Cake or death

I met my parents for lunch at a fancy garden centre in the Cotswolds today – it was one of those vast, cavernous affairs where the garden was an afterthought. Each area themed like something out of the Crystal Maze – Richard O’Brien came bounding past at one point with a load of 34-year-old IT workers from Reading shrieking “To the gilet zone!”

The clientele was very different to my usual sort of garden centre, we weren’t in Dobbies anymore. The age skewed rather higher, too. The women inside were all beautifully coiffed and twinsetted, you wouldn’t have surprised me at all if you’d told me there was a Mary Berry lookalike competition happening in the useless but compelling kitchen gadgets section.

I’m rather more used to going to garden centres with actual plants, with tools you might expect to use rather than a chromed ceremonial wheelbarrow or decorative spade, and those big revolving jobs full of seeds. There was a ‘rare and unusual’ plant section in this garden centre, but they were in a refrigerated cupboard, as if anything organic had to be kept separate for our protection. Lovely selection of olives and charcuterie too.

The cafe was a delight though – I enjoyed a delicious pistachio and lemon cake with a rose water flavoured icing, washed down with a locally blended pot of Earl Grey. Tea and a bun, really, just with added ponce. The fillable water carafes were a nice touch, a token on the way to making us feel like we were getting our money’s worth.

An ambulance appeared at the window over our shoulder at one point, but given the demographics you’d have to assume they have one on permanent standby at one end of the car park. Gardening isn’t for everyone, you understand.

Grammy get your gun

I’ve just seen a news story that BTS are planning to boycott the Grammys next year because of the introduction of a new Asian pop music award, which the group of Korean funsters complains reduces music to region and language.

Given that there are Grammys for categories as diverse as Best Spoken Word Poetry Album (a whole album! Just the thought brings a tear to my eye) and Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album (is it by weight or by number?) as well as something entitled Best Música Mexicana Album (including Tejano) (we wouldn’t want to leave Tejano out… I’m going to have to look it up now in case I’m saying something awful) (no wait, it just means Mexicans in Texas sort of) – is Best Asian Pop Music Performance really that bad?

Perhaps the Behind The Scenes lads think that they’re going to miss out on the really good awards if they get lumped in with the Asian crowd, which is a valid concern for struggling up and comers such as themselves, but I’m not au fait with the nuances of regional pop music (oops, I’ve just done it myself) to really be across the details.

But the decision I’ve come to is that I am also going to withdraw myself from the 2027 Grammys in support of my colleagues at BTS because I think it’s a very important principle.

Though having said that, if BTS have taken themselves out of the running, maybe I’m in with a better chance of winning the best Asian pop performance without them… a tough decision to be made.

Desperately lazing Susan

Do you know who I feel sorry for? Susan. So many people have used the things – and who can really be bothered to stretch across a large table? – but it’s poor Susan who has been tarred with the mean spirited brush of laziness.

I’m lazy too, but nothing has been named after me yet. Maybe I shouldn’t feel sorry for Susan, what a legacy. Famous like Cher and Madonna (who needs a surname?) and yet blissfully anonymous. That’s probably the level of fame to aspire to. She probably need many good things in her life that have gone unrecognised, and this is how we repay her. Or at least she meant to do lots of good things if only she could get off this sofa. It’s a hard life.

They bloody love a good lazy Susan in China you know. Almost every dinner I went to when I was in Beijing the other month featured a revolving centrepiece festooned with harrowing dishes of whole animals frozen in death. Or coated and deep fried in death in the case of one particular chicken. They also bloody love serving the animal in its entirety, which is a shock the first eight times a gurning grouper fish comes spinning past your body plate.

Susan is not famous in China though – their word for the device literally translates as ‘dinner table turntable’. Susan’s publicists clearly have some work to do. Or perhaps she was just too lazy to make the journey.

Road trips of fancy

A little bit of surprise and delight this afternoon when I was mentioned in the reputable London daily The Times as ‘my friend and fellow comedian Sam Burnett’. I don’t think I’ve ever been referred to by anyone as a comedian, nor as my friend either come to think of it. But it was highly esteemed humorist and travel writer Christopher Beanland who wrote the piece and I do actually know him.

He wrote a top notch book last year called Architecture for Cars and was delighted to be able to contribute some nonsense talking about my love of service stations – particularly French ones, and particularly the Aire de la Baie de Somme, which is an hour or two south of Calais and an utterly delightful example of the oeuvre.

You should have a read of Christopher’s best and worst roadtrips, even though I’m loathe to send you to look at writing that’s distinctly better than mine. Come back?

Talk to the paw

What I didn’t mention about seeing the play the other night was that it was exceedingly chilly. Which is to be expected given that the sun was on its gentle way downwards (landed in Swansea from what I can tell, someone should check whether the place is still there) – only I wasn’t expecting to be out that late on my little holiday to Devon and of course I had not brought anything suitable to wear.

Neither had Laura of course, so we found the only charity shop in Lynton and ransacked the clothing section in search of smart casual attire that was cosy but suitable for the theatre. Disaster. The men’s section is meagre. Some shirts, plenty of suits, some t-shirts. Nothing that I could make use of.

But a plentiful women’s section, so many clothes that they extended upstairs. Some rummaging later and Laura has a tasteful cardigan with chunky buttons and I have a hot pink sweater with a cartoonish image of a dog and the phrase ‘Talk to the paw’ emblazoned on the front. I think I love it, and I don’t buy many things from the charity shops. I can cope with getting books from them, but not the casual wear of the recently deceased, which I’m fairly convinced makes up the bulk of the clothing donations. I do have a couple of jackets, I must admit, but those were both bought in a fancy posh charity shop in Alcester. I sick in my mouth at the thought of getting shoes from one of them, even the posh ones.

Still, my jumper kept me snug (it’s a little short in the sleeves) and I think it’s funny. Don’t like it? Talk to the paw, because the snout ain’t listening.

What the Dickens

We have come to Devon for the weekend. If I’m honest I prefer Cornwall for the pasties, but I understand you can buy them elsewhere these days, which is a reassuring development. We’re in the north of Devon, which has a prime view of south Wales. It’s very much like booking into a nice hotel and the view from your room is into a neighbouring apartment.

I enjoy the rugged landscape and proximity to nature round here, though it’s a shame there isn’t a greater proximity to the major road network. It took hours to get down the motorway for the weekend as it was, then another three days to make the last 30 miles on foot while trying to coax along the mule that was laden with our baggage.

The telegraph has made it though, and the incandescent light bulb, so it’s not as though you feel too far away from home. The other preservation of the olden days is the bed and breakfast, where you slumber in a drastically overdecorated room and are somehow watched by the proprietor every single time you leave the house.

A particular delight of the weekend has been our visit to see a play by the Pleasure Dome theatre company (nothing to do with Amsterdam, it’s apparently a reference to a Samuel Taylor Coleridge poem) by some rocks outside. They performed The Signalman, a play by Charles Dickens but also starring his great-great-grandson. Something something nepo grandbaby.

It was a real treat though, and I speak as an uncultured swine. The feral goats stage right, the audience members trying to keep their dogs quiet. It was lovely how the sun setting behind the actors added to the eerie disquiet of the spooky train track based chiller. More theatre ought to be enjoyed from a picnic blanket with a little tub of hummus in front of you.

Without a shadow of a drought

I am essentially rather cold-blooded – I’m always fairly chilly and need a constant application of heat, like an exotic lizard or a Greggs sausage roll. In fact lolling under a bright lamp with assorted pastries sounds like a lovely way to pass the time.

Which is to say that I’m enjoying the current weather – the sunshine and the balmy temperatures are a treat. And also a doom-laden sigh of the impending collapse of the natural world, but I don’t think there’s too much tension is recognising that the two things can be true at once.

I’d quite like a spot of rain though – if it’s not too much trouble – for not much other reason than I’m sick of going round the vegetable patches with a watering can. Filling the thing up from the outside tap is playing havoc with my lower back and I keep getting bits of the outside stuck in my feet. Unfortunately every time I look at the weather forecast the damp conditions get further and further away. We may already be in a dessicated state, which is a troublesome fall for a country that wields its inclement weather as a core personality trait.

Not that I understand the weather. It might say 30% chance of rain for the day, but then 60% chance of rain within a given hour. This time it feels like there is a significant amount of tension in considering the two things to be simultaneously true.

I fundamentally can’t maths, if you have four hours with a 30% chance of rain that’s 120% chance of rain is it not? Impossible to stay dry and no point leaving the house. But even if there was only 10% chance of rain in the day and it actually does rain, in retrospect you would have to say that it was a 100% chance of rain. For a fundamentally binary choice – it’s either raining or it isn’t – you’d be as well just flipping a coin. You’d have to be right some time, wouldn’t you? What would be the chances…

The ruthless elimination of accumulation

My grandma is 90 today – happy birthday to her, what a thing. Not that she’ll see this, because how will I explain the fact that I have a website or even what a blog is, a repository for digitally vomited thoughts. She is fairly tech savvy, I shall give her that. She operates an iPad with aplomb and messages from her iPhone. She joined WhatsApp recently too, which I precisely the sort of thing that I would rely on my 80s to be able to say absolutely not to.

I went over to see her at the weekend, to check if there were any little jobs I could help with. A decent list of them, it turns out, but she was on good form. My grandad died a few months ago, and our recent wedding anniversary was on the same day as theirs – it was 65 years this July since they got married. A mind boggling passage of time, and obviously you accumulate a lot of stuff during that. Especially if you’ve lived in the same house since 1963 when it was newly built and you really can remember when it was all fields.

Grandma has been dumping things with impressively ruthless efficiency (though full disclosure, she’s German), though in some ways I’m surprised grandad was even allowed to accumulate it all. We found all of his wage slips from 1981 through to the end of 1984. Gone. Though I did keep the one from just after when I was born as a sort of memento. Someone else will have to chuck that out in a few years. An old pair of glasses, gone. Bundles of correspondence from when he was church secretary in 1979. Gone.

It really struck me as we were leafing through much of these things – grandad was a draughtsman by trade, and all of his notes for correspondence and various other things were on the backs of technical drawings he must have kept for scrap – it struck me that all of this stuff was highly meaningful to him. There were some stones in a box full of things from the late 1950s that must have come from somewhere special, but there’s no one left alive to verify.

So much of my life is going to be a simple case of moving to the recycle bin when I go, there won’t even be the impetus of wanting to get the shelf space back so sift through the potted highlights of whatever I’ve been up to. I should say here that this isn’t me being morose, I’m actually thinking how much lighter I should be travelling anyway. There’s so much nonsense I keep stuffed around me that I somehow feel is important, not enough to even pull out and look at on a regular basis. My brain curdles at the thought of having to move house at a point in the reasonably near future, but much of what is in my eye line I probably don’t need. I should go all Marie Kondo, but I’m far too lazy.

Sorry we missed you

I’m very lazy – I don’t know whether I’ve covered this before on here and frankly I can’t be bothered to check, but I should at some point. It extends to include (and indeed vastly eclipses) my emotions – I enjoy a studied ambivalence about most things, a sort of resting bitch soul, and very rarely hate anything.

So it should say a lot to you when I express my intense dislike for the we’ll-get-around-to-it-when-we-feel-like-it parcel delivery company Evri. It used to be called Hermes, but presumably the Greek government took out some kind of superinjunction, or it hoped if it changed the colour on the side of its vans we just wouldn’t notice it was the same thing. Sure, Hermes was the messenger of the gods, but he was also the protector of travellers, thieves and merchants.

I can’t tell you how many parcels over the years have arrived damaged, torn, sat on, wrecked, chucked, boiled, mashed or dropped in a stew. I would believe you if you told me that Evri warehouses had a lucrative side hustle where hen parties would come to the place as a rage room. I would believe you if you told me that the sole question on the Evri job application form was ‘Do you hate the entire world?’ I would believe you if you told me that there was a sponsorship deal in place where the England football team could pop into their local facility any time and use it for penalty practice. I would believe you if you told me that US trainee cops were brought over and used the places as part of their customer care training. I would believe you.

I also have an endless succession of images that Evri has emailed me over the years, subtle variations on a crotch shot half covered by a door, with a plaintive outstretched hand that says can you just give me the box already. I consider those messages a form of hate mail, which I thought would have been covered by the Communications Act 2003. Yet another of Evri’s egregious misdemeanours. It’s the sort of company where the ‘Sorry we missed you’ card has an unspoken rest of the sentence that goes something like ‘…we’ll work on our aim for next time’.

There are also a variety of ethical issues associated with the company, which it strenuously denies (obviously) but I’m too lazy to look into those. Oh well.

Running through my options

I really hate running – I exercise so that I can eat chips and don’t have to buy new trousers. Unfortunately my formal wear was all purchased when I was much younger and far slimmer, so with wedding season coming up I’m having to put a little more effort in than normal.

In fact I’m trying to psych myself up for a run right now, but successfully reasoning that I really ought to put something on here for fear of neglecting my global audience. I really wouldn’t want that.

What usually happens is that I resolve to head out nice and early (mostly so no one sees me) before spending the next hour or two trying to talk myself out of it. I know that from the very first step I’ll be miserable and wish that I was doing anything else in the universe right now. What keeps me going is that I don’t want to waste a good pair of contact lenses on sitting around. If I had a decent pair of glasses that didn’t fly off my face if I so much as turn my head too quickly I’d be even less fit than I currently am.

I thought about a bike ride, but I’ve really nowhere to go and there’s nothing more depressing than meandering about on a bicycle. A brisk walk was another option, but it would take twice as long as a run and I’d rather be sitting down again as soon as I can. I’m extremely lazy, though I do spend a significant amount of brain power calculating what the easiest set of scenarios are that get me sitting down again as soon as possible.

I’m often running late, though not very quickly. I love running a bath, but that’s useless for cardio. I ran for office once or twice, but that was back in my student days. None of this would normally slip past my internal quality control, incidentally, but I’m desperately trying to put off the inevitable.

Eurgh.

Ice cream with delight

I should be wary of describing anything as the happiest day of my life, especially when today is my wedding anniversary, but I did go to Sainsbury’s earlier and the mint choc chip Jude’s is back on offer.

I went in literally the day after I wrote this post and it was back up to full price. I was prepared for it to happen, but still the grief hit me like waves of cold air in the face. Then I closed the freezer door and carried on with my shopping..

Perhaps someone high up at the company read my blog and realised the error of their ways, or perhaps it’s more that there’s s keen understanding of the fact that there are certain generously valued items that people are never going to buy unless there’s a discount on the price.

Certainly the people behind Kettle Chips (could you actually make them in a kettle? I’ve heard of people boiling eggs in them before) are aware of the phenomenon, and I can only hope that everyone involved is able to make a living on the wafer thin margins involved. As concerned as I am for the welfare of everyone who works at Jude’s, I might just go and get a couple more tubs just to be on the safe side.

The norther regions

I saw today that our prime minister in waiting (and oh gosh the poor man’s been waiting) has announced that he will set up a Number 10 ‘nerve centre’ in the north of the country. Nice that politicians will be able to get on our nerves from more regional locations.

It’ll specifically be in Manchester, which is sort of where he’s from. He was actually born in Aintree on the outskirts of Liverpool and grew up just over the border of Cheshire. He’s co-opted Manchester as a sort of personality for himself, which I wouldn’t begrudge him.

Does the regional Number 10 (I really thought that’s what Chequers was for) mean that the prime minister will have a place up in Manchester and rent Downing Street out? Presumably to a shady oligarch or an assemblement of OnlyFans creators.

And just think, within 25 or 30 years the two Downing Street locations could be linked by a high speed rail line that would render the distance immaterial. What the least likely scenario, that Britain rejoins the European Union in our lifetimes, or has a working north/south high-speed railway? If Burnham does need a lift up to the office from London I’m sure the Brexit bus is still idling away somewhere.