Miscellaneous

This weekend Mrs Toque and I are celebrating our fifth anniversary. So I'm off for a long weekend in Devon, and I've decided to take her with me as a reward for good behaviour.

Five years ago I was blogging about my first, and to date only, poncy haircut, an ordeal forced upon me by our upcoming nuptials. How time flies.

Little Man in a Poncy Haircut

Exasperated by my unkempt and often disheveled appearance, and with just eleven days to go to our wedding, Mrs Toque phoned up her hairdresser and booked me in for an appointment. This was a turn up for the books - Little Man in a Toque had never been to a posh salon before - for me it had always been the barber's shop, the sort that is usually situated adjacent to the boozer or bookmakers and owned by a proprietor that resembles a Greek or Italian pirate brandishing a cut-throat razor.

Barbers shops are great places, a last bastion of male sanctuary, where lewd and politically incorrect jokes can be told, or dignified silence can be observed, without women talking about emotions and stuff. Typically, when I'm in England, I will go to the barbers when I am hung over on a Saturday. I just turn up, no appointment necessary, and take my place on a bench with the other customers. Tabloid newspapers, mens magazines and a TV showing sport (football, horse-racing, F1 or rugby) are the in-house entertainment. Chat, if there is any, revolves around those sports; the page three girl, or rather her breasts; how you came to be so pissed last night, and with whom; and cars. But pleasantries are not necessary, and conversation is only offered on the mutual understanding that it is wanted.

You are summoned from your reverie by the call of "Next"; the chair is dusted down, but not enough to prevent you getting other people's hair on your jeans; you are given a five second consultation on what you would like done; a napkin is tucked brusquely into your shirt; your head sprayed with musty water from a plant mister, and then you get a short back and sides regardless of what you asked for. This takes about five minutes from start to finish, but sometimes it seems shorter because the frantic clicking of the scissors or whir of the clippers can send you into a deep Zen-like trance.

In posher establishments the barber will offer you a paper napkin to dust yourself down with and will run some slimy substance through the stubble on your head before taking £5 from you and ushering you out onto the street, but to me this is just prolongs the humiliation. Usually on offer in these upmarket barbers is the X-treme sport of having your skin peeled face-shaved with a cut-throat razor. A skilfully wielded razor is a sight to behold, but as I usually recognise the barber from the pub the night before I rarely take up this offer.

Anyway, today at 9am I set off for the 'hair salon' to "get a decent haircut". I arrived late, of course, having got lost, but as luck would have it there had been a cancellation so they could still fit me in. The inside of the place was open-plan and all natural wood, glass, chrome, halogen lights and mirrors. To me it looked to all the world like some sort of nightclub with the lights on. The girl at the front desk asked if I would like a cup of tea, and I replied "Yes. Thank you". She then introduced me to my hairdresser and disappeared.

My hairdresser ushered me to a cubicle where I was to take off my shirt and put on a black silk smock - or poncho or something - that came down to my knees. This I did. I looked in the mirror and raised my arms out sidewards to find that I looked amazingly like batman, but without the headgear. Next I was taken to a chair by a sink and given a head-massage with some smelly balm type substance. I guess this was supposed to be relaxing, but in these surroundings it just felt kind of strange. I was told by the hairdresser that if I felt uncomfortable with any of this then it was optional.

Hairdresser: "You know?....Some guys just aren't comfortable with this sort of thing. But it's free, so I say 'why not' eh? One guy that comes here...he's been coming here for years, he's a cop, a policeman as you call them in England, well....he never has any of this stuff done! I guess he thinks it's a bit gay or something.”

Little Man in a Toque: “Really?”

Hairdresser: “I'll tell you what we are going to do, just so you are OK with it. I'll wash your hair, and then cut it. And then I'll give your face a quick moisturise and hot-towel treatment. How does that sound?”

Little Man in a Toque isn't some macho guy by any means, but I am a bloke’s bloke and I like bloke things like football, beer and err....football and beer. I figured....I'm pretty damn sure that I'm not gay, and that I never will be. And if, on the off-chance that I do have some latent homosexuality, then it's probably best to go through with this test now before my wedding. Anyway, sod it, I'm not afraid to explore my feminine side. Stupid cops.

Little Man in a Toque: “Ummm...sounds good”.

So after the head massage my head was washed and I was escorted, in my silk robe, to the hair cutting station; a huge free-standing mirror with a comfy black chair in front of it. Tea was placed in my hand - I say tea but it was yellow and had bark in the bottom of the mug - and the real hairdressing and conversation began. Now Little Man in a Toque isn't a bad conversationalist, but he's not good at small talk - and remember this was early in the morning too. Unlike the barbers, where conversation is optional, here it was unremitting and apparently mandatory. The hair-cutting was painfully slow, and no clippers were used, so Zen-like meditation could not have been achieved even if it were practicable, and under those lights I was sweating like a pig in a fleece. Forty long minutes later my hair was cut and the girl knew more about me than my own mother.

I was sent back to the sink, sat down, and tilted horizontal to wash the hairs off my head. Then I was flipped vertical and moisturiser was applied to my face before it was covered with a hot-towel of the sort given out on aeroplanes. Flipped horizontal again I lay there with the hot-towel on my face for what seemed like an eternity.

"There, wasn't that relaxing", she said, as she removed the towel - my irises contracting to pin-pricks - and began to wipe off the previously applied moisturiser.

"Yes, very", I lied.

Then back to the hair-cutting station where my hair was blow-dried and waxed. And that was it! Almost. We went back to the cubicle where she got out another towel, dusted it with some powder out of a salt cellar, and wiped my neck with it. "There, all done."

And I had been, $45 dollars and an hour and twenty minutes out of my life, for a haircut. Still, the girl who gave me the tea was quite tasty, so at least I wasn't gay.

As it turns out the haircut was a decent one. Just the same as one I'd usually get from a barber, but without my side-burns which weren't up to scratch, and blow-dried to make me look like a ponce. However, you do take pot-luck with barbers sometimes so perhaps this was for the best on this occasion. Anyone know a decent barber's shop in Edmonton?

It was the postcard that he received from Nick Clegg that first aroused the suspicions of David Davis.

In his book on the British Empire, Outposts, Simon Winchester attempts to explain the mindset of the Falkland Islander prior to the Argentine invasion:

I once bought a house in an Oxfordshire village from a pair of elderly ladies who had decided to emigrate to New Zealand because, they explained, 'it is like England was in the Fifties, and that's the time we liked so much. We don't like England today. We want to find a place that's like what it used to be.' And as with New Zealand, so with the Falkland Islands. What these people wanted, when they or their fathers set out on a ship so long ago, was just what my old ladies wanted: a country with no crime, no television, no permissiveness, no coloured people, no disco music, no drugs....These were the people for whom Carnaby Street meant the beginning of the end, and for whom progress was a dirty word. And the land they had found, and for all its faults the world to which they clung so eagerly, was about to be desecrated.

I know one Falkland Islander and she's not at all like that. New Zealanders, on the other hand....

It's an interesting book, and one that will give you itchy feet to visit some far-flung outposts.

Many moons ago, when I was just a stripling at Leicester University, I went along to the Charlotte Pub in Leicester for a gig by Dr Phibes and the Wax Equations, or it may have been Skunk Annaisie, I forget.

What I do remember is the support band, a little known group at the time named Radiohead.

I needed a piss and unwilling to queue to take a slash I popped upstairs to the lesser-known 'locals toilet'. Standing there at the urinal, knob in hand, I was joined by a strange looking fellow.

"Alright, how y'doing?"

"Yeah, OK. I'm here to see Radiohead. You?"

"I'm Thom, I'm the lead singer. See you down there".

"Will do"

What followed was an amazing gig. The only reason I knew Radiohead was from a song of theirs, 'Creep', which had been played by John Peel at the Glastonbury Festival. Amongst the mayhem of Glastonbury that song had stood out like a classic, enough for me to come and see them as a support band that night. Creep had not been released yet but I had made a point of buying a 12" version of their debut single 'Drill' which was not great but good enough to justify me being there that night.

A couple of months later and Radiohead were doing a record signing in a Leicester city centre record store. I took the morning off lectures and went along to get my copy of Drill and the newly released Creep signed by the band.

You know the rest of the story - Radiohead are now massive, and my signed copies of Drill and Creep are work a fucking mint. And the point of this laboured anecdote? Well, I just want you to check out this flash animation of Creep - the acoustic version used there is not as good because it doesn't have the booming, crunching feedback but it's still a cool little animation.

Polling for the Total Politics blog awards is taking place now, and (hint, hint) it would be nice if a few English Free Press bloggers made it into the top 100. It would also be nice if a few Scottish and Welsh nats made it in there too.

Here's the instructions:

1. You must vote for your ten favourite blogs and ranks them from 1 (your favourite) to 10 (your tenth favourite).
2. Your votes must be ranked from 1 to 10. Any votes which do not have rankings will not be counted.
3. You MUST include at least FIVE blogs in your list, but please list ten if you can. If you include fewer than five, your vote will not count.
4. Email your vote to toptenblogs@totalpolitics.com
5. Only vote once.
6. Only blogs based in the UK, run by UK residents or based on UK politics are eligible. No blog will be excluded from voting.
7. Anonymous votes left in the comments will not count. You must give a name
8. All votes must be received by midnight on 31 July 2010. Any votes received after that date will not count.

If watching Question Time annoyed you as much as it annoyed me, then just listen to this and relax.

Unusual English folk music fact: Reebok, once an English company, have recently used Vashti Bunyan's Train Song to sell hideous NFL sportswear to the Americans.

I tipped the Netherlands to win the World Cup. I thought that Spain and Brazil would do well, but I didn't figure on Germany. Usually a team falter as soon as I declare my support for them, but even though I publicly declared my support for Ghana and Germany before the Quarter Finals, Germany have comprehensively thrashed Argentina and now look a good bet to win the entire thing.

Thank you Germany. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Cheer up mate, treat yourself to a line of coke.

We're well used to Jonah Brown ruining the chances of British teams and athletes. How nice that David Miliband is continuing that proud tradition.

Murray's loss will have cheered up a great many England fans but it didn't make up for our poor show in the football.

Today the Daily Mail and Sun both reveal that Wayne Rooney booked a holiday to Barbados two days before England were knocked out of the World Cup by Germany.

I'm prepared to give Rooney the benefit of the doubt (after all he can afford the cancellation fee) but the timing of this holiday doesn't demonstrate much ambition or belief on his part, and many fans will begrudge him the holiday at his £5M Barbados mansion that is beyond most of our wildest dreams.

I am reminded of the quote from BBC Radio 5 Live's Alan Green that I published a couple of days ago:

"I hope the players are embarrassed and slink away in misery. And in economy class. But I fear they'll just jet off to Barbados, and it will all be a vague memory to them in a few weeks - unless the English public remind them. They should be booed onto the pitch at the friendly against Hungary in August."

Rooney's lack of tact is nothing compared to what the Sun and Mail are reporting that Ashley Cole has done. For this Ashley Cole should never again don an England shirt.

Ashley Cole launched a foul-mouthed rant about England and its 'people' days before flying out to the World Cup to play football for his country.

The message - which read 'I hate England and the f***ing people - was sent to friends from the Chelsea defender's Blackberry shortly before he boarded a flight to England's pre-World Cup training camp in Austria.

The 29-year-old posted it as his status message - alongside a picture of him sunbathing topless - allowing all those designated as his friends to see it.

Now I accept that the Sun and Mail aren't always the most reputable of journals, but if this is true then - as a Chelsea supporter - I don't even want this maggot of a man in a Chelsea shirt bearing one lion, let alone an England shirt bearing three.

When I heard that the FA had amended Fabio Capello's contract to commit him to England until Euro 2012, I had a premonition that I would be sat here now typing the word 'why?'

The England team's World Cup performances under Capello has brought shame to the nation. I can't soft-soap it, they are a national embarrassment and an international laughing stock. There are no positives that we can take from South Africa 2010. We played poorly in every game, and yet persisted with the same boring and unpopular system; not one of our supposedly world-class players shone and set the World Cup alight; and the team failed in what should be their primary purpose, to entertain the watching public and make us proud.

When Capello substituted Defoe for Emile Heskey , you could almost feel the whole of England let out a collective national groan. What the fucketty-fuck was Capello doing; was the Italian a fifth columnist? Heskey cannot even get a game for Aston Villa and in my opinion there's no way that he should even be in the England squad, let alone selected ahead of Villa's far more youthful and exciting Gabriel Agbonlahor and Ashley Young. And why, when Heskey has scored 7 goals in 62 England games and Peter Crouch has scored 21 goals in 40 games, was he who could not score in a whore-house given the nod ahead of England's lanky goal-scoring machine? It seemed obvious to me that Wayne Rooney was out of sorts, and by half-time I was screaming for him to be taken off and replaced by Crouch (Defoe and Crouch being a more proven striking partnership). I appreciate that it's a big call for a manager to bring off a player of Rooney's calibre and iconic status, even if he is under performing (in which case why not put Crouch on in place of Defoe and drop Rooney back into the hole alongside Gerrard, with Barry, Lampard and Milner across the middle?), but that is the type of big decision that Capello is paid £5M a year to take, and didn't.

Our other substitutes were equally uninspiring. Joe Cole is an inventive if erratic little player but he's coming back from injury and hasn't been playing well for Chelsea. He should not have traveled to South Africa. Sean Wright-Phillips was brought on at 87 minutes, presumably to inject the pace that England lacked after the substituting of Defoe and the exclusion of Walcott, Young and Agbonlahor, but it was too late to make any difference. At the end of the day - to use the time-honoured footballing idiom - all the Wright-Phillips, Walcotts, Agbonlahors, Youngs and Crouches under the sun probably would not have helped England. We lost the game in the centre of midfield, which was overstretched by the inability of a striking partnership that could not hold the ball (throughout the campaign the ball just seemed to bounce off Rooney), and through the inept pairing of Terry with Upson in the centre of defence. To give them their dues both Upson and Terry gave 100% - it was Upson who rose like a salmon to head the goal that temporarily galvanised the England team - but it is a pairing that did not work and was not given any protection by a disjointed England midfield, and that is a failure of management.

I didn't expect us to win the World Cup, I didn't even expect us to get to the semi-finals. However, I did expect us to play with the passion that every England fan expects from their team in order that we could give ourselves the best possible chance of progressing as far as possible in the competition. Some of the missing passion was evident in the last two games but it was a passion rendered worthless by incoherent tactics and, seemingly, a complete absence of footballing intelligence.

When we failed to top the weakest group, with a performance against Algeria that was the most dismal competitive match that I have ever watched an England team play, we ensured that our route to the semi-final would be as difficult as possible: Germany and Argentina instead of Ghana and Uruguay. Various players and ex-players popped up on our TV screens to say that [at the end of the day] "in order to win the World Cup you have to beat the World's best teams", so it really didn't matter that we had come second. These players and pundits clearly do not understand what the World Cup means to the watching public. We want England to progress as far as possible, we don't want to go out in the last sixteen on the basis that we have to go out sooner or later so it may as well be sooner. We want to participate in the greatest sporting festival on the planet for as long as possible for the pure entertainment of being a part of it, to give our team the chance to lift us and to revel in the joy of flying our politically incorrect flag and celebrating our Englishness. Because for the English each England matchday during the World Cup is an English national day (we alone amongst the competing nations have no public holiday on our national day), an opportunity for a collective, national, celebration of Englishness. It is this nationalistic aspect to England's participation in the World Cup, rather than a hatred of football, that leads Julie Birchill to pray for our elimination and Bruce Anderson to muse upon the end of the Union.

It's not football that our woeful team have deprived us of, many of us will continue to watch and enjoy the World Cup out of a love of football; nor have they deprived very many of us of the prospect of being world champions, for very few of us ever entertained that prospect. No, what our England team have denied us is the opportunity to revel in a national celebration (Downing Street has already replaced the Cross of St George with the Union flag, and as I type England flags across the length and breadth of England are being packed away until next time). Rugby Union and Cricket have been known to unite the nation in patriotic outbursts of Englishry, but it is the unrivalled popularity of football that makes it so important for the movement towards a popular English nationalism. Our team's abject failure is a political set-back for England.

It's impossible for me to articulate the anger I felt when I heard Fabio Capello offer the opinion that "we played well" but I'm sure that millions like me will have felt their blood boil. If he truely believes that we played well, then Capello must be the only man on the planet who does. He has to go because England deserves better, and longer, at the World Cup.

If he doesn't go then, as BBC Radio 5 Live's Alan Green suggests, England should be booed onto the pitch the next time they play at Wembley:

"I hope the players are embarrassed and slink away in misery. And in economy class. But I fear they'll just jet off to Barbados, and it will all be a vague memory to them in a few weeks - unless the English public remind them. They should be booed onto the pitch at the friendly against Hungary in August."

Recommended Further Reading: Alfie, two WAGS and Fabio..... (Waking Hereward)