the world at the end of the world

In a Funny Way

2009-10-26T15:37:00.002Z

Don't get excited about this. These re only being posted so I have access to them online in case they need editing. I say 'in case' they're obviously going to need editing because they're rubbish, and first drafts. But anyway....

The assumption in the group had been, in the six months they’d been away, Cardiff Centre should have been finished by now. Rows of people carriers lined up accordingly on the rooftop, you’d be able to make out the tiny see-through boxes tottering up and down the edge of the structure, and the sinewy alleys would be pumping little families, clustered and huddled together around the complex. But they’d seen enough as they flew together in land that it was no longer a surprise when the group began their descent over the city, and the centre was still a tangle of snapped girders, abandoned digging equipment and breezy, angular grey crumbling rocks. From a metal gauze, a putrid-smelling gas was billowing into the night.
The mystery, if any, was that none of the people responsible for this hulking eyesore had stuck around. Maybe it had something to do with all the fires they’d seen, he thought, as they passed directly overhead the geometric blot. He craned up and over the tip of his right wing he could see the Spike Tower was also on fire, and the left hand corner of the giant indoor field was also lit up, like a paper flare waving towards the sea. There had been dozens of similar fires all along the choppy water, all along the lost coastlines. It was as if Wales had ignited every major landmark to warn others to stay at sea, to keep off the jagged, dangerous rocks that seemed to be the entire island, now. They’d stopped for dinner on an archipelago, just off the coast of Pembrokeshire. Even out there, The House of the Gods at Caldey Island was aflame, the spirals of smoke dissolving into the evening sky much, much thicker than a typical chimney stack. As they swooped in at the bay and progressed home, it was obvious this was happening inland as well.
As they descended towards the lake, the sky had become thick with arid and coarse smoke. This didn’t carry the scent of any natural bush or grass fire, not that there was enough of either left around the edges of the lake and encompassing homeland to cause such intense, acidic plumes. It smelt like rain. The group ducked between the dust clouds and made their landing in the shallow water at the edge of the lake. The water was oily black, with icy reflections of orange, red, mud and gold splashed everywhere as their bodies flapped down into the gunk. Not a place to settle, even for a minute. His mate had already swum and started fussing on a verge by the time he’d even taken in his surroundings – she was always so bloody resourceful! –he watched her as she awkwardly smudged the bitter water from her feathers. He joined her on the bank and did the same.
He scuffed and wondered aloud where everyone was. Sky was dark, people should be in their nests, feeding and mating. Usually when one nest was ablaze, a noisy red people carrier would soon appear and power a hearty stream of water to quench the flames then people would go back in, to feed and mate. Today the whole Roath acre was burning; from across the lake it was evidently not one fire here spreading, but the result of several different fires joining in together. If one catches fire, the red car would be there straight away. So why, when everything’s burning, is there nobody around at all?
The sound of commotion behind him caused him to crane his neck and look towards the noise. A man he recognised, but could not place where, was leading a group – males and females together – through the metal hedge to a hexagon of grass near the water. He was clearly a leader, he was talking fast, loud, and nobody else was talking over him. He mopped his brow with a white cloth, and kept tugging at the hair on his face, then looking at his hands when he gestured. The group were all nodding as one, silhouetted, but none looked very happy. People usually looked happy when they nodded. It was probably because not many people had come to their meeting. He sneezed a glob of black water from his beak and looked down into the water. Silly goose. He watched as the rest of his flock descended into the black water like a meteor shower, splashing dusty water onto the bank.
He realised he recognised the male from hundreds of bits of paper he found while snuffling through discarded things, on wooden, wiry poles, on the side of nests. The male was definitely in charge. Maybe he’d do something about these fires. After all, if they were going to stick around for the season, it’d be nice amidst this wreckage to have shrubbery and clean water to wash, hide in, and drink from together. Together in this gathering storm.

Dystopian novels and short stories often take unusual yet distinct approaches to narrative in order to provide their sense of place and character. For example, in J.G. Ballard’s novella ‘Concrete Island’, the story takes place in just one location, and with just one character, which heightens the sense of alienation and isolation, reflected by Ballards stark descriptions of the locations. In order to create this sense of alienation, I decided to use an animal narrator, to provide a non-human view of a human-dominated society. I opted for a goose above other animals because they are undomesticated by humans, have the luxury of flight, and in the context of the story, can be isolated from human life for six months, and then return to find things very different indeed.
To create character, I decided to use the same approach to anthropomorphises as Richad Adams in Watership Down; the characters can interact, comprehend and narrate with accurate lexis, but have no concept of man-made nouns and uses vocabulary suited to their own surroundings; hence a house becomes a nest, cars become, a sports stadium becomes an ‘indoor field’. I wanted to make specific locations universally named, to frame the action in a recognisable place.

I decided to make the physical attributes of the apocalyptic scenario keeps indistinct and unspecified. Although the text infers the fires are man-made, fire is a naturally occurring phenomenon, and so one which the characters can identify with perhaps more than the humans. Human survival is one of the key components of dystopian or apocalyptic fiction, usually against a totalitarian system. Although the world creates in ‘Together’ is part of a larger scenario, I wanted to suggest a regimented human society, by the protagonists repetition that they only use their ‘nests’ for ‘feeding and mating’ and nothing else. Towards the end of the piece I wanted the human gathering to be a positive conclusion, although the goose has yet to conclude the reason for the grouping, there is an evident leader, whom we can assume is a prominent figure in their society.

In JG Ballards work, in particular High Rise and Concrete Island, the landscape is often a principal enemy, with the power to trap, isolate and disorientate the characters. He achieve this through description and allegory, and I used the initial flight of the birds to achieve this. Contextually, the centre of Cardiff, South Wales, has recently been designed, and has been rebuilt over a number of years. By the point of the birds return, the large retail outlet (“Cardiff Centre”) should have re-opened. The birds’ reception to this is that of negativity (“a hulking eyesore”) but I wanted to use Ballardian phrases such as “a tangle of snapped girders” and “angular grey rocks” to create a distant, cold vision of a modern, human creation (designed to improve life). The idea of things created for good ultimately harming the society that created it is a consistent dystopian theme, which is why I chose the ultimate source of the apocalypse as this building. I chose locations in Wales rather than more obvious settings to provide a more localised, familiar look at apocalypse, rather than the often clichéd destruction of major cities and landmarks, in order to create a more identifiable story.

In order to create a sense of menace, I wanted to create a sense of menace and that the situation was beyond of control. The fires are of no direct threat to the goose, in fact he continues relatively as normal, pausing to study the situation (and not fully appreciate the severity for the humans) and use relaxed, colloquial rhetoric (“silly goose”) but I used phrases such as “intense, acidic plumes” to emphasise the severity of the smoke, and “the whole Roath acre was burning” using a sizeable measurement normally reserved for rural contexts. I also used the simile “like a meteor shower” as a more direct use of imagery.

I wanted to use the recurring use of ‘Together’ as the title and recurring throughout the piece, partly inspired by the phrase ‘birds of a feather, flock together’ and also the sense that a united group have a better instinct to survive than an individual. It is taken that animal instincts like geese to flock together, is given, but as the thoughts of the protagonist at the end suggests, only the humans cans put out the fire and make their future secure, and this can only be achieved together.

No One Had It Better

2009-04-30T09:54:00.000+01:00

Cardiff Central’s new library opened at the end of last month, so it’s been open for about six weeks now. Upon the ribbon being sluiced and the revolving door being manually spun for the first time, this building instantly became the best thing in Cardiff, no questions asked, even less answered. Winchester’s library reopened a couple of years ago; a massively inferior complex built in a hexagonal geometric anomaly that looks like a Micro Machines replica of the Library Of Congress annexed to a smoothie bar, but having revisited the Winchester ‘Discovery Centre’ (no libraries allowed, under Hampshire County Council rulings) I made a few base-level conclusions.

My new book shop or library test is the Richard Ford test. Richard Ford is an amazing author, his most well known work being the Frank Bascombe Trilogy; The Sportswriter (probably the single greatest novel I’ve ever suffered the ecstasy of reading), Independence Day (the much lauded sequel) and The Lay of the Land (The finale), all of which I would recommend to anyone without even merest hesitation. The Richard Ford test is to see whether the literary institution in question has any Richard Ford books in it, especially the ones which aren’t the Bascombe novels The Winchester ‘Discovery‘ Centre, despite being several stories smaller than Cardiff’s magnum opus, and generally giving the impression that antique pig farmer swap meets and crusty folk nights are as important, if not more so, to a libarary as the books themselves, it has a shitload of Ford. Including, I was excited momentarily to see, a copy of Wilderness, which is pretty much impossible to find anywhere except the obvious. It almost made me want to join in the discovery, but I wasn’t carrying twenty five proofs of address, my passport or a portable retina scan. Cardiff Central Library had zero Richard Ford books in it. None! Zero! Zip! Zilch! Fucking nothing-a-doodle-doo. Failure.

That’s about the only fault that springs to mind though, the rest of it is a ridiculous geometrical nightmare, that looks like it was designed by a box of schoolchildren in a wet playtime, but it so overbearing and exciting, you can’t help but run around inside getting overexcited by things you’ve seen a million times before. There are pointless ostentatious chairs which you can’t sit on wearing a dress (not that I was), hundreds of special chairs with arm rests on, which I didn’t think would work at all, until I sat down in one by a window on the top floor, overlooking the sex shop on Mill Lane and the Wyndham Arcade, and realised that they are anatomical perfection for the lazy reader. You’re physically forced to sit hunched over a book and consume that fucker.

There are entire floors or half-floors dedicated to things I don’t understand, and machines that look like CAT Scanners and bent backed old duffers plonking about using light emitting desktop computers and sprawling out maps and other technical documents one step away from being tapestries. They also have these audiobooks which are basically miniature mp3 players with the book loaded onto them, so all you have to do is slot in headphones and it’s party time with Peter Carey. I loaned His Illegal Self and then spent the rest of the gloomy April afternoon before going to James’s birthday drinks, meandering around Bute Park in figures of 8 listening to a woman attempt a variety of bad accents and age-affected vocal lilts as she tried to convey an Italian American, a teenage teller, an elderly grandmother and small boy all having one conversation. It was like watching someone trying to juggle a ball, a knife, a tortoise and a flaming globdule of filthy wax, on a unicycle. Also, and this wasn’t any credit to the library, apart from maybe being rewarded for existing, but in the reading area where they chuck all the daily papers for people to read (alas, not on giant sticks), but there was a Muslim reading a copy of The Satanic Verses. I saw him later outside Boots and he was still reading it. I’m not sure why this was such a good thing, but it was.

There’s an episode of Seinfeld where Kramer is explaining to, I think Jerry and George about how good he is at karate, because he’s significantly better at kicking the ass of the other people in his class. The joke comes from the fact he’s joined a beginners karate class with a bunch of 8 and 9 year olds who are obviously going to have their ass kicked by a lanky hipster doofus. A couple of days ago I went and saw a terrible British comedy called Frequently Asked Questions about Time Travel, starring erm, The Irish Guy from The IT Crowd, Shirley Ghostman, and some odious wanker who can’t act, but was in Shameless. Inexplicably, this film also has Anna Faris in it, who can pretty much top the US box office off her own merit, so what she’s doing in this low budget and more or less unwatchable British Sci Fi “lads down the boozer” comedy is beyond me. But she’s Anna Faris, and is therefore completely awesome by default, and this is where the Seinfeld comparison comes in, because she’s so much better than everything else about the film, it’s like watching a 34 year old powerhouse. doing karate with a feeble 9 year old. I was tempted to write her a letter, but that’s a bit 2006.

Shout

2009-04-14T21:09:00.003+01:00

I don’t remember making any promises.

I’ve become increasingly obsessed with pathetic forms of self-regulating anger management, I hadn’t even vaguely thought about the phrase ‘anger management’, until the other day until reading on an internet website about US domestic box office figures, where until last week, the pisspoor comedy and career low for Jack Nicholson of the same time, had the highest opening weekend in April of all time. Clearly April is a barren wasteland in American cinemas. It was beaten, amusingly, by Fast and Furious, a film so angry and spiky and masculine, it almost literally reeks of gasoline, like when BOB is lurking in Twin Peaks.

I digress. Actual anger management, is something I’ve thought about even less than I’ve thought about the Adam Sandler vehicle. Until November last year, it was well documented that well, that there has only been one documented incident of me getting angry, the infamous “shut the fuck up and show some fucking respect” slice of ridiculousness from All Tomorrows Parties which will probably be on my gravestone, it being so out of character and aimed at probably two of the least deserving people I’ve ever met. Last November, a similarly undeserving soul (Pav) was fearing for his life after I threatened to kill him at a house party for the heinous crime of turning off the radio and putting some proper music back on. I don’t know why I’d put the radio on, but boy was I unhappy it had been turned off. I say he was fearing for his life, but I don’t believe for one second I was being taken seriously. I don’t know how I’d even go about thinking about killing somebody else, there just isn’t enough murderous thought real estate spare in the sprawling avenues normally occupied by thoughts of elaborate suicide. Add to these previously isolated cases an incident at work where a preposterous self-imporant no-name author, (the type who uses a pen name so her books would be shelved next to or near several superior scribes in the shitty post-Bridget Jones chick lit vomit section of your local bookstore) whose uppity and deluded opinions of herself (high) and myself (low) caused me to slam open a door and smash a foot long dent into the plasterboard wall of the basement corridor.

A couple of weeks ago, I flew too close to the sun whilst out drinking and thought (incorrectly) that because the rose wine being sold at £4.99 in the Prince of Wales was pretty cheap, and didn’t really taste that much of alcohol, that meant it wasn’t. By the time I’d gone out the side door of the pub for a cigarette, pissed over the wheels of a car parked around the back of WH Smith, swaggered back into the pub and failed entirely to hold my own in conversation with Jo or Lisa without resorting to making up words or just letting out random sounds. It’s like I was learning to talk at the age of 26. Anyway, I lost my phone somewhere between getting out of the taxi, and getting into my house, and this enraged me to the point of going barking mad, and after attempting a wide variety of massively idiotic attempts to find it, including ringing the number on my house phone, and then returning to the street outside and crawling on my hands and knees, looking underneath cars and in hedgerows to see or hear either a little neon square, or whatever terrible present ringtone I had on my last phone during it’s final days, the only solution was to fling open the bathroom door in a dramatic and pompous way, and knock it off it’s hinges. There have been a couple of other minor incidents recently, but they’re more boring than anything, so I’ll put them to one side.

So, to the management. Not that any of these anecdotes have caused anything other than minor hysteria at the time, and a general lack of conviction from anyone else that I’m being anything other than a compete fool, but I have been doing some minor things to combat the increasing waves of anger hovering in the air around me. The first is regular baths. Admittedly, this sounds like I’ve been more than content to let the filth settle neatly in a fine layer on my skin for random and irregular periods of time, but reset assured, this is not the case. A bath, watching an episode of Seinfeld or Arrested Development, or listening to Stars of the Lid or The Blue Nile on a portable DVD player. Heaven. I even did the done thing amongst flake-eating losers and invested in bottles of allegedly anger-destroying (my inference) radox bubble bath. Partial credit!

In January, I quit drinking. On April 12th, I quit again. In January I swapped Red Bull for Pro Plus. On April 12th I did the same. I can’t comment entirely on the pros and cons of this, but it’s cheaper at least. I’ve also quit smoking again, declared myself asexual, and I’m going to press on with learning how to complete cryptic crosswords, and I’m reading more books. For a pair of fleeting moments in the past few months, I half thought about falling in love again, but luckily my common sense was restored, and it proved the possibility of positivity was anomalous, rather than me thinking I’d been consistently reading the love interests intentions wrong for so long.

Right now I'm sat at the living room table with lemon and ginger tea, which smells like I should have a cold, and today in Poundland ("keeping our price promises since 1992!") I bought two slide packets of Lemon Sherbert tealights. The scent was a lie, although I've just looked at the packet again and it draws no reference to them actually smelling like lemon sherbert, but then I can't think why they'd have chosen this name otherwise. I'm not putting one in my mouth, it smells like burnt tealight.

Some of my rage has been lifted lately because I’m on the cusp of giving up on music. That’s an exaggeration actually. I’m not going to give up on it, I mean today alone I downloaded the new Black Dice album (incredible) and the new Bill Callahan album (less incredible) as well as The Way It Is by Bruce Hornsby and the Range (still amazing after all these years, although it’s not the same without Grant Coleman reading the Radio Solent football results at the end). But no longer will I ever see a band t shirt, a vocal appreciation for a band, or a habit forming indicating a person or groups musical taste alliance. I was never a ‘rock is so much better than crappy pop music’ twats at school, and although I’ve very much learned my lesson with thinking that someone liking, for example, Bill Callahan or Black Dice, automatically makes them on my wavelength, and how this is painfully untrue, there will still part of me which thought music, above film, books and anything else was ultimately the route to anyone else’s personality. I’ve been to see two bands this year; Wavves and Wintersleep. I pretty much hated everyone else there at both gigs. Anyone can like anything these days, and the money people save on not buying any records anymore means they have more money to spent on going to see the bands, and therefore you get more people, and therefore more shitbags at every gig you go to. Wavves was rubbish anyway, we all got what we deserved.

"and I will lay my head, lay my head low"

The Sugar is Sweeter

2009-01-13T00:15:00.000Z

Simple pleasures are my favourite pleasures. Complicated pleasures frankly just aren't worth the effort, but simple pleasures are amazing because they're so easily achieved, and although the seratonin imbalance is only a tiny bit levelled with a brief instance of joy, it sure beats the fizzy drinks can build up that complicated pleasures endure during their creation that by the time the big taste question is answered, it blows up in your face.

No. Like cartoonish American policemen, a coffee and doughnut is all it takes these days. I don't think I'd actively gone and bought a doughnut in about five years. Maybe not even before the time when Rachel and I used to buy them before watching VHS tapes of Twin Peaks from the library. I think that was in late 2002. Each VHS had three episodes on it apart from the ones which had the hour-long Season 2 bookends which only had two episodes. I used to watch it first on my own in bed facing the window eating skittles or chicken soup, then on Saturday or Sunday afternoon Rachel would come over and we'd watch them again, and I'd feel slightly cleverer because I'd already seen them but it meant I could be distacted picking the hundreds and thousands off the doughnuts one at a time during the bits where Nadine Hurley thinks she's a teenager again. The doughnut I bought was from Subway, which again, I don't think I've been to in about a year. Subway always enthralls me because nobody questions it. For example, everyone knows that a Greggs a day will kill you, and thingammy with the moustache told us all that eating nothing but McDonald's will also kill you, and even Adam and Eve told us that too much fruit will bring untold trouble. But Subway, they could literally be serving sliced children cutlets and fluffy hamster guts and I've never even thought about it. Same with Millies Cookies - "look, it wasn't around when I was 13 when everyone talked about people finding nemetode worms and gall bladders in their burgers, so I will unquestionningly consume it's wares". The doughnut was delicious mind, and was round, and had bits of chocolate on it when fell into the bag during transit, so I got to tip them onto the plate and then try and fasten them back onto the doughnut.

When I was younger, the jam doughnut was the king of the doughnuts. Mainly because you got jam in it, and in a more than slightly pathetic manner, I used to argue that they were better because you got less doughnut with a ring doughnut. I'm glad I grew out of that. People who think that are also the sort of people who celebrate their birthdays at midnight on the day before. One of my ex girlfriends birthdays was on New Year's Day, and she refused to even acknowledge it until the next day, despite the fact there was essentially a party happening right there and then. It's one of the reasons I fell in love with her. But back to the doughnuts, obviously garish ring doughnuts with icing and fingertraps for hungry wasps made out of sugar and drizzle and lemon and insanity, the Homer Simpson doughnut, the pumped-up party ring, these and these alone, are the only doughnuts anyone should consider. Clearly these should be digested with black coffee the colour of oil, and nobody else in the room. Then, and only then can the simplest of pleasures be truly immersed.

The Ecstasy of Gold

2009-01-11T00:11:00.006Z

2009 thus far has been brought to you by the letters R, M and the number 37.
Also the following

....and!

I went to Bristol this week. Bristol and I really don't get on. But forgive and forget. Or forgive more than anything, because I'll never forget the times I've spent in Bristol. Like the time I got lost because the falafel was too hot and I ended up at the wrong train station and had to get a train to Temple Meads in order to get back home. Like the time I had to hide all my deoderants in the bushes outside the Academy. Everyone's done that. Like the time I missed the last train (the last train missed me) and spent the night on the streets a la Chelmsford with no company except the best of Warren Zevon and the best of Uncle Tupelo on opposing sides of a C90. That was the night I found out where the Thekla was, and I found out where the mechanical cows lived. There were also times where I walked in the fountain and was sick on the station platform, times where I've been late for being a dinner lady because I wasn't sure what side of Bristol I was on. More recently there was the time I stayed on when I was planning to go home, and we got rained on more than I've ever been rained on.

This time was different because I was on my own, was going to stay on my own, wasn't going to share wine with any homeless people, and was intending to be home before bedtime. I think because of the connections to Bristol with former love life greatest hits, birthday adventures and crazed mentalists (or any combination of the above) I've always been apprehensive about the place. The last time I went anywhere near Bristol was driving through the city centre with my parents in the rain and taking photographs through the drandrop mottled car window of people waiting at the zebra crossings and bridges. I enjoyed going in the station at Temple Meads because they have those three-in-one hand washersoaperdriers which are a novelty when you're about three years old but once you're old enough to realise dry, soapy hands are a nightmare for turning the pages of a book on a crowded train. But I didn't feel like getting out of the car.

The river was frozen over in places, which was a rare pleasure because you don't often get to see rivers frozen over, partly because the freezing temperature of putrid bile is a lot lower than pure water, but there were crazing paving cracks and dark grey veins of ice all around the edges of the dockside. These were all very pretty and cold, but the real highlight was looking around the grey hulking mess around the site of "@ Bistol" a 21 century hokum museum that nobody outside of Bristol understands and/or cares about. Outside this endeavour is a courtard flanked on several sides by crap grey fountains, a big crap round metal ball that makes your reflection look like a National Geographic outtake, and some miserable little chain restaurants. This was all covered in dirty brown ice, slobbered liberally over the fountain edges and floor, and if I'd been trying to impress someone, or was waiting outside the school gates rather than on a walk through Bristol at 10am, I'd have make spinny circles and vampire bat slides across the drain covers. I really wanted to, but these are the sacrifices of solitude. I did take some photographs of some stuff I saw on the floor, like painted question marks and bourbon biscuits and green and brown slime.

Since my epiphany somewhere about two months ago that buying second hands books regardless of the likelihood of reading them at any conceivable point in the near future, second hand book shops and charity shops have been heaven to me. I think also since the realising that unlike with music, rooting out the 'classics' and the 'cult classics' is actually a very good thing, rather than a waste of effort. For example, many great novels were published in the 60s, 70s and 80s by brilliant American authors, some regarded as cult best sellers. The comparable bands would be like, The Doors. No thanks. For this reason, the second hand boat I'm sailing is good, because I'm almost guaranteed to find exactly, or near as damn it, what I'm looking for. On this occasion, I was trying to find Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, for no reason other than that it's apparently absolutely impossible to read; the literary equivalent of those jigsaw puzzles with nothing but a giant close up image of a plate of baked beans, tomato bubbles and everything. I also quite like the covers of the Thomas Pynchon reissues, which of course, is the most important thing. I didn't find Gravity's Rainbow in the Oxfam on Park Street, but I did find one of Pynchon's other books. The man at the counter who looked like a bookworm, and I could tell this because he was wearing a fleece from Millets, started talking about Gravity's Rainbow and I realised the exact conversation I had played out in full in my head like a screenplay for a fantastically boring film about myself, was taking place. It seems that you can strive for individuality and a semblance of ubiquity, but when it comes to second hand books and nerds, we're all on a level playing field. I ended up buying nine books in Bristol, I won't bore you with the details, but finding an orange-spined edition of The Kingdom By The Sea was a little exciting. Oh, I said I wouldn't bore you.

I went to some old haunts; The giant Fopp down in Broadmead has now become a giant CEX, a cross between a shoplifters paradise hookey street metropolis and a seedy above-street-level boxing club. There were three copies of 'Hats' by The Blue Nile shelved in the H section. I checked the P and A sections for The Blue Nile albums I didn't have. I also walked underneath that big building by the roundabout, the one that cars can drive under, and nobody knows what the building is actually for. I walked past that building with the graffiti skull on it. I went to the depressing blue funk that is the new shopping centre, Cabot Circus, which is up there with the worst places I've ever been. You can see the almighty air of disappointment surrounding Cabot Circus from space, you know. The only part of it I liked was the wall opposite the outside of the mens toilets. I also went to The Commericial Rooms, which is a classy Wetherspoons near the centre of town. I realised I never wanted to work in a bar, especially not this one, when the poor girl was subjected to three simultanous idiot customers complaining about their drinks. I sympathised so much that when I found out the only soft drink available with my meal deal was J-2-0, I didn't grimace until I saw she wasn't looking. And I drank the J-2-0, of course. In the spirit of exorcising demons, I sat on exactly the same table I sat on the last time I went there. I didn't even realise this until I left, despite the fact the table was right next to the kitchen, and is the table that the kitchen staff usually sit at to eat their complimentary food. They probably spat on my lamb burger before they skewered it.

I finished The Girl Who Played With Fire in the cinema in Cardiff. One of the plus points of turning up 90 minutes early for a film you've told people you're only going to see "because there's nothing else to do" is that you can pretend it's a mistake and have an hour and a half to yourself to read, and the bar in the Cineworld in Cardiff is perfect for it. The downside is then running into someone you know at the cinema and explaining you've turned up 90 minutes early to see Role Models, and look like the ultimate loser.

Which of course, I am.

Turn the Radio Off (2008 Part 2 / 2009 Part 1)

2009-01-06T06:52:00.004Z

Here's a list of my top 100 songs of 2008. As with every year, this is not based on what record I think is technically better, or is a 'better piece of music' or carries more credibility. It is more of a list of what songs meant most to me, has the most memories attached, which made my feel like my heart was full of popping candy, or my tongue was covered with sulphuric acid. I'm not making any allusions (delusions) of grandeur with this list, in fact, I don't recommend listening to the songs you don't already know, because you probably won't like it. I don't believe many people would like Mysterious Skin by Orphans and Vandals, but I do. I like it a lot. It's not an easy sell, but it's a perfect soundtrack to what's been an imperfect year.

100 Death Cab For Cutie – No Sunlight
099 Sightings – Cloven Hoof
098 The Battlefield Band – Blackhall Rocks
097 Wolf Parade – California Dreaming
096 Slow Club – Because We’re Dead
095 Canadians – The North Side of Summer
094 Constantines – Hard Feelings
093 Yeasayer - 2080
092 Bon Iver – For Emma
091 Glen Branca – Lesson no. 1
090 Crooked Fingers – Sunday Morning Coming Down
089 Galaxie 500 – Don’t Let Our Youth Go to Waste
088 Orphans and Vandals - Christopher
087 Art of Fighting – Heart Translation
086 Tom Petty – Don’t Come Around Here No More (Tiedye Dub)
085 John Denver – Fly Away
084 The Wrens – She Sends Kisses
083 The Imagined Village Band – The Hard Times of Old England Retold
082 Mobius Band – Friends Like These
081 Lloyd Cole and the Commotions – Are You Ready to Be Heartbroken?
080 John Vanderslice – Up Above The Sea
079 Johnny Foreigner – Yes! You Talk Too Fast
078 Eugene McGuinness – Bird on a Wire
077 Graham Nash – I Used to be a King
076 The Mountain Goats – San Bernadino
075 The Mae Shi – The Lamb and the Lion
074 Wild Beasts – Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants
073 Dodos - Fools
072 Mogwai – Dracula Family
071 Constantines – Trans Canada
070 Glasvegas – Lonesome Swan
069 Frightened Rabbit – Heads Roll Off
068 Fuck Buttons – Colours Move
067 Elliot – Carry On
066 The Gaslight Anthem – Casanova, Baby!
065 Wilderness – High Nero
064 White Hinterland – The Destruction of the Art Deco House
063 The Young Knives – Turn Tail
062 Alphabeat - Fascination
061 Get Well Soon – If This Hat is Missing, I Have Gone Hunting
060 Andrew Bird – The Trees Were Mistaken
059 Empire of the Sun – Walking on a Dream
058 Shearwater - Rooks
057 Paul Simon – Darling Lorraine
056 These New Puritans - Elvis
055 Sun Kil Moon – Tonight The Sky
054 Scott Walker – The Seventh Seal
053 Juno – The Sea Looked Like Lead
052 Marnie Stern - Transformer
051 Fleet Foxes - Your Transformer
050 Mark Kozelek – Up To My Neck in You
049 M83 – Graveyard Girl
048 A Mountain of One – Ride
047 The Hold Steady – Constructive Summer
046 The Magnetic Fields – California Girls
045 Sun Kil Moon – Gentle Moon
044 The Secret Stars – Shoe In
043 Usher – Love in this Club / Moving Mountains
042 Deer Tick – Ashamed
041 John Vanderslice – Promising Actress
040 The Tallest Man on Earth – I Won’t Be Found
039 Titus Andronicus – No Future (Part 2)
038 Panic at the Disco – That Green Gentleman (Things Have Changed)
037 Parts and Labor – Satellite
036 Studio – Escape From Chinatown
035 Frightened Rabbit – My Backwards Walk
034 Wintersleep – Dead Letter and the Infinite Yes
033 Sun Kil Moon – Lost Verses
032 Marnie Stern – Prime
031 Malcolm Mclaren – Madame Butterfly
030 Fuck Buttons – Sweet Love For Planet Earth (Andrew Weatherall Remix)
029 Passion Pit – Sleepyhead
028 Prefab Sprout – When Love Breaks Down
027 Wild Beasts – The Devils Crayon
026 The Gaslight Anthem – Miles Davis and The Cool
025 The Durutti Column – Otis
024 Tom Smith – Bonny
023 Frightened Rabbit – Keep Yourself Warm
022 Cat Stevens – Lilywhite
021 Bon Iver – re:stacks
020 Set Your Goals – Echoes
019 Wilderness – Silver Gene
018 Parts and Labor – Prefix Free
017 Of Great and Mortal Men – Ulysses S Grant: Helicopters Over Oakland
016 The Infadels – Make Mistakes
015 Cut Copy – Hearts On Fire
014 Ida – Maybelle
013 Fuck Buttons – Bright Tomorrow
012 Hercules and Love Affair – Time Will
011 Red House Painters – Shadows
010 Laakso – My Gods
009 Wintersleep – Miasmal Smoke and the Yellow Bellied Freaks
008 Mark Kozelek – Cruiser (Little Drummer Boy Version)
007 Kleerup feat. Marit Bergman - 3am
006 Cat Stevens – Don’t Be Shy
005 Studio – Turn The Radio Off
004 Of Great and Mortal Men – Richard M. Nixon: Two Under Par Off the Coast of Africa
003 Frightened Rabbit – Good Arms vs Bad Arms
002 Titus Andronicus – Fear and Loathing in Mahwah, NJ

001 Orphans and Vandals – Mysterious Skin#

So where do we go from here? Here's a quickly doodled biro box around the key events of 2009 so far.

* I'm pretty sure I've already seen the best film of the year. Frost / Nixon, starring Michael Sheen and Frank Langella. This isn't just because I'm obsessed with Richard Nixon and have been for about 18 months, but it really is brilliant. Langella's Nixon, despite looking and sounding very little like Tricky Dick, is one of the best acting performances I've ever seen. Michael Sheen, who seems to be getting away with murder impersonating yet another member of the British establishment, is a riot as Frost, and has all the excellent inflections in the journalist's voice. The fact that the supporting cast includes Sam Rockwell, Kevin Bacon and Oliver Platt all being completely awesome makes it even better. I went to an advance screening with Sian and Nick from work, and there was a satellite link-up afterwards with a Q+A in London, hosted by some fuckwit who was 2 parts Marcus Brigstocke, to 2 parts total bell end, and with Peter Morgan (anonymous looking screenwriter) and Sheen (much more 'britpop' behind the scenes). The link failed for a good 20 minutes, but the rest of the questionning was cool.

* I have too many books to read. As I look up, and I note all the books I got for Christmas, the ones I've picked up from work or charity shops in Winchester since, the books I bought before Christmas and the one I'm currently reading (The Girl Who Played With Fire by Steig Larsson) which I'm waiting until Thursday to buy, it amounts to a backlog of about 30 books. So, if anyone has read the following and can reccomend over some of the others, then stand up and let your voice be known.

Martin Amis- London Fields

Martin Amis - Times Arrow

Paul Auster - True Tales of American Life (Edited by P. Auster)

Eric Berne - Games People Play

Drusilla Beylus - The English Marriage

Robert Dallek - Nixon and Kissenger

Richard Feynman - Surely, You're Joking, Mr Feynman

Luke Haines - Bad Vibes

Henning Mankell - The Pyramid

Colin Thubron - Journey into Cyprus

PG Wodehouse - Psmith, Journalist

PG Wodehouse - Ukridge

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein - The Final Days

I think I'm going to be reading these until Christmas.

Im also 6 days into an attempt to go without alcohol, cigarettes, fizzy drinks and talking about the weather. So far, the hardest of these has been the latter. It's been so cold these past few days. By 'talking about the weather', I don't mean discussing temperature, like I have just done above. What I'm trying to cut out is the act of walking into a house or room after being in the cold/rain/sun/snow/tornado and going "ooh, bloody hell it's cold" or "Jesus! it's freezing" or "fuck me it's cold" or "I don't think I've ever been so cold" etc etc etc. The others I'm doing OK with, but then, these feel like the longest 6 days of my life.

Across the bridge of many ways / run with the fox...

Heads Roll Off (2008 Part 1)

2008-12-28T22:42:00.004Z

I was going to write a detailed and poignant tale about my Christmas, from the moment I got out of the car in Winchester to be greeted by a pub full of weirdos and none of my friends. I was going to continue with how I went to a different pub after being the only person from my group of friends to do the Christmas Eve tradition 10 years running, and ended up going to The Black Boy where everyone is foppish, young, drunk and beautiful, and how I drank enough red wine to be sick over the edge of the bridge into the weir. Then I was going to humour you with stories of board games and presents and christmas cake, but none of this is very exciting. I'm just going to get this year over and done with. My festivities and calamities which came to a head on Christmas Eve were the culmination of this years driving forces; my hopeless inability to keep in contact with my friends, and my belief that getting drunk alone will somehow combat the pain, are best left in the past.

And whilst we're on the subject of the past, here's a list of my top 20 albums of 2008. Unlike my forthcoming list of my favourite songs of 2008, this list is for albums released this year. Otherwise it would be Little Drummer Boy by Mark Kozelek, easily the album I've listened to most this year.

20 Neil Diamond – Home Before Dark
19 Get Well Soon – Rest Your Weary Head, You Will Get Well Soon
18 Cut Copy – In Ghost Colours
17 The Tallest Man on Earth – Shallow Grave
16 The Magnetic Fields - Distortion
15 Glasvegas - Glasvegas
14 Constantines – Kensington Heights
13 Shearwater - Rook
12 Wild Beasts – Limbo, Panto
11 Bon Iver – For Emma, Forever Ago
10 Kleerup - Kleerup
09 Parts and Labor - Receivers
08 Wilderness – (K)no(W)here
07 The Gaslight Anthem – The ’59 Sound
06 Fuck Buttons – Street Horrrsing
05 Titus Andronicus – The Airing of Grievances
04 Sun Kil Moon - April
03 Studio – Yearbook 2
02 Of Great and Mortal Men – 43 Songs for 43 Presidencies
01 Frightened Rabbit – The Midnight Organ Fight

All predictable stuff. With the exception of maybe 3) which is a collection of remixes and shouldn't really count, 2) which nobody has bothered to listen to despite it's brilliance (although the fact that it doesn't appear to have an 'artist' listed anywhere so I've decided myself to call the project 'Of Great And Mortal Men' might be the problem) and 10) which I think has only been released in Sweden, all of these have appeared on other peoples lists. I could bang on about all of these for pages and pages but I'll pass. Highlights of the year though have been Parts and Labor following up last years #1 with another flawless, if diluted album, an unbelievable return to form for Wilderness, an album at number one which is nothing but pitch-perfect angsty excellence, and Glasvegas, who I haven't just included to aggrivate, it turned out to be a pretty good album after all.

If you care (why do you care), you can see how these translate to the top 100 songs of the year, revealed in the new year.

Good News For People Who Love Bad News

2008-12-20T10:34:00.002Z

Hello

No, not the Blur reunion. No, not Mark Ronson's list of his 99 favourite musical recording acts of all time. No, not the fact that I think my mouth is going to internally collapse like a bouncy castle at the end of a kids birthday party. No, the fact that for the first time since, what, late August? I'm going to ressurect this silly useless thing, because someone called Anonymous, who can't even spell the word anonymous, said to. That's it. Exciting.

So, coming soon: a review of the year, my top 100 songs of 2008 based on order of enjoyment, a possible aesthetical re-theme so this page looks less like pages from teletext. I might even put some more photographs up. But not today. No, not today.

bullets might give you black eyes

Wrapped Up in Books

2008-08-27T23:40:00.002+01:00

I've had it with this whole dreaming thing. Last night I dreamed I fell in love with a girl with brown hair, an attic bedroom and a Penguin Classics bedspread. Then I woke up and was annoyed that I was awake. I'm aware that talking about your dreams is about as boring as it gets so I'll pass up this opportunity, but this isn't the first one of these. The more interpretations of perfection my dreams are going to screen for me on a nightly basis, the most annoyed I get when I wake up, and the less likely I'm going to compromise. The thing about all of these dreams are that they're too close to reality. Like, in most of these dreams at some point I have the exact discussion I'd probably have in my own kitchen with my housemate.

"No seriously, she had a Penguin Classics bedspread"
"That's ridiculous, that's the sort of thing that's too perfect"
"I know, that's what I said, I mean, that's the sort of thing you dream of when you're dreaming up perfect situations"

So basically, my life has got so consumingly dull that I've started to dream about dreams about dreams. It's not particularly fun either, it's not like a David Lynch movie when you can drink a cup of coffee and eat some shortbread and the most part dissected by Twin Peaks nerds on websites who wrote about Mulholland Drive for their dissertation. Not me, I wrote about Lost Highway, except it wasn't for a dissertation, it was an essay on Non-verbal communication and I got a good mark for it. But my point is, dreams within dreams within dreams don't make good dreams, and definitely don't make good dream anecdotes.

The two saddest things you can see, I think, on a normal walk somewhere are mountains of post on the doormats of closed shops and lost cat signs. One represents lost friends, the other represents lost dreams. There's a couple of shops around here that have changed owners several times over the year. One's a takeaway, which has had different names, different people behind the counter. One time, I forget the name, the owner had pulled out all the stops, had exciting posters and menus, and cooked all the food himself, and talked to you about the events of the day, almost miniature stand-up routines like local radio presenters do when they're going through the daily rags on their morning shows. He was great, but of course I only ever went there once, and now it's gone. Probably, as soon as the new takeaway opens, I'll go to that one once, and never again. I guess once-and-never-again people like me must make life hell for these people, it probably makes them think it's going to be that all the time, and then it's not, and these people never come back, so maybe there's something desperately wrong with their food. It's not my fault I moved house, or that the takeaway was in completely the wrong place, or that during that period of 2005, I wasn't really into the whole buying takeaways things because my disposable income only covered alcohol. But it still gives me twinges of sadness in my heart to see these vacant shops with piles and piles of post building up on the doorstep, post that was probably the first thing they picked up in the morning, or when they were doing their day-to-day routine, the postman would pop his head around the door and they'd have a brief chat. The saddest part is that not only is their business gone forever, but they can't even bring themselves to visit the shop and collect their mail. It's almost like people who can't face their lovers or relatives graves in the cemetery because it's too goddamn much.

Lost cat signs just make me very unhappy. I get significantly more emotionally affected by lost cat signs in plastic wallets stapled to telegraph poles than I do by hearing about the mass slaughter of human beings in any given country or town. This is because cats don't deserve to be lost. All humans in my opinion, have the potential to destroy and manipulate and create untold evil towards another, and the only thing that stops people is the lack of opportunity, and I just can't get excited about them anymore.

What is exciting though, is ten pin bowling on the Nintento Wii. Our house has managed to borrow one of these consoles whilst one of my housemates ladyfriends is kayaking in Iceland or hunting eskimo in Alaska or whatever to fuck people researching Bruce Parry's Tribe do when they're out of the country, so we've ended up with the Wii rather than her take it to a cattery or whatever. I'd safely assumed that like the Playstation 3 or the Xbox 360, I was going to take a back seat from this era of videogaming like I did with the last one. I'd only just got excited again by the idea of driving fire engines off bridges on Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas again but now there's this ridiculous motion-sensitive ten pin bowling thing. It's almost impossibly easy, but takes most of the fun out of ten pin bowling, Namely:

1. Ten pin bowling costs too much, so you have to pretend to be a lot, lot more excited about the game than you would be if it was free
2. In a ten-bowls game, it usually takes until bowl 6 for you to settle on which ball is the 'right number' for you, even though there's not really much difference between them
3. Horrible shoes which have to be sprayed with industrial-strength odour stuff before they're given back. I once asked to have my own shoes sprayed with this.
4. In the olden days when only my mums hairdresser friend Sue had Sky, bowling alleys were the only place to watch MTV
5. You don't get the option to fuck about with the little portable metal 'slope' for people too useless to even hold a bowling ball, playing at home.

Why the Wii is better:
1. You can eat doritos from a saucepan whilst you play
2. The pain in neatly transferred from your finger socket joints to your wrist, which is much less panful when you have to pick things up the next day
3. I don't get fucking spares all the time. The last proper game of bowling I played, I got 9 on the first bowl, and then 1 on the other, for the entire game. I actually texted 8-2-ASK to see if I was the first and maybe only person to ever get this score. No reply.
4. You can talk on the house phone to your parents about how you had a dream about a girl with a Penguin Classics bedspread whilst simultaneously scoring two successive strikes, and this somehow makes you look better than if you weren't on the phone, even though you only really need one hand.
5. I've managed to make a cartoon Wii character thingy who looks just like me, or me if I'd been drawn by Brian Lee O' Malley. Basically me, if I was good looking, played sports, and was a slacker in Toronto.
6. You can walk three steps into your bedroom and listen to Dance Away by Roxy Music any time you like.
7. You don't have to share your own toilet with patrons of Lazer Quest.

Can you even get Penguin Classics bedspreads?

Anyway, this is a photograph I took of a petrol station in Cardiff on a Friday night. It's very Edward Hopper.

Burn

2008-08-19T21:22:00.003+01:00

Hello
I should have done something exciting and edgy today. Like going to see "teen film of the decade" (uncredited source; this is what the advert said, but I suspiciously can't find the quote online anywhere) Wild Child, starring whatshername from Aquamarine, that walking haircut from Stormbreaker, and for some reason, Nick Frost. Starring Roberts as some sort of EVIL Malibu teenage socialite who gets banished to boarding school in mega-strict England (because obviously English people don't know how to have fun) only she causes havoc everywhere she goes, and starts all the parties, but ultimately we get a happy compromise of stiff upper lipped English snobs having a gay old time, and crazy US bitch gets a dose of normality, and learns how to do sums or something. I should have gone to see this, I really should. Instead, I did some historically dull activities, which I would say I won't bore you with, but then I don't know who you are, or why you're reading, so maybe this is fascinating for you.

I bought a new CD writer from PC World because I'm sick to the back teeth AND sick to death of burning cds in the weedy little tray that pokes in and out of my laptop like the worlds limpest Swiss Army knife. I'm not expert on these things, but this external CD writer is massive. It's like, bigger than a bible. It's almost the same size as a hardback cope of Ken Follett's A World Without End, and just about as heavy, too. Which makes me wonder what the little burner inside my laptop and located just underneath the Caps Lock and ASDFG keys thing it's doing. No wonder it broke. Although apparently not, as the album I send my dad in the post along with a copy of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo made managed to work OK. To be on the safe side, I walked up to PC World to buy a new one. I've never been in PC World before, but boy are they nothing like the adverts. Admittedly, I went to PC World in Cardiff, and like most things in South Wales, you're guaranteed to get more pathetic version of what might be brilliant elsewhere, but even taking this rule of thumb into account, PC World was a shocker. For the wealth of technology available in, store, I would have though they could have at the very least, created holographic staff with extensive artificial intelligence who actually knew where anything was, and without acne that looked like it was going to erupt any minute. Secondly, it's wonderful that they divided the store into "PC" and "Laptop" halves, but what I was looking for (an external drive for a laptop) wasn't on either, when it should surely have been with Laptop accessories, but it wasn't, it was with a bunch of other CD drives, all of which were labelled in such a high technical register the only words I understood were "CD and DVD", the rest might as well have been written in Klingon. I had to ask for help off one member of staff, who served a pleasant dose of bullshit that the drive I had in my hands was exactly what I was looking for, and then when I got to the "tech desk" where the lady informed me this drive I had was an internal drive for a PC, not a laptop, and that the one I really wanted was fifteen pounds more expensive (of course!). The tech desk was quite interesting, because there was a little room where people with big thick glasses were dismantling laptops. I couldn't help but think it was somewhere like this that Gary Glitter got rumbled. He'd have paid £114 to have his laptop fixed on site too.

I took time to have a look around Newport Road, since it's not every day you get to walk around in the pissing rain amongst an avenue of vile oblong concrete and stainless steel megastructures all ten times the size of the QE2 and infinitely less exotic or relaxing. They're all there: Comet, PC World, Pets at Home, Maplins, some stupid place whose logo was a big R in a circle, a big fuck off blue structure called WHAT! that used to have a high street version, at least three carpet showrooms, and all your other favourites. There's also a drive-thru KFC, a drive-thru McDonald's and a drive-thru Burger King. These as far as I can remember, are the only drive-thru's I've ever really seen close up. They're a massive disappointment, although I get the feeling that the Newport Road industrial estate, which is basically built either side of one long road which stretches beyond the horizon into a scribble of overpasses and junctions about two miles out of town, is modelled slightly on the entrance road to American towns, they've not quite nailed the true horror of these commercial landing strips quite enough. The McDonald's was having a refit when I went past, although they'd kept the drive-thru open, which I thought was rather sad, but not as sad as the thought that the only reason they did that was because they know people are too lazy to try and navigate six lanes of traffic to go to the Burger King on the other side of the road. There was also a Do It All, which became Focus in fuck-knows-when. There was a plaque just outside the entrance commemorating the store opening in 1982. The store was shut, the only sign of life or any kind of wood or plastic was a skateboard ramp that had been built in the car park. I thought for a moment about all the hopes and dreams that took place on that day in 1982, and how this massive structure was now standing stagnant like the Titanic, sunk in a wild sea of grey retail gloom on the outskirts of Cardiff. I carried on. By this time the rain couldn't be described as anything less than ridiculous. I was amused though, by the number of mobile burger vans that had set up in the car parks of the stores. WHAT!, Allied Carpets, The stupid shop with the big R in a circle; even the Quik Save car park had a burger van and Quik Save closed in early 2006. Running one of these burger and hot dog vans must be the worst job in the world. I guess it's like running a worn-out old dog of a pub in a backwater suburb, where you deal exclusively with regulars and nothing but regulars. Here it's builders and nothing but builders. What a job.

When I returned home, I did some rearranging, which including moving all of my DVDs out my bedroom and into the lounge. I cunningly disguised this as a "share and share alike" motif, where my housemates are now entitled to borrow any of my DVDs at will, but really it was an excuse to free up some space in my room. The space previously taken up by the DVD shelving is now taken up by three perfectly neat stacks of books. I still need to sort out space somehow for both these, and a rogue collection of CDs that I've amassed and have no sensible place for which I've then stacked on top of them. I'm praying I won't need to get to any of these books in the near future because I've stacked them like a cross between Jenga and Kerplunk and if they fall over, then there's nowhere for them to go but to fall all over me.. The CD burner works fine though. I made myself two mixes today, to listen to as I pottered around making and doing things. The idea of making a mix CD, putting it in my crappy CD player on the window sill, and playing it was an alien concept last week, but now it's back with me, like a familiar itch or an old friend I'd taken for granted. I wish I wish I had some other people to make mixes for. Requests please.

Up To My Neck in You

2008-08-16T20:09:00.020+01:00

Today I'm commemorating it being exactly 365 days since I last fell out of love. The past year has been a mess of scattershot memories, utter tedium, hearts that hate, splendid isolation and fear and loathing in Mahwah, NJ. Pretty much all of it has been soundtracked by Mark Kozelek for want of anything more cheerful. Here are some highlights.

Mistress (Piano Version) (Red House Painters)
I need someone much more mysterious
June 2006, August 2007
Red House Painters I
And so it goes...

New Jersey (Red House Painters)
You're not as good as your mum but you're as good as dead
September
Red House Painters I
Moss Bross Staff Room

Have You Forgotten? (New Version) (Red House Painters)
When we were kids, we hated things our parents did
October
Vanilla Sky OST
I shouldn't have bothered.

Take Me Out (Red House Painters)
If only you could take me out, instead of back in to a relationship I don't understand
November
Red House Painters I
No Use For Old Friends, closing number.

Carry Me Ohio (Sun Kil Moon)
Sorry for never going by your door
November
Ghosts of the Great Highway
Early mornings, familiar roads.

Gentle Moon ( Sun Kil Moon)
But if love was like stone / then yours was mine through to my bones
December
Ghosts of the Great Highway
Juke box.

Glenn Tipton (Sun Kil Moon)
I buried my first victim when I was 19
December
Ghosts of the Great Highway
Stephanie

Up To My Neck In You (Mark Kozelek)
Up to my neck in misery for most of my life / I've been a fool...
January
What's Next to the Moon
Cineworld unlimited card, building sites and cranes

Bad Boy Boogie (Mark Kozelek)
On the day I was born, the rain came down
January
What's Next to the Moon
Manchester

Down Colorful Hill (Red House Painters)
Prayers prayers prayers for success
January
Down Colorful Hill
Manchester Zodiac

Lights of Magdala (Mark Kozelek and Hannah Marcus)
If heaven were a lady, don't you know you'd been the one
February
Don't Let the Bastards Get You Down: A Tribute to Kris Kristofferson
In a park by a lake, a camera

Shadows (Red House Painters)
You ain't saying nothing, that I don't already know

February
Ocean Beach
Everywhere everywhere everywhere everywhere

Cruiser (Mark Kozelek)
Slipping letters under my door / candy wrappers round my floor
February
Little Drummer Boy
Shopping for oranges

Follow You, Follow Me (Red House Painters)
Just one single tear in each passing year
March
Shanti Project
Genesis!

Tonight The Sky (Sun Kil Moon)
She fell into his sweet strong kiss / she made her perfect gardens in this?
March
April
Hello excited stranger, I'm yet to receive my copy of April in the mail.

Michigan / Fly Away (Red House Painters)
I don't need a purpose to plan within / I just need to feel your pulse again
Live Track, The Blind Pig, Ann Arbor 2001)
March
All of her dreams have gone soft and cloudy, all of her dreams have gone dry.

Lost Verses (Sun Kil Moon)
I came up from the ocean / evaporates sea salt water / a mist above the skyling / I haunt the streets of San Francisco
April
April
Dinnertime and the train home.

Katy Song (Red House Painters)
I know tomorrow you will be somewhere in London / Living with someone
June
Red House Painters I
As covered on youtube.

Void (Red House Painters)
And I know that I have picked the most perfect sunflower yet
July
Old Ramon
For windows.

Lost Coastlines

2008-08-14T23:00:00.002+01:00

I'd as good as written off Okkervil River after last years damp squib, The Stage Names, and their live show I saw at Cardiff Barfly, where they honked out an hour and fifteen minutes of tuneless dirge, and tried to polish off a dreadful performance by doing a crowd singalong of Westfall, both made for dreadful 2007 for one of the bands on the cusp of being one of my all-time favourites. Likewise, Jens Lekman, whom I didn't get to see live, but managed to squeeze out an atypically and depressingly awful album last year which went pretty much against every reason I liked the guy in the first place. But these things can't be helped. I'm long past the naivety of expecting my favourite bands to consistently deliver. But although I'll probably never forgive Okkervil River for being total shit last December, I'm reconsidering The Stage Names. Well actually, I'm not, it's still not very good, but next month, they're releasing The Stand-Ins, which is either an accompanying album, or an appendix to the former album. Either way it explores similar themes and ideas that were brought up in The Stage Names, and the artwork even sits underneath the previous albums to make a complete picture. It's like Guns and Roses waiting a year inbetween the two Use Your Illusions instead of releasing them on the same day. Except The Stand Ins is more of a mini album, with three pointless instrumentals making up the full XI. And you know what, every single one of those eight tracks shits on the best bits of The Stage Names, massively. In Lost Coastlines, and the ridiculously titled Bruce Wayne Campbell Interviewed On The Roof of the Chelsea Hotel, 1978, they have twoof the best songs in their entire canon. In a way, I like the fact that what are clearly the best songs from this recording session all ended up on this album, rather than poorly diffused across the two volumes like a pungent odour. But despite this, they've been entirely overshadowed by Shearwater anyway, so I'm not why I'm really concerned with readdressing the situation.

I spent a few hours today in Pontypridd, for no real reason other than that I had to leave the house, and it didn't look like too shoddy a day. It did rain eventually, but it was such a not-as-bad-as-it-has-been day, that when I got home, I went onto the street and cleaned the outside of my window with windolene, and then opened the window and blasted blue collar indie rock into Rhymney Street. But Ponypridd was alright. I decided to go exploring more than I had done before. Previous visits with Anna involved looking at the down and very little else. The first time I went I only looked at the University of Glamorgan campus which was built on the side of a mountain and basically made me study twenty times for my A levels so I didn't have to go to university there. The person giving us a campus tour genuinely told us that he'd "only been to town (Pontypridd High Street) once, and (didn't) have any plans to go back there any time soon). He was a third year. The only times I'd been to Pontypridd in more recent years were on Sundays with Lisa when there were no buses out to Llantrisant, so we had to get the 132 at ten past seven in the morning, and then sit around at Pontypridd bus station for forty minutes either playing cards, or pop punk top trumps, or seeing who could skid further on the rain-soaked drain cover just inside the railway station. Then we'd get picked up by Abby and drink coffee in her garden, before being driven to work. It used to take nearly 3 1/2 hours to get to work. I don't miss that at all. Nor do I miss having a reason to go to Pontypridd, because it's not a particularly amazing place, and it hasn't really changed much since the very first time I went there. There's still a hill that I wouldn't ever dream of climbing because I know what's at the top (a boring university with an eerie Jim James thing going on where nobody ever leaves the campus) and a pokey little high street. Today was of little exception because the first shop I went into was a charity shop, and I had to pretend to look at books for an absolute age, because a drunk man who had no qualms with drinking Carling at just past midday in a charity shop, rifled through all the videos no less than three times. I didn'y dare ask him to move, but I had to wait because there were CDs I really wanted to buy. The rest of the town can fuck off, the only major difference was that the big stupid pointless joke shop wasn't there any more. It always amused me how such a big joke shop could ever thrive in a town where the only thing anyone does for fun is choke pigeons on the bandstand, and you can't package any of that in a Smiffy bag and hang it up next to the saucy nurse costumes. Alas, it's all gone now, it was replaced by some nondescript shit that had only filled half the building.

What I did like, though, was the side of Pontypridd I didn't even know existed, the park. The park was very pleasant, and walking around under the criss-cross shades of the avenues of trees and looking at the waterlogged crazy golf and the suspiciously clean looking swimming pool (which had done that thing a lot of open air swimming places do, which is to paint the bottom of the pool an obscene shade of turquoise which is so blinding it affects your retina to not even see dead twigs and Quaver packets when they're probably right there. The bandstand was closed to the public, because there was some sort of filming going on. I couldn't figure out what, and I did spend longer than I should have done milling around with my hands in my pockets waiting for something to happen. I watched a man who looked like Mackenzie Crook sweep some water off a path with a broom, but there were no cameras trained on him, so unless he's doing menial handywork because nobody went and saw Three and Out, I don't think the water sweeper was in the film. I wasn't really expectinh Russell Crowe or Viggo Mortenson to jump out and start pounding their chests on Pontypridd bandstand, not least when the surrounding area had been set up to look like a crappy little summer fete with coconut shys and hooplas. It was all very Sylvanian Families. I went home after that.

Post Script. I think from the comment below I didn't really express my point very well: The Stand-Ins is a GREAT album, and everything that I felt that the Stage Names lacked; imagination, a fantastic concept, memorable hooks and melodies, and a sense of the epic.

Game Shows Touch Our Lives

2008-08-13T21:51:00.001+01:00

"Ladies and gentlemen, in the audience tonight, Academy Award winning actor, Ralph Feinnes"

Earlier on today I watched Quiz Show, the really rather excellent period piece with Ralph Feinnes and John Turturro. I'm surprised I haven't got round to watching it before, since it was almost to the last second, a perfect hybrid of All The Presidents Men and Network, two of my favourite films. The quiz show in the program though, was pretty shoddy. It was called 21, and was a familiar format, but not one I'd ever come across before, simply because I think quite a few American format quiz shows didn't really cross the Atlantic, and plus it was very very simplistic, with rolling "applause" signs, a hilarious parody of corporate advertising, and a really ordinary systematic set of questioning. It did, though, continue the general theme of last week which I spent in the staff room at work idly reminiscing about the quiz shows of my youth. People seemed surprised at my ridiculously retentive knowledge of some of these, possibly with the suggestion that somehow I wasted my youth. This I can't deny, but at the same time, I have memories all through the childhood and teens of doing the things most people remember; going to parties, shoplifting, sitting around in the park, going to friends houses to watch 15 certificate movies like Demolition Man, and so on. In fact, I remember doing all those things more times than I recall ever wanting to. I also spent a lot of time in large DIY stores like B+Q, Texas, and Do It All. An awful lot of time. So much time, that I don't intend to go to any of them ever again, and it's just as well I can't drive, because these big breezeblock, drafty cubes of DIY misery are far from anywhere I'm intending to go for the rest of my life, and because they're all in out-of-town Sim City industry hell-holes, I can probably use the excuse that I can't. I'll buy my paint from elsewhere. Probably an art shop. I hope I never have to paint anything, really.
But back to quiz shows. David has suggested that I could feasibly write to some people and ask if they need a rough guide / essential guide / pocket guide to quiz shows. I'm actually considering this, but since I can't remember the name of who he said, or whether he was being serious, I probably won't bother. But it's an idea, and if his friend can get a book about Dario Argento, whom nobody really cares about apart from a nanopercentage of horror movie film geeks, buck toothed weirdo women, and Quentin Tarantino. Anyway, I could talk in great length about any game show, right down to some contestants names and scores, but I don't have time, and anyway, I'm not getting paid for this, and I could get paid for that, so that can wait. Here though, is what you would probably find in the back page, the quick-read guide to British game shows.

All Clued Up - bizarre word-guessing game similar to Wheel of Fortune, presented by (I think) Michael Aspel, and it involved a giant keyboard
Bob's Your Uncle - I can't remember much about this, apart from that I think the prize involved winning shit for your wedding, and involved jumping in a swimming pool
Bullseye - Oft-parodied working man's social club darts-themed quiz.
Catchword - BBC2 Who-can-come-up-with-the-longest-word program to rival countdown, which was invariable won by anyone who could spell floccinaucinihilpilidication.
Celebrity Squares - Trashy British version of Hollywood Squares with people like Leslie Joseph and Roger De Courcey and Nookie Bear.
Chainletters - Fun word-puzzle game in which you had to change letters of words to make new ones: CAKE - RAKE - RARE - MARE - MARK etc
Crosswits - Classy semi-intellectual crossword-themed quiz game with Tom O Connor.
Fifteen to One - One of the best: Set design straight born from Foucault, William G Stewart as torture master, with offensive buzzer sounds and flippant rudeness.
Full Wing - Rubbish golf-themed Saturday night drivel with Jimmy Tarbuck
The Krypton Factor - Intelligence and ability-based quasi-intellectual challenge show with Gordon Burns suggesting that anyone who completed an army assault course is somehow like Superman
Lucky Numbers - Unwatchable Bingo-themed shit with Shane Ritchie sponsored by The Sun
Play Your Cards Right - Craptacular
Raise The Roof - Crap short-lived megaquiz in which contestants could win a house in Florida. Hosted by Bob Holness, these seemed to involve more video footage of the house than of anything resembling a quiz.
Take Your Pick. Classic 'open the box' show given cheesy tabloid makeover with Des O Connor.
Turnabout - Daytime quiz which involved answering word puzzles and making computer generated spheres change colour, a bit like a more elaborate naughts and crosses.
Through the Keyhole - Another oft-parodied celebrity show with David Frost and Lloyd Grossman trying to see who could look more out of place on such a show
University Challenge - Rendered fairly useless after the Young Ones parody, this intellectually alienating quiz has hit a new stride with Jeremy Paxman's new insolent approach.
You Bet! - Either with Forsythe or Matthew Kelly from what I remember. This was THE show for rewarding utterly useless talents, like memorising the cast of the Bill by their ears, or the country of origin of stamps from what they taste like.

There are of course, hundreds of others, but in researching, the above, I've discovered this website:http://www.ukgameshows.com, which pretty much renders my continuation useless, and the utterly ridiculous person who runs this website would evidently make a better candidate to write the aforementioned book than me. Unless there's a market for someone who can drop in anecdotes about suffering severe migraines eating a cheeseburger and watching The Main Event, a bizarre and rubbish living-room based family show hosted by Chris Tarrant. Maybe I'll just skip straight to doing in-depth essays trying to explain the concepts of most 21st Century quiz shows and ignore the classics. With the exception of The Weakest Link, Deal or No Deal, and inexplicably, Eggheads, most 21st Century shows have bombed. People just don't like seeing other people win money these days, and I guess advertisers can't drum up the cash because nobody at home is watching. It's sad, because two of the best game shows I've ever seen were short lived ones from the last five years or so: Traitor, and Didn't They Do Well? Traitor was a weird cross between an amateur dramatics improv show, an episode of Big Brother where the contestants all went insane and were convinced there's a total bullshitter in the midst, and an alcoholics anonymous meeting where someone suddenly notices they can smell gin. It was televised slanging matches, all neatly compered by Tony "Daily Sport" Livesly. It was compelling and lasted about a week. Didn't They Do Well? as the title suggests, was hosted by Bruce Forsythe, and was a great concept, because the only concept was that it didn't have one, and was a Frankenstein's monster of a quiz where instead of asking questions, Bruce played clips on a big screen from other game shows, ranging from easy shit like Family Fortunes or some kids stuff, through to the big money questions from University Challenge and Mastermind. It was a great concept, and it was what brought Bruce back to the BBC, his natural environment away from the News of the World scratchcards, illuminated dolly girls and rabid pisshead audience members acting like they were in Jumpin' Jacks rather than a respectable TV studio.

The only new-new show I've seen recently since I don't watch much TV was called Battle of the Brains. Hosted by some clown I'd never even noticed and whom talked too much, I couldn't gather much from the concept apart from that it was basically Eggheads, only without the eggheads themselves. Which meant neutrals can't be bothered to root for either team, whereas you always hope the eggheads lose, or that the show has been cancelled because one of them died. BBC2 have also had the scheduling idiocy to put it on directly before Eggheads as well, meaning you're basically watching the same program twice in a row. Here's hoping the mentalists in Holland or Scandinavia who devise all these concepts have their thinking hats on, and are happy to let us steal their ideas.

Back and Forth

2008-08-06T10:01:00.007+01:00

There's a lorry outside my house that's picking up a skip or loading the recycling bags or something similar, and it's taking a long time doing what it's supposed to be doing. The noise that it makes when it either picks up or drops whatever it is that it's either picking up or dropping, is exactly the same noise as our letterbox makes when a parcel, letter or pizza delivery pamphlet makes when they drop onto the front door mat. Because I've got my bedroom window open in a failed attempt to welcome the summer into my bedroom and to usher out the wine and fag smoke from last nights 'Dorm Party' (me and Chris Rock's 'Never Scared' up all night) into the street, then the distance the sound traveling is identical to the distance from the front door, through my bedroom door. Normally I don't care, because I don't receive much post, except parcels of review copies of crap like the new Offspring album or the just-above-average She and Him album, sent to me by Playlouder, and occasionally I get to open the Liberal Democrat propaganda addressed to 'Occupier' or if I'm feeling particularly majesterial, to whom it may concern.
But at the moment I'm actually waiting for a new hard drive to come through the door. Since I only know what size the drive is in terms of how many crappy mp3 files and Microsoft notepad files I can't motivate myself to delete I can shove on there, and not how physically large it is. This is the first thing I've bought off the internet that hasn't been a standard size. A CD, like The Dismemberment Plan one I'm expecting to arrive any day now, is always CD sized, a DVD is DVD sized, a Sun Kil Moon t shirt, although far too big, is still just about the size of a t shit. The problem with buying things like hard drives or similar off Amazon is that although probably somewhere down in the small print, probably in a box of text you have to click and drag for the white text to show up, they give you the weights and measures. Like most people, I figure that because I've already committed myself to cretinous laziness by not getting on the bus and going to PC world, I might as well continue the trend and not look at anything except the price. This hard drive could be the size of half a house brick, which I'm expecting, or it could be the size of a kettle, or a toaster, or a badge maker. I have no idea, they didn't print a picture on the search page of a human hand holding the drive, so I'm lost. At least in the Argos catalogue, if you're buying a set of swings or a paddling pool, you get a picture of the first child of summer pranking about on, in, or under it. If you're buying a board game, you often get some close ups of a ritalin-ruined toddler with a gormless expression that tells you JUST how fun the board game is. I miss those pictures. They should put them on packets of twiglets, to remind you how much fun twiglets are. I guess the internet doesn't have the resources to have pictures of people standing in front of, or holding every object in the world, so more fool me if the drive won't fit through the letterbox and is so heavy I can't even put it on my load-bearing desk.
I went to the cinema yesterday and saw something funny. No, not The X Files: I Want to Believe, that shit wasn't funny at all. I did see a group of teenagers running their mouths off on the escalator telling anyone who cared to listen that "Cineworld ain't got no respect" and "You don't wanna come to this cinema, it's shit" and "fuck this place, don't go to Cineworld, they don't let you have fun", which alerted my curiosity. One of the problems with always listening to headphones when I'm out and about, is that when base-level incidents of mild amusement involving conflict with other people arise, it's really hard to get involved with eavesdropping without looking obvious. As the groups of teenagers were descending the moving staircase and being apprehended by a heavy duty guard by the revolving doors, I had a quick scan up the line of people waiting at the box office. Everyone, without exception, was trying to subtly eavesdrop on the incident in the corner of the room. Everyone. Not even, the inarticulate degenerate couple who go the cinema because they have nothing to say to each other, and then spend twenty minutes deciding what to see (10 minutes gawping at the pretty pictures outside, ten minutes trying to remember what pretty picture corresponded to what title, inside). Not even the quartet of acne-crusted teens in Lost t shirts going to see Batman for the fifth time. Especially not them, I think they were excited to be seeing a real live scuffle that didn't either involve them, or someone who can fire laser beams from their elbows or turn themselves invisible. The scuffle was minimal, but I was far away enough to get away with taking my headphones off, pretending that it was because I was nearing the box office, rather than just wanted to hear a bunch of scally teens getting mouthy in a cinema foyer. I think the general gist of the scenario was that the group were either shouting, or talking, or generally being awful in one of the screens, and had been forcibly removed by a member of security. I think their defence was that they were having fun. Since when was "it's fun" ever been a defence against anything? . I'm sure Harold Shipman found giving old ladies lethal injections fun as well. The only excuse poorer than "it's fun" is "I was bored". I didn't get to hear the extent of their cries because they were ushered out of the cinema before any more of their suggestions to other people not to come in could fall on any more deaf ears. The queue of eavesdroppers averted their attention back to thumbing through their Unlimited newsletter or drooling "so what are we seeing again" to each other, simultaneously, because they're got a psychic connection because they're so in love. I think as soon as they realised the scuffle wasn't going to be resolved with gouging and bloodshed, they had to resign themselves that the film was going to have to be their primary anecdote tonight,

On the subject of eavesdropping though, it did remind me of an incident I saw on Saturday Evening. I was at The Big Weekend, which is an annual horror show where everything shit about life in South Wales all conglomerated into a seething, sweating mass, drinks and lot and makes life hell for everyone else. It's a breeding ground for seediness and dirtiness and every unpleasantry under the sun. Three-legged rabid spongefuckers with backwards fingers and green teeth who live underneath rocks of sea slime in the caves of the Welsh Valleys. even they make their only trip to civilised society for the Big Weekend. I took a detour through the fairground which they crowbar into the roads surrounding the museum like vomit through a sluice gate, because fairground rides make good photographs, especially when it's dark, and patrons are drunk and queasy. The camera battery ran out almost instantly, leaving me stranded in the fairground with no reason to be there. I did see a fight though, and the strategy for listening in on this required more acting skills than in the cinema. If anyone of the people involved in this drunken near-brawl saw my obvious attempt to slow down and take off my headphones so I can really, truly enjoy the sight of someone with a fake diamond earring getting a good lamping on a Saturday Night. My solution was simple. I decided quickly and for no reason, that I really wanted to take a photograph of exactly what was next to where this scuffle was taking place. Obviously knowing my camera was out of battery ,I took it out of my bag and tried to take a photo, giving me a reason to stop, and I could then see what was going on out of the corner of my eye. Then, because the camera wouldn't turn on, I had to take the headphones off to listen to it, and look intently at why it wasn't working. I found myself doing this impulsively. Why do people take their headphones off to do things that don't require silence to do. It's like when my dad used to turn the car stereo down because he thought he could smell gas. It worked, I had a good listen, saw that it wasn't going to end in bloodshed, it was just some petty shit, obviously about a girl, and carried on home before I got killed.

In This City

2008-07-30T21:54:00.003+01:00

Here's what happens when I can't think of anything to say for myself for a while; the obligatory media round up. It's all I ever talk about with my friends whenever we catch up, so maybe this will eradicate even those fun-sized pockets of conversation.

Music: I take back wholeheartedly what I said about the Jonas Brothers. I actually can't believe they've covered no less than TWO Busted songs; Year 3000 and What I Go To School For. They've even given them a weedy Disney Channel makeover, taking away all the thickly-veiled innuendo (taking away the words "ass" and inexplicably replacing "Michael Jackson" with "even outsold Kelly Clarkson" as if any of her songs has remotely troubled the stratospheric sales of Thriller). Annoying, because Busted never troubled any teenagers outside of the British Isles, Yankee Doodle Donny and his teenage slagwagons will lap it all up, and if illegibly spelt Youtube comments merit anything these days, they will also think that Billy Boy Jonas wrote the bloody things, rather than a record company hack dabbling with genius. Changing Busted lyrics is like dabbling with the core existence of teenagers. Not pretty. What is pretty though, is the new recommends features on Last FM, which has kindly nudged me in the back and persuaded me to investigate Swedish electropop again. I was tempted to give up after hearing so many rave reviews of Lykke Li's album I thought I'd implode, and then didn't like it, but Andreas Kleerup's album, and his lending of one of his songs to the ridiculous new Cyndi Lauper album has reset the balance, and I can step up to the table and show my hand: Familjen, Gentle Touch, Juvelen, Le Sport, Lo-Fi-Fnk, Pacfic! and Zeigest are all completely brilliant, even though a lot of it just sounds like rejigged versions of Knife songs. Added to the fact that Yearbook 2 by Studio is fast becoming one of my favourite albums of the year, despite it all being remixed, and I've pretty much settled that my summer heatwave soundtracking will be performed by plugged-in-Swedes for the second year running. There's more of the Scandinavian influence below.
Not that it's all pop punk and roses; I've also added a few more of the 2008 speciality (epic indie rock with no edit feature) to my year's favourites, including the power-chord excellence of Miasmal Smoke and the Yellow Bellied Freaks by Wintersleep, who were knocked off the shortlist for the Canadian equivalent of the Mercury Music Prize, and better yet, a little song called Mysterious Skin by a little band called Orphans and Vandals, which reminds me a little of Jack and the Tindersticks, as well as pretentious indie post rock circa 1999, although the singer sounds like Johnny Borrell breathing through his nose and ears, but it's essentially a perfectly pretentious spoke-sung tale of journeying to France, lost memories and bad sex. It's better than that sounds. I've also got no idea who Iglu and Hartly even are, or what the hell they think they're doing, but In This City is looking like a beast and all.

Films: I've now seen The Dark Knight twice, making it the first film I've seen twice in the cinema since, well since forever. I actually can't think of the last film I saw twice in the cinema except maybe Saw, but that was back in 2004 and mostly regrettable, especially because I paid both times. I did enjoy Batman, but I can't help that I enjoyed it twice as much because I thought Batman Begins sucked big old monolithic ass, and didn't have especially high expectations for this one. But rather than being like that mismatch of failed ideas, I though The Dark Knight was great, although it was essentially an even longer version of Heat with silly costumes. Even more exciting was The Mist, which came from nowhere and knocked me sideways, and is about as superior as a B movie could ever hope to be, it's really quite something, right down to the ending, which somehow manages to turn an essentially silly Stephen King adaptation that's not entire dissimilar to previous King atrocity Maximum Overdrive, into a morbidly depressing thought-piece, and ended with almost nobody going home happy. If anyone can show me a horror movie better constructed that that one, then let's all hear about it. I though Hancock was silly and shit, and Journey to the Centre of the Earth was just utterly ridiculous, not least for the fact it tried to present Jules Vernes original novel as a factual text. Often I look out of the windows upstairs at work and look across at all the cranes and builders and busy worker ants acting out Richard Scarry books across on the building site, and I wonder what the world is coming to, building shit everywhere, but then I think that in 2008 it's possible to go and see one dumb action adventure starring Brendan Fraser at the cinema, and see a trailer for another dumb action adventure starring Brendan Fraser at the same cinema beforehand, then I think maybe everything's going to be alright. Such as it turned out in Wall-E, which is like taking an Etch-a-Sketch to your own misery. Any building up of woe or angst you feel you might have bubbling under your surface waiting to jump out of your throat and try and make conversation with someone, hop on down to watch Wall-E and you'll find yourself jibbering for a few days. It'll come back no problem, but for at least a few hours after watching Wall-E, you'll realise nothing can really be that bad. It did fill my heart a little bit though, when I realised that robots with no discerned brain can fall in love with beautiful stranger robots with no bran, despite not being able to speak more than three words between them. Maybe there's where I'm going wrong; too many words, and not enough robot dancing. I can see what they see in Peter Crouch Now. I also had the fortune to finally watch one of the Lord of the Rings films, over sixty years after everyone else did. Whilst it was obviously a good yarn, I found my main two thoughts about The Fellowship of the Ring being how they got away with it being a PG when there's decapitations and big tentacles and all sorts of nonsense, and how ridiculous the concept was that I had to change discs in the middle of the film. It reminded me of having to put in Disc 5 of Monkey Island, because that was the one with all the animated sequences in,

Television. The only TV I've watched in the last few weeks was half an episode of Richard and Judy, where they had a desperately humourless berk in the studio showing Richard and "Judy" (who for that night's episode, was inexplicably Emma Bunton) boring clips of babies on Youtube. It was horrific, but it was still better than leaving the room and looking up pictures of babies myself on Youtube. I don't find babies even remotely funny. Then they showed a clip from QI was was infinitely better than anything and was an incredibly stupid thing to do before introducing a guest. It's like introducing your friend who can do keepy-uppy for ten kicks by showing them extended highlights of the 1970 Brazil World Cup Squad. The guest, whose name I luckily forget, was someone who'd written a book about trvia, and was so unutterably dull that Richard and "Judy" had to resort to showing voxpop clips of buffoons of Brighton Beach telling us there own (mostly fabricated) trivia. One plank's "trivia" was some shit about deep sea diving and penguins that was so off-the-scale for not being trivial, I'm surprised the cameraman even let him walk away, let alone stuck him in the show.

Books. As usual, I've fifteen on the go that I've got no hope of finishing, but even if I don't finish the Alex Cox, Matt Ridley or Tonya Hurley books that are propping my door open I know I'll finish The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson tonight or tomorrow. It's simply incredible, a quasi-political thriller meets twee "locked room" crime mystery, only I love it not just just because it's set in Sweden, but because it's MASSIVE and this is only the first book, and has a rotating cast of ridiculous characters, and can range from heart-wrenching scenes of aging businessmen weeping over the missing links in their family tree, to newspaper stories about people being killed and having parakeets shoved up their vaginas. It's had ridiculous comparisons to War and Peace, which I can't fathom and explanation for except for it being quite long, but I think comparing Larsson to Tolstoy is ever so slightly over-egging the pudding. Not least because I can't ever see myself investigating War and Peace in the near future, even if it was set in Sweden and was about twee electropop.
Love: Oh, too much to talk about.

Sex is Boring

2008-07-20T21:33:00.002+01:00

I bought a book in a charity shop in Porthcawl last week called The Red Queen by Matt Ridley. One of my favourite things about being surrounded by books are that you always have the freedom to get yourself interested in things you're not interested, purely by the benefit of something being well written. This year as I've no doubt repeated and repeated and repeated like a stuck stuck record, I've immersed myself in Daily Mail sport anthologies, the horrors of the holocaust, 18th century murder mysteries, Brian Clough and now this, a lengthy analysis of evolution and the necessity of sex in this process, the hows and whys of why chosing partners for sex. All fascinating stuff, especially since I'm not in any way interested in genetics, chromasomes or evolution in any way whatsoever. But it's a well written book, that doesn't assume I was even in Mr Sharmas biology class where supposedly I learned the difference between meiosis and mitosis but I don't remember that class at all. I remember seeing posters up in the science labs at school which explained the difference, but I don't remember actually ever being taught it myself. 'Meiosis and Mitosis' sounds like it could be a pretentious metal band though. But yeah, it's a fine book, that doesn't assume I've got the intellect of a plum grape, but at the same time explains evolutionary genetics in pig English just in case I do. One of the best £1 coins I've ever spent, especially because I got a Dave Eggers book I'm never going to read thrown in free.

But I have spent my walks to and from work since trying to apply Ridley's ideas of mating and the choosing of sexual partners to my own tepid gene pool of South Wales, and most of it rings true. The survival of the fittest theory, which is all running like a greasy-smooth prick and works fine. Ridley argues that acquired intelligence doesn't play much of a part in the choosing of mates, which is also true, but humans are regularly lead to disbelieve that being witty and able to outsmart another is a great predatory tactic. Not so, as any internet message board or group of adolescents bantering about Star Wars will ultimately testify, wit just isn't sexy anymore. Take two of the last centurys greatest wits, Oscar Wilde and to a lesser extent, Stephen Fry. No evolution there. At least they've had the decency to mix up a cocktail of madness, homosexuality, celibacy and/or death to help the witticisms go down. No, fabricated intelligence resulted in nothing for either person here other than acquring the common sense not to impregnant anyone. The other thoery, that the survival of the fittest, adding hilarious inverted commas either side of fittest to make a statement about how shallow and empty the world is, is also true. But as Ridley has in a vague sort of way explained, and I'll use the analogy of the film The Hottie and the Nottie, that it's a perfectly natural to want to have moronic, exposive sex with Paris Hilton rather than her toe-faced corn-encrusted toad friend. Although I used to think this was merely because people found it more excusable to be a morally slack ho-bag with attractive people because, you know, it doesn't count if they're good looking, but not any more. I think it's because people want to have children with attractive people so they can force their children into modelling at an early age and scrounge off their Hollywood earnings without having to work hard themselves. Similarly rich people. Identical twins where one is a doctor, and the other repairs bicycles, nine out of ten people would end up with the doctor after ten minutes of conversation, because they're lazy. Even if the two stood up and doctor revealed themselves as a totally sexist bigot, a serial cheater who likes Scouting For Girls, they'd still win. It's more survival of the laziest. Attractive people think they have it easy, and in many cases they're right. Not always though, but attractive people definitely have it laziest.

Similar interests, in the grand scheme of things are drivel. I've touched on this before, but seriously, all similar interests do is fill up voids of silence. The reason mushrooms produce asexually and don't give a hoot about who with is because they don't have in rely depth conversations about Fun House and read Lord of the Rings to get through the day. We're the only species in the world who could ever allow something as trivial what radio station their partners car is tuned into dictate whether to add another generation to their family tree. It's only one thing, but I've known people to have not persued relationships any further because their boyfriend slurped his drink once, or because, well, it was just a bit of fun. No other animal gets bothered by casual sex, which is of course, the real issue here. Because mating doesn't necessarily have to result in procreation, it means the selection process can be freestyled however you want. The mating ritual is like a combination of tricks on a trampoline, eventually resulting in a triple somersualt of coming off the pill, and hey presto, the next generation. Basically, as Matt Ridley explains using the title of the book, sex and evolution is all ridiculous, because ultimately, all the adaptations a species makes and supposedly enhances, is eventually going to ruin us all. Admittedly human beings haven't got much in the way of predators right now except each other, but like an opponent in a chess game or a football match, the more obvious the tactics we eploit, the more likely it is that one day evolution will catch up with us and end the human race. And as I walked home along Windsor Place and saw awkward couples with nothing to say to each other except how nice each other looks pouring into bars to talk about work and drink away the days until one of them cheats, and I remember how easy and natural and it is to want to be there, and I start to think that day can't some soon enough.

Mysterious Skin

2008-07-19T21:43:00.003+01:00

I have precious little else to do on a Saturday night apart from finish this delicious bottle of Australian wine (£2.99) and hammer my laptop keys. One of my housemates has done that thing where my washing has finished drying in the dryer and has put all my clothes on my bed, which I'm enormously grateful for because it saves me the bother of moving it there myself, however now I'm so enormously lazy that I've sat down on the bed next to them but I really just cannot bring myself to stand up next to the bed and perform the 5 minute task of putting them in my wardrobe. There are so many other menial things like that I could, and probably should do right now, like moving the copy of The Stuff of Thought off my window sill because you can see it from the street outside, and it probably looks like I've deliberately left it there to impress people who walk past. "Wow, clearly that person is an amazing guy because he reads books about linguistics, and he bought it from Borders too because he hasn't taken the 'half price' sticker off". I'm not sure if advertising Borders through your bedroom window is a cool thing to do or not, but I've noticed someone across the street from me has dumped one of our carrier bags in their window, so maybe it is. I'm not going to pull a James Stewart and stare out of my window through a crack in the curtains to see who they are. They might be the weirdo who buys hi fi magazines on a Saturday. There are so many other things to do; here's to anyone who can come up with an idea of what to do with the Mark Kozelek and Red House Painters Cds I amassed during the first three months of this year, which I've dedicated a special 'pile' but not found a solution as to where to store them separately, since I'm out of CD rack space, and out of space to put in another CD rack.
I also need to buy a new mobile phone and/or a sim card, as I lost my mobile phone about three weeks ago, but I'm tempted to resist doing this until I actually need to, although I'm quite contented knowing that I don't have one and don't need to use one. I can probably count the number of people I've spoken to on my phone to people other than my parents in the last six months on one hand. The only time I bought phone credit between February and June, I spent £8.60 on calling the Virgin Media crisis line to moan that they still hadn't reconnected our broadband. The other £1.40 I'm presuming I pissed away when drunk because I don't remember. I think the days of laying in bed having lengthy conversations at 12p a statement, with or without x's are a thing of the past now. I hope nobody important, like The Queen or the producers of Big Brother, or that Welsh poetry competition have tried to phone me. Still, for the time being I can put away the disappointment of hearing the double-bleep and rushing to my phone to find out who's been thinking of me, only to find it's a typographical nudge from Vodafone to hoik me up another rung on the pay package ladder. There is a simplistic warming of the heart knowing that hearing two beeps from a phone proves that someone, somewhere who knows your phone number has at least thought about you for a minute or so, sometimes longer if they've spelt the words correctly, but as time has lagged and the oceans of time between contact has waned to the point of irrelevance, it's not something I'm missing all that much. But tonight, I'm not really in the mood for sitting and staring, but if I had my phone, I guess all I would have done is sat and stared at that instead, waiting to be invited to change my life somewhere.
Births, Marriages and Deaths. In the last year, I've met people that I've seen and talked to on a regular basis who are getting married, or having a baby. This isn't interesting for anyone who doesn't really know the people involved so I'll spare the details, but in a way I've enjoyed in a small way the knowledge that these events are happening. I've been to about four or five funerals in the past few years, and absolutely zero weddings; I don't really know of anyone who's even got married, apart from the one last year Mark was best man at, but that was someone I didn't know. I'm aware of long-forgotten fairytale people who have had children but they're so far off the contact radar I don't even know what country they live in, but this is my first baby. Still not outnumbering the funerals, so here's hoping everyone else I know gets pregnant and indulges shotgun weddings. Providing none of them happen to me any time fast. I don't particularly want to snuff it knowing Marcus was the last person I shared intimacy with, in the car park of TGI Fridays. I don't really plan on getting married any time soon obviously, and I need to bring new life into the world about as much as I need to bring my socks into another person's isolation chamber.

This is picture of me:

What does a bunny rabbit do? Hop. What does an axe do? Chop. What do you do when you see a green light?

Highly Suspicious

2008-07-15T22:13:00.003+01:00

Today The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non Fiction. This, I'm excited about, and I don't honest think at any point in my life I'd ever though I'd get excited about a book prize of any description. Such is the way life panned out for me, I'm in the book trade, all be it on one of the lower rungs in that my life basically revolves around flogging copies of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher to Daily Mail readers. But book prizes are different to film awards like The Oscars, when you've either seen all the films, or (with the exception of the documentary shorts and other pointless drivel) know what they're about anyway, so you're always rooting for the one you like most, or with music awards where you've heard all the nominees far too much already and are obliged to disagree and find fault even if your own band wins because it's all such a farce and all The Man anyway. No, book prizes are interesting above those because they're baffling and weird.

The Samuel Johnson Prize is an international, but British based prize awarded to what's regarded by the panel (Rosie Boycott and some other hacks) as being the best Non Fiction book of the last year (May 2007 - May 2008). First baffling point is that more than quite a few non fiction books get published a year, even working in a book store that mainly appeals to mainstreams tastes, I can see we get somewhere in the region of 10-15 new non fiction titles in each delivery. Nobody could ever dream to read all of them, especially since the average history hardback are mega-reads you can't even pick up with one hand, so picking the best is really the case of rooting through best seller charts, well received press reviews, and people swanking over gourmet dinners telling you what they're chewing over on the tube. Hardly fair, and also explains why the shortlist for the prize are comprised of precisely the above. Patrick French's biography of Booker winner VS Naipaul may have sold fuck all copies, but was reviewed to buggery. Tim Butcher's Blood River was a Richard and Judy book club book, and thus in the public eye for the past seven months. The others were all bigged up by the broadsheets. So although almost all the books are by all accounts interesting, I doubt many people have actually bothered to read them though, so at least having their names bandied around a bit more than upon publication might perform some tricks.

However, and this is rare for me, especially with the fiction prizes like the Booker and the Orange awards, I'd actually read one of the books. I'd actually read one-and-a-half, but found The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross too much and never got past chapter three in the time I had it. So by default, I found myself rooting for a book tonight, and was excited it won. I read The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale in April, about two weeks after it got published and received the inaugeral and often kiss-of-death accolade of History Book of the Month at work, but it sounded promising, a country house murder mystery yarn, complete with bonkers family and chin-stroking master detective summoned to solve the crime and sod off back to London. Very Cluedo, with a bit of 19th century true crime thrown in too. I read it on the train journey to and from Winchester when I went home for dad's 60th birthday. The Road Hill House, where the murder takes place in the book, is in Trowbridge, which is on the train route from Cardiff to London, and I found myself at the end of each chapter or paragraph gazing wistfully out of the window to look at the largely unchanged countryside to see which side of the train the house might have been resting on. I didn't even know if the house was still built, but it was a fantastic book to read hurtling through the Somerset and Wiltshire countryside. It is an extremely well-written book, that pitches itself the middle ground between true crime thriller, and historical melodrama based on life in the 1860s, neither of which have much appeal to me on their own, but together, they're lethal. Obviously then at my dad's birthday celebrations in between scoffing schloer and sausage rolls, I told pretty much everyone there to read the book, and even paraded it around at one point to ensure everyone remembered the fake sepia-tinged beige cover and investigate at a later date. I'm pretty sure they didn't, but the intent was there, and although the Samuel Johnson Prize is hardly The Brit Awards or Andy Murray, I hope if any of them hear Kate Summerscale's name on the Today show or wherever, they'll remember my good intentions and the brief speck on the radar of my life, when I was a literary critic.

Impossible

2008-07-13T21:42:00.004+01:00

The first thing I found upon arriving back from the Gower was a pamphlet advertising new conservatories and bay windows for our terraced house in the centre of Cardiff. I know that rules aren't extraordinarily stuck to by people trying to flog their wares on a door-to-door basis, but now it just seems like the laws of common sense and good business knowledge just don't apply to people anymore. Evidently the conservatory sellers aren't doing their homework I'd like to find a single garden on this stretch of road, if not this entire region, that has enough space for an entire new room to put in their garden. We just about have enough space to fit a barbecue, and even then it's a struggle to fit people around it to tend to it, eat the food, and tip a wine bottle at a 45 degree angle. No conservatory, thank you. No bay windows either, we've only got one main window on the ground floor of our house, and it's mine, and I don't need any more attention drawn to my house more than I already to, with a CD rack and 3 toy giraffes already sat there. I did have a shoe in the window, but that's long gone.

A conservatory would have been lovely on The Gower Peninsular mind, as in just two nights, a lifetime of reminders why I hate camping. This weekend, which for me was Friday and Saturday, although for others was Thursday as well, and for the majority of lazy deadbeats, just the Saturday. This was probably the most organised camping trip I've been on, not least because I was with a group of dad-minded people who think ahead and bring six barbecues, a fold-up table, a windbreak and a million and five methods of wiring mp3 players up to speaker systems to flatten nearby tents with sound waves. Despite this, I left the campsite situated right on the coast in Nathan's car with the same desire to return to comfort and bed and shower and socks and Seinfeld as I have on any incident where I'd damaged myself irreversibly, psychologically and mentally, at the Reading Festival in 2000 or 2001, or the time we camped in Penmon in North Wales, where even though I didn't drink anything all weekend, I somehow returned home from the 7 hour car journey feeling like I'd been wallowing in a pigs trough of alcohol for the previous 48 hours. Which is why I fell asleep almost the second I returned and have just woken up wondering what's going on. I did organise myself this time around, and took a spare duvet, and a sleeping bag, and a pillow, and all sorts of things, yet I was still as uncomfortable as it gets when I bedded down for the night. At least I didn't have to share my tent with anyone. There's a certain culture that takes over on camping trips, where due to the combination of advanced intimacy created by sleeping right next to people you probably wouldn't if it was, say, a house party or a Thursday, and the forced familiarity created by spending more than an hour in the company of people you know too well and/or don't know at all. In-jokes spread like wild fire, minute pockets of humour, usually at the expense of others - made up nicknames related to things which are good for a yuck but 10/10 times you have to have been there, and people who don't know each other in the slightest engage in ridiculous banter which suggests they're going to be friends forever, right up until the cars are started on the way home and that's the end of that. I go through hundreds of different conflicting feelings whenever I go on these sorts of trips, which I attempt to resolve by wandering around aimlessly on my own away from the group, forging a new vision of myself, and then returning to the group only to get bored and walk off again. I think it's because the surroundings lend themselves well to studying the beauty and general prettiness of the world. Down on the beach at Hills End, there's a causeway you can't see, a few rocks and headlands that you can see, and a huge, vast expanse of ocean that you definitely can see, and does cheerily predictably romantic things like reflect the surface of the moon, and wash up jellyfish. Although it's perfectly feasible to admire the postcard-quality scenery and gentle moon from the social-binge-combat zone of a group of friends with wine and Dire Straits nothing beats half an hour of aimless wandering and staring at sundown. This might be my favourite thing to do in the world, and I guess it's sad in a way, that my favourite thing to do in the whole world can't be shared with anybody, but it makes me thankful for having even just a few friends and people just to sit in a circle with, because it's a treat to take 30 minutes out and count shooting stars. Then you can return, thankful that it's not your entire life just yet.

It might be because I'm just an insecure idiot, a safe assumption and an excuse I fall back on regularly to explain any of my random and potentially obnoxious antics. Elongated socialising stints are not my best suit when I find it impossible to start conversations and live life on the cusp of an invite-only utopia, but at festivals, and weekends away, unless they're secure units of just myself and one other person, or two, then I find them strangely more isolating and terrifying then otherwise. It's a strange paradox, but if my main memories of various trips are staring out to sea from the cliff edges of Anglesey, or getting windswept, soaked, and stared at on the beaches of Camber Sands, then I know I've got out of the weekend what I wanted. If I made any friends for life, then that's a bonus.

I don't want to feel like it's the end of a summer

Lamb and the Lion

2008-07-10T20:01:00.004+01:00

I had a good time today listening to the George Lamb show. It's not often you'll hear me say that - like 99% of the rest of listeners to 6 Music, I find listening to his wide-boy thicko approach to radio presenting frankly unlistenable, and for a radio show dependent on it's listeners knowing their onions, and having a two-way correspondence of music adoration and the spirit of sharing, having an offensively ignorant buffoon running one of the flagship lunchtime shoes, his hiring at the end of last year is a weird and unpleasant experience. I didn't hear the whole show, simply because I just can't do it, but I found out when I got home from Maplins and Wilkinson, that Lamb had Stephin Merritt in the studio playing a couple of songs, and an interview. The results were incredible.

All Lamb's interviews are conducted in exactly the same way: The musician or band in question sit in a room adjacent, one presumes, to his normal studio. A one-on-one interaction occurs and is recorded for our amusement. Due to his general lack of knowledge of who he's talking to or what day it is, Lamb obviously reads questions off a hastily cobbled-together set of crib sheets, that aren't so much a biography as a set of pathetic DIY did-you-know? trivia, which Lamb basically reads from, instead of engaging the performer in question. Today's was undoubtedly one of the best. Stephin Merritt, who is pretty renowned for his wit as dry as a desert and bleakly romantic and deadpan nature was the perfect nemesis for this inane banter. The best thing about the interview was just how quickly Merritt twigged that Lamb was a blathering idiot, and almost by the second question, he was down to single word responses, by question five he was shooting quick-fire smart-alec responses. "You released 69 Love songs, it was a triple CD" - "it still is" and then a preposterous talk about going to hang out in a record store in London "what now?" - Merritt. It was excruciating, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out during the course of the 5 minute epic of awkwardness, where my sympathy should lean. On the one hand, I've been an admirer of Stephin Merritt, and 69 Love Songs by The Magnetic Fields is pretty much unsurpassed as a classic album, so it was unpleasant hearing him trying to turn up, talk about music, and then perform two of his songs, only to be subjected to 'yoof' radio. But on the other hand, it was unbearable, buttock-clenching listening to a interview car crash in full top-spin, with pretty much every word coming out of Lamb's mouth being a through-the-fingers moment. It was like an indie rock edition of Knowing Me, Knowing You. I had pangs of sympathy for George Lamb, again not something I'll say often, but he was no match for the snarling, wild fire wit of Merritt, he couldn't have been more out of his depth if he was a baby in a sack of snakes
At one point they were discussing one of the instruments that Merritt plays, the bouzouki, which of course was met with a predictable gag from Lamb about bazookas, and then after he drooled "what's that then" Merritt told him it was an 8 string instrument with a gourd", Lamb uttered the immortal "how do you play it, do you blow on it?". This was followed by a glorious miscommunication in which Lamb mistook Merritt's answer of "carry-on" (regarding an instrument size) for a irritated utterance "oh, carry on!" and then
hen came a hopeless non-conversation in which Lamb jabbered on about people on housing estates, and how Merritt should show a little love for his music mentor, in which the two parties involved couldn't have understood each other less. "What, like Throbbing Gristle?' was the point at which both parties gave up. But any confusion over where my sympathy was lying was washed away with the rain after the interview finished, where Lamb and his gathering of yes-men, slobbering dogs who sit around him in the studio like a professional WKD advert, all decided Merritt was a wanker, and admitted they were trying really hard not to laugh in his face, which is, I think, about as offensive, rude and pathetic as humanity gets. But the joke was obviously on Lamb, because this ten minute snapshot of the decline of media presenting in Britain, did nothing except highlight his own ineptitude, slack approach to interviewing, and God Bless Stephin Merritt, who not only endured, and outwitted on an enormous magnitude, he also performed two songs solo, with just a ukulele, as he does on stage, beautifully and impeccably, even though his voice is so deep now you can probably hear it through the ground in the next city. He did The Nun's Litany, off Distortion, which was great because he doesn't sing that on the album, and The Book of Love, which I think is the closest The Magnetic Field have had to popular recognition, and that's only because Peter Gabriel covered it on the soundtrack to Shall We Dance. Someone should make a film of this meeting of minds, though. It worked for Frost/Nixon, this is just a slightly more quirky encounter.

It's still raining. If only weather weren't such a lazy metaphor for mood, otherwise I'd write a paragraph here about the different in the weather between Winchester and Cardiff. I'm going camping on the Gower tomorrow until Sunday. Lucky I'm not scared of drowning.

Sixteen Days (Part 10)

2008-07-07T19:47:00.003+01:00

It started raining the second I left Winchester and hasn't yet stopped. I kept falling asleep in the car, but just before we crossed the Severn Bridge, we stopped for lunch in a pub in the middle of nowhere but posh enough for the dishwashers to have memberships to golf clubs. They served probably the best gravy I've ever tasted.

When I got home, I went to the pub. The rain made sitting under the parasols a nightmare, but it was a relief to have a convesation with someone who wasn't an 18 year old college drop out ontop of a hill.

Sixteen Days (Part 9)

2008-07-07T10:52:00.005+01:00

Hat Fair Day Two.

Started Saturday as i do every Saturday, listening to the Adam and Joe show on Radio 6. Joe was back this week, and I did all the things I should have done yesterday or the day before or the day, pottering about in the kitchen, making coffee, poring over my laptop, washing up the mug I'd just made coffee in, drying it, and then using the exact same mug to make coffee in. I finished reading the Hampshire Chronicle. Basically, any excuse to stay in the kitchen listening to radio and not having to unplug the radio, take it somewhere else in the house, and then plug it in again and retune it. It wasn't a particularly memorable Adam and Joe Show, and they especially teed me off my by announcing they weren't going to be on for the next three weeks, although one week they are going to be replaced by David Quantick who is better than everything, as anyone who used to listen to Collins and Maconie's Hit Parade on Radio 1 in the mid nineties, or read Quantick's World in Select. Or maybe even the hundreds of things he's done since, but I can't name any so I won't. Text the Nation was good, all about sitcom.

The Hat Fair traditionally reaches full strength on the Saturday. The Sunday is a lacklustre affair where the entire shebang ups sticks and sets up in Oram's Arbour, a splattering of grass and beech trees in a different part of town, near my old dentist and halfway to my school. It used to be a drinking ground for 16 year olds, but not on Hat Fair Sunday. You basically get all the magic and mayhem of the previous two days events, only crammed onto some grass that's too small to house it, and nobody's drunk, and there are dogs and bees and shit everywhere. I think I've been on the Sunday once, and this year, I'm not going to double my experiences. To counteract these, I decided to rinse as much circus water from the dirty Hat Fair dishcloth today. So as it was, I arrived in town to see the performances, right from the very second they started. Bad news for me then, that the first performer anywhere in town, was the same idiot Scottish woman, who looked even more today like a cross between Helena Bonham Carter, a cartoon with and Jude, the old receptionist in Casualty with a nose piercing. She was as bad as the previous day, her act appeared on every level to cover the exact same territory every single time. The only difference appeared the be that people were actually watching her, and enjoying here. Clearly the bonus of busybusy Saturday and a different pitch, in the Broadway, helped. The Broadway isn't as exciting as it sounds, it's just a stretch of road where buses go up and down and cars park in a zig-zag fashion leading up towards the big statue of King Alfred which sits on a plinth at the head of The Broadway. This area is normally a road, but to annoy drivers even more than merely closing half the parks does, they close one of the main roads into Winchester off as well, and let people juggle there instead. This is where the Scottish woman was doing her act, and I didn't want to loiter anywhere near her in case she ripped my head off and stole my wallet, so I went back up to the cathedral. My deja vu vein started throbbing as once again, I turned out the cathedral close and the Irish gobshite and Swedish accomplice were doing their trapeze thing yet again. I almost couldn't believe what I was seeing, and double backed immediately, and went back down the town. This to-ing and fro-ing went on far too long, to break up the tedium I went into Blockbuster and told the woman behind the counter that she should definitely watch Funny Games because it was really good. It is really good, but I was worried she might not like it very much, hunt me down, and break my legs with a golf club. She seemed impressed when I said "it's got the bald guy from The Lives of Others in it" as if suggesting the two films were in any way similar.

Out on the street, there was a fantastic act calling themselves The Urban Playground, which basically revolved around six people dancing, jumping, doing acrobatics and basically acting like human fleas over the top of some makeshift scaffolding planted steadily in the middle of the street. In other words, free running, break dancing and six shades of awesomeness, for 45 minutes. Terrific stuff, and probably the only act of the entire weekend which stepped out of the very pip-pip hippy ethos, and all the better for it. The only downside was the soundtrack music, which had "written especially for the show" all over it, combination of diabolical trance breakbeat guff, and a child with pro-tools and a copy of Exit Planet Dust. Rubbish, but I'd watch these cats doing turning somersaults and backflipping over their own shoulder blades wearing dinner jackets, to the sound of Greensleeves if it works. I'd rather see that, actually, with all of the gung-ho urban warriors decked out as Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. But that was not to be, and I walked back up town to watch the bloody Scottish woman again who was set up opposite the buttercross. The Indian chap from yesterday was back at the bottom of town. I felt like I was stuck in a nightmare set in a hall of mirrors, and it was starting to make me feel uncomfortable. Walking into the Abbey Grounds to find that the Train Station people had set up there and were halfway through their act, was the last straw, even though there was a barbecue set up in the far corner of the Abbey Grounds and the smell of minted lamb and DIY sausages was steaming across the flower beds. There was also some ludicrous sideshows that weren't there the previous day, which cost far too much to take part in, and the prizes included a variety of plastic guns. BROKEN BRITAIN. I went home.

I had planned to go back in to watch some of the evening performances, but a quick scan of a programme I picked up told me that all I was going to see was The Urban Playground again only in the rain, and although I was secretly tempted by the idea of seeing them all slip up on the wet pavement and break their necks, doing a You've Been Framed, but I thought better. The alternative were a wanko jazz band, and slitting my wrists. I took option D and stayed at home and watched the rain from the spare bedroom in the house until my parents got home. I'd love to say that the Hat Fair experience of 2008 wasn't a let down or a disappoint, but I can't lie about it. After nine years, I was expecting better, but as I sat in the spare bedroom and logged on and off the Internet like an indecisive sheepdog, I realised that the Hat Fair was never good in the first place, and all the interest and excitement was entirely of my own creation, and the natural instinct to believe that things get better in time. A different matter altogether, but The Truck Festival in Oxford, I went to that in 2001, and then every year until 2005. By the last time I went, it was big and busy enough to have extra fields for camping, and bands people had heard of playing. This year, the Lemonheads are playing. In my naivety, I thought The Hat Fair might have blown up too, and be bigger, more exciting, and terrific. All that was improved was a few stalls set up in a car park, and some sort of pyrotechnics shit that I missed because I thought it was on the Saturday night, and it wasn't. The sheer fact that the highlight of the weekend was a solo pub crawl that largely ignored all facets of the Hat Fair, and then listening to the Durutti Column, tells the whole story. In the evening, My parents drove me out to Sainsbury's for shopping. The whole store was full of attractive twenty-something couples buying organic olive oil and red wine vinegar and I felt sick and wanted to leave.

Sixteen Days (Part 8)

2008-07-05T23:26:00.009+01:00

The Hat Fair is an annual event that takes places on the streets of Winchester every July. The timing of the Hat Fair always used to be totally erratic, to the extent that I haven't known when it's been happening, or at least, supposed to be happening, for a long, long time. Now it's every first week of July, as the hundreds of banners, bunting and bonus bollocks up around town barks at you every three steps. I think the last time I actually went to the hat fair was in the year 2000, I missed the Friday because I'd just come back from New York. It was one of those holidays where you're away for very short time, often away for less than a week, but upon returning, felt a lot longer. But I went on the Saturday, and drank Smirnoff Ice in the Cathedral Grounds which you're categorically not allowed to do. So this year was my first Hat Fair experience in 8 years, my first Hat Fair Friday in 9. What's the Hat Fair? Oh, The Hat Fair is, to boil it down to as simple an explanation as possible, it's basically a crap version of South By Southwest, only with rubbish jugglers and acrobats and street magicians instead of bands. Or a festival comprising exclusively of the shit bits of Glastonbury. The name is derived from the fact the performers pass around a hat at the end of the performance and look at you menacingly until you cough up your dinner money. It's basically organised bullying by terrifying hippies with fire clubs and organic sausages and a fun family atmosphere. I walked into town expecting the worst.

Eight years is a long time in showbusiness. For example, since the last Hat Fair I've stopped being even remotely impressed with juggling or stilt walking or playing a banjo with your toenails. You can't go through the best part of a decade of inner turmoil and heart-sinking emotional angst, and still expect a "hoots-mon" Scottish bint juggling balls and riding a unicycle in high heels to cut the mustard, and the first performer I saw did not. Part of the schtick with street performing is getting the audience involved, and first thing on a Friday morning, the Hat Fair dead zone, nobody was in the mood, and although the lady in question was arguably competent at all her tricks, nobody could give a flying mother fuck, least of all me. Interestingly, The Hat Fair has become a lot more organised than I remember. It could be they've always done this, in which case I apologise to all concerned, but actually having designated people in certain areas or on certain roads, like tents and stages at a festival, was commendable, although there was a free-for-all in a lot of the other areas for buskers to just turn up. The epicentre of Hat Fair life though, is in the now tee-total Cathedral Grounds. The detoxing of what used to be the most beautiful and historically fascinating pub garden in the entire world, is a real shame and I hope they change it back soon. Anyway, although half of the grounds are dedicated to allowing the next generation of crummy plates-spinners to acquire their art in a gigantic circus skills free-for-all, the rest has various 'pitches' where various performers do their thing. These vary from the very basic (Man balances a broomstick on another broomstick) to the unnerving (man plays on a set of decks whilst a "monkey" (dwarf in a suit) dances in a box) although the two main areas were dedicated to two static acts. The first of these had erected a large set of scaffolding, and did a very by-numbers trapeze and balancing act, but I found it enjoyable, because the woman kept talking in Swedish for no reason, and literally didn't stop smiling the entire 45 minutes, even when her act dictated her to be spinning hula hoops whilst standing on a table and showing off her pants. I though she was ludicrously attractive, but with the sun in my eyes and standing about 50 metres away, Her accomplice, a plucky Irish gobshite with sideburns, was an absolute twat, and although he was clearly the stooge for a lot her more obvious talents, he did a rum turn as a ringleader. Best trick of all though, was how most of the jokes were clearly unsuitable for children, and Irish gobshite did say "piss off" at one point. Excellent. The other main act in the grounds were called The Bash Street Train Station, which I thought sounded a) libellous, and b) rubbish, but I went and had a look anyway, because there was nothing else to do by this point, and they'd built and entire stage up to look like a train station, and there was a bizarre man who looked like a cross between Mr Leach, my old head of year, Tony Robinson as Baldrick in Blackadder Goes Forth, and a bespectacled onion walking around in a green cardigan. Whatever the premise was, it was completely lost on me, but it essentially involved three silent comedians who all played about ten characters each, bumbling around the set getting head over the head with suitcases and hanging off balconies and signals and similar things. There was a plot of sorts, involving the theft of the Mona Lisa by some gangsters with violins that can only be stopped by the patrons of Bash Street Station. The entire thing was soundtracked, thrillingly, by a bearded man with an accordion, who not only played the accordion non-stop for the entire hour, but also did all the sound effects - laughing, trains chuffing in an out of the station, the twitterings of an old later, French people saying "hee haw" and even a few spooky "ooooohs" and "aaarghs!" when the gangster was on stage. The whole thing was borderline lunacy, and hence why it was absolutely incredible. It was a cross between Nosferatu and Zzzap! Also brilliant.

There are a few other pitches dotted around the town, much fewer on the Friday than the Saturday. The Buttercross, which for anyone who's not familiar with Winchester, is a statue monument thing that nobody really understands apart from that you can sit on it. From here, I watched Haggis and Charlie, These two literal clowns, are Hat Fair stalwarts, and I believe they've been a feature of every Hat Fair since it started in er, 1876. Quite fantastically, I sat down, and within five seconds their act started, and it was, and I'm not joking, the EXACT SAME ACT as it was in 1999. I couldn't bring myself to watch them; they're a slightly formidable sight as well, the type that would punch you in the face if you accidentally trod on their flower bed. I went back towards the cathedral and watched an Indian man trying to get people to donate their watches for his magic trick. It was very awkward, because nobody was interested in donating anything to him, especially not their money. I didn't stay long watching him either, Instead, I watched a youngish boy who looked like Andy Warhol wearing a Gonzalez t shirt mucking about with some mini scaffolding and a hat with spikes in it. I figured he was setting up his act, but by the time he'd got ready, I was getting cramp in my foot so I got walking again. I'd run out of things to watch, because the sordid trapeze woman and the train station were already going again. Fed up with how little activity there was, I walked via the Colebrook Street car park, which is an area I'm sue didn't used to be dedicated to Hat Far shennanigans, but all it had in it were some miserable looking craft stalls and a few streamers strung up over the lamp posts and rubbish bins. Not inspiring, but the idea of an ice cream van and a maypole irritating a load of drivers (there was no sign anywhere saying the car park was closed until you got right up to the barrier) warmed my heart. Standing and watching a procession of pissed off drivers approach the entrance, silently swearing and turning back into the side street to try try try again, it was a more entertaining sideshow than most of the buskers I'd seen so far. I went home.

The evening was one I'd planned all week. My parents were due back the following night, so Friday evening was really the last chance I had to get wasted in town, and then come home, cook pizza, smoke in the garden and throw my fag ends over the wall, watch TV really loudly and then fall asleep on the sofa listening to the Durutti Column for a while so I made the most of it. I decided to do a mini-tour of some of my favourite pubs in Winchester. It didn't quite work out that way, but my intentions were good. The first port of call was The Railway, which is figurehead, surely, in the memories of everyone who was ever a teenager in Winchester; the only real live music venue (although Laura Viers playing at the 'Discovery Centre' (Library) is a new pretender to the throne) and centrepiece of the alteno-loser scene. This scene was in full flow as I arrived and sat in the garden. The old guard was still hanging about, I was served at the bar by James aka 'Bollocks', who fits somewhere into the peg holes of my memory, and he did say "..John, isn't it?" but time has been unkind on my memories of 'Bollocks', I'm sure he wouldn't have said that whenever it was I was supposed to know him well. Anyway, the garden was full of fucksticks in dapperwear, all looking sufficiently like a bonsai George Lamb in a Trilby. I sat and read The Fly, which is freely available by the dozen from The Railway. The notably pisspoor writer that annoyed me the last time I read The Fly (which was the last time I was in The Railway, interestingly enough) has now left, but the quality of features and writing are still shocking. If anyone can find me a band with less personality than Black Kids, then I'd like to hear all about them. For some reason, I had two drinks in the Railway, embarrassingly because a girl turned up with a suitcase and a book and sat on a bench facing mine about ten metres away, and I naturally thought that if I was twice and drunk she'd definitely come over and invite me to take here away to Sweden because she'd already packed. This didn't happen. My next port of call was The Exchange, which I loathe to describe as an old haunt because I think I've only been there twice before. It has quite a tarted up garden, and the jukebox was on ridiculously loud and you could hear it from the street outside. I didn't mind, because rather than the usual pip-pip anarchy that starts a party normally in town, like Hard Fi and Kasabian, they were hammering "I Need Some Fine Wine, and You, You Need to be Nicer" by The Cardigans at top volume. The pub was boring though, and I had to sit on a table right next to a voluminous oaf who couldn’t stop putting forward to his drinking partners his own manifesto for attracting more customers to the golf course he worked at, which is, to quote him "the most affordable round in, well, in England". He probably rakes the bunkers. I then went through some back streets and alleys, and carefully resisting the urge to go into the Old Vine and shit on their decor, but opted for The Eclipse instead. The Old Vine, back in Victorian days, used to be called The Sun, and The Eclipse was named as such to say "yeah, we're better than The Sun" so The Sun had to change its name to something else again. This rivalry is now sadly over, because The Old Vine can go fuck itself, and so The Eclipse it was. My favourite memories of The Eclipse include sitting in there a few days before Christmas in 2002, doing the NME Christmas crossword, as well as a couple of nights of the summer of 2003 where I sat inside after work and read the sleeve notes of the CDs I'd bought. It's a nice, small, friendly pub that was tonight packed to the rafters with Hat Fair celebrities, including the Irish gobshite and his Swedish accomplice, who was significantly less attractive, decked up in a tracksuit and a boyfriend on her arm. I sat on a table outside, and a succession of other customers politely embarrassed me by taking away all the other chairs from the table so I couldn't even pretend someone else was going to sit with me.

The last pub I went to was the same place I saw the football on Sunday. It felt like weeks ago, not five days, and as I looked around and stood under the balcony in the rain looking around at the awful people there, the categorically unrepresentative misfits and high collared teens. I looked in disdain as they took photos and talked about putting the photos up on Facebook. Then I went outside and did the same. I was going to stop at The Mash Tun on the way home, which is a lovely little pub for dreadlocked art students and dog breathed loons, and where I spent New Years Eve 2004. But it wasn't there any more. In its place was a Tapas Bar, which looked like it has about as much soul as one of the Chicken Satay excuses for food that they shove on a stick and plant on your plate there. I went home in the rain and watched TV really loud, smoked in the garden and threw the fag ends over the wall, listened to the Durutti Column and passed out on the sofa.

Sixteen Days (Part 7)

2008-07-04T00:38:00.009+01:00

Today I really wanted to go to Southampton. I think everyone has to say that once in their life and mean it. Now that I could walk again, and inspired by my journey down to Portsmouth, I decided to go the other big city of Hampshire to have a walk round and to poke my nose in the horrible areas and take unrepresentative photos of how crap it was, hopefully with yet more pictures of ugly 70s architecture with the sun in the background, for a change. I've been to Southampton a lot, lot more in recent years, simply because it's on the train route home from Cardiff. If I'm getting the train to Winchester, I have to change at Southampton, and because the train station there is relatively close to the town centre, unlike Bristol, then it's no big deal to have a walk around because the trains are invariably shite. Also, because of it's proximity to Winchester, and Chandlers Ford were some of my friends used to live, then I've seen more of it and lived in it a lot more than Portsmouth or anywhere else in the south. This of course, doesn't mean it's much of a city, it's familiarity through necessity. Southampton was the site of my first gig, when I was 13, and also the site of my first kiss, four years later. Both took place at the Joiners Arms, a notorious and slightly famous venue just off the main stretch of town. The band were Joyrider, an Irish indie rock band who had one hit, a cover of 'Rush Hour'. The kiss was with a fucking idiot slag girl Rachel Stamp fan and like nearly every incidence of my life that involved the word 'kiss', I'd much rather forget it as I'm sure she did, three seconds later. There have been many varied and boring events of my life that have taken place in Southampton; meeting Coldplay, getting drunk on the bandstand in the park listening to Violator by Depeche Mode, sitting the same bandstand listening to Use Your Illusion 2 before gigs at The Joiners, someone trying to strangle me in the toilets of the Rhino Club, losing my phone for the first time. My orthodontist who described my fucked up teeth as 'the most bizarre he'd even seen' was based in Southampton, on Bedford Place, a road that looks like it has pound coins melted in the pavement. I'm sure there are many others, although the highlight of any trip is of course, going down the subway that Craig David mentions in '7 Days'

Luckily, although not unexpectedly, the bus to Southampton is still running, and running so regularly that you can pretty much guarantee there'll be one waiting in the bus station almost as soon as you arrive, a collectors item, and also a relief. After a debacle involving my realisation that there isn't a bloody cash point any further down town than Abbey National anymore now that, and I'm away of how much I sound like a stuck record, because they've moved the fucking post office, there isn't one anywhere near the market, I was glad to find a place to sit. Although Wintonian pedants will argue that have just got on the bus right outside Barclay's, but one of the reasons I love the Southampton bus, is the fact that it's a double decker, and if you get on at the bus station, you can guarantee the top row front seats, which as any fool knows, is the only way the travel double decker. I achieved this, and I quite like the ride through town on the top deck, mainly because the drivers don't think twice about piling straight into the trees as any given opportunity, and as the bus swings out of town through St Cross, Compton, where Dr Dre lives, and Otterbourne, which probably doesn't have any Otters, but the residents like to give the impression that the place is teaming with them, since there's a pub called The Otter, and all the signs have pictures of otters on. My friend Tom used to live in Otterbourne, and we went and sat in the woods a few times and everyone got drunk. I think this was during my short lived period of being tee total, as I can't remember it very well. The bus goes through Chandler's Ford at lightning pace, and before long you're on the main stretch into Southampton. It's called The Avenue, and it's fucking nightmare. One of the worst roads in the whole world. It's the sort of highway of utter ineptitude that's about five miles long, and has to have traffic lights every three metres, including those hulking, horrible overhead ones. At any given opportunity, you can look out of the window and see upwards of eight red or green lights. It usually takes half the journey to get to the other end, but today I think the Gods were smiling, because I was in the city centre. Much has changed in the centre of Southampton over recent years, although nothing in the last five years or so, as far as I can tell. The biggest event was the building of the West Quay shopping centre, a building so gargantuan you can probably see it from space. It's bigger than the entire high street and the other two fuck-arsed shopping centres crumpled together. It's a frankly beautifully vile retail extravaganza, it's like one of those out-of-town wallet-suckers like Cribbs Causeway or that one in Sheffield everyone goes on about, only this one's slap bang right in the centre of town, and boy howdy is the rest of the town still struggling to come to terms with it,

First warning sign was where the bus stopped, near the Guildhall. I can't remember if it's been like this for a while, but there used be two big department stores lined up next to each other in this area, a C+A Fabrics, and a shitty affair called Tyrell and Greens which I used to dread because it's where mum always bought my school trousers so I had to suffer the annual loss of dignity by being pulled by my ear into the schoolwear and had to try on trousers, when all I wanted to do was go in Our Price and flick through the 49p singles. I'm glad it's gone. The other noticeable absence is that the McDonald's has closed down. Seriously, what town has a McDonald's close down. I used to think Winchester was outrageous because our Burger King didn't last, but no High Street McDonald's, something's seriously up. I'll sympathise with Ron and the Hamburglar though, there is still a restauranty-cafe-y thing on the stop floor of the new centre, but you do have to worry. Another flagging point is the state of the Bargate Centre, which is the third biggest shopping centre in the city centre. The fourth biggest is an utterly ridiculous building called the East Street Shopping centre, which I kid you not, only has one open shop in the entire building, and that's a knock-off back-of-a-lorry furniture giveaway which is impossible to even look at without feeling like the furniture's having more fun that you are. The Bargate though, was never phenomenally popular and vibrant, it was mostly a place for alternative kids and college drop outs to gaze wonkily at surf shoes and loiter around the spikey belt shop. Now it's even more barren, the only activity in the entire place was on the basement floor where tattooed banjo fingered web geeks were hammering away at World of Warcraft and gobbling milkshakes. Any other corner, it was like being in a mausoleum. The only shops I went in were a clothes shop, that was either called "NME fashion" or "Closing Down Sale" because the signs were of equal size but either way it was awful and appeared to sell nothing but ugly boxer shorts with cartoons on. I thought, not unreasonably, being an "NME fashion" shop I thought they might sell band t shirts or - here's a crazy idea - CDs, but no The other shop I went in was a book shop, that took me far too long to twig was a Christian bookshop. I think it was the fact it sold DVDs through me, but on closer expection, they were things like Amazing Grace with Ioan Gruffydd, and those ridiculous Bible Stories films with Gary Oldman as Pontius Pilate. I U-turned of there pretty fast. Not because I've got anything against Christian bookshops, but because I thought the woman at the counter might start talking to me about Christian bookshop things.

I did go into the East Street Shopping Centre, for about three seconds. Not even Forbidden Planet is down in that area of town, so there's absolutely no reasons to go there. The place makes the Bargate centre look like the Trocidero. I was actually embarrassed to be in there, especially when, laughably, I saw a security guard. I like to think that he'll remember me, the only customer in the building, on Thursday July 3rd. I wonder if he works Saturday. I ended up going across the park to the Joiners, which felt closer to town that it used to be, but then I guess most of the times I went there, I got dropped off in a car rather than walking across town. It looked identical to how it always was, but a quick scan of the forthcoming gigs neatly summed up the changing of the guard as far as live music in the Hampshire goes. I think I recognised three bands on the entire list, and two of them were playing together. I think the era for one-hit-wonder indie bands and girls with plastic bracelets and crap glam rock shows are long gone. I doubt I'd have gone to anything listed for the entire of June or July, even if I lived nearby. It's become like a lot of Barfly's, all run by promoters who don't actively seek bands, they just seem to wait for bands to roll up and demand to play. That's why the entire listing was clogged up with local shite. It was disappointing, but after that I walked through a shitty market and through a shitty housing estate with a shitty playground, and everything was alright. My overall aim for the aim was to find Ocean Village, which was a marina-based retail and entertainment shitfest before the days that marina-based retail and entertainment shitfests were the done thing. There's also a crappy Cineworld there with only five screens. The last time I went down that neck of the woods was in the year 2000, after going to the dentist. I remember it being awful, so I figured a good photo opportunity would arise. The problem was, as was the problem last time, that I couldn't find the bloody thing, so after bungling around various uninspiring bits of dockland, and then got hopelessly lost in a new residential area that was so posh and stinking of money and yachts that I started to feel nauseous and ill, and after walking the entire perimeter of one building I almost gave up, but then I realised that the cinema was exactly where I'd just been, but for some idiotic reason they've faced it away from the main road, away from the road you walk down to get into the main area, and even after that, they've put a fucking tree up in front of the entrance. I'm not just finding excuses for my own idiocy, I'm finding excuses for their idiocy. But I found it, and I went in, and I saw Hancock, and it was shit. They were playing trendy US college rock in the foyer though, but I couldn't work out what it was, and the chewing girl at the box office said "unlimited card?" like she was asking me to do a shit on the desk. It's always weird when you go to a different Cineword having spent the best part of a MILLION YEARS only going to one particular one, and I don't know if the one in Cardiff is like, the best Cineworld in the entire chain, but all the others I've seen have been pretty poor

My foot started falling off when I got out of the cinema, so I headed back into town I cheated and got the bus, which had just gone up to £1.25 to cover the rise in fuel prices, although the sign on the lamp post assured me that this was only the second price hike in seven years. Nice to know. I can see why the bus services in Cardiff don't do that, because their prices have gone up seven times in the last two years, and they don't give you fucking change, and the bus drivers like to stop in lay bys to go in shops and buy cigarettes. They don't put any of that on a sign on a lamp post. The bus dropped me off just outside West Quay, so even though I was now visibly limping, I couldn’t resist a glance over of the cavalcade of retail extremities that is West Quay. For about a minute, I didn't even pause as I went up the escalator and through John Lewis, where I then realised I'd gone the wrong way and had to double back on myself, which meant the same woman from the haberdashery saw me dragging my right foot towards two different 'out' doors, but eventually I got out, and after wasting yet another 30 minutes of my life at the bus stop near Bedford Place as for the tenth time in a row, the first listed bus never turned up. In a day of few surprises, I shouldn't have expected anything less.

Sixteen Days (Part 6)

2008-07-03T19:21:00.006+01:00

I've been hunting everywhere for a copy of the Frightened Rabbit album 'Midnight Organ Fight'. By 'everywhere' I mean I've looked in HMV in Winchester and two different HMV's and Zavvi's in Portsmouth and Gunwharf Keys respectively. I hate it when you're looking in record shops for one CD and nobody has it, because you become a little too familiar with the CDs that are either side of the one you want. I remember when I was trying to find a copy of Black Sheep Boy by Okkervil River, I got absolutely sick to the back teeth of that OK Go album with the flowers and the car on the sleeve. Not as sick, I imagine, as OK Go are of seeing people rip off their running machine video and the fact that nobody can remember how the song goes. Then, when I tried to get hold of Mapmaker by Parts and Labor, and I became fed up looking at Dolly Parton albums, especially now that people don't just put her in Country, they put her in Rock and Pop as well. I eventually ended up not buying Black Sheep Boy until I found a second hand copy in London a year and a half later, and I had to import the Parts and Labor album from Sweden, even though the band are from Brooklyn. I'm not even sure if that album even made it into this country. However, Frightened Rabbit are Scottish, and fuel crisis or no fuel crisis, there's no excuse for an album created on the same island, not reaching the south. I really don't want to resort to buying it on the internet. I'll try in Southampton tomorrow, but really, I wish there was still a Fopp somewhere, because Midnight Organ Fight, is precisely the sort of album you could guarantee finding in Fopp, what with it being mawkish Highland indie shit and all. It's a truly great album though, if you ignore the three minute-long tracks of filler, you basically have 11 songs of heartbreaking and angry songs almost exclusively written by jilted romantic males, for jilted romantic males, about dealing with break-ups, wanting to injure ex girlfriends new loves, and coming to terms with having the start again. The lyric sheet should come with the best lines already underlined, it's the sort of album that people discuss their favourite lines from. I declared myself housebound when I woke up this morning because my feet were absolutely killing me, and I found it incredible difficult to stagger from one side of the living room to the other, without clutching onto the back of the sofa or adopting a preposterous bandy-legged pirate stance across the kitchen. Absolute idiocy. But I got so fed up of this that I did eventually go for a short walk today, almost deliberately as an excuse to listen to Frightened Rabbit without being distracted by television or George Lamb's greying hair. It's been a while since I loved an album so much that I needed an excuse to walk around the park even though I have malfunctioning feet. The whole album deals with heartbreak in such an accurate and romantically sad way, it almost made me want to get into another doomed relationship and fuck everything up, just to add extra resonance to the lyrics. Almost.

My walk was supposed to go straight to the post box around the corner and home again, but for reasons I can't comprehend, my feet didn't feel quite so much like amputation was the best solution when I was wearing the shoes that caused the problem, so I carried on to the leisure centre in Winchester is located at the end of my road, and isn't very exciting. It used to be simply known as The Recreation Centre, and was a faceless generic ugly building. Then it burnt down, and I remember that night really clearly, because it's just about the only major fire that Winchester's ever had, and there was lots of hilarious over-exaggerated fears that our house was in the direct line if it spread, which it was never going to do, but we were all kept inside anyway. The renovation of the centre meant it had a big ugly glass roof put on it, they rebuilt the swimming pool and chucked flume in with it, and added a few odds and sods on the ground floor to justify having this warped Sydney Opera House blue glass thing sticking out the top. This is the only version of what's now known as River Park Leisure Centre that I can remember. Although, it's not quite the same now. To be honest, I've got absolutely no fucking use in a leisure centre whatsoever, but I had a wander around to see if anything had changed. Firstly, the flume has gone, but the exit pool was still there, it just didn't have any water in it, and I'm not surprised they're loathing to remove it because it's got a really pretty blue mosaic pattern on it in the shape of a whale. Nothing else appeared to be different; the centre has recently gone under new management, and I guess the flume had to go, but the pools were the same. I didn't want to hang around because I was the only person there who wasn't the mother of a 5 year old child learning to swim, and could tell everyone was looking at me. I watched some people who were, again, uncomfortably young doing some incredible trampolining in the main hall, but got self concious, especially because the window balcony thing I was standing on was at precisely the same height as the peak of each jump. If there's one way to be put off your flip, it's the sight of a sunburn goth gawping at you. I went downstairs again and picked up a program to see what else was new and in a restricted area, like in the gym. I asked at reception if they had a swimming timetable, and was pretty much told that I was a total idiot, because the leaflet I had on me contained the swimming timetable and I should have looked closer. In mild anger, I left and walked around the park. Everything looked exactly the same. I walked up Nun's Road, because someone from Nun's Road recently got arrested for spreading graffiti everywhere, but I didn't see any evidence of it anywhere, on Nun's Road or anywhere else in town. I won't pretend I wasn't disappointed not to find any, graffiti makes a good photo opportunity. I didn't do a full circuit of the park, instead I walked on further past what used to be the athletics track. I think Winchester does keep up with modern trends and fashions, but is always lagging behind. Only getting a Starbucks and Subway in the past year is one indicator, the other is that now the running track, which used to be on the perimeter of the football pitch, has been overtaken by the football pitch, and now this area of Winchester is known as the football club. They've even put a pathetic little attempts at a stand at one end, which has, from what I could see, three rows going back and four across, so twelve people could sit down. Everyone else just has to stand around like an animal. There was no match on a Wednesday afternoon clearly, so I continued on my way. I thought about going to look at the allotment, but I'm not 100% sure that we still have one, certainly my dad hasn't mentioned anything about it recently on the phone, so maybe we don't. It's not best practice to walk onto someone else's allotment and start poking around with the shed or anything else there, so I didn't. Instead I made my way home a strange route up through Abbot's Barton, a residential area away from the city centre that isn't that exciting, but it reminded me of the week-long period I had a paper round, which I categorically despised, and should I ever have children, I will ban them from having one.

Leave the rest at arms length / I'm not ready to see you this happy.

Sixteen Days (Part 5)

2008-07-02T17:59:00.009+01:00

I used to own this Japanese Ash CD which had three singles from 1977 on it, and one each of their respective B sides, all three of which were awful. The lyric sheet thought, was interesting, and the booklet actually had the lyrics to Girl From Mars wrong, with a pair of lines which aren't actually in the song. These were actually much better than the ones sung by Tim Wheeler, and I've never been able to work out whether the problem came from being lost in translation, or whether these were the original lines. I mention this because more than any other album, 1977 by Ash is the one album that dominated summers, namely the summer of '96 with the football and the Olympics and not being old enough to see Trainspotting. Next month, I'm going to see Ash for the first time. Listening to 1977 that summer was precisely what being young, being a teenager and having six weeks off school was about.

I wasted most of the day doing boring shit like going to the awful post office in WH Smith, an activity I couldn't recommend less if I tried, it was a soul destroying experience, and I'll tell you for free that the people that work there are categorically not holograms, nor are they good examples of the human race. If and when aliens invade, I hope to God that they don't need to buy any second hand stamps. I bought some uninteresting things like cookies and pasta sauce and The Hampshire Chronicle, so I could be reassured that nothing really interesting happens in Hampshire. I also sat for a bit in the Abbey Ground, which is interesting because there isn't an Abbey there. These small areas of parkland's greatest hits in my lifetime include going there to sit on the swings and get poisoned by the Blue Dolphin, a time when I ripped the back of my Beck t shirt trying to climb over the railings during the Hat Fair, and getting caught on the spikes at the top. Everyone used to always call the old people who lived in the flats overlooking the playground perverts, as this is what teenagers do, but I'm sure they weren't, and I hope I'm not wrong. Teenagers aren't known for their perceptiveness when it comes to accusing people of paedophilia. They have stuck some ridiculous looking new cultivated bushes in the flower beds that look like Fusilli pasta though, so it's good to see this area is still being kept neat and tidy. There were a lot, and I don't use this word lightly, a lot of total motherfuckers sat around me though, so instead of killing them all, I went home via Blockbuster and rented the original German version of Funny Games to satisfy at least a few of my sadistic tendencies. Evidently the governors and deans of the Winchester School of Art must read the blogs of bored idiots on holiday, because they've taken my advice, and as I walked down park road, I discovered they've scrubbed all the pretentious "would you, could you" monkey shit off the walls. I'm sure the rest of Winchester are relieved. Maybe the culprit graduated with honours and they're going to sell off the design to a load of Hollywood titans, a la Banksy. Or perhaps not.

At home I raided the cupboards for fusilli pasta but I was disappointed not to find any, so I resorted to cooking tortellini and watching Funny Games, which was every bit as unnerving and sickening as I was expecting it to be. I can't imagine the recent US remake being much different apart from having Tim Roth in it, but for startling uncomfortable viewing, then this is great, although I was watching it in the front room where people walking past can look into the windows and see the TV screen (and trust me, they do, especially if the cat is sat in the window) and there were a few times I was hoping nobody was looking in. It's also got Ulrich Muhe in it who is a massively underrated dead actor. I quite liked the way one of the charismatic young psychopaths kept breaking the fourth wall.

I felt guilty in the end for not scaling St Catherine's Hill on Sunday. I hindsight, if my bike hadn't spontaneously destroyed itself at the Park and Ride, I'd have probably have gone up there in the end on Sunday, but I didn't want to. Today, I did, but I decided to wait until late afternoon, with the intention of climbing to the tallest point in the city and watching the sunset. I followed more or less the same route as I did on Sunday, through the cathedral grounds, which had loads of signs up offering "books! books! book!" but I couldn't find any "books!" anywhere, unless an oversized white marquee had been housing any "books!" earlier in the day. I walked through the cathedral close and then around the back of the college, past the strange round house that looks like a single turret, and then across the college green with the tennis courts, along by the river. The tennis courts were full, and the grass was littered with small groups of people, playing football and rounders, some just sat on rugs, most, if not all, full of the intense feeling of being young, and in love. Like all good hills, there's a variety of different ways to climb to the top, and being lazy, I took the easy one. There's a path which curls up through the trees, and some others where you an approach from an alternate side and climb a staircase. I just climbed up the north face, which is in full view of the city, meaning if you have to stop and wheeze and sit down and spit, then anyone with a telescope and meaningless life, can watch you do it. It's enough motivation to keep you going, although I didn't need it because, compared to the last time I came, the climb was a lot shorter, to the extent that when I reached the top, I ran back through my music player to see how many songs I'd listened to since leaving the house, and it was a lot less that the distance would suggest. The top of St Catherine's hill is almost completely unspoilt. There was a grand total of three people up there as I arrived; myself, a man in shorts and white socks who was sat reading in the spot I really wanted to sit in, but I found some shade anyway. There was also a slightly cranky Doc Brown stick-gatherer who arrived in the wood just as I was wandering around and thinking about going on the rope swing. I'm not sure of the social etiquette of rope swings. Is it social no-no to go on a rope swing alone, or if you use a rope swing in the forest and nobody's watching, does it make it OK? Anyway, I felt distinctly unnerved with him wandering around alone on the forest collecting sticks, and not just because of Funny Games, so I went back out and sat out watching the view. I decided it was be a really good idea to get drunk watching the sunset, but I'd only brought one book with, and trust me, God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens is not a good book for this sort of occasion. Luckily I didn't need it.

After I'd stared out across the city and played the whole "what the fuck building is that?" game with myself, and then moved onto the "where the fuck is that building... oh wait it's behind that one" game afterwards, the man with the white shorts and socks left. I should have mentioned that despite being a mind-you-own-business book reader, the colour of the shorts and socks were also terrifying me because of Funny Games, so I was glad that he went and was replaced by two unthreathening horse girls and faithful Lassie dog. They didn't last long, and then another group of two boys and girl arrived, and they invited me to come and join them. I didn't really want to, but they were clearly better company than Christopher Hitchens, and Winchester kids are usually posh and rich, and don't ask for cigarettes and don't have much need to beat me up and steal my camera. The main protagonist of inviting me over was called Joe, and I honestly believe that every generation of Wintonian Youth has one of these figureheads amongst them. They're usually phenomenally intelligent, witty and strong-headed people who are enormously affable sociopaths, yet for some reasons are honked up their eyeballs on narcotics and don't really 'do' college, work in a garage and borrow money off their friends all the time. Joe was this to a tee, and had posh boy good looks, like a less Neanderthal and simian Johnny Borrell, and if only didn't claim that John Frusciante was a genius, then he'd have a terrific future ahead of him, if he hadn't dropped out of college. They asked me if I'd come to the party, which was a ridiculous question, since I wasn't even aware there was a party, and at any rate, why would someone who was 8 years older than the next most senior partygoer be there on his own, when he didn't know anyone. The party was all over the internet, apparently, it was one of these guerrilla parties that get shouted out on Facebook or Myspace and usually result in peoples houses receiving multimillionpound damage, and everyone likes watching Skins and has casual sex with each other. I decided to stay. One by one different groups of teenagers swarmed around the summit and sat in groups. Joe seemed to hate almost everyone there, including tow girls he didn't know because they were wearing stupid shirts, one girl because she had ginger hair, and almost anyone that didn't come and sit in our group were threatened with something or other. He made us take a vote on whether he should beat up this dopey looking toff called Peter because Peter bitched him up. I refused to vote because I didn't know what "bitching someone up" entailed. The vote was carried over, and Peter survived. I drank about half of Joe’s vodka which was sickening because there wasn't any mixer except warm, flat, caffeine free diet coke, which is so far from good coke that I don't even want to think about it. We talked about Winchester, apparently my old headmaster Mr Jenner is no longer the head teacher of the school, he retired, and his son got busted for dealing drugs. OF COURSE! That's how it should be. Apparently the Blue Dolphin closed down ages ago, I just didn't notice, and Susie told me, but apparently it wasn't due to people getting poisoned, it's because the owner emigrated to Spain with their dirty money. They told me about how much they hated the police, because you're not allowed to drink in the grounds of the Cathedral, or at Oram's Arbour anymore, and now these have these mini-police people who can't arrest you or fine you, but they can issue warnings and stuff on the spot. They were a little worried that some of them were going to come up the hill and ruin our party. I wasn't sure whether to believe any of them, especially when they goaded me for not going to Reading to see Rage Against the Machine. They weren't interested in the fact that I'd seen them before. It started raining, and after sitting under the trees and watching Joe singe his face on a bonfire and pretend he'd be blinded, I decided to go home. It might have been fun to stay up there, merely because groups of ten and fifteen people were turning up almost every five minutes. But I'm not a party animal, and I know my place in life, and that place is not partying with children on top of a hill, so I made my excuses to leave. I said "see you at the Hat Fair" to Joe, and surprised myself at how much I actually meant it. As I travelled back down the hill, kids with backpacks and polo shirts, all of them, asked me what the best way to get up the hill was. I took delight in telling them, and even told them; from the few names I picked up, who was there. They clearly thought I knew everyone. Maybe given my age, they thought I'd organised it. I could have told them anything. One kid, who for reasons unknown was carrying a tennis racket, invited me back up the hill once I'd reached the bottom, and I was almost tempted. But my time in the sun was over, time to go back to being old. When I got home, I found that after my excursions to Portsmouth, and hillwalking today, I'd clearly flown too close to the run. I can't walk now, my feet are totally fucked. But that's the price you pay for partying for 90 minutes in the summer rain.

Sixteen Days (Part 4)

2008-06-30T23:59:00.005+01:00

I awoke with a hangover and the taste of burnt pizza on my tongue, and made the appalling discovery that the 69 bus from Winchester to Southsea has been cancelled. Gone, one the best bus journeys ever, and now it's impossible, without having to change buses at Fareham bus station, which isn't advisable, like doing most things in Fareham on foot. So it turned to be that after I'd finally bothered getting dressed, I had to get the train down to Portsmouth and Southsea. It cost £8.80, which is absolutely ridiculous, nothing should cost that much, not even a house, or a car, but since Stagecoach have decided to cancel the final leg of the 69 route, and I'm too old to qualify for the young persons railcard that I've lost anyway, it cost £8.80. The hundreds of reasons why buses are better than trains were made all too apparent by the number of slags, suits and stuffy old gits on the platform. I had to tell a man so posh he probably pays someone to operate his lungs for him where to get the London train from, IE the other platform.

My reasons for going to Portsmouth were simple. In keeping with the two key themes of my holiday which are nostalgia and change, I decided to go somewhere that I've never had a bad time, and see what was how I remember, and what had changed. Apart from the bus, which I've now managed to mention three times, none of the differences are negative at all. Portsmouth is technically three areas for the part-time tourist or day visitor: Portsmouth, which is the main city centre and veritable eyesore, Old Portsmouth, which used to be rubbish and only of any use if you've got an extended interest in sea slime and the Mary Rose but is now the must-visit area of the city, and Southsea, which is a few miles of seafront which somehow manages to get simultaneously more ugly and beautiful each time I visit it. Normally, and this is why I liked that bus route, you could hop on in Winchester and be delivered straight to the seafront and the Clarence Pier funfair. This is impossible now so far as ten minutes of googling and half-assed investigation has proved, so I went straight for the city centre. I have very little to say about the city centre. I think I've only been to centre of Portsmouth a few times before; twice was to go to the Guildhall which used to be an awesome venue to see bands, I remember seeing Super Furry Animals there one Halloween, and 11 years ago I saw Cast supported by Travis. Great times. The only other times I've been to the city centre were pretty insignificant, although for some reason I decided that Portsmouth was definitely the best place to go to spend my birthday. That was during the time that buying CD singles was definitely a good idea, so I bought loads with my birthday money, and then we tried to get a bus to Southsea and left them all on the bus. Being the idiot I was, I then went back to Our Price later in the day and bought them all again. I'd love to know where CD2 of Delta Sun Bottleneck Stomp by Mercury Rev, Big Wheels by the Llama Farmers and Solved by the Unbelievable Truth are now, because they sure as fuck aren't anywhere near my CD play. They're probably all festering in a drawer upstairs. The main thing I remember about the centre of Portsmouth, both from a causal meander, and the fact you can't avoid noticing it as you dissect the city by car, was the domineering and ominous presence of the Tricorn Centre. This behemoth of disgusting 70s architecture is, without question, the most repulsive eyesore of a building you could ever hope to see. It was a hulking grey elephant dominating the entire skyline with it's ill-conceived matrixes of concrete staircases, overflow car parks and spiral-system floor manoeuvring. If I can find any pictures that do this terrible happening justice, I'll link them at the end of this post. It was the sort of place that you fear to even go near, in case you get mugged, raped, fall into an open sewer, or shop in Iceland. It looked like something out of Escape from New York. The one time we ventured too far, we found a pigeon that had its neck caught in a loop of chicken wire. If I didn't know better, I'd assume that even the pigeon hung himself after being near the Trion too long. So it was with great disappointment that I approached the north end of town hungrily, armed with my dig cam and a sense of dread to find it wasn't there. I had heard a rumour they were tearing it down, but then, I heard a rumour that Chinese Democracy was due out in 1995, so I thought it too good to be true. What's fantastic though, is that there is no evidence of this holocaust of structural ineptitude ever existing. It's a really impressive job. I was expecting at least one pillar or archway or block of asbestos with flies buzzing around it, to remain, but no. I mean, that area of town isn't special by any means; it's just a big car park, but good job on the Etch-a-Sketch system of destruction. The rest of town is too average to comment on - I went in Waterstones to sneer at how rubbish it was and to mentally tick the box marked "Waterstones Portsmouth are clearly going to have a display of naval-themed novels and non-fiction books" and went in Zavvi, which was one of the worst examples of the chain there is going, and I noticed they'd put the band Johnny Foreigner under 'F', the idiots.

I resisted further pedantry and decided to walk down towards Old Portsmouth. Like most other cities in the 21st Century, Cardiff being a notable example, most of the council’s money is being ploughed into this area, throwing down landmarks and shopping arcades and nice orderly marinas and cafe bars, like a game of Sim City. Old Portsmouth still remains, and as I walked down towards the sea you can't really ignore the maritime tang in the sea breeze; there's pictures of boats, a bunch of new flats called Admiral's Quay or some such shit, and you can see the Victory and the Mary Rose from a mile away. But the landscape is almost completely dominated by the Spinnaker Tower, which was Portsmouth's single token effort for the Millennium, and it's a very good call. Being situated on Hampshire soil, the idea to build a monolithic white tower in the shape of a boat's sails on the edge of the harbour was naturally met with snotty mouthed bored who claimed it would ruin the landscape, and that the money would be spent if everyone in Portsmouth were given an extra £10 to spend in the bookies. Even my Gran moaned about, God rest her soul, but since she lived over 15 miles away and as far as 'ruining her view' it's like saying that an earwig at the foot of a garden is a reason not to like a house, she had no excuse. But I defy anyone; especially local residents who get to go up it and look down their noses at the peasants below for a reduced fee, to deny that The Spinnaker tower is anything less than impressive. I didn't go there straight away, instead I moseyed down to the harbour and upon discovering I had exactly the right amount of money to get the ferry across to Gosport on the other side of the harbour, decided to, despite not having a particularly good reason to. I also probably wouldn't have bothered if I didn't have exactly the right change for the machine, I mean, it's Gosport for God's sake, but I enjoyed the trip anyway. I was sat on the ferry next to two people who sounded like they'd never been on a ferry before, possibly people who hadn't even see water before. They were American, so it could have been all concerning the unbearable tweeness of it all. In America, of course, they have trillion dollar cantilever bridges and era-defining support structures to get from A to B, and in the event of route C, you've got ferries the size of Battersea Power Station to get you across the body of water. So I guess this rusty balsa-wood excuse for water transportation was quite fascinating. Unsurprisingly, there were more people waiting at the other side to get to Portsmouth rather than the other way round, and this is because Gosport is awful. It's mean to say it, it's like comparing Barry to Cardiff, or Andrew Ridgely to George Michael. I stopped in Gosport for about half an hour, which was more than enough time to realise it was a boring, average, extremely faceless little part of the world, permanently living the shadow of the city across the harbour, to the extent the whole high street seems built sloping down towards the ferry terminal, so that even if you spill a bottle of water, the liquid will drip and run away from town. I bought some fish and chips in a takeaway, and somehow got involved in the life of the woman behind the counter, as we ended up talking about her daughter’s holiday to Eurodisney being cancelled. My parting gesture was "well, I do hope it all gets sorted out", which in hindsight is ridiculous, but then, it was the longest I've spoken to anyone since last Friday, so I cut myself some slack. The fish and chips were TERRIBLE.

I crossed the harbour back on the ferry, to the amusement of the drawbridge operator who had probably bet his workmate how long I was going to stay in Gosport. Yes, perfectly rational ferry operators make bets about my life which they're fascinated in. I got annoyed with the layout of everything along the Portsmouth side of the harbour because I found it much more difficult that I should have done to find the entrance to Gunwharf Quay. Gunwharf Quay is the all-encompassing title for the megacomplex built in blocks like New York City, but full of all the usual tat like Fat Face, Chiquitos, I would stake my life on there being an Old Orleans there somewhere, but to be honest, lovely and very pretty and spectacular the whole whizz-bang moneymoneymoneybags experience really is, I couldn't be bothered to look at a bunch of shops and bars when I didn't want to buy clothes or doughnuts and I didn't want to sit underneath a thatched umbrella with an overpriced cocktail. I toyed with the idea of going up the Spinnaker, but having forked out £8.30 on getting to Portsmouth, I didn't really feel like paying more or less the same to stand a few feet above it. There's a glass floor up there though, so you can see everybody below, so I did what any normal person would, and walked around the perimeter for about twenty minutes meaning the top of my ridiculous red and black hair will be in loads of people’s photographs. You ever stopped and wondered how many photographs of you exist in the world that you're unaware of, and any given time, photographs with you in the background could be sitting on shelves or even in frames, in cities and houses right across the globe. I added a few more, and then as I was trying to leave the compound, I added more again. I had difficulty trying to leave the other side of the marina, partly because the sun was so hot and everything in these new complexes tends to be made of glass so it was like walking the plank in a day-glo laser show of bright light, although, as is the case every time I'm ever somewhere I've got no idea where I am, someone asked me for directions and then thought I was fobbing them off when I said I didn't know.

Southsea though, is the best part of the whole city. I have various memories of this stretch of coastline, most of which revolve around me being an idiot as all good memories should. The two main venues for seeing bands in Portsmouth The Wedgewood Rooms and the Pyramids, are both in Southsea. I've seen many bands in both, all of which were fun in their own right, but the occasions I most remember are when I took the 69 and just sat watching the sea drinking cider on one of the benches or in the shelter and while away a couple of hours before going to watch the bands. One afternoon I took this to extreme levels and sat in one of the shelters on the promenade for upwards of 5 hours before going to see Poison the Well at the Wedgewood Rooms and falling asleep in the car on the way home within seconds of sitting down. I revisited this shelter, and the bench on the other side of The Pyramids where I sat writing a letter to Anna during the summer where I tried to grow a beard and wrote 50 letters, What was interesting about the walk from Gunwharf Quay to the pathetic parade pier, was how each place I stopped at along the way was exactly one notch more rubbish than the previous stopping point. It was literally a parade of old fashioned seaside dross. The fairground, which from memory I remember being really really awesome, and was the biggest fairground in the world, and I used to tell people at school that it was bigger than Blackpool Pleasure Beach which is ridiculous exaggeration. Somehow, and this is going against the norm for all these fading seaside amusement parks, it's better than it was last time, although it's still crap, and I definitely wouldn't pay to go on any of the rides. The arcades hadn't changed at all. The rollercoaster is still there. There's a famous story about this rollercoaster, where come of the carriages came off the track and fell into the sea. I'm assuming it's true, it's all very plausible, and it does add an extra level of nail biting terror, having the potential to drown. The Pyramids Centres is of limited interest to me now. I don't think they even have bands on any more, at least, there weren't any adverts or anything or posters advertising events there, so it's gone back to being just a swimming pool. It's not even a good swimming pool - two shitty flumes, an average one in the shape of a snake, a wave machine, a water fountain, and nowhere to fucking swim. I did stop to look at the crazy golf for a while Nobody was playing it, but it looked like a good course. I'm fortunate enough to be able to tell a good crazy golf course from a bad one. A bad one is one that's pirate themed, or has a "ring the bell on hole 18 to win a free round of golf" hole. These are corporate, multi-national crazy golf courses, they're as bad as Subway and McDonald's and Nestle. This course was straight out of the 'yeah right' school of crazy golf, with seemingly impossible holes involving jumps, loop-the-loops and various unlikely looking ramps. Pretty good looking. The best crazy golf course I've ever played was at Shanklin Chine on the Isle of Wight. This is a course so sacred you aren't even allowed to stand on the holes to take your shots. Fantastic. By the time I got the pier on the far end of the promenade, my feet were about to give in, and I could already tell my face was sunburnt, but dare not look at any car bonnets or gift shop windows to have the awful truth revealed to me, so I didn't stop long, which was a good idea, because this is the worst place in Portsmouth, a place so ruined by the stench of inferiority that the penny arcades have been boarded up, I'd had enough, and was in no way going to walk back in the other direction. I'm glad I didn't, I probably wouldn't have any skin on my skull by now. As I write this, the newsreader's lead into the weather was commenting on how spectacular the weather was in Portsmouth was today. How nice of him to point out, it's clearly written all over my face.

As a near-perfect end to a nostalgia driven excursion, as I got off the train back in Winchester, I walked down the stairs to the Platform 1 exit and walked past the girl from school that I was in love with for 5 years. By "in love" I of course mean "Had a pathetic crush on" The conclusion of this passionate adoration resulted in me making her a mix tape with loads of great songs on it (by which I mean 'mix tape only I would ever want to listen to') and this was met with the decision to never speak to me ever again. 9 years later, the vow of silence wasn't broken, and she still offered the same minor smirk of superiority she used to exercise all the time back then. I pretended I didn't see her and kept on walking.

The Tricorn Centre: http://www.thejetsetter.co.uk/concretejungle.html

Sixteen Days (Part 3)

2008-06-30T00:57:00.008+01:00

Bike riding isn't what it used to be. Or I should say, it isn't how I remembered it being. Apart from a brief interlude during the summer of 2005 when I borrowed a knackered old two wheeled death trap off my dad to while away three weeks of being between jobs, which culminated in me springing over the top of the handlebars like a malfunctioning jack in the box as I approached a busy roundabout in Cardiff, I haven't really gone bike riding much. When, the following year, A bike I'd borrowed without asking got stolen I vowed never to approach the subject. The combination of death and theft is a potent poison for putting you off something. But I went for a bike ride today, and it was fantastic, although I don't think I'll do be doing it again in a hurry. I used a bike which was propped up against some of the crap in our garden near the wheely bin, old front doors etc. I think, after the events of the ride, this was the exact bike that almost sent me to an early grave three years ago. I should have realised when I had to put the chain back on the wheel before I'd even got to the end of the road.

My main intention was to ride out to the bottom of town and scale Winchester's 'twin peaks', the hills of St Giles and St Catherine. St Giles' hill is a really good hill because it's only five minutes from key parts of the town centre, like the Guildhall and the bus station, it has an incredibly steep but mercifully short incline, and then suddenly you realise you've only walked 200 metres and you're towering way, way above the buildings you were just strolling amongst, as the photos below no doubt demonstrate. At the top, there's a viewpoint which used to have a useful map of the city with landmarks and other titbits of information on, but this is either being replaced, or more likely stolen, and is just a green frame with nothing on or in it. There was an entire family using up all three of the benches up there otherwise I'd have taken a rest and admired the view, as it was, I took some photos and was long gone A good idea really, the main problem with St Giles Hill is that it sits neatly between the two most statistically vile parts of Winchester, which I'll admit probably has nothing on the slums of some areas of the world, but ALL the fuckfaced bullies and bastards from school were from one of these two places, and it's more the sort of places you'll find yourself retching at the sight of used condoms and beer can bongs rather than admiring the sights and sounds of Winchester in the pretty morning sun. I descended the hill and sped across town towards St Catherine’s Hill. I often wonder what the legality of listening to headphones when you're bike riding. Surely it's not approved of, but then is it illegal? It's not really a health hazard providing you've got you wits about you and use your eyes, such is my logic, and although I was keeping one eye on every policeman on the beat or offering the occasional cower from anyone in a high visibility jacket, it eventually didn't bother me. When you're careering down country lanes and through rapidly expanding farmland who's to stop you, except the horses and dragonflies? It really is worth saying, that casually careering around the edges of yellow soaked cricket pitches on a Sunday morning, or cutting lines across the gravel in the college grounds by the tennis club, listening to Your Protector by Fleet Foxes, well there's really nothing like it. Most of Winchester seemed to be out in force to provide me with perfect stereotypes of what people should be doing on a Sunday morning - a tennis match here, a country youth cricket game where nobody could throw the ball accurately there. I even saw two seperate classic cars, filled like a cartoon with a moustached prat with a flat cap and his jumper round his shoulders and the top down. On the same stretch of road. I ended up going right around the perimeter of St Catherine's Hill and not actually going up it, simply because every turn I reached approaching the ascent of the hill, the alternative route looked much more enticing, and so it was that I ended up keeping left of the river and arrived in the Water Meadows. I used to love going to The Water Meadows, in all three stages of youth; as a child it was a big expanse of grass to run around in, as a fainty rebellious teen it was a great place to swim and sling mud and dodge pike, and when I was 17 and realised what girls were, it was a sufficiently romantic place to go walking amongst the weeping willows. Except I never did that, of course.

Nowadays, The Water Meadows has become a cross between environmental sanctity, boring farmland with stupified cows and horses gaping blankly at trees, and wasteland. It doesn't even really seem open to the public anymore, you have to cross a stile to get in, there's cow shit everywhere, warnings not to let your dogs loose otherwise you'll get a fine slapped on your head, and most importantly of all, it was a pleasant Sunday morning, and nobody was there except me. I felt a slight tinge of sadness, but then it wasn't much different last time I came, in 2003. I thought the might have taken the face blocking access to the river from the grass away by now. Realising I wasn't going to be able to cross the river to the hill in a hurry, I decided to cycle through St Cross, the area of Winchester you have to cut through to get to the centre if you're travelling from Southampton or anywhere else imporant and don't fancy the M3. I then cut through another area of farmland into somewhere between lost and troubling, and then ended up by the motorway. There was a woman walking her dog by the side of the road, and after I took a ridiculous side turn trying to find the Hockley Aqueduct (which is pretty hard to miss) and doubled back on myself, I ended up talking to her for about five minutes about the state of the footpath. It was precisely the sort of tedious shit that two people who find themselves stuck on an overgrown footpath with nothing better to do tend to have, but it felt strangely superior to get involved in 'Sunday walker' culture, even for five minutes. I've not done that since I went up Snowdon. After this incident, I crossed the road and proceeded to do exactly the same thing down increasingly overgrown footpath channels, in which eventually I had to get off the bike because I had stinging nettle stings down the full length of either arm. I gave up eventually, and went off a side path through a field of a corn and ended up in Twyford. Twyford is an insignificant little village outside of Winchester but is renowned for it's 'Lock' which I never really figured out what it was, apart from that all the cool kids from school went swimming there during the summer, and it sounded like fun, although of course I never went. I thought about trying to find it, but I didn't like the look of the hill you had to go down to get there, and didn't fancy busting my legs out over trying to get back up again. So I did what any normal person would, and bought some lucozade from the village shop and sweated raw idiocy over the counter, and then went and tried to negotiate my way up an even worse hill that was around the next corner. The hill, let's be honest, to a Tour De France cyclist, is about as tricky to traverse as, say, a sleeping policeman is to you or I, but it took me about three or four attempts to get up this hill, stopping twice (although I conned myself that I was using the excuse to take photographs of MoD signposts) but the view from the top, of a different angle of Winchester different to one I'd really stopped and looked at before. There wasn't much in the way of landmarks, but you can see in the photo, just over to the right, about halfway down and halfway from the centre, is St Giles' Hill, a pathetic little mound of grass, and just emphasised how good this view was.

It was of course entirely downhill all the way back from there, and it was a fantastic descent, right up until the point where I turned in the car park of the Park and Ride, and simultaneously the saddle AND the chain of the bike fell off. I thanked my lucky stars this didn't happen two minutes ago when essentially on a motorway slip road, but then I had the annoying task of taking the remaining mile and a half across town without any chain (it actually snapped in two, somehow) which I had to throw into a wheely bin on Chesil Street or anywhere to sit, I just had to propel myself using kerbs, walls and lamp posts. The whole round trip took four hours, and I concluded it back home by filling the sink in the kitchen with cold water, and then half-drowning myself in it whilst various Radio DJ's discussed in depth an incident involving Amy Winehouse punching someone live on stage at Glastonbury. I don't remember that, I saw some of her set last night, and all I remember is her being off her trolley and forgetting half the words to her own songs.

In the afternoon, I treated myself to a roast dinner. By “treated” I of course mean, “resorted to” and by “roast dinner” I mean “microwaveable ‘lamb roast’” which had more carrots than peas, and wasn’t particularly nice. I ate it watching Children of Men, which is utterly brilliant, and is not only better than any of the Bourne films, but contains some of the most phenomenal single-shot or seemingly-single-shot scenes I’ve ever seen, There’s one ridiculously long tracking shot following Clive Owen as he machos his way through a war-torn compound near the coast that they break into, and it literally seems about twenty minutes long. It’s thing like this that make what’s essentially quite an average plot into a fantastic experience. That, and killing off Julianne Moore early on, which is always beneficial to any film. After that, I watched Neil Diamond at Glastonbury where he pretty much shit on everything else I’ve seen there thus far from such a gigantic height I’m surprised any of the many other hundreds of acts there even bothered tuning their instruments. He was amazing, even when the gremlins ate the amplifiers, he still owned the stage. I hope he didn’t play Solitary Man earlier in the set, because I missed that, but I got I’m a Believer, and Sweet Caroline, so I still went away feeling like a winner.

In the evening, I went into town via the Esso garage on Andover Road where I bought cigarettes and the cash point, to watch the final of the European Championships. I actually had difficult finding somewhere that was even showing it. My first port of call was The Old Vine, because it’s the only pub in Winchester that I’ve watched an entire game of football. That was five years ago though, and since then, The Old Vine has been turned into an all-weather wanky eatery with no pub element whatsoever. I had to do the awful thing that I imagine half the people of Winchester have done at some point, which is go in the back entrance, stroll in, realize the place is full of couples and families enjoying a quite meal, and then going out the front entrance, almost like I’d been carrying a neon sign saying “total jackass who only wanted a pint and watch the football on his own”. Then I tried The Eclipse, which, for all it’s charms, I don’t think even has a TV. Eventually I ended up in The Bakers Arms, a pub I’ve never been in before because it’s so awful, and thus it proved to be, because I was ID-ed at the bar and was subjected to the landlady saying I “was clearly trying to look like I was 15, but I can tell by your face you’re about 25” which made me want to rip her head off, and then after I sat down, I was told to move because a man with a Hawaiian shirt turned up and proceeded to set up a mobile disco right in front of me. I ended up going to the student plaza known as Alfies, formally The Coach and Horses. I watched the second half with a man in leather jacket and an ‘A’ t shirt, and because it was outdoors, I got to watch the pink grapefruit sunset and airplanes flying overhead, and it was super, not least because Germany lost the final 1-0 to Spain. There was a group of girls talking about their breasts which threatened to ruin it momentarily, but they didn’t stay long.

On the way home, I took an extended detour around the park so I could listen to the Andreas Kleerup album. Andreas Kleerup, or just Kleerup, to give him his studio name, was the person responsible for how goddamn awesome With Every Heartbeat by Robyn, last years BEST! song by anyone ever. I think, because the song ended up on Robyn’s album, the credits were mis-channeled, because it’s basically a Kleerup track with her singing on it, and this self-titled album should redress the balance, because it’s brilliant. I think the best pop songs are the ones with an element of melancholy and sadness, which is why With Every Heartbeat was so fantastic. Kleerup’s album is wall-to-wall drenched in sadness, with the ode to absent lovers, 3am, featuring the lovely Marit Bergman being the stand-out so far. It made a perfect soundtrack to sunset-gazing.

Sixteen Days (Part 2)

2008-06-29T01:31:00.013+01:00

28.06.08 Started Saturday as i do every Saturday, regardless of where I am, listening to the Adam and Joe show on Radio 6. Today's was a mixed bag; for thumbs-up, Garth Jennings was standing in for Joe again. Controversial opinion maybe, but I'm actually starting to prefer the editions where Garth stands in for Joe when he's off sick or hawking Ant Man around Hollywood, because Garth as a fun voice, and there's somehow ever less professionalism than there usually is, and Adam Buxton does his ridiculous thing where he starts talking "as" people in a ridiculous voice. I'd struggle to find an example, but try and the edition of their radio show when for no reason, he started talking as both members of Justice, and about how they wanted to be global superstars with their songs about nightclubs. MASSIVE thumbs down though, because like the rest of the entire British Broadcasting Company, the show is coming from Glastonbury. Having never been to Glastonbury, I shouldn't really be allowed to say it's shite, but really: I have been to music festivals in the past, one of which was utterly hateful and boring, but Glastonbury just looks like AWFUL, and probably the worst music festival there is going. I caught about ten minutes on TV, during which I saw Estelle perform her number one hit American Boy to a field of idiots who surely don't like music at all, and are only there because they're too thick to turn around and go somewhere else, like Zimbabwe. Like any of these simpletons would go to an Estelle show. Then I saw Kings of Leon doing that awful song where Caleb Followill screams a lot and then a pathetic 'video diary' from the point of view of a steward whose sole job was telling people to get out of the way of tractors. So far, so staggeringly boring, and I haven't even seen any of the BBC's beloved montages of clips of people in bikinis and wellies, or big jesters hats all ploughing through mud to the strains of Why Does it Always On Me, giving the impression that not one person at the entire festival is a rational, normal person. I know at least four normal people at Glastonbury this year, including at least two bands playing. What's the likelihood they're giving a grand total of zip all screen time, against several yawning hours of zonked out hippies who go there for the 'atmosphere'. I will never go to Glastonbury, nor can I think of any reason to go in the future, unless it's the only safe haven during a nuclear fall out. But despite my lack of appreciation for the festival, Adam and Garth do present the best parts, which have so far included wheeling in Robyn Hitchcock into their studio to play a song called 'Museum of Sex' and moaning that most of the people at the festival look like members of either the Ting Tings or Hot Chip. It's all preferable to Wimbledon however, and I’ll take any form of ill-advised fawning backstage over Sue Ryder going gooey-eyed over Andy Murray.

I’ve used the majority of the day to take stock of what I have to pass the time for a week with nobody to talk to talk to and nowhere to go, and I’m really rather desperate not to spend the entire 7 days I have exclusively to myself either sat in front of the computer drinking beer (2007), sat in front of the computer drinking tea (2005) or wasting two days drinking tea and beer with then-girlfriends (both years) but this time it’s me, and I’m going to brave the outside world and get hay fever and die, but it’ll be fun and exciting and I might get a sun-tan or skin cancer and I might borrow my dads bike and cycle around villages. The world, or at least this corner of Hampshire, is mine to conquer for seven days, and back-to-back episodes of Gok’s Fashion Fix is going to stop me But not today, today was for stocktaking, and shouting in frustration at the frankly inadequate wireless network signal in the computer room of our house, and pottering around Winchester buying things I needs. In list form, I realized I needed: banana-scenting hair styling product, a USB memory stick so that I can transfer photos from the laptop to the PC because I was really clever and forgot the bring the digital camera software, a battery pack for the digital camera because I was really clever and forgot to bring mine, a new toothbrush, which dubiously offers ‘extra whitening bristles’ some new foundation because I’m a) a total girl and use it, and b) I’m also a boy and continually drop it so it breaks into chunks inside the case and then becomes unuseable. I also intended to borrow some DVDs from Blockbuster, but Blockbuster have decided to not to the fantastic 3-for-£7 that made last summer bearable, and have made it all £3 each for their backlist rubbish. Instead, I found a dog-eared copy of City of Men in their bargain bin and bought that instead. The lady behind the counter tried to up-sell me a large tub of ice cream. I felt for her, evidently nobody was buying large tubs of ice cream from her. Maybe if they re-introduced their 3-for-£7 offer I’d some some Wimbledon themed ice cream.

Winchester doesn’t change very much. The extraordinarily slow process which is the modernization of town has happened at such a slugs pace that I’ve forgotten when anything happened, when various houses or roads or redevelopments sprung up. Most of these things didn’t happen whilst I was here, they tend to spring up whilst I’m spending days on end gazing at the eyesore of twisted metal and scaffolding that comprises Cardiff City Centre on a day-by-day basis so everything is neatly spread out and finished upon my return. So, after a brief stroll around today picking up the various bits and bobs of crap I need to get through the week, I noticed several minor changes in and around town.

The post office doesn’t exist anymore. I’m used to various shops disappearing or re-appearing like a giant economic whack-a-mole (last time I come home, the wonderment that Winchester finally had a Subway and Starbucks was a total revelation) but not the post office. Winchester has now become of the first towns in the UK to have their post office almost literally tacked onto the scrag end of their WH Smith. Now, Smiths in Winchester is appalling at the best of times, but to accommodate the post office, they’ve annihilated the CD and DVD section so that it now stocks about three of each. The rest of the store was always a bit dirty and run-down, especially downstairs – upstairs is fine, it’s almost beautiful, with half-timber beams and deluxe fascias overlooking the Dave Pelzer books, but now downstairs like something Duncan Bannatyne would scrape of his shoe before going to work, all be it with a deluxe ultra-modern digital post office stuffed in the corner. The post office is so modern I was tempted to reach out and stroke the cashier’s face to find out if it was a hologram or not.

There is some new art installed in the grounds of Winchester School of Art. I don’t particularly take to hanging around Art Colleges, I should clarify, it just happens to be on my main stretch into town, just after the park. The new works of art, if they can be called that over just random shit spraypainted on the walls, I can’t tell if it’s the actual work submitted by a student who needed a public wall space to make their oblique statements, or whether the college themselves commissioned someone to ruin the aesthetics of the really quite pleasant cul-de-sac in which the Students Union sits, I really don’t know. But I know I really don’t like idiocy mixed with spray paint. There was one good thing about the Students Union though, looking at their posters up in the window, they managed to have Hot Club De Paris and Elle S’appelle playing their summer ball. Clearly someone there’s got phenomenal taste with a budget of pence. A winner. Hopefully not the same person who daubed shit on the wall, otherwise I’ve got some serious double standards to address.

The managers and/or bigwigs at McDonald’s have painted all their window frames bottle green for no reason. Well actually, there probably is a reason, a very simple one, it needed a serious tarting up, and no, with the very glaring sore-thumb of the golden arches, the cornerstone of fast food in Winchester looks vaguely respectable. I didn’t go in, I’ve hardly ever been in this McDonald’s. I actually think I’ve been in the McDonald’s in Staines more times, but from the outside I could see they’d painted various bits of the inside green as well. The kids area looked like a jungle. I’d always thought that McDonald’s were punching above their weight by the mere fact they tend to have flower boxes on top of the crash barrier fencing outside, but now they seem to be coming good on their decade-long intentions. More good news for McDonald’s is their only main threat so far as cholesterol damage, The Blue Dolphin has finally poisoned one teenager too many. Actually, that might not be why it closed, it could be that chip shops are just too, you know, RIFF RAFF for 90% of the toffee nosed blazer-sleeved toffs in Winchester, but my experiences of going to the Blue Dolphin has concluded each time with 100% success rate for getting food poisoning, including the fabled incident which saw me holed up in bed on December 31^st 1999 watching every Millennium Eve celebration in the Eastern hemisphere whilst I honked up cocktail sausages. So a big WELL DONE! to McDonald’s, and a big GOODBYE to the Blue Dolphin. I’m surprised the chip shop didn’t stick around until after The Hat Fair (Winchester’s own version of Glastonbury, without the music, drugs, camping, or well, any of Glastonbury except the dickheaded hippy fans mentioned above. I can’t think of a Hat Fair I’ve been to without risking my life at least once in that particular take away.

There’s a few different things in and around our house that I’ve noticed from wandering round the garden. The problem with Radio 6, when they have good presenters on, is that I get bored when the songs are on (there’s only so many times I can listen to Hurricane Jane by Black Kids and that number is one) so I moseyed around the house playing with the cats. My dad has stuck loads of Mojo magazine CDs to poles to scare off birds. This isn’t interesting, but since I was discussing the exact subject two days ago at work, and I return to precisely the sort of madness I was talking about, it just about becomes interesting. I’ve also noticed another weird thing in our house, some sort of thermometer. Bizarre. In the house, there’s also a wooden duck in our front room, which has a name tag (Denis) which seems to always be looking at me, no matter what part of the lounge I go to sit in. I really don’t know why he’s named after a Blondie song. One more ‘N’ and he could be named after someone from Big Brother who spits on people.

Here are my cats: Alfie, Bertie, Misty, Jess (respectively)

Sixteen Days (Part 1)

2008-06-28T16:47:00.014+01:00

27.06.08 So after the best part of ten and a half months and six days, I finally woke up this morning realising I was on holiday for the first time in forever. In true keeping with events of this magnitude, it was wanking it down and so was born the first of sixteen days, wasted for the first six hours cowering from the rain and mild humid breeze inside my house in Cardiff. This wasn't all unproductive, God no. I listened to a program on Radio 4 which was essentially the broadcast radio equivalent of Points of View, only hosted by someone I didn't recognise called Roger, and didn't involve any actual real complaints or views; it was more a forum on lunch time radio for pedants and other breeds of oaf to leave evidence of their pedantry and oafishness. From today’s edition, one of the people who phone in was a victim of her own paranoia and idiocy - complaining that news broadcasters say things like "900 people die in a ferry accident" and then don't specify where this incident is taking place, only to reveal five seconds later "in the Philippines where there's a tonking great cyclone destroying the entire island colony". The callers argument was that "people are going to get panicky and worry about all their friends that might be on ferries, traveling, and be totally in the dark, only to find out a minute later it doesn't affect their friends". I mean seriously. Another person complained about the Radio 4 adaptation of a book, which was so offensive, they refused to listen past episode two. Appropriate clip was played, in which I couldn't find anything wrong apart from that it sounded a bit dull. Apparently the problem was in the pronunciation of a couple of works. Pedantry drawn from geekiness is no reason to complain. But then, they did have half an hour to fill, and the media lawyer from BBC Radio can only drivel on about the legality of reporting war for so long.

I did the washing up, which was a necessary evil, but it meant I could listen to one of my staple washing up albums. I actually haven't taken the Bon Iver album out of the kitchen since I bought it two months ago because it lends itself so nicely to scraping dead ketchup and brine from the inner rim ofa bowl and staring at puddles in the garden. Other albums that have sat on the shelf next to the stereo in the kitchen since February when I realized I enjoyed washing up, include Old Ramon by the Red House Painters, CD1 of a Simon and Garfunkle Best Of, the one with Leaves That Are Green on, and Hats by the Blue Nile. All good kitchen albums. I can actually see myself in a few years listening back to this Bon Iver album (should it ever leave the room) and it reminding me of the time I filled the sink with too much hot water and scalded my hand trying to pull the plug out. Such happy times.

It cleared up around half two so I wandered purposefully into town to watch Teeth at the cinema. Anyone who's been following the slow and steady tide of hype surrounding this ridiculous concept shocker will know that essentially, it's a nonsense horror movie about a girl with teeth in her vagina which chomps off any hand or penis which dares to test it's treacherous waters. Except it's not. I'm not sure now what I was expecting; either a both-barrels firing barrage of crass humour and knob jokes with a garnish of splatter, or a pretentious metaphorical diatribe about the sanctity of virginity and that actually gnashing faff's was just a visual representation for feminist values. Luckily it was neither of these. It was more like a cross between a Todd Solondz coming of age mess, and say, The Thing. The gore hungry should be satisfied with some blood-soaked yodeling teenage boys clutching their half-chewed genitalia whilst various creatures munch on the other, and although the whole thing isn't intentionally a metaphor - yes, she does have piranhas in her pants, there is some credible feminist undertones - all the men who get their comeuppance are in one way or another lust-fuelled asshole who deserves everything they get. The ending sees the girl appreciating the power she has, and using it as a weapon against any ill-mannered male (which seems to be just about every single person in the movie). Girl rules, hooray. Teeth is, interestingly, directed by Mitchell Litchenstein, who is "wham!" pop artist Roy Litchenstein's son, so it's good that making money from nonsense runs in the family. The other fun thing about this movie is that the guy who played agoraphobic nutjob Harold Smith in Twin Peaks, plays the girls father. Ultimately,it's a lot better than "that movie where the girls vagina eats things".

I am now in Winchester, after a massively uneventful road trip with my father. We stopped at the usual services, one with a Marks and Spencer, Burger King and WHSmith, chewable toothbrushes in the toilet, and a few posters of over-personalization which as good as give you the manages mobile phone number and home address for you to go and molest his wife and steal his washing. It's a very poor example of the motorway services, which I find an integral part of the British Landscape, and with a whiff of nostalgia about them; aside from the Leigh services (today’s example) I don't think I've ever stopped at motorway services without it being a gap-filler or time waster during some epic road trip. It's like changing trains on an epic train journey, except you can stop for as long as you want, get back on the same train, and don't have to look at adverts for Halifax at Bristol Temple Meads. The rest of the journey was spent listening to a CD I'd made for the journey. Dad seemed impressed with Fleet Foxes ("I think they got the coveted 5 stars in Mojo") Wintersleep ("who's this?") and Steve Earle ("this is in an advert for cider isn't it?) and Billy Bragg ("Ah, Billy Bragg?"). Not bad, given he usually doesn't say anything at all about the music playing. I was annoyed to find that Steve Earle has loaned his version of 'Galway Girl' to advertise Magners, it doesn't seem right somehow. He's probably completely wrong anyway. I've spent the last hour or so watching The Hits, because they're doing a run down of the top 100 selling dance songs of the 21st century. I've been watching since #25 and they still haven't played the heartbreaking and ingenious video for Another Chance by Roger Sanchez, which is not only the best dance song of the 21st century, but one of the best music videos full stop. I'm really hoping they didn't play it during the 5 minutes I was fishing pickled onions of the jar with a fork, in the kitchen. They're now on Hung Up By Madonna, which is a good song, but not a dance song, and I really don't think Another Chance outsold this for one second. Looks like it did crop in those 5 minutes. Another Chance came out in the summer of 2001, I remember it being number around the time we all went to see Belle and Sebastian in Bournemouth, and Alex cut his feet on barnacles and we had to ask Stuart Murdoch if they had any towels. I haven't put returning to Bournemouth on my list of things to do this week I'm in Winchester, and I'm not going to either. Did that last year, and it's really not worth it.

This the tracklisting for the CD

01 Get Well Soon * Born Slippy (Nuxx)

02 The Hold Steady – Constructive Summer

03 Wild Beasts * The Devil’s Crayon

04 Galaxie 500 * Don’t Let Our Youth Go to Waste

05 Sharon Shannon and Steve Earle * Galway Girl

06 Glasvegas * Geraldine

07 The Dodos * God?

08 The Imagined Village Band * Hard Times of Old England Retold

09 The Blue Nile * Headlights on the Parade

10 Neon Neon * I Told Her on Alderaan

11 Wintersleep * Miasmal Smoke and the Yellow Bellied Freaks

12 Mates of State * My Only Offer

13 The Acorn * Oh Napoleon

14 Canadians * The North Side of Summer

15 Wolf Parade * Soldier’s Grin

16 Fleet Foxes * Your Protector

The one reassuring thing about Winchester is the local news. Although it's a rarity to actually feature anything happening in Winchester itself, Meridian Tonight's news is a totally different world to the main national news. When I arrived, my mum was watching the 10 o' Clock news, which was all about how Robert Mugabe is going to destroy the entire world, and how a loaf of bread is going to cost £45 and how North Korea are pretending to destroy their nuclear reserves to we all forget about them. Straight after, the top story on Meridian Tonight was that a shop that sold wedding dresses closed down. Whoop-de-doo, this barely measures 0.1 on the Richter Scale of newsworth events, but due to slow happenings, presumably in the rest of the region, this became big news, with a preposterous Jeremy Vine style interview with her in a posh hotel (one step away from the Gerry Adams helium voice and the silhouette backdrop) and then a load of hideous brides-to-be with teeth sticking out their chins and their voluptuous pig mothers in tow moaning a bit more about their fucking dresses, failing to account for the fact that delaying their wedding might just have saved them a divorce. Item two concerned an entire warehouse full of illegal Chinese Immigrants running wild on the streets of Alton, a miniscule non-event of a town North of Winchester. This feature managed to crowbar in a pathetic and very obvious advertising puff for the book printers next door. Lovely.

Buzzards

2008-06-23T22:46:00.001+01:00

I wrote this on Friday when I was drunk and half-watching Withnail and I.

Another day in paradise. I've spent my day off today channel hopping and listening to music. Just to push the boat out, I even ate convenience food, and didn't bother getting dressed until gone 4pm, just to compound all the necessary slacker stereotypes into the dust. But through co-opting my terrible existence through a consecutive series of clichéd behind-closed-doors portraits of wasterdom, I've learned some valuable lessons. Namely.

The Jonas Brothers are brilliant. Every ten minutes when you press The Hits of TMF because you've reached the inevitable ad break elsewhere, you turn to the crummy music channels like you turn to the bottle if you're an alcoholic, or your Radiohead CDs if you're a bellend. Through this process, I've realized how boring R+B videos are these days now that they've tried to lose the misogynistic bullshit and pretended to be intergalactic space-rappers with tweed hats, and also realised how awesome The Jonas Brothers are. Basically a punked-up version of Hanson whose videos are overchoreographed to the extend you wonder if you're subliminally being told to raise your eyebrows and poke penlids in your ear as part of the routine, The Jonas Brothers are a humdinger of go-nowhere power chords and wholesome pop-punk that's so invariably cheesy. Think three prepubescent Simon Amstells imitating Busted covering the the incidental music from Punked. It doesn't get much better than this.

Jeremy Kyle is much, much more than a stereotypically bad show for the unemployed and inebriated. It's fascinating. Today’s episode, or one of today’s episodes as it appears to be on all day on ITV2, was an intervention special. Rather than a highly-personal intervention, like they should be, in which close family and friends gather the junkie drugged up alcoholic doofus in a darkened corner and batter him with sobbing and snotting until he renounces his sins, the Jeremy Kyle Intervention becomes an absolute circus of horrors as the events unfold. Basically, an alcoholic was literally propped up in a chair, and then one by one, and increasingly irrelevant gaggle of drama-students in waiting offered ascendingly bizarre reasons why the sozzled fuckwit should cut the cider. They started, naturally, with the close family and then a parade of AA lifetime members and toothless morons gave their bit, and then we got to watch some footage of a previous edition of Jeremy Kyle in which a desperately hammered alcoholic tried to mumble a sentence, only to be berated by Jeremy and it emerged he died anyway. The subject of the intervention, who was so embezzled in drink that I couldn't tell if he was actually Scottish or so pissed he couldn't avoid lapsing in an accent he didn't have, was even less impressed than I was. Then they did one on Joyriding, in which a wideboy toerag with sufficiently low enough brain cells to fit on a pin head was fed half an hours worth of car crash tales with the intention of getting him to stop joyriding. After he said "well um, like, yeah, well, yeah, one of my best mates died joyriding, but it only made me wanna do it more, like" I gave up, as should have Jeremy.

Swedish Hearts

2008-06-11T00:13:00.001+01:00

I'm not amazing with dates, or in fact writing things down as they happen. I've kept two diaries in my time. The first was on blue and green paper in a spiral bound notepad and I kept it between January 1st 2000 and sometime in mid-September 2000 when I went back to college to start the second year of sixth form. The second one I kept was between September 2002 and June 2003, which was a lot more interesting, as it wasn't entirely preoccupied with ridiculous non-happenings between myself and my angst-ridden gawkings towards members of the opposite sex. There's a few occasions on the 2002/2003 one which I don't even understand myself, because of it's abstract nature: I used to carry it around with me at all times, and even if I was in a pub drinking and my friend or girlfriend went to the toilet, I'd jot something down. Sometimes you could tell where I was or what I was doing because the writing looked like I was trying to write upside down or with my left hand, or was so drunk that even holding a pen was a bad idea. A good example from memory was New Years Eve 2002 where I ended up sleeping in Adam Bamburys car listening to my walkmen, and my closing comments on 2002 were "drunk! adam bambury car the nightingales coming through mexxx" although imagine that written in what looks like Arabic, and in letters fifteen times the magnitude of my usual scribble.I think I was listening to DJ Shadow and Julee Cruise at the time.
My point is that without keeping a diary, I'm really not great at remember when and where exactly anything happened, and so memories become even more abstract than my 02/03 diary. For example, right now is June 10th, which is my mum and dead cat's birthday. I'm trying to remember where I was or what I was doing this time last year. I can't even remember what I bought my mum for her birthday last year, like, if I posted it or took it home. I also went to Gothenburg at the start of June last year and it was absolutely brilliant, but in the here and now, I can't remember if I was there on June 10th or home again listening to The Sundays on the bus home from work. I was thinking this today when I watched the opening 5 minutes of the Sweden vs Greece game at Euro 2008. Football tournaments are fantastic time indicators for people who don't keep diaries. If there was one every year, then I'd almost certainly be able to recall the events of last year better. I can remember the World Cup of 2006 quite vividly, or rather I can remember June 2006 vividly because I was working 13 hours a day and missed almost the entire thing, bar the final, and the hilarious Portugal vs Holland game where everyone got sent off and nobody knew why. Likewise, Euro 2004 I remember really well because I was in Winchester and had just been tipped off that Soulseek was the best filesharer ever and I'd finally managed to get a copy of Dave Pajo's cover of Last Caress, and I remember the game when England lost to Portugal really well because I was making a a CD cover for a CDR of Castaways and Cutouts by the Decemberists, because I thought they were the best band ever. World Cup 2002, I was in Winchester again, and I remember getting up early to watch matches at stupid o' clock and I was obsessed with these Chinese chicken noodle soups that you can't buy anymore. It goes on. But the in between years: 01, 03, 05, 07, I can't for the life of me think what I was doing for the entire month of June. I hope I wasn't in Sweden on June 10th last year, because the comparative day this year was a massive waste of getting out of bed, since all I did was count down the hours until the Russia vs Spain game, read half a chapter of a book, and bought more cartons of orange juice from Lidl that I could feasibly carry and regretted leaving the house the second I did because huge wafts of cut grass and summertime evils took residence in my nose and the entire lengths of Coburn Street and the Woodville Road junction got to see me wipe my nose on my sleeve because my hands were full.
I didn't watch the Sweden game but I understand they gave Greece a 2-0 pasting, much like every other game in the tournament so far, being hideously one-sided with no potential for upset or excitement for a neutral. The only exception being the France vs Romania game, which was hideously no-sided, and therefore awful.
But, where the football is lacking, there has been some minor highlights.
Gordan Strachan as a pundit is always brilliant. As a Southampton fan, I used to make sure I tuned into post-match interviews with Strachan as he's pretty much a rent-a-quote for going against the usual cliches and nonsense. Once he said he'd rather have been watching Die Hard than the Southampton players, because the film and the match were roughly the same length.
The ball: I like the use of the retro black hexagons, and when the camera pans out to the helicopter shots, it looks just like Sensible Soccer
I've noticed a couple of the managers look ridiculous, Like Donadoni for Italy who looks a bit like Dustin Hoffman, a bit like Bruce Springsteen, and really doesn't look like he's enjoying his job. The Croatian manager looks like he could moonlight as a member of The Stranglers.
The fact that although Austria and Switzerland nationals are clearly loving the event and want their teams to win, they all know 100% that neither team are any good whatsoever, and really don't care one bit. The Austrian press are urging damage limitation, rather than causing an upset. Brilliant.
Having the subtitles on during the live commentary and noticing the spelling mistakes or accidental homonyms. They said 'Geese' instead of 'Greece' earlier, which was a treat.
I'm hoping things get more interesting though. The above list is usually ten times as long after the first set of games in a tournament like this. My current score for the Metro Fantasy Football is 14. I'm placed 74,324th.

Friend of the Night

2008-06-09T23:42:00.002+01:00

I have this friend. You probably know someone like him. You might even have met him, or at least someone a lot like him. He's the sort of person who turns up halfway through parties, usually staying until the
end, or at least turns up for long enough to cause a scene and you end up having to cart them home even though you can barely stand up yourself, let alone try and smoke a cigarette without wanting to jab it straight in his eyesockets for ruining your evening. He's the sort of person who drinks too much, and makes it impossible to start conversations with other people at the party or in a club, because he's so embarrassing. It's OK when you're in the pub or out dancing because he doesn't usually stumble in until quite late on, by which time it doesn't matter, it's just matters how quickly you can cart him out of there I've known him for years, probably longer than anyone I know. He's a total idiot, although I've got an odd sort of respect of him.
He's also one of these people who likes to invite himself around when you don't really want him to. It's one of the reasons why I hate surprise visits from people, because usually he'll come round to the house and keep me up until stupid times of day asking me pointless questions about who I work with, or what I used to do during the summertimes in Winchester. More often than not, he'll want to run through tedious events involving ex girlfriends and doomed friendships and it's pretty tiresome, yet annoyingly it doesn't make me tired. Sometimes he'll just turn up at inopportune moments like in the supermarket. A few times, he's just turned up when I've been at work and just sat on one of the chairs near where I am, causing me to complete distraction when I'm trying to reorganise all the Richard Dawkins books so The Selfish Gene comes before Unweaving the Rainbow and not before. Usually I just want to go home at that point, because at least at home he's not going to stop me from doing my job to the best of my abilities, which is obviously difficult to do when you've got some idiot jabbering in your ear and trying to convince you to take 10 minutes out to buy a strawberries and cream fake coffee from Starbucks or to browse through the psychology books he insists will revolutionise my life.
Some of the time he's alright. I doubt I'd be listening to half the bands I do if I'd never met him, or at least, I wouldn't have the belief that it's more than OK to listen to music that nobody else really cares about, if anything, I like trying to get people into the music that he's got me into because an extra person liking the Red House Painters or The Blue Nile is a good thing, although I don't think I've met anyone else who likes The Blue Nile, not least to the extent of listening to them over the course of whole summers like he and I did in 2006, or are doing again at the moment since he found a link to a whole double albums worth of their b sides and demos. I still like the music that I find through endless searching, or that I hear on the radio, but for some reason the music he's got me into has a different resonance, so I owe him a lot for that. He's not that good with television though, he's one of those bellends who watches Judge Judy, and Jeremy Kyle, and The Paul O' Grady Show, just because they happen to be on, and he keeps telling me that in an ideal world, he'd just turn the TV off during the day and read a book, but he's just too lazy. I'm not sure he's ever made it to the end of a film, his concentration span is useless. I've tried taking him to the cinema but he ended up talking all the way through it, and I can't remember much about the film afterwards. I've pretty much given up on going to the cinema altogether, since it seems I run into him almost every time I go into town now.
He doesn't have a girlfriend, at least, not as far as I know. He seems pretty detached from all that, although he's always saying that he could easily get a girlfriend if he wanted to, but just doesn't want to, and I often wonder if that's actually a cover up. On the rare occasions, I've seen him out with other people; I saw him out once with someone I used to work with (who I found it ridiculous that he even knew) but it's usually just me he hangs around. I ofter wonder about his attitudes to relationships. He seems pretty distant from me whenever I'm in one, although he does occasionally drop round, and I wonder sometimes if he resents the fact I'm sharing my time between other people rather than him, Especially if I'm out in a big group, he tends to make even more of a deal out of it, and makes it more embarrassing. But I'm being fairly harsh to be honest, and it's probably only noticing him being a jerk.
Most people really like him though. When we're together, people often tell me I'm a lot funnier or a lot more talkative than I really am. If a linguist broke down our conversation carefully though, they'd probably notice straight away that I'm mostly overcompensating for the nonsense he'd probably come out with, and trying my hardest to talk over him. Sometimes though, I don't get a work in edge ways and people just get bored and talk to someone else. I think me and him are inherently different people, although quite a lot of each other rubs off on each other, and there's certainly a lot of him in the way I act and some of the things I say sometimes. I wish I hadn't know him when I wasn't a student though
He smokes, and drinks, and eats too much, but hilariously he tells me that all a cigarette is going to do is take 5 minutes of life away, and I'd only waste that 5 minutes anyway out in the sun getting hay fever, and I know I certainly have a lot more fun if he's had a couple of drinks because that's the only time really he seems to act like a normal person, but more often than not he's absolutely wasted, and his hangovers are the sort that aren't gone until very late the next day.
We argue a lot though. He's one of these annoying honest-to-a-fault guys who'll tell me that I've put on weight, or that my hair is falling out, or that my teeth look more crooked today even though they don't, and because he's so right about most other things, I stupidly believe him, and I probably wouldn't have ever noticed if he hadn't just told me. That's why we argue. It's one of the reasons why I don't really argue, or pick fights with, or try not to have any confrontations with other people because I know I can get a lot of the stresses out by arguing with him later in the day. We have had some serious fallings out though. One time we had this massive fight when I was really drunk and ended up quite badly hurt, although it was good in a way because I didn't see him for about a month afterwards, when he was hanging around this girl from my last place of work, and we ended up making friends again. Sometimes I secretly hope we have another really big fight and he fucks off for good, maybe back home. Often when we drink together he ends up crashing at mine, and because I usually fall asleep first, he ends up drawing crude pictures on my body whilst I sleep that I don't notice until the morning, a bit like that white Pokemon character that sings and for some reason carry a magic marker around. I wish he wouldn't do that, but I'm always too tired or too drunk to notice what he's doing. Usually the last drink is on him, which is clearly just a cynical ploy to make sure I fall asleep first.
Despite his faults though,he's a great guy. Not just for the music. You know when you've been friends with someone for such a long time, that they leave such an indelible mark on you, and some people find it hard to work out where you start and they begin? That's what we're like, I actually can't conceive what I'd be like or what I'd enjoy doing if I didn't do most of the stuff that he does. I mean, some of the places he takes me to are awful, like, some of the nightclubs we end up because he really likes the girl behind the bar, or he once went there and a girl talked to him whilst he was having a cigarette, are really bad places, and he spends the whole time moaning that she isn't there, even though she was never likely to be. I end up being his companion on those sorts of evenings, but then he's buying the rounds on those occasions. He doesn't really like going to see bands though, so usually I watch the bands and meet him afterwards. If he does come with me, it's usually quite annoying because he talks all the way through them, much like at the cinema. But a lot of the time he accompanies me wherever I'm going, and because he's got s slightly different outlook on life, I strangely enjoy it. I definitely can't imagine life without him, especially now we've been hanging out a lot more often lately.

If You Met Me, Then You'd Like Me

2008-06-06T11:16:00.001+01:00

The tendancy to write extensively about the internet, whilst you're on the internet, writing for people on the internet, is very high, so I've been trying not to. It's really not terribly interesting. WIth the infinite number of distractions available online to waste your days, it's not surprise that when confronted with a blank slate and fuck all going on outside the four windows of your mind, and th four walls of your room, that you're bound to end up posting youtube links of people mistaking John Cusack for Kevin Spacey (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXF8Lhvjqa8)

and then talking extensively about the world that surrounds you, rather than sits infront of you.
So I've tried to avoid it, but its like sitting in a fishtank with a giant child-eating squid in the corner, it's such a behemoth of life that probably now exists as a parallel to getting out of bed and drinking a coffee and walking around the park and digging the allotment, rather than a seedy alternative, that it's a waste of time me trying to to talk about it, even though it's boring. Posting links and clips and realplayer streams of bird noises and George Lamb interviews is like anonymous 'show and tell' classes where everybody tries to show off their best 'find'. Boring. But of course, it wouldn't be one my posts if it wasn't possible to tie it all nicely with self-indulgent silly string, and turn it all around so I'm discussing how much I hate everyone and my conviction that everyone hates me, so here goes. I have had experiences in my life, particularly when I was a student, and I guess this started at sixth form, where I've found myself taking an instant dislike to somebody, within the first minute of meeting them. Taking a first impression and running off with it for eternity, with the intention of never speaking or hearing from them, or even seeing their face ever again. This has been a largely successful operation, rarely are there sleepless nights where I pontificate if life would be much improved if the idiot who turned up to watch Eurovision with us in 2005 were my friday night pub allie, or the ignorant fuckface friend of the guy I knew in the third year who liked Nick Cave and promptly forgot my name were living in the room adjacent to mine. I really don't, and in honesty, the first time I've thought about this degenerate specimins of human sea slime was three minutes ago, trying to remember where I met them. It works both ways of course, I'm still friends with Grace and Gareth, and even though both of them are on the opposing sides of various seas and oceans for the majority of the time, both were people I decided within seconds as being people I wanted to know for the rest of my aching days.

The point is, of course, with the advent of social networking, is that the average Joe can now make his deductions on whether he's going to like or dislike somebody without even having to meet them. By which I don't mean going 'Oh he looks like a wanker" because someone turns up in the laundrette wearing an Oasis beanie hat and a lumberjack shirt, I mean evil, conniving, slighly creepy and maudlin factbuilding, so that you can just avoid having to meet certain people altogether. Take for instance, this girl that I currenl have listed as a 'friend' on Facebook. There was a ridiculously contrived reason as to how this utter non-event of a friendship came about, but basically, I've never met her, am never going to meet her, she doesn't know who I am or how she knows me, but I have confidence in my convictions that she is the worst person alive. This is purely made on selfish unfair judgements; She likes Ross Kemp in Afghanistan, has joined groups about supporting the troops in Basra, she likes "all music but queen have gotta be my faves" she spells 'with' with a 'v', and has pages of horrible poems and quotes that would Mother Teresa shit herself. In a word - awful. All her picture are of her binge drinking on a Friday night and photographing the evidence. And I don't feel any modicum of guit about any of this becuase that's what you're supposed to do, and that's basically what it's for. It's the eradication of blind socialising, and it's great. Again, it works both ways, because somebody could fabricate the perfect profile to suit your tastes, and for for it to be a sham. I've long since learned through a combination of 3 years as a student, and spending too much time on the internet, that people who like the same music as me are not essentially, going to be an interesting person. I used to think that if somebody had a good band on their t shirt, (and also used to hilariously argue that this was in any way better than wanting to form sexual relations with someone because they had a good haircut) but I've seen the errors of my ways. But even so, I still look at people I don't know on the internet, see that they like The Black Heart Procession and making mix CDs and assume they're going to be AMAZING, conveniently forgetting that I like The Black Heart Procession and making mix cds and I'm certainly not amazing. It's an awesome world of paradoxes, and I never want it to stop.

I'm assuming here that I'm not the only person who does this. Far from it, I'm going to assume to that you'll be hard pressed to find someone who doesn't do it. I imagine people do it to me. Few people look as much of a fool as I do when I'm in the library or in the pub or especially at work, and so if they're trawling through their friends archives of boring nights out or odious friends lists, they're probably going to come across me, and go "oh, there's that guy with the really badly dyed hair and eyeliner who's always in the Pen and Wig (or worse, out clubbing on his own) let's have a butchers at what makes him tick. And then, the next time we cross paths and don't even make eye contact, they've achieved enough of a personal profile of my interests, activities and general lifestyle that they can tick off the box that marks ever wanting to engage in a conversation with me in the future, and our lives continue. What a wonderful world. It's made the world smaller, rather than bigger, and yet another thrilling reason to read Steven Pinker books and listen to slowcore.

On a related note, this was the first 'first night' of Big Brother since the very first one that I didn't watch. I'm not making some sort of pathetic statement by saying this, that I'm somehow above the level of watching Big Brother, but I'm just trying to make a concious effort this year not to waste an hour a day for thirteen weeks, when I could use that time reading, or listening to music, or both. Unless of course, I fall in love, in which case I'll clamp my face to the table, tie my legs together and stick matchsticks in my eyes and lie motionless for three months watching every last minute if it means someone might want to hug me at the end of it.

Gravel Bed

2008-06-02T00:03:00.001+01:00

My second England friendly in a week. This one is only two minutes in, and it's so far even more ridiculous than the USA one during the week. England's seemingly randomly-selected opponents this time around are Trinidad and Tobago, whose speciality appears to fabricating a ludicrous stereotype of themselves and acting it out at every possibility. So we've had hula-hula dancing, steel drums yammering out the national anthems, and the crowd are so overenthusiastic and gaga on coconut juice and Lilt (their stereotype, not mine) that they're cheering absolutely everything. Stern John gets hits directly in the face! Hooray! David James just scythed the striker and took his legs out. Yeaaa-ha! The Trinidad team are also slightly ridiculous because their first and second strikers are either ex Southampton players. or current Southampton players, and the rest are comprised of rubbish like substitute Swansea defenders. The other point of hilarity, apart from that the ground is so small even the players can probably see over the edge of the ground if they jump high enough, is that the perimeter of the pitch is cluttered with advertising banners for hundreds of suspiciously un-Carribbean products like Pukka Pies and Bargain Booze. At any rate, the BBC evidently concluded months ago that this wasn't worth bothering with because they haven't sent Lineker or Hansen over there, they're stuck in a studio. The token commentator is someone I've never heard of, and the token pundit is Mark Bright, who, if he isn't dancing on the bottom rung of the pundit ladder, is definitely within touching distance of the ground. Trinidad and Tobago are rubbish, mind, the commentator has pointed out one particulary player, who appears to be called Cupid, and he is seriously awfu. Like, pub team awful.

Since last writing on here, I've discovered I have fans, Well actually no. I have discovered that other people who do exactly what I'm doing right now, only better, have read some of my previous self indulgent shit. I imagine it's like when I go on music message boards to remind myself that I'm a little bit less of a fuckstick than I thought I was 5 minutes previously. But anyway, a big HELLO! to those three people, especially the guy from the New Statesman whose name I've already forgotten. They've all referred to my intoxicated Eurovision ramblings and probably aren't reading this, but just incase. HELLO! Now post some comments you ignorant shits.

Today, in contrast to last week when I stated that I would have gone to Barry Island but didn't, today, although deciding I wasn't going to leave the house, did, and went to Barry Island just like I didn't four days ago. I've been to Barry Island many times before, I'm probably in double figures. I haven't been in over two years though, the last time I went was with Grace and we sat on a bench and listened to my portable tape player and then went in a bar and I tried to start a conversation with a man with a Levellers t shirt and Grace used my phone to make a racial slur at one of her friends.I think that was the time I was subjected to unjustified homophobic abuse in the toilets of The Dolphin, althought I might be mistaken. Other times I've been to Barry Island have seen me having seagull shit sprayed liberally over my clothes within minutes of arrival, smoking a cigarette in the middle of the sea with my trousers legs rolled up, being drunk enough to wrestle Anna on the sand at a stupid time of night, before swimming in the ice cold sea in nothing but shorts and a Mercury Rev t shirt, before being accused of urinating in the sink on the train home (irrational accusations and abuse are generally the order of the day) and left my 'Avrl Lavigne' wallet on the train. There's also been trips into the murky depths of the Acropolis Nightclub (now titled something else) and death defying madness just by getting on one of the rides at the 'Pleasure' Park and getting strapped in. I've never had anything less than baffling fun there, even though Barry Island is an inherently, and obviously inadequate place to have a good time. Today was the first time I'd even been on my own, and although I still had some mumbly humbling fun, taking photographs of misspelt signposts, sitting on what I've decided to label 'my' bench, even though I've only ever sat on it three times. I even considered going on the rides and playing the brand spanking new expensive swanky swashbucking buccaneer crazy golf, but thought better of it. Why would anyone play crazy golf alone? I don't think I could pretend to like that. The route there and back was a shambles, with there being no trains runnings as is the case every time I get a train anywhere, The driver of my replacement bus service was a chain smoking imbecile, who clearly wasn't aware of the magic of air conditioning. But luck was smiling on me on the way home, because I didn't have any clue where the fuck the coach was going to pick people up from, so I just sat on the floor near the railway station, watching some of the rides in the fairground spin and twirl on their axis. The same coach driver as before saw me sat there and honked the horn at me. Lucky old me. The bas thing was having to follow the entire return route around Morrisons in Barry Town, and watching a revolting couple decked out in camoufage and grey shoplifter joggers necking in one of the car parks.

Dopamine Clouds Over Craven Cottage

2008-05-28T21:31:00.002+01:00

Tonight, on the occasion that David Beckham won his 101st cap for England, we witnessed, a national, a far more significant spectacle. Kelly Rowland, the 'middle' one from Destiny's Child, performed what has to be the wost rendition of the Star Spangled Banner in US history. Luckily, it wasn't on American soil, otherwise she'd be in big trouble, it was as bad as if she'd squatted down and squeezed out a Destiny's Child shaped little turn squarely on the corner of the stars. It was, and I hesitate to make this comparison lightly, even worse than the Red House Painters version, and that's really really bad. The occasion appears to be a friendly between England and the USA. England had some quartet of faceless cod-classical crumpets cooing out God Save the Queen like they were blowing on a hot spoon of peas, but this was just an aperetif for the main source of hilarity. I haven't watched a full game from football, from kick off to fuck off, in a long time. Like, six months or something. I think I've watched more games of rugby in their entirety since then, and I don't even understand the rules of that. I almost watched the entire champions league final, in which Chelsea came a cropper and their manager got sacked because John Terry fell over when taking a penalty. God I'd hate to be part of the Chelsea board, it's uttery ridiculous, It's not really comparable, but Avram Grant getting the heave-ho for not winning the Champions League, is a bit like me being fired because I managed to sell every single book in the entire of Borders, except for a really expensive leather bound bible. Unlucky.

Disappointing, John Motson has just announced that Brian McBride isn't playing. I say disappointing, I couldn't tell you for a second whether I respect Brian McBride as a player, I don't care either way, but I like him because he used to play for Fulham, and shares his name with one of the members of Stars of the Lid, and as a 'tribute', they named one of their songs Dopamine Clouds Over Craven Cottage. I love Stars of the Lid song titles, because you can tell the members of the band are fed up of thinking of titles for lengthy instrumentals with one note, and so just run riot with the English language. So, without Brian McBride, I don't recognise any of the American players, and barely any of them have American names, they all have barmy transcontinental names. Apart from Demarcus Beasely, who use has a stupid name, and Boccanegra has an identical name to a Verdi Opera. The rest of them have surnames that sounds like Aztec temples. Anyway, sixteen minutes in and it's a boring enough game for me to start typing on my laptop. As to the whereabouts of any of my housemates, I've got no fucking idea, I haven't seen any of them all day, although I did spend the 'arrival time' in my bedroom typing out an epic 1500 word review of the new Hold Steady album, which was hilariously self inludgent and about a third of it basically described two incidents in my life when I was listening to The Hold Steady and going mad, and the other I spent trying to cut down the hyperbole because I find it almost impossible to convey convincingly that I really really like something without sounding stupid. In concluson though, I called it fucking brilliant, with brilliant in italics. Lazy, but I got fed up with the whole thing after 1500 words. You can find the review, and a select amount of some of the other shit I type about music, here: http://www.playlouder.com/.

When I say 'arrival time' I do of course mean 'arrival window' which is the period of the day between 5 and 7 in which my housemates usually return from work and then the plan for the evening is revealed or settled on. This usually doesn't involve me, because I keep the most archaic time in the house because I work at stupid times and on weekends, but when it's my day off, like today, and I've wasted it, like today, then I quite like at least some company, given the only voice I've heard all day apart from my own huffing expletives at the fact my' windows virtual memory is too low'. But I guess it wasn't to be, and so I'll watch the football, drink vodka and cranberry juice, and pretend I don't have to be at work in 10 hours time, or that I'm lonely enough to consider striking up a conversation with the staff in Family Fish Bar, or buying phone credit.

Okay, Let's Talk About Magic

2008-05-26T18:16:00.003+01:00

I have pretty much not left my bedroom for two days. After the high jinks of Eurovision, the majority of which I watched on my own in the house, exception a ten minute period in which Thomas and his two French friends who both looked like Javier Bardem in a hall of mirrors gawped and tried to suggest the Swedish singer was attractive which she obviously wasn't, I went out. I went out and danced to incredibly mediocre indie rock tunes like This Charming Man, and La Tristesse Durera, got patronised for a bit by a number of people and then came home. Since then, I have left my bedroom on two occasions: 1) to play Tony Hawks Underground in the living room whilst listening to the new Ladytron and Cajun Dance party albums, which if I get round to it, will receive mediocre reviews, although at the moment they're fighting over which one could make less of an impression on me than the other. Anyway, I learnt how to do 'manual' tricks on Tony Hawks. Every time I find out something new that you can do, I end up whittle away at least a few more hours into nothing. Last week, it was discovering that holding on the back of cars makes you jump higher, now it's the fact you can do handstands and things. I'm guessing most people are going to be dramatically unimpressed with this, because it tells you all of this in the manual, but when you're playing a £1.50 third hand copy bought from CEX with hau hau noodle stains on the outer rim of the disc, things like manuals are a joy, and looking up basic information on the internet for this is impossible. Not least because there are approximate nine million near-identical Tony Hawks games that I don't care about because I don't own them. The other occasion, 2) was to do some washing up in the kitchen, and to listen to Paul Merton singing Stand By Me to to the tune of The William Tell Overture on I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue on a cassette.

Last night I couldn't sleep, and it was for probably the most ridiculous reason ever. I kept having visions of David Copperfield. This is unforgivably stupid, but I can only only explain it by the fact I was too bored last night to even bother going to sleep, and so I spent hour upon hour sat in front of my computer watching endless clips on youtube of hammy eighties magicians doing illusions. My particular favourite was the utterly ridiculous clip of David Copperfield 'levitating' over the Grand Canyon. The footage of this is so grainy it looks like it could even have pre-dated the invention of the video camera, but it's hilarious. It looks like it was directed by the same person responsible for the Total Eclipse of the Heart video, and for some reason, haunted me in my sleep and caused me to wake up in a cold sweat and resort to watching Seinfeld. I'm really surprised if anyone was fooled by this trick though, it's poor.

Minor gripes. Dishes or plates which have really bad floral designs which look like dirt. There's one particular dish in our house, which is too small to be a real dish, but too big to be, say, a sauce pot or an inkwell, but it's white, and has a pattern around the edge which looks exactly like burnt-on food. Uncanny. It's only today, when I looked closely, that each seemingly random stain, was exactly the same shape. I put the dish right at the back of the cupboard where hopefully I won't see it again. I'm expecting that if you look really, really closely, the flowers have probably faded loads from me trying to wash them off.

I hate 'next customer please' signs in the supermarket. I was going to spend my day today taking photographs for my ongoing collection where I go to places that aren't very interesting, take photographs of how uninteresting they are, and then go home, but it's been raining. Every time I've gone over to the window to look out, usually in between episodes of Season 4 of Seinfeld, or if the three minute clip of Franz Harary making a helicopter 'appear from nowhere' and taking about twenty minutes to do so, there's been nothing but a constant splashing in the puddles in the centre of the street. It's most certainly rain that's not worth going walking in, not least because my current cords du jour are this pair I don't even know where they came from, or whether they're green or grey. You know you're in trouble when you're wearing clothes you're unsure of the colour of, or their origin. But still, if I was Criss Angel, I'd just walk up a wall with my umbrella and nothing would ever bother me. Criss Angel is rubbish. I don't mind Copperfield, because he's cheesy as you like, and makes really bad jokes onstage, but Criss Angel is a total jerk. He's the sort of person you see in rock clubs that commands the dance floor during 'Sugar' or 'Killing in the Name' that thoroughly deserves to be stabbed in the face. I just watched a clip in which he made quasi-psychobollocks-mind-shit carping on about having 'solid objects passing through his body', then hung out with hilarious comedian 'Carrot top' in Las Vegas making appalling Bill Cinton jokes and pretended to get run over by a rollercoaster. No wonder all the bodily modified supermodels all want to marry him. What an arse. What a jerk-ahontas. "Criss Angel is the mind freak, and my mind is freaked! What I don't understand is why there isn't a good, currently active illusionist who uses digicam tricks to make them more interesting. Like Cloverfield or Jackass. Take away the gloss from magic, make it more interesting. And not like David Blaine with his moronic levitation shit. His entire life is a bloody illusion that he himself has been conned.

¡Soy un ventilador de fuck buttons también, seamos amigos!
I am a fan of fuck buttons too, let's be friends

Pokusaj

2008-05-25T13:31:00.004+01:00

Eurovision Song Contest 2008

Venue - Belgrade, wherever Belgrade is. Serbia?

Intro - ridiculous apology announcing last year's fuck up - BRILLIANT

8.00 Last winner appears to have turned into Hiro from Heroes. I don't remember it sounding anything like this. Sounds like it says "shiny crysteal teary spoon" Megalesbian. Is this two songs? It's turned into a sub 'Don't Speak' rock ballad.

8.05 "Welcome to Big Eurovision Party!" Zeljo, Servbias most stylish man, has an unbelieveably goatie. He also plays the accordian and wrote the Serbian entry!

Romania - Massively overblown yet underwhelming power ballad, which for no reason merges into a duet where one of the backing singers mysteriously becomes a cross between Lynn Scully and a Debenhams mannequin. Her parts are slightly more 'sassy'. Absolutely zero chemistry betwen the two parts.

The United Kingdom - Almost certainly going to be forgotten becaue it's second. Hadn't heard this before tonight. Absolutely abysmal opening twenty seconds, that turns into a pathetic Lighthouse Family cast-off remixed by Phats and Small. Bassist looks like he's trying to take a shit on stage.Sickening display of disco-floorl lights. Andy gets way too much into the 'Break it down' bit and starts hugging the backing singers. Terry describes it as 'our best entry in years'. I beg to differ.

Albania - Olta Boka. Backing music soungs like 2090 by Yeasayer. She looks like Joss Stone before she went insane. Lyrics translated incredibly badly. Either this is the worst song ever written, or Albania has about twenty-five different words for 'clock'. One line translates as 'the clock has gone mad'. This is quite likeable, but her voice is far, far too loud and too high and over the top of the music.

Germany - Slags! First good song of the evening, although the stage show and costumes are revolting. The song, a fairly standard electo ballad that sounds a Hot Chip, but has a strange whooshing noise that sounds like a backfiring firework every twenty seconds or so. The 'No Angels' are all reassuring severe and masculine.

Armenia - Subtitles didn't even bother to translate this one. Sounds like most Shakira songs
do after being given the Gay Club treatment, only of course, with superfluous use of traditional instruments. Terrible back dancing typical of Eurovision. Derivative beyond description.

Bosnia and Herzegovina - Tim Burtons remake of The Magical Singing, Ringing Tree. Suspiciously similar to Of Montreal. One of the best Eurovision entries OF ALL TIME.

Israel - Written by Dana International, of course! First man who sounds like a woman of the night. Nice power chord torch song, which would normally excite me, but it followed such a ridiculous Bosnian song. I don't like songs that mix two languages other, fuck that.

Finland - Utterly ridiculous headbanging heavy metal obviously trying to re-create the success of Lordi. Lots oh "hoo! ha!" although the necessary topless men, tight leather trousers and chest thumping goes, it's all present and correct. No tune to be found, mind, and Bruce Dickenson (of which this is a direct imitation) would wipe his arse with it

Croatia - Absolute shit. The whole debacle looked and sounded like an advert for Olive Oil, and just involved a man who looked like Van Morrison singing 'Year in Provence' rubbish, and a man who seemed to be wearing a cricket umpires outfit, literally shouting out nonsense like "they say I'm down in the dumps!" and "I was the first internet!" and then started scratching on a gramaphone. Terrible.

Poland - Given Poland's excellent pedigree in integrating the culture of Western Europe, you'd expect better than this. This is sung by a bizarre experiment to create the least realistic looking women possible out of wax and clay. The song itself is a power ballad so sweeping it could span oceans, and will probably win. It also sounds oddly like the sort of B side that indie bands with singers with high voices used to peddle in the late nineties. Possible winner,

Iceland - group are called 'Euroband'.Supertotalmegaultramassivegay. It's even called "this is
my life!" Female singer appears from nowhere, and hey presto! Jemini! Only in tune, with probably the most advances sounding elecronic sound on show so far, Not particularly impressive.

Turkey - Band have clearly heard more than enough Muse records. Singer looks like a perfect cross between Dave Gahan, Brian Molko and Job from Arrested Development, Really bad lyrics that don't translate well either. I liked it when they all jumped around in the air for the last five seconds, although that didn't save this dangerously average rock song.

Portugal - Baffling looking woman who has tried to encorpoate every single genre of music in living history into her general appearance. Rubbish enough for me to turn off and watch Bosnias entry again on youtube, where they did a completely different 'act' on stage, without the washing lines, and had people digging onstage with large sticks instead.

Latvia - Song is called 'Wolves of the Sea'. Band are called 'Pirates of the Sea' and involves a collectiive of absolute idiots dressed as pisspoor pirates singing songs about being pirates. This is not dissimilar to our song from last year, or indeed, 'Cotton Eye Joe' only with the theme of debunkery on the high seas instead of cowboys or air stewards. The chorus goes "with a hi hi hey! and a yo ho yay!" and you don't need me to tell you it's completely brilliant,.

Sweden - usually good, but this is diablocal. I particularly hated the use of grey filter during the opening verse which was thoroughly unnecessary. The song was massively forgettable, and the singer looked cross-bred with a wild cat, and appeared to have eyes the stretched beyond her ears. Unpleasant.

Denmark - Singer looked like Colin Farrell. Band dressed as English fops completely with trilby, and it sounded like a totally shit Rod Stewart cast off. Singer tried at almost every turn to liven up what was a terrible sing-along that nobody knew the words to, although looked most of the tiime like he was dancing and strutting to an entirely different, more exciting song.

Georgia - Another crap song wih 'Peace' in the title (see also: Croatia). Morbidly dull, that sounds like a funerial chant put to a tacky backing track. I spent the entire of this song listening to Latvias song again, I'm finding it hard to believe that the Latvia song hasn't been written before, it's so obviously catchy!

The Ukraine - This was introduced as song number 18, which it surely isn't. This had some incredibly weird special effects at the beginning with mirrors and lights that reminded me of a scene from The Prestige, and the female singer has borrowed her entire outfit, it seems, from the Armenian entry, only with less of it, and this seems to be a whole load of bombast, but absolutely no tune whatsoever.

France. I'm aware of the brilliance of Sebastian Tellier already, and this was an almost perfect
spectacle of stupidity, involving a group of backing singers male and female dressed as Sebastian himself, and then he came on in a golf cart, holding a plastic globe. The song was really quite good, although quite obviously not suitable for this, considering it was like watching The Flaming Lips perform in a scout hut. Excellent.

Azerbaijan - First ever entry to Eurovison! Absolute nonsense, soprano mentalists singing in angel constumers in glass shattering tomes, and a random lookalike of Gavin Rossdale sat in a black chair. Clearly some kind of good vs evil mess that sounded equally like a mess, but another one chalked up on the 'sounds like Depeche Mode' board

Greece - I hated this the precise second it started. For one thing, the production sounded way too professional, too slick, too out-of-place. It was like listening to a Timbaland produced pop it. It really hacked me off actually, how credible this seemed Fuck this!

Spain - Looks pretty idiotic. Sounds like 'Gasolina.'. Actually stupid, and quite clearly a joke, and designed to sound like Reggatron, a music scene that people tired of three years ago. It had good strobe effects, but really this was like entering Jasper Carrott to sing a pastiche of a Dizzee Rascal song, and was a waste of everyones time.

Serbia - Typically, the host nation follows up their win with something shit. This is no exception ,going down the sweeping route of trying to sound a bit like riverdance or that Norway song that won but shouldn't. This was massively boring,

Russia - This is a complete rip of a song that's already been written, but I can't quite place what. It might be another Rihanna rip off. The singer. who looks like a stray dog having been kicked into a skip, seems incapable of standing up. Oh wait, now he has, and he can't dance any better on his feet. This actually needed something like a baffling rollerskater or a violinist to liven up it's sub A-ha ballad, but it actually didn't improve it in any way. One of the worst. Oh wait, his shirt just fell open. Next!

Norway - I can't think of anything good to say about this at all. It was a very very boring self-righteous female-a-ballad, the sort of which shitty soap stars release as their second single, and moan about it not topping the chart. Awful.

0901522006

Interval - tedious basketball shit. Unwatchable. I voted for Bosnia. Inexplicably, the front runners were Greece ("I hated this the precise second it started"), Armenia ("Derivative beyond description") and the overall winner, Russia ("looks like a stray dog having been kicked into a skip")

I think this was one of the most run Eurovisions of recent years.

Anywhere I Lay My Head

2008-05-18T20:21:00.003+01:00

I was bored enough just now to play 'stream of conciousness weblinking'. This is a game that, well isn't really much of a game, in that there's no competitive element, and isn't actually much fun, and only serves you a reminder that your time on earth is wasted, but it's a game that everybody plays, knowingly or not. Basically, you follow links on the internet, clicking from person to person, without pressing 'back' or having to type an address in, or to enter a search term. Nothing but clicking. The top site for this is, of course, IMDB, but Facebook has it's uses too, although when you try and stalk people you don't know, you sometimes have to use 'back' so it doesn't count. Anyway, the point of the above is that during the game I'd just finished playing, I came across a Facebook tribute page in which loads of photographs of some dead teenager were put up, with a quote from some terrible song or other there (possible Snow Patrol, I forget), and there were several pages of vomworthy outpourings from his friends either too grief-stricken to too cretinous to tribute their friend with the correct use of English. It was a horrible experience. But the part that really got me interested was the fact that all the messages were directed towards him. For the sake of decency, let's not use his real name, let's pretend he was Mummra. The messages would be things like "Oh mummra, u wer taken from us to soon" or "m8 i think of u every nite u were such a laugh gonna muss u mummra" and so forth. I think the fact that they think that mummra is, as his first act in the spirit world, is going to go on Facebook to see what his illiterate friends have to say.about the situation. Although, considering how vain, vacuous and pathetically self-obsessed the world is, that probably IS what happens now when you die. It's certainly what I'd do.
This, of course, is just the tip of the iceberg, the tip of an iceberg lettuce on the tip of an iceberg, of the stupid, total fucking idiocy of my surroundings. To clarify, I'm not suggesting in any way whatsoever that I'm superior to any of the people I'm discussing, although your surely know that already. Anyway, apart from asshole students in their pyjamas in Tesco, mini supermarkets are a breeding chamber, a fucking boiler room for nurturing anger. Today I saw someone knock a jar of coffee off the shelf and it smashed into a mess of glass and brown sludge in the aisle. The Tesco worker saw it happen, and looked enquringly. I've reached the point where expecting basic manners from lank-haired fucks is an utter waste of effort, but this doofus not only didn't apologise, but actually blamed the way the jars had been stacked on the shelf, which was a ludicrous claim. He then didn't offer to help clear up, and mumbled along into the queue and started talking on his phone. This especially bothered me because at some point in my life I'm probably going to have this clown defending me in a murder trial, or shoving a rectal thermometer up my ass, or flying my to Hawaii, and I'll panic. The other main source of hatred experienced in Tesco, (apart from for myself today when I went in unwashes, and bought loads of shit food like tinned chilli and multbuy turgid pizza and then encounter the girl my housemates and I are obsessed with, restocking the orange juice in the freezer ) are students who try to go against the 'student stereotype' of buying pot noodles and beans, and instead think they're not stereotyping themselves because they buy couscous and strawberries and low fat stir fry in a plastic pot, and houmous. All the while wearing flower patterned shorts, sandles, their university hoodie and a necklace made of solid twat. Think again.

Most of the things I really hate, or really get my angry, are so because they're amusingly hypocritical, or annoy me because the situation is essentially a massive mirror held up against my face and a speech bubble saying "this is what YOU'RE like John, aren't you a wonderful human being. Massively hypocritical, and usually I can't even think of a reason why. I got really hacked off at a gig the other week because someone there was wearing a Fuck Buttons T shirt, and I like Fuck Buttons, and went to see Fuck Buttons on Valentine's Day. I get annoyed when people buy books at work that cost £1.99 rather than £8.99 because I think they're cheap, and then I always buy my shoes in shoe zone, which in actuality makes me far worse because at least they don't have blotchy, blistering stinking feet with cramp. Or maybe they do. I get pissed off when people say "yeah, that's a really good pop song" or "that might just be the best pop album of the last five years" as if to say "well I like it, but I'm not supposed to because I've still got my head up the 'alternative' area of my own asshole, so I'm going to damn it with faint praise". It's like say "this is probably the best posioned cabbage I've eaten this year" or "it's a good marzipan cabbage". As far as DIY music shit-crit, my least favourite phrase used to be "hmm yeah, people should listen to more REAL music", or "Why do people listen to Girls Aloud? They don't even write their own songs! Rubbish! People should listen to real music" and then offer an example like Paul Weller, or Feeder, as if Feeder and Paul Weller are factually superior to Girl Aloud. These sorts of comments used to crop up on Teletext soapboxes like The Void and The Vibe, Todays equivalent, the Drowned in Sound messageboards, which I've no doubt mentioned before, is also a breeding ground for dickless fuckfaces with too much time on their hands and filesharing equipment. But I could start writing about what annoys me about the patrons of that website in a size 5 font on a toilet roll, and I'd still need to go and buy another Andrex to finish the list.

This ones pretty hilarious, but I really get annoyed with people who self harm. This defies initial logic because I self harm. It's also not because I think they shouldn't do it, because everyone has the right to look like an idiot if they want to and it's not my business. But the more times I see people who have done it, the less I understand it, them, and myself. It's maddening, and it's a good example of realising how little you know about something you do a lot. I look at people with cuts and plasters and I think "fool", and then I look at myself and think the same. It's frustrating. Then I think about how little I care and how little I want to bring the subject to the dinner table, and realise that's what everyone probably thinks about me. One time when I was in hospital, a psychiatrist suggested I went to some self harm support groups to hang out with other psychopaths, a la Fight Club. If this isn't the most ridiculous suggestion ever, I don't know what is. A couple of years ago, I did go an online forum for self harmers and realised exactly how little I was like any of the people there. It's very carefully monitored, but tt's not a good place to go. For one thing, everyone used a bunch of internet lingo or slang that didn't make any fucking sense whatsoever, and it ends up with a similar playground social situation as any other website, where it's impossible to intigrate because you've only got 5 posts and someone else has 15,000. Likewise, if you have a problem, or a worry, or a fear, very few people respond unless they know who you are, or you've offered your help to someone else first. They present themselves as a very altruistic community, but it couldn't be further from the truth. The other reason I felt completely isolated from them, is that half of them were predictably angst-ridden Lacuna Coil fans who make their own dresses, and the other half were the hardcore terrifying self harmers for whom it had consumed their entire lives, and who spoke almost entirely in three letter medical acronyms, and always had their posts edited for 'graphic content'. This is because, I kid you not, people go on their website as they slash their wrists, and type things like "Oh fuck, there's blood all over the keyboard, I can't see if this is a b or a v. I can see veins hanging out" or "I know how you feel, I tried to slice my knob off with an egg slicer and now it's gone all pussy where the muscle meets my piss-tube and the stitches are falling off" or whatever. This is supposed to help, but it's like a macho competition, and you're still only on your forearms, then you've got no chance of sympathy. So would I like to go out and 'hang' with these people in real life? I'd rather slit my wrists, thanks.

Similarly to the Fuck Buttons anger above, I've found myself getting annoyed with people who like exactly the same things as I do. Now, if I find people who like Raymond Carver, or Bruce Springsteen, or used to watch The Kypton Factor with Gordon Burns, then I make a mental note and then never discuss it again. It's phenomenally boring, and makes me think I'm boring. You don't discover anything new or exciting about the world by having similar interests to other people.That's why I like talking about things I know nothing about, like football, and cars, and being successful. I think my problem has been that through the desire to eradicate all commitments, and having failry loose ties with friends, housemates and workmates, I've created myself the freedom I've always craved to be exactly who I want to be. And now I don't know who I want to be.

Last night I started a conversation with a girl in a nightclub for the first time in probably, or what seemed like, forever. She sneezed so I said 'bless you' she said 'thanks' then we talked about hay fever and how it's good to live in a city because you don't get hay fever and I'm all for cutting down the rainforests because it means I won't sneeze as much. She bought a drink and had to show her NUS card. Then I said I had to go, even thought I didn't, but it was uncomfortable, and I said I'd see her later, but then it was so uncomfortable that I decided to go home, and it was only on the way home that I remembered it was a NUS card from a university in Derby and that I'll never see her again.

No Future

2008-05-09T23:53:00.001+01:00

Nothing has concerned me more in the last few weeks than the passing away of Humphrey Lyttleton. Like most people in the world, my knowledge of Humphrey Lyttleton stretches minimally beyond a) being a jazz trumpeter and band leader I've never heard a single note of, and b) being the presenter of I'm Sorry, I Haven't a Clue. The latter reason is reason enough to mourn, as It'll result in one of two modifications to I'm Sorry, I Haven't a Clue. Either it will stop altogether, or it'll continue with 'guest hosts' a la Have I Got News For You. Right now I'm thinking I'd prefer the show to end altogther. Lyttleton, apart from Willy Rushton maybe before he passed away, the key ingredient that made the show unique. In the earlier episodes, with the 'classic' line up of Barry Cryer, Tim Brooke Taylor, Willy Rushton and Graeme Garden, although obviously the entire thing was invariably hilarious, that Rushton and Lyttleton had the stand-out voices: Rushton with his slightly surrealist and less pun-orientated one liners, and Lyttleton, as host, providing all the perfectly timed put-downs and disparaging comments, particularly in the direction of pianist Colin Sell. These are my favourite elements of I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, these links, because they turn what could, in the wrong hands, be looked at as a lot of RP jollies at the pleasure of their own puns, the self concious and generally self-deprication made it perfect. The other option, having a guest host, just won't work for me. Not only is it too big a chair to fill, it's not the sort of show where you can bring in newcomers and have it work from that side. Whilst it's OK to have people like Ross Noble on the panel and playing Mornington Crescent, the only people I'd be confident in chairing a game would be one of the original panel themselves. Which seems unlikely. A new host altogether won't work in my opinion either. So whilst it's sad that Lyttleton has passed over, it's as equal a tragedy that without a doubt the funniest radio show, which can lay waste to any number of television shows with it, might pass away alongside him. The biggest reason to mourn is that when one of the great literate, intelligent musicians and personalities ended his days, I was watching 'Balls of Steel' and drinking cider from the bottle.

Breaking news. There's a thunderstorm happening right now. I've just sneaked into my housemates bedroom to watch the sheet lightning and enjoy the thought that lots of people who were previously out drinking and wearing sandals and surfwear are now dodging the raindrops and thunderclaps trying to get home before they get trenchfoot. Hopefully they all do. Anyway, luckily my housemate is in some part of Europe right now and not in some part of his bedroom, so I've moved into his room with the lights off and typing by the light of the storm. And this white page.

So what else has happened lately? I'll condense it into a paragraph and then a list. A couple of weeks ago, massively inept and testament to how fuck-for-brains a cinema experience can be, waste of everbodys time and life purpose shit flick extraordinaire 'Pathology' became the third film I've ever walked out of. Even though it was only a fortnight ago, I literally cannot think of a single solitary split second of an idea why I went to see a film I actively knew I'd hate, but there you go. It starred the dopey Connor Oberst thicko moping spatula of a bell-end from Heroes as a twat with a scalpel, and also featured a wealth of boring beards and the slag from 'Lie With Me'. Megabad. Meanwhile, I did manage to make it to the end of 'The Hottie and the Nottie', a bungled waste of time comedy 'starring' Paris Hilton which was every bit as bad as it looked, yet strangely worse in every single way.

I can't believe that A Question of Sport is still on TV. It's probably one of the few shows that's still on that I can remember watching on Friday nights what I was at school. I think of the other shows from that era; Red Dwarf, The Crystal Maze, The Krypton Factor, Ground Force. Even Top of the Pops went, yet somehow A Question of Sport has survived multichannel television. I was in a chip shop on the way home from work about a month ago and the owners of the takeaway were watching Sue Barker drooling over Matt Dawsons what-ho humour and Phil 'Tuffers' Tufnell's munchies-schtick, who has inexplicably replaced superniceandcuddly Ally McCoist and thus completed a full house on his bingo card of appearing on every half-baked crummy TV show he posssibly can. Next stop, "Tuffers Top 10 wicket-bad rock moments' on The Hits. With 'Rock Star' by Nickelback at number five, a song which I can't decide if it's operating on nineteen different tiers of irony, or whether it's just plain idiotic. When I got home from the chip shop, my housemate was watching it with the same emotionless expression the people in the chip shop were. When I asked him why he was watching it, I got the reccommended response. "I don't know". It was on again tonight. It hasn't changed at all. It's still an excuse for dunder-headed sportspeople who can't tie their own shoelaces sat on a desk in a suit their agent chose them, answering pointlessly easy questions about their own sport which nobody would know the answer to. I swear once they had an international canoeist on there, who had to answer questions about canoeing, It was even worse than when contestants choose obscure specialist subjects on Mastermind. Tonights guests were a footballer I'd never heard of, a rugby player I'd never heard of, Jermaine Defoe, and someone I can't even remember. I think the forgettable nonentity was the one of offered the predictable 'Hurr hurr it'd be easier if you'd got rid of the tennis racket!" to a picture-round question with a tennis player obscured by the racket they were holding. This joke is, I believe, made every week. The mystery sportsman round has got worse, and even easier as well. Presuming you know who they are in the first place. And is no match for 'Neg's Urban Sports' on Balls of Steel, anyway.

I still hate everyone. Currently top of the pops are: Students (usually female) who don't bother to get dressed out of their pyjamas to go to the supermarket on Sundays, people who shop in Borders and who expect to receive discounts off damaged books when the same book is in perfect condition elsewhere in the building, people who go to 'Bait Shop', a preposturously trendy night club, and dance to CSS but leave the dancefloor whenever anything actually good comes on like Johnny Foreigner, and are so inept at life they don't even know a Cure song when they hear it. Oh yes, people who deem it necessary to ask me if I'm "meant to look like Robert Smith'. I've concluded now that the more time goes on, the more I might actually try to look like Robert Smith so I can say "yes" and hopefully defeat the point of them asking me in the first place. I could go around and start really annoying people by being agressively goth in their direction. Very intreguing. Very Balls of Steel.

I've come to the conclusion that 'The Airing of Grievances' by Titus Andronicus is probably the best album I've heard in a long long time. Other music I've enjoyed recently hasn't even come close, because this album, and especially 'Fear in Loathing in Mawhaw, NJ', the opening track, are unbelieveable. They sound like every band I like crumpled into one ball. I've so far detected the following references in there

The Arcade Fire ('Tunnels')
Neutral Milk Hotel ('Holland, 1945')
The Dropkick Murphys
Explosions in the Sky
...And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead
Los Campesinos!
Bright Eyes
Desaparecidos
The Walkmen
My Chemical Romance
The Hold Steady.
The Pogues

Elsewhere on the album there's a song that sounds identical to 'Promised Land' by Bruce Springsteen, a song which borrows the riff from 'Bankrobber' by The Clash, and then they play it in the style of The Ramones, and then in the style of Explosions in the Sky. There are spoken word intros and outtros that quote from Shakespeare and Albert Camus, and then the last song is also called 'Albert Camus'. There's a song that sounds like The Rat by The Walkmen, and another than uses 7 seconds of a Strokes song and then wipes it's nose with it. I can't stress how good it is.

I am still unhappy.

Lost Verses

2008-03-25T21:21:00.004Z

I don't believe for one second that Chris Tarrant would still be on television if he hadn't swung the '...Millionaire hot seat. ITV would almost definitely not be consistently recomissioning 'Tarrant on TV' for one thing. I swear that's been on TV for over a decade now. I remember coming home from The Hat Fair in Winchester and finding my parents watching 'Tarrant on TV'. My dad couldn't change the channel fast enough. I don't know what time of year, or day of the week it's still on, but it was on in the pub the other week. Even on silent, pub-goers find mexican banjo-fingered ad peddlars making 'comedy' campaigns involving dogs barking euphemisms for fellatio, or craptacular Japanese game-shows in which a man has to have anal intercourse a squid in a shower unitwhilst it rains jam and tabasco, a right hoot. 'Who Wants to Be a Mllionaire' doesn't cut it anymore. The first signs of death were when it stopped being a three-week long 'event' show and became a weekly hour-long crowbarred inbetween some Ant and Dec shit, an Ant and Dec shit update, and the results of the Ant and Dec shit. One Christmas, they showed an exclusive 'behind the scenes' documentary, which acted like a lethal dosage of information. Not least because you had to watch an hour-plus of Chris Tarrant touring the studio and acting a damn fool, like the sort of boring uncle who wears a 'funny' tie, even at funerals, and then tries to show you magic tricks at the week, but you get the television experience of David Copperfield pulling back the curtain and seeing the matrix of invisible wires and trapdoors which allow him to saw his knob off whilst juggling chainsaws. Basically, the documentary revealed that the show wasn't live. Nowadays nobody thinks this, because they can't keep making the supply teachers and civil servants wait a full 6 days and 23 hours before sitting them back in the chair. But when it was on every day, then there was always a slight suspicion it was live, and you kind of wanted it to be. They didn't do it live, of course, because otherwise the 'phone a friend' didn't work. The 'reveal' was; they stopped the show as soon as the 'fastest finger first' bit was done, and then phoned the contestants 'friends' and basically said 'right, don't go for a shit for the next hour or so' and that was that. Ruined.
There were, of course, many other elements that destroyed what was once a passable, if inane way to waste an hour of your life. My main crutch was when the 'phone a friend' people started offering how sure they were, as a percentage: "Ooh Tristan, I'm sure it's D - Spatular". "How sure are you?". "Oh, about 85%", as if that's an acceptable thing to say. How can quantify how 'right' you think you are on something. I think you're basically offering yourself a 15% get-out clause. Or if the positivity drops below a certain amount, then don't listen to your friend? Once, I'm sure I saw a 'friend' offer only a 60% sure answer on a 50/50 question. I think they were wrong, too. Another problem was adding another 'beat' to the background music so the 'tension' sounded like it has been remixed by Paul Oakenfold. Another is, like most TV game shoes today, in particular Saturday night shows, is the reliance on knowledge of celebrities and pop culture as being 'general knowledge. I think the National Lottery Jet Set is entirely comprised on 'general' knowledge about where Mischa Barton buys her eggs. I remember when Who Wants to Be a Millionaire asked questions about pestles and mortal, and who was 54th in line for the French Throne. I just saw a £50,000 question asking who starred with Jennifer Lopez in 'Maid in Manhattan'. They knew it instantly, of course. I also watched an episode where nobody got the fastest finger first question right. Add to that the fact that someone broke the mystique and won the £1,000,000 and basically revealed that to win you had to be related to royalty, and a complete bell-end, thus ruining the opportunity for the likes of you or I.
Celador are no mugs, however, and well aware of the fact they're now peddling a turd, have made a few changes. Firstly, they've changed the way they money goes up. They think it's to make it more interesting and fast-paced, but I beg to differ. I think it's because even Celador got fed up with having to listen to Chris interview each interesting three times about their mother-in-law's cat before they even had to think before answering one of the questions. Now they're onto the moderately difficult questions long before he's had a chance to bore the universe into imploding. Also, and interestingly, they questions haven't necessarily got easier, and I'm not just saying that because I just got a question wrong about what gargoyles are for. Although, to be honest, the show is regularly up against 'American Inventor' on cable TV, so there's no real excuse for watching it at all, so all of the above is pointless. It's nice to go back occasionally though, it's like visiting a geriatric relative in the last few days before finally reaching incontinence. American Inventor, mind, is utterly ridiculous, although I wish they had a trapdoor onstage so they could just 'crank' the idiots offstage when they realised their device is a load of baloney.
However, if every TV show is relying so heavily on what's happening in the columns of 'Bizarre', then I might be turning into the new Daphne from Eggheads. Not only was I one of the first people in the WORLD to know that Anthony Minghella had died (I was watching New 24 at the time) and Arthur C Clarke (I was listening to the radio). I even did the decent thing and watched Minghella's last hurrah, the BBC's adaptation of Alexander McCall Smith's No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency. I'm pretty sure this was the first 'destination' TV show I've bothered to watch in about six years (I think the last was Martin Bashir's interview with Michael Jackson where Jackson taught Bashir to moonwalk, climbed a tree, and Martin Bashir managed to out-nuts his subject matter by throwing child abuse scandals at the screen in the vain hope it might eventually stick like shit on perspex. Anyway, The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency was completely brilliant, all be it despite, rather than because, the thing was adapted by Richard Curtis and directed by Minghella, who's work has never failed to inspire utter tedium. But still, he put his name behind easily the best thing I've seen on TV in a long time.

I've recently lost my faith in humanity. For two reasons mainly, although I could start listing right here and now the many reasons why either the world sucks beyond all comprehensible realisation, or at the very least, I suck beyond all comprehensible realisation because I don't understand how anything operates in the world in which we live, and this would stop being a blog and start being an encyclopedia. Firstly, Whilst I was out on Friday night, I saw one of my amalgamated backlist of ex girlfriends' currently boyfriend necking someone else. This almost made me sick into my own mouth on sight, but eventually I decided to chunder on the way home instead. But still, it's only when there's personal involvement that two random stangers getting busy on the dancefloor becomes an even more stomach curling sight. Hence I'll commence my fifteen-point plan to not get personally involved with anybody ever again. Either that or move to a new country altogether and poke out my own eyes with a pencil so people can get on with their lying, cheating, vile lives the same delightful and marvellous way they already do, and it won't bother me ever again in the slightest. The other significant happening that caused my marbles to sink even further into the sands of sanity, was seing 'You! Me! Dancing!" by Los Campesinos! being used on an advert for 'Skins'. This seismic shift of lunacy has caused just a densely-coiled spiral of irony that I can't even begin to comprehend whether it's horrible, funny, ironic, expected or what. The more I think about it, the more my mind turns into a choc ice. The entire world's a mess. Forward your solutions to the usual address.

I also, honestly believe, that 'April' by Sun Kil Moon, is a masterpiece.

The Sun Goes Down and the World Goes Dancing

2008-03-24T23:43:00.003Z

How Nightclubs Work (with apologies to Desmond Morriss and Erving Goffman)

Advantage Taking: Seduction tactic involving an uneven balance of alcohol consumption between participants
The Brush-Past: Clubber walks past another with deliberate intent to make arm-to-arm contact (see also: Reverse Bush-Past, Mutual Brush-Past)
Castling: Imitation chess move. This involves a boyfriend/girlfriend, who when they encounter a group of males, the boyfriend stands between the males and the girlfriend, thus 'protecting' his chess piece.
The Chat-and-Check: Making it visually obvious you are talking about someone on the other side of the room, for their benefit.
The Clingon: Unattractive male with significantly more attractive female friends forced into club companionship by blood relation or first-year-housing scenario
Drinks on the Dancefloor: Clubbers who dance with drink(s) in their hand whilst on the dancefloor.
The Drunken Indicator: Clubber does overexaggerated stagger in an obvious display to show they are ready to be taken advantage of, or to do some advantage taking
Facebook Foresight: Wacky antics displayed purely for photographic purposes, to impress the millions of people not currently in the same room as yourself.
Fake Familiarity: Chat-up line of choice, where someone (often an Advantage Taker) pretend to know another individual 'from somewhere'.
Gel-ignite: Loss of haircut prowess due to hot dancefloor lights
Hen Party Horror Show: Either actual Hen Party, or group of inappropriately dressed boisterous females acting so.
Knight-Takes-Bishop: Group of members of one sex infiltrate the space taken by a group of the opposing sex, when they go to the bar.
Lone Ranger: Clubber evidently estranged from their party. Often sports t shirt or clothing irrelevant to their location, Eg. Bonnie 'Prince' Billy t shirt in rock club, Sisters of Mercy t shirt at under 18s night. See Also (Stationary Swinger)
The Mutual Brush-Past: Two clubbers, one passing another, both move their arms to 'accidentally' make arm-to-arm contact
'Our Song': Visually obvious indication that particular song playing has specific meaning. Subcategories: Female 'Our Song' - socially acceptable, although indicated towards Hen Party Horror Show. Male 'Our Song': generally not acceptable due to homo-erotic implications. Couple 'Our Song': highly inappropriate.
Pendulum State of Mind: Attitude of dances that changes when the band Pendulum have their records played, and people become 1992 ravers for four minutes, before returning to normal afterwards.
Plastic Age-defyer: Individual who wishes to lower their perceived age by utilisation of plastic beads in their clothing.
Private Dancer: Dancer (usually male) who places their hand on a 'private' area of the body, IE: crotch-grab, back pockets of jeans. For girls, this involved chest-thrusting and leg rubbing. I can't believe this one even exists.
Realisation Level: This is dependent on the song being played. If the song is already a certain length of time into, then entrance to the dancefloor is deemed unacceptable. Bar-purchases are a valid excuse, but this can lead to Drinks on the Dancefloor. (see also: 'Our Song')
Reverse Brush-Past: Stationary clubber moves their arm to make contact with clubber passing bay, to make arm-to-arm-contact
Smoking Area Meet-and-Greet: Club regular who stops and talks to people about him or herself about their own life and problems to anyone who goes out to smoke. Not to be confused with Lone Ranger, who usually has the talking done at them, rather than from them. Usually this individual has a 'claim to fame' Eg. they are Bono's cousin.
SNL: Single, Not Looking. Hard to determine, as in some nightclubs this is rarer than a dodo.
Sports-Shirt-Midriff: Female clubber who wears a sports shirt clearly purchased several sizes too small so it exposes their midriff
Stationary Swinger: Non-commttal clubber(s) who stand at the side of the dancefloor and 'dance' on the spot. (see also: Lone Ranger)
The Swagger: Less a form of walk as previous definitions of swagger indicate, this is a head movement, as clubber 'investigates' other clubbers as they move from one area of the club to another.
Toilet Bravado: Discussion of how drunk you are/member of your party is whilst urinating
The Tussle: An obviously ruffle of the hair performed as bizarre mating ritual to be seen across nightclub floor by member of the opposite sex.
Unpigeonholeable: Enigmatic clubber who defies simple pigeonholing and therefore remains unobtainable.(see also: SNL, Sports-Shirt-Midriff)

John Widdop likes to considere himself a relative 'expert' on clubbing body language. To date, this knowledge has never worked.

My Year in Lists

2008-02-27T20:59:00.001Z

1408
3:10 to Yuma
4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days
Aliens Vs Predator
Aliens Vs Predator: Requiem
All the Presidents Men
Before The Devil Knows Your Dead
Be Kind Rewind
Billy Madison
Boogie Nights
Cache
Charlie Wilsons War
Cloverfield
The Diving Bell and the Butterly
Ghostbusters
Jurassic Park
I am Legend
Kill Bill Vol. 2
Kingdom of Heaven
Love Liza
National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets
No Country For Old Men
Phone Booth
The Player
Predator
Predator 2
Rambo (2008)
The Savages
Shoot 'Em Up
Short Cuts
Stir Crazy
Sweeney Todd: Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Taxidermia
There Will Be Blood
Transformesr
Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
Wallace And Gromit
Wedding Crashers
XXX

Almosts:

Juno (left cinema)
Total Recall (went on too late)
Underworld (didn't understand it)

In conclusion: I watch too much shit just because it's on TV and I'm sat infront of it. I will admit though, that I'm still secretly proud of the fact I walked out of Juno to watch National Treasure 2

Cruiser

2008-02-25T21:03:00.003Z

Lidl is almost certainly not what it used to be. When I lived in the house of horrors, AKA 69 Bedford Street, I used to shop quite often in Lidl. If it was a weekday and I was off work, and I'd stayed at Annas the night before then I'd walk down Senghennydd Road as a kind of elongated, round about diversion home to buy convenience food. These were the days before there was a Tesco on Sailsbury Road - there was either Robert's Emporium, which was like a glorified indoor car boot sale good for nobody unless you wanted to buy a suit of armour, a decrepit copy of Ludo with no dice, or a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a derivative of a derivative of a copy of the painting with the dogs playing poker, or a rustic scene from 1920s beermat Britain with horses and fox slaughtering depicted in shades of vomit. When Roberts emporium closed, you had a selection of rubble and gravel to contend with to pass the time of day. But yes, Lidl isn't what it used to be. For one thing, it's quite expensive. I spent £20 in there today, and compared to three years ago, I've got very little to show for it. Out have gone the bizarre Eastern Bloc cheese spreads and fungal infected chocolate bars- in come Heinz products, Pepsi Max, Red Bull and roast pheasants. Rubbish. A bottle of Pepsi was £1.49, which last time I checked, was about as expensive as Pepsi gets, without resorting to buying it in Blockbuster. You could probably get more acid barbed soda for your buck in the cinema. £1.49, I spit on £1.49. I did scour the entire steel cage for entertaining freak show consumer goods. and found a few: some soup with a stretched out barcode that looked like the box was melting, a 10 minute excuse for a pasta dinner that screamed 'Funghi' all over the packet, some meatballs with salsa that looked like yak testicles. The rest can fuck off. So far as ruining the world and closing down local newsagents go, I'll be rooting for the capitalism around the corner.

Moving away from the subject of supermarkets - anyone would think I have nothing to do in my life except go food shopping, and write about the last time I went food shopping, and they'd be right - and actually I have got something to add on this topic, which is that I accidentally got caught buying the Daily Mail by the girl in Tesco yesterday, thus shoving any other chances I had of impressing her in a coffin and nailgunning it permenantly closed, but enough of that - let's talk worms. Or rather, Worms. Several hours of the last two days have been spent sat on the sofa under the stairs in my house, listening to live versions or 'Cruiser' by Mark Kozelek and watching my housemates play Worms 3D on the XBox. I can never be bothered to play myself because as anyone who's even been bored enough to ask, knows, I firmly believe videogames died the second they turned three dimensional, apart from a few minor exceptions. I did try and play one, before I moved in here, but I was totally fucking awful at it, and it hacked me off that you had to keep passing the controller around like a oiuja board inbetween each go, and it was far too easy to forget what button you're supposed to press and jump headlong into the sea instead of going to weapon select screen. The second problem has proved disasterous even to hardened players as this evening and yesterday lunchtime, I can begin to count on two hands the number of times I've seen innocent weapon pick ups turn into kamikaze drowning attempts. I wish it was as good as old fashioned worms, but it's just not, it's too glitzy, the worms heads are too big, its too Super Mario, and the weapons are too limited and you don't get enough carnage. At least the one player mode still looks reassuringly shit.

Games since the 3D revolution which have managed to hold my attention for more than two minutes: Goldeneye on the N64, which Martin Jackson had and we used to go around there on Saturday afternoons to absent-mindedly eat digestive biscuits with caramel in, play Goldeneye, and listen to Attack of the Grey Lantern by Mansun and Stamina by The Junket. I forget just how many hours of my life were wasted on this, plus how many biscuits I inadvertantly ate. I remember once the group of us spewed our way through an entire biscuit tin of these chocolate and caramel things. Anyway, the multiplayer mode on Goldeneye was beyond comparison. For one thing, even I was able to play it, although I was obviously hopeless, but it didn't require the memory capacity of a Grand Master to twig which button was 'fire' and which was 'jump'. I always played as Baron Samedi, the voodoo moron from Live and Let Die, purely because seeing his lunatic lanky, gawking frame run across someone elses screen was hilarity in itself. The best special weapon to use is obviously proximity mines, and although the only true way to play was to have to levels randomly selected, the level where you could climb into the air duct above the toilets, and could therefore hide proximity mines in the toilet, both an effective death tactic, and a good, immature I've-just-finished-secondary-school yuk, too. The fact the screen filled up red with blood like you've been shot between the eyes, even if you've just been slapped in the face, was a nice gory touch. The other game is of course, Grand Theft Auto; San Andreas. I discovered this in the summer of 2005, absolutely ages after it came out, surely, and I was off work for the entire duration of the Reading Festival, but obviously I wasn't going because it's rubbish. Mark and Lorna did go, however, and my solution to curing the boredom created by an entire long weekend with nothing to do, was to work out how to wire up a Playstation to the TV in the front room (a 2 hour task), find the disc that went in the empty box in Marks room (another 2 hour task) and then play the game and discover that doing it properly was no fun whatsoever (5 minutes in). I'm so monumentally inept at videogames, especially this one, that I couldn't even get past the drive-by-shooting level, which is like, level 3 or something. Diabolical. Anyway, the fun is quite blatantly in driving around, ruining lives, killing police officers, repeatedly running people over for no reason, drive-by shooting on the beach after hijacking a fire engine, driving massive trucks around pedestrian walkways, driving cars around the skate park - absolutely everything, anything, limitless possibilities of fucking about - anything so long as you don't try and play the game properly. At one point my 'go' had been repeatedly stealing cars and smacking up strangers with a shovel for the videogame equivalent of a week. Amazing. My soundtrack for the time was a load of indie pop CDRs I'd brought back from Winchester - The Constantines 'Tournament of Hearts', 'Set Yourself on Fire' by Stars, The first selt-titled Wilderness album. I also found an album by The The in the house, which I listened to when I took a break to investigate Simpsons Hit and Run. That was shit, but 'Infected' by The The was pretty good.

Post Script. (The) Klaxons completely stole key elements from one of the loading screens on 'Worms' 3D' to make 'Golden Skans'. Fact.