In the following flashback to an event from my college years, please imagine the first speaker as rather exasperated, and the second person sounding … well, frankly, exasperating.
Helen: Oh for God’s sake John, I’m fed up with all your pedantisism!
John: Actually, I think the word is pedantry.
Perhaps appallingly, that is an entirely true story.
Anyway, I suspect that alleged trait explains why I find this website so very amusing.
I’ve mentioned the band Kyro before on the blog, and as a quick squint at previous posts will show, I think they kick bottom. And that I’m biased as their lead singer Ian George is a friend of mine.
Well, Kyro are no longer together (they went through a couple of name changes before splitting up, which makes me think of the fate of the band Dead Monkeys in the Monty Python Rock Notes sketch), but Ian is now a solo artist, and crikey o’blimey if he doesn’t have a single, Number One Creation, out in collaboration with the group Remember. Have a look at the video here.
It’s really rather good, isn’t it ? Ian’s the chap at the podium, and I think he carries it off rather well – not just the singing, but looking like he’s hectoring the audience too. Of course I’m biased as he’s a good sort, but on the other hand since when we used to work together we’d try to make each other giggle in meetings by saying “Yeah, I’m dealing with that work Ian’s passed me, but the information’s kind of fragmented and …bitty“, seeing him playing the role so well makes me even more impressed.
Anyway, he’s a very talented singer and musician and a jolly decent chap, and the single’s available to buy from iTunes for the piffling sum of 79p (unfortunately I don’t seem to be able to provide a direct link to that or to embed the video, though that might be my techno-density at work), and I gather it’ll be on Amazon and Napster soon too. So, if you like the video (and what’s not to like? It’s really rather different from so many promos, I think), or the song, or just want to ensure you make it onto my ‘Nice’ list as Christmas approaches, why not buy it?
And if you’re feeling brave, you could even leave a comment on Youtube about the video – but if you do… well, you’re braver than me. Folks who post comments there all too frequently seem determined to make Web 2.0 look like a chimps’ tea party, it seems, so I hope you’ll try to raise the standard.
A quick glance at the column to the right will show the name Stevyn Colgyn, and regular readers will know that I’ve linked to comments and stuff on Steve’s blog before (and he’s reciprocated). What I haven’t directly drawn your attention to yet is the fact that Steve has a book out, called Joined-Up Thinking. Though you might well have guessed that from the picture.
Yes, a real book, with a hardcover and a dustjacket and everything. And I can confidently – and honestly – say that it’s a corking read, as I just finished reading my copy last night; Steve was kind enough to give me a signed (and indeed cartooned) copy a day or so ahead of publication, and even with my slow, finger-across-the-page reading style, I rattled throught it at a good old rate, because it’s fun and addictive stuff, showing all sorts of connections between things which you’d never have known about otherwise (as a huge fan of Twin Peaks, I was delighted to see it connected to Les Miserables, to give but one example).
It’s a lively read, and I heartily recommend it. Try not to be swayed by my bias – Steve’s a thoroughly nice chap, and a friend – because it’s good fun, and Steve writes well, especially when explaining the background to things. Oh, and one short chapter does a great job of debunking a number of urban myths, which I found particularly enjoyable (though maybe that’s because I’m always the first one to hit ‘Reply All’ and type ‘Urban Myth’ when I get one of those e-mails warning me of some unlikely peril, or claiming that I’ll get a gazillion pounds from Bill Gates if I forward it to ten people I know).
You can buy it online – here, for example – and in all good bookshops (yes, and some otherwise shoddy ones as well).
Go on, buy a copy (or more than one), and see why one reviewer referred to the book as ‘Trivia Porn’ (though that’s a better pastime than Porn Trivia – after all, few of us can remember the names of the lighting crew on Naughty Gym Instructors I – VII)…
First things first: I don’t advocate cruelty to animals in any way. I’ve been a vegetarian for over half my life, I’m strongly against hunting and the like, and tend to avoid leather and other animal-derived products.
That said, over the past year or so, I’ve come to hate mice with a vengeance. Because they keep making appearances in our home.
Quite how, I’m not too sure, as we live in a second-floor flat, and since the first sighting I’ve gone round stuffing any possible entry points (around water pipes and the like) with steel wool, or that squirty-insulation foam stuff. We’ve invested in supposedly-mega-effective ultrasonic noise emitting things (which made no difference at all), sprinkled peppermint oil so liberally round the place it smells like a Trebor factory, and of course, put down poison; I’m not happy about the last as it means killing them, but the fact is, they’re uninvited, and pests – and besides, the mice take their revenge from beyond the veil by dying in far-flung corners of the flat, so I start and go ‘yahh!’ when I find their lifeless little corpses. Oh yes, it’s quite charming.
Anyway, yesterday, my lovely wife spotted a mouse, which ran into the kitchen and under the fridge. I thought I’d seen one on Sunday night (but hadn’t been sure – it had been late and I was tired, and it could have been a shadow seen out of the corner of my eye), and so I got my torch and some bits of wood and cardboard (one of them a vast replica cheque – don’t ask) and blocked off as well as I could around the fridge. I also got the vacuum cleaner.
Yes, you read that right – but what else was I going to do ? I wasn’t going to stamp on it (if nothing else, they move with incredible speed), or try to bash it with a broom, though this latter’s mainly because I don’t live in a Tom And Jerry cartoon (and for the full effect I’d have to convince Mrs Soanes to jump onto a chair and start screaming, and she was busy doing other stuff).
I shone the torch down the back of the fridge, and saw definite movement – slow and casual, but definitely something living and not just part of the environment; one of the problems with hunting for mice in dark corners is, like watching a spooky film, you find yourself jolting at anything, such as when your torch casts a shadow. It’s quite the cardio workout, but trust me, you’re better off going for a run (which, in fact, was what I was planning to do yesterday evening before Mortimer Mouse came to visit). Anyway, there was definitely something there, so I lined up the cardboard and wood pieces and slowly started to move the fridge away from the wall.
A foot or so out from the wall. Nothing.
A couple of feet out, rotating the fridge on one corner and lifting as I went. Nothing.
I asked Mrs Wife to come and help me, and as I tilted the entire fridge forward she held the doors so they didn’t open and spill all the food and drink onto the floor. Nothing.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “Unless it ran somewhere else – like under the cooker – while I was looking away, it should still be under the fridge. But I’ve moved the fridge right out from the wall now, so…”
“I know,” she replied. “It doesn’t make sense. Unless it – ahhhhhhhhh!”
She pointed, and I looked. Almost casually, the mouse was making its way around the side of the fridge. The little… blighter had clearly moved to stay under the fridge as I lifted it, and only now was it deciding to emerge. And then with a sudden burst of speed, it ran into the cardboard barrier I’d put up.
I don’t know what m’lady did at this point, but I’ll testosteronily admit that I surprised myself at how fast I grabbed the vacuum cleaner and switched it on. To do this, though, I’d had to turn around, so had lost sight of the mouse. Where was it ?
There it was – trying to climb up the side of my oversized cardboard cheque (I said don’t ask, all right?), and I swooped in, the vacuum cleaner on full power.
“Gotcha, you [expletive deleted]!” I shouted with frankly unseemly volume.
And indeed I had got it – we have a very nice vacuum cleaner (much like this one ), which actually has a clear drum to allow you to see inside, and there amidst the grey dust, I could see a small brown mouse. Still alive, but twitching nervously – I understand that mice have a very high resting heart rate, and I can’t imagine that being sucked along a tube about 200 times one’s body length at speed would have calmed it down at all. All things considered, if I was sucked along a 1200 foot tube when I wasn’t expecting it, I reckon we’d be looking at loss of bowel control at the very least.
Still, the mouse was clearly still alive, which I felt better about, though it was startling to realise something so small was the cause of so much disturbance and irritation – though I’d imagine those of you with children are all too familiar with that notion.
“What do you think I should do with it?” I asked.
“Well, we don’t want it in the flat,” replied Mrs Wife.
“No,” I said, “but I’m reluctant to put it in the bin outside the building, it’ll probably just come back in. I mean, I don’t know if they’re that clever, but…”
“… no sense in taking the chance.”
“Exactly.”
I thought for a moment – mainly trying to figure out what to do, but also wondering if my manliness in catching the mouse had impressed her. Probably not, I decided, as it had involved the use of a vacuum cleaner, which is not entirely butch.
Inside the drum of the vacuum cleaner, the mouse was still alive, moving around in the dust.
“I know,” I said, “I’ll take it down the road, find a bin, and empty the cleaner into it. That way, the mouse isn’t likely to come back.”
“That sounds okay,” she said and nodded, “but you’ll look pretty weird walking down the street carrying the vacuum cleaner… then again, you have no shame.”
I do have no shame, that is true. And so it was that last night I walked about half a mile through London’s glittering East End, carrying a vacuum cleaner (and occasionally lifting it up to have a look and make sure that the mouse was still moving). My life, I was reminded, often takes me in unexpected directions.
I did exactly as planned – I found a bin, and emptied the drum of the cleaner into it. And as I did so, I heard a scrabbling sound, so I’m pretty certain that the mouse was still alive. Granted, I don’t know if he’ll survive if the bin is emptied into a dustcart, but I like to think that like Fox Mulder leaving Krycek in a silo, or Johnny Alpha leaving Nelson Bunker Kreelman in a time-loop, survival isn’t an impossibility.
And I walked back home with the hose of the vacuum cleaner slung over my shoulder, trying (and not always succeeding) to resist the temptation to whilst that ‘oo-ee-oo-ee-ooo-wah-wah-WAH’ music from the old Clint Eastwood films. I ignored the stares from people I passed – for, as the laydee said, I have no shame.
But enough about my evening; how the jiggins are you?
I was thinking yesterday about context – or, perhaps more accurately, about how recently-lingering memories or experience can colour an opinion or reaction to things, as well as seeing items within their background.
Oddly enough, the thing that drove me to think about it was hearing a singer in a pub yesterday afternoon. The chap was called Dave Brooks (can’t find an online link for him, but he did a decent job) and he was singing the Eric Clapton song ‘Wonderful Tonight’. To be honest, it’s not really a song that does a lot for me, and I think this is partly because the first time I ever heard it fully was when it was being played at a friend’s house, and the father of the house was miming along with it and making as if he was singing it to his wife. It was kind of cheesy to my teenage eyes, but also a little bit unconvincing, as the husband was one of those people who (generalisation ahoy) was more concerned about his work than his wife, and as if to salve that he also claimed that the song ‘The Wind Beneath My Wings’ was about her. I suspect she might have preferred him to dedicate more time and attention, and fewer songs, to her, but there you go.
Anyway, that kind of left me feeling a bit ambivalent about the song, but yesterday in the pub, as Dave sang it, I noticed a chap who was – yes – singing along to the woman he was with, and as he did so, they held hands tightly and she was smiling broadly. Forget my own ambivalence, it was clear that she was really taken with him associating the song with her, and really liked it, so I had to admit to myself that whatever I might feel about the song, it’s pretty clear that for some people, it’s really rather romantic.
And this, in some strange no-I-dunno-how-either way, set me to thinking about how you have to see things in their context; ‘Wonderful Tonight’, when fake-sung by an inattentive husband, seems like a slightly nasty attempt to get Eric Clapton to do the hard work of being nice, whereas when mimed by another partner, seems like a cute, if slightly twee, gesture.
Thinking about context led me to muse how insane the media appear to have gone over the Republican Vice-Presidential candidate, Sarah Palin; for those of you who’ve been lucky enough to miss the ludicrous amount of coverage which has been spilling out of every news outlet over the past couple of weeks, during a speech at the rally at which she accepted the party’s nomination for V-P, Mrs Palin made the following joke:
Q: What’s the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull?
A: Lipstick.
Now, it’s an okay gag (though it has a touch of ambiguity that allows the possible interpretation that pit bulls wear lipstick), but to judge from the reaction of the crowd in the hall, and indeed the news media generally, you’d think it was, without doubt, the funniest joke ever. I think it’s fair to say that it isn’t – yes, humour’s subjective, but I’m sure you can think of better jokes – but to my mind, the fact that it’s received as the greatest rib-tickler of all time suggests that one has to look at the context; it stands out as a great joke because, let’s be honest, politics is a pretty unfunny business.
It could be argued that humour has little place within politics, but I’d disagree; the ability to take in something that’s been said or done and to articulate a response which highlights an irony or folly that lies at its heart would seem to show a ready intelligence, and surely that’s a trait to be wished for in anyone in our power? Instead, most political ‘jokes’ are pretty weak, and instead the mere fact that a politician has tried to make a joke seems to make the often-mediocre puns seem to be received as if they were the best of Wilde or Swift.
It is, I’d say, a question of context – the world of politics is so lacking in humour (possibly, I suddenly think, because much of it is either at the expense of others or self-deprecating, both angles which could be feared to make a politician ‘lose support’) that anything remotely resembling a jape is given far more treatment than it would deserve. Indeed, during the 1997 comedy show The Election Night Armistice, this point was proven by a number of comedians performing politicians’ jokes verbatim in a comedy club, and getting what could generously be referred to as a poor reception.
Oddly enough, this kind of thing applies not only to comments made, but also to Mrs Palin’s appearance; the Sun newspaper refers to her as a ‘beauty’, though as far as I know they’ve never said that about Tina Fey, to whom she bears more than a slight resemblance, though that could be to do with the old nonsense about funny women not being attractive (well, not attractive to men who dislike the idea of a quick-witted woman, but I think that reveals more about the men than anything else). In much the same way, the British press was in a right old state when Carla Sarkozy (nee Bruni) visited the UK the other month, like a bunch of sixth formers meeting the pretty new French teaching assistant or something. How much coverage did they give her when she released her second album, a year before marrying Monsieur Sarkozy? Not so much.
It’s all rather questionable and strange, and I suspect I’m not necessarily making any kind of blazingly new insight here (though I guess that implicitly I’m suggesting that you can get away with being dull-witted in politics, hardly a new idea) but it was just one of those moments when my brain made a little connection between a couple of apparently unrelated topics… and in the same vein as my chum Steve’s book, I realise that I can bring things full circle by pointing out that Carla Bruni, as referred to in the paragraph above, was once romantically involved with Eric Clapton, whose song started me thinking on this topic, as described way back at the start of this post.
Almost enough to make a person think I plan these posts out as I go along, isn’t it ? But then again, looked at in the context of this blog as a whole, I think we all know the truth…
… Actually, I think it might be you, but let’s not get into that now.
Anyway, just a quick note to apologise for not updating as much as usual this week – the paying job’s been hectic, and in the few hours between that and sleep I’ve been focussing on my entry for the Red Planet Prize, which has left me rather shy of both energy and blog-thoughts, but I’m hopeful that things should be back to what we here at John Soanes rather laughingly call ‘normal’ soon.
In the meantime, as ever, I refer you to the list of links to the right, and urge you to visit some of my virtual pals…
Whilst I’m sure precious few of you are holding your breath waiting for the oft-promised amendments to my website, just a quick note to say that – as you can see – changes really are afoot, so please tolerate the holding page while I shuffle the new stuff into place.
What’s coming, you may ask? Put briefly, more actual content and fewer pictures of me – which I think you’ll agree is definitely an improvement.
In the spirit of keeping you as updated as the website I will, of course, let you know when things are up and running.
Oh, all right then – click here to see more pictures from our wedding, this time on the Flickr account of our rather talented photographer.
If you want more, you can always try to be-friend my lovely wife on Facebook, but I’d imagine you’ve probably seen more than enough of the day by now, right?
Thanks to the speedy work of our friend and wedding photographer, I can cheerfully present the following for your amusement…
As my expression reveals, I can’t quite believe my good fortune. And that’s as true now as it was on the day.
I told you we’d practiced for the First Dance.Previously in John’s life: John has married Jules, but within a number of hours, the bride is holding aloft a knife, with a meaningful look in her eye…
After the Wedding Breakfast, we cut the cake (which is not some childish fart euphemism. Honest), and posed for more photos. Actually, I should talk about the cake – it was designed and made by Claire Lewis, and instead of being made of fruit like many cakes it was a chocolate sponge, because, well, neither of us are big fans of fruit cakes (except as a slightly offhand description of our family and friends), and it was our day, so nyer. Anyway, it was a yummy cake (hopefully I’ll have some pictures to share soon).
The tables and crockery were cleared away, and after a while it was time for the First Dance. I’ve capitalised those two words for a reason. As Jules and I stepped out onto the dance floor, and our DJ filled the air with the strains of Nat King Cole singing The Very Thought Of You, something which no-one in the room knew was this: for the last couple of months, Jules and I had been having ballroom dancing lessons (at the place they rehearse for Strictly Come Dancing, no less). I don’t have any innate sense of rhythm or anything like that, but with the help of our dance teacher , we’d got a few moves choreographed. The lessons aren’t cheap (though nor are they particularly expensive), and practising at home had been quite hard work and sometimes frustrating as my feet and brain had refused to co-ordinate, but I have to be honest and say that as we started to move to the music, as planned, I thought that it had been worth every single penny.
“They’ve been practicing!” at least one onlooker said, and as we reached the middle section of the song and Jules and I circled each other – with an ease that was born more of muscle-memory than mental-memory, at least for me – I felt a great, big, stupid grin spread across my face. Shortly after that, of course, the DJ invited other people to join us on the dance floor, and we were swiftly surrounded by stumbling clods who got in the way of our finely-honed performance, but I decided to be indulgent of the amateurs. Ahem.
The final timetabled event of the wedding was one which the weather literally threatened to put a damper on, as at 10pm last Saturday it was raining heavily, but most of us stumbled outside (some folks stayed indoors and pressed their noses against the glass) to watch a Firework display. It was soggy, yes, but the Fireworks chaps went ahead anyway, and I’m very pleased that they did, because the display was great – lots of sparkly explosions to sate my wife’s desire for shiny things, and noisy booms and bangs and bright lights for … well, the likes of me. The display went on and on, and was frankly fab value for the money. At the end of it, in spite of all my English reserve, I cheered and applauded.
And after that it was drinking and dancing until people could take no more (but they didn’t seem to resent this treatment). And that, m’loves, was my wedding day, and as well as meaning everything to me on an emotional level, it also went really well on a practical level (the only thing I would have changed would be the weather, but that’s not something which is exactly controllable). A lot of people say that their wedding day’s the happiest day of their life, but rather than condemn the rest of my life to run a second-best to last Saturday, I’d have to say it was the happiest day of my life so far.
So, with the exception of the inevitable posting of a few choice pictures from the wedding as soon as I get hold of them, that’s about it for blog posts about the wedding. Well, maybe. I’m sure I’ll have some blistering insights on married life to share… ahem. Coming up, a return to the usual parade of cheap shots at people and things in the public eye, and self-indulgent posts about writing and life in London.
…I bet you can’t wait.
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