Jazz, wheels and bumps-a-daisy

I got stuck in the London to Brighton bike ride last weekend. I had a car load of design gurus making a pilgrimage to some Arts and Craftsy, National Trust pile just south of East Grinstead, quite close to where I’d once spotted Tom Cruise filling up at the Texaco garage and then been invited to an orgy by a farmer called David. You couldn’t make it up. Anyway, back in the car, one minute we were playing i-spy a groovy typeface, the next, we were surrounded by swarms of chunky buns in Lycra. We were helpless to resist – like an injured praying mantis being swept along a jungle path by thousands of impatient ants, we endured mile after mile of their cheery free-wheeling and uphill grimacing. Finally, we chucked up a side road and I pulled out the throttle. Two hours late, we reached our destination where we ooooed and aaaahhhd at a lovely wardrobe and a nice row of carrots. So glad we made the effort. Later in the week I went to a jazz session at the very hip Green Door in Brighton. This is the sort of place where a man can wear a beret and not get laughed at. When I walked in, a man, wearing a beret, was shouting into a microphone while another man played discordant notes on a clarinet. I asked the man on the door when the performance was starting which was obviously the wrong question because it already had. This was Dada. Then a man called Oxymoron came on and played a homemade xylophone on the floor to rapturous acclaim. During this I ate a packet of nuts which I figured was also quite Dada. Then Lena Lovich (who still wears a silly bonnet with stick on plaits) and a man that looked like a slightly slimmer version of Timothy Spall came on and murdered some Kurt Weill songs while a black man with a white goatee (very jazzzzzz) played a Heath Robinson double bass and a man with a cordoroy jacket mucked about on a trumpet while another grizzled old man with adenoid trouble recited a poem. This being jazz, periodically, it went all scatty and everyone did their own tedious solo, after which the audience politely clapped and gave out a few feeble whoops. On the way home I fell off  my bike into a hedge. The End.