, you can find salt tea Pakistan. And stranger; butter tea Mongolia.

Speaking of tea’s Eastern roots, rather brilliantly, a Malaysian cult called Sky Kingdom erected a 35ft tall pink teapot in its village in 2004. Sadly it was deemed so outrageous that the government had destroyed it by 2006.


Tea has traditionally been the reserve of the upper classes, being as it was so expensive, hence the development of ornate and delicate paraphernalia. Early 18th Century tea chests were locked and guarded by the lady of the house. This lead to the somewhat dubious tradition of fruit shaped ceramic pots. Tea caddy spoons often have a shell like motif at the top of the handle (which you may notice even now in some cutlery sets) – a tradition originating in the use of real scallop shells stored in caddies by oriental merchants to allow sampling for customers.

I hope you won’t mind terribly if I now make a brief digression in order to answer an age old debate: Tea or coffee? Which is the superior? Tea actually has more caffeine by weight than coffee [1-0] however, because coffee is weaker [2-0], more is used in the preparation, meaning that coffee is the more caffeinated drink. Although there are ten times more Starbuck’s and Costa’s in the UK alone than independent cafes worldwide (I can’t back that up) [2-1], the consumption of Tea outstrips all other manufactured drinks worldwide put together (including coffee) [3-1]. In fact, after water, tea is the most widely-consumed beverage in the world. It’s also worth noting that the health benefits of coffee include increased risk of coronary heart disease, iron deficiency anaemia and short term memory aggravation, where as tea is brimming with antioxidants, anti-carcinogens and has had a provable beneficial effect on halitosis, stress, depression, diabetes, memory, and even HIV [4-1]. Well, by my arbitrary and inconclusive choice of categories, I think that makes tea the clear winner at 4-1.

SOLVED.


Anyway, several great minds have had their say on the subject of tea. Anybody who is unsure as to how to make the perfect cup of tea I merrily refer to George Orwell’s brilliant disquisition for the Evening Standard in 1946. An article of no uncertain passion, he clearly details correct procedures, including some fairly controversial ideas. I agree with most of his points, especially on the inclusion of sugar. Quite evil if you ask me.

A great lecturer at my old university was paid huge sums of money by the American military to investigate the cause of tea dripping from the spout of teapots (a problem that has plagued us all, I’m sure). Presumably for use in their development of a high powered Assamilator or something.


Over the centuries tea has indelibly marked our language and culture. The word ‘teetotal’ most likely derived from the use of the emerging tea culture to combat the problems with gin and ale abuse. “The cup that cheers but does not inebriate”. Countless songs endure to this day Tea For Two, from No No Nannette, or Michael Jackson’s It Don’t Matter If You’re Black Or White. Thus we unarguably find ourselves in a modern world still informed by tea, steeped with its terms, paced by its routines of tea breaks and teatime. How could anybody not find time for its charms and simple pleasure? How could anyone not feel invigorated by talk of teacup storms or kettles and black pots?

So to all of you, builder or soapy-mouthed toff, I recall the following wisdom: “Right”, as I believe Fred once rightly said, “Let’s have a cuppa tea”, to which we said, “Right-oh”.



*30%; Thomas Sullivan; 165 million, by the way. Lord knows how they can tell.

What 2009 sounded like if you were my ears

In Which: Our Hero Pretends To Himself That Someone Out There Might Care Two Ha'pennies About His Taste In Music Or Be Able To Understand His Vague Ramblings About Maths

Having returned to Norwich from a Christmas in Manchester, I was greeted by the news, from friends, that it was time again for yet another New Year. “Already?” said I. “Yes.”

Any way, having researched the matter through my usual route of Google and Newsagents, I found the fact reinforced by the torrent of ‘Best albums of 2009’ lists in the NME and the like. “Well,” thought I, “I certainly listen to music; maybe I should join suit and produce my own celebration of 2009’s music. I have very little else to do with my time, and I’m always of the persuasion that if somebody else is doing something, I probably should be.”

So here we go:

2009

Apologies for it being so late, (traditionally I think one publishes this before the year is out, somewhat unfairly to those releasing music in December) however, considering we are at the end of a decade, I think more leeway is allowed, the business of diving into a new decade is nothing if not time consuming. An interesting concept, this new decade, since if we are counting in years since the beginning of time, then the decade is not over until the end of this year. 2010 is no more the start of a new decade than, say, 2007 was, being exactly 10 years from 1997. Ten years! Hurrah! A fairly arbitrary group for celebration really, I suppose it derives from our fingerly base 10 number system. Interestingly a French mathematician called Lagrange once proposed a radix of base 11, since 11 is no more divisible by any n<11 than another. I.e. 11/2 makes as awkward a figure as 11/7.

So yes, enjoy the music, hopefully it’s not too long. And hopefully you have Spotify.

Bye.