Patchrobe

Deceptively flat and unimpeding

2009-05-24T06:47:00.000-07:00

I went out for a paddle today. Many think that I call hitting the beach with a surf board "going for a paddle" because it's some cutesy little diminutive for those in the know. It may well be (I'm not in the know), but the reason I call it that is because I can't call what I do "surfing" with a straight face.

For those of you that don't know me (and there will be few, not because I'm incredibly popular but because this blog will probably have a readership of precisely 1) I have spent the last three summers living in a shack directly opposite the entrance to Culs Nus beach in Hossegor, south-west France. Culs Nus means naked arses by the way - it's a nudist beach, a facility I have used in this capacity precisely once while hammered and covered in the bright fluorescent green-yellow and almost certainly highly toxic contents of a glow stick in the middle of the night.

Paddling is a fine activity by the way. I may on occasion be propelled uncontrollably towards the shore by a wave, an activity I generally avoid unless conditions are perfect. This happens often enough and uncontrollably enough for me to reflexively hold my breath when it does occur. On the whole, though, I kind of groove around on my board.

There is much about paddling that allows an experienced surfer to identify you as a total newbie. Positioning on the board too far forward or too far back will present a large profile in the direction of your travel and make it difficult to move. The body is kept low to lower your overall centre of gravity, requiring the shoulders to do more work keeping the arms clear of the water. All movement is efficient and considered lending a lithe and predatory look to the overall motion. Paddling too hard or without an even,powerful stroke turns arm movement into vortices (which swirl prettily like galaxies colliding) not into propulsion and are a waste of energy. Positioning yourself relative to the wave so that you get absolutely in everybody else's way is also a favourite. These are things I am now sensitive to. These days I can paddle like a champ. Experienced surfers have to wait until I actually try and catch a wave to see how much I suck. Flailing, gurgling "oh fuck" and attempting to brake by diverting water out of the ocean and into my respiratory systems and digestive tract are dead giveaways.

Occasionally I actually do something that might be generously called surfing. This causes me to develop a grin like a water melon quartered by two perpendicular planes each containing the long axis of the fruit. Seriously. I get so happy I lose track of how happy I am. Inside I feel like a zen master. On the outside I look like a victim of Jack Nicholson's Joker.

Most of the time though I paddle. You see I find most other forms of exercise stunningly tedious. I found that I like running, but I find it hard to get motivated about not going anywhere specific while I do it. Cycling is fun but some bastard nicked my bike. Also, on the rare occasions someone comes along to motivate me, I find myself balking at their encouragement and suggestions to sprint or work harder in some way or another. On the other hand, being out on the sea brings you some pretty stark choices. You'd be amazed at how much more motivating an eight foot wall of water is. Or a really good rip current. The worst your mate can do is look a little miffed at you afterwards or say "I don't think you gave it your best". If you're caught in the impact zone and see a monster wave sucking up so much beach material the bottom two feet are beige you get the fuck out of there as fast as your puny arms will take you. If you see the shore disappearing and you're not getting any closer at a casual paddle you bloody well work harder. It's like having a coach who has permission to waterboard you and regularly does.

So, for the time being I'm content to paddle and may even learn to surf.

What is it like to be French?

2009-05-18T07:27:00.001-07:00

In his book Mortal Questions Thomas Nagel famously asked "what is it like to be a bat?".

In this blog entry I would like to ask "what is it like to be French in England?" but, if Mr.Nagel is correct, I must necessarily fall short of the perspective required for I am, at heart, English and have merely spent two years in France. However, returning home was a bit of a shock after a long time away and I can, I believe, start to shed some light on the following which have been raised with me over and over again by gentlemen of a gallic persuasion:

1) The girls are fat - it is beyond doubt that you will see more "overweight" girls in the UK than in France. However, there are two points that need responding to. First, I believe this is just fine. Skinny girls are over-rated. I saw as many beautiful women in the UK as in France. Perhaps adopting an aesthetic that isn't driven by modern marketing and the fashion houses of Italy (for which read "well-branded multi-national corporate entities") might be an idea? Real women have curves and don't look like chain-smoking greyhounds on smack. Second, this is not due to some intrinsic dietary slovenliness or ill-disciplined nature. Ask any Australian about "The Heathrow Injection". Girls who adorn the beaches of Australia and are the reason we give praise to the inventor of the bikini will arrive in the UK and suddenly find themselves effortlessly growing much larger. I suspect it's something to do with the climate. It's cold, miserable, wet and a gym is no substitute for real outdoor sport. Until the British Isles are towed a bit further south into the Atlantic, those itty-little-bit-of-extra-weight-girls are something we're prepared, nay delighted, to live with.

2) It's dirty - hmm, tricky. There's nothing like clear blue skies and good quality sunlight to make a place look lovely. Pretty much anywhere on the Med, as long as it's well-swept and has functional sewers, well look pretty good. Britain profoundly lacks bright sunlight. It does have lots of precipitation which makes what dirt there is follow you around. After reflection then, no it's not dirty but I can understand why it looks dirty. This hasn't been true for a long while, though I think it probably was true when I was a child in the early eighties. I will, however, concede the following points. Our public toilets are generally shocking and the appearance of the Stansted Express is a matter of national disgrace.

3) The food is rubbish - this is total bullshit. Not true. In fact, the British need to stop being on the culinary defensive here. I've heard so much crap about how great French cuisine is from the French. Cobblers. I'll tell you what it is. Raw ingredients in France are much better. The standard of the materials you get to cook with, specifically fruit, vegetables, meat and cheese, are much better in the French supermarkets. This makes for better meals. The French attitude towards cuisine is of fin-de-siecle decadence. There is no need to strive or improve upon the best cuisine in the world. This attitude is bolstered by a widespread inability to produce foreign cuisine or use exotic spices. Hence when the French do sample foreign cuisine it is usually some pale imitation made by a local chef incapable of abandoning inappropriate prejudices about "how it should be done". When I went back to the UK for a short trip, food was vital to the whole experience of being home. Beef and stout pie with a small hillock of steamed vegetables? Check. Chinese banquet? Check. Fish and chips? You betcha. Indian, Thai, Mexican, sushi? Dear God, if only I'd had the time. If only the British could spend more time cooking and less time in the office or on some ludicrous commute.

4) The locals are unfriendly - London? Guilty as charged. London is a deeply unfriendly and unwelcoming place. This stands in stark contrast to New York. In my brief experience there is only one kind of person that New Yorkers have no time for, and that's other New Yorkers. Hey, screw you pal. However, they are immensely proud of their city and I, as a visitor, was made to feel enormously welcome. Arriving in London for the first time as a tourist and not a local was not a good thing. You could be on a crowded carriage of the Northern Line experiencing extra-ordinary levels of physical intimacy with complete strangers and you will still be in some mental Popemobile - visible yet detached and inaccessible to the world. Few people look up. Even fewer smile. A handful will stop when you ask the way. Otherwise expect to be like a stick upright in a stream; London will simply flow around you. It's much like Paris in that respect, though in England the national railway staff will not tell you gleefully that they cannot speak your language with a flawless accent and a glint in their eye; they will simply be unable to speak your language.

Evil Hotties

2009-05-18T07:26:00.000-07:00

I like to think of myself as a reasonably high-brow kind of chap. I actually finished The Road to Reality by Roger Penrose, though I confess I understood moderately little of it. I've tried (and failed) to complete Gravity's Rainbow on at least 5 separate occasions; I've owned two copies of it having lost the first somewhere, I think, in the US and still think of it as some kind of magical talisman, the completion of which will bring to a close one of the more anti-climatic romantic non-interludes of my life. I thoroughly enjoyed and actually laughed out loud during the reading of Gawain and the Green Knight. I am about to put myself through the literary equivalent of the scene with the wicker chair in Casino Royale by attempting the Critique of Pure Reason by Kant.

That said, I must now confess.

I have an insatiable appetite for phenomenally cheesy crap. I mean, I dig some reeeeeeeeal awful television and film. I showed signs of clinical addiction to Star Trek: The Next Generation at university. I actually prefer Angel to Buffy the Vampire Slayer (no, I'm not gay). I love Doctor Who (Tom Baker and David Tennant before you ask though I like them all). I've watched every episode ever made of The Collector - an obscure Canadian series about an immortal lapsed monk who collects souls for the devil. Now I come to think about it, I probably ought to start getting round to watching those uncut versions of Battle of the Planets and am one of the army of sci-fi fans who bemoan the early demise of Firefly.

Having an encyclopaedic knowledge of schlock I can tell you one thing for absolute certain. Evil chicks are hot. Take Angel, as I've already mentioned the series. I'd take Fred home to meet my mum but I'd be thinking of Lilah. What about the Dr.Elsa Schneider in Indian Jones? Hell I've got a bit of a thing for actress Alex Kingston, but you can be sure as hell that the moment she put on that nurse's uniform for the stage version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest that little frisson turned into a snarling hell-hound of lust, every link in society's chains of propriety thrumming under the strain and creaking with the imminent threat of structural failure.

I'd have an awful lot of time for most of the female cast of Rome and would particularly appreciate a candle-lit dinner with Kerry Condon but Polly Walker's performance was quite extra-ordinary. Utterly amoral, conniving and ruthless, Atia of the Julii is a casual liar, torturer, murderer and utterly devoid of compassion, though we see through to the vulnerable and utterly lost heart of her at the very last moment. Oh yes, and she has Mark Anthony coming back for more - clearly insatiable.

So what is it about evil hotties? Well, they're usually intelligent, possessed of wit and a slightly cruel and sardonic humour and give the impression they'd be the best shag between the baby blue vaults and the fires below. A man would die happy, if somewhat sooner and vastly more painfully.

Why the French are good at algebra

2009-05-18T07:23:00.000-07:00

The French nation has a fearsome mathematical pedigree. Fermat, Coriolis, Descartes, Mandelbrot, Poincaré, Poisson, Laplace, Lagrange, Carnot, Pascal - just let me know when you want me to stop.

I have a theory why.

Most languages have their annoying little quirks. For example, you can get confused between 14 and 40 in at least three European languages (forty/fourteen, quatorze/quarante, vierzehn/vierzig) and the difference between the two words in English is pretty trivial.

However, the French number system is, in some respects, intrinsically just screwed. This is evidenced by the fact that the French have to list phone numbers to each other in a highly systematised way. For example, say my phone number is

06587699

This would be split into pairs

06-58-76-99

Giving you the spoken version

"Zero-six... ...cinquante-huit... ...soixante-seize... ...quatre-vingt-dix-neuf"

Why?

99 is quatre-vingt dix-neuf. Eighty-nineteen. But the French for eighty is "quatre-vingt" which means four-twenty and the French for nineteen is dix-neuf which means ten-nine

And so, if you are reading out a list of digits and you say 99, you are literally saying four-twenty-ten-nine.

What is that?

4-20-10-9?
80-10-9?
80-19?
99?
4-20-19?

All of these are phonetically identical apart from the timing of the pronunciation.

Please bear in mind that this is from the country that decimalised the week, completely rebuilt its capital city and spearheaded the metric system. Surely coming up with separate words for 70 and 90 shouldn' be that difficult.

But then again, algebra must surely come as a blessed relief

Lionised male wins Quiksilver Pro France 2008

2009-05-18T07:22:00.000-07:00

Mobbed, shagged rotten, "stoked"

Actually the competition is still running, so...

Socrates the philosopher was in the marketplace when an acquaintance ran up to him excitedly and said, 'Socrates, do you know what I just heard about one of your students?'

'Wait a moment,' Socrates replied. 'Before you tell me I'd like you to pass a little test. It's called the Triple Filter Test.'

'Triple filter?' asked the acquaintance.

'That's right,' Socrates continued. 'Before you talk to me about my student let's take a moment to filter what you're going to say. The first filter is Truth. Have you made absolutely sure that what you are about to tell me is true?'

'No,' the man said, 'actually I just heard about it.'

'All right,' said Socrates. 'So you don't really know if it's true or not. Now let's try the second filter, the filter of Goodness. Is what you are about to tell me about my student something good?'

'No, on the contrary ...'.

'So,' Socrates continued, 'you want to tell me something bad about him, even though you're not certain it's true?'.

The man shrugged, a little embarrassed. Socrates continued.' You may still pass the test though, because there is a third filter - the filter of Usefulness. Is what you want to tell me about my student going to be useful to me?'

'No, not really...'

'Well,' concluded Socrates, 'if what you want to tell me is neither True nor Good nor even Useful, why tell it to me at all?'

The man was defeated and ashamed. This is the reason Socrates was a great philosopher and held in such high esteem. It also explains why he never found out that Plato was nailing his wife.

Technically, I think the above is more Buddhist than Socratic, adhering to the principles of Metta and the third principle of the eightfold path (rightness in speech). I like to maintain a veneer of buddhism because a) I like it and b) I think it helps me score with vegan chicks. Ok, so they tend to be skinny and have the same attitude to sexual impropriety as Aleister Crowley. These are not bad things.

The things that I've heard during the last week are bad things. Rumours of some really world-class sledging from some world class riders. The grapevine also has it that some households name could probably have done with 5 hours of Nintendo and a bottle of Yop the other day too. These are not things I shall repeat, though I will feel free to laugh about them.

On a similar note, I watched the new Incredible Hulk film the other day and was gratified to discover that Lou Ferrigno has not died of steroid abuse. Neither has Bobby McFerrin (author/singer of "Don't Worry, Be Happy") committed suicide. So there...

All quiet today

2009-05-18T07:19:00.000-07:00

Ok, so I haven't actually been in the sea for about a week. Last time I was out I got the waggy finger treatment for being somewhere deeply beyond my skill level. This was a little unsympathetic on the other guy's part, I feel - it was clear I'd just been worked and the next wall of water was just seconds away. "Je connais", I said gasping and paddling desperately for shore, the finer points of French grammar escaping me for a moment there...

On the other hand, I have been engaging in such admirable beach activities as getting wasted on free beer, listening to live music and watching other people do unfeasibly dangerous stuff. This was all courtesy of uncle Suzuki, who generously donated 3 barrels of beer and 1000 burgers (yes, one thousand) to the people of Seignosse and Hossegor as we watched the Suzuki team riders jump ramps in the car park of Cream Cafe. Nice back flip. We were a pretty cynical crowd to call for a 7, I suppose.

This was followed by live music from Ben Howard and Offshore. Ben's been a regular feature on and off this summer. Here's some YouTube footage of a previous appearance. I'd love to offer an unbiased review, but unfortunately I'm deeply jealous of Mr.Howard's skills on the guitar and will simply maintain a slightly huffy silence.

Brutal hangover today, but last night made up for not getting anywhere near Tony Hawk's ramp show on the Centrale on Saturday.