What happened yesterday…
June 28th, 2007 at 19:29

Yesterday, Katy and I went down to London to watch the big Prime Ministerial changeover. Here’s what happened in video form. Words and pictures to follow shortly:

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London Zoo
June 15th, 2007 at 01:05

Long term readers, assuming you exist, are probably vaguely familiar with some of the stupid videos that I’ve made. I think its fair to say that my three “best” videos thus far have been maybe the time I went to the Space Centre with Katy, my trip to London in April, and a trip to Twycross Zoo. Yesterday, being someone who has horrendously original ideas, and doesn’t know the meaning of the phrase “flogging a dead horse“, I, er, went to London Zoo… with Katy. And did a video:

As you can probably tell from the video, the zoo portion of the day went swimmingly (think back to the aquarium bits and this is puntastic). We saw lots of animals, as, er, you might expect: zebras, monkeys, pigs with moustaches, lions, lizards, llamas (with excellent faces), a ferret, which bit the trainer’s arm, and an excellent guinea pig. (Photos? Here.)

Travel logistics seemed to be a bit of a recurring issue all day though. First off, as I explain at length in the video, actually finding the zoo was a lot of hassle – its not as well sign posted you might expect, and Regent’s Park is a few magnitudes larger than a “normal” park too. Here’s a map of the route we took. (I think this is easily the most web 2.0 blog entry ever).

On leaving the zoo, it turned out that it was actually really close to what a countryside person like myself would describe as Camden town centre. So after eating we got the tube back to the train station to go home, only to discover that because it was now “peak time”, our tickets weren’t valid. Bugger. So we had about two and a half hours to kill, so we did the most obvious thing and went to Westminster (via the circle line clockwise, tedious travel fans).

I love Westminster. From the second we left the tube, I was reeling off near-guidebook calibre trivia (slight exaggeration) constantly. “Bloody hell, it’s the Cenotaph!”, “Look! Banqueting House! That’s the last remaining part of the Palace of Whitehall! Oh My God! Ofgem!“. I think my boundless enthusiasm for all things London began to irritate Katy at this point. Probably because aside from enthusiasm for seeing the road where the Channel 4 Headquarters is, we both knew that I was sort of cheating, having studied up on the area only a few months ago.

We ended up sitting outside Parliament just in time for the six o’clock news – where we saw Sky News’ John Craig do a piece to camera live, and another broadcaster (I guess ITN) do the same thing. It was especially interesting to see that by ten past six, with the live done and dusted, they packed up and went home. Presumably they were all home in time for the regional news.

When we got back to St Pancras station to try and get home, the train had been delayed for yet another hour, and worse still, the trains that were scheduled for later on seemed to drop certain stations to presumably get back on track faster – meaning that it was nothing but hassle trying to get on the correct train. I’d call Midland Mainline the Stasi again to try and kick up a fuss, but I think that’d be too much of a compliment – presumably the Stasi were well organised, efficient and knew how to handle a crisis – completely unlike Midland Mainline.

In summary: Trains – boo. Zoos – hooray!

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Zoo Video
April 14th, 2007 at 12:29

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Pictures from the Zoo
April 14th, 2007 at 02:00

I went to the zoo today with JD and Sarah. If there’s one thing the internet needs more of, it’s photos of animals. Here are some photos that we took:

A penguin doing what penguins do best (ie: bugger all)

A massive sea lion.

Peter Stringfellow meets Planet of the Apes.

JD and Sarah, pointing at a Crane. They say that Cranes are great!

A battery camel, that is used for storing water. It’s head is stuck between the bars so that it doesn’t move.

An otter stands up. Soon they’ll have opposable thumbs.

A capibara, which is basically just a massive guinea pig.

Sarah incorrectly demonstrating the Nazi salute to some nonplussed llama.

JD trying on Sarah’s sunglasses, going for the Dennis Taylor look.

Sarah and a meerkat. I like how I framed this photo.

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London II
April 5th, 2007 at 02:27

As you might know, having watched the video blog below, I went to London yesterday with JD and Fundar. We went there to see the third series of That Mitchell & Webb Sound being recorded. It’s basically like their similarly named telly sketch show, only if you close your eyes.

The day began at 11am, when we caught the train.

Coke Price Watch: 500ml bottle; At the station; Cost: £1.00.

About 90 minutes later and we were in central London.

Coke Price Watch: 500ml bottle; London St Pancras; Cost: £1.10.

Our first port of call was Camden market. It was a bit weird, as it was full of people in a different socio-economic group to me. Or at least people who dressed like it. Being a market, the place was covered in people hawking tat – even the shops were open at the front and sprawled out into the streets. It reminded me of seeing a news correspondent walk through a crowded Kabul market place, I mean, if Afghanistan was populated exclusively by goths.

One man even offered to sell us cannabis – not that I realised at the time.

Almost every other market stall was selling t-shirts with “hilarious” slogans. As you might know if you’re a regular viewer of my torso, I quite like t-shirts with slogans on. I’m currently wearing an excellent t-shirt with “I’m blogging this” printed on it, for example. The trouble is, it was like the t-shirts on sale were bought wholesale by people who are a few years behind everyone else. “National Pornographic” isn’t clever or funny and “I’m a bomb technician, if you see me running try to catch up” was old even when the first alchemists were inventing explosions for the first time.

Our next port of call was Leicester Square, where we went to get some lunch and have a look around.

Coke Price Watch: 500ml bottle; Leicester Square Subway; Cost: £1.20.

When I wasn’t buying overpriced Coke, we were trying to be too clever for our own good. We put together an excellently long shot for the video, and then JD phoned his brother to see if he could see us on a webcam. He could, although unfortunately screenshot evidence of this incredible event does not exist.

After lunch we headed to Embankment, which is just next to Whitehall, where all of the big Government buildings are. I love London because its so easy just to stumble into landmarks. It makes it almost unremarkable when you realise you’re standing outside of Royal Bank of Canada head office.

It took us a second to realise that we were standing outside the Ministry of Defence. Unfortunately, as you might see if you’ve watched the video, I didn’t remember to take the opportunity to mention the MOD’s seven paper cuts last year. We walked past it and bumped into the Foreign & Commonwealth Office. I’m the sort of person who finds this exciting.

Standing outside the FCO was Tim Marshall, Sky News’ Political editor. In retrospect, I probably should have gone and harassed him – after all, he is a celebrity, and I assume celebrities love nothing more than idiot members of the public going up to them and talking to them because they recognise them, despite not being able to remember their name.

Sort of next to the Foreign Office is Downing Street. The Downing Street. Despite it just being an old house that you can barely see behind the multiple layers of security (a ramp, a big set of gates, a number of police with machine guns) it was dead exciting. I reeled off as much Downing Street trivia as I could on the off chance that the Policeman near me would say “Hey, you know your stuff, want to go in for a look around?” Unfortunately he just continued to look stern.

Excellently, it was about at this point that I tried to show-off my knowledge of history by explaining that Whitehall used to be one massive Palace of Whitehall before it was destroyed by a fire. Fundar, being a cynic and troll, accused me of making this up just seconds before we passed a sign explaining that a building was the last remaining segment of the Palace of Whitehall.

Just behind the foreign office, when we weren’t really sure where we were going, we stumbled upon the Treasury. Not just any old treasury too mind- Her Majesty’s Treasury. I missed a golden opportunity to see if I could get in because I’m a tax-man – it would have made an excellent scene in the video too. I did, however, have this excellent photograph taken of me:

After a bit more walking we ended up near Parliament and Brian Haw’s anti-war protest. MPs passed a law to try and get rid of Brian, by banning protesting near Parliament without a license a couple of years ago – unfortunately for them, Brian’s still there because he’s been continuously protesting since before the ban came into force. Interestingly, Brian’s patch of green is surrounded entirely by a massive roundabout, and the conspiracy theorist within me thinks that they’ve made it intentionally difficult to get to the centre where Brian is by altering the traffic light patterns, as I was stuck in the centre for a good five minutes before I dared cross the road.

We spent a few minutes standing outside Westminster Abbey. We were going to go in for a couple of minutes, but discovered that it costs eight pounds to visit a church. Although you could apparently “worship for free”. I didn’t think I could get away with pretending to be religious.

We walked down past the Palace of Westminster to the green where they do the live reports on the telly and did a bit for the video, before deciding to head to the Tate Modern. Exciting travel story: we took the circle line from Westminster to Mansion House.

It turns out that St Paul’s Cathedral is right next to Mansion House, and opposite the Millennium Bridge.

Coke Pepsi Price Watch: 500ml bottle; Tate Modern; Price: £1.55 (yes, 55).

Unfortunately, it’s my sad duty to report that the Tate Modern is the most overrated place in history. Even more so than the Auschwitz “theme park” the Nazis set up during World War II.

I feel like an idiot for not being able to appreciate modern art, but most of it is shit. One of the biggest pieces (in terms of physical size) was Matisse’s Snail (click that for a picture). It’s some coloured paper laid out on to a bigger piece of paper. It looks like something a child with learning difficulties could have made.

What makes it worse is the, er, back-story, as it isn’t even deep and metaphorical. According to the textual description next to it, Matisse saw a snail, and then laid out some coloured paper in a shape (very, very, very, very) vaguely resembling a snail. That’s it? That’s shit.

Beret-wearing sycophants probably look at the same picture and say in their trumped-up posh accent and say to each other “that’s bloody brilliant, oh, it’s just so inspirational. My god, it’s a work of genius.”

Another incredible work was a canvas painted almost entirely orange, apart from a strip down the right hand side which was painted a slightly darker orange, the premise being that the darker line is “disruptive”, or something like that. I’ve never seen such pretentious bollocks, and I’m a regular viewer of Newsnight Review.

It must be great being an artsy twat, as you’d experience such an exciting life. “Fuck me! It’s a lightswitch… that’s just, like, so powerful… on and off, representing despair and consequence“.

One of the more ridiculous things was some metal tiles on the floor. Apparently this changes the viewers interaction with art by allowing you to walk on it. That’s fucking incredible. I mean, walking on tiles. Genius.

Judging by my experience with one of the members of staff, they seem to have employed the snootiest minimum wage workers available. I was carrying a sealed Pepsi, bought from their own cafe through one of the galleries, and a Zoe Wanamaker-esque woman approached me, and said without even mentioning the brand, “I see you have a carbonated drink, could you put it away please? We’ve had people drop them before causing spillages”. I can’t imagine the disasterous repercussions of Pepsi getting near birdshit on a canvas, or whatever. I’d have thought the artsy Tate people would enjoy interpreting what the Pepsi stain represents.

In fairness, it wasn’t all terrible. Roy Lichenstein’s Whaam! was good. And there was a gallery of some framed pages of an old Soviet magazine showing the industrialization of the USSR, which was interesting. And I can’t really complain about the entrance price, as it was free.

After we left the Tate bitterly disappointed, we thought it finally time to head to the Drill Hall to see Mitchell & Webb. We took the tube to Goodge Street.

Coke Price Watch: 500mlish glass; Goodge Street Hamburger Union; £1.65.

Before the show, we went to Hamburger Union, which seems to be a medium-speed food chain exclusive to London. We filmed some more video here.

Coke Price Watch: 330ml can; The Drill Hall; £1.

Finally, we got into Mitchell and Webb ready for the recording. Our tickets had been validated and we had been allocated seats. Unfortunately, before we could go in the theatre, we had to wait in a tiny bar for around an hour standing up with around 200 other people. It was almost unbearable after a day of running around London. My legs hurt and I was overheating, but we stuck with it, as, after all, we were now at the primary reason why we were in London.

Mitchell and Webb recorded two shows at once, so we got approximately 90 minutes of new sketches from them, supported by Olivia Coleman and James Bachman And they were excellent. There were a few about a doctor arguing with a patient who got diagnosis’s off of the internet, which got progressively more surreal. If this sketch makes the translation to their second TV series, I imagine “I’m Bill Paxton” will become a well known catchphrase. You’ll know why when you see it.

Other memorable sketches were “Celebrity Fame Zepplin”, in which Mitchell reeled off hundreds and hundreds of reality TV clichés in quick succession and parodies if Radio 4’s Afternoon Play.

In retrospect, I should have taken my iTalk and covertly recorded it so I could write more about this. I can’t remember many more of the things they did, but I remember enjoying it immensely. So, er, I guess I win.

I had an incredibly good day over all, and I don’t think even if I had bumped into Hitler on the train home he could have dampened my spirit that much. London late at night is surprisingly non-threatening, but we were in a reasonably posh area- right near Tavistock Square, of London Bombings fame, in fact. I imagine I’d be telling a different story if they’d been recording the radio show in Hackney or wherever. And you’d be reading this from my will rather than my blog.

It was also a research packed day – our serious scientific survey has conclusively proved that London prices are infinitely more expensive than rural England. Which, er, is no surprise really.

I would highly recommend listening to That Mitchell & Webb Sound when it’s broadcast on the radio – I’ll plug it on here when it is, as it’s dead good.

Well done for making it through nearly 2000 words too. Why not watch the video?

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Echoes of myself
March 28th, 2007 at 01:38

As long time readers and window cleaners might know, I’m quite willing to criticise people. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a strong enough character to dare criticise people to their faces, I’m the sort of awful bastard who will do it behind their backs on the internet to like-minded individuals, who are, in all likelihood, criticising me in another MSN window talking to someone else. But I do worry when doing this – I worry that I might be seemingly unknowingly describing myself if I talk complain about someone being, say, a dullard. And then I worry that whoever I’m talking to is pasting what I’m saying over and commenting on the multiple layers of irony that ice every one of my words like a topping on an inedible (and thus ironic) cake.

What makes this worse is when I can see myself in other people. Not literally. I don’t live in the future and talk only to well polished silver robots- but if I notice that the person I’m talking to has a similar negative character trait to me.

I’ll often start telling an anecdote (“I met Kilroy once…”), and only later realise that the story is mind-numbingly tedious, horrendously in-jokey to the extent where the person I’m talking to won’t understand, or requires more context than the Israeli/Palestine situation.

In this situation, there is always a choice: you can either soldier through the story, pointing out all of the details in their glorious inanity and bore the listener to death, risking coming across as the most boring person alive, or cut your losses and end the anecdote prematurely. I usually opt for this latter approach by saying something like “long story short I met Kilroy… er… that’s it”, leaving out any clever remarks or observations that make up the meat of the story – which only leaves the listener bitterly disappointed. But not bored. Like how five minutes before the end of every episode of Doctor Who the Doctor discovers there’s a ‘Deus Ex-Machina’ button on his sonic screwdriver. Again.

This problem is only exacerbated by my choice of anecdote. If I’m speaking to someone I don’t really know, I’ll still try and retell an anecdote that relies on heavy character knowledge of myself. “Blah blah blah… and it turns out they were a window cleaner!” I might say expecting a laugh, forgetting that the person I’m talking to doesn’t follow my blog and thus my tedious life as avidly as, er, me.

Basically I’m saying that I don’t want to come across as a boring twat. Look, I’m even ending this blog entry fairly abruptly as I can’t think of a way to better describe this without becoming even more boring.

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Nearly mugged
February 5th, 2007 at 22:52

I left work early this evening because I was feeling ill- I had (and still have) a headache, and feel a bit sick, that sort of thing. Unfortunately, because I didn’t drive in and didn’t fancy waiting for a lift home, I had to walk to the station to get the train home.

Just as you get to the station there’s an underpass. Normally, I’d be one to avoid underpasses at night – but I reasoned that it was only half past seven, the underpass was well lit with CCTV, and I shouldn’t be scared in the city that I practically live in these days. Also I’m dead macho and that.

So I walk under the underpass, and standing on the ramp on the other side are four chav types, who are probably about my age. They weren’t using the underpass for its intended purpose: travelling from one side of the road to the other, they were just standing around in there. And how cool they looked because of it.

What scared me was that I thought I saw one of them holding a knife. I certainly saw something glistening in one of their hands, and thought that if I continued walking towards them I might be the victim of street crime: it was at the point in the evening when the city is deserted… the shops were closed and it wasn’t exactly “pub time”, meaning that if I were to cry for help, no one would hear me scream.

It was here I made a fatal mistake. I changed the way I was walking as a reaction to the perceived Burberry threat. Rather than continue on up the ramp, I decided in haste to walk up the steps to my left and try and get to the station that way. I’d just broken the first rule of avoiding being attacked: “don’t make it look like you’re scared of them in a really obvious way, for fucks sake“.

One of them spots me doing this and I believe he shouted something like “get him!”- its hard to tell because I had my headphones in at the time. When I saw him running towards me I decided to run. And I’ve never run so fast in my life.

The architecture of the pavement was against me slightly – I ended up running along a raised path parallel to the slope up from the underpass. Chasing behind me was the guy who ran after me and up the steps… and as I ran along as fast as I could, weighed down by a heavy bag, he shouted to his mates “get him lads!”. Seriously. So the three others who were on the underpass slope ran up it – this would have cut me off. I’d draw a diagram, but I think that might be a bit excessive.

After what felt like a lifetime, I got to the station and they didn’t seem to follow me into the station. I’m guessing this is either because it was crowded and people would see me being stabbed up, or they were only chasing me because they were cunts and wanted to scare me. They saw I was scared so they thought they’d have some ‘fun’.

The worst thing was, well, not the worst thing, as being chased by some hoodies was pretty fucking awful, but it was a bit depressing that when my life flashed before my eyes when I was being pursued, all I saw was the time I met Kilroy. That was it.

I’ve never been so scared in my life. Hug a hoodie? David Cameron has clearly never been in this situation.

I’m just slightly concerned now that this event might send my political opinions to the right and turn me into an awful bigot. Lock ‘em up and cut out their eyes etc etc. Something must be done about the chav underclass: MIDDLE CLASSES OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!

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Big Issue
January 30th, 2007 at 01:05

I bought a Big Issue today because my headphones have broken, and so I couldn’t even pretend that I hadn’t clocked the homeless guy and was coincidentally giving him a wide-berth on the pavement.

The seller was dead friendly, and as the transaction was completed, he tried some light conversation, telling me that he only had three left. I’m not very good at light conversation at the best of times, so talking to someone who’s had life pretty difficult is going to be something of a challenge- after all, the most difficult struggle I’ve experienced thus far in my life is trying to acquire a Nintendo Wii.

I responded with a sort of feeble yet cheerful laugh and then, predictably, put my foot in it. What’s the worst possible thing you could say to a man who spends his nights in shop doorways?

“Do you get to go home when you’ve sold them all?”

No. I didn’t just say that… did I?

I think the only way I could have made my comments worse is if I’d then explained how I was born into a vaguely middle-class family and have life easy by default. And then got the banknotes out of my wallet and rubbed them all over my face in a “do you want them? do you?” motion.

Incredibly, he didn’t stab me up or point out my stupidity, but remained friendly and cheerful, telling me to have a nice day.

I think being a Big Issue vendor must be like a seal of approval on who are the friendly homeless people. A bit like ‘rose awards’ and static caravan parks.

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Space Centre
January 5th, 2007 at 20:53

Today Katy and I went to the National Space Centre in Leicester. Neither of us had been before, and I think its fair to say that it’s probably the closest either of us are going to get to actually going into space, so it was all good.

Here’s a picture of me and a rocket (Katy refused to be pictured, presumably because she thought you readers would be too busy looking at me to notice her anyway):

It was much like you’d expect- exhibits, old spacey things, and visual metaphors to illustrate the relative mass of the planets.

There was one exhibit there that claimed to be a “Martian meteorite”- I’d love it if any scientists reading could explain to me how a bit of rock can go from Mars, float up out of Mars’ atmosphere across space and then hit the Earth, as I can’t even make a ridiculous uninformed assumption to explain that.

On the journey there, I also thought of another irritating science question that seemed to scare Katy a bit: gravity is proportional to mass, right? So if we keep sending stuff into space and not getting it back, there’s less matter on Earth, and thus Earth’s gravity will decrease? Similarly, if technology gets to a point like in Red Dwarf where we’re mining on Jupiter and bringing resources back to Earth, surely it will reach a point where Earth’s gravity will increase, fucking a few things up? I realise these will only have a tiny difference, but surely even that will (eventually) make a difference?

And energy and matter can be “changed into each other”, for lack of a scientific sounding word… and energy doesn’t have mass, right? Thus, if we keep burning all of the oil and so on, surely the earth will lose a lot of mass and thus gravity?

I’m not sure what point I’m making. I’m probably talking rubbish.

But anyway, also there was an IMAX style cinema, where the pictures are projected on to a dome on the ceiling, meaning that you get essentially 180 degrees of video. Disappointingly, the film was a Toy Story-esque computer generated, but it was still interesting. Beforehand there was a safety announcement, with the advice being that if you feel nauseous, you should, er, close your eyes. The one scene that stood out for me was when a character had the dangers of space travel humorously demonstrated on him- freezing and weightlessness, and so on. At the end of the scene the character took revenge on the professor character subjecting him to these things by sending him up into space on a firework.

As the firework was being set-up on screen, the narrator told us how most space fatalities occur on take off and landing. The firework takes off and explodes in almost exactly the same way as the Challenger space shuttle. Tasteful.

Perhaps the scariest part of the day was when I had a go at presenting the weather. (You’ll see me explain all this on the video below too.) Inexplicably, like every museum or place of learning that I’ve been to, all have a chromakey setup going that lets you pretend you’re a weather presenter. I think the tenuous link here is that satellites are used to forecast the weather.

So I enter the booth, and press the “go” button, and the TV instructs me to read the autocue and point at things on the map. It starts up, so I try my best for a few seconds, reading accurately and pointing and everything, before suddenly becoming incredibly self concious. I believe I just stopped, looked out of the booth towards Katy and remarked “what the fuck am I doing? I look ridiculous”, before leaving. Unfortunately for me, the booth had been recording my performance, and played it back on a TV outside after the autocue had finished doing its thing. And it had a loud speaker. So all we heard was “What the fuck am I doing? I look ridiculous” echoing all over the Space Centre, with me on the TV screen… which was being watched by a few small children. Whoops. I think it must have played it back a few times as well – it certainly felt like a long time.

Here’s a video of my day:

I’d like to thank Katy for coming, and TomTom for getting us there. And the Cold War for developing the technology that made the Space Centre possible.

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Happy New Year!
January 1st, 2007 at 19:48

Happy New Year readers! Last night I went to my friend Andy’s New Year Party, and I had an incredibly good time.

I had planned to do a video blog of the last moments of 2006, and the room exploding into celebration, but unfortunately the lighting wasn’t very good so you can’t see (or hear) anything- and when I tried to get everyone to re-enact the countdown for take 2, no one joined in with me.

It was a good evening though- with only one fatal flaw. This was a New Years Party, yet nobody seemed to have an accurate clock. Seriously. For some reason, everyone around me started celebrating with still about twenty or thirty seconds to go, and I don’t know about you, but if I want to celebrate an arbitrary point in time, I at least want to celebrate it accurately.

Here’s some pictures of some drunken revellers and my sober self- because I think the internet doesn’t have enough pictures of generic drunks:

This is me, Craig and Nikki, and Nikki’s hideous scar. I was only able to muster the smile on my face after literally ten minutes of looking horrified.

Here’s Fundar and myself. He’s pointing at me because I asked him who his hero was.

This is Heggs and Bailey being drunk on the metaphorical alcohol that is life. And the metaphorical alcohol that is alcohol.

And here’s Bouff. I’m including this picture as he’s now begun straightening it after 19 years of having a big ginger afro. This is probably really uninteresting if you don’t know me in real life, but a few people reading are probably saying “what the fuck?” as I speak.

So yeah, I had a good time- it was certainly less awful than watching Saddam get hanged. Hooray!

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