I can only apologise for my recent lengthy absence from blog land – work has been so horrendous for the last few weeks that I have been forced to work like a dog and alas my cultural pursuits have somewhat fallen by the wayside!!! It’s like the BBC is actually expecting me to work for my pay check for once and I really can’t deal with the pressure?! Anyway, because of this (and frankly my intense laziness last weekend) I haven’t really had a chance to either do or write about anything intellectual for the last fortnight, so, in an effort to keep up with my new years resolution I am now going to give a quick recount of recent “enlightening experiences”.
Number 1: (Week 18) Karaoke CHINESE STYLE!!!
Last Tuesday my delightful friend Diccon celebrated his 28th birthday. Ahhh. Lovely Diccon has spent many years of his (now not so)short life trekking the sands of foreign lands eventually to wind up back here married to a delightful Taiwanese gentleman called Hans who organised the birthday celebrations I am about to recount.
Diccon, as well as being some kind of linguistic savant is also rather a good singer and clearly embraced the chinese/taiwanese/whatever love of Karaoke and pop music to its full. Frankly I would have judged him if he hadn’t. He even appeared in a pop video for one of the biggest groups in Asia at the time - how cool!! For his stag-do last year I organised home karaoke and we had a very enjoyable evening getting wasted and singing along to fab pop music.
Now, some people, I believe, tend to misunderstand karaoke. They think it involves standing up in front of bars full of people and singing a song all by themselves as everyone judges and ridicules them. I’m sure this is the case in certain situations but I, a true lover of the art, have luckily never been faced with this difficult terrain. You see I passionately love singing, it just doesn’t love me back. Cats have died in a more melodious fashion but not once has this stopped me from not only enjoying singing, with all my heart, but enjoying karaoke mightily as well! This is not only to do with the advent of the private karaoke booth – a fabulous concept – but also the fact that karaoke isn’t about singing by yourself but about big old group sing-alongs whilst fucked where you all join in in one great inharmonious screech.
So, karaoke was clearly the name of the game last week and my friends, we were in the know! No Luckyvoice bullshit in Soho for us we were off to the random and inhospitable waste land of Hampstead road near Euston to a strange and uninviting buzzered door of some seriously hard core Chinese karaoke bar – this thing was full on. It would have been pretty much impossible to go there unless you either spoke Chinese (or Cantonese /Mandarin or whatever) or were with someone who does as, for example, all the machinery in the rooms was in kanji and the vast majority of the music they had was proper job Asian pop which, therefore, as an English speaker was pretty hard to sing along with. Not that this dulled my enjoyment in ANY WAY. Diccon and Hans and there friends did a damn fine job of the Asian pop while I stuck to the old karaoke favourites: Britney, Madonna and Beyonce with a healthy dose of Gaga for good measure – a women whose karaoke potential had never been fully registered by me until that night.
Diccon explained that in Taiwan they have special seats in the karaoke booths to allow you to sit down normally or to perch above with your feet on the seats to aid vocals. In each of the rooms and the bar upstairs they had that Chinese dice game that is a major drinking thing over there – I have played it several times with Diccon and Hans as I too am in the know and attuned to Asian culture. It involves cups and dice and guessing how many numbers everyone has then you drink when you’re wrong. The cocktails were WEIRD but my particular favourite had to be Yakult and vodka. Am not sure if this is a traditional karaoke drink but I think it MAY have been and it went down surprisingly well – try it it’s very refreshing for the summer!! They also had smooth white empty plates supplied in each room….enough said.
No 2: (Week 19) Chelsea Flower Show
So, that was the week before last. Last week, on Friday, my new(ish) flatmate Justin got me and a friend tickets to the Chelsea flower show as he has been working on the red button stuff for the BBC. It was ace. For one thing I took the day off work which is always AMAZING. Everyone else had to pay £50 for a ticket or somet and queue but we got them free and got to go in the special press entrance and then some annoying posh women behind us tried to get in too and weren’t allowed HAHAHAHAHA!!!! This took us directly to the production area where we got to hang out by the BBC porter cabins and get in the way. This may not sound that exciting but it WAS as for one thing I found out the BBC have a competition amongst the different Chelsea crews every year to see who can blag, borrow or steal the best selection of plants and flowers to decorate their porter cabin with. Then, at the end of the week Alan Titchmarsh judges them all and whoever wins gets a prize!!! Justin my flatmate got gold this year although apparently not best in show – which I would have thought IS gold but apparently isn’t. He managed to blag some sort of crab orchid or something which only flowers once every 3 million years – or something.
Well, Chelsea Flower Show – as a kid I use to watch this every year on the tele with my dad who is very into the gardening. I always always wanted to go until I attended a different flower show somewhere else with the parents, and almost died of boredom. It was MASSIVE with about 400 marquees going on forever filled with boring plant after boring plant and more gross dried flower arrangements than a normal person would think could possibly exist in the world. I have felt funny about dried flower arrangements ever since – or dead dust collectors as they are known in my head. From that day I went off the idea of attending Chelsea dramatically as I assumed it would be an endlessly dull as that was. However, it turns out that for one thing its pretty bloody small. I always wondered how they managed to squeeze so much into the relatively small space of the Chelsea Hospital but now I know how = it looks much bigger on the TV. This was definitely a good thing as frankly I only wanted to see the show gardens anyway and then maybe have a quick look at some pretty roses or somet and certainly not spend all day elbowing my way through hoards of ‘mature’ white middle class women. I am glad we went later in the day in general actually as it was packed yet apparently ‘emptying out’ in comparison to earlier – must have been manic.
There were something like 15 show gardens, although some of them are TINY – which again doesn’t come through on the TV at all. I have to say also that in comparison to my TV memories of old most of them were beyond horrendous. There was one which, although definitely cool wasn’t a bloody garden at all it was a swimming pool and looked like something from the outdoor bit at Homebase!! Chelsea flower show is not a place to advertise the latest collection of DFS tiles is it?? Not that I am not a huge fan of tiles and all but really… That was the Australian garden and in fairness other than a few dried out looking palm trees and rubber plants (or something) what the hell else are they going to put in gardens in Australia they can’t water anything. Although thinking about it an entire garden made up of pool is surely not great when you have a hose pipe/water ban which surely they must get A LOT. This garden was given gold???
As if this wasn’t enough the Children’s Society was even worse – it was the size of a table and consisted of a cold plunge pool and a barbeque and garden shed combo.
This brings me on to my main observation of the show gardens in general which was that apparently these days you aren’t allowed to have a garden at Chelsea without some sort of major architectural summer house construction in it and apparently those constructions have to be completely boring and all look exactly the same. Apart from a few exceptions they were all made of some sort of SOLID looking metal, usually artfully rusted, and no more than a bus shelter in design. This always, ALWAYS, seemed to contain 2 fancy metal chairs that clearly weighed about 30 tones each. Then there were some plants fitted in around it. LAME and tasteless beyond belief frankly. There were a few that bucked this trend; Leeds City Council did a damn cool one which was based around a canal lock with ‘naturalistic planting’:
But even here I couldn’t help feeling that even this one was pretty damn naff really – I mean it was a fake lock, with fake spurts of water coming out of it etc – it all just felt a tad ridiculous and beyond vulgar in its fakery. Vey Fanny Cradock. Ironic when it’s a celebration of plants and flowers etc – i.e. nature. But then it occurred to me that this was as far removed from nature as its physically possible to be. Which is kind of weird if you think about it.
However, the most hideous show garden of them all, and believe me some of them were horrid, was the Foreign & Colonial Investment Trust garden – this thing was a study in ugliness. I didn’t know until afterwards that it was supposedly based around Candide by Voltaire, a book I always feel very fond of and I really rather like the idea of being inspired to ‘tend your own garden’ at Chelsea. However, it was truly disgusting. For example; the fake stone wall along the side had the most disgusting collection of bronze statutory I have EVER SEEN – and that’s saying something. Awful, AWFUL sculptures of nude women with various arms or tits looming out into the garden space. So, so hideous. This is what they had to say about it:
The field-like layout of the garden is suggestive of the Turkish smallholding
where Candide’s final words are spoken and the planting adds an appropriate
Mediterranean flavour. The two pools represent the oceans that Candide crosses
in his travels linked by a scalloped flowform designed to mimic the rapids of the
river that shipwrecks Candide’s canoe upon entry to El Dorado. Stone-clad and
planted walls represent the steep cliffs that surround El Dorado. Love interest
Cunégonde and her transformation from coquettish girl to social climbing
courtesan is depicted in the sculpture series as Candide’s lusty ‘thought bubbles’
in his trans-global pursuit to have her. With the addition of furniture and pots
this becomes a feasible garden that could easily be found in the warmer parts of
the UK and it demonstrates new possibilities of exotic plant use due to recent
climate change.
Whatever, even the flowers they chose were ugly but clearly it was considered so foul by everyone else also that I can’t find any pictures that ‘do it justice’!
All in all though I very much enjoyed the whole thing and am more than glad I have been able to go finally – hopefully will be able to go next year also when garden design has moved on a stage. Lawns aren’t very fashionable any more are they? I like lawns, I like reclining on grass, a garden just isn’t the same without it is it??
