...ruffles...

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.

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Labels: Sport

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?

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Labels: Sport

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.

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Labels: TV and radio

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.

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Labels: News

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.

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Labels: General me

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.

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Labels: General me

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.”

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Labels: General me

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.

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Labels: Work

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.

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Labels: News

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.

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Labels: General me

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.

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Labels: General me

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.

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Labels: General me

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.

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Labels: General me, Technology

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.

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Labels: Sport, TV and radio

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.

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Labels: Technology

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.

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Labels: Technology

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.

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Labels: Music

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.

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Labels: TV and radio

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.

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Labels: Technology

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.

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