Month: March 2005

Normally I wouldn’t trouble these pages with news of something so desperately uncool (See! I am the Fearne Cotton of the blogging world), but just a quick mention that Sal and I saw the Finn Brothers at the Albert Hall last night (hey, get over it: I’m going out with an Antipodean, it’s what they do), if only to highlight some shockingly shabby journalism I discovered.

You see, we weren’t really expecting the gig to take place at all, considering that their former bandmate, Paul Hester, had committed suicide in Melbourne over the weekend, and according to the fine journalists at Melbourne’s The Age, which is a kind of Australian Daily Mail, it didn’t: an article of theirs that I read on Tuesday afternoon reported that the brothers had already flown home to be with friends and family.

It could have been worse–on Monday afternoon I read a report in the Sydney Morning Herald about how the brothers had played an emotional gig on Monday night, reunited with Crowded House bass player Nick Seymour who had flown from Dublin specially. They did indeed play on Monday, but the only problem with the report was that I was reading the article on their website several hours before the gig took place.

As you might have gathered from previous posts, we spent the Easter weekend in Budapest. The weather was not kind to us, but somehow the grey overcast skies that dominate my photographs seemed rather well suited to a weekend wandering around admiring the grand old crumbling buildings and grim soviet architecture that dominate the Hungarian capital. It’s also possible that we didn’t really mind the weather conditions because the favourable sterling to HUF exchange rate allowed us to spend the weekend there in style–on Saturday night, for example, we dined at the most expensive restaurant in town (and David Hasselhoff’s favourite), Gundel, where we enjoyed three spectacularly unethical courses, pre-dinner cocktails, and several bottles of wine, all for around £45 each. No sign of any luminaries of the calibre of their website’s reference listing, but we did wonder if our surprisingly good table was in any way related to the fact that the member of our group who had booked the table shares an initial and a surname with a certain erstwhile Spice Girl and UN Ambassador. Maybe we should keep an eye on that references page, just in case.

We spent much of the rest of the weekend eating and drinking as well, and although my Time Out guidebook contained the bitingly sardonic critiques that you might expect of most of the etterems we visited, it did prove fantastically useless at locating anywhere we might want to go to in advance. On the evening we arrived, as we were rapidly discovering many of the places around us to be shut, I attempted to call on the services of the guidebook to locate a late night drinking establishment, only to discover that although the editors had helpfully included map page and grid references for everything they mentioned, they had neglected to (a) mark anything on the maps, or (b) number the pages. Mostly we ended up reading about somewhere we went after leaving it. [One example: it was only some time after leaving the bar in which I caught the majority of the England – Northern Ireland World Cup Qualifier (yes, I know…) that I discovered with Time Out’s assistance that the unassuming chap finishing his coffee behind us (and moving to let a group of Geordies sit down with a friendly “No, it’s ok, I’m the owner”) must therefore have been “local celebrity and former world featherweight champion Istvan “Ko-Ko” Kovacs”.]

Taking a break from eating and drinking, we did just find time to visit one of the city’s baths. In this case Time Out actually came in handy, by not only helping us understand the complex and confusing procedures, but also helping us avoid two sets of baths whose clientèle consists mostly of “startled tourists and gay men on the prowl”. We headed instead for the mixed baths in the city park, where we spent most of our time in the two outdoor heated pools, watching the steam rise into the cold wintery air, and the old blokes playing chess in the corner. Inside, there was a slightly scary warren of corridors leading to some slightly manky baths of varying temperatures, interspersed with rows of restrooms and massage rooms that all looked like something from a 1950s soviet hospital. We didn’t hang around.

Watching “Express TV”, on the Heathrow Express yesterday, as Sal and I returned from our weekend in Budapest, I was delighted to watch and hear the following announcement: “Welcome to the Heathrow Express, and welcome to Express TV… For your comfort, on this train there are a number of quiet coaches, where Express TV isn’t playing. If you are in a designated quiet coach, please refrain from using your mobile phone…”

Apparently Razorlight’s Johnny Borrell wrote ‘Leave Me Alone’, off their debut album on the number 29 bus. (“…Borrell worked stops from the route of the Number 29 – the London Bus he wrote the track on – into the song“)

Hey! That goes right past my house. In fact, sometimes I catch that bus down to the tube, when it isn’t too busy to get on. Can’t say I’ve ever felt the inspiration to write a song while shoved up into the armpits of some smelly commuter, though, let alone take my guitar with me…

Paris excepted, all of my recent trips to Europe have been to countries where I have no language skills whatsoever. Having got completely fed up with feeling like the stupid uneducated Brit abroad, I resolved to do something about this, and at least make some cursory efforts to learn a few words of the language of any future countries I plan to visit.

My first brush with Estonian might have had to wait until we caught the taxi from the airport, but I am wonderfully well prepared in comparison for our upcoming trip to Budapest: this morning, my latest Amazon package arrived on my desk, and within it was the Time Out guide to said Eastern European city. Surely the single page of basic expressions at the back of this rather small book will set me well on the way to conversing fluently in one of the most difficult European languages. However, I am rather concerned that, amongst perhaps 20 or 30 expressions that the illustrious editors chose to include–the phrases they expect visitors to the city will find most useful, and need to use most often–is this one:

Getting Around

When is the train for Vienna?
Mikor indul a becsi vonat?

Not exactly the ringing endorsement of the city’s charms that I had been hoping for.

My afternoon was enlivened considerably by an email from Camden council. Nothing to do with the contents of the email, but all to do with the fact that they have configured their email server to show just the sender’s surname in the “From:” field, and this email happens to be about my council tax account, so shows just my account number in the “Subject:” field.

So this missive appears in my inbox as:

From: Prime
Subject: [7 digit number]

I can only presume that “Prime” is the evil robot that has taken over the council, and this email contains my instructions for the next phase.

in an old school hall
celeb fame academy
on my way to work

It was only this morning, and I think the jumbo red nose stuck to the entrance might have been the give away, that I realised why there’s been crowds of youngsters hanging around the old lambeth college every night for the last week as I walked past it on my way home from work. Turns out, as the InterWeb confirms, that after it closed down as a college last year, it was bought by Endemol (or perhaps it closed down as a college because it was bought by Endemol), and is therefore the location for filming of Celebrity Fame Academy. So if you were ever wondering where to go to tell Patrick Kielty what you think of him, now you know.

And before I forget:

Justin Lee Collins
At the first friday club night
Heading for the bar

After finally getting completely fed up with the ISP that likes to charge for no service, I told Virgin.net that I’d like to move off their £25 a month “no service” plan, and picked myself a new ISP.

This time, I plumped for Homechoice, who were prepared to offer me broadband at twice the speed of Virgin.net (when they deigned to provide a service at all) plus TV on demand through the phone line, at not much more than I was previously paying Branson’s lot (they also offered the option to take all the Sky Sports channels, much to Sal’s displeasure…). Seemed like a good deal to me, and for about 4 hours after it was installed, it was. Unfortunately, since then, and for the last week, we’ve been having some interesting interference problems between the TV service/broadband, and the phone (basically, you can hear the data traffic coming through the phone line, and if you happen to be trying to use the net or watch any of the Homechoice TV channels when you pick up the phone, the TV picture freezes, and you lose your connection). Unfortunately, it seems that Homechoice’s “technical” support might not be all it’s cracked up to be. My conversation with them last weekend went something like this:

Me: …the phone line works fine when there’s only a phone plugged into it, but as soon as I plug the Homechoice Set Top Box into the line as well, I can hear the modem dialling up, and then all the data traffic…
Customer Service Monkey: You’ve got a modem plugged in to the line?

Me: Er, yes. It’s inside the Homechoice Set Top Box that you supplied to me. That’s how it connects to the network…
CSM: Well, it sounds like a filter problem.
Me: I don’t think it is–I’ve tried three different filters, one of which you supplied to me, and two I used with my previous supplier with no problems for the last year.
CSM: Sounds like a filter problem to me. Do you have any other filters you could try?
Me: Er, no. Just the three…
CSM: Can you hang on, I’ll just check with my supervisor.
[a few minutes later]
CSM: Yes. We think it’s a filter problem.
(repeat ad infinitum…)

Of course it’s not a filter problem (or at least it is not a problem with the filter I have plugged in to the phone line, although it may be a problem with the filter at the exchange), and the engineer they eventually sent out agreed (it’s also not a problem with any other equipment inside the house). It’s not a problem with the line, because a BT engineer has already been out to test that. As I say, it may be a problem at the exchange, but Homechoice don’t seem to know/care, or be able to get anyone down there to find out.

Hmm. Which leaves me with a working phone line, and a working broadband/TV connection, but not both at the same time*. So InterWebNet, what’s going on, and what can I do? I’m stuck.

*Needless to say, it may not be a good idea to phone our landline any time there’s a live Everton game on Sky Sports…

Clearly it’s all downhill from here: the second 10,000 days of your life are obviously going to be nowhere near as good as the first, are they?

Maybe this is why 27 is the Rock Star Death age?

Further updates to come in 2032 if/when I clock over to 20,000 days…

It’s just as well that Rob pointed it out, or I might have missed out on celebrating my 10,000th day birthday. If that’s not enough to make you feel old on a random wintery day in March, then I don’t know what is.

Oh, I see that Glasto ticket details are up on the website. Basically as you were (Sunday April 3rd, 9AM, Aloud “Sorry we are experiencing Technical Difficulties, please Try Again Later” .com, and the expected price increase), but one bit of added hassle (for me at least) is the new ID requirements: it’s photo ID this year, but as a non-driver, the only form of acceptable ID I can produce is some silly Blanketts-esque Citizen Card thing that I’d have to apply for.

(Insert your own joke here about the irony of Glastonbury of all places pushing the whole entitlement card thing–perhaps I could organise a ceremonial burning of the cards once everyone has gained entry to the festival). And I don’t suppose there’s a Doctor, Solicitor or Civil Servant reading who could act as a referee for me…

I’ve also been browsing the logs again. Yes, I know that’s always makes a poor, lazy excuse for a blog (ah, but isn’t this always…), and only one step above just writing blogs all the time apologising for not writing any new blogs, but it does provide consistent amusement. From yesterday’s log file, I can see that Paste is being hammered again by the poker comment spam idiots (none of which is thankfully making it anywhere near the site), but there are some revealing search gems in amongst all the Texas hold em crap. Yesterday:
– at least two of the original contributors to the magazine independently googled themselves
– someone was looking for “the fish shop in Islington” (well I hope they found what they were looking for…)
– assorted other people were after “Victorian morals AND breasts“, “cartoon orang utangs“, and “merged photos of john lennon and jacky chan”
– and finally, my favourite: someone wondered “who is writing David Hasselhoff reviews amazon“. Ok, I admit it, it was me all along. All 1000 of them.