Guess Who (3)

By popular request, I have a new poll related to Prejudicial Guess Who. Again, I’ll hide my own thoughts on the matter so as to avoid bias.

I had a difference of opinion with H, the girl I’ve been going out with for almost nine months, over the age and tastes of Anita, the wide-eyed blonde of the Guess Who line-up. I asked whether she would prefer The X-Factor or Strictly Come Dancing. H said that she would like both, but would lean towards one of them. I think she would have a clear preference for one of them, and it is not the same one that H suggested.

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Cast your votes, and I’ll let you know what I think in a week or two.

Guess Who? (2)

The results to the Prejudice Guess Who poll are in, and I’m happy to report that the results vindicate my view in all three cases, although not necessarily by the margin I expected.

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Charles, by a majority of 54 per cent, would confront a burglar rather than hide and wait for the police.

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Albert, by a majority of 80 per cent, prefers vinyl to digital as a medium for listening to music.

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And Sally, by a majority of  76 per cent, says “Byeee!” in a high-pitched voice at the end of phone calls.

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The result for Albert is jolly heartening, and the one for Sally far more clear cut than I dared hope, but my moment of trousers-down-buttock-slapping triumph has been marred by a gallingly narrow victory for Charles.

Not only would he confront a burglar, I maintain, he would do so with a walking stick and a shout of: “I didn’t down five Messerschmitts to have my house burgled by the likes of you.” He would beat the hapless burglar, possibly to death, and the local press would run a picture of him with his medals under the headline: “War hero gives youth stick.”

Some friends have claimed that his sad eyes suggest a pensioner too weary to put up a fight, but I would contend that this is more than offset by his moustache, and that any antipathy towards violence would be immediately quashed upon sight of his quasi-antique carriage clock in the hands of some hoodie.

Still, the people have spoken, and I accept the result because to reject it would turn the game from Prejudicial Guess Who into Bigoted Guess Who. And, besides, the majority still agreed with me. Hah.

Alberto Frog and his Amazing Animal Band

About 25 years ago I was watching an episode of the children’s television programme Bod when my older sister walked through the room. It was the Alberto Frog section of the show, in which an amphibious orchestra leader and his Amazing Animal Band performed favours for distressed creatures who, overcome with gratitude, would offer him a reward. (Alberto Frog, it occurs to me now, was a cartoon version of Hannibal from the A-Team, or Don Corleone from The Godfather. I digress.)

Alberto would always respond to such offers with the line: “I wouldn’t say no to a milkshake.”

The grateful citizen would say: “Any particular flavour?”

And the Amazing Animal Band would ponder aloud, listing a series of flavours that, to my recollection, were usually chocolate, strawberry or vanilla, but perhaps I am just confusing his choices with the flavours one used to get in “Neapolitan” ice cream tubs.

My sister, who is eight years older than me and who was something of an antagonist during my childhood,  said: “It’ll be chocolate.”

I disagreed, naturally, and insisted that it must be strawberry, or one of the other flavours. She was right, and it wasn’t just luck. This happened on several occasions, and her predictions always rang true.

I never knew how she did it until I brought it up about two decades later. I assumed that there must have been a subtle clue in the way he spoke that gave away the answer, or a mildly complicated algorithm. Would she at last tell me the secret?

“Oh,” she said. “It was always chocolate.”

Bat and balls

It’s a somewhat minor personal triumph, but I have just shattered my personal best in the bat-and-ball game that comes free on a BlackBerry. Did I want to upload my score to the overall rankings, it asked. Hell, yes, I said, quietly, to myself. What if I’m some sort of bat-and-ball prodigy? What if, by a chain of unlikely events, proficiency in bat-and-ball games equates to some urgently needed skill, such as repelling an invading force of alien spacecraft? I’ve seen The Last Starfighter. (For anyone who hasn’t, it concerns a teenager who is selected to save the earth from extra-terrestrial hostility after achieving the highest score on a Government-monitored arcade game.)

It turns out I am about 682,000th.

I’m having trouble interpreting this. How many people are there behind me? And does it matter? After all, those who haven’t played the game probably aren’t going to be very good, so presumably I’m 682,000th out of the world population of 6.7 billion (ie in the top one hundredth of a per cent).

If skill at bat and ball is closely aligned to alien repulsion, will I still be needed? I imagine that in the event of attack it will be all hands to the pump, but how many pumps will there be?

So, to summarise, I am left with a list of questions:
a) What crossover is there between bat and ball, on the one hand, and world-saving duties, on the other?
b) Are there more than 682,000 places for planetary defenders in the event of an attack?
c) Will defenders have to be suicidally brave?

If the answers to these are “none”, “no” and “yes”, then I may have to devote my time to doing something more useful.

Cad or bounder?

H, a girl I’ve been going out with for three months, tells me I’m a cad. It’s a running joke. Or it is for her and her friends. I contest it, particularly the implication that I treat women badly, but they insist that it doesn’t mean that. A cad, they say, is merely a rake with a suspiciously self-confident manner with women.

When I was on my gap year in Indiah…

Nauseating, isn’t it? Anecdotes about India are almost as boring as anecdotes about scuba diving (“There were all these… fish”) or anecdotes about surfing (“The wave was like, woah, and I was like, dude”).

India gappers have become an archetype: floppy-haired students with collarless shirts who “found themselves” by going to a Third World country, eating Europeanised food that the locals would never touch, and travelling along a route so well-worn by budget travellers that you can almost see the rut from space. 

It is tempting, then, to dismiss the gap year to India as a contrived, boil-in-the-bag experience that non-gappers can emulate by going to Ealing and chugging a packet of laxatives.

Lots of people do dismiss it in this way, but they all have one thing in common. They didn’t go. They are armchair critics attempting to mollify their envy by pretending it isn’t enviable.

I did go, and I can tell you this: it was wonderful. I don’t mean “wonderful” as a euphemism for good. It filled me with wonder, and still does, more than a decade on.  The critics are wrong for about a thousand reasons, but here are the top five:

1. There is nothing sanitised about India. Tourism, rife as it is, has had little impact even on those towns tramped by a million Lonely Planet pilgrims. This is a world where laundry is beaten on rocks, men will shout through your train window at 4am to try to sell you tea, and mothers cling the outside of buses after passing their babies through the windows to be cared for by strangers.

2. Poverty is inescapable. Its scale and intensity means that even the most blithe tourist will have to adapt his or her world view to cope with the shock. It makes Western poverty, with its social security safety nets and health provision, seem like a Swiss finishing school.

3. Westerners are outsiders. They will be stared at and hustled, not through animosity but because of an assumption that they have money to burn. Not only is it exhausting, but for white middle-class gappers it is probably the first time they will have been on the sharp end of racist prejudices.

4. Kindness to strangers is endemic and profoundly touching.

5. It isn’t home. Gap years coincide with teenagers learning to deal with the world without their parents, and being in a country far from home only enhances that experience.

None of this is meant to suggest that India is the ultimate gap destination. Any country resistant to western influences will have the same impact. My point is that India is no theme park or pre-packaged experience. People who spend six months there on a gap year do have insights that people who spend that time at home do not.

But yes, the anti-gappers have a point. Those who have been must learn to shut up about it. I shall not mention it again.

Notes from Abu Dhabi (made a little while ago)

The palms lining the roads in downtown Abu Dhabi have dates growing on them in giant bunches. “In a few weeks they will be ripe,” says Zahoor, the driver who is taking us into the desert to drive crazily up and down the dunes. Anyone can pick them, like blackberries in the English countryside. There seems to be more attention devoted to central reservations in this country than the British devote to their public flowerbeds. From 8am until at least 5pm there are overalled gardeners tending to the palms, lawns and rockeries by the roadside.

Head in hands hold ‘em

I have a confession to make. No, I haven’t watched Cliffhanger again. It’s this: I quite like televised poker. I like watching familiar characters testing their nerves against one another, playing the odds and having to cope with high-stakes success and failure. But none of these is a winning argument. You could say the same about watching Formula One racing, a spectator sport so rich in techie knowledge and so sparse in incident that you may as well be watching Stephen Hawking reading The Silmarillion.

I like the deathless commentary and, in particular, Jesse May, a host so out of place in a jacket and tie that he might conceivably have gotten his break in television in an advertisement for PG Tips.

I know that I’m in bad company with TV poker because the advert breaks are so ghastly. There are endless pleas to send text messages to “girls in your area”, for example, but the most nauseating advert is one for pkr, an online poker video game. The voiceover, which accompanies footage of electronic poker players posturing like gang members in West Side Story, is so densely packed with jargon that anyone who said it in real life would be sent home to watch a Formula One qualifying session. “I’ve come in over the top of pot-sized raises with middle pair, bluffed under the gun with four runners behind me, folded pocket kings on a hunch,” the polygonal man says. “I’ve survived bad beats, sick draws and cold decks, and I’ve lived through fields of thousands to make the final table. Here I come.”

I despair. These guys are giving geeks a bad name.

Blank canvassing

I’d be highly surprised if the four people who read this blog regularly have enough voting power to deliver me victory, but here we go all the same. I have been nominated (on a rather long shortlist) for the Tenuous Connection awards – the contest for the most tenuous connection to a celebrity. My entry, as detailed at the bottom of this earlier post, is a mightily underwhelming brush with Suzi Quattro, whose purchase of more than £10,000 worth of wine in the Wapping branch of Oddbins immediately before my £100-odd spree made the staff regard me as somewhat inconsequential. Tenuous, I think you’ll agree. Anyhow, if you would like to vote for me, then click on the big brown icon up there and write “I vote for le poulet noir” or similar in the comments box at the bottom of that page. Go on. I’m nicer than David Davis.

Brushes with celebrity

I went to bed last night laughing at the memory of my childhood encounter with Sue Lawley.

I saw her in a branch of Waitrose in south-west London when I was ten or so. I was in a bad mood for a reason I don’t recall and, as I passed by, I muttered audibly: “Hmph. Another Sue Lawley impersonator.”

I remember her smiling, which struck me as rather gracious given the scorn I had just poured upon her. It did not occur to me at the time (or indeed for another two decades) that she was amused by the sheer absurdity of my comment. It’s quite far-fetched to imagine that there is one Sue Lawley impersonator out there, let alone sufficent numbers to justify irritation with seeing yet another one.

(It is worth noting, however, that the market for look-alikes is staggeringly broad. I have whiled away many happy hours perusing the small ads at the back of The Stage newspaper, a terrific resource for impersonators of anyone from Posh Spice to Karl Marx.)

I was reminded of the incident by Tenuous ‘08 – a blogger’s inspired competition to find people’s most tenuous connection to a celebrity. Last year’s winner was an absolute corker: “My cousin’s great grandmother was in the car crash with Sammy Davis Jr when he lost his left eye.” My Lawley story clearly wasn’t going to cut it, so I entered instead the time I was in Oddbins in Wapping, east London, to buy several crates of cava for a housewarming party. The bill was at least £100, and I remarked to the staff that it wasn’t a bad sale for them. “Not really,” the assistant said. “We just had Suzie Quattro in here. She bought so much that we had to run her card through twice.”