Simple Pleasures - the archive

I'm just moving the original posts on Simple Pleasures (the forerunner of this blog) from the dodgy old German software where it currently resides to a cut&pasted archive here (so links may not work)...

The Simple Pleasures of Life
Feb 14, 2005

This blog is inspired by a sermon I heard a couple of years ago which quoted a 'will' left by a father for his children which was not his 'money will' but his 'wisdom will' (I can't remember the exact terminology that was used but you get the idea) - it was his attempt to pass on some of the more useful things he'd learnt in his lifetime about what really matters and about the way people are. I've come to the conclusion over my forty-one years so far on the planet that Happiness is to be found primarily in the Simple Pleasures of life so I've decided to put some of those pleasures here for Noah and Dylan to read when they're a bit older and anyone else who cares to. And one day soon Noah and Dylan can start adding their own...

The smell of cut grass
Feb 14, 2005

Always loved it. Very English I suppose. The cricket pitch (and I'm not even particularly interested in cricket) - and that's another one: the sound of ball on bat, a summer rhythm, all the time in the world. The circular lawn in my ma's house. Dozing in the sun. Mowing the lawn in my own home, a bit of physical work to make the stretching out on the blanket with a good book and a cool drink all the more pleasurable. Meanwhile, back in Asterix in Britain a Briton with a red handle-bar moustache waters his perfect lawn, flicks a blade and pronounces it "a decent bit of turf" (or at least it will be in another hundred years) - and then the hurtling chariot drives across it, carrying Asterix, Obelix and Asterix's cousin Anticlimax. Then there's Cambridge and college lawns, the shaded grass around Girton's chapel-like library, Granchester, Rupert Brooke, bees and honey, tea in an orchard. Which brings me to another SP: cycling one night, after midnight, out to Granchester by the silver light of the moon, almost day-bright. A journey I'll never forget, simply me, my trusty red bike, the night air and the silver...

Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
Feb 24, 2005

I first tasted it in a coffee shop north of Leicester Square and west of Chinatown. Thought it was in a league of its own, unlike anything I'd ever tasted. To be honest, I've never been able to reproduce the impact. Bought a sack-cloth bag of it in Jamaica on my one and only trip there so far. But it didn't match up. Bought another tin of it last Christmas at the atmospheric Martyn's coffee shop in Muswell Hill, North London (home of The Kinks - let's chuck Waterloo Sunset in the pot, both as a song and an experience, while we're on the subject) - Martyn's with its aroma of roasting coffee beans, its wooden floorboards, fancy goods, unchanged Edwardian interior - but again it didn't live up to that first experience. So I go on searching for the next magical cup. Meanwhile... back in Jamaica, simple pleasures included buying 45s from the record shop where the shopkeeper played you what was hot on discs with no or wrong labels; the view from Noel Coward's living room window, a window with no glass, widescreen; an outdoor dance on the night of my friend Nigel's wedding, featuring the roots reggae of Sizzla; the first humming bird I'd ever seen, outside Nigel's folks' place in Ocho Rios; Wray & Nephew's white rum, pretty much the only spirit I like and haven't written off through a binge that ended in tears (which reminds me I love that line in The Life Aquatic where Bill Murray's Steve Zissou invites anyone who cares to do so to join him "on an overnight drunk"); and swimming in the sea with baby Noah, about 9 months old.

Reasons to be Cheerful
Feb 24, 2005

The other root of this idea (beside the sermon mentioned in the first entry) was Ian Dury's wonderful song Reasons to be Cheerful, part 3, a long list of simple pleasures from which the one that stands out in my memory is yellow socks.

Summer, Buddy Holly, the working folly
Good golly Miss Molly and boats
Hammersmith Palais, the Bolshoi Ballet
Jump back in the alley and nanny goats

18-wheeler Scammels, Domenecker camels
All other mammals plus equal votes
Seeing Piccadilly, Fanny Smith and Willy
Being rather silly, and porridge oats

A bit of grin and bear it, a bit of come and share it
You're welcome, we can spare it - yellow socks
Too short to be haughty, too nutty to be naughty
Going on 40 - no electric shocks

The juice of the carrot, [for me it's the juice of an apple] the smile of the parrot
A little drop of claret [I'll take a dessert wine] - anything that rocks
Elvis and Scotty, days when I ain't spotty,
Sitting on the potty - curing smallpox

Health service glasses [preferably John Lennon-style little round glasses] Gigolos and brasses
round or skinny bottoms [here, here]

Take your mum to paris
lighting up the chalice
wee willy harris

Bantu Stephen Biko, listening to Rico [on The Specials very special Ghost Town]
Harpo, Groucho, Chico [especially the cabin scene in Night at the Opera]

Cheddar cheese and pickle [served up by my mum in front of the radiogram listening to my Winnie the Pooh record in2A Selvage Lane, my childhood home], the Vincent motorsickle
Slap and tickle
Woody Allen [title sequence of Bananas had me under the chair before the film even started, just the interaction of the animation and music, punctuated with bullet holes], Dali [an inspiration since childhood, the finest of painting, from Christ's shoulders to a pomegranate], Dimitri and Pasquale
balabalabala and Volare [certainly Deano and of course Frank, who as a child I thought was half of a double act, Franks & Artra]

Something nice to study, phoning up a buddy
Being in my nuddy
Saying hokey-dokey, singalonga Smokey
Coming out of chokey

John Coltrane's soprano [above all on A Love Supreme and Miles' Kind of Blue, both of which I want played at my funeral], Adi Celentano Bonar Colleano

Reasons to be Cheerful, part 3...