Too much information?

I got it because I wanted simple and tough; I just needed to make, and hopefully receive calls, and send the odd text. I didn't want or need something flat and slick-looking, that could accept millions of 'apps', would guide me home on a starless night from a ditch in Suffolk, would mark me out as homosexual in a crowded tube, would.... I just wanted a basic mobile. I could even drop 'tough' - I don't work on a building site, and I don't pothole. But if I were to drop it into a urinal, or let it slip from a tall building, it would be somehow comforting to know that the blight would still work.
The little Samsung that arrived almost fitted the bill - it will actually work in urine, and will happily accept 3 tons of pressure without complaint - useful if you are crushed by a truck, and need to call your doctor. But it also has some niggles in operation, and one kind-of crazy 'feature'. A very powerful torch that, until yesterday, I had filed under 'totally useless'. In fact a couple of times it proved to be worse than useless. The beam of light it projects is so strong that, you guessed it, it drains any battery life in about 30 seconds and it is possible for it to illuminate with very little pressure on the switch, while it languishes along with the fluff, in your pocket. Result? You grab the blight to make an urgent call that will decide whether you live in comfort in Holland Park, or in a shoebox in Cockfosters, and everything is dark and dead.
Yesterday? How shall I put this. I'm not a well man. I suffer, either for my sins, or without their influence. Yesterday it was London Bridge Hospital with shoulder-replacement pain. Anti-inflammatories and pain killers had made me a stranger to the white porcelain for several days and, care-of a blister pack of supa-lax that were probably meant for the cat, I had self administered what I imagined was a safe dose. Wrong.
The hospital had taken blood, and I had 2 hours to kill. Not enough time to get up-west to see a couple of pictures perhaps, or a nice graveyard in the City. Wandered instead into Borough Market, had a fairly ordinary Pork Bap (£4.00) and found a boy posing as Pip, who had great expectations that I would give him two quids for a plastic container of 'fresh' orange juice. I was, of course, a pushover. It being the very apex of the tourist season, I suppose these people can get away with this stuff?
Anyroadup, I'm drifting back to the vampire den for more leech application and the pain arrives, quite sharp, down south. Nurse Ratchet is about half a mile away - don't think I'll make it. Using the same muscles I employ when holding my stomach in on the beach, I try to stop vesuvius, but it is feeling hopeless. A cork? No, a loo. A disabled (I am!) loo. No light. Keep door open? Impossible. A torch....wait, I have one.
Thank you Samsung, the 'phone is so-so, but the torch is.....a must.

Secularity

Had an opportunity to road test secularity a few years ago when one of my sons died unexpectedly. Cremation, in a rather dull little chapel in West London seemed oddly apposite and I set aside what, in my dreamy state leading up to this dreadful day would have been my first choice, but the wrong one - the plaintive viola ode by Vaughn Williams, Flos Campi - in favour of, among a few others, You Are My Sunshine by (and this was important) the great Chattanoogan Norman Blake. To quote the hideous Cowell, it had the X Factor

Larry LaPrise

With all the sadness and trauma going on in the world at the moment, it is worth reflecting on the death of a very important man, which almost went unnoticed the other day.

Larry LaPrise, the man who wrote "The Hokey Cokey" died peacefully at the age of 93.

The most traumatic part for his family was getting him into the coffin.

They put his left leg in. And then the trouble started....

It's only me..

At times I wish I were supremely insecure, so that I could turn my insecurity into a driving ambition to reach some imaginary 'top'.

But so comfortable am I in my skin, so smugly at ease with myself, that I am sentenced to this mediocrity that is my life.

Tooting, St George's

Of Charters I know nothing at all
Staring at this taupe coloured wall
Wondering if Sir Dickie is still feeling trickie
Upstairs after his nasty fall

Gandhi men and their wives pack the room
Designed for ten there are fifty, a tomb
But to me every week its the place that I seek
The crypt that became a womb

A Strategy

A strategy for not working. Empty the fluff not only from the sieve on the dryer door, but from the grills on the machine itself. A quarter of an hour can be made to pass this way.

Broken Families

The bonding of families, if it even exists any more, no longer takes place in the front parlour around the pianoforte - radio, and of course television have coalboxed that. Books still exist, and we are assured (mostly by publishers) that they always will, but they seem to be increasingly pushed out to the penumbra by online, talking books and, the most recent horror, the illuminated tablet, all designed to put a generation of opticians out of business.
No, the family is dead and the church, often cast in the role of surrogate, is dead and buried.

Petrol, or a Lilo?

Listen up here. Have you tried buying a gallon of petrol recently? I'd advise a stiff drink before ever thinking about it. If petrol was all you'd be wanting, you'd probably get away without breaking sweat. But try to get your hands on a petrol filler-cap or a P12 spark plug; try to get some of the air around you into the tyres; or even try a desultory conversation with the blight behind the bullet-proof glass panel. You have to mouth your request, be it for a deck-chair, lilo or pot-plant, through the slit below the glass, quickly replacing your mouth with your ear before the wretch responds. And of course a deck-chair will not fit through the slit, any more than the tin of 20:30 that he has just run out of.

Au Contraire

A contraflow am I? Au contraire. What's more, I'm not alone.
Remember Harvey Goldsmith trying to build that set for Pavaotti (another forward thinking Italian) in Hyde Park? Couldn't get the steel here, nobody was interested. Had to go to Switzerland. Switzerland! So much for Orson and the cuckoo clock.
Never mind steel - have you ever tried to buy a piece of elastic? No, not 500 metres on a roll, but just a piece to support your knickers? Yes, of course you could in Ballydehob or Bridgwater because they would have a corsetiere or a draper's shop. Try it in the West End of Londonium and you will grow a beard looking, to say nothing of the whites-of-eye behind the counter.
Tried to buy a packet of Persil the other day in Sainsburys - there's a new one opened close to us, looks like a giant Terminal 4 sized Happy Eater, complete with 'runway'. They don't make packets of Persil any more. The smallest I could find was (to stay on the carousel a moment longer) the size of a small suitcase, the bunny-dip being required to lift it without putting myself into traction. Lucky the car has a tail-lift and the house dates from 1902, or I'd have had to decant the powder into the kitchen.

Italians, don't you just love them?

Begob, it is the land of Michaelangelo and Leonardo but, frankly, that's not the half of it. You see, they still make things there. No, not just furniture and lighting, not just cars and clothing; they make lots of things you would never think about. Machine tools, aluminium extrusions, glass - and it is usually less expensive and better. Do you know it is cheaper for me to buy an 18mm thick plate glass table top in Milan and cart it across the Alps, than to buy it from Pilkingtons? So where do I buy it?
Listen, this didn't happen by accident, and it didn't happen overnight. This has happened since the war - 60 years. They are not really more 'artistic' than we are. Did anybody ever apply paint better than Turner? Did Wren have to tip his hat to anybody? Is there a more prolific architect than Foster drawing breath today? Faith, no there isn't.
It's industry. Industry got behind the designer, paid his milk bill while he was scratchin' away with the HB; then they paid for the mock-up; then they paid for the tools to make the piece. Later they built a factory to produce it, and paid the people for miles around to come and work there. And they had still sold nothing, not one unit.
So don't talk to me about the 'mystique' of Italian design. Talk to me about what this government is going to do to foster a climate where the artisan is king, not the merchant banker or the computer operator.

The Greatest? Do me a favour!

Instead of following my natural instincts of sloth and selfishness, and settling down to watch on telly what was obviously going to be a great tennis confrontation, I followed the advice of Sunday Times guru Simon Jenkins, and 'did live' with my youngest son, in a damp field in Kent, watching the great Neil Young.
But live or 'dead' the Beeb commentators had no business declaiming it 'the best tennis ever played', any more than Fed or Rafa can be described as 'the greatest'. Why is it that pundits have to label everything in extremis ?
The technique of the game has advanced, and we can probably guess that Connors never employed a 'nutritionist'; racquet and ball technology has taken a quantum leap in 20 years, and the scoring system, one of the most perfect creations of man, has only taken a small, and helpful augmentation, in the shape of the time shrinking, set ending tie break.
The question has been posited; is tennis an art or a science?
It seems to me to be neither, but a sport; but that is not to say that there are not practitioners who are artists (Santoro), or those who, primarily, use technology to advance their cause, and seek to batter their opponents into submission with power and little finesse (Roddick).
Laver, at the age of Rafa (22), equipped with a modern bat, and a left arm such as he possessed, could well (in the dream-world I inhabit) have been too strong for Rafa, with too much guile.