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.

Pain, fatigue, life, the universe and everything

It's warm in London for once, properly warm.  This is to be welcomed of course.  Unfortunately, I'm a bit out of practice with heat, as it's been grey and cool in the capital for about forty months or so.  This is why I forgot until after I'd turned in last night that the only fan I own was in the loft.  Being bone idle, I couldn't summon up enough enthusiasm to clamber up there and fetch it, which meant I got a wretched night's sleep - absolutely wretched.

Today has dragged something diabolical; I won't lie to you.  I've done very little.  My knee hurts and the soles of my feet and my hip have jumped on the bandwagon too.  This isn't helping my resolve.  Please, please make it stop.

Ennui Go

Oh, God, I'm bored today.  This is due to a number of factors.  Firstly, it's a glorious day out - sunny, still and warm.  That doesn't help.  Also, the office is as warm as a geriatric ward, as it must always be, to allow our, presumably consumptive, bought-ledger clerks to go about their duties.  Anything below thirty Celsius and they down tools.  Finally, I'm 47 and generally, therefore, bored almost literally shitless.

It's an odd age, 47.  I have tons of money, but realise I can no longer spend it on champagne and KFC without killing myself.  So I have the wherewithal but not the chassis for the journey.  It's like being given the run of a harem but without being able to take your trousers off.  This is opposite of one's salad days of course, when the only thing that stops you carousing is indigence or your finals, not the thought of a disappointing cholesterol test or a bout of mediaeval indigestion.

Best of the west

We flew back from Shannon yesterday after having spent a few days with my parents.  There was some congestion around Heathrow, and after sitting in what I assume must be the Bovingdon stack for a while, we performed a long slow loop over east London at about eight thousand feet before straightening up and 'establishing' for final approach

The light was great and the views spectacular.  I could see individual people around the foot of 1 Canada Square and could read the advertising hordings inside Brisbane Road.  It's amazing what a bit of half-decent light and

The Old Country

Off to Ireland tonight for the bank holiday weekend, and even though we're staying with my parents in their new-build home, you have to pack as if you're off camping -  oilskins, sou'westers and a primus.  

They live in the west of the country, not far from the Atlantic coast, and weather there is famously volatile and violent, like Mad Frankie Frazier.  Even getting from the house to the car requires a change of shoes and distress flares when it's pissing down.  You don't know rain until you've spent a weekend in lockdown with two pensioners in a bungalow in rural Ireland.

It doesn't help that there's nothing to do when you can't leave the house.  Irish radio doesn't matters any either.  It's so bad and bleak, it's resembles one of Samuel Beckett's less accessible and least successful stage pieces.

Where have you been all my life?

Well, hello there.  Sorry, I've been a bit slack for the last six months or so, but I had a tumble from (one of) my bike(s) and felt disinclined to jot whilst recuperating.  Still, I've mostly cupered now, a little impressive scar tissue notwithstanding, so here goes nuttin'.  Again.

Without wishing to sound like a broken gramophone record, I'm still in the midst of the middle-aged ennui doldrums.  Still in the same lacklustre job and still in the same house.  The house is part of the problem actually.  It's lovely and in a lovely street in a lovely area.  It's perfect for our needs, comfy and well-appointed.  So, we won't be moving again - well, not for a while anyways.  And this has thrown my life, or rather what's left of it, into sharp relief.  I can't continue to plough on like this until they cart me off in the back of a private ambulance and start liquidising my meals.  I need adventure - spiritual, sexual, intellectual and actual.

But where to find it?  For years I thought the classified ads in Private Eye might provide the answer, but never had the nerve to answer any.  I assumed, probably rightly actually, that you had to have been to Oxford and come down without a degree to do so without looking like an upstart.

Illness

I have a cold - a heavy one - aching joints, weakness, the tremors, you name it.  So I'm going to bugger off home, clamber into something comfortable, like a coma, and forget today ever happened.  The only obstacle to overcome before I can realise this dream is the ride home.  It's a foul day in London Town - really miserable.

Dubbin - must buy dubbin.

Hold that thought

I'll have to be brief today; I've been snowed under and I've got ton(nes) to do when I get home too so I can't hang about.

What have I learned today?  Apart from some vba code that came in useful earlier, not much if I'm honest.  Still, at least the sun shone on my ignorance.  That sounds like a euphemism, doesn't it?  It isn't.

Adiós.

I'm in love

Well, well...the missus and I popped to the Olympic Velodrome in London last evening for the first day of a new six-day cycling event.  I booked this out of curiosity more than anything, and because it was my birthday on Saturday, so I thought it made a nice bookend for the festivities.

I'm not much of a lad for track cycling really, despite having ridden the boards myself occasionally.  I do watch it, but I'm primarily a road cyclist have always looked upon the track as the road's boss-eyed, simpleton sister.  That all changed last night.

I hadn't had any great hope for the evening, but the tickets weren't that expensive, so even if it were shite, I reasoned, we could bail out after an hour or so and go to the pub.  However, it was riveting - absolutely compelling.  From start to finish, I could not drag my eyes from the spectacle.  I had to force myself to answer the call of nature at one point, but other than that, I stayed glued to my seat.

It's usually the case that televised sport is better than the same event in the flesh.  Football, rugby, cricket, road cycling - all of them are better served by television than by the empirical evidence of one's eyes.  Not so track cycling - it's so much better when you're there.  It's easier to follow; you also get the impression of the very real speed and danger inherent in the disciplines.  I was hooked by the end of the show, no question.  I'm now furiously trying to organise a trip to the continent to see one of the older, more-established six-days.  The two on the shortlist thus far are Berlin and Copenhagen.  We'll have to see how the flights work out etc.  Over there, six-days are basically a wafer-thin excuse for a piss-up - a nightclub with a bike race in the middle of it.  And it's as much fun as that sounds.

Boeuf Dei

It my birthday tomorrow!  I hate being the age I am (currently 46).  It doesn't sit at all well with yours truly.  And it's not because I'm vain or nuttin'.  Nor did I particularly like being young.  I like the material creature comforts that early middle age brings.  I own my own home; I have plenty of disposable income; I travel a lot.  But it's the way that one's generation slowly starts to become marginalised that I can't stand.  The cultural spotlight simply ebbs away.  The process is imperceptible until its dour work is done.  And I'm a late-starter; I was happy to bide my time as a young'un.  As a result, I'm fizzing with enthusiasm and ideas, just at the moment when my voice is starting to fall on deaf ears.  That's what I object to.

However, all that notwithstanding, I can't help but be a little excited by the event.  Firstly or course there will be presents.  The missus and I are popping out to our favourite restaurant tomorrow night to celebrate.  And, unusually for me, money will start burning a hole in my pocket and I'll feel compelled to splash out on some material frippery or other.  I'm minded to buy some musical equipment - a home studio for recording perhaps?  Yes, that would be nice.

Once more unto the top, once more

I'm dipping my multi-faceted hobby toe back into musical waters this evening.  Last weekend, my best friend and I reprised our musical venture of recording interesting covers of rock and pop classics.  To make them interesting, we transpose them to other musical genres - The Model by Kraftwerk in a ragamuffin stylee for example.  That one works remarkably well, by-the-way.

I was around at his last Saturday, ostensibly for a haircut - not off him, off his missus, who's a fully-qualified stylist and coiffeuse.  I wouldn't let him cut my hair.  Do I look stupid?  What's that?  No, apart from the hair?  Oh, yes, very good.  Anyway, we took the opportunity to record a version of Ace Of Spades that we've been working on for...oh about five years.  It was fun recording it, and as it had been percolating for so long, we both had strong opinions about how it should sound, which always helps.  The whole endeavour really rekindled my enthusiasm.

As luck would have it, the wife's out tonight, carousing with former colleagues, so I've planned a night in front of the computer with my guitar, bass and mandolin.  To maximise studio time, I'm not even going to cook.  It's straight home via the local Spar, whip up a cold supper and hunker down.  I can't wait.

It's rare that one is able to cause one's younger self some green-eyed envy, but this is one of those situations.  I have a good computer, several good guitars, a good bass, a wonderful mandolin, a comfortable and rangy home in which to work and plenty of expensive Belgian beer to help the creative juices flow.

Ahh, be still my beating heart.

Bike Riced

Phuque-ing Nora - that was a hard session at the velodrome last night.  It was partly my fault for not being correctly prepared for its severity, but in fairness to me, there was absolutely no information on the 'drome's website to correct my erroneous a priori assumption that it would be a piece of piss.  Firstly, I thought the session would last an hour; the others I'd been on do.  No - this one lasted ninety minutes.  That wouldn't normally be a problem, but an hour and a half requires proper fuelling.  

Also, it was a session of very short, very intense sessions - not what I was expecting.  By the end I was running on empty.  I got through it okay, but on the ride home I couldn't get the bike over 12mph even on the flat.  That's an indication of hunger knock, which is no good for one fitness or morale.  Also, the lack of electrolytes meant I cramped up quite badly too.  Not great - and totally avoidable.

The positives are that I got some intensity back into my bike work.  And as I'm still reasonably fit, the pain dissipated quickly and I was right with that pleasing combination of hunger, righteous fatigue and endorphins that endurance training gifts one.  I forgotten how vivid and pleasurable planet Earth is when viewed through this prism.

Ryan's Torture

I'm back on a stationary bike this evening for the first time in yonks.  Tonight's is a slightly different session from any I've experienced before; it's on a machine called a Wattbike.  The difference in technology from other static bike is quite marked apparently, but the upshot is the same: you're there to suffer.  Cycling, competitive cycling, hurts.  And cycling indoors magnifies this agony.  You've nothing to distract you from the essence of what it is you're doing.

Normally I love challenging myself on a bike; that makes me sound like one of those arsehole haircuts that applies to go on The Appentice, doesn't it?  The type who are convinced that the ability to remain upright in a suit after only four hours' sleep more than compensates for a double-digit IQ.  I'm not like that, really I'm not.  It's just that I've always loved competitive cycling, and am reasonably adept at it.  Also, there is something joyous about being really fit.  Your body feels like it's separate from you, like it has an objective existence outside of and independent of your awareness and/or influence.  You're just given preferred user status, and that's enough, believe me.  Life is effortless when the corporeal system is well-tuned.  And the mind falls in love with this new hunk, like a giggling schoolgirl.  It's great.

But maintaining one's fitness is harder, particularly when the weather gets cold, as it has in London recently.  I've let my fitness slide a bit and now it's time to suffer.  I need to court it again, win it back; I've treated it with blithe indifference and its ardour has cooled.  Hmm...I never learn, do I?

Men, huh?  We're all the same.

Look At The Gills On That

This spell of half-decent weather we've been enjoying of late reached new heights yesterday.  It was sunny and absolutely glorious all day long.  Days like this are like hen's teeth in England in October, so the missus and I seize the opportunity and jumped on a train to the coast.

We travelled down to Shoeburyness in Essex and walked the few miles along the Thames Estuary coast through Southend to Leigh-On-Sea.  This stretch of coast, as I'm sure I've mentioned before, gets short shrift off the self-appointed cognoscenti, but for why, I can't imagine.  It's beautiful.  The light yesterday was magical.  It was as good as anything I saw in California's Pacific coast.  I am being serious.

By the time we'd marched to Leigh, we were knackered and stopped for some cockles there, in true cliched cock-er-knee style.  Shellfish is my only concession to the otherwise appalling world of cockney cuisine.  I do like a cockle.  There's something truly lovely about the coast when the light's right.  Why is it I wonder we as species seem drawn to the water, like this?  It's as if we atavistically yearn to return to our pre-mammal state.  I certainly do.