First thought, best thought

Yesterday my iPod came up with Bob Dylan's "I Pity The Poor Immigrant". I think it's one of my favourite records of any sort. I've played that one song about five times since and even tooled about with the chords on the guitar. Last night I looked out the album "John Wesley Harding" and played it all the way through.

I love the words - particularly that line about "his gladness comes to pass". You can't separate that from the singing, which is his most restrained and precise. He hits a frequency here that he never quite hit again. But there's something more than that. "John Wesley Harding" stills falls upon the ear as a blessed relief.

It was 1967. He'd written the songs in Woodstock that summer. He recorded them in Nashville. But that doesn't tell the whole story. I read here that he recorded the whole album in just three sessions of three hours each. That's what a union session was in those days. Three hours. Most of the time there were just two other musicians in the studio, drummer Kenny Buttrey and bassist Charlie McCoy. They don't really play like a rhythm section, not as we've come to understand it. Buttrey is accenting the songs rather than driving them.

Between the second and third sessions Dylan asked Robbie Roberston and Garth Hudson to think about overdubbing the tracks. They listened and couldn't hear a way they could be improved. So they were left alone. Forty years later it's still the most persuasive argument for the view that records increase in quality in inverse proportion to the amount of time spent recording them.

If you want to hear "Immigrant", it's here.

The yes-no interlude

Just before I went out to get some lunch there was one of those polls on The Guardian website. Further to the knife crime issue it was asking its readers whether it was true that "people" were rude and thoughtless. Voting was running 85% in the affirmative.

The media is drunk on interaction. It has made the discovery that the dumber the question the greater the number of clicks. I don't know how I'd begin to answer that question, let alone reduce it to a yes or no. Most of the people I know are not rude and thoughtless. Most of the people I don't know are not rude and thoughtless. I encounter politeness and consideration from strangers everyday. I also encounter the opposite, in a range that runs from slovenliness to outright hostility, if not as yet knife crime. How am I supposed to decide which box to tick? Keep a numerical record and add it up at the end of each day? It just seems the most idiotic question to ask and is designed only to elicit anger and resentment, in precisely the same way that they accuse the Daily Mail of acting.

Anyway, when I got back to the office I looked for it and it seems to have gone. It may be just hiding or wiser counsels may have prevailed. I hope it's the latter.

The problem with film critics

I'm covering Word's film reviews while Jim White's away. This means going to a few screenings. This still has novelty value for me but it also brings me into contact with film scribblers, a sub-section of the hack fraternity which, encountered en masse, has a tendency to set my teeth on edge.

I cannot bear journalists who swap opinions with each other. Why would you do that? If they're interesting ones, you might be giving an idea to somebody else. If they're not, keep them to yourself. Film journalists, who move as a pack, subsisting on a diet of warm white wine and cocktail sausages, are forever telling each other what they thought of all the things they've seen lately and they do it in such a po-faced way.

The other day I heard one put his head back and, inbetween complaining about the free wine, bark "Oh, I was quite kind about it but I had reservations about the second act."

Who do you think you're kidding?

Whenever they're on the radio Members of Parliament are unable to resist the temptation to say absurdly flattering things about their constituencies. I've just heard Simon Mayo introducing the MPs guesting on his programme this afternoon. He sets up Dawn Butler as the member for Brent South and asks her to explain something about it for the benefit of people who might not know it.

It's the most diverse constituency in the UK, she enthuses, (as if that were some sort of moral quality that was embodied more here than anywhere else), and you can go to a different cultural celebration every day of the year.

"What about geographically?" he asks, which was what he wanted to know in the first place.

"Wembley," she says.

Oh.

How to write (latest in an occasional series)

Some old hand on The New Yorker described the magazine's journalism as being all about "a passionate specificness". This short item about the great Chip Taylor is a classic case. Every sentence contains at least one new piece of information, which isn't always the case. Hacks have written this piece before – Jon Voight's brother, professional gambler, wrote "Wild Thing", yadadada – but I've never heard the name or the profession of the third brother or the details of how Taylor used to combine writing country songs in Manhattan with playing the horses or – and this is presumably new information – how he's remarried his ex-wife but doesn't live with her. Wonderful.

It's a long story

Has anyone had to deal with so much change so quickly as Ingrid Betancourt, who's just been whisked away from six years of FARC captivity in the jungles of Colombia to be greeted by her own children (left), who are now adults?

A day later she is flown to France to be greeted at the airport by Nicolas Sarkozy. "How's the wife?" she presumably says. Ah. yes. Hum.

Charles Wheeler (1923-2008)

Charles Wheeler's death has just been announced. I was a big fan.

A couple of years ago I was at an "Oldie Of The Year" lunch at Simpsons-In-The-Strand. As the gathering was dispersing I noticed Wheeler hunkering down in the bar with Beryl Bainbridge, Alan Coren and Barry Cryer, intending no doubt to stay there all afternoon and put the world to rights.

I would love to have joined them. Now that they're short two members maybe I can.

What have we done to deserve this?

In one of their most puzzling programming decisions in a while, Radio Four have got Lenny Henry fronting a series that asks the question "What's So Great About?". They've already done Bob Dylan. Next they're doing Method Acting.

The minute I heard about this I was galvanised not to listen. This is, I'm afraid, because the person asking the question and presumably doing duty as the man on the Clapham Omnibus (or should that be the BBC town car?) is Lenny Henry. I've nothing against him but I can't hear him as the voice of stimulating scepticism. What are his credentials? Is he known as an original thinker? Is he a brilliant radio presenter? Has he suffered conspicuously at the hands of either Bob Dylan or Method Acting?

Then there's the subject matter. It's not as if people are leaving dinner parties in a huff having crossed swords with their hosts over Marlon Brando's performance in "On The Waterfront" or the value of Bob Dylan's Christian records. They should at least have the nerve to take on sacred cows of today like Amy Winehouse or The Apprentice or the pundits on Match Of The Day.

If, say, Clive James were to front the programme, I would expect the value to arise from an examination of the premises of greatness or not-greatness. What is good music? What do we mean when we say that acting is good? That's worth hearing. But I don't want the man-in-the-street's take on Bob Dylan because I heard it in 1963 and it was like water off a duck's back then as it is now. The only difference is now I'm bored with hearing it.

And surely in taking on this project the thought must have at some time occured to Lenny Henry that thousands of wags like me would briefly entertain the possibility of applying the show's premise to his own career?

"And the winner isn't"

This clip of Welsh Culture Minister Rhodri Glyn Thomas reading out the name of the wrong winner at the Wales Book Of The Year makes you wonder various things:
1. So there's a prize for the best English language book in Wales then?
2. If you're ever called upon to open an envelope at a ceremony it's best to know the contents first.
3. Thanks to You Tube an evening's embarrassment now becomes a lifetime of agony.

It's not that rare an occurence. Twenty years ago I was at a magazine awards ceremony where the celebrity prize giver Dame Edna Everage did the same thing. She named the wrong Editor of the Year. He was halfway to the stage when he had to be stopped with an apology. Then the real winner's name was read out and he went up to collect his (suddenly undeserved) award. The third person on the short list, my colleague Barry McIlheney, was not mentioned at all. We agreed he had dodged a bullet.

"A bolt of pecuniary fire"

I'm reading "Netherland" by Joseph O'Neill. This takes the events of 9/11 as its hinge, as does most contemporary fiction, it seems. In years to come they'll start teaching this as a distinct period. The hero's a Wall Street analyst. Here he is recalling what it was like in New York in 1998.

It was quickly my impression that making a million bucks in New York was essentially a question of walking down the street - of strolling, hands in pockets, in the cheerful expectation that sooner or later a bolt of pecuniary fire would jump out of the atmosphere and knock you flat. Every third person seemed to be happily struck down; by a stock market killing, or by a dot-com bonanza, or by a six-figure motion picture deal for a five-hundred word magazine article...I too became a beneficiary of the phenomenon, because the suddenly sunken price of a barrel of oil - it went down to ten bucks that year - helped create an unparalleled demand for seers in my line.

I've just checked and the price of oil is $141.75 this morning. Now if it's gone up by a factor of fourteen in the last ten years, that means it clearly can't do that again, can it?

Only sport can do zis

To Centre Court at Wimbledon to see Gasquet versus Murray.

At 7.15, with Murray two sets down, looking clueless, his first serve not working and facing a rampant Gasquet serving for the match, I packed away my water bottle in my back pack and made ready to go home.

It was another two and a half hours before I picked up the bag and left, Murray having won three sets to two.

And people still ask what it is about sport.

Red Harrison

I was thinking about the voice of Red Harrison, who died last week in Australia. He was 75.

Radio Four rarely carries much Australian news but in the past when it did it was delivered via Harrison's distinctive voice, which had the resonance of an Anthony Hopkins marbled with the slightly querulous overtones of a retired newspaper man who had seen too much human folly. I've been reading about his funeral the other day. They sang Jerusalem and played the Dambusters March.

Harrison had one of those voices which couldn't help but be moving, no matter what he was talking about. He sounded as if he belonged in a world where communication was rare and consequently precious. Here's a clip of one of his reports from Australia.

A month's a long time in African politics

The voting public are a fickle lot. A month ago Zimbabwe's presidential elections came so close they had to go several recounts. Polled again this week the people apparently came out 85% in favour of Robert Mugabe. Obviously, they just needed to have a think about it.

Now that he's been sworn in he can jet off to Egypt to take part in an African Union meeting. Either he can't have read Martin Meredith's "The State Of Africa", which demonstrates that since independence most of Africa's leaders have shown marked reluctance to let go of power no matter what the electorate might say, and have tended to be at the greatest risk of being deposed when they made the mistake of going overseas on business.

Persuasion is no longer a valid option. It's to be hoped that some of his fellow African leaders have the decency to use the occasion to at least shame him.

Kids With Guns

We were talking about toy guns in the office. As a child I carried a gun all the time. When we went to chapel one Christmas morning I insisted on wearing my newly-acquired cowboy outfit. I was even allowed to keep the gun with me as long as I closed the holster.

Then I had a plastic space gun. When you pulled the trigger it lit up at the end. I saved up for a black Colt 45. When I got to the toy shop they only had the silver one left. I choked back the tears of frustration all the way home.

Then there was a Winchester repeating rifle with a lever action. There was a Tommy Gun. You pulled back the ratchet which was then released noisily as you pulled the trigger. I also had rubber knifes, pirate cutlasses made of some presumably unsafe compound and a Zorro fencing foil with a rubber sucker at its pointy end. I wasn't unusual in this. All my contemporaries had the same interest in weaponry. It was considered just one of those things that boys did.

I'm sure there must have been one or two of us who grew up with an unhealthy interest in real guns but it's difficult to believe that it had much to do with early conditioning. When I think of it we were a peacable lot. It wasn't because of any hippy doctrine. The "peace" philosophy came much later. We just didn't see the point. There was the odd playground punch-up but I have no memory of any child carrying a real weapon with a view to either using it or deterring anyone else from doing the same.

Many of the kids who've been raised in the last thirty years have had their access to so-called "war toys" restricted by disapproving parents. The rising incidence of violent crime among teenagers seems to fly in the face of the neat theory that if you deny them this grisly tackle in their formative years they are more likely to grow into peaceful citizens. It doesn't seem to work like that.

Some of this stuff is just hard-wired into the male of the species. When our son was tiny he bit a square out of a slice of toast until all that was left was an L-shaped crust and then pointed the business end at his mother. At the time he'd never had any toy gun and he hasn't grown up with any interest in weaponry.

My theory of youth violence is it's all about prestige. I read an account by a sociologist who described gang behaviour as being all about "parading". It's "get out of the way of my bike", "did you scuff my trainers?" or, in its most chilling form, "are you looking at me funny?" Once adopted these are the kind of stances that cannot be retreated from.

Of course such "fronting" has always gone on. But back in the day the indignation might have been real but the guns weren't. These days it's likely to be the other way around.

Germany 3 Turkey 2 BBC 0

Tonight was not one of the BBC's more distinguished nights.

It was passing strange even before the signal was lost. 5Live's desperate need to pass on information as soon as they have it was manifest in the first half when John Murray interrupted his commentary to tell us the verdict in a deeply sad murder case; a second later he had to change gear from sober news reader to rattle-twirling Turk-for-a-day as the unfancied side went into the lead. The effect was distasteful.

The intermittent loss of signal underlined once more the great truth of TV sportscasting. This is that the person not there knows more than the person who is there. You would have thought that the BBC would have left one person at home in front of their TV whose job it was to tell them when they were broadcasting, with what signals and to whom. It was evident throughout the evening that they didn't know.

Finally there wasn't a voice anywhere on the network prepared to concede that the reason Germany had won was because they had scored three perfectly legitimate goals to the Turks' two and that while their performance was far from distinguished it was not dreadful. Had a British side gone through under the same circs they would have regarded it as a hard-earned victory.

Asked beforehand if he thought the Germans would be complacent, Hansen said "The Germans do arrogance but they don't do complacency." He presumably forgot to add that they don't like it up 'em.

What magazine editors should consider before they appear on video

In the near future magazine editors will be hired as much for their ability to "front the brand" as to decide what goes on page 60. Now that cheap video has come together with cheap broadband a few of them have been tempted to go in front of the camera. It's not as easy as it looks. How come?

10. In young people's magazines the editor is generally old enough to be the readers' mother. Seventeen is America's leading teenage girls magazine. Most of the team who pop up here in this hectic tip-athon are in their mid-twenties. I'm guessing the editor-in-chief is a bit older.

9. If you let daylight in on magic, well, you can see just what arm-twisting, log-rolling and bogus sincerity is involved in getting a celebrity as earth-girdling in her fame as Jessica Alba to do anything. Here she meets the hundreds of interns at Seventeen magazine. And my, aren't they a wonderful reflection of the diversity of America?

8. Although women's glossies promote messages about being comfortable in one's own skin and finding one's own personal look most of their editors refuse to appear in front of the camera. This is because they are consumed with uncertainty about their personal appearance that borders on self-loathing. If you find an editor's video message from the big glossies I want to see it.

7. The youngest and blondest member of the editorial team will always find themselves charged with the job of fronting the video. I've no doubt Valerie Jamieson is more than qualified to introduce New Scientist's round up of science clips but if Tomorrow's World ever comes back, they won't see her for moondust.

6. At Word magazine we take the belt and braces approach by having the new issue clip fronted by anyone who could be described as either young or blonde.Rob Fitzpatrick and Kate Mossman go where neither Mark Ellen nor I will tread without a makeover. Note high quality production values, achieved through Fraser's camera phone. Which is a reminder...

5. Anything that has an opening titles sequence featuring tumbling logos over copyright-free music means that the production company is trying to do something to justify all that money you're paying them through your nose.

4. There's nothing in media quite so nauseating as a hack telling us how fabulous it was to meet a fabulous person. Peter Castro of People reporting back on his encounter with Jennifer Lopez's twins is a classic of the genre. It also proves that if you hire a TV pro to front your video all it will achieve is to make your hack look even geekier.

3. Men's magazine editors should never appear on a camera because they always look as if they're getting less sex than the readers. Somebody should tell the editor of Loaded. Just have done.

2. Confidence is a great thing. Graydon Carter of Vanity Fair is the perfect representation of his brand. He looks like an educated man dedicated to gossip who has had a fair number of lunches in the pursuit of said gossip. His little intros to the new issue of Vanity Fair are further distinguished by the appearance of the Vanity Fair Orchestra.

1. But really, this is how you do it. Runners World magazine celebrate their industry award with a clever, watchable, funny self-administered pat on the back. It's fronted by an editor who has not been hit by the ugly stick and features all of the team, young, blonde and otherwise. For the moment this is the gold standard.

To the lighthouse

To Southwold yesterday. It was a delight being there. Reminded me that what I really want is to live near a small lighthouse. Also reminded me that you can't have a grief-free day out in the South of England. On our return the roundabout where the A12 met the M25 was completely grid-locked and the queue must have been going back for miles. By taking evasive action we eventually got on to a North Circular Road that appeared to be closed entirely in one direction. By the time we got home it takes about an hour to shake off the frustrations of the journey. Given that, and the price of a tank of petrol, is it worth it?

*Now* he tells us

Interesting piece in the Guardian by Daniel Taylor about Cristiano Ronaldo. Arguing that Manchester United should just let him go he cites a few occasions on which he and a number of football writers have witnessed and been shocked by Ronaldo's back-stage behaviour and paints a picture of a spoiled multi-millionaire who is used to getting his way at all times. Recalling the scene created by a petulant Ronaldo on a day the club was commemorating the victims of the Munich air crash he says "It was such an unpleasant scene the journalists decided not to write about it". This confirms what you have always suspected about sports writers - that far from competing they put their heads together and agree their party line. And they only spill the beans when they have nothing to lose by doing so. The comeback from readers on the Guardian site will, I think, surprise him. People are starting to feel shortchanged by this kind of cosiness.

Twenty20. Where's the tragedy?

To Lords yesterday evening. We were invited to a hospitality box to enjoy champagne, dinner and the lengthening rays of the sun over the loveliest lawn in the world. (Thanks, Chris.) The match was a Twenty20 encounter between Middlesex and Sussex. The first time I saw one of these games it was between England and the West Indies at the Oval and there was plenty of hitting the ball out of the ground, the sort of thing the marketing men love.

This one was a walkover for Middlesex. They batted first and Sussex never looked like making their total. This meant that the match was more of a non-event than even the least eventful traditional game of cricket could ever be. The beauty of cricket is the tension. This had none. Obviously the world game is now being reorganised in the light of the success of Twenty20 and you can see the reasons why, not least that people can turn up after work and get home in time for News At Ten. But I wonder whether a game can develop in the long run if it doesn't have that essential drama.

All the great world games have a tragic dimension that keep us coming back. Rugby is like war in that momentum is all. In the sense that the defences nearly always win, football is like life. In Test cricket even the greatest reputation can be undone through a microsecond of miscalculation. Golf is man against himself. And so on. But Twenty20? It's a laugh, which is a good thing now, but it's not enough in the long run.

Teenagers, the mobile phone and the lure of the better offer

One of the characteristics of people under thirty is that, having grown up with the mobile phone, they have never felt the need to plan. Teenagers no longer rendezvous. They swarm. They set off to meet each other and change their meeting point according to some strange new form of mathematics that can calculate where the majority of them will be at any given moment. They set off to Camden and call you an hour later from Shoreditch.

There's nothing particularly wrong with this except where it runs up against the traditional form of life planning used by the rest of us. This involves such things as calendars, invitations, tickets, bookings and commitments. For years we used to spend New Year's Eve with the same family. This wasn't a three-line whip. This was what all generations wanted to do.

But when Millennium New Year's Eve was beginning to loom the young people, by then older teenagers, wouldn't commit. They were bound to be doing something special. So-and-so was having a huge party. Wotsit was hiring the Orient Express. They couldn't possibly miss that. As the months went by the plans became more ambitious and less concrete. In fact they weren't plans. They were daydreams. Nobody was prepared to say what they were doing in case that meant they missed out on something better.

The upshot of all this was that at five o'clock on December 31st they were all on the phone to each other having the same conversation. "I dunno. What're you doing?"

Read them and weep

If you've just seen a bloke coming out of Kings Cross station wiping the tears from his eyes that was probably me listening to the end of "If You're Reading This", a Radio Four documentary I caught up with thanks to the Speechification podcast. It's a simple idea and it's probably been done lots of times before. It's about those letters that soldiers write and then put away against the day that they don't come back. The last ten minutes consist of an interview with the parents of a 19-year-old English soldier killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan. The mother talks about the letter he wrote and the karaoke night organised in her son's memory but won't read the letter out. That, she says quite correctly, is mine.

Shopping

I don't believe in the principle of "oughtness" when it's applied to music as in "what ought I to be listening to?" Doesn't stop people asking, though. Hence:
The Wire: And All The Pieces Matter
Rachel Unthank and the Winterset: The Bairns
Justin Adams: Soul Science
Orchestra Baobab: Pirates Choice
Mary Gauthier: Genesis
Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers: Greatest Hits

Czech Republic 2 Turkey 3

Another extraordinary game tonight. I don't know if we'll sleep in north London tonight if the sound of car horns right now is anything to go by.

Next to this Wayne Rooney's wedding just started looking even wetter.

We think it's all over

The football has been fantastic at Euro 2008. Last night's game between Holland and France was the most fun I've had watching an international match since that game between Argentina and Holland in the 98 World Cup. There's ten minutes of highlights here if you're interested.

But every time the BBC go back to the studio my ardour is dimmed by the dullness and complacency of the punditry the Corporation has seen fit to put there. The energy drops immediately Lineker fills the screen with "What a thoroughly entertaining forty-five minutes", uttered like a man called upon to enthuse about attending speech day when none of his children have won anything. He tosses up a soft ball to Alan Hansen who then makes an observation of such plinking obviousness that your attention immediately wanders to the subject of how they arrive at a dress code for these occasions. What does this particular encounter call for, boys? Smart suits or light-coloured shirts with huge collars? But even Hansen's insight is piercing compared to the one which inevitably comes next. Alan Shearer has apparently passed up the manager's job at Blackburn because he feels duty-bound to treat the nation to his views about international football. Maybe we should get up a petition assuring him that we'll muddle through somehow. Martin O'Neill is obviously worlds better but he's shrewd enough to have read the situation and realised that trying to raise the game of this particular bunch of log-rollers would be like trying to bring up the subject of the crisis in Zimbabwe in the golf club bar.

And thus it continues, nudged along by some leaden banter, until it's time to go back to the live commentary. The nation long ago Dolbied out the actual words employed by John Motson, reserving its amusement for the nervous laughs that follow his attempts at a joke and the involuntary barks of excitement which accompany anything that occurs in the goalmouth, but occasionally he makes a pronouncement of such monumental, transcendental fatuity that you can distinctly hear the shades of John Arlott and Peter Jones muttering darkly into their ambrosia from the depth of their leather chairs in the commentators' Valhalla.

He'd already shown himself equal to the lyricism that the occasion called for by making the observation "good skill" when Thierry Henry twisted the Dutch full-back's blood but he saved his best for last when Sneijder made it four with a looping shot from outside the area. "The Dutch have gone goal crazy!"

Dear God.

"Wise guy on line one"

The welcome return of Danny Baker to Five Live's 606 football phone-in underlines how in this interactive world we're all reliant on the sparkiness of audiences. Suddenly the bar is raised and it's not easy to find people who can clear it. It wasn't easy to get the average Five Live listener coming up with limericks that contained a rhyme for Switzerland and his call for contributions from people who had an irrational antipathy to certain competing nations solicited not much more than "France. Because they're French." It was only when his old listeners came on the line, readily identifiable through their "Ahoy Ahoy" salutation, that the idiosyncratic aircraft of his humour began to lumber into the air. As soon as it reaches cruising altitude Euro 2008 will be over and Five Live will presumably resume their efforts to turn the estimable Tim Lovejoy into something he's not, a radio broadcaster.

When you open up the lines the best you can actually hope for is a ready-made experience or gag. I heard such a one this morning. Nicky Campbell was asking for contributions from people who had married their childhood sweethearts. "I've been married to my wife for thirty years," said one. "I haven't spoken to her for the last twenty. It seems rude to interrupt." How have I never heard that one before?

"Excuse me, you've left behind your state secrets"

I use public transport and I'm an averagely observant person. Therefore I'm obviously disappointed that I've yet to stumble upon a briefcase full of documents labelled "Top Secret". Yesterday's story about the Cabinet Office official leaving the Joint Intelligence Committee reports about Al Qaeda on a train further boggles a mind already fairly boggled by the previous story about the lost MOD computer that had the personal details of 135,000 people who'd applied to join the Services, the hard drive that had the names of three million driving test candidates and the MOD laptop that was pinched in McDonalds.

The fact that nobody has yet reported finding equally sensitive material from the private sector suggests either that, say, Tesco executives are not daft enough to leave a laptop containing all the name and addresses of their club card members in Burger King or that members of the public are turning up such commercial gold dust all the time and can't be bothered to hand it in.

Can I suggest that until the Civil Service is confident enough that it doesn't have a load of staff who habitually leave stuff on trains or in their cars they cease putting the words "Top Secret" at the top? I've always believed that the easiest way to get anything ignored is to shout it from the rooftops.

In praise of "The Supersizers..."

Somebody told me that the BBC now name their programmes with search engine optimization in mind. Maybe that's how they ended up with "The Supersizers Go....", a terrible name that undersells the only appointment TV in our house at the moment.

It's the standard approach - a spoonful of celebrity sugar makes the medicine go down - except Sue Perkins and Giles Coren aren't quite red carpet material, probably by their own choice. In each show they travel back to some bygone era and live with its diet for a week. This provides ample opportunities for kitchen gore. We've seen chefs attempt to hold back the bilious tide while trying to recreate recipes for which their forebears won medals. We've seen how during the Restoration dining was a gross display of wealth and power. We've seen how long an eel continues objecting after it's been chopped in two.

Last night they went back to the 70s, to the land of Black Tower hock, half a bottle of spirits for each guest, food covered in gelatine and cigars on Concorde. The learning was that despite the apparent heaviness and fattiness of the fare, people were actually slimmer in those days. This could be, as Coren pointed out, because in those days there was something called manual labour.

Perkins and Coren are a brilliant team, as charming and funny as anyone on British TV. They're both fast talkers but they manage not to step on each other's lines or upstage each other. Presumably they don't need a scriptwriter to come up with observations like "Advocaat. A drink made from lawyers." Whatever they're presented with they attack with relish and aren't afraid to enjoy things that are bad for you.

And I know they send themselves up but am I alone in detecting a distinct strain of what breakfast TV producers call sexual chemistry? And I know they're both spoken for in different ways but there are some people who turn into flirts as soon as they hear the words "turn over".

You can watch it here.

Italian takeaway

What I loved about last night's game between Holland and Italy was the rare sight of an Italian side being given the hurry-up. Two-down at half-time is not a situation that they are at all used to dealing with. Usually they wear the seen-it-all look of men who are confident that the result at the end of the ninety minutes will be close and in their favour. Seeing them forced to inject some urgency into their time-honoured way of doing things was the first really interesting spectacle of this championship.

Quote of the week

"Everybody in politics lies. But the Clintons do it with such ease, it's troubling."

I wouldn't pay much mind to that kind of sentiment were it not for the fact that it was expressed by David Geffen, a veteran of the music and the film business. Makes you think.

Every man in his station

The Management has finally accepted that attempting to go anywhere at the weekend by car in the South of England is stressful, expensive and laughably slow. Therefore when we want to see friends in Hampshire today we took the train from Waterloo. On days like today this provided a good place to view what Elvis Costello called "London's Brilliant Parade". It was Derby Day and so the punters were gathering on the concourse. There were burly Al Murray-alikes in short sleeved shirts hoisting pints of lager, faintly blowsy young women in high heels that would probably be shed by the third race and the furtive figures of serious racegoers, their pocket seams struggling to contain form books. A very smart hen party was assembling under the clock, each member dressed in a variation on a theme of red and black.

We waited in the queue for tickets. In front of us was a ruddy faced retired gentleman of the shires, resplendent in his town uniform of hounds tooth check jacket and dazzling shoes. In front of him were two loudish Americans who were trying to get to Southampton to join an ocean liner. I turned round and was confronted by an actual toff in full morning attire, top hat included.

Sometimes London doesn't let you down.

In praise of Anthony Lane

The film critic who makes most others read as if they're typing in boxing gloves. In the New Yorker he has this to say of "Sex And The City":

You cannot simply shift a load of television actors onto a movie screen and expect them to command its greater expanse; only one in a thousand will be able to summon that mysterious confluence of presence and reserve on which stardom relies—the will both to offer oneself to the camera and yet to keep back the hidden, unguessable sources of that self.

Alongside that 99% of reasoning about film, let alone writing, is just hot air.

Mixed signals on the way to work this morning

1. At the station. A woman carefully goes through every page of the giveaway magazine "Sport" to make sure there's nothing in that will traumatise her nine-year old boy. Meanwhile he waits patiently and looks up at her expectantly.
2. On the platform. A woman with a seven year old boy who's wearing one of those anti-pollution face masks.
3. On the train. A woman with a well-dressed two year old boy. He turns to look out of the window and puts one of his feet on the seat. She immediately smacks him once on the backside. He starts crying, more out of shock and embarrassment than pain. She lectures him in some East European language for about ten seconds and then tries to cuddle him into submission. He, being male, is immediately placated. So she gives him a Milky Way.

Londoners Diary

To the Orange Broadband Prize For Fiction ceremony in the ballroom of the Festival Hall. I've no idea why I was invited. On the rare occasions I've expressed any view on this it's been to question whether we still need a fiction prize for women novelists. On the basis of the remarks from the stage it's precisely this kind of male observation that is most valued by the organisers because it helps keep the siege mentality at simmering point. Anyway, the occasion was notable for:

• the man from Orange making the best judged sponsors speech I've heard in a while
  
• the main prize going to the estimable Rose Tremain
• the candidates for Best New Writer being described as "three great women who've written great books"
• the sun arrowing over the Thames as I crossed Hungerford Bridge on one of those evenings that make you think "dull would he be who could pass by" etc etc
• The rapture on the faces of the cloakroom staff as they watched the paparazzi shoot frame after frame of token showbiz person Geri Haliwell
  

I'm no Home Secretary but...

...if the story in today's Times is true about 42 people having been caught trying to break into jails in the last five years, isn't it reasonable to assume that a certain number must have evaded detection. Are they still there? Have they come back out? Have they been released?

I'm no economist but....

....the first thing I heard this morning on the Today programme was a representative of the fishing industry saying "it no longer makes sense to fish because the cost of the fuel is greater than the value of the catch."

I thought to myself "I wonder if I'll remember this day."

I blame hen weekends for divorce

One of the many sobering facts in the first volume of David Kynaston's "Austerity Britain" is that in the 1930s the UK divorce rate was around 6,000 a year. By 1950, thanks to wartime upheaval, it had gone up to 20,000. That's partly because more people (425,000) got married for the first time in 1940 than in any other year since records began.

The UK divorce rate is now running at over 150,000 a year. I wonder whether the divorce rate rises in direct relation to the increase in fuss around the business of a wedding. In Barcelona the other weekend we came into contact with stag and hen parties from all over Europe. Bleached blonde girls from Carshalton wearing deeley-boppers at breakfast in the hotel, young Frenchmen dressed in nappies at the Park Guell and burly Brits in their late thirties striding round the Gothic Quarter in matching tee shirts.

Our daughter assures us this is now an obligatory component of the pre-match ritual. It's not something you have a choice about. It's important that you be seen to publicise your decision, particularly among your friends. When we got married nearly thirty years ago there were two ways to do it: you either organised it as a family occasion or you simply went to the Register Office and then told people about it afterwards. I know a few people who did this. I get the feeling nowadays that would be seen as passing up a unique opportunity to draw attention to yourself.

Censorship is always in a good cause

I realise this isn't the sort of place this blog normally goes but since Matthew Parris has broken cover to question the idiocy of the government's plan to make obscene drawings involving children illegal I should add my barely audible squeak of agreement to what he says in today's Times:

Maria Eagle, the Justice Minister, said that the move was not intended to curb creativity or freedom of expression but to tackle images that had “no place in society”. Crikey - the intellectual sloppiness! The move does curb creativity and freedom of expression: it curbs both in pursuit of what its proponents consider the greater public good. No censorship in history has ever been advanced on any other ground.

With the apparent connivance of the legal profession and encouraging moos from the media this government continues to act as if it finds itself faced with forms of evil that have never before been encountered in human society, crimes that require whole new laws to combat. I'm a simple soul but I've always understood that the law was there to deal with the consequences of people's actions and not the contents of their hearts. If this is passed into law it will subsequently be repealed by people who'll wonder what on earth Maria Eagle was thinking of. They'll also be amazed that the rest of us just nodded it through because we were afraid of appearing to be on The Wrong Side.

Be sure your SMS will find you out

Very good piece in the new issue of Wired describing the "spying" scandal involving Ferrari and McLaren. American magazines are strong on this soup-to-nuts storytelling. You can even overlook the references to "Surrey county" because you get a story that even Formula One unbelievers like me can understand. You also get some idea of how it's next to impossible for misbehaviour to remain undetected nowadays. The story first came to light when the wife of a McLaren employee took a 780 page document into a copy shop and handed it to to a guy who happened to be not just a Formula One follower but also a Ferrari fan. (How one can be a fan of a car company is something I can't come to terms with.) When the scandal came to light the FIA got records of no less than 288 SMS messages and 35 phone calls between the two alleged culprits. In such a world it seems par for the course that Max Mosley's little session with Miss Whiplash would end up in the News of The World. And the fact that Mr Whiplash works for MI5 does not cause us to raise even an eyebrow.

We are all in each other's pictures now

The digital camera is a wonderful thing but it has encouraged an infinite number of people to take an infinite number of infinitely unremarkable pictures. We were in Barcelona this weekend and visited the Casa Battlo, a rich man's house designed by Gaudi that has become one of the city's premier tourist attractions. Here you find yourself in a room with, say, twenty people, at least half of whom are taking pictures. This results in a strange new process of triangulation whereby no matter where you stand you are in somebody's picture. I was brought up in an era when photography was rare enough for you to be able to keep out of people's shots. It doesn't seem to be possible anymore. And photography is one of those things that increases in inverse proportion to people's competence. I have a friend who is a professional. It's very instructive to be a tourist in his company. He'll walk into a place where all the amateurs are snapping away as if they've got a once in a lifetime opportunity to capture a unique image and immediately say "there's no picture here".

Champions League Final

When you're watching penalty shoot-outs you usually have some skin in the game. Because I genuinely didn't care who won last night's European Final, penalties made for a most unsatisfactory conclusion. The trouble is the shoot-out gives the media permission to break the whole evening all down to individual tragedies and triumphs. This is really not what any football game, let alone last night's, was all about. This morning it's van der Saar's heroic save and Terry's tragic slip and is Ferguson the best manager of all time? This is just post justifying waffle. It could have gone either way. It was on the edge of chaos throughout. The managers stood there soaked and screaming and powerless like they always do. The winning team had their luck in a different order than the losing team. There was no moral.

Class of 62

Marilyn Gaunt went to a secondary modern school in Leeds in the late 50s. Her film "Class Of '62" is about what happened to half a dozen of her fellow pupils. Last night it found them in their sixties in various degrees of contentment. Even the girl who'd apparently had a dream life hadn't had it easy. There were divorces, overbearing parents, unfaithful husbands, ungrateful children, illnesses and in the odd case a sadness so deep that Marilyn Gaunt clearly thought she should pass over it entirely. The fortitude of these women, none of whom could remotely be said to have brought any misfortune on themselves, was amazing, even including the couple who wanted to move to Greece to get away from the nanny state but then came scuttling back as soon as they wanted a bit of nannying. You can watch it here. I kept thinking of that Paul Simon song called "Some Folks Lives Roll Easy" which goes "most folks stumble and fall through no fault of their own". I tried to find it on YouTube but it appears to be the only song that isn't there.

What are TV presenters for?

"Russia: A Journey With Jonathan Dimbleby", the BBC series currently running on Sunday nights, makes you wonder. In his effort to get to the heart of this vast, mysterious land and its inscrutable people Dimbleby is somewhat handicapped by the fact that the only word of Russian he knows is the one for "thank you". The producer, whose idea this series presumably was, is fluent so she comes round the Dimbleby side of the camera to translate the star's questions and the answers of the drunk on the train or the retired collective farm worker in her garden. That means there are three people in the frame. Common sense dictates that if we had to lose one, surely it would be the star.

Rum work still pulled round the font

Britain's Youngest Grannies on BBC Three began with a clip from an early '70s BBC show in which a glamorous granny was a carefully-coiffed lady in her 70s dressed along the lines of the Queen. It went on to introduce us to three contemporary women in their thirties who had all had daughters in their teens, daughters who had returned the compliment by doing the same thing. They were very different families but all gave birth to girls who were given names like Rickeita, Lexi, Casie, Lalah and Aliyah. The naming of children gives us away. We tend to choose names that we hope they can grow into. Unless, that is, we secretly don't want them to grow up at all.

To a blind horse

In the previous post somebody picked up on the point about radio presenters nodding when they interview you. It's remarkable what a key part of the broadcasting skill set nodding can be. In daily life they would you say "yes" or "uh huh". On the radio they have to use body language to do two things:
1. Get you talking.
2. Shut you up.
I have to turn off the Today Programme when I hear a "civilian" being interviewed because I know that by the time the interviewer has managed to get them talking it'll be time to shut them up, often with embarrassing abruptness.
Hence a fairly experienced hack like me knows that my main job is to start talking straightaway and keep going, while looking out for the tell-tale tics that indicate that the presenter either wants to move me on to another point or terminate the thing with something that could be passed off as an ending.
If it's a programme I'm used to doing, like "Front Row", they will tell me how long the item is and what illustrations they want me to cue. In such cases both the presenter and I are looking over each other's shoulders at the clocks behind us rather than at each other. If it's night time radio where you have generally been brought on to give the presenter a little thinking time, once they fling you a question you keep that answer going until it looks as if he's stopped taking instructions from the producer in their headphones and is ready to rejoin the conversation.
Of course none of this works if it's a phone interview. In that case you have to listen out for the strangulated vocal noises that indicates that they might want to cut in. Either that or the dead line that announces that they've already dropped your fader.

Sony presents the prizes

Congratulations to Simon Mayo, named Best Speech Broadcaster at last night's Sony Awards. Lots of former Radio One DJs have proved equal to doing a bit of speech but only Mayo has managed to establish himself as a proper all-rounder. His Five Live show proves he can handle anything from a Presidential primary to a sports story without resorting to the old DJ's trick of putting himself at the centre of the item. In the tradition of which I should point out that whenever I've guested on his show I have noted that as you're talking he looks at you as if he's not all that impressed. He doesn't employ the puppy eyes and vigorous nodding with which most presenters semaphore that you're on the right track. It seems to work. Whether he'll follow Five Live to Manchester we shall have to wait and see.

A classy gesture in a shabby world

Saw Neil Warnock on Sky this afternoon, spitting bile at the ref after his Crystal Palace side lost against Bristol City in the play-offs. Seen from that perspective you can see why he's not on any list of the most popular men in football. In his defence, last night I went to the leaving party of a high powered magazine editor who happens to be a Sheffield United fan and hence one of Warnock's admirers. In putting together a valedictory video his colleagues had contacted Warnock to see if he would agree to take part. He said yes, despite never having known the individual. What's more, he volunteered a Sheffield United shirt signed by the entire (admittedly relegated) team as a gift.

From the Media Grauniad home page this morning

The last chance saloon?

Last year I blogged about Newsnight's tendency to dress up apparently "dry" items about politics as student skits, much to the amusement of the presenters and the bemusement of the audience. This provoked some comment, including a robust defence from the producer. I have only just had this item drawn to my attention. It ran as part of the BBC's Election Night coverage last week. Clearly they're taking the piss but whose piss is it? The politicians'? The licence payers'? Theirs?

First rule of comedy

Most of the hour-long programmes on TV should really be half an hour. I watch things which are half an hour long, such as Seinfeld, knowing they'll only be twenty-two minutes. I just watched one. This exchange between Jerry and George at a New York marathon party makes me laugh out loud every time. Sure enough, somebody's posted it on YouTube. Watch the hand that holds the cracker.

Day return

They're having another of those debates about public art tonight at the National Gallery. On the radio this morning they were talking about what happens when such projects go wrong and fell upon the example of the vast sculpture of the parting lovers at St Pancras. Londoners don't agree on much but if there were a show of hands right now it would clearly be removed.

Joan Bakewell's objections to it were that the couple were in modern dress, it was too big and it was somehow kitsch. I don't disagree with any of that but I also wonder if we are living in an age in which we are never going to agree about representational pieces of any kind.

For a start they're supposed to be saying a tender, heartfelt farewell. Do you still see that? You used to see people weeping all the time at railway stations. I'm not sure that's the case anymore. You see it at airports maybe, when Mum and Dad are returning to India and there's a chance the grandchildren will never see them again. But a young couple parting at St Pancras? They're going to be texting each other while she's on the way through Kent and they'll be on Skype as soon as she's in Paris. And anyway, she's coming back tomorrow, isn't she?

Black sabbath

Last night somebody suggested that Spitalfields Market was a good place to go on Sunday morning. Determined that I wouldn't spend the entire weekend indoors, I suggested to the CEO that we should make a visit. The CEO doesn't like going on the Tube any more than she has to and I plain refuse to take the car. You won't be coming back with the drunks, I argued. It's London on a Sunday morning. It'll be fine.

To no avail. Determined not to be faced down, I got up early this morning and said that if nobody was going to come with me I was going to go on my own. Which I did. I took the train and bus to Liverpool Street, wandered around Spitalfields and back through the City into Covent Garden and then got on the tube at Leicester Square, feeling slightly smug that I had gone out to enjoy This Great City Of Ours while my family were still under the duvet.

My smugness was soon punctured. Between Leicester Square and Kings Cross I was targeted by the most active and aggressive loon I have encountered in forty years of using London Transport - and I'm Big City blasé when it comes to the extremes of human behaviour. Presumably off his medication, this bloke wasn't just jabbering to himself. He was jabbering directly at me, loudly and unintelligibly. When I didn't look him in the eye he lunged across the carriage and put his face between me and my book. He was fairly big and a lot younger than me. He wasn't the sort of person you would expect to be carrying a knife but the casualty departments are full of people who are naive in this respect.

He bothered me. He was certainly bothering the six-year-old sitting with his mother a couple of seats away. Had the CEO been there he would have bothered her in a big way and she would never have got on a tube train outside the rush hour ever again. The whole incident probably lasted about three minutes but it felt like ten and it's not easy to shake off its effect. I believe it's known as "lowering one's scene".

I just got home. How did it go, they asked.

Oh, fine.

Nothing dates like tech

I found this in a 1982 issue of Smash Hits. It's from a photo spread where various luminaries (members of Wham!, Garry Tibbs from the Vibrators, all the quality) pose with exciting new entertainment products of the time. If they can lift them, that is. Here Annie Lennox enthuses about the new light-weight VHS camerapack from Sony and suggests that we use it to make interesting documentary films that we can send to Channel Four. The power source is presumably following on an articulated lorry.

Hanging on in quiet desperation

I've just done what they say nobody does, which is watch an hour-long clip on the web. It's a lecture given recently by Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard law professor, about "the coming collapse of the middle class".

There are two reasons to watch it: she's a brilliant lecturer who, as far as I can see, is working without notes and just talking over a few Powerpoint slides. More importantly, her argument is a powerful one studded with lots of surprising details that you're tempted to introduce into dinner party conversation immediately. She sets a number of questions and then, on the basis of a study that compares the American family today to its predecessor thirty years ago, answers them. Does the average family spend more or less on clothes, food and appliances? How do hospitals become more efficient? Is it by curing the sick or sending them home? Do people believe in social mobility more or less than they believe that the moon landings were staged? Do you personally know more people who've gone bankrupt than people who've got divorced? And although the expression "middle class" summons up different pictures in America than it does in Britain – it's Homer and Marge rather than Margot and Jerry - I think a lot of her lessons could be applied here.

Heaven sent?

I'm reading John Gray's "Straw Dogs" , in which he argues that the secular humanism that passes for orthodox thought in most of Western society is merely the old religious impulse in a new guise. I hope he was watching Chelsea play Liverpool last night. That well-known Churchman Frank Lampard pointed to the sky after he'd scored his penalty, apparently "dedicating" his goal to his recently deceased mother. At the end that prominent man of faith Chelsea manager Avram Grant sank to his knees as if in thanks. In the post-match interview he muttered something about the Holocaust. What gets me about these gestures is their ostentatious nature and the fact that they appear to be playing up to some over-arching "triumph over tragedy" narrative provided by the papers and the TV.

The "deeply offended"

The Advertising Standards Authority has published its annual report into the most complained-about ads. A new language seems to have grown up around public apology. According to the BBC this morning the ASA apologised for the fact that ads for Trident gum that used voices speaking in a Caribbean accent could be "deeply offensive" and were guilty of perpetuating stereotypes. I tend to reserve my use of "deeply offensive" for people driving across the speed bumps down my road at a child-endangering 50 mph or the failure of the South African government to openly condemn the catastrophe in Zimbabwe. Even the guy who walked towards me urinating in the N1 centre the other week was pathetic more than offensive. "Deeply offensive" is grown-up code for "I'll get my Dad on you."

The worst I feel about a TV advert is "that's a bit irritating", particularly since I know from experience that every TV ad has to be signed off at every stage of its production by people whose job it is to avoid our hurt feelings. Advertising agencies are selling their gum to Afro-Caribbean people just as hard as they're selling it to me and my Greek, Asian and Russian neighbours. I believe them when they say that they consulted widely before making this ad. All TV adverts perpetuate stereotypes. They're thirty seconds long. If they didn't perpetuate stereotypes they wouldn't make much sense.

Vanity, vanity, all is vanity

The air is thick with the cloying smell of exploding humbug around the pictures of Miley Cyrus in "Vanity Fair". A bunch of powerful adults put weeks of work into taking suggestive pictures of a pretty 15-year old girl and putting them into the most prestigious magazine on the planet and then feign puzzlement and injured innocence over the fact that pressure from the public to gawp at them crashed the Conde Nast server. Everybody retreats mouthing apologies and protesting that they never dreamed they would be interpreted that way.

But really. Is there anybody involved who isn't thrilled with the outcome?
Not Miley Cyrus who has just raised the price she can ask for her first grown-up film.
Not her dad Billy Ray, a washed-up one hit wonder who suddenly finds his calls are getting answered again.
Certainly not Vanity Fair, its editors or Annie Leibowitz, who took the pictures.
And definitely not the Disney Corporation who have handled enough child stars to know that they are all corrupted sooner or later.
Move over, Lindsay Lohan. Here's some new skin for the old ceremony.

Girls talk

In 1978 Elvis Costello wrote that song about loving to hear girls talk. On a station platform yesterday morning it struck me that, thanks to the mobile phone, we're all getting to hear girls talk.

Men have generally used the phone as a means of obtaining information, whereas women have seen it as a machine that enables them to devote time to talking. The mobile's like that only more so. The young woman on the station platform was phoning her friend ostensibly to tell her that she'd been to the sale and the shop didn't have anything in her size whereas Rachel bought loads of things. In reality I guess she was just killing time until the train came by doing what girls do from about the age of six, making contact with their circle of friends and taking the temperature of their friendship. Having brought up two girls I have learned that young females have a capacity to wound each other that their male counterparts rarely bother with. They always socialise in threes which tends to mean that one is always uncertain of her position. Their mobile bills are higher than their brothers because they don't wait to be rung. They check in.

I worry that the mobile and the text and Facebook and the rest of it have provided them with new weapons to make each other feel excluded. This could be why I have noticed that the overt expressions of friendship during those phone conversations become more showy. They call each other "hon". They finish phone conversations with "love you". Even their texts manage to be high-pitched. They invent pet names for each other. I saw a colleague's leaving card recently which bore a good luck message addressed to "ladyface". The girls at the bus stop squeal when they see each other. I have a friend who is a head of a large secondary school and she now tells me they have considered building more time into the timetable to allow for all the kissing goodbye that takes place between lessons. I don't think she was entirely joking.

Many happy returns, Robert

There was a lot of coverage this week of the fact that Robert Dee, the young British tennis professional, won a match on the tour. This meant he was no longer "the worst tennis player in the world". Ho ho.

This is the kind of reflexive abuse that Tim Henman used to come in for because he never won a Grand Slam. Characterising professional athletes as "useless" is never a good idea but it seems particularly inappropriate with tennis players and doubly inappropriate coming from anyone in this country where tennis barely exists as a competitive sport.

If the average smart-arsed comic who fancied himself as a sportsman ended up on a pitch in a professional game of football he just might get to make contact with the ball on a few occasions. Put him on a professional cricket pitch he might make a catch or even score a run or two. But put him on the other side of the net from a professional tennis player and he would instantly realise that the game he was in bore absolutely no resemblance to any of his previous experiences on a tennis court.

I've played tennis against good amateur players and here's what I learned. I learned there was no point at all in my being there. The combination of skill, physical stature and racket technology in the game has now advanced to the point that the serve, like Shock and Awe, is a weapon used to make sure that your opponent never gets to actually oppose you. Do it right and he just trudges from side to side, going through the motions of assuming the position and then, just as the ball is clanging into the netting at the back of the court, lunging in the direction of where it previously went.

This is brought home once again by this ESPN piece in which their writer tries to face the serve of young American player John Isner. Isner has a serve that travels at 140 mph. That wouldn't be so bad if he weren't 6ft 9in tall. Therefore the ball is also coming down from God knows what height. The hapless hack is standing miles behind the base line and yet on the rare occasions he gets even the frame of the racket to the ball his arm is way above his own head height and therefore the chances of playing what you might call a shot are slim. Most of his "returns" end up on a neighbouring court.

And this doesn't mean that John Isner is obviously going to be the next Federer. I once took some lessons from a good young English pro and, just for a laugh, he would play a few points against me. I rarely got anywhere near the ball and he wasn't even trying. He explained to me that the British number one was better than him by the same factor that he was better than me. We really have no idea. We should shut our traps and wish Robert Dee the best of luck.

Keep up

Given the scale of the downsizing that has gone on in the music business in the last few years one would have thought that the left hand was in a better position to know what the right hand was doing. I put together the CDs that come with every issue of Word and in this capacity I get lots of approaches from PRs. Today I was contacted by one who suggested I might be interested in listening to a certain artist with a view to inclusion on one of our CDs in the near future. I was able to point that this act had in fact been included on the CD with the March edition. The reaction from the PR was faint embarrassment masked by indignation that nobody had told them. The notion that a PR is someone who has a right to be informed rather than a duty to inform themselves must be a recent innovation.

Simple minds

Clive James was talking on "A Point of View" on Radio Four this morning about V.S. Naipaul and the shortcomings of the view that you only appreciate the work of people you admire as human beings and disregard all others. And I quote:

"Poetry like Larkin's, and prose like Sir Vidia's, is still the best safeguard we've got against the rage for simplicity, the total view that wants to achieve a false peace by silencing everyone who might contradict us."

"The rage for simplicity". There's a book for our times.

Bet you can't do this

I miss twelve inch album covers. I miss the old plastic bags from Dobells in the Charing Cross Road. They had a photograph of a rack full of records. On the way home on the tube you could read the details on the spines and just wonder what it would be like to hold them. If somebody got on your carriage and they had a bag from Virgin or One Stop or even Boots you used to go and sit near them knowing that at some point in the journey they'd get their new purchase out and read the cover. (People do the same with CDs but it's nothing like as thrilling. They end up picking away at the security tag with their finger nails. They don't look like people seized with joy.) If they didn't actually get the LP out then people like me could sometimes look through the bag and work out what it was.


Anway, Fraser and I like to think we've come up with the Rock Quiz where you can't Google your way to the solution. Here are thirty fragments from the covers of pretty well-known - in some cases multi-platinum - albums montaged together. There's a larger version of it here on the Word site where you can also find your way to the solution.

Names are dropping like flies

Last night I went to a dinner party "for" David Simon, the man who invented "The Wire". It was thrown by his publishers Canongate, who have picked up his 1991 book "Homicide" for publication later this year. Simon's in London editing his new HBO mini series "Generation Kill", based on the book by Evan Wright. The party's in Notting Hill, one part of London that I'm never entirely comfortable in. It's the kind of do where Zadie Smith drops in for coffee and sits there rolling tiny cigs which she can't smoke. Nick Cave is expected later but by then I'm on the Piccadilly line.

Simon told me a story about seeking Tom Waits's permission to use "Down In The Hole" as "The Wire"'s theme tune that confirms my suspicion that when confronted by the need to make a decision, musicians will happily don the mantle of hopelessness. Simon had made a personal application and supplied tapes of the show for Waits to look at but still had no word back and it was getting close to deadline. He somehow got Waits's home number and called him. Sorry to bother you, Mr Waits, but we were wondering if you'd got the tapes.

Oh yes, said Waits. Sorry for the delay but my wife is away at the moment and I can't work the VCR on my own. Tell you what. Go ahead.

The Chinese way

If you haven't done it already you should try to see the first episode of the BBC's "Chinese School" (the iPlayer link is here). The main character is a teenage high-flier who's expected to do well in the national examination and go to the top university. You get the impression that the whole nation holds its breath when these tests come around. If you do well you can join the elite. Underperform and you are destined to be factory fodder. When the exams take place planes are diverted and traffic is calmed to ensure that nothing interrupts the concentration of the candidates.
The day after the exams they're not down the pub or off to Ibiza. They're sitting studying the answer sheet and trying to estimate how well they did. I can't imagine anything more purgatorial. Anyway, our student looks at the answers and bursts into tears. She thinks she's messed it up. She's inconsolable.
Not surprising really. When the results came out she'd got 98%.

As the crow walks

I thought it was just me who had developed this desperate need to walk everywhere. Then I heard Will Self talking about walking from airports to the centre of cities and how it was a need to reconnect yourself with your surroundings.

But there's more. When I leave the office I can either take a short, unpleasant walk to King's Cross to take the tube or a long, pleasant walk to Highbury & Islington and then catch the overground home. I've lately come to the conclusion that the reason I don't take the former is because it's in the wrong direction. Does something happen to you when you reach a certain age that means you can no longer tolerate not heading where you're going? If I'm forced out of my way because of some kink in the transport system I get crosser and crosser and crosser. If I can take the right heading I'm happy, no matter how long the journey is.

I think Paul K. Lyons realised this before me. He's written about what it's like to walk across London in a more or less straight line south to north (which takes him past the end of my road) and east to west. Good to know I'm not alone.

A small step for man

Last night Stephen Fry devoted an hour of television to explaining how Gutenberg made the first printing press. Quite interesting, but not as good as this which Chris Bourke has just sent me from New Zealand. It's bound to be Easter somewhere.

Just a thought

China. Most powerful, richest, most populous and - for the moment at least - most controversial country in the world.
Can anyone name a Chinese person?
Go on. Statesman, sports star, inventor, author, inndustralist, benefactor or reality TV star, anyone you like.
Maybe you can. Good for you. I can't, not without looking them up. I know more Belgians.
At some stage over the next few months somebody in the Chinese hierarchy is going to persuade somebody else in the Chinese hierarchy that they maybe ought to appoint a spokesperson who can present their policies to the West in English. Whoever gets the job becomes one of the most famous people in the world overnight.

Natty tread

The most powerful indicator of actual poverty is still footwear or the lack of it. My grandparents used to talk about the kids who went to school barefoot. I have a friend who wore nothing but wellingtons throughout his early childhood. Southside Johnny called one of his albums "At Least We Got Shoes" after something that his grandfather used to say. I was struck by this when watching the London Marathon yesterday. The six Tanzanians who did the race in full Masai fig had shoes made out of car tyres. This is nothing unusual, as I discovered when I visited Ethiopia. Market traders will run you up a pair of Reef-like sandals (above) out of a lorry tire that has run out of tread.

I'm sure there's a thesis to be written about the contrast between this and the boxfresh trainers sported by hip hop stars - and even some people I see on the Tube long after rush hour. There is no flaunting of wealth quite so calculated as the regular sporting of new shoes. This is particularly the case, as a casual viewing of MTV's "Cribs" will attest, when the shoes themselves are trainers, an item ostensibly designed as an unremarkable workhorse. Missy Elliott does her own line for Adidas, known as "Respect Me". According to the manufacturer these are ideal for the start of the academic year, presumably the key time for getting people to admire you because of your gym pumps.

We were robbed

Last night we had the unaccustomed pleasure of a visit to the cinema. We went to see "The Bank Job", a very enjoyable picture embroidered by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais on the basis of an actual robbery that took place in Baker Street in 1971. What makes it sing is their plausible inclusion of threads relating to real life figures from that time like Princess Margaret, Michael X and Lord Mountbatten. These were the people that you would read about in the Sunday papers in the days when scandal was hinted at but never quite spelled out.

It can't have done all that well at the box office because the Odeon Leicester Square had banished it to Screen Five, a former box-room at the top of the building which has space for just about forty seats. Leg room is further reduced by the thoughtful installation in the back of each seat of a cup-holder, as if to remind you that your main job as a customer is to consume their confectionery. Having paid £19 for the two of us, eating was out of the question.

A beautiful song

Before they're swallowed whole by the all-consuming tsunami of parody let us pay tribute to Michael Flanders and Donald Swann in general and "The Slow Train" in particular. They recorded it in the early '60s just as Doctor Beeching's report into the railways was sweeping away much of the network of local stations that used to take people to work or the shops in the days before car ownership.
I'm no steam fan but the litany of names, the hymn-like tug of the tune and the trueness of the recording can moisten even my dry eye. And I'm not remotely surprised that somebody has bothered to tell the true story of every station mentioned in the song.

Liquorice goes upmarket

When I wor a lad liquorice grew on trees. Or at least it came out of the ground in nearby Pontefract where it's said they brought it back from the Crusades. We bought it in sticks, in all-sorts, in round medallions called Pomfret Cakes and, when the budget was under pressure, in root sticks which used to sit like stick insects in jars in the sweet shops. It was not a prestige sweet. Even then it was old-fashioned.

And now it's re-appeared as premium priced low-sugar confectionery. It's very often called Australian Soft Eating Liquorice, you can get it at health food shops where it comes in huge soft logs and costs about three quid a bag. You may well love it. Yesterday my wife went to Fortnum and Mason and appeared home with one of those bijou carrier bags that usually contains something expensive and inconsequential. And so it proved. She'd bought about a dozen Pomfret Cakes. For just under three pounds. I'm rationing them out.

Get on with the bloody game

It looks like this week's debacle will be the last time that the Olympic torch will be toured around the world's capital cities. Good. And while we're at it can we get rid of all the attendant hoo-hah that has grown up around all major sporting occasions in order to satisfy the cravings of sponsors, TV producers, politicians and anyone else who seeks to use such events to "harness the power of sport" to sell gym pumps, energy drinks or a country's political system.

Let's also see an end of: choreographed dancing displays, huge flags passed down from the back of the stand to the front, any form of singing that could be said to be organised, ticker tape that some poor bugger has to pick up, pre-match firework displays in broad daylight that leave the action invisible for the first ten minutes, the cup "delivered" by abseiling parachutists, prize presentations that involve the hurried building of stages in the middle of the pitch, minutes' silences for any tragedy that didn't directly involve the people involved, pop singers doing melismatic versions of national anthems and, yes, even small children holding the hands of hung-over millionaires.

Anyone who thinks that major sporting occasions can be rendered more gripping by the addition of such nonsense should be disqualified from ever having anything to do with a sporting occasion. We don't need it. It gets in the way. It's nothing but trouble.

The most dangerous path in the world

I can't stop looking at this and thinking how lucky I am not to have to walk on the real thing. I'm bound to dream about it soon.

Snow-oh!

This is the view from the kitchen this morning. The snow was forecast to arrive but nonetheless we still react to it with the same delighted surprise as we did as a child.

Tradition dictates that whoever gets up first will always open the curtains and exclaim "Oh!" in precisely the same voice.

VIP coming through

Walking down Upper Street yesterday afternoon at four I passed the Prime Minister going the other way. To the summit in Watford, presumably. I've seen the PM's motorcade on a few occasions. There are police cars fore and aft but the main body consists of two black Range Rovers and two black Jags. I suppose the idea is that the potential assassin doesn't know which one contains the target.

It's nothing compared to the American President. I was in Sydney, Australia when Clinton was visiting and everywhere I went in that quite small city my progress was held up by his endless motorcade, plasma trucks and all. I eventually gave up and returned to my hotel room overlooking the harbour. I opened the curtains just in time to see Clinton and John Howard's boat pushing off from the adjacent dock. Looking around for someone to wave at, they waved at the only available person, which was me. I waved back.

A few years later I was passing through Green Park on a summer's evening and made to cross the Mall just as a limo bearing the royal standard came off the roundabout in front of Buckingham Palace. I was the only pedestrian on the Mall as the car went slowly past me. The passengers were the Queen and Prince Philip. They waved. I waved back.

If age but could and youth but would

This morning, in an attempt to impart to my youngest a few tips about comprehension that might prove useful in her upcoming GCSEs, I suggested that we go for a walk. She arrived at the front door in sandals and bare feet. Between both parents it was suggested on no less than six separate occasions that such footwear might lead to pain. This was batted back with everything ranging from a mild "I'm fine" to an indignant "Do you think I'm stupid?"
As I've observed before, we nag kids because we know it doesn't work. Halfway through the walk she had to sit down on a park bench such was the pain. When she got home she spent half an hour with her feet soaking in the bath. When I left this afternoon she was lying face down on the bed having extensive surgery on her blisters. By now she will have worked up to the need for a pair of brand new surgical shoes.
Age is about the steadily-dawning anticipation of consequences. Being 15 is about not daring to think of those consequences in case they stand in the way of one's immediate desire.

Charles Dickens's desk

They're selling the desk and chair that Charles Dickens wrote "Great Expectations" on to benefit Great Ormond Street hospital. They estimate it might realise up to £80,000. Is that really such a lot for something with such associations? Obviously it's beyond my budget but in a world where people pay fortunes for football shirts allegedly worn by Michael Owen on one particular Saturday, is it really that much? There are a lot of wealthy individuals and institutions around. This is the desk on which our greatest novelist wrote our greatest novel. This is the ink stain he contemplated as he sucked his pen. This is where he laid his head and probably sucked his thumb when inspiration failed to arrive.
Tell you what, I'll put a fiver in to start the ball rolling.