AND REPEAT...

It’s impossible for me to be entirely objective about The Rinse, as its artist is an old and valued friend. We’ve had a brief conversation about the book; now it’s time to take a proper look.

First things first: this is a very good-looking book. I’ll say again that it’s impossible to be entirely objective, but the visuals on the book are quite lovely. Marc Laming (the artist, about whom it’s etc etc) is inking his own pencils and while his previous work, inked by others, wasn’t what you’d call sloppy, it has an added depth here that can only be accounted for by the fact that what you’re seeing is what he wants you to see. There’s no intermediary artist/inker coming between you the reader and him the artist.

This is important in a book like The Rinse, with its cast of characters that could very easily become visually homogenised and lose their individual identities. That this doesn’t happen, even in sequences which are set in dimly-lit rooms, is a credit both to Laming[1] and to the colourist, Darrin Moore (whose parents were probably big fans of Bewitched, judging by his name’s spelling. This is a Good Thing, as the world can never have too many references to Elizabeth Montgomery).

So do I have a problem with this book at all? Yes I do, and that is that The Rinse is a comicbook that reads like a book, and moreover a book that was intended to be denser than the four-issue miniseries format allowed. Gary Phillips, the writer, is an established novelist, has written a graphic novel for Vertigo and, judging from The Rinse, has plenty of experience of plotting and characterisation, neither of which are a negative in this case. Characters have strong individual characteristics and the plot is good and tight.

But the book in its entirety, the story as an whole and the individual scenes between characters, seem to have a slightly uneven air, rushed in places, leisurely in others and at times just plain remiss. It’s fun, for instance, to see the bad guy has a phobia, but we have no idea why and it’s not really brought to our attention until it’s foregrounded in the last part of the story. We see that the two heavies who spent most of the four issues chasing the hero around have an air of Mr Wint and Mr Kidd about them, but given how their particular story ends, it would have been good to see some greater backstory or exploration of why they were working together in the first place, and of what kept them together.

The most obvious fault is that there are great chunks of exposition dropped into the story every so often, and that’s why the overall feel is of a narrative that would have been better serviced with more space to explore backstory, develop characters, and show rather than tell some of those details which are brought out via having a character stand and talk at another one.

Don’t get the wrong idea; this is a very good book indeed. It’s very much suited more to the trade paperback format than to pamphlets/floppies; Phillips has written a long-form story rather than a serial, so no recaps or any of the other standard ‘this-happened-last-issue’ comicbook tropes. In trade it’ll be easier to keep tabs on which character is doing what to which other character – somebody with a fleeting walk-on in issue one plays a major part in issue four, for example, and the casual reader in floppy format may not retain the knowledge of who and what that somebody is.

I’ll say again, as this review may well seem to be accentuating the negatives: I recommend The Rinse highly. I’d have done so without any prior knowledge of Laming. I do so with no prior knowledge of Phillips (though I do now intend to hunt down his novels). It’s a damn good comic, one of the many damn good comics that Boom! Studios are quietly slipping out these days (it stuns me that the two comics I’ve enjoyed most in the last few months have been this and Snarked! – a kids book!). If I was giving marks it’d get 7/10, borderline 8.

And for what it’s worth, I think it’d make a damn good film.

---

[1] It’s remarkably disquieting to refer to someone you know well by their surname. Reminds one of the Raj, don’tcha know. 

It's A Wonderful Life, Possibly

I’m standing at the cooker, watching butter slowly melting. The solids are separating, drifting off into a milky gold puddle in the bottom of the pan. On the worktop there are two white china bowls. One contains dark muscovado sugar, the other equal amounts of golden syrup and black treacle. There are a number of jars set beside them; ground ginger, cinnamon, ground cloves. Bicarbonate of soda, a carton of whole milk, a couple of eggs.

Soon, the butter will be liquid and the muscovado will be added, then the two will be stirred until they combine. Next, the syrup and the treacle, and the warmth from the low heat the pan is on will bring them together into a reflectionless dark pool. Looking down into the pan is like gazing into a well; I’m tempted to toss in a small stone and count the seconds until I hear the splash.

In go the spices, along with a few hillocked teaspoons of chopped fresh ginger, and the bicarb. The milk, with the eggs beaten in, lightens the darkness, bringing it down to a caramel duskiness. I stir it all into a bowl of flour, and scrape every last drop into the paper-lined, thickly-buttered cake tin.

Half an hour later, the kitchen begins to change. It’s warmer, more comforting. The smell of the cake is drifting up and around, filling the kitchen and gently moving out, exploring every room in the house.

It’s then that I realise this hasn’t simply been making a cake. This has been the beginning of Christmas. This is the moment when today stops being just another cold day and instead becomes full of soppy, sentimental tradition. It’s the moment I used to anticipate hopefully when I was young, the moment when the bite in the air isn’t just chill, but is suddenly loaded with the promise of winter; not just Christmas itself but the whole snowy, scarfy, wrapped-up-well and staying in by the fireside joy of this most beautiful of seasons. From today until sometime next March or April, the sky will be blue and breath will be white; the sound of your footsteps will for a time be crunchy and muffled by snow. Everything will be better, just that slight amount more exciting, simply because of the time of year.

I’ve missed this moment. It hasn’t been felt for too long, suffocated under everyday worries and the heavily worn cynicism of adulthood. Feeling it now, after a year filled with loss and confusion and sorrow, fills me with something that isn’t hope, isn’t the happiness that has been absent for most of this year, but is instead a sense of renewal and fresh beginnings. The harvest is late, but at last it’s coming.

Tomorrow I will begin planning and purchasing for the holiday weekend, talking to my family, deciding among ourselves who’ll be cooking what, where we’ll be on which day. The next few weeks will be as they usually are; stressful at times, joyous at others, probably culminating in a desperate hunt for a red cabbage on Christmas Eve.

But right now, as I take the tray of gingerbread from the oven, feeling the burst of heat against my legs, seeing the dark brown curvature of the cake, knowing that tomorrow it will have gained a shine and a stickiness and that each mouthful will glow slightly with ginger followed by the depth and darkness of treacle, I can only fall, slowly, willingly, into December’s soft, romantic embrace. 

I wish I'd said that...

Charity mugger on High Road to man walking just in front of me: “Hi, do you have two minutes to talk about the RSPCA?”

Man: “It’s alright mate, I’ve just been talking to your mate across the road.”

CM: ‘Okay!”

Man: “And I told him to fuck off as well…”

An' me fag's gonnout 'nall!

A couple of years ago I entered an ill-advised relationship with a woman a lot younger than myself. And for a while I was willing to ignore her screeching accent, her refusal to eat anything that didn’t come wrapped in plastic and her inability to pronounce the letter ‘t’ – particularly the one in my first name - because she was exceptionally pretty and she was half my age.

Earlier today I took a stroll down to the local supermarket. It’s on the High Road, the north-south road that crosses the east-west of White Hart Lane. WHL isn’t bad; it’s  typically 1930s council stock, interspersed with more recent tiny Barratt Home-style apartments that have 80%-sized furniture in the show flats. It has the Cemetary, which is a thing of beauty and a valued spot of quiet contemplation. Just before it ends, it changes name for a few hundred yards and becomes Creighton Road – the Lane itself skulks off on its own like a scolded dog for a bit – which is where the saintly Bill Nicholson used to live.

Tottenham High Road itself is quite ugly. There’s no avoiding the fact, it simply is. It’s a range of chicken shops and bookies; one or two employment agencies full of shaven-headed eastern Europeans willing to work all night for bare minimum wage in an Osterley industrial shed packing your Christmas doo-dahs; a couple of those barber shops full of black guys in their twenties talking into a Bluetooth headset and texting with one hand, there’s a plasma high up on one wall, and nobody seems to be either cutting hair or having their hair cut.

You know those conversations you can have with strangers, where five seconds in, you realise it’s a mistake but you can’t back out? I had one of those. Some woman with a voice like a parrot being waterboarded sprang out of Love Lane – a name very much deceptive – and asked me if I lived round here. I said yes. It was a mistake.

“Where’s Norfumberlun Par Crow? Dah nair?”  I told her Northumberland Park Road wasn’t down there, it was in the opposite direction, end of the road, turn left, first right.

“See? Smar’arse! Iss dah natway! Yorso futtin clevva you wen ron way! Arsow!”

She shouted all of this over the road to where a rat-faced fella in a Helly Hansen waterproof was skulking along trying to look inconspicuous. He shouted something back. I felt a lurching in the old lunch when I fell in that she was going to walk alongside me. Which she did, in her giant sheepskin boots and her denim leggings and her coat made from the pelts of the finest cat.

“See, I doe noe roun ear, I doen liveer, I live down Edmonton, I live Edmonton Green.”

Which pretty much explained it. My former girlie lived that way too. Like I said, nice girl but not what you’d call gifted with the social graces. And if this sounds snobbish, then very well, it’s snobbish. If Stoke Newington, our neighbour to the south, can look down on us, then we have every right to do the same to Edmonton. It’s what it’s there for. 

50

Fuck.

BEEP BEEP HONK

You know the worst thing about cycling in London?

It’s not the cars that overtake you and then immediately turn left, so saving themselves about half a second by making you brake and so exposing yourself to the possibility of a nasty tail-ender.

It’s not the drivers who forget that a car is either a flat-sided or a convex-shaped vehicle and so, owing to the laws of geometry, will reduce the distance between the side of the vehicle and the kerb as it proceeds around a left-handed curve. And having forgotten that, said drivers will speed around said curve while the poor sod on the bike feels the odds of him being swept under the side of the passing lorry growing in inverse proportion to that diminishing curve.

It's not even the buggers who overtake at traffic islands WHICH IT TELLS YOU NOT TO DO IN THE BLOODY HIGHWAY CODE YOU ARSE.

It’s bloody pedestrians.

Since the accident a few weeks ago, I’ve redoubled my efforts to be seen after dark, especially since the clocks went back. The old single-LED front light’s been replaced by a multi-LED ultrabright. There’s a second rear flasher on the seatpost to supplement the one near the gear cassette. I’ve bought some exceptionally camp arm/wrist bands with LEDs that flash alternately red and yellow. Now, small children try to stand me near their tellies and put their Christmas presents underneath me.

I even wear this kit in the mornings, especially on grey, drizzly days when visibility isn't great and windscreen wipers may or may not be used depending on how blase a driver may be. 

Days like today. 

This morning, I’m threading through the school run traffic. Being careful, watching out for car doors opening or vehicles pulling out from sidestreet or parking space. I reach a set of traffic lights as my route crosses a major road. My east-west route is very low priority compared to the main north-south road so there’s usually a long wait for the lights to change in my favour.

I’m standing there for a while when a woman steps off the pavement and walks straight into me. 

Flashing front light. Flashing back lights. Flashing armbands. Big fucking yellow fluorescent day-glo reflective hi-vis bastard vest.

And she walks straight into me.

Mutters an apology, not to me but to the world in general. Something along the lines of ‘I didn’t see that bike.” Strolls off.

A hundred yards later, the stupid cow does exactly the same thing again.

Tomorrow, I’m taking a helmet-mounted microphone and a pair of PA speakers so I can announce my presence audibly as well as visually, and I’m going nowhere unless I’m surrounded by a full Salvation Army brass band playing Onward Christian Soldiers with choir accompaniment.

And luckily there will be a place in heaven reserved for them each, for you can bet your last ha’penny that some silly bastard will still not see us, and there will be righteous blood flowing on the streets of North London Town. 

Fuck You Mick Jackson

I once saw Brian Moore walking along the touchline at White Hart Lane. He had a very big nose. Far bigger than it looked on telly.

Brian’s TV programme, The Big Match, was the Match Of The Day of its time, only without annoying graphics or Alan Hansen. Or a budget. On The Big Match you’d get seventy seconds of long-haired dockers hoofing a cannonball up and down a bombsite, followed by Crimplene-clad baldie Brian sitting behind a plywood desk, discussing what he’d just seen with Alf Ramsey or Brian Clough. I always thought Brian Clough was funny. My old man couldn’t stand him.

The thing was, The Big Match used to be, along with Sunday Lunch and Sunday Tea, one of the high points of Sundays. And it was a high point because there was literally nothing else to do. No shops, very little else on telly except an old war film. Television used to close for a couple of hours in the afternoon – my gran always said it was to give the set a chance to cool down. Try that today, you’d have riots in the streets the likes of which would make the Occupy London movement wet their pants.

Sundays were exactly like Tony Hancock said they were. They were vast expanses of Nothing To Do. You’d read the paper, maybe have a kickabout over the playing field, and that was it. All that was left was to eat yourself stupid and have a bit of a kip.

Over the last few months I’ve noticed that ennui creeping back into Sundays, these days without the Sunday paper (none of ‘em any good anymore) or the giant blow-outs at the dinner table, but most certainly with the feeling that there’s absolutely sod all to do.

Go for a walk, maybe. But it’s November, it’s grey and damp and cold and the streets are full of either baying lunatics who’d stab you and steal your trousers just for the hell of it, or filthy media types clutching Costa Coffee take-aways in the park and wearing over-designed spectacles with writing on the arms. 

I suppose there are books to read but who can be fagged these days? Besides, Sundays are a day off and exertion of physical or mental nature shouldn’t be on the agenda. I want to be entertained at the weekend but it just ain’t happening.

Yes, I know, I’m a miserable old bastard who just needs a kick up the arse to get him going. Until that kick arrives I intend to sit on the sofa, have the odd nap, and complain about modern life.

Fancy joining me?