Racy.

fog light
Originally uploaded by ALBOWIEB

Bored games.

I’ve seen adverts about the place for volunteers for the 2012 games. I really do admire the fact that they are planning these things so far in advance – if it was me doing that thing I’d probably have to text round a few friends the week before. Their preparedness is more likely however down to the fact that they’re going to need two clear years to get six references, a police check and an ID card for all three million volunteers.

And all this to clean the toilets behind some Tajik bum who’s going to watch the 4x100m relay in a newly-built stadium in Cheltenham and then disappear to the north-west to work illegally and perhaps open a newsagents, selling ten-packs of Lambert & Butler and paypoint.

It’s funny that we’re getting so corporately excited about what is essentially a school sports day for the entire world. People get intensely wrapped up for three weeks in the sack race and beanbag throwing but no-one really cares outside of that. There was some thing in China a couple of years back, but I can’t tell you a single detail about what happened, apart from some 8-year-old getting fingered for miming. I think she got shot in the face at a morning press conference, or something.

I mean, Germany got some good press out of their effort with the games that one time, but then completely lost any international goodwill a few short years later by trying to subjugate Eastern Europe. I think they wanted all the good gymnasts for Paris 1940, but their decision to upgrade Neville Chamberlain to the Fuhrer Suite in 1936 paid dividends for a little while at least.

It’s not even like it’s a real competition, either. If I lived in Cameroon I’d be a shoo-in for the men’s basketball team, and I can’t even throw. Or catch. So I suppose it’s kind of nice that the whole shebang is coming here in 2012, what with all that culture and history. But I’m afraid I just can’t get behind a ridiculous vanity event that will leave nothing but a legacy of disappointment and useless sports centres in improbable locations. My Olympic flame has flickered out.

It's glottal stop.

Now – Liv Tyler – I’ve been thinking, is her name pronounced ‘live’, or ‘fifty-four’?

I hate it when you think you know how to pronounce something but then you find out everyone else is doing it the other way. Like misled. When I used to read books as a young boy I always thought it was pronounced ‘my-zuld’. Misled was just something I never saw written anywhere. You could, in many ways (but probably just the one way), say that misled myself.

I continually fight with people over the pronunciation of Shrewsbury (rhymes with throwsbury), and I have never known how I’m supposed to say automaton in polite company, so I refrain. Even if the jury is out on how you might say a particular thing, even if it’s the most natural word in the world people are still going to judge you for it. Dropping your Ts, exhaling on your haitches (that’s a Coventry thing), trying to eradicate the whole world of all the effin Gs...

All the fun of the.

Do you know what I really miss? Of course you don’t, because I’m about to tell you, and it would be a pretty dull post if I were to ask you a question that you could immediately answer in the affirmative thereby rendering the entire subject of the post in question null and rather void.

But do you know what I really miss? (Rhetorical)

Going to the fair.

The smell of night-time and cheap hot dogs and teenage smoking. Obnoxious trucks full of really bad GCSE-level portraits of Cher in hotpants circa 1983. An air of fun you could spread on toast, goldfish and candyfloss in (separate, obvs) bags. That feeling of being close to your death that you just don’t get in theme parks, with their testing and their health and safety and their strict procedures.

You can’t beat that frisson from knowing that fat, sweaty tattooed pervert who just took your tokens spannered your seat together a matter of days previously with his own damp mitts. Man, you can’t beat that.

Thrills, spills and automobiles.

I used to really love going on the bus and train. Now, I like to see myself as an appreciative, carefree kind of person who enjoys the simple things, but I yearn for the days when riding in the front seat on the top deck was literally the most exciting thing in the world.

You have to work harder for your thrills as you age, it’s one of the many pitfalls of olderness. I’m five minutes away from taking up smack to banish my suburban ennuie. But seriously – when on earth did we get so jaded? I need to find myself the reset button...

Full of beans.

My favourite cafe in London at the moment is Caffe Grana in St. James Park tube station. It makes me feel like a nineteenth-century dandy in Vienna, it feels like it harks right back to a golden age. There’s dark wood and marble tabletops, square-edged art deco sugar pots and brassy machinery that hasn’t seen action since the Crimean war and was probably bought in a job lot at an auction in Ealing ten years ago.

The piles of beans and pastries on the counter obscure what is probably a Nestle Tassimo wedged in beside the till, but the coffee tastes good because it feels like it should taste good. That often makes all the difference, I find.

I went to a local cafe in Coventry months and months back – it felt neither like a Viennese coffee house nor like an exotic tube station hangout, it felt like a cafe in Coventry. It might have been the theme they were going for, but I very much doubt it. My mug of coffee came with granules floating on top of it. Nescafe spooned over two fingers of semi-skimmed milk and topped up with freshly-boiled water from an Argos kettle. Pure grim.

Perhaps in 200 years this is what people will crave out of misplaced nostalgia. In all fairness, if I were to go back in time to my Austrian haus of ristretto I’d almost certainly catch some primitive form of norovirus. I’d be forced to crap my brains out in a shack out the back and wipe my arse with my spare hand. It would take seven months to recover and I’d never finish that coffee.

In many ways we’ve made infinite progress as a species over the past several centuries – but while we continue to spoon freeze-dried instant coffee into a pre-milked mug anywhere on the planet I can’t help but feel we’re holding ourselves back from true civilisation.

A humble portrait.

How do you become a statesman? Is it something you can legitimately aspire to, or is a statesman someone humble enough to be assumed into a position they never really wanted?

It’s the National Portrait Gallery. I find the paintings of all the Victorian statesmen in there absolutely fascinating. They are painted at the height of their powers but described with the titles they died with. Does talking about the Duke of Smigginsborough’s efforts to widen access to the vote diminish his man-of-the-people aura or give him a patina of accomplishment?

It amazed me looking round last week that the Duke of Wellington’s real name was Arthur Wellesley. It was Wellesley wot won it at Waterloo. That must have been the very nascence of PR – someone at the Ministry of Fancy titles clearly saw that no battle-hardened war hero is called Arthur unless it’s preceded by the word ‘King’. He sounds like something who faced off Thatcher shoulder-to-shoulder with Scargill, for goodness’ sake.

I’d love to be a statesman, myself. It would be awesome for my business cards. But would history ever look kindly upon this derelict part of the life of Lord Sir Samuel Burnett MBE? Or perhaps more likely someone will happen upon a tea-stained blog, grass overgrown and chuckle at the sepia-tinged pining after bygone days and tingling with the premonition of under-achievement.

8, 9, 10 - ready or not...

rhinoceros
Originally uploaded by ALBOWIEB

Woe is me, or the weather is hot.

It was really quite hot the last few times I was in London. I mean, like properly hot. London is both unbearable and fantastic in such heat. Unbearable for the obvious reasons, but fantastic because it feels like a proper city and not something that harks back to a quaint British era when cities were cities and everyone lived in the country.

In the stifling heat it starts to feel properly European, part of the wider world. When it’s packed with visitors the place has always felt more to me like Alton Towers than a serious place with serious culture. People queue up to go on the famous rides, like Piccadilly Circus, Bond Street, or the Buckingham Palace fence.

And you only want to go to a theme park when it’s ridiculously hot – it’s just a shame London doesn’t have any decent water rides to cool off. TfL could really do with some river rapids to get you to work in the morning.

I hate that Fail Whale.

It's another one of those terrible evenings - I don't really want to go on Twitter, and I don't particularly have anything interesting or insightful to share, but I just want to know that it's there. That the world is still there and functioning as it should be. Like some sort of cultural test card, or discursive muzak - reassuring to just have on in the background.

But hell, I hate that Fail Whale. His smug little cephalopodic gob grinning back at me as if it's all none of his fault, 'nothing to do with me guv'nor'. He's the bloody Fail Whale, he should man up and take some responsibility.

"Twitter is over capacity". How I hate that phrase. It sounds like a party I'm not invited to - it doesn't say that Twitter is broken, merely that I can't get in. There are too many people inside having too much fun. Come back later, when all of the cool people have gone home and everyone else is throwing up in the bushes.

Well screw you, social media. I don't need you or the whale you rode in on. I've got real friends. Well, I've got the television. I'm sure there must be something on I can watch. But you see, normally I'd check on Twitter and see what's good...

Some art and that.

When I was in London the other week I went to some art galleries. I love the National and the Portrait galleries, but the Tate makes me angry. Much of art has become insufferably poncey and philosophised for my liking.

I love the Impressionists because they sought out beauty behind the obvious, forced you to look differently at a scene both ordinary and extraordinary – the way the light plays through a scene, or colour changes the way you perceive something.

I always try and seek out the beauty in the ordinary and the mundane – I love it when a huge gout of steam bursts out of the kettle and mushrooms as it hits the kitchen ceiling, the same way Monet watched the Gare St. Lazare fill up with smoke and steam.

I was in the Tate Britain on my most recent visit - the art is much more enjoyable there, but the whole experience unsavoury. Curating has become less about presenting art to the people and more about protecting the art from the people. The staff were entirely rude – a symptom no doubt of the pervasive art gallery arrogance on show.

The whole Tate thing is entirely depressing - the Modern makes me angry because where art used to celebrate the beautiful, this gallery seeks to showcase the ugly and contrary under the guise of thought-provocation. Art has become too smart for its own good.

Out for a drive.

steering wheel
Originally uploaded by ALBOWIEB

A spot of London.

I had some cause to go to London these past weeks. It was fun – I visited the Palace of Westminster, my erstwhile hunting ground, for the first time in a year. My hands were shaking – I felt nervous, in an adrenaline-fuelled, ready-for-action kind of good way. This is a place where things happen.

I was fully prepared to have missed the place – but it was the sort of missing I didn’t realise I’d done until I had reminded myself what I was missing. In fact London as a whole was a lot like there – a place where things happen. Coventry is no slouch, but it feels awfully provincial in comparison with the Big Smoke, our fair capital city. I miss stalking the corridors of power and the parks of relaxation. The only place you can go in Coventry is the War Memorial Park, full of brown grass and oak trees for dead people.

I always think that nostalgia is healthy, as long as you don’t try to recreate it – I know that I hated the miserable winter in London and the commuting was hazardous. But then, on the other hand, you’re in London and not anywhere else. There’s no yellow brick road, but all the other roads seem to lead there.

A sensible kind of guy.

I am in many ways, just a sensible, middle-aged kind of guy. I don’t like to bend the rules, but would hate to inconvenience anyone. I prefer a soirée to a house party; I don’t mind going out of a night, but I like to be back in bed by 10pm. I’ll occasionally drive through a red light just as it’s changing, because I genuinely think that it wouldn’t be safe (or even possible in my car) to stop – but I always park within the white lines.

Sometimes, then, to paraphrase what was no doubt a paraphrase originally anyway, it is probably better not to post and have your reader think you are dull, than to type something out and confirm it. Oops.

Rocking all over the world.

There’s a perversity to seeking inspiration for a blog like mine – I’ve developed a sort of sado-masochistic approach to bad situations – I mean, it hurts, but what a fantastic post I’ll get out of this. Only I don’t have a safe word.

It’s hard sometimes to find something – I get up, have a coffee, watch some films and I won’t get dressed until after it’s long since been acceptable. Rock and roll. Which it is, sort of, but only if it were preceded by a massive bender where you trash your house and throw a goat in the swimming pool.

The closest I’m going to get to that wild child lifestyle is teahab. I’ll swear occasionally on my blog, or take a couple of sugars more than I need to in a coffee shop. But that’s just casual thievery and indolence, not a reckless disregard for life, limb and the refundable room deposit.

Headlines (friendship never ends)

I read a headline the other day, I can’t remember where – “girl critical after 7-storey plunge”. Critical? I’d be sodding furious. I’m sure I’d have a number of strong words to say on the matter.

I saw a another headline on digitext the other day (not teletext - its tarty red-button sister) that said “British tour operator collapses”. I was seriously expecting it to be a story about a coach driver having a heart attack in the Lake District. I did wonder why that sort of thing might be covered on teletext.

There are all sorts of ridiculous 'woman dies in fatal car crash' headlines every day in our journalistic outlets - it worries me. We trust in these people to deliver accurate and realistic news to our brains with minimal effort from our own good selves - if they can't look after the little things like the huge headlines above their copy, what hope?