The best a man can get

I need to shave this morning. I hate it, but it has been 2 weeks or so since the last dalliance with Gillette’s finest, and it is now becoming intolerably itchy. I cannot bear shaving, but I also cannot bear either the itchiness that accompanies overly-long stubble, nor the thought of a full beard (especially with my blond/ginger stripe in the centre). So I am trapped. I will not shave every day – I don’t think I could find the time, even if I could be bothered. Yet I also look ridiculous with facial hair longer than that on my head. So shave I must. Which means I will look like a pre-teenage boy for a couple of hours until my 5 o’clock shadow develops. My life is terrible.

Sachertorte

A strange thought occurred to me as I was taking a shower just 5 minutes ago.  I cannot pinpoint the exact time when coffee shops became ubiquitous in the UK. As a child, I remember that Gareth Hunt and then this couple were the faces of coffee sales in the UK. Instant of course – I cannot remember seeing ground coffee on the shelves of Sainsbury’s in Portsmouth (although this may because I was a provincial lad). And the thought of a coffee machine was wholly alien, especially having one at home. Most of my family still use instant, with milk. And sugar.

I am sure the state in London was somewhat different, being the cosmopolitan melting pot it always was (and the large number of Italian-owned cafes that had proliferated, especially in Soho). Even when I started at university, Pret and Benjy’s were around, but I cannot remember those transatlantic franchises that now appear on every corner. Even amongst we pretentious mid-90’s students with passions for obscure teas, cheeses, music and other things, there was no passion for coffee. Not even a cafetiere in the kitchen (as far as I can remember).

Of course, the demand for the New York-style coffee shop increased exponentially as Friends was on TV every Friday night, and as none of the actors have enjoyed success following the demise of the show, and the Aniston haircut has now dropped out of favour (for a couple of years at least until trendy Hoxton/Shoreditch types move on to the mid-90’s in a postmodern-ironic manner), the explosion of these shops (and the destruction of the old-style cafe in its myriad forms) can be seen as the single remaining hangover of the aspirational (and financially impossible) lifestyle enjoyed by the six protagonists.

Plus of course, large American (and British) corporations at the time had the financial muscle to expand aggressively into even the smallest niche(s) – although the larger brands continue to buy up retail space, especially in central London, at an alarming rate – and smaller competitors have fallen by the wayside.

However, even in these troubled financial times, the lifestyle still seems popular – Saturday morning used to be full of kids TV, and Sundays with religious programmes, but both now have ‘cooking’ and chat shows during which large cups of coffee (and/or unusual teas are consumed), herbs need to be fresh, vegetables (with the exception of peas) must be unfrozen. I myself buy into this whole lifestyle – the coffee machine, nice saucepans, eco-friendly cleaning, composter in the kitchen, and so on… Guardian-lite I suppose you could call it, as I do not have the funds many of their other readers do.

So, to summarise, I cannot remember. Sometime in the 90’s. Now I am heading out in the rain to buy a pumpkin.

I feel most peculiar today

I woke up at 6.18am on my day off having passed out at 11-ish last night. Got up, surfed a little. Bought some music (thank the Lord for iTunes), then spent the next 11 hours drifting in and out of sleep, reading the news, catching up on Facebook. But when I actually woke up finally, at 5.30ish and went to the shower, I had a banging headache. That still persists. As a child, if I laid in bed on a Saturday (or Sunday, as we were far from religious), a similar feeling would extend over me. In those days, of course, I would not have paracetamol or aspirin, but I have just felt compelled to take one, as everything is a little fuzzy and a Doozer seems to be mining in my sinuses. I am listening to a rash of new funk, and I have had to turn down the volume, as the snap of the snare drum seems to be of the exact frequency to cause me the most pain and distress. And TV is out of the question, as the colourful moving images simply make me feel nauseous. Ahh, the vagaries of human physiology.

Two

am has come and gone again. And my brain is still ticking over. I think watching The Story of Maths as I was trying to fall asleep (it is on the BBC website as well, should you wish to partake) was a fatal error – although it skips happily through the decades, only giving 5-10 minutes per mathematician (and with a definite Michael Palin bent – this was the first of two episodes on Europe), it is engaging and a world away from the classic-style Open University programmes that used to air from midnight, full of nylon flares, facial hair and proto-computer graphics.

Anyway, tonight was Descartes, Newton, Leibniz, Euler, Gauss, Riemann and others (which kind of reminds me of the Europe vs Rest of the World football matches when I was a child – or was it Monty Python with Philosophy Football), so pretty much everyone who defined modern (as opposed to derived from Ancient Greek) mathematics. Tedious for you all, I know, but for me this programme indulges not only my fetish for the clarity and beauty of pure maths, but also my interest in intellectual history, or rather the cross pollination that occurred between what we would now consider disparate, if not entirely separate disclipines – Leibniz was a man ahead of his time in so many respects, and in so many fields. So now we all feel wholly inadequate.

But now, inspired in part by these great thinkers, I feel I should be sitting up and doing something. What, I am not sure. Maths is out of the question, I lack both the training and rigour to pick up where I left off (save mental arithmetic and mathematical history) some thirteen and a half years ago. Plus, as I have written before, certain of my senses become heightened whilst trying to get to sleep, but my mind and reactions are dulled somewhat, so nothing productive tends to follow (as this goes to prove).

I am a passive, bordering on apathetic insomniac tonight. No music, no X-Box, no TV, just me sitting in the dark on the sofa. I daren’t start surfing the net, and Wikipedia is verboten – I neither want nor need mental stimulation tonight. So I shall sit here a while longer and await Hypnos or dawn.

That is the question

“To be means to communicate dialogically. When dialogue ends, everything ends. Thus dialogue, by its very essence, cannot and must not come to an end. [...] A single voice ends nothing and resolves nothing. Two voices is the minimum for life, the minimum for existence”.

Mikhail Bakhtin

Continued

About to go to bed, so some notes about the film. For my benefit more than anyone elses, but please comment if you wish.

Three country girls. Sofia. Dreams. Post-communism. Rampant capitalism. Triumph of true Bulgarian nature. Christianity. Romantic comedy. Three Coins in the Fountain. Moskva slezam ne verit.

Seamstresses

or Shivachki is the name of the Bulgarian film for this evening, part of the LFF. I am unsure what to expect – the last time I stumbled into an unknown arena of East European cinema, I was pleasantly surprised (but then Romanian’s do have possibly the darkest and most absurd sense of humour I have ever come across). So Bulgaria tonight, and I have no idea whatsoever what to expect – the film has been described as ’soap operatic’ – which in a British sense is usually unrelenting gloom punctuated by (very) odd moments of sub-slapstick comedy (the thought of Frank Butcher in the nip still turns my stomach). I shall report back tomorrow…

Cold War Style

Definitely worth the entry fee.

Jested Telecommunications Tower and Hotel – Cold War Modern from Victoria & Albert Museum on Vimeo.

Geldof

Today was simply intolerable. I had no desire to be at  work at all. And this feeling got worse when I managed to solve the problem that has slightly taken over my life for the last week in the space of 10 minutes. I think the two days away and the critical distance it afforded me certainly clarified many things. But what to do with the remaining 7 hours and 20 minutes. I frequently felt like slumping over my desk, or over the computer I was fixing. Even less than apathy. If such a thing is possible. And this evening has not improved things at all. University Challenge was a slight distraction, but since then I have slumped once again. I cannot/will not move. Even to change the channel. And the remote is 20cm away from me. So I am being swamped by The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Whilst my legs ache in general. And all this after one day at work. At least I am off tomorrow.

Rauchwurst

There has been a German sausage stand at Ealing Broadway shopping centre for the last couple of months. We bought a paprika salami (one of their Spezialitaeten) on Friday evening having done the bulk of the shopping in Tesco – they were closing up for the night. Today, once I had escaped from the labyrithine European food market within the shopping centre, they were open, and smelling very strongly of pork (unsurprising, for a sausage stall) – I can only remember once experiencing such an overwhelming aroma of pork product, and that was at a fayre in some small town in Germany in the early 90’s – at which they were cooking enormous coiled sausages over open fires.

Now, Ealing is a multikulti kind of area, and British councils are notoriously sensitive to anything that may upset the facade of political correctness they seek to impose. So, my question is whether any non-pork eaters have complained?