Eric Von Pickles

As I'm spending the weekend in Berlin, I'm going to have to steal myself to the realisation that I'll be eating pickles at some point.  Actually, I'm sure things must have moved on a little in the decade since I was last in Germany.  On that occasion I was on a mob-handed stag do.  We dined exlusively at Burger King, so I was able to give the gerkins the swerve.

This first time I went to Germany was in 1990, whilst interrailing.  My mate and I arrived in Munich, and I was mortified to discover that all the supermarkets etc. had shut on Saturday afternoon and would not reopen until Monday morning.  Bavaria wears its Catholic heart on its sleeve.  No matter though - we'd simply eat out.  Unfortunately, the only takeaways trading were traditional German places, so even the cutlery was picked.  And I cannot abide pickles.  

 I think I spent the entire weekend eating oranges and buns.  By Sunday afternoon I was so desperate I'd have eaten a husky had we had the presence of mind to bring one.

I've been scarred by this experience.  My worst misgivings about the merciless nature of Teutonic cuisine were confirmed, and  I still to this day refuse to believe they are capable to producing anything intended for human consumption that is anything other than appalling.  Let's hope they progressed in the last quarter of a century.  I know I have.

Lurlled of weather

A week of many hues, this one.  Yesterday was a full-on late autumn day in Londres.  The cloud base descended to a height of about seventy feet, and the air below that was absolutely chockablock with moisture.  I'm not sure that it actually rained in a strict meteorological sense, but you couldn't walk the length of a dining table without getting sodden.  The air was saturated.

I went for a wander anyhoo, my usual route down to Westferry Circus.  It was wonderfully desolate down there.  The office fodder were put off by the weather and it was deserted.  There's a lovely le Carré feel to the place when it's grey and empty like this.  I can fill my time simply to staring out to the river, pretending I'm awaiting a contact from "our man in the Soviet trade delegation" or something.  This kind of glassy-eyed time wasting gets me down usually, but not at especially grimy moments.  I did try to read at one point, to take the curse off my idleness, by the book starting taking on board water like shit dingy, so I gave up.

Today, on the other hand, is a sunny, warm and life-affirming November day.  The colours are superb, and I say this as a registered colour-blind person.  It's the contrast between the plant life and the sky that does the trick.  Decaying organic greens and browns seem to suit that cornflower blue you get in the sky in the late afternoons at this time of year.  I was always taught that "blue and green should never be seen", but this is the exception.  Everyone from Keats to Jeremy Clarkson seems to like the combo.  

Actually, why on earth did they try and teach us an orthodoxy of the aesthetics of colour using rhyme in the 70s, like this?  It's seemed as natural as learning the times tables at the time.  Now it strikes me as a lot bizarre and a little sinister.  I dare say Thatcher heaved that bit of the syllabus out the window as soon as soon as her skinny white ass hit the Parker Knoll in Number 10 in 1979.  Had she stopped there, I might have felt better disposed towards the dozy old sow.

Or perhaps not.

Portland ill

A truncated post today as I'm (a) as busy as a one-legged waiter on a trampoline and (b) I'm not feeling tip top.

The reason for the under-the-weatherness is clear to me: everyone in my air-conditioned office is coughing and spluttering with some wretched seasonal lurgy, and try as I might, I cannot escape their microbes.

Air conditioning is the greatest drain on the productivity of the UK since the Second World War.  I'm pretty robust when it comes to seeing off germs.  I exercise; my diet is good etc.  And yet I am laid waste to several times a year by colds.  You can imagine then what the same maladies do to the army of sedentary weeds I work with.  Most of them spend the winter months huddled in wheelchairs in sanatoriums in the Swiss Alps, with tasselled hats and tartan blankets for succour.

Why can't we just open the fcuking windows?  That used to work okay bee-in-the-dee.  We won't jump out; I promise.  Well, I might, but I'm unusual in this regard.

Right: linctus.

Remember, remember - you're in England, not Ohio

Mrs O and I are off on yet another mini break this weekend.  This time, it's off to Berlin.  We're flying quite early on Saturday morning, so instead of running around like a pair of rank amateurs on the morning of the flight, we've decided to spend Friday night in a hotel at Heathrow.

Another unplanned but welcome benefit of this decision is the fact that it means the hoose will be empty on the night of Halloween, which means we'll be spared the ordeal of having hundreds of children led to our front door by their easily-led parents to demand sweets.

I know the grumpy old man thing is supposed to be both effortlessly hilarious and fashionable these days, but, believe me, it's not that.  I can't stand Arthur Smith's contrived moaning any more than I can trick-or-treat.  I personally don't hate the internet, my mobile phone or ipod.  I love the ipod.  Why wouldn't I?  It allows me to bring my entire record collection to work with me.  No, my ire about Halloween is not born of my age and gender.  It's born of a hatred of Americana being blindly adopted by Britons.

Halloween used to mean fcuk-all in the UK.  This was primarily due to its proximity to Guy Fawkes Night.  That was always a much bigger deal here.  Not so any more.  Over the last 10 years or so Halloween has turned into a cross between A-level Thursday and Christmas Day.  And everyone just treats it like this is perfectly normal.  It's like schoolchildren having a prom.  We don't graduate from high school, like the Americans do, so its meaning is lost.  They have to earn a high school diploma; the prom is a celebration of that fact.  All our school children have to do is reach the age of 18; then they are forced to leave, irrespective of how well, badly or indifferently they have performed academically.  So a prom in the UK is rather like having a graduation ceremony for simply having made it to 18.  Woo hoo!  Well done, us.

I don't have the child mortality rates for the UK to hand, but I'm guessing most of our progeny make it unscathed.  Why not go the whole hog and award prizes for having a spine?  It makes as much sense.

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods

I was watching a 1991 interview with Frank Zappa over the breakfast ale this morning.  Zappa was ill at the time with prostate cancer.  His condition was terminal, and he knew it.  During the interview, FZ restates his long-held opposition to drugs, as they "rob the young of their ambition" and "are a license to act like an asshole".

Naturally, as a musician during the late 60s and early 70s, Zappa's position put him at odds with the prevailing wisdom of his professional peers on the subject.  I broadly support his views on this.  Narcotics co-opt one to the system that supplies them.  Unless you grow your own "shit", you must become a customer to someone or something to feed your habit; this limits your freedom.  

I've always had a dislike of being signed-up to things I can't control, committing my future to some institution or person.  It makes me nervous and claustrophobic.   What if I don't want to be a soldier in two years' time?  Tough.  It's also why I don't like debt and hire purchase.  That simply means I have to go to work for the next 28 weeks, or whatever the credit period is.  I've sold my liberty for a consumer durable, which is an appalling act when you see it in those stark terms.

However, there is a problem with Frank's argument in that all the while he was expounding his thoughts on this subject, he was holding a cigarette.  To him, cigarettes were not drugs.  He describes tobacco at one point as his favourite herb, and voices doubts as to perceived damage it does to smokers.  His refusal to classify it as a drug implies that he believes smokers have some choice in the matter, and are able to make a detached decision prior to lighting-up each time.  This is clearly nonsense; that's the drug talking. 

The truth of course is that smokers  are hopelessly and clinically addicted to cigarettes, and are therefore subjugated absolutely by their addiction.  I realised this when I was a child.  Whenever I went on a train journey as a boy, I would look in horror at the adults in station frantically bolstering their stashes of fags prior to the off.  I thought to myself then "if you can't undertake a two-hour train journey without this drug, you are anything but free".  Imagine if the cigarette companies decided to limit the supply in order to drive up the price.  Smokers would be on their knees in days, unable to function, pleading for a hit.  Fcuk that.  I decided there and then that that would not happen to me.

All this makes me sound like a paragon of drug-free virtue.  I'm not that.  I have a very active relationship with alcohol.  But my childhood phobia of addiction constantly keeps me on my toes.  I'm always eyeing booze carefully, lest it start calling the shots instead of me.

My trouble with alcohol is that I'm not clinically addicted.  I can and do go without it regularly.  I also virtually never crave a drink.  That doesn't sound like much of a problem, I'll grant you, but it is.  It's a problem because it makes me complacent about my ability to control matters.   And that is how narcotics work their evil magic.  Suddenly, they're at the steering wheel, and then it's a problem.  This is what caused Frank's momentary lapse of good sense in the interview.  It was the addiction using his vocal chords.  The same temporary madness also explains, but does not excuse, David Hockney's ludicrous pronouncements on why anti-smoking legislation in the UK is " the most grotesque piece of social engineering".  We live in world when people starve to death every day, but not being able to have a fag in a Wimpy Bar is what gets DH's goat.

I don't blame you, David.  I blame the Capstan non-filters.

The Dark Knight

The clocks go back this weekend.  This, as per, will cause an awful lot of brow-beetling and gnashing of choppers - most of it from yours truly, sadly.  It's a real emotional size nine to the knackers, this shift back to winter.  Yes, the mornings will be brighter, but who gives a stuff for that?  You're on the way to work anyhoos, so it might as well be raining down tongues of fire for all I care.

The real problem is the afternoons and evenings.  It will be gloaming like a mofo when I take my late-ish lunchtime stroll.  That's a heart breaker.  It's the first hiatus of the working day, and already the sun has fcuked-off over the horizon to shine of the Aussies.  Like they need more vitamin D.  And of course by the time you're actually released from commercial bondage, it will be pitch black.  The urge then is to hibernate, but this can be disastrous.  If you give into it, you'll do nothing with your meagre free time until April.  You might as well be a Labrador.  No, one must fight this - using stimulants, sex, whatever.

In other news, I read on the BBC web site earlier that Lady Gaga recently bought a £24m luxury home in Malibu, which hasn't improved my mood any.  I think I've made my feelings on LG clear before now, but, in essence, I believe her to be little more than a boot-faced Madonna for the Poundstretcher generation.  Her music stinks.  There, I've said it.  The dunce army that laps up stuff like the X-Factor of a Saturday night nebulously try to defend her (ahem) oeuvre by repeatedly pointing out that she plays the piano and composes all her own material.  Let's deal with those two scintillating observations, shall we?

She earns her crust in the music business.  In years gone by, having some musical training, allied to a deal of natural musical talent used to be the minimum requirement for a jobbing musician.  And is she a virtuoso pianist?  No, she fcuking isn't.  She's no Elton John, is she?  Years ago, you could walk into any pub in the east end of London and find at least a brace of functionally-illiterate cockneys who could play the piano at least as well as she can.  Anyone with two hands and enough time can master the piano to a reasonable level.

On the second point, I must hold my hand up and admit that, yes, she does compose all her own material.  Unfortunately, all that material is incorrigible shite.  Artless, wanton, self-aggrandising aural chewing-gum for the kind of people who cried when the Princess of Wales died, but who would happily stop in the street to watch, with ghoulish glee, the victim of a road traffic accident thrashing around in the gutter, as he tries in vain to reinflate his chest cavity.

Where does she get off buying a £24m pound house?  It's a fcuking outrage.  If popstars were paid according to their talent, she'd be sharing a flat with the Chuckle Brothers.  It just as well the music business doesn't work this way.  I wouldn't wish that on Barry and Paul.  They've done nothing, as we go to press, to deserve that.

Up against the impersonal pronoun singular

Super busy at the very present.  I work in a small team.  There are two of us.  That really is as small as the law of team dynamics allows, isn't it?  Any less than that, and it's all "I" in team, which nature will not have.

The reason for the professional mania is that the other 50% of the first squad is working from home for a bit, due to unfortunate family circs. that I'd rather not go into.  For as long as I've had a hole in me arse, as they say, I've been telling my alleged boss that a two-man team is fine as long as both parties are fit and available for selection.  When that happy state of affairs is undermined for some reason, it all goes to cock in a handcart.  This is the current state of affairs.  

Worse still, I'm off to Berlin for a long weekend on Friday week.  Who's going to do the needful then?  My boss?  Roger De Courcey has more chance of joining the SAS, frankly.  I don't know what's going to happen, and, more to the point, I don't care.  When all is said and done, it's only work.  Does my attitude shock you?  Excellent.  Then my work here is done.

The sun has got his (thermal) hat on

We had a junior hurricane in the U of K yesterday.  Well, it wasn't a hurricane by the time it reached our shores; it was more of a hooley, as they say in Ireland.  But, still, the wind blew and the rain lashed.  For the east of England, this counts as biblical stuff.

I was delighted when I got home to see that the shed I'd hastily nailed together a few weeks ago had withstood the tempest.  I had already mentally earmarked it as "missing - presumed dead" as I surveyed the carnage from my office window yesterday.  But, no!, it came through unscathed.  Well done, me.

Things settled down overnight, and the only lasting impact of our brush with the elements is on the water butt in the front garden, which looks like it's been overdoing the meat and potato pies.  I don't know what one is supposed to do in circs. like this.  Is it in danger of exploding if we get a severe frost, for example?  Should I "let" some of the water into a milk bottle to ease the pressure?  Every householder of a certain age except for the wife and I appears to know this stuff automatically.  Like Bill Hicks, I feel constantly that I must have missed a meeting somewhere along the line.  This is nothing new for me of course.  I've felt like this my entire life.  Impostor syndrome, I believe it's called.

I'll google it.

The received wisdom is that one cannot overfill a WB.  And no-one makes mention of one shattering its sides due to water expansion on freezing.  I'll ignore it then.  I'm sure that's best policy...as it is with most matters in life.

 

Men of garlic

Mrs O and I spent the weekend in France - Montpellier, to be exact.  It's a city we'd never visited before.  And I can pronounce myself happy with it.  Like all truly interesting cities, it has its architectural moments (cathedrals, a university etc.) but it's also a little grubby and unkempt in parts.  Never threatening, just a little grungy.

It's unsurprising, this shabby side, when you realise that a quarter of the city's populace is made up of students.  It's a big place too, so that's plenty of students.  I've never been in a place that is so student-heavy.  A demographic like this is wont to attract shit-kickers, and this Montpellier does with gusto.  They're everywhere, but their biggest concentration is to be found outside the big Monoprix supermarket on the main square.  Again, they're not threatening (the French police would never tolerate that), but they do drag the otherwise Belle Époque vibe of the place down a notch or several hundred.

I do get annoyed by white (and they are always white) dreadlocked dropouts like this.  You just know that they're all the over-indulged offspring of relatively well-to-do bourgeois families, and could lift themselves free of the mire in a heartbeat if required.  They're playing with bohemianism, which annoys me.

What annoys me more, however, is the fact most of them try to dress up their lifestyles as some kind of mordant comment or satire on "the system" and its corrupt mores.  The truth of matter is rather more prosaic: they're drunks.  That's all.  No more and no less.  

I do feel for yer actual tramps when I see wimps like this toying with the lifestyle.  At least real tramps recognise their place in the hierarchy of developed industrial society: they're the ones rolling around at the bottom of it, boss-eyed with drink and, frankly, loving it.  They make no claims to a greater insight than the rest of us, or to living lives of greater veracity.  They simply have to live that way.

Nor do they pretend that substance abuse is the golden highway to self-knowledge.  They just like being pissed-up more than they don't.  That's why a steaming-drunk tramp will always repeat some variation of the same tramps' manta to you when you happen across his path.  He will want you to know in no uncertain terms just how "fooking pisht" he is.  End of message.  If you want to read more into it than was intended, that's your look-out.  Mr Tramp simply called the material situation as he saw it at the time.  Real tramps are suspicious of schools of abstract thought.  That's partly why they end-up being tramps of course.  It's difficult to concentrate on passing exams and insuring your home when your belief in the intrinsic value of society has been undermined by cider.

Holidays...yes, again

Ooh, off to France tomorrow.  I've had a long and demanding day chez office too, which helps, as I'm now frothing at the gash for the off.  Even the flight, normally a tiresome process, is filled with appeal.  Whilst queueing up at Gatwick with the great unwashed tomorrow morning, I won't be at work for a start.  I'm actively looking forward to security, the inevitable Pret pain au raisin (candy floss for graduates) and spending £30 on magazines for a 90 minute flight.

In other news, I'm on the wagon at the moment.  I always enjoy doing this, but only when I'm doing this.  It's odd, but I find that not drinking during the week increases my energy levels during the evening.  It also makes every night different.  I keep thinking to myself "what shall I do this evening?"  And, yet, despite this knowledge, I always fall off the weekday wagon.  And then it's a wrench to climb back aboard.  No matter, I'm enjoying it thus far.

What to do this evening?  I could carve a new nut for my guitar, dismantle the dishwasher or even get in the loft and replace the extractor fan.  Or I could just stare off into the middle distance, like last night.

Getting to know you

I think I may be coming to terms with Autumn at last.  There is a certain joy to be taken from the turning of the seasons.  People who live in uniformly temperate climes tend to point this out when the rest of us whine about our meteorological lot.  I suppose this makes sense.  There's a well-know psychological phenomenon known as The Hawthorne Effect.  I won't go into the whys-and-wherefores of this mental state, but it can be summed up as improvements in performance and behaviour can be observed in subjects who are aware that they are being watched.  This effect can to triggered by a change in one's environment.  The change can be beneficial or detrimental; it matters not which.  This change makes the subject feel loved, albeit in hugely abstracted way, and they react in a positive way.

I suppose it follows then that as we enter the cusp of the seasons, we too feel this benefit.  It manifests itself (for me at least) in a joy at the rediscovery of sweaters, root vegetables and Benilyn.  Also, I should declare an interest.  October is my birthday month, so I feel like the centre of attention for a bit, and associate the feelings of pleasure this scrutiny affords me with the return of autumn.  It does take a while to kick-in though.  The first few dark mornings are a real elbow in the solar plexus for one's psyche.

Don't tell me, don't tell me...tell me.

I've kick started my Times crossword habit again...again recently.  It's a funny thing, my relationship with the old TC.  It one of those disciplines, like playing a musical instrument or doing a headstand, that requires constant practice.  And yet despite knowing this, I always let it slip.  So months elapse between crossword events, and then I'm up against it.

The problem with crossword hiatuses, for you non-crossword types out there, is that the brain softens and runs to mental fat when you don't practice.  This makes the reintroduction of cryptic crosswords to your routine a demanding, and initially unrewarding, undertaking.  Your brain, which is programmed by evolution to make short mental leaps betwixt logic stepping stones, will not take to cryptic, lateral thinking.  It's like learning to touch your toes: initially the hamstrings will complain. 

What doesn't drown us, and all that...

Great Scott, it's wet in London at the mo.  My advisers tell me it's also pissing down throughout the sceptred isle, but I can't vouch for that.  It's always the way with the weather here: one minute it's as dry as a camel's chuff and the next it's hurling down stairrods and people are fleeing their homes for higher ground.

The rain over the last couple of days has been of that particularly viscose and tenacious variety.  Try as you might to cover up with oilskins and tarpaulins, you are going to get wet.  Getting properly sloshed on, like this, makes one feels weak and brittle.  Also, despite attacking them with blotting paper and talc, I cannot stop my trotters from feeling perpetually damp in this weather.  This is the most uncomfortable feeling available in a largely civilised society.  It's awful.

To add to the discomfort, Mrs O and I are off to Montpelier on Friday for a long weekend.  We've been to the south of France many many times over the nuptial years, and, believe me, when it pisses down there, it's does it with brio and reckless abandon.  So we're hoping against hope that it stays dry on the riviera for duration of our stay.

I remember one trip to Arles a few years ago when the heavens opened and they had 6 months' worth of rain in an afternoon.  Needless to say, the town struggled to cope.  The roof of the train station cracked under the pressure of water.  This shorted-out the lights and information boards.  Not that it mattered much, the trains had all been cancelled as they can't swim.  So that was that.  

Also, we'd rented a down house on the banks of the Rhone.  In the hours following the deluge, the river swelled to an alarming degree.  Huge uprooted trees, cars and the bloated corpses of unfortunate cattle swept past our holiday home for hours on end.  In the end Mrs O couldn't take it any more, and insisted we leg it up the nearest hill and check into a hotel.  This we did.  I had enough French at my disposal to explain that my wife "had fear of the inundations" and "could we have a room in the attic please?".

As it happens, the river didn't break its banks and all was well.  It was touch and go though.

The locals were annoyingly stoical and calm throughout.  They just stood at the flood defences for bit, staring at the maelstrom.  Then they'd have a fag and pull faces at each other.  Mrs O was beside herself at this.  "Who's in charge?  Where are the police, the fire brigade?" she'd ask.  "At lunch, I expect."

Chapeaux, old chappo.

I happened across a fascinating article on the BBC web site earlier today.  It concerns the life of a chap called Patrick Leigh Fermor.  A book of his, frankly outstanding, wartime adventures in north Africa has just been published.

His escapades in Nazi-occupied Egypt would have been enough for most mortals to dine out on for at least a thousand earth years.  But with PLF, it appears to be just the tip of the iceberg.  As an apparently unemployable 18-year-old, for example, he decided to walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople.  He travelled light, bringing only "several letters of introduction, the Oxford Book of English Verse and a volume of Horace's Odes".

I adore people like this, old-school genteel English nutters.  He sounds like a man of enormous native intelligence and self-effacing good humour.  He also had a reputation for being worldly and sophisticated, but utterly without pretension.  On the strength of this article alone, I rushed down to the bookshop and bought his account of his extraordinary walk, A Time Of Gifts.  I can't wait to get started on it.

Mrs O and I have a longish train journey to get through tomorrow and I cannot countenance train travel without a diverting tome to ease the path.  Who knows where this new book lead me?  If sufficiently inspired, I too might walk somewhere.  Kazakhstan perhaps.  How far is that?  Hmm...maybe I'll start with Belgium.

Straddle bags

We're in a funny period of the year at present.  Everyone's at sea because the shift from late summer to full-on winter was compressed into about 600 minutes this year.  A little over a week ago, Mrs O and I would spending the evenings in the beer garden of our local, basking in the relative heat.  Now, London resembles a vast grey paddy field, with pools of standing water and a constant gale blowing.  To compensate for the hellish prospect of winter (yeah, another one), the wife and I have a number of mini-breaks planned to lighten the drizzly load.  We visiting several of England's provincial cities.

England is blessed with a good number of fascinating cities, but you'd be hard-pressed to know it.  The county is ridiculously London-centric.  People from the provinces blame Londoners for this, but in my experience, most cockneys just want to be left alone to enjoy their home town.  We don't want the place to be overrun every September by an army of recent graduates intent on making their fortune here.  Most of us would like nothing more than for the streets, tubes, buses and pubs of London to be slightly less frantic than they currently are.

This mania for all-things-London has reached its civil engineering apotheosis with the frankly ludicrous HS2 rail scheme.  For those of you unaware of this stunt, the plan is to build a high-speed railway link from London to Birmingham, and then onwards to the north.  This it's argued will rejuvenate the midlands and north by slightly reducing the time it takes company directors to travel to the capital...on expenses.

HS1, which passes very close to my home, is a wonderful example of elegant white elephantiasis.  It's spectacularly under-subscribed.  This is due to its being eye-wateringly expensive.  Now and again, Mrs O and I will treat ourselves to a jolly to the coast of Kent using it.  But it's really in the same category as a trip over the Malvern Hills in a hot air balloon might be.  I certainly wouldn't use it more than four times a year.  It's just too rich for my blood.

Still, I'm sure the second one will be much better than the first.  They'll have learnt their lessons from the first flawed stab.  Oh, yes.

Water Sports

I got monumentally soaked this morning on the ride in to work.  The weather has taken a sneaky turn for the worse over the last few days.  When I left the house it was grey and unpleasant-looking, but basically dry.  A mile into the commute and the heavens opened.

In fairness it's vee rare to get dumped on like this while riding to work.  People always ask "What do you do when it rains?" This question is predicated on the wrong-headed assumption that it pisses down 50% of the time in London.  Fact is, it doesn't.  It rains very infrequently, and when it does, it's in short bursts.  So the chances of catching the deluge full in the face on one or both legs of a 40 commute are slight.

Despite my years of empirical evidence as too the dryness of the region I live in, I, like many Londoners, find it amazing when hosepipe bans are announced.  The received "wisdom" among Londoners at times like this is that any shortage of fluid in the taps is due exclusively to leaky pipework that Thames Water should have fixed by now, and not to the climate being fcuked.  People who labour under this misapprehension get, understandably but incorrectly, hacked-off when these strictures are announced.  Some belligerent cockneys (yes, there are a few) even refuse to kowtow until the water companies crack and undertake the remedial works.  They demonstrate their ire at monopoly capitalism like this by washing their cars as frequently as those of us closer to the middle of the sanity bell curve brush our teeth.

I think the primary cause of this incredulity is the fact that it's so cloudy in the south east.  Drought areas at least benefit from unbroken azure skies and glorious sunshine, don't they?  That's the quid pro quo for not being able to raise geraniums.  It seems unfair and impossible that we who suffer so much light pollution from a low grey cloud base should also be denied the opportunity to splash about a bit if so inclined.

What were our geography teachers talking about when we were kids?  They insisted that cumulo-nimbus clouds held rain.  Not the ones that reach us, it seems.  They're shit, like old teabags.

Doesn't seen fair somehow.

Bristol, cream of...

Mrs O and I are off to Bristol this weekend.  No especial reason - we just fancied it.  There's something very lovely about Bristers.  It has its own vibe - intense but not frantic, self-contained and unconcerned about what goes on in the rest of the country.  It's also an exhilarating mix of the ornate and the grubby, like all great cities.  Bath, in contrast, is a bit too twee to be genuinely exciting.  And one can go too far in the other direction and overplay the grubbiness - see also: Ipswich - a lesson from history.

We haven't been down there for absolutely yars.  The reason for this is that it's a big ask for us as we live in east London.  We had a car until January last year, but what with getting across London before you even hit the motorway, it was just too much hassle to be worth the candle.  We could have got the train down, je suppose, but trains at the weekend in Britain are like Yates Wine Lodges - expensive, noisy and full of tattooed drunks.  So that's out.

I believe Brizzle has changed quite a bit over the last few years.  There's been a concerted regeneration programme in and around old dock etc.  While this is to be welcomed (it was rather rough around there), you'd have to hope the developers haven't ripped the spuds off the place as well as the warts.  Some economic regeneration zones have about as much atmos as a branch of Boots.  Canary Wharf, anyone?  We shall see.

I wonder if Tricky still lives down there.

Indian summer lovin'

Mrs O and I had a walk in the country yesterday.  We had a family lunch to attend in the afternoon, so we thought we'd get some rudimentary exercise in before breaking our fast on two courses of high-octane scran and lashings of wine.

The weather was just delightful as we made our way through Epping Forest to my sister's house.  The sun was high, wide and handsome all day.  It was pleasantly warm as a result, but with just a hint of menace in the shade - just enough to remind you that winter is racing over the horizon.  It's a pleasure to be alive at this time of year when the sun is out.  The light is so sharp and the colours so very vivid.  I suppose it's the contrast between the squint-inducing, over lit hysteria of high-summer and the chewing-gun grey that we have in south east England for most of the winter that grabs one's sensory attention.

My eyes couldn't believe their luck.  The autumn colours in the forest were stunning, which is just as well because the going was tough.  We did two full hours at a reasonable lick, in the end.  A few years ago, we would have thought such a short and undemanding walk beneath our rambling dignity.  We used to walk most weekends then.  And clearly both of us still thought we'd gallop up to my sister's in about fifty minutes.  Back to the drawing board then.

These Gore-Tex boots are made for walking...

Wee Ah Fam-il-y

Mrs O and I are off to a family wedding reception this evening.  It's a London one, this.  Usually my family weddings are in the west of Ireland.  There, hopping over the broom and the subsequent celebratory necking takes two full days.  Try as I might over the years, I have never been able to get to grips with the day B itinerary of these affairs.  It's torturous.  

You shamble down to breakfast in the hotel at about 10.30, nudge some baked beans around the plate for 10 minutes and then join everyone in the lounge.  At this point all I want to do is to stare into the middle distance and sweat.  But, no.  Once the last rasher has been dispatched, the Irish yard arm is considered to be behind you and the pints start piling up.

Apart from the real old soaks, who you suspect would be doing this at twenty to eleven on a Sunday morning wedding or not, no-one who starts drinking this early could be said to be enjoying himself.  And it is always only the men at this stage.  Everyone looks like he's drinking cod liver oil.  It's joyless stuff.  One of my cousins, who really really cannot drink, always joins in the fray.  Christ alone knows why.  It's just the done thing I suppose.

So at least I'm being spared that indignity with tonight's shindig.  Mind you, that said, it's still a London-Irish wedding, so the turps will be getting a titanic nudge for all that.

The weather of late has been dry and warm.  That sounds all right, doesn't it?  Unfortunately, the cloud base has been about ninety feet the whole time, so it's not quite the Indian summer we were pinning our hopes on.  It's all very uninspiring.  I used to go to college with a chap who claimed he liked it cloudy, the cloudier the better in fact.  But he was a statistical outlier.  Most right-thinking Britons realise it's cobblers.

In fact it's been so stuffy of a night recently that's it's quite a challenge to sleep properly.  It's a double-edged bread knife, weather like this in October.  While no-one (particularly not yours truly) likes being cold, there's something "correct" about the cool, crisp slap in the kisser that autumn brings.  You mentally start to get the sweaters and root vegetables out of mothballs in readiness.  

The cusp of seasons, like this, helps us mark the passage of time.  Humanity has been doing this since the dawn of time, and there remains a residual part of our seemingly sophisticated modern brains that still lights up when this happens.  We react by bleeding the radiators, whilst our hairy grunting forebears simply used to hurl a mammoth on the barbie and hope for the best.

I always spare a pensée for my expat friends in Australia at times like this.  Surely the shortening and cooling of the days that October brings must be hard-wired into northern hemispherians?  I don't care how long you've lived in Wallamaloo-Super-Mare, you're going to feel at odds with the prevailing wisdom at this time of year.  

The flip side is true too of course.  It's particularly acute for Aussies in the UK on Boxing Day for some reason.  If you have access to one on the 26th this year, take a close look at him or her as events unfold.  No matter how jolly or convivial the festivities, the Aussie will wear a strained expression throughout.  This bespeaks a mind troubled by thoughts such as "This is bollocks.  I should be striding along the beach in a pair of Ray Bans and some brightly-coloured spud-cups."  Yes, you can run but you can't hide from your instincts.

"More sprouts, Bruce?"

"You haven't got a choc-ice, have you?"

Anne Guish

I had a very vivid and troubling dream last night.  There was nothing nightmarish about the subject matter, but it was one of those dreams that could have passed for an actual memory.  Nothing supernatural happened, and I wasn't sat it the basket of hot air balloon with Brian May or anything.  No, all the events were played out in plausible surroundings with "real" human beings filling all the major leads.  It was so mundane in fact that the befuddled night manager of my brain thought it was real and flicked the "go" switch.  At this I started shouting and flailing, which is what I was doing in the dream.  Loudly and violently enough to wake my wife as it happens.  I thought being paralytic during sleep was supposed to stop things like this happening?

And so it was that this morning I woke up physically refreshed, but a little lateral in the noggin department.  And I've been at 6s and 7s all day since.  I don't know quite what prompted this whole thing, a combination of factors in all probability.  I may have eaten something that disagreed with me for a start.  Also the council in my locale has introduced a "mini-Holland" scheme to promote cycling, which is as condescending and cock-headed as the name implies.

They've closed a largely commercial street to traffic, much to the annoyance of local business owners, and decanted the cars to several residential streets instead - my own among them.  This has given home-owners to pip, as you can imagine.  The worst aspect of the whole idiot exercise for me is the fact that I am lifelong cyclist: commuting, touring, racing, utility-cycling, I do it all, and it has made my cycling life worse.  I now cannot cycle the roads that have become rat runs, due to there being too much traffic on them.  I also cannot cycle down the main street in my village (the one that was closed to traffic).  It is supposed to have been given over to cyclists, but the locals now think of it as having been pedestrianised, so it's always thronged with people window-shopping or simply staring off into the middle distance, like expensively-dressed pink cattle.   

So all-in-all it's been a colossal fuck-up.  This is what is annoying my mind.  I have a phobia about flabby, illogical thinking.  I work with a lot of marketing types.  Marketing tends to attract two types: people who think plugging, selling and hawking are a necessary evil but are good at it.  And those who actually think it's laudable, akin to being a healer or a prophet.  The first type are women and the second men.  The men also all think they can count and think clearly, when the actual fact of the matter is that they know shit and pretty much do shit for a living.  So I've developed quite a specific aversion to dunces throwing their fuck-nutted weight around.  Having some of their brain-storming ordure, still warm from the colon, dumped on my doorstep, then, has got right in among me.

I will rise above it, however