A few words on the subject

A few words on the subject

The collected

ill-informed drivel

of

Richard Asplin

August 2009

A few words on...

public speaking.

22nd Aug 09

Hello you. You all right? All good? (an expression that seems to have appeared unwanted from nowhere in the last 5 years. Much like Zac Efron. “All good.” I mean it’s nice enough, knee-jerk response-wise. Quite cheery in fact. All is good. Not some, all. Hmn. However now I think about it, it’s frankly crashingly optimistic to the point of numb-skulled naivete. All good? What tosh).

Anyhap, wotcha. As I’m at a loose end, I thought I’d sling some verbiage up regarding the very peculiar experience of bookshop readings, as I just did one.

Now I have more experience of bookshop events than most (except James Patterson I imagine who appears to co-write a new thriller every 48 hours), given that betwixt the years 1995 and 2002-ish I was in charge of setting up and running bookshop events for Waterstones in Harrow, (formerly Ottakers, formerly Hammicks, formerly Burtons Menswear, formerly a car-park, formerly a Jurassic wasteland, formerly Woolworths), then Books etc in Bayswater, and finally the entire Books etc chain. You name ‘em, if they had a book out, I nagged their press office, stacked chairs, placed ads, hooked up microphones, piled books, poured wine, manned ropes, flapped dust jackets and fetched Pret Platters.

It was an odd time, frankly. Attempting to wade through the PR press release puffery and second guess which authors the clamouring British public would be eager to meet and which ones they couldn’t give a flying fuck for.

There was the vaguest of vague rules o’ thumb which, as far as I know, still hold today:

If you were a literary prize winning big-knob, you got an “evening with” style whatnot. Chairs, seats, microphones, an ad in the Ham & High and whichever minor celebrity we could bully in to interviewing you with promise of warm chardonnay and a cheesy nibble. (Mark Lawson was normally up for it, the lens-bothering rascal).

Sporting “heroes” with their tedious biogs got a lunch-time hour in the City. A table, chair, a BLT and a member of staff to open the books for them. I could be spotted standing to one side at these, bored out of my spectacles. 60 long minutes of fat-necked stripey shirted Timothys, guffawing and giving broad-shouldered handshakes to Cricketers and F1 petrolheads, ruddy chops beaming.

I always wanted to put out an extra chair next to the sportsbloke and tell queuers it was for the ghostly ghost writer who’d written the damned thing based on a single drunken Dictaphone lunch and a yawning 4 hour anecdote about “Johnners.”

Other TV type celebrities got lunch-time West End whatnot (Covent Garden, Piccadilly) and arrived surrounded by assistants and editors and assorted “people,” each one paid, it would appear, in a direct ratio to how much needless panicky arm-flapping they did.

Everyone else, pretty much, could piss off.

Oh we tried to get the shopping public interested in mid-brow readings of mid-brow debut novels or commercial lounge-lit airport schlockbusters, but nobody cared. We’d go through the motions in order to keep the publicists happy but I lost count of the events we had to pay staff to attend in disguise to pad out a sea of empty chairs as beaded-Hampsteadites droned from their not-at-all-awaited opus “The Rememberance of Forgetting” or “The Smell Of Happiness” or “The Texture Of Loss,” or "The Crapness of Bollockitude" and similar hogwank.

Which is why I was quivery with apprehension when it was mooted that I would go from a sneery, tank-topped marketing man on the till-side of the arrangement to the nervous, sweaty-palmed author trying to pretend he doesn’t mind only one person has turned up. A third paperback novel from a complete nobody? This was going to be embarrassing. Visions of the Linda Grant event at Books etc Finchley Road in Feb 2000 haunted me, as poor Linda was forced by a solitary member of the NW1 twiterati to read aloud at a lectern to an otherwise hauntingly empty shop.

I needn’t of worried, however. The fine staff at Borders on Oxford Street, Waterstones in Walthamstow and The Big Green Bookshop in Wood Green looked after me terribly well. The show I wrote works just as well infront of 70 people (thank you to pretty much everyone I’ve ever met who turned up to Oxford Street for that one) as it does 5 people (an even bigger thank you shout-out to the Wood Green posse, he said in a revoltingly aging DJ-ish sort a way).

I’m repeating the show (60 mins of stand-up, card tricks, con-tricks and a terrible swine-flu pun, he plugged shamelessly) at Waterstones Bishop Stortford in Oct and am going to try and bring it to Cardiff afore the year is out. Feel free to drop by. And if you can bring a Pret A Manger BLT and/or Mark Lawson, I’d be bionically grateful. 

Oh by the way, the painfully prolific James Patterson. I mentioned him at the beginning. He used to write those rather good Alex Cross thrillers with the spooky nursery-rhyme titles. “Kiss The Girls,” “Along Came A Spider”, “Roses Are Red” and so on. He hasn’t done one in a while, I’m guessing due to the fact he’s run out of playground rhymes for titles. Certainly his last one, “My Friend Billy’s Got A Ten Foot Willy” didn’t sell as many as they’d hoped.

Love to all

Rx

A few words on...

boating comedians.

19th Aug 09

Hello all. Welcome back and so on.

I wasn't going to post any thoughts today as frankly I'm exhausted, beat, whacked out and snoozy up the wazoo. My own fault of course. As the expression probably goes, "my head was writing cheques that my quadriceps couldn't cash."

I'll explain for the little it's worth.

Despite me being on a late-shift (11:45-8pm) my alarum exploded into life this morning at 7:10a.m. with brisk, well-meaning, up-and-at-'em eagerness. It knew, y'see - for it and I had spoken at length on the subject - that I wanted to take advantage of my free morning and catch up on my exercises. (A sane individual would use a late start to catch up on, perhaps, snoring, duvet-examination or toast, but sane has never been on my CV under hobbies or indeed interests).

Yes, I'm exercising, y'see. I'm not entirely sure why. Certainly neither my job, lifestyle or future plans involve me doing anything more strenuous than lifting my spirits, running taps, jumping queues or climbing socially. However truth be told I have reached the age of 432 months with little to show for it, buffness-wise. Skinny and malnourished in the places a man should be buff and bulky; pale, doughy and lumpy in the places one should be lithe and/or trim; two chins where a jawline used to be; purple corrugated fence about my tum where my belt leaves a welt (what Russell Brand would call 'a belty-welt' I expect) and a curved balloon of a pot belly that, when I'm lying on my back, makes it look like my erection is approaching exhaustedly over a bald hill.

Mmm, nice.

So I've taken myself in hand - not in the enjoyable adolenscent sense, mother - and am pummelling my feeble frame through sit-ups, press-ups, chin-ups and a sweat-drenched pelt around Kennington Park whenever the bellowing Sargeant Major that is my "Official British Army Fitness Guide" instructs me to. (The book doesn't actually have brass buttons and moustache, but I like to imagine it does).

It instructed me to go running this morning, however I rolled over and tugged the duvet o'er my head. It had been a  late-ish night before, with me telling myself to go to bed while sipping tea from my Captain America mug and watching Charlie Brooker on "You Have Been Watching."

Which is what these few words are about. Not the show, which is about as much fun as one can have with a television in my opinion. No. The links.

Have you seen them? For the life of me I can't recall who actually sponsors the show. Bulmer's Cider? Talk Talk? Radion? I have no clue, and frankly couldn't give a stuff. What bothers me is the sponsor's links themselves. The most ingratiating, punchable, smug-faced ponce-filled upper-middle-class twunt-monger of a link selection that throws me forward, yelping, for the mute button.

For those who haven't seen them, they're very simple. A young man, doing a bit of stand-up, and then the voice-over. "Someone-or-other sponsors Channel Four Comedy." Honestly I can't remember who it is. Persil? Li-lets?

Harmless enough, you'd think. However the coke-addled twit-cocks in the "meejah" industry that have cooked this up have decided to cast the least funny, least likeable, least stage-presencery, least not-an-oaf-y oaf that their half day at RADA, cappuccinos supplied, could get them. He's not even a Stars In Their Eyes cut-price budget Tesco Value version of a recognised comedian. Blimey, Blimyou, blime-us all, even Pot Noodle know not to attempt something clever or original and to just rip off Flight Of The Conchords..

The blisteringly insightful, rib haemmoraging insights from this floppy-haired, Jongleurs, Oxbridge toss-monkey in a boating blazer - yes! A boating blazer! White piping and everything, like he's Parick McGoohan's inbred nephew. "I am not a number, I am a friend of Toby's. Y'know Toby? From that party in Richmond?) include (careful now, watch your ribs):

"If I could get my mobile phone to disepense bad coffee, I need never go into an internet cafe again."

and

"Where do I go to find out which comparison-site is best?" (see what he did there?)

Oddly, considering the show they sponsor, he's exactly the type of trust-fund, floppy fringed fuckknuckle that Charlie Brooker ripped to peices in "Nathan Barley." One has to imagine Mr Brooker hasn't seen the links.

The only possible explanation is that the sponsors (Ariston? British Leyland?) are trying to increase viewing figures for the show (and therefore the market for their product - Pritt Stick? Natwest Piggies?) by convincing the viewing several that this gurning Harrovian twerp is what awaits them in their local live comedy club, so better to skip the Time Out listings and the cab ride and just stay in.

Sigh.

Anyhoo, in case you havent got the message, it's so bad, it makes me writhe and kick and scream and throw scatter cushions and spill tea and get so cross I wake up. So when the show ends at ten to eleven, I have to pace around and mutter and yell at my wife and spend half an hour with a crowbar prising my buttocks apart and unclamping my teeth. (I rinse the crowbar between these two tasks). Which makes me tired in the morning and I don't go running. So ontop of this guy being so painful that, I swear, even the added on canned laughter doesn't laugh very much, (honest), he's making me unfit, and therefore unhealthy, so I'll die sooner and miss the second series.

And this git's fresh bunch of links.

Ah well, every cloud.

Love to all. Rx

A few words on...

blogs and such.

18th Aug 09

Okay so. Blogs. Blogging. The – excuse me – blogosphere. Gollyblogs, Blog Marry Avoid, Raining cats and blogs, blogarithms, yuleblogs, a little mouse with blogs on (well I declare). The meandering, meaningless, mind-spills of the world. I’ve been pondering them e’er since I made my cyber debut ooooh way back last month. Some terribly kind yet clearly malnourished and confused individuals were kind enough to leave little comments saying they would “follow” my blog if I were to write one.

Blimey.

I’ve nary followed a blog myself. Unless I have? Is reading a website regularly “following” a blog? I’m not certain. I s’pose not, as “websites” tend to be group efforts, selling tools, shop-fronts, and sponsored corporate fat-cat glittering money-spinning capitalist tools of “da man,” whereas “blogs” are run by individuals and made of twigs and sunshine.

On an unrelated note, is it just me that is convinced the twee-er, gentler, more fairy-lit, barefoot, long-haired and  acoustic the ad message, the more the product is actually manufactured by Japanese steel robot Nazis out of kittens’ tears and the still-beating hearts of Rwandan sweat-shop orphans? I’m looking at you, Apple.

I have an on and off love relationship with the interwebulator (which us luddites insist on calling it, somehow suggesting that we are both cerebrally superior to the greatest collection of human knowledge in history, and it was invented by Heath Robinson and Wilf Lunn during an episode of The Great Egg Race). My online “favourites” still consist entirely of BBC News, TrainLine, Amazon and Google, as if the years 2002-2009 never bloody happened. I let out a cyber sigh. (Sighber? No, doesn’t work).

Enough. I’m going to make a coffee now. I actually want a tea but we’ve run out.

Of tea.

I know, I know.

Back again.

It all reminds me of the David Finchley 1995 Bradly Pitt and Morgan Stanley Fletcher movie “Seven.” (Oh sorry, “SE7EN” as they cleverly called it. Is it me or was that title frankly screaming for a sequel called “EI8HT”? C’mon Hollywood, pull your fingers out. And don’t give me ‘nothing famous comes in groups of eight.’ What about Kellogs Variety Packs, eh? Eh? There you go. Death by Ricicles. Get it done. I'm seeing Gene Hackman as the lead Ricicle).

Anyway, you remember it? John Doe (Kevin Spacedust) plays a mentalist who makes the punishment fit the crime in a Cadbury’s selection-box of blood, bone and macabre prosthetics. Gluttonous people are made to eat themselves to death, vain people are disgfigured, lustful folk are fatally sexualised and whatnot. Fine. Nice idea, dark movie, everyone’s a winner.

However, what was with “sloth”?

You must recall it? Sloth? It was written on the wall above a skeletal pederast who’d been tied to a bed for exactly one year - bed sores, infection, chewed off tongue, the whole Amy Winehouse look.

Punished, presumably, for his sloth.

But I'm sorry, for HIS sloth, Kevin? HIS sloth? You're the one who tied him to the fucking bed for Chrissakes. There he was, harmlessly going about being a filthy paedo (the term "harmlessly" clearly the wrong one, but I'm building up speed here) and then YOU break in, all baldy head and scabby fingers, strap him down and torture him for being a shiftless lazy assed, bone-idle slacker. How’s is that fair? I mean really.

And even if he COULD have been busy in bed - crocheting, making Christmas cards for the mentally ill, mastering the Rubik's Snake - you cut his bleedin' hands off.

Very mean. Unless, of course –as is traditional – I’ve misunderstood? Perhaps the point was the fellah was in fact an incredibly lazy, half-assed, shiftless slacking paedophile? Maybe Kevin Spacerace was punishing the chappie for not meeting his prepubescent bumming quota and letting the side down? But isn’t that a good thing to be falling behind on, Kevin? Kevin?

We need answers. Ideally 14 years ago, which is how long I’ve been worrying about this.

The reason all things Sevenly are on my mind, dear reader, is actually to do with another scene. Around the middle bit, when Morgan Freeman’s Catalogue and Brad Pittsburgh have found Kevin’s lair. A standard psycho crib, frankly. Red swinging lightbulbs, bible pages on the wall, neon crucifix, thin single mattress and odd bits of odd people in murky jars.

But just in case these starter basics from the IKEA “nutjobe” range aren’t enough to convince us Spacey keeps toys in the attic, Morgan finds Hollywood’s maddest of mad things. John Doe’s “journals.” Yes, his diaries and memoirs. Books and books and books of pages and pages and pages of handwritten personal thoughts, notions and ideas. Can you imagine the madness of it? The twisted narcissistic obsession of it all? Hundreds of pages. Every day, every moment, every passing thought captured and written down and accounted for over years and years. You’d have to be crazy.

Or a “blogger”, if you prefer.

Hmn. Anyhap, thanks for joining me. Love to all. Rx

A few words on...

being stalked.

20th Aug 09

Okay, now I'm slightly freaked out. Not completely freaked out, just a little bit. Hell, goddamn and bless my whatnot, I've been more freaked out in my life. 'Course I have.

For example:

1. When I was 12, I was waiting for a train at Wembley Park station with my friend Neal. For reasons passing understanding, we were amusing ourselves by tossing our annual 6-zone travel card wallets into the air, 10 feet high, over the fat steel roof beams of the station, and catching them again. A harmless and fatuous pursuit. Until, in a twist of physics rules that would have had Newton spazzing out like Scooby Doo, my little red plastic wallet  landed atop the steel beam and came to rest there, perched like a red plastic wallet-shaped Puffin, or p'raps chaffinch.

I freaked out, spinning, teary and terrified I would have to live on the platform of Wembley Park like a vagrant for the rest of my life. Neal was comforting, however a Watford train pulled in at that point and, like any sensible chap, Neal decided that he shouldn;t have to live on the platform of Wembley Park like a vagrant with me, not if it meant getting home late and missing Jossie's Giants.

Upshot was, I went home - bluffed my way through the barriers by flashing a library ticket, got home, told my dad who then accompanied me back to Wembley Park and gave me a leg-up to fetch the still perched pre-Oyster pouch.

That, freaked me out.

Howe'er - being spotted on television by a chap who got disproportionately excited that I resemble the comedian Robin Ince, to the point of taking a screen-shot and bunging it on section "Week 38" of his website, is one thing.

To then have the fellah spot me while I'm shopping in Selfridges a fortnight later, howe'er, reprint the photo on his blog and mention it again has freaked me out slightly more.

That the online obsessive is Ricky Gervais, is probably the most alarming aspect.

Anyhap, that's that.

Love to all

Rx

A few words on...

questionable headlines.

23rd Aug 09

Back again. Honest, this isn’t going to turn into a daily update. Don’t panic. I have every certain belief that I will hit a dry patch or a busy period or a bi-polar trough and not write a syllable for weeks.

Today dear reader, howe’er, ain’t one of those weeks.  I have a day off the day-job and a painter is up a ladder in my lounge drinking orangey tea from a PG Wodehouse mug and splashing matt on my nick nacks, so I’ve a spare few minutes.

Anyway, picture this, if you can be bothered.

A sixteen year old boy sits on a train. He’s heading to Scotland with his mum and brother for a week’s rain-lashed holiday. Look at him, the twerp. Lank brown hair, bottle-bottomed glasses, constellations of purple angry acne where his cheekbones aren’t, gangly legs too long for his black denim jeans, his head is a cloudy mix of adolescent confused existential angst, frustration and moony crushes. Deep in his holdall, lies a copy of “Zen & The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance” which he can’t really follow. In his ears a Walkman hisses The Smiths’ 2nd album ‘Meat Is Murder’. You can’t see under the table, but take it from me, on his feet are some huge, and terribly misjudged Pony basketball boots in the least pleasing mix of white, purple, green and black known to Pantone. He has feet like two gangrenous dinghies.

He’s pathetic, frankly. No girlfriend, never been kissed, never been given a second look. Mainly because of his rather intense personality which is a jumbled car-crash of Stephens Fry & Morrissey and Bruce’s Wayne and Willis. That and his huge, and terribly misjudged Pony basketball boots anyway.

What’s he doing? Well, he’s flicking through his mother’s Daily Mail, looking for the canine whimsy of a Fred Bassett as is his weekend wont, when he comes across an image so revolting that will stay with him for twenty years.

The image? Well if I give you a clue, dear reader. It’s August 1989. The year of Batman and The Last Crusade? Any ideas?

Of course. The Marchioness boating accident.

Even if he wasn’t wading through the Mail, there’s no way he’d have missed the news as across the aisle of the carriage and up and down the busy train, the pleasure-boat upending has hit every headline. Tabloids n broadsheets alike are spinning the same salty tales of Thames-based aquatic mayhem in as much Benchley-esque suffocating horror as the public can stomach.

The revolting image however isn’t a photograph. No “Ben Gardner” style severed wrinkly head peers off the page next to John Junor. No, the image that still haunts the poor chap is the Mail’s judicious choice of balanced headline. A headline so startling to his fragile, 16 year old mind that he spills his Max Pax coffee onto his Queen Is Dead T-Shirt.

The headline? “DEATH OF THE BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE.”

It’s been 20 years since this event, which is why it’s on my mind. And it don’t take much to summon in me the same feelings of hell-hot rage, teeth-clenched venom and blinding, unspeakable anguish those 5 words whipped up back then. Of course, enough broadsheet ink, stand-up spite and Late Review weariness has been spent on deriding the Daily Mail and it’s picket-fence, county cricket, Enoch Powell middle-Englishness. I wouldn’t now touch the damn thing with tongs. However back then, the paper’s particularly revolting, class-conscious “oh the poor twee, tennis-playing Oxbridge waifs” take on the Marchioness tragedy was my first personal experience of this sort of journalism. The journalism that decided this Martini-drenched marine mishap was somehow more awful because those who perished had clear-skin, straight teeth, ponies, Labradors and 985 A-Levels between them.

If I’m honest, of course - and of what possible purpose could these ramblings be if I’m not – the effect of this headline on a still growing mind, fed with lefty Channel 4 comedy, watered with George Orwell and drizzled with the Baby Bio of Billy Bragg, was the reverse of the intended effect. Rather than sobbing for the lost generation, renting my garments in twain at the thought of entire Chiswick House Parties being bereft of twits called Giles and Toby, I summoned up this thought: Good.

You’ll forgive the confused, self-righteous anger of the ill-educated adolescent, I hope. It wasn’t “good.” It was horrible. An unthinkable, stupid death and a tragic waste of life. However the Mail’s take on it that Saturday, the idea that if I’d been on the boat, the headline have had to be amended to “DEATH OF MOSTLY BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE PLUS A LANKY, GREASY HAIRED, SPECCY, ACNE-RIDDLED SMITHS FAN IN HORRIBLE TRAINERS HE BOUGHT FROM ‘FREEMAN HARDY & WILLIS WITH HIS SATURDAY JOB MONEY” brought out the worst, class-war like anger a 16 year old Cure fan could muster.

Anyway. Of no consequence or interest to anyone. Twenty years later, with older but presumably no less beautiful victims sharing “their stories” of that fateful event all over the Sunday Supplements, I was reminded of how I felt that day. Or rather, how some ignorant, public-school popsy of a feature writer was able to make me feel by her revolting choice of words.

Still feel guilty about it. Just wanted to get it off my chest really.

Love to all, Rx

A few words on...

moving pictures.

26th Aug 09

What-ho and such. Me again. As ever.

A few things to discuss this evening, none of which are particularly related, but ho-de-hum, let’s see if we can’t pull together some vague theme. Tch, Mr McCann never had this problem.*

First and secondmost, blimey there appears to be much going on at the local flea-pit, movie-house, flick-den, cinematograph and/or multiplex these days, some of which is of interest.

There’s Audrey “spiderweb” Tattoo in some starchy swoony period flick entitled “Coco, before Chanel.” I’m guessing the title is to make sure the eager, Butterkist chomping hoards who are queuing up for this francophilic frock fest aren’t disappointed that the story ends just before she discovers Cocoa, has the chocolate drink named after her and sets the fashion world alight with her innovative “hot chocolate with marshmallows” ensembles.

Secondly. If it’s close-ups of injections, Mexican stand-offs (stands-off?), bloodthirsty head-trauma, women’s bare-feet, quirky soundtracks and chapter headings, then yes, it must be the new

Quentin Taran-taraaah movie. Have you seen it yet? Gosh what a lot of nonsense. It seems, single handedly, to have ushered in a new cinematic term of legitimate critique, however. “Noir, epic, biopic, melodrama, chopsocky, actioner, weepie” can now all stand aside and welcome “silly” into their oeuvre. Because that’s what it is. Silly. Not silly like Airplane or The Naked Gun is silly. Not silly like Mary Poppins is silly. Silly like The A-Team is silly. Or Manimal.

Oh, and this might just be me, but the other thing that “Inglourious Basterds” is (apart from a title that plays merrie buggers with one’s spell check): Lush countryside? Check. Simple county folk? Check. Real life historical figures? Check. Story playing fast and loose with history? Check. Simple minded no nonsense southern fellah somehow making it through history’s landmarks despite his idiocy? Check.

Yes, it’s Quentin Tarantino’s “Forrest Gump.”

Forrest, if you will, Gimp.

It took The Guardian’s G2 section about two weeks to usher in an article about the spelling on the posters of the new movie “The Time Traveler’s Wife.” Ahh, G2. Forever lagging, breathlessly behind in the egg-and-spoon race of popular culture. Articles soon to appear in the next 6 months include “ooooh, aren’t Blue Peter presenters getting young?” and “has anyone seen the hilarious adventures of a yellow cartoon family called 'The Timpsons' or something? It’s on TV?"

By the by, The Time Traveler’s Wife got a bit of a write-up thing in The Guide a few weeks ago. It told us all, as we ate bacon sandwiches and planned our weekends, that – unlike other time-travel stories (Back To The Future, Terminator, The Lost World, Bill & Ted, 12 Monkeys etc, this one is special because the hero cannot control where or when he goes. He just pops off, willy nilly.

Right. Like Quantum Leap, then?

Finally, who do I have to write to in order to get something on the internet changed? I’m thinking of Google Images. I work in an open plan office with mostly twerps in their early twenties. As a consequence, the mere mention of a female movie/pop star (or “hottie”) has all the fellahs swinging round in their chairs, hunching over keyboards and jabbing “Megan Fox” or “Ashley Tisdale” (a name straight outta Coronation Street, surely?) or "Jessica Alba” into Google Images with clammy, sex-starved digits. Which appears to be its primary function. There are, after all, 321,000 images under the search for “Ghandi”, and 4.2million under the word “hotties.”

So I propose we change it to “Ogle Images.” Petition begins here.

Hmn. As it turns out,. no real theme at all. Apart from Richard appears to have a little too much time on his hands.

That’s it.

Love to all

Rx

*Mr. McCann was an R.E. teacher at my secondary school and was infamous in our greasy circles for talking twaddle, guff, nonsense, nincompoopery and assorted drivel at assembly, much to the dizzy bewilderment of the 1000 boys stood before him. He would, however, magically cause the whole thing to click together like a german engineered episode of Alfred Hitchcok Presents with the sparkling close. “And ahem, we er, we too, must be uhm, must be er good Christians. Yes.” Brilliant.

A few words on...

the growing up spread.

27th Aug 09

Hello all.

A few things.

I’m sat in front of the television on Thursday evening. I’ve had pasta and pesto, grated cheese and chilli flakes (because I’m alone in the house, plus my cooking ability hasn’t moved on much beyond being 15 years old). I’m on my second can of Kronenburg. I’m celebrating a tad, y’see. (Yes, with pasta and beer. It’s like living with David Furnish round here, you know. Cor blimey, yes). Went for a new job today. Same company, but a training role, rather than a team management role. And as everyone knows, training is just stand-up with handouts, so I’m crossing my powerpoints for that.

But I digress, predictably. Just saw an advert on television which I have been moved to mention because, well – you’ll see why.

Picture lots of beautiful young people, if you can do so without being sick in your mouth. It’s a summer’s evening. The girls are in sparkly flip-flops, the fellahs in those polo shirts that, for reasons passing understanding, have pre-faded references to American colleges on them, possibly random numbers (“69” is hilariously popular) and the sleeve seams on the OUT-FUCKING-SIDE. Why? Top Man, I’m looking at you.

Anyhoo, the twunts are laughing and clinking glasses of Bulmers and listening to Toploader and cooking sausages with, like, an amaaaaazing Jamie Oliver recipe (“you just take a bit of the old sausages and stick ‘em on the old barbeque. While you ride a moped. Like, amaaaaazing”)

The tag line on this ad is as follows (pay attention): “For the perfect barbeque, it’s not the heaven’s you want to open. It’s the Hellmans.”

Is it possible to explain how angry this makes me? And do I need to explain why? Read the slogan again. I’ll give you a minute…

Figured it out? We’ll get back to it at the end.

There’s another slogan out there that causes my teeth to grind, my finger nails to dig bloody scabs into my palms, my buttocks to clench so hard I could eat coal and crap a diamond. You won’t have seen it. It’s written on a blackboard outside the pub at the end of my road. The pub is the “black sheep,” in Oval. It’s an irritating little boozer, with a mixed clientel of normal people, Hoxton tosswipes, grumpy oldsters and chirpy, thick-calved Aussie staff. It has poker, a quiz and whatnot. And a big fucking screen showing sport. And THIS slogan on a sign outside. Here we go. Ahem:

“Big Screen Football! We’re like Marmite, we cater for everyone!”

Sigh. I don’t even really know where to begin with this one. It depresses me even to type the damn thing. I mean really. Honestly. For Chrissakes.

“We’re like Marmite, we cater for everyone!”

There’s something terribly depressing about an exclamation mark, don’t you find? Something equally depressing about the fact whichever pub-employed “wag” came up with this fatuous slogan, epigram, nee strapline, they are, not to put too finer point on it, an idiot.

I’ll say it once and then we’ll move on. Marmite doesn’t fucking “cater” for everyone, you cock-brained twitwit. That’s not the point of its campaign at all. Yes, you either love it, or you hate it. True. But that doesn’t bloody mean that the arseing manufacturers of “The” growing-up spread are shitting well “catering” for everyone, does it, ya ill-educated knobwipe. Marmite do NOT cater for people who don’t like Marmite. They don’t, okay? Unless you mean, by deciding NOT to legislate, lobby or force the hand of the home-office into making Marmite com-fucking-pulsory, Marmite are kindly “catering” for folk who don’t like Marmite. Are they? No. Of course they’re not. Surely clear to everyone with a third of an education and a dictionary.

Much in the same way, The Black Sheep pub is hardly catering for everyone by showing big screen Football. In what way, for example, are they catering for me, who rightly sees football for the thick-necked panting runabout-the-park tribal personal-goal-substitute it is?

Answer? They’re not.

Oh, and in case you hadn’t figured it out, you don’t want the heavens to open during a barbecue. Because that means it’s raining.

Twerps.

Love to all

Rx

A few words on...

goals.

28th Aug 09

Hello.

I won’t keep you hanging about. You’re probably busy. Like me, I expect you have an afternoon of standing outside a small newsagent planned. Pointing up at the “mobile phones unblocked” sign that winks and flashes it’s flirty neon come on to passers by, as if this is in any way a legitimate service.

I mean for heaven’s sake. Am I completely misjudging this, or is this a service entirely offered for thieves, cutpurses, scallywags and ne-er do wells? Might the sign just as well read “we’ll make stolen phones re-sellable”? What on earth is next? 24 grocery mart & Newsagent – lottery tickets, confectionary, tobacco, help in crow-barring open any Kevlar cases you’ve nicked from the back of a Securicor van. Plus top up your Oyster card here!”

Tch. Kids these days, etc.

I spoke about soccer yesterday and wanted to clarify something, as literally none of you have written in to ask about.

I am not a soccer fan. And yes, I am aware that football fans dislike the use of the word “soccer,” as it appears to be a nasty Americanism, sullying the honest face of the – ahem -beautiful game (Christ). Which tells you every thing you need to know about football fans whom are, by and large, dunderheaded beered-up dullards as “Soccer” is an abbreviation of “Association.” As in Association Football. Something football fans would have known if they’d paid attention in class instead of drooling over shiny Panini stickers and dreaming of playtime.

Here’s the thing with my hatred of soccer, and indeed all team sports.

And no, it isn’t an anti-hooligan rant inspired by Millwall’s recent display. (Not that I’m brushing such an unthinkable thing aside, however I’m not going to bang the drum for that particular theme. That the game inspires idiots and violent thugs is not the fault of the game).

It’s this. It’s love.

Love is the ability to put ones happiness, contentment, well-being and self-esteem in the hands of another, I’ve always thought.

To be so open, honest and bare that one can give one’s heart entirely over to somebody else. To give that individual the power to lift you up or destroy you, cheer you or upset you with a word or a look.

Giving this gift to another is the terrifying risk we take when we fall in love.

Football fans, however, can do this on a weekly basis. Lift their hopes and dreams of an entire year and hand them to eleven of the thickest millionaires in the world. Have their afternoons ruined, their weekends dashed and their years ground into dust due to the behaviour of overpaid strangers who don’t like them, know them or care one jot about them. Or about anything more than their skinny wives, sponsorship and sports-cars.

And quite simply, I don’t understand it

To put that much store by the physical skill of a faceless collection of Italians, Brazilians, Spaniards and Scousers? Couldn’t do it. To go to the pub on a Saturday night in a foul, stool-kicking, beer-spilling rage, blacked mood and furious thunder cloud for a hat. Not because of something you’ve done. Not for something you partner, children or family have done. No, because of the clumsy tripping over of a wet-looked 19 year old millionaire in a polyester jerkin.

Why would you do this? Why put yourself through it?

Men no longer have goals. We used to, years ago when life was more tricky. But now we don’t. Not really, not in a world of 24hr TV, instant trousers and leather-effect playstation doilies.

So we invent phoney goals. Abstract goals to pin our ambitions on. And then we paint them white and stand them at the end of a large field and watch other stronger, fitter, handsomer and richer men fanny about in these goals for 90mins plus injury time and 15mins for Bovril and a meat pie.

Me, I’d rather have goals of my own. Achievements I can take responsibility for. A mood that is my doing. But I guess I’m one of the few.

Or perhaps not. There is hope. Hope in the guise of SKY television’s outdoor ad they have at the moment. You’ve probably seen it, uglifying station platforms and billboards of our nation. It’s about a million foot by a trillion foot in full colour. It has a photo of face-painted, curly-wigged, polystyrene-handed, leering buffoons gurning out of the back of a motorway coach.

The line beneath reads “We know how you feel about football, because we feel the same way.”

Sky Sports feel the same way about football as I do? Blimey, thank Christ for that.

Cameras with gun-sights and exploding pundit-chairs any day now. Huzzah and haroo.

Cheerio. Away for the weekend now.

Love to all

Rx