Colour Prejudice…

Pearl ashes, oak apple, antique earth, amber gris, dragon’s blood, ultramarine ashes…

Myself and the missus are choosing a colour to paint the bedroom. I had originally absolved myself of all responsibility for matching colours and selecting shades based on the fact that I have no ‘artistic eye’ for such matters.

But the missus has decided that she no longer likes the colour she originally selected so it’s back to the drawing (or painting) board. So I’m now helping the process…

‘How about this one?’
‘It’s black, isn’t it?’
‘Sort of…’
‘I am not painting our bedroom black. You are no longer a student.’
‘But it’d be really cool…’
‘I repeat. I am not painting our bedroom black.'
'But...'
'Ever.’

Pause.

‘How about this one then?’
‘It’s the shade down from black, isn’t it?’
‘Might be…’
‘Don’t make me hurt you…’

Pause. Change of tactic.

‘But black’s the new black.’
‘Not it’s not. Grey is.’
‘What’s black then?’
‘Black is what is not going in our bedroom.'
'OK...'
'Idiot.’

That’s that sorted then…

Holiday...

A week off work. Hurray! Sadly the week has been pencilled in for decorating so me and the missus have been getting down and dirty – and not in a good way...

I felt all manly at first as apart from prepping the big bedroom I also repaired the lock on the shed door by drilling through the two plates of the handle and bolting it in place. Hell, I even planed the door so it fitted better.

But two days in and any romantic notions I had about the benefits of manual work and skilled labour have rapidly disintegrated. It's hard work and it's bloody dull.

Fortunately as a journalist I know I can return to work and have a rest...

Notes Of A Dirty Old Man…

American novelist and poet Charles Bukowski is a long-standing literary hero of mine and for a few years of my life I did try to emulate some of his exploits (such as his constant drinking – although I did fail miserably on bedding hundreds of women and writing gritty novels and gut-wrenching poetry).

Bukowski took on all manner of heavy labouring and dignity-stripping menial jobs to fund his writing and he virtually lived on skid row for many years before making it. One line of income that he did dabble in, however, was writing erotic stories for porn magazines so this is one thing I’ve always secretly liked the idea of doing.

And this possibility came a step nearer when a recent conversation with a work colleague revealed she had spent a small part of her career doing exactly that and she kindly explained the ins and outs (pardon the unfortunate phraseology) of the industry.

I was discussing this with the Other Woman and a mutual friend last night and they also voiced an interest in this line of work so we are now each writing a 500-word porn story with a possible view to publication in any of the UK’s leading jazz magazines (personally I want Razzle solely so I can list The National Journal Of Speech And Drama, The Daily Express and Razzle on my writing CV).

Anyway we have two weeks from today to produce the finished articles. And I’ll obviously publish my results here…

Other Woman News…

It was Hapkido grading on Sunday and, apart from me failing to break a board with a snap punch and resorting to a thrusting punch then kicking one of my friends in the face during a sparring session, all went pretty well.

In fact after catching a flu bug and smashing my collar bone pretty badly in the past two weeks I was just delighted to get through it. Hell I’m even quietly confident I might have passed…

My Other Woman was also grading and it was the first time I’d seen her grade in about a year – and suddenly she was no longer my pool and drinking buddy but had metamorphosised into this no-nonsense, hard-arse martial artist with strong stances and snapping kicks and punches. Scary…

In the pub afterwards she also regaled me with the latest instalment of her father’s impulse purchasing habit.

Her dad recently retired and has a history of buying wacky and strange things. For example the Other Woman returned home from work one day to find a full-size pool table in situ at their house. No word of warning. It was just there. And it still is…

Anyway his latest buying wheeze was a box of fireworks. The Other Woman thought this was a fab idea for a family night with toffee apples and colourful explosions in the back garden.

Then she read the box and realised he’d actually bought the sort of fireworks that councils use. For large-scale public displays. Of about 10,000 people. So they weren’t very suitable for letting off in a small garden in Surrey.

My Other Woman was nearly toast. Quite literally…

Alive…

I cycled into town this morning at 6.30am so I could park my bike at work then cross Blackfriars Bridge to head to my usual two-hour Tuesday morning hapkido class.

It was still dark and raining when I set off and the roads and parks of my journey were pretty empty. It was even relatively quiet coming over Westminster Bridge at 7am and that’s usually filled with engine-gunning driving nutcases at every hour.

I love London when it’s quiet and the addition of the rain made the roads and streets look like something from a 1940s B&W movie. It was sweet…

At one point I was on a cycle lane going through Hyde Park and I happened to glance at my front light and I saw a few drops of rain fall past its beam and I suddenly had that feeling of communing with a time and a place and being utterly at one with everything.

I sometimes have those moments during hapkido when a technique works or a kick connects just as I intend it to and it’s so perfect I just want the moment to stay. I also used to (when I wasn’t too pissed to ignore them) have those moments playing pool. It was a great feeling when I knew I’d hit the shot so well that I could feel the ball hitting the back of the pocket before it had happened.

Sadly that happens less these days on the pool table but with my desire to practice waning it’s probably just as well that particular chapter is reaching a hiatus.

But new opportunities are opening up. And my liver will probably thank me in the long run…

The Seafarer...

Went to see The Seafarer written by and directed by Conor McPherson at the National Theatre on Saturday.

I was looking forward to this as I thought The Weir was one of the best stage plays of the past decade and his movie I Went Down was pretty bloody laugh-tastic too.

And The Seafarer was pretty good. It told the story an itinerant brother returning to the family home to look after his blind brother at Christmas and it included the McPherson stock-in-trade of slapstick sight gags, drunken ramblings and seamless Irish comedy patter. Then the Devil arrived determined to claim the soul of the sighted brother via a game of poker…

It was enjoyable stuff with a bit of an upbeat message about the redeeming power of love thrown in but it just didn’t fully add up for me and it all seemed a bit too pat. Like a sitcom the play had a convenient comedy ending and that undermined the better work that had gone before.

For all that, though, it was still a very solid piece of work. Jim Norton was superb as the visually impaired brother Richard, Ron Cook (with his occasional slipping accent aside) was nicely understated as Satan and Conleth Hill was entertaining as Richard's hapless drinking buddy Ivan.

Well worth a look.

Like A Virgin...

As was infamously discussed in one of the opening scenes in Reservoir Dogs, the lyrics to Like A Virgin relate to the fact that Madonna felt like she was making love for the first time – even though in reality the old slapper had already been around several blocks more than a few times.

And, quite bizarrely, I find myself in a similar state to the baby-adopting former Miss Ciccone as I too am starting to feel quite edgy about putting myself through something that should by now hold few surprises for me.

Yup it’s grading on Sunday and I’m getting hyped but trying to disguise it by pretending to be quite detached from it all. On the plus side I’ve got my techniques more or less down, my form is in decent shape and my spin kicking has been breaking boards for some time now.

On the minus side my chumo sigi (boxing punches) need some work and my head is not as focused as it should be. So in a bid to increase my ebbing confidence I’ve kept a bit of the board that I smashed up at a class yesterday on my desk to remind me that if all else fails I can break things.

That should do the trick. Hopefully…

On Yer Bike: News...

In a bid to make myself a more proficient road user I have taken to reading the Highway Code so I know exactly what my rights are.

And basically I have as much right to be on the road as anyone else and this knowledge has filled me with much joy. It has also made me vehemently chastise any driver fuckwit who does something stupidly reckless that endangers my life.

Like last night, for example, when I was changing lanes near Westminster Bridge. I’d done everything correct such as looked back, checked for oncoming traffic, clearly signalled then moved over – only for some utter twat in a Merc or a BMW to cut over two lanes when he realised he’d missed his turning.

I handled the situation with decorum:

‘You reckless wanker. You nearly wrote off two cars and my bike! Read your fucking Highway Code you coke-addled City twat!’

Also in a bizarre opinion u-turn on a previous topic I am starting to notice some drivers of black cabs are actually quite nice and very courteous. Some of them are obviously still utter wankers (a fact usually demonstrated at least once a day on my cycling trips) but my opinions on this topic are being revised.

White van drivers, though, are still to be avoided (on the road as in life).

My newest maxim, though, is that the more flash the car the bigger the cunt inside it.

Foot Off!

The missus has been to see her doctor about pains in her foot. Apparently she has tennis elbow – but in the foot rather than in the elbow. This is causing a great deal of amusement to the boy over dinner.

‘So you have tennis elbow?’
‘Yes.’
‘In the foot?’
‘Yes.’
‘But you don’t play tennis…’
‘I know.
‘Or play anything for that matter. So how did you get a sporting injury?’
‘It’s probably from a while back.’
‘Do injuries recur after THAT long?’
‘Do your homework!’
‘Done it. Look, it’s just probably something simple.'
'Like?'
'Like... Ouchy Foot.’
'Ouchy Foot?’
'Yes. Ouchy Foot.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘Is the pain in your foot?’
‘Yes…’
‘Does it make you wince and go “Ouch!”?’
‘Yes but…’
‘It’s Ouchy Foot then. Probably terminal. Do I get the house?’

The boy is showing great comedy promise…

Play: Work In Progress...

I've been ill with this flu bug thing so I have nothing of any note to write about.

So here's something from a new play that I thought was quite good. You may, of course, disagree...

*******************************************************

SCENE 4: EXTERIOR. SUNNY
Grams: Copperhead Road by Steve Earle.
Thirtysomething Texan Amelia walks on stage in a swimming costume with a towel draped on her. She is wet and is talking on the phone. On-stage is a hold-all which has a dog. The dog yelps from inside the bag.

AMELIA
Yes, papa, we were close at one point and he did break my heart a little – but that’s because he is a man and when it comes down to it all men are just sons-of-bitches who should have their peckers cut off then be left to bleed to death in a pit full of pissed-off vipers. (Pause) No, papa, of course I don’t mean that about you. I’d never cut your pecker off. Nor leave you to bleed to death in a pit full of vipers. I mean, how would momma feel about that? (Pause) Damn right she’d be pissed off… I mean, you with no pecker and momma with no man. She’d be mad as hell and we don’t want a mad-as-hell momma, do we? No sir! (Pause) Just don’t you worry about me, papa, because I’ll find him and if that no-good son-of-a bitch has taken your money and thinks he’s not going to repay his debts then I’ll just have make sure the no-good son-of-a-bitch becomes a dead son-of-a-bitch! (Pause) And thank-you for the dog poppa. I love him so much. (She kicks the bag. Yelp!) No I’m not at all angry that he chose to defecate all over my freshly painted bedroom. After all diarrhoea brown goes so well with rose petal pink, don’t you think? No, we’ve got over that little spat and now he’s even coming for a swim with me. He looks so cute. You know, I think he’s gonna like the water so much that he won’t want to get out of it. (Pause) I love you too papa. And I’ll call when I have more news. (She turns the phone off. She addresses the bag) Now sweetcheeks, why don’t we see if you can breathe underwater.

She picks up the bag and walks off.
Cut to…

If Music Be The Food Of Love…

I’m quite a bright fella. In fact that’s using false modesty to under-sell my intelligence. I’m pretty bloody clever really. But I’ll admit there are large gaping holes in my knowledge bank.

For a start I am rubbish at languages. Never got to grips with any of them. Not even French and that’s easy. You just say everything quickly, eat garlic and horses and use lots of hand gestures. Or is that Italian?

Anyway I know bugger all about classical music and in a bid to address this I have been buying the odd CD here and there for the past year or so.

My first buy last year was Beethoven’s Nine Symphonies and I’ve struggled with these for some time as they’re a bit clumpy-clumpy, bangy-bangy.

Now Stravinsky. Quite like him and The Rite Of Spring. Hell, he even wrote some of the cello music for Jaws. Top fella from what I’ve heard so far.

My fave find so far, though, is John Tavener. He’s a little bit Gothic, a little bit epic and a little bit Medieval and a little bit New World all mixed together. I particularly like how he combines elements from various religions with other musical influences to create a new mythology examining the problems of our times.

So it says on the booklet with one of his CDs anyway…

My father-in-law has recommended Steve Reich so I may well be dipping into him soon too. It’s a brave new world of aural delights!

I love finding new things. Even if most of them are a few centuries old…

Sketch: Great Movies Our Time…

FX: Filmed in black and white.
GRAMS: Downbeat Klezmer music plays.

A middle-aged man sits in his office at a factory. He is smartly dressed in a suit waistcoat and trousers. His shirt sleeves are rolled up and in front of him are several bottles of wine and spirits. Some are empty and a few dozen empty glasses sit on the table before him. He drunkenly pours himself another drink from one of the bottles. He carefully goes to drink it but cannot coordinate his movements and misses his mouth. He mutters a drunken curse and his head flops onto his desk. He snores.

Cut to…
A factory worker rushes into his office.

WORKER
Sir, sir. The troops are coming…

Cut to…
The man raises his head. A pen from his desk is embedded in his head. He looks perplexed. His hands fumble over his head but he cannot find the pen.

Cut to…
Thee factory worker.

WORKER
Sir. The troops…

Cut to…
The man has located the pen. He yanks it out and looks at it. He then turns to the factory worker.

MAN
Troops? Fuck ’em!

He flops his head back onto his desk. The factory worker shrugs and walks out.

VOICEOVER
From Dreamjerks Pictures, the untold story of a Holocaust hero… Schindler’s Pissed. Coming to a cinema near you soon…

END

White Open Spaces...

The reviews for White Open Spaces at Soho Theatre were not good. In fact they were quite bad. The reviews, however, were wrong because it’s an entertaining and thought-provoking hour.

Devised by Shropshire touring theatre company Pentabus in conjunction with BBC and BBC Radio 4, the show explores the idea of an unspoken apartheid in the English countryside.

The play is formed of seven 10-minute monologues and while it’s true that some were better written and better performed than others the play still hung together as a whole very well.

The standout monologues were the opening two, which focused on a white man blanking his black girlfriend at a society wedding and a black landlord pinning a ‘no travelers’ sign to his pub door, and the last one, which focused on a farmer's wife who rammed her shopping trolley into a black stranger in the village supermarket.

These three in particular were very funny and quite moving.

The other four pieces although perhaps not as strong still worked well and the idea of hiring different writers to pen each monologue helped the different textures of the pieces and provided different voices.

All the monologues also linked together really well thematically to provide moments of real tenderness, such as the lost Pakistani man who admits to a farmer who’s caught him trespassing on his land that he’s just split up with his girlfriend. The farmer touches his shoulder in a moment of solidarity and support – and in moments such as these the piece offers hope for a more integrated and understanding society.

It’s a smart piece of drama on a tough subject. It’s handled with sensitivity and care and it opens up an important discussion. Just what good theatre does do.

Well worth a look.

Dark Yellow…

Went to a rehearsed reading of the above play by American playwright Julia Jordan last night.

It was part of a week of rehearsed readings by the Operating Theatre Company, a group who specialise in staging new plays and working with new writers and it was pretty decent fayre.

It told the tale of a man and a woman who hooked up after meeting in a bar. But the man was a robber who was seeking absolution for shooting the woman’s kid – or so he thought until the final reveal showed he’d got the wrong woman.

The play was just over an hour long and by twists and turns the twosome gradually revealed more about themselves until the woman finally learnt the man’s real agenda and faced a choice of whether or not to kill him.

Some of the dialogue was pretty sharp and funny and some of it was quite tender and poetic but for me the play didn’t hang together enough.

Having said that, though, it was only a rehearsed reading and I suspect it’s a far-from-finished piece and there was certainly enough potential for it to be something much stronger and much more intriguing.

And the entrance price of £2 made it the cheapest night I’d had out in the West End for quite some time.

Anyway, you can find more information about the company and their work on: www.operating-theatre.co.uk

Trinny And Susannah Undress…

I’ve worked as a TV journalist and shit-shoveller for many years and few sights can strike fear into my heart. True, the memory of Keith Chegwin nude (Naked Jungle) and Les Dennis towelling his bare arse (Extras) are two visions that can still send a shudder down my spine, but by and large I am so de-sensitised to the goggle box that I can stomach pretty much anything.

Then I read the TV guide last night and stumbled across the words Trinny And Susannah Undress… I suddenly felt that night’s evening meal start to head North. It couldn’t be? Surely? Two sloans whose only real claim to fame was knowing how to make people dress slightly better by spunking a few grand up the wall getting their kits off. Had ITV really become this poor?

Fortunately the title was intentionally misleading and Skinny and Fatty (to give them their rather wonderful Viz names) were merely rehashing their BBC show on a new channel. But here’s the twist…

Now they’re hoping their skills at spending cash on clothes can also help repair flagging relationships by getting couples whose zing has gone ming to become bling again (I’m so down with the kids…).

So step forward Elle and Lester, a couple who’ve not had sex for four months and who spend most of their time looking after their two autistic kids.

Then enter the Sloans whose job it is to put some magic back in their lives by putting them in slightly nicer clobber and using this simple task as a vehicle to examine the husband and wife’s relationship (and obviously give themselves the sort of ratings this voyeuristic, intrusive tosh will doubtlessly deliver).

You sort of know the rest. They spend a while ripping the piss out of the old them, then help them become the new them, then take them to a posh place so they can get some time on their own without the kids.

It’s the sort of self-help show the TV schedules are now littered with. But the difference between the likes of Jamie Oliver and Ian Wright and these two preening halfwits is that the former go on a journey where they genuinely care – and Trinny and Susannah merely care about getting ratings.

Cue Fatty taking the bloke to a sex shop and recommending light bondage, cue Skinny asking the wife if she’d had an affair in front of her husband. Nice…

It was car-crash telly under the guise of consideration and it was exploiting people who could probably have done with some professional relationship counselling rather these two simple sloans who obviously think clothes are the answer to everything.

What next? Aids epidemic – buy ‘em some jeans. Cancer? No problem, floral prints are in. It’s ridiculous and it extends my long-held view that Viz is still the only decently entertaining thing this pair have ever appeared in.

Get off my telly. Now!

On Yer Bike! New Words...

Now I am a veteran London cyclist of nearly two days I am getting to grips with road use and several new and exciting terms.

One of my favourite new terms is ‘Watch where you're driving you fucking idiot!' I have already had occasion to use this once and it was directed at a black minicab who thought it would be a jolly wheeze to see if he could squash me between a parked car and the side of his vehicle.

I felt I may have been harsh with my strong words of yesterday about drivers of black cabs but now I see that I was not harsh enough. Treble the Congestion Charge for all I care and make it treble that treble for those anti-cyclist black-cab-driving scum-fucks. You know who you are and we know where you live (usually because you've got BNP posters in your UPVC conservatory attached to your pebble-dashed house).

Another term of note is 'creeping'. This is when a car coming out of a junction creeps over the stop line of that junction in a plea to let him or her through. This is particular fun when the driver also chooses to ignore oncoming cyclists and keep on moving out. At speed. While talking on a mobile phone.

I may soon start cycling wiith weaponry. That'd learn 'em...

On Yer Bike!

I am now a cyclist and I am biking into work.

My initial battleplan was to use this exercise to help increase my stamina at hapkido as the academy is constantly attracting younger, fitter and more skilled martial artists who have high belts in other arts. But having pootled around sans bicycle I can now see the attraction of cycling for its own sake. I reckon I could be hooked.

I bought my new bike via a cycle-to-work scheme and picked it up on Saturday and had a ride around on it. But today was the first big test of cycling into work and it sort of went OK.

But I have so far learnt the following:

i) Drivers of black cabs are utter cunts.
ii) Other cyclists are generally very courteous.
iii) Drivers of black cabs are utter cunts who don’t give a flying fuck if they prang you or not or drive too close for comfort.
iv) Young men who drive white vans are generally to be treated with the same regard as drivers of black cabs.
v) There are not enough cycle lanes in London.
vi) Drivers of black cabs are utter cunts who don’t give a flying fuck if they prang you or not or drive too close for comfort or drive straight through the cycle lane and anyone in it if it means they can pick up a fare.

I will, of course, be reporting back on further cycling discoveries but I reckon that’s enough for one morning.