caritas
On Saturdays, when I try and go to the farmers market, my excursion is almost inevitably accompanied by a quick trawl of the legions of charity shops nearby.
I am frequently struck by the way that certain objects will nearly always be present (unless you actually need them, of course), there will be some dodgy brassware, mugs with the name of some defunct software purveyor and screeds of half-read chick lit. What truly mystifies me, though, is that if you find one specific book, for example, then there is a good chance you'll find several more copies as you progress. I'm not talking about the Tony Parsons or Nick Hornsbys that are omnipresent, but why would seven people discard their copies of 'The Incident of the Fingerpost' all at the same time? It's not the discarding of that particular work that surprises me, it's the timing; some kind of bookclub suicide/recycling pact?
This phenomenon isn't confined to books, I have also observed clusters of Stoneware hot-water bottles and most bewildering to me; breast-pumps. Maybe this is an occurrence confined to West London? and the close proximity of a population twice that of Iceland is causing a strange charitable synergy. Perhaps because I don't spend that much of my time in the borough I haven't been gripped by the urge yet?
I'll keep you posted, in the meantime feel free to add your own charitable congruities.
vermin
I've previously blogged about our rather less than feral fox population, currently we have one extremely healthy looking specimen, which lounges around in sunny patches in the back garden, and on occasion looks in at my bedroom window (my bedroom is partially below ground, and when lying in bed I am near eye level with the garden). This fox is so degage (sorry haven't found acute accent yet) about our presence in its world that I was able, whilst under the influence of a modicum of wine, to creep up to within three yards of it before it showed any sign of concern. If I were in its position the prospect of a mildly pissed electrician lurching up the path trying to be silent would have had me over the hills and far away long before. One of our neighbours has actually been able to pick up one of the foxes, when it became stuck down the side of a neighbours outhouse, I hope she was de-fleaed after.
I'm afraid that things are going to get worse for our urban foxes, and no, I'm not referring to the putative formation of the Ealing and Acton hunt, putting their chelsea tractors to good use delivering Jocelyn and Jocasta to the the latest opportunity to blood themselves. No indeed, our council have decided to up the ante on the recycling front and issue us with special buckets to take our compostable waste, this is not just for coffee grounds and apple peelings, but also for bones, cooked meat and all manner of disgustingness that we have previously been told not to put on our compost heaps because they encourage rats and other vermin. So, instead of lying out on the street overnight in tempting black sacks just waiting for a questing nose, there will be a row of buckets filled with putrefying gunk, three points occur to me; 1) I wouldn't want to be the bucket emptier, is this the modern equivalent of the night-soil collector? 2) I'm very glad they have lids, our foxes may be urban, but aren't yet equipped with opposable thumbs, 3) Somewhere in West London is going to be the mother of all tiger-worm bins, I hope, unless it's an enormous mound of rotting food, with obligatory entourage of very fat rats.
The problem, of course, is, what will the foxes eat when the muck-buckets are introduced? Or will they move up to the area that has been described as the binge drinking capital of London and feed off discarded chicken bones and partially digested kebabs as once they were wont to do. Our council has a bewildering policy towards recycling, they collect glass, metal and paper from our doors, but refuse cardboard and plastic, they have even started to charge at the local tip despite having converted it to a bespoke recycling centre. This schizophrenia is by no means uncommon, in Glasgow, where I spend a large part of my working life, they will take mixed paper, plastic and cans, but no glass, in Glasgow???
Finally, now that the nights are drawing in, those tiresome little buggers the squirrels are making their presence more obvious, this seems to mean that they feel that they have a remit to dig up my bloody pots. I have been contemplating this with less than enthusiasm, as they do like to pull things up and take a bite just in case they like it, so far, the only way I have found to limit this activity is to put a thick layer of gravel on all the pots, as the pebbles hurt their poor little toes. Maybe the foxes will eat them?
tedium
Apologies for non-blogging activity, but there has been very little happening in this part of London since my last effort. As I have mentioned before, this is the beginning of the freelancers' season; somewhere out there unfortunate PA's are being compelled to investigate the options for the christmas party/compulsory team building exercise/product sales review/brainstorming session and like a complacent shark hovering under the surface the events and logistics companies are waiting for them.
For a poignant tale of the other end of the stick please refer to
http://www.greenfairy.com/ my sympathy to the author, she got out just in time.
So, for the future; I have no idea what is coming up, in many cases I don't even find out where a gig is until I am on my way, still less who I am doing it for or what it is about. In the meantime I am engaged in that most vital and tedious of tasks, trying to persuade people to pay up, it's very important as a freelancer to get your invoices out quickly and accurately. For example, I'm still negotiating with the main contractor for the fashion show, I was told I would be paid somewhere around my normal daily rate, it has taken me about a week to get his address,and we have still not agreed a price, even when I get the invoice off, it is unlikely that I will be paid within the twenty-eight day period stipulated.
Oh well, any moment now the 'phone will ring and some pea-brained project will be handed (read:dumped) on to me, someone else will have done the recce, not taken any notes, or if they have I won't get them until two days after the gig. I'll prep the equipment in good time, and turn up to load, only to discover that half of it will have been diverted onto another show, and I am left with a pile of filthy untested crap, and somehow I'll end up driving three times across london to collect/deliver some vital component. It's a glamorous life...
Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.
nomenclatura, part two
One of our regular clients is a monster pharmaceutical company, ubiquitous on this side of London, as their buildings dominate the A4 on the way out to the airport. For some reason we always seem to do conferences and team building sessions for the sports and leisure drinks division, and every year they produce a series of great ideas, new products and marketing challenges. Last year it was sweet stale water (with a sports cap), this year we were privileged to sample the new drink aimed at the lunchbox and impulse buy sector (I wish I was making this up).
For as long as I can remember, their tooth-rottingly sweet blackcurrant syrup drink has been around, I can even remember drinking it myself as a sprog (I know that it is decribed as 'toothkind', but that simply means that it is full of aspartame and other artificial sweeteners instead of sucrose, and does nothing to educate the palate away from our national obsession with sugar). Now there may be a blueberry version, code named 'blubena'. Now, although the blueberry is a native american plant with a long and honourable history of cultivation, and I have consumed them with pleasure as a part of a fruit salad or an american type muffin, I am not entirely certain what they are supposed to taste of, all I can recall is a sort of general, slightly tart, fruitiness. I don't think they are meant to taste like boiled up jelly sweets of the type most commonly found in motorway service stations, this may well appeal to the untrained palate of the three to six year-old, but amongst us supposed grown-ups the response was a unanimous revulsion. I suspect that this innovation will never make it to market.
The conference delegates were provided with entertainment last night, of an improving kind. A Mr Panto (and I didn't make that up either), provided them with a murder mystery which unfolded and was solved during the course of their mexican buffet meal. I won't bore you with the details, beyond saying that it was coarse and corny, and pushed all the right buttons, as various executives were willingly set up and embarrassed in front of their colleagues. What seriously impressed me was that said Mr Panto had memorised the names of most of the delegates, considering a) that the seating was informal, and b) that there were 240 of them this was quite a feat. I won't reveal how much he charges for this entertainment, beyond stating that it is a great deal. As a team bonding exercise? probably better than paint-balling and much less messy.
Todays' words from the techy lexicon are rhyming slang;
You will often hear delegates or audience referred to as 'billies', this term is produced from Billy Bunters:Punters.
Similarly the term 'woollies' comes from Woolly Jumpers:Humpers, (humpers are the labourers of the tradeshow and conference industry, they are hired to transport large and heavy objects and materials into venues, and then take them out again afterwards, they are very commonly antipodean or south african, and mostly rugby players).
Finally, and with apologies to any american readers, 'septic' which comes from Septic Tank:Yank, I'm not sure why, most probably because it sounds good and indulges the british toilet humour obsession.
More gems from the techy dictionary as and when I come across them.
lies, damned lies etc, etc...
You may have noticed a small, very discrete number right at the bottom of the Blog, this is my site meter, it records the number of visitors that this Blog has had since I got it to work a couple of weeks ago. Thing is, it's a little bit cleverer than that, and can tell me the identity of each visitors' ISP,
NOT your personal ID I hasten to add.
If you click on the number you can also explore the wonderful world of Blog stats, there is a cute little world map that shows little dots for visiting ISPs as well as many other features, should anybody wonder why the most popular visitor seems to be in Sheffield, this is where my ISP is hosted.
So I am enchanted to discover that among the occasional readers is someone from Plant City, Florida, how perfect is that? Outside the UK I have also had visitors from Arizona, New Jersey, Minneapolis, Missouri and yet more in Florida, Vancouver and Montreal, Norway, the Ukraine and Hong Kong. Fraternal greetings to you all.
I hope that what seems to me to be a very parochial Blog continues to entertain outside this island even if perhaps it may be a bit confusing sometimes, rest assured that it often feels that way to me too.
high fashion?
Those who care may be aware that this is London Fashion Week, those that know me will realise that fashion and I are no friends, although according to todays' Womans Hour; black is back.
Yesterdays' strange job was to facilitate a fashion show, in my infinite ignorance I thought that you put a show on, and people came, or not, as the case may be. How wrong I was, in London Fashion Week there are shows all over the place and the great and the good are bussed around from one show to another, these are plotted to a tight schedule, with certain key shows immutable in the timeframe.
Our show was on a building site in (fashionable) Clerkenwell, we were using a shop under construction and the idea was that the models were seen through the windows from the street, partially through sheets of plastic, and then perambulated about through piles of building materials and out into the street where they all lined up across the shop front.
We got there about 1.30 with four hours to set up and rehearse, and a scheduled show time at 5.45. Our creatives were a couple of very nice french boys with big woolly cardigans and the compulsory descending trouser. They were very accommodating and undemanding, and the show was lit, soundchecked and rehearsed in record time, the actual fashion designer was very happy and all we had to do was wait for the buses. This was where it all went wrong; Clerkenwell on a Sunday is not the fizzing latte-fuelled creative maelstrom that loft dwellers would have us believe it is the rest of the time, in fact, on its day off, it subsides back into the sort of morose light industrial griminess that characterised it before it got trendy, and there is nothing whatever to do. If ever we had an excuse to slope off to the pub then this was it, and whilst there were three reasonably attractive looking pubs within 5 minutes of our venue, shut they were, and shut they stayed.
About 100 people turned up about 15 minutes after we should have done the show, and joined us in our wait. Every now and again a message would come through from fashion central; ' the buses have left such and such, and will be coming on to you next', so we waited, and waited, and waited, eventually, at 7.45 it was decided that, wherever the buses had gone, it wasn't Clerkenwell and we did the show. Cameras flashed, models stalked uncertainly over piles of sand in four inch heels, and before you knew it it was all over and done with and the designer was taking her bows. That was that, and we pulled it all down.
My next mission was to get over to Heathrow, where we have another show on, and take some bits and pieces that were forgotten (it is a feature of this company that something is always forgotten). In this case, the Heathrow show had forgotten to leave us any keys to the storage units, which gave us access only to the one store which has a combination lock, we were able (just) to shove everything away and I had to try to get to Heathrow from Bow before the pub shut.
When I got to the hotel (I missed the pub), I found my colleagues, quite drunk and in fits of hysterical laughter. Without ceremony I was forced into the gents toilet and was entranced to read this exhortation posted on the tiles above the urinals:
please do not eat the urinal cakes. What were they thinking of? I know that the articles in question are often referred to as pineapple chunks, but there the resemblance ends. I think we need to know.
straight to hell
September is the beginning of the freelancer's year, and whilst things haven't exactly taken off with a roar, work is starting to trickle in.
Last weekend I was at Audley End House in Essex, our mission was to floodlight the exterior in pink for a wedding. The commission originated from an unholy alliance of a society catering company and a DJ/disco company. This meant, for us, that they supplied most of the equipment, and that it conformed to that special substratum of kit designed for DJs, which meant that it looked nice but didn't actually do very much, or do it very well. In particular, the shade of pink that the floodlighting units produced was so insipid that the limestone walls of the house simply sucked it up and spat it out. Fortunately we were able to save the day and opt for magenta, which looked splendid, and only slightly kitch. Personally I think the chocolate fountain in the wedding marquee had the edge on us, but only just. Just for your delight, the picture is of that very building in its pinkness.
This has also been the week of PLASA, the other entertainment technology annual beano, this is the one where suits from the middle, near and far east wander around, bemused by the never ending displays of flashing lights and disco gadgets, and spend, spend, spend. There is some merit in attending, usually there are one or two new things that are worth seeing, it can be fun to go onto a stand and crash the lighting desks, and more importantly; you can get a good idea of what new trend is worth making a determined effort to avoid.
The lighting company I work with is also a dealer in a certain brand of PA speaker, and in consequence, as the nearest supplier, we were asked to provide the PA for their PLASA party, which was held at HELL on Curtain Road in the East End, this building, a former button factory, and the second location of the Brick Lane Music Hall (no prizes will be awarded for guessing it's first location) is built on the location of Burbages 'The Theatre' and is now a large and surprisingly pleasant bar, although the signs exhorting patrons:
Out of consideration for our neighbours please leave HELL quietly, did make me raise an eyebrow.
The entertainment provided for the party was a band, mates of one of the sales people, and forcefully reminded me why I ran away from mixing bands in pubs, it has been a long time since I have heard anybody sing 'Smoke on the water' without any sign of embarassment. They produced a suitable pubby sound, having bought their sound desk at the industry equivalent of a carboot sale for £60.00, and believe me, you could hear every one of those pounds. It was perhaps fortunate that alcohol numbs the pain.
This year I was invited to attend an American market survey companies' stand, in order to participate in a survey of industry professionals. My reward for this public spirited gesture, was to be an iPod, a device I have never felt the need or desire for. I turned up for my interview with some trepidation, fully expecting to be sold a florida timeshare, and was rather surprised when the entertainment on offer was exactly as promised. I did the rather curious survey, pausing only to crash their computer, and, duty done, collected my iPod. Since then I have been grappling with the device, as a (thus far), lifelong PC user, I am not used to Apple syntax, and as a proper techy I have long since learned not to read the manual unless the device in question is actually on fire. So progress has been slow, but I think I'm on top of it now.
I haven't used a walkman for years, but when I'm touring I take a portable cd player and a stack of cd's to use in the vehicle, this device, which is able to store 5000 songs (I don't quite know how you measure opera's) has so far swallowed up the contents of six albums and a copy of Peter Grimes without showing much evidence of having indigestion, so I suspect my travels will be a lot lighter in the future.
buddhas hand
My buddhas hand citron has come into flower at last, thus far the blooms are just the same as any other citrus, the weirdness will start when the petals drop and the fruiting body developes. For now, here is a picture of the flowers, I'll update as the fruit start to come.
Incidentally, there is an iranian jam made from citrus petals, I am told, I have never had the quantity to experiment. I could imagine candying them, as they are quite stiff, and frequently very fragrant, although not as perfumed as the rest of the flower.
gothic week
A couple of weekends ago I had what might be described as a wide-ranging gothic cultural experience.
The first of these was going to see Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds at Alexandra Palace, I haven't seen him live before, but I recently worked on an art work that was created to a soundtrack of one of his songs. There is something that I find quite appealing about the world he chronicles; full of blackness, buggery and murder. Curiously, I find that his bleak pictures have an honesty and compassion that can be quite uplifting.
Alexandra Palace must be one of the worst venues in London for a sound engineer: a great big rectangular room with hard walls and a vaulted ceiling. I can remember visiting a few years ago and marvelling at the rolling reverberation that an ordinary accoustic event creates, you can imagine what a large, very loud band could do to it, the first chord would probably still be pinging round the room by the time they get to the end of the song. The solution is to hang heavy black drapes strategically around the room, and to rig the PA so that it is tightly focussed down onto the audience. It was very noticeable how much the accoustic image changed as you moved across the venue.
The audience was weird, a mixture of hard-core goths with metal-studded platform boots and miscellaneous piercings and sunday supplement reading Hampstead trendies, an age range from the late teens up to the late 60's, all mingling amicably and drinking the compulsory warm weak lager. As an indication of how chilled the atmosphere was; you could buy warm lager in bottles if you wanted, rather than floppy plastic glasses, something I haven't encountered at a gig for years. The gig itself was excellent, I had forgotten how annoying a flat-floor show can be to someone who is 5'7", and consequently didn't see a lot of the on-stage action. It has to be said that they are not a very visual band anyway, and the performances were musically very strong.
My other gothic event, setting aside my Gorey-esque meandering amongst the vegetation and victoriana at Kew (see earlier blog), was to visit the National and see 'Theatre of Blood'. There is a current trend, rather tiresomely, of taking old films and sending them out as stage plays, there is a whole raft of old Ealing comedies poised to trundle round the No.1 touring venues this autumn, with their predictable casts of retired soap actors and the occasional American film star going back to his/her roots. It seems that nobody is prepared to commission new work these days, the wholesale absenteeism of the American tourist has had a deleterious effect on commercial theatre, and the subsidised sector has rushed in to fill the gap with low-rent crowd pleasers.
'Theatre of Blood' was a marvellously camp Vincent Price film, in which his character (an old style actor/manager) wreaks a ghastly revenge on a whinge of theatre critics, murdering them in a variety of Shakespearian ways. It had a fantastic cast of british actors, all of whom were capable of being as camp as the late Mr Price. This venture, unfortunately, was a pale shadow of the original, Jim Broadbent was terrific in the leading role, but was not offered much of a supporting cast. My overall impression was that it was all a bit tired, it has been in the rep for about three months I think, and I was underwhelmed by the sloppiness of the technical presentation. Also, it seemed to suffer from a delusion that it was offering a valuable social document as well as an evenings entertainment, the National sometimes seems to give the impression that merely by presenting a piece of theatre they are validating it, and we should be jolly grateful. This should have been a fun, camp and bitchy piece of theatre, it was undeniably entertaining, but in my opinion it would have been much more so if it had been a bit more pacey and hadn't taken itself so seriously. The technical effects and magic tricks were all rather clunky and obvious, there was plenty of blood, but you could always see the blood packs. There was a strange visual gag taking the piss out of Les Miserables, that probably should have been cut as there was nothing much else in the show to compare it to.
Worth seeing, but not worth paying full price for.
