FWD:Team Scoles

FWD:Team Scoles, originally uploaded by stevescoles.

Fencing hurts

FW: Fencing hurts, originally uploaded by stevescoles.

... but not as much as pouring scalding tea on your 4 year old son, which is the new worst thing I have ever done to my kids.

Now I'm mad

Newsnight are taking the piss out of the candidates standing against David Davis in the by-election. London journalist expresses his thinly veiled contempt for anyone outside the Westminster Club. So much for democracy in action. I do sympathise with what a pain it is to find out who all these people are and what they stand for, but I am a lazy journalist...

Only just discovered this...

... all that fuss about Ebeneezer Goode by The Shamen while kids television was shameless. Tut, tut.

Marco Pierre White with ordinary blokes

I've been watching Marco Pierre White's Great British Feast and he has just sat in a cafe with a bunch of cab drivers being a man of the people. He shared the 'trick' of cooking bacon in a microwave, he told everyone how wonderful it was that he could sit and chat with ordinary people and he even pondered bringing a date to the cafe because the paparazzi would never look for him there. If it was any other person I would think 'knob' but Marco Pierre White gets away with it.

This looks cool

Sayed Hasan has interviewed ordinary folk on the street and made an exhibition out of them. See here: http://www.kettering-road.com/ .

Warwick Castle slideshow

This is a belated slideshow of our trip to Warwick Castle which was our first day out in the Bongo.

Ifs and buts

If England had managed to get through to the European Championship finals it would have clashed with Glastonbury and No1 Son's performance as Billy the Duckling in the musical Honk.

If we had booked tickets to Glastonbury it would have caused the aforementioned clashtastic horror but we would also be in a foul mood now, on our way home or thinking about it, inconsolable about the return to reality.

Glastonbury

I'm watching Glastonbury on telly. I'm warm. I just walked out to the car to get a CD I wanted to listen to. That's a ten yard trip to the next band. It's a four yard stroll to the tea stall. I have a seat. I'm clean and as far as I can tell, there is almost no chance of any crusties urinating where I am going to be sleeping. It would be too much of a cliche to wish I was there.

I used to go every year and would go again but I'm put off by the palaver of getting a ticket, the unlikelihood of getting a ticket and the question of whether or not to take my millions of children too.

I am now reading The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien. Kick it.

I have loads of books to read...

... and I have just ordered a load more. These are my birthday books that I have allowed myself because it was my birthday. I have a lot of guilt about the dead trees stacked around my house but books are probably my deepest and oldest vice. Nothing fancy. Nothing hugely academic. Variety is the spice and all that.

The thing about books is that they are such simple devices for delivering so much information. Film throws coloured lights on to a screen. Books throw coloured ideas on to your imagination.

Books can be objects of beauty or they can be a thumbed wad you stuff in your pocket. And the value for money of a book, in terms of the quantity of new ideas it pours into your mind, is not really bettered by any other medium. So buying new books when you have got more than you can read already is not such a bad thing...

No water

No water is one thing, but no coffee machine?!? Damn you crypto water bug...

New book time

I have just finished Persepolis (4/5), v good, now Im pondering my next read...

Birthday hangover

Back at work after my birthday weekend. So this is it, my 40s. At least I have new toys to play with.

Euro fan

Euro fan, originally uploaded by stevescoles.

Here is no2 son loving football

New phone...

So all the old mucking around starts again.

Ok that's it...

I've given up on the new manbag, swapped my stuff out of it, the missus is going to get it after all.

A maaanbag?

Getting untold grief about my brand new aged leather manbag. May have to restore status of my old modern style one...

The Royal Marines

Gordon Ramsay was running around with the Royal Marines on the f-word the other night. That's a very cheesy dish before you've even opened the effin can, but sometimes you just can't help smiling.

Cheese warning, by the way.

The marines were taking Gordon through an assault course. They had just used him as a pull through in a sewer pipe and were composing themselves to yomp onwards to the next challenge. The dripping marine (everyone got pulled through) said something like: "deploy chest, activate pride..." as he started jogging on.

Yes it's cheese... Deploy chest. Activate pride.

...but it's also a beautifully honed little chunk of language, a perfect design in word form. It's almost like a haiku. Good cheese.

Hello

Hello from my mobile.

Gatecrasher

Tomorrow I am going here. I am hoping that I find myself doing things that I am really too old to do.

Yarmouth Biscuits

Who ate all the flapjacks? That was me. So I decided to replace what was in the biscuit tin with something homemade: Yarmouth Biscuits. One cup caster sugar, one cup plain flour, half cup butter, raisins, two beaten eggs. Ten minutes at Gas 7 (220c). The mix came out very wet. Perhaps one egg would have done it. I put the wet mix into a cup cake tray and created Yarmouth Cakes. They really taste strongly of orange. I put orange in too. Perhaps less orange would have done it.

In addition, I decided I wanted to add a manbag, change purse and wallet to my birthday wishlist. I like the whole distressed leather Guiness ad peasant look.

Who should I listen to?

I should probably listen to Radio 2 but I just can't. Every time I try I feel like I am seeing how long I can keep my face submerged in a bowl of bland. So that means I would rather get irritated by Chris Moyles and his gang in the morning than get indifferent to Terry Wogan.

This morning Moylsey was talking about not wanting to go to the Sony Radio Awards because he always gets approached by local radio DJs introducing themselves as his 'competition' on their local breakfast show. Fresh from Radio One's One Big Weekend music festival Moyles contemptuously muttered "you are so not our competition".

He's piling on the audience figures, he's in the papers but to be honest, I really miss Mark and Lard...

Pants...

I watched the incredible ITV drama Flood tonight. It's awful, mainly because it is ludicrous. The most believable part of the whole thing is the catastrophic flooding of London. There isn't one convincing relationship or motivating force in the rest of the show.

There is the classic disaster movie Old Fool Who Had Been Warning About This For Years. No-one was taking any notice of him until it became dramatically necessary for them to do so but when that time arrived suddenly everything Old Fool said was gospel.

COBRA, the Whitehall committee charged with sorting out catastrophes, decides that evacuating London in three hours is a better plan than telling everyone to go upstairs into those high London buildings we keep seeing on the news.

Robert Carlyle keeps diving into the torrent for a heroic paddle about and suspiciously keeps telling his lady friend in a flimsy silk blouse that they cannot stay here and must get into the water again...

Joanne Whalley is running Cobra without access to either Sky News, BBC News 24 or even Capital Radio. You can tell she is getting a grip of the situation when she demands some video coverage of the mayhem.

The CGI pictures of London getting swallowed up by floodwater are pretty good but I would have thought the iconic scenes of the Whitehouse getting destroyed in Independence Day or even Parliament going up in V for Vendetta should have taught film makers to savour the destruction of our seats of Government. Tower Bridge gets a good hammering but really they could have tried harder.

The thing is, Flood is so bad that you find yourself trying to work out what could have caused it. Did all the money go on the special effects and the actors? Did they start with footage of London being destroyed and then try to work a story around it? Did anyone watch it before they pressed the button marked 'Broadcast'?

The nuts...

Slam by Pendulum

Love this...

It makes me think of Bonnie, who I sing to it to punish her for not falling asleep in my arms.

Full Body Massage

I was given a full body massage yesterday so I could write a feature about what it feels like to be a man having a spa treatment usually associated with the ladies. It felt great.

I love Wii

We got a Wii Fit board this week. It hurt my feelings by estimating my Wii age at 56 but I still love it because the Wii is just so good at looking after the people playing with it. You don't need any occult technological insight to make it work for you. There are big lessons here about doing the simple stuff very well indeed.

02 what shall I do?

I had wanted to email this picture in from my mobile phone. I've been trying to do it for about a week. A week before that it would have been no problem but for some reason - despite months of happily being able to email pictures from my phone - I needed to download something new from 02. When I downloaded it my old email phone settings were still not working.

Hopefully there is some kind of work around or new thing I can do. What really bugs me about it, is that there was no warning or explanation from 02. There did not seem to be any option to carry on as I had been.

I wonder sometimes, whether we give 'technology' companies more slack than other retailers in terms of what we will put up with. I have only just bought my excellent Bongo minibus/campervan thing, but if the person who sold it to me came and changed the way it worked in a couple of months without any explanation I would be furious. As it is I am gutted, because I have dinked it already. And of course, when I wanted to email a picture to my blog to blow off steam about it I couldn't...

Is this how things start these days?

I saw this in the Guardian Guide booklet, forgot about it, Googled it, found an article on Gawker and clicked through a link from there to get to this flickr set.

The idea orginally appeared in Village Voice as part of a witty satire on rap music. People have come up with their own take on it and flickr has been the seedbed for the result.

Songs expressed as graphs and functional diagrams. Funny and strangely satisfying to decode. It's like sharing an in-joke which is how I think music and poetry work, although across a broader span of emotions than humour. I do, I really think that.

Words, words words...

I finished transcribing an interview with Alan Moore last night. In about 30 minutes of chit chat he gave me more than 3000 words worth of useful commentary. I asked three questions. There are lots of reasons he is a writer and that is one of them.

The big four O

I'm 40 this year and, like any mature adult would, I'm thinking of presents I would like. A new saddle for my bike would be good because I keep slipping forwards on this one. Also I'd like something that takes better video than my phone or my camera and something that takes pictures without eating batteries. I want, I want - but if I don't write it down somewhere I'll forget. Hopefully I'll update this list with something that shows a bit of personality or ambition for experience but for now, I'm materialisticating.

Warwick Castle

Yesterday we went to Warwick Castle and saw this:




It's a trebuchet and I want one.

Black Hawk Down?

The Olympic torch runs the gamut of Tibet protesters as it proceeds through European capitals in much the same way US troops rolled through the hostile streets of Mogadishu in Black Hawk Down.

Phalanxes of state security officers from different nations guard a symbol of popular togetherness... from the people.

Contraband fell at the 11th

My horse in the Grand National sweep was attracting odds of 500 to 1. People said to me: "you should put a tenner on that" as though it made more sense than betting on a horse that was offering me 5-1. I did wonder. He fell at the 11th. Butter hooves.

The Lost Girls come home

Alan Moore is a big hairy Englishman who resolutely comes from my town and is determined never to come from anywhere else. Along with his charming artist missus Melinda Gebbie (neither large nor overtly hirstute) he spent years and years painstakingly crafting The Lost Girls, an erotic masterpiece in graphic novel form. Various legal shenanigans (its central characters are the adult counterparts to three of fiction's best known girl heroines) have delayed its availability in the UK. Now I am informed by a big, hairless (I'm exaggerating) American from Top Shelf publishing called Chris Staros, that this has all been sorted out. It is now safe to approach, purchase and read copies of this book in the United Kingdom, where it was written. Yay. Got it already.

Sword fights are not only for winners

The demise of the duel to the death as a means of settling disputes in western culture has led to an unrecognised phenomenon: the increasing number of people who lose sword fights and live to tell the tale. Here is the story of one of those people.

Bilbo

This song means so much more to me than I could ever have believed. Dedicating it to my son William Beauregarde.

The Fishmarket

It's been a long time since our town's Fishmarket smelled of fish. When the market closed down it was colonised by a bunch of creatives who turned it into an arts centre. They conjured resources from thin air when every public budget in the area was being slashed and have gradually, tenaciously, built it up into something attracting all kinds of attention.

Today it reopened after transforming its cafe from somewhere that looked like a student's living room to somewhere that looks like a place a student might go for a coffee. You never know what you are going to see there and when you think about it, how many places can you really say that about? It's brilliant. Highly magical, no doubt about it.

The office sweepstake

I have just picked a name out of the bag as my entry in the sweepstake for the Grand National on Saturday. Quids in, possible £20 back. Bit of fun isn't it? Cheers you up.
My horse is Contraband. I have seen odds of 500-1 for him to win the race. I understand that some people will be quietly impressed if he manages to start it. Great.