I'm back. It was a good trip. More to come including photos on my
Sheffield to the Somme but here's a little overview...
Wednesday - Got an early morning Channel Tunnel Shuttle. Very efficient, but felt a bit queezy; the experience of sitting in your car on a train feels very much like experiencing 35 minutes of turbulence on a plane. Drove down to The Somme, and spent around 6 hours traipsing around the battlefields and cemeteries of Serre. The front line trench from which the Sheffield Pals attacked is still clearly visible. I stood in it and peered over the top into no mans land, towards Serre. The place is littered with cemetries; rows and rows of white stone bearing the date
1st July 1916, or else
13th November 1916, the date another attack on Serre was attempted, or else simply the words "A soldier of the Great War. Known unto God." for where the body could not be identified.
Thursday - Visited Thiepval, were there is a massive memorial to the thousands of British soldiers who have no known grave, plus other battlefield sites of note including the Canadian Memorial Park at Beaumont Hamel.
Friday - Visited the war museum at Pérronne, and en route back to Calais visited Vimy Ridge which is another Canadian memorial park, but is also the place where what was left of the Sheffield City Battalion last saw action before being dispanded in 1918.
Friday, March 31, 2006 10:53 PM
Right, I'm off to the Somme in a couple of days. As ever, I feel unable to travel abroad without
creating a new web site to accompany the trip. The site tells the story of the
Sheffield City Battalion, and when I return, will hopefully be updated to include photos.
Later.
Monday, March 27, 2006 10:28 PM
Bloody Beanies delivered me more shitting celery yesterday (perhaps as punishment for not having paid them in 5 weeks), so the quest to find some worthwhile to do with the stuff continues.
I've already tried Kemps roasting suggestion, tasted fine but didn't ignite any fires in me. Last night I had the brain wave of doing a celery risotto; a couple of shallots, celery, veg stock and risotto rice. Again though, it tasted fine, but you wouldn't actively go out and by the ingredients for it.
Celery. It's just not quite right is it?
Thursday, March 23, 2006 12:36 PM
I saw something today that had me completely flummoxed. Charlie Dimmock Fair Trade Mangoes. Seriously? What the hell is that all about. Unless Dimmock personnaly approved every single mango, or grew them herself in her back garden, or perhaps developed a completely new strain of Mango, then what is it about the Mango that is Dimmock related? Presumably it must be some kind of marketing thing, but I just can't get my head round the thought process that would take you from "We need to sell more fair trade mango" to "Let us call them Charlie Dimmock Mangoes and take a picture of Charlie Dimmock standing next to some mango" and I can't fathom out why when someone came up with that idea nobody went "Seriously, are you on crack? What kind of person would look at mangoes and not want to buy one, then see a picture of Charlie Dimmock and suddenly decide they
do want a mango? For starters, when most people see a picture of Charlie Dimmock, they chuck up, so basically you would be associating the product with some sick. That's not good marketing stategy."
Oh screw it, it's not that important. I'm going down the pub.
Wednesday, March 22, 2006 7:59 PM
I usually avoid writing about work here. I like to keep my different lives (e.g. work life, home life, superhero vigilante life) as separate as possible and I also don't think it fair to in any way associate the company I work for with the idiotic shite that I post here.
I couldn't resist mentioning this incident though, and will attempt to do so without mentioning any of the parties involved directly.
There is a web site. I won't link to it, as to do so would only help increase its Google rank and that is something I don't want to do. Let's just say it is written by a deranged xenophobe who wants to destroy Islam and contains the kind of stuff that at first makes you laugh at loud at the insanity, then suddenly worries you when you realise that it's not a parody and that people like this actually exist in the real world.
The web site in question displayed the logo of the company I work for. A member of the public queried why we were supporting such a web site. Obviously the owner of said website was politely asked to remove our logo from his site...
Hi there,
I am contacting you regarding the website [URL of insane website].
It has been brought to my attention that the placement of our logo on your website may lead people to believe that we endorse or sponsor your website.
Whilst I am pleased that you chose to provide a link to our [services] I am not happy with the way that this has been done or the impression this is clearly giving.
I would therefore respectfully ask that you remove our logo from your website so that this confusion is no longer caused.
regards
[person from marketing]Here is the response he got...
I have put my life on the line to save yours and you are such a coward that are afraid that someone may think you are supporting me? Don't worry, [your competitor], contacted me about three weeks ago and asked me to use their link. I did that in the home page but to change all the pages it takes a long time, as this must be done manually. However I may write about this so my millions of readers can know you are a coward dhimmi (servile to Muslims) and we have nothing to do with each other. For sure Osama Bin Laden will be very pleased with you when he comes to cut your throat. With cowards like you the world will fall in to the laps of Muslims with no doubt. You are a shame to mankind [person that asked him to remove logo]. I am sorry I brought so much business to you. You certainly did not deserve it. But what makes me really angry is the fact that you are such a fool that try to appease Muslims by kissing their rear end without realizing they are after your head and freedom. When will you pull your head out of your rear end to see we are losing our freedom because of coward appeasers like you?Like I say, it had me laughing out loud when I first read it. But seriously, wow.
Tuesday, March 21, 2006 12:48 PM
I was in Holland and Barrett earlier trying to source some Tahini to make Hummus, and stumbled across Meat Free Pepperami. This had me intrigued, and I am sure you are now intrigued too. You are probably thinking
"Shut up is there meat free pepperami. Chris, you so crazy you see things. Having Pepperami without meat is like having a Bible without religion, it just wouldn't happen, you big Joey."Well I'm not mistaken, I have proof.
Check it out. Sadly that website doesn't list the ingredients, as the ingredients piqued my curiosity further, given that one of the ingredients was "Smoke". Not only do these people claim to have replicated the Pepperami experience using only vegetarian ingredients, they have also someone how managed to turn smoke into an edible ingredient, like some kind of crazy food alchemists. Either that, or when I bite into the thing, I can expect a little puff of smoke to burst out. Either way I was in for an interesting food experience.
When I was a meat eater, I hated Pepperami. I like the idea of Pepperami, but hated the practise. I am happy to report that whilst the taste of vegetarian Pepperami does not exactly match the original, and nor does the texture, the experience remains the same. You feel sick afterwards. You regret buying the thing, you regret eating it. You feel emotionally damaged, on the inside you are weeping, as if the Pepperami has eaten away at a part of your soul. Maybe it has.
Maybe it has.
Monday, March 20, 2006 1:27 PM
Turns out it
was Jonathon Ross I saw at the opera the other night. He "reviewed" it on his show the other day (as pointed out by Kemp) which you can hear if you
Listen Again (18 minutes in).
Monday, March 13, 2006 9:27 PM
I didn't see another film yesterday. The film I didn't see was
The Hills have Eyes. I ran out of time, but if I had seen it, this post would be a very interesting review comparing it the
Wes Craven original which I have on DVD, which is a very charming film about a family that gets lost in the desert and are attacked by a group of inbred cannibal punks that live in the hills. The tagline is
"The lucky ones died first...". Given that the first person to die was crucified, filled with petrol and set on fire, I'm not sure about the accuracy of that tag line to be honest.
Then I though that given that my surname is Hill, I could have weaved in to the post something about something I had observed yesterday, thus hilighting the fact that I and most of the people in my family quite literally
have eyes, giving a genius double meaning to the title of the post. But I couldn't think of anything that I had observed that was out of the ordinary. I thought I saw Jonathon Ross at the opera, but he doesn't strike me as the kind of person that would go to a modern 20th century opera about an oppressed man that kills his unfaithful wife before drowinging himself leaving an orphaned son to fend for himself in a cruel world. So it probably wasn't Jonathon Ross, and that would undermine the whole conceit.
Saturday, March 11, 2006 1:05 PM
I've got a week off at the end of the month, and I've finally decided what to do with myself. I'll be taking a trip to the Somme, tracing the journey of the "Sheffield Pals". It's something I've wanted to do for a while and the fact that the 90th anniversary of the first day of the Somme is just a couple of months away, now seems like a good time.
It's all part of my "War Scars" project which I have been slowly working on (very very slowly) for the last couple of years. Sheffield and its surrounding area is littered with the scars of war. Walk down any terraced street, and you won't see any railings in front of the houses, just the scars where they used to sit. The railings were removed during the second world war and sent along with pots and pans to help the war effort. It didn't help of course, the point of it was to make people feel like they were doing something. The fact that you can't make aircraft and ships and tanks out of railings and pots and pans never really occurred to anyone.
Some scars are bigger; a common sight is a row of terraced houses with a sudden gap in the middle, often filled with a 60's style property, evidence of one of the many bombs intended for the steel factories that killed so many in the suburbs.
One of the most subtle of Sheffield's war scars is on Redmires Hill and is a reminder of one of the city's biggest war tragedies. Barely visible at gound level are the impressions of a series of trenches criss-crossing the hill. These trenches were dug by the Sheffield City Battalion, a group of men drawn mostly from the professional classes in Sheffield. The thinking behind creating the Sheffield Pals and other "Pals" battalions throughout the country was that if the people that fought together were the same people that had lived and worked together, there would be a more cohesive bond between them and they would therefore become a more effective fighting force.
The men trained together in Sheffield, learning how to fire a rifle, effective bayonet technique, and on the cold dank moors at Redmires, they learnt how to dig trenches. They trained for two years before shipping off to the front line, ready for the Battle of the Somme. Within ten
minutes of the start of that battle, virtually the entire battalion, hundreds of men, was lying dead or seriously wounded. Most were mown down by machine gun fire. Those that somehow made it across no-mans land will have found themselves confronted by impenetrable barbed wire before being shot at close range. Just two Sheffield Pals made it though to the German trench and they were immediatley taken prisoner. Two years in the making, ten minutes in the destroying. They and the rest of the 19,240 men that died in the first day of the Battle of the Somme had achieved virtually nothing. The battle continued for nearly five months, and by the time it drew to a close, over one million men had been killed, and the front line was more or less where it had been before the battle started.
I feel it's always worth remembering the sacrifices that several generations were forced to shoulder in the first part of the last century; sacrifices which are impossible to comprehend for those of us born in the west since then.
So the hotel is booked, I need to decide how to get there. My heart (and wallet) says
Ferry, my head says
Tunnel. Eurotunnel that is, I'm not about to burrow all the way to France, that would the actions of a mental.
12:49 PM
I'm making this post purely because I don't like the work "Mucus" to be the first word you see when you come to this website. It's not a nice word and it's not a nice image. So although I have nothing to say, I though I'd make a post with a more agreeable title.
Did you hear Reese Witherspoon's Oscar speech? It made me throw up a bit in my mouth. Stupid insipid fucking bitch. If winning a small statuette in a popularity contest is such a monumental thing to you, then your world view is seriously warped and you need therapy. Do you hear me Reese? You're dead to me now. I never want you to call me again and I've taken you off speed dial.
I think the last film I saw was Batman, and that was the best film I saw last year, therefore I think Batman should have won Best Film. It is a much better film than Crash (which I haven't seen) and the "gay sheepherder movie" (which I haven't seen) I'm sure. I do keep meaning to watch Crash though, it looks really good. But it probably won't be as good as Batman. My prediction for
next year's Best Film Oscar? Superman, but that is only because it will probably be the only film I get round to seeing this year.
That is all.
Monday, March 06, 2006 3:00 PM
This is good news for any westerners travelling to Beijing. Spitting is a national past time in China. From my Sheffield to Shanghai journal...
I didn't enjoy the wait for the train at Beijing Railway Station. I found the place quite intimidating, it was huge, noisy and there was little signage in Pinyin, let alone English. I was pretty tired after a lot of walking over the previous few days, low on sugar, and could have done without having to sit in this grubby environment for an hour, beset by beggers and people spitting everywhere.
Spitting - it is endemic in China. Everyone spits. The government tried to crack down on it during the SARS epidemic, but with little success it seems. It is not seen as impolite or nasty here, it is just something people do, and I never really got used to it. And though the act carries no agression, my western mind is wired to view it as an aggressive act, which did little to relax me in this oppresive environment.
Wednesday, March 01, 2006 6:40 PM
