The Dead Man’s Hand

Once, quite some time ago, I agreed to go on a holiday. My wife and I had decided to ‘start a family’ and it was suggested, not by me I hasten to add, that we should go to Barcelona – Europe’s party town – for one last hurrah before we entered the tiresome world of babysitters and early nights.

As chance would have it, sometime between booking and checking in something untoward must have occurred, because my wife was demonstrably up the duff by the time we landed in Barcelona.

Consequently, the entire week was marked by eposodes of morning sickness, early nights, and afternoon naps. It was fortuitous that Spanish TV was showing George Lucas’s original Star Wars trilogy on a non-stop loop that week, dubbed into Spanish of course but I already knew who everyone was and what was going to happen and I’m not too bad at Spanish. Well, I say not too bad. I only know a few words but I’m astoundingly cocky so I’ll just have a go and expect to be understood.

By the end of the week we’d hardly spent any money. Now you can’t possibly come back from a city break without having bankrupted yourself. It was time to book the most expensive restaurant in Barcelona.

Which is, if you weren’t aware, some Catalan gaff where everything is painted white and the menu, by dint of being printed in Catalan, is upsettingly hard to read. Catalan isn’t like proper Castilian Spanish, the kind you get in phrase books. Catalan is more like cryptic Welsh Sudoku. There are more Xs on a Catalan menu than there are in a teenage girl’s email. No-one can read the things. To exacerbate matters, the waitress had formed the distinct impression that I was a cocky Londoner who spoke Spanish at approximately toddler standard and had chosen to punish me by electing to negotiate my dining options exclusively in Catalan.

I struggled for quite some time with the menu. My various food intolerances (gluten, tomatoes, foreign muck) weren’t helping much. Eventually I found something that looked as if it might be rice-based. Rice is great. You can make pudding out of rice.

The only issue was, I couldn’t quite make out what might be with the rice. My entreaties for guidance from the waitress were met with bloody-minded Catalan jibberjabber that I probably could have understood, had I but been brainier or more Spanish or something.

Anyway, the one scrap of information I could elicit was that the rice contained ‘marisco’. I had no clue what marisco might be, but frankly the explanations had gone a bit too long, and it was getting a trifle embarrassing. My wife’s contribution to the sketch was to say “ooh, marisco, nice” . That was good enough for me I went with the marisco rice.

As soon as the waitress had gone I asked Mrs Moran what I’d ordered. She had no idea either. She’d just said something positive to defuse the tension.

It later transpired that marisco means, if it means anything, seafood. It can cover a multitude of evils.

The evil in this case was a bed of rice surmounted by a white, five-fingered something that was bony, and possessed of a pallid, rubbery flesh that tasted mostly of nothing.

To this day, I have no idea what I ate. And I don’t want to know.

George Carlin: If you you thought it was all about Bill and Ted, you missed a lot

Splendid, very funny fellow. Few comics retained their early edge so deep into their careers. Few comics had so much to say about airline announcements either.

So, if you HAVE read the book..

You might have skimmed the biographical note at the beginning and thought 'yes, you say you made some tolerable but not remotely successful records but what were they like?'

Well, they were like this. Here is my band 5TA on Channel 4's pioneering 'The Tube' show in 1986 or so.

I'm the skinny lad with the hair on the right hand side. Or I was. Skinniness and hair are both but fond memories now.

The other members of that tolerable, but not remotely successful lineup are, reading from left to right; The very lovely and very Swiss Colette Meury at the electronic keyboard, the splendid but sadly no longer with us Melanie Lewis supplying the left-hand backing vocal while the established in her own right Julia Fordham pins down the vital right hand backing singer rôle.

The lead singer was the mighty, the inimitable Lance Jowers. My fondest memories of those days are the bits when he wigged out and started singing something that I could never have written or even thought of. There's some of that here. Nick Rhodes sat at the drum throne and occasionally managed to persuade me not to be a complete tit. Not often though. Mark Pinto played the bass guitar for us, more admirably than we deserved.

We recorded a whole album with Cure producer David Allen. It's here, if you're interested. Remember though, don't judge us too harshly, It was the Eighties. Everyone thought that kind of thing was OK.

Anyway, there it is. Or was. Enjoy. If you can.

The secret evil of hotels

We all sort of know that hotels like to add annoying little extras to our bills that we're generally too polite to dispute. 

Joe McInerney, president of the American Hotel and Lodging Association would like to make it clear, though, that fees for incidental services represent a 'miniscule amount of revenue'

So, in that case, they must be doing it just to annoy us..

Welcome, Guardian Guiders!

Thanks for popping by. There's an extract from my fitfully amusing book below, if you fancy it. Or of you're just here for the map, which is pretty funny (my favourite one's Istanbul) you can find it here. Or you can leave your own tale of holiday woe here.

Or you can just poke around the blog and find stuff. There's another extract somewhere, some slightly comical news items and even an alternative Olympic logo, for some reason...

EXTRACT:5 reasons that everybody hates a tourist

1: Money

Wherever you’re going, it’s a safe bet that you’ve got more disposable income than most of the people that are there. The farther you go, the greater the disparity will grow. Now, money isn’t everything but it can more-or-less buy everything and so it ends up figuring rather significantly in the minds of people who haven’t got so much of it. I’m not suggesting that your squandering conspicuous sums of money on international travel will engender the sort of resentment that, say, the self-indulgence of the French Royal court did in 1789, or the lavish excesses of the Russian aristocracy in 1917. No, Not a bit of it: The fops and dandies in question interacted very little with the peasantry, yet still annoyed them enough to precipitate a bloody revolution. Tourists are there in the people’s face every day for the whole bloody Summer. Which leads us to…

 

2: Luggage

A lot of foreign travel involves cities. Even if you think you’re going to a bit of exotic countryside you’re bound to end up flying into an airport on the fringes of some major conurbation and then getting a train or taxi through the city centre to your destination. Let’s hope it is a taxi, because that’s just an annoying car like so many others and unlikely to give rise to too much smouldering resentment. If you’re on a train or an underground system of sort you’ll be dragging assorted pieces of bulky luggage around with you, scuffing the shins of pedestrians with your suitcase, obliviously crushing the newspapers of  tube travellers with your rucksack, or tripping absolutely everybody up with one of those spectacularly annoying trolley-bag affairs. You may think that you’re having enough trouble struggling from airport to hotel or train terminus, but the people you’re inadvertently barging into are on their way to or from work, and were probably in a fairly bad mood before you clattered into them with your skis. Which rather calls to mind..

 

3: Congestion

The joy, such as it is, of visiting a foreign city is stopping to look up at the interesting architectural features, unexpected poor weather, or strange and unusual birds that are about to defecate on your head. The drawback to these simple pleasures of course is that every time you stop to rubberneck at an exotic-looking and mildly pornographic advertising hoarding you will cause a concertina of collisions in the ‘long tail’ of fast-moving locals behind you who have seen all this stuff before and are just trying to get to where they’re going before the monsoon rains kick in. Which naturally takes us to..

 

4: Time

You’ve got lots of it. The people you’re asking for directions have little or none. The people behind you in the queue for overpriced cups of coffee have even less. Words do not exist to describe the depth of their hatred for you. Please remember that in many other countries knives and guns are more commonly carried than they are in – say – Royal Tonbridge Wells. Which takes us rather neatly to..

 

5: Money (again)

The presence of a large group of people with substantial amounts of disposable income, generous amounts of leisure time to fill and no way of storing or cooking fresh food tends to skew the local economy somewhat in the direction of overpriced coffee or sandwich bars and expensive clothing shops. Exactly the opposite of what you need if you actually live in one of these places, where all you want is a sensibly priced pastie to reheat in the office microwave for your lunch, a reasonably-priced dry cleaners and somewhere to buy an emergency present for your wife’s birthday and you’re not made of bloody money and you’ve only got an hour to eat, get your suit cleaned and buy the Smallest Diamond On Earth™.

Planning on visiting London in 2012?

Read this before you book. I think everyone outside Westminister accepts that it's a massive exercise in hubris bequathed by one dimwitted publicity-addict mayor to another, but all the same some poor bugger's bound to accidentally buy some tickets.

If they do actually complete any of the facilities they're bound to collapse as soon as somone tries to do something silly like walk into them.

Still, could be worse

They always said the logo would evolve. This one's inspired by a comment thread on Fark, created by my pal D-Hutch and I did all the stealing and cajoling.