Month: August 2005

Sal and I returned late last night, coughing, sniffing, and in need of a good lie down, from a thoroughly entertaining weekend up in Edinburgh. We can’t quite blame the city for our colds–I’m pretty sure we had those before we went–but I’m sure our activities over the weekend can’t have helped in their slow gestation.

On the way from the airport to our hotel, I realised that I’ve clearly been living in the south for far too long. My conversation with our taxi driver was punctated by increasingly lengthy pauses, as my brain stuggled to decipher his half of our conversation. I spent much of the journey concentrating really hard in an attempt to understand him, in the way one might during a French oral test, perhaps, dreading the social awkwardness that might ensue if I failed to quite catch what it was he had to say about the comedy of Mr Stewart Lee. I sensed that perhaps Sal’s quietness could be put down to her having an even harder time keeping up. Of course, this being Edinburgh (and during the fringe no less), our taxi driver was probably the most Scottish person I spoke to all weekend, so we managed to survive the weekend without subtitles after all.

This being not only my first trip to the Festival, but also my first time in the city, we headed out to explore just as soon as we had checked into our rather lovely hotel. We saw no sign of it, but the rooftop garden outside our room was allegedly home, at some point over the weekend, to Channel Five’s launch party for their Autumn schedule, at least according to last week’s Media Independent–disappointingly, the closest I got to a celebrity spot (apart from the people we’d paid to see) was a bloke who looked like Robin Ince who walked past me in the lobby.

[Is that Robin Ince?
In our hotel reception?
Looking a bit lost?]

Our first comedy event of the weekend, at the Pleasance Courtyard on Saturday night, was Richard Herring’s new show, which I enjoyed immensely, even though it seems Rich wasn’t that happy with us (“After yesterday’s lovely main show, tonight’s was much harder work. I was rather tired, but the audience were much harder to please. As usual with this kind of crowd they applauded wildly at the end, even though they hadn’t been showing their appreciation too much through laughter!”) Personally, if I wasn’t laughing loudly enough it was probably because–through regular reading of Warming Up–I felt like I’d heard many of the jokes before. Still great, though, although I did think he was just a little harsh on the couple who walked out towards the end (“If something offends you, walk away. Yeah, that’s what Jesus said, wasn’t it?”). By my watch the show was over time slightly at that point, so it’s possible that they just had another show to get to, rather than that they were deeply offended, but maybe that’s just me being naive in believing that surely no one could possibly be offended by jokes about the Pope and Catholicism any more.

Actually, for some reason, religion in general, but Catholicism specifically, seemed to crop up an awful lot over the weekend. I think every single comedian we saw had something to say about it. Perhaps that’s a reaction to the events of the last couple of years, or perhaps Catholicism specifically is just such a ridiculous belief system that it provides ludicrously easy comedy fodder for lazy comedians, I don’t know.

Stewart Lee, Rich’s erstwhile other half, who we caught on Sunday, certainly had a lot to say about religion, but then that sort of makes sense when you consider what was going on with him, his opera, and those Christian Voice loonies earlier in the year. His show, in a packed bunker at the top of the Underbelly, was one of the best pieces of stand-up that I’ve seen in a long time. Definitely worth checking out if and when it pops up in London, or wherever you happen to be.

Immediately after Mr Lee, we returned to the same room to join a much smaller crowd, as just a handful of people watched Janey Godley tell her enthralling stories about her, um, “interesting” life. We selected this show based entirely on Richard Herring’s recommendation, and it proved to be possibly the highlight of my weekend.

Edinburgh seems like a nice place. I’m not sure I’d terribly enjoy the influx of tourists and shabby student theatre every year if I was a local, but I couldn’t help noticing that, in common with much of the civilised world, the pubs are open after 11 o’clock. Did rather throw into a different light the headline on the copy of Mr Murdoch’s shabby rag (no, not The Sun, the other one) that was shoved under our hotel room door over the weekend in some kind of aritifical circulation boosting exercise. Far from being a portend of the end days, it turns out that in fact with later drinking hours, the rest of the UK will be much the same as it is now, just with drinking a bit later…

On Monday, there was just time to cram in a bit more comedy by returning to The Pleasance to see a handful of comedians (and Tim Vine) perform short sets in aid of the Charlie Hartill Special Reserve, a fund to support new comedy and theatre. It was great (including more Richard Herring, doing his slightly more obviously crowd pleasing Cock material, and also Dara O’Brien, Omid Djalili, and the like). All very good indeed. Apart from Tim Vine, who was unbelievably shit.

As you may know, I do seem to spend rather a lot of my time hanging around with Australians, for some reason, so if England do somehow manage to win the Ashes this year, then I will be a very happy man. Of course it’s not as if I’ll actually have watched any of the games: I’ve mostly been following the series on a small auto-updating Firefox window secreted at the bottom right of my monitor. It’s rather like watching the football on teletext, except it lasts for five days. (Although I do enjoy the occasional refresh on the summary page, to watch the blurb at the top swing wildly between saying that one team and then the other is now comfortably on top).

Even when I’m not at work I’ve somehow managed to hardly see any of the action: when England managed that dramatic 2 run win at the end of the second test, I was sitting beside the rooftop pool in Barcelona, expecting us to have long since wrapped the game up. I did make it home to watch the last few balls of the third test petering out into a draw, but the Saturday afternoon I’d set aside to watch it two days earlier yielded nothing more than about twenty minutes play, some rain, and a lot of filler features presented by Michael Atherton.

I can’t see that we’ll catch much of the rest of this one either, with it being the long weekend, so that leaves just the final test. Actually, it’s probably better that I don’t watch, as my viewing of sporting events that I care about is usually enough of a jinx to result in the team I want to win losing, although perhaps that’s just an Everton thing: over the course of the last few years I’ve seen them live in London at several different grounds and I don’t think I’ve even seen them score a goal. It’s usually 3-0. I’ve seen three of the four matches we’ve played so far this season on the telly, and given that they only won one of those, you don’t have to be a genius to work out which one I didn’t see… Wednesday’s Champions League defeat was particularly gutting, what with that perfectly good goal being disallowed by that scary bald ref with the dodgy eyesight and everything, although that incident did provide some light relief after the game, as Everton legend Trevor Steven discussed it with the other pundits back in the studio, repeatedly referring to the Everton striker as Darren Bent. You could almost sense the presenter cringing each time he said it, and wondering if they should somehow drop into the conversation the fact that his first name is actually Marcus, and that Darren Bent plays for Charlton (they didn’t).

So perhaps I should stick with my ball by ball updates. And stay well away from the TV when the UEFA cup game at Dinamo Bucharest comes around…

Now I know that the first rule of the affiliates program of a certain well-known, large international online retailer, is that you don’t talk about the affiliates program of said well-known, large international online retailer, but just this once I’m going to make an exception. I’ve been signed up to said program for a couple of years now, so that if anyone clicks on the links in the books and music lists over there on the side of this page, any purchases they subsequently choose to make will credit the paste magazine account with some small percentage of the value of the sale.

Most of the time (in what I would have assumed also to be in breach of the terms of the program, but which doesn’t actually appear to be), the only person actually doing this is me, and as such I’ve never actually received any money from it–even though my occasional purchases have sometimes included relatively pricey electronics items like my new DVD player or the odd bit of kit for my laptop, the paste account has never, ever passed the minimum amount you need to earn in a quarter. Q3 2005, I’m sure, will be no exception, but even so I was just idly checking the “items dispatched” list in the account to see what was on there. True to form, the short list is all stuff that I myself have purchased, and the total revenue earned is less than half the required amount, even though more than half of the quarter is gone. However, in amongst the list of items there’s one that I don’t remember making. Go on, own up. Which one of the small bunch of people out there who actually reads this rubbish is after “silky smooth skin for up to 4 weeks”?

– Apparently attractive 18 year old girls have done well in their A-Levels this year (via Rhodri).

– Apparently David James isn’t very good.

– Apparently listening to loud music for a long period of time will damage your hearing.

– Apparently working long hours is bad for you.

Yep. It’s definitely August…

Last night’s “Britpop Night” on BBC4 was entertaining, but a little repetitive. I suppose that’s rather appropriate, actually, but even I was getting bored on hearing Inbetweener for the fourth time in the space of a couple of hours. I think the problem was that much of what John Harris’s new documentary had to say was repeated in the film that followed it, Live Forever. Both interviewed a member of Blur in the Good Mixer, for example, and both featured exactly the same clips off the six o’clock news where John Humphreys announces the release of Country House and Roll With It. Despite having three times as long to tell the story of mid 90s guitar music, Live Forever somehow failed to say as much (although it did thankfully feature no more horrific close-ups of John Harris’s face–something used to particularly bad effect when he was shown nodding thoughtfully while interviewing a heavily pregnant Louise Wener in what for reasons not adequately explained appeared to be a pub toilet). It wasn’t so much a history of Britpop, as the story of the handful of people the film makers could actually persuade to talk to them. Unfortunately, Jarvis excepted, none of those people had much to say that was actually that interesting.

Highlight of the night, however, was a 1995 documentary following Pulp around the country on the first post-Common People, post-Glasto headline tour, as they stayed in shabby provincial hotels, wondered why fame hadn’t brought them happiness, and appeared on Live n’ Kicking with Gary Glitter. Times certainly have changed. I can’t quite imagine him appearing on children’s TV these days…

As I mentioned earlier, but have so far failed to blog properly, Sal and I headed off to Barcelona the weekend before last. Ostensibly visiting to see U2 play the Nou Camp on the Sunday night, we also had the chance to eat tapas, drink, and enjoy the sunshine. By the time we reached our posh, plush hotel bed on Friday night, barely a few hours after arriving in the city, we’d already been ripped off twice: once, predictably, by a taxi driver whose circuitous route to the hotel added several Euros to the fare, and once as a result of our decision to eat at one of the few restaurants we could find that was still open at 2am–even the notoriously laid-back late diners of Barcelona have finished eating and hit the bars by then, it seems–but unfortunately all that the tourist trap we’d selected on La Rambla could offer was shockingly bad tapas, and a shockingly large tab. Thankfully our fortunes improved somewhat after that, and by the time U2 took to the stage on a sweltering Sunday evening, we’d already recouped our losses (and then some) thanks to a mixup with la cuenta in a far better restaurant that left us some 50 Euros to the good.

The atmosphere inside the stadium was unlike anything I’ve really seen at a gig before, although probably nothing compared to the reception afforded the ground’s usual performers when they take to the field (shortly after the Kaiser Chiefs had left the stage to an indifferent reception from everyone but me, and shortly before Keane took to the stage to a rapturous reception from everyone but me, something of a commotion came over the crowd. 79,999 people simultaneously turned to the side of the stage, cheered, and pointed up to a small tracksuited figure in a grey baseball cap who had just arrived in a special reserved section of the seated area. Shouts of “Ronaldinho! Ronaldinho! Ronaldinho!” rang out around me, and the buck-toothed superstar waved at the adoring fans, and promptly retreated to the back, out of sight).

When the people we’d all really come to see finally took to the stage, the atmosphere was a bit like the Twickenham gig, but multiplied by about 50. Even from my lofty position, I struggled to see anything on stage for the first four or five songs, as tens of thousands of hands in the air and heads jumping up and down blocked my view, and you could barely hear the band for the roar of the audience singing along.

We were just happy to be there at all, come to think of it, after the stereotypically lax “organisation” prior to the gig on the part of the wonderful pissup/brewery style efficiency of Tick Tack Ticket, the ticket agency responsible for distributing tickets to all the non-Spanish residents who’d purchased tickets off teh interwebs. After queueing at the stadium’s ticket office for over an hour to collect ours, we finally got word that we were in fact queueing in the wrong place, and transferred to an equally long queue around the back of the stadium near the club shop. This was a queue that didn’t move anywhere because, helpfully, the tickets hadn’t actually arrived at the venue. Now you’d think that if you sold all the tickets for an August event in early February, and if you’d told non-Spanish resident ticket holders to collect them from the venue from 3.30pm for a 5.30pm opening, that it might be an idea to maybe have the tickets actually at the venue in good time. As it was, the tickets arrived at 5.20pm, some 10 mins before the doors opened. Through a small slice of luck (and the slight queue-jumping assistance provided by the new friends we made in the ticket collection queue), we made it inside the stadium just minutes before the Kaiser Chiefs took to the stage. Needless to say, we weren’t quite inside the inner circle this time…

Much of the rest of the weekend was spent enjoying some fine food, alcohol, and weather. Fish also played a large part in the weekend for some reason, not least at Barcelona’s excellent aquarium, where they have one of those funky tunnels where sharks swim over your head, but also at the excellent food market just off La Rambla, where you can see live crabs, like these.

Excellent though it was, many of the people visiting the aquarium proved to be bloggably exasperating. It was little wonder that they had to broadcast a message every 30 seconds asking people in several languages not to use their flash. At one point, we made a finger waving no sign to the German lady next to us who’d just taken a flash photograph of a tank of tropical fish, to which she replied “oh yes, I know”. Some other extremely intelligent tourists were amusing themselves by tapping on the glass in front of the sharks making “nah, nah, nah, nah, nah” noises. And not in a Kaiser Chiefs, good sort of way.

One of the main reasons why I’ve been such a staunch supporter of ID cards is that the government has such a fantastic track record on large-scale IT projects. Look at what EDS did for the Child Support Agency, for example. I have every confidence that, once they find a suitable large American corporation to outsource the project to, it will all be well managed, and your and my private and confidential data will be properly secured.

On a much smaller scale, I had my own experience of some first-rate public sector IT thinking this week. Our local pub has applied to extend its license, under the new laws that are tantalisingly close to coming into effect in November. Any Daily Mail readers out there need not fear–it’s nothing that will bring about the end of the world, just another hour in the evenings from Thursdays to Saturdays, and an extra half on Sundays. As local residents we received a pack of information about the licensing changes, which explained how we could head over to the Camden council’s licensing website at http://www.camden.gov.uk/elicensing/ and check out the application information for ourselves on the online public register by logging in with the generic username and password supplied in the form letter and helpfully also printed up on the home page of the website (username: public, password: public11).

Now you might think that if you’re going to display a username and password prominently on the site for anyone who happens to open the page to see, then there’s probably not much use in having a username and password to login with at all. But that’s not the best bit. If you login with these details, the site provides a handy link marked “Edit your account details”, where you can, ahem, change the password. Thus preventing anyone else from viewing the register. Nicely done, Camden council. This almost beats the 6 month email exchange I had with Islington last year attempting to register to pay my council tax online. It’s good to see you’re all putting that council tax to such good use by investing in IT technology that’s well suited to the purpose it’s being used for, and that you’ve really thought things through.

Being the good citizen that I am, I emailed the council to suggest that maybe, just maybe, this wasn’t all a terribly good idea. They replied to “thank me for [my] suggestion” and say that they “would like to point out that [they] do get notified if the password is changed and and would change it back straight away”. Well that’s ok then. That’s an awfully efficient use of resources (and I’m sure there’s someone in the office 24-7 on website password changing duty…)

Thursday already, huh, and I still haven’t found time to blog our weekend in Barcelona. There are pictures, of course (and indeed here), but if it’s witty, incisive commentary that you’re after, then you’ll have to wait. Maybe this afternoon, who knows.

Last night we went to see the Australian-backpackers-in-London play, The Vegemite Tales, over at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith. To anyone like me who was in their late teens in the mid 1990s, of course, and despite its long history as a studio complex, the Riverside Studios means only one thing: TFI Friday*. Sadly, the play wasn’t taking place in the cavernous studio one, and there was no sign of Shaun Ryder swearing live on Friday teatime telly, or Ocean Colour Scene wondering what happened to their career, but instead the rather smaller studio three, where just a few rows of seats backed away from the small and oddly familiar set depicting the Acton flatshare where the action takes place. The play itself has the air of a student production, but recognising many of the thinly-drawn stereotypes being portrayed on stage, I laughed a lot. Of course no one would go to see The Vegemite Tales looking for plot depth, highbrow entertainment, or well-rounded and developed characters. They go for jokes about drinking and, as a stereotypical backpacker might say, rooting. Of those, there are plenty.

The evening was only slightly marred for me by the older couple sitting in the row behind us, who, apparently lacking any kind of internal monologue, spent the entire performance explaining the jokes to themselves out loud. I can only presume that their booming cries of “oh! he’s fallen over because he’s drunk!” in between their laughter, clearly audible to the rest of the audience, and no doubt therefore the cast, must have been slightly off-putting, but if that was the case the principals did a sterling job in carrying on regardless.

* Speaking of, can it really be 10 years this Sunday since the day Blur and Oasis released Country House/Roll With It on the same day… Makes me feel old.

“Rodrigo De faria”, who arrived here with the wonderfully gramatically accurate Google “Heathrow Express Complains“, and uses a typo-filled comment to call me on my poor grasp of the English language, failing to quite grasp my point in the process.

Perhaps I need to start marking entries with a great big SARCASM flag or something. (Oh, that wouldn’t work, would it–I’d have to flag pretty much the entire blog. Oh well…)

Well, it’s not quite Americuh We Stand As One, but dear god, no: “People I Don’t Know Are Trying To Kill Me“. The video makes for particularly cringe-worthy viewing…