On some days, I fear my toaster.
It sits in the corner of my kitchen, dowdy in shades of beige and silver, and emmanates a chilling smugness when I slot my bread warily into it's broiling depths. I'm not a technophobe, but more of an inadvertant luddite - on the whole, I approach technology with a certain clandestine joy, throwing the instruction manual gaily over my shoulder and bounding in to get happily covered in machine oil, choked with WD40, and peppered with splinters. Sometimes I finish using, making, or tinkering with something and find it hasn't impaled, burnt, or exploded at me. These are good days, and they are rare. For example, I once made a phone explode by looking at it. Sparks and everything. Often are the times when a friend will return from the bar, a parent from the garden, or a teacher from a quiet smoke, to find me cradling a smoking pile of twisted metal and making apologetic noises.
Truly, there is no hope for such as me. If the robots ever dominate this green globe of ours, then whatever band of desperate rebels remain will wheel me out into the ravaged landscape to combat hulks of metal and malice, where I will pull out my Phillips and Black & Decker and grin winningly as horribly beweaponed war-droids explode into despairing showers around me. I am, in my way, a sort of technological rapture, where the faithful (Simple things that I can't break - pestle & mortar, my aging ipod, and all Nokia phones) will live on, while the sinners (That bastard toaster, for one thing) will be plunged into the abyssal wheelie-bin.
I realize that most toasters are in the same league of dubious convenience as showers - devices where the merest nanometre to the left or the right means the difference between two degrees off ultimate zero and the surface temperatrue of the sun. I understand this, and realize I am not alone. However, I have proof that my toaster not only hates me but is actively trying to kill me.
I understand that the first setting on any toaster is not hot and the, say, fifth setting is burnt. Now then. Who designed that? Who sat down in their swively designers chair and basked in the halogen glow of their angle-poise lamp, thoughtfully sucking a biro, and thought, "Hmm, I sometimes fancy toast that is uncooked, and is therefore essentially bread, and yet in my mind, remains toast, despite the level of heat being equivalent to a Cornish breeze on a July evening. For this, I will devise Level One Toast. Equally, I sometimes like to eat bread that is so burnt it is essentially carbon, and yet I do not want to eat coal or indeed diamonds, as they are difficult to spread butter on, and in the case of diamonds, both harder to come by and considerably more expensive than Warburtons, so for this quandry, I will concoct Level Five Toast."
Presumambly this same designer thought that the idea of toast gently seared to a rich gold, with nary a hint of pallid nor burnt crumbs perverse and pointless, and left it out altogether.
I wouldn't mind, but Level Two And A Half doesn't give you that, as it logically should. It's this contradiction of logic that permeates all human society and exists solely to befuddle people like me. For example, 0 degrees is freezing and 100 degrees is boiling. That is fine, that is logical. But it doesn't stop me believing in my heart of hearts that 70 degrees should be a nice warm temperature.
Anyway, I don't want to get anal about toast. Who would? But to return to the toaster briefly. It is the most malicious item I have ever owned. It has, so far, mildly electrocuted me - possibly as a test to see exactly how much wattage would be needed to boil my internal organs, for maximum hilarity - burnt me more times than I care to remember, and (and this is the impressive bit) tripped me up. Yes, a toaster has indeed made me fall arse over tit twice. Once, when its lead had somehow managed to loop, like a sleeping boa, over the microwave, before falling to the ground and craftily snaring my foot like a triffid, and once again, when it pinged gloatingly at me when I shuffled downstairs once morning, causing me to slip up and deliver a beautiful header into the corner of the fridge. It is a nasty, vindictive bastard of a toaster. I am convinced that the real reason it hates me is because when it was bought I was eying up a sleek George Foreman grill, so now it has abandonment issues bordering on the psychotic, lapsing into murderous rage if I dare to use the grill.
This, really, is yet another example of mankinds mounting obsession with taking all the effort, hardship, and mental taxation out of life and replacing it with new, shiny, chrome-and-titanium effort, hardship, and mental taxation. My on-line banking is there so I can easily track, organize, and authorize my financial transactions at the click of a mouse, ensuring me fiscal security, a zen state of mind and a glowing complexion. However, it actually enables me to forget with depressing regularity a bewildering array of secret answers, user names, and passwords (Incidentally, the password selection process is indictive of the muted hatred technology has for us - only the other day I changed my hotmail password to have my laptop bark, "Too short! Too long! Must use at least one letter, number, and lower/uppercase!") and lock myself out, or, alternately, let myself in to find out just how poor I am (at the click of a mouse!) and thus sending me on a self-destructive path of financial fear all day that culminates in me resigning myself to my fate and buying wildly expensive because I've given up hope and might as well go out with a bang.
The only exceptions to this technological impasse are my ipod, which is old, scarred, slow, and chunky, like a veteran stray cat, my typewriter, which is one of the worst designed and viciously serrated pieces of equipment its ever been my (mis)fortune to have my fingers torn to ribbons by (Although it is very beautiful and I like the smell of india ink) and itunes, which is my pride and joy and keeps me sedated with Mogwai when I go through the rigamorole of on-line banking again.
Friday, 16 April 2010
Tuesday, 23 March 2010
Bear Grylls Über Alles!
There can be few greater pleasures in life - if we take life to mean when you don't have anything better to do and/or are putting something off - than lying on a sofa with friends and bitching relentlessly about what you're watching, while making no attempt to grasp the remote (which is four inches away) with your obviously bloated and arthritis-raddled fingers to change the channel.
I, for example, would quite like to twat Bear Grylls. You know, the overgrown boy scout? Brick jaw, close-set eyes (A sign of an unstable mind in Phrenology apparently, take note). He leapt off a helicopter into the ocean the other day to get to Namibia, into the freezing Atlantic waters just off the Skeleton Coast - "What I'm about to do is really dangerous; this is one of the most violent stretches of water... (Dramatic emphasis, hushed voice, drop an octave like Jeremy Clarkson)... in the world."
Really? Why do it then?
He was plodding - no, sorry, he never plods, he sprints unnecessarily - through the Bornean jungle a bit later. Busy, busy little man. He saw a placid green tree snake, squealed a boyish squeal of delight, launched into a lecture on its many fascinating habits, extolled its beauty, and lapsed into admiring silence. Then, he looked at it thoughtfully for a bit. Then he bit its head off. I don't know why. It seemed a bit strong really, just to show how hard he was.
A bit later on, he was above the snowline in Patagonia, shivering hypothermically in a dug-out shelter, with his hat on, and his ear-flaps up. Now, I'm not a hard bastard really - despite appearances to the contrary, obviously - and I've never been in the SAS, but it seems to me that you if you lose most of the heat in your body through your head, covering up your ears might be wise. Dappy doesn't cover his ears, and who'd listen to Dappy? Anyway, he was clearly a bit chilly, and he said, "This is dangerously cold. I could die up here quite easily", in the same harmonics that you or me might use to say, "I could be given a really nice present!". Truly, there is no understanding some people's conception of fun. Some people find pleasure in masochism. Some find it in really hard crosswords. Some people even derive enjoyment from jazz. Bear Grylls derives his from the possibility of contracting a flesh-eating virus in Sumatra.
It follows then that Bear Grylls is dangerous, and you should not let him near your children, lest he take them on a trip to your suburban playpark, liberally scatter landmines about the footie pitch, dig a bloody great trench, fill it with Solenopsis Invicta - the Red Fire Ant to you and me - and lob your nippers in. This is what Bear Grylls does to relax of an afternoon, incidentally. Goes swimming in ants.
Which brings me on to part two. I tread trembling and unsettled ground here - the televisual equivalent of the San Andreas Fault. Because I'd like to slag off the One Show. I have a lot of friends - the bulk, I suppose - who are students, and for some of them, Angry Adrian and Chirpy Christina are Godheads of a kind, second only to Schofield and Britton. There are other Illuminati - Ben Fogle, That Bastard from Bargain Hunt (The one who's not David Dickinson, who I harbour a paticular hatred for), the Top Gear crew on endless Dave re-runs, but The One Show has a vice-like grip, a full-nelson if you will, on evening TV.
And it's like having your brain massaged with big, pink, beautifully moisturised hands. Or a swift lobotomy. As I watched it, I could feel my jaw slackening, my tensile neck muscles relaxing as my lower pate sunk down to somewhere around chest level. A little bit of dribble came out. This is what I normally get when I watch, say, an Arnold Schwarznegger vehicle, not middle-Britain de jour TV.
I am using my valuble time - I could be eating a cake - to watch a bubbly Irish woman tolerate grumpy Adrian as he clandestinely gets to grips with the great and good. David Attenborough was on the other day, the great David Attenborough, and they asked him if he watched Britain's Got Talent. I'm sorry, what? He didn't, as it happens, but he did know about it. Simon Cowell already heads up the broken remains of the Weimar Republic and controls the world through a secret organization using the shattered stock market, political insinuation and Jedward (Come on, keep up), so it's only right that he's burrowed into the minds of learned types too, like the little cultural Tick he is.
There's nothing wrong with The One Show, as such. But it's a bit like my mobile phone, or on-line banking: theoretically, they exist to help, ease, and calm me, but actually, they all make me a little bit more tense and worried than I was before. My phone allows unsavoury types to plague me, reminds me to reply swiftly to friends, lest I spark offence and outrage, and bequeaths me with a bill that I can't pay at the end of each month. My on-line NatWest account allows me to quickly and effortlessly access and assess the extent of my abject poverty and plunge me further into worry. And The One Show, as a light, informative mode of entertainment, is there to remind me that my wit, guile, and funtional intelligence - my tools for tax evasion and exam blagging and all sorts - are slowly but surely being drained away by Adrian droning on about self-heating meals.
He really was, you know.
I, for example, would quite like to twat Bear Grylls. You know, the overgrown boy scout? Brick jaw, close-set eyes (A sign of an unstable mind in Phrenology apparently, take note). He leapt off a helicopter into the ocean the other day to get to Namibia, into the freezing Atlantic waters just off the Skeleton Coast - "What I'm about to do is really dangerous; this is one of the most violent stretches of water... (Dramatic emphasis, hushed voice, drop an octave like Jeremy Clarkson)... in the world."
Really? Why do it then?
He was plodding - no, sorry, he never plods, he sprints unnecessarily - through the Bornean jungle a bit later. Busy, busy little man. He saw a placid green tree snake, squealed a boyish squeal of delight, launched into a lecture on its many fascinating habits, extolled its beauty, and lapsed into admiring silence. Then, he looked at it thoughtfully for a bit. Then he bit its head off. I don't know why. It seemed a bit strong really, just to show how hard he was.
A bit later on, he was above the snowline in Patagonia, shivering hypothermically in a dug-out shelter, with his hat on, and his ear-flaps up. Now, I'm not a hard bastard really - despite appearances to the contrary, obviously - and I've never been in the SAS, but it seems to me that you if you lose most of the heat in your body through your head, covering up your ears might be wise. Dappy doesn't cover his ears, and who'd listen to Dappy? Anyway, he was clearly a bit chilly, and he said, "This is dangerously cold. I could die up here quite easily", in the same harmonics that you or me might use to say, "I could be given a really nice present!". Truly, there is no understanding some people's conception of fun. Some people find pleasure in masochism. Some find it in really hard crosswords. Some people even derive enjoyment from jazz. Bear Grylls derives his from the possibility of contracting a flesh-eating virus in Sumatra.
It follows then that Bear Grylls is dangerous, and you should not let him near your children, lest he take them on a trip to your suburban playpark, liberally scatter landmines about the footie pitch, dig a bloody great trench, fill it with Solenopsis Invicta - the Red Fire Ant to you and me - and lob your nippers in. This is what Bear Grylls does to relax of an afternoon, incidentally. Goes swimming in ants.
Which brings me on to part two. I tread trembling and unsettled ground here - the televisual equivalent of the San Andreas Fault. Because I'd like to slag off the One Show. I have a lot of friends - the bulk, I suppose - who are students, and for some of them, Angry Adrian and Chirpy Christina are Godheads of a kind, second only to Schofield and Britton. There are other Illuminati - Ben Fogle, That Bastard from Bargain Hunt (The one who's not David Dickinson, who I harbour a paticular hatred for), the Top Gear crew on endless Dave re-runs, but The One Show has a vice-like grip, a full-nelson if you will, on evening TV.
And it's like having your brain massaged with big, pink, beautifully moisturised hands. Or a swift lobotomy. As I watched it, I could feel my jaw slackening, my tensile neck muscles relaxing as my lower pate sunk down to somewhere around chest level. A little bit of dribble came out. This is what I normally get when I watch, say, an Arnold Schwarznegger vehicle, not middle-Britain de jour TV.
I am using my valuble time - I could be eating a cake - to watch a bubbly Irish woman tolerate grumpy Adrian as he clandestinely gets to grips with the great and good. David Attenborough was on the other day, the great David Attenborough, and they asked him if he watched Britain's Got Talent. I'm sorry, what? He didn't, as it happens, but he did know about it. Simon Cowell already heads up the broken remains of the Weimar Republic and controls the world through a secret organization using the shattered stock market, political insinuation and Jedward (Come on, keep up), so it's only right that he's burrowed into the minds of learned types too, like the little cultural Tick he is.
There's nothing wrong with The One Show, as such. But it's a bit like my mobile phone, or on-line banking: theoretically, they exist to help, ease, and calm me, but actually, they all make me a little bit more tense and worried than I was before. My phone allows unsavoury types to plague me, reminds me to reply swiftly to friends, lest I spark offence and outrage, and bequeaths me with a bill that I can't pay at the end of each month. My on-line NatWest account allows me to quickly and effortlessly access and assess the extent of my abject poverty and plunge me further into worry. And The One Show, as a light, informative mode of entertainment, is there to remind me that my wit, guile, and funtional intelligence - my tools for tax evasion and exam blagging and all sorts - are slowly but surely being drained away by Adrian droning on about self-heating meals.
He really was, you know.
The Gospel According To Pete
Even for November, this is taking the piss.
Half-time, so me and the fellas are out front, right outside, bang in the element, in a little courtyard. It is mashing it down. Smokers are hard done by in this country. Get to stand in our own segregated patio, like lepers, like fuckin’ pariahs.
I blame the Tories. There’s a bit of thing for having a dig at the old liberals at the mo, but I’d rather have a poncy liberal from Hampstead then some posh nonce from Chelsea, know what I mean? Cameron don’t know nuffin’ about living on an estate in the East End. Brown, worl, he’s got a dodgy eye. Bit porky. Fallible. Bare-knuckle boy, like me. Fair play to him, I say. Lesser of two evils, as the poet puts it. Hur hur.
Was a time personal liberty was just that – you could do what you fancied. But now, if I enjoy my quality tobacco product inside, turns out I’m killing that blonde bird who’s scowling at me. And she’s a good ten-feet away.
She looks like a whinger. Look at that horrible little dog she’s got. A rat. A nicely groomed rat, I’ll give her that, but still a rat.
Daft bint.
Blimey. I’d written off rising sea levels and all that global warming malarkey as one of them Green fings what I don’t worry about on account of the fact that it’s all a load of scare-mongering rubbish and I’ve got duties, I have, I’ve got kids, but the way it’s coming down right now, we’ll be up to up to our arseholes in ocean by tomorrow.
“What you reckon of Westham’s chances then, Pete? Relegation on the way?”
Worl. Judging by Zola’s performance so far, s’only a matter of time, really? ‘Course, I don’t voice that opinion. No. Don’t do to let the side down. So I say what the lads want to hear, which is, “Nah, mate. Zola’s a bit of a playboy, bit of a dancer, but he’s one of them Latino types (Big laugh), can’t help it. Good manger though. Give him time, boys. Give him time”.
They all nod their heads sagely at this. Much drawing of fag smoke and supping of pints. Pete’s got it bang on, as per usual.
‘Course, that’s how it works round my way. You stand by your mates. You stand by your woman, even if she moans the place down about you rolling in from the pub late slash pissed. You stand firm, even if she does demand more trips to Ikea to get cupboards and lampshades what cost me a fuckin’ fortune... and do I get any recognition for getting up at 5am to stand in the rain and wind chipping ice for Brixham beam-haulers to pack Icelandic Cod in, and me with my lumbago? Do I fuck.
I feel quite ‘urt sometimes, I really do.
And you stand by your team. What you feel isn’t what matters, sorta fing. You don’t let the side down.
Look at Gaz. Look at that hair-cut. Like a bog-brush. No, like a parrot. ‘Course, Gaz thinks he looks the bollocks, the very bollocks, but actually, he looks like my landlady’s moulting Cockatoo.
Cockatoo. I do make myself chuckle, sometimes. Hur.
Now Gaz is banging on about the need to send more troops to Iraq to deal with the Taliban. Gaz calls anyone brown “Arabs”: A-rabs, like that. And the Taliban are in fuckin’ Afghanistan, as any pillock knows. He’s saying how we need give them a taste of Bulldog Britain; a belting round the back of The Crown & Thistle etcetera. Gaz likes that sort of thing. Bit of an animal. Bit of an old-school thug, you might say. Likes a taste of splashed blood. I keep clear of him when he’s in one of them moods.
Len’s piped up. What’s he saying? He’s trying to calm Gaz down, isn’t he? Gaz gets a bit frothy now and then. Bit piss and vinegar. And then someone says something – anything – and he goes off on one and ends up in the caring arms of the old bill, and some kid’s got his arm broken in three places.
My nephew was killed in Iraq. Nice lad. Bit quiet. Spotty, face like the surface of the moon. Thought the uniform would get the birds, no doubt. Hur.
Bit of shrapnel through the temple. Whammo. Like that. And there he was, gone.
And now Gaz reckons we should make National Service compulsory, butcher the A-rabs, make footie the state religion – none of “this Allah shit.”
Sometimes he makes me so fucking despondent.
I thought of a nice little example about sticking with your team, too. Wifey, yeah? She tries on a pair of jeans, and her arse is all over the shop – like, two pumpkins in a sack, right? You wouldn’t say, “Yeah, your bum looks massive, love”. You just wouldn’t, am I right, or am I right? ‘Course I am. Anyway, that’s your team. Don’t matter if Zola’s a bit, y’know, continental. Don’t matter if my back seizes up some mornings, apparently. Don’t matter if Gaz has frankly got Rabies. Don’t matter.
You want to stick with Papa Pete, you do. I know what’s going on.
Hur.
Half-time, so me and the fellas are out front, right outside, bang in the element, in a little courtyard. It is mashing it down. Smokers are hard done by in this country. Get to stand in our own segregated patio, like lepers, like fuckin’ pariahs.
I blame the Tories. There’s a bit of thing for having a dig at the old liberals at the mo, but I’d rather have a poncy liberal from Hampstead then some posh nonce from Chelsea, know what I mean? Cameron don’t know nuffin’ about living on an estate in the East End. Brown, worl, he’s got a dodgy eye. Bit porky. Fallible. Bare-knuckle boy, like me. Fair play to him, I say. Lesser of two evils, as the poet puts it. Hur hur.
Was a time personal liberty was just that – you could do what you fancied. But now, if I enjoy my quality tobacco product inside, turns out I’m killing that blonde bird who’s scowling at me. And she’s a good ten-feet away.
She looks like a whinger. Look at that horrible little dog she’s got. A rat. A nicely groomed rat, I’ll give her that, but still a rat.
Daft bint.
Blimey. I’d written off rising sea levels and all that global warming malarkey as one of them Green fings what I don’t worry about on account of the fact that it’s all a load of scare-mongering rubbish and I’ve got duties, I have, I’ve got kids, but the way it’s coming down right now, we’ll be up to up to our arseholes in ocean by tomorrow.
“What you reckon of Westham’s chances then, Pete? Relegation on the way?”
Worl. Judging by Zola’s performance so far, s’only a matter of time, really? ‘Course, I don’t voice that opinion. No. Don’t do to let the side down. So I say what the lads want to hear, which is, “Nah, mate. Zola’s a bit of a playboy, bit of a dancer, but he’s one of them Latino types (Big laugh), can’t help it. Good manger though. Give him time, boys. Give him time”.
They all nod their heads sagely at this. Much drawing of fag smoke and supping of pints. Pete’s got it bang on, as per usual.
‘Course, that’s how it works round my way. You stand by your mates. You stand by your woman, even if she moans the place down about you rolling in from the pub late slash pissed. You stand firm, even if she does demand more trips to Ikea to get cupboards and lampshades what cost me a fuckin’ fortune... and do I get any recognition for getting up at 5am to stand in the rain and wind chipping ice for Brixham beam-haulers to pack Icelandic Cod in, and me with my lumbago? Do I fuck.
I feel quite ‘urt sometimes, I really do.
And you stand by your team. What you feel isn’t what matters, sorta fing. You don’t let the side down.
Look at Gaz. Look at that hair-cut. Like a bog-brush. No, like a parrot. ‘Course, Gaz thinks he looks the bollocks, the very bollocks, but actually, he looks like my landlady’s moulting Cockatoo.
Cockatoo. I do make myself chuckle, sometimes. Hur.
Now Gaz is banging on about the need to send more troops to Iraq to deal with the Taliban. Gaz calls anyone brown “Arabs”: A-rabs, like that. And the Taliban are in fuckin’ Afghanistan, as any pillock knows. He’s saying how we need give them a taste of Bulldog Britain; a belting round the back of The Crown & Thistle etcetera. Gaz likes that sort of thing. Bit of an animal. Bit of an old-school thug, you might say. Likes a taste of splashed blood. I keep clear of him when he’s in one of them moods.
Len’s piped up. What’s he saying? He’s trying to calm Gaz down, isn’t he? Gaz gets a bit frothy now and then. Bit piss and vinegar. And then someone says something – anything – and he goes off on one and ends up in the caring arms of the old bill, and some kid’s got his arm broken in three places.
My nephew was killed in Iraq. Nice lad. Bit quiet. Spotty, face like the surface of the moon. Thought the uniform would get the birds, no doubt. Hur.
Bit of shrapnel through the temple. Whammo. Like that. And there he was, gone.
And now Gaz reckons we should make National Service compulsory, butcher the A-rabs, make footie the state religion – none of “this Allah shit.”
Sometimes he makes me so fucking despondent.
I thought of a nice little example about sticking with your team, too. Wifey, yeah? She tries on a pair of jeans, and her arse is all over the shop – like, two pumpkins in a sack, right? You wouldn’t say, “Yeah, your bum looks massive, love”. You just wouldn’t, am I right, or am I right? ‘Course I am. Anyway, that’s your team. Don’t matter if Zola’s a bit, y’know, continental. Don’t matter if my back seizes up some mornings, apparently. Don’t matter if Gaz has frankly got Rabies. Don’t matter.
You want to stick with Papa Pete, you do. I know what’s going on.
Hur.
Rushes & Reeds
Ideas have fetches. As with a wave, an idea breaks upon the brain like a wave train. It washes across ribbed sand spits and provokes thoughts where it sinks into the wet dunes. Which is why I migrate towards water - preferably running, noisy water - when I need to think.
I am sitting at the bend in my river. I have no formal ownership of this section of the river – no paperwork, signatures, documents, legislation – and it’s hardly a river, more a thread of torpid water that glazes the valley-bottom, like a blue ribbon measured out across green cloth, or as, the parish’s ruddy-cheeked local priest puts it, “like a spilt pint across the baize of a pool-table”, which I imagine is partly poetic expression, and partly experience.
The canal, for that is what is, doesn’t wind elegantly, or rush in excitable torrents. It instead runs straight as a die through bulrushes and watermint and pondweed, suctioning damply at the mud banks like a tongue probing for a lost tooth. It is, in its way, a profoundly uninteresting section of water. But it is mine, and I can sit by it in summer and winter and find hidden things and be rewarded by the flash of colour in the dun, and by the blur of movement in the still.
Kingfishers live in the spinney. I’m not sure where exactly – the banks do not seem high enough to accommodate their warrens, and the winter floods would drown anything lower than the high woods on the ridge-line – but I’ve seen them in summer, if you can call glimpsing a blurred shard of blue-and-orange 'seeing'. They peep and pipe throughout Spring, and as with most hidden things, are easier to hear than see. I have heard a Bittern, once, and it’s harsh, irritable, “crak”, with the middle ‘a’ accentuated (á) to create the, “arr” sound, is an annual rite of passage. But I’ve never seen it, largely because Bitterns are secretive, shy, and a dull, flecked brown.
Nevertheless, for what it’s worth, this is my bit of the river. The anglers don’t agree, and perch over the water, spindly carbon-fibre rods dangling over the stream like the legs of a Cranefly, twitching as in a breeze with the nibblings of Ten-Spined Sticklebacks. Ten-Spined Sticklebacks are apparently quite rare, but no-one told the ones in this section of the Brede River, which breed with gusto and provide vital fuel in the summer for lots of birds that live in or around the main spinney.
Sometimes I lie flat on my back on a natural bank, raised at a slight incline, and look at the clouds scudding by. I like to look at clouds, but today I am looking for a Buzzard.
Buzzards are the birds which make the lonely, mewling cries in wilderness scenes in films. People assume the cries are Eagles of some kind, because Buzzards are a bit lowly and common to be the guardians of the wilderness. Buzzards are, for me at least, as much a sign of solitude and wild land as the howls of wolves or coyotes. They are one of the most evocative sounds I can think of, largely, it must be said, due to half my family being Canadian - along with the lowing of a freight-train in North America, the two-tone warble of the Great Northern Diver, the plash of a car wheels in heavy rain, and the winter hub-bub of conversation in a busy pub, they're an inclusive part of my make-up. Buzzards wheeling overhead and piercing the sky with spearing cries are as much part of winter for me as caramelising apple-wood in a bonfire, or the deadening lull of snow-fall, or the searing rush of whisky down my throat in The Anchor, with friends, on Christmas Eve.
I am sitting at the bend in my river. I have no formal ownership of this section of the river – no paperwork, signatures, documents, legislation – and it’s hardly a river, more a thread of torpid water that glazes the valley-bottom, like a blue ribbon measured out across green cloth, or as, the parish’s ruddy-cheeked local priest puts it, “like a spilt pint across the baize of a pool-table”, which I imagine is partly poetic expression, and partly experience.
The canal, for that is what is, doesn’t wind elegantly, or rush in excitable torrents. It instead runs straight as a die through bulrushes and watermint and pondweed, suctioning damply at the mud banks like a tongue probing for a lost tooth. It is, in its way, a profoundly uninteresting section of water. But it is mine, and I can sit by it in summer and winter and find hidden things and be rewarded by the flash of colour in the dun, and by the blur of movement in the still.
Kingfishers live in the spinney. I’m not sure where exactly – the banks do not seem high enough to accommodate their warrens, and the winter floods would drown anything lower than the high woods on the ridge-line – but I’ve seen them in summer, if you can call glimpsing a blurred shard of blue-and-orange 'seeing'. They peep and pipe throughout Spring, and as with most hidden things, are easier to hear than see. I have heard a Bittern, once, and it’s harsh, irritable, “crak”, with the middle ‘a’ accentuated (á) to create the, “arr” sound, is an annual rite of passage. But I’ve never seen it, largely because Bitterns are secretive, shy, and a dull, flecked brown.
Nevertheless, for what it’s worth, this is my bit of the river. The anglers don’t agree, and perch over the water, spindly carbon-fibre rods dangling over the stream like the legs of a Cranefly, twitching as in a breeze with the nibblings of Ten-Spined Sticklebacks. Ten-Spined Sticklebacks are apparently quite rare, but no-one told the ones in this section of the Brede River, which breed with gusto and provide vital fuel in the summer for lots of birds that live in or around the main spinney.
Sometimes I lie flat on my back on a natural bank, raised at a slight incline, and look at the clouds scudding by. I like to look at clouds, but today I am looking for a Buzzard.
Buzzards are the birds which make the lonely, mewling cries in wilderness scenes in films. People assume the cries are Eagles of some kind, because Buzzards are a bit lowly and common to be the guardians of the wilderness. Buzzards are, for me at least, as much a sign of solitude and wild land as the howls of wolves or coyotes. They are one of the most evocative sounds I can think of, largely, it must be said, due to half my family being Canadian - along with the lowing of a freight-train in North America, the two-tone warble of the Great Northern Diver, the plash of a car wheels in heavy rain, and the winter hub-bub of conversation in a busy pub, they're an inclusive part of my make-up. Buzzards wheeling overhead and piercing the sky with spearing cries are as much part of winter for me as caramelising apple-wood in a bonfire, or the deadening lull of snow-fall, or the searing rush of whisky down my throat in The Anchor, with friends, on Christmas Eve.
Sound Of March
http://open.spotify.com/user/trade_winds/playlist/4ewLjPW0qZvzyj9CSGwkm5
Usual monthly aural update, for discerning eustachian tubes the world over.
Usual monthly aural update, for discerning eustachian tubes the world over.
Soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car
Tom Waits fans are a peculiar breed. The Wolfman does not promote a cult of personality - Waits shys away instinctively from all self-promotion, is notoriously cagey in the presence of journalists and devotees, and seems at times to make his work deliberately inaccessible, as anyone who's listened to some of the vaudevillian nightmares of Mule Variations, The Black Rider, and Bastards will testify.
Waits is a relentless inventor and, musically, something of an auteur - he is famed for being obsessively precise in articulating his lyrics, arrangements, art-work, and so on. For a man who actively promotes "the unfinished article - warts and scars and all", he is minutely anal about getting "it" right; an off-key passage, the whine of a string breaking, the clonk of a chair-leg falling through the fissures in a floor-board, the imperfectly timed cough - all of these combine in Waits songs to create an atmosphere that is uniquely Waitsian.
Even the term 'Waitsian' carries weight in the annals of musical journalism; its definition is obviously imprecise, spanning as it does everything from Closing Time-era balladry (Showing Waits fascination with Tin Pan Alley classic songwriting, subtly influenced by the standard template of 20's and 30's blues musicians; Waits has stated many times that Hoagy Carmichael and Howlin' Wolf were as important to him as Kerouac and Dylan) to the sleazy noir of SwordFishTrombones, all the way to the bleached-bone scare stories of Bone Machine. But if Waits imprecision and elusiveness is his hallmark of choice, then it adds to his mystique - he has made a career out of being un-pindownable, impossible to nail the ragged, smoke-stained voice to the collecting board of genre.
'Waitsian' is generally taken to mean any sludgy, detuned varietal of music-hall villain, world-weary minstrel, and mad inventor in the basement, stapling steaks to washboards and shooting Zildjian cymbals at point-blank range with a twelve-bore, and while this is a key feature of a lot of Waits oeuvre (Sleazy down-and-out characters pissing their lives in glorious tragi-comedy up the wall, somewhere off Skid Row), his work is also populated with a cast of freakish figures that rebound disquietingly off real life - the high-school jock who ended up sleeping with transsexual prostitutes, the ghost truck driver, the long-distance lovelorn call from Istanbul. It’s the superimposition of the normal and pathetic upon the surreal and grotesque that makes it so compelling.
Anyway, here's a few highlights from the whole span of Waits's work. Enjoy!
http://www.aquariumdrunkard.com/2010/01/04/tom-waits-nighthawks-on-the-radio-1976-wnew-fm-nyc/
http://bigshouldersporter.blogspot.com/2007/11/fill-in-blank-playlist.html
http://www.sandiegoserenade.com/2006/06/springsteen_seals_n_shit.html
http://monkeybastardsv20.blogspot.com/2009/03/mannish-boy.html
Get that down your ear-pipes.
Waits is a relentless inventor and, musically, something of an auteur - he is famed for being obsessively precise in articulating his lyrics, arrangements, art-work, and so on. For a man who actively promotes "the unfinished article - warts and scars and all", he is minutely anal about getting "it" right; an off-key passage, the whine of a string breaking, the clonk of a chair-leg falling through the fissures in a floor-board, the imperfectly timed cough - all of these combine in Waits songs to create an atmosphere that is uniquely Waitsian.
Even the term 'Waitsian' carries weight in the annals of musical journalism; its definition is obviously imprecise, spanning as it does everything from Closing Time-era balladry (Showing Waits fascination with Tin Pan Alley classic songwriting, subtly influenced by the standard template of 20's and 30's blues musicians; Waits has stated many times that Hoagy Carmichael and Howlin' Wolf were as important to him as Kerouac and Dylan) to the sleazy noir of SwordFishTrombones, all the way to the bleached-bone scare stories of Bone Machine. But if Waits imprecision and elusiveness is his hallmark of choice, then it adds to his mystique - he has made a career out of being un-pindownable, impossible to nail the ragged, smoke-stained voice to the collecting board of genre.
'Waitsian' is generally taken to mean any sludgy, detuned varietal of music-hall villain, world-weary minstrel, and mad inventor in the basement, stapling steaks to washboards and shooting Zildjian cymbals at point-blank range with a twelve-bore, and while this is a key feature of a lot of Waits oeuvre (Sleazy down-and-out characters pissing their lives in glorious tragi-comedy up the wall, somewhere off Skid Row), his work is also populated with a cast of freakish figures that rebound disquietingly off real life - the high-school jock who ended up sleeping with transsexual prostitutes, the ghost truck driver, the long-distance lovelorn call from Istanbul. It’s the superimposition of the normal and pathetic upon the surreal and grotesque that makes it so compelling.
Anyway, here's a few highlights from the whole span of Waits's work. Enjoy!
http://www.aquariumdrunkard.com/2010/01/04/tom-waits-nighthawks-on-the-radio-1976-wnew-fm-nyc/
http://bigshouldersporter.blogspot.com/2007/11/fill-in-blank-playlist.html
http://www.sandiegoserenade.com/2006/06/springsteen_seals_n_shit.html
http://monkeybastardsv20.blogspot.com/2009/03/mannish-boy.html
Get that down your ear-pipes.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
