I’M BEING picked up to go to Heathrow at 6am, so here’s the traditional roll-call of the great people who made my trip so enjoyable: mum and dad for putting me up, doing the laundry, and especially to mum for letting me borrow her brand-new car and put 650 miles on it; Paul for picking me up at the airport and taking me back tomorrow; Lou for making a chocolate cake just like mum used to; Flynn and Becky for the Indian meal; James, Helen, Sarah and Mark for the Tibetan meal, the Forest walk, Broome Farm, and brekkies at Weatherspoons; Blunty for the waterfalls walk, the photography tips and for carrying my camera backpack when it became obvious that if he didn’t he’d have to carry me; Mike for the Joaquin video; and the choir at St Albans Cathedral for practising while I was taking pics there and filling the building with beautiful music. If I’ve left anyone off it’s because I’m wiped out, not because I hate you. And huge thanks to Sian Rose for the ladybird hunting, muddy puddles, scrambled eggs, finger painting, trolley racing, pony riding, sandcastles, spaghetti flinging, Joaquin watching, colour mixing, dragon painting, video recordings, picture taking, Fezzy helloing and most of all for making up a song that contained the lyric “the doggy poo’d at grandma”. What an awesome niece.
I apologise for the lack of updates this trip, but the first week I was here was pretty much a washout thanks to the crappy weather and the second week has been non-stop early starts and late nights and I’ve been too knackered to sit down and edit photos/write posts. But stay tuned for trip photos next week, assuming the jetlag doesn’t wipe me out.
WHAT should a group of good-looking young(ish) people do in the Forest of Dean on a Saturday morning? Well I don’t know what they got up to, but me, James, Mark, Helen and Sarah decided to try walking the four-mile Sculpture Trail as it would be good exercise for us and good practice for the local paramedics when they were called out to give me emergency medical treatment after the first 200 yards. Above, Mark and Sarah (not pictured in that order) check out the map while trying to ignore the words “is crap” scrawled in mud next to “Trail”. Note: Apart from the first one, I can’t for the life of me remember which order the sculptures were in so I’m making it up as I go along.
This is my favourite sculpture, and not just because it’s close to the car park. It’s called “Place” and there are amazing views across the Cannop Valley. After watching James attempt to scale it, we headed on.
Some of the sculptures are obvious and some you have to look for. This is one of the obvious ones, and I don’t think it’s supposed to be a mouse with wings. It’s called “The Heart Of The Stone” and has been there since 1988. Being responsible mature adults we used it to take silly photos of each other.
This is “Raw” and it’s one I think we all thought was pretty cool. Well, until James climbed it and began throwing shapes.
I’d forgotten how beautiful the Forest is. The trail winds its way through some gorgeous scenery with occasional puddles of gloopy mud:
Here’s “Observatory”:
Someone has already given their opinion on it:
Is it art? YOU DECIDE!
So, on we went. As I said, some of the artworks are great, others not. Although it’s not a sculpture, this spooky fungus-laden tree was pretty cool:
Close to Spooky Tree, as I’ve just named it, is a sculpture called “Fire And Water Boats”:
They look like they’re made from concrete but according to the website they’re actually oak which has been passed through fire to preserve it. They’re near a man-made canal into which none of us managed to fall:
And then we plodded onwards. The trails is marked by blue poles, some of which send you around in circles which frankly is bloody annoying. There are also long stretches without any sculptures (at least none we could spot) which just added to the general feeling of “this is a nice walk, shame about the art”.
This one is called “Deer” and is frankly pretty frightening as it looks like something out of Terminator 5: When Animals Attack. If I remember rightly, which I doubt, the next part of the trail was a long, long, long straight bit which made me think of a nice hot cup of tea and a lie down the natural beauty and diverse wildlife of the forest.
This one’s “Cone & Vessel” and in my rest-deprived state I honestly thought it was one of those 1960s bubble chair things. After that we came across something more mysterious:
Is it a Mayan temple? A Bond villain’s lair? No, it’s “Hill 33″, a new sculpture. Well at least I think it’s new, or newish, as the official website doesn’t really give any information as to when it was installed. By this point we thought we were coming to the end but no, it just kept going. I’ll spare you the gory details and jump to the final one:
Called “Cathedral”, it’s my second fave after “Place”. We took in its colours and then stupidly followed the blue signposts only to discover the deceiving bastards had taken us on a long loop when we could have just walked 50 yards in a straight line. But all was not lost — finally we made it to the end only for me to have my dream of a nice cold ice-cream dashed against the rocks of futility when we went into the “cafe” and found the Wall’s freezer decimated. Still, all was not lost as we headed to Broome Farm for a cream tea:
Home-made scones and cider cake, huge bowls of cream and jam, fresh strawberries and gallons of strong tea. So that’s Britain 1, Rest of World 0.
POT NOODLE. Released into the wild UK in 1978 the much-derided but still hugely-selling pots of dehydrated crap have become a British icon. I have devoured plenty in my own lifetime, starting with cheese & tomato ones in the 80s through to the more “exotic” southern fried chicken, sweet & sour, donor kebab and chow mein. All of them have one thing in common: they’re cheap, easy to make, keep you going and if you’re really hungry they make a great sandwich filling.
But now there’s a new Pot Noodle on the block, the GTi. I couldn’t work out why it was named after a car model until I saw the ad on YouTube:
Awful, isn’t it? Although to be fair at least it isn’t American so it doesn’t have “closed course — professional driver — do not attempt” plastered across the screen during the driving scenes. A couple of things about the GTi caught my attention, namely a) it was sitting in mum’s kitchen cupboard meaning it’s free, and 2) the fact the label proudly displays the legend “REAL MEAT UNDER THE LID.” After doing some quick research I discovered that Pot Noodles didn’t have actual meat in them until the GTi, raising the question: “What exactly was I eating all those years?” (Answer: “textured soya pieces”).
The other big difference with the GTi is that it’s the first Pot Noodle that you don’t have to add hot water to. The sauce is already in liquid form — well, sort of liquid:
Christ on a bike, it looks like it’s been filled straight from the main Delhi sewer line. The instructions are simple: stick in a microwave for 2 minutes, remove from microwave, eat. So I did:
It was just crap. The noodles are more like spaghetti than the classic Pot Noodle noodles, the sauce was bland and the whole thing had the consistency of stage 3 diarrhea mixed with strips of cardboard. I did find a piece of meat, though, so I suppose I should consider myself a winner. Will I be having another one? Shit, no.
I KNOW, six books in four days is pathetic for me. I wouldn’t have bought any if I hadn’t discovered the amazing three-storey Waterstone’s in Cheltenham and spent a happy hour wandering around with £40 burning a hole in my pocket. I picked up When The Lights Went Out and No Such Thing As Society and was heading to the till when I saw Strange Days Indeed. All three are social histories of the 70s and 80s, a topic I got into after reading Dominic Sandbrook’s excellent Never Had It So Good a couple of years ago. After paying for those I saw Kenneth Williams’ biography Born Brilliant and had to get it. Left with about four quid to pay for parking in the soulless Beechwood Shopping Centre (where the pay stations are conveniently located 200 yards from wherever you park), I headed home.
I bought The Complete History Of Jack The Ripper for the princely sum of £2.99. I used to own it when I lived in Wales and it’s a brilliantly detailed account of the Ripper’s murders and the police investigation. The author doesn’t come to any conclusion as to who the killer was (my own theory is that he was a nobody, much like Jeffrey Dahmer and Dennis Nilsen would have been if they hadn’t been caught) but it’s still fascinating to read about what happened in 1888.
As for Two Fat Ladies Ride Again, it’s thanks to mum for finding it in a charity shop for £1.50. I asked her to get it because me and Ev love the TV show and want to try making some of the dishes they do. If you haven’t seen it, here they are making partridges with cabbage, Duntreath roast grouse and medallions of venison with blackberries:
They are brilliant. The programme was an overnight success when it was first broadcast on the BBC in the 1990s and it’s not difficult to see why: their contempt for modern concepts of healthy eating, their skill at making older dishes and the chemistry between them cook up a superb show.
Doubtless I’ll buy more before I head back to the States. One thing I love about looking around British bookstores is the number of books I find that I can’t get in America. Well I can, but it means using Amazon and being ripped off for postage. According to my Library Thing database I’m up to 797 books now, meaning Book 800 will more than likely bought in the next 10 days. Ev is going to kill me.
INDIAN food. It’s the best, except maybe for my nan’s Welshcakes. Anyway, with me being home and bored on a Monday night there was little else to do except call Flynn and see if he and Becky fancied an Indian. And they did.
Photo by Jonathan Billinger, courtesy of geograph.org.uk (I forgot to take an outside shot)
Zam Zam’s has got some rave reviews on tripadvisor.co.uk and we’ve eaten there a few times, although Ev is yet to try it. Monday is three-courses-for-a-tenner-night and you can’t argue with that. It was crowded downstairs so we were taken to the much quieter upstairs section where we ordered drinks (one pint of Coke, two pints of lemonade — we like to live on the edge) and looked over the menu.
Becky applies sauce as I try to breathe in. Photo by Flynn as I’d left my camera at home. Duh.
The food range is pretty basic and just what you’d expect — tandoori, korma, vindaloo, balti and so on. The £10 offer covers your starter, main course and naan bread. After a plate of crispy poppadums we all ordered chicken pakora to start, which is chicken dipped in gram flour batter, deep-fried and served with a side of green stuff and a lemony/garlicky sauce. It’s great, tender and tasty and filling and the sauce is light but adds flavour.
Photo by Flynn. Try to ignore the slab of flab in the black shirt.
When it comes to the main course I’m useless — given all the different flavours on offer I inevitably go for chicken korma because i) I’m a wimp when it comes to spicy stuff, and b) it’s bloody fantastic. It’s in the copper pot in the above pic. The only minor problem was that I forgot to order rice, but the peshwari naan sitting on my plate made an admirable substitute. Peshwari naan is the best — it’s got coconut, pistachios and raisins in it and is wonderfully sweet. The korma sauce is thick and perfectly flavoured, although it could have done with more chicken chunks.
Flynn and Becky got chicken chaat, which is chicken in a sauce of salt, garlic, coriander, turmeric, chilli powder and lemon and tomato served in a soft poppadum with something called a “salad” in between them. I’ve had it before and F&B get it all the time. It’s an interesting mix of flavours which work really well and Zam Zam does a great job of it.
The service at Zam Zam isn’t perfect but with a great three-course Indian meal for less than a tenner, who cares? The food is very good, the restaurant is nice inside, it’s conveniently located in the middle of Ross and it’s cheap. It’s also got a bring-your-own-booze policy. You can’t go wrong. Will I be going back? Oh yes.
THIS video of the reprehensible sack of shit that is Pastor Sean Harris, of North Carolina, has been making the rounds recently. If you’re going to watch it, make sure you take a shot of Jack Daniels/a valium/smoke a fattie boombattie first to relax you as by the end of his sick diatribe your blood won’t be boiling so much as steaming.
Like many of the so-called Christians who pollute inhabit the welfare state that is the South, Harris has a problem with hommaseckshuls and advocates that something should be done to “cure” them. But Pastor Harris has decided that it’s too late once your kid’s listening to Lady Gaga and watching RuPaul’s Drag Race, so he suggests starting on the gay-aversion therapy early:
“So your little son starts to act a little girlish when he is four years old and instead of squashing that like a cockroach and saying, ‘Man up, son, get that dress off you and get outside and dig a ditch, because that is what boys do,’ you get out the camera and you start taking pictures of Johnny acting like a female and then you upload it to YouTube and everybody laughs about it and the next thing you know, this dude, this kid is acting out childhood fantasies that should have been squashed….Can I make it any clearer? Dads, the second you see your son dropping the limp wrist, you walk over there and crack that wrist. Man up. Give him a good punch. Ok? You are not going to act like that. You were made by God to be a male and you are going to be a male.”
Many religious people in America are up in arms over the perceived “assault” on their freedoms, but if they use those freedoms to spout hateful messages like this then why are they surprised? I’m not so much anti-religion as ignore-religion; religion is, basically, something that happens to other people. I can’t stand baseball but I don’t actively put games on the telly just so I can shout “BOOORING” or “GIRLS PLAY THIS WHERE I COME FROM” at the screen (note: does not apply when baseball’s on the TV at work). But when shit like Harris’ rant comes along it’s impossible to stay quiet. Harris seems to forget that the 1st Amendment rights apply both ways: he gets to spout this awfulness, we get to rip him to shreds for it. The Rethinking Patient Safety blog has a good article slamming Harris for enabling parents to smack their children about. It’s also called for Harris’ church to distance itself from him and even sack him, which would be a start; a couple of nights spent in small locked room with a large black man called Magenta might be a good idea, too.
Harris’ rancid rant lasted about an hour. One child dies every five seconds around the world from hunger and malnutrition. So in the time it spent Harris to spew his hatred, 700 kids lost their lives. I would have thought the Christian thing to do would be spend that hour helping fight hunger and disease and poverty, but that might take some actual effort on the part of Harris and his cronies. Besides, he’d probably take their cries of pain and hunger as “girlish” and give them the slap upside the head he thinks they deserve.
Now there’s been such a backlash against Harris’ statements, including a protest outside his church, that lo and behold he’s backtracking on his words. “Oh, I was only joking,” he’s saying now. “Everyone in the congregation on that morning understood that there was no intent in any way, shape or form that I meant to break a wrist,” he says. Yeah, right. Maybe Harris needs to “man up” himself and take some fucking responsibility for his words. Somehow I doubt he’d be saying this if it wasn’t for the video going viral on YouTube and the millions of people who saw it and were horrified by his hate. And I’d love to have seen the look on his followers’ faces when they heard his retraction as they’d probably all rushed home to take out their inadequacies beat the gay of out their kids.
But Harris’ sudden “I was only joking, guys, honest,” turnaround has been buggered up by another North Carolina pastor, Mark Rowden, who’s come not out of the closet but out in support of Harris:
Pastor Harris should be praised for his bold stance in scripture. People get so bent out of shape over things. If America don’t stop allowing such ungodliness to go unchallenged, we’ll find our nation like Sodom. We forget the Bible says “spare the rod, spoil the child”.
Rowden is yet another so-called Christian who’s forgetten the Golden Rule, but that doesn’t really come as any surprise. Look at the words of most of the Christian leaders in America, especially the South, and it’s difficult to reconcile the hate with any of the supposed “good” that Christianity’s meant to stand for. I do get asked why I’m an atheist and why I don’t believe in God, and my response is usually along the lines of, “Why the fuck would I want to associate with people like this?” I’ve never advocated smacking little kids around, so although I’m an unbeliever I guess I’m far more Christian than Harris and his appalling ilk.
ONE person in particular was very happy to see me, so happy in fact that she very kindly woke me up by shouting “UNCLE MUT!” in my ear when I dozed off during the FA Cup Final. The flight home was great — my evil plan of downing two sleeping tablets and a can of lager meant I fell asleep over Wyoming and woke up over Coventry. The only downers are that Ev’s not here and the weather’s crap. Right, I’m off to bed. More photos and other crap tomorrow.
IT’S 1994. I’ve nipped out to see my mate Flynn and find him watching some new TV show about two FBI agents who investigate weird cases. The programme’s just started. I sit down and watch… and watch… and watch… The following week I watch the second episode at home and by its end I’m hooked through the nuts.
The X-Files was an overnight sensation. Every magazine and newspaper had features and articles about the show, the stars and the stories. It was as if the programme had tapped into some well of desire for the unknown, although people were quick to point out that the sped-up footage of beans sprouting in the opening credits is hardly paranormal.
I bought the show’s “soundtrack”, Songs In The Key Of X, which was OK, I guess. I bought the soundtrack to the 1998 movie Fight The Future. I had the obligatory X-Files T-shirt with the opening credits’ eye across it — I couldn’t get the stylised X or the guy falling into the glowing hand as they’d all sold out. I bought the videos, the trading cards (which are somewhere in my parents’ house), the posters, the novels, the trivia books. I dragged my then-girlfriend, who’d never seen an episode in her life, to see Fight The Future, which left her baffled. I queued up for hours with Flynn at the HMV store in Cardiff to get the autographs of Mitch Pileggi and Nicholas Lea. About the only thing I didn’t buy was a life-size cardboard cutout of Gillian Anderson in her underwear, and the only reason I didn’t buy that was because nobody was selling one.
I’ve been watching a lot of X-Files episodes recently, mostly from the first three series, while working from home. I’d forgotten how genuinely good it is, far better than recent sci-fi/horror shows like The Walking Dead and The River (having said that, Crossroadswas better than The River). I haven’t been bothering with the alien mythology episodes but sticking the the “monster of the week” shows, which were always my favourites. The first series episodes “Squeeze” and “Tooms”, about the horribly creepy Eugene Tooms — who can stretch his body to squeeze into small spaces, hibernates in a nest made of bile and newspaper, and emerges every 30 years to kill five people and eat their livers — are just brilliant and Doug Anthony Hutchison’s portrayal of Tooms is one of the best performances of the entire run. It’s every bit as good as it was back in 1994.
It’s amazing how, given I haven’t watched an episode since probably 1999, I can remember what they’re about within a couple of minutes of the opening scenes, or at least remember bits and pieces of each one. “‘Die Hand Die Verletzt’… isn’t there a piglet involved somehow? Yep…” That episode contains one of my favourite openings: the school PTA discussing the redecorating of the gym, the proposed school play, and then ending their meeting with a satanic chant. “Ice”, which depending on your point of view is either pays homage to or rips off of John Carpenter’s The Thing, is excellent. “Irresistible” has another unsettling villian, an unbelievably creepy death fetishist who eats dead women’s fingers. The monster-of-the-week programmes are so well done and so inventive that they reinforce exactly why The X-Files was almost mandatory viewing back in the day. There were some real clunkers — “Space” is awful and “Shapes” isn’t much better –but on the whole, an “average” episode was excellent. The mythology shows were good, don’t get me wrong, but after a while I got bored of them; there’s only so many cryptic conversations in dimly-lit rooms you can watch before you want to see an acid-spewing human or mutated inbred hillbillies.
As I’ve been giving the mythology stories a miss I haven’t seen much of the Cigarette Smoking Man or Deep Throat (not that one) or The Lone Gunmen, or any of the recurring characters who did their best to get in Mulder’s way. I remember the CSM had his own episode in which he assassinates JFK, and I know Deep Throat was killed at the end of the first series, but beyond that my memories are lost to time. Which is surprising given the sheer amount of useless trivia I used to happily read and absorb.
I’m not entirely sure when I started to go off The X-Files. Certainly by the fifth series it was bloody obvious that Chris Carter, the show’s creator, was making the mythology arc stories up as he went along, and by the sixth or seventh the lack of any real closure to the whole aliens-are-among-us thing was getting tiring, although the standalone eps were still great. I was also bored of the Scully’s-in-danger-we-must-save-her stories and her ongoing scepticism in the face of everything she’d seen, which by this point included just about every type of paranormal activity known to mankind. Then David Duchovny buggered off and that just added to the urge to bail on the show. There wasn’t any point at which I consciously gave up on it; from being a huge part of my life it just vanished. I have no idea how it ended and wasn’t really interested in finding out. Whether I’ll watch all 202 episodes to discover exactly what did happen is doubtful, especially as I have a feeling there won’t be any real conclusion. For now I’ll just stick with the early stuff.
SPONJA’S kittens are still alive and well and living a high life of eating, pooing and sleeping… and, now I think of it, that’s all Emric, Iestyn and Fezzy do, too, so it’s not like the catlets have major life changes ahead of them. They’re still very weak and blind but are safe and warm in the cage in our backyard.
They’re also unbelievably cute. I mean, just look at that little face. We thought Fezzy was cute when we got him, but these are just adorable. If they’re not climbing all over Sponja and making little squeaky noises, they’re fast asleep and look like a pile of Beanie Babies, only better made and a lot cheaper.
Our plan is to keep them til they’re seven weeks then give them up to a cat adoption centre. Oh, and get Sponja fixed, too. But for now I just want to skin them and stuff them full of foam beads and sell them as novelty keyrings.
I TOOK this pic back in October while I was in Britain and I’m still, well, puzzled by it. Who is it aimed at? We all know that McDonalds exploits children but I never realised they were out to indoctrinate them, too. Why does this exist? I suppose it could be argued that it’s an educational toy, which is pretty plausible until you remember this is McDonalds we’re talking about.
Going by the usual consistency of an Egg McMuffin I think they used an actual McDonalds’ “egg” for this set. The same goes for the chicken nuggets and I’m sure eating the plastic sauce packets is probably healthier than eating the sauce, unless they’ve discovered a way of getting a pound of sugar into a kid’s toy. But it must be said that the cardboard box has more fibre than anything advertised by Ronnie.
I mean, look at the pic of the little girl in the bottom right corner. Her smile is far too genuine and doesn’t have the the thousand-yard stare and blank repetition of “do you want fries with that?” you find in a professional fast food employee. And although she’s far too young to be working behind the counter at a McDonalds she’s probably too old to be working in whichever Chinese sweatshop churned this out.
Let’s not fuck about: who in their right mind would buy this for their kid? What kind of mental disorder would you need to see this on a shelf and think, “Hey, I’ve been looking for something to destroy my offspring’s sense of self-esteem and ambition and this shitty five-quid toy is just what I need!” I thought you’d failed as a parent if you bought your kid one of these, but the McDonalds Happy Time Food Fun Play Set & Lead Paint Delivery System really takes the peppery sausage-and-egg biscuit.
And huge thanks to Sian Rose for the ladybird hunting, muddy puddles, scrambled eggs, finger painting, trolley racing, pony riding, sandcastles, spaghetti flinging, Joaquin watching, colour mixing, dragon painting, video recordings, picture taking, Fezzy helloing and most of all for making up a song that contained the lyric “the doggy poo’d at grandma”. What an awesome niece.
