onionbagblog

An album that messes with the space-time continuum. You’d expect nothing less from those involved. I love the way the beats are stretched out. You’re one step behind where the rhythm should be.

Weatherall and pals mess with your head, as well as the whole dance industry that was growing around the time of this release. They’re looking for something new but also taking the piss privately. If you’re in on the joke, then it’s a fantastic piece of music in which to offer optimism as to where dance music would head next.

The Sabres' dream didn’t deliver and we were still left with the same old commercial crap with all the big dance festivals and mega clubs, plus the big-name DJs. Weatherall always kept it real. This album is testament to that.

⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Another Sunday, another Cycle UK ride out with the Sunny Colch crowd. Except it wasn’t so sunny up as I made my way to the Leisure World rendezvous at 9:30 am.

This was a dull but dry day. In my mind there is always the sense that I need to be cycling when there is no sign of the pesky rain up above.

We started off as a group of four and ended up as a group of a dozen. It’s quite a new thing with the Cycle UK meet-up; the defined starting point now has become elongated as we pick up passengers along the way.

I got cut up at a roundabout by some idiotic driver before I was even out of Stanway.

The suburban houses were still full of all the Halloween tat from the night before. Landfill, here we come.

The first pickup point for our ride saw a couple rolling out on a most splendid recumbent tandem. It’s been a while since I’ve seen one of these out in the wild.

As ever I had little understanding or detail as to where we were heading. We always seem to take a turn off along Turkey Cock Lane. This never fails to raise a smile.

One of our riders was a bit of an ornithologist. He had a keen eye and was able to spot a tremendous buzzard preparing for takeoff in one of the country fields.

A toilet stop was required before the coffee break. I pulled over to syphon the python with one of the other male riders. We picked an exact same spot where there was a trough in place of a farmer’s gate blocking people out.

Needs must.

The tea stop was reached. It was functional although everyone in our group was served in a dirty teacup. I did ponder bartering at the till, but then it wasn’t really the occasion to kick up a fuss.

We left the tea rooms of Coggeshall and cycled off, I think, in the rough direction of Maldon. At this stage I couldn’t stop yawning. The autumn colours from the trees and kept me awake.

We passed a large sign for Cobb’s Farm Pumpkins. I pondered stopping off and popping in to see the country cousins.

The luncheon stop just outside of Maldon was taken. It was at a caravan park. Blimey. I wasn’t expecting that.

It was actually a seafront restaurant that involved lifting a 27 kg electric bike up a short flight of stairs.

It was worth the effort. We had the Captain’s Room at the top all to ourselves. One of the tables actually had a boat underneath with a glass panel cut out in the shape of the boat.

I was energised with a very late late all-day breakfast and all set for the return ride back to base. The light was starting to fade. I took a turn off and deviated from the rest of the group when I caught my bearings and a quicker way back home.

92 km in total.

Chapeau!

I think I’ve finally made my peace with Forest. The 2-0 away defeat down at Brentford on Saturday was something of a turning point for me.

The narrative ahead of this game was that Glassner needed a win, not to save his job, but to keep the fan base on board. I I just about buy into the Forest line that he is the man for the long term.

But then the Big Fat Greek can be very trigger happy when needs must.

We’re not quite there yet, but WOH, we’re getting damn close. This time last season this situation would have been giving me sleepless nights. That’s what four head coaches in one season does to you.

But not today, nope. As I’ve said, I think I’ve finally made my peace with Forest.

This all came about, really, through coincidence. Time and tide had me running all over the place on Saturday afternoon. Peacock TV over in the States wasn’t screening the match and so I decided to go about my usual business.

That meant a first half of football up at Broad Lane watching Wivenhoe Town, and then legging it over to the Essex Sports Arena to catch the Rebs women at home.

I had a contingency in mind when it came to Forest. I caught the first half of the BBC Radio Nottingham commentary in the AirPods whilst watching the Dragons.

At the Sports Arena I had my FUCKL OFF noise cancelling Sony headphones with me. They don’t half pump up the volume at Our House when the Rebs take to the court.

I struggled to get a decent signal in the Arena. That was something of a first. In the end I just gave up on the commentary and pretty much gave up on Forest.

I had made my peace.

The 4G in the Arena was so poor that I couldn’t even get any score updates. I sat back and rather enjoyed watching a highly competitive game of basketball that was breaking out on the court.

I wasn’t surprised to see when I left the Arena that Forest had lost 2-0. No worries. If we’re relegated then so what.

I know that’s a very broad statement to make and obviously I’ll feel very different if and when that happens. But right now I’m rather chilled about all things Forest.

The performances on Saturday were shit right across the team, judging by the two and a half minutes I caught on Sky back at base and also the BBC player ratings.

We know these aren’t poor players but somehow they just aren’t buying into the system. This makes little sense. Failing to buy into four different systems last year is understandable but Glassner has laid out clearly what he wants. Just go out there and do it, right?

I gave in and had a minute or so of scrolling on X. I saw a couple of fan videos from the Forest end. The mood has clearly turned. Boos at full time is pretty ugly viewing.

But I kind of get it. If you’ve made it all the way down to some shithole in West London and then then see a team with so much promise being outplayed by what is essentially an old third division club squatting in the Premier League, then you’re going to feel angry.

Lovely bit of arrogance there, Jase.

So next weekend we welcome the serial CHEATERS Manchester City to the World Famous City Ground. How’s that home record looking, Forest fans?

Maybe the trick is that I just don’t watch Forest on the telly anymore and breeze through the season with no expectation.

You’re never going to take away what I feel for this club but I rather enjoyed a stress free Saturday afternoon at the basketball, not being put through all the emotions from a team that rarely delivers these days.

Oh yeah - I then looked at the D***y score.

Ha bloody ha.

To the Essex Sports Arena! …on Saturday afternoon

The Essex Rebels Women were hosting Newcastle Eagles as their league campaign continues to unfold with this new look Rebs team and Coach.

It’s a shame that Our House wasn’t exactly buzzing for the occasion. It was disappointing to see a very empty arena. The 4pm tip off time wasn’t exactly family Halloween friendly with armies of little ankle biters getting ready for an evening of nuisance.

Newcastle weren’t frightful but their gold kit was something of an eyesore. This was a game in which both teams looked well matched, with little to choose between both defence and attack.

I admit to having only half an eye on the early stages of the ball game. I was struggling to connect my noise cancelling headphones to the second half of the Forest commentary away at Brentford. As ever with tech, if it takes longer than 5 minutes to sort something out, then give up.

Farewell Forest, basketball it is then.

The first quarter was rather physical. There were some vicious elbows flying around as both teams traded points. Rebels were trailing 20 to 23 at the first buzzer.

Although the Rebs had a full bench that was dressed, there was little movement from new Head Coach Tor Freeman. This was disappointing as it’s not as if his bench options weakened the team considerably.

The game continued to be evenly matched, with Newcastle taking a single point lead into half time with the scoreboard showing 40 to 41.

Despite the rather barren Essex Sports Arena, this didn’t stop the Spooky Cam appearing on the big screen at the break. No surprises that we weren’t dressed up for the Halloween occasion.

WHADDYA mean I’m in fancy dress? This is my usual look.

Boo!

The third quarter came and went. Not a lot happened apart from more points being traded. Eagles were 64 to 62 ahead.

This was always going to be a close game as we headed into the final quarter. There was little to separate the teams. Eagles number five was proving to be a pesky little player, setting up each play.

A couple of big three pointers from Liv Partridge gave the Rebels some momentum. At one stage we had a Coogan and a Partridge on the court for the Rebels.

Aha!

More big three pointers came from Captain Claire Paxton. She’s such an outstanding leader. On these occasions she does a lot of the grunt work to set up play and then somehow manages to deliver when it comes to finding the big shots.

And so it came to Rebels trailing by three points with 34 seconds left on the clock. A timeout was called from the Rebels' bench.

The set play failed to deliver the three points he needed. Rebels had to foul to give Newcastle the free throws so they could regain possession.

Newcastle sunk each shot with from the free-throw line.

An audacious three pointer right on the buzzer from Paxton wasn’t enough. A heartbreaking defeat for the Rebels as they went down 83 to 82.

To Broad Lane! …on Saturday afternoon for a hit and run first half of football. Wivenhoe Town were hosting Netherton United on what was possibly the last Estuary Wilds blue sky afternoon before we enter the winter doom and gloom months.

It’s a shame I couldn’t make the most of it. I had basketball duties up at the University an hour later. It made sense to stop off at Broad Lane for some random photo action during the first half, and then bugger off to the basketball.

I arrived ever so slightly fashionably late but timed my arrival to make sure I could capture the first goal for the Dragons.

GEDDIN.

I then celebrated the second goal with my building and construction guru P. Like a bunch of twats, we were jumping around as the ball hit the side netting. Oh well. The moment was there at least.

I made my way around the ground to do the photo walk. I was expecting the old perimeter wall to have been knocked down and replaced with something a little more player-friendly. Hopefully this is to come soon.

This was an afternoon for putting your hand to your eyes in order to view the action. I struggled slightly with my SLR lens, but not as much as many of the spectators around the ground who were straining to see the action.

I say many of the spectators - just to be clear, this wasn’t a capacity 3,000 or 4,000 sellout, but we are getting there slowly, slowly up at Broad Lane. This season so far has been one of positivity both on and off the pitch.

Netherton were turning out to be very competitive. They were a strong side that weren’t afraid to make a physical game out of it for what is still a very young Wivenhoe team.

The Dragons have pace. This was demonstrated superbly with the second goal. There was a beautiful setup as the ball was played out wide before [Gawd knows who] took aim and fired home.

BACK OF THE NET.

The photo walk was done. Basketball was calling. I had 10 minutes or so behind the goal with some of the Wivenhoe old boys.

They may be ageing but their humour is still there. I don’t think the Netherton keeper appreciated Monika Seles GRUNTS each time he set himself up for a goal kick.

A quick scroll at the Wivenhoe X feed at half-time during the basketball, and oh looky looky, here: the Dragons won 3-0.

I saw two goals, missed one, so that means I must have watched at least two thirds of the action, right?

Five pamphlets from the superb Past Tense of South London.

I do love a good old pamphlet read, especially so if it has a transpontine theme. Sure, books are half decent but there’s something accessible about the format of a pamphlet that captures my attention.

I think it goes back to the old fanzine days, where I always had half a dozen on the go. It looks like I’ve substituted football for transformative South London psycho-geographic politics.

It’s quite a niche market but thank the chuff that Past Tense are there for us.

To be honest I initially went to the Past Tense site just to pick up the latest Kennington Park pamphlet. As the title suggests, The Birthplace of People’s Democracy tells the story of Kennington through the eyes of working class history.

I start clicking and then click, click, click some more.

Oh - I seem to have five items in my basket. Whatever, that’s £20 bloody well spent.

So here we have other publications exploring in detail my particular patch of South London.

Let’s start in Brixton with Through a Riot Shield and a look at the 1985 Brixton riot. It’s a tried and tested old story, but one which always seems to find some new perspective in which to understand it.

The Killing of the Elephant and the Destruction of the Castle is also very close to home. I can’t say I miss those hellish days of navigating two bloody awful roundabouts as I cycled from Stockwell up towards Farringdon.

But in its place now is something very different. The Elephant has lost its working class soul with the social cleansing of the Heygate and what was to follow further down the road as you head towards Walworth.

One quote that always sticks in my mind was when the old bastard Wolfgang Moneypenny was interviewed by the much missed South London Hardcore. He came up with the classic line of:

“I was born of Elephant and Castle.”

South London Forever etc. Comrade

The transpontine lens then widens slightly as we come to Last Orders for the Local - Working Class Space and the Marketplace. There’s a similar theme of capital taking over working class areas and replacing it with absolute shite.

It’s a bit of a broad brush in which to paint this picture but some of my South London landmarks have been transformed by middle class tossers in recent years.

We’re talking the lovely Lido, le Velo, and even days out at The Oval. These are still amongst my fave places ever but once the Bright Young Things start to take over, then, much like marketing, they turn everything into shit.

And finally, to top up the Past Tense online basket, We Remember Wat Tyler. He’s a figure I really should know a lot more about. A Past Tense pamphlet seems like a half decent starting place.

Forward ever, backward never.

Another morning, another allotment transportation.

Transporting all the old shit from the domestic garden V 1.0 ahead of the domestic garden V 2.0 has been a regular occurrence over the past few months. We’re just about there.

This could possibly be the last half decent weekend of allotment gardening weather. I rocked up with my trolley full of peat, pieces of wood, and even some corten steel to find something of a semi-industrious building site.

Allotment folk were busy banging and nailing things down ahead of the winter storms to come.

I’ve got a handyman who can do all that for you, mate.

Elsewhere, there was a similar scene across the allotment patch over at the cricket club. It looked like the square was having a few alterations ahead of the winter lockdown. Plus, there was some fella putting up some new fencing to stop those stray balls landing in someone’s garden.

CATCH IT!!!! etc.

Our allotment patch itself is looking very green and brown. The green is encouraging. The brown is simply all the sheep’s fur that’s been dumped on as an extra comfort layer for the winter.

Yeah, me neither.

That should just about be my lot for this season. I might need to return a few times to trim the grass to keep the pesky Town Council off our back.

What the chuff do you do with an allotment over the winter months? Rent it out as a campsite?

Some more early ’90s G Force exquisite knitwear.

What an absolute bloody BEAUT.

I love the combination of the scarlet red and dark blue. This would look the absolute bollocks worn with a pair of Freddy’s of Pinewood ’50s hard denim, along with possibly some red cherry DMs.

As the boys from Clobbered keep on reminding us, always dress from the bottom up. Start with the footwear and then the rest will follow.

This particular G Force cardigan was a relative bargain. It appeared on Vinted, almost hidden away as the listing title wasn’t quite correct.

Basic error there, fella.

As ever messages were pinged back and forth. I managed to get down to the price I was willing to play.

Never forget: the price you’re willing to pay is not always the price something is worth, but G Force is G Force, innit. See them, buy them.

It’s oversized - but OF COURSE it’s oversized. That’s the G Force streetwear look.

Next weekend Robin and the team have got another stall at Lustre, the annual cottage industry craft gathering at Lakeside back in the Fair City.

I don’t think my bank balance could stretch to another trip and another purchase of the Reimagined collection.

I did wander past the old G Force Hockley shop a few days ago. It’s now a barber’s. Nothing wrong with that but there was something a little melancholy about seeing the original facade and structure that was so iconic back in the day.

I do fear that I’m subverting the G Force marketplace right now. It’s a seller’s market that responds to buyers' demand. There must be diminishing stock left out there right now.

SEE IT, BUY IT, etc.

I did have plans to go to the Sunny Colch Odeon on Monday afternoon for a cheapo cheapo grubby fiver cinema experience. On the agenda was Ali G’s Who Iz I?

Yep, I know.

But wait! What’s this?

Amazon Prime started spamming me, telling me it’s now available to watch as a freebie on the telly back home. Not quite straight to video, but straight to Amazon Prime.

Blimey, I’ll have a bit of that. A fiver here, a fiver there, it all adds up.

Cut to the chase: Ali G, Who Iz I? isn’t worth a grubby fiver. It’s a bloody awful film, but also funny as fuck in places. I think that’s the point.

The Graun liberal elite narrative leading up to the cinema release was the misuse of cultural appropriation and the dangers of taking such an approach in 2026.

This feels a little self-manufactured. The actual premise of the film takes the piss out of cultural appropriation, as well as asking a fairly serious question about what you can and can’t get away with, twenty years since Staine’s Finest first rocked up.

Surprisingly, there is a plot. It’s remarkably similar to Big in Japan, the big screen follow up for People Just Do Nothing, as the Kurupt FM crew attempt to restart their DJ careers after a downfall.

Ditto Ali G.

Having landed in the States, yer main man then takes flak from the left - is it because I iz black etc - and then also from the right, as he is used as a vehicle for free speech.

Shot by both sides, etc.

That all sounds a little heavy. Of course, it’s not heavy. It’s absolutely ridiculous, with the plot merely being something of a sideshow for some Jackass style humour.

It’s not exactly a spoiler, but I’m still laughing at the puerile and schoolboy humour of a new defence weapon that involves strapping a plastic backside onto you that then also has a dildo at the front. You tug away vigorously on the front to release a bullet mechanism coming out of the arsehole.

Pure gutter, pure lowest denominator. But then some fools over in the States generally bought into this concept and went about their masturbatory defence mechanism as though their lives depended on it.

I admit reaching for my phone around an hour or so in. It wasn’t anything Ali G related, just general Friday night Insta scrolling. You couldn’t get away with that in the cinema.

The ending is quite sweet. It does answer the question: Ali G, who iz I? The cultural appropriation of one community is then shifted to another, but that still doesn’t make it all right.

I’m not really sure who the joke is on. You could take a grand sweeping view and look at it from a societal perspective and say this type of comedy really should have been banished decades ago.

Or you could take a more postmodern perspective and say it’s basically On The Buses, 2026.

Or maybe it’s just a dumb ass film, innit.

To the University! …on Friday morning for a double header of table tennis then followed by badminton.

Small racket, big racket, big racket, small racket. It’s all the same innit.

Once again my player partner attempted to tease me psychologically and take my mind off the table tennis:

“You’ve got BO again.”

That wasn’t quite the case. I was most particular with my personal hygiene an hour or so earlier.

Cheers for that one, luv.

We were once again booked into the University squash courts. These are bloody brilliant for having a full on hour session of TWATTING the ball back and forward with no need to go chasing it.

My playing partner is rather conversational. This gets right on my tits while I’m trying to focus on how to lose a game.

The talk was of new table tennis bats. Apparently some members of the Sailing Club Monday evening social session have upgraded to something rather fancy.

Betcha I can still TWAT the ball past them.

“That’s not good”

…remarked my playing partner after a very narrow miss as I returned one of her shots.

The very next ball she attempted a serve, but it crashed right into her side of the table and back onto the squash court wall.

“That’s not very good, luv, etc.”

We pressed on. I somehow managed to come very close. The score line of 6-2 in her favour didn’t do justice to my own table tennis superiority on the squash court.

“You could beat me if you didn’t arse around so much”

…was her closing observation.

We then switched over to the sports hall for some badminton. There were some serious players out on the courts, wearing the Essex Blades badminton kit as well as having proper full on badminton bags.

I felt a bit of a fraud with our Sports Direct £10 set.

It took a little bit of adjusting from table tennis to badminton. One shot in particular from my playing partner went so high and off target that it almost landed in one of the basketball hoops nearby.

Slam dunk, luv.

Truth be told I didn’t really recover from the opening remark of:

“Do you want to get the cocks out?”

I raced to a 2-0 deficit but then managed to somehow bring this back to a 3-2 win.

Let’s call that an even draw all round after a morning of hitting various things back and forth between each other.