Inadvisable

My route home involves a quick walk through Hammersmith tube station, which, like many tube stations, has a sad and nasty new-build pub in it. Every night as I go past I get a heady whiff of old chip-fat, spilt beer, and the quiet desperation of any pub that is nobody's local. Also... inappropriate karaoke. I can't begin to imagine what mildly deranged urge makes people want to do karaoke at 6 in the evening on a work night, at least initially sober, in a tube station pub, but evidently they do. If I had a pound for every time I've overheard some sad woman singing "Wind Beneath My Wings" (or insert name of unseemly power-ballad here) I'd be halfway to quite a nice secondhand car. Going through yesterday, and admittedly it was nearer 9pm than 6, I heard a man singing, and I swear with my hand on my heart this is true, "Can't Touch This" by M C Hammer. What kind of choice is that? It's the choice of a man who knows he can't sing, but foolishly believes he can rap. With the possible exception of "Walking In The Air" I can't actually think of anything less suited to being sung by an accountant in a suit, but I'm prepared to find I'm wrong, probably this evening as I walk past again...

Zombie Davina, a quick tribute

Davina, in last night's Dead Set, shown shortly prior to tearing someone's throat out and feasting on their entrails, in a literal way rather than the usual figurative way of Big Brother...

Davina McCall wins this year's Lucy award for "Celeb who isn't afraid of laughing at themselves and their public image". Although it was a close shave for "Dr" Fox for his almost self parody on Peter Kay's Britain's Got The Pop Factor And Possibly A New Jesus Christ Soapstar Superstar Strictly On Ice - but Davina scoops it, partly because I just don't like "Dr" Fox.

Am I being unreasonable?

So I'm at work, and I'm on my own. An irony is that it's easier for me to have a swift cigarette (5mins) (and yes, sorry again) than go to the loo (25 seconds) - having a cigarette means waiting till the shop's empty, then standing outside. I can see people come in, I can hastily fling my smouldering dog-end down the drain in the gutter in front of me (don't worry, full of water), and rush in to be helpful or well-informed or whateverrrr. Going to the loo is another matter, as the loo is out at the back of the shop, which means I have to hope nobody comes in (while I am soundproofed behind two doors) and shoplifts/robs the till. AAAAAAAnyway. So, after 20 minutes of no customers (which is why I have time to write this!) I race out the back, and on my return find a woman standing accusingly at the till.


"There wasn't anybody to serve me!" she says crossly, having been waiting all of 10 seconds.


"I'm sorry," I say, "I'm on my own today. How can I help?"


"Can you tell me where Brookford Road is? "


"I'm afraid not, I don't live round here. Maybe if you ask in the café next door?"


"Don't you have an A to Z?"


"Yes, downstairs in the travel section."


"I don't do stairs." she says crossly, glares at me, heaves a heavy wounded sigh at my unhelpfulness, and leaves before I have a chance to say anything (or even offer to fetch her an A to Z she won't be buying, just cracking the spine and leaving).


Now IS IT JUST ME or is that fairly unreasonable behaviour? We're a bookshop, not a tourist bureau - and while I sort of understand what makes people think that libraries are a place where, to paraphrase Robert Frost, when you go there they have to take you in (untrue and unfair though that is to libraries), where's the logic with bookshops? Is it a backhanded compliment ("You're a temple of intellect and information, so your priorities can't be anything so vulgar as making money")? Or what?? And even if she hoped that I (the person, not the bookseller) might personally know where Brookford Road was, why get grumpy with me for not knowing?


Sorry, not enough coffee.

Meme-o-rama

I've been tagged by the grotto of delight that is Perfume Shrine, and after trying to think of things about myself that I haven't already said (I'm hardly Mrs Enigmatic) here we go.

Six random things about me :

a)I am allergic to Metronidazole. Never heard of it? Neither had I, until I was prescribed it and nearly died. I persisted in taking it even while the migraine, double vision and swollen joints threatened to cripple me. I thought because it was an antibiotic it would make me feel better. Oddly the fact that I could no longer feel my extremities as I crawled to the loo didn't tip me off.

b) I make the finest, crunchiest, most golden roast potatoes in the world. I will take on all comers. The secret, sadly if you're a vegetarian, is goose fat.

c) Back in my Air France days Omar Sharif once sent me a postcard thanking me for getting him from Cairo to Nice during a baggage-handlers' strike. It wasn't easy, I can tell you. I had to reroute the poor man via Paris AND Amsterdam. At least he was in Club.

d) I was interviewed on Radio 4 a while back about the preponderence of parody books (Bored Of The Rings, The Va Dinci Cod, Barry Trotter et al) in the run-up to Christmas. While I had a fabulous speech all prepared about parody being one of the oldest forms of humour, it was reduced to about 45 seconds in total (including "candid" background noise of me at the till) on air. I got my name read out though! Have also accidentally been interviewed on TV twice but have already covered that...

e) When I was 7 I invented knitting. No lie. Casting on, and everything. My grandmother had to kindly explain to me that it had been around since the egyptians. I still invented it, though...

f) I have double-jointed fingers and can bend them back like a Thai dancer. While this was great when I was at school, making me top pick in certain rarefied gym activities (I can balance a netball on the back of my hand like nobody else), apparently it means I'll have terrible arthritis later in life. Never a silver lining without a cloud, eh? Also means I have to be careful when gesturing, as there's a fine line that separates graceful Pavlova hands from weird bendy E.T. hands... see bottom right.

I'm making myself popular by tagging Steve, JRSM, Reluctant Blogger, Can Bass 1, Scentself, and of course Laura because she just can't get enough memes (snicker). I would have tagged Mantua Maker and Titian-Red but neither of them has a blog (yet).

1. Link to the person who tagged you

2. Post the rules on your blog

3. Write six random things about yourself

4. Tag six people at the end of your post and link to them

5. Let each person know they've been tagged and leave a comment on their blog

6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up.

Just a quick one.

I was serving a customer yesterday. As she was paying she was chatting cosily to her beloved on her mobile (I presume that's who she was talking to, as she had suddenly adopted a startlingly twee ickle-girly voice and kept calling him "Baby" - presumably not her bank manager then, although in this financially unstable day and age who knows? Whatever gets you that overdraft). Her attention was caught by a pile of Mr Men bookmarks on the till - she picked up the one saying "Mr Perfect" and said "What's this?" "It's a bookmark." I replied. She put it back. "Oh no, he doesn't read." she said, and left. To which all one can say is: Well, he isn't Mr Perfect then, is he?????

Or am I being overly subjective?

Spread the payments or share the love?

You think it's bad seeing Christmas decorations everywhere, try being the poor benighted shop-monkey who has to price them all. I speak from my dungeon of pain (actually the sunny, warm, south-facing back office) with a price gun in my hand (also a large latte and a scotch egg). It is only October the 11th, and I am half-buried in boxes of charideeee cards and slippery bundles of giftwrap.

Yes, there is a credit crunch on, a term that always makes me think of Kit-Kats (mmmm... Kit-Kats...), and I appreciate that people find it easier to start shopping for the festive season in October, thus spreading the financial load over two or three months. However, shouldn't we be crediting the great buying public with some intelligence? The Mighty Bookstore Chain I used to work for had a phase-by-phase military-style operation that would roll out in September. Phase 1 was called "Early Gifting", a phrase that actually makes me physically ill. CDs of Christmas music were played from the start of November, and by the time the doors shut on Christmas Eve, you were ready to commit homicide if you heard "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas" again. Seasoned booksellers could be reduced to a twitching wreck by the repeated whispering of "Pa-rum-pa-pum-pum....".

Christmas happens at the same time every year, and I defy you to prove otherwise (Leap Years don't count). People are unlikely to be taken aback on December the 23rd; although some of us are surprised by our own lack of preparation, it's not as if we didn't know it was going to happen. Everybody knows money is tight, and will be planning their spending accordingly. So why insult everybody by reminding them, in late September even, that they may need to start buying presents? Share the love! Stop the madness! I recommend a ban on all mention of Christmas until the second week in December. Starting, obviously, from 5 minutes after I publish this post.

Cherry tomatoes in Minas Tirith??

A quiet night in, and Mr Fishwife and I were mildly at a loss so, as you do, we went for The Previously Watched Old Faithful, Lord Of The Rings: Return Of The King. The great thing about a film you have seen a million times (well, it's big! And the special effects are amazing! And Gollum's so real!) is that you can read a book at the same time, eat a plate of roast chicken off your lap, generally fail to pay attention at all, and still enjoy it, interrupted occasionally by Mr Fishwife's nerdy cries of "Frodo? At Osgiliath? Not in my copy of the book, oh no." and "Elves?? At Helm's Deep?? I think not!!". Unless, as I did, you look up at a dramatic moment and notice, for the first time, the fact that Denethor, Steward of Gondor, while curtly sending his less-favoured son to almost certain death, is eating a plate of cherry tomatoes.

So there we have it. Photographic evidence. Now it's not the fact of the cherry tomatoes themselves, although I personally think a mouthful of rare steak would have been more apposite, and blood oozing down his chin a better (if more obvious) cinematic counterpoint to the doomed battle in which Faramir finds himself, than a mouthful of tomato juice. My point, my big thing point, is that I am now unable to watch the film without wondering where in Gondor they have the poly-tunnels necessary for the successful cultivation of cherry tomatoes in such a mountainous and rocky habitat? And given the fairly merciless appearance of the terrain, couldn't better use be made of the land than frivolously market gardening? Wouldn't potatoes be a better bet? Nobody looks that rich in Minas Tirith - are the cherry tomatoes just a perk for the Stewards? In which case Aragorn returned to take up kingship not a moment too soon.

The Magic Number - and other nostalgia trips

Foofing about on YouTube the other day, as one does, and I was amazed by how much stuff there is that isn't music videos (grammar). Thank god that out there somewhere are people as nerdy as me (but in a different way), joyfully uploading every crackly VHS tape of Blake's 7 or Button Moon (although try as I may, I can't find a clip of Avon snarling "Hit that button... NOW!!"), uploading their entire 1960s record collection, and having to illustrate it with a two and a half minute shot of the record sleeve or, odder still, the stereo equaliser, because items such as "You Don't Have To Be a Baby to Cry" by the Caravelles are too old to have a video. AAAAAAnyway - While searching for Kermit singing "It Isn't Easy Being Green", a truly sweet and poignant little hymn to self-acceptance that, even at the age of 5, made me want to hug him, I came across this...


...which took me right back to being a small child again. I grew up (till the age of 8, anyway) in Canada, and Sesame Street was the flat-out all-round best thing ever. This, people, is how I know my three times table, and even these days I still sing "3, 6, 9... 12, 15, 18..." when counting something in threes. I never had a problem with turning thirty because as far as I'm concerned, Thirty is the big strong scary one you wouldn't mess with.
I have no idea how they managed to be so educational without being obvious or preachy, because children know when they're getting a nasty spoonful of education in a sugar coating - somehow they just seemed to make it effortless and fun. I could still sing you the theme tune, although given that I've forgotten the second verse of "O Canada" that's probably just a sign of a selective memory rather than a highly-developed one.
Far more arcane, as childhood TV habits go, are the all-but-forgotten Kid Power, which I can still also sing the theme tune from, The Osmonds, which implanted forever in a geek pub-quiz way the names of all the Osmond brothers but for unknown reasons missed Marie out altogether, and The Jackson 5ive, similar, but in hindsight far creepier. What was with the cartoonising of pop bands in the 70s? Was it supposed to simultaneously render them more popular and less sexy? Thank god they never thought of doing that with Gary Glitter.
Thank you for reading! This episode of "Life Happens Between Books" was brought to you by the letter N and the number three. "Sunny day, chasin' the clouds away... on my way to where the air is sweet..."

"Interesting even if not true"

Once again, a post about my heroes - here are three more. They are Northrop Frye, Luca Turin and Harold McGee. They are united by the fact that they write about things I love (respectively: fiction, perfume and cooking) without themselves being involved in the end product. That is to say, Northrop Frye has written many wonderful and thoroughly accessible books about the structure and theory of literature without actually writing a novel, Luca Turin has done the same for perfume and also engineered several synthetic components for perfume without actually creating a finished product, and Harold McGee was pretty much single-handedly responsible for the phenomenon that is "molecular gastronomy"by writing so clearly and interestingly about the science of cookery that it's only a miracle we're not all whipping up meat mousse and sugar caviar. And all this without ever owning a restaurant. When I first read his seminal (and breeze-block sized) On Food and Cooking I had to be forcibly restrained from discussing with bored strangers the difference between real coffee (a suspension), instant coffee (a solution) and tea (an infusion). It's the sign of a really great theoretician that they can write about something you love in as interesting and inspiring a way as the actual practitioners can (and often more so!). To paraphrase something Luca Turin says in The Secret of Scent, there are three kinds of theoretical writing: that which is boring if true (ie written solely for people doing a PhD in the subject), that which is interesting if true, and that which is interesting even if not true. Which in a nutshell sums up Things I Like Reading. And is another factor that unites them - the ability to find things interesting and fun.

Time after time after time

(This one's not about perfume!)

I'm re-reading the strange and deeply wonderful "Time And Again" by Jack Finney, whose take on time travel is this: if you put somebody into the clothes of, for example, 1890, in a room authentically furnished and gas-lit as it would have been in 1890, with a view that is exactly what one would have seen in 1890, then a combination of self-hypnosis and "spirit of place" will send them back to 1890. When they get up from the chair they are sitting in and walk out of the front door, they will indeed be back in 1890. Or 1410, or 1972, or whatever date they're trying to get to.

I love this idea - after all, when are you ever going to be able to disprove it? You may be in a National Trust property where a Tudor bedroom has been lovingly recreated, but how likely is it that you'll be alone, wearing Tudor clothes and not seeing a National Trust van or gift shop outside the window?

I had lunch with my family last week, and was reminded once again that my grandmother and I share the same (somewhat naive) view, which is "Isn't it great that science hasn't yet disproved everything?" (ie ghosts, the afterlife, some form of deity, etc) - my stepdad, on the other hand, is a fervently rational atheist and was just starting to (mildly) use words like "twaddle" when I reminded him that of course he would say that, because he's an Aquarius.