Come On Up To The House

Lookee yonder! A big black cloud comes. Thunder on the horizon!

London has truly descended into its typical self-pitying state when faced with actual weather today; certainly, a couple dustbins are over and the plastic bags are whipping up a storm, but it’s not that bad, good grief. It’s a spot of rain and a little bit blustery - yet the weather report this morning advised not leaving your home unless it’s essential. Of course, I am an essential component in a well-oild machine, therefore I am 100% dedicated to my position. I am certainly not posting this from home. Not least because the internet doesn’t work.

Jeremy Beadle died. That was weird. It took me approximately two seconds to remember the joke about the Beadle clocks, which’ll probably rocket up on eBay. You know, one big hand, one little hand? It’s a quite impressive show of grief for Beadle really, given that when I was young he was fair universally reviled. Times change, though, the insidious grip of nostalgia is as strong now as it was during the spate of I Love The… programmes on BBC2. Next: Stuart Maconie reminisces about his love for You’ve Been Framed.

As I sit here in my little, appropriated staff-room (reclaimed from the depths of storage room oblivion), I am surrounded by the accoutrements of my life. Peter Carey is grinning at me; my lunchbox is now empty of last night’s leftover bobotie; plenty of fluids as I battle another minor cold; speakers not working; pictures of London on the walls. No plants. Life can seem awfully one-dimensional compared with the vastness of mortality, can’t it? Wikipedia is, of course, right up-to-date with Beadle, but I recall one instance when I looked up a certain property Tv show host, and it was reported that she’d been shot dead outside her home that morning. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, there’s a human being, exited from this scene. Of course, Ms Alsop is alive and kicking, Wikipedia’s notorious instability at it’s prime here, but when your final moments arrive, I wonder, what can you take with you? Food? Fluids? Books? A beautifully-appointed Victorian villa? But no exhortation to live life to EXTREME MAX here - I am happy trying to live wisely, and it is going rather well.

My day so far seems to have been dominated by Christmas pudding. The one on my desk, as discussed yesterday, left from a Christmas hamper, was consumed by myself and my colleague this morning - no spoons, no custard, no cream, but it wasn’t not worth it.

That came after spending my commute delving into Peter Carey’s Oscar And Lucinda. It’s a richly written book, so far, and I’m looking forward to it. It’s based around the concepts put forward in Edmund Gosse’s Father & Son, which I read a while ago and thoroughly enjoyed: both writers have a sound grasp of the written language and a distinct knack with a well-turned phrase. The book so far revolves around a similarly Devonian childhood gripped with religion and botany, so the similarities are plain, but this can only be expected to diverge from here on in.

As my desk is now tidy of both pudding and paté, my attention turns to actually doing some work, in this case VLE-based fun with Moodle. This’ll mean something to the pitiable fools in my line of work, but thankfully to noone else. I say work, what I actually mean is I’ll be rehearsing some basic Polish in advance of my course starting in April. So all together now: Czy Pan mówi po angielsku?

So I feel slightly guilty now as a kindly hippy has politely shamed me on my carnivorous views. Not that they’ll be changing any time soon, but I do like vegetarians, I promise!

Today sees me bimbling away on the usual work stuff: stuffing envelopes, data entry, uploading web stuff, emails, etc. In many ways, my job is exactly the same as probably a billion other people. But do they have corned beef sandwiches for lunch? Do they heck.

My desk is a slightly curious mixture these days. Gone are the no-unauthorised-access days, now I have to be vaguley presentable to incoming types. Thusly, no scruffy clothes and trainers, no photoshopped Natasha Bedingfield pictures, no trinkets from Ghana or Nepalese calendars. I do have, however a Christmas pudding, three miniature preserves, a small tin of paté, some dying, unidentified plants, an intinerary for the US trip, and a mug that needs washing. Also a certificate stating grade A+ in advanced teamaking.

I don’t miss my old job at all, but I do occasionally miss having a scruffy work zone. All around would be boxes piled high with papers, plastic wallets spilling out of drawers - and in the middle, my zen self, working in a blissful state of perfect convenience. Nowadays, I have tidy things, and I like that too, but sometimes I miss scruffy Simone.

Stoke Newington Farmer’s Market - A Fine Place

There’s no such thing as a free lunch hmm? Tell that to the kindly Hare Krishna who just gave me a free mung bean curry and piece of cake and hot fruit tea. Healthy, tasty, filling and free: that suggests free lunch to me. As a pre-payday snack, it’s certainly good.

That said… the poster next to it said: “please don’t eat my friend!” with a picture of a child hugging a cow, and the slogan “Why vegetarianism?” Why indeed. You could:

• deny yourself delicious meat
• be scorned in every fancy restaurant in the world
• never be full up again
• have to supplement your diet to achieve a proper mineral intake
• condemn thousands of already poor farmers to abject poverty

But why would you? In order to pursue some sort of crazed, utopian ideal that bears little semblance to reality? Check. To assuage your easily-manipulated guilt functions? Check. To be a hippy? Check, you hippy. Certainly the meat industry is as corrupt, tainted and and evil as, ooh… the music industry, but to live a truly healthy, careful life you’d actually have to cut out the majority of what you veggies eat anyway, at least the ones I know. Unless you have grown your produce yourself in complete organic isolation, you’re never going to have food which reaches its full nutritional potential, or is ethically- or chemically-sound. Your average paddy farmer is in at least as dire straits as your beloved cow, with it’s complete lack of human emotion.

That rules out quite a lot, and leaves you looking like one of those barking raw food loonies (best line: ”I love to give myself an enema - a coffee enema in the morning is great.”). My advice: eat the meat. Eat it, you know you want to. You think vegetarians are inspiring? How about the woman who was been veggie for 15 years and came back in order to eat Gordon Ramsey’s cookalong steak?

Eat meat, it’s great. But do it right: treat your food with the respect you’d give to your homegrown carrots. Buy meat from farmer’s markets, from trustworthy butchers, know where it came from, treat it well, knowing that an animal bred for that specific purpose died to feed you.

I’m in the meat mood, I made a stew that averaged at a pound of beef per person over the weekend - I got it from Tom Clarke’s family butchers in Tottenham, he was proud of his meat and enjoyed selling it to me. And I enjoyed eating it - it tasted delicious, it was real.

Mmm, meatilicious.

I thought I’d end the week in generous mood, so here’s mp3s of a couple of things I’ve been listening to this week. Although, at the moment I can’t tell you what they sound like because I’m a little distracted by Oscar Cash’s Casio-demonstration-button styled cover of the Klaxons’ Golden Skans courtesy of Dalston Oxfam Shop’s Durrr podcast. Very odd. Coming up in a mo, Foals, who I’m now more inclined to be kind towards given Yannis Whatsisface’s respectable turn on Never Mind The Buzzcocks last night. It takes some doing, so I’ll be kind. I may even have a review by the end of this post.

Dropkick Murphys - For Boston

Low - (That’s How You Sing) Amazing Grace

What I was going to talk about was finishing Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood last night. I like all I’ve read of his, which is admittedly quite little, but this is generally recognised as his most accessible, most successful novel. This is true. It’s a linear and realistic story, set in late ’60’s Japan but which could exist in any place, at any time, a story of humanity and to me, a far more accurate retelling of being a late-teenage male than Catcher In The Rye will ever be.

The thing which put me off, to some extent, at the beginning was the word ‘elegiac’ on the blurb. Now, I know I’m prone to using this word, but it’s one of those which is far overused in the media world. Like ‘ethereal’ for anything musical which is vaguely shimmery, ‘elegiac’ is supposed to commute some sense of the supernatural or divine akin to listening to, say a Tavener requiem or a Gesualdo motet. It should stand for an emotionally-dense, inextricable beauty, a harmony of things which add up to greater than their worth. It represents the grief and the eulogy of a requiem, and all the setting that that invokes.

It’s usually used these days to describe post-rock, which is sadly limiting. I’ve been guilty, but I’ll certainly try and cut out its use except in the most deserving of circumstances, same with ‘ethereal’, ‘awesome’ and the like. These are words whose meanings are not changing so much as being diluted. Some would say it echoes the homogenisation and dilution of true beauty and culture into shock art and lowest-common-denominator imitation. Me, I’m not so fancy.

Sadly for my argument, Norwegian Wood actually meets pretty much all the prerequisites, which is why I ended up spending half the night finishing it off. But this is rare example - press, I’m watching you.

I’m now on Altered Images on the podcast - I can gratefully report that Foals was ok, but not all that. A spiky, angular, etc. etc. take on the standard Talking Heads, minimal ethic. Not moved to buy.

From listening to the Dropkick Murphys on Tuesday, things took a turn for the quieter this morning as I listened to Low’s Trust for the first time in a long while. I’ve been slightly putting off listening to this record for complex, associative reasons, but I was glad to walk across a hazy Noel Park this morning to the desert strains of the awesomely powerful ‘(That’s How You Sing) Amazing Grace’. One of the curses of a lack of home internet connection is that I’m unable to post you a track, so you’ll have to go exploring - you’re bound to find it somewhere.

If you’re lucky, you’ll find a live copy of the first time I heard it, from the band’s triumphant Don’t Look Back show at Koko - the song opened the encore after a full rendition of their definitive (in my opinion) masterpiece, Things We Lost In The Fire. What power! For a song that’s essentially Paris, Texas with harmonies, the dusty, sparse guitar, and oh! that elegant paucity of sound that characterises the band’s best work, these combine to make it one amazing opening track.

The associative quality of the record got me thinking. As I recall, I’ve only ever once bought an album to impress a lady, back in college. I documented the ordeal here, it really doesn’t warrant further dredging. Chances are this is my innate unwillingness to talk to women that means I avoid finding out what they like, or (as I like to imagine) I have more dignity than to sink to buying something I don’t think I’ll like. Probably the first. Not that it’s caused me any major problems in life thus far, and although I’ll probably never have a career as a semi-autobiographical, confessional novellist, I’ll happily pass that up in favour of my hard-earned journalistic integrity. Ahem.

And so I return to Low. Associations pass, integrity fails, but some Minnesotans transcend all this and continue to release breathtaking visions of apocalyptic sadness and emptiness. And thank goodness for that.

Photo of Noel Park by King Coyote 

My thoughts for purposes of blogging are generally formed by my morning commute, for better or for worse. Today I was struck by the monstrous familiarity of it all, and wondered whether it was such a bad thing.

I take the same route to the station (Turnpike Lane) every day. I rarely think to deviate from it, although it’s nice to go through Noel Park once in a while. I therefore see the same people each day: the Indian man walking his kids to school; the fellow with the wide-brimmed hat and German Shepherd that talks to a lady on Russell Avenue each morning; the elderly gentleman that walks to Westbury Avenue to collect his daily paper at the same time as I travel. The sun - especially at this time of year - is the same pale, watery luminescence that peers above the steps from Meads Road. I can recognise the same mugs that have to give out the free magazines at the entrance to the station, and those with the which I share my end of the platform.

The journey takes roughly the same amount of time each day, so I’m roughly the same time late each morning. There’s always stops in the tunnel, sometimes a seat at Finsbury Park, sometimes at Kings Cross. I’ll arrive at Holborn and my walk will take me approximately 5 minutes past some builders and some lawyers looking annoyed. I’ll see the same large-jawed fellow looking like he might grin at me one day. I’ll arrive at work and the day begins, same as ever.

I’m not complaining really. I have plenty of variety in life, almost too much sometimes, so I have no problem at all. Just an observation really.

In other news, I applied for funding for taking a Polish class this morning. I figured that if I want to interact with the wider community at any stage - or even just improve job prospects - then this is a fine way to do it. As I understand, it’s a little related to Czech, which I really liked the look of when in Prague. Not a huge Czech community in London, sadly, but tons of Poles so this’ll be enjoyable, I think.

As part of the Employment Experience ™ at my place of work, I qualify for a learning grant because “a learning worker is a happy, improving worker.” That’s right, I’ve landed somewhere between 1984 and present-day America.

Exciting things today:

Word of the day: slobber

Tunnocks Factory, Scotland

So I’m getting myself in the mood a touch, listening to some Grandmaster Flash and Dropkick Murphys. I haven’t listened to Al Barr, Spicy McHaggis and the boys in literally years, and they bring back some hilarious memories of my punk days. That is, I listened to punk rock, I never would have classified myself as a punk. Good grief alive, no. If I had, then no doubt my days would be spent ligging along with the likes of these, dressed in nought but shabby jeans, bovver boots and a wife-beater vest. As it happens, I’m wearing a stripy shirt and fairly smart trousers, but then I am at work: no doubt later my clodhoppers will come out.

The Dropkick Murphys, to me, are endearing in a somewhat aah, bless ‘em kind of way. Known first and foremost for their pride in their Boston-Irish heritage (why don’t you just get Americans?), the Murphys are also charming in their wilful, and often a touch comical appropriation of working class values and causes.

Take Sing Loud, Sing Proud! for instance. On the cover is a South Boston mural, imitating those found in Belfast and around the island. On the record you’ll find not only Irish traditionals like The Wild Rover and the Rocky Road To Dublin, but a collaboration with a slobberinhly incoherent Shane MacGowan. There’s also The Legend Of Finn MacCool, carefully avoiding the giant’s most notable misadventure, running away from his Scots counterpart. You’ll also find the raised fist in support of trade unionism and other such token, working mens’ causes. It’s all rather quaint, especially if you were to compare the tough-talking rabble with bands such as Crass, or Rage Against The Machine or the like, who actually make some effort to change things rather than just whining about them. Although, that sort of attitude could potentially wipe out the greater part of the music industry…

Tomorrow, I’m all about the playgrounds of West Philly, and Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince. Or, on the other hand: not.

to quote the ever-wise Grant Lee Phillips. My big terrifying/exhilarating news of the last few days is that I’ll soon be off on a recruitment trip around the Eastern seaboard of the United States, drumming up interest in my employer’s summer programme, and otherwise swanning around in a suit. Much as I enjoyed Belfast, this is a step up.

 I’ve not had to do business travelling before. I’m not so naive to imagine that it’s all glitz and glamour and first-class seats, but past this I have little idea of what to expect. As I sit up here in my hastily-converted staff room eating the remains of yesterday’s corned beef hash, it all seems a long way off. In reality though, tis but six weeks or so until I’m going. In fact, probably six weeks to the day. I’ll be getting a flight on Monday 3rd March to Miami. I’ll spend Tuesday there (chances are, saying hello to my leeetle friend. Or at least David Caruso) then trek to Boston to vist three colleges in the area. I guess I’ll be staying in Boston itself and hire a car to visit, so maybe I’ll get the chance for a look around. Maybe I’ll go to Bwaaston and get a cwaaafeee. After three days in the area I have the weekend off, so I’m thinking I’ll Amtrak to New York City: I’ve never been, and by all accounts, I really should.

Finally, train to Philly to visit my final stop, then a direct flight back from there. It’s quite a full schedule, for which I’m thankful: nothing would suck worse than being the Loneliness Of The Long-Distance Business Traveller. I’m hoping to meet up with a sort-of acquaintance in NY, and should be able to fill up my free time with visits and ting, so, the final verdict: a tentative should-be-good.

But still, frightening. I’m only little, I’m only young. I never expected this!

Checklist:

• Book flights/hotels/hire car
• Read wikitravel on literally everything
• Work on my six-pack before going to South Beach
• Give up on the six pack and buy a girdle and fake-tan arrangement
• Rewatch Good Will Hunting
• Practice my Noo Yawk phraseology: fugeddabouuut it; yo; etc.
• Play some B-ball outside of the school
• And so on

In this increasingly bizarre world, I find myself in the midst of a pantomime-athon. Last night saw me lounge across the luxurious spare seat at the Old Vic’s rendition of Cinderella. Imagined by none other than Stephen Fry, it’s panto through and through - singalongs, crossdressing, audience participation - but the usual risqué bits of humour for the mums and dads are considerably less subtle than the norm.

Safer, one would imagine, will be the more family-orientated - and much less luvvie - is the Saint Monica’s Players Aladdin; much more local, much less glamorous, but certainly just as fun. I go to this one each year as I know a cast member (ooh, get me!), but for am-dram this is pretty good, and they have an excellent dame. Also a man who looks a bit like a lion, which is exciting.

Mmm, pantothon. In other news, I’m considering using the learning grant I get from work to study Polish. Is that random? A good idea? I don’t know.