Toujours frôler le désastre

Amsterdam: Whatever you take a photo of, your foreground composition will be bikes and a canal. Here, Prinsengracht and the Westerkerk catch the setting sun.

Timberblog once again answers those questions of space and time that you have always needed to know. This time we deal with: is it possible to finish teaching a lesson in Vanves at 15h and catch a Thalys at 15h55 (and still have time to divert and buy a sandwich at the legendary St Lazare sandwich shop)? The answer is apparently so, as long as you don't mind getting to the Gare du Nord at 15h53 and having to catch the back end of the train. The back end of the train which goes to Köln. Not Amsterdam.

Fortunately you have enough time at Bruxelles-Midi to get off and run up to the front end which, rather more helpfully, is going to Amsterdam.

Dam Square and, on the left, Fame - direct cause of major Timberwalletdeath

And so it was that I kept up my record of nearly missing the train every single time we do a festival. The Thalys arrived at Centraal Station at 20h leaving me half an hour to find the Rozentheater, which turned out to be 29 minutes' walk away, just down the road from Westerkirk and Anne Frank's old place. I came in and took my seat in the front row. "Oh, sorry, that seat's reserved," said someone. "Yes, it's reserved for me," I said (this is a satisfying thing to be able to say).

I wasn't performing until Friday so made my way into town on Thursday. After becoming very frustrated at the lack of decent record shops I finally found quite a good one just off Dam square. One thing I may have inherited from my mother is the inability to resist a bargain, and this place was full of them. My DVD collection promptly increased five fold (in my defence, I only had one DVD before last week).

The Improfessionals chez Nelis

The final members of our group arrived on Thursday evening and we drank at a place run by a woman who seemed to be called Nelis and who had decorated the bar with photos of her entire life.

On Friday it decided to be sunny, and as a result I had to go out and take all my pictures again. A selection will be uploaded to Flickr shortly. Our show (and the hour of work for which I had deserved this free 5-day trip to the Netherlands) wasn't a vintage one, but didn't stop us from making fools of ourselves on the karaoke night afterwards. We had a few fans up from Paris to see us, one of whom took some excellent photos, that you can see here.

Oosterdok, Zondag nacht

I finished my explorations of the city over the weekend. Found that, despite not speaking a word of Dutch, it's strangely easy to understand newspapers (it helps when the word for "since" is "sinds", "news" is "nieuws", and "Sunday night" is "Zondag nacht" - and so on). Hmm, I thought, looking at the Apartments To Rent page. I could live here.

Même quand j'suis en vacances je bosse

Just a few points here, after making the mistake of listening to the Five Live phone-in this morning:

* The next time I hear anyone make arguments referring to the Sheikh incident as Eriksson "publically" criticising his players, I will go completely mad. He did not publically criticise his players. As far as anyone is concerned, it was a private conversation. How many of the people that call phone-in programmes about this would survive more than a week in their current jobs if their mates recorded and distributed what they said about their coworkers or boss over a drink down the pub?

* It's conjecture, but a very decent hypothesis, that Sven was going to leave after this world cup in any case. If so, what has the NOTW achieved with its campaign to discredit him and hound him out? Absolutely nothing, other than causing potential rifts in the England camp. Great work dudes.

* None of the "potential candidates" articles springing up seem to mention Big Phil Scolari. The man has 1. expressed an interest in the job, 2. won the last world cup, 3. reached the last european championship final, and in the process 4. dumped England out of both those competitions. Sam Allardyce and Steve McLaren's mutual most successful moment was playing a Waddington's League Combination final against each other in 2004 - they shouldn't even be mentioned in the same breath. If Hiddink can be tempted, then why not; yes, he was lucky in Korea, but imagine what he could do with players the calibre of England's current crop. Two other propositions are the stuff of political nightmare - O'Neill is an Irish Catholic for frig's sake. And whoever first suggested Hitzfeld is a loon. Great manager, but there's one glaring issue. You've seen what the English have done to a "neutral" Swede; what on earth would happen to a German?

* People saying he was a crap England manager because of the defeat to Denmark (meaningless friendly, 4-1), Australia (meaningless friendly, 3-1) or Norn Iron (ultimately insignificant qualifier, 1-0) conveniently forget the wins against Germany (5-1 in their back yard in a vital crunch match), Argentina (1-0 in the World Cup and 3-2 in an anything-but-meaningless friendly) or Poland home+away (which no-one seems to notice is actually a bloody impressive pair of qualifying results). Yes performances were poor against some "weak" opposition (the Wales+Azerbaijan wins come to mind) but when Chelsea play badly and still win, it's a sign of "Champions". Something doesn't figure.

* Nearly every caller this morning criticised Sven's private life and the fact that he likes a bit of action with a number of ladies. Then five seconds later accused him of lacking passion. (It's at moments like that I hate being English.)

* On the same subject: watching from abroad, the British Press' reaction to his private life was frankly surreal. Sven had an "affair"? Big wow, as we used to say in primary school. For feck's sake, how can it be an affair when the guy's not even married? He has a long term girlfriend maybe, but that's his problem. He did absolutely nothing wrong, and it had absolultely nothing to do with his job as England manager. Except that I suspect he wouldn't have pulled Ulrika if he was a window salesman from Chipping Sodbury.

La, well, I'm off to Amsterdam for a few days for a festival disguised as delayed Christmas holidays. Which means no Timberblog until next week. If anyone happens to be around in the Netherlands currently, details are on the poster there, but I'm afraid our show is already sold out.

Learning to deal with parties

Flo held a party at his flat last night "to mark the 10th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall", which is easily the most spurious excuse for a party that I've heard this year. The fact that Flo was leaving for Amsterdam the day after, and was letting out the flat to a friend for the week, is naturally a pure coincidence. Did I mention he's German?

Now unless you are a man or wummun of enormous charisma, or an unashamed attention whore, then chances are you find parties something of an effort. There are occasional instances of me turning into an attention whore, but they are relatively rare and almost exclusively involve either a piano or women's clothing. Purely in a professional rôle, obviously. No, wait, not that kind of profes... I'll just stop.

Anyway, I often find parties something of an effort. Symptom of shyness? Nice idea, but unfortunately this is not the case. Shy people would like to interact more than they do, but feel unable to. Conversely, I feel perfectly able to talk to strangers, it's simply that I can't be arsed. I have a virulent (and frankly totally justifiable) aversion to small talk. It's nothing against the person; sometimes you just have to accept you're not making a connection and move on. Or cop out and stick with those you know already. Nothing wrong about an odd drink with good friends. Or, better, a good drink with odd friends.

Anyway, none of this is a reflection on last night particularly, just a general state of affairs. Last night fulfilled many criteria for a good party - a clearly defined chatter room, dance room, and chillout room, so you could pick which mood suited you. A clearly defined time I had to leave (counterintuitive perhaps, but it's always a good idea to leave the party while you are still having fun). And it also helps when the host is either a stud, or someone who ends up being "just friends" with hundreds of girls. I'll leave those who know him to decide if Flo is one or the other or indeed both. Anyway, to sum up, there was beer, there were friends, there were girls. And that's a decent checklist in my book. Impressively, one girl exacted physical violence upon me only minutes after I struck up conversation. But she was German. Then, in what Mike will interpret as a possible career move, I collaborated with Florence in composing mildly erotic literature out of fridge magnets. That was before she rebuked me for not recognising the opening 3 seconds of Rivers Of Babylon. One could note that she is also German. I got my coat, and left.

If you haven't worked it out yet: yes, the fall of the Berlin wall was very significant. But it very clearly wasn't the 10th anniversary last night.

See extra photoage

In a fit of late night creativity and HTML-meddling, I have added a little jobby to the side bar thing which means you can take a gander at a few piccies of mine on flickr.

The photos I have made available to the general public are those of landscapes and buildings taken around the world (well, Europe at least). If you want to see piccies of, like, people, then you'll need to 1. have your own flickr account and 2. add me as a "friend" or "family" depending on how intimate you're feeling at that particular moment.

Meanwhile I would like everyone to sit back and appreciate the unabashed gloriousness that is Reading FC this season.

Clichés bohémiens

If you're reading Timberblog, then the chances are you'll have met an unsigned musician at some point in your lives. Fools, aren't they? And I can tell you that when you are one, you meet even more. Their favourite topics of conversation are thusly:

1. How ( x ) has sold millions of CDs despite being terrible, while they, innovative and groundbreaking genii, have sold three (to the band's mums,who gave them away as Christmas presents)

2. How they were really close to signing to ( x ) once, but "the guy that liked us left the company the week before we were supposed to sign" / "their shares fell sharply and they couldn't invest in any more new talent" / "we turned them down rather than sell our souls" / etc

3. "Artistic differences" with other members of the band, other members of other bands, or anyone in the room.

4. Isn't that new album by (obscure band no-one has ever heard of) absolutely brilliant?

SO I'm about to spring the second one on you. Actually, if you're someone I know, then I've probably already done 1, 3, and 4. Sorry about that. Anyhow, the "nice noises" coming from a maison de disques a few blog entries back have, it seems, crescendoed into something of an orgasm.

Apologies for the needless sexual imagery. I live in France, go figure.

Eddy recorded a song recently with some random producer dude that he'd been in contact with somehow via a man who probably does have a name but who is usually only referred to as celui qui m'ouvre les portes. (On which subject, couldn't we all do with a celui qui ouvre les portes?). The producer dude had written this song, and already received nice noises from aforementioned record company, but hadn't found the right voice for it. Turns out they liked Eddy's version, and that all being well (and yes, you still have to take this kind of thing
with a pinch of salt, it's a fickle world) he should be scribbling his name on the dotted line sometime around the beginning of next month, and the song itself will be going out on good ol' NRJ not so long after that. Trop cool!

So, is this A Good Thing for Timber? Still a bit early to tell. Major plus point: Eddy is probably being signed, and I am his pianist and major composer. Even if I don't sign myself, I'll be working with a signed singer, which is as good as. Particularly if they take on the songs for which I wrote the music - which at the current rate should be about a third to a half of any future album. (The dude gets signed, and suddenly all his musico friends want to write songs for him - bizarre huh?)

Of course you can never tell if it's going to work out quite as smoothly as that. It's perfectly possible that the record company take him on and then forcefeed him their own songs. While I'm sure Eddy is a good dude at heart and would want me to carry on accompanying him after all the work I've put in so far, you can't expect a multinational to have any such sentimentality or indeed respect.

Hmm, bit of a serious blog entry today, but I guess you've either dealt with that, or you're not reading this line.

Anyone for a game of "spot the subjunctive"?

Jesus was black

I'll just take a minute or two out of a ludicrously busy week or so before going to sleep. Parents are here, although they're off this afternoon. Delayed Christmas, exchange of presents, rushing around Paris trying to find new things to entertain them with, etc. Yesterday, among other things, we decided to visit St Denis' basilica (where loads of French kings are buried) and St Sulpice (where some stuff happened which was crucial to the Da Vinci Code but which like most of the book is actually complete trout droppings).

Basilique de St Denis, yesterday.

Oh no, British Institute Newsletter injokes. Sorry. For everything ever.

We grabbed sandwiches from the legendary St Lazare sandwich shop (I was on the verge of fixing up Chakkers with the girl working there last summer whom he clearly fancied, but he forbid me, and now there's a new one whom I find quite hot and flirted with as much as is possible during the course of ordering two ham sandwiches and a couple of beignets, which as you can imagine is not a great deal and certainly not enough to get her number - Chakkers, would you pop over and do the dirty work? Of course Father misses the point entirely and asks quizzically "do you know that girl from somewhere then?" Ok, this bracket is getting far too long). We caught the métro up out of Paris into St Denis and visited its 12th-century basilica.

They had a nativity scene with a black Joseph, black Mary and black baby Jesus. Kudos for this kind of thing. The constant Western portrayal of Jesus, and other biblical characters, as a white Westerner, is one of the biggest nonsenses of organised Christianity. The dude was from Israel. Probably looked more Arab than anything. If stereotypes run true, and Jesus showed up somewhere in south-central US tomorrow, they'd think he was a terrorist...

Back in Paris, we saw the cunning north-south meridien timeline thingy at St Sulpice, the "PS" stained-glass windows which mean something entirely different to what Dan Brown suggests, and this year's nativity scene, which took not only the biscuit but also made off with several fig rolls and a small fruitcake:

Utterly over-the-top nativity creation at St Sulpice this year.
Featuring fully-functional running waterfall and real gesticulating arm action figure shepherds.

Meanwhile on a less churchy subject it seems they're reinstalling a ferris wheel on place de la Concorde. You will probably know the story about the millennium one being dismantled in 2002, shipped to Birmingham and rebuilt - with one small oversight. They forgot to replace the tape recording, so as you rose up in the midlands, you heard about the marvellous views of Paris you were currently enjoying.

Ferris foul, and foul is fairground - Macbeth, I.i.11

But now it seems it's back. Or something very much like it. Any Birmingham readers noticed any ferris wheels going missing recently?