BiB

Coffee May 8, 2013

So there was an expensive coffee on sale, which I thought I’d better buy, as it was called Berlin coffee, and the illustration on the packaging was over-40s with grey beards being turned away from Berghain and others pointing and laughing, and then it just cost so life-affirmingly much, and I asked if they could change the currency when debiting my card, to make it more expensive. And then I got it home, and gave it pride of place in the kitchen. And built an extension for it. A shrine for it. And then it turned out to be whole beans. Whole cunting beans. And I didn’t have a grinder. So I bought a grinder. “Which grinder should I buy?” I asked folk. And they said that one. And I did, but it would take ages to come in the post, and of course I wouldn’t be in when it arrived, or was, but didn’t hear the door, because I was hiding from reality, and so it went to the neighbour. Who’s got so much better-looking. And he wished me, “Schönen Abend Euch,” at the end of our 12-nanosecond chit-chat, when he knows full well that no other human has entered this flat since 1997. And then I overfilled the metal drum. And there was coffee everywhere. And the bouton pressoir ergonomique wasn’t even all that impressive. And the coffee wasn’t even all that much nicer. Though there were four complimentary biscuits.

Drink?

Virtue-gap January 3, 2009

Darlings, what’s yours? In DWBs*? A virtue-gap being, of course, the period of clean living it takes you after a period of unclean living to put the wicked memories of debauchery and ribaldry behind you and feel that you wouldn’t look out of place and, indeed, might even cut quite a dash in a village church on a Sunday morning?

Not that, as a wicked old nullifidian – darlings, I all of a sudden got worried by the word atheist and wondered if it made me be a wanker to come out as one. That what’s-his-face Hitchens – not the one in America whom I can’t help having a crush on even though I’m probably meant to disagree with quite a lot of what he says – I might even do, possibly, but he always says it so alluringly – although he looks much worse now that he’s had all those makeovers and his teeth done. No, the sour-puss brother – is right that atheism is a belief-system in itself. I mean, I don’t think it is, but then I want my unbelief to be un- rather than actively non-, I think, and worried that if atheism is active belief in there not being a god, which I’d probably be happy to throw my lot in with, actually, then I’d still rather be labelled, when the machine in the people-labelling factory gets to that stage in its workings, just in case, say, by some, admittedly, extremely queer twist of fate, we had to be labelled according to our beliefs, with a label that meant, ‘doesn’t-much-go-in-for-that-religion-lark,’ which perhaps nullifidian suits better – I should be equating attendance of a service in a village church with the height of virtuousness. And, as tolerant and respectful of others’ belief systems as I am, sometimes, I must say my faith in a certain type of Christian wearing t-shirts with verses from the Bible was cruelly dented when I saw a walking billboard quoting Jeremiah 30:17 – King James Bible version: For I will restore health unto thee, and I will heal thee of thy wounds, saith the LORD; because they called thee an Outcast, saying, This is Zion, whom no man seeketh after – trying to barge into a hot-dog queue.

But I do do that equation a bit. Which is an odd virtue to have at the top of my virtue Christmas tree. That the personified height of virtue should be the type that turns up at a village church religiously – boom, boom – of a Sunday morning. This moral nirvana is located, in my head, in some corner of England I don’t know but can ascribe all the attributes of a virtuous idyll to. Probably in Lincolnshire. Near Spalding somewhere. And the church would be full of kind Lib-Dem-voting types who popped in on their old neighbours and bird-watched and wore greens and browns and whose wickedest ever misdeed was failing to enter a cake in the village fête. The men would all look like this and take The Telegraph – or would Lib-Dem-voters take something else? – and like cricket and obviously prefer rugby to football and drink real ale – but not to excess, although perhaps they’d allow themselves one half-squiffy evening three times a year – and be active in local politics and drop in on new residents of the village to make them feel welcome – probably taking along the cake they’d forgotten to enter in the village fête and a bottle of surprisingly good white wine that they’d bought when staying at their house in Brittany – and speak less-than-execrable French and be thinking of learning Spanish or Italian and think Britons’ lack of knowledge of foreign languages was worthy of despair and that knowing a few words of the local language can really open up the culture and the locals react so differently (as they are packing their goods into the removal van from the house you’ve just bought off them) and know how to use a gun, though would approve of Britain’s gun laws and would drive within the speed limit but cycle where possible and support local businesses and certainly never inhale and be an accomplished, considerate lover. (Too depressed to describe his wife now. Lucky bitch.)

But a half-logical moral idyll to create because it’s as far-removed a life from my own as I can imagine within the same cultural boundaries. And I can’t think what the perfect moral man from my other two worlds – Russia and Germany – would quite be like. Except that the Russian moral paragon would ruin things, for me, culturally, by lecturing folk on how this was moral perfection and everyone else should live like this too and the German would be proud of his beer consumption and probably like to do things in the bedroom that my Lib-Dem-voter would have to wrinkle his brow at.

Because the time of year has made me feel particularly unvirtuous. Not that I feel guilt – oh gosh. I did one of those word-cloud things for this site and, apart from me, me, me, narcissistic drivel, public masturbation, me, me, me again, the word ‘guilt’ came up. Bugger – at calendric hedonism, really, but I do see the picture of the boys from Swing Out Sister, which I carry around with me as something to aspire to at all times, slowly erasing itself like Marty’s family photo in Back to the Future. Day upon day of wanton drinking. And not doing anything virtuous, i.e. work, which would nudge my moral compass closer to Lincolnshire before you knew it.

But that’s the festivities done. No time for any more fun till the vernal equinox at the very earliest. The weekend can just jolly well skip straight past my hard-nosed threshold and hand over my fun-ration to the wonderful couple next door. (Yes, they did complain on Christmas Day, since you ask.) It’s working my fingers to the bone from now till 2017.

Though I’m not sure if it’s the current alignment of the planets or the global economic crisis meaning we have to make cuts where we can, but my 2009 virtue-gap from marauding, self-destructive, bawdy, loud-mouthed, braying arse-hole to sedate, glasses-wearing (and my vision is perfect), Schubert-listening, moralising, tutting tosser with the demeanour and sartorial acumen of a Latin teacher is now down to a single DWB*.

I shouldn’t be at all surprised if I make the 2010 New Year’s honours list.

*days-without-booze

One gold ring December 24, 2008

Have you ever seen such beauty? You can see it even bigger here. Doesn’t it just make you want to grow a beard right now and go and do nothing but chant and swing an incense-burner all day? I was so staggered by the beauty that I had to dash to last.fm and listen to two songs by Ace of Base in a row.

It’s in the town of Rostov, north-east of Moscow, and not to be confused with Rostov-on-Don which is in quite another part of Russia altogether. This Rostov is one of the towns of the Golden Ring which are all so dripping with churchly beauty that I want to give up all that is worldly and go and live as a holy fool, spending my nights and days murmuring in a cave. Naturally, having lived down the road – by Russian standards – for two years, I didn’t go to a single Golden Ring town but, if I’m spared, it’s down as an ambition for a suitably vague point in the future. Still, Novgorod – not to be confused with Nizhnij Novgorod. I do apologise for all this – where I have been, has enough churchly beauty to make your heart ache too, as, indeed, does Moscow’s own Kremlin. Ignore anyone who tells you to go to St. Petersburg, which is where Russians pretend to be Italian.

Anyway, that’ll do as a Christmas card, won’t it? It’s got snow and churches. And one of the wooden structures in the foreground is almost bound to have a manger.

Have beautiful, bearable days.

Winterspeck December 22, 2008

Darlings, the sky over Berlin has decided to give up on keeping up even the meagrest of appearances. The sun thinks, unlike the diligent lamp-lighter in the Little Prince, that it is not worth its while shining weakly for half an hour or so a day and has put its feet up and decided to tend to Berlin later. The shortest day is, of course, just behind us – summer starts today! – but the shortness this year appears to have borrowed an extra layer of grey. It is now gone 8, so should, I think, by rights, be daylight and, while you wouldn’t think it was night if you bothered your arse, needlessly, to look out the window – I’m only bothering to open the curtains so I’m not the subject of neighbourhood tuts – the sky hasn’t got that much of a daytime quality about it either.

So I plan to eat and drink the darkness away. Plus everyone’s favourite day of the year is just around the corner so eating and drinking are majorly par for the course. And we have guests coming this year – they know this blog exists, so I can’t be too revealing – but we are a drop worried about what we’re going to give them to eat. Mind you, they’re both from the English-speaking world so hopefully don’t know anything about food. Still, I slightly can’t get beyond thinking a bowl of cornflakes for the starter and then two bowls of cornflakes for main course. Perhaps with a bowl of cornflakes with sugar for pudding.

Plus there is a no-sweet-things policy in this house…

We’ll relax it for guests. But, gosh, terrifying letting people into your home, isn’t it? Giving them first-hand experience of your domestic folie à deux. The Russian and I are going to have to hide so much evidence of bits of our existence over the days to come. Like we did when his brother came to visit before he knew my darling was a trouser-bandit and I was his bellebeau and then he walked into the kitchen when the Russian gave me the only spontaneous peck on the cheek he’d ever given me. And then the Russian accidentally pinched his bum. I think as long as I can remember to take my discarded clothes off the Christmas table, we’ll pass muster…

I think it may have been a one-man executive decision – the no-sweet-things policy – but the Russian mostly goes along with it and makes sure that any gorging on Snickers is done outside the home. I do occasionally remember that policy needs to be enforced so, in moments of political zeal, I carry out spot checks and make sure no sweet things have been smuggled into the house. Yes, sorry, I’m afraid you do have to remove your shoes and belt, sir. All in the name of girth-control, of course. Which hasn’t factored in that the consumption of 18 billion savoury/liquid calories a day are also a significant contributory factor to size.

But it’s the season to be jolly. To let your hair down. Bend the rules. Yet I am busier with work than I have ever ever ever been in my long-legged life so have had almost no opportunity to make the most of the atmosphere of almost unbridled joy that Berlin’s ever-smiling, ever-polite citizenry never need an excuse to create. I did manage to have one or two light ales in honour of this chap’s birthday the other day – there was a sweet angel at the occasion that I chatted to. When I realised I was being exposed to a new species of human, I asked him his age. And he said 24. Which I think was the sweetest thing I’d ever heard. I didn’t even know 24-year-olds still existed! I gave him a brief lecture: don’t take drugs, put a little money aside every month, what do you mean, you’re a musician? Get a job! And a hair-cut! Help little old ladies across the road, an apple a day…, wash behind your ears, wait till you get married, tolerate benignly but laugh and point fingers the second they leave your field of vision at those dim enough to think differently from you, look both ways, careless talks costs lives, honey’s very good for you. And then I gave him the five-euro note I’d been planning to use as a hankie to buy an ice-cream. Mind you, that’s 700 quid now, isn’t it? – but otherwise it’s been work, work, work and almost no play at all.

So the Russian had smuggled in Nutella. I’m a late adopter because of growing up in such non-privilege. Can you believe I didn’t get to go skiing in Switzerland for the first time till I was 15? Fif-fucking-teen! If that’s not child abuse, I don’t know what is. But a school French exchange when I was 17 introduced me to Nutella. And oysters, and rabbit, actually, but Nutella’s resonated with me more ever since. But, obviously, one can’t just pander to one’s desire for Nutella! Like other almost unimaginably extravagant luxuries, I thought it was to be savoured strictly away from home only. Perhaps in a little hotel somewhere. Or as the house-guest of an obscenely rich friend who just has Nutella cavalierly lying around cupboards! So I needed an excuse, to assuage my guilt and justify the consumption, to open the jar, excavate huge, great, stonking mechanical-digger-loads of the stuff and polish it off before looking down at my rotund frame and regretting it with due speed. “I’ll only allow myself a spoonful with a cup of tea,” I settled on as a routine and had hardly got to my second cup before it was all too late anyway and the Russian had cleaned the thing out better than brigands raiding a jewellery shop.

Anyway, it’s led to a quest for ever better, ever more luxurious, December-only sweet items. And we’ve discovered this. If it’s only available in Germany, and you’re mad enough not to live here, drop what you’re doing and hijack the first conveyance that will get you here. Chocolate and mint but – imagine! – even better than After Eights.

I think we’re all allowed a little indulgence till the sun comes back, don’t you?

Cheer December 9, 2008

Insomnia or, at the very least, disturbed sleep caused by worrying that I might die while dancing along to Mickey by Toni Basil, is wreaking havoc with my clockwork. Still, as luck would have it, I’m keeping the world afloat single-handedly and there’s no time for sleep with all the scampering I have to do in my translatorly hamster-wheel.

Do you dance, darlings? I used to think it was a thing to do but as I’m now not far off the telegram from Her Majesty, I’m close to giving up the ghost. I’ll throw myself around a dance-floor if need be, but need doesn’t often. My mother taught me to waltz, or to move in a shape approximating a waltz, no doubt seeing it as a vital life-skill for a man about to embark on adulthood in the 1990s – I put it down to her not knowing how the world works rather than actual madness. And, anyway, her mind’s in far better shape than mine is and she’s 200 if she’s a day, which she is, at least, because she had me, and I wasn’t born today, or even yesterday – and I dutifully tried to pass on my dancing skills to the Russian in case we ever establish a foundation and start hosting gala dinners but my beloved is not light of foot or, indeed, mass and I think his dancing exploits are best left uncategorised, unnamed and unchoreographed.

(Speaking of choreography – Ms. Basil’s main bag – guess how old Toni Basil is now. No cheating.)

So dancing has become a vicarious pleasure.

Call me heterophobic if you will but I’ve got a feeling gay men probably set an ounce more store by dancing than our heterosexual brothers. Us gayers being artistic types – I only translate to help humanity. I’m a singer-songwriter-sculptor mostly – means that a dance-floor pulsating with poofs might even have the odd profesh or two on it and it’s not a rare treat to see someone moving in a way that seems to have education behind it. I look on in admiration and order myself another drink.

Darlings, but even we artistic gayers are products of our surroundings. And unless one makes a very concerted effort to pretend to live in a different world and is very selective about the company and geography one keeps, there are still chapters of one’s life that are heavily heterosexual. I am unfortunate enough not to know any gay men much older than myself or any long-term gay older couples. So I don’t know if the Russian and I, as surely as bankruptcy follows Christmas, will do that couple-dance that so many of our older heterosexual co-humans do. You know, the sort of jivey-dance. Him twisting her around. Their arms fumbling overhead. Catching her, supposedly, if she has spun clean away and then halting that momentum and spinning her back at just the right time. And all performed, almost without exception, with a total lack of co-ordination and skill after the committed consumption of booze.

I was only reminded that I didn’t have a prototype of couple-future when the Russian and I ended up Sunday-night-drinking in Poland. The club was quiet, naturally, and only hardened boozers bothered venturing out in flagrant disrespect of the working week ahead. Psychotically drunk people who’d never been to ballet school hurled themselves around furiously. Occasionally I would worry that it was about to descend into violence. The more psychotically drunk men were all much the most huge and most meaty present. “Probably not gay at all,” the Russian and I would reassure ourselves, drawing naturally gifted and florid designs for pink-gated communities on beer mats, but then one would pull his trousers down and dance in his boxer shorts and the other would pull his t-shirt off and then, in a crowning dénouement tying up all loose ends neater than a Vienna baker, they would snog each other and collapse with an unsexy thud onto the stage. (The Russian and I set fire to our blueprints.)

And it was only the straights who could show us the way in how to grow old gracefully and dance like proper couples. A deliciously jolly pissed couple did the inelegant jive-dance. Their movements were so slow, so padded, that even their reactions to getting the spins wrong without fail would come about twenty seconds later. Mr. would spin determinedly on. Ms. would move as the laws of physics dictated, having no mental input to contribute, and would be hauled back in close when Mr. was in a position, both physical and geographical, to do so. She would try to mouth words of apology and self-deprecation, blinking very slowly throughout. He would guffaw jollily. Then they would snog.

“Darling, we don’t know how to do that dance. Maybe it is a vital ingredient of a happy partnership. And we don’t have any older gays to ask guidance. We are pioneers. We don’t know what the future holds. Oh god, if we get rich and establish a foundation and have gala dinners, will you instantly then run off and leave me for someone 19? I promise I don’t mind that you wear pyjamas.”

Luckily for us, No Stress then rattled scratchily off the gramophone. We got jiving with the best of them and, do you know, I think we were even better than the Puerto Rican couple.

Trois Hongroises November 14, 2008

“Surprising to bump into someone around here,” I thought to myself. They looked familiar, but I was damned if I could remember who it was. The ideal solution would have been to pretend I hadn’t seen them. Turn my eyes away not too demonstratively. Fake rivetedness in some passing fancy. But it was too late for that. We’d clocked each other. I was going to have to tough the occasion out.

I rid my throat, preparing for speech. And began to contort my face to express honest but, I hoped, polite bewilderment. The stranger’s face showed no equal foreboding, so I was going to have the redoubled shame of being the only one to admit I didn’t know who the other was. I clicked my fingers. Then wiggled them. All semaphores for, “It’s coming to me. Tip of my tongue.”

“Sorry, I know I know you from somewhere, but I can’t remember where. You’re going to have to tell me your name. I do apologise.”

“Raashn,” said the Russian, who never had mastered articles.

“Good Lord! Well, fancy that! What are you doing round here?”

“I leev kheer,” said the Russian. “Zees our flyet. Kyen I gyet past?” And he disappeared into the bathroom.

“Well there’s a thing!” I thought, though I suppose bumping into the person in my own flat should have been something of a hint. It’s a rare occasion indeed that out-and-out strangers parade up and down the corridor from kitchen to living room, bedroom or bathroom. Though with all the talk of doom and gloom I shouldn’t wonder if I were soon sheltering all sorts of sundry Berliners down on their luck.

“Darling, do you mean we’re still a couple?” I inquired having entered the bathroom unannounced, eager to get to the bottom of the mystery and deciding, our acquaintance rekindled, that I had the same rights of intimacy as before. “It’s just I’d clean forgotten. I mean, it’s been so long. Must have been ’99, mustn’t it? The Biafra campaign? Or, no, wait. ’03. Jonty’s wedding! Where have you been all this time?”

“In nyext room,” he said with ease, as if conversation of this levity was an everyday occurrence. He wiped toothpaste foam away from his cheeks.

I went back to my quarters to regain my composure. There I’d been thinking I was a man of leisure without a care in the world and it turns out there’d been a significant other all along. So troubling was my confusion and so chaotic the flood of memories pinballing round my minimally-furnished head that I wasn’t even sure if my conscience could vouch for good behaviour in the intervening years. Still, no time for going back over old ground now. It was time to face up to the current lie of the land. Which seemed to mean a new beginning. A clean sheet. Starting over.

“Um, so what’s your best news?” I asked the Russian when we next bumped into each other, minutes hardly having passed. An old trick I learnt – the Trucial States, ’77 I think it was – to oblige the person to answer positively. Or was it to counter the slew of miserable old widowers my parents appeared to have adopted when I was young? Ask them how they were and they’d have the cheek to answer in all honesty. “Well, BiB, sure I don’t like to complain but this diabetes is fierce hard altogether. I can only have 100 calories a day. One cup o’ tea and that’s me lot.” Poor old widowers. Gone to London to make their fortunes and if their wives didn’t up and die the second they left, their children flourished with some foster family or other while they floundered, unable to look after themselves in the big city.

“Obama veen elyekshn,” the Russian retorted, only minimally getting into the spirit of the question yet refusing to take the contemptuous scowl off his face.

“Really? Did he? I hadn’t heard. Yes, that is good news.”

“And your byest news?” asked the Russian for the sake of at least passable propriety.

“Well, funny you should ask because I did see three rather gripping Hungarian women on the U-Bahn. One was prim. One was terse. One was frumpy. And they all had such small feet. And I thought the prim one had probably married rather well and the terse one slightly hated her. But the frumpy one seemed the happiest and…”

“Zet not news. Streektly spyeekink.”

“Oh. I see. Well, you know, darling. Same old, same old,” and I closed the door gently behind me.

Face-off October 27, 2008

By the time the Russian and I have wolfed down dinner in (verbal) silence in about fourteen seconds flat, having toiled lovingly over the preparation for considerably longer, the bottle is still usually half-full, even if the glass is half-empty. This inevitably invites a moral dilemma of critical proportions.

The only way to achieve a moral victory is, of course, to put that glass cone – the cleanest and most unused item of kitchenware in the house – in the neck and put the wine-bottle away in some dark corner where it can supposedly be forgotten about until the next wine-drinking occasion raises its predictable head the following evening.

Yet even moral fortitude and rectitude have their downsides. Chiefly that they are the enemy of hedonism and doing what you’d really like and while I’m not desperate for life to be one long string of gleeful moments, I do worry that these positives, if they can be so called, might be even loosely tied up with guilt and before you know it people will be saying or you’ll be thinking, “Once a Catholic…” which makes me want to go and impale myself on a spire somewhere, or, at the very least, speed-convert to the Church of England.

And closing the bottle with the pristine cone has the added disadvantage, or, at least, mitigated benefit, of putting me in the Russian’s good books. “Molodets,” he’ll say as I trudge hunchbacked to the cupboard under the sink where undrunk wine keeps the cleaning products company. “Umnitsa,” he’ll continue as I return to my seat and sip languidly on gone-flat mineral water in a mood redolent of the day after your birthday. Because being in the Russian’s good books and creating a fraudulent image of sobriety and temperance is as morally wicked as lying. Unless I was willing to change my ways, which I sometimes pretend I am, but am probably basically not, it would be awfully naughty to create such a false impression. And so early in our courtship! I haven’t even met my father-in-law yet.

One unlikely permutation, which occurs about as irregularly as the Earth changing direction, is that I will experience a rush of primness and suggest the bottle be coned just when the Russian’s looking like he’d fancy quite a lot more booze. I am magnanimous and say the decision is his but may have to tut (and remind him of his above-recommended-guidelines consumption) with sneering frequency.

But far more likely is a face-off between me and the bottle. Dinner is over. If I’m trying to be French, the national barometer I think best aligned with good living – ignoring the statistics for liver cancer – then I should, by rights, push my glass away from me and do something proper like meet my mistress or smoke and have an intellectual conversation at the same time, preferably with raised voices and aspersions cast on the interlocutor’s sanity. But I am not French. And the wine bottle is a foreign body my cultural immune system tries to attack. “What do you want to drink more of me for?” it whispers waspishly, circumflexes and castles leaping like sprites off the label and dragging my heavy fingers back from where they came.

Eyes right to see how I’m doing with the Russian. Is he in a wine-coning mood? Or one of those festive ones where we may drink on as long as we can find some excuse for it? “It’ll spoil by tomorrow.” “It’ll help us relax.” “We’re alcoholics.”

But the most crushing defeat is if my beloved benevolently waves his approval at my drinking on but fails to join me. He will return to online-shopping and academia and I will be left with two more cauldron-sized glasses of occasionless wine to drink. Each delicious drop tinged with reproof and condemnation. The Russian might find me in my one-man snug and ask advice on some linguistic matter. I will try to make my eyes look perky or not to slur my words or hide my red-wine lips but in an attempt to appear beyond reproach I will knock over a cactus or tip over the glass. “Uh-huh,” he’ll conclude soberly and turn on his heels, mission truncated.

Still, the nights are drawing in – it’s now dark at 2pm – and we don’t want to be too perfect, do we? What’s the world come to if a man can’t sip away the winter blues in the comfort of his own home! I say almost non-stop wine-drinking is a seasonal and traditional rite till the onset of spring.

To your good health!

Mis- October 24, 2008

Hope none of you went with that recipe. Worst indigestion I’ve ever had.

Darlings, I’m all about the getting-things-wrong these days. Naturally I assume this is just the next stage of my irreversible dementia and living mislingually. Still, every experience is a good one, apart from, perhaps, being held against your will and tortured, or talking backwards, or eating upside-down, so I’m thinking even the misexperiences are to be enjoyed and, as surely as night follows day, written down for my own and, selfless old thing that I am, your appreciation. Perhaps even marvel.

These are hard times – mind you, a gent I chatted to the other day in a bar told me there’s no crisis and it’s all just bollocks, which is surely bollocks, isn’t it? Still, he had excellent teeth so I thought he had the moral authority and I had to go and seek out an all-night glazier to reglaze the window of the bank which I’d just smashed in – so making positives out of negatives is to be encouraged. Brain going down the pan? No! It’s just the next stage in your brain’s (mis)development. The world going down the tubes? Not a bit of it. Just an opportunity for us to realign to less nasty habits and make our own entertainment. Worried about your future and thinking employers will start giving you less work? Very easy. Just charge double!

See. Life is good, even when you get things wrong.

I’ve been tapping away fairly furiously of late, trying to scrabble enough pfennigs together to put a Würstchen or two on our humble table. By the time the taxman’s had his wicked old way with my money, there’s not much left for luxuries like food, booze, fast men and fast public transport. Yet it goes without saying that this is yet more cause for rejoicing. Giving is good. How could you not feel warm and fuzzy to think you were probably single-handedly providing schools with science labs, hospitals with vital and state-of-the-art equipment, godforsaken provinces with roads and electricity and civilisation and the people from the 100%-long-term-unemployment-house across the road with fags? But the tapping’s caused short-circuitry. Shatteringly vivid incidents of misinterpretation, mishearing, miswriting and misseeing.

Loving my fellow humans as I do and hoping that one of these mishappenings might lead to a eureka moment and be of some great benefit for mankind – wasn’t penicillin invented when some drunk person put his kebab down next to a moulding pizza-box as he went to check his e-mail having rolled in drunk at 4am? – I am careful to follow my mistakes diligently. But the results have only been disturbing or pathetic.

Favourite typo. Should have written ‘bacteriostatic’ which, as anyone with even half a day at school behind him can tell, is something boring and scientific. My mistype came out as ‘bacteriotastic’ which paints bacteria in a much jollier light. Singing and dancing germs. I wrote to the authorities to see if there could be any use for the word – even went as far as e-mailing the Académie Française, with a subject line of ‘bactériotastique’ as I’m happy to sell my soul to the French for fifteen minutes of linguistic fame – but no-one was interested.

I tossed and turned in bed all night and had dreams which magnified the extent of my failings. I argued with the Russian that the socks had been mispaired but he laughed maniacally, dangling miscoloured, mismatched garments in my face and said, in perfect English, “Don’t start an argument your colour-blind ass can’t win.” Terrifying. When did he learn English? Had he been misspeaking to me all this time? Had I misinterpreted all along? Had I misbothered speaking Russian?

But the real, waking Russian got bored of my missleeping. As my dreams about my misdeeds and misachievements got ever more misbegotten, my tossing and turning – so I’m told – got ever more mismanageable and misignorable. The Russian began to contort in such a way that, with minimum effort, he might push me as far across the bed as possible to be less misturbed. I awoke with a shudder, the terrifying visions of the unconscious disappearing as quickly as a student whose round it is, only to be met with misvisions of arms and legs flailing with the rest of some body concealed under a blanket. It looked exactly like an octopus in chainmail.

I’d very much like my brain never to misbehave again.

My perfect syrnik September 24, 2008

Darlings, whom would you least like to be invited to dinner by? Though I like Closer to Fine well enough, I’d still have to say I’d least like to go for dinner at the Indigo Girls’ house, assuming they live together, because, let’s face it, you’d only choke to death on quiche and some bone-dry salad within minutes.

A squillion years ago, part of a job I had was translating the restaurant reviews for a St. Petersburg magazine. It was an OK way to (part-)earn a living, though not as much fun as translating the excoriating film reviews by the same person. He saved his sharpest vitriol for anything that came from Hollywood, or perhaps even America in general – he was a product of his times and environment, after all – and I then found that a bit of hoot. I was young. But he was more obsequious when it came to food, or perhaps the food in St. Petersburg restaurants was just unfailingly excellent. (I often did eat rather well there, but was too skint for it to be frequent.) And I remember him saying that the pudding was always the most important part of the meal as that’s what you leave the restaurant with the memory still fresh of.

I thought that was probably bollocks as even now, with my brain almost completely erased by badness, I am still capable of thinking, “Hmm, that spotted dick wasn’t so good but their toad-in-the-hole was magnificent.”

So I am heroically resisting an urge to let my pudding-memory, as it were, of England disflavour my whole meal. Yet am I allowed just a minor gripe about transport back on the island? I was even impressed to find a website to help you plan journeys when I’d always previously relied on ze Tschermans, even for journeys within the UK. Faithfully, trustingly tapped in Metroland to Luton Airport. Quickest option was by two buses with a 15-or-so-minute wait between the two at the romantically named Bricket Wood. “Wonderful,” I thought. “I’ll get fifteen minutes of greenery. There’ll probably be a cricket match happening within view, the players making the most of the last days of sun before it disappears again for 8 months. A thatched cottage or two.”

I was dropped off on a dual carriageway at a ramshackle bus-stop which had last seen human company in the 1970s. Lorries whizzed by at what, so close up, seemed terrifying speed. The odd motorist dashed a sympathetic and unbelieving glance at the nutter waiting by the side of the motorway. And then my bus appeared. In the outside lane. Travelling at about 100mph. I stuck my hand out feebly, remembering my country’s mores – a French friend once refused to believe that pulling the string on a bus would make it stop – but it sped past. “Just as well I’ve left myself oodles of time,” I muttered to myself, picking the bits of gravel thrown up by passing vehicles out of my face. And then another 757 to Luton Airport. Going at 100mph and in the outside lane. I stuck out my hand, then pretended it was the opening move in a head-scratch as he whizzed past. “Just as well I’ve left myself oodles of time,” I remuttered to myself with less confidence. A man in a rich person’s car pulled into the bus-stop’s microscopic lay-by, I thought to rescue a gentleman in distress. But he looked at a map and sped back off. Eventually a 321, servicing the world’s slowest and most circuitous bus-route, stopping at every bird’s nest in the south east of England, trundled up in the right lane and ground to a stunned halt. The Polish driver – I thought of befriending him it all took so long – got us to Luton Airport in record non-speed, where it was a mad dash through security – fuck, haven’t got a pound coin for the liquids plastic bags and it takes no other coins. Excellent. Fuck. Will risk it – planewards. I wrote indignant SMSes to the Russian throughout keeping him up-to-date. “You write complyaint lyettyer ven you get khome.”

I arrived in Berlin some hours later, still breathless from my English goodbye, wondering if the Russian might have decided to truncate his trip by a few months and surprise me by being here. Not a bit of it. So I’m fending for myself. Threats in the post. Mostly placated. And a fridge with some milk that had turned into yoghurt and a packet of Quark. (Is that really curd cheese in English?)

Nothing for it. It was going to have to be a syrnik (cream cheese fritter or cottage cheese pancake, says the online dic), which Russians eat for breakfast, for dinner.

Cook with BiB. Take a bowl. Splat packet of curd cheese – I don’t know how many effing grams. Probably 250 – into bowl. Add some white sugar. Add one egg. Add some flour. Mix it up until it’s a fairly sturdy gloop. Then dollop some gloop into a frying-pan sizzling with butter or olive oil. If you don’t burn them to a cinder, as I do, you should end up with a fairly satisfactorily thick, rubbery pancake. Nice with jam or nutella for breakfast.

Or dinner.

White trash September 19, 2008

Google says I’m riff-raff. Spot on, of course, but you don’t expect computers to be quite so damned discerning. But maybe it can sense the HP Sauce stains on my shirt or smell the vinegar off my crisp-soiled fingers. All I wanted was to google something, like any sane and sober person, when it provided a very ugly screen, which they’ve enuglied especially to put us riff-raff in our place, telling me that I reminded them of a virus-creating robot and spyware-ridden ne’er-do-well and, frankly, a bit of a tosser. And I had to do word verification just to get things back to normal, as if I was posting a comment on some lovely blog. I was struggling to hold back tears as it was – imagine not being allowed access to google. Surely a far more severe punishment than the death penalty – but they thought they’d complete the humiliation. The word verification word was ‘sCUmbAg’. Honestly!

I’m on the island. Bloody hell. Lovely here, innit? The Russian and I have already had to exchange soul-searching SMSes. “Darling,” I might write. “London is the wickedest place on the planet. We should probably move here tomorrow.” But he has to go and spoil things and shatter delusions by introducing reality. “Vere I vill vörk? Vot I vill do? Deesh-vosher?” Which, combined with freshly-formed thoughts of bedsits and single-ringed hotplates and the western end of the Bakerloo Line, saw me removing my dunce’s cap and thinking the current set-up, where I am treated to fantastic but infrequent snippets of London, is perhaps not the worst thing in the world.

I accept I may not be the first to point this out but it’s worth repeating. My god. Isn’t London fan-fucking-tastic (pardon me tmesis)? A pal asked me what had changed since I was last here as normally there’s some obvious shift or other. Though this time nothing has leapt out. Well, there always appear to be new buildings around Canary Wharf but I can’t remember that skyline from one trip to the next. I wouldn’t notice fashion trends, though people seem well-presented and, though this could be to do with my own magnificent age and decrepitude, folk look in good shape. Perhaps slobbishness is out (though I put on a good couple of kilos a day from all the delicious sausages). “Hmm,” I said to the pal. “Well, of course it’s still 900 times more crowded and racier than Berlin, but maybe things don’t seem quite as hectic as normal.” But I must have hit some quiet blip as when I ended up at London Bridge station some hours later, I thought I might pass out from the excitement of so much movement. Bloody hell. Humans swarming this way and that. Crowds the likes of which Berlin only sees when American presidential candidates or the Love Parade come to town. And yet, to my touristy eye, the atmosphere seemed pleasant enough. I never felt I was only a hair’s breadth from a frustration-unleashed bloodbath.

And my mother has moved to beyond London’s borders. To betjemanian Metroland. Even London Underground staff look bewildered when I ask for a zones 1-9 travelcard. “Where ya goin’?” they ask, pouring scorn on my mental probity. Then their eyes roll with dollar signs as they ring up my bill, a one-way ticket costing, naturally, 700 pounds. Still, London is so magnificent that I have even resisted the urge to engage in the quick getting-a-dig-in-at-how-expensive-everything-is conversation with Londoners. How else are we riff-raff to be kept out, after all?

So here I sit, blogging on what feels like a boiling hot day, though the body may have reset itself to autumn, in my mother’s Metroland garden. A little splash o’ Reeocka to wash down my second go of sausages of the day. A 25-metre extension cable keeping me hooked up to the grid. And nothing to disrupt the idyll but the odd scratch of a squirrel and my mother’s pen dancing elegantly across the Daily Mirror crossword (and perhaps my testiness at having to give hints to, “Scottish River. Three letters. TA_”).

It’s a privilege to be here.

Love all September 9, 2008

If TV didn’t exist, Americans would have to invent it.

The US Open has just come to an end. For a tennis fan like myself, it is both the best of times and worst of times. Not it being over. It being on. Because my love is so ardent and my partisanship in any match so fanatic that I normally can’t bear to watch. Which slightly defeats the object of having a love in the first place. I might allow myself to follow the score online, but have to switch that off when the score approaches excitement. Or I might allow myself to watch a snippet of the first few potentially unimportant games of a match, but then panic when the player I’m rabidly supporting misses a first serve. I quickly instruct the remote control to move up or down one channel and alight on soft porn – there is a lot of this on German TV – which is a convenient backdrop as my heart-rate resettles. Perhaps Stephen Pollard is right that tennis is a sport for being who don’t like sport.

I’ve at least learnt that women flick their hair a lot during sex.

And there was even British interest in this year’s men’s final. It would have been exciting if Murray had won but I am thrilled that Federer, whose tennis can be so beautiful that I sometimes have my passions cryogenically put on standby so that I can absorb more than a few minutes’ worth, has, at last, won another Grand Slam.

And tennis is a great waste of time while the Russian isn’t here (and even when he is, to be fair). I can get a good few hours of work avoidance out of checking every result of every tournament happening on the planet twenty times a day. And once the results are known, and the suspense is deadened, I can try to find a replay of highlights.

And one of the presenters on the US Open website TV bit – I don’t know his name. He may be a mega-star in the States – was just so damned good, wandering around talking to random spectators, asking what they thought of this and that result, that I understood TV had to exist. He was made for it. And his excellence and charm make the viewers’ experience more enjoyable. Of course there must be good TV presenters from the UK. From Germany. From Azerbaijan. But it did appear, watching an unknown-to-me man in Flushing Meadow, that Americans had perfected the art. And cue much cringing when foreign broadcasters try to adopt and adapt some recipe that’s worked on American TV. French TV trying to be zany. The Price is Right on British TV.

This could be the success of American TV so dominating the market – when I was young, real life had English accents and the unreal world American – that it’s made me think anything that skews from the path American TV has laid out is less good. But if I want glitz and glamour, or upbeat fantasy unreality TV, I want it with an American accent. For feel-good, I want USA. For grit and comedy, I look more to the island.

Speaking of which, I am having the first strong pangs of home-sickness since about the year 2000. It’s meeting Londoners (or people who live there) what’s done it. I’ve had guests (or met others’) from London and the ease of contact makes me think, if I lived there, I’d probably make best friends on the Tube at least every day. So I’m going to come and nip the home-sickness in the bud by visiting the Big Smoke.

Anyone up for debauchery next week?