You Just Can't Get The 'staff These Days

Despite being rather grey, it's another unpleasantly warm day in London. Counterintuitively, as soon as the temperature hits about 18 °C the city seems infinitely grumpier. In a nation built for mild, slightly damp conditions, "continental" weather seems to ignite the kind of rage usually reserved for "continental" polticians in a significant proportion of the public. The Underground becomes a sauna, offices bake (designers tend to overlook air conditioning) and the thousands of uncoordinated, out-of-shape, middle-managers who decide to get their bikes out of storage and cycle to work mean that a stroll along the pavement at 8:30 in the morning can be roughly as dangerous as being a spectator at the Isle Of Man TT. We spend ten months looking forward to summer and two complaining about how rubbish it is.

For me, the chief drawback is that i can no longer wear my flossy Belstaff jackets. A classic British brand reborn as an icon of modern Italian fashion, Belstaff has recently found favour with American hip-hop and r&b stars as a name to drop alongside Cristal and Mercedes. The jackets feature prominently in the video for Fergie's London Bridge and Ciara's 1,2 Step, for example.


I shall have to console myself with two cracking remixes of the aforementioned artists until it starts bucketing down with rain like it's supposed to. Space Cowboy, in particular, adds the kind of giddy bounce to ol' Meth Face's third good single in a row that makes the prospect of long summer evenings working up a sweat in a packet-out club seem almost agreeable.



Fergie ft Ludacris - Glamorous (Space Cowboy Remix)

Ciara - Like A Boy (Gotdion Remix)