Meditations on a Bar of Chocolate

The other evening I finished a whole 99p bar of Cadbury's Whole Nut. I have a cold, so I'm allowed to eat sugar and carbs. But I only meant to eat a couple of lines or six chunks. As if. I just finished the lot. I didn't want to rush out and buy another, but I did have to finish it.

Alcoholism is: you don't stop once you start. Addiction is: you keep choosing to start. Insisting that starting and then carrying on are choices frees the addict and the alcoholic from dependancy on “cures” or having to believe there's something “wrong” with them that needs endless therapy. It's the start of taking responsibility for yourself.

The real trick is this: even if you do want to start, you don't actually do anything about it. You can think what you like and feel what you like, as long as you don't have that first drink, drug or piece of chocolate. It's a trick because it leaves your head alone and concentrates on your actions. In the early days, it's a lot easier not to buy a drink than it is not to want one, and it's always easier not to buy chocolate than not to want it.

You can do anything alcoholically: drink, drugs, food (over-eating), buying CD's, sex, decorating, working, travelling, running, exercising, name it. Why you do it is between you and the darker reaches of your psyche. That's complicated and messy and even if you did understand it, there's no guarantee you would stop as a result. Stopping is one thing, understanding is another. How you stop is easy – don't start. One day at a time.

The Great London Pretty Girl Puzzle

I've just come back from a brief business trip to a Town Outside the M25 with some of the lads from work. And we were all reminded of the Great London Girl Puzzle. Which is this...

There may be some dazzlers out in the E-something postcodes, but where I and everyone I know lives and works, there are no pretty girls. There are women with trim figures, some Eastern Europeans with that fragile and quick-burning glamour, but no pretty girls. Not like Brighton, Chester, Nottingham, Newcastle or Hull. This is not just my opinion: I've checked it out with any number of the lads at work and we all feel the same way. It's a London thing, not a girl thing.

(Note: in what follows, “girls” means “female between the age of eighteen and when they start looking worn or maternal who are studying, have or trying to get proper paying jobs”. “Lads” means “male who is studying, has or trying to get a proper job and between the age of eighteen and when they start taking themselves seriously or have seriousness forced on them”.)

There are a number of theories about why. Mine is that a working in London is now the second or third job you do – you have to do somewhere in the sticks and suburbs first. So that means the girls are about twenty-four to twenty-six before they make it up to the Smoke. They've been working for five years already and have a nasty feeling they are going to be doing this shit for the rest of their lives. This may make for character, but it does not make for pretty. Now I think about it, women in the Oughties look like men did in the Fifties and Sixties: trapped, strained and forcing the fun.

What about the students? Central London should be full of them. There's the LSE, Imperial, Kings, UCL, Birkbeck, SSOA and on and on. Well, those colleges have been selling themselves to foreign students for the money. They also draw from London's multicultural population. So the pretty English girls come down on the open day, see lots of people not-like-them, and choose Hull or Newcastle instead.

The best, due to a fellow lad at work, is this. In the old days, pretty English girls came from the country to the Big Smoke for the freedom, the fun and the money. The jobs they did are now being done by Aussies, Kiwis, Latvians and Russians. Who are harder, more ambitious and not as pretty. Added to which, they can find the freedom, fun and often a better quality of life outside London. So the pretty girls don't come to London anymore.

The London girls have to look credible at work, because they want careers. So they dress, groom and prepare themselves with the same care and attention as the men. De minimus, in other words. There are a few exceptions: the impact Melissa Deep had on a roomful of male telecoms account managers had to be seen to be believed (honeypot, a, round, bees, like). There was only one of Ms Deep in the whole London scene.

Maybe the London boys aren't that worth the effort. After all, unless they're City Boys, they aren't paid enough to set up a decent life, and if they are City Boys, they have other issues. And maybe the girls come to London to get away from the whole marriage, children and family thing. Resigned to a life of unending salaried work, she could give a damn if she partners up or not.

A Brush With the UCAS Personal Statement

Yet another hour on the phone with my nephew discussing his Personal Statement. For those who
graduated a long time ago, applying to university has got a whole lot more bureaucratic. Also it's online. Part of the application is the aforesaid Personal Statement, which is a 4000-character (!) essay on yourself and why you want to study whatever it is wherever it is. Only you can't tailor it university by university, so it has to be carefully neutral about the institution.

Preparing for an earlier draft, I asked the Young Folk at work what they did for their statements. My manager said he talked a lot about his extra-curricular activities - which made sense since he's that sort of person (an invaluable part of the Sports and Social Club, Fire Warden). An even younger analyst said he talked about why he liked the subject and a little bit about his pastimes, but had also put in paragraphs relating the other subjects he did at A-level to the one he wanted to study.

The Nephew has the same genetic difficulty presenting himself as I do, his mother does and all his grandparents do or did. We just don't do sharing ourselves – our thoughts and ideas, yes, but ourselves, no. (Look carefully at my entries on this blog: are they about me or are they reports of my passing thoughts and opinions?) He wants to study history and if you talk to him for ten minutes you will hear his interest in the subject. For god's sake he's read books about the early Crusades.

My only contribution has been a) editing, and b) asking questions. Plus of course patience and a little knowledge of and sympathy for the awful struggles going on inside the poor lad. I bought him 40 Successful Personal Statements: For UCAS Application, which on first pass scared the living daylights out of me and then, having realised that they teach even less grammar and writing technique than they did when I went to school, The Complete Plain Words. But then I buy everybody that.

Maybe some people can just write about themselves and why they want to study Serbo-Croat and Theoretical Physics. If you asked me what I wanted to study Mathematics and Philosophy I might have said something like “Logic”, but the simple answer was that I'd started out with Electrical Engineering (vocation) and then read some philosophy and knew that was it. It made sense to me in a way that nothing else ever had or ever has. I'm guessing that's the way my nephew feels about history. But how do you say that in boilerplate? And without opening up a question you couldn't answer? Yet it's the best answer there is.

Middle-Class Chavs

Right, I'm going to get this off my chest once and for all. It's not nice to talk about class or style and the English – unless you're being rude about the rich, wealthy and stylish, of course. The proper view is that the moral worth, personal charm and pleasance of a person cannot be known by outward signs but only by keeping their company on their terms. This is, of course, the most arrant bosh but it goes down well. It's true that none of us are on interview form all day and all of us would like to be able to take back the odd first impression. But some people go way past this. They thought about what they did to make this list and so they don't get excused.

Dreadful Parents, pushing their huge strollers and frustrated, wailing children round suburban shopping centres; Commuter Chompers, desperately scarfing down Burger Kings on the later evening commuter trains; Pavement-Blocking Paula and Friends, walking slowly four wide on narrow London pavements as if there are no other people in the world; Tennants Terry, drinking himself inebriate on his way home and stinking the place out with booze fumes; Popcorn Peter, chomping away in the seat behind me at the cinema; Mobile-Phone Mandy, making her social arrangements so, like, we can all hear her; Chanting Colin and Scarf-Waving Wally on their way to a football match; Wales-Supporter Clive and all those self-satisfied overweight bozos who fill Richmond and Twickenham after a rugby match. Anyone who drives an SUV. There are probably a hundred more, but those are the ones who appear in my little world.

Some of these people earn six-figure sums as consultants at Accenture, BBC bureaucrats, senior civil servants and soi-disant senior managers in local councils. I don't care where they went to school or what Daddy-in-Law does for a living. They are middle-class chavs.

Dreadful Parents should leave their children with their friends (oh, wait, maybe they have no...). Pavement-blocking Paula is doing it deliberately (she's in London, it's busy, don't tell me she hasn't noticed). You have to live in the area to know what a pain Wales-Supporter Clive is. Commuter Chompers? Tennants Terry? Popcorn Peter? Mobile Phone Mandy? SUV Drivers? We're in agreement here.

Chavism is not about accent, education or undesirable post code. It's about a gross and wilful lack of style, taste, manners and consideration. And no, it's not a wonky little part of them. It's who they are through and through. And I don't care if they do love their cat and randomly donate to charity.

Vanilla Shakes at Ed's

I took this very early one Thursday morning at the start of the Oughties, on my way to Tower Hill and all things AT&T. Thursday was "routing day" when I tipped up early to get the LCR analysis done before the crowd appeared and distracted me. I was using a simple camera and analogue film. But when it works, it works.

Yup, it's a photograph because I felt so down today I had a vanilla shake from Ed's in Soho. There's nothing wrong with the shakes at Ed's - in my not-so-humble opinion, they're the best in town, and priced accordingly. It's just that I don't want sugar when I'm feeling okay. I'll blame the weather and the darker evenings. At least I'm two-thirds of my way through the Phenomenology.

On AA Birthdays

There's another reason I'm feeling odd and unsettled and my diet still has too many carbs and and and. It's almost my AA Birthday. My last drink was Saturday 9th October 1993, when I went to see Sleepless In Seattle with an attractive former colleague. I had one or two glasses of wine and it felt like someone was scraping the inside of my skull with a fork. I called the AA telephone office at ten o'clock that Monday and went to my first meeting on Wednesday 13th October 1993. I haven't had a drink or a drug since that Saturday but I count the 13th as my AA birthday. Of course, the programme is one-day-at-a-time, so no day is supposed to be special, but sobriety birthdays have a meaning way beyond what we call a “belly button birthday”. All that time ago, I made this huge decision because I felt my life was totally f....d. I was tired of being drunk, I was tired of being tired and I was tired of thinking it was all my fault, that I was useless, that I didn't understand the world and was making no progress in it. I had no idea what relationship drinking bore to any of that because my drinking never took me anywhere dangerous or illegal and I never harmed anyone as a result of it (I pissed plenty of people off, but pissed off isn't being harmed.) I was, of course, way more emotionally jerry-built than I had any idea at the time. It's taken me years to sort all that stuff out. Sometimes I wonder if I ever will. Someone said something at my meeting the other week: as an alcoholic, you survive, but you don't rise. And that's what comes back to haunt me. I crashed and I've got back to where I was, but I never get any further. Most of the time I can ignore that. But on my birthday, it looms large.

The A - Z Classical Music Project

A couple of years ago my morale was really low and only started to recover when I thought up a little project. One CD by a composer I had never heard of before from each letter of the alphabet: it had to be budget-price and on the shelves of the old Tower Records on Piccadilly Circus and I had to buy it on a Friday evening after work. I could buy in any order. This was how it went:

Anton Arensky, Piano Trios, Chandos
Rutland Boughton, Oboe and String Quartets, Helios
Doreen Carwithn, ODTAA and Others, Chandos
Francois Devienne, Four Bassoon Concertos, CPO
Giles Farnaby, Complete Fantasias for Harpsichord, Naxos
Francesco Geminiani, Cello Sonatas Op 3, L'Oiseau-Lyre
Johann Hasse, Salve Regina, Arkiv
Akira Ifukube, Ritmica Ostinata / Symphonic Fantasia 1, Naxos
Hyacinthe Jadin, Sonates pur pianoforte, Harmonia Mundi
Ivan Khandoshkin, Violin Music, Naxos
Thomas Linley, Music For the Tempest etc, Helios
George Muffat, Florilegium Secundum, L'Oiseau-Lyre
Ernesto Nazareth, Tangos, Waltzes and Polkas, Naxos
Georges Onslow, String Quartets Op 9, CPO
Giovanni Platti, Six Flute Sonatas, Op 3, Naxos
Max Reger, Four Sonatos for Unaccompanied Violin, Dorian Recordings
Johannes Schenk, Le Nymphe de Rheno Op 8 Vol 2, Naxos
Ernst Toch, Tanz-Suite etc, Naxos
Leopoldo de Urcullu, Guitar Music, Naxos
Henri Vieuxtemps, Cello Concerto No 1 and 2, EMI Classics
Unico Van Wassenaer, Six Concerti Armonici, apex
Iannis Xenakis, Various, apex
Eugene Ysaye, Six Sonatas for Solo Violin, Helios
Jan Zelenka, The Lamentations of Jeremiah, Helios

I called it quits after five months in Spring '08. No E. It turns out every composer beginning with an E who isn't Enescu is Elgar. The most commonly-used letter in the English language has the least number of composers. There was Thomas Quilter, but I just can't do historical English folk songs. I did cheat slightly: the Reger was in my collection before I started, but I hadn't heard of him when I bought it. I had heard of Xenakis (who hasn't?) but it was an excuse to buy a CD of his stuff. A couple of weeks after I bought the Carwithen, I heard it on Radio Three. That happened again with the Linley. If you're going to do this, you have to stop listening to Radio Three.

Sadly Tower Records has been no more for a long while now, which means that Central London has nowhere good to browse through classical music. To Amazon we all have to go.