I’m getting ready to travel to Japan next month. I’m fascinated by Japan and its modern history. Well, at least its modern history from 1947 onwards, if you know what I mean. I’ve been looking around to see what sights are worth seeing, and I think I’ve found a few. See what you think.

First of all, there’s the International Godzilla Observatory at Naha, Okinawa. It’s a bit off the beaten track but it does have the highest number of confirmed Godzilla sightings in the entire Japanese archipelago, and to be honest, going to Japan and not seeing Godzilla would be a bit like visiting Loch Ness and not seeing the alcoholic inbreds. Or Nessie. Apparently there’s a great Godzilla museum and visitor’s centre nearby with lots of interactive exhibits where you can trample over badly constructed cardboard cities. It should be easy to pick up some souvenirs there too, like models and toys etc. After all, I regularly receive emails telling me where I can buy a 12 inch Cockzilla at a bargain price (I think Cockzilla is one Godzilla’s enemies, even though I can’t find him mentioned anywhere on the Internet Movie Database)

More central is the newly-opened Japan National Museum of Robots Wearing Schoolgirl Uniforms in Nagoya. This state of the art facility combines two of Japan’s more recent contributions to international culture. I’m hoping to catch a sight of Shizuka Fujioka who was recently appointed an Ambassador of Cute and promotes the culture of grown women wearing schoolgirl uniforms in the west. So that makes it all right then.

Shizuka Fujioka. She's an ambassador and everything

Finally, and perhaps most poignantly, there’s the International Friendship Centre for Devastated Industries at Hiroshima. This beautifully designed museum contains many (often harrowing) images from western companies that were destroyed by the Japanese economic boom of the 60s and 70s. The displays devoted to British Leyland are supposed to be so moving that you emerge from the museum in tears, shaking your head and muttering “Never Again.” Closed Tuesdays.

Well, that’s what’s on the Agenda so far. Perhaps you have some ideas?

If there are any regular readers left of this blog they will have noticed a distinct lack of activity lately. The posts have been coming much less frequently and they’ve been even worse than before. Frankly, as we say in Scotland, The Earl of Hell’s Waistcoat has been on a shoogly peg.

I’ve enjoyed writing the blog over the last year or so, but I’ve come to the point where, if I’m going to continue with this blogging lark I think it makes sense to keep a blog that covers a specific theme instead of jumping from Mars Bars Suppers to Stripping Italian Housewives, passing obscure 80s Heavy Metal Bands on the way.

So I’ve decided to start a blog about Italy and Italian Culture. It’ll be probably be different from this blog: the posts will be shorter, but (hopefully) more frequent. The idea will be simply to share some stuff that I run into over here and may not be widely known outside of Italy. I’ve just started it, it’s called Spootfish and I hope to see you over there in the future.

I haven’t decided what I’ll do with this blog yet, but I don’t think I’ll be posting much here in the foreseeable future. So in case i do delete it, let me thank everyone who has posted a comment on it: I’ve enjoyed this year or so of blogging, and I’ve always enjoyed the comments part more than the writing part.

Buggeration! I’ve just put my Twitter Feed into this Hetero Calculator produced by the Stockholm Pride folks and it’s trying to tell me that I’m 33% Hetero! Me! Analyzing the results, it seems that the words that knocked my score down include bugger, shop, rainbow, flower and brilliant. Hmm, it seems that this Tweet from a couple of weeks back may have done a lot of damage:

Bugger me it’s hot today

Dammit, I was just saying it was hot! I wasn’t really inviting people to bugger me! If I were going to do that I would at least have left my telephone number, can’t they see that?!? In the future, I’m going to have to watch what I say; perhaps I should start using more homely asexual expressions such as “Blow me down!” or “Shiver my Timbers!” Actually, come to think of it, I don’t think Blow me Down will help my cause much, and Shiver my timbers if anything sounds worse; I don’t like the idea of anyone making my timbers shiver, to be honest.

No, this needs a dedicated action plan with timings (*opens Excel*). In order to bump that score up a bit, I’m going to make a few changes to my Twitter account, such as

1. Posting tweets during football matches (come on Celtic, this shower are pish!)
2. Using words such as knockers, jugs, jahoobies and gazongas much more frequently
3. Following Ted Nugent

That should do the trick. I bet I wouldn’t have the same score if it was calculated on this blog, with all its post on 80s Heavy Metal bands. After all, what coould be more heterosexual than listening to Manowar (below)?

I can’t think of anything to blog about. Nothing. Nada. Hee-Haw.

This has never stopped me posting lame muck before of course, but at this point I really can’t think of anything that I want to sit down and write a post about. There’s no real reason for it: I’m busy at work, but isn’t everyone? Maybe this blog has reached the end of the line and it’s time to close the doors and start something new.  So I thought in the meantime, I’d take a look in the Drafts Folder and post the stuff that I started but couldn’t finish (yes, I’m writing a post about posts I wasn’t able to write). I reckon you should think of it as a portmanteau post (and definitely not a jumble of ragtag muck that I’ve been too lazy to work up properly).

My Contribution to the Boo Fucking Hoo Literary Genre

This was to have been a post about how, if that Irish bloke can make a fortune out of maudlin rubbish like Angela’s Ashes, then surely I could come up with a similar memoir based on my childhood in the Highlands? I would have presented selected excerpts from Aye, Dad’s Pissing in the Sink Again, describing heartbreaking moments such as having to eat Red Pudding Suppers, watch Cannon &  Ball on TV, and worst of all, go on holidays to Aberdeen. Then I realised that my childhood was probably neither deprived or depraved enough to fill the 300 pages or so I’d need to get on the shelves at Tesco, so I gave up.

Dead Pope’s Society

This was to have been a serious discussion about how I happened to be in Rome on the day the last Pope died and what that was like and how Italy went very weird indeed in the week or two afterward. Then I decided to write this silly crap about my favourite popes from history instead.

Weird Italian Magazines

Walking past a news stand a few weeks back I noticed this magazine on display:

Wow, I thought, a magazine entirely devoted to Wild Boars! Why, I bet it covers them all: brown ones, black ones, tame ones, ornery ones; it’s a magazine that meets all your wild boar needs. Probably worth buying for the recipes for sausages. Then I thought I could get a post about all the weird and wonderful magazines that you find over here. Until I realised that, actually there aren’t that many worth writing about, apart from maybe the ones on wristwatch porn.

Hello there, well we’re coming to the end of another year here at The Earl of Hell’s Waistcoat, which means that I am obliged to ask for feedback on my performance ahead of my annual review. While I appreciate that you’re all busy folk, I’m hoping that you’ll take a minute or two out of your busy schedule to give me some quality and candid 360 degrees feedback that will enable me to maximise my performance next year. The Feedback Form is the same as always and is below:

THE EARL OF HELL’S WAISTCOAT FEEDBACK FORM

FULL NAME: Thumper Charles Edward Stuart Plowman

OVERALL APPRAISAL (What has this person delivered? Is he/she ready to take on additional resposnsibilities? Or should his/her next assignment involve shopping trolleys, the car park and a fluorescent bib?)

…………………………………………………………………………………………………….

…………………………………………………………………………………………………….

…………………………………………………………………………………………………….

…………………………………………………………………………………………………….

A) STRENGTHS: What are his/her 1-2 Key Strengths? (What would you like to see more of from this person? Cheap Nostalgia? Stripping Italian Housewives?)

……………………………………………………………………………………………………..

……………………………………………………………………………………………………..

……………………………………………………………………………………………………..

B) IMPROVEMENT AREA: What is the one thing this person could do to Maximise their Effectiveness? (Stop all that “Over here in Italy…” muck? Remove Mr. H’s blogs from the Blogroll?)

……………………………………………………………………………………………………..

……………………………………………………………………………………………………..

……………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Thanks for taking the time, and remember, for me all Feedback is a gift. And not a Hai Karate Body Talc and After Shave Gift, I mean a proper, Oddbins gift voucher gift.

At the end of last year there were articles in the Italian papers about a couple in northern Italy who wanted to name their baby son Venerdi (”Friday” in Italian), but who were prevented from doing so by a court of appeal. It turns out that in Italy there is a law whereby you can prevent a child being given a certain name if you expect that it will cause the child to be ridiculed. They’ve had to call him Gregorio instead, after the patron saint of his birth date. Fair enough if you ask me, after all, Venerdi sounds like a girl’s name.

There’s certainly no law like that in the UK of course where you can call your kids pretty much what the hell you you like. We would probably consider it to be a disgraceful attack on our civil rights by those barmy bureaucrats of the EC if we weren’t allowed to call our children Pocahontas, Peaches, Fifi Trixabelle or Darren, even if the story about the Scotch child named Pocahontas turned out be an urban myth. When I was living in Brighton (naturally, Brighton), there was a woman living up the road who had named her son Aslan. You know, after the lion in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe? You would hear her calling him in for his tea: “Aslan! Aslan will you get in here now!”

Still there seems to be one law for the rich etc, as the footballer Francesco Totti and his wife have named their daughter Chanel, which, when you combine it with the fact that her elder brother is called Christian, seems to illustrate the points of reference of her parents (I’m not sure whether they’re being named after designers or the fragrances named after the designers, but if the next child is named Hai Karate that should settle the matter).

I’m unlikely ever to have a job with the type of responsibility as the people seen in this video, but I’d like to announce that if I ever do end up like these folk, then the readers of this blog have permission to come after me with a big shovel.

You can buy all forms of shovels at this link.

If there’s one thing you can’t really get away from in Italy, it’s the Catholic church. From Pope lollipops on sale in Rome to pictures of Padre Pio in the smallest provincial bakery, you’re reminded of its presence and importance everywhere. As a godless protestant all this stuff was new and alien to me, but when you dig into the history, it can be fascinating stuff. So I thought it was about time I made a post about some of my favourite Popes.

Formosus (891-96)

Nothing better illustrates the fun to be had in reading about old Popes than the case of Formosus, who was Pope from 891 until his death in 896, and who went on trial in 897. The year after he died. Yup, in what is believed to be the world’s first Monty Python sketch, the ex-Pope was dug up, propped up in court and made to respond to allegations put to him by Pope Stephen IV (not reputed to be his biggest fan) in what has become known as the Cadaver Synod. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Formosus didn’t put up a stellar defence, and after being found guilty of all charges was stripped of his robes and thrown into the Tiber. Beats reading about Robert the Bruce and his spider, eh?

Felix I (269-274)

Felix I is generally regarded as the first cat to be elected Pope, narrowly beating Sylvester I, who was Pope from 314-35. During Felix’s reign, the most popular souvenirs in Rome were paintings of his image with the words “I iz infallibul, duz yu hav a pwoblem wiz dat?” written on them.

Liberius (352-66)

Liberius makes the list for the simple fact that he is the earliest pope not to become a saint after his death, and I love an underdog. It’s not clear why he was the first not to get the old Celestial Knighthood, he seems to have made a lot of bankable contributions: he refused to sign the condemnation of Athanasius, gave a favourable reception to a deputation of the Eastern episcopate, and zzzzzzzzz … OK, OK, he doesn’t sound like the most dynamic go-getter, but he doesn’t come across as the Warren Harding of the Papacy either. Maybe he just forgot to miraculously heal some sick old woman in Basilicata in the years after his death, and it’s too late now.

Adrian IV (1154 – 59)

“Cor Blimey Guv’nor, the English ‘ave only gone and got themselves a bleedin’ Pope!” No doubt that was what they were saying on the streets of London Town when Nicholas Breakspear became the first and only English Pope in 1154. As you can an imagine, the arrival of an English Pope brought many changes in Rome: Dentists were excommunicated, a Papal Edict was issued stating that all meat and vegetables must be boiled for at least 45 minutes before eating and, most controversially, the Swiss Guard were replaced by a group of medieval Boy Scouts in tight-fitting shorts.

Pope Joan (???? – ??)

I first heard of the story of Pope Joan in a BBC documentary by about 10 years ago. Apparently, the story goes, Joan tricked everybody into believing she was male for years and the secret only came out when she died in childbirth. The church was then so horrified that for years afterwards during the papal inaugurations the Pope was supposedly made to sit on a hollow seat and somebody would reach underneath the robes to check he had knackers and.. I know! And this was on BBC 1 too!

So there you go, my list of Top of the Popes, and I didn’t even need to mention the Borgias …

I’m too young to have lived through any really interesting developments in either popular music or cinema. Sure, things have changed since I was 18 back in the late 80s, but not much really, and even the bands of today that I listen to (The White Stripes, Black Mountain, Franz Ferdinand etc) aren’t really doing anything new. At the same time, I realise that I have actually lived through what I think will be remembered in history as the golden age of at least one form of entertainment: video games.

We go back a long way. I remember my brother’s Atari consol back in the late 70s that had Pong (though we called it Tennis; I didn’t know it was called Pong until I saw it called that in an episode of The Simpsons), and I had a handheld Space Invaders console in the mid 80s where a marauding army of 4 (yes, FOUR!) aliens marched towards you. Yet I’ve never been a really big gamer; unlike some of my friends, I didn’t spend entire evenings at high school trying to build up my status on Elite (I spent them listening to Pink Floyd instead),  but I’ve usually had some console or other in the house.

The games I’ve liked the most are the sports simulations, and you can actually illustrate the development of games by looking at how these have evolved over the years. After Pong, the first football game I played was on the Spectrum 48K (a computer with the memory the size of an email) called (I think) Matchday where you could score directly from throw-ins. Then, a while later, Sensible Soccer came along which we thought was really, really sophisticated because you could, like, change formations. Soon though, the developers realised that people might prefer football games where the default view wasn’t that of passing overhead in a zeppelin, and for the last 15 years or so, Fifa and Pro Evolution/ISS have been duking it out and getting increasingly sophisticated. Too sophisticated, maybe, both games have more functions and formations than now I know what to do with; I used to like tweaking things here and there, but these days I tend to just send out the default squads. I wish someone would develop a version for Scottish football fans where the only formation available is 4-4-2, and the tactical options consist of shouting “Man on, Darren!” or “Get intae him, Malkie!” It would be a lot simpler. Maybe I’m just getting old.

One of the things that will eventually die with all this music downloading malarkey is the cheapo compilation. This is a shame as they were an integral part of the record buying experience. Whether we’re talking about 4-LP box sets of James Last’s greatest hits or Top of the Pops albums with bikini-clad girls on the front inviting you in, these audio equivalents of Corgi books were there waiting to cash in on whatever the craze was at the time (my elder brother even once received Hits for a Truck Driving Man as a present at the height of the CB Radio craze; it contained Convoy, Keep on Truckin‘ and … er many other trucking themed hits).

At the start of the 80s, Heavy Metal was bothering the charts so much that it was inevitable that someone was going to step in and rush out a compilation of the best of today’s metal sounds. It was also pretty inevitable that the someone would be K-Tel.

The result was Axe Attack, which advertised itself as a solid collection of the very best in Heavy Metal, and to be fair, most of the big hitters at the time were there: AC/DC, Motorhead, Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Rainbow, Whitesnake etc.  The record achieved this impressive role call by adhering to the classic K-Tel strategy of cramming as many songs onto the record as they could and to Hell with things like sound quality (you get the idea that if they could have, they would have done away with the record label in the middle so they could have squeezed on some Uriah Heep).

It’s easy to laugh at K-Tel, but in the end, this record was probably more influential than any other in introducing Heavy Metal to a new generation of plukey young boys, me among them (actually I was too young even to be plukey; certainly young enough for the line “Well I make a pussy purr with a stroke of my hand” from Ted Nugent’s Cat Scratch Fever to go flying right over my head). Girlschool’s great cover version of Race with the Devil is below.

Today’s post is another one from the 1974 World Cup Sticker Book and celebrates the stunning genetic diversity of the Bulgarian football team, which was the Rainbow Nation of the 1974 World Cup.

All together now: “I’d like to buy the world a coke ..”

I first saw this as part of Victor Lewis Smith’s TV Hell Theme night that was on BBC 2 back in 1992. This was my favorite clip along with the one from senior citizens’ keep fit programme Boomph with Becker (that you can see about 1 minute into this).

I love everything about it: the tattiness of Nationwide’s Manchester studio; the bemused and  thinly-veiled contempt of the presenter; the fact that he has a special outfit for his egg jumping; the fact that he claims to be able to jump on eggs and people’s noses (I can’t imagine who he practiced on – unless he was a PE teacher) and, most of all, his sheer ignorance of how ridiculous he looks. Surely this man didn’t have a wife.

But he probably did. A long-suffering and tolerant one, no doubt, but I’m sure there was a Mrs Egg Jumper indoors, and more over that, away from his egg-jumping activities I’m sure he was a fine, perfectly normal fellow. It’s just that back then, you really needed to do something out of the ordinary to get on TV. If you lived in London there was always the chance you could be interviewed by Esther Rantzen for That’s Life! but if you lived in the sticks your only hope was to catch the eye of Keith Chegwin when Swap Shop rolled into town. Long odds quite frankly, so a surer path to the gogglebox was always going to be something like learning to play the New World Symphony using a rubber hose and a lavatory.

Maybe that’s one reason why YouTube is so popular; it gives these folk Creative Control. In the bad old days, if your talent was to be able to accompany Don’t Stop Me Now by making farting noises with your hands, the best you could hope for was a couple of minutes being patronised by Doc Cox or Michael Barrymore. Now you can have your own channel.

I’m a bit of a gullible devil if I’m honest; I tend to believe most things that are put to me unless the bullshit level is so high that it can’t help but set off the alarm bells. The internet has been a godsend for the gullible though, offering you a quick and easy way to check if that story you heard at work about frozen chickens being used to test jet engines is real or an urban myth (my favourite urban myth by the way is this one). At the same time, there are stories I’ve been told down the years that I don’t have the heart to expose to Mr Google, because I just want them to be true. Such as:

• U.S. Palermo play in their characteristic pink shirts (above) because when they were starting out they played in white but someone put some red clothes in the wash with the shirts by mistake.

• The Spanish town of Yeste is so named because, when the Spanish officials were giving Christian names to Moorish towns after the  Reconquista, they ran out of ideas and were tired of being asked “Y este? Y este?” (“And this one? And this one?”).

• NASA spent millions developing a pen that could survive and function under the zero gravity of space; the Russians took a pencil.

• Aviemore at one point had the highest rate per capita of veneral disease in the UK, thanks to a combination of holidaymakers from down south and day trippers from Inverness infecting the locals

• The Spanish built their railway lines at a different gauge than the rest of Europe because they were scared the French would try to invade the country. By train.

• When Polar Bears hunt in the Arctic, they cover their dark noses with their paws so as not to be seen.

Actually, I know the Polar Bear one is false (I had to look that one up, the alarm bells were  ringing), and to be honest, it really doesn’t hold up to much examination, Nature doesn’t design things as badly as that. I mention it because unlike the others, which were probably told me over a beer, it was presented as a fact by a Professor of Engineering during a Training I attended (good to know I’m not the only one who’s gullible).

Any more?

There’s an advert on TV at the moment for a new Italian Bed & Breakfast web site which features lots of matronly Italian women spoiling their guests rotten with views of the Colosseum or local produce. It’s an interesting development as B&B isn’t really an Italian thing (as the fact that the Italian for “Bed & Breakfast” is “Bed & Breakfast” shows)

I come from a part of the world that probably considers itself to be one of the spiritual homes of the B&B. In fact, from John O’Groats to Portree, it seems to be a rite of passage for old ladies in the Higlands that, once the kids have left home and their husband’s liver has finally given up the struggle, they should go to the supermarket, stock up on Variety Packs, Jam and Savers Pork Sausages, and then stick up a “Ben Nevis Guest House” sign at the bottom of the garden. And things probably go pretty smoothly until the first time a US tourist expects them to know something about the Battle of Culloden or the history of Clan MacKenzie.

All the same, at least B&Bs in the Highlands are a better deal than the local hotels, which are usually just the village bar (think the one in An American Werewolf in London crossed with that place in Star Wars where Luke Skywalker meets Han Solo, but without the genetic diversity) with a few rooms above.

I’m bitter about these because I had a negative experience in one of these hotels and like a lot of negative Highland experiences, it happened in Aviemore. I was traveling down to Edinburgh with my nephew and we were staying overnight in Aviemore. After sampling the local cultural experience (i.e. the go-karts) we came back to hotel at around 10:00pm. Perfect! I thought, we can watch Frday Night Sportscene in the bar. We went into the bar, I ordered a pint and a coke and as soon as the barman had taken my money he informed me that, actually, minors were not permitted in the bar. The fact that I didn’t just destroy that bar in a Keith Moon style rage is something that I’m still ashamed of. And that, ladies & gentlemen, is “Highland Hospitality”.

Back in the 1980s the Scottish Daily Record thought they had a good idea for an April Fools’ Day story. The paper teamed up with the Tennent Caledonian brewery and Golden Wonder crisps manufacturers to run a piece on how the two had combined to produce new, Tennent’s Lager-flavoured crisps. It was well done: they had mock-ups of the crisps with realistic looking packaging, interviewed some pub landlords who were looking forward to stocking the product and there was just enough detail to convince (they reported that the crisps would be alcoholic, but only sold in pubs so that kids couldn’t get them).

You can guess what happened next. Drinkers the length and breadth of the country got into contact with the paper, desperatly asking where and when they could get these crisps. You mean they’ve come up with a bar snack that helps you get pished?! YEE-SSS!! At the other end of the spectrum, Health groups condemned the companies for coming up with this new contribution to keeping Scotland top of the European Tables for Alcoholism and Coronary Diseases. The shame! (Me, I just like to think that the head of R&D at Tennent’s competitor Scottish & Newcastle was hauled into the boardroom and told to get into the bloody lab and not come out until he had a working prototype of McEwan’s Export-flavoured Monster Munch)

The next day, the Record, who probably weren’t expecting all the fuss (and who by now were undoubtedly feeling like Orson Welles the day after The War of the Worlds) published an article saying that actually, the piece was just a bit of fun, an April Fools’ Day hoax. The Health groups were placated, everything went back to normal and the country’s drunks would have to wait 20 years or so until the Buckfast Bhuna would come along to offer them the chance to eat and get drunk at the same time.

One of the things that is frustrating about Italy is that you don’t get many restaurants offering foreign cuisine. It’s probably becuase the Italians approach anything that comes from outside of their home town or region with fear and suspicion, so that a Sicilian restaurant opening in Milan is considered World Cusine.

So I’ve decided to open my own British Restaurant over here,  a place that will provide the locals with a quality British eating experience at competitive prices, and introduce them to the wealth and diversity of dishes from my home culture.

I’ve started putting the menu together below. This presents two challenges: firstly, which dishes make the cut: haggis or black pudding? Deep Fried Mars Bar or Deep Fried Macaroni Cheese? Pot Noodle or Cheesy Pasta? There are going to be some tough choices ahead. The second is how to explain the content of the dishes to the locals; after all, in the Chinese restaurants over here, noodles are called spaghetti and Dim Sum Dumplings are – and this is stretching it a bit -ravioli.

So I need some help. What should make the cut, and how should we describe them? I’ve made a start below: Chicken Tikka Masala can be easily understood as pollo al curry, but I’ve had to elaborate a bit more on some of them, e.g. Cornish Pasty becomes Calzone ripieno di carne, verdure ed escrementi di coniglio (I’m using the traditional Cornish recipe with rabbit droppings).

CASA DI THUMPER

Cucina Britannica, Martedi – Domenica; Chiuso Lunedi

ANTIPASTI

Beans on Toast (Bruschetta al fagioli)

Doner Kebab (Panino con carne di animale indeterminata)

PRIMI

Cornish Pasty (Calzone ripieno di carne, verdure ed escrementi di coniglio)

Pot Noodle (Linguine in sugo di conservanti)

Minced Beef Findus Crispy Pancakes (sofficini ripieni di carne tritata)

SECONDI

Chicken Tikka Masala (Pollo al curry)

Bangers & Mash (Salsicce ripiene di testicoli, segatura e chissa cos’altro con puree di patate)

Haggis (Meglio non chiedere)

Deep Fried Mars Bar Supper (Fritta Mars allo Scozzese con patate fritte)

Pie, Mash & Jellied Eels (Anguilla Gelificata con puree di patate e torta ripiena di testicoli e palpebre)

DOLCI

Trifle (Zuppa Inglese)

I think that’s a decent start, but it needs filling out a bit. What am I missing?

SCENE ONE

Interior of Living Room in Italy; THUMPER PLOWMAN, a Scotch expatriate, enters carrying a tray of food (Fettuccine with Pachino Tomatoes and Millett Seed, plus a Tetrapak of Lidl red wine) and sits down in front of the TV. He turns on the BBC Prime Satellite Channel and sits down to watch Last of the Summer Wine

THUMPER: My God, when was the last time I saw Last of the Summer Wine? I think Compo was still alive; I wonder if it’s changed much? Oh look, there’s Clegg, he’s still there…looking at bit stiff now mind, mind you I bet Nick Park is paying his medical bills, ho ho! Doesn’t seem to have changed – WHOA!!! that’s Hilda Ogden!!! What the devil is she doing? I don’t remember her being in it and – wait a minute, isn’t it that George from George & Mildred?? It bloody is, what’s his name again? Something Roper isn’t it? Yootha Joyce was Mildred,  I know that, but she’s been dead for ages… she was on the cover of a Smiths singles wasn’t she? Ask, I think and whoa! but ..but.. but that’s the guy from On the Buses!!! The conductor!! What was he called again? Boycee! No, that’s Only Fools & Horses … he can’t still be alive surely, On the Buses was ages and ages ago! When was this made? I’m getting confused, is this one of them special episodes they do for Xmas or Comic Relief? Who’s he talking to? Oh, what was she in again? Allo Allo? No, that’a not it, was it Coronation Street? Wait!! That’s the Chinese Detective! Ken Something isn’t it? Or am I mixing it up with Kendo Nagasaki? no, it’s definitely Ken Something. Ken Yelm? Can’t remember, this is weird… what’s going on? It’s like a Valhalla for light entertainment stars from the 70s and early 80s. Except they’re alive, at least I think they are. I wonder when this was made – hey! that’s Bobby Ball …

(Mr Thumper Plowman will be performing Lost in the Summer Wine in its entirety at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, August 10th – 17th)

Sometimes, things just don’t pan out the way you thought they would. A notable feature of my town when I was growing up in the 80s was the local wino brigade (I don’t mean they were an actual brigade with uniforms and that, I just don’t know what the collective noun is for alcoholics. Perhaps it’s “a guzzle”). As a town we were competitive when it came to winos; if there would have been a version of It’s a Knockout for alcoholics, I reckon we would have made the regional or even national finals, despite our small population.

One of the things i noticed about them was that they went about dressed in fashion from about 10 years beforehand. So, while everyone else was wearing fluorescent socks, muscle shirts and those awful breakdance bomber jackets, the local brewheads would be staggering around in purple suits with flared trousers, loud striped shirts and a pair of Beetlecrushers. Being an observant young guy, I figured that this was following some law of nature, and could even be expressed as a simple equation, such as:

Brewhead Fashion Year = Actual Fashion Year -10

I then looked forward to the day, 10 years in the future, when the winos of tomorrow would be staggering around in the fashions of 1984, and you’d pass the park bench down at the riverside and see some grizzled old guys wearing stonewashed Denim and a “Frankie Says Relax” T-shirt whilst guzzling Merrydown Cider.

That never happened, and you’ve no idea how disappointed I am about that. I knew in my heart that all those fancy gadgets they used to show on Tomorrow’s  World would never really appear, but I was so sure that the future was going to see alcoholics in legwarmers. What went wrong? Does the Salvation Army simply have an endless supply of 1970s suits? Whatever the reason, I reckon we’re living in a duller world because of it.

…. is how the run-out groove reads to one of The Sisters of Mercy’s 12″ singles from the 1980s. Turn the record over and the other side reads, naturally, “Long Live Gonzoid Amphetamine Filth”. Run-out grooves were one of the rituals of buying records in the 80s, and the Sisters’ Andrew Eldritch would often use them for oblique comments or arch humour. And when he wasn’t feeling inspired, he would just dedicate the record to his cat.

I was a big fan of the Sisters back in the day. I had all their stuff: albums, singles, bootlegs, posters and a collection of T-shirts of various degrees of washed-out black. I even dyed my hair once, though it was to dark brown, not black (I could never really be a goth).

Time moved on and the Sisters stopped making records (last album was released in 1990), but I’ve always liked them. I think that everyone has a clutch of artists that they “get” rather than merely like. I can understand why people wouldn’t like Kraftwerk, Kate Bush, Sparks or The Mothers of Invention, despite the fact that I think they’re all great. Trick or Treat. The Sisters are one of those.

I went to see them live for the first time last night. I wasn’t expecting miracles: Eldritch backed by a couple of unknowns and a lot of dry ice. He must be in his fifties now and is as bald as a coot, and his voice kept pretty much to the same register all night. Yet the band were tight, and they played all the hits. If I’m honest, they’d had to have really sucked for me to begrudge them the 30 Euros.

As I write this, I’m on the train coming back from Bologna to the real world of project reviews and meetings. And I’m glad. I don’t want to be 19 again, not really, but sometimes you need to just pay homage to those things that you loved when you were that age. And besides, “Temple of Love” has got a brilliant riff.

And, just in case you’re wondering, Italian Goths are better looking than British Goths.

If you’ve been reading this blog for while you’ll know that every now and again (when I can’t think of anything to say about 80s Heavy Metal), I post some tips and advice on Italian culture for the benefit of folk wanting more information on the country. In this spirit, I thought I’d take a minute or two to post some information for the person who arrived at this blog yesterday using the Search Term:

where is the leaning tower of pisa

The Leaning Tower of Pisa is found in the Italian city of Pisa. This is located in the region of Tuscany, and the nearest airport is Pisa. You can fly there via Ryanair, or alternatively, if you’d like to be able to go to the toilet during the flight without shelling out some of your holiday Euros , you can also travel via Alitalia.*

N.B. The Leaning Tower of Pisa should not be confused with the Leaning Tower of Pizza, which is a family-owned restaurant that has been providing a value-based quality taste dining experience in the Des Moines area since the 60s.

Hope that’s been useful. Thanks for your attention.

*Alitalia still exists at time of publication. Please check Press to see if it’s finally gone down the tubes if reading this post after 6/3/2009.