Welcome to Studio S

I am mildly annoyed by those greengrocer’s apostrophe’s (sic) you see on signage. Cafés with large signs offering TEA’S, and of course greengrocers offering APPLES’ ORANGE’S and “NANA’S”. What I like about this sign is the obvious attempt at cleaning up the mal-placed apostrophe. I can imagine the argument between underling and manager at the estate agents’ office who placed this sign being one of the clabby, circular kind (see Meaning of Liff for definition of “Clabby”).

It looks like the rather bog standard flats for rent in Kings Cross this sign is trying to flog are now part of a funky, luxury, city-centre development – STUDIO S.

And on the other side of those railings, just to the right of this sign, is another, identically modified one. So good, they screwed it twice.

You're like Manchester, you've got Strangeways: Daggersdukc on tour

Now that the wife has gone – though admittedly, only to train with that wild, smiling beast Nicki, Mr DD has done a bit of travelling. As well as going to see a little bit of posh on Monday, Tuesday was taken with a trip to the North West, centred on Manchester. So here’s what I did.

Pendelino from Euston. Not been on one of these to date and many of my more travelled friends have complained about their uncomfortable journeys. Humbug! They are extremely pleasing trains with nice seats and a smooth, quiet ride. I don’t think anything can beat the old HST style coaches for comfort, but these are a good, modern effort towards that end.

Metrolink to Bury. I’ve done this journey a few times before and like it for its ‘London-ness’ in that it feels like a journey to Chingford. But with better connections at the other end. At Bowker Vale, some mong threw a firework into the nearly empty car. Driver unimpressed and he did call police, but what can you do about this? Similar happened on a school trip I took in 1984 to Paris (on Bastille Day). Note to Metrolink – sort out your bloody ticket machines. Some supercomputers need less effort to make them work.

Bury to Bolton. Bus round the long way to Bolton as I realised that I’d never seen the North country (as opposed to say, Liverpool or Manchester city) than by any means of transport than by train, and hadn’t a clue as to what the anonymous wee towns between the big ones are like. I almost went to Rawtenstall, but I noticed there was only one route there and back, whereas Bolton was nearer to Manchester (I aimed to be on the 1915 back to London) and there were about six routes. So it was a 480 Rossendale bus. What strikes me about this semi-urban-ness is how raw it still looks. The countryside between is nice, but the towns with their little red brick houses and tree-less roads bring to mind the feeling you get after an LSD trip or a really serious hangover when coming home blasted on a Sunday morning. Perhaps I’m just seeing it through Southern-wanker eyes, but there seems to be an ‘unfinished’ element about the urban North. Prescott would like to demolish all this. Why? Those houses would fetch a small fortune in the South, being described as “bijou” and “compact”. My earlier comment may sound like a bit of a sleight, but I rather like these places, and can see why southerners piss off from Fulham or Southend and the freaking mad rat-race we’ve got ourselves into down here. What’s needed in these small towns is more prettification: more trees, flowers etc, costing almost nothing. Then we need a rebalancing of the economy so that the South isn’t the centre of the universe and houses like ours, which are nothing special, and pretty damn poky, don’t go for the price of some African countries’ GDPs. Bolton could be the new Guildford, since the only difference lies in the preponderance of millionaires in Guildford.

The countryside round abouts, what little I saw of it, seemed much like countryside anywhere else – perhaps I imagined huge slag-heaps and infertile, blighted fields. I should laugh at my own ignorance, and my naivete proves, if nothing else, that I need to go out more.

The real jewel in the crown of my trip was Bolton. I’ve read that it contains the second most deprived ward in the UK and so imagined it to be like Deptford with all the good bits taken out. A sort of grey brutalist-Modernist pound-shop city with abandoned shopping centres and Morlock-esque people dressed in scuzzy, beer-stained trackies. The usual pound-shops there were, but the city centre is a gem of a place with a real sense of civic pride, a good collection of old (the refurb’d market hall) and the new. I was pleasantly amused by the stone baby heffalumps at the southern end of the town centre. I liked the Russian-sounding bell (perhaps emanating from the town hall, I only heard one chime). I like the size, which gives the sense of being a self-contained town, but near another larger one, so it has nearly everything you need within walking distance but without all the problems of scale you get living in a large city. .

Bolon Market Hall

I really, really like the singy songy accent, which lies somewhere between East Lancs and Manc-proper and easier on the lugs than rough Manchester. I’m not sure about job prospects here, whether the housing is any good, whether it’s a scarier place to be than Romford on a Saturday night, but in the daytime, in the centre, it’s a place I’d be very content to be. One of those places from which you expect little, and when your expectations are well exceeded, feels quite warmly towards afterwards. Nearly Guildford, then. As I would like Guildford too were it not full of pretentious bastards.

Bolton Town Centre

I’ll just mention briefly the train journey back to Mancunia. Behind me, on the Trans-Pennine Express, were two Indian lads with mongphones. Now, the public playing of MP3 phones on any form of public transport should be punishable by having one’s nether regions shaved with sandpaper impregnated with iron filings and hydrochloric acid, but these guys I had to admire – quietly - for their inventiveness. One fellow would fire up a Punjabi vocoder classic (does anyone actually sing any more? Pitch shifters are everywhere in music now!) Then his mate would play the same tune. They were obviously trying to synchronise tracks, but alas (and I’ve tried doing the same and thus realise how hard it is) couldn’t do it quite right. So the one version of the tune was about one quarter of a second behind the other, causing a Doppler-ish echo. One was waving his blower around his head, and although I’ll be a much happier man when someone invents a Bluetooth jamming device for these blots on humanity, I just had to grin.

The rest of the trip consisted of doing the various tram routes. I didn’t really have time for proper exploration, but I can say now that Altrincham and Eccles have been seen. I wish I had been given enough time to blunder round Eccles, which looked OK too, but alas, time was against me and after a whistle stop pick-up-some-food shopping at Morrisons, I took the tram back to Piccadilly, the Pendelino, and home.


Metrolink trams as the sun goes down

My overall impression is that Manchester, a city I haven’t been massively predisposed to, at least compared to its rival, Liverpool, is on the up and looking sharp, disposing with, at long last, its down-at-heel vibe which always seem to suggest barely suppressed violence and dysfunction lurking under the surface. I always had the impression that it was jealous of London. If city could claim to have a soul, well, at long last, this place has realised that it can do things differently and at least as equally well as the capital. Small things I noticed: pink bulbs have replaced the orange sodium streetlights in the centre. Big deal, you cry, but these orange babies do make a place look murky, even sinister, at night. I can’t imagine today the sense of brooding depression I might have felt a few years ago wandering just off Oxford Road with the somewhat austere buildings (which still are austere and long may they remain so) lit by a brown light-fog, rain tap-tap-tapping on your shoulder and a Smiths tune playing in your head. To me, the appearance of the place is as radical as the one, which changed the London docks during the late 80s. Redevelopment for its own sake can be a double-edged sword and as you can see by the diminishing quantity of East End locals (who have now moved to Essex and beyond), it’s sometimes done without any thought for the indigenous population. But central Manchester is looking well, content with itself, and is destined to rise even further. London and Manchester will always be friendly rivals, but there is something to be said for being a second city (remember the Avis rent-a-car advert’s slogan: “Avis – we try harder”. London may arrogantly think it has it all – and it is a world city there is no doubt – but that doesn’t mean its brasher Northern sister isn’t capable of knocking it down with a better way of doing things. One thing that Manchester has that London does not is city centre living. Now, if only London could pull that feat off, it would feel like an entirely different place. And its true: Mancs really are friendlier, with three people in a space of a few hours getting into conversation with me without my prompting. This happens extremely rarely in the South.

As John Shuttleworth says: Manchester – long may it rain.

A little bit of posh...

Lynn started training with NickiDogg yesterday, and having dumped her at Chelmsford, I wandered over to Burnham-on-Crouch.

Not a dire place in the manner of Tilbury, but I think that laying on the couch is about the only thing that Billericay Dickie could have done because there is sweet fanny-adams else to do. I think an hour between bus arriving and next bus leaving was all the time one needs to explore this wee town. There is quite a nice pub near the clock tower. Pricey though (£2.50 for a very small Woodpeckers).

Holidays, good news, glass ceiling for blindos

I am quite looking forward - no, very much looking forward - to not working this week. I am having a well-earned holiday. I still have 14 days left which is ridiculous since I have 27 days and they started in April. There are many reasons as to why, and they are all down to the pressures of work that me and Mrs Daggersdukc have experienced.

Bang went summer.

Carly's boyfriend was no help there either. Less said about *him* the better. It could get libellous.

The big news is this week is that Nicki the New Doggg will be arriving next weekend. Mrs DD trains with her this week in Chelmsford. The other bit of news is that Wifey the Wi-Fi whyphe has been offered a new higher paid, better job at the Snivil Service and so will most likely be moving leaving from her current employer, which is the same as mine so shan't be named. The cheeky little minxes offered her a new pay package as golden padlock. It was the same rate as the other programmers in the org. She wasn't aware that she wasn't already being paid the same rate as other programmers. Needless to say, she's kinda pissed off knowing this, and alas, won't be staying unless they can do significantly better than this - putting it mildly - insulting offer. Personally, I think she should play the blind card. Any other fuckwit would when confronted with what has obviously been a glass ceiling neither of us could have guessed existed.

Is it cos sheez is black? Nah, blind. We'll just have to set Nicki the wild beast of Ilford on to them.

The day my religion died

I just want to note that after two years of soul-searching I gave up any claim Christianity had over me yesterday and am, to all intents and purposes, an atheist.

I feel quite sad about that.

Its been my crutch since the age of 14 or so., a good 23 years. But since starting uni four years later, followed by some determinedly unanswered questions, a complete lack of tangible evidence of God's existence in *my* life - well you've got to stop believing in Santa Claus some time.

For all the good Christians out there- and believe me, there are plenty - but mainly my mum and dad who gave me a good example by which to live by, my ever-loving, Christian wife - my apologies for bailing out. Whatever I think about it, this will be a shock and will sadden these good people. But IF there is a God, and my belief is that there is not, , I would rather meet him knowing that I've thought about my belief, and not, like so many others, simply followed some doctrine, sheep-like, fearful, or just unthinking. I'd rather be a firm non-believer than a by-proxy believer.

I leave the fold with a sense of regret and mostly fondness for what it held. Despite what certain idiots would have you believe, Christians are not all moronic right-wing conservative stupidheads. Jesus was easily as radical as Marx, for sure. I'll defend their right to practice their faith as long as they allow me to not practice any.

So, with the utmost respect and ultimately, regret goodbye. The evidence just doesn't add up and I can no longer lie to myself.

Will "Living Science" kill real science?

I heard on Radio 4 earlier this week, various educationlists whining on about the new science examination called “Science for Living” or something similar. Science for a dumbed down generation! It will widen elitism since it is generally kids from the state school sector who are going to be taught it! Leaving the real science involving chemicals, expensive glassware and experiments involving mysterious dial-ridden boxes to the posh kids! The world will end! Britain needs more scientists, not less! And so the hyperbolic whine went on.

Now, I love cooking. I’m not great at it, and I don’t do it as much as I would choose. I don’t have the time or inclination. But I do have a natural kind of flair. I can usually second guess what ingredients work with others without needing a recipe book. My kitchen time management is pretty good and unlike most areas involving multiple activities that can lead to a daggersdukc panicfaff, the kitchen environment is somehow soothing. I am to the kitchen what my mum is to gardening. Seemingly with no effort at all, plants of all shapes and sizes flourish under her supervision – plants from spuds to exotic trees thrive under her Midas touch. It’s a wonderful thing, but she’s trained as a nurse, not a gardener or landscaper.

I started cooking at school. Our teacher, Mrs Johnson, was a strict taskmistress, and taught us well the fundamentals. But, seeing as this was ILEA in the 1980s there was never the opportunity posited in my direction to train more formally, for example, as a chef. And besides, it would never have crossed my mind to train further.

The new science curriculum focuses on areas of life which most inquisitive kids already have a basic knowledge or at least interest in GM foods, the changing environment, mobile phones and so on. If the facts behind these are used to illustrate the real dope strands of science – radio waves, chemistry, physics, meteorology to name but a few, then what it might achieve, far more than any dry and to a kid’s mind, irrelevant, experiments with Bunsen burners and pickled dogs*, is make the brain’s lightbulb go ‘ping’. I would love to do a course like this; I mean how damn fascinating. Real issues, real products, real science. Being a schoolboy would be so much fun doing courses like this.

I never took up cooking. BUT…what I obtained from the loudest Brummie in London, also known as Linda Johnson, was the confidence to make my own way around the kitchen, not be afraid of kitchen disasters (as with Sinatra’s regrets, there have been a few, but then again…). And many of the kids doing Science for Living won’t be interested in later years, in thermodynamics. Who cares? Science is an elite subject like maths or the Classics. That’s why it pays so well once you get past a certain level. Top scientists would be the first to moan should their professions become comodified like production line workers. And most kids who are forced into doing old-fashioned science won’t ever use these skills. Heck, I don’t use anything I learned while doing my degree, but I’m very glad I did it.

School, today, isn’t an education in the sense that it was 50 or even 20 years ago, but a springboard towards greater things. Look, 50 percent of kids now go on to higher ed and you need a degree to clean a Micky D’s floor. So if you’re going to get sprung towards a scientific vocation, it makes far more sense to go into real sciences – the hard slog - understanding complex theorems, mathematics, hypothesis, experimentation, more experimentation, review, conclusion – having some sense of the ends to which it can be used.

I bet you after a few years, universities will be complaining about the poor quality of undergrads. I also bet their will be many, many more of them. That’s when the real hard education begins – the way it should be.

Who’s first in the queue then?


* I only mention this poor beast as our school had a dog feotus suspended in alcohol in what Americans would call a Mason jar. No one ever took the lid off while I was there.

New Thames Gateway Key Worker Housing

For Sale

£10,000 ono. 2 bed flat, Charlton SE5
GCH (untested) with fresh-air ventilation. Single glazed, with open plan window framing in places. Bullet holes are a unique feature of this delightful residence near schools (Borstal High) and local facilities such as Emergency Room, mental asylum and abandoned glue factory opposite. Near North Greenwich tube station and 108, 472 and 161 bus routes are also close by for quick getaway.

Would suit professional couple.

I promise you, this wasn’t taken after a Sarejevo bombardment. It is indeed located in Charlton, SE London, just off the Thames path. Fancy moving there?

Grays and Tilbury - the visit

Went for a wander this afternoon to Grays and Tilbury in Essex.

It was a mixed bag of an area.

Grays: Not a bad High Street. Has a new-ish Mall, which considering Lakeside is just round the corner, is quite a brave thing for the council to have installed. There is a rather pleasant smell of fish and chips pervading the whole area. I know there are a lot of chippies around here, but why the whole area should resemble a seaside resort which has had its sea removed I don't quite know. You expect to hear caliope organs and people scoring heroin up side-alleys, the kind of thing British seaside resorts are best known for.

This should make the place appear jolly in a "we are at the seaside and so even though its freezing and my boxers are full of sand we WILL be jolly" sort of way. However, the area feels somehow incomplete. I can see why people might get depressed living there as it is so temptingly close to London and yet nothing like the big smoke. And despite its atempts to lie to you, the sea is another 15 miles further east at Leigh.

I am not saying that Grays is the grimmest area I've been to - far from it - but it does feel as if it was the centre of something great once - or perhaps something amazing was planned for it and never completed as it has an 'almost done but not quite' feel about it. Quite weird overall.

Tilbury. This really does feel like the last chance saloon of places in and around London. It has a totally dead atmosphere and even the laughably named 'Civic Square' whose name conjurs up images of office buildings, or at least a communist-style concrete shopping centre is nothing more than a parade of wanky, crap shops (not even a KFC, but Favorite Fried Chicken sort of parade). Maybe I missed the action: maybe nearby is a huge uber-mall which might explain the centre's complete deadness. When I say dead, I mean - where are the cars? Where are the passers--by? The words 'no hope' spring to mind. Its like a day when you wake up, scratch your arse then realise that the thumping of th dole cheque on the mat is the best thing that's going to happen to you this month. A truly dispiriting hole. Not grim in the same way that towns near nuclear reactors must be (they can at least be interestingly bleak, but just a dead, not-happening, hollow kinda town. I tell you, 20 minutes there and I was glad to be heading back on the C2C to Grays and on to Lakeside. And look, I'm from Dagenham and don't have much to write about favourably when it comes to associating 'interesting' and 'my own manor'. I'm just trying to put this review into context, yeah? I am not a fan of shopping centres as a whole for the reason most people who dislike them dislike them. When it comes to my reasons for disliking large shopping centres, I'm not an original thinker. However, arriving at Lakeside, I was truly RELIEVED to back out of the Twilight Zone that is Tilbury. You have been warned. You should only go to Tilbury if you're completely sure of your own sanity, because a few hours there will surely turn you into a paranoid depressive if you're nothing less than 70 percent normal in the first place.



And you call THIS a Civic Square?

A review of The Bermondsey Kitchen

Next time I post a restaurant review I'll get a phone included from my mobile. I hadn't thought of doing a review until today though.

This gastro-pub is situated on Bermondsey Street, about 10 minus walk from London Bridge station. I was there with 10 people from work at a post-meeting meal.

The interior is light and mainly consisting of pale woods and beiges which make it look fairly contemporary. It’s more ‘restaurant’ than ‘pub’ in my view.

First course: small, but tasty I had the mixed continental meat selection. There could have been a bit more meat, but what was there was more Borough Market than Borough High Street.

Second Course: Sweet potato, mozzarella, cous-cous and rocket, splashed with chilli oil. I’m a carnivore through and through and the only reason I ordered this dish was because everything else either came with tomatoes, which I can’t abide, or was offal. Which I can’t abide either. My veggie course therefore had an air of low expectation about it. Not justified fortunately as the meal was delicious – plenty of varying tastes and enough gear to keep my stomach happy.

Dessert: Yummy choices, I went for a dessert whose name I’ve forgotten, so let me describe instead. In the middle of he plate was a ball of the kind of ‘crème’ you get in crème brulee. Atop this sat a scrumptious almond and butter cookie. If I could make these I’d give up work and sell them to random people on the on the street who would instantly want more. Boy, I could make some ‘dough’ with these biccies. Around the side of the crème/biscuit tower were pieces of quince which I’ve never tried before and whose taste I was delighted by.

So: results time:

Cost was £27.50 per head, 3 stars
Value: starter 2/5 main 3/5 dessert 4/5

3.5 / 5 then. Not bad. I would say its quite a pricey meal considering the quantity you actually get, but the grub is suitably unusual enough without being over poncified so I’m giving it a rating of RECOMMENDED.

Fags

To paraphrase Daphne du Maurier:

"once again, I stopped smoking".

Actually it was two days ago, but I thiought it would be better to blog it two days late than not at all.

I can't breathe, and that's the only reason why. I'm pumping Ventolin into my lungs 3-5 times overnight. This is shit.

If Cameron's Tories were Microsoft

You’ve just bought a new operating system for your PC. Maybe you’ve read reviews that call it the next best things since Windows 2000 (an OS which in my opinion was the most stable, reliable Microsoft offering ever). Some reviewers complain that it is too much like the current version of XP, which has reigned supreme for the last three or four years. Some say its too radically different – the colours are too way out, the means of getting your word processor to fire up are convoluted. But you bite the bullet anyway. This OS is the future and you’re going to be stuck with it at some point in time anyway. Might as well enjoy.

So you install the software. It looks great. Bill Gates gives you a personalised tour of the bits you need. Bells ring, whistles blow. The installation ends.

Then you try to fire up Word. Instead, the computer grinds down about 50 gears, the monitor fizzles, then some green text on a black background is displayed. Up pops Wordstar 2.1. In a window which looks scarily like…shock, DOS! DOS! That’s going back to age of dinosaurs isn’t it?

Well yes. You hunt around for Word in the filing system. Gone. You go onto the Internet (this is now purely ASCII based by the way) and on Google you find a file search facility like Spotlightt or Google Desktop. You start looking for documents. Well, whew! They’re still intact, but where is your word processor? It really has disappeared. And what’s more Wordstar 2.1 won’t touch your Word documents. Too new and high fallutin, apparently.

So the next thing to do is phone the helpline. “Is the replacement of Word with Wordstar 2.0 some kind of retro-inspired joke?”. “No”, you are told, “if you read the small print…”.

Excel has been replaced by a Lotus 1-2-3 beta.
Where the hell is Access?
GIVE ME MY SOFTWARE BACK!!!

So that’s it. You’ve now gone back in time 20 years. And unlike some versions of an OS, which allow you to re-install the previous version, this one just petulantly throws out the Windows XP disk (that’s when the drive doesn’t lock up entirely). You are sad, you mourn of the loss of your hard work.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why the current Conservative Party can’t win the next election. Great front end. Ancient, knackered software which would have been ashamed to have been seen on an Amstrad 1640 from 1984. Sure, the leader has the charisma of Blair c 1997 but the power elite behind the scenes is markedly 8 bit.