Money and that

I've just returned for a lunchtime amble around the southern end of the Isle of Dogs.  It's a lovely day in London, so I thought I'd take the air for an hour and try and slough off the morning's bureaucratic ennui.

It's a funny pee-of-the-double-u down there.  It's really isolated, being at the foot of a peninsular, although it's only half a mile from the centre of Greenwich.  The housing is really mixed too - some rough-as-fcuk old-school docklands terraces, interspersed with gentrified town houses here and there.  It's really nice when you catch it right: quiet, personable and different - very unlike London.

I walked past a few houses that were for sale as I pottered.  One was particularly splendid - a solid Victorian mid-terrace, well-kept and in a nice street close to the DLR.  So taken by it was I that I jotted the details down.  This, it turns out, was a mistake.  It's up for a million quid, way beyond my ken.  Discovering you can't afford to live in an area that 60 months ago you wouldn't have kennelled you dog in is bruising to the ego.  And it does prompt the question: who the fcuk lives there?

Full-time Shirk

This post is an addendum to the last one; it's also a lesson from history.  In last month's post, I rattled on a some length about my need diligently to practice playing the guitar.  The band I'm in have a gig looming, and I'm all over the place.

You'll be pleased to hear I did buckle down.  Sadly the buckle honeymoon was short.  I got bored and simply stopped.  If I'm brutally honest, this lack of application is the template for my entire life.  I get bored extremely easily.  But perhaps I'm being too hard on myself?  Perhaps I just work better under deadline pressure?  Yeah, let's go with that.

My employers (peace be upon them) are moving.  The lease on our current gaff is up come the end of the year.  We're upping sticks and moving to central London, and I for one can't wait.  We're currently based in Canary Wharf.  CW is loathsome, all mouth and trousers.  I hate it.  Nothing is what it appears to be.  The architects and interior designers do their best, but they're fooling no-one.  The oldest building in the entire complex can't be 30 years old.  This means they all by necessity fall into one of two aesthetic categories:

1. Emotion-free cack-handed (ahem) modernism.  Think a branch of Boots that sells cocktails and fajitas instead of plasters and dunkies.

2. Faux-olde worlde (shudders) charm.  Picture an enormous good-quality static caravan with MDF inglenook fireplaces and easy-wipe Chesterfields.

CW also has its own Lego police force.  It's private land, you see, so one has no inherent rights when promenading up and down its boulevards.  The tension between this and the fact that CW tries its damnest to look like any other public space in the capital occasionally causes problems.  Once, some years ago, I returned to my bike en route home to discover it had a puncture.  I set about fixing it on the "street" and was quickly approached by a uniformed member of CW's security team.  His opening gambit "Is everything all right, sir?" struck me as bizarre.  Has is one to answer that?  The best I could manage was.  "Fine...[pointing] just fixing a puncture."  That seemed to reassure him and he sloped off, presumably to compile a report on the incident.  Our "chat" also gave his sniffer cocker spaniel ample time to check my pockets for TNT or some such.

Strange place.  I can't help thinking it must have been jollier when full of violent, hairy dockers and brasses.

Exam Season

The pressure's on, and make no mistake.  I had a rehearsal yesterday with the band I play lead guitar for.  My attitude to musical endeavours is the same as the one I adopted at school, i.e., do as little actual work as possible and get by using a combination of obfuscation and charm.

This strategy is okay up to a point, but we've a gig looming and yesterday left me in no doubt that there are serious holes in my knowledge.  I've just made a revision timetable to start plugging these, and it can be summarised as: learn all the songs properly for once.  I honestly believed that I did know the set reasonably well, but that's bullshit it appears.  And given that I hadn't actually studied any of the written music, how could I have learned them?  Via some sort of rock n roll osmosis?

So I've three weeks until the next rehearsal and a ton/ne of work to do.  It's like being a student, except that I have boring full time job to hold down at the same time.  Tiresome.

Demos Rousseau

There's a general election afoot in the kay-of-yu, and the absence of excitement is palpable.  We, the electorate, don't want to have to make life-changing decisions.  That's the politicians' job.  We just want to vote in alignment with our prejudices, like our forebears, and then wash our hands of the consequences.  Is that too much to ask?

I'm almost minded not to vote, for the first time since my teens.  It's too intimidating.  No-one, not the politicians, the pundits, the academics nor the public, knows what's for the best.  They might as well get an astrologer to present Newsnight.  "As Venus is entering Sagittarius, you might want to think about opening a mini-cash ISA and voting UKIP."

The trouble is I can't spoil my ballot paper.  I'm 48 years old.  That kind of thing is fine if you're 19; it comes across as committed, passionate and charming, albeit cock-headed and simplistic.  At 48, you just look like a dick.  It's the political equivalent of a feather cut and a tight Fred Perry polo shirt on a twenty stone plasterer.  Everyone you happen across thinks the same: sober-up, mate.

How d'you like your eggs? Easter.

Well, hello there.  I've allowed another sizeable gap in my postings to emerge.  Sorry about that; I'll do better from now on.

The bee-half and I are just back from an Easter jaunt to the Netherlands.  I've posted before about why I love the low countries: they're just so well-run and sensible - a pleasure to be in.  Yes, Holland lacks the raw drama of Andalusia or the Amalfi Coast, but I'm a 48-year-old homeowner from south east England, not Peter the Great, tsar of all the Russias.

We didn't take our bikes with us this time as the missus had a squitty tummy in the days before we left and didn't want to spend Good Friday squatting in ditch behind a windmill.  This turned out to be an inspired choice.  We travelled by train instead and hired town bikes when we got there.

You really get to know a place when you've visited at least half a dozen of its neighbourhoods.  Without doing this, you just hang around the middle of town, like a giant pigeon.  Utrecht for example, a city we've visited several times previously, opened up its charming hinterland to us once we had put in a few miles.  On bike touring trips we generally arrive there having already done 50kms, and all you want to do then is try and get the crease out of your arse before the next day's exertions.

Life-affirming rawk

I went to see AC/DC on Saturday night.  I had seen them once before but that was in 1988 and so on longer counts - 1988, when both they and I cut a wonderfully seemly figure at a gig.  I'll be honest, I was rather dreading it, but my best friend, who also accompanied me on that outing 28 years ago, insisted.  And I have to say, it was brilliant.

AC/DC have never been a self-regarding band, and this has stood them in good stead.  The idea of a grown man flailing around in front of 80,000 people while dressed as a 1950s schoolboy was as ridiculous then as it is now - no more and no less.  It's meant to be pantomime.  People who harrumph at the band are guilty of a category error.  They are wrongly reading AC/DC as a heavy metal or even heavy rock band.  They're not; they're a rock n roll band - a very different beast.  They don't take themselves seriously so why should you?

It was a real shot in the arm to have my worst middle-aged fears confounded.  We're not done yet, by god.  Just a bit saggy is all.

Po-Mo-phobia

I had an odd night, last night.  I went to a 'talk' given by the writer of the Drunken Bakers, Barney Farmer.  That's a Viz strip, for the classicists among you who are unfamiliar with it.  You really should get yourself  up to speed with it, however, if we're ever going to be friends.  Here's a handy cook's tour of the oeuvre for you.

I say 'talk', but that's taking heroic liberties with the generally accepted meaning of the term.  Barney Farmer was drunk, not legless - not by any manor of means - but drunk.  Artist Mark Lecky lobbed a few topics at him and Farmer just started riffing.  It sounds horrific written down like this - a wretched cross between a 60s 'happening' and free-jazz.  In reality it was wildly entertaining and very, very funny.  As with most good comic writers, Farmer is fluent.  And his fluency is aided when he gets out of his own way.  Too much self-awareness would be ruinous for him - hence, the drink.

My companion and I left before the end.  I was enjoying it, but the bar ran out of beer and I started to feel a bit ill at ease with the atmosphere.  There's a danger with work like Farmer's in that it attracts the wrong sort, people who like being associated with things, dark things that their parents would fear and dislike.  The excessive drinking attracts the same sort.  It suits their post-college dalliances with nihilism.  These are dalliances for the most part.  The bourgeois self-preservation gene kicks in after about 30 months and they sober-up, get promoted and buy property.  Working class people don't dally with drink and drugs because there's no safety net for them.  Who's going to bail you out if you screw up?  Your parents?  Forget that.  They haven't the money or the wherewithal any more than you do.  Consequently, intoxication is either kept on a short leash or it becomes one's vocation.  You learn to live with it and still earn, knowing that it'll be with you forever.

The DBs is very bleak; it's funny too, but the humour comes more from the framing device than from the work itself.  The fact that someone has taken to the time and trouble to set this down and get it published in a comic is hilariously inappropriate.  None of the strips goes anywhere either.  They're just exercises in voyeurism.