From 1990...

The holy trinity: Theroux, Buxton, Cornish.


Top comment: "It's like they knew YouTube was going to be invented one day!"

A surprisingly rambling post about shelving and tennis

Sarah and I will be celebrating our first wedding anniversary in a week and a day. It may qualify as the strangest, happiest and most unsettled year of my life (ask me again in 50 years. Set an Outlook reminder so you don't forget). We spent every day together in India for nearly six months, we got back and kept on moving (from Oval to Shannon to Cheadle to Ealing to Salisbury), slowed down for a few months in the Cheshire countryside (courtesy of generous family members, shout out), got a hefty chunk of freelance work, and took Megabuses between Manchester and London. I played a little Xbox, before the E74 error put a stop to that.

 

I can't be bothered to do a tortured drawn-out metaphor about striding boldly through the furrowed fields of the present towards the horizon of the future (see photo), because really we're just feeling our way in the dark. We got to go through our old possessions a few months back and realised that not much of the stash is really worth hauling down from the loft. You'd have to be pretty hard-minded not to concede after a few months of backpacking that unless you own a house with extensive shelving, you can forget the removal van and get by with a hard drive and a Kindle. Not that a house with extensive shelving is on the agenda anyway - instead, we're back in south London in a flat-share with a couple of old friends. Not your average post-marriage set-up, it's true, but it's turning out to be immensely fun. I haven't been this sociable since 2002. And in the last month I've played more hours of tennis than I did throughout my 20s, thanks to this.

 

The Landlord and I (after some drinks, admittedly) were inspired and set about it. Disaster struck, but slowly. It chipped away, really. After 13 consecutive days we caved in (literally, almost) and rested due to a combination of wristy RSI, back pain and all-round massive exhaustion. Shame. I would say this, though: getting to the office at 9am having already played a set of tennis is an amazing thing, and you walk round energised, smiling at the secret in your head. Going down the escalator at Vauxhall on my way to work after a 7am knockabout, my eye was caught by the sight of a woman handing her young son a tennis ball. I looked again; it was an apple. Tennis on the brain.

A friend saw this picture on Facebook and said later, "Oh! You're living somewhere gritty and urban now, aren't you?" - and the snap was supposed to have something of the Original Pirate Material about it. But actually this is the view looking out. Sarah was originally wary about the transition from the rolling hills of Bollington, identifying one of our new local London landmarks, a massive painted wooden board with the legend "PLEASE LEAVE ROOM FOR ACCESS :-)" as a downer, an unwelcoming symbol of city life. I think for her it was like a passive-aggressive post-it note scaled up 500% and evidence that the capital is snarling at innocent passers-by. I was like, "BUT WHAT ABOUT THE SMILEY?" That did the trick. It's a pretty persuasive argument.

YOU'RE SO UNFAIR I HATE YOU

We need someone who's handy at video editing to create a feature-length We Need to Talk About Kevin mash-up so this important joke can be fully realised in time for Oscar season, but I've made a start below, so it wouldn't really be that much work.

Smoke and mirrors

A strong whiff of media beef wafted through Electric Goose Towers this morning, as we noticed that page 11 of the Daily Mirror featured a story (which isn't online and doesn't seem to have been picked up by any other papers or websites) about an allegedly sexist Ryanair advert which appeared in The Guardian at some unspecified moment in time.

According to the Mirror article, the ad, which was promoting cheap flights to Germany and featured "a large-breasted blonde clutching a huge beer glass" alongside the tagline "See The Frauleins With The Big Jugs", upset many of the "ailing" Guardian's "right-on" readers. It continues, in hilariously sarcastic vein:

Even their own staff were up in arms, some phoning in from their rustic Tuscan holidays to complain.

One said: 'I nearly choked on my gluten-free organic muesli when I saw it.

'We are keepers of the nation's morals, and we let the nation down.'

Of course, only a paranoid and crazy person would suggest the snarky tone of this piece had anything to do with articles like this, this or this…

My most-listened song of 2011 so far...

...is 'Powa' by tUnE-yArDs. I can remember the first time this came on my iPod: I was walking through the small Cheshire village I seem to have temporarily found myself living in, just coming up to the canal which for some reason is suspended overhead like a watery monorail track - and it made me grin like a local cat. (A similar thing happened when I heard Gablé, incidentally, but that's a different post.) From the pictures I've briefly seen of Merrill Garbus - for it is she, and that name really is hers - I imagine she wakes up with astonishing splashes of colourful paint daubed on her face, with white feathers slowly falling to the floor around her bed, which is quite possibly held off the ground thanks to a delicate framework of twigs and pipecleaners. Here's 'Powa' live: amazing in every way.*



* unless you think her voice sounds a bit silly.

Apples. Lots of apples.

Despite its wrenching pain

Horse and pigs

Snowdon

On my 30th birthday back in April, we sat by the pool and went on a leisurely stroll to a bookshop. On my wife's 30th birthday, we climbed a mountain. It was insanely hard work, particularly because we didn't have enough change for the car park and so in theory had to be there and back in under four hours, a challenge which would have stretched even Tenzing Norgay to the limits. Actually, you can get a train to the top of Snowdon, but as you can see from the pictures I took, the locomotives aren't actually big enough to carry real human beings, so you're better off walking.

Pics were remixed using this site.

Torchwood v The Day Today