Bijoy Dibosh

McSchadenfreude

I’d arranged to give a lift to someone who was going to the Screen Forum run at the Light-House over in Wolverhampton. No problem with that, since he lived just off the Hagley Road and that’s the route I take when I’m pushing Bella (often under protest) in that general direction.

So, I said I’d meet him at the McDonalds on the corner of Hagley Road and Wolverhampton Road. I got there a bit early so I decided to park up. (Mistake no. 1). After a couple of minutes I decided to wait inside. (Mistake no. 2). I went inside – there was a doorman (huh!) who welcomed me. Now I know McDonalds is in league with both Mammon and the Grease Industry and I’d promised myself ages ago that I would never, ever again be tempted … but I was. (Mistake no. 3)

I gave my order to the least spotty person I could see only to be told that it would be a couple of minutes before it’s ready but that if I were to take a seat then she would bring it over to me. I thought, ‘ well you’ve got to hand it to the American’s they know what customer service is all about and they even manage to transmit that knowledge to the acne’d youth of Britain’. I found a seat and waited. (Mistake no. 4 … I’ll stop enumerating them from this point on as anyone tolerating 4 mistakes in such quick succession deserves whatever results.)

I waited

… and waited

… and waited!

Did it occur to me to go and find out what was happening to my vittles? Well actually it did but I thought that as soon as I got there they would have it ready and then I’d seem like an impatient customer and they’d hate me. (Why did I Care?!)

Eventually I could bear it no longer – my craving for a convenient short cut to a coronary got the better of my well-assimilated good manners – I strode purposefully upto the counter and demanded to know where my food had got to. The counter person turned and asked the manager the manager knew nothing about the matter.

Arrrggghhhhh! (I thought)

Words failed me so I pointed feebly at the unspotted one who had served me originally and had made the promise. She stopped whatever it was she had been doing and looked at me for a moment and then denied having ever served me.

ARRRGGGHHHH! (I thought louder)

Words sputtered forth from my gob-smacked gob, “I was here over 10 minutes ago and ordered from you and you said that you’d bring it over and … well where is it?”

The manager, recognising the seriousness of the situation – a customer on the verge of a violent outburst due to saturate deprivation, filled a bag with whatever it was and apologised. I was not happy and I gave the unspotted (memory of a goldfish) one, my meanest most hardest glare – I kid you not even Paddington Bear would have been proud of it.

I turned to leave and my would be passenger arrived, instantly I regaled him with the tale of my terrible ordeal. The doorman opened the door and let us out wishing us a good night… good night my foot! How, I thought, could I have a good night after having had to endure such a sleight. I felt violated – I could feel the stresses of this traumatic experience seeping into my psyche and doing lasting damage. Years from now somebody at a counter somewhere will try to supersize me and I’ll flip – they’ll have to cart me off to Rubery a jibbering (or should that be jabbaring?) wreck.

It’s with these thoughts about lunatics in my mind that I heard a female voice behind my saying, “Excuse me”

I froze.

I turned around slowly and there she was – goldfish girl looming ever larger and, most ominously, out of range of the McManager. I’ve had it – I thought – she’s a psycho and she’s ran out in order to enact a terrible crime upon me. I began to take a defensive posture, bracing myself for the imminent insertion of a Big Mac into somewhere where it doesn’t belong, when I heard her continue, “I’m really sorry for the mix-up. I apologise”

I re-froze

“I am really sorry … Is that okay?”, she added

After several moments I managed to utter a, “Yeah, it’s okay”.

In an instant the traumatic experience became a spiritual one. Yes that’s right – I said a spiritual one. Suddenly, I knew that there are Greater Powers in the universe who watch over the lives of we mere mortals; Powers who visit justice and injustice upon us in equal measure, (if you’re lucky).

So my meek acceptance of the soul-destroying trauma which so very nearly wrecked my future sanity had been transformed into a kind of epiphany. Why? Because goldfish girl had obviously just got a bollocking off her McBoss.

It’s the petty victories in life that make all the other crap bearable.

Akram Khan – Ma

About a week ago I was lucky enough to find myself in the front row of an Akram Khan dance performance at the Royal Festival Hall. By a strange coincidence I was at another Akram Khan performance, (Kaash – an artistic collaboration between Khan, Nitin Sawhney and Anish Kapoor), almost exactly a year ago. Around this time of the year other people go to pantomimes, I go to dance performances … pretentious maybe but who really wants to see Jim Davidson in tights!

Anyway, it wasn’t for pretentious reasons I went, (I think!). If anything it was for partisan reasons. There is very little chance of me being at this performance of Khan’s second full production – Ma had he not been a fellow Brit Bangla … which I suppose is kinda sad. Well whatever the reasons I was very happy to be there.

Now when I say we had seats at the front I really mean at the front – our eyes were level with the performers feet! Which when you think about it is quite a good perspective to have when at a dance performance. Especially one that made as much use of Khatak-style flat foot stamping and athletic floor action as was made by the highly accomplished Akram Khan Dance Company.

Essentially, the piece was supposed to be inspired by Arundhati Roy‘s writings about evicted Indian farmers and indeed the key pose, repeated throughout the performance, is of dancers assuming an upside-down legs-for-branches pose and Ma, as we are informed in the programme notes, means both land and mother in Hindi. Occasionally, Khan or his dancers stop and talk to us, relating stories about childhood or motherhood in Bangladesh and at one point he broke into a bout of ???

Nitin Sawhney – Britten Sinfonia

A week ago I went to a concert at Birmingham’s shiny bright Symphony Hall featuring Nitin Sawhney and the Britten Sinfonia.

Nitin began by applauding the audience for about 5 minutes but not just your mere ‘well done mate I enjoyed that’ applause but a fully rehearsed duet of an applause which he and his fellow applauder had learned from a score by a bloke who had first applauded it back in the sixties. After our applause for his applause had died down he followed it up with a session of ‘digga-digga-diggi, dum-dagge-dum, dagge-digga-digga-dim, dagge-dim …’ — tremendous stuff I’m sure you’ll agree though something may have got lost in the transliteration.

Of course by this time I was wondering where the Britten Sinfonia people were. Perhaps, (I thought), they’d stopped by one of the canal-side pubs and just lost track of the time and poor Nitin was improvising frantically until they got back. I’ll never know because at that moment they walked onto stage (I suppose it’s just possible that that’s the way it was organised), anyway it was worth the wait.

Nitin is as comfortable on the guitar as he is at the keyboards and it was on these instruments that he accompanied the Britten Sinfonia during the rest of the concert. Apart from when they (the Sinfonia) played A. R Rahman’s hauntingly beautiful theme song from Mani Ratnam’s ‘Dil Se’ and a world premiere of Nitin’s own composition ‘The Classroom’. The latter was accompanied by a multimedia projection behind the performers of appropriate classroomy images superimposed with close-ups of the live performance.

When this heady mixture of Indian, European and Brazillian rhythms, beats and melodies had finished I wish I could say that the diverse Brummie audience gave Nitin and the Britten Sinfonia a standing ovation but sadly they didn’t. They applauded furiously though! I may be wrong but I don’t think a lot of the audience had been to many concerts before. Or it could have been a no-nonsense intrinsically Brummie understanding of the patently obvious because at the end of the performance, after Nitin had taken several bows and walked off stage, the audience stopped their applause and just sat in their seats. After an awkward wait of several seconds Nitin came back onto stage and performed the traditional encore … but did mutter something about doing so despite not actually being asked!

Hey Nitin mate, don’t be like that we knew you were coming out again and after all we’re just amateurs when it comes to applauding.