Clive Limpkin

call the cops

clive — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 11:37:50 +0000

The most callous case of granny dumping Henley police have ever encountered.

Speed

clive — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 19:46:02 +0000

Had Alex and I picked up hitchhikers as we drove home through France last week, (hypothetical of course as the Golf couldn’t take another half of rosé), they would have been mystified when she, at irregular intervals, would say “Bollocks” in a testy voice as she stared out the passenger window, then again – a little louder and more aggressively this time – and finally turn to me and shout the word in my ear, at which point I would jab a button on the steering wheel, the abuse would instantly stop and the journey continued as if nothing had happened. Had the hitchhikers, however, chosen to perform a parachute role out the rear door as we slowed at the first roundabout in a bid to retain their sanity, they’d never have discovered the cause of this bizarre ritual……

Our second-hand Golf, you see, came with a coloured satnav map in the central console plus a cruder arrow guidance system by the speedometer. Trouble is, they occasionally disagree – Alex’s will say fork left, mine will say fork right – and at such times my arrow system has proved more reliable than her prettier rolling map. That said, during such discrepancies the air turns blue as we debate the choice and it was during one of these shout-ins that I somehow pressed one of the four mystery buttons on the steering wheel and my second-opinion navigation aid was replaced with a screen offering average mpg, estimated arrival time and remaining fuel. So Alex took the wheel and somehow got it back, but every time she passed 53 mph there’d be a warning buzzer and she’d lose it again, finally learning by elimination that in hitting the bottom left mystery button, the trusted guidance arrow returned. (Check the satnav manual, you say? Please – to us technophobes, it could be written in Urdu).

So when I took over the driving again with strict instructions to touch nothing, I had to either maintain 54 mph through sleepy French villages and 52 mph on autoroutes, or continue with Alex’s obscure solution. In a bid to lighten the mood I likened the situation to ‘Speed’ where Sandra Bullock, (or ‘Bollocks’ as we affectionately know her), has to maintain 50 mph driving a coach or a bomb planted on board explodes. Sandra, though, doesn’t have failing hearing like me, hence the need for Alex’s urgent calls whenever she heard the buzzer and why, but for a full load of wine, there might be a trail of gibbering hitchhikers still lying in our wake.

We’re home now, the glitch remains but there are definite signs of goodwill returning and the Golf’s due for a service soon where there’s bound to be a lad at the garage who can read Urdu.

Opera Notes

clive — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 05:50:11 +0000

The Royal Opera House’s forthcoming production based on the life of Anna Nicole Smith might offend the cognoscenti, but what a story line…..

At eighteen she married a kitchen hand while working at Jim’s Crispy Fried Chicken Restaurant near Waco,Texas; when the marriage failed she moved to Houston but her lack of talent as a topless dancer had her switched to the lunchtime shift where as luck would have it lonely octogenarian oil billionaire J. Howard Marshall II would pass an hour. When she was asked if it was love at sight, (shades of Mrs. Merton asking Debbie McGee what first attracted her to the millionaire Paul Daniels), Anna Nicole revealed it was his liver spots that turned her on.

He married her, ignoring the sixty three-year age gap and paying for the 44DD breast implants which brought her Playboy shoots and her own TV show, but within a year he’d died, leaving her half his fortune.

Happy endings are bad news in operas and sure enough Anna Nicole spent the next five years in failed bids to get her hands on the cash, ballooning to fifteen stone by her bankruptcy hearing and finally dying of a drug overdose in a Florida hotel. Such was her fame that when a judge burst into tears when awarding custody of the body, he was promptly offered his own TV show.

But hold that curtain! Act Three centres on her funeral, (for which she wore a designer ball gown with matching tiara and a light dusting of her 44 DDs with J. Howard’s ashes), where her two ex’s stared each other down across the nave and her mother arrived to a chorus of booing. She was thirty nine.

Casting’s a cinch – Covent Garden have fat ladies coming out their arias – but the uninspired title of ‘Anna Nicole’ will have to go – for the life story of a thwarted topless dancer, it has to be, ‘If She Wants to Rigoletto.’

Any Particular Table?

clive — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 06:09:17 +0000

Fifteen months after the Mumbai terrorist attacks, security remains very… well, Indian. Sort of ho-hum karma. Hotels check beneath cars with mirrors on rollerskates; some look in the glovebox, some glance at the luggage, few do both. It gets more perfunctory as the queue and hooting grows but with Mumbai traffic it’s hard to know what’s queue and what isn’t, what’s road rage and what’s habit.
At the Leopold Café you’re frisked by a man with a rifle over his shoulder that would take down a chorus line of rhino with one shot. It was early morning and just a few Europeans inside so when waved to any of the tables, I chose one a little too close to the serving counter but with the best overall view.
A waiter took our order and without prompting pointed out the bullet holes in the walls they’ve kept after renovation and then lifted the tablecloth a little in front of Alex and pointed to a saucer-shaped hole in the marble floor between her feet. “That’s where the bomb went off,” he said, clicking his ballpoint. ”You want snack too?”. Suddenly the ho-hum’s replaced with a little chill that I’ve chosen that table out of thirty and Alex has picked that particular chair out of four. We skipped the snacks, just had coffee. And didn’t linger.

Cats and Carats

clive — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 06:05:00 +0000

After two fruitless days last week criss-crossing the Gir National Park’s dusty hinterland for the elusive Asian lion – smaller than their African cousins and lacking their natural sense of rhythm – we were on the verge of asking Alex to volunteer as tethered bait when our guide Desraj got a radio call from rangers who’d spotted three cubs resting up in the 95 degrees after a morning kill. Reversing our Jeep through the teak forest for better close-ups, (and a faster getaway should the kill have merely whetted their appetite), Desraj would have qualified for a hefty tip till we spotted his diamond-studded ear lobes.
By the time we reached the dirt track again, (and this being red-tape India), a Camera Permit Inspector with waxed moustache had monitored the call and was waiting to check our paperwork, (500 rupees for each camera over seven megapixels), while the guide and driver surreptitiously slid theirs under our seat. It’s a jungle out there.

Carry on up the Khyber

clive — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 12:52:44 +0000

Land of Contrasts? Tell me about it. Yesterday we trained from Cochin, a local second class stopper laughably called the Parasuram Express, which hugs the Keralan coast for eight hours of swaying hell as an army of shouting hawkers march the aisle with chai, coffee, curries, fried bananas, dodgy torches, Hindu fiction and religious tracts, all of which could be optimistically described as colourful – but not the toilets. These squatting hole-in-the-floors offer nothing but nothing to grip for support and though I was able to brace my head against a wall Alex had no such luxury, so a real toilet in our beach cottage last night proved heaven – until pressing the flush button revealed too late I was sitting on a state-of-the-art Toto Eco-Washer and my scream, as a freezing burst of water intruded off the Richter, had Alex rushing in lest I’d discovered non-brochure wildlife.

While accepting the maker’s claim the saving of paper contributes to preserving the rainforests, I’d sooner be lashed to the top of a mahogany tree as Brazilian loggers circle with buzzsaws than experience that again.

Low margins in Backwaters

clive — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 09:29:41 +0000

In the absence of roads in the Keralan Backwaters all haulage is by lake or canal and with profit margins thinner than the locals, overloading is the norm. These two are shifting sand for construction with a freeboard that would have Samuel Plimsoll turning in his grave. Nifty bailing with a handy saucepan is the only way to prevent sinking from the wake of passing rice barges which is maybe why the skipper’s taken up smoking.

Pondicherry

clive — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 05:23:43 +0000

After shooting a feature at Calcutta’s Future Hope School which rescues street children from Hell-on-Earth slums, we felt ready for R&R in Pondicherry, staying at a colonial gem in the French Quarter described in its brochure as ‘a hotel that never ceases to surprise,’ a claim born out as we entered Room 15 when a rat ran past our feet, under the bed and into the bathroom, causing Alex to immediately down her remaining Gynergene tablet, preciously reserved for severe migraines or rodent sightings, while I had to settle for a stiff lime and soda to aid recovery – being dry for nearly a year now, this proved the greatest test of resolve to date.
Once Alex’s eyeballs re-aligned and a new room was found free of wildlife we dined alfresco and, mindful of the Basil Fawlty episode, I suggested we skip the Cheese Platter lest opening the savoury biscuit tin produced a second sighting.

Greenest of the Green

clive — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 13:13:36 +0000

In a semi-lunar landscape of parched scrub near Jaisalmer, a brushwood fence rings six mud and dung thatched cottages in an area smaller than a tennis court which an extended family of twenty eight Bishnoi farmers call home, standing shyly on the spotless mud floor that shines with constant sweeping.
Rajasthan’s last three monsoons have been poor enough to threaten the very life of these nature worshippers whose ecological, vegetarian, pacifist and non-pollution credentials make Greenpeace look like a vandals, who bring out a little wooden stool as you try to get your head around a lifestyle that for hundreds of years was deemed backward, but now seems the only way forward.
For here is a sect of eco-warriors that may kill no animal nor even fell a tree, (unlike other Hindus, their dead are buried as to cremate would involve the use of wood). This family are millet farmers – when it rains. When it doesn’t, they survive selling milk and cream from their cows and wait and wait for the rains to save them.
Beyond their scrub fence, black buck graze on the fruit of the Khejri tree – these are animals that would provide nutrition to the Bishnois’ meagre grain diet and trees that would provide fuel and heat, but both remain sacred and untouched to these, the greenest humans on Earth.
They nod politely as you leave and after a half hour of rutted desert, the guide mentions in passing, “ Did you notice that Bishnoi in the last hut on the right who waved as we left? In his forties? He’s got an an M.A. in English at Jaipur University.”
You stop the Jeep so he can run that past again, which he does.
“So what will he do for a career?”
He shugs and looks puzzled. “Nothing,” he says.
“Then why do it – is it like some sort of intellectual exercise?”
The guide nods slowly. “Yes, you could say that, just an intellectual exercise. He calls it his hobby.”
So the Bishnoi with the M.A. sits in his mud hut with the rest of his family, waiting for the rains so he can sow his millet. And waits, and waits…..

Woolly Thinking

clive — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 05:15:27 +0000

India’s Thar Desert isn’t Peter O’Toole desert, too scrubby for that, but still desolate enough for a bend in the road to be viewed as a major feature. You can pass a hundred miles of nothing and then something. Like this – a perfect circle of a dozen sheep, their bowed heads facing inwards and touching as they doze, matched by another circle a quarter mile ahead. No one knows why. Maybe they’ve learnt how to shade their heads from the heat which can top 48 degrees; maybe they’re just attention seekers, and who could blame them?