In print

Despite being a journalist for almost seven years (!) I rarely see my name in print. As such, on the very rare occasions when it happens I can't deny getting a thrill that was one of reasons I was drawn to writing for a living.

So, when I was asked by London's free paper of choice the Metro if I could offer some comment on the success of the iPlayer, I jumped at the chance, although not literally. The fruits of my waffling can be seen below. For those of you that like it online, you can read it here.

Barging about

I have just spent a very enjoyable week in France visiting the parents who are travelling through that strange and charming country, living the retirement hippy dream of a barge lifestyle. It involved plenty of lock work - looping ropes, fending off, looking out for boats coming the other direction, and other boaty goodness, as well as eating plenty of nice food, drinking beer and wine and playing with the dog, so all in all, a lovely sojourn.

Getting the ferry across the channel was also fun - travelling as a foot passenger along with my brother - as I always used to wonder when I was younger why anyone would be travelling by foot, how you could end up needing a ferry crossing but no car, and now I know as I was one of those people.

However, the good folk of Calais have certainly no desire to please the foot travellers of this world, with little help or information for the onward journey you need to make in the town to stations. Still, through a combination of walking, ranting and taxi drivers (bizarrely wearing English football shirts but actually French) we managed to make it to our connections - well, excluding the ferry we missed on the way back because we had to spend 20 minutes waiting for a bridge to raise to let a large Danish boat out of the harbour in Calais.

Back to the barge. It's a strange idea, that you can just move your home around as you wish, waking up in one city and moving to the next, having negotiated a few locks and long, slow bends of course. Then you're free to wander the towns and fields at your leisure. We stopped in a lovely town called St Quentin which has a fascinating history and some lovely architecture and monuments.

We were passing through the heart of the First World War battle grounds, with flat and gently sloping fields rimmed by hedges and trees and numerous cemeteries and monuments to the fallen, a war now 99 years old.

Unknown history

There are just so many stories in the world it's impossible to read them all, but it's always fascinating when you come across an incident you never knew of before, despite it's clear interest and wider impact on society.

The Bristol Bus Boycott, covered in great detail by the BBC today, is one such example, with a nice echo to the wider US race issues taking place at the same time.

Why is Bill Bryson so funny?

I've read several Bill Bryson books - Notes From a Small County, Neither Here Nor There, Shakespeare, Notes from a Big Country...and enjoyed them all immensely. Well, maybe not the last one, that was just a bunch of columns strung together.

Anyway, I'm now reading A Walk in the Woods, which is an enjoyable, funny account of his attempts to hike the 2,000 mile plus Appalachian Trail. I'm about two-thirds through.

The thing that has struck me is just how often I keep laughing, out loud, at what he writes. Yet, when I look back at what made me laugh, I don't really see why I laughed. It was an easy joke, and sign-posted a mile off, but he just delivers them with perfect timing.

I've read many travel books where the writer tries far too hard to make jokes in every paragraph and it becomes utterly tiresome and you just wish they'd focus on the traveling.

Bryson does it the other way, spending most of his time talking about the travel or the job at hand, and then throwing the jokes in at appropriate moments, meaning most of the jokes hit their targets with enjoyable regularity.

Empty roads

The London cycle event over the weekend left Putney devoid of traffic for almost the entirety of Sunday. It was an odd sight and experience, to be able to wander down the high street that is so usually packed with buses and cars and instead hear nothing but the regular passing of cyclists wheels  - ssshm, ssshm, ssshm - zipping past. 

It reminded me slightly of the moments you get at crossroads with traffic lights where there are no cars, or you're the only car, stuck at red while the other lights change for nothing, as if allowing ghosts to proceed on their way. 

Walking for miles

I did the 45 miles Ten Tors challenge on Dartmoor ten years ago (yeesh, ten years). It was hard but a lot of fun and I definitely developed an appreciation of the simple pleasure of walking. Some mornings as I walk to the tube I get an itch to just walk straight past the station and keep on going, just to see what's around the corner (I know what's there, it's Wandsworth, but you know what I mean).

I never do, though, I turn into the tube and stand with all the other travellers staring out the window as we rattle into central London. It was with a mix of envy and awe then that I read The Places In Between by excellent person Rory Stewart who walked straight across Afghanistan a few weeks after the fall of the Taliban in 2002 (the same year I walked 45 miles on Dartmoor).

Of course such a walk is sheer madness, except Stewart can speak the dialect and had already walked across Iran and  India and Nepal and other nations before this leg of his adventure, so he had a bit of advantage over the wanderlust of a South West London walker.

Furthermore, the book is a brilliantly vivid, engrossing account of a trip few would ever take, or want to take, and has a lovely mix of hard, straight talking language about the people he meets and the difficulties he faces, and descriptive brilliance of the strange and inhospitable nature of the walk, the weather (lots of snow) and the sights he encounters, such as the Minaret of Jam. Even better, though, is the mix of history he weaves, revealing fascinating insights into the cultures that have shaped a nation that remains so utterly unknowable to the west.

Even better, he buys a dog to walk with him, pictured above, who proves as much as a character as any of the Kalashnikov-touting, religious zealots he meets along the way. A much recommended book. And don't just take my word for it.

Night buses, men in boats and toast-munching toads

I read Three Men in a Boat last week. It was written in 1889 and yet remains genuinely funny and relatable all these years later. There’s a bit at the start when Jerome Klapka Jerome wonders if people in the year 2000 will find their everyday trinkets of interest, value and worth. Which we do mostly. Just struck me as interesting. Apparently the book sold so well and was so popular people in other countries would put his name on books to trick people into buying them. 

Another nice aside, his publisher said, with reference to how much in royalties the book was earning for JKJ: "I cannot imagine what becomes of all the copies of that book I issue. I often think the public must eat them." Which I think is almost as funny as some of the lines in the book. The book is up there with Lucky Jim, also hilarious. 

I was sat on the night bus last night, somewhat drunk, and fell into that maudlin state of staring out the window as raindrops rolled down trying to reach some great thought, or insight or revelation that I was sure was lurking in the dim recesses of my brain. Something about life, or love or work or the like. Of course, I never captured it, if it was there at all: I think the revelation is there are no drunk-night-bus revelations to be had.

However, the event put me in mind of this wonderful excerpt from The Wind in the Willows, a far better book than any dramatisation has ever managed to capture, they all seem to cheapen and ruin it. 

“But Mole stood still a moment, held in thought. As one wakened suddenly from a beautiful dream, who struggles to recall it, but can recapture nothing but a dim sense of the beauty in it, the beauty! Till that, too, fades away in its turn, and the dreamer bitterly accepts the hard, cold waking and all its penalties.” 

My other favourite line in WITW is: 

Toad sat up on end once more, dried his eyes, sipped his tea and munched his toast, and soon began talking freely about himself, and the house he lived in, and his doings there, and how important he was, and what a lot his friends thought of him.

Boating to work

All this talk about the Olympics causing travel chaos - I decided to take the boat to work. It was bliss. Even get free tea and toast thrown in.

A trip to the Euros in Warsaw

Last week I was lucky enough to get sent to Warsaw in Poland to meet up with UEFA and talk technology before heading to the stadium to see Poland v Czech Republic in the quarter-final of the European Championships.

While there I sat on the seats reserved for the coaching staff and the substitutes, so of course I took the opportunity to sit there and gesticulate wildly at the imaginary players on the pitch in front of me. It was fun.

During the match the crowd was dominated by Polish fans who had either pre-bought tickets for the quarter-final assuming their team would make it through, or just wanted to see some more football as it's taking place in their city. This meant chants of "Polski!" were far louder than anything the Czech or Portuguese fans (of which there were about 12) could muster during the game.

Ronaldo won it for his country, after numerous misses, and seeing him in action for the first time - the preening Portuguese winker - it was easy to see why he's so much better than most other players. Firstly, he just looks bigger, and is clearly so much faster than everyone around him. As Hansen loves to say, "it's all about pace and power, if you haven't got that in the modern game, you're toast".

Also, why does Mark Lawrenson hate football so much? To hear him commentate on the BBC you'd think he'd been ordered to serve a lifetime's sentence carrying out a task that brings him as much ennui as possible, with the judge concluding spending all his time being paid to watch football the worst punishment he could imagine.

Overheard in America

I’ve been in San Francisco for the last three days or so, exploring the various sights and sounds of the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz, the trams and other postcard sites, and a fine city it is too, far nicer than Las Vegas, the only other US city I’ve visited.

Beyond this, though, I overheard two excellent pieces of conversation that I felt compelled to share (they’ve already appeared on Twitter, as live, and now here in more detail).

Walking out of Chinatown, I passed a chap on crutches, a phone tucked under his chin and wearing a bright green hoodie, the combination of which already made him stand out. As I passed he said, in his response to the other end of the call:

“You talkin’ about Ray Rakey, who played big bass and was my old high school teacher?”

This sentence just sounds so quintessentially American – the name, Ray Rakey, has musical, creativity connotations, like Big Bones Billy, or Sloppy Sue, and then the idea of him playing the big bass, (presumably the double bass?) - "...and Ray Rakey on the big bass!"... - and, more than that, he was this guy’s teacher too. Was he really called Ray Rakey, or was this a sobriquet of wonderful origin in a story of bizarre twists?

The second was not specifically American, but was just hilarious and my favourite overheard for a while: I was sitting in Yerba Buena park enjoying some sun when three dudes wandered past, all in hats and sunglasses, long baggy shorts, colourful t-shirts: a staple look. The one in the centre responded to a comment from a friend, which I didn’t hear, with:

"One review said, 'not that good', but then another review said, 'quite good', so, well, I dunno."

He sounded so forlorn as he reached this conclusion, so confused between the two voices of the ‘experts’ attempting to guide him in his understanding of this - what - film, book, TV show, restaurant? – that it was almost touching. 

What was even better though was the delivery, which started off rapidly, so up until the ‘quite good’ he was chattering away, then as he his the ‘so’ he realised the dilemma he had encountered and was forced to concede that, alas, he didn’t not know what to believe. A situation I am sure we can all identify with.

The endless advertising dystopia of Waterloo Station

I know complaining about advertising is dull, and unoriginal, but I feel I’ve reached a threshold, a limit, a breaking point, with it all. It’s all the fault of Waterloo Station.

Every day I wind my way in to the station and on arrival head down into the underground walkway that links the train platforms to the underground’s maze, and along this concourse I am visually assaulted by an almighty slew of adverts that line the passageway for its entirety.

I’ve walked down this section probably 250, 300 times in the last two years or so and, suddenly, I’ve become absolutely sick of it. I actively try to stare directly ahead, or keep my eyes cast down, so as to avoid the gaudy, idiotic text and images bearing down on me. I feel a personal sense of desire not to succumb to the incessant dross, as we all march our way to work, no doubt many of us all caught up in the creation, display and measurement of advertising.

It’s not just the adverts existence on its own that frustrates me, as adverts are everywhere, but what’s being advertised too: it all reeks of the lowest common denominator, of treating us with contempt.

There are always several books being touted with tag lines like, “A dead child, a missing mother, a killer’s revenge – read the stunning new thriller from Steve Smith”, often proclaiming this chap “The new Stieg Larsson”.  And it makes me think, why on earth would anyone want to read that, it sounds horrendous, I’d rather read nothing.

Then there’s always a bunch of adverts for the DVDs of Jimmy Carr and Russell Howard and Lee Evans and all that and again, almost for no reason, I just want to tear them down: can we not go five minutes without endless plugs for more merchandise from tired old comedians who spend every spare moment on panel shows rehashing mean or lame gags? Does it have to be everywhere?

Then there are cookery books, the worst of which is The Hairy Bikers Pie recipe book from Christmas, with the unbelievably pathetic line of “A pie is not just for Christmas but for life”, which every time I mistakenly see I think; Who came up with that, who approved that, who got paid for that, what does it even mean?”

But this is the odd thing, when I have negotiated this Versailles of adverts, and reached the underground, where the adverts continue to come thick and fast, I just don’t feel so frustrated. I still role my eyes at the lame puns, the clear attempt at trying to make you believe you need something in your life that you don’t, but I just don’t feel the same animosity, the personal affront that the Waterloo adverts draw out of me.

Can they not just give us fifty metres of architecture, of nothing, of walls? When are we going to stop and decide we don’t have to plaster every empty space with posters for crap? We can just let a wall be a wall?

Complaining about adverts is, as I have said, a pointless thing to do, like trying to catch the wind in a sieve, but there we go.

Weekend Waterloo trains

Most days the train from Wimbledon (which I like to pronounce Whim-bley-don) to Waterloo is nothing but a commute.

An early-morning jamboree of tish-tish headphones, pushing-people and Metro readers, all weekday morning indicators, while the evening is much the same, although you may see the odd loosened tie.

However, take the train on the weekend, and rolling up to Waterloo takes on a completly different air: it's relaxed, almost like you're going on holiday such is the change in atmosphere from the weekday. Where normally the train is taking you to offices, computer screens and sandwiches eaten Al Desko, the weekend train holds the promise of the theatre, friends, galleries and other fun.

It's almost enough to make you forget the prices went up again and twice in the first four days back the trains were affected by various delays.

A few book reviews

In classic fashion, here are a few more book reviews from a series of novels I have read since Freedom, in order.

Player One - Douglas Coupland: An enjoyable, fast-paced thriller set during a mini apocalypse after the world reaches its peak-oil limit, that takes place solely an airport cocktail bar. The four major characters use the experience to reflect on life and what their lives have meant, as well as their own failings, all while trying to stay alive during the period of intense civil unrest that the oil crises causes. Enjoyable and quite unique.

The Valley of Fear - Sir Arther Conan Doyle: I've always been a bit of a Sherlock Holmes fan, I'm not entirely sure why, but the chance to read a ripping yarn of his always goes down well, and this was no different.

The first of the story is classic Holmes, with the highly confusing case solved with wit and resilience, while leaving his intellectually inferior companions utterly in the dark. The story then settles you down for the second half, in which we hear the back story that caused the events in the then present-day.

I never like it when Holmes disappears for the entire second half of a book, as he's the best thing about the stories, but it's a good tale and told well-enough as the central protagonist of the story relives his time in the Wild West where he helps bring an evil gang of vicious men to justice by infiltrating their gang as one of their own.

A Film by Spencer Ludwig - David Flusfeder: An interesting and different story of a son and his very ill, fragile father going on an impromptu road trip from New York to Atlantic City. The relationship between the two characters was well imagined, and the change in their roles from child-adult to adult-octogenarian was well told and full of pathos. Some odd scenes in the book didn't quite gel for me - the father accidentally winning thousands of pounds at backgammon - but overall an enjoyable read.

How to be Good - Nick Hornby: I was after something light for a trip to Berlin that involved a 4:45am start, so this seemed perfect and indeed it was. It's a fun little tale, told with enough zip to keep you engaged with and some nice idea based around society, neighbourliness and consumerism that's only peppered lightly throughout. Hardly a classic or a must-read (what is?) but nonetheless a  fun, easy, light-hearted read.

What you can achieve in a twenty-one hour day

OnWednesday I had the pleasure of enduring a twenty-one hour day for work – this involved rising at 4:45am and getting to bed at 1am. In this time I flew to Berlin, drank several beers, wrote a lot of words, and even managed to compare car insurance while sat at the airport.

The day started early, as mentioned, and involved a quick taxi ride to the airport, followed by a zippy trip over the Atlantic and into Berlin, in which time I read 120 page of How to be Good by Nick Hornby. It has been good so far.

Then we arrived and were taken on a whistle stop tour of Berlin, mostly by coincidence, as the coach taking us from the airport to the event happened to go by the Brandenburg Gate and several pieces of the Berlin Wall.

I then did plenty of work – including two videos, a review and a news story, phew – before eating some currywurst mit kartoffelen which was sehr tasty, although my fumbling attempts at GCSE conversational German were thwarted by instant replies in perfect English from the chefs serving the food. Curses.

From there it was back to the airport with the company of four other journalists for our 9pm EasyJet flight home. Except this being life, the plane was delayed by one hour and forty minutes, meaning we had some five hours to kill at Schönefeld airport – one of those small, shed-like airports which only servers the cheap airlines.

Still, we made the best of it and imbibed on German beers and some surprisingly good burger and chips from "Cindys", the airport's own knock-off McDonalds, where the nice manageress took pity and kept the kitchen open just long enough to feed us.

We chatted about many topics: our envy of the world presented to baby boomers, the best mobile phone and some of the recent films we'd seen, and I also managed to message several friends, read all the day's news and consider the best car-protection deals.

Sometimes I get these flashbacks to another point in my life and wonder how I would react if I was shown a snapshot of where I have ended up at certain points in the future.

I sat there, in the bright, harsh lighting of the airport departure lounge, sleep-deprived, drunk, and fed up with EasyJet, longing to be back in my new house in Wimbledon, and wondered what the 21-year-old me would have made of the scene, when he stepped off the train in Paddington in 2007 to start his London life.

Eventually, the plane left, we had the Obligatory Crying Baby the entire way, I fell asleep for ten minutes, awoke startled and confused by the light below me that I realised was London and soon enough we landed.

A 45 minute taxi journey home later and I was wearily climbing the stairs into my flat, and thinking that perhaps I don't need a car after all – I find all this traveling far too tiring.

Villas, smarter Londoners and books in bed

Today is official the last day of summer. Yeah, I know, ridiculous right? It's September 21 and only now is it technically autumn, despite it clearly being cold enough to have justified booking a villa holiday and high-tailing it out of here for about three weeks now.

As I said before, though, I like autumn a lot. It's full of colour and change and enjoyable days in the calendar: Halloween, Bonfire Night, that Christmas thing which seems to be as popular as ever. All in all, it's not a bad time of year.

One thing I've always thought about the autumn/winter season in London is just how much smarter Londerers looks during the colder months than in the summer.

From now on long, smooth winters coats, elegant scarves and fancy gloves are the norm and baggy, ill-fitting, garish t-shirts, shorts and flipflops are mercifully hidden away for another 6-9 months of the year.

I've been fruitlessly trying to track down the medium sized version of a great winter coat I saw in a TK Maxx that only seems to be stocked in the large. Curses.

One other nice thing about all this is that you can spend more time curled up inside with a good book, too. There are few finer things in life than lying in a bed on a cold, blustery day with an enjoyable piece of writing that you can plough through as the weather howls impotently outside.

I once read the entire novel The House of Sleep by Jonathan Coe on one such day, and it was bliss. Recently I've been doing likewise (pre and post rugby world cup matches) with The Atlantic, Ocean of a Million Stories by Simon Winchester, a man who's led a very interesting and varied life as a journalist and writer.

It had a lot of interesting historical, social and maritime facts, stories and topics within its 400+ pages and although not the best non-fiction book I've read of recent years, it was certainly an enjoyable yarn.

For anyone that's had more than a passing interest in the great, grey slab of water that lies off the coast of Cornwall and churns and thunders unstopped until it reaches, by turns, Canada, the US, Mexico, Brazil and Argentina, then it would come with a hearty recommendation from yours truly.

Ah, the sunny climes of Brazil and Argentina, it's enough to make you book that winter summer holiday without a thought for the price.

Sleepovers

When you're young the idea of a sleepover is incredibly exciting. The chance to stay at a friend's house, or have them to yours, is the stuff of "Please mum, pleaseeeee" for years. Yet, even as a child, once the hallowed night has taken place, there's something mildly disappointing about the whole thing. It's just sleeping somewhere else, really, but not as well and coupled with waking in a strange, alien world, of if it's at yours, with a bunch of friends you wish would leave sharpish as they're driving you crazy.

Growing up, such events are obviously far rarer, but the night buses and the early closing of the tube mean that crashing on on good friend's sofa post night out, or after a wine and US Open tennis 2am evening, is preferable to a two hour journey with drunks and weirdos across the city from north to south.

Even so, waking at 7am having had a terrible night's sleep, miles from home, facing a day of relentless yawning, you can't help but wonder if you would have been better off risking the nightmare buses after all. 

It's disappointing how quickly sleep becomes an important part of your life, your thoughts, and defines your ability to function. Not in an active way, an "I must go home to sleep soon" controlling way, but a passive, next day "why did I go to bed so late" moan, that becomes ever more frequent each year, the days of going out til 3am and suffering no ill effects the next day long, long gone. And don't even get me started on two to almost three day hangovers.

Or maybe I am just a wimp. Thoughts?

Books update

Since reading The Corrections I have read a couple of other books recently the first of which was To The River by Olivia Laing. A nice, meandering book about the joys of rivers, water, walking and literary it was, as you can imagine, right up my stream.

It charts a walk Laing takes along the Ouse from its source to its estuary, while taking in the nature, history, society and literary background of the surrounding area. It reminded me of a slew of books that seem to becoming more popular now that use a central subject or cypher around which the author ruminates on various topics. The best examples of this are Philip Hoare's Leviathan, but I also read a similar book in Robin Harvie's Why We Run.

For anyone familiar with the area, or keen to read an interesting take on a river talk and Virginia Woolf it would come with my recommendation.

Second was I'm Feeling Lucky by Doug Edwards, a recounting of the adventures of a mid 40s man taking job number 59 at Google, in the days when it was an unknown start-up. There's plenty of techno speak in there, but also human angles, insights into one of the world's biggests companies, and personal stories to interest the more casual reader, although you'd have to have some base, underlying interest in Google, to make it all the way through. I may do a fuller review for work too, seeing as it's about technology.

That takes me to 21 books for the year, still way off the 51 and 47 I achieved in previous years, but I put this down to reading several very long works this year, mostly In Europe by Geert Mak which took my about six weeks.