Life Less Literary |
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A small selection of the many things that have happened to Dan Sumption, his family, friends and colleagues
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Sunday, September 30, 2001
Grrr. I'm angry with Greece. Silly really, and it's my own stupid fault no doubt for going on a cheap bucket-shop holiday, but I am, so there it is. Let's be more specific. Last night we did the obligatory "Greek Night". The dancing & entertainment were great. Nothing to begrudge there. It's just... the food. This was supposed to be a demonstration to us foreigners of all that's best about Greece. Of course it's really just a cynical way of making a bit of extra cash, but I don't mind cynical ways of making a bit of extra cash if they're done properly. The Tatziki was great (although it's a shame that, as everywhere, they serve it with heavy ageing white sliced bread, instead of the beautiful freshly-baked rolls we were given in Kefalonia). I don't even begrudge the main course (chicken with rice and chips - very traditional - although I had pizza as a veggie option) or the dessert (slices of apple on cocktail sticks - I always thought that was traditional Somerset fayre, though no doubt they have the same in Corfu. Shame that none of the restaurants here knows how to make a fruit salad though - again in Kefalonia we got beautiful ones served up with greek yoghurt and honey). No, the problem was the "Greek Salad". OK, the salad itself wasn't bad - not too easy to go wrong (although it would have been more thoughtful if they'd bunged a few olives in with the lettuce, tomato, cucumber and feta). The problem is the FUCKING OIL. The national product of Greece is OLIVE OIL, RIGHT? So howcome they have such disgusting gloop in all the restaurants? Every restaurant has two bottles on the table; one is an indistinct sort of watery vinager, the other is a bottle of what I can only describe as chip oil. I first discovered this when, eschewing the margarine-dressed-as-butter that they hand out with the stale bread, I poured some oil to dip my slice in. It tasted like I had just licked the bottom of a deep-fat fryer which hadn't been cleaned for months. And they expect us to pour this stuff on our salad? YEUUUCH! If this is really what the Greeks eat at home then I can only say they have no taste. Why don't they make better use of all those olives growing all around them? Add comment | this item Saturday, September 29, 2001
We are staying in the Valentino apartments. On our first night here, the waiter at the restaurant we visited exclaimed knowingly "ah, Valentino. The pink one, yes?". And it is, incredibly pink. The same pink as those squishy prawn sweets you get in pick'n'mixes. Makes me wonder whether the owner got a job lot bargain on candy pink paint, something like the farmer in Magnus Mills's brilliant book All Quiet on the Orient Express. Add comment | this item Friday, September 28, 2001
A short distance across the sea from here (Roda) I can see Albania - miles and miles of tan-coloured mountains softened by aeons of existence (reminds me of mount Sinai). Only a lone zig-zag of road, drizzled down a mountainside like a chef's fancy-work, gives any indication that there are humans living there. It's beautiful. Add comment | this item Sitting in the coach through Corfu town - the oblique green arrow of a traffic light reflected in the coach window, then another reflection, and another... another, each a little more transparent than the last, makes me think of a cursor with mouse trails turned on Add comment | this item Thursday, September 20, 2001
Well, 20 pages in and number9dream is every bit as good as expected. No, better. It is just so, so readable, but at the same time provides the kind of brainfood that makes the part of my mind that sleeps 99% of the time wake up and pay attention to everything. The book is a tapestry of real life (the story, the main event), fantasy (the narrator's persistent daydreams) and memory (his trips back to childhood). And there are some great little quotes and stuff that keep grabbing my attention... During those nine pouched-up months, what do babies imagine? Gills, swamps, battlefields? To people in wombs, what is imagined and what is real must be one and the same. Add comment | this item Walking home tonight, I couldn't get The Stanglers out of my head - Death and Night and Blood (Yukio) from Black & White, the bit where it goes Hey little baby don't you lean down lowI love that album - some of my all-time favourite songs: Tank, Nice'n'Sleazy, Sweden ("Let me tell you about Sweden, only country where the clouds are interesting"... sounds even better in Swedish [although... some of Hugh Cornwell's Swedish sounds more like German to me "Ende lande die mollen intereserante"), Toiler on the Sea. And it makes a nice change from the last couple of mornings, when for some unaccountable reason I have woken up with Eddy Grant singing Give me Hope Joanna in my head. Euuurgh. I hate that song. Oh, and then last night it was Peg by Steely Dan - I always used to hate Steely Dan, but Paul's enthusiasm for them is catching, and when we played through a couple of their songs last night it was quite fun. Add comment | this item Reading, reading reading.... warning - vague, dislocated, post follows, includes bloated sentences and multiple nested thoughts Just finished The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth. Good read. Not sure why I bought it in the first place... I was attracted in the bookshop by the smart silver Penguin Modern Classics cover, the name Roth (not sure why - the Allan Ginsberg poem mentioning Rexroth [who I recently discovered is Kenneth Rexroth and not, as I had thought, Rex Roth], vague awareness of the author Philip Roth as somebody I should be vaguely aware of), the book's title (the name of Marshal Radetzky was very familiar to me - I thought it must be from some of the Czech literature I had read, Josef Skvorecky or Jaroslav Hasek or somesuch, but looking back I realise that it was probably from learning 19th century European History for A-Level, 1848 rebellions, Lombardy Venetia and all that) sidenote: I was thinking the other day of certain placenames that are inextricably linked in my mind - it is not possible for me to think of one without the other. Most of these came from my 19th Century European history course - Lombardy-Venetia, Latvia-Lithania-Estonia, Moldavia-Wallachia, but for some reason the names of Elsecar and Wombwell also spring to mind as an inseperable duet.So there you have it. I bought the book. And, having bought it, I thought I ought to read it. And I did. And it was good. Not the best, but... good. A nice combination of serious literary structure and underlying meaning with general readable storyishness. The structure of the book in particular, not an aspect that I usually pay any attention to was Bach-like in its exactness. The echoes between the rigid formalities of Austro-Hungarian life and the rigid formalities of the Trotta family made for rigid but rewarding form. The overwhelming feeling of darkness and impending decay was good too. And the little section seen through the eyes of the ageing Kaiser was delightful - the epitome and figurehead of this whole tightly structured empire, enoying his day with playful childlike thoughts, brilliant. Next on the line is number9dream by David Mitchell. I read Ghostwritten last year, and it was my most memorable book of the year (at least, as far as I remember). A couple of nights back, they announced the booker nominees on Radio 4. I listened thinking "I wonder whether there's anyone there who I've been reading recently. Nah, Ian McEwen etc, OK, but then... another smattering of big names I know but am not familiar with, and a few very obscure ones. Oh, what about that bloke who wrote Ghostwritten, nah, bit of an outside chance but... wow! They just said his name!". So after that, I couldn't not buy it. Verdict here soon... (Oh, and in Audiobooks, just listened to Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes. Not sure what to make of that. Think I need another listen, to fill in all the gaps during roundabouts etc., then I might have a better sense of what's going on.) Add comment | this item Obviously a lot of other people were thinking about Microsoft Flight Simulator at the same time as we were. Microsoft have confirmed that they won't be including the twin towers in their next version, have rubbished the idea that the terrorists learnt to fly using their software (hmmm... so the software's not that realistic then... even though in the same press release Microsoft say that it is. S'funny, the one trained pilot I know said that it's a lot harder to fly a computer flight simulator than it is to fly a real plane, which I imagine is true - driving on a computer doesn't bear much relation to the real world because there are no external cues to help you, just a screen and some sounds). Despite the reassurances from Microsoft, some retailers are taking the software off their shelves. And femail, like me, are tempted to fly straight into the towers for the helluvit. Add comment | this item 
Having a bad Handspring day.
Oh joy! I don't know how this happened - it was just in my pouch (y'know, male-handbaggy over-the-shoulder phone & wallet-holder type thingy) for a couple of days. When I took it out, this big crack was just there. Musta lain on it or something. Add comment | this item Scanning blogdex, trying to find some piece of non-WTC-terrorism-related and non-Nimda-virus-related stories, this cyborg cockroach grabbed my attention. BTW, lots of wierd and wonderful blog thoughts recently, but they all come in the night-time and vanish by morning. And then are kept out all day by the prospect of lots of work. Ah well, soon.... And I met a man with (probably) the world's only lobster theremin last night. Eerie. Hmmm... "lobster theremin"... it's one of those bizarrely juxtaposed phrases that just demands to be fed into a search engine. And so I did. Nice chunks of text back from Google, like Pictures of My Theremin Rebels Slo-Pitch Team. Royal Order of the Laughing Cavalier Lobster. Most though, unsurprisingly, relate to 50s sci-fi movies where lobsters or lobster-men plan to take over the earth: the plot circles around the evil Lobster Man’s plans to steal Earth’s atmosphere and ... imitation of a ‘50’s sci-fi Theremin and ... channel, and most of the weird stuff (theremin score, laser effects) comes across with wide ... can see a silhouette of a giant lobster at the edge of the screen ... (the latter a review for the DVD edition of "Teenagers from Outer Space"). Add comment | this item Friday, September 14, 2001
Does this Stor Trooper really look like me? I think not. Closest I could get though.
Add comment | this item Thursday, September 13, 2001
This piece, once it gets into its flow, has some interesting things to say about the USA and terrorism, in particular that Osama bin Laden was trained in terrorism by the CIA. When you think that they (as well as the UK and others) did a similarly good job at getting Iraq armed to the teeth... Add comment | this item Still having to consume more personal reports of Tuesday's events and the aftermath. This report covers the whole story in detail, with lots of pictures from yesterday, bringing it all a lot closer than the TV or papers have done. This one brought home the emotion, panic and confusion of being there. Reading it, I could hear in my head the Freddie Hubbard & Ilhan Mimaroglu record Sing Me A Song Of Songmy... the final strains of Threnody for Sharon Tate merged into This is Combat, I Know with its thin, feeble Vietnamese voice reading without apparent emotion "burn me, burn my family... but do not burn my prize cow" Add comment | this item Wednesday, September 12, 2001
Interesting thought of last night: Will the twin towers of the World Trade Center be included in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2002? Sick thought of last night: Will the aforementioned flight sim include a scenario where you have to fly your plane into them? Add comment | this item Hard to describe the feeling. Like half of the world, I am in shock. And I have to add my small part to the emotional soup. OK, reverse wind, chronology... I was sitting in The Cod with Mark & Duncan when I found out. Duncan got a phone call from his wife... I could just hear his half of the conversation: "A 747?" "TWO 747s? Nah, you're having me on!" "The World Trade Centre" "What, one in each tower?" "The Pentagon AS WELL??" It all sounded like some kind of bizarre joke, and of course that was what we thought it was. Duncan got off the phone and filled in the gaps. To my mind, plane crash means accident, and you just don't get accidents like that... planes hitting buildings? Nah, pilots aren't that dumb. And even if one did it... why the hell would another, and another. No, that sort of thing doesn't happen. The idea of terrorist attack didn't even cross my mind. But then, we asked the bar staff, and they said they had just heard it on the radio. From then on, it gradually gained a thin coating of reality, finally sealed in when we returned to the Leo Burnett offices and saw all 3 TV screens tuned to the news, a crowd of silent onlookers gathered in front of them watching the clouds of dust engulf New York. We were just in time to see the second tower collapse. Even then it didn't seem real. Something like that is so extreme, there are no rational ways to cope with it. We were watching a drama unfold, but like all dramas, this was just theatre (well, OK, Hollywood cinema - even further removed from everyday life). At one point it dawned on me that there would have been people in those buildings and aeroplanes - a hell of a lot of people, and that thousands of lives were in the process of being shattered, but still I couldn't muster any real emotions. Total loss of affect, I think it's called. The rest of the day was wierd. It was hard to talk about anything else, but it was also hard to talk about the events themselves: there was so little information, all the news channels repeating the same phrases over and over, that conversation was also limited and circular. When I got home, I lay in bed listening to the Radio 4 news, but had to switch off. Too many panting, hysterical voices, too much human emotion and pain. I had already been feeling a bit wierd recently, uncertain about my future, emotions fluctuating, and now I just felt a huge oppresive unhappines with the world - like every enterprise ever is doomed to failure, civilisation is doomed. I found it very hard getting to sleep. I woke up slightly less despondent, but still not feeling exactly great. I have had to spend the morning sucking up reports of the events, not so much to make sense of them, but just because not to do so would leave a great void. Blogdex has links to little that is not related to the attacks and their aftermath. The Guardian's coverage crystallized everything for me, brought home the human tragedy and made it all more than a news story. And reading the story as it unfolded from posters to Metafilter makes events even more tangible and really sets off the goosebumps and the tears, with comments like "My dad is across the street. He was talking to my mom after the first one on the cell phone. When the second hit, the phone went dead. shit shit shit shit shit shit"I think I'm ready to face the world. I'm sadder, but at least my sadness now has a history. Add comment | this item Tuesday, September 11, 2001
This is wonderful. Sometimes I wish that I had a super-hero alter-ego. (Oh yeah, I do. I forgot all about Captain Freaky and his Chaos Mushroom Men. But that was a long time ago now). Add comment | this item Shee....it. She..it. WTF? I have no words, so must piggy-back off Auriea's memorial Add comment | this item Decided to find my weblogger twin. My twin is apparently Caroline of prolific.org. Mind you, quizzes like that... they always leave me wondering whether I answered all the questions right. Somehow they never offer the right answer for me. Mind you, they somehow managed to throw up lots of familiar matches. Out of the who-knows-how-many blogs there must be out there, I recognised:
1 comment Add comment | this item Some great Amazon.com comments on the Modern Library's top 20 novels of the 20th century. I especially liked this comment on George Orwell's 1984: "'What's the point?' Maybe if you live in a country that's a monarchy, this book's worth reading, but this is *America*, ok? The whole reason we live in a democracy is so that we the people don't have to worry about things like this." Add comment | this item Monday, September 10, 2001
I liked the other Tim's take on Sarah G's take on the ordinariness of blogging: some very domestic news Add comment | this item Second sign of winter: drinking red wine at lunch time. A long time since I've done this, and I forgot how much it can make the ears and cheeks burn in the afternoon. Feel like I need a few buckets of water over my head. And it's 4 hours since I finished drinking. Add comment | this item You know that thing, where it's late at night, you're tired, been doing too much of the same thing for too long, perhaps drinking a bit much with it, and you start to hear music? Usually string quartets, coming from your computer fan? Well, does anyone else get that, or is it just me? Add comment | this item Well, this is it. Winter has started. Not that it's snowing or anything - in fact, the sun is still shining brightly, and to anyone behind the window of a climate-controlled building like this one it would appear that nothing has changed. But step outside and you'll realise that it's light without heat, intense white stuff that burns nothing except the back of your retina. Over the weekend I gradually noticed the creeping cold feeling worming its way into the air. Doesn't seem like much at first, until you stop moving for too long, and realise that it's chiselling its way towards your innards, refrigerating your flesh. And walking from the train this morning, the chill air slipped into my shirt through the gaps between my buttons, icing my chest with a message to "buy a vest". I'm getting worried for the winter. Already on Sunday I fired up the gas heater in our vast new living room - and it did create a zone of cosiness in the North-East corner. But I'm worried about the cost and viability of keeping such huge spaces warmed but not stifling throughout the huge space that is winter. Add comment | this item Took Rowan and Lolly out for the day on Saturday. Rowan made her usual protests about wanting to stay at home, but they were less emphatic than usual, and pretty soon forgotten once we'd left the house. We caught the bus into town, train to Nottingham, and taxi to Keyworth where I collected the car (quelle shock! I'm another 500 quid poorer, after having the clutch replaced, new rear brake pipe and associated fittings, and seat stripped down and re-welded to get rid of its awkward wonkiness). Having got the neccesary stuff out of the way, we headed back into Nottingham for some serious family-style attraction visiting. Target for the day was Nottingham Castle museum and art gallery, which I had visited some 12 years before with the Woodcraft Folk. It was a wonderful, magical little place, much improved since my last visit. Although not very large, everything was laid out with such attention to detail and an obvious feeling for what children like, and Rowan didn't complain once. OK, maybe once, when she thought I was going to make her look at paintings, but for the most part she had a whale of a time. There was a lot of touchiness about - several displays had "PLEASE TOUCH" labels on them, and a wall painted to resemble Noah's Ark had pottery animals behind flaps, animal noises at the press of a button, and darkened holes to stick your hand in and feel the textures. A jar in the shape of a bear had its own picture story-book which I read to Rowan ("I'm not a teddy bear, and I'm not cute." "And I'm not even a bear - I'm a dog". The bear, it turns out, was a depiction of mediaeval bear-baiting in nearby Alfreton, and the creature it was holding was a dog who was supposed to be trying to attack it). Lunch was a bit of a hit and miss affair - the first waiter brought my sandwich but forgot my juice and Rowan's lunch box, which arrived some 5 minutes later, minus straw for Rowan's drink carton. Afterwards I got a cup of tea without any milk, and Rowan's Scone with Jam turned up without any jam. Still, the friendliness of the staff made up for it, and we got everything we wanted in the end. Then we went upstairs for the gallery portion. There was a temporary exhibition of Ghanaian coffins - wonderful, amazing things, the existence of which I had never been the slightest bit aware of. They were carved into wonderful shapes, brightly painted and decorated, and varnished shiny-smooth. Here was one shaped like a red fish, the lid off to show luxuriant red trimmings inside. To be buried in one of these, you had to be a fisherman who caught the lucky red fish. Lobster fishermen, unsurprisingly, got a coffin in the shape of a lobster. A spring-onion-shaped box was for burying farmers, elephant and leopard were less specific, although for brave and clever people only (Rowan thought that she would probably choose one of these, as there were few other coffins for girls, and she is after all both brave and clever). A lion was similarly unspecific, although stronger and less intelligent than the previous two, would suit a warlord. One of the strangest coffins came in the shape of an oil barrel, hazardous chemical symbol and all. Apparently these are used to store the local banana-derived alcohol, and the maker of such drinks would end up in this coffin. In another room were a key - for politicians and royalty, people with access to prestigious apartments - and a hen covered in chicks - for mothers with many children, and usually grandchildren as well. The coffins gave Rowan and I much to talk about - she thought that a bus coffin for bus drivers would be a good idea, and if it was a double decker you could even get two in at once. More examples of Ghanaian coffins here. The next room was just as much fun - entitled "how much is that doggy" it was an installation piece, taking the form of a toyshop. Childrens' toys and books were scattered around, animal pictures from the museum's collection were on the walls, there was a pond area where, by donning a baseball-cap built-up with felt to look like a goldfish and passing through a curtain of blue lace dotted with water-lilies, you could become a fish and swim around. In the opposite corner was a dog basket the size of a sofa, piled with well-worn and comfy looking blankets and cushions. We flopped down inside it and became lazy hounds. The fun continued outside the castle. We admired the view across the new industrial and commercial buildings of Nottingham, and then did a few circuits of the playground, where slides and climbing frames were disguised as castles, and coats of arms studded the paths between one area and the next. After carrying Lolly around all of this, I didn't have the energy to carry on to Tales of Robin Hood, and I don't think Rowan did either, but still we managed to go home feeling that our day had been full. Add comment | this item Ah, the dilemmas of food. Several months ago I took the cookbook The Single Vegan down to London with me, because despite being neither single nor vegan, I thought it might offer some handy recipes for me for when I'm staying alone in Dave's flat. Unfortunately, even its frugal shopping lists are too much for me... it offers lunches and dinners for a week at a time, and it's all very well being told that I can use the other half of my carrot in tomorrow's lunch, but if I'm not here tomorrow lunch-time then the other half just gets wasted. At the moment I'm probably at the flat for one, or if I'm very lucky two, meals per week. Makes it kinda hard shopping for fresh veg (especially as I am easily tempted). I guess I am the classic target for frozen-ready-meals, but I so wanted to make the effort to do it myself. Items currently rotting in the fridge:
Add comment | this item Friday, September 07, 2001
Quote of the night from Gordon's novel: No one comes here sober and everyone leaves in a worse state than they arrived. Add comment | this item (this entry follows on from the last one, as so many do. Which makes it kinda irritating that Blogger will place them the other way around, but at the same time I'd hate to have it any other way) Sitting on the train, a family come to occupy the 3 seats nearby. They ask the fellow already occupying the 4th seat whether he minds if they don't smoke, and he says of course not, as long as they don't mind if he does. Or (once they produce snacks), if they don't mind his passive eating. It appears that they are returning from a party in London. There are, as I said, 3 of them. Father and mother are probably in their mid-40s, daughter mid-teens. And she has obviously appeared in some TV production, which the party was in celebration of. Big names were there. Not so big that I would know them, but nonetheless big. I am touched when a phone rings. The ring tone is Eminem... can't pretend to be with it enough to know the name of the tune. "I am whatever you say I am". That one, less accessible than the more accessible ones (duh!). Whatever. The reason I'm touched is that, after 5 or 6 rings, the mid-40s father realises that it is his phone. Cool. Cool dad. I was reading the other day about "silver texters" (and have seen something of this phenomenon lately), but it's always so nice seeing older, family-type (the 16-ish daughter is, I gather from conversation overheard, his youngest), people defying stereotypes in this way. Erm, there's more.... whatever. Again... shit.... I'm pissed. It's that bottle I bought from Oddbin's (along with the cigar). It's eating away at me in the nicest and yet most belt-loosening way. Shouldn't type more. Besides which, I've got a book to review. Must go. Syonara PS. The wine was Burgans Albarino (wiggly accent on the N, but I'm fucked if I'm gonna work out how to code that in my current state) Add comment | this item Time is the greatest luxury. But it's pretty fucking hard to buy. No, that wasn't quite it. Well, my thoughts were something like that, while I was dining away in a very pleasant brasserie, but sadly I didn't take them down at the time (of course, I coulda wapped them, but it seemed a bit rude in the circumstances, and a bit silly given that my mobile battery would most likely have expired halfway through) So how did I discover this? I missed the train. No, hang on, that wasn't it. I managed to leave work early, arrived at St Pancras just a few minutes too late to catch the 17.25, and went to buy my usual ticket. My usual ticket is a Saver Return. I buy it from London on a Friday night, rather than Sheffield on a Monday morning, because the wierd and wonderful rules of railway travel dictate that the 5.17am on Monday can be boarded by somebody with a Saver ticket only in it is the return portion, not the outward bound bit. So I do my outward bound from London, and then return from my home, Sheffield, at the beginning of the working week. So anyway, I asked for my normal Saver Return. And the man behind the protective window says "7.25?" And I say "is that the earliest I can get? What about the 6.25?" and, of course, I can't board that one with a saver ticket. It seems that somehow I've always managed to get a train either before 5.15 or 7.25 onwards, and avoided the expensive rush hour (other than, of course, the glory days when I rode first class and didn't worry about all this shit). So anyway, I meekly agreed to buy the saver and wait nearly 2 hours until the 19.25, and suddenly found that for less than zero I had managed to purchase that most valuable of luxuries, time. So, how did I use that luxury? As ever when there is a large gap to fill, my mind turned to food. I wasn't really that hungry (had had a very pleasant lunch of grilled black sea bream with green beans & cherry tomatoes) but still... and perhaps I could squeeze in a nice bottle of wine. Yeah, that's it, sod the food. Well... include the food (seems a bit rude going into a restaurant and not eating) but make the wine the centre point. I wandered London - from St Pancras down towards Covent Garden - looking for somewhere quality looking but not too snobbish, where I wouldn't mind eating alone. In the end I found a brasserie - shit, what was the name? My mind says Riverside Brasserie, but that seems odd, as it wasn't near the river (it was between Holborn and Tottenham Court Road stations, just around the corner from the British Museum). It looked empty through the window, of both customers and staff. I felt a little shy, so moseyed around the block looking for somewhere else similar, but found nothing as inviting looking. So I plucked up the courage to walk inside. And take a few more steps. And stroll up to the back of the restaurant... still alone. I felt like the only living person left on earth. Was about to lose my bottle and walk out again, cried a meek "hello" just to provide an alibi should somebody nab me before walking out the door again, when a waitress appeared in the stairway and congratulated me on being the first for the night. Then there was that embarrasing moment... "table for one please"... "yes, sit wherever you like This was around about the point when my appreciation of time kicked in. I was in a restaurant. OK, so I wasn't the richest person in the world, but I had just saved nearly £50 on my train fare. And Gill had backed up my idea of spending the £50 on dinner. And I wanted some booze. And I wanted to let go. I made the change of a lifetime - despite Kir Royal being on the specials summer drinks menu, I ordered a Ricard. Relaxed and mixed pastis and ice and water, and sipped, all the time enjoying time. I ordered a main course of roast fillet of king fish with shallots, and a large glass of Gewurtztraminer (ummed and ahed and ummed and ahed about getting a whole bottle... bit in the end that seemed just too wino, too alky). The bread arrived mere seconds before the fish, and I tucked in. A strange fish, very close to chicken, but more tender than the remembered chicken of my childhood. And so strange... at first it seemed perforated, there was so much air, and then I realised that it was wrapped in a spiral, layers of fish gradually separating out as I munched. And the shallots... well cooked, melt in your mouth, roasted slivers of oniony joy, plus a dab of mayonnaise-hollandaise-goo and balsamic vinegar. I luxuriated in it, feeling like the king of the world, the conqueror of time Eventually, of course, it had to come to an end. I prolonged the moment by ordering tarte citrone with a single espresso. The tarte arrived without the promised citrone sauce, and looking a bit like yesterday's sell-by, but it sufficed. After such a kingly feast, I couldn't help ordering a cognac to polish it off. The plain Hennessy (no VS, VSOP, XO) stung a little, and was too cold as I had lost my patience and couldn't swill it in the glass for the required time, but completed the meal in a satisfactory way. My train time was fast approaching, I had to get moving. So I paid up and left. Adjourned to the off-license around the corner. As I stumbled there, I knew that I had that smile on my face. The smile that makes you irresistible to anyone, man or woman alike, the smile that says "I know what I want, where I am, where I'm going. Join me if you dare". By now I was well-nigh-tipsy. I couldn't face the idea of an unembellished train journey after having waster such wonderful time. In the offy I bought a bottle of good wine (£7.99) along with a corkscrew and plastic cup (after all, what else was I to make do with), a large Bolivar Habana cigar and a box of matches. The cigar I smoked while walking to the station. In my nonchalance, I arrived a few minutes late - the 19.25 was firing up to leave, and there was no time left for me to get on it. No concern. I sat in the waiting room and uncorked my wine (a little concerned at being viewed a wino, but not too much) and sipped away. There was an unexpected bonus, a 19.55 train, 30 minutes earlier than the one I had expected. I left it long enough to miss it if the train deemed this necessary, but managed to get on anyway. Walked with purpose through to the smoking carriage at the end of the train, and plonked myself down. My diversion had been a costly one (what with the brasserie, the wine, the cigar and accoutrements, more expensive than the £50 saved), but it taught me for the umpteenth time in my life the value of waiting, of letting pleasure come to you rather than seeking it out in a mutually-destructive manner. Will I sit up and remember tomorrow? Will I hell! Add comment | this item note to self: the future is in pc owners upgrading. remember to invest in services which let them move their content over Add comment | this item Decided to investigate UK parrots a bit further (my post about them was of neccesity brief, as I uploaded it via my mobile phone). I often see them in Bushy Park and around Teddington in general. Found this guy's website - he's doing a study of the UK parrot population. I thought that this was a recent phenomenon (they seem to have taken off [excuse the pun] in Teddington over the last 5-10 years) but apparently there were first wild parrots in the UK in 1855. They first began breeding regularly in 1969 though - same year as I was succesfully bred. Add comment | this item Oooh, there's nothing like the Daily Mail for getting my teeth griding on the tube. It's huge frontpage headline this morning was a big rant, something along the lines of "Now it's illegal to smack your own child" (referring to this story). Apart from the vast factual innaccuracy of the headline, the way they refer to "your child" as an object for your smacking, something like "your punchbag" made me seethe. In my mind, an alternative scenario formed. The government bans physical abuse of senile senior citizens - suddenly you can no longer discipline your dribbling parents with a sharp jab, and the Daily Mail kneejerks as usual: "Now it's illegal to kick your mother". I don't think so. Add comment | this item Thursday, September 06, 2001
just heard a squeak squeak squeak approaching in the sky. turned out to be 2 of west london's now indigenous green parrots. Add comment | this item Armenian proverbs, stolen without shame from notsosoft because... well, because they're wonderful (I've a feeling that numbers 6 and 18 at least are, ahem, somewhat fictitious):
Add comment | this item Wednesday, September 05, 2001
I seem to be going through a period of reflection. What with all those little memories that came drifting in the other day... and I just went to the bar and got a bottle of Budvar. Now, I'm no beer connoisseur (gosh, that's the second time I've used that word in 7 postings - I know because I remember it well, one of the few words that I have absolutely no idea how to spell - must resort to the spell-checker every time)... where was I? Oh yeah, I'm no beer connoisseur (3rd time!) and I find it hard enough telling one fizzy lager from another, but there was something about that first mouthful that I took. Suddenly, I was back there, standing on the patio of the Bratislava Economic University (or should that be Ekonomická univerzita v Bratislave). The year was, I think, 1993 (or was it 1992?) It was summer anyway, and I had travelled wiht Bridget to what was still just Czechoslovakia as a delegate to the Council of Europe's European Youth Forum conference. I met some of the most interesting and memorable people of my life (just a shame that none of them responded to my letters later). Dirk from Germany was my main buddy for the week. (you know what, I just did a search and... think this may be him!), his Spanish girlfriend (Eva?) less so - not that I had a problem with her, she just seemed rather miserable. She was fairly well down the road with muscular dystrophy though, and I guess that misery is the perogative of the seriously disabled. Gabriel, an actor from Romania, was part of the theatre group (Studio 21?) who left a huge emotional mark on me, one night with their perfomance of Ionescu's The Chairs and a couple of days later with a physical performance echoing the fear, violence, turmoil and above all the helicopters of the last days of the Caucescu regime. Gabriel seemed a lovely guy, we talked in minimal English plus sign language, and he told me of his many experiences playing Jesus (he was the spitting image of your gift-shop Jesus, and had played the role in plays, TV ads etc), which he found ironic, as his surname was Apostol. Isobel was a former prostitute from Portugal, only 25 but wise beyond her years. She had managed with great hardship to abandon her former career, and was now running an advice centre in Lisbon helping others to do the same. I forget the name of others - the Northern Irish guy with the best sense of humor and desire to party in the face of partisan struggles, bombs and all, his female companion, only 16 but with the most perfect body imaginable and a simple black dress that did it enormous justice, the Slovenian guy who had hitch-hiked the whole of Europe, and gave us invaluable advice for our return hitch to England (our train tickets had been stolen, along with my camera, on the outward journey by Gypsies from Brno), the gorgeous arabic-looking French girl from the slums of Marseilles, who did not speak a word of English and would slump on the steps of the lecture theatre puffing at a cigarette between sessions, the party from Iceland, for whom life was a nihilistic party and they were supplying the vodka, whose smashed bottle I danced barefoot over regardless and painless, and of course the many, many other beautiful women from Czechoslovakia, Slovenia and Romania. And every night, after long sessions of debate translated into 4 languages through an elaborate maze of headphones, we gathered on the patio and swigged Budvar as we talked, danced, and formed new international pacts. Add comment | this item The trials and tribulations of JavaScript: part 7,984,132 I spent far too much time over the last few days wrestling with a particularly intractible JavaScript problem. I had a funky little form which the guys had built me, with an image in place of a submit button, which called the JavaScript form.submit() function to, err, submit the form. Problem is, it didn't. It kept telling me "object does not support this property or method". Which is damn stupid, because every fule kno that JavaScript supports the form.submit() method. My JavaScript book tells me so. The numerous website I've built which use it tell me so. The websites I scoured for insights into my problem told me so. I was particularly disheartened when I tried pasting one piece of sample code alongside my own, and found that their form.submit() worked and mine didn't. In the end I gave up, and asked Guy if he could help. I felt kinda bad doing it, but I know that Guy has an even higher pain threshold than I do for dealing with such problems, plus he's encountered a few in his time. Luckily, he had encountered this one before, and after what seemed like a very short time (may have been a couplea hours, but short compared to the amount of headbanging time I had already devoted to this problem) he came up with a solution. Don't call your submit-button-replacement-image "submit". The IMG tag had both its NAME and ID properties set to "submit", and this was confusing the damn fool JavaScript into thinking that when I said form.submit() I was asking it to do something kinky with the image. I changed the image name and id to "subButton" and, lo and behold, everything worked. Simple problem, simple solution. So why, as ever, did it take 2 days to get to the bottom of it? Thanks Guy. Add comment | this item Been surfing Blogdex for some interesting links. I ended up offering to put Quack the duck up in Sheffield as part of his world tour, and finding a site that keeps old versions of all that software you don't really like the new versions of. Add comment | this item Those crazy Finns, they're at it again... being crazy. This time it's a mobile phone throwing contest. Organised by Fennolingua. I thought Fennolingua was some kind of sexual practice. Add comment | this item Tuesday, September 04, 2001
Inverting the theme this time: fall and rise. I finally got around to starting Gordon's novel. It has been sitting on my hard disc for over a year now, and on an over-lazy train journey back to Sheffield I decided that reading it on screen would be preferable to writing another suite of web apps (hah! Like I ever do that!) I've only ever done that with one other full length book - Bruce Sterling's Hacker Crackdown, and I have to say that DOS Edit with it's white-on-blue text and easily-understandable scrollbars is a lot easier going than MS-Word with its black-on-white and random page-jumps. But, whatever. The book was (is) good. Fucking good. My god, he has that inner mental voice down perfectly. I love Gordon. You can always tell that all this stuff is going on inside him. But it's not the kind of thing you can talk to him about. You can't tell him how wonderful (and yet screwed up) he is, you just hope that he picks it up by osmosis over a number of sessions down the pub. You can't really discuss shared experiences (unless properly drunk), everyone is obviously too fragile for that. You just hope that... a bit of admiration slips out once in a while, in amongst the endless piss-taking and devil-may-care-who-really-cares jive talking. Add comment | this item Talking of rises and falls, my mind also meandered its way to mid-1997. Not sure why that year in particular... though there could be many reasons. Hard Reality had just been set up, the 3 of us were freshly installed in Canary Wharf, we were at the height of our skills and notoriety. Keld directed me to an article on the Wired website about a new technology called XML. It struck a chord with me (which rang in tune with my recent extensive reading on SGML). Wired said that it was the language of the future, would engulf the web sweeping all before it. I could see huge potential, but envisaged a good few years before the tangled mess of browsers and standards would truly catch on. It's great to be a prophet before the event. At the same time we were starting to experiment with employing people outside the UK. Actually, not strictly true, we had used Tobias in Sweden a year before, but with our courting of Michael in Belgium and Big Gun in West-coast USA, things moved up a gear. We were working with the best, and we knew it. Unfortunately, nothing lasts for ever. Tobias was the king of the Java applet, and though I'm sure he has taken his experiments beyond pages of real-time rendered experiments, the history of Java has largely overlooked the kind of application which is now the domain of Flash and Shockwave. I am still stuck in the HTML standards of 1997-8, the pressures of programming and management having prevented me from taking advantage of XML or dip my toes into alternative technologies such as Flash as I would have dearly loved to have done. Guy has likewise worn his soul thin on the sharp edges of under-developed web standards, and is ready to return to music and print media. Michael (and Auriea) are still ahead of the game, but that's because they were always ahead of the game, always more interested in staying ahead of the game than in pandering to trivialities such as money or the greatest good for the greatest number. And the men in suits have moved in, razed the landscape, and put up a parking lot. Add comment | this item Walking through the alleys around Leicester Square, I was reminded of lunch with Chris some 2 years ago. Things were still good then, expense accounts were still easily abused, and although I got the impression that Chris was very fond of his expense account (he took me for lunch to discuss his company's specialised offering, having already met my colleagues on a day when I was detained elsewhere) he was not the type to spend it profligately. Instead he would make a virtue of tracking down hearty value-for-money bistros around town, balancing minimum expense against maximum quality. He was also a connoisseur of wine. Not in the respect that he would intimidate you with his vast knowledge, or make a sideshow out of choosing a bottle, but in that delightful paternalistic manner that takes great pleasure in spreading knowledge to others. He was one of those old-school public-school not-quite-Oxbridge arts/humanities type that knows how to live life enjoyably, but sadly will find it increasingly hard to get by in today's economic climate. Add comment | this item Monday, September 03, 2001
We were spending a day in Paris, and everyone had their own idea of which Paris attraction they would choose for their desert island. My own choice was the Centre Pompidou, primarly because I had heard it housed the world's largest collection of paintings by Kandinsky. My desire to visit dated back to the days when I could be single-minded enough to have a favourite anything (musician = Bill Laswell, author = M. John Harrison, artist = Wassily Kandinsky, film = Eraserhead, etc. etc.), and although my tastes now change more from day-to-day, I was still keen to see some of the great man's work. I had only ever seen 2 or 3 Kandinskys, small ones at that, at the Tate gallery in London and the National gallery in Cardiff, and it always amazed me how pictures that appear so flat and graphical on the printed page could disguise a human 3rd dimension of brush-strokes and coloured sands applied to the canvas. Of course the 5 or 6 Kandinskys on display did not disappoint. Neither did the other pieces - so many of them that it became impossible to concentrate on individual works, I ended up walking through rooms letting the impressions wash over me. The lower level, focussing on work from 1960 onwards, was easier in this respect as the wider range of materials and instantly-gratifying nature of many of the works meant not having to think too hard. But I was surprised eventually at what made an impression on me. The first thing to grab my attention was the curators. I am used to English curators, usually uniformed, usually uniform - kindly grey old men or bossing matron-like women. Here the curators were a work of art. Each seemed to have been selected for individuality and visual interest. Some even complimented the art that they curated - alongside a series of photos entitled "One Minute Sculptures" (people frozen in awkward poses) sat a woman picking at her feet in a near-yogic posture. The other memory that I took away was of the smells. At the time I was in the middle of reading Perfume, and the book's description of it's protagonist's use of smells to categorize all things prompted me to pay more attention to the evidence of my nose wherever I may be. I walked into an installation - a dark room whose walls were obscured by hundreds of second-hand garments, and instantly I moved from the clean plaster-and-metal smell of the galleries to a melange of spent human odours. At the same time, the sharp clatter of hard surfaces almost disappeared as the clothing sucked in noise. Another room contained pine-wood sculptures, its walls lined with an inch-think barrier of densely-packed bay leaves, sandwiched behind a grid of chicken-wire squares. This time the smell was herbaceous - plant and pine mingling like the Swiss alpine forests of my childhood - and again the character of sound was altered, softened. Other smaller scultures floated more infinitessimal traces of themselves in the surrounding air - from brass castings, which smelt like the taste of a penny, to leather furniture, mellowed by a life under bums. 1 comment Add comment | this item |
