One of these days I will work out why people have second "helpings". How does a bowl of custard become a "helping"? It's not the most helpful of substances. You can't paint your house with it (not for very long, anyway). It won't do the dishes. Apparently it can be promoted to run a government department, but so can squirrels and Chris Grayling, so that's hardly high praise.
It's probably something to do with "helping yourself", showing that the idea of self-service long preceded petrol companies trying to save a packet at gas stations.
I've just looked at the bottom of this blog, where some text is begging me to "label" this blog, and gives the examples "scooters, holidays, autumn". I've like to know who decided that those were the ideal archetypes of a successful blog. Perhaps they'd just returned from a scooter holiday in late September. Or maybe they were just really stuck for something interesting to suggest that a blog might be about, which is fair enough on the basis of this one.
I'm not helping.
Saturday, 16 October 2010
Tuesday, 12 October 2010
Repertory
A hard word to spell, repertory. Even harder to explain what it was. My dad wistfully recalls days when there were many rep theatres, and they were a popular form of entertainment for decades, and a key way for young actors to earn their Equity cards and work their way up to the West End.
I'm sure a lot of it was awful, and you couldn't switch it off after 5 minutes and stick the snooker on, which is probably why television was so beautifully placed to steal its ecological niche and push it towards extinction. It's a shame TV took over, though. Just think what Sky could have achieved if they'd managed to deploy Live Pause at the Bolton Empire.
There probably isn't a Bolton Empire. But I suppose in some sort of post-apocalyptic nuclear bomb ravaged world where the North West of England is the first to recover we could soon all be under the dominion of hordes of suburban Mancunians desperate to avenge the Bolton massacre. Best to die in the first flash, I think.
I'm sure a lot of it was awful, and you couldn't switch it off after 5 minutes and stick the snooker on, which is probably why television was so beautifully placed to steal its ecological niche and push it towards extinction. It's a shame TV took over, though. Just think what Sky could have achieved if they'd managed to deploy Live Pause at the Bolton Empire.
There probably isn't a Bolton Empire. But I suppose in some sort of post-apocalyptic nuclear bomb ravaged world where the North West of England is the first to recover we could soon all be under the dominion of hordes of suburban Mancunians desperate to avenge the Bolton massacre. Best to die in the first flash, I think.
Chew
My granddad always used to tell me to chew my food 32 times. I don't know where the number came from. It feels somewhat unlikely that extensive field tests had been conducted with a troupe of volunteers munching away on a specially prepared batch of sesame seed buns, all chewing them for a different number of chews and then monitoring their digestion and testing the quality of their stools.
"Sir, I have the results! The stools which demonstrated the most efficient processing of the useful, nutritious parts of the special sesame seed bun belonged to volunteer Clyde, sir."
"Clyde? But isn't he the one you made chew 32 times because he looked at you a bit funny? Something of an own goal!"
One chew for each tooth. It's good as a beginning. If you have no teeth then I suppose you want food that you don't need to chew at all. Where it breaks down is in between. What the fuck are you supposed to do if you only have one tooth left? What requires one chew? And how can you chew with one tooth anyway, even once? It's bullshit, granddad, it's bullshit I tell you!
Still, I miss him sometimes, even if he did talk shit about chewing.
"Sir, I have the results! The stools which demonstrated the most efficient processing of the useful, nutritious parts of the special sesame seed bun belonged to volunteer Clyde, sir."
"Clyde? But isn't he the one you made chew 32 times because he looked at you a bit funny? Something of an own goal!"
One chew for each tooth. It's good as a beginning. If you have no teeth then I suppose you want food that you don't need to chew at all. Where it breaks down is in between. What the fuck are you supposed to do if you only have one tooth left? What requires one chew? And how can you chew with one tooth anyway, even once? It's bullshit, granddad, it's bullshit I tell you!
Still, I miss him sometimes, even if he did talk shit about chewing.
Barrister
I spent some considerable time last night seething. I love the word seethe, but I don't love seething. Especially when trying to sleep. It's not soothing, seething.
The reason for the seething was just one of many reasons I'm a supporter of trade unions (this doesn't necessarily mean being a supporter of Bob Crow, any more than saying you're a people person compels you to like Donald Rumsfeld). But you really shouldn't be able to fuck people over when it comes to jobs. A very good friend had been offered a temp job doing some clerking for a barrister (I think he's a barrister - I'm very hazy about this things. Apparently there's things called "laws" and stuff). Unfortunately she spent the entire weekend before her first day with a stomach bug that left her vomiting like a lawn sprinkler, aching in places that didn't ought to have ached, Mr Frodo, running a scary fever and being semi-comatose.
Come Monday morning, she got up, vomited again, made her sandwiches, vomited again, put on her jacket, fell on the floor for a while, then got up and went to work. After 400 yards she nearly collapsed in the street, so she phoned her boss to explain, was nearly sick over her phone, left him a message and staggered back to bed.
She kept calling to try and get hold of the barrister, but he didn't answer his phone. She called a mutual acquaintance who managed to get hold of him and see what the situation was.
He replied with a single message: "No longer required"
Now, I appreciate the frustrations of someone trying to do a job when someone helping them doesn't turn up, but anyone who isn't even prepared to listen when that someone tried their very best and just physically could not manage the journey is really just a spiteful cunt. He probably feels a lot better about his life now, grasping at the illusion of power in a vast and uncaring universe. That's nice. I'm sure he gets a warm glow. Hopefully he'll get so excited about it that he'll drink too much on his own in his kitchen, and run skipping happily into the street, where he'll slip on a discarded used condom, crack his head on the pavement and wake up hours later with all his fingers eaten by rats.
You can but dream.
Hmm. Actually, this probably puts me in the same camp as Bob Crow and Donald Rumsfeld.
The reason for the seething was just one of many reasons I'm a supporter of trade unions (this doesn't necessarily mean being a supporter of Bob Crow, any more than saying you're a people person compels you to like Donald Rumsfeld). But you really shouldn't be able to fuck people over when it comes to jobs. A very good friend had been offered a temp job doing some clerking for a barrister (I think he's a barrister - I'm very hazy about this things. Apparently there's things called "laws" and stuff). Unfortunately she spent the entire weekend before her first day with a stomach bug that left her vomiting like a lawn sprinkler, aching in places that didn't ought to have ached, Mr Frodo, running a scary fever and being semi-comatose.
Come Monday morning, she got up, vomited again, made her sandwiches, vomited again, put on her jacket, fell on the floor for a while, then got up and went to work. After 400 yards she nearly collapsed in the street, so she phoned her boss to explain, was nearly sick over her phone, left him a message and staggered back to bed.
She kept calling to try and get hold of the barrister, but he didn't answer his phone. She called a mutual acquaintance who managed to get hold of him and see what the situation was.
He replied with a single message: "No longer required"
Now, I appreciate the frustrations of someone trying to do a job when someone helping them doesn't turn up, but anyone who isn't even prepared to listen when that someone tried their very best and just physically could not manage the journey is really just a spiteful cunt. He probably feels a lot better about his life now, grasping at the illusion of power in a vast and uncaring universe. That's nice. I'm sure he gets a warm glow. Hopefully he'll get so excited about it that he'll drink too much on his own in his kitchen, and run skipping happily into the street, where he'll slip on a discarded used condom, crack his head on the pavement and wake up hours later with all his fingers eaten by rats.
You can but dream.
Hmm. Actually, this probably puts me in the same camp as Bob Crow and Donald Rumsfeld.
Hairstyle
I'm quite lucky to still have one. Hairstyles seem to be a bit like making new friends down the pub, or having a favourite advert or something, a thing that somehow fades with age until not only is it not there, but it seems odd to have ever cared in the first place.
Not that I ever made any new friends down the pub. I always assumed it was something that happened to other people. Maybe it didn't. Or only to pub-based alcoholics. If you're an alcoholic, being pub-based is either a) a really good idea or b) a really fucking stupid idea. Not quite sure which.
Anyway.
I have a hairstyle, of sorts. It only looks very good when I treat it with a special hairstyling implement, known to some as millinery, and to me as a hat. If I don't wear a hat, the hairstyle adopts sarcastic quote marks around it, and becomes a hair "style", mostly consisting of some sort of tenacious fluff, like a really stubborn dandelion in a gale.
I don't really get to choose my hairstyle. It sort of happens to me. I'm currently sporting what is almost certainly called a grown out mid-period Alan Turing. Ha. I bet there's no-one reading this* who has one of them.
* a statement which is equally true if you just stop at this asterisk.
Not that I ever made any new friends down the pub. I always assumed it was something that happened to other people. Maybe it didn't. Or only to pub-based alcoholics. If you're an alcoholic, being pub-based is either a) a really good idea or b) a really fucking stupid idea. Not quite sure which.
Anyway.
I have a hairstyle, of sorts. It only looks very good when I treat it with a special hairstyling implement, known to some as millinery, and to me as a hat. If I don't wear a hat, the hairstyle adopts sarcastic quote marks around it, and becomes a hair "style", mostly consisting of some sort of tenacious fluff, like a really stubborn dandelion in a gale.
I don't really get to choose my hairstyle. It sort of happens to me. I'm currently sporting what is almost certainly called a grown out mid-period Alan Turing. Ha. I bet there's no-one reading this* who has one of them.
* a statement which is equally true if you just stop at this asterisk.
Monday, 4 October 2010
Cancan
Having read and agreed with Victoria Coren's excoriation of School Cheerleading, I was disappointed to be corrected by a younger (female) person who apparently knows about these things and told me that British schools have male cheerleaders too. There goes that little bit of (male) feminist outrage in me, and leaves me feeling slightly bewildered, as if a lamb had got up and head-butted me for my vegetarianism.
If indeed we have equal opportunities cheerleading the UK, then I suppose the argument moves from "is it sexist bullshit" to purely "is it sport?". And the problem that goes with that is simply that no-one has an agreed definition of what sport actually is, so any attempt to answer the question reveals a suitcase full of interesting prejudices and preconceptions that say quite a lot about the person shoving their oar in. Ooh, that was a sporty metaphor. Or was it?
I have grave misgivings about the idea of dance as sport, but I'll also admit that this is based on no real analysis of the arguments and little more than a lingering feeling that giving someone a Gold medal in Traditional Morris is sillier than giving the same for running into a sandpit in a slightly complicated way.
Which it may not be.
All of which has left me feeling a little bit confused and lacking in a good dose of moral certainty and outrage. So what I need the Government to do - right now - is introduce can-can dancing to the national curriculum, making it eligible only to pretty girls whose legs represent at least 60% of their total height and who have perfect skin. Then all I'd have to do is wrestle with whether or not it was more sexist and degrading than Beach Volleyball.
Sunday, 3 October 2010
Mileage
I'm running out of steam it would appear. All down to a shocking lack of commitment. I keep telling myself that I'm just too busy and a bit tired and therefore can;t keep up, but it's all shocking self-delusion and the simple fact is that I'm a lazy bugger.
I always wanted to be a writer. Much more than I wanted to be an actor, singer or cricketer, and certainly much more than I wanted to be an office worker. But like almost everyone else the job that pays the bills takes over the rest of your life. Why else is the small talk protocol to ask "so what do you do" so early on in a conversation?
"So, what do you do?"
"Well, sometimes I eat. Tea, breakfast, lunch - that sort of thing. Occasionally a Mars bar, but not so much since my last tooth fell out."
"No, I mean, what do you do for a living?"
"Well, I wouldn't be living if I didn't eat. Excuse me, but you seem a bit dim."
The Onion has a particularly nice take on it here
But I shall not give up! Oh, not me. The purpose of this blog is to keep me writing, so that eventually I start writing properly. You've got to keep your hand in. So I can't give up. Plenty of mileage in this yet.
I always wanted to be a writer. Much more than I wanted to be an actor, singer or cricketer, and certainly much more than I wanted to be an office worker. But like almost everyone else the job that pays the bills takes over the rest of your life. Why else is the small talk protocol to ask "so what do you do" so early on in a conversation?
"So, what do you do?"
"Well, sometimes I eat. Tea, breakfast, lunch - that sort of thing. Occasionally a Mars bar, but not so much since my last tooth fell out."
"No, I mean, what do you do for a living?"
"Well, I wouldn't be living if I didn't eat. Excuse me, but you seem a bit dim."
The Onion has a particularly nice take on it here
But I shall not give up! Oh, not me. The purpose of this blog is to keep me writing, so that eventually I start writing properly. You've got to keep your hand in. So I can't give up. Plenty of mileage in this yet.
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