The Stuff I've Been Up To. (part two)

House Hunting:

One of the main reasons I've haven't been blogging as much as I'd like is because i've been looking for somewhere new to live. When I say 'I', I mean 'we' as my lovely girlfriend and I have decided to move in and rent a place together.
Now, as all of you who have ever been house or flat hunting know, estate agents can be economical with the truth. We wanted to move to the Moseley area of Brum (or as I call it, Mos Eisley. I'll explain why later), but so do a lot of people. This means Mos Eisley is prohibitively expensive, and estate agents say properties are in Mos Eisley when they're not. We looked at places that were in Hall Green (famous for its dog track) when we were told they were in Moseley so they could bump the price up a bit. Also, what an estate agent calls a double bedroom is not what I would call a double bedroom. what they would call 'desirable' some times is what I would call a 'shithole'. We looked at one house that was a relatively new build, but inside it was terrible; the stair rods were mostly missing and every room's walls were riddled with holes. (I reckon the previous tenants were fans of the 'floating shelf'.) Apparently, having a house that resembles swiss cheese is 'desirable' these days! Not to me, matey!
My lady and I also saw a house we subsequently referred to as 'the house of death'. It was completely beige inside, beige walls and beige carpets all through the gaff. It smelled bad. Its kitchen hadn't been updated since about nineteen forty-seven and it was obviously a house where someone old had died. To be fair to the estate agent on this one, though, he could tell it wasn't the right place for us and looked suitably embarassed as he was showing us round.
We did luck out though. The house we settled on is in King's Heath, not far from Mos Eisley, it's got four bedrooms, it's in our price range and it's lovely. We'll be moving in a couple of weeks, so I'm up to my ears in packing and measuring stuff and buying washing machines. It's worse for my girlfriend, who is moving up from Winchester, so her hassles are probably ten times what mine are.

Mos Eisley Folk Festival:

My girlfriend is middle class, and I'm obviously not, so we're kind of putting ourselves through a cultural exchange. She makes me watch rom-coms (some of the time, anyway! I still won't watch anything with Reese fucking Witherspoon in it, though. I have some standards!), I make her watch kung-fu and zombie movies (but not Peter Jackson's Braindead, yet. That combines the two genres in one fantastic scene. You should all go out and see that movie if you haven't, yet. One of my faves.) I make her eat baltis, she makes me eat salad from wooden bowls. (This is the biggest indicator that someone's middle class, this is; owning wooden salad bowls.)
My girlfriend's a big fan of Seth Lakeman, who I'd not heard of before I met her, and I've since found out that he's a folk-singing midget who mostly plays violin as well. She found out that Seth was playing at the Mos Eisley folk festival, so she bought tickets for her and a friend to go and see him, and all the other bands playing at the festival. As the festival got nearer though, it turned out that her friend couldn't go, so I agreed to accompany her. This had a cultural exchange aspect to it too, as I stipulated that we had to watch the Villa-Liverpool match (which was on the same day) in a grotty pub first before we head off to the folk festival.
After watching one of the shittest nil-nils I've seen in a long time (fair play to the mighty Villa though, we're third in the Premiership as I type this, only one point off top) we headed off to Mos Eisley. Now, Moseley does resemble its Star Wars counterpart. It's a weird place, maybe not the 'wretched hive of scum and villainy' that Mos Eisley is, but it does have a strange mix of residents, so the pubs do resemble the cantina from A New Hope. There are a lot of posh people, you know the types with people carriers who take their kids to violin classes, there are also a lot of grungey students, lots of new age types, all wiry hair and sandals and creative facial hair. And that's just the women! (Insert rimshot noise here) and, Moseley also has more than its fair share of tramps. Not the modern Big Issue, dog on a string homeless, but your old-fashioned tramp. Meths-drinking, mismatched shoes-wearing, big overcoat-wearing, piss-smelling, giant beard wearing paraffin lamps. There was a famous itinerant called 'Pete the Feet' who used to bother drinkers in Moseley for small change, he was called that because he refused to wear shoes. But I digress.
We went to the festival and it was pissing down. Torrential. As has most of what we used to call 'summer'. A friend of mine said that the British weather is like the Muslim community, sometimes Sunni but mostly Shi'ite. (But, Brum's muslims are mostly Sunni, apparently, so it's a crap joke, really)
The festival was in Moseley Park, which is a park you have to go down an alley to get to, and the festival was like any other festival you've been to, but a lot smaller. That's a good thing, the queues for the chemical bogs are much smaller, for one thing. There was a real ale tent. Another good thing. There were a few stalls, including, weirdly, one that sold violins. I think the cheapest one was three hundred quid. Hardly an impulse buy at a music festival, is it? Unsurprisingly, the stallholder wasn't doing much business. There were all the usual jewellery, joss stick and hippie shit on sale, and there was quite a good book stall. Because most of the festival goers were new age-y types , I was worried I wouldn't be able to get anything substantial (i.e. meat) to eat, and, at first glance my worries were confirmed, falafels, veggie burgers, vegetarian indian nosh. I opted for a falafel, and it was lovely, but I dropped my girlfriend's chilli, so hers wasn't as nice as mine. Then, after I finished my falafel, I noticed the hog roast stand. Bastard!
The rain was coming down in big sheets, and we couldn't shelter under a tree because all the other festival goers were hugging them. And the music, whilst not my thing, was fairly good. It's nice to see proper musicians playing instruments and enjoying themselves. Bit too much accordion, though. People have a go at the metal music I like for being all morbid and obsessed with death, but it's got fuck all on folk music. The songs are about such heartwarming subjects like lifeboat disasters, the highland clearances and dead sheepdogs.
After an escape from the rain for a bit (we went to the O'Neills round the corner) we headed back into the park to watch Seth Lakeman, and he was good. Not good enough to convert me to being an Arran sweater wearing/desert boot folky, but he was alright. Despite the rain and the boring footie match, it was a good day.

Local rivalries.

The best header of that particular season!

There's a weird atmosphere at work this week. It's weird most of the time, but this week it's worse. Everyone's tense. The reason? Derby day. Birmingham City are playing the mighty Aston Villa at St. Andrew's on Sunday. (this is referred to in the media as 'The West Midlands derby', but it isn't. It's the Birmingham derby. If we were playing Coventry or Wolves-that's a West Midlands derby! Right-that's off my chest.)

You see, I am and always have been a Villain ( 'Villa', apparently, was the first word I could write. After that, I was taught to write 'Elvis', so I had V's and L's down pat pretty quickly. This was last year. (c) shit punchlines limited 2007 ) and so are a few of my colleagues. The majority support that other shower and are known locally as 'Bluenoses' (or 'wankers' by us Villa supporters), and most of the time, I get on okay with the noses. I might even call some of them 'friends', but all that goes out of the window for ninety minutes on Sunday.
I enjoy the banter, the piss-taking and the rivalry, most of the time. There are tossers from both Blue and Claret-and-Blue who can give it but can't take it shouting their mouths off. There's monetary wagers being set-up (a recipe for disaster). There are the rogue colleagues who support West Brom who watch from the sidelines with amusement, and there are the odd total fuck knuckles who support Man U or Liverpool who don't really give a toss about what's happening locally, as they're glory-hunting bastards.

Like I said, I enjoy the banter. But only when we've won! The stick I got when we got beat 3-0 a few seasons ago was unreal. My clock card and locker had '3-0' written on them in permanent marker. My coat was covered in royal blue plastic and I had to listen to 'Keep Right On' all fucking day because someone had brought it in on CD. This is on top of all the verbal abuse I had to suffer. But what can you do? You have to take it, knowing that one day you'll have your turn. And we did.
Anyway, it's tense this time round, as Villa are playing like shit lately. We've not won away from home all season. Even with a 4-1 lead at Spurs we managed to draw! Blues are losing a lot, but they played well against Liverpool and Man Utd, but they were absolute shit against Everton, so both sets of supporters don't really have a lot of confidence in their teams for the big match. But, that said, I'm looking forward to it, as it's the only proper local derby left in the Premier league these days (all the other ones are blighted by the prawn sandwich glory hunting bastard supporters who are from other parts of the country than the club they 'support', so all that 'local' rivalry isn't that important to them. Villa and Blues tend to have mostly local support-probably because neither of us have won fuck-all for ages-Blues never!).

Right, no more football talk now, I promise.

UP THE VILLA!

A Roof With A View.

My new flat has a roof terrace. I say roof terrace, it's more like a bit of flat roof you can walk on and hang your washing out on. (But, at my peril, because I live next to a Chippy/kebab shop and three doors down from a Chinese takeaway, so if I'm downwind, my clothes will smell of deep-fat fryers. Lovely! No wonder the er, ahem, 'larger ladies' love me!)
I use it mostly for smoking cigarettes on. From where I am, I can see where the Chinese takeaway's outside bog is, and so I can hear when one of the staff is having a piss. Lovely. I can also hear them arguing with each other in Cantonese quite often. It's a shame I don't understand Cantonese, as the rows sound very entertaining indeed. Maybe it's because of all the old Golden Harvest/Shaw Brothers kung-fu movies I watched in my formative years that I imagine they're insulting each other's fathers, or the younger one is shouting "WHY DID YOU KILL MY TEACHER?!! WHY?!WHY?!WHY?!WHY?!!" I know it's not really the case, but one of of them does look a bit like Sammo Hung, so you never know. They're more likely to be shouting "WHY'S THAT CHUBBY BASTARD UP THERE EVERY TIME I GO FOR A PISS?! WHY?!WHY?!WHY?!WHY?!"
Also, behind the flat is a Catholic primary school, so if I'm home during the day having a fag, I feel naughty as a teacher might be watching me and itching to shout at me. (Saying that though, I'm kinda used to having a primary school teacher shout at me. Did I ever tell you what my ex does for a living?) She's probably pointing at me through the windows of her classroom and saying to her class,"See that man over there in the Daredevil T-shirt with the cigarette? That's what will become of you if you don't study harder!" The thing is, she's probably right.

Boards don't hit back.

Being as busy as I am these days with eating, working, eating, sleeping, eating and eating, I never get the time to watch new films. I rarely rent new DVDs because of this. I can take the kids to the cinema, but if the film I want to watch is 15 certificate or above, it means sorting out babysitters and that gives my arse headache.
What normally happens is that I see a film I want to watch for £3 in Music Zone (which, funnily enough has less and less music in it every time I go in), so I'll buy it. Last Saturday I saw Ong-Bak in the sale for £2.97. I'm a big fan of Martial Arts movies, ever since I was about eight and allowed to stay up to watch Enter The Dragon on the telly by my Dad, who was a big Bruce Lee fan, and wanted me to see what all the fuss was about. I saw what all the fuss was about. I was knackered at school the next day though, and got told off for yawning.
When I say Martial Arts films, I mean the proper ones from Hong Kong, not Jean-Claude Van-Damme, Chuck Norris or Steven Seagal, or the American efforts of Jackie Chan or Jet-Li.(Hollywood has a tendency of squeezing all the energy and talent out of talented easterners- Jackie Chan, John Woo, Chow Yun-Fat, Jet-Li, Sammo Hung. Ang Lee sort of saved himself with Brokeback, but it was looking dodgy for a while after Hulk. Bruce Lee's career died after his American debut Enter The Dragon, but only because he did as well.) Many an evening or afternoon during my formative years was spent watching Project A, or Armour of God or Police Story (All classic Jackie) or Once Upon a Time In China or Fist Of Legend (Jet) or loads of shitty but still enjoyable chop-socky movies starring either Yuen Biao, Cynthia Rothrock, Sammo Hung and Michelle Yeoh, or combinations of them all.
Since Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the martial arts movie has had a bit of a renaissance, with Hero, House Of Flying Daggers, Kung-Fu Hustle and Ong-Bak.
I finally got round to watching Ong-Bak at the weekend after wanting to watch it for ages. It is awesome. Finally, there is a worthy heir to Bruce Lee's vacant throne in Tony Jaa. The man moves like a hyperactive monkey. His style is Muay Thai, (or kickboxing to you and me) so he uses his elbows and knees as weapons rather than his feet or fists, and his fight scenes and stunts make Jackie Chan look like Mollie Sugden. The film also has a lot to say about the rape of Thailand's history to find antiquities to sell to western Buddhists, and the unwelcome side of the tourist boom. See it.
I've posted a clip from a chase scene, which has been re-edited and re-scored for some strange reason, but even in this diluted form it's still phenomenal.

The One-Armed Draughtsman.

Generally, it's not been a good week. I somehow managed to royally fuck my left arm up at work. I couldn't lift my hand to wipe my sweaty brow. (I had no problem wiping lower parts of my body, thankfully.) My shoulder just gave way on Tuesday, and so for the rest of the week I was an arm cripple. It seemed to be getting better yesterday, but the bastard is giving me no end of gyp again today. My appreciation of Def Leppard's Rick Allen and Doctor Who's Davros has increased twofold.
The weather isn't helping, either. I think I might have said before that I hate the hot weather. I hate sweating. It's against my religion. It makes me wear shorts so I resemble a cast member of It Ain't Half Hot, Mum. I was shopping with my family today in a big trading park near here and caught sight of my own reflection. It was a man who shouldn't really be wearing shorts wincing as he rubs his crippled shoulder. It was a reflection that shouted "Somebody's Old Dad!" at me.