Prom com

Two utterly cringeworthy examples of the "when I say 'x', you say 'y'" paradigm, heard in Camden's Jazz Cafe last night:

"When I say 'one', you say 'extra' - one!"
"Extra."
"One!"
"Extra."
"When I say 'electric', you say 'proms' - electric!"
"Proms."
"Electric!"
"Proms."


Previous examples

I've got a lot on my template

Woah, check out my amazing new blog template! Ace, isn't it?

Okay, okay, it looks almost exactly the same as the old one. In fact, only Goose obsessives (you know who you are) will notice a change. But underneath, it's all Blogger 2.0, so bog off. Or jog on, your choice.

I AM THE NEW FACEBOOK.

Ready Steady

iTunes' FREE single of the week is The Hold Steady's majestic Stuck Between Stations. Go and get it immediately, it's a blinder of a song (provided you like REM, Springsteen and, like, music).

It also has the best opening line, nay verse, of any song this year. Well, last year - it's been around quite a while now. Which means you've probably got it already. And you're probably bored of it already. Sigh. There's no pleasing you, is there? I mean can't you just pretend to be interested even if you're not? Fine. You've got an attitude problem, you know that? And sort yourself out, you look a mess.

Anyway, that first verse:

"There are nights when I think that Sal Paradise was right.
Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together.
Sucking off each other at the demonstrations,
Making sure their make-up's straight.
Crushing one another with collossal expectations;
Dependent, undisciplined, sleeping late."

Full lyrics

Aftermath

3.54pm
Haven't eaten yet today. Still not hungry.

Chicken overdose

Last night I went over to the Stockwell flat where I used to live. James and Jamie are moving out soon, so we thought we'd have an evening of beer and reminiscence. But then it was suggested we pay a visit to our Stockwell junk food haunt of many years, Millennium Fried Chicken, and treat ourselves to a family-sized bucket of unhealth.

All three of us leap upon the idea with the utmost relish (it's the only way to leap upon ideas involving large amounts of food) and, at around 8.30pm, we head over to MFC. Our man Raju is manning the decks; as I moved out of Stockwell in April, it's an emotional reunion for us both.

I tell Raju the news that James and Jamie are also moving away, to Tooting Bec. He quizzes Jamie, who confirms that there is no branch of Millennium or Morley's nearby. Our chicken man laughs: "Only 20 minutes from here, though." And indeed, the chickenburgers are so good here I can actually imagine my former flatmate traversing five tube stops to get his feed.

"There's an enormous Chicken Cottage, though," says Jamie. For some reason, this is a piece of banter too far for Raju and he visibly flinches.

"Please sir, no," he says seriously.

"It's almost a Chicken Mansion," I add, comedian. No one hears me. Raju turns back to the task in hand; we gather together the £17 needed to pay for this epic meal.

Anyway, with heavy hearts and a heavy bag, it's time for one last "vannakam", then we're off to the flat. Extraordinarily, between us, we eat four portions of chips, five large pieces of chicken, 11 chicken wings and three chickenburgers.

Afterwards I actually have a sensation of being physically clogged. "I feel like I'm more chicken than human now," I groan.

"I never thought this could happen," adds Jamie. "But I have a chicken headache."


Remembering MFC
The five levels of chicken shop recognition
The ill fated Tamil lessons
Meeting Shiva, the destroyer of chicken

Three slices of Big Train genius

Bad news

21 November 2014: Winter is setting in, and the freesheet distributors have intensified their reign of terror on the London streets. The chill darkness arrives earlier and earlier; each evening brings with it the pack of thirsty marauders and a new stack of damned newspapers. They thrust the fresh edition into your gloved hands and woe betide those who hesitate before accepting. There was once a time – oh so distant, now! – when refusing a copy of Thelondonpaper or its one competitor, London Lite, was acceptable, even common. But now, with over twenty different evening freesheets competing fiercely against one another, a walk home is like dashing through a forest of wolves. The old havens – tube stations, buses, coffee shops, pubs – are now patrolled heavily by vendors and it is a lucky man who reaches the safety of his home with a wad of newspaper less than ten inches thick. Some are duplicates; they do not care.

Do not accuse me of exaggerating the truth with frivolous verbal furbelows. I have seen first-hand the savagery of these creatures. Writing these words, my gnarled hand shakes as I hold the pen; mine eyes dart from side to side as I recall the events, which occurred this very day, almost to the hour, two years ago. Finishing work one dreary Wednesday evening, I deviated from my usual route for no particular reason that I can remember. Perhaps I was trying to avoid a tiresome colleague, or maybe I merely wished for a change of scenery. But how I wish I had never flinched from the safe monotony which drives us all forward! As I walked down that Fitzrovia alley – a place which lurks constant in my dreams – I espied five vendors heading toward my direction. Before they saw me, and knowing I could be in trouble if they spotted the rival newspapers I had accumulated, I quickly ducked behind a nearby bin. Holding my breath as they approached, I suddenly sensed that I had misjudged the situation. My suspicions that this was no normal distribution job were confirmed as I noticed, with jerk of panic, that the largest of them, a pale, greasy bruiser of a man, had streaks of blood on his shirt. He was silent, eyes to the ground; the others were babbling to each other in words that seemed, in my delirious trepidation, almost nonsensical. Still crouching, my hands gripped my shins in fear. Then they passed, and I was safe. This was, I am afraid, not the end of my ordeal.

After waiting a good few minutes to ensure the quintet had indeed left the scene, I continued down the alley. What I saw will remain with me until the final day of my life. The man, dressed in what I guessed to be his work suit, was lying in an odd, nightmarish position, utterly still. His clothes were in disarray: the tie pulled tight into a knot, the jacket suffering a large rip. Certain that I beheld a corpse, I suddenly understood the awful events that had transpired - he had refused to take the newspapers which had been offered him. Perhaps I am being dishonest, dear reader: there was an additional detail which helped me understand what had occurred, although the word "detail" does perhaps underplay the stark and ugly quiddity of this killing. The man's eyes had been gouged. Terrible enough, you might think. But protruding from the sockets, rolled up, were two newspapers he had refused.

At this time, in this city, just denying the vendors was a wild act of rebellion for which the deceased had paid the ultimate price. As the popular saying goes: there is no such thing as a free paper.


More on the freesheets

Count your Lessings

While we're on the subject of grate righting, big up to Doris Lessing, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature last week.

Her reaction was hilarious, although she was clearly taken a little off guard (as was the injured man clutching onions and an artichoke who was accompanying her). "Look, I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one..."


I nearly knocked Lessing over once. It was accidental, of course; we weren't going ten rounds in the ring. If we had been, I wouldn't fancy her chances - they don't call me Will "iron fists" Parkhouse for nothing. Anyway, the reason for my hurry was because I was late for a talk by the great writer herself - I was all like, "Out the way, old lady, I've got to get to Lessing!"

Man oh Man

The winner of the Man Booker Prize is announced on Tuesday night. Here's my verdict on the shortlisted books.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist – Mohsin Hamid
A Pakistani man, Changez, bumps into an American in a restaurant in Lahore and begins to relate his life story, detailing his college days at Princeton, his love for a beautiful but disturbed fellow student and the high-energy graduate job in New York City that leads to him questioning his place in America. It's all told in the first person but the two parallel worlds - the eaterie of the present, as night closes in, and Changez's earlier life in the US – are beautifully evoked. Actually, the eerie style (in which we are made to become the American listener) is identical to Camus' The Fall, but I guess whether you want to take it as a rip-off or homage is up to you. Still, I thought it was excellent – the subtlety and tone of Kazuo Ishiguro combined with the storytelling finesse of [tries to think of someone with storytelling finesse]… Ian McEwan, perhaps.

On Chesil Beach – Ian McEwan
Speak of the devil. He doesn't need to win really, does he? I mean, Atonement, which he wrote YEARS AGO is back in the bestsellers charts, he's won the Booker already and everyone loves him. But, oh look, On Chesil Beach is fucking great as well. I guess there's not much new – he did the tiny minute detail thing in Saturday, he did the nifty compact novella thing with Amsterdam, he did the "skip to the end" looking back mournfully on our wasted lives thing in The Innocent… and so on. But it's still virtually impossible to dis'. Anyway, 1962: two newlyweds, Edward and Florence, arrive on their honeymoon at a hotel near Chesil Beach. Sadly, when it comes to bedroom time, Edward accidentally ***** on ********'s ***** and she's all like "Oh my God, that's totally gross". But "they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible", which puts paid to any ideas of reconciliation. It would be magnificently boring if McEwan won, but no one can say he doesn't deserve it, frankly.

Mister Pip – Lloyd Jones
This, it seems, has become the favourite to scoop the £25k, ahead of the McEwan. That's slightly bizarre in my opinion: it's competent but not dazzling. The story's told by Matilda, a young girl living on the island of Bougainville (Papua New Guinea way) during a violent conflict in the early 1990s. Matilda and her classmates get through the tough times with the help of only-white-man-in-the-village Mr Watts, who introduces the children to Charles Dickens' Great Expectations. They love it, but everything starts to go wrong when rebel soldiers arrive in the village. Worth the read, but the best thing about Mister Pip is certainly the cover art, which looks like the greatest wrapping paper you ever saw.

Darkmans – Nicola Barker
Very, very strange. Eight hundred and thirty-eight pages long, it's written almost entirely in a san serif font not unlike Century Gothic, and features constant italicised interruptions in the text to indicate characters' sudden

- hey, what the…

inner thoughts. Meandering as a one-legged jogger and without any kind of discernable story arc, it's set in Ashford, Kent, and concerns the adventures of Beede (yes, Barker does do the "venerable" joke – on page two, in fact), his German friend Dory (who keeps getting possessed and doing weird things, like digging in the sand to find petrified forests), Beede's drug-dealing son Kane (phone-obsessed, constantly looking for a lighter), Dory's chiropodist wife Elen (beautiful, worried, perhaps dangerous), their six-year-old son Fleet (apparently also possessed; is building scale model of the French town of Albi out of matchsticks), Kane's ex-girlfriend Kelly (highly temperamental, breaks foot early on and spends most of novel in hospital), everyone's mate Gaffar (Kurdish wide-boy, has morbid fear of salad) and various other ne'er-do-wells. It would be totally cool if this won, but it's probably a bit too out there.

The Gathering – Anne Enright
Didn't like this much. The writing's clearly impressive, but it was hard to love. It's about a ragtag Irish family of 12, one of whose number dies, leaving the narrator, Veronica, confused, messed up and in the mood for reminiscence. Not much of it has stuck with me really – she almost becomes an alcoholic, gets annoyed with her children, drives around a lot and, as it's Irish, there's some stuff about child abuse.

Animal's People – Indra Sinha
Definitely the most FUN of the shortlist. Told by a foul-mouthed slum-delling Indian boy who walks on all fours like an animal after his back was deformed by a chemical leak from a factory in his town (the fictional Khaufpur, based on the central Indian city Bhopal), it's a compelling read, and filled with brilliant, vivid characters. The protagonist's tone slips slightly here and there and there's a dip about two-thirds of the way through which should've been chopped, but otherwise it's a cracker, with something of the Midnight's Children about it. Sadly – and I wish I was joking – the book's chances of victory will surely be massively decreased by the fact that an Indian writer won last year (Kiran Desai's so-so The Inheritance of Loss), so if the judges did decide to give Sinha the prize, there'd be loads of muttering about the, shall we say, "chutnification" of the Booker.

Lessons learned from... Atonement

Be careful when handling expensive vases.