Dungeon Zero

Greek Easter signals the descent of the hordes.

Suddenly the supermarkets ring with foreign accents and ignorant jostling and time-consuming offerings of credit cards sans adequate ID.

The Germans aren't the worst, but the residue's there: 20 years ago when I started coming, my Viking-featured Yorkshire father kept being asked if he was German.

Greece and Corfu were not handled delicately by the sons of the Reich.

Even today I tremble un peu whenever I hear the guttural accents of Germaniki countrymen of the woman I can't un-adore.

Just this morning I was shopping at Alpha Beta and a hefty bullyboy came in waving a large € note that he expected to be changed.

Jowelly giant, mega Beemer badly parked outside, and I'm talking giant - the sort I'd've been disembowelled by whilst not saving Private Ryan.

Stood there waving the note and bulldozing the queues til Dimitra must've decided what the fuck and gave him the 50s and 20s he was after.

But this Josef Fritzl 24-year incestuosity is playing big out here and there were hellenic mutterings of 'Get back to yer dungeon' and when he got out there his van was scatched up good with crude memos that Cavafy never coined.

You read it first here and I'll continue to report ....

Top 10 Guitarists You don't know

Actually, I did know most of them but I'm impressed the *compiler* knew them.

Also, me being me and my pals being who *they* are, most readers of this blog will know at least 7/10 of these strummers and pickers and no shame in not knowing the rest. I just have too much time on my hands so I hang around musical friends and old shops that let me play their stuff.

I'm a bit alarmed that the Rev Gary is here, likewise Emily R who every self-respecting guitar fan should have got to know back in the days when we were snorting 'A woman jazz guitarist? Chortle."

Seeking entrée

Intriguing Personal advert in The Spectator of 19 April:

"LADY WRITER seeks an entrée to Harry's Bar St James's, in relation to the next chapter of her novel. Write to Box etc"

It could almost be the theme of some competition:

Seek an entrée to A in relation to B.
Most imaginative submission wins a salmanazar of bubbly.

Depicting a byegone era: Back to Lady Writer, I trust she's read the redoubtable Taki's take on the club.

Common sense abroad

Marvelous shrewd piece by estate agent Miranda Ingram that applies to everywhere - Greece as well as France.

It demands to be shared among all my Corfu-based estate agent hustler pals.

50 best cult books

The Telegraph runs a feature on "cult books" and I read it with a wry smile over my Easter lamb.

Thanks to my stint during the 1970s as publicist for the noble publishing house of Secker & Warburg (not forgetting the remarkable acquisitive eye of our MD at the time, the no less great TG Rosenthal - hi Tom!), a surprising number of those 'cult' scribblers "resonate" with me, as my American cousins would have it.

• Germaine Greer, whose "Obstacle Race" I promoted, being the "Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work". And here's a trivial pursuit winner: the pictures editor for this book became my wife.
• Erica Jong: I did the press and PR for the UK edition of 'Fear of Flying', and even got a few zipless ones out of it with certain journos keen to clinch interviews with Ms Jong.

  We flew Erica over to promote the book on radio and TV, and I even drove her up to my old alma mater, Oxford University, where she put in research for what I believe ended up as the romp, "Fanny, Being the True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones".

• Italo Calvino - another Secker author.
• Alexandria Quartet: My mother got to know Durrell quite well. One luncheon at our Corfu house, a baby swallow fell from a nest and Larry (rather a squat chappie) grabbed a ladder and shoved the wee feathery lad back home before his parents spotted him AWOL. There is also a postcard somewhere in Mum's letter box from Larry luring her over to Paris. She did not take up the invite.
• Sylvia Plath - my publicity office at Secker also housed most of the file copies and Ms Plath's work(s) occupied a 4th shelf just above my right ear. I was unaware of her importance at the time but most of my lady visitors would eventually glimpse The Name and do the 1974 equivalent of 'oh my gahd' and then fall silent. I know, a tenuous connection ....

Ah Secker ... how are the mighty fallen.

When I joined, its office was in Carlisle Street of darkest Soho, and John Blackwell and I would prop up the bar of the Nellie Dean. Then we moved to Poland Street and financed the Star & Garter.

Now it's part of some ghastly conglomerate in the back of beyond.

Good times, good people.

Doing God

I ask my martial arts pals if they spot any actual skill or menace from the Chinese thugs in blue 'escorting' the flame under their guise as the 'Olympic Holy Flame Protection Unit'.

Does not the sight of these goons banish once and for all the idea that the Olympic Games are not ‘political’?

Since the Olympic Games do not do God either, the idea that the flame is ‘holy’ is also rather rich, especially coming from China.

The ancient Greeks did god in a big way at the Olympic Games, since the Games were held in honour of Zeus, god of Olympus (not that Mount Olympus was anywhere near the site).

Zeus, having come to power by destroying all his rivals (including his father Cronus), was thought of as being especially keen on humans doing the same in the ‘purest’ of all arenas.

The image of Zeus in Olympia, thunderbolt in each hand, terrified the participants into keeping it clean.

The ancient Olympic Games were not ‘political’ for two reasons:

1. Cities did not compete to stage them in an effort to showcase what wonderful go-ahead investment opportunities they offered.
2. The Games were held at the same place every four years, the site of the far-away sanctuary to Zeus Olympios in the north-west Peloponnese, where basically nothing else happened.

Sexiest Woman

Nothing to do with me. Judge for yerself: Megan Fox voted sexiest woman.

I'm only here to provide eye candy

Genocide Olympics smoking ban

Not just smoking *ban* but 40,000 stool-pigeon inspectors ready to rat on us puffers.

Forget whatever hi-jinx those Tibet protesters manage to get up to over the torch relay, this will be the killer last straw to ensure 'there will be blood' (such a good all-purpose phrase).

I see elsewhere that Interpol fear some sort of slaughter. How could there NOT be with this anti-baccy rubbish planned?

Botanical Art

I read of the recent opening of the Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art at Kew Gardens.

The "first gallery in the world dedicated to botanical art and open to the public all year round."

It will exhibit precious works of art from the collections of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and Dr Shirley Sherwood, many of which have never been on public display before."

I wonder if it is the real thing. If it has any Marjorie Holmes.

MAIL HACK AND CONTACTS DELETION

Damn'd nuisance.

Suddenly a few days ago my gmail inbox filled with reports of inability to deliver the below message accompanied by whole swathes of my Contacts list.

A few folks checked with me if it really came from me.

And my entire address book has been deleted.

Dear friend,

We are so sorry for disturbing your precious time. we are an authorized export wholesaler.

We mainly supply Laptops, Notebooks, Digital Cameras ,Digital Video,Televisions,Ipods, Mobiles, PDA, GPS,PS3,PSP and so on.

We will supply the reasonable price and best quality items.

You could register to be a member of our website. And you can order it online and fill the order letter,or contact us for the items through email.

If you have any questions,please contact us by the following ways

WEBSITE: http://www.honesty1.com/

MSN: honesty158@hotmail.com

EMAIL: honesty158@hotmail.com

Thanks for your golden time.

Best wishes to you and all your family members.

Golden time - phooey

The Culprit Mail

Egads, the wretched spam even invaded this blog.

It occurs to me that, since these Honesty tradespersons list contact details, I ought to get on to Gmail and report this to someone. Or those UCE.GOV people referred to in the Gmail Help pages. No?

Here's the message which, since you're reading this blog, you may very well have received in your in-box supposedly from me. For which 1,000 groveling apologies.

Dear friend,
      We are so sorry for disturbing your precious time. we are an authorized export wholesaler.
      We mainly supply Laptops, Notebooks, Digital Cameras ,Digital Video,
Televisions,Ipods, Mobiles, PDA, GPS,PS3,PSP and so on. We will supply
the reasonable price and best quality items.
     You could register to be a member of our website. And you can order it online and fill the order letter,or contact us for the items through email.
     If you have any questions,please contact us by the following ways  WEBSITE: http://www.honesty1.com/
  MSN: honesty158@hotmail.com
  EMAIL: honesty158@hotmail.com
Thanks for your golden time.
 Best wishes to you and all your family members.

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Take this pie and ... shovel it

How to make shepherd's pie ...

The puns are endless:

You say tomato, i say ... thump

More catsup? Salt? Light sprinkling of petrol?

Cherchez le chef

I do like The Economist's telling of how:

"the most telling indicator of the prospects of Silicon Valley's technology firms is ... the cooks.

The insightful few on Wall Street who understood this in 1999 are now rich. That year, Google, which had just 40 employees at the time, held a cook-off to anoint its “chief food officer”. Charlie Ayers, who had once fed the Grateful Dead, won. Over the next six years, he led Google, which was also dabbling in web searches and online advertising, to dominance in its core competency: ample, free, organic and exotic food."

I love that "also dabbling in web searches and online advertising" ...

"But by all measures gastronomic, Google was still the dominant firm—until now. One of Google's current chefs is Josef Desimone, who is admired chiefly for the kombucha tea that he ferments from scratch and that gets the employees' creative juices flowing. Now however, Mr Desimone is smelling the coffee. He has given notice to Google, and will soon start work at Facebook. On Wall Street, no doubt, the short sellers have taken note."

joke

She writes,

"I have a lovely joke for you.
It is very simple, short and pure (bit like one of those Japanese haiku poems):

There are two goldfish in a tank.
One of them says to the other:
"How the hell do we drive this thing?"