A Few Degrees North

Famous Frosts and Frost Fairs in Great Britain

2012-01-30T21:18:00.000Z

I get email.

Suzie writes with a fine story to tell of a weekend visit to her Mum's place where, in a bout of attic-box-raking, she got her paws on a very old book with a long note in it from the author to her great great grandfather. The book -- how about this for a title? -- is called Famous Frosts and Frost Fairs in Great Britain, Chronicled from the Earliest to the Present Time; the author was Mr William Andrews.

Here is the truly wonderful tale from the page which Suzie screen-grabbed for me. Enjoy it...

The whole book is free to read online -- you can view it here -- though surely this is one you should track down during an afternoon of pleasurably relaxed trawling around some secondhand bookshops?

- - -

Famous Frosts, with its incredible stories of frost fairs on the Thames, does call to mind Nasa's climate change vid ... just in case you were still in any doubt about the issue.

Morgon, Côte du Py, Domaine Jean-Marc Burgaud, 2010

2012-01-22T15:34:00.002Z

I should point out, before I make my negative comments about this wine, that I spend a lot of my time acting as an unpaid trade envoy of The Wine Society, boldly coercing my friends, family and clients to become members. I have opened many hundreds of bottles from the Society, and have been truly delighted with every single bloody one of them.

So. The Jean-Marc Burgaud. Why did I buy it? And was it a stab in the dark? No -- I love the better wines of Beaujolais (the crus, if you must), especially the heftier styles of Moulin-a-Vent and Morgon (map here). I harbour especially devotional feelings for the Jean Foillard Morgon Cote du Py, a truly beautiful wine, worth every penny of its £20 price. If you've never bought any, may I suggest that you stop reading this -- honestly, go on: open another window in your browser -- and buy a case of it immediately? You will be very, very happy if you do this. (For some reason (tiny production volumes?) it's not sold by the Society.)

It might be fair to say that when I bought the Burgaud I was optimistically hoping for a bit of Foillard-lite: that wonderful combination of uncharacteristic (for gamay) spiciness and pure fruit. I drank my first gobful of the decanted Burgaud at a rather nippy 12°, so I certainly wasn't readying myself for a wash of Californian richness, but what was on offer was austerity itself: unwaveringly narrow, tannic tartness. A wee while later (God bless you if you're still reading, truly), the wine had warmed up a bit, but that straight-as-a-die tightness was still all that was on offer. Pfft.

24 hours later: has the asperity of the initial experience yielded to something I wouldn't "have to work at". No, sirs and madams, no.

As for the notes accompanying this wine on the Society website? Well. Allow me to state here, in a gentlemanly -- but forthright -- manner that the man responsible for describing this wine as "fabulously rich and fruity" is a scoundrel, a blackguard and a wayward vagrant.

I have yet to decide what to do with the second bottle -- maybe I'll have it replaced; but maybe I'll keep it until the end of its window, in 2017, to see if something else evolves in time...

It's striking that it's taken me several years of dedicated buying and drinking from the Society to, finally, encounter a wine I wasn't enamoured of. My love of the Society remains undimmed. The new list arrived in the post yesterday, with this legend printed at the back:

2011 proved an excellent year for the Society, thanks to you, its members, who continue to give strong support. Good trading allows us, as a non-profit-maximising co-operative, to thank you in the most practical way with price reductions on more than 300 wines in this New Year List. These are not short-term headline-grabbing discounts but modest, sensible price reductions for the benefit of as many members as possible.

I shall drink, once more, to the health of the Society's noble causes.

More shit written on wine labels *

2012-01-08T13:39:00.001Z

Back in August of last year Old Parn drew our attention to some of the awful, witless shit-crap you may occasionally be unfortunate enough to read on the label of your wine bottle. You know the sort of guff: the mere pretentiousness of things like, "Seductive spicy notes played by the Shiraz, harmonised by the floral, violet undertones of the Viognier. Culminating in a symphony of flavours." Through to the malfunctioning Babelfish of, "garnet rims and purple glints," and, "good backbone and fleshy to the mount".

Well. I went to a little London food and wine event a couple of months ago with @crepple, organised by and for producers from Puglia.

I met one of the wine producers; he was a jolly likable fellow, and his wines (mainly reds) were fairly nice, if not outstanding. I took his wee brochure away with me. Here are some of the descriptions therein:

"Is a very great red wine. It has color red ruby with purplish reflexes. The perfume and ethereal and persistent, the taste, justly tannico warm and harmonic with notes of leather and of spice." (I swear I've transcribed that exactly as it appeared.)

"Gotten by the grape of Troia and Merlot, it has color red ruby, perfume yielded with signs of forest fruits, soft and harmonic taste with a good fullness gustativa."

"The taste is dry, with an acido/tanico equilibrium."

And so, incomprehensibly, on.

Aye, so we could snigger at this unfortunate gibberish, but do you know what? The wines are decent. They deserve an audience. So why not -- at the very least -- ask at least one relatively literate mother tongue speaker to read your copy before publishing it on an internet, or in a brochure? I might actually drop them a message, you know, and -- politely, mind -- ask them to revisit their copy in the presence of someone who could successfully express the sense of "justly tannico warm" in clear, elegant English.

- - -

* My title is a modified version of one written by Old Parn himself.

The Sampler: Jamie Hutchinson

2011-12-03T22:30:00.001Z

Every other Friday afternoon Jamie Hutchinson sends a long email to his customers (he's the founder of The Sampler, a pair of wine shops in Islington and South Kensington, notable for their early adoption of those clever sampling machines which allow you to take an affordable mini-gargle of some Chateau Haut-Brion 1982).

I like his emails. Why? They have heart, they're unpretentious and they read as if they've been written by a man who loves the grape. He's admirably consistent, sending out his 1,500 words at the allotted hour every two weeks. The voice he uses is authentically his own: there's levity in it. And the emails are conversational, devoid of that stiff, businessy formality which bedevils so many sales messages, especially those from large corporations.

Friday's email included a link to the report on The Sampler's buccaneering buying trip to the southwest of France; I especially liked JH's wry introduction to several of the most outre wines he discovered...

• Les Cavailles Blanc 2009 £17.30. Made from the tediously familiar blend of 70% Mauzac, 20% L’en de Lel, and 10% Oundenc and fermented in cement.
• La Combe d’Aves Rouge 2007 £19.60. Again, just your everyday blend of 50% Braucol and 50% Duras. Very elegant in style – that lifted, natural nose and a red fruited and refreshing palate.
• La Grande Tertre 2010 £28.20. Sticking with the international varieties again, this is 90% Prunelard and 10% Braucol.

Steven Pinker: how to speak

2011-11-25T23:44:00.001Z

It's good to hear someone big-brained with a love of language speak beautifully, isn't it?

The most striking example of this I've ever heard, in the flesh at least, was from Steven Pinker at the LSE in 2010.

Near the end of the fifteen-minute Q&A session which followed his talk he was falteringly posed a long question which could be better expressed as: "You're an atheist. Aren't you, in calling for religion to be eradicated, just as bad as the religious zealots who want to force their religion on unbelievers?"

His response would have been notable if he'd been given 24 hours to write it down; that he delivered it on the hoof, in front of 450 people, makes it truly remarkable...

"As a thorough-going atheist I would not have a desire to eradicate religion. I think it's important to come to the best collective understanding that we can about the nature of the world and the nature of morality and justice -- and that will often require overturning long held religious beliefs. But religions themselves, as social institutions, have obviously evolved, thank goodness: the way all of the major religions are practised now is very different from the way they were practised a hundred years ago, a thousand years ago, two thousand years ago: thanks to the enlightenment, thanks to the pressure from secular reason. There's no reason why that couldn't occur and all of the things that are valuable about religion -- that they are places for people to meet, they're forums for ethical discussion -- can continue to exist; but as long as it doesn't entail that we indulge propositions about the world that our best reason indicates are incorrect, or moral arguments that our best moral reasoning indicate are indefensible."

- - -

I'm looking forward to reading The Better Angels of Our Nature; Pinker's 2007 essay, A History of Violence, on the same subject -- the decline of violence -- is a compelling, and compellingly optimistic, primer.

Competitive eating

2011-10-08T18:24:00.000+01:00

The main - only? - question to be asked of competitive eating is, of course: WHY?

To grasp some of the horrors of the pursuit (past time? hobby?) check out the records page on the Major League Eating site. One stand out for me is:

Mayonnaise
4 32-ounce bowls mayonnaise
8 minutes
Oleg Zhornitskiy

One thing though: the record holders do actually appear to be athletically trained and conditioned -- no six-belly fatties here.

I know with great certainty that I will never eat competitively.

Shooting fish in a barrel

2011-10-07T16:29:00.005+01:00

DJ Flula holds forth entertainingly on an English idiom even, or perhaps especially, when his English grammar is at its most skew-whiff.

"I don't need to make a pouring of the fish into the barrel -- and then shoot those."

"Fish in a bag I think better than fish in a barrel that you have just made shoot of".

Well put sir.

[Via Ricardo, in Moscow.]

Bert

2011-10-05T20:36:00.009+01:00

I was sad to hear that Bert Jansch (he had the perfect name for his occupation, didn't he?) died today, aged 67 -- it would've been nice to think that he could still have continued to record and perform, as I'm sure would have been his wont, until into his ninth decade at least, just like the bold BB King.

It was Dave Boyle Sr, in the early 1990s, who first played me Jansch's music (Dave had already confirmed his impeccable taste in the matter of the 6-string by also introducing me to Leo Kottke's tunes).

I can still remember well my first hearing of Angie and the distinctiveness of that muscular, angular style of his: the fluent bass lines contrasting beautifully with so many nimble little hammer-ons and pull-offs.

I saw him play live twice: once in the mid-1990s (with some of Pentangle), once on his own at the Tron Theatre in 2000; the latter was probably the perfect size and setting for him.

He was a great player.

Running from Home.

Garp

2011-09-29T21:45:00.005+01:00

"If you are careful," Garp wrote, "if you use good ingredients, and you don't take any shortcuts, then you can usually cook something very good. Sometimes it is the only worthwhile product you can salvage from a day: what you make to eat. With writing, I find, you can have all the right ingredients, give plenty of time and care, and still get nothing. Also true of love. Cooking, therefore, can keep a person who tries hard sane."

The World According to Garp, by John Irving.

Eleven Minutes Late

2011-07-17T21:49:00.008+01:00

There are great pleasures to be found in Matthew Engel's book, Eleven Minutes Late: A Train Journey to the Soul of Britain. It's deftly balanced stuff, combining stylish, wry levity with belt-and-braces history. I've not finished it yet, but I'll damn well recommend it.

Here he is, on the first of his major trips, from Penzance to Dundee non-stop:

At Bristol, we got a fresh crew, and I regarded them the way an old lag looks at a new screw. I'd been going for four hours now, a third of the way. Who did they think they were, coming in and taking charge? I'm a lifer, me. This is also the way railway staff regard each new franchisee. One guard I met in the north, who had been in the same job for twenty-five years, tried to list all the different companies that had ordered him around, and the different-coloured uniforms he had worn. He gave up in despair.

As Engel writes in his prologue:

I love trains. I hate trains. This is a book about trains. This is not a book about trains. It is a little about me. It may be a lot about you. This is a book about the British.

I also loved this passage, written in a style which pays knowing homage to the commentators and journalists of the Victorian age:

In 1868 the Midland Railway, determined to compete with its rivals to the east and west, pushed through a new line south from Bedford into its awesome new cathedral at St Pancras. Then it marched north to conquer Scotland by building the Settle and Carlisle line through some of the bleakest landscape in the kingdom at a terrifying cost of men and treasure.

To Amazon, or the library, with you.

In praise of The Wine Society

2011-06-19T14:49:00.012+01:00

Do you enjoy a wee drop of wine from time to time? Whilst you're not given to the economically ruinous and frankly distasteful business of chucking £1000-a-bottle-claret down your thrapple, do you care enough about getting a decent bottle to sidestep the two-bottles-for-a-fiver options offered by your local 24-hour grocery shop? Well, if you enjoy wine, may I urge you to join The Wine Society forthwith?

Why should you join? The main reason is that the Society (full name: International Exhibition Co-operative Wine Society Ltd) is a mutual. As Will Lyons put it in the Wall Street Journal:

"...as a mutual, the Wine Society is owned by its members, so the primary concern of its management committee is, in the words of their buying director, Master of Wine Sebastian Payne, to offer good quality wine to members at minimum-added cost. The day-to-day concerns of other international wine retailers, such as growing profit margins and increasing market share, come second to finding and selling the wines its members want to drink."

This is the very thing - one needn't be in thrall to the writings of Karl Marx to realise that the Society's model is damn near perfect if what you're about is good drinking for a sensible price: it's a large, long-established, well managed and resourced organisation whose profits go back into the business, and not to meddling, pin-stripe-clad investor types.

Not only does mutual status bring you a better quality of vino, you'll also find that there are other small pleasures to be had in what the men who say "Damn!" (from A Bit of Fry and Laurie) would call "the customer experience", such as the Society's use of its own fleet of vans and drivers - you'll find that you're spared the travails which often go hand-in-hand with having stuff delivered by a courier company. The Society also widely and clearly publishes its telephone number and email address - phone them and there shall be no death-by-Vivaldi.

It costs £40 to buy a lifetime share, and there is no ongoing commitment to buy. The Society is A Very Good Thing.

* Two wine bloggers - both proud Society members - worthy of mention are Tom Parnell and Simon Woolf.

- - -

One wee suggestion I have for the Society concerns the structuring of its offers of wines en primeur.

Let's say that, like me, you'd like to order a couple of cases of a decent 2010 Bordeaux such as Chateau Angludet, costing £250 per case of 12 bottles (plus VAT and duty). I already own a case of the 2009, and I'd really like to have the 2010 too: both are good (though quite different) years, and it strikes me that I could pass a rather jolly evening, sitting by myself on the occasion of my 50th birthday, with a bottle of the 2009 and 2010 in each of my paws.

So, come the 15th of June 2011 - the day of the release of the first chunk of 2010 Bordeaux onto the Society's website - I ordered the wines, submitting my credit card details in the process. However, as my "Confirmation of Request Only" email states:

"Please find attached confirmation of receipt of your order for wines from the 2010 Bordeaux In Bond offer. These details are being entered into our allocation system and you will receive notification of wines allocated to you by Monday 8th August 2011 at the latest."

I rather wish they would change this process: it seems that my (modest) desire to buy this wine, and my loyalty to the Society, are not compatible. I actually requested a further three cases of wine on 15th June, but, come August, I may be allocated none. (Earlier in the year, a friend and I both requested some red Burgundy en primeur from the Society - I ordered three cases, he ordered an impressively bibulous seventeen cases. How many were we each allocated? One case.)

Another added little frustration is that, if one were to rely on an (ultimately unsuccessful) request for allocation, the wines could sell out in the interim from other merchants running a straightforward, first-come-first-served system.

The Society's lottery system should probably apply to the investment-grade top wines, especially in strong vintages - but for Joe Punter who actually has the radical intention of drinking his £100-£300 claret, a simpler, straightforward purchase system is surely preferable.

Iain Sinclair on the London Olympics

2011-06-14T00:00:00.005+01:00

Iain Sinclair appeared on Start the Week (Radio 4) yesterday, holding forth entertainingly on the corporatised fuck-up which is the Stratford Olympic site - you can listen to it here (he is on second).

"It feels rather like the period after the American civil war when the carpetbaggers hit the south, this strange global regiment of weird money men and imagineers and promoters of every kind of scheme."

An obvious potential problem with cerebral commentary of such great, learned depth is that it can come across as too clever-clever, a bit smarty-pants - and, of course, as eloquent and effective a howl of outrage as it is, it could also come across as just that: an erudite whinge, lacking the prescription for an alternative. Mid-chat, Sinclair is asked pointedly by Richard Sennett: "Well, Iain, what would you have wanted instead?" .. and his response is reassuring, because he really has thought about what would have been better in the place of the alienation and sterility of the site as it is.

(Sinclair is also bang-on on the subject of the Gurkhas, hired to guard the site - I've passed by a few of them at the permanently-manned gates near the Greenway cycle path, and they seem perfectly chosen for the job.)

Pragmatism

2011-06-07T23:32:00.004+01:00

This insightful little article on pragmatism by Tim Harford is worth a butcher's; he describes well the flakiness which besets ministerial decision-making..

Politicians and their advisors have repeatedly explained to me the problem: gathering evidence is all very well in theory, but in practice a minister will arrive at their post to discover her predecessor has done little to commission the kind of solid evidence that might be useful when, say, improving literacy standards in schools, or reducing re-offending rates of former prisoners.

When she asks how long it will take to produce her own evidence base, she'll be told three or four years, perhaps longer. Figuring that by then she'll be on to her next job, or perhaps even the job after that, they'll set about figuring out what to do immediately. And action without decent evidence is bound to be dogmatic, not pragmatic. Two years later, a new minister will arrive in seat, and the cycle of ignorance continues.

Harford also wisely compares Silicon Valley and Wall Street, referring to the former's mantra of "fail faster" as being infinitely preferable to the latter's much less desirable "too big too fail".

As Harford says, it's a shame we don't have a vote for pragmatism..

"Fail faster" probably owes its existence to Esther Dyson's remark: “Fail cheap. Fail fast. Fail often. Always make new mistakes.”

School of Wine - now north of the river

2011-05-23T18:27:00.008+01:00

Right, listen up good people. Green and Blue, the fabulous independent wine shop, are launching their 13-week School of Wine course in the City on Tuesday 7th June (i.e. north of the sacred Thames, for those of you who get all skittish at the thought of heading south).

My thoughts on the utter excellence of this course have already been noted, right here.

You should go. I feel the same about School of Wine as I do about The Wire: jealous of anyone who has yet to start it.

Send your booking request to: rebecca.skinner@greenandbluewines.com

More details here.

- - -

Green and Blue School of Wine

How to taste

Viticulture

Vinification

Northern France

Southern France

Italy

Germany & Austria

Spain & Portugal

Australia & New Zealand

North America

South Africa & South America

Port, Sherry and Sweet Wines

Champagne & Sparkling

Tuesday 7th June

Tuesday 14th June

Tuesday 21st June

Tuesday 28th June

Tuesday 5th July

Tuesday 12th July

Tuesday 19th July

Tuesday 26th July

Tuesday 2nd August

Tuesday 9th August

Tuesday 16th August

Tuesday 23rd August

Tuesday 30th August

Tim Flannery at the Long Now Foundation

2011-05-04T20:08:00.008+01:00

The excellent write-ups (generally by Stewart Brand) of the talks at the Long Now Foundation are good at whacking you round the chops with the dizzying insignificance of your place in the cosmos.

Check this out, from Brand's summary of Tim Flannery's talk, which took place yesterday:

In Flannery's view, Gaia is an infant still. Even if it is the only Gaian planet in the galaxy, with growing skills and rudimentary space travel, it could invest the whole galaxy with life in just 5 to 50 million years --- an instant in light of Earth's 4.5 billion years and the universe's 14 billion years.

Yes, "in just 5 to 50 million years". There's a thought to take out for a cream tea on a Sunday afternoon.

I'll leave it with you..

Snooker as it should be

2011-04-25T17:36:00.008+01:00

The televised game of snooker could be immeasurably improved if only those responsible for staging it embraced the game's Gothic side.

The Crucible... the Sheffield theatre where the World Championships are played. Yes, it's such a wonderfully evocative name. And yet. Tune in and what do you see? Men desultorily hacking out their moves in the confines of what appears to be a Travel Lodge beside the motorway. Where is the drama? The sense of occasion?

To the producer of the World Championships, I offer the following list of improvements..

The auditorium shall be designed in the image of a Gothic billiard room: stone carvings of gargoyles, red drapes, stuffed animals and thick curtains
The referee shall wear a cape and antlers
The players must dress appropriately:

The game shall be entirely lit by hundreds of heavy candles, ideally mounted on large candelabras
The match scoreboard shall not be electronic - it must be of a timber construction, and operated exclusively by three goblins
The players shall be obliged to eat a large, rich meal, lasting many hours, prior to starting each phase of gameplay
Once gameplay has commenced the players shall be obliged to continue to drink port from goblets
The players shall be obliged to smoke cigars throughout gameplay
Hair oil - not hair gel
There shall a ready supply of snuff available to the players and officials
There shall be a bar, tended in the style of that in The Shining, for use by the players, officials and members of the audience
The occupants of the auditorium shall be accompanied by several hundred brown long-eared bats
Corporate sponsorship shall be completely forbidden. Any man arriving with AVIVA (or similar) stitched crudely into his waistcoat shall be immediately disqualified
The audience shall be obliged to show their appreciation for favourable gameplay by lowing in the bovine style of the House of Lords
The game shall be played to the faint, constant sound of a thunderstorm
Dry ice shall be pumped into the auditorium every fifteen minutes
A gramophone will be available for the players to use between shots
The players shall be obliged to read nineteenth century copies of The Times when seated
Incense shall be burned throughout gameplay

Implement these changes and what you have is drama. Gothic style. An atmosphere.

Any other suggestions?

Homicide

2011-04-04T20:33:00.010+01:00

Tom Pelligrini has been the primary detective in the investigation of the murder of an eleven year old girl, Latonya Wallace, for three, stress-filled months of fourteen and sixteen hour days. The primary crime scene of her murder was never found - all he has to work with is the location where her body was dumped - and he is haunted by the general rule which says that a murder still open after a month will stay that way. Just as he takes a much-needed break from what is known in the detectives' parlance as a "red ball" (a murder that matters), this happens:

Print hit.

When the human mind has exhausted itself, technology flexes a muscle and creates a clue of its own. Diodes and transistors and silicon chips produce a connection as the swirl pattern on a right index finger is matched to a name and address.

Why the detective wonders, does Kevin Lawrence's fingerprint appear on the inside cover of a library book on Afro-American heroes, Pioneers and Patriots? And how can it be, he enquires further, that this same book is somehow one of those found in the satchel of a murdered child in Reservoir Hill?

But Lawrence makes an unpromising suspect - he has no previous criminal record, other than the recent shoplifting charge which led to his prints being entered onto the system.

He is not the killer.

What has happened is a coincidence so implausible it's dizzying:

Eight days after a police computer took his name in vain, Kevin Lawrence is brought downtown to the homicide unit, where he tells detectives that he knows nothing about any girl named Latonya Wallace. He does, however, remember a book about black American heroes with the title, Pioneers and Patriots, Shown the text itself, he can even recall the school report he prepared long ago using the same book, which he borrowed from the Eutaw-Marshburn school library. The paper was on great black Americans and, as the young man recalled, it earned him an A.

The investigation that exonerates Kevin Lawrence is still wrapping up when Pelligrini returns to duty. But by luck or mercy or both, the primary investigator is allowed to watch from the periphery as other detectives slam into a wall. He is, in a very real sense, spared the anguish of seeing a precious piece of physical evidence reduced to fantastic coincidence - a fingerprint that sat undisturbed on a book for more than a decade, waiting for a million-dollar computer to give it life enough to taunt a few homicide detectives for a week and a half.

I suppose my decision to read Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets is merely a predictable coping strategy for having recently watched the tenth episode of the fifth and final series of The Wire, and needing something - anything - by David Simon in my life. (This is an enjoyable little interview: "Fuck the casual viewer. Seriously, who wants a casual viewer? If you're a writer, do you want a casual reader?")

Simon draws his real life Baltimore detectives in Homicide - introduced on the frontispiece as The Players - with the same unstinting care, honesty and clarity you'll know well from the characters populating The Wire; we're talking novelistic detail here. I think the elegance of Homicide - which is essentially ultra-longform journalism - is a product of Simon's unerring discipline: he sticks to telling his reader the facts, to telling a classically readable story which is sprinkled generously with salty and appropriately crude dialogue.

I haven't yet finished the book - so if you'll excuse me...

Entrepreneur schmentrepreneur

2011-03-26T14:17:00.001Z

en·tre·pre·neur (ntr-pr-nûr, -nr)
n.
A person who organizes, operates, and assumes the risk for a business venture.

[French, from Old French, from entreprendre, to undertake; see enterprise.]

Entrepreneur. Say it out loud. ENTREPRENEUR. Now, play a wee bit of word association with it. What comes up? Nothing much appealing, or admirable, is there? A self-regarding, Monaco-tanned, arrogant male in Armani wearing a watch as heavy as a ship's anchor, probably. Sitting inside an open top car, spouting jargon-infested drivel about that proposed expansion of his telecomms business into EMEA.

Here's my theory: the English language is in need of a neologism to take the place of entrepreneur. Why? Because the word entrepreneur puts people off from becoming entrepreneurs. The word is Latinate; it is multisyllabic; it is - to the ears of an Anglo-Saxon - a bit poncy-sounding. It makes the activity of starting a business sound as if it can only be undertaken by someone with the questionable gifts of a Bannatyne or a Trump.

We don't really want any more entrepreneurs of the Ferrari-driving persuasion. But we do definitely need more people to realise that self-employment is far easier to attain and maintain than the media and the government support agencies have made us believe. Doug Richard has it right:

"In some ways we have mystified the notion of starting a business. Starting a business is no more or less than the notion of waking up, thinking of something and doing it.

Most of what you need in terms of the raw toolkit is what most people with any level of spirit can reach out and see in any number of places. It can be as simple as going to the library or a website."

Yes, we have mystified the notion of starting a business; and, yes, this florid word is part of that problem.

I'd define my prescription for a replacement word further: what we need is a handy - and, ideally, non-Latinate - little word which encapsulates the idea of entrepreneurial self-employment. So that we end up with lots more people owning and running businesses like John Nese's; fewer - actually, fuck it - no more businesses being run in the image of any I'll-give-it-a-hundred-and-ten-percent poltroons.

The Wire

2011-03-26T10:39:00.008Z

Everything you've ever heard or read about The Wire - most likely a stream of heady, breathless praise - is true. I'm going to miss it.

As I've gradually worked my way through The Maestro's boxset over the past couple of months, the cadences and tones of the speech of its predominantly black cast have seeped into my head. Yessir - I am going to miss it!

I love Irvine Welsh's righteous, cage-rattler of a rallying cry for the series in this piece in The Guardian. John Williams, also in the same piece, also calls it right:

Then I watched The Wire. And there was everything I'd liked in the work of Higgins or Leonard or Pelecanos: the inventive dialogue, the characters etched in shades of grey, the prevailing mood of moral ambiguity and profound cynicism as to the motives and efficacy of the forces of law and order.

Enjoy Bunk's use of a photocopier during an interrogation here, and - if you've made the journey already - revisit some key moments from all five series here.

"The hours go by like sips of water"

2011-03-22T21:32:00.006Z

Here is a beautiful, affecting little track called Bats in the Attic by King Creosote and Jon Hopkins. It can be found on the album Diamond Mine, soon to be released.

Louis CK

2011-03-20T17:39:00.003Z

Apart from the high quality of his material, what really distinguishes Louis CK's performances is the remarkable conversational tone and fluency of his delivery - he really succeeds in sounding as if he's addressing you and a couple of your pals across a table in the boozer.

You could start with Hilarious (watch out for the eponymous riff on hyperbole in modern white American speech), move on to Chewed Up and end with Shameless.

Glengarry Glen Ross

2011-03-12T11:40:00.005Z

Was there ever a more monstrously effective portrayal of the oily, dislikable and disreputable salesman than Blake, brilliantly played by Alec Baldwin, in Glengarry Glenross?

Wild Honey

2011-03-12T09:46:00.007Z

Taking the, admittedly Londoncentric, lead from the Tired of London Tired of Life blog, here's something you can do today, or any day: have a three course set lunch at Wild Honey, in Mayfair, for twenty sheets (£19.95 to be precise).

If you have your eye on a clutch of London's culinary heavy-hitters, this is the way to go about getting your paws on their food: reject the evening a la carte in favour of the lunchtime fixed price menu. Yes, your choice is restricted - two of each course at Wild Honey, for instance - but the cooking is incredibly assured.

Value is usually easier to come by if you shoot for the dirt cheap or the top end. What Wild Honey achieves, at lunchtime at least, is an apparent conflation of these two, usually mutually exclusive, choices. The same sort of offering is available at the sister restaurants, Arbutus and Les Deux Salons.

Ken Robinson on education

2011-03-10T20:17:00.010Z

This truly inspired animation of Ken Robinson's talk at The RSA, in 2010, is well worth twelve minutes of your life.

Primary school seems to me -- at the remove of many decades, mind, and in Perthshire at any rate -- to be a fairly jolly affair which lays well the foundations of literacy and numeracy, as well celebrating a love of knowledge for its own sake.

Ice cream and jelly, eaten from recycled Stork margarine containers, also featured on a regular enough basis. So let's view Crieff Primary School as being the best that education can be: couthy wee bairns, in a handsome late-Victorian building, being well served by dedicated staff whose only crime was their taste for the dodgy knitwear of the era.

Crieff Primary School -- they've changed the front a bit since I went there.

High school though? Pffft. It may be called education, but it's no such thing. It's schooling. Mark Twain certainly had it right...

Ry Cooder

2011-03-06T17:02:00.004Z

Right. So. Yeah. I've been away from here.. I'm just easing myself back into it an' all, with a lazy post. Explanations and proper posts to follow. Don't desert me.

It's Sunday afternoon, and this tune seems to suit those lazy hours just prior to the Antiques Roadshow and Songs of Praise. (I once heard a friend's Dad refer to the 'Roadshow as the "Frantic Greed Show". Very nice.)

Remissness

2011-03-01T00:27:00.001Z

I'm still here. I promise to come back soon..

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

2011-01-06T21:23:00.005Z

To hell with it: yes, he's the literary man of the moment; yes, the papers all raved about the fabulousness of his new novel - so I'm just going to join in and insist that you get yourself a copy of it too. It's a biggish novel, but I think that, like me, you will inhale it in very few sittings.

"The pedestrians in every neighbourhood all seemed to have taken the same dowdiness pills. As if individual style were a volatile substance that evaporated in the vacuity of DC's sidewalks and infernally wide squares. The whole city was a monosyllabic imperative directed at Katz in his beat-up biker jacket. Saying: die."

"The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage."

"...he labored to penetrate the thick affective rind of her distraction."

You know what to do: go, and go quickly, either to the book shop or the library.

Yes. I know - I have been absent for far too long, for perhaps the longest time since I started this in late 2006. I shall try to return before the month is out. Oh - and happy new year.

More Danny MacAskill

2010-11-19T14:47:00.004Z

Danny's back, and it's wonderful to see the purity of his skills matched to higher production values. The scenes shot in Skye, in the low, slow light of a long summer day, are the highlights, I think.

Wine writing²

2010-11-13T12:20:00.005Z

I once heard a broadsheet sports journalist remark on Radio 4 - at a time when Chelsea were winning, week in, week out, with enervating predictability - that it was hard for her to find fresh ways of describing the same unlovely display of clinical technique. Restaurant critics are up against the same problem: how to describe the object of their trade without falling back onto a clutch of hackneyed adjectives. As AA Gill has written:

But then, many of the words that we do have are swaggered in a Pooterish bourgeois snobbery. I can’t write “moist” or “succulent” or “luxuriant” without shivering. Writing about food and the sensation of eating can be as nauseating to read as watching someone eat with their mouth open. So you have to pick your way through the verbiage with care and imagination.

And for wine writers, too, it must be tough to avoid the same tendency when writing about related grapes and styles. Though I do wonder if the meditations of David Strange on Domaine Tempier might have crossed some sort of expressive line...

This nose is charged with an arsehole-themed, herbal, meaty, scented wonderfulness that has me salivating more than Pavlov’s dogs at a campanolgy competition. I find mature Mourvedre’s sophisticated, perfumed qualities, especially in Bandol, to be so charged with panache that its oft-encountered bum-hole Brett character has to be pretty overt to repel me. The fruit on the nose is delectably soft with complex, mature flavours. Indeed the over-riding tone of its nose, beyond its arse aromas and slight alcohol burn, is one of complexity.

Urrmmmm. Let's move quickly along. In fact, let's turn to Tom Parnell, shall we? Specifically, let's hear his thoughts on Domaine de Gournier, Cévennes....

Okay. Let's rattle through this one quickly, shall we? I mean, we're all busy people.

So. Domaine de Gournier, Cévennes. It's red. Dark red. Heavyish.

Both to the nose and in the mouth, it's far from being an exhibitionist. You need to work at it a bit. The one flavour that presents itself unashamedly is plum. Caramelised plum, what's more – which is a pretty nice kind of plum if you ask me.

(Marks & Spencer does a plum danish pastry. This is like those plums.)

Verdict

If you're looking for a rough-and-ready, vaguely Bordeaux-style weekday wine that doesn't strip to its underwear while you're still pouring the drinks, this will do a fine job. And it won't decimate your bank balance.

Drink it with food, I think. Being a robust kind of character, it could stand up to most things you'd throw at it.

Thanks Tom. I'll have some wit with my wine writing from now on, please.

Bread matters

2010-11-12T12:22:00.012Z

“Feed the bitch...or she will die!”
Adam last name unknown, Kitchen Confidential

So here's the thing about baking bread: I reckon it's easy. Admittedly, there are breads out there for the making which require a level of skill, patience, commitment and attention to detail way above my station. But if you own a pair of hands, a big bowl and an oven, then properly made bread is within your gift. I still dine out on the story of arriving at my parents' house, six or seven Christmases ago, with a gift bag containing an enormous and beautiful circular loaf, its crust perfectly semi-scorched here and there, its many hollows and dimples containing convincing and totally authentic little clusters of oven-browned flour. Mum unironically enquired after the name of the premises where I'd bought it, sure that I'd been relieved of three and half quid in some new deli-bakery in the west end of Glasgow. Of course, said loaf had only recently emerged from yours truly's oven: let it be said that vanity truly helped me become a baker.

I suppose there's a hierarchy of bread, and like all such structures the further one ventures towards the top, the more rarefied things become. At the base is the awful, perma-squidgy, industrially produced guff which is sadly recognised as bread by the majority of British people; next, and way, way above your Kingsmill in terms of quality, is the bread you'll get out of a domestic counter-top machine; above machine bread in the rankings comes my type - handmade, and with a properly knobbly crust, but leavened with a commercially manufactured yeast; finally, at the apex of the pyramid, comes the bread which is handmade with a naturally cultured sourdough starter - this is the stuff which Charlie Brooker once referred to as "aspirational bread", the pricey stuff consumed by some as just another urban status reinforcer. It's a sad truth that grim supermarket dough is so very harshly divided in the UK from its more expensive artisanal cousin, and that if one wants to buy truly decent bread hereabouts it usually involves being parted from a fair few quid - conversely, about 70% of the bread consumed by the French is handmade; the figure is less than 5% in Britain.

My friend Simon is a sourdough baker; he's a rye man and, like me, his baking is a weekly affair - but unlike me, he sells the majority of his small clutch of loaves to the marvellous Brixton Cornercopia, a wonderful, locally-rooted deli and cafe in Brixton Village Market. Simon is strongly influenced by the excellent book - part instruction, part polemic - Bread Matters, by Andrew Whitley. It's a book I intend to read soon, and I expect that when I do I'll begin to ease myself off the convenience of my Doves Farm yeast.

But for now, if you'd like to make the bad boys in the photos, here is how:

Ingredients (makes two)

650g flour - white, brown or a mixture of the two; plus extra for kneading
450ml of water
Three quarters of a teaspoonful of Doves Farm yeast
A teaspoonful or two of sea salt

Optional (but recommended)

A handful or two or oats
A handful of sunflower and pumpkin seeds

Method

Mix the flour, yeast and salt in a large mixing bowl
Add the water and mix with a wooden spoon
Tip the ball out onto a floured surface and get busy kneading for ten minutes - firm folding and heel-of-hand pressure is called for, not manic voodoo-dough-hatred
Put the dough onto a floured baking tray, cover with a clean tea towel or cling film and - this is very important - place it somewhere cosy. I stick mine on the glass shelf of the extractor fan which overhangs the hob; I then turn on a couple of the gas rings, at a gentle - but not silent - burn. Draught-free warmth is crucial...
After the first hour has passed, knead the dough for a further two minutes, then cut it into two pieces and fashion each into the shape of your choice
Generously dust the baking tray with flour and place the two loaves on it
Re-cover and return to your elected warm place for another hour or so
Preheat the oven to 220°
Put the loaves into the oven and turn it down to 200°
Mine are usually ready at some point between 25 and 30 minutes - check after 25 minutes
As soon as the loaves are taken out of the oven they must be placed on a wire rack to cool - this is important as, left on the baking tray, they'll sweat in a rather unwelcome manner

Over the last month or so I've taken to doubling the amounts: 1.5kg of flour, c.950ml of water and one and a half teaspoonfuls of yeast yields four loaves (as in the photos above). The method is otherwise no different. This bread doesn't keep especially well - but it'll work as toast for a good five days - so three of the four get the freezer treatment as soon as they've cooled down.

Despite being utterly unconnected to supermarket white-slice, making bread like mine is still eminently convenient; indeed, the dough-heads on the many serious recipe websites would be withering in their consideration of my use of commercial yeast. Yes, the process of mixing, kneading, proving and baking lasts for nearly three hours; but look at how long one actually needs to do anything hands-on: about fifteen minutes.

Having perfected my straightforward daily bread, I'm now eyeing this sort of stuff:

...what I call "holey restaurant bread". No bread made with commercial yeast powder will ever look or taste like such a sourdough. And if I want to make it, I'm going to need to learn how to decode instructions such as:

3. Add flour and salt into the diluted starter, mix to combine. Cover. Autolyse for 30 minutes. (My dough temperature at time of mixing was 26 C.)

The time has come - I better get ready to feed the bitch.

The "bitch" referred to by Adam last name unknown in Anthony Bourdain's brilliant book, Kitchen Confidential, is a sourdough starter. Keeping a sourdough starter is a bit like looking after a pet - stop feeding it, and it'll die. Adam is a...

“...psychotic bread baker. To see his bread bread coming out of the oven, to smell it, that deeply satisfying, spiritually comforting waft of yeasty goodness, to tear into it, breaking apart that floury, dusty crust and into the ethereally textured interior…to taste it is to experience real genius."

The Case for Working with Your Hands

2010-11-05T15:49:00.020Z

Absurdity is good for comedy, but bad as a way of life.

Matthew Crawford

After my bonds with corporate life were cut earlier this year a friend sent me an article (Working with your hands: the secret to happiness?) she was sure would interest me. She was right; the piece resonated strongly with me. I had, after all, felt for some time a fair amount of dissatisfaction with the travails of desk-bound, fluorescent-lit office life.

At the heart of the Guardian piece by Oliver Burkeman is a book by Matthew Crawford called The Case for Working with Your Hands: or Why Office Work is Bad for Us and Fixing Things Feels Good. My interest piqued, I then found an enjoyably reflective, autobiographical review of Crawford's book by Louis de Bernieres. Then came Ian Jack's typically thoughtful and limpid piece in The Guardian, Would you want your son to be a plumber?

Jack's opening paragraph is a keeper:

The library and the swimming pool I regularly attend are very different kinds of building (one early Victorian, the other early Blair) and several miles apart across London, but they have two things in common. One, they're being ambitiously refurbished and enlarged. Two, the men in the hard hats, drilling concrete and fixing wires behind the plastic sheeting, shout to each other above the din in languages that are hard to identify. "Different parts of eastern Europe, I think," say the staff at the counters, if asked. This importation is a mystery when nearly 8% of the British workforce is unemployed. Meanwhile young men and women, the products of long educations, sit on trains fiddling with symbols on their laptop screens or making self-important calls to say they are "running late for the meeting". This is another mystery: what Britain has come to think of as its most desirable, productive work.

In his article de Bernieres writes of The Case for Working with Your Hands: "I found it hard to avoid the impression that this book was written specifically for me." And I suppose I felt the same too. Crawford's unashamedly masculine text is a refreshingly disdainful bucket of cold water in the face of every corporate turd-polisher, the manager poised to distance himself from failure as much as he is to take credit for success.

Crawford is an interesting character: he has worked as an electrician; he has a Ph.D. in political philosophy; and he is currently a fellow at the University of Virginia and a self-employed motorcycle mechanic. He celebrates the objective standards governing his work as a motorcycle mechanic as much as he denigrates the "peculiarly chancy and fluid" character of the world occupied by corporate managers (a milieu he once occupied).

Surveying the popular titles in a chain bookstore, it becomes clear that management books are a subcategory of self-help books, and that adopting them as one's guide may lead one into "an inquisitorial morass of motive and self-accountability," to borrow a phrase. Throughout this literature one finds an imperative for the manager to care, and to sincerely hold forth to his subordinates the possibility of personal transformation. He is not so much a boss as a life coach.

I especially liked Crawford's section The Crew versus the Team, which had me nodding in agreement:

How is being part of a crew different than being part of a "team" in the new mode of office work? The answer must lie, in part, in the ambiguous character of the thing produced in the latter. Say it is a marketing team at Apple. The success of the iPod, as a product, can't be specified in narrow engineering terms. Its success is due to the production of a new kind of behaviour in consumers; we listen to music in a new way. The team's job is part of a large and complex enterprise, the object of which is produce culture, and it is hard to get metrics of individual contributions to such an effort. Because of the scale and complexity of the undertaking, responsibility for success and failure are difficult to trace. There are no objective performance criteria to hold up before workers, but management still has to do something, so it directs its gaze to workers' mentalities, speaks of higher purpose and brings in industrial psychologists to track various personality measures. For his part, the team member has no solid ground on which he can make a stand against this kind of moral training. He can't say, as the carpenter can to the foreman, "It's plumb and level - check it yourself." His only defence is a kind of self-division - he armours himself with the self-referential irony supplied to him by pop culture, pinning Dilbert cartoons to his cubicle wall and watching The Office every Thursday night.

Crawford refers to Tocqueville's nineteenth century prediction that American society would be diluted by the "soft despotism" of the nanny state. He proposes an extension to this analysis, in our time, because he believes the softly despotic tendencies of government are found in the outsized corporation too. The remedy? Tocqueville suggested (and Crawford concurs) that it lay with the small commercial enterprise...

...in which Americans reason together to solve some practical problems among themselves. I believe this remedy remains valid, especially if the enterprise provides a good or service with objective standards, as those may serve as the basis for social relations within the enterprise that are nonmanipulative in character.

For some of his reviewers (particularly in The New Yorker), such views may sound unpalatable, too studied in their evocation of the nineteenth century frontier, with its notions of insular self-sufficiency and even survivalism. But I agree with Michael Agger who wrote in Slate that, "You might call Crawford a locavore of work. He wants economic policies that are human in scale and provide maximum opportunity for self-reliance and self-employment."

The general prescription for small, local and objectively measurable enterprise is simple and appealing, and it reminds me of other good sentiments and observations, such as the remarks of Jaime Lerner, the former mayor of the Brazilian city Curitiba, who achieved great things with creativity and not much money:

"You have to keep things simple, and just start working ... You have a lot of complexity-sellers in this life. We should beat them, beat them with a slipper."

Who knows - perhaps there is an office somewhere, blissfully free of inelegant and modish jargon, in which I would be capable of happily spending my allotted forty hours a week without feeling a mild sense of existential dread creep into me through the soles of my shoes. But I suspect that even an idealised office (Silicon Valley-style, with the smugness somehow removed) still wouldn't really cut it for me.

Self-employment carries its own risks, stresses and challenges but, like Matthew Crawford, I reckon that, "Such work ties us to the local communities in which we live, and instills the pride that comes from doing work that is genuinely useful."

Further reading might take you to a report, published in 2010, by the New Economics Foundation called 21 hours - Why a shorter working week can help us all to flourish in the 21st century. And Crawford, with his two simultaneous yet utterly discrete occupations, seems to be successfully pursuing another thoroughly appealing idea, that of the portfolio career.

Leviathan or, The Whale

2010-10-25T23:13:00.004+01:00

Try, if you can, to get a copy of Leviathan or, The Whale by Philip Hoare. As Ruaridh Nicoll wrote in The Observer:

WG Sebald praised one of Hoare's earlier books and I can see why the two writers might admire each other. It's all that traipsing about staring at the world with knowledgable, sad eyes, busily sticking pictures in a scrapbook and happily following intriguing diversions. I still feel the loss of Sebald and so I am delighted to discover Hoare. I hope he doesn't get swallowed. That he allowed me to see Moby-Dick anew feels like a blessing. This is a beautiful book.

Rachel Cooke, too, described it well in The Guardian:

...his work has turned into something harder to categorise: amazing feats of history and imagination that take you to places within yourself - never mind the places he is actually describing - that you did not even know existed. Leviathan or, The Whale is one of these feats and it is as elusive a beast as the great, unknowable creature that is its inspiration. It begins as memoir, then moves deftly through biography, literary criticism, social history and, finally, nature writing, in a muscular freestyle so compelling and all-encompassing that it cast a spell on me that endured for days after I had done turning its beautifully illustrated pages.

Recommended.

Scottis and Inglis

2010-10-09T00:32:00.006+01:00

Anthony Burgess wrote in A Mouthful of Air that, "A dialect that waves a flag may be called a language". In a typical passage (typical in that he'll have you looking stuff up online) he continued:

"The Scots dialect of English called itself Scottis as long ago as the end of the fifteenth century, asserting a difference from Inglis. It had literary status, a large prose and verse tradition, and a marked dissimilarity of sound, lexis and, to some extent, morphology and syntax from its southern neighbour."

Old man Burgess was right - there is indeed a marked "dissimilarity of sound" between my speech and that of my English friends. Whenever I'm introduced to middle class English people they almost always say, "You're Scottish, yet I have no problem understanding you!" To which I usually reply that I'm far from flattered - because I know they've merely compared my diction favourably with that of the exiled Glaswegian tramp who recently asked them for fifty pence somewhere in central London. And yet...

"The sound system of Scots touches RP at several points, but there are significant differences. Scots does not use vowel length in the English manner. A word like bit is much the same in Standard Scottish English and RP. Bat and palm have two distinct vowels south of the border, the first short and the second long, but SSE prefers a short a for both. The lack of vowel length enables a Scottish poet to rhyme pot with bought."

Scots vowels are rather economical: the Scottish pronunciation of gawk and hawk produces "gok" and "hok", whereas RP gives much more unhurried, languid sounds. The lack of Scots vowel length makes homophones of stock and stalk, yet these words are pronounced distinctly in RP. Conversely - and somewhat perversely - many Scots contrive two syllables from the shortest of words: "fillum" for film; "Carrol" for the name Carl; "Errol Grey" for Earl Grey; I've even heard "arrum" for arm.

Standard English may also lack vowel distinction:

"All varieties of Scots English are rhotic, retaining a full-bodied R regarded as highly characteristic of the dialect, and these seem to have kept in place a series of vowel distinctions lost in RP. I refer to the vowel in first and heard, herd and word, words pronounced with an invariable vowel, and, of course, no R after."

Burgess continues:

"...the vocabulary of Scots fascinates Sassenachs, who usually fail to recognise that certain of its features were in common English use before the winds of change blew in from across the Channel or, without outside influence, events like the Great Vowel Shift decided to occur. Forms found in Robert Burns, like mousie and beastie, seem whimsical, but probably record a fading awareness of Middle English ending. Wee - properly, as the high vowel suggests, meaning extremely rather than merely small - is good old English waeg."

I believe that the final frontier in Jock assimilation in London is governed by The Moorgate Question. Yes, Moorgate is a proper noun. Yes, I should defer to the correct, local pronunciation, which is "Moregate" or, even more commonly, a boneless, R-less "Mawgate". (The Scots pronunciation of the moo in "Moor" delivers - logically? correctly? - an impersonation of a cow.) I might concede that "Moregate" is a sensible compromise; but if I ever plummily say "Mawgate", it'll be a clear signal that I should swap my single malts for an English passport and a bowler hat.

144 Mayall Road

2010-09-28T23:01:00.003+01:00

The friendly Mayall Road squat finally bit the dust yesterday. It was highly unusual in that the squatters enjoyed near-unanimous support from their mainly middle class owner-occupier neighbours. The rarity of this relationship was even newsworthy enough to be reported in the local London rag.

The squatters claimed -- credibly -- that the owners, Lambeth council, have neither the money (an estimated c.£100k) or the intention to turn the place into a rentable property.

The first eviction was attempted a couple of months ago but the squatters arranged a breakfast gathering which was well attended by neighbours as well as some dog-on-string types. The tactic worked. The council staff and the bailiffs reclined in their vehicles two blocks away.

Yesterday was a different story, told here. I missed the action but it sounded like a long old day for all concerned. There was much talk today on the street email group such as this:

It was a depressing and shameful scene. There are now three empty council properties in Mayall Rd awaiting renovation, one of them, number 120, was empty for 3 years and has recently been squatted. There are other examples of Lambeth evicting squatters and then failing to use the land/buildings, notably St Agnes Place behind Kennington Park, a long standing row of squats which were bulldozed by Lambeth and still remains an undeveloped wasteland 5 years later on. See this link.

If a community is unhappy with inconsiderate squatters in its midst then it's probably right that the council move them on. But if a community is happy with its neighbourly squatters and the council doesn't have the money to refurb, they should be allowed to stay, right?

Chickens

2010-09-28T18:25:00.010+01:00

If you have a suitable bit of garden - and you don't need a big one - you really want to be getting yourself a brace of chickens. We took a pair of them in from a neighbour in spring this year, built a simple run and coop for them and since then it's been non-stop poultry fun.

The nearly-three year old daughter of their previous owner had named them "Bob Bob" (say it out loud - it's the sound a chicken makes) and "Hello". We renamed them in the 1950s secretarial style: Marjory and Cynthia.

They are dog-like in the excitable extent to which they engage with their keepers; but I'm not fooled into believing that what they display is tame canine affection. No, they're just greedy fuckers - a man bringing porridge and broccoli is a chicken's friend, it's as simple as that.

While it's good to have an organic waste disposal unit to stick one's carrot peelings into, let's not forget the reason for keeping chickens: a finer egg you'd struggle to find. Fried in oil and butter and topped with salt and a wee bit of smoked paprika. Yes please.

Cycling in London is..

2010-09-27T19:41:00.006+01:00

As I waited this evening, in the thick of the traffic, at the busy junction beside Oval tube station this is what I saw:

ten cyclists
all were men in their 20s, 30s and 40s
all wore helmets
most, perhaps all, wore shorts; at least half wore lycra shorts, one of which bore the legend SPECIALIZED
most - probably all - wore rucsacs
five used an egregious yellow ruscac cover bearing the legend HUMP
as he waited, one poured liquid down his gullet from a bicycle-specific plastic bottle

I don't do lycra and I don't stick isotonic drinks down my thrapple when I'm only riding five or six miles home - I can generally hold out for a glass of water at home. But in many other respects I suppose I blended in with my fellow punters.

I agree with the good people at Copenhagenize that their city's floaty, breezy and distinctly non-Specialized approach to cycling is superior to and preferable to London's. But the experience of riding down Boris's "Cycle Superhighway 7" of an evening rush hour, along Kennington Park Road and Clapham Road, is manifestly not Scandinavian in flavour: you really need to be very focused when your Superhighway crosses the path of the Brixton-bound trucks and buses. Pootling along with one's pug in the front basket, chatting on the phone, isn't going to cut it at those fraught junctions around Oval, where cyclists mix with vehicles like chalk and cheese.

I hope that both the gender balance and the attire of the average London cyclist Copenhagenizes very soon - but it ain't going to until Boris pulls his finger out and ups the infrastructural ante.

Are you a foreign accent ponce?

2010-08-28T14:52:00.004+01:00

So what do you feel about Djalili's contention that showing fidelity to a "proper" accent makes you a ponce? On one hand, I instinctively feel he's right; as well as the quality and theatricality of his mimicry, so much of the humour in his routine stems largely from the powerfully disjunctive eruption of a foreign accent into the more muted flow of middle class English speech. Yet, on the other hand, I know how impressed I have been by non-native speakers of English capable of achieving a natural-sounding English accent. (Taking it one stage further, I'll never forget hearing Carlotta - an Italian friend of friends - resident in Glasgow for ten years, reciting part of this Big Man routine in the back of a taxi ... "Ye should be flyin' in amongst them wi' the claw end ah a hammer", she said in pitch-perfect, guttural Glaswegian gangster-speak.)

The nub of the issue seems to be: it depends who your interlocutors are. So, yes, you can probably tone down your pronunciation of the name of that Spanish dance workshop if you're only talking to a couple of fellow Brits, but by all means let rip if you're in Madrid.

An interesting, and of course obvious, aspect of Djalili's routine is the extent to which it hinges on the universal British sense that there is a single accent for each of the languages he caricatures. Imagine the impossibility of creating an accent which synthesized the dizzying diversity of British accents. I suppose continental Europeans hear a general purpose Dick van Dyke-in-Mary-Poppins accent when they think of les rosbifs.

Here is a short piece in The Guardian about foreign accent syndrome. Can you imagine? Your pals thinking you're a prank caller?

Po

2010-08-27T22:43:00.003+01:00

Robert Macfarlane's meditations on time prompted me to recall this memorable line from a novel I read many years ago, East of the Mountains, by David Guterson.

Ben remembered that in Italy, he and Rachel had slipped down between rows of apple trees on the plain of the Po, deep into the cool and dark of orchards, and there they had kissed with the sadness of newlyweds who know that their kisses are too poignantly tender and that their good fortune is subject, like all things, to the crush of time, which remorselessly obliterates what is most desired and pervades all that is beautiful.

Niven and Macfarlane

2010-08-27T12:02:00.028+01:00

Some further recommendations for you. We begin with Kill Your Friends by John Niven, one of the most jarringly lurid, crude and darkly funny books I've ever read. As my friend Pete the poet said of it, "There are about three or four wrong laughs on every page".

The baleful Steven Stelfox, Niven's protagonist, puts one in mind of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis and of the Charlie Brooker creation, Nathan Barley. Indeed, Brooker's description of Barley -- "a fuck-haired swaggering cock-about-town" -- could well be applied to Stelfox.

On top of the pleasures offered by Niven's wonderfully overcooked prose is the simple, delicious cruelty of his chapter headings: genuine statements made by record company executives at the time the book is set, in 1997. "I see Gina G developing the way Madonna has," is one example. Ouch.

After the cartoonish nastiness of Stelfox may I recommend the elegiac polish of Robert Macfarlane's writing about landscape, nature and wilderness?

Macfarlane is young -- born in 1976 -- and was even younger when he made his name in 2003 with Mountains of the Mind; this was followed by the equally assured The Wild Places in 2007.

The Wild Places is part-travelogue, in which Macfarlane attempts to discover whether there is any true wilderness left in the British Isles. Central to his mission to discover the essence of each landscape he visits -- Tor, Forest, Summit and Ridge are some of the chapter titles -- is his decision to spend a night sleeping in each place. He quotes the Scottish novelist and poet Nan Shepherd:

No one knows the mountain completely who has not slept on it. As one slips over into sleep, the mind grows limpid; the body melts; perception alone remains. These moments of quiescent perceptiveness before sleep are among the most rewarding of the day. I am emptied of preoccupation, there is nothing betweeen me and the earth and sky.

Macfarlane is a supreme noticer and describer...

At one point, we disturbed an otter, which loped and skittered away over the rocks, then poured itself into the brown water, where it was instantly invisible.

I love the humility and thoughtfulness of his meditations on the dizzying span of deep time -- he is keen to remind us that any sense of permanence which we attach to ourselves, our culture or our civilisation is misplaced:

I had come to feel wildness as a quality that flared into futurity, as well as reverberating out of the past. The contemporary threats to the wild were multiple, and severe. But they were also temporary. The wild prefaced us, and it will outlive us. Human culture will pass, given time, of which there is a sufficiency. The ivy will snake back and unrig our flats and terraces, as it scattered the Roman villas. The sand will drift into our business parks, as it drifted into the brochs of the Iron Age. Our roads will lapse into the land.

Now, there's a thought to take out for a cream tea on a Sunday afternoon.

Some may see a misanthropic relish in Macfarlane's vision of your three-bed semi being taken over by the mercilessly encroaching flora. I sense, however, that his outlook is rooted more simply in the neutral pragmatism of someone who has achieved some sort of grasp on the stretch of geological time.

Let's end with this passage from his visit to the Black Wood of Rannoch, a beautiful remnant of the Caledonian pine forest:

In a clearing, I found a big storm-felled birch, prostrate but alive. I walked round to the root bole. As it had fallen, it had torn up in its roots a circular cliff of mud. The upper rim of roots had dried as hard as rock, and had turfed itself over, providing a roof of a foot or more. The snow was coming faster now. I cleared an area at the foot of the bole, cast around for fallen pine branches, and layered them so that they formed a springy mattress.

From inside the den, warm in my sleeping bag, I watched the snow fall beyond the roof, more heavily and more softly, and it seemed strange that so much motion could provoke so little sound. In those minutes before sleep, I felt accommodated by the forest, and watched it move into night: the dark settling like a fur on every object, the dropping snow, the quick adroit movements of birds between trees.

"The great what-happens-next storyteller"...

2010-08-25T22:33:00.009+01:00

...is what John Walsh justifiably called William Boyd in The Independent in 2002, after the publication of the marvellous Any Human Heart. Ever since I read that book a couple of years ago I have progressed steadily through the Boyd canon: The Blue Afternoon, An Ice Cream War, Restless, and Brazzaville Beach - not a dud amongst them. Then, a couple of days ago, I polished off The New Confessions, a substantial 500-pager which was inhaled in a sitting of a few days' duration.

I think there are two things which make a Boyd book such a treat: firstly, he cares so much about the story - he cares about making you care about his characters; the likes of John James Todd and Logan Mountstuart are credibly flawed human beings who you connect with in a fully involved way. Secondly, there is the immensely reassuring and appealing heft of Boyd's thematic anchors, such as (in The Blue Afternoon) the state of the practice of medicine and surgery in late nineteenth century Manila. Identity, its loss and its capriciousness, is another recurring theme, especially evident in Ordinary Thunderstorms and Restless. As Eve Patten put it:

"It could be said that both his stories and his novels are governed by the ideal of a 'discerning intellectual pleasure', one sustained by his ability to marry individual interest with historical scope, and to fuse conceptual purpose with the power of compelling narrative."

Only one Boyd remains for me to read: Stars and Bars. So, Bill, please - get busy with the next one.

I recommend all of his books. Start with Any Human Heart and take it from there. I envy you, starting out on your Boyd journey, as much as I am envied by those who have, unlike me, watched all five seasons of The Wire.

[...it's just occurred to me to connect Boyd's grandly sweeping novels (esp. Any Human Heart and The New Confessions) with Somerset Maugham's truly excellent and equally epic Of Human Bondage. Thanks to Danielle for that one.]

Ten

2010-08-24T22:26:00.025+01:00

So. The Semple offspring are submitting themselves to the public spectacle of being beaten by their ludicrously sprightly Faither in the Glasgow 10k next month. Now, to be fair to the younger Semples, the passage of a few years hasn't exactly seen them all routinely slouch on the couch of an evening in their grey jogging bottoms: we're all pretty fit I'd say. But - he will beat us. The old man is so fit it's almost unseemly.

Take last year's race for instance (when he was sixty): he ran it in 45:16, came 429th out of a herd of 7,000, and was 2nd in his age group. Even if we assume that a couple of thousand or so of the other punters were, according to local tradition, of the overweight, deep-fried-sausage-loving, salad-dodging sort, Dad's race position is impressive.

My new diet continues apace: double servings of pasta and sponge pudding chasers for breakfast and lunch. The diet is working; I have the necessary energy to cope with my (laughably modest) training.

But of course Dad will beat his bairns: his race is not with his us, but with the forty-five minute mark. Let's hope he does it!

You can donate a couple of quid to the cause here.

Baptazia

2010-07-16T17:50:00.003+01:00

I discovered Baptazia only recently, via the Copy Cunts blog, an anonymously written site which froths with righteous anger at the brazen plagiarism of ad agency staff. (I don't think there is any website on the entire web which is more vitriolic, or more ludicrously, joyously overwritten -- as the tagline has it: Blowing the whistle on advertising cunts -- one cunt at a time.)

Baptazia, I reckon, is so good simply because the editing and the MCing has been executed so well -- but then there's the simple fact that the evangelical types in the footage look perfectly well as if they're actually letting rip in some dirty basement club.

Bert

2010-07-16T12:21:00.012+01:00

Between January 2001 and January 2005 I lived on the first floor of 61 Bowman Street, a classic Glasgow red sandstone tenement building. The street could be optimistically considered by estate agents to be within the more desirable Queen's Park district, but it's more realistically part of Govanhill.

A 20-second walk from my front door, on Victoria Road, was the slightly dog-eared shop of a greengrocer named Bert. Although the sale of fruit and veg was the mainstay of his business, he also sold flowers, as the Google Streetmap photo below shows.

I had a sense of him having traded on Vicky Road for many years; this was confirmed by my Mum when I moved into the area, who told me that she remembered buying fruit from him when she lived nearby as a teenager back in the 1960s. He was a grafter, jangled rudely out of bed at Christ knows what time of the morning every day of the week.

His death comes five years after I last bought my spuds from him -- I was informed by my friend and former neighbour Elliot via email a couple of days ago. Like Elliot, I too felt that Bert represented a Victoria Road of yore. I also had a similar relationship with Bert -- he was deeply familiar to me, but I knew little of who he really was, or anything of his life away from the shop.

I was astonished to discover that he was eighty years old at the time of his death. I was less surprised to learn that he grafted as he always had, right until the end...

G,

Thought you'd care to know that Bert passed away yesterday....organ failure. He had been slowly going downhill for the last six months or so but continued to maintain his long hours.

I spoke to him on Saturday morning....later one of his staff couldn't wake him - eventually he came round and was driven to the Victoria [Infirmary]...the saving grace being that this eighty year old did not linger.

The store is being emptied today.

One of the last members of a generation that lived to work and worked to live. I will miss him though I really didn't know him...a few words on a regular basis and that was it -- however, he characterised a Victoria Road that no longer exists...a throwback to another time and place.

So it goes,
Elliot.

The beautiful and venerable Mitchell Library has a wonderful archive of old photographs of Glasgow. The forty-odd strong section on Victoria Road can be viewed here.

// Photo of Bert by Andy Allan.

Georgia Sea Island Singers

2010-07-09T09:47:00.005+01:00

I discovered the Georgia Sea Island Singers through the brilliant live performances of their songs by Tom Rodwell in 2009.

I love this performance: handclaps, footstomps and voices interplaying beautifully, perfectly.

Lambeth Business Desk

2010-07-06T22:04:00.016+01:00

“Bureaucracy is the art of making the possible impossible.”

Javier Pascual Salcedo

“The best way to deal with bureaucrats is with stealth and sudden violence.”
Butros Butros-Ghali

“You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.”
Thomas Sowell

I left my job at the end of April 2010 - since then, I have explored some (hopefully) low-risk business ideas.

One of my ideas - the one I want to dwell on here - is very simple indeed. It would even pass the test of being easily explicable to and readily comprehended by a five year old.

I accept that densely populated local authorities such as Lambeth don't have it easy: it is not Kensington and Chelsea; it has the inescapable structural challenges of deprivation to handle; it was run by a bunch of sheisters in the 1990s; and until recently its financial managers were apparently using their fingers and toes instead of spreadsheets. But, insofar as part of its remit is to legitimise small, locally owned and run businesses it needs to improve its provision.

I have never sought business funding or advice from the council - all I've wanted was to establish two simple things: "Is my proposed business welcome in Lambeth?"; "What process of certification or licensing would I be required to follow to trade freely and legally?"

Here is a much-edited summary of my contact with the council.

I sent an initial email to the council's Business Desk - the replies were almost willfully inconclusive, as if their authors had decided to say "no" to me, but in the most evasive and indirect way imaginable. One of the people who emailed me advised me to phone or write to a different department...

...I phoned this department. I was given advice and guidance about processes and deadlines not relevant to my two questions. The staffer took my name and address and told me I would receive some information in the post. This information never arrived.

A few days later I received an email from the Business Desk inviting me to complete a survey which, "should take no more than five minutes to complete and will be useful to us in assessing how effective the Business Desk is in providing an excellent level of customer service." I completed the survey and highlighted that I had found it really very hard indeed to get a straight answer from the council about my business proposal; I pointed out that it didn't help me to be sent PDFs and Word documents not relevant to my questions; I also said that, given my circumstances, if the council's response was going to be "no" then it should say "no" explicitly, definitively and efficiently so I could focus on other ideas instead.

I received several emails in response to my comments in the survey. In my search for an answer, I had now been guided to three different departments, individuals or organisations: two separate council departments and the Metropolitan Police. I chose to disregard contacting one of the council departments as it was clearly not relevant to my questions.

Having been directed by Lambeth to the Met I received the following response when I contacted the police in Lambeth: "...this licence is issued by Lambeth Council, police have no input in this application." Deadlock. Lambeth says speak to the Met, and the Met says speak to Lambeth.

I now moved on to contacting the other council department. Here is some of the text of that email:

"I would like to know: would a business of this type be welcome? If yes, what licence or council validation is required? What is the process for acquiring the licence? How much would the licence cost?

I am currently unemployed so if it is possible to provide me with a definitive response in the first instance I would be very grateful; if my proposal is not going to be welcomed it would be beneficial to know this as soon as possible so that I can explore alternative proposals."

I did not receive a reply to this email so I phoned the department in question.

I was asked many questions when I phoned, and they all had a clear, over-riding intent: find out what part of my story and circumstances means that I have to speak to someone else in some other department.

I was - finally - given the name and the direct line of the gentleman who would answer my two simple questions.

I called the number. It was dead.

Knowing, by now, the format of Lambeth email addresses as well as the gentleman's full name, I was able to send a slightly edited version of the above message to him.

I received the following autoreply:

I have left Lambeth for a new role in Tower Hamlets. Thank you all for your help and support over the last seven and a half years. Mr Xxxxx Xxxxxxx, phone number 020 1234 5678 or email xxxxxx@lambeth.gov.uk will be the main contact.

I then sent another email to the new contact listed in the autoreply (the date was 1 July 2010).

I immediately received the following autoreply:

I left Lambeth on 9th March 2010. If you query is about Blue Star House or any service from the former ECCS Resources Division (except property and procurement) please contact Xxxx Xxxxx. If you query is about property in Parks, Cems and Crems or the Libraries please contact the Adult and Community Services Department. If you query is about procurement of contracts or services please contact Xxxxx Xxxxxxxx for Housing Regen and Environment matters and Xxxxxx Xxxxx for ACS matters. Please do not leave emails on this site as they will not be monitored and you will not receive a reply.

Thanks.

What can we make of this? After my experience it seems there is something ineluctable about employing the clichéd epithet Kakfaesque to describe it. After all, these are the words used by Kafka's publisher to describe The Castle:

Kafka's world is one in which the individual struggles against ubiquitous, elusive and anonymous powers determining yet opposing his every step.

Perspective is surely called for in considering my experience of Lambeth's wearying failings. It's an organisation which, I'm sure, is currently contending with bigger and darker challenges than whether or not to rubberstamp my micro-business. And I don't wish to get too in-touch with my inner-Noel Edmonds. (Noel's HQ is surely the terrifying logical conclusion of becoming a splenetic local authority hater, as Charlie Brooker's brilliant review demonstrates.)

Barry Schwartz is strong on the subject of a need for "practical wisdom as an antidote to a society gone mad with bureaucracy". (I particularly love his deconstruction of a hospital janitor's terribly, depressingly blinkered job description.)

But above all, I subscribe to the view of Warren Senders that "we're basically monkeys, and we have monkey minds". Despite being a bit disappointed by Lambeth, I can see its failings as being fairly typical of any large, unwieldy collection of tired, over-worked people corralled into big fluorescent-lit rooms full of computer screens. The long, wise and deeply thoughtful essay by Senders on timescales is a marvel.

Senders takes us a long way indeed from the infelicities of Lambeth's Business Desk. Which is fine. I wouldn't want to turn into an angry Noel any time soon...

[If anyone working in Lambeth council would like to answer my questions it would be great to hear from you. I can be contacted at graeme dot semple at gmail.com and would be pleased to briefly provide the rest of the details. Thanks.]

Why the NHS doesn’t know what it isn’t doing, by Tim Harford, is an excellent article which captures perfectly the fist-gnawing frustration of banging into an impenetrable bureaucratic wall:

"I’ve no idea how typical my experience is. Nobody does. It is hard for a bureaucracy to measure delays if the delays are caused by an inability to be noticed by the bureaucracy."

Raven

2010-06-30T10:45:00.007+01:00

During his 1,000 mile Inside Passage voyage from Seattle to Juneau Jonathan Raban berths in Klemtu. Asleep on his 35-foot ketch, he is rudely awakened in the wee hours...

I awoke to voices. The VHF radio on a neighbouring boat was turned up loud, and two fisherman were gossiping over the airwaves. I couldn't quite make out what they were saying in the exchange of laconic growls, punctuated by bursts of gruff laughter. Groggy with lost sleep, resentful of my inconsiderate neighbour, I dressed and slid the hatch-cover open.

No one appeared to be up on any of the boats nearby. The radio voices belonged to two ravens, perched on adjacent pilings.

Raban writes about the ravens'....

....mordant chuckle; the tone of sly, disdainful irony; the taste for talking, like William F. Buckley, in sentences extended by multiple dependent clauses; the habit of raising rhetorical questions and immediately answering them...

In the stories of the Tlingit people, natives of the Pacific Northwest, the raven is...

...the cleverest of all the animals: a master of disguise, a brilliant con man and thief, a gourmand and lecher, an inveterate survivor. Among his many adventures, Raven steals the box containing daylight from an old man, gets control of the tides from the tide-woman by sticking porcupine needles in her bottom, makes the waves, has sex with a princess by pretending to be shaman.

Anecdotes about real ravens only need a little tweaking to be transformed into the happy extravaganzas of the Raven cycle.

Raban refers to the idiosyncratic and alluring writing of the corvid expert Lawrence Kilham, author of The American Crow and the Common Raven.

In Kilham's book, a raven distracts some young wolves from their kill by pretending it has a broken wing, so its mate can steal food from behind their backs. A mute swan is similarly distracted, and three ravens rob its nest. Ravens dive-bomb gorillas, for "deviltry", and reduce them to paralyzed terror. Ravens take turns tobogganing down a snowbank on their fronts. Tame ravens attempt to court and mate with their human masters.

In short, hens they ain't.

Raban's superb book is called A Passage to Juneau. Joshua Klein's 10-minute TED Talk about the big-brained guile of Raven's relative, the crow, is also good stuff.

A Partisan's Daughter by Louis de Bernières

2010-06-22T14:29:00.003+01:00

I loved this short novel as much as I did the much longer and more ambitiously expansive Birds Without Wings. A Partisan's Daughter immediately and evocatively draws you in to the intimacy of the relationship between its two characters. As Toby Clements wrote in his review:

De Bernières is a skilful writer, poetic but unforced, who can soothe you like a masseur, telling well-oiled stories of past excitements, and then just when you are drifting off, dexterously tweak a pressure point.

Here, for example, is the partisan telling his daughter about his first love, a woman killed by Croats long before Roza was born: "The Ustase got her. You know what those people were like. Anyway, they wrecked her like you'd wreck a doll with a hammer, and they just hung the body over a fence. There was not anything they hadn't done." It's a powerful image.

It's melancholy stuff indeed; what humour there is here is mordant. Here is a passage in which Chris bleakly ponders the dissatisfactions of his work as a pharmaceutical rep:

Roza chose this occasion to tell me how she'd got involved in selling herself. I often wonder how people end up doing what they do. How do you become a sweet-shop proprietor, or a tax inspector. How do you become a medical salesman? Well, the first thing is that you put your dreams on hold. And the second thing is that you unintentionally give up your dreams entirely, and you while away your life until death comes to collect you, and then you get the last opportunity to look back and nothing but the emptiness behind you.

I finshed the book at 1.30am a few nights ago and was kept awake for a while by the effect of its conclusion. Toby Clements again:

Neither Chris nor Roza are conventionally attractive characters, but no one likes to see a chance missed and one finishes the book gripped by a quiet, pleasant sadness.

Michael Pollan: The Myth of Nutrition and The Pleasure of Eating

2010-06-15T00:24:00.008+01:00

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." Michael Pollan

It's been great to discover the work of the American writer Michael Pollan, who debunks the falsehoods of nutritionism as elegantly as he celebrates the joy of eating good food well cooked.

This episode of The Food Programme about Pollan and his book In Defence of Food, broadcast on Radio 4 in 2008, is deserving of the award it won; and this talk explores the same territory in more depth.

Both his talk and his book are full of snappy rules one can use to eat actual food, and avoid what Pollan calls "edible foodlike substances": buy and eat stuff which requires cooking - don't rely on corporations to do it for you in distant factories; only buy food from the perimeter of the supermarket because the stuff there is perishable, while many of the items lurking in the central aisles have been mercilessly and inventively processed; never buy anything with more than five ingredients listed on the label; and never buy any food which makes a health claim for itself.

There is much to savour in Pollan's rejection of nutritionism - as Dara O'Briain put it in his wonderful rant against bad science of every stripe, "A dietician is to a dentist as a nutritionist is to a toothyologist."

Whoops! by John Lanchester

2010-06-07T11:45:00.008+01:00

When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done.

John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money

It's such a fine line between stupid and clever.

David St Hubbins, This is Spinal Tap

John Lanchester's short and engaging book about the financial crisis - Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay - published in January 2010, is an adroit exploration of how some of the smartest and best-educated people in the world got some stunningly obvious truths backwards.

Most us came to understand the main cause cause of the crisis: "predatory" sub-prime lending, mainly in the USA, got ludicrously, laughably out of hand; the resulting junk debt was chopped up, repackaged and magically, tragically, resold as iron-clad, triple-A investments. Lanchester elegantly illustrates how the mortgage brokers, the "banksters", the regulators, the governments and the public were all complicit.

One of the most striking observations he makes is that "attitudes to debt are different" in other countries: the average household in France, for instance, had debt of 60% of its income when the credit crunch started; the figure was 160% for UK households.

I also loved reading about the prescience of the wiser heads who were sadly ignored:

So Glass-Steagall [the Act separating retail from investment banking] was abolished in 1999, thanks to a bill sponsored by three Republicans and backed by Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. Only eight senators voted against the bill, one of them Bryon Dorgan, who said, "this bill will in my judgement raise the likelihood of future massive taxpayer bailouts." Looking back on the amazing correctness of this prediction from a decade later, Dorgan observed, "The culture is that Wall Street knows best."

Madoff is of course included in the litany of dishonour, in the chapter called Funny Smells:

In 2005, a professional investor called Harry Markopolos, a mild-mannered Boston accountant, wrote a twenty-one page letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission, pointing out that the high profitability of Bernard Madoff's fund was a Ponzi scheme.

Sadly his experiences with the SEC officials...

"...proved to be a systemic disappointment and led me to conclude that the SEC securities' lawyers, if only through their investigative ineptitude and financial illiteracy, colluded to maintain large frauds such as the one to which Madoff later confessed."

Markopolos understandably called his book about the scandal No One Would Listen.

School of Wine at Green and Blue

2010-05-25T11:14:00.011+01:00

So I graduated last night from School of Wine at Green and Blue: every Monday night, for three or four hours, over the past 13 weeks, I've been engaged in the sort of serious-minded, po-faced study which sustains the image of the subject as stuffy, hidebound and exclusive...

All right: that's what School of Wine was not -- the course was a joy, an informal and passionate celebration of every form of the stuff, carefully designed to explode all notions of stiff pomposity, including the disgrace of using wine as a hyper-inflated label for status.

Kate Thal, the founder of Green and Blue, was our teacher and I don't think I'm going out on a limb by saying that she inspired in every single one of us an unwavering, awed respect. The feedback forms everyone completed last night were undoubtedly like mine: that is, full of scarily devotional, hyperbolic praise. This is the sort of pedagogic experience which I suppose only comes a bit later in one's life: you've signed up because you're certain of your interest; and you're there to have a good time rather than further your career prospects in some way.

Kate has two principal gifts: formidably encyclopedic knowledge of her subject and the ability to articulate it with unending passion in original, pithy and consistently engaging language. Many of her utterances resembled beautifully crafted aphorisms, not lines extemporized without notes in front of a class. Many's the evening I would sit there, listening to her hold forth entertainingly about the contents of the stuff in each of the glasses I was clutching in my paws, and I would think: "What a truly great idea this was." Stephen Fry once spoke about the joy of discovering something which is "better than it needs to be", and I think this applies to Kate's courses -- she exceeded our expectations by a country mile.

What did we learn? The first three weeks provided a foundation for us to subsequently head off around the world's key wine regions: how to taste; viticulture -- how to grow good (and bad) grapes; and vinification -- what happens in the winery. We also learned about the upheavals caused by phylloxera, the pernicious aphid which completely wiped out European vineyards in the late 19th century. The solution at the time, which was to graft the native European vines onto phylloxera-resistant American root stock, is still used by necessity. (Beware of floods, fires and locusts by Tim Atkin provides a good overview of the subject.)

We learned about yields too, and how they influence the quality of the stuff which ends up in your glass. The vine, unlike the apple tree for instance, is not self-regulating -- it's a terribly, hopelessly greedy beast and will, if encouraged or left unchecked, produce more fruit than it would ever be capable of properly ripening. The producers of three-for-a-tenner gut-rot, the stuff which Kate says "tastes like brain damage", know this and mercilessly push their vines to create as much -- ultimately tasteless -- juice as possible. Yields in Europe are measured in hectolitres per hectare: 50 hl/ha is an approximate top-end limit for good wine, with some exceptional producers going as low as 10 hl/ha; yields of well over 200 hl/ha have been measured by some bulk wine producers.

One of the distinguishing features of Green and Blue's list is that many of the wines on it are produced in tiny, barely commercially viable volumes by growers known personally to the business. Kate and her staff are often able to speak not only about the characteristics of the wine itself, but also about the quirks and personalities of the wine makers supplying them. Take, as an example, one of the marvellous champagnes we tasted last night, Saignée de Sorbée, produced by M. Bertrand Gautherot, who farms "a mere 4 hectares". By any standard this is tiny.

What about cost? Is access to the good stuff simply a depressing matter of stratospheric financial firepower? Not at all. Kate has undoubtedly and skillfully recalibrated in her students' minds the amount of money we each consider to be reasonable for a bottle of really good, special wine. But we've also learned to pay no mind to the absurd excesses of label drinking. After learning about the time, effort, skill and love shown by a small producer such as Jean Foillard (pictured), all of us are apt to see twenty or thirty quid as an eminently fair sum for a non-everyday bottle. As Kate has taught us, "Drink better, not more".

Thank you Kate, for being such a superb teacher. Thank you to my friend Suzie, for being such an effective unpaid trade envoy for Green and Blue over the last 18 months or so. Thank you to my friend and fellow student Hannah, for sorting out the course bookings after we'd left it all a bit too late. And thank you to Helen, Sebastien, Adam, Jamie, Adrian, Kevin and Sonia and the rest of the class for making it such a pleasurable experience. Cheers!

Enrico Annoni v the language of Robert Burns

2010-05-19T16:26:00.009+01:00

This is one of those wonderful tales of Scottish language which may be apocryphal - it was nonetheless related as genuine by Tam Cowan on the BBC Radio Scotland programme Off the Ball, which is concerned equally with the patter in the crowds as it is with which team might win the Cup.

Cowan's tale concerned the despairing remarks purportedly made by a Celtic fan which greeted the substitution of one Enrico Annoni:

Aw naw, no' Annoni oan an' aw noo!

You really ought to do it justice by saying it aloud a few times.

[Hat-tip to my Dad for telling me the story as heard on the radio.]

Stewart Brand

2010-05-18T19:32:00.020+01:00

I recently finished reading Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto by Stewart Brand. He's a bit of a hero of mine, both fiercely intelligent and wonderfully undogmatic.

As I've written before, I first encountered him on BBC2 in 1997, presenting the six-part adaptation of his book How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built (which should be at or near the top of your Amazon wishlist). Brand himself has uploaded the whole series to Google Videos, saying, "Anybody is welcome to use anything from this series in any way they like."

Whole Earth Discipline is, like all of Brand's books, distinguished by his savvy, pragmatic wisdom as much as it is by the fluency of his writing, which is sprinkled with aphoristic directives such as: "We need thinkers who don't mind strongly stating their loosely held views."

The book is remarkable principally for being a statement about the important things he has changed his mind about -- urbanisation, nuclear power and geo-engineering -- since he gained his green credentials in the 1960s and 70s with Whole Earth Catalog. He's persuasive, mainly because he clarifies so elegantly the thinking which persuaded him.

On climate change he is, like his friend James Lovelock, very clear:

"The climate news, I'm sorry to say, is going to keep getting worse than we think, faster than we think: climate is a profoundly complex non-linear system full of runaway positive feedbacks, hidden thresholds and irrevocable tipping points."

Brand's beautifully direct and elegiac conclusion is well worth savouring:

Ecological balance is too important for sentiment. It requires science.

The health of natural infrastructure is too compromised for passivity. It requires engineering.

What we call natural and what we call human are inseparable. We live one life.

- - -

>> His TED talk, based on the book, is also excellent.

>> Two essays by Brand led to Whole Earth Discipline; one, published in Strategy + Business, was called City Planet; the other, published by MIT's Technology Review, was called Environmental Heresies.

"Yeah, yeah, I don't give a shit - I want to get there quick"

2010-05-13T11:43:00.008+01:00

I've just received a long-winded PDF from TFL enticingly called Cycling Revolution London. Despite such marketing-bollocks as "A cyclised London" it's all salutary enough stuff. We should look elsewhere for inspiration though...

A post at the ever-wonderful Copenhagenize (which is written by Danes in English) - called Cycling Isn't Fun, It's Transport - fizzes with a sort of prickly pragmatism, trampling on the hair-shirted, eat-your-greens lingo of bicycling advocacy programmes.

Over to Mikael, as he rips into the anthropological disconnect which bedevils the way cycling is marketed by campaign groups and quangos:

I don't ride a bicycle all over the map because it's fun.

When the City of Copenhagen asks its cycling citizens what their main reason for cycling is - and they ask every two years - the majority reply that it is because a bicycle is the quickest and easiest way to get around town. 56% of them say that.

Cycling advocacy is hopelessly out of touch with basic human anthropology. It doesn't trigger anything universal in its marketing. If we want large numbers of citizens to choose the bicycle, the main way to do that is what I call A2Bism.

On the Ecology Action - Bike2Work site that hosted that poll I found this:

Why Bike Commute?

- It's good for your health. [I don't give a shit... I want to get there quick]
- Saves you money on gasoline, vehicle maintenance, parking fees and parking tickets. [I don't give a shit...I want to get there quick]
- Reduces air, water and noise pollution associated with driving. [I don't give a shit... I want to get there quick]
- Reduces automobile traffic. [I don't give a shit... I want to get there quick... although fewer cars might be nice...]
- Its good for the community by making our streets safer, quieter, and cleaner. [Yeah, yeah, sounds nice...but I still just want to get there quick.]

"Once you discover the freedom, convenience, and fitness benefits of biking to work, you'll wonder why you didn't start riding sooner. Bicycling can be a convenient, dependable, and virtually free mode of transportation. And bicycling burns about 500 calories an hour, so you can commute and stay fit at the same time."

From a marketing perspective this is really dreadful copy. This isn't selling anything, let alone cycling. And yet this is the standard fare on so many 'advocacy' websites all over the world.

Good man yourself Mikael. He's right: "People in established bicycle cultures ride because it's quick. Easy. Convenient. If you make that possible in emerging bicycle cultures, you have half the battle won. Sure, it requires safe, separated infrastructure to gain access to the goldmine of societal benefits associated with high levels of urban cycling."

London badly needs this separated cycling infrastructure yet Boris, despite his trademark image, has yet to embrace the delivery of it. We'll know he's succeeded when the herds of cyclists in London are eventually helmetless; when this...

...is more common than this:

Reasons for emigration #1: the Stansted Express

2010-05-11T17:01:00.001+01:00

"...rolling stock in this country is built in Hamburg or somewhere, and when the German engineers test British-bound trains, they use imported lengths of our buggered, privatized tracks because the decently maintained European rails won't provide accurate testing conditions."

Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell

"The railways that remained [in the UK] could be handed into the care of France, Germany, Italy, Spain, or India—all of them countries that have preserved railway and other engineering skills, which Britain has so carelessly lost."

A Land Without Railways, by Ian Jack

I recently experienced a Clarksonesque jolt of spluttering outrage when I purchased a ticket for the hilariously, farcically overpriced Stansted Express (I'm tempted to enclose the word Express in "sneer quotes"): it runs a distance of just over 30 miles from Liverpool Street Station, the journey takes at least 45 minutes and the cost of a return ticket is £28.70.

Eye-watering pricing aside, what really sticks in my craw about this service is the use of that weasel word Express. It's a tired, greasy old dog of a commuter service given to unscheduled stops beside fields and suburban woodland - it's no more a true express service than it is a flying hovercraft!

This is what an express train worthy of the name looks like:

...or this:

Gatwick and Heathrow are served by their own eponymous express services - also hideously expensive - but they are at least non-stop if not TGV-quick. And crucially, cheaper alternatives exist: slower, local train services in the case of Gatwick, and the Tube in Heathrow's. How have the operators of the Stansted service been allowed to get away with so gallingly misrepresenting the nature of their infuriatingly crappy trains?

Simon Calder recently wrote about another aspect of the marketing of the Stansted Express in The Independent:

"Truth can be elusive, especially in travel. Take the Stansted Express: its timetables have often been compared to works of fiction, but now the creaky old train link to London Liverpool Street has finally been accelerated. "Train to London, 35 minutes," brags the sign at the ticket desk. So how has National Express East Anglia cut 10 minutes from the fastest journey time?

By adopting the low-rent, low-cost airline tactic of disguising reality in the hope of getting a commercial edge. "Don't focus on making life for the traveller better – move the buffers instead," seems to be the company's mission. There are, indeed, trains that will get you to Greater London in 35 minutes, in the shape of Tottenham Hale station, at the outer northern reaches of the Victoria Line. But if you want to get to anywhere near the centre of the capital, the Stansted "Express" will take you 45 minutes."

All of which reminds me of a piece by Matthew Taylor, of The RSA, called How EasyJet has damaged human relations.

Ian Jack is well worth reading on the sad subject of the British railways generally, and the Hatfield crash specifically. He argues forensically against "the crazy architecture of management and ownership devised for the privatised railway by the Treasury and its consultants".

"Eight Thoughts About Timescale"

2010-05-11T12:49:00.004+01:00

...I remember reading somewhere that the bombastic crash-bang V-I cadences that form the finale of many a classical symphony “could only have been developed by a culture that believed in a biblical armageddon.”

You must read this fascinating piece by Warren Senders about timescales.

He writes that it's not the short time span believed in by Young Earth creationists which is damaging: it's the idea that bound up in their beliefs is the notion of an end of time, that the Earth is just a "vessel of sin" which will be destroyed, along with all the unbelievers and backsliders.

Senders juxtaposes the 17th century literalist Ussher chronology with that of Hindu mythology, which operates at the scale of tens of trillions of years:

...Indian stories don’t tend to end with “and they all lived happily ever after” or the equivalent, and Indian musical performances don’t tend to end with crash-bang thunder and lightning. I wonder why.

Our fate as a species hinges on overcoming our inability to switch timescales as needed.

If we can’t learn to think in a Deep Time framework, we’re doomed. It’s as simple as that.

Coca

2010-05-06T19:04:00.009+01:00

This is an insightful film for one which lasts only 5 minutes: the main thing it conveys is just how unspeakably and tragically dirty is the process of turning coca leaf into second stage brown gunk (the white fluff beloved of nightclub promoters is created in distant urban labs).

It's depressing to watch these workers fouling their own backyard with such toxic effluent for so little monetary return. As Parry observes, there's certainly no shortage of global demand for cocaine - surely it would be preferable, via legalisation, to turn the whole industry into what it essentially is at heart: highly profitable farming.

As David Simon and his co-writers of The Wire put it in a piece in Time:

What the drugs themselves have not destroyed, the warfare against them has. And what once began, perhaps, as a battle against dangerous substances long ago transformed itself into a venal war on our underclass. Since declaring war on drugs nearly 40 years ago, we've been demonizing our most desperate citizens, isolating and incarcerating them and otherwise denying them a role in the American collective. All to no purpose. The prison population doubles and doubles again; the drugs remain.

London's lost river

2010-05-04T19:50:00.006+01:00

The River Effra once flowed from Norwood to the Thames - actually it still does, it's just that in the 1850s it was covered and turned into a sewer. This Google Map shows the distance, if not the precise route, of the river between Norwood and the Thames.

The Effra is also the source of a remarkable 19th century tale:

"...a coffin was discovered floating in the Thames. Once recovered it was found to have come from West Norwood Cemetery. They brought it back but spookily found the grave to be undisturbed. It was concluded that the grave had been dug too close to the course of the Effra, which runs beneath the cemetery, and the coffin had subsided into the river, flowing underneath south London before reaching the Thames at Vauxhall."

Here is a recent photograph of where the Effra flows into the Thames, just beside the MI6 building.

The song Down in the Effra by The Effras concerns the coffin and its subterranean journey.

Two wheels

2010-05-04T17:08:00.005+01:00

This was taken on the way home, during the evening rush hour, last year.

"The trials of affluence"

2010-05-04T10:48:00.005+01:00

Several years ago I decided to stop doing two things: one was watching Grand Designs, the other was buying a Sunday newspaper (usually The Observer). The reason was simple: there were far too many hip and assuredly tasteful people out there whose homes I coveted. It wasn't doing me any good at all to be exposed repeatedly to images of Thames-side penthouses, as if this sort of grooviness was the height of normality.

The moment I decided to turn away from Kevin McCloud was signalled by the closing moments of the Grand Designs episode which focused on this Irish church conversion. Kev was marshalling the forces of banality during the post-match round up: asking the couple how they were faring with the initial settling-in period, coaxing some reflections from them about the project and the renewed strength of their marriage and, of course, quizzing them about how much they had exceeded their budget by. The project, according to the gentleman of the house, had cost €350,000-odd, and he also confirmed that the church was to be their second home. Well, that was that: second home? Cheerio Kevin, and goodnight Grand Designs... I may have decided to continue watching if, as part of his summing-up to camera, McCloud had intimated gravely just how incredibly, spectacularly rare were the dual-home circumstances of this grand designing pair of householders. But he didn't, so I had to do the right thing by the envy matrix of my brain and switch off for good.

An article by Minette Marrin on Sunday perfectly articulated why we should avoid the "things intended to whip up insatiable competitive appetites and a feeling of acquisitive failure." While her piece specifically concerns women it contains much sound advice about shrugging off the entreaties of marketers and advertisers.

"Never read fashion magazines if they make you feel fat or frumpy or if they make you long for things you can’t be or have. Avoid gossip columns about the beautiful people and ignore anything labelled “lifestyle”, unless it makes you feel good. Such things are intended to whip up insatiable competitive appetites for Prada handbags and Balinese hotel suites and a feeling of acquisitive failure. Don’t read decorating magazines and don’t restyle your home more than once in 20 years. Don’t read the health pages if they make you feel anxious, guilty or ill; they are always changing their bossy advice anyway.

Don’t cook unless you really must: think catering rather than cooking. Give up worrying about frozen or tinned or pre-prepared. Never cook cakes, puddings or cupcakes — they aren’t good for you anyway.

Avoid choice fatigue. Don’t go shopping unless you have to. Give up buying things and keeping things. Don’t have lots of clothes; have only a few that really suit you. Give up any exercise you dislike. Avoid amassing objects — shoes, bags, bracelets, kitchen gadgets and so on; things take up headroom and energy, and time spent wondering which to use, remembering where it is and putting it away later means less time for talking to your teenage son or writing a report.

Stop worrying about skincare and don’t buy more than three or four products. It’s all pretty much the same and I say this as someone who wrote an anonymous column about the beauty bandits for years. Don’t spend time with people who boast, either about their beautiful lives or their talented children. Don’t compare your children with other people’s offspring.

Avoid all parents at exam results time.

Give up answering the telephone just because it’s ringing.

I have the greatest sympathy for overburdened women. I have all possible fellow feeling for women (and men) who suffer from disabling depression. But I have less, I admit, for people who are suffering from the trials of affluence."

Photo via Unhappy Hipsters.

Fundamentalism as mental illness

2010-04-28T14:46:00.006+01:00

PZ Myers writes about a girl who, during her graduation ceremony from Midwestern State University, in Texas, collapses in a fit of fundamentalist fervour. He rightly points out that were her unstable behaviour rooted in anything other than religion she would be regarded as being in need of mental healthcare support.

I've often thought the same thing about the sandwich board-clad chaps I see parading around the pavements near central Brixton, even on the most perishingly cold days and nights.

The clip of the girl at her graduation can be watched here. As one of the comments put it:

The saddest statement I've ever heard at a university graduation: "Forgive us Lord for worshiping the intellectual mind."

Tricky Dicky relaxes

2010-04-28T12:23:00.003+01:00

This is a fascinating piece of footage of Tricky Dicky, fooling around and flirting with the production crew prior to making his unprecedented resignation speech in 1974. As one blogger put it, there is palpable contrast between "profound public moment and backstage banality".

Via Seth Godin.

The theatre

2010-04-28T11:42:00.005+01:00

Sathnam Sanghera writes in The Times today about the theatre:

Last week I was invited to watch Posh, but ended up cancelling again. It has now been five years since I went to the theatre and having read about the new phenomenon of “interactive theatre”, in which audiences follow instructions through headphones, or are assigned roles in the production, I fear the phobia will become permanent. You see, there are all sorts of things that are deeply off-putting about the medium: the expensive tickets; the unconvincing way the characters talk; the way you can’t enter if you’re a bit late; how audiences laugh at jokes that aren’t funny; the way you can’t pause the production to make a cup of tea.

Which, in turn, reminded me of Charlie Brooker's dig at the "miserably piss-weak jokes" of a certain kind of play:

Critics claim the term postmodern is merely a polite substitute for "smart-arsed". Post-modernists simultaneously agree and disagree with this analysis in a morally relativistic, smart-arsed sort of way, before disappearing in a puff of irony and reappearing on the panel of a pointless late-night cultural review show aimed at the sort of simpering dick who chuckles politely in theatres each time one of the characters cracks a joke about King Lear or Nietzsche or the French or criticism or politics or architecture or any of the other subjects playwrights like to crack miserably piss-weak jokes about for an audience of several dozen tittering eggheads.

I share the two writers' ambivalence about the theatre, especially concerning the recalibrated threshold of humour which afflicts a certain kind of earnest, polo-neck-favouring audience; and lack of verisimilitude in dialogue is a problem, at a time when TV offers work with the realism of The Wire. This said, I've been very lucky to see some wonderful and wonderfully realistic theatre in the last couple of years, including Black Watch and Jerusalem.

"Volcano live blog"

2010-04-19T17:15:00.004+01:00

The internet has shaped and is still shaping the way news is delivered and consumed. There are lots of things to celebrate about this. Then, every now and again, I see something which makes me think: "Really?"

Has it come to this? I'm being invited, on the homepage of The Guardian, to visit something they have decided to call a Volcano live blog?

I hope that in the future, when the novelty of the internet has worn off, that this unedifying obsession with immediacy will reduce or largely disappear.

I have no need for, or interest in, a Volcano live blog, Mr Rusbridger.

100

2010-04-13T19:31:00.012+01:00

A wee hat-tip to my Dad, of appropriate and deferent seriousness, is in order I think. He did many remarkable things in 2009 – besides celebrating his 60th birthday – including running the Glasgow 10k in a shade over 45 minutes, and donating his 100th pint* of blood to the Scottish National Blood Tranfusion Service.

My Dad took 38 years to reach this wonderful milestone. During the first 20-odd years or so of his blood-donating career he was more committed than the average punter, although his pattern of giving wasn’t monitored and scheduled especially assiduously. This, however, was to change. In time, he reached the 75-pint mark, realised that the once-distant century was attainable – and really started going for it. There was no more waiting, willing but unable to donate, for the mobile service to roll into town. He began maximising the amount of blood he donated every year by regularly timing his visits, every 16 weeks, to the permanent blood centre in Glasgow. I suspect he had also noticed that the metropolitan airs of the Glasgow facility entailed a higher class of chocolate biscuit than that on offer from the roving team in Perthshire.

When British people donate their 50th or 75th pint of blood the selflessness of the years-long gesture is recognised with a restrained, modest gift. After parting company with his 100th pint, Dad was invited to a ceremony with a handful of other hundreders, and several dozen more who had reached the half century and three-quarter century stages.

The event sounds like it was perfectly judged: informal in the sense that there was no standing on any sort of sartorial ceremony, yet appropriately serious in driving home the deep appreciation felt by the recipients for the altruism of what a donor does. A short film was shown which movingly demonstrated the connection between the donors and those reliant on transfusions for their survival. Dad is in rarefied company indeed – Scotland’s population of 5m includes fewer than 175,000 registered donors. The simple truth for the transfusion services is that not enough people ever give blood at all.

Below is a photograph of the quaich given to Dad, engraved with his name and the magic number, which we christened at the weekend with a drop of the gold stuff.

Dad has in fact now donated 102 pints and continues to give up his blood just as diligently as ever. The transfusion service offers no higher award or recognition beyond 100 pints – when you reach the century you have unarguably proved a wonderful point.

* A "pint" (568ml) of blood actually contains 482ml of the stuff. If you were to decide tomorrow, as a virgin donor, that you would like to emulate my Dad, the shortest time it could take you is 1,600 weeks - or just under 31 years.

James Lovelock on The Today Programme

2010-03-31T10:31:00.012+01:00

"We're not really guilty. We didn't deliberately set out to heat the world, but as a result of what we've done to build our civilisation we've set things in motion."

Regular readers will know that I've referred to James Lovelock on several occasions, including here and here.

His interview with John Humphrys on yesterday's Today Programme can be heard in its entirety here - it was also filmed, and can be watched here in a series of shorter clips.

He's an old man now - aged 90 - so there is an obviously grandfatherly, valedictory feel to the many interviews he has given over the past couple of years. The contrast between his gentle, kindly, softly-spoken bearing and his fiercely objective and stark outlook is arresting - full appreciation of his distinction, for instance, between humanity being saved and the planet being saved demands the detachment of a scientist. Humphrys, unsettled by the bleak notion of the human race being edited on such an apocalyptic scale, asks him plaintively, "Why is it [the idea of saving the planet] a lot of nonsense?"

He replies: "Because we can't do it. If the planet is going to be saved it will save itself, as it always has done. We're full of hubris and think we can do these kinds of things. But we're not clever enough yet."

This piece, by fellow environmentalist Stewart Brand, called Four Sides to Every Story is worth reading in the context of Lovelock's outlook. Brand explains that climate change is not a binary issue: there are, he claims, denialists, skeptics, warners and calamatists. (Brand believes he and Lovelock are fellow warners.) As ever, Brand's writing is the height of clarity and economy: "If climate change were to suddenly reverse itself (because of some yet undiscovered mechanism of balance in our climate system), my guess is that the denialists would be triumphant, the skeptics would be skeptical this time of the apparent good news, the warners would be relieved, and the calamatists would seek out some other doom to proclaim."

Overdressed oenophiles

2010-03-21T23:57:00.015Z

I went to a big Italian wine event last week: fifty-odd winemakers touting over 230 different bottles in three hours or so. It was grand - there was some quite unusual and delicious wine to be had.

The event was naturally heaving with Italians of all stripes - agents, winemakers, merchants, salesmen, brokers, buyers, collectors as well as a few people like yours truly: shabbily dressed locals who had just blown in off the street for a bevvy, oil-stained bike lock in hand. Here's the thing though: what a curiously and distinctively overdressed bunch they were..

Just as one could fairly make all manner of derisive, sweeping remarks about the ill-fitting, crimpled attire of the average Brit, so I'm willing to state this: many Italians are tasteless try-hards!

Never have I seen in one place such a concentration of ill-judged vulgarity: women accessorized to within a very inch of their lives, flagrantly disporting themselves like corporeal advertising hoardings for Messrs Moschino and Versace; I saw manicures of unbounded indulgence and exhaustive elaboration; gigantic, ostentatious golden bracelets without number which looked as if they were shiny and heavy enough to afford their wearers a retinal as well as a muscular work-out.

The mens' transgressions were lesser, and many of them admittedly wore beautiful and perfectly cut navy blue two piece suits. The graceful cut of their threads was, however, spoilt by their choice of spectacles: ludicrously over-sized jobs from Prada in colours worthy of Fisher-Price.

The advice from the fashion department of A Few Degrees North: try less hard, people.

(While scouring the internet for photographs of some suitably gauche clothing I discovered Billionaire Couture, an unspeakable fashion house conceived by Flavio Briatore. Words fail me. Have a looky.)

Barbara Ehrenreich: Smile or Die

2010-03-18T10:33:00.009Z

I attended the talk by Barbara Ehrenreich at The RSA which provides the basis for this clever animation - her presentation was based on the ideas in her newest book Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World (sold in her native land as Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America).

There's a good review of the book in The Observer, here.

The cool cats who did the visualisation are called Cognitive Media.

Rebecca Goldstein and Steven Pinker

2010-03-11T22:41:00.014Z

To the LSE last night to hear the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein in discussion for a wee hour with her husband Steven Pinker, the psychologist and cognitive scientist.

I've been a big fan of Pinker ever since I read The Language Instinct, a book written stylishly and with great verve. Last night's discussion - which considered the philosophical and scientific views of god and religion - was lucid, stimulating and well paced. However, as is usual at this sort of LSE event (and those at The RSA, too), the swines who were given the chance to pose questions in the final 10-15 minutes generally took the piss: the Chair insists on brevity as time is short, and what do they do? Yes, they ramble on and disjointedly on, not asking a question so much as asserting their own intellectual heft. I find it unbearable!

"Be brief!" the Chair admonished one of them last night when she sensed he was gearing himself up for a ponderous, self-regarding mini-lecture of his own. Honestly, the Chair needs a University Challenge-style buzzer to silence these numpties. Buueeeep...next!

There is a podcast of the discussion here, although the first 30 minutes is missing due to a technical fault. The lassie who asked the last question at c.29 minutes (she labours with the misunderstanding that Pinker and Goldstein wish to eradicate religion) was frustratingly incoherent and long-winded. I've transcribed Pinker's typically and wonderfully elegant and thoughtful response, which followed Goldstein's.

"As a thorough-going atheist I would not have a desire to eradicate religion. I think it's important to come to the best collective understanding that we can about the nature of the world and the nature of morality and justice - and that will often require overturning long held religious beliefs. But religions themselves, as social institutions, have obviously evolved, thank goodness: the way all of the major religions are practised now is very different from the way they were practised a hundred years ago, a thousand years ago, two thousand years ago, thanks to the enlightenment, thanks to the pressure from secular reason. There's no reason why that couldn't occur and all of the things that are valuable about religion - that they are places for people to meet, they're forums for ethical discussion - can continue to exist; but as long as it doesn't entail that we indulge propositions about the world that our best reason indicates are incorrect, or moral arguments that our best moral reasoning indicate are indefensible."

The unbearable awfulness of jargon

2010-03-11T21:38:00.007Z

"A webinar trialogue for the wellderley" - Some idiot

A guest post this, courtesy of Ben. He sent it to me via email after I had highlighted to him this wee extract from this morning's Today programme which contained the ridiculous quote above. Also, check out the horrors on this Local Government Association's list of banned words: my favourite is predictors of beaconicity. Feel the rage!

Over to Ben...

I remember, after a meeting with WSCC, informing their EFO of the requirements outlined in the CPA; WSCC sent me an ITQ. I then had a short meeting with the CEO to discuss how aligning money to SOAs would help them in their CPA. The CEO found that interesting and said we should meet with the CVS and SBS with whom they have various SLAs.

He then asked me what the response had been like when talking to other LAs and suggested that I meet with the DTI regarding O4B. I thanked him for the advice and said that I had just recently been speaking with the DSC and numerous CVSs regarding O4B, and with several LA departments about O4F. Then he told me that we ought really to include FAWN, the ICT department and the NRF in the next meeting. I told him to FRO.

WSCC - West Sussex County Council
ITQ - Invitation to Quote
EFO - External Funding officer
CPA - Comprehensive Performance Assessment
CEO - Chief Executive Officer
SOA - Super Output Area
CVS - Council for Voluntary Service
SLA - Service Level Agreement
SBS - Small Business Service
LA - Local Authority
O4B - Open 4 Business
DSC - Directory of Social Change
O4F - Open 4 Funding
DTI - Department of Trade and Industry
FAWN - Funding Advice Workers Network
ICT - Information & Communication Technology
NRF - Neighbourhood Renewal Fund
FRO – Fuck Right Off

Limmy

2010-03-03T23:23:00.004Z

Like many people I stumbled across Limmy on the web a fair few years ago. He's the master of facial expressions as well as a distinctive and original sketch style. Keep your eye on his face in this one, for instance. I love the classically Glaswegian pay-off in this one. And have a look at the excellent paper aeroplane sketch.

Rémi Gaillard: La Tour N'importe Qui

2010-02-22T12:36:00.007Z

"C'est en faisant n'importe quoi qu'on devient n'importe qui" / "It's by doing whatever that you become whoever"

Three cyclists, out for a wee jaunt of a Sunday afternoon, are waylaid by Rémi Gaillard and friends. There's a manic and distinctively eccentric energy to this stunt which I just love. Watch it twice and you'll spot some hilarious peripheral details you missed first time round...

A Mouthful of Air by Anthony Burgess

2010-02-11T20:42:00.010Z

"Yeats wrote of one of his poems that he 'made it out of a mouthful of air'"

Anthony Burgess wrote his wonderfully fluent book about language A Mouthful of Air in 1992 (it's subtitled "Language and languages, especially English"), a year or so prior to his death at the age of 76. It's dense with fascinating factual insights and airy, wry opinions such as here, near the beginning of the chapter Should we learn foreign languages?

"The ability to speak three or four foreign languages with moderate proficiency is regarded in Britain and America (not Canada) both as a property of head waiters and hotel concierges and a mark of genius."

He was somewhat handy at languages himself: he could speak Malay, Russian, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Welsh, as well as some Hebrew, Japanese, Chinese, Swedish and Persian. Throughout the book the depth of his core technical understanding of linguistics is married to his broader knowledge of the historical development of languages. One recurring theme is the Latinate vocabulary inherited by English as it developed away from being a pure Germanic tongue.

English, like its cousin High German, can express any idea out of its native resources. In the nineteenth century, the poet William Barnes (1801-86), a Dorset clergyman with a large knowledge of foreign languages, favoured the coining of new words out of the native stock to replace foreign importations. "Omnibus", for instance, could be "folk-wain" (rather close to Volkswagen). The telephone could be farspeaker; in our own day, "television" might be "farlooker", with "telescope" as "farseer". "To crucify" could be, as it was for a time with the Anglo-Saxons, "roodfasten" (or try "Christ was treenailed").

In another section he wrote:

The bulk of the working class vocabulary, in all Anglophone territories, is Germanic; the Romance elements - French or Latin - creep in from journalism or the bureaux of government. It is still smart, and still derided as snobbish, to use French expressions or long Latinate words.

This infusion of Latin vocabulary into a language of Germanic origin means that we always have a choice about how we express ourselves, as Burgess illustrated by transforming "A nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse" to the outrageous pleonasm of "A minimal inclination of the cranium is as adequate as a spasmodic motion of one optic to an equine quadruped devoid of visionary capacity".

In my ignorance of the International Phonetic Alphabet, which Burgess used throughout the book, I missed many of his nuances. Perhaps that's a pre-reread project. It's out of print but easy to find second hand online. Recommended.

Another book on English - still in print - is Melvyn Bragg's excellent The Adventure of English, which is more concerned with the history and historical context of the language's development and change than Burgess's work. He also produced a TV programme of the same name.

Doug Stanhope: abortion is green

2010-02-11T20:36:00.004Z

Doug even-handedly offers his views on sanctimonious environmentalists...

You should probably also clap eyes on Adam Curtis's film, also from the same episode of Newswipe.

Unhappy Hipsters

2010-02-09T09:22:00.007Z

Please make your way as quickly as possible to Unhappy Hipsters, a site dedicated to annotating photographs from the too-cool-for-school magazine Dwell with angst-ridden captions.

I like it a lot.

The debate — whether the ubiquity of suburban neo-modern developments was really an upgrade from new-money McMansions — ended in a standoff, mired by the generation gap.

He tried to focus on the novel, and not how much his bedroom reminded him of a plywood coffin.

The Liturgical Mystery Tour

2010-02-01T18:32:00.004Z

The New Humanist Magazine has a piece today about the state visit of the Pope to the UK in September 2010. In a recent address to British Catholic bishops Herr Ratzinger said:

"Your country is well known for its firm commitment to equality of opportunity for all members of society. Yet as you have rightly pointed out, the effect of some of the legislation designed to achieve this goal has been to impose unjust limitations on the freedom of religious communities to act in accordance with their beliefs."

A recent BBC article also reported that Churches fear Equality Bill will conflict with faith. Well, good. Bloody good I say. The legislation, the Pope said, "violates the natural law upon which the equality of all human beings is grounded." Jesus wept. How very dare he! A religious figurehead sticking his nose into to the democratic enactment of a law? The fucking Pope indeed.

Click to enlarge

Shu-Yi Chou - Sadler's Wells dance contest winner

2010-02-01T00:00:00.008Z

To Sadler's Wells of a Saturday for their justifiably well regarded annual event Sadler's Wells Sampled, a pick and mix of shows from their forthcoming season. What a wonderful evening's entertainment it was, and a steal at a mere tenner a pop.

My clear highlight was the performance of 1875 Ravel and Bolero - a stunning 25-minute piece choreographed by a 26 year old from Taiwan named Shu-Yi Chou - which won the 2009 Global Dance Contest. I arrived at the performance with no frame of reference for appreciating dance of any style, be it contemporary, traditional or classical. I also had no inkling that I would find the joyousness of this piece, its sheer for-the-hell-of-it beauty, so incredibly moving.

Should it ever come to a town near you - beg, steal or borrow to get a ticket to see it.

We were also treated to ten minutes of these French cats, Phase T.

Charlie Brooker on the art of news

2010-01-29T11:14:00.005Z

Dammit, this is good.

It's from the episode of Newswipe which was shown on BBC4 on 26 January 2010.

Sprechen sie Indo-European?

2010-01-27T18:02:00.009Z

An English friend who lives in north Wales and works in France was recently asked by his Parisian colleagues what the relationship is between the French and Welsh languages. This rather excellent family tree allows you to see just that, as well as much else about the Indo-European languages.

(Click to enlarge. Red = extinct)

One of most notable quirks of the relationship between language families is the way their members rub up against non-members, as at the border between Iran and Iraq. I'd've thought, for instance, that it would be a safe bet - at the local pub quiz - to assume that a speaker of Persian living in Tehran is linguistically more closely related to a speaker of Arabic living in Baghdad than, say, a native English speaker in London. But I'd be wrong.

All of the languages presently spoken today in Iran, such as Persian and Kurdish, are Indo-Iranian, a sub-family of Indo-European. Arabic, the most widely spoken language in Iraq, is an Afro-Asiatic language, a family with brethren such as Hebrew, Somali and Amharic. All of which means that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a closer linguistic relative of Gordon Brown than he is of whoever is presently trying to run Iraq across the border.

There are some fascinatingly obscure curiosities in the tree - look at the names of some of the lost languages. One which I spotted is Yola, below English and Scots.

Yola is an extinct West Germanic language formerly spoken in Ireland. A branch of Middle English, it evolved separately among the English (known as the Old English) who followed the Norman barons Strongbow and Robert Fitzstephen to eastern Ireland in 1169.

There is plenty more here. Or try the even more daringly mysterious Celtiberian language, extinct from c.2nd century AD.

Dante's Internet

2010-01-27T15:51:00.004Z

Via Glinner. I like it!

Click to enlarge.

Michael O'Brien

2010-01-27T15:37:00.012Z

(This is an updated version of a post from 2009.)

"This extraordinary film [The Magdalene Sisters] is celluloid incendiarism, rabble-rousing cinema...it is a sustained and all-but-deafening howl of rage on behalf of vulnerable women whose story is only just beginning to be told..."
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

A major report was published in 2009 by The Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (est. 2000) concerning the Catholic Church in Ireland. The summary alone will make you sad and angry in equal measure - the lives of hundreds of children were devastated by cruelly institutionalised abuse which could have been stopped decades ago.

A victim of the abuse, one Michael O'Brien, spoke recently on the RTE News programme Questions and Answers. You can watch him say his piece below: it's a profoundly heartbreaking and giddyingly powerful piece of oratory. His candour has a Shakespearean scope which completely transcends any "mealy-mouthed" political language. The government minister himself, Noel Dempsey, is silenced, as overwhelmed by the power of O'Brien's speech as everyone else present.

Questions and Answers ended its 21-year run a few weeks after O'Brien's appearance. John Bowman, the presenter of the programme, trawled through many questions from the series to produce an archive-based programme and in an interview in The Irish Times said, “The most important bit was in the last three weeks and that was Michael O’Brien. It was just the way he told the story”.

In July 2009 O'Brien was interviewed by Karen Coleman on Newstalk about his childhood experiences, as well as his unplanned and unscripted performance on RTE.

The clip of O'Brien's speech originally came via Graham Linehan.

The Guardian review of Peter Mullan's The Magdalene Sisters is also worth reading - it's a great film, which succeeds in making you very angry, and I was reminded of it by O'Brien's "tough, muscular" rhetoric.

"Do bankers' bonuses really work?"

2010-01-21T10:51:00.006Z

In a piece in The Times Sathnam Sanghera asks Do bankers' bonuses really work?

Sanghera's quoted comparison of salaries is especially striking given the fate eventually met by Lehman Brothers in 2008: Richard Fuld's enormous salary, we know now, did not equate to competent, sound, solid stewardship.

Interviewed in The Times, Elizabeth Hartley-Brewer, the author of two books on motivating children, Raising and Praising Boys and Raising and Praising Girls, remarked: “Bribes work in the short term but they do not instil in children the purpose for good behaviour. In time, children learn how to manipulate and control them and start asking for more.”

This is a lesson that David Bolchover, a former City insurance broker who has written a new book called Paycheck: Are Top Earners Really Worth It?, says the City should absorb. “In almost 15 years as CEO of Lehman Brothers before the company went bust, Richard Fuld took home almost $500 million,” he says.

“In contrast, the head of the world’s largest bank, in China, which remained highly profitable through the financial crisis in 2008, earned less than $250,000 that year. What is so special about Western bank chiefs to justify such exorbitant salaries? Nothing."

David Attenborough, Jane Goodall and Carl Sagan

2010-01-18T22:30:00.003Z

More magic stuff from T he Symphony of Science. And another one in the eye for those pesky young earth creationists.

4.6 billion years condensed into 60 seconds

2010-01-18T18:51:00.002Z

I wonder what these crazy cats would make of this intense little film?

Billy Connolly at the Hammersmith Apollo

2010-01-18T12:41:00.005Z

I saw the Big Yin on Friday - he's in the smoke for most of January. One of my favourite bits of the show concerned the tale of his friend who, many years ago, found the bottle as well as the Lord...

"A drunk born-again: what a combination. One night he said something to me, and years later I still sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and find myself laughing at it.

He turned to me one night, drunk, and said, "Billy: anyone who doesn't believe in Jesus is a cunt."

...I think that should be carved into the walls of churches and cathedrals."

Danish army bicycles

2010-01-18T09:25:00.003Z

"It is also worth pointing out that in Britain we tend not to ride the sit-up-and-beg bicycles common in Holland; we ride mountain bikes and racing cycles that, you might well think, facilitate aggressive cycling. I once saw a cyclist respond to being abused by pedestrians for jumping a zebra crossing by leaping off his bike waving a D-lock like a mace. There is a medieval flavour to London's cycle scene. In that road environment, British cyclists dress up like extras from Rollerball or Blade Runner, almost as if they are going to war and expecting serious injury." So wrote Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian in 2008. Perhaps London cyclists would be aided in asserting their right to the road by taking a leaf out of the Danish army's book?

Via Copenhagenize.

Desire lines

2010-01-14T09:37:00.010Z

Did you know that these wee corner-cutting, line-of-least-resistance trails have a name? I've always thought - since I first encountered the term in the mid-1990s - that there was something very appealing about them, how they represent the slow, quiet victory of time and countless individual actions over the fixity of planning.

I may be wrong, but I don't imagine that the discipline of urban planning is awash with poetic language - the term, coined by Gaston Bachelard in 1958 in his book The Poetics of Space, seems like a small gift to the profession.

They are absolutely everywhere, as this Flickr group confirms. Keep your eyes peeled for them...

In Search of the British Work Ethic

2010-01-13T16:32:00.011Z

Make sure that you listen to the Radio 4 programme In Search of the British Work Ethic, written and presented by Melanie Phillips. It's worth listening to for two reasons: it shows a hitherto unfamiliar side of the oft-reviled Phillips - thoughtful, fair-minded and humane; and it's simply and powerfully an excellent piece of journalism. The prickly irascibility of her Moral Maze persona is absent here.

In one section she joins an immigrant worker who gets up at 3:40am every morning to travel on a night bus for two hours (because it's cheaper) to his cleaning jobs. It's a grim, humbling tale and Phillips uses her considerable intelligence to articulate a focused and tightly argued anger at his circumstances.

Harry Potter and the Crock of Shit

2010-01-12T17:26:00.001Z

Thank you Mr Lee.

Al Green and Willie Mitchell

2010-01-10T22:22:00.009Z

I saw Al Green at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall in 1999 and what a gig it was - the Reverend was on fire!

He released a cracker of an album, Lay it Down, in 2008; check out the beautiful Too Much for instance.

Willie Mitchell, the producer with whom he was most closely associated in the 1970s, died on 5 January 2010 at the age of 81. I liked these photos of the pair of them from Green's website...

This week I have mostly been drinking...

2010-01-10T21:02:00.007Z

My absolute stand-out wine of 2009 was "Le Colombare" Recioto di Soave, an ancient, sweet drop made by Leonildo Pieropan in the northeast of Italy. Go now. Put your scarf on. Get to the shops immediately. Or click that link: just spend fifteen sheets on a bottle as soon as you can -- in fact, do as I did and buy a half case. What beautiful, heady, precious stuff it is -- only 800 cases of the 2006 were produced.

I've referred previously to James Lovelock and his cheery predictions about the likely condition of the world at the end of the century; but have a look at this article, which describes the effect of climate change on European wines...

By the end of this century, on current projections, southern England will have the climate of south-western France, and the great burgundian and bordelais vineyards will be producing the kind of raucous plonk currently consumed in French cous cous houses. According to Gregory Jones, one of the world's foremost wine climatologists: "The ideal conditions for, say, Chianti will be in Germany and Belgium, and those for making Bordeaux wines will be in the English Home Counties." France's top agricultural research executive, Bernard Seguin, has said as much, warning his country's producers that their old business models are shot.

The article also refers to the fact that some of the French champagne houses are planning to buy land in the south of England. Strange days indeed.

Elizabeth Sieff and her mane of glossy dark hair

2010-01-10T20:16:00.006Z

I prefer not to write here (too often at least) about the execrable pish in our culture. There's plenty of it around after all, and one need not look especially hard to find it. But I couldn't let this pass and have decided to revel cheerily in the awfulness of both the writing in this Evening Standard article as well as the queasy nature of Sieff's Little Emperors card.

"Elizabeth Sieff, with her cut-glass Chelsea voice, mane of glossy dark hair, confident laughter and passionate enthusiasm for her business, strikes an incongruous figure as she sits in a booth in the ground-floor café of the Park Lane Hilton; we are having tea surrounded by Middle Eastern wives and American corporate types in dark suits studying spreadsheets.

She explains that her aim is to appeal to 'PLU's (People Like Us) who don't want to swap their regular lunch table at Daphne's for a pizza delivery from Domino's. The card has been specifically tailored to get discounts on the sort of luxury lifestyle items that London's moneyed A-list used to take for granted - such as a Bang & Olufsen sound system - but now might not be able to."

"Rare self-rolling giant snow balls found in UK"

2010-01-10T19:10:00.003Z

Have a look at these babies!

"Also known as snowrollers, snow bales and snow doughnuts, they form mostly in unusual conditions created by a precise combination of snow, ice, wind, temperature and moisture on the prairies of North America.

But this week's frozen weather has allowed the snow cylinders to make a freak appearance in the UK."

[Via Derren Brown, via The Telegraph]

Bad Science

2010-01-07T15:49:00.008Z

I've been reading Ben Goldacre's Bad Science website for a few years now, but only last week did I get round to reading the eponymous book. It's a tour de force, a righteous, wise dismissal of all the flaky, pseudoscientific drivel which has insinuated itself onto our televisions, newspapers and websites over the last decade. I love the quote on the cover from Sir Iain Chalmers, director of The Cochrane Library:

"Bad Science introduces the basic scientific principles to help everyone to become a more effective bullshit detector."

There's some outstanding stuff in the chapter on the daft Gillian McKeith, especially where he equates her pseudoscience with the religious "cargo cult" on a few small Melanesian islands in the 1950s, as it was described by Professor Richard Feynman. This is the superbly limpid Feynman quotation used by Goldacre:

“During the war they saw aeroplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head as headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas – he’s the controller – and they wait for the aeroplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No aeroplanes land.”

Goldacre follows the quotation with these remarks:

"Like the rituals of the cargo cult, the form of McKeith's pseudo-academic work is superficially correct: the superscript numbers are there, the technical words are scattered about, she talks about research and trials and findings - but the substance is lacking. I actually don't find this very funny. It makes me quite depressed to think about her, sitting up, perhaps alone, studiously and earnestly typing this stuff out."

Although I haven't yet finished reading the book I've already come across an important lessons: the next time you suspect that you've been exposed to a bit of sciencey-sounding PR, something "proven by research", something uttered by an "expert"...then you can respond with Goldacre's line..

"I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that."

Kelly Joe Phelps at the Freight and Salvage

2010-01-07T15:34:00.002Z

Country Blues was also the opener at his London gig in 2009. It's a significant reworking of this old, old track by Dock Boggs.

If you listen carefully to the final, fading notes of this performance -- just before the applause -- you're able to hear a guy who is sitting near the mic say, apparently involuntarily, "Wow". Yes sir...

BBC Life

2010-01-05T20:58:00.006Z

The ten part BBC series Life, which ended its run in December, had a beguiling, insistent beauty. The hot new thing - which as far as I'm concerned they can't overuse - is these high definition slow motion cameras. These astonishing scenes, for instance, of Dawson's bees illustrate the capabilities of the newest gear. (These shots somehow put me in mind of the Fritz Lang film Metropolis.)

Then you can feast your mince pies on this making-of section from the penultimate episode...

Danny MacAskill

2010-01-05T19:31:00.006Z

Danny MacAskill's incredibly successful YouTube film from last year seems to have acted as an online CV: on the back of it he got this groovy gig for Volkswagen, as well as a beautifully shot new one for s1jobs, the Scottish job website. You sure do deserve it Danny boy, because one of these days you might hurt yourself son. I hope not though.

Such is the quality of the ad I'm even willing to overlook the paradoxical juxtaposition of MacAskill's love for his work with a website usually infested with hundreds of low-paid call centre jobs...

The doo men

2010-01-05T16:38:00.008Z

Here's a tale, given to me third hand, which will tickle you if you like unconscious -- and, perhaps, unintentionally amusing -- verbal invention. That said, you'll need an ear for demotic Scottish speech if you're to understand it...

The scene is one of the "high flats" in a fading district of the east end of Glasgow where a wee guy shares his home -- illegally -- with his pigeons. The presence of the birds hasn't gone unnoticed by the housing authorities, but he's not for budging. So a couple of bobbies are called in to insist more forcefully that he must get rid.

One of the coppers has an eye for the absurdity of the situation -- it's hardly serious organised crime, is it? -- and there's a less-than-subtle note of mockery in his derisory remarks to the bird-loving tenant. Which led pigeon man to remonstrate:

"But that's what the doo men do man!"

[In Scots dialect, doo means "pigeon".]

The Known Universe

2009-12-21T14:30:00.003Z

This wonderful short film was made by the American Museum of Natural History. Strap in...

Michael Dibdin - banditry in Gennargentu

2009-12-14T17:15:00.004Z

"The man yelled at the owner, who brought over an unlabelled bottle and four shot glasses. My host filled them, passed one to me, and knocked his own straight back. I sipped mine. It was home-made, cask-strength grappa from an illegal still. I had already noted that one of the ways the Sardinians distanced themselves from their nominal status as Italians was in their drinking habits."

I loved this meticulously paced 5,000-worder by the late crime novelist Michael Dibdin which insidiously evokes the isolated eastern mountains of Sardinia, populated for a time by shepherds given to augmenting their meagre earnings with the occasional kidnapping.

In 1992 the eight year old Farouk Kassam was abducted and held for six months in the remote mountains and forests of the island. During the incarceration his abductors cut off part of his left ear before using the Poste Italiane to send it to his parents. There are interesting details concerning the involvement of the government in the case in The New York Times here and in The Independent here; there is a photo of the adult Kassam here, sans lug.

In an earlier case, back in the late 1970s, the musician Fabrizio De André and his wife were kidnapped and held for four months in the same area. After being released -- with a full complement of ears -- he forgave his captors, and ever the die hard lefty, he attributed their actions to the desperation of their circumstances. The experience was the basis for his song Hotel Supramonte, in recognition of the name of the mountain where he was tucked away.

William Boyd

2009-11-24T19:21:00.005Z

I wrote briefly about William Boyd's superb novel Any Human Heart a year ago. Since then he has regularly appeared on BBC2, BBC4, Radio 4 and in the newspapers - he speaks about writing and writers just as engagingly as he actually writes. A perfect example is this short literary feature from the Review section of The Guardian, My Hero.

'I can visualise Alan Ross's expression – ineffably polite, but just failing to disguise his displeasure at being called anyone's hero. Perhaps "exemplar" would be a better word, given that he was the first writer I properly came to know and also the first editor to publish me, selecting one of my unsolicited short stories for his literary journal London Magazine in 1978. I was 26 – it was to be an association that lasted until his death in 2001.

When you are an aspiring young writer – and if you don't come from a literary background – the first writers you meet take on an almost totemic significance. You think: so this is how to live; these are the attitudes to strike; these tastes are the ones to cultivate. Walking into the small cramped offices of the magazine was a revelation for me. Books everywhere, of course, but there were two dogs sprawled under his desk, and big vivid modern art on the walls. Alan was an unchangingly youthful, tanned, dark-haired figure even though he must have been in his mid-50s then. He took me to an Italian restaurant and we drank powerful cocktails. It was impossible not to be smitten. There was a sophisticated raffishness and glamour about him as well – nothing seedy or earnest. He owned racehorses. He loved women and travel. He had known Evelyn Waugh and Dylan Thomas and Ian Fleming. He was a poet and a brilliant writer on cricket.

Alan was a diffident man, and the classy veneer of his life disguised something of a tormented soul (his experiences as a young naval officer in the war haunted him all his days), but I think what he inadvertently taught me – and he never remotely sought to be a mentor – was a kind of generous eclecticism to life and culture that was embodied in the 30 years or so he edited London Magazine. He was the opposite of parochial, his interests were wide and not elitist, his enthusiasms were carefully hedonistic. He was a very fine writer of prose – his two volumes of memoirs are small classics – and his poetry is limpid and evocative. It was a very important encounter for me.'

This interview, where he discusses his latest novel Ordinary Thunderstorms, is also well worth watching - he has some fascinating things to say about the comparative historical relevance of London's growth and development. All in all, he is the fascinating literary uncle you probably wish you had...