Who killed the Oscars?

They're giving tonight's Oscars ceremony a facelift. There's talk of the presentation having a theme. What? Other than the Oscars theme? I'm feeling embarrassed already. Apparently, in keeping with the times, it will be more restrained. That memo didn't get through to Angelina Jolie who's trying to get hold of a $20 million necklace to wear on the night.

TV audiences have been dropping steadily over the years and the producers would like to restore an element of surprise. It's strange because all the elements they're trying to change - the tight focus on a couple of films as potential winners as pre-selected by lots of lesser awards shows in the run-up, the parading of all the starflesh on the red carpet beforehand, the leaking of details of the show in the press - have been deliberately introduced by the industry in an effort to maximise the evening's impact and ensure its subsequent box office clout.

Some business academic ought to put a name to the process by which businesses, in seeking to extend their control over a golden egg machine, invariably kill the goose. Witness the death of the singles chart. Slaughtered by the fell hand of the music business, the very people who most needed it to survive.

And what has Spotify ever done for us?

If there's ever an internet music play that appears too good to be true, it's Spotify, which has taken over the world of The Word in the last week or so. Effectively, the Spotify player means you can stream music from the world's biggest jukebox, stocked with tracks provided with the blessing of the record labels.

What's the catch? Your listening will be peppered with advertising. If you pay a monthly fee you don't have to put up with that. At the moment they're rolling it out a bit at a time and you have to be invited to take part. You could try following this link to a playlist I've set up and see how you get on. You might even be able to add things. Please don't add whole albums. It quickly becomes tiresome if people do that.

What has Twitter ever done for us?

I've never seen anything take off as quickly as Twitter appears to have done in the last couple of weeks. It seems a classic case of the way that ideas now spread. They travel through circles of friends. You join because you know a few friends who have joined it already. If you didn't know anyone who had tried it nothing else would ever possess you to give it a go. Here's mine.

I've come round to the view that people are now drawn to many things - books, bands, magazines, particularly magazines - through friends. In that sense propagating a magazine today is less a question of introducing the magazine to new readers than was formerly the case. Instead it's like expanding your circle of friends. You do it through baby steps and close encounters rather than by giant strides and big gestures.

I also wonder if the current financial situation has provided Twitter with the perfect moment. Right now people want to hold hands, even if it's via a screen. It costs nothing. And for those who are coping with unemployment it's the perfect way to say "I'm still here."

ITV: a lesson from history

I feel sorry for anyone who's livelihood might be affected by the cuts that ITV is said to be contemplating in the light of the fall in its advertising revenue. I also remember how ITV used to boss the market when it held a virtual monopoly over TV advertising in this country. In the early 80s I was involved in the launches of mass circulation magazines supported by TV advertising. In cases like these you had to be able to buy the first break in, say, Wednesday's "Coronation Street". Of course, you'd have to pay top dollar for the privilege. Nevertheless, as your advertising agency would explain to you, you had no guarantee that the ad would actually appear. If one of their bigger clients, such as Proctor and Gamble, came along in the late afternoon and wanted that slot instead, they would have no compunction about replacing your ad with theirs and your whole, carefully planned campaign would be holed below the waterline. That's irrelevant now but, well, I remember.

If you've got an hour, this could cheer you up

Today I heard a wonderful thing. It was a lecture called "Speaking In Tongues" given by Zadie Smith in New York. I'm too stupid to be able to capture any more than ten per cent of what she has to say but I found even that percentage inspiringly sane. She starts with what it was like to be a girl from Willesden who went to Cambridge and came out with a different voice and goes on through Eliza Doolittle's desire to get a new voice in order to work in a florist via Cary Grant's transformation from Archie Leach to Pauline Kael's "the man from Dream City" to a timely examination of Barack Obama's brilliant way of knowing how to adopt different voices to speak to different elements of America. (She could have added Bob Dylan's transformation from Jewish storekeeper's son to the eternal hobo outsider but that would have just been for me.)

In the second half she celebrates equivocation and looks at how our greatest poet, Shakespeare, was forever nipping back and forth over the frontiers of belief. (In this she credits Stephen Greenblatt's "Will In The World" which you should read if you have the slightest interest in, well, that kind of thing.) She wonders why we expect politicians to exhibit the very certainty which is our least appealing characteristic.

I don't know what the weather is going to do tomorrow but if it's anything like fine I think you should download this recording of her delivering this lecture, put it on your iPod and go for a walk long enough to listen to it. If you don't come back feeling slightly better about mankind, well, at least you'll have had some exercise.

Why I Twitter

Well, you've got to, haven't you?

How the media works (latest in an endless series)

A well-known Radio 4 programme just called me. They wanted to do a story about the magazine ABC figures and needed a comment. I took my "tell me what you want me to say and I'll tell you whether or not I'll say it" stance. It turns out that out of these thousands of figures, all of which tell a story to initiates but may as well be in Aramaic as far as outsiders are concerned, they had identified two threads.

One was fairly well-based. However once the broad brush had done its work it was bound to be wildly misleading. What's the point of me going on the radio to say, what you've just said is not the case for these reasons? That's going to mess up their neat and tidy narrative and make me sound very pedantic.

The other was a thread about an initiative that somebody's trying to get off the ground. I'm prepared to bet my house it won't work but again what's the point of going on the radio to pour cold water over something that most people have never heard of and will never get to hear about? That will make me sound bitter. So I politely declined, leaving the producer a bit miffed.

The media - particularly the broadcast media - has a series of dance steps worked out. What it's looking for is a partner who's prepared to follow. The last thing it wants is somebody who's going to stop and say "why are we doing the waltz when we should be doing the foxtrot?" Some of this frustration is unavoidable. Elvis Costello was talking about this in a recent issue of Word. He found the tedious thing about being interviewed is that the interviewer always came along with a preconception that wasn't true. Then he started his own chat show and discovered he was doing the very same thing himself.

I'm sure this says something profound about the media but I don't know exactly what

The lead story on the Mail's website today credits The Sun.

The widow's mite

Last night I had a drink with somebody who runs a small charity with magazine attached. He was explaining how a lot of their income comes from people who make a bequest of a small percentage of their modest estates. If that estate turns out to include a house in the south-east of England the small percentage can amount to a significant sum. That certainly applied before house price inflation went into reverse. Because many of his subscribers were elderly he was accustomed to the call from a widow informing them that their husband had died and the subscription should stop. These calls came about a year after the death. This chimed with the experience of one former colleague of mine who was editor-in-chief of a well-known magazine with a reader profile on the far side of 65. He reckoned that at any given time about 10% of his subscribers were dead. Their subscriptions hadn't been cancelled because their widows couldn't yet face cutting that particular chord.

The best insults descend from a great height

I think Rowan Pelling was on to something in the Daily Telegraph today:

You have to be careful what you say nowadays. A teacher is facing disciplinary procedures at a school in Hampshire after she told a 13-year-old that her itsy-bitsy skirt made her "look like a slut". The problem, it seems to me, was not the nature of the insult, but the language it was couched in. My old headmistress, who had once been a missionary, used to tell brazen girls that they looked like "painted Jezebels". The more elevated the language, the greater the freedom to abuse: that's what I learned at school.

Sofa, so good

We bought our first house nearly thirty years ago. The couple we got it from were divorcing. Because neither of them had the room to house it, they bequeathed us a beaten-up old sofa. We were delighted. At the time any furniture at all was a bonus. When the kids subsequently came along the old sofa was put into one of their bedrooms. They jumped on it without mercy. Scores of over-stimulated little visitors would climb on its back. Its possibilities as a trampoline, bus and shire horse were explored with some rigour. We didn't mind because we hadn't paid for it. We deduced from the fact that we obtained it for nothing that it must be on its last legs. Kids were ill in it - and probably on it. They had stories read to them on it. I've lost count of the number of times we've fallen asleep on it with some spark-out child cutting off the circulation to an arm. It's been terribly mistreated and yet through all that it has remained the most comfortable item of furniture in the house and the house after that.

Until a couple of months ago we thought that was mere sentiment. Then we got an upholsterer round to examine our furniture and see what was worth improving. He looked at a few different sofas and eventually pointed at the old one. "That," he said, "is a very fine piece of furniture. If you could buy something like it today it would cost a lot of money." He explained all the design features that made it so comfortable. This was an unexpected bonus. It was like suddenly finding out that chocolate was good for you.

We paid for it be reupholstered. Today it came home, no longer to be covered in discarded shoes, empty cereal bowls and copies of Heat in an upstairs bedroom, but to take pride of place in the sitting room. It's expected to be receiving visitors in due course.

Hedgehoppers Anonymous

We've all visited some holiday island where the landing strip at the airport didn't seem to give the pilot much room for error. That's nothing compared to St Maarten in the Caribbean where an arriving jumbo could probably take the flake out of your 99.

Tell me, what attracted you to the famous multi-millionaire?

A.A. Gill was on the radio just now talking about how modern men should guard against gold-digging women. The Today Programme's attitude was "does that kind of thing still go on?" which just how naive we've become. You only have to look around you to see the thing still going very strong indeed. Find a rich man and, quite often, you'll note that he is accompanied by a woman who is younger and more physically attractive than he is. What's surprising is how surprising we seem to find it. Chaucer would have taken it for granted. Darwin wouldn't have batted an eyelid. Jane Austen would have said "Durrr?"

Randy Newman, who deals with all the subjects too obvious for most songwriters to notice, touched on this recently in a song called "The World Isn't Fair", which is supposed to be addressed to Karl Marx. Here he describes going with his second wife to the parents meeting at his young children's new school:

I went to the orientation
All the young mommies were there
Karl, you never have seen such a glorious sight
as these beautiful women arrayed for the night
just like countesses, empresses, movie stars and
queens
And they'd come there with men much like me
Froggish men, unpleasant to see
Were you to kiss one, Karl
Nary a prince would there be

The art of tea

Tea is an underrated meal. Matter of fact, it seems odd to call it a meal. Today being a family birthday, we had tea at the Wolseley in Piccadilly. There was tea in proper teapots. Arrayed on one of those triple decker spinner plates were sandwiches with the crusts removed, scones with jam and cream and a medley of little cakes. Afterwards we wandered up Bond Street and looked in the windows of shops that were safely closed. Once home we opened presents and ate some absurdly expensive Beaufort cheese with a bottle of Nyetimber. This is sparkling wine from Sussex. I am in a position to tell you that it's very good indeed. Knocked sideways by its quality, some of our party have already turned in. I shall do the same once this Everton and Liverpool game is over. This may, of course, be early by your standards. But that's the great thing about tea. It's at tea time.

Technology is still all a blur

It's the fifth anniversary of the launch of Facebook. Isn't it also the 30th birthday of the Mac? How these things can go from obscurity to ubiquity that quickly has gone from breathtaking to commonplace. These things spread so fast that very soon you can't remember what life was like before they came along. At the same time you can't remember when they came along. I feel we need a new vocabulary to describe the effect such phenomena have on our memory.

My past life is marked out by academic years, the stages of the career of the Beatles, the arrival of punk rock, the ages of my children and the launches of magazines. I don't have a mental timeline that I can consult for the arrival of the mobile phone, the desktop computer, the internet or Facebook. As the snail said after he was mugged by the tortoise, "It all happened so fast."

Snowballs

Taken in the local park this morning.

The rise of the words "not appropriate"

When did the expression "not appropriate" become the all-purpose signifier of disapproval? I just heard it again on the news. It's increasingly applied to everything from intemperate outbursts by radio presenters to child abuse. It's a favourite of apologising officials. There's something very mealy-mouthed and prim about it, isn't there? Presumably it was adopted to avoid an overly-judgmental adjective like "wrong".

The world hasn't gone mad but this woman and her doctor may have

Alan Bennett famously said "All families have a secret. The secret is they're not like other families". Too true. I wonder what he'd say about Nadya Suleman, the mother of the Los Angeles octuplets. As this woman recovers in her hospital bed and negotiates with America's biggest magazines and TV shows, fragments of information emerge about her personal circumstances.

We start with the most remarkable of all. She's not on welfare. Which is pretty remarkable when you consider she's already got six children, doesn't work, has recently completed her studies into child development and lives with her mother who is divorced and recently fended off personal bankruptcy. Mother says Nadya has always been "nuts about children". Move on. She had the previous six children by in vitro fertilisation. The father was not her husband. She was recently divorced from him. He's gone to work as contractor in Iraq. Move on.

So then there's the next eight children. I'm a bit hazy about how these things work but one must assume that at some point she went along to a medical professional and said "You know the six kids I've already got? Well, I'm so tickled with them I'd like some more." And one must assume that the medical professional said "Of course. Let's try eight, shall we?"

There's an entire book to be written about how this comes to pass in a country where most people dread having to go into a hospital, not because of the MRSA but because of the cost. Anyway, the cab driver side of my brain sides with Arthur Caplan, a bioethics expert from the University of Pennsylvania, when he says "anyone who transfers eight embryos should be arrested for malpractice." I might add that my wife always says "some women have children to give love, some have children to get love." Well, she shouldn't go short with fourteen of them.

I don't know what all this means. Oh, hang on, I do. As Paul Simon pointed out years ago in song, some folks lives roll easy, some folks stumble and fall through no fault of their own. What he should have pointed out in a final verse is that some folks have a deep seated desire to make their lives more complicated than they already are. And these are infallibly people whose lives are already very, very complicated.

The passing of the Bearded Wonder

Bill Frindall died today. If Test Match Special always had the character of a senior common room, with all the accumulated antipathy seething away 'neath the brittle surface of the bonhomie, Frindall played the head of the geography department who had been passed over for the deputy headship but nonetheless remained loyal.

His role was twofold: to keep the score and to suggest that it was about to rain. Now that the room temperature of sports coverage is so high and hysterical, we shall never again see anyone quite so pessimistic given access to a mike.

Falling into the "oop north" trap

I don't deliberately pick on the BBC website but this extract from Razia Iqbal's blog about meeting Alan Bennett caught my eye:

Watching the play, I found myself thinking about how successfully Bennett has mined his past and his upbringing, and how lovingly he has given voice to working class life and communities, without being either nostalgic or sentimental.

I've seen nearly everything Alan Bennett has written and I can't remember much that's concerned with what I would call "working class life and communities". I've seen lots of lower middle class characters with strong Yorkshire accents. I suppose it's all the same from Planet Shepherd's Bush, isn't it?

This just in - humanity still some way from perfection

In the course of a column in The Guardian about making absent fathers pay child support, Polly Toynbee writes:

The world is full of good men and good fathers - there just aren't enough of them to go round.

I haven't been able to concentrate since reading this. If there aren't enough good men to go around then it surely follows that there can't be enough good women to go round either. Which means there aren't enough good people to go round.

Now there's a column, surely?

So you think you can sort out the British car industry?

According to The Times, 86% of the cars bought in the UK last year were imported and 78% of the cars made here were exported. Solution by the weekend, please.

A bit of a do

If you need reminding what was lost when photo-journalism disappeared, have a look at these remarkable pictures that Life Magazine took around the Harlem funeral of Bill "Bo Jangles" Robinson in 1949.

She's got the whole world in her pram

Life is a good deal too short to keep up with all the domestic comings and goings in the world of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie but it's difficult to look at these pictures of them arriving at Narita airport in Tokyo with their six small children and not draw the conclusion that these kids are, on some level at least, accessories.

I don't doubt that, like many of us civilians, highly-paid superstars have strong parenting instincts. But to appear with so many children so quickly? Wouldn't such conspicuous procreation be better expressed in the traditional Hollywood way? What about buying a load of cars and helping the stricken auto industry? We know you can do things that us mere mortals can not but is there really a call to rub our noses in it this way?

When I look at pictures like this I like to play the mental game that I call Just Out Of Shot. In this case Just Out Of Shot must be at least three full-time nannies, a phalanx of wide wheel-base buggies, mum's make-up artist and hairdresser, dad's personal trainer and porters pushing along trollies piled high with their possessions.

Just the average nuclear family.

Frank Skinner minds his language

Frank Skinner's "Have I Got Bad Language For You?" report on last night's Panorama is worth seeing. I like the way he managed to look majestically unimpressed when talking to embarrassed defenders of TV profanity like Jana Bennett of the BBC and embarrassed critics of it like Charles Moore. Skinner has recently decided to reduce the amount of swearing in his act and found that it didn't in any way diminish the show's impact. I'm not surprised.

In real life swearing is, by its very nature, hard to justify. This doesn't mean we don't do it. I do it all the time in front of about a dozen people. I have known those people for a long time and I'm confident they're not offended by it. In broadcasting you can only justify it on the grounds of dramatic realism - though I fancy "Boys From The Black Stuff" and "Our Friends In The North" managed to convey a sense of real life without employing as much profanity as Gordon Ramsay needs to make an omelette.

Use it in humour and you're then in a position where you have to use it all the time. One "fuck" is never quite enough. You have to have an act peppered with "fucks" to maintain the tone. And whereas in a real life conversation you filter the profanities out, when you're just listening or watching each one seems to have greater than usual emphasis. The speakers are not swearing on your behalf. They're doing it at you. Al Murray, who's interviewed in this film, talks about comedy shows where the word has come down from on high to make it "edgier". I would take that to mean, can you make it less comfortable for some of the people watching? This is in the hope, usually false, that this will then make it more appealing to the section of the audience, usually younger, that we are trying to attract at the moment.

The one thing that swearing on TV can never claim to be is natural. This struck me recently when somebody swore on one of our Word Podcasts. I realised then that, with absolutely no regulatory framework, with an audience of consenting adults who had pulled the experience towards them rather than having it pushed into their living rooms, with a format that is designed to elicit the most intemperate reactions, we hardly ever swore. We did it but we did very sparingly and often prefaced it with "if you're in the car with the kids you might want to duck the volume here...." Just as you wouldn't swear on the bus in case you offended someone who was in hearing distance, we rarely swore in this context because, well, somebody might be listening.

Re: Panorama. What the bloody hell is Jeremy Vine doing at the beginning and end of that programme poncing around outside Television Centre? I hope my licence fee is not paying him for that.

Who writes the BBC website?

There's a sweet story on the BBC site about "folk singer" James Taylor buying a fan a new iPod after she had to give up her own in settlement of a cab fare. Near the bottom of the item it drops this brick, presumably sourced from Hackipedia:

Taylor is best known for penning the classics You've Got a Friend and How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You).

In actual fact the first one was by Carole King and the second by Holland-Dozier-Holland. Apart from that it's a sentence difficult to fault.

Suddenly, I'm all over the papers

A friend rang this afternoon to draw my attention to the fact that this blog has shown up in The Times today. Apart from the fact that I am delighted to be that close to Tina Fey, I don't know how to respond to publicity. When I began this blog it was only because I wanted to read my own thoughts written down. Then slowly a few other people overheard me muttering to myself and occasionally dropped in. Some of them felt moved to comment. That's as it should be. Blogs are best approached with either low expectations or no expectations at all.

I note that I occasionally stray "exhilaratingly close to grumpy old man territory". I have decided not to be discouraged by any such category reprimand. The fact it might be possible to assign somebody to a group of citizens does not, I've decided, make their views any less valid. I probably am a grumpy old man. Deal with it. Old gits have something to say, as does everyone else. I don't hold anyone's age against them. Nor should anyone else.

What happened to grime played through a hearing aid?

I don't want to tempt providence but I wonder what happened to that plague of young blokes playing music on their phones in public places that everybody was complaining about not long ago. What stuck in the craw was not so much the annoyance. It was the fact that so much annoyance was being caused in the name of so little pleasure. Anybody who could listen to music in those conditions didn't love the music so much as they loved irritating people. I haven't noticed it for the last couple of months. Am I alone?

Advertising not yet dead

Saw this massive cross-track poster last night at Tottenham Court Road. People waiting for the train were gawping at it, slack-jawed. It's for holidays in Canada. The copy is beautiful. "We're guessing this almost never happens in London."

Calm down, dear, he's only a President

Of all the commentators pronouncing on what governments should do next, Matthew Parris of The Times is one of the few who has actually served in government, albeit not at a very grand level. Therefore he knows only too well what Barack Obama may be about to find out - that actions don't always change things and when they do it's often with unintended consequences.

Parris has a very good column today which looks at the unrealistic level of hope being invested this week in a nebulous vision of "change" and makes the point that "those who fan the flames of expectation run the danger of sowing, finally, the seeds of cynicism."

Thankfully the one person who doesn't seem drunk on his oratory is Obama himself.

The difficulty of disciplining footballers

The Guardian have a story about Robinho's walking out of Manchester City's training camp in Tenerife the other day. The first bit goes:

Robinho reacted to the collapse of Kaka's proposed £91m deal by packing his suitcase and arranging for a private jet to take him back to Brazil

I'm trying to picture this. Are we to believe that Robinho packed an overnight bag, arranged his bed so that it looked as if he was still sleeping, escaped from the hotel via the fire escape and took a cab to the airport where a jet was waiting to whisk him to Sao Paulo? But that doesn't strain credibility so much as the response of City's chairman to the incident.

However, Cook confirmed Robinho had not received consent to go, describing the player's behaviour as "very disappointing" and confirming that he would be fined.

How can you fine somebody who takes private jets on a whim? That's the problem. When it comes to discipline football clubs have no sticks but an unlimited supply of carrots. Bet they end up paying him more money to come back.

He can talk, can't he?

Watched the Inauguration. Funny how they practice everything, cover every angle but the actual oath is not properly rehearsed. Anyway, he got through it. One of his qualities is he never looks embarrassed. I thought the speech was very good. Not as a piece of rhetoric but he delivered it like he meant it. And this was the best bit.

Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the fainthearted -- for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things -- some celebrated, but more often men and women obscure in their labor -- who have carried us up the long, rugged path toward prosperity and freedom.

For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life.

For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West; endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth.

For us, they fought and died, in places like Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sahn.

Time and again, these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions; greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction.

This is the journey we continue today. We remain the most prosperous, powerful nation on Earth. Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began. Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last week or last month or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished. But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions -- that time has surely passed. Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.

The "for us" repetition works really well and obeys the power of three. And I love the reference to "standing pat" which happens to be in my favourite song lyric, Louis Armstrong's "St James Infirmary". Which goes:

Oh, when I die, please bury me
In my ten dollar Stetson hat;
Put a twenty-dollar gold piece on my watch chain
So my friends'll know I died standin' pat.

The only promise Obama can deliver on

Barack Obama reckons he smokes about eight cigarettes a day. That's what he told "Men's Health", anyway. If he's being as economical with the truth as most of us are when the doctor asks how much we drink, I'd say that means he actually smokes more than a dozen. I don't think it'll take much more than a week in his new job to have him up to twenty a day.

What I want to know is, where's he going to smoke them? My knowledge of White House layout is gleaned from a tour round the place back in the days when you could do such things and then close observation of Martin Sheen in "The West Wing". As far as I can work out there's a French window from the Oval Office that leads into a colonnade opening on to the garden. Out there at all times is a white-capped Marine (and no doubt all sorts of heavy artillery in the foliage). That's where The First Skiver will presumably step out. But who's he going to smoke with? Is he going to gather a group of White House malcontents around him, as is traditional in smoking sections? Washers-up from the White House kitchen? A bunch of interns talking about how pissed they got last night? And is somebody even now attaching one of those horrid ashtrays into the wall?

Clearly, he should give up. In fact he should make it part of his Inauguration Speech. "And I pledge to you, fellow Americans, that just as I ask you to work harder for less money, save more and volunteer in your local community, I will do my part by kicking this vile habit." After such a public declaration, this would be one decision he couldn't back down from.

Life grim according to 'arry

Further to my recent post about the strange twists and turns that the English language undergoes when in the hands of the football fraternity I see in The Times today that Harry Redknapp has Portsmouth "hanging on for grim life" near the end of yesterday's game at White Hart Lane.

This is a classic example of football fusion where two expressions from the same general region of the language - "hanging on like grim death" and "hanging on for dear life" - are put together to form a pantomime horse of an expression. i.e. one that performs none of the basic functions of the creature concerned but is good for a laugh.

Football is about to go too far, apparently

People say £100 million and £200,000 a week for Kaka would be a price too far. Fans can no longer relate to players. It's distorting the market. It's obscene. It's just too much.

Which makes me wonder, what would have been an acceptable amount? What would not have been obscene? £50 million and £100,000 a week? Would that have been within the range where we could still relate to players?

Everything old is new again. It also takes twice as long and costs twice as much

In the area around the Angel, Islington there are two kinds of pubs. There are the old working class boozers which are run for their regulars. Then there are the new pubs aimed at free-spending young people turning up after work. The latter are in the premises previously devoted to the former. To a certain extent they model themselves on a "Passport To Pimlico" version of an old neighbourhood public house. Lots of mirrors and aspidistras. Food on the blackboard. No carpets.

The customer experience in these places is often at odds with the note struck the decor. In the old working class pub you'd be served by a middle-aged woman who could fill the most complex order very quickly and would not need anything explaining to her twice. Nothing was perfect but it would all be there in double quick time. In the new pub on the other hand you will be served by someone who has been hired on the basis of their haircut. They will address you as if you were a personal friend and then take hours to bring a round of drinks to the bar, largely because they haven't mastered the computerised till and they want to be sure that you wanted Guinness rather than extra-cold Guinness. They are also generally in that age group between University and Real Life where they're Not Really Listening. Service is not as high on their agenda as image and they have that young person's belief that if it's less than first-rate you'll put up with it because complaining is so un-cool.

On my way to the Robert Capa exhibition at the Barbican this morning I stopped at a diner in Smithfield Market to get a snack. This was a newly opened place that advertised "Great British Grub". Inside it had been tricked out like some art director's version of Stanley Holloway's Pie and Mash shop. Black and white tiling and old Picture Post covers in frames. The food was fine. The customer base at that time of the morning was two gay couples and me. If this were a real working man's cafe of the kind I used to go in when I worked on the bins all five of us would probably have been regarded as interlopers.

Then something odd happened. Into this bourgeois fantasy of working class life wandered a painter and decorator. He had not come for the cultural tourism. He wanted a cup of coffee, a slice of toast with marmalade and a sausage sandwich to take out. The uniformed young woman serving, who was east European, was charming. Nonetheless you could see the cultural chasm yawning between her and the new customer. Her first step in filling his order was of course to painstakingly enter its components in the electronic till which was presumably connected to one in the kitchen. Then she made him a coffee. He asked for two sugars. She smiled and proffered two of those tubular sachets of sugar that are all the rage these days. He prised off the top of the polystyrene cup and painstakingly squeezed the sugar into the cup. By now he was clearly thinking, I should be back up my ladder by now. At this point a chef appeared from the kitchen. He was also east European. He consulted with the young waitress. She smiled at the customer and asked him whether he wanted the sausage inside the sandwich. Yes, he did. And did he want the marmalade on the toast? Yes, he did.

I paid and left because I had got to the point where I felt it was about to get embarrassing. I felt sorry for everyone involved. For the decorator who just wanted his breakfast quick. For the staff who were charged with delivering a dining experience that they had never encountered themselves. And also for the middle-aged working class English women who used to work in the actual caffs that thrived in this very area before it was taken over by design studios and advertising agencies. What's wrong with having The Thing rather than something designed to look like The Thing? If you go to France or Italy, for instance, you will have access to standard dining and snacking experiences. The brasserie. The espresso place with the zinc bar. They're there in every town. What you don't find is streets crammed with expensively refurbished premises offering - there is no alternative but to use this word - faux dining experiences imported from the recent past, experiences that leave people not knowing entirely where they stand and wondering whether they've been had. They say the serving of food is a performance. Or is that code for "we've doubled the price"?

"We're presently cruising at five feet..."

Nobody should doubt the professionalism, bravery and sang froid of Chesley Burnett Sullenberger III. I fancy that the first public words he will say are "I was doing my job", which is no more or less than the truth. He will probably also point out how lucky he was.

At the same time I think the word "hero" is best reserved for those who risk their lives when they don't have to. Your best guarantee of safety in the air is that if there's one person on board who wants to preserve his life even more than you want to preserve yours, it's the person driving.

Everywhere you go there's a slogan

Went to the new King's Cross yesterday to drop something off at The Guardian's splendid new HQ. The redevelopment of that area has been accompanied by energetic efforts to convince a sceptical public that London's grittiest area was about to become one of its most polished. A few years ago they put up posters all over the area with the slogan "King's Cross - Take Another Look". This was a grim joke on the people who had to look at some of its less salubrious aspects every day. (This weekend BBC Radio Four's Archive Hour is given over to Alan Dein's "Nations Of The Cross", his oral history of the area. Dein's stuff is always worth hearing.)

As development continues the slogans proliferate. All the smart new businesses down York Way have them. Their corporate aspirations are etched into the glass of their reception areas. They'll probably be able to afford to change them before they become an embarrassment. Walking back up the hill towards the Angel, every building seems to have some kind of inscription on it. The Edwardians chiselled it into the stone. "Drill Hall", "Boys", "Girls" or "Woodwork". The tower blocks erected in the 70s are named after politicians or birds but more prominent are the signs warning what will happen if you should venture in their precincts without either living there or being properly introduced. Everywhere you go there are inscrutable-looking keypads and entrycams, promising you that somebody is convinced you are up to no good.

The walls surrounding the girls school have been painted with somebody's idea of an educational mission statement: "Learn without limits. Create without limits. Perform without limits."

It is ah not raining here also

On the phone (well, the Skype, actually) to my son in Sao Paulo last night around 7.45.
I said "Chelsea are playing Southend tonight."
He replied "It's been called off. Oh no, it's back on again." This from 6,000 miles and a couple of hours time difference away.
I can't get over how the death of distance has also killed small talk.

Run for your lives! The politicians are back from holiday!

Today's storm in a teacup about Baroness "Green Shoots" Vadera shows how infantile our politics has become. There'll be gales of hot air on both sides for 24 hours, which is about the attention span that Westminster prefers. Meanwhile the last set of initatives wither on the vine.

I still can't believe that a bunch of supposed grown-ups came up with that hare-brained VAT reduction scheme just a couple of months ago. I was reminded of it this morning when a manager of a chain of clothes shops was on the radio, pointing out, as an aside, that it had made no difference whatsoever to the amount of money coming in. What he would have no doubt added, had he had time, is that the amount of pointless administration it caused far outstripped any benefit it might have brought. I've been in shops where they've been quite honest about the fact that they hadn't bothered. Understandably.

I genuinely find it hard to believe that a bunch of barristers, business consultants, civil servants and professional politicians sat in a room and decided that reducing the rate from 17.5% to 15% was going to make any difference to the consumer. It seems perfectly emblematic of the way that because governments can't do anything to effect the big things (see yesterday's hysteria about social mobility, which has gotten worse despite the efforts of successive governments of different stripes), they fiddle endlessly with the small ones.

BBC News expunges last traces of prejudice from our world. Greed believed to be next

Three items in a row on the BBC News just now. The first is about the Prince of Wales having to deny he is a "racist" because of something he once called an associate. The second was about football fans being in the dock for "racist and homophobic abuse" shouted in the direction of Sol Campbell. The third - this is in a row - is about the controversy over somebody publishing replica versions of 1930s newspapers in Germany, complete with Nazi propaganda.

Dumb and Dumberer

Yesterday I was recording something about Steely Dan for a Radio Four programme. Talking about the hook line of one of their tunes I described it, affectionately, as having "the dumbest" rhyme. The producer stopped the recording. Could I think of a word other than "dumbest"? They didn't much care for that at the BBC. It was "a compliance issue", apparently. Oh.

Match of The Day - where the English language goes to die

David Moyes has just been interviewed on MOTD. He's an intelligent, articulate man. In answer to a question about a chance Everton could have taken he replied, clear as a bell, "Yes. We could of." Is this a solecism or a barbarism? Either way it's increasingly the expression that people use. Does it not occur to them that of the two words they're using one is completely the wrong one?

The other one that puzzles me in football is "stonewall penalty". This has only appeared in the last few years. It must have started off as a "stone" penalty. "Stone" is the hipster adjective that denotes "utterly" and "unarguably", as in "stone fox" or "stone free". Once it was adopted even the linguistic vandals who comment on football couldn't work out what it meant and therefore it slowly morphed into "stonewall penalty" because at least that sounded like a football term.

I have a new motto

First thing yesterday I was contacted by a producer from BBC World Service News. I responded straightaway. He came back. "Thanks for your prompt reply. A lot faster than Hamas."

That's going to be my "positioning statement", I think.

What if Doomsday for the newspapers is the day after tomorrow?

If you work in print you ought to read this piece by Michael Hirschorn in The Atlantic. It poses the question "What if the New York Times were to close?" Not at some undefined point in the future but later this year. What if the owners proved to have too many debts, the revenues continued to plummet, there's no longer such a thing as credit and they could not count on Rupert Murdoch or Bill Gates or some other rich believer to bail them out? This won't mean much to British readers but for those who consider themselves sophisticated Americans it would be an epochal event. The nearest thing over here would be waking up one morning and finding that Radio Four had closed.

Meanwhile I learn that the share price of the company that publishes the Daily and Sunday Sport has gone down by 40% in the light of recent trading figures, a Russian billionaire is making enquiries about buying the Evening Standard and the collapse of Waterford Wedgwood is making the problems of The Independent that much more pressing. I'm not one of those people who finds the decline of the billionaires amusing. Like it or not the British press is kept afloat by very rich men with a sentimental attachment to the trade and the influence that goes with it. If it were left to hard headed investors the papers would have folded a few years ago. And nobody believes that anything but a fraction of this revenue can be migrated to other "platforms".

Just look at the so-called quality press in this country. You're probably thinking of titles you don't buy any more. Instead you access them on the web. Each of these is maintained either by a charity or the patronage of a billionaire. And billionaires aren't what they used to be. Hirschorn's piece suggests that we don't much care which brand is on the top of the story that we pull up on Google news. If a few of these brands disappear what will Google be bringing up? And how will we feel about it then?

And finally, one particular aspect of Hirschorn's Doomsday scenario should send a particular shiver down the collected spines of Clapham, Notting Hill and Stoke Newington:

It will also mean the end of a certain kind of quasi-bohemian urban existence for the thousands of smart middle-class writers, journalists, and public intellectuals who have, until now, lived semi-charmed kinds of lives of the mind.

Sport. It's great, isn't it?

Yesterday evening I was reminded why sport is such a rich source of entertainment. It's because it's the only area the PR people don't control with an iron hand. In any other branch of "the entertainment industry" (which is where former England cricketer Dominic Cork was placing it on Five Live last night) the Kevin Pietersen-Peter Moores squabble would have been solved behind closed doors. The extremes of embarrassment would have been spared with a large cheque and an emollient press release.

But this is sport in the age of 24-hour rolling news. It's an area where you blurt first, think later and your every word, gesture and thought is transmitted to the rest of the world within seconds. It seems that Pietersen's eventual flounce was the result of less than fulsome support in media coverage during the afternoon of the position he'd outlined in the morning.

You knew he was going to get into trouble in that job because he talked too quickly. In interviews - and he was always giving interviews - he babbled like an X-Factor contestant. This was an instructive contrast with Vaughan and Atherton. These are both cleverer men who nonetheless did their interviews in a drone designed to bring passing birdlife crashing, stunned with boredom, from above.

Last night I heard David Lloyd, Angus Fraser, Jonathan Agnew and Dominic Cork discussing his departure with that quickening excitement that steals over cricket folk when they can talk about something more than reverse swing and buses on the Camberwell New Road. They were all very good. Stripping away the thin covering of code from their remarks they seemed to be saying that KP's problem was that, when push came to shove, he's a bit of a dick.

The British way of life

Anthony Lane of The New Yorker is my favourite critic. In the course of a review of the new Tom Cruise film "Valkyrie", which features performances from the likes of Bill Nighy and Eddie Izzard, he fires off this gem:

"Character acting is, of course, one of the four things that the British still do supremely well, the others being soldiering, tailoring, and getting drunk in public..."

Lane's brilliant and he is British but I couldn't help thinking there must be something else in the national armoury. I haven't thought of anything thus far.

Saturday Night Fever 2008

This is my new favourite time of week. We've lit a fire, opened a bottle of something cheering, there is a smell of cooking and somebody on the radio is burbling about today's football. I get up to pull the curtains. As I do I see people who are either setting off for an evening out or in that peculiar state of tension that seems to hang around couples arriving at neighbours houses clutching a bottle of wine and some flowers. As I close the curtains I am suffused with that sense of pure well-being that can only be truly experienced by the person secure in the knowledge that he is NOT GOING OUT.

New Year's Eve and wasted youth

Our drive home at two this morning took us through some of London's party zones. The people they used to call "revellers" staggered through the streets like survivors of a major terrorist incident. At a zebra crossing in Islington my wife, who was the designated driver, stopped because she wasn't sure whether a group of two couples were planning to cross the road or continue their canoodling. One of them lost his footing on the slope at the edge of the pavement. As he fell he took his girlfriend with him. She tottered backwards into the other couple who fell down hard. All four of them were then lying on the crossing like beetles on their backs, their puzzlement and apparent pain picked out perfectly in our headlights. As they righted themselves, which took at least thirty seconds, nobody giggled or looked embarrassed. When they were eventually standing and I had pointed out that one of the girls had left her handbag in the road, they didn't apologise either. "Drunk" doesn't begin to describe it.

A year in 40 seconds

One year in 40 seconds from Eirik Solheim on Vimeo.

One more cup of coffee

I took part in a conference a couple of months ago. It was one of those events where you don't expect to get paid and it's not exactly of any promotional value either but you do it nonetheless. This was the kind of job that used to be recognised by a case of wine. Times seem to have changed. What I got was a thank-you and this card, which entitles me to lots of free coffee at Caffe Nero during December. I've been out and about more than usual during December but not once have I been in the vicinity of a branch of Caffe Nero while I had this card with me. I lent it to my wife. She was too busy to use it. I lent it to the kids. They forgot. And tomorrow is the last day of December and I still haven't used the damned thing. It's starting to get to me. The heart bridles at the thought of an unused discount in a way I find strangely unsettling. I may very well take a special trip to the West End tomorrow just to make sure it gets used at least once.

Don't judge your father by the standards of today

I've been reading Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks, an anthology of the work of Alan Coren. It's been put together by his children Giles and Victoria. In the foreword they worry about whether to include anything from their father's most successful work, "The Collected Bulletins Of Idi Amin". These "letters" ran in Punch in the early 70s when Amin, the first Third World bogeyman to present himself as a rich subject for comedy, was all over the papers. Coren portrayed Amin as a ludicrous monster, part Sanders of The River and part crooked businessman. In retrospect that was about the size of it. However, the time has long passed when you can have a white man putting the words "dis", "dat", "dose" and "upsetting de popperlace" in the mouth of a black man, not even one we all agree was A Bad Lot. Giles and Victoria spend a lot of time discussing the rights and wrongs of this. They know what a major part of their father's work it was. The collected edition of the Amin letters sold a million copies and probably paid for the Coren children's education. It was very funny then. It goes without saying that the broadness of its humour would not pass through today's narrow gate.

Edwardian thriller writer John Buchan rarely cracked jokes but because he had some of his characters say unflattering things about Jews, last night's BBC documentary John Buchan: Master Of Suspense had to spend five minutes deciding whether it was still OK to like his books. This is the kind of agonising that increasingly besets the business of looking back even a couple of generations. It's as if contemporary chroniclers are gazing at the recent past from the shores of a Utopia on which they've recently arrived, finding it impossible to believe that recent generations had laboured in such darkness. Can it be that our own kith and kin used to think like that? Well, people did think that like that. My own mother once described the colour of a coat as "nigger brown". She would have been horrified if you had told her this could be construed as a racial epithet. I noted this at the time but wasn't shocked for thirty years. I'm not shocked now but I do raise an eyebrow and it makes me wonder what elements of contemporary speech and manners will be equally incendiary in the future.

But for now I wish people would just relax. The kind of attitudes exemplified by Coren's 1973 humour or Buchan's 1918 thrillers don't speak of bad people any more than today's desperate avoidance of anything that could be construed as racism or any other ism is the sign of good ones. I wouldn't find the unchallenged liberalism of today's conventional wisdom quite so irritating if it weren't so ready to draw attention to the apparent shortcomings of earlier generations, people who lived in a less comfy world than ours has been. Up till now.

And people still wonder why we're obsessed with the Sixties

Patti Boyd models Mary Quant.

The Rolling Stones provide background.

And suddenly, you're dancing

Talking to Paul Morley on Christmas Eve, Bruce Forsyth said he could tell a good dancer from the way they walked. Fred Astaire had a remarkable walk. It was like a pre-war version of the pimp roll but executed by a body that couldn't be made to do anything inelegant. It's interesting how many of Astaire's routines begin with him ambling into shot and then slowly turning a walk into a dance. It's this transition from business to pleasure in a few paces that most people find most difficult when taking to the dance floor.

The most demanding performance of the musical year

The annual Christmas Eve carol service from King's College Chapel begins with a boy soprano singing the first verse of "Once In Royal David's City". I learn from an interview with a couple of former choristers that all the boys actually practise this number. The actual singer is only chosen when the red light goes on to begin the broadcast. The choirmaster points at one boy and off he goes. No time for nerves, presumably.

Happy Christmas.

Could you turn it down a bit? It's not big and it's not clever.

Loud music is a bit like free speech. Take it just that tiny bit too far and you want to kill someone.

Mark Ellen and I were talking to Katherine Whitehorn about loud music. As a member of the pre-rock and roll generation, she was keen to know what people of the rock and roll generation thought about the fact that everywhere we go nowadays we are exposed to music at a level that would have considered intolerable to the people who'd got their idea of noise from hearing actual munitions being dropped on their heads.

It was very difficult to get over how we felt. Obviously we have spent the last thirty years with headphones clamped to our ears and thereby we are by any measure clinically deaf. Nevertheless in the last few years even I have been forced to beat a retreat from both live gigs and clubs where the level of the music was actually making me feel ill. I cannot imagine what it would do to somebody of Katherine's generation. I have left branches of Abercrombie & Fitch with teenage shopping list unfulfilled thanks to the hammering my ribcage was taking from the sound waves coming from the speakers.

The world must be getting louder and people must be getting deafer. There is no other explanation.Loudness is a form of inflation that has been raging for years. It is driven not just by technology but also by humanity's incorrect belief that there is a notch on the volume knob which, once achieved, will bring about a massive explosion of human delight. They are all seeking this plateau of delirium. It never happens. It doesn't exist. Delight comes from within, not without.

In shops the rising tide of volume is driven by the staff. They are bored out of their minds and play music loud in order to persuade themselves that they work in a club and not a haberdashery. At office parties it's driven by people who have drunk slightly more than everyone else and believe that cranking the "sounds" up sufficiently will make everyone else do the thing they don't actually dare do themselves - dance. Party goers try to make themselves heard by talking louder. DJs respond by turning it up even louder. Far from increasing the sum of human happiness in the room they clearly reduce it and inevitably shorten the party.

I have talked to a number of people about the recent Leonard Cohen shows. The praise they universally volunteer is this. "It wasn't *loud*." Is it possible that this marks the moment the worm turns?

How they deal with difficult neighbours in Kenya in the year 2008

This shot, taken from The Year 2008 In Photographs, shows Masai warriors dressed in modern sportswear deploying with their bows and arrows on a hillside in Kenya.

They are not doing this for historical re-enactment purposes. This is a live dispute over territory. Twenty people have been killed in the last few months.

In defence of football chairmen

I've just heard John Williams, the Blackburn Rovers chairman, being given a hard time by Mark Saggers on Radio Five for sacking Paul Ince and replacing him with Sam Allardyce. The "they didn't give him enough time" lobby, headed up by people who have no investment in the eventual outcome of the crisis that triggered the sacking, strikes me as plain naive.

If you're chairman of a Premiership football club you are responsible for one thing and one thing only - keeping the club in the Premiership. You have but one lever at your disposal that might, just might, have some effect on this. That's the replacement of the manager. Thanks to the strange, folksy ways of this industry, it's the only course of action that might make a difference. And even if it doesn't, the tribe are unlikely to blame you for it.

Therefore the chairman has to do it. Woe betide he does it too early, woe betide he does it too late. He has one window and that's the pre-Christmas period. I believe John Williams when he said that it has been a horrible week for him and he really wanted Ince to work out. Which he probably would have done, but by then they would have dropped down a division. And nobody forgives that.

The umpteeenth Crusade is enacted on the Victoria Line

I've always believed that the most dangerous time to be on the London Underground is between two and three in the afternoon. If you're going to encounter loons, this is the time of day. First thing in the morning the loons are prettily aslumber. By going home time they have gone home. But between two and three they are inevitably abroad and the absence of crowds affords them the elbow room in which to operate.

Yesterday afternoon at this hour I noticed an older chap making his way down the carriage. He was pausing at each passenger and making the sign of the cross over their head. The smile on his face made it impossible to work out whether he was a drunk, a nutcase or an over-zealous priest putting his commuting time to productive use. As he reached the middle of the carriage a passenger, who may have been a Muslim, waved him away in an agitated manner and then, when he persisted, moved right down the carriage as if he had been bothered by a swarm of bees.

For a few seconds I wondered whether there might be An Incident, the kind of thing that might have culminated in a discussion on Newsnight with the Archbishop of Canterbury on one hand and Iqbal Sacranie on the other and eventually lead to the introduction of a law forbidding any shows of religious faith on public transport.

But then we arrived at Warren Street and I got off.

Uma Thurman's fiance might want to make some changes to the wedding list

Arpad Busson, the financier who is engaged to Uma Thurman, has just lost hundreds of millions of dollars in the Madoff swindle.

When's the happy day then?

Magazines, the recession and the decline and fall of "expense it" culture

There are already a lot of media redundancies and next year there are going to be a lot more. Clearly, this is not easy for anyone. For those who have reached a certain level of seniority in a large company it involves adjustment as well as hardship. They miss not only the salary and the sense of purpose but also the perks and fringe benefits that have come to shape their "lifestyle". These can range from the trivial to the hugely expensive. Given the present march to austerity it seems that in the future both kinds will seem equally exotic.

When I first began working for a large publisher in the late 70s there was something called a "reading allowance". This had been arrived at in an agreement with the unions during a government pay freeze. It resulted in everyone in the company filling in an expenses sheet every month and claiming around five quid to pay for the newspapers that they allegedly needed to pursue their job.

Advertising sales people were originally given company cars to enable them to visit clients in distant towns. Then the editors were given them to cover stories. In time everyone above a certain level had them. They were usually treated with the disrespect of found money. Staff living in inner-city areas didn't much mind getting them stolen because it was always somebody else's problem. People used to complain when the revenue starting treating them as a "benefit in kind" and taxing them. Such people have, of course, never known what it is to pay a garage service bill from their own pocket.

I used to work with a boss who said he would discuss anything at staff meetings - the share price, the company's equal opportunities policy, even his own salary - but he wouldn't stand there and try to referee discussions about either company cars or staff toilets. Experience had taught him that people were incapable of being rational when talking about either.

Once a publishing company starts dealing in premium-priced advertising it is a fact of life that its staff begin to travel shorter distances more expensively. Advertising directors (or "publishers", as they quickly insist on being known) can no longer get from Mayfair to the Ivy without being conveyed in a black car. Fashion people adopt the Fashionista Salute whereby their right arm shoots up to hail a cab as soon as a revolving door has propelled them into the outside world.

The appeal of working in the luxury businesses, and the magazines that maintain their illusions, is that even the foot soldiers are temporarily licensed to behave as if they are Donatella Versace. Afraid of appearing insufficiently prestigious, their employers allow them to get away with running up expenses that wouldn't be acceptable in the widget industry. I knew of one senior woman working in this area who used to have her hair titivated by a professional every single morning. At the company's expense.

A magazine's expenditure becomes a function of its success rather than its requirements. The tiny handful of titles that make enormous amounts of money begin to balk at anything that looks like penny-pinching. "You mean to tell me that with all this money we're making you're arguing about a few cab bills?" is generally how the conversation starts. After that it gets ugly and sometimes culminates in someone leaving the company.

By then you have a large executive class who are competing to spend the company's money. They are motivated less by the legitimate requirements of their job and more by the desire to gain the same prestige that somebody else has got. This is at its worst when it comes to air travel. There once was a time when the most senior executive of one organisation travelled in coach. Then more and more people started to fly on business and some began to noisily announce that they had not turned right in a plane for years. This has the effect of making the most senior staff determined to enjoy the same prestige as their juniors.

The same inflationary spiral results in everyone joining private members clubs at the company's expense where they all entertain each other on the company credit cards that they have all been given before taking the company's car service home. Meanwhile their company car, which by now is some kind of SUV that never actually goes anywhere near the place of work, is being used by their partner to ferry their kids back and forth to school.

Once you have been used to doing things in a certain way it's very difficult to claw any of it back. One in ten cars in the UK are company vehicles, a much higher proportion than anywhere else. Try taking those back from people on the grounds that they're not used for company business and anyway they're polluting the planet. Then see what rancour ensues. The same applies to most perks. People in this country are unlikely to take the "easy-come, easy-go" attitude. They are more likely to react as if you're stripping them of their civil rights.

I was thinking of all this while reading a piece called "A short history of perks at Time Inc", which details all the staff benefits, official and unofficial, that the staff of America's biggest publisher used to enjoy when the living was easy and the cotton was high. These, believe it or not, included a drinks trolley that used to be pushed round the editorial floor on press days, which makes you wonder whether "Mad Men" might have been underselling things.

At this time of year I also remember when companies used to send cases of booze to key decision makers in the hope that they could count on repeat business. The main beneficiary of this in the company I used to work for was, back in the 80s, the person who handed out the print contracts. I once met the boss on the way back from a visit to his office. "Don't go in there," he said. "It looks like a bonded warehouse."

Lloyd George Knew My Father

Unlike feudal, class-bound Great Britain, the United States of America is still a country where people can rise to the highest offices in the land by dint of their own efforts and regardless of their humble background. In which spirit I'm glad to see that the person fancied to take over the Senate seat of the previously unknown Hillary Clinton is JFK's daughter Caroline Kennedy.

What fresh hell is this?

I'll tell you one odd aspect of being a bloke. Every now and then you see some product or service being advertised and you ask yourself, what the deuce is that when it's at home? I snapped this while out walking this morning.

What you have to do to get noticed in today's highly competitive busking business

I took this on Upper Street the other day.

He's on a tightrope and he's playing the violin.

Fear of flying: a new twist

This is the picture accompanying a piece in the new Vanity Fair about a mid-air collision that took place over Brazil in 2006. It's actually an illustration, which is obvious when you think about it. When you read the piece, which is good but three times as long as it needs to be, you realise the accident happened so fast that in its wake the occupants of the private plane weren't even sure that they'd struck a commercial airliner. The element of the story that has been occupying my thoughts since reading it is this: the two planes collided because they were directed to the same part of the sky at the same height but in opposite directions. If this had happened twenty years ago then there would have been room for error and they would most probably have missed each other. Modern navigation equipment means they wouldn't.

Does Robert Peston think he's FDR?

I fear that the BBC's Robert Peston is succumbing to that peculiar form of self-importance affecting BBC reporters who suddenly find themselves at the centre of a huge story. Commenting on the effect of Congress's decision not to bail out the auto industry just now, he said "it's going to be a tough day but we'll get through it".

"We"? Whatever happens to GM workers or shareholders, Robert, I think it's reasonable to assume that your position and salary will not be affected.

All I want for Christmas is a tree - and I've got one

We have one of those Christmas trees that spends the year out in the garden and is brought inside for a couple of weeks at this time of year. We don't have to pay for a new one. We just have to summon the energy to bring the one we've got indoors. Therefore it's no use the five guys selling Christmas trees in Chapel Market trying their patter on me.

They looked a little tense to me, as if they're concerned that their stock isn't showing much sign of moving. A tree has always been the last element of Christmas I could do without. Maybe I'm unusual and it's actually one of the first things that people looking to cut back would decide they don't need.

"How much pain can you be in?"

Today Josh Lewsey announced his retirement from international rugby. This is a good enough excuse to show this clip of his tackle on Matt Rogers, my favourite moment in the entire history of England/Australia sport. I particularly love the way the Australian commentator laughs.

And today's solution to economic meltdown is...

One of the bracing features of the current economic problems is there is more discussion of genuinely radical courses of action than usual. In today's Guardian Simon Jenkins reckons that more good would be done giving everybody a thousand pounds and forcing them to spend it than in spending the same amount of money trying to unfreeze credit.

Get people to spend by giving them money, and just stop them saving it. Give them non-cashable vouchers for domestic goods and services that expire in three months. Drive them to the high streets, supermarkets, restaurants, entertainments, garages, anything that is not saving and has an employment multiplier effect. Only firms should be able to bank the vouchers. Demand must feed straight into business revenue, because revenue is collateral for credit. Without revenue, boosting credit is pointless.

I'll buy that.

Because we may not be the young ones very long

Today I was having my hair cut at an establishment in Kingly Street. I looked out of the window and saw a cheerful figure coming down the road. He was in his sixties but very well-preserved with a thick mop of silver hair and he was carrying a guitar in a case. To my surprise, he came in to the barbers shop and spoke to the woman cutting my hair.
"Are we still OK for Thursday?"
"Yes. Four o'clock."
"OK, I'm just off to rehearse. See if I can still remember the chords."
And he set off into the sunshine, swinging his guitar case as he skipped along.
Bruce Welch of the Shads, off to do the Royal Variety Performance.

Blabber 'n' smoke

An anti-smoking campaigner on the radio this morning, commenting on the display ban, said, and I think I'm quoting him correctly, "smoking exacerbates social division." I think he meant "poor people smoke more". This is really, really not the same thing at all.

The Me Generation

A year or so ago, thanks to Speechification, I caught an episode of Alan Dein's superb "Don't Hang Up". The idea of this series was to ring phone boxes late at night and interview anyone who answered. One of the voices on this programme belonged to Hannah, a 14-year-old girl living the feral life on Margate sea front. Understandably concerned and fascinated, Dein has subsequently tracked her down and done a programme about her. It contains the elements you might have predicted: a violent stepfather, a teenage mother, drugs, drink and a series of failed interventions by police and social workers. He interviews Hannah at length. She betrays the classic symptoms of a contemporary malaise that teachers talk about all the time: noisy assertiveness masking a desperate lack of genuine self-esteem.

The same theme is echoed in Tim Adams's excellent piece on the Karen Matthews case in The Guardian. Having observed the trial he concluded that Matthews seemed incapable of putting anyone's needs, not even her children's, above her own for even a moment. It's a rare case of a Guardian writer suggesting that the liberal establishment has done people like Karen Matthews no favours by excusing the way they go about their lives. He mentions Bea Campbell's contrasting of the media's differing attitudes to the Matthews case with that of Madeleine McCann.

Campbell's argument may not have been true - can any couple ever have been subjected to more media scrutiny about their lifestyle than the McCanns? - but it appealed to the class warriors on the blogs. The McCanns were traitors to their working-class roots, with their medical careers and their aspirations for their children and their Mark Warner holidays. Karen Matthews, who had never worked a day in her life, became an unlikely role model for working-class solidarity.

Right now there's a discussion about the case on Woman's Hour. Actually, it's not so much about the case as about what Woman's Hour listeners are supposed to think about it. It features someone called Anastasia. Bet she's never been to Dewsbury Moor. I have.

Tale Of The Unexpected

Next Saturday our son is due to return after six months in Brazil. We haven't seen him in that time. Unsurprisingly we were planning the coming week with his return in mind. Something to look forward to in the midst of the usual pre-Christmas melancholy. Big reunion at Heathrow on Saturday.

Yesterday morning the entirely unexpected happened. I was in my workroom at home. I heard a noise behind me and there he was, big grin all over his face.

He had decided to come a week early. His sister was in on the secret, as were most of the under-30s in London, and she had gone to pick him up from the airport. His mother and I were, it goes without saying, knocked sideways in a way that we rarely are. Ever since it happened we've been trying to recreate that moment of open-mouthed astonishment in our heads. Twenty four hours later we're still shaking our heads as if dazed.

Meanwhile the young ones have been walking round with the proud look that young ones wear when they manage to put one over on you comprehensively. Wouldn't have it any other way. Today we are killing a fatted calf.

Does it really take talent to be "The Talent"?

The discussion on the Today programme about the implications of Selina Scott's successful action against Channel Five over age discrimination was a collectors item for those who study the difference between what TV says and what it does. Both Joan Bakewell and Clive Jones of GMTV were piously pressing the case of older women and making tsk noises about the fashion for the team of silvery-haired male plus nubile female. I think the man from GMTV said that they made their hiring decisions based on "talent and creativity". Any job that required less of either quality than reading the news off an autocue would be hard to imagine.

If you build it, they won't come

My previous post refers to the difference between what people say and what they do, particularly when it comes to media. I should expand.

• In research women's magazine readers will always say that they wish the models on the fashion pages were older and rounder. When they are provided with pages of older, rounder models, they immediately stop buying the magazine.
• Similarly people always say they would like the magazine to feature clothes that are more within their price range. Once that is provided they point out that if they wanted clothes like that they would simply go and buy them.
• Everybody thinks they've got broad taste in music. Actually, they haven't. "Broad" just means "what I like".
• Both sexes say they would like to have a magazine that is for older people. But they never regard themselves as older, even when they are.
• People say they want practical, cookable recipes and not beautiful arty pictures of food shot in foreign countries. They lie.
  
• People say they're not interested in celebrities. From The New York Times to The Sun, the evidence is clear. They are more interested in celebrities than anything else in the world.
• Nobody really wants "Top Of The Pops" back.
  

The theory and practice of magazines

At City University yesterday I listened to a series of magazine proposals put together by students on their post-graduate journalism programme. This morning I sat through a two-hour meeting dealing with a real life magazine.

The contrast was marked. Yesterday afternoon all of the proposals were distinguished by the not unreasonable belief that you could believe what people told you in research. This morning's discussion was conducted by the light of experience which tells you that while people's opinions are one thing, their behaviour is another altogether.

This cognitive dissonance, which no doubt applies equally to the marketing of margarine or Mercedes, seems particularly pertinent in magazines. As soon as you ask people to tell you why they buy a magazine they will always point to the rational benefits (the listings, the in-depth features) while glossing over the sensory aspects (the naked woman on the front, the encounter with the celebrity inside, the stupid cartoon).

The entry-level professional will tend to work on the principle that if you build it they will come. The more experienced the professional the more likely they are to suspect that, actually, they won't. And of course you can't prove it. But you can show them your scars.

New media

Tomorrow I've got to help judge some students' work at City University.

To get in the mood I've just been looking at the pictures from the Guardian Student Media Awards which took place last week. I was expecting lots of serious coves looking as if they've been dragged away from their inky toil to accept a bauble to which they attached no particular importance. Instead I got lots of young chaps wearing ties and girls frocked up to here.