Cocktails and Records

A story in this week’s episode of the radio programme/podcast This American Life tackles that age old conundrum: Which superpower would you prefer – the power of flight or the power of invisibility?

The reporter behind the story, John Hodgman, seems to have spent a not inconsiderable amount of time examining this very question. He’s researched the issue over many years and has now compiled a vital analysis of people’s responses.

His findings reveal that most people know instantly which superpower they would choose, almost as though they have been pondering it all their lives. This rings true with me. As soon as he mentioned the options I knew that I wanted to fly.

He then goes on to point out that absolutely no one actually wants to use their superpower for fighting crime and saving people from collapsing buildings as superheroes are supposed to. No, mostly they want to use them to spy on ex’s and work colleagues, perve at other people, nick stuff and get to pub quickly. Exactly. I want to fly because I want to feel the cool wind rushing through my hair, enjoy the view below me and never have to encounter mustard and banana loving commuters ever again.

So what about you – flying or invisibility? And what are you going to use it for?*

*Analysis of people’s decisions also suggests that choice of superpower says a lot about your personality. Allegedly. But lets not go there. Just because I dream of the power of flight doesn’t mean that I’ve got some kind of guileless, show off, hero complex alright.

Some time ago I developed an unnatural interest in those vacuous celebrities of the 1920s known as the Bright Young People. I watched documentaries about professionally posh prats like Brian Howard and Nancy Mitford, poured over their portraits by Cecil Beaton, read Evelyn Waugh’s mirth-making Vile Bodies again and revelled in the salacious details of Circus Parties* and Bath and Bottle Parties** in DJ Taylor’s book, Bright Young People.

All that remained was to see Terence Rattigan’s ‘lost’ play about the period called After the Dance.

Happily it’s now showing at the National Theatre.

So I took myself along to see it.

After the Dance is very good (and not just because it stars the lovely Benedict Cumberbatch). A sharp, witty look at inter-generational conflict, it also examines what happens when people try to hang on to their youth for too long. It’s not pretty.

But the most impressive / horrific (I can’t quite make up my mind) thing about it is the drinking. The play starts with most of the main characters being hung-over and continues with them enjoying post-breakfast drinks, pre-lunch drinks, afternoon drinks and well, any-other-time drinks. They are never away from the drinks cabinet and the cocktail shaker. This is the kind of lifestyle you can only maintain if you have a butler named Williams, shamelessly use the words ‘drinky-poo’ and your sole occupation is drunkenly dictating a pointless biography of ‘King Bomba of Naples’ to the hired help at 5am in the morning. Still, I’m kind of jealous.

The sad practicalities of life demand that I limit myself to a tiresomely small number of cocktails each week. I’m pleased to say, however, that I have managed to locate a new favourite recently. It is called the ‘Fiesta’. They probably didn’t drink it in the 20s but hey, its the closest I’ll get to Bright Young Person style exuberance these days.

Fiesta
- dash lime juice
- dash grenadine
- 3/4 oz Noilly Prat
- 3/4 oz Calvados
- 3/4 oz white rum

Stir over ice cubes and strain into chilled cocktail glasses.

* Come dressed as a trapeze artist or lion tamer
** at St George’s Swimming Baths, Buckingham Palace Road. Guests were required to wear at Bathing Suit and bring a towel and a Bottle. It was simply divine.

You may remember that some months ago I encountered a big fan of the humble banana on a train journey. Well, yesterday I had the (mis)fortune to meet his evil twin.

Again, I had innocently boarded the tube and settled in for a quiet journey in the company of a book. There was only one other person in the carriage. He was sitting diagonally opposite me with a plastic supermarket carrier bag on his lap and a bread knife in his hand.

Needless to say, my interest was piqued.

My fellow tube traveller reached into his bag and casually pulled out a slice of loose white bread and a jar of Colman’s English Mustard. Evenly, thickly and smoothly, he carefully spread the mustard across the bread before proceeding to eat this mustardy morsel in a couple of happy bites.

Not being a huge fan of mustard myself, I struggled to stay immersed in my book. I desperately tried to ignore him as he smacked his lips and reached into the bag for another slice. But try as I might, my nose wrinkled and my stomach clenched as he smothered an even thicker layer of mustard onto this next piece of bread.

As the carriage filled though, fortunately so did his belly. After two more slices of mustard bread and a quick lick of the mustardy knife, he put the remains of the Colman’s jar back into the carrier bag, got off the train, and left me in mustard-free peace.

So this really begs two questions:

1. Is the solo mustard sandwich a frequent occurrence that I just haven’t met until now?
2. Why do these things happen to me?

A scammer attempted to scam me today. It was quite amusing.

He called the office this morning and attempted to convince me that the free listing our organisation had been enjoying in something called City Map which was now sadly coming to an end. To confirm that we didn’t want to continue with this generous offer in a ‘well known’ publication I’ve never actually heard of, I just had to sign and fax back a form that he was sending over right now.

So the fax duly arrives. It is a poorly laid out sheet of A4 utilising three different font types in eight (count them!) sizes and contains a proof of ‘our ad’. Our logo is wrong and our company information incorrect in both content and spelling.

The fax includes some humorous instructions like ‘The advertising will materialise after the placing of the order’ and other contractual information which is clearly made up. It also includes some crafty clauses indicating that if you sign this form you’re not actually cancelling the free listing that you’re not aware that you have, but ordering £1,697 of display advertising which you can’t cancel for two years instead.

But, small print aside, who would fall for this scam? This is people working in marketing and communications that they are targeting – vacuous people like me who judge things entirely by how many font sizes and spelling mistakes there are. Such a poorly executed scam deserves to fail. Put some effort in scammers!!!

A funny thing happened to me on the way home this evening… something that I’ve only ever seen happen ‘abroad’.

You see, a woman rushed up to me at my local suburban train station tonight as I was approaching the escalators. She explained in a peculiar mixture of frantic embarrassment that she had too much luggage to take by herself, that she was kind of scared she might fall down the escalator and could I help her until her husband arrived. So I took a suitcase and a bag, and once at the foot of the escalator, I assisted her in stacking a somewhat formidable pile of luggage while we waited for her husband to come down with their baby. I then pointed them in the direction of central London, they thanked me and we went off our separate ways.

The odd thing was that this all happened in French.

As much as I’ve cringed at some of my fellow English speaking natives shameless usage  of the  ‘loud and slow’ dialect in other countries, I don’t think anyone has ever just randomly started speaking to me in another language whilst in the UK or Australia.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. I don’t know whether I’m more surprised that I could communicate with her (especially considering my poor relationship with my French classes over the past year) or the fact that she just assumed that everyone at the station spoke French and wasn’t in the faintest bit taken aback that I did. Perhaps some people think higher of the foreign language speaking skills of this country than we do. Either that, or fear of the escalator conquers all.

I couldn’t get to sleep the other night. Even Mondo’s trusty old method of counting down an A-Z of some boring topic like ‘indie bands from 1991′ wasn’t working. I just remained frustratingly wide awake. So I went to the book shelves to see what I could find to soothe my sleepless misery and my hand seemed to be drawn to a book I haven’t read since 1986: Mary Norton’s The Borrowers.

And boy, it was good.

It’s odd re-reading a dimly remembered book from your childhood. Of course I remembered the vague outline of the plot, but the details were long lost so the story was relatively fresh. I probably enjoyed reading it as much as I did when I was 11.

However, it didn’t feel the same. I seem to remember that once upon a time I became absolutely immersed in a book, I couldn’t put it down, I lived in there with the characters and wanted it to go on and on and on.

I spent hours reading. I read before school, I read in the car and I read under the bed clothes at night. I read my way through the shelves of both my school library and the local library. I read everything from the classics like What Katy Did and Anne of Green Gables, to every fad series going, from the Bobbsey Twins and Nancy Drew to Sweet Valley High and Choose Your Own Adventure. I read my Grandma’s girls’ boarding school books from the 40s and the 70s/80s teen equivalents by Judy Blume and Cynthia Voigt. I read trash fantasy series by David Eddings and distressing sci-fi by Kurt Vonnegut. I just read. All the time.

But not any more. I rarely read any fiction these days. I’m not sure why. It’s not that I couldn’t make the time if I wanted to. I think it might be that a precarious combination of cynicism, a long neglected imagination, the stress of everyday life and a seriously limited attention span means that I just can’t sit there and be properly lost in anything any more. It’s not the same as when I was 13 and pathetic as it may seem, I’m kind of sad about that.

‘Good girl’ said the dentist ‘I can see you’ve been looking after your teeth – even if you haven’t seen me for two whole years.’

‘Yes’ I think, silently stewing as she scrapes away at my teeth like a chisel-wielding maniac, ‘they have invented toothbrushes now, you know.’

How can these people be so patronising? Do they actually think that making me feel like a ten year old will get me to make regular visits? Or is it the power of having someone trapped in the chair beneath them, the threateningly bright lights and the sucky thing?

Yes, I’ve been to the dentist this morning.* It wasn’t unpleasant, just annoying. From the quite frankly bizarre selection of magazines (Attitude, The World of Interiors and Lancashire Life**) when you arrive to the ‘And you’ll be making your appointment for six months time?’ breeziness of the receptionist when you leave, the whole experience just irritates.

I think that it is, like with my old friend the optician, the expectation that you should troop off to see them and their ilk at regular intervals (even if you have absolutely no need to) and that they don’t hesitate in reminding you of this fact. Oh, it’s for your health and all that, but who has regular visits to the doctor just for the hell of it?

So I want to get to the bottom of this once and for all. Does anyone actually go to the dentist and/or hygienist every six months? Is this number plucked from the air in the hope that you might go at least once a year? It is just opportunistic scaremongering isn’t it? Or am I being cynical as usual.

* at this point I’d like to reassure you that I have done more interesting things than go to the dentist during my recent blogging absence. Really.  
** no, I haven’t moved to Lancashire.

I think I may have identified another 21st century ‘illness’ – password fatigue.

This became apparent to me last night when, straight after locking myself out of my online banking for failing to remember the 11th digit of my 14 digit password, I then attempted to buy some tickets for the National Theatre and discovered that I needed to set up yet another account with yet another ‘unique’ password. I felt like screaming. Why can’t I just buy the damn tickets?*

I think I have at least 50 accounts which require passwords – from Amazon and our work’s Flickr page to this blog and the Barbican. Of course, they’re not all completely different and they have varying degrees of complexity, but this doesn’t make things any easier. I still have to remember which password it actually is and which complicated recipe of numbers and £$%£^’s I cooked up at the time. And the less I use the account and password in question, the harder it gets. God knows what my password for ebay is, its been that long since I used it, but I know I’ve got one.

Being a paranoid and cynical type of person who believes that identity muggers really do lurk around every corner, of course I never write any of them down. So all the passwords are residing in my head and as Betty Everett once sung ‘it’s getting mighty crowded’.

* ok, I work in marketing and I know exactly why they don’t allow this, but that’s not the point.

I’m sick of football, my head is full of hay-fever and the council are digging up the road outside my office window. But things could be worse. I could work for the insurance company I spent several hours with the other day.

Along with various other organisations, I had been invited by this particular company’s beleaguered HR department to an afternoon aimed at encouraging employees to make the most of all that the city around them has to offer – lunchtime music concerts, talks and walks, gyms and sports clubs, libraries and short courses, massages and spas, volunteering opportunities and in-house social clubs etc. etc. The clichéd work/life balance may have been the message, but there were loads of interesting things to do.

But well, you know what I’m going to say next.

Were the employees interested? No, of course not. They just drifted around looking faintly bored, if not perplexed, by the whole thing. As one man told me ‘We don’t have time for this kind of stuff. I go to work and don’t have time to do anything else other than watch TV’ and another ‘Why would I want to do a course for fun? What’s the point?’. But mostly, they all just looked non-plussed.

Admittedly, some people were interested in life outside work and commuting, and to give them the benefit of the doubt, others may have been put off by the continuous loop of background ‘motivating’ music featuring the likes of ‘Happy Talk’ from South Pacific and C&C Music Factory’s ‘Gonna Make you Sweat’.

Perhaps the world of insurance just attracts boring types, but really?! Life must be tragic for some people.

Usually the National Film Theatre/BFI over there on London’s sunny South Bank is a sedate place. People go in to the cinema sans popcorn, talk to each other in low voices, watch the film quietly and leave swiftly (usually after dutifully watching all of the credits). It is, in short, not the Wood Green Cineworld.

But last week something different happened at the NFT, an event so rare that I need to share it with you. Particularly since it happened, not once, but twice:

1. Drunken Angel

This is one of Akira Kurasawa’s ‘modern’ films (i.e. not a samurai epic). The film tells the tale of an ‘unlikely friendship’ between an alcoholic doctor and a gangster with TB, a death wish and hey, a keen interest in booze as well. Although quite grim in places, I would say that Drunken Angel is pretty enjoyable and definitely compelling. It is, however, certainly not the sort of film where you expect to see snogging couples indulging themselves in the seats in front of you. After a while though, I came to unfortunately recognise that there was indeed an emotional connection between the tongue-wrestlers and the film – as the gangster’s plight became more desperate so did their passion. Probably because they’d long given up on reading the subtitles.

2. Bronco Bullfrog

This British film from 1969 about a group of miserable mono-syllabic 15-year-olds living a life of petty crime and violence in East London is not the sort of film I previously expected to appeal to the cinema snogging type. OK, there is a blossoming romance between the two main characters* and I personally found this story of non-swinging London a strangely touching portrayal of youth, but clearly there is more to the film than that. The bleak streets of late 60s London make a perfect accompaniment to cinema fumbles. Well, for the couple near me anyway.

Well, it makes a difference from the usual straight-laced cinephile types I suppose. Any other unlikely snogging at the cinema tales to tell?

* Sample dialogue from when he first goes round to her flat to ask her out:

‘Is your daughter in? I don’t know her name, but she’s medium size with long hair.’
‘I’ll get her for you…’
[girl arrives at door]
‘So do want to go out with me on Saturday?’
‘Yeah.’
‘See you then.’
[boy leaves]