I don’t suppose that anyone will be in the least bit surprised to read that I have absolutely no interest in the impending Royal Wedding, or anything at all to do with the Royal family unless it involves their ploughing some of their obscene wealth back into the country and/or abdicating, but it’s really quite distressing to note the feverish interest from other quarters. The Guardian – a newspaper which could once be counted on to either ignore or critique the monarchy – claimed earlier this month to have renounced its republicanism. That was, happily, an April Fool’s joke, but it might as well not have been. Today the paper boasts an article which does two things; first points out that Prince William has been cautious to keep himself private, remaining a ‘great unknown’, and second add to the endless tiresome speculation about his supposed ‘normality’.
There was a bit of mild intrigue in the press this week about the fact that William had invited a bunch of Tories – including John Major – to his wedding at the expense of Labour politicians; not even Tony Blair is on the guestlist. But today’s article includes one really irritating sentence, which suggests that William is a child of Blair rather than Major, inheriting the tendency towards the same infuriating – and largely patronising – fetishisation of football which blighted New Labour. According to the article, Wills still plays!
Only last week a team turning up for a kickabout in Battersea Park were surprised to see him on the other side.
Oh for god’s sake! Are we really supposed to believe this inane PR? What, Prince William just spontaneously decided to go and play football down the park the other day, lining up against a bunch of local lads? That The Guardian believes this is symptomatic of the fact that it’s stopped looking critically at the Royal Circus.
My television, needless to say, will be turned off on Friday.
Posted 06 Apr 2011 — by Jonathan Category Observations
This is kind of interesting.
Here, Ian Leslie quotes Krystal D’Costa, an anthropologist who has posited some fascinating insights into “behaviour in public places, where ‘ownership’ of space is temporary and easily challenged by others”, and uses the example of the feverish way we queue at airport boarding gates – despite being guaranteed a seat.
Leslie acknowledges the hurried queuing is necessary for budget flights (where securing that tiny bit of overhead storage, or a seat away from the barking kids, is pretty important) but I identify with D’Costa’s description, even when waiting for international flights where I have a seat number. But when I travel I tend to operate somewhere between irrational urgency and a more common sense approach.
I sit like a coiled spring in the departure lounge waiting for the gate announcement, and then dart through as fast as I can, keen not to be stuck in a long queue, but then when the actual boarding begins, I belatedly cotton on to the absurdity of everyone pushing and shoving to be at the front, and sit back allowing other passengers to scramble through. Despite having been an enthusiastic, anxious participant in the earlier scrum I recapture my logic.
I think, then, that the key for me is I want to get to the end of the process; I don’t like the uncertainty of not having everything checked off and completed – check-in, passport control, customs, book-buying, arriving at the gate. It’s not that I’m queuing to ensure my place at the front, the best seat, the first through. It’s rather that I’m hurrying in order to get the process over with. Once the most stressful elements have been negotiated, and I’m pretty sure that nothing will go wrong, that’s when I’m able to sit back and relax.
That’s how I instinctively rationalise my behavior at airports. But my interest has been piqued by another contention of the piece – that we behave the way we do because others do; that the pyschology of crowds is a major factor. Ian writes:
When our mind is on other things (like worries about the flight) we tend to outsource some of our immediate decision-making to others, and just do what they do.
That’s probably true. I’m looking forward to the next opportunity I have to observe my own behaviour, and that of others around me, in this context.
Nothing in Marseille was a disappointment, in that the city was everything I expected and a bit more – a bit more relaxed, a bit friendlier, a bit hipper, a bit more beautiful. But I did expect something from the daily market – held down at Vieux Port each morning – which it didn’t quite deliver. But it was nothing more than size; and the fact that it was smaller than anticipated – just a row of perhaps ten stalls set against the waterside – didn’t in any way reduce the amount of colour or life. Indeed, with most stalls stocking a still-wriggling haul, life was in no shortage.
The fish themselves were a wonderful variety of colours, and magnificently ugly. We seem to be obsessed with eating beautiful fish in the UK – Waitrose’s fish counter is a measured display of smooth, silver scaled treats. Here in Marseille, I discovered, they draw little distinction between the perfect, shimmering form of a sardine and a wonderful series of red, blotchy, lumpy, out of proportion little fellers – heads bigger than their bodies, fins apparently replaced with malformed little wings, twisted at the edges like loose leaves of lollo rosso.
The nicest sight of all was the fisherman, unloading fresh catches and untangling nets. The most compelling the fish surgery; heads getting roughly seperated from bodies on blood-stained plastic trays. Seagulls – lacking the rude manners of Brighton’s flock – waited patiently for the remains to be discarded into the water.
Cours Julien is a wonderful artisan quarter in the 6th arrondissement of Marseilles; a bustling square full of cafes, bars and boutiques backed by a series of graffiti-covered streets which boast a treasure trove of bric-a-brac shops, record stores, and a sequence of restaurants specializing in just about cuisine you could name. I’ve tons of photos to share, but in the meantime this video speaks volumes for the spirit of the place. Set up in the middle of the square, on Saturday afternoon, amidst dozens of happy hipsters, trendy dads and insouciant teens, was a guy with portable piano. At one point, two kids stepped up and shyly took a microphone each – and summoned up the following collaboration.
“You know”, I said to Lyndsey on Saturday afternoon, sat on the beach at Catalans, just along the coast from central Marseilles, “if I miraculously earn myself a decent pay rise at some point in the next few years, I’m not going to spend a penny of it on improving my day-to-day life. No upscaling the flat and paying more rent. No wardrobe renovation. No splurges at Resident Records. I’m not going to change a thing EXCEPT that I’ll use whatever the raise brings in to fund a sequence of citybreaks through the year”.
Could there be a better way of spending that money, after all? I think we all spend far too much of our time weighed down by domestic concerns, and where once I could put emotional distance between a week and a weekend, too often now I find one bleeding into another. A weekend away does wonders. Not just geographical distance but pyschological space.
We decided to go away for two nights quite late last week, and I’m very glad we did.
And glad we chose Marseilles, too. One doesn’t automatically equate the month of March with Mediterranean sun, so although the forecast was good I hesitated before plumping for a weekend in France’s southernmost city. But actually the weather was great, and Marseilles – so often characterised as Paris’s unruly, chaotic little brother – was simultaneously sumptuously beautiful and thrillingly edgy.
Our plane touched down around midday on Friday; and Marseilles airport is a funny little place. It’s not exactly tinpot, for it’s a major hub, but it’s all exposed wires and undecorated walls; steel barriers and customs sheds. The bus into the city immediately demonstrated that for all that Marseilles is a Mediterranean city, Southern France is a great deal more verdant than Spain or Portugal.
Yet the city itself is resplendently decked out in the colours of the Med; eggshell white, olive, mustard, cornflower and terracotta. It is immediately rather scruffier than Paris, and walking down from the Gare Saint-Charles it was hard not to notice – with not the least bit of discomfort – how few pink-white faces there were. Outside coffee shops and tea-houses groups of men sat pulling at cigarettes and tiny coffees, dressed in the uniforms of arab Marseilles; a moustache and a Fez for those over 40, a tracksuit for younger generations.
Turning down to Vieux-Port, all begins to change – the buildings smarten up and more and more white faces appear – but the general feel of Marseilles is integrated rather than segregated; it’s a lively city, ethnically, with huge numbers of Italians, Armenians, Algerians and Tunisians. Like most ports, it feels like a working city (despite the fact that it boasts the country’s highest unemployment), and we spent three days pretty much without hearing another English accent. The odd surly waitor aside – of course – I found the whole place exceptionally welcoming; blunter, warmer and a great deal more laidback than Paris.
Having traversed the Port, with its fleet of lovely white-sailed fishing boats, and wandered up into the stunningly picturesque streets of Le Panier – the historic district North of the harbour which Hitler dynamited, having declared it “a mass of criminals, under-humans and saboteurs” – we sat out on the balcony at La Caravelle (34 Quai du Port, 13002 Marseilles), a small bar at Hôtel de Ville: one of the few buildings in the area which – happily – Hitler spared. I knocked back a couple of small, strong lagers and nibbled on delicious olives while Lyndsey merrily embarked on a run of mohitos which would eventually take us from bar to bar and decimate our plans for an early start to our Saturday.
In Bar Marengo (21 Rue Saint Saëns, 13001 Marseille), an unadorned bar where little distraction is provided from the serious business of drinking, we topped up our glasses and tried out our French on the incredibly friendly barman. Lyndsey started each sentence hesitantly (“Bonsoir. Je voudrais une pression et un mohito”) before transitioning seamlessly into flirtatious Spanish.
Around the corner, in Polikarpov (24 Cours Honoré d’Estienne d’Orves, 13001 Marseilles) the bar-staff forgot to charge us for cocktails and danced heedlessly around to the Talking Heads (“realisant mon espoir / je me lance, vers la gloire”) while we held our empty glasses out towards them, pleadingly. Somewhere along the way we had decided it was too late to eat and simply resolved to order more cocktails.
Me, Ant and Dan went up to the South Downs at the weekend for a bit of film-making, a pub lunch and a scoot around Devil’s Dyke on Ant’s new moped. We mooched up there mid morning, with Brighton still in its winter doldrums – chilly and grey. By the time we got to Bramber castle, we were in the midst of what felt increasingly like Sussex’s first legitimate spring day; a kind of mellow haze resting over the landscape, breached and gradually dominated by a dazzling blue sky and, between gusts of chill wind, stabs of warmth. We sat on the ruined walls of the castle then strolled around St Nicholas’ chapel, a neat, Norman church dating back to 1073, and hovered by the porch chatting.
Then, up on the dyke, we struggled with Ant’s new moped, and I fell heroically from it into a patch of cold mud on my first and only spin. It was oddly invigorating, but perhaps only because no harm was done. I wiped my hands down on a grassy verge and studied my palms on the drive home, the caked mud exposing the complexity of principal lines, ridges and wrinkles. The view from Devil’s Dyke, lest you forget, is utterly dazzling, from the Clayton windmills to the cricket pitch at Poynings, from the fringes of Ashdown Forest to the hill fort at Chanctonbury Ring. But I like the view back home just as much, in different ways – Brighton glowing orange, nestling between the A27 and the sea.
Incidentally – I attended Pecha Kucha in Brighton on Saturday night, and heard for the first time of Pegasaurus books, which is a new publishing start up specialising in books by and for Sussex residents. They’ve only published a couple of books thus far, but they’ve published an Eco Guide to Sussex and an anthology of local poetry. I’ve not seen the actual books yet, but they might be worth a look. More info here.
Here are a couple of photos from the Dyke – blue sky and white.
Posted 06 Mar 2011 — by Jonathan Category Observations
I went for a lovely meal with a bunch of friends on Friday night – we went to The Gallery in Hove; which is a colourful and friendly sort of place, which is my way of saying they cheerfully tolerated the amount of noise we made over the course of the evening. Here we are at the end of the night, trying to work out how to divide the bill.
Posted 05 Jan 2011 — by Jonathan Category Observations
There are some divergences, but this paragraph, from an article by Grace Dent in Saturday’s Guardian, is, for me, uncomfortably close to the bone. I’ve always benefited, in my life, from having someone around to tell me to go to bed, or else I’ll stay up ‘til midnight or later, then take a further hour to get to sleep, in a contradictory haze of over-stimulation and dog-tiredness. At present, living on my own, it’s all too easy to let my life fall into a pattern similar to that which Dent describes. She writes:
I finally accepted the urgent need to sort out my energy levels when the clocks went back last year. The days were suddenly short, drab, dark. I snored through the alarm every morning, then kick-started myself with strong coffee (and often migraine tablets due to a pain behind my eye). By midday, I’d be working out ways to fit in a sneaky nap. Of an evening, I’d drink wine to wind down, before sliding into bed with a laptop, promising myself sleep by at least midnight, then Skyping friends, ordering groceries and reading tomorrow’s papers until past 2am. It didn’t seem stupid at the time. Of course it didn’t – my mind was in a permanent tired yet over-stimulated fog. And anyway, everyone I knew was the same. The living half-dead.
I don’t do new year’s resolutions, or at least I don’t normally, but this year I’ve decided on a bunch of vague promises, all of which add up to “start behaving like an adult”. Save money, be more organized, sleep better, that type of thing. I was due to return to work yesterday, after a thoroughly enjoyable Christmas break, but found myself on Monday night completely unable to sleep, restlessly tossing and turning, shifting position, my mind racing recklessly from this subject to that. I sat up and read. I had a snack. I tidied the house. Nothing worked and it was only at 5.30 that I finally drifted into a much-needed sleep. So I wrote the day off, extending my holiday for a day, and decided I’d better start looking more seriously at my resolutions. Anyway, back to Dent:
The main reason we’re all so incredibly knackered is – sorry to blind you with science – we’re not getting enough sleep. Obvious, perhaps, but also non-obvious. We all seem fully aware that we need, for example, eight hours, but always get five, yet we do nothing constructive about it. I think the reason for that is that getting good sleep requires sacrifice, strong willpower and some very awkward conversations.
So last night, for the first time in several weeks, I turned in well before midnight, rationed myself to half an hour with my book (at present Ian McEwan’s rather strange, unfunny comic novel, ‘Solar’) and crashed out for eight hours. To say I felt reborn this morning would be a huge overstatement, but, I have to say, I felt pretty terrific compared to my usual morning fug. I clearly need to do this more often. So I’m blogging about it in the hope that, perhaps, I’ll feel the resolution more set-in-stone if it’s down on paper (or typed online, I suppose).
Meanwhile, I have some more interesting resolutions to see through – one I’ll share briefly now. It’s my plan to write, record and share a song every single week of 2010. Mostly here on my blog, occasionally just on my soundcloud page if it gets a bit much piling them up here. I’ve done the first one, and I’ll be posting it here on Friday morning.
I like arriving in cities in darkness. My plane touched down in Salt Lake City on Saturday evening, too late to see anything from the aeroplane window bar the anonymous smattering of lights that designate homes, roads, hotels; lights that could belong to any city in the world. In my taxi, the driver was at pains to reassure me, as we travelled the few short miles from SLC International to downtown, that I needn’t worry about the city’s conservative, Mormon background. A lot has changed round here lately, he says – it’s a modern, liberal city. (Later, I’ll discover that to cross a road in Salt Lake, you have to pluck an orange flag from a bucket on the sidewalk and charge out, waving it).
All around you, in the morning, he said, you’ll see the mountains. If I’d arrived a day later, actually, he’d have been wrong, so shrouded was the city at the start of the week with mist and snow, but on the morning after my arrival, Sunday, I sprang out of bed towards the window, and swept the heavy curtains back to see a sight that couldn’t be further removed from the gentle slope of the Sussex Downs I see from my bedroom window back in Brighton.
Salt Lake is not a big city. Like a lot of places in the US, it’s sprawling – wide and flat (but for the hotels, which rise up in the horizon, formulaic and ugly) – but it’s open and navigable, and necessarily limited in size by the mountains that surround it. It’s sat in a basin, around 4500 ft up – really high in the scheme of things and easily enough to feel more out of breath than normal after running to catch a tram – and squashed between two ranges. The Wasatch on the right hand side; a jagged run of enormous slate grey peaks, capped with snow, and the Oquirrh mountains on the left; lower, flatter, earth-brown. To see them towering over the city is really quite a sight.
There’s nothing conventionally beautiful about the Downtown area itself. Built by the Mormons, back when they saw it as the future epicentre of what would eventually be an all-conquering faith, it’s designed on a rigid grid system radiating out from the temple, with the roads so wide they seem to occupy roughly 50% of the surface area of the city. Most of the buildings are functional rather than extravagant, with many tipping over into the straightforwardly ugly.
But it’s evocative of a kind of America with which I feel somehow familiar, despite having never been anywhere like it before. It’s simultaneously the America of the Mountain West, on the edge of the Rockies, and a kind of window into everytown America, the America of the middle. It feels resolutely typical, ordinary, lacking the bustle and pace of places in the US I’ve been before. A look at the films shot here is quite instructive – mainstream, suburban stuff like Dumb and Dumber, High School Musical, the Halloween sequels. It’s not metropolitan, urbane, well-off. But nor is it rural, down-at-heel or impoverished. It’s everyday America, and a million miles from Europe.
Perhaps if I lived here I’d find it maddening, the closed-off-ness, the scale, but as a visitor, as someone who can’t help getting excited about his travels and the weird, amazing, wonderful differences from place to place – I absolutely love it here.
Here are some shots taken downtown, just off to the right of all the ugly hotel buildings.
I’m writing this in a pub in the West Village, not far from the Hudson. I arrived in New York on Tuesday, and since then I’ve noticed one disturbing but inevitable thing. Each time I come here – this is my fourth trip – it feels less like a wonderful holiday, where I socialise a little with my American colleagues, and more like a work trip, where I temper a concentrated burst of quite testing work with moments of reprieve in the city. That’s not to say that I’m not enjoying myself, but it’s a pity of sorts to discover that New York is not a playground, after all.
It’s autumnal here, but not so dramatic, in the New England sense. The trees are dipping towards the colours of rust though, inevitably. Tomorrow I’m going to head up to Central Park, which is invariably the part of my trip I never plan for, but often enjoy the most. Other things – watching the skyline from Dumbo, shopping in Tribeca, I may have to leave ‘til next time. Thus far I’ve not really engaged with the city’s wider spaces, so it’s been a few days of packed delicatessens in SoHo, busy bookshops, bustling storefronts in Chinatown. I’ve sought refuge, to an extent, in the fact that I now know this city relatively well, so I can head straight to places which are reliably lovely – the Housing Works Bookstore, Shakespeare and Co and McNally Jackson for books, Other Music for records. Here – the White Horse on Hudson St – for an end-of-work drink.
The abiding memory of this trip, I think, will be the election. It’s not my job, as a liberal outsider, to weigh into these matters, but it’s hard not to conclude that America is making an incredible mistake jettisoning the spirit of optimism that came with Obama’s election. I’m prepared to accept that he has not been the revolutionary leader people were looking for, but it’s such a failure of the imagination to elect someone on the basis that they might deliver change, then judge them so early, when its seems so obvious that change of the nature that Obama promised would take so many years. As is so often the case, self-interest guides the electorate – it does in England, too.
I watched the election results come in – some of them – in a bookshop in SoHo. New York, like California, I bet, feels pretty weird at the moment. The coasts must wonder at the middle, must feel so separate. At work my boss wearily complained ‘I’ve decided to become a Republican – it’s so much easier’.
Yesterday, before I headed up to the University of Columbia, I checked in to the Strand Bookstore off Union Square to get some books, and spotted this graffiti on the walk up from Astor Place. I guess this guy – a lonely conservative in liberal NY – feels like his fellow New Yorkers do, when they check the Midterm results.
Posted 02 Nov 2010 — by Jonathan Category Observations
Peter?
I hear the name twice, in the airport lounge, before I look up, not stirring because it is not my name.
A man is stood in front of me and the look he gives me as he says the name again is uncertain, although I do not know if that is because he doubts my identity or can not fathom why I won’t acknowledge it.
For some reason I find it hard to know what to say. Peter is my father’s name. “No”, I say at last, aware this is unsatisfactory, that it sounds more like a denial than a statement of fact.
He apologises for his mistake, backing away flustered, but I can see from his face that he is confused, and I know then that I have a doppelgänger.
Me and Lyndsey went up to London at the weekend to watch an episode of Miranda being filmed; my first time to the BBC headquarters and I was very excited, even though it took us an age to get there – Sunday service meant that our train was routed via Lewes and the journey was interminable; an experience not helped by my decision to spend it reading Saul Bellow’s ‘Dangling Man’, a super little novel but counter-productive if one is looking to escape, rather than consolidate, a feeling of stasis and ennui. In the end I resorted to taking photographs out of the window.
When we got – finally – up to White City we found that, of course, the recording had been cancelled at the last minute; no explanation nor forewarning. It was maddening; others had apparently reacted tearfully, but something about the long journey had prepared me for the fact somehow. We had, in the end, a nice evening regardless, wandering through Covent Garden eating ice-cream. We eventually found a pub off Leicester Square which, to our mutual amazement and joy, had Brew Dog Punk IPA on tap – making up at a stroke for the earlier disappointments. (Until the long journey back).
Anyway, here’s the view at East Croydon, on our way in.
Couple of landscapes from the weekend; me, Dan, Ant, Alec and Vic had a weekend camping in West Sussex; jolly nice it was – lots of warm walks in soft rain, bonfires, games of rounders and pints of Meteor.
Hook Farm, between the lovely villages of West Hoathly and Ardingly, is a beautiful spot to camp; secluded, huge, and beautiful. We’ve stayed here two years running now, and I’d be surprised if we don’t return. Here’s the campsite.
Yesterday we went on a long ramble – starting at the Ardingly Inn and touring the grounds of the local prep school (Ardingly College, which schooled Ian Hislop and a million Tory MPs) and the nearby reservoir. The views were pretty spectacular and, pleasingly, the weather held out.
Posted 16 Aug 2010 — by Jonathan Category Observations
Preamble: I hadn’t expected to attend Vintage for this, its first year, but I won a pair of free weekend tickets late in the week, meaning that Victoria and myself were able to make it along for two of the three days.
The festival, in case you’re not familiar with the concept, is a ‘celebration of Britishness’ organised by Wayne Hemingway, and aims to bring together music, art and fashion from the 1940s through to the 80s. Hosted at the splendid Goodwood estate near Chichester, it’s much more than a straight music festival – apart from the main stage and a number of smaller tents, the site includes a fairground, a food market, a patchwork of allotments and a prefabricated ‘high street’ – a run of stores operated by the likes of John Lewis, The Body Shop and Oxfam, along with a smattering of cafes, pubs, cinemas and cocktail bars.
It sounds grossly commercial, but the emphasis is on vintage gear and the crafts, with fashion shows, cookery demonstrations, dressmaking lessons and talks throughout the days. There are a bunch of second hand stalls too, with a huge number of interesting clothes, generally priced at around the same kind of price you pay in Brighton. In short, despite the emphasis on shopping, it generally avoided gaudy sponsorship and genuinely felt homespun and local, rather than like a big money-making enterprise.
1.30: The first thing to notice is the extraordinary level of effort, both on the part of the organisers (whose ‘high street’ looks genuinely brilliant) and the attendees, who appear to have gone to extraordinary lengths to look good. All day we encounter brilliantly dressed people, from teenagers in Topshop tea-dresses to super-serious Mods, from middle-aged men in expensive tailored suits to young women in exquisite 50s dresses. Via the high street, we head straight for Peter Blake’s art bus, which contains some really amazing Clash memorabilia, then explore the vintage stalls, looking at antique homeware and bric-a-brac. The weather is cool and dry, but we spy some ominous looking clouds on the horizon.
2.00: Rather than heading deeper onto the site, we drift left and locate some deck chairs overlooking the forest, and enjoy a picnic consisting of cheese (cheddar, Comte and Parlick Fell), bread, saucisson, cornichons, olives, pork pies and artichoke hearts. It starts raining and, ominously, we decide to ignore it (prefiguring later things to come). The food demolished, we embark on a circuit of the site, taking in a short glimpse of Aswad, who are sounding pretty crap over on the main stage.
2.30: The vintage shops have some great stuff. We spend a good half hour dipping our head in and out of a sequence of colourful, crowded stalls until I eventually stumble upon a pair of lovely, round-toed brogues, which after a moment’s hesitation I snap up. I’m already wishing, in fact, that I had made more effort, for I’m dressed functionally where everyone else looks amazing.
3.00: Vic, who used to become an absolute terror if deprived of a cup of tea for more than an hour, is strictly a roobois girl these days, so there are no caffeine withdrawals to guard against. Nevertheless, there are a bunch of nice places to have a sit down and a drink, and we grab a cup of tea and have a sit down. I initiate a discussion about shoe laces.
3.30: Reasoning we’ve done enough exploring, we pitch up outside the pub at the apex of the high street. Titled ‘The Festival of Britain’, it’s a gorgeously designed building – a temporary illusion of permanence. We grab a pint of Goodwood ale and sit happily admiring people’s clothes and marveling at the variety of stuff to do. Then the rain drives us inside.
4pm; We arrive at the main stage to find the Buzzcocks rattling through their back catalogue with fizzy aplomb. The contrast, as ever, between Pete Shelley and Steve Diggle is hilarious – the former round, content, undemonstrative; the latter still fighting the punk wars, hoisting his guitar high, windmilling, pointing to the crowd. When Diggle blows a speaker he’s forced to sit a song or two out, and is clearly dejected.
But such is the winning simplicity of the Buzzcocks’ back catalogue that the band sound exactly the same as a three-piece as they do when all four are playing. They bring out the hits – What Do I Get, Orgasm Addict and the timeless Ever Fallen In Love With Someone (You Shouldn’t've Fallen In Love With)? – but by now it’s hard to notice much except the driving rain, which has absolutely drenched the thinning crowd. Stoically, we resist seeking shelter – and the consequence is that we have to walk around shivering for the rest of the day.
5pm; We’re really soaked. Worse, we’re really fucking cold. So we resolve the problem by ducking into the Kenwood store, where we sit through a faintly painful Fanny Craddock parody, enlivened by the lovely set, which includes a revolving kitchen, allowing demonstrations to take place in the 1950s or 60s, depending on the need. That done, we’re still not much drier, so we go shopping. Vic picks up a frankly alarming pink cardigan, which provides an essential layer of dryness (our coats and jumpers are so sopping wet they’re relegated to our bags) and I pick up a ‘Blues and Soul’ T-shirt of which, it later transpires, Vic is so jealous that she buys one too. Still not entirely dry, we decide that momentum is what we need to warm up, so head for the fair, where we are spun up into the clearing sky, our stomachs lagging ten feet below us.
6.15pm; We go and see The Beat, who, we discover, we really don’t remember all that well after all. They dedicate a song to Joe Strummer, and everyone exchanges broad smiles. We go back to the pub.
7pm; It turns out that Sandie Shaw is still terrifically cool – she looks amazing and her voice stands up too. As we arrive at the main stage, she is tackling ‘Jeane’ by The Smiths, and it’s the perfect fit – a clever, knowing, moving track delivered with poise. Unfortunately, however, Sandie is operating as a kind of compere tonight, and the guests she introduces are not of such a high standard, and nor are the songs they sing. So while Corrine Drewery (of Swing Out Sister) has a great voice, she’s landed with a Wham song, which just sounds terrible. Similarly, Mica Paris oozes charisma, but there’s only so much you can do if you’re singing something by Tom Jones. Sandi Thom takes to the stage, too, and she’s just awful – warbling in her mannered way through a couple of songs. It feels like it will never end.
We do, however, get the splendid presence of the amazing Kathryn Williams, whose voice is just startling. She sings up a storm, her strong, passionate vocal effortlessly dominating the field. She’s charming too – after a display of effortless brilliance, she grins and admits “it’s fucking scary up here”. Her voice is so good that she even makes John Lennon’s awful, tuneless ‘Jealous Guy’ sound good. I think I could even handle watching Kathryn sing ‘Imagine’, she’s that talented. By the time, however, that Natasha Marsh and Linda Lewis take their turns, the song-selection is so grim that we’re fast exchanging pained expressions. Lewis announces that she’s going to play a Bob Marley song.
“If it’s No Woman No Cry”, I declare, “we’re leaving”. It is. We do.
8.30; Far, far, far, far better fun is the ‘Wall of Death’, a classic carnival act carried out at deafening volume. It’s massively exciting. Essentially taking place inside a large wooden barrel, the audience is placed at the top, looking down, while motorcyclists whizz around the drum, gathering speed until they’re eventually looping horizontally to the floor, inches away from the audience. It’s ludicrously dangerous and brilliant fun. We whoop and cheer, hearts in mouths, then fling coins down to the floor in appreciation. Great.
9pm; Hearts still racing, we head to the Torch, an impeccably constructed 40s style night club with a real dance floor, a big stage and a restaurant. It’s incredibly convincing – moments after the roar of engines and the smell of oil, we’re all of a sudden lounging on sofas listening to live jazz and watching some super-sophisticated dancing unfold ahead of us. It’s such a jolt, and a perfect example of what Vintage does best – of all the small festivals I’ve been to it has the most to offer in terms of variety and surprise; there literally is always something different around the corner. In conventional terms it’s not a music festival at all – it’s a day out, a kind of fair. It’s a vivid piece of escapism. And as such, I loved it. I’m also conscious that, on day one, we covered perhaps 40% of the attractions. Much more still to do, then.
Pride today in Brighton and, for once, the sun came out. It was really lovely, although I should confess I got up slowly and missed the parade. But Preston Park was great – huge numbers of people, thousands of smiley faces, and of course, tons of booze and angel wings. I pootled around – felt awkward amongst the concentration of big black guys in the dancehall tent, bumped into my friend Michi, which was lovely, went and chatted to the nice lads on the Labour stand, and shook my head in disbelief at the costumes. I have a question – are those 118 118 guys gay icons or something? Lots of people dressed as them. Weird.
I used to get chatted up at Pride, but clearly I have reached the point where I am considered too old, or else my beard is putting the gay community off. Oh well. I bet I got more attention than this guy.
I’ve lived in Brighton, on and off, for well over a decade, and I don’t think there are many Brighton landmarks I’ve not visited – I may not spend much time treading the pier, traipsing round the Pavilion or the Museum, but I know them well. I’m horrified, however, to admit that it took me this long to get to the Booth Museum of Natural History, on Dyke Road. Me and Lynds went to celebrate her birthday last month, and we both absolutely loved it – stuffed birds, moths pinned to cardboard, and lots of skeletons. The latter was the most exciting – a few shots follow of the local in-mates.
As we were leaving, we made our way back to the front of the museum, where the security guard and the guy on the information desk sat chatting and comparing videos on each others’ mobile phones. As we approached, from behind, they were laughing hysterically at something – long, high pitched, hyena laughs. I inched around the side and glanced over at the phone; they were watching a video of a cat tottering around the edge of a toilet seat before plummeting, inevitably, into the water.
I like museum shops, too. We bought a number of plastic ladybirds.
Posted 25 Jun 2010 — by Jonathan Category Observations
As has become something of a habit recently, I ended up in the pub with chums from work the other night and, using the football as a cloak to obscure a darker urge to have a few drinks and leave my desk early, managed to end up staying ‘til last orders, dimly conscious that the urge to enjoy oneself and talk rubbish runs slightly counter to the need to remain some semblance of professional distance with one’s co-workers. Well, never mind that – it’s better and easier to forget about such things occasionally. The summer sun – allied with the World Cup – has provoked a great deal of socialising, in and around work, which makes everything more enjoyable.
What it also does, alas, is puts paid to my good work in May in trying to save money, or rather not overspend so injudiciously. June has been expensive; the Vestry ran out of almost all of its watery continental lager after the football; I like to think my contribution was noted. I really do have no idea when to stop however – I would gladly have extended the drinking session into the small hours, which is why I’m thankful that not everyone I drink with is quite as impulsive as me. In the meantime, my stomach churns with a diet of supermarket sandwiches, cold cola and aspirin.
Posted 16 May 2010 — by Jonathan Category Observations
I might compile a list of the places in Brighton that I feel ashamed of having never visited, and just get them all done. It’s utterly ludicrous that I could have lived here all those years and never, until Friday, visited the Brighton Toy and Model Museum, which is an absolute treasure trove of joy and pseudo-nostalgia. Not only was the Muesum, as part of the Festival season, open late specially, but the marvellous 0 and 00 guage train set was up and running.
Me, Sam and Dan circled it hungrily, wanting to reach out and touch, while Laura looked tolerantly on and scribbled in her notebook. I like the furniture best, I decided, the level crossings, roadsigns and brick red pillar boxes. Through one window I admire a model landscape more reverently than I do the rolling downs on my daily commute.
I hear Sam talking loudly. He and Dan have stopped by a cabinet containing a model helicoper. “Why does it have twin rotor blades?”, Dan is wondering. And Sam is off. “Well actually”, he says, “the vast majority of Soviet helicopters had twin rotors. The second was introduced to counteract the effects of torque on the single blade…”. I can’t bear it. I don’t care if Sam is right or not. I denounce him as a bullshitter, loudly. Behind him a couple of children, who were listening attentively, look disappointed. Sam is now a pariah in their eyes.
They eye him angrily.
Our enthusiasm for the toys is not infectious. After a while – when we’re on our third lap of the exhibits – Laura announces that she’s going to head off and leave us to it. She does. The men are left to their toys. We grin at each other.
All being well – in other words, assuming that the signs are tomorrow morning that there’s a fair to middling chance of flights restarting – tonight may be my last night in New York, and that fact didn’t really sink into ’til about 7 o’clock tonight when, gazing out of my hotel window, I realised I had perhaps an hour of light to get out and about in. Pretty much by a process of prior elimination (I’ve now ‘done’ – in the most elementary a fashion – most of NY), I picked a place I’ve never been and piled out of my hotel and onto the Subway.
The place I picked was Dumbo, the contained, art-loft dominated enclave just over the East River (the acronym stands for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass), an area I plumped for because I dimly remembered it being a lively place for graffiti. As it happened, I didn’t see any, largely because as soon as I arrived I saw the enormous darkk buildings of Manhattan looming over the river and knew I had to rush North to take some photos of the skyline before the light went. I headed to the to the Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park, on the river bank.
It was truly magical – this small patch of green space takes you right down to the water’s edge, and I sat there, silently, listening to the trains buzzing past on the bridge above, and to the gentle pulse of the river washing up against the shore.
Posted 18 Apr 2010 — by Jonathan Category Observations
Well, time for a quick update on my whereabouts, I think, seeing as it’s fairly obvious that I’m still in the US with no immediate certainty about when I’m getting back (although just seen this, the first optimistic prediction about UK airspace re-opening).
For those of you living in a cave, an erupting volcano in Iceland – and the resultant ash belched into the atmosphere – has effectively cleared Western Europe of planes, meaning that those of us fortunate or unfortunate enough to be abroad are effectively trapped ’til the skies clear. Happily, I’m in New York, whereas two days ago I was in Atlanta, which is a terribly warm, but terribly boring place in comparison. I was due to fly back from JFK on Friday, but obviously was unable to, so I’ve checked into a cheapo hotel in Chelsea and am sitting out this unlikely delay.
Will try to get this blog up to date while I’m here, but you may have to cope with a bit of chronological uncertainty, as I review various bits and bobs that I’ve done in both NY and Atlanta, almost certainly in the wrong order.
"Me, I want to bloody kick this moronic bloody world in the bloody teeth over and over till it bloody understands that not hurting people is ten bloody thousand times more bloody important than being right."
David Mitchell, Black Swan Green
