Blackpool was lovely. Glorious weather and the roller coasters running like shit off shovels. Took two pals (Harvey Nicks types) and they hated it. The bars were full of freaks which made the new twisted and sick BBC3 drama 'Funland' seem like a documentary.
Mum and Dad arrived on Friday to take Edward to Northumberland with them as Darren and I are off on our hols this weekend. Then Mum got poorly and had to go to hospital and she's still there. Problems in the digestive tracts involving lots of blood (like I said to her, "well, it is Halloween Mum"). The consultant wants to look at her poo under a microscope but so far she's not obliged him. Dad is taking some hazelnuts to her tonight as they usually get her going. I'll let you know.

Cool travel guide Gridskipper have bigged up my series of pics on crappy England. Look.

Gone to lunch. Back on Saturday.

Everyone works very hard in England and so we take our relaxation seriously. We have perfected the art of falling asleep anywhere (even on a toilet roof) and when not sleeping, our men-folk are knitting their dinner or reading about lesbian sex scandals (in their sandals).







It's not unheard of for an elderly couple to fall asleep in the sun while holding hands and never wake up.



I'm off to Blackpool to do some relaxing tomorrow. Back on Saturday.

The lovely autumn weather on Saturday was particularly suited to breakfasting in Walthamstow market with a Scottish spinster and Mr Spellcnut. We ate at a new Portuguese place (but we had a full English each). The Scottish spinster has a mouse in her flat and has been sleeping in her bath for a few nights as “they can’t scramble up the sides and bite me”. Is it any wonder she is a spinster? The flash is back and Topshop had stock so I bought a pair. The most embarrassing plimsoll when I was at school is now retro-cool and hopefully some of this will rub off on me.
I threw up on Friday night. I ate Chinese food, popcorn, ice cream and Maltesers while watching House Of Wax on DVD. It was very gory and caused reverse gluttony which meant I went to bed with an empty stomach. Perhaps it was Paris Hilton that made me subconsciously purge (she wasn’t half bad in the film).
Monster In Law had two good bits but I can’t remember them now. Oceans Twelve was pleasant. Very Euro-arty with a convoluted plot and lovely scenery (and Scott Caan is so dreamy). I rode my bike up and down the Lea Valley canal on Saturday afternoon and the sunset from the Waterworks roundabout looking West along the North Circular was splendid (city folk eh! easy pleased). On Sunday we took a muddy stroll up Parliament Hill with our dog and a flask of hot tea and then came home via Golders Green and a Jewish deli where we bought bagels and deep fried latka. Paul Anka singing Nirvana, Soundgarden and Pet Shop Boys songs has been amusing this weekend and I rediscovered the significance of the first three Magazine albums (significance in relation to today’s young rockers I mean). I only owned Secondhand Daylight at the time but somehow know all the tracks from the other two. Remember at school when army haversacks used to be painted with your favourite album cover by the school fine artist/graphic designer (usually for 40 ciggies)? Well, someone at my school had the cover from Real Life painted on his and I was dead jealous.

Decorative bins are widespread throughout England. They are emptied once a year by prisoners on day release. I met Pauline Collins once. I was leaning against a bin sucking an iced lolly and she said "excuse me, can I get to the bin?". I moved aside and she disposed of some rubbish. My Mum loves watching Shirley Valentine.

I always wondered if Tweety Pie was a girl or a boy. Now I know.

The train was invented in England over 40 years ago by this gentleman:



Most streets in England have a train to transport old people between the bookies and the launderette:



The train has revolutionised travel in England. Nowadays a train can take you from London to Newcastle in under 3 weeks! Below is a picture of a new-fangled tilting train which is used to round up truanting chav-children on the council estates of Bristol.

As you can see below, some of the greatest architects in the world work in England. High-rise. Pebble-dash. Stone-cladding. Mock Tudor. Caravans. No moats but all castles.

It's not all grit and grim in the England of today! Look at the pretty lights in Blackpool. Illuminating.

The English love to shop and it’s just been announced that bargain-hunting is to be included in the 2012 Olympics from London. As you can see from these charming pictures we just adore browsing around delightful stalls at picturesque country markets.

Like Violator?
Love Playing The Angel!
It's nearly perfect.
Melodious to the max.

The English love dogs. We let them pee on our legs and poop in the street. We dress them up and take them dancing and at times of great nationalist flag-waving we daub their heads with poisonous paints and parade up and down our poop filled avenues.

Beautiful England. I wouldn't live anywhere else.
For every gorgeous breathtaking picture (like these) there are a thousand like these:

We saw this sign today over a large piece of vacant land and got very excited:


Then I came home and google dashed my hopes. Damn.

Charlie Brooker is really funny. He’s the funniest thing in The Guardian (apart from maybe their ‘barometer of style’ thing on Saturdays which I automatically turn the other way up as I think they know feck all about owt). In today’s Guardian he’s having a pop at being told what to eat by dieticians and the Government:

“It’s my bloody throat and I’ll put as much salt down it as I like…..I’m not disputing whether these anti-pie, pro-skipping campaigns have the potential to save lives. I’m sure they do. But come on – are humans really worth saving in the first place? I mean really? Take a look around: there’s far too many of us, and we’re not much to write home about. We spend more time picking our noses and wondering what famous peoples’ kitchens look like than we spend doing anything worthwhile. The average citizen is a cretin in need of culling….We should slowly reduce our number by gently guzzling snacks till our hearts burst….What would you rather do – spend every waking moment joylessly assessing your diet, and live to be a wizened 500 year old mantis? Or die fat, young and merry with caramel smeared round your mouth?….It’s time they launched a campaign actively encouraging the population to gorge its way to an early grave.”

Hahahahaha, caramel smeared mouth! He's marvellously irreverent and flippant and mocks everything (including himself) in a wonderful English way. Give the man an OBE next year you miserable old woman. Here's an archive of his writing.

Sturtle has provided the best post-Katrina stories over the past few weeks. This entry about his first trip back into the city is incredible. In true New Orleans fashion, his cat was voodoo'd back to life while he dug its grave. Check out the pics of his house and the happy ending.

Who's next? WHO'S NEXT?
Don’t look at the menu, look at me!
Cheezborger!
God knows why I’m subscribed to a ‘bar of the day’ email from Yahoo as I’m sure I only drink about 20 units of alcohol a year (that’s the recommended weekly amount for men). Anyway, today’s ‘bar of the day’ was the Billy Goat Tavern in Chicago. We visited this famous old spit ‘n’ sawdust place on our Midwest rollercoaster tour in 2002. We knew it was famous when we scheduled a dinner stop there but we weren’t quite prepared for the down ‘n’ out atmosphere of the place. The bar was brightly lit and several afternoon drunks occupied seats watching sports on the TV. There was a separate bar area at the back but this was the meat bar. This was where we ordered the famous cheeseburgers, which were justifiably famous so we ordered two more. Then we sat at the bar with the locals and watched a Weakest Link special with sports stars as the contestants while we sipped our beers. It’s obviously a historic and renowned place amongst Cubs fans and has it’s own legend to prove it. In 1945 the owner of the Billy Goat Tavern attempted to take his pet goat to a baseball game at Wrigley Field. He was denied entry by the ushers as they said “the goat stinks”. So, naturally, he put a curse on the Cubs by shouting "The Cubs ain't gonna win no more. The Cubs will never win a World Series so long as the goat is not allowed in Wrigley Field." And guess what, they never have. Don't mess with goats.

A film magazine polled its readers for the best horror films ever. Results below. The top five are from the 1970's (yes, I know, but The Shining was filmed in 1979 and released in 1980). I wouldn't have voted for Cannibal Holocaust, Psycho and The Shining. My top three (from that list) would be Rosemary's baby, Don't Look Now and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and my all-time top three would be The Exorcist, Frankenstein (the Boris Karloff one) and Rosemary's Baby. Newer horror films that I would vote for would be The Blair Witch Project, Saw and anything where city-types move to an old house in the country and get slaughtered by rednecks. I used to love/hate horror films when I was a nipper. Mum and Dad used to let me stay up late if they were going out and they often returned home to find every single light on in the house and me curled up on the couch with a pile of cushions acting as a barrier between the TV and myself. I was an impressionable youngster but couldn't help tuning in when a horror was on. I will never forget the night I watched the Hammer classic 'Theatre Of Blood' (Vincent Price as a crappy actor who decides to kill his critics in the manner of classic Shakespeare deaths) and the scene where he fried a woman's head under a salon hair dryer had me jumping up and down on my hands and knees on the sofa trying to tear my eyes off the screen but failing miserably. Luckily, nightmares were never a problem during my dark hours. Incidentally, it was nice to see the stage version of Theatre Of Blood this summer with Jim Broadbent hamming it up in the Vincent Price role.
Now that I'm a proper grown-up (un-raise those eyebrows you lot) the real horror films for me are stuff like Titanic, Spice World and Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy.

1. Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
2. Halloween (1978)
3. Suspiria (1977)
4. Dawn of the Dead (1978)
5. The Shining (1980)
6. Psycho (1960)
7. The Wicker Man (1973)
8. Rosemary's Baby (1968)
9. Don't Look Now (1973)
10. Cannibal Holocaust (1980)

The bees knees

Loser!
I made a record on a crappy TEAC four-track recorder using a £10 casio sampler and a bass guitar with one string. This was in 1991. I pressed 1000 flexi discs and gave them away while I was out dancing at clubs like Delirium, Garage, FF at Turnmills, Kinky Gerlinky, Pleased, Traffic, Troll and The Bell. Then it was reviewed in Sky Magazine (the poor mans Face) by Jay Strongman (the man who, with Mark Moore from S'Express, made the Mud Club unmissable) and he gave me this glowing review. In classic underachiever style I never made any more.

Marvellous article in the Guardian today (actually an interview with Martha Fiennes (she directed the film version of Onegin a few years ago). She was arguing the point that theme parks, and the rides in the parks, are designed by artists and are the new cutting edge art. The rush and buzz created by rides and ultra-themed parks is akin to conceptual art and should be celebrated and worshipped as much as anything hanging in Tate Modern. Imagine if the incredible technology created by theme park ‘imagineers’ was merged with the minds of Tracy Emin and Grayson Perry! Tracy would have us screaming down a brilliant white tunnel at 100mph while swear words are blasted at us through under-seat speakers and Grayson would create a real life version of the fancy dress shop from Mr Ben. I liked this paragraph best:

"When you go to the Tate and someone has done something where the lights go on and off, or there’s a dark room, it’s usually very low-tech. Look at James Turrell for example. I love his work, which is all about light and creating spaces, but in the end it’s a plywood box that could be knocked up by any chipie on a film set. If you took someone like him and gave him Disney’s technology to play with, you’d get something fantastic."

Imagine if Mapplethorpe was still alive and was asked by Six Flags to design a rollercoaster. We’d be flying through the air in cars shaped liked huge cocks diving into tunnels with hairs round their entrances.
*wanders off to get sketch book and crayons*

I loved watching Upstairs, Downstairs with my gran in the 1970’s. Class, war, Royalty, suffragettes, sex scandals, good manners, beastly foreigners, great clothes and Edwardian London all made it a must see in our house on Sunday evenings. Did you know Fay Weldon wrote a lot of the scripts? Anyway, while rooting around in some old U,D websites I came across an episode called ‘A Suitable Marriage’ in which Alfred the footman fell in love with a German aristocrat called, wait for it, Baron von Rimmer!

I don’t know how this episode got past my finely tuned gaydar (even at the age of 10 I was scanning the TV for signs of ‘family’) and this show even had an afternoon repeat a few years later without any of the storyline being cut. However, the homosexual fling was deemed too controversial for American TV and this episode was deleted from the schedules when Upstairs, Downstairs aired in the late 70’s. I think I have my first DVD box-set request for Santa.


UPDATE: Fuck Santa! I just bought the first series of Upstairs, Downstairs on DVD (2 disc box set) for £6!

The new Franz Ferdinand album lasts from our front door to Saddlers Wells when I ride my bike (and mighty good it is too). Last week The Rakes album was getting me as far as High Holborn before Goldfrapp kicked in. We watched Sin City at the weekend. Darren was more enthusiastic than me as I found the various chapters a bit disjointed (it looked great though). Ronnie Barker just died so that’s sad. I bet Richard Beckinsale and Ronnie will act out classic Porridge episodes in the great TV studio in the sky. This Kevin Carter-esque story depressed me and had me wet-eyed at work. What a shitty world, men have been on the moon and a little girl died in a big puddle in 1985.

P.S. The new Marks and Spencer store opened today 2 minutes from my office. Some cheff off the telly is down there cooking M&S food next to the ladies knickers and free alcohol in plastic flutes is helping office workers blow pin-money on winter woolies and pot-pourri. I'm currently sitting at my desk amusing myself by saying (in a slow come-to-bed type of voice)

"This is not just a tuna sandwich. This is Marks and Spencer alba tuna on malted brown bread with italian tomatoes and spicy rocket garnish"

(Apologies to any overseas readers who might not realise why I was amused, it's a TV ad thing).