'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.

Every so often, I flick back through my Livejournal to see what I was doing on this day ago. So this weekend, I found that it was a year since I'd last been on a doomed expedition to find anything of artistic worth in the Hayward Gallery, before dawdling along the rest of the South Bank instead. This time, the things which actually gave me the shock to which modern art aspires were a robot wrapped in plastic in the BFI corridor, and seeing the huge doors on the side of the Turbine Hall open for the first time - though we did get some laughs from Joan Miro's muff obsession.
It's also a year since I saw the Indelicates launch the album of 2008, American Demo. And now they're back with some new stuff mixed in to the set - 'The Recession Song' has already been doing the rounds, ditto Simon's 'David Koresh Superstar' side-project (but what a perfect source for a song to spice up the Easter set). But the new song proper, 'Savages'...oh, it's lovely. More 'New Art For The People' or '...if Jeff Buckely had Lived' than 'We Hate The Kids', more beauty than bile (but with plenty of bitterness still because this is, after all, an Indelicates song).
Their Cargo show on Tuesday is a Club Attitude event, intended to encourage disabled people to attend gigs. Whether incapacity benefits would cover Cargo drinks prices is another question, but the photographer whizzing around in a pimped wheelchair is pretty swish, and the sign language guy...I'm used to sign language guys being expressionless berks in red sweaters who obscure a quarter of the screen when I'm trying to watch a late-night film, and who just make me think 'What's wrong with subtitles?' This man feels like part of the band from the start, getting into it, really conveying the spirit of the music as well as the words. He is an artist. Plus, he looks like Ming the Merciless crossed with moleintheground, so watching him sign "but for the come in your hair" was always going to be classic.
No signer on Saturday, but there is Mr Solo, in a more conventional gig format than I usually see him, and as such, with an audience who seemed less appreciative. I think they must have been the peons there en masse for the other band, whose name happily escapes me.

Between my own sluggish attempts at getting up after the Bank Holiday excesses, and the dearth of Uxbridge trains, it was apparent to me yesterday that I was going to be late enough for the Tubewalk that I couldn't in all conscience ask everyone to wait for me - I decided instead to trust to synchronicity, and set off on my own walk in the rough direction of Rayner's Lane. Which didn't bring me to the expeditionary force, but did find me a wonderful little streamside park, and a house so tumbledown and overgrown that rather than thinking 'slatterns' it makes you think 'Sleeping Beauty in Pinner', and a very confused mouse lost on a main road.

Dear Gordon - I know you're a bit busy at the moment on account of your aides being a shower of arses who can't even run a smear campaign without tripping over themselves, but you should still be aware that there is, by definition, no such thing as a 'compulsory volunteer'. Such work is not 'voluntary', it is simply 'unpaid'. And mandatory unpaid work is called 'slavery'.
(ETA: This article has been tidied up since it was first posted, and now uses 'voluntary' considerably less than it did. But it still uses it, so the point still stands)
Another great move by the party of labour there - getting back to the old socialist roots with work camps, while simultaneously depressing the job market by providing a free alternative!
Though arguably the whole issue is academic, given it hinges on Brown winning the next election.

Margaret Drabble, in a piece about coping with depression, wisely recommends walking. But more interestingly, she also mentions "I've met only one writer who frankly admits that if it hadn't been for the drink, he'd have committed suicide long ago. Nobody would publish his book on alcohol as life-saver, because everyone is keen to toe the safer party line that it's really a depressant." I'd like to read that book, if anyone fancies running the neo-Puritan blockade. Bet it would have been all over the place if Wee Charlie Kennedy were PM.

Am finding it difficult coherently to express the wonder of Saturday's Black Plastic, especially since I think it was done so well on the night by that tune with the chorus of "I am here with all of my people", whatever that is. Some not-my-people too - hence shocked initial reaction of "A queue? At one of my clubs?" - but they mostly seemed OK, and they weren't crowding the place to the point of unuseability like the cocking Neil Morrissey acolytes at the Noble. Though on that note - by 8 last night the Noble was back to its charming old self. I reckon we're OK on schoolnights because the new clutter are the sort who have to get up early to drive Tarquin and Jemima to extra classes.
Anyway, yes, Black Plastic. Awesomeness, to the extent that it even bled into the nightbus and made it a really jolly nightbus with Mamas and Papas singalongs and a man who said I looked like Paul Morley, which I can't say I'm 100% happy with but it at least gives me an excuse to extemporise Morley pastiches about buses, my face &c.
edit: And I forgot about the Acton Tubewalk! There was a prison and model aircraft and the Grand Union Canal where I poked a coconut with my umbrella.

Much discussion on the friendslist lately of cyclists who jump lights. Which plenty of them do, but I'm always more bothered by the cars and vans and trucks which do likewise. OK, they seldom come up to a light which is already red and then sail through as some two-wheelers seem to feel is their right, but counting an amber or even a new red as somehow not applicable, I see a lot of that. Often, I stare 'em down and walk through, subject to my assessment of just how much of a w@nker they are. Yesterday, I saw a woman who I don't think was doing that, but was walking across a pelican in Highgate Village, holding a baby, as the lights for traffic went red. And one man was in such a hurry to get wherever it was he was going that he damn near flattened the pair of them. Fortunately, some other passers by got his number. Unfortunately, even if that does go anywhere he's clearly not going to get the punishment he deserves of a five year driving ban at the very least.

I was as glad as anyone when I heard that BBC3's supernatural house-share tale Being Human was getting a full series - except much of what I liked about the pilot was the chemistry, and they've changed two thirds of the cast. They swap the ghost out for Sugar? Fine by me. If they'd lost Russell Tovey as the werewolf, I could have lived with that; instead, he stayed but now that he's more famous as a Young Gay Actor, he seems to feel obliged to be shriller. What I cannot fathom is that they lost that perfect, perfect Mitchell and brought in a generic vampire at precisely the time when any new screen vampire most needs to distinguish himself from the herd.

2009 has already brought two more disappointing albums from Bruce Springsteen, whose latest is one of those disappointingly lumpen efforts he seems to produce from time to time, and White Lies. I really enjoyed 'Death' in spite of suspecting there wasn't much to it; at album length that hollowness becomes inescapable, and horrible. After aforementioned let-downs, this is not shaping up to be a vintage year for music.