Liza Campbell

2010-01-26T08:55:00.003Z

Musical Recommendation of the Week:
Something's On Your Mind - Karen Dalton

2010-01-16T17:56:00.003Z

The next blog will be posted shortly

2010-01-09T00:09:00.005Z

Musical Recommendation of the Week:
Midsummer Night Blues - Waldeck
[don't stop listening before it passes the minute mark]

HurdyGurdyLand

2010-01-08T22:27:00.044Z

As a single parent I’ve always traveled abroad with both of my children or neither, except for one occasion, when I took my daughter to a wedding in New York. My son had just turned 17, so I felt I had to grab at a last chance before he travels completely independently from his darling mama.

Leaving Storm to attend wall-to-wall festivals back at home, I took Atticus to Norway, land of the Vikings, moose and free love. All Atticus really wanted was to also go to NY, but he took it in his stride when I broke it to him that the letters ORWA were crammed between his dream initials. My Norwegian encompass ‘sykehus’ [hospital] ‘drittsakk’ [shitbag] and the slightly ruder sounding ‘fersken’ [peach]. It’s a great language that is possible to vaguely crack when seen written down - if think logically, get a bit lateral (fersken: furry skin) and think yourself into a kind of imaginary Dark Ages English. For example, ‘pier’ is ‘utstikker’ because it stikks ut into the water. ‘Smertefri’ is ‘painless’ because pain can make your eyes ‘smerte’, but with no pain, you are fri of that aforementioned smerte. A ‘cousin’ is ‘sØsterbarn’ because it’s the bairn of your sister. ‘Grossist’ is not the most revolting, but wholesaler and a ‘hairdresser is frisØr –although it implies a halo of bubble curls every time.

Armed with this stunted but useful vocabulary, we flew to Oslo where we were so smitten by the architecture of the airport it was all we could do not to camp out in the Arrivals Hall for the rest of time. After one last go on the motion-sensor escalators that move only when approached, we boarded a train for Vinstra in the Gudbrandsdalen valley, (although I was sorely tempted to chuck this itinerary in favour of heading to the fantastically named Skaggerak). Our plan is to wind our way north and finish by joining the Sami for their annual marking of the reindeer herds. We race north past dense pine forests, lakes, more pine, rocky outcrops, pine again, fast moving rivers, pretty farms and further pine. ‘These trees are beginning to freak me out’ muttered Atticus in a rare moment away from his headmusic.

We pass the village of Tretten, which translates as Thirteen: the number of people there who survived the plague. It was the arrival of the Black Death in 1349 that stopped the Viking Age in its tracks. Having founded Dublin, sacked Paris and reached America five hundred years before Columbus, Norwegian society collapsed into abject poverty when over half the population perished. The repercussions lasted many hundreds of years: Denmark and later, Sweden ruled over them and Norway only achieved independence once more in 1905, almost six hundred years after the arrival flea-born catastrophe. The population today is still only 4 million and the fact that nobles were reduced to scratching a living alongside their labourers laid the foundations of their classless society and somewhere along the line the Norsemen made the transition from ferocious colonisers to liberal peaceniks.

Some way beyond the back of beyond, we arrive in Vinstra. Although we have been on the train for hours, we haven’t really got at all far in this country whose length is equal to the distance between Paris and Athens. As we step off the train into an empty station Atticus says, ‘This isn’t a holiday; this is just weird.’ He has a point.

[Atticus pictured left, Plutarch in pocket, resorting to narcaleptic fugue & quite ignoring the lovely wild flower bank behind him]
The summer in Norway is incredibly short, but most Norwegians seem to have left for the sunshine of the Mediterranean. Poor Atticus , he had been expecting to be beating off Scandinavian beauties with

a flywhisk. He cheers up a little when our Vinstra host, Mikkel Dubloug arrives and ushers us to a stretch-Volvo with blacked out windows (an unusual model of car for the pimp daddy look). As we belt along, Dubloug points out the occasional royal palace-cum-hunting lodge; they look no different from the surrounding farms.

The Dobloug family farm is the same has the cache of being the birthplace of Per Gynt, Norway’s national semi-fictional folk hero immortalised in an Ibsen play. (While on his deathbed, Ibsen’s nurse assured a visitor that he was a little better, to which Ibsen sputtered, "On the contrary" and died.) The house is small, but truly lovely.
If you have ever been to New England and wondered why the hell old England doesn’t have clapboard houses and red oxide barns, its because architecturally, New England is, more accurately, New Norway. The only difference is that in old Norway, the buildings have turfed roofs out of which sprout shaggy mops of wild grasses and flowers.

Over dinner Mikkel spoke of how much the Norwegians hate the Swedes for the hundreds of years they treated them as backwoods hicks, going to great lengths to give examples of their patronizing snootiness. It is late, so seizing a momentary pause in the conversation; we make our excuses and retire. It is one in the morning, but outside it is still a soft grey twilight. Unable to sleep, we settle down to watch Heroes of Telemark on my computer. (If you’ve never seen it, it is the heroic story of six Norwegian resistance fighters under German occupation, who blew up the Telemark hydroelectricity plant, thus thwarting the Nazis’ dastardly plan to develop nuclear bombs, and all without firing a shot. Incidentally, Knut Haugland, one of Telemark heroes died this Christmas Day aged 92. Having twice been awarded Norway’s highest medal,

he was later a member of the Kon Tiki expedition; all-round groovy fucker.) At the point when Richard Harris’s character snaps at Kirk Douglas’s playboy scientist for fending off mines with a boathook, Atticus hits the stop button, saying, ‘I can’t bear it when people get a hard time for doing the right thing’

After breakfast Mikkel takes us on a tour that follows the mighty Gudebrand River – turquoise from meltwater. A normal river for Norway, but that is bigger than our Thames. Asked what we want to see, I say ‘anything cultural’ but soon realise we are in the hands of a foodie. Our whole day is spent hurtling to different meals.

Arriving in the town of Lom ‘for the bread’, we escape further eating, by heading for the local church [pictured]. ‘I cannot believe I’ve agreed to walk round a church,’ groans Atticus, but once inside, the wooden interior is so lovely, he says, ‘This would be a really lovely place to get married.’ Then he remembers himself and adds, ‘If ever I come back; which I won’t.’

On the long drive back to Per Gynt I battle to steer the conversation away from food lest Mikkel is tempted into further gourmet diversions.

We talk of trolls. We’re not talking Noddy and Big Ears here, this is Norse mythology: trolls were terrifying. Representing everything greedy, cruel, selfish and stupid in man, they were grotesque, huge and ogreish, often with trees growing from their heads – as if the very landscape could suddenly rise up and kill you. Medium-sized trolls merely harmed rather than killed, and the little ones called the Tusser and Nisser trolls

could even be quite helpful - but were extremely easy to offend and were prone to sour milk and stop hens laying.

Next day we drive to into a remote valley to meet a couple living ‘a Viking life’ - with particular emphasis on Viking…food. Their house is high up a boulder-strewn hill; their furniture is rough-hewn logs draped in sheepskins, the room lit by many tallow lights. The husband, a dead ringer for Harry Potter’s Mr Weasley (but Mr Weasley dressed in leather trousers and a large medallion over his buttoned shirt) describes at length the Viking ways. His English is good, but his accent is extremely hard to understand, but eventually we grasp that ‘peek, lark and eon’ are pike, larch and iron. He shows round his beautiful garden planted with only plants that the Viking s used herbs his then shows us handmade drums and the many knives he has fashioned from eon he has forged. This is a great man to know after the collapse of civilisation as we know it, but until then, quietly bonkers. In a converted barn on the Viking compound, the curtain is about to come up on a play by ‘Denmark’s Molière’, but Atticus pinches me really quite hard when they suggest we attend. I lie that we are faint with hunger, so they sit us down and serve us thick broth they call ‘beauty soup’. I’m relieved that Atticus is distracted by his Plutarch as the wife describes it as ‘elk shank boiled for so very long.’ Mr Weasley serenades us on a homemade alpenhorn as we leave; he tears the arse out of Stranger On The Shore. We weep with even stranger pleasure.

On the way back to Vinstra, we pass the village of Hell; it has one house – that’s not even a hamlet in Hades. Driving like a Michael Schumacher on crack, Mikkel takes us over the
mountain where Captain Scott spent the winter acclimatizing himself to Antarctic conditions the year before his doomed attempt on the South Pole in 1911. It is bleakly stunning.

Tree trunks draped in witchy, black moss, the ground carpeted with so much ash-grey lichen that from a distance it looks torched. Norwegians are fiercely proud of the great Amundsen. A Norwegian winning such a famous race and raising the first flag on the South pole gave them a sense of lasting national pride coming as it did, just six years after their long-awaited independence.

Heading north again, we take another long train journey to RØros through endless forests and the occasional seemingly unpeopled village. We read that RØros is ‘a former copper mining town’. Gloom settles in, only relieved for Atticus when a classic blonde beauty boards our carriage. She gets off at the next stop and gloom seeps back. What relief then when RØros, turns out to be enchanting: like steeping into the pages of Hard Times, if written by Lars Dickens. The brightly painted wooden houses, from the smartest to the lowliest, [Atticus right, pictured outside the lowliest] are beautifully preserved; even the slagheaps are listed as a UNESCO world heritage site. The mining company, that once owned the town, built a vast church for their workforce, in which there are far more company motifs than illustrations of the Lord - lest worshippers forget who was in ultimate charge.

At lunch, in a local hotel, we eat python-like sausages and sit next to a table of eight people, eating their pythons in silence. Finns we are told. Our hostess whispers ‘They say nothing, unless they’ve had plenty of drink, then they go crazy and next day are too ashamed to speak. And so it goes on. Silent. Crazy, silent again. It’s incredible when you think Finland’s biggest export is Nokia, with the slogan “connecting people.”' And she settles down with her python.

For small example see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEHPkbOt504

From RØros we head across the border to Sweden.

‘Is there anyone in?’ we call.

No answer is an answer; the Swedes were not at home either.

We stayed at Fjällnäs, a former royal hunting lodge with a stuffed bear in the hall. I made tentative enquiries if the Swedes hate the Norwegians, but it doesn’t seem to be reciprocal. It never is with colonisers.
The main difference I noticed in our short trip there was between the two countries was one of taste. The Swedes decorate their homes in a modern slightly Ikea style, while the Norwegians are more traditional & timeless. If there were interior décor Olympics Norway would trounce Sweden every time. The food at Fjällnäs was delicious: moose steaks, gravadlax, cloudberry soufflés, but night after night it was just me and Atticus and his imaginary friend Tony in a room that could seat further ninety-eight [see photo]. One evening another couple arrive in the hotel - just for dinner - and we are so desperate for company we sit down at the next-door table and force them talk to us.

On the day we are meant to get up at dawn to see the Sami herders branding their reindeer, it is rained off. It rains steadily all day, so we go to the local town where the good burghers are in a state of shock because there had been a spate of burglaries; unheard of events.
We visit the local museum - better than it sounds and here we meet a Mrs Tiggywinkle creature who relates many notable facts about logjams and candlemaking. She also feeds us waffles, tells us about the local bear – bjorn - population and the history of Fjällnäs, how it was built for royal visits from southern castles – or borgs.

It was impossible not to conclude that Bjorn Borg is called Bear Castle in his native tongue.

The next day our reindeer date is postponed again & then finally cancelled.

These hardy nomads can cope with any amount of snow, but summer rain is playing havoc with their plans, and ours. We decide to hike into the hills where the country’s last wild herd of musk-ox live. Majestic, prehistoric and very, very woolly, they butch out winter by standing still; semi-conscious. They weren’t about - carousing in St.Tropez I shouldn't wonder - instead these were thousands of tiny flowers and about 40 billion mosquitoes and midges.

Nature plays a cruel joke on Scandinavians: a tiny summer where everything blooms ravishingly, but the air a dense pointillism of biting insects.

No wonder everyone heads south.

My advice to anyone going Scandinavia for the summer is pack a beekeeper’s outfit & leave teenage sons sweetly snoozing in their beds until you can afford to get them to Manhattan.

Recommended viewing:
http://www.break.com/index/techno-viking-with-captions.html

The above essay was what actually happened when I was sent by Tatler to write a piece about Scandinavia as a secret summer holiday destination for their September issue. I delivered the piece on time but in the meantime the Travel editor went on maternity leave and the main editor, Geordie Greig left to edit The Standard, to be replaced by Catherine Ostler, known to all as Tiny Tears for her habit of pulling the croc. The piece then got heavily rewritten & held over until December because they found some snowy pictures they liked and wanted to use them to illustrate the article. Argument proved futile. Travel journalism for a glossy is hardly 'hard news', but what integrity the piece had with regard to truthfully reporting an experience pretty much went down the tubes. Not only have I never stood on the edge of a fjord swearing that I 'can feel the raw energy of the earth coursing' through my boots, I was sent nowhere near the fjords & I veer away from metaphysical moments accessed through the medium of my footwear.

By strange chance while the December issue was on the newsstands, I found myself at a the same supper party as the pyknician Tiny Tears. I hadn't met her before and I didn’t really meet her there either; she didn’t say hello. In fact, not only did she not say, hello, she sat across the table making it ostentatiously clear that she was discussing me with two other guests. This schoolyard stuff carried on until I was moved to lean across the table and said as politely as possible, ‘Stop being so fucking RUDE.’
The above version of the trip has been comprehensively re-edited so as not to duplicate the words in my Tatler article, but it is what actually happened...in the summer....

2010-01-03T22:05:00.003Z

Musical Recommendation of the Week

(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher & Higher - Jackie Wilson

Happy New Year Everybody!

2010-01-03T21:57:00.004Z

After a 2 month blog holiday, it is set to return. Thank you to all those people who bothered to write & cajole me back into action. I got a bit burnt out doing it weekly & so from now on, the will be fortnightly, most probably.

I plan to post on Friday, once children's terms are out of the way, but will email the usual suspects when it's out.

In the meantime, I offer the latest Musical Recommendation of the Week as a forerunner

See above.

2009-10-22T19:24:00.003+01:00

Musical Recommendation of the Week:
Who's Going To My Soul? - Gnarls Barkley

Is It A Bird? Is It A Plane? No, It's A Rant

2009-10-22T18:46:00.017+01:00

On October 13th I was went to The Literary Review lunch in Fitzroy Square for their annual lunch to award for a poem that ‘scans & rhymes & makes sense’.
The Review lunch attracts the literary and the eccentric in equal numbers.
One woman told me how mother’s friend had just introduced her to someone ‘training to be a psychopath’.
A Canadian man wearing a facemask then joined us and got onto the subject of his obsession with of impending Swine flu.
He shed some light when he described how, as a child his mother would wrap his birthday cakes with cling-film so no germ-clogged breath fumes could contaminate the icing as he blew the candles.
I was very amused by this, but he looked as me in dismay and wailed quietly, ‘But it’s a good idea!’

The highlights of Frieze week for me were Museum of Everything [more of which another time] and the Age of Marvelous in Holy Trinity Marylebone, the beautiful neo-classical church designed by John Soane.
Curated by Joe La Placa, the show was a modern day take on the Victorian Cabinet of Curiosities and was showing one of my favorite artists, Alastair Mackie who makes perfect spheres out of mouse skulls. [pictured]
It also featured Polly Morgan who has breathed life back into the defunct art of taxidermy and Kate MacGwire who has managed to create truly strange objects out of bird feathers. Her spooky serpentine knots that fill up antique mahogany cabinets remind us that birds were once reptiles whose scales grew more and more delicate until the could defy gravity.

Particularly arresting was the black Pieta a beautifully executed figure of Christ sitting in an electric chair by Paul Fryer. Fryer [pictured] was wondering around the show, startlingly handsome, in a long coat, wild hair & beard making Jane Eyre’s Mr Rochester look like a simpering beta male. He made the point that if Christ had been killed in the States, Christians would be walking round with little electric chair necklaces rather than crucifixes.
The ape nailed to a cross is even bolder. His motivation was to highlight the plight of the Western Lowland gorillas, but with the replacement of man for a monkey, it manages to speak of man’s cruelty to man, that sophistication is wafer thin & inventing ornate ways to kill each other doesn’t put a murder on a higher plane.
[Interestingly, Holy Trinity, built not to commemorate the higher planes of consciousness, but to celebrate the defeat of Napoleon.]

The show triggers my visceral loathing for organised religion. They dress themselves up as spiritual, but are so blatantly about governance and male hierarchy as to make a lady snort.
I can’t understand how any woman could want to be a part of a church – or mosque - that considers female service unworthy of inclusion. I'm all for the sacred and the importance of ceremony, I just can't stand the intimidating sexually-twisted bullies in maxi dresses who claim to be in a conference call with a supreme being.
I love the fact that the current Uncle Fester look-alike Pope has just issued an open invitation to all the misogynist Protestants to swap to Catholicism.

We look across at Iran and see a religious state that reveals it's murky political intent by rigging an election to keep its puppet in power & wields a huge ‘morality’ policeforce that menaces the public for tiny infringements of dress code & displays of ordinary affection.
Now, in the aftermath of the rigged election, we hear there is systematic rape of imprisoned protestors; state sanctioned by the ‘holy’ men who so disapprove of sex.

At the beginning of the month my friend Neil, who goes to about five plays a week, took me to see The Mysteries, an adaptation of the medieval plays of biblical stories performed by a South African troupe at the Garrick Theatre.
[Lucifer pictured. Cast as a woman]
As the interval curtain came down, I headed straight for the nearest exit.
I just can’t buy into those ghastly old chestnuts of all the angels being blokes, of woman being taken from Adam’s rib and Mary’s premarital sex being retrospectively dressed up as a virgin birth; it’s obnoxious sexist bullshit….the etymological root of Papal bull……..

I think I might be all ranted out. Oh, one last postscript rantlet.....

While he was alive there must have been hundreds of yards worth of column inches written about what a freak Michael Jackson was and how his attempts to look white were a neon sign pointing to his rampant madness and self-loathing. Reports on his post-mortem have only bothered to write a couple of words about about the fact that he was suffering from the pigmentation leaching skin disorder that he always claimed he suffered.

2009-10-12T18:31:00.001+01:00

This Blog is Posted Every Monday... on the whole

2009-10-09T16:45:00.004+01:00

Musical Recommendation of The Week:
Feel The Music - Guru

Prestat Chocolate Review No.9

2009-10-09T16:21:00.006+01:00

Organic Dark Chocolate Mint Wafers.......
Sophistication is drinking espressos rather than lattes, eating one's meat rare, eggs soft boiled, enjoying brandy & prefering dark chocolate to milk.
I like my meat like the bottom of an old shoe, my eggs like bullets & my chocolate pale...so I approach the Dark Chocolate Mint Wafer like a neolithic tribeswoman approaching a Braun juicer....
When I went to visit the gothic mansion that is the Prestat factory, they explained to me that such is the power of mint to permeate other ingredients that it is not only kept in separate boxes & cupboards, but completely segregated store rooms. Powerful, dangerous, mint can escape & invade unless put under draconian controls. It is the Hanibal Lector of the sweet world.
When I took the lid off the the deep pink and green box the smell was overpowering. Luckily the thin wafers didn't look too aggressively dark. It's chocolatey and less minty tasting than initial smells indicate.
Thinking about it's Lector-like powers I was reminded of the time I bit quite a chunk out of Jody Foster's shoulder while helping her adjust a shoulder strap after squeezing through the trapdoor into her Panic Room. [Her girlfriend was at a White Snake concert at the time.]

Deja Voodoo

2009-10-09T13:24:00.033+01:00

The difference between coincidence & serendipity, according to me...& how they can lead to crime.

The word 'serendipity' is a beauty coined in 1754 by Horace Walpole, [pictured] after the fairytale The Three Princes of Serendip, in which the heroes “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.” More than this, I think serendipity depends on our mood being elevated & at one with the universe.

[While we are on the subject of words, my favorite is Space and another one of great beauty is Sublime, but the other day, it suddenly struck me as quite a strange word. While it sounds lovely & means soaring, transcendent, uplifting - but when you deconstruct the word there's a sub in there, 'sub -lime' meaning under the limit, rather than over & beyond it.
Sometimes it's not a good idea to think too hard about these things.]

But back to serendipity...my feeling is that when we are up we are more receptive to making connections & seeing the joy in how random events effect one - joyfully irrational evidence that all is not chaos & that a thread of magic weaves through the plot of our lives.
When we are blue we miss these things: our hearts tilt towards the pavement, we see the hole in our shoes rather than the comet in the sky.

Coincidences, unlike serendipity, arrive whatever our mood and don't necessarily good things.
Take for example a recent news item about Man A, whose hat was blew into the road. Being safety conscious he checked the road was completely clear in both directions, before stepping out...if he had looked up, he might have spotted the mini bar-sized fridge flying of a third floor window where morbidly obese Man B had decided to kick start a diet with drastic action. Being a good-ish citizen he had also waited for a gap in the traffic before taking out his troubles on his white goods. The fridge landed on Man A at the exact moment he reached the hat. So, a coincidence, but not a happy one.

Coincidences swirl round us like a thousand leaves in an autumn gale. We only notice the ones that actually blow into our open mouths. It's as if they are constantly straying into our lives from across the porous membrane of a parallel universe, a universe where normal rules of odds & likelihood have no foothold... like when you squeeze a lemon & a stray squirt - that could have taken frankly any trajectory - heads straight to the bullseye of a tiny target:
your eye.
A few weeks ago I wrote in my blog [16/8/09] about the coincidence of when my ex-husband & war reporter Nick della Casa were arrested in the wilds of Northern Kenya & the young army commander who interrogated them turned out to have studied Nick for his political science degree at university, because Nick had previously been held as a hostage in Mozambique for eighteen months & Kenyan diplomats had assisted in his release. While this was good news because they suddenly had a personal connection with the army commander it was trouble too, because their story that they were 'just there on safari', no longer had any credibility & they were slung in jail. An example of a contradictory coincidence.

Two weeks ago on my birthday - actually, because of my birthday - it felt like I'd got caught up in a threshing machine of coincidences...

I met up for birthday lunch with my girlfriend Mad, who was paying a rare visit from Spain. After we had eaten, I headed back to my studio and we kissed goodbye on the corner of Ledbury Road & Westbourne Grove. As I set off down Ledbury, [incident happened a few feet from shop pictured] she called after me with one last 'Happy Birthday'. A woman, who had just overtaken me, turned back & said, 'It's my birthday too.'
I said in a stage whisper that I was turning fifty. [Dont. Say. Anything.]
She stopped & said. 'Me too.' So we hugged and congratulated each other. She asked my name, I told her & she said, 'I've heard of you, aren't you a writer?' I said, yes. 'I am too' she said, 'I'm mostly a journalist but I'm trying to write a memoir.'
'Well I'm the same: journalism as bread and butter - although doesn't seem to be any butter at the moment & my book is a memoir.'
'Where d'you come in your family?' she asked.
'Second.' I said.
'Me too. Where do you live?'
'Knsal Rise'
'Me too.' It turned out we live two streets apart.
'Have you got children?' she asked.
'Two' I said.
'Me too' she said.
'Which makes us average, but maybe they're birthday twins too.' While not being exact, they turned out to be close enough to stay within the vibe of weirdness; with 365 to choose from, one is only 5 days after my daughter, the other 9 after my son.
We exchanged numbers & week later she rang & asked me round to her house.
Sitting in her study, I noticed a painting on her wall. It was by my great friend, the painter Sarah Stitt, who I shared a studio with until three years ago, before she cruelly abandoned me for LA.
It turned out Birthday Twin was not only a collector of Sarah's art [pictured] , but considered her a friend & had just emailed her, as I had too, just before leaving my house.
When I replied to her question of who I had been married to, she shrieked. It turns out that she is my ex's eldest brother's wife's estranged stepsister.
Maybe the only odd thing is that we've lived for fifty years & never met before, but I started feeling distinctly weird.
I'm not superstitious, I don't think walking under a ladder is unlucky, nor passing black cat; I don't believe in going back to bed on seeing a magpie. I can say the word Macbeth in a theatre & often do.
I don't believe in horoscopes: I cannot believe constellations that make up a rubbish picture of a crab or a goat, (but in reality are stars billions of light years apart) can effect your personality, I really don't.
I don't believe in fairies, elves, ghosts or witches, or any sort of gods, the afterlife, reincarnation or the evil vested in the number 13 but....I didn't dare be asked, or ask Birthday Twin any more questions. One more coincidence & I was going to become hysterical. I made my excuses & returned home feeling...well...call it a failure of imagination, but to be honest... the feeling was that I might have to kill her.
I made a cup of tea, kicked off my shoes, checked in the mirror to see if it reflected my face or hers and then coolapsed on the sofa & turned on the tv. It was CSI Miami, now that is serendipity.

2009-09-30T00:45:00.004+01:00

Musical Recommendation of The Week:
Wastin' Time - Ron Sexsmith

Apocablog

2009-09-30T00:01:00.029+01:00

I read a review in the Sunday papers that described the film Big River Man ‘as if Werner Herzog had made Borat’ and went straight out to see it.

The documentary follows Martin Strel, a huge Slovenian who swam the entire length of the Amazon - from Peru to the Brazilian coast: 3,375 miles in 66 days - that’s longer than the width of the Atlantic - & he goes completely stark, raving psycho in the process.

In the headwaters terrifies some of the riverine tribes , who won't let Strel stay with them, fearing he is an evil pistachio - and this before his son Borat [really] makes him a hideous white mask to protect him from sunburn, which makes him look like the The Elephant Man doing the crawl. The incredibly honest, loving, exasperated commentary is voiced by Borat who acts as his father’s manager, publicist & nanny-minder. We lean that the Amazon is not the first river Martin Strel has swum; he has already done the Danube, the Yangtze & the Mississippi. His vague motive for the Amazon swim was, in Strel’s words, " for peace, friendship & clean waters." although the film also reveals that lurking below the water level there is a deep psychological drive, as swimming was the only effective way Strel as a boy, had to escape his violent, drunken father.

What’s also revealed is that Martin Strel is himself a drunk; tortured by his inability to swim away from himself, exhausted by the miles of river, but unable to cope with life back on land, he ends up putting electric clamps on his goose-larded head, unable to speak.
Big River Man is funny, sad & without saying much about ecology, paints a horrifying picture our destruction of the Amazon with shots of vast swathes of burning jungle as loggers seek out a single mahogany tree to satisfy our craving for chic dining room furniture.

Martin Strel ends up a mess and the adventure is a personal disaster for him, he ends up a mess, but the incredible accomplishment makes one thrilled witness and also succeeds in making one think long and hard about the larger mess the

planet is in.
It strikes me that really, the only way any of it is going to stop is with the death of a large majority of the human race. Here we are, at the beginning of the end of a civilization that we hasten by storing all our information on machines that will no longer be accessible when electricity grids grind to a halt. Such critical times and yet nothing at all seems to happen on a civic level & therefore I am steeping up & taking over. Someone has to do it.

In London, just for starters, anyone with a paved-over drive should immediately dig it up & turf or gravel it to allow rain to enter the soil. We all need to limit our meat eating to once a week, and bicycles should be compulsorily if our work is within five miles of our homes…

The talking heads in the press are constantly coming a

t it from the wrong angle.

A typical example: in a recent article in The Times, brainbox Marcus du Sautoy, Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford writing about a possible interplantary trainwreck, concluded by saying, ‘but before we abandon ship, the simulations show that it will take several billion years before Mercury might start to misbehave. For the time being, human interaction and not Mercury poses the most serious threat to the planet’s survival.'
[pictured above right, Prof Marcus Du Sautoy. Much to admire, aside from his wardrobe]

What the hell is he on about? 'The Planet’s survival'?
Why do people keep saying the planet is in danger? The planet is inert, it doesn’t give a shit, it’ll just adjust to no ozone, more carbon or whatever.

It is not in danger [unless Mercury comes at it like a billiard ball} it is man who is in danger. We are facing the end of humanity & frankly we probably deserve to go.

Give moss a chance, I say.

I think I’m in this apocalyptic mood because I have RSI in my thumb from the way I use my computer & yet, guess what, I cannot goddamn well stop myself from using it. If I can't even control my thumb, what hope is there for the rest of my behaviour?

Also...it was my birthday last week, a significant birthday, the anticipation of which had the occasional power to bring me (absurdly) to the brink of tears. It felt like I was strapped into a plunging funfair ride, hair streaming out behind, mouth open in a silent scream, heading for the hell of decrepitude.
In moments of calm - when my the G-force of my dread briefly stopped squishing my brain against the back of my skull like a sherry trifle - I assessed my life to date and found a minute scattering of achievements, victories - mostly Pyrrhic; the mistakes calamitous. In all this existential gloom the only things I feel remotely proud of are my two children. Having succumbed to my genetic pre-programming to procreate,

these poor darlings have reached young adulthood in a world of filth, poverty, corruption, Ricky Gervaise as a bone fide Hollywood movie star and the threat of another world war fought between two opposing ideologies based on identical superstitions.

While waiting for the end of life as we know it, I will lard my head with goose fat, attach electrical clamps & distract myself by heading to the Intelligence Squared interview with Werner Herzog at the Royal Festival Hall this weekend, where we are promised he will ‘explain why a real man should know how to milk cows & why chickens are such hateful animals’. One of Big River Man's many highlights is Martin Strel explaining that Slovenia is shaped like a chicken..... Poor chickens, we've bred them so they can't do what birds are designed to do & we keep them in gulags where they stand in so much of their own shit that the ammonia burns their feet and now we hate them for it...

Oh pass me the happy pills someone.....

[http://www.bigriverman.com/BigRiverMan.html]
http://www.vimeo.com/5070575

2009-09-29T21:08:00.004+01:00

Prestat Chocolate Review No. 8
The Mint Box gave Prestat the royal warrant of the Queen Mother when she commissioned it for her 100th birthday. Gorging on mints from this elegant (mint) green box was an exciting departure for a woman who had spent the previous 84 years on an exclusive diet of gin & Dubonnet.
The box contains Mint Crunches: gleaming brown diamonds, Bitter Mints, that have the sharpness of snorting toothpaste, but no real bitterness, thankfully. The Mint Fondants: topped with a violet & angelica that I accidentally finished without my analytical faculties to the fore, but probably means they are delicious… I left the Coffee Mints to last as they are white chocolate & I’m not a huge fan, but wait up! The Coffee Mints turn out to be the secret queens of the selection. It reminded me of the time, lying on the deck of Dado Ruspoli’s yacht in Monaco - and blinded by sunshine - I took what I thought was a bite of sorbet, and only when the giggles reached a crescendo of excitement did I realize it was Grace Kelly’s left breast in my mouth.

2009-09-23T15:33:00.001+01:00

Musical Recommendation of The Week:
A Place Called Home - Kim Richey

Rumpelstiltskin, Strange Twins, Woodland Creatures & Nightcrawlers......My Life In Snapshot. It's A Goddamn Fairytale

2009-09-23T02:43:00.044+01:00

Friday
To the Charles Ledray show in a disused fire station in Chiltern Street, Marylebone. It’s a strange little area, full of tailors, wedding shops and a Long Tall Sally shop selling Amazonian clothes & shoes large enough to accommodate a Viking raiding party. The surrounding shops compliment the Ledray show, which consists of just 3 pieces: the first, a tailor shop with a dummy displaying a gentleman’s jacket and on a nearby table, a fan of ties. Everything is handmade, doll-sized & under ceilings that are 2 foot off the ground, so you have to crouch down to see the charming, Rumpelstiltskin madness below.

The second piece is like a charity shop, with a circular rack of Hawaiian shirt on tiny hangers & tables of old t-shirts & jumpers. The last, is what it might look like in the backroom of that charity shop, with tiny, bulging dustbin bags in shopping trolleys beside an ironing board piled with jumble.

Everything is exquisitely made and has a weird poignancy. We seem so big beside these things & yet they manage to remind us that we are by any reckoning, very small. When it comes to how far we stick out from earth, even the tallest basketball players aren’t even as prominent as peach fuzz.
I took my daughter, who is about to start her first term at London College of Fashion and we spent ages peering at these scenes in their three pools of light in an otherwise shadowy, empty room. Empty that is, until John Waters walked in wearing his marvelous coal black Errol Flynn moustache & then we had four things to inspect.
[Show ends Sept 30th]

Saturday
Wanting to clear some life clutter, I decided to hire a stall at Portobello for the first time.

I got there at 5am, to find that I was an hour early, so I sat in my car watching the dawn break and the market team build the metal frames that, by 9am, are all shops. The upside of arriving too early was a prime spot, but all the regulars were muttering it was going to be a bad day because of Fashion Week. It was indeed a bad day and I only sold a few things, spending the rest of my time people-watching. The only fashionista to break ranks with the round of shows and come our way was Barbara Hulanicki of Biba fame. I had a Biba shirt hanging at the front of my stall & for one excited moment thought she might stop buy it – I mean, fashion designers can’t possibly remember everything they’ve ever made, but presumably they admire their own taste.... The highlight of my day was a double twin spotting. One identical pair walked by wearing the same striped shirts, although one was red/white & the other blue/white. Two minutes later, another pair passed, this time one had cut her hair short. I wanted to yell, ‘Have you see the other pair yet!?’ Are twins as interested by other twins as I am? Do they acknowledge each other when they meet - or are other twins just the norm & their fascination lies in us the single egg folk? Twins have been a gentle obsession for most of my life, but things got stoked in my teens by two court cases that made it into the national press. The first was a set of teenage twins from Cardiff who were done for arson. They spoke their own private language & insisted on being in the witness box together. One twin spoke of how claustrophobic their lives were & not long after, the dominant twin said she thought it was better if she died, which she then did.
The other court case was of twins stalking a hapless neighbour they felt they loved, but soon began to hate. They were exactly like how you would expect Clara & Clarice of Gormenghast to look. They spoke as one, in a strange droning harmony. In order to dress identically every day, if outfits differed in anyway - for example different buttons - they would cut off them all off & share them out again so they both had them alternating. Even if someone gave them a gift of two different coloured soaps they would hack them in half and cram the opposing halves together to satisfy their hysteria for parity. Riveting stuff.

Doing the maths at the end of the day at Portobello, I worked out that after expenses, in a twelve hour day I had made a sum total of £3, which even by my capacity for low earning was going it some. I tried to work out what that meant as an hourly rate & then fell into bed at 9.

Sunday
Tom, our choirmaster had booked us to sing at a miniature festival called Summer Sunset in Berkshire. Set in a beautiful woodland glade at Wasing Park, we arrived to find a mass of green-faced revelers dressed as woodland creatures, lying in heaps of day-after-the-night-before unwellness.
Our choir is not remotely professional – we do it for fun, & very occasionally, we don’t even have fun; motly we do. It is made up of artists, actors, a doctor, a chef and a nutritionist. There was slight disquiet among the sopranos when we discovered Sinead, a lawyer [& unbeknownst to her] our lead soprano, was stuck in bed with flu. Luckily though, handsome Rupert our [unbeknownst to him] choir mascot was in attendance, but everything was in the balance. As singers we are very up and down & so today it was possible we were going to make grown men, weep, but it was equally possible they were going to throw their shoes at us.
Before we went onstage, Tom took us off to run through the two songs we struggle with: Lovecats & Bare Necessities. We failed to nail either & an attempt by one of the sopranos [me] to get them knocked off our setlist was dismissed. Ten minutes later, we lined up & sung our hearts out to an audience of seventy hung-over people. Life On Mars - not always a good one - worked fantastically, as did Hallelujah & I’ll Fly Away; then we massacred Lovecats & Bare Necessities.

Monday
A distinctly odd day.
To fully explain it, let the scene go blurry as I guide you back through time to 1986…when I flew to Spain for the weekend to join my brother who was staying at the house of a well known Catalan sculptor. It was the 50th anniversary of the Civil War and I arrived thinking, very foolishly, there were going to be merry public celebrations. The sculptor's home, in a suburb of Barcelona, consisted of half a dozen small farm buildings that had been converted to bedrooms, living spaces and art studios.
There were various other guests, but it was hard to tell who or how many, although my brother had a few friends there including, one of his old schoolfriends, who I had never liked, but the living spaces were so scattered, it was easy to avoid people.
My room was at the far end of a huge studio containing lines of plan chests and scupting scaffolds. The bed was behind a glass wall, up a few steps on a raised platform at the far end of the room, all quite 60s.
In describing this room I realise the layout is very similiar to where I work now, on a little platform hived off the back of a photographer’s studio, - although the proportions are smaller & the wall is solid not glass.

On the last night of the weekend the weather broke and the wind started to howl in from the sea. I lay in bed reading Tough Guys Don’t Dance by Norman Mailer, a murder mystery in which the protaganist wakes up after a night of boozing to find his Porsche blood-soaked & a decapitated head nearby.
I turned out the light feeling spooked and listened to the branches of a tree being dashed against the courtyard wall outside the bedroom.
Then I thought I heard a tiny noise inside the studio, at the far end. I peered into the dark. Was there a denser bit of darkness in the general darkness? I stared harder, but could hear nothing over for the wind. I kept staring into the studio thinking something was there. I wanted to turn the light on the but the lamp was a good stretch from the bed & I started freaking myself out that a decapitater's axe would crash down on my outstretched arm. I went on staring and listening, until I realised I had spent the better part of 20 minutes like this & it was getting ridiculous. I really had to get over this Mailer-induced dread & sleep . I leaned out of the bed, switched the light on & there on the steps at the edge of the platform was a naked man.
There had been a denser black in the blackness. It was the schoolfriend. I had been staring at him creeping incrementally across the studio towards me.
‘Whatthefuckareyoudoing?’ I shrieked.
‘I’ve come to join you.' he said, now crouching down against the steps to hide himself. ' Getthefuck out of my room’ 'GettheFUCK out of my room’
‘Getthefuck OUT of my room’ Thankfully he slunk away. What kind of guy tries it on with a girl - who has shown absolutely no interest - by taking off all his clothes edging silently towards them in the dark? Afterwards I wondered what would have happened if I hadn’t been reading Mailer and had fallen asleep: he would have made it to my bed. Would he have raped me? If I had screamed for help would anyone have heard me? Had he raped anyone else?

When I got home to my bonsai flat in London, it had ceased to my haven; it felt like a wallpapered trap. I no longer slept in my bed, but on the sofa with all the lights on. I was wakeful most nights, listening. Sometimes I’d drink half a bottle of vodka before I could get my eyes to close. Weeks, turned into months and by the end of the year I put the flat up for sale & moved somewhere I could afford more than bedroom; I was a wreck living alone.
Years went by and I saw the schoolfriend on maybe three occasions: once across a crowded seminar, once at a party and once most oddly, deep in the Oxfordshire county.
I was driving along a narrow lane when another car appeared from the opposite direction, we slowed down to pass one another & as we drew level, I saw that it was him. On no occasion did we speak.

On Monday I drove to work, opened the door to the photographer’s studio and there was the schoolfriend, sitting in a chair. We recognised each other instantly. I passed him without speaking and went to my studio. All day long I could hear him talking to the photographer. All day long I wondered what to do.
Three sightings across 20 years & and nothing ever said.
In the afternoon, I could hear them discussing what they were going to do the following day & realised that this fouth time, I finally had to do something. I told myself that courage lies solely in the hands of the alarmed & then stepped out of my studio and said as calmly as I could, ‘By the way, what you did to me had a massive impact on my life that went on for years and years, all of it entirely negative. The thought of breathing the same air as you again tomorrow fills me revulsion.’
He sat there staring at me, saying nothing and then I left.
I walked down the corridor feeling very emotional, my hands were shaking, but by the time I reached my car, I felt goooood.

Tuesday
The photographer rang me late last night, saying the schoolfriend had told him he couldn’t come back in. Annoyingly, I had to stay away from the studio today because the photographer can't be the fall guy & lose the job over something that has nothing to do with him.
With an enforced day off I decided to wash that sleazeball outta my hair & take up the offer of M&M Management to experience hairdresser Paul Edmond's new UPR protein treatment brought here from Iran where, beneath their veils they have great glossy mains. I read somewhere that absolutely every adult Iranian, male & female wax their entire bodies. Whenever I look at Ahmedinajad fulminating on the news about the West, I can't help thinking that below that hairy chin of his he's as hairless as a spoon.
I then took my newly glossy mane to the first screening of my friend Bernard’s biopic Mr Nice, about drug dealer Howard Marks who is acted by Rhys Ifans.
I have sworn omerta until it is released.......& that's yr average four day in the life of a writer, artist, insomniac single mother: Brent brigade [militant wing]

Stop Press. Word is that twins are joining the choir tomorrow; tenors apparently [& unbeknowst to them, our lab specimens for minute study].

2009-09-23T02:29:00.005+01:00

Prestat Chocolate Review No. 7
Milk Sea Salt Caramel Cup
I don’t know what wacked out genius came up with the idea of adding sea salt to chocolate but he stumbled across something almost…sacred.
The tang is so......om
These are FANTASTIC: up there with violet & rose cremes, up there,..yes even with the lime chilli.
Eating the Sea Salt Caramel Cup reminds me of the time a bit a chunk out of Rowan Williams's ankle when I tumbled off my hassock after the communion wine. Although the Archbish was bleeding quite heavily, he took it in his stride assuming it was a moment of religious ecstasy.
Prestat also do a Sea Salt Truffle, but I daren’t talk about it now, lest they think I’m reviewing it & don’t send me any.

2009-09-14T00:29:00.005+01:00

Musical Recommendation of the Week:
You're No Good - Betty Everett

Like A Scooter Outta Hell - Hello

2009-09-13T22:50:00.031+01:00

The Great Wall of China, the Berlin Wall, Israel's Security Fence, The Congestion Charge, they're all walls that divide people, although only the Congestion Charge is conceptual rather than concrete. Like a Mongol, an East German or a Palestinian, I live on the wrong side; the outside. Should I cross the line forgetting to pay my £8 outsider levy (which I've done a sickening amount of times) there's a whacking great £50 fine for the impertinence.

In 2008, Mayor Boris announced he would rescind the western extension of the Congestion Zone, which would make my life easier as my work is currently just inside this inner city sanctum. For some reason ‘the earliest it can be removed is 2010’. There must be equivalence to Murphy's Law going on that unpleasant things like price hikes can be introduced overnight, but if it’s something involving people paying less, it takes two years.

For some reason the leader of Transport for London have agreed that motorbikes and scooters have magical powers. Like a trebuchet at the Great Wall, or a pole vault at the Security Fence, [pictured] anyone on two wheels is allowed free egress. So...now that my children move around with independence, I have decided to return to biking.

About twelve years ago I owned a motorbike, but it was ridiculous: my children were not only too little, but there were two of them and besides, the bike was far too powerful for my skills and I frequently frightened myself.

My plan is to buy a scooter, but feeling too rusty to just jump on one and weave off into the traffic, I booked myself into a short ‘proficiency certificate’ top-up course.

On Friday, as I looked around at the other people filling out forms in the scruffy office on an industrial estate near Wembley, I realised that the real joy of an excercise like this is not relearning all the defensive tactics of city driving, but being thrown together with a bunch of strangers, sharing a single purpose, for a finite period of time. The best thing about strangers is tht they are often pleasingly strange. I was aware that I too was not short of my own mental health issues. Last week, I had spent most evenings playing furious games of Snatch, an aggressive anagram tile game in which you nick your opponents' words by adding a letter to form a new word.

I still had anagrams on the brain when I was introduced to the little group of fellow bikers. there was Peter, an IT trainer, or, as he was to me: Peter-Pester-Repeats-Separate-Parakeets. There was Craig, a gardener who was a T short of Tragic and Enzo, an Italian model who would be mine if only there was an N to convert him to Dozen. I calmed down when I met to Concepción, a Filipina midwife, because that name wasn’t going anywhere. Arriving late, wearing a rainbow knit and looking as if he’d slept in a dumpster was Mervin, an urban druid type who whispered to me he was funding this course from the proceeds of hydroponically grown sensemilla growing in his mother’s attic.

The first hour was spent just re-acclimatizing ourselves to starting and more importantly, the art of stopping. I don’t know what had happened to Concepion in her non-biking years, but handling all those newborn babies had played havoc with her sense of balance. She had lost all hand-to-handlebar co-ordination and after tumbling into the tyre barriers for the 10th time, gave up and left.

The rest of our party was deemed sufficiently competent to take to the highway and follow our trainer, Reg-Rage-Grate-Target into central London. We zapped across the Congestion Zone border like Steve MacQueen in The Great Escape and went round Trafalgar Square one-way system a couple of times, passing the Anthony Gormley project on the fourth plinth as we did. As an excercise in 'people art' it is a curious thing. Every time I've seen someone having their hour up there they look a bit awkward and well, gormless. Rather than looking like voluntary living sculptures, they have an air of undergoing a punishment of gentle public embarrassment.

We returned to Wembley without incident, apart from temporarily losing Pester while crossing Hyde Park. After lunch we set out again, and again Pester became detached from the party. We parked up by a hot dog van and grabbed something to drink while waited for him to catch up. Mervin, who seemed to see cosmic significance in almost everything, was telling me how he’d been stung on the neck by a bee as we crossed Oxford Street, having just passed a van with Honeydale Laundry on it. He interrupted his story to gasp delightedly, ‘Look man! A pigeon!’ As if he'd just spotted a bird of paradise.

By early evening we were ready to run through a quick solo test for our proficiency certificates and drew straws for the order we rode. Pester went first and came back looking glum. He had gone the wrong way down a one-way street. Tragic and Dozen and I all passed and then it was Mervin’s turn. He came back fuming, tearing off his helmet and threwing it on the ground. ‘That Reg is a fascist! He failed me! There was a frog in the road! I put my indicator to overtake it and then I forgot to turn it off. I was freaked man – you don’t kill frogs!' London is many things, but what it isn't is frog-filled. It was probably a leaf.

We bid each other goodbye and I headed off for another evening of Snatch never expecting to see any of them again, but to my amazement, the next day, in a completely different part of town, I saw Mervin mooching along in some sort of cape. I was on the opposite side of the road buy food at a farmers' market, but excited by such a chance encounter I put down my purchases and hollered at him. As I did, my tongue was ambushed by my Snatch hangover. Instead of ‘Mervin!’ To my horror, out burst, ‘Vermin!’ at full volume and I had to crouch behind a cheese stall until I was sure he had gone away. It all felt suddenly so Gormley plinth.

2009-09-13T15:39:00.011+01:00

Prestat Chocolate Review No. 6

Rose Ganache this week. The exotic flavours of rose etc originated in Damascus and was brought back here by crusaders. One can read about the dangerous ecstasies of this sweet can elicit in the Newstead Abbey scrolls on display in the V&A. In the end the monks decided the effects were to powerful for the average Joe and withheld the recipe for hundreds of years. It only came back into general usage when a Syrian chef happened to be employed by Nell Gwynn.

It chocolate square with a crystal rose shard topping, inside is ganache, which is like smooth cake mix before it goes into the oven. I’ve never understood why people cook cakes, it ruins them.

Oh my God! I’ve just eaten one, they are UnBELIEVAble! My knees nearly gave way with joy - reminding of the time I fell to the ground with Rutger Hauer’s shapely calf between my teeth. [We were listening to the climax of Norma in a Cuban graveyard and I had grown overwrought]

2009-08-31T01:00:00.004+01:00

Prestat Chocolate Review No4.
Honey & Thyme Chocolates
Hmmm...unusual idea for a chocolate but absolutely fantastically delicious: delicate and horribly moreish - not unlike the time I sunk my teeth into Ava Gardner's neck [we were in a terribly overcrowded lift]. The taste lingers for quite some time. When she kissed me goodbye on the 15th floor, she murmured 'you taste divine...'

2009-08-31T00:58:00.002+01:00

Musical Recommendation of the Week
Spanish Stroll - Mink Deville

Float My Boat

2009-08-30T23:01:00.040+01:00

What is it with men and boats?
The obsession for detail stretches all the way back to the Bible when that old lush Noah sets to constructing an ark:
‘of gopher wood; rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch’
I think that’s God giving the shipwright - or is it arkwright? – instructions.
Immediately, you see them getting fussy on the specifics; not any old wood, oh no, gopher wood, not any old boat, a bloody ark.

Up until that moment ‘ark’ meant ‘cupboard’, as in the Ark of the Covenant: the cupboard in which lay the Ten Commandments, Aaron’s rod and some manna. Manna, incidentally, is another name for honeydew, as in Coleridge’s lines in Kubla Khan, ‘for he on honeydew hath fed & drunk the milk of Paradise’. While honeydew is a pretty name, in reality it’s just sugar-rich aphid poop, excreted after they have feasted on plant sap. It can be collected and ground into tasty bread, or certainly tasty if you are wandering in a rocky desert. But I digress…
So now Noah and his sons Ham, Shem & Japeth are to make a cupboard boat because there’s been a bloody great eruption on Thera [now known as the Greek island Santorini].
Thera had been experiencing continuous cycle of volcanic activity, but when it finally blew itself completely to pieces, the event was an even bigger than Krakatoa.
[When Krakatoa detonated, so much dust was thrown into the air that affected the sunsets round the entire globe for a full seven years after]
The Thera eruption caused a massive Mediterranean-wide tsunami. If bible literalists are to be believed and Noah really did wind up on Mount Ararat, then the cupboard boat was swept from the Levantine coast all the way to the Armenian border, some 900 miles inland. The paranoid don't hold with this explanation and believe the flood is evidence of the old guy in the sky being cross.
[pictured, Santorini - showing the massive caldera where the volcano vaporised]

Next in boatworld came the rise in warships during the naval antagonism of the Punic Wars with the Romans' trailing the Carthaginians and only catching up when they captured one of their boats and used it as a blueprint to copy. First there were biremes, with two levels of oars, then came triremes, followed by quadriremes, a very popular model making up most of the fleet of the Eastern Mediterranean. When it came to quinqueremes, purists said they all had to come from Nineveh [cross section pictured] and on it went: hexaremes, sexiremes septeremes, bigger and bigger until they hit polyremes and Ptolemy IV [pictured] went berserk and built a "forty" that was 128m long, required 4,000 rowers and 400 other crew, and could support a force of 3,000 marines on its decks – but probably couldn’t get out of the harbour.

Further East, the Chinese were perfecting the junk, which had a maneouverable mast and butterfly-like sails, making it possible to sail into the wind. The innovation below decks was to divide it into separate compartments, so if one got storm damaged the others remained safe and dry.
Much later, the Portuguese perfected the galleon and in about 1534 unleashed the São João Baptista, the most powerful warship in the world. With 366 bronze canons it soon became known by its nickname Botafoga, meaning ‘spitfire’. As a battleship, it became truly famous when it rammed open the chains protecting Tunis harbour, allowing the Christian allied fleet to capture the city. Botafoga’s firepower was only exceeded by the arrival, forty years later, of the Spanish vessel Our Lady of the Conception, better known as Cagafuego, a nickname in a similar vein, meaning the ‘Fireshitter’.
Away from war and three hundred years later, with the Industrial Revolution in full swing the genius of Isamabard Brunel brought us SS Great Britain. [it is now a museum in um Bristol I think, pictured] Made of iron and with a screw propeller she became the largest vessel afloat until overtaken by the Titanic.
Not only was the Titanic the biggest ship ever built, but surpassed all rivals in onboard luxury with a swimming pool, libraries a gymnasium, barber shops, a squash court and Turkish baths. The most expensive one-way trans-Atlantic passage was £2,500 - £50,000 in today's currency. Technologically advanced features included 3 elevators, ship-wide wiring feeding electric lights and a powerful 1,500-watt radio allowing constant contact with the shore, a facility that heightened the sense of terrible drama playing out on her decks when the iceberg was struck killing 1,517.

Skip forward to Corfu this summer where I visited two boats that prove that the shipbuilding madness kicked off by God’s ‘gopher & pitch’ fantasy, still rages quite unabated. Bigger, faster, blingier, my Aaron’s rod is bigger than your Aaron's rod was much in evidence. First up was Guilty. The boat belongs to an old dude, art collector and presumed squillionaire called Dakis Joannou.

Last year while puttering along in a titchy dinghy in Majorca, we come across the weirdness of Andrei Melnichenko’s Philippe Strack designed boat called simply 'A' [pictured left] so I wasn’t expecting to be surprised by Guilty...but...I certainly was.

Mr. Joannou commissioned Jeff Koons to design the boat’s livery - if it can be described as such - which Koons duly did, in a strange homage to Roy Liechtenstein.
Having been a bit of a fan of Jeff Koons’ monumental kitsch, I now am completely off him. The current show of his ‘pool toys in stepladders' at The Serpentine exposes him as a hollow Wizard of Oz. Uninteresting in the same way that Gilbert & George’s major retrospective in Tate Modern revealed their vacuity.
That aside, Guilty is certainly eye-catching. As someone said, ‘it looks like a seagull ate a bad liquorice allsort and splattered it with techni-coloured guano'. The boat is daring and amusing and unusual and really quite hideous. Nor did Mr Koons consider what large slabs of black paintwork would feel like underfoot under the full glare of Greek sunshine and a ban on footwear. Wherever it goes it is surrounded by the sound of outboard engines as curious passersby circle it for a closer look.
Inside, the design is less Koon-hell and more like an ultra modern Tribeca penthouse with neon light artworks, David Shrigley cartoons painted directly onto the wall, shocking pink fur rugs and many other examples of expensive playfulness. Everything shouts rock god.
It’s as if a bunch of coke-crazed designers got hold of the plans and egged each other in a frenzy with cries of, ‘More Sodom you pussy!’ ‘Much more Gomorrah!’ 'Whaddaya mean we can’t have permanent green fog around the hull?’ It’s all the stranger for its juxtaposition with the mild and pleasant Mr. Joannou.

Completely dwarfing Guilty was groovy Hollywood mogul David Geffen’s Rising Sun, a super-yacht that goes 34 knots…. [pictured above] which is about 40mph, so if you were planning to water ski behind it, think Hokusai-style wake.
I don’t know when a boat stops being a yacht and starts being a super-yacht, but maybe it’s at the same point a humble fishing dhow becomes an ark.
If Thera had blown while Geffen was having Rising Sun built and God had chosen him rather than Noah, then there would have been plenty of room to save the unicorn, chimera and phoenix – or maybe Noah did manage to load them and they just died of gopher wood allergies.

We went to Rising Sun for drinks one evening. It reminded me of the time my friend Hugo took me as his walker for a long weekend off Sardinia on a huge yacht, although it was about half the size of Rising Sun and I slept on the floor of his cabin like a hobo in the Ritz. The host was friend-de-jour of Hugo's who had made a rapid fortune cornering the copper market, but whose name now escapes me; all I can remember is that tabloids called him the Copper Whopper. The boat was icy cold from air conditioning with electronic doors and I wandered about all weekend, shivering in two cardigans with doors swishing open and shut, wondering where the hell everybody was.
Rising Sun is like what a roll-on roll-off ferry dreams of being if only it could meet the right rich guy. It has a crew of 45 all dressed in ninja black and walking around with earpieces. All was restrained elegance and expanses of bird's eye maple and carpet so thick it was bouncy.
There was a three-storey stairwell to fall to your death. We were shown round by the nautical equivalent of a hotel manageress who showed us a selection of rooms including the engine room and an onyx-lined loo. The whole place was exactly like the sets where Bond dispatches 45 Ninja crew members. The engine room with its hearse-sized carburetor glinted with such cleanliness that it wouldn't make much difference if a patient as ru

shed there or to the hospital room across the passage. The engine is something like 45,000 horsepower, or to put it more modern terms, has the carbon footprint of a coachload of yetis.
That’s the weird thing about boats, people always show you absolutely everything: the loos and the engine and - unless you feign a coughing fit - how they both function…
How else do you think I know how fast the darn thing goes?
When people come to my house, I hate to let them leave without showing them how my washing machine works and a detailed explanation of my garden shed's contents, so maybe I'm not so different.
Everything is stultifying just so at sea and the grander the boat, the more concentrated this ship-shaped nuttiness. When anal people die, they go to the celestial boatyards. Our poor tour manageress was visibly shaken & terribly embarrassed when she spotted some teeny smuts of charred pine needles on the vast foredeck, borne there on the wind from a forest fire across the island and only avoidable if they'd had serried ranks of turbine-sized hairdryers pointing Canute-like into the wind. They're probably on order now.

We were shown the garage in the belly of boat, housing another two

speedboats and half a dozen jet skis, like Rising Sun had been on fertility pills. There was a fabulous cinema, a gym, a library where all the books were hidden from sight so we had to take her word that is was a library and a whole state of the art beauty spa for the unkempt guest to get wrestled into...some sort of kemptitude.
My favorite moment was looking through a porthole and glimpsing a bevy of cleaning staff not only ironing the sheets on a bed, but hoovering them too.While I liked David Geffen enormously, Rising Sun felt slightly like a 45,000 carat gold, velvet-trimmed trap. It had that peripheral vibe that softly whispered 'Citizen Kane' to me and I could swear one of the jet skis was called Rosebud.
Mr Geffen seemed commendably well-adjusted, but living in that sort of luxurious, uber-sanitized removal from the grime of ordinary life also removes the simple pleasures the grind affords: watering one's own tomato plants, watching white linen blowing on the washing line, chatting to the neighbour while picking up a parcel he's taken in for you, cooking bacon for groggy teenagers, slipping into warm, slightly rumpled sheets at night.....
Sailing into the sunset on something of the scale of Rising Sun pitches a human straight onto the lip of loneliness; like being the only person living in Paris.

And to think all this flamboyance kicked off with a floating cupboard.

Nautical Terms that have hopped into common usage:

As the Crow Flies
When lost or unsure of their position in coastal waters, ships would release a caged crow. The crow would fly straight towards the nearest land thus giving the vessel some sort of a navigational fix. The tallest lookout platform on a ship came to be know as the crow's nest.
Leeway
The Lee side is the side of the ship sheltered from the wind. A lee shore is a shore that is downwind of a ship. If a ship does not have enough "leeway" it is in danger of being driven onto the shore.
Windfall
A sudden unexpected rush of wind from a mountainous shore which allowed a ship more leeway.
Over the Barrel
The most common method of punishment aboard ship was flogging. The unfortunate sailor was tied to a grating, a mast or over the barrel of a deck cannon.
To Know the Ropes
There was miles and miles of cordage in the rigging of a square rigged ship. The only way of keeping track of and knowing the function of all of these lines was to know where they were located. It took an experienced seaman to know the ropes.
Footloose
The bottom portion of a sail is called the foot. If it is not secured, it is footloose and it dances randomly in the wind.
First Rate
Implies excellence. From the 16th century on until steam powered ships took over, British naval ships were rated as to the number of heavy cannon they carried. A ship of 100 or more guns was a First Rate line-of-battle ship. rated.
Pipe Down
The Pipe Down was the last signal from the Bosun's pipe each day which meant "lights out" and "silence".
Chock-a-Block
If two blocks of rigging tackle were so hard together they couldn't be tightened further, it was said they were "Chock-a-Block".
Groggy
The sailors' daily ration of rum be diluted with water. The men called the mixture "grog". A sailor who drank too much grog was "groggy".
Three Sheets to the Wind
A sheet is a rope line which controls the tension on the downwind side of a square sail. If, on a three masted fully rigged ship, the sheets of the three lower course sails are loose, the sails will flap and flutter and are said to be "in the wind". A ship in this condition would stagger and wander aimlessly downwind.
Pooped
The poop is the stern section of a ship. To be pooped is to be swamped by a high, following sea.
Buoyed Up
Using a buoy to raise the bight of an anchor cable to prevent it from chafing on a rough bottom.
By & Large
From the nautical: by meaning into the wind and large meaning with the wind: as in, "By and Large the ship handled very well."
Cut and Run
If a captain of a smaller ship encountered a larger enemy vessel, he might decide that discretion is the better part of valour, and so he would order the crew to cut the lashings on all the sails and run away before the wind. Other sources indicate "Cut and Run" meant to cut the anchor cable and sail off in a hurry.
In the Offing
From the 16th century usage meaning a good distance from shore, barely visible from land, as in - "We sighted a ship in the offing."
Skyscraper
A small triangular sail set above the skysail in order to maximize effect in a light wind.
The Bitter End
The end of an anchor cable is fastened to the bitts at the ship's bow. If all of the anchor cable has been payed out you have come to the bitter end.
Toe the Line
When called to line up at attention, the ship's crew would form up with their toes touching a seam in the deck planking.
Overhaul
To prevent the buntline ropes from chaffing the sails, crew were sent aloft to haul them over the sails. This was called overhauling.
Slush Fund
A slushy slurry of fat was obtained by boiling or scraping the empty salted meat storage barrels. This stuff, called "slush" was often sold ashore by the ship's cook for the benefit of himself or the crew. The money so derived became known as a slush fund.
Under the Weather
If a crewman is standing watch on the weather side of the bow, he will be subject to the constant beating of the sea and the ocean spray.
Overreach
If a ship holds a tack course too long, it has overreached its turning point and the distance it must travel to reach it's next tack point is increased.
Gone By the Board
Anything seen to have gone overboard or spotted floating past the ship (by the board) was considered lost at sea.
Above Board
Anything on or above the open deck. If something is open and in plain view, it is above board.
Overwhelm
Old English for capsize or founder.
Between the Devil & the Deep Blue Sea
The devil seam was the curved seam in the deck planking closest to the side of the ship and next to the scupper gutters. If a sailor slipped on the deck, he could find himself between the devil and the deep blue sea.
The Devil To Pay
To pay the deck seams meant to seal them with tar. The devil seam was the most difficult to pay because it was curved and intersected with the straight deck planking. Some sources define the "devil" as the below-the-waterline-seam between the keel and the the adjoining planking. Paying the Devil was considered to be a most difficult and unpleasant task.
Rummage Sale
From the French "arrimage" meaning ship's cargo. Damaged cargo was sold at a rummage sale.
A Square Meal
In good weather, crews' mess was a warm meal served on square wooden platters.
Son of a Gun
When in port, and with the crew restricted to the ship for any extended period of time, women were allowed to live aboard along with the crew. Infrequently, but not uncommonly, children were born aboard, and a convenient place for this was between guns on the gun deck. If the child's father was unknown, they were entered in the ship's log as "son of a gun".
Let the Cat Out of the Bag
In the Royal Navy the punishment prescribed for most serious crimes was flogging. This was administered by the Bosun's Mate using a whip called a cat o' nine tails. The "cat" was kept in a leather or baize bag. It was considered bad news indeed when the cat was let out of the bag.
Overbearing
To sail downwind directly at another ship thus "stealing" or diverting the wind from his sails.
No Room to Swing a Cat
The entire ship's company was required to witness flogging at close hand. The crew might crowd around so that the Bosun's Mate might not have enough room to swing his cat o' nine tails.
Taking the wind out of his sails
Sailing in a manner so as to steal or divert wind from another ship's sails.
Start With a Clean Slate
A slate tablet was kept near the helm on which the watch keeper would record the speeds, distances, headings and tacks during the watch. If there were no problems during the watch, the slate would be wiped clean so that the new watch could start over with a clean slate.
Taken Aback
A dangerous situation where the wind is on the wrong side of the sails pressing them back against the mast and forcing the ship astern.
Chunder
When prisoners were being transported to Australian they would shout 'watch out under' before they vomited over the side, the phrase got shrinkwrapped to fit the emergency of the moment.
At Loggerheads
An iron ball attached to a long handle was a loggerhead. When heated it was used to seal the pitch in deck seams. It was a handy weapon for quarrelling crewmen.
Fly-by-Night
A large sail used only for sailing downwind and requiring rather little attention.
No Great Shakes
When casks became empty they were "shaken" (taken apart) so the pieces, called shakes, could be stored in a small space. Shakes had very little value.
Give (someone) a Wide Berth
To anchor a ship far enough away from another ship so that they did not hit each other when they swung with the wind or tide.
Thwarted
Thwarts are the diagonal pieces of wood that strengthen a boats hull - but are easily tripped over.
Cut of His Jib
Warships many times had their foresails or jib sails cut thinly so that they could maintain point and not be blown off course. Upon sighting thin foresails on a distant ship a captain might not like the cut of his jib and would then have an opportunity to escape.
Garbled
Garbling was the prohibited practice of mixing rubbish with the cargo. A distorted, mixed up message was said to be garbled.
Press Into Service
The British navy used Pres Gangs to fill their ships' crew quotas by kidnapping men off the streets and forcing them into service.
Touch and Go
This referred to a ship's keel touching the bottom and getting right off again.

2009-08-26T14:53:00.001+01:00

Musical Recommendation of the Week

For What It's Worth - Buffalo Springfield

Pole Faulting

2009-08-26T14:16:00.007+01:00

I have just come back from holidays and my house resembles well, a building site - which is not surprising because that's what it is. Having been woken every morning in Corfu by crickets, I was jolted awake at some ungodly hour by the shriek of an electric saw. When I bought my house the style was all 70s anaglypta and embossed palm fronds with accents of Pizza Hut. The carpets were so densely patterned that where two met carried a warning for epileptics. All these were torn out by two Poles called Kris and Mundek. Everything would go quite well until about midday and then Mundek would start cracking into the Special Brews and by late afternoon he was drunk in charge of a nail gun and calling me his Mrs Princess.

Seven years on all their work is falling apart. Tearing down some wallpaper last month, the wall followed

suit. I now have a house full of new builders, all Poles

again and to my monolingual eartheir language sounds like a series of blood curdling threats being issued. when they are probably saying something like, 'Mate, we're running short of tiling grout' to me it sounds like 'One inch closer & I'll chew off your eyebrows with my sharpened teeth'. Language barrier notwithstanding, all was going well until they set about installing the new kitchen units. I had timed by holiday to avoid being at home without access to the kitchen, but coming home very late and tired last night I walked into a 3D anagram of a kitchen that involved the unexplained removal of an upstairs loo cistern.

Not being able to read English, they had clearly tossed the instructions aside, occasionally shouting, 'Your grandmother mated with a goat in a vat of sewage!' Every surface was covered in Miss Haversham layers of dust, and where there had been a garden tree, there was now only a stump. To exhausted to weep I crawled into bed a resolved to deal with it this morning. I got dressed as soon as I heard them clattering downstairs and girded myself for a site talk. The Poles greeted me with tea cup salutes, shouting gaily, 'We plan to barbecue your armpits with our flaming vodka breath!'

Oh God.

2009-08-16T13:25:00.001+01:00

Musical Recommendation of the Week:
Everything Is Free - Gillian Welch

3 Murders, 2 Camels, 1 Divorce

2009-08-16T12:13:00.029+01:00

Continued from last week.......

Final Installment:

When the call came, to my great relief it was not a stranger telling me they were dead; it was Willie, on a terrible line. ‘Are you ok?’ ‘Sort of.’ ‘Are you hurt?’ ‘Bruised, but happy to be here…in a way.’ ‘Where are you?’ ‘Garissa jail, we’ve been here for a while, but this is the first call they’ve let me make.’ He and Nick hadn’t met the Shifta, but two days after I had flown out, they were ambushed before dawn by a sixteen strong army squad. Willie, Nick and the two guides were tied up and beaten, the poor Somalis getting the worst of it. The soldiers tore their makeshift camp apart. They had no idea what they were looking for, but when they found a defunct BBC pass in Nick’s bag, they accused them of spying - but spying on what? There were no military installations, just bush and bandits. Nick and Willie were held all day being questioned and beaten on the elbows and the soles of their feet. Next morning they were woken up, blindfolded and given a mock execution before the questioning started up again. The soldiers certainly weren’t buying the explanation that two men had voluntarily set out to meet the Shifta - the story was plainly ridiculous – every right minded person avoided them. Maybe they were arms dealers, but they could find neither weapons nor cash. The questions and the beatings continued. At noon, a Landrover arrived carrying the platoon commander, a young army major, who had come to interrogate them. As soon as he arrived the atmosphere calmed a bit and the goons backed off. The major has handed the BBC pass and their papers. He looked at Nick’s passport and said, ‘you’re not by any chance the Della Casa who was held by FRENAMO rebels are you?’ Stunned, Nick struggled to say something and eventually gabbled, ‘ah, no, that was …that was my brother.’ ‘You’re sure of that?’ said the major, looking at him. ‘You see, I studied the case in Political Science at university in Dar Es Salaam.’ Before Nick could think of another unconvincing lie, the major suddenly went very pale, reeled away and puked horribly in the dirt. When he had recovered and composed himself, he explained that he had malaria. Willie asked to be untied so he could dig out was able to offer him our medicine, which established friendly enough relations for them to be untied. In the evening, the young major released the two guides. He said he had half a mind to release them all, but the fact of the camera, the BBC pass, the knowledge that Nick had been hostage in Mozambique all smelled of trouble. Kenya might be being portrayed in some poor light. He decided to hand Nick and Willie over to the police in Garissa. His soldiers would ‘take custody’ of the camels, meaning that poor dear Bila & Makende were most likely killed and eaten. After a long drive through the bush they arrived at Garissa jail, where Nick and Willie were locked in a cell together and left alone for the night. The next morning, the senior officer came in and told them they were in very deep trouble unless they told the truth about what they were doing in the NFD. Once again, they explained that they were hoping to do a documentary on the Shifta. The man brought Willie’s journal out from behind his back and slapped it on the table. ‘We have studied this and we know you were up to something more. What is this ‘masterplan’ you write of?’ Willie told him about the muralist Masterplan, but the officer scoffed at his explanation and left. That night, as they were chatting in their beds about trying to contact the British Ambassador, there was a thud and a series of loud creaks overhead and suddenly a leg appeared through their ceiling. In the hope of gleaning information on the ‘masterplan’ a human ‘bug’ had been crouching in the rafters above their cell. He had lost his balance and fallen through the rattan ceiling. By the time Willie called me, the British Embassy had got involved on their behalf and the police had given up questioning them. Nick had been taken straight to Nairobi International airport and expelled from the country. As an ex-pat resident with a safari business, Willie was in a slightly different position. The Immigration Minister ordered that Willie bring £30,000 into the country or face deportation as well. It was a huge price for a stupid, macho outing. Willie didn’t have that sort of money, but I had a nest egg in shares that had been invested when I was twelve and had been growing slowly ever since. I knew he would he heartbroken to leave the country so, leaving a tiny war-chest, I sold almost all of them, and arranged for a money transfer. A few days later, Willie asked me send receipts to the immigration department, so they would sanction his release. ‘I think they’re going to stay on my case. They’re pissed off they couldn’t pin anything on me. I think they’ll come and search through my papers in Lamu. I want you to go through all my files and throw out anything incriminating? ‘Incriminating? Like what?’ ‘Anything that a paranoid mind could decide was espionage. There’s also some detonator cord from a salvage job in a drawer. Throw that away.’ I went to Willie’s filing cabinet and opened the top drawer. We both had our own cabinets for paperwork, but I had never had any reason to go into his before. I sat down and started going through every file, speed-reading old letters and receipts. There were three drawers filled with files; it took hours and hours. I could find nothing until I reached the back of the bottom drawer and then I found stuff of great significance, but only to me. There was letter after letter addressed to Willie from a man called Mike Hedges. Dated over months and then years, they started neutral, but grew increasing desperate and frustrated in tone. Mike Hedges had sold Willie the entire safari camp on Kiwayu. This constituted an enormous amount of kit, from tents, linen, beds and chairs to cutlery, all the kitchen equipment, dozens of lanterns and sets of china. Willie had never paid for it. I was horrified. Kenya is a very corrupt country and I had met many dishonourable people while living there, but I believed Willie was different. I couldn’t bear what I read; he owed the man thousands of pounds. I was pregnant with this man’s child. I rang the investors in London again and cleaned out what was left of my funds. I never imagined the war-chest would be also gone so soon. When Willie rang again I told him that there was no espionage that in his files, but knew about the camp being stolen. He was livid with me. ‘It’s not stolen!’ ‘well, it is if you haven’t paid for it.' ‘I fully intend to pay.’ ‘But you’ve had that camp for five years.’ 'The money always just goes on other stuff. I told him I had raised the money and to contact Mike Hedges as soon as he got out of jail. We settled the debt, but the shape of the world had permanently changed since reading those letters. Not only were we wiped out financially, but I realised that you can’t buy a sense of honour on someone else’s behalf. I was having a child with someone I was suddenly no longer confident I really knew. If our relationship had sprung some leaks far below the Plimsoll Line, then Nick’s life was heading for utter disaster. Willie’s and his friendship cooled considerably after their arrest. We didn’t go back to England for his wedding, but stayed in touch sporadically before he went to cover the first Gulf War. When Saddam Hussein rolled over so quickly, there were then rumours that the long- suppressed Kurds were planning an uprising in the north and routes into the region were closed. Nick returned to England and made a plan to get into Kurdish heartland of northern Iraq through the mountains of eastern Turkey. Once more he took Charlie Maxwell. More extraordinarily, he took Rosanna too. Despite the Shifta debacle, it seemed that he treated these arduous trips so like holidays that he invited guests. It hadn’t been so very long since we had seen Rosanna; it seemed unlikely she could be clear of such a chronic illness as ME. Maybe, like me, she had decided that joining him was a better option than waiting at home. In late March, the three of them flew to Diyabakir and hired a guide. Within a month they were all dead; killed in a rocky ravine by the guide in a fight over money. The story was pieced together by Royal Marines who recovered their bodies in late May, but no one could be sure of precisely what went so wrong, because although the guide was caught, he never confessed. What is thought to have happened is that during a disagreement the guide shot both men and ran off. There was evidence that Rosanna was alive and stayed at the spot for another night. This gave rise to questions as why she didn’t run away; the shock might have rooted her to the spot, or maybe there was only one way to run and that was the route the guide had gone. Besides, she was on her own in bleak mountains, with no habitation anywhere near, where was she to go? Another theory, according to the time on Charlie Maxwell’s movement activated watch, is that Nick was killed outright in the shooting, but Charlie, while mortally injured did not die immediately. Rosanna stayed with him as he faded, but by the next morning the guide had returned. Unable to escape, he killed her, eliminating the only witness to the crime. Rosanna’s body has never been found. It is presumed the guide threw her into the river. Back at home Charlie’s wife had just found out she was pregnant with their second daughter, something she never had a chance to tell him.

Babes

2009-08-16T12:08:00.005+01:00

Prestat Review No. 4: Babes

Babes come in a fabulous box designed by Kitty Arden, the artist creates all Prestat's chocolate artwork.
Coming in a choice of blackcurrant, mandarin, passion fruit, lemon & raspberry, they are what the French call Pate des Fruits. Hiding under a layer of chocolate is jelly with the consistency of Turkish Delight, but with grenade-strength fruit flavouring. They are the bonbon de choix of at least one former US President.
Last time I bit Jane Fonda [she never gets out of the way] she tasted not unlike the Lemon Babe

2009-08-10T19:05:00.003+01:00

Musical Recommendation of The Week
Who Knows - Marion Black

Arrest, Kidnap, Murder: Part 3

2009-08-10T16:49:00.027+01:00

Continued from last week.........

So....Willie & Nick were off to look for Shifta in the Northern Frontier District, a wild, remote semi-desert region bordering Somalia; a border, along most of it’s length, in name only.
Somalia in 1990 was sliding rapidly towards the anarchic meltdown from which it is yet to emerge. President Said Barre - months away from being toppled - had prohibited groups greater than 4 gathering in Mogadishu. At night the city lay in darkness, the generators having been sold off by the government. There were fuel shortages, petrol queues and the cost of pasta - their staple food since Italian colonial days - had skyrocketed, along with the price of khat, the amphetamine-rich plants the entire population chewed. Inflation was so high that millions of coins, too low in value to be of use, lay scattered in the streets like so many seashells. The Shifta, who Nick hoped to film, weren’t rebels however, they had no political agenda; they were outlaws. [above, click on map to see out planned route]
I didn’t say anything, but thought were there was every chance they would get robbed, if they were lucky; killed if they weren't. The Somali Shifta were known for their ruthlessness; they weren’t known for being genial interviewees. I couldn’t bear the idea of sitting on my own for weeks on end, waiting for news.
If Willie was going to die, I’d rather be there, so we flew up to Nairobi together.

On arrival, we were surprised to find Nick had company. With him was his brother-in-law, Charlie Maxwell, but he had never mentioned this on the phone. Charlie was about ten years older than us; married to Nick’s older sister. He was a genial, shambling, man and though ex-army, he wasn’t nearly as athletic as either Nick or Willie. I couldn’t really understand why he had joined this idiotic, open-ended safari: his wife was only weeks away from giving birth to their first child.

Our plan was to take a bus to Wajir, where we would buy camels. They would be our pack animals, as well as our ‘cover’ for the journey. We would walk them roughly parallel to the border, hoping to make contact with the Shifta, but telling anyone who asked, that our intention was driving the camels to Kiwayu, to become a part of our safari outfit. The distance was about the length of England. Nick had arrived at the beginning of the monsoon and the rains had arrived in cataclysmic style.

When we reached the town of Isiolo beyond Mount Kenya, the place was a giant car park. Isiolo is known as a dusty town, but just add water et voila, mud. Everyone was stuck; the rains had made the unmetalled road north impassable. After a couple of days, a great cheer went up when, like a filthy dove with an olive branch, a mud spattered Toyota Landcruiser staggered into town. Someone had made it through. Along with fifteen other assorted travelers, we hitched a ride in the back of a truck transporting sugar bound for Mado Gashe, a town half way to Wajir. Every couple of miles, the truck would get bogged down and we would all clamber down, lay branches and stones to give the tyres some purchase, tie ropes to the front axle and heave.

Eventually, outside the village of Kula Mawe we hit a section of black cotton soil, the quicksand of the mud world and became utterly stuck. Kula Mawe was a gloomy place, even its name means ‘Eat Rock’, but what it did have was a small restaurant, where we could eat a bowl of greasy goat stew. When Willie and I walked in, the place was immediately familiar to us. Covering the whitewashed walls of the dining area was a large mural; a landscape, with fever trees, distant mountains and in the foreground, an exhausted looking buffalo. We were familiar with the vast oeuvre of this artist. His murals cropped up in little cafes and restaurants all over the country and I had become slightly obsessed by them over many safaris. They were distinctive in their ‘pastoral gloom’ style, making Kenya look like an overcast day in Wales and were always signed, "Masterplan". I was hating this trip, but finding Masterplan had got this far north entertained me for the first time in days.

By the time another lorry got through and succeeded in pulling ours out, we realised it was taking far too long to reach Wajir, which was only start of our safari. We decided to cut our losses, buy camels in Mado Gashe and set off from there. We had spoken to a camel owner in Nairobi about what to look for when buying. She said it was vital to check their feet and their teeth. You try. Camels sit with their feet tucked firmly under their bodies and a get an ill-tempered look in their eyes whenever your fingers hover near their mouths. In the end we bought two rather old, very overpriced males, covered in strange, abstract brand scars. We named them Makende & Bila. We also hired two guides. One was young, the other a wizened Rumpelstiltskin figure. Both were Somalis with Kenyan residency and therefore useful when shooting the breeze with the Shifta.
We slept the night in sand dunes at edged of town so as not to attract interest from officialdom in our departure, and after loading everything onto our camels, moved off at dawn. Finally, we had arrived at the kamikaze section proper.

The land was flat, sandy under foot and covered in low bushy trees, evenly spread. Occasionally we would glimpse a slight rise and the promise of a view, but when got there, there was no view, just more of the same for mile, after interminable mile, like being a bad apple & sent to orchard hell.
I began to feel very strange; not ill, but intensely claustrophobic and a little mad. Even though the trees were neither tall nor especially dense, if we didn’t keep we would lose sight of the animals within twenty yards, despite Makende being over six foot at the shoulder and even though the ground being hard and sandy, it did not show up their footprints. It was like being in a whiteout, but made of leaves. After about three days, Charlie woke up one morning & said he’d better head back to England. He packed up and doubled back through the trees; after twenty yards he had vanished. If we did bump into the Shifta, we were going to be upon each other very quickly. [our safari kit]

We had seen only a couple of people and no buildings, but once a day Rumpelstiltskin would walk off to find milk and after an hour or so he always returned with a full gourd for the chai, and he always manage to locate us. I got him to teach me useful Somali phrases: ‘Bir ow’, meaning, ‘where’s the water?’ and ‘aner dilin’ meaning ‘don’t shoot’.
Every afternoon we would chose a campsite and set about collecting enough dry wood to build four fires before sundown. One fire was for us, one was for the Somalis so we could all cook at the same time and one each for Bila and Makende. I have never known animals like fires they way they did. They would fold their legs under themselves and warm their necks over the flames. If there was enough kindling to make only one fire for them, they would push and shove each other and keep us awake all night with their angry groans. From their sad, haughty eyes, to their kettledrum feet, I adored those camels.

Our guides told us we were nearing a small town some way off to the south, where we could buy any last supplies before the long push to the coast. I was feeling so generally odd, I bought a pregnancy testing kit. It was positive. I was both elated and appalled. For months, this was something we had both been hoping, but to find out in the middle of this stupid project was not how I imagined it would be, especially as the medicine we had brought to use if any of us contracted malaria was the same stuff local girls used to induce abortions.
Willie was thrilled and told Nick, but he didn’t immediately respond because he was having a ferocious argument with Rumpelstiltskin although they shared no common language. He was getting increasingly furious; shouting at the old man about some perceived inconsistency in the change the man had given him after buying the milk. Willie explained to him that buying milk out in the bush wasn't like a corner shop, people would charge what they felt like, depending on how much they had & it would certainly double if they knew it was being bought for 'mzungus'. The last thing we needed was to lose our guides. Luckily the argument petered out mainly because Willie managed to calm the indignant and old man by asking him to please forgive his friend's outburst who was new to Kenya and a bit of a hothead.
Willie and I went off to bathe in a large puddle. When we were out of earshot, he grabbed my arm. ‘If anything happens, don’t do what Nick says, ok? We can’t trust him.’ He was whispering urgently. This was very unlike Willie, who was neither conspiratorial nor a dramatist by nature What on earth were we getting ourselves into?

The next day, we came upon three police officers living in a concrete blockhouse beneath the first big tree we’d seen in ages. They told us they were nearing the end of a six-month posting.
‘Do you ever see the Shifta?’ Nick asked.
‘The Shifta? Why do you ask?'
'Oh.. just interested in them - keeping away from them that is.'
'We stay close to the station’ came the reply. ‘The last posting here had all their guns stolen.’
‘Are they close?’
‘They are always close. But we have orders to lock ourselves in.’
‘What if they attack the locals?’
‘The locals are all Somali tribe and there is not much to steal, except from us. This is not a job, it is a punishment. Anyway, the army are out there, they are better equipped.’
It was during this exchange that I came to my senses. I wanted to meet the Shifta as little as these policemen. I didn’t want to risk catching malaria. I didn’t want to be in danger with someone I wasn’t meant to trust.
I resolved to leave - how was another matter.
We walked back into the little town where willie thought I might be able to hitch a ride, but by a fluke of luck a Cessna flown by Dutch missionaries had just landed, hoping to press bibles on the illiterate. I hitched a ride back to Nairobi and flew down to Lamu, where I settled into waiting near a telephone, not confident when, or if, I would see Willie again.
A week later, the call came.

Story concludes next week

2009-08-10T16:46:00.002+01:00

Prestat Chocolate Review No3.
Banoffee Truffles
Banana and Toffee with a whisper of coffee. I get the banana, I get the toffee, but I get a hint of whisky rather than coffee, maybe it’s Irish. These are very sweet, and I kept thinking I could only manage one. Then minutes later realised that I could manage another. When I bit a chunk out of Bono [it was a case of mistaken identity] he tasted very like this, and I found myself going back for more…

2009-08-03T23:18:00.001+01:00

Musical Recommendation of The Week

Waltz #2 - Elliott Smith

Kidnap, Arrest & Murder

2009-08-02T23:48:00.021+01:00

Part Two

In the late 80s & early 90s I was living with my boyfriend, Willie on Kiwayu, an island at the northern end of the Lamu archipelago, off the East African coast. He owned a tented safari camp, but mostly he was a deep sea fisherman. Whenever clients asked to be taken bird-watching, they would mysteriously end up two miles out to sea.
[map from my notebook]

Kiwayu is seven miles long, half a mile wide and lies parallel to the mainland, a few hundred metres offshore. Two brackish wells supplied two hamlets of about sixty people. The locals were cheery, roguish crab-catchers and fishermen. They grew a little maize and kept goats that were rarely eaten, being symbols of wealth; symbols that liked to eat their meagre crops.
Oo the landward side we made a long jetty, where we tethered our dhow Munira. Here the water was always calm, although the tide rose & fell nine feet every day. At low tide we could see miles of mango-fringed sandflats, that at high tide became a mass of serpentine channels, through which we would wind our way whenever we sailed to Lamu, thirty miles to the south. Beyond us to the north lay Simambya, uninhabited - its name coming from the elision of the Swahili words 'kisima mbaya' meaning bad well. Twenty miles beyond Simambya was the Somali border. We rarely ventured that way - the Somalis had a reputation as trigger-happy crazies. Shifta, armed Somali bandits regularly came across the border to rob, occasionally to kill, always to terrify and occaionally to rape [men]. At least once a year they would block the landing strip and attack the local hotel across the bay from us on the mainland.
[above, Kiwayu girls]. Below, interior of our shack at night]

There was nothing anybody could do. The airborne rescue team was a figment of the Shiftas’ imagination, there were no police within fifty miles, and the handful of guards had only sticks and machetes; no guns. We were safe on Kiwayu, the islanders believed the Shifta were afraid of the sea, afraid of getting trapped on an island and would never come, and while we lived there, that was the case. We lived in a simple but beautiful shack and lived a Robinson Crusoe life of subsistence fishing, drinking salty coffee, swimming in the coral garden and having safari clients. It was an incredibly happy time.

Every few months friends would visit, warning us of their arrival by buzzing us before landing on the mainland, or they would arrive through the back channels from Lamu. With our panoramic views we could spot their boat from miles away. On day, we were coming from the jetty, up the ‘staircase’ we had carved into the sandy cliff, when we were met by a stranger approaching us from our camp. There had been no boat, no plane. Where on earth had he come from? He was a tall, handsome 29 year old, incredibly thin and wearing a curiously girlish pink straw hat.
He introduced himself as Nick Della Casa [left] and said he had arrived to meet a plane piloted by a friend, but was three weeks late. Over supper he told us he was a war reporter and had been wandering through southern Somalia hoping to get a story because unrest there was looking like it was turning into civil war. Somalia was suffering terrible floods and many nights the ground had been so waterlogged he’d slept in the branches of trees. Having shot enough film, he hired a boat that brought him south, but not knowing safe anchor lay on the inland side of Kiwayu, his captain had dumped him on the reef and he’d had to swim in. This was the reason why we had failed to notice his arrival – he was lucky to have made it across the reef without damaging himself or his camera, but he was luckier still they hadn’t abandoned him on Simambya where he would have quickly died of dehydration.

[Above, Buno, Kiwayu's hatmaker, trapmaker & only entrepreneur, who would have given a damned sight better service for Nick than the Somali boatman. That clam shell is somewhere in north Norfolk now]

Nick turned out to be an outlaw character. Educated at Rugby, at eighteen, he went to Sandhurst - but in the middle of training, he took off for Rhodesia and became a mercenary.

He fought there for several years, with the promise of land if they won. ‘The shocking thing was’ he said, ‘the propaganda was so good, we were certain we were winning against the guerrillas right up until Smith signed the accord with them.’

Hardened, bitter and unwilling to go home, he and his fellow mercenaries headed for Angola where they continued fighting for years. He saw and did terrible things until finally, he realised he wanted to stop. Still hooked to drama and adrenaline, he became a freelance war reporter for Frontline News, seeking out conflict and sending film reports back to newsrooms in London. Nick was beguiling, but clearly quite a nutbar.

He ended up in Mozambique where RENAMO guerillas were trying to oust the government. With his camera, he walked into the bush to try & interview the RENAMO leader. Instead the insurgents kidnapped him, keeping him captive for 18 months, moving him constantly; all of them living on the edge of starvation. Having established warm relations with his captors, when he was freed he asked if he might return and conduct the interview he had come for in the first place. They agreed and then were so livid when his report turned out to be highly critical, they put a price on his head.

Nick stayed with us for weeks.
[picture right, shack back door]
Willie adored him. Late at night over endless drinks, they swapped adventure tales they talked of ones they might do together one day. Nick wanted to go to the Middle East while Willie suggested Kenya’s Northern Frontier District to see if they could ‘bump into’ the Shifta and interview them. Nick finally left us, looking slightly less thin, keen to get back to England to see his girlfriend Rosanna, who was suffering from ME.

Willie’s and my life continued peacefully on the island, fishing, safari clients, exploring, and eventually discussing the idea of having a child.

We flew to England for a few weeks to see our families and while there had a picnic in Richmond Park with Nick and Rosanna. She was not at all what I had expected. She was tall, frail, very English and rather old-fashioned in manner. They brought along champagne so we could toast their engagement.

Back in Kenya and 6 months later, a message arrived, out of the blue. It was Nick. ‘I’m here! In Nairobi! Come as soon as you can. I’m ready for our Shifta project.’ I was appalled. When they had discussed it before, I had assumed it was all just whisky talk. Back then, it had seemed like the worst idea in the world, but it was about to become reality.

Next Week, Part 3……

2009-08-02T23:46:00.001+01:00

Prestat Chocolate Review No3.
Rose & Violet Creams...Smith & Wesson, Castor & Pollux, Dolce & Gabbana, Bath & Wells, Nancy & Lee..... Rose & Violet Creams are indivisible.
You should never go into Prestat and buy a box of one or the other - that way madness lies.
You have to buy both; the summit of chocolate pairings. I know certain people, normally quite cool and aloof, who go a little bit beserk in the presence of Rose & Violet Creams.
When I bit chunks out of Fontaine & Nureyev, [it was a very long, very hot weekend in Santa Monica] they tasted not unlike the Rose & the Violet Cream.

Modern Etiquette. Matchmaking

2009-08-01T12:07:00.005+01:00

This is such an emergency, I've had to set aside precious non-blogging time to write this....

Matchmaking, The Rule.

There is only one & almost everybody breaks it.

It is this, you don't let the two people know what you're doing.

You have to take your ego out of the equation.

Any information, however sly, only assists towards expectation, nervousness & failure.

Ok?

2009-07-27T19:32:00.001+01:00

Musical Recommendation of the Week:
Back To Living Again - Curtis Mayfield

Port E, Inspirationally Twinned With Lashkar Gah

2009-07-27T19:31:00.005+01:00

Part One.

This weekend I stayed at Wembury, the beautiful seaside house of Emma & Timmy Hanbury who hold an annual house party for the Port Eliot Literary Festival. I went to Port E imagining I might write my blog about literary folk, but as it is far less Lit port than overwhelmingly messy E Fest; I was struggling. Then, on Saturday evening, I went to listen to the documentary filmmaker Sean Langan talk about his experiences in Afghanistan and Pakistan and he inspired me to write about kidnapping…

An oddity of the word is that it takes the masculine form; a man gets kidnapped, while a woman or a child get abducted. Useful information should it ever happen to you; no longer will you have to fret about the correct way to sound the alarm.

In this country and in the States kidnapping is a rare crime due to the poor risk-to-benefit ratio - particularly the vexed question of the cash drop-off. However, there are dozens of countries where entrepreneurs snatch people rather than launch restaurants.

Holiday destinations to gently pencil a line through are Sub-Sahara, Yemen, the seas off the Horn of Africa, Somalia etc,. The place most likely to part a browsing tourist from his ticket home is Baghdad, kidnap capital of the world, snatching that title from Mexico, which in turn succeeded Colombia.

As Sean discovered, the Afghan-Pakistan border is a place where you can be forcibly made to escape the rat race.
[Refering to it as Af-pak makes it sound like a diet butter or styrofoam packaging rather than the lawless wilds it is.]

We might think that kidnapping is a foreign thing - something that happens to others, far away, and yet a form of it is operated by thousands of women every year. Women sperm-nap. They steal a man’s freedom to choose when or with whom they bear children. ‘It was an accident’ they cry - but an extremely high proportion are being disingenuous. Going the accident route with conviction usually necessitates going into a lifelong denial [you lie best when you lie to yourself] because here’s the thing: it’s very easy to avoid getting pregnant. But away from gametes and back to the multiple cells of kidnapping proper……..

Of all the ugly crimes we humans inflict upon one another, the theft of someone else’s freedom is second only to the theft of their life. In our curious, comedy world of unexpected consequences, the person who murders someone else to ‘rid themselves’ of them, in reality bind themselves to their victim forever.

Listening to Sean describe how he was held by Taliban fighters from March until July last year, it struck me that in the vile enterprise of kidnapping, the guards become as captive as their victims.

The story Sean told was a very heavy one, but he is a witty man who kept making the audience laugh about his ordeal. It reminded me of a recent, riveting programme [in Radio 4's Reunion series] when they assembled former Beirut hostages, Terry Waite, Bryan Keenan, John McCarthy along with McCarthy’s former girlfriend, Jill Morell. Between the three men, they were held prisoner for 14 years and 7 months in total. Laid end to end this was time for a boy to be born, go to 3 schools, grow to full height, have his voice break, get a girlfriend... It made me wonder how, or even if, I would cope: the fear, the time limbo, the boredom. Before winding up chained beside the other two, Terry Waite was kept in solitary confinement for 4 of the 5 years he was held.

The astonishing thing was just how much they laughed during their interview. Keenan told of waggish remarks made on meeting Waite - a giant of a man at 6’ 7’ - when their two sack-covered bodies were thrown on top of one another in the boot of a Mercedez transporting them to a new hiding place. Waite recalled the first book his

non-English speaking guard gave him to read was The Great Escape by Paul Brickhill; the second, a breastfeeding manual.

When one day he found a guard had left a gun behind in the loo, Waite left it alone, because to use it would have gone against everything he had been arguing with his captors: that violence only breeds more violence. You only have to look at the toxic clinch that the Israelis and Palestinians are in to see these Petri dishes of cyclical violence on a larger scale.

The Islamic Jihad Organisation’s foot soldiers, who spent years of their own lives ensuring the incarceration of these three intelligent men effectively screwed up their own freedom in the process in exactly the same way Colombia’s FARC militia have made themselves prisoners of the jungles that hide their victims.

Extraordinarily, sixteen years after he was freed, Waite volunteered in 2007 to travel to Iran to help negotiate for the release of British sailors seized in disputed waters. The programme ended with Waite describing how, when he was finally released, the suit they gave him didn’t fit him at all. McCarthy’s immediate suggestion that it ‘was too big’ reduced them all to helpless giggles, and as a listener you got a sense of their indomitability of spirit and that a key ingredient in the power of that spirit was levity.

Sean Langan appeared to possess this vital ingredient. He talked about how it took him four days to twig that he and his translator had been kidnapped. His approach to filming was always to ‘bed in’ with his subjects whether they were British squaddies besieged in a town, or Taliban mountain men so being taken somewhere with a hood over his head was the norm. It was only when he was told he and his translator were being held as spies that they realised that they weren’t getting out of the small stone room any time soon. ‘They didn’t allow Beaujolais, but they did offer me smack’ he said.

They were interrogated for days, subjected to mock executions, but mostly they were left alone with a radio on which they listened to the World Service. The news stories were filled with the story of how Elisabeth Fritzl had finally escaped after twenty-four years in her father’s cellar, although to his growing alarm, there was never any word of his own disappearance.

It made me think about how it never sounds right when the Foreign Office advises families of kidnap victims to stay quiet, while they do the softly, softly approach. Are they doing anything at all? It smacks of bullshit to me. Why let sleeping dogs lie?

If I was a family member I’d make a big stink like Jill Morell did. Hostage takers respond to the political not the personal, so it may have done nothing to shorten the time he was held, but at least John McCarthy knew that people were aware of his plight and cared.

It is hard to imagine the additional torment of being held and also feeling you have been forgotten and abandoned. From the tapes shown on the news, it certainly seems to be how the three surviving hostages in Baghdad are feeling. Meanwhile, back at home, the general public are neither tying yellow ribbons, nor lighting candles, nor marking the days of their internment, which currently stands at 2 years 2 months, about the time it takes a newborn baby to learn to smile, walk, talk & get a haircut. What despair they must feel.

Sean described how being locked for months in a room without a mirror was the first time he had been made to really take a proper look at himself. He forced himself to forget about the passage of time and worked to a daily routine that allowed him to escape from his captors and into his own imagination.

Sammy, his translator had a nervous, and then a physical breakdown, Sean took the roll of 'the PE instructor' for them both. He lost five teeth and three stone. The plight of Sammy, the bulletins about Elisabeth Fritzl and the photograph of his two small sons he had hidden in his sock - glimpses at which he had to strictly ration himself to avoid emotional collapse - all made him ‘acutely aware of the suffering of others’.

When he was finally on the way to being released he realised they were not freeing Sammy. Fearing they would execute him, Sean demanded to be returned until Sammy came with him. When that happened he was taken temporarily to safe house where he sat with a Mullah’s three-year old child on his lap watching a TV playing jehadi beheadings followed by Mr Bean. Hearing this highlights how just how hard it is for us to understand these people.
When he was about to dumped on a street in Islamabad, one of the Taliban asked him if he ‘might ask a personal question’, to which Sean said yes. ‘Are you sure you won’t take offense?’ Silently swearing that they could hardly be more offensive than to hold him against his will for three and a half months, he assured them no, he wouldn’t take offense; and to ask away.
‘Is it true that women in the West are free to marry animals? ’ There was a pause, ‘Even small animals?’
Sean said he yearned to say, ‘Sure, I know girls who marry blue whales and another married to a rhino – but for God’s sake! We draw the line at small ones!’ Instead, he stowed his yearning for levity and assured them that no, it was not true and inquired how they had come to think that. They explained that there was a book in wide circulation, used to learn English. It was a children’s book in which a girl marries a frog… ‘They want to kill us because they think we fuck frogs’ said Sean and concluded his interview.

Next Week.
Kidnapping, Part Two

2009-07-27T17:03:00.006+01:00

Prestat Review No. 2.

Organic White Chocolate Wafers Infused with Sweet Orange

I have a problem with white chocolate.

I file it under 'edible soap', along with mozzarella. Don't get me wrong, I'm not against edible soap, but as I'm not a fan of white chocolate, so I asked my son Atticus to review the taste. He pronounced it 'pimp' and the fact that there are still some left in the box is only due to the fact he's upstairs with a bout of the man swine. Before posting, I thought I would at least give one a try and if I shut my eyes, it doesn't taste quite so white, but nicely orange, so they're not lying on the infusion front. i was reminded of when I bit a chunk out of Doris Day [she got down on her knees & begged me] She tasted a bit like this.

2009-07-22T14:57:00.008+01:00

Prestat Review No 1:
Chilli & Persian Lime Dark Chocolate.

Chilli? What madness is this? But this chocolate square [slightly larger & thicker than a scrabble tile] has just won Gold at the Great Taste Awards.

The combination is unlikely, but it works. The lime infused chocolate is gooey soft but not too sweet and with the faintest hint of fire. Delicious.

When I bit a chunk out of Omar Sharif [it's a long story] he tasted a bit like this.

Prestat, Palace of Chocolate

2009-07-21T21:52:00.011+01:00

Prestat Chocolate are now sponsoring my blog & I will review one of their chocolates each week.

In preparation for this, I went to visit their factory in West London, a vast gothic palace with stained glass windows, once the home of Baron Professor Oskar Gottmeister von Elzenberg, discoverer of Molybdinum.

On arrival, an elegant footman in a dove-grey suit with silver frogging materialised & ushered me through the vast oak doors & up a sweeping staircase to the director Nick Crean's office.

After showing me his expansive collection of leather-bound books on the history of chocolate, we dressed ourselves from head to foot in white and headed to the factory floor through a series of heavy electronic doors.

The smell was glorious.

In a series state-of-the-art kitchens, silent figures went elegantly & efficiently about their business. It was as if we were on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, only more hygienic.

There were machines producing flowing waterfalls of glossy chocolate, coating hazelnuts, walnuts & chunks of ginger. At the far end, a stunning woman with restless breasts rolled out green marzipan to make perfect pear shapes, beyond her, a woman, moving like a panther around another hi-tech machine, was creating peppermint wafers. She looked up and gave us a lazy wink.

Satie's Gymnopeides was playing over an invisible sound sytem.

In the next kitchen, a man who looked exactly like James Dean would have if he'd reached middle age, was dusting chocolate powder onto fudge bricks. He stopped to talk passionately of his life-long mission to master caramel, the trickiest of all chocolate box ingredients.

At the packing section two pairs of identical Cuban twins were making short work of a large order of rose creams. Their hands working in such swift harmony it looked like hand ballet.

I've never seen such good looking staff outside a Hollywood blockbuster.

At every turn, Nick, learned & avuncular, pointed out various award-wining creations: chilli & lim

e chocolates, violet creams, champagne truffles, old fashioned fudge, geranium squares, white chocolate... and at every turn, I ate what he pointed at.

After my twentieth chocolate, I began to feel a little abnormal and while Nick's white coat remained pristine, mine was besmirched with a dense lattice chocolaty smears.

I felt a bit ashamed that my approach was proving to be one of depravity rather than learning - but I was in good company. The Queen, to whom Prestat are official chocolate suppliers, is an ardent fan and in a framed photograph hanging in the marble hallway, she's got a chocolate moustache as big as Sancho Panza's.

I will review the chocolate tomorrow, when my palette is less overwhelmed.

2009-07-19T19:55:00.007+01:00

Musical Recommendation Of The Week:
Cry To Me - Solomon Burke

Run Baby, Run Baby, Run.....

2009-07-19T01:35:00.049+01:00

On Thursday, I took a train to Manchester to see the Punchdrunk theate company's new production, It Felt Like A Kiss.
I had bought tickets for my children, but they were unexpecetedly needed elsewhere, so I resolved to go alone.

Headed by a Viking with a pointy beard, Punchdrunk has put on Faust, Tunnel 228 and the breathtaking Masque of The Red Death. Punchdrunk’s productions are known for their beauty, strangeness and scale. Their plays are staged over dozens of rooms, leaving the audience to wander freely to follow the actors or explore the intricately detailed scenery in atmospheric siderooms.In Masque of the Red Death, the audience had to wear white, heron-beaked masks, so we became part of a huge Edgar Allen Poe inspired art installation.

If I had done any research into the new play beforehand, I would never have even considered going alone, so it was by great good fortune that at the last minute I was joined by my fetisheuse friend Julie Goldsmith

[see above. check out her creatures on www.juliegoldsmith.co.uk ]

and Hermione Pilkington, the daughter of a friend.
They turned out to be the perfect companions for such an adventure: Julie’s son’s girlfriend was working as part of the play’s production

team and Herm

ione is studying Theatre at Manchester University and had been unable to get tickets before she broke up for the holidays.

The play is staged in a non-descript six-storey office block in Manchester's business district.
Entrances were staggered and we went in twelve at a time, at fifteen-minute intervals.

We rode to the top of the building in two elevators and came out into a darkened passage. An arrow pointed towards a vast Clown’s mouth that we stepped through into a pitch-black passage with thin wet rags hanging from the ceiling. [above, a passage scene for It Fe

lt Like A Kiss]

We reached a screen room that played a sh

ort, soundless film clip on a loop. When it finished and we were wondering where to go next, I glanced to my right. A huge man wearing a clown

mask was standing silently beside us. This was just the beginning of three and a half hours and six floors of ever-increasing terror.

What Punchdrunk had created was a horror movie, one into which we had all just stepped. We were now both the audience and the victims. We stumbled through blackened rooms filled with balloons and th

en made it to a typical suburban 60s sitting room, where a mother & child were watching television with strange images. Next door was a study & then two deserted children’s bedrooms. Everything was dimly

lit, but occasional a light in the next room would glow a little brighter, leading us on. We came out onto an as

tro-turf roof, with sun-loungers and an abandoned picnic, then into a concrete staircase down to the next floor. [right, scene from Like A Kiss] There was a weird figure dressed in yellow oilskins and then a sud

den, terrifying noise.
The group had splintered and by now, it was just the three clinging together. We went through rooms where absolutely everything was painted dark blue, another where all was red and then an office that was completely white. We passed through FBI rooms covered in charge sheets, mugshots of felons; details of murders com

mitted by psychopaths.
In the next office, there was a sheet of paper in an old Reming

ton typewriter detailing the dangers of confusing the psychotic and the psychopathic ‘…the psychotic is rarely able to realise his fantasises, while the psychopath is entirely unable to stop himself from making his fantasies reality’.
There were tiny laundry rooms hung with clean shirts, a beauty salon with a stripey awning, the reception desk of a seedy hotel with green flock wallpaper, a dental surgery, a place like a fish factory with thick

white sheeting hanging everywh

ere & another figure in oilskins lurking.
[left, still from Curtis film, as are all other double images on this page]
We went through a recording studio, a backstage dressing room and down narrow dark passages of metal lockers that we feared might contain people. Everywhere was 60s ephemera, from the furniture, to pictures on the walls, and down to the clunky pink hair dryer an

d magazines; the detail was overwhelming. [The rooms may well not have happened in this order, as there were dozens and also due to the general agitation.]Often the rooms were not spooky at all, but the i

dea that something bad might happened coloured our passage. Some inspired feelings of comfort, enjoyment & ease, but there was also creepy desertion, surveillance and conspiracy.

Arriving in a large room decorated with swags of white streamers for a Prom party, we found about sixty people sitting watching the film we had seen only fragments of on our way here. For the first time, we got an idea that we were not just a tiny group moving through t

his bizarre world. The film is the latest work of the genius documentarian , Adam Curtis.

Charlie Booker in the Guardian described it like this: ‘Curtis's virtuoso… film is as

tonishing. If you're familiar with his previous work, you'll know he specialises in creating mesmerizing collages, simultaneously impish and forbidding; utterly accessible yet often giddyingly deep…So what's it about? In a roundabout way, it's about you. But it's also about the golden age of pop, when the US rose to supreme power. It encompasses everything from Rock Hudson, Lou Reed, Saddam Hussein, a chimp and Lee Harvey Oswald. It's a heady brew.’And I would add, with a fantastic soundtrack. [See musical recommendation of the week]

If you want to see what I’m talking about go to http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/Scroll down past the 1st trailer you get to see a slightly longer one. The website says he is running an hour-long cut of it on the same site on July 19th, the last day of the Manchester festival. If you like what you see, I u

rge you to see the longer version.

The title It Felt Like A Kiss is taken from a song written by Carole King having discovered her babysitter

sequences of our ideological mast[who became Little Eva of Locomotion fame] was being beaten by her boyfriend, but excused him by telling

King it was because he loved her so much. This mangled view of affection works as a metaphor for America's worldview. The film weaves a story about the unintended con

ers, the rise of

AIDS, the joys of living in a rich, liberal nation, the sincere belief of ‘a righteous cause’ it is also about alienation and the power of suppressing and harrying the small people.
It is very brilliant.When seen in conjunction with Curtis' film, our experiences take on the feeling of the souring of an American dream. A funhouse gone wrong.
After the Prom room, the fear is cranked up. We move in a motley group of about ten people. There are moments of pitch-blackness and terrible noise and then we arrive in a vast labyrinth of wire lockers, each hung with a clipboard holding a handwritten survey.
The maze opens out in a space with a spot lit telephone. A sign above it flashes on: Pick Up the Phone and at the same time it rings. I answer. Unintelligible words and then nothing. At the next open space the same thing, but with a pill and a glass of water, the sign says Take The Pill. Someone does.
More wire labyrinth and a gun on a table: Fire The Gun. It’s as if we are being invited to do progressively more transgressive things.
A girl does, and the gun goes off with a deafening report, flames shooting out of the end; the smell of cordite.
She was so horrified she fled through one of the many ‘escape’ doors and left the building. We reach a cha

insaw on a table. Another order to start it up, but we can’t.
Finally, we come to a table with a comb on it, in front a lank-haired figure is leaning against a wall. Comb His Hair says the sign. As we dither, behind us the chainsaw starts up and a man is chasing us.

Panicking, we flee from the room through a wood of birch trunks an

d finally reach another suburban 60s room. A sign flashes: Bolt The Door. ‘Someone bolt it!’ a old woman screams.
When we catch our breath, we realise we are in identical domestic suburban rooms to the ones upstairs, but this time figures are slumped; an abandoned family meal, a father looks over a sleeping child in a menacing way. It’s all gone rotten. [right, a passage from It Felt Like A Kiss] We walk through the slum-like dormitory of a Black Panters' hideout and more surveillance rooms - this time lined with sheets of printed paper blacked out as heavily as our own dear MPs expenses.

We begin to hurry.
We pass a body in an unlit corridor and finally we arrive in a hospital area where people are sitting around filling in the surveys we saw in the wire lockers before the homicidal maniac lit after us. The questionnaire asks things like, Do you believe you are free thinking? Do you believe in violence to affect positive change? White-clad nurses hand out hospital bracelets. I am in Cell B. We are a group of 8. We are told to stick together and are sent to a room filled with static fizzing TVs, like air traffic control or the security of the building. A figure is slumped across the controls. Cards on our chairs read, ‘in 1984, eight people died in a funhouse fire. Their screams were ignored. People assumed they were enjoying themselves.’

We set off again, past a small glass window with a clown mask in it. The eyes follow us.
Feeling very small and very harried we are lead down, down, down into the basement.

The only comfort I have was this group of companions.
A message flashes CHOOSE YOUR PATH or maybe it says YOU ARE ALONE NOW. There is another another film clip, but I can't oncentrate on it before we are direct towards a pair of heavy steel football turnstiles. Once the first three people have passed through, the door suddenly locks and we are forced through the other one. We can see the others through the metal fencing, but our sheep pens lead us away from them. The last comforts of companionship are being removed.
We reach a pair of glass paned doors through which we can see two long passages, one is lit, the other dark. We're not stupid, choose the light. Julie and Hermione get through, but then it locks.
I am left to go down the dark passage with two guys. left in our group. ‘I’m going to have to hold onto one of you.’ I say. They are butch Mancunians and neither of them like that idea at all and make me walk point until we reach a door. There is no glass in this one to see what is next. I open it. Immediately it slams behind me. I am alone, an individual – the thing so championed by our society.

I am free to do what I want in a long dark passage.

I start to run.

I reach the end.

It is so dark I can’t see where to go, then a tiny distant light beams to my right. I run towards it.

I look behind me. Someone is chasing me. When we were together I screamed quite a bit, but now I am silent in my terror.

We spill out of the building and into the light, shaking and giggling with relief, then head straight to a café for a cup of tea. We stand in the doorway gibbering sub-linguistically. A young waiter comes up to see, smiling kindly, ‘You’ve been to It Felt Like A Kiss haven’t you? Take a table, I’ll sort you out.’

I can't believe I almost went to it on my own.
Thank God for other people.
We talk it over on the train back to London where we arrive at 10pm, & go our separate ways.
Driving home, I have forgotten about a large, empty box in the back of my car. Turning a corner, it tips forward and hits the back of my seat. I scream and only just miss a lamppost.

Some stuffy London critics who like Spamalot & Bombay Dreams gave lukewarm responses to such a bravura display of evil genius; but it's genius nevertheless.

[At the date of writing this – It Felt Like A Kiss ends in Manchester on July 20th and will not be re-staged.]

2009-07-13T20:06:00.003+01:00

Musical Recommendation of The Week:

River of Salt - Bryan Ferry

A Dunch of Flaws - excerpt

2009-07-13T15:56:00.035+01:00

Dear All,

For the past week I have been traveling all over Scandinavia with my son & am still writing up the trip.
So, if you will forgive me, this week I offer you a small excerpt of the new book I am writing. It is the story of a shy, dyslexic boy called Houston Penrose who lives with his family in 1970s Mombasa and to whom terrible things later happen. The novel is called A Dunch of Flaws, the title taken from a Valentine's card my son [also dyslexic] gave me when he was aged about eight. It was a wobbly picture of a bunch of flowers, with that across the top. Please keep in mind the writing has not been buffed at all. I hope you enjoy it.

A Dunch Of Flaws
Excerpt from Chapter One.

The view through the balcony posts was of a dripping, steamy world. Rain from the cloudburst was still pouring steadily from the roof into the covered water butts below. The frog symphony had entered a soft, syncopated movement. Houston saw Joshua emerge from the outhouse. He watched as Joshua stooped to stroke the dogs who were sheltering under the eaves there, but they turned and walked away stiffed-leggedly, as if to be subjected to something so lacking in machismo as a pat affronted them. They were two large Rhodesian ridgebacks; their job was to help the night watchman keep them safe. They did this by barking at bicyclists and fruitbats; beyond that, any relations with the occupants of the house were decidedly cool.Houston took the harmonica away from his mouth and dangled it between his forefinger and thumb wondering whether to drop it into the puddle directly below; a musical apology by way of a mercy killing. He was trying to decide what to do, when a something caught his eye - a butterfly the size of his hand was tacking in his direction. As it stuttered closer and closer, he stopped peddling his legs and kept as still as possible. Seconds later, to his delight, the butterfly had settled on the corner of his harmonica. Very gently, with his other hand, Houston offered a finger towards its legs. Hesitantly, it sidled aboard. He lifted the creature up to eyelevel and examined the beautiful metallic blue of its wings, as they pumped like tiny slowing bellows. Whoomph! A sudden rush of air, a ruffling swirl of speeding wings, and the butterfly was gone. Houston let out an involuntary yelp, unable to grasp immediately what had just happened. He looked about until he finally caught sight of the assailant. A dive-bombing bee-eater had snatched the butterfly and was now on a branch near the top of the mango tree. Two bright, stiff wings stuck out of its beak for a second before the bee-eater tipped it’s head back, opened it’s mouth a fraction and swallowed. Houston peered closely at his finger to see if it had drawn any blood, but no, it had struck its prey with such precision there was no damage, just some dots of pollen that had been shaken from the butterfly’s wings.
‘Darling!’ Houston heard his mother’s call on her third try and scrambled to his feet.
‘Coming Mama!’ he answered and took the stairs three at a time. At the bottom he padded quietly across the sitting room and out of the front door where he was hit by a waft of jasmine. Hadija waved to him from the ladder murmuring, ‘Houston….’

At the far end of the garden Boaz and Joshua were untangling the Chinese lanterns. Nina was tying cushions onto chairs. She turned as she sensed her son’s presence. He held up his finger. ‘A bee-eater snatched a butterfly right out of my hand.’
‘How bold.’ she replied. ‘What was it? A carmine, a Madagascan, a cinnamon-chested?’
‘It was a Lesser-thieving one, Mama’ he said and made her laugh.
‘Help me with these cushions darling. Where’s Gibb?’ ‘He ran over to Jenny Rasbash’s house about an hour ago. They like to swim in the rain.’
‘Well, go to my address book and look up the Rasbash’s number would you? Call and ask them to send him home straight away; we have a mass of things to do. Tell him Jenny can come - that might help.’
‘I thought you’d banned her?’
‘She can’t be sick on the ambassador’s shoes twice, can she? And even if she is, the law of probabilities means it’ll be a different ambassador, surely.’
‘Maybe she could come instead of me?’ suggested Houston. Nina looked at her son for a moment. On the whole, she let him retreat when he wanted, but tonight would not be one of those occasions. ‘Nonsense darling. You’re a teenager, you’ll be fifteen next month. You’ll be fine.’ Houston looked at her, puzzled as to how being a higher number had any connection to an increased enjoyment of meeting strangers. Nina stroked his cheek. ‘Why don’t you help Boaz serve the food? When you have a job, it’s easier.’

Houston shambled off to the telephone in the hall. Cradling the heavy Bakelite handle under his chin, he held the address book close to his face so he could see the writing and dialled. He waited a few minutes and then tried again. After his third try he said, ‘Telephone’s broken Mama.’
‘Not again!’
‘Not ours - we’ve got a dialling tone, I think it’s the Rasbashs’.
‘Well then darling, run over there like a good boy, but put a shirt on, you can’t walk around bare-chested.’
‘Why not?’
‘Why not? Well, because it’s not befitting for the son of the soon-to-be counselor at the British Embassy in Rome to be seen wandering about like a hobo, that’s why not. There should be something in the ironing.’
Houston went out of the back of the house and chose a navy blue t-shirt from the pile. Muthoni and Prudence, the two housemaids championed starch and the shirt made a pleasing ripping sound as he prized the edges apart and wriggled around to stop it feeling as if he was wearing a sandwich board.

As he left the house he took his harmonica out of his pocket and started to practice Summertime once more. Hadija laughed at him ‘Houston,’ she said as she fixed the last loop of her jasmine swag, ‘wewe nsikia mahewa kama mawe.’ [You have the musical ear of a stone] He could still hear Boaz giggling as he reached the gates at the top of the drive.

The Penroses lived at the end of a dirt track in a sleepy corner at the northern end of Twiga Heights. It was one of smartest Mombasa districts, with well-proportioned homes set in enormous gardens - although everything lay concealed from the street. High walls stuck with broken bottles and razor wire shielded the occupants from the cauldron flurry of the city. The road leading from the city centre to Twiga Heights was abundantly potholed and lined with telegraph poles festooned in dense entanglements of cable that explained why the telephone service was so intermittent.

The street was quiet for the time of day; people were only just beginning to emerge into the sunshine and pick their way through the puddles. The usual smells of exhaust fumes, spices, and raw sewage had been dampened by the rain. Houston passed a gaggle woman with buckets balanced on their heads, their kanga-clad sugar-bums undulating rhythmically as they walked. Two of them carried babies so heavily swaddled, their heads appeared like tiny chocolate drops at the centre of gigantic Swiss rolls tied to their backs.
At the junction of the main road a Maasai moran with ghee-burnished skin and long bead-strands slung over his shoulders, stood on one leg, squinting into the middle distance: a cou

ntry boy feigning indifference to the city, the insouciant drape of his red plaid shuka belying his careful styling. On the opposite corner, a pack of shenzi dogs slept in the dust, while a couple of puppies foraged for scraps in the drifts of litter.

The Penrose's house lay a few streets west of Kimathi Avenue, Twiga Height’s main shopping street. The Rasbashs lived a few streets beyond it to the east. Houston exchanged nods with the juice-seller who was singing along softly to a tinny radio tied to the top his fruit-barrow canopy and crossed the road. He dodged in front of a brightly painted truck lacing its way through the water-fille

d ruts and climbed up the four steep steps that led up to boardwalk. He loped past the shady doorways of haberdashers, ironmongers and shoe stores.
The local shops here on Kimathi counterbalanced Mombasa’s bustling centre by conducting their business with the all urgency of continental drift. Opening hours were erratic, stock was always problematic and months could go buy when the shoe store only had size nine galoshes to sell, or the ironmongers had a glut of axe-heads, but no shafts.

At the end of the parade, Mr Ali Kisii, sporting a resplendent hennaed comb-over, lounged in the doorway of his barbershop. ‘Good afternoon Master Houston.’ he said, deftly spinning his scissors round his fingers, ‘where are you off to in the heat of the day?’
‘I have to fetch my brother, we’re having a party tonight.’
‘A party? We are too: a big barbecue for my nephew’s engagement.’
‘Ours is a leaving party.’
Ali Kisii looked shocked. ‘You are not leaving?’
‘Yes.’ Houston looked at the ground. ‘It’s very sad.’ He didn’t really like saying it out loud. ‘My father has a new posting.’ A taxi tore by, pressing his horns instead of his brakes; forcing them to pause their conversation for a moment. ‘Where are you going?’
‘To Rome.’
‘Rome! My god above! Well, at least if I ever get tired of going to Mecca, I know that I can come and visit you in the home of that devil the Pope. When are you going?’

‘Not until the end of school term. We’re having the party now because everything will be packed up by then – my mother’s already made a start.’ ‘Yes surely, surely.’ Ali Kisii said vaguely, he was sizing up a rotund old man walking down the boardwalk towards them. Houston gave him a small wave and carried on. ‘Maybe you need a haircut!’ Ali Kisii called after him. ‘It is a wonder you can see where you're going, if I may say.’
‘It’s the fashion Mr Kisii’ Houston replied, turning and walking backwards.

Ali Kisii flipped the scissors upside down and held the handles to his eyes like lorgnettes. ‘Well if I may say so, it is most definitely a lady fashion you have stumbled upon in error.’

Houston smiled. ‘Perhaps tomorrow.’

But Ali Kisii and turned his concentration to the portly man who had crossed the street and was studying the price list that hung in the barbershop window beside illustrations of the hairstyles.

When Houston reached the Rasbashs’, he rattled the gate until the guard arrived and let him in. He walked straight to the pool, which was round the side of the house, hidden from view by oleander bushes. There was no one there.

Music started blasting out of the Rasbashs’ sitting room window, so he walked over to the front door and knocked. The music was far too loud for anyone to hear him, so after a minute, he turned the handle and went in.
Susan Rasbash was dancing around the sitting room, dressed in a long pink kaftan and matching turban. She swooped around the room, arms weaving, her eyes lightly shut behind oversized sunglasses. Houston froze in the doorway overcome with embarrassment. He coughed, but she remained unaware of him. The room Finally, when a crackly hush descended upon the room between tracks, he coughed again. Susan Rasbash turned and fixed him with a steady gaze, showing no sign on surprise.

‘Well looky here, sneaking up like a handsome spy, Houston Penrose.’ Almost immediately, his head felt it might explode from the surfeit of blood that had disobediently rushed there. Voluptuous orange painted lips parted and she grinned at him, pushing back the sleeves of her kaftan to fiddle with complicated earrings that had caught on the turban. She had remarkably hairy arms.

His mother said everyone got hairier in the Tropics, but Houston had read in his Look and Learn comic that body hair helped keep the body warm and put it to her that people should really get balder. She had been unable to explain to his satisfaction, why it was the opposite and if the hair grew to provide the surface shade, or if the greenhouse heat just sent the follicles into wonky overdrive. They both agreed it was a strange phenomenon manifested particularly strongly in Mrs Rasbash and why it had earned her the nickname Hirsute Sue.

‘Wasn’t that pivotal?’ She sighed in a glorious manner. ‘That was the title track. It’s my favourite I think. My sister sent it to me. It’s a smash hit in England. Look!’ And she marched over to the side-table, grabbed the album cover and strode over, waving it at him. ‘It’s called Aladdin Sane. Do you get it?’ Houston dragged his eyes away from her arms and stared blankly at a photograph of a bare shouldered man with a lightning flash painted down his face. What was he meant to ‘get’?
‘Er’ he said.
‘He’s saying he’s mental ! Aladdin Sane: A lad insane. You see?’ she cried jabbing her finger along the title.
What he wanted to say was ‘It’s you who’s acting mental Mrs Rasbash, could you stop because it’s scaring me’ but instead he said, ‘He does look a bit loony, yes.’
‘Oh no, no, you’re wrong there!’ She said fiercely, striding back to the record player. ‘Bowie’s a goddamn genius.’ He felt lost and alone in uncharted Rasbash territory, where it was alright for her to call a singer mad, but not him. She settled the needle back down and it crackled into the opening bars of a lazy guitar strum. He surfed a wave of dread that she might start dancing again and resolved to get away as soon as he could.
‘I need to find Gibb!’ he said, raising his voice over the swelling music. She swayed a bit, but thankfully this next song was a ballad. ‘My mother needs him to help with the party.’
‘Oh sure, the party. Gary and I are coming. You must be pretty excited about going to Italy.’ She looked into the middle distance. ‘What I wouldn’t give to live there.’ Houston shrugged. All the grown ups said the same thing to him, but all he felt was sad and nervous. He would miss their house and he would miss Boaz. He thought he should probably miss Joshua, but his English was very bad, so they never really spoke much; not like Boaz.

He didn’t really want to talk to Susan Rasbash about it, so instead he said, ‘Is Gibb here?’
‘No.’ she replied. ‘But they’ll be back soon. They went with Clarence to see the fire.’

‘The fire?’ Houston knew nothing about a fire.

‘The Malaika bangle factory burned down last night. They’ve gone to see what’s left. Good riddance I say!’ Susan Rasbash picked up a glass and took a long, noisy draught. She waved the glass at Houston and said, ‘Straightener?’
‘No thank you Mrs Rasbash.’
She shrugged and poured herself some more Campari and lifted the glass to him in a lazy salute. He was beginning to panic a bit. Could he leave a message for Gibb, or should he wait? He wasn’t sure how long he was going to manage being on his own with Mrs Rasbash in this mood.

‘Yes, we read about it in the paper this morning. I imagine that cloudburst probably put the last of it out.’ She grabbed the Daily Nation off her coffee table. ‘Listen to this,’ she said, tapping a Rooster cigarette out of a soft packet and lighting it. ‘“The Malaika Factory, Mombasa's most visited tourist site after Fort Jesus.” Most visited site? They must be mad! It was only visited it because that gigantic neon hand was an easy landmark for people to meet. Where was I? “…was destroyed in an inferno last night. The destruction of the bangle factory is not only a great blow to local jobs but also a loss to Mombasa’s rich and diverse heritage. Six fire engines attended. Foul play is not suspected” It’s unbelievable!’ She threw the paper down in disgust. ‘It goes on to describe it as some sort of tragedy for jewelers everywhere and a cultural cataclysm for rest of humanity’s wrists. Everyone knows that place was the wretched black heart of child labour in East Africa! I’m glad it burned.’
‘Mrs Rasbash?’ he interrupted.
‘What?’
‘Your telephone isn’t working.’
‘Damn and blast! Not again!’ and she strode out onto her front porch, arms folded, propelling him forward in the bow wake of her indignation. She gestured beyond her property.
‘Just look at it, I mean, really.’ In the line of telegraph poles in her street, the nearest one to her house was missing.
‘Did it fall over?’ Houston asked.
‘Who knows? It might have been struck by lightning, or been chopped up for firewood, or stolen to make a boat mast. Instead of replacing it, those idiot telephone engineers have simply draped the cable between the trees. Do you see?’ It was true, the wires sagged so badly, they almost touched the ground. ‘Even if I could call for help no one would come. I’ve no bloody idea what I would do with myself in this godforsaken country if it wasn’t for Rasputin.’
‘Rasputin?’
‘Yes, Rasputin. Pet tortoise. He means the world to me. Keeps me calm.'
Mrs Rasbash ushered Houston back into the house and ranted on about the telephone system, Rasputin, David Bowie, the bangle factory and much else besides until, to his great relief he heard the crunch of a car arriving and the slamming of doors.

Gibb swaggered into the house and clapped his brother on the back. ‘You missed a trip Houston. The Malaika Factory is completely burned out. It’s still smouldering man.’
‘We have to get home Gibb.’ Jenny, who had followed behind Gibb and gave Houston a friendly wave.

‘Hey Jenny.’

‘Hey Houston, looking forward to tonight?’
‘Not really, but Mama says you are invited over as well. You can come now, if you like.’
‘That’s nice of her after the....’ she stopped herself and glanced quickly at her mother. She looked down at her gingham shift and swiped at some smut marks.
‘I’ll come later with Mum and Dad, if you don’t mind. My hair reeks of burnt plastic. I need to change.’

Houston had spent quite enough time at the Rasbashes’ house and started pulling Gibb towards the door. ‘We have to get back. Mama needs our help. She sent me to fetch you. I’ve been waiting for hours.’
‘Ok. See you later’ said Gibb, blowing Jenny a nonchalant kiss. ‘Thanks for the beer Mrs Rasbash.’
‘My pleasure Gibb’ said Mrs Rasbash.
‘She gave you a beer?’ said Houston, as soon as they were in the drive and out of earshot.
‘Yep, earlier she did, two in fact’ said Gibb. ‘Don’t tell Mama.’
‘I won’t. She offered me a gin or something.’
‘You? Blimey. Jenny says her mum gets "coast crazy" and her dad has to take her upcountry to get her calmed down.’
‘Might be time for them to take that trip’ said Houston, and they strolled past the telephone cables in silence.

2009-07-05T19:02:00.001+01:00

Musical Recommendation of The Week:
White Daisy Passing - Rocky Votolato

A Week In The Life

2009-07-05T17:59:00.032+01:00

A hectic week in glorious, blazing sunshine: Parents’ Day, Wimbledon, writing a column for The Standard, my son’s 17th birthday [right, a cake but not the cake], running an inaugural Scrabble tournament, our choir first public performance of the year, early morning Harry Potter preview and the end of the summer term [& the ending of my daughter’s school life] and our choir’s first public performance of the season.

First, to Parents’ Day, which can often be slightly traumatic. I arrive from London with a picnic, lay

out a rug in the orchard alongside hundreds of other parents, only to be

abandoned to eat alone after about 5 minutes of my children’s company as they go and do mysterious things in far off undergrowth, although I am assured it is something entirely curricular.

This year there were more faces missing than usual, nothing of course to do with the fact that the day coincided with Glastonbury. Many a teenager was off school having reported the sudden onset of a debilitating affliction only to return later with hair caked in mud and appearances on Facebook in front of backdrops that by no stretch of the imagination could be described as sick rooms, although with expressions that did indicate heavy medication.

It was Atticus’s birthday on Tuesday when he would be back at class, so I along with the picnic, I brought along a large chocolate cake. As he is a huge fan of the film Gladiator, the icing read ‘Are You Entertained?’ a quote from the hero Maximus Decimus Meridius after he has slain all comers in the arena. By the time I arrived, the heat in the back of the car had taken its toll; most the letters had sunk into the chocolate or slithered down the sides of the cake, so it now read ‘re Y tert ned’ which was a bit more MacArthur Park Klingon than Gladiator.

Wimbledon, under a baking sun in the beautiful No.1 Court; I was the guest of my friends Patrick & Lucinda for the quarterfinals. The crowd was a sea of gracious pastels, waving fans and partisans catcalls. Lucinda had come over all French Revolution and kept up a incisive running commentary while knitting a golf club balaclava at a speed comparable to a top spin forehand. The main protagonists in front of us were accompanied by an extraordinary corps de ballet: linesmen bending their knees in perfect unison for every point and when filing off the court, walked with their identically folded jackets draped over the same arm. The ballboys had also been drilled to perform every task with military precision, from emptying the walls from their canisters, to standing at the back with their arms behind their back during play. They looked more like scampering SuperMario characters than local schoolchildren as they rushed forward to present towels, and while the player walked and mopped, moon-walked backwards in front of them, until the towel was chucked back. Whenever the players returned to the service line for the start of a new point, two boys on either side stood to attention, each holding a ball aloft, their arms rigidly vertical - like a ‘D’ in semaphore. If they didn’t have any, they held their arms down palms out, an ‘N’ in semaphore and the internationally recognized gesture for ‘I got no balls’. The only other place you see chores executed with this sort of precision this is in a casino.

I hadn’t been to Wimbledon in at least ten years. I ran out of interest when all the big hitters came along, but I witnessed something grippingly gladiatorial in Roddick, the lightning server [right] against Hewitt the star returner [left]. The tall, all-American boy pitted against the smaller, archetypal Australian; the wholesome athlete against the stubborn scrapper, both former world No.1s. The pair were so evenly matched it was a game that someone would lose, rather than win. In the end, Roddick found the chink and overpowered Hewitt. It was war, but it was also art. Were we entertained? Yes we were.
I’d go so far as to say we were re Y tert ned.
I was writing about this match for The Standard column and found myself in the strange position of having to leave the match before the last set, in order to get my copy about it in on time…

The inaugural Café Anglais Scrabble tournament took place on Thursday. Up for grabs was the Alfred Butts Cup, named after the inventor of the great game, [pictured right]. Runners up played for the Rotorua Plate [named after the NZ city where a Scrabble game ended in a murder.] Fifty-two contestants played hectic one-minute-limit games until supper, amid much laughter and even more cussing. Although not everyone knew each other, they all swiftly bonded by the presence of an arrogant twerp in our midst. From the moment he walked in, he bossed people about, tried to take over and behaved as if the Cup was his entitlement; it was like playing host to an enormous ego, with a small male attachment. When other people, especially women, turned out to be quite as good as him, he was patronising in the extreme and thus the atmosphere entered a state of grace when he was battered out of the quarterfinals by, not only a clever girl, but a beautiful, clever girl with spectacular breasts. Combatants will lock antlers and re Y tert ned again in January.
In the meantime, the heavenly Café Anglais will be hosting a monthly Scrabble Club – & I am trying to persuade them to expand it to include Snatch, Perudo & Backgammon, of which I may or may not be the presiding Madame. Watch this space.

The Great Western did two public performances on Saturday. We rehearsed in Tom The Choirmaster's garden and sounded very wobbly, then set off to sing indoors at a nearby fete . [pictured right, the Tony Soprano section] When we sang for real everything changed. A couple of times I got goosebumps at the wonderful noise that came out of our mouths. The second performance was at a street party in the open air & there it all ran away from us & we sounded pretty ragged.

We are due to perform outdoors at the Big Chill at the beginning of August...eek [that'll be a D flat eek]

Driving to my children’s school to bring back all their books and clobber, I crawled in Friday traffic past huge roadworks. [I’m a sucker for heavyplant – who isn’t?] The project has been in progress for a couple of years as engineers burrow an enormous tunnel into a hillside, into which, the road will one day vanish. A sprawling caravan site housing the workers has sprung up near the tunnel entrance and flags fluttered above the various sections of the site to denote the nationalities of the workforce – the red dragon of Wales, an Irish shamrock, a Polish flag, Kiwis, the double eagles of Germany and some Romanians [flag pictured left] – or were they Chadians? [flag pictured right] As every anorak knows and to the chagrin of both, those two countries share identical flags. Nice to see that some wandering Confederates had also managed to find work there.

It is possible my next blog may arrive a day late…I am off to Norway for a week.
I am already excited by the language: Blomsterbutikk = Flowershop
Sykhus = Hospital, Ferskin = Peach, Drittsakk = Shitbag

Check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1nzEFMjkI4
watch it from 50 secs in up to the 2 min mark.....it's the type of Viking friend I am very much hoping to make.

2009-06-27T01:04:00.004+01:00

Musical Recommendation of The Week:

After The Goldrush - kd lang

Surfin' Saints No, No, No

2009-06-27T00:04:00.033+01:00

As I look out at the thunderclouds building in the swampy heat, there’s a song in my heart, it goes like this: Lord, I’m So Happy Not To Be At Glastonbury. Last time I went was in 2007; a rainy year. With only a handful of benches on the whole site, the entire population of this tented city were trudging, trudging through the mud, always trudging, with nowhere to rest. It was exhausting, like being a fleeing refugee rather than a music lover. I can’t even remember what I saw other than trench foot inside my socks. My main memories are of the flags and of a notice board in Journalists’ Tent backstage that had a list of festival facts that went roughly like this: Population: 148,000.

Furthest distant between tents: 8 miles.

Medical Aid Administered: 1,200 [mostly fall injuries: slips/strains]

Tent Robberies: 58

Drug Busts: 156

Noise Complaints: 1

I would like to have listened in on that complaint.

What these statistics cannot convey is how astonishingly benign it is, given its England and the crowds are all somewhere between slightly & phenomenally wasted. This would normally be the perfect equation for an almighty ruck. Yet, it doesn't happen. On the whole, people are kind to each other, especially when we're all drenched and carrying 6lbs of mud on our shoes.

However, I can’t abide listening to all that more-Glast-than-thou stuff people churn out. All those stories of ‘Yeah, after our tent got washed away in a torrent of human ordure, we slept upright in the crook of a tree, then the money got stolen by a Viking biker on acid, so we ate sheep droppings for three days.

Our weed got blown away in a mini tornado, so we smoked grated nutmeg through a bong made from an exhaust pipe.’ Unless you can trump them with a more putrid tale, you've somehow failed to have 'done' Glastonbury.

I would like to say here and now, I've only ever 'done' it in maximum luxury thanks to my friend Carol, the Texan mermaid. Actually, if there is a phrase beyond maximum luxury, it's that. And it's the way to go, believe me.

Perhaps it is this comfort that has clouded my judgement & taken me so long time to realise that I don’t really enjoy Glastonbury, even when it's sunny. I don't like seeing bands from miles away; I can't connect. I might as well be watching it on television

In fact, I've just switched on the tv to see what's going on...oh look there's Neil Young looking like an angry Gandalf - he's has snapped off all the strings from his guitar and is making a truly hideous racket over a cacpophany of feedback...for quite some time, like he's gone stark raving psycho and thinks he's in Slipknot...maybe I missed the artistic build up to this...maybe it's the acme of musical expression...but sounds like a load of horseshit to me.

Here's what I like best about Neil Young: other people singing his songs.

[Checking this out on itunes, I must add that the Boney M, Marie Osmond & Johhny Hates Jazz covers are exceptions to the rule]

Mercifully, the cameras leave Mr Young and his plank spanking madness for a montage of clips making Glastonbury look like fun, uh oh I'm going to turn it off before I lose my head and delude myself that I might enjoy a next time.

Anyway, I have to stay at home - I have a whole garden full of

delicate things that rely on me and as their guardian, my shortcomings are many. I am aware I don’t even really know how to water properly. I fill up the watering can and stand over plants and try to imagine I am a raincloud. I've moved into vegetables this year. I have carrots the width of a hypodermic syringe. Very chic.

I peer at strange little growths wondering if they are weeds or not. Is it a weed due only to my disapproval? Sometimes weeding becomes such philosophical torment I have to lie face down in the daisies and hum.

I was invited to Cornwall for an alternative to Glastonbury weekend, but whisper it softly, I don’t really like Cornwall either.

I can’t get over the feeling that I’m staying in a corridor.

And if there’s a phobia of garden walls which feature wagon wheels, I have it and it finds its full expression in the southern peninsula. Cornwall’s a long way to go to get that passagey feel, especially if you go by train and experience it all the way there. Beyond that and the gruesome recent architecture, it does have some lovely beaches, but crammed ones. The alternative is a hinterland crammed with caravan parks and churches commemorating obscure Celtic saints. Who are these guys? St. Blaise, St. Austell, St.Cuby, St. Erc, St. Winwaloe anyone? No doubt all claiming visions after too much grated nutmeg. In the space of a mile or so there are churches named after St. Endelion

the virgin recluse, St Teath, Endelion’s hardly more outgoing sister and another named after the joker of the pack - their brother St. Nectan, the hermit.

How times change. In the 21st century we observe asthma and alcoholism running in families, while in 6th century Cornwall, beatification was the hereditary strain. What kind of conversations did the parents of such children have about them? ‘Endelion and Teath are helping Nectan moves caves, but it’s young Ogbert who's really worrying me; that boy's turning out to be merely good.’

So, I don’t want to go to Cornwall, no, no, no.

I know, I know, wagon wheels be dammed, Cornwall’s good for surfing and yes, yes I like surfing - it’s not that hard. Or rather, it’s not hard to be quite bad at it and attract people who can annoy on a Glastonburian level, with all that 'gnarly dude, I spilt some port' jargon.

And then there are those who turn it into magnificent, physical poetry. Surfing is a perfect example of man’s intrinsic joyfulness. Given the sight of waves crashing onto a beach, we rush off, find a flat plank, race back, plunge in and gyre and gimble until we are exhausted. It is a watery reminder that life is not after all, just a vale of tears, but for the tiniest span of eternity we have the sweet privilege to exist.

Or as your average surf twerp might say, ‘Cowabunga and amen.’

Meanwhile, from the peace of my toolshed, I am plotting my summer break: a whistle stop tour of the world's pariah states.