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

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.

(Anesthesia)

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....

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?

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

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.

one bad apple....

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....

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......

no easy way out....

You might have missed this, but the other day, a weight-loss drug was shifted from being prescription only to being widely available over the counter in your local chemists. How is Alli different to the drugs that you've been offered for years in those emails that you might find in your spam folder? Well, it actually works: it stops your body from absorbing approximately 1/4 of all of the fat that you eat as part of your normal diet. As a result, so they say, you are able to lose 50% more weight than you would normally shift through dieting alone - lost 2lb on a normal diet, and you would have lost 3lb if you'd been using Alli.

In theory, this drug is only to be used in conjunction with a healthy, low fat diet. It's only supposed to be used by people with a body mass index of more than 28 (i.e. "overweight"). You can see the attraction, right? Apparently 40% of the population are trying to lose weight at any given time, but I'm not sure I know many people who wouldn't be happy to take a shortcut like this that would cut a bit of extra fat out of their diet without them needing to do a single thing differently. Who doesn't feel like they've over-indulged at Christmas? Who doesn't occasionally feel regretful about that late-night curry or that portion of fish and chips when you couldn't be bothered to cook? Well, if you took Alli, then 25% of that extra fat would simply not be absorbed by your body. It's a "get out of jail free" card. Brilliant, no?

No.

There was a programme on telly the other day talking about the huge surge in the numbers of people getting gastric bands. It showed the healthcare professionals consulting with people who swore blind that they'd tried everything to lose weight and that this was their last chance. It also showed those same people nipping into McDonalds and having a Happy Meal to keep them going until they got home for their tea. In short, it showed that people were resorting to surgery instead of changing their lifestyles; instead of facing up to the simple equation that if calorific intake is greater than the rate of calory burn, then the result is weight gain, these people were going in search of the magic bullet that would help them lose weight without changing a damn thing about their lifestyle. For these people, Alli is simply going to be another form of magic bullet.

There's another type of person who will be desperate to take this drug though: the kind of person who is probably at a perfectly healthy weight, but who, for some reason, wants to lose a bit of weight. They might have body issues (who doesn't?) and want to lose a bit of weight; they may simply want to tone up a bit before their holidays or to go out for a really big meal and not feel like a fat bastard. These people will take Alli. Yes, technically you need to have a BMI of 28 before you can get the drug, but how is that going to stop anyone? The drug company and the retailers know that the diet market is massive and they know that people are going to be swallowing these pills down like candy. How hard are they going to enforce that guideline? Well, judging by the website of one well-known UK high street retailer.... not very. They ask you to confirm your height and weight, and they ask you a few other questions about your dietary habits.... but then they'll happily sell you the drug, with prices starting at £32.95 for 42 tablets. Hell, there's a recession on, you know. You have to make your money somewhere, right?

But there's a sting in the tail. What do you think happens to all the fat that this drug stops your body from absorbing? It passes through your body, of course. Sadly, your body isn't really equipped to prevent pure fat from exiting your body in this way, and do you know what that means? Yes, it means anal leakage. You shit fat. Mmm. Nice.



Think you can live with that? Well, apparently it also means that the fat passes straight through your body. You might sit down to enjoy a curry, but you probably won't make it home before some of that richness tries to make an unscheduled exit from your body. Are you ready for that? I know a guy who was on this stuff when it was only available through prescription. He tells me that it doesn't take very long before you realise that a curry simply isn't worth the cost and you give it a miss. Nice.

This may very well be a tremendous aid to helping people lose weight, but you cannot tell me that the prime market for this isn't going to be people who simply don't need to use it. Retailers know this, but they can't see past the amount of money they will make from selling this as fast as they can. They're making a few token efforts to make it look like they're not just selling this to everyone, but really they're just selling it to everybody. In my view, they don't care enough. How long before someone kills themselves with this stuff? There are enough people with eating disorders already, do they really need access to something that will help them starve their body of nutrients and to starve themselves to death? Why has this been shifted from prescription only... when you'd need a doctor to agree that this was a sensible option.... to being readily available instore? Money.

Oh, why am I bothering? You're reading this and thinking you can see the appeal, aren't you? Well, plenty of places will be happy to sell it to you. Be my guest. You might want to buy yourself some more pants, but be my guest.....

no big hair...

Right, well a review of Tuesday's Elbow gig should be forthcoming tomorrow, but I've been otherwise engaged this evening at the LeftLion pub quiz, so....

In the meantime, I thought I'd share this with you. It's a comment that was genuinely left on the Evening Post review of last week's Metallica gig at the Nottingham Arena:

"in reply to cb........the best 2 bands in the world r guns n roses and metallica and seein gnr at milton keynes in 93(with long hair)was possibly the best day of my life.....the 2nd best day was when i saw metallica at download 2006(again with long hair)....i ve now had my hair cut off as i got it caught in a tractor last september"

Brilliant. It's the human condition, with all of its triumph and disaster, summarised in a single comment. Brian in Grantham - you are an absolute legend and I salute you.

As for the quiz.... well, we reclaimed our crown by the small matter of 8 clear points from second place. To paraphrase the great Severiano Ballesteros, tonight we fuck them.

the death of all the romance...

In case you hadn't noticed - and actually, it's pretty much passed me by this year - it's Valentine's Day on Saturday this week. You can almost see the restauranteurs rubbing their hands with delight, can't you? I imagine that they'll have been calculating for months exactly how little time they can allow each dinner shift to wolf down their overpriced set menus before shoving them out into the street and warmly and sincerely welcoming in the next bunch of suckers in for service. Waiters will have been practising clearing tables so that they can have the next course down almost before you've finished putting your fork down....

Ah, but surely not everyone is as cynical about this horrible commercial travesty as I am? Surely there are some young lovers out there who are looking forward to spending a special evening with their chosen one? There must be at least one or two lovelorn mooners hoping that they will catch a sympathetic eye, ear and heart with a well-chosen card, poem or maybe a heartfelt compilation CD whose tracklisting will, with hindsight, reveal far more about their state of mind than they had intended (we've all been there, right?)

Well, if the following conversation that I overheard at the gym this evening is to be believed, then romance isn't dead. I was minding my own business in the privacy of my shower cubicle, when two voices caught my ear and I couldn't help but listen....

"So go on then, what's her name?"
"I'm not going to tell you. You don't know her anyway."
"Did you....you know?
"Yes. Last night. But you don't know her, so there's no point me telling you who she is"
"I'll find out, you know I'll find out. I'll ask Benton".
"He doesn't know her either. He didn't even know about me and Liz"
"You and Liz?"
"Yeah."
"When did you knob her?"
"Just before I went on holiday."
"Nice one."
"Yeah. It was definitely a one off though. I was wasted, totally off my face and next thing I remember we were waking up together...."

etc.

"Love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs,
Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers' eyes,
Being vexed, a sea nourished with lovers' tears.
What is it else? A madness most discreet,
A choking gall and a preserving sweet. "

Truly, we are living in the new age of chivalry.

snake eyes watching you....

Of an evening, when I've got nothing better to do, I quite often find that the TV works its way towards Dave and I end up watching old episodes of Top Gear, QI, Never Mind The Buzzcocks, Mock the Week and suchlike. They're repeats, of course, but they are generally pretty funny and it's an easy way to pass the time. Easier, certainly, than watching Celebrity Big Brother, anyway.

One thing really gets up my nose though: the primetime coverage on Dave is sponsored by Cobra beer, and we get little adverts at the start and end of every advertising break. There's nothing wrong with that, particularly, and generally I find adverts fairly easy to tune out, but I find these particular adverts absolutely insufferable.

They feature the three characters pictured above, sitting at the bar in a pub chatting over a Cobra, and they have the tagline "Prime time on Dave with Cobra beer -- Now You're Talking". I think the idea, although it's not very clearly articulated, is that Cobra is less gassy than other beers, thus promoting easier conversation in the pub.

Eh? Well, exactly.

The trouble is that not only are these ads not in the slightest bit funny, but they are also irritating, smug and self-satisfied.... which I'm not sure is entirely what Cobra had in mind when they commissioned them.

Here's a sample.

[waitress breezes past with a tray of food]
"Wow, the food here looks amazing"
"Is this a gastro pub?"
Well, they've got [pause] gastronomical prices"
Smug laughter all round.

or

[barman is making cocktails in the background]
"I've got a recipe for a cocktail"
"Oh yes?"
"Yes, you take half a pint of Cobra, and you mix it with another half pint of Cobra"
Smug laughter all round.
Prime time with Cobra. Now you're talking.

Or

[man singing tunelessly into a microphone]
"You've got to love karaoke night"
"Someone always murders 'my way'"
"....by doing it their way"
Smug laughter all round.
Prime time with Cobra. Now you're talking.

...you get the general idea.

There are loads of them. None are funny. All are irritating.

What are Cobra going for here? Are they suggesting that people who drink Cobra beer are smug wankers, or are they trying to sell their beer to the smug wankers who they believe watch Dave? Either way, I have to be honest and say that neither scenario makes me want to be the kind of person who buys Cobra. Quite why anyone would want to associate their brand with this rubbish is beyond me.

What do you mean I'm wasting my time being irritated by something as pointless and inconsequential as this?

In case you hadn't noticed, that's what I do.

your lovely head...

It doesn't seem quite so remarkable now that everyone wears them, but sometime around the early 1990s, I remember being struck how everybody on 'Neighbours' wore a helmet when they rode their bicycle. Thinking about it now, it was probably something that the producers of the programme made conspicuous entirely on purpose, as Australia was the first country in the world to impose uniform national mandatory bicycle helmet legislation, beginning in 1990. What self-respecting family-orientated cul-de-sac based soap opera wouldn't want to be encouraging its nation's children to ride safely?

Nearly thirty years later and still Britain has no equivalent law, and back then I had probably never seen such a thing being worn by a normal person before (if you can call Toadfish Rebecchi a normal person). Nowadays though, even though we're not obliged to wear them, it is far more likely that you will see a cyclist wearing a helmet than you are to see one without. I think I bought my first helmet because it was a pre-condition for competing in a triathlon I had entered, but I certainly wouldn't get on my bike without it now.

I mention all this because I have just bought myself a ski helmet. I go skiing every year, and it's something that has been nagging at me for a little while. If I won't get on my bike without a helmet, why am I happy to hurl myself down a mountain at speeds in excess of 30mph wearing only a beanie?



Although a helmet is obviously not a guarantee of safety, the statistics make for interesting reading:

"44% of skiers currently wear a helmet and 42% are intending to wear one the next time they visit the slopes. One reason for this growth is that out of 84,200 winter sports injuries recorded last season, 17,500 were head related. It is believed that out of those 17,500, 7,700 injuries and 11 deaths could have been avoided if they had been wearing a helmet."

To be honest, I value my brain quite a lot. Certainly enough to spend a few quid on a helmet. Did I really want to wait until I had an accident before I took the plunge? Surely every single person who skis has seen the dreadful sight of someone being taken down the mountain headfirst in a stretcher? Forget the stats: intuitively, do you reckon that it's better if you hit your head with or without a helmet? I realise it's better not to hit your head at all, but even the best skiier in the world can't do anything about someone crashing into them from behind, can they? Everyone falls over. Everyone. You might think that snow is a soft landing, but most pistes are packed pretty hard, and there are always things like trees, rocks and barriers that you could run into. Perhaps I'm getting old, but the more I thought about it, the more I thought that I should get myself a helmet.

Of course, given that I have a massive head, my next problem was to find a helmet that fitted me properly. I did a bit of research so that I had a reasonable grasp of what I should be looking for, and on Saturday, having taken the precaution of ringing ahead to make sure they had my likely size, we made the trip over to the Tamworth Snow Dome to have a look in our nearest decent skiing shop. No can do. Didn't fit. So I trooped back to Nottingham and ended up buying the first helmet I'd tried on the week before: The Red Hi-Fi. Obviously, it makes me look silly. And between now and the first day I wear it on the slopes, I'm going to be fretting if it fits me properly. I'm wearing it now to see if can tell.

So far so good.

It's quite warm, worn indoors with the heating on, anyway. No, please don't come round and look through the living room window. I know it looks ridiculous.

Reading this though, I'm fairly sure I've done the right thing. About wearing it on the mountain, that is, not on the sofa.

insufficient funds....

There is, it seems, some debate about the origin of the term "Pound" as used to describe the currency used by Great Britain. Some people think that it dates back to Anglo-Saxon times, when a silver coin called a sterling was produced by King Offa of Mercia, and 240 of these coins weighed exactly one pound. Other people reckon that it's a Norman term dating to around 1300 and used to refer to a small silver penny. What seems to be undisputed is the fact that the Pound Sterling is the world's oldest currency still in use today, and this fact appears to be the source of great pride for many Britons. Well, you can understand it, can't you? Your currency is an extension of your nationality; it represents you. When the pound is strong, we feel a sense of great pride. We may have an industrial base the size of a small vole, and 85% of all manufactured goods in this country are probably made elsewhere, but one unit of our currency is likely worth about ten of yours. Ha! Take that Johnny Foreigner. One-Nil to us. We like to go abroad and to feel that we're getting a good deal because the Pound is strong. In November this year, the Pound hit a 26 year high at a little over $2.11 to the £. We rejoiced. We marvelled at how much more bang we would have for our buck. We care not a jot that this same exchange rate makes Britain an unfeasibly expensive destination for many tourists and that our industry is seriously disadvantaged by these prices. Why should we care? We get cheaper jeans and cameras and stuff.

Of course, now the economy has collapsed, the boot is on the other foot: the Pound is now worth something like 1.1 Euros - which means that the exchange rate being offered to travellers (after commission and so on) saw a British Pound as actually being worth less than a Euro. Cue national despair. Oh, what is to become of us? Our currency is baseless and our sense of national self-worth is disappearing down the toilet. There's even been some crazy talk that we may find ourselves forced to actually join the Euro zone, which would mean throwing away thousands and thousands of years of our history and cultural heritage. Worse still: it would mean throwing our lot in with the French.

Is it just me, or does anyone else not actually give a damn what our national currency is? I don't derive any great sense of inner wellbeing from our coinage, and I certainly don't feel that my self-worth is bound up in having a picture of the Queen's head on my banknotes. I don't have strong feelings either way about how the Pound is performing against other national currencies. These things tend to fluctuate, and although it may notionally be more expensive now to buy a drink in New York than it was in November, it also costs me more to have a drink in London than it does in Nottingham, and we use the same tender.

What's the big deal?

As a historian, I can sort of understand the attraction of the heritage behind the Pound.... but then, that's really only a name, isn't it? Surely there's no one who seriously believes that the Pound we use now has any more than a notional link with the one used in Anglo-Saxon times? The name has remained with us, but over the years, the currency has been systematically debased, changed many times (including the move away from coins that actually contained precious metals and into paper promissory notes), locked into the gold standard, tied to a fixed exchange rate with the dollar, released from the gold standard, decimalised, tracked the deutsche mark, locked into the ERM, kicked out of the ERM and now floating freely against other currencies in the world. Would it really make all that much difference if we gave it all up and went with the Euro? Would the world really be that much worse a place if we woke up to find the Pound gone? Would our morale as a nation plummet?

No, it wouldn't. Of course it wouldn't. As soon as the Euro became legal tender in this country, you can bet that there would be a rush to get hold of it, and the Pound would become a thing of the past even before it was formally phased out. That's what happened here with decimalisation in 1971, and that's what happened in the other countries in the Euro Zone, so why would we think we would be any different now? Would we object to the throwing away of thousands of years of history and make a principled stand? No. Why would you bother?

So why make such a fuss about it now? The Pound Sterling is a symbol of the British currency. The value of the Pound is determined by the perceived strength or weakness of our economy relative to others. That is all. It is weak now because our economy is relatively weak. It does not say anything much else about us as a nation. Worry about the state of the economy, if you like, but the state of the currency? Nah. You may be valued by it, and your net worth may be measured in it, but why would you want to derive your sense of self-worth from the symbol of a currency?

That said, I'm not an economist, so perhaps I'm missing something?

and it's not not knowing that there ain't nothin' showin'....

... and so the streak continues.

It was a bit of a close run thing last night, but we've now won the Leftlion pub quiz, hosted by Nottingham's Mr. Sex every Wednesday night in the Golden Fleece, no fewer than eight times in a row. We actually got taken to a tie-break last night.... which we lost..... but there was a discrepancy between the score we thought we had and the score that we had been given. So we checked. Not because we desperately wanted to win, you understand, but because if we didn't find out which answer we'd got wrong that we thought we'd got right, we'd never be able to live with ourselves. I was already starting to dwell on the critical half point I lost by changing my mind about the name of the Blondie song played on the bontempi organ, moving it neatly from the right answer to the nearly right, but still oh-so-wrong, answer..... I'd hate to be responsible for breaking the streak and all.

Although, in a way, when we thought we'd lost, I actually experienced a moment of relief....

So we asked Nottingham's Mr. Sex for clarification, just for our own sake and -- bless him -- he did a countback and realised he'd made a mistake and that actually we'd won by a clear point.

We didn't want the prize or owt.

We just wanted to know that we won.

So we left, and the streak is still on.

Not that it matters really. It's a nice night out with good company, good food, decent beer and an excellent and very entertaining quiz.

Plus it's always nice to see the faces of the team that used to win when they see that we've turned up again....

...I'm pretty sure that everyone in that pub hates us. I'm not sure I blame them.

bright eyes...

I know what the highway code says, but I'm afraid to say that if a bunny hops out in front of me on the road, and as long as my spidey senses tell me that it's okay to do so, I'm going to swerve. That's all there is to it. I've hit a rabbit on the road before, either when I had absolutely no time to react, or when it simply would have been insane or suicidal to try to steer around it. Every single time it's happened, even if there was nothing I could do about it and it was my life or the rabbit's, I still felt awful. I know it's only a bunny, and I know that it's stupid to risk your own life and the lives of others by recklessly swerving around the road, but if I can safely avoid a bunny and thus avoid having that horrible feeling again, I will. It makes a horrible noise, for one thing.

As it happens, the A46 was pretty quiet when Thumper flopped out in front of me on Friday night, so my evasive manouevres wouldn't have caused anyone any distress. He was very cute, but with a home that close to a busy dual-carriageway and with an apparent death-wish, I don't fancy his chances of a long happy life and a carrot filled retirement on Watership Down.... but at least I don't have his death on my conscience.

Speaking of Thumper, have I ever mentioned that I've never seen Bambi? It's one of a long line of films that everyone says that I should have seen that I simply have not seen. ET? nope. Ghost? pfff. Close Encounters? Hmmm, there's the Dreyfuss factor to consider there. Dumbo? Pinocchio? Fantasia? No, although I have seen the Fox and the Hound, and it made me cry like a baby. Grease? Well, I've seen Grease II starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Maxwell Caulfield, and I just plain don't believe that the original can be any better than that. How do you improve upon perfection?

Telling me I simply *must* see any of the above is more likely than not going to make me more determined *not* to watch it. And seriously, I really do have zero interest in watching ET.

ETII, starring (hopefully)Angela Lansbury, Kenny Baker and Burt Reynolds? Well, now you're talking...!

---

I don't know about you, but I spent almost all of my weekend sat on a sofa drinking beer and watching golf.... at least 36 hours from Friday to Sunday. Even though Europe ultimately surrendered the Ryder Cup to the USA, it was still fantastic entertainment. I've been discussing this in a comments box with Cody over the weekend, but no matter how much I wanted Europe to win, there's not a shadow of doubt in my mind that the side that played the better golf won. I also think that after three European wins in a row, the last two with record margins, I think this is the right result for the future of the competition too. It was really good to finally see a US team playing as more than just a collection of individuals and showing some real fight and passion for the cause. Well done to the USA and roll on the 2010 match up at Celtic Manor. After watching him in the flesh at the K-Club in 2006, I was also really pleased that Jim Furyk took the winning point. He's played a lot of great golf in this competition, showed a lot of dignity and come away with absolutely nothing to show for it... until now. Good on him, I say, and well done the USA.

Europe to win next time though please....

un mosquito....

"....to which genus of mosquito?"

Paxman was already more than halfway through the question by the time we had changed channels.

"Anopheles," I said triumphantly.

The students were bemused and were only able to come up with "erm, Yellow Mosquito?".

"Nooooo," said Paxman, "Anopheles".

I was quite chuffed at that. We'd caught less than half of the question - and it was a difficult question too - and yet I'd come up with the correct answer. None of those clever minds from Southampton University had known the answer to that, and they'd had the advantage of hearing all of the question.

C. was less impressed.

"How many other genus of mosquito can you name?"

And thus was the bubble of my own self-satisfaction punctured before it had really had a chance to inflate. I ask you, there can't be all that many people who can name a single genus of mosquito... hell, C herself couldn't name a single genus of mosquito.... and yet she knew me well enough to know that I might not know more than one.

The fact that it was the right one was neither here nor there.

Pub quiz tonight. Well, you have to use your brain for something during the working week, don't you?

...but I feel fine?

So, is that it then?



Are we still here? Have we survived the latest Big Bang?

It looks as though this charade will have to continue for a while longer then?

After all that worry. Honestly, what's the worst thing that can happen?

"Don't be afraid," my voice said. "No one is allowed to die more than once. The comedy will be over soon, and you'll never have to go through it again."

So why worry?

I'm with Kilgore Trout on this: "Life is no way to treat an animal."

What a ridiculous species we are.

Incidentally, what's the creationist stance on this? Should Genesis really read:

"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
And God flicked the switch on a large machine and sent a beam of particles through a long tunnel and created the world in about 5 seconds.
He rested for the remainder of that day and generally took it easy for the rest of the week."

Perhaps it should.

let's talk about sex....

I received a brilliant email yesterday. It looked as though it had been addressed to me personally, but I imagine it's been sent to hundreds if not thousands of people. Hell, you might have it. You should check your inbox -- it's definitely worth a look.

It's from someone glorying in the name of Dr. Tuppy Owens, and it's a press release for the "Erotic Awards Showcase & Ball".

Sounds promising already, right? And that's even before you get to the quote from Grayson Perry saying that the event is “The Glastonbury of sex – these are the good people in a gloriously mucky Business". Wow. Grayson Perry, Turner Prize winning artist and cross-dresser said that? Maybe this is worth a closer look, eh?

Well, a quick perusal of the press release reveals that:

"Fundraising The Night of the Senses (now in it's 22nd year) and the Erotic Awards are the main fundraisers for the Outsiders Trust, a charity set up by Dr Tuppy Owens in 1979 for disabled people to enjoy sexual pleasure and form relationships."

Cool. Apparently, "The night begins with the announcement of the winners, who are presented with Golden Flying Penis Trophies which have been hand carved in Bali."

Hand carved Golden Flying Penis Trophies from Bali? Sounds brilliant. Apparently the award ceremony is then followed by the performances onstage: "fashion shows, performance art and striptease, a hot show that warms up our guests so they spill out merrily into the maze of pleasure palaces. Every taste is catered for: the Sensuality Chamber where couples make love serenaded by musicians, the Roissy Dungeon, the Infinity Dome, Golden Pond, Massage Garden, Boys' Back Room, Women's Womb, Café Shebeen and Grope Box."

My absolute favourite bit though is the announcement of the guests. Amongst the various artists, academics and international film makers, we have:

"Sue Newsome, Tantric sex worker from the West Country"

I don't know where to begin with that, really: the distractingly normal-sounding name that could (and perhaps does) belong to a jam-making pillar of the community; the fact that she's not just a sex worker, but a tantric sex worker; the fact that she's from that infamous den of iniquity in the West Country.....

This looks real enough, but I don't really know if this has been sent to me genuinely (but a little mystifyingly) as a press release or if it's simply a mailing that my spam filter has missed.... what I do know is that it made me smile and it's a whole lot better than the vast majority of the crap that I get sent offering me "v1agr@", or promising an appendage that "even lions will fear" or asking me to enter the personal security details for a bank I don't even have any accounts with.

If it's real, then I salute you and the cause you are upholding. If anyone reading this is interested in finding out more, then they should check out (at their own risk and presumably NSFW):

www.nightofthesenses.com
www.erotic-awards.co.uk (check out some of the acts in their showcase)
www.outsiders.org.uk
http://blog.nightofthesenses.org/

and apparently they have a presence on Facebook and MySpace.

A quick look at the websites and it looks like a proper event to me, and the more I think about it, the more pleased I am that it exists. Good luck to them. I'd buy a kiss off Mat Fraser, wouldn't you?

....I am curious about Sue Newsome, Tantric Sex Worker from the West Country though. I can't get her out of my head. She sounds like fun.

I've got a feeder for you to perch on...

I like birds, although I'm not so sure that they're very fond of me at the moment. We were driving home from a visit to my parents on Saturday when I contrived to run over a blackbird. It happened when I was just tootling along, minding my own business and obeying the speed limit on the way to the motorway junction. I saw a pair of blackbirds out of the corner of my eye on the side of the road, heard that distinctive alarm call and had just enough time to see the male bird launch itself into the air and in front of the car.

This has happened before, but usually you look in your rearview mirror to see the bird wheeling away into the air without a care in the world. This time I glanced back and saw a cloud of feathers and a lump in the middle of the road.

Ooops.

I know it's ridiculous, but as I drove on, I couldn't help but anthropomorphise the situation and imagined the female of the pair standing on the side of the road looking folornly at the body of her soulmate, wondering how she was going to feed all of those hungry mouths in the nest now.

We've got some blackbirds living near us, and they're frequent and welcome visitors in our garden and in the surrounding trees-- although perhaps a bit less frequent since we got the cat, mind. One often sits in the tree outside our bedroom window, and maybe it's my imagination, but he seems to be looking at me somewhat accusingly at the moment; my guilt confirmed when I fail to return his gaze and won't look him in the eye.

the team that every defender dreads....

When Manchester United last played in the final of the European Cup in 1999, my life was very different. I had split up with my girlfriend of some 4 years in March that year and after a difficult few weeks living under the same roof, when the final came around, I had literally just moved into a shared house. My books were all still in boxes in my ground-floor bedroom, and I was adjusting to my new circumstances.

I can actually remember exactly what I had for dinner that night too: a New Covent Garden corn chowder soup and a humous and herb salad sandwich. I sat in the living room with two of my new housemates, Sarah and Sally, as the game kicked off and United quickly went behind. Bayern Munich scored pretty early and never really looked like conceding as the game slowly petered out to a disappointing conclusion...

Or so I thought, anyway, as I went up the stairs to have a quick comfort break before the start of extra time.

I came back to find that, in the 30 seconds I was away, and before the final whistle had gone, Manchester Utd had scored to take the game into extra time.... except before I'd even sat down, Ole Gunnar Solskaer then scored an extremely unlikely winner and broke German hearts.

Things have changed for me in the last nine years, but other things have remained alarmingly static: I watched last night's game in the house I share with my lovely wife. That house is literally just over the road from that first shared house, so I was probably no more than 15m for the place where I sat and watched that game in 1999. C. was away in Paris, so I watched the game alone with a bowl of New Covent Garden Haddock chowder soup. Instead of a homous and herb salad sandwich, I had a couple of slices of toast (extra thick white, naturally). Instead of Sarah and Sally for company, I had the cat, who was probably if anything a little more interested in the game than they had been.

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.

Of course, being 9 years older and rapidly approaching middle-age, it was probably par for the course that I dozed through at least 35 minutes of the first half. It was a good game, but even then, I'm a bit surprised that I made it all the way through to the penalties.

If I was tired watching it, God knows how the people actually playing in the game felt....

If United make the final again in 9 years time, I'll expect I'll be tucked up in bed long before kick-off.

strange fruit....

I've developed a real taste for passion fruit. A veritable passion for them, you might say, although the "passion" in their name refers not to love, but to the passion of Christ... but I digress.

I suppose I'd always known that they existed, but I never really paid them much attention until we went out to Ecuador last year. Until then they had always been that small, wrinkly purple fruit that I vaguely recognised but never actively sought out. In South America though, they're quite a big deal. For starters, there are loads and loads of different types - they grow there, you know.... Walk through any market place and you'll see bucket loads of them, all freshly picked. Forget about the small purple ones and check out the huge granadillas or the curuba, whose fruit looks a bit like a banana. These are so fresh that they are warm to the touch from sitting in the sunshine, and you can peel them open with your bare hands and greedily suck out all the flesh and those deliciously sour seeds. Let me tell you: the humble passiflora family has got it all going on.

It's not quite the same as sitting out on a hotel veranda in Banos, sipping on a freshly squeezed maracujá juice and looking out over a gently smoking volcano whilst waiting for my breakfast, but eating a small, wizened passion fruit in front of my computer at work does take me away from the mundanity of work for a few wonderful seconds of positive association.

I suppose I should be grateful that you can buy passion fruit here at all. I discovered the tomate de árbol in Ecuador too - it makes a mean juice - but you can't seem to get it around here for love nor money.

You might think that our supermarkets give us enormous choice, and in some ways I suppose they do. When compared to the natural bounty on display in every single marketplace around the equator though, they ain't got nothing. In Ecuador they have so many bananas that you can buy a bucket of them for $1 and feed them to your cows. They're so common, you can pick them from the side of the road.

We might be rich in many ways, but there's no banana you can buy here that's tastier than one that you picked for yourself from the side of the road.

I think I need a holiday.