MALLORN

Today is one of those days.

Like the deaths of JFK, Elvis, John Lennon and Princess Diana this is one of those days when a generation date stamps and everybody remembers where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news of the death of a celebrity.

It can’t be denied that Michael Jackson was an immense talent, the first global video star and a bridge between ‘black’ and ‘white’ music. He was shrewd in that he worked with the best, Quincey Jones produced the Off The Wall /Thriller / Bad trilogy of albums, Eddie Van Halen played that searing guitar riff on Thriller, and Jon Landau directed the Thriller video.

He was also deeply troubled. His troubles, like his triumphs conducted in the glare of the public spotlight.

Having said all that, I’ve checked my shelves and I don’t have any of Michael Jackson’s recordings in any format. As such it would be hypocritical to shed crocodile tears over his passing.

He was a great artist, of his time.

I’ve deliberately held back from posting for a while, being out of work and job-hunting makes it too too easy to write a blog saying “there’s not much out there” or “the recruitment agencies don’t return calls”. So rather than clutter the blogoshere with such bleak ramblings I thought I’d hold back until I had something to say.

Well, yesterday we went to Oxfordshire to catch up with Gaz, Nic and young Kalin. Latest pictures will be uploaded to the brag-blog page shortly. Gaz took us to a pub they’ve recently discovered, ‘The Bear at Home’ in North Moreton.

It was quite bizarre, I felt at home as soon as I walked in, and felt a feeling close to deja-vu.

The pub has a reasonable car park, a small garden - with a stile to the local cricket pitch - comfortable bar and a large function/family room.

It was in the function room that we camped ourselves, young Kalin’s probably a bit distracting for most pub goers, but it was comfortable, with dining tables and comfortable sofas - the large flat screen TV showing the Turkish Grand Prix was an unexpected bonus.   

The food was tasty and freshly cooked on the barbecue outside, and the selection of beers was a very pleasant surprise, we started with Timothy Taylor’s ‘Landlord’ and then moved on to try the ‘Dark’ an excellent porter from the Lovibonds brewery in nearby Henley.

The bar was well attended with friendly bar staff and locals who all took the time to say ‘Hello’, or to pop their heads into the family room to check Jenson Button’s progress in the Grand Prix. I can’t recall ever feeling quite so comfortable, quite so quickly in any pub.

I really believe that this is probably the best pub I have ever visited… and I concede that over the past 35 years I’ve visited more than my fair share!

And as for that feeling of deja vu? Well according to the pub’s own website here, in the 1980’s the landlord was a certain Robert Massey… spooky eh?

While visiting Sri Lanka I managed to hook up with Phill Morton and his wife Anne.

Phill and I were best mates back in the late seventies and early eighties in Sheffield.

They were great times to be young guys around town in Sheffield; the music scene was booming, with bands like the Human League, ABC and Thomson Twins (although I concede the latter two bands hailed from nearby Chesterfield) and the city had numerous thriving night clubs and music venues.

We saw John Mellencamp at ‘The Limit’ for the princely sum of £1.50 each - although he was called ‘Johnny Cougar’ at that time. A tour that I suspect won’t feature in his autobiography.

Back in the day we would hang out at Uncle Sam’s Chuck Wagon on Eccleshall Road, ‘Mister Kites’ wine bar on Division Street and, of course, Saturday lunchtimes at ‘The Crazy Daisy’. It was at the Crazy Daisy that Phil Oakey from the Human League actually met Jo Catherall and Susan Sully as there were no cocktail bars in Sheffield at that time for them to have been ‘working as a waitresses’ in.

I digress, Phill and his wife moved to Sri Lanka about seven years ago and were here at the time of the tsunami and have been involved in the post tsunami effort, including working at a boys orphanage.

They now live in a comfortable house in Hikkaduwa, near Galle and we spent a very pleasant day with them.

As with all good friends, it took a matter of minutes to erase the nearly twenty years since we last met, and the afternoon was spent regaling tales of two single lads on the town. As the line from Mott the Hoople’s farewell single would have it “We were the dudes and the dudes were we”.

It’s my fervent hope that we won’t leave it as long to see them again. For all the nostalgia we both realise that we’re not the young Turks we once were.

This has only happened to me on a couple of occasions, once in ‘Wasabi’ – the noodle and sushi ‘restaurant’ in Victoria, and more recently at Dubai international airport.

Having seen the tower of the Burj Dubai shining above us as we landed in Dubai we spent a couple of hours in Emirates new Terminal 3. We were enjoying a coffee and croissant, looking out across a beautifully laid out ‘Zen’ garden. It was 2am local time and a computerised voice announced the departing flights in synthesized Arabic.

I guess it was a combination of the travel, the time and the exotic Dubai architecture but it occurred to me “we’re in the future”.

Okay so we’re not wearing white jumpsuits, and we don’t have hover cars, but the scene just struck me as reminiscent of the future visions we were presented with in the sixties, seventies and eighties – everything from ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ through to ‘Blade Runner’.

Despite the global recession and the credit crunch, this is the twenty first century, and the future is now.

When did that happen?

I filmed the bizarre scene on my hard disc camcorder (onto a memory card), edited on my wafer thin Macintosh laptop and uploaded it wirelessly to You Tube.

What do you think?

I’ve deliberately held back on posting this, but on Friday April 18th I was made redundant from lastminute.com

I held back because I didn’t want to post anything in haste that I would later regret. Yes I feel angry, yes I feel that they stitched me up, and no I wouldn’t use their services (particularly with a credit card) if my life depended on it.

The culture in lastminute.com (and that’s the last time I will deliberately add the .com anymore – I don’t have to put a pound in their corporate swear box) is ‘trendy’ to the point of being strained. They still have a ‘chill out room’ in their very expensive offices in central Westminster with both table tennis and table football, how very nineties!

And, to be fair, they played the game on the ‘consultancy’ period of the redundancy process. They were laying off around 15% of their UK employees and we were ‘encouraged’ to apply for internal roles. However when I was contacted by an external agency about one role then I realised they were simply going through the motions.

And when I heard a senior manager demanding “a good degree from a good university” then I knew the writing was on the wall for me, I only have thirty years real-world experience.

I wish them well, and if I said I wasn’t bitter then I’d be lying, but I suspect that they’re going to struggle to survive, and they will feel an increasingly tightening grip from the hands of their owners in the USA.

It’ll be lastminute Jim, but not as they know it.

As for me, well I have a few ideas for starting up on my own; and will, of course,  try and find a ‘real’ job, but I recognise that in the current economic climate (impeding ice age) these will be few and far between.

In the short term, rather than sitting around for two weeks saying “We’re doomed” (a la Fraser in “Dad’s Army”) we’re doing it on a beach in Sri Lanka, which is where I’m typing this to upload when we get back.

See the Sri Lanka pictures here.