![]() | Blogs > LadyCReturns > Mind the doormouse. > Hiding. |
Hiding.
Watch Post |
Post a comment
2/8/2008 4:44 am [Post a comment] |
Firstly, I would like to say hello to a lot of people who emailed me after the post about our kids all being nuts according to the system. I am extremely pleased to hear from you all, we are either raising a generation of the cleverest, smartest and most healthy minded munchkins ever; or we may be creating WW3. Who can say? Secondly, I would like to draw your attention to A.A.Gill It's not often I push a writer at people; but having just read a collection of his work I felt the urge to share. Starbucks: "American coffee is only coffee because they say it is. It's actually a pale, scalding version of junior-school, jam-jar brush water...I can't remember the last time I was served something as foul as its version of a cappuccino. To begin with it took longer to make than a soufflé ...An hour and a half later I was presented with a mug. A mug. One of those American mugs where the lip is so thick, you have to be able to disengage your jaw like a python to fit it in your mouth. It contained a semi-permeable white mousse − the sort of stuff they use to drown teenagers in Ibiza, or pump into cavity walls. I dumped in two spoonfuls of sugar. It rejected them. Having beaten the malevolent epidermis with the collection of plastic and wooden things provided, I managed to make it sink. Then with both hands I took a sip. Then a gulp. Then chewed. I had a momentary sense of drowning in snowman poo, then, after a long moment, a tepid sludge rose from the deep. This was reminscent of gravy browning and three-year-old Easter eggs. How can anyone sell this stuff? How can anyone buy it twice? And this was only a small one − a baby. The adult version must be like sucking the outlet of a nuclear power station. There was a pamphlet about fair trade, and how Starbucks paid some Nicaraguan Sancho a reasonable amount for his coffee so that he now had a mule to go with his thirteen children, leaky roof and fifteen coffee bushes. It made not screwing the little no-hope wetback into penury sound like the most astonishing act of charitable benevolence. And they just had to print a pamphlet about it so we all know what sort of selfless, munificent, group-hug people we're dealing with. Magnificent. |
|||
View my blog 2/8/2008 7:28 pm [Add a Comment] [quote] |
Then gulp then chew hahahaha. Ive never had any non american coffee, is it better? Will it ruin me for life to chewing my coffee for breakfast?
| |||
View my blog 2/9/2008 1:59 am [Add a Comment] [quote] |
If it isn't in your collection, look for his July 1999 column "Hunforgiven" -- it's online. A lengthy excerpt from the opening follows. Time between leaving Berlin's Tegel airport and mentioning the war: eight minutes, ten at the outside. And it wasn't me, I swear, Iron-Cross my heart with Oak-leaf cluster. I'd been told in no uncertain terms: "You're not to mention the war, we know what you're like. The war is verboten, out of bounds, off limits, bad form, we've moved on from all that." Well, it wasn't me, it was the taxi driver. "Berlin, in area, is the same size as London," he informed me in that emphatic, punctilious way that Germans have with English, as if there were a euphonium playing in their heads. "When it was laid out at the turn of the century we had the fastest birth rate, but then came the war, and the Nazis and, well..." Gong! Sorry, you mentioned the war, no prize, Fritz. The first thing you notice about Berlin is how few people there are compared with other great capitals. It feels like an overlarge patchwork suit worn by a man who has gone on a crash diet. The people rattle around the streets and there is a 1956 amount of traffic. Actually, that's not the first thing you notice. The first thing is the cranes. Berlin
|
To link to this Post ("Hiding.") use [post 446986] in your messages. |