"Goodness gracious..."

Laziness can sometimes, somehow, be the best policy... eventually.
A few months back, in a slough of anxious despair over my lack of progress in my trying-to-finally-be-an-adult attempt to (half-) buy my first property, I momentarily pondered going back to one of the only options on the slowly-moving list: a creepy cubbyhole across the road from the Red Lion and a meagre few millimetres upstairs from Chicken Cottage in Barnet High Street.

Such obvious poverty of prospects actually almost threw me instead into the welcoming, yet still dubious, embrace of a new development down the road - and across the North Circular - in Colindale, an admittedly-smart set of new apartments yet with the built-in disincentive of being in, well, Colindale.

Still, beggars can't be choosers, and it was still North London, within Barnet borough borders indeed, and I was tempted enough to ask about, and promise to attend, the crucial open day. Which, sadly, fell on a Saturday. Of a Spurs home match, but that rather proved beside the point since I could get along there bright and breezy and early that same Saturday morning.

Except I, obviously, didn't - a few drinks the night before making for a few extra hours in bed the next morning (and early afternoon, even, I dimly recall...)

So, Colindale went as casually wasted as myself, and so for a few more months I had to wait and wonder whether I'd frittered away one of my most likely sites. But, no, I should be wending Woodside Park way any day now.

And the smart and swanky Colindale setting...? Oh dear:

As that sage Homer once said: "Alcohol - the cause of, and solution to, all life's problems..."

"Who's gonna shoe your pretty little foot...?"

What a shame - had I learnt earlier of such a precious product, it would have shot straight to the top of my birthday wishlist, yet remains sadly stymied by the frustrating 28-day delivery longueur.

But still - do order a few yourself.

After all, if you're looking for excellent value for money, surely you can look no further than this.

"Gluecklich zu sehen, je suis enchante..."

Timmy Mallett's wasn't the only word association game.
Ever-instinctively, there are certain phrases that, once heard uttered, I can't help but parry with a set reply.
Some are merely repetitions. Others are script-repeating hack-copies. Others are a little more lateral.
But, anyway. As I've said here before, my dad can't hear the word "puffin" without, self-indulgently, others-annoyingly, exclaiming: "One thing about the puffin, almost tickles me to death - he always is a puffin - but he's never out of breath..."
A Danny Baker show once entertained a caller who, entirely sensibly, could never hear a football commentator exclaim, "Ole Gunnar Solksjaer" without unthinkingly retorting: "Lah-di-dah Gunnar Solksjaer..."!
My brothers and I, similarly sitcom-rifling, can't hear, say, a parent suggesting "How convenient" without twisting it back, indignant Homer-esquely...
And whenever I'm at the bar, especially with ancient best buddy Nick, and what everyone might want is being asked, one of us is sure to Alan Partridge-ly ponder: "I will have... a pint of BITTER..."

Sad and unnecessary, I well well-know...

But these word-association instincts are something I've been pondering, since just about every train journey in Germany, when the overhead announcer would oh-so-politely invite the attention of: "Meine Damen und Herren..."

... and every single little time, I couldn't help but hear in my head the corollary: "... mesdames et monsieurs - ladees unt gentlemen..."

...

"Comment ca va? ... Do you feel good? ... Ich bin eure Konfrenzier... I yem yer host - und sagen..."

Wilkommen, bienvenue, welcome indeed. Cabaret is coming back to Britain, a West End production opens in September, and I just can't wait.

Cabaret as a musical is as different from the film as both are from the original Isherwood books - say, the infamous Sally Bowles is just a relatively-minor chapter character in Goodbye To Berlin, and a jolly hockey sticks English bloomer in the stage-play before she and her American writer counterpart swap nationalities for the iconic film... (dropping, with them, the rosy-red-cheeks golly-goshness of "Perfectly Marvellous" and "Don't Tell Mama", with its late-verse hint at the movie's risqueness with such revelations as "You can tell my uncle, here and now, 'cos he's my agent anyhow" or "You can tell my cousin, that ain't grim, 'cos if he squeals on me I'LL SQUEAL ON HIM!"...)

The movie soundtrack seems to have been a constant in my life since pre-teen years, when it was one of the cassettes on constant rotation in my parents' car - gratifyingly alongside my other future-taste-determining tapes as The Beatles' "Rock And Roll Music Volume One" - so from the age of about ten I had Cabaret almost entirely off by heart.

Yet it wasn't until, I think, the mid-twenties that I finally watched the film for the first time, even after seeing a stage version at the Chichester Festival Theatre, starring as Sally Bowles the young woman who made a sudden name for herself as the young actress who (very frequently) stood in for Martine McCutcheon in My Fair Lady.

Then, not long after, I accompanied a friend to an early-morning showing, again in Chichester, but this time in their olde-worlde cinema, albeit only after the brass tributes had been blown outside on this 2002 Remembrance Sunday.

Surely the creepiest, most spine-tingling and heart-racing of horror films can’t achieve quite so unsettling an effect as the final bars of Cabaret the movie, the slow, faint Nazi inflections suddenly somehow implicated the viewer/voyeur?

Obvious comparisons can be made with the other Fosse masterpiece, yet only recently done-for-silver-screen Chicago, an utter joy to watch yet played for laughs, whereas Cabaret seems played for leers. While Richard Gere’s lawyer is domineering presence in the latter, all swaggering and swish, Joel Grey’s Emcee seeps through the former, somehow sinister even when at his most ludicrous…

Perhaps the one complaint I have against Cabaret is that Liza Minelli is, well, just too good. Sally Bowles is, I suppose, supposed to be a bit of desperate, deluding hoofer – yet Liza just dominates, enraptures, looks every millimetre the certain star. Her Mein Herr, a top hat and chair her only accompaniments, is simply exhausting to merely watch – much like Catherine Zeta-Jones’s breathless performance in Chicago of “I Just Can’t Do It Alone”, yet somehow, unbelievably even more physical and draining…

But, while I somehow find myself improbably humming the song itself “Cabaret” in the Tesco car park, the simply spine-chilling moment of moments in the movie is “Tomorrow Belongs To Me”, that beautiful hymn of hmmmm-ness, echoing up originally from the purest of pure voices yet unfolding itself into an evilly irresistible Nazi power-anthem before you’ve yet known it…
And the most affecting face of the film? Amid the soaring, ever-for-now-believing Frauleins, and the boys playing at soldiers, and the stern-looking leaders, you the complacent many-years-on and full-of-assumptions audience gets a glimpse of an old man, putting down his mug, suddenly and utterly disgusted by this new verve yet resigning himself hopelessly to this all-changed era, out of which he hopes soon to sink…

And yet, and yet...

While in Berlin, I saw plenty of well-to-do theatres, cabaret clubs with champagne-quaffing queues outside in the sunshine for as long as they really, really could…

Yet no Kit-Kat Club. Back to the Isherwood I go. Back to the seedy CDs. Back to the bookings.

Well – after all:

“So – life is disappointing?
Forget it.
In here – life is beautiful.
Zer girls are beautiful.
Even zer orchestra – is beautiful…!”

Go ahead – ask Helga.

My World Cup runneth over.
I'm all football-fatigued.
I feel well and truly Weltmeisterschaft-ed.

While I hope bits of "real life" have been sprinkled here and thereabouts during my last month or so of blogging, "normal service" should be resumed here shortly.

You have been warned, oh dear, dear, loyal reader(s)...
Nope, maybe I was right the first time.

"And I'll take a high dive, some day I'll never land..."

My voting slip, handed in half-an-hour before the deadline, opts for giving third place (one point) to Germany's Miroslav Klose, second place (three points) to Italy's Andrea Pirlo, and first place (five points) to Italy's Fabio Cannavaro.

That loud scratching sound you may have heard shortly before 10pm BST was caused by several hundred journalists simultaneously scoring a thick line through the words "Zinedine Zidane".

Cannavaro should now be a shoo-in, though Fifa's awards can still surprise.
A form just handed round the media centre reveals "The Most Entertaining Team award presented by Yahoo!", for the side "which has done the most to entertain the public with a positive approach to the game", goes to... Portugal.

Well, acting counts as a branch of entertainment, I suppose, but still...

"None shall sleep..."

That moment that finally made the final worthwhile.
After a disappointly mediocre match, a subdued crowd more keen on jeering than cheering, the unhappy shoot-out having to break the stalemate, and the disaster of a departing legend going loco – there’s an almighty tingle as Fabio Grosso’s ball blazes into, almost through, the back of the net and the split-second of realisation suddenly surges: the World Cup has just been won.
Abruptly, the air is filled with pumps of orchestral pomp – glitter and gunpowder shoots upwards into the Berlin sky, showers down on the German grass – darting figures leap, skip, dash and dart maniacally back and forth and nowhere and anywhere, while their lighter-shirted counterparts slump, each in their own loneliest daze – and scurrying, single-minded stewards stream from every entrance, hauling contraptions and shards of a stage, duties to perform upholstering this most emotional of performance art.
Football – the most seriously frivolous thing in town...?
Why, with all the world’s cares and crises put safely out of sight and out of mind, can instead all glorious life seem briefly to sit inside this collision of architectural form and era – the Olympian grandeur (and folly) of Hitler’s Olympic Stadium, all unnecessary columns but all-devouring stands topped off by a bathetic, plastic-looking modern rooftop, a cut-away at one end opening the monster’s mouth towards the city and civilisation beyond, an empty Olympic flame’s seat tonight successively occupied by Toni Braxton, Il Divo, some wackily-outfitted escapees from what seemed a tiresomely-gurning performing arts institute, and then Wyclef Jean and the ever-mesmeric Shakira, all melody sadly swamped within one thudding, muddy pound of artificial drums.
Well, well, why...? I dunno – but I know I didn’t want to leave, staying even for and beyond the inevitable turgid We Are The Champions, and being rewarded for such perseverance by the equally inevitable, infinitely more emotive Nessun Dorma, as player of the tournament, ultimately-vanquishing Italian lion Fabio Cannavaro could no longer keep his granite features quite so impassive anymore, and grinned, just grinned...

Right team, wrong performance. Sadly this was far from the classic final called for, these two occasionally-expressive yet more-often-impenetrable European powerhouses managing to cancel each other out, across the pitch: Gennaro Gattuso sticking close to Zinedine Zidane, or perhaps France happy to force Gattuso back not forwards; Cannavaro allowing the forlorn-in-a-French-shirt Thierry Henry no time to turn; Francesco Totti barely getting a coherent kick thanks to the French back six...
Ah, but Zidane - Zidane, Zidane, Zidane... Un plus nincompoop, ne c'est pas?

Having started the tournament so badly, then returning in such style, here he managed to end at his worst. Not just the match, or the tournament – but his great playing career.
"Outrageous" – one of those words so easily-over-used, like "fantastic", or "sensational", or "absolutely", absolutely.
But tonight, he really was. No longer simply, outrageously talented. But outrageously audacious, with the cheekiest of chipped penalties to – just about – give France an early lead. And two hours later, just outrageously stupid, to hurl the meatiest of headbutts into the chest of involved-in-everything Materazzi, finally "earning" Zizou a long-delayed red card. His final contribution on a football field – that same head that powered those two World Cup-winning headers into the St Denis net back in 1998, now making an irredeemably savage contribution to another, sadder final.
Silly boy – and, with the World Cup’s dirtiest player Henry (I’m only going by Fifa facts, honest...) having just preceded him off the pitch, albeit replaced by a substitute, France were without their two totemic playmaking presences not only for the final minutes, but also the do-or-die shoot-out. When everyone hit the target – except for David Trezeguet, golden-goal match-winner when these met in the Euro 2000 final, who this time merely hit the bar. And unlike Zidane’s earlier ‘normal’ penalty, this one would only, tantalising bounce the wrong side of the line…
So, having stood and dawdled, each alone on the pitch an hour before kick-off, those two American-comedian-(sort-of-)-resembling managers, Marcelo “Larry David” Lippi and Raymond “Eugene Levy” Domenech, again trod the turf even after their players had departed down the tunnel: Lippi no longer with hands jammed in pockets, but arms raised in triumph – Domenech standing stolid and silent, those Sam The Eagle brows barely twitching but the eyes rolling over the celebrations so nearly his own.
And so now for me, time to trudge back to boring reality – after tomorrow’s long drive back to Blighty, picking up those dull, put-off duties of moving home, hunting for a new job, and even – ulp – later this week entering the final dread year of my twenties...
But what a distraction this has been, England’s embarrassments and tonight’s mixed emotions aside...
The World Cup: it really doesn’t matter. But that just makes it matter more…
But each one must end. As a commentator once famously said, as he drew down the curtain on one more World Cup final...

... "Das Spiel ist aus!" (Well, it makes a change from the usual one...)

"On the 31st floor, your gold-plated door won't keep out the Lord's burning rain..."

"The construction of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church is making such very good progress, the ignorant populace never cease to be amazed."

How charmingly-put by architect Franz Schwechten, writing in 1894 of the stately centrepiece of a vast church-building programme, lofted in unbashful tribute to the late Kaiser Wilhelm I on the orders of his grandson Wilhelm II.

And yet, after being battered by Allied bombs in 1943, the still-just-about-standing ruins have been transformed into a symbol, not of vainglory, but of humility - a ravaged reminder of the horrors of war, set in a self-sufficient square at the tip of the department store-dominated Kurfurstendamm.

The "broken tooth", as it's now nicknamed, is quite a sight - more raggedly beautiful now than in its once-epic glory, pictured in stills which suggest a neo-romanesque masterpiece suddenly plonked in lonely yet awesome isolation on a roundabout.

Inside stands a tiny, gleaming cross gifted by the similarly ill-fated, similarly defiant Coventry Cathedral - while the same cathedral has donated a cross made of nails to the now-next-door squat, decahedronal "replacement" church - where iris-dazzling cyan streams through tiny squares of stained-glass, and a grim-eyed, golden Christ tips awkwardly above the altar.

The brief must have been: build something as different as can be, from what once stood - now totters - alongside. The effect of both is unnerving - yet touching too.