EXCUSES AND HALF TRUTHS

Grooooan. Serious dose of Sunday head, facilitated by alcoholic misbehaviour on Friday. Lately, though, C and I seem to be finding a routine where we both end up doing as little as possible over the weekend. That, tied into the poor excuse of a summer, means the garden looks like a bombsite, and I’m never in the mood to do anything about it. Still, the spuds and onions coming out of it are tasty, so I shouldn’t gripe too much.
Sunday afternoon. Soft rain outside. Up to my eyeballs in tea. Traffic’s Mr Fantasy on the stereo. It’s gonna have to be the Small Faces next. Lazy English psychedelia for a lazy English day.

Readers, I have a new heroine this morning. Jasmine Wallis was hospitalised after downing seven double espressos in a row while working in her family’s sandwich shop.
She says she didn’t realise they were doubles. I say she was just after that sweet sweet rush. And boy did she get it.

She said: “My nerves were all over the place. “I was crying in front of the customers and had tears streaming down my face.”

After going home she experienced frightening physical symptoms.

She added: “I was drenched. I was burning up and hyperventilating.

“I was having palpitations, my heart was beating so fast and I think I was going into shock.”

Oh, OK. So that’s unusual then. Maybe that’s why I’ve been getting strange looks from my clients lately…

Meet Kenneth Foster. He’s 31, and hails from San Antonio, Texas. Up until 1997 he ran a small record company, Tribulation Records. 

On August 14th 1997, Kenneth was driving a borrowed car around the streets of his home town. With him were three friends, Dewayne Dillard, Julius Steen and Mauricio Brown. 

The smoking ban in public areas has been running for just over a month now, and the strangeness is starting to come out. Case in point today – I had my first lunch break in a while, and chose to spend it outside the Crown & Two, my local pub. There were ashtrays arranged on the windowsills outside. The reason for this became clear later on, when we noticed smoke and embers coming out of the cellar hatch. We tipped beer onto the glow, and called out the staff. The embers were cigarette butts, dropped and left to smoulder in the wood. As everyone has to smoke outside, the corner of Dean and Bateman Street is kneedeep in old fag ends. It’s a side-effect I hadn’t considered. What’s especially interesting is how quiet it is inside the pubs. Quiet and clean. I could easily be persuaded to drink indoors from now on.

I can’t, not being American, but it should be noted that Elliot S! Maggin, comic writer of repute, is running for US Congress, and frankly based on this post I’d vote for him.
How can you not want to be represented by a Congressman who stands for “truth, justice and the American way?”

…but this list comes close to disproving that. Prepare to get well and truly fact up.

A couple of musical favourites…

183. Most toilets flush in E flat.

198. The buzz from an electric razor in America plays in the key of B flat; Key of G in England.

Yet another formative figure from my youth has gone to join the house band upstairs. Lee Hazlewood was one of those moody, romantic figures on which I modeled myself unsuccessfully as a yout. A maverick, a mystic, a bruised romantic. 
I still play the seminal Nancy and Lee album sometimes, and one of my favourite albums of last year, Ballad of the Broken Seas by Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan, owes a massive debt to the innocence corrupting experience dynamic that he and Nancy Sinatra had going on. (I always wondered about Nancy and the obvious thing she had for older men – a fixation that reached it’s creepy climax on Something Stupid – a love duet with her own dad. Urgh.)

I had to work late that night, and found out about it early. I called Clare to let her know.
“You’d better feed yourself, I’ve got no idea when I’ll be back,” I said.
She sighed. This had been happening a lot lately. “Ok,” she said.
“See you later,” I said, and returned to the vast stepped ziggurat of work in front of me.

By half past six that evening, it was clear that I could do no more without getting in the way, so I called it done and rang Clare.
“Good news,” I said. “I’m done, and I’m coming home to you.”
“Uh-huh,” she said. “See you soon.” She sounded distracted.

I was home by eight o’clock. Clare was studying, frowning over Shakespeare’s Henry V. She’d scattered books and papers over the table in the back room. “Hey baby,” she said, smiling gently, and got up to give me a hug.

“Listen, I’ve eaten,” I said. To a point, that was true. My dinner had been the chicken katsu curry I’d abandoned at lunchtime, unevenly microwaved and wolfed while I worked. “But I can do you something.”
All she wanted was something simple, pasta and sauce, the kind of thing she’d cook if I wasn’t around. That’s what I did. Spaghetti carbonara. While she worked, I divided my attention between her dinner and a couple of emails. The house was silent apart from the puttering of the water for the pasta. We were both perfectly quiet, perfectly at peace.

She left half of the carbonara, but then I always cook too much. I’m used to making food for two.

When she was done, and had gone back to her books, I tidied up around her. She kissed me on the cheek as I bent to take her plate away.
“You don’t have to wait on me like this,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I do.”

Later, we had ice cream.

I’ve had a love/hate relationship with the guitar since I was in my early 20s, and it’s not getting any less dysfunctional. I practise on occasion, moon over guitar magazines and tabs, and generally fanny around in a wan and flappy manner that let me tell you readers is not attractive to the ladies. I can hear Clare’s teeth gritting whenever I pick up my Argos special.
Perhaps I need a new direction, away from tabs and scales and chords and set tunings. Explore the instrument, and find out how to relate to the object as mine, rather than it dictating terms to me.
To that end, I was delighted to find an article on the Half-Japanese website. How To Play Guitar by David Fair could well be the paradigm shift I need.

Clare, baby … sorry in advance.

An interesting, if slightly odd week in Cornwall recently. As holidays go, it was very pleasant, and it was great to get away from the daily growl for a bit. But it’s a curious place.
Take this as an example. We hired bikes for a ride along part of The Camel Trail, a path that winds it’s way through 15 miles of lovely coastal scenery along a disused railway line between Padstow and Bodmin.
About halfway down the route to Wadebridge, my back tyre blew. A worn tyre had caused the tube to fall apart. Fortunately, we’d picked up a repair kit, and began to fix the problem. Jokes flew about, along the lines of “Call The RAC”, and “Better let Air Sea Rescue know.”
A couple of minutes later, an Army Sea King did indeed come across the bay, did a low sweep directly over us, turned, did it again to make sure we were ok, and the pilot waved as he span away.
And was I too dumbstruck to take photos?
Yes, of course I was?
Have I been kicking myself ever since? What do you think?

Actualy, while I remember, we were at Harlyn Bay last year when the air ambulance landed on the beach to pick up someone who’d had a heart attack. If there’s a sure way to get sand in your suntan lotion, it’s landing a chopper in the middle of a bay filled with the fine stuff.
I swear, I must attract the things.