The Week That Was

I was at the monstrous carbuncle this afternoon doing a bit of the old primary research, when I came across the following articles in the Birmingham Daily Gazzette (now sadly defunct).

So in this week, a hundred years ago …

Motor Buses for Birmingham
————————–
From Monday next, a service of motor omnibuses will run from the Grammer School in New Street to Hagley Road Station. There will be a ten minutes service each way …

… some things were better – try doing that journey today in 10 bloody minutes!!!

Death from Anthrax at Kidderminster
———————————–
A youth named Charles Bird (18) died at Kidderminster Infirmary at midnight on Saturday from Anthrax. He was in the institution since Thursday, and had been employed at Mr Broomes spinning mill.

Attempted Suicide at Smethwick
——————————
David Parker (60) Heath Street, Smethwick was charged yesterday at Smethwick with attempting to commit suicide on September 30th. It appeared that he was employed at Allen Everett’s Works, Bridge Street, Smethwick, and on the morning in question he was found in a cartshed with his throat cut and lying in a pool of blood – He now pleaded that he could not do his work properly owing to illness, and was discharged on promising not to repeat the offence.

…though clearly, some things were worse.

However, other things seem weirdly familiar…

A Fourpenny Pistol
——————
A sixteen-year-old lad was summoned at Leeds yesterday for a breach of the Pistols Act. He had bought a pistol for fourpence, the price included five rounds of ammunition. The deadly wepon was confiscated.

Ameer to Visit India
——————–
Reuter’s Agency understands that there is the probability in the near future of the Ameer of Afghanistan paying a visit to Lord Curzon. His highness has said that he is anxious to go to India to see the Viceroy as soon as the conditions of the country permit him to leave.

But the best bit of history I gleaned from the Gazette was that Aston Villa had beaten the League Leaders, Sheffield Wednesday, by 2 goals to 1 playing “pretty football” … Ahh! the good old days hey?

Money and Curry

Just looking through the ic Birmingham.co.uk – Midlands Rich List and noticed the following…

… sadly, no Bangladeshis there but that’s not really a surprise. Deshis figure right at the bottom of the economic pile, though Pakistanis don’t fare much better. Can’t really blame religion as Indian and Middle-Eastern muslims do well for themselves in the UK.

I dont know why this should be so but I note that most of those on the above list are families or couples. Although I know some individual Deshi restaurant owners (what else!) who do well, I don’t know of a single Deshi couple in any business together and only one family who has managed it without disintegrating into petty feuding. Don’t know if there’s anything in that.

Anyway, there’s a programme “Make a Fortune … The Asian Way” on BBC2 (9.00pm) tonight at which I shall be chucking my can of Tesco Value Baked Beans but not before being regaled with amusing anecdotes from Anthony Worell Thomson and Laurence Llewelyn Bowen in “The Joy of Curry” (8.00pm) … (somebody pass me a sick bag)

Ferrari Berrari!

Have you heard the one about an old Honda that thought it was a Ferrari?

No! well according to the Beeb, there’s been a luxury refit for Dhaka’s old bangers.

… I know what I want for Christmas.

Bolivia

Isn’t Bolivia weird hey? … you don’t hear anything about the place for decades and then an anti-capitalist revolution ousts the gringo-friendly el presidente from his cushy office. So perhaps, from the land where Che Guevara bit the bullet, a new and glorious people’s revolution might emerge to sweep through the continent and then the world – cleansing the earth of corruption, hypocrisy and greed? Hmmmmm … don’t count on it! but I bet it’ll get Condeleeza’s knickers in a twist – no doubt she’ll soon be sending in the ‘advisors’ to sort out the revolting peasants.

But I hear you ask – why are you waffling on about Bolivia in the snapshots category? Well cos I’m gonna tell you all about the time I went there on holiday a few years ago. It was infact the first ‘foreign’ place I went to as an adult, having been content to stay in dear old blighty for the previous decade. Actually, I probably wouldn’t have bothered to go if it hadn’t been for a girlfriend who was out there as part of a year-long back-packing thing she was on.

Needless to say I was a bit infatuated with her at the time hence the intercontinental dash to South America. Also, needless to say (but I’m saying it anyway so that makes the phrase ‘needless to say’ … urm … needless) that the fact that she had left on her travels many months earlier should have set the alarm bells ringing. Well, ya live and learn don’t ya?

You’ll notice that the pictures are a bit funny but that’s due to their being taken with a Boots disposable jobby and so there ain’t that many of them and they’re not that clear. Infact I only took pictures about a week or so into the trip so didn’t manage to get any of the capital La Paz. This is a shame because the highest capital city in the world was also the most bizzare – it was brown! The people were brown, the buildings were brown, the food was brown and most disturbingly the water was brown. Not that any of this mattered at first as I was concentrating all of my attention on just breathing.

If you’ve ever been up at any real altitude – you haven’t if you’ve never been outside of Europe – then you’ll know all about the lack of oxygen up there and getting knackered just making a cup of tea. Hell! just getting out of a chair was a chore and since I flew into La Paz from London and sea-level I wasn’t prepared for any of it. However, help was at hand – the guide book said that if you drink coca tea it helps. This, if you don’t know, is an infusion made from coca leaves – which grows in abundance in Bolivia, (coca has perhaps been the trigger for the current troubles). Well, the tea didn’t make much of a dent on the throbbing headache I had within hours of getting off the plane. This and the dawning realisation that all was not well on the girlfriend front meant that when a dodgy looking Argentinan bloke popped into the hotel room offering a quantity of the old ‘peruvian marching powder’ I thought – why the fuck not! Suffice to say that it was not a good idea.

Well, when in Rome hey!

Bolivia’s a land-locked country and as such I was surprised to find that it had an admiralty building, presumably with admirals in it – where did they keep their ships?. Anyway, after a week of (enhanced) marching up and down La Paz, this did not seem at all surprising. A lot of strange things go on in Bolivia, as I’ve mentioned Che Guevara died there as did Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid! (I kid you not – google it and check fer yerselves).

It’s also where a Swiss weirdo called Erich Von Daniken went, in the 60’s, and thought he’d found evidence of Ancient Alien Astronauts. The picture shows what he believed to be a runway/launch pad which aliens used in ancient times to journey to the stars.

Sad really. I’ve got to say all this ascribing of the achievments of ancient peoples to aliens pisses me off – as if humanity’s ancesters were incapable of building these magnificent monuments without recourse to alien assistance. In actuality these monuments were built by the mysterious (yet human) original inhabitants of the land but not the current indigenous peoples – the Aymara and the Quechua, (incidentally, these people are by and large leading the current protests).

Well by the time I took these snapshots me and ’she’ had settled into an uneasy truce based mostly on a common desire to get to the other end of Bolivia. So, we made our way down the Andes to the hot plains below stopping off to catch some of the sights. I actually kept a diary of the trip and have toyed with the idea of turning it into some sort of road movie type script but have lost the diary (Doh!). I do remember that as well as the infatuation deflation I also had to cope with finding out – a week into the trip – that my dad had had a mild heart-attack – on the day I flew out wouldya believe? (I didn’t fly back but that’s another story). She (the girlfriend who wasn’t) decided to give up smoking and her cat, who she’d had since her childhood, died back in Britain – yeah! really helped her mood. Things could have been better.

But the old phrase ‘time is the great healer’ is very true and by the time we’d got to the plains, a few weeks later, I was actually really enjoying Bolivia. The food was getting tastier and these guys liked their chilli … (yum!) … but mostly it was potatoes. The people were wearing different cloths – not always brown – and the women weren’t all wearing bowler hats. When we were travelling by bus along a precarious mountain route I had a singing contest with a German bloke. The locals seemed a bit confused as we belted out the chorus of ‘Vee are ze Champions’ by Queen. I had a fight with a Canadian bloke because I didn’t know what the word aboriginal really meant, (I blame the old marching powder). And obviously I did my obligatory walking around a mountain business though I was shown up badly when a kid cycled past me (on the outside!) while I was gripping on for dear life.

But the weirdest thing I saw anywhere in the country was at the end as we were journeying towards the border on a train. A journey of over 20 hours I must add – the bogs were really disgusting and I haven’t wanted to poo so badly ever in my life. Anyway, as I was sitting at the end of the train on what passed for an observation carriage squeezing my buttocks ever tighter, I read a noticeboard at the side of the tracks. There was nothing but farmlands stretching to the distant and flat horizon but this noticeboard left me gobsmacked – it was partially written in an Indian script … as in from India! It read ‘Guru Nanak Agricola’ !!!!

Apparantly, a commune of horse-racing Sikh farmers had been living there for decades. I told you Bolivia was weird.

Chilli Time Again

I’ve been shopping. Those hard-working Tesco buyers have been jetting off to foreign climes again all for the oblivious shopping pleasure of loyal customers such as yours truly.

I reckon I’ve got enough Clubcard points now to swap for a few air miles – so where can I go? … Jordan? Botswana? hey, maybe even Bangladesh or any of the other lands where the chilli don’t grow no more.

Celebrity Wedding

I hesitated before posting this, infact I wrote it off-line earlier so that I could think about it before I posted it. Well, I’ve thought about it.

On the face of it, it should have been a simple post; a conclusion of earlier posts regarding the friend who found a marriage partner via the web; a post that would say that they got married last weekend in a simple but dignified ceremony; that the food was delicious and that at this very moment they’re probably gazing at the sublime Alhambra whilst they’re on their honeymoon. Actually, I can still say that because it’s all true.

Yet, I still hesitate and the reason is because of the Tottenham Ayatollah! In case you don’t know, or just need a little reminder, I’m referring to Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammad, the Syrian born Imam and head of the Al-Muhajiroun movement. A figure much vilified by the press and perhaps more damningly by Trevor Phillips, the recently appointed, (a New Labour gift it should be added), head of the CRE. Why did I hesitate? – because I’m paranoid that’s why and if there are any CIA/MI5/Mossad/Smersch web spiders crawling over this site then would you kindly piss off! I love everyone and wouldn’t hurt a fly – unless the fly was about to eat my hydroponically grown Afghan heroin which I sell in order to buy blackmarket Iranian plutonium.

Anyway, imagine my surprise, sitting in the segregated hall, (not unusual but rare at muslim weddings these days), waiting for the Imam to turn up and begin the ceremonies when I see a vaguely familiar, well-fed looking figure enter and assume the central position beside the groom at the head table.

“That’s Bakri isn’t it?”, somebody next to me asked,

“Yes! it’s him”, I reply as the cobwebs got blown out of the way by the storming realisation.

True, my friend had said that his future bride was quite religious, after all it was one of the qualities that attracted him to her but I hadn’t expected this! Apparantly, wedding ceremonies are part of the controversial Imam’s day job and this explained the presence of this outspoken celebrity cleric.

He conducted the ceremonies in English – which was a refreshing change – and he went on to describe the process and purpose of the various elements of the ceremony. Interspersed with these informative bits were anectdotes and observations that were sometimes quite funny – I hadn’t expected that! This was a man who knew how to work an audience.

One of these anectdotes he offered up while he was telling us about the procedure for asking brides whether they want to get married. He told us that after he’s asked the groom if he wants to marry the bride, the Imam and two witnesses would make their way to where the bride was and ask her whether she wants to marry the groom. At this point Imam Bakhri told us about a wedding in Stoke he had recently officiated at where, when he asked this question, the bride replied that she did not want to marry the groom and that she was being coerced by her family. When he heard this the Imam had told the gathered wedding guests that the marriage could not take place but that they should stay and enjoy the food anyway as it would have been a sin to waste it! The point of this anectdote was that he always insisted that a bride’s father was not present when this question was asked and that marriage in Islam should always be between two freely consenting adults.

As anectdotes go I thought that it was mildy witty statement of an often overlooked requirement of muslim marriages.

Even so, I could not help but remember that this man who was bringing the bride and the groom together with the hope that they would go on to create life, was the same man who, it’s alledged, called on muslims to kill Tony Blair, George Bush and Pervez Musharraf … Oh and crucify muslims who fight in the US or UK armed forces!

Why would this man say these things? perhaps he did it to court controversy and get headlines in the papers, afterall, ‘there’s no such thing as bad publicity’ and he certainly likes publicity. Or, maybe he was the focus of media hysteria and was constantly being mis-quoted and mis-represented. Well, whatever the case, I had had an opportunity to judge for myself.

Bizarrely, I have to conclude that when it comes to Islam in the lives of muslims, the Imam is relatively progressive – it’s just when it comes to Islam in the wider context that he sounds like a total nutter!

The New Bull Ring

National Poetry Day

It was National Poetry Day today and the theme was Britain …

Britain

Powdered custard used
to cheer rhubarb crumble pie
– gulls still eat rubbish

Zen saves Panda

Years ago, at college, a programming lecturer of mine recommended Robert Pirsig’s ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ to me. Of course I didn’t bother reading it, anymore than I read anything else that was on the reading list but I should have. I did eventually read it, many years later…

Bella’s been immobile. Nothing wrong with the old girl’s engine but the brake lights just wouldn’t work – either of them. I’d had a similar problem just a few weeks ago and it transpired that both bulbs had burnt out. Actually one had burnt out quite a while ago but nobody had told me about it until the other one had gone as well and rendered me and Bella an unwitting menace to other drivers. So this time around I checked to see if the bulbs had gone; they hadn’t. With the lights on for night driving, the rear lights worked and besides, on visual inspection the filaments were intact. It also looked like the parking light wasn’t working either … the mystery deepened.

Next on the checklist of things to do in this situation was to check the fuse box, I did and nothing doing there – they were all fine, still, I changed the relevent fuses. Now the way these things work, the left hand cluster of lights are on a separate circuit to the right hand cluster, so if the fuse goes for one cluster it does not affect the other one. However, both cluster’s break lights refused to switch on.

So I sat in the car pondering my next course of action. Do I phone up the AA and get some ‘very nice man’ to come along and end up fixing something that may turn out to be really trivial thus making me appear to know nothing about cars, (true, I don’t but that’s not the point). Perhaps I could ‘phone a friend’ … no, same stubborn refusal to admit my ignorance and ask for help. Maybe I could drive the car to a garage, manually switching the fog lights on and off as and when I braked … well, apart from it being expensive, dangerous and illegal I didn’t have enough faith in my hand-eye coordination to embark on such a risky journey.

I hadn’t started kicking anything yet and the tears of frustration were somehow, tremendously bravely, being kept at bay, as I remembered Pirsig’s book. It asks the question ‘what is Quality?’ … and then proceeds to provide an answer. I can’t remember what that answer was but I do remember that the protagonist in the book was a lecturer who has some sort of breakdown, (mental not mechanical). and then he re-invents himself as a freelance technical writer of computer manuals who travels around the US on a motorcycle and has another breakdown, (mechanical not mental). The book is about the motorcycle journey, madness, Plato, Aristotle, fixing bikes and Quality. (Don’t all rush off at once to get a copy.)

No, it wasn’t the book’s content that inspired me … it was it’s title! I decided to apply a bit of Zen to the problem, I had to become at one with my car … Bella and I had to become one and the same … I had to reach into my inner Panda. And what do you get in a Panda? … wires! Wires connected everything and that’s where the problem and thus the solution lay.

Two hours had passed already when I had this epiphany. If the problem wasn’t in the bulbs and it wasn’t in the fuse box then it could only be somewhere in between. I unscrewed the rear clusters and looked at the wiring, a red wire connected to both rear lights and a white wire connected to the parking light. I followed the wires through Bella’s side panels and on towards the fuse box. Both wires connected to the same relay which in turn connected to the fuse box … BINGO!

Two apparantly unconnected problems were connected. Well okay, technically speaking they weren’t connected. The wires had disconnected from the relay and upon reconnection, the rear break lights glowed into joyous, connected life.

… So, what had I learned from this ripping adventure? – that if you have a breakdown, save yourself a lot of time and get professional help … quickly!

Hotels in Andalucia

I’ve just sorted out a list of good hotels for that friend who’s getting married. The happy couple are planning to spend their honeymoon in Southern Spain and so I consulted a copy of the latest edition of the Footprint Andalucia Handbook and compiled the following list…

Malaga
———–
1. Don Curro, C Sancha de Lara 7, T 9522 27200 F 9522 15946
2. Larios, C Larios 2, T 9522 22200 F 9522 22407
3. Malaga Palacio, C Cortina del Muelle 1, T/F 9522 15185

Granada
————
1. Alhambra Palace, C pena Partida 2, T 9582 21468 F 9582 26404
(try for a room with balcony overlooking the city)
2. Los Alixares, Av Alixares del Generalife s/n, T 9582 25506 F 9582 24102
(4th/5th floors are good)
3. Guadalupe, Av de los Alijares s/n, T 9582 23423 F 9582 23798
(ask for room with good views if possible)
4. Casa Morisca, Cuesta de la Victoria 9, T 9582 21100 F 9582 15796
(near new Granada mosque but I don’t know about parking)

Cordoba
————
1. El Conquistador, Magistral Gonzalez-Frances, T 9574 81102 F 9574 74677
(ask for a room overlooking the Mezquita if poss.)
2. Maimonides, C Torrijos 4, T 9574 71500 F 9574 83803
3. Tryp los Gallos, Av de Medina Azhara 7, T 9572 35500 F 9572 31636

… which I put here so that I don’t lose it!