It's one day after the half-term has ended and the blighters who go under the name of students decided to make up for all the mess they didn't create in the week holiday by outdoing themselves yesterday, whether it be waste bins filled to the brim, more table stains than I've seen in my entire time working as a cleaner or just plenty of casual crumbs and other waste strwen on the floor. Bastards! The head honcho of the company is coming around on Thursday, so everything has to be spick and span tomorrow in case he makes a surprise day-early visit.

Yesterday when walking down Green Street, a road just off the High Street, was a sight to defy comprehension. A black youth in all the 'with-it' fashion gear, cycled along the road with neither hand making any attempt to touch the handlebars. One of his hands was pressing a mobile phone to his ear, as he spoke loudly 'street' with many an "innit" interspersed in his speech, the other limb was rigidly outstretched, the hand splayed backwards, as if in the frozen gesticulation of rigamortis. If one was being generous, one might say the latter of the two arms was there for balance. Not so much a walking cliche as a cycling one.

Hampstead Halloween party

Went to Alex G's, Kirsten's and new girl Tally's Hallowen party in the apartment they rent in Hampstead from Kirsten's parents. I did a combo of Ghostbuster's T-shirt, hunchback (pillow in rucksack shove up T-shirt) and Urban Legend with a parka and a (toy) battle axe. Some of the best were Two-face/Harvey Dent by Ama, brilliant with two ties, two watches (one flash, one normal), the half tidy/half umkempt hair, a silver leopard on one lapel, with the fake fur (held by safety pins) on the same side, half-shaved face and also a pair of sunglasses with one lenses removed long before this party was conceived; and Viki's Cruella D'vil. The only possible showstoppers against this were the Two Johnny's (though separately inevented), one as Edward Scissorhands, and another as the character from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (the emphasis on fear). When Simon Savory arrived in his boiler suit, sans ice hockey mask, but with a toy Armalite gun, the party really became an impromptu nightclub.
In the morning, I went to church while the others slumbered. It was on Archway Road and above the name, it had Church of England, but, if that's the case, it was the most high church thing I've ever been to; maybe the name, St. Augustine's of Canterbury, Highgate, was a clue. It had the incense (no bad thing), the fixation on the Virgin Mary (dodgy ground) and even a prayer for the pope! I'm all for ecumenism, but some of the Roman Catholic credo makes me uncomfortable. Then it was back to the flat for some breakfast-cum-lunch after helping with the tidying. I left with Alex Goff and his Reading friend, Gavin, and departed from them at King's Cross, as they went to Wembley for the sport and I went home.

Not long now

After Newcastle United's 3-1 Win over Tottenham, it could be lillies for the lilywhites, as the Spurs' manager is Jol-axed, no longer with a name-plate at Broken Heart Lane. Steve Stone, local Geordie lad commentating on the game, said to call the Spurs wretched was generous. Martin Jol has the indignity of his reputation being whittled away, accusations of tactical naivety and so on, but it's hard to hold on to leads when your defence is cack and your best defender and club captain is a semi-permanent crock. Jol might be moved to say "Don't cry for me White Hart Lane/ The truth is I never left you (rather I was sacked)." With the approach of Halloween, kids on their trick and treat rounds could wear Spurs' shirts as something that's dead or there and thereabouts.

Carrying on with the football and Everton's decision to locate to a new ground outside the Liverpool area, it just makes all the more correct Bill Shankly's witty barb that "There are only two teams in Liverpool - Liverpool and the Liverpool reserves."

Workplace

A very strange occurrence happened today, just before I started work. I got to the worksite ten minutes ahead of schedule - for the first time, I was the first to arrive, maybe something to do with the cold - at 5.50am. 30 seconds later I was joined by two more work colleagues. One of them, a woman called Rachel related how she chafed under her new cooperation with another worker, Peggy, who, according to Rachel, bossed her around, despite being employed only one day before Rachel came on board. Rachel had worked in the same building as me, but a reshuffle of the rota following the opening of a new building saw her transfered. As she feared for her job should she have to continue with Peggy - threats involving buckets were aired - I said to her, jokingly, that she should take such issues onto Trisha. Whereupon Rachel said she had planned to be in the audience for Trisha yesterday but missed her train and had to rebook. What a coincidence!
Also, on a work issue, my supervisor, Dawn, mislaid a master key for one of the floors in our building and after a check of the usual places, concluded with deep regret, that she must have accidentally binned it! So she had to tip the entire contents of a rubbish bag into a storeroom closet basin and sift through the garbage looking for the unfortunate keys. This, too, proved unsuccessful, prompting a more extensive search. They were eventually found loitering in a classroom door lock. So, imagine her panic and subsequent relief when I, absentmindedly, had put the master keys for another floor in my pocket and was about to walk off home, before Dawn intercepted me just before the point of no convenient return. I had no wish to retain the keys for the weekend and so immediately handed them over, once Dawn asked if I had them.

In the name of the rose

When it comes to rugby (union), England are as welcome guests as Tsar Peter I (the Great) in the house of diarist John Evelyn. Having beaten the Aussies in their own Sydney backyard to win the final four years ago, the lads have now "shattered the dream of a nation" by sticking it to the French hosts in Paris. The English Rose has risen to the final against all expectations. They have proved themselves the antithesis of New Zealand, by being rubbish in the intervening period between the world cups, but coming good once the world cup is properly underway (after a two match warm-up you see). Fair dos, the French were courteous in defeat, far more than the whingeing Wallabies ever were. Possibly it is because the French are quite pessimistic in outlook, part of the malaise all commentators talk about, but it is honourable to be humble (after being humbled).

Visiting the capital

Last Thursday, I made the trip to London. I rendevous-ed with Mel and Lynsey in Leicester Square, but prior to that I had a Subway just off the place, where the two workers were bopping around to classic eighties Michael Jackson. As the ladies' birthdays had passed in the interim since our last meet, I gave the finger to Mel and another and another, since they were all chocolate finges of the mini variety locked up in a metal Cadbury's van of a box. An extrovert Aussie broke away from his coterie and struck up a conversation out of the blue, probably after having more pints than his bodily organs could cope with. Mel subtly bought him off with one of the packet of fingers inside the box. Lynny got a book about the wiles of dog lovers (with her Tommy in mind).
We set off for the Trash Palace where Mr Savory was in attendance as DJ. That it was near a certain fried chicken outlet and was proud to have 'trash' in its name, seemed to just speak Simon. Along Wardour Street, we entered free of charge (always a good thing) and made our way up the stairs. We bumped into Simon and his debonair girly wig straight away but the lasses were not aware at first, to the extent that I thought they were pulling one.
Apparently, the Palace was doubling as The Cleavage Club that night. It certainly fitted in as a den of ill-repute, with its gaudy colours and mock cultural paintings hanging from the walls. The bed at one end could have been employed equally by madams or opium smokers. Simon didn't seem to do much DJing, perhaps just a half-hour set of eighties 'toons', from a more leftfield aspect (but no Biloxi Blues!) tahn commercial. The general music was fine and some eminently danceable. Simon was also determined that Bananarama get an outing. The little DJ (match)box where the turntables were, reminded me of a popular alternative club in Tampere, Finland I used to frequent, where it was pretty open to people who conceived of themselves as DJs.
At the other end there was a cmaera doing some interviews with some very colourful figures, no doubt TV for transexual transmission. One of the guys in the vicinity, in addition, had a full-bodied quiff almost as long as his face. After the first round, Mel, Lynny and I drank some white wine which was rather sharp, even for house plonk. I had to leave early as I needed to catch the last train back to Gillingham, since there was no train leaving early enough on the Friday to get me to my job on time. So I departed around 11.30pm and whsked off home.

Partying for J. Williams, the northern hemisphere but not the PM

Paid a visit to Jon Williams as he gave a fuller-throated celebration of his Tuesday 2nd October birthday for the weekend. The two venues, a pub and a club, seemed to have tinnitus thrown in as a freebie, but I enjoyed the headline live act at Koko, the converted vaudeville theatre (rather what I imagine the fleapit where Dorian Gray first met the young actress he was to be initially entranced, then horrified by). There was the screen projection filled with faux-naive and counter-cultural images, inescapable from any club these days it seems, bookending the acts, and when it came down for a final time, exuberant moshers tried to haul it down altogether, before being foiled by bouncers and a hasty upward retraction of the screen. I stayed the night at Jon's priest-hole of a room. In the late morning, I ate in a nifty litle cafe round the corner from Jon's, before we went back to his place to watch 300, a hyperactive movie about valiant Spartans defending Greece, which was better than I thought it would be. I left mid-afternoon.
It caused me to forget about the England rugby game, which was quite a surprising victory. I tuned in for the second half of France-New Zealand - played in Cardiff - and I was hoping for the All Blacks to give the French a good beating, since the French had shared the World Cup with the celtic fringe and for them to go down in a foreign land would be sweet. But the sight of plucky underdogs and a rousing rendition of allez France from the crowd, swung my loyalties the other way before France equalised for the first time and even when they went behind again. To crown it with victory for Les Bleus in such a great game certainly had my heart beating for a while after. And now England vs France in the semis; who would have thought it?
Gordon Brown deferring an election was something few would have guessed since it has caused all this election speculation to spectacularly backfire. It jeopardises any plans for a spring 2008 poll and he may wait a full three years hoping to rebuild some credibility. This will be longer than a 72-hour hit, since it will be endlessly debated when he does indeed call an election. But he saw adverse opinion polls and lost his nerve because to come back even with a reduced majority would have damaged his leadership. It's his first major misstep and it's a doozie that will take some time to regain his balance from.

More miscellany

Well, I've finally got a job. It's not massive - a mere 10 hours a week, 6am-8am Monday to Friday, but it keeps me in honest verifiable employment, instead of leaving a huge hole on my CV. It's a cleaning job, which most people are condescending towards as in, it's only cleaning, but it's simple and, being part-time, my working day ends agreeably early. Located on the Medway annexe of Kent University, it's also just a short walk away from me and the building I'm working in - title: The Gillingham Building; that's original - is state-of-the-art having opened this very summer. There is a lt of building work going on and my supervisor said that I might be moved to a building nearing completion in the near future.
I've only been here one week though and already the company has been sold to an Irish company. The guy running the firm has spent 35 years in the business and began as a cleaner himself. We had a pep talk from our local head of operations that all our jobs were secure, but that we would be getting a new uniform, though seing as I have yet to be issued with one, that's not really much of a biggie. What is important is that the new chief executive will be inspecting us in our workplace, maybe even tomorrow, talking not just to the cleaning administrators but making it an issue to see the workers on the bottom of the hierarchical rung. Therefore, I'll have to work with an especially finer eye for things to make sure everything I do is ship-shape. We were also told to keep morale high, but I'm pretty happy as it goes anyway.

Last Sunday, Michael Palin went to a part of eastern Europe with which I'm a lot more familiar - Moldova and Romania. He started off in the country that does not exist - Transdniestr - a de facto rather than de jure entity. It's capital, Tiraspol, had a lot more life for Palin than when I visited it, perhaps because of the city celebrations. I wonder if the BBC crew had to pay the special visa fee that kicks in after 3 hours or whether they skedaddled with five minutes to spare. They were probably officially escorted in this unofficial state and that would explain why they took no pictures of the national stadium which is a state-secret of sorts. The BBC probably visited Transdniestr during Moldova's wine festival - a two-week festival in which visas are free, but entry is not visa-free. I know because when I went in 2005 we visited Tiraspol a few days before it's anniversary party (that lasts two days, purely so it is longer than Chisinau's, the Moldovan capital holding similarly timed carnivals).
Palin's guide in Moldova proper was wearing a UNICEF jacket which shows the circles the producers of this series move in, but hardly delving down to the local level. The hand-picked farmers Palin conversed with were asked questions about nostalgia for the former USSR. When I was there I was more interested in Moldova's relationship to Romania, given that they are ethnic Romanians. Palin did too, but didn't delve. The answer he was given was more a lament that Moldova had only land to offer (actually there is much more), rather than what I was told - that the Moldovan's have no intention of joining Romania again after the way the Romanians treated them in the 1920s and 1930s. There was also no mention of the man/woman imbalance (two-thirds of the population is women). Palin rounded off his trip with the band Zdob si Zdub, a band I have seen play live, but again kind of shows that Palin was operating in rather rarified surroundings.
Then it was on to Romania. He passed through the ancient Sighisoara and added to the Romanian tourist board's mythmaking about Bran Castle's links to the historical Dracula, Vlad Dracul (the Impaler), though Brasov, possessing one of the biggest Gothic cathedrals east of Vienna, didn't get a peek. On one of the train journeys, Palin talked to an 'ordinary' Romanian, who was reading a book by a native philosopher. The former Python said Britain didn't really have many philosophers to speak of. What?!?! Britain - no philosophers!?! After he made that comment I thought of Bacon, Hobbes and Locke within five seconds. And there are many more. Obvious what Palin did not study at university.
This travel series doesn't really have an impetus - a leitmotif - other than for a BBC jolly around an unfamiliar region. I watch it for the scenery, rather than the genial, largely inconsequential banter that is supposed to represent the 'human interest'. Before watching, I felt I wanted to keep this corner of Europe, mostly pristine and largely unknown to the western world, to myself and those who have actually ventured to such an enchanting. Palin's slight travel documentary means I had nothing to fear, but I was actually happy that he was, if only in a little way, demystifying this part of the planet. I don't know if my familiarity and continued interest in the area heightened the enjoyability of the episode, but it had more resonance than the first two installments.

One can tell a general election is in the offing. I'd prefer for it to happen in the spring so as to combine it with the local and mayoral elections and nor risk voter fatigue when next year's date comes around, but it seems a November poll has been fixed upon. I say this because the local Labour party has leafletted us extolling the sitting MP's man-of-the-people virtues. Given that he only has majority of 254, Paul Clark MP probably finds his position precarious and has given the impression in a snatched interview that he'd rather PM Gordon Brown MP wait longer. But the leaflet indicates that an inside source high up in the Labour food chain has given the nod to the constituency party to prepare for an autumn election. The official announcement from the prime minister is a formality.