January 16th - January 22nd 2006
Sunday Too bizarre
Saturday Rolling whale
Friday Da Ponte
Thursday Mini-brothels
Wednesday Watlington, Spring 1994
Tuesday Murakami
Monday Mr Balloon-Head
Sunday 22nd January
Leaving aside the sympathy one must feel for a small political party plunged into turmoil by its leaders' admissions of problems with alcohol, a party left reeling by subsequent admissions that at least one of its potential new leaders is, gasp, heterosexual... (Or not - Ed.)
Passing over the fact that said leadership contest was to a large degree kick-started by an interview given to the Telegraph by 'family man' Mark Oaten, and ignoring cheap jokes about his position as spokesman for Home Affairs...
Swerving neatly past the various ironic possibilities offered by Oaten's recent statements in re the Government's new strategy on sex workers - not least the Lib Dem press release dated 17 January 2006 headlined "Prostitution strategy a missed opportunity says Oaten..."
Pausing only briefly to ponder just what exactly is the correct word for repeated visits to a rent boy (Affair? Relationship? Liaison? Dalliance?)...
And not denying oneself a giggle of delight at the News of the World's all-too-traditional language, with Oaten 'sneaking off' from Parliament - rather than simply jumping into a cab - for 'three-in-a-bed sex' in a 'squalid' South London flat...
One eventually arrives at the core puzzle at the centre of the scandal: just what was going on when "..the naked MP then got the rent boys to humiliate him with a bizarre sex act too revolting to describe"
Do you think 'naked' is a clue? Or did the reporter suddenly realise that he hadn't used the word yet, and that this was as good a place as any?
And what exactly is a 'bizarre sex act', these days?
How revolting is too revolting?
No doubt the rumour mill will ofer us various possibilities over the next few days. But really: did one ever imagine one would need to calibrate one's own moral standards with reference to a tabloid newspaper's definition of bizarre..?
Saturday 21st January
Wapping, Winter 2005
Having slagged off rolling news just a day or so ago, I now have to take it all back, given that it was only courtesy of Sky's live helicopter coverage that I was able to discover that London's rescued whale was passing my front door, enabling me to dash down to the Thames and back and post this picture just 25 minutes later...
(Crap picture, but hey.)
Friday 20th January
Born in Ceneda, now Vittoria Veneto, into a poor Jewish family that underwent strategic conversion, Emanuele Conegliano.. flourished early as linguist, academic, improbable priest and natural scholar, enchanted by Latin, Greek and classical Italian.
He fell in with a half-mad harlot called Angiola; with a nice girl called Matilda who, for all her niceness, would be locked up by her family; with another Angiola, not at all nice; was poisoned by the lover of a woman he hadn't slept with; informed against by the gangster brother of the first Angiola; gambled, lost, made and lost again the money he never understood.
Having affronted the Venetian authorities with a disrespectful poem, he.. made friends with another elderly man distinguished in his own field, Casanova.
In the 1780s he.. moved.. to London.Here he served the King's Theatre, writing libretti, struggling with two dreadful divas and backing the bills of a dishonest manager all the way to Fleet prison.
After flight to America, in 1805, [he] lived in its cultural shallows for another 33 years - bankrupt grocer, teacher of Italian and first (unpaid) professor of the subject at what would become Columbia University...
And, two hundred years later, his direct descendant moved back to London and became our friend.
All hail Mozart's most famous collaborator, Jason's great-great-whatever-grandather: Lorenzo Da Ponte
Thursday 19th January
Mini-brothels get go-ahead to operate on your doorstep
Something tells me that The Daily Telegraph expects me to find that headline shocking. But, contrary as ever, I actually find the prospect rather charming.
Given the size of my doorstep, I calculate that each whore would be about two inches high, so I don't expect noise to be a problem...
Wednesday 18th January
Watlington, Spring 1994
Tuesday 17th January
Art Safari, Ben Lewis's excellent little series of short hand-held documentaries tucked away on BBC Four, has reminded me of how great a good documentary can be, especially when it lures you away from your standard pre-occupations to dangle before you aspects of a world to which you've never been, but are delighted to discover.
So it was with last week's take on Takashi Murakami and Lewis's attempts to decide whether the artist, ostensibly a latter-day Warhol, was truly engaged in a dissection of post-war 'Superflat' Japanese culture, or simply out to make a fast buck.
Shamefully enough, the current short series, and the Murakami programme in particular, do not appear to have been deemed worthy of a web-presence by the BBC. ('Health on your mobile', yes; contemporary art, no.)
So this single image, Time Bokan - Black (which in addition to the obvious H-bomb context, references otaku attitudes, a popular tv game-show, manga and, according to Murakami, the general emasculation of Japanese culture) will have to do.
Really though, you had to be there.
Monday 16th January
Finishing work as we do at some unpredictable hour between one and three in the morning, the last thing we want after a hard night's concentrated graft is to have to worry about how we're going to get home.
These days, at least (and largely due, one suspects, to murky EU legislation), we do at least get a cab home provided by the company. As you might imagine, the perils and quirks of the ride home provide a major source of conversation at work next day.
For a while, we availed ourselves of the services of a gritty little mini-cab company based in Bow - far enough away from us to guarantee that we needed to order cabs, as many as six at a time, well in advance. ("When will we be finishing tonight?" "When everything is done. Probably.")
Their cabs, when and if they turned up, were a motley assortment of clapped out bangers, driven by a bandit brigade of unshaven polyglots; in-car communication - once we'd got beyond the stage where we needed to agree that, say, Hammersmith was indeed west of Knightsbridge - was never much of an issue: their drivers, drawn as they were from a variety of immigrant sub-communities, were never especially chatty, which suited us very well.
Even I, normally the first to begin investigating the often rich background detail of the man at the wheel, tended to be driven home in silence - once it became clear that, tonight at least, there was no pressing need to make sure that the man in charge of the vehicle was still awake.
Our relationship with that cab firm ended when they tried charging us for waiting time - a move we found somewhat ironic giving that, more often than not, is was we who found ourselves waiting for them.
Now we avail ourselves of a much posher service - not quite a chauffeur-driven fleet, but getting that way - and we have a whole new squad of drivers to contend with.
For reasons that I don't entirely understand (this is still the East End, after all) their drivers are largely white, usually besuited and outfitted with what often proves, to a non-driver, a bewilderingly homogenous collection of smart vehicles: "For you, Naomi, a silver Volvo; Marcus, a silver Mercedes and Douglas..hang on, can't read my handwriting...something blue."
Given that these people are professional enough not to require street-by-street direction home, conversation tends to be largely subsumed beneath the late-night mutter of MoR radio stations - although my regular drivers, I think, now recognise me well enough to know that, given the choice, I'd prefer to hear them wittering on than have to listen to a late-night phone-in.
Mostly.
We dread the prospect of one driver in particular, known to us (with no particular affection) as Mr Balloon-Head. He is, to put it in a nutshell, a pub bore without a pub.
His opinions, which he is never shy of delivering, veer predictably between small-town Conservatism and outright bigotry. His lifestyle beyond the wheel, details of which he's never shy of sharing, appears to consist of equal parts botched DIY and outdated sitcom - plus the occasional visit to a suburban steak house.
Worst of all, he just won't shut up.
When it became clear that each of us actively dreaded the prospect of being driven home by him ("And for you, Malcolm, a special treat at the end of a long evening: Mr Balloon-Head!") we began to share strategies.
Just not answering was clearly never going to work: someone had obviously once told him that all good conversation is dialogue: his lengthy paragraphs of obnoxious vacuity inevitably ended with an invitation to share one's own views. ("I don't know what you think about that..?")
Taciturnity proved initially effective ("Are we going on holiday this year?" "Yup." "Somewhere nice?" "Yup.") but turned out to be too much like hard work to be practical, as did my other suggestion, that we should steer the conversation in more interesting directions, discussing the moral ambiguities of an incestuous relationship with one's grandparent, for example, or the difficulties of finding mesh panties to suit someone with the build of a rugby player.
Although I suggested strategies for others to follow - "Just say: I'm sorry, but I'm very tired, and you're very boring" - I admit I was too timid to put them into action myself: in consequence of which I once spent an entire ride home grunting into my mobile as my contribution to a long conversation with an entirely imaginary friend.
I did, though, seize the chance to air our complaints to one of the controllers at the cab company. Who took our remarks, it must be said, in very good part ("I just tell him to shut the fuck up") and undertook to have a word.
We awaited Mr Balloon-Head's next appearance with unwonted interest, eager to discover whether he'd been warned off. No such luck, it seemed.
"Well at least the weather's been fairly kind to us this winter...Might have to stop off for a sandwich once I've dropped you...The missus wants me to put some shelves up for her in the kitchen this weekend...I don't know about you but sometimes it seems the nights will never end..."
True, that last remark, oh too too true.
And then the clincher: "You will tell me to shut up if you don't feel like talking? Some people don't like chatting on the way home. I don't know about you but I like to have a natter. Passes the time, if you know what I mean. Not everyone's cup of tea, I know. And I've been told I sometimes talk too much. How about you? Do you like a good conversation..?"
Axe. Now.
......previous week
