The Challenges of Pub Life

I've been in charge of the pub for two days and the experience has been a catalogue of minor catastrophes. 

1. A smashed window. This happens a couple of times a year and boarding over the smashed pane is surprisingly therapeutic. I don't think I use a hammer enough. The glazier is coming today. But in the meantime I have fixed the problem with sufficient subtlety that most people probably wouldn't even notice the difference:

"I guess that's why they call it 'window pane'."

2. The unheralded return of Premiership football to Sky Sports. Why didn't they tell anyone the Premiership was restarting this weekend? Surely they must have an advertising budget for this sort of thing? Took me totally by surprise. Obviously some people had found out somehow as there were an awful lot of people in the pub on Saturday afternoon to watch the match and only one member of staff (me) to serve them. 

3. The mystery of the missing Breville. One of the few delights about staying above the pub is that I get to use the boss's toasted sandwich maker. I don't have a toasted sandwich maker of my own (and have no intention of buying one now as I am getting married next year). Straight after work I go out to buy cheddar and a loaf of cheap white sliced bread. I return hungry, my pulse quickened from the busy shift and the anticipation of the crunchy snack. The Breville is usually on the side in the kitchen by the hob, but it is nowhere to be seen. I frantically search the cupboards. No Breville. I spy something Breville-like on top of one of the high cupboards but closer examination reveals it to be a George Foreman Grill. Where is the damn Breville? Then it dawns on me. The Breville is not here. The boss has taken it with him on holiday. I make myself cheese on toast.

4. The churchbells on Sunday morning. It is 2am by the time I get the last revellers out of the pub. I cash up the till and decide to take a bath. Middle-of-the-night baths are another luxury I treat myself to when staying above the pub. I can't have them at home because I have been told it is anti-socially noisy to start running baths in the middle of the night. I stay up until about three reading the London Review of Books. I set my alarm for 11. Eight hours sleep. Perfect. Seven hours into my perfect eight the loud clanging of churchbells wakes me up.

5. The dead python in the cellar. This one is pretty self-explanatory. 

Shelf Portrait

It is my last day off before I do my biannual stint living above the pub. Shortly after that, we're off to the Isle of Wight for a few days and when we get back I've got to move house. I thought I would spend the day packing up my old record collection, binning the scratched ones and taking a few that I don't listen to anymore to the charity shop. Turns out the records were the only thing holding up my cobbled together shelving unit and the moment I pulled them all out the thing basically cracked spilling coloured pegs from my Original Mastermind set everywhere:

If you weren't alive in the Seventies and Eighties, Mastermind was how people entertained themselves before Facebook was invented.

To add shame to shelf-destruction, in the cobwebby cave revealed by record removal what should I spy but the pair of nutcrackers that disappeared after a New Year's Eve party eighteen months ago and that my inner Poirot has accused practically everyone in attendance of stealing. Unlike Poirot, I had yet to acquire sufficient evidence to gather everybody into the library and make my suspicions public. For the last eighteen months, I have been happily cracking nuts in a pestle and mortar. A method that is so surprisingly satisfying that I may not go back to nutcrackers. The chimpanzees in this short clip have got the right idea.

Records are easy to pack at least. They weigh a ton, though. Everytime I move house I think 'I must digitise my music collection.' But I get distracted easily and I've changed today's project from sorting out music to seeing whether I can get Windows 10 to run on my old knackered laptop and thereby give it a new lease of life. It is so achingly slow to respond to anything that I can write this on my shiny new Chromebook at the same time as waiting for it to wheeze its way through the six months of updates necessary to lay the ground for its new Operating System. It is not looking hopeful. But I owe the old machine the chance to live a new life... possibly as a hard drive for the record collection that I will definitely digitise before I next move house.

Do MPs deserve a raise?

I dashed off two blogposts on Monday. One exploring my lack of inspiration and one on an independent Korean film I had watched the night before. As a consequence of my complaining that I had been having an uninspiring Summer ideas-wise, I have had a string of suggestions (two is a string, right?) that I feel I must respond to.

Esteemed author and biographer CD Rose contacted me on Twitter to suggest that I should find inspiration from watering his plants. I suspect that this may have little to do with inspiration, it may just be a gentle reminder that I offered to water his plants while he was away in Manchester (he knows that I am notoriously flaky in such matters - I was going to check on them today but ironically I didn't because it was raining - definitely tomorrow). Anyway, can everyone please click on the link above and download his latest short-story to your e-readers so I don't feel quite so guilty about murdering his plants? Thanks folks.

The second suggestion came from a local chef whom I shall call Strongtail. He collared me in the pub to ask what I thought about the recent ten-percent payrise MPs have awarded themselves. 

"I thought you could blog about that," he said. "I thought that would be right up your street."

"I dunno, Strongtail, I did a bit of politics around the Scottish and general elections. But its not a political blog."

"Do you think they deserve a 10% payrise?"

It is a complex issue and it is easy to see why people are indignant. The standard pay for a Member of Parliament is £67,060 Chefs and waiters would be hard pushed to earn that much in three years. Bartending on my current wage, it would take me over five and a half years to earn that much money. But this disparity is not what has annoyed Strongtail. From July MPs' pay is increasing to £74,000. This at a time when the Chancellor has announced that all public sector employees will be limited to a below inflation 1% payrise. What have the politicians done to deserve their massive raise?

Nothing.

It suits the wealthy that there is a link in popular perception between money and hard work. The poor know better than anyone that you have to work hard all the hours of the day to get enough money to enjoy a few luxuries after rent and bills are covered. Those luxuries - a few pints after work, a new pair of trainers, a summer holiday - are earned by those extra shifts worked at Xmas time, by walking to work instead of taking the bus, by being nice to that table of arsehats in the vague hope that they will tip. This link disappears as you move up the payscale. The wealthy have many luxuries and do not have to work at all. They set their money to work for them.

I am fond of Bertrand Russell's observation that there are only two jobs: moving matter round at or close to the surface of the earth and telling other people to do so. The people in the second category tend to get paid more. Those at the top (those who tell people to tell people to move matter around) are often in a position to choose how much they want to pay themselves.

Crazy upside-down world. 

Watching "Like you know it all"

Charlie went to bed early last night as she had a busy day at work today. I had foolishly drunk a cup of coffee in the afternoon. With no chance, therefore, of getting to sleep before about 2am, I decided to watch a film. I tape a lot of films (obviously by 'tape' I mean 'save digitally' or whatever magic way it is done these days) but usually never get round to watching them. After a year or so, I might get politely asked: "Do you need to keep every single Sang-soo Hong film from this film4 retrospective season?" and I will capitulate and delete them, but save one because I want to be the sort of person who is familiar with independent Korean cinema even though I am not.

But last night was my chance, so I scrolled through the planner to find Like you know it all languishing unviewed at the bottom between The Wind that Shakes the Barley and Tyrannosaur (which I may delete as I have since heard it hasn't got a single dinosaur in it) and kicked back on the sofa with a glass of sparkling water.

The film was alright, I suppose, if you like independent Korean cinema then you might well have liked it. Turns out I'm more the sort of person who likes mainstream Korean cinema like OldBoy and The Chaser. If I wanted to watch long sequences exploring the awkwardness of human interaction punctuated by discussions of the importance of freedom in cinema, I could just go to the pub with my friends.  

An interesting feature was that it had a two-act structure. The three-act structure is so embedded in Western cinema that it was quite liberating to have watched a film that took a different approach. Rather than the Set-up, Confrontation and Resolution that we are all used to and expect. Like you know it all had the same central character, Mr Ku, go through two Set-ups (two different cities, no other overlapping characters) neither of which reached a resolution. Mr Ku goes through no recognisable changes, learns no lessons. He starts as as an alcoholic womanising film director beloved of critics but less appealing to a wider audience and, after a series of awkward encounters with old friends and new colleagues in two locations in South Korea, he remains an alcoholic womanising film director beloved of critics but less appealing to a wider audience.

The film was critically acclaimed.  

Inspiration interrupted

I haven't been blogging much this summer. It is hard to create a post that (e.g.) seamlessly unites an anecdote involving spilt tequila with an accurate skewering of Nietzschean Ethics when I have to refresh RightMove obsessively every five minutes in the hope of finding a habitable property to rent that is within a) our pricerange, and b) walking distance of the pub. 

Poetry is out of the question of course, because I can only find the focus I need to write it in times of uninterrupted serenity or complete mental anguish.

Sometimes I find inspiration from a photograph, but I don't seem to have been using my camera (alright, phone - who carries a camera these days?) to capture the slowly unfolding bloom of a Norwich City summer. The only photographs I have taken recently have been of Newspaper articles so that I can text them to people to prove that I was right about something previously disagreed on. Like this article in the Guardian that proved that my home county of Dorset is the Afghanistan of the United Kingdom:

The blurry opium fields of Blandford Forum

A blurred photograph of somebody else's photograph. Is this the level of reportage I have sunk to?

Apparently so.

Moving On [insert appropriate preposition]

As previously reported, our landlady is selling our home and we have to find somewhere new to live. Moving used to be a lot less hassle when all I owned was a case of clothes, a dozen or so boxes of books and a chess set. Now I appear to be at an intermediary stage in life when I am rich enough to own furniture, but not rich enough to pay someone else to move it. 

We are trying to be positive and look for a place which will be an improvement on our current flat. Maybe with some outside space? Charlie would like a bit of garden. Spike would like a conservatory, but he doesn't get much of a say because nobody can remember the last time he contributed his share of the council tax. 

The good news is that now she wants to sell the property the landlady is finally going to fix the leaky shower. I am waiting for the 'handyman' to come round now. I am sure he will be impressed by what I have achieved with gaffer tape and superglue in the absence of someone with professional plumbing skills. He may even feel that his presence is superfluous. 

I think we can call that 'fixed'.

And while we are on the subject of superfluity. It is probably time that I showed you folks the latest addition to our household:

A recent visitor to our shores (presumably unfamiliar with British social habits after dwelling on the Isle of Man for a decade or so) presented it to us as a gift in lieu of wine. And not being the sort of people who will examine the teeth of a gift-horse (or even a weird sort of gift-giraffe/zebra hybrid), we accepted it. Now it stands in the lounge looking at me with its weird painted eyes until I turn it to face the wall. In my view, it is exactly the sort of gift you don't want to receive when you are trying to downsize all the accumulated crap in your life ready for an enforced move. I am in a minority in this view, everyone else loves it. So it looks like the charmless thing may be in my life for some time yet. We still call it "...that weird giraffe-zebra thing that Jamie gave us..." Suggestions for names welcome... and if anyone can finally settle the giraffe/zebra dilemma please get in touch. 

Round Numbers

What is the sum of the first four cubes? (I'll put the answer in the comments - but it should be obvious)

Yay, done it!

Okay, I missed one.

Alright, two.

But if you look they are the right colours just the wrong the way round, that's close right? Seriously, I have been trying to solve this for eight years (on and off) and this is the closest I've got.

Incredibly, this is the one hundredth of these blogposts that you have read. Well done you. I looked up the number 100 in my Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers to see if I could crib a few facts to include subtly throughout this post but it turns out that 100 is not a very curious or interesting number. When I read the book, I have to confess, I kind of glazed over in the middle. The early numbers from i to pi were truly interesting and every visitor to the flat that spies it on the bookshelf peeps at the end to see what the highest number is (It's Graham's Number which I wrote about way back in March 2012). 

I wanted to put up a celebratory poem or something not just some pictures of an unsolved Rubik's cube and a stolen fact about the number 100. Unfortunately, the only thing I have been working on is a long history of all the chess sets that have had an impact on my life. It's in blank verse pentameter and is a work in progress as it needs tightening up and I want to add a couple of verses (one about a glass chess set where the felt had worn off the bottom of the pieces so it made a horrible noise when you played and one about the experience of playing digitally) but you'll get the gist. People who hate poetry, especially blank verse, please stay for the title as it has a pun in it!

The Joy of Sets

Battle’s coming. I can hear it in the

Rattle of the box. The sliding wooden

Lid is slid back to reveal two equal

Sides of dark and light: Stout Rook, the frowning

Bishop and my favourite: The Knight - his

Seahorse-head and unique jumping prowess

Makes him by far the most superior piece.

Learned to play the game on Father’s Staunton

Set. One Knight had had his head unscrewed by

Some unknowing toddler’s hand then chewed by

Pericles our dog. For years we played with that

Headless Knight and I’d refuse to swap him

For his twin if he remained uncaptured.

Games could turn on one unnoticed Knight.

Ed brought back from Petersburg a

Soviet Set - pinched Pawns and spiky Bishops,

Atheist King crowned with sphere in place of

Cross. Then, innocent of death and grief still

Far away, we tallied wins and wagered

Desecration rights to the loser’s grave.

(Eighty-four, Fifty-nine to Ed last count).

Lit spliff in mouth: I ponder Jack’s damn

d5 pawn that dominates the yellow

Squares and stops my knight advancing. Bloody

d5 pawn. No way he's worth a Bishop.

Must have played a thousand variations

On the Centre Game before I looked it

Up: e4, e5, d4, pawn takes pawn.

Gothic visions wrought in gold and silver,

All Inset with semi-precious stones, sit

Unloved, untouched. The King never castled.

Bishops bide their time blockaded by the

Pawns who wait forlorn upon the second

Rank. Denied their fates. Never to be
Sacrificed and never to be promoted.

You get the idea...