Holiday in the Lon
August 2nd, 2008 at 17:13

If you’re wondering why it has been quiet on my blog lately, its because last week I was in London with my internet mates. Here’s a video diary of what happened:

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Sticking it to creationists + Ska + London = Win.
June 22nd, 2008 at 16:40

Yesterday, I went to London with my friend Bouff. Why? Because London is excellent. And it certainly proved that yesterday.

After faffing about around Oxford Street and Speaker’s Corner, we decided to head to the Science and Natural History Museums - which as every good Londoner knows, are next door to each other on Exhibition Road. Unfortunately, when changing tubes at Notting Hill Gate, we discovered that the Circles and District line were both closed - so we were faced with the choice of either trekking across Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens to get there, or going to David Cameron’s Notting Hill home to see if he wants to come out to play and ride bikes with us. We chose the former, obviously, because even if Cameron did commit himself to a policy of coming out to play (unlikely), the car following us on our bikes would cramp our style a bit. Also, Cameron’s a dick.

As we approached the Royal Albert Hall, we heard what sounded like some jazz fusion. Intrigued, we stumbled upon a great big stage with a band on, where the jazz fusion was being emitted from. Ace.

I did stop to wonder who was bankrolling this? Was it one of Ken’s ideas that Boris didn’t have time to cancel in his new role as fun-spoiler? As it turns out, excellently, it was being partially funded by the EU (yet another reason not to hate them). The thing that gave this away was not the EU flags, but the incredibly clunkily name that had clearly been thought up by some top-class Eurocrats: “European Year of Intercultural Dialogue” - which presumably follows on from last year’s successful European Year of Macro-Economic Indicators or something equally dry.

We walked on down on to Exhibition Road itself, which had been closed off, and encountered a couple of men who took the “there’s always a weird old guy at a gig who’s too old for it” tradition to giddy new heights. Witness the following video of them rocking out to a devastatingly average band:

After having a look around the Science Museum for a bit, and wondering why the credit crunch hasn’t done the noble thing and prevented American tourists from entering Britain (I mean, really, who goes to a museum and films everything if they’re not making a stupid satirical video? Are they really going to watch it back?), we headed back outside to perhaps the greatest thing ever.

We stumbled on some ska.

An apparently unsigned band called Brothers Bab were getting a decent reaction from the crowds outside (and the two old guys were down at the front skanking their old, weary hearts out). Surely this only makes the summer of ska all the more imminent?

Museums… ska gigs… being able to namedrop streetnames without having to specify the city… this is why I want to live in London.

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“The path to enlightenment has been delayed due to a signals fault between Luton and Bedford”
May 29th, 2008 at 23:28

So, I was browsing the East Midlands Trains press release archive (yeah, it’s the sort of thing you do when you’re unemployed), and in amongst the tedious news about timetable updates and corporate partnerships, this leapt out at me:

“On Friday 23 May East Midlands Trains played host to a very special passenger. His Holiness the Dalai Lama travelled on the company’s 14.55 from St. Pancras International to Nottingham. His Holiness was travelling to the city to give five days of teachings.”

Christ on a bike. This means that the DALAI LAMA, must have sped through the small, unimportant, somewhat incestuous, Tory safe-seat in which I live - in fact, His Holiness must have passed a mere few hundred metres from my house. This is particularly notable, as he must be the biggest celebrity we’ve had in a ten mile radius since Frank Bruno opened the Carnival about 15 years ago.

EMT, who seem pretty chuffed with this PR-coup, posted some photos for proof:

Unfortunately for his Holiness, it looks like had to put up with the gurning East Midlands Trains chief executive for the entire two hour journey. No doubt they exchanged stories about what its like to be the spiritual leader of millions of Tibetans, and what it’s like to be in charge of an important transport artery linking London with places like Luton and Kettering. Looks like the EMT guy managed to work his magic and charm his Holiness with his dreamy eyes though:

“So the other week I was campaigning for human rights in Tibet and highlighting abuses by the Chinese occupiers to the United Nations Security Council”

“Yeah, I was having my photo taken with a sausage”

It does make you think though, what do you do if you get on the train and see the Dalai Lama. Do you say anything? Exclaiming “You’re the Dalai Lama!” would be pretty stupid, as he probably already knows that - he was discovered to be the 14th incarnation when he was four years old, so is probably well aware by now.

Similarly, sitting opposite him and just reading your book or newspaper with your iPod in as usual seems a bit of a waste - and staring at him would be even more awkward than it is when you forgot your stuff and have to just stare at the person opposite.

And what if you’d reserved a seat and when you got there found the Dalai Lama sitting in it? Do you turf him out? Actually, I’d quite like to be able to tell the story of how I kicked the Dalai Lama out of my seat.

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Reely, Reely Big Fish
February 25th, 2008 at 16:06

I’ve had a rather hectic eight days - I hesitate to claim that I’ve been “busy”, because that would imply that I’ve been doing something worthwhile. I’ve been over-indulging in a hallmark of popular culture: I’ve been to see one of my favourite bands, Reel Big Fish, three times. Yeah, that’s right, three times.

I’ve travelled all around the country to see them - to the Cresset in Peterborough, the Academy in Birmingham and Rock City in Nottingham. Each gig had almost the same set list - starting with Sell Out, about half way through having “Good Thing” and “Your Guts (I hate ‘em)” segue together (just live the live album), finishing the main set on “Beer”, then having “Trendy” and their cover of “Take On Me” in the encore. They also played at some point: “Everything Sucks”, “Ban the Tube Top”, a cover of “Enter Sandman” and “She’s got a girlfriend now” (sung with the singer from Sonic Boom Six, introduced in almost the same way as the live album), “Where have you been?”, “Somebody hates me”, “Don’t start a band” and “Kiss Me Deadly” (just like the live album, introduced by saying “Here’s a song!”, before launching into it). One notable difference in the set lists was that in Peterborough they played “She’s Famous Now”, whereas at the other two gigs they replaced it with “A little doubt goes a long way”. They played some other songs too, but I was too busy rocking out to remember them. Last night in Nottingham, right at the very end, just as they were going off stage, Aaron played an impromptu riff from “Rock You Like a Hurricane” by the Scorpians, bizarrely.

The support were good too. Sonic Boom Six are pretty cool - they stuck to the same “script” at all three gigs, getting the audience going by doing a “When I say ‘Reel Big’, you say ‘FISH’”, bit - and mixing in a couple of hip-hop bits. Streetlight Manifesto, who were also supporting, are also rather excellent - and rather ska.

So it will come as no surprise to you that I think they’re the best thing since sliced bread, and one of the best live acts around. And I’m still on the post-gig high right now.

One of the best bits, aside from meeting Aaron Barrett, the main bloke in the band last night, was knowing all of the words to all of the songs, and being right down in the pit for most of the three gigs, surrounded by hundreds of people all saying the same thing, in time, appreciating a charismatic group on a stage in front of us… without any fascistic undertones.

It was excellent. Go and see Reel Big Fish, readers.

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Lets go fly a kite…
February 24th, 2008 at 18:51

…or attempt to, anyway…

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A blog about actual things that I’ve done for once
February 10th, 2008 at 02:22

I went to London today with my friend Bouff, and have unexpectedly got three interesting, yet unrelated stories out of it. I’ve ranked them least interesting to most interesting - which is incidentally also chronological order - to keep you reading to the bitter end.

STORY ONE

Bouff suggested we go to London a couple of weeks ago, and I readily agreed, as I bloody love London. A few days ago when discussing what to do there, I suggested to him that we could, say, go to Highgate Cemetery, and have a look at Karl Marx and Douglas Adams’ graves. Bouff replied “I was thinking of H&M”.

“Nah, we won’t end up simply shopping”, I thought. Then we ended up in the Vans shop on sickeningly fashionable Carnaby Street, so he could buy the sort of shoes skateboarders wear to show that they’re totally sticking it to the man, from a large multinational corporation. Here is an “action shot”, and I use the term “action” incredibly loosely, of a man you don’t know purchasing shoes to validate this story as truth:

STORY TWO

I was shocked this evening when I checked the news earlier and found out about that massive fire in Camden. Why? Because I was there only a couple of hours earlier. Its a bit weird switching on the news and seeing the street you were just on (the one with the shop with the aeroplane on the front) covered in flames.

We went to The World’s End pub, which is famous enough to have its own Wikipedia page. Well, some people do predict that the world’s end will be in a hellish scene with lots of fire and destruction.

Whilst not technically in Camden so not relevant to this half-baked story, but it’s not like it was actually going anywhere in the first place. We also ventured to Holloway Road, which is basically just a suburban street somewhere in north London, but we went there because it was all about the destination: the club Nambucca, which is apparently some sort of famous Indie venue - I vaguely knew of it because its referenced in a Frank Turner song. Yeah, its horrendously obscure, but Bouff was excited, going through his phone book, texting everyone he knows. All I really saw was a closed building. Here is another exciting picture:

STORY THREE

This is the best story. If you’ve skipped the other two to see what’s here, then it was worth the effort. You’ve seen Shaun of the Dead, haven’t you? Well, do you recognise this newsagents:

No? Its the one from Shaun of the Dead. Really, it is. That’s why we took what looked like an unlicensed mini-cab half way across North London to a small parade of shops in a heavily residential area devoid of a Tube to take photographs of ourselves standing outside a newsagents.

Annoyingly, the shop was sold out of Cornettos.

Here’s Shaun’s house. It’s changed a bit since the film:

It was dead exciting. See, that’s a pun there. Sort of.

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Happy New Year!
January 1st, 2008 at 16:18

Happy New Year, readers!

I know what you’re thinking: “how did James spend New Years Eve?”. Perhaps somewhat predictably, I went down to London to watch the fireworks and all that. It was certainly a once-in-a-lifetime event. I mean, sure, you could do it again, but whether you’d want to is another question all together.

We drove down to London, parking at Finchley Central tube station on the outskirts, and caught the tube in. We made our way to Westminster, and more specifically, the excellent pub at the Namco Station on the South Bank. Unlike normal pubs, this pub is built into an arcade, so has a bowling alley, arcade games and dodgems. Its literally the best pub ever. So we spent the last few hours of 2007 behaving like teenagers.

Unfortunately though, at about ten o’clock, they closed off the whole South Bank, because that was where all the fireworks were going to be - so we were kicked out on to Westminster Bridge with two hours to spare. There were no drinks for sale on the bridge, and we didn’t have the foresight to bring any, which meant the two hours passed exceedingly slowly.

I tried to pass the time by doing some Peter-Kay-esque observational comedy. “Remember stuff from years ago? Eh? Eh? Remember when we had to manually type custom ringtones into black and white mobile phones? What’s with that? And when you go in a lift, right, you press the number of the floor you want to go to… but why is there a doors close button? The doors are going to close anyway! What’s with that?”

Eventually, midnight arrived, and some fireworks exploded, that sort of thing. Unlike poor Diamond Geezer, we had the best place in London. Being on Westminster Bridge, we had a full view of both Big Ben striking midnight, and the fireworks display on the London Eye. The fireworks were pretty spectacular, as you’ll see in the video:

After the fireworks display, the organisation of the event sort of fell apart, as nearly all 700,000 revellers descended on Waterloo tube station to get home (Westminster and Embankment were closed). And it turned out that the pub wasn’t reopening after midnight, so we had to join them. After faffing about for about an hour I cleverly hatched a plan to head to Southwark station which was just a bit further a long - which turned out to be a good idea, as there were only around 100,000 people who had that same idea.

But we eventually got back and it all worked out alright. I think being in London was a good idea. Really.

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Stranger; Things have happened.
December 18th, 2007 at 18:39

Last week I wrote a rather polemic piece advocating the secularisation of Christmas. Whilst I stand by my obviously well-thought-out points, I’m worried I may have forgotten about the Christmas spirit, and ruffled a few feathers, caused quite a stir, and committed various other tired clichés. So this week, I want to tell you about the sort of story you only usually get at Christmas, a heart-warming tale about the kindness of strangers.

To set the scene, on Saturday night, I was on the last train heading back from London, when I realised that my phone battery had run flat. It was annoying because it was a new mobile phone – a posh one that does everything too: internet, satellite navigation, plays music, takes photographs. I think it even makes phone calls. The only drawback with it is that if you decide that you actually need to use one of its many exciting features, it drains the battery in a matter of minutes.

The trouble was that I needed to ring my parents to let them know that I hadn’t been murdered in London – they worry like that. When it got to about half past eleven, an hour after I told them I’d be home I realised that if I left it any longer, they’d probably start kicking up a fuss and have most of London’s emergency services looking for my battered corpse, so I had to think of something.

I knew I’d have to ask another passenger on the train if I could borrow their mobile phone – which is a ridiculous request. The most you should ask of a fellow train passenger is if you can sit on the empty seat next to them – asking for anything more is breaking a big social taboo. What I wanted was far, far beyond the call of duty.

So I decided to ask an older couple on the train if I could borrow their mobile phone, to call my mum. The difficult thing was the phrasing of the question – I’m not very astute at the best of times, as I tend to just let the key words in a sentence fall out of my mouth in a jumbled order when talking to people. I needed to convey the genuine nature of my problem so that I didn’t sound like I was euphemistically saying “Hello, I’m a scruffy looking bloke and I’m going to mug you for your expensive mobile phone, so I can sell it in a pub and buy drugs with the proceeds”.

Eventually, I plucked up the courage to ask, and amazingly, these complete strangers let me use their phone – even though I could have been, say, a murderer, or something for all they knew (I’m not).

I’m dead impressed by this – I’d previously assumed that everyone who didn’t know me, especially those I encounter on public transport, are just out to get me, in some way, but it turns out strangers are really nice people.

So what’s the moral of this story? Er… could it be the complete opposite of what we’re taught growing up? “Talk to strangers more”?

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Impulsive Day
November 24th, 2007 at 01:07

Today I got up bright and early at 8am for university - I had my usual rushed shower and check of my emails, before heading to the train station little over an hour after waking up. Still groggy, after a few hours sleep, I met Katy on the train and went into university for a lengthy two-hour day. Unfortunately, this exposition was building us up for disappointment: the lecture and seminar were cancelled, meaning that we had both travelled into university for no reason.

It was at this point we decided to be impulsive. This isn’t something I do very often - I like to plan things with an autistic level of detail. If I go to anywhere big, I like to have a Google Map printed out, all relevant details with me, a map book, and a back-up plan for almost every eventuality. And I’ll constantly run through potential scenarios in my head: “What if a terrorist appears right now and challenges me to a short trivia battle to determine whether I live or die?”, and so on.

We decided to go to London, more specifically to the British Museum.

So we spent thirty pounds each on train tickets down to London, plus an extra fiver for the tube, and hopped on to the direct train down to London. 15 minutes into the journey, I learnt why being impulsive doesn’t pay off - quite literally. I remembered that I was going to see Mark Thomas tonight (which has already happened at time of writing, and was excellent, if you’re asking), so had to cut the trip short by a good few hours, decreasing value for money somewhat considerably.

But we got to the British Museum eventually, which was pretty excellent, although we’ll have to go again in order to fully appreciate all of the old tat on display there, given that we were rushed for time.

You’d think what with it being a museum full of all the best antiquities that Britain has nicked from around the world, full of priceless monuments to human civilisation, like the Rosetta Stone, I’d have taken loads of photos and maybe even done another stupid video. Unfortunately due to the ridiculously impulsive nature of the trip, the batteries in my camera were running very low. So the only two photos we managed to squeeze out of the camera were the following:

Me, standing in front of a placard looking slightly worse for wear, in order to make a horrendous, horrendous lolcat parody:

And what we bought from the British Museum café. Guess how much a couple of drinks, a chocolate muffin and some sort of strawberry/chocolate hybrid. Go on, have a guess.

£8.20. Eight pounds twenty. Really. I could have cried.

The Rosetta Stone was pretty excellent though. And it was much better than having a boring lecture. So hooray, I guess?

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London Yet Again
November 13th, 2007 at 02:08

I can’t help but think that my blog is slowly degenerating into a poor man’s Diamond Geezer, given the amount of times I’ve been to London. I went to London again today with my ginger friend Bouff. Where we did some London things.

Westminster Abbey

We went to Westminster Abbey - actually paying to go inside a Church. It was surprisingly worthwhile, as there are stacks of dead people in there. I saw the tombs of stacks of royals: Elizabeth I, Henry III, William & Mary, Mary Queen of Scots, and Mary I, for example. Unfortunately though, they are sort of hidden between a lot of filler. Nobody really wants to see the ex-MP for Exeter, whoever he was.

There were also lots of other important people: Newton, Darwin, Thomas Hardy, various old-timey Prime Ministers and so on. Now no one can say that I haven’t drummed on top of Chaucer’s grave.

It was also sort of funny to see the spot where Oliver Cromwell was buried, until Charles II got it removed. There’s some sort of RAF memorial there now.

By far the best bit, though, was what is apparently BRITAIN’S OLDEST DOOR. Here is a photo of me, knocking on BRITAIN’S OLDEST DOOR:

There’s even a sign explaining that it is BRITAIN’S OLDEST DOOR. It even made the news.

David Davies

It seems like only last week I was slagging off David Davies. Whilst walking through Westminster today I spotted him being interviewed for the telly. Here is a picture of me stroking my beard with him in the background, as if to imply that he is saying stupid things and is a twat:

We also saw Sanchez from Garth Merenghi’s Darkplace walking down Tottenham Court Road, but I don’t have a clever picture of me arsing about with him in the background.

Apple Store

We walked up Regent Street to find the Apple Store. And I got to have my first ever go on an iPhone. And it turns out that I really, really want one. Anyone from Apple reading? Send me an iPhone for free, please? I’ll review it and say nice things!

It was literally the best thing since sliced bread - the interface was incredible. The scaling, the scrolling, everything. The picture was sharp as anything. Its just a massive shame that £270 is ridiculously expensive, even before you consider the £35 a month contract.

We also had a go on the Apple TV - which is a set-top box/media server sort of thing, and I ended up watching my own YouTube videos on a massive plasma telly in London. Which was cool.

Conclusions

London is still cool. iPhones are excellent. Important dead people are interesting. But perhaps the most pertinent conclusion is that I am still a dreadful tourist. However much I try to fit in, complaining about tourists, reading the Metro on the Tube, walking around like I know where I’m going, I’m still Oyster-less and have to get about by using the most humiliating ticket known to Londoner: a national rail day travel-card.

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