...ruffles...

Nothing to declare but my Genius

2008-09-19T14:20:00.000-07:00

I downloaded iTunes 8.0 the other day, it has a new application called Genius which is a bit like Pandora.

Recorded music must be incredibly data-rich: volume, notes, melodies and harmonies can all be quantified so with enough time and money presumably you can get right to the DNA of any song. Then with clever maths, it should be possible to build a full picture of what music you like and might like in the future.

Genius does two things mainly – the first is to create play lists of songs based on a chosen track. It’s good, if you want to make a quick CD for the car and have a mood in mind, it’ll rustle up a decent compilation for you.

It’s not been created for altruistic reasons, of course. The other thing Genius does is try to recommend other songs you might like to buy from, um, the iTunes Store.

So, I click on Hey Boy, Hey Girl by the Chemical Brothers and it suggests Hey Boy, Hey Girl (Radio edit). I click on Pare Cochero by Orquesta Aragon from my definitive Cuban anthology and it suggests La Vida Loca by Ricky Martin and Shakira. An album by early nineties hip hoppers The Goats, returns a suggestion that I might like to buy an album by a band called The Boats.

Olympic observations

2008-08-24T03:40:00.001-07:00

I haven’t posted for a while, for (not serious) reasons that may become clear, but here are some Olympic observations:

Cheating
I’ve been wrestling with the concept of cheating in sport for a while; most of me believes that the Corinthian spirit should prevail. But this year’s Tour de France was not as interesting an entertainment spectacle as the years when people are being thrown out over drugs.

What’s more, there is no doubt that science is now central to sporting success – why, then, is chemically enhanced performance wrong, when enhancements through nutrition, engineering and technology are OK.

I have come to the conclusion that cheating is entirely legitimate in professional sport – afterall, if you’re not cheatin’ you’re not trying. That’s not to say it should be legal – if you get caught and thrown out, then you’ve tried and failed, and should pay the consequences. Sorry, Dwain Chambers.

I’ve also come to the conclusion that sport is more interesting when you’re good at it. Which brings me to the point…

Is it worth it?
One of the broadsheets ran a chart outlining the amount of money each medal cost us. How typically British. Something like £300 million was invested in the Olympic team in the last four years. On the radio someone said that this would buy you ‘quite a few hospitals’.

It wouldn’t. A big hospital has a budget of around £200 million-a-year, the investment in sport is chicken feed by comparison. But the impact is huge and the success is amazing.

Look at it another way; we have a medal for every 1.2 million people in this country; compare that to China (12 million), USA (4 million), Germany (2 million) and Russia (1.4 million). We have a gold for every 3.2 million, (against China (36 million), USA (13 million) and Germany (5 million)).

It means our personal investment in being successful at sport is relatively small. Yes, there are other things you can spend money on, but we should be investing in our collective esteem.

Team GB
I like the concept of Team GB – that every British competitor in every sport wears the same tracksuit and carries the same badge. We are one team – I like that sense of unity. It says something about us as a nation – that whether you’re winning gold medals or coming last, you’re part of the same team. We’re not only successful, but it’s a good kind of success.

Which sports
As the Games progress, we seem to be involved in increasingly bizarre sports. I rather like Steve Backley’s definition of an Olympic sport. The winner should be obvious - it shouldn’t have to be judged by experts (like, say, synchronised swimming). It should be the pinnacle of success in the sport (which would throw out football and tennis) and there should be legitimate competition across most, if not all continents (so, Baseball should be on the gallows).

Renewed acquaintances
On thing I love about the Olympics is watching a Czech woman winning skeet shooting at 8am on BBC1 a Tuesday. I will never hear of her again. I like that (as I’m tying, Iceland are playing France in Handball. I also like the fact that every four years you come into contact with Dan Topolski – who is a brilliant commentator in the rowing. But in between Olympics’, I couldn’t place him in a line up. What does he do in the interim? Him screaming “THE BRITISH ARE COMING” until he was hoarse during the coxless fours is my lasting memory of the Games.

Famous five adventures

2008-07-27T01:25:00.001-07:00

So Max Mosley wasn’t involved in a Nazi orgy with five prostitutes, it was just a regular orgy with five prostitutes.

It’s difficult to know whether Mosley is stupid, highly principled or pompous beyond belief. I’ve concluded that he’s all three. On principle he’s right, he does have a right to privacy and what spanks his bottom is his business. But to pursue this principle through the courts with one of the arguments being - there was a simulated rape scene and rape is not commonly considered a Nazi torture – is spectacularly pompous.

However, in the end his reputation is not enhanced by the victory, those around him are hardly untouched by the debacle. His wife and children knew nothing of this hobby and doing what he did was rather like standing up at his daughters wedding and giving a speech on his top 10 favourite perversions. Taking it through the courts might protect future victims of this process, but for him and those around him, it was a stupid thing to do.

And that’s where it all meets. You’ve got to be pretty pompous to have principles because if you’ve got them, then presumably you expect people to live by them. But you’ve got to be pretty stupid to think that everyone will live by your own self-appointed unwritten and untold rules.

Toilet humour

2008-07-06T02:06:00.000-07:00

Our offices are a 15 minute walk from the middle of town. Our nearest pub was voted one of Britain’s most dangerous and has exotic dancers on a Tuesday and Thursday afternoon. Which begs the question; who goes to see exotic dancers on a Tuesday and Thursday afternoon?

On Thursday the water people turned off the supply to the office to do essential maintenance work. We were allowed to take an extended lunch break to head down town to water ourselves.

When we got back it still wasn’t on. Inevitably, the thought of not being allowed to go to the toilet was enough to make everyone want to go to the toilet.

Slowly but surely the rules were bent as people started popping into the toilets. Eventually we formulated an informal rule…

“If it’s yellow let it mellow, if it’s brown get down town.”

Raining men

2008-06-26T13:46:00.001-07:00

We were listening to XFM on the radio today at work. OJ said he was enjoying it for a while but it was all getting a bit samey. I said that there was a band of purely pop music and a band of purely alternative-indie music. XFM’s music policy is a band in the middle that mixes the two. So while it initially sounds good and interesting and, well, alternative, ultimately it has all the things you hate about pop music (banal catchyness that drives you to distration).

“I blame Radiohead ultimately” I said, before expounding my theory that great art gets distilled and santised to the point where is palatable, but ultimately dull. Radiohead’s success ultimately lead to a cadre of epic-misery bands which eventually produced Coldplay, who ultimately created a range of epic-misery-pop-light bands.

“Yes” said OJ pondering the theory “There’s all these bands sit indoors singing about it raining, only Radiohead are actually out in the rain”.

Train of thought

2008-06-25T13:32:00.000-07:00

Most of my train journeys are simple; Aylesbury to Marylebone and Marylebone to Aylesbury. I don’t bother checking timetables, I know that I can get from my front door to anywhere in London in two hours or less. I consider it my ‘home’ route, a bit like the M40 is my home motorway – when I’m on other motorways I feel I have to drive slower and be more aware of other drivers. The M40 feels safer somehow.

In recent weeks I’ve trained my way to Salford, Warrington and Birmingham. These three journeys require me to change trains. Naturally, I plan my route and know when to get off a train and what time my next train is.

But there’s something that continues to amaze me about actually completing a journey. I know this isn’t how it works, but I think it’s that somewhere in the back of my head, I’m amazed the train knows that I’m there and arrives at the right time to pick me up.

Anaesthsia amnesia

2008-06-13T12:21:00.000-07:00

The cat is ill. It may be serious, it may not. It’s not Feline AIDS nor Feline Leukaemia, nor is it an eminently treatable thyroid or kidney infection. There’s no tumour, it may just be a generic virus which can be cleared up with a generic antibiotic. While the vet has cloned our credit card (I can think of no other reason how he could have got hold of so much of our money in such a short period of time) scientists in Scotland are currently investigating.

She went in for a blood test and x-ray today. Emma was worried…

Me: “Why? She’s only going for a blood test and x-ray.”

Her: “What about if something bad happens when she’s under general anaesthetic?”

Me: “Why would she go under general anaesthetic? They won’t treat her until they’ve talked to us”

Her: “How else will they keep her still during the x-ray?”

Me (thinking): ‘We’ve had this discussion before’

The car went in for a check up today after the ‘Check Engine Light’ came on again (then off, then on, then off again)… the car is not ill.

On a very quiet tube train...

2008-06-02T13:29:00.000-07:00

You know those iPod adverts where people are dancing with abandon? Well, I’ve never done that exactly. I know the feeling though. I’ve stood on a solemn underground station platform staring into the middle distance whilst Electrobank by the Chemical Brothers has pulsated through my brain. Occasionally my foot might tap or my head might nod, I may even mouth the words. I have not, yet, danced.

Today, however, I did laugh out loud in a silent tube carriage. I downloaded Radio 5’s Fighting Talk podcast. An Australian comedian whose name escapes me made it to the ‘Defend the un-defendable’ final. At the start, the host Colin Murray introduced him as ‘the comedian who makes me fear for my job every time he comes on’.

The un-defendable position he had 60 seconds to defend was… “Ashley Cole vomited whilst having sex… vomit is a key part of my lovemaking because…”

He paused…

“Sometimes you need lube”

I just count myself lucky that snot didn’t come out of my nose.

Generally not listening

2008-05-31T02:50:00.000-07:00

Millie has an ear infection that just won’t go away. Emma takes her for her latest check up…

Emma: “the doctor said that we should review it in a couple of weeks, if it hasn’t cleared up then he’ll refer her to the hospital.”

Me: “Right.”

Emma: “He said that they might have to put her under general anaesthetic in order to have a look. I said I didn’t like the idea of that.”

Me: “General anaesthetic? That can’t be right”

Emma: “Well that’s what he said. He said that Millie was quite compliant so it might not be needed.”

Me: “Jesus, general anaesthetic just to have a look at an ear. It’s not that she’s suffering or can’t hear.”

Emma: “Well that’s what he said.”

Me: “But general anaesthetics are dangerous at the best of times, especially on small children, especially on small children with heart conditions.” [Ruffles considers that doctor may be part of grand conspiracy to steal children’s brains whilst under unnecessary anaesthetic.]

Emma: “Well that’s what he said.”

Me, furiously thinking: “I think we should get a second opinion on that, I know I’ll ask Spankee’s GP friend, see if he does this.”

Conversation continues for a few minutes in this vain before drifting into other topics and finally to silence.

Then there’s some more silence

And more.

Emma: “Hmm, maybe it wasn’t a general anaesthetic.”

More than just a game

2008-05-25T00:22:00.000-07:00

“Fate” is how Alex Ferguson described Manchester United’s victory over Chelsea on Wednesday. Fate it wasn’t, there was much more to it than that. A victory for Chelsea would have signalled the end of football and with it the end of history itself.

Manchester United’s victory was been built on a history of footballing success. It’s a story of famous heroes - Busby and Ferguson - and tales of derring-do – The Munich Air Disaster, the 1968 and 1999 European Cup Final’s. Only by travelling this journey have they built a position where they can compete with the best.

A victory for Chelsea, the nouveau riche of European football, would have forged the link between money and trophies. It would have removed the requirement to build success over time. In short, it would have proved that money buys trophies dismissing the precursor of being good at football.

This would have finally proved the triumph of science and logic over human endeavour, spirit and imagination. Why waste the effort and experience the tragedy to win trophies, when such triumphs can be achieved quickly, objectively and without waste?

Chelsea are an efficient, bullying, belligerent team. Strong and well drilled built and bought for the purpose of winning.

Manchester United are, by comparison, swashbuckling adventurers; risk taking and imaginative, brave and spirited. Had Chelsea triumphed the very thing that makes us human will have been defeated. And the thing that our own imagination has created: science, will have, finally turned on us.

This is what makes us people and more specifically British. We are a people whose essence is built on adventure. To leave an island for an unknown destination, as we once did, is a demonstration of imagination and spirit unparalleled. It is said that Britians love a gallant loser more than it does a winner. This isn’t true; Britains respect the adventurers’ spirit; to try is to and live. To succeed is merely a bi-product.

Presented to us on Wednesday was a vision of what might be. The master puppeteer Abramovich lording over his chosen court jesters. “Lamps and JT” the arrogant two-headed beast playing centre stage. The scent of burning flesh and impending doom was real as Terry stepped up to slaughter the innocent. Then, as though the Gods had mustered an ounce of strength he slipped allowing goodness to return. As if the great poets were writing the game, then Nicolas Anelka; the greediest footballer on the planet missed; the horror presented to us before we were returned to The Shire and safety.

I am no Manchester United fan; and they are hardly without criticism. They too have been enticed by logic over spirit and have been at the forefront of the movement to pull up the drawbridge to success. Our constant thirst to strive for logicality will see football’s inevitable decline with a small number of billionaire clubs competing and technology deciding every marginal ruling. Only Alex Ferguson stands between football and oblivion.

Fat not phat

2008-05-15T11:38:00.000-07:00

“How did he do it?” Asked the bloke at work as I described to him what I’d seen on ‘Half-Ton Dad’ on Channel 4.

It was an all-pervasive question; how did he get to weigh half a ton? How did he conceive a child? I can’t say I found out the full answer to either question. I turned over at the point they were slicing great slabs of his flesh from his thighs in the vain attempt at getting him under the svelte thirty stone mark.

I’ve seen programmes like this before where some of the ‘how did he do it’ questions are answered. There was one bloke who claimed that his pizzas were healthy because they contained all the main food groups. Now I don’t care how fat, stupid or American you are; surely everyone knows that vegetables, cheese, bread and meat are not main food groups.

Also there was the bloke became housebound so put his money in a bucket and lowered it to children down below so they could get his Kentuky Fried Chicken bucket. You would think that the first time you had to resort to such a drastic action would be the point at which you start to think you’ve got a problem to sort out.

So, how did he do it? He ate a shitload of food, that’s how he did it.

Dead bloggers society

2008-05-10T01:17:00.001-07:00

Some bloggers finish their blogs having achieved something; losing weight, finding love etc. Some just go away – perhaps they’ve been rumbled and set up shop elsewhere, perhaps they realise that despite their best intentions, their lives are so cyclical, they’ve only got a few things to say. Perhaps they descend into some personal crisis.

Some, like me, plod on regardless of the number of visitors or whether you have anything interesting to say. I don’t like abandoned blogs, they unnerve me. I’m conscious that it looks like I’m abandoning this one, but it’s not true.

I’m suffering from bloggers block. I can’t get round to getting anything down. Since Christmas we seem to have been in a constant state of adjustment, any sense of routine (including the routine of posting) has been largely absent. In addition to, and perhaps because of, this constant (though in no mean bad) flux, I’m finding that I’m doing what I want to do rather than what I feel I have to do. So I’m not idly fiddling with my laptop when I really prefer to watch TV or read or go out and do something less boring instead.

Anyway, I’m here. But still not very interesting.

Analysis paralysis

2008-04-13T03:32:00.000-07:00

Have you ever done that thing where you promise to pool all the photos you have from a wedding? It never seems to happen, even with the benefits of Flickr and their kin.

Have you ever thought about the number of photos you would have if you managed it? We took 43 decent photos at Spankee and Islay’s wedding last week. If that’s an average, you’re looking at over 4,000 in total, plus all the official photos. That’s a picture every 10 seconds.

And that’s just the visual stuff you capture, there’s also all the stuff you miss. Think of all the sounds, tastes and smells; think of all the interactions - millions and billions of them; most of which you have no idea about. You go to a wedding, but at the same time, you’re barely there at all. The Spankees had a ‘fake cake cutting’ photoshoot away from prying eyes – I only know this because as an usher I had the itinerary of the day, almost nobody else will know it happened.

Where else, but at a wedding, do you spend a day ‘stripping the willow’, chatting with a disillusioned tabloid photographer, finding out how difficult it is to edit articles for The Lancet, trying to identify whether those shoes were Jimmy Choo and trading jokes a minor celebrity?

And then there’s the effort, £1000 plus per hour to put the show on, every last experience, from the cake to the speeches to the flushing toilets provided by someone. And then there’s the bride and groom; the only people who truly know what’s going on and the focal point of the whole gig. Yet whilst so much is channelled through them; at the same time they are in an entirely separate bubble of their own bewildered happiness. At the end of the night, as people prepared to board the coaches back to the hotel, I left Spankee and Islay standing practically on their own in the middle of the dancefloor smiling widely, but apparently unable to know what to do next.

This is why weddings blow my mind. A hundred or so people, many of whom you don’t know and never will, but whose lives are separated from your own by just one or two people. You eat with them, dance with them, talk to some of them, hell, you even pray with them; yet you’ll never really know them.

Perhaps it’s not wise to analyse these things. All I can say is that Spankee’s wedding was one of the best I have ever been to. With infuriating logicality, he pointed out that nobody was going to say anything different. He’s right, as he usually is (whether it’s how mobile phones work or choosing a wife) but if we have a friendship based on anything it’s probably on house music, but otherwise it’s honesty. And it was a great day. He even said something nice about me and our friends that bashfulness ensured I forgot the moment he said it.

Alex James says that you shouldn’t know why your friends are your friends. If you do, then they’re not your friends, they’re your fans. I’ve tried analysing why my friends like me (indeed, if my friends like me), but have come to the conclusion that this isn’t my concern, I simply know who my friends are and how much I like them. And with that I’m quite content.

The sickness inside

2008-03-30T04:22:00.000-07:00

I’ve been feeling unwell all week, at first I thought I’d just overdone it at the gym, then a cold took over, then flu, then you get to a point where you don’t know what is illness and what is a result of the illness. So is the sore throat a virus, or because of the coughing?

On Thursday, amidst all this, I saw a light on the dashboard of my car. I looked in the manual it said “Engine light”. Initially I took this to mean that the light in my engine was broken – which didn’t seem too troublesome. It then dawned on me that a) I don’t ever remember seeing a light in my engine and b) that was a fairly minor thing to be flagging up on your dashboard alongside things like revs, speed and engine temperature.

Checking further it suggested that something was wrong with my engine and that I should take it to a garage. This I did, where they plugged a computer into a slot I didn’t realise I had, took a reading and checked it on a database. Apparently it was indicating some sort of oil leak. They thought the car may have ‘thrown its toys out of the pram’ and so the warning may be a misreading. They turned the light off and sent me on my way.

The computer was cool though, I was tempted to see if they would put it up my bottom to take a reading to see what was wrong with me.

Probably better never than late

2008-03-23T03:49:00.000-07:00

I know what you’ve been thinking; what happened to The Ruffs? The annual rundown of my favourite albums of the year. Well, to tell you the truth, I forgot to post it. So here it is:

1. Maths and English – Dizzee Rascal
2. The State of Things – Reverend and the Makers
3. Suck my Deck – A Bugged Out Mix – Simian Mobile Disco
4. Kala – MIA
5. A Bugged Out Mix – Klaxons
6. Hats off to the Buskers - The View
7. Fabric Live 33 – Spank Rock
8. Hourglass – Dave Gahan
9. Cansei De Ser Sexy – Cansei De Ser Sexy
10. Yours Truly, Angry Mob – Kaiser Chiefs

Past winners: 2006, 2005, 2004.

Stars in the aisles

2008-03-19T13:57:00.000-07:00

We’ve got Tesco just down the road from us. Barely a day goes by when we don’t pop in for supplies. Tonight, whilst perusing the asparagus, a vision caught my eye. Actually, to be perfectly honest, the asparagus is on a low shelf, and as a result I was initially struck by this woman's curvaceous booty. She was wearing a skirt which barely covered her essentials. She had curves like Jessica Rabbit. She had a main of braided hair. Everything about her was turned up to 12.

At first she was just startling looking. Then as I glanced up, and looked away, and up again, and looked away again… I began to piece together her familiar face in my mind. It matched a face I’ve seen before. Improbably, it was Makosi from Big Brother 5. At the self-service till, she kicked up a stink because she couldn’t get anything to scan. I felt like contacting Heat there and then.

I walked up the road and past the Islamic school. It was kicking out from this evening’s lesson. A small Asian boy, fresh from being spiritually enriched, was singing along to his iPod. As I passed I heard him rapping “…your mother is a ho”.

This doesn’t happen every day in Aylesbury.

Plumbing the depths

2008-03-08T00:16:00.001-08:00

Recently we decided that we needed some more space and started investigating the possibility of having a loft conversion. We don’t want to move but could do with a little more space. We were told that it would look like someone had dropped a shed on our roof. Casually, Emma looked at a couple of websites to see what else we could get for our money. We had a look round one house and then… our house bit back.

Firstly, the toilet overflowed, inconveniently I was in Belgium on a stag do and Emma, her dad and our nice-bloke-but-terribly-disorganised plumber - “Plumbing’s an art form, not a science” - battled to bring the thing under control.

I was walking around Brussels taking phone calls and texts about the ensuing disaster. First I would get accusatory calls saying that we would have to throw money at the problem in a ‘don’t you fucking dare even challenge me’ kind of way. It was the only practical answer, obviously. Then I would get a text saying “I know it’s not your fault”. Then I would get another text saying “Call me urgently”.

When I asked why I had to call, Emma’s response was “Well I wasn’t going to pay for it”. Which rather suggests that I had to pay and that, ergo, it was considered to be my fault.

On Thursday a pipe started dripping in an awkward-to-get-to place. We calculated that the dripping would fill the only bowl that would fit the space every hour and a half. So, every 90 minutes throughout the night, we took turns to go down stairs and empty the bowl. “It was worse than breast feeding” said Emma, possibly not referring to the incessant dripping.

The dripping pipe was fixed by the plumber and his monkey wrench. This has once again highlighted an apparent failing of mine – my inability to do DIY. It is considered a source of some hilarity that I am no good at DIY. I admit, had I had a bit more time and application, I should have trained to be a master plumber, carpenter and all round builder. It is not so much that I’m not good at DIY, it’s that I chose not to do it. In the same way that people choose not to rear their own cattle for beef.

Instead, I buy it in. Ultimately, it is more expensive than doing it myself, but that’s why I go to work – to make money to pay for things I want (and don’t want e.g. a weekend of DIY). Strangely, however, being male and not doing DIY is, for some reason, considered effete. I say it’s a choice I have taken, it is fundamental to a functioning economy (specialisation and the exchange of monies) and that because I think like that I am the very essence of modern mankind – rational, specialised (and standing upright). It’s not an argument I often win.

Ruffles gold... or Never mind the Ruffles, here's the bollocks

2008-03-01T01:21:00.000-08:00

I don’t know where the year is going. Life is like a series of dials, turn one up and another goes down. If you don’t keep tweaking the dials you find one is turning itself up to max to the expense of all the others.

And so it is for me; the work dial has slowly turned itself up to the max eclipsing everything else. As a result I’ve been going to the gym less, football less, I’m getting home only 40 minutes before Millie goes to bed, then I eat and get back on the laptop. And, of course, I’ve been blogging less. I really need to readdress the balance.

So in an attempt to catch up a little, a few excerpts from some recently aborted drafts…

… The vilest spectacle at the Brits was The Brits School. It’s alumni – Kate Nash, Amy Winehouse, Leona Lewis, Adele, Mika all got exposure from their sponsors, cheered on by their peers who like the Aliens in Toy Story are waiting to be chosen for stardom.

Thank God then for James Nesbitt who announced the football scores before sneering ‘yeah , football’s big at the Brits School, isn’t it?’ before mouthing ‘wankers’ at the hysterical wannabes …

… The traditional stag do is outdated; the stags I know don’t actually want or need a last night of freedom because being with their partners is not considered any kind of purgatory. In fact, I’ve yet to see a naked woman on a stag do and would be quite scared if I did.

But a stag do is a noble thing; it should go back to fundamental principles and have the stag party ‘laying siege’ to a town of their choosing. Camping on its walls like a Roman garrison; stealing food and drink under the cover of darkness for sustenance. The townspeople should accept this law breaking for the greater principles it is demonstrating; men bonded, proving themselves as the hunter gatherers – a right of passage towards the next stage in their lives ...

... I like to ‘walk’ London because you hear and see the richness of life itself. A tour guide on Carnaby Street got the emphases in his spiel all wrong. The line I heard was “FROM 1964 PRACTICALLY ALL THE SHOPS on Carnaby Street WERE [pause] clothes SHOPS”…

If emphasis is designed to bring out the important components of the sentences – he basically said that “FROM 1964 PRACTICALLY ALL THE SHOPS WERE SHOPS”…

I say, I say, I say

2008-02-07T11:29:00.000-08:00

I see that Fabio Capello has declared he’s the not the new messiah…

Presumably that then makes him a very naughty boy.

Thankfully, GMTV are keeping me up to date with the presidential elections. Apparently on Tuesday Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton had spent the night ‘winning their victories’.

Why wouldn’t they? These are the best kind of victories.

Costa losta

2008-02-01T11:28:00.000-08:00

A few months ago I started getting a Costa Coffee Latte with my petrol. Then it became my Friday morning treat. The same bloke served me every week. Just prior to Christmas he engaged in some light discussion.

I went in a couple of times over Christmas, he asked me how my Christmas was, then how my New Year was and when I was going back to work. I wasn’t wholly comfortable with this. He was being nice, and my discomfort was my failing not his. I’m just not very good at small talk and we had few shared experiences on which to hook any conversation – he knows I like Lattes, he knows I was wearing shorts on boxing day, I know he get ‘fucking pissed off’ when he spills steaming hot milk all over his trousers. Beyond this there was little to discuss.

Still, he pursued the friendship, he started serving me large Lattes not regular as requested, and he even gave me two complimentary chocolates rather than one. It was all getting a bit Brokeback.

I haven’t been in for a couple of weeks, last week I was ill and just didn’t feel like a coffee. The week before I was in meetings and was Latte’ed up to the eyeballs. This morning I went in… and he didn’t recognise me. He just served me a regular Latte and didn’t even ask me how I was. We have drifted apart. Having not liked the fact he tried to engage in discussion with me; I now don’t like the fact he ignored me. I am never happy.

It'll be all white on the night

2008-01-19T03:59:00.001-08:00

Following Louis Theroux trip to San Quentin Jail, where he met a married neo-Nazi with two children who was having a non-physical homosexual relationship with a gay jewish man in make-up, one could only conclude ‘only in America’.

Except, last night I stumbled across BNP Wives, which did exactly what it said on the tin. I couldn’t work out whether it was shocking or funny. One lady said that the difference between white Europeans and Asians was that (and I have to confess, I didn’t know this) ‘they look after their cars, we look after our houses’ – she fully expected the UK to become a Muslim state as the result of ‘a war… or something’.

Another was seen protesting about the opening of a Mosque, nobody seemed interested in signing their petition. One lady said she wasn’t bothered if there was a Mosque in the area to which the BNP wife responded under her breath ‘you will when they rape you’. Later she was confronted with someone who tried to prize a reasoned argument as to why the Mosque shouldn’t be built; the answer was: ‘we’ll lose four municipal car parking spaces’.

And then there was the BNP Wife who was flyering around a neighbourhood. She said that she didn’t deny the holocaust, she just questioned the numbers (having read a book called ‘Did 6 million jews really die in the holocaust?’ – it’s not on Amazon. Which, unless it was 5 people of varying backgrounds who died of old age, is surely a technicality. She did say that some good had come from it – dentistry and plastic surgery, for example.

New look

2008-01-11T14:34:00.001-08:00

New Year means resolutions, I’ve tried formulating some SMART objectives, but I can’t quite nail it. Like most people, I want to be better than I was last year. I’m just not sure in what ways.

I want to swear less, Millie was quick to copy me saying ‘tractor’, it will be markedly less sweet if she comes out with ‘fucker’ over the next few months.

I want to stay fit; I’m already a gym regular and have had a clean bill of health on both my teeth and, by some miracle, eyes. I’ve been going to the gym for about 3 and a half years, but it’s still a daunting ugly prospect. I figured I should get some new kit to make me feel better.

I found some trainers, which literally overnight dropped £30 in price (and were only available in my hard to find size 10.5), so I bought them. I didn’t know whether they were any good, or even if they were suited to my needs. According to the website they were for ‘neutral’ running. I looked everywhere to find out what neutral running was – perhaps it was Swiss. Perhaps it was a new fangled exercise programme I don’t understand – like ‘core fitness’. Eventually, by downloading the Mizuno catalogue did I find out its true meaning. Apparently it just means it doesn’t have any specific purpose.

I also bought some ClimaCool Adidas shorts. They’re a bit like cycling shorts but I wear them under my normal shorts. Again, I had no idea if they were any good, but sometimes on the rowing machine my boxers show out the bottom of my shorts and it’s a bit unsightly. The blurb said that they have physiological and psychological benefits to performance which basically means that, although they are generally more comfortable, they have no real purpose apart from making you feel like you might start looking like John Arne Risse.

I’m torn by buying kit in January. On one hand it tends to be in the sales, on the other, you simply look like one of those new resolution numpties who think buying the kit takes you half way to running a marathon.

Those people are the ones who buy exercise DVDs. They’re not short of choice there’s the minor, previously fat, celebrity who starves herself to death type. There’s also the novelty exercises – today I saw an advert for a pole dancing DVD called ‘Poleercise’ and a Strictly Come Dancing DVD called; wait for it – Strictly Come Dancingercise. Surely you can’t legitimise exercise regimes by simply tagging ‘ercise’ on the end of something. Otherwise I’m going to make a new DVD called lager and kebabercise.

Hunting and gathering

2008-01-03T13:52:00.000-08:00

I lie in wait in the dark recesses of the forest. My pray is sitting alone in an open pasture. I have spent time firstly finding it, then tracking it; the kill is nearing.

But as I sit watching my vulnerable prey, a prey that will not fight my attack, I know that others may be sitting in the shadows. I may not be alone.

The minutes tick by. I could attack early to draw out my foes. Too early, however, I may find myself facing something I can’t handle. If I sit here, someone may attack when I’m not ready.

The silence is deafening; all I can hear is my own breathing. In. Out. In. Out. Should I just attack? Let the frenzy begin? I know that more experienced hunters wait.

Eventually, I decide to attack…

And as a result I won my first ebay auction. I’ve never been a big bargain hunter so ebay hasn’t really held me like it has others, but I have been usurped in a couple of auctions.

OK, so it was a CD, it was £1.99 and I was the only bidder. But, hell, it was exciting

So that was Christmas?

2008-01-02T13:29:00.000-08:00

I haven’t yet joined le grande return, as the French might enigmatically say. Christmas and New Year were pretty fragmented. We weren’t really prepared, finishing just three days before Christmas day. Millie got Chicken Pox. Three walks were cancelled, as was a Boxing Day party. We missed The Big Friends Night Out due to babysitting technicalities. Even Millie’s immense Christmas day nap meant that we didn’t get to unwrap all her presents.

Which makes it all sound like a disaster, which it wasn’t. Dinner at the Dobscrubs, Christmas Eve with the babies, Boxing Day football and Christmas Dinner were all good (Christmas Dinner was officially The Best Ever). It was just that when we actually managed to engage with the festivities, we seemed to bounce along the surface rather than delve right in.

For New Year we managed to disengage totally. As last year, we decided to do nothing, but this year we surpassed ourselves with nothingness. Following a nice meal, Emma decided to go to bed at 10.30 (learning from last year that snoozing on the settee and going to bed at 12.05 does not a New Year party make). I was supposed to go and wake her just prior to the chimes.

Nothing was on TV so I put on my new DVD copy of Depeche Mode’s 101. At 11.55, halfway through the film, I ventured upstairs. Emma didn’t respond to my calling… so I went downstairs and continued to watch the DVD whilst she slept on oblivious.

Party on.

Two peas in a pod

2007-12-21T09:12:00.000-08:00

Two of the women at work get on like a house on fire. It’s not a surprise, female demography of the organisation appears to be split between 19 year old administrators and 40+ managers with just those two in between.

Physically, they are similar height and build and have a similar style. One is blonde, the other brunette. One drinks white wine, the other red. Today, whilst sorting through another tin of chocolates they found that their tastes complimented each other in this area too.

“Cor”, said one, “Sharing a packet of Revels with you would be AMAZING!”

Dancing around the Christmas tree

2007-12-13T13:26:00.001-08:00

From a primal perspective, dancing is all about sex. Dancing demonstrates vitality and health, and many of the moves – with the exception of The Pogo and Big Fish Little Fish Cardboard Box – are simply distilled sex moves of one kind or another.

With metronomic predictability, the Christmas Party happened last week and sure enough there was dancing. I don’t really dance to cheesy wedding/Xmas disco music; not because I don’t want to – I’m not one of those who think dancing is merely a right of passage into homosexuality – more because I simply can’t.

Quite literally, music has got to move me if I’m to dance. Cheesy discos don’t do that –they’re just too slow and predictable.

It didn’t stop others filling the dancefloor. The women are most eager; dragging each other up for ‘a bit of a boogie’. Once they’ve negotiated all the tables they simply stand in a circle and do the stepping side-to-side dance. A little later and more lubricated, this might be embellished with the odd ‘hands in the air sing along to chorus’ variation.

Men also do the stepping side-to-side dance – it’s all very self conscious – height doesn’t help – and nobody knows what to do with their hands. Maybe this is an accurate pre-cursor to a night in the sack.

The other breed are the men who do the undo their shirts and jump around like baboons. These are people also tend to have sick down their shirts. These must be the people who think that picking a woman up by the hair and throwing her on the bed for a good seeing to is in some way attractive.

If dancing is indeed some sort of primal mating ritual, it's a wonder how long the human race can sustain its abject state in the modern world.

(*office party video, not authors own... thankfully).

She's in control

2007-12-01T03:29:00.000-08:00

Looking back, I’m surprised I haven’t mentioned Ginger Woman; Emma’s superhero alter-ego. Over the years, she’s managed to be in the right place at the right time to break up street fights, direct traffic around burning cars and bring to justice a couple of local tyre thieves. Oh, and she became implicated by a tabloid newspaper in a terrorist attack… but that’s another story.

Like all good super heroes Ginger Woman’s world is a secretive one. She lives in the shadows waiting to be called upon. What she does in the shadows, who knows?

On Wednesday we watched Arrange me a marriage. The woman whose marriage was being arranged was Lynn. Lynn’s parents are friends with Emma’s, one of Lynn’s closest friends is in our ante-natal group and one of the blokes selected has a son Emma taught.

Emma doesn’t know Lynn and the three people connected to Emma don’t know each other. She’s clearly is in control of a lot more than I’d previously realised. I’m just innocently making my way through life whilst she’s the master puppeteer of Oxfordshire society. I feel like Nicholas Garrigan to her Idi Amin in Last King of Scotland.

ar and keys

2007-11-27T02:33:00.000-08:00

The ‘ ‘ has fallen off my keyboard. Sorry, the ‘double-u’ has fallen off my keyboard. The cat as alking over it, hen she slipped, fell off and plucked it our ith one of her cla s.

It’s a bind, especially hen surfing the orld ide eb. It stays on for a little hile, but it’s all obbly and eventually falls off. There’s a plastic holder thing it clips into, hich has been damaged so the key on’t stay on.

I’ve got no choice but to replace it ith a ne key. Just one tiny key, ith one tiny plastic holder thing. Eventually I found a ebsite that replaces individual keys on Po erBooks.

Keys, of course, are integral to doing computer things. And don’t these suppliers kno it? One key ith plastic holder thing is £4.50 ith another £2.50 postage.

£7.00 for one measily key. ankers.

Before and after

2007-11-22T13:04:00.000-08:00

Before… those who say Steve McClaren has been given a lifeline by Israel beating Russia are wrong. I’m no fan of McClaren, but the fact that England need to draw with Croatia in their final match is merely a scheduling anomaly. The only way to ensure qualification remains in your hands is to win every game; a feat no team in Europe achieved. If the schedule of games were rearranged and the results were the same; which given that the minor highs and lows – injuries, bad decisions – even themselves out, is a reasonable assumption; then the outcome would be the same. The man can’t be judged until it’s all over…

And after… It’s all over and Jesus, how many chances did you need? How many mistakes can you make? McClaren inherits a team from Sven Goran Eriksson that is amongst the top 8 in the world. Rather than tweaking, he bows to the media hysteria shows that he’s his own man and drops the captain David Beckham.

After a number of bad results he finds himself having to pick in-form Beckham and ultimately reassembles the team Eriksson created. Results improve. Injuries return and it falls apart again. Lead against Russia, qualification beckons – lose to Russia. Israel beat Russia, qualification beckons – go two down to Croatia. Manage to get back to 2-2, qualification beckons – concede another goal. And out you must go.

In reality he screwed up against Macedonia when he was still showing the world he was being his own man. When they were getting bogged down in that game, they needed a player who could change a game with one pass… and Beckham was in Madrid.

The domination of the so-called Golden Generation disguises how weak this generation of England players are. Which is mind-boggling coming from the richest football country in the world. Although maybe we should get real – this isn’t an English league, it’s a global brand. Don’t be surprised to see a Premiership game staged in China or the US soon.

And what of the Golden Generation? They’re great players for their clubs. But the role they play is as the iconic battling bulldog whilst the Carlos Kick-a-bouts do all the fancy stuff. Modern club sides are like that; they take the best qualities from the countries around the world and blend them into a team. The English players bring English qualities; put them all together its just one boorish headless mob which the more technically able intelligent countries can just play around.

Eriksson got that and tried to slow everything down, but that was viewed as having a lack of passion - McClaren just didn’t get and turned England into a pub team. It was so badly exposed last night; I could do no more than laugh at every farcical turn.

Head for oblivion

2007-11-08T02:47:00.000-08:00

So, over two-thirds of people who downloaded the Radiohead album didn’t pay a rusty penny for it? Those who did only coughed up a couple of pounds on average.

I’m a creature of habit when it comes to music. I expect to pay for it, I buy albums on CD and until Millie came along bought singles on vinyl (part of my DJ-ing delusions). Space has dictated that I can’t really fit anymore vinyl into the house, so I’ve started buying the odd download single.

Downloading a whole album and not paying for it didn’t fit. I am a fan, so I did contemplate it, and decided to pay £5. This makes me more generous than most, I guess. When they announced that it would come out on CD, I decided to wait.

I wonder what Radiohead think of all this. Maybe it’s all part of a grand plan – sign to a major, make commercial albums, and then use the money made from The Man to subvert the industry. Using corporate greed to bring down corporate greed.

Or maybe they had faith in humanity and actually assumed people would want to pay for it. Like me, they’re of the generation that bought its music in hard format with money. Maybe they despair at the kids today who see nothing wrong in stealing other people’s work. It’s enough to make Thom Yorke start reading the Express and vote Tory.

There’s been a lot in the rhetoric about how this is changing the face of the music industry by cutting out the record labels. But Radiohead, and their kin (The Charlatans and Prince) have established their profile as a result of the labels. They can now operate outside their control.

Other artists can’t operate like this; they need the publicity that labels offer. For all the talk of MySpace bands, the Radiohead move isn’t really going to bring down the status quo. The Radiohead way maybe an option for the late career artists, but its not really going to work for those who are up and coming.

The good, the bad and the ugly

2007-11-01T04:09:00.000-07:00

Having worked over 40 hours in the last two and a bit days, I’ve taken the day off today. Tomorrow I’m back at work, tackling that key tasks of archiving my emails and drinking coffee.

I’m not much of a sleeper, but I was determined to stay in bed for a goodly length of time. As a result I’ve managed to catch up with the dark netherworld of daytime terrestrial TV.

First up was Jeremy Kyle, which I can’t watch for more than about 3 minutes at a time. The topic was ‘You slept with my cousin’s fiancé’. Gormless Chav Number 1 took a lie detector test to find out whether this was true. Kyle announced that it was, to which Gormless Chav Number 2 (who had been cheated on) sat in his Adidas tracksuit and shouted ‘Booyaah’. It was like watching Newsnight.

On Channel 4, rather more unpredictably for 10.30am, was a short documentary on the making of a glamour model. Seren, a media student from Goldsmiths College, was embarking on a glamour model career to ease her student debt.

The agency who signed her up needed to give her a distinctive look to make her stand out. They decided to brand her as the ‘smartest glamour model on the circuit’. Summarised as: pictures in FHM, talking about the pictures in Media Guardian. The creative director suggested she was pictured surrounded by books. Great.

In the end branding of the ‘smartest glamour model on the circuit’ involved shots of her topless in a white shirt and knickers. Very cerebral.

They interviewed her afterwards asking whether she knew they were branding her the smartest glamour model on the circuit. No, she said. Do you think the pictures reflected that? They said. No, she said.

She reflected, slightly shocked, before continuing...

I suppose I did cover up my fanny with a copy of Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

Nil from two

2007-10-21T13:36:00.000-07:00

During this great weekend of sport, in which the country ended with less world champions than it started, questions were raised as to whether we should switch our national sport from football to rugby.

Do you have to declare your national sport to the UN? I mean, does the National Sport Security Council sit and have conversations that start; “Sir, our intelligence informs us that the Afghans have developed an unauthorised liking for the pole vault”?

The argument basically goes that we’re better at rugby than we are at football. This, despite the fact that the rugby world is comparatively tiny, making us a big fish in a small pond and despite the fact had England won on Saturday night it would have been a travesty to declare them the best in the world.

The second argument is that football is boorish, bloated and over exposed, whereas rugby is more refined and cultured. After all, despite having a controversial try disallowed, there was no apoplexy, no derision, and no cries of foul.

This is because despite the endeavour, tension and excitement; after the final whistle blows; nobody really cares about rugby.

Cracking eggs

2007-10-14T03:55:00.001-07:00

You won’t find any meaningful analysis of the Rugby World Cup from me. However, I have enjoyed the tournament. The Wales v Fiji game was a ding dong battle and the France v All Blacks game was pure theatre from the French standing nose to nose with the snarling Kiwi haka to Jean-Baptiste Elisalde sprinting in towards his own line to punt the ball into the crowd and ensure victory.

I admire what England have achieved, though they are a one man team, I know Johnny Wilkinson couldn’t win games on his own. More importantly, England can’t win without Wilkinson. Without him on the pitch, their efforts are largely redundant. Unlike many, I like to see heroes being heroic.

But, the problem with Rugby is that it is only accessible at a certain level. From an outsider’s point of view, a vast majority appears to be about big men lying on top of each other. Its difficult to know whether Sebastien Chabal, the modern day cave man and hairy scary bastard, is a good player or just a hairy scary bastard. He looks great when his beard and hair is drenched in mud, sweat and others’ teeth, but what’s he doing lying on the floor in the first place?

The rules don’t help, they’ve been invented to make the game as aesthetically pleasing as possible, but you can only trust that the referee isn’t making them up like a game of Mornington Crescent. Players can be penalised for going in on the wrong side and doing things in a scrum that no end of TV replays can clarify. With England so reliant on Wilkinson’s penalties, who knows what might win them the game – eating fish fingers in a ruck or doing impressions of Ronny Corbett with one foot off the ground perhaps?

African queen

2007-10-13T04:30:00.001-07:00

GMTV is not known for its subtly. The only shock is that they haven’t yet managed to get the advert breaks sponsored.

This week they’ve been running a trailor promoting a week in which Fiona Phillips is flying out to Tanzania to visit a girl she sponsors. The little girl’s name is Neema.

It’s not right to criticise this, and I wouldn’t. But the trailer opens with an introduction highlighting that this little girl and millions of others, have little hope. In short, they are so poor they will die without help.

The trailer continues to a soundtrack of authentic African music. Lots of pictures of children with no shoes and living in mud huts studying from old textbooks.

Fiona herself is shot, sans make-up, staring into the middle distance from what may be the back of a safari jeep, but may also be the balcony of her five-star timber framed hotel suite.

Whilst it’s nauseating and patronising, it just about maintains its credibility. Then the final caption comes up, in their infinite wisdom, they’ve chosen to call this segment of the show Finding Neema.

Going postal

2007-10-10T13:41:00.000-07:00

Broadly speaking I am for the man in the street and against The Man. Therefore I do want to sympathise with the striking postal workers. In addition to this, I really dislike Adam Crozier, who has made a career out of turning quintessentially dusty and crusty old English institutions into ugly moneymaking machines. The man has no soul.

That said, you suspect that he’s right when he says that the postal service needs modernising. The strikers, as much as I want to support them, are probably in the wrong.

The ‘postal chaos’ hasn’t really been chaotic at all bringing into question just how much we rely on the service. Emaciated children aren’t running around the streets, no tanks have rolled through the shires. A woman on the TV said that some of her mail order customers wouldn’t have their fancy dress costumes for parties at the weekend.

This evening I got home to find a pile of post, mostly junk, but a pile. It was about 4 times the normal amount of post. Perhaps 4 days worth. In short, it does seem that the sorting offices have cleared the backlog on the first day back. Which may suggest that the post office has approximately four times too many people working for it.

A case for The Man? Perhaps.

Fair play

2007-09-23T01:43:00.001-07:00

Thame Fair is an institution round these parts and like all great institutions it’s barely changed in at least 25 years. It cuts the whole of Thame High Street off, a logistical and economic nightmare, and coincides with Thame Show – the largest one day agricultural show in the country. The two events together are the highlight of the town’s social calendar.

When we were at school, it would all start the night before it actually opened. Wednesday night was for setting up. We used to have the day off for Thame Show on the Thursday, so Wednesday night was free. Wednesday served three purposes; firstly, to check out what was new, to see if there was the opportunity to test the rides for free, and to get a fair job.

All, completely fanciful; there was never anything new, nobody ever tested the rides and why would hardened fair ride owners cut into their profit margins by handing jobs out to twelve years olds?

Because of school the next day, mums and dads throughout the county locked down their children for Thursday’s opening night. Those who did make it out would turn up on Friday morning with stories of how one of the rides had broken and killed someone. Usually a car had flown off the Tri-Star hitting the Town Hall. Oddly, the Thame Gazette chose never to feature the story; which suggested that there was some grand conspiracy, Thame’s resident hacks had bigger stories to cover, like the new tree that’s being planned for the war memorial or it was complete braggadocio.

Friday was The Night. The whole school would descend on the town; cars from the surrounding villages would stack up round the ring road waiting for clearance to drop their payload of children off at the end of the High Street. Kids would walk around four stone heavier laden ten pence pieces in their pockets. It was an egalitarian social event, because whether you were cool or a geek everyone could go down the fair.

Friday was the night Wiggazz finished his shift at Budgens and between leaving its front door and meeting us at the arcades two hundred yards away; had blown his week’s wages on slot machines. It was when Choggaz spent the night comparing Star Wars strategies some mystical lard arse and the night we encountered Gauntlet; a revolutionary game you could play with your mates and keep your characters power up by putting more money in. As a result it ate money.

Saturday was best kept clear. Rumours were abound that ‘posses’ from Aylesbury, Wallingford and all obscure villages in the surrounding area would turn up. Apparently (though typically, this again was missed by the paper) the fair would end in a massive riot with all the posses and fair workers scrapping it out for supremacy. For years I imagined that all these posses had club houses and robust governance structures and they planned their assaults meticulously. In truth it was just kids you didn’t recognise from school.

We went to the fair last night with Millie. Nothing has changed. Presumably it’s ludicrously expensive to paint a fair ride as each one is stuck in a timewarp. Like the ride which featured Ally G or the one that screamed ‘WASSSUP’ every two minutes, or the stall where you could win a cuddly Crazy Frog. I’m sure the Superbowl ride had a painting of Dan Marino on it. I found myself staring at people my age trying to regress them in my mind back to the school days. If you could take 3 stone and 20 years off their faces then, yes, they were from school. Yes, like us they have children and like us they have to go home at 7.30. But essentially, everything is the same. Now, like then, these people hang around in groups barely making eye contact with each other. And that’s just the way it should be.

London loves?

2007-09-18T13:31:00.000-07:00

Prior to boarding the train into London yesterday, I was listening to a debate about Northern Rock. The discussion basically went along the lines of…

Caller: “I’m taking all my money out because if they’re wound up then I will lose all my money and will have to work for the rest of my life”
Financial expert: “But they’re not going to be wound up, they would be able to function without any deposits at all and the Bank of England will only lend to companies who are in good shape.”
Caller: “But what if they are wound up?”
Financial expert: “They’re not going to be”
Caller: “But what if they are?”
Etc.

Getting off the train, I found I was in a carriage with a woman dressed in red shoes, thick red tights, red dress and red coat, a woman with one leg on crutches, a body builder in flip flops, a couple of fat lesbians and a woman in thigh high boots and a business suit.

Walking down Regents Street I was held up by a bunch of clearly wealthy Japanese business men dressed in hideous, but expensive, golfing casuals. With breathtaking predicatbility, they meandered along until they got to the Pringle shop then stood stock still like rabbits in a car’s headlights gawping at the pink and lemon patterned jumpers in the window.

I passed the Hanover Street branch of Northern Rock with 200 people hanging around outside and TV reporters doing their hair preparing for broadcast.

I had lunch in EAT in Vigo Street, and sat intimidated amongst stick thin models eating cress, fashionistas in vintage sportswear, people with indeterminate marketing jobs making energetic calls about ‘The Tour De France account’ and ‘The Paul Smith Campaign’ and fashion students talking about this season’s fabrics and colours with piles of drawings and rags spread out all over the table.

I went to The Pen Shop, because I needed a pen, but found their starting prices were around £60. I then spent 35 minutes looking for a shop that sold both cheap pens and mini-London A-Zs.

Britain: weird or wonderful? you decide.

Not making a meal of it

2007-09-15T01:46:00.000-07:00

Emma’s has had a wretched time with her new car. About two weeks before our holiday two of the hubcaps were nicked from it. When we returned from holiday we found the other two gone too.

Yesterday, whilst she was shopping, someone ran into the back of her in a car park breaking the rear light. The culprit then drove off without owning up to their crime.

In between some scallywag wrote in the dust on the roof what appears to be the legend ‘Cheesecake Cock’ – now I can’t definitively say what that means, though I can have a good go.

Not one to look on the dark side of life Emma turned to me and said, “You never know, maybe it says ‘Cheesecake Cook’ which would be a complement.”

All hail the chef

2007-09-12T08:31:00.000-07:00

It’s a hard life, but yesterday I had to do a tasting in preparation for a conference. The chef was a Swede, the nationality, not the vegetable. He was about nine feet tall without his hat, and twelve with it.

I’ve never done a tasting before, I thought we’d be given samples of all the food; we’d pop it in our mouths, say ‘yum’ and move on. Not a bit of it; it was all about the performance. Our Chef wanted us to understand firstly where he was coming from (two Michelin stars at the age of 23 before he had a heart attack as a result of the pressure) and where his food came from.

I don’t mean where geographically, although he told us this too – he only gets his sun blushed tomatoes from Sicily (‘if they’re the only place that does good ones, what are you gonna do?’) for example. He wanted us to know where it came from spiritually and philosophically. He was, he said, trying to redefine conference catering – well, we’ve all got to have a hobby, I suppose.

Not only was he trying; he had achieved it. He told us so. It was delicious, and there was no denying his talent. Or confidence. Or arrogance. Depending which way you look at it.

What’s more, we were lapping it up. We may have suggested under our breaths that the chicken pie needed some greenery, but we weren’t going to tell him because he was the maestro and not to be questioned. We even called him ‘Chef’ rather than use his name out of sheer reverence to his limitless capabilities.

I managed not to refer to him directly as chef; I couldn’t bring myself to do it. When he described the food’s philosophy, the temptation was to tell him to calm down – it’s just cooking a bit of lunch. I didn’t of course, but I wasn’t quite as compliant as the others.

Effectively we were playing a game of master and servant, he would tell us how marvellous he and his food was, we would tell him how right he was then call him Chef. Maybe we’ve watched too many restaurant programmes and as a result of seeing Ramsay and Marco Pierre White in action we’ve now all got a channel for our latent sadomasochism. We might as well have called him Mistress. We probably needed a safe word, like “McNuggets” or something.

One for the Daily Express readers

2007-09-09T13:52:00.000-07:00

I'd like to say that the reason for my blogging hiatus was due to spending time at a Buddhist retreat or some life changing experience. It's not; it's just because work has been bloody hard and play has been bloody fun. I've had precious little keyboard time.

Time flies... which is a neat segue into the fact that it's been ten years since Princess Diana's funeral. I can't really remember how I felt about it then; I didn't lay any flowers at a makeshift memorial, I didn't use the phrase 'Queen of Hearts' or 'The People's Princess'. I did feel the impact of what happened though, it's one of those things that you cannot describe to those who weren't there. The whole nation appeared to go into shock for a week, and for a period is was like it would never go back to normal again.

Charlie was down the weekend it happened. The night before she died we'd been out drinking and ended up at Penny's house sitting in the garden trying to wake up a Bishop who apparently lived in one of the nearby homes. We got home very late. Shortly after going to bed the phone rang; it was Andrew, who was still drinking in the garden, doing spitfire impressions. We eventually managed to convince him that it wasn't really that funny and we finally got to sleep.

I got up fairly early and went downstairs; in a completely atypical move, I didn't turn the TV on. For an hour or so I read. When I did eventually put the TV on, it was quite apparent that something was up. The news was on when it should have been Saved By The Bell.

I went upstairs to tell Emma and Charlie what had happened. I think I described it as 'exciting', which it was. We phoned Andrew who answered in a bit of a mess and thought we were getting him back for his Spitfire prank.

We'd planned to go to the cinema in the evening and, such was the impact, felt it necessary to phone up to check they were still open. A couple of our friends actually chose not to go, out of respect. We had problems getting to the cinema because the motorway was closed to allow them to transport her body back.

The next morning we went back to work and speculated that there may be a day of national mourning, or more specifically, a day off. Our fiery Irish boss was apoplectic at the prospect. Which was instantly sobering and, in hindsight, probably saved us from joining the utter madness of the week.

How clean is your gob?

2007-08-18T00:51:00.000-07:00

Highlight of my week, if it can be described as such, was a trip to the dentist. I haven't been for a long time (longer than I'd told them). It wasn't because I was scared or because of the expense; it just fell off my radar. Nothing hurt, nothing wobbled, so what did I need a dentist for? Like Wikes, the builders place, I know what it does but until I need to do any re-pointing (whatever that is), I'm not likely to go in.

I know it's not as simple as that, so I went along and found out that my teeth were all in place, no cavities and my gums were OK. I needed to see a hygienist, which I kind of expected.

I'm pretty sure hygienists didn't exist when I last went; there were just dentists. I expected the her to be a kindly women with a a high powered toothbrush. And that she'd give me a thoroughly satisfying deep polish. A bit like going for a massage, just in my mouth.

The first thing she did was to put a mirror in my face and scrape out a solid lump which I originally thought to be an extra tooth but proved to be tartar. She put various sonic, pointy implements in my mouth and I actually began to feel individual teeth rather than one continuous blade around the mouth.

Whilst she scraped away she basically carbon dated my life - that I used to drink a lot of fizzy drinks, that I've only been using an electric toothbrush for a short while, that I once ate mussels in Croatia - that sort of thing.

Deeper and deeper she went; at one point it seem like she had got a little carried away and was scraping out bit of my skull just for fun.

My half an hour was up, but she was enjoying herself so much she kept going; presumably my mouth is just the sort of mouth she dreams about with lots of crap to get out. She must do; I've got to go again next month.

The deathly hellos

2007-08-10T12:43:00.000-07:00

About three years ago I started going regularly to the gym. This was in response to a realisation that I was on a weight-gain trajectory that would make me very fat in middle age. Alongside this, I realised that I should stop eating shite like fast food and sweets.

I recently resolved to jump back on the dentistry bandwagon having fallen off it some years ago. I went on Wednesday and it turns out I've got away with it, they need a bloody good clean, but against all odds I have a healthy gob.

Once I've been scraped to death by the hygienist, I'll be onto my eyesight. I have pretty good eyesight, but when I'm tired and it's dark, I know that I'm not focussing as well as I used to.

I should also go to the doctor to see if he can do anything about the stress related ulcers and psoriasis I've been getting.

There was a time when I could eat shit, do no exercise, work and play all night without any adverse effect. Its crept up on me, but its dawned on me that I'm spending more and more time doing things just to hold myself together. I was 35 on Thursday and Mother Nature has decided that I'm more valuable as soil nutrient. She's basically trying kill me.

Now, that's what I call a job

2007-08-09T15:13:00.000-07:00

Sara works for Waitrose. She was in Beaconsfield interviewing when the store was evacuated due to a fire alarm. Upon evacuation she bumped into a friend of hers who usually works in a one of their shops in Surrey. It's a small world.

He was at the Beaconsfield store looking at their displays of yogurt.

And before you ask, no, I have no idea whether his role extends to Muller Rice or not.

This is the modern world

2007-08-05T10:04:00.000-07:00

On Friday we got back from Jersey; a week in which we walked around beautiful coastal bays, cycled through leafy, flat bike tracks, ate fresh fish in a sea front restaurant, took a RIB out to the Écréhous, went seal spotting and got dragged around on a ringo. All in the company of great friends, it was, it's fair to say, perfect.

I've come back feeling cleansed; I'm going to sort out buying a bike and I'm going to sort out those fiddly jobs that are hanging around. I may even buy myself some new underpants.

Today, with a spring in my step, I went to Moss Bros to get measured up for an ushering suit. I was armed with all the details of the wedding; date, bride and grooms names, where they're getting married etc.

When you buy something from a John Lewis or Debenhams gift list, you punch in these details and the list comes up, you buy and you're on your way. At Moss Bros you need all the appropriate paperwork before they get the tape measures out. This can't be the only wedding in history where the groom and his ushers are geographically dispersed. They have no central database of weddings on their system. They rely entirely on shuffling paperwork from one shop to another. I therefore couldn't get measured up without the appropriate paperwork. Job Nos 1: In complete.

Then I went onto Orange - this time with the phone and the receipt - for the final battle. I walk in and like every Orange shop in the world there was one skinny spotty emo farting around behind the desk and one chavvy girl leaning on the counter apparently texting.

I explained, again, what happened. But they won't touch it. Not until I take out 'emergency insurance' at £60. And, if I do that with them in the shop, they will take up to 28 days to send it to their repairers. Or, I can do it via their customer service line and they'll send a courier within 24 hours. Nobody had previously mentioned any insurance requirements which just sounds like some kind of protection racket.

So I have a phone which I didn't break and to fix this shonky phone I must pay £60. This is probably illegal as I'm sure I have statutory rights, but I no longer have the energy to fight it or hear another of their staff saying that it's not their fault. I fear I'm about to give up, defeated. Which is probably what they want me to do. Job Nos 2: incomplete.

Welcome home.

Tour de Brother

2007-07-25T12:47:00.001-07:00

I haven't mentioned Big Brother this year, I am watching it, kind of, in passing, when there's nothing better on. Its just its not really been interesting enough to comment on, I suppose.

I'm also watching the Tour De France; the parallels between the two are remarkable - especially when you can think of nothing better to write about. Firstly, it's a competition of backbreaking longevity and it doesn't pay to go out too hard - an excessively exuberant Big Brother contestant is likely to be voted out early whereas a Prologue specialist is unlikely to complete the first week.

Both competitions have their specialists - the Tour has sprinters, climbers, and domestiques whilst Big Brother has Charley, the specialist hate figure, the good old-boy, Liam, the future Nuts model; Chanelle and the odd-ball - Tracey (who uses the phrase 'Ave It' when she can't think of anything else to say - like a blank tile in Scrabble).

These people spend most of their time anonymously cruising through the competition. Overall victory is never likely but they will have their day; either in a public vote, or a moment of comedy, or a barnstorming argument. This is what the tour would view as a stage win.

They're both compelling viewing because they weave a intriguing story that you don't really want to miss, yet the overall winner becomes obvious from fairly early on. The winners tend to be good at everything without being spectacular at anything. Brian, for example, is not particularly witty, clever or entertaining, he's just a decent bloke. Victory can be secured from some way out - this year's Tour winner is pretty much decided with a week and a half still to go; the Tour winner cruises into Paris, whereas Big Brother winner cruises into a Davina interview and China White's. In many ways, the competitions are very similar.

Plus, of course, they're all constantly cheating and probably on drugs.

These are your friends

2007-07-18T11:51:00.001-07:00

I've recently registered on Facebook. I've accumulated fourteen friends; which I thought was quite good until I found out that my 23 year old assistant has 188 because apparently everyone at Uni was on it.

As part of the original Internet generation, my comprehension of it was basically as a big unwieldy largely inaccurate book. Social networking was limited to a bit of email and the odd message board. I'm probably missing the whole point of Web 2.0, but apart from accumulating friends, I just seem to spend most of my time finding out that my friends are making friends with people I've never heard of and that this person has dropped a sheep on the other person's head. It's like a giant Vic and Bob convention.

I also recently had a tootle around Second Life. I went to a club and stood like a dork in the middle of dancefloor trying to work out how to activate my 'dancing' mode. At one point a naked man with glow stick bangles on skimmed across my screen, so I went and stood in a corner so I could try and work out the basic controls. One of the quick keys is to take all your clothes off, which explains much of Second Life's purpose, I suppose. Whilst standing in the corner, I managed to 'overhear' a conversation which went something along the lines of:

"U have gr8 boobs"
"Thnx lol"

They didn't seem at all embarrassed 'talking' like this in front of a man walking in circles and occasionally flying into walls (me, trying to work out the controls still) but I was embarrassed listening to it. I logged off and am probably still standing lifelessly listening to endless trance music whilst the, *shudder*, cyber-flirting goes on around me.

My fundamental issue with all this is that its unnatural. I do not make complete strangers ('randoms' according to my 23 year old assistant) my friends just because they ask in real life and can't get my head around doing it on the Internet. Nor can I quite get into the idea of telling someone they have "gr8 boobs" when that person is probably a fat trucker from Albuquerque called Derek. Above all, Second Life, as one person put it, is men pretending to be women having sex with women pretending to be unicorns.

Quite frankly, if I wanted to have sex with a unicorn, I'd just go out and do it.

Sky+ kills the video star

2007-07-14T03:54:00.000-07:00

I vividly remember the first video my dad bought. It was not a VHS, it was not even Betamax format; it was a Grundig with big clunky keys and tapes as big as house bricks.

He brought it home one evening, Nationwide was on the TV and he tested that everything was working by recording it; a car driving over a bridge. Like all major technological breakthroughs the sheer mundane nature of the subject made it more special.

Emma’s parents’ first video came much later; Emma assured me that it was state of the art and the most expensive one in the shop. It probably was, a purchase born out of fear of the technology. Despite this, it didn’t have a timer function – I was told. So you couldn’t preset the video to record; you basically had to put a tape in at least four hours before the end of the show you wanted to record. So they had tapes and tapes of rubbish in order to catch the Eastenders Omnibus. It wasn’t until, some five years after they bought it, I found it did have a timer; they just didn’t look at the manual, probably for fear of being seen to doubt the machine’s omnipotent power – if angered it might have had their souls exhumed.

My Grandpa also couldn’t get to grips with his video; he was convinced that you had to have the TV on and tuned into the channel you wanted to record. His basic understanding was that somehow the video was recording directly off the TV screen and if the TV was off, then it would record a blank screen. He was worried that if he left the TV on when he was out it would blow a fuse and burn the house would to the ground.

SKY+ came this week; a technology from another planet. The temptation is to use all the functionality all the time, but I figured it should be introduced naturally, y’know, when something significant comes along. So what have we christened this new wizard with? The release of a political prisoner after 30 years? Capture of a long chased Saudi dissident? The winning of a major world sporting trophy after many years of hurt?

Nope, the first thing we’re recording is Neighbours on series link.

Global fawning

2007-07-08T03:21:00.000-07:00

I'm in two minds about Live Earth. On one hand it seems churlish to ignore the issue, but on the other; there's no denying the hypocrisy and flaws in its concept.

Live Aid, upon which all these things are based, was unique, had a simple principle - the biggest bands in the world play music and you give us your fucking money, a charismatic iconic leader who did the politics so the dumbo popstars could focus on the bass solos and it had a few moments of legend: the career reviving Queen set, that video with the music from The Cars, and a career defining set from U2.

All this has been lost in the slew of political concerts staged in the intervening years. I didn't see much of yesterday, but it seemed to be a hotchpotch of bands which pandered to American audiences as the day progressed (Pussycat Dolls on third from last?), it was a series of short record company driven showcases; for example, who the hell is Terra Naomi and how come she's billed higher than the Red Hot Chilli Peppers? Above all, it wasn't entertaining enough for long enough to hold the attention.

Secondly, the simplicity of the Band Aid concept has been replaced by the more nebulous 'awareness building'. Success, therefore, can't be measured in money terms, so it compels the artists to go on about 'The Issue'. With no charismatic leader (sorry, Al Gore) it's left to Madonna to tell us to 'jump up and down if you want to save the world' and Kasabian to 'save the polar bears for our children's children, or at least give it a try, yaknowhatimsayin?'. Snow Patrol justified the criticisms of hypocrisy by saying they weren't there to preach, they were there to learn... about how to put gigs on of this size in an ecologically friendly way. Then there was bloody Hollywood-addled Joss Stone rambling on about 'Saving the world being really important and global warming being really bad, like'.

I'm certainly older, and probably more cynical than I was in the days of Live Aid, so its not really a fair comparison. It did strike me that I didn't hear a single piece of practical advice about the issue. Which, when you think about it, could have transformed the thing - what about a call for governments to pass a law that says in 5 years time only energy efficient light bulbs can be sold, or that no new appliance can have a stand-by light, or even that every car built is hybrid fuelled?

It seems odd that the government can't achieve this when it has managed to successfully ban smoking, insist that every TV goes Digital and has, in the past, banned lead from petrol. None of the three suggestions above would be a perceived attack on the UK way of life, it wouldn't even effect big businesses particularly. Instead, we have a concert whose effects are unlikely to last beyond Tuesday.

HAFL - Hooble As a Foreign Language

2007-07-05T05:08:00.001-07:00

Millie is just starting to become aware of the television as a source of entertainment. Previously she just saw it as a source of flashing colours and spent many hours with her nose against the screen taking it all in.

This morning, The Hoobs were on, which she seemed to be enjoying. It had someone signing for the deaf in the corner. Goodness knows how they sign ‘Tiddlepeeps’ and ‘Hoobledoobledoo’.

For non-connoisseurs ‘Hoobledoo’ is how the Hoobs say hello to each other. They say it all the time. Eventually, on about the sixtieth ‘Hoobledoo’ Emma pipes up; ‘So, is this the Hoobs then?’

It would have been a bit weird if it was said by a Fimble.

Orange ordered

2007-07-01T13:08:00.001-07:00

So, to update; I buy a new Orange phone; it breaks through no fault of my own, there follows a brief border skirmish with Orange, in which they won't fix it without a receipt and I retreat to lick my wounds. Then I find the receipt to the phone and arm myself ready for battle. At this point I lose my SIM card somewhere between here and Poland rendering the whole phone fixing onslaught largely redundant.

Then Millie hides the controller to our Freeview box upstairs leaving us with just four fuzzy analogue channels. Then our Sky box downstairs packs up leaving us analogue downstairs too. This must have been what it was like for medieval peasants.

I decide to draw a line under the debacle; I order SKY+ and choose to simply cut my loses and buy a new phone. I head for the Orange shop, I get as far as checking out a new phone. I don't like it; the buttons are too small and it has rather unpleasant orange lights, I decide to think about it.

We walk home via Sara's; they switched to SKY+ a few months ago and it turns out they've got a spare box that we can borrow to tide us over. Emma then goes to Tesco and buys a new digibox for upstairs.

Then, and here's the miracle, I do what I always do when preparing to sit down in front of the TV. I take my shoes and belt off and empty my pockets - leaving small piles of change all over the house. Out comes my wallet and for no apparent reason I decide to have another route around for the Sim card. My finger finds a particularly ragged bit of my particularly ragged wallet... and... I feel the SIM card. I FOUND THE SIM CARD. I can't explain why I decided to have another look or why my finger found the nook for the first time. I have only one explanation - the baby Jesus put it there.

I am now fully subscribed to digital TV once more, I have my SIM card and my broken phone with it's receipt. I am making progress in my battle with technology; I feel like Mace Windu fighting the Clone Wars.

Look at each other and go Blair

2007-06-30T01:28:00.001-07:00

It didn't seem particularly fair that the core hypothesis being offered in the endless documentaries on the 'real' Tony Blair this week was 'Tony Blair, how utterly rubbish was he?'

Channel 4 ran a documentary about Blair's Children focussing on a child that'd been shot in a council estate. Honestly, is this representative of 'Blair's Children' (aside from the fact that Blair's Children are Euan, Nicky, Kathryn and Leo).

In the main, Britain under Tony Blair has been a good place; economically stable and reasonably prosperous. We're a nation that gets education, healthcare, a decent prospect of having a job, low inflation, cheap overseas holidays, pretty safe streets and in 2012 we will have the Olympic Games.

OK, some people have more than others, but that's always going to be the case and true equality is a a worthy, but unlikely prospect - which doesn't mean we should stop trying to achieve it, of course. If people living on the streets of Rio or in Baghdad, Dehli, or Kabul had the choice of living there or somewhere as stable and prosperous as Britain, I think they'd choose the latter ... we don't know we're born.

It's not been a perfect premiership; but I'd like to meet the person who hasn't made a mistake at work for ten years. After 10 years in any job there is a point where the world has moved on and you're left floundering. Which is probably what's happened to him in the last couple of years.

Sadly, one of his legacies will be Iraq; but he isn't responsible for the growth of radical Islamic thinking, that's been on the march for 30 years nor was he responsible for the election of George Bush. Our alignment on a global stage with the US goes back generations, and he knows he'd have been slaughtered for aligning with Europe on the issue. Yes, he could have had more conviction and listened to the people; but in reality he was pretty stymied in what he could do about it.

He's been on every TV channel every day for ten years, so over-exposure is an inevitability. He can't be anyone but who he is - have you tried talking or smiling differently, it's very hard, so when he smiles, it's not smarmy, it's him smiling. I think he's done OK, and think he should be respected for what he's done.

ARSECAKE!

2007-06-28T14:25:00.000-07:00

I bought an Orange phone, then it got a crack in the screen and I had to go to war with the evil corporate machine to get it fixed. I fought valiantly and heroically to try and get them accept the blame, but without a receipt they wouldn't touch it.

Then I threatened them with Trading Standards and they relented, promising to have a look at it if I sent it back to their evil lair, victory was in my grasp.

And, then, well, I kind of forgot to send it to them. You see, I'm a bit lazy and really not the kind of person who holds a grudge for very long. For all the fire in my belly during a fight, it only takes a cup of tea and a biscuit to remove my steel.

Days, weeks and months slipped by and my position became untenable. I was given a repair number in February, but you can't send the handset in June with any credibility. I kind of gave up on the idea.

THEN, on Tuesday Emma was clearing out some paperwork and came across the receipt for the phone which was the crucible of the struggle between me and the beast. The one single reason that Orange shops wouldn't touch it.

The battle was back on. I could approach them again, exploit the weakness which was once my biggest foe - the fact that Orange shops and Orange online aren't linked. I could go to the shop, get it fixed and Orange online, with their February repair number, would never know. I resisted the temptation of preening myself whilst strutting topless up the High Street in celebration.

Then, on Wednesday, less than twenty-four hours later I remembered that my work phone was carrying my work Sim Card. I replaced my Orange Sim with it when I was in Poland so that work could pay for my calls home. I went to switch it back and went to my wallet where... the Orange Sim card was gone. And they're very small. And it could be anywhere between here and Cracow. And, well, bollocks.

So, the handset is broken through no fault of my own, and is probably worth about 10% of the total value of the phone and the Sim card, 90% of the value of the phone, is lost through totally my own fault. Except, of course, if my phone wasn't broken I wouldn't be switching Sim cards back and forth in the same handset. It appears that I am being buggered by the corporate beast and it is my own fault whilst not being my own fault at the same time, it's like being buggered twice through my own choice... which I realise for some would represent a party.

Bad week for technology in the house of Ruffles.

Sky'ed up in knots

2007-06-25T14:43:00.001-07:00

Have you ever got on a roll with an argument, only to realise halfway through, you're in the wrong? This happened to me this weekend.

Our SKY box broke on Thursday, it's about 4 years old and way out of guarantee. Incidentally, the controller for our Freeview box upstairs has been hidden by Millie never to be found again. Televisually we're going back in time. Tomorrow I'm likely to turn on and observe the liquid sexual chemistry between Anne Diamond and Nick Owen on TV AM.

Something needed to be done, it was the perfect opportunity to reassess our televisual needs. Everyone raves about SKY+, so that seemed worth exploring, and we could probably live without SKY Movies. Well, I'm the customer, BT Vision and Virgin Media mean I'm in a position of considerable power. I decided I was going to get onto SKY and get myself a rollicking good deal. I looked on the website...

Option A was to upgrade to SKY+ at a cost of £159 with the whole package.

Option B was to remove the films and save about £5 a month.

I phoned them; with a head of steam, my negotiating skills and a competitive market they were sure to pull something out of the bag. I said, in my sternest voice, that I wasn't happy with the price being offered. What were they going to do about it? Not a lot, they said.

They could offer me Option C: SKY Motion, which allows you to watch SKY on more than one TV. This would knock the installation down to £99 but put £10 on the monthly subscription.

Option D: They could get my monthly subscription down to £20, but that was without any of the premium channels.

I walked away from the negotiations, because AH HA! I could always get our broken box fixed. The power was with me, for sure; they wouldn't want to lose my custom would they?

Once off the phone I worked it out; Option D wasn't much of an improvement on what I have now with a broken box, and Option C would cost me £120 a year more in subscriptions despite it being £60 less in installation. I could live without the benefit of Premiership football upstairs as well as down and we could get a new Freeview box for about £20.

Option B, dropping SKY Movies, would save about a fiver; but we probably watch a film or two a month, which still beats a Blockbuster rental DVD. So there was no point in dropping SKY Movies either.

Which left me with two options; fix the old box or upgrade to SKY+ for the extravagant price of £159. And then it dawned on me... to get the existing box fixed would be a minimum of £100. Which would be £100 to stand still. Which basically means Option A, is really only £59, the price of a cheap video, for a heap of new features. Really, the hideously priced SKY+ installation was not a bad deal after all.

Sheepishly I went back to SKY and ordered the new box.

Festival vibe

2007-06-24T01:50:00.000-07:00

I really should get out of the habit of say that I'm not going to Glastonbury this year as my festival going days are some way behind me. One day I'd like to go back with Millie and experience a different Glastonbury, although I suspect its already very different to what I remember. When the hippies and crusties left with the traveller riot in 1990, the indie kids were its lifeblood, this was my time. That seems to have been taken over by 30-something professionals. James Blunt, James Morrison and Jamie Cullum would never have even made the site during my era.

Still, there are ways of enjoying its vibe when you're a lazy 30-something (as opposed to a deluded 30 something). Today I bought the Orbital Live at Glastonbury compilation and from the second I put it on I swear I could feel the dampness in the air and smell the poppers. Seriously.

Of course, Glastonbury is also now a TV event, and, when Jo Wiley isn't trying to be John Peel (Lauren Laverne is cooler and better), and they're not playing Just Jack as the intro music, it's pretty good. Arctic Monkeys were great on Friday, but until then I hadn't quite worked out why like them. I usually know why I like the music I like. I like Radiohead because they're the band I want to be... edgy, popular, from Oxford. I like hip hop because I like to imagine that I'm at the party Kid N Play throw in House Party. With the Arctic Monkeys I have little claim on them, Happy Mondays, Oasis, the Stone Roses all defined my generation whereas the Monkeys are defining the generation I tut at on the train when they put their feet on the seats and drop litter.

They sing about going down the pub and kicking around town and play groovy funky riffs. they play them hard and fast, but there's not much innovative or clever in what they do. It then came to me why I like them; they're basically the best school band ever.

Btw - this photo album thing is good isn't it?... I love the BBC.

Prize apart

2007-06-21T01:11:00.000-07:00

The conference dinner and awards in Poland was a masterclass in the surreal. It was held in a castle some fifty minutes from the city centre. I was hoping for ramparts, but it was actually a mansion house built by a randy old bugger to house one of his mistresses – one of fifty shag pads he built throughout Poland, each one installed with an ensuite mistress.

For reasons unclear, the host chose a didactic style and rather than explain what was going on in the entertainment, chose to tell us what we were feeling. Therefore we were subject to a mechanistic dance of men shaving women’s legs, and of women dancing with a human head in a bucket, all without a word of introduction or explanation. However, when it came to the prize giving we were told that ‘this is an emotional moment for all of us’. A useful cue.

Two special awards were presented, again without real explanation. Firstly to the Polish (the main conference sponsor took a special version of the special award) and then to the Chinese. Nope, I didn’t get it either.

The main award took about an hour to present with each of the nine judging levels, eight judges and seven finalists being explained or called onto the stage in minute detail. Each finalist had a promotional video which was often a more generic TV advert than anything to do with the actual award contestant. Then there was a little vignette played out where the main judge searched his pockets pretending to have lost his envelope which he also did when presenting the Polish and Chinese awards earlier. Oh the hilarity.

With the envelope eventually found, the thirty-five people on stage and everyone checking their watches in gasping anticipation of the announcement, the host and main judge decided, in a pique of autism, to cut the proceedings to get everyone on stage more neatly arranged. Judges on the left, finalists on the right. In groups. Much confused shuffling and bowing ensued. A jazz band, which obscured most of the screen, played a groove in the background.

Eventually the announcement was made, and it was a major shock to hear the prize was shared between the growing economic superpower that it would be good to sidle up to: China and the host nation who had many influential dignitaries in attendance: Poland. Perhaps it was no irony that one of the graphics contained the typo ‘Price winners’; one speculates, what price the winners might have paid.

The evening closed with the serving of plates of what looked like entrées and a laser show with the loudest soundsystem I’ve ever heard. Nobody quite explained what the diplodocus or birthday cake had to do with the presentation, but at the time it seemed somehow wholly appropriate.

Crac'ked record

2007-06-18T23:10:00.001-07:00

Dateline: Cracow

I’m here in Poland with work, which makes me an international business person. The purpose of my visit is an international conference. Cracow is beautiful, and not at all like I’d envisaged, but I’d rather be at home. Or here on holiday. Why people enjoy this I don’t know.

For all the platitudes about reaching beyond borders and nations meeting nations, in truth the nations stick together, the English keep it particularly tribal even though everyone else speaks English as the common language. When they’re feeling gregarious they will pass the time with the odd American or Australian but in truth, everyone stays with their own and scoffs at each other. It’s largely indistinguishable from International It’s a Knockout. I keep expecting to hear Stuart Hall screaming “LOOK AT THE FRENCH, LOOK AT THE FRENCH!”

Either that or a teenage party; for the uninitiated, like me, I shake hands with Olaf and Vladimir and they seem OK. Then you find that there’s some almighty fall out and that Dave didn’t like the way Olaf said something to Vladimir and that as a result Beatrice is crying in the toilet. For those who live in this world, it all seems terribly important; but it just appears to be a self perpetuating round of inconsequential bickering.

The conference had an opening ceremony; the only opening ceremony I’ve ever seen is at the Olympics, and that usually involves elfin imps dancing incomprehensibly to signify the development of youth or something. It wasn’t quite like that, but we had the local mayor, the main sponsor and Lech Walesa, plus a classical music recital which culminated in the playing of the wedding march. Everyone sat stoney-faced; did nobody see the absurdity of it all?

I’m only here for a couple of nights, giving me one whole day at the conference and the delight of the main conference dinner. Some of the English contingent, who flew out earlier, appear to be treating their trip like a stag weekend. So it should be interesting to see what happens at the dinner, apparently, it’s not unusual for the nations to sing their national songs… I think ours is going to be ‘You’re going to get your fucking heads kicked in’.

Party in the park

2007-06-16T06:56:00.001-07:00

The Wireless festival, of which I now count myself a regular having attended Depeche Mode last year, New Order the year before and Faithless this year, delights and disgusts me in equal measure. Whilst the principle spirit of any festival is achieving some kind of 'connection' at Glastonbury its with your own inner spirit or something, at Wireless it's with your mobile phone brand.

Apart from the opportunity to bond with your O2 phone provider by texting for a "VIP" pass to their tent thing. You can walk along neat concreted pathways between various heavily sponsored areas, rather than through a bog of your own swill. Even the burgers are nice, the beer queue short and Spanx had a convenient and safe locker to store his rucksack. It is all very wrong.

But, it's convenient, it's within 30 minutes of all main stations out of town and it finishes at a reasonable time. Its like a lady choosing to discard her foxy lingerie for a pair of three pack big knickers because they're comfortable. You can't argue with the logic.

If Faithless were a football team, you'd say that in Maxi Jazz you've got a man up front who will guarantee you goals. They came on and snatched an early goal with 'Can't Get No Sleep', just before half time 'God Is A DJ' ensured victory. For most of the second half they defended deep and in numbers without really pressing their advantage home. In the final minute they broke away to slot home 'We Come 1'; flattering the score line a little.

I'd never seen Faithless before, but they look amazing on TV and when they're good, they're really good. But it wasn't quite the stellar experience I hoped it might be and it turns out that I don't know as many of their tunes as I thought.

Still, they've enough in their locker for you to go home happy and there's little better than pounding live music and a big crowd to get your spirits up. Even if it is Mark Ronson name dropping Amy Whinehouse and playing a series of anodyne covers.

Village People

2007-06-10T02:10:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, because we were in the area, we went to designer retail outlet discount centre Bicester Village. We're in the area about once every eighteen months and will drop in with increasingly low expectations of what we might find.

Last time we were there I bought a pair of Camper shoes which turned out to be from a range called 'Twins'. Sadly these weren't identical twins, they were subtly, though noticeably different. At first, probably because I'd just spent fifty quid on odd shoes, I justified this as an appropriately quirky manifestation of my character. Eventually they simply became a pair of odd shoes; odd shoes are worn by Big Brother contestants and sixth form students trying to amplify their brittle teenage characters onto a thankless peer group. My odd shoes just slipped to the back of the cupboard, to become crushed by pairs of shoes which looked the same. A sort of shoe based Darwinism.

Not that Bicester Village is totally without value. If you are morbidly obese to the point that a barrage balloon is considered to pinch a little under the arms, or skeletal to the point that risks full multiple collapse of your internal organs as a result of your bowing pipecleaner bones, then you will indeed find some of the latest fashions at discounted rates. We saw a pair of wedge healed open toed sandals at LK Bennet which are the very height of fashion, but sadly much as we tried to jam them on, they were just too small for Millie's thirteen month old feet.

If you're within a normal size range - and for this I mean that you don't have feet so big that skis are unnecessary when wintering in Whistler, or that they appear to be mere stumps. If you are within this range the shopping is rather more hit or miss. Occasionally you will find a pair of well tailored trousers, but on pulling them off the rack you'll realise that there has been a scale embroidered picture of a cat having a vasectomy stitched onto the left thigh as a design flourish. In the Camper store, Emma found a pair of men's slip-on shoes which looked like they'd been made from a neon pink cauliflower. Someone, somewhere, drew a picture of that and someone somewhere said; 'we're going to sell millions of those'.

Apart from Japanese tourists, of which there are loads, the other noticeable tribe trawling the village are fashionistas who obviously subscribe to the concept of enhancing their persona by wearing designer gear. However, they don't appear to be able to actually afford any of it at regular price and buy exclusively from the Village's hideous discounted ranges. So next time you see someone in a baseball cap made from a Lion's mane, a coat with a silver picture of hippo eating a Wagon Wheel, a skirt which spins round and changes colour with variations in temperature and shoes with horns sticking out of them. Ask them if they found anything nice at Bicester Village that weekend.

Logo-a-gogo

2007-06-06T15:06:00.000-07:00

As someone who has been on the receiving end of those ‘a child could have done it’ accusations regarding design work, I have some sympathy with the people who came up with the London 2012 logo.

Of course, theoretically, anyone with fingers can create an image. Rulers are useful for straight lines, compasses good for circles and curvy bits, and your itty bitty fingers are good for when you want to get all freestyle on yo’ hairy black ass.

But in the end someone has to make a decision about what it is they’re going to put on that bit of paper that encapsulates everything there is to say about London, Britain, Olympic-ses, and a whole heap more.

A true waste of money would have been something hideously conservative and corporate. Pretty much anyone with a copy of Quark or PhotoShop can produce a logo, and most will do it for some way under say, £250,000; so to spend £400,000 on something nondescript and vanilla would have been worse than being brave and taking a risk.

Where a good designer is worth his salt is in the thinking behind the logo – and how it might be applied and I trust whoever it was who came up with the thing has thought this through. In time we will, if not love it (how many logos do you truly love?); recognise it; which is ultimately what it should do.

Aside from the aesthetics, there’s been some criticism of the video that accompanies it. GMTV were screaming about the millions of epileptics who have been slain by the flashing lights and colouring. I don’t know, I’m not sure it’s quite been quite the cull they’re claiming, I mean, it appears to have taken its inspiration from the opening credits of Going Live and I don’t remember that being a problem.

Cosmic

2007-06-03T02:43:00.000-07:00

Periodically, Emma's sister brings around a bag full of old magazines for us to read. Mostly, it's Heat with the odd Now. We've had to odd Hello and OK but it would be misleading to say that this was the norm. They tend to travel around the house and find homes by the side of the bed, toilet and bath before, eventually, being thrown away.

Why? I don't know why, I have an MBA, am head of a marketing department; I'm in the higher tax bracket and I'm considering the benefits of buying a second property, I have a cleaner, I read books about Islamic militancy and spend £6000 a year on nursery fees. But I also need to read Heat to find out whether Lyndey Lohan has a fat arse this week.

In the latest batch we had a couple of copies of Cosmopolitan (there's always a rogue Glamour in there too). They were on the bed, so I picked one up to flick through it.

I came across a page which gave a minute by minute account of how to prepare for the hottest sex you've ever had. Apparently it only takes 12 minutes.

Each minute was detailed, so for your benefit, if you want to have mind blowing sex, and have less that quarter of an hour to get ready for it, make sure you... put naughty messages in his wallet, rummage your hand in his trouser pocket, put on a pair of satin knickers, do a salsa dance, have mutual oral sex (1 minute each, ladies should be wearing sheer knickers), watch a female friendly erotic film (or read a passage from an erotic novel... come on, come one, you don't have time to decide which), have a massage, snog like teenagers, play with your sex toy, eat something (can't remember what), do a strip tease and a sexy dance.

That was it, all that in 12 minutes - at least three dances and two pairs of knickers. Does anyone follow this advice? It must be like a game of It's A Sex Knockout, great preparation for sex? Great preparation for a cup of tea and copy of Heat more like.

The generation game

2007-05-29T14:37:00.000-07:00

I don't wish to rain on anyone's parade; particularly if that anyone happens to be old. After all, raining on an old person's parade is simply mean - they're old, and its unlikely there'll be many more parades for them to enjoy.

Nor do I disagree with the sentiment of the (wholly overrated) documentary that lead to the 'Internet phenomenon' The Zimmers. It doesn't appear right to shove old people in ropey care homes once their economic worth has been expended. But the choice of My Generation to raise the issue of their plight is a touch ironic, no?

OK, the general sentiment of the song appears to fit nicely, but like all great art you have to understand it in context in which it was written. My Generation was written by a 21-year old Pete Townshend as a call to arms for a nation of youthful Mods. Look at the lyrics and my explanation of what they probably meant when they were written...

People try to put us down

We are disaffected and ignored section of society, and our views are belittled by the powers that be.

Just because we get around

We are being actively ignored by society because we are an increasingly powerful underground force.

...good so far...

Things they do look awful cold

They are the establishment, who by definition are the older generation. What this is saying is; old people are boring.

I hope I die before I get old

I'd rather die than be old and one of them.

Why don't you all fade away

I wish old people would die a quiet death.

And don't try to dig what we all say

Don't even try talking to me, I'm not interested.

I'm not trying to cause a big sensation

I don't want you to listen to me.

I'm just talkin' 'bout my generation

It's just people like me won't listen to you.

I could be reading this wrong , but isn't this song really about everything the Zimmers are protesting about?

Pretty Vacancies

2007-05-28T01:53:00.000-07:00

We're recruiting at the moment. I haven't done much interviewing, and do feel like I'm making it up as I go along. When sifting through CVs I did find that I was able to convince myself that, in the main, people with older names like Diedre were less able than people younger fresher names like Gemma.

Last week we had one person whose interview performance was no more than moderate, but I found myself constructing an argument that suggested she had hidden depths. An argument predicated on little more than she had terribly smart shoes on (by the way, if you're a bloke with terribly smart shoes on, you don't have hidden talents, you are arrogant - fact).

Such is my amateurism at this, I am paranoid of being caught up in some discrimination case. In the end you can't help but discriminate; you're making a judgement on a 2 page CV. 50 years old, 25 years working for IKEA, Wembley which followed a 10 year career managing a major oil company in Nigeria? No thanks.

It is quite reassuring reading CVs. In moments of darker paranoia, I doubt my own abilities and assume somebody is plotting my downfall (which they probably are). There's a deep seated fear that I will be fired, leaving me to find another job and that I will finally be found out meaning the only job I will be able to get is collecting trolleys in Tesco car park. But, having read a pile of CVs, you realise that if you are slung back into the job market, that despite your own weaknesses there's an enormous number people out there more desperate than you.

I'm of the view (because I'm lazy, perhaps) that what you're really looking for in someone to work with is somebody you can get on with. And for this, I look to the 'other interests' bit of the CV. Some will list every interest they've ever had - Playing with cars in my back garden, Under-8 tennis champion. Others will try to impress significance and relevance of their extra curricular activity on the job - I like to go to the gym, which I find fascinating, looking at the way the gym manages its profit margins through the use of a small number of trained staff and flexible contractors who take my Body Pump class. Some, are downright scary - World heavywieght Ultimate Fighting Champion and some, you think, are lying I like needlecraft and weaving when you know they are binge drinking and flashing their thongs at men with pattern shirts and eyebrow rings. Above all, however, most people with a richness of opportunity out there, and little I can do to verify their claims will sell themselves as a person with spark and drive as spending their spare time Socialising with friends, watching TV and reading'.

Final heartbreak

2007-05-20T14:45:00.000-07:00

The Cup Final was a turgid affair from the opening minute. It's not the first time the spectacle has failed to live up to expectations, but I can't remember an opening 10 minutes as tepid as this one, or the concluding 110 for that matter. John Terry afterwards claimed that both teams were 'scared to give the ball away', which seems a pretty lame excuse to me. After all, it's like a musician coming on stage and playing CDs because they're scared they'd play a bum note. With the game itself turning over £8 million and TV revenues and so forth dwarfing that amount, it would be polite, if at least the players could put away their 'fear' and try and have a game.

Plenty of things were blamed; the occasion, the pitch, the long season; but nobody touched on the real problem. Top flight football is just not competitive anymore, look at the stats; In the last 10 years 9 teams have made the final and only 4 have won it - the supposed Big Four of Chelsea, Manchester United, Arsenal and Liverpool. Compare that to ten years before that: 1988-1997, where there were 12 different finalists and 7 different winners, 1978-87 12 teams and 8 winners, 1968-1977 14 teams and 10 winners. The game has become increasingly concentrated around a small number of teams.

The Big Four all claim some kind of dominance based on a spurious set of self referencing criteria - Liverpool's 5 European Cup wins, Manchester United's global brand, Chelsea's money, Arsenal's purist qualities. Maybe Oxford could claim to be the best team in the country that play in a ground where you can see people going into a multiplex cinema during the game (although, knowing Oxford, they probably aren't). These four teams, with their big claims are increasingly fearful of actually testing who's best on the field itself; especially when facing each other. When they meet in the League Cup they compete to see who can field the weakest team; which gives them the perfect excuse when defeat comes. Arsenal even fielded a weakened side for this year's League Cup Final - their only hope of a trophy. It's getting to a point where the big players will be rested permanently only to be brought out in a big glass box on special occasions. When they do meet, like yesterday, the teams don't so much want to win the game as avoid losing it. Losing equals failure, so don't give the ball away Mr £100,000-a-week.

But English football is the best in the world - we're told this interminably. This year three (of the Big Four) English teams made it to the Champions League semi-final, which was considered a glorious success and widely lauded to be a credit to English football. Which part of English football should take credit? The managers? - well the big four are managed by a Scot, Portugese, Spaniard and Frenchman. The players? - less than half the players yesterday were English and the other two teams have a handful of homegrown players between them. Nope, the real credit must go to the English marketing men and footballing administrators who have turned the game into a closed shop and a money machine where everyone is ingrained with a fear of failure. Even further down the Premiership, teams are incapable of bridging the gap into the super big time, so they simply work to consolidate their position. It's one massive cycle of negativity.

Of course, it's also very successful. The reason could be seen just after half time on Saturday; there was a great wedge of vacant seats just on the half-way line. Slowly the section began to fill and you could vaguely make out men in suits easing their way back to their seats. The half time corporate buffet was clearly delicious. The equation is perfect; Football the brand is sexy, the first Cup Final at new Wembley is 'history', companies pay thousands to buy a lump of history (a seat) and pass it onto their clients as a sweetener for future corporate deals. Let's face it; when you've bought your lump of history, what's the point of actually experiencing it; especially when it's rubbish. Where does this end? Perhaps they should do away with 'historic events' completely - after all they can be quite tiresome and in the really good ones people tend to die - maybe you could simply sell shares in historic events over the Internet, I Was There certificates with a small supporting anecdote. Then you could just get them out at dinner parties - "Battle of Agincourt? Yes, I was there, I have the certificate of authentication".

When it comes down to it, uninteresting football is being sold to disinterested people with heaps of money. The football men aren't going to admit it, they're making too much money, the corporations aren't going to let on that they're paying fortunes for shite. This sorry state of affairs it's not the players' or managers fault, they are out to win, it's not even the evil spectres of Abramovich or the Glazers who are just taking a piece of the enormous pie. It's the marketing men who have structured the game in such a way that it makes huge amounts of money, and rewards those who succeed with even more huge amounts of money. No other sport does this, actively reduces the competitiveness of the game. SKY may market football heavily like some sort of gladiatorial encounter, a thrill a minute orgy of endeavour. But whereas showbusiness is flamboyant, risk taking and outgoing, football is prudent and measured to the point of suffocation. It's a corporate mindset dressed in a spangly boob tube. Give us our bloody game back for Christ's sake.

Mouldy

2007-05-17T09:33:00.000-07:00

Emma’s birthday was on Saturday and in celebration we headed to the Mole and Chicken for a rack of ribs/warm duck salad/half a sheep. The Moley holds particular significance amongst my friends. It is a gastro-pub, and has been since before the term was invented. It serves quality, plentiful, hearty pub food. It’s the place we headed when we were old enough to eat in restaurants. We’ve never really graduated any further.

It’s also the scene of plenty of great nights out; as Spankee once described it; 10 people having 14 conversations all at the same time. Loud, boozy, delicious, funny; that’s the Moley.

Getting a table is hard; it’s very popular in the area and has a reputation that attracts people from far and wide. Emma booked six weeks in advance which was the first time in over a year that we’d actually succeeded in getting in.

In the morning we got a call from the pub checking we were still coming. It wasn’t unreasonable, the booking was for 12 people and if we hadn’t turned up it might have left a significant hole in the evening’s takings.

“Can you turn up earlier?” said the waitress of our 8pm booking. This was impossible – the chances of getting 12 people to turn up earlier than planned was about as possible as getting them to turn up on time. There were added complications of children and babysitters to organise and people coming from various corners of the shire.

“Well, you have order by 8.15 or you’ll get your food late” she said “we’re very busy”. What she didn’t seem to understand was in a pub which has about 10 tables, we would be taking up a significant proportion of her busy-ness.

As its always full it should be easy to predict the number of staff needed. What’s more, it’s one of those places that because it ain’t broke has had the same menu for a decade. Everyone orders the same thing every time. As these places go, it’s the most predictable business you can hope for.

Anyway, we all turned up at 8pm as arranged and the place was packed. We were seated and ordered by 25 minutes past – which was good going. The food turned up in good order and it was delicious. Fun was has by all. As always.

At 9.30 it became apparent that something was up… the place was empty apart from us. The staff were wiping table tops and staring at their hands in that way people with nothing to do do.

It appears that the reason tables are hard to come by is that they only have one sitting which is a strategy designed to get through the busy period as possible. Being full and busy all night in a restaurant is a bad thing, it seems. So they make hay for an hour and a half and then remain open for another 3 hours waiting to lock up. Gordon Ramsay would have a field day.

Eurofighters

2007-05-13T04:02:00.000-07:00

Another disgraceful performance at Eurovision, I see. We were out for Emma's birthday and didn't see the actual performance or voting, but we were doomed to failure from the outset.

The UK have got Eurovision all wrong; we have an intensely kitschy perception of the competition. As a result we pitch up increasingly woeful parodies of past success on the assumption that the rest of Europe share a desire to relive the hedonistic days of Bucks Fizz. Even the show where the UK representative is chosen is no longer called; 'A song for Europe' it's called 'Making your mind up'.

Scooch were one such parody with a lineage that stretches back to Abba. They were originally formed as a Steps clone. As Steps became successful, two things happened - they became popular around the world and were unable to be in all the places they needed to be at the same time. Secondly, the more successful they became the more ragged they got and the more they believed in their own talents. It's the typical lifecycle of a pop band. Scooch were there to squeeze a few more dollars from the Steps cash cow after they split to pursue catastrophic solo careers, and sell a few CDs whilst the originals were saying 'Konichiwa, we're Steps, we hope you like our new single' in unison to the vast Japanese market.

Steps, of course, were firmly positioned as family fun, smiley pop. They had nice singalong choruses, didn't say motherfucker, and did simple dance routines that everyone from 8 to 80 could learn. They were perfect for weddings. Which is exactly what Abba have been distilled into. A criminal injustice, in my view, because they were probably the greatest song writers since the Beatles. The Abba brand has been so dumbed down it is no longer possible to give them the credit they deserve.

The rest of Europe don't see this, they don't get the irony or build the link back to days of yore. Sure, a Eurovision winner can look quite cheesy to UK eyes, but the common factor is a song which is universally 'fun', and has a transfer value across all nations. The spoken-word double entendres that punctuate the Scooch song; 'Some salted nuts sir', will mean nothing to a majority of Latvians.

It's unlikely that the UK will ever win Eurovision again - firstly, we're not a member of the new school. The Eastern Bloc invasion means that there is a voting cabal that the UK will never be able to penetrate. Secondly, whilst no bad song is going to win the title, the voting is not on the song alone. It's a commentary on global social and economic politics. Our ongoing occupation in Iraq is not going to bode well with the voting public. So it's not really advisable to have a song which claims to be 'flying the flag all over the world', they might as well sing 'we invaded Iraq and we don't give a shit'.

Morrissey and Jarvis Cocker were both mooted to be writing songs for Eurovision, which may be a worthwhile experiment. But we're more likely to simply attract an increasing band of desperadoes trying to drag themselves out of their showbiz mire and onto the heady heights enjoyed by, em, Katrina and the Waves.

I'm fascinated by these people; the basic economics of scraping a living from anything that is vaguely related to showbusiness. Take band member Russ Spencer (oh, and compare the picture of him here, with the one on their official site), who's main career credits are being in Scooch, a second rate imitation of a second rate imitation, and coming second last in Eurovision. Prior to that he was in the TV show Boys Will Be Girls, which involved creating a girl band made up of boys in drag. At what point will Russ realise that his dream to be Bono, Robbie Williams and John Lennon is likely to remain unfulfilled.

365 days later

2007-05-10T12:43:00.000-07:00

Millie was 1 on Sunday - a year on from the weirdest day of my life. She's hilarious and everyone seems to enjoy her company. People are probably being kind, but they often comment on the fact she's the happiest baby they know. She changes constantly, and not just her nappies. I know that babies grow up fast, but nobody told me just how fast fast is.

From day 1 Millie has been part of the gang. We've always tried to have an open house policy with our friends; if they want to come round for something to eat or a cup of tea, they can. Even if there's 15 of them, which recently, there was. Emma knocked out a vat of lasagne and three desserts and we were off.

Millie is part of that culture and I would say that our social life, though different, is better than it ever has been. We still see all our old friends and we have a bunch of new ones. We haven't had a clear weekend for weeks.

I've also realised of all the things I like doing, the thing I like doing most is sitting around drinking tea with my friends. On Monday we sat in Katie and James' dining room sheltering from the rain that abruptly ended their BBQ drinking tea and chewing the fat.

These are people I've clubbed with, drunk with, partied with, holidayed with and been to school with. Yet of all the great things we've done together I enjoy nothing more than drinking tea with them. We still joke around in the same way we always have; about zonal babysitting strategies, Willy's plans for the holiday in the summer and Jo's new job buying soft furnishings for oil rigs in South America. It's where I feel the most comfortable.

What's more, not only do we sit around drinking tea like we have for years, we have babies hanging around with us; and I love it - it's the epicentre of my comfort zone.

Howzat?

2007-04-29T03:13:00.000-07:00

Cricket is a funny sport; it's played all day, sometimes all week, usually at a time that nobody can watch because they're at work. It is obsessed with nuances of changeable weather and is structured to ensure that you can take both lunch and tea without disturbance.

To a non-believer like me, the first week of the World Cup was quite interesting. Players were thumping sixes all over the place, village players from the Netherlands and Scotland were playing superstars from South Africa and Australia, working ridiculously hard for every run and bowling like five years old on a beach. 19 stone lumps from Bermuda were taking flying catches from the slips. The boozy Irish tied with Zimbabwe then beat Pakistan. Then the Pakistan coach got murdered and there's a myriad of conjecture about match fixing and snake venom poisoning. Brilliant. And all at a convenient time; games started at 2pm meaning you didn't have to watch the dull bit at the start; you could watch the interesting bits after you've finished your tea.

The cricket purists' view of this: rubbish.

Then we get to the 'Super Eights' - which weren't the slightest bit interesting. Only Australia were in any way good. The top 4 teams predictably beat the bottom 4 teams, in empty stadiums. The games seemed to all finish by about 4.30pm. Then the final is delayed by rain; they start late, then play through torrential rain, then come off, recalculate the scores to accomodate, come back on, play in the dark, come off, come back on again even though it's obvious who's won to finish the game. Even the presentation of the cup takes 45 minutes because long speeches were needed and the everyone including the groundsman needed to be given a medal.

The sort of sport that can only have been invented in England.

That joke isn't funny anymore

2007-04-27T11:45:00.000-07:00

Bad week in the Ruffles' house. Millie's been struck by a double blow of baby bug and uber-teething, which has made her very unhappy indeed. I had always assumed that when children were ill and they had to be off school or nursery that there was some sort of magic solution that is only revealed once you are with child.

There's not, it's very simple, when baby is ill you guiltily scratch around friends and relatives for help or leave work to tend to her using up holiday time and then, of course, you feel guilty for leaving work, even though you know that some things are more important than your monthly report.

Of course, Millie's illness means she's a 'poor little mite' but when I was struck down with it on Thursday, the instant accusation was that I was suffering from manfluenza.

If the bug that I caught off Millie remained Millie sized then it would barely have registered, but bugs don't work like that. They expand to the size of body they choose to occupy. I had the same illness as her, proportionally sized, yet I wasn't allowed to crawl around crying and filling my nappy because I was A Man.

I object to this simplifying of gender roles. I've had one day off work and school in at least 18 years. I've been ill on other occasions, but I've managed to get to work or I was on holiday in the first place. I don't really see why I should be tarnished with whatever convenient brush people choose to use. If I'm feeling crap, I don't need anyone else to tell me I'm not.

What's in a name?

2007-04-21T02:38:00.000-07:00

You have absolute control when naming a baby; the moment you settle on a name you put them on a trajectory that will dictate huge portions of their life. You have no idea what you're letting your offspring in for.

Some naming issues are fairly minor; both Emma and I have younger sisters whose names are products of apparently dyslexic parents - my sister - Annia should have been Anya, whereas Sara is pronounced as in Sarah. Still, at least it's not quite as bad as Kirsty, who had she been born a boy would have been called Devron.

When we told people that we were thinking of Amelia for a girl and Hamish for a boy most people responded with "Oh, Amelia's lovely". One out of two isn't bad. The reason we chose Amelia was because she could be Millie with her friends and Amelia when she's a QC. And it was a classic name that had a certain timelessness about it.

Not all names share this quality; not so long ago we had a temp working with us called Kylie; every time she opened her mouth - which was a lot - my mind harked back to Angry Anderson. No doubt a few Britneys will turn up at work in the next five years or so.

Emma had a girl called Holly-Blue in her class - named after a butterfly. It's a nice enough name, but it presents a challenging naming strategy. The Dobscrubs went with India for their first, which in itself is a very beautiful name - but you can't call your second Bangladesh, nor can you go to the other end of the spectrum and plump for Dave. They went with Elliot, which seems to fit perfectly.

Even middle names are tricky; Millie's is Winifred - after Emma's maternal grandmother - which means she'll have to avoid any of Brian Mawhinney's family when it comes to marriage. Could she live with Millie Winnie Mawhinney?

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing; especially in baby naming. Someone I know has just had a daughter, Mia, which is a very pretty name in itself. The middle name they've chosen is Amora; which they say is Italian for love. Except it's not, it's amore. Even if it was Amora, Mia is Italian for 'Mine' which would make her name "Mine Love" - as in "Is that my cup of tea, dear?", "No, it's mine, love". But it's OK, because Amora isn't Italian for love; it's a sex academy in London - whatever a sex academy is and its dictionary definition is... 'a group of rabbis'.

Gun doh!

2007-04-18T01:20:00.000-07:00

Following the massacre by the crazy Korean in Virginia, questions about gun control are back on the agenda. Us bleeding heart Brits with our admirably low gun crime statistics are on the game. This morning GMTV were interviewing a tubby pro-gun chappy with a bow tie live from Seattle.

Andrew Castle suggested that it was time to review gun laws in the US. The tubby man agreed, which seemed to be a breakthrough. The problem, he said, was that some college campuses are gun free zones. Your heart sinks when this is described as a problem.

If, he said, everyone was allowed to have guns on campus basically everyone would be armed and therefore able to defend themselves. Ultimate game-theory; if everyone is armed to the teeth, then nobody is going to attack anyone else for fear that they, themselves, will be shot. Stability will be maintained through fear.

I may be wrong, but I’m guessing that Cho Seung-hui probably didn’t have much interest in whether others were armed or not. Once the voices in his head got going, he would probably have blown people to kingdom-come whether it resulted in a shoot-out or not. He was clearly a troubled man; which is one of the key issues – what makes young people want to kill others in US schools. The more simple issue to solve is the fact he could legitimately buy a gun with his daily Starbucks Frappichococino. Wouldn’t it be a good idea to try and restrict the people who want to kill from accessing things that kill people?

This pro-gun logic is so ludicrous; you almost want to agree with it to see what else they come up with.

A good slippering

2007-04-13T14:09:00.000-07:00

The sensible people from the Internet reassure me that I'm not middle aged; I know I'm not. I'm comfortable with this. Then, I get home tonight to find that the corporates have hit back; a letter from Tesco saying 'thank you for using Tesco loans (18 months ago), as your circumstances change...'. Grrr.

On a not unrelated note; I suffer from cold feet due to bad circulation, which may be a sign of oncoming middle-age. Thing is, I can't remember a time when I didn't suffer. During the cold months it's particularly uncomfortable. Emma has a solution; buy slippers, which seems obvious. But I have an aversion to slippers. In fact, some limited market research reveals that I'm not alone. Men don't like slippers, and I know why.

Take away generations of the nurturing of the human race; of social programming, strip away the roles we have been given by society and the empowerment that recent generations have been given to kick against these roles. If you get back to the very essence of existence, you're left with two principle facts. Woman need to reproduce, if they don't the human race will stop, in order to do that, men need to hunt for food.

So, deep inside every man is a requirement to hunt sabre tooth tigers for tea and you don't do that in soft indoor slip-on shoes. To wear slippers emasculates you of all those hunting instincts; it says 'I'm at home, with my tea on my knees'. This does not make you a primed killing machine. The men I know who do wear slippers seem far more balanced with life in general; more in line with the rhythm of modern living. They seem to have suppressed the instinct to hunt sabre tooth tigers. I envy them, because if I was able to do the same, I would be wearing slippers and wouldn't have cold feet.

Think I'm wrong about this? Tell me for what purpose would you actually need a pair of 'active sports slippers'? Are slippers the quintessential non-active, non-sport footwear? The slipper companies are trying to dupe all us sabre tooth tiger hunting men into buying slippers (it doesn't work; they've been reduced by £2)

My research tells me that woman are much more comfortable with the concept of wearing slippers. This isn't a surprise, by definition slippers bind you to the home; the best place to reproduce. What's more, slippers are viewed as attractive on women, sexy even. This is because men need woman to want to reproduce because they can't and a penchant for slippers communicates a homely willingness to do so.

So, I've got cold feet because I'm waiting to go out and hunt sabre tooth tigers, yet Tesco Direct means you can, in a very modern sense, actually go hunting in your slippers. I think it might be time to put away my loin cloth.

Age ain't nothing but a number

2007-04-11T14:44:00.000-07:00

I got a letter from the bank today, hand written blank envelope, business card stapled at a jaunty angle. A personal letter to me, lovingly prepared by my own financial adviser. I have a financial adviser? Who knew? He's invited me to make an appointment for a free financial health check; a bit of 'advice' to sell me a financial product that funds Guatemalan whorehouses or an East African guerilla army.

The letter included the line "as you enter a new stage in life, you need a different financial strategy". What friggin' stage of life am I entering? Family life? Middle age? I'll be 35 in August and I have a daughter; these facts alone appear to have triggered something deep inside their marketing machine.

On Saturday we had a party (a dinner party, naturally) with ten of our closest friends. There was a screech from the other end of the table. I didn't quite get the gist of the conversation but someone said "we're not middle aged!". From what I can gather, someone had resigned themselves to middle age because they were married with children, whilst others (also married with children) consider themselves to be anything but.

On Thursday, I was out with friends discussing how life is nowhere near as linear as it's made out to be. Without warning, having burnt off your twenties having fun and working hard you're confronted with a surprisingly small window of opportunity in which you're then expected to enter the conventions of 'settling down'. If you choose this path but haven't put in the ground work of meeting The One, getting married, being fertile, having babies (and of course, establishing the career trajectory to fund the whole thing) the window can wind shut leaving you with what looks like a blank scorecard.

It seemed to be a recurring theme; we're getting old, life is different to what we imagined and now time is slipping through our fingers like sand. Some of my friends have all the trinkets of settling down, some have none, some have some and some had them and lost them. The only common factor is that they're my friends and I enjoy spending time with them; I'm delighted with what they have, I don't judge them on what they don't. And, fuck it, we're all getting old all the time.

I tell you what though, although it's something about not worrying too much as long as you're happy, I am wrestling with trying to find the point of this post...

We don't do duvets

2007-04-06T14:44:00.000-07:00

We went and bought a duvet today, and pillows and a bed sheet. We spent a lot of money on it. We're not frugal people, nor are we ostentatious, we buy good quality, but not very often.

The justification for spending the money was thus; we're not married so we've never had the opportunity to ask our friends and relatives to fork out £95 on pure Egyptian cotton sheets. We also have Millie; which means we get less sleep, so it might as well be the best sleep we can afford.

The duvet we were going to buy wasn't in stock; so we bought an even more expensive one. After a bit of hand-wringing we justified the expense as a long term investment.

"I can't even remember the last time we bought a duvet" said I.
"We never have" replied Emma "You don't want to know where ours came from"

It turns out that the duvet we use came from Emma's Grandma when she passed away many years ago. I swear, I'm sure I can now see a face in the mysterious brown stain that's been on it for years.

Where evil lurks

2007-04-05T02:04:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine does a lot of work in China and Korea. One of the things he talks about is how difficult it is to understand the fundamental logic system adopted in these countries. About how much harder it is to work out how action a. lead to action b. His British schooling and logic system sometimes appears completely incompatible with that of South East Asia.

I saw him last night and he had more stories of derring-do in the region; when I got back I turned on the TV; there was a repeat of the Louis Theroux weird weekend "The most hated family in America". I saw the programme on Sunday, but found myself compelled to watch it again.

The Westboro Baptist Church believe, I think, that "God hates fags", "America loves fags", American troops represent America, they are therefore defending fags, therefore God tricked George Bush into invading Iraq so that he could pick off the troops with his wrath. Ergo; troop deaths are to be celebrated; so amongst other things, they picket troop funerals.

The logic is not nearly as simple as that, the whole belief system is encased in a shell which says; if you hate this logic, you're doomed to hell. Naturally, everyone hates the logic, therefore the Westboro Baptist Church are the only people who are going to heaven. In short America is doomed. Hate (or at least anger), which they receive in spades, makes them more righteous and good. Like a boa constrictor, the more you struggle the tighter the system is.

And then, on top of this, being friends with people is a slippery slope to hell. In part because you become tainted by the evil that America does. Also, friendship leads to fornication (if only, eh fellas?) The Pastor, Fred Phelps a confused old man who develops this amorphous philosophy, has sired thirteen children. None of which through fornication, one assumes.

Nor do they actually want to convert anyone to their way of thinking because everyone is doomed to hell already. Which, presumably makes the whole activity of picketing US troop funerals, Swedish vacuum cleaner factories and 'Jew' churches with signs that say 'God Hates Fags' and 'Fag Troops' completely pointless. They go out into the community to shout things without any reason or desired outcome.

At which point the logic unravels into a heap on the floor. It's not so much extremism, which, at least has a political logic to it. It just doesn't have a logic system; it doesn't want to grow, it doesn't want to change things, it doesn't want to explain anything. Theroux's other programmes attempt to get to the nucleus of the issue, an element which is causing the bizarre behaviour. But, partly due to the impenetrable belief system and partly because Phelps was barely articulate (at one point, Theroux sweetly wraps him up in knots with a question to which all Phelps can do is drop into his "I know all about you, you're evil and doomed to hell" rhetoric), he could only conclude that there was some kind of anger at the core of the whole thing. What kind of anger, he couldn't say. In which circumstances you have to just smile sweetly and move along. Which is what he did. Due to his 'fag' fixation, one may assume that Phelps himself has had a serious buggering at some point in his past. But that's mere speculation on my part.

Oh God, to compound it all; Ben Shepherd on GMTV (who's favourite band is Jesus and Mary Chain) has just introduced G4's last ever live performance. All this and G4 splitting up? What is the world coming to?

Wax lyrical

2007-03-30T03:34:00.000-07:00

I'm not, and never have been, great at small talk. At first it was an age and experience thing; I couldn't understand why people were prepared to engage in such banalities for the sake of politeness. My brain works quite quickly, constructing complex topic trees with tenuous, awkward links that sometimes I can't even articulate.

I was being too literal; small talk is supposed to be boring and inoffensive. After all, if you have no history, no reference points with people, you have to talk about the weather, the roads, about 'what an interesting flower arrangement that is, so unusual, mmm'.

I can have rich and meaningful conversations with my friends; so I'm more comfortable with the idea that I will sometimes have to talk small with people. For this, I've adopted a simple strategy; questions, questions, questions. Keep asking questions, if you do stumble across a subject of common relevance, investigate a little and then move onto other questions.

"So where are you from?"
"Brighton"
"I love Brighton, it's one of the places I would like to live. Have you always lived there?"
"No. I used to live in Manchester"
"Manchester to Brighton is a long way, why the big change?"
"I changed jobs."
"Wow, changing jobs is a big deal, travelling from one end of the country to another to do it is something else. Were you brought up in Manchester?"

etc.

Yesterday, as part of a work thing I was sitting with a Brazilian/Italian woman (and a Kenyan/Pakisani and a German). She was very interesting and talked a lot about the differences between Brazil and Britain. She was very easy going and loved talking so the small-talk was a doddle.

However it was quite a long event, so we were able to race through and exhaust heaps of subjects. It was far from boring, in fact it bordered on enjoyable. We talked food, culture, travel, weather, politics, inevitably got onto the subject of football; which is good for me. Eventually I pretty much knew all there was to know about Brazil and the differences with Britain. We'd also talked about business, so that box had been ticked. I still needed something. I scoured my brain for things I know about Brazil and Brazilians.

Hmm, Brazilians? What do I know about Brazilians?

Luckily, the other thing age and experience has given me is a degree of control, I had this empty pot of Brazilian conversation topics in my head with just the subject of radical bikini line waxing techniques left. I mentally slammed the lid shut on the pot, but for the rest of the evening I could hear it jumping around like a conversational Gollum banging about and asking to be freed "ASK ABOUT VAGINAS, ASK ABOUT VAGINAS". Every time there was a lull in the conversation I could hear it. V-A-G-I-N-A.

I turned to the German and talked about organisation and efficiency. I could have talked about sausages, but sausages on my right and vaginas on my left would have taken me to dark synergistic places I should never investigate in polite company.

Have a heart

2007-03-29T01:24:00.000-07:00

I don't think I've mentioned this before, but Millie has a heart condition. A small hole which means regular trips to the hospital for a check up. There's no particular reason why I haven't mentioned it; it's not a taboo subject, people have less problems, but people have more. It's not a minor issue; there are six levels of intensity with this sort of thing and Millie's is at least level four. However, it has no effect on our day to day life, so you just get on with it, don't you?

We've been quite lucky, Millie was born in the John Radcliffe in Oxford, it has a world class cardiology unit so when they heard the murmur, they referred her instantly. Quite often hospitals don't even check, a lot of babies have heart murmurs when they're young which simply go away, and most places don't have the resources to chase every case down. The referral lead to a scan, the scan lead to regular appointments with a paediatric cardiologist.

The consultant we see is brilliant; in fact, a little Google reveals he's a pioneer in the field. He was the first heart surgeon in the world to fix a heart defect without the use of major surgery (it's all done with little pipes and tubes). Aside from his obvious cleverness, one of his talents is the ability to communicate clearly, warmly and professionally all at the same time. He's evidently compassionate, but he never steps out of his professional role. Quite simply he tells you what he's looking for, what he's going to do, what he's found and what he foresees in the future based on what he's found. He never promises things he can't deliver.

He also told us that if a Health Visitor came round to lock the doors, close the windows and 'crawl around the house like a leopard on the prowl'. The man is a genius.

Each appointment follows pretty much the same process. Being as good as he is, he always has a foreign student doctor with him. On Tuesday we had Dr Woo - so close to being a time traveller, yet so far, shame. Our doctor does his bit, allows the student to examine Millie then asks a couple of questions about what they've found. The student examines, agrees that they can hear the thrill. Then the doctor asks for a diagnosis.

At this point you see the student's mind racing; is it a trick question? Surely he wouldn't be asking if there was nothing wrong? Or would he? This conundrum is mixed with the underlying ambition of the doctor; I mean, they don't get into the job to examine people with nothing wrong with them. They're praying for something big. Like an eager private in a war zone; for all the peacekeeping rhetoric, they just want to blow the bloody commie to hell.

The good doctor finally pushes for an answer; "so what would you diagnose doctor?" and the student goes for broke with a wildly inaccurate and totally over the top; something like... "immediate open heart surgery?".

No. He says blankly. And corrects them; stop looking for excuses to cut people open, look at the patient, she's growing, she's pink, she's healthy. Send her home and book another appointment for the next check-up. Which is all terribly disappointing for the student who's already sharpening her scalpel.

On Monday he told us that Millie didn't need to come back for a year. We are happy.

How to be good

2007-03-24T13:54:00.000-07:00

I try to be good, I do. For the last couple of years I've been going to the gym to keep fit; it's worked, I'm over a stone lighter, look better, feel better. However, to do this, I've been getting up at 6.30am at least three times a week. I also want to be a good, attentive, fully involved father; I want to spend time with Millie and help get her ready in the morning. When she wakes up in the middle of the night I want to help settle her. I also want to be good at work; productive, hard working; I want people to think that I've put in a shift. I don't want them to think I'm one of those senior managers who make money for old rope.

I also want to make my contribution to saving the planet. When Millie was born our weekly rubbish doubled overnight. We're now voracious recyclers; all food goes in the compost, plastics, tins and papers go out fortnightly. Cardboard - which isn't picked up by the council - is put in a bag and taken to the recycling centre. I also want to have a nice house; clean, tidy and stylish. I want to buy fresh, organic food from local producers. I want to use public transport.

So, Millie wakes up in the night which makes me tired. Getting up at 6.30am for the gym becomes really hard. When I do manage it, I sacrifice the opportunity to get her ready in the morning. I could go at 7.30; which means going in a bit later, which is fine because it fits in with our flexible working policy. But people who come in late; particularly managers; are frowned upon, regardless of the policy. Even if I get in at 9.30 it means I have to work later, which again means missing Millie's bedtime. I would like to take the train to work, but it means getting in at 7.15 (ridiculously early and missing the gym) or 9.45am - which is frowned on and means having to leave late at night.

When I get home, we give Millie a bath, put her to bed, wash her bottles, and then eat. The temptation, especially at weekends, is to get a takeaway, most of the time we don't, we cook proper food, but we don't have time to go to a famers' market and we do have a broadband connection. This means much as I loath it; a Tesco online order is terribly convenient. Even when we cook, rather than scooping the waste into the bin we look to recycle. The recycling boxes are in the garden, on a cold dark night you don't really want to venture outside. So the tins and waste food are left ready to be put out when time and energy allows, which obviously makes the house a bit of a mess.

It's just not possible to be fitter, healthier, more productive all at the same time. All the same, I wouldn't go as far as saying I was a pig in a cage on antibiotics.

Unfinished sympathy

2007-03-17T01:33:00.000-07:00

I've been suffering from stress this week; something I told our deputy chief exec whose response was that 'we're all busy'. I'm not bleating about it; I'm recognising it. It manifests itself as an aching across my back and shoulders and a strange tense feeling in my chest.

I figure the first thing to do is to recognise it for what it is, hence the reason I'm happy to tell anyone that I'm stressed. I also don't expect anyone to accommodate me; everyone is busy and suffering their own traumas, but I figure these things are better out than in. There's a strange lethargy which tempts me to retreat into myself and not talk to anyone. But that doesn't seem the right thing to do.

The next thing is to try and recognise why it's happening. I have one project at work that's going badly. I know I've done everything I'm supposed to do on it, but the results aren't coming through like they used to. Being a marketeer it's often the case that when anything goes badly the answer given by non-marketeers is that we need 'more marketing'. And I know this is the simple criticism that will be exacted upon me when this thing is finally laid to rest. They actually mean we need more promotion; as the marketing spectrum is broader than leaflets and a sharp line in puns. In this case, the product has probably run its course and so I'm presiding over its slow and painful death.

Secondly, I run a very effective department on a very small team. But the team can no longer move forward because the rest of the organisation cannot accommodate our requirements. New products are being delayed, leaving us to work with the aforementioned turkeys. I try not to do others' jobs but I have an expectation of what they need to deliver. As they're not delivering, I'm left is stasis, which is causing me stress.

So, I've recognised it and possibly identified why it's happening; the next thing is to do something about it. I've tried to relax and rest when I can, but it doesn't seem to do much good. Then, on Thursday, I was walking down the stairs and the next thing I knew I was slumped at the bottom. For the first time since I was a small child I'd fallen down the stairs. I'd cut my arm, had a big carpet burn up my back and appear to have broken a toe. The feelings of stress, however, have gone.

"Good job you weren't holding Millie" people say sympathetically.

...And now for the quiz

2007-03-10T02:29:00.000-08:00

Training is not exactly in the fabric of our company. We're small, not that it should be an excuse and every year there is a training budget - usually based on 1985 prices - but it's always removed when the going gets tough.

Sometimes, however, we're required to do something because it's all legal-like. This week we had to learn something about the Data Protection Act. Being a relatively new Act, for once we were treated to a relatively new training video, or, in fact, DVD.

Old fashioned training videos followed a similar format. Comedy legend, usually John Cleese, would introduce the subject in a slightly pompous headmaster style. This would put us at our ease, but inform us that it was a subject to be considered seriously, one of those 'if we all work hard we'll have a lot of fun' things bosses are keen on.

There would be vignettes of an over acting hapless fool demonstrating how not to do the thing the video is about. There's usually a rather plain secretary who roles her eyes at the idiocy, quietly getting on with her work and correcting his mistakes. This is because she is a woman and therefore sensible, obviously. Then once the vignette is finished a graphic of the blatantly obvious learning points are read out by said comedy legend.

It seems that training videos have moved on. Rather than hand holding through the key learning points, it's a half-hour wobbly camera production in the style of The Office. For this particular video it was a training film about the Data Protection Act of people on a training course about the Data Protection Act. There were no graphics with learning points; it was all supposed to have gone in by osmosis. The Office's genius is not in what is being said, but how it's being said. The dialogue is not necessarily funny, but it's transformed by the situation it's in - the pettiness, the childishness in a supposedly serious and adult situation. In a training film it loses some of its impact if you're encouraged to ignore the dialogue. In the end you learn nothing apart from the fact that Stewpot from Grange Hill is now acting in training films.

That's the sound of violence

2007-03-03T00:18:00.000-08:00

We live in a fractured society; we know this because David Cameron says so and he is Everyman. The recent spate of gangland shootings has lead to accusations that we've become a lawless society. This is nonsense, of course, violent gangs have been around since year dot. A vast majority of people in this country never see a gun let alone get killed by one. There are problems to be addressed, but we're not quite in the wild west despite what people tell you.

On Friday shortly after going to bed I heard a massive row going on outside. I got up and looked out the window. There was a group standing in the middle of the street having a massive shouting match - chavs, hoodies and, conveniently for the purposes of this story, one girl dressed predominantly in white (who we'll call 'White') and one in black (or 'Black').

Black was lead screamer; though everyone seemed to be involved. White was on the phone, which antagonised Black who side stepped the group and headed for White with the war cry - "So watcha gonna do nah? Call the facking cops you slag" - really, she did.

Black got to White, who seemed generally unaware of her oncoming assailant. Black swung a massive roundhouse forearm smash to White's head knocking her off balance. As White fell to the ground Black instinctively swung a knee and caught White in the head on the way down.

I closed the curtain just as Black and all the others ran off leaving White sitting in the road. It was like watching Britain's Worst ASBOs on widescreen high definition TV. Part of me felt we should go out and help, or phone the police, or more sensibily; go back to bed and hope nobody saw me.

My reaction to the fight caused Emma to get up and head downstairs, presumably to get a decent view of what was going on. I scratched around to know what to do next - then I heard more talking; perhaps the gang were back - perhaps they'd seen me and decided that they had to remove a witness. They couldn't be coming for me, could they?

I looked out the window (OK, I peeped out from behind the curtain). There was another group of chavs and hoodies; White was still in the road. With her was chav A, chav B, hoodie A, chav C, hoodie B, women in pyjamas, chav D and hoodie C.

Emma, barefooted and in her pyjamas, decided to go out to help. It turned out she had no idea how the girl had managed to end in the middle of the road was worried about her being hit by a car. Eventually she came in, thankfully having not been shot by a vicious gun toting gang. I asked her what would have happened if it had got out of hand. Simple, apparently, she would have come back inside. Not that this would have, possibly, indicated where she lived. Apparently that was alright, because I was inside should anything have happened. Oh yeah, me big brave man.

Clockwork Orange

2007-02-23T23:58:00.000-08:00

It all started simply enough; I took my phone out of my laptop rucksack – as I do every day. The screen was three-quarters blank. I looked closely and could see a tiny crack on the inside of the screen. The outside of the phone itself was completely untouched. Nothing else in the rucksack; iPod, another phone, laptop, was damaged. The laptop had been on the table all night and not moved.

I knew straight away it would be awkward – I didn’t have the receipt and I bought it online from the Orange website. Luckily, mobile phone companies are meticulous in registering your products with them. I knew, therefore, with a bit of attentive service and a quick search of the database that they would be able to establish that it was my phone and that I hadn’t broken it. I’ve had similar things with Apple and Mazda in the last few months and although it’s all a bit awkward, they do get you on the sausage machine and get it sorted out.

I phoned the help line on the website and was scooted to a call centre somewhere around the world. They told me that there wasn’t a lot they could do about it because they couldn’t see the damage. They told me to go to an Orange shop. This didn’t seem unreasonable.

I went to the Orange shop in Wycombe, explained my situation and was told that they couldn’t/wouldn’t do anything about it because I didn’t have a receipt. It was like trying to penetrate the outer rim of a giant planet – or the peel on an orange, perhaps. They were totally disinterested in the problem. I pointed out that I had every other piece of information about the purchase – my debit card, the original box with endless barcodes, purchase date, delivery address etc.

To get me onside, pretty much the first thing I was told was that ‘for all we know you could have bought it from the market’. Brilliant. I was told to go to the call centre/website, because the shop had nothing to do with the website. The website told me to come to you, I told them, you’re all Orange, I told them, I don’t care how you’re organised, you’re all part of the same operation as far as I’m concerned. We’re not, she said, you are, I said, your t-shirts have the same logo as the one on my phone, where does it say that you’re different companies? We have different stock, she said, I don’t care, I said.

Eventually they called the help desk, and after several attempts they finally established it was my phone. Craig in the Wycombe branch of Orange, came out from the back of the shop, looked at my phone and said that it wasn’t customer damage. He even said he’d seen similar problems before and thought it might be something to do with a voltage surges. We were getting somewhere.

It didn’t help that the girl who served me insisted on serving other people whilst serving me; she was generally inattentive and even dropped the phone at one point because she was filling out some other form for some other poor bugger, cutting off the call centre meaning we had to start again.

Eventually she came off the phone and said that they wouldn’t fix it because it was customer damaged because it had been in my laptop bag. This is a bit like saying the cause of death of someone dieing in their sleep was ‘going to bed’. They couldn’t explain how I’d managed to break into a sealed unit and break the internal workings of the phone.

So, the shop people told me to call the call-centre, after some exasperation I left (the girl at one point going back to the fact I didn’t have a receipt and something about buying something from Comet – at which Craig interrupted and said ‘we’re beyond that’). Craig also admitted that I was stuck in the middle of their corporate shitehouse (last bit added by me). I went back and called the call centre and 45 minutes later I was in the same position – the phone was broken by me so they wouldn’t fix it.

I finally asked who it was that regulated Orange – e.g. who do I need to complain to. “Orange” said the operator. I said – no, who is your regulates your industry (Trading Standards? OfCOM?). She didn’t know. Can I talk to someone who does? You can talk to my supervisor. Thank you, I said. Then she cut me off.

What we’ve established that a phone bought legitimately by me from Orange is broken. The only person in the Orange corporation who has actually seen the phone says it’s not been damaged by the customer and it’s under warranty. Oh, and according to Craig, the people who sold it to me have a ‘six month duty of care’, whatever that is. It’s a recipe for getting it fixed, is it not?

Computer says no. It’s not going to be fixed because the person in the call centre who is hundreds, possibly thousands of miles away has, through ESP or some equally mystical power, managed to see the handset, calculate (possibly by going back in time and visiting my house in a ghostly form) that my stationary rucksack has maliciously attacked my phone (and only my phone). Presumably, therefore, I’m responsible for my rucksack and its wild ways – perhaps I should buy it a muzzle, especially with Millie in the house. Oh, and I’m £130 in the hole without a functioning mobile phone. And now they’ve raised the drawbridge. I can go through Trading Standards; which I think I will anyway, but ultimately I’m the one left without a phone, and though it is not my most treasured possession, I really do need it.

Ever feel you’ve been cheated?

Pop music is wasted on the young

2007-02-16T01:15:00.000-08:00

Tim Lovejoy has an interesting theory about TV production nowadays - basically all the people who were breaking ground with things like The Word and The Tube are the people making TV programmes today. Hence the reason we've gone through decade of programmes about doing houses up, then having children, coping with toddlers, buying second properties, then coming to terms with expanding waistlines and waning sex lives - basically as these producers grow up, they make programmes that suit them and their situation in life.

The Brits felt a bit like that; it wasn't the worst winners' roster ever; at least Annie Lennox's grip on best female solo artist is apparently loosened forever. But it was all very cosy and comfortable.

The production had very 30-something edginess - live (ooh what might happen), Russell Brand (ooh former drug addict, bit weird), and with swear words (bleeped out - you never know if children are watching). A lot was made of the fact it was live for the first time since the Mick Fleetwood and Sam Fox debacle, but that was 18 years ago, which probably says a lot about the target audience.

The performances were all very slick but uninspiring, which is something we've learnt from the Americans - put on a shitload of lights and video screens, then nobody will notice that the songs are a bit lame. Oasis were the exception, they were neither slick nor inspiring - it's a fine line with Liam, but he never used to shout like that, I'm sure.

And, isn't it terrifying what America has done to Joss Stone? Gone is the kooky Devonian with a voice like Aretha Franklin. She now seems to speak like she's reading from an auto cue, does that annoying 'born to sing' thing where she breaks out in song in the middle of sentences and puts a 'd' on the end of alright. It makes you shudder.

Ruffs 2007

2007-02-13T11:41:00.000-08:00

It's awards season, so it's about time to reveal the winner's in the third annual Ruffs - the top 10 albums of the year. Last year, that is.

1. Costello Music - Fratellis
2. Whatever People Say I am is What I'm Not - Arctic Monkeys
3. Live on Bondi Beach - Fatboy Slim
4. FabricLive 30 - Stanton Warriors
5. The Warning - Hot Chip
6. Sexor - Tiga
7. Itchy Scratch Radio - Basement Jaxx
8. Sam's Town - Killers
9. How to Get Everything You Ever Wanted in Ten Easy Steps - Ordinary Boys
10. Eraser - Thom Yorke

And, at risk of getting too much like the Grammy's, I'm introducing a second award this year, the tune of the year.

1. Creeping up the backstairs - Fratellis
2. Run 4 Cover - Basement Jaxx
3. Louder Than A Bomb - Tiga
4. Young Folks - Peter, Bjorn and John
5. Standing in the Way of Control - Gossip
6. Shake That Ass Bitch - Splack Pack
7. Touch It - Busta Rhymes
8. Empire - Kasabian
9. Monster - Automatic
10. Over and Over - Hot Chip

Well done the Fratellis.

Snow go area

2007-02-08T12:53:00.000-08:00

Our house has something in common with the National Grid; they are both barometers for national activity. Those on the grid can assess what the country is up to by the surges in power they experience; our house is on such a busy road it only takes a quick glance out the window to know what the world is up to.

I can confirm that the schlep to work was a tentative one this morning. This helps, because on the rare occasions it does snow, we both endure quite a lot of hand wringing over whether we should head out to work or not.

Emma has a harder job than me, she is part of the team that decides whether the school stays open or not. She then has to contact the local radio - with a coded message to ward of cheeky tykes – to tell them the news.

The impact of the decision is enormous; all children and teachers are sent home, the parents of those children have to arrange alternative childcare, or take time off work, their work is affected and so on. You really don’t want to close the school only to find that the snow has melted before elevenses.

My decision is slightly easier; especially this morning because I’d already planned to work at home. Rather than crawling into the office, I spent the day sending out emails into the ether not knowing who was in the office and who was buried in a snowdrift. Occasionally a reply popped into my inbox. It was like we’d just emerged from a nuclear attack and I was making tentative contact with survivors through a fierce nuclear winter.

One email suggested that people were wimps for cancelling meetings. On the radio, the bloke from the CBI came out and said the snow would cost the UK economy £400 million. There’s probably an office deep in the CBI which dreams up such pointless and blatantly inaccurate statistics by throwing a dart at a specially made board. As they said on Radio 5 when they read it out – so what are we supposed to do about it?

It’s true we probably over react to adverse weather, but without decent religious fervour in this country, we don’t have enough bank holidays and saints days to take off work. With weather a national obsession, we should have ad hoc weather based bank holidays. My family occasionally announce ‘Oh bugger it’ times, which is basically when crisis has gone beyond the point of salvage. I think we should have national ‘Oh bugger it’ times.

Rather than toiling over the should I shouldn’t I decision as to whether to head out or not, why not simply have, er, Shilpa Shetty come onto the telly to announce a national oh bugger it. The nation would rejoice and head for their duvets. We can but dream.

Scot nothing to do with me

2007-02-02T13:16:00.000-08:00

A Welsh contractor I work with wished me well in the Six Nations and commented that it was good to see Johnny Wilkinson back. When he said 'me' he meant 'us' and by 'us' he meant England.

Although i was born in England, and speak with an English accent, I'm half Scottish. I feel Scottish. Perhaps its some kind of underdog spirit, maybe its my tough working class Broxburn ancestry feeling more 'real' than my comfortable south-east middle class upbringing, maybe it's simply that Scotland had a better football team in my formative years. Whatever it is, I am more spiritually aligned to the Scots.

I don't feel English, I don't subscribe to the English way. I don't want to be known a jumped up little twerp who expects to have a seat at the global top table. In essence this is what it means to be English; whether its the overpaid, arrogant, under performing football team or their increasingly hysterical cricketers. I've never wanted the rugby team to do well; which has a lot to do with Will Carling who is the classic English nob end, and I constantly find myself hoping that the cricketers can find new depths of awfulness on the current Ashes tour. I dream of seeing them all out for 6 runs or something. None of which is particularly patriotic.

On the football pitch I follow the fortunes of both countries, but when they come together, I follow the Scots. This is not the most rewarding of strategies, it must be said. In fact, this half and half split does leave me somewhere in the middle of nowhere. I would never be accepted by the Tartan Army but I cannot assimilate myself to the Barmy Army. I'm like an ignored minority, I feel isolated and persecuted, I could roll my eyes and frown with some vigour such is the institutionalised racism I face every day of my life.

Blue skies stinking

2007-01-31T12:04:00.000-08:00

Strategic away days are called for two reasons; either the leadership has lost its way, or a new broom is in place needing a bit of head space. Thankfully the purpose of ours was the latter rather than the former.

Having been through a few of these things, it’s obvious that most fail. If your only purpose is to look at the stars without considering what you’re standing in, chances are that you’ll be up to your ankles in shit. Shit before and shit after. In fact, if you stare at the stars long enough, you’ll find the shit gets deeper and really starts to smell.

When mentioned to the facilitator of the day he assured me that because he was in charge, it wouldn’t fail. I said that the person to say that to me was the facilitator of the last strategic away day I’d been on. Facilitators and consultants are programmed to assume that the reason things fail is because everyone else is more stupid than they are and not because these things are, in there very nature, more likely to fail than succeed.

Confusion began at the start; on arrival; sartorially speaking, nobody really knew what the approach should be. Some arrived in suits, presuming it to be a working day, others appeared in IT consultant chic of beige Dockers, boots and a pressed shirt – IT software house logo optional. Those, like me, saw it as a Sunday and turn up in jeans – albeit poshed up slightly with boots and a shirt - not trainers and a hoodie. One turned up in what can only be described as the semi-professional darts player look; shiny polo shirt coloured piping and a logo on the breast pocket – no nickname on the back because he’s semi-pro. The sleeves end halfway up the biceps. Matching black slacks that are too a bit too tight, slip on shoes and a big gold watch.

Thankfully the management centre wasn’t that far from home so I didn’t have to stay over; those who did had been drinking all night like it was a boys’ weekend away. The predominantly male group had set themselves a particularly macho 13-hour agenda, You can imagine the group planning the day; upping the ante an hour at a time poker style waiting for someone to break.

In truth, despite the bravado, by lunch practically everyone was flagging and the whole purpose of the day was beginning to lose its way. Everyone’s brains had been appropriately stormed and the outputs were so wide and varied they couldn’t be shoehorned into the remaining agenda, especially not with the musk of the night before hanging around in the air. Even the most clear headed were struggling. It’s always the same, the assumption being that people are afforded the luxury to dream broad conceptual thoughts in the morning, then compartmentalise them into a series of actions after lunch. It’s like having a orgy with a hoard of dwarves in a vat of jelly in your living room then being told that you have an hour to clean up because the Queen is coming for tea.

Eventually the facilitator gave up the agenda and threw it open to the floor ‘How shall we tackle this?’ he said – which is the facilitatory way of saying 'Sorry I haven’t a clue'. At this point it was obvious we were approaching the end game. People started checking their phones which were all turned on despite being asked not to, laptops were opened and fiddled with (blogging, probably) others disappeared off to the toilet and were found like a hypnotized toddler checking the football on the lounge TV downstairs. Someone was found flipping through one of the complementary papers uttering something about needing some time to think, or waiting for an important call.

This is where everyone starts stating the bloody obvious. It’s important that this is stated with vigour to ensure that it retains a level of gravitas – ‘What we need is a plan, a budget and appropriate resourcing’, ‘We need the appropriate people with the appropriate skills in the appropriate positions’. It’s appropriate to nod sagely at these ground breaking insight.

At the end everyone congratulated themselves on a job well done. The post-it notes and flip charts were folded up and taken back to be written up and everyone leaves with a renewed sense of vigour. In the wash-up in the bar the real world begins to leak back in; the wine flows and discussions which start celebratory, in a ‘we’ve cracked it’ style, gets louder and more lairy. Eventually war breaks out ‘The thing is he’s a cocking nob-jockey’. After a series of painful circular discussions, people seep away home or to their room, looking at their feet and realising they have still have shit on their shoes.

Thrills, Brills and bellyaches

2007-01-24T15:13:00.000-08:00

The snow this morning, and hopefully this doesn't sound too incriminating, aroused the schoolboy within me. My instant reaction was; 'day off!'. Sadly, my school wasn't one of those that was closed due to frozen pipes - because I don't go to school anymore - and apart from Millie looking out and giving me a look which said; 'Wow, snow, now I know I've seen everything', the day continued as planned. Boo.

About 17 years ago the snow came, and if I remember it rightly there were snow drifts which were 200 feet high. OK, so maybe I haven't remembered it rightly, but I know that a handful of us scrambled through the chaos into school only to find that it had been closed. The valiant few decided to head for Brill in a 2CV and an old style VW Beetle.

Brill is quite famous around these parts for having a converging gene pool, and if you look at the locals in the eye - one eye, in the middle of the forehead - you can see why. Because of the high risk that you are likely to end up marrying your own cousin if you stay, some of its inhabitants are smuggled out under the cover of darkness and deposited in safe houses around the country. This is all a front, however, because Brill is the gateway to nirvana; a convergence of all that is marvellous and great.

It's called Brill, which is like brilliant. It's on a hill, which rhymes. In the middle of the village is a common; which has abandoned clay diggings. These are formed into perfect sledging runs; from beginner to black runs for the more kamikaze. It offers perfect panoramic undisturbed views of the Cotswolds, which also means the the wind whistles around the common; perfect for flying kites. You cannot not have fun in Brill.

In the middle of the common is a windmill; Brill on the hill has a windmill. Come doomsday, Brill, as the home of all things fun and good, will host the exodus to nirvana. We'll all climb aboard the 'windmill' and once safely inside, we will take off to a far off planet to fly kites and sledge until the end of never.

Then I decided that the idea of a portal from which we can escape The End was fanciful nonsense... but then having written this, I looked for some decent Brill on the Hill Windmill references; and came across this one, which rather spookily, and totally independently from my own thought processes, alludes to the same perfect tobogganing/kiting opportunities offered at Brill on the hill. Maybe, just maybe, my suspicions are correct.

Duvet day

2007-01-22T05:42:00.000-08:00

Emma and I get things done in different ways. Emma has a list written on a small bit of paper which is usually a stream of consciousness; everything she can think that needs to be done for the rest of time. There's also a second list that isn't written down, a series of observations; 'the bird bath will need moving in March', 'that crack needs some pollyfilla', 'the cat could do with a harness for when it jumps on the table'. These jobs are either started in favour of the written down lists or not started at all and serve only to clutter and lengthen the to do list which increases stress levels.

On Saturday night, whilst I dropped my mum and dad off at the airport, Millie was in bed and she had a couple of hours of spare time to kill, so she built a bedroom wardrobe in the living room. She seemed surprised, on a Saturday night which is usually reserved for seeing friends, watching films or eating takeaway, that I wasn't awash with enthusiasm to find a six foot wooden cabinet sitting in the middle of the living room floor.

This list-focussed thing comes from her mum who obsesses with two things; 'jobs' and 'sorting'. She also has lists; they all start with "bed, breakfast, bath..." as if she'll forget. If your life is a list, there's not much time left to do anything else. I'm sure this is some sort of self-validating process; if you have things to do then you are useful and valuable; therefore you are good.

I am more goal oriented; I prefer to set a small number of objectives which we both know about and can be arranged around the real purpose of the weekend; socialising and rest. Emma will rest once the list is complete. But because there's always more things to add, the list is never complete.

Quite often Emma will ask me to do something from the list; or the second list, or the magic third list (this is a list of quickly dreamt up activities that are assigned when she has something to do and I have nothing). 'You've got nothing to do? Can you, um, start a giraffe sanctuary in the garden?'.

Because of Emma's constantly replenishing lists she is not good at resting. She feels guilty about doing nothing. We are taught that doing nothing is bad and wrong, so it's very easy to spend all your time flitting from one chore to another. Today I've booked off a day to do nothing. Although there is temptation to plan something, I've been resistant; I will wait until something takes my fancy and do it. If I sit in bed all day, so be it.

I don't think I've ever taken a day that has been so precisely set aside to do nothing. 'Don't you feel guilty doing nothing' said my club promoting, hill walking, eco-warrior colleague. I explained that typically our day starts between 4am and 6am when Millie wakes up for a feed, I go to the gym at 6.30am or dress Millie, go to work at 7.45am get back at 6.15pm, put Millie to bed at 7pm, eat, tidy, wash bottles, prepare for the next day, settle down about 8.30pm go to bed about 11pm all in preparation for 4am the next morning. It's just one day, and I'll be back on the clock when Emma and Millie get back tonight, so nope, I'm not feeling guilty doing nothing.

Jaded

2007-01-20T02:22:00.000-08:00

I know, it's not healthy, but just one more thing on this racism debate. On Newsnight last night Paul Morley made a point that the whole thing had triggered a plea from the nation to define what is and isn't racism.

There isn't a single definition and interpretation; it is different calling someone a 'ginger' to calling someone a 'paki' even if both are discriminatory in some way.

One thing is for sure, however, much easier to avoid walking into a racism storm than not. Nobody, least of all Channel 4 who are £3 million poorer for it, saw Jade and thought 'we need someone to get hammered over racist remarks, she'll do.' Nobody was lying in wait, her tirade couldn't have been engineered.

In other words, whether she's racist or not, there was no compulsion for her to go anywhere near the issue. After all, the best way of avoiding being hit by a car on the motorway, is to avoid standing on motorways.

Whatever you say I am is what I am not

2007-01-18T15:01:00.000-08:00

More refined thinking on the Jade/Shilpa debate seems to conclude that Jade hasn't (yet) been conclusively racist. Racism is a rather inflammatory way of describing something that is more likely simple ignorance and stupidity. It's likely that Jade is incapable of anything as sophisticated as racism; which involves the development of a pretty thorough, if warped, ideology. It is not easy to hate an entire race. More likely; Jade is a simpleton and a nasty piece of work who is ferociously cruel when crossed. This is no lesser charge.

We could create a meritocratic society based of age or height, which would be OK for me. But we live in a society based on transactions; when you do something good; you get rewarded for it. The more talented and good you are, the more you are likely to benefit.

Millionaire Jade seems rather overcompensated for whatever talent she is selling. She is not very bright, funny or attractive. She has no capacity for strategy or politics. But she is neither thick, dull or ugly. She's a successful, strong independent woman and a caring mother. Her talent seems to be that although she's like no other woman at the same time she's like every woman. She is rewarded handsomely for her, em, normalcy.

But she can't represent the average woman in the street now she's been exposed as a viscous bully with an ugly ruthlessness. She is stripped of the only talent she has, and so her marketability has plummeted, which is presumably why sponsors are turning away in their droves. It always seemed unlikely that Jade could sustain such a profile and riches in return for such flimsy talents. It seems that the celebrity market is on the verge of an adjustment.

Nay Sayer

2007-01-15T13:32:00.000-08:00

Oh Leo, Leo, Leo, Leo, Leo, Leo. What did you do?

When Leo Sayer walked in to Celebrity Big Brother, it was his to win. H from Steps, Jo from S'Club, Danielle Lloyd were fame seeking desperadoes, Dirk and Jermaine the Hollywood weirdoes, Shilpa was the wrong class, sex, nationality and, let's face it, race to really garner a groundswell of support. Cleo had a chance, but it was Leo's to lose.

He fitted the bill perfectly; just enough profile for people to know who he was, but he'd been out of the limelight long enough to avoid accusations of fame seeking. He'd been successful, had his time, left his legacy and was now able to drift around the outer rim of the celebrity world like a kindly uncle. He knew everyone; Donny Tourette had been to his house, he greeted Jermaine with 'Hi Jermaine, how's Michael', even Kuddly Ken Russell knew him. All he had to do was hang out in the house for three weeks being small and curly wearing that bemused look on his face. Then he could come out (and not in an H way - H from Steps, gay, who knew?), release a Greatest Hits compo and enjoy a little Indian summer.

Then he revealed the monster. It's not just his slow mental breakdown, that could happen to anyone; it's the inner feelings he revealed. He is Leo; no surname required and he is Legend. He hated celebrity, then dismissed Jo from S'Club as a non-celebrity because she didn't wear expensive clothes and didn't have a car. S'Club are has-beens, according to Leo. Now, the concept of a has-been is entirely subjective, but it's been 23 years since Leo had an original hit whereas at least Jo saw chart action in this millennium. Then he flounced out due to a percieved lack of respect; when the key to winning Celebrity Big Brother is to demonstrate that you don't need anyone to validate your celebrity through fawning respect.

One thing for certain about this year's Celebrity Big Brother is that it's crushingly dull, the other is that Leo Sayer leaves the show a damaged man.

Whilst I'm at it; when Jack (Jade's boyfriend) entered the house he introduced himself as a football agent. Fair enough, at least he didn't want to be his legacy to simply be Jade's Boyfriend. I would wager that he's not a very good football agent given that he's entered a house cut off from the outside world just as the January transfer window opens.

Look, I've never pretended to be vying for a job with The Telegraph.

Back again

2007-01-12T12:58:00.000-08:00

For those of you who visit regularly, you'll notice that I'm looking a bit different. For those arriving via searches like; 'Nigella's red satin dressing gown', 'Kate Garraway eating a banana' (no, I can't find my link either) and 'Fern Britton's tights' you probably won't know that anything has changed, but honestly, we're not going to see you again, are we?

I started blogging four and a half years ago when you had to insert your html coding for bold, italics, hyperlinks and such like. Comments came from an external service, pictures were difficult to upload, lists of categories and RSS feeds didn't exist.

The old site was a Frankestien's monster, so now Blogger is all new and sparkly I thought I'd return to its womb. The old comments have gone but the address stays the same. Those of you smartypants enough to use such things, you'll want to update your RSS feeds.

Death of a salesman

2007-01-10T12:26:00.000-08:00

Not much happens at a car dealership during the week. Well, not judging by my hour long wait at the Mazda garage this morning. My car needed a service, so I sat drinking weak complimentary coffee reading car magazines I didn't understand waiting to pay them £123 for the privilege of being told that everything was fine. I really wanted to browse through the copy of Heat but it was a bit too blokey a place in which to reveal my latent campness.

People wandered around at 9am arranging who was going to lunch and when. People would phone up to book in services for 'first thing next Tuesday, OK see you then, bye'. Saleman Number 1 stared out the window he must stare out of every day whilst Salesman Number 2 was on the phone reassuring his Grandma about something. Someone turned on a computer.

These people work together for five or six days a week, 7 hours a day and nothing much happens for most of that time. Occasionally they'll engage in well rehearsed skits; when the postman arrived complaining how wet it was, Salesman Number 1 replied with 'that might have something to do with the rain'. Nobody laughed.

After an lengthy silence; Salesman Number 1 walked up to Salesman Number 2 - 'that's an interesting sandwich you have their young James, what kind is it?' That'll be a tomato and cheese sandwich on crusty bread. 'Mmm I do like sandwiches with crusty bread'. They parted in silence, back to their own thoughts.

This may have been for my benefit as I was the only other person there, but I suspect it was just them putting on a mental screensaver, a little routine to prevent their brains from closing down completely.

Carbohydrate TV

2007-01-04T14:07:00.000-08:00

TV gave up on Christmas. The big Christmas film has been gazumped by Sky Movies, and plugging in your brand new Nintendo Wii is always going to be preferable to watching Noel Up The Telecom Tower.

Focus has switched to New Year; schedules have been finessed to offer some comfort in the bleak mid-winter. This Life +10 aimed to take us back to the dog-days of Britpop. This Life was all terribly zeitgeist-y apparently; 5 lawyers who lived in London, did drugs, had sex and listened to Portishead. A reflection of my generation indeed, well I do have a Portishead album.

It did make me feel a bit sick that Egg was seen writing on his Mac Powerbook whilst listening to his iPod docked in a Bose speaker system. Turns out My Life is a bit of a thirty something cliche.

Celebrity Big Brother is the ultimate in carbohydrate TV offering comfort that's both unchallenging and soporific. How do they put together the Celebrity Big Brother contestants? Do they all sit down at a early production meeting and pick their ultimate wish-list...

"So, who do we want?"
"What about Nelson Mandela, Madonna, Khazakstani President Nursultan Nazarbayev and Pele?"
"Great, let's get to it."

Three weeks later...

"So, how did we get on with tracking down Pele?"
"Pretty good, it's taken a bit of researching, he first played in the World Cup in 1958 in Sweden. Well, in the Swedish squad that year was Sigge Parling."
"And he's friends with Pele?"
"No. Sigge Parling played for Djurgardens IF Fotball in Sweden; which is the same club that Jesper Blomqvist played for before he went to Manchester United as an understudy to Ryan Giggs."
"You've got Ryan Giggs?"
"No. But Ryan Giggs won the Champions League with another player of note from Djugardens; Teddy Sheringham, this is where I came up trumps."
"You got Teddy Sheringham!?"
"Not really."
"Who then?"
"His automaton girlfriend and disgraced Miss Great Britain; Danielle Lloyd."

Pyjamas

2007-01-01T02:52:00.000-08:00

Like every good New Year's Day we're all pyjama'ed up at Ruffles towers. It's an opportunity to reflect on what's been a great 2006. We've had Millie, of course, and babies were popping out all over the place; Lottie, Elliot and Joe. We've also got a bunch of new friends through having Millie and a whole new dimension to our social life. We've had Katie's wedding and Spanx has gone all domestic, which everyone is delighted about. Not only that, but Katie and James are have come home from Australia, and Jo and Brian will be back from the end of January.

It's been a great Christmas too; from kite flying in a hurricane whilst a battalion of wind battered toddlers cowered and wet themselves in the car to having everyone over for dinner and Emma setting the table for six and ten turning up.

New Year was the quietest on record; we had an invite to a party, but the Millie factor complicated things and in the end it was decided that we'd opt out this year. To be honest, we didn't take much persuading. We weren't the only ones; it seemed to be a universal trend to stay in for a quiet one. Perhaps, after years of pressure trying to find that big night out everyone has agreed that New Year is the biggest emperor's new clothes and did the thing they've always wanted to do; stayed in.

Either that or following Pinochet and Saddam's deaths, the collapse of the careers of Blair, Prescott, Rumsfeld and surely soon; Bush. And faced with the global jihad and environmental catastrophe they leave behind we've all realised that we're the ones who have to sort this mess out now and really we need to buckle down, put away the ironic t-shirts and combat trousers and get serious.

Or, they all had a party together and we weren't invited... bastards.

Everyone loves their own brand

2006-12-28T00:12:00.000-08:00

Christmas is like collective autism. A tight cycle of intricate routines and traditions. It's for family, but not through any particular deep love of its kinship, but because only the family understands the logic paths that have imbedded these traditions into its culture. Nobody likes to be away from their family on Christmas day because, psychologically, it's such an uncomfortable place to go.

Whilst to the outsider these traditions are impenetrable; for those inside they're a norm. I was trying to work out our family's traditional Christmas day, but found it really hard to think of anything I didn't consider to be entirely normal. We get up and open presents, this is the main focus for the day and lasts about 20 minutes. Then we'll have breakfast, usually involving salmon. The rest of the day drifts along towards lunchtime with my dad remembering various food treats he's picked up in the previous few weeks. "Oh, we've got some pear brandy, does anyone want pear brandy?".

This contrasts with Nobby's Germanically regimented Christmas day; bucks fizz for breakfast, stollen cake mid-morning, traditional lunch and card games with the family in the evening. At the other end of the scale, I know of people who sleep in until mid-morning, might have a roast chicken lunch and then dissolve the family unit to allow the individuals to do their own thing for the rest of the day. Presents are unlikely to be anything more than an exchange of cheques.

What with it being Millie's first, Emma and I broke with a tradition and had Christmas lunch together with Emma's family. The close proximity of our families have traditionally meant we've been able to shuttle between the two, but have always stuck to the routine of having lunch apart. This meant I was able to observe their traditional Christmas which after church is an avalanche of present giving punctuated only by a traditional lunch with all the trimmings. Now, I've never previously known what 'all the trimmings' meant. At what point do you know that you have the complete set? We must have been close as excluding the turkey and assorted sauces, there were no less than 16 different trimmings* and I've yet to hear of a Christmas lunch which has more.

You know that you're getting deep into tradition over true value when you're opening a present of a set of second class stamps whilst everyone around you ignores your attempts to be surprised and delighted. Emma got me a Gemini iKey; although I wish I'd asked for a Ninetendo Wii. Emma's grandma was describing what the Wii did as one of her relatives was getting one, Emma's mum looked on blankly until eventually interrupting; 'Is this one of those double-u-one-ones?'

Later in the afternoon we again departed from a Ruffles family tradition and broke the isolation by venturing into the outside world. This tradition was maintained to an extent, I was divorced from broadband for the day, which meant I missed an e-bay auction when it took 14 minutes to download a single page on the household's dial-up connection. So what if the item went at a price some £20 below the ceiling price I'd set myself. I know I know, ebaying on Christmas day... bite me.

Emma's family are very close to two other families on the road and their Christmases have always been closely knitted together. So much so that they can actually spend Christmas together without sullying each others' traditions. They can have a traditional Christmas day regardless of where it's held and who is there; it's like the total football of Christmas day. We popped along the road to find the two families watching a slide show of a holiday they'd taken together back in 1980. To them it was entirely normal, to me, entirely different.

As we get older, children are coming along, grandparents are less mobile, partners expect to see their own families with their own traditions so like a glacier; always moving, but always invisible to the eye the Christmas norms shift. In ten year's time it will all have changed again, who knows where we'll be?

*roast potatoes, boiled potatoes, pommes noisettes, leaks, parsnips, swede, peas, bacon, sausages, cauliflower cheese, onion rings, breadcrumb stuffing, peas, pork stuffing, carrots and brussel sprouts

Too many cooks

2006-12-23T07:21:00.000-08:00

If you're a celebrity cook and want to avoid the purgatory of UKTV Food, you've got to have A Thing. Jamie Oliver had his gastro-pub Brit Pop thing, Gordon Ramsay is all about The Swearing, Rick Stein's thing is The Fish, Heston Blumenthal is supposedly about The Science.

Nigella Lawson's thing is as a middle class 1950's saucepot; perfect for Yuletide. What's not to love about a woman who's first reaction after jolly good rogering is to marinade a turkey in a festive brine before giving the children hand whittled wooden toys and feeding them a pomegranate merigue mountain? Certainly that's what it looks like in the painstaking re-enactment of a Lawson family Christmas on Nigella's Christmas Kitchen. You never see her husband, however, he's probably upstairs smoking a big fat cigar wondering where it all went wrong.

Nigella is a woman who sees nothing wrong with emphasising the words 'breast', 'squeeze' and 'come' in a sentence about the perfect Christmas panchiporan aloo and she's never far away from her vampish red satin dressing gown. However, not all might be what it seems. She's always shot in a dreamlike soft focus, swaithed in floodlights, this may be to emphasise her perfect womanly ways, or it could be to hide the fact that she probably really looks more like her dad.

Dress to impress

2006-12-20T05:28:00.000-08:00

‘Tis without doubt the season to be jolly, not least in the offices of womens magazines and day time TV shows. For eleven months of the year these editorial teams toil for new features, but once December arrives it’s, well, like Christmas. Time to dredge out the Christmas party frock/new take on the little black dress type articles.

Now, I don’t consider myself to be abnormally unsociable. Even with a seven month old baby, our social calendar is a busy one. However I don’t and never have had the kind of Christmas that involved needing a new wardrobe of party wear, and certainly not the special formal partywear.

Yes, I know, I am A Man and it’s alright for me because I don’t have to worry about these things blah blah blah. But my Christmas calendar this year will be abnormally busy; the weekend before last we had Willy’s Christmas party, on last Thursday was our departmental party, on Friday our work do, Sunday was (look away now single people and those not predisposed for such things) our NCT party for the babies, Saturday is a big night out with friends, Sunday could be the traditional Christmas eve trip to the pub; though we’re not going, on Christmas night it’s the traditional mayhem party, Boxing day is another party, New Year’s Eve is sorted.

Now I reckon that’s eight parties in two and a half weeks, but even if I was a woman I wouldn’t need a party frock for each one.

I don’t know, perhaps I’m altogether too casual, maybe just a bit too Southern (a colleague from the North East frequently laments the lost art of dressing up down south… and I don’t mean wearing a merkin).

Do you? Really?

2006-12-18T11:03:00.001-08:00

Love It! magazine is exclusive to Tesco, apparently. It's a women's weekly magazine 'celebrating love, life and laughter' according to the promotional blurb. Can't you tell? It has an exclamation mark at the end of its title.

A good branding strategy gives a product a name which captures its values. It wouldn't seem unreasonable to think that Love It! has lots of things you might love; celebrity gossip, fashion tips and all that kind of thing.

Magazine publishing strategy might also suggest that the best article, the one that most matches the spirit of the magazine, should be on the front page. Ergo; in Love It! the cover might lead with something the reader might love the most. You would think.

This week's lead story in Love It! is 'Raped at gunpoint'.

Bottoms photocopied = zero

2006-12-16T14:16:00.000-08:00

The Christmas party was OK, a distinct improvement on the lunches we used to have where the silences were punctuated by the sound of knives and forks chinking against cheap plates. Yes, we've had worse.

It wasn't totally without its flash points. Old Man, whose defining characteristic is his one finger jack hammer typing style, suddenly, apropos of nothing, decided to tell us he 'didn't like deviousness'.

He admitted he didn't know one of the women standing with us and described the other as 'not devious, cunning' (an argument ensued). The comment may have been a general point he wanted to get off his chest, it could have been directed at me; the only other person listening to him. I moved onto another group rather than find out.

I'm competitive and will challenge anything I don't see as being correct, I will defend my position fiercely and make comment whether it's mine to make or not. I expect others to do the same. I'm not devious; I have no grand plan or strategy. If I'm inconsistent with my views its because I'm forgetful, not because I'm involved in some deed of sinister derring-do.

The other flashpoint was when Drunk Finance Person suddenly had a moment of clarity and started fretting that she had upset people with her boisterous ways. She was really worried and has apparently made efforts to contact people today to make an apology.

In truth, I don't think anyone really cares that she was drunk; she was loud and a bit random, but she certainly wasn't offensive.

Perhaps people give others way too much credit for the depth to which they think about things. Do people really sit and plot a long term strategy, systematically removing the obstacles in their way (rubbing their hands with sinister glee every time another blockage is expunged). Likewise, are people's lives so empty that they have time to sit and be repeatedly offended by someone who loses a bit of control on a night out.