Wedged Up

There is much fear about. It could be that of terrorism (although I personally don’t know anyone with that particular type), being poor (quite popular), worrying what people will think (I suppose I have that, but I am better able to recognise it in others), getting ripped off; that’s quite a personal one. People are easily vexed when they think that they have lost something rightfully their’s. Their concern is not really about losing the thing in question, it is a very primal thing, to do with clans and hierarchies and finding a mate, an so on. If you want to be sure that a tiger will track you down and eat you, apparently you help yourself to one of his kills. I saw a documentary recently where a miserable Siberian had done just that. So convinced were people of his fate that they wouldn’t let him stay in their houses. Sure enough, several days and miles later, his remains were found strewn about his camp-site.

I am in the supermarket, in the queue at the checkout. The person in front of me has loaded their gear on to the conveyer belt and I am starting to fill the space that is left. Check out what happens when you fail to place on of those “next customer please” doofers in the gap between his super size bottles of diet coke and your goats’ milk yogurt. You don’t have to wait long before he will slap one of those plastic wedges on to that rubber as though I’d just helped myself to few glugs of his low fat fizzy drink.

Does my failure to have positioned the plastic toblerone symbolise the fact that I might be about to grab his wench by the hair, and drag her, kicking and screaming, back to my cave. Mister, are you seriously that worried that you might accidentally pay for my daily portion of friendly bacteria? No, we are in fact talking about a hunter-gatherer-territory thing!

I suppose we should be thankful for those small wedges otherwise people would be micturating over their messages.

A Peeling

A few years ago I went to the see an exhibition in the East End of dissected and “plasticized” human bodies.

I left with a new respect for mine. There were lots of different types of exhibit, one of the most beautiful was that of a child whose blood had been replaced by resin and then everything other than his blood vessel network had been removed leaving an intricate sculpture. Whilst I rated it highly and found it to be very informative there was undoubtedly an air of the performance about the display.


Flay Boy

That turns out to be nothing compared to the first of four programmes called Anatomy for Beginners and featuring the slightly bonkers Dr Gunter von Hagens (responsible for the previously mentioned exhibition) dissecting human bodies, which was shown last night on Channel 4. Almost as revealing as the exhibition it was nevertheless a little bit like watching a spoilt child blowing a wad of his dad’s cash on rubbish with no one able to take him to one side and have a word with him. The good doctor got a clap for goodness sake, for managing to remove the donor’s spinal chord and the associated nerves leading down one leg to his foot, in one piece (and without taking his hat off).

But I’ll be watching again tonight as the oddest thing of all is the taboo around dead bodies which means that I know as little as I do about how mine fits together.

Last of the f*cking whining

Sunday evening, (when last week ends and next starts. Nowadays almost all children are at this moment listening to their iPods, slaughtering folk on their Play Stations, texting their friends and being rude. Not that I'm jealous. I can look back on a Sunday evening when Dom and I would attend chapel, tea and then the off-license; on the way back from where we would consume a bottle of cider each in preparation for Hart to Hart and a pot noodle. Or heading off to Cleckheaton for the week in my Cortina after a Chinese Take Away on Leeds Rd), it's a barometer.

Sangfroid

Yesterday I went to the town hall. I filled out the forms and joined the queue where I started the Sudoku puzzle in the Times. (I have become hooked on them, despite the fact that the part of my brain which causes me to return from a trip upstairs to collect the car keys with a flap jack and no keys, adds to my failure rate).

Next I chat to someone about where in China I went last year. When (in June) they learnt that I‘d been there and particularly that I’d been on a boat trip, they told me not to bother showing up for six months; they were quite nice about it. I went into the next room and waited to hear my name. When called, I went over to the other side of the room and lay down next to a very attractive Eastern European girl. The podgy, friendly bloke in his blue uniform seemed, not surprisingly, seemed a little reluctant to turn his attention from the clear skinned girl to me. More questions then; “you will now feel a sharp scratch”. About a pint of blood lighter I sat up on the bed, I was the only person in the room now, the staff had all gone off on their break.

I forewent the biscuit and tea, (I had had a Bounty before-hand) and left the bag of my bodily fluids to be transported to the National Blood Bank in Tooting last night. Apparently most blood is separated into a number of components to be made into various products. Where will my chi end up? I like to think it will be of some good. I wish it well. I have type B negative which 1% of the UK population has (but 20% of the Japanese have). I think they like O negative best because anyone can receive it. The Hopi Indians who live in the Mohave Dessert in Arizona have something in their blood only found in the blood of Japanese. Their folklore says that they travelled the world thousands of years ago before choosing to settle in what must be one of the most challenging places to live on the planet.

I am interested in the Hopi and when in Arizona a while ago, decided to go to see where they lived. My expectation was that we would find a fairly touristy place. Consequently we took a picnic. We found what I would describe as a run-down council estate in the desert. We are talking basic. Many of them have refused to be wired up to the electricity and telecommunications networks. There are a number of villages in the area. The one we arrived at was on the Second Mesa (a plateau in the desert). There was a shop, the lady was nice, she seemed to be aware that we were expecting something different. She suggested that if we followed the noise of the drums we would arrive at the local school where there was some kind of celebration going on in the car park. Very big energy there indeed, there were no other white people; kids of all ages in bright costumes dancing around in front of their proud families.

At the third Mesa we found the village of Old Oraibi, some say the oldest inhabited community in the United States. If anything it was even more bleak than the Second Mesa. There was another little shop. I bought a silver pendant with the image of the Ancient One on it. He looks like a space man.

Despite the harshness of the environment, there was something very powerful and attractive about the simplicity of the place.

Kent wait

Listening to the album Vapen & Ammunition by Kent as kindly sent to me by Dom in order that I can revise for their concert in May. Am very much enjoying it indeed.

I am in front of a big screen. The John Cussack character is reflecting on having been ripped off in a leafy street, or speeding down a dramatic coastal road having retrieved something that the baddy is going to want back, or celebrating in a bar with his mates, exchanging a furtive look with an unavailable girl across the room, or maybe typing up the critical information; cigarette dangling from lips, stopping to knock a big slug of ash into his plastic cup, smarting from the smoke......

Tanks

It was dark now, the driver dropped us off at Tiananmen Square. You cannot be ready for how big that place is. People were still flying kites. There is a large building in the centre of the square which is Mao’s Mausoleum, a day or two later we would join the queue to file past what is supposed to be the remains of the man himself. His face could have been made of marzipan.

It was a balmy evening and we strolled about a bit. It certainly feels like stuff has gone on there. It is adjacent to the Forbidden City and the government offices. From time to time you will see a posh black car with people in suits going about the business of transforming their county into a super power. There are no rubbish cars around as they haven't had cars there that long.



Anyway we had been wandering about for about 20 minutes and we were approached by a very smiley Chinese bloke. A few people had wanted to sell us something. He was more persistent than the others, more charming too. For the next two or three hours he was our unofficial guide, it didn’t matter that he was being paid by the shops and tea houses we visited; it was worth it. During the day he teaches English at the University but cannot afford to accommodate his family in the City, they lived out of town; he stayed during the week in a Huton, a one room apartment (without a toilet) off a little communal square. Everywhere in Beijing the Hutons are being flattened and replaced with tall buildings.


"no rubbish cars"

Whilst we were still in the square I asked him whereabouts the student was standing when he confronted the tanks. He looked at me like I had just taken all my clothes off. Through a fixed smile, glancing over his shoulder he said, “you cannot talk about that here”.

Pelican

October 1994; we were going to Florida. The flight followed a path down the east coast of the states, I tried to identify cities from 30 000 ft. By the time we were on board the hire car, heading for Miami Beach, it was getting dark and starting to rain. We had no bookings anywhere and it was several hotels before I had found one that showed the ESPN channel on the TV in the rooms; I wanted to know if Michael Schumacher was going to win his first world title.

The following morning we awoke to the remnants of Tropical Storm Gordon. There was a lot of rain and we were told to expect it to last a while. We moved to a cool hotel on the beach called the Pelican. But the weather was still interfering a little. We drove around through the floods in our convertible.

The pair of us considered flying inland to New Orleans or somewhere but in the end decided to drive south. We had to drive all the way to Key West before the sun came out. A bit knackered, we checked into the first nice and very expensive hotel we found. This was on the basis that we felt due some “r and r” and we could move somewhere cheaper later. We never moved.

Every evening there is a bit of a party to watch the sunset. One evening we found ourselves sitting side by side in a Tiger Moth. As it flew over the little crowd by the port we were joined by another old plane and we did some modest aerobatics; we even saw a shark in the clear sea. Another evening we were on a sailing boat and became witnesses at the wedding of a drunk bloke and his much older slightly less inebriated partner.

I went on a dive. My diving buddy seemed surprised that I didn’t know Ridley Scott (as I lived in London) and on the way, talked a lot about how much he enjoyed diving. I had never dived before but I wasn’t the one who freaked out. On my second dive I let too much air out of my regulator too quickly and when the bubbles had dissipated I found myself standing on the bottom with a small group of divers around me. I learnt that before I stood on it, they had been studying a baby shark on the sea bed.

When you dive you can move by the way you breathe.

So big, I couldn't stop smiling

I went to collect the bike from the hire shop; which was more of a boutique actually, Harley Davidson branded clothes and other things, everything nice and clean.

I tried a couple of leather jackets before settling on a traditional looking number with the zip across my chest at an angle. I asked about helmets. The selection consisted of several of the type sported by Dick Dastardly’s friend, Klunk. None fit comfortably but I took one anyway. The bike was a Sportster, the smallest, at 900cc but still noisy even on the very wide main road that runs through the centre of Sedona.

Between me and Prescott, 50 or so miles west, there was mainly desert and a range of quite pointy hills. I had left the edge of town and experimented with speed a little before I decided that the helmet was cramping more than just my style. I strapped it to the grab handle and set off again, a little tentatively at first as it seemed very easy to imagine my head meeting the tarmac and splitting open like a melon.

After maybe an hour, having stopped off at the little ex-mining town of Jerome, I had reached an altitude where there was snow on the edges of the road. Only a few minutes more and I was winding down the other side of the range. The view was very, very big; miles of desert with a pencilled in road, squiggling into the haze.

The music kept us going

Monday evening, listening to Tank by the Stranglers courtesy of my excellent Sennheiser cordless headphones and I am right back there in that gold Ford Granada, my father having taken his two early teenage sons for a fortnight drive-about in the borders. I think that you would call that a low point. Everyone would rather have been somewhere else.

I can’t remember a great deal about that holiday. The damp smell of the bungalow we had rented or, egged on by my brother and me, my dad’s abandoned overtaking manoeuvre on a country road. When confronted by a tractor coming the other way there was a seemingly interminable, noisy and dramatic locking up of breaks. Next, an odd moment of irony as our tyre smoke wafted gently past us, leaving the three of us behind us to quietly reflect.

Apart from listening to the Stranglers, Magazine and Kraftwerk, one other thing comes to mind. Working from the back seat as we drove along, vigorously rubbing my dad’s head and utilising the volume enhancing properties of static electricity, I succeeded in getting his comb-over to become a kind of jaunty Mohican.

Cutting......

My dad does some things differently from other people; pronunciation of certain words for example. I went to a school called Grosvenor House, which he always referred to as Gruvner, cancer has a hard second “c”, canker, the other morning we had a coffee together at Coshta (which he told me is Portuguese for rib).

During that caffeine break, he mentioned that he had fancied a new razor and had bought a four blade one. He stated that he likes it except that the head keeps falling off. Also “due to the hard water in the area a deposit of calcium builds up very quickly” on the instrument, “which is quite difficult to remove”.

I may be wrong but I bet those marketing types down at Gillette would refer to the calcium deposit as a Lubra-strip and I know from experience that attempting to remove it might well cause the head to come off.

Great crack

I had had a bad night’s sleep in that log cabin. There must have been 15 or so blokes, a good proportion of whom had been snoring hard. A bell went at about 5am to announce breakfast, and most people left after that, I went back to bed as I didn’t feel the need to walk in the dark; I didn’t have a torch anyway. An hour or so later I gathered together what little stuff I had and set off.

Having left Phantom Ranch, crossing the Colorado River on the foot bridge, I was presented with a massive dark cliff wall. I was going to take the longer route out; I had come down the shorter and steeper route the previous day so I turned right. It was starting to drizzle, there was no sign of anyone around, I decided I was going to do this walk quickly. Part of the reason that a lot of the others had left so early is that the slower ones would run the risk of running out of daylight at the other end of the day, at least that’s what the bumph at Grand Canyon Village warned you about, allow 12 hours they said; I knew that they had to protect themselves from those litigious fatter people you can find over there. I wanted to be out by lunchtime so I could head off to Monument Valley.

After a short while I caught up with a medical student with the biggest rucksack in the world, I don’t know what he had in there but he mentioned something about moving house as we walked together up a gorge for five minutes or so. He was behind me when he decided that he wanted to be travelling at a slower pace and we said our goodbyes. Despite the weather being less clement than it had been on the way down it was exhilarating to be marching up that path. I only encountered a few other beings before the last few miles of zigzag which had quite a few day trippers on it. I saw a few deer that stopped chomping the grass and looked over their shoulders at me as though they felt sorry for me. I caught up with a girl with another enormous rucksack. She had a tent and a baby in hers. Amazing; she had walked into the canyon the previous day and the pair of them had spent the night. The baby was three months old and there was snow on the ground at the rim.

Most people were well equipped for the hike; on the way in though, a girl passed me coming out on the steep path; she was wearing flip flops and listening to her walkman; she had no rucksack.

Oggetti

It was my birthday this week. I got some good presents. Amongst other things, a nice pair of Adidas trainers, some very interesting books, chocolates and a basket of fruit!

I bought myself something I have had an eye on for years but never got round to getting; an Eames coat rack. If that doesn’t mean anything to you, it looks like something a former snooker player might have made at his hobby craft class. It is a coat hanger that you screw to the wall, 14 brightly coloured balls attached to a wire frame.

Now I have it home though, I can’t find anywhere to put it. I was considering mounting it above the fireplace in the living room, it is so lovely, but that would be a bit silly; like buying something you covet but don’t know how you would use.