there's a new star in heaven tonight...
Launch was successfully accomplished at 6.05 GMT. Cloudcover was high and light, wind light and from the North. The Launch vehicle took off without incident and climbed swiftly to a great height, unfortunately, owing to an undetected design flaw it then exploded with great violence, and it is anticipated that there will be little chance of retrieving the corporeal remnants of Mr Frosty.
Mr Frosty's big adventure
The Nottingham correspondant brought a little friend with her, in the shape of Mr Frosty the snowman, he had been sent to her (and his many siblings to other recipients) on the understanding that each one was to have an adventure before the year ends.
Here are some pictures of Mr Frosty, and from the sequence, I think you can work out what his new year adventure is going to be. I'll report back later when he's been launched. Estimated launch time is 6.00 pm Greenwich Mean Time.
I feel that I ought to advise that people with a combined age of less than eighty, and no previous pyrotechnic experience shouldn't try this at home! (or at your friends houses).
the true meaning of christmas?
I travelled up to Bury St Edmunds again this week, partly to check on the condition of my installation after three weeks of wind and rain and to see how the panto was doing. My companion, the redoubtable Nottingham correspondant had also expressed a desire to visit the town, and, as she is a photographer of skill. to take some pictures around the place.
As we meandered through the streets, it was impossible not to notice the extraordinary nativity scene, made from stainless steel and very brightly lit; as you might expect, the usual suspects cluster rather two dimensionally round the baby jesus in the customary fashion. The infant messiah is the most solidly three dimensional structure in the tableau and resembles a sort of shiny tadpole. My companion hit the nail on the head when she observed; "
it looks like an unexploded bomb", and by jingo I think she's got it.
The backing chorus look for all the world like a team of ordnance experts rather gingerly contemplating the task of defusing the infant. Perhaps this is a rather better metaphor than the artist realised.
I have to confess that, despite having a) a photographer, b) a camera, we completely neglected to record this work.
It remains possible that someone else might have done so, I'll keep you posted.
Many thanks to Ruby for the pictures (especially for the closeup, which takes courage beyond the call of duty), and for any further information about BSE I point you to her excellent blog:
http://livinginburystedmunds.blogspot.com/
Norman conquests?
I just peeped over the parapet into that seething mass of garbage that laps against the walls of my hotmail junk filter, I only do this very occasionally, just in case someone has been misguided enough to send me a message.
As I hacked and slashed though the endless offers to enlarge my organ, or prolong its potency, one thing began to strike me. Although these mails were addressed to my e-mail address, they nearly all had the name Norman in the header; i.e. 'Hey Norman, check this out' or 'Norman: response needed by friday'. I am baffled, is there an american demographic that pegs all Normans as sexual pigmies with staying power to match? I think we should be told.
There does also seem to be some newish sort of spam text generator, because you get small lumps of completely weird and disconnected text thrown in for good measure. I make no apologies for offering the link to the Julie Burchill random recycler, as this too has that curious quality of almost making sense, without actually doing so (a quality I fear, that is too often shared by her unrecycled writing these days).
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/l_tabraham/jbrr.htm
horticultural terrorism
For some time I believed I had invented the concept of horticultural terrorism, my floral insults include writing insults in crocuses on someone's lawn, planting runner beans and broad beans in a retirement village in Surrey, and in the same village of the damned (about which I may yet be tempted to blog), liberally seeding nasturtiums in their manicured woodlands.
Whilst passing through the BBC website, I came across this offering:
Mrs Irene Graham of Thorpe Avenue, Boscombe, delighted the audience with her reminiscence of the German prisoner of war who was sent each week to do her garden. He was repatriated at the end of 1945, she recalled. "He'd always seemed a nice friendly chap, but when the crocuses came up in the middle of our lawn in February 1946, they spelt out Heil Hitler". (Bournemouth Evening Echo)I'm not sure if this tells us more about Bournemouth, maybe he was trying to fit in? or about the chaps optimism, but hey, I've been comprehensively gazumped.
On the other hand, writing 'bollocks' in four foot high letters on somebody's lawn in fertiliser was startlingly effective, especially as the more you mowed it, the better it got, twenty odd years later, I wonder if it is still there?
Down by the Uxbridge Road end of Ealing there are a number of large victorian villas, which, in my youth were deliberately run down and in some cases had become squats. Now of course, these are improved up the gunwales, granite worktops and multiple dishwashers are de rigeur (this is a little known phenomenon, luxury apartments [as defined under the current building regulations] can now be so cramped as to make it almost impossible to store a full dinner setting, the solution is the double dishwasher, your dishes are simply washed and left in the machine, and next time round you use the other one and never need to store anything in the cupboards that you don't have. Not being in possession of a dishwasher, I don't fully understand.)
Meanwhile, back at the story; in the late 70's one of these solid victorian structures was indeed a squat, and inhabited by greasy long-haired heavy metal fans, who held loud parties and threw their empties out of the sliding sash windows. Not only that, but they were creative, and decorated their home, painting 'Motorhead' across the dirty brick frontage in white gloss paint. Twenty-five years on, after a deal of wirebrush work and specialist attention, it is still plainly visible, maybe there is some justice after all.
Actually there truly is sometimes. we used to have a neighbour who a) drove a red mercedes convertible, b) kept guns in the house, c) believed that he owned the parking space outside his house, and d) if someone parked in 'his' space would double park his car tight alongside the offender. The last time he did this, the innocent parker had to drive his car onto the pavement with considerable difficulty, he/she was a person of resource, and having extricated the car, came back and scored
'you c**t' in foot high letters on the drivers side of the car with a six inch nail. The car was sent away for a respray, but the abuse had gone right down to the bare metal, and a repaint simply made it look as though the words had been sprayed on. He sold the car.
While I'm here, 24 hour drinking hasn't exactly gripped Ealing (despite its reputation as the binge drinking centre of London), my local, which is independently owned and has occupied the same site since the 1600's, applied for a license to 1.00 a.m, local licensing authorities (two months after the supposed deadline), have granted them a license to 11.30 [half an hour extra for the benefit of people in sensible counties], this policy has been applied to all the small pubs and independants, the large chains and kiddy bars have all had their licenses granted as requested. So, the streets are filled with vomiting teenagers, as before, and the quiet pubs where you can avoid them are all shut well before I might choose to go to bed. Time to emigrate I think.
the unbearable pinkness of being in Ealing
I don't know what it is about the colour pink, personally I don't mind it too much, and those happy few who have seen things I have lit, will know that I am not averse to using it in the right circumstances.
There is a stubborn, almost pushy quality about the colour, however, and this is exemplified by the tendency of almost anything planted in the garden here to come up pink, whatever colour it was meant to be. By way of an example, when I was visiting
The Deep North in spring I bought, rather out of sympathy a dying rose bush, which purported to be a vivid orange flashed with yellow. Having nursed said flower back to health and transported it back to London, it eventually rewarded me with a flower. No prizes for guessing what colour it was. The weird thing is, that, ever suspicious, I had kept it in a pot, rather than plant it out, and its contact with the pink-generating soil of the garden was minimal to say the least.
So, whatever the characteristic is that makes things go pink, it must be very potent. Scientific theory would suggest that the soil might be rather acid, I'm fairly sure it isn't, as acid loving plants don't do well.
Incidentally, I posted a bit about extraordinary christmas lights a while back, and said I would post any that caught my eye, there is a whole blogsite devoted to this very phenomenon, and quite extraordinary it is too.
http://www.houseblinger.com/
oddments
I was looking idly through the archive of the Rambert Dance Company, and checking to see who was on their list of lighting designers; I found it hugely funny to see that Britains' pre-eminent and most highly paid lighting designer was listed as David Heresy (his name is actually David Hersey for the uninitiated).
In the theatre people do seem to aquire nicknames very easily, mostly affectionate, sometimes anything but. Two recent examples would be Tiddles and Slimon, I'll leave you to guess who made himself popular. It is all too easy to get into trouble, with this sort of thing; I once upset a very temperamental italian set-designer by referring to 'the bit of the set that looks like a fried egg'. Unfortunately the description stuck, and I could see her wince each time it was used.
Some years ago there was an infamous design for a production of 'Waiting for Godot' which became universally known as 'the raspberry hedgehog', I have never been able to take that particular designer seriously since.
Oh, and my greengrocer (turkish I think) is offering 'custered' apples, I'll leave it to you to work that one out.
an apology?
I have had a complaint, from the AP no less, she feels that I have maligned the character of her feline; she is not a psychopath concealed within a pyjama case, she is misunderstood. Anyone who has been held in the unblinking and contemptuous gaze of her fierce golden eyes may beg to differ.
My sister, who has now had several abyssinians, has chronicled the life of her last one in great detail, amongst the concepts of feline life she recounts is the 'hating book' in which slights and insults are faithfully recorded, in order, presumably, that retribution may be calculated fairly. It seems reasonable to me to assume that this might be a breed characteristic, and thus the cat who lives upstairs, although too lazy to organise a hating book, may simply have taken the hating concept and run with it, and just hates everything that gets in her way or disagrees with her. In the warm glow of the pre-christmas shopping frenzy, and in the interest of family amity, I am prepared to admit that she doesn't hate me absolutely all of the time, she has purred at least five times in the last 13 years, and she does sometimes come when she is called.
So, from cats to mail, our mail has become increasingly random, we are five minutes from the sorting office, and our post can come any time between 7.00 in the morning and 2.30 in the afternoon. Sods Law says that the only way you can guarantee a delivery is to get in the shower. Unfortunately I don't have a doorbell, only a knocker, and there is a timed lightswitch for the outside light above the door. So many times I have had a card shoved through the door when I've been in, only to discover that the light was switched on (or off, it's usually on). I did once make a label up for the switch, but evidently used some form of mollusc pheremone to glue it to the wall,because when I got up next day there was no label any more, but several giant orange slugs hanging around looking sated and slightly guilty. Maybe santa will bring me a laminator, although I'm not sure I'd want to laminate a slug...
tiny noises
I was listening to
Start the Week on the radio this morning, and one of the worthy panellists commented on the power of little sounds when heard in relative silence. This reminded me of an incident of a few years ago when I was cat-sitting for the AP. She had gone on her holidays, and I had been left in charge of her ill-tempered and wilful abyssinian.
This creature is not generally allowed to go out at will, although she spends most of her time in the garden given half a chance, coming in only to feed, or to deposit another of the endless supply of small frogs that are the only prey slow and stupid enough for her to catch. Naturally, given the opportunity, as soon as the AP was safely deposited at Kings Cross, she took it on the lam, vanished into the middle distance, and refused to come back in. Occasional sightings reassured me that she wasn't heading North, and more importantly, the sound of her bell was and is quite characteristic and readily discernable.
As she wasn't actually catchable, I decided to let her have a night out, my bed is at garden level, and I can hear most of what goes on outside, if I choose to. Next day matters did not improve, she was still lurking in the middle distance, and had shown no interest in food either. By the end of the day I was beginning to get more concerned; several times I'd nearly caught her, but for a stout creature resembling a pyjama case she has very good accelleration. Once again I gave up, and let her stay out, but in the wee small hours I heard her bell tinkling, and decided to have another go at getting her in and wandered down the garden to try and spot her.
I should perhaps explain that in West London actual silence is very rare, there is always a background noise made up of traffic hum, sounds of the tube and the railways, punctuated occasionally by a distant emergency siren and hysterical fox (in film, this constant noise is referred to, and recorded as 'the wild track' and used to underlay the soundtrack so as to give it an auditory consistancy).
At four o'clock on a late summer morning, for some reason, all was still and silent, and I settled down on an old log to listen for the blasted cat. At first I could hear nothing but the sound of my own heart, but after a few minutes I started to hear a faint rustling, punctuated with little gasps, I flashed my torch around, and all became still and silent once more. As soon as I turned it off, and sat still, the noises started up again.
I was beginning to get quite intrigued, forgetting about the cat, I moved onto the grass, and realised that the sounds were happening all around me. As the soft grey light of the early morning slowly built up around me, I was gradually able to make out what was going on, the rustling noises were being made by earth worms struggling with bits of decaying leaf, and the little gasps were the sound of their bodies retracting into the ground in a panic at some imaginary enemy.
As for the cat, I managed to trap her the next day, and she spent the rest of the holidays incarcerated and furious. To give you an example of her evil nature, her favourite inaccessible bolthole turned out to be behind a damaged ventilation grate in the area outside my bedroom window, about six feet from my sleeping body, small wonder I thought I could hear her in my dreams.
Northern Lights
It's strange how a little browsing can lead you to things you never knew you needed, my Nottingham correspondant sent me a picture of an extreme, rare and beautiful weather phenomenon (see picture) called diamond dust. Caused, apparently, by light pollution reflecting off ice crystals in the lower atmosphere.
I have long wanted to see the Aurora Borealis, and my curiosity piqued by the image, I did a little googling. Out of the myriad sites dedicated to Philip Pulman, I found a site at Lancaster University, which offers both a live magnetometric chart and a free e-mail and text alert service for peak activity. Not only that, but they have a large gallery of images collected in the UK, from sites as diverse as Bodmin and Lochwinnoch. As the images are copyright, I recommend that you check them out yourself:
http://www.dcs.lancs.ac.uk/iono/aurorawatch/I've signed up, and look forward to the notion of being kept informed about atmospheric activity at regular intervals. Sadly, it would appear that very little is happening at the moment, but at least I'll know.
Down here in London, the chance of seeing much more than the brightest stars and planets is rare, orion is probably the most easily found constellation.
UFOs
Current state of TBC (total banking catatastrophe) means that I've been investigating the nethermost regions of my freezer. Not that this is a bad thing, just that I'm having a bit of a trauma defrosting weird food that I can't recall ever freezing. I think I owe Elizabeth David (
Katherine Whitehorn apparently)for the term UFO (unidentified frozen object), and I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong (
see above!).
Thing is, apart from the glut stuff, why did I ever think that some of my food would be rendered more desirable by prolonged freezing? So far everything I've thawed out has been vile, stuff I've cooked for myself in a spirit of experimentation, eaten a bit of and frozen, hoping it would taste better in six months time maybe? I need a dog, there would be somewhat less waste I suspect.
The other area of critical fault finding has to be my labelling; there isn't any, generally speaking I have a good memory, but it's bad for food ideas. I'm currently investigating a brown thing that seems to involve beans (possibly haricot), kidney (unspecified) and meat (even less specific), it tastes of brown, and not much else, I suspect that not even Daves Insanity Sauce could help this one.
I blame it on my ancestors; when my grandmother moved from Edinburgh to Berwick in 1970, she travelled (I hesitate to use the word flitted, not a term you would associate with my grandmother) with a selection of tins and bags of sugar that she had accumulated during and after the war, and when she died in 1981, the same collection of imperishable goods were in her cupboards. The bags of sugar had turned into solid blocks, suitable only for use as projectiles.
Of all the ideas I've inherited from my grandmother, I suspect having a well stocked cupboard would be the most useful (and most socially acceptable). I've had cause to be grateful in the past, come rain, come shine, nuclear winter or council bailiff, at least I won't starve, even if I'm eating a variety of eccentric things, things that I've never thought to label. Next week I might dare to look in the back of my cupboard, there's a lot of mysterious jars, also without labels, chutney and jam toasties anyone?
Oh well, I've got a couple of months before I have to think about getting a proper job and some fool will ask me to do something before then.
big bangs
Shortly after 6.00 this morning there was a loud boom and all the windows rattled, loud enough to wake me up and indeed, louder by far than the IRA bomb in Ealing Broadway, a mere 1/4 mile away. As I am prone to do, I looked at the clock to check the time, and went back to sleep.
When I surfaced I was surprised (as you can imagine), to discover that the explosion was up near junction 8 of the M1, at least 30 miles away (the petrol depot in case you had missed it). I know sound travels further by night, but I shudder to think what it must have been like a bit nearer .
Theatrical pyrotechnics or more specifically; maroons (the ones that make bangs), used to carry a definition of how loud they were in terms of miles/audibility. Thus a medium plastic maroon claimed to be audible at four miles, a large at eight miles, extra large at twelve and so on. It is rare that you get an opportunity to test these theories out, and I suspect that they are deliberately exaggerated to make you think you are getting more bang for your buck, as it were.
Suffice it to say that these definitions are treated with a certain amount of disdain in the industry, the accoustically controlled environment of a theatre is very effective at dissipating the accoustic energy created by what is after all a small explosion. A medium maroon sounds like a pop-gun from the rear of the stalls in a decent sized theatre with a fly tower for example.
My last big pyro hit was for the launch of a new artists' studios project down on the Thames on the opposite bank from the millenium dome. The brief was a big bang and a huge shower of confetti, at the appropriate cue. This is easily done, as the easiest method of propelling several kilos of confetti into the air is to use a confetti cannon (there are devices that use compressed gas, but they're not as much fun). The confetti cannon is based around an eight inch wrought iron tube, the propellant is a maroon of appropriate size, and you gain greater velocity and height the larger the maroon you use. The confetti (which must be flame retardent) is separated from the propellant charge by a tight fitting cardboard disc, connect to your electrical firing system and retire to a safe distance, ensuring that the pyrotechnic is in sight of the person firing, or of a spotter who can stop it from being fired.
For this gig, I had four cannons, each one of which had three large maroons and a kilo and half of confetti, all went well, the musicians did their fanfare from the balcony above the one that the cannons were to be fired from and retired to the back of the unit as instructed, closing the sliding window. As is so often the case, the pyro firer failed, and the chairman pressed his dummy button to no effect, a moments re-jigging gave the chairman the dud firer, and me the good one,and we prepared to go again. My spotter gave me the thumbs up, I gave the all clear, and the musicians repeated their fanfare. So far so good, except a dopey musician (there's always one), instead of retiring, left the window open, and stayed nearby to watch.
Six kilos of confetti is a lot, it stayed in the air for about 15 minutes, apart, of course, from that which hadn't been blasted into the room full of deafened musicians. The bang was loud, and the towers around (Canary Wharf, HSBC etc) gave some impressive reverberant effects. Not only that, but about 10 minutes after the event a couple of obviously military helicopters came down the thames, presumably in search of terrorists. There was nothing to see but a slowly diminishing cloud of pastel coloured bio-degradeable confetti.
My favourite confetti story comes from the Birmingham Odeon, when american rock dinosaurs 'Kiss' were playing, at that time Brum operated a different system of inspecting shows and concerts for safety from anyone else, and would send a senior fireman out (I have been through this in Birmingham, on a show that had twenty foot jets of naked flame integral to it, not easy, trust me). The inspector happened upon a passing american techy filling the confetti cannons and asked 'is that flame retardent confetti?' on receiving the answer 'I'm not sure' (which is so totally the wrong answer to give to a safety inspector; you should know what you are firing if you are loading pyros, and if you're not sure, you should find out before it goes any further). Inspector was kind (and now a haunted man) under the circumstances, and rather than cancel the gig, he said 'you'd better make sure it's flame retardent before you even think of firing them'.
I'm not entirely sure how bright the sort of bods who hang around with the sort of bands who'd make Spinal Tap look original and talented are, and even though I've some idea, and taught a few, I'm prepared to make allowances. After all, people for whom I have a more than a modicum of respect get into frothing ecstasies over that sub-Lloyd Webber hack Wagner, but personal prejudices aside, our friendly little american, rather than go back to his line manager and check (it would have been OK, americans techies are abiut as paranoid about that sort of thing as we are), decided to show a little initiative and went to the local crew. They supplied him with a five litre bottle of flamebar, a proprietary substance used in various formulations to make things flame retardent, who knows, they may even have given him the correct version for paper. Instructions for use, however, are to spray onto surface and allow to dry, not, 'pour into cannon and walk away'. The result, when the climactic moment arrived, and the big pyro hit came, was to fire four large soggy balls of papier mache into the audience, or more accurately above the audience, because, by a stroke of good fortune, they shot across the room and stuck firmly to the wall at the rear of the balcony, where they stayed for several years, until the venue ceased to put on concerts and reverted to being a cinema. It's been a while since I've had to do a show in Birmingham, but I'd avoid using confetti cannons there, if I were you.
last panto post before christmas
I went to the farmers market this morning, one of its principal features was a long snaking queue of chilly and glum-faced people, not, for once, battling for red onion marmalade or organic cavallo nero, but instead, desperately trying to get their parcels posted in one of the last remaining sub-post offices. Computerisation and simplified benefits seem to have done nothing to make the business of posting a letter or parcel any easier.
I had a strange evening yesterday, I went in to Brick Lane Music Hall (which now resides in a redundant church in Silvertown) to rehearse with the director. It was a classic example of the benefits of documenting a show properly, the accident prone board op hadn't made many notes, and we had to re-create the show. Most pantos tend to get a bit wayward about sticking to the script after a few performances, and sometimes you have to be a bit firm with the turns and make them say the line that a cue depends on. Unfortunately, a panto that is based firmly in the music hall tradition doesn't really have a script, more like a series of arrows saying 'the story might go this way'. Not easy to follow, especially when all my cues came from spoken lines. The audience were very easy going and good humoured, they were there to enjoy themselves, and so were the performers, hopefully I'll do it better tonight. I don't mind getting comments from the stage, if they're well intentioned; I once had to endure a barracking from Mark Lamarr, who had been nervously fiddling with his microphone, and managed to switch it off. He gave me ten minutes of ill-tempered abuse before we managed to sort him out (I couldn't leave the sound desk, and there was no-one else available), small wonder we try to idiot proof everything that can be handled by a performer.
The show itself was about as corny as you might expect, but very good for all that. The MC, who runs the music hall, does a routine straight from the blue book. No-one was working too hard, except perhaps the juveniles, who struggled a little. As a punter you get a three course meal, a well-stocked bar and a warm and comfortable environment where you can walk around and even smoke, should you wish, there aren't many venues that offer that.
another opening, another show
I went to the opening night of Robinson Crusoe at Bury St Edmunds, as with all Panto openings, it was a bit rough round the edges. The economics of putting on a panto dictate that you always have a short rehearsal period, and extra technical demands. That, and the fair in town clogging up the roads, and holding up the audience, meant that the show was late and long.
All in all though, it is shaping up to be a good show, the kids loved it, and my contribution seems to deliver them to the door (alright, tent flap), in a suitable state of anticipation, and the jungle interior just builds on that.
The tent is a bit of a star, and allows the luxury of adding circus skills to the show, I look forward to seeing it again, when it's settled down.
Just by way of a contrast, an accident to the board operator has meant that I am doing two shows this weekend at the Brick Lane Music Hall, I suspect that 'Jack and his Giant Stalk' will be somewhat different, in a saucy East-End kind of way. I'll keep you posted.
Bonny Dundee
I have to go to Dundee next week to talk about a project, as is so commonly the case I only got the call this afternoon, and have to work out the most effective way of getting there.
We arranged our meeting for mid-afternoon, to make it possible and civilised for me to travel up on the day, so I settled down for a bit of googling to try and work out the best way of travelling up. My first thought was to take the train, I've used the line up to Edinburgh and beyond for decades, but haven't done so for a while. I gave up on the attempt to identify a train or even discover a price after about half an hour; I'm sure it is possible to do it on line, but I'm afraid I don't believe them any more.
My next thought was to get a flight to Edinburgh and train it from there, not a bad option, but not great, combining a tube journey with two train trips in each direction as well as a flight. I then remembered that as you drive into Dundee you pass an airport, and lo and behold, there are direct flights to London, to London City Airport of all places. What is the commercial connection between Dundee, home of jam and DC Comics and the city? The other places they have scheduled flights to are Amsterdam, Edinburgh and Southampton, beyond auld reekie I can see no obvious link, unless they are shipping hashish in pots of jam of course. Needless to say, the price of convenience is the price, so it's going to be the motor for me.
image
Gentle reader, can I commend you to:
http://www.rereviewed.com/thedeepnorth/a picture is truly worth a thousand words
wind and dined
As I write, I have a glass of the designer beverage 'The beer to dine for' in front of me, I have to say, it is not unpleasant, it is, however, not very anything. It is pitched as a beer to accompany meals, and if anything, it tastes like cobra lager (the lager you get in indian restaurants in enormous bottles), only flatter. It's quite strong (5%), and bottled in 750ml bottles, I think if I wanted an alternative to wine (unless I was having a curry), then fizzy water would be preferable.
As a replacement for wine, I think it's a bit of a non-starter, it has none of the good points of proper beer, and I suspect, all of the bad. So, you get an insipid drink, and fart like a demon all night.
I'm sorry to return to an old obsession, but the image of the real ale drinker complete with beard, halitosis, sandals with socks and copious wind, like so many cliches is true. The brewerys have tried making proper beer attractive to women (by selling it in 1/3 pints in long stemmed glasses), I know plenty of women who happily drink pints, and accept the side effects. In my teens a night out was not dissimilar to the beans scene in Blazing Saddles, as I no longer go drinking with teenagers, I can't comment on what current thoughts are on the subject of wind. 'Better out than in' is a phrase that strikes dread into the conjugal bed in my experience, whoever says it.
What's to be done? You can't force people to like the sometimes subtle experience that proper beer offers; a generation raised on the bland, sweet and totally predictable flavours of coke, ribena and sunny delight is unlikely to embrace the unpredictable, difficult and complex flavours beer can offer. I note with amusement the protests from certain quarters that Youngs bitter has been taken off the menu at the strangers bar in the Houses of Parliament and replaced with San Miguel (a spanish lager brewed under license in the UK). I won't even bother to do more than note that the occupiers of the Houses of Parliament have always been able to drink right round the clock, and some of our distinguished legislators were (and remain) unaware that different conditions apply out here in the real world.
In conclusion, heaven help us from marketing men (and women), this year, I have sampled 'blubena' and the beer described above, in both cases I think the failure of the product owes more to the inability of the marketers to identify what was good about the original product and capitalise on that; so we get a new 'flavour' fruit drink, with a flavour that nobody in the UK would be expected to recognise, and an impeccably brewed beer from an excellent brewery that tastes like Indian lager. I rest my case.
a plaque on both your houses
Ealing isn't exactly bristling with blue plaques, it has always suffered somewhat from being a great place to leave, culturally and geographically.
The flying visit of the Northern Professor, and our swift dive into town by motor this morning, took us past a row of solid mid-to late victorian townhouses overlooking the common. In the atypically brilliant sunshine we both spotted a blue plaque, newly erected on one of these buildings, and a certain amount of speculation ensued.
The only blue plaques I was previously aware of were for Michael Balcon, on the front of Ealing Studios, and for Sid James, on Hanger Lane (my former neighbour was at school with his daughter, and her father was always happy to collect her from the James household, as Sid was apparently very convivial and possessed an extremely well stocked bar).
My curiosity was pricked, and I have undertaken a modicum of research; according to the blue plaque website there are three in Ealing, all on the same house and commemorating Alan Dower Blumlein, an electronics engineer and inventor (a pioneer of RADAR, killed in a plane crash whilst testing his handywork). I think we had secretly hoped that the new plaque would be commemorating Margery Allingham, who was born in Ealing in 1904, sadly this is not the case (no.5 Broughton Road is now a block of flats, the url below is for a picture of an adjacent house). I had a brief flurry of excitement over mentions of Mary Seacole, but these turned out to be a red herring.
At last I found a reference, there are three recent plaques in Ealing; Michael Balcon, John Lindley ( C19 botanist, orchidologist and saviour of Kew Gardens), and finally our mystery, and I hope you aren't too disappointed; Dorothea Lambert Chambers, seven times Wimbledon Ladies Tennis Champion between 1903 and 1914.
As far as I can tell, this must always have been a pretty strange place to live in, even way back when. Notable former inhabitants include a Duke of Kent (predating Victoria), who apparently took an active part in local life, attending church accompanied by his own military band, and Henry Fielding, who came to Ealing for his health, and supposedly wrote Tom Jones whilst staying in what became Lady Byrons residence; Fordhook. Other more recent notables might be Julian Clary and Andy Serkis, both of whom went to school here, plaque that!
Update: I've found two more! Both of which I was aware in a foggy sort of way, Ealing chooses to commemorate Charles Hamilton (AKA Frank Richards, author of Billy Bunter) who was born in a house now under the tasteless shopping centre in 1876, and Lady Byron, who established a charitable school hereabouts. Curiously, the grade 2 listed 'tin chapel' which was one of the last remnants of her activity, was demolished a month or so ago to make way for a development of luxury family houses.
http://www.blueplaqueproject.org/http://allingham.fotopic.net/p3436751.html
normal service resumed
Well, that's my bit done, we previewed my work to the great and the good of Suffolk, many glasses of tent temperature wine were served, as well as a beer from Greene King that has pretentions. Called 'the beer to dine for' it has a fancy bottle and label, and is plainly intended to take the beverage into the stratospheric heights of designer drinking. I'm sure it's very nice and wholesome, I was unable to try it as I was driving, but I did blag a bottle to try at home later. When later comes, I'll report back. I suppose that we should all be very grateful that what we are compelled to think of as the 'beer boffins' (although bean counters in suits probably created the bottle and then they had to think of something to put in it), opted to go down the exclusivity route rather than the trying to produce a drink with mass appeal (this means children, or as close to children as the marketting department thinks you can get away with).
Thankfully belgian experiments to produce beers with fruit flavours have produced beers that still appeal mostly to an adult palate, even though many of them are quite revolting (vide: banana beer). I suspect that even a bubble-gum flavoured beer would fail, as the bitterness of the hops would be a turn off. What these drinks miss out on, is the 'lashings of sugar' or more commonly aspartame, which give alcopops their appeal. Many specialist beers are quite sweet, but they are a more complex drink than those pitched at the sunny delight generation.
Anyway, enough burbling about beer, I am more or less finished with Bury St Edmunds until January, when it all gets pulled out. The general reaction to my piece was very favourable; the sponsors liked it very much, which is always a good sign, and all in all, they seem very happy. I was called upon to make a speech, did my best to memorise the names of the sponsors and think of a few gags that hadn't been used before, and in the end was usurped (to my considerable relief) by a man in a suit who monologued about marketing enhancement opportunities for what seemed like a small portion of eternity, and he used the same gags I had thought of. Apart from the 'loitering within tent' one, which I offer to you as a small jewel fragment from the speech that never was.
I'll be travelling up again this week, to retrieve unused equipment, and to educate the technical staff in the arcane rituals of 'switching on' and 'switching off' , and next week I shall be attending the first night, generally speaking I hate first nights, if they are my own, but in this case, as I am already out of the picture, I shall simply let it all go by and hopefully enjoy the show. There is a genuinely visceral feeling you get the first time you open a panto, and there are 500 excited people out there, it's the reason performers keep coming back. Panto remains a genuinely popular form, and if done properly, is a very powerful cultural medium which has survived even dilution with no-talent soap stars and childrens TV presenters (I once did Panto with the bloke who flys over london for Capital Radio telling you what the traffic is doing, he was easy to frighten...). If you get the dame and the villains right, everything else will fall into line behind them (oh god, it really is that time of year!).
beavis and butthead
Is it just me, or does Dubya's latest ugly little buzzword; 'sadammisation', carry with it a neocon subtext, intended insidiously to promote the notion that not only are the unfortunate iraqis a bunch of dangerous muslim extremists, but uncontrollable pillow biters too;
"My fellow americans, unless we are vigilant the sadammists will burn down the churches, defecate in mom's apple pie and have little jimmy up against a tree before you can say mujaheddin."
I can't help feeling that Dubya's 'dirty joke told behind the bike sheds' style of delivery doesn't quite impart the necessary gravitas, he conveys the same sort of mocking sincerity that Margaret Thatcher used to employ, and which made me gag even in the days when she was stealing my free school milk.
It's getting so you notice the strings that make him work, is this new catch phrase a simple-minded extension of his own small world of prejudice, or have the brains that push the buttons found a new way to electrify the american people?
