Mulva? Gipple?

I've been watching Season 4 of Seinfeld on DVD. Maybe not quite as funny as Season 3, but it's hard to say. There are still a fair share of classic episodes, like the Handicapped Space, and the one where everyone thinks George and Jerry are a gay couple... not that there's anything wrong with that.

The one I watched last night was the one in which he's dating a woman, but he doesn't know her name. Absolutely fucking brilliant. Everybody must have been in the situation at least once, of being on quite friendly terms with someone and then realising you don't know what to call them.

Instead of asking, "What's your name, by the way?" Seinfeld tries to fish for it, telling of the names he was called at school. She tells him that, of course, the kids at her school were merciless, because of her name rhyming with "a part of the female anatomy."

The look on his face after she said that was genius. So he tries all these different names on her, the joy of which is that they aren't remotely close to being names. When she finally twigs that he doesn't know, she challenges him, at which point he says, "Mulva?" As she's storming out, he calls after her: "Gipple?"

I tell you this because I know a lot of people won't have seen Seinfeld in the UK, buried as it was in the late-night BBC2 graveyard. The DVDs are definitely worth a look, if only to marvel at Elaine's clothes.

Only after she's left does the penny drop for him, and he shouts out of the window: "Dolores!"

Which is even funnier, because it doesn't really rhyme with anything. Apparently, the line was supplied by an audience member: in other words, they hadn't even thought of the payoff. Which is a bit like the story of Lennon writing "A Day in the Life" and having the line, "Now they know how many holes it takes to..." without knowing the end of it, "...the Albert Hall," which was supplied by someone else (Mal Evans? can't remember).

"There's nothing to worry about if you've done nothing wrong."

When you hear those weasel words from apologists for identity cards and draconian anti-terror laws, just remind them, gently (or with a fist to the throat, if you prefer) of the story of Walter Wolfgang, which we talked about yesterday.

For doing nothing more than shouting, "Nonsense" at some here-today-gone-tomorrow Labour empty suit, this man was not only forcibly ejected from the conference hall, which was bad enough, but also detained by the Police under the anti-terror laws, and refused re-entry to the hall under those same laws

So, in case it wasn't clear enough for the morons who support identity cards: daring to shout at a politician (let alone throwing eggs or manure, which is what they deserve) gets you branded as a "terrorist." As Simon Hoggart pointed out on yesterday's Guardian, people weren't even allowed to take sweeties into the conference hall, lest they choose to throw them at the "Four legs good, two legs better" piggies on the top table.

As we know, you're also a terrorist if you complain in a shop, at an airport, or in the bank. Not only will there often be hired thugs to bully you, but there will always be some shitbird public official who will treat you as a criminal and demand to see your papers - for no other reason than that the law says you have to carry them. Some skinny little individual with a Hitler moustache in the Post Office, for example, will demand them as a proof of identity for something you ordered from Amazon. You might not think that's so bad, but then they'll ask to see them before they'll let you into the Congestion Charge Zone, and when they stop you for having one headlight, and where will it end?

There's an over-used quotation about this sort of thing. "First they came for the Jews, and I said nothing." And so forth. But how appropriate it is here, and how stunningly inept of them to pick on a Holocaust survivor as one of their earliest, and most public, victims.

The only saving grace about corruption is that the corrupt are often inept. They have too much power, so they don't have to be clever about wielding it. So this is the first sign that all those promises about not abusing their anti-terror powers were so much hot air.

Don't let them get away with it.

See if this is not familiar to you:

From The Onion: Guy In Philosophy Class Needs To Shut The Fuck Up:

'I have no idea what Plato's ideal reality is, but I bet it doesn't include know-it-all little shits.'

Wald added: 'If he uses the word 'dialectical' one more time, I'm going to shove my copy of The Republic down his throat.'

It gives me chills. Like being back in my MA Critical Theory class. O yeah.

Venus and Mars

I tried to get some people at my company interested in blogging a while ago. A great way to give information to our customers on product availability, information about "known issues" (i.e. shoddy products that don't work properly), compatibility (ditto), carefully selected case studies etc.

One of the great ironies about working for a technology-based company is that you'll find more technophobes per square metre than on the Clapham Omnibus. Simon, who is the person I know who has the most in-depth and extensive knowledge of computers, is also the person I know who hates them the most. There's a clue for you, if you care to think about it.

Anyway, the short version is that nobody got involved, so the whole company blog thing never took off. And it's one more thing I'm associated with that sullies my good name.

But it's not the end of the world. And nor is the fact that The Observer Blog, that bold mainstream newspaper experiment with blogging, is to be mothballed. The Guardian still has a fair share of blogs, but none of them are quite as much fun, nor give quite as much insight, as The Observer one did.

But, you know, the Beatles may have split up, but we can still have Wings.

I'm not a great newspaper reader. I don't like the black finger thing, and I don't really have the time. I used to buy the Guardian religiously, but then realised I could buy the Radio Times and get the telly listings for the whole week. Sunday newspapers are a different beast. Much as I'd love that "New York Sunday Morning" kind of lifestyle, where you crawl from bed, grab the paper, make a bacon sarnie and a cuppa, and sit in bed reading the newspaper looking fabulous in your Boden pyjamas, I've never had it. My youngest wakes at the crack of dawn, regardless of the day of the week. And she wants her Weetabix and her CBeebies, and after that, well, I've got the album to finish.

That said, we'll sometimes walk round my sister's on a Sunday afternoon, and I'll read her paper, if she has one. Or one that's a week old, if it's all she has.

In fact, I'm more interested in the newspaper production process than I am in the newspaper content. It's like being more interested in cooking food than in eating it; or, to ride another hobby horse, wanting to know more about how a record is produced than about the personal life of the artist concerned. I'll happily read those long articles in Sound on Sound about how some crappy Sting record was recorded - though I'd never in a million years buy the album.

So I enjoyed the Observer Blog, and I'll miss it, and the generally cheery discussions that went on there; there were hardly any flame wars, and only the occasional, "Share a biscuit with an Ethiopian Child," which is pretty unusual for something so public, with such a large organisation behind it. But, just as most of the best Beatles songs, post 1966, came from Paul McCartney, most of what made the Observer Blog so enjoyable was down to the person who did most of the work: Rafael Behr.

So we'll still have Wings, is what I'm saying, and we've got C-Moon and Silly Love Songs to look forward to, and Mull of Kintyre 8 weeks at number one.

Custom Shop iPods*

Taking a leaf out of the Fender book Apple Computer announced yesterday that they had released a series of "pre-distressed" iPods, for customers who want their 'Pods to have that "lived-in" look.

Apple VP in charge of marketing, Shill Philler, said that "in response to customer demand" they had released a series of iPod Nanos in various states of disrepair. "Some customers want them to look totally shagged ," added Philler, "whereas others merely want a hint of scratching and slight wear and tear."

The Fender musical instrument company has for some years been selling "distressed" guitars from their custom shop. These range in appearance from "New Old Stock" - meaning it shows signs of age but has never been played - through to "Relic" - meaning the guitar has scratched and chipped paint, a worn fingerboard, and oxidised hardware. in the middle sits the "Closet Classic", which looks as if it is very old, but has been lovingly stored in a cupboard for many years.

There is undoubted caché attached to owning an iPod Nano that is obviously older than those owned by everybody else. Apple warned, however, that the customising took time to do properly, so that there would be a price premium and constrained supply of scratched, dented, and cracked iPod Nanos. "First come, first served," said Philler.

===========

*Note to Apple lawyers: fuck off.

Customer Service is our Watchword

The story of the 2,000 Year Old Heckler makes me angrier than almost anything I've heard on the news recently. Because it's a symptom, isn't it, of the disease that affects our political culture, and more:

Walter Wolfgang, of London, was ejected after shouting 'nonsense' as the foreign secretary defended Iraq policy.
Party chairman Ian McCartney later apologised to Mr Wolfgang, calling the manner of his removal 'inappropriate'.(emphasis added)

Older readers will remember that, not long ago, I suffered the indignity of being treated like cattle at Luton Airport, as two passport control officers slowly worked through about 6 planeloads of passengers' passports, glancing (cursorily) at each one, forcing people with children and hand luggage to stand for over an hour in a cramped arrivals hall.

That night, the woman standing behind me completely lost it and started shouting - and she wasn't the only one. Police were called, and they joined the many other airport staff who were standing around enjoying the spectacle of tired and angry people being forced to wait. The police stood there with their "riot" expressions on; you know, looking as mean and angry as possible while the people who pay their taxes to pay their wages were being herded slowly through. It didn't help that nobody was queuing, that it was every man for himself, so that those of us with young kids were being squished and pushed around from all angles; but neither did it help that the police who are there to serve us were looking at us like criminals.

Anyway, the woman who was heckling from behind me was accosted by a fat not-laughing policeman as soon as she finally got through. I didn't wait to hear what the tosser said, because it was near midnight and the kids and we were tired. But the first thing he said was, "RIGHT..." as he stood in front of her, arms folded, and a Ray Winstone Angry Face on him.

Fuck off, I thought. Fuck off you shitfaced jobsworth no-empathy bastard, fuck off and die.

But I didn't say anything, oh no. As Bruce Springsteen once sang, "You end up like a dog that's been beat too much, spend half your life just covering up."

A few years ago, when our oldest was just a baby, we were once stuck in the queue at the Channel Tunnel, waiting to board. And were in a moving queue of cars to get on the next crossing. And this had never happened to me (before or since), but as we reached the front of the queue (where the traffic light is), an official stepped in front of us and stopped us, waving some motorcyclists through who had arrived a long time after we had.

We'd already been waiting quite a while, and the baby was in the back of the car getting restless, and, well, I was absolutely livid.

I find the whole queuing-to-get-on very stressful. It fills me with anxiety, and I hate being behind faffers. You know, people at the queue to check-in, who arrive at the front of the queue and appear not to have anything ready. No booking reference, no credit cards, no passports. You see them arseing around in their cars looking for things, and then asking lots of questions. "We'll be going on a train will we? And it will be under the sea will it? And is it a steam train, a diesel, or electric? How does the electricity get under the sea?"

And so on. So I get stressed by that. And I get stressed by the Mr Casuals. The ones who get out of their cars and wander around in their chinos and then are not in their cars when the queue starts to move, so that you have to wait for them to get slowly in, fumble with their seatbelt, look for their keys, start the engine find the right gear, etc. Which is why - when you've been behind Mr Casual, and you finally get to the front of the queue, and you see him waved through and then you get stopped by the guy in the reflective coat - which is why you get angry.

So I lost the plot, on this occasion, and got angry, and shouted something at him. Like what the fuck is going on? Etc. And immediately regretted it, because the tosser decided to punish me for getting angry. He shouted at me to get in my car and got on his radio and was trying to get me chucked off. It was obviously touch and go - we could have been removed and banned, and the whole holiday would be ruined, and it would be my fault.

We're not a nation of complainers, are we? Your Watchdog programmes on the telly encourage you to stand up for your rights and complain when the service or the treatment is bad; and we have laws to protect our rights as consumers. But when it comes down to it, if you send your meal back in a restaurant, you might as well get up and leave, because the kitchen staff will spit in your food.

And if you make a fuss in any public place, you will be punished. The delay you've been complaining about will be made worse. Your humiliation will be compounded.

I lost it in the Doctors surgery once. We were getting married, and we needed some signature from a doctor for some reason. I can't remember if this was because we were getting married in France, or if everyone has to do it. So we had an early appointment to see some doctor - it was 9:15, so you'd think 2nd or third appointment of the day? We were kept waiting till 10:35. Again, I lost it. "How can you be running an hour and a half late after fifteen minutes?" Words to that effect.

Oh, the looks.

I appreciate that the staff in these situations must sometimes fear for their lives and safety. Angry customers are scary, I'm sure. But then all the focus is on how wrong it is to be angry, and there is never any focus on what caused the anger in the first place. Sometimes anger is the only appropriate response.

So when the foreign secretary is up on the podium uttering a load of cant and bilge about the Iraq situation, a cry of "Nonsense!" seems polite in the circumstances.

And shouldn't our political leaders be occasionally confronted with people who disagree with them, don't believe them, who think they're doing a pretty shoddy job? But express dissent and two burly security guards with Ray Winstone Angry Faces come and forcibly eject you from the hall.

The manner of his removal was inappropriate, was it? How about the fact of his removal being deeply wrong? How about it being a sign of dishonestly and corruption, to silence dissenters like that for no other reason than that it might not look good on the 6 o' clock news to have a disagreeable voice on the soundtrack?

Well, too fucking late, and too fucking bad.

Harlequin/Troubadour

** As part of my PhD research, I read a lot of Michel Serres. Everyone has a favourite French intellectual/polymath, and he is mine. You can get a lot of PhD mileage out of a few pages of Michel Serres. He's the New Blue Car of Academia.

Simon mentions below that he liked Bob Dylan's comments about being a "song and dance man." It's a good description of Dylan, maybe, apart from the bit about dancing, which seems to have been more Allen Ginsberg's bag.

Michel Serres wrote a book called The Troubadour of Knowledge. Here's a bit from the publisher's blurb:

Like a swimmer who plunges into the river's current to reach the opposite bank, the person who wishes to learn must risk a voyage from the familiar to the strange. True education, Serres writes, takes place in the fluid middle of this crossing. To be educated is to become a harlequin, a crossbreed, a hybrid of our origins--like a newborn child, complexly produced as a mixture of maternal and paternal genes, yet an independent existence, separated from the familiar and determined.

He likes the image of the Harlequin, because of the costume, which is either a kind of chequerboard pattern or of many colours.

. Dylan, as we saw in the documentary, was a sponge, absorbing influences and techniques rapidly, and then spitting them out in an extraordinary hybrid form that was something entirely knew. In this, I think, he is the very embodiment of Serres' Harlequin (and of course, he famously wore whiteface makeup on the Rolling Thunder Review, making himself seem even more Harlequin-like).

Harlequin can also be pictured as the Fool from the Tarot deck, dancing too close to the edge of the cliff, or as the Joker in the playing cards. "When the Jester sang for the King and Queen," sang Don McLean in American Pie, and many people think that "the Jester" refers to Bob Dylan.

Harlequin is a magical figure, and I think he lives among us in the body of Bob Dylan. But the lesson for us all is that we shouldn't be afraid to let go of familiar things in order to learn (and become) something new. "Always in the process of becoming," as Bob said. Wonder if he's read any Serres?

**The Harlequin image comes from Qosmiq For the People

With Thanks to Steve Jobs - an explanation

I wouldn't have been clear to us here in the UK, where the documentary was on the BBC, but in the Boo-nited States of America (see what I'm doing there with the boos?), the PBS presentation was underwritten by Apple. Thanks to The Unofficial Apple Weblog for the info.

Ultimate Bob Compo

A super thread going on over at the Guardian Culture Vulture blog, with 240+ comments from people all around the world on the No Direction Home thing. Fantastic that so much interest can be generated by a TV programme, however flawed, with such passionate opinions on display.

Now, a lot of you have written to ask, what's the best intro the Dylan? There are probably more than 240 opinions on this subject, but here's my two pence.

To begin with, I don't think you can do better than the original "Greatest Hits," which is the single album that I started with myself. Side 1, as was, is a bunch of acoustic stuff; side 2 is the '65-'66 electric stuff, including essentials like "I Want You," "Like a Rolling Stone," and "Just Like a Woman."

If that doesn't convert you or make you want to hear more, give up. Simple as that.

Now if you came to me and said, Rob, do me a CD compo of what you consider to be the best of the Dylan, what would be on it? Well, I'm a contrarian, so I like to go for slightly off-beat stuff. Assuming you will at least buy "Greatest Hits," here's what I would add:

• Don't Think Twice, It's All Right - because it's a lovely song with some great finger picking guitar (as a bonus, add the reggae version from Live at Budokan, because there's no better illustration of how Dylan deconstructs his myth in concert)


• All I Really Want to Do - because it's a great example of the fun he put into his early acoustic works - again, the Budokan version is worth having


• Love Minus Zero/No Limit - because it's another lovely song, - the Budokan version has a nice (I think it's a) flute motif going on, too


• Desolation Row - a fine example of Long Dylan, with his wonderful, resonant voice, and beautiful imagery. You can let images like "Cinderella, sweeping up, on Desolation Row" wash over you for the pleasure of it. Or you can listen more closely at the way people are being sent into and out of Desolation Row, and try to work out who belongs in, who is out, and why, and which is best?


• Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again - one of the quintessential tracks from Blonde on Blonde, packed with imagery, studded with humour. Typical Dylan humour: the senator comes down, handing out free tickets to his son's wedding, and - just his luck - Bob is caught gatecrashing without a ticket. Superb. And the organ on it is brill. Either that, or Absolutely Sweet Marie


• To Be Alone With You - from Nashville Skyline, if only because of the cool way it begins. "Is it Rolling Bob?"


• All the Tired Horses - from Self Portrait. And you'll understand just how laid back his life in Woodstock was!


• Sign in the Window - from New Morning, for his voice on it, and because it's a wonderfully melancholy song


• Hazel - from Planet Waves, another great love song


• Up To Me - from the Blood on the Tracks sessions, finally released on the Biograph collection. Because it gives you the flavour of those sessions without wrenching any tracks from the set.


• Isis - from Desire, at the height of Dylan's second wind, his second Never Ending Tour, the height of the personal crisis that saw him convert to Christianity


• Precious Angel - one of the great performances from his first evangelical set, Slow Train Coming


• Brownsville Girl - from Knocked Out Loaded - written with Sam Shepard, it's a long shaggy dog story featuring Gregory Peck. Great mythmaking

How many's that? You should be able to get them all from iTunes, anyway. I note that "Desolation Row" is available only if you buy the whole album (Highway 61 Revisited) - so you'd be better off getting that from Amazon, because you can get it for under a fiver.

Apple Continues Exploiting Dumb Indie Rockers

Thanks to Pootergeek for this link to a great blog post about iPod addicts and their spending habits: Apple Continues Exploiting Dumb Indie Rockers. Very funny.

One for Sorry, Two for Job

I don't believe in an either/or view of the world, as you know, but a lot of people do, so, oddly, sometimes you find yourself surrounded by people with fixed ideas about things. Beatles vs. Rolling Stones; Raquel Welch vs. Brigitte Bardot; Blue Peter vs. Magpie.

We never had Magpie on in our house, because it was on ITV, and we tended not to have ITV on. I think my mother subscribed to the theory that ITV meant the End of Civilisation as We Know It. I still fucking hate advert breaks, but they're easier to avoid now, what with time-shifting and all that.

Anyway, we were a Blue Peter family. Those that preferred Magpie tended to say that Blue Peter was patronising, dull, and stuffed full of middle-class worthiness; from the other point of view, Magpie was tacky, commercial, and surrounded by advertising. On Blue Peter, they always took the time to put black tape on all the brand names. Though it could be confusing; I still don't know where you were supposed to buy "sticky-back plastic."

So, that was then. The world grew up, and the intellectual Magpigmies won. That means that everything has to be commercial and tacky, and nobody is allowed to be middle-class, patronising, or, god forbid, worthy.

Documentaries now follow the style of not telling you what the hell is going on, lest the producers be accused of "telling you what to think." The recent, beautifully filmed BBC compilation of bits from The Blue Planet, Deep Blue was fatally flawed by the almost total absence of patronising/worthy/middle-class commentary. So you saw all these beautiful fish and other creatures of the deep, all fantastically filmed, but you had no idea what any of them were, or where they were.

Jesus and Lord preserve us from people who want to tell us things, eh? God forbid we should learn something while we watch the eye candy with our iPods stuck in our ears and our mobile phones on vibrate up our arses.

My daughter came home with maths homework that was completely unfathomable yesterday. She's seven years old, she's doing addition, but she has to use some crazy methodology involving drawing some weird box thing and linking up lines and making numbers jump over each other. Fucking hell, I thought, it never ends, does it? When I was her age, and younger, I was forced to go through the entire ita reading scheme with its crazy gobshite spellings and fucked phonetics - even though I could already read.

Our kid can already do addition the traditional way, believe it or not, but now she's hopelessly confused by some crazy maths method created by morons on meths. See what I'm doing there?

Anyway, so this is my opinion on the first part of No Direction Home: deeply flawed by the lack of a script, informative commentary, narrative. Instead we get Scorsese's flashy jump cuts and match cuts and vulgar montage moments (which is all he had available to him, given that he didn't film any of the actual footage). Bob Dylan, we should all know by now, is the very definition of an unreliable narrator, and most of the other talking heads had their own agendas, too, so what we really needed was someone to pull it all together, to give it a coherent chronology, to tell us what was going on.

I knew what was going on, don't misunderstand me. I know the story inside out already. But I kept thinking about those who might have been roped into watching by their friends and lovers, who probably sat through the whole thing thinking, that bloke on that blog said he had a beautiful voice, but it really does sound nasal and whiny.

Scorsese jumped back and forth, interrupting the black and white stuff with the colour stuff (to keep it interesting for the Magpites, no doubt), but he gave us no real sense of the chronological trajectory of Dylan, the constant, restless, assimilation and growth. It was all too impressionistic for me. So he's an auteur, big fucking deal. He also has absolutely no taste or subtlety.

I enjoyed watching and listening to Bob, as I was bound to, but I felt the presence of "the direc-tor" too keenly, and wished for a more sedate, patronising, worthy, educational tone. So sue me. Teach me crazy maths and ita, but you can't make me enjoy Magpie, because it's rubbish.

Watch With Mother

I was traumatised at a very early age by the funeral of Winston Churchill. I was 2-and-a-bit at the time, and I remember sitting in the living room at home waiting for the children's programmes to come on, but instead there was this s-l-o-w procession and solemn commentary that went on for hours. It was all in black and white, too, but that would be because we had a black and white telly.

I made a note to my future self: state funerals: not good television. Unfortunately, the career as Controller of BBC1 never materialised.

That sort of thing, the state funeral, the wedding, the Big Event, it always strikes me that the people who are really interested will go there and stand in the rain watching the horseys go by; therefore the rest of us shouldn't be subjected to it. But what do I know, as I so frequently ask?

Apollo launches, as Simon mentions below, now they were good telly. Apart from the delays, which even so added to the tension. There was even great telly in the whole business about the Dark Side of the Moon and Being Out of Radio Contact (the Floyd got an album title out of it); and of course, the primitive re-entry procedure was marvellous. Long, long hours, spent watching helicopters hover over burnt-looking capsules.

The astronauts were always put into Quarantine afterwards, in case they'd bought back some horrible space-borne virus that would spread like wildfire with no cure and kill us all, apart from the one or two people with natural immunity, who would be burned at the stake as alien interlopers.

There was a thing on the radio yesterday about the possible return of nuclear power. A lot of the history of it in this country is fairly recent. It was only during the reign of Thatch that the nails started to go into the coffin. But like Count Dracula, nuclear power isn't really dead unless you hammer a stake through its heart. Its return may be prompted by the, you know, oil running out. That kind of thing.

There was some bitter old geezer being interviewed. He was saying how the power station at Sellafield (which I still think of as Windscale) has run without a problem since it was commissioned. As he said those words, I said out loud, "But what about the fire?"

This geezer was especially bitter about Tony Benn, who had a Road to Damascus experience and turned from a Nuclear Booster into a Nuclear Hater. Benn said something like, "I once said it was cheap, clean and safe. Well it's not cheap, it's not clean, and it's not safe." He recounted how he was once embarrassed at an international meeting of energy ministers when the Japanese delegate said, with some sympathy, "How is everything at Windscale?"

"Fine," said Benn.
"You've not had any problems since the fire?"
"Fire?"

In other words, they tried to keep it secret even from the government minister in charge (it was Labour after all). And some of them are still in denial about it, all these years later.

Harold Wilson, who was prime ministrone in 1965, the year of Churchill's funeral, was of course famously impeded by the Security Services, who saw a Labour government as a threat to national security. It's a laughable idea now, isn't it, but you can't help thinking that the same groups, over and over, seek to do damage to a Labour government in power. Viz:

• The Farmers (if it's not fox huntng, it's the price of subsidised agricultural diesel; if it's not that it's just all the bloody Brian Aldridges whinging about tax or somesuch)


• The right-wing unions. Like the firemen, top civil servants, head teachers, police officers, lorry drivers


• The security services


• Toffs and ultra right wing political groups

Tony Blair must be absolutely steaming by now at the right-royal stitch up he received from the security boffins over Iraq. "Oh, it's only Labour, they'll believe anything, because being in power scares them stupid." I wonder if it'll all come out in his memoirs - or if they'll secretly slip him the Alzheimer's Pill before he can write them?

If you grew up in the 60s, it was all about that. Interminable state funerals; rocket launches; endless war; and money being poured into huge projects like Concorde, nuclear power, and the railways (instead of spending a lot less on a readily available off-the-shelf solution from another country that had already spent all that money). And it all came to a head in 1969 with a "man on the moon" in the Arizona desert and the Windscale festival of Peace and Love, at which Bob Dylan performed "Blowing in the Wind" to an audience of radioactive dolphins in the Irish Sea.

I Read the News Yesterday, Oh Boy

The party conference season is not something I find terribly compelling these days. The tight control exercised by the Conservatives of old, stage-managing the conference and making it a back-slappng exercise for the most part, has been extended by the Labour party over the past 10 years. Controversial motions aren't even debated; the troops are rallied, drinks are taken. Fringe meetings are where it's at, but their very existence speaks of their non-relevance to the corporate politics going on in the main hall.

If I were a politician, I don't think I'd been too keen on conferences, in much the same way as I'm averse to trade shows and conferences, training days, and product launches.

Some of our vendors are still in the habit of launching products with a big fanfare, hiring a boat, or a marquee at Silverstone on qualifying days, and they reveal their new printers/cameras/whatevers as if expecting collective gasps of astonishment. It's time warp behaviour really, because we've all read about said products, long in advance, on this thing called the internet.

We had the slightly bizarre experience the other day of phoning a vendor to ask about a new flagship product that was all the buzz on the 'net - and it was the "first they knew" about it. Apparently. Which I don't really believe, any more than we believed the other vendor, who said, abruptly, "Never head of it mate," in similar circumstances.

The control of the flow of information, the timing of product launches, the general buzz of news and politics - all changed by the web.

I said a while ago that there are some thing you just can't, or shouldn't buy on-line. Shoes being one. I'm twice bitten thrice shy on internet shoe buying. If you can afford Ocado/Waitrose, maybe you can get your groceries from them (but with the Ocado brochure suggesting bottles of wine at £19.95 a pop, I hardly think so.

I'm pretty sure I'll rarely buy clothes from a shop again, or CDs, or DVDs, or books. And magazines are becoming increasingly irrelevant. The fortnightly MacUser is getting skimpier and skimpier, and all the news is old news. Same is true of Macworld, but being monthly, they have more chance to be analytical.

Steve Jobs recently cancelled his European keynote address at the Paris Expo. I don't think for any other reason than that he'd already launched iPod Nano. In the past, he's given keynotes in Paris that basically reproduced recent American ones. And for why? Now we get the news about new products as it happens, usually before, so these staged events are pointless.

As are party conferences, really. Why bother? It's all thrashed out in the media for weeks before. Sometimes things happen. Year before last, when Duncan-Smith (yet another Smith taking on airs by double-barreling his name) gave his "quiet man" speech, the media had spent so much time trailing it in advance that they completely missed the fact that his delivery was utterly inept, signing his death warrant before he sat down. Instead, they went into the scheduled "post-analysis" of the speech content, and it was only, what, with long hindsight that the speech was seen as the abject failure it was.

But such events are increasingly rare, the single track on the album that you actually like. And these days, instead of buying the whole record, you'd just download the one song, wouldn't you?

Waltzing

Stayed up late to watch The Last Waltz. What a lovely film. The Band's Let it Be - so full of warmth and love of music.

I've got it on DVD - so why stay up late to watch? Can't switch it off. So many highlights. People whose records I'd never buy. Dr John: ace. Neil Diamond: fantastic. Eric Clapton: just love that number, him and Robbie trading solos.

Van Morrison doing "Caravan": brilliant. And at the end, Bob Dylan comes on and starts with "Forever Young." He's supposed to have said - just before he went on - that he'd changed his mind about being filmed. And yet the whole night has this building-up-to-Bob-Dylan vibe. in the same way that the 1969 Woodstock concert was somehow predicated on the idea that Dylan "might" show up (why else name it after the place he lived rather than the place it was actually held?). Instead, perverse as ever, he played the Isle of Wight. With the Band.

The Last Waltz is Bob in his Rolling Thunder guise; looking more like a mystic Jew than at any other time in his life: his hair in ringlets, his nose with a seemingly more pronounced hook; the white hat. He looks fit and skinny, loose and lithe, comfortable on the stage. It's only, what, a couple of years since he last toured with them?

Neil Diamond's supposed to have walked off the stage after his superb song and said, "Follow that, Dylan."

Er, okay then. Whereas Diamond's song was tightly rehearsed and arranged, Dylan comes on and just plays with his band.

I love Robbie Robertson's guitar playing. He's got a Strat with it looks like just 2 pickups - humbucker at the bridge and single soil at the neck. The thing about The Last Waltz is that the band prove they can play anything with anyone, and sound like the best backing band any of those artists ever had. They do it all in an unusual self-effacing way - and yet their own songs are so beautiful, too. Rick Danko singing "It Makes No Difference" makes me cry every time I see it.

If you haven't seen this film, go out and buy it immediately on DVD. Approach without prejudice. It's not really about Bob Dylan. He does 3 numbers. You get Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and The Staples, too. Everything is equally brilliant, because the common element (The Band) makes it so.

Side Effects

One of the unexpected delights of the current media interest in Bob Dylan (this Scorsese docu is an event sho'nuff), is the feeling of cosmic superiority one feels whenever a prominent (or less prominent) journo Gets Something Wrong.

A similar thing happens with Apple Computer, of course, wherein tech journalists take their lives in their hands when they pontificate upon Things Apple, knowing, surely, that they will receive 20 billion e-mails from aggrieved Apple fanatics.

I sheepishly admit that I contacted the Observer after reading Caroline Boucher's howler last weekend, in which she confuses Sara Lowndes with Suze Rotolo. Rotolo will appear in the docu, but you can smack me in the face with a sea bass if Lowndes is anywhere in evidence as a talking head.

Even more satisfyingly, in yesterday's Guardian, none other than TV heavyweight Mark Lawson commits the following error to paper:

After going slowly through the childhood years and the young Robert Zimmerman listening to his folks' stereogram - "the sound of the record made me feel that I was someone else" - the pace accelerates towards 1966 when, at Manchester Free Trade Hall, a fan called Keith Butler shouted "Judas!" when the singer picked up an electric guitar. Later that year, Dylan had a motorcycle crash and didn't perform for eight years. Scorsese takes four hours to get from 1961 to the motorbike hiatus. Scorsese and Dylan seem to believe that this is the key creative period.

Two things about this. Firstly, er, what was Bob Dylan doing with the Band at the Isle of Wight Festival in August 1969?

He meant to say "tour" instead of "perform," of course, but what journalist can resist a little embellishment and exaggeration? The other thing is that I thought we'd got past, long ago, the very idea that the so-called motorcycle accident was anything more than a convenient excuse to extricate himself from commitments and re-assess his career? Because The Basement Tapes were made the following year weren't they? No official release till 1975, but there they were, nevertheless, with Bob sounding pretty chipper and having a good time making wonderful music.

So any elision in Dylan's ability to "perform" or his rate of productivity is surely a figment of the imagination. In a way, the tendency to focus on the pre-'67 era is understandable, because the extraordinary achievements can be easily seen and described. But to even attempt to encompass all that his 1967 recordings encompass is beyond any mere mortal. The Basement Tapes are some weird shit - in the manner of performance, in the voices used, in the lyrical content, in the nature of the music. And it's even weirder when you try to understand how Music From Big Pink and John Wesley Harding fit in with it all.

And the fact is, I'm sure Scorsese would have added another couple of hours to the documentary if there had been any film of Dylan and the Band in the basement of Big Pink. But he really did hide himself away for those years, reappearing in the mid-1970s to make Renaldo and Clara with the Rolling Thunder Review. Shame the BBC couldn't dig that one out for next week's Dylan orgy on BBC4.

It never rains but it pours

Americans, eh? If it's not a moral panic, it's some other kind of panic. I wonder if any pennies are dropping about now, if people are starting to realise that driving a gigantic SUV that only does 7 mpg isn't such a fantastic idea when you're trying to get out of Dodge?

Traffic snarled to a standstill across coastal Texas yesterday amid reports of petrol shortages as more than a million people attempted to flee Hurricane Rita.

People were stuck in a long queue of traffic (stuck in first gear, other words), many of them no doubt in vehicles that only manage about 14 miles per (US) gallon at the best of times. So then they were running out of gas and causing yet more traffic spontaneous self-organisation. What they want is a nice Golf that does about 60 mpg

hair aware

the story of the mullet is similar to that of the tuberculosis strain. let's face it, we all got complacent, and in recent times the mullet has returned, mostly sneaking in under cover of the fin. if you know anyone with a finhead, now is the time to whisper quietly in their ear that this ridiculousness must stop. let's stamp out the mullet once and for all.

Ramblin'

This post isn't going to be about anything much. Just me rambling.

Had to drop the car off at the garage this morning, because the bonnet-rlease lever wasn't working. I remembered to check my oil yesterday lunchtime. But sod's law and all that. The other sod's law aspect is the fact that this is Thursday - potentially my last commute-to-work day of the week for the 3rd week in a row. First such Thursday: motorway closed at J21 - both directions - so I had to take a wide and time-consuming detour and had a shitty journey to work.

Second such Thursday: motorway closed after J26 - queues going back to J25 when I first heard about it, so I made another, slightly less wide detour.

And today: can't open bonnet. Except. When I was on the phone to the garage, it came out as, "I can't open my boot." I know it's not a boot, but the word bonnet doesn't come out very easily. It's like the skirt/dress thing. You say, "Take your skirt off and make it look like it fell off..." And she says, "It's not a skirt, it's a dress." And you say, "Whadever."

A bonnet sounds like something you put on your head. Americans call it the hood. Which is also something you put on your head, if you are a yob, or an outlaw of some description.

I might as well take a camp bed and live at the VW garage. I'm practically an employee. Next time I might get a different brand of car, just so I meet some new people.

When I worked in the tax office, many years ago, I used to have a lot of trouble with various bosses. I've spoken about it before: people who criticised me for the way I walk, the way I dress, the way I look for files, and so on. The most mindblowingly petty, insignificant things. I was the very definition of the face that didn't fit. I still have the same kind of problems. People who don't know me from Adam Ant, decide they don't like my accent, or my little jokes and cutting remarks. I'm certainly guilty of having an always-on joke reflex, and I don't guard secrets well, and have a low tolerance for preciousness, which is all around you.

One time, I had a direct supervisor who hated me because his girlfriend fancied me more than she did him. This is true, I swear to god. It's one big reason why you shouldn't date people from the office. There was this girl, I don't remember her name now, though I remember the boyfriend's name, my supervisor. She was not my type, I hasten to add. She was High Maintenance. Pretty, but lots of make-up, and, you know, hairspray and high heels. That kind of thing. It was the 80s. Probably.

Anyway, we were sitting near each other. The flipside of people hating me when they don't know me is that - surprisingly - they find they get along with me quite well when they work with me and/or know me better. Obviously, from a distance I give off the wrong kind of signals. I'm vibrating in N-space or something. So she was sitting across from me or something, and we chatted away, and started to continue our chats in the pub at lunchtime. This was the civil service, remember, and flexi-time (yay), so 2-hour lunchbreaks in the pub were, *cough*quite common*cough*.

Anyway, Truswell, that was his name, my immediate supervisor, was supposed to be engaged to her or something. And she was clearly looking for an escape route, via me, her stepping stone. I thought about it all this morning because I saw a lorry from a company called Truswell Transport on the motorway. So I didn't fancy her, but I liked her, and it was fun talking to her, and she was into it. And he was jealous.

So, if you can imagine, that was another year that I didn't get promoted, though I was doing my job as competently as anyone. Since then, I try to avoid involvement. People will still take a random disliking to you, or do a character assassination for their own purposes. And sometimes it's as blatantly selfish as the jealous boyfriend thing. So I get sick of it and just withdraw.

So I dropped off the car and walked up the hill, and I'm feeling a little warm from the unaccustomed exercise. I'm wearing a sur-chemise or overshirt that I got from Boden. Years ago, I hated with a passion the Boden catalogue and its smug (and self-promoting) models. But now I look at the clothes and realise they are my kind of thing, and I like the kind of service you get from Boden - the tailoring on the trousers to the length you want, etc. Not that I know the length I want. And I like these shirts, so I got two of them.

Looking through the catalogue, a couple of things struck me. One was that they do what I want to do with the catalogue I work on, which is to have two "fronts" and have one end upside down, meeting the other in the middle. So the women's side is one way up and the men's the other.

The other thing is that they still do that smug thing with the models, which doesn't bother me as much. The women are mostly gorgeous. Some of them obviously French, and I love French women (and married one). And they answer their questions in a certain way. Favourite indulgence: red wine; Favourite Chick Flick: Breakfast at Tiffany's. Innocent enough (still smug though), and likely to make you want to shag them all the more.

But the blokes are all answering in "jokey" ways, trying to be funny. Sartorial hero: Tarzan that kind of thing. And it is of course very annoying.

So I can see myself there, can't I? Wearing the Boden clothes, and giving jokey answers. And being annoying. So I understand why people dislike me. But I'm quite likeable when you sit near me, honestly. Just don't let your girlfriend too close, especially if she's French.

Waking the Deaf

No, we don't understand us, either

Talking of Radio Times in this week's "Dylan cover" issue, TV Editor Alison Graham has some pertinent words to say about the BBC's prime-time high-profile drama Waking the Dead.

As she correctly states, the overall effect of a double episode (most of the stories take two hours, Sunday and Monday night) is that you switch off the telly with the remote control, thinking, "Well, I just wasted 2 hours of my life."

It is hard to express just how CRAP Waking the Dead is. It's not just that it's so bad; it's that it thinks its so good. It was bad enough before, with that blonde bird from Casualty in it (the one with the nice balls), who had absolutely nothing to do except sit there and look... blonde. So they killed her off, you're thinking, because after French and Saunders took the piss out of it, they couldn't continue with it the way it was. So now they've replaced The Blonde One with The Brunette One, who also has nothing to do.

And the forensic woman, who does the autopsies (and does scene of crime, and makes the tea); the previous one wisely left the series, so they've replaced her with a complete clone who is exactly the same character, but with a different Equity card.

Sue Johnston, who seems to get more respec' than she absolutely deserves in life, is totally wooden and rubbish in it, too, clearly not understanding a word of any of the scripts. To be fair to her, this is probably because not a word of any of the scripts makes sense, so she flounders about quite a bit.

And Trevor Eve. Please. Can you spell "chewing the furniture"? What a load of old bollocks. Over-acting, clearly improvising a lot, he tries to steal every scene he's in.

And because he does so much over-acting and improvising, scenes tail off into silence, as all concerned realise they've lost their place in the script, and gone past the moment when they could have said the lines that would get them out of there. So then they have to cut out (I'm assuming) huge chunks of the story, which is why you can never tell what's going on.

But the thing I really really hate about these 2-hour consecutive night things (and the same is true of that crap about the paranormal that's set in Scotland - Sea of Souls), is that they tend to put anything good they have into the first part, and the second part is just padded-out crapola.

So this first episode of the new season of Waking the Dead had this huge build-up concerning people admitting to crimes they didn't do out of fear, and bodies being left in aeroplanes and on water towers, and the fear of some hugely evil, demonic, person/organisation. Who just turned out to be a little man who was fabricating fake pharmaceuticals. Hello? All that build up? For this? Where's the payoff? Where's the beef?

The other thing was the elaborate set-up at the beginning of the first episode, with Trevor Eve buying a load of model aeroplanes to act something out. They spend so much time setting this up, that you think, well, it must pay off in a big way later on, otherwise it's just bilge.

And you know what? It was just bilge.

So, in case you're wondering: children, don't do what I have done. Don't waste 2 hours of your life on this crap.

Getting with the hype

BBC News have a nice 8-minute puff piece on the forthcoming Bobumentary.

Nice. My favourite bit is where the 60-something year old Dylan says, "Both of these girls (early girlfriends) brought out the poet in me." And he just looks at the interviewer, suppressing a smile, for several seconds.

This week's Radio Times has him on the cover too. Top Gear Magazine has a piece about Dylan's cars, and BBC Homes and Gardens has something about Dylan antiques. You also get a Bob Dylan toy with a Happy Meal.

Gobshite Made-up Word of the Day

I read a few blogs on a regular basis. I pop in and browse around a few others semi-regularly. But I've never been much of a joiner, and my default mode is to opt out rather than opt in. In reading the comments on some blogs, I have come across the frequent use of a word which always puts me off visiting those peoples' blogs. That word is meme.

I fucking hate that word. I have a particular aversion to words which purport to explain something that already had a perfectly good word doing the explaining, sometimes for hundreds of years. In this case, the word would be "idea."

People have always copied and adapted ideas. Blatant, unacknowledged copying has another perfectly good word: plagiarism. Ideas that get picked up and turned into some kind of social movement also have a perfectly good word: ideology.

And so on.

A new coinage (1976-vintage) says more about the people using it than it does about the phenomenon it purports to describe. These people are iPod-sporting, herd-following, fashion victims.

Nano à nano

So I saw the ad for the iPod nano on telly last night. Just features someone holding it in their hand, looking at it, fighting over it with someone else who also wants to hold it.

Clever, because it shows you its size in relation to a giant hand. Advertising agencies have lists of these people in their Rolodexes: people with giant limbs, feet and hands mostly, but also giant teeth for toothpaste adverts and the like.

Yeah, it's neat, and shiny, and whatever. But I'm still not seduced. That's fine, because I'm not the target market. I'm not even tempted to get an "iPod-ready" car next time I buy, unless it becomes one of those things that makes a car hard to pass on, the in-car equivalent of Magnolia paint.

Anyway, it's clear what the selling point of the Nano is. They don't even bother to pretend it's about listening to music anymore. The one in the advert doesn't have headphones or earbuds attached to it. It's an object of desire for gadget freak fashion victims.

Do you remember seeing that old footage of Elvis in his pink Cadillac? He had a record player in it. One of those auto-changer things that would play up to six singles in a row. I bet that sounded great. And skipped a lot.

I was talking to Roy about the way the new Dylan Bootleg Series is mixed, how it seems to have been done in the "modern" way as opposed to them attempting to reproduce 60s-style mixing. So it sounds unnecessarily harsh in comparison to the original official releases. But then there's that CD thing anyway, the harshness of the sound - which isn't inaccurate, but which doesn't have the rough edges knocked off it in the way that music does on vinyl.

The black art of vinyl mastering is becoming increasingly rare. You have to do certain things to the sound in order to compensate for the effects of vinyl playback. Since the advent of the CD, records sound different, and not better. Nobody seems to try to do anything to mitigate the effects of digital playback - whether it be poor digital-analogue converters or just that ringing harshness that can get on your nerves after a while.

And it's not news, is it, that MP3 or AAC, compressed files of any filetype, sound even worse, thinner and harsher, than CD.

But it's not just that that puts me off the iPod. It's the whole walking around with headphones/earbuds thing. Alongside the people who insist on taking every call on their mobile and answering every text, you find yourself essentially surrounded by people who are cocooned in a private world upon which you cannot impinge.

And the whole style of listening, loading up a terabyte of tracks and just letting it wash over you on random play - that's not my style at all. It's a long way from the adolescent mix-tape of old, isn't it? The one you laboured over for hours, getting the gaps between tracks just right, fitting as close to 45 minutes of music per side as possible. Even if you weren't doing it for some girl/boy, you were doing it for yourself, to audition, to play back.

Getting things in the right order - that used to be important. Themes, question/answer tracks. Things being related. Now people like to pretend that their iPod knows what its doing, that "random isn't really random", and Apple have even put a slider into iTunes so you can adjust the level of randomness. Why did careful planning and attention to detail suddenly get such a bad name?

I miss those days, the mix-tape days. While making mix-tapes for women has to be among the most pathetic and annoying things that men do, I can't help being a man, and I couldn't help enjoying it.

Increasingly old-fashioned and out of touch, that's me. But I come with a guarantee: when you're with me, our conversation will never be interrupted by my phone, and I won't even have one earbud in any of the holes in my head. And if you're in the car with me, I'll almost certainly switch off the radio/CD player so we can talk.

I'm the one on the goat

Last night, I read a terrific story in my SF collection, which mght have been written for Hoses of the Holy.

"Falling Star" by Brendan Dubois is set about 60 years into the future, a time when there is no oil, no education, no national government or foreign travel because of a malicious computer "virus" that physically attacked silicon wafers and completely wiped out technology and sent society back to the 18th C. Horse and cart level civilisation, with no electricity, and ignorant peasants who blame technology for their problems, calling it "the Devil's work."

Civilisation lasted about 4 days, something you might have found hard to believe until the recent debacle in New Orleans, and it sure do make you think about how many of our essential systems depend on computers and silicon chips, and how little is in place by way of a disaster recovery strategy.

Arthur and Evgenia: a love story

I thoroughly enjoyed the BBC documentary about Arthur Ransome's adventures in Russia before and after the October Revolution, though a lot of it may have been old news to Guardian readers.

It was an absolutely fascinating story, anyway, told with great skill, and all the more satisfying because it had all the elements: romance, war, revolution, skulduggery, and more than a little bravery and guile.

What an absolute hero Ransome was, risking everything to go in and get his girl, and what a superb film it would surely be - except, if someone outlined it to you, you'd just laugh at them. Cameo appearances from Lenin and Trotsky? Escaping from under the noses of the White Russian army by losing at chess? Children messing about on boats? You're having a laugh, aren'tcha?

It's the fact that he never talked about it that tells you how very serious it all was. With his wife's family still stuck in Russia under Stalin, it was a question of keeping your head down - or else.

Brilliant.

The Lost World

Is it just me, or is it not faintly disturbing to see the cast of Lost picking up awards at the Emmys?

It seems wrong, somehow. They shouldn't be allowed to be seen in public till the whole series is finished in about 9 years, or whenever it is. I'd have written that into their contracts. Either that, or, for a laugh, they should have turned up to the awards ceremony looking dishevelled, dirty, and unshaven.

What the Hey?

We seem to have had a rash of visitors today, from Ypsilanti, Mi; Miami, Fla; Pittsburgh, Pa; Cleveland, Oh; Portland, Or; Raleigh, NC; San Antonio and Austin, Tx...

...All looking for pictures of "Kenny Chesney bald" or "Kenny Chesney Without Hat."

What on earth is going on? I wish I'd made a better job of my joke photoshopped pic, now.

==

Update: looks like we're the top hit in Yahoo for a search on Kenny Chesney without his hat. Which is nice. There's a little lesson for ya, bloggers. Just get yourself a bit of photoshop action, do a really bad job, and you too could be #1 in the Yahoo charts.

Post-modern science fiction etc.

Although I posted the quote from Overheard in the Office for a laugh, the idea of there being "no such thing" as post- or after modern does make you think.
I'm working my way slowly through Gardner Dozois' 22nd annual collection of the best SF, and as usual it's an absolute treat. Also as usual, non SF fans would be puzzled as to why many of the stories are even considered to be SF, but that's the beauty of it.

Some of the stories are moving, some intense, some funny. Some of them are weirder than weird, and others just do what so much SF does and extrapolate something that's going on now into an advanced (or nearer than we think) future.

Like the War on Terror and all it entails. Last night, I read the story "Leviathan Wept" by Daniel Abraham. If you follow that link, you can read the whole thing, it looks like, on scifi.com, which is pretty amazing.

Set in an indeterminate future, it features a "cell" of anti-terrorists who are targeting a "cell" of terrorists. So we're immediately at a stage when, to fight fire with fire, the forces of government set up semi-autonomous cells of agents to fight semi-autonomous terror cells. That's immediately an idea that gets you to sit up and pay attention. The members of the cell are networked together electronically with heads-up displays, watching - literally - each others' backs.

A sub-plot features on agent whose wife/girlfriend is dying from an immuno-deficiency disease. Her own white cells are attacking her healthy cells. Sound familiar? She's wasting away, and says at one point that it sometimes feels like being two people: one healthy person who wants to live being killed by the other, who is attacking for no reason, and wants to die.

A metaphor, of course, for the war on terror, and the sickness in our society it exemplifies.

Early in the story, the anti-terror cell undertakes an operation. In escaping the scene, they notice a young girl emerging from a building.

"Pauel! The stairs!" Renz said almost before he realized he'd seen something. There in Paasikivi's window, coming down from the building. He watched as Pauel shot the girl—five years old? six?

Time slowed. If they had been compromised, Renz thought, the girl could be wired—a walking bomb. There wasn't enough room in the parking structure to avoid her. If she went off, they were all going to die. Fear flushed his mouth with the taste of metal.

He heard Thorn exhale sharply, and the van sped past the stairway. The dead girl failed to explode. A dud.

"Jesus," Marquez said, relief in the sound of the word. "Oh, sweet Jesus."

Later, talking to his sick partner, the agent discusses her support group, and how they are coping with the disease:

"That's a matter of perspective. I mean, his immune system thinks it's being pretty heroic. Little white cells swimming around high-fiving each other. Hard to convince those guys to stop doing their jobs."

Renz shook his head. Anna's fingers found his, knitting with them. The air purifier let out a pop and then fell back to its normal grinding.

"Is everyone in your group that grim?"

"They haven't gotten to a place where they divide children into wireds and duds, but yes, there's a grimmish streak to them."

It's a moving story, and quite thought-provoking, so worth taking the time to read it. As to the Dozois collection, whatever the number on the jacket, they're always worth having, and you'll discover more great writing in one of them than you will in a whole year of newspaper literary supplements.

What you've always wanted to know but were afraid to ask...

Slate Magazine asks,: "Do bodies always float facedown?"

Very useful info. The latent thriller writer in me needs to know this stuff.

But there really is no such thing

From Overheard in the Office
:

"Patron: Can you please tell me where I can find post-modern American fiction?
Librarian: Post-modern? That would be in the future, there's no such thing.
Patron: Uh, okay. Can you tell me where science fiction is?

100 S. Potomac Street
Hagerstown, Maryland"

Space Crawl

So so predictably, the BBC 2 Space Race docu-drama (like all such things) was a load of ol' tripe. Last night's first of 4 episodes padded 10 minutes of story out to the full hour. Germany is falling, the Russians and the Americans race to capture von Braun, and the Americans win. But the Russians have an ace up their sleeve in the form of a rocket scientist who'd been stuck in a gulag after one of Stalin's purges.

The Russian side was an interesting human story, the tale of scientists denouncing each other to save their skins, and working, literally, under the gun. But then so were the Germans.

That the Russians got the first satellite and man into space (not yet covered in the slow crawl of Space Race) is probably a back-handed compliment to the United States, who weren't quite as ruthless and threatening, perhaps, to their captured Germans.

Anyway, I'd rather have watched lots of old footage of German/Russian/American rocket experiments than some ac-tors putting on silly accents. Those shots of rockets taking off and then going sideways are always entertaining. And don't patronise us: give us some technical details; tell us about the actual scientific and technological breakthroughs. Typical dialogue:

"Hmm. If we made it lighterski and more powerfulski, do you think it might go furtherski?"
"Yes, but Sergei the Builderski, can we fix it?"
"Yes we can! Er, ski."

Then again, maybe I didn't think much of Space Race because there was a trailer for Martin Scorsese's forthcoming Bobumentary No Direction Home, which I'm afraid is going to form something of an obsession on this blog for a couple of weeks.

I was totally buzzed after watching the trailer. It was like drinking 3 cups of espresso in a row. Not so much by the old footage, which I've seen bits and pieces of before ("Here's a song, it used to go like that, now it goes like this..."), but by brief snippets of Dylan speaking. Not cracking jokes in 1965 press conferences, but being a bona fide documentary Talking Head: Bob Dylan, aged 60-somethng, being interviewed by Martin Scorsese. That, and the old footage gets you me jumping around on the couch with excitement.

Note to 14-year-old TV producers: docu-dramas are docu-dumbed-down docu-crap. Martin Scorsese has sensibly chosen to make a traditional documentary with old footage and talking heads. Why? Because the subject of the documentary is interesting in and of itself, without requiring ac-tors and costumes to "entertain" the mythical 3-second attention span public.

You must have scratched your head, looking into the whole "Space" thing, wondering, "What can we do to make this interesting?" Well, gosh, I don't know. What about getting one of the CBeebies presenters to narrate it? No? How about an ac-tor, then? Robert Lindsay? He's always available isn't he?

Mr Browne is Upside Down

So someone loaned me The Very Best Of Jackson Browne (2004), which I've been listening to in the car for the past couple of days.

First of all, let me say that I always quite liked the idea of Jackson Browne, but never quite got around to listening to his work. But half-heard songs off the radio from years ago are often disappointing when listened to properly, and so it proved with these CDs.

The other thing I want to say straight off, this being my hobby horse, is that both CDs are too long. As a single CD, too long, and as two CDs, too bloody much. Who are we kidding, Mr Browne? The Very Best of You would fit comfortably onto a single CD, would it not?

As it is, the two discs divide neatly into "the 70s" and "after the 70s." What's especially striking about this division is that everything sounds more or less okay up until the end of disc 1, and then (for the first half of disc 2 at least), it all sounds shite.

I've mentioned once or twice (!) that record production has been going down hill since around 1975, and the evidence is no clearer than on the second CD. Suddenly the vocal sounds awful, the guitars are harsh and horrible, crappy synthy sounds get in your face, and the drums are not only hideous, but seem to sit on top of everything else, like a school bully farting into the face of a Year 8 kid.

I blame MTV, I think. I bet there's something crappy going with the idea of "mixing for TV" or something. Or they just put bits into the song that would fit the bit of the video. "Tender is the Night," for example, which I half-heard years ago, turns out to be a bit crap, and there's stuff going on at the end, you can just see the video pictures.

Things improve a bit after that, but the damage is done. 1980 comes around and the producers manage to make Browne sound like Billy Joel, for god's sake, and surely nobody would want to sound like him?

I note from his web site that Jacko Browne has gone all indie and is releasing a load of "solo acoustic" tracks. Perhaps he's trying to redeem himself; I know if I were him I'd listen back to that 80s stuff and want to re-record it.

The Maunder Minimum, Global Warming, and the Queue at the Petrol Station

It's a funny old world, indeed it is. In this country and elsewhere, our political agenda is being driven - in large part - by the twin concerns of "energy security" and the environment.

Because of the government's stated desire to encourage us out of our cars, and to "reduce emissions" in the process, we pay eleventy billion million pounds in tax on the fuel we buy. Passed a BP station this morning with the price at £1.019 per litre. Ker-ching. I bet they don't pay this much tax in China, Gordon.

Breaking the £1 a litre mark is a big thing, as anyone who's bought/sold on eBay knows. You go through a psychological barrier, and the sky's the limit.

I'm surprised this hasn't been more common, over the past few days, what with the rules of supply and demand. Our international reader may be interested to learn that, far from putting people off, the high price of fuel in the UK seems to be making people queue to buy more of it, even when they don't actually need it.

The most effective protest against high fuel prices is not to buy it at the higher price. Shop around for the cheapest station in your area and go there. Or just don't buy fuel for a day or two. But the merest mention of another protest at oil refineries (a repeat of the one 5 years ago), and we have panic throughout the land. (By the way, did you know that the so-called "blockade" a few years back wasn't, in fact, a blockade? It was just tanker drivers not crossing what they saw as a picket line. A "fuel strike" rather than a "fuel blockade".)

I filled up Monday lunchtime, because I needed to. And because I'm working from home again on Friday, I won't need to worry about it again till Sunday, or even Monday lunchtime. Que sera sera, as Doris put it.

Anyway, that's by way of a long pre-amble. What I started out to say is that I don't believe that this government really believes in global warming, the Kyoto Protocol, or the need to reduce emissions. I don't think they're that dumb. I don't even believe the environmental lobby believes in it, not really. They're a lobby, so they have to stand for something, but really they're just making a living like everybody else. Some people get jobs, others just find a bandwagon and jump on it.

What this government does believe in, like all governments, is tax. Smokers know this only too well. Past a certain point, the price of cigarettes can go as high as you like, but it won't stop people smoking. All the people who were going to stop smoking have stopped. If the government cared about smoking, they would rigourously and aggressively target the ways in which new smokers are recruited (yes, we're talking about children). But they don't. They just want the tax.

Same is true of motorists. Longtime readers of the now-archived Roadrage Blog will know that there are many radical and sensible ways in which traffic congestion can be reduced and carbon emissions cut. Home working incentives, for example. If you work in an office at a 'puter and you have broadband at home, working from home on one day a week is an eminent possibility. A strong enforcement of speed limits, and the police targeting tailgating and middle-lane hugging on motorways would reduce accidents, congestion, and emissions.

But they want the tax, don't they? So here we are and here we are and here we go, as Doris Day didn't say.

Something I heard on the radio on the way home yesterday intrigued me. And being the kind of James Burke groupie I am, I thought I'd draw a line between Gordon Brown's speech to the TUC yesterday, the queues at the petrol stations, and the current high levels of solar activity.

To quote Woody Allen, "Stay with me on this, because it's brilliant."

The Times, being a Murdoch title, doesn't like to exagerrate news stories, so we can take it as read that Sunspots on the horizon threaten to cripple satellites and networks is true and accurate. There's a lot of solar activity, lots of sunspots, and a solar flare that will disrupt communications and do strange things to networks. Our office network went down a couple of weeks ago, in a bizarre and hard-to-replicate incident. Bad for business, and quite scary. Listening to BBC 5Live on the first day of the Test, they kept losing their connection, over and over again, which is another thing you can put down to sunspots.

Solar activity has an 11-year cycle, which is great. Not 7 years, so you can't fit it to your human age cycles; and not 10 years, so it doesn't fit neatly into decades, but 11 years. And high levels of solar activity - as there have been for several years - means that the sun is hotter, and that the Earth is hotter - did you know that?

Here's another intriguing fact. In the 17th Century, so it goes, there is evidence to suggest that there was very little solar activity, and that, as a consequence, the world was a colder place. This was a period known as "the Little Ice Age," during which rivers froze that normally wouldn't, and snow stayed longer on the ground. Here's an academic paper from 1998, by John E. Beckman, and Terence J. Mahoney:
The Maunder Minimum and Climate Change:
Have Historical Records Aided Current Research?

We are all familiar with the 11-year sunspot cycle. One familiar factor is the effect of solar activity on short-wave radio communications. During sunspot maximum high-energy protons and alpha particles from the Sun affect the ionosphere, reducing its effectivity as a mirror from which short radio waves are reflected round the world, disrupting transmissions for days at a time. The association with the presence of large numbers of dark spots on the solar disc is widely known, and well understood, and it is also clear that such maxima repeat every 10 or 11 years, with minima between them... Even more specialized, at least until the need to understand climate change pushed it to the fore in the 1980's, was the belief that the present solar cycle might not be a permanent feature of solar behaviour. The key impulse here was the work of Eddy in the late 1970's, focused especially on the historical period between 1645 and 1715, for which there is evidence that sunspot activity was strongly suppressed or virtually absent. If this is accepted as true, it has strong implications for our ideas of how magnetic fields in stars are produced. Of more impact, it might go some of the way, even all of the way, to explaining the observed pattern of global warming of the Earth in the last decades of the 20th century.

(Emphasis added).
That's right. Global warming could be caused by sunspots. Probably is, in my opinion. Not SUVs, not power stations, not carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

We live in the world, the world is a planet orbiting a star, which is very hot, sometimes hotter than at other times.

But they want the tax. Don't they? But how is our high-tax economy supposed to compete with China, Gordon? And to the students who mashed Jeremy Clarkson in the face with a custard pie on Monday, when he went to pick up his honorary degree at Oxford Brookes University, I say this: what if he is right, and you are wrong?

The oil will run out, that much is known. We may, in our lifetimes, end up living much as they did in the 17th Century. If it gets as cold as it was back then, we will probably have to chop down trees to burn them for heat. What about those emissions? But the argument that we should be paying high tax on fuel "because of global warming" is spurious. Let's have some honesty here. The motorist, like the smoker, is an easy target: ker-ching. They should, and probably will, also target junk food for high taxes. And chocolate, and all our other addictions, like Chinese microphones and guitars.

science

BBC 2 - Saturday 17 Sep 9:10 p.m. The Secret Life of Arthur Ransome

Older readers may remember me mentioning Arthur Ransome a while ago. In a case of marketing serendipity, BBC 2 are showing a documentary about Arthur Ransome's experiences in Russia during and after the revolution. Here's a flavour:

He was close friends with many of the leading Bolsheviks including Lenin, as well as having an affair with Trotsky's secretary. Ransome was branded a traitor by the British Foreign Office and some even wanted him hanged for treason.

Sackcloth and Ashes

Just a couple of things to say about the Ashes.

1. It only feels this good because it happens so rarely, doesn't it? For this kind of euphoria, you've got to endure years and years of crapness and mediocrity. Which would you prefer? Regular wins, or this?

2. Aren't the losing side supposed to be the ones who "get" the Ashes? What's all this about "winning" the Ashes? Isn't it all supposed to be a beautiful irony? Hence the tiny urn instead of the huge trophy (and nPower really deserve a slap for attempting to present a huge trophy, by the way, idiots). The tiny urn, which is presented to the losing side.

Right?

Damning with Faint Praise?

As the verdicts come in on the new McCartney album, its clear (as the Observer Blog puts it), that it's officially not too bad .

Taking a leaf from the Observer newspaper (review linked to in above Observer blog post), I'm going to take Macca and the Stones' new record in one big pill, as it were.

Let's get the Stones out of the way first. I've slagged them off plenty of times in the past. The small back-story to this is that when I was at school I was known to be The Beatles Guy, and my then-best friend decided that he would be The Stones Guy. We readily swapped records, so I got to hear most of the Stones' oeuvre and even liked some of it (the Mick Taylor years, natch), but to my mind, they were rubbish until 1968, and they were mostly rubbish again after 1972. Some Girls, 1978, wasn't bad.

The new one, A Bigger Bang is about 40% of a decent Stones record. Some of it is good, though not nearly so good as some critics would have you think. Most of it is just Noisy Shouty Stones, which is not the Stones I like. Noisy Shouty Stones is replaced, here and there, with slightly less shouty melodic rock, which is what gets you the 40%. A couple of the melodic rock ones work quite well.

"Laugh, I Nearly Died" works pretty good, "Biggest Mistake," and a couple of the others do. Often it's the best titles that work as the best songs. Funny, that. "Back of My Hand" really does sound like one of the bluesier numbers from Exile on Main Street, complete with overdriven blues harmonica.

But the rest of it just makes your ears bleed with the noise. And as for the Keef numbers, well I don't know where to look. And it's too long, of course. After about 10 of these songs, your heart sinks as yet another riff starts up. 16 tracks? Sweet bubby Jaysus.

There are a couple of things I think are wrong with the modern Stones. The first stems from that Windows 95 song, "Start Me Up," which, when heard coming out of the radio, has what many people think of as the quintessential Stones sound. Keef riffs the guitar. Now, I read recently that Keef didn't actually think much of that song, and almost never bothered to record it properly. And there's their problem. Because it really is more like a Stones parody, and it has become so much associated with them, that they seem to have forgotten they ever sounded any other way.

And that other way is the other thing that's wrong with the modern Stones: the absence of country blues, country rock, whatever you want to call it. Their greatest records always effortlessly drew from rock 'n' roll, blues, country, rhythm 'n' blues, gospel, etc. "Tumbling Dice" and "Rocks Off"; "Sweet Black Angel," and "Brown Sugar."

What we have here are a collection of club rockers with trademark riffs, which will be stretched to their limits in a stadium setting, with Jagger shouting his way through the set. What we're missing are the kicked back, horizontal, romps through country, gospel, and other traditions.

So much for the Stones.

As to Macca, his new album is being compared (as so many have, in actual fact) to his earliest solo efforts, post-Beatles, pre-Wings, when he did everything himself. Damning with faint praise, the critics say he has pulled it off, managing to evoke both those times and the times before, the glory years.

Which is a little unfair. Because Chaos and Creation is much better than McCartney. McCartney was rubbish. Even "Maybe I'm Amazed," the best and most enduring song on that record, descended into an aimless doodle, which would have been better honed in the pressure-cooker Tin Pan Alley environment of the Beatles. Like everything on McCartney, "Maybe I'm Amazed" was an unfinished song, missing the element that interaction with the other Beatles would have brought to it.

Chaos and Creation is a properly produced record, with good, and finished, songs, and performances from McCartney which are polished and professional. His greatest sin since 1970 was to continue to behave as if everything was effortless for him, when it clearly was not, and never has been. It's understandable that, working as hard as The Beatles did, he took time off to enjoy life with his family, and I admire him for that. I also admire the lack of bitterness and recrimination in his output. Mr Thumbs Aloft bore a lot of abuse and a lot of pain, and, well, he outlasted everyone who was dishing it out to him.

The key thing about this record for me is that his voice sounds fine. Singers like McCartney, who abused their voices for their art (qv. the story of "Oh Darling" on Abbey Road, which bore a raw McCartney vocal, which he'd got to by singing the song over and over in his Little Richard voice. See also the double A sided "Mull of Kintyre," which featured the rocker "Girls' School"; and the follow-up "Old Siam Sir," with full-on Macca doing Little Richard) have suffered the consequence of not being able to sing well.

I haven't heard him sing vocals as good as this for 25 years.

So, well done Paul, and please have a word with Bob Dylan - tell him what you did to nurse your voice back to health.

Living off the fat of the land...

raspberry.jpg
Originally uploaded by mcmrbt.

When I were a wee nipper, come September, the whole family would head off into the countryside in my dad's Morris Traveller to pick blackberries.* Empty 4 litre ice cream tubs were filled, and there was much subsequent jam, pies, and crumble action. We'd take blankets, thick clothes, etc., and meet other people out doing the same thing. You'd throw a blanket over the base of the brambles, and then sort of throw yourself against it in order to reach the higher fruit (the low hanging fruit is picked quickly, hence the expression).

How strange it is now to realise that almost nobody bothers to pick blackberries these days (or anything else, come to that). Is it because they think that our environment is so badly damaged that such things no longer exist in our hedgerows and country lanes?

It's just over a year since we first viewed the house we now live in. The day we turned up, I noticed that the border between it and the school next door was filled with brambles. Now I've lived there a while, I know that there are brambles almost all the way round the school, and around the park behind it. And for a couple of weeks now, we've been picking the berries as they become ripe.

Friday night, I set to with secateurs and started trimming some of the higher vines and picking the berries at a more comfortable angle. We filled a couple of containers in a short interval, combined with some pruning of the brambles, because they are among the most evil plants known to man, capable of sending out shoots that grow around a metre a week and then burrow into the ground where they hit.

You see blackberries in the supermarket, cultivated ones, in sanitised plastic packaging, for around £2 for 200g. On that basis, I've picked at least £20 worth over the past couple of weeks. I've made 3 crumbles, a cheesecake, and given a load to my sister. My kids tend not to like them cooked, but love to eat them off the vine. What could be better than that?

I see people with apple trees in their gardens, who just let the fruit ripen and fall to the ground to rot. In other words, it's not even a question of not wanting to drive out into some country lane. It's just one of the traditions of this country that has been allowed to wither and die on the vine. In the end, people are, what? Too rich? Too rich and self-important to pick berries? It's a family activity that doesn't take a hell of a lot of time, but my kids love it, they do, and it's something we've done together and we've been close and had fun.

Maybe people are just happier to see their kids hanging around the fish and chip shop all day long instead?

*The picture of the raspberry was taken in my in-law's garden

Fooked Economy

Having the cricket on in the background just reminded me of something I heard on the radio the other day, about the success of one particular company, which makes bats endorsed by two of the England team.

They grow the willow in England (fastest growing plant in the Northern Hemisphere, don't you know), ship the wood to India, where the bats are made, then re-import them to the UK to sell.

How fucked up is that? Surely the world cannot continue in this vein?

Petrol vs. Diesel - which is cheaper?

This might be of interest to you.

I've just been over at the Honda UK web site, looking at the FR-V and wondering about the price difference between petrol and diesel models.

Honda's new diesel engine has a fantastic reputation, so would be a good choice for anyone. But it costs. For example, on the Sports model (the only one with which you can get cruise control) you pay an extra £1400 for diesel.

Hmm, okay, you're thinking. That's a bit steep, and what's the justification? Well, the petrol model does 40.9 mpg on the extra-urban cycle (I look at this one because I do almost all of my miles on this cycle); whereas the diesel does 53.3. I can believe these figures, because I do around 52 mpg with my Passat, combined.

So that's quite a difference, isn't it? Over 30,000 miles, you'd use 733 gallons of petrol, but just 563 gallons of diesel. Or 3335 litres versus 2562 litres.

But as well as the diesel car costing a premium, the diesel at the pump costs more, too. Let's say you can fill up with unleaded for 95 pence a litre. And diesel is going to cost you a pound, as it does in many places at the moment.

How long before the diesel "pays for itself". How long? 70,000 miles. If you're an average driver, 12,000 miles a year, that's going to take you nearly 6 years to get your money back. And don't forget, at 60,000 miles or so that diesel will start to cost you money - new cam belt etc.

For the sake of argument, if you invested the £1400 in a savings account for 6 years and earned a relatively low rate of interest (say 3%), it would turn into in excess of £1700. Put it against your mortgage at current rates (5%, say), and you'd save maybe £480 in interest over that same period.

So you could have a 70,000 miles diesel car, or a 70,000 mile petrol car and around £1700.

It just doesn't make sense, for most people, to buy a diesel. So forget about it.

In my case, I'd do that 70,000 miles in more like 2 years and 4 months, so it's slightly more do-able. But it still doesn't seem worth it. I could have a 70k mile diesel and nothin' or a 70k petrol and, say, £1500.

This has been a public service announcement.

Your questions answered - #3 in an infinite series

We're a bit light on the old "your questions answered" this month, because some idiot removed the Statcounter code from the blog template. So just a few issues, and hopefully normal service will be resumed etc.

• Listen to the Warm Rod McCuen - I'd rather not, if you don't mind terribly much.
  
  
• Aunti beryl bacardi - ah, yes, nostalgia. I miss it too But you might want to check your spelling



• International Workers of the World - at the risk of further confusing you by including your search string again, I wish to confirm that this web site has very little to do with work. Or the world.



• pronounce shrewsbury / how to pronounce Shrewsbury - It is pronounced Shrowsbury. Anyone who tells you different is an idiot. Here is our esteemed colleague Simon's research on the subject:

  But is it Shrewsbury or Shrowsbury? The traditional pronunciation of the 'ew' in Shrewsbury survives in the word 'sew'. In earlier days when spelling was more phonetic the name appears as Shroesbury and Shrowesbury, the 'ow' being sounded as in 'show'. It is a very handsome word when thus enunciated and befitting of such a beautiful mediaeval town. But just to confuse the visitor, you will find the locals pronouncing it both ways!

  
  And while we're on the subject, I'm convinced that the Epiphone guitar company, founded by a Greek immigrant to the United States, should be pronounced the same as "epiphany." I delight in confusing guitar shop employees with this pronunciation. I'm like John Humphrys saying WeDnesday, I am. Shouldn't they teach this stuff at school?



• boomerang centre circle - Ah, yes, the old boomerang centre circle gambit. This would be when the player shapes to kick the ball forward from within the centre circle, and it in fact balloons backwards to his own goalkeeper. Or not.

iTunes 5 is alive

iTunes 5 is yet another hideous interface from Apple. Thanks to Eji over at Diderot's Diary for this link to Daring Fireball's take on how interfaces must feel when they're superseded.

Very funny. Seriously, though, I try to ignore it but it is so hard: to be looking all day long at your computer screen and to absolutely hate the look and feel. There's nothing more contemptible than the fake on fake look. Fake veneer on fake wood. Fake aluminium on a computer screen is just bloody ridiculous, no matter how you dress it up. What the hell is wrong with "these people"?

Yeah, that's right: these people, meant in it's fully pejorative "them and us" sense.

I like coffee, I like tea

illy of the valley

There's been some controversy over with Rafael at the Observer Blog as to which brew is the king of beverages.

Well, not controversy as such. More a passing comment. Still, from small acorns, great big acorn fights grow. Acorns hurt.

I was always a tea man. Back when I was into joining things, I joined something called the "Pure Indian Tea Club", which meant I was ordering posh tea in little wooden boxes. Assam, Darjeeling, Nilgiri. Nilgiri is the secret fantastic flavour of the tea blending world. It makes a brew with almost no colour (if you add milk), but it has an elusive, fragrant flavour which isn't as flowery as Darjeeling, but makes you thirst for more of it.

But one thing I've never been able to stand is the tea bag. The tea bag is a turd on the face of the world of tea. Your tea bag, I'll have you know, is filled with dust. It's the sweepings off the tea room floor. Dust, I tell you!

Most mass-produced, commercial tea is made from cheap grades of tea, such as dust and tiny pieces, so that it will steep quickly, and produce a pleasant, if somewhat generic brew that will accept milk, sugar, or lemon. Fine quality teas consist of whole or larger parts of leaves, have greater depth and complexity of flavor, and a smoother quality.

(from, ironically, ineedcoffee.com)

Well, you can take your dust and stick it in the dustbin. I won't have it, I won't brew it.

At home, I brew using leaves, of course, in a proper tea pot. I use a Bodum tea press a little like that one, but with a proper spout. This means you don't have to worry about a tea stainer, and can take advantage of the press, which replicates the one advantage of the tea bag and stops the brewing process, so that a second cup will be as good as the first. In the summer, we saw examples of tea presses which were white porcelain tea pots, so they looked much nicer. I'll get one of those at some point.

I no longer buy pure Indian tea. Tea is best blended, so that you get the best of all possible worlds. The blend I prefer is, surprisingly, not a terribly expensive one. I buy Sainsbury's Gold Label tea leaves, which makes a morning brew with a satisfying flavour.

As to your fruit teas, your infusions, your smoky china teas, forget about it.

But here's the rub. I get up at 20 to 6 on a working day and I've "discovered" that getting out of the house by, say, ten past 6, means that I avoid the worst excesses of the Snottingham gridlock. Other words, I can get to work in an hour and a half (quarter to 8 at the latest), and have a clear conscience when I sneak off at 20 to 5, in order to avoid the worst excesses of the afternoon Snottingham gridlock.

30 mins in the morning doesn't really leave time for a proper brew. So I've taken to making a quick cup of coffee.

Compared to tea, coffee lends itself to a quicker brew. What else is an espresso? My Senseo machine warms up in about 30 seconds, and I can run off a quick cup with a good taste and excellent crema in another 30 seconds.

So, against medical advice I haven't had but I'm sure I would get, I've become a bit of a coffee drinker. Coffee in the morning. Avoid tea bags at work, and drink coffee from the office Gaggia bean-to-cup machine. Even, sometimes, decaff coffee in the evening. At home, I've got a Gaggia pump machine and a grinder, and I've even taken to roasting my own coffee beans. Friday night, I roast a couple batches of beans in my popcorn maker, and over the weekend I have the most heavenly coffee you can imagine.

This morning, working from home, I had my first cup of tea since Sunday. It was lovely, but I've crossed that line and become a coffee drinker, 80-90% of the time. My wee smells of coffee. My beard smells of coffee. Like a 40-a-day smoker, my fingers smell... of coffee (especially after the home roasting sessions).

The beauty of coffee is that it is more flexible than tea. A Gaggia bean-to-cup machine will make a delicious cup in under a minute. Or you can spend time roasting your own beans, grinding them to perfection, and running them through a home espresso machine. You can add syrups and flavourings, cover it in frothy milk, play with it. A Senseo or other dosette machine will make a pretty decent cup from bags! whereas a tea bag will almost never make a good cup. The tea bags they use at work make tea that smells like fish.

Anyone who knows me knows that when I make you a cuppa, you get a good cuppa. This has been true since I was a young man indeed. I like to think that people walking away from my house have it in their minds that they just had one of the best cups of tea or coffee they ever had. It's a small thing to ask in life. How would you like to be remembered? As someone who made a really good brew.