E is for

Earphones

Maybe this will make me sound old but some people on the tube listen to their music far too loudly. This is not new of course, people have been complaining about this for a while; in fact the Underground people now put posters up telling people to keep their music down. What would our Victorian forebears have thought of this all. Why did Victorian's keep four bears anyway?

This morning on either side of the carriage were two young dudes, probably about the same age as me actually, whose music was deafeningly loud. One was listening to the fudge of noise that comes from incessantly heavy bass (what is the obsession with 'bass' anyhow?) while the other had on some Rage Against the Machine style shouty rock. I could hear the guitar solos, hear them moving around the fret board, hear the drums when they kicked in and so on. Both of them looked utterly devoid of any enjoyment in the music, devoid of much life anyway. Why the need for it so loud? Showing off? Deafness? Purposefully annoying other people?

D is for...

Dick Dastardly.

In Wacky Races Dick Dastardly would spend the entire show zooming ahead of the other racers to set elaborate traps. Hilariously these would always back fire leaving him looking foolish and his 'faithful' hound Muttley (great name) laughing at him - until scolded for doing so.

It made no sense. He had the fastest car. If he didn't stop to set needless traps he'd have won ever race by an absolute mile.

Old dogs

Have you ever seen New Tricks? I seem to have a magnet in me that means I end up watching it every week when I am in on a Thursday. I don't know why. It's hardly good, the stories are always a bit flimsy, and by the end I'm never sure I've even understood what the outcome was.

I studied crime fiction at university - and thoroughly enjoyed it - so I've always had a slight affinity to crime shows, but Old Tricks ticks none of the boxes and yet I still seem to watch it. Dennis Waterman's character is 2D but Amanda Redman is good. One character has disappeared but I am not sure if we know why or not and the other character - played by Alan Armstrong - is always involved in the slightly silly plots - making friends with a radio enthusiast, awkwardly confronting a 'Polish' builder who turns out to be Albanian etc. So all in all, it's a bit weird that I keep watching it. Or, more than that, keep finding myself watching it without every really planning to.

That's all really.

C is for...

Creativity.

Have you noticed how creative everyone is? Everyone has a good idea, everyone is writing a book, or running a website, or painting, or writing music. Youtube is awash with talented amateurs singing, playing music and other such things. Any journalist you speak to seems to harbour ambitions of writing a novel or a work of non-fiction (I am no different) and so on.

What is creativity anyway? Where do ideas come from. The best book I have read this year was Leviathan (which I wrote several blog posts about). Where did the idea for that book come from? To write an entire book, a 400+ page piece of non-fiction, about whales. Whales. Why? In the bath? On a boat? Driving down the M4. Undoubtedly he had probably always thought whales were fascinating but to final conjure up the whys-and-wherefores of turning it in to a book is something else entirely.

I did creative writing at Cardiff for two years. I always did my best work when I was slightly hung-over, a bit punch drunk. I found my mind would be flitting around on to different subjects and more often than not one would become a credible idea. When I sat down to purposefully write something though, out of this state of mind, I would find inspiration impossible to come by. The shower is also a good place for ideas - although it's hard to write anything down when they do come. Paper goes soggy and laptops break.

And writing it down is the key. If you don't do that the idea always fades, even though when you thought of it, it seemed as if it was so good it would never leave you. I did National Novel Writing Month last year - 52,000 words in one month. It was hard work but the ethos of 'write anything, forget about how good it is' was an important one as it is much easier to go back and edit work you have written, rather than getting snow blindness but just staring at an empty Word document all day - 'you can't edit a blank page'.

Still, my book was terrible and has been consigned to the dustbin of history. But I've got this other idea...

You're not singing anymore

I went to Arsenal v West Brom last night as part of the usual once-a-year-Arsenal outing to the Carling Cup 3rd round (£10 tickets you see). It's always fun to go and be part of the throng of the crowd, cheer a few goals, boo a few villains etc and enjoy the pre and post match atmosphere.

One of my favourite things at football matches is the chants that make their way around the stadium. There were two good ones last night. At random moments the Arsenal fans would chant 'Who are ya?' at the West Brom fans who, after a moment of silence presented itself, would responded with, 'We are Al-bi-ion, say we are Albion'. It just seems so weirdly banal.

Second was the chant of 'Stand up...if you hate Tottenham, stand up...if you hate TottenHAM' (to the tune of, I believe, Go West). The best bit of this was when, as we started to hear the chant emanating from the other side of the stadium, two lads, no more than five or six-years-old, were the first to stand and in high, falsetto voices, proclaim their hatred for a bunch of people that live just a few miles north of them.

B is for...

Butterscotch.

A last minute request swung this one for me. Remember Angel Delight? I used to love Angel Delight, especially the strawberry flavoured stuff. Chcolate less so, but then I’ve always been a bit odd (apparently) in not liking chocolate based puddings (or not much anyway). Butterscotch though I couldn’t stand. In fact I doubt we had it more than once after the first time due to my protestations that it was ‘the most vile punishment ever ladled out upon man since the Tolpuddle Martyrs.’ I was a weird eight-year-old.

A is for...

It could have been aardvarks, it could have been Anne of Cleves, it could even have been Accrington Stanley, but no. My Great Twitter / Blog Crossover experiment (i.e. asking for people to suggest things beginning with A) resulted in anti-protons. So here are some words about a subject I know nothing about:

Anti-protons. Well, actually I am ProProtons. Or just Protons I suppose. I am also in favour of the unit of measurement known as a tonne. So I am Pro-tonne too. But I am no expert on this and so not a Tonne-pro.

Anti-protons are, actually, the opposite of protons. Obviously. If you wish to make them it's quite simple. Like any good journalist, I have taken the following from Wikipedia:

Their formation requires energy equivalent to a temperature of 10 trillion K (10¹³K). At CERN, protons are accelerated in the Proton Synchrotron (PS) to an energy of 26 GeV, and then smashed into an iridium rod. The protons bounce off the iridium nuclei with enough energy for matter to be created. A range of particles and antiparticles are formed, and the anti-protons are separated off using magnets in vacuum.

So you need a hoover, a fire and some iridium nuclei (most hardware stores stock this).

Now, before you go off to look for anti-protons you need to know they are really small. Think of a small bird - smaller than that. A grain of sand. Smaller than that. I mean they are really tiny. But if you stare long enough you'll see them dancing around with their little faces smiling up at you. Cute little things they are. In fact it's a little known piece of trivia but the Smiley Face is the exact anatomical structure of the face of an antiproton.

Perhaps I'll do B tomorrow - so if you want to suggest a topic, comment away...

OMG LOLS!

T-Mobile have recently been vox-popping complete morons on the streets of Britain.

They have been doing this to ask them what they would do with free texts for life. The answers I have heard / seen are 'I'd text all my mates about my DJ night', and, 'I'd throw a huge party and invite all my mates'. My favourite is the person who just says, 'I don't know, it's mind-boggling'.

No it isn't. As my brother said to me, 'nothing of importance has ever been sent by text message. It's always stuff like "see you in 5" or "put it on bbc2".'

Spot on. Furthermore, those answers make no sense. If you've got a DJ night on surely you'd tell your mates anyway? What sort of a friend only texts mates about something as important as that (to him presumably) if he can do so via unlimited free texts for life. Similarly, if you have a party you would never decide on who to invite on the basis of the fact you can text everyone for free. It's a party! Send an email, make a phone call, or just take the 10p text hit.

Meeting with disaster

I have always enjoyed a brief flutter on football. Nothing major, just a pound here or there. I do believe though that something is telling me to give up. Here are some bets I have lost recently.

In April I put a pound on a six way accumulator at 65-1 and with 5 results in the final score was 3-1 to the team I needed to win. There was 25 minutes to play and the other team came back to 3-3. Annoying.

Yesterday I had a four way accumulator at 24 to 1. With three games won, the fourth was one minute from finishing at the result I needed when Bolton equalised in the last minute of time to ruin that one.

Today, and this is the one that has a real air of finality about it, I had a hugely random, gut feeling 50p on United and City to draw 3-3 at 70 to 1. So £35 for 50p stake. This happened.

I've won some other smaller bets of six or seven quid but nothing of note. Winning 30+ is enough to cover tube travel or a weekly shop. You should understand I am not bitter, I am open enough to accept the money was never really mine and I have lost nothing (bar a pound or two) and I know gambling is for mugs, as the above proves, but there are some times when I do wonder if the fates have it in for me.

Or...perhaps they are saving me up for one massive pay day in the future...

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;

Okay so the last line doesn't apply, but Kipling didn't live in the world of blogging and internet gambling.

A thousand monkeys...

Once, there was a monkey tribe who feared another monkey tribe. For you see, the second tribe had big stones they could throw quite far - far enough to hit the first tribe. The first tribe also had these weapons, had had them first in fact, but was a sensible tribe, with no rogue elements so that was okay.

To counter this risk the first tribe decided to ask another, independent tribe, if they could store some of their special stones in their land to be able to knock the rogue tribe's stones out of the air if they were ever thrown.

But, another tribe, who the first tribe had once been at war with, but had now become friends again - eaten some bananas together, picked nits etc - said, 'you can't do that, you might be tricking us and wanting to throw them at us!'. That idea didn't work.

So on it went, with stones stored in each country, tribe I mean, and each tribe was able to aim at each other tribe and each tribe claimed they had the best interests of their people in their actions, monkeys I mean, and so they looked at each other, all hoarding stones behind their backs, saying ' you shouldn't have those stones, you could have someone's eye out'.

But no one would give up their stones, so they continued to hoard them and now all the monkeys have stones and none will give up their stones, even though if they were to ever throw a stone the entire rain forest would be destroyed, forever.

Surgically...

Dan Brown is back (and this time he's personal). I read the Da Vinci Code (The answer was Paris, or Jesus, or birth. I forget) many years ago when it first came out because after a scathing, withering put-down of the book by my Dad (which included the family-famous line of 'Up yours ratso!') I felt compelled to read it. Funny how recommendations work isn't it?

Books. They've become massive again, to the point where that isn't even an issue. Harry Potter and Dan Brown - two insufferable people who have changed the face of publishing, in some ways. I can't stand HP and I'll happily never read another DB book. I've always wanted to watch the Da Vinci movie though after I heard that, apparently, during the press screening all the critics laughed at the line "Quick, to a library!" Who couldn't?

I am off to the Tate Britain in a moment where perhaps I will encounter a dying curator with a strange, cryptic message on the floor beside him and a beautiful yet highly talented female cryptologist will enter the room and together we'll decipher a series of yadda yadda yadda...

Unexpected item in bagging area

Many years ago, well about five, I worked in ASDA on the tills. Oh, the times I had. But, like all good things, it came to an end. And, as I walked off into the sunset, waving once more to my green clothed colleagues and kicked my heels I thought, "Well, there's the obligatory supermarket job done, no more for me the scanning and packing of items..."

But, the supermarkets, not content with near world wide domination of our eating habits, have decided they can get us to do our own scanning and packing too. The self-service machines are the new choice of payment for today's fast-paced, latte drinking, 24/7, news junkies, as they are quicker and faster, and importantly involve no human interaction whatsoever.

What has happened to us? Why are we so keen to embrace this? We are slaves to the supermarkets already but now we're doing what is paid work for free. Up with this, we should not put.

I would suggest one of the two following options.

1) For using self-service you should get 1% off your bill. This won't be much each time you go, but over a year could add up to several pounds - about the same as an hour of work at the supermarket - which leads on to idea two...

2) They could time you from the moment you place an item down to the moment payment is made. They then work out what they would have paid you for this pro rata and this should come off the next bill.

On another, but relevant, point: Why do they say 'Unexpected item in bagging area". It's always something you've picked up in store so why is it so unexpected?

The end of (summer) days

I think the summer has ended. The last two weekends have had a mad end of summer holidays feel to them. London has been buzzing, more than usual, and there's been an air of congeniality usually not associated with the city - I've had more random conversations in two weeks than in 12 months.

Sitting on Southwark Bridge on Saturday afternoon, closed to traffic and home to a big street party event with alcohol and food, animals and wine pressing, there was a languid, soporific feel to it all, as if we knew this was the last warm sun of the year. Then on Sunday it was a brisk, fresh day with coats out in force and the sun's rays nowhere to be seen.

Now it's time for rain lashing windows, wind swirling fallen leaves across pavements, tube stations offering warmth and shelter (rather than stifling heat and imprisonment) and the ever-growing darkness as the sun's arc heads to its winter solstice.

Londoners do look smarter in the winter though. All scarves and coats, not flip-flops and shorts.

Photo round-up

Went to the Thames Festival on both Saturday and Sunday this weekend. It was absolutely brilliant, with great food, music, fire and fireworks, and a great example of the never-ending cycle of London events that fill every weekend in the capital. A bunch of pictures to illustrate this.

Rowers / mad escapologist / carnival man / flaming orb / southwark bridge transformed x 3