Tue
28-Dec-2004

christmas comforts

I'm back at my weblog, after a long absence, to report on our adventures over the holiday season. Francis is over from Zimbabwe now for a two-year working holiday, and me and Alex took him down to the new house in Devon for Christmas. The new house is lovely - well designed and comfortable. There are two main rooms, both well heated and a pleasing shape, and since it is a bungalow, the rest of the house is on the same floor! This is such an innovation, and we've all got used to being free from the tyranny of stairs very rapidly. The alpacas are now all around the house, instead of being at a separate farm, and there is an office outbuilding where Rachel and Chas can walk up to work every morning. The farm cat that lives in one of the barns had five cute little kittens just before Christmas, all nestled between two bales of straw.

We ate a lot, the usual roast meat extravaganza where Rachel prepared goose on Christmas Eve, a turkey on Christmas Day and a ham on Boxing Day. We enjoyed being comfortable in the new house, watching lots of films - including the entire extended Lord of the Rings trilogy - and quaffing lots of booze. Matt came to visit from Boxing Day onwards. On Monday we had our scary neighbours round for tea - the Old Couple from down the road and the Goat Man and his Goat Wife, who make lovely goat's cheese next door and look rather like kindly trolls.

Wed
10-Nov-2004

the exorcist

Matt and I went to see the recut version of the Exorcist at the NFT this evening. It was fantastic, the Exorcist in all its marvellous theological horror, but with a few new scenes and a much less abrupt ending, reinstating several scenes that the producer and writer, Blatty, wanted in the original. There's an amazing 'spider walking' scene where the girl runs down the stairs on her back like some kind of horrific arachnid, and a comforting and satisfying ending.

the dangers of cycling along the canal

On the way back home today, I had a narrow brush with getting very wet indeed. I was setting off cycling along the canal from work by Caledonian Road and I saw a group of kids up ahead along the towpath. It was getting very dark at that point and I realised that they were loitering with a little too much intent. I braced myself for them possibly shouting at me as I cycled by to scare me off my bike, which kids have done before. As I drew alongside, one of them stepped out besides me, reached forwards and deliberately and powerfully shoved me off my bike into the canal. I was shocked by the forcefulness, even though I had been expecting something. I tumbled off the bike, struggling to keep it on the towpath, scraping along the side and off the edge. I just about managed to grab the edge of the bank and fuelled by a massive adrenaline rush haul myself back on to the towpath, swinging my legs away from the water to dry land. As I clambered up, the children had fled, which was probably lucky for them, and I turned around expecting my bike to have vanished below the waters. But there it was, the pedal have caught on the edge, suspended for a few seconds with enough time for me to pluck it back from oblivion. All in all, I was very pleased with myself at that point - I had just a couple of grazes and my bike was unharmed, just a little wet.

ceri's stag do

I joined Jon and Charles on Friday evening and we headed down to Southampton for the beginning stages of Ceri's stag weekend. We met lots of his Southampton friends and his brothers, admired his pert attempt at cross dressing, and roamed through a number of pubs and ended up eating a drunken curry before passing out.

I had to get up quite early to go back to London for a DSA conference, but Charles remained in Southampton and they all embarked on a massive D-Day landings style paintballing adventure.

Sun
07-Nov-2004

managing britannia

I recently finished an excellent book called Managing Britannia, by Robert Protherough and John Pick. It's about the way that the idea of management has come to take over swathes of British life, bringing its own ethos, rules and vocabulary, imposing them on organisations which worked well beforehand, and wrecking them.

The book is quite polemical, but it mainly deals with areas where the effects of modern management has been particularly corrosive. The chapters where idiocy is most plain are those on schools and universities, and the NHS. In education, it is plain that the assault on the professional independence of teachers and the proliferation of central targets and tests and reforms has had appalling consequences. The chapters that criticise government attempts to understand the arts as an 'industry' are entertaining (particular disdain is piled upon Chris Smith in his time as Culture Secretary) but not always convincing. The authors are inclined to see the creation of DCMS and its forebears as a Stalinist project.

I like the way that they book points out how all this began in earnest under Thatcher in the 1980s. Despite their neoliberal rhetoric about 'little government' it was the Tories who oversaw the initial proliferation of central government management over every sphere of human life and endeavour. Blair and the control freaks of New Labour emerge as the natural heirs of Thatcherite Conservativism in their relentless multiplication of management bureaucracies and their ambitious attempts to bring all of British life under the tedious reductionism of evidence-based policy.

Thu
28-Oct-2004

two days in devon

Just got back from a couple of days in Devon, where I was adopting Josh's old computer as he upgrades to some kind of multi-gigahertzed, ninja graphics card, pulsating beast of a PC, picking sloe berries to make sloe gin, and tidying out mine and Alex's bedroom in advance of the next house move. The weather was lovely and sunny the first day, then violently windy and rainy on the second. Everything had a lovely crisp cold autumn feel to it. Rachel fed us with a gorgeous meal of watercress soup, then swordfish and roasted carrots, and then raspberry crumble for pudding on Tuesday night. It was all very homely.

Meanwhile, Matt met Anna and Glyn on Tuesday evening and they made a very impressive looking pumpkin. Check it out!

Mon
11-Oct-2004

battle royale II: requiem

Alex, Jim and Kal came round to the flat last night and we watched the glorious Battle Royale II: Requiem. The film follows on from the violent high-octane Lord of the Flies madness of Battle Royale and attempts to expand its vision, resulting in a looser, less dramatically cogent affair, but one that brings in some powerful political themes and generally ups the ante.

It opens with a very powerful aerial shot over Tokyo, with office buildings drenched in the red light of the setting sun dominating the skyline. Then there is a shudder as an explosion rips through a pair of towers, and the two skyscrapers slowly collapse into rubble. This is the first of a number of obvious real world allusions to the post-September 11th world order that characterise this film. Shuya Nanahara, survivor of the first film, is now a wanted terrorist and his group Wild Seven have declared war against all adults. In this film, the government forces a class of middle school dropouts to hunt down and kill Wild Seven who are holed up on an island. This seems to be in order to punish the class for its lack of respect for its elders, and to punish Wild Seven, who will be killing their own kind. The class have to execute a bloody Saving Private Ryan style beach landing where they are mown down by Wild Seven, until some of them break through into their hideout and come face to face with Nanahara. Nanahara then recounts a tale of how he journeyed into central Asia and the film cuts to TV news video footage of young Afghan children playing in bombed out tanks and buildings and smiling amid the rubble. THe implications of these Afghan scenes aren't really spelled out, but parallels are drawn between Wild Seven and al-Qaeda and the idea seems to be that wars waged by adults inevitably implicate children who have common cause against them.

America seems to be the enemy that ultimately casts its shadow across the film, with Japan being presented as just one of many countries under the umbrella of an anonymous fascist Superstate. There are two excellent scenes where a checklist of victims of US military policy since WWII is reeled out, from Afghanistan, though Nicaragua and Iraq, to Somalia. These themes are gripping and shocking and remind you of how much things have changed in the last couple of years with the new hysterical global consensus around 'terrorism', though none of the themes are pursued or developed and all ends in a hail of missiles.

Sun
03-Oct-2004

you are g8, we are 6 billion

Have just finished Jonathan Neale's book You Are G8, We Are 6 Billion, an inspiring account of the G8 Genoa protests of 2001. It is very engaging and readable and has chapters summarising the issues at stake as well as chapters charting the protests as they emerged over the weekend of the G8. The chapter on 'Oil, dictatorship and war' is a particularly cogent explanation of the roots of the conflict in the Middle East and the role of oil and US geostrategic ambitions in shaping the world economy.

Thu
30-Sep-2004

recorder woman!

Matt took me on a surprise afternoon anniversary-related excursion this afternoon. We had a pint in a lovely pub on Craven Passage by Heaven nightclub, The Ship and Shovell, and then walked over the bridge to the Royal Festival Hall.

I had no idea what we were going to see, even as we sat down in nice front row seats. Then, everyone was clapping, and out of the door on the stage came a woman comically clutching a handful of recorders in each hand. For a moment I forgot her name so I just cried, "oh, the recorder woman!" It was Michala Petri and her husband Lars Hannibal, whom we saw at the Leicester Early Music Festival with Russ and Lesley! They were magnificent as ever, and trilled and strummed away while we all bathed in Baroque elegance.

Wed
29-Sep-2004

1920s fallout

Andy has worked his evil ways on a photo from the 1920s party...

Tue
28-Sep-2004

first amendment

Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping have been getting people to assemble every week in New York to recite the first amendment of the US Bill of Rights that guarantees the right of free speech and peaceable assembly. I've been reading updates on it every week, and the sentence is really growing on me. Though its phrasing and diction seem archaic at first, its power is evident when it enters everyday life in this fashion. These first amendment mobilisations have found it particularly potent against the heavy handed post-9/11 police forces, who have found it hard to resist the sentence's very real talismanic and legislative power as they try to move the protesters on.

Congress shall make no law, respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press, or the right of the people to peaceably assembly, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Sun
26-Sep-2004

figs

Images

I got some figs from Green Lanes on Friday and we ate some today in a savoury dish, with mozzarella and basil and a lemon and olive oil dressing. The combination works so well, with the sweet figs backed up by the cheese and cross cut by the basil and lemon. I hadn't had figs in a savoury context before.

Sat
25-Sep-2004

charpentier

Matt and I went down to St John's Church in Brighton for a concert being held as part of the Brighton Early Music Festival 2004. It's a lovely little church, over in Hove. The musicians played recorder, oboe, cello, violin, viola and harpsichord. There was also a very high pitch French counter-tenor. They performed pieces by Charpentier, a French baroque composer who died exactly 300 years ago, interspersed with stories about his life read out in heavily French accented English. We had a spliff in the break and were then collared by a nice old woman who is one of the organisers of the festival and was very excited by the presence of 'young people' and wondered how we'd heard of the performance. We explained we'd picked up a leaflet at a Michala Petri performance in the Leicester Early Music Festival. She was very impressed that we'd come down from London. It is true that there was only one other person under the age of forty at the concert.

The music was very enjoyable. Simple and quiet, but with enjoyably complex ornamentation and frills in the baroque fashion.

Sun
19-Sep-2004

twenty-seventh birthday

Well, I'm twenty-seven today, and it's a very pleasant sunny Sunday for it really. I'm off to the Dove in Hackney in an hour or two to drink beer all afternoon, but before then I'm sat here listening to Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of War of the Worlds, which Wesley has given me for my birthday. It's SO good! A crazy, camp, seventies, prog-rock adaptation of War of the Worlds. It's so theatrical and over the top, but takes itself very seriously, thus rendering it fabulous. The dramatic narration and songs meld together charmingly with all kinds of cool, inventive sonic effects.

It raised itself to full height, flourished the funnel high in the air, and the ghostly terrible heat ray struck the town. As it struck, all five fighting machines exulted, emitting deafening howls which roared like thunder: Ooooooolaaaah! Ooooooolaaaah! Ooooooolaaaah! Ooooooolaaaah! Ooooooolaaaah! Ooooooolaaaah! Ooooooolaaaah!

Fri
10-Sep-2004

dissertation

I'm at home trying to write my evil dissertation. Oh the slowness of academic writing!

Minor setback early this morning. I was doing quick bit of hoovering as we were getting up in order to reduce the levels of cat hair blowing around the flat, and Mouse, hating the hoover, tried to run away into the bedroom, met Matt in the corridor, ran back into the kitchen and tried to leap over the plant box with all our herbs in to leap up on top of the cupboard. She got a grip on the edge of the box and tipped it off the ledge, collapsing underneath the box as soil and plants scattered all over the floor across the room.

I saw it all happening in classic slow motion and roared "CAT!" and she ran to the bathroom and whimpered pathetically while Matt and I cleaned up the soil.

My poor herbs! Will they recover? Poor Mouse, as well. I just went over to see her and apologised for shouting.

Better get back to the dissertation...

Sun
05-Sep-2004

angel canal festival 2004

On Sunday we took Anders to Angel Canal Festival, meeting up with Abbie, Jim and his brother Ben, Kate, Kal, Michal and Ema while we were there. The hot weather continued unabated and we wandered about dozily looking at the stalls and marvelling at the English Village atmosphere. I chatted to someone from the North London Beekeepers, looked at various birds of prey from a local wildlife sanctuary and bought some lemon mint and southernwood for the herb pot. We stood outside the pub by Danbury Street and Vincent Terrace and drank beer and occasionly dancing merrily while a small band of pearly kings played rousing English folk tunes.

Following this, I was co-opted by a band of morris dancers and forced to join in with one of their songs, waving a white hankerchief in the air and skipping ineptly. Surprisingly enjoyable. I think I might become a morris dancer (one day!). Matt took this photo with his phone:

Sat
04-Sep-2004

hot primrose hill

Anders came to visit from Sweden this weekend, and it has been blazing with Indian summer heat. We spent today sat on Primrose Hill with drinks, blanket and the little chairs I got from the Glade Festival, being roasted by the sunshine. Anders was taking lots of marvellous black and white pictures that make everything look elegant and strangely unfamiliar.

Sat
28-Aug-2004

1920s party

Images

Lots of people came down to Devon for a 1920s party. Every single person made the effort to dress up and the effect was really cool, as if we'd all been transported to a land of heady glamour, bubbles and much use of the word 'darling' ... simply fabulous!

The next day, the Poles and Wesley stayed a little longer and we all went to look for fossils on Charmouth beach.

Tue
24-Aug-2004

spiderman 2

Went with Alex, Abbie and Jim to see Spiderman 2 last night. I enjoyed this one more than the first, though I think both are excellent. Having Sam Raimi directing makes for a much more inventive, funny, action-packed feel to the film. There's even a bit with a chainsaw! There's also a gloriously sentimental moment when Spiderman saves an entire subway train from going off the rails, but exhausts himself in the process and loses his mask. The commuters on the train then carry him gently inside and lay him down, and two little kids bring him his mask and say, "don't worry we won't tell". I nearly burst out crying, but then, I'm probably a bit pathetic like that.

route 73 bus musings

On the way back from Blackboys this morning, we arrived at Victoria Station to find the underground closed, so we took a Number 73 bus across town to Kings Cross. An engaging bus conductor kept us entertained with banter and interesting chatter all the way. It was very funny, but very sad, as he's being laid off in a couple of weeks along with all the old Route Masters. It's such a shame; I'm going to miss being able to jump on and off the bus and generally having some control over my own actions. It seems that apart from disabled access, the Route Master is superior in every way that matters to all the other kinds of bus in London. The conductor system is cool, they are a design classic and they make you proud to be a Londoner.

d&d weekend in blackboys

Josh, Al and I went to Blackboys for a D&D weekend with Adam and Henry! It was a fabulous act of wanton escapism. The heroes visited the Plain of Ida, by Tempus' House of the Valient, on the outer plane of Ysgard, plummeting off the earth bergs of the top layer down to the volcanoes of Muspelheim and then underground to the third layer, Nidavellir, where they found their way through a portal to the Plane of Shadow back to Faerun. They emerged near Myth Drannor and then had fun defeating the plans of the Cult of the Dragon and their nefarious attempts to corrupt the city's ancient mythal.

It was a full house, what with Kayla's mother visiting, so the five of us played down in the garage. This made it even more exciting, since we were able to actively live a Weezer song over the weekend:

I've got my Dungeon Master's Guide,
I've got a 12-sided die,
I've got Kitty Pryde,
and Nightcrawler too,
waiting there for me,
Yes I do, I do!

In the garage I feel safe!
No one cares about my ways.
In the garage,
Where I belong,
No one hears me sing this song.
In the garage...

Tue
17-Aug-2004

rome

Images

Matt and I took Josh on a fantastic long weekend to Rome. Josh had a school project to write looking at the meanings of first and second century Roman architecture and was there to take lots of pictures. I was there for archaeology, espresso and ice cream.

While Josh had seen the city before, Matt and I had not, and we were pretty bowled over by this great city. The sheer density of notable architecture and archaeology is astounding; at every turn the ghost of Renaissance and Ancient Rome rises up before you like a startling apparition. And yet the city is so alive, even in the hot quiet month of August when we visited there was a dirty, bustling noisiness on the roads, a hectic vitality to everything.

We did a lot of sightseeing and walking in three days. We spent half a day tramping up and down the forum in the blazing sun, and Josh and I went up on the Palatine Hill as well. We stumbled upon the spectacular eighteenth century Trevi Fountain lit up at night, admired the outside of the Colosseum, and were struck dumb by the perfect calm hemispherical interior of the Pantheon. We drank Jamaica Blue Mountain espressos from the excellent Tazza d'Oro Caffè, ate soul quenching fruity gelati and drank beer lightly but enthusiastically. We stayed in a lovely hotel – Hotel Columbia on Via del Viminale –which had a roof balcony on which to take our breakfast in the bright early morning sunshine. We went on a lot of late evening walks - it was always hot enough to stroll in shorts and t-shirt, even in the early hours of the morning. We met up with Matt's friend Leonardo, who gave us an Italian perspective on things.

A particular highlight for me was when Josh and I wandered down to the narrow old streets around the Campo dei Fiori and the Ghetto, by the Tiber River. We stumbled on the Theatre and Porticus of Pompey the Great and found our way across the river to Tiber Island where stalls and events around the edges of the island were in full swing to celebrate a national holiday. We went back to the hotel to get Matt and Leonardo, who had been at a beach, and we all spent an hour or so at this very pleasant outdoor club at the head of the island.

Thu
12-Aug-2004

the white swan

After Spiderman 2 I headed over to Wesley's flat by Limehouse to join him and Matt for a night at the White Swan, a male-only gay pub in that area. Matt and I went there for a Friday night a couple of years ago and it was very loud and much like a club. On Wednesday nights though, it's their famous amateur strip night! It was compered by a very funny tall thin drag queen in leopard skin, who began with a silly song and then went round the room searching for volunteers and persuading them to get up and strip. She was very good indeed. You have to strip right down and get your cock out. All very amusing good old-fashioned gay fun. I got far too pissed though, and have had an annoying hangover during much of today.

Tue
10-Aug-2004

mid devon show

Came down to the Mid Devon Show again this year! Matt and Alex came too. This year, it was bright and sunny, unlike last year where we all nearly drowned in mud. Chas was hosting an alpaca show and so was very busy organising that. We met our new neighbour in Devon there, who had a stall. He makes this rather fine goats cheese, and is completely mad. Weird sticking out teeth, thin hair, and a stooped over scary smiley manner. Bit like Gollum, but without the preciousssss. Very nice though. We brought back lots of goats cheese.

glade 2004

Alex, Dan M and I went to Glade Festival at the weekend. It was a very sunny, fresh and open air extravaganza! On the first night, we took acid and wandered around the place being scared of the enormous inflatable objects that loomed above us, particularly this star ...

... which we felt was pulsing and alive and ready to leap off its moorings and run us down at any time. As it grew dark, we also became aware near the tent of what seemed to be a giant sparkling throbbing jelly fish floating up in the sky. We walked over to investigate and realised it was a tree where the organisers had cunningly set up a rotating array of coloured lights that shone through the leaves and branches creating, under the influence of LSD, an incredibly intense effect. I stood transfixed for about twenty minutes, convinced that the spinning light nexus at the centre of the tree was a portal through which I could see the indistinct form of what looked like a bearded aged tree god. Very cool.

Next day, we roamed around and danced some more. Alex took more acid. I took loads of speed. Dan, I think, stuck to the MDMA. It was fun dancing in the daylight, and there was a cool dust cloud which was formed when Talamasca took to the outdoor stage. The evening saw us listening to some crazy Aphex Twin. Late evening and morning, we found Jake, he of Oxford drug dealing mad festival loving fame, and wound down with him as Sunday morning dawned across the fields.

Tue
03-Aug-2004

stockholm

Images

Matt and I took a long weekend in Stockholm visiting his friends through KPMG, Linda and Anders. We flew out on Wednesday and returned the following Monday. Stockholm is a really interesting city. It's incredibly clean and impeccably well run. You can go swimming or fishing in the very heart of the city, the public transport all works perfectly, and the streets are spacious and uncrowded. Most of the city is very pleasing to the eye, there is just one block of streets that was demolished in the 1960s on the machine age urgings of Le Corbusier when he visited Stockholm and replaced with a load of concrete which now looks like Croydon town centre. It is rather too quiet and peaceful, lacking the dirty crowded buzz and soul of London, but you can see that it is a model of city planning by any standards.

Linda's mother has a summer house out on the archipelago around Stockholm and we went out there for one day and night. This was a lovely old wooden house that looked like a Swiss alpine cottage, on a little island which you had to take a boat to. Linda and Anders took us, and also another couple they knew, Alexander and Karolina. Karolina is Polish and Alexander is half Polish, half Swedish.

We met various members of Linda's family and ate gravadlax and played on the enormous trampoline they happened to have by the house. We also went swimming in the Baltic Sea around the island. It was very warm and brackish, with very little salinity. It tasted almost sweet in fact, and made swimming a lot more fun than in the North Sea. We all drank Pimms, cava and wine, had a lovely dinner, and then later when it got dark, we sat with Karolina, Alexander, Linda and Anders out on the rocks by the lapping water and got rather stoned on a spliff. In my stoned state I had one of those moments of clarity where I felt very keenly the similarities between us all and how profoundly easy cross-cultural communication can sometimes be. Differences arising out of our different countries, governments, languages and cultures all suddenly seemed very trivial compared to a shared appreciation of listening to the sea washing up against the rock below us as we sat in the darkness.

The next day, Friday, we took the ferry back into Stockholm and that evening Linda and Anders had a party at their flat, followed by a bout of clubbing somewhere in town. The club was like the haunt of a Scandinavian James Bond, with cool leather sofas and 1970s wooden screens and a laid back groovy atmosphere. It was mostly sitting and talking space, only a little bit of the club was actually given over to dancing.

On Saturday, we took ourselves to town to watch the Pride parade, which was happening in Stockholm that weekend. This was big and fun, though a bit splintered into floats representing various interests, rather than being more like a united carnival in the manner of Brighton Pride. There was a float for the bears, and one an S&M float, on which people dressed as monks waved spiky crosses and leather clad women whipped hairy men's backs. Unlike all the other floats, the S&M one looked really miserable and seemed to take their dark image quite seriously. After the parade we went to the rather expensive park party that followed, and ran around chatting to lots of random people, drinking beer and listening to various bands on the stage. We enjoyed one band called Pay TV, who were a runner up in the Swedish Eurovision entries. They are a bit like Ex-Girl, robotic and ironic with regular guitars, crazy costumes, and songs like Trendy Discotheque: "We wear very very very very trendy shoes..."

On Sunday, we wandered around town shopping, visited the Modern Art Museum, and then went to Alexander and Karolina's flat in the suburbs to eat some lovely pizza they homemade that evening. They fed us some Zubrowka vodka mixed with apple juice before we headed back over to Linda and Anders' flat for our last night.

On Monday, we wandered around town some more, bought some clothes and got ourselves some Swedish alcohol, punsch, which they drink warm with pea soup apparently. Should be interesting to try.

Fri
23-Jul-2004

dinner intensity

Well, we've had lots of people round to our flat to dinner this week. Old housemates on Monday, where Michal regaled us with tales of his recent near-death experience on ketamine and subsequent belief in the existence of the soul, which I'm very envious of. Then, Verity and Rob round on Wednesday for excitable lemon risotto and chicken and talk of the uneven deposition of fat across the body in times of weight increase. Thursday night, we had Ed and Aaron round for chicken and fried battered courgettes. Matt's marvellous gazpacho soup and upside down blueberry cake topped and tailed the meal.

Thu
15-Jul-2004

retro alco alto glasto aftermath

The ripples and eddies of retro alco alto glasto continue to stir our quiet computer-bound lives as Alex kicked off a poetry response to Abbie. He did however, nick a lot of this from some poor woman who really likes Hay of Wye, but I'm sure she won't mind.

Sheltered in a valley with hills that tower round,
a little town called Hay-on-Wye, its beauty is renowned.
The partly ruined castle on elevated ground,
Richard Booth is the owner, he's known the world around.

With Richard, Morelli and others, the town is full of books,
in every hole and corner, there's books and still more books.
In May, the "Literary Festival " of nationwide acclaim,
with writers, orators and linguists, mostly from the hall of fame.

They read their books and poetry for interested folks to hear,
the pianists and instrumentalists are a joy to the ear,
Classical, country and western, jazz, rhythm and blues,
Scientists, Psychiatrists, Broadcasters reading the news.

Orchards thick with fruit trees, fields of waving corn,
Black Mountains in the distance, majestic, yet forlorn.
With Hay's historical places and beautiful scenery round,
Go to Tom B's cottage and get wasted.

In Dorset, as in Hay,
We capped a rainy day
With revelry and drugs,
Then several dozen mugs
Of tea, in the morning,
Reflecting on the dawning
Of another day of Summer.

The gauntlet cast down
By the Allens and Elliot,
With a giggle and a frown,
Come, Muse, and embellish it.

******

Alas, with no 'shrooms, or MDMA,
But with tender memories, some vibrant, some shady,
How may I paint the glory that was Hay?
The apple award to which choicest lady?

Lads were there too, just as bonny and sweet,
Two noble brothers, and a master of ales,
And plenty of bohemians whom I just failed to meet,
So addled were my wits, and tortuous my travails.

Chemical pleasure ferments in the brain,
But garnered with that was the truth of the heart,
A talk in the loft, twelve drinks on the train,
As the pill starts to weaken, a friendship may start.

Another weekend, I had by that Wye,
With revellers less fucked, but possibly less sober,
Of years more advanced, but of spirits as high,
Though none there could contrive a Bell-like hangover.

O zealots of pleasure, Abbie, Mary, Kate,
O priests of indulgence, Al, Tom and Dan,
Under which stars may we such abandon recreate?
Step up, a master of ceremonies, and give us a plan.

But now this wan scribe, his powers all are lost,
Must be wedded to markets and unit elasticity,
To optimisation, and benefit, and cost,
Too far from the West, mourning lost felicity.

*****

My story now done,
You six blushing and hail,
Summon a new one,
Bright, sweet, Abigail?

retro alco alto glasto

Images

A motley crew descended upon the countryside near Hay on Wye last weekend for the almighty celebrations known to many as 'Alto Glasto'. Kate, Abbie, Mary and John S took a train down on Friday night, Rosie and Steve drove there in a car, while Dan, Alex and myself took a train there early on Saturday morning. Fearful that we might wuss out in the bleak light of a soul-chilling early morning, Abbie wrote us a charming poem to get us up and moving:

Ode to the Saturday Trippers

Twas a rainy day in 2004
when Rosie, Mary, Abbie and more
decided that the time was nigh
to venture to Hay on Wye

With Dr Wellsely's smile on board
and Mary's wit, and the hoard
of substances that Kate had packed
despite all this, they something lacked

For how much merriment can
one have without a hardcore Buffy fan?
What cheer is there, without a pair
of brothers with perennially re-dyed hair?

None, comes the answer, o'er hills and dales
None, speaks the wind from the depths of Wales
Though we may have Simon, Jezzer and Pippa
there's no Alto Glasto without Saturday trippers.

Tom B's house, site of the party, was marvellous. An amazing isolated little cottage tucked away at the top of a hill overlooking the green hills and vales of Merry Wales. We all started drinking and chatting and then lots of us went out for a bracing afternoon walk. Rosie and Kate invented a game called Falling Backwards Into The Ferns And Hoping We Won't Land In Any Nettles. Steve tried to fly his kite, but the wind was too irregular. He did, however, look pretty cool with the rolled-up kite slung across his shoulder. Legolas would have been proud.

By nightfall, the house was filling up with all kinds of people most of whom gamely began to take all kinds of narcotics, stimulants and hallucinogens. It was a pleasure and joy to behold.

The house was definitely suited to these adventures. There was a comfortable, stone-floor kitchen with a good aga for leaning against, a good-sized living room or two, a long attic with space for everyone to crash out in, a couple of tents in the garden and a pit out the back with a blazing fire that provided a primeval focus all night. The survivors of the night clustered around the fire as the sun came up, mostly us lot along with another quite random guy who Abbie became convinced was called 'Bayo', even though he kept assuring her that he wasn't.

The train back on Sunday was an amusing occasion as Dan, John, Abbie, Mary, Kate, Alex and I restored our bashed in bodies and minds with incredibly expensive alcoholic drinks from the train trolley. We idly played games, chatted and read bits of newspaper. By the time we arrived at Paddington, our section of the carriage was a remarkable rubbish dump of newspapers, magazines, bottles, cans and food packets. The dispersal at Paddington was a sad affair, as we drifted off into the London night like ragged butterflies.

Mon
12-Jul-2004

holiday in kyiv

I have returned after a glorious week in Kyiv, in the Ukraine, visiting the Brothers Smith.

Andy, Jim and I took the plane from Gatwick to Kyiv on Friday morning. Everything went pretty smoothly and we were soon on board our Ukraine International Airlines jet, eating some kind of strange dish of squidgy meatballs and rice followed by squidgy gym mat chocolate foam pudding washed down with a can of beer. Jamie was waiting for us at the airport and after a celebratory arrival beer, we all took a car to Kyiv itself to their flat. Rob and Jamie’s flat is nice – bashed in and spacious with lots of pictures and postcards all over the walls.

The Ukraine looks in certain respects similar to Poland, but much rougher around the edges, much more like a Third World country. Kyiv, which apparently is home to three million people, is a sprawling mix of tower blocks of varying quality, building works and cranes, broad squares, wide boulevards and monumental architecture. The streets are quite rough and dusty, and at this time of year, with bright sunshine most days, they feel like the laid back streets of southern countries, occupied by cheap markets and little kiosks selling cigarettes, beer, drinks and other bits and pieces. There aren’t really any bars or restaurants except for a few catering to those with more western tastes. You can just buy beer in bottles at pretty much any time of day or night from one of these kiosks and then stand around drinking on the street. All of the city’s older tower blocks have centrally controlled water and heating, so that the heating comes on in September and turns off again in March, and the entire city’s hot water has been turned off for two weeks during the time we are here. Apparently, they are cleaning out the system or something. Pretty amazing that they can just turn off an entire city’s hot water like that. The newer blocks of flats have their own boilers and are not subject to the whims of central control, but we are all stuck with cold showers for now.

In the flat, Jamie cooked some food and we all started drinking. Beer is extremely cheap here, at about the equivalent of 30p a bottle. You can also get this slightly sweet but rather nice champagne for not much more than that. After a few hours of drinking and chatting, Jamie and Rob took us out for a night time walk around Kyiv. We strolled past the amazing golden domes and blue and white walls and towers of the cruciform St Sophia Cathedral, and took the funicular railway down the hill from here to the edge of the old town, and then walked to some kind of late night expat bar, where we got more drunk, and Jim, Jamie and Rob spent about an hour explaining to a Ukrainian guy that they were from Wales rather than England, drawing parallels between the Ukraine and Wales and comparing the USSR to Great Britain, which I thought was a little excessive.

On Saturday we got up quite late, and then all headed out to the nearby market to buy lots of food, mainly cheese! The food market was in a big hall like a railway arch, and the room was piled high with attractive mounds of vegetables and fruit. There were also lots of cool looking sausages, large lumps of yellow cheese and all kinds of random products derived from fish. We had a beer while we were there, with some of the local nibbles designed to go with beer: paprika crisps, cheese crisps, these surprisingly tasty ‘salmon’ crisps cut into long flat rectangular pieces and sold in a box, little shredded bits of dried shrimp which are a bit like pork scratching but much more fishy, and these sticks of fibrous cheese which smell like a cow’s foot but taste weirdly nice, kind of smoky and cheesy, you peel off strips of cheese and eat them.

After a delicious dinner, we were taken to Shevchenko Opera House to see La Gioconda by Amilcare Ponchielli, a complex tale of a woman in Venice who loves a man who already loves the wife of the head of the Inquisition and who is lusted after by some scheming Inquisition spy who devises various plots to blacken her mother’s good name. Luckily there was an English translation in the brochure so we were able to work out what on earth was going on, but it was a convoluted plot by any standards. Though the whole thing was four and a half hours long, there were pleasing breaks after each act and these made the opera quite manageable. We drank a bottle of champagne in each break, and admired the lavish gold walls and chandeliers of the opera house. The opera house was glorious to look at. It spanned about six floors and was very tall and thin, so the seats were stacked up over many levels, looking steeply down to the stage rather than being set back We were up in the gods, by the roof, perched by the rail at the front, with a great view that plummeted down to the stage and the pit. The acoustics seemed to be really good, with the sound bellowing up to us. The production had over a hundred people dressed in all manner of fabulous Renaissance costumes prancing around and singing. It was all rather marvellous.

After the performance we went back to the flat to eat and prepare for a psy trance night out on an island in the middle of the Dnipro river which runs through the city. The river that runs through Kyiv is quite vast, with some large islands nestled together in the middle. Various bridges join the main city to the islands, which are mostly forested and are bordered by lovely sandy beaches. We took a car to one of the bridges, then walked over it and through the island forests till a winding track took us to the trance party.

The music was very loud indeed, pounding out of the speakers into a small crowd of dancers, while other people gathered nearby around fires. It was around two or three in the morning when we arrived, so within a few hours of dancing it began to get light. We all took a little acid. It was soon turning into a bright sunny morning as we milled around, went for walks in the wood, wandered over to the river nearby to contemplate its stillness, or carried on dancing. As it got hotter the crowd thinned out to the hardcore dancers and the ground became increasingly dry, our pounding feet throwing up big clouds of dust as we whirled like dervishes in the hot sun. Cheap beer sold from a nearby tent fortified us while the talkative acid led us into enjoyable loud political arguments and realisations of the shared psychic unity of humankind.

By midday, Rob had taken over playing at the decks as the organisers attempted to dismantle them around him, I was still hopping up and down like some kind of psychedelic puppet, Andy and Jamie had decided to go swimming and were attempting to traverse the surprisingly wide river, and Jim was sitting under the trees wondering if it had all gone too far. There followed a long walk back across the island in the burning sun to the bridge, where Jamie made us devour multiple choc ices, before we crossed the bridge and caught a car home. We all passed out there. I had a freezing shower first.

We woke up later that evening and got up to watch the Portugal v Greece world cup game, before passing out again.

On Monday, we wandered through Kyiv to Andriyiviskiy market which has lots of arts and crafts, painted eggs, spiky wooden maces, bad paintings, Manchester United t-shirts and so on. On Tuesday, we all hired two boats and went rowing down on the river, pausing to lie on one of the island beaches and swim, drinking lots of beer and taking acid again. The acid gave me a profound sense of the implacable immensity of the river stretching out around us. I sometimes forget how much better psychedelics are when you spend time outdoors, in natural environments, than when you are boxed inside by walls and ceilings. And how good holidays are when rivers run through them.

We took the boats back around half seven, staggered away from them, and plonked ourselves on some chairs and tables in a clearing with some beer to drink and some roasted sunflower seeds to nibble, talking rubbish till it got dark. When we finally made it home, we carried on talking till it got light, the conversation mainly dwelling on various dirty topics, such as the fresh, ‘amateur’ appeal of Bulgarian porn, whether or not shitting in someone’s mouth could be considered a valid sexual act, and the need for humorous facial expressions in porn actors.

On Wednesday we got up quite late, had a big lunch, took ourselves to the market to buy lots more food, mostly cheese but also these rather fetching dangling lengths of walnut pieces threaded on pieces of string and covered in sweet red jelly, and then wandered round town buying cheap CDs from various music shops and stalls. We popped into an American style happy consumer mall and sampled Ukrainian fast food too. Jamie introduced us to some kind of non-alcoholic fermented bread drink, like coke but utterly disgusting.

On Thursday, we went to the marvellous Lavra Monastery, which began back in the eleventh century when various monks lived in underground caves. As they grew in number, they built a church and then a cathedral, and over the centuries it grew to an enormous complex of glittering golden domes and monastic buildings. It is still inhabited by over fifty monks and is the centre of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. All very impressive and golden. The site includes the Museum of the Microminiature, a slightly absurd but amazing exhibition of works by a Russian artist, Nikolai Siadristy, whose creations are so small you have to look through microscopes to view them. They include a tiny chess set placed on the head of a nail, a flea shod with golden shoes, the world’s smallest book and a tiny ship, the ropes which make up the rigging of this boat being 400 times finer than a human hair.

On Friday we ran around buying things frantically to take back to London and prove that we had been in other realms. I mainly took back cheese and Ukrainian sausage.

It has been a good week and has refreshed me on many levels. Now I just have to adjust to the harsh reality of beer not costing 25p a bottle…

Wed
30-Jun-2004

the origin of capitalism

I have just finished the Origin of Capitalism by the excellent Ellen Meiksins Wood. This is my first step towards trying to articulate a coherent anti-capitalist standpoint. The book is very short, readable and good.

Its starting point is countering the increasing universalisation of capitalist logic by outlining capitalism's historical peculiarity and transitoriness, to defamiliarise much that now seems normal and natural. This certainly doesn't have to be a left-wing or anti-capitalist endeavour, and I read the book only as a refreshing attempt to understand where the current capitalist system has come from and what it really is. A look at its historical specificity rather than a polemic against it. It is particularly good for delineating the boundaries of capitalism, for separating out modernity, urban life, technological advancement, bourgeois revolution and other things that have been bundled up with it, and that help to make the strange case that it has always existed in some form or other and only needed the right conditions or opportunity to be fully realised.

Wood roundly vanquishes the sloppy notion that feudalism as a system was always somehow transitional to capitalism, and that the growth of cities, trade and commerce inevitably lead to its development. She observes that there have been sophisticated technological developments, urban cultures and trading networks both in the European and non-European worlds that did not see the emergence of the specifically capitalist market imperative. Trading networks have long been based on the circulation of goods, rather than on intensifying production in the manner of a market society. Goods are brought cheap in one market, and sold at higher prices in other. In the capitalist market society that first emerged in the rural southeast of sixteenth-century England, there is just one, unified market where profit is derived from the intensification of production, through competition economic improvement rather than trading. Capitalism emerged in this one time and place, out of a unique reconfiguration of land, landowners, agricultural tenants and agricultural labourers in the countryside, turning around the famous Enclosure Acts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The emergence of a proletariat and an urban capitalist class were driven by capitalism, rather than the other way around, though the emergence of a mass proletariat enabled capitalism to expand massively, and it has been expanding and colonising ever since. Its roots are agrarian.

What this means is that capitalism is not about the 'bourgeois' revolution of the Enlightenment and the French philosophes, nor about technological or rational improvement, nor are cities inherently capitalist, nor is 'modernity' necessarily capitalist. Capitalism is a very specific way of organising society, where all aspects of how you live your life are mediated by the market. Capitalism's strength is that it colonises, bringing more and more areas of life into the market system. The turning point for Wood, where society becomes truly capitalist, is when that most basic of commodities, food, is only obtainable through the market system.

I think this may help in my quest to work out where I stand, since so often, opposing capitalism is taken by its knee jerk defenders to mean opposing many other things which are not in any way capitalist and which have predated and will postdate the capitalist system. I'm thinking here of cities, representation (democracy), modernity, technological development, science, rationality, a nice beer, and so on...

bikram yoga

Matt and I got a £10 for ten days special offer introductory ticket at our local Bikram's Yoga College of India centre. Bikram yoga is the latest celebrity-endorsed trendy yoga where you do a set sequence of positions in an absurdly hot room (42 degrees C in fact). Bikram is a rather enjoyable contrast to other forms of yoga, as it is led by a living guru, Bikram Choudhury, who has built a patented and copyrighted empire around it. This is capitalist, go-getting yoga! Choudhury basically sells books and videos, and teaches students in £3000 workshops. These students go on to teach other students and set up franchise yoga studios and Choudhury rakes in the franchise fees. There doesn't seem to me to be anything inherently rotten about this, but it does take you a step away from the contemplative, mystical feel of an incense-steeped ashtanga yoga class. Plus, the heat is excessive, I think. It enables you to bend into positions and it cleans the skin as you sweat buckets, but it seems unnecessarily painful to me. I was so weak and drained after our first session. I think I'll go for these first cheap lessons and then stop.

reverend billy and the church of stop shopping

Alex, Matt and I went to Conway Hall at Red Lion Square to behold the wonders of a post-religious, anti-capitalist gospel choir hailing from New York, who had been flown over by the Ecologist magazine for a performance. Reverend Billy is a kind of anti-capitalist, global justice performance artist, backed up by a whole choir of excellent happy gospel singers. They are all completely dedicated to their mission of converting people to the cause of 'stop shopping' and do that thing which the jokers and clowns of anti-corporate capitalism do best, being very funny and entertaining while being deadly serious at the same time. They were absolutely amazing. From the beginning where the choir went around the room covering any logos on people's clothing with strips of brightly coloured tape, to the opening and closing glorious harmonies of 'stop shopping', to the dances and songs of the individual choir members, to Billy himself, totally playing the part of a deep South evangelical man of god ('we put the odd in god!') but harnessing that style to a genuine celebratory progressive love of humanity, it was by turns uplifting, saddening and inspiring. Reverend Billy and his choir really put themselves on the line, constantly going into chain stores to preach to the unconverted and generally living the rock'n'roll global justice dream. They make very simple links between everyday consumer behaviour and environmental destruction, bombing and war, and the replacement of community-based social places, shops and cafes with the endless repeating boring brands of the global neoliberal monoculture.

Check out their website: http://revbilly.com. It has lots of sermons and calls to action, written in a style that's something like a cross between Julian Cope and Michael Moore.

Sample headlines:
'Against the Evil of Chain Stores: Lick Ye! and Kiss Ye with Long Tongue!'
'Gay Marriage is the Power and the Glory' ('and is the key to reversing global climate change brought on by trapped greenhouse gasses. Lesbian Marriage is the life everlasting and will save the Spotted Owl. Change-a-luliah!')

political parties

Excitingly, I am now a member of not one, but two political parties. I am a member of the Green Party and of Kongra-Gel, the People's Congress of Kurdistan. This was recently listed by the EU as a terrorist organisation, despite being a mainstream, peaceful organisation working to defend the democratic rights of Kurds in Turkey, Iran, Syria and Iraq. They are hoping to make the EU's designation unworkable by having as many people join the party as possible. Do contact estella24[at]tiscali.co.uk if you would like to join.

Fri
18-Jun-2004

dan's wedding

Lots of us headed down to Brighton today for Dan N's crazy wedding to Donatella! Very amusing! And in the same venue as Adam and Kayla's wedding. Same women officiating who look like men in drag. Afterwards we went down to the beach to get pissed, then ate cheap Indian food at Bombay Aloo, then played frisbee back on the beach...

Sun
13-Jun-2004

new flat in chalk farm

Matt and I are moving into a new flat this weekend. It's all very hectic, lots of packing and unpacking to do, but it is a lovely flat. Chalk Farm looks to be a fun and bustling area to live in.

narrow boat weekend in leicestershire

Matt, Alex and I joined Russ and Lesley for a sunny weekend on their narrow boat in Leicestershire. We dashed from work to St Pancras station to catch trains northwards and Lesley picked us up and took us to Market Harborough, where they are based these days. That night we went to their local pub, which was very local indeed and somewhat unfriendly at first. However, by midnight they had closed the curtains and a small gang of us were drinking and talking for a good few hours after closing time. This was generally what we found during the weekend: the people of rural Leicestershire didn't initially take well to our foolish coloured hair and London clothes, being a Daily Mail and Telegraph reading lot in the main, but once you persisted they turned out to be very warm and friendly.

Saturday, we took Doris (their narrow boat) along the canal from one pub to another, stopping to look at the Foxton locks, an amazing staircase of ten locks rising steeply up a hill. The locks had been bypassed by an inclined plane lift, built in 1900 to carry barges and narrow boats up and down the hill more swiftly and efficiently than the ten locks, but it was closed in 1911 and dismantled. The Foxton Inclined Plane Museum chronicles this and the Foxton Inclined Plane Trust is out to rebuild the lift, having received and squandered various grants to do so. They are a bunch of crazy industrial enthusiasts if there ever were any, devoted to reconstructing something that was completely dismantled and sold for scrap under eighty years ago. I can't see it being worth the effort, given that there isn't enough traffic on this section of the canal to warrant it. Still, I got a nice mug from the museum shop and we watched a video they had playing on the wall that bizarrely chronicled this local man's obsession with building elaborate models of 1920s orchestras, with little players whose arms moved in and out or up and down depending on the instrument. This man also did the voiceover on the video and had a wonderfully flat, monotonous voice that seemed to suit the whole endeavour rather well: 'Well, this one took me five years to build...'

We kept stopping for drinks and having nice pints of quality bitter, at agreeable northern prices. Then in the evening, we drove into Leicester to one of the big nights of the Leicester Early Music Festival, which runs through May and June. In a rather magnificent Saint Mary de Castro church we listened to Michala Petri, a Danish recorder player and one of the finest in the world, accompanied by her scarily named husband Lars Hannibal on the lute and basso continuo. I've never really thought about listening to 'recorder music' before, but it has to be said, this was very good indeed. They played Baroque pieces, things like Corelli, Bach and Vivaldi, and her skill with the recorder was just incredible. At times she was like a babbling brook or a trilling bird, such was her skill with the instrument, and at the end she even did a kind of party piece, where she hummed and played at the same time, thus singing her own harmony to her playing. The church was full of marvellous bearded, white haired early music enthusiasts. It was a good thing to go to.

After the concert, we went for an Indian meal back in Market Harborough, then to bed. On Sunday, we boated again for much of the day, enjoying more sunshine than on Saturday and ending up rather red and mildly burnt. Lesley started running around and getting excited with reading our horoscopes, while Russ tried to calm her down by admonishing her to peel the potatoes. Me and Matt were lying on the roof of the narrow boat, while Alex was at the tiller with Russ, Lesley was reading these horoscope entries and trying to work out what our 'special stones' were as Russ kept saying: 'Potatoes, Lesley! Potatoes!'

Around three or four in the afternoon, we set off back to London on the train, to the rather less idyllic charms of the city. Thoroughly enjoyable weekend.

Mon
31-May-2004

eternal sunshine of the spotless mind

Matt and I saw Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind earlier at the Panton Street Odeon. This was great fun - serious, romantic, mildly funny at times, but thoughtful above all - with Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet being very accomplished and likeable throughout. They play Joel and Clementine, lovers who end up trying to erase the memory of each other from their minds through the services of the wittily named biotech firm Lacuna Inc. Elijah Wood stars as one of the firm's employees and potential love interest for Clementine. As one reviewer put it, he looks like a hobbit who's wandered into the wrong film, but is still cool enough. More interestingly, he wears my 'ewok' brown and yellow H&M jacket. The exact same size and type. Quite strange seeing one's own clothes on screen.

The film is witty - the screenplay is by Charlie Kaufman after all - and exciting to watch, for it is directed by Michel Gondry, of inventive music video fame. Its themes are fascinating, centering around the enigmatic nature of memory and personality, on the consequences of deleting sections of what makes a person who they are. The science is believable in the context of the film, but obviously totally unrealistic. I like the way they present Lacuna Inc as being run from a dodgy, down-at-heel office with stoned scientists. There are lots of visual sequences showing libraries and one flash of a stack of filing cabinets, laying bare the assumptions of this kind of science, the metaphor of the computer, where memory is stored in 'files' which can be recalled and extracted in the manner of data on a disk.

It's amazing how complicated memory storage actually is. As I understand it, you have perceptual information entering the brain from outside and then mental imagery arising from within. Much of this is cast by the wayside, as the brain filters it all according to pre-established mental templates and some is held in short-term memory, in the form of transient increases in neurotransmission between nerve cells, notably in the hippocampus. Over a cetain period of time, some of these memories may be made more permanant, through a kind of reinscription process where more structural changes to the synapses are effected. This process involves a cascade of biochemical mechanisms, triggered by the initial increases in neurotransmission and eventually resulting in the creation of new proteins. These move to the synapse, modifying its structure.

Because a sequence of biochemical steps is required to reshape the synapses in the hours after an important event or experience, it is possible to use drugs or inhibitors to disrupt the process. Herein lies the only real-world hope for memory altering procedures like those shown in this film. Interestingly, it has recentle been shown that if an animal was taught a particular task, and then days later was reminded of it by being put in the same context, the memory became labile once more and it can be disrupted by protein synthesis inhibitors. Thus, reiterating the task doesn't so much reactivate the old memory as reinscribe it with a new one. This makes sense in the way that when we recall a past event, we are not recalling the event per se, but our memory of it from the last time we recalled it. It does make memory this rather tenuous little bank of facts that we are constantly reshaping as we go through life...

Thu
27-May-2004

the living embodiment of rock'n'roll!

Tom P, Neil, Nick, my brother and myself all sloped off to the Garage at Highbury and Islington last night to witness the glory of Guitar Wolf, the Tokyo rock band with absolutely no irony and an intense dedication to leather jackets, combs and the smouldering essence of rock'n'roll. They came on at ten, we pushed through to the front, and then the next hour was a crazy sweat drenched flying hair moshing screaming pit of madness. Very good band. The lead singer particularly takes the whole thing very seriously, inspiring all around him to also do so. The venue was also perfect, a fairly small dark dingy upstairs room, consecrated by the skulking gods of long hair and black t-shirts, built on powerful foundations of plastic cup beer and jubilant rock magic. It was one of those rare moments of alchemy, when things are just as they should be.

Balls of fire are burning in my body!
The temperature is rising in my leather jacket
The speed meter is fierce & impatient!
Speeding square on the Rock'n Roll!

Tue
25-May-2004

women on the verge of a nervous breakdown

Went with Matt, James I and Alex to see Almodóvar's Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown at the NFT. It was marvellously funny, and had that Almodóvan Utopian intensity about it, all bright colours, an apparently non-sexist and yet very believable Madrid world, drugged gazpacho soup, sex and absurd situations.

clare short lecture

Went to a Clare Short lecture at SOAS today. She argued not uncontroversally that the war on terror is making the world a more dangerous and bitterly divided place, distracting energy from the most serious threat to the future safety and security of the world, namely poverty and environmental degradation. She had very strong opinions, if not particularly subtle or well thought out from an academic perspective. She was very funny though, and good at handling the audience.

drama

Matt got back from France on Friday, having thoroughly enjoyed his holiday with Jamie and the boys. They all ran around eating, drinking and wearing each other's clothes by the sound of it. And spanking each other. French country houses must do that to people...

Saturday evening, I went with Matt to the Village to meet all the French travellers. Me and Ed's boyfriend, Aaron, were the main non-Frenchies there. Afterwards, we took taxis to Canvas to sample the glory of Drama, which I have to say I was very impressed with. It's a lovely spacious venue, lots of interestingly dressed people, including on this occasion a girl with little red lights in her hair, pleasant mix of gay and straight people, sexy and highly competant pole dancers, and beds and soft surfaces everywhere! With room on them to sit down, or indeed roll around. It was fabulous. Nice that it's monthly as well, I like clubbing when it's not overdone. Gets a bit chewy otherwise.

new house

I got up at some point in the afternoon on Monday and flitted off to Devon for a couple of days. Rachel and Chas showed me the new house. It's really nice, sitting at the top of a steep hill, which should please the alpacas, and with particularly pretty fields around it. The grass is a good shade of faintly bluey green. The house itself is a little bungalow, but they are extending it to build two more big rooms. There's lots of barns and farm space, and one big barn is being turned into an office for Chas and Rachel. It's all very promising. They'll probably be moving in around christmas, though the alpacas will be moving there much sooner.

Alice is very well. She's become a very energetic farm dog and seems to have shed the last of her toy dog heritage, bouncing about around the alpacas and looking comically tiny next to them.

Mon
24-May-2004

rupert street bar

On our way back from Delia and Russell's, we met Antonio in Soho Square, bumped into Michal briefly, and then joined up with Jamie, Rob and Peter and went to Rupert Street for a drink. Old Compton Street was generally heaving, as always on Sunday nights. I sometimes wonder about the gay Sunday night tradition. Kaz Bar down in Clapham was always buzzing on a Sunday, more so than any other night I think. Is this perhaps the gay world's reaction to the traditional family and church focus of Sundays, an assertion of alternative family values and a refutation of Christian morality? Or maybe it's just a good chance to have the town to ourselves after the heterosexual madness of Saturday nights? It vaguely fits into the hedonistic, bars and clubs ideologies of the scene, announcing an unashamed devotion to the heady pleasures of the night, even in the face of the chilling horror of Monday morning.

delia and russell's chiminea

Matt and I went down to Delia and Russell's new two-bedroom house in Surbiton to enjoy some sunny Sunday barbecue cooked in their marvellous Mexican chiminea. I'd never encountered one of these before - they are bulb-shaped wood-burning ovens that you can stand up on little legs. They have a round bottom, with a mouth where you pile wood and coals, and where you can grill your food, and also have a chimney extending upwards. You can hang things to cook in the chimney and also cook things on a grill on top of the chimney. It's all very clever and efficient and has much of the appeal of an aga.

"spread the handz"

Last night, Matt and I joined Martin and Mark for a Deaf Rave at The Rocket, on Holloway Road. This had been suggested to us weeks ago, when we first met them both, but we had little idea what to expect. They are held every few months, and around 600 to 800 people usually attend, most of them using British Sign Language (BSL) as their first language. It was an amazing moment when we arrived. The main downstairs bar was spread out before us, there was hardly any noise, and the whole room was full of people signing, a sea of arms and hands moving around. I had never seen anything like it before. It's very pleasant being in a room of signing people since there's lots of space to move around. The natural inclination of deaf people is to stand quite far apart when signing, and in a circle if there's more than two of you. That way everyone can see everyone else.

As well as this room there was a room upstairs with a main stage and music. The music was very loud indeed. Cool little pink and yellow earplugs were provided for the hearing people present, so that their ears wouldn't be damaged.

Entertainment for the evening was a mixture of DJs, dancers, visual screens projecting light shows on the wall, an 8 Mile theme sign language battle, sign song performers and signing comedy. Most things were translated into spoken English and BSL. The music was more reggae and hip hop rather than house or garage, and a lot of the dancing was rap and hip hop style, which has a lot of gestures anyway and seems quite well suited to signing. The language on the deaf rave flyer has a similar upbeat urban slang feel to it:

Social life is back to it best bubbly deaf vibes again. We like to keep it smiley and jiggy. It all blissful spirits on the night and many things to watch, feel, dance, eat, sit, laugh n hug.

The comedy/performance was by an Australian guy called Rob Farmer, who is famous for his jokes, story telling and sign songs. There's a strong tradition of story-telling and joke-telling in the deaf community, which makes sense given that deaf communities have historically been fairly illiterate. Rather like non-state, small-scale communities without a written language but with strong oral traditions, deaf culture in this country prizes story-telling that exploits the resources of language to greatest effect. The complexities and cleverness of BSL performances have to be seen to be believed, especially as the poetry of the performance is expressed through a use of visual imagery unfamiliar to most hearing people. A lot of this creativity arises from what is generally thought to be a higher level of iconicity, ie a perceivable link between linguistic form and meaning, in sign language than in spoken language.

Mark and Martin were on good form, our signing wasn't too appalling, and we met some more nice people who want to take us to a deaf group they go to. Mark and Martin came back to our house to stay the night and we fed them fishfinger sandwiches before heading to bed around six in the morning. Martin then insisted on getting up around 10 in the morning, so none of us got any sleep, but that was kind of useful since Andy and Jim were coming around later in the day.

Photo booth picture of Mark, Martin, me and Matt

Sat
22-May-2004

inside out and upside down

Images

We had an Inside Out and Upside Down party on Friday. It was one of our more fun parties, lots of people but not so many that everything went pear shaped. Lots of drugs, all kinds of people I hadn't seen in quite a while, speed punch and all kinds of merriment. In the morning, Jim, Dan, Kal and Steve stayed on to help clean up and we all went for a walk down by the canal in the Saturday morning sunshine.

Tue
18-May-2004

bad education

Juicy unexpectedly got me a ticket to see La Mala Educacion with him, Almodóvar's latest film. I enjoyed this very much. It was strange watching this one, since Almodóvar is definitely of the mainstream now and this film felt squarely like an accomplished, mainstream, big budget movie, albeit a rather more stylish and captivating movie than a Hollywood blockbuster. It's quite remarkable though in that, departing from his other films, he has almost no female characters at all. In fact the film is populated entirely by gay, bisexual and transgendered men. It's weird sitting there watching a non art house movie where this is the case. How times have changed over the last ten years! How lucky I am to live in such times.

The film is great. An exhilarating and even handed mix of fantasy and reality, filled with acting and role play, and suffused with homoeroticism.

Fri
07-May-2004

smoke kills

According to a report from ITDG, smoke in the home from cooking on wood, dung and crop waste kills nearly one million children a year. I didn't realise the figure was so high. It is a death toll almost as great as that caused by unsafe water and sanitation, and greater than that caused by malaria.

More than a third of humanity burn biomass (wood, crop residues, charcoal and dung) for cooking and heating and those affected adversely are mainly women and children. I remember from Zimbabwe how sitting in rural kitchens filled with smoke used to hurt my eyes as I wasn't used to it - it didn't occur to me that there was a risk of lung cancer too.

dtpm

After an afternoon of getting stoned and playing Carcassonne, a really seductive little strategy board game we nicked off Tom P, with James, Kal and Steve, our household went out to DTPMs at Fabric for some crazy Sunday night clubbing. We went with Kornelia, Agata and Dan M, and Daniel N came along later. The only one who wasn't with us was Matt, as he's still in France.

DTPM's is interesting, much more mixed than I expected. I thought it would be full of topless muscular gay men along the lines of Action, but it was much more diverse. I had forgotten how big Fabric is as well, and how very loud they turn up the music. I fear for all my hearing friends. They'll all have tinnitus within a few years if they stray too close to that bass...

We all took more drugs! I cruised along on speed and a little ecstasy for most of the night, and then sometime around four in the morning, Alex, Dan N, Michal and I all snorted a whole load of ketamine. Now, I've taken K before, but never after other drugs in this fashion. It was quite a different experience and one I'd really recommend. Whereas taken sober, ketamine leaves you feeling very confused and tired, in these circumstances it feels energising and euphoric. It still plays havoc with your vision, with everything becoming entertainingly confused and blurry and an increased contrast between foreground and background making itself evident. It's a dissociative anaesthetic, which separates perception from sensation, so you do have these wonderful feelings of disconnection and a general 'out of body' vibe. I can see why many people find K frightening, but for me, this is what I always wanted taking drugs to be, a glorious combination of crazy visual effects, dissociation from your surroundings, confusion mixed with intense happiness, and a strange inability to walk fowards.

My favourite aspect of K is the way it does strange things to your sense of time. I get the impression that I can fly out of my body back into my own past and remember things with an amazing sense of actually being there again, feeling exactly as if I were the person I was, but still retaining a memory of myself in the future. It gave me that intense awareness of the illusory nature of time, the surety that past, present and future are simultaneously present at every moment, which can come through meditation (or infection by the Siddartha virus).

We all left around six and trekked out to Kornelia's house at Ealing Broadway and sat around till midday getting caned and chatting. Then Dan N went to move house (!), Kornelia, Ema and Michal went to bed, and me, Alex and Dan M headed back to Marylebone and watched Zoolander and lay around dozing through the afternoon.

Thu
06-May-2004

scissor sisters at brixton academy

Dan M, Alex, myself and two of Dan's friends from work travelled down to Brixton last night to see the Scissor Sisters, Queens of Noize, and Lamb in concert. The venue was the glorious Art Deco 1920s picture palace magnificence of the Brixton Academy, with its impressive columns and statues and a ceiling painted black so it looks like the roof is open. Scissor Sisters were excellent, really rather rocking. I took speed and reflected on what a good drug it is for guitar music - it gets you bouncing!

a thousand clouds of peace fence the sky, love; your being love will never end

Matt and I went to see this lovely Mexican film at the NFT. Its untranslated title: Mil nubes de paz cercan el cielo, amor, jamas acabaras de ser amor.

I really enjoyed it. It's a slow moving, dreamy, black and white story centered on Gerardo, a seventeen-year-old who has broken up with his lover Bruno and now wanders the streets of Mexico City seeking his proper place in the world through a string of unsatisfactory sexual encounters. The bright black and white cinematography transforms the squalid settings of the film - the empty alleys, parks and railway bridges that Gerardo restlessly cruises - into rapturous scenes of intense beauty. Each time he has sex, the other person usually offers him cash. At first he tries to refuse it, but he always accepts it in the end to try and prevent himself from being too hurt and not to expose himself as someone who had entered into the encounter with the hope for something more than just sex. The film is very melancholy and Gerardo is never able to escape his all-consuming pain. He dies at the end, apparently of a broken heart.

Wed
05-May-2004

matt off to france

Matt went to France this morning for a week's holiday with Jamie C and others. They are driving down to Jamie's parental home in a hired Mercedes, a sort of gay French road trip. So last night we all went out to Discotec at The End to see him off with a bout of clubbing. I went after seeing Kill Bill Vol 2. Began what promises to be a rather heavy weekend by trying out some new blue pills we've got. Matt and I also met Daniel, a potter, who has invited us to come and look at his ceramics when his studio has its next open day.

the haunting

After the gay parenting film, Alex joined me and Matt at the NFT for another film called Teknolust. This was apparently about a lesbian who clones herself, or something along those lines. However, in our haste, we wandered into the wrong screen and so watched The Haunting instead, though this was well worth stumbling in to.

The Haunting is an extremely good, extremely frightening 1963 Robert Wise film about a haunted house and a slightly crazed woman who slowly becomes a part of it. The film sucks you in very subtly and weirdly. There are just four main central characters: Doctor Markway, who wants to prove the existence of the supernatural; Eleanor, who comes from a troubled domestic background; Theodora, an assertive, psychic lesbian; and Luke, an arch sceptic who expects to inherit the house at his aunt's death and thus wants to check it out as a prospective business venture.

The house itself has crooked angles everywhere and is a labyrinth of meandering corridors and cluttered rooms. It is also very haunted, with banging and screaming night after night, but never any sign of what it is that threatens them, which is what makes the film so utterly terrifying by the end.

The guests sit around day after day chatting and dining, and the dialogue is witty and enjoyable. Eleanor, who's the focus of everything paranormal, becomes stranger and stranger as she realises the house is after her. One scary aspect of it is that she loves the house and wants to stay, even though it terrifies her too. There's this awful sexual edge to her obsession where she screams at night in terror, but during the day begs to be allowed to remain because she likes the house so much. It's extremely unsettling.

A sample scary quote from Eleanor on the house: "Funny how everything's so ugly and yet so comfortable - like drowning I guess..."

What made it stranger for me, Matt and Al was that we weren't sure what the film was, and whether it might actually be Teknolust. So not only did the scariness of the film really get to us, as we weren't expecting it, but we kept thinking that at any minute Eleanor was going to indulge her lesbian side and some kind of cloning would occur. As Alex said afterwards: "Good, but I was expecting more cloning. And where were the lesbians?"

bournemouth

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Friday evening, we decided not to sleep in our little shelter and headed down to Bournemouth to stay the night there. Bournemouth was interesting, quite like Brighton, but with sandy beaches and a lovely central park area running down through the middle of the town to the beach. We sought out the gay places, which were clustered around a little roundabout called the triangle, and which seemed to number three in total. It was fun, much more intimate and provincial, and the lack of choice meant everyone would move from the pub to the bar to the club at the same time, meaning only one of the three venues was ever full at any given time.

Next morning, we took some breakfast cereal down to the beach and sat on the sands to eat before setting off back to London.

beaulieu

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After we'd finished our breakfast and washed up, we drove away from the campsite, pausing to say hello to some forest ponies and swing on a rope swing we found by a stream, to Beaulieu, a village with a kind of cross between a stately home and a theme park. You pay to get in, and then you can visit the National Motor Museum, Beaulieu Abbey, and Palace House, all in these rather nice grounds with benches, gardens, a monorail and even an old-fashioned open-top bus that takes people for short drives around the grounds.

The National Motor Museum, which Matt was keen to see, was actually really enjoyable. I'm not generally interested in cars, but this is mostly very cool old cars, ranging from amazing nineteenth century contraptions built along the lines of horseless carriages, to open-top early twentieth century ones, to the first mass produced cars of the 1930s and onwards. One vehicle was an electric taxi, used in London in the late nineteenth century by a particular company and resembling a big yellow carriage, just without the horse hitched to the front. It was powered with an enormous battery that slid underneath the carriage and which had to be recharged every day. There were other really old 'cars' that were basically engine-powered prams, or bikes, and examples of steam-driven road vehicles before combustion engines made petrol-driven cars feasible in the 1880s.

We took a walk around the remains of Beaulieu Abbey, where some sculptures by Philip Jackson were displayed around the tranquil ruins, all brooding nuns and priests along a papal theme...

Sat
01-May-2004

a cat called mouse

We've adopted a cat! Her owner Celia is heading over to France to try and set up some kind of French Chateau live-in cookery school, and she had to leave Mouse behind. We'd met Celia about a week before through a mutual friend, and we all got on well, but the parting for Celia and Mouse was still an emotional one, with Celia having to rush back into the house upset, and Mouse yowling sadly during the drive back from Seven Sisters Road to Marylebone.

Kal kindly drove us from Celia's to our house. We got back and put her in the corner with all her things under the stairs where she could retreat and be safe and she cowered there all night. But then, next morning, we couldn't find her. We looked all over the place, and finally found her hiding behind the washing machine and fridge, where there's a hole in the wall she could sit inside. We had to pick her up to get her out, but she kept going back in. Gradually, over the next couple of days she became less terrified of everything though, and her default hiding place became under the bed in the living room, which is a lot nicer than behind the washing machine.

She's now quite friendly, but will only come out from under the bed if you ask her to, at which point she'll emerge and be quite sociable. But once there's a very loud noise, or people leave, she'll tend to return to a box under there where she likes to base herself. The living room generally suits her quite well, since she likes to sit there looking out of the window. This seems to amuse her more than actually going outside.

Fri
30-Apr-2004

kill bill

Went to the big cinema at Angel with the whole bhahtee crew, Andy, Jim, Steve, Kal, Kate and Abbie, to see the second half of the glorious Kill Bill saga. Once again it managed to be utterly unrealistic and thrillingly believable all at once, but with a somewhat different pace from the first film. The fighting and violence is a little more sparse and concentrated, but still an exhilirating mix of something brash, American and gloriously modern with something of the martial arts beauty of kung fu death power.

Bill himself turns out to be quite interesting, less of the crazy villain I had expected, and there are some cool flashbacks. One is a black and white sequence showing the events leading to the wedding chapel massacre, and another is probably my favourite bit of the film, a flashback to the Bride's training under the traditional kung fu master, Pai Mei, played in hysterical over the top form by Gordon Liu. Pai Mei is totally untouchable, with awesome fighting skills and an extremely bad temper. He laughs at Uma Thurman as she tries to land a blow on him and generally humiliates her and calls her an American dog. Very funny part of the movie. I'm looking forwards to watching the two films one after the other now.

Fri
16-Apr-2004

ipod cycling

The random function on one's ipod is a marvellous thing, and sometimes it throws up some great songs at apt times. It's always good to have songs chosen for you, it takes a little of their magic away when you choose them yourself, I find. If a song just pops up unexpectedly you treat it graciously rather than with the heightened expectation that comes with demanding that it perform for you.

Anyway, I was cycling home along the canal just now and it's beautifully mild sunny weather, probably the first real summer's day we've had this year. The ipod just gave me a series of lovely mellow songs for the journey home, I was very impressed.

Ngoma Nehosho - Oliver Mtukudzi
This Train - Bob Marley & The Wailers
Somebody's Callin' My Name - Ry Cooder
Plateau - Nirvana
Part Of The Process - Morcheeba
A Groovy Kind Of Love - The Mindbenders

I thoroughly recommend them for when you are cycling from Kings Cross to Marylebone along the canal on a sunny early Friday evening.

Tue
13-Apr-2004

stansted

Matt and I went to Stansted late on Sunday night, with the strange intention to sleep at the airport for a few hours before getting up at five in the morning to check in for the flight. The airport stretched out around us, bright and echoing, it's grid-roof supported by elegant tree-like columns stretching off all around us. We pitched camp outside a sock shop, stretching out on our towels. I tried to write a poem as bored teenagers zoomed around on really noisy skateboards.

The artificial light and closed shop fronts -
Sock shop Hargreaves, Ponti's Costa -
The distant chatter of three-in-the-morning voices
Footsteps, skateboards, air conditioning.
Hard floor below me, clammy limbs
And battered soul.
The temple stretches out in all directions, vast and improbable,
While its priests, in crisp suits of nylon, trot back and forth preparing for the dawn,
Lord Foster, we salute you.

catedral de barcelona

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We were going to take the train to Madrid on the Monday evening, but it was full so we took it on Tuesday evening instead. We spent Monday wandering Barcelona, stumbling across the enchanting pools and palm trees of the Catedral de Barcelona on our rambles and visiting the strange modern concreted Parc de l'Espanya Industrial near Sants-Estació rail station.

Sun
11-Apr-2004

diplomacy again

Andy came round at midday, and then Jim got here rather late around three. The three of us and Alex played an interesting four person game of Diplomacy. The trouble with four person games is that you get to play two countries each, apart from the player that gets England, and so there's less need for diplomacy and you tend to play a quieter game with few alliances being made with other players. For the next game, it definitely has to be a seven player job. The time has come!

Sat
10-Apr-2004

new forest camping adventure

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Matt and I headed off on our New Forest Camping Adventure on Thursday morning. We picked up a car from the EasyCar place near Edgeware Road, packed loads of things into it, and drove off south towards Hampshire.

We stopped off at Stonehenge on the way and marvelled at the neolithic glory of the toppled stones and at the incredible numbers of tourists who constantly stream through the site.

After a tea, and a run across the field and up two long barrows nearby, we set off again in the car, heading down through the picturesque surroundings of the New Forest with its ponies, gorse bushes and rural pubs. It began to get dark and we started looking around for a campsite. This proved to be a long job, first we looked for one down by the coast but to no avail. Then we headed back up into the forest and found one run by the Forestry Commission, but it was full. Finally, as night came on, we found one nearby in a forest clearing and booked two nights there.

We headed out to the campsite, and found a spot up against some gorse bushes. We spent some time clearing away the pony poo and then got out our stuff. We opened up the new tent (which I had never even looked at before) and began to get nervous. I had got it as a small one or two person tent a few years ago from an army surplus shop, but it was very small indeed. There seemed to be a lack of groundsheets or double layers. Still, we figured we could cope with that. It was as we were putting it up that we realised there appeared to be no door on the thing, so I had a proper read of the instructions and saw the fateful words: 'Warning: this is not actually a tent. This is a shelter for use when fishing.'

Alas, we had an open windbreak, rather than a tent, and it was fast turning into a very cold night. Matt and I are rarely deterred by such things however, so we decided to cook dinner. We made a delicious meal of sausages and beans, with a cup of tea, on our little stove - it tasted so good outdoors! It started to get really cold at this point. We were going to turn our 'shelter' upside down and try to sleep underneath it, though this would have involved sleeping on the grass, but we thought that was probably the route to hypothermia and death. We slept in the car instead, turning on the engine for ten minutes first in an attempt to warm up the interior before we bedded in.

By four or five in the morning, we were absolutely freezing, so we got up around 5.45, brushed our teeth, washed some plates, watched a fabulous crisp bitter cold bright yellow dawn, and then had a lovely breakfast of cereal, tea and pain au chocolat.

Sat
03-Apr-2004

the angelic conversation

Matt and I went to see The Angelic Conversation, a grainy black and white Derek Jarman film shot with a stop-motion camera at the rate of around 3 frames per second and then transferred from Super-8 to low-band video to high-band video to 35mm film. This results in a particularly dreamy, almost abstract, quality to the film, where everything dances in bright sunlight and dreamy slow motion and there are only hints of colour here and there. Accompanying a series of homoerotic images that build up through repetition to a gentle climax, Judi Dench intones sonnets by Shakespeare in her posh, rich and well enunciated voice which somehow goes perfectly with Jarman's subtle style.

To me, fair friend, you never can be old,
For as you were when first your eye I eyed,
Such seems your beauty still. Three winters cold
Have from the forests shook three summers' pride,
Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turn'd
In process of the seasons have I seen,
Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burn'd,
Since first I saw you fresh, which yet are green.
Ah! yet doth beauty, like a dial-hand,
Steal from his figure and no pace perceived;
So your sweet hue, which methinks still doth stand,
Hath motion and mine eye may be deceived:
      For fear of which, hear this, thou age unbred;
      Ere you were born was beauty's summer dead.

Mon
29-Mar-2004

trailer happiness

My first visit to the famous Trailer Happiness on Portobello Road. There was Alex, Matt, me, Kayla, Gina, Steve and Kate. Great place, though shockingly expensive. A classy kitsch lounge bar supposed to invoke the feel of a 1950s bachelor pad. Probably the best cocktails I've ever tasted, particularly in the Cuban spicy rum vein...

piccadilly

In the evening, Matt, Alex (Greek Alex), Kayla and I went to see the bfi National Film and Television Archive's restoration of Piccadilly this evening. Piccadilly is a 1929 silent movie set in Jazz Age London, in the nightclub of the same name. It stars Anna May Wong, the first Asian-American star and one of the first non-white actresses to gain international celebrity, as a Chinese scullery girl whose exotic dance routines catch the eye of suave club owner Valentine Wilmot. She rises to become the toast of London and the object of his erotic obsession until it all ends in tragedy.

Accompanying the film was a specially commissioned score by Neil Brand, known internationally as a master of improvised silent film accompaniment, performed by a live jazz band. We drank two bottles of champagne in the auditorium from plastic gold glitter champagne flutes beforehand, and halfway through the film Matt and I had to leave to go to the toilet. We were right at the front, in the middle of the row, so I think we pissed a lot of people off, but as Matt observed while we were sighing with relief at the urinals, we at least were being true to the spirit of Jazz Age London.

Afterwards, Alex took us to a lovely Greek restaurant near Farringdon and we ate souvlaki and I drank coke to try and fight off my oncoming champagne hangover.

matt and steve and gordon's wine bar

Having sent Kayla off to Heathrow to meet her friend who was flying over from Newfoundland to London, I went to Belitha Villas to get Steve C and we went for a drink with Matt W from Zimbabwe in Gordon's Wine Bar by Charing Cross. I had just happened to bump into Matt the day before in the lobby of the House of Lords, having not seen him for about three years. We were both very surprised by this, as neither of us had been in the House of Lords before anyway and were quite freaked out by the gentlemen's club atmosphere of the whole place. We arranged to have this drink though, and I'd been wanting to see Gordon's Wine Bar for a while.

Gordon's is an interesting place, underground off Villiers Street, with low arched ceilings and rickety candlelit tables and the smell of old French caves. Lovely place for an intimate bottle of wine, friendly rather than romantic though.

Fri
26-Mar-2004

paternal instinct

Matt and I joined up with Adrian and Rob for a jaunt to the NFT last night for our first Gay and Lesbian Film Festival offering of the year. The film was a documentary by a psychologist/anthropologist type from Columbia University about two gay men from New York who want to have children with a surrogate mother. They put their profiles on the internet and are approached by a white witch called Wen. Wen is probably the most lovable person in the film - married with a son, and wanting to donate children to a gay couple in order to give the gift of life to those who wouldn't normally be able to have children. She's very political, defining herself as queer, though she's married, and one of her reasons for wanting to help two men bring up a child was in order to make the point that women should not always bear the primary responsibility for childrearing in our societies. Her life was structured by very healthy wicca songs and rituals, like cutting symbolic cords when she gave the baby to the gay parents or sitting with all her friends singing and drawing pictures together when a first attempt at surrogacy ends in a tragic miscarriage. The film is pretty emotional, particularly the remarkable scenes when you see the gay couple actually bringing the baby into the world as she gives birth in a paddling pool in her house. It made me think a lot, more about my attitude towards wicca, hippy types than about the fact of gay parenting, to be honest.

Wed
24-Mar-2004

zatoichi

Alex and I met up with Steve C and Kate in Angel for a quick drink at the Camden Head before watching Takeshi Kitano's Zatoichi at Screen on the Green. Fantastic film, probably better than Kill Bill, since it has human, emotional elements as well as wonderful samurai combat. Whereas Tarantino worships Japanese steel and has his yellow-haired warrior wave her samurai sword around like a combine harvester, in Zatoichi, the glory of the samurai sword is treated with a certain amount of respect and awe. I recall Alex complaining when we saw Kill Bill that Uma Thurman got a bit too messed up and bloody by the end of the film, whereas the usual way with the samurai master is that they are completely unwounded and unruffled by wave after wave of slaughtered opponents. This film sticks to that tradition more closely and the heroes are completely untouchable, or they get utterly killed in seconds by someone even harder than them.

Zatoichi is one of those films that's so beautifully made the violence appears aesthetically pleasing. This is helped by the fact that it's a period piece set in nineteenth century Japan, and the colours are all strangely muted, and, a nice touch, much of the blood is computer generated, giving it a beautiful swirly liquid look, though at first it can look a little silly.

The central characters are an engaging bunch of misfits, including a brother and sister who both dress as geishas, with the brother taking the more feminine role, and of course, the blind swordsman, gambler and masseuse, Katoichi himself. The whole film is very funny as well, with lots of humourous interaction between the carefully drawn central characters and random moments of slapstick and hilarious detail. Most glorious of all, the end of the film sees them building a huge stage and engaging in this crazy Japanese tap dancing, performed without music, just using the rhythm of dozens of crazy dancers with big blocks under their shoes. It's as if the whole thing turned into a happy musical for the last ten minutes or so and makes you leave the cinema with a very warm glow.

Tue
23-Mar-2004

queens arms

Alex and I met with the Bell family minus Adam in the Queens Arms on Greyhound Road, by Hammersmith Cemetery and Barons Court. They were all well. Henry was in town having interviews at Lamda, for a director MA type thing, and Kayla was there for an interview at the University of Hertfordshire, for her art degree. It looks like the Bell children are going to end up in London, or in Exeter and Falmouth.

We all got quite pissed and Alex was savaged by the pub cat, which had no restraint when playing, and dashed around the pubs raking blood from people's arms and attempting to kill this bouncy ball it was chasing.

Mon
22-Mar-2004

green tea

After a delicious Polish comfort food meal of Ema's - a thin soup, followed by chicken and potatoes with this mashed vegetable, apple and horseradish sauce - Matt made us some green tea. It was so good. Green tea always reminds me, in a Dharma Bums kind of way, of the power of simple drinks and simple sensations. I've just about reached utter saturation with food and alcohol at the moment. I can feel a fast coming on!

horticulture

Enjoying the sunny weather yesterday, Matt and I walked to the posh garden centre on Warwick Avenue in Little Venice to buy oregano, thyme, sage, rosemary, mint, and four little primrose plants. These have been planted in our little strip of dirt in our yard and hopefully the god of urban gardening will bestow his blessings upon them...

engagement in the white hart

On Saturday, I got back from Devon, shaved Matt's hair with the trimmers so he's got a round little head now, and then we both headed out to the White Hart on Drury Lane, where Ceri and Sam were celebrating their engagement. It was a bit of a Zim event, with Charles, Steve and Graham there, though we were vastly outnumbered by loads of the couple's friends from their universities.

Steve and I had a mustard fight, and he got mustard all over my jeans, the bitch. Bright yellow it was. Though I then wiped lots of it on this random girl's beautiful white fur coat. I don't think she was too pleased about that. Luckily I was too drunk at the time to feel guilty.

On the way home, I had the fabulous idea of having a bite to eat, so Matt and I popped into China Town for a very late night meal. We finished around one in the morning, and realised that we didn't have enough to pay, nor cards with which to withdraw money. Doomed! Washing dishes! Triad won ton human soup!

We phoned up Michal, who at that moment was with Ema about to leap on a bus home from Oxford Circus. They took pity on us, and travelled across Soho to give us £10. Having paid off our good natured Chinese hosts, we fled home to drink tea and collapse in bed.

un chant d’amour

Matt made two lovely lychee cocktails when he came home, with little lychees on sticks, and we watched Un Chant d'Amour, by Jean Genet, a short film made in 1950 about lots of bored soldiers lying around in the cells of a military jail, dreaming of gay frolics with each other in the grass and flowers of home.

It is very carnal and raw, and feels like it is reacting to society, rather than to lots of gay interest groups, so unlike 'gay' films now it was able to be straightforward in depicting homosexual desire. It is very sweaty and dirty, quite unlike the happy robotic smooth bleached sex of modern films. There's lots of soldiers frustratedly rubbing themselves up the concrete walls, masturbating and dancing, while a guard watches them through peepholes, simultaneously aroused and disturbed by their sexual behaviour.

hotel barcelona

Me and Alex mostly slept on the train on the way to Devon and arrived at Taunton a bit shellshocked by it all, but we perked up by the time we were at Tiverton. Rachel picked us up from the station and we headed back to the house. There was Alice - shorn of her hair and looking very silly! It all felted up after too many baths without combing or using dog shampoo, or something like that. At any rate, it all had to come off. She looks more like a terrier now, than a ball of cute fur, and her head looks more bat-like, and you can see her teeth and mouth more easily. She's still totally psycho though, so you can tell it's Alice.

Anyway, we said hello to Chas, lay around chatting for a bit, then Alex opened some presents and we ate a Winnie the Pooh birthday cake. Later on, Josh got back from school, and we all headed off to Exeter for dinner at the marvellous Hotel Barcelona.

Hotel Barcelona was pretty cool. From the outside it's a large, converted, former Victorian eye hospital in nice red Devon stone. Inside it is all extremely funky, with 1950s decor, lots of brown, cool lights, old posters, luxuriant sofas, dark wood, and an atmospheric club and cocktail bar. The restaurant, Café Paradiso, goes for the Mediterranean-style wood-burned oven fare. We ate pizzas, soups and heavy chocolate puddings. It was marvellous!

this is the end

Thursday night saw the beginning of Alex's birthday with some jolly clubbing fun at The End. A group of us gathered in De Hems on Macclesfield Street for some Dutch beer first, including Andy and Jo, Tom P, Kate and Vangelis, of all people, who's in London for a week before heading back to Greece. After this Abbie, Dan M, Alex, Matt and I headed over to the club, fortified by a dash of speed in our last beers, to meet with Michal, Kornelia, Dan N and Ema outside, and then Jamie and Mark (Piglet) inside. The club was great fun, as it is when there're lots of you gathered there. The night was rather drug-fuelled, with amusing lines of k in bathroom antics and much dancing.

We got back to the house around half four, and carried on with the drinks, drugs and foolish chatter. Some Ally McBeal was watched, as well as some Bill Hicks, and various people gradually passed out, or at least lay down. Abbie, Michal and both the Dans kept on going like Bats out of Hell, notching up an impressive set of red wine stained lips. Matt got up after an hour's dozing around eight to go to work, while Alex and I got a couple more hours 'sleep' before rising.

Abbie, Michal, Dan M, Alex and I spent a couple of hours in the pub at Marylebone Station, before Alex and I headed off to Devon for more marvellous birthday fun.

Thu
18-Mar-2004

mmmmmmmmmm, doughnut

Tue
16-Mar-2004

me and matt in the kitchen

Tue
09-Mar-2004

highgate cemetery

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Matt and I took the day off today and visited Highgate Cemetery! It's an amazing place, like a living incarnation of a Dungeons and Dragons cemetery ... all toppled stone angels, romantic Victorians sepulchres, ivy grown catacombs, trees, grass, and nature generally claiming back the dead from the stones and structures of the living. It is clearly managed and allowed to become artfully overgrown, but it is so beautiful and wild at times. You can clamber in between the paths, all over forgotten graves almost completely overgrown by vegetation.

This is also the resting place of Karl Marx, who is buried under a highly amusing huge thick column with an enormous sculpture of his fat head on it. Some good quotes on the column: 'The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it!'

Mon
08-Mar-2004

the birthday of the battygail

We enjoyed the glory of Abbie's birthday last night! Matt, Alex, Michal and I all took a little speed in Babushka on Caledonian road and then rolled on through the evening, first at the Hemingford Arms, where Abbie got them to open the fabulous airy, 1920s, big-leather-sofas upstairs room for us, and then at Belitha Villas. It was great fun, with lots of people there I don't often see, and with the exciting culmination of Kate setting her hair on fire around two in the morning. Michal noticed luckily and beat it out with his hands while she just looked vaguely bemused and pissed, and other very fucked people wandered around commenting that the place smelt a bit funny...

belbatty villas

On Saturday night I went to dinner at the new abode of Jim, Abbie and Kate. The battily named Belitha Villas, a cute little ground floor flat in one of the swanky houses of Angel. All the furniture inside is very old and solid, including a chaise longue (how batty!), there's a comfortable kitchen with an old notched table, and lovely wooden shutters on some of the windows. It feels rather like a country cottage; not a bad achievement when it's in the middle of London.

Steve C was down from Edinburgh and he cooked a rather splendid vegetarian tortilla thing, which we washed down with three bottles of cava and much other wine besides. As we became steadily more inebriated, we turned to playing the rather intellectual game of guessing the first and last lines of various books (including King of the Murgos by David Eddings, interjected Silk sardonically!). Later, Kal, Steph and Josh turned up, Josh with a guitar in tow. Josh sang and played for a bit, and finally as various people began to pass out into drunken stupors, he put on a film he'd brought around called Baraka. It was a kind meditation on humanity's relationship with nature, as far as I could tell (I was asleep for a lot of it!), a series of amazingly perfect-looking images, going from place to place around the world, without any context or explanation. It opened with this amazing scene of a great crowd of Buddhist monks, all in identical loincloths, sitting or standing outside a crumbling temple, all wiggling their arms this way and that, in perfect time, and making these intense excitable noises throughout.

I stumbled off into the London night around four in the morning, and got home safely enough. I think the calm early morning cup of tea before bed may have been what prevented me from having a hangover. When I got up I could feel I was just a glass or two away from feeling quite ill, but I felt remarkably good instead.

Sun
07-Mar-2004

beirut express

After getting back from Kill Bill, Rosie came round to our house around half eleven, and Alex and I went with her to Edgware road to the Lebanese restaurant/cafe Beirut Express, to eat houmous, pitta and things I don't know the name of. All really lovely, and accompanied by freshly made banana milkshake. The perfect place for non-alcoholic, late night socialising and chatting Middle East style...

kill bill

Alex and I went to the Mezzanine Odeon on Leicester Square on Friday night and watched Kill Bill. I'm really glad I finally got round to watching it, as it is superb. We loved it from beginning to end. Uma Thurman is quite beautiful as the 'yellow-haired warrior', clad in a yellow jumpsuit like Bruce Lee's in Game of Death and wielding an almighty samurai sword forged in Okinawa. The whole world Tarantino creates is an exciting, thrilling, callous and utterly unrealistic one. The reference points are Western revenge movies, Asian martial-arts choreography and, best of all, manga cartoons. Me and Alex kept seeing references to classic manga anime like Ninja Scroll, where the animation is very stylised, with a deft little piece of Zen violence, a long pause, and then someone's limbs all fall off and blood goes spurting out in great gushing fountains.

Kill Bill is almost like a violent manga cartoon in film form. Swords flash about like the awe-inspiring weapons of death that they are in the hands of samurai, and then suddenly necks and stumps are geysering blood everywhere in a way that would be ridiculous if the quality of the whole production wasn't so utterly perfect. There's actually a whole anime sequence looking at early life of one of the main villains of this film, yakuza boss O-Ren Ishii.

The soundtrack is genius as always, opening with an amazingly sultry and apt Nancy Sinatra song, Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down), accompanying the first acts of brutal violence against the heroine that set the tone of the whole film. There's lots of school boy homage from Tarantino. He casts the violent Japanese hero Sonny Chiba as a legendary sword-craftsman, brings in Chiaki Kuriyama from Battle Royale as a scary schoolgirl-killer, and there's apparently Jun Kurimura from Ichi the Killer, which I haven't seen yet, but will very soon.

It's all so trashy, but so utterly wonderful I really can't find much fault with it. There's not much emotional attachment to the characters, as usual with Tarantino we're more in it for his finely crafted, obsessive technical virtuosity than for his nicely crafted characters or anything like that.

Fri
05-Mar-2004

microsoft messenger

I love Messenger chats sometimes. The way you just exchange inanities. My name is Megatron at the moment...

Josh says:
ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh megatronnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn

Megatron says:
So, Optimus, we meet again.

Josh says:
and I'm still in my 'prime' baby

Megatron says:
SUCK ON MY LASER CANNON ROBOT BITCH!

Josh says:
eat my hairy circuit board you pile of junk

Josh says:
what are you doing tomorrow night?

Thu
04-Mar-2004

brunel bridge

Hurrah! They've found another bridge designed by my namesake, Isambard Kingdom Brunel. And it's very near our house, at Paddington! Check out the BBC for the story. I think I've finally come to terms with having 'Brunel' as a middle name. It could have been worse.

immigration

Just come across some interesting statistics. In 2002 the UN Population Division estimated that the EU requires an inflow of three million migrants a year to maintain the curent support ratio of people in employment to those over the age of 65. This is actually double the combined legal and illegal annual flows into Europe - its amazing that for all our economic determinism in many respects the immigration debate remains so negative and untethered to economic need.

Sat
28-Feb-2004

1920s exhibition

Matt and I met Anna for lunch today near St Pauls before the three of us sauntered over to the Museum of London for another heady dose of the 1920s. The exhibition is called 'The 1920s: the decade that changed London' and it is really rather enjoyable.

As a quote from the exhibition says: 'No notion was too cranky to voice, no experiment too eccentric to try. 1920s London shimmered with the nerves of the world.'

It all conveys the new internationalism of the times very well. There was exuberant, though contested, cultural diversity. Jazz, cocktails, crazy dancing and informal manners came over from America. You had this interesting Russian theme with ballet and Bolshevism. And the internationally focused, Western educated citizens of Britain's overseas empire were issuing challenges to the assumptions of British colonial imperialism, particularly individuals from Ireland and India.

Wed
25-Feb-2004

shall we dance

Matt, Al and I went to see Shall We Dance. It's a classic Gershwins film with Fred and Ginger dancing their way through amusing romantic comedy satin'n'platinum jollities. It was very funny, with lots of banter and amazing songs. Many Gershwin classics. There was Slap That Bass, set in a fabulous chrome and white Art Deco engine room on a luxury ocean liner, totally over the top and silly, and Let's Call The Whole Thing Off, sung as they roller skate through Central Park in New York.

the power of sushi

I've realised that I am totally into Japanese food at the moment, mainly sushi. The strong, yet delicate, flavours, and not too many of them mixed together. The small portions. The marvellous fishiness of it all. I'm tempted to start making sushi myself, but I'm also afraid that would spoil the perfection of it arriving all delicate and perfect like in a restaurant. Preparing it yourself, you might nibble bits as you go along, or prepare too much, all things which I think could spoil that moment when you place an inarizushi delicately in your mouth with some chopsticks and taste it with a clean palate. I think one would have to be disciplined about it anyway.

oxfam

Went to visit Oxfam today. They seem to own most of Summertown - impressive swathe of buildings. My impression from this meeting with just two or three people, so maybe not too representative, didn't leave me loving them that much. They weren't very into sharing information or names, more into building up their brand and being seen to be the authority on everything. Not too willing to risk upsetting the authorities or being too open about anything. Obviously, they are still a marvellous campaigning NGO and all that, but it was a bit disappointing. They seem to exemplify that unique 'NGO arrogance' one comes across in the sector, and I have no time for this obsession with hoarding information so as to gain a competitive advantage over other NGOs. The larger mission is more important than maintaining one's brand, surely...

moulin rouge

Me and Matt went to see Moulin Rouge at the NFT today. It's so hardcore. A three-hour long silent movie from 1928, about the Parisian dance hall which is dominated by its star, the erotic Olga Tschechowa! It's SO much longer than necessary, totally melodramatic, but very engrossing. A guy at the front played a specially commissioned score on the piano, accompanying the film at a furious pace for the whole three hours.

Sun
15-Feb-2004

titus andronicus and henry of hull

Alex and I made a long trek up to Hull at the weekend to see the play Henry had directed, the excitable revenge madness of Titus Andronicus! It was very good indeed, with the Queen of the Goths holding her two semi-naked, snarling, leather-clad sons on leashes, Titus and Lavinia crawling around with their severed hands and excised tongues, people rushing about being angry and lots of inspired bits of direction. He went all the way with the tragedy for the first half of the play, and then played up the more extravagant comic elements of the second half, which I thought was apt if you're going to take this play in the spirit of Shakespeare's time. There's a classic bit I shall always remember, when the dignified Marcus, who is played by a girl dressed in white and remains rather aloof and noble through the whole thing, is given a Cadbury's Cream Egg by Titus in the picnic scene near the end. She looks at it with this perfect look of quizzical dignity tinged with worry at Titus' apparent madness. It was so funny.

We were also united with the whole Bell family, and afterwards we all went to a cast party at a dingy little student kitchen somewhere in Hull, where there were bright strip lights in the ceiling and lots of young people with strong opinions. It was marvellous.

Alex and I had rather a nightmare getting back the next day however. I lost our bus tickets. The trains weren't running to Leeds. It was all beginning to look like Royston Vasey. Luckily we managed to get a train to Doncaster where we spent several hours having the life sapped from us, before managing to catch a train to London. Ah, great cosmopolitan city! How we missed thee!

Good to get out of town every so often though. And what an enjoyable play. Well done Henry.

Fri
13-Feb-2004

peace tax campaign

The Peace Tax Campaign lobbies for conscientious objectors to have the right to opt out of military funding and has urged people to offer support to Robin Brookes who is being charged in court for refusing to pay 10 per cent of his tax bill. This simple, direct campaign provides a Peace Tax Return Form which you can send to the Inland Revenue to demand that the tenth of your tax bill going to the military is spent on peace-building initiatives instead. It's a lovely simple thing to do, and I'm certainly doing it.

Mon
09-Feb-2004

swing time

Matt, Al and I went to see our second Gershwins Fred and Ginger outing, Swing Time. It's an earlier film than the last one we saw, though still the sixth such musical with the two of them, and is more restrained, and generally better. There's an amazing scene for the dramatic song 'Never Gonna Dance' where the two of them dance up an enormous, black double-staircase, with Ginger twirling round and round like a dervish at the top. The number took over forty takes to film, and shooting continued through a Saturday evening and into the early Sunday morning hours with Ginger's feet bleeding. The pain!

The ending is strange, with a series of scenes in which the whole cast have this ongoing joke (not even that funny) and all laugh hysterically at every possible moment. The laughing goes on and on, till you're convinced that they're all stoned, or this is some kind of sick joke, but in the end you get quite into it. There's also an amazingly tacky sunburst right at the end as they kiss before a window looking out over snowy New York and the sun blazes behind the two of them.

Fri
06-Feb-2004

hugo's fish

Matt and I went and had an exciting dinner at Mary and Hugo's flat last night. They were labouring over making their own mayonnaise, which I found very impressive. We ate a delicious huge trout which had been caught by Hugo himself, with parsnips!

Thu
05-Feb-2004

evil howard

Howard, it seems, has taken to reading my weblog. This is an unforgivable intrusion of work people into the lifeworld. Habermas will be joining me in denouncing Howard for this dangerous venture between worlds. The very fabric of reality could rupture, leaving the space time continuum looking, like, well rough.

tobin tax network meeting

I went along to the Tobin Tax Network's latest meeting at the plush little Jubilee Room off the Great Hall at Parliament yesterday. These meetings are always fun as there are lots of faith group people with huge crosses hanging round their necks advocating things like Tobin Tax mechanisms being controlled by the Roman Catholic Church (in a jokey kind of way!). The religious people often seem to be more chilled out than NGO people in many ways...

The Network, which until now has been considered pretty far out, has basically refined its proposals over the last half a year in an attempt to turn the campaign into something politically and economically feasible that lots of people can unite around.

The meeting was reflecting on a paper written by someone from SOAS that examines the case for and against a currency transaction tax. This reviews the literature, and argues that a currency tax at the kind of rates previously proposed by economists like Tobin (0.1% - 1%) would be economically destructive and politically unfeasible. A tax at one or two base points (0.01-0.02%) would be much more acceptable, and would barely affect market liquidity, but should provide adequate disincentives to traders not to engage in short-term 'noise trading' of the kind that causes such damage to third world economies.

Adrian, a senior person from DfID, gave a talk, taking advantage of the informal atmosphere to chat freely about the paper and about his views on the currency tax and other methods for financing development. He thought there were no technical problems with the proposal, it was a matter of political will. He talked lots of economist-speak about transaction costs, behavioural economics and equilibrium, but his main point was that a currency tax involves setting up new mechanisms, and in terms of political economy, this is more costly than financing development through existing mechanisms, i.e. aid levels.

A guy from the New Economics Foundation gave a talk elaborating on the SOAS paper's arguments and explaining the Tobin Tax Network's new position. They have now modified their proposal, arguing for a very low tax in the region of one or two base points. In trying to make the proposal as mainstream as possible, he pointed out that owing to falling currency transaction costs, levying a tax of one or two base points would take market liquidity levels back to their 1998 position, hardly a crazy proposition. If a tax averted the negative effects of currency speculation, many businesses could stand to gain, and the Network is working on getting totally mainstream business people on their side - so far they are doing quite well. In development terms, the revenue generating potential of such a reduced tax would be much lower - probably only about £10-£15bn a year, but they reckon the spin-off effects would be good in many other respects.

It was a very detailed compelling argument, and worth keeping an eye on, especially with Belgium and France passing Tobin legislation, and large Southern countries like Brazil and India backing the idea.

The discussion afterwards was fun. The guy from DfID was quite frank about the fact he doesn't really have a personal opinion on anything. Bit of a paralysed academic. He pointed out that DfID's 'official' chosen vehicle for financing development is the IFF, and explained what he thought of it by observing that it's the only economic mechanism of those flying around at the moment that was thought up by politicians rather than economists.

Marvellous stuff. Sign the Tobin Tax online petition here. You know you want to.

Mon
02-Feb-2004

what a pile of complete rubbish

Apparently, David Blunkett is considering a major extension of anti-terrorist legislation, like we haven't clamped down on civil liberties in this country already. Essentially, post-September 11 we seem to have given away civil rights and on a permanent basis. 7,000 people have been detained in Britain under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, the vast majority were released without charge. These people could have been arrested under ordinary criminal law.

Instead we have to suffer anti terror laws that are being used to quell peaceful protest and detain foreign nationals without trial. More insidiously, they are feeding into this frenzy of paranoia and depression that is tightening its grip on the country. We now get a stream of lurid terrorist warnings that repeatedly ground British Airways and Air France flights, leaving everyone panicking, but with no actual evidence of any kind of threat ever materialising. Strange also how American flights seem to escape these warnings untouched...

I really find it hard to believe any of the 'intelligence' flying around these days. Why does another implausible terror alert always turn up when things are looking dodgy for the UK and US administrations? Why is no-one within the mainstream political system seemingly able to look at things realistically and dispassionately? September 11 is about all this almighty terrorist threat ever amounted to, as far as I can tell. America claims an omnipresent global terrorist army is constantly on the verge of destroying Western civilisation. In fact, what we seem to have is a small band of Saudi Arabian terrorists, Al-Qaeda, who have some extreme religious views and rather ingeniously managed to bring down the tallest buildings in the world two years ago. There's not much more to them though, really.

The war on terror may be quite a complicated phenomenon, but it is definitely not a proportionate approach to a credible threat. It is an enormous made-up pile of crap. As a result of it, we have to put up with living under an ever-tightening security regime where asylum and terrorism gradually warp the national psyche, foster discrimination against Muslim communities, and generally contribute to the erosion of progressive and optimistic politics.

Thu
29-Jan-2004

michal's stalker part two

Wow. Chen came back to Michal's school for the first time in months yesterday, bearing an orange and an apple for him. He took the opportunity to ask her to go for a coffee with him, and when they sat down in the cafe he asked her what had been the point of all the text messages she'd been sending him. She denied sending any text messages, so he got out his phone to show her them. She accepted that OK maybe she'd sent a few. Michal really wanted to sort the whole matter out there and then, so he said, "look, you know this whole thing can't work don't you? I mean, for one thing, you know I'm gay."

Suddenly she reeled back in her chair, put her hands to her head, and started wailing and crying, causing consternation across the cafe. "No!" she cried, "no! You're not! You can't be!" After some persuasion, Michal assured her he was. "It is not lost," she said, "I can have a sex change operation. I can become a man!"

She probably would, as well. But hopefully she doesn't have enough money. But then she does claim Michal is the only man she's ever loved in all her 26 years of life...

Sun
25-Jan-2004

high treason

Matt and I went to the NFT this evening to see High Treason, a 1929 silent movie set in an imaginative future, circa 1940, in which the United Atlantic States and the Federated States of Europe come to the brink of worldwide conflagration. It was all silent, with piano accompaniment from an old man at the front of the auditorium. This was novel for me, and really interesting. He was so good, improvising appropriate piano all the way through - and I got quite used to the format. The film itself looks fabulous - a kind of art deco future with a stern Gladstonian white haired hero heading the World Peace League, and futuristic biplanes and strange airships flying over a Metropolis-style London, which is presented as low-rise, grand and stately, rather than full of skyscrapers.

diplomacy!

When I got back from Lewes, Tom P, Neil and James came round today, and along with Alex we played a nice game of Diplomacy, a game which is enjoying a resurgence of popularity in these parts at the moment. I got a bit vindicative as my glorious plans to lead Russia to a mighty victory were foiled by England and France (curse them!), while Tom and Neil coped very well playing the game for the first time as Turkey and Austro-Hungary.

dinner in lewes with colin, linda and cher

Strictly speaking actually, I was just having dinner with Colin and Linda. I came down to pick up my drugs bag, which Colin had picked up at the new year's party and taken home, thinking it belonged to Kayla. I dropped in on Brighton, meeting Dan H and Emily for a couple of pints. It was good to see them both. Then over to the Bells' residence in Blackboys. Colin picked me up from Lewes train station, and we arrived to behold Linda dancing around the living room to the Best of Cher, an album which boasts this fantastic, glitter-studded front cover:

I got quite sucked in to the Cher - it is rather glamourous and magnificent stuff. Bit like Meatloaf, big and proud, if rather silly. Linda cooked a delicious and exciting meal with a vegetable burger thing with tomato sauce, tagliatelli with a light fish sauce, and fried bananas! It sounds like a shocking combination, but it was absolutely delicious.

Fri
23-Jan-2004

mushrooms on baker street

Yesterday, Michal, Alex and I sampled a little Psilocybe cubensis. We just started nibbling some, and we were interested in testing how they are now we've dried them. Just as potent as when fresh as far as we can tell. We had two each, and were very pleasantly tripping within an hour or two. We went for a stroll around Baker Street, Michal nattering incoherently all the way, and then came back to watch Futurama, being briefly scared by a sober Rosh and Ema, but soon recovering. I felt lovely the next morning as well. Very clear-headed and happy.

Thu
22-Jan-2004

michal's stalker

Hark now while I briefly summarise the tale of Michal's stalker. Michal, just an everyday Polish guy who works at a language school in Finsbury Park, had a student, a Chinese girl called Chen, who how now left his class. Not only does she have a problem with gerund forms, but she has also become completely obsessed with Michal. She's sent him messages, generally stalked him, and it's got to the point where she just sent him this text message: "I'll keep text u fo ever, i know what im doing now , v r my ememy and lover"

Scary stuff.

Wed
14-Jan-2004

lost in translation

After our Diplomacy game, James and I headed over to Andy's to meet Josh, Geli, Steve, Kate and the Rider himself for a marvellous supper that he had prepared for us. Though the original plan had been to watch the late showing of the Return of the King, the Rider hadn't checked the times, so we saw Lost in Translation instead.

Lost in Translation is a lovely look at a brief unusual relationship that develops between two Americans travelling in Tokyo, who become very close, and then part never to see each other again. It has Bill Murray in it as a jaded actor called Bob who stars in Japanese whisky adverts.

He and the girl, Charlotte, have a series of intense encounters in Tokyo, and the film sketches out their quiet relationship and little else. It conveys that amazing intimacy you can have with people you meet when travelling alone very well indeed. And as Charlotte says at one point, when they leave Tokyo they should never see each other again, since that would overextend the emotional connection, and shatter it. Ending those kinds of encounters is always a difficult matter, and I thought the film captured the happiness and sadness that accompanies those moments very well indeed. It was extremely funny too.

Mon
05-Jan-2004

the world has turned and left me here

I'm back in London again after ten days in Devon with the family. It's been rather marvellous. Matt and I headed down on christmas eve, and we all had our biggest present overload year ever! Everyone had thoughtfully found things for everyone else, and we all drank champagne as we tore off bits of wrapping paper and exclaimed at how shiny everything was. We ate an enormous lunch, and then had goose on boxing day, and then Rachel made all kinds of nice stocks, rillettes and soups.

A couple of days later, Adam, Kayla and Henry came to stay, and me, Alex, Adam, Josh and Henry played some heavy Dungeons and Dragons. The adventurers descended into the Monastery of the Old Order, where the marilith (six-armed demon) that they had freed from her 900 year imprisonment had descended through the nine levels of the dungeon battling the black dragon living on the lowermost level and releasing all kinds of disruptive extraplanar creatures into the dungeon ecology. They were sorely tested, and at one point Josh's Dwarven character was slain by an angry young white dragon. The others rescued the body and found a glowing green statue that had the ability to regenerate him to life, though he wound up with much of his skin regrowing as chitin as a result.

At new year, we had a fantastic party. Adam and Henry's parents came along, as well as various notables like Abbie, Kate, Charles, Miranda and Steve. Alex's friends Dan and Matt also found their way down into the wilds of Devon, and Rachel invited Jeffrey who designs her magazine and his family. We all started drinking cava at about four o clock. By around seven, we were all hopelessly pissed, and had to resort to non-alcoholic drinks and other such strategies to avoid passing out by midnight. It was unashamedly drunken, and featured various classic moments, such as Josh letting off a few fireworks Matt and I had given him for christmas around nine o clock, dancing to the power of the blue Weezer album and worshipping the god of American alternative rock, dancing to the inspired Beatles version of Twist and Shout, with my mother turning it up so loud the speakers blew, torrential rain and wind around midnight which made it impossible to even open the door witout being blown back across the room and slammed against the wall like some kind of X-Man character, thus rendering a second waves of fireworks impractical, and of course a loud and emotional rendition of Auld Lang Syne. By three in the morning, Colin was making so-called Joshua Gins with the remaining spirits and mixers, causing already drunk people to become unnecessarily drunker. It was all great fun.

Everyone gradually departed over the next few days, and on Friday, Matt and I had a go with Rachel's new pasta rolling machine and made pasta, which we ate with garlic and chilli and oil. Josh and Matt tried out Rachel's new metal detector as well, and dug up the back garden discovering two copper coins from the reign of Thatcher, c 1986, the front half of a toy lorry, an old bullet, some metal squeezy paint tubes and various bits of wire.

We also all played a lot of table tennis on Josh's new exciting outdoor table tennis table.

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