Boxing Clever: Part I…

I have now joined the white collar boxing gym I sampled some weeks ago with a try-out session and I decide to head on in there when it’s quiet to suss out the run of the place and get to grips with the equipment. This way I won’t look like a total tool when there are other people about.

Fortunately most of the equipment is stuff I’m familiar with so the heavy bags, speed balls, uppercut bags, free weights and weight machines hold no major surprises for me. I also take a little notebook so I can chart my progress and keep a track of what I’m doing and not miss anything out before I establish a training routine I know by heart.

The notebook has a picture of a pig on it. This was a present from the Missus and is based on one of my terms of affection for her, namely 'I love you more than any pig' which is a line from Blackadder. This may not be a particularly macho possession to display in a boxing gym but I like it nonetheless and it makes me smile.

The initial boxing battleplan is for me to get my basic skills in shape over a few weeks then I can hit the ground (not literally) running when I start using my personal training sessions. I soon learn, however, that delivering rapid-fire roundhouse kicks to punchbags is frowned upon.

I can sort of understand this as I wouldn’t walk into a hapkido dojang and start karate training. It’s also quite a good discipline as when I’m at the boxing gym I’m boxing and not working on anything else.

After a 45-minute workout of stretching, weights and working various punchbags I learn another two important lessons, though.

Lesson one is not to get carried away on the heavy bags. Just because they can take a lot of punishment it doesn’t mean my wrists, arms and fists can. My left arm was ready to drop off an hour after training. Slowly, slowly seems to be the key here…

Lesson number two is on tying my hand wraps. I sort of rushed doing these because I was very self-conscious of not looking like an idiot but they form a vital layer of protection for the knuckles and they also provide additional support for the wrists. A well-tied wrap could be the difference between a broken knuckle and a sprained wrist and keeping everything in working order.

Apart from that, though, all is good in the land of pugilism. If a bit tiring to start off with…

Snooker Loopy...

I am sat down watching the snooker and I point out that Peter Ebdon is now winning what was a tight match. My TV-watching colleague, however, is not a fan of Ebdon...

'I hate Ebdon.'
'Why?'
'He's a cock-sucker...'
'Metaphorically or literally?'
'Both.'
'Why metaphorically?'
'Tax exile scum. Brought up and nurtured in the UK then sods off abroad when he makes his dough.'
'And literally?'
'I suspect it...'
'So you really think Peter Ebdon takes men's penises in his mouth?'
'I can't prove it...'
'But you suspect it?'
'Yes.'
'But he's married... He has children.'
'I know.'
'And he's moved to Dubai. You really wouldn't go to an Arab state if men was your thing.'
'You would if it was aversion therapy...'
'Credit where it's due... The phrase Peter Ebdon sucks cock does have a very funny ring to it but I fear your main thesis is flawed as he is married and he has kids and he seems a bona-fide hetero-sexual to me.'
'He plays the cello.'
'I take it all back. Case closed...'
'You're being sarcastic aren't you?'
'Yes.'

The Zen Of Pool: Part VII...

I was out with the Other Woman this week and we went off to play some US pool at Rileys in Victoria.

I'm slowly beginning to quite like this club as it has some decent nineball and US eightball players and they're quite a useful barometer to gauge my own progress at the game. I'm also not boozing at the moment so my pool game is having less beer-inspired moments but my overall form is plateauing out and remaining steady. And this is good.

I also haven't played much recently so I was quite looking forward to our night of potting balls and I played very well. The Other Woman is not a bad player herself and if she took it seriously she could easily make a county-standard player in a few months, but I was flying and even using a racker there was very little she could do but watch me clear frame after frame.

I think I'm going to keep playing US pool as it's something I can do to unwind and practice at the same time. But it doesn't seem like practice and that's probably the key...

It also makes practice feel less jaded. It's partly the reason I'm doing boxing from next week as it will be new and fun so it won't seem like training for martial arts (even though it is).

Routines are obviously good things but a bit of variety is nice as well. Though obviously not within a marriage unless both partners are consenting...

Food For Thought...

I am cooking tea. The Boy is waiting to be fed and he is hungry so he is also grouchy.

The Missus arrives back from her fitness class and overhears me asking the boy to do something, a request which gets a non-commital response. I then ask him to do something else and he complains about having to 'do stuff...' so the Missus offers her views on his behaviour.

'If somebody asks you to do something why don't you just do it rather than complaining and whining about it?'
'I'm doing it.'
'And stop being grouchy.'
'Says you...'
'And stop being sarcastic. It's not clever.'

There is silence. I try to stop my mouth from opening but I fail miserably.
'Complaining, grouchy and sarcastic. I don't know where he gets that from...'

The Boy smiles. The Missus gives me a slanted look. It is a look that threatens the withdrawal of certain privileges if I offer any more opinions.

I carry on cooking. Very quietly...

Arms News...

My local MP Dawn Butler eventually replied to my several letters about the BAE arms scandal and the government's decision to cancel a Serious Fraud Office investigation into it on the grounds that it would potentially damage relations with the Saudis and intelligence on terrorists and that it would cost British jobs and trade.

She replied with a copy of a letter from the Defence Secretary which stated that the cancelation of this inquiry was perfectly legal and the government had nothing to answer for.

So imagine my surprise when the Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT) and Corner House took the government to court and the judge sided with them rather than the politicians and stated that the decision to cancel the inquiry was illegal.

The CAAT website reports it more fully:

'The High Court this morning ruled that the Director of the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) acted unlawfully when he stopped a corruption investigation into BAE Systems' arms deals with Saudi Arabia.

The judgment was handed down by Lord Justice Moses and Mr Justice Sullivan in response to a judicial review brought by Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) and The Corner House.

In the light of this judgment, the Serious Fraud Office must reopen the BAE-Saudi corruption investigation immediately. Both groups are calling upon the SFO to work jointly with US and Swiss investigators in doing so.

The judges detailed how BAE lobbied the Government by suggesting that the company would lose a large Saudi arms sale if the investigation was not dropped.

When the SFO was about to obtain access to Swiss bank accounts, Saudi Arabia threatened not only to cancel the arms deal but also to withdraw diplomatic and intelligence co-operation. This threat was made by Prince Bandar, who was allegedly complicit in the corruption under investigation.

The judges described the SFO Director's subsequent termination of the investigation on 14th December 2006 as a "successful attempt by a foreign government to pervert the course of justice in the United Kingdom".

They ruled that:
"No-one, whether within this country or outside, is entitled to interfere with the course of our justice. It is the failure of Government and the defendant [the Director of the Serious Fraud Office] to bear that essential principle in mind that justifies the intervention of this court."'

Bloody excellent work by CAAT and Corner House in my book. Restores your faith in British justice a bit.

Now Brown and his chums just have to realise that placing an extra tax burden on the very poorest by scrapping the 10p rate while letting non-doms pay a ridiculously small amount of tax (and propping up banks which have paid millions to shareholders in the past too) is also wrong. What are the chances, eh?

Rickaaay!

EastEnders is the BBC’s flagship drama. No matter how many Jane Austen or Charles Dickens novels they continue to adapt the bread and butter of the BBC’s drama output is EastEnders.

There it stands like a behemoth in the TV schedules with four pristine 30-minute prime-time slots on weekday evenings, plus an omnibus on Sundays and all manner of repeats and offshoot shows on BBC3. Just on BBC1 it accounts for four hours of TV every week, that’s 208 hours every year…

But, sadly, unlike the expensively produced bodice-rippers that the Beeb’s commissioning editors produce with one eye on promotion and the other on industry acclaim, the old Walford warhorse doesn’t seem to get anywhere near the same amount of time or care spent on it – and consequently the scripts have got shabbier and the plotlines more ridiculous. Bi-sexual nutcase prodigal sons, wives burying adulterous husbands while they're still alive, roadsweepers eating dogs, etc, etc...

So desperate now is the once great show that was EastEnders that it’s even brought back Bianca Jackson (Patsy Palmer) and Ricky Butcher (Sid Owen) in the hope that they can inject some much-needed interest in the show. And, in a sign of how rubbish the rest of the characters and their storylines currently are, it’s actually sort of working.

In a repeat storyline from when Bianca’s mum Carol Jackson first came into the show, Bianca has returned with a gaggle of kids by different fathers in tow. Unlike her mum, however, she’s a bit rubbish at looking after them and they were briefly taken into care while she got her act together and now has them back. Palmer was never the greatest actress in the world but she could do the screeching, gob-on-legs-with-a-heart that was Bianca quite well.

And in this latest incarnation she’s almost becoming the unofficial spokesperson for the Slag Chav Mum’s Society. ‘You try bringin’ four kids up on benefit with yer husband banged up inside!’ she thunderously muses at one point. Quite…

Her nice-but-dim ex-hubby Ricky, of course, was only ever a great character in relation to the amount of great one-liners or put-downs his much-missed dad, Frank Butcher (played by the late Mike Reid), could deliver to him. Sadly the character Frank Butcher’s death is the initial reason for his and Bianca’s return to the show so it seems his key raison d’etre is already a non-starter.

No more will the cockney tones of his dad call him a ‘Pilchard’ or ask him ‘Do you think I’m a double-yolker?’ or ‘What am I? The speaking clock?’ So Ricky is back too but his role seems much less well-defined and as Sid Owen’s not exactly hunk material or a truly gifted actor you have to wonder what it’s all about as the Square's not exactly short of thick bokes…

But it doesn’t matter how many characters they bring back or invent, the major trouble at the Walford mill is the quality of the scripts. There are occasional good episodes but too many times characters are asked to behave in a totally unbelievable manner or they spend long periods of time explaining or examining their actions, which from a dramatic point of view means the writers are trying fit square pegs in round holes then justifying using the hammer to get them in place. It's very poor indeed.

EastEnders is pretty rubbish at present but, to paraphrase Bianca, ‘You try creatin’ two hours of prime-time telly when the people in charge clearly have no idea about character integrity or dramatic logic. It’d never ‘appen with that Jane Austen, posh bitch!’ How true...

Boxing Fitness: A Guide To Get Fighting Fit...

Ian Oliver’s book is a must-have for any martial artist wanting to embark on or refine training in the art of boxing.

It’s divided into 19 short chapters beginning with one on basic technique before it examines specific training areas such as bag work, focus pad training, weight training and callisthenics.

It also offers some useful advice on skipping before it goes into more advanced areas such as solo training drills, training with a partner and alternative training.

With closing chapters on flexibility and stretching, nutrition and equipment it certainly covers all the bases, including a novice’s guide to tying hand wraps.

It’s a well-written and easy-to-read guide and Oliver has a friendly and accessible writing style, which is enthusiastic without ever being patronising. It’s also well designed and nicely laid-out and contains a surprisingly large amount of information for a small but perfectly formed book.

It’s well worth a look and great value for money at only £9.99.

New York Stories: Part IV...

Just found the online version of the Cai Guo-Qiang exhibition. It's at www.guggenheim.org/exhibitions/exhibition_pages/cai.html.

The artist's website is at www.caiguoqiang.com.

New York Stories: Part III...

The Mel Brooks film Young Frankenstein is something of a family favourite at From Beer To Paternity Towers so the chance to see the musical version on Broadway was too good an opportunity to miss.

The stage version is pretty faithful to the movie one (but it obviously has much more singing and dancing) and follows the same story of a Frankenstein relative returning to the castle of his grandfather and reluctantly carrying on the family business, aided and abetted by the hunchback Igor and the sexy lab assistant Inga.

It's slapstick aplenty and music hall gags by the shedload and it's good fun. The dance routines could be a bit tighter and the script could do with a trim but it's pretty decent stuff and deserved better than the utter panning it got in Time Out New York.

Sadly, because of that panning, it may well not make it over here...

New York Stories: Part II...

I'm an adopted Londoner and I love the place so whenever I go to any other city I always compare it to London to see how it measures up – and, to be quite honest, London looks a bit shabby in comparison to New York.

For a start pretty much everyone in any service industry who we came across on our six-day stay was polite and pleasant, whether it was shops, museums, restaurants or delis. Compare that to the often surly, snarling and slightly superior service you get at many places in London and you wonder how the grumpy fuckers actually keep their jobs. But the reality is that good service is the exception in London while in New York it seems to be considered the norm.

Secondly the value of money is another factor. The pound may be strong thanks to our falsely inflated and booming economy but, even bearing that in mind, what you can get for your money in the USA is ridiculous compared to what the same money will buy you in the UK. Everything from a Starbucks coffee to a pair of jeans to a pair of trainers is relatively cheaper. So either New York is very cheap or London is stupidly expensive. I'm opting for the latter – especially after getting several yellow cabs in NY for very little then getting a black cab when we landed back in London for a very lot.

The streets were also really clean and everyone on the street was also unerringly polite and generally pretty chilled and good-natured. For example we went to a basketball game at Madison Square Garden to see the Nicks and it was great fun and pretty packed and I just couldn't imagine such a good-natured gathering at a football game in London. If basketball is representative of sport in New York it's very much a family thing while in London I still know people who won't take their kids to football games because of the aggressive atmosphere.

Finally I felt massively safe in New York. I wandered pretty everywhere in Manhattan and never once felt in danger – and that's not something I can in Central London. A lot of that is obviously the legacy of former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani who cleaned up the place and got tough on crime and you wonder how many teenage deaths it will take before the London Mayor takes similar decisive action.

New York was a really pleasant surprise. The Metroplitan Museum was fabulous, the Museum of Modern Art was stunning and the people we met were great. I expected it to be much more aggressive and its people rude but that's because I expected it to be a bigger version of London. But it wasn't and I've now seen what a major world city and its people can be like and, sadly with its crime and violence and rip-off prices for everything, London is not it. At the moment anyway.

But it could be...

New York Stories: Part I…

Cai Guo-Qiang is an artist from the Chinese province of Qaunzhou whose exhibition I Want To Believe is currently filling pretty much most of the Guggenheim in New York.

The Guggenheim, although nowhere near the size of New York’s vast Metropolitan Museum of Art or Museum of Modern Art, is still a pretty big place and for an artist who’s still alive to more or less have the run of the place is an impressive feat.

Cai is most famous for his gunpowder paintings, where he essentially lays down images of trees or other natural phenomena in gunpowder or with fuses, then places boards and rocks on top of then and lights the fuse. The gunpowder burns and explodes and any fires are put out leaving the burnt imprint scorched into the canvas.

It sounds mental but the images he creates are stunning and the exhibition features film of him at work with this team of assistants and the massive tree he created then lifted into place so it filled the whole wall of one gallery’s entrance hall was utterly stunning. You also imagine the act of creation and the event surrounding it is probably as important as the finished work of art itself.

It’s also quite clever. The Chinese created gunpowder, which is one of its greatest gifts to Western and other civilisations, but instead of using it for warfare Cai turns it from a destructive into a creative force. One gunpowder painting featuring the silhouette of a wolf in a bamboo forest was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.

Cai creates large-scale sculpture installations too and one featuring a pack of 99 running wolves charging into a perspex wall (a metaphor for will and energy and creative power crashing against a wall of ideological dogma) was incredible too.

Borrowing Your Enemy’s Arrows, based on the cunning ruse off a Chinese general to rearm his archers and thus win the battle, is also an incredibly striking piece of work.

There were so many other stunning pieces in this exhibition that I could easily write for another two or three hours about his imagery and his use of Chinese religious and mythical imagery. In short it’s a truly stunning exhibition and I hope it comes to the UK.

The Corporate Ladder...

When I first started out as a word-butcher-cum-sub-cum-writer in London I used to drink with a lot of old boys who'd been in the magazine and newspaper industry for years.

One of these was something of a legend and I was once berating a management decision to sack a raft of people as a cost-cutting measure and he very sagely leant over, put his hand on my shoulder and offered the following calm words of advice.

'The thing about management is... what you always have to remember is... the thing is... pretty much all of 'em... they're all cunts...'

His words have stayed with me to this day.

Carlos Acosta And Friends…

What I know about dance could be written in its entirety on a stamp. Granted, because I have seen a bit courtesy of Phoenix, Matthew Bourne, DV8 and a few other groups, it would have to be a bigger than normal stamp but even still my dance knowledge isn’t so much peppered with holes as landscaped with gaping great chasms.

So it was very much with an open mind and the chance to learn that I joined the Missus to see Carlos Acosta And Friends at the Coliseum last night. For those in the know Acosta is the hottest and most innovative thing to hit dance since Rudolph Nureyev (it said that in the programme) and this show featured the Cuban dance wunderkind and several ‘friends’ from the Royal Ballet performing ballet from their favourite shows or to their fave music.

Sadly this made the first half in particular seem like the ballet equivalent of a Stars On 45 single. The dancing looked very impressive but because it was a grab-bag taken from all over the shop there was no narrative or thematic structure to follow and there was no chance to build the sort of emotional understanding that makes a dying swan seem like a thing of tragedy and beauty rather than a dancer’s party piece. And it felt like that for most of the pieces.

Even worse Acosta came on stage at one point in the first half wearing little more than a loincloth and the swooning and sharp intakes of breath from many of the women in my vicinity suggested we were now present at the posh version of an evening with the Chippendales. But fair play to the game old girls who reacted thus – at their time of life you wouldn’t have thought most of them had it in them…

The second half improved a little and the opening dance about two survivors from a holocaust done to a piece by Rachmaninov was quite moving, while two solo pieces, one to a Latin vesper and the other to Edith Piaf’s lament Non Je Ne Regrette Rien, were quite entertaining. And the final ensemble piece was pretty lively but you got the impression that this was little more than an evening for Acosta and his mates to do their star turns and show off.

Acosta may be a dance genius for all I know but I suspect his elevation to near-deity is certainly helped by the fact that he’s clearly a good-looking fella with a well-honed physique. And even though his jumping and twirling were certainly impressive and muscular, I’ve seen martial artists do similar feats of gymnastic brilliance so he wasn’t really all that.

And, to be brutally honest, for £65 a ticket I would have liked a little more than 90 minutes of the dance equivalent of performing seals doing tricks for fish.

But doubtless Brand Acosta will continue to roll on and he probably won’t be renamed Carlos Acosta-but-earna-fortune as seemed likely on last night's evidence…