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

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.

stupid bloody tuesday....

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?

faster...harder...scooter....

Far be it from me to impugn mobility scooters and mobility scooter users...after all, the first one was built in 1968 by a man, Allan R. Thieme, who was inspired to create the product when a member of his family was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis....

But are they really supposed to be driven at 15mph down the middle of a main road?

I was a pedestrian at the time, so I suppose I should probably be grateful that the elderly man behind the controls had chosen to scorch down the middle of the road rather than the middle of the busy lunchtime pavement I was using. Judging from their faces, I'm pretty sure that the increasingly impatient drivers in the long queue of traffic trailing in his wake were not exactly wishing the old boy long life and happiness.

I turned to watch him go past, half-expecting him to stop at the Conservative Club some 200m down the road. He did not stop. Far from it. In fact, much to my amusement, he showed absolutely no sign of stopping and, as far as I know, he's still going, with an ever growing line of irate motorists trailing in his wake.

So, if you found yourself stuck in a queue of unexpectedly heavy traffic today, you never know, perhaps he was at the front......

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

"All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;"

Ah, probably the most famous Shakespearean soliloquy to be delivered by a man whose very name was a toilet joke. What Shakespeare doesn't go on to say in that speech is that, not only are men and women merely actors, but that in our own heads, we're all playing Hamlet: we're the stars of our own dramas and everyone else in our lives are merely the supporting cast. If you're the star, then the absolute most that everyone else can hope for is that they might get to play Gertrude, Horatio, Ophelia or even Claudius in the drama of your life. More likely though, most people will end up playing the third spear carrier on the left. We Hamlets define the world by how it impacts on us, and not the other way around. When something happens, or when someone does something, we will immediately view it through the lens of how it affects us. Somewhat annoyingly for us Hamlets, then, the supporting players in all our lives are often played by terrible hams; the kind of actors who take it upon themselves to try and steal some of our limelight and to attract attention away from us, the stars of our own productions. It almost as though they thought this play was about them.

Surely this Hamlet complex is the only way to explain why so many people seem to be so wrapped up in themselves and their own lives and so insensitive to the needs of others. I'm sure we all see countless examples every day of our lives: the people who jump the traffic lights, as though red lights somehow don't apply for them and that it's okay for you to have to wait at a green light until they have gone through; the guy in the pool who ploughs up and down the lane you're sharing at a speed of his choosing, showing no consideration at all to your needs or the speed at which you're swimming, wrapped up only in his own requirements; the people you work with who will happily take credit but are quick to duck responsibility and to apportion blame; the guy who elbows his way to the front of the bar queue and gleefully gets served in front of you.... life sometimes seems to be a succession of little acts of rudeness; death from the thousand cuts of someone else's lack of consideration for another human being, or at least by their decision that their own needs are more important. Well, when you're the star of the show, it's you who should be getting the plaudits. Why worry about the little people?

Only life isn't really like that, is it? As Shakespeare goes on to say in the same soliloquy:

"And one man in his time plays many parts,"

He's referring, of course, to the seven ages of man; our journey from "mewling and puking" infant to decrepit old age, "sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything". What he might also add is that, whilst we might all be playing Hamlet in the dramas of our own lives, we're also simultaneously playing all of the other parts in other people's dramas. You might be Polonious to your brother, Rosencrantz to your boss and the third spear carrier on the left to your neighbours....Everyone might be Hamlet in their own head, but we'd do well to remember that we're no more than a supporting character in everyone else's. To mix my metaphors, wouldn't we do better to think of life as a team game? No matter how good a Ronaldo or a Kaká might be, no matter how inspirational their individual brilliance on the football pitch might be, they still can't win a game of football entirely on their own. Even people in the apparently individual pursuits like tennis or golf will still rely heavily on their own support teams if they are to succeed; their coaches and their caddies, their physiotherapists and their psychotherapists.... even their families and friends.

As a contemporary of Shakespeare, John Donne, wrote:

"No man is an island, entire of itself
Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were,
As well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were
Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls
It tolls for thee."

I like the idea that we're all connected simply by being human. We're all in it together, aren't we? Anything we can do to help make all of our rides a little easier have got to be worthwhile, hasn't it? Isn't that a much nicer way to think about the world and the way we relate to each other? We're all ultimately in the same show and not just the stars of our own matinees. Wouldn't it be nice if we all tried to behave a bit more like it?

Of course, the somewhat inconvenient problem with this argument is that I'm not so selfless myself as to be beyond reproach. By railing against traffic light jumpers, swimming pool hogs, unscrupulous colleagues, queue jumpers at the bar and the like, I'm merely casting my own judgement upon them all; a judgement based entirely upon how the behaviour of those people has impacted upon me and how it has inconvenienced me. By acknowledging that fact, am I not also acknowledging that I am guilty of casting myself as Hamlet?

As Shakespeare also said:

"A pox damn you, you muddy rascal, is that all the comfort you give me?"

Pah.

the echoes they surround....

Swimming is pretty tedious. The best thing that can be said for tonight's swim was that, by the time I got to the gym after leaving the office, I virtually had the pool to myself. In fact, about the only other people there were two girls having a good old natter as they swam up and down in the lane next to me.

The thirty of so minutes I spend at the pool, two or three times a week, is about the only time that I am alone with my thoughts and without any kind of external distractions. They play music around the pool, but as my ears spend almost the whole time below water, I don't hear a damn thing. I'd love to be able to say that I spent this time productively, and that as well as exercising my body, I get some quality thinking done. The sad truth, however, is that I either spend the whole time trying not to forget how many lengths I have done ("twenty-two, twenty-two, twenty-two, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six .... shit ....um .... twenty, twenty, twenty, etc.") or I find my brain gets stuck on a single thought that I just can't seem to shake off.

Today was little different, although at least I had a lane to myself for the duration and didn't need a battle of wills with anyone over their lack of end-of-lane courtesy.

As I surfaced at the end of my last length, I was just in time to catch a snippet of the two girls in the next door lane as they made their leisurely way back up the pool:

"Oh my God! Leanne had an orgy when she was 20!"
"No!"
"Yeah. She told me herself!"
"Really? Oh my God!"

Diverting though Leanne's dalliance with "Jonathan, Jonathan's dad and Lee" sounded, it wasn't quite enough to make me wish that I could hear underwater.

Perhaps it's just as well that this is one of my (soon to arrive) birthday presents from C. Maybe a waterproof MP3 player is just what I need to take my mind off the things I'm not thinking about whilst swimming.

territorial pissings....

If you'll pardon the lowering of the tone (and there are very few places where what I'm about to say wouldn't lower the tone, and I'm pretty sure that the ones where it doesn't are not really places that people like you or I would tend to frequent)..... it never fails to amaze me quite how disgusting the gents toilets can be.

I'm not talking about those dank squat affairs that you still occasionally find in places like rural France, South America or Africa. Oh no. When you're travelling somewhere remote, a disgusting toilet is pretty much par for the course. After all, hard though it may be to believe, there are still many toilets in the world which aren't systematically cleaned on an annual basis, nevermind on a twice daily basis, and one or two don't have access to fresh running water. I know! No, I'm talking here about the toilets in the head office building of a large, very well known and, you'd imagine, pretty cleanly company. People around here don't generally wear flip-flops and sarongs and have large back packs and horrible dirty white man's dreadlocks; they have neatly cut hair and tend to wear stiff-collared shirts, smart trousers and, more often than not, a tie. There isn't a shortage of clean, running water here. In fact, we have hot and cold running water on demand, and all of the toilets around here are connected to the sewage main and have flushes and everything. There's soap too, and occasionally those little pineapple cubes of bleachy freshness.

So how come they're so disgusting? And they are, let me tell you, utterly revolting. What does it say about the men who work here that we allow these toilets to get into such a state, even when they are all cleaned twice a day? I can understand that, how to put this, sometimes things can come out at an unexpected angle, but I fail to see how that would mean that you might miss a urinal entirely and spray the products of your mecturation all over the wall tiles and the floor. And why spit your chewing gum out into the drain? And am I the only man who doesn't feel the urge to pick my nose whilst standing at the urinal? Is there some kind of unspoken rule that the product of this nasal exploration should be smeared onto the wall next to where you stand?

It's even worse in the cubicles. Is it too hard to lift the toilet seat up before having a piss, or is it no big deal to spray your mark all across the seat and the floor? Is it really? And if you are planning a, shall we say, longer stay, is it really asking too much that you might consider flushing, or even that you might pay a bit of attention to where you are leaving your deposit (no, trust me, the seat is not the right place)? Is it wrong of me to expect that anyone leaving a cubicle might pause to wash their hands with the soap provided before heading back out into the office where they presumably then smear their microscopic particles of shit across everything that they touch? Or that, actually, a small smattering of water sprinkled on your hands after pissing is not really the same thing as spending an extra ten seconds doing the whole thing properly and using a dash of soap? Hell, when the people who do wash their hands throw their used hand towels onto the floor rather than into the bin, perhaps I should be grateful that more people don't wash their hands, else I might not be able to open the door to get inside in the first place.

Quite how people feel able to wash their coffee mugs in here, I really don't know.

Ick.

no sleep till brooklyn....

When it comes to holidays, I'm a great believer in serendipity. I'll probably buy a guidebook, but that's about it. I'll have a vague idea of the sorts of things that I might want to see, but I probably won't even open the book until I get onto the plane, never mind do something rash like actually plan an itinerary.

This trip was no different. I wanted to go to New York, and that was almost as much as I knew. I perhaps had some vague ideas about going to the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, maybe having a hot dog and doing a bit of shopping, and I had a few restaurant recommendations (thanks for that Bob), but beyond that, I was really just happy to be going away for a few days to such an interesting city.

I like to wander and to see what turns up. Luckily, it turns out that this approach works really well for New York. We must have walked for miles and miles every day we were there. It only costs $2 to ride on the subway, but whenever it was practical, we walked. There's nothing better for getting a proper feel for a place than by walking through it. We were staying in a hotel about five blocks up from Times Square and about three blocks down from Central Park, but we walked through as many different neighbourhoods as we could: Greenwich Village, Chelsea, the Meatpacking District, the Financial District, Flatiron, Hell's Kitchen, Lower Manhattan, Upper East Side.... each with their own distinctive feel. We didn't manage to get up beyond Central Park and into the Bronx, and I know there's plenty of stuff we didn't see (next time, eh?), but we did manage to get around quite a lot of Manhattan in the four days we were there.

One of the best pieces of advice I was given before I left (thank you Sarah) was, whatever else I did, to make sure I got off Manhattan Island. We spent about ten seconds on Staten Island as we disembarked from the ferry and got straight back on, but I'm not sure that really counts.... but as a result of that advice, we did make the effort to get out to Brooklyn, and after an unpromising start, had the best time of the days we were there.

The walk across the bridge is fantastic, of course... but instead of turning on our heels and coming straight back to enjoy the views of Manhattan again, we pushed on into Brooklyn. For an hour or so, things did not look at all promising. Once we'd got past the oasis of the Brooklyn Bridge Park, we found ourselves walking through an industrial desert alongside a nest of ring roads pushing on to the tunnels and bridges. We perservered, and then found ourselves in neighbourhood that seemed to consist of nothing but fried chicken outlets and places to get your hair braided in the senegalese style. New York is of course an incredibly multicultural city, but this was the first time in my wandering that I felt it would be a really, really bad idea to get the guidebook out for a look, as I was standing out more than enough already. We nearly gave up there and then, but we pushed on looking for a subway or something, and gradually the neighbourhood changed. The fried chicken shops gave way to halal groceries and then, slowly but surely, little boutiques and bistros began to appear. We were heading into Boerum Hill. Driven on by my bladder and the distinct lack of public toilets in the city, we popped into a nice looking French restaurant to have a drink and to make use of the facilities. The barman - Bart - was friendly, and he mixed a mean cocktail, so we hung around for a bit. We then started talking to some middle-aged ladies who were having a drink whilst waiting for the last member of their dinner party to arrive. One of the ladies had been reading about malt whisky and was keen to try some (Bart had a good selection, including Laphroig, Lagavulin, Glenmorangie and Glenlivet). We chatted about different malts, how to drink them, moved on to discuss port and finally onto why we'd come over to Brooklyn. They were all astonished that we'd walked all the way from Manhattan, as though it was a hundred miles away, but were all Brooklynites and were really keen that we make the most of our time over the East River.

I don't even really know how it happened, but before long, the maitre d' had got involved in the discussion, and they all agreed that we should go to a tiny little restaurant just around the corner that had just been voted the best pizza place in New York City - quite an accolade. We weren't even sure we were staying for dinner, but the maitre d' was persistent to the extent that he even rang them up and booked us a table..... he ran his own restaurant, but felt that if we only stayed in Brooklyn for one meal, then we should go to the pizza place. We stayed long enough to have another drink and to pick up recommendations on the best possible place to buy a bottle of wine to take to the (bring your own) restaurant, and then we went out to find this other restaurant. The pizza restaurant - Lucali - was amazing. It's tucked away in a residential area of Brooklyn, and consists of nothing much more than a front room with an open kitchen area with a wood-fired oven at the back. You don't get much of a choice: calzone or pizza. You choose from a list of about 5 ingredients, and that's it. No starters. No pudding. Just plain and simple pizza. We shared a calzone, stuffed with fresh basil and some delicious, light ricotta. It wasn't at all expensive, but it felt like we were being included in a great local secret - there were people waiting outside the door the whole time we were there. It was a lovely meal, but the thing that I will really remember about it is the kindness of the Brooklyn locals that we met in that first restaurant who had been so friendly and welcoming. The ladies at that first bar told me that the French restaurant - Jolie - was their favourite in Brooklyn. We didn't eat there, so I can't comment, but the people we met there were brilliant, and Bart makes a mean cocktail.... so if you are around Brooklyn, do go and see them and thank them for me.

One of the restaurant recommendations I had before leaving was from a colleague who suggested that the River Cafe in Brooklyn was the best restaurant in the world with the best view in the world. Not cheap, with a meal for two likely to top $300, but apparently worth every cent. Perhaps it is the best restaurant in the world, but I'd like to think that the $20-odd we paid for that calzone and for that experience simply cannot be beaten.

I'm telling you, serendipity: it's the future.

it's a fashion that we follow that we should be forgetting...

You know when you walk past someone that you vaguely know, and just at the last possible moment they don't just smile or say hello or something, but they also ask you how you are? They can't seriously be expecting an answer as you both continue to walk in opposite directions, and yet how often do you find yourself stopping, turning around and replying to their ever more distant back, perhaps even going so far as to call out after their back to ask how they're doing? The fact that they keep moving says to me that they're only asking out of pure reflex and they aren't really interested in how you are at all. With that in mind, the logical thing to do is probably to give a quick answer and keep walking, or even to just keep walking. In fact, a smile is probably enough, but no one wants to seem rude, do they? Once the question has been asked, it sort of requires an answer, and conversational norms also dictate that you should follow up your answer with the same polite inquiry. The fact that the other person is now several hundred yards away from you and likely won't even hear you asking is neither here nor there. It's just the way things work.

I sometimes find myself having terrible dilemmas when I see people that I vaguely know standing in a queue that I'm about to join. If I join the line behind them, then small talk is inevitable because horrible, awkward, forced small talk is clearly much better than blanking someone and pretending that they're not there. This happens quite a lot at work, and I have to say that I will quite often delay my coffee for 5 minutes just to avoid a mildly uncomfortable social situation. It's ridiculous. I know it's ridiculous, but there you go.

I don't think I'm very good at small talk. I think I understand the unwritten rules on paper, if you see what I mean, but I have a nasty feeling that my practical application of the theory is woefully lacking. I had to get in work early the other day, so after my first meeting, I joined the breakfast queue to get a bagel. A colleague of mine that I vaguely know joined the same queue moments later. Hiding was not an option, so I resigned myself to the fact that conversation of some kind was now inevitable. I've worked with this person before, so my opening move was a thin smile of acknowledgment. Often that's enough, and far better than a total blank, but I rather think she saw this as encouragement.

"Hello. How are you?"

My usual gambit in conversations like these is to make some weary comment about how near / far we are from the weekend. A shrug and a resigned "It's Monday" will be taken by most people as being a more than adequate response that somehow conveys lots without actually saying a great deal. Similarly, remarking that "things can never be that bad on a Friday" somehow expresses how drab a week in the office is, but also hints at the approaching nirvana of the weekend and all the exciting and possibly nefarious things you have planned. Most importantly of all, neither phrase exactly invites more conversation on either side unless you want it to. A chuckle and a raised eyebrow is more than sufficient. Thus your small talk obligations can be easily fulfilled with one short sentence. This particular day was a Thursday morning though, and still quite early: the weekend still felt a bit far off to discuss. Hm. I tried to keep things simple.

"I'm fine thanks"

I'm aware that the norm here would be to ask my partner in this reluctant conversation how she was in return. I didn't want to leave that door open, so I didn't ask. Is that rude? Do I have to return her feigned interest in me with a feigned interest of my own? Sadly, she clearly expected more from the conversation and persisted.

"Did you have a good weekend?"

Wow. Asking about my weekend on a Thursday? Her grasp of the rules that govern small talk seemed tenuous at best.

"Yes thanks."

Again, no expansion on why my weekend was good and no polite rejoinder to inquire about hers.

"Anything planned for this weekend?"

Sure, the long bank holiday weekend was in sight and this was perhaps a valid inquiry, but she clearly wasn't taking her conversational cues from my increasingly monosyllabic responses. Damn her eyes.

"Nothing much. I've got friends coming up."

There you go. There's some actual information about my weekend. Are you happy? Eh?

"Oh, for the whole weekend?"

Oh for Christ's sake!

"No. Just on Saturday evening"

Luckily, before she could extract from me the vital information that they were coming up around about 7pm and that we were thinking of having a barbeque, her toast appeared and she tottered off to get a coffee, leaving me to wait a few beats longer than necessary when picking up my bagel to make sure that she had actually gone before I went to order my own Americano.

The funny thing is that she actually seems to be a perfectly pleasant person, and I hadn't really set out not to talk to her or anything... I just wasn't really interested enough to have a nothing conversation with her, and ultimately I just wasn't very interested in knowing how she was and what she had planned for the weekend.

Does that make me a bad person? It certainly makes me feel a little socially inadequate.

vulture stalked white piped lie forever

Watching or reading the news is almost always a depressing experience. Every news bulletin I watch or every newspaper that I read is certain to have at least one thing that makes me reflect on what an appalling world we live in and how beyond salvation we appear to be as a species. Every day brings some new terrorist or government outrage; wars are being fought and atrocities committed more quickly than the news of them can be brought to the unfeeling world on our 24 hour rolling news channels. People starve and die of treatable diseases. We know this because we watch it happening on live on TV with rolling subtitles underneath telling us of other breaking news. It's horrific, but in some ways we have become numbed through exposure. We are inured to the horror.

Some stories are just so awful though that they can't be ignored or dismissed with a sad shake of the head and some vague intention to give more to charity. Some stories are so shocking that they force you to sit up and suck in all of the dreadful details..... and this story is one of them.

I simply cannot conceive what would make someone lock their own daughter up in the cellar; to pretend to the world that she was dead whilst systematically raping her over the course of decades. He fathered seven children in all by his own child. It's chilling. When one of those children died as an infant, he disposed of the corpse by dropping it into an incinerator, leaving the mother and her other children to look after themselves in the cellar with no access to medical attention. Job done. He fostered or adopted three of those children with his apparently unsuspecting wife and left the other three to rot with their poor mother in that soundproofed cell. As his second family expanded, he periodically extended the cellar further out under his back garden. It has a little kitchen, a toilet and a bathroom with tiles decorated with snails and octopus motifs. It's an awful, awful story.

And what happens now? A 73 year old man will go to prison and the media interest will begin to die down, leaving some broken people to try to rebuild their shattered lives: his wife, his presumably irreparably damaged daughter and those poor unsuspecting kids - his children. His grandchildren. Apparently the 5 year old was moved to tears at the ride in the police car away from the cellar, the only home he has ever known. He wasn't upset - he'd only ever seen cars before on the television, and could not believe that now he was travelling in one. He was excited. What happens to that child?

We're all nice liberal types around here, but here's a question for you: it looks as though Josef Fritzl faces a maximum sentence of fifteen years. Fifteen years for subjecting his daughter to that twenty-four year ordeal. Does that sound like enough to you? Is that enough of a punishment for the pain this man has inflicted on his own flesh and blood?

No?

Well what would you do with him then?

I've been wrestling with this all day today. My gut reaction is that fifteen years is derisory, but the wishy-washy liberal in me is struggling with the idea that we can make a special case, even of this man, and change the rules for a more fitting punishment. And what would that punishment be? How long would be enough? 20 years? Should "life" mean "life"? Is incarceration even enough of a punishment? No? Perhaps we could hurt him the way that he hurt his children? Would it make anything better? An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth? How would that work exactly? What about the death penalty? Would a judicially sanctioned murder achieve anything? Would it bring back those lost years or give those kids any sense of justice?

No, no, no.

These are difficult questions and I don't have any answers, but the more I think about it, the less comfortable I feel with any of the options on the table. Fifteen years doesn't seem enough, but changing the law or moving outside it to look for alternatives doesn't seem to achieve anything either. Society might have created this monster, this intense humming of evil, but I'm sure he was nice to his mother and paid his bills on time. What choice does a civilized society have but to obey its own laws?

Perhaps it's enough for now that those children have been freed from that cellar and can try to start their lives again and will never have to see that man again. It's hardly ideal, but what alternative do they have?

What would you do with him?

it's gettin' hot in here (hot)....

After I've dragged myself inefficiently up and down the swimming pool fifty-two times, I like to reward myself by flopping out in the sauna for ten minutes or so. Generally, I'll just sit there and try not to think about how hot I feel until I start to feel that sticky-outy bit just on the opening of my ear (what is that called?) starting to burn. If there's a paper in there, I'll read it. What I won't generally do is strike up a conversation with anyone who happens to be in there. If someone talks to me, then I'll answer, but to be honest, it's not really somehwere that I want to be making new friends. On the whole I prefer to make friends with people who aren't naked. Well, most of the time anyway. I am, however, quite often entertained by other people's conversations in the sauna. Yesterday was no exception.

Bloke 1 walks into the sauna and spots a guy that he knows. "Hey there, how's it going? Got a job yet?"

Bloke 2: "Well, I'm doing agency work at the moment, but I've got 5 interviews lined up next week."

Bloke 1: "That's pretty good going. You're bound to get one of those."

Bloke 2: "Yeah, finger's crossed. I tend to do pretty well once I get to the interview stage. I've got a job offer on the table already, but I'm holding out for one of these other jobs."

Bloke 1: "Yeah? More interesting are they?"

Bloke 2: "Yeah. I want a job that doesn't have any responsibility at all, if I can help it. I want to enjoy what I do, do my hours and get home. I don't want to get wrapped up in any politics."

Bloke 1: "I know what you mean. So what have you been doing then?"

Bloke 2: "Agency work for Derby Council. Last week I was out cutting people's grass. It's tiring work, but it's a decent job."

Bloke 1: "Right"

So far, the conversation was only mildly interesting, mainly in the sense that it took my mind off the fact that I was slowly cooking myself and that the rotator muscles in my right arm were hurting from the swim. We were about to take a conversational left-turn though.

Bloke 2: "Mind you. You do meet some funny people on this job."

Bloke 1: "Yeah?"

Bloke 2: "I knocked on a door the other day, and this woman opened it wearing only a bra and knickers."

Bloke 1: "How old?"

Bloke 2: "Well, that doesn't matter as I wasn't interested anyway"

Bloke 1: "Yeah, but how old was she?"

Bloke 2: "Mid-Forties maybe. No - late thirties."

Bloke 1: "Okay then!"

Bloke 2: "She asked me in for a cup of tea"

Bloke 1: "And you said.....?"

Bloke 2: "No thanks love, I'm here to cut the grass."

Bloke 1: "Well, you are taken I suppose"

Bloke 2: "It was the first cut of the year though, and it was a bit damp, so I had to tell her that I wouldn't be able to cut the grass back too much. You know what she said to that?"

Bloke 1: "....."

Bloke 2: "Oh, I know what it's like when it's all wet down there. Are you sure you don't want to come in for a cup of tea?"

Bloke 1: "Bloody hell"

Bloke 2: "I know. No thanks love, I'm only here to cut the grass. You get loads like that."

So apparently things like that DO actually happen. Perhaps in the best traditions of Monty Python, she has a spare room filled with council workers who came to mow the lawn....

My ears were starting to burn, so at this point, like all good reporters, I made my excuses and left.

counting all the ripples on the sea...

In his first post of 2008, Andrew Collins had an idea.
"It's a new year. Time to solve the problems of the world - and there are one or two - before it's too late. I've been thinking about this for a while now, and it's dawned on me that the only way we're going to make the world a better place without having to plough through all that due process and red tape and so-called democracy is to start being better ourselves."

Fair enough. Be the change you want to see in the world and all that.

But how?

He put forward the following and called it The Manners Manifesto

1. Smile
2. Say please and thank you
3. Let that car in
4. Be friendly to strangers
5. Help old people off or on the bus
6. Buy the Big Issue and give some change to the homeless
7. Be polite to Jehovah's Witnesses
8. Never swear at people on the other end of helplines
9. Never, ever drop litter
10. Leaving bags of stuff outside charity shops when they're closed? Come on!
11. Talk to people at the check-out
12. Don't swear when there are kids about

The thinking behind each one is detailed in the post itself, and it worth having a look at the follow-up discussion that this stimulated on Metafilter (if only to marvel at the idiot who thinks it's his right to litter the world with his butt ends if the world insists on banishing him outside into the cold to smoke).

I'm sure you don't agree with it all, and none of this stuff should need to be said at all, but the sad truth is that we could probably all do with a bit of a brush-up on a few of the points. Here's my own self-assessment:

good: 2, 8, 9, 11
could do more: 1, 3, 4, 6 (but at least I always make eye contact), 12
not really relevant, but yes in principle: 5, 7, 10

Actually, I reckon I could still do more of the things I think I'm alright at.

The point is, I think, is that we are all human beings and we're all in this together. We can either try to make the journey as pleasant as possible for each other, or we can decide not to bother. You don't have to be a pushover, but you just have to try to remember that it's easy to make somebody's day, and it's easy to ruin someone's day... sometimes you have the choice. Which one would you prefer someone chose for you?

Christ, I sound like a hippy.

I'm not the most outgoing of people in the main, but I do enjoy being as polite and friendly as I can manage with the people I run into in the course of my normal day... not the people I know, of course - I'm a bastard to them. I mean the people I don't know: the checkout girl, the bus driver, the taxi driver, a waitress. A smile here, a little comment there, making absolutely sure that all my Ps and Qs are in the right places... it doesn't take much. Some people will always be miserable bastards, of course, but actually surprisingly few, and when someone responds positively with a smile or whatever, I find that little spark of human interaction really gives me a kick and puts a spring in my step.

Of course, when she sees me doing this, C. generally accuses me of being a flirt and of having a magic touch with ladies of a certain age.... well, that's not it at all. I'm not denying that I find it easier to make a connection with ladies, but it's definitely not flirting - not consciously, anyway. Jesus - I wish I could be so relaxed about flirting, but I've always been absolutely hopeless at it. Terrible. I've never knowingly chatted up or flirted with anyone in my life, I don't think. The very thought of it makes me start to sweat. If, as C. alleges, my behaviour is tantamount to flirting, then perhaps I have the slightly unfortunate ability only to flirt with people I'm not really seriously interested in flirting with.

Whatever. It's not flirting. I'm just doing my bit to make the world a better place, one person at a time (two at a time, if you count me).

Anyway. Enough about me. How do you score?

read all about it....

There's no two ways about it: travelling in rush hour traffic can be be boring. I'm lucky enough that my commute only takes me fifteen minutes or so, but sometimes even that measly quarter of an hour can seem to drag. As I usually travel on my own, I tend to pass the time in the car listening to the radio or singing along to a CD. It's also quite a good opportunity to people watch, as within the bubble of their own car, people tend to imagine that they're somehow invisible and behave accordingly. You see people applying make-up, having a shave, picking their nose, having an argument on the phone, kissing their passenger... all sorts of things.

Even so, it's still pretty dull.

Mind you, it might be tedious, but I think that the guy who overtook me this morning whilst reading the paper was taking things too far - he was literally holding the newspaper up with both hands in front of his steering wheel as he came past me.

I would have tried to stay alongside him for a while, but it was yesterday's paper and I'd already read it.

no need to laugh and cry...

I was saddened today to read of the death of Jane Tomlinson after a seven year battle against cancer. She was a truly remarkable and inspirational woman who raised in excess of £1.75m for cancer charities after her diagnosis, when she was told that she had six months to live.

I think what affected me most about was not so much the fact that she raised so much money (although this is clearly remarkable in its own right), but the manner in which she raised it: she ran three London marathons, a New York marathon and several Great North Runs. She is the only person to have completed a marathon whilst undergoing chemotherapy. As if that wasn't enough, she cycled from Lands End to John O'Groats, from Rome to Leeds and the 3,700 miles between the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco and the Brooklyn Bridge in New York. The ones that really get me the most though are the triathlons: as well as competing in three London Triathlons (1500m swim, 40km cycle, 10km run), she successfully completed an Iron Man Triathlon in Florida.

Just think about that.

This woman had terminal cancer. She was told her cancer was incurable in 2000 and, as well as having a mastectomy, was often in excruciating pain in her bones, neck, hips, back and shoulders. As if that wasn't enough, she also developed a heart problem because of the medication regimes she was on.....but still she was able to complete a triathlon that consisted of a 2.4 mile swim, 112 mile cycle ride and a full marathon to finish. All in the same day - in fact inside sixteen hours.

How many people at their absolute physical peak could even hope to match that kind of feat? How many of us would even get to the starting line? As someone who has dabbled in triathlons myself, I was totally in awe of her achievements, particularly since I haven't done a triathlon since 2005 when I was first diagnosed with Transverse Myelitis.

She leaves behind a husband and three children, but she was a huge inspiration to thousands of people and a tremendous example of fortitude and determination. When I saw the news, I was moved to make a donation to the charity that bears her name, and if you feel so inclined, you can do the same thing too.

She was an amazing person who simply refused to be beaten. She used to say that “Death doesn’t arrive with the prognosis" and simply wanted to show that terminally ill people could lead an active and fruitful life.

No kidding.

What a life.

I really must pull my finger out and do some triathlons for the MS Society. I have absolutely no excuses.