Flamingo

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I posted the picture above to Instagram a few weeks ago. It is a cropped section of a photo that I have used as a Facebook cover photo for a similar length of time.

It got a bit of attention. It’s quite pretty.

Flamingos are one of those birds that – having grown up in Harrow – seem incredibly exotic. They are associated with hot climates and remote settings. I grew up with images of vast flocks filling TV screens while deep, gravelly and authoritative voice overs explained the size and scale of the flocks, the mind blowing distances that they travel on their annual migrations and the food sources that the eat that allows them to develop such a distinctive colour (Hubba Bubba Bubblegum). Away from the TV screens and images of vast salty lakes in Africa, the closest that I could expect to get to them was at a zoo or wildlife park, where a dozen would sit in a large garden pond and prevented from escaping by the clipping of their wings. When I did see them, apparently open to the elements and free to leave I rarely dwelled to look at them because I found it sad that they were effectively imprisoned in the UKs seasonal cycle. They looked sad and forlorn.

Fuchsia pink and a metre tall, they’re pretty hard to miss. Their slow, methodical gait makes them appear graceful and long necks and social instincts make them incredibly photogenic. Which is why – I guess – I took the opportunity to catch a few shots when I found a group close to shore in Khobar.

They’re not uncommon in Khobar. They’re pretty common down the shallow Arabian Gulf coastline from Jubail to Bahrain. Khobar sits in the middle. I’d seen a few within weeks of arriving and, having not expected to see them, was momentarily excited by it. A few weeks down the line and – you could argue sadly – I had become rather used to them. They were as ubiquitous as the Reef Herons that hang out down the front. But, en masse, I still recognise that they cut a pretty impressive shape, so, having the opportunity to get close to them, I made the most of my limited lens capabilities.

I’m not alone. I follow a number of local photographers on Instagram and have noted over the past few weeks that more and more people are making the most of the seasonal influx in numbers and proximity to the sea front. Several of my Insta-buddies have captured far better shots than I. Here are couple, here:

Pretty Flamingo

Pretty Flamingo Too

And there is romance in these shots.

But, I am now going to let you into a secret.

One of the reasons that I took the shot that I have cropped up and heaved onto social media is that I found the sight far from romantic. It was a busy day while I went for my stroll. The temperature was down around the 20C mark and a breeze from the North made walking a really enjoyable. I walked for about three hours. It was a great day out. That afternoon, The Corniche was buzzing. Families were out in force, walking, playing, roller blading or just kicking back and enjoying the weather. I bumped into a Filipino guy playing a guitar – yeah… music in a public place – and everyone was relaxed. The air smelled of sea food and barbecues.

I’d seen the flock of Flamingo some way off and was pleased that I was able to get quite close to them from the shore and – given that they were sleeping – they didn’t stroll off and keep their distance which is quite common for them. At the closest point, I realised that I would get a fair shot of them. Nothing remarkable, but passable shots of the birds.

But I was really pissed off.

A fisherman with the usual array of rods and kit was systematically ripping up and throwing food and plastic waste into the sea. I watched him for a few minutes, Plastic bags, plastic cups and bread. All was going into the sea. He was just chucking it in.

I asked him what he was doing…

He explained that the coloured plastic and the food attracted the fish.

None of the other fisherman – the dozens of other fisherman – were adopting the same or similar approach, so I assume that the guy is a moron rather than an expert.

You can see, the rubbish he was generating was just sitting on the surface and slowing drifting away.

I always knew that I would need to park my western sensibilities in London while I lived in Saudi.

By and large, I have been successful. I carefully boxed my sensibilities up and left them in a loft in Hanwell, West London. Marking the box; “Do not disturb – Hibernating” and drawing a stylised Blue Peter logo on it, I hoped that if anyone stumbled over it, they would assume that the box contained a Z List TV celebrity tortoise and ignore it.

But, increasingly, I am finding my western sensibilities creeping back. Perhaps it’s because I’ve made the choice to return to the UK and have reached the “counting weeks” stage. I’m no Environmental tree hugger, but I found the fisherman’s actions and waste really illogical and frustrating. Although I bit my tongue and didn’t shout him out, I was quite angry with the inconsiderate, wasteful and stupid fucker of a fisherman. Tongue bitten, I walked on.

Now, I’ve already said that I find London a dirty town.

I bloody well have!

Go back to posts from February last year if you doubt me. I’ve grown to associate it with dog shit. I’m here again, now… as I type… and I still think the same.

Dog Shitty City.

Back in Khobar, though, I have to admit that the cities general dirt and grime is one of the least desirable aspects of my life out there. I don’t live in a compound. I do not have a house with a manicured lawn, I live in an apartment attached to a hotel on the edge of an Indian quarter. It’s real life. It isn’t the richest part of town. I’m comparatively affluent. It’s functional, not pretty. And I knew this when I moved, so the dirty streets were expected. I’ve never been bothered. Even when I have seen roaches the size of my thumb and rats the size of small children in the street. Because I’ve always been a five minute stroll (albeit over two monumentally busy roads) from the Corniche.

So the fisherman polluting the sea with his littering shit, pissed me off. But, stepping back, I have to be realistic. Even my beloved Corniche is far from the litter free utopia that I may have implied. I’ve stated that it gets busy. Families utilising the space to eat and entertain on cool winter afternoons and warm summer evenings. Barbecues abound. And so do cats. Stray cats, in their hundreds. And the cats thrive, demonstrating that there is food to be found. Much as I love the space alongside the sea, I have to admit that the concrete benches and sea walls are all stained by dirt. It can be a struggle to find a place to sit where you won’t be surrounded by the waste of the day before. Meat, fish, rice, bread, paper/card/polystyrene packaging. Although there are bins and there are regularly blue overalled cleaners doing their best to tidy away, the Corniche is a sea of chicken bones on most days. The sea is not the clear blue, dream like sea that you would want, you can see that it is often filled with bloated flat breads and rice portions that the locals have decided not to eat. Algae covers the more sheltered corners in hotter months. At times it can be a little grim.

The fisherman that annoyed me is far from alone.

And it is what it is. With western sensibilities safely disguised as a hibernating TV tortoise, I have been able to accept it and make the most of it. And I have. Dirt included, dirt excluded, The Corniche has become my stalwart escape from the bustling city. It still represents freedom. With its relative clean air, its green lawns, shrubs and trees, its wide seascapes and a view of the bridge to Bahrain.

Thinking back, when I first saw Flamingo I noted on Facebook that I had not expected them in a waste filled lagoon next to a building site and a supermarket. Even I if I found rose tinted (fuchsia pink - flamingo tint) glasses in my early days in Saudi, I fear I may be losing them as my departure draws closer.

Time to come home?

Converse Used To Be Good

Another update and another toilet.

July 14^th 2011. The 100 Club. Oxford Street. London.

I note the above was scrawled on the wall adjacent as I took a leak. It made me smile. On and off, I have lived in Converse for over half my life. I like them so much, I have been known to sleep in them but remain otherwise naked. Used to be good? Nah. They still are!

To understand why I was standing in the Gents at the 100 Club, I need to step back a few years. To a summer day in 2008.

In my last post, I spoke of the cyclical music loops at Topshop that the staff became conditioned to ignore.

I recall a day when I strolled across the shop floor toward some dull but vital meeting with a department manager. As I noted last time, you only really took in the music when it warmed your heart and cockles or spat in the face of all that is musically pure and holy. On this day, my ears pricked up at the sound of an angular bass line setting off at a relentless pace, accompanied by feedback, jarring guitar riffs and an obtuse and challenging chord structure. I couldn’t make out the lyrics but the vocals were delivered at the same break necked speed as the bass. It was all underpinned by a swirling, fairground like organ.

I was smitten. It was utterly magical.

I slowed my walk to make sure I took the whole track in. With no phone on me, I couldn’t Shazam it. Other than realising that it was “greatness” incarnate, I had no idea who or what it was. I felt like Tim Smith (Cardiacs) and JJ Burnell (The Stranglers) had had a car crash and the resulting sound was being broadcast to me.

I knew it was on a loop, so over the following days, I kept returning to the shop floor to hear it again. Over the course of the next week, I made up more and more spurious reasons to eschew the safety and comfort of my ivory tower office and step onto the shop floor into the firing line of the stores demanding staff and pesky customers. All because I was determined to hear this beautiful masterpiece one more time, to maybe get a lyric that I could google.

Despite my best efforts, I never heard it again.

Plan B was to resume my normal working patterns in my office but get a copy of the recent store playlist and work through it in my spare time.

A regular complaint of Topshop from its customers was that they never posted or published the playlists in store making it difficult to ID a song that was played. And I was in the same boat, except I had an advantage of Joe or Joanne Public; I could just go and borrow the various discs from the team responsible for updating/uploading them into the system. So I did.

There were dozens of discs. All with about 20-25 tracks. The team responsible filed them in an unhelpful pile in a drawer. Few had content lists, fewer still had dates or anything that may indicate when they had been issued. What I thought would be a ten minute job seemed to stretch into forever. I was left with the formidable task of sitting through all the discs to explore all the music designed to be ignored and find it.

For over a week, I dedicated a couple of hours each night to the search. My Colliers Wood flat rang out to the sounds of the appalling and anodyne gush that passes as “Alternative”, these days. I’ve said before. I love and hate music in equal measure. At times it was a pretty tough task.

Most tracks were skipped after thirty seconds. They clearly were not what I had heard and they left me cold. Forgettable.

Many tracks that I played through resulted from acts of involuntary masochism. I would sit open mouthed and stunned as the tepid and insipid numbed me to the point of oblivion. Coldplay. Kings of Leon. Foo Fighters. Tragic.

There was some pretty shite stuff being ignored at Topshop in 2008.

But some demanded my total attention. They seemed beautiful. Smitten, I became distracted while I wallowed in aural delight, exploring back catalogues of bands that I had never previously heard. A fair few times, I fell head over heels in love.

After two weeks, I had reviewed each and every disc available. And my song wasn’t included on any of them.

Did I imagine it?

I began to question myself. Had I, created an epic soundtrack in my own mind to take me away from the moment?

It began to convince myself that it was conceivable.

Thinking back to the day I heard it, I was probably on my way to have a conversation with a shoe concession who had lost a pair of shoes sometime in the previous 18 months and wanted someone to look at CCTV images to see who had been near them, or some such nonsense. I would have been walking through the store with leaden shoes, a leaden head and a heavy heart. The meeting was probably offset against a background of dealing with one of my staff who had managed to get another two weeks signed off work by their doctor because they had a slightly sore throat or felt “an ickle bit funny”.

It was entirely possible that my little, fizzy brain had given up on the bollocks that was weighing me down and I had created something that would make me feel momentarily happy… If only I was able to have transcribed what I had imagined; I could have made some money.

Step forwards to a night out in late 2008 or early 2009.

Somewhere in London.

I meet up with my brother, who produces a small CD sized bag and offers me a Birthday or Christmas present. I doubt that it was around either my birthday or Christmas when this happened. My brother and I have a habit of presenting and receiving gifts early or late. Year’s merge into one.

Unsurprisingly, as usual, the bag contained a CD.

Silvery. Thunderer and Excelsior.

My brother enthused – he had heard them on the Gideon Coe show on radio 6 – and kept using the words like, “Cardiacs” and “Sparks” and “Incredible” and “Best Album of the Year” and “Whhhhaaaahhhhhhooooowwwwwwww” all the while grinning like the type of demented cat only Lewis Carroll could imagine. 

I had already latched onto two key words. Sparks and Cardiacs.

These two words were enough to make me need to hear the album. But Alex went on to explain that one of the tracks appeared to have Sparks lyrics being spoken across a solo (still haven’t found that, yet), another detailed the demise of a class of UK diesel locomotive and a third listed off a series of London’s Lost Rivers as a near chant during a fade out.

My brother had clearly thought through his sales pitch well. He sold me three irresistible ideas and concepts. What more could I want from an album?... See notes, below.

But he missed out a few more surprises…

>> Allusions to ghosts and flying saucers above cemeteries.

>> And a muse about the demise of a ship which was crewed entirely by mice, bar the ships cat.

But I think that it still took a couple of days to find the time to give it a listen. I was probably locked in the rota-cokey shift patterns I wrote about last year.

You can guess the rest?

Track two. Devil in the Detail.

The sound of an angular bass line setting off at a relentless pace, accompanied by feedback, jarring guitar riffs and an obtuse and challenging chord structure. I couldn’t make out the lyrics but the vocals were delivered at the same break necked speed as the bass. It was all underpinned by a swirling, fairground like organ.

Sitting in my Colliers Wood living room, I was immediately taken back to that solitary walk across the sales floor at Topshop. Although the album turned out to sound like the inside of my head, I realised that I hadn’t imagined it to make myself feel calm and free of daemons. It was real. Very real. Almost flesh and blood. And it became more beautiful as I listened to it over and over and over.

It’s late 2015 and I still feel warm each time I hear the album.

By the time I got to see Silvery live, for the first time at The 100 Club on July 14^th 2011, I’d found a live bootleg from the Bull & Gate (RIP) and waited at the edge of my seat for the second of three official album releases – Railway Architecture. Back catalogue entirely absorbed, I’d read a million words about them and become lost in their old world videos. I’d had a moment where, back on the shop floor, on the receiving end of an earnest whinge, for something I or someone else had done or hadn’t done… who cares? I’d bitten my tongue to the point of bleeding to stop myself shouting at them:

“Blah Blah Fuckity Blah. Don’t trouble me with your bollocks! I’m listening to Nishikado!”

And that night in 2011, alongside my brother and about another twenty fair souls they were as good and great as I imagined that they would be. Like the best gigs, I was pulled into a vortex where my brain could relax and swirl around and around like something out of The Wizard of Oz leaving me giddy and wound up like a clock-work toy by the end. But – for all my passion for the moment - I sensed that James Orman wasn’t feeling it that night. He seemed disengaged and remote… the rest of the band had to persuade him to play “You Give A Little Love”.

But it mattered not, to me. I was lost. But found.

Now, I’m not going to encourage you to visit Topshop. I doubt they play Silvery anymore.

And I’m not going to say that you should all go out and buy everything that Silvery have ever released. That would be senseless.

But, I will say that, if you don’t go out and buy everything that they have ever released, I consider you an idiot.

For Reference:

Christ On A Bike

The Charge of the Light Brigade

                                      

NOTES

I suppose that the album could include Sarah Nixey making a fake BBC public announcement regarding an imminent nuclear threat to London. I would have to wait until 2015 to have that appear on an album, thanks to Luke Haines.