May 20, 2018 · 3 minute read
afraid of americans wedding
One gets more right-wing as you get older, they say. I don’t really agree1, but I have found myself mellowing a little in recent years towards institutions I previously railed against. The House of Lords, for example, is a towering anachronism at the heart of Britain, something that in the 90s I believed should have been liquidated.
These days, I haven’t so much changed my mind as come to terms with the idea that yes, it is a laughable mockery of democracy, but strangely often manages to check the actual democratically-elected arm of Parliament better than the official Opposition. And while it’s a cynical view, it seems good to have the Lords there as a reminder for all the battles of 1911 onwards, they’re still there, still with their power after all these years.
As for the Royal Wedding, well, it’s not my thing, but who am I to rail so hard against somebody who lost his mother at an early age thanks to a group of people that hounded him for all the years following? It’s not a life he chose, after all. And obviously, seeing Harry excoriate the royal tabloid press for being the racist, classist scum that they are was incredibly entertaining.
(but the idea that ‘the Royal Family will pay for the wedding’ is a complete fiction. Aside from them not paying security costs, which dwarfed all other expenses, where does their money come from? The state, of course, or land that essentially is owned by the state through the family.
Given my ambivalence towards the wedding, I am therefore turning my ire onto the real enemy: Americans. Reactions here to the wedding seemed to fall into two types:
‘OH MY GOD, YOU’RE ENGLISH DID YOU WATCH THE WEDDING?’ - this said to me in the middle of an American supermarket where all the cashiers were wearing tiaras. I mean, you fought a war to get rid of us; have a bit of self-respect. Even if the country is a dumpster fire at the moment.
‘Flint still doesn’t have water! #royalfamily’ - if you’re going to do performative woke statements, you could at bloody least tailor it to the country in question. What about Windrush? Grenfell? The on-going disaster of Universal Credit and the humiliation of ESA check-ups for disabled people? It’s not always about you, you know…
Aside from the wedding, been a tough and long week that I’m glad to see consigned to history. But the blackcurrants in the back garden are flowering, I’m meeting one of my favourite pastry chefs today, and my friends are on their way.
Next week: if I finally get the documents signed and sent off tomorrow, I will no longer own my house in Durham by the end of the week…
And for anybody questioning my credentials, I’ll have you know I joined the DSA at the start of the year, so there
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It might be getting worse, perhaps because I have spent so much time by myself for the past few years that my filter no longer works as well as it used to. And yes, not managing to get past the BBC’s new geolocation defenses and thus missing Eurovision was an annoyance. But I don’t really think it should have got me so worked up that I disappeared into the garage and tore cardboard boxes apart until I calmed down by virtue of being exhausted.
(the good news is that now I’m living in Cincinnati instead of Durham, I was soon joined by a friend and explored some more of the city. So that is an improvement!)
It has been a week. I’d say I’m done with it, but tomorrow is already attempting to bash through before midnight.
Is there any time where Mr. Punch isn’t terrifying?
It has now been a week, and I think I’m almost there. The books are out of their boxes, the chocolate room is assembled, and I’ve broken in the kitchen. I’ve also driven solo to Fairfield and back! Of course, I haven’t braved downtown Cincinnati yet. But maybe next weekend.
Apr 30, 2018 · 2 minute read
driving more driving unpacking unpacking more unpacking
I watched this show on Netflix, ‘Very British Problems’. And all those things I thought were you being you…it’s how your country actually is!
I left Durham just in time to be confirmed as a walking stereotype, apparently.
Surprisingly, the 500-odd mile drive from North Carolina to Ohio (through Virginia, West Virginia, and Kentucky) wasn’t quite as bad as I thought it was going to be. Oh, it was long, that’s for sure, but fairly uneventful; I just had to make sure I kept Tammy and the U-Haul lorry in sight for nine hours.
Anyway, I am now here in Cincinnati. Unpacking is…a work in progress, but I have managed to sort out the CDs, the DVDs, the boardgames, most of the kitchen, and the new chocolate area (no longer its own room, but there’s also a lot more of it in the kitchen itself now). Wednesday is the day I return to IKEA to buy all the bookcases. And by the weekend, the garage will be full of nothing but empty boxes.
Odd things so far? It was 16˚C outside today. But it was lovely. Like when it hits 16˚C back home and you can go out in a t-shirt. There’s no humidity, and it is amazing.
(I will pay for this during the snowdrifts next February, obviously. But for now, it’s great!)
Oh, and my neighbours gave me a cake. I guess this means I need to get this finished by the weekend so I can give them some chocolates in return:
Apr 22, 2018 · 1 minute read
packing packing more packing even more packing
To sum up: I hate almost everything right now. The fuse on my temper has grown very short, the house is covered in boxes, and of course I’m also at the state in the selling process where you discover awkward things about the house which a) you had no idea were an issue, and b) may torpedo the current process. So yay!
Apr 13, 2018 · 2 minute read
goodbye durham seattle las vegas all the moving
“Clouds are bumpy you know. Do we look worried?”
While I do appreciate that the flight attendants were trying to make me feel better as I gripped hold of the armrest in a manner akin to a bear giving out a generous hug, they really only made things worse. I am fully aware of all these things they were saying, but it matters very little at 35,000 ft. One of these days, I will rip out one of the armrests, which is going to be quite embarrassing.
Anyway, I flew places! Firstly, to Seattle, where it was wet, windy, and 26 floors up, and right now, I’m in Las Vegas with my family for my birthday weekend. Which is the first time I’ve been here since…2007?
Oh, and I’m also trying to co-ordinate a move, sell my house, and work all at the same time. It’s a fun combination! Especially since I have a moving date of…two weeks from right now. I may be a little frazzled, and perhaps that’s why my psoriasis is the most painful it has been in a long while. And also one of the reasons why there has been a lack of updates here for a bit. I’m hoping May will be a little easier, though I also imagine I will spend a lot of it staring at boxes full of books and wondering if the new house will ever look moved in.
Back in 1994, this was, I think, the first shop we visited on our first-ever trip to the USA. It seemed appropriate to re-visit it before it’s gone forever. The good thing about coming here with family is that we don’t tend to hang about The Strip too much (indeed, we’ve been here two days and haven’t been there yet; and won’t tomorrow, either). You do get to see a slightly different Las Vegas, even if that’s essentially Newark, CA with a bit more sun.
However, on my birthday, I will be heading to the bright lights in order to visit Milk Bar and Bouchon Bakery!
The Goodbye Durham Tour is now in full swing; whilst my house isn’t on the market yet1, and I’m not scheduled to move until the end of April, I’m going to Seattle and Las Vegas in a week’s time. Then I just have two weeks which will mainly be a flurry of me getting increasingly more exasperated as I try to fit all my things into little boxes that somehow take on the density of a small black hole even after just putting a few books in them2.
So that means it is time for a final trip to OnlyBurger, in their original location, of course. One of the top priorities I have when I get to Cincinnati is to find a replacement, but it’s going to be hard.
Toast! Ten years old, and still going strong. Many an afternoon or evening was spent here, although I haven’t been much since I stopped working in downtown Durham.
And of course, one final shot of the South Bank Building, which if I do come back to Durham in the future (and I expect I will!), I imagine will be raised to the ground. The centre of Durham has changed a huge amount in the seven years I’ve lived here. Can’t quite get along with all the changes; in particular, this hideous work of glass:
It’s a building that’s too tall and is too close to the amazing Hill Building. But, I do hope that they have a plaque inside to commemorate where Colin Firth once stood and attempted…that…accent.
It’s not all bad; I’d argue that despite reservations about Unscripted, they prevented a lovely little modernist building from being demolished and turned into a soulless glass block matching the one across the road. Of all the hotels that have sprung up in Durham in the past few years, it’s the one I’d actually want to stay in.
Anyway, so you may catch me out and about in the last couple of weeks of April frantically trying to check off the last of my old haunts. And not just Durham, of course! It has been so long since I’ve been to Sunrise Biscuit Kitchen. Apparently they now ship biscuits, but I feel that they’d be somewhat cold by the time they reached Ohio…
But I already have a fun story about that, trust me.
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‘few books’ means 3 cookbooks that weight about 10lbs each, obviously.
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The packing has begun in earnest. The books are being packed away and bubble-wrapped. And they have somehow…grown since the last move. There’s even a box of books that have to be driven by car because they would be so difficult to replace if anything happened to them (including rare B.S. Johnson editions and obviously a couple of Brutalist books).
Having also spoken to estate agents this week to find out just how you sell a house, things are becoming a lot more real. This time next month, I’ll be on my way to Ohio, leaving North Carolina behind. And I think I’m ready for it, though I do still have a list of Durham restaurants to visit before I go (next week: Toast!). Plus, I’ll be in Seattle and Las Vegas at the start of April, so it’s going to be an odd few weeks. Maybe by June I’ll be settled in Cincinnati.
Mar 10, 2018 · 2 minute read
nme the glory days of when they'd take the piss out of crispian mills all week long
#RIPNME This is from an NME photo shoot in 1997. Kenickie on the Staten Island Ferry. Should mention NME wouldn’t put us on the cover because we refused to strip off and be painted gold. pic.twitter.com/Gly7MKQ4ym
I feel like the reaction of ‘the NME got bad one year after you left university’ takes over the end of the NME’s printed edition miss the point. I know that the period I read it was not a great one. It did not have Morley, Penman, or Sinker. But…it was how I was introduced to Spiritualized, Asian Dub Foundation, Atari Teenage Riot, Sleater-Kinney, and countless others. It had Kitty Empire, Sylvia Patterson, and Steven Wells.
It was there: week in, week out; Fifty pages of music every week. Sometimes it’d be terrible, other times it would be great. At times, it would get me so angry that I’d scribble a furious missive, one of which even got published1. Every Wednesday afternoon, we’d have a free period in the Sixth Form common room, sharing the week’s NME and Melody Maker between us.
Of course, you could say that it’s not needed any more, but…while, sure, the day-to-day ‘MUSIC! NEWS! INCOMING! PETER! YOU’VE LOST THE MUSIC NEWS!’ is handled well by the Internet, I feel that we’re missing something by not having a weekly that ends up taking the piss as much as it takes things seriously2. And it was a weekly that paid real money to writers, something that’s lacking in our bold new era of Digital Content.
But obviously, I haven’t bought the NME since I went to UNC in 2002. I could never bring myself to buy Q or Word (okay, I did buy them a couple of times, but that was for when my online work got featured in them), or god forgive us, Uncut. And the writing on the wall had been there since it became a free sheet. In many ways, it’s a mercy killing. But it’s another avenue closed off, another chunk of something intensely…well…British3 disappearing into the mists.
It was Stereophonics slagging off Kenickie that finally got me into the letters pages. The gall of Kelly Jones still angers me to this very day, obviously.
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I still miss NTK’s weekly British-slanted take on technology news
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British in the way I remember it, in the immortal words of Your Sinclair: ‘it’s crap. in a funky skillo sort of way’
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“Wait, you can tell whether somebody is Catholic or Protestant there just by their name?”
“Often, yes!”
“What would ‘George’ be?”
“Obviously, 100% Protestant.”
“Why are the Catholics leaving on the 12th?”
Watching Derry Girls with Americans is interesting. There’s so much of it that is just pure-NI (and pure 90s Britain) that you don’t get a chunk of the jokes if you weren’t there. I also discovered that Americans don’t know who Whigfield is either…
I’m just past the half-way point of my current visit to Cincinnati, and the realisation is setting in: there isn’t going to be a next ‘visit’. The next time I come back here, at the end of April, I will be following a large lorry of books, and I won’t be going anywhere after that. In eight weeks, I’ll be gone from Durham.
While that’s more than a little terrifying, I think it’ll be good! I’ve already seen more people this week than I have in the past month back in NC. Plus more kitchen space, less grass in the back garden, and well, the new house has a built-in bar. You can’t really argue with that. I have even driven in Cincinnati this week! Admittedly, it has been ‘turn left, then go straight for about 2 miles and then turn right into Target/Kroger’, but it’s a start…
By the way, everybody is invited to my bar in May for a Eurovision party. It has been seven years since first mooted, but finally (finally!), everything is place for it to actually happen!