woobiquity

xxvii. The weather in Montréal

Willie, who once lived in Montréal for six months, keeps saying it all looked a little better under snow. But this is mainly linked to the city's seemilngly un-selfconscious attitudes toward rubbish removal (see previous post). Richard, who has lived here through a lifetime of brutal winters, says he can already feel summer receding. And now that the temperatures have rebounded - into the 70s - that statement begins to have some meaning.

In truth, Montréal is hot. What with the world's best urban jazz festival kicking off today, Canada Day tomorrow (in Quebec, that means little more than a reason to stay out late tonight), and a three-day street fair on Sainte-Catherine at the weekend. In a smaller city like this, such events are magnified to true glory.

xxvi. Of unwanted monkeys

Today is the day that everyone in Montréal who is going to move this year, moves. Which is so very European. And means that just in time for the city's biggest festival of the year, the sidewalks are stacked with unwanted mattresses, paint cans, and the odd monkey.

xxv. Of in-flight dentertainment

Yesterday we flew from Gatwick to Montréal (Canadian Affair – London to Canada for £79 one-way? You betcha!). The passenger on my right was a 50-something, broad-waisted Indian man with massive eyeglasses and a double breasted suit. His fidgety unease was immediately apparent and lasted throughout the flight. I’ve got the elbow bruises up and down my right side to prove it.

The man’s demands of the flight attendants were relentless and slurred. He seemed to need alcohol as much as he simply needed to need.

At the airport (Dorval – a people-watcher’s paradise), I saw the man again. His wife had come to meet him, and on terra firma, with her there, two steps ahead of him, the man was transformed. He pushed his luggage trolley with great smoothness, uttering strong, smiling comments about the evening’s plans.

I saw in all this both a touching affirmation and a terrible warning.

xxiv. Of the Olympic flame

Saturday was Olympic flame day in London. Walking back through Greenwich after the gym, I spied a restlessly well-behaved welcome party of banner-holding eight-year-olds, and then a police motorbike, and began making little masochistic bets with myself about who it would be this time: Philip, Andrew, Anne, or just one of the Kensington Palace dukes who have royal crests for faces.

Then there were whole families holding Samsung flags aloft (Samsung flags with a tiny Olympic logo, by the way, not the other way around), and for a moment I thought the monarchy itself might have taken a corporate sponsor, or that there had been a bloodless coup in the night, and we were about to greet the nation’s new figurehead CEO.

But it was bigger than any of that. We were, of course, about to see the Olympic Flame! Any… minute now. The anticipation was – patchy but palpable. Helicopters whirred overhead. Two ladies in slippers leaned out the door of a Georgian row house, sipping champagne. Another two women sat in the front seats of an ice cream truck, finishing off Magnums while they waited, lackadaisically. Oliver, the Frenchman with the handlebar moustache, who runs an eponymous jazz club nearby, skulked to the sidelines with a tabloid Independent under his arm.

It started to rain. A woman held up an umbrella with one hand and both a half-smoked fag and a video camera (Samsung) in the other.

A police escort arrived, with an ‘Out of Service’ London bus. Wait… Another police escort, and then, finally, the flame, carried by a podgy young guy who blushed like he’d just been kissed for the first time; then a cadre of “Pass the flame” motorbike riders, each as camp as the Coleherne, and a cramped car-full of British Olympians, presumably, waving weakly, as if their mothers had put them up to it.

And that was that. Not much of a show, really. And we all went home.

But the bigger disillusion came later. Call me gullible, but I had always thought of the Olympic flame relay as an honest-to-God relay, in which the flame was lit at Point A and was carried, day and night, with great precision, to the triumphant lighting of the cauldron on opening night. After Maritime Greenwich, I guessed the runners would take to the shoulder of the motorway and then, by way of a Channel crossing, perhaps run in place atop a slow-moving barge, handing off the flame to a lanky (is that a baguette in your pocket?) Frenchman, even as the boat boys tied her up.

This was not the case. I know this because after a shower, brunch, and a ride on British Rail (no speedy competition for an Olympic set of legs, let me tell you) I got out of the tube at Oxford Circus, and I’ll be damned: helicopters whirring, Coleherne riders, Samsung flags, touristic mayhem.

A bus ride, half an hour sitting outside a coffeehouse, and a long walk later, I happened to turn up Shaftesbury avenue, and there was the whole show all over again, mingling with the drumbeats of a Chinatown celebration. And on it’s way, I later learned, to a free British concert on The Mall, complete with a military flyover low and loud enough to send those of us in the echoing confines of Villiers street into a brief apocalyptic panic.

“Pass the flame, unite the world.” As long as you can accept, for a day, I guess, the symbolic notion that London is the world. Or the even bigger stretch of the imagination - that London is in it. But, I tell you. Some childhood fantasies are better left unfulfilled.

xxiii. Of balletic manpower in the streets

Jayke is visiting from Johannesburg, and brings bright late-night chatter about a South Africa on the brink of peace and prosperity – as opposed to the heinous racial violence and sprawling poverty that get all the coverage in the British and American press. Jayke’s own life as a well-paid real estate agent is a kind of testimony to this, what with its rich black clients who jokingly comment after a viewing, “those poor whites can’t afford our house!”

(I am not sure how white boy Jayke’s full-time, Zulu maid fits into the rosy view, except that to hear him tell it, she’s delighted to do the work, loves him like a son, and takes far more pride in polishing the silvery bits of his BMW than any valet would.)

Apparently, even the country’s infamous carjackers have gone upmarket, according to Jayke, who has met some of them - their smooth movements and instructional manner worthy of the noblest profession. And the gun keeps things efficient.

In my London street last week, I witnessed carjackings of a different variety. Workmen who arrived to do some repaving found several parked cars in their way. So they stuck mini-jacks under the tires, and the cars became like floats on little swivel-wheels. Five or six strong men pushing in unison was all it took. And when they got home, the owners must have done a collective “hmmm”.

The possibilities in this are limitless! Add a little Stravinsky from an open window, and some low-touch choreography, and you’d have a careening street performance of the highest order. (This is probably not the time to mention all those hairy beer bellies, so forget I said it.)

Add boom-box “River” (Joni Mitchell) and many guerrilla volunteers, and you’d have an anarchic winter art event like the world would never forget. One that, like all good 21st-century spectacles, would have a political angle or six, taking on the root causes of pollution, homelessness, student debt, obesity and Lord only knows what else.

Soon the world will be sucked dry of fossil fuels – and then what? Car lovers will either be stuck puppy-faced in their driveways or will have to find an alternative way to burn rubber. I say manual labor is that alternative. The emissions can't be worse than diesel.

Ok, I realize that a full-time burly entourage, though stylish, would be an extravagance for most people. So that’s where students and the homeless come in, and a simple operation to insert electronic tags behind their ears, so they can be summoned like cogs wherever they’re needed. Ken’s got to spend that congestion charge money somewhere. And Tony certainly needs a new plank in the old man… ifesto. Bring back national service, with a twist, Tony, you know you want to! (You’ve already made students Britain’s indentured servants, and just like George W Reagan, you’re really a man of symbolism at heart.)

So I’ll see you all beneath The Eye on December 4 to get this show on the road. Jacks will be distributed on a first come basis. Bring cupcakes, please, as there is nothing like balletic labor to work up an appetite.

xxii. A humanist union (then dancing)

The bride wore princess lavender, the groom a kaftan, and the celebrant (an actor who has appeared in Casualty) off-white linen. Oh, and the Greek statues in the foyer wore hula leis.

So my first Jewish wedding – was, in fact, my first truly humanist one, reflecting the bride, Miriam’s, individualism, with support from her three vibrant sisters: Ruth, Rachel and Esther (pictured). Somehow, though, none of this was as unreal as yet another ‘Reinvention’.

xxi. After a death, the birth of Soul

There was none of the Nancy Reagan-style casket kissing for the mourners of Ray Charles, who filed past his open casket in their thousands last night at a Los Angeles funeral home. That’s ok for some, I guess, but for me, when a legend dies, I prefer to take solace in the immortality of the online archives.

What could beat hearing Ray Charles tell in a voice that is no less genuinely down-home for all his fame, how he woke up one morning and realised he had to do something different. Like invent Soul music. Or the way he repeatedly but gently patronises Fresh Air's teacherly liberal host, Terri Gross. “Bless your heart. I appreciate the question.”

xx. The other world of the falafel bar

I knew exactly what I wanted 10 seconds ago, when I walked through the door of an Old Compton Street falafel shop (Maoz, for those of you who might have walked on by this amazing source of cheap and tasty vegetarian sustenance due to its gaudy signage and 1950s burger boy mascot).

However, now that I’ve been asked, by the young Israeli man with the ice blue eyes, I seem to have forgotten not only what food I wanted but why I am here at all. Here as in, the world. Ice blue eyes do that to me, whomever they belong to.

Perhaps because of this, the trance-speak order I finally summon is followed by a lapse into ‘the zone’, where everything worldly is otherworldly, magnified, so that the thin red-haired man with the pony tail may well be a threat to us all, or just himself, the way he whizzes back and forth on spindly legs, between the feet of the waiting we and the toppings bar, as if, in this flash, no one will notice that he took extra pickles, or that he bears the aural markings of a junkie.

The 20-something Asian girl gets her pita next, and sets about primly topping it with carrots and salad shreds that she takes, gently, one by one with the tongs, like a person oft scolded in her youth for putting more on her plate than she could eat, or an anorexic for whom accepting the food is half the struggle.

Next up, the 30-something mixed race woman with the shaved head and tattooed wrists, who attacks the toppings, in quick fits, like one who has known starvation, or prison.

Throughout all this, a large African man has been dawdling by the various sauces, which he dribbles onto his fries in a slow and uncertain way. Somehow, despite his caution, more of it ends up on the bar than in the bowl.

As he shuffles toward one of the veneer tables, a jolly banter erupts between the bar boys, who are all smiles as they rip into the African, confident that he doesn’t speak their language. Neither do I, but I can guess what they’re saying, because of where their eyes are pointed, and because one of them reaches for a towel, then steps back, realizing he’s been too obvious.

Gasp. Cough, cough. Back out on the street - where spectacle and mere mortality are fashioned in gym-defined relief. And I think to myself, people don’t see these things. They don’t. And if they did, a lot more of us would end up being the kind of people who follow their index fingers around in public or spit for no reason into strangers’ faces at Tube stations. And, walking south, I thank God for this rare and central insight into the mind of the North Londoner.

xix. When the light is the window

xviii. Of jazz in the Roman night

As Kurt Vonnegut said, all advice is nostalgia. But I’m giving you a piece of it anyway. Get a cheap seat on any plane to Rome from now through the end of August and spend as many evenings as you can at the Villa Celimontana Jazz Festival.

Oh how I’ve loved walking through those Baroque gates and down the torch-lit gravel path into a jazz club under the stars, complete with flickering candles on every table and an encircling stand of umbrella pines that fade to silhouette in the approaching twilight. (I think I might sigh...)

I won’t be there this year, since we’ve blown the budget on a trip to Montreal, but please, you go, and enjoy it. Just don’t blame me if the music’s shite, it rains cats and dogs and the people at the next table start a fight with you over who ordered their pasta first.