Searching for a Backbone

So where's the backbone?

2005-09-10T08:47:00.000Z

Might as well take this opportunity to get back on the bicycle. Metaphorically speaking, of course. I won't be getting back on my real bicycle for a little while yet.

The story is that one recent Saturday morning, I was heading to West Kensington to help Prof carry some things from a friend's flat. Coming out of the tube station, I bent over to unfold my folding bike and felt an ominous twinge in my lower back. Thought to myself, "What the heck? It'll loosen off if I just work it a bit" - I've tried to impress you with my formidable level of intelligence before, haven't I?

So I got on my Brompton and cycled away, looking now and then at my A-Z, my back feeling increasingly uncomfortable. Found myself on Old Brompton Road (on my Brompton bicycle) outside Brompton Specialist dry cleaners, where my incompetent brain and body finally agreed to let me drag myself onto the pavement and collapse (slowly, slowly!) against a wall. The dry cleaner saw me and helped me into his shop, gave me a cup of tea, and used me as a conversation piece with his customers. Thanks, John! If you ever need something cleaned in Chelsea, look him up.

So I ended up being carried rather than carrying things, but hey!, at least I got to see an osteopath. That's not something you do every day. The moral is clear: if you're an old fat bastard, don't be stupid as well.

Like I said, searching for the backbone

Place Marker

2005-05-29T22:10:00.000Z

The striking thing about my fellow bloggers (by this, I mean the conceptual (rarefied, held together only by virtue of sub-atomic forces and the fact of sharing the same universe) network of people who post and comment upon each other's blogs (please don't get confused by these multiple nestings of parentheses, I _am_ a computer guy)) posts, is that they impart a keen sense of a life lived, of stories to tell, of Hey I'm here and I'm an exemplar of human experience so screw you buddy 'cos my life means something!, and perhaps most importantly, a sense of living your life with no regrets. So, this is a short note of thanks for taking me in. When my life calms down enough, I'll post a little more to entertain and divert.

Here's the no regrets link.

Catchup

2005-05-29T21:43:00.000Z

Sounds like ketchup, doesn't it?

The Cat Sings

2005-05-21T11:43:00.000Z

I'm listening to Doc Watson as I write this. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the name, Arthel "Doc" Watson is one of the reasons people want to learn the guitar, rather than being forced to learn the guitar because the band's already got a fiddle player. He was born in 1923 and he's still going. Now, you might think, of course he can play good, he lost his sight at the age of one, and started playing when he was five years old. Not everyone is that lucky, you say, or perhaps unlucky, or er.. there's no way out of this one. Leaving that aside, I think the single most interesting fact about Doc's life is that his father made him his first banjo out of his grandmother's cat. That's all I need to say really; any more would be gilding the lily.

James Joyce time

2005-05-09T20:36:00.000Z

Today I lack a subject, but I do have red wine, and so let us take a journey into the barren hinterlands of a place that is nowhere at all. Be warned, even though my avowed intent is to numb all my readers with egregious and unrequested nonsense, what follows will not even reach these high standards. May I take this opportunity, then, to give thanks to the anonymity I enjoy, albeit illusorily, as a nameless blogger.

Think then, as we walk down this curiously crooked lane, hedged by skinny trees and oddly featureless flowers that would spring into colour if you only knew their names, this lane that narrows into a cul-de-sac, a space betwen cheap restaurants, smelling of vegetables rotting inside tied-off black plastic sacks, as we get to the end of the alley and push through the the viscous grey brick wall at the end, into..

..Your local library. What!? Why aren't we in my local library? Well, improvise, improvise. Come, this stack over here, which in my continuum would be filled with the orphaned middle volumes of all the SF & Fantasy trilogies ever written, but in yours carries all the finest books written about regional cooking. Look, this recipe has a picture of the most delicate of all chillies, the chili padi, native to Thailand and Malaysia, small, concentrated, and almost unconscious of its rapier-like potency and narcotic flavour. And here, this one tells you how to use Jerusalem artichokes! Oh, so that's what you do..

I catch my breath. There was a sensation of falling, of vacuum. We're sitting in an English pub that never existed. There are beams of polished oak, an open wood-burning fireplace, and by the taste of the pint which I now sip on, no recycled slops. The landlord's face is friendly, but knowing, arch, but open. He subtly arches an eyebrow towards the grandfather clock standing opposite the fire. I look at the clock, then over at you. Your eyes are heavy-lidded, and it would do you no good to fall asleep here. I pay, and call a taxi.

How to write about music

2005-05-03T14:35:00.000Z

Tom Waits is becoming a hero of mine. He's taken in language like a pet, and then left it to forage and growl at intruders and friends alike. Read what he has to say about his 20 favourite albums.

A Cross Post

2005-05-03T12:05:00.000Z

So, I'm sitting here working at the job that I should have left last Friday, except they really, really needed someone to do this one thing. This morning woke up at 5 a.m. full of guilt about sequentially losing my temper over the weekend with every single person who knows me. Drove Prof to airport, took a wrong turn into a forbidden zone, and got told off by a cop who you know, just wanted to inform me that the f.z. is camera-controlled and I may get a traffic ticket through the door, just letting me know, you know. Went back home through crawling traffic, AT 6.45 A.M.! Rush hour before the cows wake up! Went to aforementioned work, on soul-leeching London Transport, thanks guys, good job, no humanity on display. Don't tell me I haven't paid my dues, got to keep moving, keep moving, blues falling down like hail.. Bah.

Now that we've mentioned Deodato

2005-04-28T21:59:00.000Z

That last post wrung blood out of me, oh it's so hard to deal with real things. I mentioned Deodato in there, but didn't mention that one of our favourites in those days was the guitar player for Deodato, John Tropea. Hey!

Kien at Bullet

2005-04-28T21:57:00.000Z

We hurried, the Professor and I, at the last minute as always, to the bar where Kien Lim was booked as the main attraction. What was he like? Well, imagine Don Williams, Doc Watson and Gillian Welch melded together by eldritch energies, their very protoplasm being drawn out and intermingled to become one person who then loses some weight and becomes a wiry Malaysian. Pretty gross, huh? Also probably not very helpful. Let me explain.

Kien was very obviously wrestling with nerves when we got there, walking here and there in the bar while Prof and I listened to the acts on before him. The gig was running late, the usual technical problems. We sat there, enjoying the other performers, while Kien's posture slowly became more and more foetal.

Finally, it was time for our boy to take the stage. After a bit of fiddling and quiet tuning, Kien ambled unassumingly to the microphone with his D-28 slung oddly low, and then, well, took over. The first song started quietly, Kien barely tickling the strings, then swelled and receded like the tide coming in, a lonely song about chemicals. No-one else made a sound until he finished. Then we clapped. He carried on with a series of simple sounding, but craftily constructed tunes. No swagger, no fuss, the boy just stood there, picked his guitar and sang with a mellow low voice, songs about loneliness, songs about women, though no songs about lonely women that I could detect. He played, and after a while it seemed as if we had always been there, like living in a neighbourhood where you wave at every shopkeeper. Suddenly, it ended. We came back to ourselves, and life carried on.

That's not what you expect from an old schoolfriend, years after banging on cheap guitars and dreaming together about being Jimmy Page, playing Deodato covers, and generally being your random, scoffish, awkward teenagers. But it is what we all, those of us who have resisted a cynical acceptance of eternal mediocrity, it is what we all keep our little candles burning for.

Just a Minute

2005-04-24T12:19:00.000Z

"You have one second to talk without hesitation, deviation or repetition about indoor sports."

"Judo.."

The Hard Road

2005-04-24T10:55:00.000Z

Let me tell you about the Professor. We all agree that anything worth doing is going to be hard to do. No pain, no gain, right? After a long time spent looking for the right human, in bars, in cars, on buses, up and down dale, journeying through rents in the very fabric of spacetime, I have finally found her. It took a long time, and she is Baby Bear's porridge.

"Now how can you be sure?", I hear you say, "You are naive, love is fleeting, things change, your hubris leads ineluctably to nemesis!", you expound. Thank you very much, I'm not taking that from you overeducated naysayers. Go away and predict the heat death of the Universe. Bad philosopher. No biscuit!

Harrumph. Well, to continue. With the Professor, although I said that my search is finished, I have no sense of finality, of ending. Deploy your sick bags now, please. I feel, instead, that my journey is finally beginning. When I think of the Brainy One, I think of possibility, of change, that a problem shared is a problem halved, of someone to watch my back. More roads open, and none are closed. Okay? Now wipe your mouth and listen to the rest of it.

The difference is, that this is not the dizzy, out-of-control, moonstruck passion that we all remember with varying degrees of nostalgia. No. We just help each other out, become better people, and make other people happier. No drama, just competent life judo. It was tough getting here, and we're tougher! It also helps that we can chatter away to each other until the cows come home. Almost a year on, I can't think of anything I'd rather do than hang with the Professor. It's just too much damn fun.

Jump from a helicopter

2005-04-23T21:22:00.000Z

Some small blessings need to be counted. I got iTunes. I got Mannix. If you know what I'm talking about, you know what I mean!

Thespian

2005-04-23T18:29:00.000Z

Well, here's an award-winning thespian if ever I've seen one. Three gongs for the non-smoker!

May I present Edwin Sumun, stylish recipient of my plug of the day. This young and magnetic hopeful may some day rocket Kuala Lumpur to the top spot in the list of places where famous people come from. The hardware is for his tour-de-force design, production and performance in Five Letters from an Eastern Empire, a deep, terrifying, enigmatic and downright weird one man play (well, I haven't seen it, but how could it be otherwise?) Look at the awards on the Cameronian arts award page. Here's raising a glass of Theakston's Old Peculiar to ya!

Count 'em. Three! Way to go, Edwin!

Juice of the Orange.

2005-04-22T16:20:00.000Z

On holiday in France last year, we were stretching our legs at a rest stop on one of the autoroutes. Never being one to mind my own business, I became interested in a man with a family, who was trying hard to finalise the family drinks order. He reminded me of Columbo, with his grubby raincoat and hunched over intense manner, as he jabbed his finger at each family member in turn saying "Cafe, cafe, jus d'orange..", then being interrupted by a request for extra milk or cake, then again, jab, jab, jab, "Cafe, cafe, jus d'orange.."

I don't know whether he finally managed to buy any drinks at all. That is not what concerns me here. What stuck in my mind was the strangeness, to my ears, of how nouns and adjectives go together in French. Juice of the orange. Bicycle of my grandmother. That's how it goes, adjective of the verb. Natural for francophones, archaic feeling for English speakers.

Imagine Peter Falk shambling into a diner, fixing the hapless server behind the counter with a lop-sided stare before saying "Gimme a.. a.. apple danish and a coffee to go", paying for his danish and coffee, then turning round and saying "Just one more thing.. a Juice of the Orange for the wife." I don't know about you, but it makes my mind reel.

Duff

2005-04-21T14:16:00.000Z

OK, just had to squeeze this in. My boss, in an off-duty moment at home, doing what bosses do when they're not being bosses, reached into his fridge for a bottle of Bud. Just as he pulled out the refreshing golden brew, his sharp-eyed 7-year old daughter said, "That's a Duff! You're Homer!" His eyes swelled with tears at the clear perceptions and sheer cuteness of his child.

How can you resist?

Lunchtime

2005-04-21T11:52:00.000Z

It'll get better, I promise. The phenomenal success of my first post (ever!) has encouraged me in my quest to foist inconsequential nonsense upon all and sundry, without distinction as to race, creed or species.

So it's lunchtime, and I'm taking advantage of the statutory midday break to compose my second world-shattering post. The conditions are favourable, having just consumed a large shish kebab. The endorphin-releasing properties of the grilled meat fill me with peace and the desire to share my sense of well-feeling with the world. The office is quiet and peaceful, and I feel strong in solidarity with my colleagues (more on that in a future post). Really, that's all I have to say. A good meal followed by a good sit down and maybe a cup of tea; that's wealth.

For any one who wants a little more, here's the Story of Mel.

YAFP

2005-04-20T19:39:00.000Z

Yet another first posting by a newbie. Jeez. I saw 'Jaws' 5 years after everyone else did, and here I am late again. Even dogs have blogs. Come on!