..KEVIN NOLAN - PAY ME MY MONEY DOWN....

......I really didn't want to post this blog , but it's my birthday and I have had a shit weekend so far and am getting pissed off.......so let's roll........................

NAME AND SHAME No 1 - KEVIN NOLAN

Kevin Nolan is a professional footballer , currently playing for West Ham - and Club Captain.

Kevin was born in Liverpool and is currently having a house built there , in Aigburth.

And as is a footballer's wont these days , the house is rather large ; the house I currently live in would fit - side to side , front to back , top to bottom - into Kevin's hall . I know , because I have measured it.

Kevin , during the course of construction of the house , has employed a number of people  - interior designers and architects , plasterers  , heating and plumbing contractors , joiners.........

..........and Kevin hasn't paid them . Certainly the Interior Designers - i.e. me - haven't been paid since February. the M&E people ( heating and plumbing ) tell me they haven't been paid , and are owed some £55k.......plasterers , everyone , has now walked off site and construction work is at a standstill . No comments , no explanation , just no money forthcoming . The nearest that you get is a message from ' his people ' suggesting ' a technical delay in accessing the required funds '..............

A footballer with cash-flow problems ? I should be so lucky.....................

Apart from the sheer energy-sapping frustration of not being paid - enthusiasm and constructive creativity disappearing faster than bathwater down a plughole , what seriously pisses me off is that due to the current economic uncertainty we have now had to let our designer go : that's three years of investing time, money and effort into teaching and training up to the level of a potential director that we won't get back. Bugger.

Thanks, Kevin........and there was me thinking that being Club Captain was a position of responsibility , a role model for principled behavior , a representative for the values espoused by the club ........

Maybe its all a big misunderstanding..........Maybe Kevin will read this and the money will arrive along with a ' sorry about that ' note and we will all be friends again ............or maybe I am just a click away from the West Ham Supporters page on Facebook and ready to lodge a posting - then the fan REALLY would be hitting the shit...............

...Ok - lets all sing along - and play it LOUD......................

......I thought I heard the Captain say.................

PAY ME , PAY ME
PAY ME MY MONEY DOWN
PAY ME OR GO TO JAIL
PAY ME MY MONEY DOWN.  

....THIS WHEEL'S ON FIRE ..........

.....The height of ambition for any professional road-racing cyclist , probably the highlight of his career , is , if he is lucky ,to maybe one day win a stage of the Tour de France . Within the last three weeks Team Sky have become the first professional team from the UK to ever win a stage ( loosing team leader Bradley Wiggins the following day to a broken collar bone ) . Cadel Evans , a pre-race favorite and the 2009 Road Race World champion , has won his second ever stage , his first on the open road......and gone on to win the race for the first time.  The previous record holder of stages from the UK was Barry Hoban , who won a total of eight stages over his career.

Within the last three weeks Mark Cavendish has now won his 16th , 17th , 18th, 19th and 20th stages , and the green jersey into the bargain.

Cavendish is the first rider in the history of the race to have won four stages in each of four consecutive Tours.

Cavendish is the first rider to have won three consecutive final stages in Paris .

Cavendish is the first rider from the Uk to win the Green Jersey.

Cavendish is the Real Deal..............

.....The UK , particularly the English , have a curiously ambivalent attitude towards their sporting heroes.............

Favorites are ' The Gallant Losers '..........Henry Cooper will forever be remembered for his bloodily ' heroic ' defeat at the hands of Mohamed Ali , Stirling Moss remembered as ' The Best Racing Driver Never To Win The F1 World Championship ' , Mike Hawthorn ( the first British driver to become F1 champion ) long forgotten . ' Plucky ' Ricky Hatton took 35,000 fans to Vegas in 2009 , only for them to see his career destroyed in the first two rounds by Manny Pacquiao .....they cheered him out , they cheered him back...........

Then there are the ' Good , Just Not Good Enough ' ..........entire forests of newsprint are consumed every year as the public and the press follow Andy Murray And Mother in their increasingly futile quest to win Wimbledon ( or any Grand Slam title )......a relationship echoed in the film ' The Black Swan ' as the mother lives out the hopes of her own career through that of the son / daughter.. Tim Henman - sans mother - likewise carried the burden of expectation.

The ' Just Rubbish '...........What passes for the English Football Team sets sail every other year to a European or World tournament on a totally unfounded tide of optimism , hope , flags and funny hats , only to return , inevitably , some three weeks later - as failures yet again - to howls of derision , citing ' tiredness ' . ' lack of preparation ', ' bad luck ' , ' injuries ' etc..........sheer ineptness is never mentioned . The whole circus then starts again , on yet more unfounded optimism - ' this time it will be different '  ..........

And ,  ' If You Can't Beat Them , Join Them '  - the English Rugby team have elected to play in an all-black strip at the next Rugby World Cup - in New Zealand............. 

Mark Cavendish won six stages in the Tour de France in 2009 , unprecedented for a rider from the UK. The BBC Sports Personality of the Year that year was one Ryan Giggs, who achieved nothing much of note other than being a member of a reasonable football team - and in hindsight probably remembered more for his achievements off the field rather than on it. Cavendish won a further five stages in 2010 ; that year the Sports Personality was a jockey, again being selected for his overall career achievements rather than any singular event within the year. The runners up included a darts player ; Cavendish wasn't even placed.

Will Cavendish be Sports Personality this year ?  Probably not , it most likely being a golfer from Northern Ireland - take your pick ; golf has a huge fanbase in the UK , much bigger than cycling ........or it might be a boxer .......or a cricketer..........or a darts player ............or a horse.

We'll see..............in the meantime , just enjoy him - they don't come along like him too often.

Mark Cavendish at the roll-out from our home town in the Bearn at the start of Stage 19 in the 2010 Tour. Some four  hours later he won the stage in a sprint finish up in Bordeaux .

...ONE MORE CUP OF COFFEE.........

..   A quick sketch here for some Manchester-based clients for a continental style cafe bar - non of this anodyne Starbucks rubbish imported from the States but a more honest attempt to replicate the small continental bar that seems to be open all hours and sells coffee / spirits / wine all together without any problem...............


......it would be nice to get this one up and running on site , as I am sure that we could roll it out, but for the moment it's waiting for the right location.............

 

The right client / brief , the right location and the right time - the Holy Trinity of the design world , at least for us in the leisure industry.......

...SINGING THE BLUES.......

 Ottilie Patterson, singer with the Chris Barber Jazz and Blues Band , died this week

I probably first saw her around 1962 - 63 , singing with the band at the Birmingham and Midland Jazz Club at the old Digbeth Institute , sneaking in as an under-age member , and through her discovered Ma Rainey and the incomparable Bessie Smith , starting a life long love affair with the blues..............and she was a bloody good singer. She suffered from poor health and left the band in the late sixties, but had toured the States with the band to great acclaim and sung with Muddy Waters - not too bad for a girl from Northern Ireland. 

The Chris Barber Band is still touring.

...STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN.....

           

As it enters its fnal week we finally got to the V&A to see ' The Cult of Beauty - The Aesthetic Movement 1860 - 1900 ' which I enjoyed very much - it was interesting to see the Pre-Raphaelite movement placed into a wider cultural context , and the influence of the Aesthetic Movement on both the burgeoning Arts and Crafts movement and the then  growing interest in domestic interior decoration , which was always going to appeal, given my background . Exhibitions these days tend to be very much more than a single artist collection , and the setting within a wider social context allows for both a greater collection of exhibits and a greater interpretation - sometimes reinterpretation - and understanding of both their time and their place.

.........We then wandered through to the newly re-vamped Renaissance Galleries - The Simon Sainsbury gallery is particularly effective , where again - much on the lines of the Sackler Gallery at the RA - a hitherto inaccessible external space has now been roofed over and incorporated within the main exhibition space , providing a top-lit space of considerable height in which to display more architectural elements.........visible in this first picture is one of the few timber-frame building frontages to survive the Great Fire of London , and close up the scale and size is quite spectacular.......

........but to my mind by far the most intriguing , if not bizarre , exhibit is this staircase , marooned in flight , going nowhere . Rescued from a Breton house in the town of Morlaix at around 1860 , it dates back to around the 17th century ; but why would someone just preserve the staircase ? Staircases , more than most other architectural forms , depend on context to make sense.........where was it going from, where was it going to ? Quite a few of the treads have not survived , particularly  the top flight , and neither have the landings ,  so being able to climb the stairs is a non-starter . A structure robbed of its meaning , an exo-skeleton , a journey suspended and preserved in time. The support steelwork is minimalist , beautifully detailed and executed , and the whole of the staircase must have been dry assembled within a scaffolding frame , to allow the steelwork to be set-out prior to manufacture; the support steelwork then determines the setting out and construction of the wall , so the staircase for once dictates the surrounding construction. The whole structure hangs there lightly in space , a staircase without steps ,a ghost from times past...............

It just looked so light and so beautiful.......

...THRILLS, SPILLS AND BELLYACHES.........

Soooooo.................2 days into Le Tour and last years winner Contador ( possibly ) has already been bumped down to 75th in the overall classification , due to the unwitting intervention of a spectator together with falling outside the 3K ruling for the finish.

......and none of the teams fussed about helping him out . Already some 102 seconds down on Shleck and Evans and with last years winning margin only 38 seconds , its looking like being a long hard road for the Spanish rider - and still 3 Sundays to go. Lets hope Millar ( currently second ) and Cavendish have more luck.

....ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST.....

......This last weekend saw the final demise of Habitat here in the UK , the high-street furniture / lifestyle shop that seems to have been around forever ; its ultimate failure was , they say , down to its inability to adapt. Adapt to what.........?

......It's difficult now , from this point in time , to appreciate how groundbreaking and important the Habitat shops - and even more so the catalogues - were when they first started appearing in the late 'sixties. The first and second generation of design students to come through the art college system - and ' design ' rather than 'art ' is the operative word here - were just about starting out on their professional careers to become the first wave of what is now the Design Profession , and wanted a lifestyle to match the design-led experience of their time at college. Out with the austerity and tiredness of their parent's world , a generation exhausted by the Second World War and its aftermath , in with a bright new future. Enter Habitat , providing the furniture , the fabrics , the kitchen accessories and the clean ' Provencal ' vision of a lifestyle looking forward towards the brightness of the continent rather than backwards to dark utility furniture and those heavily patterned carpets.

Terrance Conran had a vision , to bring contemporary homeware and furnishings to the masses at an affordable price, and the aspiring middle classes loved it - a set of the early Habitat catalogues through to around 1980 or so would tell you all you need to know about the history of design in the home ; it's all there , at 30p a time. It couldn't last , but essentially the ultimate ' failure ' of the Habitat chain is down to the fact that during its time it was enormously successful  and achieved everything that it set out to do , changing the public face of design in the UK for ever . Conran's importance as both  retailer and restaurateur cannot be overstated - single-handedly he dragged the high street into the second half of the 20th century.

Habitat had eventually run its course and its time was up ; the design world has changed out of all recognition in the past forty years or so . Designers pour out of the colleges at the rate of some 5,000 or so a year , designers set up their own branded businesses and outlets, design magazines proliferate , the entire globe is sourced for designs and inspiration , everyone is now their own design guru. To say Habitat failed ' because it couldn't adapt ' is to miss the point entirely ; it's a bit like saying the Beatles failed because they couldn't adapt to all the genres that comprise the current musical scene . The Beatles kicked down the door and everyone else followed ; likewise Conran and Habitat kicked down their own door and made it possible for everything that followed in the world of design on the High Street , and for this we should owe them an enormous debt of gratitude...............

...............and remember them fondly for those heady days of the early seventies when we could furnish our first homes as WE wanted, red enamel coffee pot , chicken brick and all........