July 20th 2004 - July 25th 2004
Sunday Marc
Saturday Houndsight
Friday Colour me...
Thursday Holy smoke
Wednesday Great, man
Tuesday Truss
Monday Cross2
Sunday 25th July 2004
Thanks, once again, to Jonathan's unflagging generosity, I went to see Marc Almond at the Almeida yesterday.
I leave detailed criticism to his more rabid fans (I'd call myself an admirer rather than a fan) but I enjoyed it all enormously (despite my long-standing problem with the banality of some lyrics, and bemusement about why such a famously gay artist still sings heterosexual torch songs.)
Most unintentionally hilarious lyric phrase of the night? "Mysterious liqueurs". Oh please.
After Marc, I headed south to the Great Eastern Hotel for Radio Egypt's one-off party, something I'd been looking forward to all week.
Sadly, it was a huge disappointment.
The dance-room beyond the impressive atrium was nasty boxy affair with a vile acoustic. The beer was £3 a bottle. And, yes, the boys were as pretty as ever and, yes, Jonny Woo pole-dancing in skull-bandages and layered rips was certainly a surreal sight but beyond that...not a lot.
Saturday 24th July 2004
One in ten guide dogs is short-sighted
Friday 23rd July 2004
Here's an intriguing thought for a Friday afternoon, as you power-down your machine ("Do you really want to log out?") and wearily rise to stretch and survey your fellow-workers on the cube-farm.
Robert Owen, a notoriously forward-thinking nineteenth-century mill owner, "...came to work in the morning not as a kindly man, but as a progressive manager both of men and machines.. The flywheel was obedient to the boiler pressures being stoked - and so it must be with living machinery."
As part of his efforts "a colour-coded plaque denoting the operator's moral character was hung by each machine."
Thursday 22nd July 2004
Bishop takes note of popular culture shock horror
The Bishop of London, the Right Reverend Richard Chartres, has drawn attention to the close parallels between clubbing and church-going.
He said: "There are preparation rituals, like donning the right dress and saving up for the night out. Then there is a sense of belonging and openness to one another and sometimes even what people describe as a mystical experience.
"Drugs are part of the spiritual feeling, and Ecstasy has a mystic sign embossed on it," added the Bishop, who later declined to say when he had last visited a nightclub. (The lack of reference to patient lines of celebrants queueing up to be administered a bump of K may be a clue.)
"There is hardly anything more ridiculous than the sight of an ageing, follicly challenged ecclesiastic wearing a pink wig and gyrating to some primeval stomp," said the Bishop, who plainly hasn't been to The Royal Vauxhall Tavern in a while.
Wednesday 21st July 2004
An intriguing footnote to my attempts to trace the precise relationship between Sonia and Mahatma Gandhi comes in a London Review of Books piece by Tariq Ali, where he recalls an Indian co-producer of Richard Attenborough's Gandhi telling him:
The film was not made for people like you. We wanted to show the ferangi [foreigners/Westerners] that Indira Gandhi was Jawaharlal Nehru's daughter and no relation at all to Mahatma Gandhi.
Ali then recounts a further conversation with Richard Attenborough himself, who told him:
Oh yes, of course, that was the only reason. But it didn't entirely work. After a White House screening, Ronald Reagan walked up to me and said, 'Great movie. Great man. Just like his daughter.'
Tuesday 20th July 2004
This week's Lynne Truss Award for Scrupulously Correct Punctuation goes to a headline with only three apostrophes to distinguish it from a Tintin adventure:
Legionnaire's 'traced to fort'
Monday 19th July 2004
The south-eastern edge of the City is marked by the Tower and, beside it, the Victorian Gothic folly so closely identified with the metropolis that most foreigners think of it as the London bridge.
To the east lie Ripper-redolent Whitechapel and newly-respectable Limehouse. Below them the Thames swoops south to begin its long broad curl around the Isle of Dogs.
On the northern bank of the river, at the beginning of what used to be just docks, but now is "Docklands", lies the river-side parish of Wapping, reclaimed from swamp in the seventeenth century. And that's where I live.
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