In perfect harmony

Last New Year's Eve I spent the evening sitting next to a woman who was carefully operating a breast pump.

Thought that might get your attention.

It was quite a novel way to see in the new year, I'll give you that.  With her free hand, the pumper (or should that be pumpee?) showed me her phone, on which she had been reading the very blog that you see before you.  Apparently, Make Lard History had helped her through many a sleepless night of baby feeds.

I don't know about you, dear reader, but when having a conversation in such circumstances it's difficult to know where to look, even though she was being incredibly discrete.  (I was brought up in a cul-de-sac, for God's sake.  I was 17 before I saw another human nipple.)  And so I let my gaze drift to the other end of the room, where it was caught by some records.  Not CDs, but records.  Honest, 12 inch, vinyl records, and quite a lot of them.  The whole wall, from floor to ceiling, was taken with the record collection of Beck, the aforementioned pumpee (or pumper) and Matt, her then-fiance.

Beck is a professional singing teacher and Matt is the Most Laid Back Man in the Western Hemisphere.  They are parents to Ben, who will, if I'm any judge, surely achieve world domination within the next 20 years or so.

On that night and subsequent visits I've had my musical tastes gently expanded by their library of shiny black goodness.  Artists and bands I'd heard of, like Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and Boards of Canada have received an airing.  Then there have been some that even with my fairly eclectic tastes were new to me; such names as Joan as Policewoman, Okkervil River and Shearwater getting a very welcome spin.

By the way, if you have a moment, do yourselves a favour and find Rooks, by Shearwater. It's tremendous.

It was Beck and Matt's wedding yesterday and a relaxed, musical thread ran through the whole event.  Let me paint you a picture.

This was the groom's choice of footwear.  And, after the formal ceremony and pictures, the bride joined him and slipped into a pair of Converse Allstars under her dress.  All the better for throwing some shapes to the Black Keys later on.

Beck was serenaded into the wedding venue by a choir made up of her students.  Wedding march?  Nope.  Trumpet Voluntary?  Not here.  It was an arrangement of Alanis Morissette's Head Over Feet.  Which is a pretty good state to be in, all things considered.

For the wedding breakfast, guests had individual cupcakes as place-settings, with each table having a separate sweet-related theme.  As you can tell, our table was candy necklaces; others had sours, foam bananas, liquorice allsorts, chocolate Revels,  dolly mixtures, etc.  This prompted a vibrant trading community throughout the afternoon as kids travelled from table to table, politely making trades.

And yes, the toast drinks were mojitos.  It was that kind of event.

Later on that evening, after we'd had an afternoon including the playing of KerPlunk, the bride and groom took to the dancefloor to their chosen first dance song.  And it was this.  (Caution, this may be NSFW for some of you out there).

I think if you're going to have a wedding, it's only right to have one that speaks volumes about the bride and groom.  Congratulations, both.

Twelve proverbs for modern times

Cut your coat according to the instructions of Gok Wan and you too can end up looking like someone with a ruined coat.

All that glitters is not Gary.

If you sup with the devil, use recipes that don’t involve nuts.  Remember, he has an allergy and you don’t want to have to perform the Heimlich manoeuvre on the Lord of Darkness for a second time.

Out of the frying pan and into the bin.  Sod this for a lark, where’s the menu for Pizza Hut?

It’s a wise child that knows how to change the automatic gearbox on a 1998 Ford Mondeo.  

You can’t make a silk purse out of silk these days without annoying the hell out of those unionised silkworms.

He who hesitates is going to find revolving doors a bit of a challenge.

When the cat’s away the mice will knock the house down and build apartments for retired gerbils.

Don’t count your chickens before they’re mechanically reconstituted by the McDonalds corporation into nuggets of pure evil.

A rolling stone gathers no royalties, due to some fiendish contract signed when they were all whacked off their gourds on the Colombian Marching Powder in the early 70’s.

Love me, love my rather unseemly collection of horse brasses.

The longest journey begins with the thought: “Did I leave the gas on?”

Celebrating the failures

Today is Guy Fawkes Day in the UK.  Elsewhere, I guess it's just Day.

On 5th November we celebrate the discovery of a failed plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605.  If that seems like an odd thing to be doing, some 400-odd years after the event, then you really haven't got to grips with the peculiarities of British history.

But it is a little unusual to be marking the anniversary of what was, essentially, a failed terrorist attack.  Especially as we use tons of high explosives for the purpose.  However, if we're relaxed about celebrating such events, perhaps we need to extend the franchise a little bit.  Because let's face it, if we don't want to be terrorised, we don't have to be.  Taking the piss is often the best option: 


Belt Buckle Day

In honour of airport security operatives the world over, on this day leave your belt buckles at home and shuffle along praying you don't suffer a wardrobe malfunction of the worst kind.  Watch the eyes of the kids light up as Grandma is subjected to a rough body-search by taciturn people in peaked caps.

John Smeaton Night

In remembrance of the 2007 Glasgow Airport attack, people up and down the country are to be smacked around the face by angry Scottish blokes.  Actually, that probably counts as a normal Saturday night in some town centres.

The Burning Shoe Festival

Set light to your footwear with gay abandon, folks.  Because nothing says, "Member of a shadowy organisation destined to bring terror to the travelling public" any better than the smell of a scorched pair of Nike Air High.

Send a Printer Ink Cartridge to a Complete Stranger Week

I think the clue's in the title with this one.

Capital Punishment

Well this won't do at all.

Yesterday afternoon I went to London.  You know, London.  Big place on the Thames, daft prices for houses, you can't miss it.

I was going with a work colleague because we'd won an award.  Well, strictly speaking, she'd won the award.  Mind you, I wrote the winning submission, so really I could say I was partly responsible for the award.

Hang on, this isn't getting us anywhere.  Let's start again.

Yesterday afternoon I went to London.  And, as is normally the case when I visit the capital, those good people of London Underground decided to take it upon themselves to go on strike.

I have been here before.  In fact, it's almost as if the unions wait until I'm approaching, then decide to down tools.  Or whatever it is tube train drivers down when they're not working.  I should get Boris Johnson to pay me not to go.  I'm a Jonah.

Having been warned yesterday afternoon that the city was gripped by a tube strike, I spent a little time thinking about alternatives.  I knew from past experience a strike of this magnitude meant that arriving at London Euston at peak time would lead to my joining a taxi queue containing most of the population of the western hemisphere, all waiting for precisely five taxis.

I thought about maybe walking from Euston to our final destination in the insurance district, by that bulbous gherkin-y building.  Hmm.  About three miles.  Certainly possible, but not entirely comfortable in the November drizzle, in my sensible clumpy English shoes and woollen winter suit.  My colleague gently advised me that she Was Not Sodding Walking Three Bloody Miles In These Heels Thank You Very Much.  I asked if she had a pair of trainers to slip into, in the manner of Melanie Griffiths' character in the film Working Girl.  I remembered seeing the film in the cinema when it came out.

Worst. Date. Movie. Ever.

Anyway, we decided instead to head down to London on an earlier train, in the hope that this would give us more options before the 6pm awards ceremony.  We arrived at a bustling Euston not long after 4.  And as we wandered, a-bitching and a-mumbling, towards the burgeoning taxi queue, I thought I would just check with the London Underground employee on the station concourse patiently fielding customer queries and dispensing wisdom like Buddha.  Only with more polyester and a hi-vis tabard.

"What's it looking like on the Northern Line to Bank Station?"
"Oh, that one's fine sir, you'll be alright."

He probably wondered why I looked slightly disappointed at this news.

This is why I said, at the start of this post, that this would not do.  I mean, in narrative terms there is nothing good about, "I-went-to-London-and-used-a-remarkably-efficient-public-mass-transport-solution-and-it-was-actually-quite-cheap-don't-you-know," is there?  No, you want to know about our suffering, don't you?  How the forces ranged against us - weather, traffic, Londoners - as we went about our gargantuan task.  How we fought valiantly against the odds, straining every sinew in a determined effort to reach our destination. 

Somehow, sitting down on a tube train for ten minutes with a copy of the Evening Standard to hand doesn't quite cut it, does it?

This is planet earth

Hello.

This is your world speaking. No, not you lot. Just me, the one of me. Your planet. Earth, terra, etc.

Oh, for Pete's sake. Don't all look in the air. Where do you expect the voice of your planet to be coming from? That's better. And yes, I'm well aware I sound like James Earl Jones. Given that I've been around for 4.5 billion years longer than he has, I'm pretty well pissed off that the comparison always seems to go that way round.

And do I need to remind you who invented the whole concept of the 'year' in the first place?

The reason I've chosen to speak to you all is that I'm becoming increasingly aware that many of you feel they ought to do something to save me. I suppose I should be flattered. Truth be known, I only knew you lot were there relatively recently. To be honest, there's not much going on that grabs my attention. I had a nasty case of asteroids some time back, but since then it's been fairly quiet, planetary-wise.

Anyway. You lot have been pretty invasive, you believe. You're killing me, you think. I need saving from you all, apparently. Well, let me tell you something for nothing.  I'm big enough and ugly enough.

I'm 6,000 of your, what do you call them, miles, wide and made principally out of granite and iron.  Plus a whole buch of other stuff that you think yourselves very clever at finding and using.  Yes yes yes, I know all about uranium.  To be frank with you, I'd much rather I didn't have the stuff in me, it gives me a shocking case of hives at the best of times.  But you guys think you're the bees knees with your fast-breeder reactors and multiple warheads, don't you?

I do quite like bees, by the way.  I think they're a nice touch.  I'm fond of the humming.


But now I hear you all agonising about how you're mucking me up.  How you're killing me.  Look, folks, let's have a little honesty, shall we? You couldn't give a tinker's cuss - whatever on me one of those is - about anyone, or anything, but yourselves.  Your concern for planet Earth is really all to do with your own little temporary existence.  You don't kid me.  I wasn't impressed by the dinosaurs - bunch of bloody lizards with ideas above their station, if you ask me - and I'm not taken in by you upright chimps, either. 

I was here a long time before you were, so think on.  And I've got a good 5 billion or so rotations to go before old Sol gets all ansty and swallows me up, along with those others you call Mercury and Venus.

And while we're on the subject, which one of you thought Earth was a decent name?  You use the names of your gods for my brothers, then call me after the stuff in which you grow your spuds.  I ask you.  There's gratitude.

Anyhow, I digress.  As I said earlier, I've only just noticed you there - I thought it was a crust irritation at first.  In my younger eons I just needed to send up the odd me-quake, ice-age or volcano to quieten things down, but you don't seem to have taken the hint.  I'll just have to wait for the next comet to clear you buggers out, I suppose.

Make Lard History: the live show

It's well over a month since I last mentioned it.  And, given that all this time has since passed us by, perhaps I'd better provide a bit of an update.  Of course, the fact that I have to fill 30 posts this month has absolutely nothing to do with this sudden openness on my part.

I'll be doing a lot of this in November; interspersing the vaguely creative stuff with general ramblings about things that are happening to me.  Don't judge, you're not the boss of me.  If I was Stephen Fry you'd be calling me a frickin' genius.

At the end of September, you may recall, I said that I'd been asked to contribute to a charity evening at a local pub.  The basic premise was that I would stand up in front of a room of complete strangers and read things out to them.  This caused me the odd moment of worry.  You may remember be weighing up the pros and cons.

Not because of any anxieties about getting up in front of a crowd.  I am, truth be told, a colossal show-off.  But it was the potential for poetry that was causing me some concern.  I don't do poetry.  Or, at least, on 27 September I didn't.

The pros won.  And it was marvellous. 

I was helped by a sympathetic audience.  Any crowd containing members who, when presented with a guy with an acoustic guitar offering to do a cover of Dylan's Subterranean Homesick Blues, call out "Right on!" with no sense of irony, aren't going to get at all precious about poems.

There are poets who write sensitively about beauty and truth.  Who weave words, painting verbal pictures.  Who touch on the rawest of human emotion.  I am not one of those people.  I write about what's in my fridge, drinking wine from the box and the number 50 night-bus from Birmingham City Centre.  Romantic poets?  Sod that for a lark.

My allotted ten minutes seemed to fly by, I got plenty of (intentional) laughs and I was applauded back to my seat.  A very good friend who was there told me how proud Dad would have been.  Beer was consumed.

What's that?  You actually want to see some of these poems?  Well, I do have 30 days to fill....

The morning after the E'en before

It was just past midnight, the first day of November, and the ladies were relaxing once more.

"Thank goodness that's over for another year," sighed Deirdre.

"I know what you mean," said Bridget, "every year I say I'm looking forward to it, but, well, I don't know.." Her voice trailed off as she focused on the liquid, gently bubbling away in an iron pot in front of them.

The younger of the trio piped up. "I just don't understand mortals any more."

"It's not just you, Hilda, I think we all feel the same," said Bridget, stirring the brew gently.  "Time was when Halloween really meant something."

"Now I think it's just like any other festival.  It's definitely gone commercial."

Deirdre pulled the cape closely around her thin shoulders and stared glumly into the glowing coals.  "I remember when it was different," she muttered darkly.  "I bet you a winter's kindling that none of those humans we saw tonight could even bloody pronounce Samhain, let alone understand its true meaning."

"I know, dear, I know."

"I mean, what's this 'trick-or-treat' malarkey supposed to be all about?  It just seems to be an excuse to push sugar on unsuspecting kids.  They'll ruin their teeth.  I mean, none of us have perfect teeth..."

"I'll have you know my tooth has done me very well this last 800 years, Deirdre."

"But it's different for us, Bridget.  We are witches, after all.  We're supposed to be, well, crone-like."

"And what is it with the costumes they're wearing these days?"

"I know!  I remember when you could at least get the odd bit of witchiness going on.  You know, pointy hat, black cape, maybe even a hazel broom if the parents were being sufficiently middle-class about the whole endeavour.  But now it's so random.  I swear I saw twelve Spidermen last night.  It was like a Fathers For Justice conference."

The three ladies paused as the fire crackled and sparked.  Deirdre reached out and carefully decanted the now-boiling contents of the vessel into three broad cups.

"Right.  Who's for milk and sugar?"