The BBC had predicted an onset of rain at around 10-ish, so we were prepared to abandon at first signs of precipitation. It turned out we both had seen the movie anyway, and the ‘British-Upper-Class’ acting was annoying to say the least (except you, dear Scarlett. As ever, you were fab!).

I had brought a sleeping bag as well as a picnic blanket to keep snug, so all was going well, lying against a grass knoll with dusk slowly descending. There was something very charming about being there that time of the evening, with good company, the smell of kebabs in the air, and the happy chatter of people around. And then the rain came down. Petra had a brolly, and there were Spinningfield staff handing out plastic macintoshes. To the credit of all the Mancunians, almost everybody braved it through to the end. It was quite a unique experience to sit huddled under a brolly under seige from the winds and rain, sitting through a movie we both knew the conclusion of.

-”Everything is allow no problem here. Except the fighting. Fighting is not good manners at India Guest House”.
-”You see? No problem”.
-”And dying”, Prabaker added, with a thoughtful wag of his round head. “Mr. Anand is not liking it, if the people are dying here”.

The past reflects eternally between two mirrors – the bright mirror of words and deeds, and the dark one, full of things we didn’t do or say.

I was tough, which is probably the saddest thing to say about a man.

“… You‘re a good listener. That‘s dangerous, because it’s so hard to resist. Being listened to – really listened to – is the second-best thing in the world”.

Leopold’s was a place to see, a place to be seen, and a place to see themselves in the act of being seen.

“Ah. This is a Bombay gold dealer‘s no. It is a no that means maybe, and the more passionate the no, the more definite the maybe”.

“I make ends meet, as they say, and when they meet I get a payment from both of the ends”.

“When you judge the power that is in a person, you must judge their capacities as both friend and as enemy”.

The truth is a bully we all pretend to like.

What we call cowardice is just another name for being taken by surprise, and courage is seldom any better than simply being well prepared.

Gradually, I realised that the wiggle of the head was a signal to others that carried an amiable and disarming message: I’m a peaceful man. I don’t mean any harm.

“And make sure he doesn‘t learn any bad words. Don‘t teach him any swearing. There are plenty of arseholes and bastards around who will teach him the wrong sisterfucking words. Keep him away from motherfuckers like that”.

It was a wild speech that called them cowards and invoked Mahatma Gandhi, Buddha, the god Krishna, Mother Teresa, and the Bollywood film star Amitabh Bachchan in the same sentence.

Life on the run puts a lie in the echo of every laugh, and at least a little larceny in every act of love.

Raju’s task was to determine whether I could live with them. Johnny’s task was to make sure they could live with me.

Didier once told me, in a rambling, midnight dissertation, that a dream is the place where a wish and a fear meet. When the wish and the fear are exactly the same, he said, we call the dream a nightmare.

It’s a fact of life on the run that you often love more people than you trust. For people in the safe world, of course, exactly the opposite is true.

If fate doesn’t make you laugh, Karla said, in one of my first conversations with her, then you just don’t get the joke.

It is an exceptionally powerful story of life in Bombay’s underbelly, with a richness and truthfulness about it that is lyrical. The portrayal of characters is nothing but genius with a true love for India shining through.

Very few books come close to this.

Just leave a comment to this post and I will update the list if your dumb idea makes the cut.

No suggestion is too vague or precise. It could be something you have done or something you can comfortably lie about having done. It could be something you heard someone else doing or something you aspire to do in the future. We might even do it together!

I entertain the vague hope that this list will galvanise me into action and it might possibly even convince you to do something about your lazy-ass life!

I believe such a list is called a ‘Kick-The-Bucket List’.

Sights seen: British Museum, Kew Gardens. St. Paul’s Cathedral (in time for Sunday Mass). Hyde Park. Royal Albert Hall. Tate Modern. Hammersmith Apollo. Southbank. Regents Park. Covent Garden. Holland Park. Tower of London. Trafalgar Square. Big Ben. Marble Arch. The Burroughs. Piccadilly Circus. Leicester Square. Spitalfields. The Golden Hinde. Stag Beetles.

Distance covered: approx 60 miles.

Bridges crossed: Hammersmith, Putney, Westminster, Millennium, London, Tower.

Food and Drink: The Coach and Horses, Kew. Fuel, Covent Gardens. The Crispy Duck, Chinatown. The Slug and Lettuce, Soho. Nando’s, Southwark. The Pastry Shop, Euston Station. Various hot dogs, delicious and otherwise.

Celebrities spotted: Graham Norton, Johnny Vegas.

Highlights.

Has to be the Stag Beetle display at Kew Gardens. A bunch of tree trunks. Nothing else.

The Fuel balcony in Covent Garden is one heck of a cool place to be. Especially with pitchers of Long Islands.

And the Best-Burger-Ever Award goes to the Coach and Horses Hotel for a succcccculent burger and secret recipe mayo that was very memorable.

The celebs were like bookends to our visit; Graham Norton with two dogs at a Hyde Park hot dog stand by The Serpentine as we set out on a fine Saturday morning, and Johnny Vegas coming the opposite way in Euston Station as we were dashing with our bikes to get the train home to Manc.

p.s. we may have been in the presence of more celebs over the course of the weekend, but it’s fitting that I only recognised comedians.

Liberal Democrat Nick Clegg was always going to fare better than the other two as he was going in with nothing to lose and all to gain. With Labour’s Brown and Conservative Cameron pandering to him on the night (I suppose they were instructed not to publicly pick on the new kid) he grew a set of cojones and came out trumps. With the publicity he’s gained the Lib Dems have gone from long-standing laughing stock and also-rans to serious contenders. Betcha my Grannie to your old shoes they’ll try to shred him in the next two debates.

The performance of the other two? Brown looked stolid but tired and Cameron was patronisingly slimy as ever.

I guess what annoys me most about these so-called debates is that I, conceivably prematurely, foresee an inevitable decline of British politics towards the kind of show-boating and back-stabbing one-upmanship that will denigrate the almost faultless lives that our leading politicians lead.

Hah!

What really bothers me actually is the fact that we’ve now agreed, nay, demanded! as ‘The Public’, to be impressed by the person who’s most well-turned-out. Because that’s (pretty much) all that the televised debates will be able to highlight.

With record viewing figures (average 9.4 million, peak 9.9, which “beat even Coronation Street”) being quoted in the papers, it almost seemed as if they were competing against the other “talent” shows that abound nowadays.

Fair enough to say, the media is having its predictable field day with the ‘who-looked-at-whom, who-wore-what’ inane chatter.

I despair.

You that never done nothin’
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it’s your little toy
You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
And you turn and run farther
When the fast bullets fly.

Like Judas of old
You lie and deceive
A world war can be won
You want me to believe
But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain.

You fasten all the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you set back and watch
When the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansions
As young people’s blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud.

You’ve thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world
For threatening my baby
Unborn and unnamed
You ain’t worth the blood
That runs in your veins.

How much do I know
To talk out of turn
You might say that I’m young
You might say I’m unlearned
But there’s one thing I know
Though I’m younger than you
That even Jesus would never
Forgive what you do.

Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul.

And I hope that you die
And your death’ll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I’ll watch while you’re lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I’ll stand over your grave
‘Til I’m sure that you’re dead.

-Dylan

Blair joins the Fray. Blair praises Brown. Desperate times with desperate measures indeed.

Rooney Injured. Munich pay back for 1999 with 2 late goals to finish 2-1 up in the first leg against Man U. But England fans will be more concerned about Rooney limping off at the end.

Ricky Martin is Gay. Whod’ve known?

But I was wrong. This was indeed a rather slow-paced movie, with the one lead actor on screen 95% of the time. But this wasn’t art, it was sci-fi at its simple, emotive best. Sam Rockwell is Sam Bell, an employee of a large organisation working alone on a 3-year contract on a far-side lunar base helping extract helium for use on Earth. He has an accident and then discovers a chilling truth about his existence on the moon. The film is a great example of what can be done with a good storyline. It stays firmly in classic sci-fi territory, but manages not to feel dated at all. I was quite moved by the film and delighted I saw it.

Apparently it’s won Best British Independent Film 2009 (2 wins, 7 nominations), and was nominated for 2 BAFTAs in 2010. Well done Duncan Jones for his directorial debut. All on a budget of $5 mill.

Sam Rockwell is really convincing in his role. And casting Kevin Spacey for the voice of the robotic-servant module GERTY 3000 was sheer brilliance.

Regarding the England Cricket team to line up against Bangladesh -

“Cook copes without Onions”

Captain Alastair Cook was left without bowler Graham Onions after an injury.

Only the greatest night! Like, what, forever!

It was Sunday night at the Bridgewater Hall. As ever, the moment of walking into Manchester’s Crown Jewel of Musical Experiences was one to be savoured. I had Ioan and Jessy for company, and as we sat at our Circle seats I wondered whether the artists I’d suggested we see would be met with approval.

It opened with a bang. The Orchestre de Cotonou, strongly reminiscent of Buena Vista SC and Orchestra Baobab yet memorable in their own right, were groovy and more suited to a open air beach bar where gorgeously honeyed people sip cocktails into the night, swaying along with the palm trees. The horns, the bass, the drums, the big band sound, yeah man. They’ve been going for almost 50 years, and listening to them really felt like a bit of a time-warp. The guys from Benin were over much too soon for my liking.

I’d like to stay positive about the second act, the Kalahari Surfers. I’m assured they played and continue to play a not insignificant role in the political arena of South Africa with regards to the anti-Apartheid movement. However, while listening to them the thought kept occuring to me that three people were jerking off on the stage and expecting me to clap. Perhaps all music doesn’t sound good in the Bridgewater, as I previously thought. I can tell you that their electro-funk / kindergarten-poetry-recital effort certainly didn’t. And talk about stage presence! I was bored so numb I actually closed my eyes and recalled with no small delight a memorable rainy day spent indoors watching paint dry. But the organisers are surely to blame for buying a bull and asking it to give milk.

But perhaps it was a well-engineered pause, before the total immersion ahead.

As we sat down for the third time, we saw musicians enter with the tamalane, flute, djembe and guitar. As they took their places, two lithe girls entered stage left with calabash in hand and walked to the right, the strings started plucking and they opened with the choral ‘Kayi ne Wura’ (Good evening to all).

How would I describe her music? The rythms are mesmerising and primal. And when she, not too often, just opens the throttle and lets rip there’s almost an audible rustle of everyone’s goosebumps across the hall. And the subject is very homely; women and their lot, love and respect. She has always been critical of the treatment given to women in her home-town Bamako, Mali. There is castigation, but there’s also hope. And not understanding a word only made it better.

The time just flew by.

I first heard Oumou from a CD I picked up at Manchester’s Central library. It was a BBC World Music compilation with the soulful ‘Ne Bi Fe’ (I love you), which I shamelessly ripped. It led me to finding the 2-disc compilation album ‘Oumou’, which I treasure. I’ve now bought her new ‘Seya’ album.

Merci beaucoup pour tout.

Heavy hung the canopy of blue
Shade my eyes and I can see you
White is the light that shines through the dress that you wore.
She lay in the shadow of the wave
Hazy were the visions of her playing
Sunlight on her eyes but moonshine beat her blind everytime.
Green is the colour of her kind
Quickness of the eye deceives the mind
Envy is the bond between the hopeful and the damned.

An old Pink Floyd song, just sprung to mind like bumping in to a old friend on the street.

Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
Valentine’s Day is just consumerist bullshit,
Now haven’t you got some ironing to do?

After all, it might set a bad precedent if our leaders had to explain their decisions..

On another front, can’t wait for Snowboarding Sunday! We shall be visiting the beautiful, staggering slopes of Val d’Trafford and make the run down the bone-crunching Le Chill Factore. Shoop shoop baby!

1) avatar. one heck of a film an experience. my first 3D film, IMAXed it and sat with goggles over my customary goggles, and didn’t fidget for the entire two-and-a-half hours or so. more to my surprise, i was told i didn’t even make any sarky comments (obviously apart from identifying, for everybody’s benefit, the analogies being drawn from humanity’s chequered history).

2) dawkins. bought ‘the god delusion’ and the second reading has me thinking that perhaps i’m not agnostic (because i thought a true scientist would not assert an absence of a thing without definitive proof) but athesist (because gods are more hassle to explain than any other hypothesis). jury’s out on that one.

3) m2. got increased memory for my phone/walkman (yes that w word dates me) and am rollicking in choice, choice. no dj in the world would go from toto to chapman, ozzy to police, wishbone ash to e.s.t. also bought again the superlative enigma trilogy album after “somebody” kept my first which i loaned them. “somebody else” should also remember who the annie lennox ‘diva’ cd belongs to, as should “somebody else else” bring themself around to return carl sagan’s ‘cosmos’. you know who you are. the view i take on it (after the initial cussing because of the loss) is “damn, i’ve got good taste for people wanting to keep my books and music”. then i auto-fellate.

4) bulls. will be running with them, or being chased by them to be more accurate. pamplona, ready or not, here we come. anything to avoid being hit, chased, accosted or otherwise molested by tomatoes.

5) ligament. recurring ailment of (what appears to be) the lateral collateral ligament of my left knee due to ice-related slippage.

6) birthday. missed my darling sas’s. what kind of a cad would do that? i mean totally dolally forgot. i was expecting a dressing down, which would be severe. but ‘understanding’? oooh, i’m in for a decade of winters.

7) risk. it’s a strategy game. wine helps the playing. mebbe not the winning therefore it of.

scots. more of that should be coming up, watch this url. suffice to say i love them.

and missing the frankie boyle.

I will definitely buy this in the original Russian (still looking for where to buy it from), as there’s clearly been some loss in translation. And seeing shoddy English such as “…the train was already breaking as it pulled into a station” when I’m only 14 pages in doesn’t build confidence in the rest of the work. I’ve heard said, and agree with the fact that the language a translator is translating into should be their strongest. And with a name like Andrew Bromfield you’d expect the translator to know better. But maybe I should give him a brake (pun intended).

As an aside, I will point out that I rented this book from the library a while ago, and was in no way influenced by the recent spate of teen-vampire mush spewing out of all of Hollywood’s orifices.

Note: in today’s news, Dubai World’s failure to repay its debt has resulted in further loss of confidence in the whole Dubai rollercoaster. To quote: “Dubai could not undermine itself any further as a place not to do business in at the moment,” said Manus Cranny at MF Global. From BBC News, link

According to Richard Scarth, day-to-day life in Kabul remains relatively unaffected despite the global downturn.

“That is because the economy is UN-driven,” he says. “Money just keeps coming in regardless of what is happening in the wider world.”

Now, it hasn’t escaped my notice that just 24-hour protection came before that, and I could cast my mind back to times when 12 hour protection was deemed sufficient for the modern male homo sapien.

We are all aware of the famous 1 blade, no-you-need 2 blades, no-you-need 3 blades, no-you-need 4 blades, no-you-need 5 blades, etc. indecision of the famous blade manufacturers.

In both cases we’ve seen a natural, predictable one-upmanship for a cerain time before a stagnation point is reached and there is simply no more room for blades without moving into cheese-grater territory.

The case with pit-sprays is this. Although I don’t mind the adverts calling me a dynamic 24-hour man, juggling work, wife, mistress, blood donations and my volunteering role as a mentor for under-priviledged kids who only smile when they see me coming down the road on my super-cool urban scooter, being called a 48-hour man would only imply I hadn’t had a shower in two days. And although not showering in two days doesn’t really bother old “Oh-do-I-have-to-dress-for-success?” Naz (you should see smell my record!), I still don’t like it to be pointed out to me.

Reckon they’ve already realised this? Welcome to Stagnation Point.

My my, there’s been a lot of hyphens today.

Since it was only £2 (RRP £12 I think) I snapped it up. Reading it at home I came across MY letter to him revolving around the “Prisoner’s Dilemma”.

My letter was published!!

Go to page 64 and you’ll see it.

I’m reading Richard Dawkins’ ‘The Blind Watchmaker’ at the moment, also purchased from Fopp but at a much dearer £9. It is really gripping, and I marvel at how to DNA we are just “methods of propagation”.

Professor Nutt has written a critical article appearing in The New Scientist today about how governments can get it wrong by not heeding their advisors when cementing policy.

Some telling excerpts are:

“Policies that ignore the realities of the world we live in are doomed to fail. This is true for just about all the biggest issues that we confront, from energy and climate to criminal justice, health and immigration. I’m not arguing that science dictate policy; considerations such as cost, practicality and morality also have a role. But scientific evidence should never be brushed aside from the political debate.”

“On ecstasy, for example, it made policy first, sought advice second – and cynically rejected the advice it was given. The result is shambolic policy-making which gives great cause for concern if that is how governments operate more generally.”

“The results of a government inventing its own reality and acting on it can be seen in the appalling consequences the George W. Bush presidency had for world peace, the environment and human rights.”

You can find the article here. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18099-david-nutt-governments-should-get-real-on-drugs.html

Here Chief Scientific Advisor Professor John Beddington backs him up saying research showing the drug to be less dangerous than alcohol and cigarettes was “absolutely clear cut”, 

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article6902240.ece