Argh! Don’t panic!

25Jan12

Strange moment on the tube this morning. Crawling towards Victoria station, on the Victoria line, the intercom runs through its usual sunny mix of jingles, direct orders and disapproving pre-recorded rebukes. So we’ve moved down the carriage, tingling at the Sliding Doors potential offered by the rainbow of tube lines available just a few yards away. We’ve stood clear of the doors, kept our personal possessions with us at ALL times and understood that we’re held at a red signal because there’s a train already at the platform.

Then the pre-recorded lady’s back on again: ‘If there’s a police officer on the train, please make yourself known to the train operator.’ Pause. Several beats long. Glances exchanged – it’s rush hour. Then it’s the driver’s turn again. Mumbles, ‘Sorry, yeah, wrong message. Software problems.’ *Clunk*

Software problems? Pressed the wrong button, more like. Once I’d stood down my fight-or-flight response, I snorted a laugh, which probably scared my fellow passengers even more. What other messages have they got in their bag of pre-recorded tricks, that are just waiting to be mistakenly blurted? ‘Brace! Brace!’ maybe, or ‘Jesus! What was that?’

They should open it up. Instead of finding out the best place to alight for Tate Britain, I’d like to hear things like ‘Celebrity! Third carriage down!’ or ‘Oi! Large group of Spanish students! Don’t talk so loudly!’ or ‘Japanese teenagers! Walk faster!’ Or simply the classic, elegant ‘Looking good, Harriss.’ I might have to record that one myself and hack it into their system. How cool would that be? And in its defence, it’s at least as unhelpful as being told to make use of all the available space.

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Tags: London underground, tube intercom, tube lines, Victoria line

Cool, mon cul

20Jan12

This week has been spent at a posh interiors magazine where I learned a phrase that has been a stone in my shoe ever since. This artistic type was explaining how her apparently casually mismatched home had been ruthlessly edited from finds she had picked up over the years. And how had she magpied together these darling little touches? By scouring vide-greniers, of course.

Brows were furrowed across the subs’ desk. Vide-greniers? We’re all au fait with trompe l’oeil, Klamotten and bricolage, and you won’t find a bunch more au courant with chiaroscuro and Gustavian aesthetics, but vide-grenier?

It’s a car-boot sale, you pleb.

Unusually, I don’t blame the French – it’s a perfectly sensibly constructed expression – but my God do I loathe the Anglophone who uses it. Using vide-grenier feels like préciosité, that high-falutin’, shibbolethy slang affected by pre-Revolutionary French aristocrats, half out of their minds with boredom at court and imprisoned by a king who feared they might foment rebellion if left to stew at their country estates (looking the wrong way, yer madge!).

What kind of mimsy narcissist can’t bring herself to admit to going to a car-boot sale? People who buy their vegetables from M&S, that’s who. For them, car-boot sales are where you find Cliff Richard 45s and broken barometers promising ‘Memories of Margate’. Vide-greniers are piled high with bits of old lace, artlessly chipped ewers and coal scuttles just crying out for an armful of hyacinths. Vide-greniers are full of People Like Us. Car-boot sales are for fat people, crooks and mentallers who hoard.

Thank God we’ve cleared that up. And if you have any more questions, I shall be loading my plate at the, ahm, rempli-visage. Oh for Christ’s sake, keep your voice down – just follow the signs for the all-you-can-eat.

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Tags: car-boot sales, vide-grenier

Box clever

16Jan12

Sad news about the Little Chef, or ‘iconic roadside diner’ as the Sun has called it. I know this story is a few days old, and it’s not that I’m only able to write about it now, having dragged myself from my couch of grief. But I’m still a bit sad that it’s having to close so many outlets in order to survive. I hope the strategy works.

As must be clear, my interest stems not just from a love of the Jubilee Pancake (no. 55), although it is the finest iconic roadside diner dessert known to the known world. That cherry gloop, so interestingly viscous for a fruit that contains so very little pectin. Mmm. I can only assume it was extract of boiled hooves that got it to stick so satisfyingly, so unctuously, to the fluffy thickness of the pancake/duvet. The block of pure white ice cream I could leave but yum, that pancake.

My first ever paid job was working at the Little Chef, or Le P’tit Chef, as we liked to call it. My mate Lucy got me a job there, and we still reminisce from time to time. I was a waitress, barrel-shaped because the dose of glandular fever that stripped off the weight was still four years away. So there I would stand, in my triangular, polyester, zip-fronted tent, a little Plymouth Brethren-style scarf on my head, affixed with a plastic hairband, clumsily attempting to serve the famished pilgrims of the A303.

The waitresses’ pads were divided into a grid of numbered squares, which you would mark according to the order. On hearing a request for a still orange (no. 91) one would mark box number 91 with an oblique line. I assume this was because there was a good chance that neither the waitresses nor short-order chefs were the top-drawer readers or writers in their class, so the tick-the-box system was deemed the clearest.

However, this simple system found its nemesis in the barrel shape of a useless waitress in Chicklade. I could never remember all the numbers – though some have haphazardly stuck. Cod, haddock and plaice were 76, 77 and 78, though I never did get the running order straight. Oddly, that branch has some heavyweight alumni – Lucy is a recruitment consultant with her own business, Sam is something uber at the Haunch of Venison art gallery, and Hodgey, well, poor Hodgey was killed on his motorbike at the age of 19, but he used to discuss the global balance of power through the prism of the Dow Jones, with a disconcertingly thick Wiltshire accent. He should be running the bloody world now.

Memories. Anyway, God bless Le P’tit Chef, and may you feed generations more.

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Tags: A303, little chef, roadside restaurant

Too taxing for this brain

09Jan12

Ooh, catch me if you can! I’m afire, a whirling dervish, a human snowplough of mixed metaphors and exaggeration. See, things have been a bit sluggish of late. Maybe my chakras have popped out of their designated ley lines. Maybe I’ve been sitting too far from my healing crystals. Maybe I’ve just been going to be bed too late, but whatever it is, I used to be a lot better at a) getting up and b) getting stuff done, but then, I dunno, winter happened. Ha! Not this weekend. This weekend I’ve been a blur.

Yesterday I went to Tate Modern where my flatmate gave me a tour around the Gerhard Richter exhibition because she’s a Richterphile. I by contrast know nowt about art and usually get museum legs and art gallery backache within about 40 minutes, but we managed two hours. Then I walked up to Spitalfields – where a mate was running a stall at a vintage fair – to browse the Bakelite and try on hats, before helping her spend her takings on pints and curry.

This morning, I kicked off big by doing my tax return. The prelims and calculations had been done, the ground prepared, as complained about in an earlier post. Groundwork notwithstanding, I still managed to make an error so grave the blood pooled in my legs for a few heartbeats, before rushing back up to my head, taking a wave of sick with it. See, I was just checking over the final view and thanks to some fat-fingered brain fart the form seemed to think the interest I was earning – the interest – on my savings was £16,719. The interest? And where the arse did 16 grand come from? Nothing like that number had appeared anywhere in my calculations.

Anyway, I was able to go back in and adjust the amount – precipitously downwards to a square-rooty-feeling £158, if you must know – and clicked back, eyes gleaming with avarice, to find how that had affected the calculations. No difference. Even an overstatement to the tune of 16-plus effing grand hadn’t bunked me erroneously into the next tax band. Hey ho. I also had to declare my dividends of any investments, so I made a clean breast of the £7.34 I’d cleared from a dream investment in Telecom Eireann shares. They cost me £700 ten years ago. In another 90 years I should have made a tidy profit of ooh, rainbows and buttercups.

But getting that bugger out of the way I was like a dog out of the traps: after that I overwintered the garden, calculated the household bills for the last five months, did all my washing, cleaned the bathroom, did a grocery shop, wrote a thank you letter, went to Stoke Newington for tea, had a swim and watched yet another episode of Lewis.

Incidentally, you know when you’re having tea with a friend, praps in Stoke Newington, and their child interrupts at an intriguing bit but then it’s chaos and you only remember later? Yeah, so I’ve just had a flashback which I feel needs clarification. We were interrupted just after my hostess had announced that people are often to be seen naked and shagging at a toy train museum in Hamburg ‘but the children don’t notice’. Wtf? I mean really, WTF?

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I’m not the only one

06Jan12

Yup, they remembered the story. I was hoping I could just brass it out but it was just about the VERY FIRST THING that was mentioned, once we’d got the Christmas/new year greetings out of the way. I smiled tightly, mixed my drinks and pretty soon was laughing like drain at everyone else’s salty tales of embarrassment and ineptitude. God, I like being English.

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