I started listening this week to the new David Byrne / Brian Eno album, ‘Everything That Happens Will Happen Today’, this is quite an exciting thing at Chateau Andrews as the last album they released together, ‘My Life in the Bush of Ghosts’, in 1981 pretty much acted as the soundtrack to the first few years I spent living in London in a huge draughty house on the Walworth Road in the Elephant and Castle working as a manager of the Mecca bookmakers on Electric Avenue in Brixton – the glamour of the big city.
Thankfully (as you will see from the new album to the right above) they, like me, seem to have mellowed a little in their old age. The track (above left) from the original album, ‘The Jezebel Spirit’, contains a rather sinister sample from an American excorcist, hence the lyrics;

Jezebel,
Spirit of destruction,
Spirit of grief,
I bind you with chains of iron
I bind you out of that bounded heaven.
Loosen your hold and come out of her now.

Not a track to listen to if you’re feeling in any way afeared of the existential nightmare of life or indeed if you’re off your tits on some pharmacological adventure. I cite as an example one of the comments from the YouTube page showing this video;

“This shit is as dense, fractured and ahead of the great curve as it gets, predicting, for example, the dark voo-doo of Sarah Palin, the white bread Al Queda snow machine vixen, and the pale horse she rode in on.”

Indeedy…..

My new all time favourite song ever (this week) is ‘I Sing, I Swim’ by Seabear, acoustic loveliness straight out of Reykjavik, which I present to you here by way of uplifting antidote.

The financial debacle of our trip to London coupled with the imminent collapse of all of the world’s economies has induced a state of extreme belt tightening this week. Lunches have been courtesy of huge tureen of turnip and bacon soup (nicer than it sounds) and dinners have been mostly experimental affairs utilizing whatever I can find in the freezer made into a stew and served with cous cous, which for some reason, seems to be in plentiful supply in the store cupboard.

The collapse of sterling against the dollar has wiped out a huge chunk of DrawBox’s profit margins, which is a bore, but we are in negotiations with our Chinese suppliers about a redrafting of price. Apart from that we have started preparations for the biggest furniture show in the UK in January at which we are exhibiting.

Last year we managed to inadvertently rent an apartment in the gay part of Birmingham – only in Birmingham could the gay part of town be quite so ineffably dull. If anyone has any recommendations for a good night out in Birmingham, please send them here.

As it says on ‘Birmingham, It’s Not Shit’

Where else would you see Dave Hill in a Little Chef?”

Where else indeed….

So said the Spanish photographer at last week’s wedding….this from a nation whose national sport is throwing donkeys off churches.

That being said he was a very nice chap - the baldicoot next to him turned out to be a trumpeter I met on a plumbing for incompetents course five years ago, before we came to France - he progressed to installing central heating in his house and I….er….didn’t.

Obviously I didn’t remember him, way too much Côtes du Rhône under the bridge for that. Frankly, I don’t think I can be expected to remember every bald trumpeter I meet - what am I Mr Memory Man…

Far too much cheerful music from me of late I feel. As Autumn continues to crowd in on us and the rains come again, herewith miserable Matt Sweet from Southampton (I’d be miserable if I came from Southampton) aka Boduf Songs - I doubt very much that he has, at any stage, been ‘fired up, ready to go’. A packed week this week (by my own minimal standards) we went to London last weekend for the wedding of my business partner in DrawDwarfBox which was an an entertaining do and blissfully short. The happy couple got married on Sunday in Richmond Park and had a civil ceremony that lasted all of ten minutes (they entered the church to Nick Cave and left to an indie-hindi Bhangra version of the Coronation Street theme tune), followed by champagne on the terrace in the late evening sun looking out over London with a delicious buffet to follow and finally poor poor dancing (I was accused by my good lady wife of incorporating the ‘gay head bob’ into my dance routines, specifically, it seems to annoy her).
All went well on the Monday, we had a whole day to pootle around London (which, I had forgotten, was a really fantastically expensive thing to do - without an Oyster card, the cheapest tube fare from zone 1 to zone 1 is now £4….yes, £4) , pootling which took the form of lunch at Meson Don Felipe (including a quite delicious dish of chicken livers in brandy - why can’t you buy chicken livers in France, he asked no-one in particular), our favourite Spanish restaurant in London followed by the Rothko exhibition at the Tate Modern (£12.50 each, total rip off - do not attend) and back to Kingston and our friend’s house for vast quantities of pizza and ridiculously strong New World Shiraz.
Whilst the Rothko was disappointing I did like the piece shown above called ‘Thirty Pieces of Silver’ by Cornelia Parker. It was made by steamrollering (see below) all the pieces of silver she had bought from various junk shops and jumble sales before hanging them up in circles - don’t ask me what it means (something to do with ‘cartoon violence’ I believe) but it looked nice.
We left for the station the following lunchtime for the three o’clock back to Paris and thence to Limoges. It was as we checked in for the London - Paris leg that the fun and games commenced.

“Monsieur, there ees a probleme with your tickets,” said our check in guru.
“Oh yes,” I said nochalantly “what’s that”
“You were supposed to ‘ave travelled yesterday”
It transpired we didn’t have quite as much time for arsing about in London as we thought, to be precise, 24 hours less arsing time. We hied pronto to the ticket booth to buy new tickets - the three o’clock was full, we could catch the four thirty but then we couldn’t get to Limoges that same night.

After about forty minutes of discusisons with (the very helpful) ticketing guru, concerning options via Angouleme or trains to Brussels - plane to Limoges - taxi to the station to pick up the car, we worked out that the only option available to us if we wanted to get back before midday the next day (which we had to because of Pilates classes comitments and imminent departure of our dog sitter) was to get to Paris, stay the night and catch the 7.30am to Limoges the next morning.

All in all, the new tickets, hotel room and very pleasing curry in Paris came to the thick end of £400. We had been thinking of renting a little studio flat in Barcelona for a week and spending Xmas there this year - we are no longer thinking about his.

This has to be the scariest thing ever……Chucky schmucky - what kind of bizarre weird parent or child would consider buying that thing…….that is all.

This below, however, would make an extraordinary gift

The internet trials and tribulations of Helen continue to the point where they now have no access to the world outside at all and not for the forseeable future…….anyone else wants to write anything (new or existing bloggers welcome) please get in touch as there may be a period of calm otherwise

I would write something but I have had rather a trying couple of days…….

Loath as I am to jump onto any careering critical bandwagon, I give you Operaboy (for anyone unaware of their minimal oeuvre) the new lords of indie Britpop (this week) with a hint of the Arctic Monkeys and a dash of the Killers (in my opinion…which is all you’re getting)…..jangly jangly jangly.
If you’re reading this then it’s already two days earlier than it would have been this time on Saturday, in other words today is Thursday but I shall be busy drinking mulled wine and watching fireworks in south west London on Saturday and will not, probably, have time to blog. I could I suppose say to the friends with whom we’re staying, excuse me but I have to go and scour the internet for near naughty pictures and write a stream of consciousness word association football for an hour – see you soon, but it could be construed as rude.

So….little has happened this week as half of it has yet to happen, although it is very cold today. Apropos of the paragraph above I always get somewhat afeared watching time travel films, even ‘Back to the Future’ bought me out in a cold sweat and don’t get me started on Bill and Ted – it’s that whole changing the past, affecting the future, meeting previous version of yourselves rubbish. In general terms I am more in favour of parallel and alternate universes – who isn’t? In fact if the universe truly is infinite and, as a corollary, contains an infinite number of planets, then there is, by definition, a planet somewhere where I am the President of France (hurrah), sadly there is also a planet where I’m a bloke in a dressing gown writing about planets where I’m a bloke in a dressing gown etc – I think the latter is closer to home.

So off to Paris on the train tomorrow morning with our onward journey on the Eurostar cunningly booked to allow time off for some steak frites and a pichet of your finest vin merci – if anyone is at Gare du Nord with time to kill , the brasserie (Terminus Nord, part of the Flo group) opposite, as opposed to every restaurant near every other station in the world, is very very good. In fact this link is very useful and served us well on our honeymoon in Paris when we brasseried every lunchtime and evening for a week as I recall.
Saturday is fireworks and Sunday is a wedding in Richmond Park (indoors hopefully, ha ha ha hahaa ha) Monday will be head nursing and Quantum of Solace and then back to the grindstone of French life on Tuesday. I predict much battening down of hatches and preparation of assorted stews for next week as the weather now feels like it has given up for the rest of the year.

Finally congratulations to Liz and Simon and their new progeny, Amelie – I have erased you from my potential dog sitting list.

Yours from the future living in the past.

I have, this week, been investigating the music of the Scandinavian archipelago (resounding cries of “oh good” echo across the verdant hills of the Limousin countryside) and as an extra special treat, three songs for your musical delight today. First up, Christian Kjellvander, a Swedish singer songwriter with an alt country leaning and his song ‘When the Mourning Comes’, followed by Thomas Dybdahl, a Norwegian, with Cecilia and finally Echo is Your Love, a thrashy band from Helsinki, with ‘Song for Sea Scouts’…there’s something I like about the Finns and their love of metal, drinking and untimely suicide. Having said that, the only Finn I know is a chap who used to work for me who was six foot five and looked like a male model except he could speak seven languages.…bastard.

Every time I go in to EcoMarché in the village (which is a lot, especially whilst my brother in law is staying) they ask for my loyalty card. Four years now I have been handing it over and it struck me this week that I have never seen any bill reduction, coupons , cash back or vouchers of any kind. So I asked the girl at the checkout to explain it to me and it turns out to be a microcosm of French society. You don’t get any cash back but you can get reductions on certain items but only on certain days of the week but on a special day each week (which seems to change at the whim of the gods) you get double reduction on the same items BUT each week the items change. To discover the new items you consult a lavishly produced colour booklet, printed each week but this week the book was the book for last week as copies of this week’s book had run out, I queried the logic of this and she looked at me as if I was a rapist.

Apart from that thrilling interchange it has been another fairly quiet week of glorious sunshine (mostly). I spent a day at a friend’s house chopping and splitting wood with Craig (the aforementioned brother in law) which he had given me in exchange for helping him to clear it out of his overgrown woodlands and I have spent quite a bit of time preparing a presentation for Ercol, a furniture company in the UK who we are trying to entice in to the web of guile and intrigue that is the exciting world of DrawBox (henceforth known as DwarfBox). The exciting animation below will be part of this effort.

No mention this week of the US election other than to say, Amy Strozzi, who was formerly ithe make-up artist on the US version of So You Think you Can Dance, was paid, in the first half of this month alone, $22,800 to do Sarah Palin’s make up - I sense a new career in the offing, how hard can it be ?

The only other thing I will say about the election is to mention this nutter woman who alleged she had been attacked by Obama supporters and had a ‘B’ carved on her face. There are many things dubious about this, firstly Obama starts with an ‘A’ and it seems unlikely that an attacker would have carved the letter backwards as if looking in a mirror. Indeed she quickly admitted making up the whole thing. My favourite aspect of the story was one of the comments at the end of the Times’ coverage from an American

“What about the black eye and the other signs of attack? People seem to be ignoring that and only zeroing on the backward B.”
Robin, SJ, USA

Robin – she admitted making it up, that was what the article was about…….in fact, it was a Robin who was whinging about my last US election post….it’s almost certainly the same person.

Last night was dinner chez Matt and Helen, which consisted of a cheeky little beetroot and blue cheese concoction as a reluctant starter and a damned fine beef stew (”fucking nice” - Stew Weekly) and a frangipangifiggy pudding created by my wife. Much merriment and discussion of the ontological characterisation of the fundamental nature of reality….well, much merriment anyway. Matt did tell us about a rare video he made some time ago which managed to fuse his two great loves, big building machines and the expression of his his inner artist through modern interpretative dance. Luckily I have found it.

I have been making some CDs for my friend Ray at whose house we are staying in a couple of weeks time when we head back to the UK for the wedding of Stuart, one of my business partners in the (mighty) DrawBox, or as Helen prefers it, with her gift for social Tourettes, DwarfBox (I have just put dwarfbox into Google, as you do, and I have found this picture below - blame Helen). His musical taste is interestingly both Catholic and shit. Despite the fact that I have turned him on (man) to the joys of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and The Archie Bronson Outfit, he still occasionally veers uncontrollably towards Captain Beefheart and 70s Italian prog rock giants (I nearly typed gonads then) PFM. All this is to explain the choice of this week’s musical interlude, from Sheffield the poppy, catchy Slow Club, which is one of the CDs I am giving him – fascinating.

No mention this week of the US elections after the overwhelming wall of opprobrium heaped upon me after last week’s exegesis (Robin, whoever you are, I hope you’re happy now). Instead, back to the minutiae of my day to day existence, truly what a blog should be. Orders for DrawBox are starting to trickle in after the hiring of our astounding new sales director, we currently have around £17,500 worth of invoices outstanding waiting to be paid, which, by a happy coincidence, is almost exactly the amount we owe to all our creditors, as Helen and Matt both point out, in today’s business climate this represents a shit hot business model.

Apart from that it has been a quiet week with a very nice picnic in the sunshine at a nearby lake last weekend –see below…. verily, ‘tis shroom season.

The other main news of the week was my weekly golf game with Matt, proud possessor of a new set of clubs. Obviously I let this do my precarious head in, and played as badly as I have ever played, finally succumbing with a wheeze and a whimper to a miserable twelve shot defeat – I won’t embarrass either of us by writing down the scores in human words, suffice to say, Seve Ballesteros would have beaten both of us whilst strapped to his hospital bed with a scalpel in his head.

I have just been informed by my good lady wife that the new Bond girl, Gemma Arterton (see picture right), is the niece of Wreckless Eric who lives in the next village, truly the Limousin is the new Rodeo drive wherein we find ourselves constantly tripping over celebrities.

Finally can I just say - what an extraordinary choice of wedding dress

Normally I would firmly eschew the hand carved wooden flute and from time to time run screaming from the mandolin, but to kick us off, Mariee Sioux (playing in Niort in the Charente in November). Her only connection to this election special being that she is from….er….America.

Less than three weeks to go to possibly the most important election in modern times and things are getting nasty across the pond. I’ve never been a big believer in conspiracy theories, (actually that’s bollocks, I think we all know that no-one has ever landed on the moon and that Chesney “I am the one and only” Hawkes was actually an animatronic ) however this seems to be an unlikely accident

For those who can’t be arsed to click on the link or read the article (everyone, I imagine), the gist is that some absentee ballots have gone out in a few counties in upstate NY with Barack Obama’s name spelled Barack Osama….as the piece points out - just how close are the B and S keys on a keyboard ? …..hmmmm….I shall say no more.

There is a long tradition in the land of the free and home of the cheats for vote rigging. I think everyone is by now aware that Al Gore actually won the 2000 election but was sucker punched out of it by a combination of George Bush’s brother and an acquiescent supreme court.

The thinking for the 2004 election, however, seems to be that once Bush and his assorted denizens of darkness had successfully portrayed John Kerry as a “wind surfing Frenchman” (I’m not making this up) Dubya won at a canter. Actually nothing could be further from the truth. If you look a the graphic below you will see that the whole thing boiled down to Ohio (circled)

Had those 20 elecotral votes gone the other way then the current president of the USA would have been John Kerry. “So what” I hear almost none of you cry, “it didn’t happen” – think again and read this. A litany of systematic manipulation of the electoral roll, voter registration and counting procedures. What is interesting is to compare the current map showing Obama / McCain based on up to date poll numbers.

Even without winning Ohio and Florida (both states in which he is ahead in the polls) Obama would still creep past the 270 electoral votes needed. The difference between the two maps isn’t huge and although Obama is campaigning heavily in Republican states (and may conceivably pick off one or two, although the main purpose is to force McCain to spend what’s left of his dwindling war chest on defending votes he would usually expect as god given) as usual the election of the President of America is actually decided by a relatively small number of people in a relatively small number of states.

Given the numbers it is unsurprising that McCain and Palin are attempting to whip up their supporters into a frenzy of righteous indignation, intimating that Obama somehow isn’t ‘American’ enough. The real obfuscator ( a word insufficiently used in my opinion) is McCain himself. Read here for the real story of the McCain rise to prominence….a couple of quotes from the piece for those who really, truly cannot be arsed (it is ten pages long)

“This is the story of the real John McCain, the one who has been hiding in plain sight. It is the story of a man who has consistently put his own advancement above all else, a man willing to say and do anything to achieve his ultimate ambition: to become commander in chief, ascending to the one position that would finally enable him to outrank his four-star father and grandfather.”

“The reckless, womanizing hotshot who leaned on family connections for advancement before his capture in Vietnam emerged a reckless, womanizing celebrity who continued to pull strings. The real difference between the McCain of 1967 and the McCain of 1973 was that the latter’s ambition was now on overdrive.”

Finally 6.7 million people have now viewed this YouTube clip, which is about 20 more than watched my dog running round the garden with the Pixies in the background – I think we all know which one will affect the future of the world more.

For your delight and aural delectation this week, the very pleasant Maps and ‘Frightened Rabbit’…..lovely strummy frottage.

More work this week on the house, mainly from Moraig’s brother, Craig. In common with most South Africans and colonials in general, he is obsessed with barbecueing – here is a picture of him that I have literally just taken at 7.30pm on a Saturday evening in October

…..still if it makes him happy. This is one of the less picturesque corners of the work in progress that is our garden – be assured there is a reason for the drainpipe ending half way down the wall, I’m just not going to tell you what it is.

The plastering of the landing, which is his main task whilst staying is almost complete, here is an especially crap picture of it which gives little or no indication of anything really but does take up valuable space and makes this post appear longer and more in depth that it actually is.

The roof height is about 7 metres so the boy has done well. We also found a tint that you mix into the ‘gear’ as it is apparently called, thereby obviating any need for paint…..many hurrahs all round.

The other highlight of the week was the annual general meeting of blog posters chez Helen last night – Myself (can I interest you in some software), Alan (naked in a hotel corridor) and Helen (that’s not a dachshund) were in attendance with other halves and much merriment was had by all, including a pudding with an extraordinary amount of pastry in it, in many ways it was like a club sandwich with pastry replacing the bread and something else replacing everything else.

Today’s small headache was cured by cheap red wine at lunch in Les Halles in Limoges which is the French equivalent of a fast food restaurant (even though you get starter, main course, cheese, pudding and coffee) where everyone sits on long benches and ignores the strangers sitting near them (or is that just me). Craig has already tried more adventurous food in the two weeks he has been here than I have in four years, today he opted for the calves trotters in a red wine sauce, I would have ordered that except it sounds fucking horrible and there was steak on the menu – I have few rules in life (always count the steps as you go down stairs and try not to shatter your kneecap falling awkwardly being one of them) but ‘always have the steak if it’s offered’ is my equivalent of the ten commandments wrapped up into one handy bite sized lifestyle hint – there is little else in the way of moral guidance that I can think one would need.

I can’t remember whether we were discussing it last night (probably not) but I remember recently explaining the rice on a chess board ‘problem’ to someone and they were having none of it. The point is an example of exponential growth – if you put one grain of rice on the first square of a chess board, then double it to 2 on the second, 4 on the third, 8 on the fourth etc by the time you get to the 64th square you would need more rice that exists in the entire world. Whosoever I was explaining this to disputed the maths of this, going so far as to describe it as “bollocks”, however I have looked it up and it is true – on the 64th square alone you would need 2 to the 63 grains or 9,223,372,036,854,775,808…..which is a lot of rice in anyone’s book…or paddy field…..prroobabbberry.

I am currently obsessed with US elections, even getting up to watch the vice presidential debate the other morning, so finally two sides of the country that is the US of A – very shoddy rednecks and some spectacular body popping, as I believe it is called.

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