Great Love Songs (40)

I think The Wind Knows My Name was my favourite of the Mark E. Nevin songs from the superb Fairground Attraction album First Of A Million Kisses. The theme of restlessness and inconstancy strikes a particular chord with me. I don't think that's been an issue in my love life. Well, not on my side, anyway. Well, not directly; I suppose that if one is unsettled in the rest of one's life, it makes it difficult to form stable and lasting relationships. It's hard for a nomad to make a nest-builder happy, and vice versa.

One of the great songs of farewell, anyway. And so this seems an especially appropriate choice, as I prepare to move on from this blog. And, hopefully, from Beijing. And maybe even from drinking. Really. Lots of changes happening in my life at the moment.

Here's the lovely Eddi Reader singing The Wind Knows My Name. She might be the only singer to get three mentions in this series; I've posted on her previously here and here. [You can listen to the album version here.]

A Top Five 'Magic' Letters

Reflecting on my strange (and terrible) romantic history, I am struck by the curious fact that the ladies I have been attracted to seem to form clusters. There are certain names that I seem to have a particular weakness for. More than this, even, I seem to be drawn to girls with names that start with particular letters of the alphabet.

I have never been attracted to - nor could I imagine being! - a Belinda or a Beryl or a Briony or a Bernice. Nor a Mary, Marian, Miriam, Millicent. Nor any Annas or Angelas (and only an isolated Amanda and Annabel).

On the other hand, I seem to have an astonishingly high strike-rate with these few letters of the alphabet....

Froog's Top Five (or so!) Fateful Letters of the Alphabet

5=)  N

But only for Natasha, a name which causes butterflies in my tummy merely typing it. Natalia, Nadia, Nadezhda etc. might also be in with a chance, I imagine. Bit of a Russian fetish, I confess. I blame Tolstoy.

5=)  F

But only because I have a huge soft spot for Fiona - possibly my favourite female name. I struggle to think of any others. I suppose the similar-sounding Fionnula and Fennella might be in with a chance. I've never much liked Felicity or Fay.

4)  K

K is the letter that haunts me. I love the name Kirsty, but I've never gone out with a girl of that name (nor with a Kirsten, or a Kristen). Kates and Katherines are mighty fine too; but I always seem to find myself with girls who use the C spelling (see below). And I absolutely swoon for the idea of a Kitty (blame Tolstoy again) - but it remains an abstract fixation.

3)  R

Rose, Rosie, Rosemary, and Rosalind, Rachel, Rebecca, Rowan and Rowena.

2)  C 

Several Carolines (and a Carolyn), a Cathy or three, a Cindy and a Candy and couple of Christines. I've never much liked Carol, funnily enough - although given my obvious propensity to fall for other C-names, I wouldn't rule out the possibility one day.

But what has been the most fateful letter in my romantic life, the most haunted page of my address book??

1)  S

Several Sarahs and Susans, a Selena and a Simone. And a Sally or two. It's a tight competition, but I think S shades it for me - on both quantity and quality.

Mike's Bar

Being on the road, and trying out some new bars over the last few weeks, I've found my mind wandering back to past travels and fortuitous bar discoveries of years gone by. Perhaps I've also been subsconsciously fretting that there are certain subjects I really should have covered on this blog, and will now never get around to, because I'm closing it down next week.

This is what brought Mike's to mind.

Mike's Bar (now, apparently, styling itself Mike's Irish Bar, although I'm pretty certain the 'Irish' is new; and it's the kind of pointless affectation that would be likely to put me off a place), is a large British-style pub in the centre of Athens, and I spent a week or so there over Christmas and New Year, in the middle of the spell that I spent working in Toronto.

Yes, I spent pretty much the whole week in that pub. My hotel accommodation began to seem superfluous, because there were at least a couple of occasions when I stayed in Mike's all night, and only went back to the hotel at dawn for breakfast.

Now, in fact, there was a much smaller, darker, and cosier pub just a few minutes' walk away (whose name I have entirely forgotten, I'm afraid), which would have been my preference for an evening hangout, but Mike's Bar had the advantages of large size and convenient proximity to the hotel, ensuring that it immediately won broad popularity among the group I was part of. It achieved a critical mass which made it impossible to lobby for any alternative rendezvous, it became the essential default boozing option for the duration of the holiday.

The group I was with was large and aggressively sociable and - for the most part - very hard-drinking. I was there for the World Universities' Debating Championship - an event I'd had experience of judging when at Oxford some years before, and had become involved in again while at Bar School. Well, I had been President of my Inn's debating society that year, but had selflessly abstained from picking myself to attend glamorous overseas events as a competitor (a level of ethical restraint rarely displayed by other holders of this office, I discovered); however, I worked my butt off in that job, and by the end of my term of office I thought I had earned a small treat for myself. And since Athens - the next designated host of the 'Worlds' event - was a relatively inexpensive trip, I thought it would be reasonable to volunteer my participation as a judge and thus get myself a little expenses-paid winter holiday.

And so it was that I got to hang out for 8 or 10 days with 1,000 or more boozy students. But at least competition debaters tend to be amongst the brightest and best of the student population. And also, in fact, amongst the most mature: a good number of them, probably the majority in fact, are graduate students, or members of certain professional guilds or vocational training schools or institutes of higher learning that aren't strictly universities (like my own Middle Temple). I'd say the average age was at least 25, and I was still only in my early 30s myself at this time. So, it was a very convivial crowd. And after the first 4 or 5 days, when a mini-league system involving all of the hundreds of teams winnowed down the field to just 16 or 32 teams for the final knockout rounds, most of us were left with nothing to do during the day - except catch up on the sleep we hadn't had the night before. (I initially felt quite bad about not making more of being in Athens, but I had visited the city twice before, done most of the standard sightseeing; and everything was closed over the holidays, anyway.)

Greece is probably my favourite country in the world. I love the sense of openness and generosity towards strangers that you find everywhere, the notion of hospitality that has been at the heart of their culture for thousands of years. (A favourite example from a visit a few years before: I'd been drinking with a friend at a table beside the harbour for a few hours. When we settled up, the bill seemed rather high; I suspected they'd inadvertently added a few drinks that had been ordered on the next table. Anywhere else in the world, the customer might start feeling paranoid about the likelihood of a deliberate scam, and the staff would probably get exaggeratedly defensive, and it might end in a lengthy and awkward wrangle, at the least, perhaps a stand-up fight. In Greece, I knew it was almost certainly an honest mistake, and queried it as such. The waiter immediately acknowledged that he might well have goofed, and asked me how much I'd like to pay. I think I happily paid rather more than my actual tab, because it was such a delightful way of handling a dispute.)

I suspect this national emphasis on the virtue of hospitality explains why the Greeks are almost always so good at running restaurants and bars, even restaurants and bars of an alien kind. Most people make a complete pig's ear of trying to emulate another country's food or its bar culture (the Chinese interpretation of Thai food being my particular bugbear here in Beijing). But the Greeks, bless 'em, somehow they manage to do it right.

The eponymous owner of Mike's Bar is not English or Irish or American, but Greek through and through. And yet he has managed to create one of the best large-scale pubs I've ever been in. 

I suspect, though, that dear Mike never sussed out why all these young foreigners were suddenly flooding into his bar every night, or how soon they would depart again. He had a bonanza week or so, was ordering extra kegs and hiring extra staff to keep the beer flowing all night, every night. I hope the adjustment back to his regular level of custom wasn't too painful for him.

Three Postscripts:

I may perhaps have been driven to drink more self-destructively than is usual for me because I was still smarting from a painful breakup six months earlier - and, as Fate would have it (Cruel Fate!), she was there. And having a fling with someone else, I soon learned.

My principal drinking companions on this trip were a daffy pair of Belgian accountants (it remained obscure as to how they were eligible to be taking part in a student competition), who introduced me to the useful term liquid sandwiches - to describe beer consumed in lieu of lunch.

These two Belgians caused some consternation to the hotel staff, when it appeared that they had consumed the entire contents of their heavily - and, of course, expensively - stocked mini-bar in a single night. In fact, they had merely transferred all of the miniature bottles of spirits and so on to a sock drawer, so that they could pack their fridge full of beer.

Girl power! - A Top Five songs by female vocalists

To kick off the advertised 'Music Week' here on The Barstool, here's a varied roundup - possibly compromising my usual macho image??!! - of girly songs that I rather like.

Not a very considered or definitive pick, just an off-the-top-of-my-head (and what I could find on YouTube) selection.

Froog's Top Five Girly Songs

5)  Lisa Loeb - I Do

Ridiculously hooky little song, with the hint of inner toughness and self-assertion that I always look for in my women (I can't stand drippy "I can't live without him" love songs!). And Ms Loeb is quite a compelling character: she has that librarian-sexy thing going on.

4)  Meredith Brooks  -  Bitch

A song that perhaps goes a bit far to the opposite extreme from the soft-and-fluffy/pathetic/can't-get-by-without-a-man image of femininity, but I've always found this sort of sassiness very appealing - even if it can be scary, vexing, and impossible to live with. I wonder if this song got under my skin so much because it came out just after the great break-up of my life (from a gorgeous Aussie academic I later jokingly dubbed 'The Evil One'): there did seem to be rather too much appropriateness in it.

3)  Sheryl Crow - Strong Enough

A similar stance to Bitch, but not so in-your-face, and with a touching overlay of vulnerability: not so much 'I will make your life hell just for the fun of it' as 'I will make your life hell because I'm a bit of an emotional basketcase'. This one is probably even more appropriate to that break-up, but not so contemporary.

I can't resist adding this duet with Stevie Nicks that I just found.

2)  Throwing Muses - Honeychain

I've mentioned a few times before that I'm a big fan of Tanya Donnelly and her subsequent band, Belly; but I wasn't so familiar with her earlier work with Kristin Hersh in Throwing Muses. My mate Ned introduced me to their 1991 album The Real Ramona, and this song really got under my skin somehow. That line Stare holes into the wall I find particularly haunting.

And at the top of this particular heap...

1)  Transvision Vamp  -  I Want Your Love

I believe someone - it might have been Malcolm McLaren - slightly snarkily dubbed Wendy James "the face of the '80s". It was a backhanded compliment because she and her band didn't break big until the late summer of 1988; and sadly prescient, because the band would soon fizzle and die in the '90s. But oh damn, their infectious pop-punk was tremendous FUN for a while, a late high point in what had been a mostly rather musically uninspired decade. And Wendy James might just possibly be the sexiest female singer Britain has ever produced: not just supermodel gorgeous, but brash, ballsy, smart as a whip - and she had a decent voice too. (Elvis Costello wrote a solo album for her, which suggests that I'm not alone in thinking she had some talent.) I remember the first time I heard this, I had just finished at university, and I was walking through London on a gloriously sunny day, the streets almost deserted on a midweek afternoon; suddenly, there was an open window on an upper floor, and someone had cranked up their hi-fi to full volume to blast out this song. "Damn," I thought to myself, "this is, um... bouncy!" And then I saw the video...

Great Love Songs (37)

Today, I am nominating Nina Simone as my 'Fantasy Girlfriend' over on Froogville. It doesn't matter that she was in her thirties before I was even born, and has now been dead for 9 years. Most of these selections have been 'impossible' in one way or another. It's the idea of Nina Simone that I'm in love with.

In addition to the good things included in the Froogville post, here's one of my favourite of her love songs, He Needs Me (which blog-friend JES once informed me was written by one Arthur Hamilton; not one of the more celebrated lyricists, but he was given a flying start in the business when old high school friend Julie London asked him to write her some songs and he came up with Cry Me A River).

This is a great song about 'difficult' love. I'm not comfortable with the suggestions of imbalanced affection, dependence, and self-delusion in it - but these all too commonly are elements of love. I prefer to think of it as suggestive of stoical, calmly optimistic perseverance with a partner who's just a little wayward - or perhaps just a little slow on the uptake, a little slow to realise or acknowledge the depth of the relationship that has formed. It's a complex and beautiful little song, and Nina's rendition of it has always sent shivers down my spine.

HBH 311

The distant city teems

Cool night breeze ruffles the sea

Lights on the harbour

Ah, back in Hong Kong - for the first time in 16 years.

I had one of the most exquisite evenings of my life here, back in the early '90s, sitting on the terrace of the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club, watching night fall, looking out across the bay at the lights of Kowloon - and enjoying the company of an utterly enchanting woman... who, unfortunately, was married.

We shared a taxi afterwards, and she invited me back to her place, "for a coffee" - oh, the cliché! I declined. It seemed her marriage was quite a loose arrangement, the husband working in Japan and rarely seeing her. But I have a rather stern ethical hang-up about adultery. Or I had back then. I have been tormented by curiosity and regret about this incident ever since (and I don't normally do regret). She was one of the handful of great infatuations of my life.

What was a low-life like me doing entertaining a glamorous merchant banker in the swank environs of the Yacht Club, you might well ask. Well, as it happens, I was (am?) a member. Well, a sort of affiliate member. My best friend's girlfriend at the time was the membership secretary of a rather exclusive yacht club in England, and - as a going-away present when I set out on my round-the-world backpacking year - she did an elementary bit of computer hacking to insinuate me on to their membership roll, so that I could enjoy visiting guest member rights at a string of affiliated clubs worldwide.

Though I was grateful for the goodwill demonstrated in this gift, I felt a bit guilty about its mild criminality. And I didn't think that I was ever likely to take advantage of it. But I did find it very useful in Hong Kong....

The Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club, with its prime harbourfront location, is one of the most desirable yet frustratingly unattainable venues on the island. It is strictly 'members only', and not many people can get to be members. Members can take in guests, but only members can pay for anything. And even members can't pay in cash (or by cheque or card); you have to use your member's tab for everything, and settle up at the end of each month by credit card.

I was staying with an old university friend who was working for a merchant bank, and I discovered that he and his friends and colleagues were all mad keen to have a chance to get inside the Yacht Club for once. Since he was putting me up for free and treating me rather generously throughout the two weeks I was there, a night out at the Yacht Club seemed to be an ideal way to thank him for his hospitality. Oddly enough, despite its high-tone vibe, it was one of the cheapest places to drink on the island (something I was much relieved to discover!).

Of course, as soon as I'd done it once, I was hooked on the experience, and went back two or three more times -  most notably for this marvellous 'date' with one of my friend's colleagues who I'd found myself falling into a dangerously flirtatious friendship with.

The guilty knowledge that I was an imposter there never quite left me, even though I was becoming something of a 'regular'; but the only moment of real alarm I experienced was on my preliminary visit, when I dropped in during the daytime to make sure that I would be able to set up a visiting guest member account with them. "Where are you moored?" they asked me. Oops - busted! My panic was fleeting. I calmly explained that I was on a business trip, and had flown in this time. Everything was fine. Until my heart got broken. I suppose that's karma, of a sort.

The Monmouth connection

At the start of the year, I did a little post on the development of my musical tastes in childhood and young adulthood.

I closed that piece by mentioning that accident of birth (I was born in the small Welsh border city of Hereford, and spent my childhood in the even smaller town of Monmouth, 20 miles to the south) may have had a significant influence on the evolution of my interest in music, and I threatened a further post on this at some point. It had slipped my mind for 9 or 10 months, but here it is at last.

For odd reasons lost in the mists of economic history (well, it was never plausibly explained to me, anyway), a record pressing plant was established a little outside of Monmouth (in the 1980s, it transformed into a CD pressing plant). Possibly predating the record plant a little, a recording studio was founded down at the bottom end of the town, in the area known as Rockfield. These studios became quite influential for a while in the '70s: most notably, this was where Queen recorded their landmark albums Sheer Heart Attack and A Night At The Opera  (I remember the studios actually got a mention in the credits on the gatefold sleeve of Night). Nimbus Records also set up shop in the area around about then.

So, there was a lot of activity in the music business in the neighbourhood where I grew up. I never saw any of the members of Queen when they were briefly in town to do those recordings, but I did quite often see people like Les Gray (lead singer of a band called Mud, briefly famous in the early '70s for a song called Tiger Feet - one of the greatest of the cheesy hits of that era, or of any era) and Robert Plant (also a fairly well-regarded vocalist), who bought houses in the area. Mott The Hoople, a band of some note at that time (Queen's first tour of America was supporting Mott! That's what that otherwise incomprehensible lyric in Brian May's Now I'm Here - "Down in the city, just Hoople an' me" - was about!), hailed from Hereford. So did The Pretenders. A decade or so later, EMF emerged from the Forest of Dean, midway between Hereford and Monmouth. Nick Lowe - a less illustrious name, perhaps, but a very influential and respected figure - also lived in the area for a while. I think the first gig I ever saw was Nick playing unplugged in my first local, The Nag's Head, in the early '80s.

Because of the recording connection, and the beautiful rural scenery of the surrounding Wye Valley area, quite a few rock stars acquired country homes round about. But they weren't full-time residents, and you'd only ever spot them once in a blue moon. More interesting to me was the community of session musicians the town attracted - guys who could play guitar or drums like gods, but just didn't have the ambition (or the craziness, or whatever it is that it takes) to want to be in a successful band, who were content just to make a decent living in the studios during the day and then hang out like regular people in the evening. Seeing one of these chaps step up to play on a small pub stage could be an astounding experience.

Robert Plant would usually arrange an end-of-year party for this local music community if he was around. And my brother would usually get invited through a couple of these session men who were drinking buddies of his. And a couple of times he took me along with him. These would be low-key, utterly unadvertised, invitation-only affairs in unremarkable local venues - but they were often quite star-studded, as Robert would inveigle all sorts of rock biz aristocracy to show up and jam. You'd do your best not to act too starstruck; and the booze flowed so freely at these things that you'd soon be struggling to recognise people anyway. But then you'd have a transient spell of lucidity where you'd find yourself saying out loud, "Fuck me! Isn't that The Edge?"

Those were probably two of the greatest shows I've ever been to; but, unfortunately, I don't remember too much about them.

Well, I remember the women. What is it about rock stars that attracts gorgeous women like moths to a flame?? I think I made a fool of myself more than once trying to hit on women who were clearly out of my league at those parties (you know, they might have been married to Jimmy Page, or something...). The memory loss is probably more of a psychological ego-defence strategy than a consequence of over-indulgence in booze and weed.

Aw, just for old times' sake - here's a blast of Tiger Feet.

Bon mot for the week

"When a woman buys a drink, she's either trying to seduce you or break up with you."

Froog

Oh, sure, that isn't invariably the case, but it does hold true a hefty percentage of the time. Yes, I speak from bitter experience. My ex of exes, "The Evil One", tried to break up with me* at least once a week throughout the four or five months we were together; I always knew it was coming because these were the only occasions when she ever tried to buy me - or herself, or anyone - a drink. (For an ardent feminist, she was surprisingly comfortable with patriarchal customs that require a man to pay for everything!)

* It was, in fact, probably rather more than once a week, but not all of them were completely in earnest: perhaps the majority might be better characterised as teasing threats, or ominous discussions about the possibility of ending it. Even full-on dumpings were, it transpired, not necessarily in earnest. The first she repented of after 12 days, the second in a matter of minutes (she claimed she'd only done it to "test" my reaction). 'Volatile' hardly seems an adequate word for that relationship; but the good times were very good.

I would also like to point out that these frequent ruptures were rarely if ever precipitated by any 'offence' on my part. The dear girl just wasn't comfortable with committed relationships.

Wimping out - AGAIN

Four years ago - and several times subsequently - I was tempted to try out a speed-dating event organised by the charming people at Fishbowl Events; but self-doubt and inertia got the better of me.

There's another one today. And this one I really was going to go to. Oh yes. My self-image is better than it's been for years, as I've dropped a ton of weight and got back into a regular running habit over the past two months. And I must admit that I am, alas, feeling desperately randy of late.

So, this time I was definitely going to give it a try.

Until I realised they were holding it at Switch. Oh, I'm sorry - SWITCH!, I should have said. Now, this place is fairly new, and I've never been there; but nothing I've heard about it persuades me to try it. The name is fucking STUPID! for a start. Exclamation mark - really?? Moreover, it's run by Culinary Capers, a catering company whose food I have found - at a couple of events they've catered, and at the most godawful Thanksgiving Dinner I've ever had - to be pretentiously over-elaborate and just not very good.

Still, I was really keen to try this speed-dating thing, so I thought I'd do some more research: and I discovered this online review (the only one it's yet garnered on the City Weekend website) which complains that the place is outrageously overpriced. I'll say! 62rmb for a Stella? WTF??!! That's at least 25% more than anyone else in town is charging (assuming that's the price for a 500ml glass, and not a piddling 330ml!), 35-50% more than most places, and more than 100% more than the keenest 'happy hour' price. OK, I gather they have a two-for-one 'happy hour' deal; but that doesn't count for much if their base prices are twice as high as they should be. The 35 or 40rmb we usually get charged these days is already way too fucking high (there's simply no way the price of anything in Beijing should be higher than it is back home in the UK); 62rmb is simply obscene.

And I gather the food is similiarly exorbitantly priced, without the quality to justify it. I'm afraid this is the kind of place that I MUST boycott on principle. I'll have to wait for December's round of speed-dating....

[Furthermore, of course, it SNOWED last night - so I fear the event is likely to fizzle anyway. It would be hard enough for me to hack just a few miles across town to Dongzhimen. I can't see people making the effort to come in all the way from Shunyi or Shuangjing or Wudaokou with the roads and sidewalks in this sort of condition.]

Stop that!

Meandering in the diverting thickets of Wikipedia the other day, I came upon The Anti-Flirt Club, a short-lived social movement founded by a group of young women in the Washington, DC area in 1923.

It seems these girls, under the leadership of their President, Alice Reighly, were particularly concerned about the recent growth of the phenomenon of men making passes at women from their motor cars. But their evangelising efforts  were aimed at their own sex rather than at men, aiming to stamp out the dangerous vice of promiscuous flirtation. Their 'Ten Commandments' - a rather repetitive and glibly epigrammatic set of injunctions for more decorous feminine behaviour - included such gems as:

Don't wink—a flutter of one eye may cause a tear in the other.

... and...

Don't annex all the men you can get—by flirting with many, you may lose out on the one.

But my favourite was the bafflingly verbose No. 8:

Don't fall for the slick, dandified cake eater—the unpolished gold of a real man is worth more than the gloss of a lounge lizard.

"Cake eater"?? Several online slang dictionaries I've just consulted are unfamiliar with the term, and it is not immediately evident why such a commonplace and innocuous activity should be associated, in men, with moral turpitude. Perhaps Ms Reighly's eccentric and obscure turn of phrase was to blame for the failure of the Club's great mission.

I am relieved at this failure. I'm rather partial to a spot of flirting myself. No harm can come of it - so long as the lady concerned is a safe distance away down the bar. And is leaving the country the next morning....

[Reading about this odd little campaign of yesteryear reminded me once again of The League of Health and Strength, a morally crusading organisation for young men that was active in Great Britain in the early 1900s.]

A Top Five Guitar Riffs

I've been thinking of attempting this for a while - as a variation on my 'Great Basslines' series of the past six months - and last week's 'Blues Week' brought it to the forefront of my mind again. I discovered quite a few rundowns on Youtube (mostly 'Top 20s') that provided food for thought, but they were mostly fairly similar: And I found that I was somewhat out of sympathy with several of the most obvious choices. Layla is indeed devastatingly hooky, but I find it rather wears out its welcome (after 6 minutes of almost nothing but the riff!); Smoke On The Water is certainly iconic, but a bit too plodding for my taste (high recognition value, but zero adrenalin rush); the key riff in Sultans of Swing is buried in the middle of the song (after the "We are the Sultans of Swing" refrain) rather than taking centre stage from the outset, and it doesn't stand out so much in a song full of memorable guitar bits (the insane run of 1/32-notes in the extended instrumental break at the end is what makes the most lingering impression for me).

Just a few minutes of reflection on this threw up getting on for 30 candidates, so, as with the 'Great Basslines', I may return to this in a series of further posts (although I'm running out of time to do all the music posts I'd like to, because - as we all know - the world is going to end on 21st December). For this first selection, I thought I'd try to focus on the most conspicuous omissions from the various other lists I've consulted - the really great rock riffs that most compilers somehow seem to overlook.

So, here we go....

A Top Five Great Rock Guitar Riffs

5)  Whole Lotta Rosie - AC/DC

Of course, we could have a whole 'Top Five' (Top 10, Top 20!) just on these boys: AC/DC are all about the riffs - Highway To Hell, You Shook Me All Night Long, Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, Back in Black, Thunderstruck...  But it's Bon Scott's unlikely celebration of an oversized groupie that's long had a special place in my heart. (At the end of my university days I was for a while dating a very beautiful art student called Rosie - very slender, and not at all a rock chick; but nevertheless, this song, and its monster riff, became a happy reminder of her.) Here's a great live version from 1977. [The album version can be heard here.]

4)  Rebel, Rebel - David Bowie

Bowie would also have more than one contender here, especially amongst his early '70s stuff (Mick Ronson's influence?). Jean Genie would be a close runner-up, but this is surely one of the greatest rock riffs of all time.

3)  Unbelievable - EMF

This Gloucestershire band (from the Forest of Dean, in fact; just a few miles up the road from where I grew up) faded from view in the mid-90s, and are probably perceived as a one-hit wonder. But damn, what a hit! (Curiously, America was the only country where it reached No. 1.) And what a riff!!!! Here they are playing on a comeback/greatest hits tour in 2001, at The Astoria at the top of London's Charing Cross Road (one of my favourite music venues; I was sad to discover that it had recently been demolished). [Plus, of course, Tom Jones chose to cover it. What higher accolade can there be?]

2)  Seven Nation Army - The White Stripes

Surely the greatest new entry into the pantheon of awesome riffage in the last decade, and much covered. No disrespect to Jack and Meg, but this is such a monster song that it really benefits from having a full band belt it out, and the best live version I've found is this one by Audioslave. [The original White Stripes video is here, and a good live version here.]

But in the top spot??

1)  20th Century Boy - T. Rex

I think the late '60s and early '70s was the Golden Age of Riffage, and, for a brief shining moment, Marc Bolan was the golden boy of that era.

After-love

I did a post on Froogville last weekend about the unlikely-sounding word mamihlapinatapai. This I had stumbled across as a result of this post by my old blog-friend JES, which referred to the word razblliuto. This, according to many an online source and the book cited by JES, They Have A Word For It by Howard Rheingold (which offered up mamihlapinatapai as its next example), is supposedly a Russian noun for "the feeling you have for someone you once loved, but do not any more".

Alas, the word appears to be unknown to Russian speakers (although an intriguing theory has been floated that it is a corruption of razlyubeno, a verb meaning to fall out of love, and supposedly originates from an episode of the '60s TV spy series The Man From U.N.C.L.E. [American scriptwriters naturally being likely to mangle any attempt at using Russian!]).

My scepticism was immediately aroused by the fact that it doesn't seem to be a very plausible word, since it does not define any distinct concept.

I can't see any value in having a word that means "whatever feeling you have for a former lover". If it meant simply "not in love any more" (as would seem to have been intended, if that "scriptwriter's goof" theory is true), that would make sense - but it wouldn't be an especially resonant word/concept. If it meant - as anguished romantics naturally assume it does - a sense of wistful longing for a lost love, then it would be more resonant; but surely there are plenty of other words or phrases for that?

According to the definition usually given for this word, it is seemingly intended to denote a particular emotion that exists between former lovers. And I don't believe there is any single emotion one finds in that situation. It depends on so many factors - the circumstances of the breakup, how long ago it was, whether the people concerned are now involved with someone else, and so on.

I tend to have a lingering wistful fondness for all of my exes (at least, the ones with whom I was in love) - though not a raging, obsessive passion, nor any urge to try to revisit and revive the relationship. But the range of other emotions we find in this situation is almost limitless: everything from fanatical hatred through bitterness and resentment to complete indifference or strictly Platonic friendship, and out on the other side to a flirtatious frisson of continuing attraction or easily rekindled lust, and, at the furthest extreme, undying adulation.

And though I would have doubted it when I was a young man, I now realise it is entirely possible after a lapse of many years to (almost?) completely forget that you were once sexually intimate with someone.

Furthermore, I think it's quite rare that one finds identical feeling on both sides of the relationship (before or after breakup!).

The (probably mythical) word razbliuto, then, appears to me to lack any definite or useful meaning.

However... sometimes words command our thoughts, and our thoughts may direct our feelings. If a language did have such a word, and it was understood to mean one particular emotion - a useful, healing emotion: a small ember of past love that was capable of engendering forgiveness of supposed wrongs and allowing a continuance of friendship... the existence of this word might work a gentle magic in the realm of romantic relationships; it might condition us to expect, to know that this is how we will feel after a breakup, and preclude the possibility of our experiencing any more powerful and potentially damaging emotions. I think the existence of such a word might be a blessing. Perhaps we should invent one.

By the way, I notice that the Wikipedia entry on The Man From U.N.C.L.E. that I hotlinked to above begins with the note "THRUSH redirects here." Oh dear. That might cause some confusion for people seeking medical advice.

Froog Solutions (25)

Froog's solution to the embarrassment of being invited to a party by an attractive young woman within seconds of meeting her....

Decline, politely - with explanations, and suitably hangdog facial expressions emphasising one's regret.

Of course, I repented of my foolishness almost immediately, but it was too late. I told JK - a witness to this debacle - that if he ever sees me doing something like this again, he is to intervene by giving me a firm slap.

Fate jabs me in the ribs again

A curious thing happened the other week.

I received an e-mail from someone I hadn't been in contact with for over a decade, someone whose e-mail address I'd forgotten was still in my directory.

Alas, it was not an actual communication, but one of those automated spam messages that indicates the sender's e-mail account has been hacked.

This rogue anonymous mail purported to come from a girl I'd fallen in love with when I was living in Toronto in the 1990s (this one, in fact). And the change of surname on the account announced to me that she must have got married.

After nearly 15 years, it really shouldn't cause me such a pang. And yet it does.

Qixi, schmixi!

Qixi - a traditional Chinese festival which has evolved over the past decade or so into a "Chinese Valentine's Day" (and you can imagine how much I detest that idea!) - fell a couple of weeks ago this year. I had been thinking of writing something about it then, but I had no Internet access. In fact, I had been meaning to write something about it last year, but didn't get around to it because I was travelling a lot in August. So, this post is 13 months late. Ah, well.

Last year, "Lovers' Day" came around rather earlier, near the start of August. Its date is set by the Chinese lunar calendar - the easily memorable 7:7, the seventh day of the seventh lunar month.

I happened to be down in Yunnan at that time, and had been happily unaware of the imminent tsunami of slush. But as I wandered around Kunming on a sultry summer's evening, it became very obvious what was looming. Almost every shop seemed to have converted from its usual business into being a florist's for the day. Either that or a teddy bear shop. Or a chocolate shop. Many places were covering all three options, with huge displays of teddy bears, boxes of chocolates, and flowers outside. Many were also touting heart-shaped helium balloons. On more than one occasion, someone had thought it cute to suspend a teddy bear from a bunch of balloons with a string knotted around its throat. To me this seemed macabre, like some coded gangland threat - and a sinister omen for the night of "romance" ahead.

Bars and cafés were all hoping for a bumper night. Many had forests of pink helium-filled balloons outside, sometimes even fashioned into heart-shaped arches, to advertise their festive spirit.

But their hopes, it seemed, were being disappointed. Every single one I passed was completely deserted. The bar touts mooched dejectedly outside on the sidewalks, fretting that their labours all afternoon in erecting balloon arches had been wasted.

Still, it was early in the evening. Perhaps things would pick up later, after sundown. I decided to distance myself from all the balloon-festooned venues, and retired to one of the few restaurants that appeared to be having no truck with this nonsense.

I was upstairs, reading a book, not paying very much attention to my surroundings. I was vaguely aware that the sun had gone down, and that there had been a rising amount of foot traffic on the street outside. Then I was roused from my reverie by a sudden ROAR from down the street. It sounded like the growl of an angry mob, and my first thought was that two groups of lads were about to have a rumble - perhaps provoked by an argument over a young lady. But then I realised that the noise was not outside on the street, but inside a nearby bar. In fact, there were similar noises coming from almost every bar. Now that I started listening, I realised that there were sounds of agitation coming from downstairs in my own venue - so I went down to investigate.

I had quite forgotten, but the Italian Super Cup - the showpiece opening game of the Italian football season, between the winners of the previous year's league and cup titles - was being played in Beijing that day, between the two Milan giants, AC and Internazionale. The game was live on TV, and of course everyone was watching it.

So much for Qixi! I suppose it is possible that young couples might have arranged to go out together after the game. But that seemed unlikely: the crowds of football watchers were almost exclusively male, and after an evening of exciting bonding with their guy pals - and consuming rather more beer than the limited Asian alcohol capacity can cope with - the prospects for an intimate à deux with the girlfriend appeared severely unpromising.

I was strangely gratified to find that for the young urban Chinese male football trumps "romance" so emphatically. That is as it should be.

Last call

I have touched on this point a number of times on this blog over the years, and have long been meaning to get around to a full post on the topic... but this isn't it. Maybe soon.

Oh, all right then, I'll have a go at covering it briefly here.

In essence, although there are many things I like about the unfetteredness - and the occasional exhilarating extremities into which that may lead one - of the 'no closing time' regime we have in China, I do, on the whole, prefer the culture in which I grew up, where there is a clear distinction between the hours of drinking and the hours of not, and you have to take a little care to structure your evening around the unalterable fact that at 11pm or 12am or thereabouts there'll be nothing more for you to do and you might as well go home. It is an entirely reasonable and unobjectionable restriction, one that conduces to one's health and happiness by providing more sleep, a better balanced lifestyle, and a less painful and more productive working day on the morrow.

Also, of course, there's a particular poignancy about the last drink of the evening. And a camaraderie of shared experience, with so many people being turfed out on to the street at the same time.

There is heated debate as to whether restricted opening hours and an early closing time increase or decrease the problems of overindulgence and drunkenness. I imagine it operates rather differently for different people, but my general observation has been that, while one might overall drink more if one is able to carry on until 2am or 3am or 4am, the drunkenness is usually no worse, if anything a little better. At least, that's how it is with me: if I know I'm going to be in for a long - indefinite - haul, I find the pace at which I can drink fairly comfortably all night without getting too hammered (it's the equivalent of the 'forever pace' I look for in my running, the speed at which I can go on gentle exploratory runs in new environments, secure in the knowledge that however far I may stray and however lost I may get, I'll be able to keep on running until I reach home again).

Alas, not everyone is such a cultured and experienced drinker as myself; many people get terribly sloppy if they try to keep going into the early hours of the morning. I've come across a few people who just don't know when to stop - unless the barman is telling them to. However, I think binge-drinking is probably far more of a problem with the fixed closing time: people tend to rush their drinks, to try and get as much in as possible in the limited time available to them, especially in the last hour before the dread bell rings to mark the close of the evening. I am a little prone to that vice myself, but at least I have the compensation that I'm home in bed by a sensible time, and so have more opportunity for recovery before work the next day, should I need it (hangovers have never been a problem for me, but my operational effectiveness can be severely compromised by inadequate sleep).

Ah, but the combination of rushing your last few drinks and that subtle surge of melancholia you feel because the evening is being brought to an end a little before you might have wished, and the fact that this is an experience shared with numbers of other drinkers you may know little or not at all... well, that leads once in a while to the other well-known 'closing time' phenomenon of the abbreviated love affair - where you may suddenly become smitten with a companion at the bar, strike up a conversation, discover apparent sympathies and compatibilities, and head home together, all within the space of an hour or less, perhaps in only a few minutes, that oh-so-dangerous period just before the bell rings.

So, for this weekend's musical treat, I give you two songs on this theme. The first is by a short-lived Minnesotan indie rock outfit called Semisonic (BAD band name, which may explain why they only managed to put out three albums before fading from sight), of whom I knew/know next to nothing. However, I have grown to rather like this one song of theirs, Closing Time, since it was one of the most regular fixtures of the old 12 Square Metres playlist, one that I only narrowly (well, I just forgot about it, to be honest) omitted from this roundup of the overplayed favourites that we were starting to miss after JK's departure.

The second is an even older and dearer favourite, a classic piece of early Tom Waits, I Hope That I Don't Fall In Love With You. Until recently it hadn't been available on YouTube. I mentioned it in one of my early posts on this blog, but had to content myself with publishing the lyrics only. However, I've just turned up a rather fine live version of it that I'd not heard before. "Last call for drinks. I'll have another stout."

HBH 291

Away for ten years

Memories all frozen in time

Lying in ambush

All the things that made me sad in this country are still here. Griefs from ten - and fifteen and twenty - years ago suddenly feel again as if they happened only yesterday. That's the trouble with going away for so long, the way it messes with your memory. You can't escape the past, you can only delay a reckoning.

A song for the Euros

I've been hunting for this classic piece of Neil Innes for ages, but it only recently seems to have turned up on YouTube. One Thing On Your Mind was one of the highlights from his superb '70s TV show The Innes Book of Records. It is possibly the best Country & Western song I know, and quite astute in the way it nails the typical - disingenuous! - female complaint that men are preoccupied with sex, while they become even more dissatisfied with us on realising that we are in fact far more obsessed with sport. [This is a rather long excerpt, but has much better sound quality than other postings. And it has the added bonus of being prefaced by a guest appearance from 'punk poet' John Cooper Clarke, reciting one of his best-known pieces, Chickentown - a sort of Slough for the '70s/'80s.]

I can't think of any song more appropriate to accompany the start of my three-week immersion in Euro 2012.

I suppose this is probably the best place to attempt to kick off  a discussion thread on the tournament. Four years ago, the banter got pretty lively here. I may have to send out a few warning e-mails to The Lads.

[By the by, Neil is now arranging a petition to lobby the BBC to re-show both series of The Innes Book of Records. He's been in a bitter rights dispute with the Beeb for decades, which has thus far prevented the show from being released on video or DVD.]

Foxy ladies

"We have supermodels in the bar tonight. No, REALLY."

My text message taunting of The Choirboy a few weeks back.

This is the kind of thing that happens in my 'local' once in a while. Two ridiculously tall and elegant and stylish and gorgeous and TALL (one of them was nearly my height, in flat shoes!) young women suddenly showed up there one Friday night. They were on a kind of date with two younger and hunkier American dudes. Ah, well. 

But I gathered that they were indeed international stars of the catwalk... one French, one Polish (the ridiculously tall one)... and they live together in an apartment in Prague. That was enough to  fuel my fantasies for the next several weeks.

Rearranging the deckchairs on the RMS Topicality

A friend was deflecting an invitation to drink the other night on unspecified grounds. I could speculate that his non-availability might be related to the demands of wife, children, or a straight job, but I was a tad irked that he wouldn't volunteer any more detail. When pressed, he replied archly, "They're called responsibilities."

"I believe I've heard of those," I said. "But I've never paid them much attention. A bit like the iceberg warnings on the Titanic. I may be steaming towards a crash."

Titanic analogies seem to follow me around. Ex of exes and queen of commitment-phobia The Evil One, in the midst of one of her half-hearted, twice-weekly attempts to break up with me, asked whether my efforts to save the relationship weren't like "trying to rearrange the deckchairs on the Titanic".

I responded, "Well, if I knew I was going to die tonight, I think I would want to contrive to sit in the sunshine for as long as possible today. And we might be able to lash some of them together to make a raft..."  [I believe somebody on the Titanic tried that, but didn't enjoy success with the attempt.]

A few years later, The Poet came along, and, after the giddiest few weeks of my life, proved to be the second greatest heartwreck of my wretched romantic career. Very soon after the breakup I was able to ruefully jest with her, "There was an awful inevitability about that. I was the Titanic and you were my iceberg."