Polymaths

There are people like me – who troll their way through life. And there are those who are good at everything (just about). Mrs Rambling Nappa used to work with a distinguished surgeon, who was also a qualified architect, who was widely travelled and spoke fifteen languages (most fluently). I seem to remember that he was also a lay preacher or something, virtually built his house, and on, and on.

I’m rambling on about this (enviously) because I recently had one of those “I wish I could write like that” moments when reading an article in The Spectator about Suffolk of all things. Try this:

“But then in this last year Suffolk and I started seeing more of each other. Tentatively at first. I spent some time in Newmarket painting portraits of horsemen under protestant blue skies…”

Or this:

“Meanwhile my dates with Suffolk were coalescing into something of, if not a ‘journey’, then at least a ‘character arc’: sleeping off a wedding in an Elveden graveyard; kissing a girl on a roof; bareback-riding with under-10s across potato field in perfect magenta bloom; the low September sun lens-flaring off a lake and across the stirring silhouette of my girlfriend; losing a few rounds of ‘Escape & Die’ to the sheep; making friends with smoker exiles outside A-road pubs in the bitter Christmas cold: and all against a year of party-blasted dawns imprinted straight into the amygdala, a misty North Sea radiance fading up over crumbling cliffs…”

Wow! I am supremely jealous of that kind of skill with words. And who wrote them? Someone called Thomas Leveritt. I googled him and (to quote) found out that he is half-American, half-British, and 32. He has won the Carroll Medal for Portraiture from the UK's Royal Society of Portrait Painters, and twice been runner-up at the National Portrait Gallery's BP Competition. He has a CV that looks like it ran over an improvised explosive device (his words), with pieces of soldiering, law, computer programming, import-export, film production, signmaking, and teaching scattered all over the place. No matter where you come from, he has a slightly different accent. He published a novel in February 2008 variously described as 'dazzling' (The Guardian), 'crazed and hilarious' (New Statesman), 'radiat[ing] a certain clued-up, slacker intelligence' (Metro).

Damn him! I guess I’ll have to buy his book.

LARPing Around

I was bit confused when one of my staff requested Friday off - so she could prepare for a LARPing weekend. Needless to say I had no idea what she was talking about; but did I care? I certainly did.

Discreet enquiries to other staff members revealed that the gentle lady in question liked to partake of Live Action Role Playing, meaning dressing up in fanciful costume (leather apparently) and beating the hell out of other participants using latex and foam weapons. A strange way to vent your frustrations, but then again...

Needless to say I googled LARPing and found loads of specialist clothing companies and armourers (as well as pinching the above photo off some-one's site). And it's not just ladies from Petersfield that like this sort of thing. LARPing is everywhere - Belgium, across America, and Germany. They've moved on from the old roundheads vs cavaliers re-creations of Civil War battles. Your modern LARPer will have a specially themed event (Conan the Barbarian meets Godzilla in the Temple of Arkan, sacrifices at 4.00pm, bar opens at 6.00pm, bring axes).

Somehow I feel quite pleased that I'm leaving my job in less than three weeks. I do work with my back to the lady LARPer and I just feel a little uneasy about her. I don't think I'll ask her if she enjoyed her weekend when I go back to work on Monday.

Masterchef - First Cake

Ouch! It doesn't look very good does it? My first attempt at baking a cake (an educational process intended to climax with the production of a Rambling Nappa Christening Cake in the summer) did not impress the judging panel. Here are a few of the comments.

1. It would have been sensible not to have iced the cake while it was still hot (so the icing simply ran straight off like molten lava)
2. What's that strata of fat running through the sponge?
3. It hasn't been cooked long enough.
4. More baking powder.
5. No, Nigella's all wrong. You don't just bung everything in the mixer and hope for the best.
6. What do you mean it has gone down the waste disposal unit? (the mother of the child)

Oh well. Back to the drawing board.

Bags of Nonsense

Well done Marks and Spencer. You are doing the right thing by charging us for plastic carrier bags. And how predictable the reaction of other retail giants who are not following suit. A couple of years ago the French government outlawed the free issue of plastic carriers in supermarkets and there has been no violent protest (apart from the Rambling Nappa who repeatedly arrives at the checkout of his local Shoppi with a laden trolley - having forgotten to bring his reusable, hard-wearing 3 euro bag with him - again, and again).

Wales (and I hardly ever agree with anything Welsh) is likely to issue a similar ban. Why, for heavens sake, can't we?

Not so boring - Jonno

I'd got this image of Jonny Wilkinson as an admirable, but terribly boring English sportsman. A dullard in the mould of Tim Henman. The sort of person you'd find it terribly difficult to strike up a conversation with unless it was about the intricacies of playing backhand volleys off the baseline using multifilament stringing at max tension, as opposed to catgut. Then I read Wilkinson's piece in Monday's Times in which hardly a mention was given to Saturday night's victory in Paris. Instead he wrote entertainingly and interestingly about having a rather splendid lunch the following morning with Toby Flood and Mathew Tait (irritatingly "Taity" and "Floody") at Yves Camdeborde's Le Comptoir off the Boulevard St Germain.

I guess that if you can slot penalties like Jonny, then you have little difficulty in getting a Sunday lunch table at a place like that. But it was a surprise to find a likeable-sounding human being lurking behind the grim facade.

Singing in the Rain

Many apologies for my enforced absence. Orange Broadband failed my household on New Year’s Eve, and after four weeks of expensive and entirely useless phone calls to Mumbai (Orange technical support division) I still had no broadband service. Accordingly I left Orange and am now a happy Pipex customer with full blogging facilities to hand. My phone contracts with Orange will also cease shortly and I’ll cheerfully and insistently find an alternative supplier. I recommend all my readers to take note and to steer well clear of all Orange products unless they concern fruit.

So what’s been happening? Personally only two news items to report. The first is that the Rambling Nappa managed to ramble last Sunday from his front door in Rowlands Castle to the town of Petersfield ten miles away. I didn’t ramble back again (preferring a lift home from the long-suffering wife), and was left both blistered and knackered from the sudden surge of activity. Heaven knows how people get the stamina to run a 26-mile marathon (or my senior cousin the oomph to cycle from London to Paris - repeatedly.

The second news item concerns a brief conversation I had yesterday with my Managing Director. We agreed that a parting of the ways was a sensible course from both our points of view - so I’ll be unemployed by Easter.

Fortunately I’m not the least bit despondent about this turn of events. I had become dispirited by book-selling and the seeming impossibility of competing profitably with Amazon. I have a backlog of things to do – which includes writing two works of fiction (one for adults, and one for children) and the clearing of the final debris of fifteen years running bookshops (yes, I still own shelves, cctv cameras, tills, stacks of books, and accumulated junk). I have volunteered to bake a christening cake for the latest grand-daughter (this requires an educational process as I’ve never baked a cake before). I need to lose weight and get fit. There’s the prickly issue of selling the house in France. It would be wonderful to sort out my finances so that I could take the long-suffering wife away for a proper holiday. There’s some good cricket coming up this summer (okay I did get up at 5.00am today, saw very quickly how badly things were going for England in New Zealand, and went straight back to bed). In other words I’m rather looking forward to having time to do a few of these things.

I also vow to blog more diligently…

No Broadband means No Blog

Thankyou Orange!

Towards the end of December my Orange home broadband failed. So far nearly nine hours of (expensive) phone calls to a call centre in India have failed to provide a solution. It wasn't until I googled "Orange PPP Server Down" on someone else's computer that I realised that this is a very common problem that drives Orange customers completely mad.

I'm changing broadband supplier and expect to resume blogging very soon....