It happened one summer

I'm told the annual occasions which sell most books are Christmas and Father's Day.

Makes sense, I suppose. Doesn't matter how much of a book lover mother is, you probably don't buy her a book for Mother's Day.

Father's Day is coming up in a couple of weeks and you can obtain One Summer: America 1927 by Bill Bryson for the price of a pair of socks. I can't see why the recipient wouldn't thank you.

What happened in summer 1927?  Babe Ruth redefined baseball. Charles Lindbergh redefined celebrity. The Mississippi flooded. The Jazz Singer was filmed (with sound). Radio became enormous. TV was invented. Al Capone and the Federal Reserve made the mistake of thinking they could go on forever. Sacco and Vanzetti were executed. Work began on Mount Rushmore. Above all, as Bryson says, the USA, which had up to then been used to all the biggest advances coming from Europe, began to realise it was the most powerful country in the world.

Was there ever a memoir as po-faced as Patti's?

Read the Patti Smith memoir Just Kids, which is candid, well-observed and well-written, as the reviews said, but did any of the reviews point out that it's completely lacking humour?

I don't expect a laugh riot but surely you shouldn't be able to look back at your formative years without either snapping into the foetal position under the duvet out of mortified embarrassment or dealing with the same feeling by having a bit of a rueful laugh at yourself. On the evidence of this book that never ever happened with Patti.

I remember seeing a TV interview with Ken Campbell back in the 70s where he said "anything that isn't in some way funny isn't true". I'd buy that.

If Led Zeppelin reformed they'd be playing for people who don't "remember" them

Interesting piece by Michael Hann about the chances of Led Zeppelin getting back together again. He think they're slim. I think he's right. Robert Plant doesn't need to risk being called mutton dressed as lamb. It's different for the blokes in the band. They're operating machinery. They're not advancing towards the microphone and singing "you need cooling, I'm not fooling, I'm gonna send you back to schooling'". The singer is the one who's most exposed. Here the line between worship and ridicule is a thin one.

This must be made more difficult by the fact that in rock, unlike in almost every other branch of human endeavour, the audience for what you're doing continues to grow as your ability to do that thing diminishes. It is amazing that all those years after Led Zeppelin gave up you can still write pieces in serious newspapers about them getting back together again. In fact the level of interest in Led Zeppelin is higher now than at any time since they started in 1968. That's not because of anything they've done. It's because of the relentlessly retrospective nature of popular music. Let that be the new law of rock. Most of it's in the past.

Bands may stop but their music stays there in the canon to be taken up and championed by successive waves of fans. The remorseless march of demographics mean that those latter-day fans soon outnumber the originals. If Led Zeppelin reformed and played Wembley Stadium this year I would guess no more than 5% of the people who went would have seen them first time around.  Most of them wouldn't have been born when they broke up. Even a 50 year old fan probably wouldn't have been old enough to have gone to Knebworth in 1979 without a chaperone.

This flies in the face of all the theories about rock - that you live it, that it reflects the moment and when the moment's over people throw it away. All around us is the evidence that they don't. What's more the audience is boosted by millions of people who aren't even aware what that moment was like because they weren't around. It's a truism to point out that people like to hear old music because it reminds them of their youth. What's interesting is that most of the time it's not their youth they're reliving.

Terry Reid and the incurable disease of being a musician

In the sixties everybody thought it was only a matter of time before Terry Reid made it.

He'd left school at fifteen to go on tour with the Rolling Stones. He was managed and produced by Mickie Most, who'd made Donovan and the Animals into hit acts. He could sing, play guitar and was considered the best looking front man around. Others took this quality more seriously than he did. The story goes Jimmy Page wanted him to be the lead singer of Led Zeppelin. Terry decided it wasn't for him and suggested Page should talk to another young singer called Robert Plant. Page asked "what does he look like?" Reid wondered why he asked.

Ever since then he's had to put up with people telling him how unlucky he was. He doesn't see it that way. Funny how we see the people who didn't make it as the victims of cruel misfortune. It's more useful to reflect upon the one in a million stroke of luck accounting for the tiny handful who did.

Terry Reid has his own idea what he wanted to do and a few years later he did it, putting out two albums, "River" and "Seed Of Memory", which, while leaving the charts unbothered, were widely admired. Ahmet Ertegun, who got him out of his contract with Most, paid for the first one, which was produced by Tom Dowd and came out in 1973. When Ahmet heard it he said "you've given me a jazz album". Both records are notable for their grooves rather than songs. Reid's theory was that if you could get the right musicians they would lean together and magic up the loose-limbed, Brazil-inflected music he heard in his head. He was right.

He moved to America in 1971 and has been there ever since. There were a few major label tries but nothing that took. He still plays. He was at the Jazz Cafe on Wednesday with a band of high calibre musicians who were clearly playing for the love of it as much as anything else. Where else would they get the opportunity to play this kind of thing? The voice doesn't have the silvery highs but the people who turn up don't care much about that. That's the funny thing about the expansion of rock cults. More people than ever like to tell everyone how underrated their favourites are, thereby making them no longer underrated.

I talked to him on Thursday at his lawyer's house. Amazingly he's had the same British legal representative since the late sixties. I know what Hunter Thompson said about the music business being "a cruel and shallow money trench" but it's surprising what pockets of sentiment and loyalty you still come across. Rob Dickins, who used to book him in the late sixties when he was a university social sec, signed Reid to Warners in 1991 for an album called "The Driver". Robert Plant is still in touch. Jack White's group The Raconteurs have recorded his "Rich Kid Blues". Admiring young musicians turn up backstage, aware that what he does they can't really do.

I dropped him off at the station in the rain. He was going off to Southend to stay with a friend. He's here for a month but it's not the kind of visit that stretches to a hotel. That's the music business in 2014. More people than ever playing for less money. What sustains live music is not so much the audience's hunger to hear as the musicians' hunger to play.

Talking of which, Alex Gold and I were on the tube yesterday when we bumped into Carl Hunter from the Farm. He joked that the group were getting together for "another of our Saga holidays". They had a few big hits in the early 90s, enough to ensure they still get a few down the bill bookings at festivals. They enjoy it and presumably just about show a profit. In any other business it wouldn't be enough. But this isn't any business.

Alex has just got back from touring Germany with a ukulele orchestra. The musicians were all ages and backgrounds. The oldest one, who used to be Lulu's bassist in the 60s, flew over from Alicante to join them. He passed on to Alex the best definition of being a musician I've ever heard. "It's not a profession," he said. "It's an incurable disease".

Terry Reid's UK dates are here.

Listen to Mark Ellen talk bollocks: on the new Word podcast and live

Obviously it pains me to admit it but this morning  I couldn't get through just a paragraph of the chapter on the Weeley Festival in Mark Ellen's book Rock Stars Stole My Life!: A Big Bad Love Affair with Music without entirely losing my composure.

You can hear what ensued if you listen to the new Word Podcast that we recorded this morning Chez Fraser (above).

We're putting on a special Word In Your Ear evening at the Deaf Institute in Manchester tomorrow. There I'll be talking to Mark about his book and to Stuart Maconie about his new one The People's Songs: The Story of Modern Britain in 50 Records. If you're quick you might be able to score a ticket here.  Hope to see you there if you're within reach of Manchester.

Mark and I are talking at Word In Your Ear events in London on May 12th and 19th but I'm afraid both of those are already sold out.

Remembering Ray Gosling

If you're near a radio tomorrow night you might listen to "Sum Total", a Radio Four Archive Hour programme about Ray Gosling. It's presented by Mark Hodkinson, who used to write things for The Word and also published some of Gosling's writing.

Gosling died in 2013 in rather reduced circumstances both materially and professionally but in the 70s and 80s he was one of the most distinctive voices in broadcasting.  He was, as Mark says, "a complicated man with his life divided into different compartments". Gay when the term was unknown. A lot of a drinker. Fiercely working class but sent for ballet and elocution lessons as a child. Maybe the latter took, maybe they didn't. He never lost his wheedling Midlands tone.

His personal touch made him a brilliant interviewer. Somebody in the programme calls it "deceptive diffidence". There's a clip from an interview with Barbara Castle which illustrates how his willingness to allow himself to look foolish often conjured tiny slivers of interpersonal gold.

Worth hearing.

Aren't hand-written lyrics as reliable as fragments of the true cross?

Obviously Sotheby's wouldn't be lending their good name to the sale of the original hand-written lyrics for "Like A Rolling Stone" if they hadn't checked the provenance. They apparently come from somebody in California who was given them by Dylan many years ago and is now looking to cash in. The auction is on June 24th if you're interested. They expect it to fetch half a million dollars.

Just imagine for a second you're a sixties legend and somebody asks if you've got the original piece of paper where you first scribbled the words to your legendary hit. I'd be tempted to say nothing for a few months and then say "you'll never guess what fluttered out of an old book the other day - there it is on the actual hotel stationery with authentic Maxwell House coffee mug mark in the corner. What about that then? Do you think it's worth anything?"

Rock heirlooms seem to multiply according to demand. When I spent some time filming in Memphis many years ago I found that there were as many original recording consoles on which Booker T & The MGs allegedly recorded "Green Onions" as you might find fragments of the true cross in a Tuscan hill town.

Wouldn't mind betting a lot of hit songs never had the words written down properly, not in a form that you or I could read. In the days of Smash Hits you'd often negotiate a fee with the publishers to reproduce the lyrics and then find that they expected you to get the words from the record because they didn't have an official copy of them.

I was amused to see that when they asked McCartney to contribute a hand-written lyric to a charity auction in 2010 he came up with this.

Was this the greatest hot streak in the history of pop?

Been thinking about what Ray Davies said when I interviewed him last night at the Stratford Upon Avon Literary Festival, about how he wrote all those great Kinks songs in the sixties to order.

They needed a new hit single every three months and he was the one who supplied them: You Really Got Me, All Day And All Of The Night, Tired Of Waiting For You, Everybody's Gonna Be Happy, Set Me Free, See My Friends, Till The End Of The Day, Dedicated Follower Of Fashion, Sunny Afternoon, Dandy, Dead End Street, Waterloo Sunset, Autumn Almanac and Days.

That's fourteen smash hits in four years. Mark Ellen's fond of describing it as the greatest hot streak in the history of pop. Even more amazing when you consider they were all written and sung by one person. That's what you call pressure. Pressure appears to be every bit as effective as inspiration.

There's one further single which sometimes gets forgotten in that sequence and it was raised by somebody in the audience last night. Wonderboy came out at the beginning of 1968 and stalled at number thirty-six, which was disappointing by Kinks' standards.

Davies draws comfort from the fact that somebody told him that John Lennon loved it, demanding it was played three times in a row by a DJ in a club because he liked the middle eight so much. That may be an apocryphal tale but if it was my song I too would do my best to keep it alive.

 

The Pearlfishers and the cheap music that doesn't sound cheap anymore

There was a time when it was possible to hear how much had been spent on a record. The records with big budgets, those that had been paid for with an advance from major record companies, sounded more polished, deeper, more resonant than the record that had been done in the cheap studio, let alone in the garage. They might not always have been inspired but they were usually more congenial to listen to than their low budget competitors. You knew the difference, much as you might have done if you'd slipped into the passenger seat of an expensive German car immediately after a cheap Japanese one.

Listening to Open Up Your Colouring Book by the Pearlfishers it strikes me you can't make that distinction anymore.

The Pearlfishers' records are the work of David Scott, a writer, musician and lecturer, who made "Up With The Larks", which is one of my favourite records of the last five years. It was the kind of record which sounds like a hit to people who don't have the first idea of what actually makes a record a hit. People like me.

Unlike most music made by indies (if that term still has any meaning) Scott's abjures rough manners, aspiring to polish rather than grit. If you were going to try to plot him on an taste map you might show him in the vicinity of Prefab Sprout and Jim Webb. His music can sound a bit precious, as if it's been inspired by an afternoon visit to an arts cinema rather than real life, but that's the risk involved in reaching for a certain delicacy. Also that might just be a prejudice I've placed there because I know he's a lecturer.

Colouring Book is his new one and, given Scott's circumstances, which are the same as the overwhelming majority of musicians, it seems reasonable to assume it was made on a budget which wouldn't stretch to unlimited studio time, the services of legions of session musicians, the input of top mixers and mastering engineers flown in from America in order to increase the chances of radio play.

In 2014 major record companies still spend sums of money they don't have to spend because they can't bear to think they left anything un-done. But the truth is that nowadays anybody can layer backing vocals, get instruments in tune, edit precisely, erase tracks that aren't working and add some strings; you don't need to have Universal paying the bills.

I'm guessing Open Up Your Colouring Book was a fairly cheap record to make. But here's the thing. It doesn't sound like one. I think you might like it. If you don't, I'll buy it off you.

No good expecting us English to beg the Scots to stay - let's make them a mixtape

I don't want Scotland to leave the union but I can see it happening. If it does you'll be able to blame England's twin traditions of superiority and reticence. Taken together these two qualities makes us incapable of pleading with anyone to stay, in any situation, ever. I'm profoundly English. This manifests itself in the fact that I would never want anyone to spend time in my company who didn't want to. I'd hate anyone to come to one of my parties (if I had parties) out of a sense of obligation. The thought of it makes my English soul shrivel. The expression "if that's the way you feel" comes to my lips all too readily. The accompanying shrug comes just as naturally to my shoulders.

There appear to be initiatives to encourage Englishers to band together to persuade the Scots not to do it. I can't see any of them getting much in the way of a following. The English are not going to campaign to persuade somebody else to do something. They're not going to make passionate declarations of their belief in the Union or their respect for the Scots. The English don't go in for big, public gestures. Instead I propose that we choose a Scottish friend who is thinking of voting "yes" and do what the English always do when called upon to express something too deep for words. Make them a mixtape.

You don't have to get sucked into the Fake Rarity Roadshow

Unhappy with the way his limited edition records were on sale on eBay before National Record Store Day 2014 was even over, Paul Weller says he won't be taking part in future. In his statement he contrasts "greedy touts" with "genuine fans". 

Fair enough, if that's what he wants to do, but surely the simple act of producing an edition of a record for which the demand is bound to exceed the supply guarantees this kind of thing is going to happen. If you make something rare you increase the value of it and somebody is bound to try to realise that value.

When he refers to "greedy touts" I suppose we're meant to conjure up visions of fat blokes in knock-off Burberry smoking five cigarettes while peeling off fifties from a bundle big enough to choke a donkey.

When he refers to "genuine fans" we're supposed to picture Tiny Tim lookalikes pressing their noses against record shop windows while clutching their carefully pinched pennies in their hands.

I'm not sure I buy any of this. I don't believe there's any way of judging the "genuineness" of fans. What does that mean? Length of service? Degree of disengagement from normal society? Age? Wealth?

Plus I suspect some of these "greedy touts" are also the "genuine fans". They're doing a bit of the former in order to subsidise some of the latter.

There's only one way to avoid being exploited in the Fake Rarity Roadshow. Don't take part. Pass by on the other side. Go and do something else. There are plenty of other ways to support your local record shop. That applies whether you're a performer or a genuine fan. Or even a fair-weather fan like me.

The best first album ever made is fifty years old today

It's fifty years this week since the first Rolling Stones album was released.  It's still the best first album ever put out by anyone.

Most of the songs were rhythm and blues favourites, which would have been unfamiliar to their UK audience.  There wasn't much chance of Rufus Thomas's "Walking The Dog" or Jimmy Reed's "Honest I Do" being played on the Light Programme or Radio Luxemburg.

Blues purists, who like to spoil people's fun, said the Stones' versions of Bo Diddley's "Mona" and Chuck Berry's "Oh Carol" weren't as "authentic" as the originals. What they missed or deliberately ignored was the way their hopped up versions of Muddy Waters "I Just Wanna Make Love To You" or Slim Harpo's "I'mA King Bee" suddenly turned this middle-aged braggadocio into what the MC5 later called teenage lust.

It was the first great party album of the sixties. You simply had to put it on the Dansette and you unleashed something elemental into the most staid suburban sitting room.

It was produced by Andrew Loog Oldham who was making it up as he went along. And recorded in a tiny room on Denmark Street where, as they like to recall, the tape machine was attached to the wall and insulation provided by a bunch of egg cartons. It was, as Keith Richards later recalled, the ideal space in which to make that album and no use at all when it came to making anything else.

That doesn't matter to me. What they produced was perfect. They never made a record with quite the same buzz ever again. To borrow a line from Roy Carr's sleeve notes to a later Stones compilation, don't go looking for a better first album than this. It hasn't been made.

The Angel of Records watches over an old head like me

In the early 70s I used to buy records at Harum in Crouch End. It was opposite the church that Dave Stewart later turned into a recording studio. Later on there was another shop round the corner called Spanish Moon after the Little Feat record. Before fame, Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart rented the flat  upstairs.

Harum kept a good cellar and they had a secondhand rack from which I picked up lots of ex-review promos. I've still got a white label of Ry Cooder's "Boomer's Story" I picked up there back in the day. It's possible that they might have also had a copy of Michael Hurley's Armchair Boogie but it would have been just that bit too obscure for even my snobbish Bearsville tastes.

Harum's long gone, along with thousands of similarly-named head shops.  I only recently heard "Armchair Boogie" via the miracle of Spotify. I was drawn to the fact that it came out in in 1971, which, as any fule no, was the annus mirabilis of the rock album.

Then, on the advice of Ian Penman, I took my amp to be fixed at Audio Gold, a shop dealing in vintage hifi not all that far from the old Harum. When I went to pick it up I saw on the counter a little rack containing half a dozen copies of "Armchair Boogie", which has been lovingly and no doubt unprofitably reissued  in a de luxe CD version by Light In The Attic Records (above). It cost me twelve quid but since the Angel of Records had gone to such trouble to place it in my path it seemed churlish to refuse.

I'm listening to it now. You know there's an Angel of Records who makes sure you get to hear everything you're supposed to hear. I really believe that.

Richard Hoggart's Lost City of Leeds

Today they announced the death of Richard Hoggart. He was ninety-six.  Hoggart was an academic who made a big splash in 1957 with the publication of The Uses of Literacy. In it he called upon his memories of growing up very poor in Leeds in the period between the wars.

When I was in the sixth form our English teacher recommended it because at the time there weren't any books dealing with working class life and popular culture, at least none that anyone would wish to read.

I found this copy a couple of years ago and read it again. I find the first half of it still an extraordinary reminder of the world of cobbled streets and back to backs - before TV, cars and the free movement of people changed things forever.

I've just been trying to find the bit where he describes how he used to see men pushing items of furniture across town in old prams. I can just about remember that myself.

Didn't find that but I did find a paragraph where he talks about the old sayings which, as he points out, "cluster most thickly around birth, copulation and death". One, which was apparently used to refer to the easy sexual habits of married women, goes: "A slice off a cut cake is never missed."

The hack's fear of the word count

I write a regular column about magazines for In Publishing. They're collected here, if you're interested.

Somebody just commented that the last one could have been shorter. Undoubtedly true. Pretty much anything could be shorter.

The reason it's long is it starts life in the magazine and James the editor asks for 1500 words. That way he knows it will fill the space he's set aside for it.

That's the way editors are. "Good idea. Can you do 3,000 words?" They pay you on the same basis. Weight. I suppose in the future the idea of asking for a certain amount of words will seem quaint.

I can write any amount of stuff for this blog because I don't have to. I'm not worried about whether I can produce enough words. If what I'm writing needs to be longer I keep going. If it doesn't I just stop. Like this.

Only New Yorker podcasts can do zis

The reason I bore on a lot about The New Yorker and its podcasts is they do things you simply won't find anywhere in British radio. This one, a  discussion of the books coming out of America's recent wars, involves war reporters George Packer and Dexter Filkins.


It does the thing podcasts do so well: lets people who know whereof they speak to do the talking. It doesn't come in with an editorial view that the journalists are expected to endorse. It wanders as good conversations wander. It has nuance. Not just the nuance of the well recollected detail but also the more valuable nuance of a tone of voice.

They also point out that war correspondents don't properly reflect war because they're always trying to superimpose a narrative on it. Bit like football journalists in that respect.

I seem to be in the most repeated music documentary of our times

A  couple of years ago a TV producer called and asked me to be a talking head on a clip show he was making for BBC-4. The hook was they'd compiled a list of the most lucrative songs in the history of music publishing. Since TV producers don't believe their audience understands the word "lucrative" it ended up being called "The Richest Songs In The World", which is of course ridiculous because a song can't be rich.

When they sent me the list I couldn't see how they'd done their working out. Nobody has an accounting for the full life of a relatively recent song like "Yesterday", let alone "Happy Birthday", and if they did they wouldn't be sharing it with anyone. But in TV the commissioning editor gets what the commissioning editor orders. Therefore I turned up on the appointed day, made my comments on camera, invoiced for the agreed fee - which, believe me, wasn't much - and thought no more about it.

The programme, fronted by Mark Radcliffe, was first shown in December 2012. Then again. Then again. Then people started contacting me saying they'd caught it in the middle of the night on BBC-4. This morning I was looking for something else on the iPlayer and I see that last night they were showing it once more. It must be in double figures by now.

It's obviously one of those programmes that somebody has decided is ideal for just running and running. It's ninety minutes long, hence it uses up plenty of schedule. It's not got anything in it that might make you switch off. It's got "hey, Doris" appeal; most people will be interested to learn "Happy Birthday" is still in copyright. It's not likely to be superseded by subsequent events. They must have made sure that there's nothing in it which qualifies for repeat fees. I certainly don't.

It looks destined to follow me into decrepitude.

"Game Of Thrones" is top of my must-not-watch TV chart

I've never watched "Game Of Thrones". That's nothing special. I've never watched "The Hunger Games" either. Nor "Breaking Bad", "Battlestar Galactica", "The Waking Dead", "Sherlock", "Lost", "True Detective", "Buffy The Vampire Slayer", "Arrested Development" and hundreds of other hot TV series everybody says are great.

And when I say I've never watched them I mean I've never watched so much as ten minutes of any of them. They're not designed for snacking. With this kind of densely-plotted high concept entertainment you can't stop while passing through the room and expect to be brought up to date by somebody sunk deep in the sofa. You're either there for the long haul or you're not there at all.

There are plenty of these shows I hear a bit about and decide to avoid because I suspect they're clever enough to keep me watching but not substantial enough to make me glad I did. And they're so long they can steal half your life away. It's a new category. Must-not-watch TV. If I had a chart of must-not-watch TV "Game Of Thrones" would be at the top of it.

Which is why it's so risky putting a show like that on the cover of a general interest magazine. Shows like this run in narrow channels and don't pique the interest of anyone outside those channels. They're intensely rather than widely popular.

It's not like when J.R. was shot in "Dallas" almost thirty-five years ago. Everybody had some attachment to that storyline. Either they watched it or they had watched enough of it to know which one was J.R. and to have an idea why somebody would wish to shoot him.

Interest in "Dallas" spilled over the sides of the channel which carried it. No longer.

They say it's the golden age of TV. They're probably right. In years to come we'll look back and say "Yes, I remember Game Of Thrones. Never watched it."

An open letter to the board of Tottenham Hotspur

Gentlemen,

Thank you for your patience in waiting so long to hear what I think of the club's current situation. It's only when I'm away on holiday that I have the leisure to turn my thoughts to such a serious matter. This post is being composed while keeping out of the afternoon sun.

You will be relieved to know I am not one of those supporters who believe that football nowadays is run too much like a business. I am more likely to side with those who think it is not run enough like a business.

The Chief Executive Daniel Levy will also be relieved to hear that I do not hold him responsible for the team's lacklustre, inconsistent performance on the field this season. Football is chaos and all narratives are written to justify the score at the end. As William Goldman said about Hollywood, nobody knows anything.

And yet. I suspect that, in seeking to maximise shareholder value, the board hires people experienced in the game, people such as the present Director of Football Signor Baldini. The hiring of such people should ensure that the club's player purchases are more sound than they would have been had they been made after consulting a random selection of supporters in my local. This, in case it helps to know, is the Dog & Duck in Winchmore Hill.

If we are to believe the back pages of the papers last summer Signor Baldini presided over the purchase of a number of players for a combined figure in excess of £80 million, the windfall that came in as a result of the once in a century sale of a genuine superstar. That, as PG Wodehouse would have observed, is a lot of lettuce.

I do not intend to criticise those players individually. I shall simply suggest that even they will have been disappointed at how they have failed individually to adapt to a new league and failed collectively to gel into a proper team. None of those players has enhanced his reputation and increased his value. But I would prefer to focus on what this has done to the balance sheet. The company's finance director must be dismayed at the fact that in less than a year that eighty million pounds of player value has been transformed, by a process of reverse alchemy, into about fifty million pounds. That is worrying for any company.

Here I would like to help. I think it would be unfair to put Signor Baldini under the pressure involved in going out on another buying spree this close-season. It seems only fair to let him have the summer off to recharge his batteries. Yet the work must go on. If you would care to send a list of the club's transfer targets together with their asking prices and an estimate of the funds available, then you will be pleased to hear that I have organised a sub-committee of Dog and Duck patrons who would be happy to do the actual choosing. Our services will cost the club nothing, not least because we have our own pin.

In passing, can you please mention to Signor Baldini that I have a four bedroom house for sale not far from the Dog & Duck? It is worth £25 million. I have a queue of eager buyers.

Yours in Spurs.

Is there a future in Marks and Spencer's dreaming?

My parents believed in a few key things: family, arithmetic, the benefits of fresh air, the enduring value of Marks & Spencer.

They would talk about M&S a lot. They praised the things it did right. They averted their eyes from the few things it did poorly in the belief the company should be left to mend its ways in private.

Growing up I absorbed the idea whatever else might change M&S would be here forever. In the last couple of years I've changed my mind.

There are many reasons to raise an eyebrow at the latest instalment of their "Leading Ladies" marketing campaign: from the idea that you spend money on a celebrity photographer like Annie Leibowitz ten years after the end of the era of the celebrity photographer through the painful over-thinking apparent in the casting of the women to the striving for a quality of nobility in the pictures.

But more dismaying than that is the belief that what they need to do is burnish their brand when they should be improving their offer. I was talking to a distinguished magazine editor the other day, somebody who's whole career has been spent in the world of prestige brands, and he said this: "As far as my kids are concerned, brands have had their day. They just want a quality product at the right price."

Last time I went shopping for an item of clothing in Marks and Spencer I went to their biggest store with the actual serial number of the thing I wanted. The assistant tried to be helpful but she couldn't find the thing in stock. The reason she couldn't find it is because she didn't know which sub-brand to look under. That problem was entirely of the company's own making. I left and ordered it on line. It took three days. I don't think you can do business like that any longer.