Behind Blue Eyes

For no particular reason, I love seeing the sign Polski Sklep on a shop-front. It’s never “Bryga’s Polski Sklep” or even “Polski Delikatesy”. Plain, simple, Polish Shop. I’d love to see some other nationalities trying this out: McDonald’s could switch its name to “Downmarket American Slop”; Zizzi could be re-Christened as “That Italian Place You Go To When You Don’t Know A Local”.

My token Muslim friend was very impressed when he was down for the weekend recently. I popped out to get breakfast materials but had neither the time nor the inclination to go all the way to Tesco. Instead I went to the nearest 24/7 shop and procured – amongst other things – some halal sausages. They stock them in the local shop? he asked. Yeah, I replied nonchalantly, you can buy all sorts of stuff in there. His usual anti-London comments calmed down for a bit after that.

This week I was in the same shop. I needed some sandwich materials. I used to dread buying bread from the now-defunct even-nearer shop because it only stocked bloody Sunblest and that sugary, fatty Jamaican bread from the bakery in Camberwell. Now I have to traipse a whole two minutes further I am offered a wider selection. Not only does this place have a Delice de France rack to satisfy one’s baguette and pain au chocolat cravings but I was also given the choice of Polski Chleb. This was a new one on me so I bought it. It’s half wheat, half rye and I will definitely be buying it as emergency bread again.

BLOG NEWS

This was all just an excuse to point out to readers that I have reached the giddy heights of 40,000 hits since I moved to WordPress.com in October last year. Obviously the posts go back far longer than that but it’s a nice round number. If you want to know quite how meaningless blog stats really are, when you are next feeling that bored and lonely take a look at dormant or retired sites and watch how their numbers increase even without any activity. What counts is the quality of the comments and on that measure I am one of the world’s best ever blogs!!

My life has improved markedly since I stopped reading the papers and watching the new bulletins. Another upward step when I stopped getting involved in shouting matches with Newsnight. XFM is much more entertaining to wake to than Radio Four. At this stage you are expecting a cliché such as “ignorance is bliss” but you won’t get one because even though I have opted out of mainlining on The News I have not opted out of keeping an eye on what is going on. I scan the headlines every now and again. I keep track of my ever-diminishing list of favourite blogs. I seem to have finally detached myself from caring so much about what is going on.

You can care too little and, of course, you can care too much. The people who care too little are those who harm others deliberately or through negligence. The people who care too much are those who would tell others how they should live or get annoyed with people who don’t live as “expected”. I have been known to get worked up about the fact that the world is not as it should be. But there is no point.

Instead of worrying too much about the world around me I have been indulging in a bit of What I Want To Do. This is much healthier, and coincidentally much more fun. I have about a million projects on the go at the moment and none of them involve saving the world. Lovely.

Until quite recently I thought that I have worse-than-average hearing. In arenas with background noise, such as pubs and clubs, I have great difficulty zooming in on what people quite close by are saying. Other people seem to manage better than me. However a couple of years ago I took a proper hearing test and I came up trumps, excellent marks. I also seem to hear more in certain situations than other people do. My working theory is that in a “loud” environment my ears are saturated although I am not certain that eardrums work in the same way as electronic transducers…

Apart from sometimes appearing aloof in a pub or club, my sensitive hearing also has another rather unpleasant result. To celebrate our sixteenth birthdays, my best mate and I hired the downstairs club venue at a local cultural centre. Unfortunately the venue knew that we were under age so the only booze was that brought by naughty people and gate crashers. I was stone cold sober. Despite that the night went well, I thought.

At midnight the music was turned off. I was the first time I had experienced ringing in my ears. I didn’t like it one bit. I felt damaged. Maybe this was the first time I doubted my immortality, although I wouldn’t have put it that way at sixteen.

The ringing has never really gone away. It is not particularly loud and is by no means constant. If I have to concentrate on something or there is even a very low-level background sound then I cannot hear it. But if there isn’t much going on and my surroundings are quiet that persistent sound is there. This can be particularly maddening when trying to get back to sleep at 4am.

The persistence of the noise increases if I have been silly enough to stand near a speaker at a music venue or go to Carnival. Before Christmas I was honoured to attend a friend’s stag do in Brighton. We had an absolutely awesome time and because of that I exuberantly enjoyed the club we ended up in. Caught up in a drunken fug I decided to let the music swamp me completely. I got far too close to a speaker and regretted it for some days after. I can’t blame the dance music though, heavy metal seems to have the same effect.

I am not sure I understand pricing in the mobile phone industry. Non-obsessives may safely stop reading right here.

Call me a cynic, but I am not remotely surprised that various functions on my “smart” phone started acting irrationally and intermittently just as the contractual lock-in expired. The manufacturers and the networks have a symbiotic relationship. It is not in anyone’s interest, apparently, for customers to find a phone they like which does what they want and just pay for the minutes, texts and data they use.

One thing I won’t do is restrict the amount I use the phone to suit the bill. The phone is a social animal and is mainly used for entertainment purposes. I don’t want to feel like I am holding back by not forwarding on some crap joke or not telling a friend about something vaguely amusing just because I am on the wrong billing set-up.

I find myself in a typically BE bind. I quite like the idea of having a basic two-up, two-down, two-G phone for the occasional call or text message. I hate the idea of being “always on” and the widespread expectation that everyone should be contactable at all times. I despair of people who chase up emails and texts that have not been replied to within twenty four seconds. Yesterday I actually had an email from someone asking if they had my number right because I had not replied to a text sent a few minutes before. Luckily that person could not read my mind as I read it.

But at the same time I appreciate having my calendar in my pocket, I like reading your witty comments as they come through and I absolutely love being able to share a quick snap with a friend via email. Actually, sending and receiving funny pics on the phone is the feature I would miss the most. Having spent eighteen months in the smart phone age, could I go back to my little Nokia 6300? Could I do without maps and the occasional emergency look-up of something online? OK so the sky wouldn’t exactly fall in, but…

Which brings me to the supposed main point of this. The range of prices you can pay for phones astounds me. Yes I realise that prices don’t always reflect the cost of production and yes I realise that the phone companies get a better deal than a single customer could get by buying a phone direct from the manufacturer. What I don’t understand is how if a “sim only” deal costs X per month for Y usage, how come getting a new phone in with the deal is hardly more expensive? These are luxury bits of cutting-edge kit we are talking about, and yet somehow consumers are able to get them for a fraction of the “proper” price. The only thing I can think of is that perhaps enough people use much more than what is “included” to counteract the loss made on customers like me who rarely go beyond the basic stipend.

I wish I was little bit taller

Well actually excess height is a disadvantage in many ways. In London, for example, tall people complain about the small tube trains. This is not a problem I have faced. Also, many people feel threatened or challenged by taller people. Tall people encourage insecurity amongst certain others and as we know insecurity is extremely debilitating. Height diversity is a good thing.

I wish I was a ‘baller

The money would be nice, but the rest of the “lifestyle”? Working every Saturday so no chance to go to the pub on Friday; being followed around by the paparazzi and having your home broken in to every time you pop to the shops for a pint of milk; being involved in the celebrity circuit? No thanks. This is a “profession” which glorifies stupidity, where any player who shows signs of intelligence or outside interest is branded strange. No, I think I prefer a more thoughtful way of making money.

I wish I had a girl who looked good

Well yes, obviously.

I would call her

This is where it gets more difficult. What if she looks good but has nothing much to say for herself? What if there is no killer selling point that marks her out as a cut above the rest? What if she’s someone who demands to know where I am at all times and resents my spending time with other people? What if she wants to try and change me; to “improve” me? What if she’s the clingy, unconfident sort?

I wish I had a rabbit in a hat with a bat

This would be great. Take my hat off, impress everyone with the rabbit inside and then the rabbit goes on the rampage to defeat my enemies. Brilliant: my kind of hat, my kind of rabbit. But what about the responsibility? Rabbits need feeding and hutches which need cleaning out on a regular basis. I can barely work the vacuum cleaner let alone take charge of a living, breathing thing. And let’s say I am out on the town after a 5-1 victory in the local derby. What if the rabbit wants to go to bed before I do? What if there is no rabbit litter tray in the trendy bar I am in? That’s gonna seriously mess up my hair.

and a ’64 Impala

Hmm, this I could handle.

This guy must be amazing. How did he know that I had problems in each and every one of these different areas? He put his card through my door, just for me. Incredible. It’s the final point which clinched it for me “if you have no idea whats [sic] going on in your life come and see Sheikh Yousef”. Spot on that man. I am having him around for tea on Tuesday.

I’d like to think that not many people are stupid enough to believe that there is a simple solution to anything, let alone a cure-all. But actually even supposedly intelligent people can fall in to the trap of thinking that a) there is something abnormal about them and b) there might be some answer out there.

Whoops.

The other day Lola posted this amazing description of how it felt for her not to “fit in” and then the realisation that there is no such thing as “fitting in”. The idea of belonging to a particular group or community is a strange one. You can’t measure why someone might have an affinity or dislike for another particular person, you can’t analyse a group to answer the question of whether someone will fit into it.

During my England-following days, I was often surprised how accepted I was by the people I went on trips with. I felt very different from the rest of the gang. I talked differently and had different non-football interests. But this was my own stupidity talking. They did not waste their time deciding whether to let me in to the club or not. There was no pre-existing club to join. We all gravitated together without any complicated process or over-analysis, because we all got along. The rest was just my stupid head.

You keep your friends not because you have this particular attribute or the other or because you never make mistakes or piss anyone off. You keep them because overall, they think you’re someone they appreciate having around.

It’s pointless and incredibly damaging trying to work out whether people like you or accept you. Ultimately the only test is whether people treat you as you would hope that they would. It’s usually only in glorious hindsight that you can see whether someone was a true friend or not, or whether “the group” considered you an integral part. Thinking about it is just plain dangerous.

1) I can see the future

I went to meet my erstwhile flatmate, fitness guru and general good buddy for a bike ride this evening. En route to our rendezvous, I was cycling down a road which I dislike because – for some reason – the driving standard is particularly bad there. I had a near miss myself when a right-turning car kept creeping from a side road into my path even though it was bloody obvious that it was not going to be able to get all the way across the lane before the oncoming traffic reached it. I managed to de-clip, slow down, swerve and give him a piece of my mind without crashing. Things are improving.

A bit further on the traffic was slowing for a junction which is not complicated but is a nuisance with right-turn filters and pedestrian crossings and it is on a curved section of road. I am a bit vanilla these days and actually stop for red lights and things. In my old age I have become a bit of a stickler for the road rules mainly because I think they are a sensible way to stay safe. Many cyclists, as any Londoner who ventures outside will know, think that the rules are just a fascist imposition on their two-wheeled freedom and, in the absence of strong enforcement, actively ignore them.

The lights were red for our carriageway. From where I was, a few yards behind, I could see the bus that was turning right into the junction. I could see exactly what was going to happen, about a hundredth of a second before it did. The cyclist who was saving himself four seconds by going straight through the lights must have had his view blocked by the other bus that he was undertaking. It’s interesting how time slows down in these situations. My bellowed STOP! went unheard. This chap’s brakes were good enough to stop him before he actually bounced off the side of the bus and also good enough to send him over the handlebars onto the road nanometres from the bus. Mentally I was prepared to swing into first aid mode. I rushed forward towards the spread-eagled man on the ground. But by the time I reached him he had already managed to right himself and was merely winded and extremely embarrassed.

I used to enjoy the cut and thrust of cycling on London’s busy roads. At seventeen I actively looked forward to the morning race down the Marylebone and Euston Roads. I am getting old now.

2) Different folks, different strokes

I promise I will stop going on about this. It’s “blogging about blogging” gone mad. I hate the concept of “core friends” because it implies that there are some people who are second-rate buddies. But several of the people I am in touch with most constantly and at a deeper level have made comments about this pair of recent posts. Everyone interacts differently with everyone else. You can know two people equally well but the relationship between yourself and those two people will be different. Without wishing to breach any confidences, the reaction to those posts has been amusingly wide-ranging:

- The chap who was flatteringly worried about me after the first one thought that the second post was an “eloquent” explanation;
- Another mate says that I have undermined the value of the dark posts by trying to brush them off as trivial;
- A further buddy let me know that the first post needed no further explanation;
- A fourth signed me up for a dating web site.

A pet theory of mine is that restrictions to retail competition, diversity and start-ups are caused by a fundamental mistake that Britain has made in its approach to post-war town planning. No, I’m not talking about the green belt or the arcane, tortuous and self-defeating process that developers must go through before being allowed to build anything new or use anything old for something different. I don’t know whether its driven by “policy” or “culture”. I’m talking about what happens on the ground floor.

From Manhattan to Krung Thep Mahanakhon via Paris and Berlin, cities which are more vibrant; welcoming; accessible; full of character; and, well, fun have a far larger number of local retail outlets. In most city centres around the world, office buildings and blocks of flats have shops, cafés, off-licences – you name it – on the ground floor. My theory is that because there is a greater availability of rentable space there is more opportunity for diversity of retail offering and therefore innovation with the added bonus that retail prices need not be so outlandish hence the more accessible café culture enjoyed by the Aussies, Italians et al.

I live in a fairly dense, central part of town and yet my nearest useful shop is nearly five minutes walk away. Between my door and their door are simply blocks of flats, a seedy pub and a kebab shop. In most other cities I reckon there would be a plethora of activity.

I think this feeds in to how we feel about our own communities. I think if there was a café right nearby I would be in there all the time. I would be a regular and I would probably know other regulars by sight at least. Instead, I brew my own coffee and fry my own bacon sandwiches and know fewer people in the neighbourhood.

Britain has been too obsessed with urban specialisation: shopping district here, living quarters there, pubs and bars somewhere else. The parts of London which feel most “bohemian” or simply “desirable” seem to be those which have a few decent independent shops. Too often the debate revolves around whether Tesco is evil. I think it runs deeper than that.

Recently someone suggested to me the idea of “total travel”. This is a different way of organising a trip from the usual over-planned, over-guidebooked stuff that people do. One concept is to have no plan, no pre-knowledge of the destination and nothing booked apart from the accommodation. The idea is that you have to be spontaneous and take the city as you find it with no preconceptions.

This weekend I did a bit of total travel by default. I turned up in Munich with nothing more than a basic street map of the centre and a hotel booking. I had not had time to look into anything else. In the hotel reception there was a leaflet for a company offering walking tours, one of which was the Third Reich Tour.

It was very interesting. Places which now look like ordinary parts of the cityscape were at the epicentre of literally world-changing events. The pub where the German Workers Party, for example, held its inaugural meeting is this rather nondescript place:

This rather ugly academy of music and theatre is where the wartime NSDAP had its headquarters:

This is where Hitler used to shoot pool in between blood-curdling speeches:

And this is where I went for a refreshing beer after I had had enough history:

On an unspecified evening during the recent WM, one of my favourite bloggers and I sat down for a refreshing half of shandy at an unspecified location in this great capital city. For obvious reasons of anonymity I can’t tell you much about him apart from him being a very cool dude. During this little “meet” this gentleman told me that he thought that I was brave to impart such personal stuff on a site which is read by people who know me in real life. Brave, naive or possibly just plain stupid. Brave is out of the question because that would imply that I consider the consequences of what I put up on here before I click “Publish”.

A bit about those “personal” posts: don’t take them too seriously. Ja, they occasionally provide a snapshot of an idea that has passed through my head. Nein, they do not represent a full and clear picture of my state of mind. They are most definitely NOT some kind of pathetic Moat-style cry for assistance. Think of this stuff as a thought experiment. I put stuff on here so it can be released in a controlled, environmentally responsible way. I don’t put it up to solicit phone calls begging me not to jump off the nearest bridge. Think of it as a way of grabbing some perspective on life. When stuff is whirling around it can sometime be difficult to judge how important it is. Once it’s written down it can be dismissed as poppycock*. Don’t get me wrong, I love the fact that there are people who care about my state of mind. I love the fact that there are people around me to say “shut up, BE”. But this blog is not the whole picture.

My dad was at LSE at the same time as Mick Jagger. One of my dad’s favourite supposedly-educational stories was about how he was one of the people who advised Jagger to stay on and finish his degree as something to fall back on if the music industry didn’t work out for him. I think this was supposed to be a tale to encourage us kids to stick to our studies and pursue a “proper” career before thinking too hard about hobbies and interests. It always seemed to me that actually the story illustrated the exact opposite: Jagger dropped out of university and did rather well for himself doing what he enjoyed, in stark contrast to my dad who failed his finals at the first attempt, got a Richard on re-sitting and failed in what he actually wanted to do in life. Dad died frustrated and miserable at 58; Jagger, of course, is still going strong.

* good word