Polemic

Here at 'Box of Meat', we are taking a stand against the Hornbeyisation of the Infosphere. We refer the reader to the practice of listmaking. Once a practice in carried out by highly skilled artisans in pollution of the male adolescent's bedroom, it is now a virulent form of showing off. So far has it reached that, such young voices as HK, TL and CK (he did have something up, but he seems to have thought better of it) have all succumbed. Perhaps it is the search for page views (or 'eyeballs') that is impelling them to the egregious activity. In the case of the authors above, 'Box of Meat' objects to the apparent special pleading that their roll-call of grooviness implies. 'In your calculations of our worth, factor in the company we keep'.

When you pursue one of the bum-steers found on these lists, you are oftened hookeyed into a purchase that you never consume. Worse still if you do consume your purchase, often it is 'of note', it smells of the Present, but it tastes of a Recommendation. The authority has had their oily mits on it already. It is the same sensation that you get when you go on the pointer of a movie poster. 'Possibly the Best British Horror Film of the Decade' Empire. Those invisible opinion-formers, the men in grey mullets, have got in there first.

Another thing. In an earlier post, 'Box of Meat' proposed a txt campaign to win A from the arms of Weedy Boyfriend. The low-level pestering never happened. This potential mischief was averted by daily imbibement of healthful Bromine. 'Box of Meat' rushes to condemn any dirty other box thinking to copycat the plan.

Keep it tupperware. Keep it sealed tight.

I am not at the 'flaccid for the next week and a half (on my holiday) so posts may reduce from a gush to a trickle. Rest assured, when back in the ennui of the office, the tap will be turned back on.

I leave you 98.7.

PS Have you noticed the inappropriacy of the .com tag? All of the writers cited above are namesurname.com. .com is as good as .org or .edu but the unilateral declaration of yourself as a business concern seems wrong. Can I make a modest proposal? Can the W3 Consortium institute a .van for those who want to punt themselves online? Much obliged.

Name Drop

My good friend HK, with whom I have weekended on more than one occasion is interviewed in the Observer. He has joined me in sporting a beard (picture unavailable on the webpage).

The interview is in soft-focus. HK clearly enjoys a free-trade bean in his frapuccino. I haven't read the book, the imminent publication of which is the occasion for the interview. I am suspicious though, when he says he is interested in the emergence of a 'new globalised elite' who are unwedded to place. His days working as the music hack for the vapid 'Wallpaper' magazine are still casting a shadow over his concerns. The new globalised elite hardly need their ways and means dissected - I think that we all have a pretty clear idea of what they get up to. Perhaps H's book is a 'Bergdorf Blondes' for boys.

It is interesting to speculate whether as two introverted literary type, Plum Sykes and HK were ever close at University. If they were, HK would now deny it, dismissing girls of Syke's pedigree as toffs. The interviewer's recollection was that HK was in with the poshies. Me too. I recall I first came across him swooping into a party, thanking, at the top of his voice, a drugs flunky thus
'For the trips, much thanks'.
'This is no Northern Chemist here', I thought.

A corpulent 98.6 Kilos. Must pedal faster.

DJs

I've now lunched. Despite the comments in the previous post, under some unconscious motor, I went to Marks and Spencers. I bought a fearsome Salade Nicoise. It came in a plastic vat and was enough for ten.

When I came to eat the salad, I opened the satchet wrongly and it spat pesto at me . The pesto has left a mark on my shirt. As for the taste, the pesto coated leaves had a high note so screeching that it was quite possibly battery acid.

Near the exit I came upon a scene that I could not believe. A sound rig manned by two djs was blasting out dancehall at alarmed shoppers. The rig was not small. It looked as if it has seen some action at squat parties or in Hackney bashments (as I believe they are called). As for the DJs, they had gone for the Masters-at-Work model. One of them was enormously fat and tall. The other was a midget. They were deep in the mix, so they didn't have the opportunity to peruse the haberdashery that festooned the space around them. Considering that up till now Marks and Spencers have not got so far as tasteful piped music to entice the consumer into shopping with them, the full deployment of these bad boys must indicate a company on its last legs.

In protest I went to Gap and bought a pair of trousers that I didn't need.

Truss

Getting into my truss this morning was a struggle, as I had hit 98.1 kilos. I resolved to 'do a Bridget Jones' and start to record alcohol intake too. I think it was the small matter of those six pints I hoick back last evening. That, or yesterday's adoption of the 'five small meals instead of the three large one' regime. I finished having had five large meals.

My exercise regime is having to increase to accommodate the ever greater intake of food. The repercussions of not coming in on a bike this morning could be catastrophic. And when I am on the thing, I need to pedal faster.

Yesterday lunchtime I went to Marks and Spencers. Marks and Spencers used to be the young Humberstone's preferred outfitter. Their Tshirts were gaily coloured and they didn't sell denim. They were BBC not ITV, Blue Peter not Grange Hill.

In those days I didn't hold the purse strings, but if I had, I would have decked myself out a denim fantasia from Top Shop, a replica Shakin Stevens.

My early experience in elephant cords and sailor shirts has seeded a predilection for sensible styling that at present seems to be viciously returning. In discussions at a bar recently, I admitted to having missed out on the Hoxton Fin haircut. That was the exit from youth. With all previous fashionable coiffures, I attempted a feeble approximation of my own devising. But the Fin swam past me and recede into the distance.

Then music didn't sound so good, and now for long trips, I buy the Economist.

I spose to their credit, Marks and Spencers innoculated me against wearing sleeveless tshirts. But I did once wear a bandana round my head. And smoke a pipe. And, to save my sight (for which read 'look bookish'), I wore the weakest spectacles known to man (0.25 dioptres). And for reasons that I cannot divine, I still sometimes wear a hat.

It's a young fogey look, I got goin' on.

Marks and Spencers deserve to die. The interior of their shops look like Bhs or Woolworths. All of their Men's clothes are colours the shades of mud. In their suit department they only sell three button jackets that make a man of my stoutness look like a small wardrobe. Their trendy line is called Autograph. I saw a girl's tshirt emblazoned with the word 'Retro'. Any takers? They never stock enough Calves Liver. Everyone on their posters looks marriageable.

As I write, an English man several bays back is shouting at the top of his voice in Spanish.

Eye of the Tiger

It has been my plan to raffle my soul through an MBA programme. Unfortunately, as I am such a duffer, this has proved more difficult than anticipated.

My GMAT scores arrived yesterday. I was in the bottom 25% on Math, the top 25% on verbal reasoning/Problem Solving and in the top 10% on essay-writing. I recognised these results because I had seen them before when I was 16. My Dad sent me to do a psychometric test to see what I was good for. The results were presented to me in a bar chart form. There was one Linguistic skyscraper, one Cognitive tall building and a little cottage called Math at the end.

I need to take the test again and triple my Math score to approach respectable. The literature sent with the results did it's best to discourage this plan. It said that the test has you pinned after the first go. The chances are set against an improvement. But they are not factoring that ol' Hummerstein magic.

But suppose I raise my game and pull straight As next semester, I will still have to face Business School Math. Can I bear it?

In light of the wild oscilations in my life plans these past few days, I ask what will become of me.

'Will it be mushrooms?
Fried Onion Rings?
You'll have to wait and see,
We hope it's chips, it's chips
We hope it's chips, it's chips'
etc

I am 97.7 kilos. Oops. I had something uncooked at lunch and have stabbing pains. Ominous.

And why do people cycle to work with earphones on? Does listening to 'Eye of the Tiger' as you go through yet another red light, make the laborious business of pedalling that less painful? Used improperly the Ipod is a death-trap.

Come and have go if you think you're hard enough

Gratifyingly my view of ‘our boys’ is backed up by no less and authority than the Duke of Wellington –

‘The French system of conscription brings together a fair sample of all classes; ours is composed of the scum of the earth – the mere scum of the earth …. The English soldiers are fellows who have all enlisted for drink.’

The shop window to the violent passions of this country is the football terrace. Or rather the football All-Seater stadium. In this mania we are not alone. The Dutch and Germans, and further a field the Serbs and the Turks are on occasion similarly seized by high feeling. But we also enjoy having-a-go at throwing-out time in the Market Town. During the daytime, the loudest hue-and-cry these places can raise, is in the check-out queue for Waitrose. But by night, woe betides the innocent who is not up for a bit-of-a-ruck. And to add to this Carnivalesque, we like to liberally paste our effluvia on the gutters and dark corners. Our streets ming with our smell.

When you look at the placidity of our continental friends, who by and large, are uninterested in the prospect of filling in passer-bys, and who even as the clock strikes midnight, will let the casual wanderer pass through their cities unmolested, you are to made to wonder why we are such curs.

Today, was to borrow the expression, a Winner’s Dinner. I was to be found in the Terminus Brasserie opposite the Gare du Nord enjoying a fillet d’agneau. The meat was under the cover of a bosky sauce but I believe that had I seen it uncloaked, it would have been more than fifty percent fat. The vegetables that came with it were crunchy but not distinguished.

Contrast this dish though, with the carbo-bomb that I customarily put away at Cannaletto’s near work. Following its consumption, I return to my desk in a complete torpor, incapable of productive activity. And it amuses me that although these dishes invariably comes with a cheese sauce, they are always offered with ‘cheese on top’.

The Agneau and the civilized living at Terminus was restraint itself. My fellow dinners were Capri-Panted, Haute Bourgeouises ladies and finely turned out older gentlemen. The interior was characteristic of the Brasserie genre – that mixture of mirror and gold and red plush. There was even a stage area out of which I fancied Josephine Baker may have strutted.

* * * * *

But when you go to Continental Europe and you enjoy the finer things, you wonder if you could live without the scuzz of Blighty, the Lip, our defiant one-eyed pursuit of our own dereliction. And you are forced to concede that you couldn’t ditch all this for the inoffensive wearing of pastel jumpers and shoes without socks.

After the dynamite news of yesterday’s drop, I neglected to the weigh myself. The Agneau has surely done some damage.

Weedy Boyfriend

More of an interjection than an entry this morning, occasioned by a dramatic slip to 96.2 kilos.

The measurement was taken at sea-level but it was compromised by being post-morning-dump. On the other hand, I am working press-ups into the exercise regime. Perhaps that's what done it.

I was on the smash again last night. First off, it was DP and his sexually ambiguous cronies at Cairo Cafe in South Clapham. I tried to spread myself around but always landed the same bloke 'who was at Oxford'. 'Who was at Oxford'. When you hear this expression you do feel a tug on a not-slender tie. You fall to talking about 'your time at Ox-ford' (dying fall - dum-dum). 'My time at Oxford'. It is not an interesting topic. What can you say? 'At Ox-ford, my attempts at chasing after skirt were thwarted by my own pretension, and the neuroses of those around me'. Or my own neuroses and the pretensions of those around me. Take your pick. It was a two-way street.

'Who was at Gravesend Technical College'. That's more promising. 'In my time at Gravesend Technical College my potency expressed itself uncheck . 'So much action was I seeing, I was fearful that IT would drop off'.

After the agressive buttonholing by the bloke who was at Oxford, I set off North to hook up with P. P was attending the birthday do of A. A works for Conde Nast ('Conde Nasty, Nuclear Wintour) as a sub-editor for Vogue. She dresses in black and after a brief chat, I filed her under the 'sort' category. She was accompanied by a braying friend, (standard home countys' issue) and a boyfriend who was so weedy in conversation, so lacking in sturdy opinion, that in the course of speaking to him, I got the feeling that he was slowly releasing a fart of a faintly cabbagey odour.

What can this mean? Have they lowered the boyfriend bar and neglected to inform me?

After some ineffectual dancing with P's squeeze L (not even 'Copacabana' can seem to get me in the mood these days), we left the bar. P and L disappeared so fast that I thought they might be doing for a stunt. A invited me to the next destination which was the unpromisingly named 'Al's'. As if we are in America! Standard pub names please - 'the Gangrenous Ferret', 'the Colonel Tagnut' etc.

A. tried to up the ante by proposing a trip to Fabric. That's my girl! The Wets vetoed this suggestion, filibustering it with wan looks out the window and protestations of tiredness. At this point, I left.

Now I am no wrecker of homes, but I feel it my Christian Duty to do some industrial strength txting to poor old A. It looks like she could do with a pick-up. I will avail myself of her number and commence forthwith.

Lunch is served at home. Home home. I am looking forward to the delightful company of my niece E. I feel that chasing will be involved.

Knob Gag

96.9 kilos drifting 97.2 kilos. Mental Health is improving with greater intake of sticky drinks.

Having opted at school for Art 'O' level (got a C) over the Combined Cadet Core as my Thursday Afternoon Activity, the reader may think that I have no claim to any knowledge of the War Machine. Not so. I was chased out of pubs in Windsor a number of times by bestial squaddies. I have all the evidence I need.

Our camoflaged paparazzi have shocked everyone with their apres-war pricture, but surely everyone know what soldier pay consists of? It's rape and pillage. Bush says this is not 'the America that he knows'. Come off it! It's got America's prints all over it. It's all porno - genitals, S-and-M and the one-eyed fixation with labeling the Iraqi, 'Nature's faggot'. Or F-A-G-G-O-T as they spell it over there. Compare our British Tommy, getting on with his leak. It's a knob gag, previously only rehearsed outside his tent somewhere on Salisbury Plain. Typical too that the yanks repurpose their holiday snaps as baseball cards. That's their mercantile genius - get the stuff circulating and add some value. Us Brits, worried by our indiscretion, have a national debate about 'What the Mirror Saw' - very end of the pier. Fact is that our respective militaries are not 'chaps' or 'good guys'. They are dogs on leashes. If we lily-livered types do not want a junta forming at home, we have to take our military for a walk and have it piss somewhere else. When we declare war, we are not exercising the popular will. War is to stop the bastards who pursue it from slavering on us.

More sausage

I am sat atop a sausage mountain. 'Pelion piled on Offal'. I don't think I can consume anymore. I have stuffed as much of what remains into the fridge as I could. After the last sitting, I was more than a little bit queasy. The sausages were from a reputed dealer, but if reconstituted meat is wrong for the human organism then regardless of quality, it is wrong full stop. I have renounced sausage before, and I renounce it again.

I am going to have some mackerel this evening - a variety of excellent oils and marvellously cheap.

Cooking for one leads to excess. True, you can eat what you like, but nothing is sold to fit. Cook for two and you can judge the quantity perfectly. You may not have the same licence to please yourself - the more exotic dishes are often off the list - but you leave the table replete rather than bloated. With two the company can be better, although there are occasions when it is much worse, an isolated munch.

Writing is for one. It is not in the plural. It's nutritional value is much debated. It can be gruelly, slim fare but it can also patch the yawning chasm within. When writing, you are obliged to lean upon yourself. The reader is not on the phone. There is no heater in the room.

I am being presumptious. Back to lunch. I am 96.5 kilos, for reasons which we will not go into. I anticipate a surge back up the dial tomorrow.

Fatkins

Felt obliged to put this up - http://www.illwillpress.com/fatkins.html. The Information Super Highway is meant to take you where you want to go.

Enter Nietzsche

Nietzsche asks ... (Gentle Reader, persevere!) ... Nietzsche asks, 'who is the expert on food? A gourmand or a hungry man? A hungry man.' I am such a one. Hunger's Savour is upon my lips. And lunch is hours off.

Empty of sustenance, my mind is free from bodily shackles. Thus I have been, in contemplative mood, reading my Sunday text which is the Saturday colour supplement. The article that most happily fitted the hour was a piece on bagged-up salads. Like all students of the Saturdays, I am wary of their tendency to interest you by scaring you. Surely it is faintly ridiculous trying to worry you by pointing at your greens. I am sure that being attacked by a lettuce leaf was a comedy standby as far back as the Goons. The article convinced me, this is no longer a laughing matter.

At primary school my favourite hymn was 'Daisys are our Silver, Buttercups our Gold'. (If anyone is asking though, it was 'Onward Christian Soldiers'. I don't want to marked out as a pansy at this late stage). I liked the faintly oriental air of the tune but more than that, I liked the shininess of the images. The same principle is now being applied to salads. The supermarket marketeers are courting the tyrannic eye at the expense of the judicious palate. This is a fact commonly accepted. What is less put about but is much suspected, is that the ruminative gut is getting a good kicking too. What is happening to the patient DNA, we can only hope to guess. (But as we do know, DNA doesn't give a toss about what happens to it. It's preference it for 'abide and rule'.) Ably assisted by that slag 'the Good Earth', our imaginative failure in our treatment of animals is now being played out for a second time upon vegetables.

Against those who would apply a principle of reincarntation tout court all along the whole chain of being, I would like to make the case that the reincarnation principle can only observed in those beings sufficiently sentinent to be make protestation against going around the carousel of birth and death one more time. Whether the objection is signalled by pain or by the sinking feeling of imminent demise, be you fox or bear, it is immaterial. Vegetables, to my mind, fail this test. They are the loose link in Being's chain. Sat on your plate, half smelling of sunshine, readying themselves for their diner's inner recesses and their next resting place, silage, you know that you will be seeing them again before too long. The Fate of the vegetables, those dupes of Creation, is being spun out upon the Wheel of Ixion.

Some point to tests that have shown plants 'screaming' as they deconstituted. What can we do with this thought? If we listen to these lunatics, even if they are proves to be right, the moral imperative will dictate that we go to live on plinths in the Mohabi desert and trust that we don't harm any bacteria, as we lick our plinth's for their morning dew. In consequence we must banish from us such seditious talk.

We should set about our allotments with the same best practices that we apply to the abbatoir. If, upon uprooting a celeriac, we can tell ourselves that the tuber was locked into the groove of its own demise, and further, that even if it our metaphysics are cracked, the celeriac had a nice life while it was here, we are in pretty good shape to justify our ways and means at the Court of Cosmological Justice.

I am not sure if a celeriac is a tuber and I don't have a garden. As a first step, I was thinking of becoming the custodian of a window box, and planting it with basil. I fear however the charges of negligence coming from the usual quarters.

I will however, abjure the purchase of the packet of salad for the reasons that the article's writer highlights. The consumption of the vacuum packed leaf is indeed a gaping whole in man's bodily security fence. We could all be sunk by an tasteless Iceberg Lettuce.

Elsewhere in the supplement, there was a good interview with Robert Altman. Gesturing at the gongs that he has won for his cinematic services, he said, 'Look at this shit. It is nice to have for your credentials. But it is like anything else, lasts as long as a kiss.'

'Just A Minute' is on the radio. 'Deviation', shouts a competitor. Right you are! Today I am 97.2 kilos. I am going to have a jam sandwich to get me to lunch.

Swarm of Pigeons

In order to get a hunger up, and to sweat out the hangover, I went for a run. I progressed at a startling speed, even-if-I-say-so-myself. Turning at the southend of the park, I ploughed into a slick of pigeons. As one, the pigeons took to the air. First they flew ahead of me, as a swarm. Then they banked to turn back for a run at me. For an enth of a second, I thought I was done for. But even as they headed towards me they arranged themselves to avoid me. So numerous were they, that as they flew above and around me, I had the sensation of heading into a tunnel. Looking to my sides as they enveloped me, they seemed to be rationally spaced, as if I had run into a chance double helix That can't be right.

They fetched up where they had begun. With their usual nonchalance, the pigeons went back to the business of puffing out their chests, of chasing after one another, and those in acts of avian congress, of standing on top off each other for the mutual use of each other's cloacae.

It would be nice to enjoy the species-being of a pack animal. All that abjuring of responsibility, not having to decide on anything because someone else will - lovely.

For lunch it was Tagliatelle with Italian sausage. The dish was on the TV and then, following a visit to the supermarket, it was on my plate. I sat eating it in my front room trying to ignore the fact that the air was saturated with the smell of exploded egg.

On return from a particularly bestial night of boozing, I had thought to make myself some boiled eggs. I removed the eggs from the fridge, sat them in the pan, that was on the fast-warming element in readiness for the water which had been set to boil, and then due to my post booze stupor, lay myself down on the settee and fell asleep.

I awoke with smoke billowing from the kitchen and the sound of popping eggs.

I have almost got through all the Haze that I bought this morning. Against the sulphurous,ambient niff, the plug-in smelly barely registers any pungency at all. I am now opening all the windows for a second time, hoping that the smelll does not stand upon the order of its going, but just goes.

96.9 kilos. Yikes! Where did the foie gras go?