Sunday, September 16, 2007

Gay Ring About It

G1, Southwark's baddest utter barista elect, has alerted me to a pretty unsettling discrepancy in the North London borough of Haring-. Well that's it really. To quote directly from his frenzied email:

"The station which I passed through twice yesterday describes itself as Haringay. The schools inspectorate thinks an area called South Harringay exists (two rs) and the council insists it is spelt Haringey (see www.haringey.gov.uk)."

Actually it's very simple. Harringay is an vaguely defined area within the London Borough of Haringey. A bit like Battersea. And that business at the station - well it's more shocking evidence that this country's going to hell in a handcart.

Saturday, September 01, 2007

Peepo!


Yeah so I've been away some while, roaming the land, writing and a musing but now I'm in a Blogmarch state of mind again so frenz..the experiment resumes.

And whilst I was having a late night shower (because I still don't understand those wait until morning to rid themselves of the day's sweat and grime) the Beatles' Hard Day's Night was going round in my head. And I was struck by the innocence of the lyrics , wonderfully reflected in the children's story Peepo!, which centres around a little non-verbal baby observing the micro world around him. It's all outdoor toilets, coal scuttles, tin baths and Dad donning army fatigues in the evening.

And it's a complete outrage because there I was thinking this was one of those timeless childrens' book passed down countless generations since those simplistic post-war years to find that it's written by a bearded hippy and his wife Janet and Allan Alhlberg in the early 90s. Well he looks like a hippy in the self-portrait and there's nothing intrinsically wrong with that but it's not the author painstakingly drawing on his papyrus under the paraffin lamp that I'd nostalgically envisaged in my head.

But I digress severely. A Hard Day's Night, one of those lines you just accept until many years later when you wonder what it's actually referring to. If taken in isolation and written in longhand as "A Hard Day Is Night" I quite like that. I'm assuming it's a commentary on the comparative severity of the nightshift. It makes sense put in context of their gruelling Berlin clubhouse era performing 5 concerts a day or whatever it was.

But that's wrong because he says (John I think.Definitely NOT Ringo who has an album of greatest hits being hawked on the GMTV ad breaks right now. Who buys Ringo albums but the most obsessive Fab Four completist and sympathetic relatives ?) "It's been a hard day's night" so the apostrophe is intact.

So I was marvelling at the mysterious subtetly and multi-layered complexity of this single throwaway line in contrast to the sledgehammer directness of today's pop lyricists. And the best polar opposite I could immediately think of was the double breasted Fergie of Black Eyed Peas singing about "my humps. my humps. my lovely little lumps".

But you know the strangest thing is that there's something quite subversive about this lyric. Because Humps and Lumps don't exactly summon up images of great sexual promise but more speed control measures and cancerous tumours. And maybe that's what she was trying to say. They are just that. Shapes resembling other shapes with the propensity for malignant intent.