What gives, Andy?

I'll tell you what gives. I haven't posted since Feb, that's what fucking gives. By now you're used to the excuses so I won't bore you with them, save to say, I had to go to Shanghai again and all the usual life administration things, such as renewing car insurance, setting up a company ( I am now the proud owner of a company called "G Bailey & Sons Horse & Motor Contractors Ltd.) then I had to get get a face cloth, of all things removed from, of all places, the fuel tank of my car  (wha...eh...errmm....a face cloth you say...but..how...how... no...never mind), playing cricket (see earlier posts) and dealing with a mother who has lost the ability to differentiate between good things and bad things so has taken to thinking everything is now a bad thing, you know, just to be on the safe side.

Anyway. Here's some pics. I was sat outside a pub called The Fox on Paul Street one sunny weekend recently. It's a fanny-tastic boozer on a quiet street between Old Street and Spitalfields. This means that it's heaving with hipsters and city people during the week but almost completely deserted during the weekend which automatically makes it the place to be on weekends in my book (the book being entitled "Get out of my way you massive idiot"). There are few cars as the street doesn't really go anywhere anyone would want to go (apart from paradise). The sun was out. I had a pint. I was sat on a low wall in the sun. In short I was happy as a stick. To put icing on the cake, two nuns strolled past and said hello to me. I didn't really know what to do but they were smiley and I think they could just tell I was really pleased with everything. I got the impression that they were implying that this beautiful day had something to do with them and I wanted to say something along the lines that if indeed they and their god had arranged my day like this then they'd done a particularly good job and would they please pass on my hearty thanks. There were three things that stopped me,

a) They seemed to have somewhere to go and frankly, that's a lot to get over in a simple 

street greeting.

b) I'm not sure where their god stands on being happy in part because one has a pint. Can't help but think he'd be OK with it but I decided to err on the side of caution.

c) They looked really nice (they were nuns so, you know, it was a good bet) and I wanted them to think I was too.  

I settled on "Lovely day."  And as they tottered off I took the pic below. I like their little handbags.

Two nuns walking down a street, one says to the other "Look at that bloke sat outside the pub." The other nun replies "What an idiot."

I've also made a coffee table or occasional table or mobile beer and pizza shelf /trip hazard combo unit.  I found an old pallet outside the post office. When no one was looking I nicked it. Then I made it into this.

The technique is this:

1) Put it under your bed for 6 months.

2) Sand the fuck out of it.

3) Stain it.

4) Screw wheels onto the bottom of it.

5) Put it on the floor where you can bark your shin on it.

I've seen these for sale on the Uniweb for £150. Cost me about £20 and three layers of epidermis (sander got away from me).

Mostly it gets in the way but we've found it's great for putting "television watching" food and beverages on (ie all food and beverages) when you're lying on the sofa and then you just wheel it over to right next to you. You heard me. Right next to you.

Yangs Fried Dumplings

I eat a lot of these.

What you're looking at here is a piece of pork about the size of an Oxo cube, wrapped in a sort of pasta like piece of I dunno what, which is then popped into a frying pan and had the fuck fried out of it by a mysteriously angry Chinese man in a daft hat. This results in  a small parcel of pork surrounded by 3 fluid ounces of molten fat that is hotter than the sun. Four of them cost 60p and that's enough for me. Delicious. I burned my tongue on one yesterday when I was too keen to get at its heavenly cholesterol.
It comes from Yangs which is a chain of restaurants which serve just these and some noodles if you like that sort of thing, which I  don't. The brilliant thing about Chinese restaurants is they don't care if you bring in your own booze. So a trip to Yang's involves ordering your heart attack, nip to the Family Mart (a sort of Chinese off licence, confectionery and dildo store) buy a bottle or two of Tsing Tsao then back for the slap up, sit down Chinese supper while fellow diners point at you and laugh. The sight of a white person, all by themselves, with a grey beard in Yangs, wielding chopsticks badly, burning their mouth and then dousing the flames with Tsing Tsao is I discover, hilariously funny. I can't complain. I often laugh at the bizarre antics of our Chinese cousins. I swear at them a lot too.

I've been back to London and now I'm back out here in Shanghai again.

Yes I just can't stay away. I'm just out here for three weeks to cover a shoot for an advert for bottled water. That's right. Sitting in a chair all day, watching people who know what they're doing, filming a Chinese child fucking things up.

Town Square Shaxi. This was opposite the bar I was in. Otherwise I wouldn't have got a picture of it.

I ate some of this. See the fish in the top left. I thought you ate them, head and all. After I'd had two I saw everyone else had left the head. Hmmm

Blue sky. Oxygen. Not used to either of them in China.

Yes we ignored the old film maxim of never working with children or animals by working with both. Specifically a fucking idiot and some goats. The goats won hands down. Far more professional. Anywway we eventually got what we needed. The kid sadly, didn't get what he needed ie. my boot in  his ear but you can't have everything can you?

Two nosey parkers watching the shoot.

The editor is, however, putting a reel together of all the times the kid messed things up, fell over, dropped things, picked his nose, fell over again and hilariously got body checked by a girl and knocked to the floor. Me and the crew all gave the girl a round of applause.
I was filming in a place called Shaxi in Yunnan, which is a four hour flight and two hour car journey into the middle of goddam nowhere. This means that it has blue skies and has real oxygen instead of the toxic mix of poo vapour and mustard gas that we use for air here in Shangers.
Other good points about Shaxi was that it had an Italian restaurant, run by an Italian. I had a pizza. I was in Bumville, China and had the best pizza I've ever had. Weird.
Back in Shanghai now. The journey home was long and tedious but was enlivened at the end by the cab from Hongqiao airport in Shanghai back to my apartment. It was raining heavily and the journey takes us down the Yanan Road which is an elevated, eight-lane, death road that stretches the width of Shanghai that the Chinese use for crashing into each other. This would have been exciting enough had the windscreen wipers been working but, of course, this is China, so they weren't. Well, they worked intermittently. When they stopped, the driver would continue for a while until he considered he'd reached the most dangerous moment to try to fix them and then lean out of the window, grab the wiper blade and give it a pull. At which point they would feebly commence smearing water over the window again. How I laughed and reached for the seatbelt. Pointlessly as it turns out because, of course, it didn't have any.
I was so shaken up I had to have several beers to calm myself down. So it wasn't all bad.
I haven't blogged for a while due to a combination of laziness and .... no that's it...just laziness. I can't promise I'll start again but who knows?

I'm only back in Shanghai

Just a quick note as I've only just found out how to blog from China. So here's a pic.

As you can see from my fashionable clothes, my cool expression and the caption on the window "I am the style."

Ils De Re

Ils de Re is French for Isle of Re.
And it was to this French idyll that Liz and me repaired to for a well earned spring, weekend, short, three-day break.


A street in Ils De Re on one of the rare occasions there were no French people flouncing up and down it getting in each other's way.

It was a very nice place and even at this early stage of the summer, quite full of Frenchies having a holiday.
This involves them being haughty, walking in a line abreast that stretches the exact width of the street so anyone approaching has either to reverse in front of them or suffer the withering stares of some Frenchies who are having to go through the tiresome experience of acknowledging the existence of other human beings and deigning to move a millimetre aside so they can squeeze past,  hiring bicycles and wobbling off on them in a dangerous fashion, mocking English people in restaurants who are politely doing the best they can in a language they are unfamiliar with and eating cheese.
In other words Frenchies are the same on holiday as they are everywhere else on the planet.
Got stuck into some moules marinieres and a delicious beer called Pelican Biere.
The place we stayed in was called Ars and everytime the bus stopped in the village the bus driver would announce its arrival by shouting ARSE! Ha ha ha ha ha, I'm sure you'll agree.

Regular readers of my so called blog will recall a piece of graffiti on the ceiling of a bar in Shanghai which informed us that "Chris is a homo!"  Whilst the author could be criticised for his lack of wit and creativity (though if I recall correctly he did also drew a 'jizzing cock' next to it) he cannot be faulted on the concise precision of his phraseology. Whoever he is, he's clearly widely travelled because look what I spotted in the Ars bus shelter.

Compare if you will.

Same precise phrasing , same language, same helpful urge to keep the world abreast of who is gay. The only difference is the lack of 'jizzing cock.' Presumably he is either working solely in the written word these days or the bus turned up.

The Mighthy ICC - The Final Chapter

Tom Bentall is the last player in our line up: AKA Tom, Tommy. Nothing creative here.

Tom wasn't born in the conventional sense. He was found. One summer morn' back in the 80's when summers actually had sun in them, the then skipper found a little baby nestling in a pile of old pads in the Home changing room. It was Tom.
Not really.
But he may as well have been. His Dad has been playing for ICC for 170 years and all his children, upon birth, were brought along to the club and more or less raised there by cricketers, the spiders in the shower and feral rabbits. All Tom's formative years have been spent in the company of immense idiots. Which tells you all you need to know.
It also explains why his body cannot tolerate vitamins, minerals, fibre and the like as he has been weaned on a diet of cricket teas and whatever he could scavenge from the pav. His body now produces all the nutrients it needs from Cheese and Onion sanditches, Lemon Drizzle Cake, Cherry Bakewells, warm milky tea, spider's webs and 4 year old cans of lager.
Tom plys most of his trade (the trade being medium pace, batting, fielding, talking shite, untidy scoring and possessing a good arm) for our arch rivals. Shipbourne Cricket Club. That's right. Those bastards. However before you go taking against him, he plays mostly for their 2nd IX and as such is not tarred by the same arse-brush as their 1's indubitably are.
Come Sunday though and he will, like a salmon, return to his spawning ground and ply his trade for his alma mater. Right again. The Mighthy Ightham Sunday All-Stars. Which explains his presence in the team photo all those many posts ago.
Let's now examine Tom's cricketing skill set.
Bowling. Tall, gangly, uniquely (at ICC) aerodynamic, Tom is a decent bowler. To fit more closely into the team, he's only missing about 4 and a half stone and a big pair of wobbly man boobs (which are surprisingly off putting to batsmen when they're jangling up to the wicket).
Batting: Again. A decent bat. But continuous absence from the influence of such Ightham luminaries as Moodie, Alexander, Smart, Bridge, Smith, Austin and Mungo has resulted in a strange technique whereupon the ball is sometimes tapped gently back to the bowler instead of pretending one's bat is a sort of willow Large Hadron Collider with which to smash the ball into sub-atomic God particles or the ball is played along the ground instead of smote into the ionosphere and worst of all he keeps his eyes open at the moment of impact!
Some people.
Never mind. We'll have all that drummed out of him by August.
Fielding: In Tom's case it isn't really fielding. It is more a cloak and dagger secret op behind enemy lines. Like the Special Operations Executive during WW2 Tom 's mission should he choose to accept it (which he does) is to set Kent's village cricket pitches ablaze. Not in the style of Joe Austin, by appearing and disappearing and wandering off at will. No. Tom hides in plain site. He likes to give the oppo the impression that in fielding he is a cretinous moron. While most of us can give this impression with some ease, Tom has to do things like throw it in left handed or drop it when the ball is being returned to the bowler or the ever popular, simply fall over when nothing's happening. Then when the chips are down and the batsmen take a risky run, he whips it into his right hand and unleashes a very fast, very accurate throw to the stumps. In first class cricket this would be worth at least one run out every game. At ICC it pretty much always results in four overthrows.
If you've been following this blog as assiduously as I hope, you'll already have spotted why. The give away is the phrase 'very fast, very accurate throw to the stumps.'
There are several things wrong with this.
1) No one ever throws fast accurate throws to the stumps. As the team's wicket keeper I have grown used to throws hurtling over my head, bouncing just in front of my ankles, not actually reaching me, heading off on a compass bearing at least 27 degrees North West of the one it should be on.  In other words, as I'm not expecting it to arrive at the stumps, I'm probably standing somewhere else. Possibly chatting to someone about the drizzle. The ball will sail off to the boundary unhindered by human glove.
2) Even if I happened to have wandered near the stumps, the ball's sudden arrival in a place it's never been before would have rendered it completely out-of-context. In short, it would have confused the fuck out of me and I probably would have simply watched it sail past as I tried to work out what this mysterious sphere above the stumps actually was.
3) In the completely unlikely event that I actually tried to catch it and run the batsman out, it undoubtedly would have been going too damn fast for me to hang on to.
The result? Order is restored. The situation is normal. Mirth is provoked.
Tom: Shipbourne. Ightham. Shightham.

Ightham. Nearly done.

Joe Austin: Joe hasn't acquired a nickname. Don't know why. Perhaps because Joe sounds quite nicknamey anyway and Austin is impossible to nicknamise. If he DID have a nickname it might be, for reasons that will become clear, Will O' the Wisp. Mainly because the first bit sounds like Willy, which is automatically funny, but also because of his unique fielding style.

If we were comparing Ightham CC to a Panzer Division in 1941 we'd be wildly off the mark as they were professional, well equipped and could hit stuff they aimed at but if we were to ignore that and press on with this unlikely metaphor that we so foolishly embarked on, Joe would be the division's reserve. ie held back until we'd had all had our tanks blown up underneath us by T34's or we'd hidden behind a tree or run away. Joe then steps into the breach.
In short he can't play every week but will climb into his "Tiger" (a German tank - but in this metaphor, "play cricket") every now and then to save the day.
Joe never bowls. Why this should be so is a mystery but maybe the contraption that holds his body together perhaps goes someway to explain. Before every game Joe clambers into the complicated web of elasticated strapping, rope and pulley systems, ratchets and torque returns that hold his body together long enough to play a game of cricket, eat some cake, launch his bat with a blood curdling cry at the bowling of the enemy and sit around talking shit with idiots.
Batting. Textbook Ightham batting technique. Has more than once saved the day when batting low in the order. He deceives the oppo into thinking he's rubbish by basically being  rubbish for a bit, then becoming, in the blink of an eye, brilliant and launching a six or two back over the bowler's head with drives of a straightness rarely seen at ICC headquarters.
But it is Joe's fielding that sets him apart from the rest of the team. Literally. Sometimes by many miles.
It's known as the Austin Drift and it is this idiosyncratic but effective style of fielding that would earn him the nickname Willy O' the Wisp if we could be arsed to think of one.
Don't get me wrong. Joe's fielding is as brave, foolhardy and hilarious as the rest of us, it's just that Joe's compass is on the blink.
Let me explain. Usually fielders are carefully placed by our skipper according to some nonsensical plan he has made up in his head and once placed, we are meant to stay there. However Joe is a free spirit. Not one to be tied down, as soon as you take your eyes off him he will wander far and wide, appearing and disappearing like a woodland nymph. At once here and not here. Matter and anti-matter at the same time.
Of course in a higher standard of cricket where fielders are placed specifically according to the delivery the bowler plans to bowl, a fielder wandering off from his position would be a problem. But since none of our bowlers seem to know what day it is, let alone what they plan to bowl, it actually becomes a tactical advantage. Becoming visible and invisible at will, it sometimes appears to the opposition batsman that we have 27 players on the field, 3 on the pavilion roof, 1 in Cherbourg and another one peeing in the orchard.
Joe Austin: Tiger. Drifter. Woodland nympher.