Alan Coleman

I look forward to an Indian meal more than I do Saturday, Christmas and the start of the football season combined. The wind up to it starts at about 1pm on Saturday afternoon after I get back from the shops and tell Mandy that I’m having a starter, probably Sheek kebab. Then I spend the rest of the afternoon deciding whether I’m going to have a Vindaloo or not, which I rarely do because I’ll change my mind at the precise moment the waiter looks up from his pad, Biro poised.

At around 5pm I’m pacing around the flat urging Mand to hurry with the makeup. During the football season this part of the day is even better because the results are on the TV and I’m walking around with a can of lager pretending to be a Man City fan. Great.

As we walk towards East Dulwich I can see the restaurant sign shining through the trees from a quarter of a mile away. Mirash Tandoori, in red an blue neon. Finally, at last, like Clark Griswald reaching Wally World, I’m actually there. But not quite, to prolong the experience a bit longer we’ll go for a few drinks in The Black Cherry where they serve cocktails and Austrian lager.

And so to the Mirash, greeted at the door like a friend, seated, the wine glasses removed without asking. And as the pints of chilled Cobra are placed on the stiff white tablecloth, Mand looks at me over the menu, smiles and looks back down again. “Am I allowed a starter?”

I’m learning how to play guitar, Mandy brought me one as a present for my birthday and I’m properly getting in to it. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do as it’s been my favourite sound for as long as I can remember.

I used to play the Saxophone, grade 8, although that means nothing really as I was never actually any good. It was enjoyable from a technical perspective, playing in a band and keeping the thing in tune and playing the notes in the right place. It’s just that I’m not a natural musician so was only going to go far. Also I was playing in an Army Band, and in that environment unless you’re exceptional at your chosen instrument you’re treated like something scraped off the shoe. Men can be very bitchy.

Who wants to play the Sax anyway? As an instrument it’s always going to be associated with greasy pony tails rather than Stan Getz and John Coltrane. Anything on the sax post 1970 will always sound smug.

A guitar on the other hand is the embodiment of Rock ‘n Roll music. It’s what it’s all about, from 1950s America to the Mersey and from Zappa to Sonic Youth. Stuff marching around in a red uniform, that was a waste of everybody’s time.

I used to play guitar when I was younger, at primary school. The head teacher, Mr Atkins, would spend the best part of Friday afternoon teaching chords and songs to anyone that came along with a guitar. I used to ask myself why anyone would want to sit in a classroom learning arithmetic when you could be sat in the sunshine learning E minor, G and D7. The shoving parents of today would have had none of it. My child, the targets, push to the front. Judging children by sneering at league tables in grubby Sunday newspapers. Nice.

Mr Atkins was notable for another reason, he had a strange infatuation with the Parachute Regiment. If any child dared break rules the resulting lecture would probably involve a comparison with one of the British Army’s finest fighting units. “Do you think that’s acceptable behaviour do you? Eh?! Wouldn’t get away with that in the Parachute Regiment would you? No!! So why in Gods name do you think it’s okay to forget your sports kit here then?!!” There’s nothing more comical than an unintentionally funny person.

Mr Atkins, guitar player, great bloke and comic genius.

He’ll probably get off the train at Cannon Street or London Bridge. Along with his important AACCA documentation, his work clothes and sensible shoes will be tucked inside a cheap Fitness First day bag strapped to his back.

On alighting the train he will go about unpacking his Brompton folding bike, tugging and screwing at the various parts with his elbows and backside banging into other commuters struggling to get past. The whole procedure will have about it an earnest importance that comes with the lower ranks of middle management, that quiet and serious demeanour of corporate life by which the bored justify their bored existence. The concentration, blank look and scruffy sweatshirt at the weekend (Nottingham University).

Now he’s queuing to get through the gate, bobbing from side to side with impatience as he makes last minute adjustments to the Brompton folding bike, sturdy and traditional. He’ll be wearing a bright yellow rain resistant cycling top that will probably smell of stale sweat, that’ll be accompanied by a pair of lycra shorts that will be stretched to capacity by his ever expanding bottom. The legs will be unshaved and as anyone with any knowledge of the sport will tell you, that is a big NO if you’re going to wear Lycra. The side pocket of the cheap rucksack from the gym he never goes to will have a copy of the Metro stuffed in the side, it’s free after all. The full effect will be topped off by a garish helmet of metallic blue and red that he’ll drop when he gets his travelcard from the outer pocket of the backpack. You think he looks stupid now, wait until he gets on the Brompton folding bike.

Overweight blokes on bikes are all about momentum. Once they get going they can’t stop, and the city accountant on the folding bike is no exception to the rule. He’ll thunder along the streets balanced precariously over those tiny little wheels, panting heavily as his huge thighs pound and wobble a low gear. Like his company’s corporate policy, it’s definitely a case of no pain no gain, which is why he’ll be sweating like a pig by the time he gets to Ludgate Circus.

Don’t get in his way because a pair of utterly ridiculous wrap around blue mirror shades will render this 20mph unstoppable lump completely blind. Don’t bother shouting either, because he’ll be listening to Massive Attack album on his iPod (White earphones).

Utterly, ridiculous.

What is it about London cyclists? In the space of about six months they’ve morphed from a few people commuting to work into a whole army of renegade road users battling for survival. Don’t get me wrong, it’s good for air quality and general congestion, but does it really have to be quite so aggressive?

I’m sure it used to be about people getting to work, now it seems to be about fat Steve from accounts indulging in some kind of alternative lifestyle for forty minutes a day. The wrap around shades, the shouting at pedestrians as the lights are jumped. Yes Steve, you’re one insane motherfucker, you don’t work in an office at all do you? No, you’re a professional base jumper/surfer/ hitman and member of 3 Para aren’t you? I’m surprised you’ve got time to be in London at all what with your commitments to the 2008 Extreme Sport Expo. You’ll be under a bus next week, then of course it’ll all be someone else’s fault.

Cyclists have very quickly become regarded as London’s worst road users. And that’s not worst as in ‘Down with the kids’ or ‘Bad ass’, but worst in terms of road using ability and basic two wheeled skill. The misguided faux aggression and lack of substance is London personified, in fact the London cyclist is everything you need to know about this city.

But despite identifying with some kind of new radical movement against boring people like me, the urban cyclist is just another thirty something fad for people that think Radiohead is alternative music.

So the next time you see the devil glaring at you from behind the insane sunglasses, smog mask and day glow Lycra, remember it’s just another office bod, like you and me.

FA Cup Final, Saturday 17th May 2008. Portsmouth Vs Cardiff.

The day starts with a journey down to Portsmouth on the South West Trains’ superb service out of Waterloo. Great station, quiet new trains with spacious carriages, £30 return. You can’t argue with that. People who moan about trains in this country usually listen to bands like Coldplay, drink Magners Cider and pretend they like Jeremy Clarkson. Go away.

The Final itself coincided with Ian’s Stag night, which was handy for getting refused entry to most pubs in Southsea, “Nothing personal guys, but no groups of blokes”. What do you expect? It’s the FA Cup Final, not fucking Valentines Day. You can stuff it anyway, who needs student pubs with stab vests, chalk boards and fake sawdust? Not when some of the finest pubs in Portsmouth are open for anyone, The 5th Hants Volunteer, The Devonshire Arms, proper boozers with Vinyl padding and dog hair. Pints in pint glasses and a dartboard without the irony. Urban pubs for industry, a dying and underrated breed.

A proper football club in a proper city. Women wearing football tops out drinking with their blokes. Humour, cigarettes, the buzz of victory and self respect. Great stuff, great day.

The news is on, BBC. I haven’t seen it in ages and now I know why.

A completely unrelated story focuses on a man with an England tattoo on his forearm. He’s done nothing wrong other than to offer some first hand evidence. Yet that evidence has already been doubted by the production crew, the BBC, the self importance of Television.

The crime of ink stained skin being a point of focus before he’s even opened his mouth.

It doesn’t matter what you have to say, what you’ve done, where you’ve been, what battle you’ve served in or what college you’ve been to. If you’ve dared to decorate yourself then you’re a potential point of interest for the revolting chattering classes.

I don’t know what upsets me most about the pointing with knowledge, and the sneering smiles of contempt. It could be the blatant snobbery of it all, but it’s probably that all important knowing of middle class smug.

One things for sure, news has never been more blatant with its condescension towards anyone that dares anything other than to aspire to the tedium of Graduate normality.

On the contrary, you people with cameras and clip boards make me fucking sick.

When I was younger I used to read small colorful comic books about war called, Commando. You can buy them concatenated as huge volumes in bigger bookshops. Gripping and predictable stories from all wars about fighting and destruction. I couldn’t get enough of it, the struggle between good and evil laid bare by Tommies with stubble pitted against skinny and monocled Jerry officers with leather gloves. Great stuff, honestly. Like with most things in life though I eventually grew out of it, I can’t remember when or why in particular but for some reason one day I was into reading Dick Francis.

I grew up, but as I look around me the real stories of our current wars still seem to take on the same Commando comic theme. Huge tabloid lettering laid onto pictures of ‘OUR BOYS’ in action. Enemy kill counts and detailed tales of bravery and valour, all complimented with big regimental cap badges and motto’s.

The very same simplicity that attracted me to stories of war in the first place is being used in the next generation to flog copy of tabloid rubbish to the masses. It’s an effective and fairly cynical tactic, although not new if one remembers the shameful coverage of the Falklands Conflict.

What bothers me most about this kind of sanitisation is the effect it’s had on how we’ve have come to view warfare. Not as a horrific and destructive waste of life and culture, but as a kind of triumphalist entertainment that leaves the reading itching for more excitement. Pictures of soldiers firing from the hip are great for paper sales, recruitment figures and flag waving, but behind the comic book stubble lies a terrifying pit of betrayal and damage for everyone involved.

We are simply kidding ourselves as adults in very much the same way that Commando Comic writers did as children. The idea that ‘OUR BOYS’ and ‘Harry the Homecoming Hero’ are somehow made of steel and will overcome evil with British grit and determination is ludicrous. Don’t get me wrong, I love the armed forces as much as the next bloke. But turning them into comic book heroes to hide the inconvenient reality of war will only exacerbate the disappointment of our eventual defeat. Worse still, it’ll make it easier for small religious men in suits to wage war with other peoples children.

The most depressing sight of the Olympic torch making its way through London on Sunday was those figures decked out in the blue and white shell suits. Having swapped tunics for disguises from JJB, the two lines of identical Chinese ‘Officials’ pushed and shoved their way passed anything that stood in their path.

The ‘Officials’ themselves were then protected by lines of Metropolitan Police, somehow reassuring against their irate counterparts in black caps, radios and sunglasses. The anger in the shell suited faces tells of a paranoid administration refusing to come to terms with any idea outside of their own of what it feels like to be a human being. For them, the lies, deception and contempt flow with the same underpinning sense of denial as it’s always done. Simply stare at the camera and say something completely different, if there wasn’t something quite so sinister lurking in the background it would be funny.

Great British authors were writing about people like you decades ago.

Meanwhile boring celebrities like Tim Henman queue up to become a part of Olympic history, happily turning a blind against Tibet and its unwanted regime from neighbouring China. A regime whose record on human rights is shocking even by today’s standards. Ellen MacArthur too, grinning inanely whilst holding the torch of oppression, she really should have known better.

It is the police that uphold the law in this country so it follows that it should have been them doing the shoving, and nobody else. By allowing foreign ‘Officials’ to bully protesters we’re sending a negative message to the world that’ll we’ll doing pretty much anything if you’re big enough, irrespective of what those small men in plain suits get up to back home. But then that’s what happened only moths after Blair became Prime Minister, remember? Using Police vans to Hide protesters from the Communist Party of China, I like your style Piety.

I hope that Pro Tibet protesters continue to harass the Olympics, I hope they spoil the Olympics for the Chinese people and the rest of the world. The Olympics have been dogged by corruption and greed in recent years, it looks like they’re finally coming home.

All my favourite writers are American, as is most of the music I listen too, in fact it’s difficult to think of a culture outside of our own that has given my life so much pleasure. I re-read Steinbeck’s work over and over in the same way that I’ll be listening to Sonic Youth in thirty years time. I love the place, even though at the age of thirty five I’ve never been further west than the Gower Peninsula.

In terms of culture, technology and history they’ve given us so much to be grateful for. Yet when it comes to the task of government they have always failed to live up to expectation, now we’ve reached a point where even the idea hope has about it an air of failure.

Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Obama. These names have never been capable of anything more than the repellent self interest of their own celebrity. But after everything, even after the Bush family and giving up hope of the Whitehouse ever being able to live up to Jed Bartlett, I still refuse to believe that America can’t produce a set of individuals capable of government.

I was going to write about ‘Brave Prince Harry’, the ‘Homecoming Hero’. But I’ll just end up getting angry and spoiling what would have been a perfectly good March Monday afternoon, albeit a wet and windy one.

I find that one of the main problems of playlisting in apps like WinAmp or iTunes is that the same set of songs tends to get listened to over and over again. Eventually the above mentioned playlist ends up like a huge comfort zone, a predictable and somewhat tedious musical backdrop to a Saturday afternoon. This defeats the object of embracing the technology in the first place, it also means that we’ll spend the rest of our lives listening to Six By Seven.

After searching for music like At The Drive In online the first band it threw up was The Fall of Troy, a three-piece experimental post-hardcore band from Mukilteo, Washington in the USA. The site also describes them as having Mathcore tendencies, Mathcore?

The Fall of Troy are a great band. Complete with wailing metal guitars, howling vocals and sexy chords. Mathcore.

“Me? Yeah…….I’m kinda into the whole Mathccore thing at the moment, it’s like, a US post-hardcore scene. There’s some really cool stuff going on.”

And that’s just the kind of bullshit I’ll be spinning by end of the week.

Anyway, they’ve been around for a while, have three albums out and they’re all great. You should ‘Check them out’.