Month: April 2006

Friday, then, was London. Up at you-have-to-be-joking o’clock for the shuttle to Heathrow (delayed 20 minutes), in on the Express (delayed 10 minutes), hop over to Oxford Circus on the Bakerloo and thence to Whitfield Street to pick up some documents. In a cab – quick, quick – and so to Aldwych, where an ominously long line snaked around the corner of India House. I knew I should have been there earlier.

Luckily, I’d only been in the line for a few minutes before a charming lady from a central European country I couldn’t quite place (possibly Hungary) asked if I knew that this was the collection line, and new visa applications were around the corner. Oops.

Around the corner I collected a yellow ticket from the booth – number 1360, and they only give out 1500 a day, eek! – ducked inside, went to entirely the wrong room, found the right room, barged through the huddle of people at what appeared to be (and indeed was) the wrong window, and discovered I was about to be called. Er… huh?

Ah. The ticket was ‘B60,’ not ‘1360,’ and I needn’t have worried about the rushing thing. Durr. Still, somebody nabbed my place at the window and I ended up hovering between three others, hoping I’d get in quick when the next ticket was called. The deli-counter style system was up the swannee, but there we go.

Finally, I got to thrust my paperwork feverishly under the soundproof glass partition, and make vague guesses at appropriate responses to the questions asked by the polite, patient, and almost entirely inaudible clerk on the other side. The discussion went something like ‘You’re a journalist?’ / ‘No.’ / ‘But you work for a television company.’ / ‘Yes, but I make science programmes, not news programmes. I’m not a journalist.’ / ‘Why are you applying for a business visa rather than a journalist visa?’ / ‘Because I’m not a journalist.’ Matters became even more confused when the clerk noticed that my letter of reference from an organisation in India was from – er – The British High Commission in Delhi.

Ultimately, she passed everything on to the media desk to work out whether they’d have to send me through clearance procedures for journalists, which would, I gathered, take five working days minimum. Ulp. Vague memories of Douglas Adam’s Infocom game Bureaucracy loomed.

I’ve no idea what happened in the next thirty minutes – there may have been phone calls, or perhaps somebody just read the letters and worked out what was going on – but my visa application was approved. Hurrah! So, back to join the mob I’d pushed through near the door, to wait for another inaudible clerk to call my number again.

An hour of that, and eventually that clerk asked if anyone was waiting for the ‘B’s. I was, so I enquired tentatively if he had B60 – yes, it had been there for an hour. Umm… okaaaay. Where did… no, never mind. As the smiling clerk handed my visa-endorsed passport under the glass, he said, ‘Ah, journalist. Have a good trip.’ So now I’m completely confused, since my receipt says I paid for a business visa and it appears to say ‘Type: B,’ but… ach, I’m sure everything’s fine. Yay! I have a visa!

After that, breakfast.

Shortly followed, as it happened, by lunch, loafing around on the waterfront with a chum, only to be rudely interrupted by ruddy great cannons going off repeatedly a few hundred yards downriver. Something to do with someone’s birthday, evidently.

Hop, skip and jump up to Oxford Circus, in good time for my travel clinic appointment. A jolly consultation, stern advice about DEET, dogs, and denghi fever, followed by three jabs, a whacking great bill, and a rattle of antimalarials.

Back to Paddington – missed the Express, quick quick, a bagel, ooh! Pickled chilies! – off to Heathrow, start devouring the Rough Guide…

…and home.

Felt rough as boots today, unsurprisingly.

Tomorrow: luggage, washing, tying up loose ends. Looks like I fly out Tuesday, back probably next Monday. By which time it may all make sense. Or not.

Having made a few things like this over the years, I can say with some authority:

• These are spectacularly good. Mine were never so complex.
• They’re beautifully filmed. It’s astonishingly hard to do these right – you have to design for the camera right from the start, which is why BBC Choice’s Simply Complicated wasn’t as good as one might have hoped
• The Honda advert wasn’t as original as everyone thinks. Aside from the Fischli & Weiss film, there were others.
• Bryson was absolutely right when he was pitching exactly this idea, long before the Honda ad. Ah, hindsight.
• Jack, you’re up.

Link? OK, then. A video of charming machines, evidently from a Japanese children’s TV show.

Japanese sketch show? These are cute gags: I prefer the first one to the second, but they’re both worth seeing. Apparently from Fuji TV’s Mechaike (slogan: ‘What a cool we are!’).

Sesame Street is, quite possibly, the best TV series of all time. Witness: REM performing ‘Furry Happy Monsters.’ Rock. On.

(via Fraser Spiers, wherein comments also point to the genuinely priceless ‘Don’t Know Why Y Didn’t Come‘ – a Norah Jones/Elmo duet. I’d love to know how many takes they have to do for these things before they get a complete pass without everyone corpsing.)

Which I always thought should continue ‘Crewe, Barley McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble, Grub. But perhaps that’s just me.

My jetset lifestyle starts, it seems, in Crewe. At a funeral. My grandmother’s funeral, in fact – no, it’s fine, really, but thanks for your thoughts. She was 93, has had nothing like quality of life for years now, and… well, let’s just say that the family circumstances are complicated. As funerals go it was a modest affair, a handful of family outnumbered by staff from the care home. A florid service with a character of a vicar (just short of the ‘fire and brimstone’ type), and a malfunctioning foot pedal for the curtain.

As is the way of such things, it was a surprisingly pleasant event. I was caught sneaking out of a greasy spoon by Uncle John and Auntie Eileen, long the jokers of the family, and they proceeded to drive me around Crewe ring-road until we achieved escape velocity. Which, with John driving, didn’t take long but did involve plenty of bickering. We worked out later that I have identical memories of sitting in the back of their various cars while they bickered, going back something like 25 years.

Jetset phase 2: London. On the 06:30 tomorrow morning (and what does the ‘0’ stand for?… yes, quite). The plan is that I collect a couple of scraps of paper from Tottenham Court Road, then head to the Indian High Commission and sit for as long as it takes to get a visa. Later in the afternoon I’m then due at a travel clinic for jabs. By then it should be clear whether I’m flying to Delhi on Monday. Assuming we can get a flight.

All entirely barking, of course. Somehow I’d be disappointed if it made sense.

Ignore the weirdness that may require you to turn off the advert blocker in your web browser (?!), and sponsor my friend Katie and her NESTA chums in next month’s Race for Life in Battersea Park. It’s in aid of Cancer Research UK; if you need any further convincing, head over to the blog Alan kept for Jules. ’nuff said.

Those of you with eagle eyes may have noticed this article in the Telegraph over the weekend, about the possibility of the Christmas Lectures moving to Bangalore. I… couldn’t possibly comment.

[update: the story hit the news wires too.]

London, Ri (that’s ‘RI’ to the rest of us), NESTA, Tower of ibid, Crown Jewels (Ooh! Sparkly!), not the Eye, Greenwich, rain, Ducks, Bowling (bowling?), DIY window seat, circular saws, home again x2, jiggity x2, Bangalore next week, gaaaaah.

More later.

In the meantime, amuse yourselves with this.

There are, at rough count, about fifteen hard drives in my flat. One of them just died. Which one? Er… my main backup drive, that gets an incremental from my PowerBook every Saturday morning.

That’s… that’s not good, is it? Eeek!

So, now I’m frantically backing up before I catch the morning’s red-eye to Stanstead. Ugh ugh ugh.

In November of 2001, this website asked its readers in a poll “What Star Wars mystery do you most want solved?” Most voted for the plot-centric “Why didn’t Vader sense Leia,” but five percent chose “Where does the ladder on Luke’s X-wing go?” as their favorite puzzle.

Link.