Chipping in

I wanted to talk about the semiology of keeping a level gaze (yes, really) but I just don’t have the time right now.

Instead, let me share my favourite chip shop name. It’s not The Sea Cow, nor is it the yet to be named Rick Stein chip shop that will mark the man’s final and complete ownership of the town of Padstow.

The best named chip shop in my view is the grubby little place tucked under the bridge next to Waterloo station. It revels in the endlessly inappropriate and meaningless name of ‘Fishcoteque’. The absurd intimation of fun it offers gives me a laugh every time I see it.

I am looking forward to the second branch, which can only be called ‘Fishco Inferno’.

A game of life

Computer users who started out in the 80s (and programmers of all stripes) will remember all too well John Conway’s famous Game of Life. I first saw it when it arrived as free software for my 48K Sinclair ZX Spectrum, in about 1983. It was tantalising but deeply frustrating; the rules are desperately simple and yet it has almost limitless scope for complexity, if only you can find it.

Plenty of people have spent prodigious amounts of time teasing out that complexity-in-simplicity. It exists in its own semantic space of puffers, sparkersand glider guns. To some, these are forms that display key characteristics of living things; birth, development, complex interaction, death. The game has been extensively used as the tiniest of toy worlds displaying evolutionary logic.

If I couldn’t cope with Life (or, I suppose, life) I fear I’ve no chance with Avida, the evolutionary sandbox hosted by Caltech. It is available as a free download, so I’ll give it a try anyway, if only for the reassurance that proper science is forever beyond both my ken and my patience.

Sealed for your protection

I have a tube of toothpaste that bears the warning:

Sealed for your protection

My God, what terrors could it contain? Must send for Quatermass.

Nail bars

For Mothering Sunday I went back to the small town in which I grew up. Winding down the High Street towards the river is always a time-shifting experience. Each shop front is a veil behind which lurks the hidden face of its childhood version.

This bike shop was once the chemist. What was once the butcher’s is now one of those peculiar petite clothes shops, the sort where there will never be another customer to keep the shopkeeper’s oversolicitous eye off your browsing. The monumental mason once sold carpet tiles. The sportswear shop was, well, it was a different sportswear shop.

Just as confusing are the shops that have not changed. The old-fashioned hardware shop and it’s offshoot over the road (selling an unsatisfying array of furniture oddments) are just as they ever were. The grocer’s has evolved into a late-opening convenience store by such tiny increments that it is no longer possible to accurately reconstruct in the memory any of its previous incarnations.

The biggest change since my last visit only suggests itself very slowly. Dotted all down the stretch of the town are almost half a dozen small boutiques, offering a service I am sure was never available in the town as I grew up.

My hometown has a full handful of nail bars.

I feel such a stranger.

Hitting the high notes in Southwark

Continuing our shared enjoyment of local newspaper headlines, the Southwark News today offers:

QUEEN OF THE NIGHT TO VISIT DULWICH

Excellent. That’s where she is then.

It’s funny, because only last week I saw Figaro and Don Giovanni arguing outside a chip shop in Camberwell.

First class cricket talk

[From April 2004]

I’ve written about cricket writers writing about Andrew Flintoff before, so this, to me, has a giddyingly reflexive feel.

After last week’s tumultuous demolition of the Windies, England are preparing for the second test. This gives both Derek Pringle in the Telegraph and Mike Selvey in the Guardian the excuse to write glowing reports of Flintoff’s maturation from being the blacksmith’s son to being the blacksmith himself.

Flintoff, as Selvey correctly deduces, has become the heartbeat of the team; the carthorse that also provides the gallops.

One phrase from Flintoff really caught my eye. In Selvey’s report, he says of the slip-catching:

“Well, we are holding on to a few,” he said. “With players such as the West Indies have, you can’t afford to give them two chances. It is something at which we have worked hard and emphasised.”

Did the farmer’s lad really say “something at which we have worked hard“? I detect the journalist’s punctilious syntactical manners at work here. It would just be too delightful if Flintoff is not only maturing into a cricketer of legendary proportions, but constructing sentences the end of which he knows at their beginning.

Gasper

The man was standing just behind the Hampstead theatre, at the top of a scratchy plot of grass. He caught my eye because, at first, I thought it was Boris Johnson, the bumbly MP for Henley* and part-time PG Wodehouse character.

It wasn’t him, although the combination of straw hair, Bunterish frame and bemused expression made the mistake forgivable, I think.

He was, ever so slowly, performing some Tai Chi. His pudgy arms ghosted around in pondeous arcs, then carefully stacked somethings in front of him. From the waist up he looked like a clubber in slow motion.

After about ten minutes of this, he let his arms fall to his sides one last time and leant back against the wall of the theatre. A few seconds later he’d grappled a quick cigarette into his mouth and was taking his first drag with obvious and deep relish.

Boris would have been proud.

* 2013 footnote: The idea, when I wrote this, that Boris would ever become Mayor of London, let alone be spoken about non-jokingly as a potential Prime Minister would have produced wretchings of laughter.