Notting Hill Diary

Suzi Quatro’s Can the Can, one of the greatest pop records ever made, if you happen to be about my or John Robb’s age

John Robb, whom Wifey and I recently had the immense pleasure of meeting, posted an article today on his blog postulating that Pop is Dead. I agree with him, but for completely different reasons.

Why is John wrong?
John theorises that great pop was based on the concept of the 7″ single and that as such the format peeked in the 70s with punk. According to him, pretty much for this reason (and the greater involvement of Big Business from the 80s onwards), pop music has been on the decline since the end of the golden decade of the 70s.

And I agree with him! Why? Because John and I are roughly the same age. The best music in the world, ever, was made whenever the listener was between the ages of around 10 to 17 or so, which is why John and I think that the 70s was the golden age of pop music.

I know people 10 years older than me who swear blind that no good songs were written beyond 1969. And wait, what’s this? Wifey is 10 years younger than me and guess what? She’s convinced that no decade before or since has produced pop music as fine as was created during the 80s.

Both of us felt very old a couple of years ago when we watched some up and coming band tell an interviewer that they were “brought up on Oasis”. Yep, to them, there’s never been a decade like the 90s as far as pop music is concerned.

The greatest period of pop music is completely relative to the age of the listener.

Why is John right?
And yet, yes, John is completely correct in his assertion that pop music has been dying since the 70s, but for a different reason to the one he states.

When I was growing up, half the point about listening to “our” music was that our parents didn’t like it. We are the last generation whose parents hated the music we blasted out of our bedrooms and we loved it all the more because of that. Nothing pleased us more than to hear “grown ups” telling us that “There’s no tune, and you can’t hear the words” when we subjected them to what to us was just “obviously good”.

Sometime around mid 80s our contemporaries became parents themselves and because we’d grown up on modern popular music our kids¹ could no longer shock us. I feel quite sorry for them I suppose, robbed as they are of their main raison d’être, but that’s the way it is. From the 50s to the mid 80s, being a teenager was about loving the music your parents hated and that’s what made pop music great.

¹Just for the record, Wifey and I don’t yet have kids, but we are actively working on it.

 

Greek food that is far nicer than the food we endured this evening

Wifey and I have just come back from what we think was probably our worst restaurant experience ever. I’m not going to name names, but it was just outside the area and it was Greek.

Her starter of calimari was both hard and rubbery and most definitely inedible. I had a selection of three starters. Houmous, baba ganoush and a mushroom dish of no specific origin. While we sent her calimari back immediately (it was replaced by some that was average, which in context seemed good), we had just brushed our teeth before leaving home, so we assumed that that was the reason why the starters tasted funny to us.

A few mouthfuls later we realised it wasn’t. The baba ganoush had the desparately sour taste of wrinkley old aubergines that they’d attempted to mask by adding too much tahini. The mushrooms had overtones of mould and way too much cinnamon, but the pièce de résistance was my houmous, which tasted more than faintly of puke.

Finally, wifey’s main course of kofta was as dry, stale an overcooked as her calimari had been. We gave up all hope at that point, sent it back, cut our losses and drove up to Sainsburys to buy a couple of sachets of instant soup just to get the taste out of our mouths.

Why am I not naming the restaurant? Well because if I do you won’t go to it and if I don’t you won’t go to it either because you won’t know about it and in general I hate to criticise people who are trying hard, plus it’s only my opinion (although houmous that tastes as if it’s been regurgitated is more than an opinion).

But while we were sitting there, we had an idea for a new site where only bad reviews are posted. Doesn’t this go against everything I said in the last paragraph? Um - yup! But I never said I was an angel! The reviews won’t necessarily be of restaurants, they could be of plays, movies, anything. And extra points will be awarded if you went there with high hopes, either because you’d read good reviews, had it recommended by someone you trusted, or simply had one of those “feelings” you sometimes get when you think something is going to be good. Any bad review will be welcome. but if you had hopes that were dashed you will gain extra kudos.

We’re working on the domain name at the moment, but as soon as we get it up and running we’ll let you know. Meanwhile, keep trying to remember all those places you’ve wanted to spread the bad word about and be ready to submit a bad review.

Blackberries, rich in vitamins C, E and all sorts of other stuff

OK strictly speaking it’s W12 …
While not exactly in the area, Wormwood Scrubs is an area of grassland designated in 1879 as a public space. It’s in the borough of Hammesmith and Fulham, though in fact the eastern part, known as Little Wormwood Scrubs is within Kensington and Chelsea. The Scrubs deserves an article of its own because it has an interesting history.

… but that’s close enough for me
It’s close enough to the western end of Notting Hill to be the nearest open space, so many of us from this end go for walks there and today Wifey and I decided to go blackberry picking. During the last couple of weeks they’ve really ripened and the biggest and softest of them are deliciously sweet. We picked a couple of kilos and we’ve decided on making urbanberry jam, urbanberry crumble (well, I have) and to freeze the rest and use them in smoothies.

The sounds of Carnival
The experience was good in a husband and wife team building sense and was made all the more pleasurable by the fact that we could hear a steel band rehearsing somewhere in the distance for Notting Hill Carnival next weekend.

Sarah Anderson - an inspirational woman

As I wrote in a previous article, it’s well documented that the Travel Bookshop at 13-15 Blenheim Crescent London W11 is the inspiration behind the Travel Book Company in the Notting Hill movie and most definitely NOT the shop itself.

Not that this seems to concern estate agents Kinleigh, Folkard and Hayward, who are in the process of selling the flat above on behalf of its owner, author Sarah Anderson. Explaining that “This is a dream home for a buyer who wants to be in the heart of Notting Hill surrounded by real film nostalgia”, they describe the flat as “A beautiful double bedroom duplex apartment with study”, which I’m sure it is, “situated above Notting Hill’s famous ‘The Travel Bookshop’.”, which it is, but there’s a clear attempt to make it sound as if it’s the shop in the movie.

No matter, I’m more interested in Sarah Anderson herself, an inspirational woman to say the least and writer, among other things, of “Inside Notting Hill” which, judging from the excerpts on her website, looks very good and, you would have thought, would be required reading for someone like me. I plan to address that as soon as I can and I’ll write a review.

Sarah is a fascinating character, having opened the bookshop itself in 1980. At some point I think I’ll write an article on her.

When Madonna appeared on Jonathan Ross¹ in one of the best interviews I’ve seen him do, she was trying to prove her credentials as a born again Brit by claming that she liked nothing more than to while away a few pleasant hours in a lovely old English pub². Thinking he was calling her bluff. He asked her what her favourite bitter³ was. “I’m quite partial to a pint of Timothy Taylor” came the reply. Wossy⁴ thought she had just made something up to save face, but the next day a newspaper found out that Timothy Taylor did indeed exist and was made by a small brewery in West Yorkshire. Subsequently a few pubs here in the South East have started to stock it and I’ve found that I have something in common with Mrs Richie, I like the stuff too.

This evening Ray and I must have been having some kind of argument (we can’t remember, the Timmy Taylor has kicked in in between) because she ran off round to the North Pole, one of our locals. The argument (and remember we’re not really sure if there was one) can’t have been that serious because she called 5 minutes later to tell me that the North Pole now sells TT.

Ray is gregarious almost to a fault. When I arrived at the pub she was already entertaining one of the locals, Dave, who in turn was entertaining her with a virtuosic display of cockney rhyming slang⁵. Now strictly speaking, because I was born within the sound of the Bow Bells, I’m a cockney, but my parents hammered out any trace of a local dialect when I was young by sending me to elocution lessons. That’s right, I’m a Londoner born and bred, but I cannot do a London accent! Nonetheless I managed to teach him “It’s all gone Pete Tong”⁶.

Dave, it turns out, is a builder/decorator who works with other builders/decorators on rather high end projects some as the National Galery and Very Rich People’s Homes. He explained to us (in ever shortening loops, the more he had to drink) that he’s “not cheap, but we’ll give you the date that we’ll turn up and we’ll be there on that day. We’ll give you a schedule and we’ll stick to it and we’ll give you a quote and that’s the price you’ll pay”. For some reason we believe him, so we explain what it is that we’re trying to do and arrange to have him round to take a look. He did, after all, paint a large mural at the end of a cul-de-sac just near the North Pole.

Notes for non UK readers

¹ Jonathon Ross is a popular TV presenter with his own chat show, known for being hilarious and making his interviewees look good at the same time.
² I can confirm that this is (sort of) true. When she and Guy were living in Holland Park, she apparently used to frequent a pub called the Windsor Castle, notable for two VERY low doorways (one is about 4 feet high). A friend of mine was in there once and noticed her in the corner. When she got up to leave about half the pub got up with her, because they were all her security guards.
³ Bitter is what the rest of the world thinks of as “warm, flat beer”. An acquired taste usually guaranteed to turn the stomachs of non Brits, along with Marmite. Strangely Ray has acquired it since she’s been here.
⁴ Mr Ross makes a feature of the fact that he can’t pronounce his “R”s. A musician friend of mine is terrified of being interviewed by him because he goes out under the name “Ranking Roger”.
⁵ Cockney slang involves finding a (usually 2 or 3 word) phrase whose last word rhymes with the word you actually want to say, then sometimes only saying the first word of the phrase. So “look” becomes “butcher’s hook”, which is usually reduced to “butcher’s”, as in “Let’s ‘ave a butcher’s”.
⁶ Pete Tong is a DJ specialising in dance music and his name, when used in the phrase “It’s all gone Pete Tong”, means “wrong”. It’s very modern slang, probably only about 10 years old, so it might not count.
⁷ (Yes I know there isn’t really a ⁷, this is completely gratuitous). Isn’t it amazing how quickly the singer James Blunt’s name became rhyming slang?

We set out with the best of intentions
Last Friday we were both very tired so we decided to stay in, having already had a couple of unscheduled late ones that week.

We went to Sainsburys to pick up a couple of ingredients for dinner. That was mistake number one. Sainsburys Ladbroke Grove is West London’s Rock & Roll supermarket on account of the number of musicians who live
around Notting Hill. Now some of the more successful musicians make a play of only buying organic produce from the we-saw-you-coming “Traditional” butchers and grocers in Holland Park, but between you and me you can spot nearly all of them at some time or other pushing a shopping cart around Sainsburys.

Gaz Mayall is a real gent

One man who is very successful, but not at all embarrassed to be seen in Sainsburys is Gaz Mayal. Gaz runs the longest running club night in London, Gaz’s Rockin Blues, and is also leader of the brilliant Trojans ska band. We ran into him in the vegetable aisle. Gaz is one of those people familiar to people living in the Notting Hill area, but I only got to know him better when Ray & I look a random trip to Tregaron, a small village in Wales, to
see the Trojans place in a hotel bar last December.

No we are NOT going to the Paradise bar tonight!
As it happens I wanted to talk to him anyway because they do a couple of Russian songs in their set and I thought it would be good if they had a balalaika, one of which I’ve recently acquired. He was up for the idea (I thought he would be because he gets all sorts of people to join in. My favourite so far being a bagpipe player.). He asked what we were
doing that evening and we explained that despite having been invited to go to the Paradise on Kensal Rise where a few bands were playing and he was DJing, we were having a quiet night in.

You’re a dangerous man Gaz Mayall!But only because he’s so disarmingly charming in the first place.

He asked if we ‘d pop back to his place “on the way home”because he had “a few bottles of mead”. I think it might be first time anyone’s asked me that. Once there, we ended up staying for dinner (Gaz is an excellent cook) and by the time we finished it was time for him to DJ so were - er - accompanied him. Suffice to say I got bed about 4am and Ray
came home some time later.

or: Confessions of an embarrassed former slightly-less-than-white SEOer

I’ve just installed the DoFollow plugin to get rid of those pesky nofollow attributes that WordPress adds to your blog by default.

Why? Well because the nofollow atribute contributes close to nothing to the fight against blogspam once you have decent antispam plugins in place such as the beautifully named Akismet and does everything to deter genuine comment. You see, if you have something valid to say about an article I post on my blog, good or bad, I believe you should be allowed a little link love in return if that’s what you want.

Why doesn’t the nofollow attribute help in the fight against blogspam? Well I’ll come clean. Much to my embarrassment, a few years back I was tempted by a combination of flattery and promises of a huge payday-oneday into a situation where my coding skills were momentarily used by the forces of evil. A seemingly charming and straightforward couple of naredowells hooked me in on a promise of a bright new future, but soon had me scraping the seedy underbelly of the Internet by writing hastily concocted perl scripts that used a whole heap of LWP modules to peak and poke the soft nether regions of poorly secured websites.

Their argument that we were actually helping out sysadmins by pointing out their systems’ insecurities sounded to me like a gunman explaining to his helpless victim that he was merely pointing out how poorly constructed human flesh was. Did I mention how sorry I am at this few months of madness that I both endured and, by implication, endorsed?

Anyway, the lesson learned was that the heartlessness of these people was nothing compared to the heartlessness of the spambots that they commissioned. Spambots could give two hoots whether your blog uses the nofollow tag or not. They’re still going to spam you on the offchance that you don’t because it costs close to nothing to do so. The only real defence is actual spam protection in place such as Akismet, which so far, for me, has been 100% accurate.

So feel free to comment on anything I write. If it looks like spam my various antispam plugins will spot them and not even bother me and if it doesn’t, I’ll be the judge (and a fairly liberal one at that).

And please allow this good (very much former) poacher turned game keeper to apologise once again. In my mitigation I’m pretty sure that the coercive slime that tempted me into the arena of dodgy SEO were so incompetent that my efforts fell on infertile ground.

I certainly hope so.

I was browsing through some photos on my phone recently when I came across these two. In brief, Ray and I had just left Inn on the Green near Portobello where Rotten Hill Gang had been playing with Mick Jones’s band Carbon Silicon. At the start of this year, Carbon Silicon hosted a run of seven fantastic nights there called Carbon Casino. These shots are just after the last one. We were walking along Portobello Road on the way to a friend’s house for a nightcap when we were pounced on by three paparazzi.

Now I don’t pretend for one minute that they had any interest in me or Ray, or even really in Gaz Mayall, the dapper looking fellow on the left. Just a hunch, but I suspect they might have thought there would be more mileage in a late night bleary eyed shot of Sienna Miller and Rhys Ifans.

I decided it would be nice to see what it looks like from the victims’ angle so I took a shot myself. The next day the same scene from the view of one of the scumbags appeared in the Daily Mail or somesuch quality rag. The nice thing is that it’s taken at exactly the same moment. Look at the position of Sienna’s arm and hand in both shots and, a little bit harder to see, Ray’s right arm and legs. Oh - and the geek in the background with a camera phone to his eye.

As the weazels danced around in front of us like three crazed leprachauns, Rhys called out to them “Right lads, you’ve got thirty seconds or this beer goes over you”. He counted down from about 10 and did indeed give the pieces of human waste probably the closest thing they’d had to a shower all day.

Just for fun, here’s the celebrity spotting page on the the Smirkle site.