So, as of today, I'm one of those people who has 'therapy', apparently. After years of not feeling particularly amazing on a lot of fronts (driving, confidence, family history, bereavement, anger etc) I decided - with T's support - to, well, seek help.
I have only been for one session, with a cool woman who lives about two doors away - is there anything this village can't do? I was a little nervous, but also wierdly calm. Or, as calm as you can be when you're about to tell a complete stranger some unresolved stuff that dates all the way back to when you were a nipper.
Anyway, she's cool, and we had a good introductory chat. I already think it's beneficial. For too long I have felt a bit like a car with only two working gears. I can go forward, but progress is halting, and I tend to roll to a standstill at the first sign of a hill, if you like. I haven't driven here for three weeks, and frankly I'm not arsed if I never drive again. It is too much, and I fear hitting stuff and endangering other people. That's not something I was over-burdened with in Bristol, or London for that matter. Maybe a bit more self-confidence will enable me to take this shit on and actually excel at something? Early days yet, but I am hopeful.
I've felt strange and 'drifty' for the last couple of years. I don't really know what I'm doing, or where I'm going particularly. Maybe this will help to focus that? I don't know. I already feel it's the best thing to do - it's also really nice to have a space where you can just talk to someone neutral about yourself for a while. I've not had that, ever. Nobody gets that close, and those that used to aren't around (at least corporeally) these days, so it's got to be a good thing. I sensed a bit of envy from Tam when I came back. Maybe she could benefit from doing something similar?
All I know is, I love her too much to not be with her, so I'm going to become better in order to keep her.
Monday, 24 November 2014
Monday, 20 October 2014
Swan 2014
Writing case studies for work, especially if you're sat next to your scanner, is quite dull.
This is a far more interesting use of ink.
This is a far more interesting use of ink.
Lost Pen
This is another random bit of scribbling I found cowering in the dusty recesses of my hard drive. It dates from London (November 2012 or so), and is alright.
I lose things. I am absent-minded. Things I own just plain disappear, without warning, rhyme, reason or explanation – whompf! – they’re gone. Clean fucked off. I cannot understand it or predict what will be next, and I can explain it only marginally more adroitly than I can, say, particle physics, or the success of Two Door Cinema Club.
This week’s near-vital missing item is a pen. Not just any pen, this – a fine, balanced and moreover entirely free fountain pen of the house of Waterman, procured through the labyrinthine means of the work stationary catalogue (more on this dastardly and infernal tome later).
The writing implement in question’s lines and the smooth flow of ink issuing from it have - I’ve assured thrilled onlookers - led to better, more considered note-taking on my part, and in short, an upswing in my performance at work. By association, I have gained confidence in a variety of areas of life, and now leap as sure-footedly as a mountain goat from one challenge to the next, guided by the certain knowledge that I will succeed. Yup, my posh new pen’s made the world a better place for everybody. It’s a joy to behold, literally. Until this morning’s arrival at the Citadel of Relentless Opportunity was overshadowed by ill tidings and a development that cast a great pall over our team’s early wisecracking; a black mood leavened only slightly by the news that the Bank Holiday was next week: The Pen, that shining example to us all, had gone missing.
Aghast, I rooted through my rucksack, palms slick with perspiration at the thought of The Pen’s horrendous demise on the floor of the 0804 from Loughborough Junction. Perhaps it had fallen and choked to death in the shifting, foot-thick silt of receipts and business cards that dominate the bottom of this, the world’s least tidy work bag? Worse still, what if a long-forgotten sandwich remnant, lurking Kraken-esque in the bag’s inky depths, had slathered it in a nib-rotting hummus-and-tobacco-flake bisque – a fate that had already befallen an iPod in similarly tragic circumstances last year? I almost had to call off the search as a horrific slideshow of images flashed through my mind’s eye, featuring The Pen coming to grief under the relentless tide of commuters trampling past Farringdon station.
I looked everywhere, short of actually pacing maniacally back to Farringdon, as after all a pen’s a pen, even if it is The Pen. After a few minutes, my years of training in second-guessing and then outwitting my past self kicked in: ‘Think how you’d think in this situation’, I told myself, confusingly: ‘then do something unexpected and totally without precedent, because that’s probably what you did with it in the first place.’ It didn’t work. I tried looking for The Pen in my bag, my jacket, the lining of my jacket – see, told you I’m a pro – under my chair, under my desk, under my pedestal drawers thing under my desk, under colleagues’ desks – but to no avail. The Pen remained resolutely unfound.
Disconsolate, and sensing the familiar escalation to full-on rage that frequently accompanies situations like this, I looked down at the alternatives to my new and favourite note-taking device. The various desk-tidies were billets to quite the scrawniest, half-chewed and decidedly motley selection of writing implements I’ve seen in a good while. A sorry company of fading highlighters, biros with blobs of ink drying embarrassingly in their fuselages, blunt pencils and something that looked like it had last seen action a Ladbrokes stockroom in 1987 were all I had to work with. To get through the day using this past-it collection would have been depressing in the extreme, and there would have been casualties for sure. Old Timer Biro, whose clicky button hasn’t worked this side of 9/11, and can’t do a lower-case j without weeping stodgy black crud until halfway through the next word would never make it to lunch, let alone my three-thirty with the chatty bloke and his lazy eye from Accounts. It would have been carnage – like sending Manfred Mann over the top at Ypres.
As it turned out, my meetings were cancelled, so I was able to confine the Clive Dunn of the rollerball world and his similarly antiquated cohorts to barracks for the rest of the day, but still mystery shrouded the exact location of The Pen – in so many ways, the Enterprise-D to their Model-T Ford.
The good news for me, though, is that technology – or rather, some young and well-funded creative thinkers with great hair, doubtless based in California – have provided an answer of sorts. Tile, a product small enough to fit on a keyring, has been launched through the crowdfunding site Kickstarter, and has already secured a quite absurd amount of funding. Why? Well, in short, Tiles find things for you.
I am not the most technologically-minded person in the world, but by my reckoning, Tiles are little RFID tags that you stick onto your treasured possessions and then track them, using some sort of tidily-appointed mobile app or other. As you can tell, my research into this is at this stage pretty minimal, but I am fairly certain that’s how it works. In other words, things that are Tiled cannot be misplaced, unless my suspicions are correct and small, important things in my possession can actually create wormholes in the very fabric of space and time and disappear at will. There’s no news yet on whether the Tile app will enable object-tracking through temporal distortions – no doubt they’ll issue an update that covers this in due course.
Then again, do the creators of Tile really know what they’re up against? I am a black-belt at misplacing important items. I have lost a set of house keys /the day before going on holiday/. Without them, I couldn’t lock the back door of our house, which was already well-known to the criminal underworld of South East London thanks to the break-in we’d been treated to just weeks earlier. In a state of panic, the Other Half rush-ordered a temporary door lock, which arrived at considerable expense the next morning and all was well. We went away, still perilously oblivious as to the exact location of our back-door keys, only for them to turn up in the lining of the door seal of our washing machine after it had completed a full cycle of dirty holiday clothes. Would a plucky little Tile have put up with that, doggedly bleeping away from within the salty bowels of the washer-dryer as we fretted on the French coast? I doubt it.
All this is very well and futuristic of course, but what of The Pen? Our return home, delayed slightly thanks to a wander through Old Street and the altogether nicer Bankside, led to more fraught searching of bags and personages, and the grey, relentless creep of resignation that, once again, Tile or no Tile, something else had disappeared. After a moment’s pondering, though, Other Half came to the rescue. “Found it,” she cried, “in the lining of the inside pocket of that bloody bag. For God’s sake, get yourself a pencil case like a grown man,” she said, paradoxically. “A man can’t just carry a pen around without losing it, can he?”
Maybe if it was WiFi-enabled, tethered or lived in the cloud he could.
Tuesday, 14 October 2014
London: One Night
Inspired by On The Road, I decided to walk from Blackfriars to the Worlds End and back in the rain. It was lovely. Enlivened by a few whiskies, I came back and wrote this. I like it:
So it is what it was and is - a walk through the greased and shining city streets in bruised darkness, to the known via the unknown. A sideward glance eight fifty two, beat red man from Bankside cross, all sliding lights, water and cobbles, up to monument, memories and events that didn't happen, but for the sake of a story, perhaps did.
Hard up by stations only seen from the inside, roads never walked before, umbrellas and sellers writhing for a way down current-pushed pavement. Puddles mirror streams of walkers, water, water everywhere, and where to get a drink? Nobody to shock-stop, no Bem to chime an end, one foot in front of t'other, forward gleefully as past and present blend.
Through intersections nudges plastic mind with all the answers. In pocketback keeps us safe, a blue line in the familiar, confirming confidence, doubling resolve in the rain. On you go, he chides, on, on, on.
Starting to bleed familiar now, old tracks amid streetlights and convenience stores that could be anywhere, but are definitely here and now and right; blue line and fragile little instincts, flickering, light the same page at last.
Forward through the drizzle, light of foot, fleet of mind and quick of heart, too warm for the rain to counter, too hot to be cold, the only answer forward. One foot in neon, one in guttertaxi, chickenbone ranks, first Bloomsbury, then old giant Euston. A great, dark-shouldered bulk over the way, stone guard of the City's North, hunched on the Roman road; an ogre sleeping on a chain. Still after all these times and souls, he sits and waits.
Then break in the gloaming, and things come familiar as trust in the route returns. Tired and hungry in the spray and bluelight violins, through twinkling, past revelries, new loves and drunks. In shadow, away from scenes, a homeless man locks gates on the tireless cold with one blue blanket, a scrawled face cowed under a hoarfrost mourning. One forgotten, facing more than we know, with less than we carry. Our crouched hero shivers, resolute.
Further again, lights trigger memory as a goal looms. Noise - warm, deep and infinite, broils at the world's end. Warm whiskey rewards stoke fired to carry the wayward home as the underworld shakes below.
Pool hall Maggie teases Mr Blue Sky, who cuts clouds from minds eyes in the queue, all triplets and love. So long, so long, son. Hot stones and warm spice start me up as the sky seethes and the wind cries Mary, beckoning back the way we came. Rain everpresent now quickens, beating woebegone streets, oiling unseen wheels that push tired limbs home on that little blue line, to a bed not owned.
Sent from my iPhone
So it is what it was and is - a walk through the greased and shining city streets in bruised darkness, to the known via the unknown. A sideward glance eight fifty two, beat red man from Bankside cross, all sliding lights, water and cobbles, up to monument, memories and events that didn't happen, but for the sake of a story, perhaps did.
Hard up by stations only seen from the inside, roads never walked before, umbrellas and sellers writhing for a way down current-pushed pavement. Puddles mirror streams of walkers, water, water everywhere, and where to get a drink? Nobody to shock-stop, no Bem to chime an end, one foot in front of t'other, forward gleefully as past and present blend.
Through intersections nudges plastic mind with all the answers. In pocketback keeps us safe, a blue line in the familiar, confirming confidence, doubling resolve in the rain. On you go, he chides, on, on, on.
Starting to bleed familiar now, old tracks amid streetlights and convenience stores that could be anywhere, but are definitely here and now and right; blue line and fragile little instincts, flickering, light the same page at last.
Forward through the drizzle, light of foot, fleet of mind and quick of heart, too warm for the rain to counter, too hot to be cold, the only answer forward. One foot in neon, one in guttertaxi, chickenbone ranks, first Bloomsbury, then old giant Euston. A great, dark-shouldered bulk over the way, stone guard of the City's North, hunched on the Roman road; an ogre sleeping on a chain. Still after all these times and souls, he sits and waits.
Then break in the gloaming, and things come familiar as trust in the route returns. Tired and hungry in the spray and bluelight violins, through twinkling, past revelries, new loves and drunks. In shadow, away from scenes, a homeless man locks gates on the tireless cold with one blue blanket, a scrawled face cowed under a hoarfrost mourning. One forgotten, facing more than we know, with less than we carry. Our crouched hero shivers, resolute.
Further again, lights trigger memory as a goal looms. Noise - warm, deep and infinite, broils at the world's end. Warm whiskey rewards stoke fired to carry the wayward home as the underworld shakes below.
Pool hall Maggie teases Mr Blue Sky, who cuts clouds from minds eyes in the queue, all triplets and love. So long, so long, son. Hot stones and warm spice start me up as the sky seethes and the wind cries Mary, beckoning back the way we came. Rain everpresent now quickens, beating woebegone streets, oiling unseen wheels that push tired limbs home on that little blue line, to a bed not owned.
Sent from my iPhone
Monday, 13 October 2014
Purpose
Me again.
You’ll notice there’s been a slight hiatus. Sorry about that. Moving house, planning the wedding, working etc.
We made it though, and it’s fabulously new and big and wierd and awesome and other. I love it. The house is tremendous. I wish, in a distracted way, that you could see it.
You’ll also notice that I’ve decided to do some more ‘drawing’. As always I have grandiose plans for this that won’t come to anything. Bugt regardless of whether they are any good, wouldn’t it be great if I managed to ‘produce’ a drawing every day for a year. I suppose that this blog is a kind of living record, a memento – a memoir, even.
And if I’m going to fill it with interesting things as well as swearing and moaning about the small stuff, I need to produce said content. I’ve always liked drawing, even though I’ve never had any real flair for it, or instruction. It just calms my mind. It’s more meditative than writing, that’s for sure, which – despite everyone else in my life’s conviction that I’m some kind of literary genius – I find difficult to the point of impossibility. When I’ve tried, consciously, to ‘write something’, I find it incredibly hard to start, difficult to love, impossible to stop fiddling with and easy to disown. I only see the bits I’m not pleased with. The flaws, clichés and generalities. The rushing. The /wanting/ something good to be in there, somewhere. But there isn’t anything in there; it’s only echoes.
Anyway, it strikes me that this little online bolthole might actually be growing a purpose of its own. I’ll use it as a record of my life. I’ll be honest, life since Mum passed away has lacked a little purpose. I’m also struck by the idea that I’m the last one around who can reliably recall /anything/ that happened in my family before Mike’s arrival on the scene in 1990. I was born in ’79 and your aunt in ’81, so there’s a lot of years in the middle that are just a dotted line. I’m the only one who can fill those pages in. Maybe that’s my purpose. Maybe I should make that my purpose. There it is again: maybe.
I have just realised that for the first time ever, I’m writing this to the child I don’t yet have and have not yet planned to have, but will probably have one day. That might be the definition of shouting into the void. How strange. Hello, you. How’s tricks? I hope we’ve met, and we get on. You’re probably as much fabulous, complicated trouble as your mother, so we should be fine, you rascal.
Maybe I’ll write this to you so that you know the story of life before you were born, as soon there won’t be anyone else who can tell you the real tales of when your Dad was your age, younger and older. Mike’s a great, great man, and his family are wonderful, but they are not necessarily my family. I’m related to them by marriage, and since my Mum passed away, that relationship’s changed. I’d like to say we’re really close, and we are, but we’re not quite as close as we were. We’re being men about things more than we did while Mum was alive – closed off and uneven with eachother. We still love eachother, but in a male way, because we’ve both simultaneously lost the single biggest female influence on both our lives, and are spinning a little bit. Mike’s anchored himself to Bashley and his allotment and his neighbours, and I’ve concentrated on our house (possibly even the one you’re going to be born in - who knows?). We’ll be alright, but we need to tell you about the times before. I’ll do so in due course, I hope.
I love you, whoever you turn out to be.
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Friday, 10 October 2014
Monday, 6 October 2014
Friday, 9 May 2014
Member of Legal Profession in Doing Something Shock
Right – lots of things have happened. To whit:
We had originally engaged a conveyancer to shuffle our bits of paper on the initial move which fell through. They were utter rubbish – not a single phone call or email, and they managed to ‘lose’ the signed and witnessed documentation we sent them via recorded delivery. Fuckwits.
Fearful that we’d end up on Watchdog or something, I decided to switch to a conveyancer that’s actually another department of the company brokering our mortgage. I spent an enjoyable 20 minutes yesterday morning really leaning into the first conveyancer, in a spectacular telephonic takedown of which my mother would have been proud. So, we now have a new one. It’s telling that in the last 24 hours, we’ve been able to progress further with the new conveyancer than we did with the old one in two months. My god, they were awful. I was promised a phone call from their head conveyancer yesterday, but as of yet I’ve not received it. I am not surprised by this.
Despite this, our mortgage application is on track, and we just need to send the lender original copies of every important document we have ever owned (passports, driving licenses, bank statements, payslips, locks of hair, cheek swabs, stool samples etc) and then pray they get returned. Otherwise though, all’s well, and we’re on target to exchange before the end of June, when our tenancy runs out.
On the inheritance front – STRIKE UP THE MARCHING BAND! SEND IN THE CLOWNS! ARRANGE THE RED ARROWS! FIREWORKS ON STANDBY! CHILL THE CHAMPAGNE! – John Smart has ACTUALLY DONE SOMETHING OF NOTE!
What a man John Smart is. I’ve never doubted him – he has the elegantly disinterested, old-money air of a man unfamiliar with the vaguaries of mortgages. When phoning him, I like to imagine that my unexpected phone call has caused him to fluff a two-footer on the 18th green at Barton Links. I have phoned him in relation to grandma’s estate on no fewer than 14 occasions in the last two months (I know this because I resorted to minuting them after his caddy Stephen Wheatley buggered off two months ago).
I have merely requested a bit of paper that states the extent of the estate and my legal claim to it on no fewer than six occasions, the last of which was an email on Tuesday of this week. I phoned him today and he said ‘I’ve got two of your cheques in front of me, just waiting on the third.’ A momentous breakthrough, but my 15th phone call notwithstanding, not one he was going to inform me of.
He is ‘surprised’ the last cheque’s not arrived yet. I am not. He is also confident that everything should be with me ‘this time next week.’ Encouraging as this sounds, I will still expect a windfall sometime in September 2015 if current form’s any guide, bless him.
So, we’re nearly there. I told John to email me with ‘something appropriately official-looking explaining where the money’s coming from’, as without this we can’t progress our mortgage, and he promised to do so ASAP. This is also a breakthrough, and evidence that my new ‘JFDI’ approach is paying early dividends, even if my inheritance money isn’t.
This process has been exhausting so far. We have at times been enmeshed in the kind of self-interested, institutionalised incompetence that only prevails when an entire industry is based on both hourly rate and bonuses. The only exception is our surveyor, who is as keen as a famished spaniel and would happily take a squiz your roofline and soffits you if you stood still for any more than eight seconds. That he’s an ex-Balfour Beatty employee who knew my old boss is beside the point.
We will get there, and we will love it when we do.
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Wednesday, 7 May 2014
OIEO?
Buying a house is an utter, utter fucker. Estate agents are basically scum. Everything is more expensive than it rightfully should be. Even though I’ve been waiting for this moment for 10 years, I can’t actually enjoy it, because of arseholes. Even though the house I want to buy is probably worth what I’m going to pay for it, I feel cheated.
Nobody does what they need to do when they need to do it unless you talk to them like a child and threaten non-payment of their scarcely-earned fees. They are all playing you off against other people, and needlessly obfuscating. Even as someone who hasn’t had to scrimp up a few thousand and has everything he’ll ever have riding on this, I’m by turns disappointed and actually upset by the attitude of sellers, agents, conveyancers, solicitors... it just goes on. Even the vendor, who was nice enough initially, has turned hard-nosed and pushy.
I’ve got no help in this either, as Mike can’t even be bothered to pick up the phone, and Tam’s parents are more interested in (a) minimising the amount that we spend because they have no perspective on the matter and (b) borrowing from me so they can effect their own move. Despite the fact that I haven’t got the money yet, for God’s sake.
It’s still better than renting. It’s still better than renting. It’s still better than renting.
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Friday, 2 May 2014
Jack Kerouac Had It Pretty Much Spot-On
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Generally Negative
In a funny mood for the last couple of days. Still no sign of the inheritance, and time marches on, effectively meaning that our collapsed house move and subsequent fuckery could potentially lead to rental in Exeter, and manifold disappointments therein. Hey, that is, as they say, how fucking life goes. I feel hard done by, I think it’s fair to say.
I am also entering a grand old funk about injustices in the workplace – either perceived or real. It dawns on me that in six years I’ve had two days of training, and would like some new skills in order to reignite interest levels that are basically on the floor. Meanwhile newcomers are being given hundreds of pounds’-worth of training and letters after their names that will mean increased employment opportunities. Meanwhile my manager sits on his arse doing nothing, but mainly because I can’t ask him for anything, as I have no goals to hit that I can’t already hit. I could volunteer to become an in-house videographer, spend six months and thousands of pounds on equipment, but there’s no drive for anything like this from the top, so why bother? Just rebrand fucking case studies and shut up, Jones. My career is effectively over, unless I radically change it.
So, what do I want to do? In the long-term, property management. In the short term, something creative and visual enough for people to be impressed by? Maybe. I envied Nick’s abilities on that video shoot, but most of his business is in London, and I don’t want to be based here, because (fanfare please) it’s a fucking shithole. Meanwhile Tam’s doing well, and is really respected and ensconced at the management level of the business, with all the attendant kudos that brings. Tony’s sitting at the end of these desks chortling to Chris about nothing whatsoever and I can’t fucking to listen to it anymore without wanting to walk out and never come back to any of this. It is, and always has been, utter bollocks.
I think a sabbatical might be in order.
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Wednesday, 26 February 2014
Gwendoline Doris Wheale, 1/10/18 - 26/2/14
My grandmother, Doris, passed away this morning. She was 96.
She had been ill for several years, had suffered angina, and two strokes related to the Alzheimer’s that ultimately ended her life. I had little contact with her in the last three years of her life, despite the fact that she was in a care home just a mile from my parents’ house in New Milton. I found it hard to visit as her condition deteriorated, but justified this with the notion that ‘she’ had effectively vacated her physical body a long time ago. Alzheimer’s strikes me as a cruel condition, creating in the sufferer a complete breakdown in the veracity of one’s own memory. Then, it replaces key memories – the house you grew up in, your wedding day - with fabrications. Next, Alzheimer’s starts to alter your perception of the present, ‘real’ world such that you can’t even believe or understand what you’re hearing. Voices, ‘strangers’ in your own house, and all the while, the true memories are being erased.
After losing your ability to perceive time, language and any sense of your location in the wider world, Alzheimer’s plays it’s cruellest trick: sufferers forget that they’ve forgotten anything, and appear to exist in a heavily medicated dream-state, where one second lasts years, years last minutes, hours are infinite and everything’s in the wrong order. The dissociative, disorientating combination of all these factors would be overwhelming to a young, agile mind, but it generally afflicts the elderly. How must it feel to realise that your mind is coming apart at the seams? Alzheimer’s steals experiences away from those who experienced them, and then those who have been robbed no longer realise that any theft has occurred.
Thankfully, I have some amazing memories of my Grandma, which I’ll be forming into a eulogy at a later date some time next week. She was a pretty amazing person before her condition started to take effect. She was an amazing cook, a crossword-solver extraordinaire, a proud and fervent supporter of her family, and had a toughness and flint in her gaze that spoke, I always thought, of her Welsh ancestry. She could be argumentative and forthright – a trait that all the women in my family share, but this was driven not by malice or the simple love of an ‘exchange of views’, but by love; by wanting what was best; by an innate sense of what was right. I hope that some of that has carried on percolating down through the generations, and will continue to do so.
Now that she’s gone, and relations with my father are still very much non grata, I consider myself orphaned, remarkably, at 35. ‘The last of the Joneses’ (which is nearly true, of course, but not quite). I am not literally alone. I have the nucleus of a family – my step-father will be as great a source of strength in the next few weeks as I no doubt was to him when my mother – the woman he had expected to die in the arms of, no doubt – passed away three years ago. Even as a youngster, I realised and accepted that I might see a day when my mother and grandparents would have passed on – that I would be living in a ‘post-Mum’ universe – but to have lost a sister, mother, grandfather and now grandmother at this point in my life does feel unfair. Christmas at Tam’s family home brought home to me just how many people I no longer have to call my own.
Of course, after the formalities are completed, the funeral over, and our lives resume, there are positives to be drawn from the midst of all this loss. My Grandmother is, I can virtually guarantee it, in a better place than she was this time yesterday. They call it ‘being at peace’, and the deaths I’ve had to witness or share with friends and colleagues certainly fit that description.
A friend of my sister’s lost her parents when she was in her early twenties, and I think her personality altered somewhat afterwards. I remember feeling the deepest sympathy for her, being scarcely able to comprehend how that much loneliness would feel. I feel it too, sometimes, and in my case it takes the form of a howling emptiness in the quiet times of the day, and a heightened significance at family occasions or on anniversaries. It’s literally like a dull ache in the heart, which if pursued and brought into the open of conscious consideration, leads to tears. Even more dispiritingly, it seems to get worse as the years go by. The idea that this howl might live inside me for the rest of my life is profoundly sad, and very real. This, of course, is why people have children.
I look forward to introducing mine to their grandmother, and telling them what a great person my grandmother was.
Monday, 24 February 2014
Brace for impact
In truth, I have felt utterly exhausted for some time. Frozen, both creatively and work-wise, for the best part of a year.
All of that, with a bit of luck, is about to change. All of the what-ifs will come at once, pull up a chair at our little table, and start spinning our preconceptions of what we do, where we live and in many ways, who we actually are. I am obviously excited by the idea of change on this kind of scale, but also terrified of letting everybody down. I have several more hurdles to cross before the most monumental event in the last three years is welcomed in with quaking arms. Let’s just say that if I’m brave, and right enough for an hour at the end of this otherwise unassuming little week in late February, we will be a quantum leap in the direction of the Long Term Goal, and all of this fight, scrap and scrape will be a memory – a source of pride, to be sure, but a memory all the same.
Our time is coming, again.
Do we want it? Is it right? Am I right? Only time will tell. On the face of it, the potential opportunity is a massive reshuffle of the work-life balance, a copper-bottomed opportunity to finish saving and start investing, and a self-determining poke in the eye for all those fuckers who continue to doubt me, all rolled into one. I will have my revenge, again. I will move forward with those I love, regardless of their views on my limitations. I will prove myself, again.
This is the moment that decides where we get married.
This is the moment that decrees where I finally learn to drive.
This is the moment that clarifies where our first house is purchased.
This is where our baby could take her first steps.
This is where I take back control of things.
This is where we make our own rules.
I’m terrified and confident of success. I could back off now, but don’t want to. In any case, I have set in motion a sequence of events that makes most of the above unavoidable.
Thursday, 23 January 2014
Jon Hopkins/Daniel Avery
I don't like dancing. It's pointless, fake, obviously contrived and bears no relation to the music that allegedly inspires it. I'll do a longer post on why dancing is shit (probably entitled Why Dancing's Shit, obviously) at a later date - and I can hear you all holding your breath for that one already, but don't. No, dancing is not for me. Dance music, however, definitely is. What's more, I blame Noel Gallagher's dalliance with the Chemical Brothers for this.
Now then. I like to think of myself as a person who won't necessarily dismiss music on grounds of genre, but I also count myself as a person who can dismiss a great deal of Nineties chart music precisely in this way, because I was there, and let's face it, it was bollocks. Culturally, musically, in terms of its legacy, it was utter rubbish. Unlike some fads (flares, kipper ties etc) which are seen as dreadfully a la mode at the time, only to be sniffily derided with the benefit of hindsight, mid-to-late-Nineties chart music, with its wall-to-wall manufacture of bobbins boy bands and cheap 'untz-untz' house fit only for the bovine super-club arenas that blighted the cultural landscape at the time, was shit then, and it's shit now.
Between 1992 and '95, something bloody horrible started happening on the radio - a music none of us in the provinces understood washed over us, like a deafening blanket of nothing in particular, its verses, modulation, form, interest all stripped away, leaving a beat and a bunch of synths that just went on and on and on, until someone reached, at last, for a song with words in it. It was horrible unless you were on strong drugs. We weren't on strong drugs.
It was a dark time to be a rocker, I can tell you. This obvious crock of shit - If There Ain't No Love (Then It Ain't No Use) by Sub Sub - later to bafflingly re-emerge as the bearded and bucolic Doves - was on the radio eighty times a day, it seemed.
Give me fucking strength.
Then along came Block Rockin' Beats, with its - gasp - melody and - crivens - bassline probably played on an actual bass! The indie nation looked up from its collective copy of Vox for a second, snorted derisively (which we did a lot at the time) and carried on waiting for Dog Man Star to come out. The Chemical Brothers, who had goosed the public in late '94 with Leave Home and Chemical Beats,were coming back. Their joker, of course, was only just around the corner. This, for those of you who don't have it permanently seared onto your eardrums, is the noisy bastard in all its screeching glory:
I know how that feather felt.
Lore has it that the vocal Noel laid down for Setting Sun, the single that propelled the Chemical Brothers to number one and started all of this in my house at least, was recorded while a cab waited outside with its meter running. This alone makes it unimpeachably great, and is another reason to love Noel and his erstwhile band. I like to file this one alongside 'Supersonic was written and recorded in six hours', and just down from 'Wonderwall's vocal is take one', and not at all far from the fact that Talk Tonight, Headshrinker and Acquiesce were all b-sides of the same single.
As it happens, Noel's contribution to Setting Sun is pretty perfunctory, as the above story might attest. What it did, though, was bring the Chemical Brothers' seismic 1997 career highlight Dig Your Own Hole into otherwise unsuspecting sixth-form common rooms nationwide, whereupon it preceded to gently propel otherwise died-in-the-wool guitar-fanciers towards beats, synths, amyl and acid. It did so with fucking deafening beats, screeching synth lines, clarinets, trumpets - you name it. It's a bonkers record, and Noel's specific involvement with it made a 'cleverer' more textural kind of instrumental house music, acceptable. As trojan horses go, it must be one of the loudest ever constructed.
That must have taken all of 20 minutes, then.
Kasabian's very existence aside, there are no real downsides to this turn of events. Personally speaking, it led me directly or otherwise to seek out Neu!, Can, drum'n'bass, Aphrodite, Renegade Snares, Orbital, the Orb and many other acts in that space that I would normally have avoided while ripping the piss out of, as they didn't know what a Les Paul was for. This interest in dance music comes and goes to this day: while I'm ostensibly 'into' more rock'n'roll than anything else, I'm endlessly drawn back to dance music (and jazz, actually) like it's some vast, scarcely mapped continent that needs further examination. Recently a couple of artists - one new, and one, well, new to me - have emerged that have further piqued my interest. It strikes me that living in London I've been exposed to, and taken a greater interest in, places like the Boiler Room, home to some of the most innovative dance music producers and DJs around - or so I'm told. I'm no expert on this, so forgive, yo.
Now then. I like to think of myself as a person who won't necessarily dismiss music on grounds of genre, but I also count myself as a person who can dismiss a great deal of Nineties chart music precisely in this way, because I was there, and let's face it, it was bollocks. Culturally, musically, in terms of its legacy, it was utter rubbish. Unlike some fads (flares, kipper ties etc) which are seen as dreadfully a la mode at the time, only to be sniffily derided with the benefit of hindsight, mid-to-late-Nineties chart music, with its wall-to-wall manufacture of bobbins boy bands and cheap 'untz-untz' house fit only for the bovine super-club arenas that blighted the cultural landscape at the time, was shit then, and it's shit now.
Between 1992 and '95, something bloody horrible started happening on the radio - a music none of us in the provinces understood washed over us, like a deafening blanket of nothing in particular, its verses, modulation, form, interest all stripped away, leaving a beat and a bunch of synths that just went on and on and on, until someone reached, at last, for a song with words in it. It was horrible unless you were on strong drugs. We weren't on strong drugs.
It was a dark time to be a rocker, I can tell you. This obvious crock of shit - If There Ain't No Love (Then It Ain't No Use) by Sub Sub - later to bafflingly re-emerge as the bearded and bucolic Doves - was on the radio eighty times a day, it seemed.
Give me fucking strength.
Then along came Block Rockin' Beats, with its - gasp - melody and - crivens - bassline probably played on an actual bass! The indie nation looked up from its collective copy of Vox for a second, snorted derisively (which we did a lot at the time) and carried on waiting for Dog Man Star to come out. The Chemical Brothers, who had goosed the public in late '94 with Leave Home and Chemical Beats,were coming back. Their joker, of course, was only just around the corner. This, for those of you who don't have it permanently seared onto your eardrums, is the noisy bastard in all its screeching glory:
I know how that feather felt.
Lore has it that the vocal Noel laid down for Setting Sun, the single that propelled the Chemical Brothers to number one and started all of this in my house at least, was recorded while a cab waited outside with its meter running. This alone makes it unimpeachably great, and is another reason to love Noel and his erstwhile band. I like to file this one alongside 'Supersonic was written and recorded in six hours', and just down from 'Wonderwall's vocal is take one', and not at all far from the fact that Talk Tonight, Headshrinker and Acquiesce were all b-sides of the same single.
As it happens, Noel's contribution to Setting Sun is pretty perfunctory, as the above story might attest. What it did, though, was bring the Chemical Brothers' seismic 1997 career highlight Dig Your Own Hole into otherwise unsuspecting sixth-form common rooms nationwide, whereupon it preceded to gently propel otherwise died-in-the-wool guitar-fanciers towards beats, synths, amyl and acid. It did so with fucking deafening beats, screeching synth lines, clarinets, trumpets - you name it. It's a bonkers record, and Noel's specific involvement with it made a 'cleverer' more textural kind of instrumental house music, acceptable. As trojan horses go, it must be one of the loudest ever constructed.
That must have taken all of 20 minutes, then.
Kasabian's very existence aside, there are no real downsides to this turn of events. Personally speaking, it led me directly or otherwise to seek out Neu!, Can, drum'n'bass, Aphrodite, Renegade Snares, Orbital, the Orb and many other acts in that space that I would normally have avoided while ripping the piss out of, as they didn't know what a Les Paul was for. This interest in dance music comes and goes to this day: while I'm ostensibly 'into' more rock'n'roll than anything else, I'm endlessly drawn back to dance music (and jazz, actually) like it's some vast, scarcely mapped continent that needs further examination. Recently a couple of artists - one new, and one, well, new to me - have emerged that have further piqued my interest. It strikes me that living in London I've been exposed to, and taken a greater interest in, places like the Boiler Room, home to some of the most innovative dance music producers and DJs around - or so I'm told. I'm no expert on this, so forgive, yo.
Monday, 20 January 2014
Cassie was no joke
Cassie was no joke. Flipping channels, hopping bus to bus, train to tube, pushed and pulled, spat up at TCR, queued down into Maccy D’s, between seats and standing, hovered at the entrance, neon pulsing, skullcandy rattles Drake. Cassie was no joke. Mal bounced up, kiss kiss, how are you? Yeah not bad, got the tickets? Scoh, fucko.
Friday, 17 January 2014
Is Formula 1 Buggered?
Bernie Ecclestone, as reported in today’s Grauniad, might have done some naughty things in relation to the sale of F1 to somebody or other a few years ago. Obviously he isn’t confirmed as such, so there’ll be no allegations of wrongdoing in these august pages. But to the untrained observer, the man’s business dealings do look a little opaque at times, don’t they? Not that I’m really interested in the byzantine machinations at the top of the F1 management structure. No, I’m altogether more bothered about the proposed changes to F1’s core ‘product’ – its racing.
In recent years, a short-arsed German bloke who I’ll admit to having quite a bit of time for, principally because he loves Oasis, has eviscerated the competition in a car whose reliability and tarmac-curdling power has at times beggared belief. Time after time, Sebastian Vettel has wrung the absolute nuts off the snorting thoroughbred that is the RB9. The drive to victory in the USA. The absurd, lap-after-lap-after-bloody-lap consistency at Silverstone. The comeback in Brazil. The pass from miles back, around the outside of a bemused, struggling Hamilton, under Singapore’s lights. It just went on and on. Both car and driver won races in the most challenging conditions, and looked almost chipper at the end. More than once, Vettel reminded me of an eight-year-old lad emerging, wild of hair and broad of grin, after his first go in a dodgem. Going that fast, that often wasn’t just easy – it was fun.
And so the poles, the points, the wins and the accolades piled up, and up, and up. As the season progressed, Vettel’s lead began to take on embarrassing proportions, while somehow avoiding to do the incredible talent and technology struggling in his wake a disservice. He was better. His car was better. His car didn’t break. Ergo, he won, and won handsomely. But the people, they wanted more. They wanted competition: wheel-to-wheel, Mansell-vs-Senna-down-to-Ascari madness... and they weren't getting it.
Speaking of Mansell, Our Nige dominated the 1992 season, winning the first six in a 16-race season by margins. In doing so, he made Senna and Prost look like chancers, and McLaren and Benetton appeared positively backward. The backlash experienced by Vettel as his dominance increased last year bred envy, which might have something to do with his single-minded, arguably slightly cold public persona. There are several drivers in the paddock I could happily go for a pint with (viz: Webber, Alonso, and if I had a week off to recover afterwards, Raikonnen) but Vettel? Maybe not. I’m sure he’s a nice guy, and clearly knows his Supersonic from his Shakermaker, if you know what I mean, but he might just be a bit, well, German for some people.
I fully expect this situation to continue into 2014. Vettel’s dominance is in many ways more ominous than that of Schumacher – who crashed into those he couldn’t catch, and was really run ragged by Mika Hakkinen alone during his six years as the sport’s apex predator. Vettel is younger, and is consistently thrashing a stronger field than Schumacher did. Schumi reigned during a period when brute grunt – sheer horses in harness – won races; when the number of torques spat out on the grid often dictated the number of points awarded at the end. Nowadays, the crazy-haired geniuses in Oxfordshire wind-tunnels decide things – aero performance is key. KERS, DRS and all that are mere distractions, adding a faint sense of unreality and more than a whiff of videogame power-up logic to the racing. As a spectacle, it’s got brighter, but duller.
F1’s sharks believe that the technology bleeping away under all that carbon fibre must move forward, or no-one will watch their global superbrand’s travelling circus. With Little Seb winning at a canter every weekend, F1’s very own PT Barnum, Bernie Ecclestone, clearly had to convene the Powers That Be and decide to do about all of this tiresome predictability. After what one assumes would be considerable deliberation, the latest in a sequence of technological restrictions and rule changes was announced. Fanfare if you please – it’s time for Uncle Bernie’s Big Shake-Up.
As Patrick Head would probably put it, things done changed all over this biatch, basically. The engines in 2013’s cars were 2.4l, 760bhp beasts. 2014’s are 1.6s – that’s a mid-range Polo to you and me. Disturbingly, they’ll still kick out 600bhp, but as they’re still naturally aspirated, they’re set to whine like the world’s largest motorcycle display team composed entirely of wasps. They will probably reach peak revs at 20-22,000, with most ‘perfect’ changes happening at 18,000. 2013’s peaked at 19,000. Roughly translated, that means ‘Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeoooowwww!’ All the time.
There’s also a new Energy Return System to replace DRS, which produced an extra 60bhp for six seconds per lap in 2013, the new ERS will generate 180bhp for THIRTY THREE (possibly trouser-soiling) seconds per lap.
All the cars must have a faintly ridiculous eight forward gears instead of seven, for every race. The teams must also decide what their gear ratios are before the start of the season and then stick to them. This is designed to even up the differences in acceleration and top speed between the fastest and slowest cars on the grid, and kind of makes sense.
The big one: in 2013, fuel use was unlimited, with cars typically glugging down 160kg per car per race. In 2014, the cars will be limited to just 100kg per race, a reduction of 40%-ish. Obviously the fuel is one of the heaviest parts of the car, and combined with the 20% reduction in weight by dint of the smaller engine, these things are going to start races light, and only get lighter. This might be why the larger drivers have started complaining that they may soon be too heavy to drive the things.
Mark Webber (who is at my estimate 6’4, and built like a boxer) quit because of the fuel and weight restrictions. They will doubtless lead to teams telling drivers who could potentially challenge for a podium or the lead to back off, for fear of not finishing at all. As Webber said on Top Gear the other day: “What’s the point of driving a super-lightweight car with a massive turbo on it at 70% for the last 20 laps of the race? Not for me, mate.”
The FIA’s prediction is the cars will be 3 seconds a lap slower, but much closer together. Time will tell...
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