SwissToni's Place

why do all good things come to an end....?

2009-11-21T17:21:00.002Z

I'm moving my blog. If you're looking for me, then you should now head to swisslet.com

I've had a pretty good run on here.

I started making my first tentative forays into blogging way back in March 2004. I was only playing around, so I picked the first name that popped into my head. It wasn't an especially original name, but it was one that I'd been using on a few forums when just mucking around and not wanting to use my actual name. I quite liked Charlie Higson's SwissToni character from the Fast Show, so I just used that. Blogging, as the real Swiss might have said, was very much like making love to a beautiful woman... or something like that.

There was no way I could have known how much of my life was going to get sucked into blogging and, almost before I knew where I was, I was stuck with an online identity I wasn't massively fond of and I didn't really think there was anything much I could do about it.

Well, I'd like to think I've come a long way since then, both as a blogger and as a person. I think the time has come for me to grasp the bull by the horns and just get rid of this millstone by changing my online identity.

I'm still not going for my real name, or anything silly like that. In fact, I'm not moving very far at all. From today, I'm shifting from "SwissToni" to "Swisslet". It's a name that I think Lizzie first came up with a few years ago, and it's sort of stuck. It's not very different, but at least it's all my own.

This blog will stay here, but I likely won't be updating it any more.

Instead, you can join me at Swisslet.com

I've gone and got my own domain and everything, but I've moved all the posts from here over to the new site, so really it will just be more of the same at a new address. I've taken the opportunity to refresh my antique template too, whilst I'm at it and to generally have a play around to try to freshen things up a bit (although if anyone fancies tweaking my old blog header so that it has the new name on it, then that would be great!)

Mind you, I'll probably still sign all my comments as ST out of sheer force of habit.....

It's not a big deal, but if you could update your links and stuff, that would be lovely.

Just to show how mature the new me really is, I'll even finish with a quote from the Bible without frothing at the mouth in righteous atheist fury.....

"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things"

Pfff.

They put a parking lot on a piece of land......

2009-11-20T17:43:00.002Z

It's been a while since we had a Guest Editor around these parts, isn't it? Well, as chance would have it, I had a volunteer to have a crack, and I was only to happy to oblige. I think it's fair to say that he's had one or two goes at this in the past, but he's always welcome. Besides, if you don't ask, you don't get, do you?

Without further ado then, it is my great pleasure to introduce (again) for your earworming pleasure.......

Earworms of the week - guest editor #100 - Fiery Little Sod.

this feels like being greedy, however the kind bloghost has allowed me another go at his pages, so here's a mixed bag of tunes that will hopefully provide some light relief prior to your weekend

> Take it to the Limit - The Eagles

This song was a part of my childhood and though it contains all the California-rock components one might expect, the limit 25 years down the line is a very different place, and the lyrics mean a little more. I apologise for the cheesy AOR, but I am a child of someone else's times

> Die Young, Stay Pretty - Blondie

It is a small step forward from the live fast, die young adage as it assumes the protagonist is pretty in the first place. Anyway, Ms Harry is dishing out some of her finest and the support lacks little. Seems caught on the kinfe-edge of punk and 80's keyboard madness. Not their best known I expect, however provides a pointer to where musical taste may be headed

> Walking Down Your Street - The Bangles

No excuses, no blaming someone else. Chicks with guitars and harmonies. Survived in my head after I had heard it in the car and was walking down your aisle doing my . Very glad the girl bands could play instruments and write songs when I grew up.

> Cash Machine - Hard-Fi

Realised now I am a commuter again it appears that some folk believe I look like the eponymous article. I on the other hand spend an unnecessary part of my life avoiding the things that charge me for acquiring my own hard-earned wedge. Anyway, this cash machine (sorry, tune) is a modern classic and the keyboard harmonica intro is one of the most evocative (and crowd-erupting) I have heard.

> Come Dancing - The Kinks

Was on the way into work and trying to piece together the first verse and realised it is still true today. Unless one has built a "Selection of Executive apartments with underground parking and 35% affordable housing" then the cinema or palais will be left to crumble where it sits. Ahead of its time like most of their later songs and still contained the vital lyrical element I have yet heard matched

> I Love to Boogie - T-Rex

This is very simple. Twice or more a day I stand on (or stomp up and down) London Underground escalators and when I am not the man knocking you out of the way I gaze vacantly at the small adverts for West End shows. I am glad I know no tunes from the many others, but when I see a 'Billy Elliot' billboard I enjoy a touch of Marc Bolan and struggle not to jitterbug across the station concourse.

> The River - Bruce Springsteen

This chap's songs are still hanging around from seeing him live earlier this year and this song stuck. Why an earworm of the week though I pretend to hear you ask? No doubt about it when my neighbour who can play the guitar but needs to work on the voice chose this as his practice song after lights out on a school night. Not the cheeriest of his output but lacks nothing in quality.

> God Save the Queen - The Sex Pistols

Sadly for the monarchy, the only tune I really hear as I walk past Liz and Phil's house each day is this one. I no longer fear a fascist regime, but the one we have just now ain't too clever. Anyway, hardly melodic this, but gets the message across - even if it is a rather bleak one

> Left of Center - Suzanne Vega

This is where you will find me, I am in the outskirts and I have no idea for what I may be looking. But whilst out there I am totally listening to this kind of stuff. More importantly this tune does have some fine drums - oh, and she can properly sing. [ST's note: she can indeed - I like Luka]

> Klunk - Green Nuns of the Revolution

Courtesy of an unlikely source at work I was reminded of a quality tune that not only makes my brain operate differently but contains some of the most inspired samples I have ever had the privilege to hear. The lesson is that music works. Unlike some of the inventions....

that's it......Hasta luego

----

Thanks my friend - another quality selection. Always welcome around these parts... not least because it allows me (and everyone else who's sick of hearing that I'm earworming Flight of the Conchords again) to have a Friday off!

If anyone else wants to elbow FLS off his monopoly as Guest Editor-in-Chief around here, then just drop me a line in the comments below or via the email address in my profile above.

All welcome.

...And that's your lot. Have a good weekend, y'all. Stay classy.

I'm doing a stint on the Children in Need call centre tonight, so if you call 0345 7 33 22 33 between 9pm and 2am tonight, you might just speak to me (especially if you're from Wales. I always seem to get the Welsh callers for some reason). Be sure to say your name and address nice and clearly for me..... especially if it involves a ridiculous number of letters. My hearing isn't once what it was, and I still find it hard to tell my Caernarfons from my Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwll-llantysiliogogogochs....

Give generously now.

[Previous Guest Editors: Flash, The Urban Fox, Lord Bargain, Retro-Boy, Statue John, Ben, OLS, Ka, Jenni, Aravis, Yoko, Bee, Charlie, Tom, Di, Spin, The Ultimate Olympian, Damo, Mike, RedOne, The NumNum, Leah, Le Moine Perdu, clm, Michael, Hyde, Adem, Alecya, bytheseashore, adamant, Earworms of the Year 2005, Delrico Bandito, Graham, Lithaborn, Phil, Mark II, Stef, Kaptain Kobold, bedshaped, I have ordinary addictions, TheCatGirlSpeaks, Lord B rides again, Tina, Charlie II, Cody Bones, Poll Star, Jenni II, Martin, Del II, The Eye in the Sky, RussL, Lizzy's Hoax, Ben II, Earworms of the Year 2006, Sarah, Flash II, Erika, Hen, Pynchon, Troubled Diva, Graham II, Cat II, Statue John II, Sweeping the Nation, Aravis II, Olympian II, C, Planet-Me, Mike, Michael II, Eye in the Sky II, Charlie III, The Great Grape Ape, asta, Ben III, Earworms of the Year 2007, Cat III, JamieS & Wombat, Pynchon II, Briskate, Craig Cliff, Fiery Little Sod, Cody II, J, Yoko II, Rol, Lisa, Pollstar II, Joe the Troll, Eye in the Sky III, Jerry Cornelius, Stevious, Luke, FLS II, Earworms of the Year 2008, FLS III, Mik, Mark Again, Ben IV, Lisa, FLS V]

the wrong impression....

2009-11-19T20:33:00.004Z

My 22 year old colleague was this week the inaugural recipient of a "Plonker of the Week" trophy from some of our colleagues. His mistake was to get a bit confused about the meaning of the word "harem", thinking it was an all-purpose collective noun for a group of people, and then using it to describe someone's new - female - employee. A touch embarrassing, perhaps, but a harmless enough mistake you would have thought.

The plonker of the week is apparently going to be chosen from a shortlist of nominees in a team meeting, with the winner then receiving a little trophy and having their photo taken receiving the award displayed somewhere in the department. It's all pretty harmless and, as he usually does, 22 y.o. took it all in pretty good spirit, even when he then spent the rest of the evening explaining to everyone who asked about the trophy at his desk what he had done to warrant the award.

Apparently the award will be a little like the World Cup, and if you win it three times, you get to keep the trophy. The joke was that bookies had already stopped taking bets on who was going to keep the trophy even though it had only just been awarded for the very first time....

All very amusing.... but 22 y.o.'s boss got in this morning having been working at home yesterday, and she found the whole thing far less funny. She stormed off down the office to take the picture down, and then proceeded to give her young apprentice a long lecture about how he needed to think about how he was perceived by his colleagues and by other people. What kind of impression is this going to make on people who haven't met him before? How much more difficult could something like this make it to be to be taken seriously by these people? This, she said, was nothing more than workplace bullying.

To some extent, I can see what she means: even when marveling at the things that 22 y.o. doesn't know (like the names of three of the four Beatles), I've tried really hard to not make him feel stupid. He may not know loads of things - some of them quite alarming - but that doesn't make him an idiot. I'm not sure that everyone has troubled to make the same distinction between ignorance and stupidity. The Plonker of the Week award is intended, I'm sure, to be taken as a light-hearted bit of banter with no malice. I'm also pretty sure that 22 y.o. won't be the only person to win it (I reckon I must have been a candidate for this). But does my colleague have a point: is he being bullied? Or does her intervention - a little like your mum wading in at school on your behalf - make it all the more embarrassing for him?

Or is it all just political correctness gone mad?

I could sleep for a thousand years...

2009-11-18T19:49:00.000Z

Coming as they do immediately after the night of my weekly injection, I always seem to find Wednesday mornings difficult. My routine on a Tuesday is almost entirely built around my injection: I drink as much water as I can during the day; I avoid alcohol; I take a couple of paracetamol and a couple of ibuprofen and then I go for a run. All of these things - bar the run - are designed to try and minimise the side-effects of the Avonex that I inject into one of my thighs after my shower but before my dinner. The injection itself is usually pretty quick and painless, but the thought of it looms large throughout the whole day.

The purpose of this drug is to try and prevent my immune system from causing any more damage to my nervous system, thus slowing down the onset of disability as my multiple sclerosis advances. The evidence that it works isn't exactly overwhelming, but I'm of the opinion that it's better to try something that might work than to do nothing at all. Not everyone with MS agrees, and lots of people find that they would rather take the chance of the increased relapses by doing nothing than of continuing to live with the side-effects of the drug.

The side-effects vary from person to person, but include things like pounding headaches, shivering, a raised temperature, sweats and other flu-like symptoms. The long-term use of the drug can also damage liver function and cause other blood abnormalities, as well as the more immediate problem of injection site issues where you stick the bloody great needle into your leg. Yeah, it's easy to see why some people decide that it's not worth it... but luckily for me, I seem to be relatively unaffected: my red blood count has been dropping and I'm now slightly anaemic, but my liver seems to be okay, and as long as I remember to take the ibuprofen and paracetamol before I inject, I'm not really bothered by headaches or anything like that (although the one time I did forget, I woke up in the middle of the night with the most incredible pounding in my head, so I'm certainly not in a hurry to forget again).

One side-effect I do experience is that I usually wake up on a Wednesday morning completely devoid of energy. I wake up most days now with very little feeling in the soles of my feet, and have to get out of bed very carefully, but on a Wednesday I struggle to get out of bed at all: I feel as though all of the strength has been sapped from my muscles and I'm weary down to my bones. The main reason I go for a run on a Tuesday night is that I know there's a good chance I won't want to do anything of the sort on a Wednesday. Too much like hard work. Wednesday has become my default (and reluctant) rest day.

This morning I dragged myself out of bed, forced myself to do the strengthening exercises -- that I do every Monday, Wednesday and Friday -- that are helping to stop muscle wastage across my arms and shoulders and got ready for another depressing day at work. The weather was pretty grim, so I think it's fair to say that I didn't exactly have a spring in my step as I left the house.

My energy levels - both physical and mental - are definitely at their lowest on a Wednesday morning. If there is a time of the week when I need a lift, then Wednesday morning is definitely that time. Luckily for me though, that is exactly the time of the week - in term time at least - when I usually receive exactly the boost required: I don't go directly to work on a Wednesday morning, I stop instead at a local primary school to help out with their reading. I often say that it's probably the most valuable hour of my working week, thinking of the kids, but I'm beginning to realise how much of a difference that hour makes to me too.

This morning, I walked into an almost empty classroom to be greeted by the warmest of smiles and a cheery "Good morning Tim!" from a charming seven year-old called Chloe.

It is, I reckon, impossible to feel too sorry for yourself after that.

hail to the thief...

2009-11-17T21:29:00.000Z

Statistically, I suppose it was always bound to happen sooner or later: after more than ten years happily buying stuff over the internet, this weekend I was finally the victim of that online identity theft and attempted fraud you read so much about.

I was down in Oxford for the weekend, so I didn't pick up my emails until Sunday morning after a distinctly leisurely start to the day. What I saw quickly snapped me out of my slightly fuzzy, morning after the night before kind of a mood. Amongst the usual pre-Christmas marketing guff, a few emails caught my eye: one was a confirmation from PayPal saying that I'd authorised a payment from Dabs.com, then there was an email from PayPal saying they'd limited access to my account, then there was an order confirmation from Dabs.com and finally there was an email confirming a change to my account details at Dabs.com.

Eh?

This was strange and alarming because I had no recollection of placing any kind of order with anyone, and I haven't actually used Dabs.com at all for more than five years. A quick read of the emails and my fears were realised: someone had placed an order for two Playstation 3s -- worth £598 -- using my long dormant account on Dabs.com and had paid for it using my PayPal account. There was my name and address on the invoice, right above a delivery address somewhere in Telford.

I wasn't immediately sure what to do, but quickly made my way straight to the money and tried to report the fraudulent transaction to PayPal. They were way ahead of me, it seemed, and even as I looked at my account, the transaction was being removed from my account before my eyes. Pausing only to change my PayPal logon and password, I then went off to Dabs to make sure that the order was cancelled at their end. Here I had less joy. Dabs.com may well be very cheap, but one of the ways that they appear to have saved money (and they're hardly alone in this) is by making it impossible to contact them directly: any question has to be put to them either through email or via a "live link" to a customer services operator. According to their site, all their customer service advisors were busy, so I had to fire off an email and hope they got back to me.

It turns out, as I found out on Monday when I tried contacting them again when they hadn't bothered to reply to my email by lunchtime, that the customer service advisors at Dabs were not busy on Sunday at all... they just weren't there full stop... they shut for the weekend (perhaps explaining why the fraudulent order was placed at 7pm on Friday night, when I would have no chance of getting the order cancelled until Monday morning). My email would be responded to, the online advisor told me, but she insisted that she couldn't tell me anything about the status of my order. By now I was reasonably sure that I wouldn't lose any money as a result of this attempted fraud, but I was becoming increasingly frustrated at the lack of communication from Dabs when it was clear that the attack had started on their website with someone hacking my account. They may well have spotted this order as fraudulent the moment it was placed, and it may well actually have been them that cancelled the transaction with PayPal, but they were giving me - the victim here - no sign that they cared about me at all. At one point, the advisor told me that the Web Accounts team had sent me an email to my new registered address.... an address that had been changed by the fraudster when they changed my account details to prevent me cancelling the order myself.

In the end, they sent me an email confirming that the order had been cancelled and that they had deleted my account. The sign off was priceless:

"I am sorry that you have been a victim, but would like to highlight that dabs.com Plc is one of the most secure e-commerce companies in the UK, unfortunately identity theft can be the hardest type of Fraud to detect."

Right, so in spite of the fact that my details have been hacked out of your systems and someone has tried to steal £600 from me, you'd like to tell me how secure your site is?

How reassuring.

So I'm cross. I'm cross that someone tried to steal from me like this; I'm cross that they were nearly able to; I'm cross that Dabs.com have made it as difficult for their customers to contact them as they possibly can and that they clearly haven't cared about how they handle their customers; I'm delighted that PayPal seemed to react so swiftly to kill the order and were available to me on the phone on a Sunday morning, but I'm a bit cross that my account access has now been limited (even though I was still able to access it fully and change all my account details on Sunday morning.... and if I could, then presumably the fraudster could have done too). Above all, I'm cross that I probably put myself in this position by being lazy with my online passwords and not changing them around enough to make it as difficult as possible for someone to crack them and try to steal from me.

The internet remains an amazing resource and a great place to find and buy the most obscure things at the best possible prices....I'm hardly likely to be giving that up anytime soon. There are, after all, thieves in the offline world too.

But, all the same..... grrr!

In short: go change your passwords and under no circumstances shop at Dabs.com. In fact, if you have an account with Dabs.com - even if you haven't used it in years - I suggest you go and delete it.

you're gonna burn, you're gonna burn....

2009-11-16T21:40:00.006Z

I noticed, about halfway round my run this evening and some nine days after Bonfire Night, that the big charity bonfire in Wilford was finally out. It was still burning when I ran past yesterday evening, and if they hadn't clearly raked it over at some point today, then I'm sure it would still have been smouldering away merrily tonight.

Nine days is quite a long time for any fire to be burning, I would say, but if you factor in the fact that it has been hooning it down pretty solidly every day since the bonfire was lit, then you'll agree that this was quite a big bloody fire. It's so big, in fact, that the organisers of the event apparently have to get a structural engineer to put it all together. It's literally the size of a large house, and this year, they had to build it twice when some of the local youth thought it might be amusing to set the pile alight a week before bonfire night.

Tsk.

That pile of ashes was still smouldering sadly as the organisers somehow managed to conjure up another massive pile of wood alongside so that the show could go on.

Not that I've given this much thought, but a bonfire of that size must burn pretty hot, right? Wouldn't that make it a really good place to get rid of a body? If you could get it into the woodpile somehow, surely it would then burn so hot that nothing would remain? And even if someone did see a man-shaped silhouette in the flames, given that it's traditional to burn effigies at this time of the year, wouldn't they just mistake it for another Guy?

Just as a point of interest and as a terrible history bore, I feel I should point out that Guy Fawkes wasn't burned at all.... he was actually sentenced to be hung, drawn and quartered, but was so weak from his torture that he never made it past the hanging bit, sensibly deciding to jump from the gallows, breaking his neck. Spoilsport.

It seems to me something of an overreaction that he is still such a reviled figure in this country some 400 years after the Gunpowder Plot.... perhaps he'd seen the register of Parliamentary expenses and they were afraid he'd publish?

Isn't it time we got over it?

If we must burn effigies of a catholic in a massive bonfire every year, might I humbly suggest we move on to Tony Blair?

(Anesthesia)

2009-11-12T19:53:00.009Z

As I casually bit into a carrot the other day, about the last thing I was expecting to find was a stone.... but there it was.
Crunch.
Crack.
Ow.
I imagine the carrot must just have grown around the stone and at some point assimilated it. When all you are expecting to bite down on is a nice crunchy carrot, this is somewhat less than ideal. My tooth was a bit sore, but nothing appeared to drop off, so I put the rest of my carrots to one side and tried to forget about it.

A few days later, and my tooth still seemed to be a bit sore, so I thought I'd better go and see the dentist to make sure I hadn't broken anything. My next scheduled appointment isn't until next June, but they managed to find me a slot this morning.

Over my life, I have had absolutely mountains of dental work done. It may come as news to anyone who has had to listen to me sounding off on any number of topics, but I've apparently got a very small mouth. I certainly had more teeth than I had mouth, and over the course of my teenage years I had a variety of extractions and orthodontic work done in an attempt to make my teeth vaguely presentable. If you can think of a type of brace, I've had it. I've had metal train tracks to pull my gappy teeth together; I've had a brace with a key that I turned once a week to open it out to widen the gap between the left and right sides of my jaw; I had a brace I had to bite down onto to level out the massive bow in my bottom teeth; I had a brace with hideous cheek plates that warped my whole face; I had some headgear that used elastic bands to push my teeth further back in my jaw..... even today, I've got a metal wire attached to the back of my bottom teeth to hold them straight. I had my wisdom teeth out too, naturally. No room for them in there, so out they came. Under local. Which wore off halfway through. As the dentist was wrestling with a tooth, practically with his foot on my chest as he pulled as hard as he could. Twist, twist, crack.

Yup. I've spent a lot of time at the dentists over the years and - perhaps oddly - the dental surgery doesn't really hold any fears for me. Luckily for me, in spite of the fact that all this pushing and shoving appears to have softened my teeth, I've not really needed much in the way of fillings since then, and my annual visits are usually short and sweet. I've noticed I'm becoming more nervous of these visits as I get older, but they happen so infrequently and I need so little done, that it's never been a problem.

I was a touch nervous this morning as I sat in the waiting room awaiting my appointment. I didn't know if I'd cracked my tooth or not, and I'd not seen this dentist before and so didn't really know what to expect. He was younger than me, of course, and he insisted on shaking my hand before I sat down in the chair. He then made small talk with me.... Goodness, I'd travelled a long way across Nottingham. Where did I work? Oh, that's not so far away from here. Have they started taking graduate recruits again, or has the programme been affected by the credit crunch? How long had I lived in the area? Where were my family from?

....and so on.

All very well, but as soon as he'd put the chair back, adjusted the lamp and started to poke around inside my mouth, I'd rather assumed that the small talk would come to an end. Does it qualify as small talk if there's only one person in the conversation? Isn't it a bit odd to be attempting to exchange pleasantries with someone who cannot reciprocate?

He seemed nice enough, but I found the whole thing slightly unsettling, and an image crept, unwanted, into my head:

Szell: Is it safe?... Is it safe?
Babe: You're talking to me?
Szell: Is it safe?
Babe: Is what safe?
Szell: Is it safe?
Babe: I don't know what you mean. I can't tell you something's safe or not, unless I know specifically what you're talking about.
Szell: Is it safe?
Babe: Tell me what the "it" refers to.
Szell: Is it safe?
Babe: Yes, it's safe, it's very safe, it's so safe you wouldn't believe it.
Szell: Is it safe?
Babe: No. It's not safe, it's... very dangerous, be careful.

Anyway. Apparently the tooth looks okay and I've probably just bruised a ligament.

I didn't even know teeth had ligaments....every day's a school day, right? Oh, and apparently I eat too much fruit too.

Just 364 days until my next appointment.

Szell: Oh, don't worry. I'm not going into that cavity. That nerve's already dying. A live, freshly-cut nerve is infinitely more sensitive. So I'll just drill into a healthy tooth until I reach the pulp. That is unless, of course, you can tell me that it's safe.....

Can't wait.

turn it on again....

2009-11-11T18:40:00.004Z

At some point on Monday evening, my broadband connection went down.

At first I wondered what had happened and if it was my fault: I had, after all, been moving cables and things around in my man room as I attempted a reorganisation that would enable my good stereo to be connected to my airport express to enable wireless access to my music through decent speakers. I'm sure you know what it's like, and I'll bet you have similar forests of cables behind your desks and TVs.....I've often wondered if I'll be able to remember how to put it all back together again if anything ever stops working and I have to risk unplugging stuff, and this was clearly my opportunity to find out.

After a lot of unplugging of cables and rebooting of various routers and modems, I decided - as my internal network still seemed to be working and I was able to connect to everything but the internet - that the fault probably lay with my broadband connection itself.

But how do you check when you can't access the internet?
How can you find out what phone number you're supposed to ring?

In the old days, you could probably rely on a neighbour having an unsecured wireless network. In these untrusting times, however, these seem to be few and far between (and those that exist have a frustratingly intermittent signal from inside my house, the inconsiderate sods....). I was forced to resort, in the end, to disabling the wifi on my phone and using the 3G / Edge network to connect to my provider.

Tsk.

A quick (relatively speaking) phonecall to a lovely man on the helpdesk in India showed that it probably was my cable modem, and an engineer visit was quickly booked... surely I could manage a measley 36 hours without an Internet connection at home?

You'd think, wouldn't you?

But how am I supposed to publish that blog I'd written? How am I supposed to find out the name of that bloke who was in that thing on the telly and what else he had been in? How am I supposed to put a post up onto Freecycle to tell people that someone has come to collect that futon and that they can all stop emailing me now? How am I supposed to look up the postcode of that place I'm supposed to be going to first thing in the morning to attend a course? How am I going to find out what that red button on the side of the scart block I bought is supposed to do?

Gah!

It all felt so 2004 to be without wireless and it felt positively 1998 to be without any kind of decent Internet connection at all. I was practically helpless.

It's pathetic, isn't it?

Still, all back online now so I can mainline the Internet to my heart's content now.

Honestly, what have we become?

alright....

2009-11-10T19:38:00.002Z

A new starter to the department was shown around the office yesterday. She doesn't start for another couple of weeks, but she's clearly very keen and had taken a day off from her current job to be introduced to everyone and to help her get her bearings. She'll be working pretty closely with my team, so her guide made sure she spent a little bit of time getting to know us. My desk is located just opposite the director of the department, and he took a couple of minutes to welcome this new starter to the business. After some pleasant small talk about where she's working now, when she starts and how pleased she is to be joining us, the director then gestured to the desks around him:

"If you want to know what it's really like to work around here, you just have to ask any of these guys. Tim here will tell you what it's really like...."

At this point all eyes turn expectantly to me. This is clearly a golden opportunity for me to stoke the excitement and enthusiasm of this new join as she starts her new job, and also to make a good impression on both the director and several of the senior management team, including my boss, now all waiting with bated breath to hear my easy platitudes about how wonderful a place my office is to work and how we all have such a splendid time together.

I've been put on the spot here, for sure, but I'm certain I have the wit and imagination to come up with something suitable.

So, Tim, what's it really like around here?

".......um. It's..... alright."

Brilliant! Nicely played, I thought.

I was smart enough to feel the disappointment now hanging palpably in the air around me, so I sensed I somehow hadn't been forthcoming enough with my assessment and more needed to be said. Far be it from me to rain on anybody's parade.

"....but then, I do have a window seat."

Stick with me, kid, and I'll take you to the end of the world.

bigmouth strikes again....

2009-11-09T22:40:00.001Z

As we were driving to work this morning, an innocent conversation about the mist rolling off the river and the number of trees now entirely without leaves suddenly mutated into an argument:

Winter's nearly upon us, I remarked.
Well, said C, actually winter doesn't start until 21st December.
Really? Isn't that the shortest day? Wouldn't you associate that with the depths of winter?
No. It's the winter solstice and it's the official start of winter.

We carried on the debate after we reached the office, with C. sending me something from wikipedia, and me retaliating by sending something back from the met office. As these things tend to do - at least with me - what I thought of as being a trivial, light-hearted discussion seemed to quickly be descending into a surprisingly bitter argument. I'll never learn: just as my dad remains convinced that I used to do a deliberately bad job of mowing the lawn just to piss him off, C seems equally convinced that when we have a discussion like this, I am driven to not only to prove her wrong, but to make her look foolish. Perhaps that's the way it seems, but all I'm trying to do is to understand the basis of the argument. I hope I'm not too grudging when I am proved wrong, but I do like to be swayed by evidence. It's probably my historical training, but even on a subject I know nothing about, I'll never accept anything at face value; I like to be presented with at least some sort of evidence.

I'm the first to admit that this isn't always an attractive trait, and I know that it can have its dark side: I used to maintain that no one is ever more than 80% sure they're right in any particular discussion. With that in mind, I would sometimes chose to make it my position to push at the 20% that wasn't so sure of themselves. All this was originally intended to do was to explore the uncertainty and test the evidence, but in the heat of debate, this probably transformed all too often into a desire to push someone off their point. No matter that the other person may well have been originally more sure of their own argument than I was of my own position, I still found that I could push most people into questioning their own certainty, if not actually making them back down entirely.

I like to think that I've realised that's not actually a very nice way to behave, and it's something to be held back for special occasions. However, in even the most trivial discussion, I have a certain curiosity that compels me to ask questions. It often gets me into trouble at work (in spite of the fact that my analytical brain is the reason I was hired to do this job), and it also gets me into trouble at home.

Why is the shortest day the start of winter?
If it is the start of winter, does that mean that summer doesn't start until 21st June?
If that's the case, why is Midsummer's Day traditionally celebrated on 24th June? Is summer only 6 days long?
When would you say Spring starts? I suppose technically, by this logic, it would be on 21st March - the Spring Equinox. If that's the case, then why is the 1st March called the start of Spring? Is 20th June really still Spring?

....and so on.

These are the questions that I want to know the answers to, and these are the questions that I asked C..... who (perhaps not surprisingly) now thinks that I'm trying to make her look a fool. The thing is, I'm not trying to make her look a fool, and she may well be right.... it's just that I can't stop my brain asking what I see as the unanswered questions, and I then have a need to know the answers. If this is the start of winter, then why? Based on what? Does everyone agree?

Even as C. sent me the wikipedia link, I started searching for more answers.

It seems that winter is traditionally held to start in the UK on 21st December, and has apparently been so for thousands of years, based upon an observation of the stars and the length of the day. Meteorologists don't seem to have much truck with this, and the Met Office for one has the seasons neatly parcelled up: Winter - 1st December; Spring - 1st March; Summer - 1st June; Autumn - 1st September.

But it's all quibbling, isn't it? Aren't the seasons dictated by things other than by dates? The change of the season cannot be marked on a calendar and does not happen at precisely the same moment every year.... there isn't a clock that dictates when birds migrate and animals hibernate; there isn't a calendar that can tell you when the leaves will fall from the trees or when the daffodils will bud. It changes from year to year and is affected by all kinds of things, both natural and manmade...................

And so it goes. More or less every single thing that anyone ever says to me is run through this kind of an internal process, with a succession of questions popping up that can never be fully answered; even if they could be, there are more questions following them up close behind.

I'm not sure why I'm driven to ask these questions, and perhaps more pertinently, I don't know why I haven't yet learned when to stop asking them. I should probably at least be more aware, as I ask all these questions one-by-one, that increasingly the best I can hope for is that I don't lose all my friends by making them feel like they're in front of some kind of ranting inquisition 24/7.

I just can't turn off my brain. Like the scorpion in the fable, I may drown us all simply because it's my nature.

I used to glance beyond the stars....

2009-11-06T22:12:00.000Z

--
Earworms of the Week

> "You Think I Ain't Worth A Dollar, But I Feel Like a Millionaire" - Queens of the Stoneage

Their gig at Rock City during One Live in Nottingham in 2002 remains one of the best concerts I have ever attended, and "Songs for the Deaf" is still a fantastic sounding record. I bought it on a whim too, and spent the rest of the day before I listened to it wondering if I'd made a terrible mistake and thrown £10 down the toilet. I needn't have worried: it's a masterpiece. The Josh Homme and Mark Lanegan songs are superb, but once in while I find that I need a little nihilistic screaming in my life, and Nick Olivieri fits the bill just perfectly. What a way to start an album. Dave Grohl returned to the drum stool as a favour to the band, and - naturally - sounds fantastic throughout. Shouty rock. Nice one.

> "D.O.A." - Foo Fighters
> "Keep The Car Running" - Foo Fighters

Jools Holland is an unctuous toad at the best of times, but "Later...." seems to have been absolutely diabolical this series. You used to at least be able to rely on a few really top mark acts to make things interesting, and I quite often found that I'd discover something new - Bloc Party, Ray LaMontagne, Interpol, Devendra Banhart. This series has been so poor though that I'd almost given up looking who was on. Not quite though, and I had a quick look this week to discover that the Foo Fighters were on. Well, they've got a Greatest Hits album to plug, after all. They played "Wheels", one of the new songs on the hits album, and "Times Like These". Neither are from the very top drawer of their ouevre, but they're not bad, and it's great to see a proper band performing on the show. Worth watching, if only to see the handover from a heavily bearded Sting performing awful lute-ridden seasonal music to Grohl kicking straight into "Times Like These". Neither of these two songs, incidentally, is on the Greatest Hits. "D.O.A." should certainly be there, no? I'd have put it on, anyway.

Anothe band appearing on the show were an unsigned band from Oxford called Stornoway. Well, judging by their awful lyrics talking about "going back to Uni", they should probably stay that way, eh?

> "99 Problems" - Jay-Z

Jay-Z was also on "Later....", performing "Empire State of Mind" and this song. He's quite a big deal, apparently, but he seemed happy enough to be playing second fiddle to the Foo Fighters. As I've said before, I'm not a big fan of the Zed, in the main, but I do like "Empire State of Mind", and you really can't go wrong with "99 Problems", can you? It's so good, in fact, that it inspired our team name at the quiz on Wednesday night: If You've Got Deep Fried Seafood Based Issues, I Feel Bad For You Son. I've Got 99 Problems but the Fishcakes Ain't One.

We won, of course... but I think I enjoy the laughs for the team name almost as much as I do winning.

> "Bad Romance" - Lady GaGa

"Rah-rah-ah-ah-ah-ah!
Roma-roma-mamaa!
Ga-ga-ooh-la-la!
Want your bad romance"

I love Lady GaGa. Official.

> "Protection" - Massive Attack
> "Karmacoma" - Massive Attack

Another set of earworms resulting entirely from listening to music in the bedroom. I try to choose something a little bit mellower as I drift off towards the land of nod. Massive Attack seemed to fit the bill just nicely. Mind you, last night I went to sleep listening to Probot, so it probably doesn't make all that much difference, eh?

> "Hurt Feelings" - Flight of the Conchords
> "Carol Brown" - Flight of the Conchords

Well, sorry about this, but they've brought out a new album and I can't get enough of them.

"Have you even been told that your ass is too big?
Have you ever been asked if your hair is a wig?
Have you ever been told you’re mediocre in bed?
Have you ever been told you’ve got a weird-shaped head?"

Rappers cry diamond tears, you know.

As for "Carol Brown", well she caught the bus out of town.....

If the last album is anything to go by, I'm afraid that you can expect a lot more of this kind of shit over the next few months. Sorry about that.

> "Manhattan Skyline" - a-ha
> "Stay on These Roads" a-ha

Two of the real highlights from Monday night's gig at the NIA, both showcasing Morten Harkett's undiminished vocal power. To be honest, I'm still reeling from the show. They were fantastic. I really wasn't expecting much, and - what with being in Birmingham and all - the whole thing seemed a little bit of a drag.....but they blew my expectations out of the water. They were superb, and I'm so pleased to have seen them. They're splitting up, but there's a farewell tour on the way, and I'm definitely going to see them again.

> "Earth Song" - Michael Jackson

I loathe this song, but you have to take your hat off to it's earwormability...... All together now

Ah aaaah aaaaaaaaaah-ah-ah-ah!
Ah aaaah aaaaaaaaaah-ah-ah-ah!

Grrr. If this has to be stuck on my internal jukebox, where's my internal Jarvis Cocker when I need him?

See you next week kids. Be good.

the righteous and the wicked....

2009-11-05T21:40:00.001Z

There's a bit in Joseph Heller's "Catch-22" where Captain Black runs something he calls the "Glorious Loyalty Oath Campaign", where everyone in the squadron finds themselves forced to sign oaths pledging their loyalty in order to get absolutely anything or everything:

"Almost overnight the Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade was in full flower, and Captain Black was enraptured to discover himself spearheading it. He had really hit on something. All the enlisted men and officers on combat duty had to sign a loyalty oath to get their map cases from the intelligence tent, a second loyalty oath to receive their flak suits and parachutes from the parachute tent, a third loyalty oath for Lieutenant Balkington, the motor vehicle officer, to be allowed to ride from the squadron to the airfield in one of the trucks. Every time they turned around there was another loyalty oath to be signed. They signed a loyalty oath to get their pay from the finance officer, to obtain their PX supplies, to have their hair cut by the Italian barbers. To Captain Black, every officer who supported his Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade was a competitor, and he planned and plotted twenty-four hours a day to keep one step ahead. He would stand second to none in his devotion to country. When other officers had followed his urging and introduced loyalty oaths of their own, he went them one better by making every son of a bitch who came to his intelligence tent sign two loyalty oaths, then three, then four; then he introduced the pledge of allegiance, and after that "The Star-Spangled Banner," one chorus, two choruses, three choruses, four choruses. Each time Captain Black forged ahead of his competitors, he swung upon them scornfully for their failure to follow his example. Each time they followed his example, he retreated with concern and racked his brain for some new stratagem that would enable him to turn upon them scornfully again"

Of course, anyone refusing to sign one of these oaths is immediately branded as somehow being disloyal to their country, to their flag and to their cause:

"Without realizing how it had come about, the combat men in the squadron discovered themselves dominated by the administrators appointed to serve them. They were bullied, insulted, harassed and shoved about all day long by one after the other. When they voiced objection, Captain Black replied that people who were loyal would not mind signing all the loyalty oaths they had to. To anyone who questioned the effectiveness of the loyalty oaths, he replied that people who really did owe allegiance to their country would be proud to pledge it as often as he forced them to."

Captain Black's rival, Major Major, is actively prevented from signing any of these oaths, even if he wanted to:

"What makes you so sure Major Major is a Communist?"

"You never heard him denying it until we began accusing him, did you? And you don't see him signing any of our loyalty oaths."

"You aren't letting him sign any."

"Of course not," Captain Black explained. "That would defeat the whole purpose of our crusade".

Thus does Joseph Heller neatly skewer empty patriotism.

I was reminded of this when reading about the Daily Mail's latest campaign to try and get every Premier League football club to display a poppy on their matchday shirts during November.

As a result of their bullying, there are now only three of the twenty clubs holding out: Liverpool, Manchester United and Bolton Wanderers. As a spokesman for Manchester Utd not unreasonably said:

"We don’t think it’s particularly necessary. We sell poppies around the ground and all our officials wear them and we work with Armed Forces charities in a lot of other ways throughout the year."

Not good enough, apparently, and the Mail is continuing to try to bully them into changing their minds. Obviously, their readers are full of considered opinions on the subject. Here's lazzruss:

"Yes Yes Yes!!! It is beyond my capacity to put into words how this 'government' has ruined our once Great Britain by sytematically [sic] attacking our spiritual and historical heritage and culture and we have had enough! Banning poppies is the final insult to our nation as this shows a complete disregard and contempt for our Glorious Dead who gave everything including their very lives for the sake of the future of our Nation and every football team owes them their success and privileges - to display a simple poppy proudly on their shirts should be a moral imperative for anyone who loves our Country and what we (not the inept and shameful Labour Government) stand for."

Let's leave aside the fact that the majority of the players in the Premier League aren't even English, eh? Why let that get in the way of a good rant about WHAT'S WRONG WITH THIS COUNTRY?

Um, perhaps it's a statement of the obvious, but if you try to force people to wear a poppy, aren't you restricting our freedom to choose not to wear one? Isn't that the same freedom that "our Glorious Dead' fought for? Like it or not, that's the same freedom that allows a student to get so paralytically drunk that he urinated on a war memorial in Sheffield. Not very nice, for sure, but surely more a story about binge drinking than it is about any calculated disrespect for the dead, whatever the Daily Mail try to make of the story (flogging too good for him, naturally).

This "Poppy fascism" seems to be everywhere at the moment. Apparently the BBC are under pressure because the dancers on "Strictly..." weren't wearing poppies last week. All of the judges were, but none of the dancers. Not good enough, apparently, as everyone on the X-Factor was wearing one.... The BBC initially (and not very bravely) hid behind "Health & Safety issues" as the reason why the dancers weren't wearing poppies, but have now apparently changed their minds in the face of all this public outrage.

Where does this oneupmanship and assumed moral authority stop? Why are we only displaying our poppies for a couple of weeks of November? Does that mean we're being disrespectful and unpatriotic for the other 50 weeks of the year? Should we all be dyeing our hair red and tattooing poppies onto our cheeks so we can be displaying our gratitude and support for the sacrifices made on our behalf every single day of the year?

Of course, you can trust the good old Guardian for an alternative view, and Marina Hyde today has a good rant about this "phony poppy apoplexy":

"So on Saturday, know that every late challenge, every sending-off, will be in the memory of those who fell in battle. Then accept the fact that media campaigns to foreground the poppies that are not being worn, as opposed to the ones that are, serve not as a memorial to the sacrifices made on our behalf, but as a reminder of our hard-wired one‑upmanship and infinite capacity to find ways to divide ourselves."

The commentators are even more strident:

"Forced wearing of the poppy to commemorate a fight against tyranny? Britain seems to get sillier and sillier, and more and more irrelevant every week."

One takes the trouble to remind everyone of the Daily Mail's support of the Nazis in the 1930s, when they praised Oswald Mosley ("Hurrah for the Blackshirts") for his "sound, commonsense, Conservative doctrine", and the proprietor of the paper, the Viscount Rothermere, visited and corresponded with Hitler, culminating, on 1 October 1938, when Rothermere sent Hitler a telegram in support of Germany's invasion of the Sudetenland, and expressing the hope that 'Adolf the Great' would become a popular figure in Britain.

They don't talk about that so much, do they? Why am I now uncomfortably reminded of people being forced to wear pink triangles and yellow stars?

It seems that the spirit of Captain Black is alive and well and still busily hunting out people who won't sign his loyalty oaths.

"You never heard him denying it until we began accusing him, did you?"

Is that the Daily Mail's motto?

red running over white....

2009-11-04T23:23:00.001Z

Something like 10m soldiers, and who knows how many civilians, were killed in the First World War. It was supposed to be the 'War to End All Wars', something so terrible, so utterly awful that it could surely never be repeated. It wasn't, of course, and a barely more than two decades later, the world was again inflamed in war, and a total of something like 70m people died in an even more destructive and all consuming conflict. Even that wasn't the end, and mankind has been trying to settle its differences by force pretty much continually ever since, just as it had been in all the centuries before.

The Royal British Legion was founded in 1921 to provide financial, social and emotional support to ex-servicemen and their families. Almost from the very beginning, their emblem was the red poppy: this fragile, resilient flower was one of the first plants to return to the shell-blasted fields of Flanders between the trenches; it was a symbol of renewed hope, whilst the colour red somehow symbolised all of the blood spilled on those fields. In the run up to Remembrance Sunday on 11th November each year, millions and millions of paper poppies are sold to raise money for the British Legion and also to symbolise all those people whose lives have been affected by war.

I don't hold with the concept of a 'just' war. I know that plenty of people will disagree with that, but I just don't want to believe that anything can be worth all that death and suffering. But opposition to war does not have to mean opposition to the people fighting those wars, and I find this time of year extremely moving, and I will wear my poppy as my own personal mark of respect.

You might remember the newsreader, Jon Snow, getting caught up in a storm a couple of years ago when he refused to wear a poppy on air and criticised what he called "poppy fascism" (it wasn't just poppies - Snow refuses to wear any other charitable emblem whilst on air). His refusal was seen, in some quarters, as disrespectful. John Humphrys was reported as saying:

"The reason I wear the poppy is because I want to pay tribute, it is a mark of respect for those men who gave their lives so that I can live the way I do today - to protect my freedom. And if there is anybody in this country who does not feel that gratitude then I think they should feel vaguely ashamed of themselves."

Hmm. For me, this is problematic. I absolutely and categorically want to pay tribute and show my respect for people who gave their lives in war.... but what about all the poor sods on the other side who were wounded or killed? What about them? How much of a say did they have in the war they were fighting? Do their relatives suffer their loss less? As well as respect, does the red poppy have other connotations of Allied soldiers figthing a just war? The Irish certainly seem to think so, and the poppy is widely worn by Unionists as a symbol of the involvement of the British Army in Northern Ireland, and as such is rejected by more nationalist political parties. But if I want to pay tribute, what choice do I have?

Well, as it happens, there is a choice: you can wear a white poppy . The white poppy is meant to symbolise peace, and aparently has a history stretching back to 1933.

Here's the blurb on the website:

"The White Poppy symbolises the belief that there are better ways to resolve conflicts than killing strangers. Our work, primarily educational, draws attention to many of our social values and habits which make continuing violence a likely outcome. From economic reliance on arms sales (Britain is the world's second largest arms exporter) to maintaining manifestly useless nuclear weapons Britain contributes significantly to international instability. The outcome of the recent military adventures highlights their ineffectiveness in today's complex world. Now 90 years after the end of the ‘war to end all wars’ we still have a long way to go to put an end to a social institution, which in the last decade alone killed over 10 million children."

I like the idea that the white poppy is intended to represent all people on all sides whose lives have been affected by war, and to symbolise the desire to settle our differences without recourse to armed conflict..... but people being people, of course, we just end up arguing about the colour of poppy that we chose to wear to remember those killed and wounded in war.....

After some thought, I've decided that I'm going to wear both: I'm going to wear a white poppy to symbolise my opposition to war and my respect for all victims of war, but I'm also going to wear a red poppy because I want to contribute directly to the Royal British Legion funds that are used to support the victims of war and their families (the money raised by the white poppies goes towards peace campaigning, which is good, but not exactly the same thing). A compromise, perhaps, but it's my own personal statement of remembrance and hope for the future.

Ultimately, I don't think it matters whether you wear a white poppy, a red poppy or no poppy at all. The important thing, surely, is to honour the memory of the dead and to help the living. In a year that saw the death of Harry Patch, the last surviving soldier to have fought in the trenches of the First World War, we've finally lost that immediate, human link with the 'war to end all wars' that ended more 91 years ago. We do try to remember, especially at this time of year, but with wars being fought all over the world today, we do also seem to be very forgetful.

---

Flanders Fields by John MacRae

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

(He was doing so well right up to the last verse....)

...Oh, and yes, I am aware that the white poppy is sometimes held up by religious types as a more "christian" colour to wear than the red. Well, like I say, I know why I'm wearing it.

---

The top news story when I woke up this morning was the five soldiers killed in Afghanistan. Their deaths are tragic, no doubt, but am I alone in finding it slightly strange that the death of some soldiers fighting in a war so newsworthy? Apparently we've become so used to our troops being blown up by bombs that it's mildly unusual to have some killed by bullets. There's also a vague suggestion that the Taliban were somehow not playing fair by infiltrating the Afghan police and then ambushing our troops. Um.... did the Taliban sign up to some sort of code of conduct for warfare that I'm not aware of, or are they desperately fighting a struggle for their own survival against people they undoubtedly see as foreign invaders? I'm sorry these guys have died, just as I'm sorry when anyone dies, but since when did we think there were rules to war?

Wear a red poppy this month, by all means, but surely we can find a better way to settle our differences than by killing each other?

I'm trying to keep my newspaper dry....

2009-11-03T21:05:00.001Z

a-ha @ Birmingham NIA, 2nd November 2009

"Scoundrel Days" was a-ha's second album, and although it features "Cry Wolf" and sold well worldwide, it will forever be in the shadow of its multi-platinum selling predecessor "Hunting High and Low", which featured the timeless classics "The Sun Always Shines on TV", the title track and -- of course -- the era-defining "Take On Me" (is there any other keyboard riff that better defines the music of the 1980s?). "Scoundrel Days" does, however, hold the distinction of being one of the very first albums that I ever owned, when I was given a copy on cassette for my birthday, along with a copy of "Silk & Steel" by Five Star. As a result, I have something of a soft-spot for a-ha. Like everyone else, I thought they had broken up years ago until I received a copy of their 2005 album "Analogue". I'm not sure what I was expecting, exactly, but it was really good. It turns out that they'd never actually broken up at all, and it was something of a shock then, in the weeks immediately following the top 5 UK chart placing of their most recent album, "Foot of the Mountain", that the band announced that they were calling it a day. As the BBC reported in October this year:

"We've literally lived the ultimate boy's adventure tale," the group, which formed 25 years ago, said. The trio added that the split would allow them to pursue "other meaningful aspects of life, be it humanitarian work, politics, or whatever else".
"We are retiring as a band, not as individuals," the band reassured fans in their statement. "Change is always difficult and it is easy to get set in one's ways. Now it is time to move on."

When the chance arose (thanks to LB) to see the band playing one of their only three UK dates this year then, I jumped at the chance.

As the day dawned though, the sheer inconvenience of a hack out along the M42 to the National Indoor Arena in Birmingham made the whole trip seem somewhat less appealing. I was tired after a weekend in London, I hadn't even heard the new album, and all I really wanted to do was to go home and get an early night. Did I really like a-ha? How much of their stuff did I actually know? Apart from "Scoundrel Days", which I haven't listened to in twenty years, the only album I have is a Greatest Hits. What if they just played a set to promote their new album? And how good was a support act called Donkeyboy really likely to be?

Well, as it turns out, I needn't have worried. Donkeyboy do labour under a name so bad that it makes the audience laugh when they say it, but their music isn't half bad. They're one of Norway's top bands, apparently, and the influence of tonight's headliners is clear in their sparse, widescreen sound, but they're far, far better than I was expecting and well worth getting to the venue early for. And, of course, tonight's crowd have all made it to the venue early. It's all seated, and even though we arrive at a little after half-seven and well before the support take to the stage, the majority of the crowd are already in their seats and waiting with a quiet, respectful buzz of anticipation. As you might expect for a band whose heyday was in the mid-1980s, then audience are all of a certain age, and many are clutching programmes and posters. It is not, I think it's fair to say, quite the same thing as a Rock City crowd. I'm feeling tired and start to doze in my seat when the house lights drop and a-ha come on.

Oh my.

They open with "The Sun Always Shines on TV", and I find myself strangely overcome with emotion. This is a song that reminds me of being 12 years old, and the band performing it live in front of my 35 year old eyes both look and sound fantastic: Morten's voice and cheekbones both remain absurdly high. They sound awesome and the crowd respond accordingly. The set is very accessible too: there are songs that I don't recognise, but there is also much to enjoy. Cry Wolf, The Blood that Moves the Body, Hunting High & Low, Stay on These Roads (which sounds amazing), You Are The One, Manhattan Skyline (with Morten using a megaphone for the distorted parts), Crying In the Rain, Foot of the Mountain, Summer Moved On, Analogue...... They're not the most interactive of bands, with only Magne really talking to the audience, but they sound fantastic. At one point the huge screen behind the band shows footage of a rising swell in the ocean, and for me this is how a-ha sound: they're widescreen and windswept and Harket's voice is sometimes as pure and lonely as a gull calling across an expanse of ocean; they're open and desolate like tundra..... they're utterly defined by their success in the 80s, but even their oldest and most famous songs do not sound in the least bit dated. They finish with "The Living Daylights" - the fifth Bond theme I have seen being performed by the original artist, and -- of course -- with "Take on Me". The Bond theme is especially good: it's both definable a Bond theme whilst remaining entirely an a-ha song, with an air of melancholy and loneliness underneath the orchestral bombast. "Take on Me" is, well, "Take on Me". 50 year old Morten Harket still hits all of the high notes, Magne stabs out the most famous keyboard riff of the 80s, and the whole thing is received joyously. It's the perfect end, the only end, to a really surprisingly good night.

I hear they're planning a farewell tour. I think I'll go and see them again.

Out of the blue, a really enjoyable evening. How could I ever have doubted it would be?

Verdict: 9 / 10

with your triumphs and your charms....

2009-10-30T19:06:00.001Z

-
Earworms of the Week

> "Buddy Holly" - Weezer

Weezer have actually been around now since 1992, displaying a longevity you would never have imagined possible upon hearing their first album. Don't get me wrong, I have an enormous soft-spot for songs like "Undone - The Sweater Song" and "In the Garage", but you wouldn't have thought that they were going to be anything like as durable a band as they have become. The reason for that longevity is probably because they keep evolving their sound: right from the opening chords - event the name - of "Tired of Sex" on "Pinkerton", it was clear that the cheerful geeks we see mucking about in the brilliant, Spike Jonze directed, "Happy Days" video accompanying "Buddy Holly" were already a thing of the past. That said, "Buddy Holly" might just be the perfect.

> "Dumb" - Nirvana

Not really amongst their finer work, and something of a respite from some of the other, more sonically challenging, tracks on "In Utero", but a good song nonetheless. There's a hint of angst there, of course, but it's really a showcase for a melody. As is their wont, the band try and hide it: not behind feedback this time, but behind a very loose sounding recording. They know it's there though, and are confident enough in it to add a cello to the track. Quite a contrast to "Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge" and "Very Ape", the two tracks either side of the song on the album, anyway. Good band. Watch out for them.

> "Vietnam" - Jimmy Cliff

I saw Jimmy Cliff playing the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury on a gloriously sunny Sunday afternoon. It was an almost perfect festival moment, baking in the sunshine, drinking beer and listening to songs like "The Harder They Come", "Many Rivers to Cross" and this song. The first thing I did when I got home the following day was to place an order for a greatest hits album. He was brilliant. A proper legend.

> "Lazy Sunday Afternoon" - The Small Faces

Just on the cusp of being too twee to listen to, I actually quite like this song. Whilst not quite being up there with the genius of Ray Davies' "Waterloo Sunset", the lyrics of this song are a snapshot of a world that is now gone. Does anyone still get lumbago? Come to that, is anyone still called Bert?

> "L.E.S. Artistes" - Santogold

I always feel as though Santogold is an artist that I somehow shouldn't like. Perhaps it's because I like to categorise myself as the kind of man who listens to miserable guitar music played by skinny white boys. Whatever, this album is superb, and it gets better with every listen. To hell with you, self-musical stereotyping!

> Theme to "Magnum P.I."

Sounds remarkably similar played backwards to played forwards. I was always more of a Jim Rockford or Quincy man myself, but Magnum had his moments, I suppose.

> "Salute Your Solution" - The Raconteurs

I'm not too sure about the rest of the album, but it's worth the effort just for the adrenaline rush of the guitar riff in this song. I've no idea what Jack White is on about, of course, but since when did that ever matter?

> "I Know It's Over" / "Never Had No One Ever" - The Smiths

The opening up of my iTunes library over my wireless network has meant that I'm able to listen to more or less whatever I want as I potter around. In practice, this seems to have meant that I've listened to a whole lot of Smiths records. Worse still, the ones that have been sticking in my head are the especially miserable, depressing ones. These two, of course, sit side-by-side on "The Queen is Dead", and both are epic. "I Know It's Over" is a towering song, one of Morrissey's finest. Is there a bleaker opening line anywhere in the world than "Oh Mother, I can feel the soil falling over my head"?

As always, Morrissey is able to put voice to the worst fears of the disaffected and lonely youth.

"If you're so funny
Then why are you on your own tonight ?
And if you're so clever
Then why are you on your own tonight ?
If you're so very entertaining
Then why are you on your own tonight ?
If you're so very good-looking
Why do you sleep alone tonight ?
...Because tonight is just like any other night"

it's a great song, and it's followed by the preposterously lachrymose "Never Had No One Ever", which is self-pitying even by Morrissey's lofty standards:

"I had a really bad dream, It lasted 20 years, 7 months and 27 days".

There was a time in my life when I knew exactly what date it was when I hit that age myself and was wondering why the same thing seemed to be happening to me.

The answer is probably pretty simple, but to paraphrase another Smiths song, I just hadn't earned it yet, baby. I must suffer and cry for a longer time....

If you see the 20-something year old me, do me a favour and give him a slap will you?
Or a kiss.
Or both.

Have a good weekend, y'all.

here's my handle, here's my spout....

2009-10-29T20:57:00.000Z

From celestial teapots to actual teapots......We may be in financial meltdown, with our world wracked by vicious wars and by the advancing ravages of climate change, but scientists have finally come up with the solution to a problem that has troubled people for centuries: why do teapots dribble?

Previous research into this critical field vital for the advancement of human understanding has shown that a number of factors affect the rate of dribble: the radius of curvature of the teapot lip; the speed of the flow; the porous nature of the teapot material. The real answer, the source of the dribble itself, has remained frustratingly elusive.

Now, however, scientists have deduced that the answer lies in the fact that, at low pouring speeds, tea starts to "stick" to the inside of the spout, causing the flow to momentarily stop and then to start again - causing the problematic dribble.

Even better news is that, by reducing the friction between the spout and the fluid, this bothersome dribble can be all but be eradicated.

Hurray!

But how? How can we eliminate this problem that has troubled our brightest minds and blighted the advancement our civilizations for so long? Well, the scientists recommend using the thinnest material possible for the lip of the spout, ideally metal, and applying an "hydrophobic" or water repelling substance to the inside.

This will mean the tea literally glides off the surface and into your cup.

The hydrophobic material they suggest? Butter.

What? You think that we're going to smear the spouts of our teapots with butter? Are you mad?

Ah, it seems the research was carried out at the University of Lyons. Well, who else would you put on the case to solve a problem that has bothered tea drinkers for time immemorial but a nation of coffee drinkers?

Brilliant.

...and I'm saving the world at eight.

2009-10-27T19:20:00.003Z

Join me! All welcome (offer may exclude women, homosexuals and other minority groups....)

So I see that the Pope has generously decided to allow Anglican clergy to return to the loving arms of the Roman Catholic Church. This is quite a big deal: it's probably the first time since the Reformation in the Sixteenth Century that whole communities of Protestants could be allowed to return to the communion of the Catholic Church. Over the years, untold thousands, perhaps millions of people, have died in conflict between the Catholic and Protestant churches. They've died over their differing beliefs in things like Bibles written in languages other than Latin; over whether or not the host at the communion literally, or only figuratively, turns into the body of Christ; about whether or not churches should be covered with statues of saints or not..... interesting points of discussion, perhaps, but surely not worth fighting and dying over? But fight and die they have. It's not just the wars either - people have been burnt at the stake because they refused to renounce a belief in what language they should be reciting their services in at church. Sir Thomas More, was one, but there were many others... all died because they weren't prepared to do what Henri IV of France seemed prepared to do at the drop of a hat: to recant and join whichever religion it was that was threatening to kill him (usually Catholicism).

So isn't it good that the Pope has offered to cast aside centuries of enmity to bring two sides of the christian faith together? But after centuries of emphasising their distinctness from Catholicism, why would any Anglicans take him up on his kind offer?

Ah, of course... because they've got the proper hump at the Anglican policy of ordinating *gasp* women into the clergy. Yes, ridiculous though it might sound to you and to me, but there are people for whom this one issue is divisive enough that they will cross the Tiber to join the church of Rome over it. Bugger any other canonical issues they might have, bugger the fact that they may well be married and will be joining a priesthood that is supposedly celibate.... no, the idea that women should in any way be considered to be remotely qualified or even appropriate for the clergy is enough to send some people running into the arms of the Roman Catholic Church.

Women in the church? Imagine that. Surely there's nothing in the otherwise famously tolerant and inclusive Holy Book that might lead anybody to think that women should be ordained is there?

Here's what Forward in Faith, a traditionalist strand of Anglicanism, has to say on the matter:

"Forward in Faith is a worldwide association of Anglicans who are unable in conscience to accept the ordination of women as priests or as bishops. Forward in Faith is opposed to the ordination of women to the priesthood and the episcopate for three simple reasons.

First, it is a practice contrary to the scriptures as they have been consistently interpreted by the two thousand year tradition of the churches of both East and West.

Second, we hold that the ordination of women by individual provinces of the Anglican Communion, without inter-provincial agreement or consensus, is a schismatic act, impairing communion between provinces by subverting the interchangeability and mutual recognition of orders between them.

Third, mindful of the unity for which Our Lord prayed on the night before he died, we are bound to repudiate an action which has willfully placed a new and serious obstacle in the way of reconciliation and full visible unity between Anglicans and the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches. "

(The vicar of my mum and dad's parish is, of course, a fully paid up member of Forward in Faith)

They might actually have something with that second point: the Anglican church has always been something of an unlikely alliance between some sometimes quite different strands of Christianity, with a kind of non-papal Catholicism on one side, and a more Lutheran or Calvinist Protestant faith on the other side. The Communion is an alliance between these different strands; although they might differ on the specifics of their beliefs, especially over the Communion, they were all still grouped together as one big happy family. A priest in one branch of the Anglican Church would be recognised as a priest by every other branch. The ordination of women has changed all of this, because not all branches of the Anglican church subscribe to it, and therefore will not recognise the authority of any female Anglican priests. Mind you, I'm not sure what an influx of married Anglican priests will do for the Communion of the Catholic church, but there you go....

It's almost impossible to escape the impression that these people are primarily pissed off because their little boys club has been opened up to the girls. They can hide behind the Bible all they like, but as long as their are passages in that book that they don't take literally, then I don't see how they have a right to be so literal in their interpretation of the rest of it:

Any person who curseth his father or mother must be killed~Leviticus 20:9

Entrance into the assembly of the Lord was granted only to those with uninjured testicles and a complete penis ~Deuteronomy 23:1

People who have flat noses, or are blind or lame, cannot go to an altar of God ~Leviticus 21:17-18

... to pick just three.

Yes, yes... it is a book that was written thousands of years ago and for a very specific society. Times have changed. We certainly can't be expected to take all of it literally nowadays. The thing is though, what is it that makes you think you can pick and choose the bits you like to interpret literally and the bits that you don't? If you accept that those passages aren't to be taken literally, then how seriously should I take your interpretation of what jobs a woman should or should not be allowed?

Of course, these disaffected Anglicans who are looking to cross the Tiber to the Roman Catholic Church are not looking to leave the Anglican church armed only with their principles. Oh no. They want compensation too:

As the Rev Geoffrey Kirk told an audience at a Forward in Faith assembly: "The Hebrews did not leave Egypt empty-handed. We must now apply ourselves to the task of securing our buildings and assets. We must ensure – for its own good and self-respect – that the Church of England is as generous in its dealings with us."

Good luck with that.

I suppose, as a disinterested observer to the whole thing, instead of getting all worked up about it, I should really just take a seat and enjoy the bun fight.

The New Humanist is clearly doing just that:

"In a gesture which dramatically parallels the recent “come-and-join-us” invitation from the Pope to disaffected Anglicans, the Rationalist Association has opened its door to thousands of can’t-quite-decide agnostics. A spokesperson for the RA (publisher of New Humanist) pointed out that many agnostics had been unhappy for years about the manner in which their uncertainty about God’s existence played into the hands of religious apologists. New recruits to the RA were given some reassurances.

“We are,” said the spokesperson, “not at all averse to agnostics maintaining some traditional forms of speech, such as ‘You can’t help feeling that there is something up there’, but obviously they’ll be expected to gradually forsake their uncertainty about who made the world.”

In a further gesture of conciliation, the spokesperson confirmed that new recruits would not initially be expected to recognise the infallibility of Richard Dawkins"

Initially. Hehehe.

I want to live and I want to love....

2009-10-26T19:13:00.000Z

So, that's decided then.

From the end of January through to sometime in September 2010, we are going to be stepping off the merry-go-round and will be taking some time off from work. Aside from an already booked ski trip in January, we've got nothing concrete planned yet, although we're hoping to get down to New Zealand and Australia for a couple of months from February. Other ideas include things like learning how to dive, going on a safari, visiting Petra in Jordan and the Valley of the Kings in Eygpt and I'd also very much like to spend some time in the Canadian Rockies outside of winter. There's literally a whole world of possibilities in front of us.

Why now? Well, since my diagnosis with MS earlier this year, I suppose it's tempting to say that I want to go and do these things whilst I still can, before my condition becomes too physically limiting. Cobblers. That's too easy and it's not really the reason at all. The simple truth is that there's not a single one of us who knows what life has in store for us, and I'm absolutely no different. If medical science has got little or no idea how my condition is going to progress, then how the hell am I going to? Why worry about what MS may or may not do to me when I could be hit by a bus tomorrow? Any of us could be.

My diagnosis has certainly been a kick up the arse: it's helped me to realise that life is too short to keep putting off until tomorrow the things that we really want to do with our lives. Who really wants to spend all their time stuck in the drudgery of a corporate desk job? It's a living and it passes the time, but it's certainly not something that I live for. I'm lucky: my critical illness insurance payout has given us the financial breathing space to make something like this possible; to enable us to afford to take the time off work and to go and do those things that we've always wanted to do. It's a fantastic opportunity and I'm not going to pass it up.

I've got some time in the office yet before I go, so I'm trying not to get too excited, but we've now got a map of the world up in our kitchen and we're about to get down to some serious planning.....it's really happening.

It's time to step off the treadmill.

you occupy the bench like toothache....

2009-10-23T18:57:00.006+01:00

--
Earworms of the Week

> "The Man With the Golden Gun" - LuLu

Perhaps the best opening line of any song ever.

"He has a powerful weapon, he charges a million a shot."

The second line is pretty good too:

"An assassin, second to none, the man with the golden gun!"

I ask you, does it get any better than that, ladies and gentlemen?

> "Sweet Caroline" - Neil Diamond

Presented by Marcus Brigstocke on Argumental the other day as the reason why Michael Jackson could never be considered the undisputed king of pop.... Well, unfortunately timed topics on a light entertainment programme aside, there's not much you can do to defend yourself in the face of an earworm as potent as this one, is there? Surrender, would be my advice.

Phil Jupitus simply argued that Jackson couldn't be the King of Pop because pop was not, in fact, a monarchy. Perhaps a more compelling argument?

Who's touching who in this song again?

> "Love Me For a Reason" - The Osmonds

You might think this would have been planted in my head by recent coverage of Boyzone in the wake of the tragic death of Stephen Gateley. No. Sadly, I heard the original being played on hospital radio in the Queens Medical Centre as I waited for my appointment with the nurse on Thursday morning. It's no "Crazy Horses" for sure, but it's not a bad record, you have to concede.

> "Feel" - Robbie Williams

His comeback is already apparently being dubbed a failure on the basis of his appearance on X-Factor and the fact that his single, his fastest selling since "Rock DJ", has been beaten to number one by Alexandra Burke. Ridiculously unfair. As Jude Rogers says in the Guardian today, we should be saluting Williams for his defiant oddness and his resilience. Apparently his new album is sensationally good too. I won't be rushing out to buy it, but I can't help rooting for him. Better him than another Simon Cowell clone, anyway. Mind you, look what happened to Robbie. Perhaps an X-Factor clone will one day tread a similar path. Who knows? ...although if they do, I'm sure it will be without Cowell's support if they dare to tread off the mainsteam.

> "Fade Away & Radiate" - Blondie

I listened to "Parallel Lines" as I ate my breakfast the other day. It's a statement of the bleeding obvious, of course, but what an album that is. Surely better to eat my fruit & oat bagel with golden syrup and to drink my cup of tea listening to that than to put up with whatever Chris Moyles is ranting about, eh? An excellent way to start the day.

> "Wired for Sound" - Cliff Richard

I'm starting to think that this might just be the most persistent earworm of the year as I just can't seem to shake it. It's probably not in the least bit cool to say so, but actually I think this is a damn fine pop record. My mum likes Cliff, and so I used to have to listen to his music from this era in the car as we were driven to school. You know, "Devil Woman" and all that kind of stuff. Pretty good, actually. Having grown up there, I've even got something of a soft-spot for the video of Cliff wearing a walkman as he rollerskates in the Milton Keynes shopping centre just outside John Lewis. If you haven't read Bob Stanley's piece in the Guardian that attempts to put Cliff up where he belongs in the pantheon of British rock and roll pioneers, then you really should. It wasn't all "Millennium Prayer", you know.... and do watch this video: it's brilliant.

> "My Humps" - Black Eyed Peas
> "Milkshake" - Kelis

It's the little things that keep you entertained at work. I was in a meeting the other day; I was probably the senior stakeholder there, and I was being taken through a detailed requirements catalogue. When we came to a section about a piece of functionality called "my links", I couldn't help myself and blurted out:
"my lovely lady links".
Not everyone got it, but those who did looked at me in amazement.
Someone then confused the Black Eyed Peas with Kelis, and the second half of this earworm double-team was complete. For the record, I much prefer the Kelis record. The Black Eyed Peas? Nah... you can keep'em.

> "Kelly Watch the Stars" - Air

I fell asleep the other night listening to "Moon Safari". It's a good way to go, actually. You should try it.

> "Crying Lightning" - Arctic Monkeys

I was today presented with an unexpected opportunity to buy standing tickets for the Arctic Monkeys gig at the Nottingham Arena in November. It was predictably chaotic when the tickets first went on sale, so I didn't even bother... but now they're back on sale for some reason. I was tempted for a while, mostly because they were available, I think. Then I thought about it a bit more and decided that £30-odd for a ticket was quite steep both for a gig in an Arena (which I generally find unsatisfactory) and to see a band whose last album I didn't really enjoy all that much. I enjoyed watching them at Glastonbury a couple of years ago, and I may well go and see them again some time, but this time around I think I'm going to give them a miss. That said, I have been making a bit more of an effort with the album, and it has been growing on me. This song in particular has been working its way into my head. Alex Turner's way with a lyric is amply displayed in the way he works the pick n'mix metaphor through this song, throwing in a line about toothache for good measure. They're talented for sure, and they're a compelling live act.... just not compelling enough for me to risk an arena gig with a crowd I suspect will be filled with beer chuckers. Perhaps I'm now just too old and grumpy to put up with that....?

---

That's your lot. Have a good weekend, y'all and stay classy. I'll be mostly reading my book, drinking some Leffe Blonde and listening to Queens of the Stone Age. There are worse ways to pass the time, you know.

where is my mind?

2009-10-22T21:03:00.000+01:00

"So was there anything else?"

I was in my regular six-monthly session with my MS Nurse. If you have multiple sclerosis, then the network of MS Nurses - that suddenly seems to appear as you are diagnosed - becomes the absolute centre of your medical world and of your contact with the NHS. Whatever you need, whether that's an appointment, advice, treatment or simply a shoulder to cry on, the MS Nurses are just a phonecall away. Where consultant neurologists and other doctors sometimes seem to come from another planet where empathy and human understanding are in short supply, the MS Nurses also provide a reassuringly human face to the monolith that is the National Health Service.

Today's appointment was a simple follow-up to make sure that I was okay and that I was coping alright with the injections that I have now been doing for six months. My doctors have thus far been extremely tight-lipped in front of me about my case and they seem to be absolutely determined to avoid using the phrase "multiple sclerosis" to label my condition, preferring instead to hide behind "demyelinating disease". To date, the only doctor to use "MS" when talking about my condition was the guy who saw me after the lumbar puncture and who casually gave me my results in a waiting room of patients (the nurse said she'd be having a word with him about that...). All of my neurologists have steadfastly and carefully stayed away from it, to the extent that they rarely actually give me the results of the tests that I have done at all, preferring to generalise. As a result, I don't actually know what type of MS I have. Relapsing-remitting is the most common, and even in the absence of obvious relapses, I'm assuming it's that, but for all I know it could also be primary-progressive or something else.

Today's session with my MS Nurse was priceless then, if only because it gave me a chance to have a look at the letters the doctors have been sending each other about my condition: my blood tests show that my liver function has been okay since I started on the beta-interferon but my haemoglobin levels have been falling and I'm now slightly anaemic. My evoked potentials test showed mainly that they don't have "normal" readings for a man of my height, but that the tests showed a slower passage of nerve signals up one leg than up another, indicating demyelination. The lumbar puncture showed oligoclonal banding in the proteins also indicating demyelination. A letter from one consultant to my GP showed that I have been classified as having relapsing-remitting MS..... all good, useful information that no one thought fit to tell me about until I saw my MS Nurse.

So apart from the blurring in my right eye, the general ups-and-downs of the numbness and tingling in my body and the weakness in my arms and shoulders, was there anything else I wanted to mention to the nurse?

Well... as it happens, yes there was. I wasn't really sure how to say this, and I wasn't sure whether this was all in my head or not, so in the end I just came right out with it: I've started to notice, or I think I've started to notice, some problems with my memory. I have an excellent memory, in the main, but just recently I have found it oddly difficult to recall one or two things: people's names, a system that I used to work with. Nothing much, you might think, and feasibly things I might just have forgotten. But then again, it is unusual for me, and not a little disconcerting too.... and it's one of the symptoms of multiple sclerosis. I have so far been able to handle all of the physical symptoms that this condition has managed to throw at me. I know I haven't been all that badly affected yet, relatively speaking, but what I've had, I've coped with. Physical symptoms are only that, aren't they? They only affect your body. Sure, I'd feel pretty down if I lost the ability to run, never mind the ability to walk, but as long as you have all your marbles, then at least you have something. I pride myself on my intellect, and the idea that I might be beginning to lose some of those marbles I prize so highly, is a very, very frightening thought.

So I mentioned it.

And now I am going to be seeing a neuropsychologist.

As C. was there too today, I imagine that I'm also going to be getting some kind of brain training game thing for Christmas. I've managed to happily avoid sudoku all of my life so far, let's hope that I manage to avoid it for a bit longer, eh?

and it ain't not proving that me mind ain't moving....

2009-10-21T19:11:00.002+01:00

There was a funny crowd out in town on Saturday night. I wasn't stopping for long, and was just having a quick meal after the cinema before heading home... but it was long enough to see that the makeup of the crowd was a lot older and more male than usual. It took me a minute or two to realise, as I walked up the Lace Market, that Carl Froch was defending his Super-Middleweight crown at the Nottingham Arena later that same night, and that the people milling about were likely boxing fans whiling away their early evening before the start of the under-card. If anything, this had a calming effect on the city centre, with pubs filled with crowds of people having a quiet drink as a prelude to the main event of their night, instead of crowds of people moving between pubs and well on the way to oblivion.

We ate in the Cock & Hoop, a relatively quiet pub that serves excellent food and probably isn't really a stop on most people's pub crawls. Dinner was good, but what really caught my eye was the group of ladies who were gathering in the main seating area where we were eating. At first I took them to be the other halves of some boxing fans; they were a little bit older than your average hen party, and they were clearly having a fairly quiet drink rather than slinging back the Bacardi Breezers. After a bit, I noticed that they were all wearing some kind of a uniform. As one of the ladies turned her back to me, I got a good chance to have a look at the large logo on the back of her fleece. There was a large picture of a star, a website address and the company name:

Central England Paranormal Investigators.

I looked them up when I got home, and apparently they were having some kind of a "do" at the Galleries of Justice, just opposite the pub. If you've seen "Most Haunted", then you probably know the drill: set up loads of infra-red cameras and thermometers and stuff, and spend the night giving your paying customers the heebie-jeebies in a really creepy old jailhouse in the wee-small hours of the morning. A quick scan of their website reveals that they guys I was looking at in the pub were the core team who would be leading the night's investigations. Now, I personally don't really believe in all that stuff. It's not so much that I don't think there's anything else out there, but rather that I'm prone to be a bit sceptical of someone selling their services as a psychic or a spirit medium. I'm open-minded though, and I'm sure these guys are really good at what they do and that their clients have a really interesting night out..... but the thing is, I'm not sure if I would really trust in the expertise of someone who had put a six-pointed star as the focal point of their logo. Everybody knows that the pentagram is associated with magic and the occult, but surely most people also know that a pentagram has five points. The clue's in the name. These guys had a six-pointed star - a hexagram - on their backs. The Star of David. Um. Doesn't that mean something completely different?

We had a good laugh about it on the way home, anyway. Can you imagine summoning a demon and thinking you're protected by the symbols you've drawn on the floor inside a chalk circle... only to discover that the six-pointed star you've drawn protects you rather less well than the pentagram you thought you'd drawn? You'd be a laughing stock in all of the circles of hell.

Or perhaps I should try not be such a smartarse - a quick glance at wikipedia tells me that the hexagram (not necessarily the same thing as a Star of David, apparently) is commonly used both as a talisman and for conjuring spirits in the practice of witchcraft.

Ah.

That being true, then I am forced to admit that those people I'd been quietly laughing at might well be right. Anyway, it definitely means that I was wrong to infer from the logo alone that they must be idiots. Just because I didn't know the hexagram's associations with the occult, doesn't mean that no one else does, and it certainly doesn't mean that they made a mistake.

*does more research*

Ah, but then again, they were using the "Star of David" form of hexagram - two overlaid triangles - rather than the Unicursal hexagram, which is drawn in one continuous line and is more commonly associated with the occult....

So they could have known of the hexagram's associations with the occult but chosen the wrong form of hexagram for their logos, or they could simply have mistaken the hexagram for the a pentagram. Or I could be wrong.

Or I could be thinking about this too much.

......Actually, don't answer that.

the green, green grass of home....

2009-10-20T21:04:00.001+01:00

Ever since I was a teenager, I think it's fair to say that I haven't always seen eye-to-eye with my dad. This is hardly a unique phenomenon, I'm sure, but to this day, we barely have to be around each other under the same roof for longer than a day before we start rubbing each other up the wrong way. I'm not sure why this is. Superficially, we're quite similar. For starters, at first glance, we look physically very similar, and are unmistakably father and son. Look a little more closely though, and the differences become more apparent: as well as being bald where my dad has a full head of hair, I'm a lot taller and actually have quite a different physical build to my dad. It wasn't until my mum lost a load of weight recently that I realised quite how much I actually resemble her in terms of our physical stature - tall, thin, broad-shouldered.

I think something similar is true of our personalities: on the face of it we're both untidy, impatient and irascible, with a tendency not to listen and to interrupt, but when you look at things a bit closer, the differences become a lot starker. At least I hope they do.... My dad is a doctor and a man of the sciences; I am very much inclined towards the humanities. My dad is religious and I most certainly am not.... and so on. I love him to bits, of course, but I just don't think he understands me because, although we're superficially similar on the face of it, I am ultimately put together in a quite different way to him. Somehow, after all this time, he still gets angry when I react to things differently to him (and, I suppose, vice-versa). It's as if he keeps expecting me to be more like him than I actually am.

I was given a stark illustration of this when we last saw my parents: my dad was talking to C. and was describing how I used to drive him mad when I was a teenager by deliberately doing a bad job of mowing the lawn, leaving tufts of uncut grass all over the place. This, he said, was absolutely typical of me. This is not the way I remember things. It's absolutely true to say that I used to drag my heels over being told to cut the grass. What teenager doesn't? It wasn't so much that I disliked the job itself or had anything better to do with my time, it was more to do with the fact that I was being told -- ordered -- to do something, and I objected on principle and took my time getting it done. There was never any question that I wouldn't do it; it was always only a matter of how far I could push it before I actually went and did it. If you've been a teenager, then you've probably been there yourself and I'm sure you know how it works. However, once I was out and cutting the grass, never once did I deliberately set out to do a bad job, to piss my father off or otherwise. I may have DONE a bad job, but I never set out to do so intentionally. The idea that my dad has spent the last twenty years or so stewing on that as being somehow typical of me is something that I find a little disturbing. It is entirely possible, I now think, that my dad has based his assessment of my personality on a presumption of a premeditation, of a malice of forethought, that has simply never been there.

Based on a conversation I had with C. over the weekend, what really worries me now is that she has taken my father's misreading of me on-board and is applying it to me herself. I've no one to blame for this misreading of my intentions but myself, but I still find it alarming that my actions (or inactions) are interpreted in this way. I'm surely not that inscrutable, am I?

and you know where they burn books, people are next....

2009-10-19T22:11:00.009+01:00

-
"Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime....."

So begins "To His Coy Mistress" by Andrew Marvell, written at some point in the middle of the Seventeenth Century. It famously features an amorous suitor attempting to convince his reluctant partner to surrender her virginity. If I had the time, he says, I would spend centuries adoring every part of your body... but....

"But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long preserv'd virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust.
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none I think do there embrace."

In other words, give it up now love, before it's too late.

It's a fantastic poem, and I was reminded of it this afternoon, when Aravis tweeted how she'd been studying it in class and had been somewhat taken aback by some of her classmates' reactions to it:

"Asked if To His Coy Mistress was meant as existential angst or seduction, my classmates' consensus was: neither. He's just some gross creepy guy trying to get into her pants."

Hmm. That's arguable, I suppose, but they went further, with one student saying:

"...it communicates a man who would like to use a woman for his own pleasure to gratify his ego."

The same student then goes on to call him violent.

When I studied this poem, some twenty years ago, we talked at length about the poet's intentions here, and how, as a religious man, he might actually be mocking some of the "carpe diem" attitudes of his contemporaries. For myself, I like to think that the narrator of the poem is being slightly comical in his argument, as though when your dad refuses to lend you a fiver, you ask him to lend you a £100 instead. What we didn't discuss in any detail was how "gross" or otherwise the poet might be. It's always a dangerous game to view a 350 year old poem through the lens of today's morality. They didn't have flushing toilets, power showers or cable tv back then either, and I'm sure that's a pretty grotesque thought for lots of people too. Things become even more dangerous when you start to factor in your religious beliefs.

Apparently lots of Aravis' class are quite religious - Catholics - and although I don't know them, it's tempting to think that their views on a poem like this have been shaped by their conservative, religious viewpoints.

For some reason, I'm reminded of the recent new reports about the top ten books that people tried to get the American Library Association to ban. Surprise, surprise.... many of them feature themes that the conservative religious right finds offensive: "And Tango Makes Three", the story of two gay penguins in Central Park Zoo; the "His Dark Materials" trilogy, where God is senile and decrepit; "Uncle Bobby's Wedding", featuring some gay guinea pigs. This follows earlier stories about how Sarah Palin tried in the late 1990s as then mayor of Wasilla in Alaska to have "Daddy's Roommate", a tale about a gay father, removed from the town library. Just the other day, Matt Latimer, a former speechwriter for George Bush, alleged in his new memoir of life in the White House that Bush had refused to grant JK Rowling the Presidential Medal of Freedom because her writing "encouraged witchcraft".... .and don't even mention Charles Darwin: a recent film on the naturalist's life has failed to find a US distributor because of its controversial themes. i.e. it talks about Evolution.

I'm sure we all agree that censorship is bad... but all you have to do is to take a closer look at the one book these people will never ban, and you will see quite how ridiculous these people really are.

Let's start with Genesis. We'll pass over a drunken Noah sleeping with his daughters, and we'll stop at Genesis chapter 19, verses 4-8, where two angels come to visit Lot to warn him of the impending disaster about to strike Sodom. He invites them in as his guests:

"But before they lay down, the men of the city, even the men of Sodom, compassed the house round, both old and young, all the people from every quarter. And they called unto Lot, and said unto him, Where are the men which came in to thee this night? Bring them out unto us, that we may know them. And Lot went out at the door unto them, and shut the door after him, and said, I pray you brethren, do not so wickedly. Behold now, I have two daughters which have not known man; let me, I pray you, bring them out unto you, and do ye unto them as is good unto your eyes: only unto these men do nothing; for therefore came they unto the shadow of my roof."

In other words, gang rape my virgin daughters, but leave my guests alone. Nice.

Or, how about Judges chapter 19, verses 22-25, where a Levite and his concubine come to visit Gibeah and stay with an old man who lives there:

"Now as they were making their hearts merry, behold, the men of the city, certain sons of Belial, beset the house round about, and beat at the door, and spake to the master of the house, the old man, saying, Bring forth the man that came into the house, that we may know him. And the man, the master of the house, said unto them, Nay, my brethren, nay, I pray you, do not so wickedly; seeing that this man is come into my house, do not this folly. Behold, here is my daughter a maiden, and his concubine; them I will bring out now, and humble ye them, and do with them what seemeth good unto you; but unto this man do not so vile a thing. But the men would not hearken to him: so the man took his concubine, and brought her forth unto them; and they knew her, and abused her, all the night until morning: and when the day began to spring, they let her go."

Nice, eh? She dies, incidentally, as a result of her terrible night, and her master cuts her body up and sends the parts to different parts of the coast. Much righteous slaughter ensues, in God's name, of course.*

The Old Testament is riddled with this kind of stuff, and -- if read through the lens of today's morality -- isn't it just the most awful, misogynist rubbish you've ever heard? But they'll never ban that, of course, it's The Bible, isn't it? It's only the word of God, innit? I'm sure you'll agree that Harry Potter is far more of a perfidious influence on our youth than stories of maidens offered up for gang rape by their fathers, or come to that, a seventeenth century charmer trying to woo his coy mistress.

---

*In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention at this point that I'm not as up on the Old Testament as I might be --- I'm still reading "The God Delusion", and Dawkins mentions both these passages in chapter 7 to illustrate how people pick and choose which bits of the Bible are to be taken literally and which bits should be read allegorically. Obviously the Bible isn't suggesting we should offer up our daughters for rape, but clearly that bit about a man lying with another man is to be taken literally and homosexuality is thus a grievous sin.... Out of interest, I checked a book of children's bible stories that I was given at my christening before writing this, and although the story of the angels visiting Lot is told, funnily enough, it skips Lot's offering of his virgin daughters to the mob. Strange that. It's still full of the blood and thunder of the Old Testament God, but it chooses to skip that bit....

---

Whilst we're on the subject of the ignorance of crowds... lest we liberals get too excited by our recent triumphs in the battles against Carter-Ruck over Trafigura and over Jan Moir's stunningly insensitive article about Stephen Gately, let's remember two things:

1) We're not the only people who can organise campaigns like this: ask Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand about how easily roused the good people of middle England can be, and get ready for a campaign from the BNP over this week's Question Time appearance.

2) We might be a more tolerant and inclusive pitchfork wielding mob, but we're still a pitchfork wielding mob.

I'll follow you until you love me....

2009-10-16T22:20:00.000+01:00

--
Earworms of the Week

> "Harold of the Rocks" - Primus

Amazingly, in spite of having quite a few of their albums, I don't actually have any Primus ripped onto my iPod. That's a situation that must change. How can anyone manage without some gloriously random, almost jazzy, bass driven metal on their portable MP3 player? I ask you? This song is on "Frizzle Fry", an album that I discovered when I was about 16 years old and have pretty much loved ever since. It reminds me, inevitably, of that emotional scene in Neighbours when Harold Bishop is lost, apparently swept out to sea, and all that remains are his glasses that are discovered in a rock pool. Heart breaking.

> "America" - Razorlight

Their first album was promising, with perhaps even some signs that there might be some substance behind Johnny Borrell's boasting. The second album promptly delivered them a number one single, but -- for me anyway -- was resolutely "meh". When the next album comes out, whenever that's going to be, I don't think I'll be bothering. Lightweight and with far too big an opinion of their own greatness. Still, this is a pretty decent song.

> "Monkey Gone to Heaven" - The Pixies

lots of incomprehensible screaming about the devil being six and God being seven? Brilliant, obviously.

> "Blue Skies" - Noah and the Whale

Breaking up with Laura Marling may well have hurt like a bastard at the time, but if the result of all that pain is an album as good as "The First Days of Spring", then -- from my point of view anyway -- it's got to have all be worthwhile, right? A breakup album, and no mistake, but superb.

> "Goddess on a Hiway" - Mercury Rev

One of the joys of finally making my iTunes available wirelessly is that I am now actively listening to music in the bedroom. Yes, I know that this is ridiculous: I have an iPod; I have speakers; I have various stereos I could move about the house... but the fact remains that in several years I have had access to all of these things, and I have mainly been entirely without music in the bedroom. Stick an Airport Express into the bedroom, and suddenly I'm listening to music all the time. Stupid, but there you go..... Anyway, one of the albums I listened to this week whilst reading my book was "Deserter's Songs" was released in 1998, but I reckon it sounds as perfectly out of time now as it did back then. It's superb. This is the best song on it by a country mile, of course, but it's a fantastic ethereal album.

> "Age of Revolution" / "Gentlemen & Players" - Duckworth Lewis

A concept album about cricket by the man behind The Divine Comedy? What a dreadful idea. Except that, actually, it works. Yes, "Jiggery Pokery" is probably the song that captures the headlines, but actually it's the least typical song on the album. The musical style varies hugely across the album, but the main thread is that all of the songs are loosely themed about cricket. "Age of Revolution" charts how the game has changed from being run by the Gentlemen to being taken over by the upstart players who are now "driving Bentleys, playing Twenty20". "Gentlemen & Players" is a more pastoral number, with a distinctly sepia-tinged view of the game. Sounds ridiculous, but sounds fantastic. Seriously, you should give it a go.

> "The Living Daylights" / "The Sun Always Shines on TV" - A-ha

Sad news this week that the legendary A-ha have split up. Their heyday was in the 1980s, but they never actually split up, taking a hiatus in 1994, but coming back together in 1998. You might not have heard anything new by them since something like 1988, but actually their 2002 album "Analogue" is actually really good (I must have listened to "Celice" alone hundreds of times... although that's at least partially because it's the very first track on my iPod on alphabetical order by artist, and if I hit the wrong button, that's the song that starts playing....). Their second album, "Scoundrel Days", was actually one of the very first albums that I ever owned. They're a big part of my life and I'm really sad to hear that they've finally called it a day. "The Living Daylights" is hardly their finest or best known song, but I like it as it manages to be both an A-ha song and also recognisably a James Bond theme tune. I also love the Nordic froideur and restrained passion that courses through "The Sun Always Shines on TV". Fantastic band. They'll be missed.

> "California Uber Alles" - Dead Kennedys

I was aware of "Too Drunk To Fuck", of course... but quite how good this song is was only latterly revealed to me. It's not just the choppy guitar riffs (although they're pretty damn good), it's the syncopation in the chorus

"California Uber Alles
California Uber Alles
Uber Alles California
Uber Alles California

Zen fascists will control you
100% natural
You will jog for the master race
And always wear the happy face"

Brilliant, brilliant record.

> "Karma Police" - Radiohead

...Speaking of brilliant records. "OK Computer" came out when I was working on the shopfloor of HMV York. Initially I was delighted to have a decent record to listen to whilst working instead of the usual succession of crappy "Now" albums, the Spice Girls or Ministry of Sound compiliations.... and then the constant repetition managed to kill it for me. It took me a good few years and a good pair of headphones before I realised quite how good this album really was. "Lucky" is probably my favourite song on the album, followed closely by "Exit Music (for a film)" - which works especially well through headphones as you can hear every catch as Thom Yorke takes a breath. You can't really argue with this song though, and the video is somehow archetypally Radiohead-y too, with Yorke looking especially miserable (not quite as archetypal as "No Surprises" though, it has to be said). I'm not massively keen on anything they've done since, but they remain a damn good band and few bands scale heights like this.

> "Paparazzi" - Lady Gaga

Gaga is something of a guilty pleasure of mine. I've nothing against pop, but it seems to me that there's something a little bit arty and edgy about Gaga. Yes, a lot of the album tracks are not all that far removed from other performers (like Pink), and she can sometimes seem a bit forced when interviewed (as she did on Jonathan Ross a while back), but the real standout tracks are something different. They're catchy, of course, but they seem to deal with sometimes quite dark lyrical themes - rough sex, for instance, seems to crop up several times. There's also something of an air of melancholy underneath all the glitz and shiny production sheen. Maybe I'm overanalysing. One thing's for sure: I'm certainly analysing it more than 22 y.o. at work, who seemed troubled by the question of whether he found Gaga attractive or not. Well, anyway. I like this song. I find it slightly haunting.

---

Right. That's your lot. The weekend is here and I have the prospect of buying some more speaker cables ahead of me as the development of my man room starts to take shape. I hope your weekend is somewhere near as exciting as that..... stay classy.

I'm a man, that's what I am.....

2009-10-15T21:11:00.005+01:00

One of the unexpected benefits of getting the loft converted is that I'm apparently now going to get a proper man space in the house. I've had a cave since we first moved in: home to the bulk of my CDs, my separates stereo, a pile of my books, my desk, an old telly and one of my computers. The walls are covered with pictures of Andrew Flintoff, The Beatles, Muhammad Ali, Han Solo and Morrissey/Marr. There's even a beer fridge in there. It's meant to be a proper man space, but sadly for me, it hasn't really worked out like that. The room has served as our main spare room, and although the futon in there spends most of its life folded up as a sofa and not rolled out as a bed, it effectively blocks access to the CD racks and the stereo; there's no real signal on the tv and the beer fridge is sadly empty and unplugged most of the time. Since I've had a laptop and no longer need to sit at the desk, I don't really spend much time in there at all.

The addition of a new room in the house has now moved the goalposts: the room in the loft is now very much our guest room. It has a double-bed and an en-suite bathroom. This means, so I was informed this evening, that we don't need to keep a futon in my cave any more, and we can get a chair, put in some more book and CD shelves, shift the stereo and speakers somewhere more central to the room for optimal listening, perhaps get a decent telly, another sky box and a DVD player.... the world is suddenly my oyster.

What I really want, and all I really need, is a room where I will be happy to spend some time: somewhere I can sit in a chair and listen to music, watch some telly and to read some books. But can I really leave it there? As a man, do I not have some kind of obligation to pack the room full of all kinds of other stuff?

I throw the question open to the floor: what else should go in that room? What else does any self-respecting man room need? A drumkit? A moose head? A gun cabinet? A fully functioning casino? A full-size snooker table? A grotto with lake and a cascading waterfall?

You tell me......

tell me life is beautiful....

2009-10-14T23:27:00.004+01:00

When we were in a noodle bar the other day, alongside the bill, we were presented with a pair of fortune cookies. For some reason, C. gets excited about such things, and she eagerly ripped open her cookie and pulled out the message. It said something like, "you will receive some good news next Tuesday". The usual carefully non-specific, quasi-mystical nonsense, I thought. I would have expected nothing less. After all, what's the point of fortune cookies? They're not even especially nice biscuits. Even so, C seemed a touch disappointed and down in the mouth, as if she was somehow expecting more from her fortune. Her disappointment was quickly replaced by an eagerness to see what my fortune had in store for me. She was so keen, in fact, that I had to move fairly quickly to stop her taking my cookie and opening it for herself.

My fortune read: "Because of your melodic nature, the moonlight never misses an appointment".

For some unknown reason, this seemed to enrage C. How could it be fair that her fortune was so mundane and mine was so poetic? Frankly, I couldn't see what her problem was and I was quietly impressed by my fortune. How the cookie could possibly know about my melodic nature...?

Perhaps I've misjudged the whole thing?

but your boss gets richer off you....

2009-10-13T20:46:00.003+01:00

I'm suffering from superlative exhaustion. I spent the day at one of those internal work conference things where you sit at a table with a saucer of sweets, hotel branded notepaper and biros and big glass bottles of mineral water*. We have these every six months or so, and the idea is for our leadership to share their ambitions with their wider management team**. Sounds awful, right? Well, surprisingly they're usually not too bad.

After a few hours though, the thing that really starts to grate is the language. I'm not talking about 'buzzword bingo' here, although you do get the odd "low hanging fruit" or "singing from the same hymn sheet" here and there. It's just the relentless onslaught of superlatives. Why be good when you can be great? Why settle for merely great when you can be legendary? Everything is massively important and vital. It's draining and ultimately it's empty. I understand why we use the language of aspiration - who aims to be "quite good"? It's not exactly a motivational stretch target, is it? But after a while, the real meaning and emphasis of those words is lost. Eventually, I stop hearing those words at all.

I love words and I love the English language. When used well, it can have the most incredible combination of form and function. We may not have as many words for snow as the Eskimos***, but we do have a wonderfully expressive and flexible language. Language is important to me, and I think that it is important to use it properly. At my worst, this manifests itself as the terrible grammar nazi who pulls people up for their misuse of the apostrophe or who chastises people who ignorantly correct my use of "me" instead of "I" (as in "that belongs to C and me"). That said, I also know that one of the best things about the English language is its capacity to absorb new words to continually evolve. What really gets on my nerves though is the casual misuse of language where words are used so much that they become empty. If you're going to fill your sentences with meaningless words like that, then why bother speaking at all?

We have a regular temperature check-type survey in the office. It's called the "Great Place to Work" survey, but I'll let that particular superlative pass as an aspiration. The use of language is sloppy though. When you're asking me to score you on how much I agree with a particular statement, the words that you use are absolutely critical to the way I will answer the question: the words you choose are the only way you have of communicating the question that you want me to answer. They have to be right. If you ask me, as the survey does, do I LOVE being part of my team at work, then I'm going to have to tell you that I don't. I quite like some of the people in my team, but love? No. If someone has to explain to me, before I fill out the survey, what they mean by each question, then something is terribly wrong. How hard would it be to word it right in the first place, without ambiguity? By the same token, why do we have to constantly and brainlessly reach for the biggest superlative we can think of? Do we not have the wit to use the language more creatively than that?

Part of it, I suppose, is that people like to be seen to be doing and saying the right things. In this world, the language of positivity is the same thing as genuinely being positive. This should also be accompanied by the waving of arms, the widening of eyes and, if you think you can pull it off, some actual, honest-to-goodness whooping. Same thing applies to your successes: saying that you have been massively successful and have achieved great things is exactly the same thing as actually achieving great things. In fact, in many ways it's much more important. Looking at some of the people in the room at the conference today, this is an approach that seems to work.

I work hard and I do many of the things that my senior managers were talking about today. My problem, I'm told, is that what I don't do is to work hard enough on telling other people about what I do. Forgive me if I think that the substance of what you do should be more important than what you say.

Mind you, that said, I'm not so lacking in self-awareness as to realise that I sometimes don't exactly help myself: when asked why I thought a "massively important" new project had been codenamed "Darwin", I said that it was because we fundamentally did not believe in intelligent design. Not the answer they were looking for, apparently.....

----

* As you might expect from an event like this, the bottled water was ethical and each bottle saw a donation made to a charity that installs water pumps into African villages. The name of this water? Sela V. What the hell were they thinking? I know that Perrier ran a successful advertising campaign in the 80s with lots of "eau" puns, but that's just excruciating and more than a touch self-satisfied. Awful... and perhaps entirely audience appropriate.

** Don't be thinking I'm any kind of a big cheese. There are hundreds of us.

*** Urban myth, by the way

As I've talked about grammar here, I'm sure to have made several mistakes. Oh well. Sela V.

high/low

2009-10-12T20:58:00.001+01:00

MS is a right barrel of laughs, I can tell you. One of the things that I'm discovering is that I never quite know what's going to happen next, or indeed what to make of it all. That's true for everyone else, of course, but at the moment my life seems to be a rollercoaster of minor surprises and little humps in the road: sleeping policemen on the highway of life, if you like.

I went out running as usual on Saturday morning. Nothing unusual in that, and since the training for the half marathon, I've been trying to make a bit of an effort to keep the mileage up on at least one of my weekly runs. More often than not, that longer run takes place on a Saturday lunchtime when time pressures are fewer. I had a bit of a lie-in as usual, gently sounded out the morning-after impact of a night spent at the Nottingham beer festival, and then headed out the door. It was a lovely day, and I actually quite enjoyed the 6.70 mile route I took out along the river, even though I ran it the wrong way around (is it just me who normally follows my normal running routes the same way around? It just feels wrong if I do them back-to-front...).

About a mile from home, I noticed that I was losing sensation in my bottom lip. In the context of the numbness I feel elsewhere in my body, it wasn't really anything too dramatic, and I wasn't too worried about it, but I felt it slowly increasing in its (lack of) intensity as I continued to head home. By the time I set foot through the front door, I had lost a good deal of the feeling in the lower part of my cheeks too: I felt a little like I was at the dentists and about to have a filling put in.

Over the course of the next few hours, feeling returned, but it does leave a lingering feeling of "what's next"?

The answer wasn't long in making itself known, and I found my usual Sunday swim hampered by a loss of power across my upper arms and shoulders. This isn't new, but it seems to come and go unpredictably, and naturally made my swim -- an exercise I do specifically to exercise those muscles -- rather more bothersome than usual.

And then this morning I woke up with a blurry eye. I've talked about this before, but a visit to my eye doctor last week has now shown that my eyes and their implanted lenses are extremely healthy and working very well. Under normal conditions, my vision is excellent - much better than average. This blurriness then, is something of a mystery. My optic nerve apparently looks good, but it now seems certain that this sporadic blurriness is being caused by old nerve damage. Something they don't tell you, it now seems, is that you can suffer neurological damage that you don't notice at the time, but which leaves permanent damage. This blurriness is a classic sign, apparently. It's not there all the time, and even when it is there, it's not too annoying... but given that it's never going to entirely go away, that's probably just as well. Actually, given the choice of a problem with my eye, my implants or a nerve problem, this is probably the easiest one to deal with as I have no choice but to get on with things. No intervention will make any difference, so I can just try to ignore it and move on. Hey ho.

I don't need to be told that, in the grand scheme of things, a weekend where I have been able to run, swim and attend a beer festival doesn't sound like one where I have been too greatly inconvenienced by my condition. And I haven't been. Trust me, I'm very much aware of that already; every painful run I go on is now precious to me in its own way simply because I can still run. But what's next? There's no way of knowing, and nothing anyone could do about it even if there was. I know that. There's nothing to be gained by worrying about what my future might, or might not, hold.....but...well, you have to wonder, don't you?

It's a right old barrel of laughs, this dear old surprise-a-minute, never-saw-that-one-coming condition of mine.

and so I drank one it became four.....

2009-10-09T18:54:00.002+01:00

Gone drinking at the Nottingham Beer Festival. Well, you get a souvenir glass and everything, so....

According to wikipedia, "Beer is the world's oldest and most widely consumed alcoholic beverage and the third most popular drink overall after water and tea. It is produced by the brewing and fermentation of starches, mainly derived from cereal grains—most commonly malted barley, although wheat, maize (corn), and rice are widely used. Most beer is flavoured with hops, which add bitterness and act as a natural preservative, though other flavourings such as herbs or fruit may occasionally be included."

Hmmm. I'm not sure that entirely captures the appeal.

Hmm. Neither does that.

Well, I'm going to pack up my little notebook and my pens in three different colours to make careful tasting notes, and I'm going to go anyway.

There are apparently 701 different beers and more than 100 ciders (give or take).

I may be some time.

.....You know I was joking about the notebook and pens, right?

Right?

Aw, come on....

you know the preacher likes the cold, he knows I'm gonna stay.....

2009-10-08T21:27:00.002+01:00

Right, well as I think I'm likely to be at the Nottingham Beer Festival tomorrow, I think I'd better get this week's earworms done today, eh?

Earworms of the Week

> "Walking in Memphis" - Cher

There I was, innocently minding my own business in the office, when I was suddenly landed with this. How does a conversation about the ten bestselling soundtrack albums of all time suddenly end up with me having to put up with bloody Cher, eh? Yeah, I suppose it's mildly amusing that someone might think that this song was written by Leonard Cohen (Marc Cohn / Leonard Cohen... easy mistake to make right?). It's not half so funny when you have this ringing around your head, let me tell you......

> "Marlon JD" - Manic Street Preachers

I was listening again to "Journal for Plague Lovers" the other day, and it really is a very good album. In the writing of this album, the band had finally returned to some lyrical fragments left behind by Richie shortly before his disappearance. The result, perhaps not surprisingly, is the best thing that they've done since.... well, pretty much since Richie vanished. Then again, "The Holy Bible" has always been my favourite Manics album, so perhaps I would say that. The lyrics are incredibly dense, seemingly packing in an impossible number of references into each line: I'd be surprised if anyone other than their author would be able to explain them. It was a brave decision by a band who have spent more than a decade trying to look forwards and not backwards, and I think the results entirely vindicate them.... not that they had anything to prove to anyone. I've no idea what this song is about, but it's brilliant.

> "Voodoo Chile" - Jimi Hendrix

Someone linked to this on Twitter the other day, and I'm not sure if I'm missing something, or if they really have made a Bob Marley t-shirt with Jimi Hendrix on it. Whatever, it was enough to plant this into my head anyway. Well, that and hearing it on the radio, anyway. It's not my favourite of his songs, but it's pretty unmistakeable. Is there anyone else who has quite such a recognisable guitar-playing style? All loose-limbed and effortless. His not the best singer in the world, for sure, but you can't have everything, can you? (and I'm afraid to say, that whenever I think of Hendrix, I end up coming back to that immortal line from Spinal Tap: you can't dust for vomit.....)

> "Hey Man (Now You're Really Livin')" - Eels

I love this band. It's not that E writes spectacular anthems or anything, but he does have this amazing knack of conveying emotion. He's had an apparently tragic life, but -- as here -- he has the lightness of touch to talk about some pretty heavy emotions with an almost incongruously upbeat tune.

"Do you know what it's like to fall on the floor
And cry your guts out 'til you got no more
Hey man now you're really living"

He's unique, I think. Great tune.

> "Vicinity of Obscenity" - System of a Down

Well, you couldn't get much more of a contrast from Eels than System of a Down, could you? Absolutely bonkers band. If I have no idea what Richie was talking about in that Manics tune, then what the hell are you to make of this?

"Banana Banana Banana Terracotta Banana Terracotta Terracotta Pie!
Banana Banana Banana Terracotta Banana Terracotta Terracotta Pie!"

I'm usually a lyrics man, and that looks suspiciously like nonsense to me....but the sheer weight of the music and the full on screaming commitment of Serj Tankian just about make it all work somehow.

Terracotta Pie Hey!
Terracotta Pie Hey!

> "Empire State of Mind" - Jay-Z

I'm not an especially big fan of Jay-Z, I have to say... but this song stood out at his Wembley gig the other week, and the more I hear it, the more I like it. There you go. I'm sure he'll be thrilled to know my view, so if you see him, please feel free to tell him.

> "PDA" - Interpol

Paul Banks still sounds like an undertaker reading a legal document, but I love Interpol and I was long overdue digging out their debut album and giving it a spin. Still sounds good to me.

> "Love it When You Call" - The Feeling

This was playing when I was in a bar last weekend, and it's just a sublime pop song, isn't it? My favourite bits are the band harmonies on the chorus echoing the main lyrics:

"I love it when you call
(he loves it when you call)"

etc.

Brilliant song.

> "I'm Throwing My Arms Around Paris" - Morrissey

Morrissey is such a maddening artist: having come back with a bang from his years in the wilderness with "You Are the Quarry", he then quickly followed it up with an album - "Ringleader of the Tormentors" - that just never really did it for me. It was all sound and fury and lacking in substance, even if Morrissey's voice itself sounded as good as it has done in years. Having not really been that thrilled with it initially, his next album, "Years of Refusal" has grown on me. It's not my favourite Morrissey album by any stretch of the imagination, but neither is it "Maladjusted". This is the most immediate song on the album, and when it popped up on the CD player in the car, I found myself repeating it several times. It's short and sweet and certainly doesn't outstay its welcome. Good song. Would probably be enhanced by the presence of Johnny Marr, though..... but what wouldn't be??

> "California Dreaming" - Lee Moses

Given that the Mamas and Papas version of this song was deemed to be number 89 in the Rolling Stone list of the 500 greatest songs of all time, then you'd imagine that it would be pretty difficult to top. Well, perhaps Lee Moses doesn't quite manage that, but he does get pretty damn close. The style is completely different - well, what would be the point of trying to top Mama Cass and co. on vocal harmonies? - but that injection of soul works incredibly well, shifting the tone of the song completely and really making the song his own by not competing on the same pitch at all. I can only take my hat off to Red, who brought this song to my attention in the comments to Queenie's autumn playlist on Postculturist. It's superb. I can't stop listening to it......

And tomorrow night.... beer. There will be more than 600 casks of real ale, apparently. Well, I'll do my best.

Enjoy your weekends people.

broad beans are sleeping in their blankety bed.....

2009-10-07T19:48:00.003+01:00

At Primary School this morning, instead of reading with the kids, their teacher apologetically took me through to the main event of the day: the harvest festival service.

I haven't been to a Harvest Festival service since I was at school, and I was pleased to see that the format remains much the same: all the kids sat on the floor in the main hall, with a couple of tables at the front laden with tins of food (including, I was amused to note, a tin of mushy peas....) as well as some cabbages and the odd pineapple. The service itself was run by a nice lady vicar (who is actually the mother of one of the kids I read with last year) and was - as far as these things go - pretty good. She'd brought in a bag of apples from a tree in her garden and was getting everyone involved by asking the assembled kids lots of questions: how many different varieties of apples are there? (the initial guess was 4, the answer was something like 1,500), what is the study of apples called: apology, theology or pomology? How much air is in an apple? (25% apparently). There was then a spot of apple bobbing on the stage, with every participant being rewarded with an apple. Finally, a couple of volunteers came up onto the stage and were each given a slice of apple. Asked if they liked the apple, both willingly agreed. The vicar then turned the apple around to show that the other side of the apple had a wormhole. Rather than running away screaming (which the teacher sat next to me had whispered she was worried about,especially as one of the kids chosen was apparently autistic), both kids were fascinated and wanted to know if the worm was still in there.... The vicar's point, she went on to explain, was that many of the apples had blemishes, bruises and wormholes, but that they were still fundamentally good. Can you see where she's going? That's right, apples are a lot like people, aren't they? Some have bruises and seem bad, but that everyone is basically good. Naturally, religion came into it, but actually it was done in quite an inclusive way, stressing what she believed as a christian, but not necessarily assuming that everyone in the room shared her faith. I thought it was nicely done, actually.

That said, my favourite bit of the whole service was the song that the kids all sang (and acted out in sign language):

Cauliflowers fluffy and cabbages green,
Strawberries sweeter than any I've seen
Beetroot purple and onions white,
All grow steadily day and night

The apples are ripe, the plums are red,
Broad beans are sleeping in a blankety bed

Blackberries juicy and rhubarb sour,
Marrows that are fattening hour by hour.
Gooseberries hairy and lettuces fat
Radishes round and runner beans flat

The apples are ripe, the plums are red,
Broad beans are sleeping in a blankety bed

Orangey carrots and turnips cream,
Reddening tomatoes that used to be green,
Brown potatoes in little heaps,
Down in the darkness where the celery sleeps

The apples are ripe, the plums are red,
Broad beans are sleeping in a blankety bed

They'd been practicing all week, I was told, and they sounded great. How can you not be charmed by a room full of kids all singing to you about some beans in their blankety bed?

On the way out, my class's teacher told me how she thought it was really good for her class to have a man come in to read to them every week, as there are only two male teachers in the whole school. If they don't have one of those guys as their class teacher, then a class might well spend the whole year surrounded entirely by women. Ah, I thought, that explains why most of them call me "miss" then.....

Best hour of the working week, without a shadow of a doubt. As usual. A new earworm, too.

a paper world with paper faces beneath a paper moon....

2009-10-06T21:35:00.004+01:00

As the darkness drew in this evening and a wintry rain started to fall, instead of going home to head out on the run I'd promised myself I would do, I found myself chatting with a few of my colleagues. As the office emptied, the topic of conversation drifted relentlessly towards the subject of what it took to get ahead at work, with my 22 year-old colleague asking me if I would ever consider playing the game in order to get promoted. The easy answer is no, but I still hesitated a little before answering. I'm conscious that 22 y.o. is quite impressionable, and I definitely don't want to give him the impression that my way is the only way to go. In fact, I think I will be doing him a great disservice if I don't point out that if he chooses to walk the path I have chosen, then he is likely to find it somewhat career limiting.

I used to think that I wanted to be managing director, but as I've got older, I've realised how far from the truth that is. I am challenge orientated and I want to do the best job that I can, but I can't quite stop myself from asking questions that it might be more prudent to leave unasked. I can't help myself: the same analytical mind that is essential to doing my job is forever getting me into trouble. My new boss is always going on about how doing a good job is not enough; how you need to work on 'building your brand' and making sure that the right people see you behaving in what they consider the right way. Part of the assessment of our performance is, after all, based upon our "behaviours"..... If you want to get ahead, my boss tells me, you need to work on your brand. Or as one of my other colleagues said this evening, "You have to be prepared to suck some cock".

It's a glib line: it's funny and it means that we outsiders can vent our scorn at the people we perceive to be advancing their careers on the basis of appearances rather than achievements. It's too easy though. It's an easy answer that provides succour to people like us who think we're doing a better job than the people being promoted around us. It can't always be true, can it? It might seem true in my department, but -- as my wife likes to point out -- it is possible to move your career forwards without compromising your integrity, and her career is proof positive: a shining example of someone who treats her colleagues with respect and achieves success through nothing less than talent and sheer hard work.

I've been thinking about this.

We all have our opinions on our colleagues and on ourselves, but I reckon that if you can come up with a method for somehow measuring integrity, then you might just have the benchmark for determining who is merely going through the motions of 'building their brand' and who is genuinely concerned about doing the best job that they can.

How about this:

Picture a sliding scale, with "Self-Awareness" on one end and "Self-Importance" on the other end. I'm going to call this the "Vestiges of Humanity" scale. Every single thing we do at work -- and in life -- will move us in one direction or the other along that scale. I think that any reasonable person should always be aiming to have their self-awareness outweigh their self-importance. Anyone, no matter how much you may dislike them or doubt their motives, who has shown you that they are the right side of that scale, I think deserve the benefit of the doubt. In the spirit of self-development and to further your own self-awareness, you should of course apply this measure most rigorously to yourself.

I'm not claiming that this is the perfect measure, by any means. It's a rule of thumb at best. Actually, I doubt that you will find many people who fall entirely on the wrong side of the scale at all. Most people will probably be somewhere around the middle. But I am convinced that you will get a reasonable measure of someone if you consider the direction they are travelling along that scale.

I've been idly applying this to various of my colleagues over the course of the evening, and the results have been quite interesting. There's only really one of my team who I would say has actively tipped into self-importance in recent weeks (and I don't think he's a lost cause), but it has given me cause to reassess my opinions of a couple of people, including my boss. I've not been sure what his motives have been over the last few weeks, and my overall view of him has taken a sharp turn for the worse as a direct result. A bit of close consideration using the "Vestiges of Humanity" scale, and I find to my surprise that I need to amend my opinion of him. I'm still not sure of his motives, but I am pretty sure that he's both self-aware and not especially self-important. He might be confused himself about where he's going at the moment, so perhaps I should be offering him some help instead of adding to his problems?

A most unexpected result, and one that is going to perhaps lead me to change my own attitude and behaviour. Hmm. I might be onto something here.

I've always fancied writing a book, and I was reading in the paper the other day that the most successful books on the market are self-help books. "Who Moved My Cheese" and all that jazz. With a bit of work, perhaps the "Vestiges of Humanity" scale could be the next big thing? If I can help myself, then I reckon I can help anyone...

Or perhaps I've just tipped critically down my own scale and into self-importance?

and we cry when they all dye blonde....

2009-10-05T21:06:00.000+01:00

"Apparently," C. told me this weekend, "if you have your arsehole bleached, you can have real problems getting it waxed afterwards. It's the increased sensitivity."

I'm not sure if there's ever a right moment to be told that kind of thing, to be honest, and it took a little while for the information to process. Had I heard that correctly? Yes, I rather think I had. Did I understand what I was hearing or why I was being told it? Not really.

Let's pause here and consult wikipedia:

Anal bleaching, I learn "is the practice of bleaching the pigmentation of the skin of medium- to light-skinned people around the anus. Some white people have some degree of darker pigmentation of the skin immediately around the anus, which can be mistaken for poor personal hygiene. Discoloration of the anal and vaginal areas can be caused by aging, hormonal changes from pregnancy, diet, and other factors.Bleaching is used mostly for cosmetic purposes to lighten the color of the skin around the anus, making it more uniform with the surrounding area."

Ah, I see. But where on earth does the idea of something like this come from?

"Originally, anal and vaginal lightening was discovered by adult film stars, dancers, models, beauty-forward celebrities and others on the forefront of the waxing trend who were "exposed" and wanted to enhance the appearance of the anal, vaginal and genital areas."

Right. Beauty-forward celebrities. Of course. Am I the only person thinking of Jordan at this point?

Now, I might be metrosexual enough to use moisturiser, but that grey hair is all my own, and I'm about as likely to have a back, crack and sack wax as I am to tap-dance to San Francisco singing "Holding Back the Years" by Simply Red. Anal bleaching? I'm not sure I know which is the more bizarre: the idea of someone applying bleach to their fundament, or the idea that anyone might actually want to bleach it in the first place. How does that come up in conversation? Who tries that out for the first time? And once you've started, would you ever really be happy with the colour you've achieved, or would you want more? Would you spend every spare moment over a mirror with a colour chart? And as for the news that it renders many people too sensitive to be waxed.... well.

I put it to you: if the biggest problems in your life are the colour of your arsehole and the subsequent increased sensitivity - post-bleaching - that makes waxing something of an ordeal, then I'd suggest you're lucky not to have more serious problems.

Or is that just me? Is everyone else doing this but me?

I'm clearly reading the wrong magazines.

A problem, I would suggest, that our forebears never had. This, my friends, is evolution. Can our species advance any further?

And, yes...... I am still a little baffled as to how this can come up, apropos nothing, in casual conversation with my wife. Wouldn't you be?

if you're poorly, I will send poetry....

2009-10-02T19:36:00.001+01:00

--
Earworms of the Week

> "Montague Terrace (In Blue)" - Scott Walker

A gloomy, damp Friday morning in October is somehow perfect for listening to the beautiful, but distinctly doleful, voice of Mr. Noel Scott Engel. He's still a going concern, of course, producing an arty and mostly unlisteneable album every six or seven years or so, but I very much prefer his earlier work, particularly the material he put on that run of imaginatively titled albums: Scott 1, Scott 2, Scott 3 and Scott 4. I absolutely adore his voice and the way that he chooses to use such a beautiful, lush instrument to sing songs of loneliness and despair. Not for the first time, I have cause to thank a Mr. Mark Preston for introducing me to this stuff when I was a heavy metal loving first year at University. Along with Morrissey, probably the single most influential artist in shaping my music taste.

> "Daniel" - Bat for Lashes

I was never really into Kate Bush (I much prefer the Futureheads version of "Hounds of Love" to the original). Still, the influence is there for all to see in Natasha Khan's work. I really like this album, and not just because of the duet with Scott Walker that closes the album. I think it's fair to say that I don't have a whole lot of music with female vocalists in my collection, but I have collected a few bits and bobs over the years, and there are times when nothing else will do. As you'll see from much of the below, this has clearly been one of those weeks. Haunting.

> "Rattlesnakes" - Tori Amos

For a long time, Tori Amos was probably the only female voice in the whole of my collection. "Little Earthquakes" remains my favourite of her albums by some distance, but I was curious enough to pick up "Strange Little Girls", her album of covers, when I saw it at a ridiculously knocked-down price a while back. All the reviews of it that I had seen tended to treat it as something of a novelty concept album, but that doesn't do it any kind of justice at all. The conceit, such as it is, it that Amos has deliberately chosen songs that were originally performed by men, and put a female spin on them. Songs on the record include "'97 Bonnie & Clyde" (originally by Eminem), "New Age" (the Velvet Underground", "Enjoy the Silence" (Depeche Mode), "Raining Blood" (Slayer) and my favourite, this version of Lloyd Cole's "Rattlesnakes". I wasn't actually familiar with the original, but listening to this version had me out looking for the album. Both are excellent. Her version of Neil Young's "Heart of Gold" leaves a little to be desired, mind....

> "The Distance" - Cake

Cake are one of those bands who are beloved of American college students. I used to work with a guy fresh out of college who would listen to practically nothing else as he sat behind his desk, hidden by a massive pair of headphones. Mind you, that guy now works for George Lucas at ILM on Skywalker Ranch, so who's laughing now, eh? (maybe it was him who did Jar-Jar?). Oddly, they came up in conversation this week, completely unexpectedly, and this song popped into my head. I also know their cover of "I Will Survive", but I'm actually thinking of maybe getting hold of a copy of "Fashion Nugget" and/or "Comfort Eagle" and seeing if they do anything for me.

> "Midlife Crisis" - Faith No More

Goodness, it's been a while since I listened to any of my Faith No More records... but since I put this one song onto that 9 hour playlist I built for my running, I've not been able to get it out of my head. I don't think it's their best song, by any stretch of the imagination, but it's certainly proving persistent. "Angel Dust" is a good album too, so perhaps I should give in and give it a proper listen, eh?

> "Rockin' in the Free World" - Neil Young
> "Keep the Car Running" / "No Cars Go" - Arcade Fire

....Speaking of my running playlist, although I don't remember many specifics about the route of the half marathon, or the songs that I listened to as I plodded around, I do remember these ones specifically. Neil Young helped me up a nasty hill in the University grounds, and I was pleasantly surprised how good Arcade Fire are to run to. Looking at them, I'm sure it's not something they thought of when they wrote the songs, but they really work very well when you're starting to tire and you've still got 7 or 8 miles to go.

> "A&E" - Goldfrapp

Another female singer, and this from the album that best showcases her voice by stripping the accompaniment back to basics. It's a lovely song.

> "Irish Blood, English Heart" - Morrissey
> "Handsome Devil" - The Smiths

I've been flicking through Simon Goddard's "Mozipedia" - the encyclopaedia of Morrissey and the Smiths. It's exhaustively detailed, featuring every single song and as many different events, influences and people that the author can think of. I'm not sure I'd want to read it cover to cover, but like any encyclopedia, it's been written to dip into.... and of course, the dipping made me want to listen to the music. I started with "You Are The Quarry", but as always, listening to Morrissey's solo work made me crave the presence of Johnny Marr, and so I popped on "Hatful of Hollow". It's my favourite of their albums, even if it isn't an album-proper. I love the rawness of some of those session tracks and, in my opinion, they're the definitive versions. This is an unusually sexually voracious track for Morrissey, who is normally much more oblique on such matters. On "Handsome Devil", it's all yelps and primal driving guitar...much like "Irish Blood, English Heart". I wasn't sure about that track when I first heard it, even though it was Morrissey's first proper recorded output for something like 7 or 8 years. It's grown on me though, ageing well where some of the other songs on "...Quarry" have not fared so well. It's short, sharp and explosive. Apparently people (including Goddard) have been confused by the lyrical assertion that the English monarchy are still in thrall to Oliver Cromwell...... ah, but is it really so hard? The English monarch reigns at the consent of parliament. All the real power resides with a body who, after all, ordered and then carried out the execution of a king. In a very real sense, the Queen does still salute Oliver Cromwell, or at least his modern day successors, whenever she attends Parliament.

Oh, hold on, I'm being a history bore again...

> "That Don't Impress Me Much" - Shania Twain

Well, this is a pretty radical change of pace. It's the usual story: I heard it accidentally and then the bastard thing stuck. In my office, they've started playing the "stores radio" channel that goes out in our shops in the main reception area. As I was on my way out of the building one evening, I was aurally assaulted by this drivel. It's still bloody there too. Does this stuff make people buy more stuff? Perhaps more than listening to Probot would, but still....

> "Between the Wars" / "The Milkman of Human Kindness" - Billy Bragg

My 22 y.o. colleague approached me at my desk the other day, when I was listening to my iPod, and he peered over my shoulder to see what I was listening to. "Billy Bragg? Who the bloody hell is that?" Nevermind his lack of knowledge of the Beatles, this is real ignorance. These two songs highlight nicely the two different sides of Bragg's muse: the first is an impassioned piece of empathy towards the working man struggling to make ends meet, written during the Miner's Strike, and the second is a wonderfully human piece of compassion. The man's a genius.... he is the milkman of human kindness and he will leave an extra pint.

Have a good weekend, y'all.

poor little rich boy....

2009-10-01T19:16:00.009+01:00

I can't quite believe either the fuss or excitement that has greeted the mayor of London's appearance on Eastenders this evening.

The BBC has come under fire for apparently showing political favouritism by allowing Boris to appear when they consistently rejected his predecessor's requests to show his face in the Queen Vic. Naturally, Ken Livingstone is not amused:

"There has obviously been a Damascene conversion here ... There is no reason why the BBC should not give the mayor a cameo appearance; I just wish they would do it for everybody, not just their chosen favourites."

Having just watched his stilted, awkward appearance that was clumsily and embarrassingly set up by the cast beforehand, I can't really see why Ken would be getting so agitated about the whole thing.

"...I'm going to have a pint of bitter."
"...Please call me Boris."

Awful. Predictably awful.

Still, Boris is always going to be something of an unlikely man of the people, isn't he? Eton, Oxford, Bullingdon club and all.....

David Cameron, the leader of the opposition and likely future Prime Minister of this country, is number 2, and Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, is number 8.

[for completeness: 1.Sebastian Grigg, 2. David Cameron 3. Ralph Perry Robinson 4. Ewen Fergusson 5. Matthew Benson 6. Sebastian James 7. Jonathan Ford 8. Boris Johnson 9. Harry Eastwood]

What the hell has happened to the Conservative Party? In the party leadership elections of 1990, Douglas Hurd was widely ridiculed as a "toff". His background at Eton and Oxford was a positive disadvantage as the - definitely less experienced and arguably far less accomplished - John Major swept to power. Nowadays, it seems that Eton and Oxford are prerequisites for a role on the Conservative front bench.

I realise that the Labour Party have made an awful lot of people very angry and have hardly set the world alight recently, but let's take a closer look at the alternative:

Come on. Seriously?

Who do you think is best qualified to run the economy? Gordon Brown and Alastair Darling, two men who have been credited by the leaders of the major world powers with taking decisive action to save the world's economy*, or the man in the far right of that picture above - George Osbourne?

* Let's not probe that claim too deeply, but it is something that people are saying....

For the record, the other people in that photograph are:

1: THE HON LUKE BRIDGEMAN - Second son of the 3rd Viscount Bridgeman, he became heir after the death of his older brother. Works for a private equity firm.

2: NAT ROTHSCHILD - The only son of Jacob Rothschild and heir to a £750million fortune. After turning his back on alcohol he made a second fortune in his own right with the £11bn Atticus hedge fund. Links to Peter Mandelson and Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska under scrutiny.

3: IFTY RIAZ - According to the Daily Mail, "Believed to have moved abroad". But he was always the odd one out in this company, eh?

4: GEORGE LATHAM - Sandhurst. Now a senior fund manager of Henderson's Global Care Income fund.

5: BARON LUPUS VON MALTZAHN - From a prominent German family. A relative of Baron Bruno Schroder, owner of Schroder private bank. Now a senior manager for a consulting firm and lives in London.

6: LORD ALEXANDER HOPE - Son of the 4th Marquess of Linlithgow, his family seat is Hopetoun House, near Edinburgh. Left merchant banking to enter the art world. Now director of UK business development for Christies.

7: GEORGE OSBORNE - The Shadow Chancellor is the eldest son of baronet Sir Peter Osborne, the founder of wallpaper merchants, Osborne & Little

I'm all too aware that similar photos were taken of some of my contemporaries at school.... But I can't imagine (or would care to imagine) any of those people running the country either.

**shudder**

I guess we get the politicians we deserve, eh? I make it a point of principle to vote in every election, but this time around, I'm really struggling to know what to do: I'm not sure I want to vote Labour, but it will be a cold day in hell before I vote for this shower of shit. It's probably just as well that my vote is likely to be utterly redundant as Ken Clarke holds onto his extremely safe seat.....

It's been said before, but the Labour Party are likely to have plenty of time to rue the fact that Tony Blair's greatest legacy may well turn out to be David Cameron.....

But then again......as Tony Blair's background is Durham Chorister School, Fettes College and Oxford University, you might well wonder what the difference between them is anyway.

2010 election? Different result, same old shit.

Grrr.

whatever you do, don't tell anyone....

2009-09-30T20:16:00.007+01:00

When I was writing the blurb to go on our JustGiving page, I deliberately erred on the side of caution in how I described why we'd chosen the MS Society as the charity we were supporting:

"MS is a disease that has recently touched our lives...."

Perhaps a little coy. My MS isn't exactly a secret, but it's also not something that I'm going out of my way to advertise to all and sundry. I'm all for helping shake off people's preconceptions, but I am also aware that, for people who don't know me all that well, it could easily be the thing that defines me for them. As if to prove the point, one of C's colleagues was asking her about the half marathon and why we were running for the MS Society, and when he was told, he was all.... "Oh, but I saw him the other day and he looked fine".

I was conscious that I was likely to be touting the page at all sorts of people, and I decided that I wanted to tell people -- or not tell them -- about my MS on my own terms... and not via a casual remark on a charity website.

As it turns out, what I'd written was still enough to get a few people curious. Most were content to put their hands into their pockets without probing any deeper, but some were interested enough to try fishing (but not outright asking) for more information, and one or two quietly managed to read between the lines and approached me for a word. Interestingly, in every case, the people who approached me had also had their lives touched by MS: either because a close member of their family was a sufferer, or because they themselves had it. I already know of a couple of people in the office whose lives have been affected by MS in this way, but I was still very surprised when on particular colleague of mine approached me and revealed that she had MS and would be more than happy to speak to whoever it was that I knew who was suffering.

Surprised? Why would I be surprised? Haven't I been going on and on about how MS is a disease that is often invisible? Was I not just mildly disdainful, a mere two paragraphs above, about one of C's colleagues who remarked that I was looking surprisingly well? Just goes to show, eh? Seems we all have preconceptions about multiple sclerosis and multiple sclerosis sufferers, me included. Well, I've worked with this lady for several years now, and not only is she superb at her job, but she is also one of those lovely, warm friendly types who are a real joy to work with. She's about the same age as me, and since I've worked with her, she has married, had two kids and run a half marathon (for the MS Society, I discover....). And yet apparently she was diagnosed with MS when she was in her early 20s and a student - which must have been quite a shock to the system, to say the least. We had lunch together on Monday and swapped notes (she doesn't actually know anyone else with MS). It turns out that she has had a couple of relapses since diagnosis (including the temporary loss of sight in one eye), but is generally doing quite well and is not on any disease modifying drug therapy. It turns out that we even see the same neurologist.....

Who knew that people with MS might turn out to be people just like me? It was good to talk. Maybe we should form a club or something? Perhaps with a special badge, or a secret handshake?

Maybe not, eh?

---

Just a quick update on our fundraising, the total raised for MS Society currently stands at £2,775 with a further £489.36 of Gift Aid. That gives us a grand total of £3,264.36.

....I reckon that LB, C and I have done pretty well there, eh?

Thanks to you all for your generosity.

You can still donate, actually..... what are you waiting for?

old man take a look at yourself...

2009-09-29T20:24:00.005+01:00

In my professional life, I am obliged to be something of a Janus: I sit between the business on one side and a large outsourced IT department on the other. I have a responsibility to my delivery partners to make sure that I capture clear, accurate requirements and kick work off in a way that enables it to be successfully delivered, but I also have a responsibility to the business on the other side to make sure that those projects are delivered as cheaply and accurately as possible. In an ideal world, both sides would always be pushing for the same things and everything would go smoothly, but the reality is that I spend most of my time bridging between two (or more) organisations that seem to be wrestling each other for an advantage.

Naturally, I think I do a pretty reasonable job. Where most people in my role naturally tend to focus on one side or the other, I reckon I go well out of my way to try and steer a middle path and make sure that I challenge both sides equally. I don't think of myself as a natural conciliator, but I spend much of my time at work seeking ways forward without endless needless recrimination over what we've agreed to do; over the often difficult line between defect and project change request... to seek, if you'll pardon the laboured simile, to rub the grit together to produce the pearl.

It wasn't that unusual, therefore, to find myself in a meeting this afternoon where the key business stakeholder and the manager of the third party development team were arguing over the scope and costs of a soon-to-be-delivered project. I've worked with both parties for several years, so although the emotion in the room was real and escalating, I was never really concerned that we wouldn't be able to work something out and leave the meeting room as friends. It's a reasonably big project for both parties, but the sums of money we were debating weren't that large and I was confident that everything would be okay. I sat between both parties, listening to each side and intervening occasionally, but generally waiting for the storm to blow itself out so that we could move forwards.

At that point, however, I looked up to see the other two people in the meeting room. Both have played important roles on the project, but both are also relatively new to the company and are in their early-20s. They both looked a touch concerned by the direction the meeting was taking and clearly weren't quite sure what to do next, not quite daring to say anything. It took me a moment to realise why the two of them kept shooting anxious looks in my direction, but it then suddenly dawned on me that they were looking to me to take hold of the meeting and to calm everything down. It was an insight that brought two thoughts tumbling into my head: the first was to remember how relatively inexperienced the pair of them are and how the meeting might be quite unsettling for them. And then, hard on the heels of that thought, I felt like the oldest man in the world. I'm grey enough as it is; I have no wish to be anybody's éminence grise.

Don't these people realise that I'm the young iconoclast?

In my own head, if in no-one else's...... I'm not quite ready to be Solomon.*

* Get me. As if I've ever been a young iconoclast or will ever be considered a Solomon....

I saw the sign....

2009-09-28T16:34:00.010+01:00

So there we have it: Pastor Sonny Manuel provides people passing the Palm Heights Baptist Chuch with the definitive answer to a conundrum that has been exercising philosophers for years.

Well, he almost does. I think he's actually trying to be funny.

...or maybe he's simply an accomplished surrealist? Isn't everyone in his line of work?

It's the certainty of it that annoys me most, I think. In "The God Delusion", Richard Dawkins talks about a continuous "spectrum of probabilities" between two extremes of opposite certainty, which can be represented on a scale of 1 to 7, where 1 is certitude that God exists and 7 is certitude that God does not exist:

Strong theist. 100% probablity of God. In the words of Carl Jung, 'I do not believe, I know.'
Very high probability but short of 100 per cent. De facto theist. 'I cannot know for certain, but I strongly believe in God and live my life on the assumption that he is there.'
Higher than 50 per cent but not very high. Technically agnostic but leaning towards theism. 'I am very uncertain, but I am inclined to believe in God.'
Exactly 50 per cent. Completely impartial agnostic. 'God's existence and non-existence are exactly equiprobable.'
Lower than 50 per cent but not very low. Technically agnostic but leaning towards atheism. 'I do not know whether God exists but I'm inclined to be sceptical.'
Very low probability, but short of zero. De facto atheist. 'I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there.'
Strong atheist. 'I know there is no God, with the same conviction as Jung "knows" there is one.'

Dawkins rates himself as between a 6 and a 7: "I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there." He goes on to add that "I am agnostic, but only to the extent that I am agnostic about fairies at the bottom of the garden." His point is that although not many 'atheists' would score themselves as a 7, how many Christians would score themselves as anything other than a 1? I get the distinct impression that Pastor Sonny Manuel would score himself as a strong 1, don't you?

Still, they're easy targets, aren't they? Let's all have a laugh at those weird religious nutjobs and the funny signs they put up outside their churches. The sign above comes from a list of similarly idiotic signs that can be found here and was kindly sent to me by the numnum, but laughing at them seems to be a pretty popular sport: just go and look at Google and you'll see that the internet is full of them. An awful lot of them.

Surely they're not representative? For every one of those, there must surely be hundreds of perfectly reasonable signs outside churches, put there by nice, moderate people?

But why am I asking Google?

(That's certainly true, but am I alone in thinking that Google has probably provided more actual answers over the years than prayer?)

Then again, in the cold light of day, is saying something as sanctimonious, judgmental and smug as "I kissed a girl and I liked it... and then I went to hell" actually all that much more ridiculous than saying "When the Son of Man comes, will He find Faith on the earth?" (Luke 18:8). Both statements ultimately display a level of certainty that I suspect leaves little room for rational debate. There was one outside the church around the corner from me the other week loudly declaring that "JESUS IS HOPE". There's not much room for doubt or negotiation there either.

Of course, as long as they don't insist on inflicting it on anyone else, people are entitled to believe what they want. If you ask me, I think that we'd be a whole lot better off basing our society upon the utopian ideals of the Wyld Stallyns:

Now just tell me the world wouldn't be a better place if we all lived by that one simple adage?

Here endeth the lesson.

living for the weekend....

2009-09-27T19:59:00.003+01:00

Well, that was over all too fast. How long until the next one starts? Are they always this far apart?

Who the hell decided that?

Why did we listen?

some are dead and some are living....

2009-09-25T23:07:00.000+01:00

--
Earworms of the Week

> "Screamager" - Therapy?

I swear I didn't do it deliberately, but I have spent all day today listening to music pretty much exclusively performed by power trios. I enjoyed the Ungdomskulen gig last night, for sure, but it wasn't until I listed on Twitter what I'd been listening to that I realised quite what my subconscious had been up to: Ungdomskulen, White Denim, We Are Scientists, Supergrass and the Young Knives. It's not on my iPod, but for some reason, the moment of realisation was suddenly soundtracked by this astonishing track. I suppose it's probably because this probably the song that defines power trios for me. Oh, hang on, no sooner have I said that than my head is starting to play "Smells Like Teenspirit" just to show me quite how wrong I can be.....

> "Grace" - Supergrass
> "Richard III" - Supergrass

A completely different kind of three-piece band to either Therapy? or Nirvana, and actually I think they're officially a four-piece now anyway. I loved them from the moment that I first heard "Caught By The Fuzz" and "Mansize Rooster", when I was sat at the desk in my room as a third year undergraduate, listening to Mark and Lard and trying to revise for my finals. They appear to have lasted quite well, although I do generally prefer their earlier, rougher stuff to the britpop-y stuff. Still, good band though.

> "Death" - White Lies
> "In My Place" - Coldplay

It's not been all three-pieces in my head, and I suppose there would be something really wrong if nothing at all from last weekend's Wembley gig hadn't stuck in my head. I thought White Lies were pretty good, and I had to have a little chuckle at the idea of closing your biggest ever show with a song called Death.... I keep saying I'd like to see them at Rock City next month, but I still haven't pulled my finger out to get any tickets. I'd best get on that, eh? As for Coldplay... well, I like most of their stuff, although hearing "In My Place" reminded me quite how good a band I think they can be when they keep things simple. You can't get a much more straightforward song than this, and there's absolutely nothing fancy about it at all, but it remains for me perhaps the definitive Coldplay song, with the definitive Chris Martin worry-wort lyrics. Bless. I loved "Parachutes", but it was hearing this and "Politik" that really made me believe they were onto something. I listened to "Viva La Vida" tonight, actually... it's really very good, you know.

> "DOA" - Foo Fighters

Triggered by the sight of the proposed track-listing for their forthcoming greatest hits album. I've got all of their albums, but I've thought that they're a better singles band than they are an albums band. You'd have thought, therefore, that a Greatest Hits would suit them down to the ground... and I'm not sure that it does. It looks like a decent album, for sure, but it's not the tracklisting that I would have chosen. It doesn't include this belter, for starters......

> "Welcome to the Jungle" - Guns n'Roses

On the way down to the Coldplay gig last week, in salute to the fact that they were the last band I saw at Wembley Stadium (in 1991), I put on Appetite for Destruction. Damn, but that's a good album. Starts strong and just goes on and on. I think I listened to this to the exclusion of almost everything else for the duration of 1988, and it still sounds pretty good to this day. Shame what happened next, but this is an absolute, solid-gold, nailed on rock classic. tr-na-na-na-na-na-na knees, knees..... un-sing-alongeable, but brilliant.

> "Wired for Sound" - Cliff Richard

I'm blaming you for this one Sarah. Great video of Cliff on rollerskates in Milton Keynes shopping centre though, eh? oh-a-oh-a oh-a-wo-oh oh!

> "Falling from Grace" - Gentle Waves

As wholeheartedly recommended by Aertog the other day. As a big fan of B&S and Isobel Campbell, I immediately made my way over to iTunes and downloaded. A welcome relief from all the rock I've been listening to. A contrast, at the very least, that has cleansed my pallet for more ROCK!

> "After Hours" - We Are Scientists

Originally a trio, but a duo by the time they released this song. A fine song by a fine band and a great video to boot. They must be about due to tour again - I do hope so as they are brilliant live.

> "Up All Night" - The Young Knives (ninjas!)

I first saw Ungdomskulen supporting the Young Knives when they played the Rescue Rooms back in 2007. Even in the face of such a superb support band, and in spite of playing mostly new material, I thought they did pretty well. They're a bit awkward and hard to place, and I fear their faces don't fit, but I think they're a good, interesting band. When the mood takes them, which it does here, they can really get a pretty convincing stomp going. We're not sleeping, we are staying up all night....

> "Spartacus" - Ungdomskulen

I've raved about them enough for one week, but when played live, this song is a pretty much quintessential devil-horn hands in the air classic. Statue John would love them: they're like a looser, freer, rockier White Denim... and that really is saying something. (really - do go and have a look at the video - they're brilliant. The album version can be found here, but live is where it really breathes.)

> "In My Life" - The Beatles

Rubber Soul is superb. Statement of the obvious, but there we are. Johnny Cash does a cover of "In My Life" on one of the American Recordings albums.... and having an 80-odd year old singing wistfully about the people and places he has known has an obvious resonance. But fucking hell, the Beatles were 24 years old when they wrote this. 24! How much did you know when you were 24? What an incredible song. I especially love that chiming guitar at the start of every verse. This is a sublime song. Practically perfect.

Enough already. It's been a musical week and I'm off for a swim.

Have a good weekend, y'all. Stay classy.

...not an ordinary son

2009-09-25T08:59:00.010+01:00

UNGDOMSKULEN @ The Royal (Derby), 24th September 2009

It's not often that you see a support band that really catches the eye. Well, to be honest, it's not that often that I turn up early enough to a gig to catch much of the support act at all, but.... Norwegian three-piece, Ungdomskulen, providing support for the Young Knives at the Rescue Rooms back in 2007, didn't so much grab my attention, as seize it from me, wrestle it to the ground and pummel it into submission. They were fantastic. They were loud, they had great songs, a nice line in self-deprecating onstage banter and they were clearly all brilliant musicians. The Young Knives were good that night, playing material from their about-to-be-released second album, but by their own admission, they were always going to be struggling to out-do their own warm-up band.
"You pick the support act, and they turn out to be the best band in the world.”

I was so impressed that, for the first time in my gig-going life, I was moved to make my way over to the merchandising table and to get myself a CD. To be honest, I wasn't sure if I was ever going to be able to find an Ungdomskulen CD anywhere outside of Norway, so I thought I'd better seize the opportunity whilst I could. The record doesn't quite capture the majesty of their live act, but it's good enough and an excellent reminder of a happy night.

So when Mike suggested a trip out to Derby to go and check out Ungdomskulen again, I jumped at the chance. Actually, the main reason for heading over to the Derby badlands was the chance to meet Gordon, but the lure of the band was a pretty strong incentive. In spite of living barely 10 miles away from the place, I can count the number of times I've been to Derby on the fingers of one hand (five. I couldn't say how many the locals have...) I've been there on work business a few times, and I've been to a couple of gigs. I'm sure it's a nice enough place, but when you live in Nottingham, there has to be a greater incentive than "nice enough" to go and hang out somewhere. In searching for the Royal, Sarah and I actually walked through a couple of small streets that looked to have some really nice bars and restaurants. Perhaps Derby wasn't such a bad place? Hmm. Soon enough, we turned the corner to find ourselves on a big street with loads of bus stops and taxi ranks, and were confronted by the not-terribly edifying sight of a young man in a tracksuit shouting at the backs of a small gaggle of girls walking away from him:
"Yeah. You're nice. And you're friend's nice too. Not the one next to you, but the one after that."
As mating strategies go, I shouldn't have thought that's the most effective, but I'm not from Derby, so.....

Sarah and I found ourselves a nice, unprepossessing old-school fast food joint and dined in style up chips in naan bread and a nice greasy cheeseburger, and then we went out to meet up with Mike, gain entry to the venue and meet up with Gordon.

I think it's Fresher's Week in Derby, and the Royal appeared to be running some sort of club night for the new intake. Freshers, clearly marked by the wristbands they were all wearing, were free, but we old-timers were admitted to see the bands for the princely sum of £2. The support acts in the main bar made conversation impossible, but we soon managed to find a pew in the large, chandeliered chill out bar where some DJs were busy entertaining themselves (if no one else) with their mixing skills in an almost deserted room. We met Gordon, we drank Carlsberg (who appear to have a monopoly on the joint) and we chatted as the white boys in their over-sized baseball caps went about their business. At one point, I could have sworn I saw one of the guys take off his massive baseball cap to reveal a smaller one underneath, but I could perhaps have imagined that. They were having fun, anyway, and I was enjoying the company too much to care for their assortment of bleeps and nurdles.

The main room was disappointingly empty when Ungdomskulen first appeared onstage, but soon filled to the point of respectability when they began to play. They've not changed much since 2007: the singer's facial hair has grown out magnificently, the bassist (who is actually playing a six-stringed baritone guitar) still has a luxuriant moustache and the drummer... well, the drummer looks like he's walked into the wrong band. Happily, something else that hasn't changed much is their thrilling live act. They have technical difficulties during their first song when the microphone doesn't work, but this band are more than happy to jam until they are resolved. How much would you trust a soundman who needs pictures of the positions the sliders should be in on the sound-desk? Ungdomskulen live are a different proposition to the Ungdomskulen on record: live they are heavier and louder, but also much looser and improvisational. They're good on record, but they really make sense live. Like White Denim, another trio I've seen recently, they are driven on by a sensational drummer, but all seem to be fantastic musicians in their own right, comfortable enough with each other and with their material to let it stretch out and breathe. Some bands - most bands - like to work strictly within the constraints of the song as it was originally written and recorded. Not Ungdomskulen. On record, their songs are frequently very long and feature prog-rock like breaks and sudden changes of pace and direction, all clearly very carefully thought through and structured whilst also still sounding spontaneous. Live, they add an extra dash of that spontaneity, and they also aren't afraid of throwing themselves into their songs with real gust. They look unlikely, but they are a real treat.

They've got a new album out, but much of the material they play tonight in their short seeming 45 minute set is taken from their last album, "Cry-Baby": Ordinary Son, Glory Hole, Modern Drummer and the superb rock wig-out of Spartacus. They're superb. Mike might keep his legendary pointy-fingers to himself tonight, but the drummer still sees him dancing and tells him so at the end of the set. No wonder, even a confirmed non-dancer like me can hardly keep still during these songs. The crowd might be small, but they're enthusiastic, even if the glamorously dolled up girls turning up for the club night that follows the band seem mightily confused and soon leave at the sight and sound of this remarkable band (even if the cow-bells on Modern Drummer convince one or two of them to stay until the singing starts!). The earnest, introverted-looking bespectacled indie-kids in front of me nod their approval at what they hear, anyway.... truly a band they can proudly file alongside all those other awkward bands in their record collections.

A great night and a fantastic band.... hard to believe that you can see an act this good for £2 (or free, if you're a fresher... which sadly I haven't been since the frighteningly distant 1992).

Great to meet Gordon too. I hope he enjoyed the gig as much as I did. In fact, for the second-time in my gig-going life, I was inspired to get a CD. Drummer Øyvind was kind enough to throw in a button badge for free too, so I was well pleased. A good night.

Verdict: 8 / 10

take your time, don't hurry....

2009-09-23T22:46:00.003+01:00

I already own quite a few Beatles albums: Abbey Road, The White Album, Revolver, Sergeant Pepper (obv.) and various collections.... but I only got around to finally getting myself a copy of "Rubber Soul" when I turned the corner in the supermarket to find myself confronted wall of top 40 albums that was unexpectedly dominated by old Beatles records. I knew about the digital remastering, of course, but for some reason I hadn't imagined that Michael Jackson's dominance of the album chart would be replaced by a band even older and still more successful.

It's an album that's intrigued me for a little while. I wouldn't say that I was a Beatles nut, but I am interested in the band, and I love dipping into Ian MacDonald's seminal piece of scholarship on their music, "Revolution in the Head". If you aren't aware of this book, it's a song-by-song breakdown of every single record the Beatles made. Apart from the obvious fascination of seeing who wrote and played what on every song, and a description of the various influences at play, what makes this book great and sets it apart from the crowd is the way that the author is most certainly not afraid of telling it how he hears it. Too often we see the work of this band being canonised. They are, after all, the great Beatles. I still find it refreshing to read the work of a critic who is (mostly) able to keep his objectivity intact whilst listening and commenting on songs we've all heard hundreds of times before. Much of their work still stands up, of course, but crucially, not all of it.

How about this on "All You Need is Love":

"One of the Beatles' less deserving hits...slapdash atmosphere in which it was made...sloppiness on show...The Beatles were now doing wilfully substandard work: paying little attention to musical values and settling for lyric first-thoughts on the principle that everything, however haphazard, meant something and if it didn't - so what? .... drug-sodden laziness...lotus eating delusion of an egalitarian life of ease...."

or this on "Helter Skelter":

"Condensed for release on 9th September, the result was nevertheless ridiculous, McCartney shrieking weedily against a massively tape-echoed backdrop of out-of-tune thrashing.. few have seen fit to describe this track as anything other than a literally drunken mess."

I could go on, but I think you probably catch my drift. Good band, but they sure weren't perfect. If anything, MacDonald generally sounds annoyed and disappointed when a great band, clearly capable of so much, fail to live up to their potential. Must try harder.

"Rubber Soul" is an especially interesting album because it is supposed to catch the moment that the Beatles stopped being the mop-topped pop band of their early albums and started to move into the more experimental second-half of their career. As Ian MacDonald wrote:

"Gradually realising, from Dylan's example, that they didn't have to segregate their professional work from their inner lives, they consciously experimented in much of the "Rubber Soul" material, feeling their way towards a new style - one which, defining the second half of their career together, would be inspired by their encounter with one of the biggest influences on life and culture in the late sixties: LSD."

Cue Revolver....

"Rubber Soul" proves that music doesn't have to be about great singles, but can also be about producing a great album. There's not a track on the album that was released as a single, but feel the quality: Drive My Car, Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown), Nowhere Man, Michelle (laughably described by The Sun the other day as being "Greek influenced"), Girl, In My Life.....

Not every song is great (What Goes On, The Word....), but it's a fine album, for sure.

Not that I'm claiming that as any great insight onto what is widely proclaimed as one of the greatest albums ever recorded. I'm not sure the digital remastering adds too much - not to my ears, anyway - but it's still a decent record by anyone's standard.

Great cover too. Growing out their mop tops, but pre-dodgy moustaches and afghan coats. The Beatles looked great around this time too.....

Good band - you should check them out. Remember you heard about them here first.

do you see what I see?

2009-09-22T20:28:00.003+01:00

One of the most common presenting symptoms of multiple sclerosis is optic neuritis. To quote wikipedia:

"Major symptoms are sudden loss of vision (partial or complete), or sudden blurred or "foggy" vision, and pain on movement of the affected eye. Many patients with optic neuritis may lose some of their color vision in the affected eye, with colors appearing subtly washed out compared to the other eye. A study found that 92.2% of patients experienced pain, which actually preceded the visual loss in 39.5% of cases"

Apparently, up to 50% of patients with MS will develop an episode of optic neuritis, and 20-30% of the time optic neuritis is the presenting sign of MS. As I know all too well, MS can somewhat slippery to diagnose at the best of times. Compared to symptoms as generalised and hard to nail down as numbness and pins & needles, it's really not too hard to understand why a sudden disturbance in your vision might be the thing that really scares someone off to their doctor and onwards to their neurologist.

...unless, of course, you've recently had your eyes cracked open and had corrective lens implants clipped onto the front of your irises..... in which case a blurring of your vision may not automatically have you reaching for your neurologist's phone number.

Since I had my eyes operated on in July 2008, I would say that my eyesight has been brilliant more than 90% of the time. I only say 90% because, although I don't regret the procedure for an instant, there have been one or two little niggles. The lens in my right eye is smaller than the lens in my left. The reason for this was that I needed a rigid lens in that eye to correct an astigmatism, and the rigid lens couldn't be rolled up before insertion like the other lens, and so needed to be smaller. Because it's smaller, in some light conditions my pupil approaches the edge of the lens and I get some leakage of light. It's not too much of a big deal, and once I got used to it, my brain basically tuned it out. But it's there. My right eye also seems to react more slowly to changing light conditions, meaning that my vision becomes slightly blurred when I move from very bright conditions to dimmer conditions, and once in a while my pupil seems to get "stuck", and takes a bit longer to adjust. Again, not a very big deal.... but it's there.

I also have an obsessive personality, and once in a while, my brain finds something tiny to latch onto to the exclusion of almost everything else. In the old days, this was things like the fit of my glasses or imaginary scratches on my lenses. Nowadays, sometimes it's my new eyes. Initially I fixated on some barely perceptible hazing that occurred in my left eye, caused by skin cells on the implant that my brain - if left to its own devices - would quickly tune out. When I finally let it go, the hazing quickly disappeared. In addition, once in a while, I'll notice that the correction of my right eye is fractionally less good than the correction in my left. I'll sometimes sit for a while, alternately closing each eye and comparing what I see. Then I'll realise that I have perfect vision with both eyes together, and perfectly acceptable vision even in my 'weaker' eye, and I'll get over myself and find something else to worry about.

So, with that in mind, you might understand why, when I start to experience more regular blurring in one of my eyes, I don't immediately assume that it is the onset of optic neuritis. Over the last couple of weeks, this is exactly what has been happening: the blurring in my right eye has been getting steadily worse. Where before it only happened from time to time, now it seems to be happening more regularly, and although my vision still tends to improve in brighter light, that doesn't now seem to be always the case. I've also noticed that, when blurry, my eyesight is less blurry at the periphery of my vision than it is at the centre. Not surprisingly, I've also been getting nagging tension headaches behind my eyes too. Of course, it's possible that it's still all in my head, or that there is some kind of mechanical problem with my implant.... but I've also started to come to terms with the fact that there might also be a neurological explanation.

I really don't know how I feel about that. Let's review the possible outcomes: if it's all in my head, I may well be crazy; if it's a problem with the implant inside my eye, then it could require surgical correction (or removal)....or it could be further neurological evidence that my MS is progressing.

What kind of options are they?

Well, one way or another, I guess I'll find out more on Friday - I've got an appointment go get my eyes checked up. It's a regular appointment that was originally supposed to happen in November last year, then in July and then last Friday, when I sat in a hospital waiting room for two pointless hours for my doctor to show up..... well, what kind of service do you expect when you go private? If the appointment does nothing else, it should help start the process of elimination.

Funnily enough, since the possibility occurred to me that this might be caused by something that is totally outside of my control and nothing to do with any choices I've made or how nuts or otherwise I may be, I've found the whole thing a lot easier to deal with.

Funny things, brains.

the hollowest of halos is no halo at all....

2009-09-21T19:06:00.007+01:00

White Lies / Girls Aloud / Jay-Z / Coldplay @ Wembley Stadium, 18th September 2009

I think the last gig I attended at Wembley Stadium was Guns N'Roses way back in August 1991. It was shortly before the "Use Your Illusion" albums were released, and as I recall, the band kept us waiting for something like 2 1/2 hours after their scheduled onstage time before deigning to make an appearance. Small wonder that it was Izzy Stradlin's last gig with the band before heading off to form the immortal Ju Ju Hounds. The bill at Wembley that night included Nine Inch Nails and Skid Row.

Not only did this gig have a rather different line up, but the old stadium itself has undergone something of a facelift since then. The now-demolished Wembley Towers might be lamented, but surely very few people miss much about the cavernous old stadium itself: everything about this new version seems to be an improvement, from the elegant arch to the way that the -- mostly under cover -- seats now hug up close to the edge of the pitch since the removal of the athletics track. The end result is a venue that feels less like a stadium and more like a relatively intimate arena gig..... it's never going to be as up-close-and-personal a venue as somewhere like the Rescue Rooms, but these things are relative, after all. At a stadium gig, I'll take all of the intimacy I can get, thanks.

White Lies are a band that I've wanted to see for a little while. Their debut album was one that LB said I would like, and sure enough, when I bought it, it was indeed an album that I liked. Superficially, I suppose they sound as though they have a lot in common with bands like Interpol and Editors... mainly meaning that they have a dark, dense rock sound and singer Harry McVeigh has a deep, almost Ian Curtis-like singing voice. Actually, I don't think they're an especially depressing band at all, with lyrical themes often speaking of escape and love. Here they were granted something like 30 minutes to make an impression on Coldplay's crowd, and perhaps sensibly they opted to open with their two most famous songs: "Farewell to the Fairground" and "To Lose My Life". I thought they sounded pretty good. McVeigh has a slightly alarming bulging vein on his neck when he's singing, but otherwise I thought they did the best with the time slot they had. Oddly, I thought they actually sounded slightly like Ultravox live, but I still saw enough to think that I should make the effort to see them playing their own show at Rock City later in the year. You've also got to love a band who sign off what is probably their biggest ever gig by saying "We've been White Lies and here's a song called 'Death'".

I liked them.

When Coldplay first announced these dates, the reason we chose to attend the Friday date rather than the Saturday was because Girls Aloud were initially only playing the first date, and Jay-Z was only playing the second. Later on, long after the tickets had been purchased, it was announced that they would both be playing both nights.... We'd chosen Friday not only through a desire to avoid Jay-Z, but also because C. was quite keen to see the Girls in action. Various people at work have found it amusing that I would be watching a band like Girls Aloud in action, but actually I was quite curious to see them. Other than at somewhere like Glastonbury, when else was I likely to see a band as "pop" as this?

Naturally, the guys in the office were keen to know which of the band was my favourite... and the honest answer is I don't have one. In the fallout of Beatles-gate, I'd already established that I could name the band. Hell, I even have their greatest hits on my iPod.... but a favourite? Nah. That said, I did have to take one of my colleagues to task when he told me that I surely couldn't fancy "the ginger one or the fat one". Now, I'm pretty sure that even Nicola herself wouldn't vehemently deny being ginger.... but which one of those girls is supposedly the fat one? I think he meant Kimberley, but to call her fat is just ridiculous.

Anyway.

So what were they like? Well, I thought they were fun but a touch under-rehearsed. One or two of their vocals were a bit off-key (especially on "I'll Stand By You"). I also thought that whoever dressed and choreographed their backing dancers wants shooting. What on earth were they were thinking of when they dressed them in fluorescent hi-top trainers and luminous dungarees and had them prancing around like children's TV presenters?? I also thought, and I know that this sounds ridiculous, that their songs sounded wafer thin and bubblegum light. I know they're a pop band, but I thought that I quite liked songs like "Biology".... and then I listened to it live, and realised that I actually only like about ten seconds of it. It's true that they repeat that ten second snippet several times during the song, but the rest is pretty ordinary. Yes, songs like "Love Machine" and "The Promise" are great, but I was disappointed by the rest.

Still, they were entertaining... and perhaps even a touch nervous to be playing in such a big venue in front of a rock band's audience. *

Jay-Z. Ah, Jay-Z. I saw him at Glastonbury in 2008 and surprised myself by enjoying his set very much. I'm not a massive fan of the genre, but he was witty and entertaining, and the whole gig had been turned into something of an EVENT by all that stupid controversy about a rapper headlining Glastonbury. He slayed it.... but I felt very little need to see him perform live again, and took the opportunity to look for a pint, something to eat and a chance to take the weight off my feet before the headliners came on.

As I sat at the far end of the stadium from the stage, I marvelled at Jay-Z's performance: all the songs sound as though they've had a backing track supplied by Linkin Park, and Jay's act seems to consist of allowing that backing track to play, watching his supporting rapper and exhorting the crowd to "bounce! bounce!" with an accompanying wave of his arm. I'm sure he's very good at what he does... but I just don't get it.

...although "99 Problems" still sounds brilliant. I can only imagine what Beyonce thinks of the lyrics, but it's a great record.

He seemed to go down very well with the, by now very excitable, crowd, but I certainly don't need to see him a third time to tell you that he's not my cup of tea.

Each to their own.

Which brings us to the headliners.....

I've seen Coldplay several times now. In fact, I actually saw them on this same tour, some nine months and 150 shows ago in December last year at the NIA in Birmingham.... and that's the problem. Much though I like Coldplay, and I think it's been pretty well-documented here that I do very much like Coldplay, when their setlist is at least 90% the same as a show you've already seen -- including the little off-the-cuff bits of Satie that Chris Martin throws in when at the piano, then your enjoyment is going to be limited... at least a little bit.

Don't get me wrong, I thought that Coldplay were good.... it's just that I could almost reprint my review from December word for word.

"They played a strong set tonight, bookended by the different versions of "Life in Technicolour". They have now got enough material that they are able to play singles like "Violet Hill", "Clocks", "Speed of Sound", "Fix You", "In My Place" and "Yellow" very early on in the set. "Fix You" in particular, a song that I've never quite liked, seeing it as being too much like Coldplay in excelsis, is embraced by the crowd and becomes the night's first - but not last - mass communal singalong"

Yup.

"The new material sounded pretty good. "Lost" (thankfully without Jay-Z), "Cemeteries of London" and "42" all sound good, and "Viva La Vida" is a showstopper with a vocal harmony section at the end seems tailor made for a crowd to roar along to"

Well, we did get Jay-Z this time around, mucking about with Martin and trying to put him off the song, but the rest is still true.

"The band themselves are far from static: they do a little segment at the end of one of the walkways, where they emphasise the strength of their material by playing songs as good as "Talk" and "God Put A Smile on Your Face" in a slightly offhand, casual way. Later on in the show, the band also made their way along the side of the arena to a space right at the very back, from where they play another few songs."

That medley actually annoys me even more now: both are great songs in their own right, but they're tossed away in an almost jokey manner, and I find myself wishing that the band didn't play them at all rather than teasing us like this. We're in a stadium now, so the band can't practically make their way to a section at the back, but they do make their way to a small stage near the sound-desk, where they are inexplicably joined by Simon Pegg, who stands around a lot pretending to play the harmonica and is pretty much entirely a spare part throughout. His presence is entirely superfluous, and I'm not sure how he wasn't ashamed to stand there. Mind you, the cover of "Billy Jean" that we're treated to in this little segment is actually surprisingly good, with the vocals suiting Chris Martin (and drummer Will's) falsettos. They've probably been playing it since Jackson's death in June, but this is the first time I've heard them do it and they actually do a pretty good job of it. Credit where credit is due.

"The band finish the show with "The Scientist", an absolutely barnstorming version of "Lovers in Japan" where phosphorescent ticker-tape rains from the ceiling, and leave us with "Life in Technicolour II". It's a good show. The new songs sound great, the old songs are received by the enthusiastic crowd as old friends. The band seem to have a good time, with Chris Martin being his usual puppy-ish, bouncy, cheerful self. We all have a good old sing-song. It's a good show. No question. So why is it that I feel slightly distanced from the whole thing?"

It's not ticker-tape, I discovered, they are paper butterflies... and in spite of the fact that I've seen the effect before, it actually works fantastically well in the stadium, with butterflies drifting down onto the crowd long after the band have actually left the stage.....

It's a good show, dammit. I like Coldplay and I like the fact that, in stark contrast to a band like U2, their approach to a massive stadium gig like this is really simple and stripped down. The songs are good and it's really hard not to warm to a band led by a singer as eager-to-please as Chris Martin. The rest of the band are also doing so much more than making up the numbers, something made entirely evident at the end when the band link arms for their traditional bow to the crowd before leaving the stage for the last time.

But.... I've seen the show before. That's not Coldplay's fault, for sure. Neither is it the band's fault that I have a slightly snobbish dislike for a stadium crowd. It's all part of the territory when attending a big gig like this, but I can't help but notice that we're surrounded by people who are probably attending their only gig of the year. It's okay to be excited, really it is. I don't expect everyone to keep a cool reserve, after all, and I expect a certain amount of pushing and shoving in a big crowd like this.... but this was ridiculous. No, I don't have a great deal of sympathy for you looking for your friends down at the front ten minutes before the headliners come on. Not when you've obviously just popped out for a round, anyway. That said, nor do I have a great deal of sympathy for the guy just in front of me who seemed to be getting more and more stressed with each person who pushed past him. No one likes being pushed and shoved, but if you want to be reasonably close to the band, then that's what you have to put up with. If you don't like big crowds, don't push yourself up to the front. As for the guy who decided to spark up a massive cigar......

Perhaps I'm getting too old for all this.

Verdict: This is a tough one. I enjoyed the day as a whole; I was happy to spend the day at Wembley with my friends and I thought all the bands were good in their own ways... but... I wasn't especially inspired by Coldplay as I'd seen them perform essentially the same set a few months before. They were good, but....

6.5 / 10

I've seen Coldplay perform better, but I reckon it's ultimately harsh to mark them down too far for a decent performance just because I've seen them performing more or less the same set before. Ultimately though, it was a good day but not a great gig.

---

* for the record, and if absolutely forced to choose, it's Sarah. There's something about her froideur and the fact that where the others are girls, she's a woman..... but like I say, I don't have a favourite.

I may be dumb but I'm not a dweeb....

2009-09-16T19:48:00.001+01:00

At last! A geek / nerd / dweeb /dork venn diagram.

This is something that has been puzzling me for some time. Over the years, people have used each of these phrases, apparently interchangeably, to describe me. Although I vaguely have an idea what they mean, I've been bothered because I haven't know exactly what they mean. They might mean similar things, but I've always been pretty sure that they don't mean the same thing. I've been called all of them, but what if not all of them applied? Perhaps none of them did? If they didn't mean exactly the same thing, then isn't there likely to be a hierarchy, where one of those words might be considered to be less - or more - insulting than another? Was I taking offence needlessly, or was I not offended enough by what people were calling me?

So: here's a chart that should provide me with some of answers I've been looking for.

From here (via @annapickard)

Hmm. Unfortunately I'm still no clearer.

Well, I say I'm no clearer, what I actually mean by that is "Dangnabbit, I think I probably qualify for all of the above and that most likely makes me a nerd".

The chart must be inaccurate, right?

stupid bloody tuesday....

2009-09-15T19:07:00.004+01:00

Um, Something Street?

Amongst all the coverage of the launch of Beatles Rock Band last week, I heard Nicky Campbell on Five Live wondering whether there could really be anybody who would be discovering the music of the Beatles through this game. The guy he was talking to, some expert who has written a book on the band, told him that he would be surprised how many people, especially those in their 20s and 30s, were relatively unfamiliar with the band. Well, I'm in my 30s and I own several Beatles albums, so I wasn't sure about that. To test the theory, as soon as I arrived in the office, I wandered over to the 22-year old in our team:

Me: "Have you heard of the Beatles"
22: "Yes"
Me: "Can you name them?"
22: "Ermmmm. Ahhhh. Hmmmm. Ummmmmm. Aha! Paul McCartney!"
Me: "Yes. And the other three?"
22: "Erm. No"
Me: "John Lennon?"
22: "Yes, heard of him"
Me: "George Harrison"
22: "Never heard of him"
Me: "Ringo Starr"
22: "Isn't he dead?"

This was a level of ignorance that I hadn't been expecting.

Me: "Can you name any of their songs or albums?"
22: "Um. Something Street or Road?"
Me: "Abbey Road?"
22: "That's it"
Me: "Anything else?"
22: "Um. Not off the top of my head"
Me: "Eleanor Rigby?"
22: "Nope"
Me: "Yesterday?"
22: "Yes, heard of that one. Long and Winding Road. Was that them?"
Me: "Yes. Yellow Submarine?"
22: "Is that the same as the song you sing in Nursery?"

....and so on.

22y.o. subsequently had a quick trawl through wikipedia and wrote down a number of other Beatles songs or albums he thought he had heard of ("Sergeant Pepper? I think I know that one"). He thought he was normal, and if anything, he was a little taken aback by the shock with which his lack of Beatles related knowledge was causing in those who had overheard our little conversation.

Not wishing to appear stupid, he set off to prove that he wasn't the anomaly, and that there were other people with a similar lack of knowledge.

He faced an initial setback when the 18 year old who has just joined us for a placement as part of his degree turned out to be something of a fan, but he was undeterred. His policy of asking people much older than him didn't bear much fruit ("Name the band? I can name the two that left!"), but he did have some success when a surprising number of people were completely unable to name George Harrison as a member of the Beatles (surprising in that there were about four or five people who didn't know. I was mildly surprised that anyone didn't know who he was. My Sweet Lord, indeed).

I've never been one of those people who thinks that the Beatles are somehow above criticism. A band that highly praised cannot help but be overrated, if you ask me. I think what's really amazing about them is how so much of their work still sounds pretty fresh today. Not all of it does: I'd just listened to "Revolver" in the car, so I was very well aware that some of the sitar-heavy numbers in particular were very much a product of their era (or perhaps the start of the era itself?). Much of the songwriting remains incredibly fresh though. How many better song lyrics have there ever been than those in "Eleanor Rigby"? Or am I now unable to view a song that is so embedded into our popular culture with anything approaching objectivity?

Meanwhile, as 22 y.o.'s quest continued, he faced an increasing level of incredulity from those around him:
"Are your retarded?"
"Is it too late to have him shot?"
Whilst it's true that I hadn't even been born by the time by the Beatles had split up, that I had parents who weren't really into music, I still managed to discover the band. I was therefore somewhat surprised by his total lack of knowledge on the subject. Even so, I soon started to feel mildly uncomfortable about what I'd started. Was it really fair to call him ignorant? After all, "Free As A Bird" and the fuss around the release of the Anthology albums happened as far back as 1995. 22 y.o. would have been 8 years old. Is it all that surprising that he might have missed out on the Beatles entirely?

I became more uncomfortable the next day when 22 y.o. was grilled about his knowledge of Queen - much harder than knowing about the Beatles, surely? Before long he was being asked about capital cities. Perhaps he should know what the capital of Australia is, but should we really be laughing at him? He took it all in good spirit, but by the time he was confronted with "The Ultimate Beatles Quiz" from the Times, I wouldn't blame him if he was thoroughly bored of the whole thing and starting to feel a little got at. He got 0 out of 40. A big fat zero. Then again, I don't think I got more than about half of the questions.

"Who was the first Beatle to sport a moptop?"
"Name the Beatles first wives"
"Who suggested that John Lennon change the line "Waiting for the man to come" to "waiting for the van to come" in I Am The Walrus?"
"Who pressed the panic button in Yellow Submarine?"
"Who is the only guest musician to be credited on the label of a Beatles record?"

Not impossible - but if you don't know who George Harrison was, then I'd suggest you're going to struggle with some of those.

22 y.o. hit back this morning with some questions for me:

He tried to test me initially by asking me to name the members of Girls Aloud, only to find that I could (I am seeing them live at Wembley on Friday, after all....), but he found more fertile ground with some questions from a football quiz he was at on Monday night.

"Tony Roberts (the old QPR goalkeeper) was the first goalkeeper to do what?"
"Which striker made his debut for Manchester Utd in the 2007 season, playing up front with Ole Gunnar Solskaer, and made a total of 3 appearances for the club?"
"Name the three Australian players in the Leeds Utd squad in 2001"

I got none of them right, and he felt a bit better about himself (even if he actually only knew the answer to one of those questions himself...)

I don't know though. Is it right to mock someone for something like that? I might perhaps marvel at how he hasn't been inquisitive enough to pick up practically anything at all about the Beatles, but it's entirely possible that they just haven't crossed his radar. Incredible though that sounds, they just don't register with him. Why should they? Is it fair to call him ignorant because of that? They're just a band, aren't they?

At what point does the teasing become bullying?

I think the finish line's a good place we could start....

2009-09-14T18:46:00.006+01:00

Half Marathon? Done.

My official time was 1 hour, 56 minutes & 52 seconds. All my training has led me to think that I run at a fairly steady pace of between nine and ten minutes per mile. I took that to mean that, on a good day, I would be able to complete the course in less than two hours.... although I was also mindful that basically all of my training has taken place alongside either a river or a canal, and that the race itself featured a few more ups and downs. I hoped I could beat 2 hours, but until the actual day itself, I didn't know if I was going to be able to.

I've been in various triathlons and things, but I've never actually run a race like this before. There were 12,000 runners all lined up for the start, and it took me something like 5 minutes from the gun going off before I actually reached the starting line. The first mile or so was spent weaving my way through other runners and trying to find a path that compromised my running pace the least. In spite of all the traffic though, that first mile was quite a bit faster than my normal pace... probably something to do with all the excitement of the day and being carried along by the sheer weight of all the other runners. Mind you, I ran the whole thing faster than my normal pace, as the splits below show:

mile	Split:	climb (ft):
1	8:39	11
2	8.43	69
3	8:28	15
4	8.56	48
5	9:09	12
6	9.41	97
7	8:27	0
8	9:38	65
9	9:02	2
10	9:03	21
11	9:12	2
12	7:54	3
13	9.37	0

I think you can ignore the split for the 12th mile (I had to adjust a glitch on the GPS reading on the map Runkeeper was plotting), but those splits show how much faster than normal I was running. I overtook the 2 hour pacemarker (a guy holding a red board with the time he was aiming for emblazoned on it) in the first mile, and - in spite of a vague fear that he would appear over my shoulder any minute - never saw him again. Mind you, I am told that the 2:00 pace marker was actually overtaken by 2:15, so something was wrong somewhere. I didn't actually believe that I was going to beat 2 hours until I went through the 10 mile marker in 90 minutes.

I'm very, very pleased.

Although I was very sore on the last mile, especially in my hips and in my calf muscles, I was actually more surprised at how much of an emotional rollercoaster I found the race. I seemed to vacillate wildly between feeling strong and positive, and feeling quite the opposite. I played little tricks on myself like plotting 3 miles as being a quarter of the way there; 4 miles as a third of the way there; 6.5 miles as halfway..... but it was still sometimes a struggle not to feel oppressed by the amount of running I still had to do. The hardest part of the course for me was actually the last couple of miles, even the last 400m, with the finishing line literally in sight in front of me. That was when I felt the most crippled by the distance seeming to not get any shorter. Never has 400m felt quite so disproportionately far. Other stretches were a doddle: running down the Derby Road the first time; running down through the fallen leaves of that tree-lined avenue in Wollaton Park... Indeed, the eleventh mile felt the shortest of the lot, as I rounded the bottom of Castle Boulevard and turned towards the Experian offices and the last, painful, couple of miles.

I listened to my playlist on my iPhone throughout, and also had the Runkeeper application keeping my up to date with my pace and progress. Funnily enough, although I must have listened to loads of tracks and used them to distract me from how much my legs were hurting... I can actually remember very few specific songs. "Keep On Rocking in the Free World" helped me up that nasty hill at the University, "Hiphopopotamus vs Rhymenoceros" took me around the lake, "Ace of Spades" helped me up the long hill in Wollaton, "Touch Too Much" helped me up another nasty little incline.... but generally it's all blurred into the background.

Actually, thinking back, I can't even really remember the detail of the route we ran either. I know it in outline, but if I try and think back to running the course, the details become quite sketchy. Even when I was quite fresh, apparently I was concentrating more on the runners around me and on my running than I was on exactly where I was going. That's not to say that I didn't look at the crowds and the spectacle of the race itself, because I did: I enjoyed the huge variety of other runners, with most seemingly representing a charity. There were people of all shapes and sizes, with some athletic types wheezing on the floor having a breather after a couple of miles, and other far more unlikely looking runners breezing past me with a mile to go. The crowds were brilliant too. I was cheered off at the start by our own little pack of supporters, and again at 8 miles going up a nasty hill... but the crowds lined the route throughout and it was great to be clapped and generally encouraged.

I wish I could say that I felt a tremendous rush of emotions when I finished too, but I was so physically and mentally tired that I could barely lift my leg up to have my timing chip removed from around my ankle. I had about twenty minutes to myself before I caught up with everyone else, and I was busy doing mundane things like taking on board lots of fluid, eating the Mars bar that was in my little finishing pack and trying to stay warm. After that, I was busy cheering C. and LB to the finishing line. It was only really much later on that I started to get a sense of quiet satisfaction at a job well done.

C. came in at 2 hours, 18 minutes & 41 seconds, with LB being sightly harshly - given they crossed the line together - clocked a second later. They started the race together, separated when C set off down a hill like she was on rollerskates, and came together again in the last couple of miles when LB caught up with a struggling C. and helped give her the encouragement to get over the finishing line. They did really, really well and I'm very proud of both of them. They beat the first marathon runner in, anyway, which is just as well as he sprinted / floated his way to the finishing line in about 2 hours 20 minutes. Well, he gets paid to do this sort of thing, so....

Between the three of us, we have raised (so far) a total of £2,640. On top of that, the MS Society will receive a further £480 in Gift Aid.... this gives us a grand total of around £3120. That's a fantastic achievement - especially given that I was initially hoping to raise a mere £1000. I am really grateful to every single one of you who has made a donation, however small, or offered us any kind of support at all as we've pushed ourselves through all those endless, dreary miles in training. It was a real incentive to keep on going even when every fibre of my being was telling me to stop.

Well done team!

There may be some more photos appearing here as and when I gather them all together (some are on my dad's phone, some are on the official photographer's website (here are the ones of me and the ones of C - also featuring LB). You never know, LB or Hen might put some up at their places too.

It was a good day. My legs are quite sore today (and oddly getting more sore as the day goes on), but I'm off for a curry now, so it's all good. I'm not in training any more, you see....

Not until tomorrow, anyway.

Perhaps the London Triathlon next year. That's the one I had to drop out of at the last minute in 2005 when I first started seeing my neurologist. No promises, but it feels like unfinished business.....

It's not too late to add to our kitty for the MS Society either. You can still sponsor us here.

Thanks everyone. That's a wrap.

stop them crazy horses on the run....

2009-09-11T18:58:00.004+01:00

One of the most important things to remember when preparing for a race like the half marathon, they say, is that you should try not to do anything too differently to normal. Obviously, the presence of 20,000 other runners is going to be a bit of a change, but I'm going to wear the same trainers, drink the same amount of fluid beforehand... that kind of thing. I'm also going to be wearing a pair of headphones and carrying my iPhone strapped to my left arm. Partly that's because I'm going to have the Runkeeper application on and telling me how far I've run and what pace I'm running at -- it makes me run faster -- but also so that I can listen to music.

For me, music is a vital part of the whole process: apart from anything else, if you can focus on each song as it goes past, before you know where you are, you're another four or five minutes down the road and not worrying too much about how everything hurts. For the last few weeks, I've been training to a playlist made up of tracks by the likes of Metallica, Foo Fighters and Iron Maiden. There's something about the driving drums and screaming guitars that encourages me to pick my knees up and run as though the hounds of hell are on my trail.

For Sunday, I thought I might treat myself to a new playlist.

I've been combing through iTunes, pulling out songs that I think might be good. There's a fair bit of rock in there, but as I'll be listening to it on shuffle, I've thrown in a few wildcards to change the pace and to freshen things up from time-to-time.

I've been thinking about it for a little while now, and so, not surprisingly, this week's earworms are all taken from that playlist.

Earworms of the Week

> "Celebrity Skin" - Hole

Courtney has been in the news this week raging against the approval of Kurt's image for use in one of those Guitar Hero/Rock Band type games. As well as being able to play "Smells Like Teenspirit" (also on this playlist, of course), you are able to unlock the "Kurt" character and have him play songs by the likes of Bon Jovi. Yeah. I'd be pissed off too, but who gets the money?? Ah, whatever, this song remains a timeless reminder of the fact that the woman may be crazy but she does / did have talent.

> "The Lost Art of Keeping a Secret" - Queens of the Stone Age

QOSA make good running music, and I've slipped a few tracks onto the playlist ("No One Knows" is always good). This was actually initially my favourite track on "Songs For the Deaf", even though it's only included as a live bonus and actually appears on their previous album.

> "Make Your Own Kind of Music" - Mama Cass

Something of a change of pace, especially if it follows something like "Master of Puppets" or "Battery", but hopefully it won't make me slow down too much and will give me a bit of respite from the relentless metal. I ran out of patience with "Lost" not long after, but that opening sequence of the second season that was soundtracked by this song was absolutely brilliant.

> "Search and Destroy" - Iggy & The Stooges

If this doesn't make me pick my knees up, then nothing will. I actually discovered this song initially through a cover version by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, of all people. It's a b-side to "Under the Bridge", and it's surprisingly good. Less surprising once I'd worked out the quality of the source material though.

> "Foux du Fafa" - Flight of the Conchords

Mock French whimsy? But of course. I had to have some Conchords on the playlist too. Baguette!

> "Souljacker pt1" - Eels

Watching Okkervil River last night actually made me pine to see Eels. They're a band that I've never actually seen, and although I didn't especially enjoy last night's gig, there must have been something in their style that made me think of someone who also does a nice line in downbeat, sometimes lyrically dense material. Mark Everett also does it a whole lot better than Okkervil River, if you ask me. I picked this particular song, from one of the less celebrated albums, for the simple reason that it rocks in a way that "Climbing to the Moon" and "Mr E's Beautiful Blues" just don't. Both those other songs included, mind you...

> "Safe European Home" - The Clash

I've been obsessing about the Clash for a while now. Usually, I focus my attention on their debut album and songs like "Career Opportunities" and "White Riot" (both included), but for now my attention has been particularly taken by this one from "Give 'em Enough Rope".

> "Chasing Cars" - Snow Patrol

Another change of pace, but incredibly satisfying to run to. I once listened to this about five times in a row when I was out for a lunchtime run at work. It's not that I especially like the song, although it's pretty good, but for some reason it absolutely hit the spot about halfway round a 4 mile track. If it has the same effect at the ten mile mark on Sunday, then I'll consider it a job well done....

> "Fireball" - Deep Purple

Another earworm I can safely dedicate to Des..... it's that keyboard solo and the fact that it throws me back to the first CD I ever bought ("Protect the Innocent"). Other songs included from that album: "Ace of Spades" by Motorhead and "Paranoid" by Black Sabbath.

> "Crazy Horses" - The Osmonds

Included first and foremost because it's a (surprisingly) good song. Also included because I've been reading "America Unchained" by Dave Gorman, and he spends a fair amount to time explaining in great detail the madness of the Mormons. I was only dimly aware of some of it, but a book of golden plates? the angel Moroni? Urim and Thummin? Goodness me.... Still, it's a great record, isn't it?

Waaaah! Waaah!

---

I reckon I need a playlist that's about two-and-a-half hours long, to over some mucking about at the start and the two hours or so that I'll need for the race itself. After a careful process of elimination, my race playlist is now complete. You know how long it is?

9.4 hours.

That should cover it, eh?

Many thanks to everyone who has contributed to the sponsorship money we're raising for the MS Society. I was originally aiming to raise £1000, but the figure at the moment stands at the magnificent sum of £2,080... with £500 of that being matched by my office and still to be added to the total. That's pretty good, I reckon and you're generosity has both astounded and humbled me.

Still time to contribute of course - you can do that on our JustGiving page.

All that remains now is to forcefeed myself wholemeal pasta until the race starts on Sunday morning at 10am.

Wish us luck!

I reckon we'll have earned that pub lunch we've got booked for 2.30pm.....

evil don't look like anything....

2009-09-10T23:17:00.005+01:00

--
Okkervil River @ Rescue Rooms, 10th September 2009

A band that name themselves after a short story by Russian author Tatyana Tolstaya can only be a barrel of laughs, right? Right? Well, I first heard of Okkervil River when Mike included "Life Is Not A Movie Or Maybe" on my 2007 Shuffleathon CD. It's a great track, and although I liked it immediately, it's one of those songs that seems to have got better with every listen. I was intrigued enough to go out and buy the album, "The Stage Names". And....well.... it's okay but I'd already got the standout track. It's probably one of those albums that I need to give more time to breathe, but it just hasn't grabbed me enough to get much airplay. Still, I was disappointed to miss the band last time they were in town (I was at a gig somewhere else on the same night, if memory serves me correctly), and was keen to get grab my chance to see them live when I saw they were playing the Rescue Rooms this time around.

I very nearly forgot, too. Ninety minutes of football, and my plans for a long leisurely shower and a lazy evening were ambushed by a text from Sarah asking if I'd bought a ticket in the end. Shit. The gig. Somewhere in the back of my mind (and in the front of my diary) I knew that I was supposed to be attending this gig, but somewhere along the way I'd managed to forget. Nevermind, I still had enough time to grab a bite to eat and to head into town to meet up with Sarah and Mike in the RR bar - which was already filling up nicely with earnest, bearded types.

The gig? Well, perhaps I should say that there were an awful lot of people there who seemed to know the band's material really, really well and who really enjoyed themselves. I don't know the band's material all that well, and I found them, and singer Will Sheff in particular, to be overly earnest and the material live sounds more country than on record. At one point, Sheff approached the microphone to tell us about the pressure he felt to think up witty rejoinders to members of the crowd who shouted things at him from the darkness in front of the stage. "It's not my job to think up witty rejoinders!" he cried. No, but it is your job to entertain me, and frankly I wish you'd start. I was not grabbed. In spite of their country sound, when the keyboardist at the back grabbed a trumpet, I was oddly reminded of James fronted by a lesser singer, albeit one with a good deal more hair. It was a comparison that made me think how much I liked James, and my mind began to wander to which album I would dig out tomorrow. Not really a good sign for Okkervil River's hold on my attention, eh?

To be fair, things looked up when one of the keyboard players picked up a guitar and they began to play much more muscular material, including a decent version of "Life Is Not A Movie Or Maybe" (still far-and-away their best song). I even began to enjoy a few of the slower songs, some of which sent parts of the crowd into raptures (why do people shout out requests at bands? Isn't that what setlists are for? And if you're shouting for one of their best known songs, really... what's the point?). Perhaps the band had always been good and I was just warming up? Perhaps they're the kind of band that I would only really enjoy live with a slightly more than casual knowledge of their material?

Hmm. Even then, I suspect they'd still be overly earnest.

I'll have to give that album another listen, but they didn't do very much for me live... although, to be fair, clearly they did for a decent proportion of the audience. Still, I haven't been to a gig for a couple of months now, so it's always good to get out of the house, right?

Verdict: 5 / 10

repossess and crucify....

2009-09-08T20:28:00.004+01:00

In April last year, I was struggling to get my bank to care about a mortgage payment they had lost. All they had to do was to transfer it from my current account to my mortgage account with a different bank. They transferred it out okay, but sadly they didn't transfer it to the right place and didn't actually know where it had ended up at all. I wasn't sure how that was even possible in the digital era, so not surprisingly I was hopping mad and anxious to find my money. You'd think my bank would be anxious to find it to, right? Wrong. They couldn't have made it clearer that they didn't think it was anything other than my problem or that they had any kind of responsibility at all. I was actually told by my local branch manager that I wasn't actually able to complain about it. Needless to say, I did complain, long and loud and pointlessly. I waved the banking code at them, I waded through the endless circles of hell that is their call centre, where poor undertrained people on the other side of the world tried everything to politely make me go away, including at one point, putting me on hold on then bringing me back and pretending that I was now through to the complaints department.

In the end I found the money myself. They'd transferred it to another account I sometimes make payments to. I moved it out and made up my mind that the £20 compensation they eventually paid me wouldn't be enough to prevent me from moving my account.

Needless to say, although I opened another bank account with an ethical bank, I haven't yet been bothered to shift my current account. This, of course, is what they count on.... but I've got a long memory: I know that this is a bank that can't be trusted with anything and who ultimately don't give a monkeys about their customers or - ultimately - their customer's money.

Imagine my total lack of surprise, then, when I received a phonecall this afternoon from the "Premiere Account Advisor" at the local branch of my bank. The very same branch, you'll remember, where the manager told me to my face that I wasn't able to make a complaint. Now what on earth would make them want to suddenly call me up out of the blue a mere five working days after I paid in a cheque worth more than three year's salary? Oh, HSBC... your total predictability is almost awe-inspiring.

Was I aware of the Premiere Service the bank offered? No, but I was aware that HSBC have been doing everything they can to make me think I should pay for their lack of service, but I was not aware of any Premiere Service they offered. Oh, it's for our favourite customers with a shit pile of cash (I'm paraphrasing) in their accounts. We offer them all kinds of free services, including access to our "independent" financial advisor. Independent? Yes, she spends all her time in different HSBC branches. Right, I see. What are you planning to do with all that money? Remove it from your crappy bank as soon as possible and talk to a real financial advisor, as it happens. Undeterred by this news, or perhaps following her bank's noble tradition of not listening to what I had actually said, she pushed on. Can I give you my mobile phone number? Just in case you think things over and decide you want to talk to me.....

Unbelievable. Alright, it's my own fault for not pulling my finger out and moving my current account business sooner, but - like I said - I've got a long memory. Longer than them, anyway. They might not be able to remember losing my money eighteen months ago, but I do, and if these clowns think I'm leaving my money in their bank for any longer than necessary, then they've another thing coming. Honestly, it it wasn't for the fact that even their derisory rates of interest are preferable not cashing the cheque at all, the bloody thing would still be sitting on my bedside table now.

As always, Richie had it right:

"Economic forecast soothe our dereliction
Words of euthanasia, apathy of sick routine
Carried away with useless advertising dreams
Blinding children, life as autonotomes"

Death sanitized through credit indeed.

somehow it always collects to one big melting pot....

2009-09-07T19:23:00.004+01:00

Yesterday morning, with exactly one week to go before the start of the half marathon, I began to get myself ready for my last big training run. I'll have a couple of short - 30 minute - tuning runs before I get to the start line on Sunday, but this was one final sixty minute thrash before I rest up for the big day.

There was just one small problem: I felt terrible.

I'd woken up on Saturday morning with a headache that got steadily worse through the day and took away first my appetite and then my desire to do anything much more than just go back to bed. Now, my body is not exactly a temple, but the plan was to stop drinking entirely for the seven days in the run up to the race. I'm not sure if a total abstinence from alcohol would significantly enhance my performance - I don't drink that much - but I was pretty sure it couldn't hurt. A couple of drinks on Friday and Saturday and then off the sauce until after the race. That was the plan, anyway. Unfortunately, it didn't quite work out like that. I'd only had a couple of small glasses of wine on Friday night, so my headache surely wasn't caused by the booze. Now it was dragging out into Saturday though and I no longer felt like drinking anything stronger than water, I was starting to feel positively resentful: how unfair that I was going to be deprived of even a moderate weekend tipple before my self-imposed alcohol ban. Feeling distinctly sorry for myself, I couldn't help but wonder where the justice was in that.

Things got worse when I awoke to find the headache was still there on Sunday morning. Worse yet: now it was accompanied by a feeling of crippling fatigue that made even getting out of bed something of a struggle. Where a headache might be a symptom of MS, fatigue definitely is one of my warning signs, although I haven't worked out yet what triggers it. You might think that it would be directly related to the amount of physical exertion I put in, but actually it doesn't seem to be. I seem to be able to physically push my body quite hard, but it's often smaller exertions that seem to really clobber me: a few weeks ago it was an early start and a long(-ish) drive that had me struggling to hold my arms up straight on the steering wheel; last week it was the couple of hours I spent in one of our warehouses doing nothing more physical than observing transactions.... neither of those activities should be as taxing on the body as a 12 mile run, but both of them left me feeling bone weary and with shoulders actually trembling with fatigue. I'm fairly sure that all of this extra mileage is taking its toll on my body, but it's not a straightforward case of cause and effect, with the running being linked directly to the fatigue.

I'm nothing if not determined though - probably to a fault. Whatever was making me feel fatigued was not going to stop me getting up and going out for my last long training run. I dragged myself out of bed, got into my running gear, stuck "Death Magnetic" onto my iPod and set off out the door.

Almost immediately I knew this was going to be difficult. If you're a runner, you'll probably know this feeling, but there are some days, some runs, where everything feels great, and - more often - other runs where everything feels much harder than usual. Things often get easier after the first half mile or so as your body eases into the exertion, but it was quickly clear that this run was going to be a real struggle from start to finish: my muscles felt okay and relatively loose after a couple of days off, but my head was aching and my shoulder and arms felt weak and useless.

I ran for a little over an hour, in the end. I covered 6.51 miles at a decent overall pace of 9.19 minutes per mile... about the same as usual if not actually a little faster. But it was hard. In fact, it was a real struggle putting one foot in front of the other. I usually listen to music to help me to focus my mind on something other than what I'm doing; with each song taking me another four or five minutes down the road. Today, not even Metallica was helping take my mind away from how difficult it all felt and how much more running I had to do before I could stop. I got home okay, but I am really not relishing dragging myself around 13 miles-or so next weekend if I feel anything like that on the starting line. I also have the words of one of my MS Nurses ringing around my head: MS is not something you can just "push through" and you have to learn to listen to your body. Was I listening to my body by dragging it out for a run when all it wanted to do was to rest? No. Will I listen to it if it tells me the same thing before Sunday's race? No. When will I learn that it's not always a case of mind over matter?

Perhaps it was just a bad day; a one-off. Maybe next week I will bounce my way around the half marathon course in something approaching two hours and wonder what all the fuss was about. I hope so. I currently feel very mortal - although sadly not in the Scottish sense of being profoundly drunk, either. I'm officially off the sauce, remember... and I've still got that bloody headache too.

Pah.

----

There is one perfectly good reason to drag myself around the course next week, and one thing that makes it all feel worthwhile: all the money we've raised for the MS Society. You've all been amazingly generous so far, but there's still time to sponsor us yet. We're hoping to raise more than £2,000 overall and we're well on the way towards that target..... Click here for more details and to sponsor us.

oooh, we can eat cereal...

2009-09-04T19:56:00.003+01:00

--
Earworms of the Week

> "Roadhouse Blues" - The Doors

I've not listened to The Doors in absolutely ages. There was a time, when I was around-about sixteen, that I used to listen to them all the time - often in the company of friends as we whiled away the spare time between lessons at school. This wasn't one of my favourites (I love "Riders on the Storm"), but given that I'd spent much of my adolescence up until then listening to heavy metal, listening to anything at all by The Doors made me feel a little bit sophisticated. C. was schooled in France, and she told me once that she used to hang around with her friends in cafes drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes and generally being pretentious. Well, we used to sit around listening to the Doors, talking shit and eating Jaffa cakes. Same thing, innit?

> "That's Not My Name" - The Ting-Tings

Inescapable last year, but I hadn't heard this for a while when I heard it twice on the same day. Naturally, it stuck. Actually, I still quite like this. It's aged pretty well and I find that the pointed humour in the lyrics is just enough to stop that tune and her singing from becoming annoying. I think they've got a new album coming out, haven't they? Are they in danger of having a career, do you think?

> "Frayed Ends of Sanity" - Metallica

I really need to put together a new running playlist before next week's half-marathon. Mind you, this is good running music, so.....

> "Crying Lightning" - Arctic Monkeys

I'm not sure if I like this song or not. I loved "I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor" from the very first listen, and it was the same with much of their other stuff too. I can't make my mind up about this one. I'm not too sure about the tune, but I love that running lyrical motif about a bag of pick n' mix. It's not a grower, exactly, as I'm not sure it's catchy enough, but somehow it's hanging on the playlist inside my head. The album is much the same too. More time required before a definitive judgement is given, I think. (Hats off to the lyric "What came first, the chicken or the dickhead" on "Pretty Visitors" though. Brilliant.)

> "Lilac Wine" - Jeff Buckley

Have I told you the story of how I only saw Jeff Buckley live because he was playing in the Melody Maker tent at the Reading Festival in 1994 just before Gene? I have? Every single time anyone mentions him? Oh, right..... well he was good, and I'm very glad that I got to see him (I knocked back the chance to see Nirvana at the same festival on another year). Gene were superb too, mind.

> "The Bucket" - Kings of Leon

Speaking of the Reading Festival, I watched the KoL set last weekend on the BBC. They seemed pretty good to me, and I was quite impressed at how many of the songs the crowd knew all of the words too.... even the ones where Caleb is really mumbling.... when all of a sudden they cut back to the studio, and Reggie Yates was telling us that they KoL didn't want the BBC to broadcast the end of their set as they weren't happy with their performance. Well, they sounded alright to me, but since they've become such big stars, perhaps they've become a little more perfectionist than they were in the old days. They were a better band in the old days too. "Sex on Fire" is alright, but it's no "Red Morning Light", is it? There aren't enough songs about losing your hair, either.

> "Holiday in Cambodia" - Dead Kennedies

Nana worked her Bontempi magic this week, and although I failed to recognise this track in the LeftLion quiz on Wednesday night, it's been stuck in my head ever since. I'm obviously not playing Guitar Hero enough.....

> "A Cloud of Mystery" - Maximo Park

Maximo Park's new album didn't grab me at first, but it's really grown on me with each listen. It's perhaps not a massive stride forwards for them, but they're good at what they do. Saying it's a grower though, this song was the one that impressed me the most on first listen, and it's still my favourite. Paul Smith still seems suspiciously attached to his hats though...

> "A Rush and a Push and the Land is Ours" - The Smiths

"Strangeways..." may just about be my favourite Smiths album (if you don't count "Hatful of Hollow" as a proper album). I especially love the growls and yelps that are so prominent in Morrissey's voice on the first four tracks. In the context of his sometimes dubious lyrical imagery ("Asian Rut", "National Front Disco", "Bengali in Platforms"), I am somewhat suspicious of what he's driving at here, but I do love his sssssibilant, grrrrrowling delivery.

"A rush and a push and the land that
We stand on is ours
It has been before
So why can't it be now ?
And people who are uglier than you or I
They take what they need and just leave."

What a brilliant band. Please never reform ("so phone me, phone me, phone me...."). As always, time has increased my respect for how much Johnny Marr brought to the band.....

> "Jiggery Pokery" - Duckworth Lewis Method

A concept album based around a love of cricket? Done by Neil Hannon? A distinctly unpromising proposition for an earworm indeed, but amazingly an absolute gem of a record. Every song is good, but it's this little ditty about Mike Gatting's dismissal by Shane Warne in the 1993 Ashes Test at Old Trafford that sticks in the mind. How many songs have been written on such an arcane and specific topic? I love it. I don't where or how they recorded the album, but it sounds beautiful through headphones too. You should try it. And, praise be, for a Neil Hannon record, it actually sounds nothing at all like Scott Walker-lite..... even if he does nick that line about the cheese roll from Graham Gooch.

Thanks Fiery!

> "Carol Brown" - Flight of the Conchords

OK, OK... another week another Flight of the Conchords earworm. This one is from the episode in the second series where Jermaine accidentally sleeps with an Australian. It's a brilliant episode - directed by Michel Gondry - and actually features two brilliant songs ("Too Many Dicks (on the Dancefloor)" could easily have featured here too). This song is a riff on Paul Simon's "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover" and sees Jermaine telling us of the many ways in which he has been dumped, accompanied by a choir of his ex-girlfriends saying where it all went wrong. Very funny, not least because of the ridiculous instruments that Bret and Jermaine are playing.... (seriously - watch the clip)

Carol Brown? She took a bus out of town....

---

And that's your lot. I've got one last 60 minute run to negotiate this weekend before a taper down leading up to the half marathon next Sunday (we're up to £1540 now, but still time to sponsor us!). After this weekend, I'm actually going to try to cut out the booze and to start to take on board lots of pasta and water and stuff. Just call me the new puritan.

Well, after this lovely bottle of Chilean Carmenere anyway.....

Have a good weekend, y'all.

a modern day fagan....

2009-09-03T20:01:00.005+01:00

When I got home from the pub quiz last night, I was a little surprised to see that someone had covered my front doormat with rice. I'd only had a couple of pints, so it didn't take long for me to realise that this was a somewhat unlikely scenario, and so I had a closer look: the bits of rice were moving. The mat - and in fact the whole of the little storm porch the mat sits in - was swarming with maggots. Nice.

It was by now 23:30 and I was quite keen to get to bed. C. wasn't due home on the late flight from Prague until later. For a fraction of a second, I contemplated stepping over the mat and pretending I hadn't seen anything. Well, they definitely weren't there when I left earlier, so perhaps I could mount a convincing defence about them not being there when I got home.

Hmmm. Perhaps not.

With a deep sigh, I opened the door and stepped over the writhing masses to help me mount a defence against the invaders. My first act was to gingerly pick up the doormat and to carry it around the corner to the bin. It was pretty old anyway, has been peed on numerous times by various cats annoyed that our Minou has disappeared through her cat flap and that they don't have the magic key that allows access, and so it was no great loss (and perhaps it exuded a smell that was attracting the damn things in the first place). My next step was to sweep the remaining maggots into the dustpan and to toss them down the drain. Easier said than done. For one thing, they seemed to be a little sticky and were actually quite tricky to sweep up. I persisted, but it quickly became obvious that more were arriving almost as quickly as I was sweeping them up. What's more, the wheelie bin round the corner was now covered in maggots too, climbing off the doormat I'd tossed in there earlier.

Where on earth were they coming from? I fetched a torch and had a look around: although they were making a beeline for my front door, they actually appeared to be coming in off the street. I looked around at the various wheelie-bins nearby, but there was no obvious cadaver or anything. It was now getting pretty late, so in a last-ditch attempt to clear my lines, I boiled the kettle a few times and filled a bucket with a mixture of boiling water and bleach. A few applications of this seemed to slow the tide, if not actually stop it, and I was soon aided by the arrival of reinforcements in the shape of C. and her willingness to pop every moving maggot she could see with the toe of her shoes. By about 01:15, we looked to have won the skirmish. The area around the door was clear, I'd emptied the hoover of live maggots, and the bin looked much quieter after an application of boiling water and bleach. I retreated to bed, not entirely convinced that I wouldn't wake up to a front hall filled with writhing maggots. Luckily I slept a dreamless sleep.

As it happened, by the time I woke up, it was as if nothing had happened: apart from the odd cadaver, the porch and the bin were completely free of live maggots. They say that the weather this year has been perfect for bugs, being just the right combination of warm and damp. A rise in the number of ladybirds is one thing though; an infestation of maggots something else entirely.

Yuck. Good job I'm not really squeamish (or that I hadn't had more to drink. Can you imagine stumbling across that after a skin-full?).

But a few mysteries remain: where on earth did they come from? Where did they go? Is that it? Is this something that happens every year? Does it always only last for a few hours? Was I actually pretty lucky/unlucky to have witnessed it at all? So many unanswered questions.

Nature, eh?

you gotta run, run, run, run, run....

2009-09-02T19:31:00.003+01:00

The half-marathon is now only ten days away. My training programme peaked with a 12 mile run last week, and has now started to taper down. Well, I say taper down - I still went on a six mile run this morning....but the hard work has now been done and it's now just a question of getting to race day and getting the race done. As an example of the differences in our lifestyles, my run this morning took place along the Grantham canal; C's run took place around Wenceslas Square in Prague. Not as glamarous as it sounds, apparently.

As promised / threatened, I have updated the picture on our JustGiving pages. Instead of a fuzzy picture of me finishing a triathlon, I've now put up this rather fetching picture of the pair of us in our lovely MS Society running vests.

Mmmm.

Our original fundraising target was £1000, but people have been so generous that I've now uplifted that to £1250, and we may even get beyond that. Whatever else they may be, my company have also agreed to match the first £500 that we've raised, so we should be able to donate something approaching £2000 to the MS Society by the time we're done. Not bad. I've said it before, but I think it bears repeating: I have been both touched and humbled by your generosity. A pretty hefty chunk of the money we've so far raised has come directly from readers of this blog, much of it from people that I've never even met. Thank you. From the bottom of my heart, thank you. Without wanting to get too soppy about it, your generosity and kindness is a real inspiration.

We've also acquired a new member to our little team: as of last week, LB has entered the half marathon too and will be raising sponsorship on our behalf. He's an old hand at this kind of thing, so we'll naturally be looking to him for tips about how to get around the course, guidance on our refuelling habits, that kind of thing....

Ask me again when I'm halfway round, running up a hill into a headwind in a torrential downpour, but as of now, this has been an entirely positive, life-affirming experience.

You can still donate via our JustGiving page. Every donation, no matter how small, is gratefully received and will go to a really great cause.

You guys rock!

...not until the next time

2009-09-01T19:37:00.006+01:00

Today marks the 70th anniversary of the start of the Second World War. At 04:45 on that morning seventy years ago, German tanks, infantry and cavalry penetrated Polish territory on several fronts with five armies and a total of something like 1.5 million troops. Soon after that, German planes bombarded Polish cities. The Germans made swift progress in penetrating the heavily outnumbered defences, attacking the cities of Katowice, Krakow, Tczew and Tunel with incendiary bombs. Air raids on Warsaw began at 0900. The first shots of the war were fired, and England and France declared war on Germany two days later.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel led the commemorations:

"I remember the 6 million Jews and all others who suffered, who died a terrible death in German concentration and extermination camps. I remember the many millions of people who had to lose their lives in their fight and in the resistance against Germany. I remember all those, those innocents who suffered, who died from hunger, cold and disease, from the violence of war and its consequences; I remember the 60 million people who lost their lives through this war that Germany started. There are no words to adequately describe the suffering of this war and the Holocaust. I bow to the victims"

As an historian, I flinch slightly at the idea that Germany was absolutely and solely responsible for the war. Yes, clearly they fired the first shots, but it's simplistic to suggest that it was this naked act of aggression that triggered the conflagration. It's as simplistic, in fact, as suggesting that it was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand that started the First World War. What cannot and should not be denied, however, is the shocking impact that the war had on so many lives: on every side.

Some of the language we use on these occasions unsettles me though. Here's Obama:

"On behalf of the American people, I wish to join the voices commemorating this anniversary today, and express admiration and gratitude to those who stood on the side of freedom and hope, giving an example of spiritual superiority over tyranny".

On the face of it, I suppose that sounds okay, but it's a prime example of history being written by the winners. Of course, when he says "the side of freedom and hope", he really means "on America's side". "Spiritual superiority"? Really? Are we so sure of that? Did the winning side kill sufficiently fewer innocent people to feel able to assume the moral high ground in the matter? Are we really confident that we did absolutely everything we did to rid the world of Nazism from the first moment we heard rumour of the deathcamps? Really?

Actually, that's another comfort we like to take, isn't it? That Hitler was a uniquely evil man in history and that we can hold him and the Nazi party entirely responsible for the war and attendant atrocities. Angela Merkel is acknowledging this in her speech above: the only way that Germany has been allowed to play a part in the world is if they openly and frequently speak of the remorse and guilt they must always bear for the war (did we learn nothing from the War Guilt Clause?). But you can't pin everything on the Nazis, can you? Who were the Nazis, after all, but people like me and you? We don't much like to think about the bureacratisation of evil; the way that ordinary people wore uniforms, stamped identity cards and processed people onto the trains that took them to their deaths. When people say that something like the rise of National Socialism can never happen again, or that it could never happen here, I don't believe them. If time and circumstances are right, it absolutely could happen again; it could happen anywhere. It might already have started.

I went to watch"Inglourious Basterds" on Sunday night. It's had some terrible reviews but, for what it's worth, I thought it was pretty good, with Tarantino belying his reputation and deftly producing a work of some power and, more surprisingly, subtlety. I thought Christoph Waltz was especially good as SS Colonel Hans Landa, giving us a glimpse at how "evil" can just as easily be contained in the body of a mild-seeming man with a silly pipe as it can in that of a frothing dictator with a toothbrush moustache.

As I left the cinema, talking these and other things over with my companions, we stepped out into the street. It was now after 11pm on a Sunday night, but as it was a Bank Holiday weekend, so Broad Street was still busy. My attention was soon grabbed by the sight of a gang of drunken men walking down the middle of the street, each one with both arms raised to the sky and fists clenched. As they walked, clearing their way through the busy street, they were screaming as loudly as they could in celebration of Nottingham Forest's 3-2 win over local rivals Derby County, some 36 hours before. Even amongst the usual detritus clogging the streets of an average English city centre at closing time, they were an intimidating presence. The cause is very different, of course, but I couldn't help but mark the similarities between this kind of tribalism and the kind harnessed by the National Socialist Party in 1930s Germany. You only have to look back to the West Ham v Millwall game the week before to how football tribalism can sometimes lead to violence. Forget the game, these people have chosen to define themselves by the club they support, and this then defines their relationship with other people, especially people who support other clubs. Not so very different to the Brown Shirts.

We are right to mark this anniversary, and right to remember the deaths and sacrifices of so many people in the Second World War. Of course we are. If we are to truly learn the lessons we can draw from the Second World War, though, then perhaps we need to stop pretending that Hitler and the Nazis were anything other than just human beings like you and like me, or that something like that could never happen again or was somehow unique to Germany. Look around you: you can see it everywhere.

with your hands on your head or on the trigger of your gun....

2009-08-28T17:46:00.002+01:00

--
Earworms of the Week

> "My Star" - Ian Brown

Ah, King Monkey! He couldn't carry a tune in a bucket, as anyone who has had the misfortune to see him live will be amply able to confirm, but he definitely has something about him. For starters, he was in one of the best British Bands ever, and that has to stand him in pretty good stead, and whatever his voice might be like live, on record he can be just about perfect. You want proof? Look no further than "I Wanna Be Adored" or "Fool's Gold", where that mumbling, shamanic chant of a voice really comes into its own. Some of his solo stuff is pretty reasonable too. I've no idea why this is in my head, particularly, although I did see a picture of the man himself in a magazine the other day reprising his appearance in Harry Potter (in the pub on Diagon Alley, reading "A Brief History of Time" and stirring his coffee without touching the spoon). This song was on a compilation tape that a friend gave me in about 1998 that I listened to when driving a colleague to a meeting in Wellingborough. He asked me to turn in down when this came on. Make of that what you will, but I like it. Military mission to Mars? Whatever you say, Ian.

> "Knights of Cydonia" - Muse

I'm not an especially big fan of Muse, I must say. I like the idea of them, and at their best they're pretty bloody good, but I really struggle to listen my way through a whole album. All that pseudo-classical symphonic nonsense really starts to hurt my head after a while. Still, credit where credit is due, and the solo on this song is just fantastic. You need a lift when you're out running sometimes, and this track was just the ticket for me the other day when I was about halfway through a 12-mile run and feeling the burn. There's a reason this is on Guitar Hero, you know.

> "Magnificent" / "Get On Your Boots" - U2

I wasn't the least bit tempted to buy "No Line on the Horizon" when it came out, but a colleague presented me with his copy the other day when he was raving about their live show in Cardiff. I really ought to give it a listen, apparently. I got about halfway through before I took it off and put on The Clash. I should probably say now that I quite like U2. It took me a long time to be able to admit that, but they slowly wormed their way into my brain and turned a pretty fierce loathing into a grudging respect and onwards to actually buying their records and seeing them live. The problem with this, and with their last couple of albums generally, is that the standout tracks are almost completely lost amidst a whole lot of turgid, over-emoting drivel. In my opinion, anyway. And even that is lost by the chronic over-exposure of that unbearable attention seeker, Bono. I like the band and I have a fair bit of time for the causes that Bono espouses, but I'm becoming increasingly less tolerant of having him hector me and am really starting to find their heart-on-sleeve-isn't-life-beautiful plods interchangeable. They're still capable of decent stuff, but I fear that for me it's getting lost amidst everything else about brand U2.

> "Killing in the Name" - Rage Against The Machine

I was reading Tom Morrello talking the other day (on Twitter, actually) in tribute to Les Paul; he was saying how he'd used a Gibson Les Paul on a few RATM tracks, mainly as overdubs, and quite a lot when in Audioslave. This was one of the overdubbed tracks he mentioned, and as chance would have it, it popped up on my iPod this week too. Well, I'm not sure what part chance has to play in the matter when I'm running more than 20 miles a week and I've been listening to the same playlist for weeks, but anyway.... it's a brilliant song this. Swearing has rarely been used to better effect on record.

> "Bulletproof" - La Roux

I can take or leave this whole "new-80s" thing that's happening in music at the moment, to be honest. I wasn't that big on this sort of thing the first time around, and I don't really get why people who weren't born the first time around are now picking the sounds and the fashions with such enthusiasm. Still, I do like this record, so.....

> "Ruby" - Kaiser Chiefs
> "Push It" - Salt n'Pepa
> "Build Me Up Buttercup" - The Foundations

"Ruby" is the earworm that will not die. It's been years now, and it's still going strong. Still, as someone pointed out to me when they heard me moaning about it, I should worry... their daughter is called "Ruby", so they can never, ever escape. The only possible cure is to try and find an earworm more virulent. My standby on these occasions is usually that Foundations record, but this chap suggested I try a touch of Salt n'Pepa. Not bad, but the relief was only temporary, and then the universe conspired to drop first "Never Miss a Beat" and then "I Predict a Riot" into my head. I'm learning to loathe the Kaiser bloody Chiefs, I tell thee....

> "All Hell Is Breaking Loose Down At Little Kathy Wilson's Place" - Wolfsbane

Another one for Des, this. Wolfsbane were a sadly much overlooked metal band from Tamworth, probably most notable for featuring future Iron Maiden singer Blaze Bayley on vocals. I loved them. Their records always sounded like they were recorded for about 12p, but they probably were. This song is based on the 1953 B-movie, "Invaders from Mars", which I discovered one night when watching the film on telly and wondering why the plot elements seemed so familiar. The album was about 20 minutes long and I loved it to bits. It's on my iPod, but I'm almost afraid to listen to it in case it's crap*. Aw, it's probably always been crap. That was part of the charm.

*actually, it sounds okay. Just click the link.....

> "Guns of Brixton" - The Clash

I've really got into The Clash recently, and was given a whole pile of their albums by my brother-in-law - a long-standing fan - for Christmas. I've been listening to "Live from Shea Stadium" in the car all week, and when this popped up in the bontempi organ round at the LeftLion pub quiz on Wednesday night, my fate was sealed and the song stuck. Credit where credit is due, it was C. who spotted the track first and won us the point... all those years listening to it through the wall from her brother's bedroom obviously paying off. Brilliant, brilliant song. The coolest bassist ever?

---

And that's your lot. We've a long bank holiday weekend to look forward to here, so I'm planning to do..... nothing. Hurray! Have a good weekend, y'all. It's a long way to the Christmas holidays from here, so let's make the most of this one, eh??

PUSH IT REAL GOOD...!

you've got to dance, little liar...

2009-08-27T20:40:00.005+01:00

I woke up yesterday morning to the distinctly unwelcome sounds of John Prescott holding forth on climate change. I have an unpleasant feeling that he watched Al Gore on "An Inconvenient Truth" and had the dawning realisation that washed-up deputies do sometimes have the chance to completely relaunch themselves and to restore their reputations with the public. Instead of finding his own topic, it appears that Prescott decided that the simplest thing to do would be to nick Gore's idea and bang on about the environment. Who knows, perhaps it could make him credible again. Relevant. Cool, even.

To be honest, I can't really remember what he said. Frankly I was too astonished. This is a man who, more than any other, symbolises the fall of the Labour Party: he's a former ship's steward and trade union activist. His presence in Blair's front bench personified the link between old Labour's working class roots and New Labour's modernising middle classes represented by the likes of Tony Blair. Unfortunately he was apparently unable to keep his hand out of the cookie jar, his fist to himself or his dick in his trousers. To hear John "two jags" Prescott lecturing me on climate change was quite a difficult pill to swallow.... particularly as he seemed to be trying to lay claim to founding the whole movement, banging on about how he swam up the Thames to present some sort of petition to Thatcher. Very impressive, but given that, since then, this man has used his official car to travel a few hundred yards down the road, it's not really very credible. He went on to say how he abhorred violence and cautioned the Climate Camp protestors not to go down that road. Right, advice on non-violence from a man who once punched out a guy who threw an egg at him. Spare us. And whilst you're at it, you might like to modify your tone of smug self-righteousness too.

Whilst he's busy reinventing himself, we learn that Prescott has apparently also become something of a web 2.0 icon, although he admits that he sometimes dictates his Tweets.... because, y'know, 140 characters is a bit of a chore. I'm sure there's lots more to the new John Prescott, but frankly I've long since stopped caring enough to find out.

Do these people think we're stupid? Do they think that just because they say something with authority, it makes them authoritative? Do they think that we've all got the memory of a goldfish and will magically forget all of their past indiscretions as they speak, mesmerised by the magic in their voices? Of course they do. Of course they think we're stupid. Perhaps we are stupid. Why else would we give these people, who long ago sold their principles and their ideals down the river in the pursuit of power, a chance to wake me up in the morning with their fatuous waffle and insincere bandwagon jumping bullshit.

one bad apple....

2009-08-26T23:02:00.000+01:00

I'm having a bad Apple day.

You might remember that I thought my much loved 60gb iPod was going to die back in May this year. The screen went all funny and it started behaving a bit unpredictably. The old boy seemed basically okay though, so we carried on regardless. I therefore wasn't expecting any problems when I reached for my trusty MP3 player to maybe shut out the office with a bit of Rage Against the Machine as I tried to concentrate on some tedious document or other. Imagine my surprise and annoyance, then, when I turned the thing on only to find that it was completely empty. The menu structure was there alright, but there appeared to be not a single piece of usable content. Given that I synced it only a couple of days before, I was a little bemused.

Nevermind..... I had a plan b: my iPhone. I picked up my phone and started to think if I had any RATM on there or perhaps some Audioslave. I pressed the 'home' button, and nothing happened: the screen remained resolutely blank. Now, this has happened to me once before, about a month ago, when the phone has gone from registering an almost full battery to shutting itself down without warning with a completely flat battery. Annoying, certainly, but not catastrophic. Except, of course, the charging cable that I take everywhere with me was in my other jacket. Luckily for me, enough people now have iPhones that I was able to plug in at someone else's desk. It's not really very good though, is it? I've only had the bloody thing 13 months, and the least you'd hope is that you can rely on it.

Grrr.

I can charge my phone, but what am I going to do about the iPod though? Several attempts to reset and sync it have failed, and I think it's dead. Not having an iPod at all is clearly not an option, but should I buy a new iPod immediately? There's only one hard drive iPod with a decent capacity left now: the 120gb Classic. Should I just buy that? Apple are secretive about their product launches at the best of times, but the iPod range is probably due an upgrade and there's a Mac Expo next month. Should I hang on and see what they have to say? There's apparently a chance they may just can the classic range entirely and force everyone to buy a new iPod Touch. Given that I already have an iPhone, and I like to carry my whole music library around with me, that's not all that appealing an option for me.

Dilemmas, dilemmas.

To be fair to apples though, I did have a very nice Granny Smith with my lunch, so it's not all bad news....

I am tired, I am weary...

2009-08-25T20:16:00.000+01:00

I seem to be developing bags underneath my eyes; bruised, black smudges pointing obliquely outwards from the inside corner of my eyes towards my cheekbones. They rather serve to make me look sallow, sunken and tired. I think this may largely be because I *am* sallow, sunken and tired. They might always have been there, I suppose, obscured from my attention by the glasses that I used to wear. I rather think, however, that they're new and that they're a product of my age, my exercise regime and too many late nights.

I'm not really taken with them, but I hardly think I'm metrosexual enough for eye lotions. Perhaps I'll simply have to get used to looking tired. I *feel* tired most of the time, so why not?

Coming hard on the heels of some very late nights at the weekend, I'm sure that the twelve mile run I did last night won't have much helped, but it did include two moments that brought a massive smile to my face and a spring to my weary step. The first was when I turned around at the six mile point just as "Knights of Cydonia" popped up on my iPod. That guitar solo is preposterously joyous. The second moment came soon after, at about the seven-and-a-half mile mark, when I saw a man walking a ferret along the canal towpath. It was a perky looking thing, with bright white fur and wearing a natty looking harness. Its owner offered me a cheery good evening as we passed, and the thought of them kept me amused for at least another mile in the darkening evening.

There was a little bit of a chill in the air by about 8pm, and I'm rather afraid that summer might be over.

I was quite pleased with my splits for this one:

mile	Split:	climb (ft):
1	9:27	1
2	9:32	9
3	9:12	4
4	9:04	21
5	9:56	14
6	10:17	1
7	9:44	2
8	9:14	0
9	9:49	0
10	9:19	4
11	10:07	1
12	10:04	2

It's a very flat run, as you'd expect alongside a canal, but what stood out for me is the way that I ran at a pretty consistent pace all the way through. It certainly didn't feel like that, as for the last five or six miles, my legs felt like lead. I discovered that, even though I was feeling tired, if I picked my knees up and upped the pace a bit, it didn't make me feel any worse.... hence the slightly faster times around miles 7-10. I suppose it just goes to show how much of running is mental as well as physical. At this sort of pace, I should think I should finish the race a few minutes over two hours. If I give my body a chance to recover in the run-up to the race, so that I actually get to the starting line feeling fresh, perhaps I'll be able to run a bit quicker. Who knows?

As you probably already know, C. and I are running the half marathon to raise money for the MS Society. We're hoping to raise £1000, and any money you can spare is gratefully received. You can sponsor us here.

I'm happy, hope you're happy too....

2009-08-24T22:07:00.009+01:00

I've been watching cricket for a long time now. I have been unlucky enough to actually be present in the ground to watch Australia retain the Ashes three times at Trent Bridge: 1993, 1997 and 2001*. I've seen Shane Warne dancing with a stump on the pavilion roof twice. It's a good job we won the game there in 2005 as I'm not sure the old timbers of the building could take any more of that kind of strain.

There was no Trent Bridge test this time around, and no Shane Warne, but I was lucky enough to get hold of a pair of tickets for the fourth day of the last Test match at the Oval. The series was nicely poised at 1-1 going into the game, and the England selectors resisted the calls to give Mark Ramprakash one last hurrah at his home ground. Having seen him charging down the wicket in Nottingham towards the close of play on the Friday Ashes Test in 2001, completely ruining my Saturday by his inability to resist Shane Warne's taunts, I was pleased I wouldn't be seeing him playing in a game of this importance. I wasn't sure about Jonathan Trott, making his debut in this game, but surely he couldn't be as catastrophic and negative selection as the 39-year old Ramps.

The terracotta urn containing the Ashes is only 6 inches tall, but England and Australia have been fighting over them since 1882, and it remains the single greatest prize for an English cricketer.

When England finally won it in 2005, for the first time since 1986/7, it was a cause for national celebration. Over-celebration, many would say, but after such a long period of Australian dominance, it was simply joyous not only to win the Ashes, but to win them in such an incredible series.

After a 5-0 thumping in Australia in 2006/7, there can't have been too many people who gave England much of a chance this summer.... but we did it. We went into Sunday needing ten wickets to win. That was all we needed to do to bring the Ashes home. It wasn't exactly plain sailing, and the Aussies fought like...well.... Australians, but at a little after 6pm, when Graham Swann took the wicket of the superb Mike Hussey it was all over.

We had regained the Ashes.

And I was there. I saw every ball bowled; every wicket fall and -- best of all -- I saw the England captain, Andrew Strauss, lift that famous old urn.

I've been lucky enough to have seen some brilliant sport: Allan Donald and Michael Atherton at Trent Bridge in 1998; the amazing Ashes test in 2005. I've seen Europe winning the Ryder Cup at the Belfry in 2002 and at the K-Club in 2006. I was in the Olympic Stadium in Athens when Kelly Holmes won the 800m. I was at the rowing lake at Schinias in Athens when the Men's Coxless Fours, led by Matthew Pinsent, won the gold medal by the tiniest of margins.

How does this day compare to those? I'm not sure. All of those were fantastic in their own way. As a big cricket fan though, and having suffered through 20-odd years of awful, heartbreaking England performances, actually being present in the ground when we won the Ashes was pretty bloody special.

Let's hope we can enjoy the win without gloating, eh? There's little less attractive than winning without dignity and then wallowing in that win instead of looking forwards. For what it's worth, my favourite moment of the day (winning aside) was when the crowd gave Ricky Ponting a massive standing ovation both to and from the wicket. He was booed at Edgbaston, but he was shown an awful lot more respect here for what he's achieved. It's no less than a champion like him deserves.

It was a very good day.

*actually, Australia held on for a draw in 1993 - the first test match I ever went to go and watch live - to keep the series score at two up with three to play. Needless to say the Aussies won the remaining tests that mattered to win the series 4-1. It just felt like they retained the Ashes that day when we failed to get Steve Waugh and Brendon Julian out. I had a nice day though, eh?

he's the hairy handed gent who ran amok in Kent....

2009-08-21T19:28:00.004+01:00

-
Earworms of the Week

> "Master of Puppets" - Metallica
> "The Trooper" - Iron Maiden

I like rock music. I like running to rock music. It probably won't come as much surprise to learn, then, that as my mileage has increased in the run-up to the Half Marathon, I've been listening to lots and lots of heavy metal on a playlist a I plod my weary way around the place. I've been listening to Muse, Foo Fighters, Queens of the Stone Age, Probot, Rage Against the Machine, AC/DC... but above all, I've been listening to Metallica and Iron Maiden. There's something about the driving drum beat and the screaming guitars that makes me pick my knees up and run that little bit faster, no matter how tired I am or how much I've started to drag my feet. It also, it must be said, makes the whole process somewhat less boring. When you're out for ninety odd minutes, with nothing much to think about but how much you're hurting, you take all the distraction you can get..... Is it poor form to wear an iPod on the day itself, do you think?

> "Shoot the Runner" - Kasabian

Damn those gibbons, but I'm finding some of their music damn near impossible to shift from my brain. Perhaps this one is a plea for mercy from a tired athlete in training? Or a desperate cry from a despairing full back as the player he's supposed to be marking leaves him for dead?

> "Caribbean Moon" - Kevin Ayers
> "Stranger in Blue Suede Shoes" - Kevin Ayers

I was introduced to Kevin Ayers courtesy of Mike's Shuffleathon disc from last year, and was curious enough to get myself a collection of his work. It's not something I like to listen to every day, but just once in a while it hits the spot perfectly. For some reason, I seem to find his cod reggae "Caribbean Moon" stuck in my head, when it's pretty far from his best song.... but it is absurdly catchy and there's not a whole lot I can do about that (great video too). "Stranger in Blue Suede Shoes" is much more like it, and it a rambling tale of a man who walks into a bar. Puts me in mind of Stan Ridgeway's "Camouflage", for some reason....

> "Money" - Pink Floyd
> "Free Money" - Patti Smith

In my head for fairly obvious reasons, I would say. The Floyd song is probably the more famous (and marvellously covered by the Dan Reed Network, if memory serves me correctly. Des will be able to confirm, I'm sure...). I prefer the Patti Smith song though, as I love the way the song works its way up from a whisper to a gallop and then eases itself back down again.

> "Cheek to Cheek" - Fred Astaire

A colleague of mine at work was disgruntled about something this week, and asked me who he should escalate to. I suggested the Head of Delivery, who happens to be a sikh. My colleague, also a sikh, dismissed the idea. "No, I don't want to be accused of the whole Sikh-to-Sikh thing". Now, this statement had two immediate effects on me: the first was to wonder what on earth the sikh-to-sikh thing was. Was it like the masons? The second was to plant that wonderful Irving Berlin song into my head.... only with sadly altered lyrics and an unfortunate mental image of two sikh gentlemen waltzing around the office together.

> "Romeo & Juliet" - The Killers

A great song at the best of times, but this is a really, really good cover version and one that I've heard twice in the last week. Once was when I chose it on my iPod in the car, but the other time was a lot more random when it popped up on the radio. Good song.

> "Afternoon Delight' - Starland Vocal Band

C and I took out 4 DVDs last weekend: The Wrestler, Valkyrie, Doubt and Revolutionary Road (can you guess which two I chose and which two C chose?). All good films, I thought, but none are exactly upbeat. As we finished off the last, Revolutionary Road, on Tuesday night, my mind drifted off into the thought that I actually really like Will Ferrell films, Anchorman in particular. I've been toying with the idea of buying myself a "Stay Classy, San Diego" t-shirt, and that thought after watching all those excellent but downbeat films pushed me over the edge and I hopped online and placed an order. Is it geeky? Probably. But 60% of the time it works every time.

Sky rockets in flight?
Afternoon delight.

If you don't think this song is the greatest song ever, I will fight you. That's no lie.

> "Werewolves of London" - Warren Zevon

It was listening to Kevin Ayers that planted the seed that I should listen to some Warren Zevon next. The two are loosely associated in my mind because they sound similar-ish, at least in terms of their singing voices. Zevon wrote lots of good songs, of course, not least "Raspberry Beret", but it's this one that stands out a mile for me. Ahhhh-hoooooh!

--

And that's your lot. I'm off to Oxford this evening and then onwards to watch England hopefully regain the Ashes at the Oval on Sunday. In the meantime, may I point you in the direction of our Just Giving page in the hope that you might see your way towards making a donation....? We're running the half marathon to raise money for the MS Society of Great Britain. Thanks to all who have given money so far - you've been very generous and your generosity humbles me.

Have a good weekend y'all, and stay classy.

if you know when to take them....

2009-08-20T20:24:00.006+01:00

At about 07:30 this morning, just as I was about to get into the shower, there was a loud bang on the front door. Cursing, I quickly grabbed a towel and ran down the stairs to see what was going on. I unlocked, opened up and cautiously peered out from behind the door - after all, who wants to be confronted at that time of the morning by a semi-naked man? It was the postman, of course, clutching a small plastic envelope. I scrawled my signature approximately on his little digital screen and took the delivery. I opened it up, and was stunned by what I saw: it was short letter with a cheque stapled to the bottom.

The cheque was made out to a sum that equates to about 3.5 years salary.

Tax free.

My mind flashed back about five or six years, and I could see myself flicking through the brochure that came with my critical illness insurance. Let's look down the list of conditions and see what I could maybe tolerate in order to get a payout: obviously you don't want something nasty like cancer, but could I lose a limb? An eye? All good fun, and then I filed the paperwork away and thought nothing more of it. Who really thinks that there may come a time when they will be diagnosed with one of the conditions on that list? Who would really want to be?

To be honest, I was only dimly aware that you might be well advised to take out life and critical illness insurance when you take out a mortgage. Getting the mortgage itself was a big enough step for me. Luckily for me, I was well advised, and my very diligent and professional financial advisor made sure that, as well as getting an excellent deal on our mortgage, we signed all the necessary paperwork and got ourselves properly covered. In fact, I'm not sure I can ever thank LB enough for his foresight.

....And now my critical illness policy has paid out. Without any great fuss or fanfare, my insurance company has paid up the full amount less than a month after they received my claim form, at a stroke making all the inconvenience of that lumbar puncture worth the bother.

I stared at the cheque for a few minutes. Then I sat down and stared at it some more.

Then I went to work.

Then I came home from work and after a game of football and I stared at it again.

That's quite a lot of money.

That money is not consolation or compensation for having multiple sclerosis, but it does offer me financial security. More than that: it presents me with some new options and opens up some interesting choices. I have MS, but at the moment I'm still relatively unaffected. Who knows what will happen tomorrow, or in a year's time, or in five years time.... that's was true before my diagnosis, but somehow the present feels all the more precious to me. Every mile that I run, every game of football that I play (even ones where I feel rubbish, as I did tonight)... it all feels like something to be cherished because I really don't know how long I will be able to play. I'm not worried about my future, really. Good job really, as there's not a damn thing I can do about it. I might be one of the 'lucky' MS sufferers who are barely affected by the condition throughout their lives. I might not be. No one can tell and there's not much point worrying about it. I do wonder, however, if I really want to spend my the bulk of my time sat at a desk doing a job that is hardly the passion of my life.

Surely there are much better things I should be doing with my life? I want to go to Australia again; I want to go to New Zealand; I want to go back to South America; I want to travel in Africa and to go on a walking safari; I want to learn how to scuba dive; I want to see whales and dolphins and sharks; I want to see lions and tigers and elephants; I want to travel around the great cities of Europe and to see the works of the Great Masters and the soaring cathedrals. There are so many better things I could be doing than sitting at my desk as a tiny cog in the wheels of a big company. Perhaps this money is my opportunity to get out and do some of those things whilst I still can.

The big question, I suppose, is whether or not I am brave enough to seize that opportunity.

Hmm.

and you've got the face on....

2009-08-18T19:14:00.001+01:00

When I was about eight years old, we did a test in our biology class to see how many of us could roll our tongues - apparently it's a genetic thing, and not something that everybody can do. I couldn't do it. About half of the class could do it, but I wasn't one of them, no matter how hard I tried.

For some reason, when I was a teenager, I tried again. This time it worked. Now, the ability to roll your tongue is not really anything much to write home about, and it doesn't really have much practical use, but I still felt elated by this. I'm not sure that my late development in the field of tongue rolling exactly disproves the genetic theory (unless I'm a member of the X-Men with an especially rubbish mutant power... take that Magneto!), but it gave me a bit of a kick to suddenly discover that I could actually do something I had assumed would forever be out of my grasp.

I've always been able to wiggle my nose. I don't know how I do it, but I can make the damn thing twitch like a rabbit. Again, it's not a skill with any great application, but it does seem to make people laugh, and was always a good secret weapon to be able to unleash in any staring contests I happened to find myself in.

A little while after discovering that I could roll my tongue, I discovered that I could raise each of my eyebrows individually. Finally! A talent with a practical application, and one that opened up a whole new world of sardonic facial expressions. Looking back, it was probably a discovery that played a critical role in the formation of my personality in those teenage years. This was a skill that required a little practice to master, but it felt like an investment worth making, and I'm still collecting the dividends today with every barely discernable and yet unmistakeably sarcastic flicker of disbelief I make in tedious meetings at work.

I thought that perhaps that would be it. After all, I had been amply gifted already with a tongue I could roll, a nose I could twitch and eyebrows I could arch independently. What more could I possibly ask for?

Well, just last week I discovered that I could wiggle my ears.

Will this never end? Are there other, still greater talents awaiting my discovery?

Much more of this and I'll be considering an entry into Britain's Got Talent.....

[a loud klaxon sounds]

'cos your crystal ball ain't so crystal clear.....

2009-08-17T18:39:00.006+01:00

I heard the other day that you ideal job is likely to be the thing that you wanted to be when you grew up. Apparently, so the theory goes, when you were young, you didn't have to worry about the practicalities of living, working or earning money. So when you thought about your future, it was not constrained by reality, so you believed you could do anything.

Fast-forward to your life now, and if you're unhappy with your career and have ever given any thought to a total change of direction.... then that first childhood dream could be a good starting point to finding fulfillment.

Hmm.

I'm pretty sure that I didn't grow up wanting to be an IT Consultant. Does anyone? My doctor father and nurse mother tried to influence my career choice at an early age by giving me a toy medical kit, but I wasn't having any of it. In fact, the first thing I can remember really wanting to be is a motorcycle policeman. I had a plastic helmet with goggles and everything that I used to wear when I rode around my bike.

Is it too late for me to apply for the California Highway Patrol, do you think? Can I be soundtracked by this? (as opposed to this....)

What did you want to be when you grew up?

Why did we ever decide to be anything else?

all aboard and we're hitting the road....

2009-08-16T13:42:00.004+01:00

9.10 miles in 87 minutes. At that pace, the half marathon should take me a little over two hours - not that I'm aiming to do more than just get around the course. The way my legs are feeling at the moment, I'm not sure I'm exactly going to pick up speed over that last four miles or so....

C's out doing a 10km loop now as part of her training schedule.

It's hard work this, you know. Tonight I'm going to be especially dedicated if I'm going to undo all the goodness of my training at the BBQ I'm attending.....

Should you feel so inclined, you can sponsor C and me here. We're hoping to raise £1000 for the MS Society, and every penny will help us towards that target.