Month: January 2007

Errol Brown (part 2)

ooh and Cliff Richard gave a concert at our school, he turned up in a canary yellow Rolls Royce, personalised number plate, sold his autograph(!), then gave some gabble all about that god bloke. finally performing a few songs on request
everybody hollered for ‘Devil Woman’, but curiously he refused!

he lives in St Georges Hill Weybridge, billionaires row, which somewhat sadly is where the Diggers set up their commune
you know the one that Billy Bragg belts out in that song
‘It was 1642, the Diggers came to St Georges Hill….’ or some such
……………
dead thread said fred, but i will witter on with the usual harmless egotistical eccentricity
………
one summer we spent painting a house in Talland bay Cornwall,
’tis very therapeutic perched 20ft up a ladder, paint brush in hand gawping at the ocean.
..and the place has beautiful purple rocks.. and an eleventh century church..and
Of an afternoon we’d amble around the coast path, to Polperro and then sit in the pub for umpteen hours and pints,
before a precarious moonlit trips traipse stumble home over the cliffs

Most day we’d meet Richard Madeley on the path, as he had a holiday cottage nearby.
He is not a man who knows doubt, he’d boom out a hearty ‘hello’ then stride by, in shorts, walking boots and wooly socks.
oh and a shoulder height staff.
we’d always hope he’d say ‘good morning’ or ‘this morning’ or something tv programmish. but nope

Anyway on the last day, car packed up, we’re just pulling out the drive.
Pam is changing her trousers in the car, no idea why as we haven’t even left.
Mr Madeley walks vigorously past, i say ‘go on then’, she says ‘step on it’
so as we speed past she moons Richard. ha!
The only prob being that, much as i love old volvos, top speed, fully laden, uphill, on an armslength wide cornish country lane ,is not very top speed at all.
It took an embarrassing age to drift past him.
finally we were away. phew!
In the rear mirror a much amused Madeley is shaking his staff threateningly. ho hum
…………..

zoey ball knows me… but i don’t know her
i was in the sea life center, when she came over and said hello to me, sad to say i gave a ‘what is it now zoey’ type shrug.
but that was only because i was mesmerised by the herd of pirranhas gobble gloop glooping behind her head!

she was with her nipper and she seemed friendly… and remarkably tall
i don’t suppose Brighton celebs count as everybody has a eubank or two
…………

RichardB, you deserve your own TV series…

ah thank you, a frightenning concept!

a film maybe?

my friend Dee was in Flash Gordon, you know the camp 1980’s one with Brian Blessed
‘Flash aaah saviour of every one of us’
Even better, she was the ice queen ‘Queen of Fridgidaire’. ho ho

…………….
ee and Struan are dreadful lushes, their house has a roof terrace which overlooks the dome of the Hanbury ballroom,
precarious steep on all sides, some good garden gnomage though, evrey time i visit i get so trashed i can hardly climb back down the ladder. gulp. come plummeting through that dome one day.
anyway Struan is apparently the real life model for Mr Rude

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts/2677285.stm

as they’re best friends with Adam Hargreaves the Mr Men heir!

his job consists of going to work in the shed at the bottom of the garden, drawing round the bottom of his coffee cup
getting out the felt tip pens, then colouring in the circle to make a new Mr Man
that’d be the job for me
…………………..

I bumped into Andrew Flintoff in a hotel at heathrow teh other week
he is even taller than Zoey Ball!
The whole rest of the England team were probably there too, hiding behind the palms in the atrium
i doubt i’d have recognised them anyway

……………….

good story. ho hum

Wendy from Transvision Vamp!

Once when i was living in Barcelona, she was filming a video in Plaza Real which entailed flounce dancing around the fountain
admiring her balance, i said to my friend ‘hello that’s whatsername!’
i presume she was startled by an english accent. stumbled, stopped what she was doing and peered down from on high at me, just like an incredibly long legged stork
then pronounced in a finest Looondon accent ‘ere, what are you doing ere then’
sadly she was then bustled away by a coterie of bodyguards and minders, not to be

‘ere what are doing ere then’ though

………………
Once at a party I met Jonah Louie, mostly forgotten now
he once sang ‘You’ll always find me in the Kitchen at Parties’ – ‘cept i found him in the queue for the loo
Jonah as befits his name was a bit down on his luck and somewhat glum.
being, as ever, a drunken twerp i took it upon myself to cheer him up!
‘don’t be sad Jonah’, so every time I’d see him i’d sing some of his song lyrics
I sang Bang Bang (lyrics below, as it’s a rather marvelous song)
only later did i discover that it wasn’t even his song, but had pipped him to the number one spot and was actually by B A Robertson
….. oh well

B.A. Robertson Bang Bang Lyrics

The straight jacket of true love’s fine bang, bang
If you’re Houdini in your spare time bang, bang
Lord Nel and Lady Hamilton they fought for love
When he come home from the war he gave her what for love
The mighty fall when love has called

Vampire friends desire to lust – fang fang
They fall on necks then fall in love – pang pang
The Marquis de Sade was happy with a stroke of love
Sherlock Holmes alone preferred a little toke of love

Bang, bang, the mighty fall
Bang, bang, when love has called
Bang, bang, the mighty fall

Tony and Cleo struck out for the freedom down Egypt’s way
But Caesar had squeezed her in Rome on his quilt for a day
Hey, hey

Now Anthony got really angry
About old Caesar’s hanky panky
She told em she would use em
And boy did she abuse em
Fall in love and blew em away

Bang, bang, the mighty fall
Bang, bang, when love has called
Bang, bang, the mighty fall
Bang, bang

And Sam and Delilah they both we should file under fool
‘Cos when the temple start to crumble
Sammy for his comb did fumble
Life was in a ruin, she loved Johnny Fruin
Fall in love and blew em away

I was Errol Browns paper boy (part 1)

I was Errol Browns paper boy!
you know, the lead singer of hot chocolate (‘you sexy thing’)
he had a brown moustache, er porsche, i mean parked in his drive

http://www.errolbrown.com/gallery.htm

does anyone else know anybody famous? the more tenuous the link the better

my friend Henry went to school with Laurence Llewlyn Bowen, who was apparently not very popular! gosh.

whereas our school could only boast the son of Rodger Dautrey, the singer from the Who.
not very impressive, except the son had a glass eye, which if you asked him nicely he’d pop out and roll around like a marble

…………….
my mate Flaps was caught by Griff Rhys Jones whilst stealing a bottle of Timotei shampoo from Griff’s bathroom
…………….
old hippy canucks
Joni Mitchell
Neil Young
and Jen..and casey .. and adrian, that nation has surely contributed enough!

claire who i shared a cave with went from there straight to a barn in the bottom of Johnny Morris’s garden near avebury

http://www.screenonline.org.uk/people/id/464434/index.html

he kept a llama
and was very grumpy (morris and the llama both!)
back in 1970 Johnny Morris refused to sign my sisters autograph book in weybridge library
not that i bear a grudge
………………….

gosh andy as an air hostess!
you should wear your uniform to work…. and push the drinks trolly around

I was once on a plane with michael portillo, he has a big head..
quite literally his head is huge! sitting several rows behind him nobody could see the film screen whatsoever

the only advantage to having michael portillo on board is that if one of the windows was blown out, in a decompression, goldfinger type moment, he would be sucked towards it
and completely plug the gap. hurrah

Bryan Ferry (father of dreadful tory, orville? otis?) was air hijacked once, there is a great surreal photograph of it somewhere, but i couldn’t find it. glum

……………………
that Dean Gaffney bloke was at my brothers wedding (and a mountain of Proffita Rolls)
actually half the cast of East Enders was there
Finn was only 3 at the time so we tied a Helium balloon to his arm, one with ‘Happy Wedding’ on it, then set him free to roam whither he wilt, the logic being we’d be able to see his balloon amidst the crowd of disco boppers.
what with general champagne quaffing we hadn’t noticed him for a while, then away in the distance up bobbed the balloon
‘ah there he is’, so i dashed over, only to find, nope not Finn, but it was that italian restaurant geezer, Bepe.
Bepe had a half deflated helium balloon to his lips and was speak squeaking in a high pitched Donald Duck voice
…as you do

gong bath

anyone heard of gong baths?
it’s the latest craze which is sweeping the nation! Well actually one friend in the school told me all about it
she went off to the BuddhaFields festival in the summer and returned, as you do, with a gong bath practionner

From what i can gather, you lie down and relax on the floor
the fellow sets up huge gong near your head, then J Arthur Rank, gives it the most colossal boiiiinnng
The cosmic vibrations, wash all over your body turning bones to jelly rubber, this sets up harmonious rhythmic oscillations in all your atoms
he then gets a little tinier tinnier gong and runs up and down your prime meridians, doing little feather gonging rituals
gives me goosebumps thinking about it
what great fun!

……
oh i’ve just found some wonderful blurb:
‘Infuse yourself in sound with the vibrations from an enormous gong. This will lead you into an intensive immersion and a trans formative experience of spiritual and physical healing. This unforgettable experiential evening soothes, inspires, and awakens your spirit. Experience the healing properties of the sacred singing bowls and transformational waves of sound bathing you with the rising and falling rhythms, tonalities, and vibrations of a huge earth gong tuned to the sound of AUM, the universal chord. Relax, let go, and harmonize with frequencies of the gong for a remarkable vibrational experience.’

hey Jonny. Planet Gong!

dull by lunch. Rod Stewart

somebody mentioned Rod Stewart the other day, i met his cousin at a wedding, years ago, she was quite a hoot, similar poodle blonde hair and healthy appetites

heres a very old email tale. hum drum, tum te tum umpteen times
……
……………….
went to a scottish hippy wedding yonks ago, all tartan and dreadlocks, sarongs and grannies and lots of wafty purple. pleasantly wild!

It was in Geoffs parents garden, out in North Berwick,
right on the edge of the Firth of Forth, just below North Berwick Law,
a traditionally bleak scottish hillside, this one though had the giant jaw bone of a whale on top of it.
The house was an odd rambling, bewildering place, the 3 kids (one was called Hamish!) had built it all themselves

A great day, giddy highland reels and jigs, dancing with all the grannies,
flinging myself about the dance floor, free reeling bob dylan, endlessly guzzling malt whisky

anyway ended the night, blearily, bundled off into a bedroom, with the best woman, Nickii, shelter some sleep under a huge scrummage pile of colourful south american jumpers.
half way through the night, mouthful of wool… fell off the couch… almost woke up… head spins … ‘bleagggh, where am i’
stumbled to the loo, but somehow blundered back the wrong way in the dark,ended up in a bedroom, was it ours?

i was like harshly hoarsely whispering ‘Nickii, Nickii, you there?’
then keeping dead still, i could hear breathing….two people breathing, ooops!
yikes, my thoughts turned to escape
rattled at the door handle, couldn’t get out, somehow had become locked in, trapped!
worse gradually, the breathing pattern had changed the sleepers were now awake….

finally they flicked on the light.
There sitting up in bed, bedecked in pink nighties and pyjamas…. were the brides parents.

‘aaah good evening.how are you?’ , found the lock, threw the door open and fled!

two thirty – tooth hurty

thanks to aidan…
from the web…

Can any one tell me why we get like electric shocks or whatever
when we chew on a piece of aluminum foil (with silver fillings in a couple of teeth)?

That is exactly what you get…an electric shock. The filling is
made of an amalgam of mercury and either tin or silver. When the aluminum foil touches the filling, a galvanic cell is created in the mouth.
Aluminum is the anode, the filling is the cathode and the saliva is the electrolyte ‘salt bridge.’ The contact essentially short circuits the cell and a small amount of current flows which is sensed by the nerves in the teeth. There is the pain you feel.

new company name

matt: ‘Epic Performance Improvement Limited’ eh? Does anyone else think that we missed a trick here? If we’d called ourselves Epic Performance Improvement Co.’ then the acronym would have been EPIC! Which is also a recursive acronym in the classic style, e.g. PHP (PHP Hypertext Preprocessor), GNU (GNU is Not Unix), SAAB (Saab Automobile Aktiebolaget), VISA (Visa International Service Association) etc.

………….
i like the idea of mats recursive giddy spiralling in acronyms,
bit like that artwork in the great salt lake
spiral jetty – Robert Smithson