Month: February 2008

With Fidel stepping down this week, it seems only right for me to dig out my notes from our trip to Cuba last year and try to finish off the job of blogging it.

In case you missed or don’t remember the first half of this story, we’d begun in Havana, where we skilfully avoided any serious run-ins with the touts and spent the rest of the time attempting to speak bad Spanish, visiting the rum museum and the Capitol and drinking a lot of mojitos along the way…

After a few days in Havana, we moved on, catching an almost empty Viazul tourist bus bound for Viñales: tobacco country. It was a bumpy journey, and we weren’t sure if it was a great sign when the driver stalled at least once before he had even left the bus terminal car park, but we made it to Viñales in one piece and somehow on time despite us stopping to pick up and drop off assorted random people along the way. As we left the bus, we were mobbed by the owners of the town’s casas particulares (this being low season, they far outnumbered the passengers on the bus). As we’d already booked and paid for our accommodation, we tried to get past them with some polite “No”s and move down the street to get our bearings and check the map.

Unfortunately “No” apparently wasn’t an answer they were accustomed to taking, and it took me a while to work out that in fact the magic words were “reservacion… los jazmines… pagado”

“Ah!” said the closest tout, in English. “You want taxi!” And off she went to produce a taxi driver, who duly drove us up to our hotel (although not without him trying one final time to get us to change our minds and go to his mate’s casa instead…)

The Los Jazmines hotel where we were staying sits up in the hills a couple of miles outside of Viñales itself, with stunning views over the valley. We were lucky enough to have a room on the end of the row of rooms on the top floor, with views out in two different directions.

*

The following day we were up early and foolishly opted to set out on foot in search of the Visitor’s Centre to find out about walks into the beautiful countryside. Unfortunately it turned out not to be quite as close as it appeared on the map in our otherwise reliable Lonely Planet, and not quite as useful as the book pretended it might be.

“Oh no”, said the bloke inside the half-finished building. “You can’t arrange the walks from here. You have to go into town for that.”

Luckily, at that moment a bus came whizzing round the corner. We thanked the chap and legged it across the street to jump on board. It turned out to be the tourist bus, which runs all day in a circuit through the town and links up the other attractions in the area. It took us to the Mural de la Prehistoria, a garish mural painted on the side of a mogote, and then on to town, where we ate pizzas that cost about 50p and went to find the real tourist centre (where we arranged to join a guided tour through the valley the next day). We opted to cab it back to the hotel…

Having made the mistake of eating the predictably poor hotel food the previous evening, and not wanting to repeat the error, we set off a couple of hours later back into town. As we emerged from the hotel reception, there was the same taxi driver waiting outside. He started chatting to us on the way in, and I did my best to talk back. And then he reached into the glove compartment.

“Un Regalo!” he announced, offering a cigar in our direction. Not wanting to turn down the gift we felt duty bound to accept, although we didn’t spark up in the back of his cab, as he suggested.

Later that night, as we sat outside one of the town’s bars, he popped up again, wearing a baseball cap with “Jesus is my best friend” written on the top. I bought him a beer and took the opportunity to brush up on my Spanish…

I know I did this last week, but I’ve had so many new letters over the last few days that I’m doing it again (it’s times like these when you just wish that Spamusement was still going).

“Tye Stockton” has written in to say: “Don’t let hot women laugh at your small tool, because you can change that today.” Well, quite: after last week’s letters I went straight down to B&Q to pick up some power tools to impress old Scarlet Johansson. Presumably if those are still too small for her then I can return them under the sale of goods act as being not “fit for purporse”. Thanks, Tye, for reminding me.

Less helpful is this letter from “Lev Roche”: “Life’s tough, make IT tougher, harder, longer”. What are you suggesting? Yes, you are correct, I do work in IT, but I don’t think it’s fair for you to suggest I’m not doing my bit. How much tougher, harder and longer do you want me to work? Honestly. Some people…

Elsewhere, someone else is picking apart a bit of my life, but I’m not sure what Ilona Panoutsoukian really means when she says “Your instrument could be so much bigger”. Look mate, I play a standard-sized guitar, so I don’t really see what you are getting at.

Oh, and I haven’t read the letter from Gurpreet Nhum in full (“Doctors endorse this miracle solution that adds inches within just weeks.”) but I’m pretty sure the answer is cakes, isn’t it…

That’s all for now, but remember, kids: don’t be put off if we haven’t read out your letter. We do look at everything you send in!

Via the BBC News website, comes the moderately amusing story of some restaurant diners who, having complained about the service, ended up with the following item on their itemised bill:

1 – SUCK MY DICK FUCK FACE – £0.00

Which is quite funny in and of itself (well, at least it was charged at £0.00…) but more amusing is the response from the owner:

Owner Mr Langsdon said the message had been meant to be seen only by kitchen staff and he did not know how it ended up as an item on the receipt. “That shouldn’t come out on the bill, so we’ve got to find out what’s gone wrong there.”

Not, you’ll note, “we’re sorry for making a rude comment about a customer”, but “we’re sorry that the comment ended up on your bill”…

He’s also offered the diners a free meal… Don’t think I’d risk it, to be honest.

The Guardian: Jan 30th 2008: “As a Tory MP faces suspension from the party over payments to his son, should nepotism be banned, asks Pamela Hutchinson”

The Guardian: Feb 14th 2008: “Max, 19, hits the road”

Ah, so this would be the new blog chronicling the adventures of Max Gogarty, an overprivileged teenager off to “find himself” in India and Thailand. How fantastically original, and how deserving of a regular column on the website of a national newspaper.

It’s just odd that the same national newspaper already has a travel writer called Paul Gogarty, who just happened to have a thirteen year old son called Max when he want to Thailand in 2002. A coincidence, I’m sure.*

* Yeah, ok, so it’s hardly news that there’s nepotism in journalism, but the young lad’s blog is worth a quick look anyway just for the savagery unleashed on him in the comments (or just read some of the best ones here). There’s also the outside possibility that the whole thing is just one big spoof (and/or some kind of viral marketing for the new series of Skins, given the URL of the blog post and the fact that last year young Max wrote an “unseen” webisode for the series…)

Update: The Guardian’s travel editor responds…

No one snuck Max through the backdoor. I called him purely on the strength of his track record. On the back of his writing at his comprehensive school, he was invited on to a young writers’ group at the Royal Court theatre, and since then he has worked as an occasional writer on the TV series Skins. I think that’s pretty impressive for a 19-year-old.

Oh so he did some writing at school and wrote that myspace episode of Skins? Ah well then that’s fair enough.

Hang on, you called him? Since when did national newspapers start ringing up 19 year olds with no journalism experience and offering them a writing gig? And how did you know he was going on holiday?

One thing that came out of yesterday’s posts was that you want to hear a lot more from real people rather than journalists, so I’m going to be putting up a lot more readers’ recommendations and writing. I hope you like it. I’m sure you’ll let me know.

No, no, no, no, no. As one of the comments on the response says:

“Surely the one thing to come out of yesterday’s posts is that ‘citizen journalism’ and ‘user-generated content’ is generally bollocks, and people much prefer things done by professionals, rather than well-connected amateurs?

So the opposite of what you’re saying.”

Also in the comments is the dissapointing revelation from someone calling themselves “maxdad” that “Max won’t be writing any more blogs”. Shame. I was rather looking forward to them…

Ok, so I know that writing about Spam is just about the lowest form of blogging, but a couple of today’s missives caught my eye…

Amongst the messages that Gmail had helpfully moved to my spam folder today I found a note from the intriguingly-named “Nicolle Laurila”. The subject heading tells me that “Scarlet Johansson loves Men with huge equipment – do you measure up?” Huge equipment? I’ve not read about that in Heat. You mean like mechanical diggers and stuff? Well I guess that explains why she’s always hanging around at building sites, and at least now I know that the true way to impress women is to steal a crane.

In other news, I have a message from “Marjorie Escobar”, (a distant relative of the famed Colombian drug overlord perhaps?) who tells me to “Do What Millions of Other Men Are Doing Today aiken”. Well clearly this message was intended for Mr Aiken, and I wouldn’t want to be opening his post, so I’ll never know what it is that Millions of Other Men Are Doing Today–is it going to work? having long awkward silences in overpriced restaurants surrounded by other couples also pretending to enjoy themselves? buying half a dozen wilting roses from a petrol station forecourt? investing in an extra large box of man-size Kleenex?

Sadly, we can never know.

A third message, from the frankly bafflingly named “pacerfan714undersea” (that’s not your real name, is it?) is simply titled “Valentine Dad”. Now if that’s not the name of a seasonal comedy film that’s fun for all the family and stars Tim Allen, then it damn well should be…

Much as it pleases me to see Everton winning again in Europe last night (even after such a poor performance) and much as it pleases me to see so many of their UEFA Cup games being shown on terrestrial telly, so I don’t have to hunt around the internet for a stream, I do wish that someone at Channel 5 would have a quiet word with co-commentator Kevin Ratcliffe, on the subject of Mr Philip Jagielka.

Kev: you were a fine Everton player, but please, please, please could you learn how to say the Everton defender’s surname. With the rise of P2P streaming, I’ve been able to watch a lot of live Everton games this year, and no one else seems to have a problem with it: the guys on the Premiership feeds that go off to TrueSports manage to say it properly; the hilariously awful bloke on the Fox Soccer Channel manages it ok; Dave Woods, who is sitting next to you in the commentary box manages ok; hell even the Chinese commentators that I have to listen to when I can’t find an English language stream manage it ok…

C’mon Kev, it’s not hard–say it with me: his name is pronounced almost the way it is spelt. It’s JAG-EE-EL-KA. His name is not, and never has been: JUDGE-GEL-KA. Easy…

Just a quick one, but we inadvertently flicked on to the coverage of the Grammys the other night and saw a bit of Amy Winehouse. She sounded pretty awful, as she always seems to do whenever I see her on TV (I once had the misfortune to see her performing some kind of hideous duet with Charlotte Church that was just about the most tuneless thing I’d ever heard, and although this was bad, it wasn’t quite that bad). So I was wondering if someone out there in the big wide internets could explain the whole Amy Winehouse thing to me?

I wouldn’t want to suggest that TV talent shows should be held up as the barometer of good taste, but if she turned up at an X Factor or Whatever Idol audition and gave a performance of the kind she regularly gives on TV, she’d be one of the deluded fools that gets laughed out of the room. So how is it that she’s lauded to the hills with awards and things?

Now of course I know that the Grammys are the most ridiculous and self-congratulatory back-slapping awards of all, with so many categories as to render any success utterly meaningless (“Best Studio Tea Making (Non Classical)”, “Best Yodelling (Country)”…) and they always remind me of that scene in the B-Sharps episode of the Simpsons where Homer chucks his award out of his hotel window and the kid who finds it (“Hey! an award”) throws it back into the dumpster (“Ah, it’s only a Grammy…”) but she seems to have won several of the things, which is usual for a British artist. So this means that someone somewhere must have (a) bought her records in significant quantities (in so far as anyone really buys records any more) and/or (b) paid money to see her perform. Who are these people? I don’t believe I know anyone who has ever paid money for the music of Amy Winehouse* Do you?

[* Yeah, I know Sal and I accidentally ended up in the same field as her at Glastonbury this year, and that, even if we hadn’t done, a portion of our ticket price would have contributed to her gak habit anyway, but surely her imminent self destruction can’t be entirely funded by festival ticket sales–there must be other people making a more direct contribution. Seriously. Who are these people?]

Well, it’s just as well that’s Sal’s having her Camden-based birthday drinks next weekend, otherwise we’d probably have been prevented from getting to dance like fools to indie tunes in the Barfly at the end of the evening due to half of Camden being on fire on Saturday night.

We were actually having a quiet night in on Saturday entirely unaware of anything going on when Sal’s phone got a text: “Are you ok with the fire? Is that near you?” asked her cousin Sarah from Melbourne.

“Fire?” we asked ourselves. “What fire?” (and how does someone on the other side of the world know about it before we do?)

We couldn’t see anything out of the window, so I stuck the telly on, and after skipping through the first three of our rolling news options (News 24, CNN and CNBC), who had all unbelievably found better ways to fill their airtime, we found Sky News, who clearly had nothing better to do with their channel than show grainy viewer footage of the Great Fire of Camden Town and let a man in the studio ramble incoherently over the top of it.

And there was plenty of hyperbole from the man in the studio. Apparently the Hawley Arms was just about the most famous pub in London, and at one point he just started reading out the names of indie musicians and their hangers-on (“Amy Winehouse, Pete Doherty, Kate Moss, Razorlight, Liam Gallagher…”) not because any of them were actually in the pub on Saturday evening, but because they may all have been there at some point in the past. Perhaps all future news events should be covered by a man reading out a full list of all the famous people who’ve ever been in the area before.

Of course, by this point it was about 10:30, and the fire had been going on for a couple of hours. I can only assume that he’d been talking over the top of whatever footage they had for some time and was running out of things to say (when he wasn’t listing the names of indie stars, he was mostly just saying “look! flames!”)

Occasionaly Sky would give their studio guy a rest and cut to their reporter on the ground, who would then speak to an inebriated man on the street who could provide some assorted hearsay and speculation (one chap told us that he’d “just heard that the whole of the Stables market [was] on fire”, which was entirely untrue). The reporter also spoke to an “eyewitness” whose first words to camera were “well, I didn’t actually see anything…” and at another point a chap speaking to them over the phone explained that at the time the fire broke out, Camden would have been pretty busy as lots of people arrived to start their nights out. Unfortunately he chose, without a trace of irony, to tell Sky News that things “would have just been warming up…”

PS. Memo to London buses: if you’re going to redirect the No. 24 bus route while Camden High Street and Chalk Farm Road are closed, then you might want to make sure your double deckers can fit under all the bridges (via Londonist).