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 .

TV Presenting - the job anybody can do and nobody can do

I haven't been watching Channel 4's coverage of the world athletics championship but nonetheless the news of the tribulations of lead presenter Ortis Deeley reached me via various waspish comments in the newspapers. You can get an idea of how at sea he was in this item in the Guardian. Now he's been demoted mid-games.

I tend to believe that in 99% of situations where the presenter has egg on his face it's not his fault. He's just the poor bloke out front trying to put a brave face on it while unseen others grapple with the logistics. Having said that it wouldn't have been asking too much of him to expect him to learn the names of the commentators he was handing over to so that he didn't get them wrong twice.

But the person who should be in the dock here is not Deeley, who is probably only guilty of a little too much ambition and not quite enough homework. The guilty party is whichever, presumably highly-paid, person at Channel 4 decided: a) that anchoring a major live sports presentation like this could be done by a novice rather than the most battle-hardened professional on your books; b) that the novice should be this graduate of Saturday morning television.

Only in television is the person who fronts the business likely to have been chosen by somebody who has never personally fronted the business, doesn't know what's involved in fronting the business and intends to keep their head firmly below the parapet when their choice of person to front the business is proved to have been so wrong.

P.S. I was talking to a senior person in a large company recently and congratulating her on the quality of her young intern, who seemed to be the last word in bright-eyed and bushy-tailed efficiency. She rolled her eyes and said "She doesn't read a book. No hinterland."

John Rawling is a pretty well-known commentator and I'd like to feel that anyone who ended up anchoring a sports show might have heard of him. If, that is, they had a hinterland.

A great music book about the days when the road was the road

This weekend I finished The Chitlin' Circuit: and the Road to Rock 'n' Roll by Preston Lauterbach, which is one of the best music books I've read in years. Chitlins are pig intestines which, when fried, were a popular delicacy among African Americans. Hence the Chitlin' Circuit was the name given to the network of dancehalls, night clubs and music joints flourishing below the Mason Dixon Line in the days before television and mass entertainment.

Lauterbach's book is essentially the story of Denver Ferguson and Don Robey, the promoters who realised that every community down south had a "dark town" and every dark town had a "stroll", a parade of black-owned barbers, beer joints, undertakers and money lenders. Where there was a stroll there was invariably a market for rambunctious musical entertainment.

Thus they despatched hundreds of entertainers on tours of one-nighters throughout the south in the 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s. Advance men went out in front, making sure that the musicians' record was on the jukebox. Recorded music was about immortality and profile, not about money. This was a live business and it ran as perfectly in sync with human self-interest as eBay does today.

If the performers were lucky there were black hotels that might accommodate them. More likely they'd be staying in boarding houses or sleeping on buses, doing their best to keep their stage clothes clean, trying to make sure they got paid at the end of the night and avoiding the attentions of razor-toting members of the audience who suspected the saxophone player of looking at their girl.

In the 30s it was all about the big bands. Walter Barnes and his Royal Creolians were one of the biggest attractions of that era. They were killed along with 290 dancers in a 1940 fire in a dancehall at Natchez, Mississippi. Many of these venues were known as "toilets", not because of the sanitary conditions, but because there was just one way in and one way out.

It's full of examples of ingenuity in pursuit of green: from the "policy" rackets that drove the neighbourhood economies to the promoters who put on "sissie nights" to cater for the transvestite market; from James Brown's first group whistling the instrumental passages because they couldn't afford gear to the early 78s which were literally baked like biscuits. Nobody in this book talks of creativity. They talk about making a living.

By the 40s a wartime shortage of buses meant the bands got smaller after the style of Louis Jordan's Tympany Five. It became more about rocking than swinging. When Elvis Presley finally came along, chitlin circuit heroes like Roy Brown and Wynonie Harris wondered what the fuss was about. They'd been making that exact same sound for five years.

I suspect some canny publisher suggested the author put that bit about rock'n'roll in the title. There's a tendency to undervalue any version of popular music that doesn't culminate in a big white millionaire. It's a shame we have to see it like that. Even if this journey had led nowhere in particular it would still have been a hell of a ride.

Another tiny detail from Nick Lowe's new record

The Nick Lowe album is gentle, which is not the same as being quiet. There are plenty of quiet records at the moment which are actually quite tense to listen to. Most of "The Old Magic" is performed with a band but it's put over so gently that you pick up nuances lost in 99% of pop records.

There's a lovely bit at the end of House For Sale. This is sung from the point of view of a bloke trying to get rid of the house where love "once did reside". Like all vendors he wishes to reassure potential purchasers that while its material condition may be shabby there's nothing that can't be improved.

In fact, he sings, "with time, care, cash, peace, love and understanding it can be as good as new". The unusual word in that list is "cash", which he seems to acknowledge in the half-beat's pause before singing it. When the word "cash" turns up in pop music it tends to be used aggressively. It's rhymed with flash and trash. To hear it suffused with the same comforting glow it creates in the householder who's got some is a delight. Particularly in times like these.

Forget Ab Fab. This is what the 60s really looked like

This picture of the HMV Shop in Oxford Street has been doing the rounds again today. Judging by the LP covers displayed at the back it appears to have been taken at Christmas 1965. The Beatles Rubber Soul has just come out and the shop is more than usually full.

The interesting thing is this is at the midway point of the Swinging 60s. This has been the year of the Rolling Stones' Satisfaction, Bob Dylan's Like A Rolling Stone and James Brown's Papa's Got A Brand New Bag. If you were to ask a film director to re-stage this scene he'd look at the date and suddenly it would be all paisley shirts, bell bottoms and op-art frocks which as you can see here was not the case.

This picture is a rare opportunity to examine the reality of the 60s rather than the version of it that's been propagated by Austin Powers films. The men have all got neatly-trimmed short hair and are wearing shirts and ties. There's a woman in a head scarf. The assistant behind the counter is in a nylon overall. The till has just run up 32 shillings, which was probably the price of one of those copies of the Beach Boys' Little Deuce Coupe stacked at the top above the listening booths.

There's nothing as improving as a dead end job

After we'd finished recording a podcast with David Ford the other day Fraser said "that's three of us who've been road sweepers". I did two years as a road sweeper in north London during college vacations in the seventies before graduating to the dustbins. Sweeping was boring but it was educational, like doing the Knowledge. Working on the bins was hard, lucrative and, believe it or not, fun. That's another blog entirely.

I was reminded of this experience when reading Alice Thomson's column in The Times today where she says "the professional middle classes used to mix widely in pubs, factories and communities. Now they are ghettoised" and goes on to argue that they don't need more holiday jobs helping out in law offices. There seems to be some truth in that. My own kids have done holiday jobs but they haven't done anything like the bins or the Christmas post, which were staples for grammar school boys like me back in the day.

The decline of manufacturing, the march of automation and the need for every job to require some training means that it's no longer possible for a dozy 18-year-old to find useful employment the way that we did. Everybody of my age has a vivid memory of what it was like to work in a factory or to perform some mundane, repetitive task, often in the company of people who didn't make any allowance for the fact that you were young and foolish. It was more educational than the education it was designed to subsidise.

Jerry Leiber - songwriting's great pretender

Jerry Leiber's death was announced today. A Jewish kid from Baltimore whose first language was Yiddish, he wrote the words for more classic rhythm and blues tunes than anyone else. He's best known for Hound Dog and Jailhouse Rock, which is a pity because neither of them is a particularly interesting song. Far better are the gems he and Mike Stoller wrote and produced for The Coasters: three-minute dramas like Searchin', Smokey Joe's Cafe and Young Blood, each one a dazzling mixture of Saturday morning funnies, black street slang and social comment wrapped around infallible hooks and brilliant playing.

Leiber's ear for the nuances of African-American language was uncanny, as was his nerve in putting himself into situations that he may not have experienced at first hand. In Down Home Girl the protagonist, a sharp car worker from Detroit, going out with a girl from the backwoods of the Carolinas, sings "every time I kiss you, girl, you taste like pork and beans".

The Sistine Chapel of this purple patch was Shopping For Clothes, which they wrote under the name "Elmo Glick", exactly what a black Jewish songwriter would be called. Here a would-be dandy goes into a department store, picks out the clothes that will make him the envy of the guys at the ballroom on Saturday night and then finds that his credit is refused. As somebody pointed out to me today on Twitter, the fade-out "I got a good job sweeping up every day" says more about civil rights than any amount of Blowing In The Wind.

When I was growing up those Coasters songs were merely musical comedy in the background. It was only in my twenties, via such magazines as Cream and Let It Rock, and the writings of Charlie Gillett and Richard Williams, that I came to appreciate the genius of the Coasters and Leiber and Stoller and realised that fifties r&b was not just insanely catchy and clever. It was also grown up, subtle and serious in ways we are only just now beginning to appreciate. In fact it's a lot cleverer than the records that think they're clever.

Is this what they mean by playing in the big leagues?

When our son used to play rugby as a teenager there was always a nervous moment when the opposition came running out. You'd look at them and be immediately struck by how much bigger they appeared than our boys. Surely they had to be from another age group. Of course they weren't. This was simply an illusion fostered by the fact that you didn't notice how fast your own were growing.

I was struck by something similar last night watching Tottenham swat Hearts aside by five goals to nil. Obviously there was a gulf in class which is an inevitable result of the gulf in money and prestige. But what was surprising is that there was such a gulf in physique. Even Tottenham's smaller players appeared barrel chested. Next to them Hearts looked like a bunch of under-nourished schoolboys.

He might have been a spy but he didn't patronise

Best moment from an excellent episode of the always interesting The Reunion on Radio Four was an anecdote about the spy and art historian Anthony Blunt. Called upon to explain Van Dyck's portrait of Charles I to a group of nine-year-olds in the National Gallery he surveyed the children sitting on the floor and began thus:

"If I could just remind you of the historical background to this picture....."

Is anybody writing better love songs than Nick Lowe?

The upcoming Nick Lowe album The Old Magic" starts with a song called "Stoplight Roses". I'd never heard that particular expression before but I immediately knew what he was singing about. Many years ago a good friend who was out there in the dating game said to me, "Better no flowers than garage flowers". She said it feelingly. I have since passed on this advice to young men of my acquaintance.

The last few Nick Lowe albums are like a series of slim novels which explore the perfidious inclinations of men. I think they're some of the best pop records ever made. They're certainly some of the most affecting explorations of regret since Frank Sinatra's "lonely" albums of the 1950s. The men in Nick Lowe's songs reach for romantic gestures when cornered but generally underestimate how rigorously those gestures might be interpreted.

The key line in "Stoplight Roses" is especially chilling. "You've broken something this time," he sings, "stoplight roses can't mend".

My unique take on the London riots

The London riots may not have been the biggest outbreak of disobedience and larceny in the capital's history - as a quick flick through Peter Akroyd's London: The Biography demonstrates - but they are already the most commented on.

As someone who from time to time "gives out" about issues of the day who has been unavoidably detained in a hammock in Brittany while it's all been going on, I feel I should make it clear that, other than sending my sympathies to anyone who's been directly affected, I have nothing to say.

I have no prescriptions to offer, no advice to give the government or the police and no bright ideas for instantly improving people's behaviour. I realise this may come as a disappointment to some of my regular readers but there it is.

I've had it with the "pudding first" school of TV documentary

Started The First World War From Above on the iPlayer. After five minutes I turned it off. It seemed to have all the things that drive me mad about today's factual programmes:

* A script machine assembled from a Scrabble set of clichés: "bird's eye view", "like a lunar landscape", "today's state of the art technology", "those brave pilots", "from the intimate to the truly epic" and so on;
* More shots of the noble presenter, Fergal Keane, looking at the things which are supposed to be interesting than of the things themselves;
* Swelling music to reassure us that the programme will be emotional as well as informative;
* The insistence that the programme will "uncover one of World War One's secrets"' - a "secret" being anything that's not been in this time-slot before
* A three-minute opening section desperate to shoehorn in a taster of everything that's coming up in the next hour, up to and including "the extraordinary encounter at the end of my journey when I meet the daughter of the airship pilot of ninety years ago" and the obligatory shot of somebody crying when they see some film of their father.

There's nothing wrong with making factual programmes entertaining but techniques like these seem to be rooted in a growing belief that we won't eat our greens unless we're first assured that there will be pudding. After a while we lose our appetite.

Every joke has its day

Back in 1978 we were on holiday in Los Angeles. We stayed at the Sunset Marquis. This was the rock and roll hotel at the time. Bruce Springsteen had recently checked out. Santana were there, as were Hall & Oates.

It was summer and there was a small hot tub in the grounds which had room for about half a dozen people. We were lounging in there one day when we were joined by a hippyish chap and an elderly French gentleman. Listening to their conversation it dawned on me that the latter was Stéphane Grappelli, the violinist who played with Django Reinhardt in the Quintette du Hot Club de France. The former was the American mandolinist David Grisman. This is impressive but not as impressive as a member of the Hot Club.

This week I happened to relate this story to Mark Ellen. He cracked the joke that has been waiting to be cracked for almost 35 years.

"Ah yes," he said. "The Hot Tub de France."

Twitter leaves the media standing

Yesterday morning Broadcasting House on Radio 4 carried an item about the death of Amy Winehouse. The reporter went to Camden Square and mused into his microphone about why people were standing around. He then recorded interviews with them. It seems likely that even more people will subsequently come to stand around because at last something was happening. People were getting interviewed about why they were standing around.

The media may well have to get used to just standing around looking at people standing around because this weekend's events have seen them not so much breaking stories as puffing along in their wake. The first hint of the events in Oslo appeared in my Twitter timeline in the middle of Friday afternoon. I searched on "Oslo" and immediately my screen looked like the Dow Jones index at the height of a crash, with tens of thousands of tweets in different languages scrolling past at an unreadable speed. I switched on Five Live, which is the BBC's news and sport station, to hear Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode reviewing films. I found myself on an RTE site where they were just running the feed from Norwegian TV.

Similarly the following afternoon I was watching rugby on TV with the iPad on my lap when a tweet appeared from a source who you'd expect to be well informed, asking "Is this Winehouse story true?". I immediately searched on "Winehouse" and discovered what the story was. This can't have been more than half an hour after the ambulance had arrived at her home. An hour later it was confirmed.

Obviously mainstream broadcasters and newspapers can't publish on the basis of unsubstantiated tweets but the pressure to do so is going to become harder and harder to resist. And this at a time when there is talk of them being brought into line. It'll be funny if the press are restrained from intruding into private lives while at the same time a medium ideally suited to the spreading of unsubstantiated gossip become's the nation's favourite toy.

Do people think like they tweet or tweet like they think?

Years ago Andrew Harrison told me the proper etiquette for communicating with people on eBay. When you give feedback, he advised, you've got to exaggerate. A thank-you isn't enough, he said. It has to be accompanied by the word "brilliant" and a thicket of exclamation marks. He was right.

That was years before Twitter. When you've only got 140 characters to work with adjectives tend to take the place of thoughts. This produces a language in which the world is divided into people who are either "lovely" or "bad" and every experience is either "amazing" or "crap". There's no way of dealing with the average or of discriminating between monstrous events and everyday disappointments.

I wondered yesterday whether this was a case of language changing the way people thought or language changing to reflect the way they already thought. I was still wondering when the first news came in of the events in Oslo. Radio was running its usual programming and so I searched "Oslo" on Twitter. I'd never done that before in the moments after such a terrible event. Suddenly my screen was alive with thousands of messages in many different languages. Some were close to the event - there was a Word reader who lived ten minutes away - others were trying to find out about loved ones; most were, like me, just turning up to gawk, like people slowing down when passing the scene of an accident.

Some people seemed to be trying to set down their feelings before they'd decided what their feelings were. Did the person who wrote "Oslo bombed. Shitty day" really feel that the events of Friday were a bit like standing in a puddle or missing a few buses? Did the person tapping "this is so surreal" know what surreal meant and did they really find the idea of a bomb in a major European city in 2011 "hard to believe"? Maybe they did.

I'm sure all these messages were motivated by nothing but simple compassion. I suppose a lot of the people doing the messaging were very young. Surely that's the case with the one who wrote "peeps in Norway. Hope you're OK." I only hope they don't forget about it as quickly as they tweeted about it.

There's nothing as funny as an old Grazia cover line

One of the curses of the internet is that old issues of gossip magazines stick around to haunt their editors. These are just a few Grazia cover stories I found last night.

"Victoria - leading separate life from David" (December 2007)

Think they've just had a baby.

"Brangelina - it's over - Brad banned from bedroom" (March 2009)

Seem to be going strong three years later.

"Jennifer to adopt a baby boy called Alex!" (April 2008)

Didn't.

"Jen and Brad - back together?" (May 2009)

No.

"Katie flips! Is new marriage test the final straw?" (May 2009)

Doesn't appear so.

"Ange - Life without Brad" (June 2009)

Except she was still with Brad.

"Gwyneth marriage under attack" (November 2009)

Seemed to withstand whatever "attack" that was.

"Lady Gaga - battling serious illness?" (June 2010)

Seems to be bearing up.

"Has Kate secretly got married?" (October 2010)

No, she waited a year and then got very publicly married.

The secret of pitching is making them say no

So you want to get on in the media, do you, kids? Well here's my advice to you, refreshed by a recent experience.

When pitching projects to large, bureaucratic organisations, try to get them to say no. Get them to say that is an idea their organisation has no interest in now or in the foreseeable future. Get them to make you promise never to speak of it again.

You probably think it's hard to get them to say yes. That's certainly the case but it's not half as difficult as it is to get them to say no. Very few executives have the nerve to say no without first seeking the backing of their fellow execs. They're terrified they will say no to something that will prove to be a success elsewhere. Thus what they do is endlessly procrastinate in the hope that you'll lose interest or they'll get moved to some other post.

Next time you pitch something tell them they have a week to make up their mind and then you take it somewhere else. You may not get a successful outcome but at least you'll waste less time.

Keep going like this and you won't have newspapers to kick around anymore

When we were entering the 6th form they did everything they could to encourage us to read a newspaper. We were of course nudged to "take" The Guardian or The Times or the Telegraph. I think they probably knew that our parents were happy with the Yorkshire Post, which had a world view that didn't stretch much to Lancashire, let alone overseas. That was in the 60s. I started buying a paper then and carried on through the 70s, 80s and 90s to today.

I don't recall much discussion about which paper anyone read. When pressed people would repeat variants on the line that was put in the mouth of Jim Hacker in "Yes Minister", but more in amusement than in the present mood of indignation:

"I know exactly who reads the papers: the Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country; The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country; The Times is read by people who actually do run the country; the Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country; the Financial Times is read by people who own the country; The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country; and The Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is."

I've never known a time when people argued so bitterly about the values of different newspapers. The weird thing is that most of the people doing the arguing don't buy newspapers any more. They consult them, certainly, they scan their headlines, tweet about them and they happily link to them but they don't actually read them - not like a buyer would read them. Many of them say they won't even pay to read the news on iPad or on a Kindle version such as The Guardian has launched today. Ultimately the coming generation's unwillingness to pay is going to decide the future of newspapers more certainly than any scandals or PCC deliberations.

In the days when people bought papers they would direct at least a fiver a week towards their title of choice. You've got to sell a lot of click-through advertising and sponsorship to make up that shortfall. That's what Murdoch's corporate investors (your pension funds if you have one) have been telling him for years. This current mess only increases their determination to get out of papers altogether. Nobody's buying them, they say, and the advertisers have lots of other places to go. It's difficult to argue with that line. When the investors take flight from newspapers it will ultimately threaten the papers Twitter Nation approves of and doesn't buy just as surely as the ones it hates and doesn't buy.

Never seen this in a magazine before

At the Printout! event I spoke at on Wednesday, Les Jones gave me a copy of his magazine, Elsie.

Inside the centre spread I found this.

When I opened it, this was inside.

Kewl, as I believe the youngsters say.

No more holidays for Matt Wells

Interesting that in the midst of the biggest media story of the last few years the Guardian's excellent Media Talk podcast seems to have been caught on the hop. Its estimable anchor Matt Wells tweeted yesterday from his holiday in Turkey that since the producer was also away Media Talk would be unlikely to appear this week. Since then somebody has drafted in a relief anchor and they promise to publish a Media Talk podcast about the News of The World later today, though not before the BBC's equally excellent Media Show with its no less estimable Steve Hewlett had rejigged their schedules to get there first.

This may be the last time this happens. Obviously the actual newspapers keep coming out even when people go on holiday but the "digital stuff" can sometimes go by the board for a week or two, even in the best organised places. The odd user may miss a podcast but since they're not paying for them then nobody feels too bad about them going without for a while. It's only when something like this happens that a media organisation realises that the one thing people value more than anything else is not pictures, learned think pieces or even more reporting. What they want is just people who know what they're talking about talking about it. And maybe the only way of making sure podcasts are always available is to pay for them.

How to tell if you're old enough for The New Yorker

Last night I was one of the speakers at Printout!, an event put together by Magculture and Stack. It was held, not in a conference centre, but in a cellar bar near Old Street. The people there saw themselves as "making" magazines rather than publishing them. Raygun occupied the same place in their world as NME once occupied in mine.

We were asked to choose one favourite magazine and, in five minutes, explain why. I chose The New Yorker. There's always a conscious and a sub-conscious reason for liking a magazine. My conscious reason for liking the New Yorker is for its range of compelling stories. My sub-conscious reason is to do with getting older.

For most of your life the world is a frustrating place because it appears to be run by people older than you are. Then one morning you wake up and find that it's a frustrating place because it's run by people younger than you are. When you reach this stage The New Yorker suddenly has a really strong pull on you. Suddenly it functions as a counter-balance to what seems like the increasing hysteria of everyday life.

It's not working, Ringo

Ringo Starr wants us all to come together tomorrow on his 71st birthday and think about peace and love.

Why, Ringo? What's peace got to do with love? And what are the credentials of an ex-Beatle when it comes to recommending one or both to us? As we were discussing with Peter Doggett on this week's Word podcast, the Beatles fought for years, sometimes physically. There is no more graphic example of the difficulty of rising above one's baser human emotions and coming to a peaceable settlement than the story of the Beatles.

Since 1967 a huge swathe of the less reflective members of the rock'n'pop brethren (and sistren) have automatically prescribed peace and love as the cure for mankind's ills. If we were to perform a basic analysis of how much humanity has taken their advice we would be forced to concede that for some reason Ringo et al are not getting their message across. War and conflict have been the twin constants of man's time on earth. That's been just as much the case since Sgt Pepper as it was before.

Happy birthday, nonetheless.

Why nobody can answer the "what kind of music do you like?" question

At a drinks do the other day a woman asked me the question I dread the most.
"What kind of music do you like?"
I know she was only trying to make small talk. I really shouldn't shrivel up the way I do. I wouldn't have a problem if she'd said "read any good books lately?" or "have you been on holiday yet?" because those questions demand direct, specific answers.
Two kinds of people ask me the "what kind of music?" question. There are those who don't know I've got the better part of 20,000 records at home and therefore my relationship with music could be said to be complicated.
Then there are the people who know I've got a lot of records and expect me to be somehow expert in predicting what they might like.
In truth there is nothing you can say in response to the question that doesn't make you sound like either a dunderhead or a raging pseud.
I've heard all these and more. I've probably said some of them.
"Anything with a good tune" is the only honest answer but it's been unusable since 1965.
"You probably wouldn't have heard of them" makes you sound 17-years-old, which is the emotional age of most men when it comes to discussing music.
"Coldplay and Beyonce" makes you sound like a sheep.
"The Arctic Monkeys" makes you sound like Gordon Brown.
"Anything but country and western" marks you out as both snob and moron.
"I don't like music" is just plain rude.
"Oh, bit of trance, bit of rare groove etc" makes you sound like a cloth-eared category shopper.
"Oh, I always think Louis Armstrong had a point when he said there were just two kinds of music: good and bad" makes you sound pompous enough to punch.
To avoid any of these and other catastrophes I tend to look down and mumble "all sorts of things", at which point my interlocutor will invariably say "oh, like me!"
That's the interesting thing about taste. Everyone thinks theirs is broad. Mostly it's not. When you've worked around music and music fiends as long as I have you learn that only a tiny handful of people are familiar with a wide range of music and catholic taste when it comes to appreciating it. And they tend to keep quiet about it because they know how much they don't know.
Anyway, my wife appeared and rescued me mid-mumble with a change of subject. I've thought about it a lot since. I think in future if people ask me what kind of music I like I shall respond brightly with "The Beatles!"
At least it's honest.

Is this Johann Hari business the death rattle of the old way?

I wonder if this current to-do about Johann Hari using quotes from previously published sources in interviews is one of the dying twitches of traditional journalism. If I've understood it correctly he inserts quotes from elsewhere if they seem to make the point better than the interviewee did when his own recording machine was turned on.

I'm sure the interviewee doesn't mind this because it makes him sound more eloquent. The reader probably doesn't mind either because for them clarity is all. But I think most journalists would consider this sharp practice, particularly if the quotes are not flagged up with something like "as he said in an earlier interview". He may well have said it but the fact is he didn't say it to you.

Interviewing is like fishing. Sometimes you get a bite. Most of the time you don't. In fact increasingly you're going to a lake that has been intensively fished for some time before you got there. Interviewees don't have an endless supply of original things to say. Mostly what you get is what they've been saying to the person who interviewed them half an hour ago. You may get a slight variation but the essence remains the same. All that makes your encounter distinct is your ability to write a more nuanced account.

The current pretence that each encounter is in some way exclusive is dear to the hearts of editors and journalists, who think of themselves as competing in the traditional fashion. The new way, in which all information and opinion merges into one giant Wiki, is the way of the future. And where do big-name columnists and the newspapers who pay them stand in that world?

People in glass houses have difficulty re-engineering their businesses

Whiskery old joke. Country bumpkin sitting on five-barred gate is asked for directions by holidaymaking couple trying to find their hotel. "Well, I wouldn't start from here," he says, which is absurd and profound at the same time.

I've been thinking of this in a week which has been dominated by stories of major media and entertainment groups spelling out their strategies. EMI is for sale once again, the Guardian and Observer are contemplating a predominantly digital future within five years, the BBC wonder whether they should close a channel or change the daytime output of BBC-2.

All of these are strategies for survival, not expansion. They're the right thoughts to be thinking. But here's the thing. All the thinking about these momentous issues is being done inside massive new architect-designed corporate HQs which have been built in the last ten or so years. The media boom of the 90s provided them with the cash to build their own temples and imbued them with the belief that the expansion would go on forever. But they never dreamed that they would be thinking such frightened thoughts inside them. Ever since these companies - and many other media and publishing firms - moved into their airy new offices they've been shedding the staff they were intended to house and looking nothing like the masters of the universe the temples were intended to exalt.

Like the man on the gate said, you wouldn't start from here.

It's the smoking ban that did for Galliano

If this does prove to be the end of John Galliano's career then he may well go down as the first victim of the disruption that the smoking ban has caused in the lives of celebrities. The facts appear to be: Galliano, while pissed, went to the outside smoking area of fashionable Paris bar La Perle and was more than unpleasant to a few other drinkers, some of whom filmed his behaviour on a mobile.

You can't do much about the behaviour but you can keep it in the family. Had it not been for the smoking ban he would have remained in the bar with his fashionable friends and not been exposed to the chance of meeting people who didn't think he was fabulous and, what's worse, might engage him in conversation. These days if you want to find a celebrity don't go looking inside places. Try instead the goods entrance of one of London's luxury hotels or the fire escape outside its most expensive restaurants. They'll be there - probably sans minder - running the risk of rubbing shoulders with chummy from the accounts department and just possibly some patient soul with a video camera from The Sun.

Why you should use your full name and nothing but your full name

Laura Kuenssberg is leaving the BBC to become the Business Editor of ITV, leading to speculation that her Twitter handle @BBCLauraK (with its 58,832 followers) may have to be changed to @ITVLauraK. I even wonder whether some enterprising soul at the independent broadcaster might have already asked the BBC how much they want for that list or whether some coding genius is working on a way that old Twitter names could be subsumed into new ones.

In the course of a long and no doubt distinguished career somebody like Kuenssberg can expect to work for many different organisations (as well quite a few that remain the same and yet change their names) so it doesn't make any sense for her to sell or lease her identity to them. It's enough to sell or lease her services.

On a less exalted level I've always told my kids that when they start work they should use their full name in every interaction. There's no use developing strong recognition as "Jane from Acme Magazines" because it's obvious that one day you won't be that any more and you'll have to start all over again, identifying yourself with some other organisation. Build your own brand. It'll last longer than theirs.

People used to go to rock festivals to escape the things they now find at rock festivals

I’ve never been a big festival goer. I watch with interest as the people I know who are big ones for Glastonbury stiffen as the big weekend approaches. In the world I inhabit, where some kind of privileged access is what people are used to, the jockeying for position started months ago. Have you got the right kind of ticket with the right kind of pass and the right access to the right car park or camp site? Have you got the right equipment? Bin bags? Wellies? Wet wipes? Plastic bottle full of ready mixed gin and tonic? Insurance? Insect spray? Anxiety pills?

I seem to remember that in the late sixties and early seventies people set off to festivals with a tenner in their pocket and a carefree skip in their stride. Nowadays they seem to take with them all the comforts and anxieties of home. A friend of a friend’s daughter turned up at Glastonbury a few years ago with a pull-along suitcase and some hair straighteners. I thought this was funny until I saw, at last year’s Latitude, a special tent where one could go and, for a fee, plug in your hair and beauty aids.

What’s even more surprising is that while the original festival goers set off to the country intent on shrugging off the hierarchies and strictures of everyday society and getting back to the garden, nowadays people go to the country in order to obey the festival organiser's rules, codes which are far more draconian and much less amenable to reason than any they would expect to deal with in their daily life. If ever you think the law of the land is unreasonable, think again. Try arguing with a festival steward over whether you’ve got the right wrist band. That’s when you learn about unreasonable authority and how a dog's obeyed in office. But nobody seems to mind. They accept it as the price of taking part. It particularly amuses me how my daughter and friends keep the wristbands on for months afterwards – as if they’d like to prolong their weekend serfdom.

The long memories of would-be rock stars

At a 60th birthday party in a suburban garden yesterday somebody uttered the words that always send a chill down the spine of this old hack.

"I was in a band once and you reviewed us."

If ever you're tempted to worry that nobody is actually paying any attention to what you write, then all you need do is make the glancing acquaintance of any musician you have ever described in less than glowing terms, no matter how long ago. They'll quote you verbatim, even, as in this case, if thirty-two years have elapsed since you loosed-off your one-liner in a singles review at the end of a no doubt trying day and thought no more of it.

Mark Hodkinson has done an excellent piece in the new issue of The Word where he finds a bunch of uncelebrated indie 45s in a record shop and goes in search of the people who made them a quarter of a century before. What he finds in almost every case is that this record was the most important episode in those people's lives.

The former musician I met at the party had a refreshingly clear-eyed view of his own distant brush with rock stardom. "As soon as we'd been on Top of The Pops, I realised it was all rubbish," he said. Most musicians you meet are not quite so reconciled. They all sport one item of clothing or jewellery which hints that, no matter how straight and settled they may appear today, there was once a time when they were on the highway to hell. They can all explain in very simple terms what deal, what TV strike, what distribution cock-up prevented them from being as successful as the handful of successful acts.

And, what's more, they're usually just about to put out a record or put together a tour. Which they hope you'll review.

Clarence Clemons and the greatest pose in rock history

The death of Clarence Clemons means that nothing can ever be quite the same any more in the world of the E Street Band. He wasn't the most original saxophonist but his playing was integral to their sound. He wasn't the most animated live performer but Springsteen gave him the starring role in the band's inner drama.

I still can't get over the fact that when it came time to shoot some pictures for Springsteen's third album "Born To Run", he just turned up at the studio of Eric Meola with Clarence. Not on his own, not with the whole band, just with Clarence. He knew what would make not just a great shot but a defining shot. Whenever you saw him live after that there would always be a moment or two when they would snap into that pose. It could be that photo session was the most important day's work he did with the band.

It's a common misconception about big rock stars that they leave all the image mongering to somebody else, that they're only interested in the music and that they're above manipulating the people around them. Not so.

The sad story of Darren Burn

I'd never heard of Darren Burn until Pete Paphides dropped in to the Word podcast to talk about his collection of old music papers. Thanks to Gavin Hogg I got hold of a DVD of the Man Alive documentary that was made about Darren in 1973. At the time he was an 11-year-old schoolboy living just up the road from where I live now and attending City of London.

His father was Colin Burn, a promotion man working for EMI. When EMI decided they needed to be competing in the Donny Osmond market Darren's mother Joanna put him forward. He could sing, he looked cute and he was a bright lad. His first single was a cover of Gene Pitney's "Something's Gotten Hold Of My Heart". He was given the big label treatment, much of which was captured in John Pitman's film "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" for Man Alive.

The record wasn't a hit and Darren had to go back to school where his classmates called him "top of the flops". The Man Alive film, which is very disapproving of everyone at the record company for exploiting the child, really can't have helped. In the eighties the BBC caught up with him for a "Where Are They Now?" slot. He was unemployed and living on his own in south London. All the youthful twinkle had been replaced by a cold bitterness. He blamed his mother for using him to further her own show business ambitions. A couple of years later he was dead following an overdose of anti-depressants.

Please come along to True Stories on July 5th

True Stories Told Live started life when I was talking to Malcolm Gladwell about where he got his experience of talking in public. He told me about The Moth in New York City. "It's a load of people in a dark room drinking too much and listening to people tell stories," he said. Clearly London could do that just as well.

I talked to Kerry Shale and Kate Bland about it. Kerry's an actor, Kate's a radio producer and they're both based in Islington, which made it easy for us to meet up. I spent ages looking round at potential venues. Initially I had the idea that there must be some kind of old gentlemen's club we could use. Nothing worked. Either there were too many restrictions on use or the venues were too big, too small or too difficult to get to. I was on the points of giving up when I got an email from John Rensten who had just finished turning the Compass on the corner of Chapel Market into a pub/restaurant. I went and looked and found to my delight it had a small but pleasant room upstairs with a very basic sound system in it.

We did the first one in September 2009. I told the first story and the other "turns" were all mates that we'd cajoled into telling theirs. The audience was made up of mates of the storytellers. Since then we've done one every month, it's sprouted other True Stories events in Brighton, Cambridge, Hebden Bridge, Stroud and Cardiff and we're regularly turning away scores of people. We run it on a guest list basis. People sign up to our mailing list, we invite people to apply to come and we put together a list, mainly made up of people who've never been before. We don't want to have the same people month after month. It's not about stars, although some of the turns are well known. Imelda Staunton came to watch and said to me afterwards "this is the best night out ever." You can get a further idea here.

Apart from the warm feeling of starting something that works, why do we do it? Not for money, that's for sure. We don't charge anything for admission at The Compass and we give our time (the three of us plus Meg Rosoff) for free, as do the turns. We'd like to think that there might be a radio format in it at some stage but that's out of our hands. Because we want to get the funds we would need to improve our very basic website and also look at taking what we've learned about live storytelling into other areas like schools, we're having a fundraiser on July 5th at The Crypt in Clerkenwell. We've asked six of our favourite turns to come back and tell their stories that night. The tickets, which cost £22, include some very drinkable wine and some very cold beer.

If you've always wanted to see what TSTL is all about and been unable to get in, if you've been and feel this is something that deserves more support or if you just fancy a genuinely unique night out, which starts at 7.30 and finishes no later than 9.30, please come along. You can buy tickets on line here. Thank you.

Is Newsbeat suffering from Crowded Cabin Syndrome?

John Myers' independent report on Radios One and Two came up with one eye-catching fact. Newsbeat, Radio One's news service, employs 52 full-time staff. I've no idea how busy they all are but that figure caught my eye because it seems to demonstrate how all institutions grow first and then post-justify the increased head count.

According to my old colleague Trevor Dann, who used to be part of the management, in the 80s Newsbeat had just 15 staff. That means its staff has grown by a few hundred per cent in a period when the number of listeners has gone down by, well, quite a lot. Newspapers have responded to the same decline by shedding staff. Newsbeat seems to have gone the other way.

I'm sure you could point to lots of things that keep them all busy: the digital station that they also have to do work for, the website and the increased sophistication with which all forms of news are put together. But still that wouldn't account for a staff of 52 in what it increasingly a small-portions world. I can only assume that it's succumbed to Crowded Cabin Syndrome.

This is inspired by the scene in the Marx Brothers "A Night At The Opera" where more and more people come into the room and nobody leaves. Crowded Cabin Syndrome particularly affects the media because media folk have one key objective - staying in the media. Thus when junior employees get bored with doing mundane tasks they take on even more junior employees to perform them. Senior staff, unless they're exceptional, have nowhere else to go so they stick around longer and longer.

In the private sector this growth is reversed every few years by bankruptcy or corporate takeover. In the public it just keeps on growing until somebody commissions somebody else to write a report to tell them what they shouldn't need to be told.

My J.R. Hartley moment

I can remember most of the plays I was in at college but "Lunchtime Concert" by Olwen Wymark has slipped my mind. It was directed by Tim Evans who lives Out East nowadays and occasionally chides me on Facebook about forgetting it. The other day I was walking past French's Theatre Bookshop so I popped in and asked the young woman behind the counter, probably a drama student, if she could look it up. She looked and said it was out of print. "It was published in 1969," she said with the air of one for whom this may as well have been just after the Relief of Mafeking.

"I know," I said. "It was around that time I was in it."

She looked at me and tilted her head to one side, as one would with a very old person. "Aah," she said. "Have you tried Abe Books?"

I can imagine her meeting her boyfriend in the pub after work. At some point in the evening, when the conversation really flags, she might say "do you know, I had this old bloke in this morning and he was trying to find a script to a play he was in in 1969. Can you imagine that?"

You can take the girl out of Yorkshire and apparently take the Yorkshire out of the girl

The sculptor Barbara Hepworth came from Wakefield in Yorkshire and went to the Girls High School. At the age of 16 she went to Leeds College of Art and then on to the Royal College in London. She didn't return to Yorkshire and spent most of the rest of her life in St Ives. One thing that nobody seemed to mention when they opened the Hepworth Wakefield recently was what happened to her Yorkshire accent. Her father was a prominent civil servant and so it's likely that as a teenager she may have had a genteel Yorkshire accent but it must have been a Yorkshire accent nonetheless. It wouldn't be surprising if in the years living away the tone of her speaking voice had changed but that wouldn't account for her apparent transformation into the dowager we see and hear in this clip from 1968.

It's even more marked when you contrast with that other sculptor contemporary Henry Moore who went to school in nearby Castleford and was also at Leeds with Hepworth. His voice has obviously changed by about the same time but you can still hear the Yorkshire in it.

It's one thing to change your voice. In the case of Barbara Hepworth she seems to have adopted somebody else's entirely.

Graham Linehan was right

I've been away so I didn't hear the interview with Graham Linehan on the Today Programme which led to him accusing the BBC of promoting a style of debate where there are "no positions possible except diametrically opposed ones". I'm not sure it was wise to try to make that point in a live radio programme but I do sympathise with his point of view. I've been amazed at how often I get rung up to offer some anodyne views on some release or anniversary to find that the BBC have also lined up somebody whose job it is to oppose me. "On the other line, here's somebody who doesn't think Bob Dylan should have a 70th birthday" - that kind of thing.

I suppose it's inevitable that in radio and TV they confuse drama with debate. That's why I never watch programmes like Question Time. They're all about what Matthew Parris calls "boo words and hooray words". Boo words are spoken by boo people. Hooray words are spoken by hooray people. I'm particularly glad that I didn't watch last night's show in which Germaine Greer made some remarks about a link between girls' talent for flirtation and their relationship with their fathers. This seems like the kind of observation which would be almost commonplace if made round the average suburban dinner party table. It only becomes incendiary once it's voiced in the adversarial bear pit that TV favours. I don't get indignant or energised when I hear people being shouted down. I'm just embarrassed for all of us.

TV and radio don't care whether the debate creates any light. Just as long as it creates some heat.

How to write

Found this little gem in a New Yorker piece about the value of a college education. It comes from Professor X, the author of “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower”, which is about the difficulties of trying to get non-academic students to perform traditional academic tasks such as writing essays.

“I have come to think that the two most crucial ingredients in the mysterious mix that makes a good writer may be (1) having read enough throughout a lifetime to have internalized the rhythms of the written word, and (2) refining the ability to mimic those rhythms.”

Seems as good a working definition as I've ever heard.

A Low Expectation Holiday

We've just come back from five days on Harris in the outer Hebrides. I often fantasise about starting a travel firm called Low Expectation Holidays. It would offer things like: mooching tours round military cemeteries in Flanders during February, days spent wandering round sites loosely associated with the Beatles, drives through the featureless industrial wastes of New Jersey and short trips to the Hebrides. My target demographic would be glass half-full people, the kind of people who treat good weather as a pleasant bonus rather than a civil right. This is the way you have to approach the Hebrides. When the sun does shine up there, people say, "why can't it be like this all the time?" The obvious answer to that is that if it were sunny all the time it would be overrun with tourists from all over the world and would no longer offer the peace and solitude that makes it so precious.

Even six year olds have bad days at the office

I was walking up from the station the other night when ahead of me I spied a mother in her early thirties and a girl of about six. The mother, I deduce, had just got off the train from town and was picking up the girl from a child minder and hearing about the day at school as they walked home.

The girl had blonde hair in a pony tail and was wearing a cardigan over a school summer dress. She walked with that sweet solemnity of kids that age. Mother was burdened with her own stuff plus the child's. Standard stuff. As I got closer I could hear the conversation:

Mother: So why did the teacher get cross?

Child: (inaudible)

Mother: And did Robert get into trouble too?

Child: (even less audible)

Mother: And what about Kirsty? Was she told off as well?

Child: (not even a bat could have heard what she said but she was clearly saying something and breathing quite hard)

Mother: So why didn't you explain? She would have understood.

By this time I had drawn level and was overtaking. I looked across at this little girl's face and saw a look I've seen occasionally in the past on the faces of my own children when they were little. It indicates that something had snapped that day in the child's fragile ecosystem, somebody had spoken sharply to someone who wasn't used to being spoken sharply to, it was all a terrible misunderstanding and all of a sudden black uncertainty had darkened the normally sunny, carefree disposition of a small child

I found that looking at that girl's expression upset me far more now than it ever used to do at the time. I wanted to put my arm round her and give her a squeeze. Knowing how the smallest things loom large for young kids it wouldn't have done any good at all. It would have made me feel better. Are these the first pangs of a potential grandfather?

75% of footballers play away

Once the current fuss about super injunctions has died down and we realise we have built a world where the tabloid newspapers suddenly look like models of restraint next to Twitter Nation, we should think about this. Given the recent revelations about carnal actitivy on the far side of the red rope, does it not seem likely that a working majority of rich, famous and fit young men must at one time or another have been unfaithful to their partners, whether married or not?

It doesn't matter what figure you put on it - I think 75% would be realistic, 90% not impossible, 25% laughably naive - it seems childish to think that they're not. Footballers, actors, rock stars, deejays, TV personalities - they're all bundles of hormones and ego. They also don't have to go far to be surrounded by young women happy to help them discharge some of that fissile matter. Some of them do it all the time. Some of them stray occaionally. Hardly any are innocent.

I've met hundreds of rock stars and would swear on a stack of Bibles that at least 90% of them have been unfaithful. And if you don't believe me, go and ask anyone who's been married to them. They consider their promiscuity a fact of life. So why are we so outraged? What we think of their lifestyle weighs about as heavily as what we think about China's environmental policy and is about as likely to bring about a change. In fact it says a lot for our credulousness that we are shocked when details occasionally finds their way into the daylight.

Maybe we only pretend to be shocked because we like to pretend to be disgusted. It makes us feel superior. It's no use asking them to grow up. They don't have to. We're the ones who should grow up. The sooner we stop pretending to be shocked the sooner the problem may go away.

What the Queen could teach the Obamas

I note that Michelle Obama is due to visit the school across the road from the office again. When she first came, soon after they moved into the White House, hundreds of local people waited patiently at the top of Chapel Market to see her. If you know the area you'll realise that it's not the kind of place where people normally turn out for public figures. After three quarters of an hour a motorcade appeared made up of blacked-out vehicles, most of which were duplicates of the one behind. It drove straight into the school gates. The waiting crowd saw literally nothing.

Around about the same time I was walking through Green Park one summer evening when I arrived at the Mall to find that the police had stopped the traffic because the Queen was going from Buckingham Palace to Lancaster House. I waited, completely on my own, on the pavement as a couple of outriders drove ahead of a large limousine with the royal standard on top. It was one of those vehicles which has been designed so that the people outside it can see the people in it. The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh smiled at me – not at a crowd but at me – and waved. I smiled and waved back.

All heads of state are equally concerned about security. But all heads of state also have a duty to be seen. It seems the Queen understands this better than the Obamas.

The pathetically grateful interviewer

It's not surprising that a fashion writer from the Daily Telegraph is so star-stuck when meeting Kate Moss that she files a piece that reads like an over-excited text between teenage girls. One of its more coherent lines, as she describes a brief roundtable chat with a couple of overseas journalists, is "I am standing in front of Kate!"

There's always a tendency with these kind of encounters to describe the drama of the meeting rather than to relate anything that happens to be said. The PR is always "harassed", the subject is always "running late" and room is usually found for the line "and with that she was gone". We'd better get ready for a lot more of this kind of thing as celebrities find they can get by without the press and brands like Mango take their advertising budget and give it instead to somebody like Kate Moss.

However, if the BBC's Andrew Marr is to be given only eighteen minutes to interview the President of the United States, I'm not sure I wish to be made aware of it - not to the extent of reading a piece on the BBC website about just how nervous the interviewer was beforehand and how relieved he was that it turned out OK in the end. What is this? Jackie?

Talent borrows, genius steals - and sometimes it's a Big Job

This afternoon, while recording a Word podcast to mark Bob Dylan's 70th, we were talking about the lines that he borrowed from other songs and how the images that seemed to spring from his psychedelic imagination were often flown in from earlier traditions. An instance is the line about "the railroad men drink up your blood like wine" from "Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again" which he got from Bascom Lamar Lunsford's 1924 song "I Wish I Was A Mole In The Ground" which contained the lines "'Cause a railroad man they'll kill you when he can/And drink up your blood like wine."

When I was at school I learned T.S. Eliot's "Journey Of The Magi", which begins:

A cold coming we had of it,

Just the worst time of the year

For a journey, and such a journey:

The ways deep and the weather sharp,

The very dead of winter.

Reading Adam Nicholson's excellent book God's Secretaries about the men who made the King James Bible I learned that one of their leaders was Lancelot Andrewes who preached a sermon one Christmas Day in the early 17th century which began with these lines:

"A cold coming they had of it at this time of the year, just the worst time of the year to take a journey, and specially a long journey. The ways deep, the weather sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off, in solstitio brumali, the very dead of winter."

Eliot didn't try to pass this off as his own but nonetheless starting his poem with it, and such a large chunk of it, got him off the mark and provided the rhythm that makes the poem work. I wonder whether he blushed as he read it back. Probably not. Think I'll start doing the same.

There are three great books about The Beatles

Stumbled upon my copy of Michael Braun's "Love Me Do" yesterday. I'm not sure you can get it at the moment, which is a shame. This is a 1995 reissue of the original book which came out in 1965 and was written in 1963-4. Braun was an American journalist who went on the road with the Beatles when nobody beyond the showbiz columns was interested in them. In his introduction to the 1995 version he wrote that what interested him was they were "a new kind of people". John Lennon later said that Braun's was the best book about The Beatles because "he wrote how we were, which was bastards".

They don't come over as bastards, just four blokes from unremarkable backgrounds (flicking through it I come upon the bit where Lennon says Ringo had only been to school for two days thanks to his childhood illnesses) who suddenly find themselves bulleted into a position no humans had ever been in before and somehow deal with it. It's not the most joined-up narrative. Instead Braun just records what people said amid the chaos.

It's as if the window is just closing on their real lives and henceforth we will only be able to see them through clouds of myth. It starts in the bar of the ABC in Cambridge.

In another corner John Lennon is sipping a coke which he keeps replenishing with Scotch.
"How long do you think the group will last?" somebody asks.
"About five years."
"Will the group stay together?"
"Don't know," says Mr Lennon and pours another Scotch into the coke.

The other two important books about The Beatles are Ian Macdonald's Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties, which is all about the music, and Peter Doggett's You Never Give Me Your Money: The Battle For The Soul Of The Beatles, which is all about what happened afterwards.

I don't understand people (part 27)

I once asked my mother if my father had been present at the births of his children. I was teasing her because I knew he wouldn't have been. "In fact," she added, "if he'd even suggested it I would have been horrified."

Funny how behaviour changes. What was once exceptional becomes first optional and then compulsory. We now live in a world where Test cricketers return from Australia for the weekend to witness the birth of their third child because they simply can't risk the opprobrium of not being there.

Similar case today. Somebody I know was contacted by a freelance who was wondering if they could get more work because she's expecting a baby and her partner has cut down his working hours in order to help her out. This meant there was a shortfall in the household income that needed making up.

We were reflecting that a coal miner in the 30s would have been unlikely to come home and tell his pregnant wife he was cutting down his hours underground in order to help her out. Had he dared he would have been chased back to the pit with the rolling pin of beloved cliché.

If you cry at the end of Toy Story 3 you really should grow up

I didn't take notice of the reviews of Toy Story 3 when it came out. I knew I'd see it, just like I saw and enjoyed the previous two. And The Incredibles. And Shrek. And lots of other kidult hits. Finally got round to watching it last night after sending forth a daughter to buy it in a shop - for £20, which is a ridiculous amount of money, whoever's setting that price.

Really enjoyed it. How could you not? Approaching the end I was dimly aware that there had been much talk about how the ending made grown men and women cry. There had been widespread debates about whether this was OK. I was waiting for it. Right until the end I was braced for it, particularly since the theme was sacrifice, which always makes men cry.

How was it? Well, it didn't come close to making me cry. In the ranks of tear jerkers I have watched it ranks as no more than touching. So why the fuss?

Is Toy Story one of those juvenile things that we never grow out of? There's nothing wrong with that but we don't have to build it up into something it isn't just to make ourselves feel comfortable with our inner child. Instead of admitting that it's we who are child-like we pretend that the child-like thing has somehow become more adult because, you know, it works on so many levels? Like Doctor Who? And Kylie? And the Eurovision Song Contest? And, it seems, an increasing number of things which are pitched at juvenile adults.

What do pretty girls do?

In 1985 I was working with a friend of the musician Tim Finn. At the time he was living with the actress Greta Scacchi. She was 24, the coming film beauty.

One day I came back from buying cigarettes to find both of them sitting in my office. The impact of a genuine incandescent screen beauty in three dimensions at close quarters in your basic everyday surroundings is like nothing else. It's almost like Jessica Rabbit materialising to Bob Hoskins. You realise that there are everyday good looks and then there are the kind of good looks that can comfortably occupy a massive screen.

She's now in her 50s and playing Bette Davis in a play in the West End. She gave an interview today in which she said she hadn't turned a head in ten years. In the pictures she looks handsome but unglamorous, as if she can't bear chasing after what's gone. Contrast that with Jane Fonda who appeared at Cannes yesterday looking fit to put Bob Hoskins eyes out on stalks. She's 72 and clearly hasn't given up.

Reminds me of that wonderful old song by Kirsty MacColl called "What Do Pretty Girls Do?" Well, some of them fight it and some don't.

Anticipation: a language women speak that men don't understand

Earlier this year my wife had a birthday of some significance. It's the kind where she inevitably says "I don't want a present". This is clearly code for "I do want a present". I'm not that stupid.

I couldn't think of anything. Jewellery is a language I simply don't speak. When consulted for advice the eldest daughter said "Well, she's always wanted one of those custom-made bags from Very Expensive Bag Shop." The pair of us went to VEBS and inspected the options. They were very impressive. Even I could tell that. I asked how long it would take them to make one of these bags and get it monogrammed. "Between two and three months," said the lady. It was days until the birthday. It wouldn't do to turn up at the birthday dinner with an I.O.U.. We beat a retreat from the shop and thought again. We couldn't come up with a better idea.

I rang a female friend of the family and put my dilemma to her. She had no hesitation. "Get it," she said. "She won't mind the wait. Matter of fact she'll enjoy the anticipation." Now this advice flew in the face of everything I've ever thought about buying or receiving presents. I don't know a single male who can bear getting a present that he can't rip open and over-use on the spot. But that's males.

I ordered the bag, paid for it and got in return a beautifully embossed envelope with a nice written promissory note inside. I presented this on the evening of the birthday. It went down better than I could ever have hope. Two months later the shop rang to say the bag was ready for collection. I rang the wife, who works near the shop. "The bag's ready! You can go and get it tonight!"

She didn't get it that night. Or the next night. Or the one after that. A week later, when the time was right, she picked it up and brought it home in one of those bags big enough to carry a car in. She's unwrapped it, fondled it, hugged it to her and shown it to a few close friends. She hasn't taken it out yet because the right occasion hasn't presented itself.

Anticipation. It's a foreign language. I wish it hadn't taken me this long to learn it.

P.S. I told my wife that her eldest daughter had suggested that she had always wanted one. "I never said a word about it to her," she replied. This may indicate that the daughter has even more patience.

Whatever happened to the fish knife?

This morning we had tea from the remnants of the breakfast service my in-laws were given when they got married after the war. Apparently the cups are shaped like that to ensure that the tea cools quickly.

We have inherited all manner of cutlery and chinaware which was given to our parents (and even, in some cases their parents) upon their marriage. We have sets of fish knives, forks and slices, often encased in velvet lined cases as if they were dueling pistols. We have sugar tongs. We have silver-plated cake stands. We have what would now be called "solutions" to every serving problem that might have faced the domestic hostess in the days of Macmillan.

Looking at this arsenal of equipment you might be forgiven for thinking our parents were big entertainers. They weren't. Nor were most people in those days. Aunts in hats would be invited to tea from time to time but dinner parties were unknown and nobody ever came round to Sunday lunch (which was of course Sunday dinner). Who was all this stuff supposed to impress? I'd find it all a lot easier to understand in the world of "Come Dine With Me" than it was back then.

Smoke and mirrors at the White House

I only want to draw your attention to two aspects of the Obama/Osama business. It was pretty clear from the moment this picture was released that that group of people were not watching the events unfolding over in Pakistan. We know that cameras are mounted on pretty much all items of expensive military kit nowadays but in order for those people in the White House situation room to be able to watch anything intelligible from the compound in Abbotabad the special forces group would have had to drop out of the sky with a couple of Winnebagos full of directors and vision mixers. They would probably have needed to find the nearest Starbucks and get the coffees in before any violence began. What those people are probably watching is a link to CIA headquarters where the operation is being controlled from.

The second interesting detail I picked up from the New York Times account was that Obama was keeping an eye on the unfolding operation while "rehearsing" for his appearance at the White House Correspondents Dinner. This annual event, which takes place in front of a room full of gorgeous actresses and not gorgeous hacks, is now one of the biggest occasions of the Washington year. The President shows up and reads a load of self-deprecating jokes about himself from a teleprompter. Obviously this needs preparing for but I don't think Lincoln "rehearsed" the Gettysburg address. Had he "rehearsed" it that would have suggested it was a "performance".

Calm down, dear. They're only concert tickets.

Today's You and Yours on Radio Four was all about whether it should be against the law to sell a concert ticket at more than the face value. The lines were jammed with indignant members of the public who had been in one way or another stymied in their efforts to get a ticket for this or that musical, theatrical or sporting event. They blamed it on the touts, the secondary ticketing sites, the acts and their fellow concertgoers. To listen to some of them talk you would have thought they'd been denied their civil rights.

I don't know where this ticket-buying mania has come from but in the last ten years I've seen it turn into a national sickness. I meet people at dinner parties nowadays who are desperate to get tickets for festivals or big name gigs and they're the kind of people who would have had no interest twenty years ago. They don't go to small gigs. They only go to big ones and they're always amazed that millions of other people just like them are struggling for the same tickets as they are, with predictable consequences.

During the last ten years we've seen ticket prices more than double and it seems to have had no effect on demand at all. As soon as there's a prestige event in the offing people seem to be prepared to spend anything to make sure they can get in. A young person I know recently asked me if I could help her get tickets to see Dolly Parton at the O2. They're £75 each. That means that if she and her boyfriend went along they would be spending the best part of £200 to see an artist they don't own a single record by, have never seen before and may well be disappointed by. These are people in their twenties who can't afford to be splashing money around like this. I've known teenagers with no festival going experience who have spent a hundred pounds on festival tickets that didn't turn up. How did they get so desperate?

I paid £100 for me and the GLW to see Leonard Cohen at the same venue a couple of years ago. I only did that because I knew I was going to enjoy it. He was worth it but I wouldn't be queueing up to spend the same amount of money the following week to see anyone else and I'm probably not going to pay it to see him again. There was a time when I could get a press ticket to most musical events by picking up the phone. Those days are gone. Record companies are having to pay the same inflated sums that the public are paying and therefore they're not flinging tickets around. It doesn't bother me at all. If you can't get into the big gig, go to the small gig, go to the pub or stay at home and read a book. Calm down, for crying out loud.

I was a victim of Grand Theft Auto

It's only when you have your car stolen from outside your house that you discover, from friends, neighbours and faintly bored professionals, just what an imaginative, energetic and bare-faced lot car thieves are.

A friend of ours recently came home from work by car to discover her husband's sports car pinched off the drive and the lights on in the house. She went in to find the house had been ransacked. She rang her husband, who was overseas, to tell him. He suggested she quickly look in the drawer where they kept the second key for the car she'd come back in. It wasn't there and - by the time she got back to the phone - nor was the vehicle. The thieves had obviously been waiting for her to come back with the other car so that they could pinch that one as well. They'd passed the time waiting for her by burgling a house across the road.

Other friends living not far away were also relieved of two vehicles in similar style a year before, only this time the gang, which was fronted by adolescent boys, unlikely to suffer the full force of the law, came back the following day to take the second car.

Our loss was nothing like as dramatic. Nonetheless we lost a 15-year-old Mercedes Estate with plenty of miles on the clock. The police shrugged and gave us a crime number. The insurers gave us less than a thousand pounds for it. A man from the motor trade guessed it would have been on its way to Africa or Albania within twenty-four hours. He pointed out that every part of that car is worth around fifty quid and therefore it would be cannibalized for spares. More fool us for lovingly and expensively caring for it.

One of the kids wanted to know why nobody could find it. After all she's grown up with the modern miracle of number plate recognition whereby the screen at the entrance to the Channel Tunnel always greets us with "Good morning, Mr Hepworth". With such technology available it ought to be possible to know where every recently pinched car in the UK is at any given time. I suspect it's one of those cases where the sheer amount of information available overwhelms the human element. In truth nobody really wants to know. The police either can't be bothered or aren't geared up for the effort. The insurance companies just want to settle. It's just one of those constantly grinding bureaucratic processes which everybody prefers to leave well alone.

Another neighbour found this when he was victim of the old fishing rod through the letter-box ruse. He got one of his two vehicles back. After he'd settled with the insurance company over the other one he started getting parking tickets for it. He went to the address on the tickets and found the vehicle, where it had clearly been abandoned. He then spent considerable time on the phone and banging on desks at the offices of the local authority, police and insurance company trying to get somebody to take responsibility for the car, which was no longer his. All concerned made it clear that they regarded him as being rather tiresome.

What TV is always looking for - and it's not talent

I caught the last ten minutes of "Britain's Got Talent" last night. This featured a 12-year-old boy called Ronan Parke (left) who has clearly been identified by the producers as the winner of the competition. Before he began singing his mother said "I do hope people like him". After he'd finished the judges said "you don't need to bother going back to school" and "you're going to be a big star".

You don't have to be a child guidance counsellor to suspect that any one of those statements could do harm to a young mind. As I was watching the carefully contrived montage - cut to the proud parents, the audience apparently rising spontaneously to applaud mid-song, the boys' shocked and delighted expression - I thought, we're going to see this bit again, probably when it all goes wrong.

Earlier yesterday I was talking to a friend with thirty years experience in a senior capacity in television. His opinion on television and "real people" was simple: don't ever go on television unless you are prepared to be manipulated. That's because manipulation is what television, at any level, does. He also pointed out something that I'd always dimly sensed but never thought about - when producers are reviewing what footage they've got the only thing they're looking for is an edit point. They're not bothered about the sense of the story or its relationship with the truth - they're looking at how they can stitch that bit to this bit in a way that maximises the energy of the whole.

On the occasions I'm interviewed for television I always start by saying "tell me what you want me to say and I'll tell you whether I'll say it". This saves a great deal of time. I've also worked out that if you're going to be on BBC-1 you have to make your answers half the length they would be on BBC-2 which is in turn half the length they would be on BBC-4, which is half the length they would be on Radio 4. However even I've been amazed at how BBC-1 or ITV-1 will chop even the pithiest answer in half if they can find an edit point. That's because, as my friend points out, they're not attending at all to the sense of what you say. They're responding to the energy with which you say it and wondering how they can cut and paste it into their own little national grid.

The Ronan Parke item last night was not a performance. It was a little drama about a performance, as predetermined and carefully scripted as an episode of Glee. Talking of which, I don't think the competitors in shows like Britain's Got Talent should be lured there on false promises of musical stardom. I think they should be paid for their appearances much as actors would be. After all that's how they're used.