That Was The Week That Blogged #3

Saturday morning found me sitting outside "Picnic", one of Reading's most splendid cafes, nursing a mocha. I was tapping away at my iPhone catching up on blogs posted by my transatlantic and Antipodean friends from the night before when my friend Lucy went by wheeling a pushchair containing her son. Despite this I gladly engaged her in conversation, because I'm good like that.

Eventually (and when I say "eventually" I mean very quickly) we happened to get round to talking about me. And when I say "happened to get round to" I mean the conversation was steered to me because I have an ego the size of the planet.

"I don't get that thing you've started doing on your blog." she said thoughtfully. "The one where you give an award to three other blogs every week. I mean, I see the point but what's your ulterior motive? You must have one, I just can't figure out what it is."

Charming. As if I am completely motivated by self-interest! I was deeply shocked. In her defence she was clearly frayed from having to look after her kid so I am going to give her the benefit of the doubt and charitably assume that some wanky synapses were behind her wonky synopsis. Because, like I said, I'm good like that.

Anyway, on to the awards. On one hand, you lot make this job unbelievably easy by writing loads of excellent posts every week. On the other hand, you make it incredibly difficult by doing precisely that. So thanks/damn you all to blazes (delete as applicable). As always, there can only be three winners every week and this week's triumphant blog posts are a fantastically diverse bunch and very different from last week's. Here, without further ado, they are.

1. Loophole In My Laptop by Everything I Like Causes Cancer

"But I must warn you...making out with God is dangerous. Afterwards, no mortal man will satisfy you even a little. I mean, I INVENTED those pink parts. I know how they work better than anyone. So think carefully. And yes, the G-spot is named after me. Because if you find it, you see me and many have been known to call out my name."

I loved this. Somehow Gwen managed to spend some of last week having a lengthy email conversation with God. Rather than sell the story to Time magazine and live off the earnings she has inexplicably decided instead to publish the contents on her blog in one of the very funniest things I read this week. Time's loss is our gain: in a wide-ranging chat one of my favourite bloggers managed to cover the tricky issue of Dan Brown and extract the Frost-Nixonesque confession that Mary Magdalene "does shit that would turn Paris Hilton's hair white." Not to be missed.

2. Life After Scooby-Doo by The Time Crook

"It wasn’t long before he was living out of the back of the Mystery Machine and turning tricks for drug money. I even heard a story about how Fred gave a blowjob to a dealer in a bathroom stall at a nightclub. After the deed, the dealer dumped the coke on the floor and Fred crawled around on all fours snorting it up."

Hunter’s blog is a relatively new read for me and I read this post on Sunday, the very first eligible day for TWTWTB. I remember thinking I would be absolutely amazed if I read three better posts than this one this week and so it proved. Interesting (or not very) Scooby-Doo fact – I dated a girl who was the spitting image of Velma for over a year. She wasn’t, as far as I was aware, a lesbian but she did put me off the show forever. Thanks to Hunter for taking some of those unhappy memories away. For the rest of you who have probably never dated anyone who looks like a cartoon character, this enjoyably silly romp should give you shedloads of baggage-free fun.

3. A rather long post by Andy Warhol Goes Shopping

"She smiled and said, 'well, if we're going to be all honest and shit, if I was looking for a boyfriend, I'd look to you.' And that was that. Nothing happened. She did say that, 'one day, we'll have sex.' But I knew it wasn't true, just as she knew it wasn't true. And we didn't."

A lot of blogs (though not mine, obviously) spawn second-rate impersonators, either of prose styles or of particular types of post. Memes are just this problem writ large. You will find hundreds of identical mommy blogs, hundreds of disastrous date blogs, hundreds of people rambling about politics. You’ll find sex blogs, sex blog clones, PostSecret clones, the whole shebang. But you won’t find another blog quite like tennyson ee hemingway’s blog or a post quite like this. With no sentimentality, no whistles and bells he just talks you through a story of his relationship that never was. The things he doesn’t say or tell you are just as nicely judged as the things he does (a rare gift, and I speak as a relentless tell, tell, teller myself) and the overall effect kind of reminds me a little of Raymond Carver. People might tell you it’s easy to write this way; I really don’t think it is. I thought this was excellent and quite a few seemed to agree.

There you go - I'm proud to have them and their words on my blog, and I hope you check them out and like them. Feel free to tell them I sent you. Oh, and if you won would you like a smaller version of the image to pop on your sidebar? If so let me know and I'll sort something out (no ulterior motive I promise).

One other thing - nobody this week sent me a mail suggesting any other posts I might want to consider. Is that because you forgot, or because you think I'm doing such a fantastic job that I don't need any help? If you read something brilliant this week make a note, drop me a line and tell me.

All serious offers considered. No time wasters.

I miss the Marais

It was over dinner in the Forbury a few weeks back that Kelly and I made an important decision about holidays. We’re going back to Paris later in the year.

We went last September and spent a fantastic week staying in an apartment in the Marais. Everyone has their favourite part of the city and this area, north of Notre Dame and east of the Centre Pompidou is mine. The narrow streets are full of tiny cool boutiques selling books, art, clothes and wine. They are lined with cafes, bars and falafel joints. By day it’s quiet, almost eerily so, but by night the people spill out onto the street and the whole area comes to glorious life. It doesn’t feel like Paris for tourists but for locals. You can sit on the rue Vielle de Temple, nursing a carafe of something rich and red, and just watch the parade of Parisiens mooching or cycling past on their way somewhere.


To have their life (only a better version where you don’t have to worry about money, or go to work) for even a week is an incredible privilege and I would take it over a week in an anonymous villa or rapidly frying by a swimming pool by the Mediterranean every single time.

The sights of the Marais are just something else. The queue of builders at the corner bakery, patiently waiting to pick up a golden sheaf of baguettes and carry them back to their work. The tall, imposing buildings lining every street with ever so faded majesty. There's none of your Cool Britannia nonsense here. They are class and old money compared to London's brash nouveau desperation to please. I don't feel judged for being English, maybe it's because the people can tell I love it here. Maybe it's because I never stop trying with my fumbling French, so different now from the diffident 18 year old who came here and was too frightened even to ask for an ice cream. Maybe they hate me and I'm too insensitive to work that out. As long as I never do, that will be fine.


Then there are the sounds. I don't like kids. Never have, never will. They set my teeth on edge in every way. And I can't abide choral music, its appeal has always been lost on me. But on the way to anywhere from our apartment last year you had to walk past a school, slap bang in the middle of the Marais. An inner city school in London would be intimidating, but this was a very different matter. The sound of all the kids at play was amazing. Somehow all those reedy voices merge into an incredible murmuring single sound like a river of force and vitality rushing across the schoolyard, the sound rising up into the air and being lost amid the church bells. You feel like this could only happen here, in this place.

Paris is a city of grandness, of course it is. No place can have the incredible view down from the Sacre Coeur across the whole city, the span of the Seine dotted with bridges and quays and islands, without being so.



But it's not just about the bigger picture, about the vistas. That's the other thing I love about it. I can't stand back and see everything at once, my mind just doesn't work that way. For me, it's all about the small details, the things that stick out in your mind and jump out of that bigger picture. I'm far too interested in that specific knot on the trunk of that particular tree to see the wood it patently forms part of. Sometimes that power to fixate brings me incredible joy, sometimes it stops me seeing past things that really shouldn't be important.

I take photographs like I write blogs. I don't have a whizzy zoom lens or tons of fancy kit. I walk around with a camera with a simple prime lens on it and my camera works the same way as my mind - packed full of what some people call quirks, some people call design features. Paris is a perfect city for somebody cursed or blessed the way I am. Little things scream for attention at every turn. Gnomes crouch enigmatically above shop windows:


Nothing is quite as it seems. A bicycle lock on an anonymous velo chained up on the rue des Archives resembles nothing so much as a dangerous snake:


Or the binoculars on the parapet of the viewing post at Montmartre, bright yellow and shaped like some 1920s space rocket from the machine age, ready to take passengers effortlessly from yesterday to tomorrow at supersonic speed without ever stopping at today:


I could go on about Paris between now and the time that I get on the Eurostar in October and I wouldn't run out of things to say. The streets of the Left Bank. The stunning beauty of Sainte-Chapelle. Wandering through the flower market on the Ile de la Cite. The way it looks at dusk, and in the early morning sun. Sitting on the Metro as it crosses the river by Bir-Hakeim and shoots out of the tunnels and over a bridge leaving all its passengers blinking in sunshine sudden and unexpected, like a kindly smile from a grumpy looking cashier.

I haven't even started on the food, the markets and the cheese. Maybe another time. I have done quite enough work for their tourist board and all I have left to say is two things. First of all, go! Go now. Go tomorrow. If you can go, go there. And let me know you're going and I will tell you all my favourite places. Take plenty of photos and write a blog post better than this and make me jealous. You're all easily capable of that.

And second, last of all, take someone beautiful if you can. Because I am telling you now, however beautiful they are, however beautiful you find them, follow this simple advice. Take them to Notre Dame late in the evening. Because when they stand there outside the cathedral round about midnight, lit by the lamps, they will look even more beautiful than you ever thought possible.

The Marriott incident (Part 2)

My friend Dave’s other speciality was using his friends as some kind of glorified dating agency. Whenever anyone had a female friend to visit in term time, Dave pounced. It became depressingly predictable and was a great way of rubbing it in that all of us were virtually incapable of pulling a muscle.

He went through the attractive (and less attractive) female acquaintances of friends in much the same way that haemophilia went through the royal families of Europe in the nineteenth century. At first, when he lured Steve’s 15 year old sister into his room and had his fun with her we didn’t realise it was a trend in the making. Then Nick’s busty friend Heather - who he’d fancied for years – fell under his spell (many years later she would still sigh whenever his name was mentioned and ask Nick to give him her number).

Nobody was safe. There was nothing wilful or manipulative about it, it just happened. The next day, in a good light, he could almost sound apologetic. Especially the morning after he pulled my friend Hannah who I’d always had a soft spot for. He had to be particularly apologetic that time – to her, along the lines of “I’m so sorry, that has never happened to me before.” I even forgave him for copping off with my ex a couple of weeks after we split up, though the fact that he took two years to get round to telling me helped. You just couldn’t be cross with him. He was like a cross between the Tasmanian Devil and Ron Jeremy and it wasn’t worth being put out just because your lady friends had done exactly that.

Dave only went too far once, and that was the time he slept with Eric’s precious little sister.

The warning signs were all there. There had always been a spark, and they’d messed around and flirted whenever she visited, but Eric’s sister was clearly off limits. The blissful vision of Swiss Family Eric gathered round the old joanna at Yuletide had no space in it for plebs like Dave. Especially because they would have taken a dim view of him trying to perform Set You Free by N-Trance as a Christmas carol.

So in a massive cover-up we kept the whole thing a secret from him. After all, we had no way of knowing how he’d react but from the way Eric had talked about his family before none of us wanted to incur the wrath of the Norwegian mafia. Presumably they came to your house and made you an offer you couldn’t listen to without lapsing into a tedium-induced coma.

Thank goodness Dave, uncharacteristically, was far too much of a gentleman to tell us whether Eric’s sister also “moaned when the fingers came to town.”

Some time later, the three of us went to a house party in Bristol. We were all single, all on the prowl and the signs were good. Apparently this party was going to be chock full of women of a feminine persuasion in all shapes and sizes. I was especially interested, as going by the law of averages I reckoned there might even have been one desperate enough to let me touch her boobs.

However, arriving at the party, it soon became apparent that some very heavy liberties had been taken with the truth. The party was crawling with men, many of whom were in fact literally crawling. There was – and we conducted an extensive search before coming reluctantly to this conclusion – only one woman. Not only that, but she had white dreadlocks and looked an awful lot like a goat. Not only that, but she had a baby. Even I wasn’t that desperate.

Nor, probably, was she.

We had been duped. The only consolation was that there was virtually nobody there to challenge my status as the bronze medallist in the alpha male competition. But it wasn’t enough. There was nothing for it but to smoke an awful lot of dope, leave the house and get as pissed as a little beetle. So that’s precisely what we did.

We wandered through a few pubs in the city without finding any suitable victims for our tried and tested Three Stooges routine. The plan normally was that we found and targeted a group of unaccompanied women. Dave would get the most attractive one, Eric would get the next most attractive one and I would get the other one. The one with the personality.

Regrettably, what usually happened was that Dave did indeed snog the most attractive one, Dave turned down the next most attractive one who eventually got off with Eric and the one with the personality would take one look at me and decided she would rather do something more enjoyable, like head back to her room and engage in a quiet spot of self-mutilation.

The evening was bearing up very unpromisingly, and that’s the point where in our increasingly desperate quest for a suitable venue we stumbled upon the Marriott looming invitingly out of the darkness.

If the hotel staff were disconcerted to find a bunch of lads reeking of cannabis shambling into their bar, plonking themselves down in the comfy chairs and ordering several pints of lager they had the class not to betray it. The people attending the black tie event in the adjacent function room, on the other hand, were less impressed. They looked at us in much the same way that Stella McCartney might regard a foie gras and veal sandwich, or the way I look at a smear of butter in a jar of Branston pickle.

(I actually felt queasy just typing that. It’s a real bugbear of mine.)

Several pints further on, Eric tottered drunkenly off to the bathroom. And suddenly, mind fogged by a considerable amount of fermented cheap liquid filth, I had a very evil idea.

“Dave, shall I go in there and tell Eric about that time you fucked his sister?”

Dave chuckled. He didn’t think I meant it.

“Yeah, if you want to.”

The problem is, I did mean it. And I can move pretty fast when I want to. I was at the bathroom door before Dave could tell me he was joking, and I disappeared beyond view. The next thing Dave knew, Eric and I were returning to the table. I was grinning malevolently like Kerry Katona in a crack den. And Eric? He was an ashen-faced broken man. There was no arguing, no violence, nothing. The fight had gone out of him completely. He went up to the bar without speaking and returned with some chasers, and we all had to act like it hadn’t happened. It was clear that Eric was drinking to forget. Initially I thought he was just drinking to forget that Dave had defiled his precious sister in the nakedest way possible, but during the rest of our bender in the Marriott I started to think he might be drinking to forget his own name.

By bedtime I am pretty certain he had succeeded.

The next morning found the three of us sleeping uncomfortably on the floor in a pretty unpleasant room. If the clock radio hadn’t started playing Boyzone I don’t think we would ever have had an incentive to get up at all. Dave and I awoke, badly scathed by the previous night’s exploits but relieved to still be alive. My head was clanging in a way which made the tiniest of movements feel like unspeakable agony. Gradually we threw our clothes on, but Eric remained prostrate. For some time we thought he might be dead.

None of us spoke about the previous night’s confession. I even managed to deceive myself into thinking that maybe he’d forgotten, or it hadn’t really happened, assisted I must say by the fact that I couldn’t specifically remember what I had said to paint the picture of his sister impaled on Dave’s porky plunger. With hindsight I would be amazed if it had been more delicate than “Eric, Dave slept with your sister that time she came to visit”, but it could easily have involved even more industrial language than that.

Eventually Eric managed to tremble his way gingerly into his clothes and we left to head back to the station. He was in a bad way, even by his fragile standards.

”Eric, on a scale of one to ten how bad would you say this hangover is?” I asked him.

“Nine.” came the very terse reply.

“Jesus, that’s bad. Are you sure?”

No reply came. With perfect timing, almost without breaking his stride, Eric turned his head to one side and projectile vomited against the side of a building considerably older and more attractive than the Marriott at great velocity.

Ah, the nineties.

Over ten years on, Eric is less a friend, more a running joke and fast disappearing fixture on my Christmas card list. Dave and I, on the other hand, are still the best of friends, even though we are apparently now properly grown up. He’s a devoted dad now and we meet up regularly and spend happy days gradually regressing to the age of about 21 down the pub (until he gets tired and needs to turn in, usually around half-ten). We even go on holiday together without our respective other halves. And a couple of weeks back, as I was packing my bags to head to Bristol and he was holidaying in Norfolk with his family, he sent me this.


I guess it must have subliminally jogged my memory.

The Marriott incident (Part 1)

The Marriott Hotel in Bristol is a fairly unremarkable edifice and unlikely to provoke strong reactions from anyone. It will never be a listed building or trouble anyone from English Heritage. Conversely, nobody will ever clamour for it to be torn down.

But when I walked past it a few weeks back I shuddered involuntarily because I had been there once before, many years ago.

The full story of that fateful visit involves two of my best friends from university, Dave and Eric. The popular cliché would be to describe them as a study in contrasts. Eric was regular and unadventurous – a thoroughly good egg about whom you could say almost nothing bad. He worked hard, got brilliant results, was a steadfast and loyal friend and if you had taken him home to meet your parents they would have enthused wholeheartedly in a way parents certainly never did about me.

His family was everything mine wasn’t – his parents were still together and he had a wonderful relationship with his two sisters to whom he was utterly devoted. He would go home to Norway every Christmas and they would all sit round the piano singing festive tunes, presumably sporting chunky patterned sweaters while the frosty windows steamed up with good cheer and wholesome loveliness. I on the other hand went home to find that Christmas Day was the one day every year I was nagged for not getting drunk, as opposed to the other 364 when I was told off for doing so.

From the thumbnail sketch I’ve just given it probably won’t surprise you to hear that Eric and I are no longer in touch. In fact, I stopped talking to him shortly after he got married which could be partly linked to the fact that I found his description of the wedding more than slightly chilling.

No two weddings are the same, and there’s endless scope to personalise them. Many, for instance, feature a reading which has been picked by the couple (or just the usual dreck from The Prophet by Khalil Gibran, if they’re feeling uninspired). Often there will be a piece of music picked for its sentimental value. For instance, I went to a wedding a few years back where the happy couple walked out of the venue as man and wife to the tune of Mr Blue Sky by ELO.

It was such a nice touch that I almost forgot that my friend was marrying a management consultant (though not quite. She's dead to me now).

If you are really lucky the wedding will feature some live music, maybe a nice acoustic performance by some friends of the bride or groom. One of my cousins, for instance, had a friend perform Forever Young by Bob Dylan at his wedding. How lovely! The performance might be deeply touching, it might be hilariously incompetent. Either way it’s a win-win, provided it’s not your wedding.

Eric’s wedding, however, went one step further even than that. Because he performed a song himself. During his own wedding ceremony. Not just any song, mind you. He performed saccharine blandfest Come What May from the crime against celluloid best known as Moulin Rouge.

Not alone though, oh no. He performed it as a duet. At this stage you might be thinking “a duet with his wife? how sweet/naff [delete as applicable]” but no, it was more unsettling than that.

He was duetting with his own sister.

I don’t know whether this virtuoso performance took place before or after they were declared man and wife but it’s a safe bet that it was well after the bit where people can stand up if they know of any reason why the couple shouldn’t be lawfully wed. Because if it had been before that surely there would have been someone, anyone, who would have had the decency to rise up and shout “Stop! This man has just sung a love song to - and with - his own sister. Am I the only one who can see that this is every shade of wrong?”

Perhaps this is why I wasn’t invited to the wedding.

Dave, on the other hand, has been immortalised in this blog post. He, like me, was at university to have fun and hopefully get a degree at the same time. In this respect we were very similar. Sadly (for me at least) Dave had a much better idea of what fun actually was than I did. It predominantly revolved around drinking Corona, going clubbing and copping off with ladies of widely varying quality. His conquests were legendary, as was his turn of phrase. I’ll never forget the time he drunkenly pulled another girl in our year. The next day, a group of us was quizzing him about how far he had got. It was a bit like Summer Loving without the cool cars or abuse of hair products. Dave's response was in his inimitable style.

“No, I didn’t shag her. But she moaned when the fingers came to town.”

Many years later both Eric and I tried to embrace laddishness but neither of us could carry it off. One time after university Dave and I were staying at Eric’s and Eric got lucky so we ended up going back to his room to take up our sleeping bags on the floor. He came back in at six in the morning and plonked himself smugly on the bed.

“How did it go?” we asked him.

“Let’s just say that that girl loves to eat cock.” was his indelicate response.

I learned a very important lesson that day. Well, two. The first was that Eric spoke with all the excitement of somebody probably receiving his first ever blow job. The second, and more important, lesson was that there may be no spectacle more toe-curlingly pathetic than a nerd boasting about his sexual conquests. Well, except a nerd complaining about his lack of sexual conquests. Funnily enough the latter was taking up an awful lot of my packed schedule back in those days. That and wanking.

So, that's Dave and Eric. And now that I’ve set the scene, come back next time when I’ll explain what this has to do with anything and why the innocent looking Marriott Hotel in Bristol holds such dread for me.

And yes, I know I'm a tease.

That Was The Week That Blogged #2

When I decided to start off “That Was The Week That Blogged” I don’t think I realised it would be so difficult.

Looking through all the posts I’ve scribbled down notes of, and trying to narrow it down to just three, has left me scratching my head. Because it’s been quite an eventful week in the blogosphere – full of comings and goings, people returning from holidays and business trips, going on terrible dates, looking back and celebrating long and happy - though not entirely unproblematic - partnerships or reflecting on finally getting to the age when things start to make sense (and if anyone works out when that is, please let me know).

It makes me proud to play a tiny part in this weird and wonderful community, even if I’m only contributing my tales of smut and unsatisfactory meals.

But there can only be three winners, just like last week. And after much reflection these are the ones I have gone for.

1. Or Else What? by Birdykins: Fly. Crash. Repeat.

“I want to be one of those loves. You know the ones. The middle-aged couple holding tight to each other in an airport in the middle of the day, oblivious. The senior citizens hiking through country sides, toasting to their life together. Family photos competing for space on my walls. That tender look from across the room. The love that lasts. Even if it means being on that hospital bed.”

This one absolutely hit me right between the eyes, I went back and read it more than once. Birdykins is a very talented writer (I’m new to her blog) and this wonderful post takes a thumbnail sketch of a colleague and skilfully builds it into a rallying cry for wanting to make sure you don’t turn out with a life just like everyone else’s because you stop making choices. Quite, quite brilliant.

2. True Crime by Meditations In An Emergency

“My colleagues are wonderful people. But literacy does not appear to be a requirement to join the job anymore.”

By contrast this was the funniest thing I read this week. It’s a modern version of the old Australian claim forms gag that Jasper Carrott used to do so well, and many of the unbelievably inept crime reports quoted here are howlingly funny. Would that I had a job which provided material half this good because these are comedy platinum (See what I did there? This is my latest new phrase, I’m hoping it will catch on).

Oh, and since Mysterg has won this week using other people’s words I think it’s only fair to point out that when he’s using his own he is very good indeed. Have a peek at some of his other posts.

3. a big thing by Friday I’m In Love

“It’s quiet. You can’t make anything happen; you just have to wait. It’s rare. It’s comforting and lovely and nearly always a surprise. And if you are patient, you can catch a piece of it in your hands.”

Regular readers will know that I have been banging the drum for Harper and Beatrix’s blog since I started writing. And I think it gets better and better. I know Beatrix has worried recently that finding what appears to be happiness would make her writing less interesting, this beautiful piece of prose would suggest otherwise.

I hope you enjoy checking them out – feel free to tell all three that I sent you.

If you read a fantastic post last week and it’s not in here, it may well be because I didn’t read it. So here’s how you can help me out this week – next time you read something amazing, make a note, drop me a line and tell me. I can’t promise it will be in here next Sunday, but I can promise that I’ll read it and if I like it I’ll tell you, and them.

Pass it on!

Choucroute and fried eggs

On the second night of my honeymoon, every precaution was taken to ensure there was no repeat of the horrendous meal the night before. Guidebooks were scoured. Menus were perused. Homework was done. And so that evening we found ourselves in one of Paris’ oldest brasseries. The contrast from the previous evening could not have been more marked. We sat under a gorgeous glass dome in the central dining room. Impeccably dressed waiters swanned from table to table with an insouciant efficiency I had never previously associated with France.

Fresh with confidence from a day of mangling my schoolboy French in the city, we decided to be brave and wave away the English language menus. After all, we knew better than to order the pot au feu, so what could possibly go wrong? This view was only reinforced when a gorgeous bottle of Chateauneuf du Pape was opened and poured. All our cares drifted away. Off in the distance I swore I could hear a languidly tinkled piano.

The starters arrived and were delicious, and by this point the euphoria was almost overwhelming. I could even forget that I’d frozen my nadgers off wandering through the Ile de la Cité and been thoroughly baffled by virtually everything in the Centre Pompidou. Because I was in Paris – the city both for lovers and for diners, and nothing could be more perfect.

Besides, I had a steak chateaubriand with béarnaise sauce on the way and I was salivating just thinking about it.

“What did you order again?” I asked Kelly.

“The chargrilled seafood. I’m so looking forward to it. If I have another bad meal I don’t know what I’ll do.”

I frowned almost instinctively. I couldn’t remember chargrilled seafood on the menu. And I have a photographic recollection of menus, as we have previously established.

“What was the name of what you ordered on the menu?”

“Choucroute avec fruits de mer.”

“Kelly, choucroute doesn’t mean chargrilled, it means…”

My sentence was interrupted by the waiter arriving at our table. He set my meal down in front of me – a juicy, delicious steak, frites and a healthy (or rather, unhealthy) helping of béarnaise sauce, thick and pungent with tarragon. Kelly on the other hand had what can only be described as an absolutely enormous heap of sauerkraut with some bits of fish on the top. Because that’s what choucroute is.

Kelly looked at me, and looked at her meal. I could see she was struggling to hold it together. The initial mouthfuls confirmed two things – one, that I had been served one of the finest steaks in Christendom and two, that Kelly absolutely loathes sauerkraut. Normally when you get something you don’t like you can just idly push it round your plate. But this amorphous giant mass of warm vegetation covered the entire plate. In fact it looked like her plate had been attacked by, and lost a colossal fight with, an albino Triffid. A family of four could have hiked across this pile of sauerkraut and it would have taken them a week.

The restaurant we had picked, ironically, was famous for its sauerkraut. Subsequent research has confirmed that it doles out over 100 platefuls of the stuff every day. That’s because it specialises in cuisine from the Alsace region, and choucroute is an Alsatian delicacy.

Kelly would rather have eaten an Alsatian.

A few minutes in, I was making good progress. Béarnaise and blood were mixing in a glorious pool on my plate and my frites were perfect for dipping in it. Kelly’s plate looked exactly the same as it did when it had arrived, only colder. It matched her expression.

“Do you want some of my steak?”

“No. It will only make me more depressed when I have to eat the rest of this.”

“Isn’t any of it any good?”

“The piece of fish nearest to me is quite nice, but that’s all.”

“Oh, that bit.” I said not very helpfully as I sliced off another piece of steak like butter. “I think that’s roe.”

That was the final straw. Kelly put her knife and fork down and huge, silvery tears welled out of her eyes, rolled down her cheeks and plopped into the sauerkraut. It showed no signs of abating. On the plus side, there were no racking sobs but I could tell they were probably only moments away. It was one of those crying fits that starts with a major disappointment but then gets fuelled by your mind snowballing to consider every upset, every rejection, every bad exam mark and scraped knee you’ve ever had until you are a bawling 12 year old mass of brine and phlegm.

I knew. I had been there many times.

The immaculate waiters walked past to see me ineffectually putting down my cutlery and desperately trying to comfort my beautiful, inconsolable wife of three days. What must they have thought? I don’t have the arms to be a wife beater, and I don’t have the looks to be a raffish heartbreaking cad. Maybe they thought I’d got her up the stick or something. Just as the day before, I felt like I had stepped into a subtitled film. The only problem was that this time, it was Scenes From A Marriage.

In the very back of my mind, I already knew there was absolutely no chance of us staying long enough for me to order the crème brulee. But for the sake of our union I kept a stiff upper lip.

We hastily paid, left and started the walk back to the hotel in chilly silence. There was Chateauneuf du Pape left on the table, that’s how grave this crisis was. The beautiful, romantic city had become a cold and unfriendly place and even the prospect of a late night stroll across Pont Neuf and through the stunning streets of Saint Germain couldn’t make it better. Then, glowing warmly by the side of the street, we saw a late night minimarket. We went in, briefly, and Kelly’s eyes lit up as she saw what was behind the counter.

Jelly sweets.

Some people like tobacco, some people go for chocolate, some are drawn to alcohol. Some lucky blighters like all three. But not my wife. Give her a nice cup of Earl Grey on a cold winter night, a cold gin and tonic with freshly squeezed lime on a hot summer’s day and a packet of strawberry laces at the drop of a hat and she’s always happy. I envy it, and I’ll never understand it. I saw a glimmer of hope, and this time Kelly knew every word of the French she needed to try to salvage the situation.

“Vingt oeufs frites, s’il vous plait.”

As Kelly munched the first of the fried eggs from the paper bag, the river came into view. Notre Dame was lit up and from the bridges you could see the beautiful tall buildings of the Rive Gauche. A boat passed under the bridge, full of tourists far too cheerful to have any conception of just how badly they were being ripped off.

I looked at Kelly. She gave me the faintest of smiles. And I thought, It’s okay. I think we’re going to make it.

Pot au feu

I have a bad menu porn habit.

If I see an interesting looking restaurant on my travels I have to go and look at the menu outside detailing its exciting list of culinary destinations. I do this regardless of whether it’s lunchtime, dinnertime, ten in the morning or three in the afternoon. It doesn’t even matter whether I will ever realistically have the opportunity to eat there. If it looks good, and the menu doesn’t contain laminated pictures of the food, I am on the case. I have been known to cross the road to do this. With my rather cavalier approach to the Green Cross Code, menu porn is almost an extreme sport for me. It’s certainly far more dangerous than all this auto erotic asphyxiation nonsense.

It’s far, far worse when I go on holiday. Then, everything is structured around food. I need to know where I am eating and when, and I need to know that it’s very likely to be delicious. If it gets to about one o’clock and I don’t know where my lunch is coming from, I can feel myself getting agitated. Some have used the far less elegant word “nasty”, but they don’t understand me or grasp my inner turmoil.

It is a serious matter and no mistake. A disappointing lunch, especially on holiday, can spoil my entire day. If I’ve eaten something subpar it has the potential to ruin everything. Unable to snap out of it, I reflect on what might have been all the way through to dinner time. Some have used the far less elegant word “mope”. The same people, in fact, who mistakenly dub me “nasty”.

When I say people, I of course mean “person”. Spouses can be very fierce critics in my experience. Kelly just doesn’t understand the pivotal importance of mealtimes. “I used to think I was really into food” she always tells friends, “until I met him.” She is far more prosaic about this sort of thing so no mere repast can have that kind of effect on her.

Except on one occasion, and that was the first time we went to Paris.

We honeymooned there, flying out on Valentine’s Day. We checked into our glamorous hotel on the Left Bank, the room a tasteful vision of chocolate and mint. From our window we could see the oldest church in the city and the famous Café de Flore and Les Deux Magots, as frequented by Sartre and de Beauvoir, were on our doorstep. The picturesque stand by the Metro station turned out paper-thin crepes, crunchy with sugar and tart with lemon juice. They were piping hot and steam rose off them in the crisp clear air, rising and dissipating in the bright winter sunshine. Everything was perfect, as if we had stepped into a film.

Until we went out for dinner, that is.

The restaurant was at the end of our street and described in the guidebook as “charmingly rustic”. That turned out to be one way of putting it. The menu for the day was up on a blackboard and the tables were laid out in long rows so you sat among the other diners. The people were all French - no tourists here - and they were a people watcher’s dream. The water, the wine and the bread turned up, brought by a surly looking woman in an apron. I had a good feeling about this.

The good feeling left at almost exactly the same time as our main courses arrived. I had ordered “pot au feu”, which is meant to be a classic gutsy French stew. It was peasant fayre in all the wrongest of ways. What I in fact got was a thick slab of what looked like shoe leather, served on a wan smear of what I was prepared to charitably assume were wilted lettuce leaves. A solitary pale green carrot splashed miserably in a pool of thin brown water in a manner which was frighteningly reminiscent of my trips to the seaside at Weston-super-Mare as an unwilling five year old.

The cherry on the icing on this grotesque gastronomic gateau was a piece of bone atop the ropy ensemble (and yes, that is your actual French right there). I had absolutely no idea why this rather primitive piece of window dressing was on my plate at all. Then I looked down the table and realised with a growing dread – a man who had ordered the same thing as me was scooping out the marrow and spreading it over his grisly beef. Because the only way to make that meal look less appetising was to copiously cover it in bone marrow that looked an awful lot like thick manky jizz.

Kelly’s meal was just as bad. “I seem to have been served ‘knuckle of fish’. I didn’t even know fish had knuckles.” was her expert assessment. It was so bad we had to laugh about it, so we did. We laughed brightly and happily all the way back to our hotel room, past the flaneurs in their wicker chairs, smoking away under the heated awnings at the front of the garish red cafés.

That however wasn’t the nadir of the honeymoon. The horrendous meal that scarred Kelly for years was to take place the following night. But it deserves a post to itself, so I’ll tell you about it next time.

Little Clarendon Street

"I think I'll have the snails." says Sarah. "I didn't have them when I went to Bordeaux and I regretted it. I felt like I'd chickened out."

The four of us are ensconced in a French restaurant on my favourite little street in Oxford. It twinkles with fairy lights all year round and is lined with lovely shops, bars and restaurants. We have a table by the bar, at the heart of things. The glow of the candles makes everyone look amazing. Or it could be the numerous cocktails we enjoyed earlier on, sitting out in the fading sun before taking a lazy stroll through the colleges. That too is a possibility.

We decide to split the risk of the snails being vile by ordering four starters and sharing. This principle of dilution, of safety in numbers, is one I understand well. My mother is a dab hand at invoking it at family gatherings.

The food arrives. Amid the smoked mozzarella, chicken liver parfait and scallop brochettes the snails are still conspicuous on the table. Surrounded by the others they look like the ugly mate in a group of women at a bar. There is a hesitant pause as we all wonder how this is going to turn out. I wait and watch the others who are faking confidence I do not possess. My inability to do this has always been a problem.

I clumsily grab a shell with the unwieldy tongs and prod with the tiny fork. Eventually it sneezes its contents, a tiny rubbery nugget, onto my plate. It sits there waiting to be eaten.

I am always reminded of Road Runner at times like this. Specifically, the moment where Wile E. Coyote runs off the edge of a cliff. His legs go round and round as he hovers in mid air. Then, the moment comes where he looks down and realises his situation. And that is precisely when he falls into the chasm.

Some food, I’ve found, is like that. You are okay as long as you never for a minute think about what you are eating, where it came from and how it got there. The moment you do, like Wile E. Coyote, you plummet into the abyss getting smaller and smaller until there is only a distant thud and a tiny cloud of dust to mark where you fell.

This time, at least, I manage to avoid looking down. Carl, Sarah and I polish off the snails. Kelly, with a heavy cold, understandably has no interest in eating something so reminiscent of what she's been coughing up all weekend.

"What do you reckon?" I ask Sarah.

"Not bad. Somehow I wanted them to be more... remarkable. I think I secretly hoped they'd be ghastly."

"I don't think you're American any more." I tell her. "It’s not just your love of tea. It’s not even the fact that you said ‘ghastly’ just then. Only the English order something expecting to dislike it and are then disappointed when they don't. You could probably go to the Passport Office, tell them that story and get dual nationality on the spot. You're one of us now."

That Was The Week That Blogged

You’ve probably noticed by now that I don’t give enough acknowledgment to other bloggers, though I’m working on this. So I’ve decided to add a new regular feature to the blog. Every weekend I’m going to nominate the three best posts I’ve read in the blogosphere for the previous week, under the title “That Was The Week That Blogged”.

Catchy, no?

The idea is that if you read me and you’re a blogger you have some other stuff to go and check out. But I know I have quite a few readers who aren’t bloggers and it might give you lot something interesting to read in that hellishly long wait between my posts.

Other blog quality acknowledgment schemes are available. And don’t get me wrong, they sometimes link to some really good stuff. But having nominated some absolutely stonking posts to them only to see them overlooked in favour of another macro photo of some gerbera or a rambling account of a mom and her zany kids on holiday by Lake Tahoe (complete with gurning photographs), or for that matter Stuff About God I’ve decided that if you want something done properly you have to do it yourself.

Plus if I’m running the thing I have a great excuse for the fact that I never win.

As far as a manifesto goes, all I’m looking for is fantastic writing – brilliant stories, amazing observations, hilarious anecdotes. Or superb photographs, of course. Phrases, images and pictures that stay with you after you hit the exit button and go elsewhere. Is that too much to ask? Thought not.

There are three ways you can potentially help me if you’re a blogger. Firstly, if you read a post and you think it’s really amazing, mail me (my address is in my profile) with the link. I’m interested to see what people nominate. Secondly, if you fancy knocking me up a picture or logo to go with this every weekend that would be fantastic (I have a couple of you in mind for this and you probably know who you are). Thirdly, if you know how I could add something snazzy to my sidebar about this and can send me detailed technical instructions that would be just grand.

And without further ado, here are the three inaugural winners of That Was The Week That Blogged:

1. Vegetable Contemplation by The Vegetable Assassin

"I want to paint outside by the ocean and drink cocktails watching the sunset over some distant desert mesa or Mexican vista. I want the person I love to be there too because this dream is worthless alone."

I loved this superbly contemplative post from one of my favourite bloggers who normally uses humour as a defence mechanism (I can recognize a kindred spirit when I see one). This one struck a chord with plenty of people and with good reason.

2. Parenthood and the evolution of society by The Gravel Farm

"My little boy will one day become a big boy, and he will rebel and earn for himself the independence he will so desire. He will stick it to The Man, unaware that The Man in this case will be behind him every step of the way, letting him make his own mistakes without falling down too hard if I can help it."

This is the sort of post that is in danger of giving parental blogs a good name. I don’t tend to read blogs about kids but this is so wise, so funny and so god-damned English that it definitely deserves its place here.

3. Keep the change, you filthy animal by My Soul Is A Butterfly

"After a year of cooking ramen in Bushwick, I had hoped to return to a perfect house with a Chevy Chase father stringing Christmas lights. Our empty, tree-less living room shattered this illusion of simplicity. I couldn’t return to a childhood that I never had to begin with."

This is the post which brought this all about, ironically, because when it was rejected for “Post of the Day” I decided I ought to do something about it. It’s beautifully judged, well structured, clever and confessional without a hint of self-pity. Hannah’s blog is one to watch if she can keep producing writing like this.

Right then, go off and read them. And if you spot something I should be putting in my list next weekend, drop me a line and tell me.

Blanking Justine

There are occasional days, rarer now the weather is good, when I don’t stop after work for a relaxing drink. On those days, provided I haven’t left my keys at home (like I did again on Monday) I like to be conventional and head straight home. And so today I was strolling through the market square, still gently washed by the late afternoon sun, when I saw Justine sitting on a bench.

I worked with her ten years ago. She was in credit control, but that’s not what I remember about her. I remember her vile smelling coat. She had a cream fake fur overcoat and it always smelled like she had laid it out in the middle of a field and flown over it with a crop duster full of the cheapest perfume you could lay your hands on. Every day she would go out for a cigarette break, return and put her coat on the rack, right on top of mine. My coat would gradually stop reeking every weekend, only to be tainted again on a Monday morning.

I didn’t stay in touch with her, but the advent of Facebook meant that we became what now can occasionally pass for friends. We stayed that way for a few months but we never spoke and I really wasn’t that interested. So I deleted her. About a year later she returned, this time with a different surname, and I again accepted. And again I deleted her soon after. I can’t pretend I had a single qualm about it. She had never contacted me and if she had there would have been absolutely nothing to say.

And there she was. She didn’t see me, but I knew in that split second that she shortly would and we would need to do that awkward dance of whether we speak, or nod, or ignore. Playing chicken with another human being is not fun. My foot hovered on the pavement, just as my finger had hovered over the delete button all that time ago.

But not for long.

I got some money from the cashpoint and I headed home. That’s exactly what I would have done if she hadn’t been sitting there. No, that's a big fat lie, because I walked the long way round the square so she wouldn't see me. But I thought about it all the way back to the flat.

She looked a lot older, with jet black hair, resting there with a bag of shopping in front of her. She seemed tired but severe and dignified in a way I didn’t remember from back then. When I spotted her I got an image of the kind of mother she would be (or maybe already was), the kind of grandmother, the way her features would age and coarsen. In that moment, time had simultaneously stood still and raced into a future I would never see. I was struck by all the things I didn’t know about her and wouldn’t find out.

Because, of course, I really wasn’t that interested.

One day, I will run out of time and there will be books I never got around to reading, records I never heard, movies I never saw and words I never wrote. Things I never said to you. And then there are all those people that pass through your life. In fact, life just strikes me as a bunch of stories you never hear the end of. It’s a wonder anybody puts up with it.

And there’s nothing unique about me. Yes, I'm the narrator and yes, this is my story, but that doesn’t mean anything. There will be people out there not wondering what I do any more, people who don’t feel like calling me nowadays, people who are tired of my song and dance act. And maybe one day sometime soon one of them will blank me on a sunny afternoon while I’m taking the weight off my feet and wishing my mind would stop working, just for a second.

Maybe it will be you.

You weren’t all here when I started this thing, you won’t all be here at the end. But I’m glad you’re here now.

Calling you what?

I’m pleased to see that the fame of Bageltopia, my favourite lunch spot and the only good reason to visit Bracknell, seems to be spreading. Last Thursday my friend David contacted me for advice:

DAVID: I'm going out for lunch today - would you recommend Bageltopia or the dirt food of KFC?
MLS: It's got to be Bageltopia. The Reuben on toasted sesame...
DAVID: The 'Reuben'? Really? Very New York.
MLS: Absolutely! Oy vey David.
DAVID: I'm a Welsh David rather than Hebrew.
MLS: What would be in a Welsh bagel?
DAVID: Dairylea and laver bread.
MLS: Ah, laver bread, so called because it's thrown up all over the mountains.
DAVID: So what would be in a Reading Bagel?
MLS: Concrete and chain pubs. And the bagel would be a ring road.
DAVID: I would never have thought a concrete-laced bagel would be a big seller. But the official bagel place at White Hart Lane appears to get through thousands on match day. Your Reading Bagel has a whiff of Betjeman about it. 'The Betjeman Bagel'.
MLS: Come friendly poppy seeds and fall on Reading
To finish a bagel I've been dreading.
DAVID: Second line doesn't scan, but that's better than my effort was going to be. I had 'Come friendly Bagels' and '...isn't fit for humans now', but was missing a link. (pause) I had so much to do today, and now it's going to be spent adapting poetry into bagel-related comedy.
MLS: Shall I compare thee to a caramelised onion bagel?
Thou art as lovely, but sans gaping hole.
You also lack that gorgeous, just-baked smell
But, on the other hand, you have a soul.
DAVID: There's not a lot that rhymes with bagel.
MLS: So to create poetry you're unable.
DAVID: Who are you, Andre the Giant?
MLS: That was a little harsh. But I see where you're coming from.
DAVID: I was trying to find an exemplar of doggerel.
So it was Andre the Giant or William McGonagall.
I went with the one I thought less offensive.
Buying bagels from Waitrose can be quite expensive.
MLS: When I was at school one of the girls that ran for Head Girl delivered her hustings speech in rhyming couplets. Just when I thought it wasn't possible for her to be more hateful she took it up a notch.

After all that he completely ignored my advice - he got in touch later in the day to say he’d gone for KFC and as a result was feeling a little ill. My disappointment that he had snubbed Bageltopia was tempered by the fact that I got to enjoy another of life's wonderful pleasures, namely saying "I told you so".

Gemma and I, on the other hand, went to Bageltopia on Friday to celebrate her birthday. And Bracknell was especially frightening – maybe it was the day everyone went to pick up their Jobseekers’ Allowance but the whole shopping centre was crawling with the misshapen offcut pieces of the broken society we keep getting told so much about. At one point we were walking towards Bageltopia and were forced to speed up to overtake a particularly slow moving bovine individual shunting a pram.

As we did we both looked over. The individual in question was wearing a tracksuit. Short brown hair. Body shape short and almost completely spherical. A few items of Run-DMC style jewellery which may have cost as much as three pounds at Elizabeth Duke but weighed considerably more. Knuckles at or close to the ground, but no evidence of scrape marks. An earring. Light wispy facial hair – little enough to have been embarrassing if you’re a man, quite enough to have been very embarrassing if you’re a woman. A pair of what might have been breasts but might well have been moobs.

Yes, it was completely impossible to ascertain the sex of the prampusher. She/he/it

[Why isn’t there a word for a person of totally indeterminate sex? The English language fails us yet again. There's nothing for it, I am just going to have to invent one. Let’s go out and come back in again on that paragraph, shall we?]

Yes, it was completely impossible to ascertain the sex of the prampusher. Shit could just as easily have been a man as a lady. Or perhaps Bracknell is now evolving hermaphrodite breeding chavs who can knock themselves up time after time and just sit at home in their council flats watching daytime telly and wondering if they can sue Charles Darwin on a no win, no fee basis. Technically a full medical examination might have settled the debate that was still raging as we got to the doors of Waterstones, but any duty we might have to medical science was soon outweighed by Gemma's and my natural aversion to seeing ugly people in the altogether.

[See what I did there? “Shit could just as easily…” I know – naturally you’re impressed. What can I say, “cuntroversial” is my middle name.]

Worse was to come. After we had finished devouring our bagels and having a proper gossip we headed down the stairs only to find another of Bracknell’s denizens marching in the opposite direction. She must have been fifty years old if she was a day, with a face that wasn’t so much like a wet weekend in Grimsby, more like a guided tour round a sewage reclamation facility on a very warm day. She desperately needed to put on a few pounds, if only to try and fill out the wrinkles from within. Decades of sucking John Player Specials (or possibly her probation officer’s cock) had left her with a puckered mouth like a cat’s arse. Her hair was the colour of cigarette ash and worse still, her roots were still showing.

None of that, though, was particularly remarkable in Bracknell. Something else made her stand out from the herd of drones clutching Peacocks carrier bags. It was the outfit that chilled me to the bone. Crop trousers and a bright neon t-shirt showing just the wrong amount of midriff, by which I mean any midriff at all. But not just any t-shirt. There, scraped across her droopy norks like Tesco Value margarine over cheap thin white toast, was the following slogan in big block capitals:

TELL YOUR BOYFRIEND TO STOP CALLING ME

Gemma and I fled the shop in a wordless mix of horror and hysterical laughter. All I could find myself thinking was calling you what? Isn’t the word ‘Skeletor’ missing from the end of that sentence? It was one of the grisliest things I have ever seen. I’ve racked my brains and there’s only one thing that could have cranked this up on the wrong-o-meter.

Thank god those fateful words weren’t written in Comic Sans.

Four postcards from Bristol

I

The Queen of Intros is stumped. It doesn’t happen very often, so I am making the most of it.

We are in the lounge of Hotel du Vin in Bristol. Despite having an extensive cocktail list they have run out of mint and Worcester sauce. This means no mojito for Kelly, no Bloody Mary for me. We have to muddle through, even though they have nothing worth muddling. But that’s not the point.

Kelly has always been the Intros Queen. She can identify any song – not just from the intro, not just from the opening lines, but often from the first one or two notes. It’s an uncanny party piece, and much more show-offable than my ability to unhook a bra with one hand (I tried showing that off at parties but I usually got slapped). Forget Shazam, Kelly is the real deal. But the oddest thing has happened. A song has struck up and Kelly’s face is clouded with confusion. You can tell she knows the song, she just can’t remember what it’s called.

“It’s Hotel California. No, it’s House of the Rising Sun. No, I think it’s Hotel California. Shit, I can’t remember.”

“Don’t worry,” I say, “the Hotel California and the House of the Rising Sun are owned by the same chain. But Hotel California is rated significantly better on Tripadvisor.”

I get a withering look. She pays me back later by inventing a new word to describe me when I’m being offensive just to be difficult and trying to piss people off. It’s “cuntroversial” and I think I’ll be hearing a lot more of it.

And it was Hotel California. She is never wrong.

II

The sun is beating down as we strike a path up the hill towards Clifton Village. The weather is amazing, and it’s all because we decided to come here spontaneously on a whim. We didn’t decide to spend the weekend in Bristol until Wednesday night. If this had been planned for weeks we would be coping with monsoon conditions right now but we have ambushed the city and tricked the weather.

They haven’t even had time to put the scaffolding up. Whenever I go anywhere they put the scaffolding up. I swear they have some kind of electronic tracking that knows my plans and sees me coming. I have photos of all the major European cities covered in scaffolding. Notre Dame – covered in scaffolding. The streets of Prague – covered in scaffolding. The Houses of Parliament – yes, you guessed. If it wasn’t for the fact that the Tour Eiffel is basically a giant piece of scaffolding they’d have bloody done that one too.

A man and his girlfriend totter past us going in the opposite direction. She is in vertiginous heels, he is done up to the nines. His brow (which is a lot further down his head than I am personally comfortable with) is glistening with sweat.

“It’s a wedding, it must be.” I say to Kelly. “If a man’s in a suit on a Saturday he’s either going to a wedding or trying to sell you a mobile phone.”

“You’re going to use that in the blog, aren’t you?” she says. “That’s quite good by your standards.”

My other big insight about suits is that it’s impossible to listen to Billy Bragg while wearing a suit without feeling like an utter fraud. But that’s another story.

III

One of my bad habits as a tourist is to compare every city I go to to every other city. It’s the tourist equivalent of lazy journalism. Budapest is like Prague, only not as good. Cordoba reminds me of Carcassonne reminds me of Barcelona reminds me of Lisbon reminds me of Edinburgh and so it goes on. I suppose the only exception is London. Abject surrender to the Nazis is wonderful for your skyline and your architecture, whereas London bears all the hallmarks of a city where large parts of it had to be rebuilt.

I like Bristol a lot, far more than I expected to. Some of the old town reminds me of a lot of other wonderful cities I’ve been to. The gorgeous Georgian crescents remind me of Bath, or Edinburgh’s new town. The waterways are reminiscent of Amsterdam. The hills it's built around take me back to Lisbon and Edinburgh. Hills, incidentally, are another recurrent theme – show me a city built around numerous hills and I’m there. You might as well put out the bunting and erect the scaffolding because I am on my way.

Bristol even, like Oxford, has a covered market called St Nicholas. It’s a great place to wander round full of little shops and food stalls and cheesemongers and pie shops. I drool as we criss-cross the narrow lanes and curse myself for coming here so soon after breakfast. But what’s this? We walk past a shop devoted to selling unbelievably hot chilli sauces called “Dr. Burnorium’s Hot Sauce Emporium”. Here’s an example of what’s in the glass cabinet:

Other classics include “Professor Phardtpounder’s Colon Cleaner”, “Rectum Ripper” and “Pain Is Good #114 Jamaican Style”. They all sound like extreme forms of sodomy to me. I look up at the shop front which proudly boasts Let’s get out there and melt some faces.

“I misread that just then.” I say to Kelly “I thought it said 'faeces' rather than 'faces'. Still, I suppose it will melt that too.”

IV

We are in a fantastic retro shop on the Christmas Steps. It’s full of 50s, 60s and 70s stuff – kitchenware, cups, saucers and artifacts.

A table of vintage badges advertises the delights of “Penbow Castle: Wales’ Oldest Lived-In Castle”, “Ashworth Valley Scout Camp Site” and “Marineland Morecambe” – all forgotten delights from the 1970s. I remember going to countless attractions like this when I was a kid. Back then, tourism in England was a bit like having a “hobby” is now, an unspontaneous attempt to have fun that reeks of desperation. I remember faded, brown-tinged photos of trips to Cheddar Gorge and a particularly surreal trip to Gweek Seal Sanctuary where my brother had adopted a seal. They let us go by the pool and feed it fish while the other visitors looked on enviously. If you scratch those photos they probably smell of Instant Whip and ugly wallpaper.

They actually had a badge for Gweek Seal Sanctuary. I only realise this looking back when I check through my photographs. I wish I'd known at the time, I would have bought it.

The guys behind the counter look achingly 60s with the sort of look that seems carelessly tossed together but has taken hours of consideration. In my ironic slogan t-shirt and baggy jeans I am green with envy. The soundtrack playing is just brilliant. We both want to live here, to jack in our jobs and work somewhere like this playing amazing records and selling wonderful stuff to people like us, only cooler.

Unfortunately, as so often in this kind of shop, we cannot find anything to buy. I think of all the little shops I love that I never spend money in, and all the times months later when I mourn their passing. But that’s what happens if you don’t shop there and nor does anybody else. I feel a growing resolve to fight against the faceless chains infecting the high streets – to buy stuff in the games shop full of enthusiastic geeks opposite the station, to eat in my local family-run Italian at the unfashionable end of town, to listen to brilliant and unsung bands who will never get plugged to death on the radio.

The forces of neglect and inertia are scary things. They triumph so easily. I am suddenly struck by all the fantastic friends I don’t talk to enough, all the amazing blogs I never read and all the places I never go. All the photos I never take. I must do better or my life will be a chain of chain stores, chain restaurants and chain letters.


By the counter is a bowl of “shop-irmations”. It’s yet another touch about the shop that makes me fall in love with it just a little bit. The friendly sign encourages me to take one so I pull one out of the bowl and keenly unfold it. Of course, if this was a film it would tell me to seize that day, somehow echo my musings and make me change my life. But life isn’t that facile and straightforward, and thank goodness for that. Instead, it says this:

If you know someone who likes to drown their sorrows, remind them how good sorrows can swim.

This might be valuable advice but to me it seems rather beside the point, something I reflect on at leisure later that day. Kelly and I sit in the shade outside the Coronation Tap cider house in Clifton, sipping a lethal half of “Exhibition” cider which is only sold on the premises.

Forget drowning or swimming sorrows, sometimes happiness too likes a long bath. Or at the very least a lovely refreshing shower.

Lumming it with a hort pot

At work, Iain Gemma and I are the Three Musketeers. But this week I have been abandoned. Iain has been on leave sailing in Cowes (like all awfully posh people he does sports involving sitting down, rather than common people who do sports revolving around standing up). Gemma has also been away, "working from home" apparently. It was her birthday on Wednesday and she is now 24, or in her own inimitable words “mucho old”.

But I don’t care, because the fourth musketeer is back in the building. My friend and colleague Sarah has returned from maternity leave. I am much happier about this, I have to say, than she is. She has recovered splendidly from being off work for a year. She also seems to have forgiven me for my reaction when she first told me she was pregnant. I believe my exact words were “You’re dead to me.” But I was wrong about that, just as I was wrong when my friend Dave became a father and I sent him a card in which I had thoughtfully inscribed “Congratulations! See you in 18 years” so what do I know?

Sarah is one of the funniest people I’ve ever met so my lunches this week have been a complete joy. She also has an impressive array of comedy faces, something I think everyone should try to develop. And let me tell you, I am no slouch in the comedy face department either. Once, I was in Budapest and Kelly and I went for dinner at a restaurant which had a pianist so loud that conversation was impossible. I had no choice but to fill the hour and a half with comedy faces across the goulash. It just about worked (though in the process I wore out my sad face which means I can never get sympathy from Kelly ever again. Damn you Budapest).

Sadly I am also apparently no slouch in the come face department either. I know this because I once had an ex whose party piece was to impersonate my come face to all of my friends. Behind my back. She’s dead now (not literally dead, just dead to me). But on the other hand, I can confidently say that I have absolutely no idea what her come face looked like. So who’s having the last laugh there, eh? One nil to me!

Really funny people fascinate me. They just see the world in different ways to everyone else and their minds make connections between things and people that you would never think of yourself. But I also believe that, like an extra law of Newtonian motion, funny things naturally happen to funny people.

So I wasn’t surprised when Sarah told me yesterday that the S key had fallen off her keyboard.

My response wasn’t terribly supportive. I hopped onto IM and sent her a message saying “Really? That mut be hite.”

I went over to her desk to review the situation. It had indeed fallen off and apparently couldn’t be reattached because her laptop was missing a “nipple”, whatever that is (I didn’t even know laptops had nipples. Maybe it too had been on maternity leave). She had had to resort to sellotaping her S key to the computer.

Poor Sarah then had to raise an IT fault using an online system which appeared to have been written in Esperanto and then translated into English using a Babelfish knock-off. Oddly enough there is no menu option for “The S key has fallen off my keyboard.” so the whole thing was a bit convoluted. This never helps when your request is going to India despite the fact that there are probably hundreds of defunct keyboards sitting piled high in a store cupboard metres from your desk.

Sarah stopped by my desk this morning to jubilantly show off her new refurbished keyboard.

”Look, they finally fixed it!”

“Excellent, and have you caught up with your new manager now?”

“No – I haven’t talked to him him yet.”

“I think he might be at home, lacking off. Or maybe he went to Pearmint Rhino to check out the tripper.”

“You’re not funny.”

I won’t be posting for a few days as I am off to Bristol tomorrow for the weekend. Despite having been born there I haven’t gone back in ages and don’t know what to expect. The hotel has been booked, tables at two lovely looking restaurants have been reserved and I understand there’s shopping to be done. But if I return with a blog post called “Bristol – the bastard son of Budapest and Carcassonne” you’ll know it didn’t go well.

Never mind. Every cloud has a silver lining (especially ones that I don’t even necessarily know actually existed). It transpires that If I am stuck for somewhere for a light snack my friend Darren – who was there a little while back for the Banksy exhibition – has found just the place.

Have a fantastic weekend!

The fucking girl

My bed is my favourite bed in the whole wide world. It’s the only one I’ve ever actually bought from new after years of college rooms, renting rooms in grotty furnished houses and the occasional cohabitation. Despite this I have a paradoxical relationship with bed. During the working week when the alarm goes off it is the most comfortable place in the world, like swimming in a warm pool of fuzzy loveliness, and I can’t bring myself to leave. At weekends, when I have all the time in the world I can’t manage to stay in it and want to be up and about instead of wasting the day.

I’m not sure when I became the sort of person who says things like “wasting the day” but it definitely worries me. But there’s no feeling quite as wonderful as drifting off to sleep in fresh bedding on a Saturday night with nowhere to go and nothing to do the next day, and if that makes me sound a hundred years old so be it (he said, reaching for his ear trumpet).

My favourite chair in the whole wide world, on the other hand, is the 1950s Italian armchair which sits in our living room. It is one of those beautiful pieces of design that looks good from every angle. But more importantly, it is right next to the massive Georgian sash window. The television has serious competition in my flat. Why watch it, when you can look outside and see all of Reading’s rich tapestry going past the window? Usually shuffling, I might add, as Reading appears to be the silly walks capital of the world. I swear people with silly walks gravitate to Reading (albeit probably rather slowly), drawn by the irrevocable pull of fellow shamblers.

At night the buses go past, the top deck level with my window. The fluorescent lighting lends the people being dejectedly transported to Whitley the air of an Edward Hopper painting and a resigned dignity they probably don’t deserve.

But my favourite table in the whole wide world is not in my flat. Its location changes all the time.

For a while, it was outside Santa Fe, the bar in the centre of town by the canal. Every Friday afternoon we would sit there, our table groaning with cocktails, and watch the weekend slowly come to life in front of us. Over time, like a stop motion animation, the hubbub got shriller, the skirts got shorter and the age of the revellers gradually got younger. And eventually we knew it was time to get a new favourite table.

Places fall into and out of fashion, come under new ownership or just close down. And keeping ahead of that cycle is what makes things fun. Besides, there is nothing worse than actively knowing you’re somewhere which is well past its best - be that a table, a bed, a chair, a friendship or a relationship. Not that I’m saying furniture is any kind of metaphor for sexual partners, though I reserve the right to change my mind if I come up with any decent punchlines. Let's just say that the springs had definitely gone on a couple of my exes.

At the moment – for now at least – my favourite table is in Forbury's, the fantastic French restaurant just off the park. Not a specific table, just whichever one they can find for me on any given evening. This is where I went with Ivor for the famous pig’s head incident and since then I seem to keep finding people to go back there with. It’s got to the stage where the last time I popped in there to book a table on my way home they already knew my surname. I walked home on cloud nine after that thinking this is what being famous must feel like - and unless I go mental with a machete in the office or get left alone in the billiard room with Davina McCall and some lead piping it may well be the closest to famous I’m going to get. I go to Forburys often enough that the waiters have started looking at me conspiratorially every time I turn up with a woman.

I wonder which one they think I’m married to and which ones they think are my bits on the side?

I was there on Thursday with my friend Clare. The ambience was cool, calm and still. The tables are beautifully spaced. The food is superbly done whether you’re having something classic from the set menu or going off piste and having something fiddly and delicate from the a la carte. And nobody does service quite like the French – to the untrained eye it looks like rudeness but there’s a grudging respect about it, especially if you know your way round a wine list.

Incidentally, there’s nothing worse than trying to bluff when it comes to wine. My friend Sarah (famous for the Muncle story) once told me about a time when her sister was working at a pub in Surrey and a woman came up to the bar determined to impress all her friends by asking for an especially delicious white wine she'd had recently. She then asked Sarah's sister for "a bottle of that Pingo Gringo" within earshot of most of the regulars.

The bottle of wine on Thursday was very far from that – it was a beautiful inky Margaux, perfumed with fruit and oak and age. You can always tell how good a wine is in restaurants like this – if it’s nothing special they bring it to you and serve it in the glasses already at the table. If it’s quite good they take the glasses away and replace them with different, bigger, deeper ones with a more satisfying shape to cradle, more room to breathe. And if - like this Margaux - they are really good, they replace the glasses and decant the bottle into a bright and shapely carafe like a lab flask. And it sits there getting more rich and complex as you sit there getting poorer and more straightforward. Which, it seems to me, is exactly how it should be.

Clare and I go way back and we first met at school when I was 17. Back then she was known as “the fucking girl”. Not because she was doing lots of it – although she probably was. If we had called everybody who was getting more sex than us “the fucking girl” Mother Teresa would have been in with a chance. She got that nickname because of her propensity for using the F word at every available opportunity. Like me she has absolutely no filters and if she wants to say something she just does. She’s not bitchy like me, it’s more that she genuinely doesn’t care who hears it or what they think. We usually have a lot to talk about and virtually none of it is charitable. I look forward to our meals out for weeks. So there we are, sitting at that sophisticated table, waiting for our main course to turn up, in our thirties on our outside and seventeen on the inside.

That must be why she accused one of the women at the table near us of being a prostitute.

“Look at that woman over there.” she said. “Clearly a hooker.”

It’s not that she shouted. She didn’t exactly whisper either. But the crucial thing is that she didn’t give a monkeys who heard, including some of the waiters. Her voice carried, clear and level, through the hushed space of the Forbury like somebody denouncing a witch in The Crucible.

I spun round to see the couple in question were out on the patio. He was elderly and so far from attractive that he made Monty Burns look like Daniel Craig. Moreover the fashion police should have turned up and taken him into custody for possession of a non-ironic blazer with intent to team it with chinos. She on the other hand, decked out in Primark’s finest, was old enough to be younger than his daughter. She kept laughing gamely at all his jokes and touching her hair, which in my Columbo-like state of mind was the clincher. Yep, she was a lady of the night, no doubt about it. Money was going to change hands at the end of the evening, and I wasn’t talking about the sea bream. Maybe he had ordered the haddock pasty. I turned back to look at Clare.

“Jesus, not like that! Could you have been any less subtle?”

Anyway I still maintain that having no filters - broadly speaking - is no bad thing and nothing so far has changed my mind. Not even Clare going into great lengths about her dog’s impending castration during dessert. Because believe you me, nobody wants to hear about a hound getting de-nadgered while enjoying a mouthful of sticky tarte tatin. Thank Christ it wasn’t plums is all I can say.

That’s it for today’s instalment. Just a quick concluding note to say that I’ve lost a couple of followers recently - people can be so thin skinned, can’t they - and, it appears, half my commenters (commentalists?). So if you’re still reading this thanks ever so much. And now if you’ll excuse me I had better go and make a cup of tea – my throat is a little sore from enthusiastically singing Quinn The Eskimo all the way home.

Together in eclectic dreams

We are not morning people. So when I clamber on board the funbus at Sierra Quebec every morning the salutations are always the same – a perfunctory nod from Mikey, a disconcertingly Cockney wink from Cornish Rob. And then I sit by myself and drink my mocha, lovingly prepared by the chirpy midgets in the AMT hut in the middle of the train station. I’ll never understand how a branch of Starbucks can have over half a dozen slack jawed reprobates behind the counter at any given time and still churn out coffee in roughly the time it would take the Queen to run a half marathon. By contrast the grinning dwarves at AMT have your drink ready about thirty seconds after you’ve decided you want one. This often coincides with the split second you get to the front of the queue.

No, the rule on the funbus is that conversations only take place in the afternoon when all the mails have been sent, spreadsheets have been monkeyed about with and baffling management communiqués have been read. On Thursday afternoon it was just me and Cornish Rob. Mikey was out of the office meeting a supplier (they let him do that from time to time, even though his expensively coiffed hairstyle looks ever so slightly like a coconut). Rob and I chatted idly away about all sorts as Donald Pleasence put his foot to the floor and drove the silver dream machine down the A329 back to civilisation.

Cornish Rob, like me, is quite a foodie so we often talk about food, or television programmes. Or, better still, television programmes about food. Another recurring topic is his deep and abiding hatred of vapid daily BBC magazine-style programme The One Show. That always gets him foaming at the mouth and ranting about the demise of public service broadcasting. I, being mild mannered and possessed of no animosity towards minor figures on television, usually find myself just nodding and saying yes.

However, on this occasion Cornish Rob decided to up the ante.

He told me that one morning that week he had been ambling round the kitchen making a hot beverage when his fiancée Jo came into the room. Cornish Rob had had a fantastic dream the night before where he was a pirate. Not downloading music or making dodgy knocked up copies of DVDs, but a proper pirate. On a pirate ship having all sorts of piratical japes and everything. Unusually, he could remember all about it. It was one of those dreams, he said, where you woke up gutted to be awake and desperate to get back to sleep. I have to say I found that quite sweet, because whenever I’ve had a dream like that it’s involved several naked women. Or six figure sums of money. Excited by his antics on the seven seas he was bursting to tell Jo all about it.

“I had a really weird and amazing dream last night.” he said.

“So did I.” came the response. “I was getting a pounding off Heath Ledger. Dressed as the Joker.”

Cornish Rob was rather knocked for six by this admission.

“That doesn’t sound like it was very nice.”

There was a moment’s silence. Then Jo looked at him, gave him a very slow, very sly smile and left the room looking pleased with herself. This somewhat pissed on his chips.

Cornish Rob’s cuckolding at the hands of a dead film star dressed as a supervillain played on his mind all that day. How could he compete with that? He was still feeling more than slightly mutinous that night and couldn’t stop himself from bringing it up. He was in the kitchen again making his packed lunch for the next day and Jo asked him to get something from the cupboard.

“I bet Heath Ledger doesn’t have this problem.” said Cornish Rob as he grumpily obliged her.

“Oh no.” said Jo, with a sudden dreamy smirk on her face, “No he definitely does not.”

So now Cornish Rob’s ego is understandably more than a little fragile. He’s struggling to come to terms with the image of his intended frantically knocking boots with the filmic embodiment of psychotic evil. He was explaining to me on the funbus that the weirdest thing about it was that Jo had never previously expressed an interest in Heath Ledger. Or an interest in the Joker. Or, for that matter, in “getting a pounding”. The poor chap was clearly feeling quite put out by the whole thing and Jo’s protestations that he wasn’t allowed to feel threatened because Mr Ledger is dead somehow didn’t make things any better.

With hindsight, there may have been more sensitive ways to respond to this situation than saying “I bet they were both grinning from ear to ear after that session.” Even as it came out of my mouth I knew it probably wasn’t quite supportive enough. Nor was my observation that the Joker is probably one of the only people who, like Jo, can fit their entire fist in their mouth. But Cornish Rob obviously wasn’t too gutted because he was even considering getting flash cards made saying “ZAP!” and “POW!” to hold up during any future acts of lovemaking. I think maybe some adult Batman sound effects could be the way forward, things like “JIZZ!”, “HUMP!” and “FAKE!”. Well, maybe not the last one so much.

“I might have to dress up as a supervillain to reignite the passion.” said Cornish Rob. “Maybe I’ll dress as the Penguin, see how she likes it.”

“I don’t think you need to.” I said, “Cornish Rob already sounds like a supervillain. I can see it now: Cornish Rob, hell bent on wreaking pasty all over the British Isles. That’s ‘wreaking’ rather than ‘reeking’ by the way. ‘reeking pasty’ just sounds like a euphemism for someone’s lady petals.”

“That could work. ‘Slowly, I nibbled the pastry off her haddock pasty.’”

“Stop it. That’s disgusting.”

I couldn’t believe finally somebody had said something I found mildly distasteful. Not because it’s sexually revolting or in poor taste, I ought to add. Nothing disgusts me in that way (at least, nothing I’ve heard so far). It just didn’t paint a very appetising picture. I was out to dinner that night and it sounded like something I’d shy away from in a restaurant.

Priorities, you see.

In the Oakford after work on Friday Cornish Rob confessed to Jo that he had revealed the story of her nocturnal unconscious infidelities. And we found out the missing piece of the jigsaw from her. The dream rutting had apparently taken place in Jo’s mum’s kitchen. Even if you aren’t shocked by the betrayal of trust, even if you aren’t appalled by the necrophilia, surely this final snippet of information pushes this fully over the line of good taste. What would Freud say?

Incidentally I’d like to thank all my friends for repeatedly pointing out that there is a line of good taste, albeit rather disappointedly. Having done a bit of research I find I can just about see it on a clear night with a powerful telescope from where I am.