...and folks sure like their boats in this part of the world...
...you can park on the beach to go windsurfing...
...or laze on the sand-dunes...
Friday, 8 July 2011
Short Break In Wales (2): Newport Beach
You can see this beach as you drive through Newport on the A478, but to get to it, you have to drive a couple of miles along narrow, windy roads. It's worth it. This is the town.
Wednesday, 6 July 2011
Short Break In Wales (1): Mwnt
Mwnt is a secret. Almost. There are no signposts, as there are to Newport Beach or Whitesands, and it's at the end of some narrow, twisting roads with a couple of left turns you could miss if you aren't used to looking for those old-style signposts. When you get there, it's beautiful. The locals come out in the afternoon to do a little fishing or just walk up the hill and kiss. It's a large cove at the bottom of steps that are steeper than this makes them look (that's a tea-shop and wet-suit hire emporium at the top, with facilities). Above the beach, miles from almost anywhere, is the church, which is still used for weekly services.
Monday, 4 July 2011
How To Manoeuvre A Sten Line Ferry, Fishguard Harbour
One fairly hefty Stena Line ferry at her moorings at Fishguard Harbour
... starts to move sideways...
...and then rotate...
...before straightening out...
....and heading off to sea
It's done with bow- and stern-thrusters, water-jets that add an astonishing amount of manoeuvrability to even a large-ish ship. It took about three minutes to spin the ship round.
Friday, 1 July 2011
Cool: The Complete Handbook (Harry Armfield)
Back in the day a guy called Harry Armfield wrote a book called Cool: The Complete Handbook. Amongst other things it has the best movie list, reading list and music list I have seen. Armfield describes Classical Cool, whose icons are Steve McQueen and Miles Davis. Cool is not about accessories you had - though some, like the Zippo lighter, are iconic - not was it about being pretty, though that helps. It was about how you comported yourself: with a certain individuality, a touch of anti-establishment attitude, and an ineffable distance from the concerns, values and rules of everyday life. It is logically possible to be a parent and cool, but so far no-one you know has managed the trick. (What teenagers call "cool parents" is a different thing.)
Classical Cool can embrace a wide range of people and callings. There are cool mathematicians (Alexander Grothendieck, who eventually quit his teaching job and became a hermit); there are cool physicists (Richard Feynman, who did his physics in a strip club in Rio, picked up air stewardesses and looked like a handsome cowboy); there are cool magazine editors (Anna Wintour), there are even cool programmers (Linus Torvalds, godfather of Linux) and politicians (Winston Churchill). Cool had an unresolved relationship with drugs, and is as austere as a Palestrina Motet. It's restrained, understated, off-beat, non-conformist: it's a sibling of the idea of the Gentleman. Classical cool is masculine. There are classically cool women, but not many. Feminism is not cool, nor is therapy, and anyone who holds intimacy and closeness to be amongst the highest of human values is never going to be cool.
A number of Amazon Marketplace suppliers have second-hand copies Armfield's book and a couple of weeks ago, when I was thinking of those lists, I ordered one. It was as good as I remember it. It was written in 1986. You may not remember 1986. I think I was there at the time, but I don't remember a lot of it. 1987. That was the year that followed it. David Harvey, in his best-seller The Condition of Post-Modernity, identifies 1972 as the year when the old world was replaced by the post-modern world. I will beg to differ. It was 1987. The second summer of love, Ecstasy was actually made of MDMA, Balearic beats finally made sense and the behemoth that is dance / club culture rose from the deep. Classical cool as a cultural force vanished by 1990, the exact symbolic moment being when Kate Moss was chosen for the cover of the Third Summer of Love issue of ID magazine.
Dance culture was the opposite of Classical Cool. It was based on taking a drug that made you love everyone around you. It needed you to dance for hours, mostly like a prat, with unstoppable enthusiasm. It isn't about the Art, it's about the Vibe: the audience don't care how the DJ's get the sound, as long as they get it. Classical Cool was never compatible with day jobs, capitalism or careers and it was pretty much closed to the masses. Dance culture is populist and the Opium of the Office Worker. Cool is the moving camera of Robert Altman: Dance is 3-D and CGI.
Dance / Club Culture doesn't care who you are or what you do, as long as you are prepared to put on tonight's themed costume join in the crowd. All you need for entry is whatever it takes to get past the bouncers. All the nerds making their wonderful dance music of whatever genre are not cool. The Yahhovians I see in my building every day are variously funky, trendy, a couple are hot, but none are cool. Nobody playing Angry Birds has ever been, is now or ever will be cool. Classical Cool is too austere for these times, when people need distraction from the ghastly economic and employment uncertainty they face on a daily basis, as well as the now seeming financial impossibility of their ever living the lifestyle.
If you are under forty-five, read Armfield's book, and you might understand why certain of your older relatives and co-workers can't quite take you seriously. If you are under thirty, the world it describes will be simply quaint. Read it and learn. Then both of you move on to Bernhard Roetzel's Gentleman.
Classical Cool can embrace a wide range of people and callings. There are cool mathematicians (Alexander Grothendieck, who eventually quit his teaching job and became a hermit); there are cool physicists (Richard Feynman, who did his physics in a strip club in Rio, picked up air stewardesses and looked like a handsome cowboy); there are cool magazine editors (Anna Wintour), there are even cool programmers (Linus Torvalds, godfather of Linux) and politicians (Winston Churchill). Cool had an unresolved relationship with drugs, and is as austere as a Palestrina Motet. It's restrained, understated, off-beat, non-conformist: it's a sibling of the idea of the Gentleman. Classical cool is masculine. There are classically cool women, but not many. Feminism is not cool, nor is therapy, and anyone who holds intimacy and closeness to be amongst the highest of human values is never going to be cool.
A number of Amazon Marketplace suppliers have second-hand copies Armfield's book and a couple of weeks ago, when I was thinking of those lists, I ordered one. It was as good as I remember it. It was written in 1986. You may not remember 1986. I think I was there at the time, but I don't remember a lot of it. 1987. That was the year that followed it. David Harvey, in his best-seller The Condition of Post-Modernity, identifies 1972 as the year when the old world was replaced by the post-modern world. I will beg to differ. It was 1987. The second summer of love, Ecstasy was actually made of MDMA, Balearic beats finally made sense and the behemoth that is dance / club culture rose from the deep. Classical cool as a cultural force vanished by 1990, the exact symbolic moment being when Kate Moss was chosen for the cover of the Third Summer of Love issue of ID magazine.
Dance culture was the opposite of Classical Cool. It was based on taking a drug that made you love everyone around you. It needed you to dance for hours, mostly like a prat, with unstoppable enthusiasm. It isn't about the Art, it's about the Vibe: the audience don't care how the DJ's get the sound, as long as they get it. Classical Cool was never compatible with day jobs, capitalism or careers and it was pretty much closed to the masses. Dance culture is populist and the Opium of the Office Worker. Cool is the moving camera of Robert Altman: Dance is 3-D and CGI.
Dance / Club Culture doesn't care who you are or what you do, as long as you are prepared to put on tonight's themed costume join in the crowd. All you need for entry is whatever it takes to get past the bouncers. All the nerds making their wonderful dance music of whatever genre are not cool. The Yahhovians I see in my building every day are variously funky, trendy, a couple are hot, but none are cool. Nobody playing Angry Birds has ever been, is now or ever will be cool. Classical Cool is too austere for these times, when people need distraction from the ghastly economic and employment uncertainty they face on a daily basis, as well as the now seeming financial impossibility of their ever living the lifestyle.
If you are under forty-five, read Armfield's book, and you might understand why certain of your older relatives and co-workers can't quite take you seriously. If you are under thirty, the world it describes will be simply quaint. Read it and learn. Then both of you move on to Bernhard Roetzel's Gentleman.
Wednesday, 29 June 2011
Restaurants: Five, Fishguard
Five
5 Main Street, Fishguard, Pembrokeshire SA65 9HG
01348 875050
One of the risks of staying anywhere between the M25 and Abroad is that there may be Nowhere To Eat. Or worse, that there will be but it will be well-meant and horribly average. That was the first place I ate in Fishguard, for lunch, and I will spare its blushes.
The next place, ten yards up the road from my hotel, was pretty much what you want a restaurant to be. The service, since it wasn't busy (Tuesday night is never busy anywhere) was admirably snappy.
I think that an eating-house should only be allowed to call itself a restaurant if it serves an amuse-bouche before the evening meal. This was black pudding and monkfish, exactly as tasty as it sounds.
I went for the goats cheese and poached pear on bruchetta. The goats cheese was very soft and came from a happy goat, since angry goats produce the more familiar chalky-textured cheese. I want to know how to do pears like that, or indeed, where to get pears like that. Their chef obviously does.
I chose the goats cheese because I wanted the fish pie as my main course. I am never going to cook a fish pie at home, so I like to order one when it's on offer. This had mackeral, salmon and prawns, very light on the potato and heavy on the fish, with some garden peas, peeled (!) broad beans and fresh asparagus on the side.
Telling my usual tale of being forbidden alcohol, the waitress found out for me that the summer fruits and pancetta were inseparable from a champagne sauce, so I opted for a brownie with vanilla ice cream: the brownie was basically a chocolate fondant and the peanut brittle was laced with sea-salt. And that's not a complaint.
I went back the next evening. Why experiment when you have found a Good Thing? They go to bed early in Fishguard, last serving is 21:00. Best to book, especially in the season and at weekends.
The Victim: Me
The Damage: Three courses £30 - £40 a head excluding drinks
The Verdict: I liked it so much, I went back the next evening
5 Main Street, Fishguard, Pembrokeshire SA65 9HG
01348 875050
One of the risks of staying anywhere between the M25 and Abroad is that there may be Nowhere To Eat. Or worse, that there will be but it will be well-meant and horribly average. That was the first place I ate in Fishguard, for lunch, and I will spare its blushes.
The next place, ten yards up the road from my hotel, was pretty much what you want a restaurant to be. The service, since it wasn't busy (Tuesday night is never busy anywhere) was admirably snappy.
I think that an eating-house should only be allowed to call itself a restaurant if it serves an amuse-bouche before the evening meal. This was black pudding and monkfish, exactly as tasty as it sounds.
I went for the goats cheese and poached pear on bruchetta. The goats cheese was very soft and came from a happy goat, since angry goats produce the more familiar chalky-textured cheese. I want to know how to do pears like that, or indeed, where to get pears like that. Their chef obviously does.
I chose the goats cheese because I wanted the fish pie as my main course. I am never going to cook a fish pie at home, so I like to order one when it's on offer. This had mackeral, salmon and prawns, very light on the potato and heavy on the fish, with some garden peas, peeled (!) broad beans and fresh asparagus on the side.
Telling my usual tale of being forbidden alcohol, the waitress found out for me that the summer fruits and pancetta were inseparable from a champagne sauce, so I opted for a brownie with vanilla ice cream: the brownie was basically a chocolate fondant and the peanut brittle was laced with sea-salt. And that's not a complaint.
I went back the next evening. Why experiment when you have found a Good Thing? They go to bed early in Fishguard, last serving is 21:00. Best to book, especially in the season and at weekends.
The Victim: Me
The Damage: Three courses £30 - £40 a head excluding drinks
The Verdict: I liked it so much, I went back the next evening
Monday, 27 June 2011
Never Go To A Funeral On Your Own
If you should find out that you are coming to my funeral, and you will be going there on your own and won't know anyone there, then my friend you are excused. Turn round. Go home. With my blessing. I have been to a funeral solo and it is not how it should be done. It was six weeks ago, in mid-May, and while I got over the immediate impact, I realised this week I haven't really processed it.
Funerals are supposed to remind us of our mortality as well as of the life of the deceased. We are supposed to reflect on our life with and without them, and become aware of the little losses we will feel over the next year every time we do something and they aren't there as they used to be.
Everyone else had come with wives and even with children. I had never met any of these people, and I'm not sure many of them had met each other. Those people could share their grief, squeeze each other's hands or put arms round shoulders. I couldn't, so it was probably a good thing I wasn't feeling tearful. Actually I don't know what I was feeling at the time. I may have looked like I was on Mars.
The other people from the same part of his life that I was in did not show up. Unless I didn't recognise them nor they me, but I doubt it. I don't think I expected them to be there, but given that they were the only other people I knew, they were the ones who left me in the lurch. If that makes sense. There was nowhere to go with whatever feelings I had.
There was a long moment when I really thought that smoking a cigarette would be a good idea. I quit smoking in 1995 and after the first year have never had a craving or an urge for a cigarette. Until then. The original plan was that I would go back to work and go to the gym, as usual on a Thursday. On the way back to the station, I knew I had to go home. I stopped in Richmond to get some cake and chocolate (uh-huh, yep) and spent the afternoon and much of the evening watching DVDs. I even watched Rent - it's a great movie for when you're feeling a little emotional and then along came this...
...and because I'm a human being living a real life, of course I burst into tears. "Will someone care / will I wake tomorrow from this nightmare?" At the time I thought I was letting out feelings over my friend's death. The next morning, I got on with life, maybe a little subdued, but not emotionally hungover or upset.
I wasn't letting out feelings about my friend's death or my own mortality. You forget that I regard a quick and timely death as a reward for passing the endurance test that is life. I didn't feel sad for him. He died quickly and with all his faculties, despite the cancer drugs. His wife and son are left to get on with their lives, and they are both sensible, practical people who will do so with application, pausing every now and then to feel a twinge of sadness. They have a lot of support from their friends, and me, if they ever need it.
Yes, I was looking at all those people and once again there's a whole crowd I don't know that perhaps I might have thought I should. The funeral was making me feel isolated and lonely again.
Funerals are a religious service and I don't do religion. The more time passes, the more I see the Middle-Eastern influences of Christianity and the more those influences seem wrong for the times I live in. In my world what's gone is gone, and what remains are the lessons, the debt and the mess to clear up. (No. Good stuff never lasts beyond the moment.) No matter what happens, we will pay our taxes, our due bills and re-fill our refrigerators and petrol tank; we will go to work, where we will be surrounded by people who need us to behave as usual so they can do their job. The Middle-Eastern tradition was developed in a world where people could take weeks out to mourn or fast or attend ceremonies, and where those ceremonies served to gather together people who needed to be gathered together anyway. The Middle-Eastern tradition invites us to feel emotions and behave in a manner that is unsuitable for the Western world, and therefore to feel guilty if we don't feel the way it says we should. And I don't.
Nobody needed me there and there was nothing I could do. Why would I go somewhere I'm just going to feel useless? You may say: to show my respects. That makes sense in a Middle-Eastern setting where there's a functioning community and extended families, and my presence and actions will be noted and judged, but I live in the suburban world where my presence and actions are invisible. You may say: to show my support for the family. I had already done that.
I went because I thought it was the "right" thing to do. Well, guess what? It wasn't. I sat through a ceremony I think is a sham, humming along to lyrics I don't believe. Nobody needed me to be putting on a show. I was reminded that that when I die, I will not be found until the smell of my decomposing is noticeable by the neighbours. (Actually, I'm okay with that. I'll be dead when it's happening.) And mostly I was reminded that I have one nearby close relative and my few friends are otherwise scattered across the globe. Yeah. I needed that. The point of going to a funeral is to share our grief. I had no-one to share mine with. I should not have been there.
Which is why you are excused if you are travelling to my funeral on your own. Turn round, go back to work, go back to the world. With my blessing.
Funerals are supposed to remind us of our mortality as well as of the life of the deceased. We are supposed to reflect on our life with and without them, and become aware of the little losses we will feel over the next year every time we do something and they aren't there as they used to be.
Everyone else had come with wives and even with children. I had never met any of these people, and I'm not sure many of them had met each other. Those people could share their grief, squeeze each other's hands or put arms round shoulders. I couldn't, so it was probably a good thing I wasn't feeling tearful. Actually I don't know what I was feeling at the time. I may have looked like I was on Mars.
The other people from the same part of his life that I was in did not show up. Unless I didn't recognise them nor they me, but I doubt it. I don't think I expected them to be there, but given that they were the only other people I knew, they were the ones who left me in the lurch. If that makes sense. There was nowhere to go with whatever feelings I had.
There was a long moment when I really thought that smoking a cigarette would be a good idea. I quit smoking in 1995 and after the first year have never had a craving or an urge for a cigarette. Until then. The original plan was that I would go back to work and go to the gym, as usual on a Thursday. On the way back to the station, I knew I had to go home. I stopped in Richmond to get some cake and chocolate (uh-huh, yep) and spent the afternoon and much of the evening watching DVDs. I even watched Rent - it's a great movie for when you're feeling a little emotional and then along came this...
...and because I'm a human being living a real life, of course I burst into tears. "Will someone care / will I wake tomorrow from this nightmare?" At the time I thought I was letting out feelings over my friend's death. The next morning, I got on with life, maybe a little subdued, but not emotionally hungover or upset.
I wasn't letting out feelings about my friend's death or my own mortality. You forget that I regard a quick and timely death as a reward for passing the endurance test that is life. I didn't feel sad for him. He died quickly and with all his faculties, despite the cancer drugs. His wife and son are left to get on with their lives, and they are both sensible, practical people who will do so with application, pausing every now and then to feel a twinge of sadness. They have a lot of support from their friends, and me, if they ever need it.
Yes, I was looking at all those people and once again there's a whole crowd I don't know that perhaps I might have thought I should. The funeral was making me feel isolated and lonely again.
Funerals are a religious service and I don't do religion. The more time passes, the more I see the Middle-Eastern influences of Christianity and the more those influences seem wrong for the times I live in. In my world what's gone is gone, and what remains are the lessons, the debt and the mess to clear up. (No. Good stuff never lasts beyond the moment.) No matter what happens, we will pay our taxes, our due bills and re-fill our refrigerators and petrol tank; we will go to work, where we will be surrounded by people who need us to behave as usual so they can do their job. The Middle-Eastern tradition was developed in a world where people could take weeks out to mourn or fast or attend ceremonies, and where those ceremonies served to gather together people who needed to be gathered together anyway. The Middle-Eastern tradition invites us to feel emotions and behave in a manner that is unsuitable for the Western world, and therefore to feel guilty if we don't feel the way it says we should. And I don't.
Nobody needed me there and there was nothing I could do. Why would I go somewhere I'm just going to feel useless? You may say: to show my respects. That makes sense in a Middle-Eastern setting where there's a functioning community and extended families, and my presence and actions will be noted and judged, but I live in the suburban world where my presence and actions are invisible. You may say: to show my support for the family. I had already done that.
I went because I thought it was the "right" thing to do. Well, guess what? It wasn't. I sat through a ceremony I think is a sham, humming along to lyrics I don't believe. Nobody needed me to be putting on a show. I was reminded that that when I die, I will not be found until the smell of my decomposing is noticeable by the neighbours. (Actually, I'm okay with that. I'll be dead when it's happening.) And mostly I was reminded that I have one nearby close relative and my few friends are otherwise scattered across the globe. Yeah. I needed that. The point of going to a funeral is to share our grief. I had no-one to share mine with. I should not have been there.
Which is why you are excused if you are travelling to my funeral on your own. Turn round, go back to work, go back to the world. With my blessing.
Friday, 24 June 2011
Waiting For Barry Manilow, Covent Garden
So I was on my way into work Thursday morning, weaving through the side streets of Covent Garden (actually, with the exception of Long Acre, all the streets of Covent Garden are side-streets) and suddenly I saw this...
Ladies and Gentlemen... Barry Manilow will be in the building!
The tables told this was serious waiting...
...for the man whom many consider to the heart-throb of all time...
Ladies and Gentlemen... Barry Manilow will be in the building!
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