Can romance survive the National Wedding Show?

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‘We don’t need no piece of paper from the city hall, keeping us tied and true’
Joni Mitchell, My Old Man, 1971

I think we can say conclusively that Joni Mitchell, when she wrote the above song at the back-end of the hippy era, had not been to the National Wedding Show. Because if she had done, her lyric, if accurately rendered, would read something more like:

We need a piece of paper from the city hall, keeping us tied and true, and we also need a fantastically expensive wedding, reception and honeymoon which will cost a small fortune, to show that we love each other.

Yes, I took a trip to the National Wedding Show at Olympia at the weekend. This is the place where that proposal, that down on one knee burbling of, ‘will you, my dear?’ turns into reality. The place where romance morphs into budgets and colour schemes and timelines. Where men realise what they have let themselves in for, and the women say, ‘don’t worry, just organise the music at the reception, and leave the rest to me.’

I wasn’t there because of any upcoming nuptials on my part. I was volunteering for Breakthrough Breast Cancer, for whom I also work. The people who organise the thing had generously given the charity a stand to promote our good cause. We spent our time chatting to the people about the various pins we had on offer which could be alternative wedding favours.

To give you some understanding of my level of innocence before attending on Sunday, I didn’t even know what a wedding favour was. For the unenlightened, they are the sugared almonds, or similar, that you get on the table when you sit down to a meal at a wedding. In the weddings I have attended, I have clearly scoffed the little blighters long before ascertaining that they are a traditional gesture of friendship from the happy couple.

The Wedding Fair was a bustling place, mostly with business-like mothers dragging their daughter and groom-to-be around, looking at dresses, places to get married, places to have receptions, caterers, the lot. It’s a place to gather ideas and start to scope out what’s out there.

Some were floating around the place, excited by the possibilities of it all. Others were utterly bewildered, finding out that, yes, even trifling things like confetti and cup cakes have got to be bought. And if you think you might struggle into the wedding dress of your dreams, there was even a Boot Camp to get you into shape.

There was some wonderfully novel sights to be seen down at the show. Opposite us was a heavy-set fellow from Scunthorpe who had a stand called Amazing Smile. This was offering a kind UV light treatment to the teeth, to whiten them, with prices starting at £89.99. I never knew such a product existed, and thought it preposterously expensive. But apparently this was very cheap and prices are usually in the hundreds of pounds. He did a roaring trade.

The Amazing Smile stand drew some interesting characters to it. Some of the ladies getting their gnashers done were in what you might call the Silvio Berlusconi class. But the biggest (in every way) customers were the Dream Boys. These are hen party specialists, appearing at various locations across the UK to do their show. Needless to say, they were all getting their teeth done, some quite possibly twice. It appears that the dream these boys were peddling was that of a group of men, quite possibly from Essex, with gym-built physiques and unnaturally whitened teeth, stripping down to the posing pouch. The show has been running for years, so it clearly works.

One of the blokes told us they support a different cancer charity each year, and have given tens of thousands to charity, including Breakthrough. So it appears that everyone is a winner.

By the end of Sunday, it had been a hard few days for many of the people working there. I saw models who had been doing the catwalk show hobbling about. Some of the stallholders were on autopilot – dreaming of being at home with their feet up.

When we tottered out of there, I wondered whether this modern obsession with highly elaborate, highly expensive weddings kills romance stone dead. I needed some sort of affirmation that people who get married aren’t just burdened by societal pressure and financial strain. On the cab back to the office, I prattled to the driver about the wedding show. He told me that it was the day of his ninth wedding anniversary, and he was out working.

Economics conquering love? Not a bit of it. He was taking his wife out for a meal the following day, he told me with a smile. A heartwarming tale to end a good, but rather unromantic day.

Short man Gattuso blows his fuse!!!

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Last night’s display by Gennaro Gattuso was possibly the best example of a short man going on the rampage since Joe Pesci went at that poor unfortunate with the telephone in Goodfellas.

Infuriated by the beanpole striker, short man Gattuso goes after Crouch

Not only did he hand out this finger-wagging attack on Peter Crouch, probably just on account of Crouch’s preposterous size, but he sought out Joe Jordan, a jock known as hard even amongst his own rugged people, and dealt him a headbutt.

(A note on this headutt: while I fully admire the handing out of a headbutt by Gattuso on Joe Jordan, I cannot admire the execution. It was one of those half-hearted push-headed efforts which suggests that even this volcanic footballer was holding himself in somewhat. It reminds me of Zidane in the World Cup Final. I still can’t understand why he didn’t deal him the blow to the bridge of the nose rather than the breast bone. My philosophy – you should never waste a good headbutt.)

This takes me back to my own football-playing heyday when my pragmatic manager sent me out, week after week, to man-mark the tallest player on the field. There I would be, all furious because of the brevity of my physique, and take great pride in pulling this week’s giant to the ground with a succession of, shall we say, ‘committed’ challenges.

Occasionally, when it looked my nascent short man syndrome was not quite to the fore, he would suggest amiably that ‘the bigger they are the harder they fall’. That, it’s safe to say, was all that was needed to fire up the old Napoleon Complex and leave some poor gentle giant wondering why short men had such aggressive streaks.

Well, as Gattuso or Pesci would testify, there really is no explaining it. There is no saying why when I see a tall man I boil up in some sort of apoplectic rage. Is it genetic? Is it environment? Is it a complex mix of both? Hard to tell. It’s just the way it is.

And football is all the better for it. In a recent interview with the Guardian, Xavi suggested that Barcelona’s style of play was the most beautiful and, almost, that the result was secondary. Well, after we had watched the tedium of Spain’s succession of 1-0s winning the World Cup, I think the football fraternity is ready for a taste of an older style, that style of football where no one can be quite sure they are going to leave the field of play with all four limbs still attached.

Because, on the night that Arsenal play Barcelona, in what the aesthetes are calling a meeting of philosophers and artists, we should remember this: football began as a game being played with a pig’s bladder between working men who wanted to thrash a ball about and hurt each other after a hard day working in the fields. In an age when the two-footed, studs-up challege is anathema to many, we should rejoice in the behaviour of players such as Gattuso who are in it for the physical battle and as a legal way to unleash their psychotic tendencies.

From one short man to another: Gattuso, I salute you.

Notes: Gattuso is about 5ft 9ins. This is not short when it comes to the general population but in the world of sport people who are usually six feet or above, he certainly is. And what I always say when people are unsure if a man is truly short or not – you will be able to tell. With Gattuso, I think we can rest assured, in his heart of hearts, he is a short man and proud.

Joe Pesci keeping his short man syndrome nicely under control

A poem in honour of President Mubarak and other friends of the west

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Mubarak and Barack Obama, the best of friends

President Mubarak has gone, despite the very generous $1.5 billion each year he received from the US to keep his people in the state to which they had become accustomed. Throughout the 18 days of protests the west remained unwilling to speak out too strongly against their friend and ally. Like Pinochet, he was a man with whom the west could conduct business.

So here is a poem in honour of

A good despot
 
People called him a dictator, a tyrant, a despot
I say: that is not the man I know
I know a man of learning, culture, principles
And say this world must have gone mad when
A man, a military man, can give 60 years
Of unswerving service to his nation
And be treated like a common or garden criminal

It was laughable to me, seeing those unwashed beasts
filling the streets with their tatty flags and odours –
Couldn’t you almost smell them through the flat screen tv? –
Bearing their rotting cavitied teeth,
and demanding, what? Some kind of idiot justice
and an end to the rule of a man, a friend to the west
A man who had done his duty and his exceptional best

They said he had feathered his nest a little bit
Well, did he not deserve that for playing such a
calm, considered role in the realm of geopolitics?
We are not talking about anything insidious,
We are talking about a man who
was steadfast in doing the right thing,
A man whose farthest thought was abandoning ship
 
He has gone now, sating the shameful need of
A nation’s children to be rid of their grandfather.
The next days will be hard, yet I feel sure
he will be wise enough to reflect that
He is merely the latest in a line of great leaders
who leave power quietly admired by the many
while loudly decried by the hotheaded few

Brad Pitt to play Steve Eisman in Big Short film: Michael Lewis at LSE

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Michael Lewis, author of The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, was in converation at a free LSE lecture tonight. He confirmed that the book, about the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage market, and subsequent spectacular fallout, had been bought by Brad Pitt and Paramount Pictures.

He also said that Brad Pitt would star in the film as Steve Eisman, a hedge fund manager who made millions by betting against the subprime market.

Lewis, in his usual irreverent style, described Eisman as a guy who ‘gets pleasure out of saying things that are true and offensive, like a really bright four-year-old on steroids.’

Eisman’s wife says of him in the book, ‘Even on Wall Street people think he is rude and obnoxious and offensive.’

So it looks Pitt should have a lot of fun playing this character, and we should have a lot of fun watching him when the film comes out.

Lewis had a host of great throwaway quotes at LSE:

“People have unreliable memories, especially about their own financial decisions.”

He pointed out the most of the characters in the book are reprehensible in many respects. About Greg Lippmann, who had shorted the market at Deutsche Bank: “Even when he is saying a profound truth he can seem like he is lying.”

About the bond traders: “None of them thought they had made bad decisions. They thought they were victims of a natural disaster…they were not good witnesses. They hadn’t understood what was happening to them when it was happening to them.”

He also told a terrific story about his own LSE days when the students used the sport budget to buy a racehorse. Upshot was the racehorse wasn’t very good and some people weren’t happy so the sport budget was instead spent on sending folk like Lewis around Europe to play basketball.

Lewis described LSE students in the early 1980s as ‘the most irresponsible people I’ve met, including sub-prime mortgage traders.’

He also showed himself to be a master of the Q&A, using all of the questions as an opportunity to pull out more from his seemingly endless supply of stories.

And finally he gave this wonderful insight into his writing style and indeed good writing generally: “The trick is to leave a hole in the story to allow the reader in and let them exercise judgement.”

Quotes from Mark Twain autobiography

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My dad was given the Mark Twain autobiography for Christmas. Great big thing, about a thousand pages long, of such formidable size you could never get it on the tube or bus. It’s the kind of awesome volume which you can only read if you are a scholar, or retired. I am neither; fortunately CW Purnell is both. Happily he has pulled out some of the juiciest quotes from the first third of the book from the inestimable writer of Huckleberry Finn.

So, in page order, here they are. Thanks daddio. For all Twain fans – enjoy!

Selected quotations from Mark Twain’s Autobiography 

On James W Paige, a failed businessman who cost Twain $170,000 (p102)

(He) is a most extraordinary compound of business thrift and commercial insanity; of cold calculation and jejune sentimentality; of veracity and falsehood; of fidelity and treachery; of pluck and cowardice; of wasteful liberality and pitiful stinginess; of solid sense and weltering moonshine; of towering genius and trivial ambitions; of merciful bowels and a petrified heart; of colossal vanity and – but there the opposites stop. His vanity stands alone, sky piercing as an Egyptian monolith.

 On Countess Massiglia, landlady of Villa di Quarto (p241)

She is excitable, malicious, malignant, vengeful, unforgiving, selfish, stingy, avaricious, coarse, vulgar, profane, obscene, a furious blusterer on the outside and at heart a coward. Her lips are familiar with lies, deceptions, swindles and treacheries as are her nostrils with breath.

On his discussion club (p273)

The Club was founded by a great clergyman: it always had more clergymen in it than good people.

Twain’s quote from Bill Nye about Wagner (p288)

I have been told that Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.

On Duelling (p294) 

In those early days duelling suddenly became a fashion in the new Territory of Nevada and by 1864 everybody was anxious to have a chance in the new sport, mainly for the reason that he was not able to thoroughly respect himself so long as he had not killed or crippled somebody in a duel or been killed or crippled in one himself… I was ambitious in several ways, but I had entirely escaped the seductions of that particular craze. I had no desire to fight a duel; I had no intention of provoking one. I did not feel respectable, but I got certain amount of satisfaction out of feeling safe.

The Character of Man (p312)

 … of all the creatures that were made he is the most detestable. Of the entire brood he is the only one – the solitary one – that possesses malice. That is the basest of all instincts, passions, vices – the most hateful. That one thing puts him below rats, the grubs, the trichinae. He is the only creature that inflicts pain for sport, knowing it to be pain…. All creatures kill… but of the whole list, man is the only one that kills in malice, the only one that kills for revenge.

Who should get the Olympic stadium – West Ham or Spurs?

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You know the debate about the future of the Olympic stadium at Stratford has become farcical when Pele starts piping up with his opinion.

Pele is the most notoriously wrongheaded pundit in football (I know, a bold claim, but one he comfortably justifies). This is the fellow who said that Nicky Butt was the future of football, as he did about Freddy Adu, the wonderkind who flopped hopelessly from that moment on. He also declared Totti the best player in the world, which might be true if you were judging him on his hair and overlook that he always goes missing in big games.

It’s true, Pele was good at scoring goals. He is also a geriatric loudmouth who should, as Maradona so wisely put it, ‘go back to the museum.’

An irritating old man who used to be good at football

Now, possibly guided by a conversation with that impartial and sober judge, Jimmy Greaves, he has been led to think that Tottenham are the rightful inheritors of the Olympic stadium. That’s the proposal, you will remember, to rebuild the stadium for football with no running track. Which is perhaps not quite what the British public thought the Olympic legacy would look like. This is in opposition to West Ham’s proposal to move in, retaining the track.

So what is the right decision?

I’ll admit, it’s a tough one. On the upside, if Tottenham get the stadium it would leave their fans harrumphing about loss of identity and give opposition fans years of fun along the lines of ‘you’re just a shit club from Stratford,’ etc. It would leave West Ham fans feeling like they’ve been robbed, which is their natural state. It would also make Lord Coe a hate figure among athletes.

If West Ham get the stadium they will get a nice new home which is vaguely in the right part of town for them. However, the track would be retained, therefore robbing fans of their ability to intimidate opponents and linesmen. As a Rangers fan, I’ve long enjoyed abusing the lino, so I can feel the Hammers’ fan pain on this sensitive issue. When the super hoops are not having a good day, you can always amuse yourself by shouting at the linesman:

‘Oi, Lino. Dipstick!’

It’s part and parcel of the game, a tradition that has gone back generations, and one I would hate to see lost.

To make a proper judgement we must look at the wider ramifications. If Spurs get a bigger stadium it would give them greater income and secure their top five status. It would, therefore, leave Liverpool stranded in the longer-term as England’s sixth club (unless Sunderland or Villa are having a good year).

For me, the sound of the whinging scouser ringing up 606 saying this player or that player is ‘not fit to wear the shirt’ in that preposterously egotistical fashion the Reds fan has perfected is, in its way, rather endearing. It should be nurtured at every opportunity.

So, in summary, these, I feel, are the salient points to consider:

1. We must do everything we can to keep the scouser whinging
2. Upton Park should remain a haven for fans to abuse players and officials alike
3. West Ham fans should retain their sense of bad luck and injustice.

So, for the good of football, and it does pain me to say this: give the stadium to Spurs.

Review – Russell Brand, Booky Wook 2

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Another quiet night for Russell

When I first saw Russell Brand on telly I thought he was an annoying twat.
There he was: all hair, eyeliner and belts, delivering a steady stream of innuendo-laden inanities.
My housemate at the time, Dan, put it succinctly:
‘I can’t stand that cunt,’ he said.

Dan didn’t just turn the channel over, he switched the tv off, as if to ward against Brand sneaking onto a different channel. I heartily agreed with this affirmative action. From there I cast aspersions against him at any opportunity without ever bothering to check if the fella was actually funny.

It was about this time that Russell Brand became ominpresent, what with his tv and radio shows, and daily appearances in the tabloid press. He even had a column in the sport section of the Guardian on a Saturday, and I went to great lengths to fold the newspaper in a way in which meant I could safely avoid looking at his odious fizzog.

However, there comes a time when a celebrity reaches a threshold of visibility when they simply cannot be avoided. Russell Brand, of course, achieved that point when he insulted Manuel on his radio show.

I hadn’t heard the broadcast but got the basics from the blanket media coverage seeping into my skull. I was coming home on the tube from a solid night’s boozing when my friend Alex asked me what I thought about the Brand controversy. I’m from Rainham, just a few miles away from Grays, where he’s from, so I was being consulted as a fellow Estuary Essexman.

‘I think he’s a disgrace to his county,’ I said vehemently, my views unbesmirched by any factual knowledge of the incident.

‘You can’t really think that, can you?’ said a bloke sitting opposite. ‘It’s all a storm being whipped up by the Daily Mail. It was just a joke that went wrong.’

‘I bloody well can think that. He’s a disgrace, going around abusing short men like that.’ (NB: I’m 5ft 4ins). ‘I’ve met people from Grays and he’s typical of the low-grade people you get there. He should be sent to Australia, I reckon.’

The bloke, a lily-livered liberal type, looked shaken. We glared at each other a bit, and then I got off at Victoria, and the matter was not further commented upon.

After that incident, I was intrigued enough to actually watch some footage of Brand doing stand-up on YouTube. He was okay. Not really laugh out loud funny, but intelligent, eloquent, and addictive to watch.

You could call Brand a lot of things, but you could never call him an attention-seeker

I was impressed by the fact that he had created a complete comic persona which allowed him to be confessional, surreal and a storyteller. And to pull vast hordes of women. He reminded me of my friend from school, Rob Howard, who could turn absolutely anything into innuendo, and had a sensational record with the ladies, too.

I loved the way that he cared about his audience. He managed to involve them, and allow them to share his pain and joy. That takes great skill and courage. To me, it was only moderately funny; but as a comedic journey towards truth it was brilliant. This is a man who truly knows himself and, like any great artist, can provide insights into our own lives.

A few months ago, I finally stumped up the money to buy Brand’s first autobiography, My Booky Wook. This was one of the best autobiographies I have ever read, and certainly the best modern memoir. He doesn’t allow himself to be anything less than totally honest, or totally funny.

This second book is clearly less well-written than the first installment. He’s run this off while he’s busy doing films and getting hitched to Katy Perry. So, he’s busy. Much of the text is cobbled together from his stand-up performances over the last few years, detailing appearances at various music award shows where like Ricky Gervais this week, he became notorious for telling mildly offensive jokes about famous people. Yet it says a lot for the quality of his lives shows that they stand up remarkably well when read off the page.

The original sections are mostly to the front of the book and this paragraph talking about how his pratfalls caused Kate Moss to dump him is typically briliant:

What no one realised, not Kate nor the red-top tabloid press, was that far from viewing her as a conquest, I was absolutely smitten. When I clumsily ballsed it up by flatly telling journalists who I’d not yet learned to ignore that I was ‘just larking around’, she wisely withdrew and I had enough sense to stop calling her. I didn’t delete her number from the phone though. I left it stored under ‘Grimy Tyke’, which is what I’d call her in an attempt to punctuate the endless flattery and awe.

And even when he’s got his hero, Morrissey, round at his house for filming, his mind is on other things:

Morrissey perused the house. I perused his make-up lady’s boobs; that is the miracle of big boobs, they remain interesting above all else.

This next sentence should go on his headstone:

I have stared over the shoulder of enlightenment to get a butcher’s at a cleavage.

His awareness of his own ludicrousness is what makes him so engaging. This second Booky Wook is the story of his escape from British TV and comedy, to superstardom. He’s made it. He’s got the pop star wife, the film career, and no doubt marvellous homes in LA and London. And even if he eventually loses touch with ordinary life in this country, it probably won’t matter, because as long as understands himself as acutely in the future as he does now, he’ll always be entertaining.

My mate Dan wouldn’t agree with me, though.

The demise of Ricky Ponting – Australia’s Napoleon

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Ricky Ponting in happier times

I sit here, at the end of a successful Ashes series, reflecting on the demise of Ricky Ponting. A man who has scored 12,000 Test runs finished the series injured, defeated and with an average a shade over 14. This is unquestionably the end of the era of Aussie dominance in Test cricket.

As an impressionable youngster I first experienced the Australians in the 1989 series in England. Their main bowler was Merv Hughes, a frightening-looking fellow with a thick, flowing moustache and a beer gut. Coming off a long run, with his belly jiggling around, he looked more dart player than cricketer. He would deliver a venomous short ball around the throat area, and finish about six inches from the frankly terrified batsman, all bulging eyes and boozy breath. The English succumbed quickly, which seemed sensible. I had heard that England had once won an Ashes but it seemed the stuff of myth.

When it was England’s time to bowl, a friendly bloke such as Derek Pringle would lollop in and send the ball at medium pace outside off-stump. The fellow at the other end was, again, a snarling, heavy-set man with Victorian moustache. This was Hughes’s soul mate, David Boon, who would respond by carving the ball through the covers for four.

England lost that six-match series 4-0. The only person who put up much resistance was our resident South African batsman, Robin Smith, a man who had a devil-may-care attitude to short-pitched bowling.

Call me a masochist; call me an inveterate idler. I was hooked on cricket. I didn’t mind that England lost. The Ashes was something in which comforting certainties, a natural order, existed.

With Victorian moustache, bulging eyes and xxxx on the chest, Merv Hughes was the archetypal Aussie cricketer

They came back in 1993, with Shane Warne in their team, and won 4-1. David Boon bludgeoned runs, Hughes snarled his way through the England batting. In 1997, Boon and Hughes were gone, replaced by sadly clean-shaven men called Matty, Mark or Jason. It was hard to tell these identikit Aussies apart.

In 2001, I settled down to watch the series knowing that England had no chance. The new Aussie No 3 caught the eye. Small fellow, by the name of Ricky Ponting, full of bullheaded aggression, like a distilled David Boon.

In the first three Tests, he showed flourishes of brilliance, but it was in the fourth that the English public got its first proper sight of this arrogant genius. In the first innings he scored 144 off 154 balls. He did not so much bat, as slap the ball about. If you bowled short, he pulled for four. If you bowled full, he drove for four. And if you bowled wide, he cut for four.

England bowlers, by this point, had enjoyed a decade of uninterrupted failure against the Aussie. But it was only with the accession of Ponting to No 3, that Australia went from being superior to completely driving England into the dirt. Humiliating them. In frank terms, taking the piss.

In this belligerent short man, the English cricket fan heard a historical echo. Here was not simply another Aussie cricketer, over here to bolster his average and claim the Ashes. This was a short man on the rampage. Damn it, Ponting was another Napoleon.

The English were roused from their gentle slumber. They realised it was not good enough to simply turn up and lose 4-1. That was fine, before Ponting. Not now.

The England team had to try a bit harder. Central contracts were introduced. The lads went for the occasional jog. They laid off the booze and fags before matches. They did a bit of catching practice.

By 2005, England wanted to win. They knew the only way to do that was by targeting Ponting, now captain. As a cricketing Napoleon, England knew he had a short fuse. It was just a case of working out how best to help the chap ignite.

Ricky losing his rag, in fine Napoleonic fashion

 

Firstly, like all successful English campaigns, some foreigners were brought in to help. We got an Aussie (Troy Cooley) to whip the bowlers into shape. Crucially, we brought in a South African (Pietersen) to bolster the middle order. Ponting wouldn’t like this. Oh no.

Then the winding-up started in earnest. The schoolboy tactics. The England team, full of big lads, were encouraged by our Wellington, Michael Vaughan, to taunt Napoleon. Matthew Hoggard, a bluff Yorkshireman, was deployed in press conferences to tell Ricky they had plans for him. During the match, the England fielders had mouthfuls of wine gums to help shine the ball and make it reverse swing. Vaughan started giving bowlers ‘toilet’ or ‘injury’ breaks during the day, so they could put their feet up and get a massage before their next spell, replacing them with crack fielders.

Ponting, nonchalant at first, safe in the knowledge that the Aussie would prevail, did not react. But through a tight series, the pressure grew. The Press started asking leading questions about whether he was happy with English tactics. The fuse was ready to explode.

And then, in the fourth Test, with England dominating, Damien Martyn pushed a ball into the covers for a quick single. The substitute fielder, Gary Pratt, picked the ball up and hurled down the stumps at the striker’s end with Ponting some way from his ground.

Ponting, whose temper had been contained until this point, exploded. He flew into a rage, waving his bat at the English dressing-room like a modern-day Yosemite Sam. Vaughan laughed, and England laughed with him. From there, with Pratt as 12th man for the final Test, and our South African plundering runs, the series was won.

The template of English success against Ponting was laid. In this present series we have merely refined it. We have another South African in Jonathan Trott to further solidify the middle order. We have an even better Aussie bowling coach in David Saker. And we made smart use of the referral system which caused Ponting to go apoplectic, again in the fourth Test.

It is unlikely Ponting will be seen against England in the next Ashes series. It is unlikely the Aussie batting order will quickly recover its former strength. Drawing the Napoleonic parallel again, I can’t help but think that putting the short man in charge caused great triumphs in the short-term. But while Australia, like France, enjoyed great success with a short-tempered short man as leader, it was in that very appointment that the seeds of their humiliation were sewn.

Ponting modelled his captaincy closely on the Yosemite Sam model

Two types of theft in Sainsbury’s

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I was having a stroll yesterday, enjoying the sight of the fine people of south London attempting to slide down the newly-laid snow on the slopes of Streatham Common. The contraptions used were many and varied, from a fellow strapped onto a snowboard, to children on the classic sledge you see on Christmas cards. Most amusing, however, was a couple of middle-aged women going down the Rookery with Sainsbury’s carrier bags underneath their bottoms. Not the biggest surface on which to be sat, particularly when considering the scope of their back-sides, but they went down the slope at a decent clip nevertheless.

It was this sight that reminded me I was not far from the main Sainsbury’s in Streatham (there are another two, smaller stores farther along the High Road). As I had little to do with my afternoon, I though I would go in and buy some food. (Or ‘bob in for a few bits’ as my mother would have it.)

I’m a fairly loyal customer of Streatham Fruiterers, the greengrocers down near Streatham Hill Station, so I avoided the fruit and veg side of things. Ambling along, I found myself on the aisle with the breakfast cereals. Recently, I’ve moved towards Alpen as my cereal of choice. Seeking it out, I realised there was more work to be done in deciding which type of Alpen to buy.

There were three options:

a. Classic Alpen i.e. the normal one
b. High-fibre Alpen (with extra roughage for those who don’t shit as often as they would like)
c. Alpen, with no added sugar

All were £2.37, in same-size boxes. However, I noticed, with the alertness which rarely comes upon me in working hours, the Classic was 750g, while the other two were 560g.

I bridled at this. I am quite health-conscious, for two reasons: I want to live forever and enjoy being censorious about what other people eat. Therefore, I wanted the ‘no added sugar’ version. But, while I am health-conscious, I want good value. I envisaged buying the ‘no added sugar’ and finishing the box, knowing that if I had bought the Classic I would still have had another 190gs of the good stuff left. For once, my healthy lifestyle took second place to my parsimoniousness. I bought the Classic, yet felt like Sainsbury was making a mug of me.

Cantering about the store, I picked up some other essentials: pasta, bread, Bombay mix; at which point I realised I could have done with a basket. I am, if nothing else, efficient in my movements, and could not tolerate going back to the store entrance to pick one up. So I carried on, dropping the occasional item, picking it up, and dropping something else in the same motion. If Charlie Chaplin was there, doing his weekly shop, he would have thought it a bravura display of comic acting.

Having got my hands securely around all of my shopping, I came upon the herb shelf and realised I needed some dried oregano. I put my items on the floor, shoved the oregano in my jacket pocket, before going about the aforementioned picking up and dropping routine again.

Getting to the till, I unloaded the items on the conveyor belt, bar the oregano. I felt inside my pocket, and it was still there. While I paid for the vast majority of my items, the oregano stayed in my pocket.

Outside the store, I was so pleased with my work that I slid into the Pied Bull for a pint of Winter Warmer (£3.20). Ruminating about the matter, I saw clearly that Sainsbury could absorb the odd loss of oregano into its day-to-day running costs, with no harm to anyone. What’s more, becoming more reflective at about the half-pint mark, I realised this festive generosity on the part of Sainsbury had secured my custom for the New Year, however sneaky some of its pricing might be.

Len Shelley RIP

Richard Purnell Obituary , , ,

Len Shelley and his wife, Ang, have both died of cancer. He has had an obituary published in the Guardian which speaks of him in very factual terms. Hopefully, I can add some colour to the picture of this wonderful man.

I lived with Len from 2002-2005 in his big old house on Undercliffe Terrace, just off the St Leonards seafront.

In late 2001, I was working at the Hastings Observer as a reporter, earning peanuts, living in a bedsit in Bexhill. It was an attic room, and I had to pay pound coins into the heater. I was miserable and lonely.

One day, a South African woman called Hazel arrived at the Observer offices to promote a gig – some sort of world music thing called the Baghdaddies. I ran the ents pages and promised to put her gig in. We got talking and I explained I needed a place to live. She said I could live in her boyfriend’s house. She drove me down there after work in her retro-style car, looking sexy in a fake fur coat.

She let herself in to the house and I saw a big man with long hair, wearing a waistcoat, billowing shirt and green jeans, mopping water in the kitchen. The place was freezing. She introduced me to Len and he started apologising for everything: the leak in the kitchen, the lack of heating, the chaos.

They showed me round the house. All the rooms were big, with exposed floorboards, old rugs, OS maps of Sussex running up the wall next to the stairs. Everything was peeling, falling apart, damp walls, strange art lying around the place. I remembered a Dylan Thomas story about him moving to London and finding himself in a house full of furniture and thinking it the best place he had ever been. I felt the same about Len’s place. I moved in.

Len was mostly away, living with Hazel. We went on occasional cinema trips down to Bexhill or for Harvey’s in the Horse and Groom pub. He was both very warm yet clearly uncomfortable with other humans. He wouldn’t look you in the eye and nervously fiddled with blu-tac.

We always talked about music – it was the way in which we could safely connect with each other. We liked the same freaky shit: Parliament, Beefheart, King Tubby, etc. He introduced me to shit like Fela Kuti, Gang of Four, Can. He only had cassette tapes and vinyl. He loved cassettes, the way they rolled from one side to the other. He also liked that he could pick them up from second hand shops – the only places he ever bought anything.

After a year, he and Hazel split up and he moved back in. He brought his two cats with him. I am allergic to cats, but I didn’t want to leave the house. I wanted to live with Len, so I spent my time enjoying life, but not breathing very well.

Len was in quite poor condition at that time. He was coming off anti-depressants. He wasn’t doing his art – these strange, glass fronted cases with still animated scenes made from found objects. He spoke very little. It was a big house and we gave each other a lot of space.

He loved to read the Hastings Observer and liked to hear about what was going on. We had very polite conversations in the kitchen, chatting about the cassettes he was playing or my work or my drinking, which was going well at that time. He made a big pot of tea in the morning and got about his day before I went to work. He would potter in his garden, digging with no great purpose.

Slowly, his life began again. Word got about Hastings that he was single and he had a number of suitors. He was an incredibly attractive man. Dark skin, brooding eyes, a genuine artist among all of the much more loud and much less talented artists with which Hastings is filled. He got together with Angie, a painter. She was a warm and more gently encouraging presence than Hazel. She got him to get the basement turned into a studio and generally able to see the future in less bleak terms. The depressive cloud lifted somewhat.

I, meanwhile, was drinking with my friends in Hastings. We’d use the house as a late night hangout, getting up on the roof if Len was out, drinking Lynx lager, looking out to sea. I developed an obsession with the Libertines, which sent me into a manic state of hyperactivity which channelled my energy and frustrated creativity.

Len was invited to be part of an art show in Romney churches. He loved the Romney coast, both for its bleakness, and for the opportunities it offered to pick up flotsam and jetsam, which formed his art. The work he displayed in one of the Romney churches showed all of his mordant humour, surreal imagination, and respect for his surroundings, yet his desire to subvert them. Drinking wine at the opening, he still seemed uncomfortable, but he was back. He was pleased with the show. (See Len’s work at www.lenshelley.co.uk.)

Living with Len was both beautiful and remarkable in many ways. He grew rhubarb in his garden, only to let it sit there and die. He said he liked the shape of the leaves. I would often come home from my office in shirt and tie, to the sound of loud African music in the basement, and the sound of banging; the artist at work.

One day, I came home to find a large, strange object on the dining table. I couldn’t work out what it was at first. I walked round it, to discover it was a horse’s head. It would form part of a show in Tunbridge Wells. I loved that.

When his relationship with Ang became serious he started taking an interest in making the house more civilised. He got the house damp-proofed. He painted walls. He wanted her to move in. I had finally managed to get a girlfriend and so I made my excuses. It had been three years and it was time to move on.

I still saw Len on occasion in more recent years. He was working, he was doing well. He and Ang were in love. Ang was keeping bees and writing poems about them.

When I started on the road I am now on – writing performance poetry – the first piece I wrote was about him. It took the structure from My Old Man, by Ian Dury, who we both loved. It might not be on the level of his art, but it’s all true, a poem from me to him.

Len was a mentor for me in those years when I had no direction and was struggling to know what to do with my life. His love, support and friendship – and that of Ang’s – meant everything to me. He was a true bohemian, a true artist, and a true friend.

RIP Len and Ang.

My landlord

I saw the house in the winter
Boiler’d broke, it was cold
There was a flood in the kitchen
Wasn’t normal I was told
Rugs and sofa were all ancient
Maps of Sussex on the wall
Maps of Sussex on the wall
My landlord

My landlord he was an artist
Only worked with things he’d found
Brung in seagulls, foxes, badgers
Dreamt of ships run aground
Created strange dioramas
Gothic visions for the home
Gothic visions for the home
My landlord

My landlord, the women knew him
He weren’t like other blokes
Had himself romantic notions
Always wore an old waistcoat
In the summer, he had a boater
See him cycle down the coast
See him cycle down the coast
My landlord

Ol’ Len he never done much talking
Always showed a great reserve
He liked digging in his garden
Think it helped him with his nerves
Played me all his vinyl records
‘Tribal beats, son, have you heard’
‘Tribal beats, son, have you heard’
My landlord

Three years in he met a painter
She was blonde and had two sons
He became quite dynamic
Got the damp and the pointing done
In the end we hid our feelings
Shook hands and I moved on
Shook hands and I was gone
My landlord
My landlord