Tag Archives: edinburgh

ARGOS EXTRA

September 9, 2011 By in WORDS Tags: , , , , , , 27 Comments

The other day, I watched a programme showing various acts from this year’s Edinburgh Festival:

One the performers was Josh Widdicombe, who is a very likeable comedian and in fact was one of the other acts the night I bought my cat.

During his short set, Widdicombe talks about how where he is staying in Edinburgh is nicer than where actually lives during the rest of the year (skip to about 9mins 10secs). “I moved six months ago” he explains.

I moved to quite a rough area. To give you an idea, when we moved in, the estate agent – one of the ways he sold it to us – he said “Well, it’s a great location because you’re just across the road from Argos Extra.” If you don’t know Argos Extra, it’s a smaller version of Argos.

Now, this is simply wrong.

Argos Extra stores are the largest of all the Argos stores. That’s why they’re called “Argos Extra”. It wouldn’t make sense to call them “Argos Extra” if they were smaller than normal Argos stores. Widdicombe seems aware of this contradiction, but rather than question his own assertion that Argos Extra stores are smaller than normal Argos stores, he suggests Argos are engaging in some kind of obscure wordplay.

They’ve used the rare definition of “extra” to mean far, far less.

Argos aren’t being sarcastic, Josh. They just want to sell people kettles. They’re not interested in irony.

And the audience. The audience all laugh along happily. Not one person challenges this liar. If I’d been there, I’d have stood up and shouted “NO. ARGOS EXTRA STORES ARE LARGER THAN NORMAL ARGOS STORES. THAT’S WHY THEY’RE CALLED ARGOS EXTRA. IT WOULDN’T MAKE SENSE OTHERWISE WOULD IT? THEY’RE NOT BEING SARCASTIC. THEY JUST WANT TO SELL PEOPLE KETTLES. THEY’RE NOT INTERESTED IN IRONY. YOU’RE THINKING OF ARGOS CALL & COLLECT STORES. THEY’RE SMALLER THAN NORMAL ARGOS STORES. NOW APOLOGISE TO ALL THESE PEOPLE AND LEAVE THE STAGE, YOU CHARLATAN”. Then I’d have stormed out, kicking over tables and hurling chairs in the air as I left. There would have been a moment of silence, as everyone tried to understand what had just happened. Eventually, someone would gasp “He’s right!” and, as the scales fell from their eyes, they would all follow me outside, hoist me upon their shoulders, carry me through the streets and make me their king.

That would have been a shame, because I would then have missed the rest of his set, and the line about shopping at Argos being like playing Battleships is quite brilliant, but he needlessly compromised the integrity of that joke by building it on a foundation of lies, and for that, he must die.

Anyway, to avoid any further confusion, here is an explanation of each store type taken from the Argos website:

What is the difference between a regular Argos store and an Argos Extra store?

Argos Extra stores are bigger stores that keep the full range of Argos Extra products in-store so you can take them away straightaway. We’re constantly opening new Argos Extra stores so there should be one near you. All Argos Extra stores are identified with the Extra symbol on the Store locator, in your trolley and in the catalogue.

Our regular Argos stores keep the regular Argos range but can get Extra items in for you, usually within 3 working days. Remember, if you want to buy an Extra item from a regular Argos store, you can order by using Check and Reserve to save yourself a journey!

What is the difference between a regular Argos store and an Argos Call & Collect store?

Argos Call & Collect stores are smaller stores that don’t hold any stock, but they can get both regular and items in for you. Argos Call & Collect stores are used as a pick-up point to save you a long journey to your nearest stocked-in store!

Remember you can still get all your favourite products at these stores – all you have to do is order your items before you visit the store. You can make an order over the phone and then collect your order from the store usually within 3 working days.

Please print this out and learn it. There will be a test.

COCKTAIL

September 5, 2011 By in PICTURES, WORDS Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 6 Comments

While I was in Edinburgh, I came back to the flat one evening (it was the same night I bought the cat) and found a note on the kitchen table from Lewis:

The scrawl in the top right hand corner was my response. I apologise for the state of my handwriting, but I’m sure you can understand I had been under a lot of pressure.

I think Lewis’ craving for Nando’s had possibly been inspired by watching Matthew Crosby’s show AdventureParty, which features Nando’s quite prominently. Anyway, the next day, Lewis and I met up with Peter Fletcher and we went to Nando’s. In an unusual move, I ordered the Mediterranean salad. I would normally have the Chicken Breast burger, but having spent almost a fortnight in Scotland by this point, I was in desperate need for some vegetables. It’s a cliché to talk about how Scottish food mainly consists of things being deep-fried and then sprinkled with grated cheese, but it is also true. Late one night, as I was walking back from somewhere or other, I genuinely saw someone come out of Tesco and rip open a bag of mixed leaf salad and shove handfuls of the stuff into his mouth; with the same guilty, furtive look of a man tucking into a late-night kebab. In fact, towards the end of my time in Edinburgh, I was driven by the same impulse, causing me to stand in a shop doorway eating this:

So, anyway, the point is, we went to Nando’s.

Nando’s offer a “Bottomless Soft Drink” option, where for £2.25, you are given a glass and are free to refill your glass as many times as you want from the dispenser. The dispenser system gives the adventurous Nando’s customer the opportunity to experiment by creating a “cocktail” of their own devising (Coca-Cola and Fanta, for example – a drink known as Spezi and popular in Germany and Austria).

I did not experiment in this way, fearing the results might be vile, however, a thought occurred to me. What would a cocktail of Coca-Cola and Pepsi taste like? I decided to find out.

I bought a can of Coke and a can of Pepsi:

I also bought a 175ml measure to make sure the quantities of the two drinks were even:

175ml is not ideal, of course. Each can being 330ml, I would have preferred a 165ml measure. Unfortunately, my local catering supplies shop did not have any 165ml measures, and so I had to make do with the 175ml measure. I had two options, I could either fill the 175ml measure with Coke, pour the Coke into a glass and then do the same with the Pepsi (creating a 350ml serving of my Coke-Pepsi cocktail, with a second 310ml serving to follow) or I could slightly under-fill the measure each time, meaning that the two servings would be more equal in size, but the Coke:Pepsi ratio might be slightly uneven.1

I went with the second option.

Here is approximately 165ml of Pepsi:

I poured this into my glass:

Here is approximately 165ml of Coca-Cola:

I added this to the glass and gave it a gentle stir, creating a Coke-Pepsi mix:

I am like Heston Blumenthal.

I took a sip. It was confusing. My tastebuds kept trying to determine whether I was drinking Pepsi or Coke. It had the syrupiness of Coke, but at the same time, it also had the slightly lighter flavour of Pepsi. One second the Coke flavour would dominate, only to be replaced by Pepsi. I constantly tried to rationalise what it was I was drinking, but it was impossible. I wasn’t drinking Coke and I wasn’t drinking Pepsi. I was drinking Pepsi-Coke. At once familiar yet entirely alien. Life will never be the same again.

—–
NOTES

1 There is of course a third option, which would have been much more simple and would have saved me the £6.99 I spent buying the 175ml measure. I could have just poured the cans of Coke and Pepsi into a large jug and then filled my glass from that. However, this option has only just occurred to me.

BUYING SHOES

September 2, 2011 By in WORDS Tags: , , , , , 2 Comments

I need to buy new shoes.

I’ve already explained the reasons for this; I don’t need to explain any further, surely? People buy new shoes all the time; it’s not a big deal. Leave me alone.

Today I went in to three shops, hoping to buy shoes in each. Actually this is not correct. I hoped to buy shoes in the first shop. Having failed to do so, I went into a second shop and hoped to buy shoes there. This second shop did not have shoes for me, and so I went to a third shop and hoped I would have luck there instead. Saying “I went in to three shops, hoping to buy shoes in each” suggests I hoped to buy three pairs of shoes, one from each shop. What I mean is, I only wanted to buy one pair of shoes, and as I entered each of the three shops I visited today, I remained hopeful each time that this could be the shop; this could be where I would buy my shoes.

I didn’t buy any shoes.

The first shop I went to was Topman. More correctly, Topshop was the first shop I went into. I needed to go into Topshop to get to Topman. Topman is on the upper floors of the flagship Topshop store on Oxford Street in London, and forgetting to bring a ladder or set of grappling hooks, I decided instead to enter through the main entrance and use the escalator (twice) to the top floor where the men’s shoe department is currently situated.

I was filled with hope as I travelled up these escalators. The shoes I had sadly lost in Edinburgh had been from Topman. A pair of black, creased leather low Chelsea boots. £38. Not bad. If they had them in stock, I wouldn’t even need to try them on. I already know they fit. I was wearing them just last week – before the rain and the cobbles and the fear.

They didn’t have any.

They had other shoes which looked vaguely interesting. I picked them up. I studied them. They did not appeal.

From there, I went to Schuh and then Office. My confidence was already shattered. I knew it was pointless.

Once upon a time, I bought a pair of boots from Schuh. In fact, I wore them yesterday, or at least I wore what remains of them. They were nice boots, but they caused me pain. They were the last pair in that size in the shop when I bought them, and the right (I want to say “right-hand” here, but obviously that is stupid) one had been the “display” model. Consequently, that shoe had been stretched and softened by the feet of countless people on my behalf (teamwork). The other shoe (the left one) had been hidden away in a box in their stockroom, lonely and resentful.

Despite the fact that I had offered this shoe freedom – a chance at a new life, away from all the other shoes, no longer trapped in a box stuffed with tissue paper – I could tell that it didn’t trust me. It crushed my foot for months. Some days I’d take painkillers to help me get through it. The worst was when I wore the boot on a plane going to Berlin. The cabin pressure caused my foot to swell slightly, and the boot refused to help in any way whatsoever. I had to take the boot off in the end, fearful that my foot might actually burst otherwise. This was a mistake. After that moment, the shoe knew it was in charge; the shoe was dominant.

For weeks, months even, I pleaded with the shoe for peace. Eventually, the shoe came to an agreement with the bones in my foot and some sort of treaty was signed. If I am honest, I would say that the bones in my foot gave way too quickly, and they should have stood their ground for longer. However, I am not sure that sort of language is helpful in the long term and we should be grateful that some kind of peaceful settlement was reached. It was in this uncertain peace that I lived for almost a year. These were happy times. The conflict over, we walked the streets of London together. Me and my boots. Nothing could separate us. Well, maybe only some socks.

Of course, it couldn’t last. Nothing lasts forever. A small crack formed in the sole of the shoe and as it grew, the boots became increasingly unsuitable for wet weather. My own physicality didn’t help either; weak ankles meaning that the inner side of each heel would wear away within a few months and as I wore the wonkified pair of shoes for longer, the problem surely only got worse.

Out of desperation, it has been this pair of shoes which I have been wearing for the last few days.

Of course, there was nothing in Schuh and there was nothing in Office.

My trouble is that I know exactly what I want, and so mainstream commerce has little to offer me. The ideal consumer is someone who knows vaguely that they want to buy something, and they sort of know how much they want to spend on whatever it is, but is otherwise open to suggestion. That’s not the case with me. I want a pair of black leather pointed Chelsea boots with a Cuban heel in a size 8 (size 42) for about sixty quid. I want the cruel shoes from Schuh again, basically, but without the pain.

There is, of course, a lesson here. That lesson is that if you find a pair of shoes you like, you should buy enough pairs of those shoes to see you through the dark times. At the very minimum, I’d recommend buying a dozen pairs of your favourite shoes.

SHOES

September 2, 2011 By in WORDS Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Edinburgh killed my shoes. It killed my bag too.

The combination of rain and cobbles meant that my poor Chelsea boots never made it back to London. My bag came back with me though, I carried the cat in it on the way home – its head poking out, causing strangers to give me funny looks on the tube back from Kings Cross – but the shoulder strap had broken. This meant I had to buy a replacement bag from Topman while in Edinburgh (annoying because I already had a replacement bag at home). The bag I bought was exactly the same as the old bag, but blue instead of brown. An improvement, I think.

The zip on the inside pocket of my new bag is already broken. It broke during my last night in Edinburgh. I’d gone into a pub (The World’s End on the Royal Mile) for one last pint before heading home to pack and got asked for ID. I opened the inner pocket of the bag to get my passport (as a non-driver, I’m limited in terms of available forms of identification) and the zip handle (“handle”? The bit you hold as you open or close a zip. It must have a name) broke off. It’s still in my bag somewhere, I think.

I showed the barmaid my passport and enjoyed the pause before she realised that I was definitely old enough to buy alcohol. She ruined it slightly; saying the pub had introduced a new policy where anyone who looked under twenty-five had to show ID. Still, even this was quite pleasing. I haven’t been twenty-five for five years. What have I done with that time? Very little.

As she studied my passport, I bravely hid the fact that my bag – barely a few days old – was already falling to pieces. I should have suspected the quality of the bag when I found this tag attached to it:

I love the bravado on display there. “This is not a fault”. It’s a feature not a flaw. It’s like Quentin Crisp’s idea of “the trouble with you”. The idea that you should exaggerate and accentuate that part of your personality which a concerned friend might describe as “the trouble with you”. “Emphasise the flaws”, one of Eno’s mantras – included as one of the cards in his Oblique Strategies.

When you’re interested in somebody, and you think they might be interested in you, you should point out all your beauty problems and defects right away, rather than take a chance they won’t notice them. At least you know it will never become an issue later on in the relationship, and if it does, you can always say “Well I told you that in the beginning.”
- Andy Warhol

If, when you peer into your soul, you find that you are ordinary, then ordinary is what you must remain. But you must be so ordinary that you can imagine someone saying “Come to my party and bring your humdrum friend” and everyone knowing he meant you.
- Quentin Crisp

And so the Boring Conference. And so Edinburgh and The Quotidian Revue.

Oh, Edinburgh. On top of all the other costs, this jaunt has cost me a pair of shoes and a bag. But what did I gain from all this suffering? A resin statue of a cat, obviously. But what else? I’d gone to Edinburgh with one Dymo printer (used for our flyer and poster design – the receipt for £10.99 pinned to the notice board under our photos, only partially visible on the flyer, is for this Dymo printer. This stuff isn’t just thrown together, you know) and returned with two (the second being a present from Lewis who saw it in the window of a charity shop). A resin cat and an additional Dymo printer. This surely is enough for any man. But is it enough to make me want to go back again?

It’s too soon to answer that question.

In the meantime, I need to buy a new pair of shoes.

EDINBURGH

August 26, 2011 By in WORDS Tags: , , , , 23 Comments

So.

It’s not a big word, is it? “So”. It’s just two little letters (“s” and “o”), and yet it can be very significant.

So.

It’s the first word I say in the Edinburgh show I’m doing. Did I mention I’m doing an Edinburgh show? Every day at 7pm? At The Bongo Club? You know, on Holyrood Road? I must have mentioned it. We got four stars from Broadway Baby. Have I not mentioned that? It’s “strangely hypnotic and engaging” and leaves you with “a sense of perceiving the world slightly differently”. I must have mentioned it. Do you want a flyer?

So.

“So”. It’s the first thing I say. “So, are there any fork-lift truck drivers in tonight?” The “so” is crucial. It suggests a continuation. I’m responding to something. I’m responding to the framework we have created. This is our show, and the entrance music (Ho Renomo by Eno & Cluster) and the videos which play as you come in are designed to introduce you to our little world. It’s not a high energy show. It’s quiet and it’s meditative and it’s silly. It “swings between the absurd and the beautiful” (The List). It’s “witty and fascinating” (Josie Long). I’m proud of it. And even if it’s costing us a ridiculous amount of money to perform each night to smaller and smaller audiences, I’m happy to have done this because I think it’s a good show. This is not the next big thing, this is our little thing (I stole that line from Lewis).

But.

“But” is not like “so”. “But” suggests a change in tone.

But.

Tonight, I did a bit from our show somewhere else, in front of people who have no idea who I am or what I believe in. It didn’t go down well. It was my fault, of course. I knocked over my props, and as I bent down to pick them up, the microphone caused a high-pitched squeal of feedback. But this wasn’t the real problem. As Tom (who had asked me to do the gig) explained later I’d “already lost the room by then”.

It wasn’t fun. There was a roomful of people looking at me, thinking “You poor, poor man”, as I scrambled around on the floor, picking up the props which everyone had already decided they weren’t interested in anyway.

Of course, all comedians have bad gigs, but the point is, I don’t want to be a comedian. It seems like a horrible job. I want to create spaces and events where I can do my own little thing on my own terms. Boring was something I created, and I’m proud of it. The Quotidian Revue is something I’ve co-created and I’m proud of that too. I don’t want to do “circuit” gigs, and I can’t anyway. I’m not good enough. I’m comfortable with that because I know it’s not what I want to do. I’m not interested in doing that.

It’s now quarter to three in the morning. I was upset earlier because the gig had gone badly and I felt I’d let Tom down. I was so upset, that as I walked home, I decided to buy myself a present to cheer myself up:

I’m not entirely sure why I bought it. I saw it in the window of a newsagents and it sort of seemed funny. When I actually went inside and picked it up and gave it to the man in the shop, it started to get less funny. He looked at it in amazement. I don’t think he realised that they sold them in his shop. He was confused. He turned it over, looking for a price tag. £24.99. Twenty five fucking pounds I spent on this. I hadn’t checked the price before going to the till, but by now I was committed to the purchase.

And that is the reason I now own this:

It’s a life-size model of a cat. I have no idea what I’m going to do with it, or how I’ll get it home, but it’s mine.

I think I’m having a breakdown.

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