Memoirs Of A Fire Hazard isn't usually political. Sometimes, however, something happens in politics which is so seismically stupid, annoying and bloody terrifying that it would be remiss not to pass comment. Largely I have been respectful of the opposite view to my own during the EU referendum campaigns. Yesterday was the first time I posted anything about the subject on social media. Many said, quite rightly, that we shouldn't be launching personal attacks on each other over a political issue, but when this morning we awoke to the news that the UK, in their limitless wisdom, had decided to leave the European Union following yesterday's vote I started to wish I'd made more effort to put people off voting Leave. What we will have now is a so-called 'Brexit' which I described yesterday as like setting your rented house on fire because you want more control over what happens to it. When you ask the average Leave voter why they want to leave the EU they don't actually know, or they come up with something about taking back control of our own borders. All of which is complete nonsense, as we will see.
The referendum result was a close run thing. Fifty-one point nine per cent of those who voted chose to leave while 49.1% had the nous to think it better to stay. As a result of this narrow defeat for the Remain campaign, pig-fancying gobshite Prime Minister David Cameron has announced that he will leave office by this October. I can honestly say I never thought I would be genuinely disturbed by his departure, but I am. There will be those who think that the Leave campaign is a triumph because it has brought about the end of his time in Downing Street, but this is a short term view which fails to acknowledge any of the multitude of other dangers that may lie around the corner following his exit. In short, be careful what you wish for.
Although Cameron campaigned for the UK to remain in the EU he is largely to blame for the mess that has this morning left the pound weaker than it has been since 1985. The mess that threatens to see lovable television buffoon and English Donald Trump Boris Johnson take over the premiership, and a situation which will in truth make absolutely rock all difference to immigration except for the anticipated flood of people who might be desperate to get here for fear that we will be shutting our doors to them two years from now. That's right Leave voters, even if we start the process of leaving today (which we won't for reasons I will explain later) it will take two years to complete. Let's just say it is complex. If you imagined that you would wake up this morning to news footage of someone blocking the Channel Tunnel with a great big red brick wall then you are going to be sorely disappointed. Ironically, Leave voters may even have brought about an increase in immigration, in the short term at least. Regardless, if we did shut our doors to everyone and not just those from Europe, it would make a difference of around one in 35 people over a 10-year period. That is to say that in 10 years time there would be 34 children in your child's school classroom instead of 35, or 34 cars ahead of you in the morning traffic jams instead of 35. Was this really worth fucking the economy for? Or potentially turning our fate as a nation over to the extreme right loonies Johnson, Michael Gove and Nigel Farage? Respectfully I suggest not.
The awful truth is that Cameron should never have offered the people a referendum to decide something so important. It was spineless and politically irresponsible, as is his departure now. He'll probably be reflecting on that now as he prepares to go through the door marked Do One. The people were never close to being interested enough or educated enough to make a sensible decision. Right up until yesterday social media was flooded with half-wits suggesting that they didn't know which way to vote because there was 'not enough information' available. These people, who it seems have not yet grasped the concept of Google, were also adamant that since people fought and died for their right to vote that they should exercise that right. All of which sounds lovely in principle but should you really exercise your right to vote if you know fuck all about what you are voting on? And what's more if you do not care to know to the extent that you couldn't spend five minutes conducting a little research, instead preferring to use your technological know-how to shout into the social media void that you don't know what the fuck you are doing? But it's all so difficult, isn't it?
Now even though Cameron's departure as PM could be considered a good thing, it has left the country in an almighty mess. Basically, Mr Cameron has walked into a room, shit in the corner and then ran off to leave someone else to clean up the mess. It's monumentally cowardly of him and I confess to being a little bit surprised by it. I was hanging on to the hope that he would use his legendary devious nature to either rig the referendum for the greater good or else stay in office and work to find a way to avoid enforcing the EU withdrawal. Or at least manage it to try to limit the damage. After all, the vote was particularly close and if you include the people who did not turn out to vote then you could argue that the majority of people did not vote to leave the EU. Still, so long as the people who didn't know what to do until yesterday turned out then we're in safe hands. Democracy works.
Chillingly, the people who will most likely be left to pick up the pieces from this and that ran the Leave campaign are as surprised by the result as I am. It's highly likely that they didn't expect to win and that the likes of Johnson, Farage and Gove just wanted to give Cameron a bloody nose for their own political ends. Their agenda always seemed more likely to be to shove Cameron aside to progress their own, even more right wing plans for control than it was to actually cut the UK adrift from an organisation which has provided us with all manner of positives from human rights, employment rights, regeneration for our cities and towns and blah blah blah. I know, Leave don't want to read that because the main thing is that we stop foreigners piling through our borders at a rate of 200million a day.
Back in the real world and with all that in mind there will now be a probably interminable period to allow for the meeting of these great minds to decide exactly how to go about facilitating our exit from the EU. Scotland and Northern Ireland are already making noises about leaving the UK, clearly because they overwhelmingly want to remain part of the EU. The referendum results in those countries proved that. Brexit is a distinctly English thing. Not that any of this matters to Leave voters who are just delighted that the Leave campaign have promised to stop those bloody foreigners coming over here taking our benefits and our jobs at the same time, contributing to our economy and all kinds of other evil that Little Englanders hate. It's a promise they may not even keep but it has at least sated the English appetite for hatred for now. Indeed, the result is a victory for hate. The people who start their sentences with the phrase 'I'm not racist but....' may not be racist in the same way that people who come up to me in the street and say 'I'm not being funny but...' are not necessarily prejudiced against the disabled. Yet the fact that they need to establish that before they speak sometimes is fairly telling. The bottom line is that they have thrown their lot in with some very powerful people who are clearly racist. People like Farage who sold voters the lie that the UK pours £350million into the EU every week, and who has immediately back-tracked on his laughable claim that following our EU exit that money would instead be spent on the NHS. At best a vote for that is naïve and irresponsible, at worst it is disgusting and unpalatable.
One crumb of comfort could come from the possibility that a General Election takes place. Cameron's lot were elected to hold the referendum, but not necessarily to follow through with our EU exit. If the people decide whether we should stay or go from the EU then perhaps they should also have a say in who manages our departure from it. OK so we are trusting idiots again that way, and the far right psychos like Farage will no doubt take some of the working class vote, thus helping the Tories to divide and conquer us. But it might be our best bet, given that the alternative is to let Bellend Nigel and his cronies guide us through what is now sure to be a difficult period.
Friday, 24 June 2016
Thursday, 23 June 2016
The Boss
Yesterday, Saturday, we passed The Shard. So named because it looks a bit like a shard of glass, it's main purpose seems to be visibility from outer space. I actually didn't know what it was used for except showing off, but a cursory Google search has thrown up the nugget that it replaced an office block built in 1975 and is owned by a property company as well as the state of Qatar. It has a viewing gallery, which is the point that I am agonisingly arriving at. I pointed this out but Emma said that it would cost far more than it was worth to go up there (I think she said about £20) and that we could get an aerial view of London from the top of a shopping centre by St Paul's Cathedral.
We have to find the shopping centre first and it doesn't prove to be all that easy. We'd got off the train at Bank and immediately it got complicated. Brilliantly, they shut the lifts off at the weekend. I mean, why wouldn't they? What the fuck are disabled people doing wanting to go anywhere at the weekend? The audacity of these fucking freaks. We spend a ridiculous amount of time sat waiting with a lady and her mum until Emma manages to contact someone on the intercom. He then has to haul his poor arse down a flight of stairs to unlock the lifts for us. One of five bloody lifts in a row, all of which have been shut off because it is the weekend. This happened more than a fortnight before I write this and I'm still reeling. It's all a bloody outrage. If only the pair of us had stayed indoors dribbling like we are supposed to then we might have spared this poor guy his legs. In the event he denies any responsibility for the whole charade, calling himself a 'mere puppet'. To be quite honest it seems as if the whole of Bank Underground Station is run by puppets so he may have more power than he supposes. Either way there is no point wasting any more time berating him for it. That's what this column is for.
We waste yet more time wandering around the area by St Paul's Cathedral looking for a shopping centre. Emma's dad offers some directions over the phone and it turns out that we have gone past it. I think we had expected something taller, given that it's meant to offer a view of the city from the rooftop terrace. Nevertheless we go in and ride the glass lift up to the sixth and top floor. Glass lifts are a bit weird I think. You lose your stomach a little bit. We come out on to the terrace and it's surprisingly stunning. There's a magnificent view of St Paul's Cathedral along a path that leads down also to views of the London Eye. The Shard is probably visible from here too as it is visible from pretty much anywhere in the universe. Best of all there is a small terrace bar just set back from the wall around the terrace. We go there and drink Sol at some totally unjustifiable price but it is hot, it's sunny and it is 11.30 on a Sunday morning. Sometimes you just have to spend a bit more to get a unique experience. Whatever it cost, and I don't rightly remember, it is definitely better value than the £5.30 a pint in The George yesterday. That was just an ordinary pub. A nice pub, don't get me wrong, but just a pub. No views of significant London landmarks and actually no sunshine because all of the outdoor space was taken and we drank inside.
We shelve plans to visit the Tower Of London. By the time we have stopped laying about in the sun drinking expensive beer it's way after 12.00 and Emma wants to be at Wembley Stadium for around 4.00. It's the day of the Bruce Springsteen concert, which after all is the reason we have come all this way. We take a walk (push?) towards and over the Millennium Bridge but then while looking for a pub we visited a couple of years ago called The Old Thameside Inn we take a wrong turn somewhere at Bankside, Southwalk. Eventually we realise this and turn back, looking instead for either Southwalk or London Bridge tube stations. Inevitably, we find another pub. This time it is the brilliantly monikered Doggett's Coat And Badge. There we watch the first set of the French Open tennis final between Andy Murray and Novak Djokovic. Murray wins the first but by the time we leave midway through the second he's on his way to what was probably always an inevitable defeat by the Serb who now holds all four Grand Slam titles, the first man to do so since Rod Laver in 1969. Architecture and tennis. Memoirs Of A Fire Hazard is your one-stop shop for useless information.
We get back on the tube and it starts. The gathering of the hard-core Bruce fans. I'm actually expecting them to be much older and with an array of stupid tattoos and piercings, but most of those that board the train between London Bridge and Wembley Park seem fairly average in appearance. The only thing that gives their musical preferences away is the t-shirts they wear which carry the face of 'The Boss' on the front and a list of exotic places he has played at on the reverse. Well some of them at any rate. Springsteen is 66 years old and has probably played everywhere except Thatto Heath Labour Club by now. Going off on a tangent for a second a friend of mine has just told me that her son is working in Thatto Heath at the moment. He took a photograph of the sign at the railway station and asked the question what kind of name this was 'for a gaff'. Then he said something about it being a shithole. While I can't make an impassioned argument against that I did at least tell her to let him know that I live in the posh end. Which means I own my own home. Said friend then went on to suggest that Thatto Heath must be a shithole because of the way we speak, before having a wild stab at mocking my accent. All of which is ironic given her own staggering scouse-ness.
We've gone off course. The next challenge for us was to get inside the stadium. It is not a long walk from Wembley Park but it is all uphill. At the top I feel like I have done 90 minutes in bloody Gym Bug or some other poser's paradise. We consider buying some food from the many outlets on the way in, but remembering my mum's advice never to buy food from 'places' (by which she means anything with wheels) we skip it and make our way inside. Like last week we are meant to enter at Gate J but we are about 30 blocks over from where we were for the play-off final. It takes an absolute age to walk that distance around the concourse, to the point where actually it would have been much quicker to let us in at Gate K. Which is probably not accessible. That's the only reason I can see for the logic. I mean, come on, it is only 2016 and only four years on from London hosting a Paralympics. Give them a chance.
Just to make life more difficult there is a separate kiosk for every different item of food you might want to spend silly amounts of money on. Which is all very well if you are on your own. Just decide what you want and find the relevant kiosk. But if you are with someone else, and you want a burger and someone else wants a hot dog or some nachos then you have to go your separate ways. So we both got a burger because anyway, in the end, there's little difference between one type of overpriced shit and another. Fortunately, all of the different kiosks serve beer. So with that sorted we eventually find our seats which aren't bad. Perhaps we are a little too far away from the stage if I'm honest. Bruce is going to look fairly ant-like from this distance (though I do hope he is a good deal more entertaining than Ant Man). Yet there are several big screens around the stage which will help.
For now the entertainment is on the field, well before Bruce has even appeared. One fella has had far too many scoops for his own good and is lying prostrate on the temporary surface, emptying the contents of his gut with some vigour. It's highly unedifying and gets worse when the security people get wind of it because their intervention involved that most dreaded of allegedly helpful apparatus, the evac-chair. I have spent large parts of my life to this point doing anything to avoid ever being placed on an evac-chair. Quite frankly I would rather burn like Stannis' daughter than suffer the ignominy of descending a flight of stairs in that manner. The chair they use to hoist me on to aeroplanes is as close as I'm ever going to get to it and that is only because that is a necessary evil if I'm ever going to get anywhere outside of the UK. In this lad's position I would have crawled off the surface and down the nearest tunnel. He doesn't though. He voluntarily sits on the wretched thing, assuming he can do anything voluntarily such is the depth of his inebriation. Notably his mates don't leave with him. Just as you sometimes have to pay that bit extra for a special experience, so you sometimes have to let your mates fuck off on their own to sober up if they can't handle their ale.
I'm in the toilet when Bruce starts playing, which would be slightly annoying if I was a massive fan. I'm not really, is the awful truth. Emma's the one with a keenness for him but I enjoy the show all the same. I don't know all of the songs so I spend part of the three and a half hour gig (he doesn't do support acts) trying to work out what song he is playing and part of it people watching. I haven't seen as many drunken and quite rubbish dance moves as this since we went to see Simple Minds at Wembley arena when punching the air seemed to be the thing. Looking around I'm quite envious that they know every word and are bellowing along. Concerts are always better when you know the music well, so I'd be the same if I'd done my homework. There's no doubt Bruce is good. He's very good and he has an exhaustive repertoire of rock anthems at his disposal. Born To Run is particularly uplifting and a fair portion of folk go quite dizzy during The River. I don't recall him playing Glory Days which is one that I do like, although I may just have missed it having been distracted by the swathes of middle aged, would-be rockers getting their Bruce on in ever more embarrassing ways.
Helpfully, Bruce introduces every song with signs and even chastises one or two audience member for the sub-standard quality of the signs that they have brought with them. I've not seen this kind of signage before at a gig and I can't work out whether it is a Bruce thing or a stadium thing. The majority of gigs that I have been to have been at indoor arenas, except for Robbie Williams at the Eithad in Manchester a couple of years ago. There's a fair chance that his fans don't bring signs because they can't spell. Except for me, of course. I'm a Robbie Williams fan and I can spell.
It takes an eternity to get out of the stadium and Emma's impatience is obvious. The police are holding people up so that there aren't too many people entering Wembley Park at one time. This happened last week but it somehow seems to take longer this time around. Not for waiting, Emma's weaving between the crowds through gaps that I can't fit my fat arse into let alone my wheelchair and I'm worried that I will lose her. Fortunately she knows to wait by the lift outside Wembley Park. Unfortunately, when I eventually get there I'm at the back of a ridiculous queue, made worse by the inability of the general public to operate a lift. They overload it three times, once to the point where an out of service message flashes above the door and it looks for a moment as if we'll all been spending the night here. Unhelpfully people who could walk up the stairs choose not to, contributing even more to the overloading of the lift and wasting yet more of my life force. When it comes to my turn Emma takes the steps, although someone bizarrely claims that they had been told they were not allowed to do so if they were accompanying a wheelchair user. This seems unlikely, although Memoirs Of A Fire Hazard would not be surprised to learn that the right to walk up a flight of stairs and wait at the top has been stripped from anyone who has the audacity to rock up with a cripple.
One such, a middle-aged woman with a seriously bad attitude, spend the tube journey chastising her teenage son for never doing anything to help her. The same teenage son who has just taken her to a Bruce Springsteen concert and pushed her all the way back from the stadium to Wembley Park. She never once touched her own wheels in anything resembling an attempt to self propel. Maybe she wasn't able to, but if that is the case shut the fuck up and stop having a go at your son for not doing anything for you. Do you really think he would rather be at a Bruce Springsteen gig than out drinking cider with girls his own age or whatever it is the cool kids do nowadays. I loathe ungratefulness.
Monday comes and we swerve the Tower Of London again, settling instead for a Spoons brekkie and a bit more time at home ahead of a Wednesday return to work.
Yesterday, Saturday, we passed The Shard. So named because it looks a bit like a shard of glass, it's main purpose seems to be visibility from outer space. I actually didn't know what it was used for except showing off, but a cursory Google search has thrown up the nugget that it replaced an office block built in 1975 and is owned by a property company as well as the state of Qatar. It has a viewing gallery, which is the point that I am agonisingly arriving at. I pointed this out but Emma said that it would cost far more than it was worth to go up there (I think she said about £20) and that we could get an aerial view of London from the top of a shopping centre by St Paul's Cathedral.
We have to find the shopping centre first and it doesn't prove to be all that easy. We'd got off the train at Bank and immediately it got complicated. Brilliantly, they shut the lifts off at the weekend. I mean, why wouldn't they? What the fuck are disabled people doing wanting to go anywhere at the weekend? The audacity of these fucking freaks. We spend a ridiculous amount of time sat waiting with a lady and her mum until Emma manages to contact someone on the intercom. He then has to haul his poor arse down a flight of stairs to unlock the lifts for us. One of five bloody lifts in a row, all of which have been shut off because it is the weekend. This happened more than a fortnight before I write this and I'm still reeling. It's all a bloody outrage. If only the pair of us had stayed indoors dribbling like we are supposed to then we might have spared this poor guy his legs. In the event he denies any responsibility for the whole charade, calling himself a 'mere puppet'. To be quite honest it seems as if the whole of Bank Underground Station is run by puppets so he may have more power than he supposes. Either way there is no point wasting any more time berating him for it. That's what this column is for.
We waste yet more time wandering around the area by St Paul's Cathedral looking for a shopping centre. Emma's dad offers some directions over the phone and it turns out that we have gone past it. I think we had expected something taller, given that it's meant to offer a view of the city from the rooftop terrace. Nevertheless we go in and ride the glass lift up to the sixth and top floor. Glass lifts are a bit weird I think. You lose your stomach a little bit. We come out on to the terrace and it's surprisingly stunning. There's a magnificent view of St Paul's Cathedral along a path that leads down also to views of the London Eye. The Shard is probably visible from here too as it is visible from pretty much anywhere in the universe. Best of all there is a small terrace bar just set back from the wall around the terrace. We go there and drink Sol at some totally unjustifiable price but it is hot, it's sunny and it is 11.30 on a Sunday morning. Sometimes you just have to spend a bit more to get a unique experience. Whatever it cost, and I don't rightly remember, it is definitely better value than the £5.30 a pint in The George yesterday. That was just an ordinary pub. A nice pub, don't get me wrong, but just a pub. No views of significant London landmarks and actually no sunshine because all of the outdoor space was taken and we drank inside.
We shelve plans to visit the Tower Of London. By the time we have stopped laying about in the sun drinking expensive beer it's way after 12.00 and Emma wants to be at Wembley Stadium for around 4.00. It's the day of the Bruce Springsteen concert, which after all is the reason we have come all this way. We take a walk (push?) towards and over the Millennium Bridge but then while looking for a pub we visited a couple of years ago called The Old Thameside Inn we take a wrong turn somewhere at Bankside, Southwalk. Eventually we realise this and turn back, looking instead for either Southwalk or London Bridge tube stations. Inevitably, we find another pub. This time it is the brilliantly monikered Doggett's Coat And Badge. There we watch the first set of the French Open tennis final between Andy Murray and Novak Djokovic. Murray wins the first but by the time we leave midway through the second he's on his way to what was probably always an inevitable defeat by the Serb who now holds all four Grand Slam titles, the first man to do so since Rod Laver in 1969. Architecture and tennis. Memoirs Of A Fire Hazard is your one-stop shop for useless information.
We get back on the tube and it starts. The gathering of the hard-core Bruce fans. I'm actually expecting them to be much older and with an array of stupid tattoos and piercings, but most of those that board the train between London Bridge and Wembley Park seem fairly average in appearance. The only thing that gives their musical preferences away is the t-shirts they wear which carry the face of 'The Boss' on the front and a list of exotic places he has played at on the reverse. Well some of them at any rate. Springsteen is 66 years old and has probably played everywhere except Thatto Heath Labour Club by now. Going off on a tangent for a second a friend of mine has just told me that her son is working in Thatto Heath at the moment. He took a photograph of the sign at the railway station and asked the question what kind of name this was 'for a gaff'. Then he said something about it being a shithole. While I can't make an impassioned argument against that I did at least tell her to let him know that I live in the posh end. Which means I own my own home. Said friend then went on to suggest that Thatto Heath must be a shithole because of the way we speak, before having a wild stab at mocking my accent. All of which is ironic given her own staggering scouse-ness.
We've gone off course. The next challenge for us was to get inside the stadium. It is not a long walk from Wembley Park but it is all uphill. At the top I feel like I have done 90 minutes in bloody Gym Bug or some other poser's paradise. We consider buying some food from the many outlets on the way in, but remembering my mum's advice never to buy food from 'places' (by which she means anything with wheels) we skip it and make our way inside. Like last week we are meant to enter at Gate J but we are about 30 blocks over from where we were for the play-off final. It takes an absolute age to walk that distance around the concourse, to the point where actually it would have been much quicker to let us in at Gate K. Which is probably not accessible. That's the only reason I can see for the logic. I mean, come on, it is only 2016 and only four years on from London hosting a Paralympics. Give them a chance.
Just to make life more difficult there is a separate kiosk for every different item of food you might want to spend silly amounts of money on. Which is all very well if you are on your own. Just decide what you want and find the relevant kiosk. But if you are with someone else, and you want a burger and someone else wants a hot dog or some nachos then you have to go your separate ways. So we both got a burger because anyway, in the end, there's little difference between one type of overpriced shit and another. Fortunately, all of the different kiosks serve beer. So with that sorted we eventually find our seats which aren't bad. Perhaps we are a little too far away from the stage if I'm honest. Bruce is going to look fairly ant-like from this distance (though I do hope he is a good deal more entertaining than Ant Man). Yet there are several big screens around the stage which will help.
For now the entertainment is on the field, well before Bruce has even appeared. One fella has had far too many scoops for his own good and is lying prostrate on the temporary surface, emptying the contents of his gut with some vigour. It's highly unedifying and gets worse when the security people get wind of it because their intervention involved that most dreaded of allegedly helpful apparatus, the evac-chair. I have spent large parts of my life to this point doing anything to avoid ever being placed on an evac-chair. Quite frankly I would rather burn like Stannis' daughter than suffer the ignominy of descending a flight of stairs in that manner. The chair they use to hoist me on to aeroplanes is as close as I'm ever going to get to it and that is only because that is a necessary evil if I'm ever going to get anywhere outside of the UK. In this lad's position I would have crawled off the surface and down the nearest tunnel. He doesn't though. He voluntarily sits on the wretched thing, assuming he can do anything voluntarily such is the depth of his inebriation. Notably his mates don't leave with him. Just as you sometimes have to pay that bit extra for a special experience, so you sometimes have to let your mates fuck off on their own to sober up if they can't handle their ale.
I'm in the toilet when Bruce starts playing, which would be slightly annoying if I was a massive fan. I'm not really, is the awful truth. Emma's the one with a keenness for him but I enjoy the show all the same. I don't know all of the songs so I spend part of the three and a half hour gig (he doesn't do support acts) trying to work out what song he is playing and part of it people watching. I haven't seen as many drunken and quite rubbish dance moves as this since we went to see Simple Minds at Wembley arena when punching the air seemed to be the thing. Looking around I'm quite envious that they know every word and are bellowing along. Concerts are always better when you know the music well, so I'd be the same if I'd done my homework. There's no doubt Bruce is good. He's very good and he has an exhaustive repertoire of rock anthems at his disposal. Born To Run is particularly uplifting and a fair portion of folk go quite dizzy during The River. I don't recall him playing Glory Days which is one that I do like, although I may just have missed it having been distracted by the swathes of middle aged, would-be rockers getting their Bruce on in ever more embarrassing ways.
Helpfully, Bruce introduces every song with signs and even chastises one or two audience member for the sub-standard quality of the signs that they have brought with them. I've not seen this kind of signage before at a gig and I can't work out whether it is a Bruce thing or a stadium thing. The majority of gigs that I have been to have been at indoor arenas, except for Robbie Williams at the Eithad in Manchester a couple of years ago. There's a fair chance that his fans don't bring signs because they can't spell. Except for me, of course. I'm a Robbie Williams fan and I can spell.
It takes an eternity to get out of the stadium and Emma's impatience is obvious. The police are holding people up so that there aren't too many people entering Wembley Park at one time. This happened last week but it somehow seems to take longer this time around. Not for waiting, Emma's weaving between the crowds through gaps that I can't fit my fat arse into let alone my wheelchair and I'm worried that I will lose her. Fortunately she knows to wait by the lift outside Wembley Park. Unfortunately, when I eventually get there I'm at the back of a ridiculous queue, made worse by the inability of the general public to operate a lift. They overload it three times, once to the point where an out of service message flashes above the door and it looks for a moment as if we'll all been spending the night here. Unhelpfully people who could walk up the stairs choose not to, contributing even more to the overloading of the lift and wasting yet more of my life force. When it comes to my turn Emma takes the steps, although someone bizarrely claims that they had been told they were not allowed to do so if they were accompanying a wheelchair user. This seems unlikely, although Memoirs Of A Fire Hazard would not be surprised to learn that the right to walk up a flight of stairs and wait at the top has been stripped from anyone who has the audacity to rock up with a cripple.
One such, a middle-aged woman with a seriously bad attitude, spend the tube journey chastising her teenage son for never doing anything to help her. The same teenage son who has just taken her to a Bruce Springsteen concert and pushed her all the way back from the stadium to Wembley Park. She never once touched her own wheels in anything resembling an attempt to self propel. Maybe she wasn't able to, but if that is the case shut the fuck up and stop having a go at your son for not doing anything for you. Do you really think he would rather be at a Bruce Springsteen gig than out drinking cider with girls his own age or whatever it is the cool kids do nowadays. I loathe ungratefulness.
Monday comes and we swerve the Tower Of London again, settling instead for a Spoons brekkie and a bit more time at home ahead of a Wednesday return to work.
Monday, 20 June 2016
London - The Day Before Bruce
I’m in London the day Muhammad Ali dies. Before that, I watch the breaking news of his death at home over breakfast. Tributes pour in. Tony ‘I am Everton’ (what? mediocre?) Bellew even goes as far as to claim that Ali invented sarcasm. This seems a stretch, but there is no doubt about the influence of a man who is widely regarded as the greatest sportsman of the 20th century and who also was one of the leading figures in promoting civil rights during the troubled 1960’s and 70s. The word ‘legend’ is over-used, as is the phrase ‘the word legend is over-used’, both by this writer and the roll-call of slebs who are cold-called by the BBC to offer their thoughts in praise of ‘The Greatest’.
Four hours later we’re in London. After the excesses of the Britannia International last week, Emma has chosen the rather cheaper and more cheerful Tunes Hotel for this weekend’s visit. Like the Britannia International it is in Canary Wharf but is much smaller, has no bar, and we’re not allowed in our room until 3.00pm. We arrived at 12.30pm. I’m not complaining though. It’s a nice enough place and frankly, if Emma didn’t make the decisions about where we stay when we go on our little forays then it just wouldn’t get done. I’m just one of those people who puts things off. I’m currently late completing my application for my blue badge, which runs out in a fortnight and I regularly receive red letters from United Utilities having forgotten to pay the water bill. This particular problem comes from a stubborn refusal to open most of my mail since I developed kidney disease. I don’t want to read any more bad news.
Since we have to fill some time before the room is ready we set off to find Camden Town. We’re in London for Sunday’s Bruce Springsteen concert at Wembley but if you are going to go that kind of distance you are as well to make a weekend of it. There’s a million gazillion things to do in London, which has transformed in my mind’s eye from England’s toilet to one of my favourite cities in the world. Well, at least of those I have been to but they include Adelaide, New York, Toronto, San Diego, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Las Vegas, Barcelona, Minneapolis, Orlando, Amsterdam, Brussels and er…..Leeds. London is right up there with any or all of them and if it had a guarantee of good weather it might just top the lot.
We take the DLR (Docklands Light Railway) from just a short walk outside the hotel at West India Quay. This takes us to Stratford, sight of the London 2012 Olympics and now home to Taxpayers FC Bloody West Ham United. We were last here in November for the England v New Zealand rugby league test match, since when the outside of the stadium has been emblazoned with the happy hammers logo. We can see it from the train as we pass. No doubt next time we are here it will have been completely daubed in claret and blue and there’ll be huge scary billboards of Slaven Bilic all over the place. Did you see him jump on to the table in the ITV studio just because one of his happy hammers scored a goal for France? Bilic isn't even French, yet the way he climbed up beside Manu Petit's coffee mug, arms aloft, would suggest that he grew up just down the road from Petit rather than in Croatia. Perhaps he knows there won't be too much to celebrate from Croatia during the Euros so he's living it vicariously through France.
From Stratford we have to get on an overground train and this is where it gets a bit complex. There doesn’t appear to be anywhere to buy tickets. Finding the right platform is a bit of a minefield too, but we get there and talk to the man at the information desk about where we might be able to get tickets. He tells us that they are sold at machines downstairs, which means that Emma has to go back downstairs to get them. There are currently two trains to Camden Road on the platforms, one of which leaves in three minutes and which the man at the desk informs me we are going to miss, and one which leaves in 10 minutes. We’ll have to take that one, he says, because it will take more than three minutes for Emma to get back downstairs and get the tickets. It does. And while she is away a train pulls in and 20 million people get off it and start funnelling down the stairs leading towards her. I got that figure from the same people calculating immigration statistics for the Brexit campaign. It might be a bit high. Still, I don’t know how she finds me in that crowd but she does and we board the train, but not before the officious man at the desk insists on bringing out the ramp. Access on overground trains is as abysmal in London as it is anywhere else, it seems. The step from the platform is doable for me with Emma to help, but had I been on my own I would definitely have needed the ramp. The man insists on making me use it anyway, which delays things a little and I start to worry that the 10 minutes is probably up by now, but we make it.
Miraculously, there is someone there to meet us at Camden Road with a ramp to again insist on helping me get off the train. This wouldn’t happen anywhere on the line between Thatto Heath and Liverpool Lime Street. Not all of the time, at any rate. On one occasion I was visiting a friend in Seaforth and ended up in Waterloo. The step between the train and the platform was much steeper there and I could have ended up on the front of the local paper if I had tried to get off by myself. Had there been nobody to meet us at Camden Road we would have been ok but it is good to know that they make sure, even if they are a little over fussy about it for my tastes.
Camden Town is the busiest place I have been to bar Manhattan. The narrow, often cobbly pavements are more tightly packed than Tom Daley's trunks. There’s some kind of rock music festival on somewhere in the vicinity, so quite a significant percentage of the people blocking my way are leather-clad, Mohawk-sporting, walking tattoo easels. This being Saturday lunchtime and with the weather co-operating for once, the famous Camden Market is bursting with shoppers just desperate to part with their money in exchange for all manner of assorted tat. But we’re starving having by now. It’s after 2.00 and we haven’t eaten since about 7.30 so instead of scouring the stalls and shops for said tat we are only interested in finding somewhere for a feed. Which is difficult. There’s lots of pubs and restaurants in the area but they are all very, very busy. And loud. If not because of the general hum of chatter then due to various kinds of music blaring out of the open windows and doors. We find a place with a few spare seats outside and pay close to £30 for what is essentially two chicken burgers, one portion of fries and a couple of soft drinks. London is great, but London is not cheap.
Just over the road from where we sit is The Stables Market, inside which you will find what we came here for. The Amy Winehouse statue. It's my fault we are here. Despite the Heroin, the tattoo overkill and her willingness to put up with domestic abuse from half-wit no marks, I've always been a big fan of Amy Winehouse. The word legend is over.....Oh. Well, she was pretty bloody good anyway, especially in an era when most prominent singers are manufactured from somewhere beneath Simon Cowell's high waistline, or have made it through after having to compete with a dancing fucking dog. Amy was a proper singer, soul, blues, jazz, that kind of thing. She didn't dress up in leopard print or whatever it is and scream about how we are all going to hear her roar We can already bloody hear you love.. Nor did she want you to love her like she was a hot pie or any other such lyrical idiocy. As such she hasn't had a major impact on everyone, it seems. Our servers in the restaurant did not know where the statue was situated despite running a business less than three minutes walk away. I find that remarkable and annoying at the same time, but we Google it and crack on. No pun intended. Did Amy do any crack? I don't know, possibly. If she did Mitch probably won't admit it so Mitch, I'm not saying she did, right? In case you were thinking of suing someone who has less than 10 regular readers. Can we have a whip round?
Added to the huge crowds I am now faced with that old nemesis of wheelchair users everywhere, cobbled streets. Many is the time I have been separated from my wheelchair thanks to cobbled streets. My arse does come off the seat occasionally, in fact most of the most pleasurable things in life are practised without a wheelchair anywhere near my arse. So anyway I am moving along especially carefully, on my back wheels only which I'm sure most observers either find odd or think I'm showing off like some under 14's contestant on Kick-Start. Do you remember Kick-Start? It's main attraction was the chance to watch young people fall off logs into streams. It was very popular among young people who like watching other young people fall off logs into streams. There are no logs or streams here but there is method in the puerile manner of my movements. It's the small wheels at the front of a wheelchair which put the user in the most danger on cobbled streets, so if you can stay balanced on your back wheels then you are advised to do so here.
The statue is both smaller than I expected and life-size. Amy must have been smaller than I thought. Everyone looks tall though when you are five foot nothing and spend large parts of your existence sitting down. It's only when a group of girls come by and start having their photographs taken with the statue that I realise that it's probably about the right height. So if that's the case then we can safely assume that it is a realistic width also, meaning that Amy probably never had a square meal in her life. I haven't seen a waist as thin as the one on this statue in my entire life. Do you remember when Sir Bobby Charlton's daughter used to present the weather and Baddiel And Skinner did a sketch about the things people shout at the telly? One of the jokes in the sketch featured the Three Lions-warbling comics shouting at Charlton to eat something because she was so painfully thin. This is the kind of scale we are talking about.
Despite the fact that the Amy statue makes me look fat (I am fat) I have my photograph taken with it also. This is becoming something of a tradition now for me. I've had similar photographs taken with statues of Brian Clough in Nottingham, and with Rocky in Philadelphia. Having updated my phone recently (I had one of those that you have to hold in one hand while the other presses the ear-piece to your ear, popular in episodes of Poirot) I am now able to post my photographs to Facebook. But before I do I have to have the photograph taken again. I had forgotten to put my sunglasses on so my eyes are screwed up in the sun. If you have one of those faces that always looks miserable, like I do, arguably because I am bloody miserable perhaps, but if you do then the only way to make yourself look more ridiculous is to squint. I'm squinting, so I have the photograph taken again, which takes a while because by now a crowd has gathered around the statue, almost as if nobody else had thought about taking a look at it, much less having a photograph taken with it, until I rocked up. On my fucking back wheels like Eddie Fucking Kidd. His wife left him, you know, but that's another blog which I would get too angry about to finish.
From Stables Market it was back on to the train to Stratford and then the tube out to Southwark, where we took in a couple of the local watering holes. One such, The George, had featured on a recently aired programme in which The Hairy Bikers staggered around Britain visiting pubs of note or character. Not bloody Yates, basically. The George was lovely and very popular, with lots of people gathering outside to take advantage of the summer sun before it disappears again until next May. The only problem with The George is that a pint of lager will set you back £5.30, and a half £2.65. If nothing else, that is mathematically logical. But I told you London wasn't cheap. In the next Southwalk pub, the Old King's Head, someone tells me that they hope I have a license for that. Presumably they mean my wheelchair but I'm too dizzy from the witlessness of the remark to be absolutely sure.
I can't really tell you too much about the access in these places because nature doesn't call until we get back to Canary Wharf, specifically at a Wetherspoons just across the road from Tunes Hotel, which is handy. You can always rely on a Wetherspoons to have accessible facilities. Except for the one in Trafalgar Square which we once tried to enter and were presented with the kind of excuse for a ramp which you wouldn't attempt to ascend if you were a contestant on Kick-Start on your big brother's BMX. Less handy is the fact that there is a mouse scurrying around one of the rooms in Wetherspoons. The same Wetherspoons we will be eating breakfast at in the morning. We'll use another room....
Four hours later we’re in London. After the excesses of the Britannia International last week, Emma has chosen the rather cheaper and more cheerful Tunes Hotel for this weekend’s visit. Like the Britannia International it is in Canary Wharf but is much smaller, has no bar, and we’re not allowed in our room until 3.00pm. We arrived at 12.30pm. I’m not complaining though. It’s a nice enough place and frankly, if Emma didn’t make the decisions about where we stay when we go on our little forays then it just wouldn’t get done. I’m just one of those people who puts things off. I’m currently late completing my application for my blue badge, which runs out in a fortnight and I regularly receive red letters from United Utilities having forgotten to pay the water bill. This particular problem comes from a stubborn refusal to open most of my mail since I developed kidney disease. I don’t want to read any more bad news.
Since we have to fill some time before the room is ready we set off to find Camden Town. We’re in London for Sunday’s Bruce Springsteen concert at Wembley but if you are going to go that kind of distance you are as well to make a weekend of it. There’s a million gazillion things to do in London, which has transformed in my mind’s eye from England’s toilet to one of my favourite cities in the world. Well, at least of those I have been to but they include Adelaide, New York, Toronto, San Diego, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Las Vegas, Barcelona, Minneapolis, Orlando, Amsterdam, Brussels and er…..Leeds. London is right up there with any or all of them and if it had a guarantee of good weather it might just top the lot.
We take the DLR (Docklands Light Railway) from just a short walk outside the hotel at West India Quay. This takes us to Stratford, sight of the London 2012 Olympics and now home to Taxpayers FC Bloody West Ham United. We were last here in November for the England v New Zealand rugby league test match, since when the outside of the stadium has been emblazoned with the happy hammers logo. We can see it from the train as we pass. No doubt next time we are here it will have been completely daubed in claret and blue and there’ll be huge scary billboards of Slaven Bilic all over the place. Did you see him jump on to the table in the ITV studio just because one of his happy hammers scored a goal for France? Bilic isn't even French, yet the way he climbed up beside Manu Petit's coffee mug, arms aloft, would suggest that he grew up just down the road from Petit rather than in Croatia. Perhaps he knows there won't be too much to celebrate from Croatia during the Euros so he's living it vicariously through France.
From Stratford we have to get on an overground train and this is where it gets a bit complex. There doesn’t appear to be anywhere to buy tickets. Finding the right platform is a bit of a minefield too, but we get there and talk to the man at the information desk about where we might be able to get tickets. He tells us that they are sold at machines downstairs, which means that Emma has to go back downstairs to get them. There are currently two trains to Camden Road on the platforms, one of which leaves in three minutes and which the man at the desk informs me we are going to miss, and one which leaves in 10 minutes. We’ll have to take that one, he says, because it will take more than three minutes for Emma to get back downstairs and get the tickets. It does. And while she is away a train pulls in and 20 million people get off it and start funnelling down the stairs leading towards her. I got that figure from the same people calculating immigration statistics for the Brexit campaign. It might be a bit high. Still, I don’t know how she finds me in that crowd but she does and we board the train, but not before the officious man at the desk insists on bringing out the ramp. Access on overground trains is as abysmal in London as it is anywhere else, it seems. The step from the platform is doable for me with Emma to help, but had I been on my own I would definitely have needed the ramp. The man insists on making me use it anyway, which delays things a little and I start to worry that the 10 minutes is probably up by now, but we make it.
Miraculously, there is someone there to meet us at Camden Road with a ramp to again insist on helping me get off the train. This wouldn’t happen anywhere on the line between Thatto Heath and Liverpool Lime Street. Not all of the time, at any rate. On one occasion I was visiting a friend in Seaforth and ended up in Waterloo. The step between the train and the platform was much steeper there and I could have ended up on the front of the local paper if I had tried to get off by myself. Had there been nobody to meet us at Camden Road we would have been ok but it is good to know that they make sure, even if they are a little over fussy about it for my tastes.
Camden Town is the busiest place I have been to bar Manhattan. The narrow, often cobbly pavements are more tightly packed than Tom Daley's trunks. There’s some kind of rock music festival on somewhere in the vicinity, so quite a significant percentage of the people blocking my way are leather-clad, Mohawk-sporting, walking tattoo easels. This being Saturday lunchtime and with the weather co-operating for once, the famous Camden Market is bursting with shoppers just desperate to part with their money in exchange for all manner of assorted tat. But we’re starving having by now. It’s after 2.00 and we haven’t eaten since about 7.30 so instead of scouring the stalls and shops for said tat we are only interested in finding somewhere for a feed. Which is difficult. There’s lots of pubs and restaurants in the area but they are all very, very busy. And loud. If not because of the general hum of chatter then due to various kinds of music blaring out of the open windows and doors. We find a place with a few spare seats outside and pay close to £30 for what is essentially two chicken burgers, one portion of fries and a couple of soft drinks. London is great, but London is not cheap.
Just over the road from where we sit is The Stables Market, inside which you will find what we came here for. The Amy Winehouse statue. It's my fault we are here. Despite the Heroin, the tattoo overkill and her willingness to put up with domestic abuse from half-wit no marks, I've always been a big fan of Amy Winehouse. The word legend is over.....Oh. Well, she was pretty bloody good anyway, especially in an era when most prominent singers are manufactured from somewhere beneath Simon Cowell's high waistline, or have made it through after having to compete with a dancing fucking dog. Amy was a proper singer, soul, blues, jazz, that kind of thing. She didn't dress up in leopard print or whatever it is and scream about how we are all going to hear her roar We can already bloody hear you love.. Nor did she want you to love her like she was a hot pie or any other such lyrical idiocy. As such she hasn't had a major impact on everyone, it seems. Our servers in the restaurant did not know where the statue was situated despite running a business less than three minutes walk away. I find that remarkable and annoying at the same time, but we Google it and crack on. No pun intended. Did Amy do any crack? I don't know, possibly. If she did Mitch probably won't admit it so Mitch, I'm not saying she did, right? In case you were thinking of suing someone who has less than 10 regular readers. Can we have a whip round?
Added to the huge crowds I am now faced with that old nemesis of wheelchair users everywhere, cobbled streets. Many is the time I have been separated from my wheelchair thanks to cobbled streets. My arse does come off the seat occasionally, in fact most of the most pleasurable things in life are practised without a wheelchair anywhere near my arse. So anyway I am moving along especially carefully, on my back wheels only which I'm sure most observers either find odd or think I'm showing off like some under 14's contestant on Kick-Start. Do you remember Kick-Start? It's main attraction was the chance to watch young people fall off logs into streams. It was very popular among young people who like watching other young people fall off logs into streams. There are no logs or streams here but there is method in the puerile manner of my movements. It's the small wheels at the front of a wheelchair which put the user in the most danger on cobbled streets, so if you can stay balanced on your back wheels then you are advised to do so here.
The statue is both smaller than I expected and life-size. Amy must have been smaller than I thought. Everyone looks tall though when you are five foot nothing and spend large parts of your existence sitting down. It's only when a group of girls come by and start having their photographs taken with the statue that I realise that it's probably about the right height. So if that's the case then we can safely assume that it is a realistic width also, meaning that Amy probably never had a square meal in her life. I haven't seen a waist as thin as the one on this statue in my entire life. Do you remember when Sir Bobby Charlton's daughter used to present the weather and Baddiel And Skinner did a sketch about the things people shout at the telly? One of the jokes in the sketch featured the Three Lions-warbling comics shouting at Charlton to eat something because she was so painfully thin. This is the kind of scale we are talking about.
Despite the fact that the Amy statue makes me look fat (I am fat) I have my photograph taken with it also. This is becoming something of a tradition now for me. I've had similar photographs taken with statues of Brian Clough in Nottingham, and with Rocky in Philadelphia. Having updated my phone recently (I had one of those that you have to hold in one hand while the other presses the ear-piece to your ear, popular in episodes of Poirot) I am now able to post my photographs to Facebook. But before I do I have to have the photograph taken again. I had forgotten to put my sunglasses on so my eyes are screwed up in the sun. If you have one of those faces that always looks miserable, like I do, arguably because I am bloody miserable perhaps, but if you do then the only way to make yourself look more ridiculous is to squint. I'm squinting, so I have the photograph taken again, which takes a while because by now a crowd has gathered around the statue, almost as if nobody else had thought about taking a look at it, much less having a photograph taken with it, until I rocked up. On my fucking back wheels like Eddie Fucking Kidd. His wife left him, you know, but that's another blog which I would get too angry about to finish.
From Stables Market it was back on to the train to Stratford and then the tube out to Southwark, where we took in a couple of the local watering holes. One such, The George, had featured on a recently aired programme in which The Hairy Bikers staggered around Britain visiting pubs of note or character. Not bloody Yates, basically. The George was lovely and very popular, with lots of people gathering outside to take advantage of the summer sun before it disappears again until next May. The only problem with The George is that a pint of lager will set you back £5.30, and a half £2.65. If nothing else, that is mathematically logical. But I told you London wasn't cheap. In the next Southwalk pub, the Old King's Head, someone tells me that they hope I have a license for that. Presumably they mean my wheelchair but I'm too dizzy from the witlessness of the remark to be absolutely sure.
I can't really tell you too much about the access in these places because nature doesn't call until we get back to Canary Wharf, specifically at a Wetherspoons just across the road from Tunes Hotel, which is handy. You can always rely on a Wetherspoons to have accessible facilities. Except for the one in Trafalgar Square which we once tried to enter and were presented with the kind of excuse for a ramp which you wouldn't attempt to ascend if you were a contestant on Kick-Start on your big brother's BMX. Less handy is the fact that there is a mouse scurrying around one of the rooms in Wetherspoons. The same Wetherspoons we will be eating breakfast at in the morning. We'll use another room....
Monday, 30 May 2016
One Hull Of A Weekend
Sheffield Wednesday have been crap for years. Which is easy to say for a Liverpool supporter. For people like us reaching (and losing) two major finals represents a disappointing season. Though Liverpool haven't won the title for 26 years and have rarely even threatened to do so, it's still only just over a decade since we last celebrated being champions of Europe. We have one of the most sought after managers in world football and a sense of entitlement that is so heightened that we can afford to leave a £32million striker on the bench and have a good laugh at his ineptitude when he does play.
Sheffield Wednesday know nothing of this. They were relegated from the Premier League in 2000 and haven't been back since. They slipped into League One soon after that and only returned to the Championship when they beat mighty Hartlepool in the play-off final in 2005. I was there that day in Cardiff due to the footballing allegiances of Emma and her family. Since then I've watched them battle it out with the likes of Carlisle United (twice), Blackpool, Tranmere Rovers (now a non league outfit), Bolton Wanderers and Wigan Athletic.
The 2015/16 season has been a vintage one by Wednesday standards, certainly in the time I've been following them since meeting Emma. After years of plodding along in mid table without the prospect of either promotion or relegation they were good enough to secure sixth place and a place in the play-offs. Even then expectations were low that they would overcome a Brighton side which had finished third in the table, especially not over a two-legged semi final. But overcome them they did, booking a place at Wembley for the Championship play-off final where they would face Hull City for a place in the Premier League. It would have been rude not to take the opportunity of a weekend in London for Wednesday's big day.
With a 5.00 kick-off on Saturday afternoon we could have driven down there on the morning of the game but decided to go straight from work on Friday. Previous experience of staying at the hotels near to Wembley Stadium told us that it would be much more cost effective to stay elsewhere and get the tube across to Wembley on the day. That meant battling with the Friday post-work traffic and saw the journey take five hours, but better that than spending Saturday morning parked on the M1 and risking being late. We chose Canary Wharf because we have been there before and knew that we could get around London easily from there.
We were placed on the 13th and top floor of the Brittannia International hotel, which would have been very interesting in the event of a fire. Still, after such a long time on the motorway I wasn't prepared to challenge it. In any case, in all the years I've been travelling around the world, staying in the hotels of varying quality both with Emma and with the basketball team I've only once experienced the spine tingling awfulness of a broken lift. That was in Chester some years ago when I chose to solve the problem by descending two flights of stairs on my backside. These days I'm not sure I can do 13 flights, especially given how dramatically my fitness and all around health has regressed since my time as a pretend athlete. But it was late. I just wanted a beer and something to eat. I was happy to take this risk.
These meanderings serve a purpose other than just logging my travel exploits. Whether anyone reads this or not (and sometimes I think I could use this space to reveal my darkest secrets or confess to a string of murders and nobody would be any the wiser) it acts as a reminder to me of all the interesting experiences I've had, good or bad, on my travels. It allows me to tell the stupid stories I manage to be part of with such regularity. It's also meant to inform others who use wheelchairs about any access issues they may encounter if they find themselves in the places I visit. Well better that than reading reviews on tripadvisor maybe. You don't know the people who post those so how are you going to know whether to trust them? You can have more faith in what I tell you. Even if you are reading this and thinking what a pleb I am. Either way, you have your answer on whether my recommendations hold any sway for you. What I'm saying is that what follows is the practical bit.
If you have an arse that is any wider than mine, or if you have difficulty transferring in and out of your wheelchair then room 1302 of the Brittannia International is not for you. There was just enough room to get my chair in to the bathroom so that I could use the toilet, but closing the door behind me was not an option without vacating my chair. The door swung away in front of the sink on the left hand wall, thus blocking me from using said sink. Leaving my chair outside the bathroom didn't help as it meant that I was sat on the floor so had no chance of reaching the sink. Washing was strictly limited to taking place in or over the bath as was brushing my teeth. How the other half live. You people. You don't know you're born. Thankfully there was more space elsewhere in the room. It not being a disabled room we were spared that all too common indignity of twin beds. You'd be surprised how often this happens. Or maybe you wouldn't. The implication is that the only person your biff arse is sharing a room with is your carer.
The plan for Saturday was to have breakfast late and then get to a pub near Wembley called The Green Man. We'd have a few pints and wait for Emma's mum and dad and their Wednesday-supporting friends to arrive. Before we get there some more advice. Not access-related but if you're having breakfast in Canary Wharf do it at Wetherspoons rather than at All Bar One. The latter's offering is twice the price and half as enjoyable. Also, Wetherspoons are unlikely to have young, attractive bar staff running after you and shouting 'DO YOU WANT TO GO TO THE TOILET?' when they see you heading that way. Acquiring my own radar key hasn't yet taken all of the ignominy away from basic bodily functions, it seems.
It's fully 18 stops between Canary Wharf station and the one at Wembley Park. That sounds like too many to bear but they are quite closely bunched. The entire journey takes around 35 minutes. Wembley Park's platform is not totally accessible but helpfully Canary Wharf's platform has a clearly marked boarding point for anyone using a wheelchair travelling to Wembley Park. The platform is long enough that we had to let one train go because we hadn't quite reached the accessible boarding point, but the regularity of tube trains and the lateness of the kick-off meant that this was never going to be a major problem. Wembley has two tube stations but for access reasons we needed Wembley Park. We did see a couple of Hull City fans get off around Baker Street to get on the Met Line which Emma reckoned might be quicker but isn't accessible.
Everything had gone virtually to plan then until we got off the train at Wembley Park and began trying to find The Green Man. Emma had 'Googlemapped' it so had some idea of where it was. Except she didn't really. We spent the first few minutes going up a steep hill in the wrong direction before realising our mistake and turning the ship around. The journey was supposed to be around 17 minutes and for the first few of those once we'd turned around I was lulled into a false sense of security. It was all downhill and I didn't have to do a thing except slow myself down a little on the slope. And then it flattened out. And then the path started to climb uphill. Not only that, but it was sloped horizontally aswell as vertically. A double whammy that is a killer for most wheelchair users, let alone one whose last athletic endeavour was 10 minutes on a hand cycle four years ago.
Frustratingly, we passed two or three bars on the way but we'd arranged to meet at The Green Man and so had to press on. Those bars looked a bit dingy and empty, but it's surprising how little that mattered to me at the time. Two minutes battling the double slope had given me quite a thirst. They must have been expecting plenty of business at those bars anyway because there were security staff on the door. Helpfully they pointed some other fans in the direction of The Green Man. Unhelpfully their instructions were to carry on down the road we were on. Up the hill, on the path with the sideways slope.
It's a good thing that there were plenty of other fans heading to The Green Man, otherwise we might never have known to take the left turn we took up another ludicrously steep hill. We'd long since given up on Google Maps and besides, neither of us had a hand free to operate a smart phone since we were now both helping out with the pushing. When we reached the top of the ludicrously steep hill we discovered another one where the fans we were following started to head. We were both gassed by then and loudly cursing whoever came up with the idea of meeting at this particular pub. We crossed the road towards the latest (and thankfully last) slope and were asked by the security staff at the bottom of the drive whether we were Sheffield Wednesday fans. Of course I'm not, but after clumbing Kilimanjaro I wasn't going to tell them that. It was only a small lie anyway. I was supporting Sheffield Wednesday that day and I'm certainly not a Hull City fan. Football has now become so uncivilised that they have to allocate entire pubs to one set of fans or the other on occasions like this. This is not what I'm used to as a rugby league fan. When Saints played Wigan on Good Friday I went for a few beers before kick-off at a pub in town called The George. Every single regular in The George is a Saints fan but that didn't stop hundreds of Wiganers from getting in and mixing with us. I was quite happily chatting away to a few of them as we watched the Hull derby on the television. Yet apparently that sort of integration is not possible in football, which is undeniably sad and a bit of an embarrassment to the sport.
The lawn outside The Green Man was already covered with fans when we got there just after midday on what was now an absolute scorcher by British standards. There were no empty seats inside but getting served at the bar was still reasonably easy. We took our drinks back outside and enjoyed some well earned refreshment as the crowd built up. As it did so the accessible entrance became the stuff of myth and legend, doubling as it did as the fastest route to the ladies toilet. From quite early on and for all of the four hours or so we were there the queue was constantly backed up outside the door. Having a wee was going to be a challenge as it would mean battling through the throng of weak-bladdered Yorkshire women. I have enough trouble getting in my own bathroom ahead of one weak-bladdered Yorkshire woman. I was seriously contemplating leaving it until we got inside the stadium but Emma would see to it that I wouldn't be doing that. Probably for the best. I didn't get stage four kidney disease by treating my bladder kindly.
It wasn't long before we got talking to the obligatory chatty bloke. There's always a few people on these occasions who, despite being a total stranger, will chat to you as if they've known you forever when they've had a pint. Truth be told I'm probably one of them. Or at least I was before even I got sick of myself. This one was called Richard, and he hadn't slept for four nights waiting to find out if he'd got tickets for today in the ballot. He mustn't go to very many Wednesday games. We got our tickets based on the fact that we had accrued a small number of points from the few games that we have been to over the last few years. We had to get Roland's friend Norman to pick them up for us but the point is we qualified without the need for entry into a ballot. He seemed confused and slightly miffed when it came up in conversation that we had driven down from Liverpool last night, but Richard was not a grudge holder. He was going to have a good time come what may and he told me several times that I would too.
To that end his was one of the loudest voices joining in with the unofficial Sheffield Wednesday play-off final song. They all knew it word for word and they sang it incessantly. As a consequence I know it word for word. To the tune of Billy Ray Cyrus' Achy Breaky Heart they sing;
'We've got Bannan'
'Barry Bannan'
'I just don't think you understand'
'The wee Scotsman'
'Is better than Zidane'
'We've got Barry Bannan'
There's something pure and wonderful about a set of fans so joyously celebrating something as mediocre as Barry Bannan. It's almost self deprecating, which is something that seems totally absent from fans of the traditional elite clubs. Glory hunting has plunged such depths that I recently read a tweet from one Asia-based fan which expressed disbelief at ending the 2015/16 season as a Leicester City fan before going on to proclaim 'WE ARE THE CHAMPIONS'. The capital letters belong to the person writing the tweet, not to me. The message is clear. That individual was going to support whichever team made off with the Premier League title this season and will probably adopt the same philosophy next season. There is nothing in this world less valuable than his kind of glory and it's something which speaks loudly about the modern Premier League. Yet here we all were waiting to attend a game for which the prize on offer is a place in that very same, soulless cash-fest.
At around 1.30 Emma got a call from Roland. They'd arrived but couldn't get in to the pub because the security people were now employing a strict one-in, one-out policy. We decided to stay firstly because we weren't confident of getting in anywhere else at that stage and secondly because we didn't fancy negotiating more hills in the quest. So Emma went back down the drive to collect our tickets from Norman. I was left making small talk with Richard and his mate Dave (no really) but not for very long. The next person I saw that I recognised was not Emma but Susan, her mum. She wasn't alone either. Roland and Norman were there along with Norman's daughters Lisa and Jenny and Jenny's young son Dylan. Clearly there were enough people leaving the pub to make room for everyone, which was a relief really because the whole point of pushing up those 17 hills was so that we could meet up with everyone.
Inevitably the time came to address the toilet situation. A couple of pints of watered down Fosters will do that to you. Still I was happy to hang on but Emma couldn't. Not wanting to get in the massive queue she made me dodge my way through the weak-bladdered Yorkshire women so that she also could use the disabled toilet facilities. I was pretty put out by this but on reflection I'm a bit more philosophical about it. There aren't many advantages associated with being with a man like me so I suppose you take what perks there are. To be fair the female population of Yorkshire were more patient and accommodating than I'd imagined. Nobody got angry and nobody batted an eyelid when we both went into the disabled toilet together. Sometimes having everyone assume that you can't wipe your own arse can come in handy. It's no less humiliating for all that, mind.
Three o'clock ticked around and so time for Saints to kick-off. They were also playing Hull, specifically Super League leading Hull FC at the KC Stadium. Current form suggested very little chance of a Saints win and when the first Twitter update reported that Luke Walsh had left the field injured and that we were already 6-0 down that chance all but evaporated for me. I was cheered slightly by rumours of Wigan arsehole John Bateman bottling one of his team-mates on a night out, but a loss is a loss even when your rivals are beating each other up. In the end we lost 32-24 with Keiron blaming most of it on the referee. Whatever the reason for it finding out that my team had lost to a team from Hull seemed a pretty bad omen.
The Green Man closed at 4.00. That seems odd in the age of 24-hour drinking but was actually quite handy. It takes the gamble of having just that one more pint before you leave out of the equation. As we made our way back down the hill towards the stadium the fans were still chanting about Barry Bannan (or Gary Balloon in Susan's case) and spirits were still very high. Perhaps Richard was right and we would all have a great day no matter what. As we rolled on down Wembley Way I veered off the road to allow a slow-moving car to pass me. It's progress was being held up by the hordes of fans in the road but that was just giving the man in the back seat time to film the scene on his phone. As he passed me I turned to find that the man poking his head out of the window was former England cricket captain Michael Vaughan. Vaughan is the poster boy for celebrity Wednesday fans now that Roy Hattersley and David Blunkett are yesterday's news so it was no surprise that he was at Wembley, despite having been working for BBC Radio on England's test match with Sri Lanka at Durham. It's a long way from Durham to Wembley, but Roland had been listening to the radio earlier on and heard Vaughan say that he had a helicopter picking him up to take him to the Wednesday game. All of which was all Susan needed to run up to his open car window and ask as to the whereabouts of said helicopter.
On the way up to Block J I bumped into an old basketball team-mate. I knew he'd be here as he's a regular at Wednesday but it still felt strange seeing him in a crowd of 70,000. We were led through a gate and made our way to section 134, coming to rest in our seats at the back of the first tier directly behind the goal where all the Wednesday support was assembled. From that moment, right up until the final whistle those fans were relentless and unfailing in their support. That's all the more remarkable given the low quality of their team's performance and of the game in general. If this were Saints playing this poorly in a game this bad it would be all of five minutes before the bitching and moaning went into overdrive. It goes back to that sense of entitlement again. Wednesday fans just don't have it. They love their team unconditionally. The media talk a lot about the best fans in football being those in Liverpool or Newcastle or Glasgow but this lot are right up there.
The atmosphere dipped only slightly when Mo Diame scored the winner from out of absolutely nowhere with about 20 minutes left. It seemed a decisive blow even then. Wednesday were creating very little in terms of goal threat and the decision by manager Carlos Carvalhal to use the lumbering and useless Adte Nuhiu as a substitute before the gifted Lucas Jiao seemed like an admission of defeat. Over 90 minutes Gary Balloon proved beyond doubt that he was not better than Zidane or even Kilbane, and there were those who couldn't keep up the pretence as the clock ticked down to their timid defeat. One lad sat directly in front of me had spent almost the entire game singing and chanting, hitting me on the head with blue or white balloons (probably Gary's) at regular intervals. But when Diame scored he sat down quietly, resigned to his team's fate and scarcely even able to watch.
Before time was called there was one half-hearted shout for a penalty for handball and one wasted opportunity which the inept Jeremie Helan stroked over the bar, but in truth Wednesday didn't do nearly enough to avoid a painful defeat. Despite their low expectations there was palpable disappointment in the Wednesday end and it was hard not to get a little caught up in that dejection. Particularly if you're a miserable bugger to begin with. This was a whole season's work that had come to nothing and done so without much of a fight. The more philosophical Wednesday fans might reflect that this is a side which isn't quite ready for the big league but in the context of Leicester City winning the thing this year that may no longer ring true. Another year in the Championship could help them develop and come back stronger, but equally there are no guarantees that they'll get this close to promotion again any time soon. Wednesday's loss is probably the Premier League's loss too. I've certainly seen enough of Hull City's yo-yo act over the last few years to believe that they won't add much more to it than another scrapper aiming only for survival.
We said our goodbyes to the others when we met outside the ground. None of them were staying in London for the night so understandably wanted to get away. It was well after 8.00 by the time we got away from the stadium and we were held up further by the police limiting the number of fans getting into Wembley Park station at any one time. We got off the train at Westminster so that we could visit the Red Lion, a small pub around the corner from the Houses Of Parliament. It's a place that oozes character. You sense it's history. You can well imagine many a political strategy or big decision being mulled over here by prominent political figures over the years here. It's unlikely that those politicians were drinking bottles of San Miguel when they considered the country's fate, but there's enough in the décor and the layout to give it the sense of history that is slightly diluted by what they now sell.
Sadly they don't sell it for very long these days. We got there at around 8.35 thinking we'd have time for a couple before heading back to Canary Wharf, but for reasons best known to the management they closed at 9.00. Nine o'clock on a Saturday night! I don't remember this being the case on our last visit but it certainly has made us think again about coming here when we're back in London next weekend for the Bruce Springsteen gig. For now we made our way back to the station, making sure to take a photograph of an illuminated Big Ben looking resplendent in the fading early summer light. Certainly a lot more attractive than a couple of the selfies I had posted earlier in the weekend, one an ingenious in-joke with a friend who's partial to a car selfie, and the other an altogether better affair rescued by Emma's presence.
We finished the night back in Canary Wharf at a bog-standard, tourism-proof Slug & Lettuce. We made plans for next week while I tried not to vomit at the sight of self-adoring football superpower Cristiano Ronaldo scoring the winning penalty for Real Madrid to beat rivals Atletico in a Champions League final shoot-out. Theirs is the highest honour in European club football but it's highly doubtful that it meant as much to them as the day they went to Wembley meant to the insomniac Richard and the rest of the Wednesday faithful.
Sheffield Wednesday know nothing of this. They were relegated from the Premier League in 2000 and haven't been back since. They slipped into League One soon after that and only returned to the Championship when they beat mighty Hartlepool in the play-off final in 2005. I was there that day in Cardiff due to the footballing allegiances of Emma and her family. Since then I've watched them battle it out with the likes of Carlisle United (twice), Blackpool, Tranmere Rovers (now a non league outfit), Bolton Wanderers and Wigan Athletic.
The 2015/16 season has been a vintage one by Wednesday standards, certainly in the time I've been following them since meeting Emma. After years of plodding along in mid table without the prospect of either promotion or relegation they were good enough to secure sixth place and a place in the play-offs. Even then expectations were low that they would overcome a Brighton side which had finished third in the table, especially not over a two-legged semi final. But overcome them they did, booking a place at Wembley for the Championship play-off final where they would face Hull City for a place in the Premier League. It would have been rude not to take the opportunity of a weekend in London for Wednesday's big day.
With a 5.00 kick-off on Saturday afternoon we could have driven down there on the morning of the game but decided to go straight from work on Friday. Previous experience of staying at the hotels near to Wembley Stadium told us that it would be much more cost effective to stay elsewhere and get the tube across to Wembley on the day. That meant battling with the Friday post-work traffic and saw the journey take five hours, but better that than spending Saturday morning parked on the M1 and risking being late. We chose Canary Wharf because we have been there before and knew that we could get around London easily from there.
We were placed on the 13th and top floor of the Brittannia International hotel, which would have been very interesting in the event of a fire. Still, after such a long time on the motorway I wasn't prepared to challenge it. In any case, in all the years I've been travelling around the world, staying in the hotels of varying quality both with Emma and with the basketball team I've only once experienced the spine tingling awfulness of a broken lift. That was in Chester some years ago when I chose to solve the problem by descending two flights of stairs on my backside. These days I'm not sure I can do 13 flights, especially given how dramatically my fitness and all around health has regressed since my time as a pretend athlete. But it was late. I just wanted a beer and something to eat. I was happy to take this risk.
These meanderings serve a purpose other than just logging my travel exploits. Whether anyone reads this or not (and sometimes I think I could use this space to reveal my darkest secrets or confess to a string of murders and nobody would be any the wiser) it acts as a reminder to me of all the interesting experiences I've had, good or bad, on my travels. It allows me to tell the stupid stories I manage to be part of with such regularity. It's also meant to inform others who use wheelchairs about any access issues they may encounter if they find themselves in the places I visit. Well better that than reading reviews on tripadvisor maybe. You don't know the people who post those so how are you going to know whether to trust them? You can have more faith in what I tell you. Even if you are reading this and thinking what a pleb I am. Either way, you have your answer on whether my recommendations hold any sway for you. What I'm saying is that what follows is the practical bit.
If you have an arse that is any wider than mine, or if you have difficulty transferring in and out of your wheelchair then room 1302 of the Brittannia International is not for you. There was just enough room to get my chair in to the bathroom so that I could use the toilet, but closing the door behind me was not an option without vacating my chair. The door swung away in front of the sink on the left hand wall, thus blocking me from using said sink. Leaving my chair outside the bathroom didn't help as it meant that I was sat on the floor so had no chance of reaching the sink. Washing was strictly limited to taking place in or over the bath as was brushing my teeth. How the other half live. You people. You don't know you're born. Thankfully there was more space elsewhere in the room. It not being a disabled room we were spared that all too common indignity of twin beds. You'd be surprised how often this happens. Or maybe you wouldn't. The implication is that the only person your biff arse is sharing a room with is your carer.
The plan for Saturday was to have breakfast late and then get to a pub near Wembley called The Green Man. We'd have a few pints and wait for Emma's mum and dad and their Wednesday-supporting friends to arrive. Before we get there some more advice. Not access-related but if you're having breakfast in Canary Wharf do it at Wetherspoons rather than at All Bar One. The latter's offering is twice the price and half as enjoyable. Also, Wetherspoons are unlikely to have young, attractive bar staff running after you and shouting 'DO YOU WANT TO GO TO THE TOILET?' when they see you heading that way. Acquiring my own radar key hasn't yet taken all of the ignominy away from basic bodily functions, it seems.
It's fully 18 stops between Canary Wharf station and the one at Wembley Park. That sounds like too many to bear but they are quite closely bunched. The entire journey takes around 35 minutes. Wembley Park's platform is not totally accessible but helpfully Canary Wharf's platform has a clearly marked boarding point for anyone using a wheelchair travelling to Wembley Park. The platform is long enough that we had to let one train go because we hadn't quite reached the accessible boarding point, but the regularity of tube trains and the lateness of the kick-off meant that this was never going to be a major problem. Wembley has two tube stations but for access reasons we needed Wembley Park. We did see a couple of Hull City fans get off around Baker Street to get on the Met Line which Emma reckoned might be quicker but isn't accessible.
Everything had gone virtually to plan then until we got off the train at Wembley Park and began trying to find The Green Man. Emma had 'Googlemapped' it so had some idea of where it was. Except she didn't really. We spent the first few minutes going up a steep hill in the wrong direction before realising our mistake and turning the ship around. The journey was supposed to be around 17 minutes and for the first few of those once we'd turned around I was lulled into a false sense of security. It was all downhill and I didn't have to do a thing except slow myself down a little on the slope. And then it flattened out. And then the path started to climb uphill. Not only that, but it was sloped horizontally aswell as vertically. A double whammy that is a killer for most wheelchair users, let alone one whose last athletic endeavour was 10 minutes on a hand cycle four years ago.
Frustratingly, we passed two or three bars on the way but we'd arranged to meet at The Green Man and so had to press on. Those bars looked a bit dingy and empty, but it's surprising how little that mattered to me at the time. Two minutes battling the double slope had given me quite a thirst. They must have been expecting plenty of business at those bars anyway because there were security staff on the door. Helpfully they pointed some other fans in the direction of The Green Man. Unhelpfully their instructions were to carry on down the road we were on. Up the hill, on the path with the sideways slope.
It's a good thing that there were plenty of other fans heading to The Green Man, otherwise we might never have known to take the left turn we took up another ludicrously steep hill. We'd long since given up on Google Maps and besides, neither of us had a hand free to operate a smart phone since we were now both helping out with the pushing. When we reached the top of the ludicrously steep hill we discovered another one where the fans we were following started to head. We were both gassed by then and loudly cursing whoever came up with the idea of meeting at this particular pub. We crossed the road towards the latest (and thankfully last) slope and were asked by the security staff at the bottom of the drive whether we were Sheffield Wednesday fans. Of course I'm not, but after clumbing Kilimanjaro I wasn't going to tell them that. It was only a small lie anyway. I was supporting Sheffield Wednesday that day and I'm certainly not a Hull City fan. Football has now become so uncivilised that they have to allocate entire pubs to one set of fans or the other on occasions like this. This is not what I'm used to as a rugby league fan. When Saints played Wigan on Good Friday I went for a few beers before kick-off at a pub in town called The George. Every single regular in The George is a Saints fan but that didn't stop hundreds of Wiganers from getting in and mixing with us. I was quite happily chatting away to a few of them as we watched the Hull derby on the television. Yet apparently that sort of integration is not possible in football, which is undeniably sad and a bit of an embarrassment to the sport.
The lawn outside The Green Man was already covered with fans when we got there just after midday on what was now an absolute scorcher by British standards. There were no empty seats inside but getting served at the bar was still reasonably easy. We took our drinks back outside and enjoyed some well earned refreshment as the crowd built up. As it did so the accessible entrance became the stuff of myth and legend, doubling as it did as the fastest route to the ladies toilet. From quite early on and for all of the four hours or so we were there the queue was constantly backed up outside the door. Having a wee was going to be a challenge as it would mean battling through the throng of weak-bladdered Yorkshire women. I have enough trouble getting in my own bathroom ahead of one weak-bladdered Yorkshire woman. I was seriously contemplating leaving it until we got inside the stadium but Emma would see to it that I wouldn't be doing that. Probably for the best. I didn't get stage four kidney disease by treating my bladder kindly.
It wasn't long before we got talking to the obligatory chatty bloke. There's always a few people on these occasions who, despite being a total stranger, will chat to you as if they've known you forever when they've had a pint. Truth be told I'm probably one of them. Or at least I was before even I got sick of myself. This one was called Richard, and he hadn't slept for four nights waiting to find out if he'd got tickets for today in the ballot. He mustn't go to very many Wednesday games. We got our tickets based on the fact that we had accrued a small number of points from the few games that we have been to over the last few years. We had to get Roland's friend Norman to pick them up for us but the point is we qualified without the need for entry into a ballot. He seemed confused and slightly miffed when it came up in conversation that we had driven down from Liverpool last night, but Richard was not a grudge holder. He was going to have a good time come what may and he told me several times that I would too.
To that end his was one of the loudest voices joining in with the unofficial Sheffield Wednesday play-off final song. They all knew it word for word and they sang it incessantly. As a consequence I know it word for word. To the tune of Billy Ray Cyrus' Achy Breaky Heart they sing;
'We've got Bannan'
'Barry Bannan'
'I just don't think you understand'
'The wee Scotsman'
'Is better than Zidane'
'We've got Barry Bannan'
There's something pure and wonderful about a set of fans so joyously celebrating something as mediocre as Barry Bannan. It's almost self deprecating, which is something that seems totally absent from fans of the traditional elite clubs. Glory hunting has plunged such depths that I recently read a tweet from one Asia-based fan which expressed disbelief at ending the 2015/16 season as a Leicester City fan before going on to proclaim 'WE ARE THE CHAMPIONS'. The capital letters belong to the person writing the tweet, not to me. The message is clear. That individual was going to support whichever team made off with the Premier League title this season and will probably adopt the same philosophy next season. There is nothing in this world less valuable than his kind of glory and it's something which speaks loudly about the modern Premier League. Yet here we all were waiting to attend a game for which the prize on offer is a place in that very same, soulless cash-fest.
At around 1.30 Emma got a call from Roland. They'd arrived but couldn't get in to the pub because the security people were now employing a strict one-in, one-out policy. We decided to stay firstly because we weren't confident of getting in anywhere else at that stage and secondly because we didn't fancy negotiating more hills in the quest. So Emma went back down the drive to collect our tickets from Norman. I was left making small talk with Richard and his mate Dave (no really) but not for very long. The next person I saw that I recognised was not Emma but Susan, her mum. She wasn't alone either. Roland and Norman were there along with Norman's daughters Lisa and Jenny and Jenny's young son Dylan. Clearly there were enough people leaving the pub to make room for everyone, which was a relief really because the whole point of pushing up those 17 hills was so that we could meet up with everyone.
Inevitably the time came to address the toilet situation. A couple of pints of watered down Fosters will do that to you. Still I was happy to hang on but Emma couldn't. Not wanting to get in the massive queue she made me dodge my way through the weak-bladdered Yorkshire women so that she also could use the disabled toilet facilities. I was pretty put out by this but on reflection I'm a bit more philosophical about it. There aren't many advantages associated with being with a man like me so I suppose you take what perks there are. To be fair the female population of Yorkshire were more patient and accommodating than I'd imagined. Nobody got angry and nobody batted an eyelid when we both went into the disabled toilet together. Sometimes having everyone assume that you can't wipe your own arse can come in handy. It's no less humiliating for all that, mind.
Three o'clock ticked around and so time for Saints to kick-off. They were also playing Hull, specifically Super League leading Hull FC at the KC Stadium. Current form suggested very little chance of a Saints win and when the first Twitter update reported that Luke Walsh had left the field injured and that we were already 6-0 down that chance all but evaporated for me. I was cheered slightly by rumours of Wigan arsehole John Bateman bottling one of his team-mates on a night out, but a loss is a loss even when your rivals are beating each other up. In the end we lost 32-24 with Keiron blaming most of it on the referee. Whatever the reason for it finding out that my team had lost to a team from Hull seemed a pretty bad omen.
The Green Man closed at 4.00. That seems odd in the age of 24-hour drinking but was actually quite handy. It takes the gamble of having just that one more pint before you leave out of the equation. As we made our way back down the hill towards the stadium the fans were still chanting about Barry Bannan (or Gary Balloon in Susan's case) and spirits were still very high. Perhaps Richard was right and we would all have a great day no matter what. As we rolled on down Wembley Way I veered off the road to allow a slow-moving car to pass me. It's progress was being held up by the hordes of fans in the road but that was just giving the man in the back seat time to film the scene on his phone. As he passed me I turned to find that the man poking his head out of the window was former England cricket captain Michael Vaughan. Vaughan is the poster boy for celebrity Wednesday fans now that Roy Hattersley and David Blunkett are yesterday's news so it was no surprise that he was at Wembley, despite having been working for BBC Radio on England's test match with Sri Lanka at Durham. It's a long way from Durham to Wembley, but Roland had been listening to the radio earlier on and heard Vaughan say that he had a helicopter picking him up to take him to the Wednesday game. All of which was all Susan needed to run up to his open car window and ask as to the whereabouts of said helicopter.
On the way up to Block J I bumped into an old basketball team-mate. I knew he'd be here as he's a regular at Wednesday but it still felt strange seeing him in a crowd of 70,000. We were led through a gate and made our way to section 134, coming to rest in our seats at the back of the first tier directly behind the goal where all the Wednesday support was assembled. From that moment, right up until the final whistle those fans were relentless and unfailing in their support. That's all the more remarkable given the low quality of their team's performance and of the game in general. If this were Saints playing this poorly in a game this bad it would be all of five minutes before the bitching and moaning went into overdrive. It goes back to that sense of entitlement again. Wednesday fans just don't have it. They love their team unconditionally. The media talk a lot about the best fans in football being those in Liverpool or Newcastle or Glasgow but this lot are right up there.
The atmosphere dipped only slightly when Mo Diame scored the winner from out of absolutely nowhere with about 20 minutes left. It seemed a decisive blow even then. Wednesday were creating very little in terms of goal threat and the decision by manager Carlos Carvalhal to use the lumbering and useless Adte Nuhiu as a substitute before the gifted Lucas Jiao seemed like an admission of defeat. Over 90 minutes Gary Balloon proved beyond doubt that he was not better than Zidane or even Kilbane, and there were those who couldn't keep up the pretence as the clock ticked down to their timid defeat. One lad sat directly in front of me had spent almost the entire game singing and chanting, hitting me on the head with blue or white balloons (probably Gary's) at regular intervals. But when Diame scored he sat down quietly, resigned to his team's fate and scarcely even able to watch.
Before time was called there was one half-hearted shout for a penalty for handball and one wasted opportunity which the inept Jeremie Helan stroked over the bar, but in truth Wednesday didn't do nearly enough to avoid a painful defeat. Despite their low expectations there was palpable disappointment in the Wednesday end and it was hard not to get a little caught up in that dejection. Particularly if you're a miserable bugger to begin with. This was a whole season's work that had come to nothing and done so without much of a fight. The more philosophical Wednesday fans might reflect that this is a side which isn't quite ready for the big league but in the context of Leicester City winning the thing this year that may no longer ring true. Another year in the Championship could help them develop and come back stronger, but equally there are no guarantees that they'll get this close to promotion again any time soon. Wednesday's loss is probably the Premier League's loss too. I've certainly seen enough of Hull City's yo-yo act over the last few years to believe that they won't add much more to it than another scrapper aiming only for survival.
We said our goodbyes to the others when we met outside the ground. None of them were staying in London for the night so understandably wanted to get away. It was well after 8.00 by the time we got away from the stadium and we were held up further by the police limiting the number of fans getting into Wembley Park station at any one time. We got off the train at Westminster so that we could visit the Red Lion, a small pub around the corner from the Houses Of Parliament. It's a place that oozes character. You sense it's history. You can well imagine many a political strategy or big decision being mulled over here by prominent political figures over the years here. It's unlikely that those politicians were drinking bottles of San Miguel when they considered the country's fate, but there's enough in the décor and the layout to give it the sense of history that is slightly diluted by what they now sell.
Sadly they don't sell it for very long these days. We got there at around 8.35 thinking we'd have time for a couple before heading back to Canary Wharf, but for reasons best known to the management they closed at 9.00. Nine o'clock on a Saturday night! I don't remember this being the case on our last visit but it certainly has made us think again about coming here when we're back in London next weekend for the Bruce Springsteen gig. For now we made our way back to the station, making sure to take a photograph of an illuminated Big Ben looking resplendent in the fading early summer light. Certainly a lot more attractive than a couple of the selfies I had posted earlier in the weekend, one an ingenious in-joke with a friend who's partial to a car selfie, and the other an altogether better affair rescued by Emma's presence.
We finished the night back in Canary Wharf at a bog-standard, tourism-proof Slug & Lettuce. We made plans for next week while I tried not to vomit at the sight of self-adoring football superpower Cristiano Ronaldo scoring the winning penalty for Real Madrid to beat rivals Atletico in a Champions League final shoot-out. Theirs is the highest honour in European club football but it's highly doubtful that it meant as much to them as the day they went to Wembley meant to the insomniac Richard and the rest of the Wednesday faithful.
Wednesday, 4 May 2016
The A Word
Two things I can talk a lot about today....disability and television. For the last six weeks I have been spending part of my Tuesday nights watching the BBC's six-part autism-based drama 'The A Word'. This may have something to do with the fact that I don't have BT Sport and therefore consider the Champions League dead to me until such time as Liverpool qualify for it again or it returns to Sky Sports. Whichever happens first.
Regardless, 'The A Word', though not perfect by any means, was at least if not more diverting than Arsenal's annual hobble through the group stage and inevitable exit in the Round Of Arsenal. It is meant to centre around Joe, a 5 year-old boy with autism. Or, as every character in the story annoyingly insists on saying, a 5 year-old boy on the autism spectrum. That's our first problem. Here's a drama that hopes to tackle autism by populating its narrative with people who can't bring themselves to refer to Joe as 'autistic'. Chief among the culprits here is Joe's mum Alison played by Morven Christie. She's in denial about Joe's autism to the point of self-defeating mania. The ugliest character traits that one can possess all come frothing out of Alison as she harasses and bullies everyone around her in her wild and misguided attempts to stop people she doesn't know and shouldn't care about from noticing that Joe is a little different. I'm not a parent, let alone a parent of an autistic child (sorry, one on the spectrum, I mean), but I would doubt whether those that are carry on in quite the hysterical manner of Alison. By the end of episode six you'll find yourself wanting to donk her over the head with something heavy. If not before.
It's not all about Alison, but it's more about Alison than it is about Joe, unfortunately. He's only 5 years old, but as a central character his own thoughts and feelings are criminally under-explored. This is basically a family drama about the people around Joe, from his overbearing bully mother Alison to doormat dad Paul (Lee Ingleby) and comedy granddad Morris (Christopher Eccleston). Alison has a daughter Rebecca (Molly Wright) from a previous relationship which apart from leaving me wondering how Alison got two men to put up with her in her lifetime also inspires Paul to scandalously attempt to emotionally blackmail Alison into having another baby. He wants a 'normal' child of his own he admits in one moment of spectacularly insensitive but very possibly realistic drama. Publicly most people mock use of the word 'normal' in the context of anyone not disabled. 'The A Word' appears to contend that it's still in common usage behind closed doors, which is as depressing a thought as one can muster.
Along with Joe's immediate family there's his uncle Eddie (Greg McHugh) and his recently unfaithful wife Nicola (Vinette Robinson) who along with Eccleston do a fine job of taking the attention away from Joe with their own, arguably bigger personal problems. Eccleston's Morris provides the comedy highlight when he's offered a no strings sexual relationship with his singing teacher. Recently widowed he spends much of his time after this unusual proposal comically displaying the awkwardness of a 13 year-old who is being romantically pursued by the kid nobody else at school talks to. But Morris is in his 50s, and so eventually does what men do and sleeps with her anyway. He's clearly there for comic effect which the excellent Eccleston pulls off easily. The point of Eddie and Nicola is less clear, although the latter has a medical background and so occasionally offers some vague insight into autism. Beyond that she seems only to be there to offer sage advice to Rebecca when she runs into boyfriend trouble. As for what Eddie gives the story, I'll maybe get back to you on that.
The last word should be about Joe, wonderfully portrayed by Max Vento. He may not get to see much of the action and drama as everyone else goes to bits around him, but there's something undeniably endearing about a boy who communicates with his fussing mother only by belting out the opening line to The Human League's 'Don't You Want Me'. His odd musical taste (everything he listens to appears to have been made about 25 years before his birth which is a bit like me filling up the mp3 player with Drifters numbers) and his quirk of opening a door and closing it before opening it again to walk through it seemed much more like the sort of thing that should have been focused on. As good as he is Vento is always on the periphery. The only one who ever seems to get through to him is Rebecca, and that's almost certainly because she's the only one who doesn't waste time trying to bend him to her will. Come and do a puzzle. Come and read this book. Come and look at the animals. Joe's life with anyone other than Rebecca consists of a series of commands which he clearly struggles to see a reason for. It's probably not a coincidence that Rebecca is also the only one who feels no shame in using 'The A Word' and has no desire to cover up Joe's differences.
Rebecca's only 16 so perhaps the message is that it's an age thing. I've always felt that people younger than me or my peers have a greater capacity to deem disability irrelevant. They have had the benefit of a greater education on the subject than people my age. It's like language. If you teach a child early enough they'll find it easier to understand. I'm not sure the writers of 'The A Word' quite mastered that concept.
Regardless, 'The A Word', though not perfect by any means, was at least if not more diverting than Arsenal's annual hobble through the group stage and inevitable exit in the Round Of Arsenal. It is meant to centre around Joe, a 5 year-old boy with autism. Or, as every character in the story annoyingly insists on saying, a 5 year-old boy on the autism spectrum. That's our first problem. Here's a drama that hopes to tackle autism by populating its narrative with people who can't bring themselves to refer to Joe as 'autistic'. Chief among the culprits here is Joe's mum Alison played by Morven Christie. She's in denial about Joe's autism to the point of self-defeating mania. The ugliest character traits that one can possess all come frothing out of Alison as she harasses and bullies everyone around her in her wild and misguided attempts to stop people she doesn't know and shouldn't care about from noticing that Joe is a little different. I'm not a parent, let alone a parent of an autistic child (sorry, one on the spectrum, I mean), but I would doubt whether those that are carry on in quite the hysterical manner of Alison. By the end of episode six you'll find yourself wanting to donk her over the head with something heavy. If not before.
It's not all about Alison, but it's more about Alison than it is about Joe, unfortunately. He's only 5 years old, but as a central character his own thoughts and feelings are criminally under-explored. This is basically a family drama about the people around Joe, from his overbearing bully mother Alison to doormat dad Paul (Lee Ingleby) and comedy granddad Morris (Christopher Eccleston). Alison has a daughter Rebecca (Molly Wright) from a previous relationship which apart from leaving me wondering how Alison got two men to put up with her in her lifetime also inspires Paul to scandalously attempt to emotionally blackmail Alison into having another baby. He wants a 'normal' child of his own he admits in one moment of spectacularly insensitive but very possibly realistic drama. Publicly most people mock use of the word 'normal' in the context of anyone not disabled. 'The A Word' appears to contend that it's still in common usage behind closed doors, which is as depressing a thought as one can muster.
Along with Joe's immediate family there's his uncle Eddie (Greg McHugh) and his recently unfaithful wife Nicola (Vinette Robinson) who along with Eccleston do a fine job of taking the attention away from Joe with their own, arguably bigger personal problems. Eccleston's Morris provides the comedy highlight when he's offered a no strings sexual relationship with his singing teacher. Recently widowed he spends much of his time after this unusual proposal comically displaying the awkwardness of a 13 year-old who is being romantically pursued by the kid nobody else at school talks to. But Morris is in his 50s, and so eventually does what men do and sleeps with her anyway. He's clearly there for comic effect which the excellent Eccleston pulls off easily. The point of Eddie and Nicola is less clear, although the latter has a medical background and so occasionally offers some vague insight into autism. Beyond that she seems only to be there to offer sage advice to Rebecca when she runs into boyfriend trouble. As for what Eddie gives the story, I'll maybe get back to you on that.
The last word should be about Joe, wonderfully portrayed by Max Vento. He may not get to see much of the action and drama as everyone else goes to bits around him, but there's something undeniably endearing about a boy who communicates with his fussing mother only by belting out the opening line to The Human League's 'Don't You Want Me'. His odd musical taste (everything he listens to appears to have been made about 25 years before his birth which is a bit like me filling up the mp3 player with Drifters numbers) and his quirk of opening a door and closing it before opening it again to walk through it seemed much more like the sort of thing that should have been focused on. As good as he is Vento is always on the periphery. The only one who ever seems to get through to him is Rebecca, and that's almost certainly because she's the only one who doesn't waste time trying to bend him to her will. Come and do a puzzle. Come and read this book. Come and look at the animals. Joe's life with anyone other than Rebecca consists of a series of commands which he clearly struggles to see a reason for. It's probably not a coincidence that Rebecca is also the only one who feels no shame in using 'The A Word' and has no desire to cover up Joe's differences.
Rebecca's only 16 so perhaps the message is that it's an age thing. I've always felt that people younger than me or my peers have a greater capacity to deem disability irrelevant. They have had the benefit of a greater education on the subject than people my age. It's like language. If you teach a child early enough they'll find it easier to understand. I'm not sure the writers of 'The A Word' quite mastered that concept.
Tuesday, 3 May 2016
Leicester City And The London Marathon
It feels like I should mention Leicester City about now. Memoirs Of A Fire Hazard is not just a cynical rant, though that is it's main strength. It's also a record of significant events. There are entries about the deaths of Michael Jackson and Prince. There's a piece about Paul Wellens' retirement. So the greatest upset in the history of sport seems noteworthy.
And that's what Leicester City's Premier League title win is. Leicester City? Are you shitting me? I read earlier today that the 5000-1 odds on Leicester City winning the Premier League when the season kicked off were the same as those of Elvis being found alive and well and of aliens arriving on Earth. That is just how unlikely this outcome was. Some rather bitter and cynical folk have tried to crap on the fairy-tale by pointing out that Leicester now have wealthy owners. That they do, but those owners tend not to spend their money on strengthening Claudio Ranieri's team. The team which was most often selected by Ranieri set the club back about £52million, which is a good deal less than was splurged to assemble the squads representing so-called bigger clubs like Manchesters City and United, Chelsea, Arsenal and Liverpool. Most of those clubs have spent more than that on an individual player at one time or another.
That Leicester have done the impossible in the manner that they have has very possibly changed the face of football. For as long as anyone can remember there has been a direct correlation between a club's wage bill and it's prospects for winning a title. Even Liverpool's flirtation with a title win in 2013-14 was powered almost entirely by the freakish brilliance of Freddie Mercury tribute act Luis Suarez. They failed, Suarez moved on and everyone settled back into a pattern of expecting City, United, Chelsea and Arsenal to carve it up between them forever. Leicester's miracle is brilliant not only because it shames traditional and newly-rich heavyweights alike, but also because it eliminates the excuses trotted out by Premier League clubs outside the Champions League elite. If Leicester are Premier League champions then at what point do the Newcastles, Evertons, West Hams and even (though they came close this year) the Tottenhams of this world stop selling us the lie that they can't compete due to finances? Now would be a good time.
Should these clubs take confidence and inspiration from Leicester's deeds we may find ourselves being transported back to a time of footballing unpredictability for more than just this one season. Leicester's triumph has been compared to that of East Midlands neighbours Nottingham Forest's title win in 1978. That led to two European Cup wins for Brian Clough's side, who somehow managed to carry off the title in their first season following promotion from the old second division. But theirs was an era which contained no billionaires funded by oligarchs or sheikhs, no commercially over-sized national institutions made seemingly untouchable by gargantuan TV deals and scandalous ticket prices. The playing field was a little more even back then, and the only thing hindering Forest was the perception that they were a little unfashionable. Not that it stopped them from becoming the first English club to pay £1million for a player when they brought in Trevor Francis from Birmingham City. Leicester will likely remain among the lowest spenders in defence of their crown while the fat cats will no doubt embark on another spending spree to try to re-establish the accepted Premier League order. I can't be the only one hoping they fail.
Staying with sport I wanted also to make mention of last week's London Marathon. I didn't actually watch it. In the On Demand era there are infinitely better options than watching CJ from Eggheads wheeze his way around the streets of the capital. But whether you are watching or not it is probably a good idea to stay tucked away from the general public if you happen to be a wheelchair user when the London Marathon is on. I'm not alone in having lost count of the number of times I've been asked why I'm not in the wheelchair race. Of course the real reason is that at my time of life and with my ailments I would rather be stabbed in both eyes with rusty forks than attempt to haul my arse down 26 miles of road. You might just as well ask me why I'm not Director General of the BBC or why I don't present Masterchef.
To assume that I could and should compete in the wheelchair marathon is a flagrant disrespect of the proper athletes who endure it year after year. They're not volunteers, these people. It's not something they do to prove to fucking Cameron and IDS that they're disabled and therefore qualify for PIP. They're serious athletes who train hard for this shit. The failure of the general public to get its collective head around that fact, and to realise that one doesn't actually have to complete the wheelchair marathon to be validated as a human being with a disability is one of life's imponderables. A sad legacy of the Paralympics in London in 2012 and one which will no doubt rear its head again during this year's shebang in Rio. Just why am I not out there chasing David Weir around a track?
I ought to be ashamed.
And that's what Leicester City's Premier League title win is. Leicester City? Are you shitting me? I read earlier today that the 5000-1 odds on Leicester City winning the Premier League when the season kicked off were the same as those of Elvis being found alive and well and of aliens arriving on Earth. That is just how unlikely this outcome was. Some rather bitter and cynical folk have tried to crap on the fairy-tale by pointing out that Leicester now have wealthy owners. That they do, but those owners tend not to spend their money on strengthening Claudio Ranieri's team. The team which was most often selected by Ranieri set the club back about £52million, which is a good deal less than was splurged to assemble the squads representing so-called bigger clubs like Manchesters City and United, Chelsea, Arsenal and Liverpool. Most of those clubs have spent more than that on an individual player at one time or another.
That Leicester have done the impossible in the manner that they have has very possibly changed the face of football. For as long as anyone can remember there has been a direct correlation between a club's wage bill and it's prospects for winning a title. Even Liverpool's flirtation with a title win in 2013-14 was powered almost entirely by the freakish brilliance of Freddie Mercury tribute act Luis Suarez. They failed, Suarez moved on and everyone settled back into a pattern of expecting City, United, Chelsea and Arsenal to carve it up between them forever. Leicester's miracle is brilliant not only because it shames traditional and newly-rich heavyweights alike, but also because it eliminates the excuses trotted out by Premier League clubs outside the Champions League elite. If Leicester are Premier League champions then at what point do the Newcastles, Evertons, West Hams and even (though they came close this year) the Tottenhams of this world stop selling us the lie that they can't compete due to finances? Now would be a good time.
Should these clubs take confidence and inspiration from Leicester's deeds we may find ourselves being transported back to a time of footballing unpredictability for more than just this one season. Leicester's triumph has been compared to that of East Midlands neighbours Nottingham Forest's title win in 1978. That led to two European Cup wins for Brian Clough's side, who somehow managed to carry off the title in their first season following promotion from the old second division. But theirs was an era which contained no billionaires funded by oligarchs or sheikhs, no commercially over-sized national institutions made seemingly untouchable by gargantuan TV deals and scandalous ticket prices. The playing field was a little more even back then, and the only thing hindering Forest was the perception that they were a little unfashionable. Not that it stopped them from becoming the first English club to pay £1million for a player when they brought in Trevor Francis from Birmingham City. Leicester will likely remain among the lowest spenders in defence of their crown while the fat cats will no doubt embark on another spending spree to try to re-establish the accepted Premier League order. I can't be the only one hoping they fail.
Staying with sport I wanted also to make mention of last week's London Marathon. I didn't actually watch it. In the On Demand era there are infinitely better options than watching CJ from Eggheads wheeze his way around the streets of the capital. But whether you are watching or not it is probably a good idea to stay tucked away from the general public if you happen to be a wheelchair user when the London Marathon is on. I'm not alone in having lost count of the number of times I've been asked why I'm not in the wheelchair race. Of course the real reason is that at my time of life and with my ailments I would rather be stabbed in both eyes with rusty forks than attempt to haul my arse down 26 miles of road. You might just as well ask me why I'm not Director General of the BBC or why I don't present Masterchef.
To assume that I could and should compete in the wheelchair marathon is a flagrant disrespect of the proper athletes who endure it year after year. They're not volunteers, these people. It's not something they do to prove to fucking Cameron and IDS that they're disabled and therefore qualify for PIP. They're serious athletes who train hard for this shit. The failure of the general public to get its collective head around that fact, and to realise that one doesn't actually have to complete the wheelchair marathon to be validated as a human being with a disability is one of life's imponderables. A sad legacy of the Paralympics in London in 2012 and one which will no doubt rear its head again during this year's shebang in Rio. Just why am I not out there chasing David Weir around a track?
I ought to be ashamed.
Thursday, 21 April 2016
Oh No...Not Prince....
I was watching an episode of Boston Legal earlier. In it the brilliant Alan Shore (played by the equally brilliant James Spader who can currently be seen with far less hair in The Blacklist) uses the phrase 'summarily schmidt-canned'. I was working on a way to work this phrase into these pages (just done it) when I noticed a Facebook post by a friend which declared the death of Prince. That Prince. Prince Rogers Nelson for feck's sake. He was just 57.
It has been a severely testing couple of days. A bizarre chain of events facilitated the almost complete erosion of my self-esteem. Just when you get through that, when you finally digest the notion that the majority view on you doesn't matter enough to justify a total meltdown, you find out that Prince has died. The word 'genius' is grossly, horribly over-used. There are very few true geniuses in modern popular culture, much less music. Most of the artists I like fall way short of this billing. I basically like anyone who is easy to copy on karaoke (and therefore musically limited in a technical, music snobbery sense) and a certain soul diva from the south coast. But genius she is not. Anyone who has heard 'Don't Cha' Wanna Ride' will know that Miss Stone's best work is when she is covering forgotten oul classics from the 1950's and adapting the odd White Stripes number. But Prince? Prince was different gravy.
Purple Rain is perhaps the most iconic of his enormous catalogue of hits but the truth is everything he did was pretty magical. I defy even those people who find Sinead O'Connor's 'Nothing Compares 2 U' to be mawkish nonsense (it doesn't help that she actually cries during the performance) to listen to Prince's version and not have their view of the whole song changed for the better. He wrote the song, aswell as The Bangles classic Manic Monday (who doesn't like The Bangles?) and many more hits for many other artists that you've probably bellowed along to on the drive to work. I know I have. Not so much Carpool Karaoke as Peter Kay's Car Share.
Some of his songs were a little on the risque side, leading to the perception that he was....well....a bit of a perv. I remember sitting listening to one album and realising that pretty much every song had a sexual connotation on some level. That could have been the mind of a late teenage male but with titles like 'Soft And Wet', 'Do Me Baby' and 'Sexy MF' the jury has to be out. But on the other hand if you can bury blatantly offensive lyrics amid the spell-binding Hendrixian guitar prowess and a vocal range that made Mariah Carey sound like Bruce Springsteen then you'll probably get away with it. And he did.
Slightly unnerving sexual obsession wasn't Prince's only oddity, of course. Who can forget him changing his name to an unpronouncable symbol in some kind of protest against gender labelling? Word is he wasn't that fussed. Or the time he attempted to shame his record label into settling their dispute by writing 'Slave' on his face? Some thought at the time that a millionaire recording artist shouldn't have been trivialising slavery. I remember Cristiano Ronaldo getting in hot water for a similar loss of perspective. But he too is one of those few true geniuses in modern popular culture I mentioned, so perhaps it's a pre-requisite. It wasn't all bad from Prince anyway. Occasionally he would derive pleasure from giving albums away at a ridiculous price with certain Sunday newspapers. Publicity stunt? Possibly, but certainly better than the £19.99 charged by many hugely inferior artists for the 'deluxe' versions of their work.
As a long-time critic of the general public expressing too much, inappropriate emotion following the loss of celebrities this column breaks every rule. But for me there's a genuine difference between trying to articulate some feelings about one of the most influential human beings of all time and writing RIP to the latest reality show no-mark who has passed, as equally sad as their deaths are to the people who knew and loved them. So, just deal with it if you wouldn't mind awfully. Thanks.
Reflecting now on Prince's death while that terrible song he did which Tom Jones covered plays in the background on one of many hastily cobbled tribute shows on MTV my great regret is that I will now never get to see him live. Latterly he had taken to announcing tour venues and dates at about a week's notice which makes life difficult. Bloody annoying but again the sort of thing you get away with if you're a bona fide genius and an icon. I wouldn't really begrudge him this right. His passing is a genuinely appalling day for the arts, for music, and for anyone with any interest in human achievement in general.
It has been a severely testing couple of days. A bizarre chain of events facilitated the almost complete erosion of my self-esteem. Just when you get through that, when you finally digest the notion that the majority view on you doesn't matter enough to justify a total meltdown, you find out that Prince has died. The word 'genius' is grossly, horribly over-used. There are very few true geniuses in modern popular culture, much less music. Most of the artists I like fall way short of this billing. I basically like anyone who is easy to copy on karaoke (and therefore musically limited in a technical, music snobbery sense) and a certain soul diva from the south coast. But genius she is not. Anyone who has heard 'Don't Cha' Wanna Ride' will know that Miss Stone's best work is when she is covering forgotten oul classics from the 1950's and adapting the odd White Stripes number. But Prince? Prince was different gravy.
Purple Rain is perhaps the most iconic of his enormous catalogue of hits but the truth is everything he did was pretty magical. I defy even those people who find Sinead O'Connor's 'Nothing Compares 2 U' to be mawkish nonsense (it doesn't help that she actually cries during the performance) to listen to Prince's version and not have their view of the whole song changed for the better. He wrote the song, aswell as The Bangles classic Manic Monday (who doesn't like The Bangles?) and many more hits for many other artists that you've probably bellowed along to on the drive to work. I know I have. Not so much Carpool Karaoke as Peter Kay's Car Share.
Some of his songs were a little on the risque side, leading to the perception that he was....well....a bit of a perv. I remember sitting listening to one album and realising that pretty much every song had a sexual connotation on some level. That could have been the mind of a late teenage male but with titles like 'Soft And Wet', 'Do Me Baby' and 'Sexy MF' the jury has to be out. But on the other hand if you can bury blatantly offensive lyrics amid the spell-binding Hendrixian guitar prowess and a vocal range that made Mariah Carey sound like Bruce Springsteen then you'll probably get away with it. And he did.
Slightly unnerving sexual obsession wasn't Prince's only oddity, of course. Who can forget him changing his name to an unpronouncable symbol in some kind of protest against gender labelling? Word is he wasn't that fussed. Or the time he attempted to shame his record label into settling their dispute by writing 'Slave' on his face? Some thought at the time that a millionaire recording artist shouldn't have been trivialising slavery. I remember Cristiano Ronaldo getting in hot water for a similar loss of perspective. But he too is one of those few true geniuses in modern popular culture I mentioned, so perhaps it's a pre-requisite. It wasn't all bad from Prince anyway. Occasionally he would derive pleasure from giving albums away at a ridiculous price with certain Sunday newspapers. Publicity stunt? Possibly, but certainly better than the £19.99 charged by many hugely inferior artists for the 'deluxe' versions of their work.
As a long-time critic of the general public expressing too much, inappropriate emotion following the loss of celebrities this column breaks every rule. But for me there's a genuine difference between trying to articulate some feelings about one of the most influential human beings of all time and writing RIP to the latest reality show no-mark who has passed, as equally sad as their deaths are to the people who knew and loved them. So, just deal with it if you wouldn't mind awfully. Thanks.
Reflecting now on Prince's death while that terrible song he did which Tom Jones covered plays in the background on one of many hastily cobbled tribute shows on MTV my great regret is that I will now never get to see him live. Latterly he had taken to announcing tour venues and dates at about a week's notice which makes life difficult. Bloody annoying but again the sort of thing you get away with if you're a bona fide genius and an icon. I wouldn't really begrudge him this right. His passing is a genuinely appalling day for the arts, for music, and for anyone with any interest in human achievement in general.
Sunday, 17 April 2016
Kelly & Cal
I'm going to put this here because it's important that you see it. All four of you. Ordinarily it would sit in my film blog but even the four of you don't bother with that. You don't want to have Star Wars ruined for you, or something. I have news for you. I didn't ruin Star Wars for you, that was JJ Fucking Abrams.
Anyway this kind of fits here too. Where better to tell you about a film which tries to deal with some very similar issues as Memoirs Of A Fire Hazard endeavours to do? Kelly And Cal tells the story of the relationship that develops between the mother of a new-born baby and her wheelchair-using teenage neighbour. She, Kelly that is, is played by Juliette Lewis who I love. She's beautiful in that interesting way that the likes of Rihanna and Cheryl Whateverhernameisthisweek could never be. And as she shows here she's supremely talented. She's also mad, but not in an 'all women are mad' way but a quirky way.
As we'll see there's much that resonates about Kelly And Cal for me. That would be the reason that I'm up writing at 1.20am. However it is not a perfect film. For starters, the way in which Kelly and Cal's relationship begins is utterly implausible. She's in her back garden having a smoke and he's peering over the fence. After bludging a cigarette from her he tells her she has nice tits. As opening gambits go it's not up there for me, that one. Kelly tends to agree and is about to admonish Cal until she looks over the fence more closely. This is when she sees him rolling away down a ramp and when she sees the wheelchair for the first time. She confides in husband Josh about this and resolves to apologise to Cal the next day. She shouldn't have shouted at the boy in the wheelchair. But the idea that she should feel guilty about his rudeness because of his disability just isn't a realistic one. It certainly isn't my experience of what's happened when I've been rude to women. To pretend that Cal is justified is to make him a victim regardless of his behaviour. Or it could just be me. Maybe you can say what you like when you are as handsome as Cal, played by Jonny Weston.
Josh doesn't get essily offended by Cal either, and this is something I can identify with. As Kelly and Cal's relationship develops Josh doesn't even have the decency to feel threatened. And it's not even because his relationship with Kelly is that rock solid. They argue over the fact that they haven't resumed their sexual relationship since the birth of their son Jackson (it's Juliette Lewis, you idiot). Yet despite Josh's insecurities he still sees no problem with Cal turning up on his front doorstep suited and booted and ready to take Kelly out to a swanky dinner. I rarely do swanky dinners but I have, in my distant past, blatantly snogged the face off a woman right in front of her fella's face. And he was one of those Rottweiller boyfriends, eight feet tall and twice as wide. An able-bodied man would have been beaten half to death by him in my situation. I'd have taken that just to feel respected by him. Threatened. Like I was in the game. At the time I probably laughed at my own audacity, but I know it wasn't long after before I realised that actually I was being mocked.
Josh doesn't get the funk on until Cal, who it turns out is an artist, creates a sculpture of a topless Kelly having seen her undressing in her bedroom window one night. He has a telescope which is a fairly offensive characterisation of the disabled as Peeping Toms, as if that's how we're getting our kicks since we're not getting much else. He does get fairly close to Kelly. At the school after they've vandalised it in protest at 'bullshit proms' or something. But then the police come and Cal's moment goes. Before that there's the cliched conversation about whether Cal can have sex that seems to be a mandatory part of any romance dealing with disability. It's almost always done awkwardly and it's no different here.
The sculpture scenario does provide what was for me the film's comedy highlight. For reasons I won't go into Cal has to steal back possession of his creation. He's spotted by Kelly pushing away from the scene with the thing laid out across his knee. He's wearing a balaclava in a bid not to be identified which is just hilarious. It illustrates perfectly how being the only wheelchair user in the village will get you banged to rights. This has happened to me at work. If any other member of our team gives out duff information the unfortunate recipient can't identify who gave it to them. The best they can do is tell us whether it was a man or a woman. But when it is 'the one in the wheelchair' there's nowhere really to hide. Luckily we don't operate in a culture of blame but you get the point. Sometimes the worst thing about disability is the inability to blend in and go un-noticed. Like being a celebrity only without money or girls. Like Ian Fucking Brady.
Cal comes across as a bit of a childish tit when he doesn't get his own way with Kelly in the end. As a leading authority on being a childish tit I thought they took this a bit too far anyway. He's clearly bonkers about her by the end but he still finds time to call her old and saggy and offer tips on how she might make herself more attractive to Josh during one spectacular blow-up. Is this really what you would say to someone you love, even with a skinful of ale down you? Doubtful. At a stretch you could maybe make the argument that he's just passionate about her. There are those couples who stay together despite arguing constantly and seemingly being constantly on the verge of a break-up. I suppose anything is possible if you're a childish tit.
For all its faults Kelly And Cal is a thought-provoking attempt to examine disability and romance, and more particularly romance in which disability isn't the only potential barrier. But you don't need to see it now, anyway.
Cheers, it's now 2.00am. Sleep well.
Anyway this kind of fits here too. Where better to tell you about a film which tries to deal with some very similar issues as Memoirs Of A Fire Hazard endeavours to do? Kelly And Cal tells the story of the relationship that develops between the mother of a new-born baby and her wheelchair-using teenage neighbour. She, Kelly that is, is played by Juliette Lewis who I love. She's beautiful in that interesting way that the likes of Rihanna and Cheryl Whateverhernameisthisweek could never be. And as she shows here she's supremely talented. She's also mad, but not in an 'all women are mad' way but a quirky way.
As we'll see there's much that resonates about Kelly And Cal for me. That would be the reason that I'm up writing at 1.20am. However it is not a perfect film. For starters, the way in which Kelly and Cal's relationship begins is utterly implausible. She's in her back garden having a smoke and he's peering over the fence. After bludging a cigarette from her he tells her she has nice tits. As opening gambits go it's not up there for me, that one. Kelly tends to agree and is about to admonish Cal until she looks over the fence more closely. This is when she sees him rolling away down a ramp and when she sees the wheelchair for the first time. She confides in husband Josh about this and resolves to apologise to Cal the next day. She shouldn't have shouted at the boy in the wheelchair. But the idea that she should feel guilty about his rudeness because of his disability just isn't a realistic one. It certainly isn't my experience of what's happened when I've been rude to women. To pretend that Cal is justified is to make him a victim regardless of his behaviour. Or it could just be me. Maybe you can say what you like when you are as handsome as Cal, played by Jonny Weston.
Josh doesn't get essily offended by Cal either, and this is something I can identify with. As Kelly and Cal's relationship develops Josh doesn't even have the decency to feel threatened. And it's not even because his relationship with Kelly is that rock solid. They argue over the fact that they haven't resumed their sexual relationship since the birth of their son Jackson (it's Juliette Lewis, you idiot). Yet despite Josh's insecurities he still sees no problem with Cal turning up on his front doorstep suited and booted and ready to take Kelly out to a swanky dinner. I rarely do swanky dinners but I have, in my distant past, blatantly snogged the face off a woman right in front of her fella's face. And he was one of those Rottweiller boyfriends, eight feet tall and twice as wide. An able-bodied man would have been beaten half to death by him in my situation. I'd have taken that just to feel respected by him. Threatened. Like I was in the game. At the time I probably laughed at my own audacity, but I know it wasn't long after before I realised that actually I was being mocked.
Josh doesn't get the funk on until Cal, who it turns out is an artist, creates a sculpture of a topless Kelly having seen her undressing in her bedroom window one night. He has a telescope which is a fairly offensive characterisation of the disabled as Peeping Toms, as if that's how we're getting our kicks since we're not getting much else. He does get fairly close to Kelly. At the school after they've vandalised it in protest at 'bullshit proms' or something. But then the police come and Cal's moment goes. Before that there's the cliched conversation about whether Cal can have sex that seems to be a mandatory part of any romance dealing with disability. It's almost always done awkwardly and it's no different here.
The sculpture scenario does provide what was for me the film's comedy highlight. For reasons I won't go into Cal has to steal back possession of his creation. He's spotted by Kelly pushing away from the scene with the thing laid out across his knee. He's wearing a balaclava in a bid not to be identified which is just hilarious. It illustrates perfectly how being the only wheelchair user in the village will get you banged to rights. This has happened to me at work. If any other member of our team gives out duff information the unfortunate recipient can't identify who gave it to them. The best they can do is tell us whether it was a man or a woman. But when it is 'the one in the wheelchair' there's nowhere really to hide. Luckily we don't operate in a culture of blame but you get the point. Sometimes the worst thing about disability is the inability to blend in and go un-noticed. Like being a celebrity only without money or girls. Like Ian Fucking Brady.
Cal comes across as a bit of a childish tit when he doesn't get his own way with Kelly in the end. As a leading authority on being a childish tit I thought they took this a bit too far anyway. He's clearly bonkers about her by the end but he still finds time to call her old and saggy and offer tips on how she might make herself more attractive to Josh during one spectacular blow-up. Is this really what you would say to someone you love, even with a skinful of ale down you? Doubtful. At a stretch you could maybe make the argument that he's just passionate about her. There are those couples who stay together despite arguing constantly and seemingly being constantly on the verge of a break-up. I suppose anything is possible if you're a childish tit.
For all its faults Kelly And Cal is a thought-provoking attempt to examine disability and romance, and more particularly romance in which disability isn't the only potential barrier. But you don't need to see it now, anyway.
Cheers, it's now 2.00am. Sleep well.
Monday, 4 April 2016
A Silk Purse From a S'au's Ear
There’s a photograph doing the rounds of Junior S’au. For those of you who don’t know, he’s a rugby league player with the Salford Red Devils. The photograph shows him shaking hands with a young disabled fan. It’s meant to show rugby league players in a more favourable light, especially those from Salford following the unsavoury incidents in the crowd at the end of their match with Huddersfield Giants last week. The point being that the media just love to jump on the bandwagon of any negative rugby league story so here’s something which proves that actually rugby league players are a lovely bunch of lads and don’t get half of the credit they deserve.
All of which may be true. The anti-league media do love to highlight the negatives while routinely ignoring the game the rest of the time, and so there is a need for more positive publicity around the sport. Yet as with anything that is well intentioned and is related to disability I have a fucking problem with this particular example. Here’s my problem. It’s a flagrant misuse of disability which I personally find vile and offensive. Of course, I would. Here we go a-fucking-gain. But then you think about it. If that fan meeting S’au is not disabled it significantly lessens the impact of that photograph. It no longer says ‘ah, look how nice our players are’. It just says ‘here’s a picture of Junior S’au meeting a fan’. So in hoiking this photograph around the rugby league community what we are actually doing is using disability to romanticise the players. A kind of inspiration porn in reverse. We’re not saying that the child is marvellous for getting out of bed and living life with such an awful curse as we do with conventional inspoporn, we’re saying S’au is marvellous for choosing to be seen with the child in public. But meeting a disabled fan does not make S’au a hero or a role model. It is not an act of kindness or selflessness. It is run of the mill community spirit. Two equals saying ‘how do you do?’ at the end of a game in which one has paid good money to support the other. A common courtesy. Politeness and nothing more. S’au does not have to go any more out of his way to meet this fan than he would any other. Yes, there may be extreme circumstances with this fan in particular. Her plight may be particularly disastrous and so who am I to deny what is obviously a pleasure for any rugby league-loving child. But there's no context in the photograph and in many ways it doesn't matter anyway, the point stands.
But that view doesn’t tally with the agenda, which is that rugby league players are not louts but gold-hearted champions of the less fortunate. I made this point on social media and was invited to ‘get over myself’ by one person. Which is the great problem with trying to explain disability issues to people who are not disabled and don’t quite have the intellect to debate them properly. The default setting of most people is to believe that disabled people are less fortunate than they are, which fosters a culture of pity over one of respect. Which is why a photograph of S’au shaking hands with a disabled fan is seen as an appropriate way to demonstrate his all-around awesomeness. Look at him giving up his valuable 12 seconds to be the highlight of some poor disabled person’s entire life. That assumes far too much about that young fan’s life and in any case, whatever the circumstances, I would hate to think that someone giving me a small amount of the time of day could be used in this way. I remember when Wigan Athletic got to the League Cup Final about a decade ago, and their then chairman Dave Whelan was rubbing the heads of all the disabled fans in the front row behind the goal during the celebrations. I recall remarking that if Dave Whelan, or any of the players for that matter, had come over to me at the end of a semi-final win like that and put his hands on me I would have punched him square in the nose. It’s not acceptable. Please keep your sense of superiority to yourselves.
I hate to use the word patronising as it is a fairly meaningless catch-all term given to what amounts to a lack of respect for disabled people and a lack of acceptance of them as equals. Yet I have not been able to help but notice over the years how often I have been talked down to by people who have, frankly, very little going for them. Fat people, smelly people, thick people, Tories, all kinds of people who need to have a good look at themselves have been guilty of it. Their sense of superiority is laughable and makes me pity them as much as they do me. And yet still the overriding feeling in society is that people like me deserve pity. The only reason I deserve pity is that my life is made more difficult by the ignorance of others who persist with this appalling attitude. And it isn’t just strangers or casual acquaintances. I’ve had it from people closer to me. For them it is not a lack of respect or acceptance. For them sweeping away these sorts of issues is their way of down-playing disability because they don’t want to see it as an issue and they don’t want you to see it that way either. But that is full-on, ostrich, head-in-the-sand stuff. Disability is an issue, and it is more of an issue today because the general public see fit to approve of the S’au photograph as some sort of example of outstanding benevolent gallantry.
Of course, since everyone else on the planet is in favour of this kind of thing there is peril in pointing out its flaws. Disabled people have to get used to being labelled the bad guy when they make any social comment about their treatment in society. The classic chip on the shoulder. Some choose not to be labelled so and so sit and suffer in their dignified silence. Others, like the clown writing this, are happy to wear the bad-guy tag if it means that one day we will get to a place where disability is not used to glorify the ordinary in a way that only serves to re-inforce the idea that we are somehow less than we really are.
All of which may be true. The anti-league media do love to highlight the negatives while routinely ignoring the game the rest of the time, and so there is a need for more positive publicity around the sport. Yet as with anything that is well intentioned and is related to disability I have a fucking problem with this particular example. Here’s my problem. It’s a flagrant misuse of disability which I personally find vile and offensive. Of course, I would. Here we go a-fucking-gain. But then you think about it. If that fan meeting S’au is not disabled it significantly lessens the impact of that photograph. It no longer says ‘ah, look how nice our players are’. It just says ‘here’s a picture of Junior S’au meeting a fan’. So in hoiking this photograph around the rugby league community what we are actually doing is using disability to romanticise the players. A kind of inspiration porn in reverse. We’re not saying that the child is marvellous for getting out of bed and living life with such an awful curse as we do with conventional inspoporn, we’re saying S’au is marvellous for choosing to be seen with the child in public. But meeting a disabled fan does not make S’au a hero or a role model. It is not an act of kindness or selflessness. It is run of the mill community spirit. Two equals saying ‘how do you do?’ at the end of a game in which one has paid good money to support the other. A common courtesy. Politeness and nothing more. S’au does not have to go any more out of his way to meet this fan than he would any other. Yes, there may be extreme circumstances with this fan in particular. Her plight may be particularly disastrous and so who am I to deny what is obviously a pleasure for any rugby league-loving child. But there's no context in the photograph and in many ways it doesn't matter anyway, the point stands.
But that view doesn’t tally with the agenda, which is that rugby league players are not louts but gold-hearted champions of the less fortunate. I made this point on social media and was invited to ‘get over myself’ by one person. Which is the great problem with trying to explain disability issues to people who are not disabled and don’t quite have the intellect to debate them properly. The default setting of most people is to believe that disabled people are less fortunate than they are, which fosters a culture of pity over one of respect. Which is why a photograph of S’au shaking hands with a disabled fan is seen as an appropriate way to demonstrate his all-around awesomeness. Look at him giving up his valuable 12 seconds to be the highlight of some poor disabled person’s entire life. That assumes far too much about that young fan’s life and in any case, whatever the circumstances, I would hate to think that someone giving me a small amount of the time of day could be used in this way. I remember when Wigan Athletic got to the League Cup Final about a decade ago, and their then chairman Dave Whelan was rubbing the heads of all the disabled fans in the front row behind the goal during the celebrations. I recall remarking that if Dave Whelan, or any of the players for that matter, had come over to me at the end of a semi-final win like that and put his hands on me I would have punched him square in the nose. It’s not acceptable. Please keep your sense of superiority to yourselves.
I hate to use the word patronising as it is a fairly meaningless catch-all term given to what amounts to a lack of respect for disabled people and a lack of acceptance of them as equals. Yet I have not been able to help but notice over the years how often I have been talked down to by people who have, frankly, very little going for them. Fat people, smelly people, thick people, Tories, all kinds of people who need to have a good look at themselves have been guilty of it. Their sense of superiority is laughable and makes me pity them as much as they do me. And yet still the overriding feeling in society is that people like me deserve pity. The only reason I deserve pity is that my life is made more difficult by the ignorance of others who persist with this appalling attitude. And it isn’t just strangers or casual acquaintances. I’ve had it from people closer to me. For them it is not a lack of respect or acceptance. For them sweeping away these sorts of issues is their way of down-playing disability because they don’t want to see it as an issue and they don’t want you to see it that way either. But that is full-on, ostrich, head-in-the-sand stuff. Disability is an issue, and it is more of an issue today because the general public see fit to approve of the S’au photograph as some sort of example of outstanding benevolent gallantry.
Of course, since everyone else on the planet is in favour of this kind of thing there is peril in pointing out its flaws. Disabled people have to get used to being labelled the bad guy when they make any social comment about their treatment in society. The classic chip on the shoulder. Some choose not to be labelled so and so sit and suffer in their dignified silence. Others, like the clown writing this, are happy to wear the bad-guy tag if it means that one day we will get to a place where disability is not used to glorify the ordinary in a way that only serves to re-inforce the idea that we are somehow less than we really are.
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