Posted on Dec 18, 2003
Why has it taken me so long to find out about Chilli Flavoured Ice Cream ?!!.
Well bless the Purbeck Ice Cream Company for coming up with it but dammit why did they have to be out there in Dorset? now the Tesco out somewhere in Poole stocks this new food of the gods but is there anywhere near Brum that has it? … Of course not! Typical ‘Ignore Brum in our plans for World Conquest’ marketing mentality — I mean we are talking one of the largest concentrations of devoted chilli eaters in Western Europe but still no Chilli Red Ice Cream for us.
Apparantly, somewhere in London stocks it as well, (now there’s a surprise), so I feel a special Chilli Ice-Cream shopping trip down to the smoke will be necessary before too long.
(Urm … does anyone out there have a refrigerated van they could lend me for a day?)
Posted on Dec 15, 2003
Posted on Dec 12, 2003
Back in May I made a note to myself reminding me to get tickets to see Akram Khan’s performance of Kaash in December — I did and I saw it yesterday.
Well, I’m just a brummie pleb so I won’t trouble this posting with a detailed review of it, suffice to say, “it was really bostin”. (Yeah — I can just picture that quoted at the bottom of their publicity materials)
At the end of the performance Akram came back onto the stage and answered a few questions put to him by the audience.
Man! what a bunch of pretentious attention seekers they were, (the questioners that is and not the audience — of which I was obviously a member and therefore could never by any stretch of the imagination be considered pretentious or attention seeking … ahem!)
One questioner began,
“Akram, it’s been quite a while since we studied Khatak together …”,
as she smiled sweetly and flicked her hair back. I so wanted Akram to answer ‘Sorry but who are you?’ but he’s a nice bloke and so didn’t. Though when somebody else asked,
“Did you study Bharatanatyam ?”
his curt reply of,
“No”,
was quite comical.
Another questioner asked,
“Are you going to India to perform?”,
to which the reply was yes, the questioner then followed up with,
“Where and when will you be performing there?”, Akram being a dancer and not the British Council Website hesitated a bit but his tour manager shouted a few dates out from somewhere else in the hall. After receiving this information the questioner clearly in thrall to his own smugness proceeded to announce,
“That’s great because we’re flying there tommorrow”,
and sat back down next to his asian babe trophy girlfriend.
[UPDATE : 02/01/04 - Akram Khan performed Kaash in Bangladesh yesterday according to a Daily Star review of it]
Posted on Dec 10, 2003
Just catching up on my blogroll and noticed that Rezwan had posted up an article from the Bangladeshi Daily Star about a bunch of hapless Bangladeshis who got banged up in jail on suspicion of being terrorists … in Bolivia!
I was looking forward to going abroad at some point next year but am having second thoughts. Let’s face it I’m a British born Birmingham based Asian man with a Muslim background who has Bolivia, Pakistan and Dubai visa stamps glaring out of my UK Passport!
Talk about your racial profiling! It’s enough to swing my paranoia into overdrive.
Posted on Dec 9, 2003
“The only reason anybody works here is cos of the people”, so said one of the people who I’m selling door-to-door guilt with.
It’s true I guess. I haven’t been there long enough to be completely unmoved by random strangers’ generosity or to know the other’s in my team well enough to say otherwise. But they are an interesting bunch.
The Team Leader is originally from Pakistan and a cool character, gently encouraging us to go and get ‘links’. He started doing this job whilst studying for a Master’s in E-Commerce and has stuck with it even after getting this rather marketable qualification — he listen’s to The Doors and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. The ‘daddy’ of the team is a larger-than-life character who holds the company record of 10 links in a day. He always has something to say and has that ‘Robbie Williams’ cheeky chappie thing going but not in an annoying way — he writes poetry in his spare time. The ‘mommy’ of the team is a woman who walked out of her management position job four months ago — she once drove at 130 mph on an empty motorway before being overtaken by two police squad cars racing each other. There’s a trumpet playing music grad as well — he sleeps a lot in cars. A Frenchman who graduated in a business-related degree in Birmingham — he’s a rubbish dancer when he’s drunk. A Maths & Physics student who is a good friend of the ‘three month old veteren’ — he’s a DJ at the Uni on the weekends. Last but not least is a Staffordshire lass, a single mom who’s just bought her son his Christmas presents with her first months wages — She finishes every sentence with the phrase ‘innit’ … and she’s not even Asian!
Posted on Dec 7, 2003
One of the side-effects of my traipsing up and down anonymous estates in middle-income Coventry was that I got to breath in a lot of cold but fresh air (well almost fresh).
This resulted this week, in the deepest sleep I’ve had in ages. Now I’m not someone who has problems sleeping anyway, infact quite the opposite — sleeping is amongst some of my favourite activities whilst in a horizontal position and indeed the one I’m most successful at on a regular basis. So it came as a bit of a shock to me, on Thursday after my first full day out on the streets, to find myself asleep on my nose.
Even more shocking was that it occured whilst I was wrapping myself up in swathes of nostalgic anoraks during Ch4’s ‘Top Ten Sci Fi’ programme. The venerable Tom Baker was waxing lyrical about ‘Space 1999′, ‘Saphire & Steel’ and other equally fantasic rubbish from my childhood. So, given my predeliction for all things nerdish I should not only have been awake till the end but should have been recording it on VHS for later transfer to DVD, which I would have buried in a Titanium container along with a DVD Player, which would then be burried at the bottom of the garden with a ‘Do Not Open till the very Far Far Future Mr Martian Paleantologist’ sticker written on it … in binary code. But as I said, I fell asleep on my nose.
Maybe to keep awake I should have been reflecting upon the 15 doorslams I’d received during that day, or the 20 no answers or the 14 refusals to pledge? Perhaps even upon the 3 remarkable individuals who decided that they would donate money to a charity they’d never heard of via a direct debit mandate which required them to give out their account details to a slightly nervous bloke who came knocking on their door. I mean, would you? I know I wouldn’t — well I suppose I wouldn’t have in the past but now I might be willing to listen at least. What struck me as poignant was that two of them were care workers of some kind – one a security guard at a hospital and another a Fillipino ‘guest worker’ nurse. Neither had BMW’s parked outside their homes if you know what I mean. I wonder whether through me, the charity was exploiting so called ’soft touches’ or is there a rare type of person who just cares and gives when the opportunity arises. I think my cynicism is undergoing some sort of transformation. As indeed is my nose.
Posted on Dec 4, 2003
Denzil Washington and Ethan Hawke starred in a movie released in 2001 where Hawke’s character was a rookie undercover cop being taken out on his ‘training day’ by the charming but ultra cynical and terminally corrupt veteren officer as brilliantly played by Washington.
Now apart from the fact that yesterday was my ‘training day’ there’s really very little similarity between Hawke’s experience and mine upon our respective first days out on the mean streets. For a start his was a hollywood day out on the sunny streets of LA and mine was a clueless evening out on the darkly dank streets of Coventry.
Perhaps I should have started this by mentioning that I’ve got a new job. Actually, it’s a job I had landed through a temping agency which should see me through a month or so while I work out how to (select one from the following: get a proper job/rob a bank/win the lottery/marry kylie).
So, the temping agency bloke starts by saying “We’ve got a role for you … it’s not quite office work”
“Hey that sounds good, what is it?” I asked enthusiastically looking forward to a few days working as a mattress tester at Slumberland or mango fruit-picker in the Seychelles
“Well it’s as a fundraiser for a charity”
“… !”
“It’s almost a quid an hour above the minimum wage”, Mr temping agency added hopefully
“Hmmmm … interesting”, I say uninterestedly, “as long as it’s not ‘cold-calling’ I guess I could give it a go”
“Oh no problem and besides they’ll give you training for which you’ll get paid — what about that hey? — paid training!”
Well, yesterday was that training day and guess what? Yep! it’s door to door ‘cold calling’ trying to convince snugly warm middle-englanders that they should be giving out their bank details to a complete stranger with an incomplete grasp of what the charities he claims to represent actually do.
Lucky for me, I was paired up with a veteren fundraiser. The team leader told me that this guy, a recent graduate of Warwick Uni, was very good and had a very effective ‘pitch’ and that I would do well to observe and pick up pointers from his finely honed patter. He had been doing it for nearly three (yes count them – three) whole months.
Well, I have to say that while not quite in Denzil Washington’s class he was a cool performer nonetheless. But in another way he is exactly the same — he’s not going to be around for Day 2 … he’s left the job!
Well, if anyone wants to run a sweepstakes on how long I’m going to last then you can put me down for three weeks.
Posted on Dec 2, 2003
