Vinter Vonderland

When I was a child I was in The Curse of the Werewolf. No, not the Oliver Reed/Hammer horror one. It was a musical we did at school and I played the chief of police, Otto someone. A madman with an uncontrollable false arm; his real one ripped off by a werewolf, the new false one unable to stop sieg heiling. It was Dr. Strangelove in a Salford comprehensive. I had to do a German accent, and it was as good as the one you can do when you read out this post title. I also sang a song (again with a German accent- tricky that one) called Don’t be a Silly Sceptic. Why didn’t I realise the young Germanpast-me was trying to give the old future current-me some life lesson I have since chosen to ignore?

These memories flooded back as I entered Winter Wonderland in Hyde Park with my cousin Jessica and her son. There they go, up above, heading off.

I had these memories because, like my Inspector Otto, Winter Wonderland seems a little Germanic, but without going the whole hog. I think it’s maybe some kind of fair transported over from somewhere in Germany but I can’t be bothered checking (it’s Christmas Eve and there are presents to wrap). All the signs are in German. Well most. Occasionally you will see as small Exit sign hung over a larger Ausfahrt one.

Spuk was a bit of a giveaway. From a distance Jessica misread it. It gave us something to laugh about as a trapped pigeon battled against a plastic window as we ate chicken sausages in a knocked up Bavarian hut. I’d never had a chicken sausage before. It was, like most things in life, ok.

We didn’t go on Spuk. Don’t worry about the man hanging. It was a Ghost Train. Though trains and death and German theme parks could easily unsettle the most ignorant of Christmas tourists.

Here’s Wellenflug. No idea. No time to look it up. Attention! is maybe not the kindest or most sensitive way to get your… well… attention. It’s something about that exclamation mark that once again takes me back a few decades. But I was charmed by the grammar, making me once again feel at home with my most naturalistic of German performances way back in the late 70’s. Don’t be a silly sceptic you’ll never get on/ Don’t be a disbeliever it’s not any fun.

When my friends Claire and Jimmy heard I was going to Winter Wonderland they told me to read AA Gill’s review. I haven’t. I know he won’t like it. And I’m scared he’ll be really funny about it and make me feel unworthy and useless, even though no one really reads this and no one pays me anything for anything.

No! I won’t read AA Gill. He shot a monkey! (Yes, yes, I know, but monkey’s a nicer and funnier word than ape). So, he shoots a monkey for the hell of it and I’m going to be all self righteous and declare that I have never shot a monkey and how dare he! I bet he wandered around Winter Wonderland shooting  Germans.

Here’s the deal: it’s a little bit rubbish. It’s very expensive. Cheapest ride for the young ones, the most basic of rides, £2. Dearest ride £68.43. Maybe.

But the staff were nice. And at Christmas, with the kids, that’s a good thing.

Happy Christmas one and all. x

Broadstairs in the snow

Should I let my daughter date David Platt?

My daughter is dating David Platt and I’m not happy.

For those who know me you know I believe Coronation Street to be real. For those who don’t know me, you’ll most likely think I’m just being funny, or weird, or perverse. But the great thing about beliefs is that that’s all you need. Reason goes out of the window. I believe Coronation Street is real… so there!

And psycho David Platt is going out with my daughter!

My daughter is Kirsty Leigh Porter.

Kirsty Leigh Porter (pic courtesy of Holy Soap)

Kirsty was only my daughter for a day. Trev and myself were writing for a show called My Spy Family. Kirsty played Marcy Desmond, and in one of our episodes, The Quiz Night Affair, I played her father Mr Desmond. He was a wild haired weirdo. I didn’t have to do much. Just turn up.

But now she’s changed her name to Zoe and is slowly creeping into Corrie as bloody Platt’s girlfriend. I’m going to have to put my foot down.

Crate Expectations

Ok, it’s not a great picture, but I shouldn’t have taken it in the first place. That’s because we’re in the dark here and there should be no light. I used no flash, but there would have still been a faint orange glow from the autofocus. Sorry Tate Modern. And I apologise sincerely for this post’s poor title (though I like it… so not that sincere… but sorry anyways pun-haters).

This is the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern. And there’s always something worth seeing, whether it’s a big red horn or a large crack in the floor. Oh, I know my art and the right terms.

The large crack was called Shibboleth. I’d come across that word once before, in an episode of The West Wing. I had an understanding of sorts; that the word was a test, the right pronunciation showing whether or not you belonged to a certain tribe or another. At the heart of the West Wing Episode and the crack in the floor there is something being conveyed about racism and intolerance.

But,  when I go to the Tate Modern I don’t think like that. I see a big crack, and I hop from side to side and then try and stick my foot as far down as it will go. It’s fun. Then I read about Shibboleth, the work of art, and I become thoughtful. But not for long. I’m not sure you should have to read about a work of art to understand it. Sure, it helps. It Illuminates. But the reading and the experiencing seem like separate things.

That’s how I felt when I was in the big metal box yesterday. I just wanted to leap in, into the darkness, and run around.

It’s called How It Is. It’s by the Polish artist Miroslaw Balka. It’s a… Oh, why should I try to describe it when the Tate’s website does it so much better:

Hovering somewhere between sculpture and architecture, on 2 metre stilts, it stands 13 metres high and 30 metres long. Visitors can walk underneath it, listening to the echoing sound of footsteps on steel, or enter via a ramp into a pitch black interior, creating a sense of unease.

I wasn’t uneasy. I was happy and excited. I loved it. It’s a huge metal box that you just vanish into. No edges, no end, until you bump into them in the darkness. It’s so huge I couldn’t help but make a cheap joke in there about feeling like a midget illegal immigrant. I shouldn’t have of course, because when you read again, you read that the work has been inspired by such realities. And, like Shibboleth, the work is associated with the darker moments of recent history and the terrible crimes race can commit against race.

I’m going to stop reading.

The work is great fun. Go and see it. Or not, since you will be in the darkest place you have ever been.

Go and see it. Run into it. Be daring. Go in as far as you can, til you hit a wall you never knew was there. Then kiss someone. Or kick someone. Or go boo.

Me and the Santas

Last year I bumped into the mass Santas, by accident, in Leicester Square. You can see me with them here. This year I bumped into the mass Santas, by accident, in Trafalgar Square.

I walked out of Charing Cross station straight into a streaming Strand of Santas. I followed them to the Square, and then I just wandered and mingled and snapped away. Mass Santas are a friendly bunch. They wish you a Happy Christmas and they give you gold coins. But not real gold. Inside is chocolate. Oh, and they like to throw sprouts around. They arrive with sprouts on stalks, pluck them off, and hurl them at each other. Some Santas drink, some smoke. One was smoking a fancy cigarette; perhaps a North Pole special. They dance and kiss and hug, and no one tries to stop them.

Who knows where they come from? Maybe the North Pole. Maybe Facebook.

I stopped by a policeman to ask. He was so young he looked like a little toy figure Santa may bring you to go with your Duplo village. Except he wasn’t that young. He was old enough to know me. Last year I was asked if I was “the man who worked with animals”. This policeman asked me if I used to be on Magpie! Cheeky bastard! How old did he think I was? Sorry… not cheeky bastard. He was very nice. As were all of the three police officers I could see there. They obviously trust the Santas to behave. And, to be the fair, the drunken one who dropped his bottle of beer and smashed it, did do his best to scoot the bits away into a corner with his black-booted foot.

Well done Santas for entertaining yourselves and us.

24 is real

I’m sorry blog. I’ve neglected you. Sure, I had an excuse for a few weeks. I was ill. But I’m back in the land of the breathing now. Sorry Mummified Fox. You deserve better and I will try harder.

But for now, to try and get going again, three random things.

Random thing one. When you go to Muffin Break- and don’t pretend you don’t, because you do- when you go to Muffin Break do you ever wonder where all the soup signs go when they aren’t needed? I know I do. And this last weekend, down in Muffin Break in Lewisham, I spied the answer.

Where the soup signs hide

I was sat on the near side of this central well when I saw the soup signs, hiding, cowering together in a corner. Or maybe they had broken free from the barber pole style danger tape. Who knows? I wasn’t trying to surreptitiously photograph an arse, or an old lady. Honest. I just felt a bit of humanity might help the picture.

Random thing two. We have a new road. Look! Here’s what a road looks like without cars on it.

The Road

Course, the cars are back now, waiting at the edges. Cats crawl under them and foxes duck and dive around them. occasionally, a car might move, and there’ll be another on standby, waiting to pounce and take its place.

Random thing three. I forget that Jack Bauer once visited Hither Green. It’s true. Everyday I go to my local newsagents and buy the guardian and The Mirror. (I say everyday, but today I betrayed The Mirror and bought The Sun, just because they had a Tiger Woods porn star story on the cover- I then had so little interest in the story I forgot to read it. Porn, it’s so ephemeral isn’t it).

Anyways, so, yes, Jack Bauer. A few years back he was in the area and he has some connection with the people who own the newsagents, and he called in, and he signed some photos for them, and they are on display in the shop. They’re signed Kiefer Sutherland, but I know it’s Jack Bauer.

I’ve seen enough of 24 to convince myself it, and Jack, are real. And if you dare claim otherwise I will set Tony Almeida (the only terrorist to be named after a poncey theatre) on to you.

The Sydenham Subversives

Ok, subversives is maybe taking things a bit too far, but someone is Sydenham has been up to a bit of mischief.

I’ve been indoors for the past two weeks, with an unusual bout of asthma. Now, I’m back. Like Arnie, except with a Salford accent and no muscles.

One of my first ventures was to head over to Ben and Sarah’s for lunch. They texted me; could I pick up some Bisto on the way? But of course. And so I headed to a nearby Sydenham shop. And I was delighted, along the way, to see that someone had defaced all the big adverts at the bus stops. Not in a nasty way, damaging for the hell of it, but in an oddly creative way, simply sticking bits of silver tape over any brand names. I still knew it was an advert for Nivea, but maybe Nivea won’t be too happy. And on another, they’d gone one step further by changing the slogan. I’m all for it. Having said that, I haven’t been getting out much.

The King of Coughs

Earlier this year I wrote a (hopefully) humourous piece about having asthma. Oh, that was easy then, when I was on top form, lungs working at 90% of their capacity, a peak flow of 540.

Now my peak flow is down to 200, a day or two ago 100.

So this leads to insane drug abuse. Mainly of steroids. I double my inhaler usage and I get the multi-purpose Amoxicillin 500 mg and then some dinky elliptical maroon pills called Prednisolone that I take six at at time and can lead to such side effects as Moon-Face and insomnia.

If it’s a clear night and you wake in the middle of it, open your curtains and see me smile down at you.

Yesterday I went for an X-Ray at Lewisham Hospital. The results were fine (I think- they don’t tell you anything, but they did let me leave, and my doctor had said they wouldn’t if there was “anything gross”).

So I head to the Radiology Department (next to the Nuclear Medicine Department… I don’t know, and I was too afraid to ask).

There’s a smallish queue at the reception and two or three ahead of me is the King of Coughs. This man’s cough is relentless. It’s not a barking or hacking cough. It does, sadly, have a hint of the death rattle about it. His cough sounds like a cough trying to cough.

He’s seen to and he coughs to a seat.

A few minutes later I hand in my form and I’m given a green ticket. A39. Tickets like you pull out of a machine when waiting at the delicatessen counter in a supermarket.

I sit near the Rothko print, and a few rows away from the King. He looks like me only twenty years older. And really what I mean by that is that we both need haircuts, a shave and a good bath. We’re like Catweazle and Catweazler.

We both get called at the same time to go to our next waiting post. His name is Edward. We’re given shopping baskets (it is like being at the supermarket!) and asked to go into cubicles, strip to our waists, put our clothes in the baskets and to put on thin green cotton robes.

Then we sit next to each other and wait a few moments, smiling at each other.

Edward goes off for his X-Ray and I go off for mine. Then we both come out and wait again. This time we sit opposite each other and say hello.

Edward has chronic bronchitis. Although Edward has a truly awful and worrying cough, he is smiling and he is happy to talk. He rushes things out, in a seemingly random order; he has chronic bronchitis, his wife died a year ago, he worked and rushed, and ate, and drank, and met, family, a brother, all work, all rush, all coughing… random thoughts that made me think he is leading to an understanding of what condition his condition is in. But it isn’t coming and so I try to prompt him.

But Edward, who is me twenty years on, is quite a little deaf. Through the coughs, and the coughs of the coughs, I try to make myself clear, to be heard. And regular readers of my blog will know that this is not something I normally have difficulty with. But I’m in a hospital, and I’m doing my best to be sensitive, already making enough noise with my own heavy breathing and gasping.

I felt the secret to Edward’s condition was his work. He seemed to be driving at that. Perhaps he’d been a baker, spending a lifetime breathing in flour. Or perhaps he’d worked with asbestos.

I ask him what he did, and he hears. “Worked for the council”.

And then the radiologist approaches us both. We can both get dressed. We can both go. Our doctors will get the results soon. Nothing “gross”.

I’m glad. For both of us. Take care Edward.

Rothko in Lewisham

Years ago, when I was young and gloomy, I travelled down to London to see Mark Rothko’s murals at the Tate. There was only one Tate in those days; the London one. And travelling down to London from Manchester was a big deal; this was a pilgrimage. This day had the same power as a Crystal Day in Liverpool or a Blackpool Day at the Pleasure Beach.

These huge and oppressive paintings appealed to me in the way that Joy Division and Echo and the Bunnymen and the Big Dipper appealed to me. A way that I am still unable to put into words and unwilling and unwanting to try. Instead, I will put them into paintings, music and rollercoasters. That’s the best I can do.

The murals can now be found in Tate Modern. John Banville writes perfectly about them and Rothko here.

They were commissioned for the swanky Four Seasons Restaurant in New York in the late 1950’s. and here’s what Rothko said at the time;

“I accepted this assignment as a challenge, with strictly malicious intentions. I hope to paint something that will ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room. If the restaurant would refuse to put up my murals, that would be the ultimate compliment. But they won’t. People can stand anything these days.”

The restaurant didn’t refuse, but Rothko did withdraw from the commission.

Shortly after giving the paintings to the Tate instead, Rothko cut deep into his arms and died “in a wine-dark sea of his own blood”.

So I was surprised, as I sat in the Radiology Department of Lewisham Hospital, waiting for a chest X-Ray, to find myself close to a Rothko.  Not one of his restaurant ones, but, I think, a miniature of Light Red Over Black, 1957.

I like it. The big one. And I think I have the constitution to contemplate it whilst also contemplating the response of my doctor, yesterday, to my question as to whether the hospital would tell me anything or not; If it’s gross, they’ll keep you in.

Thankfully it wasn’t gross. They didn’t keep me in. Just my asthma having fun. I’m not wheezy; just not really breathing. I’m on steroids now. I was hoping to become Hulk-like, but it seems a real possible side effect* is Moon Face. I’ll settle for that. Sounds like a new Batman villain.

Walking home… ha! At what speed does a walk begin? And what comes before that? It wasn’t a dawdle;  I kept a straight line and an even pace. But noticing me move would be like watching the London Eye spin …I fancied stopping off for a quick nap at Lewisham’s snazzzziest titled bed shop.

* Oh, and insomnia. Hence the late post.

Happy Birthday Mummified Fox

A year ago today I wrote my first blog entry. You can find it here. It’s a test one really, not about much; though in saying that I do Bobbin and Tess a disservice.

A year ago I was full of crazy excitement. Blogging was a new adventure. I hadn’t got a clue what I would write. I felt that bit by bit, writing at least a post a day, I would find my feet and discover why I was doing this.

A year on I’ve slowed down a bit. No post every day, but I try for a couple a week. And I’ve expanded. We’ve got the Trev and Simon blog on the go, and I’ve started 20th Century Mummified Fox- a blog where I can indulge in my love of films.

I still don’t know why I’m doing this. I haven’t found my feet. Of course it’s an indulgence; no doubt I am showing off, but showing off what? It’s not a comedy blog. It’s not some kind of confessional. I’m no film critic. Nor a photographer. But this blog is made up of bits of all of these. And lots of animals.

And it keeps me busy when times are tough. I enjoy it. And so, sometimes, do some of you. All of the people who come here and read or look, thank you. I know there’s lots of blogs out there, blah blah blah airline appreciation speech.

And thank you all for your comments. I enjoy reading them and I enjoy the interaction. And, to my pleasant surprise, the comments over the year have been thoughtful and considered, even when being critical. I haven’t, as yet, had to delete any for taking the chance to hurl abuse at me. Still, there’s time. My blog is just a baby.

Since the whole blogging thing is one enormous indulgence, for Mummified Fox’s first birthday I am going to pick some of my blog favourites from my 234 posts. One from each month.

November 2008- This and That’s Entertainment. Every year I go to Great Yarmouth to play pool. But which is best, Great Yarmouth or Las Vegas?

December 2008- Tommie Smith and John Carlos. I drag my family to see the Tommie Smith and John Carlos statue in San Jose.

January 2009- Murderer. Me, Trev and Cyndi Lauper have a close shave with Coronation Street murderer Tony Gordon.

February 2009- Deal or No Deal on the Dole. Ok, a bit of a weird one. this is a story about Deal or No Deal, Noel Edmonds, a luckless contestant, and Cosmic ordering.

March 2009- The Nazis. I drew them at school and only got a B+.

April 2009- A Nightingale sang in the 100 Club. A sort of review of the Nightingales and Ted Chippington.

May 2009- “Yes, I spent money on furniture”. Shadow Education Secretary Michael Gove and the elephant lamps we bought him. Including comments from the man himself (or so it seems).

June 2009- Pigs, a goose and a sheep. Just as it says.

July 2009- I’m going to cheat here and mention two posts. I’m not quite sure why it’s cheating; there’s no rules, it’s my blog. But at the top of this post I did say I’d pick one from each month, so yes, I am cheating. First Like the circles that you find- a guide to reglazing windows. And also RIP Rob. Rob sold the Big Issue outside Hither Green station. He died in July.

August 2009- Little and Large. My mum and dad used to go to The Talk of the North in the 70’s and see all the top acts. Years later I get to meet one of them.

September 2009- The Rogers Brothers and the Cox twins. The real life inspiration for two of our characters.

October 2009- Bigmouth strikes again. Possibly my most personal and indulgent post and also my most commented on.

So there’s some of my favourites for the year. If you click on any of them I hope you enjoy them. And if you do, please look at some of the remaining 221 posts.

I was going to use the blog’s first birthday to say why it’s called Mummified Fox. but I’m going to save that for next year.

Happy 1st Birthday Mummified Fox