Reality breaks out in the middle of a football match

On Saturday around six I was in a room with two TVs. One was showing the England-Ireland rugby match. The other, which I was watching out of the corner of my eye, had the Spurs-Bolton game on with the sound turned down.

I glanced across at the football and suddenly saw the genuinely shocked faces of the players as they reacted to Fabrice Muamba's collapse. When a player is in real peril on a football pitch the other players know it instantly and react accordingly. Their behaviour in these circumstances is so radically different from the usual operatic simulation of agony which is their stock in trade that it's surprising they don't find it more embarrassing. It's as if an actor in Romeo & Juliet has suddenly stopped the fight scene because somebody has really been stabbed.

You can't help thinking none of those players will ever be able to run on a pitch in quite the same way again.

Why people kiss and tell

I just caught a little of Frank Skinner talking to Mark Lawson on the iPlayer. One of the things they touch upon is the amount of casual sex Skinner enjoyed during his stand-up years. Skinner describes doing a book signing at a Literary Festival when he suddenly found himself confronted by a woman who said "you may not remember me. We had a one-night stand once."

She was perfectly pleasant about it and even introduced him to her partner. Skinner confessed to Lawson that he had no memory of her which is the kind of modest boast most men would like to be able to make. Then he pointed out that while he might have mentioned the many women he'd slept with in his books he at least had stopped short of identifying them. Unlike the women, many of whom will have been tempted to let slip at a dinner party that they once had a bunk-up with TV's Frank Skinner.

"Part of the purpose of casual sex," he says, "is anecdote production." This is truer than people like to admit. I know at least one person who had a one-off sexual encounter with a Very Famous Person. This person has been known to say "it was the best thing that ever happened to me."

Adele leaves me cold & Bonnie Raitt doesn't

Bonnie Raitt's version of "I Can't Make You Love Me" is one of my favourite sad records. Raitt's always been brilliant at delivering songs about being overlooked. She makes a nonsense of the idea that you have to write a song to understand it. She understands this song better than the blokes who wrote it.

Adele's done a version too, which isn't surprising. I'm amazed that while the first one moves me the second one doesn't. They're in the same style and by common consent Adele "can sing", whatever that means. There are no egregious lapses of taste and no X Factor flights of melisma. The arrangement is no different. It's done in the same way. It presses the emotional buttons. It just doesn't touch me at all, which I realise puts me in a minority of one.

I'm sure a certain amount of it is prejudice. Bonnie Raitt's been a part of my life since I was 21. There is history between us. I will never be able to look at or listen to Adele in the same way.

But there's something beyond the prejudice, something beyond the inevitable discussion about "kinds of singers". There's something in the notes that come out of the speaker and the way they make me feel. What makes me warm to one and not the other?

Why do Americans pronounce non-English words in such a pretentious way?

Everybody else in the world, including the Iraqis, puts the emphasis on the second syllable of "Baghdad". Not the Americans. They put it on the first. Where do they get that idea from?

I watched Midnight In Paris last night. This is about Americans in Paris and therefore it's full of similarly mangled versions of well-known foreign words. Parisians becomes "Pareezhuns". The painter Monet is "Moanay". The sculptor Rodin is "Row-Dan".  When the Sorbonne is first mentioned it's "Sorebone". The Boeuf Bourguignon is "Boeuf Berniown". The splendid old Peugeot which picks Owen Wilson up every night is a "Poojoe". This is not exclusively a problem with French words either. The well-known flat bread popular in Greece is "Peter Bread".

Obviously no nation is blameless in this regard but there's something about the way that many Americans - particularly sophisticated Americans, the kind you get in Woody Allen films - deliver these words that suggests that they feel that even the way the locals do it isn't sufficiently pretentious for them.

Why rock records are like cakes

The rush to pronounce on the new Bruce Springsteen album reminds me of all the frantic spinning that goes on immediately after a Budget. The New York Times even unleashed *two* of its pop critics on it. Their debate was like an argument over the merits of different candidates running in the Presidential primaries. Everybody seems obsessed with what he had to say about the recession and just who he was siding with. It reminds me of the crowd pursuing Graham Chapman in The Life Of Brian, begging for a sign.

There was a similar clutching at straws among those who confined themselves to discussions of the music. They ticked off the musical characteristics - choruses, types of guitars, production techniques - as if from a shopping list. I honestly can’t see the point.

Here’s the thing about rock records. Even to the trained ear they all sound the same the first four or five times through. At that stage those people who are predisposed to like them will convince themselves the record is great. Those predisposed to think the record's poor will convince themselves of the opposite. Those with 1,000 words to write will form an opinion that they don’t yet have. None of them know.

They don't know because the things that mark out the tiny handful of great records from the thousands of fair to middling ones only emerge over time and they do so when you’re not concentrating. Great records creep up on you like friendship. The things that make them great records are often not obvious on first acquaintance. Most cakes have the same ingredients. Only the good ones rise. And any baker will tell you that you'll get nowhere opening the oven door to check.

In defence of very rich men who own football clubs

The firing of Andre Villas-Boas coincides with the QPR behind the scenes documentary "The Four Year Plan". If it's your view that the owners of football clubs are overgrown trigger-happy boys who shouldn't be in charge of a sweet shop today is the perfect day to voice it.

I disagree. I don't think the likes of Flavio Briatore and Roman Abramovich or any of these people are fools. I think they may have some courtiers who are scoundrels and they all have fans who are quite happy to see insane sums of money spent on players' wages but I don't think they're stupid. The only lever they have on the business is the hiring and more often the firing of the manager and they have to do it sooner because if they're going to do it later it'll probably be too late.

The contrary view is that the clubs who have stuck with their managers, Manchester United and Arsenal, have prospered as a consequence. I think this is a fundamental misreading. Those clubs have stuck with their managers because, through some combination of good judgement, good luck and sheer effrontery, they have done well more than they have done badly. They've been retained because they've done well. They haven't done well because they've been retained.

The Moorgate train crash was 37 years ago today

On this day in 1975, at 8.45, a packed train entered Moorgate station on what was then the Northern Line (Highbury Branch) and, instead of slowing down, accelerated into the sand drag at the end of the platform, through the buffers and into the wall at the end of the tunnel. Forty three people lost their lives. Nobody really knows why. There was speculation that the driver may have committed suicide. I remember seeing his picture in the papers for months afterwards.

I was thinking about that this yesterday morning when I stood on Palmers Green train platform. Some of those 43 dead may have stood there 37 years earlier. This line is now operated by First Capital Connect. It's called something different but it serves the same purpose - to get office workers from the suburbs of north London and Hertfordshire into the City of London.

I was thinking about it again last night while watching the first episode of The Tube, the new BBC series about how the underground works. My youngest was enthralled by this programme, by the steady thrum of the service, the seen-it-all look in the eyes of the staff and the drunken selfishness of a small minority of passengers. I've seen films about the Tube before but I'm always happy to watch a new one.

My reaction is always the same. Considering four million people get on the Tube every day and considering these metal bullets are being fired down these tunnels with such remorseless regularity and taking into account that the one thing we know is that the unforeseen does happen, it really is a miracle that these tragedies don't occur more often.