Dynargh dhe'n Blogofrob

Tuesday 31st July 2007

From the BBC website today:

Scientists have discovered the first gene which appears to increase the odds of being left-handed.

The Oxford University-led team believe carrying the gene may also slightly raise the risk of developing psychotic mental illness
...

Oh good.

107 - posted at 11:23:50
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Thursday 17th May 2007

Havana (Part two)

Calle Opispo is the bustling, cluttered main street of old Havana. It's lined with shops, paladares, banks, and hotels, including Ambos Mundos. In the hotel, you pass through the marbled lobby, take a ride in the antique cage lift, and head down an anonymous corridor, before arriving at the room where Hemingway lived in the late 1920s and early '30s, writing For Whom the Bell Tolls. Back on ground level, Obispo will also take you past Farmacia Taquechel, an ancient apothecary, where ceramic jars line the dark wooden shelves that stretch to the ceiling and a human skeleton stares out of a glass fronted cabinet.

Other such relics of pre-Castro Cuba are to be found all over the city, but mainly as crumbling artifacts, such as in Vedado, which in Batista's time, and before, was an affluent suburb, to which the huge art-deco and neo-classical villas that sit beside the neighbourhood's streets bear witness. But now, the brickwork is falling away and the walls' bright colours are faded. All the same, our stroll down the tree-lined avenues and around the green spaces was an elegant antidote to the frantic thoroughfares of the old quarter. One such green space is John Lennon park, a patchy area of grass, where a statue of The Mouthy One relaxes on a bench. On examination, I realised that the holes just in front of his ears suggested that there once had been a pair of glasses attached to his face. Before I could mention this to Claire, an old man was at our side, brandishing a round pair of glasses, and CDs for sale, including an album of Beatles tracks, covered by Cuban artists. I bought a copy, and gave him an extra tip. In response he secured the spectacles. Then, after we had taken a couple of photos, thanked him and wandered away, he retreated with the glasses to his own bench, ready for the next tourists in search of Lennon.

Back on Opispo, the end of the street is overshadowed by the dome of the Capitol. We headed up towards it, and there the city opens up, the claustrophobic walls of Old Havana falling away to reveal large and ornate public buildings, with small landscaped parks set amongst wide roads carrying the requisite old American cars, huge truck like buses known as Camiles, and the distinctive yellow Coco-cabs, three wheeled egg-shaped taxis. On the far side, beyond the capital, a Chinese gate looms over the road, marking Chinatown. Nearby is one of the city's cigar factories. We trailed through it on a tour, and I was disappointed to find the rows of workers expertly rolling leaves not to the sound of a man reading the newspaper through a microphone, but to a blaring radio. The guide said we weren't allowed to take photos, but if the flash was off and if we did it subtly he promised to look away.

We took a cab west, up to the dusty Plaza del Revolucion. One side of its large empty expanse is dominated by the towering Jose Marti memorial, around the top of which birds constantly wheel. On the wall of one of the government buildings on the other side, Che Guevara looks out, a blackened steel freize of the famous Korda photo. Today, the space in between resembled a spacious but unused inner city car park. On busier days it trembles under the weight of marching feet and rumbling tanks and echoes with the sound of Fidel's five hour speeches.

Just further up the road, we found the vast Necropolis, where thousands of white stone tombs and memorials jostle for space. We spent a couple of hours exploring the place, finding flower covered graves of supposed miracle workers, wondering at the elaborate family vaults which I imagine provided better living quarters than offered in the city, and being asked the time by groundsmen. We were constantly being asked the time. I decided that this may have been either because many people didn't have watches, or they just wanted to practice their English. The Necropolis was still very much in use, and while we were there at least three hearses dropped off their contents. A typical funeral procession consisted of the hearse, followed by a motorbike and sidecar, then an open backed truck with a dozen mourners in the back, and finally a spluttering Lada, again packed with people.

We spent about 5 days in Havana. As a city so full of colour, noise and friendliness, but also carrying the weight of its recent history and the endless propaganda of both sides, it is of course, ultimately perplexing. Especially, when the music does stop. We looked up from yet another mojito to find the band had discarded their instruments and were eagerly crowding around the windows. We joined them to watch a couple of policemen laying into a skinny rickshaw driver. One worked his stomach, while the other caught the man's bare heels with his boot, toppling the unfortunate onto his back.

106 - posted at 17:43:16
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Friday 11th May 2007

Inexplicably, given that they're vermin seen all around the city, there's been some doubt cast upon my assertion that a family of foxes has taken up residence under the garden shed. So I thought I'd better post a picture of one of the little buggers, which is grainy and out of focus, in the tradition of the best Sasquatch photos.

A Little Fox

105 - posted at 09:26:40
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Thursday 3rd May 2007

Well, I feel awful this morning. An insistent headache, burrowing its way around the back of my head into my right eye, and a growing sense of nausea that will no doubt blossom into a couple of dry retches later on.

I deserve it though: not because of the bottle and a half of wine I put away last night, but because once again I made an utter jerk of myself in front of someone well known whose work I highly rate.

A few of us went to Adam Buxton's Out of Focus Group Comedy Night at the Zetter. I've been a couple of times before, and it's a consistently good night, but yesterday's was the best yet. Adam Buxton always makes me laugh a lot, even when he's doing stuff that doesn't work so well - but there was no sign of that yesterday, just very funny chatty stand up and some excellent videos. Stephen Merchant also rocked up to deliver some solidly amusing material, although Jim's point that "condom jokes are, like, so 1980s" may have some validity.

Jo Neary and Tony Law were also on stage. Tony Law's first set featured some inspired (but not laugh out loud) stream of consciousness surrealism that reminded me of some of Noel Fielding's stuff on The Mighty Boosh - however his second set, featuring an ex-city boy who had left the rat race to become an ultimate fighter-cum-poet was hilarious. Although there was a lot of wine swilling round my belly and brain by then.

This swillage explains why I once again broke my rule of never approaching talented artists. I had a very brief chat with Adam Buxton, and it was like Lou Rhodes and Johnny Morris all over again, in that I did almost all of the talking, gibbering away like some inbred cretin, he looked vaguely worried and I wandered away cursing myself. The frustration I felt at breaking the rule was exacerbated by Adam's well-intended but poorly disguised fake laugh at some particularly weak comment of mine. But, hold the fucking front page, I did get a perhaps exclusive! Possibly, although maybe not, no more Xfm work for Adam & Joe. Which is a real shame, as they were a very high point on a station which seems to be sliding into the doldrums.

My hangover was softened slightly this morning. I heard some vulpine chirruping in the garden at around 6:30. I stood for a while watching the four fox cubs who live under the garden shed running, jumping, wrestling and pestering the vixen. They are adorable, and seem to have resisted the temptation to shit all over the decking. Apparently, people tell me, they can get to be a nuisance. I assume this is when they get a bit bigger and more brazen, nose their way through the catflap and run riot through the flat, hiding the remote controls and leaving the lights on etc. Even so, I am worried by my increasingly psychotic landlady's intention to get the council in to kill them. Hopefully it'll slip her slippery mind. She claims to be a Buddhist, but I don't think there is anything particularly dharmic about wiping out an entire family, in a horrific orgy of blood caked brushes, severed limbs and uncomprehending brown eyes asking why? before being put out by Camden Council's Murder Unit.

104 - posted at 10:18:27
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Wednesday 18th April 2007

Havana (Part one)

Casting my mind back to October and November 2005:

We followed the driver out of the chaotic arrivals hall, to the minibus outside. A surge of childish excitement grabbed me as I noticed a battered 1950s Chevrolet parked up beside it. So far, so Cuba.

Except that it was cold. And drizzly. The edge of Hurricane Wilma had brushed the western part of the island a few days before and the weather remained inclement. We drove through the darkness into Havana, and I had the strange sensation that we were entering a city underwater. I peered through the windows and caught glimpses of cars splashing by, shadowy buildings and figures under umbrellas, some of whom appeared to be carrying large decorated birthday cakes.

We turned into a small side street and found our hotel. Like many buildings, its windows were crossed with tape as a hurricane defence. In our room I fumbled with convertible pesos to tip the guy who had insisted on bringing our bags up to the room. It was to be the first of many such fumblings. Only in the States have I been more conscious of the need to tip, although in Cuba it seemed somehow more valid (although paying toilet attendants for a couple of sheets of loo paper may be an exception). We turned on the rattling fan. Then we turned it off again and headed down to the simple bar attached to the hotel. Under very high ceilings we were served mojitos from the heavy wooden bar, embellished with wrought iron. A four man band, all dressed in white, sang at us.

In Havana the mojitos are lovely. I have no taste for them in London - too much crushed ice, various types of over-fizzy and/or acidic mixer, in which a wash of detritus floats. Here, they are simplicity in a glass: sugar mixed with lime juice, a sprig of mint, soda, rum and a couple of ice cubes.

The following morning we woke to a still wet Havana. The narrow cobbled street outside reflected the sky. We stepped out of the hotel, avoiding a crocodile of school-children. Within a minute we were at the cathedral, a small pockmarked old building from whose recesses odd clumps of weeds sprout. From here we started wandering Havana's old quarter, a portrait of narrow streets, dotted with squares and filled with gently crumbling buildings. That day I grew tired of the wind and the rain, but in the days that followed, the sun emerged and the old quarter's colourful streets were illuminated. The brilliant sunshine swam over tall balconied tenements, covered in washing and bird cages. It fell on the chattering red-scarved schoolchildren, bustling Havanans, beggars and invalids, countless stray dogs, white-clad Santeros, a policeman on a street corner chewing a cigar, and everywhere, cigar hawkers and buskers ready to pursue you. Actually, pursue is the wrong word, although we were followed enthusiastically down the street by a couple of men, one with a guitar, the other with maracas. We had to submit, be serenaded and tip.

Music is everywhere. Almost every bar or restaurant we popped into in Havana had a band, who, after playing a few numbers, circulated amongst the drinkers and diners flogging CDs or simply asking for a few convertible pesos. I did get the feeling that perhaps that Ry Cooder's exercise in cinematic onanism, The Buena Vista Social Club, has affected these bands' repertoire. We kept hearing the same songs, and were often stopped in the street by hawkers promising to show us the Buena Vista Social Club, "where the Cubans go."

"Hawkers" also doesn't seem quite the right word: we were approached again and again by Havanans. Whether it was men simply murmuring "cigar" as we passed, caricaturists presenting us with a likeness they had just furtively scribbled, or people pushing tours of the city by horse drawn carriage, I was struck by the difference to the hawking that goes on in, for example, China or South East Asia. In Havana there is none of the relentless and cynical drive for the tourist dollar that occurs elsewhere. Some just approach for a chat. One day, as we were walking up to the Museum of the Revolution (where gun-toting waxworks of Fidel, Che and Camilo Cienfuegos burst through plastic bushes) a man caught up and accompanied us for a while. My heart sank in contemplation of what we were to have to politely but firmly turn down. But he just wanted to talk and, a few minutes later, waved us goodbye and headed in another direction.

Similarly, on a sunny afternoon we were sitting on the sea wall that runs along the Malecon, looking out at the Caribbean. I noticed two or three men lolling in the arcade of a broken down old house on the other side of the road, idly strumming guitars. Becoming aware of my attention, they wandered over with their instruments. After giving us the obligatory tune, I gave them the obligatory tip and changed some dollars into pesos for one of them. And then, they stuck around for while longer, just chatting.

I mentioned horse drawn carriages. We did take one, climbing on board in the lively Plaza del San Francisco, and glided down the road past the Havana Club distillery we had visited a couple of days previously and a bar next door to it, called The Two Brothers. Our guide told us it served the best mojitos in town. We went there later, and he had a point. But he knew what he was talking about. He lived over the water in the more industrial area of Havana, where he had a job as an engineer, but the one job wasn't enough to support his family and he supplemented his income carting the likes of Claire and me around. He had a healthy scepticism for the way Cuba was being run, and willingly pointed out the actual ferry that had been hijacked a couple of years previously by would-be defectors, noting with disapproval that the hijackers had been executed. We also chatted about music - he had been to see the Manics gig when they were in town. Had he enjoyed it? He hadn't heard of them beforehand, but liked them a lot. Then again, he said the same about Simply Red.

We clopped around Habana Vieja, past the train station, the old Barcardi building and the Floridita - another place where we later found ourselves drinking, alongside the lifesize statue of Hemingway, which leans against the bar. It's good to know there's at least one person waiting for a drink who won't get served before you. Perhaps the most eye-opening part of the tour was when we hopped off the carriage and were led through a local meat market, where the prices were all in regular pesos. The shed was full of punters and butchers. On the tables piles of red meat sat in the sweltering heat. Flies happily buzzed around and a couple of stray dogs sat under the tables, blissfully chewing hunks of flesh.

The stray dogs, by the way, are mostly inoffensive. They are all over Havana. On our first day we visited a series of squares in Old Havana, including Plaza Del Armas, which has a small park in the middle (complete with obligatory statue of Jose Marti), very green in the damp air. We were sheltering from the rain in the porticoed ground floor of a building, contemplating browsing the second-hand book stalls that line the square. A stray temporarily adopted us, sitting a few feet away, and then followed at a respectful distance as we nosed around the square. He soon lost interest and trotted off, as light a touch as the hawkers.

103 - posted at 00:55:42
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