the camel's back

While walking over to the South Bank, I was asked by GMTV (represented by a short blonde and a tall cameraman) if I watched Dancing On Ice. 'No', I said. Then I added: 'Only on Harry Hill', but they'd lost interest by then. They should have known, shouldn't they? Who are you going to get on that bridge except foreign tourists and people who are interested in only the very finest examples of the culture? Now if they'd asked about Deal Or No Deal...

One thing I have noticed watching TV recently, is people having difficulty with the idea of straws. First I saw the villain in a Jean-Claude Van Damme film telling JCVD that if he wasn't careful he'd be 'eating out of a straw'. Out of a straw? Through a straw I can understand, but out of a straw, that sounds tricky, and would it even be worth it, the amount of nourishment you could squeeze into the average straw? Unless it was some sort of super-condensed space food, or just a giant straw... But there was no suggestion of this in the script.

Then, a couple of days later, and I can't remember what programme it was on, someone was commiserating with someone else for picking 'the short end of the straw'. Now come on, that whole straw is short, isn't it? It's not just one end. It's both ends. And the middle.

So what is it about straws? Are they a concept that's hard to grasp? Hence the phrase 'clutching at straws'? Or does 'clutching at straws' mean that they're easy to grasp, because straws are what you clutch at when you can't get the whole thing? Then again, clutching at straws doesn't sound easy, does it? Christ, now I'm confused. Straws really are tricky customers. Hence the phrase 'the last straw'.

Mysteries of the NHS

I discovered that Liz is having a baby on Facebook. Well no, she's not actually having it on the social networking site, that would be ridiculous. In fact, she's thinking of having a water birth. I warned her that, in Romford, that means a public swimming baths, with about 40 other mums giving birth simultaneously. She was thinking of 'Romford' names for it like Aurora but I think I talked her round to Courgette (Parsnip if it's a boy). Vegetables are so in right now.

At work they are offering 'clinical masterclasses for CLODs', I noticed. That's 'Clinical Lead on Organ Donation', of course, what kind of clod wouldn't just know that? Meanwhile, our Assistant Director is being 'moved sideways'. A few days after he told us this he rang his PA claiming to be in Legoland. 'In Legoland' is possibly another term that means something to those in the know. Or perhaps he was really in Legoland, maybe when you're moved sideways, that's where you end up. At that level, it is hard to say. His PA is being 'moved sideways under him' while simultaneously remaining exactly where she is. The public sector is a place of many mysteries.

So is the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Why were they showing Lucio Fulci's 1970 film A Lizard in A Woman's Skin? Is it Art? Not exactly. Fulci went on to make Zombie Flesh Eaters. This is better, but not that much better. In front of me sat that guy who curates obscure exploitation movies for the BFI's 'Flipside' strand. It's a small world, the world of obscure exploitation movies. Then again, you'd expect it to be, wouldn't you?

This was an Italian movie set in London and dubbed into English, except for one brief scene they obviously missed in which the (English) characters start frantically jabbering in (subtitled) Italian. Of course, such things just add to the delirious pleasure of the film, which features Stanley Baker as a detective who whistles with a tunelessness that's almost avant-garde, and who at one point blithely orders the interrogation of every red-headed man in London.

The film also features one of the most gratuitous scenes in any film ever, in which the tormented (but is she?) heroine blunders into a room in a clinic and is horrified to discover a number of dogs hanging up with their bodies slit open and their beating hearts and squirming entrails on display. So much attention to detail has gone into the creation of this special effect that, at the time of the film's release, Fulci was almost arrested for extreme cruelty to animals, but its irrelevance is as breathtaking as its grotesquerie. Up until this point the clinic has seemed like just the kind of genteel place where upper-middle class people with over-strained nerves sit out on the lawn with tartan blankets over their knees. The director of the clinic apologises, but - amusingly - only for not locking the door.

The Last of Danny Dire

What the hell am I going to do now? Danny Dyer's Deadliest Men 2 has finished. The last episode was a compilation of all the 'best bits' of the series, themed around DD's slang, used exclusively by him, I think ('Didgy', anyone?) 'My arse is flapping', he said, quite a lot. No Danny - that's your mouth.

The other week he was talking to Bernard O'Mahoney, author of Essex Boys. O'Mahoney knew the Essex Boys gangsters. Not very nice people, apparently. 'Naked violence', he says of one. 'It's the only thing he knew.'

Yes, here is a man who actually speaks tabloid.

Of course anything he can do, DD can do better. When O'Mahoney talks about the effect of Ecstasy on Essex club culture, he puts it like this: 'the monsters turned into mice overnight'. Cue Danny, in portentous voiceover: 'And the mice needed feeding.'

I thought they were talking about e's, not cheese. Similiarly, DD describes these gangsters as 'having their fingers in various unsavoury pies'. Hmm, aren't unsavoury pies just sweet ones? Such as lemon meringue pies? Then again, you wouldn't want to find a finger in one, would you? A meat pie, that wouldn't be quite so bad.

Mat is calling Sam's cuddly pink pig 'Mr. Pork' in an attempt to convey to his child the fact that cute animals may be slaughtered for food. He has even come up with the idea of manufacturing cuddly pigs, cows etc. which, when unzipped, can be disassembled into cuddly cuts of meat and possibly organs (all labelled of course). He thinks that this would be educational. Though, after some discussion, we decided that it might give young children the wrong idea about household pets, as they try to unzip Fluffikins and extract her tripe.

Give Rhys a Chance

It was Rhys' stag do in Cardiff. This involved a five-a-side tournament in which I was unwilling to play. However, my ignorance of, and complete lack of interest in, football were not held to be any kind of drawback to my being the referee. I wore my old Waterstones polo shirt (because I wasn't expecting to enjoy myself) and was handed a whistle and two sets of red and yellow cards. I immediately proceeded to just stand there.

Because I had to be near the electronic scoreboard in order for the remote to work, I was stationed on the far side of the pitch from where everybody else was standing, in this freezing cold industrial unit. What should I do? The games were only fifteen minutes long so sleeping was not an option. Luckily, I had a notebook with me. Here are some excerpts from the journal I kept of my time in the wilderness:

12:31 Lonely. Confused. No change there then. Feel like a scientist stationed in some Arctic outpost, monitoring the obscure social rituals of a new breed of penguin. My prime directive: do not interfere. All I can do here is keep score and blow the whistle. It should be easy.

12:48 I blew the whistle. It seemed to work. They actually stopped playing!

Must not let this power go to my head.

1:10 Keeping score not so simple. On the telly you know when they've scored because everyone is cheering and hugging and having furious sex on the pitch. This lot aren't so demonstrative. Well, except maybe for Rhys' team. I'm going to have to rely on more subtle clues, such as attempting to observe with my actual eyes whether or not the ball has gone in the net. Shit.

Is anyone really bothered about who wins? I mean, it's only a game.

1:40 Have witnessed several acts of brutal violence, mostly committed by Rhys. Wonder if I should do anything. Oh, is that a pigeon up there?

No.

2:32 Bored. Yet tense. It's like watching paint dry. Except it doesn't dry. It keeps moving. All the colours swirling around in front of me. Feel strangely weak... Head... melting!

Shortly after this, the Great God Cthulhu appeared. But that's another story.

From the moments immediately following this game comes the only photograph I managed to take during the entire day. It shows a man in pink hotpants and an England shirt, seemingly alone in a car park, in broad daylight, downing a half yard of Special Brew. Rhys looks not so much like a man on his stag do as someone with severe mental health problems.

(The pink hotpants and England shirt were imposed upon him, by the way. All of the shame, I understand, lay in the England shirt.)

So we went into Cardiff in the late afternoon. It was touch and go whether we would all get there, since a bus journey was involved and, in Cardiff, the bus driver's well-known resentment of people who aren't carrying the exact change is enshrined in law, meaning that such people may be shot. Or at any rate not permitted to travel.

Despite this, we managed it, and proceeded to crawl through numerous pubs. Rhys was provided by Mat his best man with various challenges, one of which was to eat a raw chilli. This he did with considerable nonchalance for about thirty seconds. Then, metaphorically speaking, his head exploded.

It was his worst nightmare. The rest of it was a cinch. After several gallons of Coke, he was made to don Mat's grubby, ill-used Gordon the Gopher glove puppet and go round getting women to kiss it. Which is not too far from a normal Saturday night for Rhys, as I understand it.

As we moved further into town the pubs got louder and Gordon lost most of his clothing. (Much later, Mat had a dream in which Gordon - mute for years - got his squeak back. 'It just needed warming up', Mat said disturbingly.)

I was enjoying myself, at least until someone called Lleu turned to me and said: 'Are you Rhys' Dad?' Immediately, I was back in those snowy wastes, watching the penguins playing five-a-side. Thinking back, I wish I'd said yes and seen how far I could take it. 'Yes you could say I'm Rhys' Dad, although technically of course his father is a Staffordshire bull terrier. It was a strange time, the Seventies, let me tell you...'

Rhys said, when I told him about this and he'd finished laughing, that he didn't know who should be more insulted, me or him.

I thought me.

However, true to my elderly stereotype, I was among the first to go back to the hotel (a Toby carvery). Rhys, although very anxious that nobody should go home at all, followed about ten minutes later along with Mat, who had spent the previous hour burbling on about how what he really wanted was a nice cup of tea. We had been busy extracting Mini-Cheddars and chocolate bars from the vending machine. Some would have preferred a kebab but, as Dave put it the next day, 'You don't get dysentery from a Yorkie.' Which is the tagline to their new ad campaign, I believe.

Those who didn't return went to what they described the next morning as 'the place with the test tubes', suggesting that they wound up in a secret underground laboratory where strange experiments were carried out on them. Which is pretty much what I expected would happen.

Apres Garage

I went to see Pere Ubu again. I've seen them twice over the past two years and been slightly disappointed. Nevertheless, following a band is a bit like supporting a football team. Or so I imagine. You stick with them through all their concept albums about ducks.

First I had to get a ticket. Since I very seldom part with money online this meant physically going somewhere, in this case the Jazz Cafe in Camden. It was dark, and unoccupied save for a little booth by the door, inside which a woman was struggling to operate a primitive form of Windows. She gave the impression of being new to the job, and even to civilization itself: when the phone rang, her first impulse was not to lift the receiver but to turn the whole thing upside down and frown at it. Nevertheless I got my ticket. Written on it were the mysterious words: 'Relentless Garage Sale'. The gig was at the venue formerly known as the Garage, in Islington, which is now sponsored by a fizzy drink called Relentless. The Relentless Garage sounds like a very peculiar children's picture book. Couldn't they have got a more suitable sponsor? Esso, for example?

Then again, that might have created confusion.

Two things pleased me about the gig. Firstly, I got a seat. Secondly, they played the old stuff. God, that sounds bad. Truth is, though, that whole concept album based on the 19th century Absurdist play was a dead horse which no amount of flogging - or teasing with cattle prods - could lend a semblance of life to. 'I screwed up', admitted lead vocalist David Thomas, having abandoned the scheduled playthrough of that album two songs before the end. After the interval, it was straight into one of their first singles, Final Solution ('Don't need a cure, need a final solution.')

Rarely have those words been greeted with such enthusiasm. 57-year old Thomas berated his audience for preferring the old songs, but he didn't mean it any more than, back in the day, he meant Final Solution to carry certain unfortunate associations. He was young and naive, back then. Not now. 'One day', he serenaded us towards the end of the set, 'I will be your man. One day, I'll be the best that you can do.'

'I'll kill myself first', said one (male) audience member. Rather unkindly I thought.