Month: January 2007

did anyone else discover it was a bit of a waft on the windy side?
cycling in, had to pedal flat out, just to go down the hill of Sussex Square
would have been better whisking the duvet cover off the bed and sailing
swallows and amazons tack

Once our dustbin was blown over and i had to rescue the lid from down the road, cycle helmet at a jaunty angle, dustbin lid shield clasped to my breast, ready for the joust, chivalry, love, knight in shining amour…

…still going home should be super smoothe conveyor belt blown along

………. after moaning

nonsense, being buffeted it’s such good fun,
legs washing machine churning, trying to dent the wind
baggy clothes sucked back taut by the gale
a smear of grimace of a grin across my face, waaghh,
as though I am smudged up ‘gainst a window pane.
the rain, like being ‘slapped in the face with a damp flannel’

….. does though play havoc with my bobby charlton dreadlock combover

apologies if you’ve seen this piccie before, but there was a radio 4 prog about when Dizzy Gillespie ran for President in 1964
bebop jazz trumpeter, self styled clown prince of jazz
apparently he wanted Miles Davies as the head of the CIA

his autobiog was apparently called ‘to be, or not to bop’

this is my favorite song!
i have only ever heard it once, but it made me cry, some things just do.
i’m not too bothered if i never hear it again, because it probably wouldn’t be as good as i remember
The original is by Richard Thomson, but that wasn’t what i heard. just some mournful bloke with an acoustic guitar.
A folk song, they always sound so much better than the written down lyrics
‘that’s the price we pay, for the chains that we refuse’

dang forgot the actual lyrics!
oh and it reminds me of people i used to know

…………..
………………………….

Bees Wing
I was nineteen when I came to town, they called it the Summer of Love
They were burning babies, burning flags. The hawks against the doves
I took a job in the steamie down on Cauldrum Street
And I fell in love with a laundry girl who was working next to me

Oh she was a rare thing, fine as a bee’s wing
So fine a breath of wind might blow her away
She was a lost child, oh she was running wild
She said “As long as there’s no price on love, I’ll stay.
And you wouldn’t want me any other way”

Brown hair zig-zag around her face and a look of half-surprise
Like a fox caught in the headlights, there was animal in her eyes
She said “Young man, oh can’t you see I’m not the factory kind
If you don’t take me out of here I’ll surely lose my mind”

Oh she was a rare thing, fine as a bee’s wing
So fine that I might crush her where she lay
She was a lost child, she was running wild
She said “As long as there’s no price on love, I’ll stay.
And you wouldn’t want me any other way”

We busked around the market towns and picked fruit down in Kent
And we could tinker lamps and pots and knives wherever we went
And I said that we might settle down, get a few acres dug
Fire burning in the hearth and babies on the rug
She said “Oh man, you foolish man, it surely sounds like hell.
You might be lord of half the world, you’ll not own me as well”

Oh she was a rare thing, fine as a bee’s wing
So fine a breath of wind might blow her away
She was a lost child, oh she was running wild
She said “As long as there’s no price on love, I’ll stay.
And you wouldn’t want me any other way”

We was camping down the Gower one time, the work was pretty good
She thought we shouldn’t wait for the frost and I thought maybe we should
We was drinking more in those days and tempers reached a pitch
And like a fool I let her run with the rambling itch

Oh the last I heard she’s sleeping rough back on the Derby beat
White Horse in her hip pocket and a wolfhound at her feet
And they say she even married once, a man named Romany Brown
But even a gypsy caravan was too much settling down
And they say her flower is faded now, hard weather and hard booze
But maybe that’s just the price you pay for the chains you refuse

Oh she was a rare thing, fine as a bee’s wing
And I miss her more than ever words could say
If I could just taste all of her wildness now
If I could hold her in my arms today
Well I wouldn’t want her any other way

I saw half of this film last night, the middle bit, so a bit confusing, i thought it was lovely, very sweet!

much to my suprise i have a brief photo booth story ……..
Once I was in Victoria station, in the booth, perched on one of those swivel twizzle stools,
face contorted into a rictus grin, awaiting the permanent stasis of flash,
I hear some ferrety rustling outside, ‘oooh theres someone in there!’
Then the curtain is flung back and a beaming bewhiskered drunk announces ‘suprise!’
he shoves his face in, just as the blue light flashes. ha.

in a photo, trapped forever together
in the picture i’ve always liked the look of disdain and grumpiness on my face, apart from that i guess we could very well be brothers

whenever Finn is having his passport piccie taken, i always burst in for the last photo. fun!

………
I finally got around to watching amelie the other week, it’s brilliant, so sweet, gentle, playful and imaginative.
just how all films should be!

……………..
….. an excuse for another rambling travel shaggy dog tale about getting my passport photo taken in Kathmandu

On the way to the shop, jostling through the grubby, happy palaver of the streets I saw a beggar, fakir type.
Somehow he had dug a hole in the tarmac and had his head completely buried under the road. Just like an ostrich!
I’ve no idea how he managed to breathe.

The obvious drawback with this busking strategy being that there was no way he could see, if somebody ran off with all his cash?!

Next I met the ‘Official Nepalese Thriller era Michael Jackson Impersonator’, he was greeting people in the street, then periodically would give a Billie Jean Yelp, spin around, moonwalk then grab his crotch
Very impressive, I went over to greet him, he was wearing an alvin stardust glove. we shook hands.
he leaned in, stared into my eyes. ‘Black Hash? … Change Money… Good Rate’
Michael Jackson could have been my money changer!

The actual photo was taken by a man in a little shop, who held an old fashionned flash bulb above his head. look at the birdie.. 23 awww

anyway, the point of this tail, another amelie theme, missed letters
after having my photo taken i went to pick up my mail from poste restante.
This was yonks before the days of email and internet cafes.
You had to time your mail drops perfectly. Exciting! Often hadn’t heard from anyone in 3 months, then hopefully a big batch of letters.
crushing if there was nothing and you think checking your inbox every 2 mins is bad enough!

The post office in Kathmandu was very lax, you could just take anything away, i found a letter for Flaps and took that for him.
We had been travelling together for 3 months, but had separated in Maduraii, India i was always supposed to be catching up with him again, but in the end went a bit doolally in sumatra, what with the orangutangs and had to go home
Flaps ended up in Beijing leaving town on the trans-siberian 2 days before the army stormed Tiannamen square!

anyway i put the letter in my Rucksac, forgot about it, got back to England, letter migrated to a box and then up, up and away into my parents loft
….years later i found it
…. and presented it to him, unopened, an exact 10 years after he should have received it

he was very good about it. merely commenting that it was from a woman he’d fancied at the time, never seen again and that had he received it, it would possibly have changed the course of his life!

oh well

i got my brother a book on brighton ghosts for christmas,
apparently theres a grey nun ghost in the lanes, who wafts spookily along meeting house lane, before disappearing into a bricked up doorway.
I noticed the doorway at lunch
yikes! scooby doo, pesky meddling kids

sadly, i was unable to read further in the book, as am of a timid disposition and get the heebie bee gees to easily
I don’t believe in this ghost, but i do believe in some sort of spirit realm

didn’t max befriend a ghost in meeting room 4 basement?

botched up spelling botticelli
or something similar

Ker-splash!
I jumped in the sea on Christmas day.
wakes you up.
It’s the local tradition at the forty foot swimming place in Dublin, just below James Joyces Martello tower
(‘stately plump buck mulligan’), hundreds of folk take the plunge, many in fancy dress, a great festive occasion.

A couple of years ago i managed to swear at pams mum, a good catholic woman
Just as i was getting out she asked ‘how was it?’, to which i naturally replied ‘f***ing freezing!!!’

This year, there was a seal swimming about too, guess he was curious about the kerfuffle?
It’s not that cold when your in, but afterwards the wind chill really gets you, my goosebumps had goosebumps!

Afterwards i wore a towel turban wrapped about my head and slurped a sizeable glass of brandy, teeth cha-t-t-ering against the rim
I asked Finn, who had his new christmas camera at the ready, ‘did you get a picture of me jumping in?’
‘aww Dad, your going to have to do it again. Spiderman jumped in just before you, so i took a picture of him instead’

hrrumphh
……..

goodness no! I’m not one of those mexican cliff diving tarzan types,
I reckon it was about a 10ft drop max, i guess the 40ft is similar to the possibly slightly spurious length of an irish mile?
forty foot is the name of the place

the water in the Irish sea is alledgedly warmer due to Sellafield (springfield. doh) Nuclear power station

‘the snot green, scrotum tightenning sea’
as Joyce, echoing the ‘wine dark’ sea of the oddyssey calls it.

yep i’ll be in come the summer, me, David Walliams and Moby Dick, your welcome to join us Ed

I helped bring down the Berlin wall, mostly it was Gorby, me and David Hasselhoff
I was there a few months after it happened, the main tourist attraction at the time was getting a hammer and bashing slabs off of it
It was brilliant destructive fun, even better than jumping on sandcastles
All the way along the wall, there were ladders you could climb, so i felt like a bit like Kiki the frog, from Hectors house… or going up the ladder was like, in the old days, bunking over the fence at Glastonbury!

Once up the top, you could heave ho, bash out all your angst, biff bosh heartily away at it.

I had a small paleontologists hammer, so it was more dinosaur hunting at Lyme Regis than the crumbling edifice of communism
Viva Zapata! Long live Trotsky! should have borrowed his ice pick…
the last piece i knocked down with my juggling club (sigh. idiot!)

At home somewhere my lumpen proleteriat piece of the wall looks a little like moon rock, ‘cept from concrete, with a few daubs of graffiti spray colour.
I’m not as proud of it as my piece of the West Pier, from the day it burned down, this sits proudly on my computer, looking like a very charred piece of toast
or even of the piece of turf from QPR when they….

…. I guess the answer as to where to stay in Berlin or Barcelona is nope! not a breeze
If the question was Berlin or Barcelona, then Barcelona is just a zillion times better