 |
|
 |
|
|
Well Finland was a blast. I was there last week taking care of business. I had to go over for several days to hook up with my team and set my objectives for the next six months (long story short, i'm doing pretty good). It was freezing in Helsinki, like -20ºC some nights. I'd pre-empted this by purchasing a base layer from one of those sports shops in covent garden that's perpetually on the brink of closing down, and i was pretty warm.
The duration of my time in Finland was spend hopping between various offices throughout the city centre. Nokia has a huge number of offices in Finland, so i amused myself by travelling around by coach, bus and taxi. Eeva, one of my co-workers, was kind enough to show me how to operate the underground. They've got this thing where you can pay to travel for a certain amount of time, which i quite liked - i bought an hour ticket stub and set my iPod to play the theme to Mission Impossible everytime i needed to go somewhere.
One of the ironies was that my team member, Essi, who had asked me to come over to Finland, had ended up injuring her foot so badly she had to work from home. This meant that instead of having daily meetings with her from my office phone in London, i had meetings with her from a speakphone in various offices in Finland. She was able to make it in a few times, and she also invited me over to her apartment to take dinner with her and her partner. She lived in a modern apartment which would be worth millions in London and i was impressed at the large grid of windows that made the living room bright and airy. Over a dinner of mushroom rissotto a freshly baked rolls, our conversation melted towards photography and art. I like Essi. She's a maverick Finn - a kind of mixture of traditional wellbeing laced with an intensity to succeed. She describes herself and her countryfolk as "people of the lakes". This is certainly true. I wondered where i fitted in. I grew up in the countryside and enjoy walking through the wilderness, but i'm also drawn towards industrial landscapes and the rainsoaked streets of London.
I also had the pleasure of hooking up with Kirsi. She and her friend Elli met with me after work and we catched up at a Belgium restaurant which had menus tucked away inside Tintin comic books. We ate french fries drizzled in mayonnaise and drunk cider. Kirsi presented me with a beautiful hardbound book on Helsinki architecture, and a moomin coffee mug. Outside i kept my gaze calm and acknowledged the gifts with a curt, resepectful nod... but inside i started to melt and wished, not for the first time, that i could invent some kind of teleportation device to whisk me between Alppiharju and Camden at leisure. Sadly, the evening was so bitterly cold that we were unable to do much wandering about. Seriously, the wind was like ice-cold razorblades on any exposed skin.
There were moments when i did wander out, though. Some of the London team were staying at my hotel on their own trip, so i hooked up with them to go eat. But as they wobbled the two-minute journey back to the hotel, i made the exodus outside with all points of my body clad in insulation, save for a small exposed area around the eyes. I wandered, skidded and crunched towards the harbour to take photos of Helsinki cathedral. When i got the pier, i realised that A: this was probably the coldest place i've ever been to and B: helsinki cathedral is really, really stunning when it's snowing. The entire square was deserted and the steps up to the building were blanketed in snow. You could hear the snow fall. I took off my gloves to take few snaps of the vista on my fisheye, but after three shots my fingers were so cold it i shoved them under my shirt in order to revive them. Damn.
The whole journey went pretty smoothly, save for a lively incident on the way to the airport in which the taxi got stuck in snow-locked traffic for an hour. Luckily i made it with enough time to spare and managed to cram my face with a delicious Runenberg before boarding the plane.
CODA
I also managed to get my hands on a bottle of "Tar Schnapps", made from pine tar. It is the wierdest drink i've sampled since that German fig drink Spencer gave me when i was fourteen. The Tar Schnapps, and i'm not joking here, smells just like frying bacon. But it tastes like caramel that's been chargrilled over a barbecue - sweet, syrupy but shot through with a smoky taste. It's actually quite nice, but i don't think i'll be getting hammered on it anytime soon.
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
I don't care how much they attempt to doll up Posh Spice, it just isn't working for me. She looks like she died back in 2003 and they embalmed her before shoving her back in the spotlight. Also, when exactly did celebrities become news?
It sounds clichéd, but i really do think we should return to traditional journalistic values of the 1970s. Around the end of Vietnam, when people started to ask questions (but not too many of them), that was the golden age of journalism. None of these lousy "lifestyle" supplements or promotional tie-ins, newspapers should relegate all opinion and human interest to a single column on the fourth page. In fact.....
I should set up my own newspaper. It will be called "The Camden Orrery" and will be manufactured entirely out of mechanical printing presses, silver nitrate and stock pulp. The offices will, of course, be based in Camden and i shall want nothing but the finest journalist reporters and analytical minds at my disposal. Sadly, i know of no such people so instead my friends will have to take up the slack:
I myself will be the editor. As head of the newspaper, it will be my sole duty to drink scotch from a crystal tumbler whilst smoking and pacing up and down the office wearing an off-white shirt and twill trousers held up by braces. I will coax my staff into producing fabulous articles by alternately yelling at them and condescending them in a paternalistic manner.
Josh will be the sub-editor. It is his job to skim the contributions for the best news articles from a large foolscap folder and type them onto sheets of bond using a selectric typewriter. Should i request his presence, i shall wait until exactly 3am until phoning him from home and making him get out of bed and come to the office to witness me pacing up and down telling him about this dream i had recently. Also, he would be married with children thus exacerbating his personal relationships.
Neil would be in charge of the actual composition. After i burn his laptop and denounce photoshop as "just a fad", i would provide him with a graphics ledger, some letraset and several marker pens of different thickness. He would have to provide his own Tipp-Ex and bottles of spirit.
Paul would be the cub reporter, getting the facts regardless of any man, woman, child or statutory law standing in his way. Armed with nothing more than a memo pad, bookie's pen, crowbar and battered film camera, Paul would stake out top stories and then run to the nearest telephone booth to give us the copy.
Richie would be charged with technology pages segment, covering novelties such as the home computer, personal video recorders and the music scene.
There would only be one supplement - the "woman's lifestyle" section. Charlotte would be in fim control of this, rubbing shoulders with minor aristocracy and employing charlatans and romanian peasant women to edit the astrology section. She would also be responsible for reviewing the latest mink furs from across the atlantic and the most decadent designers from Paris. To help boost our female readership, the lifestyle section would on occasional distribute discount vouchers from such illustrious purveyors of haute couture as Jane Norman, Louis Vuitton and the French Connection.
Mark would be kept busy selling advertising space to our booming automotive and steel industries as well as particularly saucy joke phone numbers. Driving around the country in the company car, Mark would dazzle clients in his draylon suit and warm smile, providing us with a sizable income thanks his technique of sealing the deal with a firm handshake and a celebratory "several drinks" down the pub afterwards.
Ursula would be charged with editing the "men's health" section. Her advice on tying a scarf put me right within minutes.
Cian was originally going to be our international correspondent, staying at the Sheraton in various tropical destinations, but she's recently disgraced herself by sassing me on the member's messageboard, so i'm demoting her to working in the dark room where she'll spend the next six months wrist deep in developer fluid and red lighting. Once she redeems herself, she will then be placed in charge of the political cartoon (entitled "Cian's View") in which she will make the politicians and law lords feel very uncomfortable with her sharp lambasting of their hubristic intentions. She can also make Neil colour in the peanuts cartoon if she so wishes.
Scouse is an expert on popular sports, including rallying, darts and snooker tournaments. Unfortunately, he is also a good at fixing things, so he'll be placed in charge of operating and maintaining the printing presses. One perk of the job is that at any given moment he is permitted to form a union within minutes alongside his fellow workers and shut down the factory before heading to the pub to organise a march down Fleet Street.
Alex will be the wise janitor.
The Camden Orrery will be a surefire success! The masses will no longer need to buy the tabloids to fatten their desire for the sensational when they now have an option to read articles written by some of the finest minds south of Birmingham! The fresh smell of the printer's ink shall entice the working classes to put down their penny dreadfuls and racing gazettes in pursuit of a much more satisfying reward - the quenching of the thirst of ignorance in the form of a broadsheet that seamlessly merges fact with well informed opinion. Indeed it is my one dream that our newspaper shall so inflame the thoughts and convictions of the masses that it shall bring down government for once and for all through nothing less than violet and anarchic protest. This will then pave the way to the second phase of my plans.....
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
Quick round of events: had christival dinner with my parents at the Hilton in Euston, which was delicious. They served us various gourmet treats in a converted orangery the size of a small warehouse. After boxing day, i followed my folks back to my hometown and hooked up with Jon Spencer and Neil for an intense drinking session.
ANDOVER
The first night back saw me head down to the Globe pub with Jon, where a friend from back in the day, Sarah, was doing some live singing. She was really good, and it was nice to see her after nearly 15 years. Spencer told the landlord about my past job at BMG and i took a note of various promising local bands with a promise to "see if i could talk to someone". I did this with some success for another band a while back (the promo got listened to by the head of Rock & Pop), sadly the band had made a really shitty demo (something they neglected to tell me) so nothing really took off there.
The second night was "All Spencer"; his extended family were over at his for a games night, and i joined them. We totally rocked the kazbah on "Buzz" with Jon's knowledge of military miscellanea and my knowledge of fetishes and iconography. Afterwards, Jon and I retired to the garage to get properly hammered on brandy and play round-the-clock darts. As we were playing, Spencer told me about Katie, the sister of our childhood friend Paul, who had been the victim of an horrific acid attack. She had presented the alternative christmas message this year on channel 4 and they'd made a documentary about the impact on her life (she had been a model and budding tv presenter), but all of this had passed me by as i don't own a TV and never made the connection when i heard about it on the news.
Jon narrowly won the darts match through "alco-luck", and i headed home around midnight. The evening had given me a lot to think about and i wondered what mechanism lies in some people to make them do appalling things without thinking about the consequences. It reminded me of the July 7 attacks in London and all those people who got deleted in the prime of their life because of someone else's terrible decision. But the most startling thing was that Katie seemed genuinely optimistic about her future and i think she's going to surprise a lot of people. Realising that the situation was getting maudlin, i immersed myself in some chill out music and looked ahead at the pub crawl planned for the next day.
If you define success as "getting drunk", then the pub crawl was an unprecedented victory for booze over common sense. Jon, Neil and myself staggered around the environs of Andover playing pool, drinking booze and regailing poorly-remembered anecdotes. About three hours into drinking, we were hungry, so we headed to the local Domino's and ordered a pizza the size of a hula-hoop. Unbeknown to us, it was "Toofers Day", which meant we got another giant-sized pizza for free. This then posed a problem, even with Jon's ferocious appetite, my untamed greed and Neil's fondness for meat it became clear that we weren't going to finish it all. At the end, there was still enough cheese and dough to feed an army of fat people. We sat on the kerb and discussed what to do.
"We should, like, put slices in our pockets or something" i suggested, unhelpfully.
"Let's pick off the cheese and sausage pieces at least" said Neil, rubbing his eye on his knee joint.
"No...wait...no.....let's hide it!" said Spencer. Before i could reply, Neil's eyes lit up and you could practically see his beerswigged brain grinding into some kind of motion.
What happened next was not the kind of thing your usual god-fearing pub enthusiast would dare to do. But this was a desperate situation, and time was running out to drink more booze. We eneded up pooling the pizza into one box, placed the box in a shopping trolley and then trundled it down into an alleyway next to a church. It was a conspicuous location, no chance of a "pizza mishap", but hidden from anyone else wishing to chance a free snack.
The next pub we stopped at was also my last. Spencer had ordered the "mega hot jalapeno tantrum" pizza with "double decadence" sandwich crusts. After three nights on the trot drinking nothing but cask-strength spirits and eating things from packets, my stomach was starting to bubble. As i nursed a scotch and soda, Jon started sniffing around a local girl while Neil ordered more drinks. I realised we had lost Jon's attention for the rest of the evening and decided to pull out. It was nearly midnight.
I stumbled back home, only being interrupted once by a bunch of lads in a black hatchback who wanted to kidnap me "for a dare". I told them to fuck off, flashed my oyster card at them and told them i worked in "the police 'crime division'". They hit the accelerator and left me on my jack jones in the middle of a bubble of exhaust fumes. I couldn't wait to be back in London for NYE.
NEW YEARS
I got a call from Richie seeking asylum at mine for New Years. Neil was coming over with the intention of meeting his girlfriend, Melissa, and "her gang" at Koko where we all planned to congregate. The ticket cost a couple of ponies and so we decided to pool beer at mine and drink for several hours. This was a good idea - it gave us time to drink with focus and insight as opposed to last minute chugging. Koko was really good this time around - less crowded and annoying but still the sell-out noise fest it promised to be. To be honest, i can't remember much because we had jagerbombs with each drink and everything sort of felt purple and rusty after a while. We got back to mine around 4am and five hours later Neil knocked on my bedroom door to bid farewell, but i was so fucked i couldn't even crane my head up to return to gesture.
Oh, and Richie bought me a second-hand Gameboy Advance SP as a christmas give. Go Richie!
On another note, they jacked up the prices of the bus fares by nearly 20%!. A monthly ticket costs £63 instead of £53! It's that tory bastard Boris' fault - the bozz-haired cunt keeps harping on about his transport policies whilst warbling about on his stupid bicycle and then tries to bankrupt the honest working man with his price fiddling! This is what happens when you put a dandy-arsed columnist in charge of the capital, so i'm protesting by typesetting this site in Comic Sans.
Personally, i didn't mind old Ken Livingstone getting drunk and abusing journos as long as he subsidised the buses...
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
NOTICE TO ALL CONCERNED
When crashing over at mine, please remember to take your toothbrush with you. I've got five toothbrushes that aren't mine, and it's just getting silly.
MESSAGE ENDS
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
 |
|
| Read:
|
Vanilla Beach 2005 ::
E-Mail Me |
| |
|
|
