This Is This

Just got back from Liverpool where I saw Everton get beaten by Arsenal. Driving for nine hours in two days to watch your team lose? If you have to ask, you’ll never understand.

I am very tired. I was tired when I went up, here’s a picture of me looking tired at the match and here’s something I wrote at 4am this morning despite being very tired, which makes me tired now, having driven back today.

Eric Wasn’t God

Eric Clapton he got crapped on.
Dolly wives with make-up slapped on
were the women he got wrapped on.
Eric wasn’t god.

He was one of few guitarists
I-took-drugs-but-still-went-far-ists,
doors perceptive left ajarest.
Eric wasn’t god.

Around the planet he went zooming,
axe in hand and Marshalls booming,
blind to the disasters looming.
Eric wasn’t god.

Rio, Paris, Jo ‘burg, Devon -
amps turned right up to eleven.
Shame about that Tears In Heaven.
Eric wasn’t god.
—
Related posts
What Scares Me About Eric Clapton
What Scares Me About Eric Clapton - An Apology

The Roman god Janus was the diety of gates, doorways and hinges. It’s where we get the word janitor. Oh, and he had two faces, so he could see the future and the past. It’s also where we get the word January.

Because January to me is all about mopping up piles of puke and telling children not to run.

No, seriously it’s about looking ahead and seeing where you’ve been; new beginnings and the ends of chapters, resolve, resilience and hope.

More on that tomorrow on a similar theme, but here’s your weekend song for now.

Winter’s crept up, and made itself comfortable regardless of my lacklustre hospitality this time around, but it’ll go - it’s just a case of riding it out.

I guess the winter makes you laugh a little slower,
makes you talk a little lower about the things you could not show her.
And its been a long December and there’s reason to believe
maybe this year will be better than the last.
I can’t remember all the times I tried to tell my myself
to hold on to these moments as they pass.

Listen: A Long December
—
Related pages
Weekend Song archive

Ahhh, California Dreaming. A great folk crossover tune and about as wistful as they come. Four-part harms, no fancy intro, all polyphonics and polyester.

Sing it with me now, I’ll do Part 1, then you come in with the safes and the warms. OK?

You ready?

Part 1: “I’d be safe and waaaaaaaaaaaaaaarm.”
Part 2: ”                   ”I’D BE SAFE AND WARM.”

That’s it.

Part 1: “If I was in LAAAAAAAAAAAA.”
Part 2: ”                  ”IF I WAS IN LA.”

Hang on, hang on, no wait. No, you’re fine, it’s just…

…it should be “were”.

“If I were in LA.”

But that’s not so bad I guess. “If I was a carpenter and you were my lady.” That should be “were” too. Everybody’s doing it and it’s no shame.

Especially if you’re Northern and then you say “were” to everything.

As in

Eee by ‘eck, our mam, happen that Yorkshire t’putting were right smashin’

Or something.

But what really pops my moms is when bands misuse apostrophes.

They’ve let themselves down, there. I was hoping their grammar would be better than their personal hygene, but no. Crazy times I guess. Woodstock, man on the moon, no toilet seats, Vietnam.

Aimee Mann. Now there’s a lady who knew her corresponding dative pronouns. In Mister Harris, Saturday’s Weekend Song just gone, you had the line “Am I the only one to whom that’s making sense.” That’s grammar you can set your watch to.

Part 1: “YOU KNOW I GOT DOWN ON MY”
Part 2:                                                “Got down on my knee-eee’s.”

Have a very good weekend.

Need light. Please send.

If you haven’t heard of Sungha Jung, I have just enriched your lives. Unless you are a guitarist.

Yeah, but can he dance?

He’s eleven. He turned eleven in September. He started playing when he was nine, he practices about an hour or two a day. Please, please let this be a wind-up. Make him be 42 with a growth hormone disorder and ample free time.

Please let me find a shred of evidence among his other videos.

Seriously, no, I am happy for him.

A Whiter Shade Of Pale is one of those songs where the words do the word thing in my head and get mixed up. I get the verses muddled and then try and do the rhyme anyway. I keep digging.

One of sixteen vestal virgins
who were leaving for the coast.
When we called out for another drink,
the waiter brought us toast.

I hope your Christmas was a good one, and you’re enjoying some time off if you have it.

The 1944 musical in Meet Me in St. Louis was the first audition of Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas, sung by Judy Garland, but it was made famous by Frank Sinatra in the 1950s.

Frank Si-fucking-natra. Don’t get me started. A quick search of this site tells me I have never spoken of this, but I hate Frank Sinatra. I almost can’t believe I’ve never posted about it before, but that’s probably because I can’t stand him.

Can no one else hear how flat he sounds? And I don’t just mean blue notes, or bending up to lazily hit the note in lazy, dulcet jazz stylings. He is just flat. The fact that he’s so highly rated baffles me but, yes, I do not like Frank Sinatra. I like all that other stuff, the rat-pack thing, the swing era material before and the cheesy Vegas ballads after, but - well - I’ve said my piece. He made me swear on Christmas day as well, and you didn’t need to hear that. I’m sorry. I sometimes say things.

Anyway, Sinatra was recording an album called A Jolly Christmas and he wanted the lyrics changed. So instead of the darker original line “Until then, we’ll have to muddle through somehow“, he sang the line: “Hang a shining star upon the highest bow“.

This totally changed the song’s focus to a celebration of present happiness, rather than anticipation of a better future. But it’s the end of the year, it’s the days getting longer and the hope of new things that makes today what it is as much as it is a time to give thanks.

My man James Taylor wanted to stay faithful to the tone. He says: “I always sort of thought of this song with these lyrics from the movie. And it resonates more with me this way, with the sort of sadder, more melancholy lyrics. I like it better.”

He sings of ”bringing joy that may last“.

“May.”

Sigh.

Christmas is bittersweet. It’s marzipan, it’s the absent friend among company, it’s - ”it’s not much but I thought of you.”

Although it’s been said many times many ways - Merry Christmas to you.

In a year, we all will be together if the fates allow.
Until then we’ll just have to muddle through somehow.
And have ourselves a merry little Christmas now.

Listen: Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas

You may be bored of all the Christmas songs, but we’re nearly there. Two more - this one and my favourite one song of all on the day itself.

Yes, we’re going on posting every day here. No rest for the wicked, not that I qualify for that category. Anyway, I keep talking about posts and songs and stuff and I’ve given you little of either, so I better crack on.

There’s a film out at the moment called Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium. It stars Dustin Hoffman, the man who gave us such fine performances in The Graduate, Rain Man, Midnight Cowboy and (I can say it) Meet The Fockers.

Only trouble is (gee-eee wiz) it is possibly the worst film title ever, and sequel titles run looting through my head.

Mr. Moorehouse’s Colourful Whorehouse
Mr. Rackden’s Boarded-up Crackden
Mr. Gorzone’s No-fly Warzone
Mr. Lionel’s Magic Urinal
Mr. Mellor’s Dank, Dark Cellar
Mr. Alhop’s Childhood Sweatshop

You see? Just terrible. This is what my head does. I hear one thing, I think of another. Like if anyone’s going to write His And Hers Dark Materials, or do a mime version of Waiting For Godot, or if there are any zydeco Christmas songs.

Hell yes on the latter, with one here by C.J. Chenier, for whom no foot stays still and who by playing accordion to the sound of a washboard has the power to make you dance like your parents.

Deck the halls with cayenne pepper.
Fill the room, red hot two steppers.
Don’t hold back no how, no way,
laisse le bon temps rouler.

Listen: Zydeco Christmas

I went ice skating yesterday for the first time in many years. I went out family to Hampton Court for my birthday and it emerged that I was the only one who could skate, so I went around by myself for a bit.

I discovered I can still skate really well. It’s surprising how I remember it from being a kid and I guess all the skiing I’ve done since had helped.

I tend on this site to avoid cliches like the plague, but “the experience was liberating”. The rink was set up in the courtyard of the palace, so at one turn you could skate along with the Thames just off to your right with the building growing in front of you. Every time I made the corner, Joni Mitchell nudged her way into my head - I wish I had river I could skate away on - it was the perfect song for the moment and if it had been a film, you’d have said it was too much, but the sponteneity made it ok, so I went with it.

Everyone looks better when they’re skating. They are wrapped up warm and comfortable, smiling, active, helping others with their purpose, some arm in arm and caring, others single and not.

You’re in one of two states when you’re skating - graceful or funny. That’s it. You’re either gliding elegantly or slipping around like a clown, and it’s nice when life boils things down so simple.

It’s coming on Christmas, they’re cutting down trees,
They’re putting up reindeer, and singing songs of joy and peace.
I wish I had a river I could skate away on.

Listen: River

Here’s a song which could be straight out of a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, or written by Johnny Mercer or Cole Porter, or George and Ira Gershwin.

It’s the part where the lights go down and there’s a spot on the lady, and the set lumbers around almost apologetically in the darkness to bring her to a back fence where she sweeps a little, then looks up at the moon in the dusk, both of them wistful and mournsome for her to sing of the man she doesn’t yet adore as she teeters on the brink of smite.

I hardly believe this was written in 1996, because it sounds like such a classic. I don’t generally use the word lovely, but this is.

It’s so beautiful that the wonder lies maybe not within in the song itself but in our ability to appreciate it.

Depending on which ever book you read,
sometimes it takes a lifetime to get what you need.

And honesty, I might be stupid to think love is love, but I do.
And you’ve waited so long and I’ve waited long enough for you.

Listen: Mr. Harris

—
Related pages
Weekend Song archive

Only Margaret Anderson could succeed where Ezra Pound failed.

Ezra tried for a while to get James Joyce’s Ulysses published in the US and persuaded the publisher from Indiana to print the novel in her Chicago-based magazine The Little Review.

She serialised the book over three years, starting in 1918. The US Post Office burned four complete editions of the magazine during the run and she was convicted on obscenity charges.

She once said:  “I believe in the unsubmissive, the unfaltering, the unassailable, the irresistible, the unbelievable. In other words the art of life.”

These words stand up to the toughest criticism of blogs today so I take my hat off to the woman.

Extreme Melancholia 2007!

All the massive folk club hits on one CD!

The essential Cambridge sound!

Richard Thompson ft. Mary Black (MC Mike Yarwood Radio Two Mix)!

Two hours of banging, classic bodhran and mandolin sounds!

Revival! Introspection! Bittersweet Confessional! Protest!

All the top melancholy anthems of the year!

Extreme Melancholia 2007!

I had a dream last night I was at a Christmas work lunch and someone asked me about my watch. It’s a 1962 Omega Seamaster which he bought in Panama in that year on his way to a new life in New Zealand. In those days it took three weeks to get there, so I don’t know why he was so preoccupied with timekeeping, but few family stories have much logic to them.

In my dream, a colleague remarked upon it and I went into the Christopher Walken speech from Pulp Fiction, getting it wrong but not caring.

“You’re fatha’s wahtch. We were shot down …over Hanoi. He carried this watch - up his ass. And I’d be damned if some slope was gonna get his hands on your fatha’s wahtch.”

It winds itself, but you have to keep moving to keep it charged up. It I don’t wear it for a day, it grinds to a halt, just like this blog.

Getting it wrong and not caring is something I don’t normally do. Personality traits of self-consciousness and aptitude mean I don’t often attempt to do something until I think I can do it.

And even saying that goes against the grain because maybe now you’re thinking that I think I can play music, write video posts, take pictures and write. Well, I can, but I balance that by thinking those things are easy. I don’t know my seven times table. It’s stuff like that I find difficult.

You get those people on X-Factor who can not sing and come out thinking they have nailed the audition? They really fucking scare me. Because they truly don’t know how awful they are but they keep going.

I wonder - I hope - that they have no talent filter at all. For example, if they saw someone else out of tune with no moves, I’d like to think they would think that performance was good. I would be worried if they thought it was awful but theirs was OK. I would be worried that I was one of those people.

Remember this?

November 24 - I was told this week I will be made redundant as part of a restructure at AOL UK.

Well, I’m still not sure how it happened, but I have been offered a job as a senior manager for BBC News.

I’ll be working in the new media division - it sound like a great job, it’s a good step up, the office is amazing, it’s one of the best news websites in the world and they want to work on ways to make it better.

Thanks for your encouragement before - it really mattered and I wanted share this back to say thanks.

I’ll delete this post in a couple of days because I don’t want to gloat while other people here (or anywhere) are losing their jobs with nothing lined up, or leave it online to make for my future or current employers feel uneasy. But how about this year, hey?

Once the absent-hearted waited
for the sound of footsteps and the
creaking of a gate
to fill the nooks of affection.

In their place now
the missing rings of phones
and empty subject fields
of unsent emails.

But still we listen,
against our better judgement,
for the words and sounds
of a message that never gets sent
and the footsteps that never come.

Or you could have had:

Superstar CJs… -Here We Go!

But yeah, it was fucking awesome. I’m talking about the Chemical Brothers gig in Brixton on Friday.

Coincidences? Extraordinary goings on?

You’d expect nothing less, would you? Hang on, I’ll get to that.

I’m always amazed at the enthusiasm and boundless creativity of musicians and it something that I hope will always amaze me, however much I see it.

And I’ve got to say that the fans were just the nicest bunch of young folks I have ever seen at any gig. At one point someone walked past me and was waiting for someone else to hand beers to their friends. The person passing by stopped in front of me briefly and wasn’t blocking my view. She was short and I’m not a big guy - about five ten and average, but she’d been in front of me for about six seconds before she said: “I’m really sorry about this.”

Sorry about not blocking my view while you wait for someone to finish giving beer to their friends? I love being English.

Drugs were there in abundance and our friends were getting really annoyed that I kept getting offered pills (six times in two hours) while they weren’t. Cocaine and speed was the most pedalled, and of course I didn’t, but they were pleased at the end of the evening when someone tried to sell them weed. Immediately after which some guy tried to score off me, which put a damper on their short-lived, somewhat concessionary celebrations.

OK, OK. A coincidence.

During the gig and a brief comfort stop I ran into a friend in the bar who used to work with me and is now at rival company, where he sits across from someone who used to work for me.

Did I really say “I’ll see you online anyway?” I think I did. Sorry, dude if you’re reading. Which he says he does, by the way, so I’m not presuming too much.

And as if 2007 hasn’t been extraordinary enough, I thought things would at least wind down by the end of the year. But no, I have to go and save some guy’s life.

In the cab on the way home at two in the morning, our driver spots another taxi on the wrong side of he road, crawling along with cars swerving all around it, and four passegers in the back going nuts.

We pull alongside and ask what he’s doing, and the driver is barely conscious and clearly in a bad way.

Our driver tells us the incapacitated driver is drunk and starts asking him what the hell he’s doing, pointing out that he’s on the wrong side of the road, but he’s hardly able to lift his head from the steering wheel, and he looks like he’s getting worse by the second. You can tell he can hear us, but he can’t even turn his head and within twenty seconds he get what we’re saying and he stops the car but he can’t even grip the steering wheel.

In the back of his cab, the passengers say they don’t know what’s happening and ask us for help so me and the driver jump out, because we have to get the people out of the car before this guy drives on again.

I stand in the road, diverting down cars around the event, and our cabbie puts on the handbreak of the other car and the apparently drunk gets out and staggers to the side of the road with my friend, who got out of our car right after me.

Our cab driver meanwhile gets the people out of the now abandoned car to safety at the side of the road and he gets their car and drives it to the curb. 

Once everyone is safe and I don’t have to hold up traffic, I start walking back over the road to the staggering driver standing there with my friend, who yells to me: “Diabetic!”

I look at the guy, who is now struggling to breathe, covered in sweat and can barely stand, and he’s wrenching at the throat to take off his tie while swaying against the railings behind him.

I say “Diabetic?” and my friend says “Diabetic - he just said. Diabetic.”

I call an ambulance immediately while my friend stays with him and someone else rummages through his car for any medication.

The emergency services kept me on the line and asked for the guy’s situation, which wasn’t improving, and you could tell he was trying hard not to not pass out. We couldn’t sit him down because we weren’t sure he could hear us, and he was soaked in sweat anyway and it was about minus two degrees out, and he would have probably laid down and been worse off.

Someone finds his needle pen and takes it to him and very carefully dials up the maximum dose and injects himself in the stomach.

It’s a very slow process, during which I don’t rouse his attention since he was so out of it. It must be a humiliating thing anyway, standing with two strange blokes while you’re trying to keep yourself from going into a coma in the street.

After a couple of minutes and while I’m still on the phone to the ambulance service, he injects himself again in the belly and checks a reading on the pen thing.

A paramedic arrived about ten minutes later. Does everyone think they are a medical expert when they talk to the emergency services? I did.

The medic jumped out of the car and I addressed her.

“I called it in. The gentlemen says he is diabetic and has injected himself with something while we were waiting. He is not conscious of his surroundings and appears to be improving, although slowly.”

I should have added “Vital signs appear to be good. I need ten mils of epoxy resin and a sentimental gurney. Talk to me, people.” 

Because everything’s a big fucking joke with me, isn’t it?

I’m glad we were there, because the passengers didn’t have a clue what was going on, and he might have kept driving if our cab hadn’t asked him what the fuck he was doing. His passengers said they had been driving on the motorway half an hour before and that could have been a disaster.

Someone called the cab company he worked for and they say they were sending someone out, so the passengers were going to be OK, so we decided to leave. An ambulance pulled up as we moved away to leave, once he was sitting in the paramedic’s car.

Or…. OR….

Last Night A CJ Saved My Life

Here’s a saxophonist who was often overlooked by jazz and soul fans, because he was neither all of either, but for me there was no ignoring Grover Washington Jr when I was a kid, because he peaked in Philadelphia in the late seventies/early eighties. Whether I did or not remains to be seen, but as a kid learning the sax, he was a local hero and was on the radio a lot.

He was a prolific session musician - he played the sax solo on Just The Two Of Us by Bill Withers - but he released many albums of his own. This is from one of his on the Motown label and I think it was the first cassette I ever owned.

It shows his confidence but not showmanship, which is sometimes just as good a thing.

Listen: Snake Eyes

—
Related pages
Weekend Song archive

The montage.

Have a good weekend.

This week, office kitchen

Colleague: How do you take your coffee?

Me: Black. With no sugar. Just like my future.

Sometimes I say things that you shouldn’t say at work.

This week I am going to see The Chemical Brothers at Brixton Academy. I am really looking forward to it because they rock. I don’t know what Mr and Mrs Chemical were feeding them when they were boys, but it seemed to do the trick.

It’ll probably be something Gordon Brown will pick up and then make compulsory for all parents, or the government will just decide they know best and put it in our bread.

“Bake your own? Fuck you, we’ll put it in wheat. We’ll spray the crops. We know what’s best.”

That’s not democracy. That’s voting for someone who then decides how you should bring up your family. Market forces have led the healthy food movement, not the government. Consumerism is people power on a daily basis. Voting is just something you do every few years. The role of the government is to tax me, fight wars, lock up the bad guys and make sure everyone is educated, safe, healthy and prosperous. We will do the rest.

I don’t get much involved in politics on this site, but I really don’t like the government getting involved in grass-roots parenting. If they really want to look after my kids, they wouldn’t build another runway at Heathrow and they would get proper sport back into schools.

I’m pushing the boat out tomorrow with another video post. It’s nice to see the comments filling up too, and to have new people writing in. The feedback always gets me thinking and often what comes out is the kernel of another post.

Did you know the original title for George Orwell’s Down And Out In Paris And London was “Travels With A Pink Hobo”?

Fact.

I’m later than normal posting today on account of my day off. Normal service resumes tomorrow. Not that knob gags about classic works of art isn’t the dish of the day, but I normally serve that stuff up for breakfast. That’s not a pretty image.

I was running errands today and using up some holiday time before I leave my present gainful employment.

To be honest with you, it wouldn’t have been taxing to take ten minutes to haul myself up to a computer screen to write about the King Of Biscuits, so I don’t have much of an excuse. (Amaretti, dark chocolate digestives and Pepperidge Farm Milanos)

Amaretti in Italian literally means “bitter little things” which was the working title for this blog. Only joking, this was the working title.

The real reason I couldn’t post is because I’ve been working on my sex blog. It started recently but I have kept it anonymous to protect my identity, and it hasn’t really taken off. As yet I have had no sexual partners, so it’s not really about my prowess between the sheets as much as a load of posts by a wanker.

Oh no, that is this blog.

I haven’t been answering comments a lot lately, so I was a lot more diligent just now with the King Of Cheeses debate, which you can read here.

A couple on months ago we all established that cream of mushroom was the king of soups. As part of one of most laid-back series ever to hit the web, we’re looking at cheeses.

Personal cheeses
Like the best of all food, you have to look to Italy, where you have dolcelatte, gorgonzola and mascarpone. Mozzarella is among the finest of all the cheeses when it’s good. I mean moist and stringy almost, not when it’s dried out and rubbery. Provolone is incredible in sandwiches - sharp and a little grainy. Have that with mustard and it’s a riot of flavours.

Soft cheeses I can give or take. Stilton’s awesome. A nice stilton on digestive biscuits. Cheddar’s great with beer, too.

Ou sont les fromages?
Notice I didn’t mention any French varieties. I am aware of their work. Pont l’Eveque is good, roquefort as well. Emmental is good, but technically it’s Swiss.

You know what’s nice? Right now I am on a train and there are no announcements. It’s really really nice.

This post terminates here.

This weekend I took a trip up to the Whole Foods Market in Kensington, sorry, London’s Kensington.

This is a dangerous thing, especially in the second week of December when I should be buying presents for people and saving some money, because I knew I would walk out three figures lighter. Thank god I’m paid early this month. I say god, I actually work for the world’s largest media company, so my gratitude might be somewhat misplaced.

The damage would have been less if I wasn’t such a food snob.

Chickory coffee! Provolone! Sourdough bread! Festive stollen? Are you serious?? That’s like my favourite kind of stollen.

Yummy yummy yummy favourites that I can’t find anywhere else.

Well, that’ll do. Work is very busy, and I’m doing a lot of work on This Is This Live 2008. I never thought it would be such a big job taking this shit out on the road.

Except it isn’t yet, but it’s bound to be.

Part of feeling blue is knowing that things are going to get worse when you already feel bad. I often wonder if mild depression is made worse because you’re aware of how pitiful you sound.

It’s like the CS Lewis thing. It’s 4:10pm outside and already it’s dark as arseholes. I really miss the sunshine. 

I’m just back from a morning in Kensington where the people are really attractive but probably neurotic. I think maybe they must be, because you look at people and see how they are dressed really smart and groomed to double figures just to go out food shopping. Meantime, I’m wandering around in jeans and fleece looking not so much like a vision as a rumour of a sighting.

Still, the pineapple I just ate made me feel a bit better, but that’ll be out of my system long before it gets light.

I shouldn’t really blog when I feel like this. I should have a moodalizer that I have to breath into before I can access my publishing dashboard.

I will feel better. I had a really nice evening out last night which I will talk about in the week, which promises to be very busy as life gears up for the home straight of this year.

I have written about this song before, but it has never been the Weekend Song, so excuse the repetition.

But when this comes on, I go silly. It is one of the greatest songs ever written. Not in terms of complexity but for qualities that make us unable to explain why music matters.

And a sitar opening riff? Fuck. Fucking. Me. Who knew? Who has dared since? No one, that’s who, cause they ain’t Stevie. I like wierd combinations in music. I like songs that mix it up some with things you wouldn’t've (yes it is) reckoned. And this coming from a guy who spreads peanut butter on apples.*

Also, when you listen, you’ve got two drummers, one left, one right - panned hard. And the horn riff when it changes for the “…heeere I aaam baby…” And when he fills out a line he finishes too early, how he gets you to the end, and everything else that makes life and this worth having.

I’ve done a lot of foolish things
That I really didn’t mean, didn’t I?

Listen: Signed, Sealed, Delivered

—
Related pages
Weekend Song archive
Pop Songs I Think Of When I Hear Certain Instruments
10 Songs I Wish I Had Written

*Seriously. Spread on cold apple slices right from the fridge. You’ll thank me.

You lot, honestly.

I post something about Nasrullah Stanekzai, I expose coolness in the Afghan ministerial cabinet, and I get one reply.

I get, no - secure,  the rights - the RIGHTS - to read out a poem about the nature of love, on the 250th birthday of William Blake and barely an eyelid is bat.

Then I write one post that mentions artificially inseminated turkeys and the switchboard lights up. I think I’ve found the level here. It’s really jizz monkeys and knob gags, right?

Anyway, short post today and no video post this week because I’ve been shaking off a cold and I don’t sound to great. My colleagues have put up with me but then they are paid to and I won’t be here much longer.* As far as I know anything about this blog, it’s my understanding than no cash actually changes hands.

This time next week I’ll be fighting fit and well into my pre-Christmas cocktail drinking training regime. Kir. Kir Royale. Kir Royale with cheese.

Have a good weekend. You got the Weekend Song tomorrow, some more stuff on Sunday, then Monday and daily all right through until 2008. Keep it. Check ya. Out.

*At work, I mean. I’m not that ill.

Thinking of Christmas, did you know turkeys are now bred so large that they have to be artificially inseminated?

That’s got a to be a sign, surely. If man and consumer demand has engineered creatures that can’t actually fuck, then we should probably look at ourselves. Are scientists actually getting around the reproductions problem actually saying “No, it’s all cool. We just get some of these. It’s all good,” and they produce a turkey baster, “and the good thing about this,” they continue…

Good god, that means someone else’s job is wanking off turkeys. That’s got to be one of the worst jobs in the world. How would you take your mind off that? “Doing anything nice for the holidays?”

You know who eats a lot of turkey? Per head, I mean?

Israelis. Those guys eat almost twice as much turkey on average than Americans, who you would naturally put at the top because it involves consumers. Turkey farmers in the US raise about 300 million turkeys each year. But because of the kosher thing and the lack of abundant irrigation and fresh green pastures, Isrealis eat a shitload of turkey, even without Christmas.

According to the National Turkey Federation, in 1998 Israel consumed a whopping 27.8 pounds per capita. The United States is in second place, at 18 pounds per capita, followed by France (14.3 pounds), the United Kingdom (11.5), Canada (9.7), Belgium-Luxembourg (7.5), and the Netherlands (3.9).

They have tons of ways to cook it, too, so leftovers will never be a problem.

I now have a terrible image of an Israeli turkey fluffer that is just wrong and wrong and bad on so many levels.

The views in this blog are not those of my employer. Any similarities between the ethics expressed in this post and those of AOL are purely coincidental.

All I’m saying is that one minute he’s here, next he’s not, running around in seventeen fifty this and fourteen hundred god knows what I mean its not normal Claire it never happened in my day when your father and I were courting, of course back in those days if you were different you kept it to yourself because it wasn’t the done thing and where’s the proof anyway “sorry I’m late, got stuck in the debate about the abolition you know how that William Wilberforce force goes on” I tell you he’s a wrong ‘un, that one - he’s like my dad was oh me poor dear mother god rest her soul…

This morning. Commuters who know each other from the journey.

Man: Didn’t the Spice Girls do their concert last night?

Woman: I think so. It was in Canada. Vancouver or Toronto.

Man: I don’t think they were singing either.

Woman 2: They are all very pretty. They just look beautiful.

Man: Yes, but if you had a team of people who were experts in hair and make-up and costume, they could make you look just as beautiful.

Woman 2: Sorry?

Man: Well, I mean if you had people doing your wardrobe and hair and nails, they could do that to anyone.

Woman: I’m not sure that’s a compliment.

Woman 2: So you’re saying that if I took that care of my appearance, I’d be beautiful?

Man: No, I mean - some people have a natural beauty and they don’t need anything and they would look great without the clothes and make-up.

Woman: I’m not sure you’ve redeemed yourself, Terry.

Yes, I may not be the first to say it, but I’m certainly the latest. Christmas is coming.

Sorry to get all festive on your arse (ooh, can you imagine?) but that’s how thoughts are turning and you’d link less of me (ok, even more less) if I didn’t reflect a least some of the more disjoined ones.

This Christmas, spare a thought for those people who go without. These are people who can’t join in with the rest because they believe in something else. I’m talking, of course, of Muslims.

I mean vegetarians. Vegetarians, sorry. Although now that it’s out there and neither my backspace, cursor buttons or mouse work (bizarrely), I’ll just have to keep typing. Although, I’m not sure which group is more dangerous when angered. Probably the veggies.

I’m one myself. A veggie, that is - not a Muslim. I’m a Buddhist, mostly. I’d probably be a “vegetarian, mostly” if I could, but I looked into it and apparently you can’t.

So Christmas is always a kerfuffle in my house, where those who eat meat outnumber those who don’t. There’s a vegetarian option for me, but every year I wonder why I have a dish at all. Because when you think about it, a meat-free meal is just vegetables already. You might throw in some fancy cheese and pastry, but basically it’s vegetables.

The dish has been prepared or bought by you or your loved ones (and I make that assumption in the hope that they are) but it sits there on the table surrounded by other vegetables. So the only difference is the shape.

Not eating meat doesn’t spoil my enjoyment of Christmas, but I am red-green colourblind, and I understand that might be a pisser. Those colours just look like grey to me.

So Santa Claus to me is a guy with a beard in a big grey coat, and looks a lot like General Lee, only he’s asking children if they’ve been good instead of marching them towards the Union line and their deaths. But I’ve been colourblind my whole life, so I don’t really know the difference, whereas I consciously gave up eating meat.

I have no beef (See? Genius.) with vegetarian meals, but usually they are some kind of pasta, rice or pastry/dough thing. That doesn’t scream out Christmas to me, and none of them have much place among the potatoes, parsnips, swede, sprouts, yorkshire puddings, yams, carrots, peas, beans and whatever else.

I promise you, if you’re hosting a meal for a vegetarian this year, forget their special dish. They are not going to think: “Hang on. Where’s my actual food here?”

And you don’t have to spend ages talking about not eating meat, either. You don’t need to. We’ll help ourselves. We’re fine.

Pass the gravy.

No - the other gravy.

Hey look at that. A weekend song with bittersweet resignation and defiance with old-time folk instruments in an off-mainstream modern song. Whod’a thunk?

Well yes. Hello. This is sometimes what I do. One man’s formulaic is another another man’s consistency.

Here’s a song that’s not going to set the world on fire, but it’s just nice. It fits. It’s a playful chuck on the shoulder and a dose of reality. It has the guts to admit that feeling that you want to call someone “sport” or “tiger” or “baby” even though those are words you don’t normally don’t use. Nice is good. We need it.

I haven’t replied to comments lately and I’m sorry about that. I read them but I’m just not getting time to reply because everything is hectic at the moment. So I’ve gone for nice.

I guess you got me, oh, oh
You got me hanging around
For too long

Listen: I Can Buy You

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Related page
Weekend Song archive