'huge, queer and tawdry' but 'much admired by the public'

The bubbling 'SPRING BREAK!' excitement of Maundy Thursday collapsed somewhere between rain and general inertia, leaving me with a QNI instead, so on Good Friday I was rather making up for lost time. This was error. A while back I learned an important lesson: never try to do three drinking events in a single day. On Friday, some cocktail of consolation, 'Tesla Girls' and seat of the pants theology saw me forget that lesson. It won't happen again - or at least, not for another few years. Good to hear Herman Dune in a pub, though.

On Saturday...well, I've already posted about Saturday's main business. But then I headed out for a quiet pint in the Ewok Village while we had it all to ourselves (always the best way for a pub (garden) to be), then on to the Mucky Pup. Which was full of people I didn't recognise even a little, something I'm not used to in North London. All of them split into very distinct little tribes, too, in spite of how small the pub was - lots of rockabilly girls with tats at one table, and stereotypical lesbians at the next, and one man with a lightning flash shaved into the back of his head, and one man who had the angriest face in the world but wasn't angry at all. The only problem, aside from my fragility after the night before, was that the Mucky Pup doesn't have a dancefloor, and when they're playing loud and dirty stuff like the Cramps, that's not really ideal for sitting and chatting. Cue for an early night.

PopArt's Cure special on Sunday kicked off with Girls On Film, who were very loud and did a good 'Cut Here', then Typewriter, with 'A Forest' and some great Barney Sumner stage presence from Matt. Then two bands I didn't know, so the Hell with them, time to sit outside. Keith TOTP had his own inimitable take on gothing up, drawing 'My Cold Black Heart' on one side of his shirt and writing 'I Never Asked To Be Born, Mother' on the other. Ace. He joined in with Mr Solo for a set whose lack of Cure cover can be forgiven on grounds of general awesomeness, but before them it was the White Witches punking their way through 'Killing An Arab' - a song even the Cure have now apparently retitled in case people miss the point. Jessies.

Monday brings the Greenford Tubewalk. Greenford still has a wooden escalator at the station - but only going up. Opposite the station is an estate agent's called Brian Cox & Company. And our walk begins through a park called Paradise Fields. What wonderland is this? Well, no. Within Paradise Fields the map indicates an area called The Depression, which is more like it, though at least the empty 12-packs of Durex around its margin indicate that the local people are taking steps to cheer themselves up. At our destination, Northolt, we pass a Harvester just before the station. Fortunately, from the station we can just make out another pub sign in the distance. Has to be worth a try, because how can it be worse than the Harvester? Here's how: it has burned down, and only the sign remains.

Yesterday I went to Hampton Court Palace. What's the first thing that springs to mind about Hampton Court Palace? It's the maze, isn't it? Well, the maze is rubbish. I expected something out of Terry Gilliam - or at least The Goblet of Fire. But you can see through the hedges! They're barely higher than my head! The overall area of the maze is probably smaller than that of the Monarch!
Fortunately, the rest of the place is brilliant. Swans getting confused by fences! More tapestries than I think I've seen in my life to date! The largest vine in the world! A palace in two styles which don't go together at all yet somehow work! Just like Brian Cox (not the estate agent) was saying on the last Wonders about how Earth has complex life because it's been stable enough for long enough, so with Britain - it's our knack for muddling along which leaves us with palaces like this whereas in more volatile lands like France they end up with constructions which are grand, unified and slightly dull.

It may be the night when the boundaries between the worlds are at their weakest, but the main thing I expect from Hallowe'en is a chance to have a dance in my cloak. Which I got, plus the chance to stalk home through Stoke Newington and Brownswood Park afterwards. Although on this of all nights, I find it unbelievable that you can still get catcalls from oiks. It's Hallowe'en, you dreckwits! It's the one night of the year when you're meant to be dressed like this and are not being even mildly controversial by so doing! Also, you know how some people pronounce 'nuclear' as 'nucelar'? There's a reverse one about too, because I definitely heard a few 'Draclua's.
('Count Fvckula', on the other hand, is a perfectly acceptable alternative)
Anyway, Nightbeast - very rocking, but with a name like Nightbeast I fear they'll never find another gig which will live up to a Hallowe'en debut.
On Saturday I went to Feeling Gloomy's Leonard Cohen special. There should be more clubs playing Leonard Cohen.

Execrable hack Jeph Loeb has been sacked from Heroes, so I may give it another go once we get to the relevant episodes. Sadly, Marvel comics have not had the sense to do likewise. Maybe I should fake his voice, ring Sarah Palin and claim to have done her daughter?

In the run-up to the US election, I find myself very receptive to TV touching on the American Dream; I'm misting up at Simon Schama's The American Future: A History, and devouring HBO's John Adams. Which is a peculiar series, every episode seeming to exist in a different genre: the first sees a mild man radicalised, like a Mel Gibson film done right; the second, leading up to the Declaration of Independence, is the one brimming with patriotic pride; when Adams goes to Europe in the third, his hopelessly undiplomatic diplomacy in the structured courts of Europe turns the whole thing into a comedy of embarassment. And through it all comes a sort of higher patriotism - because I am, after all, not American. I'm British, hence one of the bad guys in this story (The American War of Independence - is it the only war it was ever right that Britain should lose? I'm struggling to think of another). But the ideal of America, like the ideal of Greece before it, is part of the shared heritage of humanity's better part - even if, being in the hands of humans, it has shown the human tendency to fall terribly short of the ideal.
It's weird, though - being a young country, America has a national epic where the facts and figures are a matter of record. The rest of us have myths we can recast and reinterpret, but theirs...well, the DVD finds the series accompanied by a feature called Facts Are Stubborn Things. They can play a little loose with some details - the editing of the Declaration of Independence feels like a scene from a student newspaper office, with Franklin distracted by Jefferson's other great creation, the revolving chair. But Franklin still talks mainly in Franklin quotations, and we have yet to see George Washington with an outfit or facial expression other than the one from that portrait.

In the same time period, I've finally finished the Talleyrand biography I've been reading on-and-off for ages. Was amused to read that after Waterloo, various well-meaning English liberals attempted to use writs of habeas corpus to prevent Napoleon's rendition to exile in St Helena. This, remember, is after he has already escaped from one, gentle exile on Elba, left Europe in tatters, caused the death of thousands and even left France in a considerably worse position than it was after his first defeat. And yet, still, some people are primarily worried about the possible infringement of his human rights.
I do love Britain's liberal tradition, but it hasn't half bred some soft idiots in its time.
(Talleyrand himself is a strange figure - a man who prized stability and good governance above all things, but had the misfortune to be born French. Had he lived in Britain, and been able to curb his taste for backhanders, he'd have done very well in the Civil Service**, and his name would now be forgotten. But living in France...he never managed to direct events half so much as he would like or even as much as this adoring biographer contends. Consider, this is a man who felt that among the things France most needed were a free press, the rule of law and lasting peace with England - and yet he ended up intimately involved with the Revolution, at the right hand of Napoleon, and in practice acted as precious little brake on either. And yet, for what little he did achieve, he has attained immortality - albeit by being remembered as a byword for duplicity, vanity and greed. Oh, and his legendary wit? Either it just doesn't translate, or it was rubbish in the first place and people only laughed like they do at any powerful man's jokes. Like Wilde in Stoppard's Invention of Love, he lives in history simply because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Suddenly, obscurity doesn't seem so bad. And if any of that seemed like patriotic chauvinism, I refer you to Talleyrand's own summary - "The English do everything better than we do". This in a letter to a countryman, mark you, not as part of his usual sycophancy)

*Cloaks are so great. I sometimes seriously suspect that as much as I want to set the world to rights, the primary appeal of superpowers is that they'd give me more excuses to wear a cloak.
**"They think I am immoral and Machiavellian, yet I am simply impassive and disdainful. I have never given perverse advice to a government or a prince, but I do not go down with them. After shipwrecks, you need pilots to rescue the shipwrecked. I stay calm and get them to port somewhere. No matter which port, as long as it offers shelter." - that could be Sir Humphrey in an unusually open moment, couldn't it?