How often have you visualised dropping your pants and showing your arse to the gathered crowd at your ‘leaving’ presentation, or maybe that’s just my own private and personal fantasy, but bare with me for a moment. The message quoted verbatim below was sent by one happy worker at JPMorgan as his parting shot. The message was apparently sent to a huge number of senior and middle management, names people allegedly still working for the firm, and included the CEO.

Dear Co-Workers and Managers,

To those who I have held a great relationship with, I will miss being your co-worker and will cherish our history together. Please don’t bother responding as at this very moment I am most likely in my car doing 85 with the windows down listening to Biggie.

Let’s just hope he never needs a reference

During a recent spontaneous flush of adventurous spirit the current Mrs G and I decided to take the Bentley out for a run in the country for a spot of pub lunch.

Fancy a spin in the country for a bite to eat and a pint of beer, Mrs G? I said with a growing sense of bravado at the thought of such high adventure.

Splendid, absolutely splendid! The current Mrs G responded gleefully; swept along as she was with the thought of such romance and danger.

We naturally logged a generalised route and expected time of return at our local police station; one can never be too careful when venturing out and off the beaten track. Mrs G and I have both watched ‘Deliverance’. Country folk, whilst appearing quaint from a distance, often have a distinct air of inbreeding and lack of personal hygiene which only becomes obvious when you have to get closer to them.

Undaunted by the concerns and dire warnings of friends and neighbours we set off, the Bentley purring gently as we passed along leafy lanes, the smell of farmyard animals (and probably locals too) drifting in through the slightly open windows. We passed farms, their cobbled courtyards littered with strangely medieval looking equipment presumably designed to be pulled behind horses, and groups of ruddy looking youths in utilitarian clothing. We passed ponds, the ducks scattering as we swept past, and fields of animals inexplicably all facing in the same direction. The countryside was even stranger than I remembered it from my only previous visit some thirty years earlier. I seem to remember overhearing my father talking once in hushed tones of a cousin who moved to the countryside when I was only very young; behaviour that could have wrought shame on us all.

We were now miles from civilization, but the directions I had been given by a close, if somewhat odd, friend and regular frequenter of the outdoors held true, and we soon drew up outside the pub he had recommended. The faint smell of manure only seemed to get stronger as we swung open the heavy iron studded door and stepped into the dimly lit interior. The current Mrs G held my arm a little tighter and stepped slightly closer as we crossed the few steps to the bar under the silent and watchful eyes of the locals. “Lunch?” I mumbled almost apologetically to the large rosy cheeked barmaid who leaned forward placing hands the size of ham hocks on the bar as we approached.

“Do you have a reservation?” She replied sweetly. The room seemed to suddenly become brighter, less foreboding. Those people already seated at the tables seemed less like the warty, muck stained individuals one might expect to meet in the outdoors, and more like normal people; stock brokers and bank managers; professional white collar types, people who knew with some certainty who their parent were. This was, it turned out, a ‘gastropub‘, no longer the haunt of Mellors the gardener so beloved of Lady Chatterley. No longer the haunt of the broad backed, sun darkened farm hand; locals could no longer afford to live in the country. This pub was now the territory of the wonnabe Michelin Star chef.

So what did we settle for? The current Mrs G had the Steamed Salmon Fillet with Lime and Pepper Butter and a Salade de Pois Chiches (chickpea salad with roasted red peppers and cumin vinaigrette) and for myself the Agneau Chapvallon and a Topinambours en Daube. All very nice but not quite what we had planned when we set off to sample the delights of traditional English pub food; if such a thing exists anymore.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to visit the countryside every day, it’s untidy and above all it smells, but it would be nice just once in a while to be able to go there and eat real English food. Perhaps it can still be found in places like ‘the North’ but I have no intention of every setting foot there. It’s simply not safe. The countryside of southern England offers quite enough thrill and mystique for the current Mrs G and me.

Nice to know that the god fearing folk of Petersburg Kentucky now have a brand new $25 million dollar privately funded natural history museum. But wait this is America (or land of the dumb-fucks as I like to think of it) so a wander around these exhibits and you’ll soon spot some pretty fundamental differences between this and most other museums. For this is a ‘creationist’ museum. For those of you who don’t know ‘creationists’ believe that the earth is only around 6,000 years old, evolution did not happen, that God created the earth, universe basically everything in just 6 days. We didn’t evolve from more primitive ancestors, the Grand Canyon and all other geological features were created in an instant, and oh yes – you’ll love this one, that we shared this earth with the dinosaurs in peace and harmony in the days following the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. Indeed Noah took them with him in the Ark. And there was me thinking it was only the silly old Unicorn that missed out on a place on the world cruise. Noah by the way also invented wine and lived to the ripe old age of 950, he was already 600 years old when God tipped him off about a spot of bad weather headed his way.

I was going to attempt to make light of the utterly preposterous notion of creationism until I started to dig a little deeper, no paleontological pun intended, only to find how wide spread this believe is in the US. Only a few weeks ago three Republican presidential candidates said they do not believe in evolution, and polls suggest that about half of Americans agree. Half for fuck sake! They dismiss the scientific theory that all beings have a common ancestor, believing instead that God created humans in one glorious stroke. Similar numbers of people say the world’s age should be counted in the thousands of years, not billions, as established science would have it. For the record, mainstream scientists currently estimate the age of the Earth at about 4.5 billion years, but don’t try telling that to Ken Ham, an Australian-born evangelist and former high school science teacher who heads Answers in Genesis, the organization behind the Creationist Museum. Strangely enough Ham was one of Noah’s sons, not our Ken Ham, but the father of Canaan who Noah cursed to eternal slavery for seeing him laying naked in his tent after a particularly heavy night on the newly invented vino.

However I digress (as usual) so back to the lunacy that is creationism. Like I say I was going to try to lampoon this utterly farcical notion until I realised how prevalent it is in the US. Now I’m just shocked. No actually I’m afraid, because these people are not just your average loonies, they hold positions of power and authority (no change there I hear you cry), they teach our children for God sake!

So who cares what they think. I do because it is this blind determination to either ignore or selectively interpret genuine research to suit a hard-line fundamentalist religious belief that will strike fear into the very heart and soul of any scientist. How long before these dangerously deluded individuals hold the purse-strings of colleges, universities and research institutes?

How long before the creationists, and other believers in the literal truth of the Bible, use the Curse of Ham, you remember it was his son Canaan who saw Noah in the buff, to once again justify racism and the enslavement of people of African ancestry, who were thought to be descendants of Ham (often called Hamites), either through Canaan or his older brothers. How long before they persecute and drive genuine science and research out in favor of the ‘approved’ creationist view of what is and is not acceptable?

John Morris, president of the Institute for Creation Research in San Diego, an organization that promotes creationism, said the museum will affirm the doubts many people have about science, namely the notion that man evolved from lower forms of life.

“Americans just aren’t gullible enough to believe that they came from a fish” he said.

No John, almost half of them are way more fucking gullible than that.

I read an article recently in the Economist stating that the good people of Luxembourg glug more than 15.5 litres of alcohol per person in a year, more than any other country on earth. Quite an astonishing fact given the enormous popularity of binge-drinking in this country, indeed the current Mrs. G and I often wander down to our local town centre of a Saturday evening to indulge in a little of it ourselves. Mrs. G and I find the antics of the gangs of short-skirted, white stiletto wearing trollops particularly amusing. A little hesitant at first we were soon ‘necking back’ the sweet sherry like there was no tomorrow. Indeed the hangover Mrs. G and I experienced the following morning as we awoke in the next door neighbours hedge plastered in our own vomit made us wish that there had been no tomorrow. Mrs. G looked a frightful mess, her hair and make-up reminiscent of Robert Smith (lead singer of post-punk band The Cure), mind you I was hardly in any position to point the finger as I myself had managed to quite literally have been dragged backwards through several hedges and had lost one shoe and both socks at some point during the evenings revelry.

But I digress, back to our wayward European chums the Luxembourgers. Not even a real country Mrs. G has just informed me but a Grand Duchy. “The worlds only sovereign Grand Duchy it has the highest GDP (Gross Domestic Product) per capita on earth” she said looking sternly over the top rim of her spectacles. So who came second in the poll of the inebriated; Ireland of course, but that was only to be expected. Britain, we managed a measly 10^th and the United States with all her industrial and economic might could only manage a pathetic 40^th place. Mrs. G and I will at least be able to take some comfort from the fact that if the ‘Armageddon Button’ is ever pressed it will be pressed by a sober idiot rather than a drunken one. Didn’t Luxembourg declare war on America once and actually win? I can just imagine the entire population of Luxembourg staggering home after yet another drunken night out and invading France to buy up all the kebabs.

Luxembourg’s motto is “Mir wëlle bleiwe wat mir sinn” which translates as “We wish to remain what we are” (pissed I assume).

I was talking with a friend the other day about cockney rhyming slang and that got me to thinking about Mockneys (a portmanteau of mock and cockney) and the fact that Cockney terms and phrases have over the last few years gained a new lease of life or at least “hipness” following the release of a number of Brit flicks, such as Filthy Beast, Lock Stock & 2 Smoking Barrels, etc. The director of the latter, Mr. Guy Madonna, is probably one of the most famous mockneys of them all. One of the others is of course Nigel Kennedy. Someone who on the face of it had a fairly privileged upbringing in Brighton and studied at the Yehudi Menuhin School, under Yehudi Menuhin himself no less. He at least has had the decency to relocate himself to obscurity in Poland; a county, so backward that it has yet to invent money. Nigel, it should be noted, did for a while prefer to be addressed simply as Kennedy. That for me puts him in the same group of self obsessed pretentious celebs as Cher and the artist formally known as Prince; an individual so devoid of talent that I would only pay him a visit if he held a free concert next door in order to ask him to keep the noise down.

Never one to miss the opportunity to pour vitriol on the Oliver boy I was going to add him to my list of Mockneys. But Jamie Oliver, whose dumbed-down mockneyed accent clashes violently with the cut-glass Home Counties diction of both his parents, is in fact something even worse. He is not even a mockney but a Faux Essex-Boy. He might be a real diamond geezer to some but to me he will always be a right Ravi (as in Ravi Shanka)

In the words of Mr Kennedy, sorry Kennedy, “Monster!”

I read a line in an article by Tom Parker Bowles today that had me sitting with my head held in my hands in sheer disbelief.  Tom said, and I quote

Posh restaurants match each course of your meal to a glass of wine.  Why should your barbecue be any different? 

Well Tom let me explain. For a start, the last time I was at the ‘Ivy’ I don’t remember the sommelier saying

May I recommend the pint of larger with the wild Scottish halibut poached with hollandaise?

There is a reason for that. It’s simple really, a barbecue, why people insist on writing BBQ I’ll never know, is not and has never been about fine dining. A barbecue is about standing around an open fire eating meat and drinking beer. (Glass of white wine or fruit based cocktail for the ladies, beer for the men). It’s not about delicately flavoured appetizers and courses. I’m not saying that it’s about food which is at the same time burnt and raw, something that only a man could actually achieve and worse still be amazingly proud of. It’s about meat; burgers, ribs, sausages, steak. Only Australians are stupid enough to put fish, or worse still, shellfish on barbecues. People from Mediterranean countries also tend to try to cook non-meat things on barbecues but they don’t really know any better and so can be forgiven for that. Please don’t make the barbecue into an outdoor dinner party.

I once went to a barbecue where the food was cooked in an old Silver Cross Pram (a pram is a baby carriage for any North Americans out there) and the salad dished up in a plastic washing up bowl. Strangely enough I wasn’t offered a choice of wine with my meal. Actually I wasn’t even offered a knife and fork. Perfect!

Is it just me or are others perplexed by the rise and rise of the so called Celebrity Chef? What exactly is a celebrity chef anyway? I don’t know the answer to that question but I do know that for the most part I can’t stand them. The BBC Food website describes one of my particular favourites; Ainsley Harriott, as the

charismatic, larger-than-life presenter of BBC Two’s Ready Steady Cook

Well I would describe him as a buffoon and you know what he looks rather to me like he might just be prone to dribbling.

The site goes on to describe Antony Worrall Thompson actually Henry Antony Cardew Worrall Thompson; known fondly as AWT or Wozza (apparently), as

a restaurateur and TV chef. He presented Saturday Kitchen and was a regular guest chef on Ready Steady Cook

Well for a start Wozza you have way more names than is good for anyone and a beard. A beard! Now don’t get me wrong I am not against beards in their right place, Father Christmas, odd looking ladies in the circus freak show, etc; but not on someone involved in the preparation of food.

I have one more celebrity, Gary Rhodes, to discuss before I get on to the most obviously evil of all personalities Jamie Oliver. Gary’s biography states that

more than any other chef, Gary Rhodes has reinvigorated British cooking with his own modern twist on the traditional

 For a start Gary your sixty eight years old – get a proper hair cut. For me Gary typifies the pretentiousness of the celebrity chef. I just don’t like the way he handles the food, hunching over it like some wizened crow. And why oh why do they all place one thing on top of the other making a kind of culinary Tower of Babel, attempting to cover as little of the plate as they can. A bit like Gary’s own hair style really pilled high on his head taking up as little surface area on his head as possible. It must be a miracle of a balancing act to get the plate to the table without the three foot high meal toppling over. How do you eat it, stick your fork in and shout ‘Timber!’ I guess.

Last but no means least Jamie Oliver – where do I begin. His biography describes him as

The hottest young star of TV cookery programmes, Jamie Oliver has wowed all generations of food lovers with his fresh, no-nonsense cooking style and his inspiring recipes.  The first series featuring Jamie cooking was the Naked Chef. Viewers were treated to a glimpse into his world, zipping about London on a scooter and hosting parties for all of his friends, all to a rock’n'roll soundtrack. The food was reassuringly hearty, but not too fiddly, and Jamie always seemed to have his hands full of fresh herbs and olive oil. It was an overnight success, attracting an audience that wouldn’t normally watch food programmes. The book that accompanied the series became a bestseller and the young chef, always fully clothed, was catapulted into the limelight

 I’m with Al Murray (aka The Pub Landlord) when he said that if you ever find yourself driving around London and you see someone on a scooter knock them down because ‘you never know it might just be the Oliver boy…‘ Jamie is a twat a word that is defined by many as ‘One who behaves in a childish, extroverted manner to the annoyance of others‘. Anyone who would call a child Daisy Boo or Poppy Honey and uses the word ‘pukka’ over and over again is worthy of all forms of derision. His biography mentions inspiring recipes. If you follow the link ‘Try some of Jamie’s Recipes‘ on his biography page the only thing you are presented with is, wait for it, ‘Tasty fish bake’. Truly inspired – pukka!

Oh yes one last thing what the **** is a Jus.

Now I must admit I am not a fan of Elvis Presley (aka The King) but I do love a good Elvis impersonator. I say good; but I don’t actually mean good. I really mean bad; in fact the worse the better. So what makes a good (bad) Elvis? A number of things really, firstly they must think that they are the worlds best, they must be over-weight (even for the Vegas Elvis), they must be the sort of person who finds it necessary to lie about their age in their publicity material, they must always wear a white rhinestone encrusted jump-suite that has a collar with the wingspan of a small commercial jet, they must under no circumstances sound too like Elvis. It is a positive advantage however to be Chinese, Afro-Caribbean, Welsh, or suffer with achondroplasia.

I would now like to recount an almost perfect performance by one gentleman at my works social club who billed himself as ‘Elvis Previously’, although what he is now god alone knows. We sat at our allotted table, my friends and I, anticipation mounting as the band played the first few bars of his opening number. No sign of Mr Previously. The band repeated the intro; still no sign. The crowd shuffled nervously in their seats glancing quizzically at their neighbours. A few muffled coughs rose from the front as the fog from two smoke machines at the back of the stage drifted alarmingly into the hall almost completely obscuring the tables nearest to the stage. As the band struck up the sixth repeat of the intro he burst onto the stage; a bloated apparition in rhinestones and skin tight white satin and promptly fell flat on his face in the dense yellowish smog. Gasps from the audience were quickly replaced by cheers as some wag from the table behind ours shouted “Ladies and Gentlemen, Elvis has left the building.” It was as if he had bounced as he hit the floor he was up so quick and without so much as a pause for breath slammed straight into ‘Viva Las Vegas’ one of the mandatory numbers for any Elvis impersonator worth his salt. How he got up I will never know. His suite was so tight every movement must have been agony, at one point I actually thought he might explode. This was going to be special.

As he clumped around the stage in a pair of white stack healed shoes that looked like he had owned them since the mid-seventies the crowd cheered. Mr Previously warmed to the challenge, threw caution to the wind and began to try to swivel his aging hips. Either that or he was being electrocuted or having some form of fit. The crowd couldn’t have cared less, one group even rushed to the dance floor – not a wise move considering the amount of artificial smoke that was being pumped into the hall. Visibility was rapidly dropping to below 15 feet, something had to be done. To the strains of ‘Love me Tender’ someone cut power to the smoke machines (and briefly the microphone) and flung open the large double doors at the side of the hall. The huge mushroom cloud must have been visible for miles as the air in the hall slowly cleared. We could now see each others tear streaked faces. Tear streaked in my case not from the smoke but from laughter at the antics of the incomparable ‘Elvis Previously’.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Elvis has definitely left the building……..

In philosophy of mind, zombies are hypothetical persons who lack full consciousness but behave otherwise just like other people. They are referred to as philosophical zombies or “p-zombies”.So were to start this strange tale of the un-dead. At the beginning I suppose, for as Maria said in the Sound of Music

let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start’

Last week-end my wife asked me to do some additional bits of shopping that she had missed the day before. Although, I must say judging by the pile of stuff that she managed to drag home it looked pretty much to me like we had at least one of every item our local supermarket had on its shelves. Having examined the couple of dozen sheets of paper that made up the missing items list I decided to venture forth on foot to an unfamiliar supermarket closer to home than the one she would normally invade. Full of hope I began my walk, the list held firmly in my clenched fist and the instructions ‘don’t buy rotten fruit’ (something that can happen apparently if your inexperienced or not constantly on your guard) still ringing in my ears.

Suddenly, as if from nowhere, a huge hanger-like building rose from the mist, its name spelt out in hundred foot high neon letters perched precariously atop its sweeping arch of a roof. I can now imagine just how the first pilgrims must have felt as they crested that last hill to be confronted with the huge magnificence of Canterbury Cathedral. So feeling a little like a character from Chaucers’ Canterbury Tales I approached the magnificent entrance its slowly opening and closing automatic doors seemed to whisper ‘…come shop, come shop…’. Boldly I selected my trolley from the corral being constantly replenished by the small army of youths who scour the hedgerows and waste ground in a roughly three mile radius to retrieve the lost and abandoned chariots. One brave youth was even venturing out towards the far reaches of the car park, a distance considerably more than three miles; to retrieve what I can only assume was a particularly valuable cart.

It was with a growing sense of anticipation that I pointed my trolley at the entrance, lent slightly forward, and took my first bold steps. As if dragged by some mysterious force I veered to the left. This was going to be more difficult than I thought. I quick adjustment and I set off again. But no, I still could not hit the entrance. I stood perplexed as all those around me swept past into the (for me at least) impenetrable building. I selected another trolley, this time one with four functioning wheels. I was off!

I never imagined that these places sold all kinds of stuff that’s not food! Not surprising really in a building so large it must be visible from space. It was then that I started to notice the people. Everyone shuffling around slack jawed and glassy eyed; strange. As I took my next few steps I felt my own jaw beginning to droop, the life slowly draining from me. My god! It was the music, the soporific relaxation music pumped into the building at almost subliminal levels. I quickly plugged in my iPod, selected a track from The Clash, and woke from the semi-trance as if slapped. Things suddenly seemed brighter, more sharply in focus; but as I wove the curious trolley dance through the shuffling masses I realised that I was completely inappropriately dressed for shopping. I should either have worn a shellsuit (100% polyester, 100% flammable – You know you’re hot!), some form of football kit or roller-skates. “Get your skates on kids we’re going shopping” – a phrase taken quite literally by at least one family. Ah! The huddled masses, the great unwashed, the proletarian salts of the earth and of course the chav. I could see this was going to be fun. The kind of fun you have at the dentist, the kind of fun you have standing in the rain waiting for a bus that isn’t going to arrive, you know the sort.

To be continued…….

Pass the shovel honey: I saw in the paper recently that Mumbai is currently generating 10,000 tons of building rubble per day. In most countries this kind of waste is either used in other construction sites as hard-core or is reprocessed into cinder blocks or other types of building material – not in Mumbai. Here they simply walk it down the road and make a pile of it on some street corner. Mumbai is a very big place, it covers around 170 square miles, but I estimate that at current rate of rubble production the entire city will be about 13 feet deep in the stuff by 2020. The city also produces around 6,000 tons of ‘household’ waste per day, but the citizens of Mumbai have a method for dealing with most of that (but more on that subject later). The other notable thing about construction in Mumbai, well construction workers really, is that at least half of them are women. You also have to admire their sense of tradition for apart from the apparently single one size fits all wellingtons they are all wearing sari’s. When I mentioned the abundance of female construction workers particularly in the continual and seemingly random acts of road maintenance to an Indian colleague she said ‘Oh no, they don’t dig the roads – they just do the fetching and carrying’. Right, I understand now – so they don’t actually do the hard work they just carry 10,000 tons of rubble around in wicker baskets on their heads.

Every day is dustbin day: The poor in Mumbai, there are a lot of them by the way in case you hadn’t already guessed, don’t have their household waste removed they actually have it delivered. They collect large piles of the rotting and stinking stuff right outside of their homes. The adults then pick through the piles removing anything vaguely serviceable. This first pass reduces the piles by approximately 50% and increases the size, robustness or ‘quality’ of the hovel the live in by a similar percentage. The next phase of the treatment system employed to rid Mumbai of its 6,000 tons of daily waste is to turn these piles over to the huge numbers of stray dogs, goats, children and cattle that roam the poorer neighbourhoods. These further reduce the stinking piles by eating anything that cannot be used to build a better shack, and probably many things that could. I didn’t actually see stray children eating plastic or cardboard but I did see goats doing it. Hay, spit that out! I could live in that! So by the end of each day all that remains of the once mighty pile of rubbish you had delivered is a smallish heap of unrecognisable stuff that not even children will eat. Never mind the bin men will drop off another load tomorrow….

And finally: As you head out of Mumbai and into one of its sprawling suburbs along a kind of dual carriage way dotted with random holes and the scars of previous resurfacing efforts you pass through the centre of a shanty town that covers a full square mile. This shanty consists of hundreds if not thousands of single story roughly square dwellings ranging from fairly substantial tin and cardboard homes to small lean-to structures of rotting rags. The shacks sit about ten feet back from the road and this rubble and refuse covered strip is the playground of countless naked children, dogs, goats and cattle. Family groups sits around smouldering camp fires, wash, eat and go to the toilet right next to the busy road. I can only imagine the smell – I didn’t have the courage to wind down the window. But right in the middle of this scene of utter squalor an old lady stoops to sweep the road with a hand brush – why? In any other country on earth the cars passing through this slum, with their affluent western passengers, would be stoned, hijacked, their occupants robbed and murdered – not in Mumbai. The strangest thing is that there appears to be no sense of animus. Not even a defeated sense of hopelessness; it is simply what it is. It’s chaotic, random, bureaucratic, wondrous and amazing – quiet the strangest place I have ever been.