The saying goes that you can never have too much of a good thing. And I’m a sucker for sayings. So in my over-enthusiasm for music and writing, my diary at work often looked something like this over the summer; three gigs and two festivals in fourteen days, enjoying the company of 240,000 people in the process; nearly a quarter of a million people who loved music and beer as much as me. Not bad for someone who claimed they didn’t like crowds…
Here are some cheeky bits that didn’t make it to print…
Lounge on the Farm Festival- Kent
Armed with a pop up tent and a crate of cider, I was prepared to loose my camping virginity. Yes, I am twenty-three years old and had never been camping before. I don’t know how I feel about a serious lack of showering facilities but I do know how I feel about portaloos, and more importantly, suffering a hangover without the comfort of carbohydrates and a box set of House. But hay ho duty calls.
My and my friend affectionately named ‘Foogasey’ headed off to Kent Saturday morning, the name Foogasey originating from a holiday together aged 16 where we met a group of shaved-headed scousers in the villa up the road to us, who apart from spending their entire holiday stoned (and flying home early when their stash ran out) called eachother ‘foogasey’ constantly in a strong Liverpudlian accent. It’s funny how when you’re a teenage girl, the bigger the idiot and the lower the IQ, the more wildly attractive a guy appears to be. (My mum would argue here that despite no longer being a teenage girl, my dating history shows not much has changed..)
I don’t think even to this day me and my friend have any idea what that word means-but it has been our nickname for each other ever since.
Anyway, back in a field in Kent, after traipsing through the grass finding a spot, we somehow manage to park our tent in what seems to be a subconscious walkway; even though it was definitely not on any official path, the tents plotted in such a fashion that everybody seemed to walk straight into ours. After the 18th person tripped over the string attaching my Tesco tent to the mud, I enquired as to what, if you don’t mind, is the godamn problem? A woozy teenager scratched his head thoughtfully and then said helpfully- “You know what it is? This tent wasn’t here yesterday.”
There you go guys, your first piece of advice when it comes to festival camping, don’t arrive on the Saturday, arrive on the Friday- because otherwise people will have cemented their field map in their minds and the amount of alcohol that’s consumed means that regardless of the fact that your tent is bright purple, people will simply not see it.
Me and my Foogasey proceeded to drink an entire crate of cider before moving on to the VIP tent, listening to Katy B, Ellie Goulding and Example play live out on the grass. This particular area was full of very suave looking people in fashionable ray bans and wellington boots that were obviously far too expensive to really be for mud, one particular fellow lounging on the grass like a Greek at a feast waiting to be fed grapes, sporting instead of a toga, the welly/rayban combo. He tells me casually as he smokes a cigar (what kind of festival is this?) that he works for the Mercury prize, but is leaving the music industry to become a pub landlord.
“Why?”
“Because people can’t download pints for free,” he says mournfully.
As the sun sets, me and my Foogasey proceed to ‘the cow shed’ which is literally just that- a huge barn that was built for raving, dubstep and drum’n’bass pulsating into a heaving crowd and we dance like the sun will never rise, sweating like its an aerobics marathon, and not caring at all. We stagger back in the dark, now hoping we will indeed fall upon our tent the way 25 thousand other people no doubt have done during the evening, and we end up being momentarily distracted, ‘planking’ on bails of hay and eating late night burgers and wondering why didn’t we buy more cider?
***
Waking up in a hot, sweaty tent with a stinking hangover was officially on the list of one of the most horrific mornings of.my.life. Do you know how early the sun rises in the summer months? Damn early I’ll tell you, a fact I was blissfully ignorant of until I had the pleasure of sleeping in a florescent synthetic bubble which was rather like being in a plastic pocket in a microwave- but instead of a spag bol churning inside, it was two Essex girls churning full of cider and rum.
So apparently this is the deal with festivals- you’re expected to get up hungover, early, deal with the hangover with no comfort and most importantly no shower or hot running water and a portaloo so full I could smell it before I saw it. And then you want me to start drinking alcohol again? I’m going to say here that I don’t care what you think of me after reading the next paragrapgh. I stand by my hangover-fulled decision.
“Foogasey- lets rock and rolla.” We discarded our tent- or sweatfest 2011- into the nearest bin after discovering the bugger was not quite as easy to fold back up as it was to pop out. We then jumped into my buddy’s air-conditioned vehicle and went off to Burger King. And then we went home. I don’t do camping Foogasey.
Foo Fighters, Milton Keynes Bowl
It seemed to be a bit of a running joke that I was a gig reviewer afraid of crowds, a city girl terrified of the tube, but one of our gang that fine day was a scaffolder afraid of heights; I couldn’t quite tell whether this made me feel better, or just feel a little bit sorry for the pair of us.
I probed him for some pearls of wisdom- at one point his feet wouldn’t leave the ground (making his job slightly difficult I imaged) but now he was at top of buildings on a daily basis. What did he do to make the fear go away?? When did it go? Somehow I didn’t think he was going to give me a date for the calendar, but I wanted to know that one day, however far in the future, that goblin clinging to my ankles who pulls me to my knees more frequently than I would like to admit, one day he would be gone and my life would be mine again without me subconsciously checking at every corner whether he was lurking in there, waiting to get to get me.
The scaffolder thought for a moment. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. “Eventually, it just went away. You just have to get on with it don’t you. After a while, because I had to, eventually it got a bit better, and now, it’s just ok.
Great.
I think that although not quite the answer I was hoping for, there was an important slice of wisdom underneath the shrug of his shoulders. No one else can help you or give you the answer- there isn’t enough valium, diazepam, any of the pams to make whatever your problem is go away. The hardest advice, but the only advice is that no matter what it is that is causing you to suffer, you have to face it, head on, over and over and over. And if you can do that, regardless of how completely shit it feels, eventually you see that fear is nothing. I mean that logically- it has no weight or form, it has no substance apart from what you feed it yourself, and you feed it in avoiding it.
At the top of a building or in the depth of anxiety and depression, if you just keep ploughing on into it and simply refuse to give it an inch of your life, one day you’ll see that that goblin clinging around your ankles isn’t there at all.
But for now he is here, he’s amongst the 70,000 people in Milton Keynes despite the sunshine because he never strays far from me no matter where I run. But I loose him in the songs and the atmosphere, and for a while, all I hear is the music.
***
Rock concerts have this strange ability to make me fall in love with men that usually I would recommend to take a shower before I let them anywhere near me. The lead singer of the day’s supporting act- Biffy Cyro- being a prime example here, having me utterly entranced with the killer combo of A. playing the guitar, B. blue eyes and tattoos and C. well, being a rock star. Rock concerts also have the ability to bring out the inner rocker in even the most reserved of us, the guys in our little gang having ripped shirts and bandanas round their head by the end of the evening. One of them was going two days in a row, and was starting this marathon with a mammoth hangover- throwing up in the cab on the way to Milton Keynes. He was so green he possibly was from Mars and I marvelled at his love of for this band that he was going to put himself through this, but when in doubt, drink, and it wasn’t long before he was bouncing around like the rest of us.
Milton Keynes is quite simply, a glorious venue. It’s like sitting in God’s cereal bowl, sunshine pouring in, space to sit on the grass, Biffy Cyro, Death Cab for Cutie and the unbeatable Foo Fighters completely taking over my life from 1pm-1am.
The most important thing I learnt that fine day was the importance of the mosh pit- a rite of passage in the world of live music. I was slightly unsure if mosh-pitting with rock fans was maybe a slightly ambitious one to tick off my anxiety list, but the boys would stride forward disappearing to the front returning a few songs later breathless, gleaming with sweat and bruises but most importantly- beaming. Smiles radiating as they explained to me that mosh-pitting was the only way to enjoy a gig- to throw yourself around, loose yourself in the music (and other fans) and not worry about the bones being smashed to pieces beneath your skin. A few buckets of cider served as dutch courage and with the atmosphere being so delicious in its fever and excitement, I heard myself say- yeh, why not- wait for meeeee!
Well, I must report that I rocked the socks off that mosh pitt- apart from that fact my 8-day old camera was smashed to smithereens. I was smashed to smithereens. But mosh pitting is good stuff guys. Its like a friendly punch up- everyone picks each other up, friendly rock-loving strangers peeling me off the floor as I tumbled and ran and threw myself around the tight tornado that had formed 20 metres from the stage, Dave Grohl so close he could almost definitely catch the kisses I was blowing at him (if he would stop tossing his hair around for a second.)
“Dude- we forgot to eat!” It was 3am and our bodies were running solely on large plastic cups of cider by this point, my Weetabix at 10am being a long time ago. Our exasperated cabbie had nearly lost the will to live looking for us among the thousands of drunk and tired fans taking into consideration that Milton Keynes consists of nothing but roundabout after roundabout and in our collective state of merry dishevelment the only directions for him to find us was- “We’re at a roundabout! We’re at a damn round about! Where are you?”
To which he consistently replied: “I’m at a roundabout!”
Finally united we then hit the most ridiculous traffic with road works on the M something mixed with 70,000 rock fans dispersing.
“Mr cab driver, how many miles to go?” I asked hopefully as we went along at a pace that would make snails look like Formula One cars.
“Fifty seven.” He mumbled. I tossed and turned, hitting the uncomfortable point between drunkenness and sobriety that usually you go through while sleeping, waking up with the finished product of a hangover without having to live through the transition aswell. I dozed fitfully, waking up 45minutes later.
“Mr cab driver, how many miles to go now?”
“Fifty six.”
Are you freaking kidding me!? My bladder screamed. I suddenly had a startlingly clear epiphany- we were going to die of old age in that cab.
Four and half hours later at 6am with the early morning sunshine breaking through, I crawled into bed, my ears still ringing, my jaw aching from all the smiling and yelling for 16hours. Best.gig.ever.
Professor Green- Somerset House
Somerset House by the River Thames on a warm summers evening, a cheeky bit of VIP and a large alcoholic beverage is a pretty agreeable combination for a Thursday, or at least it would be without the bonus of an annoying male chewing your ear off so you can’t actually pay attention to what’s going on up on stage…
The amount of bollocks this guy has in terms of confidence whilst talking to me, grows exactly in proportion to how much shit he’s shovelled up his nose. Now without launching into an anti drugs tirade here, you have to admit, the white stuff does seem to make even the most moronic of men suddenly think they’re a bit of a Casanova. ‘A whiff of the white does not a good looking bloke make.’ Shakespeare, I’m sure, would agree.
I’m doing my best to use the subtle art of body language to show this gentleman I would love him to sod off so I can enjoy the gig, considering I don’t know who he is and he’s spitting on my face as he talks, his jaw about to come off its hinge as if chewing something invisible.
“Did I tell you I just got back from Malia on Sunday?”
Oh dear.
I get a full and detailed account of this trip that leaves me wanting to take a shower when suddenly he drops what I think is supposed to be the winning ticket in his wooing technique;
“I work for Barclays Capital.” He stops for dramatic effect. “Yep, yep you’re right, I am indeed a banker boy.”
Dear god. He actually used those words, and then, smoothing his suit jacket with his palms, he winked at me.
Mate, a wally is a wally, regardless of how you dress it up. He had apparently followed the expected rites of passage- boys holiday to a shitty resort, sex, STDs, cheap drugs, dirty hangovers, dull job title- but I wasn’t quite convinced that the final product was a man worth being spat on for an evening. He was still grinning gormlessly at me, apparently not noticing that I hadn’t even remotely participated in the last 20 minutes of the conversation, with even Professor Green fighting to be heard over this boys insistent waffling. I don’t think he could see the words ‘loosing’ and ‘battle’ floating in the air, but to be fair, it wasn’t so much a loosing battle as it was the battlefield after Mel Gibson had dropped his Scottish-ass over it Braveheart style.
Bye Bye banker boy.
-Oh, and Professor Green was really good by the way.
Thursday, 20 October 2011
Sunday, 2 October 2011
Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: Music Related Life and Encounters
(Part 1)
Writing breathes life when it contains something that means something to the person holding the pen, and so having the opportunity to review and write about some of the best artists has been a bucket of fun but not always suitable for print.... Here are just a few of the highlights - the stuff that didn’t make into The Independent…
It’s probably important to take into consideration before we enter this music filled world, that before I got this job, I had never been to a gig. Not that I wasn’t a fan of all things music. But to say I was not a fan of crowds was possibly an understatement in a much longer story (For another day.) More and more with this job I seemed to place myself in front of things that I thought I couldn’t do; tubes, crowds, lifts, trains- any crowded small spaces, which seemed nothing short of unfortunate and downright exhausting, until I can across this paragraph one day;
‘We attract that which we fear most into our lives, so we may know what our fears are, face them, and master them.’
Diana Cooper
* * *
David Guetta- Brixton Academy
Brixton, from whichever angle it’s looked at, is just not somewhere I think I want to live. Ever. I don’t quite know how to go about describing this infamous part of London without slipping into stereotypes or regurgitated opinions, but there was a sharps bin in the porta-loo toilets of the Wetherspoons- and so I think that probably sums it up.
The streets this particular warm evening were lined with people covered in neon paint and very little clothes- a slice of Malia/ Falaraki or whichever Brit-endorsed island takes your fancy, heading for one place- Brixton academy to worship the DJ-ing legend that is Mr Guetta.
Inside was a hot sweaty jungle, thousands upon thousands of bodies dancing as if that Saturday night was to be the final sunset, the body heat radiating to such a temperature that it could be felt from the entrance, you could barely move inside without being covered in someone else’s sweat. This happened to be the exact combination of elements that would usually have me running in the opposite direction.
But I couldn’t write a review from outside. So beer in hand- off I plunged into the jungle.
And oh what a jungle. The best way to describe this gig would be somewhere along the line of it being the love-child of a passionate affair between Las Vegas and Ibiza in the height of the season, with a light show behind the decks that was like Disneyland on drugs mixed with Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory on an LSD trip. This was music, when it completely engulfs you, when it’s the only thing that matters, when you can’t remember your own name and don’t even want to and when pitching up a tent and living in Brixton academy forever sounds like your vocation.
The best thing about David Guetta when you see him live is his facial expressions when he’s DJing. He looks so ecstatic at the music he is playing, looking up wide-eyed from the decks with such delight to see a collection of random party lovers enjoying the music he’s passionate about. There’s something very genuine about the blonde Frenchman, a man so in demand by every musician in the charts, he’s moulded pop into an entirely new dance genre that the mainstream are lapping up by the gallon.
Down in Brixton, he climbed onto the decks, arms spread wide, almost Jesus-like with the florescent glow of lights behind him raving away. Somehow I managed to get the Phrase ‘Guetta is God’ into my review. And they printed it.
I woke up the next morning with the feeling (no not just the hangover feeling) that something very significant had happened to me, although I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I’d rumbled in the jungle and didn’t flip out and panic. Last night a DJ saved my life…
Camden Crawl- Razorlight/Tychy Stryder/Lethal Bizzle/ CockandBull Kid
Camden to me is the Narnia of London; technically part of the same city, but a different side of the coin: you’re never quite sure who you’re going to meet …The crawl had gigs taking place all day and night in numerous bars from one end of Camden to the other and I’d spent the day happily drinking Corona and going from one venue to another skipping ques with the magic thing called a press pass with friends, when who do we bump into? Pete Doherty….
Doherty strolled in front of me at the cash point and I couldn’t resist the temptation- I leant over as the screen flashed ‘you have insufficient funds’.
Well well well..
He turned around giving me a full frontal view of actually how unattractive his was. Pete is the type of guy you want to hose down with a jet wash and stick on a sunbed for a few sessions; dirty, pale, and in need of a bit of Lynx. His skin was sallow but not drawn, in fact he looked slightly poggy-faced like a badly put together plasticine man, wearing some ridiculous hat that I’m sure somewhere was ‘cutting edge.’ Just not here around people with their sanity intact. (Can I just chuck in here- why oh why do men where skinny jeans? And what oh what is wrong with girls that like men in skinny jeans???)
“Can I borrow 20 quid?” He asks me.
I stare at him as he looks unfazed at me and the other people in the que. Someone whips out their wallet.
“Yeh here you are mate, yer there you go Pete” the guy behind me says.
“Thanks mate he replies and scuttles off.
I probably would have given him some money, but he’s not my ‘mate.’ So I didn’t.
Swedish House Mafia – Alexandra Palace
The record label EMI decided that they liked me and my 5 star review for their boy Guetta, (they have since sent me every single he has ever consequently worked on and his album download 3 weeks before general release thank youuu) and so sent me four VIP tickets for Swedish House Mafia at Alexandra Palace for a review.
The atmosphere in the entire area of North London was brewing like a cauldron of bubbling excitement but we were so busy getting pie-eyed on the interesting combo of jaegger bombs and Cornas in the Wetherspoons (it’s always a Wetherspoons) that we missed the Swedish DJs themselves who were having a pre drink in the VIP bar we had access to. Damn the jaeggermister.
Ally-Pally’s impossibly high ceilings give it an outside feel - something that many revellers took literally as cigarettes were smoked all night and looking around I had a feeling that no amount of security could control this crowd. This was verified by the ‘apples and pears’ style voice that rolled through the crowd calling ‘Pills, mdma, gggggget cha pills and mdma right ere…’
Raving away to their hit tracks- pumping electric rhythms with snappy baselines- I turned around to see one of my brother’s friends, who from the expression on his face, looked like he couldn’t remember where he was and what he was doing. Considering there was 25,000 people in there, it was quite a coincidence that ‘Crazy Liam’ was there wandering about. It’s not quite so much of a coincidence that he was on his own in a state of merry dishevelment; having been on a group holiday with him in the past, the nick-name ‘Crazy Liam’ arose from his entertaining yet worryingly erratic behaviour when under the influence; including pouring bottles of San Miguel over his head grinning like a mad man, and humping the sand in the middle of the night informing us all he was in fact, a turtle.
We took him under our wing, or under our legs- as he became a perfect candidate for sitting on his shoulders sing at the top of our voices “Whose gonna save the world tonight..”
Razorlight/ The Noisettes- Clapham Common
When the rain falls and it’s festival season, you pray to the Lord for Hunter welly boots, and failing that, pray for a Moroccan style VIP tent with unlimited alcohol.
Clapham common was wet and grey and my buddy and I positioned ourselves on the cushions in what looked like the Moroccan tea tent that seen in the desert of Sex and the City 2. Not bad. Also not bad was the company- we befriended a group of guys that to be honest didn’t look like they belonged with the funky looking music mogals (neither do I to be fair), aged between thirty-and thirty five and completely uninterested in any of the artists playing- in fact they hadn’t heard of most of them. BUT what they did have was unlimited free drinks tokens as their buddy was head of security and so viola, they had two new best buds in the form of two Essex girls.
We continued to get sloshed sheltered from the rain until our pyramid of beer cans grew to an impressive height and I realised I bet go and review some music.
Razorlight were belting out the classics (write some new material soon mate?) Johnny borrell looking like a rock star in so much as he looked dishevelled and we danced in the rain and the mud to those cracking guitar rifts.
The merriment continued as we wandered into the nearest pub along Clapham Common, a pub that had the genius idea of giving us wet and muddy music lovers a box of Jenga. As we descended into new levels of merriment, became more and more difficult (especially with forfeits of shots) until it was a complete impossible game that no one in the history of the earth could have ever possibly have done so why was in invented- bah humbug.
Read the Reviews:
David Guetta
Camden Crawl
Swedish House Mafia
Razorlight
Part 2- Foo Fighters, Black Eyed Peas, Take That and many more…
Wednesday, 21 September 2011
The Essex Girl Guide To City Life
The Reluctant Commuters Guide to Commuting
Get An Oyster Card. Then Find Out What The Hell An Oyster Card Is.
You can’t officially class yourself as anything resembling a ‘Londoner’ unless you own an oyster card- a strange blue piece of plastic that you slap everywhere from buses to trains apparently saving money. I can never work out all the differences between a paper travel card, pay as you go, or how the hell to work out which (if either) is better for your bank balance. The key is to not jam it into ticket slots when you’re half asleep at Liverpool street station. Its slap, not jam, slap not jam guys, and this key phrase will ensure you won’t blow your cover as having no idea whatsoever about London, commuting or how the hell to cope with early mornings.
Watch Out For Random Parades Of Horses.
Cars aren’t really the hazard in London town I’ve found, mainly because they’re too many of them tangled with black cabs and buses to go very fast. The main hazard commuters should be wary of are cyclists, creatures that ride a fine line(literally) between being a pedestrian and motorist, crossing the line when it suits them, ignoring traffic lights when they’re red and switching to pedestrian mode as they continue the other way in line with the green man. Cyclists love to guess when the light are going to turn green and think, ‘what the hell, it’ll probably be green in a few seconds,’ striding off into the sea of cars, seemingly unaware of the pedestrians not leaving the appearance of a green light down to guesswork. 
The other hazard to watch for is horses. Some Londoners sweat through Hyde Park in spandex and expensive looking trainers with springs in them at 7.30am, some Londoners take their horses out for a ride before their morning espresso. There is a separate lane in the park for horse riding as well as the cycle lane (a lane I often wander into with my headphones on, oblivious to angry bike bells being rung at me by people in aggressive looking helmets and knee protection). A Horse parade caught me off guard one morning across Marble Arch- a 40 beast strong line towing carts and Cannnons ridden by various stern looking men and women in stiff looking uniform. Horse parades do not stop at traffic lights I discovered, even when it was a green man I couldn’t cross the road for hooves and carts. I was rather indignant. Don’t Go Shopping On The Way Home
You may think your being clever in avoiding the devil that is rush hour but its far more likely that you’ll get into hazardous situations..
I leisurely browsed the shoes in a high street shoe store before strolling out and was half way down the road when I felt someone tapping me on the shoulder
“You dropped your shoe.”
I pulled out my headphones. “My what?” I looked at the girl who was helpfully holding out a shoe in my direction. A shoe with a grey plastic security tag on it.
The shoe had become attached to my bag that had a woolly cardigan through the handles as I left the shop, then dropped on the pavement, but the girl was now looking at me, then the tag, then back at me as slowly she came to her conclusion. Before she could cry ‘Thief!’ I hastily interject-,
“It’s not mine.”
Good one. Because no thief has ever used that line.
The girl doesn’t move and is still holding out the shoe, now slightly unsure of what to do next. I decide that honesty is the best policy;
“It just got caught on my bag on the way out.” She doesn’t believe me. I try a different tactic. “Just chuck it in the bin.” Now she definitely doesn’t believe me.
“The bin?”
Christ will this child give up??
At this point I wish I had just said thank you, taken the shoe and taken it back to the shop, rectifying the mistake instead of somehow now being involved in theft and destroying the evidence. The girl skirts over to the bin, chucks the shoes and scuttles off not looking back at me. We’re going down.
I leisurely browsed the shoes in a high street shoe store before strolling out and was half way down the road when I felt someone tapping me on the shoulder
“You dropped your shoe.”
I pulled out my headphones. “My what?” I looked at the girl who was helpfully holding out a shoe in my direction. A shoe with a grey plastic security tag on it.
“It’s not mine.”
Good one. Because no thief has ever used that line.
The girl doesn’t move and is still holding out the shoe, now slightly unsure of what to do next. I decide that honesty is the best policy;
“It just got caught on my bag on the way out.” She doesn’t believe me. I try a different tactic. “Just chuck it in the bin.” Now she definitely doesn’t believe me.
“The bin?”
Christ will this child give up??
At this point I wish I had just said thank you, taken the shoe and taken it back to the shop, rectifying the mistake instead of somehow now being involved in theft and destroying the evidence. The girl skirts over to the bin, chucks the shoes and scuttles off not looking back at me. We’re going down.
Don’t Use The Toilet On Trains.
I silently press the brightly lit ‘close the fucking door’ icon and it slides gracefully shut and I wonder if it would be plausible to just stay in here until my stop, or perhaps just until forever.
Don’t Trust Your Blackberry Sat Nav.
I’ve spent a rather embarrassing amount of time wandering around the city unable to look up from the little black thing that has grown into an extension of my hand. The main problem is that for some reason my sat nav puts St Pauls cathedral 10 metres east of where it actually sits, and being a rather large landmark, this slightly confused my geographic understanding of Bank and Cheapside. Considering my train out of the city lies somewhere between all that, it took a while to get home that first week. ‘Blackberry-itus’ is the realization that even though there must have been a time where you didn’t actually own one, it’s so implausible, it sounds like a myth. It is an old legend that people coped without bbm, facebook, twitter and emails pouring out of one screen, letalone texts and actual phone calls. A blackberry or I phone is like a city passport along with the oyster card: they won’t let you in the city walls without one.Beware Of Men In Suits
There is a rule me and my fellow amigas have discovered up here; that men automatically look 20% better looking when you put them in a suit. This makes the east side of central London a rather tricky place as you can imagine- rather like an optical illusion where seemingly good looking, successful males gather in herds and throw money around. It’s not until you get a little closer that the illusion looses it’s shine slightly -give a young man too much money and a room rent free in his parent’s house, the product doesn’t exactly scream boyfriend material… The more I watch the jungle between Liverpool st and Fenchurch st, the more I wonder whether they live in the same London as everybody else- this strange faction whereby a culture of wanker-ish behaviour is cultivated from a young age, fed with food, beer and bonus’s … (Miaow)
Always Have A Plan B. (i.e Diazpam.)
If you afraid of the tube, then it’s nothing short of unfortunate if the geography of your office requires you to sit on it for long periods. Everyday.
I don’t quite know how to even expand on this sentence, the understatement that it is, so the advice I’ll offer for now is, you have to really want it, for it to be worth it.
I have always harboured this sense that there are two types of Londoners; those that get on the tube, and those that do not. I can’t quite pinpoint my desperation to be one of those placid commuters who show no recognition of discomfort or anxiety at being stuffed in to a steel tube a hundred meters underground, but I really want to be one of those people, because I decided somewhere along the line that for whatever reason, that what Londoners are. The only problem lies in the fact that even writing that makes me feel ill, and I spent the first days of my city life paying 30p to wretch in station toilets at the thought of the central line I then had to get on, and would only get on knowing my pockets were lined with diazepam. Just in case.
I have never once been late for work though.
Thursday, 30 June 2011
Sugar Hut Aren't Happy (But they don't really give a S***)
And so the reply....Apologies that this took a while to post up- but if you care to read a good example of how NOT to run your customer care department read on….
I felt by the end of this exasperated email, that rather than apologise, they thought it was better I didn’t come at all, as if I should know that this is how the Sugarhut is run, and furthermore be grateful and put up with it..
Dear Ms. Miller
Your blog was indeed brought to our attention and our response, which we were about to post, is below.
I was rather flattered by this- and slightly disappointed- would have been much more fun if they have actually had the balls to post this online rather than back out an email it over…
We were very disappointed to read your blog Melody and, taking into account all your criticisms, wonder what made you want to visit to Sugar Hut. You were clearly aware that the club would be very busy, yet you queued “in the cold” for an hour to get in and stayed long enough to sample all the different areas.
Oh no, Sugarhut is disappointed in me- Thie paragraph suggests that I should of known better, that I should have given up before I got to the door and I’m the silly one for even entering and trying to find a space to breathe in all the different areas. Silly me.
“Go to the Sugar hut, Essex’s greatest tourist attraction! But do so at your own peril, because we don’t actually care if you do come along, and really we secretly laughing at all you silly customers that que in the cold, actually que, and then stay…..”
As regards the points you raise:
Thank you for bringing the confusion as to entry price to our attention and this is being addressed. We will happily send you a £5 refund if you let us know your address, although you did have the option to walk away on the night if you felt you were being “robbed”.
Is it me or is there a hint of sarcasm there? And lets be honest, its not a ‘confusion’- (MASSIVE air quotes please.) Unless the girl on the door can’t tell the time (a serious possibility) then there’s no confusion, someone knew they were making a hefty profit. Its very kind of her to offer to post me my fiver, but what about the rest of the group? Or the hundreds of people in front of me?
We operate a zero tolerance policy on drugs and make no apologies for conducting searches before entry.
Yep, because that was my problem here- that I wasn’t allowed drugs on the premises.
We have received no complaints from our regular customers (yes we do have them) regarding the increase of visitors and the club’s capacity is 1,000 and not 2,000 as you erroneously state.
Again with the sarcasm, (but bravo on the big word) and I think if it she had read my blog correctly , she'd see that I was pointing out I had been a regular customer.
The licensing laws state that plastic glasses are used throughout the venue and we must adhere to this rule.
Then it's probably not a good idea to advertise yourselves as a ‘West End Experience’ then because if its the Law you're worried about, then I’m pretty sure you're breaking advertising laws in thre somewhere.
Michael Norcross is a successful businessman and has reached where he is today by hard work and being involved in every aspect of his ventures. He has always been present at the club to ensure that guests are happy and things are running smoothly, although his profile has undeniably been raised by “The Only Way Is Essex” and he is now recognised.
Oooh its Michael now is it, forgive me. Being involved in every aspect of a nightclub involves tasks that I sincerely sympathise with, watching him smooze with legs blondes right left and centre. Hard work indeed.
To reiterate, we are sorry you didn’t enjoy your evening with us but can assure you that our regular clientele is enjoying the company of the wide variety of visitors from all over the UK and, thankfully, opinions such as yours are rare.
Regards
Karen Rogers
PA to Michael J. Norcross
MIAOW!!
I was perhaps a tad optimistic to think that this woman would have offered some sort of conciliation to our group, invite us back again to prove we were wrong about all the above. But by making it quite clear that I am wrong, that it doesn’t even matter anyway because they have enough other clients, just proves my point. Who cares if you provide lousy service, overcharge, when the tills are bulging? Because she’s right- those doors have ques outside all weekend- they don’t need the little minions because the name is big enough that presently it feeds itself.
The Sunday Express funnyily enough ran a piece that following week saying the exact same thing with a slightly more bemused tone- that Sugar Hut is a tourist attraction- not a West end experience nightclub.
So lets agree to disagree Karen, my opinion is definitely not as rare as you think, but while the doors are jammed full of orange wannabes, enjoy- but all cheap tourist attractions loose their sparkle when the novelty has worn off, and what used to be- dare I say it- a classy place to spend an evening, will very soon become a joke without the show to prop it up. Lets hope they makes a series three eh Micky…
Oh, and Karen, you can post that fiver back to me.
Yours sincerely,
Melodys Pen
Follow me on twitter- https://twitter.com/melodys_pen
Monday, 6 June 2011
Sugar Hut? It Ain't So Sweet...
It’s not Panto season right? I don’t see D-list celebs prancing around being fairy godmothers and what-not? But make the mistake of stepping into the vajazzled world of Brentwood’s Sugar Hut and you’ll find yourself trapped in a groundhog day of cringe-worthy shenanigans…
The queue for entry is an hour. An hour. By the time you’ve sobered up and got through the door after a scrupulous drug search, £15 is taken from you for the pleasure of your company.
“15 quid?” I say to the girl on the door, “It better be worth it.”
“Oh ma gawd yer, like totally. It ‘s completely ramo-ed in there.” She promises.
Gee thanks, after standing in the cold and being robbed I feel so much better knowing I have the pleasure of being elbowed and rubbed up against once I get through the door.
Every corner was jammed, which of course is great for the Sugarhut’s pockets, but not so great for the mood of the place, stripping the venue of any atmosphere and securing its status as a tourist attraction. It’s not a club but a visitation site along the map of Essex. What happens to the customers that came here before the show? They get trampled on by 2,000 tangoed girls with eyelashes so thick and heavy their eyes are held open only by the force of the Redbull in the jaggerbombs coursing through their veins. It’s a live panto version of the ‘Only Way is Essex’ where the truck loads of ‘Geordie Shore’ hopefuls have taken the cameo roles.
A TV screen flashes with images of people having an amazing time while the barmaid chews gum and serves me wine in plastic glasses, having waited in line in another queue for 20 minutes.
“As seen on TV” the screen boasts, “Beautiful people everynight of the week, the West End experience in Essex.”
West End? You’ve just served me my drinks in PLASTIC glasses mate. The only thing West End about this debacle is the prices. I look around for the beautiful people…
Look, it’s a nightclub, I’m not going to be snooty at the disheveled state of the clientele, regardless even of their substance of choice. I've spent enough time in bars and clubs to know that everyone falls over in their beautiful shoes at some point in their lives, it’s a law of gravity- but this slapstick-style scene was in a league of it’s own, a league devoid of any gravitational laws or common sense. I had never seen so many girls that couldn't walk in their shoes; there certainly was not a pair of ballet pumps in sight. Vajazzled girls staggered everywhere, more than several taking a serious tumble during the evening. But hay, that’s all in jest, it just adds to the comedy in this particular scene. It’s what Mollie from the Saturday’s is to Sienna Miller; a poor man’s version of a good thing, something that looks pretty similar but hasn't quite got the edge. Or the class.
Of course it’s important to note that when the original product is a tongue-in-cheek look at the life of Essex-landers, the copy version is never going to be a pretty sight, but this was something else. One guy is so off his face as he rolls around the sofa in his expensive ‘booth’ area he passes over the magnum of grey goose vodka to us standing next to him, jaw clicking. I’m not queuing another 30 minutes for a drink while everybody’s fake tan wipes on over my dress. We take a glug or two each of the massive bottle before someone notices their wasted mate’s generosity and takes the bottle back- they’re not going to share it with the commoners that haven’t spend a grand for a table…
Needless to say, unless you've got a table or smooched your way into the VIP area there was no room at all. You couldn't dance in the main dance room, you couldn't get near the bar in either the downstairs room or the RnB room, nor get near the toilets; girls opting to ambush the male bathroom much to their amusement.
(Not to mention the fact that the female toilets were blocked- staff members seen arguing over who was to unblock them.)
Drinks were spilled, feet were stepped on and the place generally resembled an over-dressed mosh-pitt. Credit to the DJ where credit is due, the music was only thing saving my sanity, but although definitely to my taste of dance and rave with excellently executed remixes, it didn't quite fit the ‘West-end’ shape-makers that were suited and booted as if for a day a the races.
The star of ‘Carry on Essex’ is surely Micky Norcross who battled his way through crowds having his photo taken, arriving amid a few ‘whoops’, three girls younger than his son in tow.
Although undeniably devoid of charisma in the ‘BAFTA award winning show,’ this is a very clever man. I won’t claim to know the ins and outs of how out of all the venues filmed Sugar Hut is by far the most plugged in the series, but it certainly is food for thought. For example the infamous proposal of Mark Wright and Lauren Goodger took place in the garden of the lovely Switch bar in South Woodford but is constantly quoted in magazines as having taken place in the Sugar Hut. In fact of the numerous scenes filmed there, producers never showed the front shot, letting Sugar Hut take the publicity.
It’s a plug that the Norcross’s have used to their advantage- turning the Brentwood club into a tourist attraction sees the que spilling out on to Brentwood high street, a sight that definitely didn't occur before the ITV2 show’s success, nor the infamous fire that saw the venue gutted and re-vamped.
I discover the next day that we and numerous others were over-charged; having clearly advertised their prices online and over the phone as £10 before 11pm, £15 after, this was not the case at the door.
Having waited in line from 9.30 and being in the main door just after 10.30pm, it clearly wasn’t after 11pm and yet everyone was charged £15? So where’s all that extra money going?
I find myself in a slanging match with the Sugarhut via twitter the following morning, where I’m assured that all the money taken from the door goes into the till at the front. This is offered as a consolation when I asked them if they were aware that their FOH staff were overcharging sugar-hungry customers, but really, it all goes in Norcross’s pockets so why this is supposed to make it better I don’t know. I‘m offered no explanation, no offer of a refund and told “We’re sorry you didn’t enjoy your evening.”
With guest list apparently not being an option (at least not for us ‘nobodies’) on a Saturday night, high prices, queuing for the toilets and the bar, I thank my lucky stars that we didn't have to queue for the exit.
It’s a genuine shame. It’s a beautiful club, well decorated, well put together, the open courtyard and restaurant giving it an edge against competitors and I've had some great nights out here, but the Sugar Hut Group have exploited the cheap instant fame which is certainly filling the tills now, but I cant help but think Micky is going to loose out in the long run. By turning his club into a novelty, people won’t go there twice- they’re going to visit a film set, (a hot sweaty overpriced film set.) It’s an experience, not a good night out- and when the novelty of cheap fame wears off, then what? Locals and regulars have been forced out the door by troops of wannabes, a good Essex night out having turned into a parody of its worst stereotype, leaving me and many others sober and out of pocket by the end of the evening.
Conclusion: A place for high rollers willing to splash out for space and service, or a ‘one night stand’ for tourists on tour. No room for regulars any more. No space for Essex.
Micky blue eyes, you’re welcome to prove me wrong.
The queue for entry is an hour. An hour. By the time you’ve sobered up and got through the door after a scrupulous drug search, £15 is taken from you for the pleasure of your company.
“15 quid?” I say to the girl on the door, “It better be worth it.”
“Oh ma gawd yer, like totally. It ‘s completely ramo-ed in there.” She promises.
Gee thanks, after standing in the cold and being robbed I feel so much better knowing I have the pleasure of being elbowed and rubbed up against once I get through the door.
Every corner was jammed, which of course is great for the Sugarhut’s pockets, but not so great for the mood of the place, stripping the venue of any atmosphere and securing its status as a tourist attraction. It’s not a club but a visitation site along the map of Essex. What happens to the customers that came here before the show? They get trampled on by 2,000 tangoed girls with eyelashes so thick and heavy their eyes are held open only by the force of the Redbull in the jaggerbombs coursing through their veins. It’s a live panto version of the ‘Only Way is Essex’ where the truck loads of ‘Geordie Shore’ hopefuls have taken the cameo roles.
A TV screen flashes with images of people having an amazing time while the barmaid chews gum and serves me wine in plastic glasses, having waited in line in another queue for 20 minutes.
“As seen on TV” the screen boasts, “Beautiful people everynight of the week, the West End experience in Essex.”
West End? You’ve just served me my drinks in PLASTIC glasses mate. The only thing West End about this debacle is the prices. I look around for the beautiful people…
Look, it’s a nightclub, I’m not going to be snooty at the disheveled state of the clientele, regardless even of their substance of choice. I've spent enough time in bars and clubs to know that everyone falls over in their beautiful shoes at some point in their lives, it’s a law of gravity- but this slapstick-style scene was in a league of it’s own, a league devoid of any gravitational laws or common sense. I had never seen so many girls that couldn't walk in their shoes; there certainly was not a pair of ballet pumps in sight. Vajazzled girls staggered everywhere, more than several taking a serious tumble during the evening. But hay, that’s all in jest, it just adds to the comedy in this particular scene. It’s what Mollie from the Saturday’s is to Sienna Miller; a poor man’s version of a good thing, something that looks pretty similar but hasn't quite got the edge. Or the class.
Of course it’s important to note that when the original product is a tongue-in-cheek look at the life of Essex-landers, the copy version is never going to be a pretty sight, but this was something else. One guy is so off his face as he rolls around the sofa in his expensive ‘booth’ area he passes over the magnum of grey goose vodka to us standing next to him, jaw clicking. I’m not queuing another 30 minutes for a drink while everybody’s fake tan wipes on over my dress. We take a glug or two each of the massive bottle before someone notices their wasted mate’s generosity and takes the bottle back- they’re not going to share it with the commoners that haven’t spend a grand for a table…Needless to say, unless you've got a table or smooched your way into the VIP area there was no room at all. You couldn't dance in the main dance room, you couldn't get near the bar in either the downstairs room or the RnB room, nor get near the toilets; girls opting to ambush the male bathroom much to their amusement.
(Not to mention the fact that the female toilets were blocked- staff members seen arguing over who was to unblock them.)
Drinks were spilled, feet were stepped on and the place generally resembled an over-dressed mosh-pitt. Credit to the DJ where credit is due, the music was only thing saving my sanity, but although definitely to my taste of dance and rave with excellently executed remixes, it didn't quite fit the ‘West-end’ shape-makers that were suited and booted as if for a day a the races.
The star of ‘Carry on Essex’ is surely Micky Norcross who battled his way through crowds having his photo taken, arriving amid a few ‘whoops’, three girls younger than his son in tow.
Although undeniably devoid of charisma in the ‘BAFTA award winning show,’ this is a very clever man. I won’t claim to know the ins and outs of how out of all the venues filmed Sugar Hut is by far the most plugged in the series, but it certainly is food for thought. For example the infamous proposal of Mark Wright and Lauren Goodger took place in the garden of the lovely Switch bar in South Woodford but is constantly quoted in magazines as having taken place in the Sugar Hut. In fact of the numerous scenes filmed there, producers never showed the front shot, letting Sugar Hut take the publicity.It’s a plug that the Norcross’s have used to their advantage- turning the Brentwood club into a tourist attraction sees the que spilling out on to Brentwood high street, a sight that definitely didn't occur before the ITV2 show’s success, nor the infamous fire that saw the venue gutted and re-vamped.
I discover the next day that we and numerous others were over-charged; having clearly advertised their prices online and over the phone as £10 before 11pm, £15 after, this was not the case at the door.
Having waited in line from 9.30 and being in the main door just after 10.30pm, it clearly wasn’t after 11pm and yet everyone was charged £15? So where’s all that extra money going?
I find myself in a slanging match with the Sugarhut via twitter the following morning, where I’m assured that all the money taken from the door goes into the till at the front. This is offered as a consolation when I asked them if they were aware that their FOH staff were overcharging sugar-hungry customers, but really, it all goes in Norcross’s pockets so why this is supposed to make it better I don’t know. I‘m offered no explanation, no offer of a refund and told “We’re sorry you didn’t enjoy your evening.”
With guest list apparently not being an option (at least not for us ‘nobodies’) on a Saturday night, high prices, queuing for the toilets and the bar, I thank my lucky stars that we didn't have to queue for the exit.
It’s a genuine shame. It’s a beautiful club, well decorated, well put together, the open courtyard and restaurant giving it an edge against competitors and I've had some great nights out here, but the Sugar Hut Group have exploited the cheap instant fame which is certainly filling the tills now, but I cant help but think Micky is going to loose out in the long run. By turning his club into a novelty, people won’t go there twice- they’re going to visit a film set, (a hot sweaty overpriced film set.) It’s an experience, not a good night out- and when the novelty of cheap fame wears off, then what? Locals and regulars have been forced out the door by troops of wannabes, a good Essex night out having turned into a parody of its worst stereotype, leaving me and many others sober and out of pocket by the end of the evening.Conclusion: A place for high rollers willing to splash out for space and service, or a ‘one night stand’ for tourists on tour. No room for regulars any more. No space for Essex.
Micky blue eyes, you’re welcome to prove me wrong.
Tuesday, 8 February 2011
You Know You Need A New Job When...
Everyone loves a good moan about the winter blues, the morning blues, the work blues; waking up early, office politics, fighting over stationary; all things I feel I have strategically manage to avoid so far in my life as a wandering compass. But I have indeed had a fair few iffy jobs on my travels that I thought I would share with you- to cheer you up, make you feel pleased, comforted even, to be sat in that office chair, that white van, anywhere in comparison to the ridiculousness that is my C.V. Here are some highlights of my fantastical career so far
You know you need a new job when… Your blind boss insists on driving you home, while you sit in the passenger seat telling her whether there is any oncoming traffic heading your way.
For those who have met Madame Bowes, an introduction is just not needed- you won’t easily forget the encounter. In her sixties with the poise of a first class ballerina, this woman's elocution rivalled the Queen's, holding an air of old-school glamour and elegance in a ‘Street Car Named Desire’ kind of way. Eccentric, demanding and not quite belonging to the 21st first century, Madame Bowes had been a show girl in her day, travelling around the world appearing on BBC television when it was only on at teatime in black and white. She had never married (although I have a theory about a long term affair with a married man) and lived with her sister, also unmarried, in a big house with a never-ending garden. She ran a dance school (and perhaps still does despite her cataracts which got worse and worse with the years) that I had attended as a kid for elocution lessons in an attempt to rid me of my Essex twang, (epic fail) and she asked me years later (Essex twang still intact) to help her with her drama classes at the Saturday school. Somehow along the way I had unwittingly been convinced into teaching the tap class to the under 6s.
I hadn’t done tap since I was 8. She was blind. It was a good arrangement.
Every week she dropped me home afterwards in her royal blue Ford escort that wasn’t old enough to be classic, but old enough to be a piece of junk- me sitting in the passenger seat telling her when a car was coming in our direction. She may as well have been wearing a blindfold. She was very proud, and hid her problem with her sight rather well as we pranced round the dance floor, but being in a driver’s seat gave the game away slightly as she’d ask me, “Ok are we coming to the end of the road?”
In more ways than one Madame.
You know you need a new job when…. your boss yells at you for not selling drugs.
The first time I met Miguel, the owner of Mister Jules Discotec, was about an hour into my first night of the job. I had convinced the assistant manager with my best smile and broken Spanish to give me some work- it was November and I was new to Malaga and the big bad world in general at eighteen years old. I had been outside serving drinks when one of the side windows opened and smacked me in the back of the head. Miguel was leaning out of it, waving his arms and shouting at me, I presume for being in the way, perhaps for making a dent in the wood of the window frame with my skull.
He pointed to the table of two girls and a boy sat on the far end of the terrace.
“Que bebiendo?”
“No, not drinking anything,” I replied, “Quieren drugas.” They had asked me for drugs, what did I sell? When I said I sold nothing they had laughed.
“Well? What did you tell them?”
“Nada.”
He swore at me in Spanish, “Go ask what they want Stupido, make sure they order drinks too.”
He muttered and slammed the window. So now I was a drug dealer. He hadn’t asked me my name.
The discotec’s lisence was till 2am, and when they shut the doors I was sat on a bar stool outside on my own in the cold and was told to watch for police. If they drove by I had to knock on the window, this being the signal for Miguel to turn the music down and tidy the drugs away.
It was a lock-in every night where I was always locked outside.
Out on my barstool I thought of the restaurants I worked in as a teenager, the presentable English waitresses ‘front of house’ making the tips and the ever-changing number of immigrant and foreign chefs, cleaners and pot wash boys out in the back. Now I was the one that didn’t understand, that earned less money, the one they laughed at. It’s a strange experience being the foreigner. Miguel had muddy brown eyes that simmered with whatever emotion was overcoming him at the time, when I think of him, I think of a kettle on the boil shaking with heat as steam pours from every orifice.
When the club was full, I used to hide in the toilets for as long as I could until Miguel noticed I was missing, perching on the toilet seat surrounded by an explosion of toilet paper, water, broken glass and sick. Shovelling it all out at the end of the night, I’d find enough drugs to stock a small pharmacy.
Malaga was a law unto its own; exhilarating, but mostly exhausting when you end up on the wrong side of it. I felt culturally challenged to the point of stupidity. Not because I struggled with the language; I learnt fast. I felt stupid for being so naïve; I had thought I was so grown up being out there, but realised I knew nothing about the world and what actually went on when the sun went down.
You know you need a new job when… There are more cockroaches behind the bar than there are euros in your pay check.
Oh yeh, Miguel was a dirty fucker too.
You know you need a new job when… You get to your office and the place is stripped bare, consequently finding out your boss was using a fake name and he’s disappeared back to Canada. With your wages.
Escaping from that crack den of a job, I ended up in an office in Fuengirola selling some sort of fake time-shares to corporate companies. I wasn’t technically told this at the beginning, but worked it out from the fact that the two Canadian brothers running the joint had no clue about investments but a lot about bouncing money in offshore accounts, different phones were answered with different company names and they shoved a lot of white powder up their noses all day long. There was a phase where we were ringing China for a while, although god knows what they were selling those guys because I’m sure it wasn’t two weeks in a villa in Marbella.
The receptionist was a lively American woman who had been brought up in a weird cult in the southern states of the U.S, been forced into an arranged marriage and consequently fled to the Costa del Sol. Oh, and she had a thing for sex clubs in Germany.
The morning I stood outside the office looking through the window to an empty room, I was over 300 euros short and jobless; the two Canadians having disappeared off into the sunset. To this day I don’t even know what their real names were. (The receptionist went back to Germany.)
You know you need a new job when… you've prentended you're a chef, then forgotten to put sherry in the sherry trifle.
When the Hercules Carvery asked me whether I had any chef experience, I said yes, yes of course!
Which may have been a slight fib.
Next thing I know I’m in chef whites being given a recipe sheet for all the desserts they required. Homemade desserts. An array of bailey’s cheese cakes, Victoria sponges and shortbreads were hence produced by moi, on top of the fact my official title was ‘starters and desserts chef’ so I was whipping up battered tiger prawns and salads caramelized onion jam too. This, let me tell you, should be marked as near miracle considering that the most you’ll usually get out of me is a toasted sandwich or cereal when I’m in the kitchen.
I was starting to get the knack of the cheffing shizzle when I came head to head with the most important dessert of all- the sherry trifle. This was a carvery- built to cater for ex-pats, retired golf players and all those owning a set of false teeth; Sherry trifle was intrinsic to their culture of denture-dating over a roast dinner.
And I forgot to put the sherry in it.
I stared at my master piece sadly; It had taken bloody hours- layering up the sponge fingers, the fruit, the custard made from SCRATCH, the cream whipped up BY HAND smothered on top. The owner was a bit of a battleaxe who blatantly saw through the exaggerated kitchen experience on my ever-colourful C.V so I decided to do some damage control before she sniffed me out; digging a hole in one side with a serving spoon and pouring half a bottle of sherry in. I then tipped the bowl almost vertical, propping it up out of sight for twenty minutes, hoping the sherry would soak through to the sponge fingers on the other side.
That night we had a few pissed OAPs on one side of the restaurant, the other half looking suspiciously sober.
-You know you need a new job when… the customers have jumped out of a Martina Cole paperback.
This guy was the real deal, looked like a relative of Scarface and was built like a bull- a brick shithouse of a bloke who would sit at the end of the bar for 36 hours stretches (the place was open 24/7) on a cocktail of vodka redbull and coacaine. Unfortunately for us, Mr Gangster took a disliking to my boyfriend after he was told to refuse to serve him when his antics got too much for the management, (delegation is a piss-take). His cronies jumped in front of his car on the way home, Mr Ganstger leaning in the passenger window and grabbing him. Firmly. His exact words were- (I didn’t forget them in a hurry) “If you ever fuck with me again I’ll put you in the boot of my car and take you somewhere where no one will find you.”
You know you need a new job when… you work with the French.
Crazy French lady of the ‘Havana beach café’ drove me nuts.
This woman looked like she was always one vallium away from a nervous breakdown, frazzled as if she had spent the day sticking her fingers in plug sockets while her French artist husband sat in the kitchen, so laid back from years of smoking weed, that not much got cooked at all really. I ran the bar and watched the circus unfold.
The place was technically run by the only other waitress- a Chinese girl that walked and talked at a hundred miles per hour but she was so nice, and the customers loved her. It made me laugh that she didn’t know any of their names- even the regulars had been taking their morning breakfast their everyday for the four years she had worked there.
“I am good with names,” she explained exasperatedly. “They just all look the same to me!”
You know you need a new job when… there are no customers.
This boss was the nicest guy I’ve ever met, one of those guys that never catches a break but is always still gentle and generous with everyone he comes across. A guy who taught me so much about business and families and life. And crosswords- we did a lot of those, and I spent a lot of time making us cups of coffee and writing poetry. All very picturesque, but I served maybe two customers a day and spend all my money in the fruit machine that he didn’t have a key for. Not very profitable.
You know you need a new job when… your ex-boyfriend is the manager.
Damn it. That was the best job I ever had- I earnt more money in that restaurant working part-time whilst at uni than I ever have since graduating. Windsor was full of tourists, lovely Americans tipping ten percent from 11am-11pm, and I worked long hours, ran round like a nutter and got paid well for it. But he got the restaurant in the ‘divorce’ with the matching set of friends, I got uni and that set of friends. End of dollar.
You know you need a new job when… you get paid 750 euros per month for 6 days per week 12 hours per day in the Spanish heat.
The novelty of being in a foreign country all by myself back then seemed to feed me instead, and I think that particular boss was a sharp woman, savvy enough to pick up on that fact.
That works out at 2.60 EUROS an hour. What a div. All I could see was the sunshine. (And the free alcahol).
The funny thing was, I was as happy as Larry.
Join the conversation... If you have a “You know you need a new job when…” fee free to contribute... here or on the facebook group-
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You know you need a new job when… Your blind boss insists on driving you home, while you sit in the passenger seat telling her whether there is any oncoming traffic heading your way.
For those who have met Madame Bowes, an introduction is just not needed- you won’t easily forget the encounter. In her sixties with the poise of a first class ballerina, this woman's elocution rivalled the Queen's, holding an air of old-school glamour and elegance in a ‘Street Car Named Desire’ kind of way. Eccentric, demanding and not quite belonging to the 21st first century, Madame Bowes had been a show girl in her day, travelling around the world appearing on BBC television when it was only on at teatime in black and white. She had never married (although I have a theory about a long term affair with a married man) and lived with her sister, also unmarried, in a big house with a never-ending garden. She ran a dance school (and perhaps still does despite her cataracts which got worse and worse with the years) that I had attended as a kid for elocution lessons in an attempt to rid me of my Essex twang, (epic fail) and she asked me years later (Essex twang still intact) to help her with her drama classes at the Saturday school. Somehow along the way I had unwittingly been convinced into teaching the tap class to the under 6s.
I hadn’t done tap since I was 8. She was blind. It was a good arrangement.
Every week she dropped me home afterwards in her royal blue Ford escort that wasn’t old enough to be classic, but old enough to be a piece of junk- me sitting in the passenger seat telling her when a car was coming in our direction. She may as well have been wearing a blindfold. She was very proud, and hid her problem with her sight rather well as we pranced round the dance floor, but being in a driver’s seat gave the game away slightly as she’d ask me, “Ok are we coming to the end of the road?”
In more ways than one Madame.
You know you need a new job when…. your boss yells at you for not selling drugs.
The first time I met Miguel, the owner of Mister Jules Discotec, was about an hour into my first night of the job. I had convinced the assistant manager with my best smile and broken Spanish to give me some work- it was November and I was new to Malaga and the big bad world in general at eighteen years old. I had been outside serving drinks when one of the side windows opened and smacked me in the back of the head. Miguel was leaning out of it, waving his arms and shouting at me, I presume for being in the way, perhaps for making a dent in the wood of the window frame with my skull.
He pointed to the table of two girls and a boy sat on the far end of the terrace.
“Que bebiendo?”
“No, not drinking anything,” I replied, “Quieren drugas.” They had asked me for drugs, what did I sell? When I said I sold nothing they had laughed.
“Well? What did you tell them?”
“Nada.”
He swore at me in Spanish, “Go ask what they want Stupido, make sure they order drinks too.”
He muttered and slammed the window. So now I was a drug dealer. He hadn’t asked me my name.
The discotec’s lisence was till 2am, and when they shut the doors I was sat on a bar stool outside on my own in the cold and was told to watch for police. If they drove by I had to knock on the window, this being the signal for Miguel to turn the music down and tidy the drugs away.
It was a lock-in every night where I was always locked outside.
Out on my barstool I thought of the restaurants I worked in as a teenager, the presentable English waitresses ‘front of house’ making the tips and the ever-changing number of immigrant and foreign chefs, cleaners and pot wash boys out in the back. Now I was the one that didn’t understand, that earned less money, the one they laughed at. It’s a strange experience being the foreigner. Miguel had muddy brown eyes that simmered with whatever emotion was overcoming him at the time, when I think of him, I think of a kettle on the boil shaking with heat as steam pours from every orifice.
When the club was full, I used to hide in the toilets for as long as I could until Miguel noticed I was missing, perching on the toilet seat surrounded by an explosion of toilet paper, water, broken glass and sick. Shovelling it all out at the end of the night, I’d find enough drugs to stock a small pharmacy.
Malaga was a law unto its own; exhilarating, but mostly exhausting when you end up on the wrong side of it. I felt culturally challenged to the point of stupidity. Not because I struggled with the language; I learnt fast. I felt stupid for being so naïve; I had thought I was so grown up being out there, but realised I knew nothing about the world and what actually went on when the sun went down.
You know you need a new job when… There are more cockroaches behind the bar than there are euros in your pay check.
Oh yeh, Miguel was a dirty fucker too.
You know you need a new job when… You get to your office and the place is stripped bare, consequently finding out your boss was using a fake name and he’s disappeared back to Canada. With your wages.
Escaping from that crack den of a job, I ended up in an office in Fuengirola selling some sort of fake time-shares to corporate companies. I wasn’t technically told this at the beginning, but worked it out from the fact that the two Canadian brothers running the joint had no clue about investments but a lot about bouncing money in offshore accounts, different phones were answered with different company names and they shoved a lot of white powder up their noses all day long. There was a phase where we were ringing China for a while, although god knows what they were selling those guys because I’m sure it wasn’t two weeks in a villa in Marbella.
The receptionist was a lively American woman who had been brought up in a weird cult in the southern states of the U.S, been forced into an arranged marriage and consequently fled to the Costa del Sol. Oh, and she had a thing for sex clubs in Germany.
The morning I stood outside the office looking through the window to an empty room, I was over 300 euros short and jobless; the two Canadians having disappeared off into the sunset. To this day I don’t even know what their real names were. (The receptionist went back to Germany.)
You know you need a new job when… you've prentended you're a chef, then forgotten to put sherry in the sherry trifle.
When the Hercules Carvery asked me whether I had any chef experience, I said yes, yes of course!
Which may have been a slight fib.
Next thing I know I’m in chef whites being given a recipe sheet for all the desserts they required. Homemade desserts. An array of bailey’s cheese cakes, Victoria sponges and shortbreads were hence produced by moi, on top of the fact my official title was ‘starters and desserts chef’ so I was whipping up battered tiger prawns and salads caramelized onion jam too. This, let me tell you, should be marked as near miracle considering that the most you’ll usually get out of me is a toasted sandwich or cereal when I’m in the kitchen.
I was starting to get the knack of the cheffing shizzle when I came head to head with the most important dessert of all- the sherry trifle. This was a carvery- built to cater for ex-pats, retired golf players and all those owning a set of false teeth; Sherry trifle was intrinsic to their culture of denture-dating over a roast dinner.
And I forgot to put the sherry in it.
I stared at my master piece sadly; It had taken bloody hours- layering up the sponge fingers, the fruit, the custard made from SCRATCH, the cream whipped up BY HAND smothered on top. The owner was a bit of a battleaxe who blatantly saw through the exaggerated kitchen experience on my ever-colourful C.V so I decided to do some damage control before she sniffed me out; digging a hole in one side with a serving spoon and pouring half a bottle of sherry in. I then tipped the bowl almost vertical, propping it up out of sight for twenty minutes, hoping the sherry would soak through to the sponge fingers on the other side.
That night we had a few pissed OAPs on one side of the restaurant, the other half looking suspiciously sober.
-You know you need a new job when… the customers have jumped out of a Martina Cole paperback.
This guy was the real deal, looked like a relative of Scarface and was built like a bull- a brick shithouse of a bloke who would sit at the end of the bar for 36 hours stretches (the place was open 24/7) on a cocktail of vodka redbull and coacaine. Unfortunately for us, Mr Gangster took a disliking to my boyfriend after he was told to refuse to serve him when his antics got too much for the management, (delegation is a piss-take). His cronies jumped in front of his car on the way home, Mr Ganstger leaning in the passenger window and grabbing him. Firmly. His exact words were- (I didn’t forget them in a hurry) “If you ever fuck with me again I’ll put you in the boot of my car and take you somewhere where no one will find you.”
You know you need a new job when… you work with the French.
Crazy French lady of the ‘Havana beach café’ drove me nuts.
This woman looked like she was always one vallium away from a nervous breakdown, frazzled as if she had spent the day sticking her fingers in plug sockets while her French artist husband sat in the kitchen, so laid back from years of smoking weed, that not much got cooked at all really. I ran the bar and watched the circus unfold.
The place was technically run by the only other waitress- a Chinese girl that walked and talked at a hundred miles per hour but she was so nice, and the customers loved her. It made me laugh that she didn’t know any of their names- even the regulars had been taking their morning breakfast their everyday for the four years she had worked there.
“I am good with names,” she explained exasperatedly. “They just all look the same to me!”
You know you need a new job when… there are no customers.
This boss was the nicest guy I’ve ever met, one of those guys that never catches a break but is always still gentle and generous with everyone he comes across. A guy who taught me so much about business and families and life. And crosswords- we did a lot of those, and I spent a lot of time making us cups of coffee and writing poetry. All very picturesque, but I served maybe two customers a day and spend all my money in the fruit machine that he didn’t have a key for. Not very profitable.
You know you need a new job when… your ex-boyfriend is the manager.
Damn it. That was the best job I ever had- I earnt more money in that restaurant working part-time whilst at uni than I ever have since graduating. Windsor was full of tourists, lovely Americans tipping ten percent from 11am-11pm, and I worked long hours, ran round like a nutter and got paid well for it. But he got the restaurant in the ‘divorce’ with the matching set of friends, I got uni and that set of friends. End of dollar.
You know you need a new job when… you get paid 750 euros per month for 6 days per week 12 hours per day in the Spanish heat.
The novelty of being in a foreign country all by myself back then seemed to feed me instead, and I think that particular boss was a sharp woman, savvy enough to pick up on that fact.
That works out at 2.60 EUROS an hour. What a div. All I could see was the sunshine. (And the free alcahol).
The funny thing was, I was as happy as Larry.
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