Some people are on the pitch, they’re reading a blog...
It's a curious thing, that once every 4 years, I find that it's completely appropriate to become a gurgling neanderthal, shedding millions of years of natural selection in the process. It leaves me scouring round the flat, scuttling after pigeons that land on the windowsill, hoping to lure them inside so I can bash them to death with an IKEA bedside lamp and grill the meat over the toaster. I got LOVE and HATE tattooed onto my eyelids. I started clapping with my elbows. I enjoyed yelling jingoistic slogans in the direction of the magic picture box in the corner of the pub and imploring some of the fittest men in the world to 'work harder' while I recline in my seat and suck warm beer through a straw like an alcoholic stroke victim.
The World Cup has a reputation for turning hoards of right thinking, modern people into flag draped, riot inciting, monotoned, shameless anti-socials or sunshine fearing, TV worshiping, offside rule explaining, entertainment vacuums. This time around though, the emperor is starting to look somewhat exposed around the edges. This World Cup is a little bit rubbish, despite infinite adverts rubbing their crotch and jocularly backslapping us into remembering how much we all really like football. No really... NO REALLY - YOU DO (eat at McDonald's) YOU DO. FOOTBALL. EURRRGH. FOOTBALL!
I’ve taken a short break to write this, after 7 days cultivating the impression of my buttocks into the couch and treating myself to herculean doses of the most soporific matches in history. I'm begining to think it's me vs. the World Cup. If this was a boxing match, they’d have called it off, mainly on account of being bludgeoned to death by rank tedium and the fearful sight of Alan Shearer seemingly aging on screen before my eyes.
As a dedicated football fan, I really look forward to enjoying my favorite sport with people who have a bi-decade, passing interest in it. I love watching everyone coming together and enjoying the games. The World Cup allows people who normally have stupid pointless things, like friends and lives, to stand in the pub with the rest of us, shouting at In-ger-land for doing a rubbish “ball kick thing” or celebrating a goal by shouting “BINGO”. Of course, there will always be a few hardened wretches, glumly forced into grumbling acceptance that TV is suspended for a month and complaining about the Eastenders start times.
This time around I have a sort of sympathy for the naysayers. My ears are hounded by the relentless muffled white noise of the Vuvuzelas (or ZuluAliens as someone at work calls them – you can tell he’s the father of young children) which make the match sound like it’s being beamed to us direct from the inside of Mosses' arse during a biblical plague of wasps. It's a din more irritating than having your temple prised open with a crowbar and teams of glass ants being pushed inside your brain cavity. At least the unique sound of the screeching little Pingu’s tootling away has caught the public imagination, while somewhere in the middle distance several overpaid athletes hoof their orb to and fro, with a lack of enthusiasm that suggests they're just killing time between Thai massages and adultery.
The action to date has been a humourless, grey display of defensive inscrutability, just begging for characters and big game players to get the flyaway pound shop ball under control and reverse the current trend of pinging it over the bar like Johnny Wilkinson and standing, hands on hips, looking heavenward with a ‘why me’ expression all over their sour puss.
Lucky then that there are a couple of wacky tales underpinning the drudgery and wing-backs. The astonishing sight of the overweight, onion headed North Korean goal hanger blubbing during the national anthem was something to savour, until you remembered that his tears were probably the endgame of a knowing acceptance that failure to cruise to glorious victory would mean suddenly going ‘missing’ and being replaced by another gaggle of interchangeable patriots in the next game as a result of the edict from the 'Dear Leader'.
There's the ludicrous story of a bevvy of Dutch beauties being thrown out of Holland's first game for wearing matching micro dresses that showed sponsorship logos from an evil non-FIFA endorsed brand. Only an organisation as myopic and slapstick as FIFA would fail to realise that banning the dresses and kicking them out of the ground would only draw attention to the brand that oh so badly offended them. Sure. There's literally no way pictures of dutch hotties wearing tiny orange dresses would ever get on TV or in the papers. Behold; Sepp Blatter, the thinking man's idiot.
The hilarity seemed to not only double, but square, when it turned out that monotone ITV summariser Robbie Earle was responsible for the ladies getting into the ground in the first place, leading to him losing his job, his dignity and becoming the unwitting subject of 'Well I would have done the same..' conversations up and down the country between gangs of slobbering teens and overweight, bear knuckled gruntholes.
The opening ceremony promised myriad delights, with a huge concert held in a cavernous corporate rock venue in a South African township called Myideaohell. It was quite a sight to see Shakipsdon'tlie, The Black EyePods and other paid up members of popville trying to whip up some atmosphere. The organisers helped by dumping a load of beach balls on the bedazzled onlookers and first rate strategic flag distribution. The camera's occasional, ill-judged, close ups of the crowd showed them looking like they’ve been bussed in from the Eurovision Song contest to wear sparkly costumes and tick the appropriate boxes of enthusiasm and retain starry eyed rapture, making whole thing resemble a Loony Tunes re-imagining of the Nuremberg rally.
But, for those of us who know, this is everything we've been waiting for. Only a certain type can appreciate the warm, sunny feeling of waking up each day knowing that there's going to be 3 full matches. Not only that, but they're on the telly. Then, the world seems to open it's full glory to us; no matter that it's BBQ weather outside, no matter that the kids want to be taken for a bike ride, or you need to eat, or that you've failed to move for 12 hours and the DVT is threatening to move towards your spine if you untie the bit of string holding it in your calf. For just a short time, every four years, the world comes together. And watches a goalless draw between countries you've never been to. Ah. Sweet mysteries of life.
BabywhenyoucallmeyoucancallmeAl... xx
Thursday, 17 June 2010
Sunday, 6 June 2010
No place like homeless
28 Blogs Later...
It's a bi-product of my nomadic lifestyle over the last couple of years, that I seem to be in a constant state of unpacked half and half. The things that I own, the books that I've read, the CDs I've borrowed and never returned (and put in box labelled "Mwahhhahhahhhaaa, it's MINE now") they all live in stasis. Little nuggets of my personality packed away in the attics of friends and family waiting to eventually be reanimated into my world. It feels like I'm trapped in a cautionary satire of my own life, written by a disturbed John Lennon obsessive, riffing on the idea of removing all my possessions and warbling a tedious, patronising song about it.
The stinging and painful sensation of homelessness comes into focus during more depressed moments, like when I stub a toenail, drop a plate or stand, weeping, in front of a mirror. Being without a base causes a worrisome split within me and gives me a feeling of something being out of joint. Although I've had some great times renting in flat shares, it's inevitable to be haunted by an impotent feeling of not being able to influence your surroundings and the acceptance that you must at all times be seen to be grateful and get your bloody feet off the sofa.
I've never actually owned my own house, mainly on account of the fact that I don't possess a magic duck that shits golden eggs, so find myself somewhere short of the 47 billion lifetimes I would need to be working for in order to afford a deposit. Instead, I've been wandering from short term lease to short term lease and sharing with live in landlords. Although I've never been anything other than welcome (in no small part on account of the pennies coughed up monthly) there will always be a sense of being the second rooster in the hen house. Especially when I was discovered burying turds and crowing outside the back door at six in the morning.
Perhaps my dislocation from my location is caused by the split from my possessions as much as the lack of the traditional notion of a home. This is a personal Hell, not because I live in a manner that is even approaching "mildly inconvenient", but because I am absent from my heaven. Everything I own is absent from me, locked away in storage and bundled into boxes. It's a continuously weird situation to be so transient and it's a situation that makes me wonder constantly about what my future holds.
When you lose something important; your wallet, an old letter, the key to a secret basement dungeon, the frustration is driven by the function or emotional significance of the item and how desperate you are to use it. Eventually it dissipates and you give up searching, so the anger, the looking down the children's throats, the threats to perform an emergency c section on the kitten, they give way to a constant migrane of irritation. This feels like a yearning, caused by the knowledge that it's out there. Somewhere. Mocking you. Entering your dreams and whispering quietly; "I'm here... why can't you find me....? I'm so aloneeeeeeeeee..... BURN THINGS"
All the things I've owned in the past and at some point given away, outgrown or sold for crack, they're all out there, somewhere. My history is in those artifacts. My old sofa is being guffed on by a flatulent, bum picking sloth in somebody else's front room. My old washing machine is being cacked on by a seagull on a rancid landfill. My first toothbrush was probably pushed inside a broken oil pipe in a dismally futile 'Top Kill' exercise.
Thinking about these things can lead to either a sad nostalgia, where your missing object is romanced, mourned or even personified, which is exactly what I was telling my hairbrush this morning. I know it's silly to attach painful emotions to mere items, but it's hard not to want to pin your experiences to things that remind you of certain times in your life. It has to be better to think of the objects you shed as discarding a past, rooting you in inactivity. I'm glad I can move on and create a vacuum which is ready to be filled with experiences rather than commodities.
I do miss a home and a solid base. It makes life more comforting to know you can always return to your own sanctuary, but for now, life is constantly about emptying baggage and doing as much as I can to refill it. Perhaps next time, I'll pitch up somewhere I'll be able to stay.
At least my old toothbrush is doing its bit to stop the apocalypse. Not a surprise really. It did have Mighty Mouse on it and there ain't nothing he can't do. Apart from blocking pipes vomiting oil into the sea, it appears, but then I might have missed that episode.
Callmeonthelinecallmecallmecallmeanytimecallme xx
It's a bi-product of my nomadic lifestyle over the last couple of years, that I seem to be in a constant state of unpacked half and half. The things that I own, the books that I've read, the CDs I've borrowed and never returned (and put in box labelled "Mwahhhahhahhhaaa, it's MINE now") they all live in stasis. Little nuggets of my personality packed away in the attics of friends and family waiting to eventually be reanimated into my world. It feels like I'm trapped in a cautionary satire of my own life, written by a disturbed John Lennon obsessive, riffing on the idea of removing all my possessions and warbling a tedious, patronising song about it.
The stinging and painful sensation of homelessness comes into focus during more depressed moments, like when I stub a toenail, drop a plate or stand, weeping, in front of a mirror. Being without a base causes a worrisome split within me and gives me a feeling of something being out of joint. Although I've had some great times renting in flat shares, it's inevitable to be haunted by an impotent feeling of not being able to influence your surroundings and the acceptance that you must at all times be seen to be grateful and get your bloody feet off the sofa.
I've never actually owned my own house, mainly on account of the fact that I don't possess a magic duck that shits golden eggs, so find myself somewhere short of the 47 billion lifetimes I would need to be working for in order to afford a deposit. Instead, I've been wandering from short term lease to short term lease and sharing with live in landlords. Although I've never been anything other than welcome (in no small part on account of the pennies coughed up monthly) there will always be a sense of being the second rooster in the hen house. Especially when I was discovered burying turds and crowing outside the back door at six in the morning.
Perhaps my dislocation from my location is caused by the split from my possessions as much as the lack of the traditional notion of a home. This is a personal Hell, not because I live in a manner that is even approaching "mildly inconvenient", but because I am absent from my heaven. Everything I own is absent from me, locked away in storage and bundled into boxes. It's a continuously weird situation to be so transient and it's a situation that makes me wonder constantly about what my future holds.
When you lose something important; your wallet, an old letter, the key to a secret basement dungeon, the frustration is driven by the function or emotional significance of the item and how desperate you are to use it. Eventually it dissipates and you give up searching, so the anger, the looking down the children's throats, the threats to perform an emergency c section on the kitten, they give way to a constant migrane of irritation. This feels like a yearning, caused by the knowledge that it's out there. Somewhere. Mocking you. Entering your dreams and whispering quietly; "I'm here... why can't you find me....? I'm so aloneeeeeeeeee..... BURN THINGS"
All the things I've owned in the past and at some point given away, outgrown or sold for crack, they're all out there, somewhere. My history is in those artifacts. My old sofa is being guffed on by a flatulent, bum picking sloth in somebody else's front room. My old washing machine is being cacked on by a seagull on a rancid landfill. My first toothbrush was probably pushed inside a broken oil pipe in a dismally futile 'Top Kill' exercise.
Thinking about these things can lead to either a sad nostalgia, where your missing object is romanced, mourned or even personified, which is exactly what I was telling my hairbrush this morning. I know it's silly to attach painful emotions to mere items, but it's hard not to want to pin your experiences to things that remind you of certain times in your life. It has to be better to think of the objects you shed as discarding a past, rooting you in inactivity. I'm glad I can move on and create a vacuum which is ready to be filled with experiences rather than commodities.
I do miss a home and a solid base. It makes life more comforting to know you can always return to your own sanctuary, but for now, life is constantly about emptying baggage and doing as much as I can to refill it. Perhaps next time, I'll pitch up somewhere I'll be able to stay.
At least my old toothbrush is doing its bit to stop the apocalypse. Not a surprise really. It did have Mighty Mouse on it and there ain't nothing he can't do. Apart from blocking pipes vomiting oil into the sea, it appears, but then I might have missed that episode.
Callmeonthelinecallmecallmecallmeanytimecallme xx
Wednesday, 2 June 2010
Seasons Weepings
The Blogfather...
You'll be pleased to know I had a charming weekend, spending most of it in my deckchair overlooking Reservation Towers, with a knotted hankie on my forehead and wearing a string vest covered in vinegar stains from pickled eggs consumed over 12 hours sat in persistent drizzle.
It got a bit alarming when two care workers were dispatched by the council to smile at me cautiously and ask “If I was ok” in patronisingly cheery tones, before I shooed them from my roof terrace with a cricket bat. I was merely enjoying the freezing weather as only a patriotic Hercules and borderline alcoholic can.
I’ve always considered June to be the start of summer and thoughts turn to walking through the gardens of stately homes while unshaven, flat capped grounds keepers wielding multi-barrelled shotguns, shout unintelligible threats about walking on the paths and not picking the Hydrangeas. Images flash across my mind of never ending bike rides down steep country hills, staying out past nine o’clock and the taste of barbecued meats followed by the sound of uncontrollable retching and the satisfying ‘plop’ as hunks of undercooked sausage repatriate themselves from gullet to toilet bowl like a ten year old hitting a belly flop from the high diving board.
In this country we have a shared understanding and disappointment regarding the seasons which is often discussed nervously by people stuck in awkward social situations. Who among us hasn’t passed the time during, say, a chance meeting at the water cooler, the gathering round a fatal accident or the aftermath of a mugging, by politely discussing Mother Nature’s unwillingness to provide Britain's with slightly less hail?
People often speculate as to why the Brits talk so much about the weather, but it’s not that surprising because it’s always on the change, morphing from one partially recognisable state to another, before you’ve even had chance to check if you remembered your brolly.
Helpfully, people from previous generations often remind us (normally in the manner of wise sages issuing Caesar a grim warning to watch out for the Ides. Nothing more dangerous than an Ide. More dangerous than a Lion with a broken bottle... Sorry, I digress) about weather they remember from their youth and how bloody brilliant it was. Yes. That’s right. Even historical weather gets a good going over. Well, great. Let’s all get on board the fun bus and have a good old chat about historical weather. Parp, Parp.
To hear it told, this was a golden age, when summers lasted exactly the 6 weeks of the school holidays and were so hot, the oven was turned on to cool the house down, you could fry eggs on your nipples and lambs spontaneously combusted in the fields before being scooped up from the ground into pita bread and scoffed on the beachfront. Winters, in turn, were semi-arctic with great drifts of snow blocking in pensioners and marauding Yetis were hunted in the hills by SAS marksmen.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that indulging in imagined wonderment at historical weather might possibly be a cathartic exercise to purge us of our jealousy of the really nice stuff the rest of Europe seems to enjoy. Either that, or the frame of reference has simply changed. A beautiful summer forty years ago probably involved a trip to Margate, a dip in the brine, then back behind the windbreak before your eyes turn blue. Nowadays a good summer is judged by a previous Majorcan getaway, where it was so hot your entire body evaporated, leaving only a thin mist and the smell of BO and Ambre Solaire where you once stood.
I don’t put much stock by these rememberings of extreme conditions because it’s amazing how selective the brain hole can be. I can remember as many rainy days as sunny when I was a kid and frankly it didn’t bother me too much. It just meant a day kicking lumps out of pixelated Spectrum footballers on Kick Off 2 rather than playing “knock and run” or being bullied at the local park. The myth of summer never amounts to much more than shop windows displaying skin tight hot pants instead of woolly-pully’s, advertising agencies finding legitimate reasons to reduce their adverts to semi-pornographic levels by stripping the female models down to thong bikinis and people finding increasingly grim excuses to hang out the back of the pub with the fag ends, dog turds and frenetic kids, rather than huddled round a storage heater praying for the lock in at the Onion and Weasel.
This year there does seem to be an unhealthy number of tight shorted, floppy fringed morons around, looking like gay lumberjacks engaging in a battle as to who can look the most mentally incompetent whilst at the same time maintaining a galactic level of smug self-satisfaction that would make Fearne Cotton blush (as an aside, you know what they say; you can’t spell “Fearne” without FEAR. You also can’t spell “Cotton” without wanting to stop writing “Cotton” and instead go round to her house and push her face into an industrial belt sander, but that’s for another time...). It’s still raining, it’s still windy, but the sunglasses remain in place and I have to restrain myself from hurling concrete blocks from my window and watching these preening foreskins dodge them like little Asos froggers.
I think that, as a nation, we need to break free of the tyranny of an imagined summer that never happens and be bloody thankful for the nice days that we do get. Drizzle adds nice depth to a beautiful view, so it shouldn’t stop us doing what we want anyway. It doesn’t matter. In 50 years we’ll all be underwater anyway and all that will be left to moan about will be who gets the last lilo.
LoveisthedrugandIneedtoscoreooohohohcan’tyouseeloveisthedrugforme xx
You'll be pleased to know I had a charming weekend, spending most of it in my deckchair overlooking Reservation Towers, with a knotted hankie on my forehead and wearing a string vest covered in vinegar stains from pickled eggs consumed over 12 hours sat in persistent drizzle.
It got a bit alarming when two care workers were dispatched by the council to smile at me cautiously and ask “If I was ok” in patronisingly cheery tones, before I shooed them from my roof terrace with a cricket bat. I was merely enjoying the freezing weather as only a patriotic Hercules and borderline alcoholic can.
I’ve always considered June to be the start of summer and thoughts turn to walking through the gardens of stately homes while unshaven, flat capped grounds keepers wielding multi-barrelled shotguns, shout unintelligible threats about walking on the paths and not picking the Hydrangeas. Images flash across my mind of never ending bike rides down steep country hills, staying out past nine o’clock and the taste of barbecued meats followed by the sound of uncontrollable retching and the satisfying ‘plop’ as hunks of undercooked sausage repatriate themselves from gullet to toilet bowl like a ten year old hitting a belly flop from the high diving board.
In this country we have a shared understanding and disappointment regarding the seasons which is often discussed nervously by people stuck in awkward social situations. Who among us hasn’t passed the time during, say, a chance meeting at the water cooler, the gathering round a fatal accident or the aftermath of a mugging, by politely discussing Mother Nature’s unwillingness to provide Britain's with slightly less hail?
People often speculate as to why the Brits talk so much about the weather, but it’s not that surprising because it’s always on the change, morphing from one partially recognisable state to another, before you’ve even had chance to check if you remembered your brolly.
Helpfully, people from previous generations often remind us (normally in the manner of wise sages issuing Caesar a grim warning to watch out for the Ides. Nothing more dangerous than an Ide. More dangerous than a Lion with a broken bottle... Sorry, I digress) about weather they remember from their youth and how bloody brilliant it was. Yes. That’s right. Even historical weather gets a good going over. Well, great. Let’s all get on board the fun bus and have a good old chat about historical weather. Parp, Parp.
To hear it told, this was a golden age, when summers lasted exactly the 6 weeks of the school holidays and were so hot, the oven was turned on to cool the house down, you could fry eggs on your nipples and lambs spontaneously combusted in the fields before being scooped up from the ground into pita bread and scoffed on the beachfront. Winters, in turn, were semi-arctic with great drifts of snow blocking in pensioners and marauding Yetis were hunted in the hills by SAS marksmen.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that indulging in imagined wonderment at historical weather might possibly be a cathartic exercise to purge us of our jealousy of the really nice stuff the rest of Europe seems to enjoy. Either that, or the frame of reference has simply changed. A beautiful summer forty years ago probably involved a trip to Margate, a dip in the brine, then back behind the windbreak before your eyes turn blue. Nowadays a good summer is judged by a previous Majorcan getaway, where it was so hot your entire body evaporated, leaving only a thin mist and the smell of BO and Ambre Solaire where you once stood.
I don’t put much stock by these rememberings of extreme conditions because it’s amazing how selective the brain hole can be. I can remember as many rainy days as sunny when I was a kid and frankly it didn’t bother me too much. It just meant a day kicking lumps out of pixelated Spectrum footballers on Kick Off 2 rather than playing “knock and run” or being bullied at the local park. The myth of summer never amounts to much more than shop windows displaying skin tight hot pants instead of woolly-pully’s, advertising agencies finding legitimate reasons to reduce their adverts to semi-pornographic levels by stripping the female models down to thong bikinis and people finding increasingly grim excuses to hang out the back of the pub with the fag ends, dog turds and frenetic kids, rather than huddled round a storage heater praying for the lock in at the Onion and Weasel.
This year there does seem to be an unhealthy number of tight shorted, floppy fringed morons around, looking like gay lumberjacks engaging in a battle as to who can look the most mentally incompetent whilst at the same time maintaining a galactic level of smug self-satisfaction that would make Fearne Cotton blush (as an aside, you know what they say; you can’t spell “Fearne” without FEAR. You also can’t spell “Cotton” without wanting to stop writing “Cotton” and instead go round to her house and push her face into an industrial belt sander, but that’s for another time...). It’s still raining, it’s still windy, but the sunglasses remain in place and I have to restrain myself from hurling concrete blocks from my window and watching these preening foreskins dodge them like little Asos froggers.
I think that, as a nation, we need to break free of the tyranny of an imagined summer that never happens and be bloody thankful for the nice days that we do get. Drizzle adds nice depth to a beautiful view, so it shouldn’t stop us doing what we want anyway. It doesn’t matter. In 50 years we’ll all be underwater anyway and all that will be left to moan about will be who gets the last lilo.
LoveisthedrugandIneedtoscoreooohohohcan’tyouseeloveisthedrugforme xx
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