A Scot in London

Food Writing Cliche Bingo

2010-05-31T00:51:00.006+01:00

We've had Book Review Bingo I've seen wine review bingo so now it's time for Food Writing Cliche Bingo. The participating phrases have been gathered from different twitter requests for words in food writing that various bloggers and journos feel more than a slight antipathy towards, and can been seen as a collective effort of the wonderful hive mind that is twitter rather than any individual's taste.
Print out the PDF, choose your own word or phrase to fill in the blank space, select the food blogs, journals or magazines and begin. You can do this on your own or turn it into a group activity by selecting different articles and blogs and seeing who can score a line or the entire card first.
Be warned it may become addictive.
Please comment below if you feel any phrases are not of high enough cliche quality and please suggest alternatives and additions.
Download Food Writing Cliche Bingo

A Scot in London on tour: Oman Part 1

2010-05-11T02:36:00.009+01:00

My bosses in their infinite wisdom happened upon the idea that I would be the best candidate (or at least the best candidate who said yes) to go on a trip to Oman to train some clients. As I have never intended to get any closer to the Middle East than a trip to the Saudi Pavilion during the 1992 Expo in Seville I have spent the past couple of weeks fretting about what clothes I should wear and - most unusually for me – who I might offend.

Armed with ill fitting trousers and borrowed long sleeve tops I headed off on Sunday to Heathrow terminal 3 watching people en route to Lagos, Delhi and Bangkok wondering at my folly of being caught in a good mood and actually saying yes to this venture.

While all of the ladies at the Oman air check in desk wore very hats with strips of veil like material attached hanging down on in a strip over their shoulders, none of them were Omani or had ever been there. The cabin crew were all Filipino and the pilot English. None of the English speaking passengers could understand the cabin crew’s English announcements over the loud speaker while the pilot made no attempt to speak to the passengers in Arabic.

Oman also appears to be a mini-hub - a poor man’s shopless Dubai, and most of the young Australian and English passengers were transit passengers racing towards the next flight to Thailand or Melbourne. What I found fascinating about this mix of Arab and Anglo passengers was the totally different attitudes we have developed towards public space. On the overnight flight the young Anglos acted as if they were at home or on a friend’s sofa. They sprawled over each other in a desperate attempt to get comfortable, exposing limbs, feet, lower backs and muffin tops. They lay over friends and lovers with a total lack self-consciousness creating a mess of bodies, flesh and flip flops. The Arabs stayed in their seats, didn’t remove their shoes and many kept their jackets on. A woman may have rested her head gently on her companion’s shoulder but it never got further than that.

We also have greatly contrasting attitudes to dressing in heat. We seem to cover as little as possible while they cover as much. The desire to expose flesh in the face of the glaring sun is something that, as a Scot, I can strongly identify with. Sun is a most unusual experience for us and when it happens we discard tights, roll up sleeves and trousers, some of the more uncouth among us even expose hairy bellies and old tattoos. A quick survey of my own summer wardrobe last week to this trip proved that I had no suitable light long sleeved ankle length lightweight clothes and I do not regard myself as a naked sun worshipper of any shape or form. However for an Australian sun is as daily an event as for an Omani and a cursory glance at the Australian colony in Fulham , West London will show you that faced with tiniest hint of sun they wander around as if they haven’t quite managed to get out of their bed properly or put much more on than their underwear. Almost every Omani, man or woman, wears a full length robe. It has made me wonder what is the optimum number of years before a culture adapts its style of dress to a specific climate and if climate change makes Scotland warmer are we in for even more of the assault on our eyes that is the topless fat hairy pot bellied lobster coloured Old Firm supporter that my hometown is full of on a sunny day in June.

Pork Dinner at Valentina's in Putney

2010-03-10T19:10:00.003Z

At the begining of the year the Guardian sent the Gargantuan Tim Hayward to take part in the annual pig slaughter of the family Zoccola. The videos and estactic commentary from Tim can be seen here and then the susage making extravangaza here
If you are watch either of these films with your eyes popping out of your head and your mouth drooling then you should come along to the meal the Zuccola family are preparing on Tues 30th March and Tim Hayward is hosting ( he promises not to talk for too long and to focus on the pig) at Valentina's in Putney
The menu is and is £50 all inclusive:

Prosecco on arrival. Olives, Nuts, Luppini Beans Etc.

***

Cotechino on a bed of Lentils

***

Bucatini Pasta with Coratella Insaccati (Pig’s Pluck) in a tomato sauce

***

Salsiccia Con Patate e Peperni

***

Lemon/Orange Sorbet

***

Coffee

½ Bottle Wine Per Head

Valentina's is at 75 Upper Richmnd Street, the nearest Tube is East Putney.

Please book by calling (020) 8877 9906

I hasten to add that this has not been organised by me but by Andre Dang, but as he is, lucky bugger, on holiday in Vietnam I have posted it on my blog.

The Dead Sheep Scandal

2010-02-21T15:18:00.000Z

It’s been a strange week for food. Andrea Charman resigned as head teacher of Lydd Primary after a hate campaign waged against her due to her respecting the vote of the pupil council and allowing a lamb the school had kept to be sent for slaughter. One parent has claimed that her child needed psychiatric help due to the trauma suffered by knowing that the lamb had been sent to be killed. Others are furious at how upset their children are and the fact that some of them have decided to be become vegetarians.
Having worked as a teacher for quite a few years I would venture to postulate that a child who needs psychiatric help after finding out about the slaughter of the school lamb, in a rural farming area where he or she is surrounded by animals reared to be eaten, may not be the most well-adjusted child in the first place. Rather than waging a campaign of hate against a head teacher the parents in question would do far better to look at how best to equip their child with the tools to cope with life, with or without professional help.
That children became vegetarians after realising that meat does not miraculously appear wrapped in plastic on the shelf at Tesco is an issue which, to be honest, can be put down to bad parenting (and every parent is bad at something). Did these parents never tell their children that meat came from animals? Is it because they are unaware themselves?
My mother, the daughter of a butcher, did not realise that meat was a dead animal until the age of 8. As her Mother never bought meat and my Grandfather would always take the meat he brought home straight to the kitchen my Mother never saw raw meat and never made any connection until she was that age. When she first found out, she vowed never to eat it, much to my Grandparents’ consternation, ever again. The ‘ever again’ lasted all of a fortnight as my Grandmother wisely decide just to ignore it and only served her the 2 veg at each dinner until my Mother realised she was actually missing all the things she liked. To this day, however, she gets squeamish discussing the animal origin of her meat while eating it. My persistent childhood questions of which animal does this meat come for again were met with a sharp,” I am not prepared to discuss this at the dinner table.”
What really struck me about this story, though, was not how pampered the children are, how vicious the minority of parents are, but how cowardly we in Britain have become.
This hate campaign has all been waged virtually with personal insults against Mrs Charman and even death threats from extreme animal rights groups (being extremely pro animals is far more acceptable than being against Jews nowadays and every fascist has to find their cause). A real pro-animal rights group with an actual interest in animals would be brave enough to take on supermarkets and the pressures they apply on farmers to get their meat for the lowest price possible. A real pro-animal rights group would not simply issue death threats against a lone primary head teacher who has approved the decision of a pupil council.
Parents with traumatised newly vegetarian children rather than looking at their child and thinking ,’If this is the biggest trauma they have to face then they will have one of the easiest childhoods in the world’ are getting angry and vicious all from behind the safety of a Facebook group and virtual campaigns. They have no need to actually face the person that they have a disagreement with unless they form part of an angry mob. There is no consideration of Mrs Charman as a human being, it is simply vitriol and rage poured out from behind a computer screen. Many, if not most, of these people would not have the bravery or the decency to air their views in person in a calm and thought out manner. I imagine it would be, if they actually dared show their face, to quote Congressman Barney Frank ‘like arguing with my dining-room table’
The moral cowardice of hiding behind screens to attack people seems to be a feature of modern life. It as if we are constantly at the mercy of cowardly mob rule. Look at the comment sections of newspapers. A story about street food in LA gets turned into a diatribe against white racism, almost everything in The Telegraph turns into ‘this country is going to the dogs and we have too many immigrants’ People (real live human beings with emotions and feelings just like you) mercilessly attack others anonymously or even using their real names but from behind a screen because they can. Because it’s easy and because it gives them relief from their own bile and pent up frustration, albeit for a moment.
The interesting thing is when you meet most of these people in real life face to face, when they venture out without their PCs, it is completely shocking how insecure and inarticulate they actually are. Many of them would run a mile if you said boo to them too loudly (I used to be involved in the Reiki world and, aside from extreme animal rights activists , there is almost nothing as vitriolic and nasty as an aggrieved New Ager). Faced with a real live human being and away from the safety of the mob, they retreat into a stammering mumbling apology or say nothing at all for fear of being confronted with their actual words and having to present a proper a proper defence for their argument. The entire experience is rather like, to quote another politician, being savaged by a dead sheep.

On Monkfish Liver

2010-01-23T15:13:00.004Z

About two years ago I aquired a small tri-lingual pamphlet entitled 'Five Recipes with Monkfish liver' At the 6 Euros it cost me that works out 2 Euros per language, or 1.2 Euros a recipe. At face value not the best deal in the world but where else do you find 5 recipes for monkfish liver easily and in a tri-lingual edition?
It is part of a small range of pamphlet like 'books for misanthropists' written by Victor Nubla. Other books in his range include 'An Essay Against the Wheel' and 'A Study of Breaks' I don't know if they are also in Catalan, Spanish and English but you can ask him yourself by using the contact section of his website here
Mr Nubla comes from the neighbourhood of Gracia in Barcelona. Once home to unrepentent anarchists it is now becoming increasingly gentrified; the anarchists utter disgust at this was recently expressed to me by a few of them over foie gras and very good port. Mr Nubla, it seems from his internet presence, forms part of the old vanguard holding onto the ways of pluralism, defence of culture, excellent food for pleasure over pretense, and a strong desire to do things primarily for fun rather than money. I have number 360 of 500 of the first edition of 'Five Recipes With Monkfish' and I don't imagine the author is planning on retiring on the royalties anytime in the near future.
In his introduction he explains that while the taste is not very diferent to other fish the size of the liver means that it can be used for a whole dish and that his book is a result of the "romance" he has had with this foodstuff for the past few years. He also warns the reader that his book is not suitable for
"1. Those who don't eat animals
2. Those who eat animals providing the orginal taste goes unnoticed or the taste is not overpowering."

In idiosyncratic, albeit correct, English he takes you by the hand and guides you through his recipes giving you a new found respect for liver, offal, fish, food writing and almost all that is good about life. I say almost all as he doesn't mention wine, except in passing, or any carnal activity that is generally conducted in private .
Below is one of his recipes, with a couple of notes in brackets. His website is http://www.hronir.org/

Roasted Monkfish Liver

"The wintery feeling about this recipe has probably to do with its austerity and its rich-resulting colours. It was a total event to discover that monkfish liver endured a test like this one.

We will stick to the claypot and this time will be generous with the oil [he's a Gracia Anarchist. He means Extra Virign olive oil. There is no other kind for him] in which we will allow for two unpeeled cloves of garlic per person, to which we have made a slit with a knife, so they don't pop, and a teaspoonful of paprika [if you can get nyora pepper ground one of them instead as it's nyora in the recipe in Catalan]. We'll also add some sprigs of thyme and, when the oil is smoking hot carefully place the fillets of liver and discover that they don't stick. Such a magnificent experience will bring back our self-confidence and tempt us to add a small glass of white wine. The flame should be moderate and it's a good idea to flip the fillets over so they roast thoroughly. We will allow for the wine to evaporate and will serve the fillets together with the garlic.

One day we accompanied these roasted fillets with wine and a dense reduction of tomato and carrot that Lo Casino prepared and that, I'm told, is used for 'ossobucco'. It was a great success."

The number of people you can cook for is of course completely dependent on the size of the liver and as monkfish vary greatly in size you need to get it first to decide. The point of Mr Nubla's book is to extend his passion for monkfish liver to the reader and encourage him/her to cook and eat it rather than to be a slave to his recipe and his ideas. So please go forth and get thy monkfish liver.

Announcing the Girls' Steak Club

2009-12-16T21:28:00.006Z

There is a very strange thing in Anglo-Saxon culture that would be worthy of in depth anthropological study and that is the gender assignation given to food. If you are not sure what I mean then look at the number of food reviews describing food as macho, separating men from boys, butch, etc etc. Almost everyone writing in English is at it.
Personally I blame Anthony Bourdain and the like. At some point chefs decided they were pirates and that cutting meat was akin to hoisting petards. Well I’m sorry boys you don’t swash buckles, you chop onions and last time I looked it wasn’t the same thing.
The losers in this, as always, are the women, as anything a man decided he liked became macho. So it is with steak
We – me and a few n’er do wells on twitter- have decided it was time that this imbalance in our culture was redressed and that a new phenomenon of women meeting for steak and martini, as opposed to afternoon tea and cakes, needs to be created.
The inauguration of the London Chapter of the Girls' Steak Club will take place on Tuesday 2nd Feb Hawksmoor Steakhouse 157 Commercial Street E1
The meat Hawksmoor serves is the reason men made steak macho.
The menu is below and is £40 per head with a sitting at 7pm and another one at 7.30pm
Apart from an initial martini, drinks are separate leaving you free to have your choice of cocktail, wine or anything else.

Menu

Martini

Tamworth Belly Ribs

Chargrilled squid with capers, shallots and watercress

Rib-eye (400g)

Bone-in Sirloin

Selection of sides

Please e-mail info@hawksmoor to book mentioning you are booking for The Girls' Steak Club.

If you are a disgruntled envious man reading this you are catered for in style the night before at a Boys Eat Beef organised by Simon Majumdar of Dos Hermanos. Please contact him for details via his website

The Girls' Steak Club. All the meat you can eat.

Update: Some not very frequently asked questions

I've been asked some questions on twitter and in person regarding the girls steak club so here are some of the questions and answers:

Why are there two sittings?

It's steak not stew so the restaurant can only do a certain number at a time. If there are too many of us for one sitting we will get served better in two. In reality some of you will arrive early, some late so we'll see what happens. All of you will get martini.

Is this an exclusive event?

If you are in posession of a XX chromosome, are over 18, and have sufficient social skills to be able to eat in a restauarant with cutlery you are welcome to come. Contact info@hawksmoor.com saying you would like to book for girls steak club. There isn't a particular limit on numbers, if you can book you can come. The more the merrier. The idea is to meet other women, have fun, and eat steak.

Can I come with friends?

Yes. If you would specifically like a separate table with your friends please let Hawksmoor know when you book. If you wouldn't, just e-mail them with the number of people that you are coming with.

Can I come alone?

Yes. Most of us know each other through twitter as opposed to real life (which is fast becoming an illusion for me at least). If you come by yourself there will be plenty of people able to hold a conversation with you. if you can't find any of them then come and talk to me. e-mail Hawksmoor and book a place for one at the girls steak club.

I can't come that night, when will there be another girl's steak club?

When you decide to organise one. Seriously. It's not been trademarked. Pick your restaurant, organise a menu with them and ask women to come. You can ask them on twitter, on Facebook at work or wherever. Just make sure the place you go to has good steak. You can make the numbers as inclusive or as exclusive as you like.

When will there be another one with a different cut of steak/different menu/in Manchester/ Glasgow/Bristol?

See above.

What the Hip and Single do on a Saturday in London in the Rain

2009-11-21T22:54:00.002Z

Read Blogs, twitter, read blogs, twitter.
I have been procrastinating for over 30 years and have no intention of giving up now. I'll blog the list of things I should be doing to acheive my 'life goals' another time.
Oh and eat leftover pigeon and polenta made by very kind flatmate the night before. Her parents brought her polenta from their village in Piedmonte and it was the best polenta I have ever tasted in my entire life. I had pigeon in the freezer.

Why I am not a food blogger

2009-11-16T20:20:00.002Z

I’m one of the fortunate people on the planet who lives to eat. I visit friends I have not seen in 18 months and am immediately presented with a list of meals that they wish me to make for them, my reciprocal requests having already been relayed by telephone some weeks previously. My travels, trips and holidays generally revolve around eating and my answer to many a stunned questioner about whether I think about anything that isn’t food is invariably, “Well there is wine.”
However in the past few weeks I have been asked another food-related question by some Londoners. “Why don’t you become a food blogger?” There are a plethora of food bloggers in this city all reviewing restaurants and various food products taking photos, uploading them reviewing places and products, so why not become another one?
These blogs range from the virtually unreadable to Proustain prose. Actually far more entertaining than Proust (has anyone ever managed to read Proust’s entire oevre AND have a full time job?); many give more reliable views on food than the national newspapers while also covering a larger geographical range than Mr Gill’s West London.
The best of them all is the above linked Dos Hermanos and one look at that will also make clear my lack of desire to take food blogging on. To be good at it you need to as they say ‘Go everywhere and eat everything’. To be a good London food blogger you have to go be able to go to lots of restaurants regularly and have your finger on the pulse on what celeb chefs, non celeb chefs and the restaurant world of London is doing. This requires a sizeable disposable income, far larger than the one as I posses, as well as a near heroic level of stoicism. While constantly eating in new restaurants might sound like great fun and would be in Madrid, Barcelona, or Luxembourg; in London this can be fraught with difficulties. There is way too much fame chasing for most restaurants in this city to actually be up to much food wise, at least within my budget. They have PRs, gimics, fusions, themes and concepts. I just want some good fresh food properly made with some care and attention. That does not seem to be a particularly popular concept at the moment.
The places that are good are often heavily oversubscribed as well as over-hyped. You don’t need my opinion on it around 3 to 6 months after everyone else. And sometimes I don’t want to ruin my evening out by making notes on sub-standard food.
About a week ago I went out with a couple of friends to that frightening popular combination of pub with a Thai restaurant at the back. I was there principally to catch up with them after a few months and they suggested the place. The combination itself sounded pretty awful and I set my expectations suitably low so I wasn’t too disappointed. Despite my vegetables being undercooked, my duck slices drier than an Arabs sandal and the sauce just thrown in at the end, my food was edible (well I hadn’t had any lunch) and I had a pleasant evening chatting with my friends. I did not want to focus on the food. I know, how can you not focus on the food when you are in a restaurant? Answer; practice and a lot of it.
I learned after far too many meals alone on business trips that a mediocre meal with company can be a better experience than a good meal on your own. At the very least you can share the mediocrity while with the good food unless you take loads of photos for twitter, you are on your own. So if I am in company and the food is rubbish I don’t want to ruin everyone elses night and my own by drawing attention to it unless it is completely inedible.
Also if I am choosing the place I want to go somewhere where I can rely on the food. Until my disposable income increases I won’t be going anywhere that hasn’t been tried and tested by bloggers I trust or previously by me. Either I can review the same places on a regular basis or not bother at all. I choose the later.

On Stereotypes and Wine

2009-11-08T16:04:00.003Z

There is a certain comfort in people acting to national stereotypes. It helps to ingrain prejudice, confirm deeply held beliefs and engenders self-congratulatory feelings of wisdom and intelligence.
I attended a wine show called, imaginatively enough, The Wine Show a wee while ago and it was one such occasion.
As this is London, conforming to stereotype one, everyone is here and everything happens here, one of the extras available at this show was billed as an hour with Oz Clarke. This was not a chance for Oz to expand a la A.L. Kennedy into the world of the stand up comic, but an opportunity for the great unwashed, including yours truly, to sit through a tasting of 6 Sainsbury’s wines guided by Mr Clarke.
Everyone knows that the UK is controlled by supermarkets and independent shops don’t get a look in, and that you can only get the great British public to pay extra for someone if they have seen them on the tele. So the big event is a supermarket sponsored wine tasting of their ‘Extra Special’ range of wines available only in their shop by a well known TV face. That’s about three stereotypes ticked before you have walked through the door.
Despite being struck down with swine-esque flu Oz pulled out all the stops. Steadied by a chair he put on a most admirable show explaining why Chilean merlot is so good – it isn’t pure merlot but also carmenere, the climate of the New Zealand the winds that come from Antarctica and why they can produce such good white wines; how far north Chablis is in Burgundy and why it’s the furthest place north for decent non sparkling wine.
He also knew his audience. He made a brilliant case for screw tops rather than corks with a few points regarding the untruths being told about the decline of the cork industry in Portugal and how certain types of wine are actually better off sealed with metal rather than cork. The clincher however, and one that his audience nearly stamping their feet in agreement, was the fact that screw tops are much quicker to open leading, over course of a decade, to a significant increase in drinking time. Indeed sitting at the back of the room, many people had availed themselves of the opportunity to gulp down all the wine placed on front of them to taste and then drink all the other glasses that were around them at empty places. The British do not disappoint when faced with available alcohol at no extra charge.
The actual show was no less rewarding. The British scurried round drinking as much as possible of their chosen colour of wine disregarding almost all available advice on grape type, soil, geographical description. The only food available that wasn’t the God awful design centre cafes was a badly attended stall with cheese and ham.
The section on Wines of Spain had no actual Spaniards at it – it being the weekend and the Spanish being. . . themselves. The English people in attendance had some really good wines though among them Raimat’s first albarinyo and Scala Dei from Priorat. They explained well, were professional and willing to come out to work on the weekend.
The wines from Portugal section showed that the Portuguese, as usual about 20 years behind the Spanish, have woken up to the fact that they have good quality wine that people will buy if you give them the chance. They even managed to get some real live Portuguese people to turn up, which shows just how serious they must be. They were polite, quiet and assumed, quite rightly in my case, that the public knew nothing about Portugal or its wines outside of the Douro.
Then there was the French.
It is a universally accepted fact that with two French people in a room at any given in time the % of gripes, moans and grumpiness in a conversation will quadruple. With individuals this can be kept under control – most people have a French person they like (hello Clarisse if you are reading) but more than two of them and the grumpiness becomes a geometric addition to the power of 10. After trying some very pleasant wine from Corsica that I had to persuade two young French gentlemen let me try and then even make an even bigger effort to get them to sell me, they proceeded to shrug their shoulders griping about how hard it was to place Corsican wines and create a demand for them and that they were very difficult to sell. I have no idea where to get Corsican wine as they wouldn’t tell me where I could get any, so I won’t be drinking anymore in the near future.
In fairness they were better than another pair of Gallic servers who were so busy muttering to each other about how long they’d been there that at least three people gave up waiting to taste their wine. They moved along to try and to buy from English people who owned vineyards in France and who were generous, polite and informative.
Lastly, and most entertainingly, I was faced with a fake Armani t-shirt, gold bracelet and hand gestures promising me the best price before I had even seen what was available, by a Sardinian. His female companions, who only communicated in glarespeak, wore leather jackets and make up 80s style without looking in anyway retro. All that were missing were some sheep, a baritone choir and a Milanese industrialist tied to chair awaiting the receipt of the ransom money. I bought two bottles at the non-negotiated best price, just to be safe.

That Friday Feeling

2009-02-20T14:37:00.000Z

It’s a Friday afternoon. It’s just after 2pm my lunch time is over and I have 4 hours before I can go home. Someone in our office is leaving today and in his leaving speech helpfully pointed out that he believes that nostalgia isn’t what it used to be and that the merger a year ago really changed things and that the good old days are over. Well so does everyone else but as he must have found about the only job going in the city good luck to him and commiserations to us.
I wonder if Friday afternoon for every office worker in the world is full of that utter inertia when your mind is already having the weekend but you body is still stuck to your PC and your fingers still look like they have to be tapping.
I have listened in my lunch hour to Andy Hamilton’s comedy on radio 4 Old Harry’s Game which is always entertaining although I am not too happy about the demise of Gary the Demon or that God has got bored of creation and turned it over to some newly promoted Project Managers. I liked Gary he was a very kind well-spoken demon – even if he was somewhat dim, and God’s voice, with the secret name of Nigel, was only rivalled by Joss Akland’s God in Piccolo Mundo.
I am even checking my Yahoo SPAM mailbox religiously and have just discovered how to get a bigger penis, a fake university degree and government funding although I have missed the e-mails offering me the chance to make lots of money even if I am really dumb. They seemed to have stopped since the bank crisis – if something looks too good to be true. . .
I have the eternal optimism, that only the truly deluded can have, that I am one yahoo e-mail away from an afternoon of entertainment or one work e-mail away from having something to do.
I fear this is also the problem with being in my mid-thirties and being childless. I am sure if I had children the utter boredom and drudgery that comprises the daily lot of motherhood (and before all you Mothers get antsy – I know this is true my Mother told me this and she really loves me and would never lie) would make any kind of outing with adults, even if it is to work, seem stimulating by comparison. For the childless work becomes the drudgery you do to be able to get out and do things that stimulate and excite you, for Mothers of young children work is the excitement that keeps you sane.
So, my solution to my Friday inertia? Find a random sperm donor, have a child and this will seem exciting – hmmm. But ohh look, its now 2.30 and I just got a work e-mail! If I’m slow it’ll keep me going until 6!

Slam

2009-02-19T14:31:00.001Z

Slam among other things can be South London and Maudsley NHS trust, an organisation which hosts massive techno club nights around Europe, half a basketball technique or a book slam. The last one is a monthly London event in a club just near the top end of Portobello road, beside a busy flyover and near an equally busy mosque. It was set up by writer Patrick Neate and the guy from Everything But The Girl who has now left it all to Patrick, as an alternative to readings in libraries and bookshops.
The venue is certainly different from a Waterstones or an independent bookshop. It suffers a bit from a lack of vodka or ecstasy googles as it is a night club open very early with not very loud music and not a lot of drunks. Everything was painted black some time ago so it is mostly scrapped, the toilets are, quite frankly, scary and everyone is sober enough to notice. But it does remove reading out loud from the gentility of the bookshop, it does give it more of an edge and does give a literate high brow audience a chance to be gritty and urban without actually getting gravel on their shoes.
The audience seemed to consist of types who work in publishing, types who wished they worked in publishing and types who were looking to be published. I was quite disappointed by the lack of white men with dreadlocks. The best that could be had was Jamie Bing, the head of Canongate Press’ slightly long hair pushed behind his ear.
Maybe white ‘dreads’ like gravel.
On the night I attended there were four young men listed all to stand up and read from their new novels, two of them having just published their first. Patrick was the compere playing it with that self-deprecation and apologetic air so beloved of posh Englishmen. Think Boris on old episodes of Have I Got New for You with less stammering and wearing a hooded top.
The compere repeatedly informed us that the ‘gimic’ of the evening was how the four writers Ross Raisin, Chris Kullen, Joe Dunthorne and Richard Milward had been selected to read because they all were all exceptionally good looking. Personally I thought that they were all chosen because they were exceptionally thin. Apart from the married Ross Raisin they all looked as if you could fold them up concertina like and put them inside a small suitcase as if they were pieces of cardboard.
The now fashionable 80s drainpipe jeans with trainers does nothing for an exceptionally skinny man except make him look like an actual drain pipe or a cardboard cut out of himself. An awkward young writer nervous about reading to an audience of over 300 people ends up looking like a cardboard drainpipe in a Lowry painting. The actual readings were entertaining if somewhat predicable (awkward young men, unfathomable women, self-hatred and doom) and I am sure that all of their books are worth a read. And if enough people buy their books they all will be able to eat some decent food.

Nae Mair Arran Jumpers

2009-01-28T17:12:00.000Z

As a Scot in London is a Scot and in London, January is the perfect month for some self-indulgent, misty eyed nostalgia of the kind practised by those members of the Caledonian Club who dream about Scotch pies being available at Selfridges a la Stanley Baxter.
A Scot in London is not a member of the above illustrious establishment so I had the choice between a few tartan ceilidh, some extremely overpriced Burns suppers or a concert called Burns Eclectica. The latter is part of a series at the Barbican called Eclectica and seems to have the remit of ‘whatever we haven’t really thought of putting together before’ ranging from Jazz to opera singers singing blues songs.
Last week the organisers had asked Ayrshire composer James McMillan to curate an event. He invited Shetlander Chris Smout and Dundonian Catriona Mckay (although for some reason he insisted on calling her Catrona) to play on the fiddle and harp respectively and then afterwards he had Salsa Celtica.
I had seen Salsa Celtica before at the Fruitmarket in Glasgow and at the time I was stunned. The combination of pipes, banjos, timbales, fiddle playing and son left me thrilled and delighted, although I took it as a sign of my increasing age that it was the first time I had been to a concert where the only drugs anyone was on were actually prescribed by a doctor.
I have a general aversion to folk music, my first phrases in schoolgirl French were J’aime la music pop et la musique classique mais j n’aime pas la musique folklorique. I have images of bearded men in Arran jumpers singing about the massacre of Glencoe or red haired ladies with kilts down to their ankles strumming on harps in some 1970s time warp.
I was fully prepared for the above experience from Chris and Catriona as the last time I had seen Salsa Celtica I had endured their support band stoically as some boy band from Uist with a median age of 70 whistled and wailed their way through one of the longest hours in living memory. I was extremely pleasantly surprised. Catriona arrived in a short dress knee high boots and a sequin jacket – no tartan to be seen, and proceeded to get sounds out of a harp that I didn’t know were possible. It was at various times a guitar, a banjo, a drum and seemed to be on many occasion at least two instruments. Chris, dressed all in black, played the fiddle without recourse to the stereotypical droning so beloved of 70s folkies. They both looked as if they were doing their favourite thing in the whole world and that their only hope was to infect the audience with some of their genuine pleasure. From the sounds of the applause and the nodding of heads they succeeded. I now have full faith in the demise of the Arran jumper and the floor length kilt.
Salsa Celtica were as enjoyable as I expected, but I don’t think they will be saying the same about us. The venue had no bar during the show or at the interval, the floor just below the stage was covered with tables and chairs. The Venezuelan lead singer explained that they were used to no chairs and people dancing and drinking. Having an occasionally rather shell shocked audience who appeared to have been expecting Jean Redpath and My Love is like a Red Red Rose applaud very loudly and happily but not move any which way was a real disappointment to them.
The evening started with the Edinburgh conga player telling us the songs they were about to play were from Burn’s little known tour of South America (well he was planning to go and work as an overseer in Jamaica before his poetry was published). To the complete incomprehension of a large section of the audience he went on to say that it didn’t matter as we would have a good time and as Burns was mostly steaming anyway, he would have approved of the event.Salsa Celtica were playing a sold out gig at the Fruitmarket on Saturday 24th with a well stocked bar and no seats. I am sure Burns would have approved far more.

Earphones and Inaugurations

2009-01-21T17:54:00.000Z

While I still officially have one of the most boring jobs in the world I have just been banned from using earphones at work. I think that three of us have been told this and it is my fault as I got caught watching the inauguration yesterday by my boss who is the type of person likely to ask ‘who’s inauguration and why is this such a big deal?’

Not allowing your staff to listen to music or the radio or have earphones during work might, at first glance, appear to be a good thing. However I, for example, am now looking very industrious typing away on a Word file which is in fact this blogpost. Had I been left alone I would be listening to a radio 4 programme on child trafficking in Liberia while searching through various Excel spreadsheets and cutting and pasting depending on the information on the various files. No headphones, no spreadsheet. I am just beginning to realise the magnitude of how much work I could get on with while distracted and how little will now get done.

Rather than actually dealing with these speadsheets I have now googled (is anyone elses life becoming so virtual that it isn’t very different from the Matrix?) How to Deal With Boredom At Work.

According to careerknow-how.com if boredom is left unattended (ie if I don’t get my earphones back) it can get so intense and last so long that it will leads to burnout which is a costly and potentially dangerous threat to my life and my career, To cut to the chase I will end up a depressed alcoholic selling the Big Issue on your street.

However professional speaker Michelle Yozzo Drake at michelleydrake.com (the time that woman must have spent thinking up her URL) on her blog tells us to face the facts that some jobs are just dead boring and we need to look on balance at the benefits and see if it is worth the boredom. For example they may offer you health insurance so that when you do become a depressed alcoholic you can go to the Priory instead of an NHS psychiatric ward. You may be the only person you know in your social circle who isn’t facing redundancy, that is a positive. On the other hand you may be bored, burnt out and facing redundancy- the good thing about that is you will be so busy saving in case you get made redundant that you won’t be able to become an alcoholic, just depressed but you can still get Prozac on the NHS.

iplayer and me

2008-12-09T11:00:00.000Z

I appear to have one of the most boring jobs in the world. The problem is that now the panic and bad organisation on a massive scale is coming to an end by 11 o'clock I have done all my work and am left with merely pretending to work for most of the rest of the day barring meetings and a couple of hectic days at the end of the month. Being still glued to a chair and semi-attached to a PC for another 6 1/2 hours I have decide to moonlight on the job and am now the self-declared official listener to the BBC iPlayer.
Thus far it is an unpaid position and being official listener may prove as lucrative as my attempts to become IBMs mystic at their Greenock office, but it passes the time.
For those of you unaware. the thoughtful people at the Beeb have created a website where you can see online lots of TV programmes as well as listening to radio programmes. If like me, you are deprived of the opportunity to download Real Player into your work PC due to the pesky IT department's admin rights, you cannot listen to Radio Scotland, Wales or a lot of the World Service, neither can you download anything for later. This still leaves a lot of listening and stealth watching as you can switch screens if anyone is walking by and watch TV on a tiny window in the left hand corner safe in the knowledge that it is covered by your head and your on-line CRM programme takes up most of the screen. You can therefore look like you are working while watching Wallander.
So for all the bored skivers out there in the blogosphere with access to the BBC iPlayer (I don't know if it is available outside the UK ) I can tell you so far:
Radio 7 might not have it still available as I can't see it, but if you get the chance to listen to A Thousand Splendid Suns, don't bother. The radio programme is just as bad as the book and reading it was a waste of time. Buy A Wasted Vigil by Nadeem Aslam instead and use your time wisely.
Radio 4's new book at bedtime is Alexander McCall Smith's new novel (He of Mama Ramotswe) La's Orchestra Saves The World. It's sure to be one of those heart warming novels where a London lady saves a village and the world from the Nazis with a cup of tea and a slice of Victoria sponge cake. I know this after 15 mins of the first episode because the lady in question, La has just come from London to a small village in the West Country, wearing what the quaint villagers suppose is London fashions. Emilia Fox also sees fit to impersonate Clarry from the Archers every time she is reading the words of the villagers, just to hammer home the point that these are simple country folk. La herself has wasted no time keeping secrets and has declared to all and sundry at the end of Episode One that her husband has run off with another woman so she herself has run away to the country.
It is the auricular equivalent of lavender oil for the temples, chamomile tea for the nerves, chicken soup for the soul. You will find in comforting and refreshing or so sickly sweet you will want to vomit and throw your computer out of the window. If you choose to do the latter make sure you have removed the earphone from your ear so you don't follow your PC out the window.

On a far more sombre note Adventures in Poetry also on the Radio 4 section of the iPlayer has a study of John Clare and his poem I Am. John Clare wrote this poem in a lunatic asylum and it may be argued, was partly driven to levels of utter despair by the consequences of the Enclosure Act of 1809 and the resulting land grab by the aristocracy where peasants lost their rights to common grounds and were forced to become low paid labourers, urban poor in the new cities or to emigrate elsewhere. Trying to get a sense of the circumstances of Clare's life takes us to his cottage with a lengthy explanation of coffin hatches and a tour of the asylum where Clare wrote I Am while the psychiatrist currently at the hospital explains his mental state during the years Clare was there is a tremendously moving experience.

The Change We Can't Laugh At

2008-11-18T22:45:00.000Z

As our modern society has replaced political debate and serious philosophical enquiry with satire we now have a serious problem on our hands. Those of us who eagerly watch America’s Daily Show on the net, listen to the News Quiz or watch its TV offshoot, Have I Got News for You and who are not yet alarmed, should be.
History has taught us that losing our leaders may also mean that we will lose our satire. The premature death of Spitting Image was a direct result of Mrs Thatcher’s replacement by John Major. Thatcher was a gift to Spitting Image. John Major in grey eating peas while looking at Norma just didn’t cut it (had we known he had his feet under the table at Edwina Curry’s house, it would have been quite different) and while Gerald Kaufman could whisper and scare over excited schoolboy Neil Kinnock, with no Thatcher there was no programme.
I am thrilled and extremely relieved that yes he can and he did it, that Barack Obama will be the 44th President of the United States, but I wonder what we will slag off now. For eight years satirists and comedians have been shooting fish in a barrel with Bush. During the Presidential campaign all Tina Fey had to do was repeat Sarah Palin’s words and she made satirical history, now it is a lot harder.
It has not started promisingly. On The News Quiz, panellist Jeremy Hardy asked us all to cast aside our cynicism for a moment as he said how wonderful it was that Barack Obama had become the US President. The audience clapped and cheered and then his team mate Fred Macaulay suggested that if anyone was going to see Jeremy Hardy doing stand up that they wait for another six months until he became funny again. Jeremy seemed to forget the golden rule that those who wish to cast aside cynicism do not listen to The News Quiz.
Ian Hislop on Have I got News For You seemed to follow the maxim, if you can’t say anything nasty don’t say anything at all. Paul Merton’s comment, ‘Oh Ian you miss the empire don’t you’ and an oft repeated joke about Gordon Brown and extra salt in porridge made me fear unless the posh guy wins the UK election and soon, that particular show will not go on.
America’s Daily Show is fairing better. They have now introduced the concept of black liberal guilt, pointed out what happens when ‘brothers’ get together with white women and have their Senior Reporter in Chief Who Just Happens to Be Black valiantly attempting just the right level of patronising behaviour towards Hispanics. However nothing has actually been properly directed at Obama himself.
The problem is how can you? His kids are normal, his wife is normal, he himself comes across as normal. Thoughtful, highly intelligent and extremely well informed normal, but still normal. The Obamas are the kind of family you would want as your neighbours, you’d want your children to mix with theirs in the hope that some of their good manners would rub off o your rowdy offspring. You’d want to go on family holidays together.
The fact that America finally has its first African-American President is amazing, thrilling and will change the way many people look at the US, their own world and themselves. The fact that Sarah Palin is not Vice President is a relief of such proportions that language cannot fully express. But Obama needs to start messing up and quick or else satire will go soft and we will have to start asking our serious questions seriously and that will not do at all.

Shuffling along

2008-09-19T22:11:00.000+01:00

Having succumbed to the wonders of modern technology I have finally purchased an iPod. It is the tiny 1GB shuffle version as opposed to the full bhuna but it can take over 130 songs that will take over 13 hours to listen to and is a vast improvement on trying to change a CD while driving a car at 80 mph along the M8.
My first problem was that my laptop wasn’t working so I couldn’t transfer anything from my iTunes onto it and the CDs I have are packed away in someone’s attic so I couldn’t download them onto someone elses iTunes to then give them a listen. I have duly uploaded a random mix of a friend’s iTunes to listen to myself.
Unlike other iPods the shuffle is too small to have a screen so listening is rather like eating an unknown dish blindfolded with a peg on your nose as you have no idea what is coming next and, unless you recognise the song, no idea what you are listening to.
There is also something so utterly personal about listening to a random mixture of someone else’s music through headphones. While you may be exposed to another musical taste when you are in their house, listening on loud speakers you are being invited to share that you are not sneeking into their mind to see what it is like in there. Also your host, if they have any consideration (and if they haven’t, find yourself better friends), may realise that their devotion to Megadeath is not necessarily shared by you and will choose their music accordingly. That in itself can be a fascinating experience as you if you listen closely enough you can find out what your friends really think you are like. I often seem to be mistaken for a old Suzanne Vega song fan and am also frequently subjected to Coldplay and Travis droning about rain (answer to the question Why Does It Always Rain On me? – You live in the West of Scotland, it’s nothing personal my dear, it happens to everyone). I am, however, fortunate to no longer be friends with the Bluegrass fans who tried to convert me to their music with a zeal that Bluegrass musicians themselves normally reserve for Jesus.
But listening to someone elses iPod selection is like being inside their head. No one else on the Picadilly line can hear anything- well apart from the occasional tinny drumbeat leaking out of my ears, so they have no idea that I am listening to a rather bizarre selection of Classic 1950s Bollywood songs mixed with Aerosmith and Guns and Roses numbers. It’s only two tiny speakers in my ears that isolate me from the rest of the passengers, mentally even if their elbows are in my ribs, and I realise that this particular selection is only listened to by someone else also through two tiny speakers in her ears on the District line. All we need to do is swap heads.
Try it. Borrow a friend’s iPod or download their iTunes and play the random selection. It will give you an insight into who they are, who they used to be and what they dream. You may lose some respect for intellectual Spice Girl fans, be rather taken aback at an atheist's passion for Gregorian chant but you will know them better in the end.

The Royal Academy

2008-07-12T14:05:00.000+01:00

The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition is something that I have a vague memory of studying in my deep and dark distant past as being something to do with Sir Joshua Reynolds and that the French equivalent was shunned by the Impressionists.

As I have now been in London for a year, this is my second visit to one, and the fact of being here for two summer displays and having seen now three different exhibitions in the same space makes me feel less like a long term tourist and more like an actual inhabitant.

Now when I watch TV and see things set in London (as most things are, especially dramas and British films- people who write them must generally be too lazy to write about anywhere else - except for Russell T Davis transporting Dr Who to Cardiff), I am more likely to recognise bits of where they are. Previously I was only ever able to do this with Taggart, Ballymory, adverts shot in Barcelona and holiday programmes showing the Bahamas.

It is also quite strange to watch Golly Gosh Boris in the left ventricle of the testicle as his new deputy resigns due to not having perfectly spotless past (subject for another discussion; does anyone over the age of 30? Would any of us stand up completely to a thorough scrutiny of the slightly soiled linen in the cupboards of our own past? ) and realising that behind a very tired, pasty and stressed looking Boris is actually a view of a part of a city that I walk through regularly. In no way do I feel an integral part of it, but I have a feeling that this statement has to be quantified with a ‘yet’ rather than a definite ‘no way.’

Further along the path to reaching beyond the ‘yet,’ my visit to 2008s Summer Exhibition propelled me along to agreeing with the critics as to its usefulness, its relevance and its standard. The Times critic pointed out before he had even seen it that ‘it’s always lousy,’ I would say it was completely crap.

Last years exhibition seemed so much better which made me wonder if having been in London for a fortnight I was star struck at the idea of attending a summer exhibition and following in the footsteps of rich Victorian ladies. I think that was part of it but I also think there is truth in the simple explanation that last years was much better.

Now I didn’t think about writing about this on my blog until I had moaned and groaned about it over coffee with my Mother who was with me, and we had both decided to leave the list of works on top of the tray at Brioche Doree. Therefore I will have to describe the show without recourse to any knowledge of a) the names of any of the paintings or artists, b) the names of any of the rooms.

In the course of a year someone of importance has obviously died so there is a quick retrospective of his or her work (almost always his). This was at the entrance –the opening gambit so to speak, to give a sense of historical weight of the place –the RA is so important, its members are important people who when they die get retrospectives. You, lucky attendee of such hallowed halls may be able to purchase an item that, when the artist who made it dies, may required to be returned to this place for such an event.

The next hall has a whole load of other quite decent stuff that is not for sale by honorary members of the Academy and others whose work is there in honour of the dead person in the previous hall. I recognised a work by Tapias there, not that this marks me out as person with great artistic intelligence, its just that if you have spent any length of time in Barcelona the two artists you can recognise half drunk with one eye shut and double vision in the other one are Miro and Tapias.

This particular Tapias looked like every other one I have ever seen.

Beside it was a wide abstract painting that my Mother thought looked like passing thoughts and I though looked giant honesty seed pods like the kind I used to pritstick onto paper and make collages out at my Grandmother’s house when I was about 8. It was a very impressive painting.

There was a small room with a load of paintings covering the length and breadth of all four walls and looked like those old photos of, well, Summer Exhibitions. The stuff in it ranged from slightly better than mediocre to really crap. If you are ever at a dinner party and on walking through your host’s hall to visit their toilet you come across a print of two decaying semi decomposed birds in black and white, rather than shiver and think, “what in the name of the wee man possessed them to put that on their wall?” Please, please comment on their good taste at using the opportunity of the 2008 RA Summer Exhibition to invest their money so wisely.

Then there was Tracey.

Apparently her idea was to shock and be explicit and as the RA had asked Tracey Emin to select and hang pieces in one of their galleries at the show, they must have shared that vision. There was a warning at the entrance that the pieces in this gallery were of an explicitly sexual nature and that no one under the age of 18 was allowed to enter. There was however no one there checking ID, so I am sure that a lot of 16 and 17 year olds found it far easier to get into than to see this than to illegally buy Lambrini in Tesco's.

There was in no particular order and not exclusively; a video of a woman’s lower torso hula hooping most adeptly. On closer inspection the hula hoop was made of barbed wire but she wasn’t getting cut or flinching so she was either an extreme sado-masochist or some artistic licence had been used, along with special effects. There were some photo montages of a woman fingering herself (I am not using the word ‘pleasuring’ – I don’t think that was the intended effect) while she had her period and extremely large montage of a zebra shagging from behind a surprised looking woman who was drawn in the same style as Victorian postcards.

There was also a free standing sculpture of a bunch of pink penises with pink fingers locked around them. The ‘clever’ part of this was that it was lit in such a way that the shadow it cast on the adjacent wall looked like two heads in profile facing away from each other.

I left with the feeling that this sculpture wasn’t the only bunch of knobs associated with the exhibition.

Studying Chavs

2008-07-10T18:18:00.000+01:00

Radio 4s ‘Thinking Aloud’ programme had an article a few weeks ago on the sexualisation of chavs, where the fascinated listener could learn all about how the gay English community has fetishised Chavs (too many gay Scottish people are chavs , or neds as we like to call them, to bother fetishising them – especially the ones from Ayr). Gay clubs have regular chav nights, there is Chav porn and a whole host of gay Chav sex phone lines. The idea of anyone paying to hear a nasally accented man saying down a crackly phone line ’Gonnae suck ma boaby big man,’ while fantasising about a red head in a shell suit is an interesting concept to say the least. In the end it boiled down to the long standing middle class fantasy of the sexual nature of the poorer classes. It appears that the higher up the social class ladder you are, the lower your libido.

One of the guests on the programme was an academic from a wonderful place named the Centre for Sexual Dissidence at the University of Sussex in Brighton. It’s not the kind of centre that you could imagine being in Aberdeen. According to its website (and no I don’t know how to do that clever hyperlink thing so until some teaches me, you will have to look it up yourself on google), it “explores sexual dissidence as a diverse site of signification and subjective identification, acknowledging that the social milieus that produce and are shaped by sexual dissidences are just as plural and not confined within national or regional borders alone.” So now you know.

I found all this fascinating but I did wonder why no one had created a Centre for Chavdom. Surely there are more Chavs than sexual dissidents? Where are the studies on their social and cultural significance? Where are the papers written on the symbolism of Special Brew and Buckfast? Who explores their aspirations and fantasies? Do chavs have a secret yearning for Kiera Knightly?

While I am aware that Chavs have in many cases embraced the hip hop of Black America while their northern ned cousins are exclusive fans of extremely fast furious and f**king annoying pseudo-dance music, so far I have only come across one set of Ali G impersonators once on the Bakerloo Line from Kensal Green. The utter whiteness of the boys with their Jafaican accents, too small baseball caps and loud London hip hop played on their mobile phones reminded me of a time I once got on an overnight train a long time ago from Glasgow to London only to be sharing a carriage with a large group of toggled and kilted teenage boy scouts who had a ghetto blaster (ask your Mother, she’ll remember what those things were) playing James Brown’s, ’I’m Black, I’m Proud’ full volume. An American couple looked on in utter astonishment as pasty white face after pasty white face encouraged the red haired freckled owner of the blaster with the words, ”Gonnae turn that up man? I want tae listen tae Jimmy Brown!”

Could Chavs in England as a social group of Caucasians (that what we now have to call white people, just in case you are wondering) actually be undiscovered followers of negritude? Apart from the more obvious embodiments of black culture as witnessed by me on the Jubilee line, I also saw one day two extremely lady like chavs near Mile End with what can only be more examples of negritude. They were both dressed in the necessary shell suits and five or six tiny rings on each hand but one had the colours of the Jamaican flag down each side of her black shell suit while the other one had a white shell suit but was wearing white sling back shoes of the kind favoured by West African women shopping at Petticoat Lane market on a Sunday.

Poor Aimé Césaire never realised that rather than trying to unite disparate black cultures under the one culture and celebrate blackness all he had to do was wait. Sooner or later some white people would come along, unite it and nick it.

A Grand Morning Out

2008-06-14T17:06:00.000+01:00

On Saturday I did the most English thing I have ever done in my life. It was only the rehearsal, not the full bhuna, so I don’t feel quite such a traitor.
The actual formal name for the event is the Colonel’s Review as it was the second rehearsal, the first one only being important enough to have the Major General review it. Today the Head of the British State, Her Majesty the Queen will be there to take the salute from her own house guards and cavalry, filling last weeks empty carriage alongside that dreadful Greek man.
I had never seen a military parade but I have a vague childhood memory of the Queen on side saddle in my Grandmother’s living-room with a red top and some medals.
I may be wrong about the medals. What medal could she possibly have won and who would present them to her? God? The Archbishop of Canterbury?
In the photos of more recent Trooping of the Colours she seems limits herself to a colourful dress and matching hat.
The audience at this even seem to come from a range of Home Counties with some New Jersey housewives for good measure although one very well spoken lady behind me declared herself to be of French extraction and marvelled at how terribly well organised and prompt everything was. “Madame it’s the army.” I was tempted to say, “Military precision. It’s what they do.” As we all know what they are actually supposed to do is kill people, but this lot looked they hadn’t done any of that in a very long time. At least 200 years. They must have a lot of practise at timing.
They did, however, look lovely. The cavalry was stunning, and the toy soldier outfits of the red jacket with shiny buttons and a big bearskin hat – possibly now the non-endangered acrylic version, and their ability to march in diagonal does make for an impressive spectacle. Marching round a square actually requires more choreography that would first appear and they can also shuffle into position admirably. I did hold out hope of a Bollywood moment where some of them would break ranks and start singing and dancing but I had to content myself with the military brass bands and the shuffle.
The massed bands drum their drums and blow their trumpets beautifully but I kept hearing distant flutes although I couldn’t actually see any which rather ruined the effect. I am prepared to admit that the flutes were all in my head, but I defy anyone who comes from my neck of the woods or across the water in the north, to hear these bands and not immediately think of an Orange Walk. This may not be effect the Queen is looking for, but I am sure that The Orange Lodge will be delighted by the comparison.
My only issue with the whole event was that the organisers had gone to all the trouble of providing us spectators with chairs only to make us stand up from them all the time. It was rather like being a confused Protestant at Mass. Up for God Save the Queen (unfortunately not the Sex Pistols version, my Father will disown me when he finds out I have done this), up for the empty carriage coming in – although Prince Charles was behind it, up for some flag begin waved about, up for about three other reasons that I couldn’t fathom (which is what always happens to Presbyterians at a Roman Catholic church), up again for God Save the Queen and finally up for the empty carriage going away again. By the end of it my knees were sore and I needed a gin. Perhaps that was the point.

The Union (if I have asked you to look at my blog for an explanation, this is the post)

2007-07-05T20:46:00.000+01:00

I have finally found some English people (more of that in another blog) and it has been an enriching and enlightening experience. However when someone raises the topic of Scottish devolution, I tend to feel like the only gay in a room full of politically correct homophobes.

Therefore I am writing this as a solution to avoid having to repeat myself ad nauseum for the rest of my London life. When I ask you to look at my blog at a dinner table in the middle of a discussion on this topic, this is the one I mean.

We now have a parliament in Edinburgh. We didn’t have one for 292 years. We have always had different laws to that of England and Wales. When a law was passed in parliament in Westminster previous to 1999 it only ever covered England and Wales. Another law had to be rushed through to apply to Scotland. They were then put in to place in Scotland via the Scottish Office in Edinburgh which was where people living in Scotland were effectively governed from. So we got badly thought out laws that were passed double quick given the constraints of Westminster time. It also gave all Scots a wonderful opportunity to blame the English for everything that went wrong.

The creation of the parliament in Edinburgh took our ability to moan away – something that is lamented every time we get another badly thought out law that has just had more parliamentary time to mess up. However it didn’t give us very much real power, in fact all the Parliament got was the powers that the old Scottish Office had.

It is very true that a Scottish Minister of Health in Westminster would have powers over England and Wales and not Scotland but to an extent this has always been the case. The NHS in Scotland has a slightly different system than the English and Welsh one and any Health Minister in the cabinet wouldn’t really have had much to do with the Scottish NHS. Likewise an Education Minister (again our system is different). Our laws are different, we print our own money and we drink a lot more alcohol.

Yes devolution isn’t fair as Scottish MPs in Westminster can vote on issues in England that English MPs can’t do for Scotland.
Yes devolution has its problems and no is hasn’t been done very well.
But the Union hasn’t been ‘done’ very well for 300 years.
It’s just that the English haven’t noticed for 292 of them.

Where are the English?

2007-06-27T20:36:00.000+01:00

Now that Golden Brown has finally got to the top of the pile, I thought that I should take the high road away from Loch Lomond and see what he was up to and what people think about him.
On first arrival it seems to me the very worst place in the whole of the UK to be to learn this is London. I can’t find any English people to tell me.
Brazilians, Polish, Australians, South Africans - thousands and millions of them. English people are pretty thin on the ground.
In the three weeks I have been here I can honestly say that goings on of Lula, the president of Brazil, his murky associations with drug barons and interference in the politics of Sao Paolo seem to have more importance than anything the Golden one might do.
The London based newspapers that I have spent most of my adult life reading have never seemed so irrelevant. Reading articles written by white middle class –albeit with a token second generation immigrant here and there - English people about London and the south of England had significance north of the border. The culture that these journalists talk about and move in is similar to an urban Scottish one albeit bigger and with more options. Reading them the average Scot can believe that the London life they read about can easily be accessed by them should they tread the well worn path south.
Well I can, at last, go and see the films and exhibitions that these newspapers review but not with anyone English.
Sizeable communities that appear invisible to the media thrive here. Who is conscious of the numbers of white South Africans who live in the UK, most of them in London? Apart from Rio Ferdinand whose Brazilian father seems like an anomaly in the history of UK immigration, how many people are aware of the sheer number of Brazilians are here? Why does no one in the London press ever mention these people?
The only conclusion I can come to is not only is the London press unaware of anything that goes on out with easy reach of the capital, neither do they actually have any idea what goes on in it. They must live and work within their own tiny wee group somewhat similar in style to the Hassidic Jews of Hendon. I am sure that it would make a good topic for anthropological study.
Meanwhile I try to decipher the Portuguese in the London Brazilian newspapers and magazines or read the white South Africans’ London magazine to see if I am missing anything.