naranjas de la china1

My life as a penalty shoot-out

2004-06-25T02:52:00.000-07:00

One of the advantages of being a football fan is that you can tell a very abridged version of your life story simply by recalling who you watched the big games with, and where. For example, this is how I have watched England getting knocked out of the European Championships, every four years since I was 12 years old: 1980. Tournament held in Germany. England draw 1-1 with Belgium and lose 1-0 to Italy, in games I watch in the front room of a boy named Henry McGrath from the year above me at school, while his mother plies us with tea and biscuits. For the third and decisive game against Spain, I for some reason have decamped to the front room of another boy from my class named Martin Goldberg (maybe Henry's mother wanted to watch a film on the other side, or maybe I have broken one of Henry's subbuteo players and he isn't talking to me). Anyway, England lose 2-1 and are out. 1984. Tournament held in France. England have not qualified, and the games hardly seem to be on the telly. However, I am allowed to stay up late with my cousin Simon to watch the highlights of the great France v Portugal game that finishes 3-2 to the hosts. 1988. Germany. I am at college, and celebrate the end of the second-year exams by watching England's defeat by Holland with Gavin Lok and his flatmate Nick Jones, while we add a further layer to the growing stack of empty Carling Black Label cans decorating their front room in Bushbury Lane, Wolverhampton. A few days later, England crash out of the competition by losing 3-1 to Russia, in a game me and my dad listen to on his car radio while he is taking me home for the summer. I will spend the holidays (including the 90 minutes of the classic final between Holland and Russia) clearing tables in the cafe at Newcastle Airport for a meagre wage. 1992. Sweden. I have just finished a year teaching English in San Sebastian, Spain, and celebrate by watching England play France with my flatmates Liverpool Mark and Arsenal Nigel while drinking vast amounts of cheap European lager, vomiting over the edge or our 10th floor balcony onto the cars on the Avenida de Madrid, and falling over senseless in a back street pool bar. My night is more eventful than the match, which finishes 0-0. Another scoreles draw with Denmark, and a 2-1 defeat by Sweden, see England out in the first round- again. 1996. England. Hosting the tournament, the national team has reached the semi-finals, and I have persuaded my new girlfriend Charlotte to take in the big-match atmosphere at a massive student pub in Fallowfield, Manchester, where I am working answering telephones for British Gas having abandoned a brief and not-very-promising career as a secondary school teacher. The date takes a turn for the worse after 5 minutes of play when Alan Shearer scores and the pub erupts into pandemonium, causing a major spillage of student-rate Stella Artois onto Charlotte's jacket. We retire to a quiet corner of the bar from where we can just make out on the flickering screen a Germany equaliser, the onset of extra-time, and, inevitably, penalties. While I am attempting to explain to my enthralled and lager-soaked new girlfriend the intricacies of the 12-yard shoot out, the German footballers demonstrate that they have grasped the concept quite ably, and shoot England right out of their own tournament. 2000. Belgium. Having miraculously forgiven me for the Stella Artois/ jacket incident, Charlotte is still my girlfriend, and we are on holiday in Portugal, whose national team is facing England in the decisive first round game. As night falls around the poolside bar, we watch with a happily mingling crowd of tourists and local kids, as England go into an early a 2-0 lead. Their opponents mount a comeback, and the local kids get excited and start chanting 'Portugal! Portugal' until they are told off by the stern bar-tender, who doesn't want them upsetting the thirsty English holidaymakers crowded around his bar. He needn't bother- we are upset enough by the Portuguese footballers, who incredibly score three times without reply and run out deserved winners. England subsequently lose 3-2 again- to Romania- and are back at Gatwick airport just as me and Charlotte are touching down in Manchester, covered in incredibly itchy mosquito bites. 2004. Portugal. Having miraculously forgiven me for suggesting a holiday to the mosquito capital of southern Europe, Charlotte is now married to me, and we have a beautiful four month-old baby named Frank. As Frank is too young to get into crowded student sports bars, go on holiday to Portugal, go to college in Wolverhampton, or enjoy the life of a trainee alcoholic TEFL teacher in the Basque country, we take him to his friend Oreana's flat in Hulme, Manchester, to watch the quarter-final against Portugal. Oreana is another four month old baby, and her parents are a German man and a Colombian girl, who we met at Preparation for Parenthood classes. Chris is a very knowledgeble and intellectual European-style football fan who drinks only coca-cola, while Luz is most charming but doesn't understand the importance of the inevitable penalty shoot out, and decides to start showing Charlotte an album of wedding photos while David Beckham is lining up the first spot-kick. While Charlotte admires the bridesmaids' outfits, the England captain reminds everyone of his own occasional penchant for wearing women's clothing by hitting a penalty like one of my my grandmother's. Darius Vassell later hits one like my Aunty Mary, and England are coming home early- again! So there you have it. My life story in European Championship matches that England have lost, or occasionally drawn. Of course some stuff happened in between (to both me and the England football team) and not all of it involved cheap lager getting spilled on people's jackets (although admittedly a lot of it did). Anyway you can probably fill in the gaps without going to far wrong. Where will I be watching the 2008 competition, and who with? And will it go to penalties again, and will Charlotte get to see them this time? Come back to this site in four years' time, and maybe we will all find out.

Having a cow

2004-06-24T04:08:00.000-07:00

I am cycling through the university precinct on my way to work when I come across a large fibre-glass cow standing in front of the library. It seems rude not to stop and admire its wondrous multicoloured design. While I am doing so two schoolgirls walk past, seemingly without taking much notice. But then I hear one of them asking the other, 'Here, what's that cow for?'. I am quite intrigued myself, and on a hunch set out at lunchtime on a longer, whistlestop bike ride through the city centre. In fifteen minutes I meet 5 more cows (if it is indeed possible to 'meet' cows, especially multicoloured ones made out of fibre-glass). There are one each in front of the town library and the Bridgewater Hall, two more on Market Street, and one in St Annes Square. Each has a different design, and most of the designs are quite bizarre; for example the one in St Anne's Square is lying down in a full-size rowing boat (I think it is a real rowing boat as opposed to one made out of papier mache) and appears to be adorned with a map of the city of Chester. While one of the Market Street ones (I think it was the one outside of Virgin records) is covered in really bad 'cow' jokes, such as 'When do you milk a cow? When he is in the moooooooooood'. What can be the explanation for this unusual invasion of the city streets? A search of the net reveals that what we are witnessing is an artistic event going under the name of Cow Parade. Apparently ours is not the first city to be blessed with this phenonemon, which first emerged in Geneva a few years ago, and, since everyone involved thought it was such damn good fun, has decamped to a different city every year since, getting bigger, and, I should imagine, slightly more bizarre each time. Now it is Manchester's turn. The exhibits are made (I think I may have mentioned this) out of fibre-glass and started off life as blank canvases, or should I say blank cows. Judging by the information given on the plaques next to each one, it appears some owe their multicoloured liveries to the work of professional artists, while others have been designed by members of the public who have submitted drawings to a competition based in the central art gallery: the one with the jokes, for example, was the brainchild of a group of schoolkids from somewhere like Moston (oh, schoolkids; in that case I will let them off with their appallingly immature senses of humour). What will be the reaction of your average Mancunian? Well some, like the schoolgirls in the university precinct, will walk on by with merely the passing thought, 'what's that cow for?'. Other pedantic types (well, OK, me) will insist you cannot really call it a 'cow parade' when none of the animals in question are showing the slightest inclination to move anywhere at all, and seem content to stand stock still (or in the case of the St Anne's Square cow, sit stock still in their rowing boat) in their appointed spots, for as long as necessary, or for that matter until the cows come home. If they had really wanted a parade (these pedants who are really me will continue) perhaps they should have made fibre-glass models of something with a bit more zest, like jaguars or goats. Whatever, one thing is for sure. The multicoloured ruminants might be lazy, and might not really be 'for' anything at all, but they sure as hell brighten this rainy old town up a bit. I say to them, thanks for coming, and good luck to their crazy, bovine luck.

Just Give Me Some Kind of Sign

2004-06-23T04:54:00.000-07:00

There used to be four of us working here on customer service- but then Donna was kidnapped. Well, what actually happened was that the people from the other side of the office made an offer involving considerably more money, and after deliberating for about 7 seconds, Donna quite sensibly took them up on it. But it felt, to the remaining three of us, like a kidnapping, and sometimes, on busy afternoons when we are struggling to get the orders on and the phones answered, we feel like putting on balaclavas and launching a daring raid to bring Donna back, dead or alive. But then we remember that this is not the Iranian Embassy it is a sales office, and we are not members of the SAS we are customer service representatives, so we merely accept our downsized fate while cursing under our breath (although sometimes quite daringly loudly). It wouldn't bother us so much if our lovely Donna had gone off to do something useful. However the people on the other side of the office operate under the title of 'Customer Relationship Management', which is a classic piece of corporate terminology meaning nothing at all. In reality this ever-expanding team appears to concern itself with Telesales- except they do not like to be referred to by this title, possibly because they are not targeted with anything so base and vulgar as actually selling product to customers. Instead it seems they are merely expected to ring customers up to chat generally about what the company has to offer, and if they decide to actually buy some of it, then this is a bonus we should all be thankful for. Really, it seems like a massive and obvious waste of everybody's time- and there are rumours that people in very senior positions are beginning to suspect as much. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the people in charge of the Customer Relationship gravy boat appear just a little defensive about their positions, so in the absence of having anything crude like sales figures to show for their handsomely-rewarded labours, have taken to drawing attention to themselves in any way they can, in the apparent hope that the powers-that-be will mistake ubiquity for indispensability. Already this month the staff magazine is leading with a story on how 'Customer Relationship Management ensures XXX Corporation is more than just another supplier'. But clearly this level of exposure is not enough for the boss of the new team (he has a background in marketing and is infamously competitive, as I need not tell you), who has decided (I am not kidding here) that he needs to erect a big red sign above his team, so that everyone will know who they are, and what exactly it is that they do. Now as I was indicating earlier, we here in customer service are not naturally given to rebellion, and for that matter even the thought of any display of petulance rather makes us come out in a hot flush, so it may surprise you to learn that when we found out about the sign, we became quite militant indeed and started to reach for our balaclavas. I mean- we spluttered to each other between 'phone calls- why should just one team in the building get to advertise itself with a great big red sign listing all of the pivotal and ground-breaking stuff they are supposedly engaged in? And if it is all so ground-breaking and pivotal, why the need for a big red sign telling everyone what it is? So, balaclavas to the ready. We have resolved to fight fire with fire, and if the big red sign does ever emerge on the other side of the office (there is talk of it being vetoed on spurious Health and Safety grounds), then we will hit straight back with our own, bigger and better, sign, that we will have prepared earlier in the style of Blue Peter, possibly using double-sided sticky tape. It is going to be an impressive sight, at least 8 yards square and possibly featuring neon lights, and it will say simply, 'Customer Service Team. Doing lots of important stuff, even though there are hardly any of us left'. And there will be other smaller signs, strategically placed around the office, saying 'Customer Service this way', 'Useful and overworked people 200 metres', and so on. Oh, and each of us on the team will wear colourful T-shirts emblazoned with the names of the customers we look after, and maybe huge luminous hats with some kind of logo. Except, of course, we will do nothing of the sort. We are mild-mannered customer service people and are not given to drawing attention to ourselves- if we were we would have joined the SAS and spent our days jumping headlong through embassy windows brandishing hand-grenades, or maybe gone into marketing. So perhaps, after all, we will not reach for our balaclavas. However I can promise you that if the sign does go up (and I am thinking it will be any day now) we will curse under our breath, and louder than we have ever done before. Who dares wins, oh yes.

Flag Days

2004-06-18T09:17:00.000-07:00

The last weeks have seen the build-up to Euro 2004, and, in what has become a tradition whenever England have qualified for an international football tournament, the nation has been busy whipping itself up into a sort of patriotic frenzy. The first St George’s flag was spotted flying from a white Ford Transit outside St Albans towards the end of April, and by mid-May it was impossible to look in any direction anywhere at all without seeing the ubiquitous red cross on the white background. Now that we have entered the tournament proper, the thing has got entirely out of hand and, as a small paper flag cut out of the newspaper has become almost de rigeur for anyone who does not want to be branded a traitor and thrown on the first train through the Eurotunnel, it has become necessary for those who consider themselves true supporters of the national cause to raise the bar a little, and go for a real full-size flag, on a pole, in the middle of the front lawn. For some particularly diehard patriots, even this display of national pride will not suffice, and there are reports that a greengrocer from Rickmansworth, Herts, has erected a full-scale model of Big Ben in his front garden, and has taken to parading around it every hour on the hour in a beefeater’s uniform while playing ‘Rule Britannia’ on the trumpet. Which is all very nice, but it does leave those of us not naturally given to deranged flag-waving a bit of a problem when it comes to watching the England games. You want to support the team, but you don’t want anyone thinking you drive a white van and vote for Robert Kilroy-Silk. It is important to have a strategy, and stick to it. This has been mine so far: 1: during the weeks of frenzied build up to the tournament, adopt a lukewarm attitude. Tell anyone who will listen that you really aren’t that bothered about the England team, and there is certainly no way you will be found watching any of the games in a crowded pub, with a distant view of the screen, and 200 lager-soaked people singing ‘Engerland. Engerland , Engerland’ while spilling Stella Artois on each other’s shoes. 2: during the days just before the opening game, begin to have second thoughts about the whole ‘lukewarm’ thing. After all it is your national team. And there’s someone at work who knows a quiet little boozer in the suburbs where there’s sure to be a decent view of the big screen and no queues at the bar. 3. as the game kicks off, find yourself in the ‘quiet’ boozer, along with 350 other people, who have been attracted there by its famed quietness, and who are all trying to get served with four pints each at the bar while craning their necks to catch a view of the tiny footballing figures over on the flickering screen in the corner. 4. 20 minutes later, England score. You think it was Frank Lampard Junior but you can’t be sure. Dropping all pretence of lukewarmness, aloofness, and general inscutability, leap into the air shouting ‘go on England!. Spill Stella Artois on your shoes. 5. Wake up on Monday morning with a hangover and a half-hazy memory of singing ‘Football’s Coming Home’ in a park somewhere and telling everyone you were going to build a scale model of Tower Bridge in your front yard. Feel slightly ashamed, and resolve to watch the second England game in your front room, with a cup of tea, some biscuits, and a properly aloof attitude more befitting a Guardian reader like yourself. It’s a lovely plan, isn’t it? And I must say so far I have been sticking to it quite resolutely. As for the England team, well, they have managed nearly to beat France, and actually to beat Switzerland, while being unable to string three consecutive passes together at any time, and generally doing a good impression of a pub team. Hell, if they actually start playing football, they could win the tournament. It is a frightening thought- and as for the outbreak of patriotic fervour that will result- well, never mind the flags, it may just take a personal appearance from St George himself to calm us back down again. And me? I will be the one at the back, trying to look aloof and non-nationalistic while singing ‘England’s coming Home’ at the top of my voice and spilling Stella Artois on my shoes. Good night, and best of British- sorry- English- luck to you all.

The postman

2004-06-15T05:30:00.000-07:00

It was the local and European elections yesterday and I very nearly didn't vote. I would like to claim that this was due to some firmly-held political principle. However the real reason for my near-refusal to exercise my democratic right was a firmly-established fear of the British Postbox. Ridiculous, I know. But then the whole business of getting an item of mail together and actually getting it in the box is a fantastically long-drawn out and stressful one, is it not? I mean, first of all you have to 1- get the item of mail into an envelope. Easy, you say- except where can you find an envelope? I mean one of the right size, that hasn't been in a drawer for 5 years gathering dust and losing all of its precious stickiness? Well, you can't, can you? Which means you have to go to the newsagents and buy one. Except you can't buy one, so you have to buy fifty. So you do- one for your letter, and the other 49 to gather dust and lose their precious stickiness in a drawer for the next five years. Still, you've got what you needed and march back home with a happy step, only to remember when you get there that you also need...... 2- a stamp. Of course, you've got stamps, because last time you posted a letter you bought a pack of 5. Except, can you find them? Of course not- so you have to go back to the newsagent for five more. This is when you find out about the Stamps and Sundry Mail (Retail of) Act(1969), which makes it a criminal offence for a shopkeeper offering envelopes for sale also to keep stock of postage stamps. So you embark on a whistle-stop tour of the high street, taking in a stationers, a hardware store, a florist and a launderette, before finally discovering that stamps are actually sold at the butchers, where they are available at a discounted price when purchased along with a pound of lean Cheshire pork chops. Which is a bit unfortunate as you are a vegetarian. Still, you now have your envelope with a piece of mail in and your stamps. What could possibly go wrong? Well, you could... 3- forget to take the letter with you the next 6 times that you leave the house. This also appears to be obligatory by law, at least it is for me. Things take a turn for the better on the seventh occasion that you leave the house, when you do remember to take the letter. Of course, you immediately forget about its existence and bring it back home with you where you find it in your jacket pocket a week later. This process is repeated several times, until one day you find yourself quite miraculously approaching a postbox, with the letter in your hand, muttering to yourself 'remember to post the letter' over and over again. At this stage it is still possible you will become distracted and walk past the postbox. However (as I can see you are starting to think I am making this up now) let's assume you hold it together, and get to the next stage, which is.... 4A dealing with the postbox. Now this in theory is the easy bit. You just have to put the thing in the slot and walk away. Except this casual action seems to be quite beyond you; you find yourself walking away thinking, 'now did that really go in the box? Very soon you are convinced that your letter has somehow missed the slot and fallen into the drain at the side of the road, or that it has gone into the box but failed to land in the basket inside and is lost forever, or that it only went half-way into the box and was stolen from its mouth as soon as your back was turned by a cheeky grubby-faced urchin. In short it didn't really go in the box, or at least you will not be satisfied of the fact unless you adopt stage 4B- dealing with the postbox (advanced). This is where you move from muttering to yourself 'got to remember to post this letter' to speaking out loud, as you go through the action of posting, the following phrases: 'I am going to put it in the box' 'I am putting it in the box' I have put it in the box', and then finally as you turn away, 'It is in the box'. Which of course, it is. But I hope you get the idea that really, posting things is not very straight forward at all (and I haven't even begun to talk about when you have to take some kind of parcel to the post office and, as it is too big to go in the box, have to entrust it to some liveried employee of the Royal Mail who might do anything with it at all. So you can imagine how delighted I was when they decided to change the voting system for the municipal elections, from the apparently very very difficult one of walking twenty yards to your local polling station, putting an X against the candidate of your choice and walking out again, to a postal vote involving a dizzying array of instructions involving putting envelope A inside envelope B, making sure the barcode was visible, getting someone who knows you to be your witness, and then proceeding to stages one to 4B above of actually getting the thing in a box. Needless to say this task was absolutely beyond me and my package of voting paraphanerlia remained on a table near the front door until it was too late to be posted at all, at which point I brought it into work, where my similarly postally-challenged colleague Chris took it, along with his own, along to the Town Hall, where he handed it personally to the Lord Mayor himself. At least that it what he said. In reality of course, he could have done anything with it at all. Oh, and the result of the experiment with postal voting? A massive increase in turnout with something like 38% attending the polls in the north west. They say the other 62% are apathetic, but we know that the true threat to British democracy is nothing so abstract- in fact it is bright red, made of solid metal, and standing on a streetcorner near you. Do not underestimate the power of the British Postbox.

calling an army of hidden gardeners a spade

2004-06-11T06:39:00.000-07:00

I woke up this morning with several aches and pains for which I hold Alan Titchmarsh and his evil assistant Charlie Dimmock personally responsible. If you have a TV and have tuned it in to the BBC at any time during the last 6 months you will have seen one of this sadistic duo's 30-minute propaganda campaigns for the garden fork and wheelbarrow industry, or as they prefer to call them 'lifestyle magazine programmes'. There are, I think, about 37 of them, but if I tell you there is just one, and it is 14 hours long and called 'Home Front Celebrity Ground Force Challenge Special Small Garden Taskforce Makeover- Uncut!' you will get the idea. What happens in these shows is that our heroes Titchmarsh and Dimmock descend on some unsuspecting householders, and with the apparent aid of nothing more than a pair of sturdy spades and a regular supply of strong tea, transform their 'garden' - an overgrown 6-foot-square patch of land whose central feature is a rusty burnt-out Ford Cortina- into an open-air urban paradise containing fully seventeen hectares of lush greenery, complete with fountains modelled on those at the Alhambra and, over in a shady corner, a team of mermaids strumming pensively on harps made of solid gold. All this in 10 minutes flat and for a total budget of £17.63. The important word in the preceding paragraph, of course, is 'apparent'. You think it has all been done with spades and tea because of the skilful editing which has obscured from view the small matter of the 16-ton articulated lorry containing an army of slaves, each with the strength of a lion and armed top-of-the-range B & Q rotovators, pneumatic drills, cement-mixers and a giant crane borrowed from the reconstuction of Wembley stadium. Oh, and the fact that the programme is not really filmed over lunchtime at 37 Railway Cuttings Harrogate, but over 6 months, and at a cost to the British licence payer of £350 000, in the secret private garden of the crown prince of Trinidad and Tobago, who happens to be a personal friend of Dermot Mernaghan. Anyway you get the idea. You watch the show (whichever of the 37 shows it happens to be) and you start to get ideas about the possible transformation of your own, adequate but unspectacular patch of greenery into something more eye-catching and contemporary. 20 minutes later you are in B and Q, and having scoured the aisles in an unsuccesful search for mermaids, content yourself with a spade, a fork, a dutch hoe, a wheelbarrow and a trowel. Later that night you start cheerily hacking away at your lawn with the spade, reckoning to be putting the final touches to the giant musical fountain in time for Coronation Street. Except, of course, you have been fooled. Giant musical fountains, as you come to realise during 2 solid weeks of hacking, spading, shovelling and swearing (most of all swearing) are the sole preserve of the Crown Prince of Trinidad and Tobago and his evil henchman Dermot Mernaghan. At the end of these two weeks you look up to see the result of your labour, and see that it is the following: One not-very-level and rather grubby patch of muddy soil. liberally splattered with housebricks. No mermaids at all A bad back and some strange shooting pains down the left side, possibly a small heart attack. It is at this point that you put down the dutch hoe, walk calmly into your front room, and with a mighty cry of 'Alan Titchmarsh you lying, cheating BASTARD', hurl your thirty inch colour television into the High Street. At this point, strangely, you start to feel ever so slightly better. Which reminds me. Euro 2004 starts on Saturday and my television appears to be out of order. Titchmarsh, you really are a bastard, aren't you?

Tuesday Morning's all right for fighting

2004-06-08T06:47:00.000-07:00

Now you might be a lion tamer, or maybe you are engaged in interstellar travel or as one of those people who tests the strength of old-fashioned wooden barrels by riding them over the top of Niagara falls. If so you probably reckon you know a bit about dangerous ways to make a living. But if you really want to live on the edge, then what you need to do is come and work in an office. You don't believe me? Just ask my friend Warren, who was quite peacefully sitting at his desk this morning wondering when it was time for the next cup of tea, when an mysterious airborne piece of sharp debri came flying through the air and lodged itself painfully in his right eye. Now with most people this kind of thing might surprise you, but our Warren is known as being just a little accident prone. In the last couple of years he has been involved in the following calamitous incidents, and these are just the ones I know about: the time he came in to work looking like he had just contested the Middleweight Championship of the World, losing narrowly on points. Apparently he had been beaten up in a club in Newton-le-Willows by 'someone who didn't like the way I was looking at him, as far as I can remember'. the time he woke up the morning after a day on the bevvy with numerous cuts and bruises, convinced he had been mugged, albeit by some quite inefficient muggers who, it appeared, had clean forgot to steal his wallet, watch, or anything else from his defenseless and knocked-out person. The muggers were also invisible, or at least our victim could remember nothing about them, or in fact anything at all from the previous evening after round about the 12th pint of Stella ('not that I was pissed, like'). This mysterious amnesia did not stop him giving a detailed statement to the Police, who strangely have so far failed to pin the atrocity on anyone from Boltons's notorious fraternity of see-through bloodthirsty criminals. the time I was meeting him at Piccadilly station to go and watch the Bolton- Newcastle game, and he was 10 minutes late, having become involved in a short but spectacular fight outside the Finnegan's Wake pub, apparently started by a Rugby League fan who 'fell out of the boozer right on top of me, then when I tried to pick him antoher feller came out, thought I had attacked his mate, so threw a right hook at my head'. Can you see a pattern emerging here? Well so can I, so really the only surprise about today's turn of events was that as far as I can see it was 10 o-clock in the morning and our boy was stone-cold sober. Anyway he pronounced himself to be in great pain and was driven to the nearby Manchester Eye Hospital (what a wonderful city, we have whole hospitals just for small individual parts of the body, you want to see the triumph of architecure that is the Royal Northern Infirmary for Chinese Burns on the Arm), where they apparently stuck something sharp in his eye in order to remove the sharp thing that was there already (except, they couldn't remove all of it. He has to go back on Saturday to see about some that is still lodged up he back of the eye, an appointment he seems to looking forward to with some relish). Oh. and what was the thing that flew through the office and lodged itself in Warren's head? Well we have had the Health and Safety man in and he has not got a bastard clue. However I am personally offering these odds that the culprit will turn out to have been: 11/8- a staple which had become mysteriously airborne due to the overactive air-conditioning system 10/3- a particle of sinister dust-like material which will initially be feared to have been anthrax but will turn out to be either Daz Automatic or dandruff. 4/1- a very tiny invisible mugger attempting to steal his retina 33/1- a crowd of absolutely miniscule and very drunk rugby league fans mistaking Warren's eye for the street outside of the Finnegan's Wake pub 66/1 bar the above. And that is all for today. Goodnight.

Manchester, Manchester, so much to answer for

2004-06-02T07:26:00.000-07:00

What is this in my overcrowded wallet, in among the flyers for taxi cabs firms, scrawled mobile phone numbers, and packs of first class stamps with one stamp left in? Well blow me down if it is not a gift voucher for WH Smith, which has been there since Christmas when it was presented to me by my wife's sister in a moving yuletide ceremony. In fact two vouchers each of value £10. £10! Suddenly this windfall is burning an immense hole in my wallet and there is only one option: to march across the city at lunchtime and get a hold of the new release by Morrissey, which I have been promising myself ever since getting involved in a heated debate about it the other week, during which my sister argued that the man was clearly a sad parody of his former self, while I insisted that, actually, she was probably right but I was going to buy the record anyway out of some misguided sense of tribal loyalty to my wasted indiepop youth, and be damned what any of you thought. And then forgot all about it, until the magical discovery of the crumpled gift voucher... ... hell, for such a major flagship store WH Smith is certainly a long bleedin' way from anywhere else at all, and it is no wonder ex-indie popsters such as myself would rather leave a valuable gift voucher getting steadily more crumpled in their wallet for nigh-on six months than trek across halfway to bleedin' Victoria Station just to view their paltry selection of 'tracks' from the 'hit parade', as we used to call it when I was a lad and Talulah Gosh were wowing the nation with their funny swirling guitars that they couldn't really play very well. Still, it has been worthwhile because here is says Morrissey is number three in the said parade with his new 'disc', and sure enough down here among all these unrecognisable titles, right here in the display segment reserved for the number three hit record we have- Mo-what-Avril Lavigne? Avril Bleedin' Lavigne?? Now Avril is clearly a winsome presence, but she is quite clearly not a weatherbeaten veteran of 20 years of chrysanthemum-flailing floppy-shirted, thick-black-bequiffed bedist angst, at least not yet. Morrissey being nowhere to be seen, I am thrown into intense confusion, and after ten minutes of trawling the aisles in an increasingly pathetic search for the hits of Talulah Gosh, pounce upon the new 'Streets' LP being as I heard the single the other day on Radio 2 (it's cool now you know) and quite liked it. One manic dash back across town later I am back in the office and recount the entire tale to one of our resident 'young people'. 'The Streets? Yeah, they're OK', is his considered verdict- So altogother a succesful day out. I managed to carry off a trip to a modern day record store without entirely disgracing myself, and proved myself to be 'in with the kids' by buying a 'hip and happening set of sounds' as we used to say back in 1985 in the Students Union. Hurrah for the Streets! Hurrah for Morrissey, even if he is possibly a shadow of his former self, even though we shall probably never find out. And finally, hurrah for Talulah Gosh! Hurrah!

Out for Lunch

2004-06-02T07:04:00.000-07:00

What we saw on the city streets today: A wannabe cool skateboard kid attempting an overambitious kind of back-flip move under the railway arches on Whitworth Street and very nearly coming to grief and ending up on his arse in a way we can only describe as 'uncool'. Obviously it is still just the second day of the half term and he is out of practice. By Friday he will be back-flipping up over the train line and landing on top of the 15:26 Liverpool to Norwich express. A small stocky man carrying a small stocky umbrella, but no raincoat; in fact no coat of any kind. Where does he think he is- in the opening credits of 'Friends'? If so he is sadly deluded; he is in fact on Great Bridgewater Street and there is no closely-knit gang of beautiful 20-something urbanites in attendance, or for that matter a fountain. An attractive European-looking girl being waved at from the 1st floor balcony of some attractive European-looking flats by her attractive European-looking friend. Manchester is a very European-looking city, you know. Sometimes you would think you were strolling along the boulvards of Milan, or, you know, Dusseldorf. In McDonalds a very large woman tucking into what look like three Big Mac meals, each with extra fries. She is deliriously happy at this turn of events, but still makes a poor advert for the new McDonalds and their 'lovely McSalads for the way we live today' that you see plastered on the side of buses, but strangely enough never see anyone ordering at all, ever. Not even the thin customers.