Category: Uncategorized

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…

“In this time of heightened security”, as the announcement I keep hearing at train stations around the capital describes it (surely that’s the wrong way round, by the way: isn’t this a time of heightened risk?) you could argue, if you were an overly cynical individual, that an unpopular government mired in an unpopular war half way around the world would be absolutely relishing the opportunity to push through all sorts of anti-democratic unpopular legislation with little or no dissent from their own party, and nothing but ringing endorsements from the opposition. Don’t support the introduction of ID cards, or the unilateral police decision to introduce a policy of Stop And Search And Shoot To Kill Without Warning If You Look A Bit Foreign And Happen To Be In The Wrong Place At The Wrong Time?

Why, anyone who objects must be a terrorist themselves, or a supporter of terror.

Yesterday, we lost the right to peacefully protest in a half-mile “exclusion zone” around Westminster. This new, and surprisingly underreported, law was rushed through in June, and came into effect yesterday. Hey, what price democracy when Tony Blair and Charles Clarke find Brian Haw a bit “distracting”? (Ironically, the law as it stands doesn’t actually apply to Mr Haw, after he won an injunction last week on the basis that the new law requires those organising protests in the zone to have “authorisation for the demonstration… under section 131(2), when the demonstration starts“. Given that his protest started four years ago, he gets to stay. Well, that’s what happens when you rush a piece of legislation through the house without thinking it through, I suppose.)

And what price civil liberties and human rights, when you have 2001’s Anti Terrorism Crime and Security Act to allow foreign nationals to be detained indefinitely without trial? Or when you are seeking to increase the limit on the amount of time the police can hold terrorism suspects of any nationality without bringing charges from 14 days to three months?

Carry on, says Tony Blair. Just don’t mind us while we make a few changes round here…

I finally made contact with my mysterious landlady this morning (the wonderful Spencer Michael Consultancy, it emerges, had helpfully given me the wrong phone number). It appears that things have been sorted out, and we aren’t about to be evicted after all. Which is nice.

It would appear not, if this country’s news outlets are anything to go by. Sky News, in particular, in their desperate bid to fill airtime and webspace in the absence of actual facts will apparently happily run anything, no matter how unfounded or inconsistent (for example, their reports about the windows being blown out on the bus in Hackney were accompanied by… a photograph of the bus in Hackney with its windows intact).

Most of yesterday’s “reports” consisted of highly reliable “eyewitness accounts”, but sometimes Sky resorted to second hand accounts. For much of yesterday their website had something along the lines of “an eyewitness said that an Italian man who was on the train told her…” Well, that’s clearly a conclusive and reliable report, then. (I think this was the same person to utter the classic statement–later removed from the site–about there having been a small blast. Apparently it wasn’t enough to hurt anybody, but was enough to blow open the rucksack in which the device was located, and as a result “the man holding the rucksack looked rather dismayed”.)

By the time I got home, the networks had endured several hours of coverage with no new information, and as such were deep in the realms of speculation, reporting the news they wanted to report without letting anything as silly as the facts (or lack of them) get in the way.

Today the police seem to have shot a man dead on the tube at Stockwell. Bearing in mind the fact that they managed to arrest several people yesterday who weren’t in any way connected to the (attempted) bombings, you’d want to hope that they were mighty sure that they were shooting dead (five times) the right person on the tube at Stockwell, and not just targetting anyone with the wrong colour skin and heavy luggage in the wrong place at the wrong time.

(According to the BBC: “They brought in the air ambulance. They did everything they can to revive him. He died at the scene.” I dunno. Wouldn’t doing “everything [you] can to revive him” perhaps include not shooting him five times?)

Still no real developments regarding our imminent eviction. I’ve written some letters, but no one seems to want to talk to me about it.

I’ve been perusing the interwebs looking for information, but the best I’ve come up with are the various details out there on the agency I’ve been dealing with (and through whom our landlady purchased the property), The Spencer Michael Consultancy. For example, see here, here, and here).

Do you think it’s a bad thing if the top Google results for your company name are from Watchdog and the Advertising Standards Authority?

Perhaps that is why the company appears to have changed its name to “Property Investor Courses Ltd“. Or maybe that’s just a coincidence.

Oh look–they have some glowing case studies on their website about all the people who’ve made millions out of following their courses. This, for example, is one I selected entirely at random.

—– Original Message —–
From: *.**********@jamjobs.co.uk
Sent: Wednesday, July 20, 2005 3:08 PM
Subject: Technical Author * 4………… South Cumbria………

Hi,

I currently have available vacancies for 4 Technical Authors to join a leading international organisation. These are permanent roles based in South Cumbria

A leading international organisation are looking for 4 Technical Authors to review and evaluate existing Nuclear systems related procedures.

The successful candidates will have Authoring experience, ideally in the nuclear industry. Any engineering experience including control and instrumentation would be of benefit.

—snip—

“Nuclear systems related procedures“? “South Cumbria”? Surely that can mean only one thing.

Hmm. Perhaps not…

I went down the road for a haircut at lunchtime. As I was sitting in the chair in the middle of my cut an extremely stressed grey-haired woman in, I guess, her 50s, popped her head round the door and asked the bloke sitting nearest to it if she could borrow his phone.

“Could you call that number?” she asked, in an awfully posh voice, pointing to something written in her address book. “I’ve left my phone and my glasses at home and I can’t possibly read it. I’m parked just over there and I imagine I shall have to pay the most horrendous fine.”

The poor gentleman awaiting his haircut obligingly produced his mobile phone and passed it to her after dialing the number. Alas, the person we all later worked out to be her son that she was trying to contact (who appeared to work in the office building across the street) failed to answer his phone or his office direct line.

“Oh you daft boy!” she exclaimed angrily. “I don’t understand it. Why does everybody have to be so modern?”

I never did work out exactly what she meant by this, or exactly what her errant son had done to annoy her (although she did offer a tantalising clue by announcing to the rest of the equally bemused barbershop customers that she would “leave and not give them to him”, something that would, apparently, “show him”), but I just thought this was a wonderful line, and worth sharing.

When I left the barber some 15 minutes later she was still sitting waiting for him in her Smart car parked up in the street outside.

Still no progress getting in touch with the elusive landlady, but we’ve started the initial stage of flat hunting at least. So far that hasn’t amounted to much more than my idle work-avoidance interwebs browsing, and I’ve been casually wading through the barrage of identikit, exclamation heavy adverts stuffed with phrases like “Must be seen!” and “First to see will take!”

I’ve noticed some unusual stuff, though. One property (sadly I neglected to bookmark the ad) offered an “open flan” kitchen. I quite like the sound of that. Another one (this one) purports to have “1 bedroom 1 reception room 11 bathrooms”. Well, that’s “unusually spacious” indeed. I suppose I’d never have to wait for Sal to get out of there in the morning, but surely a tad excessive, even for us?