Category: Uncategorized

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?

According to the leaks from the latest report into the de Menezes shooting, Sir Ian Blair didn’t actually lie to the media after all, because the people who knew the truth were too scared to tell him. Apparently, according to some people, that makes everything ok. Well, then… he’s just an incompetent manager, feared by his subordinates, but at least he’s not a liar.

Now, I’ve always felt that he was in something of a no-win drown-him-if-he’s-a-witch catch 22 situation here: he either mislead the media, in which case he should go, or he “runs” an organisation that is so ineffective that it took a full 24 hours for him to discover what many of us suspected within hours of the event.

Either way, I can’t see how he should remain in the job. Can you?

I’ve been rather enjoying the World Cup so far (and not just because my fantasy football team has been doing rather well for once–today’s been particularly good, with both Tim Cahill and Tomas Rosicky in my team). Maybe it’s just because, unlike the European Championships two years ago, this time we’ve got two tellies, so Sal can happily retreat next door with Big Brother leaving me happily ensconced in front of Italy – Ghana.

On Saturday, with Rhys in town, we got up early and headed East to fit a suitable venue to watch the England match. I had briefly thought that maybe we should head for the big screen at Canary Wharf (although it turns out that that would have been a mistake), but instead we had intended to watch it at the Vibe Bar, on Brick Lane, labouring as we were under the misapprehension that their big screen would be in their big beer garden. When it turned out that they were actually showing it inside, in a big hot stuffy room, and that we had to pay for tickets, and that they were in fact already sold out, we decided that maybe we’d go somewhere else. Helpfully, when Sal asked the girl on the ticket desk if she knew anywhere else in the area that was showing the game, she said “Yes”.

So, left to find somewhere on our own, we went to investigate the local pubs, and ended up in a real East-end boozer round by Spitalfields, perhaps the biggest contrast we could have picked from the overtly trendy ShoreditchTwat-esque location where we’d originally planned to watch the game.

The pub we ended up in came complete with an authentic eccentric East End landlady, who popped up with five minutes to go in the game, and began removing furniture. I’d barely got up from my chair to peer around the bloke in front of me whose head was obscuring my view of the screen when she’d whipped it out from underneath me and carried it outside. “I’ve got to make room” she said, as she came back to relieve us of our table. All very sensible, if she’d chosen to do this at the start of the game, but with 85 minutes on the clock this seemed a rather odd move. Ah well, a good result anyway, and the less said about the game itself the better.

Yesterday, we spent a pleasant afternoon loafing about in sunny Regent’s Park, with our picnics, beers, and boules. We even staged our own mini football match, which I enjoyed a great deal (partly because, although I’ve always been rubbish at football, I don’t seem too bad when everyone else in the game is an Aussie more used to kicking a brown oval ball). Now, there’s officially a “no ball games” in the section of Regent’s Park where we’d chosen to picnic, but it’s a rule that’s largely ignored by most visitors. At one point, long before we began our actual football match, a crazy old lady came round the park, telling each and every person in the park who looked like they might be about to break this rule that “there’s no ball games in here, you know”.

“Are you Australian as well?” she said to our friend Andrew, who had been throwing around an AFL footie with a couple of other Aussies who randomly turned out to be in the park too. “It’s no ball games in here don’t you know!”

When he tactfully pointed out that most of the park’s other visitors were ignoring this rule too (some of whom were probably Brits), “Oh no,” she said, “they’re all Arabs,” and with that she was off to tell the rest of the park off, one by one.

Today, I took a late lunch and popped out to catch the first half hour of the Australia – Japan game, before I had to dash back, unpleasantly sweaty, to sit in a meeting. Luckily the guys from IT were setting up the projector/TV tuner combo in our big meeting room, so I got to see the cracking last ten minutes–all three Australian goals–back at the office. Not bad so far, anyway. Roll on Trinidad and Tobago…

In response to a blog post I made almost two and a half years ago, “brookfield” writes that [s]he is “terribly sorry that [I’ve] gone entirely mad”.

From what I remember, at the gig in question, Damien Rice was being a bit of a petulant, precious, artiste, and I believe that was the point I was trying to make in the blog. I do actually quite like Mr Rice’s music, but apparently I “wouldn’t understand, obviously”.

Well, fair dos, Mr[s] Brookfield, you’ve got me: clearly by googling for “Damien Rice Dallas November” and reading something I wrote 2 years ago you know everything about me that there is to know. I’m sorry that I can’t be included in the select group of people who do understand the tribulations of being an emotional man with an acoustic guitar.

I have failed as a human being. Obviously.

I didn’t have my book today, so I found myself sitting on the tube reading Metro this morning. After I’d got past the utterly vacuous Rumsfeld quote on the front page (“no single person on this planet has had the blood of more innocent men, women and children on his hands than Zarqawi”–look Rummy, I know you are contractually obliged to pretend that getting the terrists is the most important thing ever, but think about it: that’s not even close to true, is it. What about Hitler? Pol Pot? Genghis Khan?) I got to a bit about “Get Loaded in the Park”, a Metro-sponsored music thingy that’s happening on Clapham Common in July. I was interested to read that Badly Drawn Boy is playing, but confused about their write up, which talked of him being about to release his new album, One Plus One is One. It’s funny, because I’m pretty sure that came out a couple of years ago and promptly sank without trace.

It was only when I looked at his website to check that I realised what must have happened. You see, the esteemed Metro, rather than bothering to write their own copy, simply swiped a chunk of the description from BDB’s website without bothering to check when it was last updated. Because if they had, they’d have realised that when it says the album will be released on June 21st, that’s June 21st 2004. Now that’s professional, fact-checking journalism in action…

We spent the sunniest weekend of the year so far with my parents, who, opting not to remain in London for longer than was absolutely necessary, collected us from our flat on Saturday morning and drove off into leafy Kent, where they are staying for the week. Prior to the weekend, Kent wasn’t exactly somewhere that I would have chosen to spend any length of time, but it proved something of a revelation, and not without its charm.

Of course we were doing appropriately parent-y, tourist-y things that we wouldn’t normally be doing, like visiting the surprisingly well kept Leeds castle (Sal’s favourite castle so far, apparently), but despite only travelling for an hour or so to the south of London, it all seemed like a very different world: a world of country lanes and village pubs far removed from the pollution, congestion, and crowds of the city.

On Sunday, we visited a town called Battle, where the Battle of Hastings took place. I’d always assumed that this event took place in Hastings, but this turns out not to be the case. Frankly, I’ve a feeling the Anglo Saxons were rather tempting fate there. I wonder how different English history might have been if they’d just had the foresight to name their town “HaveANiceCupOfTeaAndASitDown”.

Another revelation from the weekend came in the form of the English wine industry, which turns out not to be the joke you might have thought it is after all. We pulled into this place to have lunch, but not before we’d tried most of their varieties of really surprisingly good wine. We bought a case, of course (and if you ask really nicely next time you’re round at our place, I might even let you try some).

Oh, and completing our attempts to purchase the most inappropriately heavy items to be bringing back on the train, we added to our case of wine by picking up an authentic (and authentically weighty) set of boules, which we’ll be taking to Regent’s Park on the next sunny day: previously we’ve been struck with a serious case of park games envy, feeling that our only item of park paraphernalia (a Frisbee we got free at Glastonbury a few years ago that says “GM Foods: Pull the Udder One” underneath a picture of a cow) wasn’t quite cutting it. But now we have boules, so we win, obviously.

So today was the big office move, as my work finally swapped its two small floors on the edge of Bermondsey for a single big room in a government building up by the Thames.

The circumstances are rather different to those the last time I was involved in an office move. Back in 2002, in the dark days before this blog even existed, I moved from Richmond to Putney when the imminently defunct software company that I worked for at the time was purchased by its biggest rival (which has itself now been swallowed up in a hostile takeover). Back then, the move represented the end of an era, the final nail in the coffin of the old company, and offered a new office filled only with a selection of worried new colleagues, understandably concerned about the future of their own jobs, and consequently somewhat less than welcoming.

This time, however, it’s all positive–a growing company that has outlived its time in a small, cosy office and that badly needs the extra space. It was all a bit surreal turning up to a brand new office this morning, having my photo taken for a new pass, and meeting the security guards–it almost felt as if I’d started a new job, but for some strange reason all my old colleagues had decided to come with.

The new place is not short of comedy value, either. The other floors in the building are occupied by the Health and Safety Executive, and tales of their amusing bureaucracy’s desperate attempts to foil our attempts to outfit the office had already made it back to us. Today I particularly enjoyed the little warning signs in the bathrooms placed above each and every one of the taps that let us know that the stuff that comes out of the hot taps is “Very Hot Water”.