Backing the Losing Team

I should consider myself fortunate that I am not the sort of person whose temperament is dependent on their team doing well. It's not been a good year for my team. I'm not certain that my team have had a good year in my lifetime. 

Obviously, I am not talking about football: my home team, the Weymouth Terras, came a respectable seventh in the only Premiership that matters (the Southern Football League Premier Division) and everyone knows that (even though their fans are reluctant to mention it) my adopted team, the Norwich Canaries, won the Milk Cup in 1985. 

It was a simpler time: the 1980s, a time when events were sponsored by the Milk Marketing Board. Milk - the nutritious drink that we suck out of cows, heat to a high temperature to limit microbial growth, then sell in a supermarket for a price less than it costs to produce - sponsored the League Cup from 1981 to 1986. Coincidentally, this was a time when I was particularly interested in milk - I guess advertising works. 

Do you know who is sponsoring the League Cup next season? Carabao Daeng. Carabao Daeng is, of course, Thailand's second most popular energy drink. This is the world we live in.

I digress, I was talking about my team. My team are the people who yearn for a decent progressive world where people are nice to each other. Where the less able are supported by the better able. Where the quantity of light that is absorbed by your skin, the direction that your sexual organs point and the gender of the person that you want to kiss do not limit your opportunities. Where wealth is shared instead of hoarded. 

That's the team I support. The team that keeps on losing. 

The Cardigan's - My Favourite Game

On the plus side, I think I have just figured out how to insert videos into these posts. For someone who makes half of their living writing the internet, you would think I would have worked that out sooner. I'm guessing I'll never get a contract with Buzzfeed.

Letter to America

I fell in love with America when I was seventeen. I spent the summer of 1998 working as Campboy (I know. That job title doesn't translate too well into British English) at the Cotopaxi Smokehouse in Colorado. At the time, the Smokehouse's owner Gwyn Lawrence was a great lover of America too (he fell out with America when she deported him for not having a green card a few years later). 

My first impression of America was of its great size. Flying across it took about as long as flying across the Atlantic. My connecting flight from Minneapolis/St Paul to Denver was delayed 24 hours. The airline put me up in a great skyscraper of a hotel. From my window, I could see out over the nightscape of the twin cities - lit up and stretching to the horizon. This was only a glimpse of a tangle of highways and buildings that comprised just one (oh all right, two!) of America's hundreds of cities.

I took a Greyhound bus from Denver to Colorado Springs. I sat next to a grizzled Vietnam Veteran who brought me up to date on the Monica Lewinsky scandal that had been dominating headlines that year. He railed against the political elite and then he railed against the bus driver who appeared to have taken a wrong turn. He seemed to quite like me, though.

The Vietnam Vet was the first of many characters that I met on my first trip to the States. Uh...Clem, the Texan guitar slinger; Lance Romance, the Woodstock era hippy who sold us a foosball table; Ted Rebel Horse, the full blooded Navajo Indian who called me 'Little Brother' and was always offering me marijuana at seven o'clock in the morning before we started work. There was Quiet Jean, who gave me her copy of Jack Kerouac's On The Road and Leann from the Rock Shop who is my pen pal to this day.

There is no place more beautiful to me on the whole of this planet than the Sangre de Cristo mountains at sunset. The distant snowpeaks supported by the rocky red shoulders whose colour give the mountain range its name, the aspen pine forests, the noisy Arkansas river carving through the landscape.

Me (second from left) and Gwyn (second from right) taking on the mighty Arkansas.

Where I grew up, what we called a river could be dammed by a schoolchild in half an hour. The Arkansas at peak flow runs at 12,000 cubic feet per second (per second!). Getting used to this change in scale was a constant in my trips to America. In England, when an acquaintance moves to a town thirty miles away, in all likelihood you will never see them again. In the States, I found that people thought nothing of driving thirty miles to get breakfast.

America is a great country, I love the scale and beauty of the landscapes, I love the huge cities with their numbered streets and orderly grid systems. I love the milkshakes and the burgers and the beer and the soft packs of Camel plain. I especially love the welcoming wonderful people. 

There is a shameful sneer in the air in the UK at the moment - fresh from our own string of election disasters - that the odious Trump candidate is the President those Americans deserve.

As my first American friend on that bus ride 18 years ago knew only too well: the worst thing about America is the elite moneyed class. It is this parasitic subclass of plutocrats (not the American people) that have spawned this hateful misogynist and succoured him with media coverage. The America I know won't be fooled by the likes of him.            

     

The Granary Gallery

Just like I always dreamed, for most of my adult life, I have been a philosopher, poet, bartender. However, things might not have turned out that way. For about a year, when I was eighteen/nineteen I was part of an anarchist art collective housed in a disused granary in the grounds of the village Manor House.

I've never forgotten this brief chapter of my life. The ideas, creativity and intellectual arguments fomented in that cold dusty attic studio still influence the person I am today. What I had forgotten was the artwork I actually produced during that time. That was until a recent visit to my father's house. 

Understandably fed up with storing my junk for years on end, my father politely suggested that I take home what I wanted and he would skip the rest. I found some great stuff. Charlie seemed particularly pleased when I pulled out my old Jim Harley squier standard Stratocaster copy with the Jackson pickups and vintage Wah-Wah pedal:

"Do you have an amp for it?" she asked, tentatively, obviously keen to hear me shred. 

"I lent it to someone in 2001 and never got it back," I replied.

"Oh. That's a shame!"

As if my old Jim Harley Strat wasn't prize enough, in amongst some dusty papers I found some of the canvasses from my days in the Granary. 

Alien in a Hoody

Alex Asleep.

Melting Pot

It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words. As I make part of my living writing the internet I know exactly how much a thousand words is worth. For 1000 words, I get paid £24.41. Let's open the bidding at £25.

Forward the Foundation

There's a run of family birthdays in the middle of October, so it's a good time of year to head West and catch up with everybody at once. My sister-in-law's birthday is sandwiched between my father's 65th (large family gathering) and her eldest's 5th (22 excitable classmates to be catered for) so I wanted to make sure her gift was something really special.

I spent a pleasant afternoon browsing the Norwich Lanes and acquired a range of mustard themed products from the Mustard Museum gift shop for my father and a set of Fireman Sam playing cards for my niece. Finding the right gift for my sister-in-law was a little harder. I had one of those shopping trips where everything you eye up is too similar to something you have bought for that person before. In previous years, I have bought her a yo-yo, a book of modern poetry, a salt themed cookbook and a blue glass objet d'art. Every shop and flea market stall I browsed seemed to be chock full of glass objets d'art.  

Eventually I happened upon a stall selling vintage brass compact mirrors and chose a pretty one that didn't look like it needed too much cleaning up. Fortunately, bartenders can lay their hands on Brasso (other brands of brass cleaning product are available) pretty easily, so I was confident that I could buff the case up to make a shiny present.

Vintage Compact Mirror

I would have left it at that. Perhaps I should have left it at that. But that evening Charlie cast her practised eye over my proudly displayed purchases. She wrinkled her nose at the mustard and lemon soap from the Mustard Museum gift shop. She declined to play a quick game of 'Where's Norman?' with the Fireman Sam playing cards and when she popped open vintage brass compact mirror, she observed, "It's been used."

"I know," I said, "It's vintage. I bought it from a vintage stall selling vintage brass compact mirrors."

"You could put some foundation in it," suggested Charlie. So in a way it was her idea.

What I didn't know is that you can buy foundation refill packs. How was I supposed to know that? Like most boys, I wore a bit of eye-liner from time to time as a teenager, but foundation was a mystery to me. So I looked up the ingredients of an all-natural foundation powder and made my own.

It was really simple. I combined a base of some leftover zinc oxide I had from my crystal growing phase with some cornflour and coloured it with cocoa powder. I mixed these dry ingredients with a bit of rubbing alcohol until they formed a paste. (Actually, I didn't have any rubbing alcohol so I used a very pure vodka I brought back from my honeymoon in Russia.) As the mixture dries and the alcohol evaporates you are left with foundation.

All the ingredients you need to make your own foundation.

  

My sister-in-law seemed very pleased with her vintage compact mirror. However, I'm not sure I got her colour exactly right as she didn't apply any of the foundation.

 

Pool Talk

About a year ago, the pub pool team, the Temple Bar Hashtags (see blogs passim for the tale of the time they rescued me from a bottle-wielding maniac) grew large enough to spawn a 'B' team. In a process similar to binary fission in bacteria, one team became two. The Temple Bar Falcons was born. (My suggestion that the new team should be called the Temple Bar Stools was sensibly ignored).

The best name for a pub pool team I've ever come across is the Sinhalers - imaginary internet points for anybody who can tell me the name of the pub they played for...

I have an over-inflated sense of my own ability at the game, probably because I usually play after a shift, when everyone else has had a gallon and I am on my first pint. Bartenders who work pool nights are usually signed up for a team so that they can step in if the team are short-handed during a home match. On such evenings, I am essentially being paid to play pool. 

Over the course of the summer, I stood in for two games when the Falcons were short a player. Coincidentally, both of these were in the Nine-ball cup knockout competition and this qualified me to play in the Final at Rileys sports bar on Magdalene Street.

Falcon "the Dazman" eyes up a key shot. 

The best thing about Rileys sports bar on Magdalene Street is its proximity to the King's Head - one of the best pubs in the city. The perfect place for a chap to drink a refreshing pint or three of real ale and have a warm up game of barbilliards before heading over to the noisy badly lit giant-screened assault on the senses that is Rileys sports bar.

Whenever I am in a bar full of pool and snooker tables, I can never get the Johnny Cash song The Baron out of my head. I think this must have put me off my game. Or maybe it was the fact that I'd had about six pints (probably shouldn't have gone to the King's Head first) by the time my turn to play came round.

Every bartender dreads 'pool talk'. This is when a player shares his analysis of the game with you. Pool does not lend itself to audio description, but this won't stop the enthusiastic player attempting to tell the captive bartender all the ball layouts, shot angles, missed opportunities and counter-factual accounts of what would have happened with a bit more screw. With that in mind I will only say this: the other guy broke off, I missed the ball I was aiming for completely, potted the cue ball and the other guy potted the Nine on the next shot to win the game. 

The Falcons went on to win the tournament. I have a shiny trophy to show for my contribution.

The Future of Cash

Until the bank over the footbridge closed its doors and its cashpoint, the pub I work in didn't have a PDQ machine. If folks wanted to pay by debit card, we would send them over the footbridge to get cash. This was only five years ago. You couldn't get away with that now. The young people that venture into the pub nearly all pay exclusively by card. It wouldn't occur to them to get fifty notes out of a hole-in-the-wall before a night out. They look at me quizzically when I offer them cashback: What would I want that for?

Now that nearly everywhere, even the Temple Bar, accepts credit and debit cards; now that you can use your mobile phone to securely transfer money in an instant, it seems natural that cash will begin the slow slide into near oblivion. Because money is only really an agreement between two parties, it doesn't really matter what form that agreement takes. Cheques have basically disappeared in the last few years. Would you even know what to do if you received a Postal Order?

As if to herald the beginning of the end of cash, the British government has issued a new £5 note printed on plastic polymer.

In my other job writing the internet, one of the clients I blog for is a plastics manufacturing company based in Norfolk. Every week, I have to produce 300-400 words on something plastic-related for them to post on their website, so plastic actually being in the news is always useful. My editor won't let me write anything negative for these company blogs, but luckily I have this blog to air my true feelings about the new fiver.

5 Things to Hate About the New Fiver

1. It can't be ripped in half, except for when idiots try really hard and then they rip in half.
2. If you receive one that has been rolled up for some nefarious purpose in the Gents, it keeps rolling itself back up in your till.
3. They are frequently scorched from idiots who "just wanted to see if it would melt".
4. They stick together and then I have to be honest and hand one back.
5. I have to endure endless conversations about serial numbers from people convinced that they will earn a fortune if they can find one marked AK47 (Currently trading on ebay for £4.24 with 6 bids and a day and a half to go).

I meant to keep hold of one of the new fivers for this photo, but I forgot.
This is all the cash I had on me.

Regular readers of these updates will remember that I chronicled my experience of a bitcoin windfall a couple of summers ago. When my investment increased by nearly half over a period of days. Fortunately, my local pub  (i.e. the one that I drink in not the one that I work in) accepts bitcoins so I was able to buy a few pints of Pegasus, before they lost their value again.

Ic eom Finnginn

It has long been an ambition of mine to read the great works of English Literature. Unfortunately, the charity shops of Mile Cross aren't overburdened with donations of the aforementioned. So I went online to buy myself a copy of Beowulf. Start at the beginning, I reasoned.

Fans of the Anglo Saxon hero aren't short of translations to read. I wound up buying three. I'd heard that Seamus Heaney's is widely regarded as being the best poetic translation. The Tolkien Estate released the fantasy writer's verse translation recently and I also went a copy of the original in Old English with a prose translation on each opposing page. It was whilst purchasing this last that I remembered that on a recent visit to Sutton Hoo - the local Anglo Saxon burial ground museum - I had purchased on a whim a book that promised to teach me the basics of Old English.

I don't know why I'm so taken by these whims. A couple of years ago I became obsessed with non-Skaldic verse poems (especially the Riddles of Heithrek). I decided I wanted to learn to read them unhindered by translation and acquired several academic books on Old Norse that lie currently unread in the languages and linguistics section of my bookshelves. Old English looks considerably more approachable. The book I am learning from is for beginners and there are accompanying online audio files.

I was just in the bedroom obeying the instruction to repeat aloud after some of these audio files when I heard Charlie coming up the stairs. Charlie is home from work ill with a cold.

"What are you doing? I feel like death and all I can hear is you making stupid sounds!"

"I am teaching myself Old English so that I can read Beowulf in the original before I read the two translations that I have just ordered."

"Why?" I think this comment was a virus-induced existential plea rather than a direct question, but I answered it anyway.

"Ic eom Finnginn!"  

Learn Old English with Leofwin by Matt Love
is available from all good Anglo-Saxon burial grounds