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.