Raised Manholes

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There’s something sinister about this photo, but I can’t work out what it is. It seems to herald a confluence of painful events, what with the manholes, and the coffee, and the car bumper, and the weird dark thing floating above the girl’s head.

Kriegsmarine, not SS

Here I am all dressed up as a U-boat captain for the Blitz party in London’s vibrant East End, with my girlfriend dressed up as a wartime nurse. Not sure under what circumstances we would have met, maybe if she were working on a bends ward. The pipe is my own.

Blitz Party 09

A German TV channel was filming there and were very interested in my costume… maybe they were doing a piece about the English obsession with World War 2.

Street ‘tude Hate Hump

Charm vacuum

I can’t imagine what nightmare parallel universe Zuccato’s woefully misguided “Z-kids” come from, but they’re obviously way too cool for school.

I can’t begin to describe how many things are wrong with this advert (at the rear entrance of the Finchley Road O2 Centre) but simply glancing at it I can feel my “hate hump” (link contains swears) filling to bursting point.

The eyeless girl seems to be flipping some kind of meaningless gang sign, while the eyeless boy’s mouth looks like it was once a smile until the corners were thickened and turned down to give him a sullen, adversarial air. The tagline claims that the new Z-kids menu is “scrumdiddlyyum”, a rip-off of the Willy Wonka “Scrumdiddlyumptious” name parsed through 1950s street slang, like the kids are about to recommend a “hotdogerooni” or a “shake-ola”.

I’ve just checked out the Z-kids website at etruscarestaurants.com and it looks like I was right. The kids look more benign on the website - the boys mouth is smiling and the girl is holding a lollipop, and the introductory text offers “A big, warm, happy WELCOME to the new Z-kids site.”

So why the decision to gangsta them up? I plan to ask Etrusca Restaurants to explain their marketing strategy via their handy online feedback form…

3 Dogs, 3 Poses.

dog_silhouettes

3 dogs I saw on my morning bike ride on the Heath. The dog on the left is returning with a yellow ball.

Doesn’t it feel much better?

Sullen hand-waggling grime princess  Lady Sovereign asks:

“Doesn’t it feel much better, when you’ve had a better day than yesterday?

Doesn’t it feel much better, when you’ve had a better day than yesterday?

Doesn’t it feel much better, when you’ve had a better day than yesterday?

Doesn’t it feel much better, when you’ve had a better day than yesterday?”

OF COURSE IT FUCKING DOES! That’s why it’s a better day!

Keep this up, Lady Sovereign, and I might have to reconsider your claim to be an “educated example of intelligence”…

Three lies about Dean Gaffney

Apparently Dean Gaffney once tore a horse in half. Lengthways.

This is a lie. Obvious, you might think…

But I’ve been a bit perturbed recently by the amount of people who tell me that they can never tell when I’m being serious or not. So I thought I’d offer a handy list of things I say which are usually lies:

1. “Dean Gaffney once tore a horse in half… lengthways.” There you are, you know that one already. Incidentally, it doesn’t have to be Dean Gaffney - anyone will do. Minor celebrities are best, and the lie works well if you lean towards the person and lower your voice, conspiratorially.

2. “Dean Gaffney died by choking on a magnet.” Dean Gaffney, at the time of writing this, isn’t dead, so this is obviously falsehood. But if it were someone in the distant past, you might be sucked in, so beware. Sometimes I will add, with a sad shake of the head, “if only he’d had two… or been nearer to the fridge.”

3. “Dean Gaffney once caused a goat to burst, just by speaking its name.” Come to think of it… this one is completely true.

Extravaganza Bonanza

If you watch the digital channel G.O.L.D. (formerly UK Gold) you can hear my voice trailing the channel’s “Extravaganza Bonanza” lasting all of January, with double episodes of various classic sit-coms back-to-back from 9pm!

I would have titled this post “G.O.L.D.man Sachs” but for the fact that it doesn’t have anything to do with banking.

Bafta!

Charlie and Lola scooped two Baftas yesterday, in the Best Animation and Best Preschool Animation categories, against very stiff competition! Well done everyone! You can see pics from the ceremony here.

Me as George Michael’s studio engineer

I just found this video online of me alongside Matt Lucas in their BBC show Rock Profiles… I make a very short appearance at about 2:18 as a studio engineer. Matt Lucas was a lovely bloke to work with, and I remember thinking the show was very well written.

Graticules and Pippy Bags

I note that a Google search for the word “Spegdroth” turns up only one result, a comment on Frank Key’s fascinating and edifying website Hooting Yard (he also writes and narrates a weekly radio show of the same name on Resonance FM) at the end of a long thread about pippy bags. To wit:

Mr Key. I am a busy and important man. My automated manservant, Spegdroth, is driving me mad with his relentless demands for a pippy bag to call his own. His wheedling will be curtailed only by the failure of one or more of the components along his desire/whinge nexus, for instance a brain pipe, or his throat-plate, or the giant granite bearings on either side of his monstrous gob. But I will be dead long before such a failure occurs.

All day and night he clumps up and down the corridors of the institute keening for a pippy bag. Geraldine and I have not had a nod of sleep for months, and I’m too tired even to caulk the primary heat exchangers these days. He’s ruining my research right when it’s entering the crucial phase!

I don’t even know where he got wind of such a thing - he certainly didn’t get it from me, and my wife has never so much as acknowledged Spegdroth’s presence (apart from running screaming from the house when he first lumbered from his birthing pod). I suppose it’s possible he read it in a magazine that one of the Burbage twins left lying around - Italian Vogue, probably, or the Damart catalogue.

To begin with I thought he might mean a bag emblazoned with the likeness of Astrid Lindgren’s well-loved children’s book character Pippi Longstocking, and risking imprisonment (or at least a hefty fine) for copyright infringement, I fashioned him a stylish hessian shoulder-bag bearing an iron-on transfer of her pigtailed countenance. Alas - it was all in vain. He plucked it from my outstretched hand, studied it for a moment, and hurled it sullenly into the lake.

I was momentarily disheartened but the thought struck me that I may simply have made a slight mistake in the rendering of Pippi’s face. Perhaps her hair colour was not red enough for Spegdroth’s eye-graticule to resolve, perhaps his objection was to the work of Viveca Serlachius, who portrayed the character in the 1949 film, and he preferred, as Lindgren herself did, the child actress Inger Nilsson. These variations and countless more I explored as I sat up night after night, weaving my fingers raw. I tried hessian, denim, polyester, chiffon, oilcloth, calico and a hundred other fabrics. I tried black and white photographs, screen-printing, applique, patchwork, embroidery, and methods of textile production as yet too advanced to describe without inviting derision. I tried satchels, holdalls, haversacks, clutch-, tote- and kit-bags. All of them beautiful, strange and wondrous. All of them offered up hopefully to the metal tyrant. And all of them now in the lake.
In God’s name, Key, I beseech you, tell me where to get one of these infernal things so I can shut his ceramic cakehole up once and for all!

-Fitzmaurice Trenery-

Incidentally, Frank Key’s new book “Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude and Pippy Bags” is available from Lulu now. It is a riveting read and will answer all none of your pressing questions about pippy bags.