Every picture tells a story

Went to a press preview of the Camille Silvy exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. Silvy was a French pioneer of photography in the 19th century, working on both sides of the channel in the period before anybody had a clear idea of how you might make a living out of the new art.

There are entire folders of all the people he took pictures of in his London studio, from memorial pictures of dead infants through famous writers to would-be society figures. Included among them is this arresting picture from 1862 of James and Sarah Davies. She was a present from the King of Dahomey to the Queen of England via a sea captain. There's more of the story here.

In Praise of Green Metropolis

I can't vouch for how much money Green Metropolis donate towards their declared aim of saving the planet but I've been using them for the last couple of years to sell on books I no longer want and using the credit to buy things I do want. This week I bought "I Saw Two Englands" by H.V. Morton, the Michael Palin of his day, for £3.50. It's got a tattered dust jacket but so would you if you'd been given by Kathleen to Mabel at Christmas 1946. The actual copy's in very good condition - and, what's more, it comes with a bookmark extolling the virtues of National Savings. I can't tell you how much pleasure I get from things like this dropping through the letterbox.

Do we have to revisit the sweary bits of Live Aid?

It's twenty-five years since Live Aid. In most quarters this will pass unremarked. The One Show on BBC-1 are doing an item about "things you didn't know (or have forgotten) about Live Aid" and they wanted me to tell the story about Bob Geldof saying "give us your fucking money" while I was interviewing him live on air. Since the point of this story is that he didn't say that (instead he said "fuck the address") I always feel that I'm letting people down.

Telling a story like this on TV is difficult enough, given the impatience of editors with any story that has to be told in a joined-up way or not at all. When the nub of that story is to contrast two sentences, both containing a word that you can't say on TV at tea time, this is near impossible. The producer in this case said he'd "have to check it with Ed Pol". You will quickly work out that Ed Pol is not an actual person but Corporation shorthand for "editorial policy". (BBC people always refer to their internal bureaucracy as if it is a given, rather like gravity.) Anyway Ed Pol said that obviously I couldn't say the word, nor could they bleep me saying the word and nor could I replace it with "effing". I had a similar experience with a Radio Four programme I did about bootlegs where we played parts of the Troggs Tapes. This was safely after the watershed but unsurprisingly we couldn't run it without bleeping the offending words. What surprised me is that Ed Pol would only allow them a specific number of bleeps.

I can understand zero tolerance of swearing. It worked for fifty years. I suppose I can also understand the arguments for total tolerance, though I think you have to take into account the fact that swearing is tiring to listen to and, if the swearing is being done by somebody you don't happen to be close to, removes a layer of skin from your soul with each obscenity. What I don't really understand is the curious halfway house we're in at the moment, where Ed Pol imposes quotas and you're allowed certain things at certain times. If the Geldof incident was an embarrassment at the time, what's the point of revisiting it 25 years later on a channel and at a time where you can say less about it than you could say at the time? It was live, which says all you need to say about it. In fact shouldn't the live blurt be the only acceptable excuse for swearing on the TV?

I don't buy the idea that TV has to change to reflect the manners of society. It's TV. Not real life. There was a time, not long ago, when you couldn't swear at all on the TV. Wasn't that also the era that produced Boys From The Black Stuff, The Singing Detective, Fawlty Towers and all the other programmes that people now look back on as the golden age?

Has Blue Peter made children out of us?

In a restaurant last night somebody pointed out Biddy Baxter, former doyenne of Blue Peter. Earlier in the day the historian Peter Hennessy had been presumably making mischief when he said on Start The Week that he believed that many of New Labour's failings could be traced back to Blue Peter. "It produced a political generation who believed they could collect the bottle tops, do AIDS next week and then solve world poverty. It was absolutely toe curling."

Certainly we have a political class who believe that once you do something that thing is done. Some of the things they do have that bright-eyed "new beginning" feeling of a Blue Peter campaign. The difference is that while all Blue Peter is trying to do is build an orphanage, they're trying to bring about changes in behaviour. Initiatives are announced, budgets assigned, progress reported and then there's a long silence. Only when the people who began the initiative have moved on does somebody emerge to admit that while they took all the action they intended to take it hasn't quite produced the results they intended. There was an item saying just that yesterday about government's campaign on childhood obesity. Seems you can't make people act in their own interests if they don't want to.

It's only when a campaign has hit the wall that people are prepared to concede that expectations might have been unrealistic. In recent years questioning the steady extension of university education has been like arguing for a better deal for witches in Salem. Now that the big story is 69 people chasing every graduate job Martin Birchall of graduate recruitment firm High Fliers is on the radio pointing out that nobody asked industry whether they needed this number of graduates. Seems obvious now, doesn't it?

Of course I don't blame the politicians. They're only trying to do what they think will play with us and we're addicted to good feelings particularly when they can be achieved without any apparent sacrifice on our part. Would we like to solve world hunger? Yes! Would we like to get those people across the road to behave better? Of course we would. Do we want all our children to go to university? You bet we do. Have we thought about the consequences of some of this? Not a lot.

An open letter to Rupert Murdoch on the erection of the Times paywall

Dear Rupert

I know you've been waiting to hear what I think about the reality of The Times and Sunday Times being behind a paywall. Fair enough. I don't expect you take much notice of much of the hot air this has generated in the blogosphere but, hey, us press barons must stick together.

Obviously, I'd love to see your pay plan work because the alternative is cloud cuckoo land. The idea that this news-for-free shemozzle is all going to work out OK at some unspecified point in the future is as transparent a nonsense as has ever been peddled by grown adults to other grown adults. This is a rum revolution we're going through and no mistake. For a start there are no revolutionaries. There are just a load of salaried employees being paid to spend other people's money until it runs out. There's no end of freeloading end users who haven't got a clue how close that is to happening. Finally there's a bunch of academics standing on the sidelines shouting for more money to be hurled on the bonfire. It's only people like you and, to an extent so minuscule as to be invisible, me who have got any skin in this particular game. So, Rupe (may I call you Rupe?) I'd love to see it work and to that end you'll be personally relieved to learn that I've signed up, paid my footling pound, handed over my credit card details and waited to see how it feels to be a paying customer of a web site. It's only been 48 hours but already I feel something.

I feel The Guardian should have done it first. The Guardian would have been in a stronger position to charge because its core readers think everyone else is lying to them and their choice of paper is an announcement of who they are. The Guardian would have found it quite easy to say, pay for this site or the armies of the night will triumph. But they didn't. They're over there watching with interest with their fingers crossed so tightly it's cutting off their circulation.

The Times is a paper that covers the same things as The Guardian but is read primarily by people who don't want to read anything written by the people at The Guardian. On the news stand its key strength is what it doesn't have. This is fine on the news stand. It's less valuable in the invisible world of on-line. Once you've paid for admittance to The Times on-line you want to feel your money has bought you access to something less vanilla than the basic editorial proposition of the paper. You also realise that a newspaper (as in the news on paper) has to be a balanced proposition. Little bit of this, bit more of that, not too much of the other. That doesn't apply so much on-line where density is all. At the moment this site feels like a lite bite rather than a rich storehouse of treasure.

What else might it provide? I don't know but I suspect that it's more raw meat, more provocative even intemperate opinion, material that doesn't feel it's been edited to fit a half-page gap, lots more photos and a lot more edge than we're getting at the moment.

You of all people, Rupes baby, will be aware that the newspaper that's currently running away with it on-line is the Daily Mail and that while your home page right now is rotating a number of nice-to-read "top stories" including Nadal winning Wimbledon, how the market might behave tomorrow, MI5 looking for Russian sleepers and the latest goings on in the Coalition, the Mail is clearly leading on a must-read story whose headline - "Fugitive bouncer who gunned down ex-lover and her boyfriend taunts police with 999 call after shooting officer in in unprovoked attack" - seems to be longer than half the stories on your site.

Still, as you would no doubt say, it's early days and I'm sure we'll see more real change in the next few weeks as the site responds to the reality of the marketplace than we've seen in the last few years. I shall be watching with interest. If you need any more advice, you know where to find me.

The man who guarded the secret of the Beatles

Ringo's 70 next week. Somebody's bound to trot out that old John Lennon line about him being "not even the best drummer in the Beatles". This misses the point on purpose, as if the best drummer for a group was always the one with the most skills. What matters with any group musician is fit.

But drummers are a different category altogether. A musician friend recently pointed out to me that the drummer is the one who "knows where the beat is". This intrigued me. He was explaining that once the drummer had decided where the beat was, which will be a product of his ear, personality and physical disposition, then you either go along with it or replace him, either with a drummer nearer to your taste or, as is the increasingly the case, with a drum machine. There's no point thinking you can change the way he plays any more than you can change the way he walks, holds his head or drinks his tea. Ringo was also unusual in that he's a left handed person playing a right handed kit. That meant that there were some things he couldn't do very well, such as play a roll, but it also made him, in his own words, "a handy kind of player". It may be why he was one of the first drummers not to hold his left stick like a chopstick.

Ringo knew where the beat was on the greatest creative streak in popular music, which is quite a responsibility. Not being involved in the creative squabbles on the front line he had one simple job - to define the pulse of the group. He knew their secret. On the best Beatle records he's an equal contributor. Take away those flourishes towards the end of She Loves You, the jubilant ride cymbal swing of Eight Days A Week, the straightening middle-eight of No Reply and the brilliant off-kilter funk of She Said She Said, and these are only instances, and you would have records that are not only 25% less musical but probably 50% less Beatle. And because he was a glass half-full personality his percentage contained a greater than normal injection of that buoyancy and joy which is key to the group's DNA.

So Happy Birthday for next Wednesday. It's still Ringo's world. We just live in it.

Because he's worth it

I'm enjoying listening to nervous BBC presenters quizzing Sir Michael Lyons about the BBC Trust's determination to publish the names of the talent who get most money from the corporation. Jeremy Clarkson is no doubt paid a small fortune and he probably makes sure that his remuneration is organised in as tax-efficient a way as possible. So would you. Now that Ross is leaving the BBC Clarkson will be the whipping boy, the first about whom we'll be asked to decide "is he really worth that much?"

I don't know what the sum is but if any TV presenter is worth it I reckon Clarkson is worth it. Lots of people, me included, will watch anything he presents. (Full disclosure: I've no interest in cars.) He probably writes his own links, which is more than can be said about 90% of TV presenters. There is a sign, in everything he does, of a mischievous intelligence at work. He's got that energy which is the most important thing broadcasters need. He's a genuine TV star in that even when things slightly misfire you have to watch the way he slightly colours up. He's human in a way that your standard autocue reader isn't.

James May and Richard Hammond are perfectly good at what they do and very famous as a consequence of it but they're not genuine TV stars. If Clarkson went to ITV or Channel Four he'd take a lot of his audience with him. There are a lot of people who are likely to calculate their value for money from the licence fee in terms of how much Jeremy Clarkson it gets them. This is a fact, whether sophisticated opinion wishes to believe it or not.

But just because Clarkson is worth it, that doesn't mean that most TV presenters are also worth it. I suspect the BBC pay Clarkson-type money to a number of well-known faces who don't write their own links, are entirely the creatures of their producers, do very well because they're in the right slot at the right time and wouldn't take much of their audience with them if they moved. I wonder whether that's behind the implication in Sir Michael Lyons' interview this morning that the public might be surprised who's in the top band and who isn't.

How the BBC can start saving English football. Today.

While we wait - probably in vain - for the people who run football to take the measures that should be taken to improve our national game, there is one thing that could be done which might make a far-reaching difference to football in this country and it could be done by the BBC before lunchtime today.

They should change Match of The Day.

Obviously MOTD was not responsible for yesterday's mugging but it does set the critical climate in which football is judged in this country. In this it has been responsible for encouraging complacency. Match of The Day is contractually obliged to say that the Premier League is the best in the world but its editorial stance could stand to be more sceptical without over-trying the patience of the armchair fan.

Are these handful of home-grown players the programme scrutinises every week really "world class" or are they just good players made to look better by the foreign players alongside them? Why can none of our honest yeomen midfielders beat their opposite number? Why don't we have defenders who can go forward with the ball? Why do so many of our top players seem so frightened? Shouldn't we be looking at the number of successful passes players complete in the course of a game rather than making an assessment based on one telegenic moment?

The guys who currently appear on MOTD could be sent round the world for a year to broaden their horizons and improve their golf. They could be replaced by pundits who:

a) have something fresh to say

b) will say it without worrying about being cut dead at the next football managers dinner

c) have played the game as it is played today

d) are capable of getting indignant about something other than Sepp Blatter and the introduction of goal-line technology.

What these people say and, more importantly, don't say has an effect on what the average person thinks. This particularly applies to all those football-mad kids who get their idea of the gold standard from its analysis. Yesterday was not just a question of a few great players performing under par. It was more like an entire star system being, in the words of the Nick Lowe song, nutted by reality. The people who helped create that star system should be brought to account.

Danny Baker's guest appearance on the programme during the World Cup was very amusing but mainly notable for the way the rest of the panel sucked in their breath as if he had been guilty of breaching parliamentary privilege. "It's all right," he said to Shearer. "It's football. You can say what you like."

Don't let's be beastly to the Germans

My parents' generation had good reason not to warm to the Germans but they rarely indulged in the kind of knockabout xenophobia we have to put up with in the run-up to Sunday's match. The strange thing is that the people behind it, the ones writing the links on Five Live and the headlines in the tabloids, were probably born in the 70s, long after the end of hostilities, and their jokey antipathy seems to owe more to viewings of The Italian Job, Dad's Army and The Great Escape than it does to anything very real. I heard football writer Mick Dennis on the radio the other day saying that he'd changed his mind about the Germans based on having gone there on holiday ten years ago. It seemed odd that you could have a prejudice so superficial that a few days in a pension was enough to shrug it off. It's not as if he went ashore on D Day and got shot at.

Maybe the key to our feeling about the Germans is in that line that gets attributed to Gary Lineker. "Football is a game with 11 men a side where the Germans win". We only keep referring to the war because we keep losing at football. Maybe it's a way to explain away our national lack of confidence by pretending it's something to do with the continuation of a noble struggle and not because, nine times out of ten, our multi-millionaires don't hold their nerve under pressure quite as well as their mere millionaires. We're very good at jutting out our chins and pretending it's all to do with the bulldog spirit. But then we make silly mistakes and give it away, much like Captain Mainwaring did when he said "don't tell him, Pike!"

Social kissing and The Archers

There are many things that make Ambridge unique. No two residents have the same first name. Nobody phones anyone, preferring to pop round in person to ensure that their neighbours got the message about the latest project. This is the only village which has a net in-flow of people in their early twenties, most of whom are saving the planet, one yogurt at a time. Members of minority groups arrive in a blaze of controversy and then hang around like spare parts.

Until recently a further thing had made Ambridge an exception to the general drift of life in Britain in 2010. Ambridge was the only place in the nation where there was no social kissing. Guests would turn up at other people's houses for celebrations with none of that osculatory awkwardness in the hall where people have to decide which cheek to lunge for first and judge when everyone has "done" everyone else and it's safe to go and get a drink. This was a bit of a relief. However, all that's changed. When I first noticed social kissing arriving in the Archers - and there was certainly one occasion this past week - I thought to myself, I hope Radio Four are going to extend the running time of the programme by at least a minute to at least make sure all the kissing doesn't eat into the plotlines. Because the thing about social kissing, whether real or dramatic, is that once you start with it you've got to see it through.

Strange that this should arrive in The Archers just as I'm trying to cut down on it in real life. It has its place, of course, in expressing genuine affection and in some cases respect but it can make life more complicated than it need be. At what point does one extend it to your children's grown-up friends? What about those work colleagues who might expect a peck in a social situation but would be understandably freaked out if you started every day with a mwah? What about the people that one meets professionally, then socially and then professionally again? What about - and I confess I have come near this variant with not entirely satisfactory outcomes - the male-on-male mwah? I trust the people at The Archers have had meetings about all this and come up with rules. If they have I would appreciate them giving us all a copy.

Let's be honest. Phones are toys

I have a close friend who worked in the City for many years. When we first met, which was just over twenty years ago, he told me he was an analyst. I asked him what he was analyzing. "Telecoms," he said. I asked him if that was big enough to be a field of its own. Surely it wasn't as big as steel or retail or chemicals or insurance. Obviously everyone had a phone and some people were getting these mobile ones but it still didn't seem substantial enough to qualify as its own industry.

I thought back to this yesterday when I was walking towards Kings Cross after the match. The day was sunny, the team had won and everyone was out on the streets doing something with their phone. Talking, texting, tweeting, checking the score, looking at video, sending each other elaborate jokes. What he should have said to me twenty years ago is that he was involved in the biggest step forward for the toy trade the world had ever seen. That would have been nearer the truth.

Passion is no ordinary word

If you wanted to fly somewhere and were offered a choice between one pilot who was capable and another who was immensely passionate about every aspect of flying, surely you'd choose the former rather than the latter? Feeling strongly about something doesn't make you do it any better. It may well make you do it worse.

England fans blame the team's shortcomings on their lack of passion, the fact that they aren't driven by the same strong emotion that compels them. Well, they wouldn't be, would they? The players are in a position to influence events. The fans exhibit passion - which generally means they shout themselves hoarse - because they aren't in a position to influence events. They persuade themselves that the reason England failed in the last week is because they were thinking about their Porsches. It wasn't because they couldn't pass the ball in a straight line and endured a collective nervous breakdown.

I blogged in the past about what Arsene Wenger said about football and a country's writers. It still holds good. The French dressing room at the moment doesn't look too much like the home of rationalism. I'm sure they'll get over that, as England may even get over their current malaise. At which point all the fans will say, see, they've won because they're finally showing "some passion".

We increasingly sprinkle our national conversation with references to passion. Companies claim to be passionate about everything from magazines to under floor heating. Maybe we do it to invoke a religious or patriotic feeling that we wouldn't allow ourselves to express in any other way. We assume that passion solves all problems. It doesn't. It may well get in the way. Shakespeare wrote his best plays about people in the grip of their own ungovernable passions. Oddly enough he didn't write any about tragic heroes who couldn't do right for doing wrong. That's a far more common feeling.

The iPad and our craving for distraction

There's an interesting piece by Peter Bregman in the Harvard Business Review called "Why I Returned My iPad". He loved it as a piece of technology but found it was occupying too much of his time, particularly that portion of his time that he usually spent staring out of the window, doing nothing in particular, just letting his mental wheels spin. This is true. Devices that are allegedly labour-saving simply make room for the introduction of further labour-saving devices.

This may be an early sign of the rehabilitation of that most underrated of human experiences. Boredom is due a comeback, I feel. I'm thinking particularly of that distinctively British variety of boredom celebrated in films like "It Always Rains On Sunday" and Hancock's "Sunday Afternoon At Home". It's that yawning prairie of time with nothing to do and nothing on the TV. The tedium of growing up in the 50s and 60s is what fired the Beatles and nearly everyone else worth hearing in British pop. For some people boredom is a powerful engine of motivation. Well now, thanks to the efforts of the entertainment industry, boredom has been banished.

Watching my own children growing up I've concluded that young people are rarely bored in the way I used to be bored at their age. This is because there's generally a button they can push that will provide something they can look at, listen to or play with, something that will stave off that boredom long before it sets in. This is good in some ways. In other ways it can result in a fidgety state of permanent distraction, an inability to just stare out of the window or go for a walk. In the near future this may become a social problem ever bit as alarming as drugs and drink.

However, I should make one thing clear. I still want an iPad.

Rumours of serious illness? Congratulations. You've arrived.

It could be that Grazia have some knowledge of the state of Lady Gaga's health. I doubt it. Magazines don't have a good record when it comes to this kind of thing. In fact they are liable to swallow whatever propaganda they are fed when they've got the act's cooperation and to run their sniping stories only when the artist has made it clear that she no longer needs them. Paula Yates was dead not long after Red magazine had run a cover story giving her a clean bill of health, mental and otherwise, River Phoenix was exalted as a paragon of clean living in all sorts of high-end magazines until he was found face-down outside the Viper Room and I've no doubt that some title will soon be running a piece about how Amy Winehouse has finally got her life together in exchange for some glamorous pictures of her new look.

The funny thing is that speculation about an artist being in the grip of a disease is one of the hallmarks of massive success. We used to notice it on Smash Hits back in the 80s. We used to get tear-stained letters on Friends Forever notepaper asking if it was true that Morten Harket or Boy George or Annie Lennox was secretly battling some life-threatening illness. We used to conclude that it was just malicious playground gossip designed to wound fans of the hot new thing. And so it proved. We would never have dreamed of printing any of it. Grazia, which is today's Smash Hits, albeit for people with a surfeit of brand-awareness, feels no such compunction.

There was no spirit of 1966

I was sixteen years old and we were on a school trip to France. That particular Saturday we took a train from Paris to the Loire Valley. There must have been about forty of us - all boys in their teens. We got to the hotel in time to watch the end of the second half and extra time sitting on our suitcases in the lobby. That's how we saw England win the World Cup.

Here's the thing about football in the 60s - it was quite a big deal but nothing like the all-consuming craziness it is today. I can't help but laugh when I hear appeals to "bring back the spirit of 66". There was no particular spirit. There was a nation, a football tournament and daily life, which went on. When the England team won it caught the nation unprepared for what it was supposed to feel. You only have to look at the venue for the team's celebrations - the Royal Lancaster Hotel. It's like a Travel Tavern.

In the very unlikely event that England get anywhere near a World Cup Final today parties of teenage schoolboys will regard it as a fundamental breach of their human rights if they're not watching the whole of it in HD on a giant screen. Nobody will be taking school parties anywhere. Everything will stop even more than it did on Saturday evening.

The vuvuzela drowns the sound of the crowd

Three games in and I've had it with the Vuvuzela. I know it's the local custom but there are local customs all over the world that I can do without. If this noisemaker had been taken up by German or American fans rather than South African crowds it would be denounced as the tiresome annoyance it is. We had a go with one in the office yesterday and even as a solo instrument it's fearfully loud. I can only imagine what 70,000 of them would sound like. That's only a problem for those people watching in the stadium. I'm speaking on behalf of the TV viewer.

Clearly there's nothing wrong with making a noise in any way you think fit but not if it drowns out the gloriously expressive human noise that is an inescapable element of the experience of all proper sports, and football in particular. The beautiful thing about crowd noise is that it reflects even the tiniest nuance of the play. 30,000 fans chorussing "yessssss" or "refereeeee" or even just gasping is a unique and wonderful noise. If you listen to a lot of football on the radio, as I do, you can tell what's happening before the commentator has told you. The sound of an actual crowd is as varied and powerful and eloquent and moving as the best music. Terrible that we should be robbed of that wonderful human music by a musical instrument.

What the New Yorker does and doesn't get about "soccer"

Once every four years in the run up to the World Cup, the New Yorker runs a feature about what it has to call "soccer". These pieces, with their distinctive blend of great respect and polite puzzlement, are something I have come to look forward to. They are generally the best things written about football because they take nothing for granted. After the tournament in France in 1996 the magazine's Paris correspondent, Adam Gopnik, who grew up in Europe, wrote a memorable despatch in which he unpacked his theory that soccer's essentially tragic nature, in which the bad guys (the defenders) generally prevail, made it fundamentally unappealing to Americans who like to see the triumph of the men in the white hats.

This year they've got Hampton Sides to profile the American goalkeeper Tim Howard ahead of the England-USA game this weekend. As usual it's a good read, although it falters slightly when it has to describe the English self image when it comes to football. It says England is (note the giveaway singular) "good but rarely as good as its fanatical supporters believe".

I can imagine how you might get the impression of iron fanaticism if all you read was the copy on special promotional six packs of lager. No true Englishman really believes that the team are that good. In fact, far from believing that other nations have hardly any right to play the game, as the piece implies later on, we are predisposed to think most nations are better at it than we are. It is only when we have been worked upon by our two key industries, the deadly tandem of brewing and media, that we allow ourselves to unleash the fateful lightning of that fragile spark of optimism that flickers in our breast and briefly entertain the idea that we are contenders. Come six o'clock on Saturday night we will be swaggering conquerors. By ten o'clock it will be a different story. What the New Yorker, admirable though it is, doesn't understand is what all the ancient football-playing nations off the world understand. The despair you can handle; it's the hope that does you every time .

Whose box is this outside my house?

I think this is what they call "street furniture". This has been directly outside my house for the last twenty-two years. At first it seemed something to do with BT. Now it appears to be something to do with cable TV. Apart from the fact that it's pig-ugly and I keep bashing the car door against it what really annoys me is that the front is often left hanging open (as pictured) exposing the wires inside. If I had a vandal's nature I could reach inside, grab a fistful and plunge a load of local TVs in to darkness during "Britain's Got Talent". Years ago I asked the local council if they could do something about it and they said they couldn't, because it was all to do with some Act Of Parliament guaranteeing that you could find one of these abominations at regular intervals down every cabled road in the kingdom. Anybody know if this is true or who I could complain to? And who, apart from the viewers, would I be annoying if I decided to take direct action?

What Mariella Frostrup and Kristen Stewart meant when they used those words

A few months ago I heard a couple of young women in conversation on the Tube. "He looked liked he was going to rape me but then he turned out to be really sweet," one said to the other. That's been ringing in my head ever since. The entire sweep of human relations reduced to violence at one end and charm at the other. It's the same style that describes things as "really brilliant" or "a bit crap".

I was reminded of that conversation this week when the actress Kristen Stewart had to apologise for likening the experience of being hounded by photographers to "being raped". At the same time the broadcaster Mariella Frostrup had to withdraw her earlier comment about the producers of Radio Four's Today programme being "a bunch of misogynists".

Let's be kind about this and assume that she reached for the word "misogynist", which means a hater of women, when what she should have used was a term indicating the producers had some kind of bias against women. Since there isn't a word that does that she would have had to articulate the actual thought. Kristen Stewart would have been more accurate if she'd said that the targets of paparazzi often looked as if they've been harried or violated. But she didn't.

In our tone deaf public discourse "personalities" reach for explosive words when they want to minutely increase the drama of their often drab conversation. This isn't just because they think it's the only way they'll be heard. It isn't just linguistic imprecision. It also has a crude moral dimension. It's intended to swiftly reduce complex issues to good guys versus bad guys and to clearly associate them with the former group. In that sense it is, to use a popular portmanteau adjective, "uncool".

I survived the 1950s

This weekend they were celebrating the centenary of Jowett Cars, a company that manufactured cars in Yorkshire between 1910 and the early Fifties. My brother in law took this picture of a Jowett van at one of their events. We think it's the same model that my parents had when I was a small child. One day they put me in my pram, loaded it into the back of the van and then set off to Leeds. On the way round Tingley Roundabout it became apparent that the back doors weren't closed properly. The doors opened and the pram rolled out - with me in it. There wasn't as much traffic then as there is today and, this being the fifties, there was a passing District Nurse who yanked me and the pram out of danger. Doesn't mean I stop thinking about it. Obviously, as is traditionally the case with those isolated incidents of heart-stopping terror that happen when you first become a parent, they never told their parents.