The Annual Review 2012

Whilst it would seem a strange thing to have an annual review following a year that has only highlighted my descent into further indolence which is no mean achievement considering my starting point! However there is a rationale, for a change! Were Red Baron’s Words to have, or require, stakeholders you would be they by virtue of your presence and therefore you should be rewarded for your laudable persistence.  Furthermore having left a comment on Gema’s brand new blog it seemed I needed to stick up for us old hacks who’ve been at this silliness for nearly a decade now!  Even all the newbies have passed me and soon I will not even have my extensive back catalogue to rest laurels on!

It speaks volumes that I did not, as I usually have done previously, mark the anniversary of my starting this journey, such as it has been. On January 18th 2004 aged a mere 32 I decided that I was not going to right things down in books and notepaper that would get lost and would instead follow the example of luminaries and embracers of the new media such as Salaam Pax the “Baghdad Blogger.” Weblogs as they were then called were attracting a little attention precisely because no-one really knew a lot about them, such that had they been referred to in ways such as ‘online journal’ or ‘electronic diary’ it might have made quite clear what most people used the medium for. As it was it all sounded exotic to most people who at the time were not entirely convinced the internet was an idea that would catch on.

So this all in mind I decided that it would be fair and correct to give updates on the Pre-50 50 in order to see how I’ve been getting on, perhaps garner some hints, collect volunteers where applicable and generally hold myself to account a bit.

[The Pre-50 50 should you choose to revisit it.]

There are of course a number of things on the list that are ongoing and should be so one has to assess whether or not things are progressing as they should be.

Personal

1. Move abroad (again)

2. Leave IT for something meaningful

3. Go for custody of my children

4. Rationalise my stuff into want I need and a little of what commemorates my past for posterity.

In numbers 1-4 there has been little progression and in truth I would probably have expected as much. Which is not to say they should be forgotten, merely realistically assessed.  Due to circumstances beyond my control no.2 may have its hand forced before the end of this year.

5. Keep off the fags

This continues and this is a good thing, the wagon has bumps now and again one looks out as sees the vista as one thought it might have been but I remain reasonably steady.

6. Do an MA either in Linguistics or Trade Union relations

This is something that may sort of be happening in a roundabout way as I have embarked on the TUC Dipl Employment Law, it isn’t quite an MA but it is practical study for perhaps something to assist with No. 2

7. Write something every week

Hmm yes a little difficult to avoid scrutiny on this one. I am gradually getting back to it now, I did write last year, fits and starts, mostly poetry, some prose, not as much diatribe as I probably needed to! I do of course have my other new project which until February was progressing pretty well. Not yet up to scratch but I do have a compadre equally derelict in her duties, so maybe soon we’ll be back on track.

8. Read a book every month

For whatever reason I cannot seem to get going properly on the reading, I’ve been much the same with music as well. Reading for me is not generally the sort of thing I do when going to bed it is the sort of thing I do when travelling by train or eating lunch and the former happens precious few times whilst the latter I now rarely if ever tend to do alone.

9. Write a book every year – and not just part of a book either.

Well I didn’t finish one last year, I did write quite a bit more of one but no still not finished, must try harder!

10. Finish my play – to avoid it becoming like the books!

Yep bang to rights again, I don’t think I’ve actually done anything else on it last year in fairness so it’s not been on the radar.

11. Get an anthology of poetry published

I’m not sure about this one, right now it seems unimportant almost undesirable, perhaps that’ll change.  I do post poetry, I’ve even put some here, but others can be a little too raw.

12. Send more work to competitions and journals

Again there is a mixed feeling to this one so for now it’s on hold.

13. Take more photographs

I took comparatively few last year which is a shame, but my Christmas present to myself was a 9yr old 2nd hand camera that I have been after for nearly 9 years! I’m hoping this may reinvigorate. I should perhaps add to this one to take more video footage, the children grow up relentlessly and each week is one where you cannot go back to who they were and what they looked like then.

14. Do an anonymous selfless act each week

Well this hasn’t happened consciously which was sort of the point to ensure I did it. I’d like to hope I might do so as a general rule in life anyway but of course it is easy to think you’re being good whereas actually being so may be a little different.

15. Think before I speak more often

I still REALLY need to work on that!

16. Slow dance with someone.

Nope still a to do. The thing with something like this is that it would feel odd as a forced thing, doing it for the sake of crossing it off a list is different to doing it and gaining the enjoyment and then crossing it off the list with a story surrounding it.

17. Sit on top of a hill and watch the sun come up with someone

Again like 16 there kind of has to be someone to do it with.  I know a venue close and one far away where it would be wonderful.

18. Ask people out if I like them

Well confidence has always been a tricky one, I have on two occasions specifically asked the question and on a further two there seemed a possibility of some ‘organic chemistry’ but all came to naught. However it is sometimes easy to see the end result as rendering futile that which led you to the conclusion in the first place and that would be wrong. I have fulfilled my part of the bargain the fact that nothing came of it was neither within my control nor the subject of this point.

19. Go to a film marathon with someone

The opportunity has never arisen for this but I guess the point with such a list is to be proactive, you have to make things happen as by and large they will not happen of their own accord. If you allow life to dictate the terms it seldom turns out well.

20. Spend more time concerned with those who care about me and less concerned trying to convert those who do not.

It remains something of an ongoing thing and surely something that everybody at certain times is guilty of but those of us with little confidence wobbles perhaps more so or more often. It would be probably inaccurate to say I’ve improved but I haven’t got any worse!

21. Learn empathy

Rather like the point above it is more about a time investment.

Travel

22. Take someone I’m in love with to Ile Saint-Margueritte

Well the second part rather relies on the first doesn’t it?!

23. Visit St-Guilhem-Le-Désert (again)

Still a to do, I have been back to France but not there, yet.

24. Buy a sailing yacht

I should really have put this one after the next one as there is something of an interdependence!

25. Learn to sail

No movement, literally.

26. Visit Cuba

27. Visit Venezuela

There is a leetle monetary shortfall on this one but you never know, one day.

28. Drive a 1980s BMW 6 series along the French Riviera

Ah, still just a dream sadly

29. Drive a multi-national banger rally in either an old Mini or a BMW E30

Well I have a friend who is interested in doing this one with me now in the E30 (not mine!) so that’s progress and I would say definitely going to happen before 50, maybe even 45.

30. Spend a month travelling round India on trains

Every time the pyjama cricket comes on the TV it makes me think of India and the myriad assortment of things I wish to do.  As yet the cash is lacking but this will be the first one to be addressed when I have the time and money to do so.

31. Spend a week on the Isles of Scilly

Not even been back as yet, which is a bit poor really!

32. Leave the country once every year

So far so good on this, ok it’s only been 1 year in the scheme of things but we all start somewhere and I started in Portugal. The trip to France this year has already happened and I may be going again in the next couple of months.

33. Visit 1 new country every 5 years

Hurrah for Portugal ticking 2 boxes and giving me 4 years grace! It was nice to go somewhere new and I learnt a surprising amount about myself in a short space of time that I am almost a different person abroad. I am also hoping to get to Greece to visit a friend hopefully within the next 12 months so that would be another new.

34. Visit 2 continents within the 10 years

Sadly Portugal does not tick a triple whammy and the intercontinental endeavours must wait.

35. Take the children to Ireland

Disappointingly I’ve not been back to the homeland in a couple of years and it is high time even without the children. It is a place that seems to afford me a certain amount of peace which is much needed.

36. Take the children to France

This relies on the patronage of the other parent, as in fact does the above and that is yet to be granted.

37. Walk the route of the old Berlin Wall

I walked the great Hadrians Wall in 2011 with Captain Fay McDandy and it was most excellent, far from putting me off such efforts it fuelled the desire with evidence of its enjoyment, in all but a nasty encounter with Brown 187 and a last day that was as near to Northern hell as I would ever seek to experience.

38. Stay in the DDR theme hotel

This is probably one for the same time as the wall

Health

39. Get into the habit of 4 forms of exercise a week

The High Intensity Training as part of the academic study is making some real changes here, which is as well given the excesses of Christmas and shoulder tendonitis stopping me from the badminton.

40. Cycle to work (4.8 miles)

There is partly a health issue to blame here but it is too easy solely to blame my back problems. However the High Intensity Training has shown that I can cycle and the benefit in doing so is manifold. Definitely one to have a real tilt at this year.

41. Get down to 34″ waist

Ahem, yes, well…

42. Get down to 14 stone

Hahahahaha

43. Sort out the health niggles I’m always putting off.

Bloody niggles!

Money

44. Pay off debts (around £7000)

This has plagued me since I left university, it’s a gradual process but progress remains albeit little steps.

45. Don’t get into any more debt

46. Menu plan every meal

A lot better at this now which has proven valuable especially this month, knowing what you are going to eat and when does cut down on the desire to eat shite because you’re not standing in the kitchen after work thinking that you can’t be bothered to cook.

47. Don’t buy mindless things just to make me feel better or less bored.

I’ve been skint, this has helped!

48. Sell one item on ebay for each item I buy

I’m buying little and selling even less

49. Save some money each month, even if it’s a tenner. – longer you leave it harder it is.

I am now saving a tenner!

50. If I should be still writing (not to mention alive) at 60 I hope that I might continue the process and that it will be of as much interest as it may be now.

Well I’ve continued to make it so I guess that’s a success!

So there you go, feel free to sit in the board room and issue suitable admonishments.  If I’m feeling really productive I may even manage to respond, maybe even this month.  Let’s not be too hasty eh, small steps!

Song Of The Day ~ Junip – Line Of Fire

In The Meantime Here Is Some Light Music

Yes we got a little stuck again there didn’t we, the desire was there to write, and I have the drafts to prove it but I didn’t quite get back into the swing of things.  We are working on bringing you back to your normal programme as soon as possible, however in doing so we are working closely with another former-Blog-City comrade over at Raytsbaron, a new home for competitive collaboration designed to make 2 indolent idiots get back into the habit of being a little more productive.  Please check back here a little later where we hope to be able to return you to ‘Angry Man Getting Older!’

****The Fabled 500****

The last post was my 500th and I felt, perhaps self-indulgantly, that the milestone deserved a little marking.  I started blogging 8 1/2 years ago in order to regulate my writing and give me an outlet effectively to replace lined pieces of paper and diary-type books which were constantly going missing.  In that time I’ve met people both online and in person, had some excellent contributions, and hopefully made the odd one or two.  At the beginning this method of communication was comparatively new, there were people doing it who had been for some time but there were a great many more who had never heard of it and looked quizzically when I mentioned it.  I had heard about it through media coverage of the so-called Baghdad blogger, Salam Pax, who started at a similar time to me but was picked up very early in The Guardian due to the currency of his postings in Iraq at the time.  Pax last posted in 2009 from what I can see and largely ramped down in 2006.  By this time there were many people blogging, it was before the phenomena of Facebook and Twitter where people needed an outlet for their mindless inane ramblings.  Some of it was unadulterated tosh, but the same might often be said of mine, why should opinions of the global and national events of the day be any more valid than those of very localised events about the type of clothing one is wearing to parties?!

In the early days I wrote a lot, at time a self-confessional, at time chronicle and usually rants from the rather left wing of the political dial.  Within a few months there were a few people who seemed to regularly read my ramblings.  It was nice to have a connection to others across the world at a time when in my personal life I was confined to a small one room bedsit and writing was the escape.  Additionally the interaction from others often sparked new ideas and new posts and the desire to write often enough was good for regulating my output and stemming the lethargy that I often succumbed to.  I’ve spoken to those who share similar political leanings as me to the holocaust denier on the other end of the spectrum.  There is no greater catalyst to inspire writing than the actions of others, whether one agrees or vehemently opposes.  There was even a period of about 3 months when I wrote every day just to see if I could do it.  As I was listening to the news constantly in order to have subjects to rant about I was very much alive and participating in the online world at large and it spilled over into my work life, an environment increasingly unaccepting of my brand of political diatribe.   In some ways my actions through the formative years of the new job I started at almost exactly the time I did my blog shaped people’s opinions of me that last to this day, for better or worse.  By the middle of 2006 due in no small part to personal reasons my output subsided and became perhaps 2 posts in a month rather than a couple in most weeks.  It became almost a chore, a desire to keep something going that I had held dear to me at a time of flux but my heart wasn’t in it in truth.

I went on hiatus for a long while, online fripperies took up far more time than they should have done, it was a more immediate method of communication replacing face-to-face contact in many cases, it did make you feel connected for a while but then, at least to me, became far more disconnected a medium due to its short conversational style.  There is little place for wordy monologues now and some might say this is a good thing but I object to trying to shoehorn what I wish to say into 140 characters.  This may make me more verbose than I should or could be but to speak to the outside world with only really the people you know following you, if even them, feels like an admission that the essay is dead, or just in-depth conversation.  I do not wish to play a part in the murder of prose.  I like long words when searching for the correct word or term for something I want the one that is most apt, or apposite, but were I to say ‘more appropriate’ that would already take up 10% of my allocation so I would have to restrict myself and this is low-fat communication, better for you but tastes like shit.

Besides which as an experiment I checked myself occasionally to see whether or not I had a sort of pithy retort the like of which I might see fit to post in so short a space.  The only time I remember thinking that I had a good tweet was -

“Drinking Irish beer in a Cuban bar in a German city.“

- which I thought possessed both my own activity and one of some interest and would be worthy, in that moment only, in my having such an account to post to.  This was in 2010 so had I been an early adopter of Twitter the endless tripe that might have preceded and ensued would have been a pretty unfulfilling experience both for me and anyone unlucky enough to read my feed more than the once.  That is not to say there are a great deal of people here nowadays, it is like the small town in the Klondike that had its brief bedlam of people and activity when blogging became the online gold only to become a ghost town when the resource was exhausted and people went in search of it elsewhere.  Every now and again a lost traveller stops in to ask directions and I think the Wild West analogy should probably stop there.

I found the silence made my writing more about what I wished to say than what I thought people might wish to hear.  I don’t mean that I was purely writing for the audience but I was probably more likely to self-censor to protect some of my own identity.  Now it is back to barking at the moon, people are no longer blog diving and therefore no longer find you which is at times liberating and at times discomforting.  Anyone who writes does so to be heard, otherwise you wouldn’t write, it is a method of communication just as direct speech, but unlike talking it affords you the time to work out what it is you want to say before someone comes back and tells you that you are wrong and why they think so.  It is also a way to commit one’s life to posterity, even if you write about things that are not related to yourself, the words you use, the way you see things and the experience of your eyes in seeing those things changes all the time as you age and it is in the very style that this is most visible if you know how to read it.  I find the idea of trying to build a picture of someone based on throwaway comments that have been distilled into a mere sentence saddening, as if identifying a body from dental records rather than unearthing a perfectly preserved specimen that tells so much about the individual and the time in which they lived.

Perhaps people have just evolved to the point where demands on their time are so many and so varied that to sit and write long blocks of text is a luxury they feel they can no longer afford.  Maybe it is a fashion the future generations will see as folly and return to the written word.  Or I might just be a dinosaur clinging on to a fading food source as many around have moved on, evolved or died out.  If it is the latter then so be it, I shall go down writing.

Song Of The Day ~ Air – Alone In Kyoto

Little Boxes All The Same

It was admittendly some years after Fi’onna that I had heard the afternoon play. Initially it was easy to listen to the mellifluous voices, those of actors familiar, the woman’s warm yet vulnerable, the man’s enthusiastic and slightly swashbuckling. The nature of the familiarity of those voices led to a superficial involvement for a time, until the plot deepened it was so carefully crafted and well-acted that it pulled like a plughole and it brought it all back. The play highlighted the highs and the lows of non-physical contact, a relationship that is often more intense than those not familiar with it could imagine, often more intense even than the physical itself. It is something I know, something I got caught up in, an intensity that burns to the touch but is as nurturing as the sun in what would otherwise be the blackest darkness. There is the sensual direction of the person being as much as you could ever hope for, there is nothing to suggest they may not be all you wanted, needed and perhaps more. There is the heightening frisson of getting slowly, almost inexorably, closer and closer to someone, the very denial of certain senses necessitating an inexorable reliance on the others. A reliance we are not used to, a downhill run too steep to be measured or braked. What begins as a safe gradual relaxation of the boundaries, distance affording a cape of seeming invincibility, continues as a headlong dash, the wind whistling past, the thrill of the speed and the knowledge that the sensation is daring, exciting, utterly out of control, maybe there is no end, maybe this time the brick wall is made of paper and the velocity will bring you crashing through to the other side and a world where pain and cynicism is replaced by contentment and a lack of expectation of either good or ill, a living for being alive. It is as much beauty as it is tragedy.

The dynamic whilst not unique to inter-personal relationships is more critical because the lack of the space between. Those undulations of moods the patterns of love, trust, fear and faith coinciding only at specific points on the graph to allow empathy and connection whilst at other times seeming so distant as if reality tries to yank back from the edge of something that could be so much better. The highs of the psychological narcotic are such as to be so alluring, so consuming as to lay waste to the otherwise mundanity of the day. This in turn left the yearning in times of no drug to be as excruciating as to be physically tortured and the effects on mood just the same. There is all too often so little information that just to survive the silence we invent something, anything, just to show we are still there and they are with us, the mind trying to give us one last safety net suspending us over that abyss that spells a pain we cannot begin to speculate on. For me it was as emotionally violent as a previous relationship had been physically so, although on this occasion it had not been by design merely by circumstance.

In truth I could romanticise about how it all started but I don’t really know, or remember, or perhaps both. What I do know is the chain of coincidences that led to it. A chance comment on a picture put up on a profile to justify the humorous title of same led to a cheerful response because something in the comment had seemed bright, neither serious nor flippant, more friendly than merely polite. Therein began a conversation that effectively lasted 2.5 years and the effect a further 1.5 subsequent to that, the full fallout cannot be adequately measured because all events in our lives shape the people we become. We would be different if not for them and the world and our perception of it and those within it would be altered. We are the sum of our experiences coupled with our genetic predisposition as to what we are able to experience. Given these factors and who we are at a specific time we were perhaps always going to head along certain paths. I was always going to fall for her because she was always going to be the one that drew me in at that time in my life.

Just as the deep rush of positive emotion made me feel childlike, the exuberance, the cradle of a new creativity, a tone to my writing and a sudden outpouring of feelings and fresh awareness of the world and the things around it. The garage door opened, the light coming only from the gap under the door now flooded in with a radiance that brought with it warmth, vivid colour, and a small amount of fear. So the end when it came left a feeling the like of which I had not felt since 17, that first breaking of innocence, the dashing of the hopes that you may have held within you since the notion of deep relationships first starting growing from the soil in your dreams. Such uprooting is not like trimming the leaves or deadheading the flowers, nor even cutting into the stem, it is a wrenching from the roots removing the whole plant. It will not grow back. This is not hyperbole, this is not some idea that the world is over, it isn’t, there may be other circumstances there may not but this strand of innocence is gone, the empirical evidence now replaces the dream, any future moment that appears to be proceeding down the same path will ring alarm bells. Others will inevitably be judged by the sins of them that have gone before, it is unfair, it is unavoidable.

I have long since speculated as to whether given the chance to expunge the events and memories of that period I would do so. At times I have had distance and grace to think that I would not, that the writing to her and the emotions accompanying it were such as to tell me that which I did not know about myself, a level of me I had not hitherto attained not even been aware of, a seam yet to have been mined. There have been darker times when the hastily applied dressing has come off and opened up the wound a little to reveal raw flesh beneath and the twinge of pain that just piques a reminder, briefly spells the agony that once required such hasty binding of the cuts then. In those moments I would go back to the cynical and yet more naive me – a person not aware of that which could be and the consequences of both its successes and failure and I would tell myself to run in order to preserve the little saplings so that they may live to grow in better soil,

Like so much that we have to put away before its time so as to function properly day to day there sits at the back of my mind a box and in it the ephemera of each section of memories and unsolved little strands of them that wait in case ever needed for a little haunting, a little self criticism or just occasionally, very occasionally to be tied up and put on the shelf with the other things that time and closure has rendered benign. The latter is far rarer than the formers but not impossible and the catharsis drawn from such a situation is liberating. I sometimes believe that were I to have neatly tidied all the boxes I would be a happy man living a normal life, but I might also be dead with nothing left to make me live from one day to the next. It is only ever likely to be something I hypothesise about.

To open such boxes is a dangerous business, like chemically induced highs you may never quite know what you are going to get and once the walking of that path is begun there is no turning back for some time. Moreover it is not always within your control to keep the lid on the box and so in this instance it was that the play acted as the catalyst that heated the feelings causing them to expand and push off the lid to release themselves into the air again. It did not awaken the sorts of emotions there had been before, neither the level of love nor the level of anguish. In fact it wasn’t to do with the level of these at all, the detachment itself was both illuminating and disquieting. Time had not healed, the wound was still there but it had not bled for a while and I had forgotten what it felt like to have it do so. It could never be as bad as it was originally, then there was no way I could have expected that severity of pain, now it is just like revisiting something unpleasant but familiar where it is more the memory of how unpleasant it was at the time that causes the emotion than the specifics of the actual discomfort now.

In physical relationships we very often have things that go wrong and breakups that are not of our choosing, but there has often been much beforehand that we have learnt, the very variety of our senses bring us to conclusions of what is going on. After these there is often a proximity to a person that forces us into a state of acecptance or ambivalence, we are forced to confront the situation head on, the person continues to exist in our physical world (even if at times we may wish they did not) and this requires us to act. This is not at all the same with distance, endings are abrupt, feelings forced off like a broken circuit, sinapses still twitching and shaking as the energy of the impulses ebbs away. It is not just that a relationship is dead, the whole world with it has died, the person no longer exists and this is unnatural and allows your brain no peace. The cliff face has collapsed whilst you were standing on it.

Memories of things in the physical world are rounded, colour and odour, a sense of how someone moves and holds themselves, their bathroom habits, their clothing anomalies, the foibles that come together to make up the whole. Yet this means that the life goes on as an undulation the peaks and troughs not always noticable in the way they might be for the lack of stark comparison. But is this not better than the sharp climb to a world of more personal completion and the plummet to a world where the realisation that one is not and has never been whole renders it an aberration, a place devoid of the pleasures one used to take comfort in?

If you return to black and white having seen colour where black and white can no longer ever be the same, would you prefer to have continued life in black and white in ignorance that this is a hollow bliss or a comfortable numbness or is the fact that you then know that colour exists making your world the richer even if you are not able to enjoy it. Answers on a coloured postcard.

Song Of The Day ~ Gotye (feat. Kimbra) – Somebody I used To Know

Future Shocks – The Real Cost Of The Internal COmbustion Engine

So let’s look at the old car first. I can get a nice old car for £500, I have done for the last few years, cars that in their day cost a great deal of money but are now out of favour.If my car were to get 35 miles to the gallon – not a great deal by modern standards (and actually a little less than I do get but it makes the maths easier). Say I was to do 500 miles a month with 35mpg and petrol at £1.40/litre that would mean I would need 14.29 gallons for my monthly mileage (1 gallon = 3.79 ltrs) so 54 ltrs. which is £75.80 per month. My tax would be £220 /year which equates to £18.33 / month. Insurance generally costs around £35/month and then you have to take into consideration general wear and tear and other costs such as MOT and any work that needs doing for it. (MOT – £40, assume £100 to sort niggles and £100 wear and tear, on brakes, fluids, tyres, seals etc. = £20/month)

So my old car, with nice specifications costs me somewhere in the region of £150 a month – no small amount of money when you consider I’ve spent £500 on the car in the first year this means £2290 in total so over a 5 year period (being that of the warranty of most new cars) this would mean £9450 – let’s say £10,000 for sake of argument, and the odd major blip to do with the engine or such like. At this point I own my car and could sell it for a similar amount to that which I paid provided I have kept it in good condition. (I could also decide to convert my engine to lpg gas power which would decrease emissions as well as lower the cost of fuel. This conversion would cost around £1000)

To get a new car of equivalent initial value at the time as mine is no small cost, but let us take one that is a hybrid to give the full advantage of a new car.. Were I to take a BMW (the same make as my old car) this would cost £48000 and get 44.1mpg so let’s not take that or the comparison would be not worth making. Let’s take a VW Golf Bluemotion. Reasonable spec and around £8000 outright buy price. For an extra £300 you can get a service warranty for 30000 miles or 3 years, whichever is the shorter. Taking my 500 miles a month figure you would not exceed the 30000 in the 3 year period. As the car is new you would not have to pay for an MOT test and let us presume the tax is £0 (I don’t think it is, but some hybrid cars are so we’ll give it the benefit of the doubt). Let’s also give it an inflated mpg because I know some claim to be able to do over 70. So taking 70 mpg baseline x my 500 miles I would need 7.14 gallons half the amount and only £37.90/ month for fuel. So for my first 3 years I’m paying £9364 in purchase price and fuel, add £1260 for 3 years worth of insurance (although with the car being worth far more the insurance will be higher) = £10624. The subsequent 2 years will cost more, I will no longer receive free servicing and if I do not get the car serviced I will lose further value on it – already my car will have depreciated by >20% just for having used it at all. However the car should be reliable so let us half the £500 I have allocated to my older car for niggles. The insurance cost is likely to stay steady because although the car depreciates in value and I get a no claims bonus the cost of insurance is usually rising, and I was generous at the beginning so you’ll have to allow me this one! So £250 niggles, £840 insurance, £910 fuel, £100 x2 wear and tear = £2200 +£10624 = £12824 full 5 year cost. Rounding up as I did with the old car analogy it’s £13,000

The difference in latent financial cost is therefore £3000 however there is of course the environmental issue of my old car’s emissions, these have a much higher concentration of CO2 compared with a modern car, some of which have very little. Though I could get the lpg conversion for £1k. It is estimated that 11% of carbon impact comes from production of the car with the rest coming from the usage. So were you to buy a hybrid car for example it is likely to be more environmentally efficient than a used car. However in the example of the VW Golf as I have given I am having to come up with £8k just to start the process, if I were to go for the finance option of paying every month I would pay a great deal more in total – somewhere around £10k and if at any point I missed payments I would effectively own nothing. This does not detract from the environmental argument but even were I to look at a used hybrid car I am looking at around £5000 minimum, even factoring in a part exchange on my old car at full value that takes it down to £4500.

So using this rather basic example green cars are indeed cheaper to the environment than old petrol and diesel cars the cost is not environmental but financial. It is simply not feasible for most people to come up with several thousand pounds, when the squeeze on petrol prices, the loss of earnings due to inflation and the rise in home energy prices are pushing surplus income to a bare minimum. I would I confess reluctantly give up my old car but given the large reduction in monthly expenditure it would certainly persuade me to do so were I to be able to afford it. The lack of being able to save this money where those with more disposable income were able to do so further widens the division between those on the higher incomes from those on the lower ones. It is the same sort of argument with taking the train (where it exists as an option for your journey), or regular buses (should the routes exist that make you able to use these) the cost of these so frequently price the lower-incomed out of the market. Environmental considerations are wonderful if only we could afford them.

Song Of The Day ~ Deacon Blue – Raintown

Mediawatch – The Trouble With Derek

When I first saw the trailers for Derek I was concerned as it looked like Ricky Gervais had written what was supposed to be a comedy about what appeared a clichéd depiction of someone with learning difficulties and/or autism.  It seemed that if the trailer looked this crass I was either misinterpreting the program, or that the depiction was inaccurate, or just that it was a shit and potentially very bigotted piece of writing.  I have to give context here, I do not like Ricky Gervais, I don’t find him particularly funny and as a person he comes across as pretty objectionable. I saw him first on the comic current affairs program the 11 o’clock show many years ago where he was given a brief solo spot, I did not find him at all funny he seemed bland and a little puerile and I did not expect him to return to the screen.  Looking back now it is easy to superimpose thoughts I have had since onto how I felt about him then, in truth I simply did not give him much time, he wasn’t prominent or notable enough.   Now I could see his performances then as having something of the counter-revolutionary alternative comedy about them, the post-modern Jim Davidson if you like, stripped of any tangible malice or outright bigotry but neither especially witty nor observant.  The comedian for Thatcher’s children and that’s still an overriding impression I have.  My guess is that he would be very matey if you were in his gang and a right twat if you weren’t.  So that does tell you the colour glasses I’d be wearing when casting a critical eye over his output.  I hope I have retained some objectivity or at least that my subjectivity has grounds!

The Office was largely well-written and certainly well-acted and had David Brent been played by someone else I think the tragi-comedy element would have been drastically heightened.  It is easy for me to find fault with something that has been a huge success, but success means good no more than it means perfect. For me the Ricky Gervais David Brent was consistently annoying, not uncommon in anti-heroes but with few if any redeeming features and here lay the lack of any sympathy for the character it was an exercise in car-crash tv waiting for the next excruciating cringe.  Having myself at the time an office workplace and line managers with equally few redeeming features I wallowed in this dramatisation of what seemed like my career it was an identification with rather than a wry regard from without.

Gervais’s next project was ‘Extras” which seemed frankly an excuse to get as many famous actors onto a series as possible, as if simply notches on a slate.  I found it disengaging and consequently disengaged.  I heard few if any people speaking about it and no evidence that i had made a rash decision.

Gervais then went to Hollywood and the trailer I saw for the film in which he was cast made me think of a vehicle of a Black And White Minstrel show using Gervais as a quirky Englishman playing to American stereotypes.  Now this is not fair since I did not see the film and trailers are notoriously biased toward what they think will appeal to the audience they are hoping to attract, but I’ve once written a review of a film I didn’t see that received a favourable comment from someone who had done so I’m no stranger to judgementalism!

And so on to Derek.  The only thing I had heard about the program was Gervais’s assertion that this was a favourable portrayal.  For the entire program Derek is shown with facial ticks, a perpetual open-mouthed gormless expression, a shuffling gait and a constant repetition of words in what would often be categorised as an autistic fashion. It is the pastiche of how anyone might perceive the autistic, the sort of ‘man in the street’ view of “the afflicted”.  Derek’s dress sense is no less clichéd the shirt top button done up, the lack of any colour in the clothing, stereotypical light brown shirt and dark brown jacket with nylon slacks directly out of 1974. Having been very recently to a centre dealing with people with extreme conditions of learning difficulty I can state without fear of contradiction that in those I met fashion sense has moved on at the same pace as everyone else’s.

Ultimately the show was meant to be a comedy and so should be judged in that light but the comedy elements Gervais writes are obvious and badly crafted, the sitting on the bowl on the chair, the falling in the pond are both utterly cringeworthy and tedious. Sometimes being able to see what is coming can be funny others it looks staged and ridiculous and this falls into the latter, it makes standing on a rake or slipping on a banana skin look new and edgy.  When he tries to show anything other than a vacant staring open-mouthed simpleton it comes across as clumsy, no more is this better illustrated than when one of the elderly inhabitants dies and Derek is recounting that she has said that it was more important to be kind than clever or good looking at which point he stumbles out that he is neither clever or good looking but is kind.  It just seems awkward, something one could not imagine a character that is not autistic saying, one would have expected more self-deprecation from a non-autistic person.  It was a scene that could and should have been tender and emotional and with minimum difficulty save for an ability to act.  In The Office Gervais had the excuse to look into the camera as this was in the context of it being a fly-on-the-wall documentary, Derek uses the same premise but his continuing to look in the camera gives more the impression that the style is used to allow Gervais to keep attention on him rather than anything else.  The character would probably have been a great deal more convincing if less comfortable in from of the camera.

Kerry Goodleman’s performance had some heart and her head butting one of the chavs on the way out of the pub was definitely the funniest moment of the 1/2 hour, admittedly without comparison.  Karl Pilkington, who in the limited experience I have of him comes across as a fairly vacuous person, gives a performance that shows Gervais up and this is in spite of Pilkington’s character being very unsympathetic.  Where Pilkington’s character performs the task of highlighting how little we think of the treatment of elderly people the defence is mounted in such a way by Gervais as to make it look like it is only normal for it to be so negative since those who do care have something wrong with them.  There was little else that offered any redemption and I cannot help but see it as a loss of time in my life that I would like to have back to spend more constructively.

If this is supposed to be sympathetic and demonstrating feeling for a character who may suffer ridicule and stigma due merely to his style and manner it is a horrendous way of doing so and is either the fault of the writer(s) or Gervais’ acting that this does not come across at all. The character and acting of Gervais in this is self-indulgant, ill-conceived and cruel.  It strikes me as being one that Gervais has seen in someone somewhere and decided to embellish and exploit for comic purpose in a sniggering and schoolboy way and this perhaps more than anything else shows how we allow certain people to be treated.  It is childish in the sort of way that is not merely ignorant humour but has a nastier streak.  Whether or not Gervais feels such a critique is unfair this is the way I found the program and I fail to see how anyone else might find it otherwise.  The trouble with humour is that whilst it is to be defended in its lampooning of things and I have stood up for Chris Morris in the past for his very sharp and deeply uncomfortable depictions of bigotry and fear it is because I feel that his doing so is not of malicious intent but is designed in essence to be constructive to prick the bubble of malign acquiescence that that which is harmful.  Of course once again this is my subjective interpretation of constructive so perhaps I should defend Gervais’s right to be shit, he will certainly continue to be so with or without my blessing.

Song Of The Day ~ Echobelly – Dark Therapy

Last Train To St. Pancras (Part 2)

To be sat in a pub off Tavistock Square that called itself “The London Pub” serving a beer of which I had neither heard nor tasted, something which I might now regard to have been a time of joyous innocence, suffice to say it was not especially palatable.  Perhaps it was not the beer’s fault, perhaps the pipes hadn’t been cleaned in years, perhaps in this sort of establishment I had been in fact the only ale drinker in years.  This was not a pub, it was more like a themed bar, the sort you might find in an airport in the far flung reaches of the old empire trying to market itself as the last bastion of Britishness in a sea of indigenous heathenism.  A metaphorical rock of Gibraltar where things were preserved in aspic so as not to dilute them with native culture.  Someone not from these collection of islands might assume this is only the same as the countless “Irish pubs” all over the world, staffed very often by people whose notion of Ireland is of the faeries and men in Enid Blyton green hats with black bands who grow up knowing how to make shoes and drink large quantities of beer.  In a way I suspect the inside is designed to be a similar sort of thing, it just doesn’t work as somewhere warm and friendly, more cold and functional.  Is it that a British-themed pub has less charm, or cannot achieve the level of homely tweeness that its Western neighbours achieve effortlessly?  That isn’t really for me to answer, Irish pubs for me often represent a place I can get a pint of ale in an otherwise lager-infused location, it also has a familiar sense of the images I grew up with being told of “the auld country” by my grandparents.  The English pub is one I am maybe even more familiar with but less of a uniform concept and more of specific people and places associated with ones in which I have been a regular or drunk occasionally, and some in which I have been regularly or occasionally drunk.  An English theme pub homogenises that concept and I can only look upon it with disdain.

I think in this case of the ‘London Pub’ it’s just as much to do with its location, would you expect to find an Irish-themed pub in Dublin?  It seemed strange, alien, embodying a sense of this being a London I didn’t know and the people in it being the sort I would not normally expect to mix with, rather those I might merely regard from a distance, be it forced or voluntary.  This was not even the seedy East of St Pancras area that I now had good reason to be wary of now, even that wariness comes with a familiarity of what the area represents, a frisson almost a lure towards looking behind the curtain to see the stains.  The knowledge of something whether good or bad still demystifies to an extent.  But  this wasn’t the London I knew, where before I might have been frequently in the area (albeit in an era in which this crass approximation of a pub would not have existed) it would have been daytime, and me less than 12 years old and accompanied by a responsible adult.  I would also have been a native then, indeed I was bought a badge more than 30 years go that said “I’m not a tourist I live here” which I saw as funny rather than what might for some have been a fledging journey into racism!

The world looks so different when all the expectations of an outing are that it will be enjoyable something one may have been looking forward to for some time, or been surprised by first thing in the morning.  Because of the nature of the things I had been here for in the past it was an area where good things happened,  I did not use the darker area of Kings X for the things with which it has become synonymous nor knew of them.  During and in fact ever since then I have had no cause to be around late at night here for any reason.  Looking back the times of day, times of life, and times of things around seemed, and in some cases were, so different.  Now as I search it is not for someone with whom to spend the night for money.  Or is it but with more random chaotic seemingly benign means, ones that are less the sure thing and more the 100-1 outside shot, the pick-up in a bar kind where money merely facilitates the talking in the hope the clothes may fall off without further cost later.

I could not have known the nature of the district in the early hours searching for a decent pint of beer and something to distract a person not yet ready for sleep.  (I use the term decent advisedly in the knowledge that there was at this time of night unlikely to be anything that would taste even remotely drinkable this side of a bottle. I don’t see this as having been that different years ago it’s just that then you probably wouldn’t have even bothered to expect there to be any chance of quenching or any other kind of sustenance other than the sweaty and pocket-emptying kind.

In this place it feels that this is the London of those who may be glad to be here, many who may not have to do so for long, shielded from the darkness of living here from day to day.  Passing their time without knowledge of the squalid and exorbitant accommodation, the lack of prospects, the deadness inside of the inhabitants.  Those forced to view all the city has to offer from afar never able to experience it for the lack of the money required to do so, money which they have spent in subsidising these self same attractions in the first place.  I can smell the thick languid cigarette smoke, that of a group of people unsullied by the financial trappings of needing to put food on the table, for nowadays it is scarcely possible to afford both.  I have done the same in my past, cities I have stayed in and enjoyed for their beauty looking at that which lies on the surface not regarding how that experience may differ from that of the permanent resident.  There are also a small number in which I have stayed in and subsequently returned to hoping that what had occurred on holiday might repeat when permanently based there.  It is yet to do so in my experience.

It put my prior musings on this area into perspective, just as visiting the homeless shelter close by had done some years ago.  I may have the option of a train elsewhere but I know the real side of things here, the side even many of the long-term inhabitants neither see nor really want to.  In my own life I had once an occasion to see just how fragile the safety net between what seems from the outside to be comfortable and safe respectability to what seems the lowest of the low and how this is viewed to be something entirely of ones own making.  When you rent your home you are never as far from destitution as you might like to think.  Once you open that box there is no unlearning of its contents.  Since that point every day has seemed always one step away from the destitute to preserve the comfortable. It is not the maintaining a pretence or the image to other people, it is staving off that falling through the net, the becoming part of the anonymous statistic that allows the invisibility society hopes will shield them from having to face the problem and glimpse under the carpet. When you are aware the demon is so close to our face it is impossible not to stare it in the eye and to feel the fear from its gaze, you may attempt to bury your head in the sand if you deny it is there in the first place but once you know you do not forget. You can then choose to ignore the consequences, pretend they couldn’t happen to you, with your good job, middle class education and nice shiny things.  You cannot eat your education nor live in your things and your job is as dependent on the patronage of others as your home may be.  Ostensibly it is mere chance whether it is you who end up there or someone else.  If you think ‘there but for the grace of God’ then you are merely adding a third party’s patronage that you now have to rely on too.

Why did I come here? To attempt to drink?  To attempt to score? With an altogether different motive?  The first seems unlikely, for though I know London to be a world city I would be surprised if, save for the suburbs and their real pubs where you are known well enough to be safely locked in after hours, you would find a good pint of ale.  The second question seems even more unlikely than the beer, I was never good riding shotgun or solo in such endeavours and age, girth and thinning mane has not given me new found confidence that things might be just about to change.  As for other motives I cant even think of any of them at the moment.  So is this simply the boredom of the certain aged man who is young enough to remember the old days but no longer young enough to have time or lack of responsibility to enjoy them as he might have done?  Am I now the lone man who stands out, on the sidelines looking in, the one that those on the inside think they will never become.  ’Jealous of youth’s first yearning for lust‘ as one of the finest lyricists once put it.

This is surely the action of just Mr A N Other person lost in the foreign city looking for something or someone to cling to on a dark night with no other consequence in sight for the next 8 hours. And this is indeed now just another foreign city, not merely because it has changed, I have not been around enough to properly assess that, and therein lies the crux of it, I have changed away from it whilst it has changed without me.  I am no longer at home as me here, I belong to it no more than it now does to me.  If you do not belong to the place in which you were born you are destined to walk many streets, be that a freedom or a condemnation, there are things a foreigner sees that a native does not, you see the invisible people because you are no longer accustomed to them being there, you walk streets where there could be anything around the next corner, except a pub.  But there are things only a native can see such as the way home and the smallest section of themselves encased within the vast sea of brick and concrete and there are things only a native can do such as accept and be truly accepted by that same sea.

Song Of The Day ~ The Korgis – Everybody’s Got To Learn Sometime

Last Train To St. Pancras

Much of my life has been intertwined with St Pancras and its surrounds, although it might not really seem to have at first glance, being myself anchored for most of my childhood years in West London.  It was only something I was contemplating whilst sat across the road from the station in the Euston Flyer enjoying a pint.  St Pancras is a vast cathedral like structure, red and white brick and a clock tower, it is gothic and Victorian splendour, an edifice built when times were good and railways made statements about themselves and in London all met and vied for attention like preening Gods.  It’s worth googling for images for those not familiar with it. It isn’t just the external fascia of the station but the cast iron and glass canopy that stretches across the platform evokes a bygone era where it was service and comfort that held sway over cost-cutting and ambivalence.

Superlatives of the station have been said before and doubtless will continue to be but where some of London’s termini have an element of nostalgia because of their association with heritage or purely their association with personal times in my life St Pancras is I think the only one that I love for itself and still stand for a few moments when my train arrives just to take it in. The station itself was in fact the last London terminus that I had caught a train from (not until my 30s) though I’ll grant you that is not an especially sparkling item of intelligence.

Some years ago St Pancras had fallen into some disrepair, nationalisation followed by re-privatisation had robbed any thoughts of the financial in the first instance and the aesthetic in the second.  Indeed in the late 1960s it was apparently 10 days from demolition until John Betjeman led a campaign to save it.  It is strange for me to hear just how hated it once was when soulless brutalist monstrosities were thriving and in many places continue to.  Most of the main railway stations in London are but shadows of what they once commanded, eclipsed by buildings that are higher and more eye-catching (frequently for the wrong reasons) and then with added modern bits built purely for their functionality paying no heed to the original architecture or its possible significance.  In this regard the rebuild of the glass canopy at St Pancras is an absolute masterpiece, intricately planned to fulfil both function and beauty, you really do just have to be there.  There is no doubt in my mind that the great Betjeman would have sat and enjoyed it as he had the original.

Since I did not use the station until my 30s it was the area around it that had more influence on me.  Here was the place where aged 4 and in the flat of my Mother’s then boyfriend, whilst they practised music, I got bored watching the trains go in and out of St. Pancras station and decided to walk home to Chelsea (as the crow flies around 4.5 miles).  I knew the number 45 bus went past the station and also over Battersea Bridge which was near home, at that age the route and salubrity of the passing districts was of no consequence to me, I had no concept of it. Walking what I perceived to be long distances at the time did not phase me either, I did it frequently, usually when I was bored.  (I had awoken my best friend’s mother one morning at 6am having walked the mile from my house because I had woken up and wanted to play).  My excursion through the notorious King’s Cross and district  in pursuit of the 45 was stopped by a pair of traffic wardens on the Grays Inn Road, much to my annoyance. They took me back to their base and bribed me with a packet of Refreshers. At which point I divulged our home telephone number and they rang my mother who had been in a state of high panic having been informed by her distraught boyfriend of my absence. These were the days without mobile phones so the search party was not able to be called off until some time later when a by then  catatonic boyfriend rang to tell my mother that there had been no luck locating me. This was one of those times of more relief than anger and I escaped unscathed. I found out later when a parent myself why this was.

Euston the next London Terminus 500 yards down the road too has been linked to these early years, trains to Liverpool to visit family when I was young before my stepmother could drive coupled with frequent visits to the still favourite family restaurant since its opening 30 years ago.  Such a post would not be complete with a plug for the Great Nepalese Restaurant, Eversholt st, a jewel in an otherwise very grubby crown of an area!  Almost right next door to St Pancras is Kings Cross station where throughout the late 70s and early 80s we caught trains to St Neots to visit the two closest people I had to sisters, the younger of the girls being the goddaughter to my mother the older born 2 weeks before me someone I had known literally all of my life.

During these years there were regular trips to the Scala cinema, regarded now as something of a cult place when in its heyday, it had begun its life just up from Goodge Street in 1979 and moved to Kings Cross 2 years later. Looking back on it the Scala must have been a surreal experience for most children, they showed a lot of lesser seen films and childrens comic-like films. I no longer recall what I watched there but I remember the programs that promised eclectic all-night festivals back-to-back film marathons and the colours everywhere. The cinema was always quite dark and almost seedy feeling but not in an unpleasant way, more exciting. Had it been in Soho I imagine it would have seemed a fitting venue for a downmarket strip joint but here it wasn’t and I was unaware of the nature of the red light district of King’s Cross just up the road.  I had been brought up on the Kings Road, so eclectic was practically something I had been born into, the Scala didn’t seem weird to me at all. I wish now I had kept the programs of the Scala in its pomp they would have made for quite fascinating reading and shown alternative London in its true form when the term alternative meant specifically not the mainstream rather than marginally leftfield versions of the norm as it is so often now.  I lament the loss of the Scala, its present incarnation is not one I have visited for I know it cannot live up to any expectations and though hazy I would like the feeling of my memories of the place to remain intact.

The Maiden Lane estate just off York Way, up from Kings Cross was where some friends of my mothers lived whom we visited often. Their flat always interested me as these modern block were squat and stacked together, they had minimal windows on one side and big expansive ones in the sitting room through which you could look out on the whole area. 2000ad was in its early days and these were the flats and estates I imagined that Mega City One would be like. Back then such housing estates seemed innovative, and perhaps in fact were, there was for me no knowledge of crime, now I look at the estate and it is precisely the sort of place I would give a very wide berth. Camden Town has associations with Dingwalls market (now known as Camden Lock) and alternative music, the area that the real bohemians went after being priced out of the Kings Road, as they had been in the 60s from Carnaby St. (Where they have all gone now I couldn’t say, there is barely a part of London affordable these days)

I have been a participant of almost the entire life of a political party here, its fledgling conception in the Euston Friends meeting house, its founding convention in Camden Town Hall, its first congress, its finished constitution and its final capitulation into left-wing sectarianism. It was the dawn of hope and the dusk of despair and it sent me back to being an exiled activist.  That set of events almost summed up the periods of time I had been here, as the exuberant youth boundless with enthusiasm, attacking with vigour, passion and no fear.  As the adolescent with much of the verve but with more serious things on his mind, things that needed more thought and examination to fulfil dreams that remain lofty and ambitious.  Then as the middle-aged man, shaped by so much of no consequence and in realising it and the time which has been spent on it turns inward upon himself looking for something to blame having failed to find someone.  Now perhaps it is time for my brickwork to be cleaned, to be returned to the youth I was buoyed by the enjoyment of the fact that whilst so much has changed the majestic station remains as it has been, a beacon, for so many years.

Song Of The Day ~ The Strokes – Is This It

Spit Or Swallow?

Before we go any further I would like to state categorically that I have used the title entirely in a benign coquetishness and not at all to open a discussion on one’s sodium intake.

“Not only does one drink wine, but one inhales it, tastes it – and then talks about it.” – Edward VII

I only started drinking wine in the Spring of 1993 when after clearing a table in a restaurant in which I was working I happened upon half a bottle of an inexpensive Macôn-Villages. The manager said I could have it, I was 21 and working in a restaurant I wasn’t proud! Since my only experience of wine up to that point had been supermarket hock that was occasionally brought to the family home at parties by well-meaning but viticulturally-ignorant guests my palette was not especially refined. After the Macôn-Vill I decided that I liked wine. The manager seizing on my new youthful zeal put me in charge of sorting out the wine cellar and ordering wines where applicable. For those who’ve never been in a proper wine cellar you should, even if you don’t like wine it is a unique environment, where the nature of things is often defined by the amount of cobweb and dust an item has built up. The cold damp musty smells that signify the correct conditions that anywhere else in the house you’d have the damproofers in straight away. It has a historical feel like somewhere out of the 19th century, somewhere that you sort of assume is an unwitting surprise discovery each time you open the door. And then of course there is the wine itself. There is something about a bottle of wine that lends itself to mystique, the coloured labels, the exotic names and locations from which they come, the price tags on some, the perception that only posh people drink it, the fact that you can age it so that it’ll taste different and then after all that until you open it you never quite know what you’re going to get.

I mean lots of people like wine, but unlike most of them I was paid money to like wine for a while. I even remember some of that while, which is perhaps an indication that I didn’t like wine nearly as much as I could have done! After the restaurant I got a job in an off-licence which with a wage packet and 15% staff discount on the alcohol which made me both occasionally more popular and very frequently drunk whilst at university. During my time at the offy I got to host wine tastings which was a quite pleasurable social event and if managed carefully can lead to quite a trolleying later on when the “remnants” of the bottles used have to be disposed of. I recall a particularly entertaining Sunday evening when having closed the shop the manager and I proceeded to get bolloxed on a “few” dregs of a particularly fine Cabernet Sauvignon. I hasten to add this was at least marginally speaking on our own time, to have charged the company for both the wine and the time to drink it would have been churlish, I have standards of decency!

The highlight of the job was a trip to the International Wine Fair at Olympia. This is, so far as I can see, the premier event in this country for winemakers, distributors and retailers, it is a veritable vintnerial delight and I got there early so as not to miss anything! Basically each winemaker sets up their stall with a number of wines to try in the hope that you may buy some. The fair takes place over 3 days and some of the winemakers have themselves comes from the countries in which they work as far afield as Australia, South Africa and Chile. In all honesty I had gone there expecting to find out about wines and perhaps get the odd free sample or two having never been to such an event before. What I was unaware of was that on the third day, which was the day I went, provided the wineries had managed to sell sufficient contracts to the big players to justify their visit they could relax a little, be more chatty and enjoy things a little more. They could afford to be a little more generous, word of mouth is a good way to get known and even a lonely sales assistant can spread things around their shop and beyond. Since at the time I worked in one of the more only salubrious areas in SE London I did indeed have some influence over the buying habits of those with a bit of cash to spend. Hence by lunchtime I was decidedly shaky on my feet. This was a scenario which was not going to end well, the prospect of being carried from the venue into an ambulance to have my stomach pumped did not appeal especially and neither did missing out on the tasting of all of these wines!

There were cuspidors at every stand and a great many people with big noses were using them frequently, usually in a manner that seemed to maintain their pomposity, no mean feat when you are spitting something out. I had always hitherto spurned the cuspidor, not simply because I was too common to spit, nor to do with any dipsomaniacal tendencies I may have had but because to me part of the process of tasting a wine is how it goes down the throat and the length of it on the palette. It is true you can get some of this from sloshing it around your mouth but I didn’t, and still don’t, believe that you get the same experience as you do when drinking the taster properly. All that being said at the stage of being several over the 8 by lunchtime the likely conclusion of my going home with so many wines untested seemed a shame and the cuspidor became suddenly an item of use. I had something hearty to eat and went off spitting with wanton abandon. Ok not in every case I’ll grant youn aturally there had to be some form of floor limit to this since I was unlikely to get a chance to drink wine that was either extremely old or more than £50 I decided that it would be foolish not to have what I could of these on the one time only basis. This strategy worked and I spent the rest of the afternoon getting only slowly pissed and being able to hold sufficient conversation that I had a long chat to Leska de Wet, wife of South African winemaker Danny, who subsequently presented me with 3 bottles of wine that I had tasted and enjoyed and told me that they’d had a good festival and were delighted that I had enjoyed their wine. In addition to this I got some dregs of a 1971 Burgundy, which was I confess a little past its best, the bottle of which I retain on my bookcase. And so dear reader I hope I have illustrated that a cuspidor is not merely for decorative purposes or to indulge big-nosed idiots to feel like they’re in touch with the spit and sawdust pub visiting commoners. I like to think that the big noses themselves are also only doing so to avoid themselves getting shit-faced, perhaps their financial threshold of wine to swallow is a little higher!

What the wine festival did was expose me to a large number of wines of all sorts of grapes, blends, countries etc. and the biggest advantage of this is that when I go to an off licence or more frequently these days a supermarket (where now the Threshers, Wine Racks, Bottoms Ups, Unwins and Oddbins of old?) I can pick a wine that I am most likely to enjoy and likewise take something to a party that won’t be that bottle that sits around for months until the hosts forget who brought it in the first place and bring it back to a party of yours. Even this is hit and miss, I might like one vintage and not the other, whether or not you notice that a vintage has changed you’ll still notice if it tastes different and if ever a wine you like suddenly takes on a twang you don’t remember that is probably exactly what has happened.

In the early days I thought the wild and fantastical adjectives used by people such as Jilly Goolden and Oz Clarke such as tasting like ‘hollyhocks’ and ‘a horses saddle’ were entertaining from a linguistic point of view were nothing further than pretentious tosh. Part of me is not convinced that may not still be the case but I confess as I have tasted more wines the nuance in tastes has meant using a wider vocabularly to define them because as you get beyond what was then the £5 a bottle mark and is probably now the £10 a bottle mark the depth and definition of a bottle of wine does vary a colossal amount. I have indeed now tasted a wine that tasted like chewing leather but oddly not in an unpleasant way, I cannot prove this to anyone unless you tried it yourself but bring me a bottle of Chateau Musar 1991 and I challenge you not to find the same (as a point of information you can pick up the 2004 for a mere £17.99 and the 1989 will cost you the comparatively small sum of £75 – when you think this means someone else has stored it for you for more than 20 years that isn’t bad). Of course I don’t know whether the other vintages of Musar taste the same as the ’91 so bring a couple of bottles of those for comparison too!

Wine tasting is an incredibly complex business and I do now have genuine respect and admiration for the level of detail which some people can pick up out of a simple swig, I used to be able to tell the specific grape, provided it wasn’t a blend, I could often tell the country and very occasionally get the year to within two or three if it was less than 10 years old. However to tell the exact year, the level of blend and even the Chateau from which it comes shows not only a laudable capability of memory but also one of being able to quaff a biblical amount of wine. And here is the only difference. If you listened to an music album in not too long you would know what the songs are and even a lot of the lyrics, were you to listen to another you would have the comparison to determine more definitively the style of the band and personnel whilst retaining your information of the previous album you continue to build up knowledge of the new song names and lyrics. By a third album you would like as not pick up any change in personnel and begin to chart whether this was the bands older or newer style, if you find out the year you could start to determine their influences and all the time continue to add to the song and lyric information you already hold. By the time you have listened to all of the albums by that artist you would a line of text be able to tell the song, who sang it, which album it was from, what the year was, what the make-up of the band was, what there influences were at the time and perhaps even snippets around its recording. All this would have come from continued exposure to the artist building a database of information in your mind of each minute specific as to the makeup of the whole. So it is with wine.

However exactly like music, you can be able to define all this to the nth degree, you can know all there is to know about the grape, the vintage, the chateau, the slope at the chateau, etc. etc. at the end of the day you still might not like the taste and this is the whole crux of the argument, When you choose a wine you have to choose one you like within your budget, it doesn’t matter if you like a 1982 Chateau Margaux at a hefty £1200+ or a bottle of Chilean red at £5.99 just so long as you like it and can afford it. You might think that £1200 is a stupid amount to pay for a bottle of wine, I might as well, but then we haven’t drunk a bottle of 82 Chateau Margaux so it is impossible to say whether or not it is worth it. I do remember when I first tasted a bottle of wine that was twice as expensive as the norm and tasting immediately the difference, if that is replicated up the financial scale then the Margaux is likely to be the nearest thing to a liquid orgasm this side of a Pan Galactic Gargleblaster. The trouble is the more different wines you try the more you search for the ones that were the nicest and the less likely the cheap and perfectly cheerful wines will appeal (they are often great in the cooking!) there is no returning to the acceptable you are ruined it just doesn’t measure up in the same way. It’s rather like contentedly listening to the Dave Clark Five until Led Zeppelin come along and blow your mind, there’s no going back to Dave Clark it just doesn’t cut the mustard. Very difficult to match a wine with mustard, possibly a nice Chianti if you were interested!

Song Of The Day ~ The Dubliners – Seven Drunken Nights

The Pre-50 50

Back in 2004 when I was what seems now like a tender age of 32 I created a list My Pre-40 Top 40 which was designed to outline the things I wished to achieve before 2011 when I hit the less than eagerly-anticipated age of 40.  My reasons for making the list public were multiple, firstly I thought it would be of interest to people to see what it was that I wished to do, the things that made up my character, or that which I hoped would make up my character.  Secondly I wanted to put it out there in order to give myself the impetus of doing these things, a kick up the arse in the wanting not to look stupid in front of my readership, like an internal competition as it were, something I need to spur me on a little.  I think were I to have had a steady relationship during this time and had I shared my list with my partner there might have been an overlap in the things they wanted to do too, thus increasing the likelihood of some of these happening.  This may of course be my slothfulness attempting to abdicate responsibility and trying to place the onus on someone else making sure I do what I should want to do enough myself.  I am fairly sure though in my defence that I would be nurtuting enough of my partner to help them complete items on their list whether or not they were something of interest to me.  There is a great pleasure seeing someone you love find or achieve something that makes them happy.  If you have helped and participated in any way it heightens this joy because it makes you feel useful.

I had achieved a fairly derisory number of these items when I hit the magic age, I had however accomplished some other things but it would be disingenuous to claim that this mitigates the fact that I should have done more than I actually did.  It is something that I feel somewhat ashamed of, many were perfectly within my power to do, whilst others could have been done with a little more focus and planning, and quite a lot of determination.  They say you have to want something enough, it is also what I tell my children, but I do believe I want some of these things, many of these things, in some ways ALL of these things, and yet they have not happened.  Did I perhaps spread myself too thin or allow myself to be dictated by the indolence that has defined me more than anything else across my life?  [I did begin the process in certain areas which may have a more long-term effect, I have at various points lost weight, at times quite a bit, at times less than I put on but at present I am about the level I was at in my early thirties but no longer smoking so can officially now say that I have given up and not merely traded one vice for another.  I had not solved my passport dilemma in 2004 and had not been abroad since 1997, it was too long then and it wasn't until 2008 when I finally sorted it and got out.  Within 45 minutes of my arrival in Cannes I stood outside the hotel having a smoke, basking in the sunshine hearing French radio in the background.  It brought all the pleasure to life back, the brightness of the evening alleviated what had seemed embedded darkness within me and I felt refreshed by the heat, the culture, the proximity to the sea.  It had been 21 years since I had been in France and I hadn't realised just how much I had missed it.  Such things shape our lives and can herald a whole new series of things we know we must accomplish.]

The purpose of my last list still stands, the desire to do meaningful things that not only seek to justify my existence and therefore render the oxygen I have breathed to have been of some purpose, but also to have been able to derive the pleasure from those accomplishments.  And so spurred on by my actions 8 years ago and my inactions since then, coupled with a post by my erstwhile travelling companion, (the one who is going to get a punch up the bracket if he continues to refer to me as his sidekick!) I have resolved to create a Pre-50 Top 50 – the extra 10 being a penance for not having completed my original 40.  It will be interesting at least for me to compare, to see whether this tells me anything about who I was and who I am now, hence as I write this it is not my intention to look at my last list at all so that the things I choose whilst perhaps duplicating will only be doing so because I thought of them independently now as I did then.

This is not an exhaustive list, though I am likely to get exhausted thinking about and writing it) nor is it designed to be one that includes silly wooly stuff or dreams that have little hope of coming true, or are at least not at all under my control to make happen.  This list must be things that require me to do something, I cannot rely on others to be in control or even to help, if they choose to assist that is another matter.

Personal and Inter Personal Development

1. Move abroad (again) – I can’t guarantee this but I really do need to try, I feel better in Europe and I think actually I am better in Europe, it has to wait until the kids are old enough to come as and when they wish, but that isn’t as far off as it once seemed.

2. Leave IT for something meaningful – This is an absolute must before my soul is erased beyond recovery!

3. Go for custody of my children – For them, for me, at the very least to show that they have someone willing to take on the system for them.

4. Rationalise my stuff into want I need and a little of what commemorates my past for posterity. – This has always been a goal, perhaps the least attainable of the lot

5. Keep off the fags (been nearly 2 1/2 years now) – one can never say never but I am still pretty strong on this, most of the time!

6. Do an MA either in Linguistics or Trade Union relations – This depends on finance, these days education is not seen as something that will benefit society only something that should benefit the Exchequer and institutional coffers.

7. Write something every week – I need to get back to doing this, I used to and sometimes I write far more but often it just dries up and frequently due to nothing more than indolence

8. Read a book every month – I have long since needed to read again, I used to do so when I commuted on the train but cannot do so whilst driving.  Now I need to find a time and set it aside, it will be its own reward.

9. Write a book every year – and not just part of a book either, perhaps this should have been finish one of the books every year!

10. Finish my play – to avoid it becoming like the books!

11. Get an anthology of poetry published – it would be nice, not vital but perhaps more important than it ought to be, this should be offset perhaps with the goal to stop searching for validation from others.

12. Send more work to competitions and journals – see above

13. Take more photographs – I used to take loads and nowadays I still see beautiful scenery all the time and moments that I should capture but my trusty Praktica BC1 is not in the car and such moments are lost forever.

14. Do an anonymous selfless act each week – this isn’t as much of an ego trip as it sounds for whilst it will undoubtedly give me some pleasure it will also brighten albeit briefly someone else’s day and that might lead to another good act.  I cannot expect the world to change to my way of thinking without trying to do something!

15. Think before I speak more often – Yes I REALLY need to do that!

16. Slow dance with someone – I’ve still never done this, in later life the situation never presented itself but the thought is a throwback to those many occasions watching others and having not had enough beer not to care.

17. Sit on top of a hill and watch the sun come up with someone – ok it sounds slushy perhaps and would be almost as good at sunset but I think if you’ve stayed up until sunrise and you watch that and go to bed that’s got to be special

 18. Ask people out if I like them – bit of confidence, I’m better than I used to be and if I were to continue this would go some way to offsetting the ‘what if…’ thoughts.  There is a chance for me to put that into practice sooner rather than later but circumstances are as yet unclear!

19. Go to a film marathon with someone – I guess this is just one of those sort of bonding things, to spend a large but defined amount of time within a shared interest seems a win-win.

20. Spend more time concerned with those who care about me and less concerned trying to convert those who do not. – I’m sure we’re all guilty of this but that doesn’t make it any less necessary.

21. Learn empathy – never been a strong point, I get single-minded abut things, it isn’t that I don’t care I just find it difficult to detach myself from what is my routine for that time.

Travel

22. Take someone I’m in love with to Ile Saint-Margueritte (Currently my favourite place on the planet) – were I ever to feel the need to propose to anyone this is the place I would do it, but leaving that unlikely event to one side this really is a special place.

23. Visit St-Guilhem-Le-Désert (again) – This is one of those places that is just nice to visit, it’s a lovely place with a peace about it, in spite of the many tourists

24. Buy a sailing yacht – Given that I do not, nor am likely to own a house the prospect of retirement looks bleak, even were there still to be a state pension or any other kind is doubtful that this will be sufficient to pay all the bills that I would incur living as I do now in a house with a car and the like, to live in one’s mode of transport seems sensible combining the two costs and also having some freedom.  Some might take the VW camper route but I prefer the sea.

25. Learn to sail – if my retirement plan is to have a boat then it would be sensible to be able to use it.

26. Visit Cuba – I have wanted to for many years and would prefer to do so when Fidel is still alive.  I am aware that Cuba is no paradise but they have done a number of things differently to the Western model and I would like to see for myself how this is working rather than relying on Western sources that have a vested interest in the collapse of such a society.

27. Visit Venezuela – mostly because of similar reasons to Cuba, not a perfect place but one that has chosen to be more populous-focused than business-focused, as much of the West is going further the other way it seems like a good time to check out the alternatives.

28. Drive a 1980s BMW 6 series along the French Riviera – this ticks two boxes, I love the old shark-nosed 6 series, it was an iconic sports car of the late 70s early 80s, not a wide boys car this was far superior, it cost around the same as a Ferrari then and costs about the same as a decent old style Mini now.  To drive it along the riviera would probably be the nearest to panache that I will ever attain.

29. Drive a multi-national banger rally in either an old Mini or a BMW E30 – Ok another BMW one, though I’d be just as happy in a Mini, I just think a rally would be fun, not the Cannonball Run I’ll grant you but a laugh anyway.

30. Spend a month travelling round India on trains – THis is perhaps the top travel one, the trip of a lifetime I think, India has always had a draw, the people, the colour, the food, the tea…

31. Spend a week on the Isles of Scilly

32. Leave the country once every year – one of those eminently achievable ones, I had hoped to do it from 4 years ago when I finally left but last year broke that.  This way I could go every year of my 40s.

33. Visit 1 new country every 5 years – which follows on from the last really but isn’t as valid if you just visit the same country all the time, I need to leave my comfort zone and get further afield there is a lot of world out there.

34. Visit 2 continents within the 10 years – I really need to leave my comfort zone!

35. Take the children to Ireland – the trip to the homeland, they already want to go and I want to take them but there are administrative issues.

36. Take the children to France – my Grandmother used to take me to France all the time when I was younger, it was our little excursion, no-one else ever came, I loved it.

37. Walk the route of the old Berlin Wall – I remember Berlin in the old days, I confess I miss it, the uniqueness and the sense that the place was steeped in both history and intrigue it was as magical as it was palpable.

38. Stay in the DDR theme hotel – I have to, a year in Rostock was probably pretty close but I want the full monty!

Health

39. Get into the habit of 4 forms of exercise a week

40. Cycle to work (4.8 miles)

41. Get down to 34″ waist

42. Get down to 14 stone

43. Sort out the health niggles I’m always putting off.

Money

44. Pay off debts (around £7000)

45. Don’t get into any more debt

46. Menu plan every meal – that’s EVERY meal not just towards the end of the month when I’m already skint!

47. Don’t buy mindless things just to make me feel better or less bored.

48. Sell one item on ebay for each item I buy – this is not to say I should be working out small things to sell and then buy a load of big shit, the value and size should be close together.

49. Save some money each month, even if it’s a tenner. – longer you leave it harder it is.

50. If I should be still writing (not to mention alive) at 60 I hope that I might continue the process and that it will be of as much interest as it may be now.

Should you wish to do your own list, whatever the number (!) then it would be interesting to hear/see them.

Song Of The Day ~ Blondie – 11.59