Resting Pedant

Sun, 31 May 2009 00:50:06 GMT

More unconscionable behaviour in the changing rooms:

*the constant relays of unrecognisable, tuneless whistling. Only a few convulsive seconds from each offender, but someone’s always at it – just beginning or just petering out. The background music alternates between the banging high-energy poison you’d expect and those pained, striving, Evanescence-style dirges. So everyone, regardless of age, taste and bearing in the outside world, just toots a few notes slightly related to those. It’s a relative of tuneless whistling at the urinal, I suppose. A lot of men feel compelled to do that, especially at pubs. “I’m here, I’m doing what I’m doing, and I’m completely at ease.”

*crap dumped everywhere. Holders of ‘platinum membership’ are entitled to a papery white towel whenever they visit. There are bins all over the place to put your wet papery white towels in … but they’re better off hurled on to the floor with your scrunched-up tissues, aren’t they. Perhaps their mums come in later to straighten everything up.

*decaying underwear. This is very widespread. I don’t want to come over all Gok Wan, but a lot of men hang on to their smalls for far too long. If you favour form-fitting, trunk-style underpants, you must replace them immediately once they no longer cling to the thigh. If they flap and sag loosely in the breeze, they are not serving their purpose. They are providing neither containment nor aesthetic appeal - even if they have a person’s name running around the waistband.

If your pants have gone like a skirt, get rid of them and buy some more.

*In the showers today, I caught myself in the middle of a dying-foal sigh.

Mon, 11 May 2009 22:41:24 GMT

I used to swim at the public baths, with its completely unisex changing facilities; separate men’s and women’s showers, obviously, but apart from that, just a great prairie of slam-door cubicles. Now I use the pool at the local gym, and the men and women change communally, but in total seclusion from each other. These are some of the things I see men do, when amongst men only:

- use the puny hairdryers to dry all body areas. Under the arms; between the toes; across the hairy chests and backs. One massive regular pulls open the waistband of his briefs, sticks the nozzle of the dryer right in there, and wiggles it around a bit as a sort of finishing flourish.

- preen, epically and unselfconsciously. This really surprised me, and I think I’m quite vain. I get mesmerised watching all the dudes make imperceptible changes to their very short, gelled hairdos before the mirrors. Quite a few arrive, get half undressed, and then just stand there for ages looking gormlessly at their muscles, or their nipples, or whatever, I don’t know.

- make noises in the showers. They’re not communal here; it’s a series of individual cubicles with opaque curtains arranged around the edges of a square room. You walk in and look about for a free shower, and you hear these strange, mournful sounds. People letting go in a tiny semi-private space, I suppose. Deep sighs, little whimpers, low moans. Sometimes it sounds as if you might pull back one of the curtains to see what’s wrong and find a beautiful, dying foal under the shower, instead of a chubby middle-aged man wringing out his swimming trunks.

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 22:51:50 GMT

Sun, 11 Jan 2009 23:47:24 GMT

I took the ferry from Newhaven to Dieppe just before Christmas to spend some time with an old friend. I can’t really express how bleak the port of Newhaven is. But it’s only a few minutes from Brighton, and the voyage means four uninterrupted hours of reading and staring at the sea, which is obviously worth a little sacrifice.

I came back late on a Sunday night. Foot passengers get off the boat first, and then on to a little minibus to be driven a few hundred yards to the terminal building. So I’m sitting on this minibus waiting for it to fill up, and almost the final passenger to climb in is a man hauling an absolutely enormous wheeled case. It’s the biggest size they make – the sort of size you see in a shop window that makes you stop and reflect on what kind of disorganised lush could ever need luggage that big. This unremarkable-looking, polite man in his late forties is having extreme difficulty. He finds this case so hard to move that it takes all his strength to pull it over the tiny ridges running across the floor of the bus. It blocks the aisle completely. All the time, he’s sweating alarmingly and gasping for breath as if he’s about to pass out. As soon as we pull up at the other end, there’s a big faff because two huffy women want to get past him instantly to run for a train that they have absolutely no chance of catching. He does his best to let them through. He sounds Italian.

By the time we disembark and start queueing to show our passports, he's right in front of me, still panting over his four-foot-high case. We smile at each other a bit, as you do, and I half think about commenting on the weight of his luggage or the attitude of the women on the bus, but I don’t. Of course we’re all standing around for ages, and I look away and back a few times, and dimly realise that he’s fiddling with the case. He seems to have undone the zips around the main opening a little. And then my attention wanders as the queue shifts, and I’m getting my passport out, and the next time I look back there’s a woman standing next to this man, maybe teenage or in her early twenties, wearing a sort of white jumpsuit. They’re mumbling to each other quite amiably, and I’m thinking, how strange, I didn’t see her before. Perhaps I even thought, ha ha, wouldn’t it be amazing if she’d just climbed out of the case – but that would obviously be crazy.

Eventually these two are at the head of the queue, and while he shows his papers the girl nonchalantly walks around the corner, out of sight of the rest of us, towards the exit door leading to the wasteland of Newhaven town. The customs arrangements always seem madly laid-back here – I’ve never seen anyone’s luggage checked – but the man behind the desk spots her immediately and motions for someone to stop her. Meanwhile the case man is waved through without a hitch, and once I’ve shown my passport and headed for the exit, I see him as I walk past. He has stopped to ask the girl who she is and where she came from in a sweet, innocent voice, as a customs officer keeps a grip on her forearm.

And then, as I’m walking on towards the car park, I realise that he's right behind me. I can’t shake the feeling that there’s something peculiar about this, so I look round to see that he’s now carrying this immensely heavy wheeled suitcase by its little fabric handle, lifting it completely clear of the ground as he goes, matching my pace and then overtaking me and loping off into the night in that Pythonesque way people do, when they’re just barely preventing their maximum-speed walk from shifting into an attention-grabbing, headlong run.

Someone had seen the girl emerging from his suitcase and told the security staff, and they frog-marched him back as I was starting up my car. It’s pretty hard to disappear fast in Newhaven if you don’t have a car.

Every time I tell someone all this I can see them silently marvelling at how stupid I was not to pick up on what was going on. Apparently, if you don’t want to believe that a person has been clumsily smuggled under duress from Dieppe to Newhaven in a wheeled suitcase, and you don’t actually see the moment when they climb out of it, three feet from where you stand, you can convince yourself that it didn’t really happen at all. But why would I want to do that, even unconsciously? And why did she get out of the case before they’d cleared the passport desk, unless she was even keener to escape from the man who was wheeling her than to get into England undetected?

Wed, 24 Dec 2008 18:05:48 GMT

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 23:02:04 GMT

I bought a big, stout, black umbrella with a spike on top but so far it's been a disappointment. It seemed huge in the shop, and I thought it would measure up very nicely to the puny telescopic things you see around. But now that I have it, there are great big umbrella people abroad everywhere, and I don't feel as special as I had expected. And it's actually quite hard to compare sizes properly - once you're alongside a rival who appeared impressive at a distance, all you can really see is the inside of your own umbrella. Of course, there isn't anywhere venerable in Brighton any more that has an Umbrella Dept., where you could seek the advice of a gentleman who has been in umbrellas for many years, and has some opinions on the subject, and will shoot a few up and down for you from the dozens on display. I had to go to Debenhams.

Stepping about with my new umbrella, I noticed a new convenience store in Preston Street called Thingslicious. A very fine name, if not as utterly post-descriptive as Well Done, the newsagent now open at Castle Square. Also, a new place in Montefiore Road that repairs boots and shoes. It's very conveniently located for me, but I can't leave any footwear at an establishment called Cobbler's Nest. I mean excuse my language, but what the fuck kind of idiotic name is Cobbler's Nest? Was there a bygone age when the most resilient shoe repairs were performed by craftsmen seated high in the branches of a tree? Is that what they're harking back to?

I am still knocking around

Sun, 09 Nov 2008 16:22:29 GMT

Paul Kelly's little films about defunct London cafés:

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 15:41:16 GMT

I just had this regular thing that comes around every few years, where I let slip my completely unshakeable conviction that Charles and Ray Eames were two intense, bespectacled brothers and then some arse jumps in to put me right, and then I say something like "Oh yes it's like with George and Ira Gershwin, because they're .. um .." And then I realise that I'm not quite positive that they really were two brothers, and maybe Ira was George's wife. Not that Ira is ever a female name, but maybe it is.

And now I have it all clear, but this will recur around 2012, and I will record it here if I still have a Livejournal. In fact it may be the next entry, at this rate.

Sat, 09 Aug 2008 23:10:01 GMT

All alone, lying on the floor listening to music. Everything's a bit of a mess. The phone went a couple of times, but I left it.

This morning I managed five episodes of Orson Welles's Harry Lime radio serial, which is all free at the Internet Archive. He is a much less unpleasant character in these than he is in The Third Man. Half the time Welles sounds completely unfamiliar with the lines, as if he's being handed them phrase by phrase as he speaks. Every episode begins with Lime being shot dead, as at the close of the film. Then, in a tangled-up, self-referential, auto-critical sort of outburst, he explains that this is sound of him being killed in Vienna "as those of you know who saw the movie The Third Man". "Yes," he continues, rather obviously, "that was the end of Harry Lime ... but it was not the beginning."

So, I've just been lying here really, wondering how I would have got on back then. Back when the waistband of the male trouser was worn closer to the armpit than the testicle, as is favoured today.

*

(Everything's a bit of a mess in this room, I mean. I wasn't generalising about my life.)

jargonauts

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 23:43:24 GMT

If I have a wish for the coming week, it's that fewer people will use unpleasant words, and nasty strings of them, in my presence. Sometimes I think about leaving human company behind to live among creatures who communicate in quiet whirrs and beeps, with a note of fragrance underneath.

Once, before my voice had broken properly, I admit that I picked up all the music papers specifically to read about cowering shards of inevitability this and a deliquescent intimation of mortality that. Long words all pressed up together made my heart beat a little faster, but now I prefer miserly writers who really ration the syllables. Henry Green and Muriel Spark are amazing like that. Will Self and Jonathan Meades are not.

But it's the jargon that's getting me down. Last week everything was robust. We've got a robust plan, that seems like a robust strategy, and I thought you gave a robust defence of your views. And still with the sourcing, everywhere. When did people start sourcing things anyway? What's the difference between local ingredients and locally-sourced ingredients? Part of me wants to carry a huge gong everywhere for highlighting the bad words, but most of me knows I must accept the bloat and move on.

Across the piece - this is big with my colleagues at the moment. First it was just politicians on the Today programme, but now everyone's promising to carry out new ideas across the piece, and sometimes across the piste. I think it means really well, but I don't know for sure. Two people from nPower came to the door on Friday to make me change supplier and it was mostly quite nice, quite soporific, with the woman saying, "What it is, it's really simple," over and over, and pointing at a book of extremely complex flow charts with questions inside diamonds and rectangles about my energy consumption. But then she said, "What it is, it's really simple - we can save you money on your electric across the piece," and that's fuckery, to borrow Ms Winehouse's nice new word.

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 23:14:11 GMT

I went to Cambridge, and sat waiting for someone in a huge new Pret à Manger the size of a Victorian workhouse. I got talking to this bloke - or barista - who, it turned out, was half-Israeli and half-English and had just returned from living in Mexico, where he experiences considerable success as a wrestler. In Mexico he wears a mask which covers the left side of his face in the Union Jack and the right in the Stars and Stripes, 'to get the crowds going'. When he wrestles in England (and where in Cambridge you might do this, I did not ask) he wears some other less controversial mask whose details I forget. He grapples under the name Tico 'The Tornado' Gonzalez, and if you think I'm making it up you had better visit Pret à Manger in Market Street and tell him so. He only looked about twenty. I don't understand where people that young find the time to have done things like this.

After we had talked for a while, a manager told him to return to the counter because a barista must always be ready to etc. Disappointingly, the Tornado did not stand on his throat or scream in his face.

Then I drove to Ely with my wife, past a restaurant called the Slap-Up Tandoori. How good can a restaurant with that name, sitting alone at the side of a barren stretch of dual carriageway, be?

Wed, 14 May 2008 23:24:25 GMT

I've got some amazing marmalade at the moment. I lie in bed salivating about it when I should be asleep.

Wed, 14 May 2008 00:14:13 GMT

Ah, Brighton Festival. Yesterday evening I did this thing where they strap a small device with a screen to the handlebars of your bicycle, give you ear buds and a little microphone, and send you out (oh god) into the community (jesus) to be art. You could stop wherever you fancy, and somehow the magic spirit box was able to tell you the names of others who had already visited the same place. Then you could choose to answer a question asked over the headphones, or press names on your screen to hear responses from the people who had just been there.

I wanted to foam with contempt for the whole enterprise because I sometimes mistakenly believe that this is what makes me happy, but I ended up eulogising the sea and the piers, and doing the story about when Tim locked himself inside an empty police car on the way home from the pub outside the Open Market and started the sirens wailing, and nobody could get him out. I realised in the telling of it that I don't know what's happened to Tim, and I got quite choked up.

Naturally there were some vomit-inducing recordings to listen to. "What do you lie awake thinking about?" "I think of my father being eaten by dragons, and my fight to stay above the surface, and worry that I will never provide enough for my beloved children." But there was non-drivel too - people speaking in tantalising ways that made you wish you could actually meet them. The special bicycle-mounted machine made me ride very fast from the library to Lower Rock Gardens against a soundtrack of wheedly, tinkling music, and then asked me to talk on the subject of Leaving And Never Coming Back. I fell into the confessional mode. It was impossible not to involve yourself.

And this is exactly what these bastard community artists want.

I think it’s short for argument-bargument

Sat, 03 May 2008 09:35:55 GMT

Funny week. I had the radio on constantly, and Scenes From An Italian Restaurant was played three times on different stations. Halfway through the third listen I heard a beautiful, melodious voice at my shoulder saying actually, this is a pretty amazing song. Yet I was the only person in the car at the time. That was on Wednesday, when I had to drive to a remote spot in Suffolk for business reasons. I found a B&B that looked just fine through the lens of the internet. What’s wrong with the internet in this respect? Ask for a picture of a navvy bumming an antelope and it immediately returns many precisely matched results, but for B&Bs it’s a bag of snakes.

The only things in the room were a single bed, a wardrobe filled with children’s clothes, and a combined TV/video on a pine chest with a few films inside. Freaky Friday the remake, Slap Her She’s French, Road Trip. On top of the pile was an unboxed tape labelled INTERESTED IN MAKING MONEY? DISCUSS THIS PROGRAMME OVER BREAKFAST WITH PAUL. It began with a man addressing the camera while he walked around what I’m pretty sure was High Wycombe town centre. Something about selling electricity to your friends. I started fuming about it but then I fell asleep. I am unable to talk about what happened in the morning.

Yesterday I visited one of my oldest friends, who has moved from London to one of these places on the Kent coast where just five years ago there was nowhere to buy an Orla Kiely cushion or an old wardrobe painted white; I mean, an armoire. We had lunch at his house, looking out at his lawn from the kitchen. It was just me and him and his little boy, eating Covent Garden tomato soup and expensive white bread, talking about books and films. Come at about one and I’ll make you a light lunch from the 80s, he might as well have said. From twelve to fourteen I went to his meticulous house every Saturday, and it was a tin of Heinz tomato soup at noon with rubbery slices of Sunblest, Penguin biscuits later. I usually left at about six in the evening, while his mum was laying the kitchen table for the next morning’s breakfast. He had a Sharp record player with a vertical turntable and a stylus on both sides, so you could play a record all the way through without turning it over. I still feel close to him, in a pointless sort of way. It would feel phoney to confide in him. We just talk about books and films and music, approximately twice a year.

Anyway, I was sitting in his kitchen, in this place I had never been to before, thinking what is it that this reminds me of, and it was only when I was leaving that I realised everything smelt just as it did in his childhood home. Nothing pungent or unpleasant - just that domestic cocktail sort of thing that you only pin down by contrasting it with the slightly different versions in other houses. How did he hold on to that? I think I was just smelling an old picture in my brain.

On the way back I went to a branch of John Lewis, where I was mistaken for a member of staff in the electronic gadgets dept. “So do you have any DSes then?” I can’t even express how much this fucked me off.

Wed, 09 Jan 2008 14:22:52 GMT

I ate such a disappointing lunch just now. It's going to make me feel sad for the rest of the day.

You have a point; an idiotic one, but a point.

Sat, 29 Dec 2007 01:19:54 GMT

My brother-in-law sent me two blister-packed toothbrushes and three pairs of blue nylon socks this year. He does all his Christmas shopping at a Wal-Mart somewhere in South Carolina. As November approaches, I think he just scoops things at random from the shelves into a Jiffy bag and posts them to England by surface mail. These are the only truly unguessable gifts I receive. A very small amount of exoticism clings to them, because they come from a different supermarket giant to the ones I know here.

He has led a complicated and troubled life and can be fantastically irritating, what with the merciless Christianity simmering underneath every utterance, but I find myself very drawn to him because he is a tireless searcher. Navy, marriages, the Unification Church, truck driving, school teaching. Last year, for some bogus-sounding reason or other, he was frying chickens at a place called Zaxby’s (where they call the salads Zalads, because “calling them salads would have been an understatement”) and now he is back selling cars again.

***

All About Eve at the Duke Of York’s on the evening of the 24th. It was such a pleasure to sit in the dark, cackling with all the people who have no other home town to return to, or no inclination to go there. Then I made my mother update me on her enigmatic, uninventable neighbours. The compromised bigot is now suffering some sort of agoraphobia, and cannot be in any large building without a clear view of the exit at all times. She is despairing, because this rules out almost all her favourite haunts, such as M&S in Western Road. Also, she now goes to great lengths to avoid making left turns when out and about because it makes her “feel sick inside”. A new man has moved in on the top floor. He lives entirely by candlelight to save on his electricity bills and arranges his money on the kitchen table in permanent annotated piles – gas, TV licence, pub. She has her own names for all these people: Stormin' Norman, The Great Raymondo, Ron Moody, Luz Clarita. I keep expecting her to sit me down and tactfully break the news that she's signed a huge book deal or done an awful play for Radio 4.

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 00:56:36 GMT

Organisations with which I intend to establish stronger links in 2008:

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 23:44:05 GMT

Give it to the kids

Tue, 23 Oct 2007 21:28:03 GMT

Download David Lynch and Donovan discussing Transcendental Meditation with Edward Stourton on Radio 4 this morning. Whenever anyone faintly 'creative' is invited on to Today they sound as if they've been summoned by the Headmaster to explain their anti-social behaviour.

Things I remember from the huge wall of Lynch's scribbled-on post-its and hotel notepaper at the Fondation Cartier in May:

"stamp on bees larvae in yard laughing"

"COFFEE a dog is eating turkey"

I meant to say, part a million

Sun, 21 Oct 2007 23:36:14 GMT

When I got home from Germany there were four messages from Marco saying let’s have lunch at the New Piccadilly. I had to call back and break the sorry news that, despite being unexpectedly-not-shut-down for much of its life, it really did shut down as expected a month ago. We ended up eating in a stupid place next to his work, where the waiter runs over and squats next to you at the table in that jaunty, chummy sort of a way. I feel bad for not enjoying this treatment, but I never do. On his first attack he called me ma maaan, and then hombre when he came back with the drinks. These things just don’t sound right from a young, white, middle-class English mouth. Being addressed as fucker would actually put me in a better frame of mind to enjoy a meal.

Anyway, the New Piccadilly. The New Piccadilly was continuously on the brink of closure for at least twenty years, maybe more. It was almost a relief when it finally switched off the EATS sign forever. How would it have been to nurse a coffee there and listen to the tinging of the till without fretting that it might be the last time? Someone must know, I suppose. I shan’t go on about the ancient patterned formica panels and tables, the booths, and the vinyl seating bolted in to the floor; the unmodernised menu with an 01 number on the front and the option of minute steak and chips with a little spaghetti on the side; the faintly naval tunics of the waiters (were there ever any waitresses there?); the indifferent food made completely magical by the quiet eccentricity of the whole place. It’s all gone now, and I only remembered to write something down because of Marco’s message.

My last visit, on the 12th of September, in the certain knowledge that it was shutting for good on the 22nd, was a bit weird. Nobody was acting like a normal diner. Selfish-looking fat media fellows were busy taking furtive pictures of the light fittings and things, having occupied all the good tables. There was one lone girl on her lunch hour with a banana split and a cappuccino; exactly what I used to have when, as a highly-strung teenage ponce in the mid to late eighties, I spent many lingering afternoons here. I used to sit in the centre aisle near the counter, trying to read City Of Spades or Absolute Beginners and wondering about girls like that, with ladders in their tights and a distracted air. But today everyone was thinking: this is my last frothy coffee, and this is my last peach melba.

It was a flotation tank for loafers and dreamers. A nice, cosy, colourful place to go when you needed London to stop for a while, or felt like leaving your shitty job immediately, or wanted egg and chips with someone before seeing a film. Long thick parmesan shavings and wasabi peas and thayir sadam are all very nice, but they’re not egg and chips.

Who decided that places like the New Piccadilly aren’t needed any more? I still need them.

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 23:53:50 GMT

Not really a fitting tribute, but here is an idiotic compilation someone has made of Deborah Kerr preparing tea at different stages of her movie career:

I wonder if tea in The Innocents would be better than tea in Major Barbara. They refuse to address stuff like this in Cahiers du cinéma.

Thu, 11 Oct 2007 08:56:04 GMT

Yes I know you have your problems, and I hope it gets better soon, but at least you're not attending the purgatorial Frankfurt Book Fair. Are you? If you are, please comment immediately and I'll buy you lunch. Please.

In Frankfurt taxis the meters are incorporated into the driver's mirror so that the figures appear to be just floating in the left hand corner.

And now, in the manner of a recent post by ruudboy, would everyone please make an effort to get this one right:

You and I and you and me. If "I" is the subject of the sentence, use "I". Otherwise, don't.

Correct: Dirk Bogarde, Sky Saxon and I are meeting for tea this afternoon.

Correct: Alain Delon does not pay enough attention to Reg Varney and me.

Incorrect: Things between Paula Prentiss and I didn't work out.

Incorrect: Bruno Ganz and me are so completely over.

Right, tchüss.

Wed, 19 Sep 2007 00:48:25 GMT

People do write about Louis Tussaud's House Of Wax every so often, but it's always with a tinge of ridicule, or even pity. There are signs everywhere forbidding photography, but on a dead weekday afternoon it just wasn't possible to comply. It's true that many of the figures barely connect with the humans that inspired them, and that the collection hasn't been refreshed with new waxworks for around twenty years, but so what? It is a melancholy and hilarious place, and incredible value at £3 admission. Celebrities and historical greats upstairs, murderers and other bad people in the basement, and then you emerge into a completely unexpected room full of fruit machines, pinball tables and arcade games from the 1960s and 70s, all of which are still 2p and 10p a go. What sort of dullard could fail to find something to enjoy in all that?

There is a little more at flickr, along with some pictures of Great Yarmouth's last unravaged Italian-English cafés, if you like that sort of thing. Personally I can't leave it alone.

Sun, 09 Sep 2007 08:33:57 GMT

Brian Sewell on the radio just now:

"I don't believe in England. I think England is a kind of shit place, run by shits."

Tip top as always, Brian.

Sun, 02 Sep 2007 15:02:48 GMT

These people have started lumbering through the least threatening, chichiest parts of Brighton on Saturdays now. They don't belong to particular shops or bars. What business do they have on a public street?

They're not there to monitor the temperature of the babyccinos, are they.