Dear Americans….

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…hi there. I know you read this blog, I’ve seen your traces on my geotracker. That’s ok, I take it as a compliment. But we have to talk.

Again.

See here, over the last 2 years us Europeans (and the rest of the world, I presume) have started to warm to you again. You have an amazing president who (while not being able to deliver everything within the first two years but had a good stab at it) has singlehandedly turned around the perception that the rest of the world had of you. I even ended my self-imposed travel ban and visited your lovely east coast after 8 years again and was delighted to meet more open minded, friendly and intelligent people with a thoroughly modern and international outlook than you can shake a stick at, all delighted to be again embraced by the world after 8 years of being the butt of jokes and disliked for a disastrous foreign and domestic politics (and the odd war thrown in). It just re-emphasised my belief in what an amazing bunch of people you can be.

But now this: how in your right mind can you even think about re-electing the same people to congress, senate and state-mansions that turned you into in an international pariah in the first place? Some of them with views that are so alien to the rest of the civilised world that we are constantly shaking our heads.

So, please don’t let the nutters back in. Do you really want to make life harder for this guy:

Thank you for your consideration.

That will be all.

FB

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.