Scotland's incomprehensible bard on Coffee

Rab C Nesbitt up to his usual string vested eloquence, this time in a coffee bar:

There you go. One tall latte.

What happened to small, medium and large?

Does it matter? It's the same thing.

Well if it's the same thing, why change it? Do you want me to tell you why it's not the same thing?

That's two pounds please.

That's it. That's your answer right there: two quid. For a half-cup of milky steam enhanced by a suggestion of coffee so meagre that it would make you think that you'd forgotten to wash the cup out after the last customer. The only tall thing about this boy is the size of the rip off.

Whatever. Have a nice day.

You're on a fiver an hour! What the hell do you care what kind of day I have?!

On the subject of coffee, the other day I found out that Costa coffee have a slightly bizarre fairtrade policy. The coffee they serve is not generally fairtrade, but on request, they will make you a fairtrade cup at no extra cost. Sound surprising? Well it's not. Apparently, a few years ago Costa jumped on the fairtrade bandwagon and began to offer fairtrade coffee to customers for 15p extra per cup. In fact, the proportion of the cost to Costa of a cup of coffee is so miniscule that tripling the price paid to farmers only increases the cost by a penny or so. What Costa were in fact doing was taking advantage of customers' willingness to pay a little extra to make 14p clear profit on every cup. Having been rumbled by consumers who mounted a widespread protest, they came up with their current policy.

Fairtrade wash or what?

Confessions of an Ango-Indian Kierkegaard reader.

En fait c'est un peu comme la seduction de danguer.

WARNING: what follows is by no means consequentialist, more than likely well felt but not well meant and the epitome of hypocracy:

Two ideologies, both alike in dignity, in fair Manchester, where we lay our scene, from ancient grudge break to new mutiny...

On the one hand, it'd be great to live the essentially selfish life of an academic: Living in an ivory tower surounded by books and the all encompassing warmth of scholarship. On the other, perhaps the homelier charms of a steady family life are the real draw of existence.

As you may have gathered, this blogger is about to break, Von Trapp-like, into new musical lyricisist verbosity.

I've just had the time of my life. I've never felt this way before. No. I swear. It's the truth. And I owe it all to youth. (Man, this is the sort of eloquence and poesy Arundathi Roy and Tracy Emin dream of... Maybe in my time, I'll be the enfant terrible of the establishment, and my blog posts will sell for *millons*. I'm like Keats, but insincere, and therefore comme il faut.)

There comes a time in a young man's life when university is far behind, the youths of today no longer revel in the lost Mancunian wonder of Oasis, unless in some retro club or other where air conditioning preserves those who don parkas for fashion deliberately counter-cultural faux pas. They're just doing things I used to do that they think are new.

"That's right. I look like an arse. But isn't it ironic don't you think..."

All that's left to those that are old of heart is the vague happy memory of the youthful exuberance that Sex in the City once afforded, (before Kim Cattrall stooped to pose for a modern Titian... are they worth a hundred million pounds?), and the rememberance of lost time. Who knows: somehow lying on the sofa watching iPlayer and Channel Four on Demand isn't the same as lying in bed in your mother's house reading the papers, slowly accruing the words and phrases that will one day make Swan's Way and your name in the world.

Indeed. These are no doubt the bile infested mental meanderings of a soul not so much in torment as subjected to that horrific middle class feeling that the intellectual twilight is upon him. When suddenly the bus is infested with the undergrads with their inescapably tight trousers and their Mighty Boosh. The terrible realisation that perhaps no longer am I young enough to partake of the bread and the wine of bang-up-to-the-minute finger-on-the-pulse living. It's time to slow down. Take stock. See what life is worth. Surrender yourself to the NYTimes Quarter-life-crisis.

Mais bien sûr: j'ai bu un peu trop. But this is the last refuge of a soul with nowhere else to go. At least liver-addling addiction greets me with open tobacco-stained Red Bull'n'Vodka-quivering arms. Life on the other hand throws curved balls and gives no quarter.

If you're desperate to know how it feels, think Thomas Beddoes meets de Quincey.

Messenger Antics

After last week's great I Bike MCR alleycat, I've been inspired by my part time messenger team-mate to maybe give messengering a go at some point. Check out this characteristically American take on the 'urban sport'. I can't imagine doing it in San Fransisco with all those hills though... And Part II Apparently in these days of credit crunch economics however, messenger jobs are becoming scarce as companies decide that speed isn't worth what it was.

Notes from my father

One of my father's lasting legacies on my life will probably be the music I was exposed to as a child. The Bangles and Micheal Jackson not withstanding, I've been trawling the internet to try and find some of the Indian tunes which I have in my head. This has proved to be a rather more challenging task than one might expect - many of the songs are in Hindi, which I don't understand. My attempts thus far have therefore been typing in possible transliterations of some misremembered Hindi words in the hope that they will be close enough to someone else's transliterationto identify the song. Here are some I've found so far:

The second song is song by a legend of South Indian classical music, Yesudas. He has a purity of tone and technical ability comparable to Pavarotti (who is also mind-blowingly good, see here for proof, especially the sotto voce bit). It seems pretty hard to find some of Yesudas' earlier recordings of classical music on CD. Does anyone know of any?