Status report Page 6,055

Weekend Status 3 - Person B (2)

Well, not quite. That comes with two provisos. One, I have said on many occasions and I mean it that had I had kids they would unquestionably have been in that category and they would never have gone to university as I did. Consequently, there is a part of me which conceptually is prepared to champion them almost parentally as long as they are not too obnoxious. Whatever, I think I can tolerate most of their states of obnoxiousness more than I could university states of obnoxiousness as I perceive such things now though not actually in the 1980s when I felt at home with ordinary university types. I probably allowed my mates to be more horrible than was appropriate but none of them displayed pushiness and a sense of entitlement like the current breed even if subsequently in some cases that turned out to have been obscured.

Two, I dress like a chav and like dressing as a chav. Consequently, there is nothing in my attire which marks me out from these very people. There is a bit of history here. Body dysmorphia early on meant that I felt that my face in particular didn't suit street style. It was all total nonsense and it took me years to force myself out of such feelings. By the end of my 20s I had succeeded and given that it was noticeable I got a lot of flak from people who had known me until they got used to me being just what everyone else is. I'm not ancient looking. I easily carry it off in a way that many of my current age could not do which pleases me hugely as it is a kind of getting my own back. I watch the way people move into the clothes of old people at 45 with disbelief but that's up to them. The minus side is that everyone sees me as so normal that I can't be narcissistically paranoid anymore and when situations get iffy any statement that I am a 56 year old graduate with personality issues is dismissed on all levels, I have to carry the cross of being society's' average bloke and that ain't good.

Then before the fireworks there was the band. Old geezers with beards who in truth were 10 or 20 years younger than me knocking out versions of ELO and the Beatles and Oasis at deafening volumes. Fair enough as it goes except that I could only think that as the originally externally uncool but always internally cool geezer, not that anyone would have known, it was inevitable that I would have spent 20 years ultimately at all of the cool gigs and cool festivals, not least seeing Oasis live before they were well known. So, no, there was no identification with those people, their wives or their big families.

And then there were the gays. Mainly bellowing out talk on the microphone from Radio Helier. For better and worse, they had chosen the records. To be frank, I feared that it was all going to be for the worse. Some disco thing. George Ezra. Shawn Mendes. Sam Smith. I don't get these modern people. Fortunately we got a bit of Etta James's "At Last" and Bill Withers's "Ain't No Sunshine" and Ella's version of "Dream a Little Dream of Me" and all was forgiven but in terms of personal identification, absolutely not. Lovely people all, no doubt, but they might as well be on a different planet. But this is precisely the thing. If the bloke on the mike had been a taxi driver, it would all have been great. Ditto the bearded wonder in the band or the middle class Dad or the Nan who campaigns for the Lib Dems and insists no one should fly until 2038. But they weren't. They were all who they are in that context and my god they identify as unfriendly "clique".

Weekend Status 4 - A Child Like Joy

So far I haven't mentioned the thousands of kids with their light sabres. It is here where I take the dimmest view of the modern adult. I have a heightened awareness of what society expects me to do as a late middle aged man on my own and I do it, I fully comply with its peculiar ways but given that the all round indifference other than in that regard is generally uncommunicative - the only person I spoke with in the duration was the bloke who was making money out of me by selling me a coffee - it does mean that my internal critique is not communicated so I communicate it now. I stand many yards away from all of these people. In doing so, I observe and pick up at distance little comments on the wind not aimed at me but adult obsessions generally. "Stay close to me". "Walk on the inside". Sometimes the kids are physically dragged.

Well, very briefly I was in 2005 partnered with a divorced woman who had a daughter. It didn't last largely because of her attitudes towards her. She would say that the girl, seven, was a nightmare and would end up pregnant at 15. In any attempt at sex between us which was never great she would almost flaunt supposed privacy and hence exclusion of proper Mum dialogue with messages to her daughter in the other room. And it was not my way. I didn't like that openness on sexual matters to a child. "You just sleep now. Horse and I are trying to have fun". Yeah. Very trying although she did have big breasts. I didn't like what I sensed as some sort of power dialogue between her and her daughter, And I didn't like the way that when I bought a Christmas tree so that her daughter could enjoy it that she was so visibly troubled by her mother's divorce that all she could do was fling objects at it. I asked myself where is her childhood and where is her awe? What really bloody annoyed me was that I was a seven year old who loved that tree and she just couldn't be as raised.

And it wasn't her fault. This, I sense, is typical. It wasn't my fault either when loving Dorset and very keen to see Chuck Berry live in what - 2008? - I booked myself in to Camp Bestival and on my arrival I had a 20 year old cocky bloke who was there to check the rucksacks asking "what, are you on your OWN?" as if to suggest I was dodgy. It was horrible and so far from the truth. It said an awful lot about him and society at large. Because - and here is the gist - somehow at nearly 57 I just about manage to retain the child in me. On many levels I am a child whatever I went on to do. Consequently, I am as a single man the last p;erson on earth who would ever be a threat. I stand there looking at the adults ways and thinking "you are not helping your children by saying or doing that, not least because it doesn't seem to me that you are able to engage with them on what should be their level". If only they knew what I really thought. They would feel alienated then.

So anyways the fireworks start. They were terrific. Most of the music was excellent or bearable. They began with the Katy Perry gay anthem, Firework, which is actually one of this century's decent pop songs and they even had the class to stick in a brief bit of Handel. Looking around, the kids were yawning or shrieking or running around and I'm not quite sure that I saw any real child in the external world. No. I was the child. My inner child was all warm and lovely and I watched the colours in the sky so that I was swimming in them to the extent that I became them. Stuff like that. I am just a short pace, me, between Person B and a non drug induced psychedelia. I think I must be blessed with that on some strange level.

I do know a fair few men who were married and are now divorced and they do go to places on their own full of a feeling "what do people think of me?". They say they are increasingly paranoid. Personally. my angle with me is "I couldn't give a toss". It has gone in the opposite direction. It would be nice not to feel so alienated from people now but I engage mostly with all versions of light. The journey back would have felt shit except what I knew was that I had a proper childhood. It was troubled - wow, it was troubled - but there were so many plus points to it that I still have it but on the night it did take Etta with the rockets to cut through the crap. What a f**king brilliant record when the skies are taking your breath away:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-cbOl96RFM

And. ok, I will concede to the 21st C briefly as it is a great POP song/vid : actually I think this is the best POP song of the last 20 years not that I listen to a lot of POP - and not that I like him hugely but I believe a comedian with initials RB part penned it - plus I love the idea of fireworks spraying out of a massive pair of gigantic.......it's 2019......eyes. Perry is to use the vernacular and in my humble opinion one of the hottest women in recent years. It's got it all for what it tries to do:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGJuMBdaqIw

(In looks, she reminds me a bit of Crystal Gayle which is a massive plus although it shows my age)

Horse yet another deeply profound, thought provoking post. Your point out Katie Perry empathising with just about anything "Do you ever feel like a plastic bag" "do you feel paper thin ?" there's a theme here, Rustling, only she divorced him. So what you're really saying is Etta has the voice, but Katie is better with inanimate object. So true.

Quote: Firkin @ 3rd November 2019, 5:03 PM

Horse yet another deeply profound, thought provoking post. Your point out Katie Perry empathising with just about anything "Do you ever feel like a plastic bag" "do you feel paper thin ?" there's a theme here, Rustling, only she divorced him. So what you're really saying is Etta has the voice, but Katie is better with inanimate object. So true.

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Weekend Status 5 - Boris Falls Into The Flames

Yes, spot on. You really got the full meaning there and are one cool cat. Anyhow, as is predictable I hadn't quite finished. First a couple of mopping up points on that night. When I asked for directions back to Wallington High Street from about half a dozen different people, they all reacted as if they didn't want to talk and were as miserable as sin. Most had young children in tow and they looked equally miserable. Clearly all the lights hadn't managed to reach them. It was very weird actually. I think every one of them responded with a glare and a waving of the arm with the words "over there, diagonal". I'm sorry but it would be helpful if people gave instructions which involved streets so that it didn't require the questioner to turn into a bird flying over houses. Or maybe it is just that I look like I can simply walk through umpteen brick walls.

The High Street itself was full of people who hadn't been to the fireworks and consequently they were even worse. An incoherent line at the bus stop. I asked a woman who looked like she was preparing for WW3 which was the front and the back of the queue. "WHAT?" I asked it again. "WHAT?" I asked it again. "No queue. No queue, No queue". Oh cheers. So pleased that I had had the decency to ask so that I didn't commit the sin of not doing what we used to call British. Once on, I recalled the words of the gay DJ from Radio Helier in the countdown to the bonfire after the fireworks. They have the thing in a pit and it is a spectacle in itself, hence it doesn't happen until the end which is unusual. The smoke rises and rises until you see the flames lapping. There is a wooden guy which ultimately falls into the flames and much is made of the direction in which he falls as some sort of huge symbol. It's kind of like The Wicker Man meets Groundhog Day.

"This year" he said "I am calling him Boris". No response whatsoever from the crowd. It is a Lib Dem seat as it happens but the Tories are just behind so I was expecting a massive knife fight and loads of ambulances turning up at the very least. Maybe it was all just a bit too pagan for the stereotypical. "Wow, controversial" bellowed his cohort. Still; no response. "Wave your lights children and let's see if Boris falls to the left or the right.......the smoke is rising, the smoke is rising". The Pope turned up. No, that's a lie. The Pope didn't turn up but had he done so there wouldn't have been any big reaction.

Boris, it turned out, was taking longer than any of his predecessors to topple and here I do have to criticise Radio Helier. Having spent the evening shouting not wholly without high camp at deafening levels, it all went so quiet and lengthily gabbled and indeed garbled that it was hard to know what the hell was going on. To be honest, I think they were having a bit of a tiff among themselves on what direction he appeared to be leaning. Such, I guess, are the ways of orientation but what amazed me was that no one else seemed to be bothered that there was a bloody great tree to the far left where we the plebs were. If that had gone up, it would not have been a mere election prediction but the Book of Revelations.

Next came a few whispers from the mike of "oh my god, I think he is going to fall forwards - is that the centre? - this has never happened before. Is it safe?" Something in that vein. At this point, I concluded that it was back to that old adage in life. Don't expect anybody else to be helpful. Just do it yourself. Risking accusations of being a single man who had the temerity to be within a mile of a bawling child, I made my way towards the pit so that I could see Boris for myself. For all I knew, he could have been entire fabrication. I did this using my skills developed in festivals and the bollard manoeuvres in my much earlier cycling proficiency test. It is a skilful weave in which my arms wave outwards and inwards strangely so that people naturally take several paces back. And it is done with a temporary thought that my face might be seen as similar either to that of an old tramp in jogging trousers or else that of an angel representing none other than Jesus Christ.

Well, all I can say is that from my point of view it appears that he fell sort of forwards and yet diagonally to the left as if he had been given directions back to Wallington Hight Street and followed them too literally for his own good. In the absence of any coherence from the turntable area, I deduce from this that Tom Brake will hold Carshalton and Wallington for the Lib Dems and there will be some sort of centre-left coalition by next month's Friday the 13th. The tree didn't go up in flames so I suspect Corbyn will not survive whatever deal arises. But what do I know? It isn't just a problem with people. Culturally everything has changed so much it is like another world to me. Sure, I can still recognise a rocket, a roman candle and a catherine wheel but "musically" I couldn't even tell the difference between, say, Dua Lipa and Donika Nuhiu.

No wonder you're neglecting your Bathroom thread.

Quote: Hercules Grytpype Thynne @ 4th November 2019, 12:17 PM

No wonder you're neglecting your Bathroom thread.

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Eh?

I haven't done the sixth post yet - that will be me old crocks one.

I don't normally watch the comedian-free version of Countdown but I've just clicked onto it by accident.

Rachel Riley appears to have a different body and a different face!

The change in body I'm assuming is due to pregnancy.

But why is her face different?

PS. I thought it might be a Rachel lookalike and so I waited 10 minutes until somebody addressed her by name - and they called her "Rachel" so I'm assuming it is actually Rachel Riley.

Quote: A Horseradish @ 4th November 2019, 12:30 PM

Eh?

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It's getting really filthy with people putting up all manner of disgusting ailments

Quote: Hercules Grytpype Thynne @ 4th November 2019, 4:25 PM

It's getting really filthy with people putting up all manner of disgusting ailments

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Your "people" is largely (though admittedly not exclusively) the royal "We".

Margaret Thatcher also did it - "We are a grandmother".

So it is a We-We.

Ayup.

Quote: Lee @ 5th November 2019, 9:44 AM

Ayup.

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Bloody nora!

Quote: Lee @ 5th November 2019, 9:44 AM

Ayup.

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Hello again,

It can't have been much more than a decade.

Weekend Status 6 - Religious Angles on The Old Crocks Races (1)

Not sure why the London to Brighton Veteran Car Rally is known as the Old Crocks Race because the cars which are all from 1905 or earlier are in brilliant condition. Maybe it has something to do with the average age of the drivers. As a child, I was in Coulsdon town centre for it every year except the year that I went to Hyde Park to see the start and the year that I .went to Brighton to see the finish. The best year was the one in which I was standing with my father in a garage forecourt (where the bypass now is) and one vehicle, an Oldsmobile, pulled in followed by a trailer vehicle with TV cameras on it and a massive limousine. Everyone who got out of the vehicles was from Ohio and they owned a television company in Ohio.

I was asked if I wanted a ride in the Oldsmobile and hence be on American television. I said yes please. They took me to Gatwick. Somehow my Dad manage to follow us in the car and take photos while doing so. It was my first ever appearance on television actually. Then later as a student aged 19, my father won a competition in the Sunday Mirror. The prize was to do the entire London to Brighton route with ten other winners and journos in a vintage Renault bus with unlimited access to champagne from 6am to 11am. Obviously I don't recall a lot about it. I believe that bus still travels down if not always in parallel with the veteran rally then in May when there is always a London to Brighton vintage commercial vehicles run.

I've just started brewing 10 gallons of Christmas ale. It should turn out very similar to this stuff:

https://www.breckbrew.com/beers/christmas-ale-1

7.1% gah.. Too strong for me dabutt.
Enjoy.

Quote: Stephen Goodlad @ 5th November 2019, 3:14 PM

7.1% gah.. Too strong for me dabutt.

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It was a request from my neighbor. Most of the English-style beers I brew only use 8-15 pounds of grain for a 10-gallon batch, but this one was almost 32 pounds. I have a 3.3% mild and a 4.9% stout on tap, so I have options for extended drinking sessions.