Road To Nowhere

Can this be true?????

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See previous blog entry for why I am actually reading this but, already three mysteries have emerged that are puzzling me...

1. Mrs Muggins leaves her village shop to run an errand, first putting on a feather boa. Is she:
A. Bonkers
B. Ridiculously affected
C. Moonlighting as a burlesque dancer.

2. A dozen aniseed balls cost a penny in her shop. Is this because:
A. Aniseed was once cheaper than chips
B. She is hellbent on rotting the teeth of Billy Blunt, MMM and little-friend-Susan and in the pockets of the local dentist, Mr Savage, who has an NHS scam going
C. The rate of inflation in Britain rockets regularly

3. Milly Molly Mandy is always being nice to people. is this because:
A. She is secretly having a Lolita-style affair with Mr Rudd, the blacksmith, and is using her do-gooding as a cover
B. She is a loving, caring Christian child brought up in a ridiculously small cottage with more relatives than the Adams family
C. She is completely fictional and has never had the misfortune to stray into a Red Riding book.

I'm reading those Red Riding books just now - by David Peace.

I'm about 90 pages in to 1974 and taking it slowly. Anyone who saw the TV adaptation and thought that was too grim should avoid the book. The book makes the TV version look like Goldilocks.

In interveiw David Peace has said that crime corrupts everyone it touchs. Victims, their families, neighbours, perpetrators, the police, journalists... everyone is tarnished by it. In the way they think, behave, carry the knowledge of human rottenness and find it reflected in their words and behaviour. Peace is no doubt right, but this book screams its message as loudly as anyone can tolerate and the relentless crawl through human faailure is hard to take. There are no happy people in this book.

I can manage about 20 pages a day and I'm reading Milly Molly Mandy books before I go to sleep to offset it!

Anyone noticed how quiet it is today on the roads... and the buses... and the trains...

Like everyone is on holiday.

And it's a gorgeous day.

Bastards!

NM is treating me to a wee break.

I am being taken to Bruges for a couple of days towards the end of the month, to make up for the fact I have to work next weekend.

And I am being taken via Chocopolis, emporium of the finest chocolates in the world (I've tracked doen so far), so I can stock up.

Hotel looks lovely...

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Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

You don't half see life from a bus.

This morning's cabaret was provided by hordes of students walking home from their end of year festivities at the Wilmslow Road SU building.

The No 43 passed two six-foot penguins and an assortment of sundry bright young things wrapped in blankets or bits of cloth masquerading as frocks.

Face painting seemed popular (no not THAT kind of face painting) with the occasional post-modern reference to Ziggy Stardust, but mostly flags - persumably of origin.

I witnessed one gentleman, outside Platt Fields, with an Irish flag penned on his cheek, ladelling white powder up his nose. In the middle of the street! At 6.40am!!

And the sun not even within winking distance of a yard-arm.

Fortunately NM can.

Otherwise he'd be worried about my trying to avoid the

'...usual bum fight at the cup stop...'

I quite like autospell humour... the way, for instance, it offers anal before cock... perhaps my phone is trying to tell me something.

Ok, I'm taking a wild stab at this particular bus passenger's mental illness, but he's definitely swinging way outside the boundaries of normal 6.30am behaviour.

Mostly it's his singing. A thin, tuneless whine which runs through some easy-listening playlist of radio stations from hell, like someone trying to tune a dial into reality. And then there's the random laughing to himself.

"'Im just a day dreamer, walking in the rain, chasing after rainbows I may never find again...' ha, ha, ha.... 'walk like a man, talk like a man, my so-o-o-o-n...' ha, ha, ha... 'And they called it puppy love, why I guess I'll never know, how a young heart really feels...' ha, ha, ha..."

There was a time when I felt some sympathy, but he has been catching the same bus in the morning as me for months. PC-ness: right out the window. The singing, oh and the fact he's stinks like the bottom of an ashtray that's been locked in a vaccuum for a month, is not endearing him to me, or indeed any other passenger. No-one's tutted out loud, but you can see their shoulders drop as he gets on in Withington.

Not surprisingly he gets off at the hospital.

Thank god for ipods. Now all I need is a nosegay.

Don't ask me why anyone with a bike wants to take it on a bus.

But you can't. Not on the 43 route in Manchester anyway.

Ask the cyclist who ended up sprawled across the pavement in Rusholme at 6.45am after a passenger lost his patience during a this-bus-aint-goin-nowhere stand-off between driver and cyclist.

Passenger gave cyclist a shove out the bus doors and the driver shot off.

Me, I'm perched up the back, reading my Guardian and tutting about Peru.

You can't condone violence but at least it got us moving. Mind you, I still missed my train.

Our thirst for natural resources is wreaking havoc in Peru.

Last weekend approximately 30 protesters died trying to save their rainforest home from being plundered for minerals and oil and anything else that might feed the US and EU's need to consume. this isn't about a few people trying to protect their backyard, these protests are about saving whole tribes, complete cultures whose world will be wiped out.

It's not hard so see why President Garcia thinks billion-dollar deals will bring benefits to Peru's population, but at what price? Life? The lives of those protesters, of entire tribes, of great swathes of rainforest and the ecological repurcussions they entail?

If money is so important then I say:
* boycott Peru as a holiday destination,
* protest to the multinationals - such as Anglo-French oil company Perenco, who want to extract oil, gas and minerals from the rainforest,
* consume less.

I have a vested interest in Peru. I've been there, as part of a year-off I travelled through Central and South America eight years ago and I spent about six weeks there. It is an astonishingly lovely country. It has a spiritual charm and a natural beauty that Western values will ruin. Yes, it has terrible poverty but we all know how aid money is ransacked and no amount of cash changes the problems caused by one of human nature's less appealing traits - greed.

So Gordon lives to fight another day.

A complete Euro election fiasco for Labour but Mr Brown is still at the helm and adamant he can sail the HMS Not-so-Great-these-days Britain through the rocks of economic disaster and forward to the straights of Recovery.

Maybe he can.

Maybe UKip's vote share is a protest vote. Maybe concerns about the rise of the BNP are unfounded and we should not see their gains as an indicator of rising fascism. Ukip has defused a great deal of the impact they may have hoped to gain.

But there can be no doubt that there is a rise in nationalism and that isn't just a UK experience, it's a global shift. From the optimism of the 1990s, when the Cold War ended, we now see Russia is focusing on Russia. It's clearly interested in national standing before embracing the EU's no-borders philosophy. China is now moving to build internet-blocking software into its PCs to control what its people see of the outside world. India is a rapidly rising economic force.

Robert Kagan's The Return of History and the End of Dreams is very easy-to-read in getting to grips with worldwide geo-political landscape, if anyone's interested.

On Saturday night me and NM are having dinner in a lovely Sri Lankan restaurant and enjoying a Lion beer.

The waiter is thrilled we like it, as we do - it's definitely 8/10 on the yummometer.

But it's label states it was first brewed in 1881.

'Oooh, that's a really important date, historically,' I pronounce and then promptly forget why 1881 is ingrained on my memory. With more beer supped the subject is forgotten but next morning we run the date through google as I still can't remember why 1881 is so significant.

'That's it!' I proclaim, eventually. 'October 26 - Gun Fight at the OK Corral'.

Sometimes I can see how that lack of history study in my education kind of shows!

I spent last Friday trotting round Kew Gardens, as planned, in spite of showers. NM beavered away at his place of employment.

It is vast, Kew, and so I made a point of walking its perameters before going to look at things like the palm house and temperate house when the showers were a bit more insistent.

They also have this Princess of Wales Conservatory which is divided up into various zones - rainforest, dry desert etc - and is really quite absorbing. The orchids are delightful.

As I was going from one area to another I saw a woman cooing at something on the ground - turned out to be a mouse. All dark fur and beady brown eyes, he had a complete fan club.

I described the mouse to NM that evening and he immediately identified it as a house mouse. I don't know why, but living in a tropical bit of Kew I'd somehow expected mousey to be exotic.

'But he was much prettier than a field mouse,' I said.

'Hmmm, you wouldn't say that if he was in your house. We had them when I was a student...' said NM, whose student life was lived out in something bordering a squat in south-east Gommarah.

There's something to be said for being a prissy-girly sometimes.

But I digress, Kew review:

* Upside - very interesting, very big. Good five hours' enrtertainment. Nice scones, lovely staff.
* Downers - entry fee - £13! Though it does loads for conservation so swallow your misgivings and consider it a donation to the environment. The rose garden isn't in full bloom yet. Oh and the website - who can read this?

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I know you can make it bigger but it looks like it's been designed for a mouse to read.

This is a bit of a pointless fancy, he's been dead for over 300 years.

But you see I didn't do metaphysical poetry at school, so it's all a bit new to me. I'm rather surprised and perhaps slightly a-flutter at the umm.. earthiness of his prose. Though I don't know why, I always think of previous British cultures being quite proper.

But take a gander at John Donne and it becomes quite apparent the Elisabethans were at it like knives.

We saw his portrait in the National Portrait Gallery on Saturday - he's all pouty and sensual. And we saw loads of Henry VIII. He seems to be everywhere just now.

'Oooh look, she's reading the new Donna Leon,' said the woman pushing a trolley towards me in the M&S cafe of Ealing high street yesterday morning.

Me, I'm just trying to get some caffiene into my system. I don't do small-talk until the sun is over the yard arm.

But no, I have to spend a good five minutes talking to these ladies who are cheerfully dispelling any myths about southerners being stand-offish. And so I am smiling through bleary eyes as I agree that 'yes' it's interesting to hear so much about Italian life in Ms Leon's books and 'no' I don't think we'll ever have a culture where we all go home for lunch and debate whether or not to have a cognac on the way back to the office.

Which kind of got me thinking about lunchtime drinking. Remember that?

OK, I used to work in a newspaper newsroom so maybe that was a bit different, but I can't remember the last time I went to the pub at lunchtime. It seems to have slipped from our working lives, along with paid over-time, company cars and teabreaks.

I am turning into one of those old dears who hankers for the past, I can see it coming. I'll be talking about dream topping as if it were ambrosia next.

Back again to London this afternoon.

I am on a course tomorrow about postgraduate student recruitment and then having a day off on Friday to go to Kew. Well, that's the plan. Then a weekend of loafing about before bombing back up country on Sunday.

I have been reading lots on my travels and am currently embroiled in the new Donna Leon paperback, which is harmless crime thriller fun set in lovely Venice.

Yesterday was spent putting together our magazine at the designers' gaff. Always a pleasant job, though I do like it to look it's best so plenty of polishing yet.

Right, must crack on - back next week.

There a few things I'm not very good with. I wouldn't call them out and out phobias, but they come close.

Lots of people + enclosed, no daylight place = borderline freakout scenario.

So the hat exhibition in the V&A wasn't ideal for me on a sweltering summer afternoon.

People were patiently queuing to gaze at display cases. I was looking over shoulders and bobbing about.

There were historical hats, glamorous hats, hats made out of strange material, presentations on the history of hats... pretty much all you could imagine there was to see or hear about hats.

But I was in and out in 15 minutes. Too many people. Too hot.

For me the V&A had far more exciting curios anyway. The jewellery displays, with more diamonds and precious stones than you can imagine ever existing, were gorgeous. Jewel-encrusted swords, samples of arts and crafts movement creations were alongside diamonds from every century and gold from ancient Greece to tiaras from the art noveau movement.

And there was The Great Bed of Ware - everyone should see that, it truly was enormous.

A thoroughly well spent, if exhausting afternoon.

Friday's wedding reception was great fun. It turns out the groom was something of an Adam Ant fan in his youth and so we had all the fun of watching grown men dancing up and down the room to Prince Charming.

The venue was the rowing club just by Hammersmith Bridge. We watched the sun set over the Thames into a hazy orange smog.

We were up dancing most of the night and while NM was having none of dancing to Go West's 'We Close Our Eyes' or 'Hungry Like the Wolf', by Duran Duran he caved on Stevie Wonder and several others.

Something of a sprint for the last tube to Northfields and then home to sleep the sleep of a Tiller girl.

Mission accomplished, I'd say.