Week Thirty-Six: World Cup, Flags and Broken Feet

June 7, 2006June 11, 2010Leave a comment

The hype is building here now for the 2006 Deutschland World Cup, and as I write Wayne Rooney’s foot is awaiting the results of its latest scan. Beers are being bought en masse from Tesco, armchairs being moved here and there to find the perfect position in front of the telly, and then there are the flags. I’ve never seen so many bloody flags.

They used to fly the Union Jack (more properly called the ‘Union Flag’; it’s only a ‘Jack’ when it’s on a ship). Now the navy blue has been thoroughly washed away, and only the red cross of St.George remains, and it is everywhere. Our house is probably the only one in the street which does not have at least one giant England flag hanging from the top windows, but some houses are completely decked out, I mean roof to roses in white and red. Cars all over suburban London are flying the flags, looking every bit like diplomatic vehicles (if that diplomacy includes throwing plastic chairs into Belgian fountains).

There are more England flags than I have ever seen. For decades people were afraid of flying it, thanks to the sinister associations it had with the National Front; slowly and surely, that association has been eroded. I hardly saw any in France 98, and for 2002 there were lots out alongside the Union flag, because the World Cup coincided with the Queen’s Golden Jubilee. By 2004, for the Euro in Portugal, the country had completely reclaimed the flag, and shops had cottoned onto this new patriotism in the same way that American shops had done, post 9/11. But this year? Five times as many, without a doubt.

But will they be up for long? Will England get very far, with or without Wayne’s foot? I hope so, of course, but I doubt they have been practising their penalties with too much enthusiasm. England cannot take penalties, and the Germans, unfortunately, can. So therefore I have predicted that England will go all the way to the Berlin final, dispatching Brazil along the way, where they will meet Germany, and it will come to penalties. The deciding penalty will be taken by Wayne Rooney, who will use his dodgy metatarsally-challenged foot, scuffing the ball weakly into scummer Lehmann’s arms. I’m so sorry, everybody. Mystic Pete has spoken. Enjoy the World Cup.

Week Thirty-Five: petescully is Away

May 30, 2006June 10, 2010Leave a comment

I hate airports. Some people see them as places of excitement, full of people travelling all over the globe, every continent and every country coming together in one place, huge metal birds soaring across the horizon, and all of that bollocks. In reality they are inconvenient places packed tight with tired and stressed-out travellers in inappropriate clothing for the climate, families with noisy young children who have to take up the entire row of waiting-area seats with various coats they were never going to wear, soulless security staff who have been trained in the art of humourless arrogance, and shops full of things you really don’t want. Yes I know that’s a glass-half-empty look at airports, but that’s how I see them. I don’t like them.

San Francisco International was actually quite nice. Incredibly modern (lots of glass and white painted metal) with interesting displays of public art. Hardly anybody about, so there was space to breathe, and there was none of that waiting in a queue for a couple of hours to check in. I hate how airlines insist on you being two or three hours early, mainly because I do not ever want to spend any more time in an airport than I have to. It didn’t take too long to get around it, either – some airports are so huge you need to take a plane to get across them. Of course, there are the travelators – which, as Seinfeld once pointed out, people often forget are actually for travelling on, not for just standing there, leisurely passing the world by, ‘look at me, i’m not even walking’.

Usually it is such a relief for me to get on the plane and get off the ground. Unfortunately, United Airlines employ the sardine-method to air-travel, and I was clamped into place with nothing but King Kong for entertainment, on a flight I was expected to sleep on. I didn’t make the journey any worse by actually watching it, so I read a little, listened to some music, tried to sleep and failed. The air-hostesses, their baggy eyes caked in make-up and their uniforms threatening to throw stitches and release unwanted air-pressure, waddled the aisles unsmilingly offering pretzels and sodas and food with less taste than the Daily Star. I watched the map anxiously, passing over the Rocky states, past places with names like ‘Big Baldy Mountain’, across Canada and Greenland, over Iceland and finally into Britain.

And into Heathrow, one of the world’s largest (and therefore most irritating) airports. Baggage reclaim is always fun, isn’t it? It’s like a gamble, did my one make it, or is it in Sydney? And then you start to wish that you’d tied a ribbon to it, because everyone’s bag is large and black and looks just like yours. People pile around the treadmill ready to pounce on any bag slightly resembling their own, pushing other people out of the way in fits of jetlagged desperation. And then a sigh of relief as your luggage comes out; and a smug look on your face as if to say to the others still waiting, “well, I guess I’ll be off, good luck getting your bags back from Australia, suckers!” Yes, airports are really lovely places.

Week Thirty-Four: End of the Season

May 23, 2006June 11, 2010Leave a comment

The dramatic FA Cup final shoot-out, the tense (and ultimately rigged, in my opinion, all’italiana) race for fourth place in the Premiership, the return of Barcelona as Champions of Europe – it all passed without so much as a murmur over here. Same with the Eurovision Song Contest. Nobody cared, except maybe the one guy I met wearing a Barcelona shirt, who innocently wondered if I supported Arsenal, and received a look so foul it would have turned an M&M sour. And yet there can be no doubt about it – this week is the End of the Season: the TV Season. All the long distance shows have been running since September (‘Lost’, ‘Gray’s Anatomy’, ‘Desperate Housewives’, to name but a few), and are all culminating in their own two-hour season finale Cup Finals. I fully intend to sing ‘Abide With Me’ before tomorrow’s ‘Lost’. I have a feeling that one will end in some sort of shoot-out as well.

The American TV Season is one of the big cultural differences between Britain and the US. In the UK, a series will often last for six, maybe even eight episodes; an American show will last for over twenty. But how do you stretch twenty episodes into almost forty weeks? What they do here is they show a few new episodes, then they repeat some, then some new ones, then some repeats (pronounced re-peats, not re-peats). In this way, the suspense is, well, suspended. And it can be really irritating, not least because there appears to be little pattern of when they will show repeats and when they will show new episodes, making the series incredibly frustrating to follow. The repeats they show are equally arbitrary – they have no order, they serve no purpose, other than to rest star players. It is as if Claudio Ranieri is in charge of the TV networks (actually, I really wish he were).

I have no idea what will take place during the summer. I would like to see all the different shows get together and have their own World Cup – we could see Eastenders vs Sex and the City, or at the very least a fist-fight between Jeremy Paxman and those imbeciles on ABC News10. I would pay good money for that, really good money. Who knows, this might even be one World Cup where the English actually beat the Germans. I’ll settle for the real thing; though I know they will show some matches, I will be watching it for the most part on the Mexican channels (that is, when I come back form my holiday to BBC land). Speaking of which, you know the way films sometimes have different names here? Well that film ‘Goal’ is currently listed in theatres here with the catchy title ‘Goal: The Dream Begins’, while in Mexico it is listed as ‘Gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooool!’. Strange but true.

Week Thirty-Three: If You Can’t Take the Heat

May 16, 2006June 11, 2010Leave a comment

Yesterday, someone said something that gave me the impression that they thought it was still Spring. I told them, look, if it’s nearly a hundred degrees Fahrenheit outside, that means it is Summer. I was assured that this is indeed still Spring, and that I will be looking back on the days when it was only in the 90s like some bygone cold spell. In Davis – in the Central Valley generally – it gets hot, and I mean HOT.

Not that I can go outside, of course. The hay fever is especially bad right now, and I’m tired of everyone asking me what I’m taking for it. Nothing works for me, and anything medicated makes me ridiculously drowsy. I’ve realised that the best thing for me is to just stay inside, in the safe insulated bubble of my office. I don’t have a window, so I don’t see how sunny it is, but my spies tell me it’s glorious right now.

I read somewhere that California got it’s name from the Spanish words ‘cali’, meaning ‘hot’, and ‘fornia’, meaning ‘oven’. Hot Oven. I don’t know about that folk etymology, but it’s a pretty good description. The hottest place in the world is in California, down in Death Valley. It is, of course, a ‘dry heat’, which means that you won’t sweat to death in desperate humidity as you might in the South. It also means that air-conditioning is essential, or plenty of fans at least. In our apartment, for example, we have more fans than Milton Keynes Dons.

And so all that was recently green is already golden brown, and the flooded plains that stretch from Davis to Sacramento have already all but dried up. The snowmelt from the Sierras is causing some Foothills rivers to rage violently, with frequent warnings about going anywhere near the icy cold torrents. Over on the East Coast, however, they are having some terrible rainstorms. By all accounts we in Davis have had our rain now, that’s it, that’s all we get until the winter. Not for Pete though – I’ll be back in London in just under a fortnight. Better bring me brolly.

Week Thirty-Two: On the Road

May 9, 2006June 11, 2010Leave a comment

Going from northern to southern California usually requires a motorcycle, a head full of poetry and the famous Big Sur coastline. You leave the foggy Bay Area behind, and head for the palm trees and suntans of the Los Angeles beaches. For us, however, the north-south jaunt took us down Interstate-5 from the rising heat of Davis down the agricultural furnace called the Central Valley, over the Grapevine mountains (turn off the a/c, folks), and into the traffic and cooling smog of LA and Orange County, the ‘OC’. We were going there for the wedding of a friend who, a century ago in Aix-en-Provence, introduced me to my wife; ultimately, you could say, it is because of said friend that I now live in the US. We stocked up the ice-chest with Sobes and sandwiches, filled up the iPod shuffle with Jack, Art and Joni, and head off down the highway.

America is all about its roads, and some of the most memorable Americana springs from that. I’ve never read Kerouac, and despite many visits to the City Lights store in SF, I probably never will; I have seen Convoy, though, which is why every time I see a helicopter or police light aircraft while out on the sun-washed freeway I announce that there’s a ‘bear in the air’. As we speed past a backdrop of already browning hills, I get a sense of just how massive America really is; though it is not one country, but many. You have to travel among them to tell the difference, a lot of the time. Even the States, who make their presence felt in the license plate game (when I wonder to myself what story brought that SUV down from the distant grey shores of New Jersey), are not particularly real entities, and passing over the mountains into the land of LA, I get the feeling that, yes we’re in California, but this is a different country, and the road has brought us here.

Yes, the sun is clearly getting to me, so I splash a bit more sunscreen onto my arms. We eventually roll into the rich country of the OC, strolling by the Balboa Island waterfront, shopping and eating in Newport Beach. The wedding was beautiful, a mixture of Irish America and colourful Persia, in the spectacularly Mediterranean Laguna Beach. It wasn’t the only wedding in town, though; down on the shores of the Pacific, other Happy Couples were snapping photos with long sunset shadows and shimmering waves. We wandered among the palm trees and tuxedoes for a bit, before retiring to the hotel, to finish off the previous night’s cheesecake.

And then back on the road, the very next day. Back over the mountains, back into the Valley, watching the thermometer rise from the early 70s to the late 80s (completely bypassing both punk and new romantic). I noticed that in the supposedly smoggy OC/LA area, my hay fever and related allergies actually cleared up. No sniffling and sneezing for me (I was all ready to put it down to tears at the wedding, too). It took less time to get back to our part of the world than it had taken to go south – or at least it did, until just as we were getting into Sacramento, our car threw a flat tyre, forcing us onto the side of the freeway. We had to wait to be rescued, while juggernauts and Sunday drivers whizzed by at speeds that made the ground shake. An ironically fitting end to a road trip – stuck on the side of the road. At least we weren’t far from home.

Week Thirty-one: Don’t Give Me Your Huddled Masses

May 3, 2006June 11, 2010Leave a comment

The key issue here this week is immigration. Actually, it’s not, it’s the criminal President and his criminal war, but the news channels don’t want to tell us about that any more. On Monday there was a national protest known as “the day without immigrants”, when immigrants both legal and illegal showed solidarity for one another and took the day off work, just to show everybody how much America depends on them. This is a country founded by immigrants, they cry, and they have a damn valid point. As a recent immigrant myself I’m with them all the way.

But the immigration debate is a minefield. In Britain, tabloid headlines rarely distinguish between “asylum seekers”, “economic migrants” and “illegal immigrants”. The consequence is that the public lumps them all in together, and treats them just the same. The same arguments people use in the UK are being used by people here, namely “they are coming over here and taking our jobs” and complaining that with them here, wages will be forced down because they will work for much less than a local. And so they become victimised, and scapegoats.

Hang on a minute, though – where are all the jobs really going? Big corporations are outsourcing their industries abroad, to Asia and elsewhere, because they can pay lower wages there. Are we then to blame the Chinese and the Indians for that? Why don’t we blame the corporations? We seem to be quick to pick on the worker, to pick on the poor sods who bust their bottoms all day and night for a pittance, just because it is a better life than what they left behind. Why are people so quick to attack them? They come to America because they have to – it’s supposed to be the richest country, and everyone wants to take part in the American Dream. Oh yeah, remember that?

And then there is the whole language debate. “They come over here from Mexico, they don’t even want to learn English!” People talk of forcing everyone to learn English, as if in a society dominated by English-language media they wouldn’t anyway. And was Spanish not spoken in California way before English? and the Native American languages before that? It is quite ridiculous that California can support the “English First” policy (whereby they make English the sole official language, thus ‘protecting’ it), when almost all its major cities have Spanish names (Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento, San Diego – hardly Anglo-Saxon). I’d say that, truthfully, the English-speakers were the immigrants, wouldn’t you?

I didn’t take the day off, though (it being my first day on the new job proper), though I did stay away from the shops. The immigration debate is big and sticky, and all sides have real concerns (even the language concerns have some validity). But I think it must be remembered that people come here because there are opportunities denied to them at home, it’s that simple.

Week Thirty: Vegas in the Springtime

April 27, 2006June 11, 2010Leave a comment

I’ve been to Las Vegas three times now. The first time, A and I were on the way from Disneyland to the Grand Canyon; the second time, we invited the families, and got married by an Elvis. We love Vegas, crazy Vegas with its dry heat, its non-stop neon lights, and its trance-inducing slot machine noise. I went there for the third time this week, this time not with my wife, but with Tel, my oldest mate from Burnt Oak, who was in America on a visit.

We stayed at the Super 8 Motel on Koval, not far from Paris and Bally’s – not a first choice, of course, but there was a convention or two in town, so it was the best we could afford. It wasn’t bad, a good location, decent rooms, an okay pool – and the sort of place where, over breakfast, you could see a decent fight between a tall black hooker, a small Hispanic pimp and two rejected guests from Jerry Springer. Well, you’d see it if you weren’t in bed with a terrible hangover from a crazy karaoke night at the Ellis Island casino pub right next door, like I was.

The funny thing about going out in Vegas is that drinks can vary wildly in prices. In the casino, of course, they are free, as long as you are filling the slots, and give the waitress a good tip (such as, “put some clothes on, you’ll freeze to death in that”). In lounges and clubs, though, expect to feel like a pushover parent in a toyshop. In those bars which purport to be brewpubs, however, you can have many a beer at roughly a couple of dollars each. We went to a few of them. People even bought us drinks, even after I’d done a nasal cockney spoken-word version of Lola to an audience of local rednecks in cowboy hats.

We went Downtown, to Old Vegas, where we had an average buffet, met a fat old Elvis, watched the Fremont Street Experience and saw the casino used in Back to the Future 2 as ‘Biff’s’ (“We can do this the easy way or the hard way – thud! – the easy way…”). It’s a lot more red and gold carpeting downtown, a lot more CSI and Fredo Corleone. The cool swinging hipsters that we are, we took the bus there and back, meeting Texans and Iowans and other merrymaking mid-Staters on the way. I sensibly kept my Bush-whacking comments to myself. That’s Vegas for you, it has many faces, many accents, many opinions. And so we flew back from the dusty Nevada desert to the wetlands of Sacramento, with Tel deciding that though he kinda liked it, he preferred little Davis better. Me, I still love Vegas, and next time, I’m going back with my wife, my good luck charm (as Elvis would say). Without her, the third time wasn’t lucky, but may the fourth be with us!

Week Twenty-Nine: Eggciting Times

April 18, 2006June 11, 2010Leave a comment

The Sun has come out, after record Californian rainfall, and Spring is well and truly in the air. The once sun-crisp brown hills and fields of northern California are now alive and green, while the mountains are still thick with snow, and the rivers full to overflowing. Pete has begun murdering all spiders that look even remotely like a widow or a recluse (“execute Order 66”), and the Easter Bunny has been defying his asbo and bringing baskets of colourful eggs to all. The White House has been holding its annual Easter Egg Hunt, though despite the President’s insistence that there were mobile chicken pens and painting equipment on the White House lawn, the UN teams of specialist toddlers have yet to find any evidence of coloured eggs.

Easter is slightly different here than in Britain. For one thing, they don’t get Good Friday off work, nor Easter Monday. Secondly, they don’t have the big hollow chocolate Easter Eggs so common in the UK. Thirdly – and this one I really missed – they don’t have Hot Cross Buns. Here in the US it is the custom to give big Easter Baskets, stuffed with colourful candies, little chocolate eggs and other sweet goodies; moreover, the art of painting eggs is more popular here than in Britain (I just draw eyes on them). There has been a recent trend, however, to rebrand Easter as the sterile “Spring Holiday”, with terms such as “Good Friday” being seen as too offensively unsecular. Personally I like the name my brother-in-law Kris gives Easter, “Zombie Jesus Day”. Now, where shall I draw the parallel with the Zombie Jesus and the Church’s long history of eating people’s brains..?

Every holiday here has its associated colours. Christmas has red and green, Thanksgiving has brown and orange, 4th of July has red, white and blue; Easter has, well, pastel colours. Yellows, light greens, a bit of soft pink, maybe a touch of pale blue. It’s a very wimpy holiday, colour-wise, as if it can’t really make its mind up. Cards show baby rabbits and newly hatched chicks, rather than bloody nails and splintered wood, surely the true spirit of Easter. What would Jesus do? I don’t know, but I know if he were alive in today’s America, he would probably be deported because of his Mexican-sounding name. And so, to close this week’s entry, I’d just like to point out (in my best Cockney rhyming slang) that as long as Bush is in office, there will always be a bunch of easter egg hunts at the White House. Happy Vernal Equinox!

Week Twenty-Eight: Prints Charming

April 11, 2006June 11, 2010Leave a comment

The office is a strange place. Office society is like medieval Germany, full of tiny little independent principalities that must not be encroached. Medieval Germany, however, did not have photocopiers (though I imagine that when Gutenberg put his original printing press together he spent the first week calling in overweight technicians and trying to un-jam paper). I am struggling to understand our new giant photocopier, trying to work out why it prints twenty copies when I indicated I just wanted one, and why it prints ‘recto-verso’ when I don’t want it but won’t tell me how to do it when I do.

I am not very good friends with technology. Sure, we keep in contact, but it’s not in my speed-dial or anything. Sometimes I will walk past this photocopier and it will growl at me. I try not to look it in the eye if I can avoid it. I have given up wondering why, when there are five trays filled with paper, it insists on using the tray which is not only empty but impossible to open without a crowbar. I have not even begun to tackle the many options on the control panel; I’m sure that if I really wanted to I could get it to wallpaper the living room, but it’s just best if I stay away.

The little printer we have at home is even more scullyphobic. It seems to be pretty straightforward: you load the paper, you press ‘print’, it prints – couldn’t be simpler. Tell that to the bloody printer! What really happens is that you press print, and the printer says ‘no’, stating its reason as ‘out of paper’. “No,” I tell it, “the paper is THERE, right there in front of you.” “Where?” it replies childishly. “THERE!” I moan. I hold its hand, feed it the paper like a baby in a high-chair, and then, halfway through the first bite, it chokes up, flashing “Paper Jam! Paper Jam!” on its little LED screen.

So I take the paper out. And press ‘Continue printing’. And, like a schoolkid trying to wind up the teacher, it continues wailing about there being a Paper Jam, despite all the paper being removed from its guts and several threats of hammer-induced destruction are thrown its way. Oh, I really hate printers, why can’t they just grow up? And the worst thing is, you know that when that printer does grow up, it will be a smug, self-important photocopier. It’s nature’s way.

Week Twenty-Seven: Let The Wookiee Win

April 5, 2006June 11, 2010Leave a comment

Sometimes, when the absence of thought and the distraction of mind take us to places where we find it impossible to sit and think of anything beyond ‘it is still raining’ and ‘I hate the newsreaders’ (well, I do), it is necessary to simply reflect, allow the stream of consciousness to take you away (although whenever I think of stream, I think of the one in Watling Park, whose stickleback and piss infested waters take you on a twisty-turny journey through the sewage system of Burnt Oak, bringing you out somewhere beneath the old Scout Hall behind the shops). You see where this week’s entry is going.

I have been job-interviewed a couple of times lately, with one on the way. It never rains, but it pours, and the rain is pouring right now, thundering against the skylight. I will be seriously wet when I reach the bookshop later. I’m enjoying it there, entering invoices, making origami muppets, wowing people with my ‘intelligent-sounding’ British accent. Davis is a Republic, you know, or so they say – it’s full of Democrats, but I know a few prominent Republicans too, and I don’t hold it against them (though I’m more Moses minded, I’d like to see Bush burning – but not dying, of course, I’m anti-capitalist punishment).

I’ve ventured into space, also, but not on a rocket: I have a myspace now, like many social-minded Americans (though I am not particularly social-minded). It’s ‘all the rage’. I have taken workside doodling to new extremes – I am still trying to perfect messers Bush, Cheney and Blair, as well as a million different faces for a shady literary character I am calling The Prince. He is half Fomorian, and has one eye slightly bigger than the other. And I am planning not only a trip back to London, but also to Las Vegas – Mr Potticary is coming out for a visit in a little short while.

Mrs Pete is busy with her studies and her job; Mr Pete is reading Neil Gaiman’s ‘American Gods’. I’m about a third into it, and it is pretty good, some interesting ideas about the old folk gods and sods of the various immigrants, pitted against the new American gods, which I think include TV, shopping malls, the internet. Maybe the gods are all out there on myspace? Maybe there should be a site for all the old gods, such as ‘deities reunited’, or ‘myheaven’. There’s a lot of stars in space, but a lot of wannabes as well. And thus concludes this stream of barely consciousness.

Until next time, y’all come back now, y’hear…