Joyfeed

One of the supermarkets where I sometimes buy my grapes sells them in plastic bags with a zip. This is so that none of the grapes can escape.

A little while ago I wrote about a short performance piece by Search Party involving a hula hoop and some nicely done text. I liked it. When they invited submissions for a Wimbledon follow-up I expressed an interest. Despite the lovely typewritten letter they sent me with instructions, I was far too busy being a damn fool to do anything. Inspired by the damp weather yesterday, however, I did manage to produce an image which I think captures something of the season.

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On this particular Sunday morning he was eating Cornflakes while reading, the book held precariously open by a jar of marmalade on the thick right-hand ‘to-be-read’ side, and an empty wine bottle on the thin left-hand ‘having-been-read’ side, offering him satisfactory hands free operation, but at the same time threatening at any moment to eject the improvised paperweights and flip shut, the bungled attempts to prevent this violent loss of place inevitably resulting in flapping and mess.

He had recently become disproportionately exercised by the problem of the limpness of the flakes in the latter stages of any regular serving of Cornflakes. As he preferred his Cornflakes both crunchy and well-milked (the contrast in textures generated, along with the subtle flavour, was to him the very point of the product), the fact that the closing stages of his breakfast experience were so unsatisfactory seemed unjust and wrong. He had then settled upon the not altogether complicated idea of simply having two half portions, ensuring crunch and taste to the last bowl-tilted, catch-that-flake spoonful.

The problem, and he was himself all too aware of how tragically typical this was of him, how this so neatly summed him - and indeed the whole sorry predicament that was his life - up, was that he was incapable of executing even this most simple of strategies, always and without fail over-flaking the first bowl, and then pathetically trying to compensate by adding a tiny amount of milk. It was not so much this common ineptitude that aroused in him such self-loathing, but rather the doublethink by which he allowed himself to carry the delusion that the breakfast bowl was adequately prepared all the way to the table. Only once he had sat himself down and begun comforting himself with televised drivel or newsprint or spring-loaded literature would he stop, usually on about the third or fourth dessicated mouthful, and confront the reality that his breakfast cereal was, again, moronically undermilked, and that something would have to be done.

And there, at that exact point, he would feel the abdominal sink of the new dilemma: to bring the milk to the bowl, or the bowl to the milk? And always the futile calculation of each strategy. The milk-to-bowl option entailed a frustrating double round-trip, one to fetch the milk from the fridge and apply it to the flakes, and the second to return it to the fridge (pride ruling out the option of simply leaving it on the table: the bottle standing over the bowl, looking on scornfully, mockingly aloof, like Matron, as the increasingly soggy breakfast is consumed: “can’t you even put milk in a bowl?”). Futile because it was always the short-term attraction of the single round-trip that won, no matter how predictable the result.

And so he carried the bowl, now with the correct milk to flake ratio, but due to the initial overflaking dangerously full, through the swing door of his kitchen and turned, sidestepping the kitchen door as it swung back out into the hallway, his momentum carrying him through into the living room, and as he entered he caught his arm just above the left elbow against the frame of the living-room door, jolting him slightly, and with him the bowl, causing a small amount of milk and three individual Cornflakes to squirt and fall with a quiet splat on the laminated floor. He swore, at his misfortune and stupidity in equal measure, put down the bowl, the bottom of which would leave an opaque ring on the table when he lifted it later, and returned to deal with the slick, pausing only briefly to decide whether to save trees and use the dishcloth, before baulking at the hygiene implications of the floor-to-dish contact, and using 2 sheets of kitchen paper on what was clearly a three-sheet spill.

As well as receiving paper items through my door most days, I am also in frequent receipt of messages from complete strangers in my Thunderbird Inbox. Most of these messages I have some difficulty in understanding, and I move them to a special folder that I think of as a computer version of the large plastic bag that the Council gives me for all of the paper items that come through my door.

The other day though I received a message from somebody and it attracted my attention. It started off like this:

If you do not want to loose your money and to talk to girls who does not even exist there is new wonderful opportunity

and it went on to talk about a cruise ship with fifty “Russian beauties who want to meet a foreigner in order to make a family”. Perhaps the Chernobyl disaster has had an adverse effect on former-Soviet men’s fertility organs. I wouldn’t be surprised. In any case, I continued reading.

All their pictures are placed on the website. On the ship will be created such an atmosphere that will help to start romantic relations. There will be invited only 30 foreign men on that cruise. And you can be one of them!

So fifty homemake-hungry ladies and thirty lady-hungry men. That’s one and two thirds lady to every one man.

On the website there are pictures of the ship and cross-section diagrams so you can see how many rooms it has and how they are laid out, and there are photos of the rooms, and it says:

Then you get into the restaurant. Our chef will offer you heavenly cuisine and the waitresses will serve you quickly.

There’s even a photo of the chef. They were lucky to get that one I think because you only have to watch television to see what busy people chefs are, and that they can have quite a temper if you annoy them, and this one looks like he might be getting a bit impatient when the photo was taken. He probably wanted to get off to shell some prawns and make a Marie Rose sauce. Maybe he had something on the boil.

There’s a beauty pageant judging beauty and intelligence:

Girls write essays about different foreign countries. They pick the country themselves.

There is information about the on-board entertainments:

We have only qualified stuff. There is a nice surprise for our guests. The point is that all stuff except safeguards and the captain consists of pretty girls who are ready for everything to make your cruise fun and comfortable.

And there’s a guestbook with messages from potential passengers.

There’s one from a man who likes what he sees. There’s one from the captain’s cousin who’s going for a second time. There are men who have fallen in love with Russian women over the Internet in the past and lost their money. There’s a divorced man who is tired of American emancipated women. He wants a normal family. He wants his wife to take good care of him. He hopes this cruise will make him happy.

Then when you click on the link to “Girls” you get to a page with fifty small photos, one of each Russian beauty. When you click on the photo you get to see a bigger version of the photo. Even though the link calls the page “Girls”, I don’t think any of them are actually girls - I don’t think that would be allowed, even on a special boat in the Black Sea.

The photos are laid out very neatly on the page and each one has the first name of the woman underneath so you can understand who you are looking at and make a note for when you meet her on the cruise. Some of them also have an email address, so you can maybe write to her first and introduce yourself to give you a bit of a head start over the other twenty-nine men.

But the interesting thing is that there are so many different types of photo. They are all different sizes and some of them are holiday snaps with the woman sunbathing, and others are a little more hair-tossed-back you-know-why-you’re-here, and there’s at least one glossy studio portrait which probably cost a lot of money. There’s even a photo booth one with a pleated brown curtain behind and she’s not looking at the camera, as if she couldn’t use it for her passport so she thought “that’s OK, it’ll do for that website”.

At the top of the email about this cruise it says “Thunderbird thinks this message might be an email scam.” I don’t know if the email is trying to steal my money or not. The pictures of the ship and the fifty beauties look quite real. Maybe they just want me to give them a lot of money to go on the cruise and meet the women and enjoy the heavenly cuisine and efficient service. The only thing that is a bit unusual is that none of the fifty women have the same name. There is one Alena and one Alexandra and one Alina and one Alisa and so on in alphabetical order right the way to Yulia and Yuliya. What are the chances of that?

Maybe they have lots of cruises through the year, and at the end of the cruise the ones that haven’t been chosen can try again next time, unless they get fed up talking to the sort of men who would pay to go on this sort of cruise, and decide to take their chances back on dry land. But this would mean that up to thirty vacancies would open up for more Russian beauties to take the plunge. There would probably be a waiting list to make it onto the ship, and so the organisers could pick only those applicants with names that are different from the ones they’ve already got. All of the women would be queuing up in lines, with one line for each name, and when the one at the front is taken they all shuffle forward, like an enormous wife vending machine.

I shall be celebrating Englishness today by not making a fuss about it.

But the intercom just mumbled something short, and the door buzzed. He lurched for it, but as he pushed it, the buzzing stopped, and it wouldn’t move. He pulled, he pushed. Reluctantly he gave the intercom another, apologetic push, and just as he did so, the door buzzed again. He threw himself against it and it clicked and opened, and he staggered into a dark grey lobby. The door swung slowly shut behind him. The only way out of the lobby was a concrete staircase leading to the first floor.

At the top he peered through the glass in the door to what was clearly the main office and reception area. He could see desks and computers and people milling and tapping. He was about to knock on the door when a body appeared at the glass, there was a click, and the door opened.

“Can you wait in here?” she said, directing him into a kitchen and dining area. He sat down. “Would you like a cup of tea or coffee?”

What now? Yes, he would love a cup of tea. Tea was good for people suffering from shock, which he supposed was similar to feeling acutely stressed, which is what he was now. But tea made by strangers, tea made by strangers in public kitchen facilities, possibly with unusual milk, which is to say UHT, unusual tea made by unusual people in unusual kitchens was rarely nice tea, tea that would sooth the drinker, relieving stress and enhancing performance. Plus he never received the correct amount of sugar despite the simple clarity of his instructions (imagine a level teaspoon of sugar, well just a little bit less than that, so you can see some of the spoon all the way around), and chose instead to make commentary (I don’t know why you bother with that amount, surely you can’t taste it, that’s just silly), failing to realise that it was of course precisely the smallness of the amount of sugar that made accuracy more important: a few grains either way in a builder’s four-teaspooned atrocity being neither here nor there, but at the low end of the sweetness spectrum, undue deference to the finely honed instructions, a failure to appreciate the curvature of the micro-heap, for example, could lead to catastrophic, irreversable oversweetening, or, worse, a bland beverage, equivalent to that which, yes, had no sugar at all, placing its drinker in the socially awkward situation of having to choose between downing the pleasureless liquid without comment, or risk offending the host by making a surruptitious move on the sugarbowl, to add a visibly countable number of extra grains, rendering the drink drinkable in the true sense of the word.

“No. Thankyou. Yes. A coffee, please. Thanks. No sugar, and a little bit of milk.” Coffee was a bitter drink, was his opinion, no point in denying the obvious and trying to alter it with sugar, and so, surely, a safer bet under the circumstances.

She moved to the filter machine, which appeared reassuringly full and steaming. Nothing quite as bad as cold stale coffee. Let’s not start on that.

Winston Churchill is at a party and a woman comes up to him and says: “Mr Churchill, how marvellous to meet you. I am a huge fan.”

And Churchill, a little the worse for wear, looks at her for a few seconds and then says “Fuck off you ugly cow”.

A couple of days later Churchill is having lunch with a friend.

Churchill: I say [friend’s name], I made a bit of a hash of myself at that party at the weekend. Some old trout waddled over to me and started mouthing something gastly, and I told her to “Fuck off you ugly cow.” I confess I had been drinking.
Friend: I say Winston, that’s rather rum. What did she do?
C: Ran off sobbing.
F: Oh dear oh dear. That doesn’t present you in the best light.
C: No, quite. Future generations will not be falling over themselves to vote me the Greatest Britain if I get a name for going about making women cry by telling them to fuck off you ugly cow.
F: To say nothing of the Nobel jury.
C: Oh Christ, this is a disaster. We’ve got to sort this out. Hang on hang on, here’s a thought,… What about something like “Never in the field of human ugliness have I seen anyone as ugly as you, you ugly cow.” Has a certain rhetorical feel to it, more statesmanlike, wouldn’t you say?
F: True, it’s an improvement, but… still, I think it needs something else. You’d been drinking you say?
C: Excessively.
F: Maybe you could use that. How about “My dear, you appear to be extremely ugly, but, then again, I am completely pissed.”
C: I like it, makes me sound manly. The people like a man who likes a drink. That’s something I’ve always had going for me. So, so, wait, let’s see, something like “So ugly are you and so drunk am I that it would be better that I should vomit on your face and…something blah blah…” Going for the rude charm vote. Treat them mean, and all that.
F: I think we’re veering away again. But the drunk line is good. Maybe if we introduced a dialogue element. Something Socratic, appeal to the intellectuals, the sort that like to regurgitate witty put-downs at dinner parties.
C: Right, of course, good, so I say, yes this is it I say “God you’re ugly” and she says “Who are you calling ugly you pissed old bastard” and I say “You, you ugly cow. Now fuck off, I’m going to bed.”
F: Winston, you are a genius.

History is, of course, written by the winners. Or, in Churchill’s case, people who write huge volumes of history.

The other day I went to my front door to see if the man had pushed anything through it (I don’t know what the time was exactly, but, as I’ve said before, it doesn’t matter) and sure enough he had. Most of the items were from people I don’t know either asking me to give them money or offering to give me money, but one of the items was different. It was slightly thicker and slightly heavier than the others, and it felt a bit like a present. Of course I opened it immediately and I was almost right, because it was a Free Gift.

It was a new sort of shaving razor for men by a famous razor company whose name I will not mention as that would be advertising but the razor is called “Fusion”. Somehow the boffins in the research and development laboratories have managed to “fuse” onto the head of the razor not one, not two, not three, not four, but five tiny little blades facing one way, and - this I think is the part they were particularly smug about when they thought of it - just one facing the other way.

What’s the point of the one facing the other way? One word: precision. Gentlemen, we know how frustrating it can be to, for example, produce a neat sideburn, and with the current arms race for packing more and more blades onto the main cutting face of the razor, precision has long since gone out of the window. But by exploiting the three dimensional properties of the razor - namely the reverse side - we return to a level of accuracy unknown since the days of the uniblade.

The handle of the razor is also of interest. It is a “fusion” of slightly grippy rubbery bits and a shiny silver substance that has a metallic heft, but still carries about it a plastic quality, perhaps hinting at its disposable ancestry. But the manufacturers of this gentlemen’s face smoothing tool do not want me to dispose of the handle, they want me to keep it, because they have included a 007 ejector button, one nonchalent nudge of which sends the sixblade head leaping into oblivion, leaving a little stalk on which I can attach a new gleaming set of tightly packed micro-blades.

I was intrigued by the sheer perversion of the multiblade, and decided to give it a “test drive”.

The main advantage of the techno-razor seemed to be that the head does not clog up with whisker sludge, but can be cleaned with a simple swish in shallow water, without the need to bang it against the sink. I found this quite reassuring. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating (as nobody seems in the least bit capable of saying these days) and in this regard I can report that “it cuts the hair, and not the face”. It is thus “fit for purpose” - in itself a phrase appropriately as nauseating and unacceptable as the manufacturer’s own advertising slogan.

You may have noticed that many houses in this country have placed in their front doors small rectangular holes with various sorts of more or less moveable covers. They remind me a little of cat-flaps, though they are generally far too small for a cat to squeeze through, and somewhat the wrong shape being wide enough for a cat, but not tall enough, I would think, even for a baby cat, and in any case they are usually too high up for a cat small enough to climb through to jump. Grown-up cats can jump, definitely, I’ve seen them, but a baby cat couldn’t jump that high, I’m sure. But this lack of accessibility to cats is, far from being a design flaw, actually very clever, as the purpose of these apertures is not to admit cats, but rather to allow a man to visit my house almost every day and push a variety of paper-based items through my door and onto the mat, where I can collect them later at my convenience. The beauty of this hole-in-the-door system is that it works even if I can’t come to the door, for example if I am on the toilet, or even not in the house at all, for example if I am at the shops. The man can leave these items for me without anyone having to open the door.

Keen observers may by now have realised that this website is often little more than a vehicle through which I can exercise my right to show off and be silly. Sometimes, however, I can use it to talk about occasions when others have taken time out from their busy lives to show off and be silly. Last night was one of those occasions.

The event was called Pilot and it was at the Custard Factory and it was organised by The B-Theatre. It consisted of six short pieces by both established and not so established companies, and I liked it very much. At various points in the evening I tried to establish a consensus that the best word to sum up the performances was “spunky”, though this consistently failed to generate any conversational traction, either as an appropriate word to sum up the performances, or as a funny thing to say. It was just me being silly and showing off again, it seems.

The performances, I thought, were never less than “quite good” or “interesting”, and one or two were even “actually really very nice”, which is no mean feat in an evening which is explicitly justifying itself as a sharing event for works in progress. So, here goes:

This is for Tim Henman Search Party

They came all the way from Exeter to show us “Pete” (not me, a different “Pete” - I know it’s confusing) trying to do the hula hoop for ten seconds. Of course the theatrical frame is all important here and it was done extremely well. Some Forced Entertainment style text, but when done properly there’s no harm in that. Actually really very nice. I want to see more of their stuff.

Cargo The Plasticine Men

This is a collaboration between the compere/organiser Simon Day (not the famous one, another one) and the brothers Gunter aka Spanner, and it was adeptly performed energetic physical theatre with humour. It worked well as a - what - 15 minute? - sketch, but would require some clever pacing and structuring for it to succeed as a full length piece.

Teg Jake Oldershaw

So it says, although the full credits according to the programme are “adapted by Lee Beagley, directed by Jake Oldershaw and Jo Carr and performed by Ffion Williams”. Again a short sketch of something that might get enlarged. Jake is a friend of mine, and I’ve never seen any of his work that wasn’t pretty much on the money, with a good ear for what performance ought to be all about. This was no different, with witty use of back projection and some good proper acting from Ms Williams.

In my Father’s house Kindle Theatre

There were mixed opinions about this one, but I found it quite amusing. I would describe it as “spunky”. Four women dressed in old fashioned posh clothes are advertising some event they are holding at a church hall or something. One of them starts explaining how to make a pudding, one is playing the accordian, another is drinking quite heavily. They all do a big hokey-cokey twice. If this was a trailer for their full length piece, then I’m not sure what to make of it. As a one-off performance curiosity I thought it was quite nice.

Don’t Make Me Say This Talking Birds

Directed by my dear dear friend Nick Walker and performed by Jim Low and a female performer drafted in so close to the wire that she didn’t even make it into the programme [but you can find out her name by reading the comments]. I have no idea what was going on here, but I think the people who made it were one step ahead at least, and it was great. Typical Walker/Birds blend of humour and off-beat something or other.

Please Forgive Me Augusto Corrieri

Ten people who may or may not have ever met before learn simple movements by watching an instructional video on You Tube, then get together for a couple of hours the day before to make sure they are all on the right continent. This was interesting, and at times it was very nice - in particular the chorus line finale Bryan Adams number - and at times exactly what you might expect from ten people doing warm up exercises. Again, as a short sketch, great. It is apparently episode two of Continuous Project, a series of meta dance/performance pieces conceived and choreographed by Augusto Corrieri. OK, keep it up fella.

The evening was also neatly compered by (the still non-famous) Simon Day, and Manos Puestas provided the splendid musical interludes. There was plenty of time during the two short intervals and afterwards to mingle and feed back.

Applause!