Categories
London walking

North (3)

Lavender Hill Cemetery, Enfield.

Cemeteries are a bit unnerving. Partly because of all the dead people. Partly because of the grim reminder that one day I’ll be one of them. Mainly because I don’t the idea that this sort of thing will happen to my gravestone and no-one will bother to fix it as by that point I will inevitably have alienated anyone who found me even slightly bearable:

ABANDONED GRAVE

Possibly the answer to this is to be buried in a gigantic golden sphere embedded into a hillside. It could be one of a series of spheres that form a massive picture of my face. Maybe some of them could move in such a way as to make me wink at space. Tasteful, not like this rubbish:

 

This belongs to a Moseley, although not any of the ones who are famous for being a sexy Nazi.

If you ever visit Lavender Hill cemetery, be advised that any problems in the cemetery are not to be reported to the cemetery lodge, as this has been flogged off as a private residence. “Overlooking a delightful garden of local remains.”

Just outside is a shop selling gravestones, including one in the shape of a teddy bear. I involuntarily uttered the word “Christ” and pressed on to Gordon Hill, which in deference to the nature of geography is a railway station rather than a former Manchester United player. At least it had stopped snowing.

Categories
Podcasts Things

Talking about fish paste and eating out-of-date snacks on Shift Run Stop

Guest appearance on the excellent (if now somewhat irregularly released) Shift Run Stop podcast, which if memory serves involved sitting somewhere on the Southbank eating Japanese kitkats.

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Categories
London walking

North (2)

Last time I was on a farm I got chased off it by a dog. One of many reasons not to go to Amersham. This time I appeared to be on a legitimate public footpath and got out of the farm without having my leg chewed, to meet the heartwarming sight of the M25, welcoming the lost Londoner home with a message of hope:

WEED

Unfortunately on the other side of the M25 there wasn’t hope. There was Crews Hill. Have you ever thought “I wish there was one place where I could buy a shed, some fertiliser, wedding decorations, a lizard AND PRETTY MUCH NOTHING ELSE”? That place exists! It is called Crews Hill!

Crews Hill

I’d call it an industrial estate but industry seems going a bit far. It goes on and on like this for pointless acres. My advice for the people of Crews Hill is that if you’re living in Crews Hill you almost certainly do not want to know what the future holds for you.

PSYCHIC NIGHT

If anyone from Crews Hill is reading this and feels that I’m being a bit unnecessary about the place, I would remind you that I voluntarily spent over half an hour of my holiday walking through it. I am not suggesting that you are the only people who have problems. And you have that garden centre with a fake windmill outside it for no particular reason. You do have that.

After some more walking I got to Clay Hill. I didn’t spend much time there but I get the feeling that life can be difficult in Clay Hill. They have to explicitly tell people not to bring their own drink to church functions. They still use Clip Art.

But I didn’t have time to get to know Clay Hill, to get a true sense of this place. I had to trudge south through a graveyard to yet another hole with the word Hill in the name, for absolutely no reason.

Categories
London walking

North (1)

The other day I took the train to the village of Cuffley. Apparently not many people go to the village of Cuffley because the village Cuffley got quite excited about it.

@cuffleyonline tweeted @edjeff Are you in Cuffley just for a visit or something else that could be mentioned on the website?

I though this might mean that I’d finally made it, but Myleene Klass lives in the village of Cuffley according to the internet and she didn’t meet me at the station, so probably not. Maybe she was too busy protesting something called an Anaerobic Digestion Plant which someone apparently wants to build in or on or under the village of Cuffley. I’m told this also happened in Radio 4 programme The Archers. Maybe it was why David Archer chucked that man off a roof.

The real aim of my visit to the village of Cuffley was to walk very far away from the village of Cuffley, which is lucky, as the village of Cuffley didn’t look very interesting, unless you’re a fan of naff churches.

Cuffley and its naff church

I did find a house with loads of pictures of young boys pasted to the upstairs window. I was a bit worried that this might be the bedroom of a dead child and that the pictures were some kind of loving tribute to his life. It’s probably not okay to take a picture of that and mock it on the internet.

A window full of pictures of Justin Bieber

Luckily on closer inspection it turned out that at least 2 of the pictures were of Justin Bieber, and no-one can say that there’s anything wrong with taking photos of a 12 year old girl’s bedroom window and posting them on the internet.

For unrelated reasons I decided to get the hell out of the village of Cuffley and walk through some fields next to the railway line. It started to snow.

I Love Elvis

And who doesn’t? Onward, onward, under the M25 and into the hell world of Crews Hill.

Categories
The Guardian Things

I was Ben, the unofficial face of Shippam’s paste (The Guardian)

Idiot creates Twitter account pretending to be corporate voice of a brand of fish paste. It gets shut down, Guardian asks him to write about it.

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Categories
Film reviews of films

My review of The Third Man

The Third Man is one of those films from when they made them in black and white in order to make them seem classy, but I think that’s just stupid as it’s hard to tell the people apart because you can’t see if they’re wearing a different coloured jumper or whatever.

This guy sells tyres with meningitis because of World War II or something.

As if that wasn’t confusing enough the main character is called Holly which a girl’s name even though the main character is not a girl. I did some research and found out that the director of this film was called Carol which is a girl’s name even though the director is not a girl. I don’t watch a film to see a director deal with personal issues! I watch it to see action and sometimes kissing!

Anyway it had a complicated plot: Orson Welles is dead but then he is not dead really he just had to pretend so he could get a free ride on a big wheel and then he is really dead after all. To be honest I’m not sure I 100% understood it, but that’s the gist.

My best thing in the film was when the funny army man punched the man with a girl’s name but then Orson Welles ends up shooting the funny army man to death which is a bit off as he didn’t even know the army man had punched the man with a girl’s name who he didn’t even seem to like that much anyway.

The worst thing about this film is how the camera man kept setting up the camera all wonky. I assume they must have made this quickly and didn’t have time to re-film it but I’d have thought you could cut out the squares of film and stick them back together wonky the opposite way so it would come back normal. Lazy.

This film is a bit pretentious and nothing exploded. 5/10.

Categories
Things

A Million Words

Apparently the author Ray Bradbury once said something along the lines of every writer needing to write one million words before they’d write anything decent. He might not have actually said this at all, but the internet believes that he did and that’s just as good as a fact.

I’ve alway thought it would nice to be a good writer, so I obviously need to get to the million word mark. First of all, let’s work out where I am at the moment. I have made 21,055 tweets on Twitter. Let’s assume an average of 100 characters, and that a word has an average of 6 characters. 21,055/100 * 6. That’s over 350,000 words right there. Let’s assume another 50,000 on various essays, unfunny blog posts, articles for ropey student publications, begging letters, etc. That’s only 600,000 words to go!

Possibly because it’s not really clear that he said it at all, no-one seems to mention if Bradbury was any more specific than “a million words”. Do they all need to be different words? Presumably not, as even with a thesaurus you’d still end up having to list a lot of medical conditions. Or possibly switch languages every so often. Maybe you can cheat and just write “A a a a a a a a a…” until you have written the word “a” one million times. If that’s not enough variation you could just count up to one million, although that might get confusing as numbers like “one hundred and four” have four numbers in so you would get to a million before you got to a million and the whole thing would be an aesthetic mess.

Perhaps the best solution would be to buy lots of Ray Bradbury books and just copy them out onto your computer until you hit a word count of one million. This is ideal as a) since all the words after that are supposed to be better you are guaranteed to be a better writer than Ray Bradbury, who has published a lot of books which caused him to make “mad bank” and b) because it will annoy Rad Bradbury who is old and mental and thinks the film Farenheit 9/11 ripped off his book Farenheit 452 which is stupid because Farenheit 9/11 is about a big fat man pretending to cry.

I can’t really be bothered to find some Ray Bradbury books but I have read some of them so I will attempt to reproduce what I remember in order to get a little bit closer to one million:

‘What do you mean, the President is a butterfly?’, asked the man who was burning all the books in a fire.

It turns out I don’t really remember very much about Ray Bradbury. Oh well. Only 599,563 to go!

Categories
Judging a book by its cover

Water For Elephants: A Novel

From the looks of things this is a book about a circus which is pretty stupid as circuses are not really as good as Alton Towers or PlayStation.

I think that it is clever that they have put “A Novel” in the title of this book so you know that is a novel and not puzzles or a manual; I think this is a very helpful idea that more books should consider to avoid unnecessary confusion in these times of doubt and uncertainty.

I do not like that there are no elephants on the cover of this book even though there are Elephants in the title as I like elephants even though they are scary I think I would like one to be my friend and share peanuts with me and also fly.

Apparently they have made this book into a film with the man who is a vampire in September the 11th so I would advise you to watch that instead as there is probably music and colours in it.

Categories
Judging a book by its cover

The Pregnant Widow

This is a book about going to the beach and looking at things which is not always a good idea as sometimes people do not want you to look at their things even though they have their things right there and they shout and then when you still don’t stop they look frightened and cry or run away. This is confusing and this book is probably confusing.

Also two ladies cannot make a baby together. Martin Amis is an idiot and only gets published because his dad used to play James Bond. I don’t know what “phenomenal” means- is it like in the film Phenomenon when everyone thinks John Travolta is magic but then he dies of cancer? Seems a bit harsh.

Categories
Judging a book by its cover

Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

I really do not like this cover at all. The faces are a bit like something from one of those computer films that’s a bit like Toy Story but not really as good because someone dropped the film down a valley and it came out all wrong.

The big green faces are very scary and perhaps the reason everyone in this new world (that is what olden days people called America before they found out about it from watching HBO, so this is probably about America) had to be very brave is because they all got spooked by each other’s faces and lips. 

I just thought about what it would be like to kiss a frightening floating green head and felt bad in my insides, this is a dreadful book about dreadful people and I would not like to look at it any more.