Author Archives: Fordiebianco

Thinking about moving to London? Really?

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Over at Deutsche in London, an expatriate forum for -you guessed it- German expatriates in London, the forums are being inundated by requests from bright eyed and bushy tailed Germans (and, surprisingly, Austrians) who want to flee this mortal coil (or whatever you call life in Germany these days) and move to London, of all places. The requests are of refreshingly naive (‘hello, I am jobless here in Berlin, can I come to London and get a flat and be put on benefits?’ or ‘How long do my 500 pounds last on the housing market’) and wary locals often have to dampen the enthusiasm of the wannabe immgrants by introducing them the realities of inner city London life:

  • If you earn less than 2000 pounds per month and you want to live in the city, re-acquaint yourself with the lovely life of a flat sharer. Live with housemates who pinch your food, make love at 4 am in the morning before your important meeting and insist on drinking 40+ units on a Friday and Saturday night and vomit loudly on their way back to bed.
  • Forget about owning a car: you won’t be able to affort congestion charge and the insurance
  • Embrace public transport: sweat like the rest of your 3 million commuters in the Tube and get coughed on in the bus
  • Enjoy the lively drug dealer in your local park who will eye suspiciously for some time and get assualted by one of their clients.

And don’t forget: these were the good times: oodles of public money pushed into the economy, a banking sector that was spending like heck, quangos and NGOs in the thousands, companies actually hiring. That’s already changing. Councils are preparing themselves for 30% less funds to play with, the NHS is starting to reduce costs and the rest of the public sector is bracing itself for George Osborne’s cuts.  Beneficiaries will be hit hard, and the dole queues are likely to achieve the length of the seventies. The mollycuddled continental Europeans moving to London won’t know what hit them.

So,  if you’re sitting pretty (but bored stiff) in Duesseldorf and you’re thinking about coming over:

Don’t. Enjoy your clean streets and your drug dealer free parks. Coming over here might not be the best thing for your quality of life.

How to annoy your girlfriend and make a new pop filter

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Today I needed to record a podcast for a work project and fortunately I own an appropriate microphone, but during recording it was quite obvious that an abundance of the letter ‘p’ in my text a pop filter was necessary. The only problem is of course that here in the apocalyptical desert of South East Essex there is a void where good music shops should be. So I had to find another way. Fortunately the essentials were all available. Much to the annoyance of the best girlfriend ever, who is now one sock down.

Voila. One pop filter a la mode.

Through the Jungle of Krefeld I Walked

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Today I did some (rather embarrassingly unsuccessful) geocaching around the beautiful Niepkuhlen, a collection of former Rhine tributaries. While rather disgruntled, I had to hand to those lower rhine Germans: they do keep their cities beautiful, with lovely walkways, a minimum of garbage of the streets and some of the most lovely parks and nature reserves you can wish for. I think we might have to send the mayor of Tower Hamlets on a fact finding mission.

Matt Bianco @ Jazz Cafe Camden, 17.9.2010

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Pic by Isobel Kellermann

Pic by Isobel Kellermann

The second Matt Bianco concert within a year in London! It’s quite obvious that the band is slowly but surely happy to play in the UK again, and the capacity crowd at the Jazz Cafe was utterly delighted to have their heroes back. It’s quite rare to see Mark Fisher and Mark Reilly smile at the same time, but there they were, beaming like Cheshire Cats, infused by an appreciative audience which went completely mad from the first minute of the gig, singing in happy unison with Reilly, Sim and Foster and spurning on the soloists. The setlist was the by now well rehearsed mix of classics and the recent Hifi Bossanova but with an exciting new take on ‘Half a Minute’, inspired by the recent Joey Negro remix. It’s interesting which of the 11 studio albums don’t make it on the setlist anymore: there were no songs from ‘Rico’, ‘Echoes’, ‘Another Time Another Place’ and ‘Samba in your casa’ which shows a certain negligence of their ‘naughties’ period.  Fortunately they did not drop their best live song, the brillant ‘Lost in You’ which with an extended Salsa section in the middle and Mark Fisher’s long piano solo continues to be the highlight of each show. ‘Fordiebianco’s law’ states that the quality of each Matt Bianco gig can be ascertained by Mark Fisher’s keyboard solo during ‘Lost in You’. If he’s really into it and sparks fly he’s been infused by the audience’s vibe and is obviously enjoying himself, but if it’s a lacklustre affair the gig was obviously not as enjoyable for everybody.

So for Fisher’s performance on a scale of 10, Friday’s was a 24 and the same can be said for the rest of the gig. Which again shows that Fordiebianco’s law is valid. Even Danny White was seen enjoying himself!

Quod erat demostrandum.

It was an absolute joy to see this much loved band play in front of a happy hame crowd, and I can only hope that there will be many more London gigs in the future.

I Shall Wear Midnight

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The arrival of a new Pratchett is always a big deal here in our tiny refuge within the hellish suburbian post-industrial wastelands that they call South-East Essex. It pretty much means that I will not be available for any chores within the house, including picking up the phone, answer emails or at all rise from the sofa. After me finishing The Book, it’s the best girlfriend’s ever turn to take over the tome and to indulge in a brief spell of escapism full of politically incorrect witches, moronic right wing types, ghosts with OCD and anarchic gnomes. So this time it was the teenage witch Tiffany to take over the helm in the protagonist’s chair and as before she seems to bring out Pratchett’s more introspective side. Why this book is labelled ‘for young adults’ (like the previous Tiffany novels) is beyond me. First, you could very well argue that all of Pratchett’s books appeal to young adults (and middle aged adults and older adults and decrepit old fogies like myself). Second, Tiffany always seems to bring out Prattchett’s philosophical side, making the books arguably more attractive to an older audience. Third, the distiction is completely arbitrary.

Anyway, the book is (as usual) a cracker. It covers all the usual, recurring issues that Pratchett (understandably) has been grappling with repeatedly in his last novels: Hate, tolerance, feminism, death, pre- and postmarital sex are all covered with Pratchett’s usual deftness and it’s hard not to feel both elated and shed a tear at the end of the novel.

I remain convinced that if more people would read Pratchett (especially Teaparty conservatives), the world would surely a better place, but that remains a pipe dream as he is surely blacklisted for these guys, just like that dangerous indoctrinator J.K. Rowling.