Was Charles Dickens the first rock star to go on a never ending tour because he needed to be loved?

Just finished Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin. Maybe all biographies should be written by women. Men like Peter Ackroyd, the author of Dickens, tend too much towards hero worship. Tomalin on the other hand describes how he could be callous as well as compassionate, how he condemned his wife to a life of uninterrupted child-bearing and then dismissed her from his life so that he could set up an alternative home with a young actress and how he sent many of his children overseas so that he wouldn't be tainted by their failures.

Her depiction of the novelist in later life, spending much of his time "on the road" in order to maintain his increasingly lavish and complicated lifestyle, recalls nothing so much as a legendary rock star on a never-ending tour, playing the arenas in order to enjoy the uncomplicated affection you can only get from a bunch of strangers.

The applause and praise received at readings became increasingly important as balm to his wounds, allowing him to believe in his own goodness. Having specialized in being a good man for so long and been known as such to the public, he was intent on keeping his good reputation: hence the public statements putting others in the wrong.

I've decided not to enter Parliament

On Monday night I was in a committee room in the Houses Of Parliament, taking part in a debate around the motion “This House Agrees With Dr Johnson that no man but a blockhead ever wrote, but for money”. This was sponsored by the PPA. We won but it was, in the words of the Iron Duke, “a close run thing”, not least because it’s easy to pick holes in anything that came out of the mouth of a controversialist like Johnson.

This was the first time I’d taken part in a formal debate since the age of fourteen. Actually, I took part in one a few years ago at the Oxford Union but that was to a hall full of students. They wanted rabble rousing so rabble rousing they got.

 The atmosphere at this debate was very different. The room was full of the great and good of publishing plus a load of people whose idea of a Monday night’s entertainment is popping out to take part in a debate. Any one of them could easily have taken apart my logic.

The usual speakers trick - make eye contact with anyone who looks sympathetic - doesn’t work. You don’t know where to pitch your tone of voice. The atmosphere leaves you unsure whether to declaim or converse.

You can prepare your opening remarks but at the end you have to summarise what’s been said by your opponent and the speakers from the floor, take some of it on board, kick most of it into touch and then somehow restate your argument. It’s very hard. I emerged from the experience with new respect for parliamentarians and a fresh understanding of why so many of them are former barristers.

Why the tappety-tappety office of today is a bad place to learn things

One afternoon in 1975 I spent a few hours in the sales office of an independent record company. I'd done various jobs but I'd never been in a working environment like it before. There were six people in an overcrowded basement office and the thing that immediately struck me was they were all on the phone all the time, not simply cold calling big accounts but also fielding enquiries, sharing news, bollocking reps, making arrangements, taking messages for each other and through it all just talking, talking, talking.

I sat in a corner, intimidated and dazzled by it all. I was only there for an afternoon but I learned more in those few hours than I would have done in an ordinary month. If I'd been there a month I would have learned a year's worth - just from watching and listening to how people handled themselves.

In complete contrast I was in an office today where ten people sat round a table. There was very little noise. They were all working very hard but it was impossible to know what they were doing because they were communicating by email rather than phone. Tappety-tappety where it had once been ring-ring. They were presumably doing the same jobs as the people in 1975 but you wouldn't know it. You could presumably spend months in that office and never overhear anything. And if you're not witnessing people working you can't be learning anything from them. If nobody's answering a colleague's phone, nobody's extending their circle of contacts. You're not picking up hints, borrowing elements of style, building up your schtick. 

You learn to work like you learn most other things, at first by copying and then by gradually building your own style. The modern office environment makes it more difficult to copy. Therefore it must be making it more difficult to learn. Or maybe there's nothing to copy anymore. Which is even more worrying.

Steve Hewlett, the Media Show and the question nobody in the media can answer

Radio Four's Media Show is currently one of the best things on the network. That's probably because its presenter, Steve Hewlett, is the best broadcast interviewer working anywhere. He's done enough homework to be able to get an interviewee to explain the key points of what are increasingly complex stories and yet when he slips the stiletto between the ribs he doesn't seem to be doing it maliciously.

I just caught up with a recent edition where he interviewed The Guardian's Director of Digital Engagement about the practicalities and ethics of their new Facebook alliance and the new editor of The Independent, Chris Blackhurst, about press regulation, Johann Hari and the future of the paper.

When he asked "Do you think the Independent will still be here on paper in five years?", the editor said that this was difficult to predict, which is a pretty remarkable answer if you think about it.

A John Humphreys would not have been able to let that answer go by without mocking the inability of the newspaper to be able to see its own immediate future. He would have repeated the question in a number of different ways while the editor shifted from foot to foot and eventually muttered something about having to speak to his superiors.

Hewlett didn't bother. He knows that the media is the land of vanished certainty. To pursue the question would only have tempted Blackhurst to make something up. I'm very glad he didn't.

How to get some more young people into The Archers

I know The Archers isn't real. If it was Ambridge would be a victim of the same drift which is seeing an estimated 200,000 young people a year desert rural areas for the cities. But instead I am happy to report that Ambridge is bursting at the seams with bright, personable, highly motivated, web-savvy people under the age of 30, all starting up businesses selling sausages, organic cheese, cocktails, horse shoes and the other staples of life in the year 2011.

There's something else that makes this notional village near Birmingham exceptional. 21% of the UK population work in the public sector in some shape or form and yet Ambridge doesn't boast a single teacher, nurse, road sweeper or retired civil servant. Not one. The only person who is reliant on the public purse is Clive Horobin, who's just been released from prison. This sylvan hive of industry must be the motor that is keeping the British economy going now that the North Sea oil has run out. I'm surprised it hasn't been on the news.

A friend of mine lives in a small hamlet in the (real) East Midlands. The residents recently noticed that somebody had moved into the large house on the edge of the settlement. It seemed to be occupied by a number of willowy young women who tottered down the shop on very high heels to buy the cigarettes which seemed to be their only form of nourishment. A number of burly gentlemen looked out from the front of the property.

It turned out, of course, to be an east European-run knocking shop. The locals reported it to the police and it was shut down quite promptly. Now wouldn't this make an Archers plotline? It would be both stranger and truer than what's going on in Ambridge at the moment.

Politics is a dialogue of the deaf

Had the plumbers round this morning.

Having established my wife is a teacher, the younger of the two, in his thirties but probably not a parent, said "I see Michael Gove is going to make it OK for them to hit pupils".

I think he expected to enlist my automatic disapproval. I widened my eyes in the "you don't say" expression I use when I don't want to pursue a line of conversation.

The older of the two, definitely a parent, said "some of them want a good hiding" and carried on with his work without looking up.

This is why I don't watch "Question Time".

Happy birthday to Paul Simon, the man who's made more great pop records than anyone

"Baby Driver", a track from Simon and Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Water", popped up on my iPod last night. It struck me, as it does from time to time, that Paul Simon's musical reputation suffers because he doesn't represent anyone but himself. I tweeted to the effect that no individual writer has more great pop records to his name than Paul Simon. @MaggieA, among others, contested this view, suggesting that Joni Mitchell had more.

Today is Paul Simon's 70th birthday so it seemed as good a time as any to offer this Spotify playlist as evidence. Life's too short to get bogged down in defining what is and what isn't pop. It stands for popular. Pop records, to my mind, exist independently of the artist. They are familiar to people who aren't very aware of who made them and don't much care. If I was putting music on the computer of a radio station these are the Paul Simon-authored records I'd put on there in the confident expectation that when they came up on the airwaves people would say "I know this one".

I've cheated in including his first hit "Hey Schoolgirl", which was in the fifties, but I haven't put in anything from his recent "So Beautiful Or So What" or any of his much-admired but relatively uncommercial records of the last few years. Even without those his achievement is exceptional. Big hits as a member of a duo, for whom he wrote all the songs and did most of the singing. Big hits on his own in the 70s. Even more big hits on his own in the 80s. Songs like "50 Ways To Leave Your Lover" and "Still Crazy After All These Years" which are still a boon to headline writers all these years later. Only Paul McCartney can boast a comparable span.

Oh, and I didn't include "Baby Driver".

Women drinking pints and other things that give the lie to costume drama

I caught a clip of Pan Am, the new American drama about the early 60s when air travel was glamorous. In one scene the stewardesses were on a layover in London. They were in a pub and  they were drinking pints.

I don't remember exactly when women started drinking pints but it wasn't in the sixties and the last people you would have seen with a brimming beaker in hand were these would-be Jackie Kennedys.

I've adapted to many things but women and pints is something I've never quite got used to. It just never looks right to me. It's obviously one of those things that betrays one's age.

Back in the early 70s the only woman I knew who drank pints was a roadsweeper I worked with during a student vacation. She used to have two pints at lunchtime and a lot more in the evening. She was probably in her fifties and wore bright red lipstick framing her solitary front tooth. I want to call her Lil.

I can't expect the makers of today's period dramas to recognise their own bum notes. The world of Pan Am is about as distant from today as the Edwardian world was from the makers of The Forsyte Saga in the mid-60s. Back then there were probably Edwardian etiquette books they could consult to establish how polite society had been ordered. There's nothing you can refer to which rules with similar authority on what went on in more recent times. When women started drinking pints it was as much a watershed moment as the first appearance of a mini skirt. Nobody, however, seems to have marked it.

There's a difference between changing the world and selling it toys

Saw a Tweet yesterday which read:

"They're leaving flowers outside the Apple Store. What has happened to us?"

Couldn't help but sympathise. Steven Spielberg described Steve Jobs as "the greatest inventor since Edison", which can't be right. What about the airplane? The rocket to the moon? The technology which enables keyhole surgery? Antibiotics?

More to the point in Steve Jobs' case, he probably wouldn't have claimed to have invented the personal computer or MP3 player, the products with which he's most associated. He was a man who had a genius for perfecting such products and then marketing them. However nobody mourns a brilliant marketeer.

Did he "change the world", as all and sundry were claiming yesterday? You could say that he was a brilliant maker of toys. That's not to diminish him or the sense of loss of those around him. I've got all his toys and I love them.  But I do worry what our possession of these toys may be doing to our sense of proportion.

Another Tweet I saw yesterday came from Richard Coles.

"William Tyndale, translator of the Bible into English that ploughboys might be as learned as bishops - burned for his trouble on this day."

Now William Tyndale. There's a man who did change the world. Got no thanks for it either.

Anyone who says they can't work their mobile or their Mac is just trying to draw attention to themselves

The presenter of the football programme on Five Live last night was making the usual announcements about how you could get the programme as a podcast. Guests John Motson and Steve Claridge were making the harrumphy "this is all too space-age for me" noises that men of a certain age and background seem to feel is their only appropriate response to a sentence that contains the word "podcast" or "tweet". 

How long can they - or anyone - keep this kind of thing up? They already sound like Victorian butlers whinging about the telephone. It's not the space age any more, boys. That was ages ago.

Obviously not everyone listens to podcasts. Not everyone uses Twitter. Personally, I don't like Facebook. Every time I go on there I feel as if I've stepped into a bar full of people whose names I've forgotten and immediately want to turn on my heel and leave.

I don't however pretend that I don't understand it or that it's operating on some level beyond my competence because I haven't passed the right exams or I began my education too late. Anything that's been taken up by millions of people all over the world can not be difficult to understand. 

If I don't embrace it that's my choice. I don't say "I'm a bit of a Luddite", not least because Luddites were weavers whose jobs were threatened by the advent of machines and in extreme cases they destroyed said machinery. 

I don't say "it's all too technical for me" because one of the most interesting things about the digital revolution is that it's been achieved without anyone other than a coder having to consult a technical manual at all. 

Our adoption of this technology has been so seamless that we've been taught how to use the technology by the technology itself. The only people who have trouble are people who have decided to have trouble.

Nobody has had to pore over an instruction manual to use Google or eBay or an iPhone. We may have relied on friends to show us the odd short-cut but we haven't needed anyone to tell us how to begin. It wasn't always thus. It's not that long since you had to take a day off to set-up even the most elementary item of kit.

The introduction of the Amstrad PCW 8256 back in the 80s. Now that *was* too technical for everybody. It came with two huge spiral bound books and had no hard drive. That meant you couldn't save even the smallest memo on it. You had to save it on to a removable disc. If, like me, you were a very early adopter, you only found this out after you'd lost a whole day's work.

In those days technology allowed you to get things wrong. Today you almost have to want to.

Why can't gigs start earlier?

Went to see Charlie Dore at Green Note in Camden Town last night. The three musicians played beautifully. Green Note is a nice little place but not exactly fit for purpose. It's so long and narrow that they had to perform in single file. From the front they looked like one of those many-armed Hindu statues.

I got up not long after five a.m. yesterday. We get up early in our house, particularly when my wife is teaching. I had a long day at work. At 6.30 I looked at my watch and realised I still had two and a half hours to kill before the show began. I went to Wagamama for something to eat then made my way over to Camden, found the venue and then went across the road to have a drink in a pub in Parkway. I bumped into an old friend, which passed some more of the time. Nonetheless, by the time she came on I was starting to fade and could only stay for the first half.

When we started True Stories Told Live I insisted that we had to start at 7.30 and finish no later than 9.30. Most people were coming straight from work and they don't want to have to kill time before the entertainment. I think it's one of the best decisions we ever made. If people want to hang about and have a meal they can do it afterwards.

I realise that most gigs are put on by people who can only make money if we eat and drink but this has meant that gigs get pushed further and further back in the evening. I suppose there are people who need time to travel in from the suburbs but most of the people I encounter have come there straight from a very long day at work. The performers may be fresh as paint but the audience are dying on their feet. If there was a thought bubble over their heads it would say "how long will it take me to get home at this time of night?"

I don't expect this to change but surely in these hard-pressed times (I walked past the Jazz Cafe last night and it appeared to be closed) there must be room for alternatives. What about two shows, one starting at 7.00? What about Saturday afternoon matinees which aren't just for kids? Lunchtimes? Back in the early 60s promoters used to organise gigs for the convenience of the audience. It seems they don't do that anymore. If ever there was a time to do it that time is now.

It's easier to make up a baddie because we're all baddies inside

I read a very good piece by novelist William Nicholson in The Guardian. He was wondering why book publishers have such a resistance to commissioning serious fiction with a hero who is middle class. After all, publishing is the most middle class of industries and its products are bought by almost exclusively middle class customers. Nicholson thinks they're in a life-long denial of who they are.

This coincides with my reading of this year's Man Booker Prize Short List. I've done four so far. The two I've enjoyed, The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes and Snowdrops by A.D. Miller, are written from the point of view of middle-class males who are not wildly removed from the books' authors. In fact the latter almost reads like a magazine feature about life for a single male British lawyer in Putin's Russia.

I've got on less well with the other two. Jamrach's Menagerie by Carol Birch is told by a young male urchin engaged by a Victorian collector of animals. Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan is told by an elderly black American jazz player who spent the years between the wars in Berlin. I didn't actually believe in either of them. And it's not helped by the fact that I know neither author can ever have had anything like the life experiences they describe.

I don't think this is anything to do with the fact that their authors are women. Hilary Mantel certainly made me believe in Thomas Cromwell in Wolf Hall. But maybe that worked because he was such a sinister character. It seems that's what you have to do to make people convincing. One of the reasons Randy Newman ventriloquises so well is that his protagonists are often weak, lustful, grasping and sometimes outright malign. He's perfectly comfortable with admitting that elements of those people are inside us all.

The men (do we still call them heroes?) in the first two Booker books are averagely horny and certainly easily-led. In both cases they don't see what's happening to them. In creating them the authors seem to have revealed plenty about themselves.  That's why I preferred them to the other two where the authors don't.

If you don't cane it on Saturday night, you won't know about the SOS bus

Returning to my Norwich hotel in the early hours of Sunday I saw the SOS bus, something which I have since learned is increasingly becoming a feature of the weekend in British city centres.

The SOS Bus is a mobile medical unit cum social work resource parked in the town's clubland. It's primarily there to keep young people who have been, in the jargon, "overdoing it" from coming to harm. It was started in response to a tragedy in 2000 when three young people in Norwich all died on the same night in drink-related incidents. It's funded by the police, the council, local club owners and other agencies such as churches. It's manned by volunteers.

I can see the benefits of this. It no doubt stops nasty cases turning into fatalities while taking the pressure off the local A&E. Young doctors I've talked to reckon that without drink the average A&E would be a comparatively serene place at the weekend. I wouldn't be surprised if the club owners' support of the SOS Bus also helps when they come to renew their licences.

At the same time you can't help but think about the message a service like this sends over time. "Society", as represented by the law and the local authorities, accepts the fact that oblivion drinking is here to stay and is prepared to devote resources to protecting those who voluntarily indulge in it from its inevitable consequences.

In the 19th century organisations like the Sally Army and the Band of Hope patrolled the back streets of major cities picking up drunks. The best they could hope for in those circumstances was a new recruit. The least they could expect was a little shame. Maybe nobody feels that any more.

Ever put the wrong record on at the wedding disco?

The wedding we went to this weekend was one of those rare occasions where the dance floor was crowded from the moment the confetti bomb went off over the head of the happy couple, who inaugurated proceedings to the sound of Andy Williams. Young and old, sophisticats and rubes subsequently lapped up a programme of tunes that largely pre-dated 1990 and thankfully inclined towards the bleeding obvious: "Superstition", "Blame It On The Boogie", "I'm A Believer", "Staying Alive", "Livin' La Vida Loca" and "Uptown Girl" were just a few of the tunes I remember. None of the DJ's selections seemed to be trying to appeal to the usual snobs sneering on the sidelines because there weren't any. Everyone was on the dance floor.

The only time our man dropped the ball was when he played "Sweet Child O' Mine" by Guns N' Roses. This can only have been in response to a request from somebody in the wedding party. The DJ must have suspected that you couldn't follow tunes like those above with a piece of near-rock as sludgy, generic and ploddingly macho as this one. It went down well with a handful of young males but the rest of the dancers began to slip away, to re-charge their glasses and wait for the restoration of good sense. The DJ's heart must have sunk and the song's 5.56 running time must have stretched before him like a Russian winter. He must have been kicking himself inside.

It's a funny thing. When dancers are in the zone they want one particular set of chords and beats to go on forever while wishing that some other set of chords and beats would immediately cease. Time either gallops by or drags unbearably according to what the tune is. Our DJ got it back with Beyonce - the universal panacea for party longueurs - and then never wavered again. Maybe that's the mark of a great wedding set. It's only by making one wrong move that we see the true path more clearly. It's only by recognising what is not party music that we appreciate how rare real party music is.

Are we too busy to play with the kids or are we too idle?

A UNICEF report says that the British don't spend enough time with their children because they're too busy. This is a theme that seems to go unchallenged by the commentariat and politicians. They were talking about it on the World At One just now. "We all live busy lives" is one of those clichés that is passed on and never examined as if that's just the inevitable price we pay for the life we lead, a bit like electricity and traffic.

The word "busy" implies that we're doing something important like work or cooking or checking our tax returns. But what we're probably "busy" doing in that time is watching TV. A recent survey found that the British watched an average of three hours forty five minutes every day. If they're being as honest as I am when the doctor asks me how much I drink in an average week, they're probably underestimating those hours.

Let's say they're watching four hours a day. That's 1,456 hours a year. That's almost sixty-one whole days a year spent watching TV. Even if you accept that some of the programmes we're watching might be passing on some worthwhile information, such as the value of spending more time with our children or going for a bracing walk, that's a mind-boggling share of time.

And if Twitter is anything to go by the people doing the heavy watching are just as likely to be the university-educated sorts with their iPads on their laps as the Jim Royles of this world. We're not busy. Just idle.

When Degas was papped

This morning I went to the press preview of Degas and The Ballet: Picturing Movement at the Royal Academy.

In the 1870s Degas spent hours sketching dancers rehearsing and performing from every conceivable angle. His girls appear more solid than today’s ballerinas. They bend and flex. They grip their ankles. They adjust their straps. They have hips and thighs. You can almost hear them strain. For all the airs and graces on display they could be lifting baskets of fish down at the market.

Photography wasn’t up to the job of capturing a dancer on tiptoe because exposure times could be as long as fifteen minutes. The early moving pictures which were being pioneered in Paris around the same time took multiple exposures of running men, connected them and slowed them down in an effort to isolate the secrets of motion. It wasn’t satisfactory. To adapt an old commercial, thanks to the way shading and shape can suggest precise transfers of weight, only painting can do zis.

The press event was enhanced by the attendance of former prima ballerina Darcey Bussell (above). She was dressed all in red. This is the only respect in which she would be confused with the back of a bus. She was explaining how she admired the way Degas had managed to suggest that the dancer had arrived at a particular pose that very instant. To demonstrate she flickered to life in front us, dazzlingly arranging her upper body into that precise pose. Degas would have got out his pencil and made her do it again and again and again.

The exhibition finishes with a lovely touch. Degas had become obsessed with photography late in his life. When he was a very old man he was asked if he would pose for a movie. He refused. So the photographer set up in the street near his house, waited for the old man to come out and then filmed him walking past the camera. He doesn't appear to have been aware that he was being papped.

This is what 1965 looked like if you really were absolutely fabulous

Publishing event of the week has been the arrival on You Tube of a selection of the home movies of actor and best friend of the stars Roddy McDowall. Here you see the jeunesse dorée disporting themselves on the decks of Malibu homes in the year 1965. Rock Hudson, Jane Fonda, Natalie Wood, Julie Andrews, Edward Fox, Robert Wagner and many more whose names don't immediately spring to mind, all knocking back small brown drinks and smoking as if the health implications were completely unknown.

You really must watch some of these films. They're curiously compelling. Three things struck me while looking at them:

 1. Nobody ever holds a home movie shot quite as long as they ought to. We frantically pan in search of movement when stillness is what the eye most craves. 2. Even Hollywood stars, for whom the admiring close-up is the stuff of their daily work, feel the need to send themselves up when put in front of a movie camera. 3. Right now some smart advertising exec is negotiating for the rights to get this footage, set it to some suitably hedonistic contemporary music and use it to sell fragrances in the run-up to Christmas.

It's Joe Bussard, broadcasting from Planet 1928

There's nobody whose enthusiasm for music I've found more infectious over the last year than Joe Bussard. He's the collector of vintage 78s who's the subject of the documentary Desperate Man Blues. He's currently doing a weekly radio show which you can hear as a podcast. It's called Country Classics but it also features hot jazz, blues and in the one I've just been listening to, he played a flamenco recording from 1930. In fact pretty much anything Joe plays comes off a 78 and was released during that small time window that started in 1928 and ended with the Depression.

Joe hasn't got an awful lot to say about the music. In fact he's at his most eloquent when he's just dissolving into delighted giggles over some ancient track by Uncle Dave Macon or the Carter Family. He reads out listeners emails as if email had just been invented. One of them came from a listener in Atlanta who said he liked to listen while in traffic jams. "Yup, I heard of them traffic jams," says Joe, who clearly doesn't intend to experience one for himself. More power to him.

It's better to have a short book that you actually read than a fat one that you don't

I've read two books in the last week: Submergence is a novel about a British agent taken hostage by Al-Qaeda in Somalia. Its author J.M. Ledgard says its aim is "to alter the perspective of the planet we inhabit". The Sense Of An Ending by Julian Barnes is about a man in his sixties trying to distinguish between the things he remembers of his young life and the things that actually occured.

They're both, in their different ways, terrific. You can imagine Ledgard being a cult favourite for years to come. The Barnes book could be a big popular success because its central premise is so compelling. The thing they have in common, and the reason I've been able to read the pair of them in a week, is that they're both short. Submergence is 208 pages, The Sense Of An Ending only 160. You could read either of them in an afternoon and evening. I don't know whether this indicates that the publishing business is starting to favour brevity. It wouldn't be a bad thing if it did. Most books, like most films and most records, don't need to be anything like as long as they are.

Funny that I should read these books so quickly in the same week that the new management of Waterstone's announced that they're stopping their famous "three-for-two" offers on books. As I write this I'm looking at the spine of a fat paperback I picked up in one of these offers some while ago and still haven't read. I don't think I'll miss the three-for-two. I tend to buy books because I feel like starting them on the day I buy them. It's difficult to extend that feeling beyond one book. And if the other ones are still sitting there unread a year later it's no comfort to know I got them cheap.

Whistle Test and me

Spent a morning this week with Bob Harris and his Radio Two team who are doing a whole series of radio shows celebrating the legacy of Old Grey Whistle Test. The idea is to do one programme about each series of the show, to talk to old presenters and record sessions with the bands, many of whom are still playing. I went on the day Gang Of Four, Squeeze and Nick Lowe were booked in. We recorded it in the huge studio at Maida Vale. There's a plaque marking the fact that Bing Crosby did his last recording there in 1977. He died the following day on the golf course. I talked to the engineer who did the session. Since Whistle Test seemed to be in the air, I wrote down my personal reminiscences of my experience working on it in the early 80s in a feature in The Word. You can read it here .