plastic bowls
Coming to London you expect the double decker buses, kids in hoodies, knife crimes, greyness, tube signs and red phone boxes.
All of those are easy to see.
But there is one thing I have seen more of than any of those combined, plastic bowls.
They are everywhere. Always holding fruit that you would be ashamed to throw at a bad performance. Bananas that look like they have been used for some sexual experiment than went wrong. Apples that not even a worm could love. Oranges that no longer live up to their coloured name.
Every high street in London seems to have a shop that has these bowls all crowded together. I’ve never seen anyone buy from them.
And it isn’t just fruit shops that do this, it seems that any kind of shop can just put out a rickety old table with a plastic sheet of crap pretending to be tablecloth. Then the only thing left to do is put as many bowls out as possible.
Depending on the place, you can buy the bowls whole content, although I must admit I have never seen anyone buy a bowl of mixed fruit.
With people wisely avoiding the bowled crapness, you can only assume it is some marketing gimmick to get people into shops with bright colours. Otherwise why would people bother with it?
I see a post apocalyptic day in London where the fruit will be replaced by human organs in the fruit bowls.
People still won’t buy them though.
The bowls don’t fool people, not with fruit, not with organs.
getting your milk right
For years I have been weird with my weet-bix.
I crush them down with my hand, then I pour the milk in, then I wait 15 minutes, and I eat them.
This has always been the case.
It didn’t change when I moved to London and exchanged my tax free religious weet-bix for the almost the same in every way weetabix.
Eating them in this way I always thought I was a freak, as did many others, but it turns out I am not the only one to do it, Jack Russell (former English wicket keeper) does it as well, this makes me a freak, but not a lone freak. This is on wiki:
“For lunch, Russell would eat two Weetabix, soaked for exactly eight minutes in milk”
Now I have never talked to Jack about this, although I hope to one day, but I want to know how he deals with winter.
Waiting 15 (or 8 in his case) minutes in normal weather conditions is fine, but waiting 15 minutes during the English winter is pointless. The bix don’t change as much.
The milk is as cold after 15 minutes as it was coming out of the fridge, and the milk and bix don’t get a chance to bond correctly.
On some days it has taken me 35 minutes to get any bonding, and then the milk is still cold.
Even though I work from home, waiting 35 minutes is not easy.
I like to eat my bix in front of the computer while reading my rss feeds for the day. Sometimes they don’t last 35 minutes, and then I am left with eating breakfast with nothing to read.
Like an animal.
Surely Jack would have found a way around this without ruining the taste and feel of the bix.
I just want to know his secret.
literally in edinburgh
I was in Edinburgh last week.
I liked it. Any city that you can walk around even when you are lost without getting tired has a friend in me.
Although it took me a while to get the whole “everything is a bridge” concept.
I went up to the castle, it was ok.
Bought a magic slim wallet.
Went to their wacky parliament building, in which you can just sort of walk around like you own the place, and spent a great deal of time trying to work out exactly what drugs the architect was on.
Enjoyed walking around their hills, that is fun, not alot of fat people in Edinburh, they all have heart attacks i guess.
I went on a ghost tour, cause if i was in Roswell I’d go on an alien tour, more on that later.
I ate lots of seafood. For some reason I never thought of places that cold and seafood went together, but after my 40th oyster i realised cold weather seafood was good.
There was also some haggis eaten, it was ok, not my thing though. I preferred Wannaburger.
And most importantly I learnt how to drink whisky.
You can’t learn how to drink whisky on a whisky tour, although i did that too (and it was a good tour, lots of free whisky), the best way was in some old pub sitting around watching the old guys do it.
House whisky (a cheap blend, the good stuff is too expensive for a weekday), with water in it, and half pint of lager to wash it down with.
I am now a whisky drinker, although I don’t always need the half pint of lager.
You can’t ask for more from a holiday to leave as a beer drinker, and come back as a whisky drinker.
Thank you, Edinburgh.
It is offal
I had the traditional French meal of offal.
Not on purpose.
It came from a bit of mix up over my reading of French.
I thought I was getting steak, something I would actually pay to eat. Not just any steak either, this restaurant gave me the best steak I had ever eaten the last time I was here, I couldn’t wait to get at this year’s steak.
Alas it was not to be.
Ordering a steak and getting what appears to be a sausage is disappointing, soon after when you realise this aint no ordinary sausage the whole thing gets very fucken depressing.
A sausage would have been bad, but what I had was a tube of ass.
No one at the table could tell us what the tube was of. And I wasn’t about to eat too much more to find out. It was fucken horrible, two mouthfuls in I wanted to kill all chefs.
We asked the waiter, and he seemed to say Pork.
Bullshit. This wasn’t no pork, I’ve eaten and enjoyed pork, if this was Pork it must have come from some diseased pig’s ass.
The next day my French friends told me that it was offal.
And then I looked into offal; apparently it is made from the assholes of all the foods you would never usually eat.
This makes sense.
From then on in I made sure I was eating steak, and it was great, although in comparison everything would be great compared to fucken offal.
Brum
This weekend I went to Brum.
I call it Brum not just because that is what people call it, but because when I try and say Birmingham I say it the way one would say Birmingham, Alabama, not Birmingham, Warwickshire.
Before I got up there I read this by Gideon Haigh (noted writer and book foreworder to the blogger you are reading) about Brum.
“Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains – in Birmingham anyway, whose city centre has been devoured over the last four years by the all-encompassing Bullring, a super concentration of chain store outlets and franchises in which all sense of locality deserts you. From Debenhams and Tesco to Phone4U and Foot Locker, with a starburst of Starbucks, a cluster of Costas, and the inevitable Subways and sub-Subways: Baguette World, Baguette Du Monde, Baguette Delicieux, Baguette Cetera (actually, I made that one up, but it has a nice ring). You could be anywhere in the world. It’s possible that some visitors welcome the distraction from being in Birmingham; I’d never be so unkind.”
I was expecting some grey lifeless city with McDonalds on top of their McDonalds.
What I saw was a fairly nice place.
Yes it is more industrial looking than Bath but it isn’t so ugly on the eyes.
Sometimes I think English people (not that Gideon is really English) think anything that isn’t a quaint English city or old looking is ugly.
Brum has plenty of parks.
Who talks about the parks?
Trees too.
Sure it is a grey dingy place in parts, but in others it is quite nice.
I felt very comfortable there, and I could understand the accents (mostly Indian).
Sorry that it doesn’t have cobbled roads or fucked up streets that make little sense, but it is a more modern city and it doesn’t need to be pretty to feel good about itself.
Generally most of the jokes about Brum are made by locals trying to beat the interlopers to the joke, but you can feel their pain when they say the joke.
Gideon does have a point about the chains. Upon leaving my cockroach-riddled hotel I walked for 15 minutes without seeing anything but chain eateries.
It got so desperate that I almost ate at TGI Fridays; I only left there when I saw they had product placement steak names.
I like my steak independent.
I ended up at the beefeater, which probably isn’t that much better, but at least it didn’t have a fucken Herbie out the front.
The original herbie I am sure.
jrod helps the homeless part 3
Finally everyone left the kitchen, probably because there was real work to do, and the head cook told me all about how Christians always help Muslims, but Muslims never help Christians, I tried to tell her this was not true, well I did tell her it was not true, what a waste of breath that was.
We started feeding them after that, and that went well. One guy came in with a full plate, put it in the bin, and asked for another plate, we gave it to him, later I saw him throw that out too.
A few asked for seconds, the older ones just wanted the meat or the vegetables. One guy came in to complain about the salt, he didn’t like sea salt, the other shelter had proper salt. I resisted any urge I had to tell him to fuck off to the other shelter.
When everyone had finished, I took out Apple pies, it would be fair to say that they no one really wanted them. 3 of the 12 or 13 ate them.
The one decision I made was the apple pies, and it failed, perhaps if I kneeled before Jesus more often I would not made such a mistake.
It was ok though, as there were heaps of “helpers” in the kitchen at that time, so they ate the pies.
This should have been the easiest part of the night, the cooking serving, and cleaning had been done, but the Christians wanted to give me a show, and a show they did give me a show.
It all started with discussions over the fact their church needs a new Priest. A loud red haired lady (3 pies) started it off saying that she wanted the young priest who had filled in a few times, because he was ‘well fit’.
The head cook chipped in that she didn’t care who it was as long as it was a man.
The forewoman, proving she did have some intelligence, said she would love it if it was a strong black woman was the priest as a role model to her children.
She was then abused by pretty much everyone in the room, luckily this quickly turned to mocking her opinion. She deserved everything she got though, as she was eating the spaghetti in the kitchen, even though she was the person who said that I wasn’t within the spirit by not eating with them.
Then the African women started saying that if you don’t want a woman as priest, you must vote, as we cannot let this happen.
Someone decided to chip in with, “what about a transsexual priest”, which actually started the African women shrieking instead of talking.
That died down, and red haired three pie woman put in her two cents, “what about a Chinese Priest, Father Chong, Father Ching Chang Chongy”.
I know.
And everyone laughed, well except me and the forewoman, she was too busy eating her hypocritical spaghetti.
The father Chong shtick went on for about 15 minutes, I shit you not.
It only stopped when the gentleman greeter popped his head in to say he was off. When he left the forewoman said that he had greeted two people, and then gone off for the best part of two hours to get one of the people foot cream.
They all went on about how useless he had been, even though for the whole time we were there, there was generally between 5 and 10 people in the kitchen, that could have gone in and helped.
The night was almost over now, just had to wait for the over night sleepers to turn up and relieve me.
There were a painfully middle class couple, who, I promise, brought their whole duvet set, mauve if I’m not mistaken, two pillows per person, and a spare blanket.
Generally the people who stay over night sleep in the same room as the homeless, to look over everyone and make sure there is no problem.
This couple slept locked up right in the office, which mean them being there was mostly a ceremonial position, as they couldn’t really overlook anyone.
When they got there I pissed off quick, I couldn’t wait to get away from these people.
I was only there for 3 and a half hours, yet by reading this you would think it was a year long adventure.
I did come away with a two things, Church going Christians really are as annoying, racist, sexist and full of themselves as I always thought they would be, and that homeless people are pretty well dressed.
The next week I had to come back and sleep over night, I was not looking forward to it.
Surprisingly.
TBC…
-
Recent Comments
lynsey on It aint no raptor claw, it… Pat on It aint no raptor claw, it… lynsey on It aint no raptor claw, it… Pat on It aint no raptor claw, it… lynsey on It aint no raptor claw, it…
my latest book
-
My Photos
More Photos
