December 3rd - December 9th 2001
Sunday A disastrous date
Saturday Winnie Wagner
Friday Paranoia
Thursday A series of bangs
Wednesday Fare's fair
Tuesday Happy Birthday Blogadoon
Monday Zen dojo
Sunday 9th December 2001
I don't go on a lot of dates these days. I don't know why. Maybe the Zimmer frame puts people off.
But I do recall the delicious days you spend waiting for the date to happen, the heady anticipation, the busy fantasies you spin about the guy you're going to meet: he'll be witty, intelligent, gorgeous; he'll like books, and beer; he'll like me.
Given that I'd spoken for all of six seconds to He that I was due to meet on Saturday night, I had steeled myself against disappointment by steadfastly refusing to dream up imaginary conversations between us.
Incurable optimist that I am though, I'd found myself painting an idealised portrait of the date itself:
We arrange to meet at a club or a bar. One of us is slightly late, just late enough to stoke the fires of anticipation. We start staring at each other the moment we walk through the door, and don't stop for the rest of the evening. Hands will alight briefly on knees, and elbows. We'll drink enough to get a nice buzz on, then catch a swift cab back to his place to tangle the freshly laundered sheets...
Needless to say, Saturday night was not like that. Not at all.
We met at His flat, not in a bar. He was not alone. We sat and watched television with three flatmates and two friends. We came dangerously close to accompanying them to a club in Ealing (Ealing!). He and I, after extended discussion about whether we could really afford it, went to Up.
Up was great, full of friendly faces. I really wanted to stay. He'd said He didn't do drugs, but started asking me to find him a pill. I declined, and He got very drunk very fast. And insisted we leave.
On the short argumentative walk back to His place, I discovered He had agreed to give His bed up to one of the friends.
We sat and waited whilst the flatmates made themselves fried-egg sandwiches. We unfolded The Most Uncomfortable Sofa-Bed In The World.
He said: "Enough with the aggressive tongue already!"
He said: "I don't do penetrative sex."
He said: "I'm sorry I'm not to going to suck your cock"
He said: "Let's just go to sleep."
I waited for him to doze off, slid quietly out of bed, got dressed and let myself out.
Less fun than I had imazibubed. No more dates for a while, please.
Saturday 8th December 2001
50 years ago, the poet John Heath-Stubbs described The Lord of the Rings as "A combination of Wagner and Winnie-the-Pooh," and didn't mean it as a compliment.
This week, dedicated fans can gear themselves up for Monday's film premiere with a lengthy article in, where else?, The London Review of Books, written by Jenny Turner:
"Even now, even as I find the book silly and boring and rather noisome... it still locks with my psyche in a most alarming way. There is suction, something fundamental passes between us, like when a spaceship docks. It's tit in some way, it's an infantile comfort. It's an infantile comfort that is also a black pit.
"It is possible for readers to live their whole lives through Tolkien's universe... it has cubby-holes for all sorts of urges to hide in, like Star Trek or Star Wars.
"The elegiac, valedictory aspect of the novel perhaps speaks with particular power to the swotty teenager, sorry to be leaving the figments of childhood, but itching to get to a university library. All those lists and footnotes. All those lovely books.
"The widespread disdain for Tolkien does indeed have an association with the perceived social class of his readers, but the association is not straightforward, and the disdain is not entirely social: anorakery, trainspotting, dweeberie and being 'sad' are complicated psychosocial phenomena, and it is both inaccurate and shallow to tie them too tightly to individual people. "
Friday 7th December 2001
David directs us to BBC London which describes yesterday's fire as a "massive blaze... when 50 tonnes of roofing material caught alight..." and continues "Some residents have also expressed shock that so much flammable material was being stored in a residential area." Ahem. Reference to debris raining on a "nearby elderly peoples' home" obliges me to offer you this aerial view; the red cross at the top marks the site of the explosions, and the white cross at the bottom marks my flat (green and yellow being my first and second vantage points). |
 |
Call me cynical, call me paranoid - no, wait, you've already done that.
Experience has taught me that people who come a-knocking at your door without an appointment are never not bad news; salesmen, taxmen, ex-boyfriends, bailiffs, neighbours with a major head wound: when was the last time you answered the door and thought "Oh, good"?
So except on exceptionally brave (or rich, or cheerful) days, I've trained myself to ignore all cheery raps on my window, all admonitory rattles of my mail-flap. (I don't have a doorbell - why encourage them?)
It's when that dreaded second knock comes, one of those Neanderthal-knuckled numbers that announces that someone is not going away any time soon, it's then that my spine turns to jelly and I freeze.
A further quiet rattle, followed by a penetrating silence, infers my visitor is curious enough to take the trouble to bend down and squint through my letter-box. That's when I start running down a mental list of all my life's unfinished business: debts outstanding, enquiries pending, troubles looming.
Sometimes, at this stage, there'll be a shout through the slit and, once in a blue moon, it will be a voice that I recognise and I will think about getting up to open the door. More usually, they leave: resigned footsteps sulking off down the stairwell.
If not, if there is only further silence, then I know they've escalated their enquiries and moved on down the balcony to peer through my kitchen window.
Well, good luck with that; no technology yet invented can penetrate the grime that frosts that glass. But I try to ease my feet a little further out of sight beneath the duvet and pray that I'm not wearing brightly-coloured socks.
And then, and this is what sends my persecution-meter off the scale, there is whispering. There are two of them. Whatever that implies, it's double plus ungood.
When one of them says "Wait... are you sure this is the right address?" a muffled whimper from the bottom of my dirty laundry basket silently mutters "No, no, no - it's someone else you want." But another voice replies "Yeah, look: 36 Dorset House."
A pause while I wait for them to knock the door down, and then there is a heavy thump as something substantial, quite probably wrapped in cardboard, falls heavily onto the door-mat.
You see: they think I'm stupid. They think I'm going to leap out of bed to investigate and thereby reveal that I've been here all along. Ha! Well I know two of that - and so I wait, alert for the sinister hiss of escaping gases or a flicker of flame from the hallway.
Five minutes pass.
Ninja stealthy, I crane my cautious curious head around the door-frame. There, denting the carpet, is a package. Eighteen inches long and clearly marked. Bang & Olufsen. Wall Bracket.
Guess how much Bang & Olufsen I own? Correct. So I check the address. Yup: 26 Dorset House.
Thursday 6th December 2001
And yes, thank you for asking, I did ring him and we have a loose date for Saturday, perhaps at Up...
Reading in bed, toying with the idea of an afternoon nap, there's a sudden loud bang, louder than a car-crash, louder than a firework. Going to the front door, you can't miss the roiling column of dense grey smoke. Heading out into the street, it's clear that there's been some kind of explosion in the hitherto anonymous storage facility a couple of blocks away.
Police cars and fire engines are still arriving as I join the scattered pedestrians watching the flames flash through the smoke above the high dock wall. Everybody's asking each other what's happened; nobody knows.
The fire engine starts pumping water towards the heart of the blaze. There's another explosion, and then another; the flames briefly balloon up to a height of fifty yards or more.
The explosions are coming faster now. It's clear that this a massive blaze, spreading through gas or chemical containers. The thick grey pillar of smoke must be visible from all over London. A tannoy from a police van makes an urgent, though incomprehensible announcement. The underlying message is clear though, and bystanders move themselves further away from the site with some urgency.
We huddle a hundred yards or so away, ducking back behind the side of a block of flats each time there's a new explosion. Policemen are unrolling tapes and closing off the road; press cameramen are trying to get closer.
I return to my flat just in time to catch the regional news headlines: "We're getting reports of a fire at an industrial premises in Wapping, in London's docklands. A large plume of black smoke is visible.. may have started after a gas cylinder exploded..no reports of any injuries.."
Shocking that this can happen in a heavily populated area just a couple of miles from the City of London.Addendum: and yes, I appreciate there is no comparison with Recent Events in New York. No meaningful comparison, at any rate.
Further confirmation of the bizarre continuing conflation between The Daily Telegraph, The Pink Paper and The Sun comes with a story eye-catchingly headlined: Shame of the mullah caught red-handed with a beardless boy.
There's rather more in the reporting of this story than I have room to deconstruct here.
Surely the phrase is, more commonly, 'beardless youth'? (Especially given that boys are, practically by definition, pre-pubertal.) But I guess that doesn't carry the same turbaned-paedophile vibe that the subs were looking for.
And I'm also reminded of Phillip Hensher's assertion that the Taliban's diplomatic relations with Dorothy have always been closer than one might think. Not forgetting the 28 young boys promised to all martyrs for the cause.
Most of all, though, I like the mental picture summoned by the headline: some huge Victorian genre painting, all gloom and chiaroscuro, the two Afghans surprised mid-guilty-tryst, the mullah's look of horror, his hand frozen inches from the boy's beardless face, his Kalashnikov abandoned by the side of the humble truckle bed - "The Mullah's Shame, or, Further Stages in a Religious Education".
"When I used to meet a gay person, maybe I'd think they were a little brighter than average. But these days I think: 'Oh, you poor dumb dear! He's dumb!' I mean, imagine spending all those hours in the gym.
"You see those Showboat boys walking down the road with big muscles and smiles - it's like the gay equivalent of Barbie dolls. Now I feel that gay plays are often nothing more than striptease shows, and gay music is the worst kind of disco music from the 1980s - which was the most benighted of all music periods.
"A lot more interesting people died in the 1980s. They lived in big cities, and they were people who were more exposed to the virus, lived in the fast lane and died as a result. They experimented with sex more, and they got punished. The ones who survived were either too alcoholic ever to get laid, or so unimaginative they were never in danger."
- Edmund White ("the homosexual writer")in conversation with Adam Mars-Jones as part of the London literary festival The Word.
Not sure whether to file myself under alcoholic or unimaginative, but, like, you know, whatever. (Not sure what a "Showboat boy" is either - but I can feel the expression entering my vocabulary as we speak.)
Wednesday 5th December 2001
 |
If I was a James Bond villain, I would be Princess Margaret. I enjoy a drink, a fag, and being plain bloody rude. Who would you be? James Bond Villain Personality Test |
Harry bloody Potter is being translated into Welsh, into Zulu, into Braille - and into classical Latin. Peter Needham, the Latinist, describes it as "an ideal job for an old bloke in retirement". Fittingly enough, the man working on the braille translation is none other than serial killer Harold Shipman.
Daveo provides an exhaustive run-down of last night's PopQuiz, politely refraining from pointing out that David wanted to veto two perfectly correct answers and didn't even blush when his errors were revealed.
Yon brainsluicer also tactfully omits to explain why called ourselves "The Only Safe Bet Is An Alpha Bet", which is just as well given that by the time Jonce had finished telling us, the bar resembled nothing so much as Sleeping Beauty's palace ten years after the fairy's curse.
(Acerbic? Moi?)
"15 people - Israeli Arabs and Jews together - lay dead in Haifa, blown to bits on a municipal bus by a Hamas suicide bomber, Maher Habashi, who had stepped on board and handed over a large banknote as his fare.
"When the driver called him back to get his change, he blew himself up, a repeat of a similar attack in Hadera on Thursday night which killed three people."
Given what we've been told about the elaborate preparations made by suicide bombers - up to and including shaving off all their body hair - it seems a little remiss not to have sorted out the proper change beforehand. But what do I know?
Well, I know it wouldn't be the same in London, where bus-drivers are given special coaching, um, special training, um, special education such that anyone offering anything larger than a fiver gets a very special kind of reproachful look, a disappointed-beyond-words tooth-sucking look that says "You've been out and about having a good time while I'm stuck driving this stinking great bus, and you can't even be bothered to make sure you've procured the appropriate small change before you board?"
It doesn't always work, of course. One night, I watched as a large drunk man insisted, over and over again, that the bus-driver had to give him change for a 70p fare from a twenty pound note.
The driver tried the look, tried explaining that he had no change, even tried quoting the relevant bye-laws, but the man still carried on angrily insisting.
So eventually the driver plucked the twenty pound note from the man's hand, crumpled it into a tiny ball, threw it out through the open door, waited for the man to dive out after it, closed the doors and drove off.
I'm not saying it would work on the Gaza Strip, mind.
Tuesday 4th December 2001
Remember 'Ginger', the "...invention as significant as the World Wide Web, and for details of which a publisher has paid a quarter of a million dollars, sight unseen?"
Dean Kamen finally unveiled it yesterday and, yep, it's a scooter.
As my friends know all too well, I'm really crap at birthdays - especially my own. And I almost missed this one:
You've come a long way. But, then again, in a way, you haven't.
Admit it: one of the reasons it's good to have movie reviews on-line is so you can look them up afterwards and find out what the hell was going on.
Well good luck with Todd Solondz's Storytelling.
"At the next seminar, Vi reads out a story that's a veiled account of this bruising experience, provoking a storm of disgust among her classmates: they think it's 'weirdly misogynistic' and 'mean-spirited'. The point being made here is simple, yet it's one that's frequently misunderstood. Artistic worth should be judged not on the choice of subject matter, but on its treatment."
- The Independent
"She then meets the teacher in a bar that night, goes home with him, and is raped. The next time we see her she is reading a story about the rape and the class begin to criticise what she has written. The point, I guess, is that fiction proves insufficient to the needs of reality."
- The Daily Telegraph
Monday 3rd December 2001
Difficult to feel sympathy with train-spotters, let alone plane-spotters, but spare a thought for Lesley Coppin, the only woman in the tour group recently arrested in Greece:
"'There is a woman here who chopped up her husband and then buried him in the garden and planted onions on top of his grave. I didn't think people like this existed outside the pages of a novel.'
"Mrs Coppin, from Mildenhall, Suffolk, thought she was going on a belated honeymoon with her second husband when they arrived in Greece early last month.
"At the time of her arrest, Mrs Coppin, who... does not share [her husband's] passion for aircraft, insisted that she was sitting in the party's minibus doing a crossword."
It must be true; it's in the News of the World:
"Pop pervert Jonathan King is having a homosexual relationship with another jailed paedophile. The disgraced mogul and convicted child sex offender John Chudley have been spotted 'kissing and touching' in King's cell and in prison showers."
And, in other show-biz news, if William Hague could have one luxury on his desert island, he says it would have to be a dojo. Hmmm. I thought the whole point of judo was to use your opponent's weight against them. Wouldn't that be a bit difficult when you are, by definition, the only person on the island? Maybe it's a zen thing.
The British contingent working alongside military planners at US Central Command in Tampa is led by Air Vice-Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup.
......previous entries