Last Saturday I went for a wander to Ely and Cambridge, after reading Corn Dolls, a detective thriller set on the Fens. The author, Patrick Lennon, really sold the area and like Christopher Moore's portrayals of San Francisco, the location is almost a character in its own right. Unfortunately, the transport in that part of Cambridgeshire is so dire that you can really on soak up the atmosphere with a car. So, yet more social exclusionism hitting home.

Despite being confined to the city limits, I can say that Ely is quite a pleasant city and feels nicely balanced with neither too much deprrivation and unlike Chichester (another cathedral city) the population don't appear to be snobbish about its status, despite it being well-and-true middle-of-the-road England. Bet the salaries are crap in general though.

Having arrived, I munched a burger from the growler stand in the market, known simply as "The Business", I can thoroughly recommend it - one of the best burgers I've had a while, or maybe it was just that I was a bit cold. The meat was...well, meaty, which was a pleasant surprise, aand the bacon was a large, lean lump.

I fell in love with the cathedral which is about as picture-book as it could be (and free to enter too). Some pictures of the cathedral ltseelf and a couple of shots of the stained glass are below.

Its a shame about the lack of transport though. Getting around middle England is near-nigh impossible without a car and its at times like these where the non-driver really does feel (and IS) a second-class citizen of this country.

A Titan-ic admission of guilt

I have managed to get through over three years of writing this blog without telling the world at large that I'm a transport nerd, especially when that transport concerns me directly - so any London centric news interests me. I'm not a fully fledged anorak, but I'm fairly close. Keen readers may have spotted that I tend to include stories about transport which interest me.

Well here's a nice couple of pictures I took while on my way home from work. I was passing, on a detour, Barking bus garage, when I spotted this little beauty parked outside, with its nose, sadly, facing the street, so there was no way I was going to get a frontward view. Here's a couple of sideways shots of London Titan T1, the first ever Titan to enter London service back in 1979. The bus was done up in full 70s paint job with 'multi-ride' labelling on the front. Attention to detail also includes the RD garage code on the side. Hornchurch garage (RomforD) no longer exists and this bus would have been transferred to nearly NS (North Street, Romford). For London bus nerds of 30 or 40-something vintage, this is a wonderfully evocative animal. I remember how excited I was, aged 10, when the first Metrobuses appeared on one of my local routes, the 90B from Kew Gardens to Yeading (as was then). I'd never heard anything like them, the they did make the future seem a brighter place.
A lot of people were upset when the last Routemaster was withdrawn from regular service use. I was pretty sad, but the Titans, Metros and even Fleetlines were my generation's London buses when the last Titan went, more or less unremarked, this was a sad moment for me. I can't get so an excited over an ALX400 or President, competent machines though they are.

Nicki the dog goes rasta

Spent a very relaxing weekend at the parents house after the first week of my new job. And what a well-deserved period of non-work it was too. The work is difficult (being the newbie) and I'm learning loads and don't feel as though I'm pulling my weight - though i suppose that will change in time as I get to learn new processes and routines.

Nicki, AKA Noodles, Lynn's new dog, did it dancehall stylee with her new rasta hat, worn, aherm, firmly, on her head. Just caught her before she flipped it!

Supernanny

I'm only writing this cos its on telly at the mo. d
Does anyone else find Supernanny, aka Jo Frost, really, really sexy?

I'm married to a big girl and find that mostly I'm drawn to the corpulant side of femalehood, but I reckon than if I wasn't a chubby-chaser I'd find Ms Frost a bit of a lust-magnet.

Trip to Tallinn

Got back from Tallinn last week. Estonia was great and I'd recommend it to a friend. Sadly (unless you're Estonian) its not a cheap city any more and tourist prices are about 10 percent less than London suburban - beer about £2.50 a pop, a good meal is about £20-25 a head. Here are a few pictures I took on the mobile. When I can be arsed I'll post some picture of the soviet style flatblocks I took on the proper camera.



Charge your battery with an Estonian Red Bull clone. Not a bad representation of a Duracell-esque cell.


The view from our hotel. Enhanced a wee bit on the Mac, but quite a nice colour palette I reckon.


The ornate, and somewhat gorgeous pink Russian cathedral in Toompea, the hill at the centre of the Old Town, a prime qualtiy bit of medieval real estate, though the church dates from the early 20th century.


A view of the lower town from the top of Toompea


The centre of the old town - Town Hall Square. Fan-bloody-tastic architecture and postively bursting with atmosphere. This has to be the most photogenic city we've been too, other than maybe Krakov, which I've possibly spelt wrong.

So what was Tallinn like? Different, espensive, surprising, not so much ex-Eastern Europe, but more up-and-coming Nordic/Scandinavian. If it weren't for the housing developments on the outskirts whcih comprise at least 200 tower blocks, then you could almost be in olde worlde Sweden or Finland. Worth a trip before it gets even more expensive and EasyJet certainly don't overcharge - I think we paid £60 return each, so a wee bargain.

We stayed at the Metropol Hotel, a 3 star. Comfortable without being luxurious and missing a few basic staples which I'd expect from a hotetl of this class - no coffee making facility or shampoo/soap in the bathroom. Beds get a high mark though and the room itself was about the same as a Premier Travel Inn. Bang for buck ration was fair though we've done better (I'd recommend the rather wonderful communist throwback for anyone travelling to Krakov, known as the Start. Walls stinking of cabbage, as though they had absorbed years of stinking condesation, but clean, cheap at £8 per night and with coffee machines too). A basic but very comfortable place if you don't mind a 20 minute trip into the centre by tram).

Three days before my new job

Am I nuts?

Have I bitten off more than I can chew?

Could it be the job from hell dressed up in Prada?

We'll see.

In just over three days time.

Plenty of space in which to shit myself blue.

I've left my job!

My last day at at my current place of work came to an end on Friday. Nearly 11 years of service and I can't say I'm sad to leave.

I'll be missing some people, but since I decided when creating this blog not to namecheck my friends, especially those connected with work, by name, I can't, regrettably, give this item of somewhat significant news much justice. If you're one of them and should stumble across this blog, my thanks probably extends to you.

Work has become a hotbed of politics of late. Too much politics, too much (and ever-expanding) layers of upper management re-arranging deckchairs as the Titanic drifts towards the iceberg. I'm not saying the my ex-employer's future will be end in tears or even be especially bleak - events tend to ride themselves out - but working there isn't the same as it was for the first five years or so. As everywhere now, an honest day's work cannot be had without involving huge swathes or corporate bollocks intervening, and to honest, I just don't care enough about them to be arsed. There have been some large holes in this blog where I've simply been too demotivated or simply depressed to write anything, and much of this is as a direct result from what was going on in the workplace.

Despite this, I have come across some fine people there. Some of these lovely colleagues, the ones who didn't get away before I did anyhow, gave me what I would have most wanted, having just about all the material goodies I reckon I need in life.

Food.

Salami, pork pies, Harribo sour jellies which I can't get enough of, and cider. They know me so well. In a vain nod towards the healthy lifestyle I don't possess (or ever will), they even included an apple. Wasn't there enough health-promoting Magners already?

So fairwell old employer. Hello new one (in two weeks' time). More news on that when it happens.

A nice (I said NICE) brown Rover 2000

I haven't seen one of these beauties for a while. One of our family friends had a turquoise one. A P reg I think, back in 1980 or so. Went like a rocket, though to me, always felt old fashioned. This example was captured a street round the corner from where I work in Kings Cross.

The end of the unrefurbished Ds is nigh

They're disappearing fast.

The unrefurbished D-stock trains on the District Line, that is. I took a picture of this silver beast against a suitably grey sky. While I shan't ultimately miss their old-style wooden slat flooring, horrible bright silver lighting, installed about 2002 - and what exactly was wrong with the pinky-peach fluorescents they came with? - and their garish "pizza topping" seat covers, I will miss their PROPER comfortable seats, which are not like tea-trays with a small amount of token padding and their quite seriously good heating which caused a wonderful dry, used smelling fug on cold winter days to fill the train.

I've been on these since 1980 or so, when they were first introduced to the tube and so I can't help but feel a little nostalgic about them passing. Another year or so and that'll be that for the unpainted silver tubes. Which were only introduced to save money on paint. Until then, most tubes were painted either red or white. The silver tubes, as can be seen here, were also a graffiti magnet, hence the re-introduction of painted bodies.

I'll miss their shabby comfort. But like ELO, a band I love to this day, am I glad we've moved on? To quote a certain nodding dog, ohhh yes.

And finally, these are by far the most reliable tubes on the network with old fashioned tried and trusted "garden shed" technology tucked beneath. I hope TfL think long and hard before replacing them technologically advanced depot-hogs. And while they're about it, get the dreadfully iffy signalling sorted out. I wonder, now Metronet is out of the way, whether we'll notice a difference in station and track refurbishment. After a promising start, it looks as though MN just gave up. So they deserved to not be handed over any extra money - they were not cheap and provided an inefficient, slow maintenance program. Anyway, we're drifting off elsewhere.

Inside....

...and out

The great Cambridge Folk Festival Trip - part 3

SATURDAY AND SUNDAY

Apart from being rained out on Saturday evening, the two remaining days were rather fantabulous. Musical highlights included guitarist Martin Simpson, the gorgeous of voice and body Kate Rusby and the UK Ukelele Orchestra who did covers of pop tunes on, not surprisingly, ukeleles, including a chord sequence from Handel where pop and rock tunes were superimposed - the dreadful I Will Survive, Hotel California, Love Story Theme, Killing Me Softly and about eight others. Movingly clever stuff. Toots and the Maytals put on a great party rocker of a show, headlining on Saturday. I wasn't so keen on Sunday's bill-topper, Nanci Griffith and was too wet to enjoy Joan Baez. I would hardly call myself a die-hard fan, but she IS a legend. But played the quite awful Imagine at the end of her set so loses Dukc street cred.

Toots and the Maytals. They were tootin'. Monkey Man - ya, go go go.

Now Lottie takes a chill pill and lies languidly in the sun.

The wonderful Rachel Unthank and the Winterset. They got a new fan today. Me. What a lovely tune the opener to their new Album is. Check their myspace site out www.myspace.com/rachelunthank and listen to Felton Lonnen Radio. Does that not sound like the Geordie Bjork? Lovely chappesses, entertaining, funny and by this track potentially quite dark. The album is mine.

The Great Cambridge Folk Festival Trip - part 2

FRIDAY

Quite a mellow start to the day with breakfast at Cowbelles Chuck Wagon, a steak and sawdust type affair (note: nice gets big brownie points for very decent and FRESH cheese baguettes). Returning to the tent afterwards, I noticed a label had been placed on our tent. This was a nomination for being the loudest snorers on site. I'm quite proud of that as you can imagine though to be honest I'm not sure if anyone for certain whether the culprit was Mrs D or myself since both of us are prime candidates.


Snoring for Cambridge

Heading off for to the main fest site, we did the usual festival things. Eat, shop, lie around in drying mud and smoke the occasional festival green gear.

Mmmmm, nice veggie Indian grub. That'll keep the folkies happier than the thought of hoofing down that big wad of dead animal I'm cruisin' on.


These aren't just clouds. These are Marks and Spencer's symbols of the festival weather we were granted; good mixture of half rain, half cloud cloud, half sun. Half baked metaphor too.


Corie and Goose chilling in the sunshine.

The main stage at dusk

The great Cambridge Folk Festival Trip - part 1

Here are some of the pictures I captured on my phone-cam of our trip to Cambridge for the annual Folk Festival. Having been rather sceptical at the thought of spending four days in the company of Joan Baez, Nanci Griffith, not to mention a host of Oirish fiddle-di-dee type flute tootlers, it turned out to be a rather pleasant event, made even more pleasanter by the company of Anna, Ian, Goose and Corie - and of course Mrs Daggersdukc ensconced as she was quite often in her famous bright red and blue "spidey-suit". There were ups and downs, but mainly a good time was had by all.

Thursday
Goose and Corie had bought with them a new tent, as yet unassembled. This was going to be a difficult erection (and putting up the tent would prove quite difficult too bearing in mind it was raining heavily and that damn wind was blowing at force five or more.

This tent isn't going to work, is it?



OK, lets calm down and work this out. The bottom half of Mrs DD's spidey suit is on full display and let's face it - she'll need all the superpowers of Spiderman to add the bottom half of the tent to its outer in that wind.



BUT SHE DID IT - along with a lot of help from Ian that is. Up she rises.

Our tent. Looking smug and ready for temporary festival sleeping

Oh boy. What a cliche. So this is is a folk festival right? Surely the odd rainbow must come into it since folksters and hippies were often the same people and actually believe in some of that gaia/peace and love crud (I am of course aware this is a blatant stereotype but indulge me, pur-leeze). And as if to order, at around 2010, a multi-coloured Mother Nature approved portent of general wellbeing and other such bollocks appeared, right above the main stage. You couldn't pay for this sort of thing to happen. How's your Burt's lumbago, Mrs Jones? Not being ironic here - that was a lovely sight to behold.

More dereliction

I honestly don't go out of my way to find these, but while I was scoping out the area around my possible new employer, at the end of the 369 bus route at Thames View, Barking, these Cadiz Court style beauties found me. There were at least three of these flatblocks. I wil come here again, and get a pictorial sense of the sinister and sad at night. I lived in a tower block for two years and loved it. Admittedly, it was at Warmington Tower, a hall of residence block next to Goldsmiths' College in New Cross, a well maintained place, but I was always jealous of anyone who grew up in one. I spent my childhood in a nice but boring terrace house and live in one now. Thought I love having a garden, I always saw myself moving to a tower, especially one of the higher ones in Hackney - Trowbridge Estate or Holly Street would have been just fine.

Is Barking and Dagenham Council having a bad day with their tower blocks? I really can't see what's wrong with these, besides their generaly closed-down-ness. Anyone local, like Yaki Noodles commentator, know the area better than me and can explain what's going on?

Mrs Dukc on holiday

This is weird. I'm on my own for a few days while Mrs DD visits her N. Irish rellies. I feel...obsolete and empty. Is this what being involuntarily single would feel like all the time?

I never, ever EVER thought I'd ever feel like this. I was quite a happy and a reasonably successful singleton and hardly ever a resentful or jealous one. Nearly always with someone when I wanted to be, plenty of friends, driking 3-4 nights a week - OK, so I couldn't do THAT now, I'm 38 now after all.

Being married changes you in ways you could not expect. Missing her and doing things I'd like to do instead, like read, a little luxury I haven't indulged since...well I'll go into my work woes in another entry since I want an early night tonight and the account would take me half an hour to write at least.

Seven years married August 20th. Does the infamouse itch kick in then? Certainly don't feel like it could now. Being married feels comfortable, familiar and safe, but with enough good banter and sparring to stop the boredom from setting in. Mrs D is a supreme debater though she'd probably deny it.

Wandering around London

Spent yesterday having a pleasant meander along the South Bank with Mrs DD and my favourite niece, Stacey. The Turkish festival which was basically a promo for food and holiday companies, was quite a disappointment, mainly because the venue, Bernie Spain Gardens, near the Oxo building was far too diminutive for the purpose. There should really have been more stalls selling food as well since we could only find three or four. We also bought some of the most disgusting yoghurt-based drink ever. It tasted like warm jizz, no kidding. Uck. Needed a diet coke to clear the taste. The only thing viler than this is Maubi fizz, a Caribbean drink. Its only worse because it lies to you and pretends its going to be a sweet little number. Smell - sweet. Initial taste. Matches smell. Pleasant. A tad sweet but no worse than regular Coke, say. Then 15 seconds afterwards, the bitterest and nastiest aftertaste kicks in. Imagine paint stripper and we're probably not too far away. Its a nasty, unpleasant surprise and how anyone can move onto a second bottle of it is far beyond my ken.

We also took in Tate Modern. We thought we might go see the Dali exhibition, but at £11 a ticket, this may be one I do on my own since Stace was only so-so into it and Lynn's would only get my interpretation of his paintings which seeing as my sight's not up to much anyway, may be a little skew-whiff. Not to mention confused.

The "girls" then went on and booked themselves an afternoon's play at the Globe (Othello) the jammy buggers.

Here's a picture I took of the inside of the old Bankside Power Station, home of Tate Modern, using my new Sony Ericsson K800i camera phone. This is by far the bestest phone snapper I've ever come across. My mate has a 3 megapixel Nokia N95 which I'd like to see strutting its stuff. The results of what this wee phone can do are quite amazing and I'm pretty impressed. Its quite a brick and doesn't do some of the things my Samsung D900 does, such as repeat message alerts ad nauseam, a feature I got to like for its self-annoyance factor. Generally I am extremely happy with it though there was a little jam-up yesterday which a restart cleared. Watch this space I suppose.

Subversive snapping on the Victoria Line

There's nothing unusual about the guy in the photo. Victoria Line tube train. Passenger scene.

EXCEPT...while me and the wife and Nicki were on the Victoria Line, heading towards Walthamstow earlier today, he whipped out his camera and without asking us, started snapping. His camera was a little compact digital, not a mobile, and with a proper flash, which was the firing of which drew my attention. Did he assume that because we were being accompanied by a guide dog that "neither" of us could see?

Wrong!

So not to be out-done, I firstly gave him a hard stare while he snapped his second masterpiece, and secondly, managed to get a picture of him on my mobile. I also asked him to "say cheese" and to be fair to the chap, he was smiling in the shot.

But what a cheek for not asking - even if it was only the dog he was after.

Seeing Fountains of Wayne

Tomorrow, myself, Mrs DD, Goose and Corie are heading off to see the best pure-pop outfit currently making music, and that band is the fantastic, the awesome and the musically gorgeous Fountains of Wayne. They are playing at the Astoria and I'll hopefully be able to post a picture or two of them after the gig. Really looking forward to some good old fashioned British inspired power pop.

Best FoW track? So hard to decide. Little Red Light from Welcome Interstate Managers and Mexican Wine from the same era, as well as Radiation Vibe from their self-titled first album and Red Dragon Tattoo from Utopia Parkway...but then there's the downbeat and beautiful Troubled Times with its melancholic Wurlitzer electric piano... I just can't make up my mind!

Birthday

Had my birthday shindig at the Yaki Noodle House (reviewed here) yesterday. No problem with coping with sudden invasion of 15 blindos and three dawgs. The food was liked by all but one of my party. Fortunately complacency hasn't yet set in and they still offer excellent quality food and service. Since Googling for this restaurant, the only thing which pops up as a result is this blog. Surely there must be another review, either a pro or just a humble blogger, able and willing to review it. The lack of a review, even a poor one, just tells me just how parochial the London dining world is. I do know this place is nothing special, but sites like the chillisource.com review local kebaberies. Come on guys.
Afterwards, spent some quality drinking time at the Barking Dog, a Wetherspoons, opposite. As part of their Real Ale Festival, one of the beers on offer was this particularly lurid looking green one below, named Silent Spring.


Sadly, the beer didn't taste especially unusual.

Twasn't a bad birthday overall, especially for a not-particularly-important 38th.

Daffs in Rose Lane

I'm not really a photographer, and certainly not a photographer of nature, but I was walking through the Rose Lane Estate in Chadwell Heath on Thursday evening and noticed these daffodils growing what seemed like in a planned way and though that they were considerably prettier than what our council provides for us round here - nowt. And its the same borough too. So what have Rose Lane residents done to deserve this display of yellow?

Unsafe and scared

This sign worries me. The question I want to know is, "what do they do to you if you're an unsafe driver?"

Odd things happen around Parsloes Avenue late at night and three milkmen have reported a slaughterhouse stench wafting over the Heathway during the wee small hours.

Spring

I don't want to tempt a cold north wind, but it seems as though spring is here at last.

Cleared out the garden and I'm hoping that next week we'll be able to sit in it. After the paving job, I'm looking forward to parking my butt down with Mrs D, Nicki the dog, a few mates and a collection of alcoholic bevvies.

This time, after a winter where me and the wife have been feeling the strain work-wise, its nice to be saying goodbye to winter. Our working lives may be stressy, and basically a hard slog with few day-to-day rewards, but at least the evenings and weekends will be looked forward to with gusto.

We took Nicki out to HaInault Forest yesterday as an alternative to Epping. She loved running around with Max the half-lab, half-German Shepherd, and swimming in the lake. The lazy bitch, soaking and a bit smelly fell asleep on the bus too.


Here's a picture of the forest. I have a quite long video of the dogs chasing each other buts 6.5 megs and I can't see a way of posting videos on Blogger anyhow. Reckon I have to pay or summat.

Streetlights - but why?

A few minutes walk from Cadiz Court are these. Streetlights. Yeah. So what. But look at where the post is. Why is it here? It looks like the kind of streetlights you would find in the middle of a busy dual carriageway. And yet they would shine, if they were to light up at all, which they don't by the way, on precisely nothing. Unless you think of a marshy bit of parkland as a dangerous road. Yet another surreal site in a borough which is closely becoming amalgamated into the nether region that is...The Twilight Zone.



Seen from the road itself, you can see the park beyond the fence.




...and here, once again are the "lights" - this time taken from the park and looking towards the houses. I'm not convinced the devices on the end of the arms are lights at all - they look more like CCTV cameras or maybe some kind of siren?

If anyone has any further information about them, do tell.

Daylight pictures of Cadiz Court

Not half as creepy as the last all-red effort, but nevertheless, Cadiz Court (the flats, obviously) still look sad, neglected, and potentially malevolent. I know my imagination is a bit much sometimes, but if this block were a gentleman, he would be a forgetful, sometimes mentally ill hobo with a bad scabies problem and a liking for small boys.

Scary picture

I was coming home from work via Rainham. As I was bimbling along on the 103 bus, it passed these flats - Cadiz Court as I later found out. I'd seen this block for years and didn't take much heed - except - I noticed there were no lights on. At all. Anywhere. The place wa abandoned. It even spouted a couple of mobile phone masts for that additional air of otherworldliness. I had to have a further look, and did. Trying the take a picture of the rear of the building, which is in a residential street, was impossible because of a lack of lighting. Most of the pictures on this site are 'vox pop' and taken with my trusty and nearly perfectly featured Samsung D900 phone (8 out of 10, highly recommended).

But it hasn't a flash. And the flats have a massive wall round them saying things like 'if you trespass here, you'll be chased kicking and screaming by a devil who has mental problems, new trainers and a set of Sabatier knives'. You get the idea. So this was taken on Rainham Road South itself and the because I'd been messing around with my phone at the back of the flats trying to make it take a picture of something which wasn't a square of black, the colour settings were screwed.

I ran it through the Mac and added sepia, but to be honest, although the colour wasn't as wild, and probably more representive of what I actually saw, drenched in a washed out brown-pink, I much preferred the red that my cameraphone captured, and so present it here.

May Cadiz court rest in peace. For 44 years it has housed families, both happy and sad, angry, disturbed and pleasant. Now looks like the kind of tower block in which only nightmares reside.

Jaywick on Sea - the bleakest place in England?

Here's a picture of Austin Avenue (taken from http://www.essexphotos.co.uk/

I knew once a rather posh, confident girl called Kate who grew up in Maldon and who used to go on about how scummy Jaywick, near Clacton is. Recently, one of our neighbours has been forced to move there because they can't afford the mortgage due to the husband leaving work due to disability. But Kate really was a few class grades above to put it gently. With a day off from the wife, I took a bus there from Clacton and your ''greeting', ie if you prefer, entry into the Twiglet Zone, for that is how it felt, believe you me, started when the bus left relatively oridinary 1930s suburbia and entered what I described to Lynn as 'township on sea'.

Now, if anyone from Jaywick is reading this, puh-leeeeze, don't think I'm having a pop at your town. He who comes from Dagenham, after all, has very little right to be snobby about anyone else's yard. Its just, for once, I'm shocked. Oh bugger it, if you are offended, I don't much care, you've heard it all before anyway.

The bus starts out by taking a road onto a brownfield site. The sort of place which you can imagine once contained animal feed factories and will, after the heavy duty decontamination work has been done, truckloads of heavy metals have been transported somewhere else, and in a year's time, the site will be host to sprawling avenues of Prescott Mansions of the tickytackiest order. But no. The houses, should you deign to call them that, are built already. Quite futuristic looking Swedish style wooden shacks are on both side of the road. You do a double take. Wood works in Sweden, but it doesn't work here. This style of building works in Sweden because they know how to care for wood structures and how to prettify them. These places don't look cared for, or prettified. But they contain a huge slab of (liff word) zeerust. They are almost ghostly - they should not be in England in 2007. This isn't a class or snob thing, far from it. They don't belong because cerise pink sky just doesn't belong. Looking at their not-belongingness gave me the creeps in a trans-siberian motorway sense. Nick, a guy who took a lot of the pictures of the town on essexphotos.co.uk, seems to have placed an inordinate number of shots of signs declaring the dangers of tsharp rocks, riptides and sharp shellfish you can injure yourself on and posted liberally along the sea (correction, mud) front. These amused me. It amused me that there is a whole road of bungalows (shacks) whose front windows look at not the sea but at a brown wall which presumably was put up after the floods of the 50s.

Essex, until the 50s, was famous for its 'plotlanders' who, being mainly reasonably well-off working class East Enders, bought a small parcel of land in and could pretty well do whatever they wanted with it, including building houses. Historically, I believe this was due to the fact that Essex, being a marshy county, wasn't parcelled up for agribusiness in the way most land in England had been. I'm not sure whether Jaywick was plotlander territory, but if it was, it explains the way the place looks since it reminded of old pictures of Basildon I saw before it became the new town of today. Jaywick looks like a throwback from the 50s, or before.

The pub is called the "Never Say Die'. We need to visit that too. Either the place is going to be full of boiled and carrots eating cockneys from the 30s or the kind of redneck with three eyes and where the women look like men and the men look like asylum escapees. With guns, probably. They smuggle them in from Holland when the tide is high enough not to get the bottom of your boat ripped to pieces by the sharp shellfish or grounded in soft mud.

My comments, actually aren't directed out of any sense of dislike to the place. In fact, I am very much drawn to it. Plotlanders in Basildon were paid a pittance for their sites when they were forcibly bought in the 50s. Once again the working class try and better themselves only to be sharfted by those who own or who can buy the law. It was a noble cause, a chance for those who had grated to buy into a system that had hitherto been beyond their reach. No doubt the Basildon Plotlanders were offereed very fair rents on the council houses they were not in a position to refuse. The very unplanned nature of the place is appealing. Its just that when I saw a black child for the first time (as I did at the late age of five), the first though I had - translated from the infant is "this can't be..." as all my preconceptions about what humans look like had to be reset and adjusted for the new circumstances. This is the case with Jaywick. Its not that I dislike the place, its just I'd never imagined somewhere like it could exist. And it does.

I'll be back there.

Review of Yaki Noodle House, Barking, Essex

arking is famous for its fishing industry - that was until it closed down in late Victorian times. It is famous for its pound shops and it has a wide selection of kebab shops though it isn't especially famous for them being great. For that you'd need to visit Stoke Newington or Green Lanes.

Its these kebab shops though that I want to write about. Or rather, it is is the fact these venerable establishments now have a rival in the form of the Yaki Noodle House. Conveniently situated opposite the station, the Yaki is a newly opened cafe/restaurant selling a mixture of classic noodle dishes, ramen soups, Chinese, Vietnamese and Thai dishes. In fact, the whole of Oriental Asia is at your beck and call.

First, I've got to start of with two observations before we even get on to the food. It is clean. I mean, really, really clean to the point where you could probably perform operations safely there. You would pick up MRSA anyhow. I dropped some money and floor was completely dirt free. It looks it, and I know now, it feels it. Good. Noodle places are really just Taiwanese factory canteens. Food should be quickly served, pleasant but basic, with no frills service and presentation and I think any South Korean factory would be proud to have a place as clean as the Yaki serving its workers. Secondly, it is empty. This is cause for concern as two friends of mine have recommended it to me. My friends aren't unusually weird in their choice or opinion of food. But on a Friday night, I'd expect there to be a reasonable selection of Barking's finest there. Sadly, there was me, Adam-no-mates, and two others. Two more came in for a take-away, and that was it. I can't see how a place this empty can operate for long, so let's just hope the word spreads.

And the word, from me, is a good one. Excellent is what the word is. I can find very little to fault with anything. I know this sounds more than a little partisan, perhaps bland beyond belief, but my baptism by noodles was at the Tai Wan Mein in Greenwich. Yep, Wagamamas may be older but the TWM was where it all started for me and it will always set the benchmark. Yaki puts it to shame. Not only is it clean, but the lady who served me was friendly and courteous, the food was served on nice white, square plates and the food contained just the right balance of everything to be...well pretty much unfaultable. I had lamb in sao sa sauce (not sure what this is, but wanted to try it). It was mildly curry-ish, with hints of coconut and chilli and served with peppers and just-so fried lamb peices. No sign of MSG. Noodles were basic, plain and completely grease-free. Spot on.

I hope the Yaki does well. Barking deserves it as is almost nothing outside the kebab zone (plus a smattering of so-so curry houses, plus a selection of actually rather good curry houses). Yaki fulfils the Barking main food need - cheap and lots of it. The fact that my plate was also of fine quality helps things along nicely.

Its just a shame no-one else knows about it yet.

Service: 10/10
Quality: 9/10
Value: £5.50. 10/10
Overall: ***** Excellent

Is it the right kind of snow?

Blimey. It snowed today apart from a bit of a problem on the Hammersmith and City Line, which lets face it, doesn't need anything as contraversial as snow to cause it to grind to a halt, the railways ran fine (none of the usual 'wrong type of snow' excuses to be heard). Took the usual amount of time to get to and from work. At last, maybe we as a nation are doing what the Scots and Swedes do every year.

PHOTO - Snow covers our wee street

Supercasino. Great location choice, chaps

So Manchester go the supercasino!

CLEV-UH. About as clever as anything else this bunch of incompetents have planned. What were NuLab thinking of?

I think any supercasino is a pretty crap idea, but the decision to put in Manchester takes some beating for incompetence in my opinion. The choice of the Dome would have been a supreme farce as well, since the attraction (if you can call it that) of Las Vegas is that it is the middle of nowhere and there wasn't much to see or do other than playing the slots and poker tables, hence the hotels charge almost nothing knowing that you'd be pulled to the cards or fruities. The idea in Greenwich's case, was a stick a giant hotel near the dome, which couldn't have charged next-to-nothing prices as its only 15 minutes away on the Jubillee Line to central London, so would have been a conveniently cheap site for tourists not the slightest bit interested in throwing money away on blackjack. And since this is going to be white elephant anyhow, it would have been laughable to have created not one, but two on the same site. Manchester though? Beswick is a poor quarter, isn't best served by transport (no tram, yet) and is in a location not associated with fun, as would have been the case with Blackpool, the tackiest kind of fun, but nevertheless, fitting some kind of criteria in the same way that Atlantic City is also tacky, gaudy full of the American equivalent of kiss me quick hats (check out any early Bruce Springsteen album which seems to focus on this part of New Jersey prominently).

I think the government, knowing the whole idea of a supercasino has turned out to be a dead loss, plan to deliberately fail it by placing it in a no-hope location, so at least they can shrug and say to those Mafia types in America and the nu-rich Russians with far too much money who are both certainly up to their necks in this face: "I'm sorry guys, we tried our hardest to convince 'em, but the Brits just ain't falling for this £10,000 jackpot lark".

I give it a year. Then bye bye. Or a government subsidy to keep it open in the name of 'job retention'. They did it with the Saudis and BAE, so why not?

Review of the Quality Chop House

The Quality Chop House is one of those old London institutions in that it has traded at the same spot on Farringdon Street, more-or-less opposite the Grauniad, since 1880. On the outside it looks like a Victorian gin palace, and inside - well all I can say is that working class bottoms in Victorian times were considerably leaner than 21st century posterii. Bench seating and very narrow tables make eating quite uncomfortable, but overall I'd rather do it this way than have the place gutted and turned into a parody of itself. This is the real deal, so like living in a slightly breezy cottage, its worth putting up with its faults in order to experience its genuine charms.

The ambience is nice and homely, with warm lighting, a steamy atmosphere and helpful staff. The menu was fairly comprehensive and there is more on it than just meat. You can buy fish, snails and there's a reasonably wide veggie selection too. I had a steak tartare as a starter - fresh and tasty with just enough dill involved to kick arse. My main course of venison and mushroom pie appeared a little wimpy in its size, but game is so rich that I left with quite a bloat on my - and I can eat. But I think charging for extra veggies other than mashed spud is stingy. Dessert was one of the highlights, a crisp-on-the-outside-gooey-on-the-inside chocolate hot muffin type thingy, which was moist and perfect. My daughter, being an awkward cuss, wanted a very basic variation of a fish and chip meal (extra cheese, no veg). No problem. The sign of a customer-friendly restaurant.

However, much as I liked the food in this place, I think it was a tad expensive. Working-class it certainly isn't (not if you compare prices to real working class food such as pie 'n' mash anyhow). £28 a head (with two beers each). Not cheap, and the quality is on par with a good gastro-pub so I think you should be paying 25 percent less. This seemed to be opinion of the five others I ate with.

Service: 8/10 (the waiter was obviously new and nervous, but willing to go the extra mile)
Quality: 8/10
Value for price: 6/10
Recommended: Yes, but you can eat just as well for less.

Travelling

Had a week off work last week - and so I did the usual thing, which is to say I travelled some some lovely unglamourous towns. Last time, my combination of annual leave and a couple of train tickets took me to Bolton and Manchester (with a diversion to Burnham on Crouch). This time, the hotspots which are Telford and Norwich. I'll be blogging these spots later this week, so watch this apcee, and prepare to be stunned.

I can hear the yawns already.

Funeral for a friend

My friend Tracey died last Sunday. She wasn't someone I knew well in person - in fact we'd only met four or five times, but we'd shared an internet mailing list and knew one another quite well over the years, and I found her to be wise, thoughtful and blisteringly funny at times.

She had met her husband Graham via the same egroup and it was a privilege for myself and Mrs DD to attend their wedding last July (q.v).

The cancer which she had been born with - retinal blastoma which afflicted the eyes, meaning they had been removed from her being a baby - came back with a vengeance just before her wedding. This return was always on the cards, and Tracey knew that it was probably a case of when rather than if. She was a fighter throughout her life, but she wasn't any match for it this time.

Her funeral was on Friday and although this sad event, like most, but especially this one, as she as was a mere 38, it was more a celebration of her life rather than a (pretty good) excuse to weep and wail. I am pretty dang sure Tracey would have approved of this way of being sent off.

Me and Mrs DD will try and keep in contact with Graham her husband - hopefully we'll be seeing him in a few weeks.

Tracey, the original Cornish pastie - RIP my love. You're already much missed.

A few days not working

A few days holiday due. I didn't get any days off at Christmas because I didn't book early enough so I've a few days to do as I like. Which could involve going to Telford (cos I like new towns) and possibly seeing my old mucker Alex, and his wife Carol, who live in Birmingham while en route. Or I may just do nothing. We'll see how cold it is, as it was certainly getting rather wintry this afternoon.

Why UK television comedy will from now on be shit

When the Weakest Link first came onto our TV screens, my dad made a comment along the lines of 'that will be the death of TV that will'. I wasn't entirely sure what this muttered gobbledygook meant at the time, but I thought it gloomily amusing enough a thought to file it away in my memory banks.

Mrs D-D and I were talking, on the way home from a trip to Iceland earlier today, about the question as to why comedy today is so uninteresting. And although I'm sure this explanation has been mentioned by the pundits before, its not one I'd thought about, and Mrs D-D's proposition is quite simple. More of this in a sec.

Over Christmas I watched On the Buses with my darling family. While the slapstick was crass, the jokes a bit lame (though I liked some of the scenery - where were all the cars? back then) there was something very cheesily inclusive about it. I know people who aren't necessarily carbon copies of Blakey and co, but do share characteristics that would have been easy to caricature in 1972.

And here's the point.

Comedy no longer laughs with people, as On The Buses did, but at people. The BBC wrote comedy that was by and largely about middle class Britain and it was aimed at middle-class Britain. Programmes like Only Fools and Horses were the incredibly successful exceptions to the rule, and they were of Delboy and Rodders, not poking snide fun at them even though the script obvious did on a surface level. ITV made bad comedy. Not bad-bad but that which could pull in advertising rating. Lowest common denominator stuff but, if you've ever written for kiddies, you'll know that this is the hardest audience to please. In the same way that a mass audience had a bullshit detector that bloody well knew when it having the piss taken out of it by some media snob. Media snobs didn't make ITV money. They made programmes which appealed to them. And since societally we weren't half as media savvy as we are now, there weren't the sheer numbers of media snobs in the first place.

When you see those list programmes featuring the 100 worst or most embarrassing TV, Love Thy Neighbour is always mentioned. Now I'm far too young to remember it, though I do remember the Fosters and Mixed Blessings which covered roughly the same ground. LTN is ALWAYS dissed. Always. And the people who diss it probably either a) never watched it because they were having their nappies changed, or b) are, by my definition at least, very middle class. The fact they are now pundits now makes them so at least. What I can say is that my granny loved it. Truly loved it, and she certainly wasn't a racist, at least not by today's definition. She was of Jewish decent and was extremely proud of that. Half her church was non-white and it just wasn't an issue with her. TV is only seen as embarrassing by a generation who eiher didn't get the humour in the first place, or who retrospectively 'get it' and are ashamed of themselves liking it (I used to like Mind Your Language a lot, but would find it cringeingly embarrassing to watch now, so guilty as charged of hypocrisy. Except I'm only writing a no-man-army blog making me the grand total of £ zilch and these pundits are preaching their revisionist bullshit to millions. Which strikes me as more than a little false). It was only with the wonderful, knowing acting of Warren Mitchell as Alf Garnett that racism became acceptable - oooh look at that silly arsehole having a go at those poor niggers - oops, did I say that? - I meant coloureds next door. Isn't he horrible? And aren't we lovely people for putting up with the Johnson's at number 42. Lovely family, lovely family... Weren't we all so fucking ironic little sophisticats?

So what happened to the great bullshit detecting ability of the great British public. Nothing. What happen was that Thatcher appeared and killed the solid "we're all in this shit together" mentality of the British working class and made us compete with each other. For jobs, the a promotion, for housing with the right to buy scheme. Divide. Conquer. Old rules, still works. Comedy-wise you can see the beginnings of the mock the hand that feeds you school of laughmongery with Spitting Image. Now I for one found Spitting Image one of the best comedic expressions there has been. It also unleashed a secret weapon - one that always been in the armoury, just one which had been forgotten about, and its the simplest and yet most devastating one. If you want to bring something down, laugh at it. Politician been sleeping with rent-boy? Who needs scandalous headlines when a few well aimed chops with the fist armed full of jokes can be that more a threat. Politicians set themselves up to be mocked, and for the first time, on a mass scale, we did. Then we turned the bloody tables on ourselves.

After WW2 itself, then rations and large scale austerity, there was a sense of maybe not the class structure as we knew it as dead and buried, but at least of it giving out its last writhing throes. Things could never return to upstairs-downstair pre-war conditions, could they? The white heat of technology, housing for all after the war, very few people, at least as the 60s exploded into life, were in absolute poverty. This would made the class structure dead. This would make us, eventually all equal. What utter and complete rubbish that wee populist dream was, but how much the vast majority believed it. How tasty a morsal it must be been, dangling an inch from our noses. The spirit of optimism may have been in the air, but the spirit of truth wasn't as the 70s its oil crises and winter of discontent made us all draw together round the metaphorical hearth once again as we did when Germany was bombing the bejesus our of land. We all know about Thatcherism's success in whipping away the solid, stolid and at times stultifying bedrock of the working class away. Now we could complete against each other. Now we could own our own house! Now we could be like those suburbanites in Surbiton with their BMWs. Now Romford man could apply market stall ethics to the trading floor. Now we could be free to not giving a flying-f about our neighbour. Set the dogs fighting amongst themselves for what appeared to be tastier scraps - the odd Versace suit, better quality DIY products, bigger widescreen TVs. Compared with the amount the bottom 90 percent earn in this country, what's left to fight over is scraps, despite the air of bling attached them. 10 percent of the wealth, land and profits 'shared' amongst 90 percent of the populace. And the bling looks so sparkly, the rewards for 'success' - read 'most successful shaftage of neighbour' appear so tempting. Doesn't it?

Set in this light, its hardly surprising that we can't do comedy any more. And why Americans are seen as doing it better - America, at least the large middle slice, being more homogenous than the UK's population. How can we laugh at ourselves when not only don't we not know who are 'ourselves' but even when we do, we despise that very body for being so ordinary, so embarrasing, so...crap.

I find myself doing this a lot, so I'm not aiming for holier-than-thou sainthood. I look down on fellow Dagenham-ites. Many of whom work as hard if not harder than me, earn as much, possibly much more money as me, live in the same ticky-tacky house as me and just try and get by, the same as me. I should see the guys round here as my equals because they are, at least that. And the reason I don't is because I don't want to be here - I want to live a lifestyle which doesn't involve an hour's slog into town each way each day, coming back to a pebbledasheed home, stopping off at the supermarket whose front door is surrounded by mong children, then eating the same food, watching the same telly. I'm BETTER than them aren't I? No, of course not.

So getahead mentality kicks in: Soon we'll be mill-yun-airs. Bollox we'll be, but its he same false ethos which was the engine behind Only Fools and Horses has been engraved our our thought processes and our dreams as it was with the fictional Peckhamites. Except, whereas Delboy was laughable but endearing (and hey, he actually did something in a vain attempt to achieve the end, ridiculous as it is) we not only believe, that I that we ought to be doing something better, we're WORTH IT) but many of us believe that this social leap is ours by birthright and we can achieve this jump by doing fuck-all because we're WORTH IT.

And now comedy, and particular the new comedy, reality TV, deprived of good old racism as a weapon, TV does nothing more than take the piss out of everyone else. Who is: FAT. Who is: OLD. Who is: AN ADDICT. Who is: A MONG! Who is: UP TO THEIR EARS IN DEBT. Who is: DISABLED. If telly had more balls and didn't just make a loud noise, the most obvious target is of course: Who is MUSLIM. Basically, anyone who doesn't conform. Which actually is just about everyone. Even the super-rich are fair game. Look at the way the Beckhams have been set up so that they can be shaken down again.

So my dad's comment was right, though he got the order wrong. The Weakest Link can only work in a society which is so competitive that its members feel a need to compete with everyone else. It is not the cause, but merely and indicator of where things have seriously become screwed. The Weakest Link should be a game where you, as the strongest link, try to keep on board the second strongest link until the end of the game, so that you can bank the maximum amount of money. But time and time I've seen the strongest player reject the second strongest link too early because they are a rival, or because they are a woman, or because they don't like the player's bald patch. And maybe that's just a reflection of society in that we sometimes don't see our friends and allies because they are not obviously like us. They might be blind, or stammer, or be a different race, or hang around in a different milieu to us, therefore they are not ONE OF US.

Until the working class becomes united in believing in itself again, by actually recognising its members (most of whom would strongly deny any kind of membership and certainly not with HIM, or HER or Mr Ali from round the corner, the sense of solidarity can never happen and we'll all be at each other's throats battling it out in our own Satre-esque mini hells where we are isolated from one another by fear. Can this coming together happen. No. Its just a dream. Emile Durkheim wrote all about these bitter fruits 120 years ago. And just how right was he.

ITV will continue not to able to make bad but oh-so-funny comedies, we'll all be watching more and more degraded fuckwits on less-reality, more hellyvision-tellyvision and we'll all be harking back to the 70s when comedy was either The Good Life or George and Mildred. And everyone had three channels of shit to choose from and all was well.

On that downbeat note, I'm off to watch some spazbrains swear and some Z-list slebs showing off their general knwledge.

Celebrity Big Brother to you.

First blog entry for the year. Was it worth the wait? Nah.

I've been a bit quiet on the blogging front. Be assured, dear blogfan (the singular isn't meant to be ironic, there really is just one blogfan and I'm buggered if I know their name). There will be more writings from my sweet fingertips. But at the moment, I'm not angry or upset enough to get fired and ranty about much and I'm not feeling happy enough to create something out of bollocks-all. This sorry state of affairs may change in a very short space of time. But if I were to say that I'd bough a cordless mouse for my Mac (which is very nice and works much better than I thought, now I can use the sofa cushion as a super-large mouse mat) or if I were to to tell you that Christmas was OK - you know, not bad or fun-tastic, would you really give a lump of night-soil?

No, of course not.

What I have to say at least interests me and I hope at least 3 of your may look at in the future and laugh or just think 'what a complete tosser'. I wouldn't (and don't) care what you think. Except I would hate to bore myself because this would definitely bore you, whereas if I am entertaining myself, or my future self when I come back to this literary effluent in a few years time, at least one of us will have the decency to care.

So until I'm out of the luxury-zone of not being massively happy or depressed, I'll enjoy every second of feeling sort of middling. But I don't have much to say. Even about a new sexy shade of green or a favourite drum sample. Though much to my surprise I like the Lily Alien track which sounds a bit like Fatboy Slim's Gangster Tripping. LDN?

I'm truly sorry about that. And a happy new year from Daggersdukc, Mrs Daggersdukc and the dog.

STOP PRESS!! When I said I didn't have anything interesting to blog about that wasn't quite true. Restaurant review of the Quality Chop House coming up in the next few days. Rather an interesting place if only because its been around, more or less unchanged for over 100 years - this can be a good and bad thing as I hope will be evident. Hold your breath now, underlings.