Category Archives: Foreigners, pesky

It Takes Two…

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So, what’s been happening? I’ve not been on here for a while but, luckily, the world at large has been billowing tonne after tonne of grade-A terror and misery for us all to enjoy as civilisation slides happily into terminal oblivion. First of all, Iceland started spewing most of itself into the air over Europe meaning everyone had to suffer the indignity of an extended Easter holiday abroad. It’s worth bearing in mind that Iceland is still trying to recover from almost going bankrupt last year and so has enough problems without slowly turning itself into an ash cloud. I can only speculate that, much as the monarchy is said to fall should the ravens ever leave the Tower of London, these are the sort of disasters legendarily forewarned to hit Iceland should Bjork go 5 years without making a decent album.

At least they can content themselves by now being world trend-setters in terms of catastrophe. Already BP have joined on to the end of the eruption conga and had one of their oil pipelines burst all over the southern United States. The good news here is that the US government for years has been talking about the country needing to find more oil and now everyone can get some of their own just by popping down to the beach with a bucket.

Over in Greece, meanwhile, Iceland’s mantle of bankrupt nationhood has been taken up in spectaular fashion. Unlike those polite Icelanders thought, they’ve been rioting on the streets, setting fire to banks and asking the whole of Europe to look down the back of the sofa for a spare hundred billion Euros in unmarked bills. Now they’re threatening to drag the rest of the continent down with them which means it’s good for us in Blighty that this country has finally sorted out the tricky conundrum of whose running it.

We’ve ended up, due to the fact that in 2 millenia no-one even thought about writing our constitution down on so much as a fag packet, with a country being run by a diverse combination of a 43 year old posh bloke and a 43 year old posh bloke. For those of you struggling to tell the difference between them, Nick Clegg is the one who’s disarmingly like Richard Madeley. The people of Britain seem to be strangely unsure what to make of this newly founded political double act at the controls of the country which is odd really because we’ve got a long history of embracing famous duos on this island.

Morecambe and Wise, Mainwaring and Wilson, Burke and Hare, Ant and Dec, Lennon and McCartney, Mick and Keef, Sooty and Sweep- we can’t get enough of the unique relationship between two men indulged in a common pursuit- whether it be entertaining (Morecambe and Wise, Ant and Dec), songwriting (Lennon and McCartney, Mick and Keef) or grave robbing (Burke and Hare, Sooty and Sweep). Now we’ve got Cameron and Clegg to enjoy; though the uncertainty about how they’ll pan out in practice may well be due to it not being clear yet which of the men will fill which role in the twosome.

Put simply, the roles in a great British duo are clearly defined and are thus:

- The pretentious, loveable buffoon (Mainwaring, Wise, Jagger, McCartney, Ant or Dec, Sweep)
- The knowing, sarcastic wit (Wilson, Morecambe, Richards, Lennon, Ant or Dec, Sooty)

The obvious answer would appear to be that Cameron is the former and Clegg is the latter though it really isn’t that clear. Maybe this is why there is so much disquiet and worry about their prospects in the country at the moment. Well, this and the potentially incendiary consequences for our still unwritten constitution and the fact that we’re sailing an untried political vessel into an apocalyptic financial storm, but ill-defined roles within the nation-helming two-hander can’t help.

So I’m proposing this- when everything inevitably goes tits up they need to take one of the following leads from a great British double act:

1. Morecambe and Wise- they need to do that old Eric and Ernie skip up to a lectern in Downing Street to the strains of ‘Bring Me Sunshine’. Then Cameron needs to say “What do you think of it so far?” before Clegg yells “RUBBISH!”. Then they skip off into the distance. Everyone laughs and cheers up.

2. Sooty and Sweep- Clegg devlops a really squeaky voice, Cameron says nothing and they spend their time spraying William Hague in the face with a water pistol. Everyone laughs and cheers up.

3. Burke and Hare- They decide to take up grave robbing. We’ll probably be so poor as a country soon we’ll need to burn corpses for heat anyway.

or finally;

4. Lennon and McCartney- They are forced to decide between them who has to get shot dead and who has to marry Heather Mills. And we all thought the coalition negotiations were tough…

Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow…

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It’s something of a cliche to suggest that we Brits spend all our time talking about the weather, at least when we aren’t dealing with our other favourite topics i.e. health & safety, snooker or sentences that begin “I don’t mean to sound racist but…”. The irony of this is that, while we may be conversant in weather, we’re head-bogglingly rubbish at dealing with it when it turns in any way slightly beyond what would be considered ‘mild’- if you believe the news anyway.

In other parts of the world, people live in places such as Tornado Alley in the US where a good day in August is one where you come home from work to find your house in the same street you left it, or there’s the monsoon lashed regions of Asia which can experience as much rain in an afternoon as Somerset would in the average lifetime.

Meanwhile we live in possibly the most temperate country on the face of the Earth.   Thus we’re depicted as being prone to either all dying of sunstroke if the mercury climbs over 80 in July or, as the last few days have demonstrated, getting hopelessly befuddled and often caught completely unawares when water freezes into snow and starts lazily billowing out of the sky. I’ve allegedly been practically housebound for the last 48 hours because, despite us now being in a year with a funky futuristic name, we can’t manage to put salt- one of the most abundant substances anywhere- onto our roads and pavements to prevent us having to deal with the minor inconvenience of driving or walking on snow that has been compacted down into unending sheets of ice which lie in wait ready to make us skid or tumble and snap our necks with no warning.

How the would-be Brittanic members of the human race managed to get through ice ages that lasted for millenia is anyone’s guess when all we get now is news bulletins booming that the cold snap is due to last “a few more days” with so much portent they might as well be saying it’ll last “till the absolute end of all time”. Reporters have been stationed up and down the country to tell us that everywhere has become ‘snow-bound’ and ‘inaccessible’, despite the fact that they’ve managed to get several hundred kilos of broadcast equipment there in the first place  to tell us this.

I don’t know about you though but, for all the tooth-gnashing horrorbastardism of the news reports on the snow, all I’ve seen is people collectively taking time off work and school to joyously, for want of a better phrase, dick about. Everyone’s found their Christmas/New Year break unexpectedly lengthened by a couple of days and, in the case of my neighbourhood, set about building ever increasingly massive snowmen (there’s a 9 footer round the corner), have snowball fights, drag each other round on sledges and, in a couple of magnificent cases, build igloos and have a picnic in them. The 9ft snowman has even had a huge snow living room built for him. And a trumpet put in his mouth.

Clearly, far from being bewildered by snow, we’re better at dealing with it than any other nation. In a few weeks the Winter Olympics get underway in Vancouver and, no matter what events you may end up watching through the Games, I guarantee you won’t see one snowman, one snowball fight and certainly no snow living rooms constructed by either spectators or competitors. If the Winter Olympics were held on these isles there’d be a packed Wembley Stadium watching nations throw snowballs against nations, the whole of Dartmoor stripped of snow during a snowman building contest that’ll end up with an army of massive 50ft high creations straddling the South Downs, and all the skiing events replaced by the infinitely more tense British pastime of crowding round the radio first thing in the morning and waiting to see if your school’s been closed.

And, for another guaranteed British medal, the newsreader biathlon- where they have to travel to a snowy village, then file a report about how it’s impossible to travel to the same snowy village.

Obviously, over the next few days the snow will freeze into ice and then it’ll turn slushy and things might be a bit unpleasant for a bit but, for a while, let’s just enjoy the snow. The world’s all pretty and white and fluffy, every footstep makes that crunchy snow noise, many of us have an extended holiday and- this is a fact, by the way- sitting in a pub is for some reason infinitely more satisfying when there’s snow on the ground outside.

All of these are good things because, at a time like this, there’s really no reason to stay indoors. For one thing, there’s bugger all on the telly. Unless you like panicking reporters.

Or Labour simply handing the election to the fucking Tories 5 months early. This snow might be the best news we get all year.

The Universal Medium

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Just under three weeks from now, give or take an hour, there’s a good chance I’ll be outdoors, naked and unconscious. I’ll be in Tunisia on holiday and, since the daytime temperature will have nudged above 20 degrees and the sun will have spent it’s day lazily traversing the sky and burning down on my Viking skin, I’ll most probably have sunburn. I won’t, however, have the all-over, salmon-pink flesh, flakes of skin all-over the bedroom floor, Skinless-Julia-from-Hellraiser-III form of sunburn- I’m too old and experienced with the factor 50 for that to happen.

No, I’ll have protected myself throughly by covering whatever flesh I’ve exposed (which won’t be much- I only recently purchased my first ever pair of non-swimming shorts) when sat by the pool listening to Rodrigo y Gabriella with a Simon Schama and some bizarre North African cocktail. I will be covered in so much sunblock that I’ll look as white as the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man man getting some R+R but somewhere on my body there’ll be a couple of tiny slivers of flesh that will have escaped my attention. Usually it’s just next to my watch, or just behind the ears or, worst of all, a fold behind the knees which slips through the net and lets the sun’s rays set about crisping up for hours and which I don’t notice till I attempt to sleep that night. The only way to get any relief when this happens will be to sleep outside on the blacony, where it’ll hopefully be cool, and naked as a newborn so that no clothing touches the affected areas. In short, it won’t be pretty, it’ll be borderline illegal, and I’ll be paying a few hundred quid for the privilige.

Before I even get to this dignity-stripping kip though I’ll have had to deal with Manchester Airport on an Easter Sunday. At half five in the morning. Whilst this will mean it’ll be quieter it also means I’ll have had about 45 minutes sleep and be somewhere between hungover and still inebriated from the Easter festivities. Standing in the check-in queue, barely able to stand, focus or blink-in-unison, I’m pretty sure Amy will be thoroughly cheesed off and eyeing me up for how many camels she can sell me for when we get to our destination.

Assuming she decides against it and we make it to the resort on speaking terms (unlikely seeing as the only way I can deal with the boredom of an aircraft involves travel-sickness pills and whiskey) we’ll have arrived just in time for lunch where I fully intend to continue on my quest to eat one of every animal on Earth. The target for Tunisia is goat, a local delicacy apparently and usually served in a curry with cous-cous. I assume, this being Africa and all, that the curry will contain enough spice to power Denmark and I’ll spend the rest of the first day of the holiday running back and forth to the toilet in-between getting localised sun-burn and then sleeping off a day’s beer, burning and bowel-evacuation in the au-naturel, al-fresco way detailled above.

With a bit of luck, by day two, I won’t have been arrested for public nudity, the sun-burn will have died down and I’ll be three stone lighter from the previous day’s curry aftermath. This will be good news as I can then get down to the serious business of enjoying myself. Mostly, as with any holiday, this will comprise relaxing, wandering round wherever’s local, trying out a variety of regional delicacies and drinks and trying on lots of hats. It’ll be fantastic. Whenever I get the business of the airport and the first day’s acclimatising out of the way, I am seriously good at holidays.

There is, however, a danger that I may spend all my time lying on the bed in the room doing absolutely nothing. If you’ve ever been abroad, you’ll recognise the danger I’m talking about. It’ll have tried to draw you in before. You’ll have been struck dumb by it’s gaudiness. Mesmerised by it’s baffling output. Terrified by it’s colours and shapes. If you’ve ever visited foreign climes you will, at some point, have been transfixed by foreign television.

It. Is. Insane.

Sometimes, as in the Czech Republic, it’s made up of indecipherable variety shows and ancient football re-runs and isn’t too diverting after a couple of days. On other occasions, as in France, it’s got all the gloss and production values of British television but something’s not quite right. It might be the fact that the female newscasters are the most beautiful people on Earth or it might be the that in all the drama or comedy nothing ever seems to happen- no matter how mad-cap the premise. I swear I saw a sit-com once over there that was as if Harold Pinter had written ‘Ratatouille’.

However, if you’re really unlucky, the TV will be like Poland and you’ll never want to leave the hotel bedroom ever again. Obviously, in this part of the world, they’re sick of their historical national cycle of popping in and out of existence, interpsperced by being invaded by everybody else, and have instead decided to subdue the masses and any potential insurgents with hour after hour of cheap, mental television. There’s the indecipherable variety shows of the nearby Czechs except the Poles fill them with transvestites singing bizarre swing/thrash-metal hybrids and circus acts featuring both clowns and eagles. The news that follows is filmed from a broom cupboard, the weathermaps are drawn by a six-year-old and the station idents have clearly been knocked up on a Commodore 64- it is quite simply impossible to look away from. At some point, a hidden camera show will turn up which inevitably features young women having their clothes fall off near unsuspecting commuters/restaurant diners/priests and very little else. The variety of premises under which they can make this happen suggest Benny Hill simply wasn’t trying hard enough.

Then, without warning, at about midnight, all normal programming is replaced by hard-core pornography which is about as erotic as sandpaper and so graphic it’s more reminiscent of a More4 documentary than onanistic entertainment. Each vignette (actually, they’re more ‘tone pieces’) lasts only 10 minutes so it’s still addictive in the way that The Box or MTV Hits- although rather than waiting through whatever’s on in the hope that a good tune will be next, you’re waiting for some good-old fashioned three-way girl-on-girl-on-girl naked pillow-fighting in a shower. Instead, you’ll get something about as sexy as ‘Triumph of the Will’ featuring a man with back-hair and a woman with the muscle tone of Geoff Capes.

Since Tunisia’s an Islamic nation, it’s unlikely to feature much programming of the Polish ilk so I might actually get out and about and see some of what is, I’m reliably informed, a beautiful country. They are, however, not big on public nudity so I just have to hope that I can keep the sunburn at bay or no-one spots me taking some nocturnal relief on the balcony. Mind you, whilst I may be arrested for being ‘conkers-out’ I can at least tell my captors that I wasn’t doing it for any sort of sexual thrill. If they’ve been on holiday to Poland, they’ll understand.