LAWS AND SAUSAGES

I love political diaries.

So often these days, politics, at least in the UK, hides behinds shrouds and curtains of obfuscation. The powers that be MUST be doing things they are not totally proud of, to feel the need to hide so much of what they do, and how they do it from the gaze of the general public.

Just occasionally however, someone involved in the governmental process shines a light into the dark and murky corners of our political life, and, to mix a metaphor, lifts the edge of the carpet giving us a glimpse of how the wheels of government turn or sometimes, don’t turn.

So they write a diary. The thing about a diary is its immediacy. It’s written on the day it happens, so you get what the writer thinks when it all happens, not many years after when the memory has changed, views mellow and change, and the longer view, as well often as the latest view paints over the way it was then. There haven’t been that many decent ones in this country over the last 50 years. I suspect I’ve bought most of them. And it’s not always the heavyweights in the political firmament that produce the good ones – on occasions the really good ones come from people your prejudices would class as light weight. The ones I like are few and far between -

Richard Crossman almost started it for me, when he covered the Wilson Years from 1964-1970. Quite explosively. It showed almost for the firat time how Government actually worked rather than how they’d like you to think it worked.

Tony Benn wrote at enormous length (4 million words before editing! – just work that out on a words per day basis). Most definitely his own man, and on occasions as mad as a hatter, but Denis Healey had a standing order to those around him in Parliament – Never leave me for an hour with Benn on my own. I might end up being converted by him. A very charismatic man.

Edwina Currie (she of the salmonella debate) punched way above her weight, with a short book covering 1987-1992, which showed the frustrations of the lower ranks of the Ministerial Greasy Pole extremely well, as well as informing us first hand, if that’s the right phrase, of the colour of John Major’s underpants. Blue as it happened. Well it would be, wouldn’t it?

Gyles Brandreth, he of the woolly jumpers, wrote a hugely underrated book covering his time as a small town MP, covering the gradual decay of the Major government in a very atmospheric and readable way. I think it’s one of the best set of political diaries ever, and yet it’s hardly known at all. You can’t imagine someone like Brandreth producing something like this. He seems such a lightweight. But read them – they are quite superb, reeking of gradual fatalism and terminal, unrecoverable political decline.

And then there’s Alan Clark. Scurrilous, gossipy, outspoken, hugely well written and a series of three stunning books which I couldn’t put down. They pulsed with life, and showed again the frustrations of unrealised political ambition, as well as a terrific insider’s portrait of Thatcher’s downfall.

He was in love with her, of course. Odd, but true. A unique man who loved animals, was a vegetarian, and had two dogs, one named after Hitler’s film director, and the other after his Test Pilot. He lived in a beautiful 12th century Moated castle in Kent with his wife Jane. He married her when he was 28, and she was 16. You couldn’t make it up. If I was ever granted the wish of having dinner with 6 people of my choice, he would be the first on my list.

The Blair years - remember them? Try Alistair Campbell. Flawed they most certainly are. Probably published too soon, so too much airbrushing, particularly with the Brown/Blair relationship, which is not written up truly and fairly, to avoid giving the opposition too much ammunition to fire at Brown. But they’re still a marvellous read. You can’t help feeling that for many years, the country was actually governed by the Author, who had his hand up Blair’s back, pulling the strings for much of the time. You might not like what he stands for, but I bet he’s a great bloke with whom to spend an evening in a pub.

And try Piers Morgan. Almost the last man you’d expect to produce something like a worthwhile view of political life. They’re strictly not diaries in that they were written up long after the event, from notes he had kept. But they are really riveting stuff. He met Blair on innumerable occasions, with greater access that any politician, but it’s also the peripheral bits which enthral you. Try the bit where he’s out at a Rugby Club dinner with the Rugby player Will Carling who’s being pestered by someone on his mobile. A while later a small box wrapped as a present turns up via a uniformed flunkey. Upon opening it, he is faced with a freshly cut clip of Princess Diana’s pubic hair. An invitation not to be rejected! I don’t suppose that will make it into any of the official biographies.

And to the latest one I’ve got my sticky little mitts on. Chris Mullin. At a time when no-one has a good word to say about any politician, up comes a 600 page tome about Mullin’s life as a (very) junior Minister in Blair’s government. I can’t think of any MP who seems to have more integrity and honesty than this man. A very Left wing ex journalist who stands up for the rights of the common man, and who is increasingly appalled by the sinuous goings on at the top of New Labour. He admires Blair The Man, but has a real crisis of conscience over Iraq, and thinks that people like Rove, Rumsfeld, and Cheny are borderline insane.

You’d think he’d come over as a bit of a dull and worthy do-gooder, but he doesn’t. He writes well, perceptively, sees the big picture, and has a dry and funny sense of humour. I started them yesterday, and have just passed page 500.

Given what’s going on in the UK today with the Expenses saga, here’s one very topical entry in his book.

“Andrew Mackinlay dropped a little bombshell at this afternoon’s meeting of the parliamentary committee. Apparently, under the Freedom of information Act, by January 2005 MP’s expenses will be subject to public scrutiny, retrospectively. Goodness knows what mayhem this will cause. “We are in a jam,” said Robin Cook. “Few members have yet tumbled to the juggernaut heading their way.” He said he had been advised that we could probably get away with publishing headline figures and it would be desirable to start publishing a year before the deadline so that any fuss would have died down come the general election. It was agreed not to minute the discussion.

I’ll bet it was! And when was that written? May 2002!!

Talk about pulling the pin out of a grenade, and staring for seven years at what you’ve just done.

Once again, snippets like that shine very bright lights into very dark and dingy corners. And thank Goodness they do. You can understand the politician’s view about all this. Leo McGarry, the President’s Chief of Staff in the West Wing stole Bismarck’s supposed line which got it just about right from their point of view –

"There are two things you should never let people see how they're made. Laws and sausages."

It’s down to people like Chris Mullin who give us all a bit of a clue as to how the system works, or more accurately doesn’t work.

Good on him.

THE RETURN OF THE MAJESTICS !!

I've moaned here a few times before about the fact that one of the great TV Dramas I've ever seen has never been available on DVD. "Tutti Frutti" is a six part tragi/comedy first shown in the mid Eighties. Robbie Coltrane, Emma Thompson and Richard Wilson were the, then new, stars of this story of the Majestics, an ageing Scottish rock band touring the most remote villages and towns in Scotland on their ill fated 25th Silver Jubilee tour.

It drips with black comedy, great performances, and an unusually high body count. Robbie Ciltrane singing "Love Hurts" to Emma Thompson is very touching and moving. And he's got a great voice.

Written by John Byrne, it was simply the best comedy drama series I've ever watched. It quickly gained a "cult" status, made more so over the years because of the rumours of why it had never been repeated since the first showings. Copyright problems with some of the songs, members of the cast who didn't want it to be seen again, suggestions that some bright spark in the BBC had wiped the tapes - even the thought that, because John Byrne refused to write a sequel, a BBC Big-Wig was witholding permission to release it, as a punishment - all these have surfaced from time to time.

Thye really sad thing is there is a whole generation who have been denied a classic series which is up with the very, very best.

But - THEY'RE FINALLY GOING RELEASE IT !!!!!!!!!!

JAZZER!

The Beeb has announced that it's on the market from August 3rd.

Yippee!!!

Tags:tutti frutti

WHO DO YOU WANT BATTING FOR YOUR LIFE?

If I have anything approaching a Regular Reader, they will be aware of my love of Test Cricket, simply the best game the world has ever invented. The players are utterly fascinating in their almost infinitely varied approach to the game. And the fact that it is played across the world, with England, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, West Indies, India and Sri Lanka being the major countries constantly involved, brings the differences between nations and even continents into play in a way most other games lack.

The World Series in Baseball ? – do me a favour!

However you look at it, there are always certain players who, when you realise they are playing, make you get out of bed earlier then you’d planned just to watch them.

It is a simple fact of life that there are not too many English names in such a list at the moment. Pietersen is the only batsman who gets anywhere near a place on my “Pick a World Eleven” to play a visiting First Eleven from Mars, and I’m not even totally sure that he’d get my final vote. South Africans Graham Smith, AB De Villiers and JP Duminy, India’s Virender Sehwag (on a good day the best there is) and Gambhir, New Zealand’s Jesse Ryder (a real hooligan, but he hit a stunning 201 against the Indians a couple of months ago) and possibly Brendan McCullum, the new boy from Australia Philip Hughes (I suspect England are in for a hell of a shock with him batting against them this summer), as well as Ponting, Kumar Sangakkara from Sri Lanka – well that’s a decent lot to get on with. You can see why Pietersen may not even get a look in.

But there’s one guy who never seems to get a mention in these lists and I really don’t understand why – a guys who bats in a totally unique and distinctive way, Shivnarine Chanderpaul from the West Indies. He seems to be an intensely private man, who never gets anywhere the limelight. And yet, to pick a couple of cricketing numbers from his last two years, over 6 Test Series against Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, England and Sri Lanka (arguably the 5 best teams on the planet) he AVERAGED 105 runs over the 14 matches. The Best of the Rest of the world average around 50. That stat alone is pretty unbelievable. Only Bradman, back in the 1930s can touch such a feat.

As a cricketer, you’d throw him back into the river if you were picking a player on the way he looks. He’s small (5ft 7in), wiry, introspective and almost diffident on the field, and he looks as if he couldn’t hit the ball off the square let alone get it to the boundary. He bats as if he’s never seen a coaching manual, with a hysterically open stance which looks as if he’s expecting the Square Leg Umpire to bowl the ball to him. But he shuffles his way across the wicket, watches the ball unerringly and plays the ball VERY late, and with very soft hands. It looks really odd until you see where he is when the bat makes contact with the ball. Then it all makes sense.

But it’s his mental approach which lifts him high above the others. His approach is almost Zen like, in a trance on occasions. Absolute Concentration, like no other batsman I know today.

With the West Indians today not being a particularly reliable batting line-up, the number of times Chanderpaul is left there to marshall a rearguard action, and nurture his fellow batsmen through an innings must get him down dreadfully. But, he always seems to find the grit and guts to stay there, with each ball being played severely on its merits. But when the bad ball comes, Pow. He’s got a beautiful little flick that can send the ball miles. It simply doesn’t seem possible that a guy of his stature can hit a ball that far. But he can.

People complain that he is a selfish batsman, which I’m sure irritates and angers him. Yes, the number of times he’s Not Out is very high, but he would counter, that by saying that, if all his team-mates did what he’d just done, they’d have scored around 1,000 runs in an innings, rather than the typical 237 All Out (Chanderpaul 118) that seems to happen all too depressingly often. Why he doesn’t brain the rest of them with his bat at times like this, I can’t imagine.

Two more stats. Who hold the World Record for staying at the crease without being out for longer than anyone else? Yup. Shivnarine Chanderpaul. He batted for 1,512 minutes (25 hours!!) against India before giving his wicket away. Of the only six times a batsman has stayed at the crease for longer than 1,000 minutes in the history of Test Cricket, four of those were Our Man.

And yet, that sounds like someone whose batting looks akin to watching paint dry. Nothing could be further from the truth. When he wants to go for it, you’d better watch out. The fourth fastest Hundred ever in Test cricket was his – 69 balls. And if you want to see someone in a 50 over One day International performing the impossible, just watch this YouTube Clip. West Indies need 10 off the last two balls of the match. Impossible. Step forward Our Gallant Hero.

One Four off the penultimate ball, and a deft flick to Mid Wicket off the last which flew over the ropes for Six. You’d have got odds of a million to One against two balls before, but Shiv played two shots of genius under tremendous pressure.

I just love to watch him bat. He frustrates the bowlers, but then blasts them around the ground when their frustration gets the better of them. His total determination is an utterly admirable trait, particularly in someone from the Carribean, where that commodity is not in plentiful supply.

And he’s just passed the great Sir Vivien Richards to become the second highest West Indian run maker ever. Two more different ways of batting you’d struggle to come up with, but, if I needed to select any batsman in the world today to make a Hundred for me if my life depended on the outcome, I’d pick this man.

I’ve got a ticket to the 20-20 World Cup finals in a couple of weeks, and guess who I’m going to see.

NEVER IN THE FIELD OF HUMAN CONFLICT ....

If you have any interests in politics, and the way our country is run, you will realise that Parliamentarily speaking, the UK is currently in the throes of some pretty hefty seismic goings on. I do not intend here to hammer the same nail into the same wall as the newspapers have been doing about The Speaker, MPs' expenses, Sleaze, corruption, lack of moral integrity etc. I just read rather dejectedly about it, and wonder whether the 650 MPs collectively realise just how much damage is being done to the fragile but crucial trust we need to have in those who are in Parliament.

So No Comment on this issue, if only to avoid pushing my Blood Pressure into the stratosphere by getting wound up about Gorbals Mick or the cost of a Ministerial Bathplug or a Parliamentary tin of dogfood, or MPs who can only see the error of their ways AFTER THEY ARE FOUND OUT, and even then sometimes not. And, by the way we should also hear it for all those zealous Newspaper hacks who have let this issue pass them by on the other side of the road for decades without poking it hard enough and long enough with their stick. Where were the British versions of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein when we needed them?

Now look at my blood pressure!!

As a bit of an antidote, firstly, if you want to see the other side of this horror story, have a check on the people whose names have NOT appeared in the Telegraph’s Name and Shame tirade over the last couple of weeks.

Secondly, and on a much more pleasurable subject, we’re doing some building work in our East Anglian Bolt Hole, and driving around recently to pick up the odds and ends you need to finish the job off, I couldn’t help but be struck by the beauty of the countryside and villages. And the utter timelessness of some of the surroundings.

A village a few miles from where we live over here rejoices under the name of Little Snoring. Now tell me you don’t get a feeling of pleasure when you read that name. It’s a sleepy little place, although, in a quirky and pleasant Norfolk way, it’s somewhat bigger that the next village along the road – Great Snoring.

Yes, I know it’s illogical, but that’s part of its charm. The “Great” apparently refers to its age, not its size, and the “Snoring” is a corruption of Snaer, a man’s name who was the leader of some of the early settlers around here.

Each village around here has its own lovingly hand painted sign, usually made from wood and mounted on the Green in the centre of the village. This one is Little Snoring’s –

EVERY VILLAGE HAS ITS OWN SIGN

60 years ago, this place was not the sleepy backwater it is now. In the middle of the Second World War, this county, because of its flatness and proximity to the European Coast, was home to around 160 RAF wartime Airfields. The days and nights were drowned out by the sound of Spitfires, Hurricanes, Wellingtons, Mosquitos and Lancasters blasting off to take on the Germans. Little Snoring was one of these airfields and it is this which is celebrated by the three bladed propeller in the centre of the sign.

The runways have been ploughed up now, apart from a small remnant which is still there and used as a private Flying Club today. Hence the Windsock –

THE WINDSOCK

A field or two away is the local church. Norfolk churches are things of beauty. Many are far larger and more ornate than you’d expect them to be, with unusual design features. We have thatched ones, Brick and Flint ones, Beamed ones, and here in Little Snoring, the church has a separate tower which is round.

LITTLE SNORING CHURCH - IDYLLIC THIS MORNING

You get a strange feel walking around the churchyard on your own on a windy morning, reading the inscriptions on the gravestones – almost as if you’ve travelled back half a century in time.

I found one gravestone commemorating a lady with the same rather unusual surname as mine.

And another to the wife of the camp commander in the mid 1940s. If you do the maths, he can’t have been more than 25 or 26 years old when he was the head honcho.

It was so different then.

Inside the church are the very poignant memorials to the many pilots and airmen, who took off one day from this tranquil and beautifully understated Norfolk countryside, and never came back.

You can almost feel the contrast between the Parliamentary goings on today, and the ways of 1942-3 - rather depressing.

Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.

These were Churchill’s perfect words about “The Few” in the mid 1940s. Transpose the “few” and the “many” in the sentence, and you get a simple soundbite which sums up the way too many of our MPs are behaving today.

GREAT NEWSPAPER PHOTOGRAPHS No. 3

My mind must have been on other things, because the last post in this (very) occasional series was almost two years ago. Ye Gods.

Anyway, I was struck by the one here, the other day. It's a really simple picture of the sun, with the Space Shuttle passing across a section of the disc. But Wow, what a terrific image.

Now the picture is not one any of us could take. A millionth of a second at F8 will not work on my humble Nikon. It needs some special equipment, but that doesn't stop it being a great picture. The credits on the picture go to Thierry Lagaut, and NASA.

Given the subject, it still comes across as a humbling picture, one which puts the machinations of the odious UK Parliament Speaker, and our MP's expenses into perspective.

And I just LOVED the title that the Newspaper editor chose.

Great image.

WHEN YOU WALK THROUGH THE GARDEN, YOU'D BETTER WATCH YOUR BACK ...

You’ve eaten your way through a couple of biscuits in a packet. Then, a few minutes later, you have another two or so, and then another, and a little while later, another. You look at the packet and you’ve done some serious damage to it. Not many left.

So you have another one, and something clicks in your mind. Sod it, there’s only three or so left. What’s the point of leaving three biscuits in a packet?

Soon there are no biscuits, a feeling of slight self loathing, and a crumpled up packet in the waste bin.

It’s the same occasionally with the tub of Ice Cream, especially the Chocolate Fudge Brownie one, not the crappy Yoghurty one, but the full fat calorie laden one. The one that tastes like Ice Cream. The only problem I have with the Ice cream version of this is that the pivotal point where the decision to finish it all off starts when there’s a bit more left – usually a tiny bit after halfway.

I don’t know what the word for it all is – the exact point where you tip over the edge from “That’s enough”, and put the packet back for another day, to “Oh, sod it”. Douglas Adams probably had a little village or town listed n “The Meaning of Liff” which defined it exactly, but my copy is at home, so I can’t check. So I’ll call it a “Morston”, after a village a few miles from where I’m writing this.

Morston - Noun – the precise moment when the desire to leave something for another day is overwhelmed by an immediate, uncontrolled desire to finish it all off.

I used to get the feeling on holidays, when around day 10 of a two weeker, the clouds of the final day started to gather almost imperceptibly on the horizon, and the unalloyed pleasure in the last few days started to fade. You’d spent about a week and a half in blissful animation, and suddenly the return to work, the daily toil and the lists of things to do started to nip and corrode at your mind. It’s raining in my heart, and all that.

In my more introspective (I do have them!) moments, I’ve even thought this happens with life. You spend 50 years or so thinking it’s all immortal, that the summers are never going to end, and then something happens. You start to count the cycles of the earth. Each spring the thought goes through your mind that that’s one less I will see. I still enjoy them immensely, as I am doing in 2009. But now, you count. It’s finite, and the clock never stops.

I know that sounds really rather pretentious, but unfortunately it’s true.

Why am I thinking like that now? It’s just gone midnight. I’m on my own in our little house on the Norfolk coast, and I’ve just watched two episodes of the best TV series it has been my privilege to see. Over the last few weeks, I’ve spent 58 hours glued to my TV watching all but the last couple of episodes of “The Wire”. And I am in full and complete withdrawal mode. One evening left, two if I ration myself to an episode a night. But I know that I won’t. So really it’s one evening left. Not tomorrow, because I’m travelling home, but maybe I’ll start out early so I can get home and watch them before bed. This from a grown man. Pathetic really, but there you are.

EVEN THE CREDITS ARE BRILLIANT - THIS IS SERIES 4

It’s almost impossible to force someone else to watch something you like on TV, or to read a book or listen to a CD, or watch a film that’s captivated and entranced you. You want to give people something that you’ve had, hoping it affects them the way it’s affected you. But we’re all different, so why should they like what you like?

But this series has really got to me. The epic scale of the events, the long, lingering character development, the subtle balance of right and wrong, the utter reality of the storylines, the grown up nature of the treatment, the stunning acting, the incredible photography, the brilliant cutting, and the utter magnetic hold that a series of plastic DVD disc has managed to entwine me with, does not happen often.

The occasional book, the infrequent film, a few TV series, half a dozen CDs and Long Players in the whole of my life have done it, and here, out of the blue, is another one. I suppose it’s a good sign that, at the age of 63, I can still find myself utterly enthralled by something like this. So maybe there’s hope here.

But I still have this disappointment nibbling at me that in a couple of days, it will be all over, and I’ll never be able to experience the anticipation of watching the next instalment of what, to me, is a great, great piece of drama which stands comparison with any film or book I’ve ever experienced.

Things like this don’t come along every day of the week. I just wonder what, and when, the next one will be. Let it roll.

WELL ANYWAY, IT AMUSED ME No. 30

I wonder if he’s in the AA?

Notes to the above – If you live in the UK, you will immediately find that hilariously funny, and be truly amazed at the genius of the writer for pointing it out to you. If however, you live further afield, you may be wondering “What in heaven’s name is all that about?”

I will explain.

“Tidly” – in the UK, those of us with very short “sticky-out” bits improve our inner self confidence by paying huge sums of money to the Government who will then allow us to put hysterically amusing witicisms on the Registration plates of our cars. I’ve met an Accountant who had AUD1T on his (presumably Tax deductable) car, and I was overtaken recently by, I think, Paul Daniels in a mauve Jaguar sports car, with a very long bonnet and the number MAJ1C. All very clever.

In the far distant past I used to live in Buckinghamshire (which explains what follows rather well actually) and a gentleman, or at least I assume he was a gentleman, owned a Jaguar XJS, the one with another very long bonnet or hood which stuck out over the engine for several feet.

His Registration was PEN15. You had the feeling that you’d want to wash your hands before you met him.

Anyway, back to the plot. “Tidly” is not an English word as afar as I, and Chambers Dictionary know, but “Tiddly” is.

That’s the first semantic hurdle one needs to jump.

Now “Tiddly” in England means – “smashed, rat-arsed, blotto, legless, tipsy, leathered, trashed, merry, bladdered, hammered, wasted, pissed, plastered”, or more prosaically “drunk, inebriated”, or “in your cups”.

That’s the second semantic hurdle one needs to jump.

The third hurdle is the amazing pun on “AA”, which is the key, the kernel, which unlocks the explosion of hysteria to be found in the first sentence of this epistle.

In this country, when your car breaks down you call the Automobile Association (AA, get it?), who, after waiting for about an hour, drive up in a bright yellow van, poke around in the engine bay, tell you they can’t fix it, and that it will have to be towed away/put on a lorry to go to a garage. Many millions of UK drivers belong to the AA, which gives them a great deal of automobilistic comfort. In the USA, I think it’s called the AAA, the American Automobile Association, and in other countries I suspect something different. Canada doubles up the CAA (Canadian Automobile Association) with the CAA (Civil Aviation Authority), which is helpful, but destroys the point of the joke completely.

Now, in this country, if you end up getting “tiddly”, but in a serious, long term, having a quadruple Vodka for your breakfast, type of way, you can find salvation in the arms of Alcoholics Anonymous – or AA. The Twelve Steps and all that.

You may be getting some clues as to the nub of the joke by now.

AA? AA? Tidly? Tiddly? Yes?

Perhaps humour, like cheese, or a good friend of mine who shall be nameless, doesn’t travel too well.

Anyway, it seemed to amuse me at the time.

Sorry.

GIVE ME THE FOKKING MONEY - LIVE AID 1985

A Canadian Airline Pilot/ex(?) Disc Jockey, bloggist (Whitenoise, by name) put up a posting the other day which showed a clip of U2 singing “Bad” at “Live Aid” in 1985. I hadn’t watched this or even thought much about the whole show for a few years, but this 12 minute YouTube extract shot me back 23 years in an instant. I was 39 again for a few precious minutes – for which, much thanks.

“Live Aid”, for those of a very certain age, was a magical afternoon/night - 10 hours of unmissable entertainment. Bod Geldof may not have been much of a singer, but by God, when he and Midge Ure (of Ultravox) decided to arrange a concert to raise money for famine relief in Ethiopia, he can’t in his wildest dreams have envisaged what they were going to achieve. The concert was planned to take place in 2 locations – Wembley Stadium in London and, semi concurrently, in JFK Stadium in Philadelphia. Geldof thought originally that they might raise up to £1 million.

He was slightly out – it finally ended up making around £150 million.

It was one of those events which totally gripped both the public’s and performers’ imagination and in the weeks before the event, it just grew and grew and grew. Finally on 13th July 1985, in boiling summer weather, it all got underway. At the time, it was the biggest outside broadcast ever, and in truth, it was a bit of a shambles, which added to the impact, in my view. Paul McCartney, closing the show at Wembley had the first two minutes of his set completely unamplified, when his microphone didn’t work.

But, in spite of the setbacks, it was a simply unforgettable experience for anyone who watched it. I’m not sure I’ve ever been so riveted by anything like this in the whole of my life. As it unfolded, you felt you were watching a real piece of history being made.

BY COMMON CONSENT, THE BEST LIVE GIG EVER - QUEEN!

To get a clue of the scale of what Geldof pulled together, just read through the list of performers he managed to get on stage in the UK and the USA –

Status Quo, Style Council, Boomtown Rats, Adam Ant, Ultravox, Spandau Ballet, Joan Baez, Elvis Costello, Nik Kershaw, Four Tops, Billy Ocean, Sade, Black Sabbath, Run DMC, Sting, Phil Collins, REO Speedwagon, Howard Jones, Bryan Ferry, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Judas Priest, Paul Young, Bryan Adams, U2, Beach Boys, Dire Straits, Queen, Simple Minds, David Bowie, Pretenders, The Who, Santana, Elton John, Madonna, Paul McCartney, Tom Petty, Kenny Loggins, The Cars, Neil Young, Thompson Twins, Eric Clapton, Led Zeppelin, Duran Duran, Patti Labelle, Hall & Oates, Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan and Prince.

Not bad, eh? A well placed bomb or two that afternoon would have destroyed Pop Music as we then knew it throughout the entire world. It’s interesting to read the post event squirmings and explanations of those few performers whose egos prevented them from attending and performing.

I don’t suppose anything like it will ever happen again. It’s all about the timing. The conjunction of the planets, and all that. I even wonder, being someone to whom that list of people represented the best that Pop Music could ever, in all its history, have ever collected together, what the list of potential, let alone actual performers you’d pull together in 2009 would look like I know I’m a bit biased, but, if you think you can top that lot, just have a go.

I think you’d be wasting your time.

JUST A MINUTE, THAT'S ANOTHER ONE GONE

Sir Clement Freud is dead. At 84, not a bad innings.

A strange man, who will, I imagine, be described by most writers as “lugubrious”, a word which probably means that 99% of the population will not understand what the writer of a tribute to him, is trying to convey. Just look at the dog he paired up with in a petfood commercial and you’ll get the message. The dog is the one on the left.

THE DOG'S NAME WAS "HENRY"

He (Clement Freud, that is) was one of those fascinating, increasingly rare characters who managed to dip his fingers, very successfully, into many pies. He was Aide to Field Marshall Montgomery in the Second World War, a Celebrity Chef, a Writer, a Radio panellist and broadcaster, an inveterate gambler – and a Liberal Member of Parliament for 14 years – a very rare beast indeed!! Grandson of Sigmund Freud, brother of Lucien and father of Emma, his family seems to be a collection of high achievers.

Speaking of MPs, coincidentally, or not, we’ve seen this week a particularly nasty bit of the underbelly of current British politics, with the Derek Draper/Damian (well named?) McBride saga of smear e-mails about Conservative MPs wives etc reaching a new low in the way our Political Parties (or at least, the Labour Party) choose today to conduct their business.

The contrast between Sir Clement’s approach to being a Member of Parliament, and the way it seems you have to behave as an MP today to ensure that your progress up the greasy pole is upwards rather than downwards is all too depressing. How many of the people who represent us in the mother of all Parliaments today are people who really merit a place there?

I’m not saying that yesterday is always better than today, but when you look at the way MPs behave, it’s certainly true in this case. I’ve just finished a book of World War 2 Diaries by Sir Allan (Tommy, don’t ask me why) Lascelles, who was Private Secretary to King George VI, and the comparison in these diaries between the way MPs handled themselves in the mid 40s when the country was, literally fighting for its life, and today, when, for the most part, it’s a “snout in the trough”, and bugger the rest of you attitude, is enough to make you lobby for a revolution.

Parliament then was a club where almost everyone got there on the back of achievements made in other walks of life. There was therefore a much wider level of experience, a wider knowledge, and much more of what I call “wisdom”. It used to be said that, somewhere among the 650 or so members, there would be a world expert on just about any subject on earth, and all you had to do was find him. Bee keeping, Nuclear Power, Indian History, there was usually someone there who knew more about it than anyone else. And so, the quality of debate was guaranteed to be higher. In addition, the integrity of the members, their diligence and sense of honour was of the highest order. We seem to have lost that – big time.

Today, following Blair’s deliberate, conscious, and unfortunately, successful, attempt over the last 10 years, to emasculate and destroy Parliament, the way the seat of Government actually operates today, almost makes it a pointless organisation. Only on very rare occasions, the last one I can remember being the revolt on the quite unnecessary 42 days detention proposal for terror suspects, does Parliament stand up and reflect the will of the people. And, even then, it only got the chance because the House of Lords threw the Bill out. By a million miles, that’s not what the population of this country wants from its governing body. But that’s what we’ve got.

The Clement Freuds of the world, independent people who did not have to rely on the MP’s salary to put bread on their family’s table, are an almost extinct species. A few of the others like Frank Field, Dennis Stringer, Tony Benn, the late Allan Clarke, are people who you would travel a long way to listen to – they held an opinion, with which you might not agree but you still wanted to hear it. They said what they thought, not what the party boss told them they needed to think, and the world (or at least this country) was a better place as a result.

The faceless automatons who drone on in Parliament today, using a language which is quite alien to most of us, follow the party line in a Stalinist-like slavish way. They are depressingly all too common, and seem to be the only ones who progress upwards in their respective parties.

Quite how we get Parliament to recover its rightful position as the forum for the highest level of debate in this country is quite beyond me. Perhaps Guy Fawkes had the right idea in 1605. It was just that he couldn’t keep his mouth shut, and someone blabbed about his intentions, that screwed him up. At least we still celebrate what he tried to do once a year, although I suspect too few of us really recall his intentions when the fireworks and the party starts.

This is something that really gets me wound up. Nobody in charge of any of the political parties seems even to care about this fundamental change. Mr Brown and his acolytes continue to trample systematically on the ways of democracy, and just occasionally something like this week’s email smear saga shows just what it’s really like if you lift the edge of today’s Political Carpet, and see the utter nastiness and ruthlessness which sits underneath it all. Brown adopts his standard “Nothing to do with me, mate” approach. But perhaps we now start to see Brown’s position, with Ed Balls’ involvement becoming more visible. It looks something akin to the way Watergate crept up to engulf Richard Nixon. If he didn’t know about it, he was incompetent, if he did know about it, he was complicit. You choose.

The parliamentary system in this country used to have a reputation which was held up throughout the world as a shining example of how to run a country. Today, it runs more like a corrupt Banana republic, and I hope that’s not being unfair to those Banana republics which still exist in the world. It’s not as if the way it’s run today even works.

Sometimes I’m not too proud to be British.

REPEAT AFTER ME - "SAVES COST AND WEIGHT"

A couple of posts ago, I rambled on about the Citroen 2CV, the “Deux Chevaux”, one of the greatest car designs ever. The piece was a bit of a precursor to some thoughts on another new car which has just hit the market. And the intriguing thing is, this one is also aimed at the bottom end of the market, actually a bit lower than the bottom end of the market.

The Tata Nano.

Rumours have been spreading for a couple of years now about how Ratan Tata, the Chairman of Tata Motors in India, was planning to build a “One Lakh” car. That’s 100,000 rupees or around £1,400. Now all of us bigheads who work in the European Motor Industry know perfectly well that building a car for that amount of money is quite impossible, so we all ignore the whispers and get on with our jobs. After all, replacing the cloth seats in my Audi with leather ones costs a bit more that that, doesn't it?

Except that a couple of months ago, he showed the car off in its final form. And it is a remarkable piece of work.

Tata’s aim is to offer a way for a massive section of the Indian population to stop carrying their family around on a scooter, and to have access to a new car for the first time ever. So, he’s done what the designers of all the really iconic vehicles do, and tear up the engineering history books, don’t even look at the competition, and start with a very simple question –

“What is it EXACTLY that I’m trying to achieve?”

When he had got the answer to that sorted out he clearly made sure that all the minions under him who were doing the detailed and strategic design work, keep looking at everything they were doing, and asked if the results of their labour was in line with the brief. If YES, carry on, if NO, start again.

Setting yourself a target of One Lakh as a selling price, as he did, forced some very unconventional thinking. Your first thought is – “That’s simply impossible.” And, in some ways you’d be right. You couldn’t produce a car for around 50% of the cost of the current cheapest car in India without addressing and changing some pretty fundamental things.

ACTUALLY, THIS IS THE EUROPEAN VERSION - NOTE THE ALLOY WHEELS!

The amazing thing, to my eyes at least, is that it still ends up looking pretty good. But when you look underneath the skin, you can start to see just how it has been done and that the sort of questions which were asked. Things like “How many wheels should it have?”, “How many doors, what sort of engine can we have, what’s the minimum level of performance we can live with, how low can we get it to weigh and so on.” Each of the answers leads to a way of improving the performance of one of the other important criteria. The more you lower the weight, the less power the engine needs, the simpler (say) the braking system needs to be, which in turn lowers the weight, which ……………….. - you get the point.

He ended up with a modern design that looks rather “cheeky”, but bears comparison in the way it has been conceived with the Citroen 2CV I eulogised over a couple of posts ago.

It’s as important for what it’s not got, as much as for what it has. It has only got a two cylinder engine (saves cost and weight), a 4 speed gearbox (saves cost and weight), one windscreen wiper (saves cost and weight), drum brakes (saves cost and weight), almost no instrumentation (saves cost and weight), lots of painted metal surfaces inside (saves cost and weight), no door for the boot (saves cost and weight, and adds strength), tiny little 12” wheels (saves cost and weight – although remember that the BMC Mini had 10” ones), no passenger seat adjustment (saves cost and weight), no glovebox (saves cost and weight) and so on.

Although disputed by Tata, I have little doubt that its crash performance may not be up to the levels of European cars (which also saves weight and cost by the way), and some of the petrolhead journalists will whinge about this, missing the point completely. Tata was not trying to match European safety levels, but trying to offer an alternative to the current "MPV" mode of transport in India – in their case, the rickshaw or the scooter, seen everywhere carrying whole families around. The improvement which the Nano offers in terms of safety should be compared to the scooter/rickshaw alternative, not a fully specced Volvo.

The new car also gives birth to another argument, which is unwinnable by either side. This is where the additional CO2 emissions caused by introducing a whole segment of Asia to hundreds of thousands of this new fangled motor car, to which they currently don’t have access, in one fell swoop, speeds up the course of the Planet’s demise. Yes, it possibly does (if you actually believe everything you read about Global Warming, which I most certainly don’t), but the answer is simple – What are you going to do about it? Ban it? Bomb the factories where it’s built? Tax it out of existence? Actually, just there, I was about to set off a tangential ranting about the Global Warming, Flat Earth, Hair Shirt, lobby, but it’s Good Friday today (anyone know why it’s called “Good”?), so perhaps I’ll leave that one until another day.

So, back to the Nano. It they ever bring it to Europe, as they have intimated they will, the danger is that it will have to undergo a massive redesign, because it’s not "safe" enough for us. It will end up getting the full set of European safety standards built into it, as well, no doubt, as a turbocharged diesel engine with a six speed semi automatic gearbox, air conditioning, power steering, a full Bose sound system, electric reclining seats and all the gizmos none of us in Europe can live without. The weight will double, as will the price. They may even get round to think of calling it a Smart Car, except some of our German friends have got there already. And some people will think they’ve done a really good thing, missing the point, once again, completely.

I still fail to understand why there is such a fetish in Europe about occupant safety in cars. In this country we kill about 8 people a day in car crashes, and yet the industry is forced to spend billions of pounds improving the cars to be even safer and safer. The poor souls injured in these crashes are transferred into hospitals where they are subjected to such things like MRSA, which kills 10 times as many people, and which can be reduced/eliminated by getting a few people to keep washing their hands, which I suspect might NOT cost billions. Yes, I know it's not as simple as that, but there is a real element of truth in it.

My simple mind keeps coming back to the outlandish (or is it?) idea that the best way to improve vehicle safety is to put a large, sharp spike sticking out from the centre of the steering wheel just touching the driver’s sternum, as well as totally banning the fitment of airbags. This could, at the same time, be allied to the banning of comprehensive insurance for vehicles, so that you had to bear the cost of any accident yourselves and could only get the other party’s insurance Company to pay, if you were blameless.

If we introduced these small changes, everyone would drive more slowly, the level of noxious emissions would go down, the number of pedestrians injured by the car would diminish, the cost of motoring would reduce, you could fit more cars on any given road, so congestion would reduce, the number of car accidents would be lower, and the construction of the car could become so much simpler (saving cost and weight). I’m not sure where this all leads, but it seems to me that there is therefore a reasonably logical case for banning all the current cars being built in Europe, and turning all the current factories over to building only Nanos.

And Nanos with spikes sticking out of their steering wheels at that!

I just can’t imagine anyone in our Government having the balls even to think about such a thing. Perhaps a Royal Commission is needed, chaired by Jeremy Clarkson.

LOTS AND LOTS OF NOUGHTS

I’ve just ordered a new Computer. Nothing fancy, it sits just a tiny little bit off the bottom of the range that Dell offer. And yet, it has a hard disc capacity of 1 Terrabyte.

I lose track of Noughts quite easily, but that means that I can store 1,000,000,000,000 bytey “things”. I hadn’t really given that sort of issue much thought until today, but I’ve suddenly realised just how big a number that really is.

If I started to count them all, at 1 every Second, I’d take 31,709 years or so to get to the end. It’s enough to store one complete Text Message for every person on the planet – not that I’ve got 6,250,000,000 different text messages in my mind to send to anyone. But you get my drift.

My mind wanders back 25 years to a night at work in around 1980. I used to be the Accounting Manager for a car company called Rover, or was it British Leyland, or even BL Cars, or conceivably Austin Morris? Anyway, there was a payroll of something around 27,000 people on the site, which I had to look after, so it was, at the time, a large and complex company.

At that time, many of the financial calculations we had to do to support the business were all done on piles and piles of pages of A3 Analysis paper, all printed with 13 columns for the information – 12 for each month and a thirteenth for a column to let you put the total in for a year. When we built up the Annual budget for the company we used to have a heap of around 50 of these pages all held together with a very High Tech Bulldog Clip. We used to write down on these enormous sheets of paper, very laboriously, all the vehicle sales volumes (by country, by model derivative etc etc), the sales revenues per vehicle (by country, by model derivative etc etc), the other costs, the overheads, the profit (or was it a loss? – I can’t remember), and then multiply all of them together in a frenzy of (hopefully) controlled number crunching. Remember, we’d only just got our first hand-held calculator, so it all had to be done by hand.

It took some 3 days for some poor sod (I did it once just to show I could) to go through all the numbers to work out the results. At which point someone took it to The Boss, who usually informed the messenger that someone in Higher Management, wherever that might have been, had reviewed the volumes or pricing or something, and they’d changed a few of the numbers, and it all needed to be done again. How character building was that? To this day, I’m surprised that a murder was never committed.

Back to that night in 1980. A guy came to see me after work, and brought with him a buff coloured typewriter sized box which he plonked on my desk. It had “Apple” written on it, and you thought “How cute.”. He put a small TV screen with a ghostly green flashing cursor, and pressed a few buttons on the keyboard. The screen lit up with something that looked like the child’s game Battleships. I wanted to get home, and wanted the guy to go away, like NOW, but something kept me interested.

He went down to a little square called A1, and typed a 2 into it, then moved the cursor (not that the word meant anything to me then) into the square below (A2) and typed a 3 into it. He then moved it all down into A3 and typed something like “=A1+A2” into the square and the number 5 popped into the box. I probably told him that I already knew that 3+2 equalled 5, and that if I checked it all on my new fangled calculator, that would indeed confirm it for him.

I was somewhat underwhelmed.

Then he put his cursor back in A1 and overtyped a 7 and the number in the A3 square changed immediately to a 10. “Oooh-er!”

“How the bloody hell did you do that?” I smelt smoke and mirrors, sleight of hand, and possibly witchcraft. Maybe all three, seeing we were in Birmingham.

He had just started to show me a little programme called “Visicalc”, a piece of utter computing genius developed by two guys called Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston. I realised in that couple of seconds that the way my working life was going to operate from that point onwards had just changed - totally.

25 YEARS AGO, THIS WAS A PIECE OF GENIUS

I had to have one.So I did.

But, as usual, it wasn’t quite as simple as that. The programme was fabulous – so, so clever. The technology, however, which supported it was way, way behind the idea which it was there to support. The floppy discs which contained the information could hold 312,000 bytey things. The memory in the machine was, I think, 16 kilobytes. And I don’t think it even had a hard disc. So, on the one hand, the Good Lord gaveth, and on the other hand, he immediately tooketh it away again - at least, until the hardware manufacturers got their act together.

But it was still a piece of genius. We laboured frantically to jam what we wanted to do onto a series of these discs, and somehow managed to make it work. The spectre of the manager wandering in and changing the data on the Budget fell into the background as a non-event, and I still recall his disbelief, bordering on suspicion of a confidence trick, when we turned round a complete change to the numbers in an hour or so, rather than the days it took before. Magic.

But look at the numbers. 16k of memory, and we ran the Management Accounting systems for the UK’s largest car manufacturer on that. Today, my new machine, which I will use at home to play on, will have 3,072,000,000 bytes – some 190,000 times as much. My new hard disc could contain 3 million floppy discs. The mind boggles. I know about Moore’s law, but I’m still amazed.

And yet, what do we use all this capacity for?

Keeping pictures, by the thousand, that we’ll probably never look at again. We probably never glance at 95% of the images we take. And then, if all we do with the 5% that we do look at, is to send them to people across the internet, we immediately throw away another 99% of that 5%. It only gets used if we set to and print a decently sized image off it. So, for most people, almost all of the volume of the information we keep on a computer is redundant and utterly unnecessary.

Compare the size of a decent written file on a computer with a decent picture size. I do not find it difficult to press my camera’s shutter and generate 25 megabytes of data in a few milliseconds. Just to make it worse, it’s probably a rubbish picture, that I won’t give a second glance to, but it’s still 25 megabytes.

If I bothered to work out how much space is taken up with a long article in Microsoft Word, I’d be very hard pressed to generate a file of more than 100,000 bytes. Typing away for an evening leaves me with a file of about 25,000 bytes, around 0.1% of the size of the rubbish picture I’m just about to ignore. But it’s taken me a couple of hard worked hours to put it on the machine. And which am I more proud of? Which is the more meaningful demonstration of my intellect? You choose, but the writing has at least had 2 hours of attention from my brain.

So, back to my new computer. I suppose we buy these things, not because we NEED them, but because they’re available, and we can get our hands on them. Bragging rites as to the “Mine’s Bigger than Yours” size of a hard Disc is probably in there somewhere, but if we actually thought about it all, most of us could probably still manage with an Apple with a couple of 312kbyte discs and 16kb of memory.

Apollo 11 did, but then it nearly crashed while landing on the Moon, so perhaps I’d better think of a better example.

So, have I just cancelled my order with Dell?

Have I hell.

EVERYDAY, IT'S-A GETTING CLOSER ....

A posting by a Canadian e-friend about the demise of "The Record Shop" in his neck of the woods has set my mind going. I am of a sufficiently advanced age to remember when my father used to play records which were made of shellac, ran at 78 rpm and broke if you dropped them. I think prehistoric is probably the right word I'm trying to describe.

I can just (meaningfully) remember Bill Haley and the Comets coming to the UK in the mid Fifties with cinema seats being ripped up at his concerts. But only because I read it in the newspapers. I really found out at first hand about Pop Music around 1957, when I was 11. I went with my cousin, who was older than me, and was therefore in all probability responsible for what my parents saw as some form of irredeemable mental decline, to Whitby, a small seaside village on the Yorkshire Coast.

One of my founding memories was going to a café, near the harbour, which had a juke box and feeding Sixpences into it. We played the first pop song which totally gripped my mind over and over and over again – probably 20 times. It must have driven the poor café owner demented, unless of course he shared out intoxication, which I suspect he did not.

It was Paul Anka’s “Diana”.

It was a song which I can still remember hit me like a Thunderbolt. That mesmerising saxophone introduction, and the gradually rising phrases in the song which the singer blasted out had me totally “gone”. Solid Gone. I had never heard anything like it before.

I wasn’t alone. The record shot to the top of the British Hit Parade, and stayed there for umpteen weeks, and sold well over 1 million copies in the UK alone. My 7 inch 45 RPM copy was played so much I could almost hear the song on the other side being played backwards.

From then on, the local record shop became a very regular haunt. You skulked in the soundproof booths, and tried to con the shop owner to play every new record that came in. He knew full well that kids of our age had no money so the idea of any of us actually buying a record was out of the question, but he still indulged our passions. I suppose he was like a musical drug dealer, feeding our desires to get us hooked so that, when the money did start to roll in, he could reap his financial rewards. A sort of long term social investment in the teenage life of the town. Very strategic in a way, although the possibility exists that he just liked listening to the music.

Buddy Holly was The Man for me when I really got into the music, and I owned everything he recorded up until the day he was killed. That was the first of those days in my life, where you remember for ever where you were when the news broke. You know the thing – Kennedy, John Lennon, Challenger and 9/11 - interestingly, all four are in America, and two in New York. Even after 60-odd years, there aren’t that many of them that I recall.

It was early 1959, and I was idly reading the newspaper, lying on the floor in our small living room, when I turned the page and there was a picture of a plane crash. And the headline about him, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper ("Chantilly Lace, and a pretty face, and a Pony Tail hanging down, a Wiggle in her walk, and a Giggle in her talk …….." Very profound but a Great Song!). And the shock was there because the article was buried in the middle of the paper, and you came across it almost as an afterthought. Bang.

It was just a few weeks ago when I realised that February 3rd 2009 was the fiftieth anniversary of that day. It really hit me that day as a rather scary demonstration of the way my life is flashing past at an exponentially increasing rate, and that there’s a lot more behind me that is left to come. How very depressing.

Carpe Diem. Be-Bop-A-Lula.

RARE GENIUS IN CAR DESIGN - FRENCH STYLE

Occasionally, very occasionally, a new car is produced which takes your breath away. Not necessarily because of its beauty, or its performance, but because it is so different from anything which has ever gone before.

This happens so infrequently because many important things need to occur at the same time for this particular egg to produce a chicken. Developing a new car is a fearsomely expensive proposition – many hundreds of millions of pounds, so whoever’s going to do it needs an awful lot of cash. Some one needs a real vision, something that most of us say can’t be done. And that person with the vision needs to have the power to commit the enormous funds to a project which most of the people around him probably think will not work.

Committees and concensus, which is the way of most of the World’s Motor Companies simply don’t understand that approach at all – all they want is Safe and Secure. But just occasionally, thank Goodness, the genius overwhelms the mundane.

Sometimes what comes out of this is outrageously expensive. The Bugatti Veyron, produced at a rumoured development cost of £400 million, and with a planned production of around 300 units is one such. It was made because the boss of VW, one Ferdinand Piech, wanted to make it, at any cost, just to say he could. The loss on each car, which they sold for almost £1million each is suggested to be two or three times that figure. But the man wanted to do it, was in a position to do it, had no work colleagues who could tell him not to be so silly, and keep their jobs, so he did it. Simple as that.

I suppose you could account for that one as a rather large Marketing Investment for VW. Or the most expensive Auto-ego trip in the History of the World.

But more often, the vehicles which fall into this category are at the other end of the scale. Two or three come to mind. The original Beetle, sired by Ferdinand Porsche (interestingly Ferdinand Piech's Grandfather - there must be a story there), the Citroen 2CV sired by Pierre-Jules Boulanger and the BMC Mini, designed by Alec Issigonis. All were one person and one person alone’s view of starting with a very large, very clean sheet of paper. They all must have written down a simple design Brief, and thought logically and ruthlessly about how best they could achieve the Brief, ignoring totally the frettings of jobsworths Marketing proles adn whisperings of all their design mates saying “We tried that and it didn’t work” or “You can’t do that.”

This piece is really leading up to a few thoughts about a new car which is just on the market, but I’m going to scribble away for a while on one of the three pieces of engineering genius mentioned above to set the scene for today’s market entry, to show that nothing is ever new – it just gets reinvented if the times are right.

So, of the three, I’ll pick the Citroen 2CV, just because we used to have one in the family. Just look at it.

NOW ISN'T THAT PRETTY?

Its Design Brief is quite famous, and today’s Chief Engineers’ minds would boggle at it. It said, apparently –

… a low-priced, rugged "umbrella on four wheels" that would enable two peasants to drive 100 kg (220 lb) of farm goods to market at 60 km/h (37 mph), in clogs and across muddy unpaved roads if necessary. (France at that time had a very large rural population, who had not yet adopted the automobile, due to its cost – note this bit for later!) The car would use no more than 3 litres of petrol to travel 100 km (78mpg). Most famously, it would be able to drive across a ploughed field without breaking the eggs it was carrying. Boulanger (the man in charge) later also had the roof raised to allow him to drive while wearing a hat.

What he ended up with was a piece of genius, minimalist engineering that ran for over 40 years until the Nineties. Nothing was sacred to him in his aim to bring motoring to a whole new range of people. Compared to what had gone before, it was a breathtaking piece of audacious belief in the need to do things totally differently. And succeeding.

It had front and rear interconnected all wheel suspension (to make it ride like a Rolls Royce), inboard front brakes (same reason), an aircooled 2 cylinder engine (to save cost), bolt on wings front and rear (to save cost and make it easy to repair – have you ever driven in France?), detachable, hingeless doors (to save cost), flap up windows (to save the cost of the winder mechanism), and a full length fabric sunroof. It looked like an upturned pram and handled like an unruly yacht in a high wind.

To save cost, there were no anti-roll bars on the suspension. But the ride was excellent – it floated over the roads quite brilliantly – the eggs did not get broken. It had an utterly unique gear change pattern, which looked really odd until you thought about it and tried it. At which point, you realised that everyone else, before and after, had got it wrong. To save cost, the windscreen wipers had no separate motor – they were powered via a cable from the engine. The faster you went, the faster they went. Simple.

To save cost, it had no radiator, no coolant, no water pump and no thermostat. It had no distributor and no hydraulics. Because the cooling fan and the dynamo were integral parts of the crankshaft, no drive belts were needed to power them. His philosophy must have been - If you can do without a particular component, then leave it out. If it’s not there, it can’t go wrong.

On the one we had, the air conditioning was provided by a forward facing flap which you opened (manually) from the top of the dashboard, allowing the wind to pass into the car. The de-luxe models had a wire mesh grille in the aperture to stop (most of) the bugs and creepy crawlies which would otherwise breathe their last as they flew up your nose at 60 mph. If you wanted to go on a picnic in ours, you stopped at your chosen site, opened the back door, or slid it off its hinge, and took out the back seat, whereupon you immediately had a picnic bench. I’ve tried that with my expensive Audi, and you can forget it.

The thread which runs through all this from a design viewpoint is not “Make it Cheap” which makes it unreliable, but “Let’s not have it at all”, or if we can’t do that, let’s design it to be as utterly simple as possible, whilst staying within the Design Brief. I’ll bet a copy of that Brief was on every Citroen Engineer’s wall, and if they finished the day and what they’d done didn’t match it, they binned it all and started again tomorrow.

So you end up with a very minimalist car, which looked like a joke, but ran like a train, and did exactly what it was supposed to do. There was next to nothing to go wrong, and the bits it did have, ran for ever because they were so simple. It was immense fun to drive, cornering on its door-handles, but it could keep up in the bends with much more esoteric machinery. It phutted its 2 cylinder, 33 horsepower way along today’s motorways at 70 mph, although it has to be admitted that it did take an awful length of time to get there.

So you just developed a different driving style in which, momentum having been gained over a few minutes of gentle, but flat out acceleration, ensured that it was never lost. Corners were taken as if you were competing in the Americas Cup, and the idea of ever braking was pushed to the bottom of the list of possible solutions to any given driving situation. You even took note of the wind strength and direction when starting a long run – it would affect quite considerably how long the journey would take.

The only thing it was bad at was having an accident. The steel shell was paper thin, and that was before the rust set in to make it even thinner. It weighed 560 kilogrammes, about a third of an equivalent car today. I dread to think what the seatbelts were mounted onto. The thought of an airbag in this thing was the cause for hysterical laughter. You simply had to hope that you kept away from everyone else at any sensible speed. Which of course made you do exactly that.

But they made around 5 million of them over a period of 42 years, and changed the way of low cost motoring for the masses. The eccentric, but very astute motoring journalist, LJK Setright, called it “the most intelligent application of minimalism ever to succeed as a car.” And he knew what he was talking about.

Part 2 of this piece looks at today’s take on roughly the same design brief.

Watch this space.

WHY CAN'T WE MAKE DECENT TV DRAMA ANYMORE?

There was a time, in the last century, when you could say anywhere in the world that British Television produced the best drama series on the planet, and no-one would bother to argue with you. The Boys from the Blackstuff, Brideshead Revisited, Quatermass, Edge of Darkness, Inspector Morse, The Singing Detective, The Prisoner, Tutti Frutti, The Six Wives of Henry VIII, Elizabeth R, I Claudius, The Biederbeck Trilogy, A Very Peculiar Practice, That’s Life… the list never ends.

Except of course, that it does end. In about 1995.

These pieces of work are worthy of standing alongside any of the great films of that era. And if you think some of those films qualify as Great Art, you have to accord that accolade to the TV productions as well. Picking two at (relative) random, “Edge of Darkness” is a mid Eighties stunner about the Nuclear World and the limits of power of Governments vs Multinationals, written by Troy Kennedy Martin – he of Z Cars fame. “Tutti Frutti” is one of the blackest comedies you’ll ever see, about a “has-been” Scottish Rock band on their Silver Jubilee tour of the less well known parts of Scotland. It popped up on BBC2 when I suspect I was the only viewer, and then a few weeks later, was repeated on BBC1. Since then, nothing. No video, no DVD. If I had my way, I would make it a Capital offence, punishable by death (or something very similar) if the BBC could not organise to show it again within a year, starting from today. There are people dying today who will go to their graves never having seen it. It’s that good.

Now it may be my creeping senility, or some form of critical Brain degradation on my part, but since that time, the TV series which have captured my attention have been almost exclusively American. I can’t think why, but it’s as black and white as you can get. Before 1995 – Britain, after 1995 American.

Actually, I don’t think it’s me, I think it’s them. The BBC and the other UK TV companies. They suddenly decided that taking artistic risks was not a good idea anymore. Maybe it was tied in with the way the political climate in this country changed with Blair and his accolytes, and the way the pervasive influence of Health and Safety ground its nasty little way into the sinews of our life, but the stuffing seemed to go out of the collective TV artistic departments in the UK almost overnight.

And in America, almost the exact opposite happened. Why?

Things like HBO happened, and blossomed, and the major networks followed suit. Home Box Office is a USA wide, subscription channel which has consistently pushed drama boundaries and produced programmes of the highest quality in the way that the Beeb and the other UK channels used to do, but don’t do anymore. They’re independent, so they can go their own sweet way artistically. They’ve got a lot of money – almost 40 million subscriptions in the USA, so they can afford to throw some serious cash at their programmes. They’re not alone, but they are probably the leaders in all this. The results speak for themselves.

Looking at my shelf of DVDs, the ones which take pride of place are The West Wing, Six Feet Under, The Sopranos, 24, and my latest viewing Marathon, The Wire. There’s no British DVDs of the same era on the shelf anywhere, which is really rather sad.

I’ve bleated on about the West Wing before on this site. Six Feet Under is a distinctly acquired taste about a dysfunctional(ish) family who run a Funeral Home. The series addresses one of the great No-Nos of our age – Death, and Dying. But it does it startlingly well.

The reason I’m scribbling this down now is that I’m having a mid series break from The second series of The Wire. Set in Baltimore, the series addresses the crimes of the city in a graphic and often depressingly realistic way. You see it from the side of the Police and the legal authorities, but interlaced with the view from inside the criminals’ minds. You quickly realise that not all the cops are good, and not all the criminals are bad. They’re human and real, and that’s what gives it its edge.

I sat and watched the 13 episodes of Series 1 in two evenings - which made my wife very happy, by the way. But it was riveting stuff.

All I can say is if you’ve seen it you’ll know what I’m going on about, and if you haven’t and don’t mind the sometimes unpleasant realities of life being shown in an effort to explain the real complexities and subtleties of life in a sprawling urban environment, then you have a real treat in store for you.

But don’t take your eyes off it. There are no helpful introductions, or plot set-ups. They don’t even tell you which actor plays which role. You have to work it all out on the fly, and heaven help you if you blink, or pop out to make a cup of tea. It’s a densely composed piece of work which treats you like a grown up.

Anyway, watch it, and let’s hope that someone in the Beeb has enough balls and power to stand up and say “That’s what we should be doing – Sod Dancing on Ice and The X Factor”.

BETWEEN A ROCK AND AN AERODYNAMIC HARD PLACE

I don’t like flying.

I have a decent degree in Aeronautical Engineering from the 5th best University on the Planet. I’ve read and absorbed all the stats that tell me I’m safer flying in an aeroplane than I am driving to the airport. I also know that airline pilots don’t have their life insurance premiums loaded because of the hazardous nature of their jobs anymore than burger flippers in McDonalds do - actually I don't know if McDonalds burger flippers have increased Insurance premia, but you get my point.

In my defence, I have also flown solo several times in a 30 year old wooden glider, yanked 1000 feet up into the air by what looked like a (not very well) converted farm tractor. So, at least I've tried it.

But I still don’t like flying.

I still do it, because it used to be part and parcel of my job, and there are places in the world I want to visit, where any other way of getting there is almost unworkable. But my knuckles are a very pale shade of white for much of the time when we're buzzing along.

One of the things I do hope in my attempt to sleep well before a flight however is that the guys who police the Air Safety system are looking after my interests with unblinking vigilance. Mine (as in the passenger), and mine alone rather than the big businesses of the Aircraft Industry. They’re big enough and ugly enough to look after themselves in my view.

In the UK, we have the Civil Aviation Agency and the Air Accident Investigation Branch (AAIB). In Europe there is the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), and in America there is the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). You would like to think that, on safety matters, they all spoke with one voice, or at least you would find difficulty getting a cigarette paper between their views. We, the customers, rely on these guys to take the necessary decisions which might just keep us alive. It’s as simple as that.

Fast forward now to the Boeing 777, a two engined plane which has sold in many hundreds over the last few years. Its modern design, its massive level of economy and its slightly smaller size (compared to a 747 Jumbo) means that this plane is used increasingly in these straitened times as much as possible by the airlines who have them in their fleets. This aeroplane can be fitted with either Rolls Royce or General Electric Engines, and there is intense rivalry between both of these companies to power the next order that Boeing secure.

A couple of worrying “incidents” have occurred recently to two 777s, both powered by Rolls Royce engines – one a Delta plane in the USA, which lost power temporarily in one engine, and the other a BA plane which crash landed at Heathrow following a scary loss of power in both engines in the last stages of the approach.

Both incidents were apparently caused by the build up of ice particles in the fuel system, which blocked the flow of fuel through a heat exchanger thus resulting in a dramatic loss of power when power was what the pilot wanted above all else. No-one was killed in either incident, but, in the case of the Heathrow accident, this seemed to be because of prompt and responsive reactions from the pilot and God being on his side that day.

There seems no disagreement between anyone involved as to the cause of the accidents. If I’ve read it correctly, flying for a long time in a very cold environment seems to be the cause of the ice build up. If you read the AAIB report, the Trent (Rolls Royce) powered 777s have flown 6.5 million hours in total, and the Heathrow accident was the first time such a failure had occurred. It seems clear from the report that the flight temperatures experienced during the Heathrow flight were on the margins (70 out of 13,000) of the total RR 777 flights to date. But these "incidents" still should not have happened.

From my simple mind, one difficulty here is that the redundancy built into aircraft systems (for instance, 3 computer systems, with the aircraft taking the advice of the two good ones when the 3rd goes off the rails etc) doesn’t seem to work. If the environment outside can affect one engine system to the point where the ice builds up on the Heat exchanger inlet, then it’s not difficult to expect that a second engine situated a few yards to the left of that one is going to find itself in a similar situation. Even my conceptual, rhetorical discussion about whether the complexity of 4 engines outweighs the benefits offered by 2 engines goes out of the window here. If 2 engines can ice up, why shouldn’t 4? I’m still a believer in the More the Better from an engine point of view, but I'd rather that the engines kept running while the aeroplane was up in the air.

If you trawl through the AAIB’s report, and get to the summary, what you finds is as follows.

This is the first such event in 6.5 million flight hours and places the probability of the failure as being ‘remote’ as defined in EASA CS 25.1309.

Which seems to say that, in their eyes, this is an issue but not a major problem. That’s the UK (and Europe) speaking. And it conveniently passes the buck to the EASA in the event that, in the future, a Trent powered 777 falls out of the sky with serious results. But that report does not take into account the implications of the second Delta incident which occurred at a later date.

The problem starts when you get into the “What now?” bit of the discussion. Do you ground the Rolls 777 fleet until a sollution is in place? It would seem that Rolls needs some 12 months to design, test and certify and then manufacture and install the solution to the problem. In the meantime, Boeing and Rolls have issued a raft of operational changes which the airlines need to implement before they get the redesigned parts. These include periodic reductions and increases in engine power and the possible use of fuel additives. All of which increases the pilot workload, and could result in a catastrophic chain of events with no recovery, if such a problem occurred close to the ground.

The real issue here, from the wary and slightly knowledgeable passenger (ie Me), is – Is that response sufficient?

I’m not daft. I know that, even in the land of safety, everything has its price, including a human life. When last I looked, if it cost the aeroplane manufacturer less than c $2.75 million to save a life as a result of a design issue, they did it. If it cost more, they didn’t. Now I know it won’t be as simple as that, but you get my drift. There’s a cut off point, and in the aeroplane business, the scale of money is vast. So the money involved doesn’t just talk, it shouts. You don’t want it to be that way, but in truth, it can’t be any other way.

Hence you rely on the National Safety Boards to protect the passenger’s interests. Nationality, one would hope, doesn’t come into it. I’m not sure I’d trust a report from a West Indian Safety board to the same level as one from, say, Germany for instance. But, in the world of the big players, you’d expect that a report from a UK accident body would say the same as a European one, which in turn would say the same as a USA one.

And here’s the issue. Assuming that what I read is correct, there have been two reports from the AAIB and the NTSC about these cold flying issues on the 777, and while they broadly agree about the cause of the problem, they differ totally in the conclusions they draw about what to do in the meantime, and also in the way they choose to commit their words down on paper.

The USA NTSC’s conclusion in their letter to the EASA is stark and simple, and totally different from the AAIB’s view of the situation.

Therefore, until the current FOHEs (Fuel/Oil Heat Exchangers) are replaced by FOHEs more tolerant to ice accretion, additional failures to achieve commanded thrust could occur and could result in a serious accident and, possibly, injuries and deaths.

All of which, I an sure, is semantically accurate. But what a different message from the AAIB. One (the UK, and the home of the engine makers Rolls Royce) concludes that the issue (at least at the time they wrote their summary) had only happened once in 6,500,000 flying hours, and the level of danger to the passengers was therefore “remote”, and presumably acceptable. The other (the USA, and the home of the rival engine makers General Electric) ends with a conclusion which simply stops me in my tracks from flying on one.

I cannot believe that the two attitudes are accidental. The UK authorities shelter behind the EASA rules and definitions in deciding how to stake their position. Note they don’t say it’s safe, they just say that in terms of someone else’s categorisation of relative safety levels, it is "remote". The USA authorities come from a diametrically opposed position.

Both are “right”. But what is the poor sod getting on the aeroplane supposed to do now? Is the aircraft dangerous to fly in or isn’t it? I’ve lived long enough to realise that the difference between reality and perception is often enormous. I’ll guarantee that other aircraft suffer similar problems where safety is not the black and white issue we all think it is. It’s just that the customer doesn’t hear about it, either intentionally or unintentionally, and therefore gets on the beast in blissful ignorance.

In this particular case, even British Airways are compounding the problem. For reasons that only their labyrinthine financial wiz-kids could explain to me, they have a mixed fleet of Rolls and GE engined 777s. 15 are Rolls powered, and the remaining 27 are GE powered. BA, ever helpful, say that they will not tell passengers, even if they ask, what engines will be powering the 777 you are getting on. How on earth is that statement supposed to give the passenger any comfort? All it says to me is that there is clearly a problem, and a big one.

One can’t help but suspect that it’s all down to money. The 747 is a big, expensive aircraft to run, and in these disastrous times, passenger bookings have taken a tumble. So a smaller aircraft will do on many of the previous 747 routes. A website I’ve just looked at claims that 16 of BA’s 55 747s are “stored”. All the 777s are in use. What a surprise!

So BA are going to get maximum utilisation from their 42 777s, however they are powered. Their action just looks Machiavellian. If the issue goes away, the 42 777s keep flying and BA maximise their margins. If the pressure mounts, they will take the 15 out of service until the fix is available, and put as much pressure on Rolls Royce to get their act together NOW. But, in an industry where every operator tries to claim the high moral safety ground, how grubby does this look?

What happens if there is another “incident”? Perhaps one that turns out to be an “Accident”. One where people, lots of people lose their lives. Can you imagine the lawsuits that would follow now, especially in America?

I suspect that a lot of people in Rolls Royce are working all hours God sends to expedite a solution as quickly as they possibly can. A lot of people in Boeing, Rolls Royce, the National Safety Organisitions and BA will have every finger well and truly crossed while this is going on, hoping and praying that a third “incident” doesn’t happen. They will not sleep at all well until the time when all of their 15 777s are fitted with sets of modified Heat exchangers. Let’s hope they are right.

But you still wonder –

What would those reports look like if GE had the problem, and not Rolls Royce?

Does the NTSC report reflect their lawyers’ view of covering the corporate backside in the event of a disaster, or is it a non too subtle way of boosting GE’s position in the market place?

What will the AAIB’s bland position look like if one of these planes drops out of the sky?

Why can’t the Safety organisations get together and issue a set of reports which at least say the same thing, so the customer can feel that someone in this hugely complex industry is looking after their interests alone, even if it causes the airlines and the manufacturers some grief?

All I know is that, in the next few months, when I want to fly a long way, I will not be asking BA for a price for my next long haul flight. I’ll be going somewhere I know that doesn’t fly these things.

Stupid? I simply don’t know.

The truth is that, apart from looking back in a year’s time, I’ll never know if I’m doing something unnecessary or not. At least, however, the customer (that’s Me in this case) can make a choice here.

As a contrast to that, just ask the RAF Nimrod aircrews what they think about flying them for many months when it seems quite clear (to me at least) that there are fundamental and life threatening problems with that airframe. You can’t, of course, ask the 14 who died in a crash a while back for their opinion, but the UK Ministry of Defence has lost a massive amount of credibility by denying the existence of a problem that any clear thinking individual knows exists. What price the power of the Military?

Don’t the rules change when you’re in the Armed Forces.

THE RETURN OF THE PRODIGAL

I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to the ways of the Cyberworld. I’ve written a blog for something over two years now, and I’m still not really sure why I do it.

I used to (and to the extent of working one day a week) still do have a job which majors almost totally on the analytical side of things. All through the 40 years I’ve been doing it however, I’ve had a parallel artistic streak in me which I’ve kept separate from my work. I like/love music, paintings, good writing, and am passionate about Photography as an art form. I give talks to local photographic societies almost as a release to some of this side of me.

Working where I do in the UK Manufacturing Industry (or what's left of it) has meant that very few of one’s work colleagues shared one’s interests. Unless it's football or sex, their eyes glaze over at the thought of anything "arty". The thought of telling most of them that I went to the Ballet last Saturday (which I did) would set them off wondering very seriously about my “soundness”, to borrow a word from “Yes Minister”. It’s grown up Billy Elliot, but in the real world.

It was only a few years ago that I started to write on a purely personal basis. There was no point to it other than to satisfy a desire I had in me. I then started occasionally passing a copy of something I’d written to a couple of special and trusted friends, who (and I don’t think they were bullshitting me) said they liked what they read.

But it was the death of Syd Barrett of early Pink Floyd which convinced me to put pen to cyber-paper and set my scribblings in front of a larger audience, and this has since carried on for some 300 separate postings. Occasionally someone puts a note down about something I’d written, but in the main, an average of 60 or 70 people hit the blog each day, although only a small number - you know who you are – felt the need to it with a formal comment. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not looking for sympathy here, but I assume that what I write has only a limited appeal. That doesn’t matter greatly, as I really do it for one person – me.

For various reasons, I haven’t put pen to blog now since mid December last year. I don’t feel comfortable that a blog, which reaches people in a very impersonal way, is the right place for intensely personal thoughts. It just seems uncomfortable, to me at least, to write down one’s innermost thoughts for examination by anyone who clicked on the link. Perhaps that’s why there has been limited feedback, I simply don’t know.

Since Christmas, I have been beset with a few family issues, culminating in the death of my mother a month ago, as well as one of my closest friend undergoing a massive and life threatening operation on the day that she died. These things take precedence.

In the meantime, it’s been intriguing to me to see how the interest in 42@60 has carried on without any further postings. It should correctly now be called 42@63, following my birthday (and 40th Wedding Anniversary) a few days ago. The title should change, but somehow 63 is not a number with anything about it, so we’ll carry on using a bit of artistic, numerical licence here.

Anyway, I checked up yesterday for the first time in a month to see if anyone was still looking at it, and was rather staggered to find that the hit-rate had blossomed in late January to a tad under 300 per day. Now this is not “set the world alight” stuff, but I can see no reason whatever for such a solar flare of activity on something which had been dormant for a couple of months. It would seem that the less you write, the more you are read. Perhaps rarity is the key factor here!

So, I thought I’d put something down, just to show I’m still alive and kicking. I probably won’t keep up the rate of postings from last year, but when I find something interesting (at least to me!) I’ll pass it on.

Belated Happy New Year. Oh, and have a Good Christmas!