You may never have heard of this place, but you have definitely seen it: Londongeles is where British characters in a US show live. Here we have Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler in the otherwise very enjoyable series Elementary.
“London” says the caption. And just to hammer the point home, the black cab has an English flag on the windscreen. Do admire the almost subliminal red bus in the background and the slightly more obvious, sooo European, vintage scooter.
A few minutes later, the bus hasn’t moved. I know London traffic is bad but it isn’t that bad.
Brace yourselves for the appearance of a Ford Anglia, a totally common sight on a London street in 2013. Yup.
Seriously, everyone in England drives them. And I do mean everyone.
That’s a very British-looking pay-and-display machine. Not. Plus, the slowest bus in the universe is still visible. I don’t know how much it cost to hire but they’re certainly getting their money’s worth.
This demonstrates what not to do in London: namely leave your bike leaning against a wall in your front garden, totally unsecured, clearly visible and easily reachable from the street. I’m crying with laughter at the very thought of the owner expecting to find it still there tomorrow morning.
More weirdness: in the UK, front doors never open outwards. Although I think we’ve got it wrong on this one; just imagine the possibilities… two words: Jehovah’s Witnesses. Bang.
Nice attempt at Britishifying the door though, what with the panels, pillarbox red paint and lion knocker. Alas, the bizarre letter slot in the wall is an epic fail.
Hope you enjoyed your trip to Londongeles. We’ll be back.
And the reason for it is obvious: most women are impressed by a guy who can do something they can’t, especially something artistic, but most men resent it if a girl can do something they can’t. After all, how can they hope to impress her now?
And if the guitar-playing girl isn’t the one they’re interested in, it’s even worse: she’s attracting attention that belongs to them!
Trying too hard, dear
The funny thing is, even male musicians react that way if (female) you brought your instrument to the party and they didn’t. Before you know it, they ask to borrow it… and don’t give it back. Within seconds, girls who showed zero interest when you were playing start flocking around them as if by magic. And when you try to get your guitar back after a solid 45 minutes of horrible jazz (yeah, they always play jazz. I hate jazz), it’s the girls who give you the stink eye and/or complain loudly that you’re interrupting the wonderful concert! Some of those girls have been known to include your best friend!
(… and breathe)
Plus, the guitar mystique only works on a man, really. A woman with a guitar just looks awkward, probably because she knows she doesn’t look sexy. Look at the top pic in that article, no girl could carry that off. When I was young and going to music lessons, I just felt embarrassed lugging that huge guitar case around. I’m sure a boy would have burst with pride.
Women on the other hand look good playing the piano. It’s posh, it’s elegant, it’s refined. It’s just not cool.
But who cares? Suddenly, men love you!
There’s also the harp. Now that is a quintessentially female instrument. Very, very few harpists are male, but then that’s probably because you can’t nonchalantly sling a harp over your shoulder and go off to be the life and soul of the campfire.
I am being reliably informed by an actual man that a girl holding a violin or cello does look sexy. Yup, until she starts playing it. The violin gives you a double chin and the cello… well, the legs akimbo playing position is hardly the prettiest, is it?
Interestingly, when looking for pictures of women playing the piano, I found quite a few showing a woman tickling the ivories whilst a man stares at her in admiration. Search for pics of a woman playing the guitar, however, and the male admirers suddenly disappear. Also, half of the girls in the more arty pics are clearly just holding the instrument and couldn’t play a note to save their lives. Pfft.
I’m afraid I can’t take much credit for this one. I don’t brew much anymore (stupid work getting in the way) and I’m crap at duelling as my cordless mouse is a bit sluggish. Still, yay us!
I don’t usually believe in ignoring the law but that little cabin is on private land in the middle of nowhere, was built out of natural materials and doesn’t even have any foundations! It’s basically a shed (albeit a very pretty one).
I just hope they’re not planning on baking triangular flapjacks in there, or the world would surely end.
Councils just hate it when people show self-sufficiency, don’t they? If this couple had asked for planning permission, it would have been refused for some flimsy reason (harmful to the ‘rural character of the locality’?! ‘Not essential to provide accommodation for an agricultural or forestry worker’?!). So why bother?
From the comments: “If this house is torn down I hope the council are going to provide this family with alternate housing because they will have made them homeless.”
Too right. So the council wants to feel needed, does it? Well, now’s the time to deliver – and that council house had better be a lot nicer than this one. Good luck with that.
Wisdom, huh? This tragic crap makes a Hallmark greeting card sound like Schopenhauer.
Some of those gems are unintentionally funny though. This one should really be sung to a disco beat by a man in drag. And I had to smile at that one… I, too, used to love Chumbawamba.
“Matt also has “cunt” tattooed on his shoulder. Abracadabra boss Dave shakes his head. “We wouldn’t do that,” he says. Well, you say that, Dave, but looking at your website here, I see there’s a photo of you tattooing a picture of Gordon Ramsay on to someone’s leg. I can’t really see the difference, to be honest.”
So that’s the Guardian officially calling Gordon Ramsay a cunt. This is probably because what Gordon Ramsay does (running restaurants and fronting cookery programmes, just so we’re clear) is far, far worse than stabbing teenagers to death at Victoria Station, and that’s why he fully deserves the epithet. Unlike others who “might have gone on to university” if they hadn’t become murderous bastards before taking their A-Levels that dastardly justice system hadn’t decided to interfere.
And those aren’t from Argos either
Also, he’s white (what an arse, really), which probably forces tattoo artists up and down the country to overshade his picture otherwise he’d be “invisible”. That’s right, getting tattoos of white people if you’re white yourself is apparently surprisingly difficult. No race issue is ever left unturned by the Guardian, is it? Of course, the reviewer wouldn’t even dream of joking about, say, Will.i.am getting an invisible tattoo of Martin Luther King or even black people being invisible in the dark. Because that would be beyond the pale. But this
“Anyway, Matt’s having a picture of his baby daughter over the C-word. She’s white but Dave’s doing her black, presumably because otherwise she’d be invisible. I can see that it’s difficult, portraying skin on skin, and you have to do it a few shades darker to show up. That’s why this other white fellow Carl has a picture of a black Miley Cyrus on his leg, I guess. Interesting.”
Poor old Guardian. The article started so well, with sad stories of people, all with children in tow (non-parents don’t matter in the media), being forced to share one damp, tiny room in a grotty hostel with unpleasant, sometimes violent, neighbours, all because they can’t afford decent accommodation anymore – they got evicted when housing benefit caps were introduced by the evil coalition.
Then the journalist shot herself in the foot by telling us where the people in question used to live:
1. In a £500 a week (!!) two-bedroom flat in St John’s Wood, entirely paid for by housing benefit. Person doesn’t work due to arthritis.
2. In a flat in Hammersmith, partly paid for by housing benefit. Person works part-time.
3. In a flat in Maida Vale. No info on who paid the rent but person is a carer – not usually a fantastically-paid job.
4. In a shared flat somewhere in Central London. We are told person cannot afford to rent nearby – how did she manage before? Surely there is more than one flatshare in the area.
Apart from the fact that these locations are all very expensive, with Hammersmith being a bit further away and less extortionate than the rest, all the people interviewed keep complaining about having to leave the neighbourhood where they have their roots / GP / job / kids’s school / friends / etc.
Well, I’m sorry but tough titties. Are they not aware that everyone is in the same boat? I lived in Fulham for five years and loved every minute of it. Yet when my circumstances changed and I could no longer afford the rent, I left, broken-hearted, for the unexplored wilds of Zone 4. I am now in Zone 6 (here be dragons) and whinge about it on a regular basis. I’ve had to change jobs as the commute was not realistically doable any longer. Still, I never expected the state to keep me in the style to which I’d become accustomed. So why do they? And why is the journalist enabling them? (stupid question, I know)
My dear Guardian soft-hearted milksop, it’s very simple: nobody has a God-given right to live in central London at everyone else’s expense. And when they ask
“I’ve had the same GP for 20 years, the same hospital. All my daughter’s friends are here. Are we meant to change all these things?”
the answer is :”Yes. Yes, you are. It would be miles better than the grotty B&B in my opinion, but suit yourself.”
Waaaah! Oh dear, here I go again
The journalist even had the nerve to pre-empt her readers’ legitimate indignation:
“Housing is an emotive subject because most people are struggling to pay rent, or a mortgage, making life-altering decisions about where to live based on how much they can afford to spend – so making the case for the state to be subsidising large chunks of rent for other people to live in London does not instantly elicit sympathy. If you’re in any doubt about this, just glance below to read the comments that inevitably follow pieces on this theme.”
Is that passive-aggressive or what?
On top of that, the people featured appear remarkably helpess and incapable of doing anything for themselves:
“Rana and her mother have responded by no longer using the communal kitchen. Instead they buy food from KFC and McDonald’s.”
That can’t be cheap or healthy (expecially for a child). I’d rather buy bread and stuff and make sandwiches and salads in my room. You don’t need a kitchen to prepare simple food; I once camped for three months with no facilities whatsoever, only a little portable gas stove to heat water. I didn’t crave cooked food once.
“The family don’t cook, because all their saucepans are in council storage […]. They too are surviving on takeaways – junk food and sandwiches.”
“She is not allowed to use the kitchen after 10pm, which means she can’t do any cooking when she gets back late from work, so has taken to eating McDonald’s on the bus on the way home.”
See above. It’s like for these people there’s absolutely no middle ground between home-cooked hot food and takeaways. I’m confused.
“The family stay inside a lot, because they don’t know the area; there is no garden, and they don’t know where the nearest park is.”
Are you kidding me? How about going for a walk one day so they, y’know, find out? There are no snipers in the street, I assure you!
Having said all this, here is my submission for the 2012 Rip-Off Britain Award:
“The family don’t cook, because all their saucepans are in council storage (along with their winter clothes) and it costs £45 every time they access it to get something out.”
Fucking outrageous. If Big Yellow tried to pull this one they’d be out of business within a week. You have to hand it to councils, they could certainly teach the Mafia a thing or two about extortion.
Clue: it’s cold, it’s liquid and there isn’t much of it. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
YES! That’s right, my problem is with the tiny, usually half-filled, mockery-of-a-refreshment glass of orange juice one always gets as part of a hotel continental breakfast. And you can’t generally ask for a refill either, unlike with tea or coffee. No provision is ever made for those of us who don’t like hot beverages but need to drink at least two decently-sized glasses of something cold in order to be able to eat.
Considering the juice is usually straight out of a cheapo carton anyway – I can tell from the slightly uriney taste – I’m not sure why they’re so miserly with it. Yes, it costs more than tea or coffee but we’re hardly talking Tropicana prices.
I can still remember those dreadful breakfasts when I was young, at guide camp or on any kind of school outing, where all I had to drink was water as the only two options were café au lait or hot chocolate. It was stomach-turning but since there was nothing else to drink I didn’t have much of a choice. Not a good way to start the day. On top of that, I had to put up with everyone staring at me as if I were an alien (not liking hot drinks makes you a pariah everywhere you go). Sigh.
So now I bring my own juice to B&Bs and have a nice swig in the room before coming down to breakfast – and the only reason I bother having breakfast is because it’s already paid for. In hotels I skip the overpriced breakfast altogether (and why is it served so early anyway? I’m on holiday, dammit! But that is another rant for another day).
