Year: 2006

Just a quick one (again): so I’m reading Metro on the train this morning (yeah, I know) and there’s an article in there about some power cuts in the West End yesterday: after I’d finished cringing about their use of the words “Dunkirk Spirit”, I was intrigued to read about the chefs at Aldo Zilli’s restaurant, who apparently had to walk out after “temperatures in the kitchen reached 150 degrees C”. Er, surely shome mistake, Metro? Maybe the temperatures in the ovens had reached 150C, but in the whole kitchen? Really? 50 degrees above the boiling point of water? Perhaps they meant Fahrenheit…

Elsewhere, Amazon have emailed me with some helpful recommendations:

“As you’ve bought similar books from us in the past, you might be interested in one of these great titles–available with fantastic discounts for one week only:
Marley and Me
Billie Piper: A Biography

Wayne Rooney: My Story So Far”

Er, what? Sorry? What books could I possibly have bought that led your computer to believe that I might be interested in this tosh? I mean, honestly…

Elsewhere, I see that TV Hypnotist Paul McKenna has won his libel case. Now, I’m slightly confused by this, but if I understand correctly, the crux of the case was that the Daily Mirror’s Victor Lewis-Smith had insinuated on a number of occasions that McKenna, like “Dr” Gillian McKeith before him, had bought a fake degree off the Internet. McKenna sued for libel claiming that he had been the victim of a con. So presumably he thought that he was buying a genuine degree off the Internet, then?

Just a quickie, but hey, isn’t gambling great! On Wednesday I joined several of my colleagues on a work social trip to the evening races at Kempton Park.

It was all rather good fun, although the tiny grandstand and all-weather course (the going, apparently was “standard”; you don’t say…) couldn’t quite match up to my previous trip to the races (to Flemington, back in November). By the time the penultimate race came round, my betting activities weren’t exactly looking too great–one of the other chaps from work was about £60 up by this point, but I had only lost money. Nevertheless, as promised, I phoned Sal back in London and read out the names of the horses so that I could place a bet for her. She picked Dancing Guest, purely on the basis of its name. I plumped for Best Guess, which seemed a rather appropriate reflection of my choices up to that point. Sure enough, Sal’s horse came home in first place, giving her a whopping £8 profit even though she hadn’t set foot on the course, and leaving me with even greater losses than before.

So, with the last race approaching it was all to play for. Someone in our group mentioned this horse called Finsbury, and it seemed rather appropriate. You know, because it’s a bit like Finsbury Park. Not that I’ve even been there or anything, except to change trains on my way to Enfield all those years ago when I worked up there, but you know…

Throwing caution to the wind, I recklessly backed this 14-1 shot at £5 each way, and wandered down to join the rest of the group on the grass by the finish line. As the horses came round the final bend, the announcer’s commentary was drowned out by the shouts of the people around me. Unable to hear the name of the leader, I tried to pick it out from the pack, but couldn’t see Finsbury anywhere. As they all crossed the line I scanned through the numbers on the trailing horses, just to see where mine had finished, but still couldn’t see it anywhere.

Ah well, another £10 down the drain then.

Then someone in our group said that Finsbury had won, and I initially assumed that they were merely joking, as most of us seemed to have had some money riding on this particular horse.

But no, hang on! There it was on the TV screen, with a caption reading “Winner: 7. Finsbury”

Fantastic. I danced all the way back to the bookie and collected my £97.50 winnings, grinning like an idiot. When you convert it, that actually beats the AU$200 I won for my part in that trifecta syndicate back in November. It also in one fell swoop wiped out my earlier loss and left me £82 up on the night, which to my immense satisfaction was better than everyone else from work.

Now, surely this, and our upcoming trip to Vegas in September, can be nothing more than the start of my slippery descent into addiction. Ah well, you heard it here first…

Who’s that Walking Past?
On the street outside our house?
Hey! Cheeky Cheeky!

Ah, so now my life is complete: I have finally seen The Cheeky Girls wandering the streets near our house. Sal had seen them several times before, of course–always together, always heading past our place towards St John’s Wood–but last night I finally got my chance, as we rounded off a highly pleasant weekend at Mumtaz, our surprisingly quiet local curry house.

“Look! There they are!” said Sal, pointing out of the window. “It’s the Cheeky Girls”

And sure enough there they were, walking down the street together in their identical outfits. Out in the street, some of the post-cricket crowd driving past, who had clearly just had a very similar conversation, honked their horn, causing one of the cheeky girls to turn round and wave at them.

“What are they doing with themselves these days?” I wondered aloud to Sal. “What does an ex cheeky do for work once the record deal has gone? It’s not like you can go and work in McDonald’s, is it?”

I opted not to run after them and ask. Instead, we just finished our curry and left.

It had been a lovely weekend. Earlier, we’d risen hungover early in the morning and inadvertently ended up watching Michael Palin travel the pacific rim in a ten year old travel series that UK History, in its infinite wisdom, had chosen to show continuously for the whole day, with Palin doomed to repeat himself until 1AM, each time just failing to reach his destination and complete his full circle (although bizarrely they were only showing the second half of the series, as if perhaps they’d only been able to rent the second disc in the box set; perhaps next week they’ll show the first half). By the time he’d reached the end of his journey, and was about to begin it again from the half way point, I managed to drag myself away and into the park, where I sought refuge from the tourists by heading for the secret garden, where I sat in the shade and finished off Douglas Coupland’s deeply disappointing jPod while listening to the sound of Paul Kelly wafting over from the Toast Australia festival on the other side of the trees.

A while back, I mentioned that I’d started uploading all my old photos onto Flickr. Now, I really like some things about Flickr, like the fact that the storage space is effectively unlimited, but I’ve never been entirely happy with some other aspects of the site.

For example, I really don’t like the way everything is ordered by the date it was uploaded (which means absolutely nothing to me) and not the date when it was taken (and in the recent redesign, one of my favourite navigational tools, the calendar, was hidden away behind several layers of menu item). I’ve also never been keen on the fact that, despite storing several different sizes of each shot, the only practical way they allow you to browse your photos is with the default, tiny sized ones (which is fine if you have a rubbish dial-up connection, but in the age of broadband, I’d be much happier if they at least gave you the option of easily looking through the pictures at a larger size).

Luckily, none of that actually matters, because one of the best things about Flickr is that they provide this cracking API that exposes just about every bit of information about your photos that you could need.

And that means, that I can do this: www.mattarmstrong.co.uk/photos

All the photo files are the very same ones that are hosted on Flickr, but the navigation is much more aligned with the way I’d like to show our photos off to the world.

– The photos in the photostream are in the order they were taken.
– The calendar is nice and easy to get to.
– When you look at the individual photos, it’s the “large” size (and there’s a handy “Download Original” button at the bottom if you want to save a copy of the full size version).
– You can navigate through through the images by clicking on the left or right side of a photo.

I still have a few more things to add, but it’s mostly there. So it’s up to you. Stick with the Flickr version, or look at my version. Whatever you prefer, I guess…

Sorry if you’re totally bored by the football by now, but I’m afraid I’ve been continuing to enjoy this year’s competition. Last Thursday, I joined a bunch of Aussies in a central London pub to watch their final group game. With a somewhat depressing predictability, the beeb had chosen to show Brazil as their main BBC1 game (which offered only the remotest of outside chances of Japan qualifying), instead of the one remaining group F match that actually meant something, relegating Australia v Croatia to BBC3. After gently assisting the bar staff in locating said digital channel on their Sky system, we settled in for the match. I hate to admit it, but I was rather caught up in the atmosphere, and I actually wanted the Aussies to win (and that’s not something you’ll hear me saying very often): they were far the better team on the night, for one, and they seemed to come off rather worse from Graham Poll’s erratic decisions (even before the revelation that he can’t count to 2). Rugby tackling Mark Viduka to the ground, for example, apparently doesn’t warrant a penalty (nor, for that matter, does a blatant handball). When Australia equalised for the second time, I actually found myself unconsciously leaping into the air and cheering (before I was able to check myself and revert to polite clapping). Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear: I feel like I’ve cheated on England.

On arriving at work the next morning, I was amused to see that the Wikipedia monkeys had already been busy cataloguing Poll’s misfortunes. It’s been removed since then, but when I first looked at it, the Croatia v Australia section of that page ended simply with the following final paragraph: “He will be too old for the 2010 world cup.” Clearly he’s a man with many fans around the world.

On Sunday, we joined our friends in South London to catch the England game near their house. Their local, otherwise a quiet gastropub populated by young professionals, had unfortunately been taken over by lairy, En-ger-land-shirted drunks, who were climbing on the bar and filling the room with very loud terrace-style chanting. It gave the pub a deeply unpleasant atmosphere and precipitated 45 of the most unpleasant minutes of my life as we struggled to concentrate on the game. I considered leaving after about 10 minutes, but somehow we lasted for a full half before fleeing to the much more pleasant place round the corner. It didn’t help that the pathetic volume levels on the pub’s TVs struggled to compete with the localised chanting (and, I suppose, the woeful England performance didn’t help matters much either). Suffice to say, we won’t be heading back to that pub for any of their future games.

There’s a sizeable Portuguese community in the Stockwell/Vauxhall area, so we hung around for the other game, Portugal v Holland. In the hours leading up to the kick-off, we barely saw a single individual not wearing some item of clothing proclaiming their support for the red and green team. Most cars that passed us seemed to be engaging in a special one-upmanship contest to see who could fit the most Portuguese flags on their vehicle. We watched most of the bad-tempered clash from a comfy sofa in the pub, but we wandered down to the street to join the crowds for the last 20 minutes: we joined a few hundred people crowded outside the tapas restaurants down the road, chants of “POR-TU-GAL, POR-TU-GAL” ringing out. As we pushed through the crowd to find a spot to settle, a bloke shouted to me:

“Oi, it’s Peter Crouch! Hey Peter Crouch…” (Well, I was wearing a red t-shirt and white shorts).
I did my best attempt at a robot dance as we passed.

When the final whistle finally went, after they held on for some 6 minutes of added time (a testament to the type of game it was), the crowds went predictably crazy. There was much cheering. People climbed up onto lampposts to wave their giant flags around. Car horns were very much tooted. We almost forgot we were in a corner of South London, and not wandering the streets of Lisbon. All that, and they’d only won their second round match. I can only imagine how crazy they’d be if they made it past England and went on to win the thing…

Today I arrived at work at the crack of dawn in an attempt to reach the pub in time for the 4pm kick off in the Australia v Italy game. Surely they can’t do it again, can they?

EDIT: Er, no. They can’t. But pretty close, and if wasn’t for a cynical dive and an unjustified penalty at the death, who knows what might have happened…

Many, many months ago I half considered buying tickets to go to this year’s wireless festival. Not the James Gray/David Blunt/KT Thingie nonsense that happened over the weekend, of course, but just the first day of the event, the “indie” day: I’m very much enjoying The Raconteurs’ album, for one, the Dirty Pretty Things remind me of The Libertines when they were good, and it’s always worth seeing the likes of The Strokes or Belle and Sebastian as a bonus.

In the end I decided that by the time you’d paid 40 quid for tickets, and added on some ridiculous postage charges and ten or so quid worth of various fees, it was all a bit much for a few hours of music, and I didn’t bother. I think too that I half remembered that last year (when this all clashed with Glasto and thus wasn’t an option) they hadn’t sold it out, and ended up selling off tickets cheaply at the last minute on, appropriately enough, Lastminute.com. I guess I was hoping that the same thing might happen this year.

But then, as luck would have it, I didn’t have to actually pay for tickets, because a few weeks ago an email turned up offering free tickets, in exchange for signing up for some mailing list. I suppose that they must have really failed to flog the tickets this year–they even had to resort to doing the lastminute.com cheap sell off thing as well (and nice to see that so few people wanted to see James Blunt that they were reduced to flogging tickets off for just twenty quid).

Although I’m not sure if I’d have felt it was value for money if I’d had to pay to get in, considering that we all got there for nothing, I actually rather enjoyed it. After a ridiculously early start at work, I’d managed to join Sal in time to have already got inside and to the bar just as the Dirty Pretty Things took to the stage.

For a while it felt like we weren’t in London, having just dashed there from work, but more like perhaps the Saturday afternoon at Glastonbury, when maybe we’d wandered over to the Other Stage.

I particularly enjoyed seeing The Raconteurs, although I couldn’t help thinking that their thing would work a lot better in a Brixton Academy, rather than a big festival area. Later, we wandered into the XFM tent in time to catch the end of the Super Furries (they played Man Don’t Give a Fuck. Yay!) Oh, and the Strokes were a lot better than I thought they were going to be, but maybe that was just because they played so much stuff from their first album, the only one I actually like…

Wireless festival,
Behind Us, watching the Strokes.
IT’S: Edith Bowman

Who’s that on the tube?
Chubby girl in business suit?
Her off Apprentice

– Is it wrong that, on seeing this 1978 photo of Microsoft staffers that’s been doing the rounds again recently, that my main thought was “I wonder what happened to their tech author…”?

– Despite it being nearly three weeks since my (private) company moved into a floor of a building otherwise occupied by a government department, I only noticed this morning that there is a permanent sign in reception displaying the current “bikini alert” status for the UK. Apparently we’re currently on “black special” bikini alert (which appears to roughly approximate to “pretty much anything could happen, at any time, in any place; we’re not really sure, sorry!”) but I’ll be sure to let you know if anything changes.

– Finally, some celeb spotting:

Sal phones, excited
“Liam, at the ATM!”
“Quick,” I say, “Phone Heat!”

Guy from Hollyoaks
(Tony’s brother in real life
and fake) near Euston

For some reason, TNT Magazine have decided that I’d like to receive email updates about the World Cup progress of the Australian football team. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to see the Aussies winning for once–it’s got to be good for the domestic game in Australia, for one thing, which, who knows, might come in handy for me personally at some point in the future, and it’s not as if I see them repeating the feat against Brazil–but I’d rather not receive daily email updates on this subject, particularly if they’re written by a imbecile who appears to know next to nothing about football, and contain comments like this one:

Aussies on song
The chants from the Aussie camp are definitely on the improve. Two of the best heard heard yesterday in Kaiserslautern: “Sing when you’re whaling. You only sing when you’re whaling,” and, in reply to the “Nippon,” clap clap clap chant from Japanese fans: “Nikon,” click click click.

I’m sorry, but in most of the rest of the world we’ve been trying to kick racism out of football…

BBC: Release of 53 lifers under fire.

Well, I suppose it makes things interesting, watching them dodge the bullets, doesn’t it?