Coffee Comrades

These days the biggest challenge facing any aspiring left wing revolutionary must surely be coming up with an iconic image. All the best ones have been taken: Lenin's goatee, Stalin's 'Uncle Joe', Mao's sociopathic stare, Fidel's Freudian cigars and Che's berets. So balaclavas off to Subcomandante Marcos, public face, or rather not, of the Mexican Zapatistas.

Of course, any well schooled revolutionary will be only too aware that if their predecessors hadn't been quite so, err, revolutionary, they'd have ensured a copyright legacy the Hendrix family would envy. No doubt with such thoughts in mind and to turn a buck for the Chiapas cause, they've come up with this rather splendid idea. I spotted it in 'Roots and Fruits Organic' store on Great Western Road.

Stick that in your Fair Trade pipe and smoke it!

Still, as anyone who ever tried drinking Nicaraguan coffee to support the Sandinistas will tell you, fighting for them would have been a hell of a lot easier. Their coffee was shit.

Well, hurrah, because Cafe Rebelde Zapatista is anything but butt. It's really good. Clean, fruity, acidic and even verges on refreshing. It's not as complex as some coffees but neither is it as heavy. It also has a really nice caffeine hit. Lifting without gibbering. Mind, after finishing the jug I was pretty lifted.

By a remarkable coincidence a few days later in work, Julie turned up with a present from her holidays... and, no escaping it, this really was shit coffee.

Civet shit to be precise.

And they say it was a brave man who first ate an oyster.....

A great cup of coffee. Complex, chocolaty mouthful with an earthy finish.

Roots and Fruits Organic

455 Great Western Road, (just past Kelvinbridge)

Glasgow

G12 8HH

0141 339 3077

Click here for the distributors of Cafe Rebelde Zapatista

And click here for wikinfo on Kopi Luak / Civet Coffee

Che Camille Fashion Show

It's hard not to be impressed by Camille. That it took a New Yorker to do what she's doing is telling. In return for a commission on sales, Camille provides space, equipment and marketing for a select group chosen from the creatives flooding out of Scotland's art schools and colleges. Fashion's the main business but she also associates with various artists in most mediums. 

Her latest venue, many floors above Argyll Arcade, doesn't have any signage and the lift is erratic. So when we turned up for a fashion show on Saturday it wasn't just the anticipation that had set my heart pounding. Still, no pain, no gain.........

Over the years I've noticed a few things about fashion.....

For example, at any one time the most unfashionable thing you can possibly think of, is, simultaneously, the most fashionable.

Also, fashion too often lacks any sense of humour, finding it as hard to laugh at itself as others find it easy. 

No such problems for The Niallist seen performing here. His tongue was planted firmly in his cheek, and I'd wager, by the end of the night he was hoping it'd be planted in a few other cheeks too.

One of the designers 'Rabii' makes made to measure denim. The emblem's a small embroidered silhouette of himself in his trademark cap. Recently he secured a rather spectacular order to make jeans for the Man Utd team. Just before the show he told me he'd been, not surprisingly, a bit nervous at the prospect of measuring Ronaldo and Co. But when the time came, bizarrely, the soccer stars were just as awestruck.... "No way, you're the actual guy on the jeans!"

Walking home after the show I spotted a young chap in some incredible get up. As they say on Project Runway, "Very fashion forward".

In the years after Communism, via telly and travel, we got to see what the ordinary people in those countries actually looked like. Isolation had left them ten years behind the times with a unique take on western styles. Into the mid 1990s men sported perm topped mullets and patterned jumpers that even M&S, by then, would have been ashamed of.

Well, that was 'the look' that walked past me, and I've coined it..... "Sarajevo Chic". 

If you think that's a bit tasteless, well, to quote Julian Macdonald.... and you must read this in a camp haughty Welsh accent, "This is fashion, and fashion has no mercy".

Che Camille

Floor 6

Argyll Chambers

Glasgow

G2 8BD

0141 221 9620

(It's first on the left as you walk in off Buchanan Street)

The Niallist

somewhere in cyberspace