Category Archives: Life

Sailing on the Seven Streets

Posted on by David Lloyd

Caution: does not contain ranting

It’s all gone horribly wrong.

I started this blog almost exactly a year ago today. A hundred entries later and I could see the way things were heading. And it wasn’t pretty. I started off, dewy of cheek and pert of ambition – a little review here, a wise askance architectural critique there (who am I kidding?). But soon, the furies set in. Every third day, like some particularly bloodthirsty character in an Icelandic saga, I’d have to spear a little (atomic) kitten or race across the lava flow, astride my trusty steed, to impale a Wag Troll.

Yes. I’d turned into one of those bloggers. And, frankly, I felt dirty. Continue reading →

A Momentary Lapse of Reason

Posted on by David Lloyd

Calm down dear, it's only a model

Just before he became the foursquare mayor of the Second World War (let’s face it, he’s revisited it that often), Stephen Spielberg admitted: ‘Jaws couldn’t be made now. The audience wouldn’t wait that long to see the shark.”

He’s right.

Within ten minutes, focus groups would be demanding a CGI Great White (probably in 3D) skullpunching the teeth out of a hapless cheerleader on waterskis.

Goodbye narrative arc and charater-driven ennui, and hello gratuitous shark porn. Continue reading →

The C Word

Posted on by David Lloyd

...if my calculations are correct...

People who (unlike me) have made it past the “Big Bang” chapter of A Brief History of Time tell me that, way into the future, we’re heading for a Big Crunch

I’ve got news for them. It’s already happening.

I’m not talking about the moment the Universe will contract in on itself, like some cosmic Rosemary Conley hip and thigh diet.

No. I’m talking of a sinister foreshadowing down here on Earth. Like that moment in a Keanu Reeves disaster movie when he notices a little blip on a seismic read-out and his friends in Government tell him that, if he wants to avoid snarl-ups on the turnpike and panic buying of Wonderbread, he should shut the flip up.
Continue reading →

Of Magic and Medicine

Posted on by David Lloyd

a spoonful of sugar

I’m not a scientist. But I’m fairly certain that water doesn’t have a memory. At least, no more than a first generation iMac. I’ve been acquainted with water all my life and it still forgets to send me a birthday card. So it’s odd, isn’t it, that Homeopathy took this premise as its starting point and has been running (rather successfully) with it ever since.

If water did have a memory, imagine the stories it could tell. Imagine the techniques it would have developed to stop us having a little wee in municipal swimming baths. Seventy percent of the Earth – all water. All that memory. Water should be cleverer than Steven Fry. It should follow Yvette Fielding around derelict Roman Baths saying ‘I sense there was great lewdness here between off-duty Centurions.’ Continue reading →

A Supposedly Fun Thing We’ll All Be Doing Soon

Posted on by David Lloyd

Hey, Martha, is this Liverpool or Dublin? I used my itinerary as a Tena Lady.

Ten years ago, you could still find a cove or a harbour of some sunkissed isle that wasn’t crammed with luxury liners from April to October. No more. Now, they’re so crowded with cruise ships that, from Google Earth, they look less ‘idyllic horseshoe lagoons’, more ‘Ken Dodd’s teeth’. Continue reading →

Turning The Tables

Posted on by David Lloyd

Where's the Richard and Judy section?

I thought I’d been Christmas shopping. But, as it happened, I’d been abducted.  My cold, lifeless shell merely shuffled around the the streets of Chester picking up things that had already been chosen for me by a silent, invisible army of personal shoppers.  I was merely a prop. A patsy. A pawn. And I’d been punk’d from one end of Chester to another.
Continue reading →

The Lost Art Of Getting Lost

Posted on by David Lloyd

London Road. Not paved with gold.

I don’t have sat-nav. I have a phone with maps on it. It’s not as good. As I found out on the Staffordshire moors at dusk, last week. It doesn’t have what my mum calls  ‘that patient woman’ who directs you soothingly into a swollen ford to your certain death.

With Google maps, sat-navs and location-aware iphone apps leading us all precisely where we want to go, aimless wandering is the last taboo of the always-connected.
Continue reading →

Why Dubai is an un-Sound City

Posted on by David Lloyd
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Kendal's finest. Apart from me.

Is it right that, in a week when a gay man gets beaten almost to death, a Liverpool music festival is about to prop up the tourist economy of a country which employs a special task force to ‘combat’ homosexuality and other ‘indecent acts’ from taking place in public. A country which sides with Nick Griffin’s stance – that  ‘to see two men kissing in public was ‘creepy’? And that this festival – and its line up (Echo & The Bunnymen, Doves and Super Furry Animals etc) does this all for money?

It’s great to see Liverpool Music Week packing in a selection box of goodies again this year.

They call this shindig The UK’s biggest indoor winter music festival. I guess 390 acts in 80 venues takes some beating. But here’s the thing – the festival’s highlights aren’t the paid-for big ticket items.  The really exciting stuff is – miraculously, and wonderfully – totally free.  The Wild Beasts, Field Music, The Bays, Maps and Grammatics. For zero pence.

Liverpool Sound City, likewise, had lots of great free stuff earlier in the year. But how do festivals like this support themselves? Well, in the case of Sound City, they take their show on the road, to franchise new territories. And that’s when you start to wonder…is there any such thing as a free launch?

Next month sees the people behind the phenomenally successful Sound City take their show on the road. To Dubai. The Emirate where money buys you anything. Except a conscience. Continue reading →

Whatever happened to Hallowe’en?

Posted on by David Lloyd
krispy-kreme-heart-doughnuts

Would you like sprinkles with your heart attack?

America’s given us loads of great stuff. The Wire, The Decemberists, The Chrysler Crossfire (OK, maybe not that), but after a week living out of motorway service stations I know what the next invasion is: Krispy Kreme Donuts.

What’s wrong with our Customs Officers? They claim to be vigilantly stopping highly addictive, life threatening narcotics getting onto the streets of Britain, yet not one single sniffer dog can spot a fucking huge pink iced ring with marshmallow blobs sprinkled all over it?

These babies have a street value of over £100 a kilo, and can render a man incapable of rational thought within half an hour. Continue reading →

I Left My Heart in Cowes

Posted on by David Lloyd
Cowes High Street

Cowes High Street

I was on the Isle of Wight last week. It was bloody brilliant. The isle, for many, is like a time capsule, a pickled curio of how we used to live, back in the 50′s or something. Well, I guess that’s how the Tourist Board promote it. I disagree. I do tend to, usually.

I think it’s an experiment in how we should be living in the future. And if so, I can’t wait to get there. Continue reading →