April 2011
13 posts
5 tags
THE ROYAL WEDDING
LUV - Oh, I do like a good royal wedding. A royal wedding. A specific royal wedding. Specifically, the royal wedding where Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York was right royally weddinged to Prince Andrew KG, GCVO, CD, ADC(P) right up their royal wedding on their royal wedding day, on the day of their royal wedding, 17 March 1986. Why? Because I got a piece of the wedding cake. Yes I did. Because...
3 tags
GARDEN CENTRES
LUV - There’s a chance you’ll disagree with me here. This will either be because you’re younger than I am - which I’m taking as a given because I am the oldest man in the world - or because you live in a city and foliage confuses you. But I don’t care. I think garden centres are a little bit special.
Seasons come and seasons go. Things fall in and out of fashion like so much ephemeral...
3 tags
NARNIA
LUV - Because when I was a child I was a child, and not a joyless narc waiting out the long years for someone to invent pop-up restaurants so I could floridly complain about them, I loved the Narnia books. I mean yes, the entire series was a thinly veiled Christian allegory with each book thinner-veiled than the last, and yes, the baddies wear turbans and curly shoes and have oiled beards and...
3 tags
EASTER
LUV - I love Easter. It’s the most mixty-up religious holiday we have in the Western world. It’s even more mixty-up than Christmas, which celebrates the birth of Christ (yes, Christmas celebrates the birth of Christ, perhaps you’ve heard of it?) with those old Middle Eastern staples, Nordic pine and Aled Jones. But Easter is different. Easter is crazy. Easter is like an episode of Eurotrash. I...
4 tags
TINTIN
LUV - One of the best gifts I recieved as a kidling was a package of a dozen or so Tintin books, passed down to me by my older cousin. I’d been led to believe that books could contain fascinating tales of adventure and fisticuffs, but at this point in my life had yet to see much proof. It turned out that to get my attention, authors just needed to replace two thirds of the words with...
3 tags
POP-UP RESTAURANTS
LUV - I am not a foodie, I am an eater. I know lots of foodies and what I admire most is how, at a moment’s notice, they’ll go zipping off to secret, inaccessible locations to nibble unpronouncable things daintily from napkins, and say “bellini” and “au poivre” to events people with genuine undiluted enthusiasm. What I have a problem with are the unpronouncable things foodies have...
3 tags
THE NIGHT BUS
LUV - Hello there, young urbanite swaying on a traffic island at 3am. You’ve had a nice evening, haven’t you? Of course you have. You’re holding a helium balloon you don’t remember acquiring (perhaps you’ve always had it?), you can only see straight if you close your left eye, and every single molecule in your body that doesn’t smell of Jägerbombs smells of kebab. Of course you’ve had a...
14 tags
SCIENCE FICTION
LUV - Science fiction! Shiny metal space things! Omniscient amorphous gas things! Malevolent three-legged things! Mysterious big oblong things! The future! The past! The future and the past together with time and space - imagining it all as a big rubber sheet and then wibbling it, just to see what happens. Hoping each time that the next leap will be the leap…. home. Science fiction is...
3 tags
BIRDS
LUV - Alright? Going anywhere nice on your holidays this year? Ooh, that sounds lovely. Who you flying with? Oh yeah? STOP. THINK. BIRDS. You would not be going anywhere in a plane if birds hadn’t first invented flight. Birds are so preposterously clever that it took us millions of years to get around to doing something they do naturally. We can thank the extinct flightless Roller Turkey...
3 tags
BATHS
LUV - I want you to think back to the last time you checked into a hotel. What was the first thing you did? Actually, no, scrap that - the first thing you did was open the minibar to see if any of it was complimentary. Everyone does that. And, come to think of it, it wasn’t the second thing either - because that almost certainly involved going through all the television channels one by one to...
3 tags
SUSHI
LUV - There are some things that the Japanese are spectacularly bad at, like remembering to have children and filling vending machines with things that aren’t abnormally creepy. However, sushi is not one of these things. Sushi is the best.
It’s ideal. Sandwiches are too mundane, salads are too drab and soup barely even counts as a food anyway. Sushi is always the perfect lunch...
4 tags
BELGIUM
LUV - All countries have slightly unfair reputations. For example, it probably isn’t the case that all Americans are morbidly obese rednecks who go around shooting each other for larks. And, despite the stereotype, not all British people have teeth like a tray of broken crockery. It’s only about 98% of us or something. I don’t know. I haven’t counted.
But, for some...
3 tags
MOTHER'S DAY
LUV - Not that it’s any of your business, but my mother is divorced. I mention this because, since her divorce, my mother has eschewed all forms of normal mum behaviour – you know, cooking, keeping house, getting the same three strands of her hair highlighted each month, reading Grisham novels, having self respect – in favour of lighting a cigarette and opening a vat of wine whenever I visit...
