Goddamnit

I just picked my nose after chopping chili then compounded my misery by shortly thereafter rubbing my left knuckle against my eyelid. AaaarrgghhhhBASTARDDDDDDDD!

Expressions I Move We Ban Immediately. A Series. I Love You To Bits Where it came from I have no idea but here in Britain, in particular it seems, this idiomatic expression has taken an unshakable grip that I'd like to see broken immediately. What it is, is a way of saying "I love you" for people that are not able to just say I love you. "To Bits" is jewelery, window dressing for real emotion - a spoonful of honey to aid emotional digestion in people who are afraid of being open. I despise it, I hate the sound of it. Even if taken literally, if you love someone, why would you want to use such violent and destructive words of language to express it? My advice to all of those looking to cure their British emotional constipation is: if you love someone, just say you love them.

Great Ads 2 Where have I been? This advert just lifted me up so fantastically and the copycat amateur attempts on Youtube had me going "gwan yourself, you mad bastards". The song, incidentally, "The Snake" by Al Wilson is an epochial Northern Soul moment that I've long championed, as former readers of Gaijinworld may recall. I congratulate the creative team on this ad wholeheartedly. I now want to belong to the legion of Lambrini drinkers. In other words, I want to be a fifteen year old British girl, pissed up in a bus shelter about to become pregnant to the local samurai-sword gang leader who'll abandon me cruelly within the half-year.

Jungle Drums Man, I've been away five months and I've missed one of the best adverts out. I'm a huge fan of good commercials and this one is everything I look for in an ad: suspense, passion and a big-ole payoff line at the end. It also, curiously, has me in the mood of a taste of Cadbury's Dairy Milk..

Goodbye To Berlin
Well, Berlin is behind me. It’s almost half a year we’ve spent there which is hard to believe. Not least because I’m now back at Ivy Cottage and keep going to grab things I know are there, because I bought them last week – 5 ½ months ago! A weird time warp, like nothing has happened in the preceding half year. My smell is probably still on my pillow, the laundry I left behind the door, still there. It’s like being inside Goldilocks and still seeing through the bears’ eyes.

Berlin was an amazing experience though What a place to spend time in – I urge anyone with predetermined ideas about Germany and the German people to hang out in Berlin for a spell. I’ve even lived in Germany before – in Munich, at the end of the ‘80s and I thought I knew what the country was about. The year I left, however, Berlin was put back together and these two frames of mind – the western, old German attitude, the moneyed and the snobbish, was forced to coexist with its communist-affected neighbour. It was an oil and water mix and I can only imagine the teething troubles they’ve had in the ensuing years but the resulting creole is fascinating. The people I met were mostly in the film business, so they were sort of creative types who generally tend to a tolerant view of the world but the people we lived among, in Wilmersdorf, were the right side of the dial – old money, snobbish Germans so we saw both sides. It’s hard to describe but Berlin seems first and foremost, a FAIR city, in the old fashioned sense o the world. I feel like democracy is in action there, that everyone has some say in their town’s destiny.

The people are tolerant and even-handed with each other. I love a town in which buskers can walk on to a full subway car and perform at the pitch of their lungs and people are polite and respectful of the fact that the dude is just trying to make a crust. Plenty of places they’d get run out on a rail at the next stop. They even happily fork over a euro or two or his trouble. I’ve always felt that you can get a fair understanding of a country from its attitude towards beggars and street performers – how many you see around, how disinclined the cops are to hassle them etc. We came to know the strolling musicians in our area, Olivaer Platz and the top end of Kudamm by sight and by their styles. You’d be sitting at dinner and along they’d come, one at a time, respecting each others’ patch, open their accordion case, give a brief introduction then launch into an endless array of medleys of classics, played with varying degrees of aplomb and dexterity but a universal passion. One old gypsy chap in our neighourhood had the most passionate tremolo in his accordion playing that could move you to tears, no matter which tune he was playing. And people paid not just a few coins, but they paid attention and sometimes applauded. Then they’d trundle off with their instrument on a little luggage trolley.

One small thing. Other things I noticed was that, among even the young people I worked with who had come from parents from the Eastern half of the city – they were so disinclined to waste food! I noticed it immediately, they’d half a bun and carefully set the other half aside and either take it home or eat it later. They couldn’t bear to throw the last of their dinner out, they’d cover it and again, use it later. Then I began to ask them and they were so adamant that it was ridiculous to waste food. They’re like my parents’ generation here, who suffered hardship and shortage before and after the war. I noticed it in the older generation in Japan too. I respect thatand it opened my eyes to how wasteful we have become.

Overall though, a positive experience living in Berlin.

Amis Off The Leash? I've never been a Martin Amis fanatic though I have read and enjoyed a few of his books. Having not followed his career closely, it seems I've been missing out, at least in the mental extra-curricular nonsense-spouting sphere. Yes, it turns out he's a curmudgeonly bigot, if Chris Morris' hilarious piece in the Guardian last week is to be believed. Check it out here.

The Devil of Dare

You come to a point in your life when you really don't care what people think about you, you just care what you think about yourself.
Evel Knievel



I’d be remiss if I let go unmarked, the passing today of a childhood hero today. Mr Evel Knievel, the original motorcycle daredevil (after, arguably, Steve McQueen’s scene in “The Great Escape”). Maybe we were easier pleased in the old days but to us, on Greystone Avenue, Kelloholm, this man’s exploits impressed us to an unholy degree. When we built apparatuses in the primary school grounds with the steel plates from the doorways with one of us lying under it to make a ramp, there was only on man on all of our minds and he was dressed in a red, white and blue leather jumpsuit. When I think of childhood heroes, Knievel is second only to Muhammad Ali. Even now, watching the documentaries, the footage of his great attempts like the Snake River Canyon rocket bike calamity, I’m absolutely rapt. His wordy, vaudevillian press interviews from those years bring me near tears at times. He was never short of an inspirational bon mot or two.

Thinking of him now reminds me primarily of how things have changed in the intervening years, how feats like his are seldom attempted and hardly ever televised nowadays. Our idea of entertainment has definitely changed but maybe more than that, our idea of inspiration has changed. The world as it stands today, could use a few more like Evel, I reckon. The world is divided, as it watches a man traveling at top speed towards a ramp that will send him careening over a yawning gorge, into those who go “what a f@ckin' idiot” and those who say “shit!” but whom also quietly think “Jesus! Heaps of things are possible”.

I’m sure I speak for all of us in the latter category when I wish this inspirational, fearless man, whatever his motivations may have been, a 500cc 2-stroke-powered, ground-shaking, center-of-the-ramp, God- speed leap into a peaceful afterlife.