Orange Bastards

I had problems with my new Orange phone. Specifically that they won't unbar it until I fax them proof of my address. However, the next day, when I ring the call centre in Bangalore to get my phone put on, there is a problem. So begins three days of growing rage, magnified somehow by the fact of it being focussed into such a small area as a phone. Obviously, sending the phone to my address is no proof at all, but neither is apparently a British Gas bill (Don't ask. I asked about 100 times [post goes on at long, dribbling length] ... Orange[bastards]'s stringent 'policies' ... Oh yeah, I thought, that's helpful ... Orange bastards ... And I have to fight this battle so I can... give them loads of money. Hmmmm. Time to call up the contract cancellation department. I hate to think how much worse this is going to get.

Things I have learnt this week: everyone has a big company phone line horror story; one of the drawbacks of finding someone to let off steam to is that you have to reciprocally listen to their equally torturous tale, which was probably bad enough at the time and gains nothing in the retelling. Rather like other people's dreams, and other people's travel stories, other people's call centre hell tales belong in the huge lead-lined box that we're going to fire up into outer-space; along with all the call centres.

Life's leaving

My beautiful cousin was the latest eligible female to bemoan her unattached status. “What am I going to do?” she asked me, “I'm going to die alone.”
I told her: “everybody dies alone. If you don't die alone it means there's been some sort of a disaster.”

Compare & Contrast

Hmmmm...

Bill goes Virago

I told him “I’m pregnant.”
He said, “Congratulations! Who’s the father?”
There was a long silence.
“You bastard,” I whispered.
“Oh,” he said.



She told me: "I'm pregnant."
I said: "Congratulations! Who's the father?"
There was a long silence.
"You bastard," she whispered.
"Oh," I said.

Public Life

Saturday morning, after one Friday night too many, I end up outside Public Life, a bar/club situated in a renovated public toilet outside Christ Church, Spitalfields. It was inevitable really; there are so many toilets masquerading as bars in Hoxton, it was only a matter of time before somebody went the whole bog hog. I couldn't even muster the indignation to say they are taking the piss. Of course there was a huge queue outside - this at 8 in the morning - and I'd imagine spending a penny wouldn't get you very far in there, so I put my tail between my legs and went and took a slash up Brick Lane.

The Cat with only one life

The question of Schroedinger's cat, which has consumed top-level physicists and very stoned geeks over the past 100 years has reared its ugly head once again. The question Schroedinger raised states in essence that if a scenario exists where a cat could be isolated from external interference (decoherence), the state of the cat can only be known as a superposition (combination) of possible rest states (eigenstates) because finding out (measuring the state) cannot be done without the observer interfering with the experiment — the measurement system (the observer) is entagled with the experiment.

The thought experiment serves to illustrate the strangeness of quantum mechanics and the mathematics necessary to describe quantum states. The idea of a particle existing in a superposition of possible states, while a fact of quantum mechanics, is a concept that does not scale to large systems (like cats), which are not indeterminably probabilistic in nature. courtesy of Wikipedia

Or in other words, if you put a cat in a box it could be dead or it could be alive and until you find out, you don't know it could be both or it could be neither.

But the question of whether the cat is dead or alive was finally answered today by physioveterinarian Mark Fowells, who in a groundbreaking study published in Nature, pointed out that regardless of the action of the atomic-based poison gas release system indicated in the experiment, after three days or so the cat is pretty much dead.

Fucking hell

Its Tom Lehrer!

Flood and guts

The full under-stated beauty of the British stiff upper lip has been on display as the floods have wrecked middle England. An old couple were taken by a news crew to see the remains of their house, half of which has fallen into the fast-flowing river. They can see most of their bedroom, where a dressing gown still hangs on the door. “How do you feel?” asks the reporter. “Not brilliant,” the old dear tells him.

Ron Jonson

I’m reading the paper on Saturday morning. “Cor!” I think, “This Jon Ronson’s quite good. I think I’d like to write something like him.” I wonder if I should write to Jon and tell him about my idea. “Hang on!” I think, “perhaps Jon won’t like that. Perhaps Jon will think ‘there’s only room for one person to write off-the-cuff, insubstantial fluff cunningly concealing real, genuine insight into one life’s merry masquerade.’ Perhaps, he’ll even take it as an attack.”

I wouldn’t like to attack Jon. I think he’s great. How do I tell him that I think he’s great without looking like I’m trying to attack him?

My boy Noel comes into the room. “Dad,” he says, “Can we go out and play in the pond today.”

I sigh loudly. My wife, down the hall in the bathroom hears me. “Ron!” she shouts, “take him to the pond. Stop obsessing about Jon Ronson.”

Later on, after I’ve wiped the flakes of mud off my glasses and out of my hair, I reflect that life must be really hard for Jon Ronson. “All those people writing to him the whole time, expecting things from him. I wouldn’t like that at all.” I decide I’ll definitely not write to him.

My wife is unimpressed and tells me that if I don’t stop watching Secret Rulers of the World again she’s going to go to her mother’s for the rest of the weekend.

Hmmm, I think. How does he do it? How does he transmogrify his dull everyday meanderings into comic nuggets of gold?

“I can’t stand the way he uses his family in his pieces,” my wife always says when we discuss Jon. I have always agreed with her. I decide to steer clear of anything like that and just report objectively on the things people want to know about, using my charming neurotic persona to smooth out any suspicion that I’m a grasping, malevolent journalist. I wonder what I should have as my first topic.

“How about conspiracy theories?” says my neighbour Dan, who’s come round to borrow the paper. “I can’t,” I say, “Jon’s already done that.” I point to a copy of Them, which sits on my shelf next to the Secret Rulers DVD. “Oh,” says Dan. He takes the paper and goes back next door.

I pause, stare out of the window, and clean my glasses. “I know. I won’t tackle any really big things at all, at least not at first. Instead I’ll just sort of write about what I’m thinking and the conversations I have.”

I stare out of the window a bit more. Then I have a very significant thought: “It’ll be sort of like an episode of Seinfeld.”

Bruce Molsky, Magpie’s Nest

Some people are so accomplished, they defy you to shrink them into language. Instead of piling inadequate superlatives upon them, you are left only able to give them a single, particular word; par example Bruce Molsky. The Bronx-born master of fiddle, guitar and banjo is nothing less than an all-encapsulating definition of the word ‘talent’. Molsky plays the fiddle as though charming an upturned, rapidly emptying bottle of wine. However it is that he plays something, it is how it is meant to be played. He plays accurate, smooth and as lively as a firecracker. Every now and then he jerks some new and unexpected sounds from his instrument, as though waking up spirits that are dozing inside. But the music, American old-time, is not so much mystical, instead practical and rational. It is not spirits, but pure joy that he jerks from his violin, a gift to all who hear it.

Blackwall Tunnel

Drivers are up in arms after the Transport for London authority closed the 30-year old 'tidal flow' rush-hour management of traffic in the Blackwall Tunnel, escalating many-fold the already terrible congestion at the tunnel approaches. There are talks of drivers leading a protest. Some sort of 'drive slow' perhaps?

The lazy do the work

I live in a small flat. Cramped. Cluttered. I do have a washing machine, which is mainly a good thing and only slightly a problem because of where to hang the clothes. I could shell out for a washer-drier, I suppose, but I am either far too piously environmental for that, or just too cheap. For many years I had a very cheap plastic triangular rack which, despite being some way short of commodious enough for the inundation of my laundry, managed to air hundreds of washes in any case. Then, at a friends, I spotted a multi-triangular affair, reminiscent of the spacecraft in Close Encounters of a Third Kind, able to accommodate a veritable bonanza of soggy Mr Byrite products. After some sine qua non procrastination I located and bought a similar one. Two full loads of washing hung from its eaves, plus you could hang towels and sheets over the top. My airing pile-up crises were over. The original puny triangle rack lay against my bookshelves. I twice considered throwing it out. I meant to. I even began to, but it somehow remained, leaning languidly against the shelves, like a too-cool teenager who knows something you don’t.

And then today I was putting up a blind and I rested it on the triple-decker alien spaceship washing hanger, momentarily. It folded up flat on the floor, the way it would be if I ever got round to taking the clothes off it before I’d washed a new load, which is never. After I put up the blind I tried to restore the structure to its full architectural glory but I soon realised that something had gone very wrong. Further inspection revealed all. The fleeting stress of the blind’s weight had caused the chrome effect bars to shear apart, destroying entirely the carefully plotted equilibrium and leaving the entire edifice limp and flat and completely worthless. I briefly wondered if I’d bought it from a reputable store like John Lewis, from where I could never bother to go and claim a refund, but thankfully I think it was probably from the cheapo hardware store down the road. It lies in a heap on my bedroom floor. The cheap white plastic triangle still leans against the bookshelves, coolly smoking a cigarette.

Life's bitter conundrum

I was feeling bored, like, like I was a really boring person and I hadn’t done nothing interesting ever more or less so I got a gun and I shot a couple of strangers, thinking now this is fucking interesting isn’t it and they came and arrested me and now I’m in prison and I’m bored again.

The Times is streets ahead

Accurate forecasts of the weather in individual streets are likely to be available within five years, meterorologists predict.

Today I got run over

Sometimes I feel like crying
I feel like that a lot
Sometimes I have a reason
but mostly I have not

Curse of the Jade Scorpwned

A little late in the day, naturally, I thought I’d wade into the Jade affair. I haven’t watched much of it, but why should that stop me adding my tuppence-worth (note to commissioning editors, that is not an invoice). This is the story of how one young lady from Elephant and Castle made it as a star on Big Brother before – in a frankly quite brilliant move – returning on Celebrity Big Brother. What finer accolade than to return to the scene of your ennoblement, clad in your celebrity ermine robes? Of course it could only be downhill from there.

The papers have been focusing to a large extent on whether or not Jade and her two dim cohorts’ bullying of Bollywood star Shilpa is racist or not. Many commentators have suggested that class differences were more at play – which I would tend to agree with. Other people have reasonably pointed out that racist bullying is a lot like what they have been up to, whether or not the racism is explicit. But I would say that bullying is a big tent and a lot of racism fits snugly under it.

Racism is a thorny topic at the best of times and the reaction to Celebrity Big Brother just goes to show how potent even an accusation of racism is. I would have thought it was enough for them to be horrible bullies, but apparently they must be lanced with the hot blade of multiculturalism.

And what an outpouring of hatred towards Jade! I mean, come on! You’d almost think all these journalists turning out copy after copy of bile and venom had never liked her in the first place and were only forced belatedly to endure her because she was so genuinely popular with the general public. And you’d be right. But to read Tony Parsons going on about her as a fat, ugly pig with no talent or intelligence (Tony fucking Parsons!) is to wonder why fattism or povertyism or just general working-classism isn’t as much of a taboo as racism.

Jade is by no means stupid, despite her greviously uneducated gaffs, but from the minute I saw her I liked her. She is as genuine as they come, which means not 100% but quite a bit higher than most. And she is a survivor – her life story reads like the sort of thing that happens to Charles Bronson before he goes on the rampage. Now its taken another dramatic turn.

If there’s one good thing to come out of this, it’s that Russell Brand wrote a half-decent article in the Guardian. Alas I can’t link to it because the Guardian seem to be embarrassed about paying him and he doesn’t feature on their website in their list of writers, despite his weekly column. But it agreed with me wholeheartedly, only wasn’t as funny.

Keeley Hazell Sex Tape Shocker!!!

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New Years Eve 2007

I've enjoyed it heartily...
or is it hardly?

King Lear, Barbican

Recently, having spent much of my youth cultivating acute cultural ignorance, I decided that perhaps Shakespeare and all that kind of thing might actually be interesting after all. Although previous experiences have been a mixed bag, I don’t think you can really go wrong with a good tragedy. And of all Shakespeare’s major tragedies the only one of which I was completely ignorant – of plot, characters and type and magnitude of tragedy to unfold – was King Lear. So for sometime I had been waiting for a fairly traditional, unaffected production with which to gloriously lose my Lear innocence, free from the attentions of English teachers and the like. This production was poorly advertised and I felt very lucky to secure a seat near the front of the stalls at very late notice. So imagine my delight when, taking my seat in the plush and sparsely attended auditorium, I opened the programme to see that the play would be in Russian, with English subtitles.

Now the more savvy of you may be able to tell, at a glance, that a production by the Maly Drama Theatre of St Petersburg will certainly be in Russian, but I did not. I even read an entire article on the director, Lev Dodin, in a newspaper, without realising. But even though it did occur to me as I was waiting in the bar for the play to start, I made the tragically naïve assumption that if a theatre was to host a play in Russian, or indeed in any foreign language, especially a classic of English drama, they might put themselves out enough to actually explain this clearly on such publicity as they bothered to produce.

Paralysed by the imminent start of the play my girlfriend and I were unable to decide to make a quick dash for a refund and after I’d digested my disappointment at sullying my Lear tabla rasa, we decided to try it out and see just how great Shakespeare is in Russian, in a play that was apparently in rehearsal for three years. The first problem was that the subtitles were on a screen high over the stage and our fantastic stalls seats meant that it was either actors or subtitles. No amount of neck straining could bring the two into one viewpoint. On the other hand, of all the plays to watch in a foreign language, Shakespeare’s probably loses the least in comprehensibility, what with being generally unfathomable at the best of times. Even as the script flashed past me in large green letters, with Russian actors enunciating beautifully beneath, I was still hard-pressed to know exactly what was going on.

As for the production, the Russian flavour was evident even to me. The three daughters were in bright, white robes, set against a black stage, with only grey to liven it up. The Fool, dressed as a sort of Marcel Marceau type, spent much of the first act lounging at a bar-room piano, on which he and Lear played Russian ditties. I particularly enjoyed the piano-playing, partly as it gave me respite from trying to read the subtitles. And the Fool was great to watch in any language.

Towards the end of the first act one of the secondary characters, possibly an Edmund or Edgar or someone like that, unexpectedly ripped off all his clothes and skulked in the shadows of the stage, cock swinging like a bell-rope. My girlfriend perked up at this point. “I’m glad we stayed now,” she confided to me. "Oh, its nothing to do with that!" she said as she realised her profligate transparency. In fact this was just a softener, as early in the second act three more of the actors divested themselves of costume and cavorted about in the altogether. Trivia buffs should note that this may well be the only Shakespeare production in history to have stolen an old Young Ones joke – one with a naked Neil and a fortuitously placed flower pot.

In the interval we decided to swap seats for some further back, in the hope that we could watch the play and read the subtitles in one go. Of course life being what it is, we chose seats that still didn’t allow us to combine both, but yet were far enough away to make reading the subtitles a strain. This did not help me follow the action at all. By now I’d had a good read of the programme, which explained that the Russian translator had cut out lots of the more political parts of the play, along with most of the soliloquies, and was playing up the kitchen-sink drama, all fathers and daughters. Even I could tell that this left some very peculiar gaps in the plot, not least the fact that there was no battle with which to bring about Lear’s final tragedy. I was still hoping for a bit more of the Fool, before Lear callously dropped the news that he’d been hanged, without so much as a by-or-leave. As for the finale, it just sort of happened, without there being any real explanation for how or why. I assumed that I must have fallen asleep, but apparently not.

Swan Lake, Hackney Empire

It is a little known fact that the word ‘ballet’ actually derives from the French phrase ‘ball et chaine’ since men would only ever go to see it at the behest of their wives. I myself, seeking cultural enlightenment at any and every opportunity, was not exactly unwilling to go, but I did wonder whether it really was so much more cultured than staying in and watching Celebrity Big Brother.

This being Hackney, I managed to get myself offered out at the bar before the show had even begun but things looked up when I realised that I was allowed to take my pint with me to my seat.

I know no more about ballet than I do about the nocturnal habits of the Amazonian laughbeetle, and hence I am not really in a position to judge whether the Moscow State Ballet Team (or whatever they were calling themselves) were any cop or not. I am fairly sure that it was not the most avant-garde of performances. All the ballet clichés were employed liberally; plenty of girls on tip-toes and men literally prancing about in what looked like painted-on tights. It was noticeable how the men leapt around arses ahoy, whereas the women were all dressed in tutus - as though they’d been pushed through the centre of a satellite dish - which kept their pretty tuches more or less secret.

But nothing got up my nose so much as the way the dancers were so devilishly pleased with themselves. Every spin and leap and tip-toe was accompanied by a god-awful mile-wide grin on the face of the dancer. I would later realise that this was their idea of acting, but it remained gratuitously irritating.

It is true that the ubiquity of shows like Swan Lake makes these things clichés in the first place. When Swan Lake was first performed it was probably full of revolutionary techniques, but nowadays its a museum curio. As ignorant as I am, however, I did recognise quite a few of the dance moves, mainly from reading the karma sutra.

Having sat through assorted people prancing about differently-but-the-same for the best part of an hour I was shocked at the interval to be told that there was a story which I was supposed to be following. I had gleaned that a strange Crowleyesque man - who thankfully did not look pleased with himself but did remind me a bit of Robbie Williams – might not be a good guy but he was dressed all in black and grimacing at every opportunity. Beyond that the relevance of the king, queen, jester and ladies hopping around as though they were trying to look like swans was completely lost on me. Knowing a bit more about what was going on helped me enjoy the second act all the more, but I still managed to totally miss the tragic denouncement. In ballet it is not always clear whether someone is dying or just having a sit down.

Something as old and venerable as Swan Lake is supposedly timeless, but not when you are sitting through it.