Goth-tastic!

I am a former Goth. Of sorts…

I never actually went as far as to wear make-up or a long black trenchcoat, but I made a sort of ham-fisted attempt at Goth fashion and I liked the music as it appealed to my introspective, the world-doesn’t-understand-me, why-aren’t-I-getting-any-sex, tortured artist of a teenager.

So Goth-spotting is one of my favourite hobbies when I’m out and about and last night, after attending hapkido then going off to play pool with my other woman, I went to grab a nightbus home. And it was while waiting for this that I had one of my best-ever spots…

Because running down Oxford Street at 12.30am came two young men in full black suits that were four sizes too small for them and black trenchcoats, festooned in huge boots and slightly pallid made-up skin with black eyeliner. And one of them had a top hat, which he was trying to keep on his head while running to catch a bus.

I was so excited that I nearly phoned the missus to share this top-drawer Goth spot, but I didn’t fancy waking her up with a sentence that started:

‘It’s gone midnight, I’ve had a couple of pints, I’m waiting for a nightbus – and guess what I’ve just seen?’

Instead I quietly made my way home and decided to play some Sisters Of Mercy tracks. Goths. Bloody love ‘em!

STOP PRESS STOP PRESS STOP PRESS STOP PRESS

Just discovered that Goths have their own dating website on www.gothicmatch.com

Now that is brilliant. Romance but in a miserable way!

Cold Comfort…

I currently have a cold. I have coldsores too. It’s not pleasant. This little combination is a usual indicator of stress but it now has a new element because I am also still on allergy medicine.

This little extra element now has the added effect of drying me up so when I sneeze instead of runny snot I can emit projectiles with the consistency of rubber that shoot straight through poor unsuspecting tissues not used to such rigours.

I could have halted riots in Northern Ireland in the Seventies with my newfound nasal skills.

Sinner!

Myself, the boy and the missus are sat down eating supper and the boy has discovered my latest transgression. And he’s not happy…

‘You bought a Coldplay song!’
‘It was just the one…’
‘But it’s Coldplay! How could you?’
‘My iTunes window was open and I quite liked it. I tried really hard to resist but I just felt too weak…’
‘He’s been very stressed lately. Feel sorry for your stepfather…’ offers the missus as a means of defence. But the onslaught continues.
‘Well we need have a serious think about this,’ ponders the boy. ‘We need ground rules and the first is that you cannot play it in the house. Ever. Also you cannot hum or sing it at any point. Ever. In fact just never mention it again and we’ll pretend it never happened. You’ll have to live with it as your guilty secret…’
‘But it was just the one. And I only bought it because it sounded like Big Country…’
‘It’s one too many. You need help. In fact, thinking about it, it may be kinder to just kill you…’
‘That is a joke isn’t it?’
‘Depends… Do I still get your comic collection?’

The boy is an evil genius in the making…

The Tyger

I’ve just finished reading Peter Aykroyd’s biography of William Blake.

I read Aykroyd’s biography of London a few years ago and thought it was a thoroughly wonderful book which was both well-researched and very entertainingly written. And as William Blake is one of my favourite poets I’m amazed it’s taken me this long to get round to actually reading it.

But it’s a familiar lament in our household (from both myself and the missus) that there are so many great books to enjoy and so little time – and people still insist on buying the bloody Da Vinci Code…

The Blake book is a wonderful achievement, capturing both the complexity of the poet and artist as a person and evocatively recording the world in which he lived.

Although a highly skilled commercial engraver, Blake lived in relative poverty most of his life and was rarely recognised for his work as a poet in his own lifetime. But he kept working on his poems and various works of art as he always believed he was working for posterity.

I was nearly in tears on the Tube as I read the chapter describing his death. Basically it’s bloody brilliant and I’m now sorely tempted by the rest of the Aykroyd ouvre…

Neighbourhood Watch…

I heard the missus chatting away on the doorstep this morning while she was waiting for me to leave with her for work. And, as I arrived at the front door, I found her talking to a man getting into a car down the road.

As we left the house we neared the man in the car and he wound the window down to say hello. So, as I’m from the North where we do things like talk to our neighbours, I offered my hand and introduced myself.

‘Hello. I’m Paul. What’s your name?’
‘Hi. I’m Trevor.’

It was at this point the wife interjected to introduce herself further and comment that she hadn’t seen much of him around – in a sly attempt to elicit more information from the poor unsuspecting fool...

‘I’ve been away in India shooting.’
‘Are you a hunter?’
‘No I’m a cameraman.’
‘Oh…’

I thought this was a perfectly reasonable response but as we ended the conversation and myself and the missus walked on she offered her thoughts on the matter. As she does on most matters…

‘You idiot…’
‘But he said he was shooting things.’
‘He lives here. It’s obvious he works in media.'
'He could have been a big-game hunter.'
'We live in media town. You can’t move down this street without bumping into cameramen, film producers or journalists!’
‘I thought it was funny. He laughed…’
‘He didn’t laugh. He was scared. You’ve got a skinhead, you have a northern accent, you loomed in through his car window and your mouth was covered in toothpaste you hadn’t wiped off.’

So let that be a lesson. Never be friendly in London…

The Last Word

Myself and the missus are having a discussion and I am annoyed.

‘I really hate the way you try to have the last word in every petty argument we ever have.’
‘That’s not entirely true.’
‘It is!’
‘It’s not…’
‘We can never have an exchange of views over anything without you having the last word! Take last night. I was cooking burgers…’
‘Badly…’
‘How can anyone cook burgers badly? You just stick them under the grill!’
‘Well you messed it up…’
‘My point is… for just once… can I have the last word in an argument? Even a minor discussion will do…’
‘OK. You can have the last word now.’
‘Really? Right... Well, I don’t ever want to argue about this petty nonsense again. I am sick of it.’

Pause.

‘Fine by me…’

She leaves the room. A minute goes by and I realise I have been done. Again…

Coogan’s Run…

He gets around does that Steve Coogan, with his love of fast cars, his lanky gait and his slightly oddball, sneery Manchester stare.

If he’s not making TV shows via his Baby Cow production company (I Am Not An Animal) then he’s getting more mileage out of Alan Partridge (soon to be immortalised in movie form) or starring in some new film or other (Around The World In 80 Days, A Cock And Bull Story, The Persuaders, etc).

In fact the cocky, sneery, award-winning git gets everywhere – including back on BBC2 with a new sitcom called Saxondale.

In this he plays roadie-turned-pest-controller Tommy Saxondale, a fella with hair like Rick Wakeman after electric shock therapy and major anger management problems. It’s familiar comedy territory for Coogan fans in that it relies on uncomfortable and uneasy moments to provoke laughs.

Hence he and his wife openly discuss their sex lives in front of his newly hired young pest control protégé and, when the same employee moves in with him, he happily chats about his vintage jazz mag collection before handing them over for him to enjoy.

On first viewing it’s a genuinely measured and funny performance from Coogan, who wrote it alongside Neil MacLennan, and the supporting cast (Nighty Night’s Ruth Jones as wife Magz, Morwenna Banks as bitchy receptionist Vicky and Rasmus Hardiker as apprentice pest killer Raymond) look as though they’re well up to the task too.

Critics may want to dislike Coogan but he consistently produces the comedy goods. It’s no Alan Partridge but it’s certainly no Tony Ferrino either. Good stuff.

Here Comes Trouble…

Alcoholism and gambling run in my family.

Some people inherit country estates and others inherit fortunes but the only thing I have to look forward in my dotage is finding a propensity for drinking very heavily while kissing my liver goodbye or discovering an almost clairvoyant ability to spunk large amounts of money on horses, cards and slot machines.

Piles also run in the family but as they haven’t gone there yet I’m likewise not going there either.

Fortunately I rarely gamble and just the thought of walking into a betting shop still makes me feel very ill. The sight of living cadavers smoking roll-ups and watching the last of their bets go down is one very unpleasant image.

And while it’s true I have a history of enjoying a pint or ten I am now close to curbing my wilder excesses as hangovers are not the to-be-proudly-displayed badges of fast living they once were.

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries people who drank were said to be ‘in drink’ which suggests the act of drinking had changed them or affected them. It was seen as a transitory state while these days we refer to people as drunk or as drunks which carries with it a whole weight of moral baggage.

So should my genes ever kick in please think of me ‘in drink’ rather than as a drunk. It’ll make me happier…

News Of The World

I was listening to BBC Breakfast News today when the following headlines were reported:

‘Convicted paedophile Gary Glitter, real name Paul Gadd, will today hear if his conviction has been overturned. And when is the right time to have children?’

The latter was a seperate report on having children in the pregnancy sense rather than having children in the Gadd sense but surely some BBC news bod must have noticed the rather obvious faux pas of putting these two items together.

Or maybe they didn’t…

Shooting Stars!

There’s been a lot of press chat about the police shooting innocent people recently.

But surely the more people they shoot the more chance they have of getting somebody who’s actually a terrorist!

Critics of the police have just not thought this through…

Football Crazy!

Taking the piss out of ITV football commentary is like shooting fish in a barrel. In fact it’s like shooting really big fish in a really small barrel with a really big gun, the sort of cartoon gun that Elmer J Fudd used to go hunting ‘wabbits’ with.

But there’s good reason for that and the weekend presented another glowing example of how terrible the whole ITV football team really are.

For a start studio anchors Matt Smith and Andy Townsend are like two kids who have been given the controls of an expensive fighter jet and rather than treat it with respect – and just that little bit of awe – they verbally speed around from here to there with no coherent meaning anywhere inbetween. They’re like an excited pair of Alan Partridges made real.

Then there’s the commentators themselves…

I watched the bulk of the Trinidad and Tobago v Sweden game on Saturday and at one point the commentary team of Gareth Southgate and Clive Tyldesley got so bored you could almost hear the slow drip of ennui escaping their very beings. Interesting facts used to fill in this type of commentary void but they’d either not researched enough or simply had some sort of verbal rigor mortis set in, hence Tyldesley repeating his mantra that T&T were the ‘smallest nation ever to compete at the World Cup.’ Yawn…

The other memorable bits of the commentary for me were when Tyldesley started adopting a sentence structure that made him sound a bit like Yoda. ‘Fantastic result… for Trinidad and Tobago… this will be…’ he uttered at one point.

Then, of course, there was Gareth Southgate’s comment that ‘The Swedish fans are booing the Trinidad lads for time-wasting, but they don't realise that's the pace they move at when they're not playing.’ Oh my aching sides… Racial sterotype anyone?

But this was topped when one of the duo managed to work in a phrase that went something like: ‘They’ll be deliriously happy and there'll be the exotic smell of some sweet spices in the air tonight…’ which to me seemed to suggest that the whole T&T team and its fans would be stoned off their tits.

ITV is a commercial channel and as such it has limitations – but even if the bulk of its output is lying in the gutter the World Cup is one of the few occasions where it can look up at the stars.

But as per usual it’s just making an utter arse of it…

Hold The Front Page!

Went to see the above exhibition at the British Library at the weekend.

It’s a celebration of 100 years of newspaper headlines and it includes such classics as The Sun’s bellicose ‘Gotcha!’ during the Falklands Conflict in 1982 and its damning ‘If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain please turn off the lights’…’ indictment of Neil Kinnock and the Labour Party on the day of the 1998 General Election.

Other memorable entries included the Daily Express’ hopeful but tragically inaccurate ‘Titanic sunk: no Lives lost’ in 1912 and the Daily Sketch’s fantastically wrong ‘Peace in our time’ boast from Neville Chamberlain in 1938.

The exhibition is well laid out and it’s not so comprehensive or technically demanding that it would put off non-journalists either. It’s very much the headline-as-social-document and well worth a look.

I also had a wander around the British Library for the first time since it was refurbished and it truly is a fantastic place, with the Ritblat Gallery housing the Magna Carta, early folios of Shakespeare plays, Shakespeare’s signature and Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebook among other things.

Bizarrely libraries are under major threat at the moment because funds are apparently needed elsewhere and a swathe of them are soon to be closing on a permanent basis.

The British Library is thankfully not one of these but it still remains a national disgrace that Blair can find money for tanks and bombs in a far-off country but not for education (or ‘Education, education, education…’ as he once put it) at this sort of basic local level.

Shame on this government for letting that happen – and for slowly selling off another piece of our national heritage.

Old Bag…

The missus is a bit of a bag fanatic. If Mein Kampf came with a free bag she’d wrestle with her conscience for all of five seconds and buy several copies, trying to pass off the Swastika motifs as post-modern irony.

As such she has amassed a large collection of bags, ranging from freebie tat to very expensive-looking leather items. The bulk of these currently reside on a coat stand outside our bedroom that has been rechristened ‘the bag tree’ because a plentiful harvest of new bags seems to grow on it every month or so.

But there's been a new development...

I was giving the house a proper clean and vacuum over the weekend when I kept running into carrier bags secreted around the place. They were mainly the sort of brown paper or posh carrier bags you get from shops that have people on the door and they were hidden in cupboards and behind wardrobes and the like.

So I sought some answers…

‘Why do we have carrier bags hidden all over the house?’
‘You never know when you’ll need one.’
‘But they’re carrier bags!’
‘No. They’re nice carrier bags.’
‘But we have a plastic tube for carrier bags that is always full.’
‘It’s not the same. They're carrier bags for rubbish. Not for things.’
'But you have hundreds of bags already. And we have hundreds of carrier bags. Why do you need posh carrier bags too?'
'They're for emergencies.'

Pause.

‘Can I throw them away?’
‘No. You can’t.’

So if I ever go missing assume the missus has killed me for the insurance money – or that I’ve simply opened a cupboard and have been buried under a mountain of posh carrier bags. At least it would be a comedy death…

Specs Appeal: The Sequel...

The new Gregorys have arrived and are ready to picked up. I plan to do this tomorrow.

News glasses always promise so much: they’ll make me more attractive, I’ll look more serious, I’ll look more charming, I’ll look more intellectual, women will fall at my feet, every femme fatale in Paris will want to bed me, the wife may be nice to me – occasionally...

It’s like the start of the football season where your team winning everything on offer is still possible or like the optimism of sending off a new script where success is a certainty and rejection letters are not going to happen.

After a few weeks, of course, the team starts losing and the letters start arriving. And the life-changing new frames and lenses will just become glasses...

Angels And Devils…

Myself, the missus and the mother of my missus went to see the Michelangelo exhibition at the British Museum at the weekend.

The exhibition is basically sketches from various stages in the artist’s career, from his early days in Florence to his work on the Sistine Chapel to his last days in Rome, with bits of biographical details thrown in to give it a linear narrative.

I thought it was fabulous and it was quite well laid out and easy to navigate too. The sketches were intriguing and it was interesting to see the doodlings of a genius. The quality of the sketches was also breath-taking, with bits of angels and devils done in miniature.

Sunday saw me attend a hapkido grading and a seminar on ground fighting afterwards. The grading was great and lots of junior belts in the academy were really excellent and were miles better than I was at that stage. To be fair many of them also have the advantage of having done other martial arts and of having youth on their side but nevertheless it was very impressive stuff.

The ground-fighting seminar afterwards was a very demanding affair with various neck chokes and arm bars and the like. I also got kicked once on the side of my head as a fellow student tried to wrap his leg around my neck to secure a choke hold then 20 minutes later got another whack on the other side as somebody else tried the same thing.

Maybe it was the Michelangelo exhibition or may be it’s because today is 6/6/6 but the two whacks on the side of my head have grown into little lumps and I think they are starting to look like Devil’s horns. Maybe I am the anti-Christ…

If The Shoe Fits…

The missus is cock-a-hoop. After much nagging by me she finally went to see my osteopath at the weekend to try and sort out her occasional back pain – and she returned with the following bits of news:

1) She has a high in-step.
2) The way of correcting this is to throw out all her old flat shoes and go and buy lots of news shoes with a slight heel.

I had a ground-fighting seminar at the weekend and was battered and bruised so I also went to see my osteopath this morning and asked if my wife really needed new shoes and she assured me this was the case.

So I asked if I could also buy a nice new linen suit that I’d seen in Muji on the grounds of medical treatment. Or a new American pool cue. Or some classic porn films…

Sadly she said she couldn’t see the medical need for this sort of expense. Bugger…

The World Cup...

The waving flags, the opening match, the thrill, the beer, the cheer, the crowd, the worldwide audience, the patriotism, the pride, the hope…

Dope! The penalty shootout.
Bugger…

The hope dashed, the disappointment, the bitterness, the beer, the jeer, the barmaid leer, the corporate sponsors, the beer, more jeer, lots of barmaid leer, the jingoism and yet even more beer…

But I never really liked football. I support Leeds…

The Bitterest Pill…

I have an ongoing allergy complaint and the doctor finally prescribed industrial strength tablets and a nasal spray to alleviate my symptoms.

In truth she only did this because I turned up at the surgery and dribbled snot all over her table although in truth I only went because the missus had threatened violence the previous week.

‘Go see the doctor…’
‘I went.’
‘Please go see the doctor…’
‘I did. There’s nothing she can do…’
‘Please go see…’
‘Look… I went. I’m on a list. There’s nothing else I can do.’
‘She must be able to give you something…’
‘She won’t. I asked.’
‘OK. I’ll put it another way then. Go see the doctor again because if you sniff one more time I will take your pool cue, snap it in half and ram a piece up each nostril!’

Fortunately my return visit to the doctor coincided with a particularly bad bout of sniffling, sneezing and watery eyes so she took pity and rattled off a prescription.

Sadly for me the tablets I have to take contain the words no self-respecting man should ever have to read: AVOID ALCOHOL. They were even written in capital letters in a large font so I couldn’t ignore them.

So I have a choice: get well and never drink again or don’t get well and enjoy a pint. And to make matters worse it’s a repeat prescription until I go to an allergy clinic – which may take anything up to two years. Bugger…