Inbuilt collars

Remember back in the old days - before we lived the way we live today - when you had to buy a shirt and a jumper separately? What an odd age!

That's if you wanted to wear a jumper with a shirt under it of course. This is a very difficult thing to pull off without looking preppy and foppish and appalling. It's not impossible but it's definitely tricky and generally not recommended.

But you don't have to do that any more. You'd be hard pushed to do it even if you wanted to. Because they've solved the problem. Nowadays when you buy a jumper it comes with an inbuilt shirt. Not a whole shirt, mind you, just the visible bits around the collar. 

The reverse doesn't apply of course as if you bought a shirt with an inbuilt jumper then the whole jumper would be visible and only the visible bits around the collar of the shirt would be, er, visible. 

[thinks...]

Hold on that's just the same thing. Whichever way you cut it you get a jumper with little more than a suggestion of a shirt underneath.

Anyway, they've solved that centuries old separate jumper/shirt problem for us. 

Thanks Goodness for they. I know I couldn't have waited a second longer.

Russell Brand

I don't think I've ever knowingly watched Russell Brand on tv or heard him on the radio.

And I've generally got a decent handle on my own activities so you can probably infer that I have, in fact, never watched him on tv or heard him on the radio.

I have read him in the paper though. I read his sports column in the Guardian and find it diverting enough. This week he writes the following about Old Twitchy and his extraordinary improvement over his hapless predecessor at Spurs, Juande Ramos.

I suppose in a way it's not that baffling; one could use a Stradivarius to fiddle out Vivaldi or to smash a prostitute over the head - it's not the violin that decides whether to be a maestro or a misogynist, it's the operator.

It's a good line and also, I think, a brilliant and subtle sideswipe at the awful Clarkson and his pathetic oeuvre. 

Deipnosophy

I much prefer one conversation at a time over dinner. I may be old fashioned in this regard, many people seem quite happy to have two or more conversations concurrently but I find this off-putting and noisy and, predictably, I'm never in the conversation I want to be. 

It's even worse if the conversations are criss-crossed and I have snatches of interesting conversation about The One Show or Chopin coming at me amidships while I'm struggling to keep up my end of a conversation about James Fucking Bond or The Bleeding Economy.

My parents didn't really have dinner parties, they just had drunken drinks parties but they knew the importance even then of One Singer One Song. Of course, that related to actual singing songs rather than conversation but the principle applies. Now I think of it I can't quite fathom why more than one singer would have been singing more than one song but this was the seventies when they used to dress monkeys as jockeys and parade them down the High Street. At least in my home town anyway. I have a picture somewhere of the young Musters holding a monkey-jockey and I'll hunt it out and post it up here sometime. On a slow news days perhaps.

Deipnosophy is the art of dinner party conversation and one of it's key tenets is that when your hostess says "This is Nigel Slater" they mean "This is a Nigel Slater recipe". It helps no-one to suggest that we are actually eating Nigel Slater himself because cannibalism is rarely a fit topic for the dinner table (or, indeed, any table). No matter how funny you think it is, the idea of eating humans (even that one) is enough to put decent folks off their dinner.

Ned Beatty

Ned Beatty is perhaps my favourite actor. He's also very attentive about responding to his emails as you'll see.

He's probably best known for his first movie role in which he was horribly brutalised in Deliverance. But I don't want to think about that. 

He's a lovely cuddly old uncle to me and I prefer to think of him as Detective Stanley "Stan" Bolander, aka "Big Man", from the brilliant tv series Homicide, Life on the Street.

I sent Ned an email yesterday via his website and, honestly, within the hour he'd responded personally saying that he needed time to consider my request and that he'd speak to his wife and sister (2 different people, I assume) and get back to me as soon as possible (asap, he said).

I'm very excited. I'll keep you "looped-in", as they say.

The One Show (Two)

You have to be careful what you write.

Although one very good thing about my intanet is that it doesn't keep history records. I can simply go in and make a change and you'd never know. Unless, of course, you'd saved off that page to your own intanet storage device. But you'd have to be nuts to do that.

You may think I'd said this or that in posts passim but if you go back and look again carefully it may actually be that I'd  said the other. I can simply re-write history like it had never happened.

You know I was talking about that really interesting and clever wildlife chap off the life giving, life taking The One Show? Yea him, remember? Well I was out this afternoon having a music adventure with my kids and I bumped into his brother. His actual real brother in true life who not only looks and sounds like him but actually is his brother and is also bald.

As I chatted to him today I thought to myself thank goodness I didn't say anything nasty or mean about his interesting and clever brother off the telly. 

Lord Mayor's Show

Those lazy bastards at BBC Scotland are showing the Lord Mayor's Show this morning.

Why can't they show their own show? What the fuck is it anyway?

(Not that I was looking for Saturday Kitchen or anything)

Zbigniew

I was in Next today buying a deadly night shade.

The lady in front of me was being invited to enter a competition to win a holiday in Bali. She started to fill in the entry form and then asked if she really had to provide her email address. 

The assistant (Zbigniew) told her yes, but assured her they would only use the address to send her promotional information about once a week.

"For the rest of your life", I chipped in, helpfully.

"Yes", she agreed, adding "And I already get enough emails about viagra and sex aids".

"Viagra is a sex aid", I chipped in, helpfully.

She told Zbigniew that she wouldn't bother with the competition.

He replied, "You could always get another email address".

After she'd gone he told me that he'd only been joking with the other email address idea. I told him I had thought that, but had only been about 75% sure.

It's just a hunch but I suspect that Zbigniew is wasted in the Home Department at Next.

BrightBlack Morning Light

Sometimes I feel like I'm living back in the olden times.

In the days before intanets and magnetic card readers when you could run past a weatherbeaten fencepost 'pon summer hoof and make another reclaimation. In the days before hologram buffalos when beads spell power leaf. 

Did we even care about credit crunches (whatever they are!) when we could simply fry bread 'bove Amber Canon Majik and share our blanket with an owl?

No we did not, my friends.

And you don't even need drugs. I urge you not to take drugs. Only the music. Let into your soul, it will ease your troubled mind and make you whole again. I'll see your global recession and raise you a star blanket river child.

I'm saying, let BrightBlack Morning Light be your hammock today.

Chez

Is there anything quite so unnecessary in these straitened financial times than using the word chez when speaking English?

I think it's perfectly acceptable to spatter one's daily chit-chat with some foreign words, like coberta-acolchoada and treppenhausen for example, but chez, I think, is just slightly beyond the pale.

Chez is a derivative of the French word chez and means "at the place of".

Jessica Brinton in his, frankly incomprehensible (but unputdownable), Sunday Times column (it seems to be written in English but not as we know it) writes:

"Then there was a debauched evening in Richmond chez Nicky Haslam, of which the less said the better."

I couldn't agree more, mate.

Crazy?

Ignoring entirely the fact that we were in Ireland, physically speaking anyway, myself and an unusually shaped friend had a pint at lunchtime. This doesn't really happen in Ireland (except to alcoholics) but we're both (arguably) British so we did it anyway.

We ordered two pints of black blood from the dingiest pub in the Free State and sat down.

He told me how he remembered that he lost his mind and how pleasant that place was. Even his emotions had an echo in so much space. And he was so out there, without care, that he was out of touch. It wasn't that he didn't know enough, he knew too much. Have the time of your life, was his only advice. 

Come on now, who do you think you are, Ha Ha Ha bless your soul, he cackled maniacally.

Then I went to the toilet.

I think he's crazy. Possibly.