EVENTS, DEAR BOY, EVENTS .........

We live in interesting times. An Icelandic volcano with a name which looks like the Pass-Key encryption into my Photoshop software has burped and reminded us all too clearly of its existence, and every aeroplane in Western Europe has been grounded. My holiday to the Carmargue in Southern France duly bit the dust, or more accurately the ash, so I’m sitting here at home venting my spleen and writing increasingly vitriolic letters about the Pension Scheme I run, rather than taking pictures of pink Flamingoes against a blue Mediterranean sky, whilst drinking a cool beer in the warm Provençale sunshine.

Now that the window of opportunity to reinstate the holiday a couple of days later has completely shut, they all start to fly again. Bastards. All, that is, except the Royal Air Force fighters we have paid Billions of pounds for to defend us from the murderous attacks of our scheming Cold War Russian foes. The Tornados are grounded because the Icelandic ash apparently screws their engines up particularly badly - a good time to invade perhaps. I have to say I’m not sure I’d have announced that little nugget of news to the world on Nationwide TV, but maybe I’m missing something. Perhaps their bombers use the same engines.

Anyway, the country is gripped (I think) in the build up to a General Election, and flocks of political chickens are about to come home to roost for those who look after us so diligently in Westminster. Whether to lay the Golden Egg, or shit on the floor of the cage, we will shortly find out.

At first, when the campaign started, it all seemed like the same old “Yes you did, No I didn’t” argument between the two main parties who have dominated British politics for nigh on 100 years. Then, for reasons which I haven’t quite got to grips with, a decision was made to have a series of TV debates in this country for the first time. Debates held between the THREE main protagonists in the British Political system. Yes, there is a third, although you don’t get to hear much about them. They’re called the Liberal Democrats, and in the main, their voice is sidelined, deliberately I suspect, drowned out by the noise from the other two main parties.

And yet, look at the votes the Lib-Dems got in the last election. Firstly, less than two thirds of the British electorate actually voted (61.2% for the pedants), and of those 36.9% voted for the Labour Party, 33.9% for the Conservatives and 23.1% for the Lib-Dems – not that far behind.

This actually means that the Labour Party’s mandate was endorsed by only 22.5% of the country’s electoral role. Nearly 80% of us either wanted somebody else, or couldn’t be bothered, didn’t want any of the candidates etc, etc, etc. I am not qualified to pontificate about the pros and cons of Proportional Representation, except to say that a system which gives us the situation above does not seem right, and does not seem fair. They bang on about the need for strong Government, and “Look at Italy”, but “They would say that, wouldn’t they” in Mandy Rice-Davis’s immortal (or is it immoral) phrase.

The last 5 years have seen massive issues raised in this country, things which will be looked back at in years to come as seismic, and potentially life changing. We’ve had a religious zealot (by the name of Blair) who, almost single handedly took this country into an illegal war. We’ve had a Chancellor, now an unelected Prime Minister, who has finished selling off the Country’s “Family Silver”, who has led a positive campaign to eradicate any sensible level of regulation within the Country’s banking system, who has poured unbelievable sums of money into the National Health Service with far less benefit than we have the right to expect, who is part way through the ruination of the country’s education system, and who has presided over a systematic takeover of the rights of the Individual in this country in a way that would have given Stalin a fair degree of satisfaction, had he been in charge. He and Blair have also been the individuals in charge of emasculating (or attempting to emasculate) the Judicial system, the Parliamentary legislative system, of politicising the Police system, and creating a New Labour labyrinth of “Jobs for the Boys” - His Boys - in a breathtakingly brazen and quite appalling way. We’ve all watched, powerlessly we thought, while it was all going on around us.

And 4 out of 5 of us didn’t even vote for him. It’s the Politics of the Madhouse.

If we want the country to be run by One Man – in Brown’s case One Man who has never even been given a mandate to lead us – and a bunch of unelected cronies, then fine. But let’s have a referendum to agree a change in this.

To police and mould all this, the more sinister political systems of America, the focus groups, the pinpointing of the small minority of voters who swing the marginal constituencies, the ruthless smearing and bad-mouthing of any dissenters, the continual pressure to be “on message”, with no individual thoughts being brooked or allowed have all been brought into play. The Drones, the Apparatchiks, the Control freaks have taken over.

So, back to this week. Some bright spark came up with the suggestion that for this election we’ll have a series of TV debates. Not just between the two “main” parties, but one including the Lib-Dems as well. Quite what these clever souls who think about these issues in the Labour and Conservative Back offices were thinking is beyond me. Gordon Brown is always going to look like “Yesterday’s Man” in that sort of company, and on any issue raised, the question “If you’ve been in power for 13 years, why haven’t you already done something about it?” is one he simply can’t answer. He’s on a hiding to nothing.

As far as the Tories are concerned, with the current Government’s performance being so shambolic, Cameron and his men should be miles ahead, hardly able to see Brown’s cohorts in their rear view mirrors. But that is not the case. Cameron, however he seems to put himself over simply does not cut the mustard. There’s something about him that just stops you believing in him. He’s not a saviour, and I suspect he knows it, and it all seems a bit “manufactured” and “Top-show”.

The third guy, who, I suspect less than 5% of the British public could recognise from his photograph up until 10 days ago, must have seen this TV debate development as “Manna from Heaven”. A chance to stand alongside the Big Two, show he can talk, show he’s got something about him, lay out his thoughts in a way he has been totally unable to do until now. No baggage, no “History”, no “Form”.

Why, in heaven’s name, did they both agree to do it?

But, agree to it they did. And just look at the result. New kid on the block, Nick Clegg, for that is his name, is suddenly on everyone’s lips. They got 22% of the vote last time when no-one even knew who the Lib-Dem leader was, so what’s going to happen in a couple of weeks time? Clegg “ambushed” them both in the two debates to date. It almost doesn’t seem to matter what their policies are, here’s someone new who isn’t tainted like the others. It may not be true of course, and there may be carpets to be lifted, and skeletons to be found, but that’s all in the future, and on May 7th, it won’t matter. In the way the political game is played today, Perception is All, and Now is Important.

I have absolutely no idea how it’s all going to turn out. The really exciting thing is that I’m pretty sure that nobody else does either. Pandora’s box has been opened, and what’s flown out, let alone in what direction it’s flown, is anyone’s guess. In the same way that a Division 2 volcano in Iceland can, at a stroke, bring the European air transport system to a halt, a couple of hours of prime-time TV can throw all the British political balls high in the air. The thread on which we all dangle is very thin. Little things can make big changes, and we’d do well to remember that.

It does seems very sad and telling however, that one man, whoever he is, in 3 hours of Talking Heads on TV can seem to transform the UK public’s views on how their country should be governed. You’d like to think that the policies and beliefs of the parties, and the strength of their candidates, would be the major factors, but maybe that’s not true anymore. Whoever said that we get the politicians we deserve may not have been too far away from the truth.

As a principal, I don’t want such power to be in the hands of one person, and the systematic and progressive stripping away of the checks and balances within our political system have worried me increasingly over the last 10 years. Maybe, as a way to give a bit of moderation, a “hung” parliament, and the probable consequences of Proportional Representation may be the way to go. Who knows?

But Churchill’s comment in 1947 is still worth reading – “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." We still need the common endeavour of a bunch of intelligent, honourable, far sighted individuals to take us forward – one where wisdom is still seen as a key ingredient. You don’t get that from one man, and a return to a wider spread of views in the Body Politic would be something I’d like to see given a chance.

Cue Bob Dylan – “The Times they are a-Changin”, or is it “Don’t think twice, It’s Alright”. Or maybe even “A Hard Rains a-Gonna Fall”?

Roll on May 6^th.

1/125th at F4, AND THEN SCARPER

I don't usually put up images taken by other people, but here I make an exception. I was going to say "it's an ill wind that blows nobody any good", but you might take that in bad taste, seeing as all the Airports in the UK are closed because of the fall-out.

But - The Volcano eruption in Iceland has resulted in a raft of pictures. I saw this one, and it blew me away (that's not particularly funny either).

IF YOUR PICTURES AREN'T GOOD ENOUGH, YOU'RE NOT CLOSE ENOUGH -

ROBERT CAPA (WAR PHOTOGRAPHER)

It was taken by a guy named "skarpi" and can be found on Flickr. His title for it is "Playing with the Devil", which is a bit more eloquent than my version - see Blog Title.

Note - "Scarper" is a verb meaning "To Run like Hell away from where-ever you are".

PETER GABRIEL - SCRATCH MY BACK

I've been a Peter Gabriel fan for a long time. For the last 30 odd years, he has been one of the most inventive, intelligent and thought provoking singer/songwriters around. Ever since his Genesis days in the mid 70s, when he would appear onstage wearing a fox's head or a sunflower, or a women's dress, the one thing you could say about him was that he was unpredictable, and you never knew what was coming next. His songwriting was always on the eccentric and somewhat bizarre side, but it was always interesting, absorbing – and different.

He has never been one to follow the crowd, thank goodness, and sitting back on his laurels is absolutely not his style. He hasn't produced a new body of work for something like 7 or 8 years, so it was with a fair amount of anticipation that I heard a new album was about to appear, and that he would be setting off on one of these “Saga” like tours they all seem to do when 60 is around the corner.

I had not bothered to read much about what was going to happen, so expectation hung heavy in the air with me. Mr Gabriel tends not to do the “more of the same” routine.

3 months ago, I got my ticket, and last Saturday, I dutifully set off to London for a day of "Kulchur". Firstly, a visit to Tate Modern on the South Bank, and then off to the O2 Arena in the old Millennium Dome to see "yer man" in the evening. I have to say that the O2 Arena is a terrific Concert Venue. It’s a marvelous looking building, especially when seen at dusk from the other side of the River. Its purity of line and simple but striking design mark it out as a real landmark construction. It’s a great pity that Politics almost managed to drag the building down with the ineptitude of what Our Leaders originally put inside it, but all’s well that end’s well. It’s very well set out, easy to get to, and seats huge numbers of people in pretty reasonable comfort. The acoustics of the place are also good, so, all in all, an excellent place.

ARENA FROM ABOVE

Not my picture, I'm afraid. Author unknown.

ARENA ENTRANCE

INSIDE THE ARENA

THE ARENA FILLING UP

The Tannoy system made a real point of emphasizing that he would be onstage at 7.30, so everyone found their seats in good time. There's always a real expectant buzz when 10,000 people sit there waiting for something like this. Of course, 7.30 came and - Nothing.

20 minutes later, a large 50 piece Orchestra had assembled behind a screen which cut off the main audience's view of the back of the stage. We were seated close to, but to one side of, the stage, so could see the magician's tricks going on behind the screen. Then, out he came, sidling onto the stage. He was dressed all in black, looking like a cross between a slightly portly Olden Day Sage, and a scruffy Undertaker’s Assistant. The days of the fancy dresses are clearly a lifetime ago. No matter. Here he is.

To me the show didn’t start well. He introduced a tall Scandinvian girl named Ane Brun who sang 3 very samey songs, accompanying herself on a guitar. The poor girl was on a hiding to nothing. The songs were unexceptional, and everyone was waiting for Peter Gabriel. The guy next to me summed it up with a comment “Now I know why the Norwegian Suicide rate is so high”. Not totally fair, but there you go.

Peter Gabriel’s new album is called “Scratch My Back”, and is a collection of 12 cover versions of other peoples’ songs. The plan is that they record one of Gabriel’s songs in return – presumably that will be called “And I’ll Scratch Yours”. We’ll see. Before tonight, I couldn’t imagine Peter Gabriel doing a cover version of anyone’s music. It just seems so alien to the man. He’s ploughed a very lonely furrow for the last 30 years, so for him to copy other people’s ideas seems quite strange.

The whole of the first half of the concert was given over to a performance of the 12 song project in its entirety. As soon as it started, the difference between the original songs and the versions we were hearing here seemed like a chasm. These weren’t cover versions, they were total reworks and reconstructions. No guitars, no drums, and a semi Classical orchestration of people like Bowie, Paul Simon, Lou Reed, Aerosmith and others was laid out in front of us. I’m not a pop music anorak, and many of the songs were new to me, but the ones that I did know came across as totally different in this performance, almost unrecognisable.

They were almost all slowed down dramatically, with the lyrics taking on a sparse character of voice, piano and strings. Even a song as bouncy as Paul Simon’s “Boy in the Bubble” was turned into a mournful, introspective contemplation. All the up beat rhythms, and the bright, bouncy tempo were discarded. And yet, if you read the words of the song, you could argue that this version was truer to the meaning of the lyrics. It's always good to hear a another view of any song, but this was from a different planet.

On the negative side, you could be forgiven for thinking the orchestrations were all a bit samey. Or that the tempo of the songs verged on the monotonous. There wasn’t a fast song in any of the 12, and the whole project took on an almost classical span, which clearly got some of the audience in a bit of a dilemma. The 3 minute Pop song this was not.

It demanded attention and concentration. Now I think Peter Gabriel has one of the most remarkable voices in music. He has such a purity of tone, overlaid with a husky edge which is quite distinctive and true. His top register is remarkable. What he gave us was the result of somebody paring down the original to an almost skeletal form, distilling down the essence of the song and reforming it in his own totally different view. In many places in the songs, he was almost talking melodically rather than singing the words, and you felt an almost intimacy coming over. And there were 22,999 other people in the Arena sharing this approach!

On several occasions, I wanted to rewind the performance, and get him to sing it again, because I’d failed to keep up with the message. There’s always the CD to do that with though.

The lighting effects were not spectacular in their scope. But, in some ways they matched the music. There was a backdrop of LED lights, and a perfectly synch-ed animation of red and white accompanied it all. No colour changes, nothing to distract, but gentle and beautiful animations which were very thoughtful, sympathetic and appropriate.

It was absolutely not one of those “Dancing in the Aisles” nights you sometimes get on the big venue, superstar nights. It was a thoughtful, contemplative couple of hours which stayed with me on the long journey home. Only for the last song of the whole evening, an orchestral reworking of “Solsbury Hill” did the audience jump up and get animated. “Here’s one you might know” was his telling introduction which said that he knew perfectly well what he was doing. I’m sure for some this was a bit of “Too little, too Late”, but with a guy like this, he leads and you decide if you want to follow.

I thought he produced some very haunting music, something I want to listen to again. It didn’t have an immediate “impact”, but you could feel it creeping up and engulfing you – something which would mature and burrow its way into your mind. I would imagine a Review of Reviews would result in a real polarization of opinion. Some would love it, some would hate it. No middle ground.

I know where I am on it.

POPPY

What is it about dogs?

The world is split into those who love them, and those who don’t. I tend very much towards those who love them. The relationship between a dog and the humans that surround it is very strange and, in my experience, one that is utterly unique. It’s not “unconditional love” as some people suggest but a symbiotic partnering where each side gets and gives immense pleasure from and to the other, a pleasure which exists nowhere else.

We play together, walk together, sit together, lie on the floor in an evening together, and, as a result, spend huge amounts of each day together. The relationship becomes a major part of one's life. With our dogs, watching them running free on the empty Norfolk beaches is one of the most pleasurable things in my life. The place itself is quite beautiful, and they seem to show a simple and utter joy there. They look fabulous as they bound around and play in the sea, and for a short time while this is going on, you might think you’re in Paradise. I know, to most people, this is all probably inconsequential stuff compared to the “big” things in life, but I’m not most people. I’m me.

But nothing is ever perfect. Today, out of the blue, our senior dog collapsed and died. On Sunday, she was tearing around in the snow in the sand-dunes on Holkham Beach over in Norfolk. Yesterday, she was running around like a puppy while we walked near home for miles.

Now, she’s gone, and I feel quite, quite lost.

MY NAME IS FOR MY FRIENDS

Serendipitously, last night I idly turned on the TV, and found myself 5 or 6 minutes into a High Definition version of David Lean’s epic film, Lawrence of Arabia. Nearly 4 hours later, it ended, and I sat back quite entranced. For the last I don’t know how many years, it has sat at either No.1 or No.2 at the top of my favourite films of all time, alternating with Ridley Scott’s BladeRunner. The film is now 45 years old, and I must say that the remastered version, funded I suspect as a labour of love, by Steven Spielberg, is a magnificent transformation.

I sat about five feet from the screen, so that the TV image filled most of my Field of View, and the effect of the landscape which unfolded before me was quite overwhelming. Anyone who says that the optical quality of a film is not important and that the story is the only thing that matters should have been sitting alongside me. I found it breathtaking, and there were several occasions during the evening when I could only gasp at the beauty what I was watching.

It’s a bit of a cliché, because only because it's true, but the landscape Lean captures on film deserves Star Billing alongside the actors. He captures the absolute nothingness of the place, its remorseless and unforgiving size, the searing heat of the Sun, and the insignificance of man’s place in it all, quite superbly.

Forget the story for a moment, and just ponder the unmatched cinematography (courtesy of Freddie Young), the inch perfect screenplay written by Robert Bolt (A Man for All Seasons was another of his), the editing (unsurpassed in my limited view) of Anne Coates, and Maurice Jarre’s musical score which surely sets the standard for epic films, and you almost couldn’t fail to produce a classic.

There are scenes in the film which I think will live with me for ever – two involving the humble matchstick, one in HQ in Cairo (see the YouTube clip below) and the other with O’Toole (Lawrence) and Claude Rains (Dryden - the superbly devious, suave and many faced symbol of the British Government in the Middle East) which ends in one of the greatest film transitions ever. One minute you are held in a close-up of Lawrence holding the last throws of a burning match and instantly you cut to the same orange of the flame except now you're looking at an orange, sand and sky only, burning shot of the desert, a couple of seconds before a shimmering sun rises for the day over the stark bare horizon, a shot which Lean holds for ages. If that’s not perfect film-making, then I don’t know what is. Even though it’s mid January here, I could feel the heat of the desert suddenly warming my room up.

"THE TRICK, WILLIAM POTTER, IS NOT MINDING THAT IT HURTS"

I could go on and on about many other bits of the film which please and delight me.

Omar Sharif’s long drawn out first ever entrance into films starts with a microscopic dot of a man in black on a camel on the desert horizon and ends up with the death by shooting of Lawrence’s companion. “My name is for my friends” is Lawrence’s response, when Sharif asks him who he is. Best entrance ever? I know of no better.

The charge of Lawrence leading his men into Aqaba, having crossed the uncrossable desert, and taken the town from the undefended side - undefended because no-one thinks an attack could be mounted from that direction. The camera then swings round after seeing the cavalry charge which captures the town, to show a fleeting, momentary glimpse of the unmoveable guns installed to protect it all pointing uselessly out to sea. Nothing is said, but the camera’s image, no more than a second, tells us all.

And there are more -the discovery of the Canal, the "No Prisoners" charge, the explosion, derailing and routing of the Turkish railway train, the desert meeting of the men on the two camels following the recovery of the fallen soldier - all moments of great pleasure. They won't mean too much if you haven't seen the film, but that simply means you should watch it.

The film is full of such moments, and even at nearly four hours long, for me it ends way too soon. Even so, it’s the series of conundrums in the underlying story in the end which binds it all together. The actors are, to a man (mainly because there are no women in it) all excellent, but it’s the enigma of Lawrence the man which digs away at you all the way through.

Terrorist or Freedom Fighter? Genius or Mad Man? Self serving publicist or One in a Million Soldier? Historian, archaeologist, linguist, writer, fighter, leader, embellisher of the truth? Some of the answers to this list are known, some not.

Ninety years later, with as much known about him as there probably ever will be, there are still conflicting views about him. Perhaps that’s why the story has so many twists and turns. Yes, the film has to be a work of fiction in the end. The dialogue is Bolt’s, the images are courtesy of Young and Coates, and the structure is David Lean’s and Sam Spiegel. But the start point and the end point of it all is Thomas Edward Lawrence – a fascinating and complex human being if ever there was one.

CDs AND MARS BARS - AN UPDATE

Sometimes, posts on this blog are like buses. You wait ages for one, and then two come along together. This is simply an update to a couple of relatively recent pieces – the Ghosts of Blogs Past.

Firstly, musing musically over Christmas about a late 2009 post about CDs/LPs where each track hit the bell, made me think of two more. So, in order to maintain some form of editorial completeness, these are offered for posterity. The real reason for their non-inclusion was probably something to do with the gentle alcoholic haze in which that post was put together not actually aiding my aim of Total Artistic Recall.

ABC – Lexicon of Love – one of the best albums of the Eighties – still sounds fresh 25 years on.

Eagles – Hotel California – Yes, I know it’s right down the white line in the Middle of the Road, but I still think it’s terrific. I remember playing it about a dozen times in one day not too long ago. It absolutely reeks of whatever it reeks of.

And Secondly, a culinary update for fellow Mars Bar Afficionados.

Following my purchase of several thousand of the Limited Edition Dark Mars Bars and my subsequent creation of a structured stockpile in several secret locations, I developed a plan to consume my strategic stock of them on the strict basis of One per Day.

You will no doubt be overwhelmingly impressed to hear that, as long as tomorrow is May 1st 2010, my consumption is absolutely dead on target. Self Control of an exceptionally high order, I think you'll agree.

Just thought you’d like to know.

MAD MEN

Well, “The Wire” is finished and I still think of it as a piece of televisual genius. To me, the storyline was so overwhelmingly encompassing in the way that it dealt with the real, big problems of today with each of the five series given over to one over-arching theme. The balance of good and evil in everyone of us, contrasting the good in the bad with the bad in the good, the disappearance of heavy industry in Western Society, and the despairing effects it has on people whose life are being destroyed with it, the emergence of an original uncorrupted vision and the gradually corrupting effects of the taking of power within complex American conurbations, the potential of enlightened Education to change, or fail to change, underprivileged children almost on the toss of a coin, and the diminishing capability of the newspaper Media to mould and lead public opinion as they come under pressure from the presence of new forms of information dissemination.

Powerful stuff indeed, welded together by a near flawless cast, brilliantly realistic and unremittingly honest dialogue, fabulous photography, editing and cutting all combining with a beautifully paced way of telling the story. I found it quite spellbinding, and still think of it almost every day.

How to follow that? I’m in the middle of the "Sopranos", and it’s very good, but it’s not a match for McNulty and his colleagues. So perhaps a change of direction. Cue Christmas. Cue pressies.

I think I must be losing the odd marble or two, but I ended up with two Box Sets to watch – “Mad Men” and “Shaun the Sheep”. The Sublime and the Ridiculous you might think, although I’m not sure which is which yet. My current view is that it’s going to turn out to be The Sublime and The Sublime. I’ll hold fire on the adventures of our ovine friend until a later date, as I’ve only watched 16 of the (8 minute long) 42 episodes so far, although I have to report on an interim basis that I haven’t collapsed into fits of hysteria so much and so consistently for many a long year. And it’s supposed to be a Children’s programme!

Back to “Mad Men”. HBO famously passed on it, and it ended up being produced by another American Studio – AMC. It’s a period drama set in the very early Sixties in a large American Advertising Agency on Madison Avenue (hence “Mad Men”). You are transported perfectly back to the age of Triple Martinis at work, colleagues who have at least two faces, a perfectly caught demonstration of casual sexism, pre Martin Luther King racism, a mind boggling amount of alcohol and cigarette smoking, and a macho-ness among the almost exclusively male elite in the organisation which is like an alien culture today. To think it was only two generations ago makes you realise just how frighteningly quickly the way of life can change - perhaps one of the reasons for the “They don’t know they’re born” attitudes of Grumpy Old Gits of my age.

The real irony of the whole production is that everything goes on with a security of belief in the way it is, which is unerring in the eyes of the protagonists. And yet, a couple of years hence their World is about to undergo a total seismic change in social attitudes. And we have the luxury of the hindsight which shows us these Ad Men, whose job it is to mould, change and manipulate the American Public in their chosen direction, being totally oblivious to the tornado which is about to hit them. As a clue, the closing credits to the last episode of Series 1 is Bob Dylan - "Don't think twice, It's alright". Just hum the words to yourself to get the drift.

It’s a series where nothing happens. Or at least, nothing seems to happen. Seen mainly through the eyes of Donald Draper, a Senior Ad Exec, we see the glossy Ad World colliding with family relationships where wives are almost fashion accessories, where business “relationships” between Secretaries and executives are acted out in a completely different universe from the home environment. Gradually in Series One, we start to see behind the slick Draper Business Persona, and glimpse what is washing around underneath.

It’s very underplayed, with a lovely feeling of the time. A huge effort has gone into the accuracy of the production values, and to very good effect but in the end, as always, it’s the people in it who grab your attention. The almost black and white stereotypes you are invited to observe gradually dissolve into a range of fragmented shades, and simplicity is slowly replaced by complexity.

I find it quite beguiling, and have devoured Series 1 in a bit of a rush. In our house, Father Christmas got his knickers in a bit of a twist when he wrapped my presents, and sent me two copies of Series One, when I remember quite distinctly asking him (very politely) for Series One and Series Two. But his franchisee (Amazon, I believe) is currently looking to find a spare reindeer to hot foot it through the snow send a replacement Series Two down my chimney.

I can’t wait.

WHEN DID YOU LAST LISTEN TO A CD ALL THE WAY THROUGH?

Or maybe I've developed the attention span of a goldfish.

I’ve finally got round to loading some of my CDs onto my smart-phone. Actually, it uses Windows Mobile 6.1 as an Operating System, so actually it’s not that smart at all. But that’s another story. The good thing about the phone is it can take a 16Gb Memory card, and you can get just about the whole of my music collection onto something about 15mm square, which is a bit scary if you think about it for too long.

Paired up with a decent set of headphones (Sennheiser PX-100s, for the anoraks out there), I can immerse myself in music anywhere. And very nice it is too, on occasions. Yes, I know a few of you in the rest of the world have been there for ages, but some of us need a little time to make the change. That’s my stance anyway. I won’t tell you what my childrens' slightly different opinions of this dilatoriness are down to.

But it got me thinking. I am of the analogue age. Recorded Music to me started with 78RPM shellac discs. They played for a maximum of 4 minutes or so, and if you wanted to listen to, say, a classical symphony, you were up and down, to the record player, like a Bride’s Nightie to turn the record over, and 4 minutes later, you did it again. Somewhere in my archives, I have a complete recording of Handel’s Messiah which is on, I think, 13 records – that’s 26 sides.

Then some clever soul in around 1948, I think in Columbia, came up with the Long Playing record - the LP. This was quite simply, a miracle. You could get around 25-30 minutes to a side, and because it was made from new fangled vinyl, the surface noise was almost inaudible and the frequency range capable of being played was (compared to the 78s), immense. The Hi-Fi industry was born, and mad (and not so mad) inventors in England particularly produced amazing pieces of electrical gear and loudspeakers to listen to the new LPs on. 50 years ago, they sounded stunning, and still do. Look up companies like Leak, Rogers, Radford, Quad (Peter Walker), Thorens, Tannoy, Spendor and Bowers and Wilkins if that sort of thing turns you on.

But the medium was still Analogue. Some people today still think the latest vinyl LPs sound better than their equivalent CD versions. I’m afraid my ears no longer allow me to decide, but the issue is still open to debate. What that does tell you is the sound then was pretty good. I’ve still got a couple of Classical recordings (Decca and Deutsche Grammaphon were the two companies that led the way in recording quality) which stand comparison with anything produced since – and they were released in the mid 60s.

On another tack, it’s interesting to wonder how this LP technology affected the way music (and Pop Music, in particular) was actually written. Because you put the stylus in the groove at the beginning of the record, and it wound its way unchallenged through the groove sequentially, it was quite difficult, and frought with the potential to damage the record significantly if you got it wrong, to skip tracks. You listened from Track 1 through to the End of Side 1, turned it over and then listened to the other side, again starting at the beginning of Track 1 on that side. So composers and singers had to give considerable thought to the order in which the songs appeared on the disc – even to decide what song they wanted to finish Side One on before you got up to turn the disc over. The format also forced singers and songwriters into a 50-60 minute collection of songs to put on one record. The prolific guy who had 80 minutes of songs to sell was not too welcome at the record studios in those days. One and a bit records didn’t go down too well with the suits in charge even then.

All of which thought came to me when I started to listen on my new fangled machine. When was the last time you actually listened to a CD from beginning to end, without skipping a track, or even thinking of Fast Forwarding to miss one you didn’t quite fancy? I don’t mean the live concerts, the “Greatest Hits” collections or the concept albums (The Wall, DSOTM, Tommy etc), but a common or garden standard collection of pop songs.

I sat down last night to think how many of the albums I possess which would stand this test. Where every song (not just most of them, but all of them) were ones you wanted to listen to. That’s what we had to do 40 years ago, and I’m not sure that the simple ability to skip, jump and reorder a digital version into whatever sequence you want today makes the artist think as much about what is on the record as they needed to back in the dark ages of the vinyl groove, and the stylus.

Anyway, for me the list so far isn’t that long. It doesn’t mean that they necessarily include the best individual songs ever – That’s another list! – but these LPs or CDs are the ones where every song hits the button with me – no weak links, fillers or make-weights.

As they say, in No Particular Order -

Fleetwood Mac – Rumours listen to the angst in the words
Steve Winwood – Talking Back to the Night the man has a great and unique voice
Wings – Band on the Run – I know it’s heresy, but I like this more than any Beatles record
Abba –The Visitors - a very dark album - Abba for people who don't like Abba. Assuming, that is, you get the one without the added Extra tracks which are very definitely Division 2. They left them off the first version for a very good reason – they’re not good enough.
Enya – Watermark she flows all over you like a warm Irish Coffee - very haunting
Michael Jackson – Off the Wall I think it's his best album
Stan Getz and Charlie Bird – Jazz Samba fabulous creamy sax and brilliant guitar playing
Roxy Music – Flesh and Blood perfect 1980s pop
Simon and Garfunkel – Bridge Over Troubled Water Only Just! There’s one track that only marginally scrapes through - the rest though is stunning
Bryan Ferry - Dylanesque Dylan's lyrics still lacerate, provoke and intrigue - some of his imagery is remarkable, and Ferry puts a more laidback 2006 spin on them. At least he can sing!
Gerry Rafferty – City to City one of Pop music's most under-rated singer/composers

Now that lot probably gives any psychiatrist worth their salt enough informatio to form a very clear view of the utter Middle of the Roadness my musical spectrum, and possibly my life spans. Let’s hope I don’t ever need to apply for a job again.

LITTLE RED ROOSTER AND LADY JANE

Sometimes you catch something on TV, usually late in the evening, which is quite unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. About 10 years ago I caught a programme on what was later to become the Sky Arts channel.

Now I am quite a fan of the ballet. For many years, we were Subscription Members of the Birmingham Royal Ballet, making several trips each year up to the Hippodrome in Birmingham to see them dance. It was always an excellent evening, and sometimes an amazing one. When people hear that you’re a fan, they sometimes look at you a bit sideways, as if there is a slightly disturbing side to you they didn’t know before.

There’s nothing like that actually. I just love the simplicity of the medium, the power and the gracefulness of the dancers, the wit and inventiveness of the choreography, the beauty of what’s played out in front of you, and the way an enormous range of emotions can be evoked simply by a movement or a glance.

So, back to the TV. It was a ballet programme, and I recorded it to watch later. The title of the piece was “Rooster”, and it turned out to be a ballet set to 7 or 8 Rolling Stones songs. It starts out with a guy – the Rooster – who is quite simply a chicken in a suit. He moves and struts around JUST like a Rooster, and you can’t take your eyes off the way he simply becomes the animal. The ballet is actually all about the battle of the sexes, and there is some amazing choreography in it.

I’ve lost the video now, and have often looked around to see if anyone ever put out a DVD of the film I had recorded. They haven’t, so until this evening I’ve had to rely on my memory to replay in my mind.

Typing “rooster” into Youtube, which rather pathetically had not occurred to me for 10 years, threw up this clip. It’s the first 8 minutes or so of the 25 minute performance. The sound on it is none too good, but that's the early Stones for you. You may think I’m turning a bit odd when you look at it, but I think it’s a tremendous piece of work, and as an introduction to modern ballet for people who would never be seen anywhere near one, it’s a great start.

All we need to do is get the company who danced it (I think they were Dutch) to search through their archives, and make a DVD of it, and I will be a slightly happier man for the rest of my life.

Anyway, give it a go, let go of your prejudices, and when you’ve seen it, tell me you didn’t like it. Just a little bit anyway.

Tags:

rolling stones
,ballet,
rooster

SEHWAG DOES IT AGAIN

Once again, I’m glued to the TV watching two of my favourite cricket teams in action – India and Sri Lanka. They are playing the last of three Test Matches in Mumbai in India. It’s hot and humid, and Sri Lanka have just been bowled out for just under 400. Not a bad score.

Except my favourite batsman, Virender Sehwag, is opening the batting for India. He has made a few false starts so far this year, although he did get 131 in the last match. Today, he made complete amends, and showed why, when he is on form, he’s the most exciting batsman in the World. He opened very gently for him, scoring only 15 off his first 31 deliveries. Very unlike him. But that was a bit like “Light the blue Touch Paper, and Retire”.

Suffice it to say, he batted for most of the day, and gradually turned the screw on the Sri Lankan bowlers in a display of utter professional batting. He ended up smashing a Not Out 284, scoring the fastest 250 ever seen in Test match Cricket’s history. If he scores another 16 runs he will stand as the only player ever to score three Triple Centuries in Test Matches.

ON HIS WAY - ONE OF HIS 7 SIXES

He plays with a ruthless attack, with defence being the last resort. It was clear today that he wanted to hit Muralidaran, particularly, out of the game – which he did stupendously. You simply can’t place a field which will restrain him, and one suspects that around 17 men would be needed in the fielding side to slow him down when he’s in this sort of mood. Unfortunately, the rules only allow 11.

Tomorrow is another day, and India are already 50 ahead of Sri Lanka with 3 days left. They will plan to bat all day tomorrow to remove any chance of Sri Lanka even thinking of winning. Sehwag scores at such a rate that any team he plays for can get themselves in a winning position very quickly. I would love to see him get another 100 and beat Brian Lara’s 400 runs record, but that’s a really tall order. Apparently, he has a bad back. Imagine what he’d be like if he was fully fit!

HAVING A BREATHER AFTER SCORING 250

The TV recorder is on for 4 in the morning. I can't wait.

Pictures by Associated Press.

DISPOSE OF THIS AEROPLANE RESPONSIBLY

I’ve decided to collect some of my images together and publish them in book form to be given to friends and family. I want to use one of the many on-line “Photobox” type set-ups where they offer a system which allows you to upload your pictures and text into one of their book templates. You pay them money, you wait a few days and they send you back your photos in a nicely bound book. Simple.

Except that, having a degree of perfectionism about me in this sort of thing, none of them quite offer the layouts which I actually want. And since there are still parts of me that haven’t progressed beyond the “I want it EXACTLY as I want it, not how you want me to have it” phase, I’ve decided to do it myself and do all the page set ups at home, and send them the pages as finished products, thereby bypassing their templates. Simple, once again.

So I purloin a very fancy, Industrial Strength Desk-Top Publishing Program, called Adobe InDesign, which is, in the English vernacular, the “Bees Knees” of Desk-Top Publishers. The Rolls Royce of DTPs. So, off we go on the learning process to get to grips with it all.

Into the minefield again. We have all learnt the ways of myriads of machines and gizmos in our life, but the number of these I have had in my life where the Instruction Manuals are models of clarity, simple to read, easy to understand, logical in their thought flows, and capable of answering the questions the new user can’t fail to ask, in a precise and succinct way, can be numbered on a single hand – and one with the odd finger missing as well. Why is it so difficult to explain simply and logically what a product does and how it does it, without the reader needing to have been a founder member of the product’s design team to understand it?

It may, of course, be me. I may just be thick, stupid or hard of understanding, loose of thought, incoherent where logic is concerned or incapable of understanding simple instructions. I might be, but I’m not.

I have a degree in Aeronautics from what is currently the 5th best University on the Planet, I have an Accountancy qualification where, during one of the many exams we needed to pass, I came 3rd out of 3,845 other aspirants, and I have a reasonable understanding of how the UK Pension system is currently constructed. Ignoring the fact that the last claim may in fact be the most impressive of the three, this is not written to indulge in a bout of personal “halo-polishing”, merely to show that intellectually, I’m not useless.

So, what is it about Instruction Manuals? Why do they fail to do what they are there to do ie INSTRUCT?

There is, of course, a fundamental “Catch-22” in all this. The guy who writes the Instruction Manual needs to know himself exactly how it all works, otherwise he can’t possibly impart the information to someone else. Except that he then needs to write it for someone who knows absolutely nothing about the thing he knows everything about. It’s the difference between being an expert in a subject and being a good teacher in that subject. In the same way that Architects should be forced to live for a year in the houses they design, and aircraft designers should be forced to be part of the crew when their baby takes to the air, then Instruction Manual Writers should have to man the telephones in the call centres answering the calls from confused customers of products they’ve designed. They'd soon learn.

When I at University, we were taught in our last year by a few Post-Graduate Students, who probably knew more about what they were talking than anyone else in the world. Except they had no clue whatsoever how to impart that knowledge to anyone else. What was “obvious” to them, as they admired the acres of equations they had just scribbled on the blackboards around them, was, at least to this poor soul, NOT in any sense “obvious” at all. George Bernard Shaw said “those who can, do; those who can't, teach”. He might have been a really clever guy, but he got that bit completely wrong. The ability to impart something well is a completely separate skill which is just as important as the ability to do the same something in the first place.

I can recall buying a computer a few years ago and the Instruction Manual’s first words were “Switch the machine on”. Could I find the switch? Could I hell. It was cunningly recessed into the base of the machine, accessible only if you turned the thing over. You ring the Manufacturer up to explain your problem, and are met with a “Yes, you’re not the only person who’s asked that question”. Oh well, that’s all right then.

The person who’d written the Instruction Manual knew perfectly well how to switch it on: he just couldn’t put himself in the place of the poor soul who didn’t so failed totally in his job.

If I look back at Instruction Manuals and Text Books which I have laboured over in the past, there is only one where I thought “The guy who wrote this knows his subject perfectly, and he also knows perfectly how to impart his subject to a pupil.” His name was Captain Smith, and he wrote the Tax Manual for my Accountancy Course. It was the model of simple, connected, flowing logic, with nothing being assumed that hadn’t been explained earlier, each fact or subject building seamlessly on the previous ones, so nowhere did you look for the missing page which covers the bit of the subject where otherwise the “leap of faith” needed to occur. The result was he got me through the subject, and I found out later that in the Army, where he taught the subject, he had never had a student fail. It was a cheap looking book typed rather than type-set, and you’d walk straight past it these days to the glitzier, shinier ones on the shelf, but as a model of excellence in its sphere, I have known no better.

The problem today is compounded by the complexity of things. The last camera I bought was a Nikon D300. It is a quite remarkable piece of technology/engineering, and I admire it unfailingly. As a tool for taking pictures, it has transformed my photography. It is quite, quite brilliant.

BUT, its Instruction Manual is 310 pages long. And that’s just the English version, it’s not one of those multi-language jobs we get these days. I doubt if there is one person on Earth who has read every word in it. The only saving grace is that the machine is so intuitive in the way it operates that the Manual is almost superfluous. I mean, 310 pages! My life has a finite span, and 310 pages is just too much.

Discussing this with a friend, the other night, he said that the Instruction Manual for the Avro Lancaster Bomber used in the Second World War was available in print. So, off to Amazon, and guess what, there it is. It has 532 pages, and that’s the complete Operating Manual for the Aeroplane, hydraulic and electric circuits and all. Everything.

THE FRONT COVER

Some wag apparently wondered how they could cram the whole of the information needed to operate a complex State of the Art Bomber from the Second World War into 532 pages, when the new DVD Recorder they had just bought needed significantly more pages. His response was that the Lancaster Manual did not need the longish section his DVD recorder manual had on how to dispose of the Product safely, and also, for the Lancaster, the German and Japanese translation sections were not needed.

Nice.

WORLDS BEST PHOTOGRAPHERS No 5 - JANE BOWN

Are YOU in for a treat. If you’ve not seen this lady’s work before, these are some of the best portrait pictures you will find anywhere.

Jane Bown worked for “The Observer” newspaper in England for 60 years, and currently an Exhibition of her life’s work is being shown in London. 100 of her pictures of the Great and the Good, and perhaps some of the Not so Good since 1949 are on display.

She is a very self effacing photographer and it is quite likely you will never have heard of her. That’s one reason why she takes such excellent pictures. With people like Annie Liebovich, it's hard to avoid the thought that the image is more about the person behind the camera, than the one in front of the lens. This lady is very different.

Portrait photography is not easy at all. First, even if you know the person well, you have to get that person to sit for you - we do know who we're talking to here, don’t we, by the way? Actually, before that, you have to have an idea of what that person is like, so you know what it is about the person in the portrait, you’re trying to bring out.

Getting people to relax, and “be themselves” sounds all to simple. It isn’t. A few people can do it, most can’t. Even when you know the person well, picking up and pointing a camera at someone brings up the shutters (no pun intended), and the “interview” face comes on, with the person you really want to photograph disappearing.

Photographing celebrities is different. They are used to being photographed, many even welcome it, so that bit is not the problem. The problem is photographing the real person, not the image that the person wants to be seen by the camera. The reality is that we have no idea what someone like Richard Nixon or Marilyn Monroe was actually like. We rely on their own writings, the writings of others, pictures, conversations and snippets from their friends and enemies and those who just “knew them” to flesh out the view of that person in our minds. Always, the distortions which these Third Parties, intentionally or unintentionally, overlay on the reality give us a picture which can only be an interpretation. It takes a special person to begin to slide behind the mask.

This applies to all portrait photography. Everyone, especially the person with their hand on the shutter button, has an angle, a view and an opinion - it's inescapable. The degree to which you’re looking at the real person, or the photographer’s spin on the individual in front of the lens is impossible to deduce. In the end, I believe in the end it’s a simple matter of belief, if you don't actually know the person in the image - if you think it’s the person, then it is.

Jane Bown’s style was to work very quickly, capture the immediate essence of the person in front of the lens, and disappear. There’s a very revealing short video of a Channel 4 interview - http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid1184614595?bctid=45769473001 - with her a few days ago, explaining how she took her pictures. Certainly, early in her life, she often had little idea who the people the “Observer” sent her to photograph actually were. Even later on, in the Nineties it was “Who’s Jarvis Cocker?”, which may not have pleased him too much, but at least it meant the guy got treated as much like a normal person as possible. Perhaps that’s why there’s an overwhelming sense of naturalness about her pictures which is so refreshing.

A few words from the interview tell us a lot, when the interviewer asks her about her approach to the subject -

Bown - "Light .... Get you in a good light, so that I can see your eyes ... Pause ... Look into them ... long pause .... And that's it really."

Interviewer - "The eyes are the most important bit ..."

Bown - "That's all .... Eye to Eye ..."

Here’s another link - The Complete Jane Bown, A Lifetime in Photographs – just click on the Gallery tab - which takes you to a slideshow of the 100 images in her Exhibition. I think it’s a remarkable achievement, and shows her to be at the very top of the pile of Portrait photographers in the last 50 years.

A few of these are shown below.

JOHN LENNON

RICHARD HARRIS

MY NAME'S HARRY PALMER - MICHAEL CAINE

BJORK

She is in a wheelchair and has stopped taking pictures now, but when I look at her body of work, she made a unique record of her times, of the Good and the Bad, the Beautiful and the Not so Beautiful – in immediate and fresh Black and White images which will stay in the mind for a very long time.

What a legacy.

Tags:jane bown,
photography

DARK SIDE OF THE MARS

Just occasionally, you wake up, completely unaware that your life is going to change, and change seriously before the day is out. All too often these days as the years pass, it’s not something good. But yesterday, I had one of those life-changing days which left me on a real high.

Going about my business, causing offence to no-one, I went to the local shop to pick up my newspaper, and –

THE DARK MARS BAR IS BACK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

A RARE SIGHTING - AN UNOPENED ONE

You have no idea how important this is in my life. I don’t eat an enormous amount of sweets, but once in a while, I get hooked on one particular brand, and gross overload consumption, on a semi-industrial scale, ensues.

It’s really quite pathetic, but if that’s the worst thing I do, well ……

The fiendish Marketing Men from Mars (that’s the Mars in Slough, not the one on the way to Jupiter) first dreamt this product up about 10 years ago. I remember buying one in a petrol station, and consuming it on the way home from work. I think it was called the Mars Midnight then – very soft lights and “Would you care for a nightcap, my dear?”.

Its dark, slightly grown up chocolate taste mingled with a fluffy and light nougat, much whiter than normal, complemented by a layer of soft, squishy caramel. I thought it was definitely a confection for those people with taste, refinement, class and a rare touch of discrimination - the Mars Bar for the Connoisseur in fact. They are definitely to be eaten with your little finger crooked daintily in the air, not wolfed down in two bites or heaven help us, consumed in the (alleged) Jagger/Faithfull style.

So I binged on them, and became a hopeless addict. And what did the bastards do then? They took it off the market without a by-the-by, or a hint of a bit of prior notice. Suddenly they just disappeared. I’ve never been into drugs or that sort of thing (Alcohol’s not a drug, it’s a vital food, necessary for the efficient functioning and smooth operation of my body) but over the next few days I felt exactly how I imagined a crack addict must feel going down the “cold turkey” route. I drove around town looking for out of the way little shops who might have been left with a bit of unsold stock. But no luck. It was almost as if the fiends from Slough had driven round every shop they’d sold them to and taken all their unsold ones back in to captivity, just to torment me.

Not a pleasant time in my life at all.

And then, about 4 years later, the things reappeared. I don’t know why. They just did. Is there someone in Mars who enjoys irritating their customers, Mars Bar Teasers in effect who get there kicks seeing grown men driving around small rural shops late at night looking for non existent bars of chocolate. I think it’s all a bit sadistic personally.

Anyway, I am not one to make the same mistake twice. I came up with a personal Worst Case Scenario, and assumed that this time, it might also only be in the shops for about four weeks. So I bought two boxes of the things and salted them away as Strategic Stocks, hidden away from prying eyes, in a location that would go with me to my grave.

Except of course that this totally missed the point. They did indeed strip the country’s shelves bare of the infernal things again after a few weeks, and I sat back with the luxurious thought that I was safe from their actions. Two boxes, at 24 per box is 48 units of pleasure. 48 units of pleasure at 2 per day means 24 days ie 3 and a bit weeks. I don’t recall the details now, but I suspect that my re-addicted state probably resulted in me mainlining on more than the planned "One with my Morning Coffee and One with my Afternoon Tea strategy". There was possibly an "Oh I’ll just have another one before I go to bed" bit of the plan that I may have forgotten to include. So, a couple of weeks later, they’d got me again. And this time there was the added personal guilt and inadequacy of trying to outwit them and failing so dismally.

Anyway, this time it’s going to be different. I’ve checked on the website and it’s a “Limited Edition” on sale for four weeks. Why the hell do they do this? Nastyness for its own sake? The whole point of sweets and confectionery is to give people instant pleasure, so where is the need to behave in such a despicable and unpleasant way? Is it just to show a small section of the population that Multinational companies are all powerful, and just don’t you forget it? I’m not a litigious person, but I'm sure most liberal minded Human Right Lawyers (is there any other sort?) would advise me that a test case in Strasbourg was a winnable proposition.

I think there’s two weeks to go. My local shop has 4 boxes in store, and I’ve also scouted around to find secondary, back-up sources of supply. I’ve measured the size of the box, and done a 3-D space review of my fridge to investigate the close packing capabilities on the shelves. If, without being noticed by the lady of the house, I get rid of the non essentials like Milk, Butter, Vegetables and the other fripperies, I think I can get around 1000 inside. Unfortunately, the boxes will not fit vertically in the door bins, so the 15 bottles of wine currently in them there will have to stay. Maybe I can live with that.

At a strict ration of 2 per day, this will last around 1½ years, which is better than the previous 5 and a bit weeks, but still not long enough to span the four years or so enshrined in Mars’s devilish Product Cycle.

Apart from buying some additional shelving in the coolest part of the garage, for additional overflow storage during the winter, I’m worried that this 2½ year gap is unfillable. I could consider planning on One per day, rather than Two, splitting each one up in the morning into two halves, but I’m not sure the early morning will-power needed for that strategy to work, would be strong enough.

Perhaps my children, who live quite close, or some well meaning friends, might squirrel some away for me. Except, most of them are quite partial to the taste as well, so when I went to collect them, it’s quite possible that they may have “disappeared”, a bit like the “Angel’s Share” in a Whisky Distillery.

All this means that it’s already beginning to look a bit like being on the 10th day of a two week holiday, when the thoughts of the end of the holiday begin to crowd in on the unalloyed “Away from it all” pleasure you’ve felt up until then. The Dark thoughts.

Ah! Dark Thoughts. Excuse me. I’ve just got to go to the fridge. I might be some time.

Tags:

mars bar,
mars dark

IT'S ONLY A GAME

Regular readers may possibly have noticed that I have a rather unhealthy interest in Cricket.

Pause for Groan – but, although this little piece is related to cricket, it isn’t really. It’s about a man who plays the game at the highest level, and the way that greatness sometimes brings problems to blight someone’s life seriously.

Marcus Trescothick. He currently opens the batting for Somerset, and he’s pretty good. Actually, he’s bloody good. One of my absolute favourite players. 33 years old, he played for England for many years, and was a key part of the England team which won the Ashes in 2005 – Player of the Year in fact.

I don’t recall a better opening batsman in the country in the last 40 years. I suspect, for the first few years of this century, his was the first name the England selectors wrote down when they selected their team, apart from the captain. Actually, given some of England’s recent captains, I’m not sure that the captain’s names got written down before him that often, but that’s another story.

Trescothick played some stupendous innings for his country, and amassed 5,825 runs during the 6 years he was in the England team. To put that into some sort of perspective, only 10 men have ever scored more runs than him, with Graham Gooch’s 8,900 topping the list. None of the 10 above him played for their country for less than 12 years amassing their totals, and some of their careers actually lasted more than 2 decades. His rate of scoring must be the highest ever.

His style of play is very individual. He does not move his feet as the purists say you (or he) should. He has exceptional Hand/Eye co-ordination, and when you watch him, he seems to have all the time in the world to stop the ball in mid flight in his mind, examine what it’s doing, decide on his shot and then play it. An English Virender Sehwag – and that’s a compliment of the very highest order. He’s a big, solid man – 6ft 3in – and he hits the ball very, very hard, but with a slow, almost languorous, even contemptuous swing that looks so simple, but is so effective. You only have to look at the bowler’s face when Trescothick gets his eye in. They know they’re in for the equivalent of a sporting execution. There are very few players who you’d run to the TV to watch if you heard they were batting, but he’s absolutely one of them.

IN FULL FLIGHT, PLAYING FOR SOMERSET

But ….. there had to be a but. When he went out to India in 2006 to play Test Cricket out there, he was found collapsed and sobbing his heart out the Dressing Room. He came home under a media driven secrecy cover. “It’s a bug”or “Family problems” were some of the media's explanantions. Speculation about his marriage, the reasons were many – and all wrong. Trescothick didn’t help because he tried to cover it up, probably from a shame viewpoint. The truth was that he had clinical depression, and it had finally exploded. Why? Perhaps being a long way from home, or playing for England, or something else. Who knows?

SOMETIMES, A PICTURE SPEAKS A THOUSAND WORDS

Two years later, and after several failed attempts to return to the world cricket stage, it’s still there. He wrote a very moving and honest book about it all (called “Coming back to Me”) which takes you through the awful build up to his breakdown, and its consequences, in painful and gruesome detail, a book which gripped me totally and won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year in 2008.

He still played on for his county through all this. England missed him dreadfully, and some well meaning but wrong people clearly tried to get him to return to Test Cricket, because he had left a gaping hole which is still quite unfilled. Thankfully he decided that his health was more important than any cricket match, so he concentrated on playing for Somerset. And in 2009, when you look at the Batting performances of all the hundreds of County Cricketers in this country, guess whose name is at the top. He scored the prodigious total of almost 3,000 runs this year – mind boggling - and he looked as relaxed as could be doing it.

A couple of months ago, with Somerset taking the World Stage in India for the Champions World Twenty20 League Series, he agreed to go and represent his county. You watched him with a good deal of trepidation and, rather depressingly I for one immediately felt from the start he was not the man you’d seen playing County Cricket in England during 2009. Out of sorts, timing all over the place, and not scoring any runs. Lo and behold, the “black demons” had come back, and he had to fly home prematurely, probably for the last time. How very sad.

He clearly wants to be back on the world stage, otherwise he wouldn’t keep subjecting himself to the ordeal, but the time must be here where he realises that “That was then, and this is Now”. I suspect he’ll now put it all behind him and just play county cricket for a few more years. I also suspect that he’ll stay right at the top of the County averages when he does that. Lack of pressure, and being comfortable with yourself.

A real crying shame for England, but for those of us who watch County Cricket, I, for one, think I’m in for a real treat.

THERE ARE NO FLIES ON ME ....

First post for quite a while.

It’s not that there’s nothing in my mind worth rabbiting on about. At the moment, it’s more like the antidote to “Mastermind” – I’ve started but I haven’t finished anything for a few days. My computer is littered with bit of this and bits of something else. Things like the revival of the MP’s expenses issue and the way it’s always the little things in life which cause the real damage, or a piece on the two men, Ponting and Hurley, who photographed the Scott and Shackleton Antarctic expeditions so brilliantly ninety years ago, or a bit on Humphrey Lyttleton, jazz player, writer, and the best quiz show host EVER, or even one on the ramifications of the Report on the MG Rover "Phoenix Four" fiasco, or the rather sad story of Marcus Trescothick, and a couple more besides. They’re all there in embryonic form, some struggling for survival and some blossoming nicely.

But they’ve not been finished, so the blogger’s equivalent of the Deafening Silence has invaded the 42at60 pitch for a couple of weeks.

Explanations over, this post now goes from the sublime to the Gor Blimey.

I’m sitting down this morning with a cup of coffee and a biscuit, or more accurately two biscuits. Now one of my less impressive habits is that of dunking these things. My mother taught me that it’s not done in polite society, a bit like picking your nose and flicking the results at one's host or wearing brown shoes at a funeral. So, since I’m on my own, and, as far as I can see, nobody is staring through the window, I decide that these biscuits are definitely going to be eaten sinfully and impolitely - dunked in fact.

I can’t believe how sad I am writing about all this in so much detail but they are the excellent, slightly burnt, caramelly, crispy little ones you get in a decent restaurant, individually wrapped with your coffee - the biscuits the word "Moreish" was invented for. Although I am not a pig, I have been known to eat a complete packet at one sitting. Actually, I can remember starting out on the second one!

Now the skill (yes, it is a skill) in dunking biscuits is all in the timing. The depth of immersion is related in a complex, non linear fashion to the time it’s in the liquid. Also, the thinness of the biscuit, the temperature of the liquid, the relationship between the biscuit's volume and surface area (I'm sure Aspect Ratio and Sweepback Angles may play their part as well here) and, if I recall correctly from my youth, the Angle of the Dangle, all interact to mean that the time it must stay in the liquid is almost impossible to compute. I suspect, empirically I have to say, that there’s probably a Square/Cube Law in their somewhere if you could but do the maths properly. Probably a good subject for a PHD Dissertation at one of the UK’s many second class universities. At least the experiments would be enjoyable. Talk about generating a hunger for learning.

But this morning, the human mind swerves past all this maths, avoiding the complexities of the dynamics of cantilevered structures flexing at close to yield points, the divergent thermodynamic properties of randomly wet materials under severe loading and the aerodynamics of bluff, rough surfaced objects at low airspeeds and in turbulent airflow conditions – do I hear the need to consider the Reynolds Number of a moving Ginger Nut anywhere? - it really is not a simple thing, all this. We aficionados rely on a lifetime of hard earned biscuit dunking experiences to avoid needing to address and solve these awesome scientific issues.

Practice teaches us, to within about a second, just how long to leave it in the coffee, so the maximum amount of liquid has been absorbed, but leaving the biscuit at the very edge of its operating envelope, just capable of being transferred to one’s mouth without that sickening spludge of sodden carbohydrate falling on newly washed and ironed shirt. The more skilled of us can repeatedly pull this off, and we know the inner pleasure behind the slight supercilious sneer we give when some less experienced practitioner tries to copy, and falls at the first. Without polishing my halo here, if dunking biscuits was an Olympic sport, I’d be putting my application in to be the England team Manager.

Anyway, I’m just savouring my second (and last) biscuit, when I taste a really crunchy bit – somewhat like the currants you get in an (undunked) Garibaldi biscuit.

Except of course, as I realise almost instantaneously but just too late, that there are no currants in the caramel biscuits I’d been munching on. Signal from Brain to Mouth - stop chewing NOW and investigate. This is a "Code Red". A finger leads the investigation and soon provides the answer.

Half a fly.

Further investigation reveals that the matching half is nowhere to be found, leading to one distasteful (in both senses of the word) but inevitable conclusion. As an ex-scientist, I considered the alternatives and immediately rejected the idea that this particular fly had previously just been chopped neatly in two by person or persons unknown, followed by an immediate parabolic free-fall into my cup of coffee. The reason being that I was on my own, otherwise I wouldn’t have been dunking the biscuits in the first place, would I? It’s not polite, I've told you that already. Pay attention.

So, the irrefutable whereabouts of the rear end of this recently dismembered creature became, in an instant, quite clear to me. I certainly couldn't see it but I knew precisely where it was.

Yes, I know this isn’t polite either but, Uuurrrrgggghhhh!!!

I don’t know why (the maths – statistics and probability theory - is hugely against it), but I could not resist an involuntary swirl around in the coffee with my index finger to see if its nether regions were still swirling around in the brew. I even pondered whether the recently deceased fly had perhaps been a member of a suicide pact, which had, like lovers jumping off the Clifton Suspension Bridge holding hands, or legs, as they met a watery end, resulted in another fly ending its life at the same time in the same Espresso. But No. The phrase "We enter this world alone, and we leave it alone" applies to flies as well as humans.

Oh Dear, sorry about all this rambling, but al least it proves to the outside world, if nothing else, that I’m still around.

I don’t know if anyone has ever coined a saying – “There’s only one thing worse than finding a caterpillar in your salad, and that’s finding half a caterpillar.”

If they haven’t then, I claim authorship.

ACCENTUATE THE POSITIVE .....

Just occasionally, one sits back and looks at the way life is going. What's important, and what's not so important, or at least not as important as you once thought it was. A few months ago, I was employed (albeit on a One Day per Week basis), and a visit to the plant where I had been part of a team which had started the company some 15 years ago, was the highlight of my week.

Then the company, obviously lacking the firm direction I had given (!) since a medical “incident” 8 years ago, culminated in the Administrators being called in. About 95% of the workforce, including yours truly, received one of those “Dear John” letters which mark a turning point in one’s life – except mine was addressed “Dear Sir” which did not please me overmuch. Although I am aware there were reasons for it, it does not seem right that no-one could bother to ensure that they even called you by name when writing such a missive. For the first, and probably the last time in my life, I had been made redundant.

So what now?

As it happened I remained as a Trustee of the Company’s Pension Scheme, and the only noticeable change to my situation was that previously the Company paid for my efforts in this direction, whereas now it has involutarily become a Voluntary activity. But it remains a strange feeling to see oneself as unemployed.

Fast forward to tonight. It’s a Saturday evening and I’m sitting here pondering Life, the Universe and Everything. Great things have happened in our family in the last few days. My younger daughter has give birth to a little baby, the fourth of our grandchildren and the first girl in the family. She is of course the most beautiful creature on the face of the Earth, and everyone is doting on her unmercifully.

We are very lucky as a family in that both my daughters and their families live very close to us. A very pumped up John Daly could hit a Drive and a pretty decent 7 Iron in two different directions and each Second shot would land in one of the girls’ gardens. We can walk to both of their houses, and, in a situation like now, it is so much easier to help with what needs to be done. Given that much of it all is “Venus” rather than “Mars” stuff, my function is to look after the house and minister to our dogs while my wife is out on Grandmother duty. But the closeness of the extended family makes this all a good deal easier to orchestrate than if we all lived in different parts of the country.

It does of course have reciprocal benefits. My elder daughter, especially, is a very good cook, and tonight when I was sitting at home, one glass of wine to the good, watching the cricket from India and feeling like I couldn’t really be bothered to get up and make a meal, the phone rings and the gist of the message was that there was a portion of Shepherds Pie, and a chunk of Apple, Blackberry and Raspberry Crumble going a-begging if I wanted it. It took me about a minute to scoot down there, replete with plates and bowls to dish it all up onto. Talk about perfect timing.

It’s a pretty good form of symbiotic family co-existence. I keep a running tab for a sort of informal “Meals on Wheels”, paying, on a course by course basis for what I’d normally pay to construct a meal on my own. This pays my way, and salves my conscience regarding sponging off my children, which would never do. It also means that I don’t have to bother to cook occasionally.

On the other side of the coin, my daughter doesn’t have to worry about using up the left-overs from a meal, and, in spite of not wanting to accept money from parents, is forced to receive a tiny additional amount of revenue. Oh, and I get to eat some excellent meals. There’s probably a decent Carbon Footprint benefit somewhere, except I can’t be bothered to think where. I can’t even begin to see the first sign of a downside to all this.

Anyway, when I got there, my daughter explained that she was going to the cinema tomorrow with her two children to see “Up”, the new 3-D Pixar Cartoon. Now, ageing though I may be, I find most of these film to be absolutely brilliant and very witty - in my humble opinion, future Classics in the making. I’d read a couple of reviews about this particular film, and it seemed to get 5 Stars from most of the reviewers, so I piped up to say that I’d love to go along. So tomorrow, I’m off shepherding my two elder grandchildren to the local cinema, where we’ll no doubt hit the Popcorn and Pepsi, and quite possibly the Ben & Jerrys, stand, as part of the afternoon’s entertainment.

All of which makes the general problems of the world seem a fair distance away. It doesn’t mean they’re not there, because they are. Closer to home, a great friend’s Father in Law has just died, and another friend is recovering from yet another operation a few days ago. We’ve just been through a difficult period where one of our dogs has had a major operation and we wondered for some time about the outcome.

But, and this is the only reason for writing this piece tonight, it’s nice occasionally to see the other side of the coin.