People take cabs when they think they're important

Half a year in, haven't lost the shiver of pleasure that comes with telling cab driver, "Conde Nast building, please."

It would be unkind to mention the name of the person who tweeted this yesterday. There's nothing wrong with a young person being really excited that they've got a job on a New York fashion magazine. What's interesting is the reference to the cab, which the tweeter probably didn't even notice.

There are many legitimate reasons for taking a cab: to complete a journey difficult to make by public transport, to transport heavy packages or for safety late at night, for instance. (Obviously it can't be for convenience because in London cabs spend most of their times in traffic jams.) However the impulse that causes people to raise their arms to the noonday traffic and take a cab is the heart-pounding, almost erotic feeling that they are far too important to be transported any other way. The fact that their employers are happy to refund cab expenses in certain jobs confirms them in this feeling that their work is of an order that demands they be moved about separately from the rest of us, that they be not impeded in any way and that, wherever possible, they be given the solitude to think about their next move. They're about status, not transport.

During economic boom nobody bats an eyelid. It's different right now. If I took cabs for work I would be keeping pretty quiet about it at the moment. Spotlights are being shone hard on the running expenses of public bodies and the amount of money being splashed on cabs does rather stand out. If you've got a moment, just Google "taxi expenses" for a selection of eye openers. This is just one.

Where's the 6 Music of talk radio?

For a couple of months earlier this year the nation discussed the future of a minority music station as if its survival were the thin membrane separating civilisation from the abyss. The debate around 6 Music essentially hinged on whether there was only one kind of pop music or whether there were many. It was concluded there were many and 6 music was a sufficiently distinct variety to preserve.

Shouldn't there be a similar debate about whether the BBC could be providing more than a couple of varieties of speech radio? At the moment we have the news, arts and lifestyle mix of Radio Four; we also have the news, sport and phone-ins mix of Five Live. Both are admirable but it's clear that they do not cover the full range of what licence fee payers might wish to listen to.
Three things made me think about this.

Firstly, the appointment of a new controller of Radio 4 spotlights the peculiar challenge of introducing innovation in a place where listener satisfaction is so high. Anything new has to come by removing what is already there, which will be fiercely loved by somebody. If there is any change at Radio Four it will be at the margins.

Secondly, the uneasy introduction of "Men's Hour" on Five Live demonstrates how stylistically inelastic BBC stations are. The controllers have a highly-tuned idea of what fits. After a while the listeners become just as sensitive to what jars, which makes any innovation difficult.

Thirdly, I was listening to This American Life, Ira Glass's long-running show for NPR in the States, and wondering why British radio, for all its qualities, can't produce anything similarly soulful, hip and clever. The answer, at least to a certain extent, is it wouldn't fit anywhere.

There's no use looking to the commercial radio industry to provide anything like this because there isn't the advertising to support it. However you would have thought that the BBC, even in its current hair shirt mode, could divert a tiny amount of its budget (maybe the bit marked "taxis"?) to send up a probe of some kind to see if there is some new way of providing speech-based entertainment.

6 Music was saved on the basis that it did something that the commercials couldn't and, for many people, justified the licence fee on its own. Couldn't the same thing apply with a new form of speech radio? And surely it doesn't have to be a bureaucracy? Might it be possible to do something cheap and cheerful, without the normal overheads? Could it not curate material coming in from other sources rather than operating in the belief that all good ideas come from the centre? Why not start its own pirate ship? The web is teeming with talent and ideas which would benefit from some kind of broadcast outlet and at the moment digital radio has no reason to exist. This seems an opportunity to kill a number of birds with one stone.

Everywhere in media - whether it's in the big publishing companies or people running websites from their sheds - operators are having to contemplate doing things in an entirely new way. They're driven by necessity. The BBC, the only organisation in the media that has at least a rough idea of its revenue for the next few years, could innovate out of choice. I think they'd be surprised how much support they would get.

Why do the British press keep on getting burned by Hollywood?

Once again a British tabloid, in this case the News of The World, has to pay some American movie stars, in this case Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, a lot of money for falsely claiming that their marriage is at an end. You wonder why British hacks in Covent Garden or Wapping persist in pretending that they know what's going on with the domestic circumstances of faraway film actors who spend most of their time behind an expensive wall of PR deceit. These people's lives are so unusual and so completely consumed by their careers that it's possible that even they don't know how they stand, let alone some hack Googling away in London whose knowledge of Hollywood is limited to reading the odd feature in Empire.

Nonetheless every week our news stands groan with magazines claiming to know what Jen said to Brad this week. They can't have a clue. Think about it. If they did know what happened behind closed doors in Hollywood on Thursday night then they would have a highly-placed mole who would be looking for an Andrew Morton-style book deal. If they're just resorting to the same old scuttlebutt as everyone else they may as well be reading Perez Hilton. What eats away at the print media is the conviction that if they keep on speculating about a celebrity marriage then experience suggests that one of these days they'll be right. But guessing may be becoming a prohibitively expensive business.

The Googling classes

Poet Jackie Kay is reading her autobiography "Red Dust Road" on Radio 4 at the moment. I only caught the latter half of yesterday's broadcast but she described how she traced her Nigerian father. She'd never met him but she knew his name and that he was an academic. She didn't know how to go about finding him. Then a friend made the suggestion I imagine most of the people reading this blog would have made. Why not Google him? Within seconds she found him. Academics are a breeze on Google.

The world is now so firmly divided into people who Google everything and those who rarely think of it that it's almost become an alternative definition of intelligence. I was sitting on the tube the other night facing somebody wearing a security pass for an educational institution. It had their name and picture on it. They'd made no effort to conceal it. They got off at my station. With nothing else to do while waiting for the bus I looked on the web on my iPhone, entered just their title and first name plus the name of the institution into Google and within a couple of seconds I had their CV. I do things like that because I'm a nosy hack but it would be just as easy for somebody who wished to steal their identity. The person who would probably be most disturbed by this prospect would probably be the person who didn't make the basic effort to conceal the pass in the first place. If they were in the Googling classes they would make sure they hid it.

Looking out for each other

Alice Glass of Crystal Castles made a plea from the stage for rapists to be castrated. The BBC Suffolk website said that "regular festival goers were shocked by the attack". The Daily Mail added that "police began patrols following the second attack in an attempt to curb fears among festival-goers" and, having found somebody who talked like a sub-editor, quoted her as saying "Now everyone is left reeling after this second rape". The Guardian wagged its rarely-used finger and said following these two alleged incidents that "safety must become Latitude's top priority".

It's difficult to believe that these reports were written by people who actually went to Latitude, most of whom passed a pleasant sunny weekend without being aware of any attacks or any police presence of any kind. It goes without saying that any attack is serious and, if proven, the law should deal with it. I went there (with wife, two daughters and a friend, for what it's worth) and would happily do so again.

In any place where 35,000 people gather there's likely to be some crime. The notion that the organisers of a gathering of this kind can guarantee the safety of every individual all the time is ridiculous. The organisers of an event can be expected to provide security fences and adequate lighting but they cannot legislate for what might happen if somebody stumbles off on their own in the middle of the night. One of the stage announcements I remember from the Woodstock film in 1969 was along the lines of "the man next to you is your brother so look out for each other". This seemed to me to be true back then as it is today.

My son and his girlfriend - final year students at Leeds University - were recently returning to his flat late at night when a cab pulled up and dropped off a young woman who was so drunk they had to help her open her front door. They didn't know her but they took her inside, put her to bed and decided they couldn't leave her in case she vomited. They found her mobile, got the number of her friends and rang them. These friends were still in the club that she'd somehow left. They didn't seem overly concerned about her but promised they'd come back and take care of her. It took the best part of two hours for the friends to return.

I don't think any society can ever stop random attacks taking place but I'm regularly shocked when I see how often drunk young people fail to, in the words of Chip Monk at Woodstock, "look out for each other". Alice Glass, The Guardian and anybody else who can get the ear of young people would be more usefully employed ramming home the message that the safety and well-being of your mate is your responsibility, no matter how drunk and temporarily obnoxious they may be, than waving their arms around and expecting this problem to be solved by either security men or public executioners.

Every picture tells a story

Went to a press preview of the Camille Silvy exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. Silvy was a French pioneer of photography in the 19th century, working on both sides of the channel in the period before anybody had a clear idea of how you might make a living out of the new art.

There are entire folders of all the people he took pictures of in his London studio, from memorial pictures of dead infants through famous writers to would-be society figures. Included among them is this arresting picture from 1862 of James and Sarah Davies. She was a present from the King of Dahomey to the Queen of England via a sea captain. There's more of the story here.

In Praise of Green Metropolis

I can't vouch for how much money Green Metropolis donate towards their declared aim of saving the planet but I've been using them for the last couple of years to sell on books I no longer want and using the credit to buy things I do want. This week I bought "I Saw Two Englands" by H.V. Morton, the Michael Palin of his day, for £3.50. It's got a tattered dust jacket but so would you if you'd been given by Kathleen to Mabel at Christmas 1946. The actual copy's in very good condition - and, what's more, it comes with a bookmark extolling the virtues of National Savings. I can't tell you how much pleasure I get from things like this dropping through the letterbox.

Do we have to revisit the sweary bits of Live Aid?

It's twenty-five years since Live Aid. In most quarters this will pass unremarked. The One Show on BBC-1 are doing an item about "things you didn't know (or have forgotten) about Live Aid" and they wanted me to tell the story about Bob Geldof saying "give us your fucking money" while I was interviewing him live on air. Since the point of this story is that he didn't say that (instead he said "fuck the address") I always feel that I'm letting people down.

Telling a story like this on TV is difficult enough, given the impatience of editors with any story that has to be told in a joined-up way or not at all. When the nub of that story is to contrast two sentences, both containing a word that you can't say on TV at tea time, this is near impossible. The producer in this case said he'd "have to check it with Ed Pol". You will quickly work out that Ed Pol is not an actual person but Corporation shorthand for "editorial policy". (BBC people always refer to their internal bureaucracy as if it is a given, rather like gravity.) Anyway Ed Pol said that obviously I couldn't say the word, nor could they bleep me saying the word and nor could I replace it with "effing". I had a similar experience with a Radio Four programme I did about bootlegs where we played parts of the Troggs Tapes. This was safely after the watershed but unsurprisingly we couldn't run it without bleeping the offending words. What surprised me is that Ed Pol would only allow them a specific number of bleeps.

I can understand zero tolerance of swearing. It worked for fifty years. I suppose I can also understand the arguments for total tolerance, though I think you have to take into account the fact that swearing is tiring to listen to and, if the swearing is being done by somebody you don't happen to be close to, removes a layer of skin from your soul with each obscenity. What I don't really understand is the curious halfway house we're in at the moment, where Ed Pol imposes quotas and you're allowed certain things at certain times. If the Geldof incident was an embarrassment at the time, what's the point of revisiting it 25 years later on a channel and at a time where you can say less about it than you could say at the time? It was live, which says all you need to say about it. In fact shouldn't the live blurt be the only acceptable excuse for swearing on the TV?

I don't buy the idea that TV has to change to reflect the manners of society. It's TV. Not real life. There was a time, not long ago, when you couldn't swear at all on the TV. Wasn't that also the era that produced Boys From The Black Stuff, The Singing Detective, Fawlty Towers and all the other programmes that people now look back on as the golden age?

Has Blue Peter made children out of us?

In a restaurant last night somebody pointed out Biddy Baxter, former doyenne of Blue Peter. Earlier in the day the historian Peter Hennessy had been presumably making mischief when he said on Start The Week that he believed that many of New Labour's failings could be traced back to Blue Peter. "It produced a political generation who believed they could collect the bottle tops, do AIDS next week and then solve world poverty. It was absolutely toe curling."

Certainly we have a political class who believe that once you do something that thing is done. Some of the things they do have that bright-eyed "new beginning" feeling of a Blue Peter campaign. The difference is that while all Blue Peter is trying to do is build an orphanage, they're trying to bring about changes in behaviour. Initiatives are announced, budgets assigned, progress reported and then there's a long silence. Only when the people who began the initiative have moved on does somebody emerge to admit that while they took all the action they intended to take it hasn't quite produced the results they intended. There was an item saying just that yesterday about government's campaign on childhood obesity. Seems you can't make people act in their own interests if they don't want to.

It's only when a campaign has hit the wall that people are prepared to concede that expectations might have been unrealistic. In recent years questioning the steady extension of university education has been like arguing for a better deal for witches in Salem. Now that the big story is 69 people chasing every graduate job Martin Birchall of graduate recruitment firm High Fliers is on the radio pointing out that nobody asked industry whether they needed this number of graduates. Seems obvious now, doesn't it?

Of course I don't blame the politicians. They're only trying to do what they think will play with us and we're addicted to good feelings particularly when they can be achieved without any apparent sacrifice on our part. Would we like to solve world hunger? Yes! Would we like to get those people across the road to behave better? Of course we would. Do we want all our children to go to university? You bet we do. Have we thought about the consequences of some of this? Not a lot.

An open letter to Rupert Murdoch on the erection of the Times paywall

Dear Rupert

I know you've been waiting to hear what I think about the reality of The Times and Sunday Times being behind a paywall. Fair enough. I don't expect you take much notice of much of the hot air this has generated in the blogosphere but, hey, us press barons must stick together.

Obviously, I'd love to see your pay plan work because the alternative is cloud cuckoo land. The idea that this news-for-free shemozzle is all going to work out OK at some unspecified point in the future is as transparent a nonsense as has ever been peddled by grown adults to other grown adults. This is a rum revolution we're going through and no mistake. For a start there are no revolutionaries. There are just a load of salaried employees being paid to spend other people's money until it runs out. There's no end of freeloading end users who haven't got a clue how close that is to happening. Finally there's a bunch of academics standing on the sidelines shouting for more money to be hurled on the bonfire. It's only people like you and, to an extent so minuscule as to be invisible, me who have got any skin in this particular game. So, Rupe (may I call you Rupe?) I'd love to see it work and to that end you'll be personally relieved to learn that I've signed up, paid my footling pound, handed over my credit card details and waited to see how it feels to be a paying customer of a web site. It's only been 48 hours but already I feel something.

I feel The Guardian should have done it first. The Guardian would have been in a stronger position to charge because its core readers think everyone else is lying to them and their choice of paper is an announcement of who they are. The Guardian would have found it quite easy to say, pay for this site or the armies of the night will triumph. But they didn't. They're over there watching with interest with their fingers crossed so tightly it's cutting off their circulation.

The Times is a paper that covers the same things as The Guardian but is read primarily by people who don't want to read anything written by the people at The Guardian. On the news stand its key strength is what it doesn't have. This is fine on the news stand. It's less valuable in the invisible world of on-line. Once you've paid for admittance to The Times on-line you want to feel your money has bought you access to something less vanilla than the basic editorial proposition of the paper. You also realise that a newspaper (as in the news on paper) has to be a balanced proposition. Little bit of this, bit more of that, not too much of the other. That doesn't apply so much on-line where density is all. At the moment this site feels like a lite bite rather than a rich storehouse of treasure.

What else might it provide? I don't know but I suspect that it's more raw meat, more provocative even intemperate opinion, material that doesn't feel it's been edited to fit a half-page gap, lots more photos and a lot more edge than we're getting at the moment.

You of all people, Rupes baby, will be aware that the newspaper that's currently running away with it on-line is the Daily Mail and that while your home page right now is rotating a number of nice-to-read "top stories" including Nadal winning Wimbledon, how the market might behave tomorrow, MI5 looking for Russian sleepers and the latest goings on in the Coalition, the Mail is clearly leading on a must-read story whose headline - "Fugitive bouncer who gunned down ex-lover and her boyfriend taunts police with 999 call after shooting officer in in unprovoked attack" - seems to be longer than half the stories on your site.

Still, as you would no doubt say, it's early days and I'm sure we'll see more real change in the next few weeks as the site responds to the reality of the marketplace than we've seen in the last few years. I shall be watching with interest. If you need any more advice, you know where to find me.

The man who guarded the secret of the Beatles

Ringo's 70 next week. Somebody's bound to trot out that old John Lennon line about him being "not even the best drummer in the Beatles". This misses the point on purpose, as if the best drummer for a group was always the one with the most skills. What matters with any group musician is fit.

But drummers are a different category altogether. A musician friend recently pointed out to me that the drummer is the one who "knows where the beat is". This intrigued me. He was explaining that once the drummer had decided where the beat was, which will be a product of his ear, personality and physical disposition, then you either go along with it or replace him, either with a drummer nearer to your taste or, as is the increasingly the case, with a drum machine. There's no point thinking you can change the way he plays any more than you can change the way he walks, holds his head or drinks his tea. Ringo was also unusual in that he's a left handed person playing a right handed kit. That meant that there were some things he couldn't do very well, such as play a roll, but it also made him, in his own words, "a handy kind of player". It may be why he was one of the first drummers not to hold his left stick like a chopstick.

Ringo knew where the beat was on the greatest creative streak in popular music, which is quite a responsibility. Not being involved in the creative squabbles on the front line he had one simple job - to define the pulse of the group. He knew their secret. On the best Beatle records he's an equal contributor. Take away those flourishes towards the end of She Loves You, the jubilant ride cymbal swing of Eight Days A Week, the straightening middle-eight of No Reply and the brilliant off-kilter funk of She Said She Said, and these are only instances, and you would have records that are not only 25% less musical but probably 50% less Beatle. And because he was a glass half-full personality his percentage contained a greater than normal injection of that buoyancy and joy which is key to the group's DNA.

So Happy Birthday for next Wednesday. It's still Ringo's world. We just live in it.

Because he's worth it

I'm enjoying listening to nervous BBC presenters quizzing Sir Michael Lyons about the BBC Trust's determination to publish the names of the talent who get most money from the corporation. Jeremy Clarkson is no doubt paid a small fortune and he probably makes sure that his remuneration is organised in as tax-efficient a way as possible. So would you. Now that Ross is leaving the BBC Clarkson will be the whipping boy, the first about whom we'll be asked to decide "is he really worth that much?"

I don't know what the sum is but if any TV presenter is worth it I reckon Clarkson is worth it. Lots of people, me included, will watch anything he presents. (Full disclosure: I've no interest in cars.) He probably writes his own links, which is more than can be said about 90% of TV presenters. There is a sign, in everything he does, of a mischievous intelligence at work. He's got that energy which is the most important thing broadcasters need. He's a genuine TV star in that even when things slightly misfire you have to watch the way he slightly colours up. He's human in a way that your standard autocue reader isn't.

James May and Richard Hammond are perfectly good at what they do and very famous as a consequence of it but they're not genuine TV stars. If Clarkson went to ITV or Channel Four he'd take a lot of his audience with him. There are a lot of people who are likely to calculate their value for money from the licence fee in terms of how much Jeremy Clarkson it gets them. This is a fact, whether sophisticated opinion wishes to believe it or not.

But just because Clarkson is worth it, that doesn't mean that most TV presenters are also worth it. I suspect the BBC pay Clarkson-type money to a number of well-known faces who don't write their own links, are entirely the creatures of their producers, do very well because they're in the right slot at the right time and wouldn't take much of their audience with them if they moved. I wonder whether that's behind the implication in Sir Michael Lyons' interview this morning that the public might be surprised who's in the top band and who isn't.

How the BBC can start saving English football. Today.

While we wait - probably in vain - for the people who run football to take the measures that should be taken to improve our national game, there is one thing that could be done which might make a far-reaching difference to football in this country and it could be done by the BBC before lunchtime today.

They should change Match of The Day.

Obviously MOTD was not responsible for yesterday's mugging but it does set the critical climate in which football is judged in this country. In this it has been responsible for encouraging complacency. Match of The Day is contractually obliged to say that the Premier League is the best in the world but its editorial stance could stand to be more sceptical without over-trying the patience of the armchair fan.

Are these handful of home-grown players the programme scrutinises every week really "world class" or are they just good players made to look better by the foreign players alongside them? Why can none of our honest yeomen midfielders beat their opposite number? Why don't we have defenders who can go forward with the ball? Why do so many of our top players seem so frightened? Shouldn't we be looking at the number of successful passes players complete in the course of a game rather than making an assessment based on one telegenic moment?

The guys who currently appear on MOTD could be sent round the world for a year to broaden their horizons and improve their golf. They could be replaced by pundits who:

a) have something fresh to say

b) will say it without worrying about being cut dead at the next football managers dinner

c) have played the game as it is played today

d) are capable of getting indignant about something other than Sepp Blatter and the introduction of goal-line technology.

What these people say and, more importantly, don't say has an effect on what the average person thinks. This particularly applies to all those football-mad kids who get their idea of the gold standard from its analysis. Yesterday was not just a question of a few great players performing under par. It was more like an entire star system being, in the words of the Nick Lowe song, nutted by reality. The people who helped create that star system should be brought to account.

Danny Baker's guest appearance on the programme during the World Cup was very amusing but mainly notable for the way the rest of the panel sucked in their breath as if he had been guilty of breaching parliamentary privilege. "It's all right," he said to Shearer. "It's football. You can say what you like."

Don't let's be beastly to the Germans

My parents' generation had good reason not to warm to the Germans but they rarely indulged in the kind of knockabout xenophobia we have to put up with in the run-up to Sunday's match. The strange thing is that the people behind it, the ones writing the links on Five Live and the headlines in the tabloids, were probably born in the 70s, long after the end of hostilities, and their jokey antipathy seems to owe more to viewings of The Italian Job, Dad's Army and The Great Escape than it does to anything very real. I heard football writer Mick Dennis on the radio the other day saying that he'd changed his mind about the Germans based on having gone there on holiday ten years ago. It seemed odd that you could have a prejudice so superficial that a few days in a pension was enough to shrug it off. It's not as if he went ashore on D Day and got shot at.

Maybe the key to our feeling about the Germans is in that line that gets attributed to Gary Lineker. "Football is a game with 11 men a side where the Germans win". We only keep referring to the war because we keep losing at football. Maybe it's a way to explain away our national lack of confidence by pretending it's something to do with the continuation of a noble struggle and not because, nine times out of ten, our multi-millionaires don't hold their nerve under pressure quite as well as their mere millionaires. We're very good at jutting out our chins and pretending it's all to do with the bulldog spirit. But then we make silly mistakes and give it away, much like Captain Mainwaring did when he said "don't tell him, Pike!"

Social kissing and The Archers

There are many things that make Ambridge unique. No two residents have the same first name. Nobody phones anyone, preferring to pop round in person to ensure that their neighbours got the message about the latest project. This is the only village which has a net in-flow of people in their early twenties, most of whom are saving the planet, one yogurt at a time. Members of minority groups arrive in a blaze of controversy and then hang around like spare parts.

Until recently a further thing had made Ambridge an exception to the general drift of life in Britain in 2010. Ambridge was the only place in the nation where there was no social kissing. Guests would turn up at other people's houses for celebrations with none of that osculatory awkwardness in the hall where people have to decide which cheek to lunge for first and judge when everyone has "done" everyone else and it's safe to go and get a drink. This was a bit of a relief. However, all that's changed. When I first noticed social kissing arriving in the Archers - and there was certainly one occasion this past week - I thought to myself, I hope Radio Four are going to extend the running time of the programme by at least a minute to at least make sure all the kissing doesn't eat into the plotlines. Because the thing about social kissing, whether real or dramatic, is that once you start with it you've got to see it through.

Strange that this should arrive in The Archers just as I'm trying to cut down on it in real life. It has its place, of course, in expressing genuine affection and in some cases respect but it can make life more complicated than it need be. At what point does one extend it to your children's grown-up friends? What about those work colleagues who might expect a peck in a social situation but would be understandably freaked out if you started every day with a mwah? What about the people that one meets professionally, then socially and then professionally again? What about - and I confess I have come near this variant with not entirely satisfactory outcomes - the male-on-male mwah? I trust the people at The Archers have had meetings about all this and come up with rules. If they have I would appreciate them giving us all a copy.

Let's be honest. Phones are toys

I have a close friend who worked in the City for many years. When we first met, which was just over twenty years ago, he told me he was an analyst. I asked him what he was analyzing. "Telecoms," he said. I asked him if that was big enough to be a field of its own. Surely it wasn't as big as steel or retail or chemicals or insurance. Obviously everyone had a phone and some people were getting these mobile ones but it still didn't seem substantial enough to qualify as its own industry.

I thought back to this yesterday when I was walking towards Kings Cross after the match. The day was sunny, the team had won and everyone was out on the streets doing something with their phone. Talking, texting, tweeting, checking the score, looking at video, sending each other elaborate jokes. What he should have said to me twenty years ago is that he was involved in the biggest step forward for the toy trade the world had ever seen. That would have been nearer the truth.

Passion is no ordinary word

If you wanted to fly somewhere and were offered a choice between one pilot who was capable and another who was immensely passionate about every aspect of flying, surely you'd choose the former rather than the latter? Feeling strongly about something doesn't make you do it any better. It may well make you do it worse.

England fans blame the team's shortcomings on their lack of passion, the fact that they aren't driven by the same strong emotion that compels them. Well, they wouldn't be, would they? The players are in a position to influence events. The fans exhibit passion - which generally means they shout themselves hoarse - because they aren't in a position to influence events. They persuade themselves that the reason England failed in the last week is because they were thinking about their Porsches. It wasn't because they couldn't pass the ball in a straight line and endured a collective nervous breakdown.

I blogged in the past about what Arsene Wenger said about football and a country's writers. It still holds good. The French dressing room at the moment doesn't look too much like the home of rationalism. I'm sure they'll get over that, as England may even get over their current malaise. At which point all the fans will say, see, they've won because they're finally showing "some passion".

We increasingly sprinkle our national conversation with references to passion. Companies claim to be passionate about everything from magazines to under floor heating. Maybe we do it to invoke a religious or patriotic feeling that we wouldn't allow ourselves to express in any other way. We assume that passion solves all problems. It doesn't. It may well get in the way. Shakespeare wrote his best plays about people in the grip of their own ungovernable passions. Oddly enough he didn't write any about tragic heroes who couldn't do right for doing wrong. That's a far more common feeling.

The iPad and our craving for distraction

There's an interesting piece by Peter Bregman in the Harvard Business Review called "Why I Returned My iPad". He loved it as a piece of technology but found it was occupying too much of his time, particularly that portion of his time that he usually spent staring out of the window, doing nothing in particular, just letting his mental wheels spin. This is true. Devices that are allegedly labour-saving simply make room for the introduction of further labour-saving devices.

This may be an early sign of the rehabilitation of that most underrated of human experiences. Boredom is due a comeback, I feel. I'm thinking particularly of that distinctively British variety of boredom celebrated in films like "It Always Rains On Sunday" and Hancock's "Sunday Afternoon At Home". It's that yawning prairie of time with nothing to do and nothing on the TV. The tedium of growing up in the 50s and 60s is what fired the Beatles and nearly everyone else worth hearing in British pop. For some people boredom is a powerful engine of motivation. Well now, thanks to the efforts of the entertainment industry, boredom has been banished.

Watching my own children growing up I've concluded that young people are rarely bored in the way I used to be bored at their age. This is because there's generally a button they can push that will provide something they can look at, listen to or play with, something that will stave off that boredom long before it sets in. This is good in some ways. In other ways it can result in a fidgety state of permanent distraction, an inability to just stare out of the window or go for a walk. In the near future this may become a social problem ever bit as alarming as drugs and drink.

However, I should make one thing clear. I still want an iPad.

Rumours of serious illness? Congratulations. You've arrived.

It could be that Grazia have some knowledge of the state of Lady Gaga's health. I doubt it. Magazines don't have a good record when it comes to this kind of thing. In fact they are liable to swallow whatever propaganda they are fed when they've got the act's cooperation and to run their sniping stories only when the artist has made it clear that she no longer needs them. Paula Yates was dead not long after Red magazine had run a cover story giving her a clean bill of health, mental and otherwise, River Phoenix was exalted as a paragon of clean living in all sorts of high-end magazines until he was found face-down outside the Viper Room and I've no doubt that some title will soon be running a piece about how Amy Winehouse has finally got her life together in exchange for some glamorous pictures of her new look.

The funny thing is that speculation about an artist being in the grip of a disease is one of the hallmarks of massive success. We used to notice it on Smash Hits back in the 80s. We used to get tear-stained letters on Friends Forever notepaper asking if it was true that Morten Harket or Boy George or Annie Lennox was secretly battling some life-threatening illness. We used to conclude that it was just malicious playground gossip designed to wound fans of the hot new thing. And so it proved. We would never have dreamed of printing any of it. Grazia, which is today's Smash Hits, albeit for people with a surfeit of brand-awareness, feels no such compunction.

There was no spirit of 1966

I was sixteen years old and we were on a school trip to France. That particular Saturday we took a train from Paris to the Loire Valley. There must have been about forty of us - all boys in their teens. We got to the hotel in time to watch the end of the second half and extra time sitting on our suitcases in the lobby. That's how we saw England win the World Cup.

Here's the thing about football in the 60s - it was quite a big deal but nothing like the all-consuming craziness it is today. I can't help but laugh when I hear appeals to "bring back the spirit of 66". There was no particular spirit. There was a nation, a football tournament and daily life, which went on. When the England team won it caught the nation unprepared for what it was supposed to feel. You only have to look at the venue for the team's celebrations - the Royal Lancaster Hotel. It's like a Travel Tavern.

In the very unlikely event that England get anywhere near a World Cup Final today parties of teenage schoolboys will regard it as a fundamental breach of their human rights if they're not watching the whole of it in HD on a giant screen. Nobody will be taking school parties anywhere. Everything will stop even more than it did on Saturday evening.