THEY MADE ME DEAF, YOU KNOW (PART 1)

Paris, 17th March 1482


Baldrick "Quasi" McModo lurched along the boulevard, gritting his tooth against the freezing sleet that battered his pockmarked face.   With his one good eye he glanced up at the twin towers of the brand new cathedral, and poked his tongue out at the gargoyles which gurned back at him in mockery.

"Gaaaah!!"  he rasped in his cracked voice.  A passing toff crossed the road.   Quasi cackled, and spat thick phlegm into the straw lining the thoroughfare.   "Feck arf!"  he barked.  The toff started to run away.

He turned the corner into the street where She lived.  She Wot Must Be Obeyed.  She Wot Owned Him.   He whistled "On the street where you live" from My Fair Lady. 


A bucketful of urine launched from a third-floor window crashed onto the dirt road in front of him, splashing his already filthy rags.   Lerner & Loewe were dirty words in these parts.

"Feckin gobshite bastards!!"  he roared, waving two of the three remaining fingers on his good hand at the perpetrators above.  He hopped around the puddle of piss, and hirpled unevenly to Her house, where he pulled on the bellrope and assumed a position of abject lack of self-esteem while he waited for the gatekeeper, Jacek, to shuffle to open the door.


 



Fifteen minutes passed.








"Who go there?"  eventually came the muffled demand.

"It be I, Baldrick "Quasi" McModo, executive slave to Milady Esmeralda de Wayne de la Bough," he whined in his most obsequious whine.

He heard the sound of bolts being slid back, and the door opened with a creak.  A crabbed hand appeared.   

"Cross me palm with silver, luvvie!"  

Quasi kicked at the door savagely and pushed through.  Jacek was lying flat on his back. 

"Ye Scotch baskit!"  he moaned.  "Ye've broke me back!  Yer gipsy queen will be told!"

Quasi clambered over him and made for the caravan in the stableyard at the back.  Milady's 27 pairs of shoes were set outside on the steps for him to clean.  He got out his filthy handkerchief and did his best to summon up some spit.   When he had cleaned all her shoes, he scratched at the door, subserviently.  

"Entrez,"  came the peremptory response.  His heart sank and soared at the same time.  His daily agony and ecstasy was about to start.  There was nothing in this world, NOTHING, worse than being in love with a social climbing gypsy princess.   He adjusted his hump, assumed the position, and crawled on his hands and knees into the caravan.    

Milady Esmeralda de Wayne de la Bough, formerly Gladys Perkins of Wapping, was choosing ribbons from a box.  

"Ah, there you are, McModo," she called down to him from her pedestal.  "Help me decorate this tambourine.  What day is it today?"

Quasi cast his good eye through the hole in the roof at the sky.  

"March 17th, if it please Milady, begging your pardon."  

"Green then.  Here!"  she threw a tambourine at him and a bunch of green ribbons.  "It'll be Oh Danny Boy, My Lagan Love, and Black Velvet Band,  and finish up with Seven Drunken Nights.  Go and practice being a leprechaun." 

Quasi shuffled out, weaving the green ribbons into the tambourine as he went.   He sat patiently on the steps,  waiting for Milady to appear, some hours later, looking like the absinthe fairy.    He struggled to keep up with her as she riverdanced down the street to Notre Dame Cathedral, where beggars scurried away in terror at the sight of her terrible greenness.  She looked up at the stone effigies of saints.  


"Now where is he .... Saint Patrick?   Oh this one will do. Give me my tambourine, slave!" 

Quasi handed her the green-ribboned tambourine and prepared to caper along behind her spirited Irish gypsy dance with the collecting hat.   

"Ah one, ah two, ah one-two-three-four .... " 

Milady launched herself into a performance reminiscent of Isadora Duncan doing the Harlem Shake.  Quasi hopped along behind her in the snow, ecstatic in his misery and humiliation.  She was so beautiful, and he was so .... enslaved.   She had saved him from the gibbet, and now she made him suffer, oh how he suffered.  It was exquisite.  His misery was complete .....  there was no happier one-eyed hunchback in all of Paris.

 

(to be continued)

DANCING IN THE STREET

I am notoriously slow in embracing new technology.  I only got a flatscreen TV two years ago.  I only started using a mobile phone in 2000, and in 12 years I've not really progressed much in terms of model.  Up until last week I was still using a basic Nokia that fits nicely in your hand and you can text with one thumb while walking along the street. 

I have to admit my earlier reluctance was mostly down to fear - I didn't understand how they worked, which makes me thicker than Bubble in Ab Fab.  But then I saw Aunty Marianne's new Galaxy III and I decided it was Time.   I so hate to be out of the loop.  And so, dear readers, I finally succumbed.  I have joined the Twittering classes.  But I had no idea what I was buying.  Android or iPhone?  Jelly Bean or Ice Cream Sandwich?  Keyboard or touchscreen?  How many megapixels should I have?  How much should I pay?  The prices ranged from 89 euros to 890 euros.  How would I find my way in the digital jungle?

In the end it was a combination of advice, pinning the tail on the donkey, and the January sales.  I ended up with a rather amazing piece of kit without having to take out a mortgage.  The damn thing worked before I'd even put my SIM card in!   It went into my Facebook and Gmail accounts and fished out all my contacts.  How clever is that?  

Some of my friends say my address book will now be on the FBI's Rol-a-dex, but frankly that doesn't worry me.  Back in the day I was once tracked by the Libyans, because I made a passing reference to Colonel Gaddafi in a blog post.  The idea of Libyan goons running around Brussels looking for a woman with a fruit basket on her head just made me chuckle.

Some say it is dangerous to be broadcasting your whereabouts at all times.  As someone who just goes to work, goes home again, and occasionally goes to the supermarket, I really think the FBI might get bored with me fairly quickly.  I subscribe to the philosophy "If you've got nothing to hide you've got nothing to fear".  And my life is an open book, with odds of 1000-1 on me being bundled into a black limo by the Men in Black with earpieces.  In fact it would rather liven things up a bit.

 

Hello boys

Talking of earpieces, the music player was one of the main reasons I made this purchase.  I have recently started walking to work, in the interest of my health and amortizing those second-hand Karrimor walking shoes I got in a Sue Ryder shop last summer, and the 45 minute march is made much more pleasant by a bit of thrash metal.   My cheap old mp3 player was very unreliable, and in the early days I spent most of the walk fiddling with the jack trying to get sound in both ears.  It was time to buy a new one, and this new phone has a fabulous music player.  I can't be doing with those earbud things, they keep falling out, so I bought a pair of spiffy JVC headphones, which block out all extraneous noise and keep my ears warm on cold days.  They make me look a bit like Colin from Spooks but that may serve to confuse the blokes from the FBI who are following along in the black limo. 

I'm walking backwards to Spart Towers

I now go bouncing off to work each morning with Nirvana or AC/DC blasting out through my cans.  Some tunes are better than others as a walking aid.  Michael Jackson is not too good, as moonwalking backwards can double the time it takes to get to work, not to mention frightening people in the street when I grab my crotch and go "Oooh!".   120 bpm (beats per minute) is the optimal rhythm for walking at a brisk pace.  By the time I get to the uphill bit I've zoned out so sail up it on a cloud of Nigerian Afrobeat.   Bouncing downhill through a snow-covered park to the rhythms of Fela Kuti was one of the high points of last week.   As a result I now get to the office full of beans and dancing.  Everybody wins!

This phone also has a projector.  Now you might think this is a bit of superfluous gadgetry, but you never know when the urge to make a powerpoint presentation is going to strike.  I've also found that it will project anything you're looking at on a flat surface up to 3 metres away.  And you can stream videos.  So in the summer I'll be able to watch EastEnders while sitting in the garden with a Pimms.     I could turn Gorbals into a human screen and project George Clooney onto him.  The possibilities are endless.

 

But you know what?   I can't text with one hand while walking.

Pfffft.

SUET AND SEE

Not Fry's Turkish Delight

With Christmas looming, I have been exchanging mincemeat recipes with various girlie friends across the globe (New Mexico, New Caledonia, New Malden) in the course of which the S-word cropped up.  SUET.  Most recipes - including that Delia woman - insist that suet is a suitable ingredient to include in what is basically a spiced fruit filling.  SUET.  Animal fat.  WTF? - as David Cameron would say. 

A couple of years ago a heavy snowfall prevented me from getting out to the British shop which is out in the sticks and only accessible with a car, so I was forced to doe-het-zelf, as our Flemish friends would put it.    I rummaged in the cupboard and threw together various types of dried fruit (currants, raisins, sultanas, figs, dates, prunes) and some candied peel, muscovado sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves, soaked it in whatever booze Gorbals had not found in my secret hiding place*, covered it and left it in another secret hiding place.   Come Christmas the raisins had swollen up, and the alcohol and the sugar had congealed into a dark, sticky, aromatic syrup.  I used it in my mince pies and it was gorgeous.  I had enough left over to fill a couple of big pickle jars, and shoved them in the back of the cupboard.  Last Christmas I dug them out and found they were even better than the previous year.  Proving that suet is quite unnecessary and probably just a leftover from the days when "mincemeat" actually contained meat. 

The word "suet" acted like one of Proust's Madeleines, and took me rippling backwards in a sort of Dr Who dream sequence to 1983, when I visited North Africa.  Not a lot of people know this, but when I was a dancer at the Folies Bergere in Paris, before I met Harold, one of my stage-door Johnnies was a Berber prince from the Atlas mountains.  He was dashing, exotic and madly in love with me.  He wanted to marry me and take me to live with him in the highlands of the Maghreb. 

"But Hamidouche, my noble son of the desert," I protested, "What would my life be out there? I can't really do my speciality act in a Moslem country, now can I?"

"Daphne, my little rosewater loukoum," he smouldered, "You would live in the lap of luxury in my village, and all the people would come from miles around to look at you and touch your golden locks and marvel at your white skin."  On seeing the stony expression on my marble-white face, he added "And you could do your speciality act just for me."

It sounded a bit like the Fry's Turkish Delight advert, to be honest, but I agreed to go and see for myself.

Well it was an adventure, I'll say that.  After a stopover in Marbella to get my nails done, I took an Algerian tugboat across the Med to Oran, where Hamidouche was waiting impatiently with the Golf.  

"Where is the white camel with gold trappings you promised me?"  I cried indignantly.

"It's got a cold.   Just get in, will you?  It's an 8-hour drive."  

This lad was but a baby at the time, but the Prince was from the same gene pool

We drove over the Atlas mountains, through melon fields and villages where the women were swathed in sheets.  The heat was stifling, it must have been around 40 degrees C. 

We eventually arrived at his village and pulled up at a modest little house.  

"I thought you were a prince in your own country?"  I exploded.

"Er, well, you know, we lost all our lands in the revolution,"  he mumbled.    He pushed me through the archway into the courtyard of the tiny house, and sat me on a rickety bench.  There didn't seem to be much room inside, as his father was asleep on a mattress in the courtyard.  

"Afternoon nap," whispered Hamidouche. "Here's me mum."

A small, wizened woman approached, wearing a brightly patterned floral dress, a mismatched cardigan and an even more mismatched scarf around her hair.  I clutched my Little White Handbag tightly and tried not to stare at the tattoos on her face.

"How do you do, Mrs ... er ..  "   

"Don't bother, she doesn't understand English.  Or French."  said my swain, in a matter of fact tone.  "Or even Arabic.  She only understands the local dialect."

"I thought you said she'd lived in Paris for 20 years?"  I hissed.

"Yeah, she did."  he replied, chewing on a date.  

I felt slightly faint, and sat down on the bench.  As I looked upwards, I saw a washing line over my head, on which was pegged what looked like a massive lump of fat.

"What's that?"  I nearly shrieked.

"Suet," he replied.   "They just killed the sheep, for the Eid.  They cut out the fat and dry it on the line, then use it for cooking."  

My head started to swim.  I clutched my Little White Handbag even tighter and tried to stay upright. I was feeling more like Zaza in La Cage aux Folles 2 than the Fry's Turkish Delight girl.  All that was going through my head was my mother's voice, sternly admonishing me.   "Daphne Boadicea Harridan,"  (my maiden name) "You were born on Hyde Park Corner, in what is now the most expensive hotel in London.  You were brought up in a nice middle class home in Surbiton, and you currently live in Paris.  Right now, you are sitting in an Algerian hovel in 40 degrees of heat with a lump of sheep fat hanging over your head.   WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING HERE ?????"

The next thing I knew, I was lying under a fig tree and Hamidouche's mum was muttering incantations and waving a smouldering branch back and forth under my nose. His dad was still asleep.   Hamidouche was looking a bit, well, sheepish.  

"Um.  Shall I tell her we'll be staying at the hotel in town, then?"  he ventured with a weak smile. 

Needless to say, his backstage pass was cancelled as soon as we got back to Paris.

* If you're reading this, Gorbals, I have moved the secret hiding place.

GOOD GRIEF, IS THAT THE TIME?

Shame on moi.  I have not posted since August.  Well it's been a busy autumn up to now.  

The KNOB asked - nay, begged - me to return for the European championships in October, which were held in Cyprus, to coincide with the presidency of the European Union.    Cyprus!   If there is one country in Europe with no brass band tradition .... still, I packed my dirndl and my triangle and set off towards the land of George Michael, Cat Stevens and Peter Andre. 


I had been to Cyprus once before, some 20 years ago, with Harold, when we had found the food abominable, and some of the resorts - Ayia Napa specifically - made us shudder with middle class horror.  Some things had improved since then - the spanking new motorway that took us from the airport to our hotel at some unearthly hour of the morning was obviously EU money well spent.  The hotel was getting on a bit but quite comfortable, in a 1980s sort of way.  Whatever they may tell you, Cyprus is not the most beautiful island in the Mediterranean.  It is quite ugly, in fact.  The coastline, particularly around Larnaca, is quite industrial, with cement works and power stations interspersed with half-finished villas and blocks of holiday flats festooned with "For sale" signs in Russian.  There is not much in the way of antiquities in that part of the island either.  Still, we were there to work, not to enjoy ourselves.   

                                              Piraeus Bank is a specialist in recycling.  Roubles, mostly.
 

The KNOB must have been the oldest combo at the competition.  Some of the new brass ensembles are surprisingly young, and the old Tyrolean twostep is no longer the benchmark.    Those young Americans, particularly, can blow anything out of their brass - it's those marching bands they have at college.  One group were practising "Gangnam Style" by the pool.   It put Werner right off his black forest gateau.   

"Was ist ze point?"  he finally exploded.  "Es gibt nicht mehr standards!   If ve don't play ze German oompah, warum ve should call ourself ein oompah band?"    he started to weep softly into his glass of Blue Nun.  Hildegard (lead sax) comforted him with soothing umlauts and German baby-talk.

"Ach, ze times sie sind a-changing, die Antwort ist in ze wind blowing,"  philosophized Hans-Peter.   "Ve must mit Die Zeit be moving.  Nobody ist interested in ze traditional sauerkraut style, daddyo. "  

"So, we must more modern becoming!"  I retorted (my English gets a bit Teutonic after being in the company of the KNOB for a while).    I grabbed a napkin and started jotting down contemporary songs I had picked up from Glasto for the KNOB to add to their playlist.  Lothar was looking over my shoulder.

"Was ist Uprising?  Ist das von Bruce Springsteen?"    

"Nein, schatzi, it's Muse,"  I replied.

Lothar, Hans-Peter and the others looked blankly at each other.  

"Mouse?"  they murmured.

"MUSE"  I began to sing:  "They will not control us ... we will be victorious .... "    

I noticed a number of left arms twitching.  

"Or perhaps not.  OK, what about Adele?  Rolling in the Deep?"  

More blank looks.  I rolled my eyes to the sky.

"Don't you know ANYTHING outside of Eurovision?  Haven't you had any good bands in Germany since the Beatles left Hamburg?"  

Hildegard raised a timid hand.   "Ja, Daphne .... wir lieben Kraftwerk.  But Wir fahrn fahrn fahrn auf der Autobahn does not so well into ze brass translate." 

"This is Madness!"  I exploded.   To my surprise, Werner, Lothar and Hans-Peter leapt to their feet and started doing the "Baggy Trousers" dance.  

"Ja ja! Wahnsinn!  Wir kennen Wahnsinn!"  they shouted.  "Suggs ist der Beste!"   

And so that, dear readers, is how we ended up re-enacting the  "Unser Haus ist in der Mitte unserer Strasse" video clip, with the funny walk, and everything.  As luck would have it I had my knitting needles with me and ran up some authentic 1960's sleeveless jerseys for the boys.  We borrowed the pork pie hats off one of the Balkan gipsy bands and of course the boys had their sunglasses with them.  One of the chambermaids rented me her work clothes so I played the part of Mutti.  This of course took some sterling work from the hotel hairdresser - a lithe young Cypriot-Australian who could have passed for Peter Andre's younger brother.   I had to get him to do it over and overagain until he got the curlers just right.   It took HOURS. 

We didn't win in the end - those Serbians are untouchable these days  - but we came a creditable 10th.  Out of 11.  The Koreans doing "The Lonely Goatherd" in full Sound of Music costume came last.

ONE STEP AT A TIME

I am in need of another holiday.  I had barely recovered from my grand tour of the South West of Blighty when the Olympics started.  I had been to look at the Olympic Park while I was staying in trendy E12, but nothing had prepared me for the spectacle that Danny Boyle served up to the world.   It was breathtaking - Her Majesty as Bond girl, the 20-minute industrial revolution, Mr Bean and the London Symphony Orchestra, the fabulous music composed and performed by Underground, the dancing nurses, Beckham in a speedboat going under Tower Bridge with the Olympic flame, Ban-Ki Moon carrying the Olympic flag with Doreen Lawrence, the flaming rings in the sky, Muhammed Ali, the fireworks, the parade of the teams -- there was so much crammed into a couple of hours that I had to watch it again on playback the next day, to see all the bits I'd missed.  

 

I am not remotely interested in archery, fencing, dressage, beach volleyball or BMX riding, but Team GB's success in the cycling and sailing whetted my appetite, and as soon as the track and field events started, I was glued to the sofa in the true Olympic spirit. It's all that lycra I think.  I took to toasting each medal with a glass of wine, and that is how I became temporarily alcoholic.  My patriotism knows no bounds.  I did, in fact, feel proud to be British and a Londoner, and even "Gorbals" McChe, who found an excuse to go out of the room every time God Save the Queen was played, looked up from his video game once or twice, which counts as rapt attention from him.

Sous l'atomium ....

 .... le paradis terrestre !

During the athletics I had a visitor from UK, which meant much out-and-abouting, to the Grand' Place, the Mannekin Pis, and the usual tourist circuit.   I couldn't face going up the bloody Atomium for the nth time so while my visitor went up inside I went wandering in the woods at the foot of the edifice.  This was quite a revelation - it was delightful, with a canal and an open air auditorium.  Brussels certainly keeps its best bits - the green bits - hidden.  The green spaces are the best thing about this city, which has ruined quite a lot of the centre with supposedly cutting edge architecture.  The "Square", for example, is a massive glass cube plonked right in the middle of the very classical Mont des Arts, which houses an underground conference centre.  Because, you know, there is an absolute dearth of underground conference centres in the middle of Brussels.  I think they wanted to do something like the Pyramide du Louvre, which was equally badly received when it was first built in the 1980's.  But the Pyramide somehow worked.  The Square doesn't.  So well done Brussels town planning department, you've done it again.  La Brusselisation continue.

Pyramide du Louvre, Paris

Le Square, Brussels

In the midst of all this I decided it was time to send out a Missing Persons Alert on my waistline, which was last seen circa 1994 heading in a southerly direction.   Although I think I eat a fairly healthy diet - fresh meat and vegetables, good quality bread, chips only on very rare occasions (and only outside - I could never achieve the perfection of a Belgian frietkot), chocs perhaps a bit less rarely - I thought it might be a useful exercise just to see how many calories I pack away each day.  They have these wonderful websites now where you just type in everything you eat and drink and it works it all out for you.  After I'd typed in my age, weight, lifestyle details etc. it replied "LOL".   On weekends I consume nearly half my daily allowance at breakfast!   Anyway, I've devised a 3-step programme.  First step - start taking an interest.  Second step - start worrying about the results.  Third step - do something about it.   I'm only on the first step for now.  I'll keep you posted.

While out and about being a tourist guide, I was drawn by the irresistable sound of a brass band from a courtyard.  My visitor and I went to investigate, and to my surprise there were the KNOB* doing a gig for an old people's home.   Hildegard from Hot Flash! was guesting on sax.  There were various pensioners milling about in odd costomes, smocks and whatnot, which I presumed was the Belgian equivalent of the Chelsea Pensioners' dress uniform.  One lady was dressed as the cartoon character Madame Chapeau and a number of the younger contingent were dressed like the bull-runners of Pamplona, in white with red neckerchiefs.  Then there was a giant puppet wandering around the streets looking a bit disoriented.  This is fairly standard for a Saturday afternoon in Brussels, which is of course the home of surrealism.   

 

The KNOB*  feat. Hildegard on sax 

Making an old woman very happy

One of the blue-smocked pensioners grabbed me for a quick foxtrot around the courtyard.  It turned out this was the warm-up day for a strange and slightly mad event which takes place every 9th August in Brussels - the planting of the Meyboom.  I tried to find out the story behind it - something about a 13th century wedding, a punch-up between people from Brussels and Louvain, and a tree.  So on the appointed day, a bunch of colleagues and I went off to see this bit of unique Brussels folklore.  It was all very jolly, although several hours later when I was sitting in La Mort Subite slumped over a Grimbergen and a plate of cheese with a militant Spaniard, I couldn't quite recall what the point of it had all been.

And then Lolo La Clope turned up and it was "rebelote", as the French say.  Lolo went off to America a few years ago and we had a lot to catch up on.  Her anecdotes about the Americans made me realize the Belgians are actually not as crazy as they appear.  It is one thing to dress up in a smock and dance with strange women, and quite another to carry a kitten around an all-night shopping centre because the poor thing can't sleep.  Normality is all relative.  But there I was, out on the razzle again, two nights in a row.  Do you know how many calories are in beer?  And do you know how many beers I had over two evenings out?   Sufficient to say that I am not likely to get past Step One for quite a while yet.  And next Friday I am orf to the Sahf of France with "Gorbals" McChe for a week of sun, Pastis and cassoulet.   I feel I ought to amortize those walking shoes I bought in Blighty, but as they only cost £6.95, I think walking from the house to the car and back for five days should probably cover it.

This, just so's you know, is the view I will be looking at for most of next week, altered only by a glass of something cold and pink close to hand on the edge of the pool.  On my return will think about progressing to Step 2.

 Bonnes vacances!

  * Kurt Nachtnebel Oompah Band