February 2005 Archives

(more pics of Cannes)
(more pics of St. Raphael)

You know how sometimes you wonder about things. I used to wonder what it would be like to drink champagne on the deck of a 5 million pound yacht in the South of France. The answer is: it feels pretty good.

I've just been at the 3GSM mobile phone conference in Cannes. Exhibitor Space is at a premium there, so some companies rent a yacht for the week. Usually these aren't used for walk-by exhibits, but for meetings and as a place for the delegates to stay when they're at the conference. Hotels are also in short supply. I ended up staying in the town of St. Raphael 30 miles south of Cannes. And if you have a yacht and you're going to invite people on to it for a chat, it only makes sense to do so in the evening and offer a few cocktails.

Note that this was for work though. I wasn't there on a pleasure trip. I was on that yacht (well, several yachts, actually) drinking champagne and WORKING. This is the key point. It's all about steely resolve and finding out what your host knows and building relationships and doing your damnedest to ignore the jazz trio playing on the upper-deck and not getting too loaded down with canapes and bubbly so your mind can still operate at peak efficiency and making sure you can do your best for the corporation and bring back juicy bits of espionage and that one crucial business card that can whisk your fly out of the ointment just before the cleaver comes down.

But enough about work, let's all just look at the pictures and dream of moving to the South of France.

I wrote a Valentine's Poem for my Darling Spousal Unit. It went:

Roses are soft
Pine sap is sticky
The girl that I love
Calls herself Vicki

Last year I wrote one that went...

Roses are red
Auburgine are purple
You make my pants
Look like a church sturple

Just thought I should note them down somewhere so they are not lost to posterity.

A while ago I wrote that I was worried about losing my appreciation for music or at least for going to live gigs. Thanks to Ed Harcourt, it may slowly be coming back.

I've been to two Ed Harcourt gigs now. Last night's was at the St. James Church on Piccadilly, an absolutely beautiful venue. We sat in the gallery just above and to the left of the stage. I watched from a similar vantage point at the other gig as well. I prefer it to being front and center. It has a kind of I'm-with-the-band-backstage-groupie feel to it. The other gig was at Dingwalls in Camden (or whatever it's called now). That gig was much rowdier. There was much jumping up and down and spilled drinks and shouting. Ed brought his banjo to that gig.

St. James is not the kind of place conducive to jumping up and down or rock and roll banjo playing. It's a church, after all. What made the St. James gig stand out for me, though, was the trumpet player. Now HE was rock and roll. He was totally cool. He just did his job, ignored the crowd, and played his music when called upon. And the man didn't just play the trumpet. Oh no. He also played the xylophone, the wind-chimes, and the wine glass. This last was my favourite and completely made up for the absence of the banjo.

I used to play the wine glass on occasion after a big family dinner. Unfortunately, while I enjoyed the sound, it seemed to drive the rest of the family into the kind of frenzy exhibited by dogs reacting to a noise beyond the range of human hearing.

The technique is simple but requires a certain mastery and practice. You dip your finger in the wine to moisten it and then run it slowly around the edge of the wine glass. This produces a delightful (or possibly not) high-pitched keening noise. You have to have just the right amount of wine in the glass, of course. This involves a long calibration process. The wine is carefully poured in, and then carefully sipped out until it is at just the right level. This is usually when the person doing the calibration is too drunk to distinguish between a beautiful ringing full tone and an irritating fingernails-on-chalkboard screech.

Fortunately, trumpet-playing dude was a professional and his wine glass produced the desired ringing full tone rather than the screech. Later on in the performance, when the wine glass was no longer needed, he knocked back the contents in between bouts of trumpet playing and wind-chime tingling.

The man was a consummate professional when it came to his other instruments as well. I remember one piece in particular where he hunched over, dangling the wind chimes carefully from his teeth and hit a series of precise notes on the xylophone, tingling the chimes all the while. Very impressive. I also liked the way he used a couple of empty paper coffee cups to mute his trumpet. The man is a genius. I'm confident he could produce beautiful music given nothing but a block of spam and a feather.

His coolest performance, though, was during the last song. He sat down at a bench towards the back of the stage and methodically emptied all his pockets. He then stood up, walked to the front of the stage and played his trumpety bits. When that was over, he sat back down on the bench, and searched through the items spread beside him until he determined the least crumpled piece of paper and then rolled himself a cigarette. He had just enough time to finish this before it was time for a final blast on the trumpet. Then, while everyone was taking their bows and waving to the crowd, he put the ciggie in his mouth, grabbed a lit candle and headed for the door. Now that is the kind of coolness that can make a man believe in music again.

My old treeplanting buddy, Roy, stopped by for a visit last week. Sadly, I didn't take any pictures to commemorate the event. It's probably a good thing, actually. Not that Roy isn't a good looking lad, but he's got an identical twin brother and so the photo really would have meant nothing in terms of proof. You'd look at the photo and say to yourself, "yeah, sure, it looks like Roy, but it could easily be Steve" and we'd be no better off than we are right now. You'll just have to trust me. Roy did come to visit. Honest.

It was a whirlwind tour for Roy. He was in England to pick up a Master's degree from the University of Leicester. We didn't get to spend much time together which is unfortunate because I think our minds are tuned to the same wavelength, or at least the same rough spectrum. On Friday night he met me at work and we grabbed a quick bite to eat, then joined some friends at a combined leaving do and birthday party at the Old Bank of England on Fleet street. I like Roy. He's a slow drinker, a good listener and has lived through some of my best stories. We spent a good part of the night boring people with treeplanting stories.

"...the first time I saw Russ, he was butt naked, changing the oil on a quad," Roy was saying as I returned from the bar with a round of drinks.

"Wasn't that a great wedding!" I said.

"Wedding?" asked John.

"Fantastic wedding!" said Roy. "Only no nakedness -- that I saw, anyway." He turned to me. "Hey do you remember the chainsaw breakfast?"

"Sadly, no. I wasn't there. It's a great story though."

"What's a chainsaw breakfast?" asked John.

"A chainsaw breakfast is baked grapefruit and grilled cheese sandwiches." I said. "But you have to cut them in half with a chainsaw."

"It doesn't really work very well," said Roy. "The chainsaw pretty much just mangles them up and spews them into the crowd."

"You tried to cut grilled cheese sandwiches in half with a chainsaw?" asked John.

"No, not me," said Roy. "That was Blair."

"Blair was a bit of a madman," I explained.

"Remember that truck he had..."

...and so it continued until they kicked us out at closing time.

It was too good a night to end it there so seven of us headed towards Soho with the intention of getting some Chinese food. Unfortunately, these noble intentions were thwarted by a trio of gorgeous Brazilian women being kicked out of a cocktail lounge we were passing. One of them grabbed my glasses. Another grabbed Roy by the arm and demanded he lead them to the nearest Salsa bar. The third took this as her cue to begin dancing up and down the pavement with another member of our party, Brendan.

I pleaded with the one Brazilian to give me my glasses back. Roy explained to the other that he was from Canada and didn't know the location of any salsa bars in London. And Brendan, who was the only single one in our group, shouted, "There's a salsa bar on Charing Cross Road!" and immediately flagged down a taxi.

Everyone except Roy, John, and myself got into a couple of cabs. The three of us shouted insincere assurances to the taxi people that we would see them there. We had no intention of doing so, but this is the decade of the mobile phone, and the salsa bar was between us and the Chinese restaurant, and so, after a couple of nagging phone calls, we bowed to peer pressure and found ourselves in a crowded sweaty nightclub dancing like crazed wildebeest with strange women from the other side of the world.

This didn't last long for Roy and I. We are both elderly and settled compared with most of the others in our group. Our wild time has past. As soon as we were certain everyone was mesmerised by the writhings of the Brazilians, we fled for the streets and the always entertaining night bus home.

The next morning my Karma was levelled out by a brutal hour and a half yoga class which served to remind me just how un-Brazilian I was on the lithe-omemeter.

Roy abandoned me to this fate and travelled back across the city to visit his relatives. We met up again for dinner that night and then he was gone. I'm glad we had a good night while he was here. I feel I've been a bit of a disappointment for some of my more recent visitors. My mother was here just a week before Roy, for instance, and we didn't run into a single Brazilian.