I JUST realised that Planet Mut was six years old back in July. Thanks to both of you for sticking with me over the past 2,190 days.
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FOR some reason I’ve recently become a huge fan of iced tea. I think it’s because it’s not as gassy as Coke and because it’s slightly less dehydrating than coffee. Drinking cold tea over ice with lemon obviously goes against every atom of my Britishness as tea should be served hot, strong and with milk. But the iced stuff tastes good and, from Ev’s point of view, anything that cuts down on my dinosaur-roar burps in restaurants is good with her. Iced coffee, on the other hand, is something I’ve never got in to. But when I saw Starbucks’ new instant iced coffee I thought I’d give it a shot as their Via instant is pretty good. And again, it would make a nice change from swigging down gallons of diet Coke or Gatorade G2. Besides, the Starbucks site tells me that summer is no time to stop enjoying the bold, satisfying taste of Starbucks® coffee, and how can I argue with marketing bullshit like that?
Ev saw all the police and fire lights when she came home from a friend’s at about midnight (I stayed home to catch up on my horror-movie watching). Shame I didn’t go as I’d doubtless have had the camera with me. We went today to see the aftermath; I’ve only just realised that Peninsula is spelled Peninsula and not Peninsular. Is this another case of stupid rich people? UPDATE: The fourth person in the Mustang has died, and the driver of the Taurus has been charged with four counts of manslaughter. (Today would have been HP Lovecraft‘s 120th birthday. Hope he avoided the Mountains of Madness.) Dear Long Beach Police Department: Correct me if I’m wrong, but if I was to blow through a stop sign/red light, or drive at night without lights, or drive on the wrong side of the road, or drive down the middle of the road blocking other traffic, or drive across junctions causing other motorists to slam on their brakes, or weave back and forth across lanes, or (and this is my all-time favourite) drive down the wrong side of the road at night with no lights, you’d be writing me tickets from now til 2020. Right? So why is it that I see cyclists pull this shit every single week yet I never see one of your officers or patrol cars pull them over? There is frequently a police car parked near the stop sign at Ocean and Bennet Avenue. I’ve seen him go after cars that have rolled through the stop sign at gone midnight. What I’ve never seen him do is go after cyclists who’ve breezed through the stop sign regardless of traffic. Care to tell me why they’re immune? I cannot begin to count the number of idiots who’ve shot out in front of me at the stop sign on Bayshore and East 1st Street, or casually biked towards me on Ocean, or who’ve almost been hit because they have an aversion to using lights and are to me little more than slow-moving blobs. Or the ones who seem to think that red lights are only for cars, or who believe that riding a neon-pink beach cruiser means you don’t have to worry about being maimed or killed. Ev tells me that many cyclists act like this because we’re in a beach community. I never realised that sea air makes a bike rider impervious to being hit by a car. Or, going by the rampant stupidity I see on the roads every day, maybe it turns their brains to shit. Maybe I’m wrong and the rules of the road don’t apply to cyclists, which frankly I’d be OK with if it wasn’t for the fact that by law I’m to blame if I hit one, regardless of whether I could, say, see it, or even have a chance to react when one shoots out of a side street 10 feet in front of me. But to give irresponsible morons the run of the road and then penalise some poor bastard who runs over one through no fault of his own is ridiculous. Despite being a menace to everything on the road, cyclists want to be treated equally with motorists and, unfortunately, the PC-happy crowd which runs Southern California have acceded to their demands with open arms. Which is why there’s now a bike lane taking up space on Second Street, meaning drivers have less space on what was already a congested road. Cyclists already have a bike lane: it’s called the pavement. Even the beach near us now has a long concrete scar running from downtown to 54th so these arses can enjoy themselves (and run down pedestrians) while we motorists sit and wait and fume on California’s pathetically inadequate road system. And if they want to be treated equally, how about they start obeying the rules of the road like motorists have to? Even better, tax them and make them get insurance. Make them get tags for their beach cruisers. Make them take a proficiency test before they can get on the road. Make them queue for hours in a cyclist-only DMV. Make them wear helmets. Put them through all the shit us motorists have to go through. But to make sure they get the equality they so desperately crave, nick some of the bastards every now and then.
SWEET zombie Jesus, Francis Spufford’s I May Be Some Time: Ice And The English Imagination is boring. Boooooor-ing. How you can take something as fascinating as Arctic/Antarctic exploration and make it so deadly dull is beyond me. “Hey,” Mr Spufford must have thought, “I’ll dedicate an entire chapter to Edmund Burke’s ruminations on the flooding of the River Liffey”. You do that, Francis; I’ll be over here reading a much more interesting book. Ev, don the Raiments of Happiness and prepare to perform the Dance of Rejoicing, for I’m about to get rid of a book. AFTER giving up on My L.A. I picked up Monica Dickens’s My Turn To Make The Tea, her semi-autobiographical account of working as a junior reporter on a provincial paper in the late 1940s/early 50s. The book is pretty lightweight (I got through it in a night) and very witty and engaging. There’s no real plot but that doesn’t matter as the book’s entertaining enough. Dickens’ character Poppy describes the day-to-day life of being the only female reporter on the Downingham Post, the frustrations and chauvinism she experiences as she tries to add some sparkle to the deadly dull pages, and the characters and situations she meets in the boarding house where she’s lodging. This was journalism in the old days: no computers, cellphones, police scanners, internet or page design software. Reporters did everything by phone or by actually going out and, you know, reporting. Being a good writer was secondary to getting the facts right. Stories were written up by hand and then typed on the office’s one and only typewriter. No sub-editors on a paper this size; reporters were expected to hang around and read the page proofs as they came off the Linotype machine. Poppy starts off wanting to change the paper, to introduce a column aimed at women and maybe report on what the Rotarians’ dance was actually like, not just list all the important people who attended. Almost everyone who starts life on small-town paper feels the same idealism (even as a non-scribe, I wanted to redesign every paper as soon as I got there – apart from Wales on Sunday, which ruled in the design stakes). But as Poppy’s editor Mr Pellet explains: “Everyone who comes here,” he said, “starts off by thinking this is a lousy old rag and they must have been sent from Heaven to bring it up to date. Do you know why people read this paper? Because they’ve been reading it for umpteen years, and it’s still more or less the same as the first copy they ever read. It’s safe. They know where they are. In Downingham they’ve been eating meat pie and chips on Saturday nights since the world began, and if they were suddenly asked to eat their joint on Saturday and their pie on Sunday they’d think the bottom had dropped out of life.” And the sad thing is, he’s right. If my girlfriend had got control of the Cynon Valley Leader back in 1998 she’d have updated it, added some interesting stories and features, some new sections, possibly even got the photographer to take actual photographs and not just shitty snapshots – and the paper would have closed in a month. People like the dull, the safe, the predictable. For better or for worse, golden wedding anniversaries, cheque presentations and the local soccer team’s descent into utter crapness are the bread-and-butter of local papers. So Poppy’s idealism is slowly eroded by the daily grind of reporting and the weekly rush to get the paper to the press, which is located in the basement of their office. Reading about this was one of the more interesting parts for me, much the same, I imagine, as when one of my younger cousins reads about that archaic music storage system called “the tape cassette”: Wednesday was the worst day of each week. We went to press, or, as we liked to say in our nonchalant Fleet Street jargon, we put the paper to bed. Each page was built up in a ‘forme’, a heavy metal frame with screws around the sides to hold the type in place… When we had written our last paragraph and Ernie or Ricky had turned it into type, we then had to read a proof of it, recheck the corrected proof, and finally correct a proof of the whole page. There were always one or two mistakes… and Harold would bend over the forme and pick out a line with a pair of eyebrow tweezers. It was then reset and dropped delicately back into place again and the forme screwed up. To proof a page I click “Print”. To send a page to the press I click “Send” and then “OK”. Much easier. I miss the pressroom at the building I worked at in Wales, the slight shudder of the desks when it started up, going for a fag after sending the north edition of WoS at 9.20 on a Saturday night and picking up fresh copies on the way back (and getting my arms and shirt covered in wet ink in the process), the smell of the machinery and ink, the people who worked there… then the press was moved to Cardiff Bay and the building lost something. But I can’t work on hot metal and a Linotype machine is as much of a mystery to me as QuarkXPress would be to the Downingham Post’s Harold. Eventually Poppy moves on, leaving Downingham and the Post behind. My Turn To Make The Tea may be light but it’s packed with great characters and anyone who’s worked on a paper will recognise the Post‘s employees as people they’ve probably shared an office with. |
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