Tuesday, March 28, 2006

Spring Has Sprung!

Got up at 6.15am to go to ki class this morning. This is pretty much normal routine these days and it’s a fabulous way to start the day. Well once a week anyway…

For the uninitiated, ki is the Korean version of the Chinese chi, which basically amounts to life energy. Ki class looks a bit like tai chi and yoga with a bit of meditation thrown in and it’s a good way to get in tune with yourself and focus the mind.

It’s also a good class to do because it’s followed by an hour-long hapkido class and I find I take lots more onboard when my mind is sharp and focused.

After class I also hit on an idea for a few scenes in a play that I’ve been stuck on and I also got another scene for a sitcom idea I’m tinkering with. It was also sunny and a bit breezy and walking over Blackfriars Bridge just seemed a good place to be.

Sadly I then arrived at work and it all went wrong. Bugger…

Friday, March 24, 2006

On The Fiddle...

Came across a woman called Sophie Solomon when I was hunting around on itunes a week ago. Her album Poison Sweet Madeira is pretty bloody fabulous and her website (www.sophiesolomon.com) is worth a visit.

She’s a violinist but her style is more world music than classical.

Anyway when she rules the world please remember you read it here first...

Monday, March 20, 2006

Mussels In Brussels!

Me and the missus went to Brussels for the weekend and we did all the usual tourist stuff such as drink Belgian beer in the Grand Place, wander around and look at the art nouveau buildings, and eat moules, chocolate, frites and waffles (although not all at the same time).

We also had a bit of a Herge pilgrimage as the missus is a huge Tintin fan and as this involved going around the comic design museum and several comic shops I was quite happy too.

The highlight for me, though, was the Museum of Ancient and Modern Art. The ‘ancient’ stuff consisted of 14th-century to 18th-century work which was mainly religious paintings or portraits of rich folk. To be fair the Ruebens stuff was very big and very impressive but art designed to inspire religious awe never really floated my boat in the first place. And there was rather a lot of this…

The modern stuff, however, was fabulous with Picasso, Magritte, Dali, Henry Moore, Seurat, Gaugin and chums all on show. There was also a Belgian artist called Marcel Broodthaers who had done a work made entirely of empty mussel shells. Sadly some of these shells had fallen off the work and were lying at the bottom of the case.

I argued that these discarded shells represented the ephemeral nature of art and the artist had intentionally created a work with a limited shelf-life. The missus said it was because the glue he’d used to stick the shells on wasn’t strong enough.

But that’s the great thing about art. It inspires debate…

Friday, March 17, 2006

Pyjama Game

A work colleague told she wore pyjamas today and it sent me off on a long rant about a former lover who had also worn ‘jim-jams’ as she affectionately referred to them.

I explained to the colleague that I now no longer trust people who wear pyjamas as they gave my ex the appearance of a demure and proper young home-maker who was about to head to bed with cocoa and muffins, whereas in reality she was an utter tramp in the bedroom (not that I was ever complaining).

My colleague looked at me and the penny didn’t drop until I realised she maybe thought I was by association also calling her an utter tramp in the bedroom. I tried to extricate myself by saying that it, of course, didn’t refer to her – which then of course meant I was calling her a prude. Bugger!

Anyway the conversation ended something like this:

‘Of course I am not calling you a whore in the bedroom just because you wear pyjamas but at the same time I also realise you are a very attractive woman who could doubtlessly possess whorish qualities should she or the occasion demand it. In fact I’m sure you could be pristine as a shiny new fivepence or as dirty as a dockside hooker – but that choice is, of course, yours. So well done!’

I think I got away with it…

Wednesday, March 15, 2006

Woody Good Pecker

I’ve just finished reading a biography of US folk singer and songwriter Woody Guthrie. His musical legacy came into sharp focus for me when Billy Bragg did two albums of his songs with Wilco a few years ago and I’ve slowly dipped into his music ever since.

The biography by Ed Cray is entertaining and moving stuff and Woody, undoubtedly a true folk legend, sadly comes across as a bit of a shit who consistently let down his family and couldn’t keep his cock in his trousers. A tireless left-wing and union campaigner, he died from Huntingdon’s chorea in 1967.

As a semi-tribute to Woody my cue case and my laptop now sport the slogan ‘This machine kills fascists’ that he used to have on his guitar. How my computer and my cue case will kill these fascists is something I haven’t quite decided but I like the stickers.

Monday, March 13, 2006

More Monkey Business

I mentioned my sighting of the copulating monkeys to a friend at work and she said that she had also seen it – but thankfully her young son, who was also in the room at the time, had not.

She reminded me that the copulating monkeys went at it for a good 10 minutes after which time the rather smug narrator announced ‘Of course, monkey copulation never lasts for very long…’

I posited my theory that the child monkey who came along and slapped the father monkey’s arse towards the end was only perverted because he had come across a careless BBC cameraman’s secret stash of porn and stolen some. He’d had a quick look through, got quite excited then decided he wanted some part in the action.

My friend pointed out that the narrator had also said the young monkey slapping his father’s arse was ‘part of the bonding process’. In humankind a similar act would involve the Social Services.

But different strokes and all that…

Friday, March 10, 2006

Kick Ass Miracles

Mind, Body And Kick Ass Moves (BBC3) was one of my favourite shows last year with Brummie kung fu expert Chris Crudelli travelling the Far East to meet various martial arts masters and capture their fighting skills on camera.

Now he’s back with another BBC3 show called Kick Ass Miracles in which he covers similar geographical territory but instead of concentrating on the fighting arts he examines the more esoteric end of the martial arts spectrum to, according to the press release, uncover ‘the beliefs that underpin the abilities of people who perform incredible feats’.

Last week he went to Thailand to watch people possessed by the souls of warriors stick large metal spikes through their faces and last night he caught up with a young boy who helps feed his impoverished family by taunting then avoiding the fatal fangs of a king cobra in front of tourists.

The latter report saw one of those all-too rare TV moments of totally unmanufactured emotion as it suddenly dawned on Crudelli that this boy was risking his life so his family could eat.

It’s a highly watchable show whether you like martial arts or not and Crudelli remains a thoroughly engaging presenter.

Thursday, March 09, 2006

Wild life!

I saw five minutes of a wildlife documentary last night about monkeys.

And the clip I saw showed two monkeys mating. This obviously was no amazing thing but the bizarre bit of it was that half-way through a baby monkey walked up to his copulating parents and started shoving his father’s arse further into his mother.

I felt quite sorry for the father and mother monkey as I imagine it’s hard enough trying to concentrate in the middle of a busy jungle without one of your nippers trying to get in on the act by slapping your arse. It would certainly put me off.

Maybe it was a pervert monkey – or maybe it’s just par-for-the–course in the monkey world. Whichever it is I think we should be told…

Monday, March 06, 2006

A Load Of Balls?

Myself and my county pool playing colleagues headed to the National Inter-county Eightball Pool Finals in Great Yarmouth at the weekend.

For the uninitiated these finals are played at a caravan park with the 500 or so caravans providing cheap accommodation for the 500 or so pool players and officials attending the event. And, as all the Surrey teams (men’s A team, men’s B team, ladies and juniors) had qualified, we accounted for a fair percentage of the people present.

So it was a weekend away with a lot of people I’d known for more than 10 years and, although it didn’t go too well on the pool table, it was superb to be part of it and remind yourself why you bother playing team games like this in the first place.

On a selfish level I was gutted that I played badly but I was even more gutted when I saw a few of my team-mates struggle because I knew exactly how they were feeling – and it’s very hard to hide in a massive hall full of players watching everything you do.

But on the plus side there was a feeling of genuine pleasure when you saw a mate play well and raise his game to win key frames. And when we were down after losing our opening match then ecstatic after ironing out a side in our next match you just knew that everyone else felt the same as you did.

We then played the defending champions in our last match and it went all the way to 22-22 to force a sudden-death three-frame play-off. They won frame one, we won frame two and in frame three we had our best player and one of my best mates on the table – and he accidentally foul-potted the black to lose the frame and the match.

We were gutted and he was devastated but we were all in it together and in the same situation he would have been the only player we wanted to play.

Bill Shankly once said that ‘Football isn’t a matter of life or death – it’s more important that that!’ And while a few games of pool clearly isn’t as important as that it’s a basic truth that what you do makes you what you are and most of us are both pool players and more importantly friends.

And when I eventually take a break from all things baize-connected as I'm slowly starting to do I’ll greatly miss them.

Thursday, March 02, 2006

TV Gone Mad!

C4 was once the bastion of ambitious telly. Now it’s predominantly the home of a lot of lifestyle rubbish and real-life shows – and for every work of comedy genius like Peep Show or imported success story like Desperate Housewives there’s always a few dozen bilge-fests like the bizarre Noel Edmonds vehicle Deal Or No Deal.

But just when I thought rock bottom had been reached the channel finds a way to dig through the stone floor and plummet to new depths…

Going Cold Turkey was essentially Big Brother with three heroin addicts and it was sold as a challenging piece of real-life TV following our trio as they came off the drug with the help of ‘experts’ and the support of their loved ones.

To say it was pure voyeurism would be to insult anyone who spends more than 12 hours a day watching hardcore porn surrounded by an armchair full of crusty Kleenex. It was much worse than that – it was genuinely horrible stuff and to then have it presented by Krishnan Guru-Murthy, the most insincere man on telly, was purely adding insult to injury on the poor addicted saps who were probably told what they were doing was ground-breaking telly. It wasn’t. It was an attempt to grab headlines in the most tabloid way possible.

C4 used to commission Cutting Edge for God’s sake! How the mighty have fallen…

Thank god then for the return of The Apprentice on BBC2 last week. At least here’s a bunch of people who know the score and realise how they will be humiliated and embarrassed thanks to cunning editing as they all strive like starving dogs for the bone that is a career with Alan Sugar.

So far… nice bloke team leader Ben got the boot last week and posh woman leader Nargis got the boot last night. Potential series highlights could revolve around smug and slimy Syed, a man so oily he could supply the world motor industry for several years, and bonkers Jo, a loose cannon who struggles to keep her emotions in check but is usually right. And the token northerner is a bloke called Paul who looks like the type of slightly gone-to-seed and portly thirtysomething you see trying to chat up teenage girls in nightclubs in Rotherham.

So thank god for Alan Sugar – and I never thought I’d say that!