The First Days Of My Thirties

Six Disputable Truths

2008-12-18T22:45:00.002Z

1. Pre-mixed doubles taste horrible

I was ill recently with a stomach bug and found myself struggling through the work day, so I decided to get some fresh air, or as fresh air as it’s possible to get within the City. I needed to send some letters, so made my way to a Post Office counter in the Spar mini-market on Moorgate. Though handy, it’s not really equipped to deal with the number of people wanting to send things during their lunch break, and so the queues in there are often painfully long. Helpfully, to counter this, they have set up an extra till which you can use if you have three items or less to post, the aim being to get quick transactions out of the shop quickly. To get there you have to queue alongside the chilled drinks cabinets, which, bearing in mind that I was alternately shivering and nauseous, wasn’t a part of the shop that I was especially pleased to be standing near.

My gaze alighted upon something I’d never seen before, and which made me feel even more crook than I was before – pre-mixed doubles cocktails. On face value, this is quite a brave innovation, especially in these torrid days of binge-drinking, but not necessarily one that should be applauded.

The very concept of buying a pre-mixed drink should be abhorrent to anyone who actually enjoys making cocktails, where a considerable amount of passion, energy and often experimentation is put into making the perfect drink; to buy it pre-mixed defeats the object entirely, but I suppose is entirely in keeping with the ‘get it now’ culture in which we live. In any case, the drinks on sale in this range were made with the cheapest sort of alternatives to high quality spirits you can imagine, the types of bottles you see behind the bar on package holidays or the own-brands you see in supermarkets. For example, the vodka and tonic bottle was made with a brand of vodka nobody would have ever heard of, but it was labelled with a Russian-sounding name to lend some degree of authenticity to it; similarly the whiskey and dry ginger had the name of a Scottish distillery that I’m sure can’t exist (MacPisshead or something like that), again designed to evoke a sense of genuine provenance. Only Beefeater, surely one of the least inspiring gins available, was a recognisable brand, but that says a lot about Beefeater – can you imagine Tanqueray or Bombay Sapphire attaching themselves to such a ghastly product?

The following week, with my health restored, I found myself at the National Indoor Arena in Birmingham to watch Kings of Leon. It is a pre-concert ritual that my wife will order a Bacardi and Diet Coke; fine, except that at the NIA they don’t serve spirits by measure, and to my horror I found that they only sold the very same brand of mixed doubles that I’d seen in Spar the week before. She ordered one anyway, an imaginatively named ‘White Rum And Coke’ – I’m not even sure they’d bothered to invent a suitably Jamaican-influenced brand here – and one sip was all it took to confirm what I thought would be the case – it tasted horrible. She grimaced, swallowed grimly and uttered a disappointed ‘Yuck,’ before offloading it on to me.

And it really was disgusting. The white rum tasted faintly of chemicals, whereas the mixer was flat and over-sweet, like the Panda Coke from my youth. All I can say is that if you find yourself faced with pre-mixed drinks over nothing at all, go for the latter. Save the money and put it towards a decent cocktails book, an ice-cube tray and a Boston shaker. Your taste buds and liver will appreciate it far more.

2. How long is forever?

At first, that enquiry looks quite a deep one, one upon which you could ruminate and ponder and come up with many differing answers. But, dear reader, there is no need, for I have the answer for you already.

The answer to the question is eighty hours.

I know this to be true because the squeaky-voiced shop assistant at the Molton Brown store at the Royal Exchange said so. And who am I to doubt her?

I was buying a candle for my wife (more accurately, I was buying a ‘candella’ according to the box, but I sense that may be a made-up word; merely describing it as a candle would somehow undermine its additional qualities, I guess), a great big, heavy thing in a glass vase, which set me back nearly £50. I typically feel a bit of an idiot in these types of shops, and this wasn’t aided by my card being declined, but mostly I just want to pay my money and get the hell out of there. Not so on this day – the aforementioned and wizened shop assistant started talking to me and telling me how nice the candle was while she was gift-wrapping it, and I was powerless but to listen.

She proceeded to tell me that the burn time of the candle was eighty hours, and without any sense of irony, told me that this ‘Basically means it will last forever.’ All of which is quite depressing. I had visions of the sun taking many more millennia to implode, but it seems that popular wisdom and scientific theory got it wrong; there is no such thing as infinity, and forever is just eighty hours long. I’m reluctant to let my wife light the damn thing in case she puts in motion the end of our days.

3. Dark forces are at work at eBay

I’ve been an eBay user for many years. I have an untainted feedback rating as both a seller and a buyer, and I’ll always try and sell something before handing it into the charity shop – yes, I really am that mean-spirited, and I don’t even feel compelled to apologise. But for some time I have suspected something a teensy bit fishy about eBay.

Being ever more the precious commodity, I have barely any time to stick unwanted items on eBay these days. But when I do, a very curious pattern emerges, which has given rise to my belief that something is afoot.

What happens is that I list a couple of items just to get back into the swing of using eBay again, and invariably those items will sell. The following week, I’ll try and sell some more things, and they will also sell. Buoyed by this success and my burgeoning PayPal account balance, I’ll then go hell for leather the following week and list about ten or fifteen things and… none of them sell at all.

I therefore believe that eBay plants phoney sellers who buy up your items until you decide to load on a high number of items; they then expose your item to the general eBay public, collect their listing fees from you and allow none of your items to sell. Bastards.

4. Pregnant women on the Tube do predictable things

My wife having been pregnant twice, I have developed a sense of how pregnant women think. I appreciate that this is something of a bold statement for a mere male to make, but it’s true. Especially the second time around, you develop an understanding of what your partner is thinking; for example, she looks pensive, you ask what’s wrong, she says ‘Nothing,’ and you know she’s lying, so you ask her again and she tells you that she’s worried about the birth, how she’s going to cope etc. That sort of thing.

I was stood on the Tube the other day and saw a pregnant woman sat nearby. At Angel, another pregnant woman got on. I watched as the first woman instinctively started rubbing her bump, and also looking to see how far gone the other woman was. The other woman, when the first woman had started looking elsewhere, also checked out the size of her bump, mentally working out how advanced she was compared to her. They then take it in turns to look for signs of stress or fatigue in the other’s face, as if trying to gauge whether they’re coping better than she is, looking panicked, calm or otherwise.

At Angel, a woman got on the train with a buggy. Somewhat predictably, both women scanned the face of the mother, I’d guess for some sort of positive signal that having a child isn’t actually as stressful as they perhaps fear it might be. They then turn their attentions to the child. Is he well-behaved? Screaming blue murder? Causing his mother to tear her hair out? This lady got off at Kings Cross and both pregnant women went back to stroking their respective bumps ruminatively.

5. People in queues are rude

Or, more accurately, people in queues who’ve never worked behind a counter are rude. I queued up at my local rail station last night to get my season ticket re-printed, having put it next to my BlackBerry for about two minutes, thus erasing it.

There were no more than three people behind me when I was stood at the head of the queue, and things were moving quite quickly. Like most places, like banks or Post Offices, at our station we have a display that announces which cashier is free. A woman moved away from the till position where she was buying a ticket, so I waited patiently for the display to call me forward to the now-vacant till position.

I swear I was stood there for no more than ten seconds when a woman behind me said ‘Excuse me,’ and, with a face like thunder, pointed toward the free till position, motioning me to get a move on. I grunted a sarcastic thanks and tut-tutted my way to the till, almost feeling the need to apologise to the cashier.

Earlier in my career, I worked behind the counter of one of the busiest branches of the bank I work for and so I have some appreciation of what it’s like. One of the things that used to annoy me most was customers coming up to your till before you’ve called them. The few seconds between finishing with one customer and serving the next can be absolutely invaluable for catching a breath, putting away the paperwork from the previous customer or taking a sip from a glass of water. Having worked in that environment, I have the ultimate sympathy and wish everyone could afford the cashier the same courtesy that I’m able to.

6. Products made by Worlds Apart are rubbish

For our eldest daughter’s second birthday, we bought her a pop-up In The Night Garden gazebo, made by Cornish-based firm Worlds Apart. For the same birthday, continuing the Night Garden theme, my parents bought her a pop-up Ninky Nonk. (Apologies to those not familiar with the specifics of Night Garden; trust me, you’re not missing much.)

We’re familiar with the supposedly award-winning products of Worlds Apart, since we bought a pop-up tent made by them a few years ago which fitted neatly into our smallest suitcase. It simply pops up into the shape it should when you take it out of its bag, and a few twists and folds returns it into the bag. Easy, simple and innovative.

The Night Garden stuff less so. The Ninky Nonk included several different parts, each modelled on carriages of the annoying train from the TV programme. I swear that none of them have ever gone back up to their folded state. As for the Gazebo, don’t even get me started. You need a team of builders or structural engineers to erect that. Twice I’ve thrown the pieces back in the shed in a rage, and only once have I successfully built it; when I did it took twenty minutes and then it rained, or Seren said she didn’t like it; one of the two.

I thought the Gazebo was the worst thing made by Worlds Apart we’d bought. That was until we purchased the Upsy Daisy / Iggle Piggle ‘alarm clock’. I use the inverted commas, because it doesn’t exactly behave like any alarm clock I’ve ever owned.

Basically, it’s designed to train your children when night stops and day starts. During the day the clock face shows Upsy Daisy whereas at night Iggle Piggle comes out and a night light comes on. Sounds perfect, were it not for a few flaws.

Firstly, this ‘clock’ has no hands. Yep, that’s right. A clock with no hands. Instead, you have to set the time using a little marker on the outside edge of the clock face, and as there’s only one you have to guess that you have pointed it at the right time (it does have numerals, which I suppose is a good thing). Similarly, you have to set the alarm with a single marker, except that this marker – designed to look like the Pinky Ponk from Night Garden – is quite wide, and so you don’t really know if it’s pointing at the desired time or not. Not great so far.

The worst thing, apart from the fact that it somehow requires four batteries (what alarm clock do you know that needs four batteries?) is that it is an abysmal timekeeper. The alarm seems to go off at a totally different time each day with no predictability at all. Given that the primary purpose of this alarm clock is to train your child to wake up at the same time each day, that seems like a major flaw to me. It seems to have a mind of its own, and I don’t know how many times we’ve heard Seren from her bedroom saying ‘Look mummy, Upsy Daisy’s come out!’ twenty minutes before it should have done.

Take my advice, buy a traditional alarm clock and while you’re at it, join me in boycotting products from Worlds Apart.

Alcohol

2008-11-27T07:12:00.004Z

We were driving through Woburn Sands one Sunday evening. Despite some cloud cover late afternoon, it was a sticky, balmy night; the type of night where you know that any sleep you actually get will be had without the use of even your thinnest summer duvet and that it will be just as hot in the morning.

Still, it was a pleasant enough evening for a social drink; not for us, however. With two little girls in the back of the car, both past their respective bedtimes and both out of sorts because of the heat, we were never going to partake in such a pre-children pastime, but as we drove through successive villages and small towns on the way home from the birthday party we'd been to in Dunstable, it did rather appeal.

As romantic and alluring as this image might well have appeared, it did provide a valuable lesson in how a pub's clientele can have a large bearing on how inviting your establishment might be to thirsty sun-worshippers. The pub in Woburn Sands is a large, distinctive building occupying a corner by a double roundabout, and whilst they've smartened up its exterior recently, it's always had the look and feel of one of those 'two meals for a fiver' kind of places; in other words, cheap and cheerful. But my impression was forever altered on that night owing to a group of well-groomed thirtysomethings sat at one of the outside tables sharing a bottle of red wine. In short, it created an image that appealed to me. It changed my perception of the pub from one of avoidance to acceptance since I could relate to the patrons; gone is the view that it's the kind of place where you can go and get tanked up on cheap vodka for a quid.

Further along the road we passed through Wavendon, a smaller cluster of houses mostly set away from the main road. Here too is a pub, a lovely old traditional-looking place that was recently given a new lease of life and makeover as a sleek gastropub. We've been meaning to go here for dinner for ages and the reviews have all been positive, but after passing by on that Sunday evening I'm no longer so keen.

In the precise mirror of the positive impression garnered from the gaggle of friends (weaned on Friends) outside the pub in Woburn Sands, the patron stood in the doorway of the pub in Wavendon served only to put me off and caused me to think that this wasn't a place that appealed to my sensibilities at all. He was a big, swarthy man, his expansive belly and man-boobs barely contained by his white wife-beater, from whose sides two flabby arms – covered in tattoos – protruded. In one huge hand he held a pint of lager and in the other a cigarette.

Now, I know appearances can be deceptive and he may well have been a perfectly nice individual. All I'm trying to say is that whereas the scene in Woburn Sands was inviting, something about this solitary figure was the opposite and I'd go so far as to say there was a certain incongruousness with what I know about that pub.

The purpose of this was to simply highlight that a pub's visible clientele act as a type of window dressing in much the same way that mannequins do in a shopfront display, and the way you dress your window can have a big impact on the way your establishment is perceived, irrespective of any preconceived ideas you may have about a place.

***

One of my colleagues is retiring, and my boss decided it would be a good idea – a nice gesture – to take him out for lunch to say thanks for his support over the years. Along with another colleague we went to a bar on the corner of Old Broad Street and Throgmorton Street called The Phoenix, which used to be a bank many years ago.

In as much as I barely ever used to go out after work for drinks before the girls were born, I used to find myself in The Phoenix from time to time for leaving dos or social drinks, but haven't been there for quite a few years. It was always popular since it had one major advantage and USP over any other pub locally – it was entirely non-smoking. Post the smoking ban that uniqueness has now gone and The Phoenix is more or less your traditional, Greene King watering hole. In the space of little more than an hour my manager – an overweight diabetic who is hardly the paragon of health and virtue – drank three pints of lager and spilt a further pint over the very person we were there to thank. Three pints would be challenge enough for me as I've never been able to hold my alcohol especially well, but he then went on to tell us that he recently met a friend after work and sank five pints in an hour. I thought his point was that this was somehow impressive; rather, he was trying to say that this made him a lightweight compared to his former, younger self.

After five pints – in fact, after two pints – I'd be a wreck, and it got me thinking about the embarrassing times I've been drunk, which I present here for everyone's amusement and to remind me of why I should never, ever, drink too much again. Please note that you will find no tales of debauched hedonism below, just pathetic drunkenness.

1. Just got dumped, Leamington 1994

A girl who I never should've got involved with dumped me unceremoniously on the morning of a work social event at a bowling alley in Leamington Spa. The way she decided things were over vexed me considerably, and I'd spent the afternoon listening to the same bleak Depeche Mode song on repeat. Fast forward to the evening and getting drunk with my colleagues and friends Jon and Steve seemed like a good way of putting it behind me. Little did I know at the time of booze's ability to make you really maudlin, or in the case of that day, to amplify how miserable I felt already that day. I recall Steve valiantly trying to cheer me up on the way back home and me telling him somewhat ungratefully that if he didn't stop I'd hit him. I've never drunk while depressed since.

2. My eighteenth birthday, September 1994

For my eighteenth, I arranged drinks with various people who for the purposes of that evening were 'friends' at The Encore and then The Falcon in my hometown of Stratford. This being my first opportunity to drink legally in earnest, I recall not wanting to overdo it, and I probably had no more than three drinks – all cider – across the whole night. I use the word 'night' somewhat hesitantly, as I was out for no more than an hour and a half; at The Falcon, a girl next to me lit a cigarette, the smoke went right up my nose and I was sick all down myself, in front of those supposed friends and causing much embarrassment at school on the following Monday. I maintain that it was the cigarette smoke and not that I was drunk, as I'm sure I wasn't. I was home that night before my parents had even cleared the table from the birthday meal I'd enjoyed before going out. This was the first of three public examples I'll recount of embarrassment relating to alcohol, all of which I'm deeply ashamed of now.

3. Sick in my mouth, New Year 1994

I had a huge crush on a girl in the year below me in my last year at high school. She was a very sweet and innocent girl, and I would think about her constantly. To my amazement, she thought I was okay too, and we shared an awkward snog on the way back from the sixth form Christmas Party where she'd gone as my date. (This, I should add, was in defiance of the threats from her older brother – and the on-off boyfriend of the girl who dumped me above – to beat me up if I laid a finger on her; he was a stoner, and I didn’t feel especially scared.)

Fast-forward a fortnight to New Year’s Eve the same year, and I find myself at a party at her house with some friends. After a while, everyone gets a little restless, so we decide to order some cabs to take us into town and, while we're waiting, we go for a drink at the pub over the road. I down a pint too quickly because the taxis arrive earlier than expected, and I'm promptly sick in my mouth. I'm ashamed to say that I snogged her again that night, in spite of vomiting, and by the time we were back at school after the Christmas holidays, she'd gone off with the guy who took over from me as Head Boy, and I don't blame her at all. Second-hand smoke is one thing; second-hand vomit is an entirely different matter.

4. The first time I was pathetically drunk, August 1995

My first pathetic drunken experience came the summer before heading off to university. I'd gone to The Wildmoor, a nightclub just outside Stratford, and simply drank too much. No pretext, no particular reason, just good old-fashioned over-indulgence.

After doing that jejune 'can't get the key in the lock' thing, I walked into the lounge only to find my parents and sister still in front of the TV, and I hopelessly tried to convey a confident sobriety. I mistakenly recalled some advice about drinking milk to stop you being sick thinking that it worked after drinking, so sank a pint of semi-skimmed and was promptly sick in my parents' kitchen sink, apologising to my mum for some reason whilst doing so. To my eternal ignominy, my sister produced the same orange plastic bowl mum used to put by my bed when I was sick as a child and set it down in front of me where I was now curled up in a ball on the floor.

Laughing wryly and tut-tutting, my parents retreated to bed, leaving me uttering fraudulent assurances that I'd never drink again. My sister and I stayed up and watched a Wombles video and she nursed my hangover the following morning with the best omelette I've ever tasted.

5. The hangover at university that lasted a month, April 1996

Arriving at the University of Essex in 1995, I adopted a stance of enforced abstemiousness and for the first few months I avoided booze entirely. I was in that formative stage, forming new relationships and trying to find myself and my place in the world. My outlook and friendships coalesced toward the end of the first term and I let my hair down a little. By the second term I was living about as hedonistically as I ever will (i.e. more than I'd ordinarily been accustomed to by that point, but far less than most people). I don't recall the night that preceded my worst-ever hangover, but I do recall the hangover vividly because the feeling that I'd encased my head in a block of concrete during the evening's shenanigans seemed to last for weeks, during which period I couldn't face alcohol and the abstention returned. Not for the first time did I consider that I wasn't really cut out for that lifestyle.

6. Colchester Arts Centre, Valentine's Day 1997

My ex-girlfriend decided that it was perfectly acceptable to spend our first Valentine's Day apart; she wanted to go out with her friends in the evening to celebrate a birthday, so I decided to go into Colchester that night with my housemates Neil and Barry.

We went to a pub on the high street, stuck some good songs on the jukebox and I drank my way through several Moscow Mules. We then walked up to Colchester Arts Centre for their regular indie night. Within seconds of walking in there, I felt queasy and was promptly sick all over myself. Shameful as of course this was, I was wearing white jeans that night, which is perhaps altogether more embarrassing.

Neil decided to take me home, and we picked up a taxi from a rank on the high street. After pulling away the driver commented that he thought I looked like I was going to be sick and threw us out again, charging the full fare anyway. So we walked, or rather Neil walked and I staggered. Apparently I tried to curl up and fall asleep outside my favourite record shop, but I don't remember that.

7. Drunk at The Peveril Hotel, July 1999

I graduated from Essex in 1998 and my then-girlfriend and I moved away from the brick and concrete topography of the campus and all that went with it. I wanted to cut everything from that period off, she still wanted it, and so we wound up going to the University summer ball in 1999. Dredging up the past and witnessing the simpering idolatry my girlfriend proffered to her old University friends prompted me to get hopelessly inebriated, and I was subsequently violently sick in the bathroom at our hotel. I believe this was the first time I lost my stomach lining and I felt sufficiently rough on the following Monday to have to take time off work with, ahem, a stomach bug. That’s the one and only time I’ve missed work through being hung over.

8. The Friday before we moved house, March 2003

The third of my 'public embarrassments' and the one I'm most ashamed of. Unusually, I found myself in a bar called 1 Of 2 (now The Wall) next to our offices on a Friday evening; I don't recall if there was an occasion, but I do know that it was ill-timed, as it meant Michelle was at home packing up for the house move we were undertaking on the Monday. A colleague plied me with pints of Kirin, and got me so hammered that to this day I don't know how I got back to Moorgate for the Thameslink train home.

What I do know is that I was standing by the doors of the train opposite a couple of Chinese tourists and just after we'd stopped at Kings Cross I threw up on the floor. The Chinese couple gasped in horror and I think moved away from the wino prone to public vomiting. I call this my absolute rock bottom with drinking, and since then I've never had more than one drink at work functions for fear of making a drunken arse of myself. So utterly shameful.

9. After my grandmother's funeral, August 2004

My maternal grandmother passed away in August 2004 and I decided to do a reading at her funeral, out of a sense of guilt at not having seen her for a long time rather than duty.

Afterwards we went to a golf club for a reception and I spoke to my cousins for the first time in years. I was so absorbed in reacquainting myself with them that I didn't notice them continuously re-filling my wine glass. Unusually, for me, I didn't feel the slightest bit worse for wear... until we left the golf club, stepped outside and the fresh air hit me. I passed out in the car, woke up again when we got to my parents', was sick in their bathroom and spent the entire afternoon slumped over a chair on their patio, totally out for the count. To my chagrin, I found myself hugging the porcelain telling my mum that I was sorry, just like I’d done nearly ten years before.

10. 'I did not piss in a bin!' Prague 2003

My wife and I went to Prague with Steve (he of the post-dumping efforts to cheer me up) and his girlfriend Tina just before Christmas in 2003. We stayed at the Corinthia Towers hotel and, because of their business running a successful online travel agency, we had rooms on the executive floor; this allowed us access to the executive lounge, which provided access to free drinks and canapés in the early evening. We made good use of this while we were there, but I made rather too much use of the drink one night before we headed downstairs for dinner. Midway through the meal I staggered to the gents' where I swear on my life I saw another hotel guest taking a leak in a bin rather than a urinal.

Rushing back to the table, my inability to describe this guest and the fact that I was the only person to emerge from the toilets leant credence to the fact that in fact it was me who took a leak in the bin; for the rest of the meal and the trip I was forced to emphatically state that it was not me. Even now Tina still insists it was me.

Just between you and me, I'm not so sure it wasn't me, but don't tell Tina.

05/11/08 : Taking the girls to London

2008-11-06T07:34:00.001Z

Growing up, I yearned for my parents to take my sister and I to London; in the midst of the IRA threat hanging over into the 1980s, I can understand their apprehension. A similar feeling of nervousness pervaded our plans to take Seren and Freya to London today - since July 7 2005 I have used the Underground daily, but the prospect of taking our two precious children onto the network somehow still seems a difficult decision, even three-plus years on.

We make an annual pilgrimage to Harrods, simply to visit the Christmas department. Seren came with us for the first time last year, and this year it was Freya's turn to see the magical pinnacle of festive commerce (at eight months it doesn't make sense, but that's not the point). The destination aside - it makes me feel like I'm a short-sighted tourist - I'm keen that our girls experience London regularly from an early age, and if that means starting with an obvious place, so be it.

The day in Knightsbridge's biggest draw provided three, perhaps obvious, conclusions.

The first is that threats of Tube terrorism as a reason for not using the Underground should be secondary to the actual act of traversing London using a transport system that is far from buggy-friendly, unless you wish to carry your pushchair up the numerous steps you walk down every day as a commuter, but which are nigh on impossible with small kids. With a heavy double buggy, it's even harder. But we managed it, and I even got a minor work-out too. It was worth it anyway just to see the look on Seren's face as we whizzed through tunnels. Furthermore judging by the smiles she and Freya were receiving from the other passengers, it's made me realise that kids aren't loathed on the Underground after all.

The second conclusion was perhaps inevitable : kids love toy departments and Christmas decorations. After being stuck in her buggy most of the morning, Seren was in her element running round and picking object after object up squealing 'Look at this mummy! Look at this daddy!'. I've never seen her so excited. They say children make parents feel younger, and that was certainly the case here.

The final conclusion came when both Seren and Freya fell asleep in the taxi back to Euston : London is tiring. Even as a commuter, making the trip to London most days in the week, I was shattered at night, and we'd only actually been there for a few hours.

15/10/08 : DPT at The Roundhouse

2008-10-15T08:30:00.001+01:00

I went to see Dirty Pretty Things (the band of Carl Barat, the Libertine who isn't Pete Doherty) at The Roundhouse in Camden last night. I was expecting the band to be shambolic, as they always are, but I wasn't expecting the sound to be as murky and muddy as a large venue, given The Roundhouse's relative intimacy. It was so bad that in place of the usual twin guitar / bass / drums set-up for the majority of the gig you could only hear the rhythm section.

DPT had announced a few days before that they were quitting, which meant I approached the gig with slight disdain - where usually I'd accept them being 'ramshackle' and disorganised, knowing that they were splitting up made me view this as disinterestedness on the part of the band. It also brought into sharp relief how patchy the second album is. Concerts like this serve only to reduce the legacy of Barat's band to a mere footprint in the extended history of The Libertines.

On the positive, I got to go to The Roundhouse, which really is an incredible, historic venue, and the gloomy mood was lifted after my wife found Nikki from Big Brother in the toilets singing along badly to Arctic Monkeys songs.

Change

2008-07-26T07:13:00.002+01:00

I've always thought that I cope with change reasonably well. Sometimes, for example when your children are born, you don't really have an option but to cope. Elsewhere, I've been through countless restructures at work, changes of role, had routines and habits frequently turned upside down and have simply got on with it.

However, in the last few years I have found it hard to accept change in my birth town of Stratford-upon-Avon. I struggle to be positive about anything that alters Stratford from how it was when I was a child. I clearly have an idyllic, frozen image in my mind and anything that threatens that isn’t comfortable to me.

It is perhaps because Stratford still retains the character and personality – even in these modern times – of an English market town. Certainly the abundance of half-timbered Tudor houses connected to England's greatest playwright have done much to keep Stratford unspoilt. There’s the vast green park which wraps itself around Stratford's two principle theatres – the RSC and The Swan – and Holy Trinity church, a park which quickly flows into beautiful unspoilt countryside and which is bisected by the Avon; apart from some improvements to the playground, a new café and a shiny but unnecessary bandstand, the park remains almost exactly the same as from when I was a child.

Elsewhere, Stratford is no longer the same place I remember. The shops of my childhood – RH Bailey's toyshop with its distinctive smell that I can still remember to this day; Midland Ed with its well in the centre; the old Tesco where my sister threw up by the tills; the card shop on Henley Street where I went with my nan to buy a 50th birthday card for an uncle; the Derek Lamb-owned toyshop in Bell Court where I met and was terrified by Star Wars' Darth Vader; another branch of the same toyshop on Wood Street where dad took me to choose a toy, a grey mouse, for my newborn sister; Music Junction where I bought most of the records that I love the most – all of these places are now gone, mere memories and nothing more. In most cases, the shop may have gone but the actual building is retained much as it was owing to a wealth of listed building orders. Not so with the old Post Office, an admittedly ugly block of a building that had a new frontage applied in the 1990s to allow it to blend in with neighbouring shops. Okay, it may look better now aesthetically, but give me that ugly redundant Post Office building any day over the derivative branch of New Look that resides there now.

Putting aside tenancy changes and the expansion of Stratford's housing out into the green belts and fields that once bordered the town, the far bigger change to hit me personally is with regard to my old high school. Stratford-upon-Avon High School was the location of my academic studies for seven years, and while I don't necessarily agree with the old phrase that your days at school are the best years of your life, a lot of formative things happened to me at that school. Admittedly, not all of those things were necessarily good, and indeed there were a number of absolutely terrible events while I was there, but my overriding memory of my time at this school is a positive one.

Therefore, antiquated and ill-equipped for modern times though it may well have been, to demolish the place and build a shiny new school next door to it, and to turn much of the land formerly occupied by my old school to housing, is tragic. It feels like someone indiscriminately snuffed out a major part of my personal history, leaving just memories which will fade out over time. I’ll never be able to show my daughters the school their daddy spent such a long time at and they’ll never be fully able to visualise the layout, outbuildings and playgrounds so vividly etched in my own mind when I describe them to them.

The old Stratford-upon-Avon High School was quirky and in places so old as to have a looming, overbearing presence, just like some of the teachers did. The main buildings, formed around a quadrangle in which the wiry-haired science teacher Mr Turner would keep bees and on one occasion sheep, dated back to a time when the school was formally divided into a girls’ school and a boys’ school. Each had their own assembly halls that during our time at the school were given over to the ‘Lower’ school and the ‘Upper’ school for the obligatory weekly talks by the heads of the respective schools. The boys’ half included the science labs and the girls’ half the home economics rooms, reflecting a time when sexual equality was an abhorrent concept. This segregation went further still, with the playground originally divided so as to prevent intermingling and the distractions afforded, during those pubescent years, by the opposite sex. Bleak though it often appeared during the autumn and winter months, the quadrangle was a green lung at the heart of the school and it instilled a sense of order that the derivative pile that is the new school lacks; at first glance the new school could be a generic office building, utterly devoid of character and soul.

Like many schools, the High School retained a suite of temporary classrooms that had become permanent. These black, wooden huts were hot and uncomfortable in the summer and crushing during the wet weather when you’d have to stand outside waiting to go into class in the rain, your blazer, books and bag becoming ever soggier. There was also a more modern, but still old, building known as the Maths block which was rather ill-named given that only one room of the six or seven in there was used for that topic. When the sixth form common rooms moved from their home in no doubt asbestos- and occasionally rat-riddled cream-coloured concrete sheds on the leftmost edge of the playground, they moved us into the Maths block, and it was here that I spent most of my time in the final year at the school. I have no fond memories whatsoever of the gym building and the sports hall. When I recently looked around schools for Seren I visibly shuddered when they took us into the sports hall. Too many memories of being last picked for sports leave a mark on a man. Similarly, I have no pleasant memories of the dinner hall, beyond the fact that I must have consumed a lifetime’s worth of sausage rolls and nasty cup-a-soups in a very short space of time given that I only went in there for a term at best.

In all honesty, I'd struggle to make a convincing case for the architectural beauty of the High School. It was, in all senses, a poor relation to the boys’ grammar school with its supporting annual funding from the Clopton Foundation and the girls’ grammar school in nearby Shottery. The school, just as the September 1988 intake I was part of joined, had a terrible reputation, a terrible uniform and terrible grades. I had the good-fortune to be there during a time when all of those things improved, but being a basic comprehensive in a town with not one, but two, grammar schools always rendered it somehow second-rate. But it worked for me and many of the people who I was at school with, and you just have to look at the career paths that many of us have taken to see that the High School did a lot of things right.

But that High School simply doesn’t exist any more. Call me sentimental, but I miss it. Perhaps it’s not just about the building itself, but about the array of experiences that went with it, be they first girlfriends or getting head butted for the first time and all the myriad points in between.

There are many further examples of change. On the Birmingham Road there was once an Amoco petrol station that was pulled down to make room for apartments; ugly though it was, it was part of the fabric of my childhood since I’d walk past it every day I went into town with my mother. Further up the same road a Texaco filling station met with the same fate, making me wonder if Stratford has somehow overcome the need for cars given the paucity of petrol pumps in and around the town centre. And then there’s the Island Café, a formerly dilapidated eatery on the roundabout at the top of Henley Street which lay empty for my entire childhood, prompting my sister and I to yearn for the funds to buy it and turn it into a funky hangout for twenty-somethings, and which now looks set to be redeveloped. I agree that it must be a sorry sight for the tourists who flock into the town centre, but it’s sat there, unchanged, for so many years that surely it couldn’t hurt to leave it be?

Then there’s the theatre redevelopment and associated overhauling of the Bancroft Gardens out front. The main RSC theatre was an impressive example of 1930s art deco architecture, designed by Elisabeth Scott. However, austere though its brick-clad exterior might well appear, its proximity to the refurbished Swan and its traditional design meant that, functionally at least, it simply didn’t operate effectively, and was a source of frustration for producers and actors alike. The RSC are right to push for a modern, well-equipped venue as their flagship theatre given the increasingly advanced stage productions of today, but I'm pleased that the planners capitulated to public pressure and allowed much of the original façade to be retained in the new design; although, one simply needs to take a look at the state of the building now – a mere shell bereft or all its former visual power – to wonder whether the builders might now ‘accidentally’ cause the whole structure to collapse anyway, giving the original, more radical plan a new lease of life. As for the Bancroft – the scene of much underage drinking of a Friday night by many a generation of Stratford teenager, spontaneous football matches by topless visiting Brummie lads and sunbathing bikers – a ploughed field would have more visual appeal than the wasteland that currently leads up to the theatre.

To a certain extent, I'm somewhat hypocritical in all of this on two counts. Firstly, I detest the redevelopment and modernising of Stratford, but when it comes to London, whose environs I inhabit during the working week, I'm all for tearing down old and inefficient buildings to make way for shiny new edifices, even though with the current state of the commercial property market they’ll doubtless sit there empty for many years to come. As for Milton Keynes, my home since 2003, I have even less emotional attachment to the buildings and history here, and if they pulled everything in the city centre down tomorrow and started again I wouldn’t mind.

The second point is that I don’t even live in Stratford anymore, and haven’t done so since I went to university in 1995. Furthermore, my parents are about to up sticks and leave the town, leaving me with no immediate familial connection to the town. You could therefore argue that I have no right to criticise given that I clearly didn’t care enough to stay around. Irrespective, Stratford has always been, and will always be, my home and I think that gives me the right to care.

In trying to rectify the latter hypocrisy somewhat, last year I joined the Stratford Society, an organisation with the stated aim of helping ‘preserve and maintain the character and appearance of Stratford-upon-Avon’. I fully accept that I might well be the youngest member of this group, but nevertheless I'm all for a group that only wants to do the best it can to preserve the essential fabric of this unique and important Midlands market town. The Society is respected enough locally to have its collective and informed voice listened to, and is often directly consulted by the town planners over developmental issues, such as the controversial river crossing that I first saw as an architect’s model at the Royal Academy of Arts’ Summer Exhibition last year. Moreover, the Society has been entrusted with the stewardship of certain buildings to ensure they are maintained. A good example would be the project to find a use for the Toll House building which can be found on the town end of Clopton Bridge, a tiny building which has fascinated and enthralled me since I was a child and which one day we might have access to.

Change, I accept, is inevitable and as I said at the start this piece, ordinarily I embrace progress. I think we have to. Stasis, after all, is death. But Stratford is a town preserved in aspic whose essential charm has little need for excessive modernity. I would therefore encourage any similarly minded residents or former residents to shell out a mere £15 and join the Stratford Society. It’s a small price to pay for preservation.

Eleven Short Pieces About People And Trains

2008-01-26T07:55:00.001Z

The issue with trains in this country is that they run badly at the best of times and fail to work at all when something goes wrong. I'm stood on the platform at Wembley Central right this second after being thrown off a train as a result of some selfish soul throwing themselves under a train at Harrow & Wealdstone.

On this train line there are four lines – a set of fast lines going north and a corresponding set of lines heading south. The width of two sets of train lines must be, I don't know, twenty feet. That's a forty foot track width. Assuming this incident happened at the station itself, there's a platform dividing the north / south lines and that must measure about twenty foot also.

A person, even if compressed under a train, could not cover two sets of tracks and a platform. So please forgive me for not comprehending why it is that a train could not pass along one set of lines while the other is blocked. But this is precisely how the powers that be handle something like this – total shutdown. No trains are allowed to move anywhere, Euston is at a total standstill and according to my friend Paul who is currently at Euston, they're telling what must be an absolute throng of commuters that there will be no trains until at least 8.30. I've been here at Wembley since 5.30 and it's now 6.30. Seems like a huge wait for one solitary fatality.

No trains from the North West can get through because they've got to pass through Harrow to get to London. I couldn't even begin to imagine how many passengers are being inconvenienced this evening given that this affects travellers from Glasgow right down to London, but one person has caused a heck of a lot of people a lot of frustration this sticky July evening.

For me, this represents something of a comeuppance. I was in Bournemouth today meeting an IFA with a fund manager from our office. I've been meaning to take this particular fund manager out to lunch for a while to massage his ego and say thanks for a year of support. To what now appears to be my detriment, we chose today for his convenience since he lives in Bournemouth. What I thought was supposed to be a quick sandwich and a chat turned into a three course meal and a full-blown meeting. This meant that I left Bournemouth much later than anticipated, slightly worse for wear and much to the disappointment of my wife, and caught a much later train from Euston back home. If you've ever seen My Name Is Earl, you might well call this karma; bad things happen because you've done bad things.

Predictably, and understandably, I am well and truly in the doghouse over this at home. I have missed my daughter's bedtime, which often leads to her having an unsettled night's sleep. I'm also not going to be around to cook dinner for my wife who really needs to be resting after a day of sickness and looking after a one year old who is running her into the ground.

But hey, it's seven now and we're moving again. It sucks to have been delayed so long, but at least it's earlier than 8.30 and at least I won't be camping out at Wembley.

***

A girl is facing me from the other side of the aisle, applying makeup using her mobile phone as a mirror. Layer after layer goes on, and I'll admit that she was pretty around layer number three, but for all the attention lavished on her face her hair was lank and messy, more like a female mullet than anything fashionable. And she keeps looking at me and is smiling with her eyes, and all I can think of is: please brush your hair. She did eventually and it looked worse than before.

***

It’s a warm day. An older lady opposite me on the tube is taking an age to eat a Mars chocolate bar, each mouthful thoroughly masticated while the chocolate must be melting into nothing in her hand. The front of her right shoe is scuffed right down to the soft brown leather underneath the outer colour, and she's wearing a full coat despite the heat. She is taking up two seats, one with herself the other with a handbag. She's got a shopping trolley hung on the handle of the door that perilously crosses into the next carriage. She has quite a sinister stare, as if she's embittered with the world. The tube pulls up at Barbican and the doors ponderously open. Only then does she start to move, shoving the Mars in her coat pocket as she picks up her bags, then very casually strolls off the train as if it's jolly well going to wait for her before signalling that it's going to move on. She makes it, but only just.

At the next stop, Farringdon, a woman all in white, wearing shorts that were far too short and a blouse that was cut far too low, takes her seat. She's wearing red flip-flops, and carrying a trolley case in one hand and a massive floppy hat in the other. When she sits down the case goes next to her seat and the hat rests in her lap. It's so wide-brimmed that from where I'm sitting all I can see is her skin because of the short shorts and low top and so she appears to be wearing nothing.

***

On the train home, the guy next to me is working on financial spreadsheets on a laptop. He takes a break, pulls the screen closer so that me and the guy next to him can't see (by doing it he's attracted attention and so I take a look out of the corner of my eye) and pulls up a load of hardcore pornography on the screen, not accidentally but deliberately and flicks through it all until he reaches the end of the slideshow, adjusts himself then goes back to his financial modelling. I can't believe someone would do this in the rush hour, but it was at least more interesting than the spreadsheets.

***

I had breakfast with my sister this morning at a hotel near Pimlico Underground station. I couldn't face a fry-up; I've always been a bit funny about cooked breakfasts in places that I haven't been to before, and even more so when I can see into the kitchens like I could when Natalie and I went to the buffet to load up. It's a strange thing to get anxious about, but a constant whenever I go somewhere new; for some reason too the sight of loads of food laid out like this makes me really ill, like I'm going to have to eat it all. I drank far too much coffee, leaving me with a horrible feeling in my mouth. I don't see Natalie often enough and I didn't see her for long enough this morning.

Saying farewell at Pimlico, I took the Victoria Line to Oxford Circus. I'm always amazed at London's second 'rush hour', consisting of the last stragglers going to work plus the intransient population who've just eaten their breakfast and are ready to hit the tourist attractions of the city at the same time. They're all sat there with their identical maps, trying to work out where they need to get off to see the sights, or peering up at the tube maps on the curved ceilings of the carriage for validation that they are actually heading the right way.

***

As if it wasn't bad enough that she basically sat on my arm when she got on the train, and then proceeded to talk her bland friend and celebrity gossip down the phone as loud as she liked, she then started playing with her ponytail like some kid of about five years old, giving it five twizzles with her forefinger and thumb before pushing the end of the stubby little tail into her ear; all the while she's doing it she's sucking her thumb. She then stops, perhaps realises that she's about fifteen years older than the person she's acting like, and then starts again. There are some irritating people in this world. I find myself shaking my head in disbelief at how annoying and immature she is which prompts a female passenger opposite to laugh at me and causes me to roll my eyes.

***

I sat opposite a very pretty woman on the tube this morning. She was listening to her iPod. Toward the end of the journey from Euston Square to Liverpool Street she flicked through the playlist – the 'clicker' volume was up, but because she was attractive I didn't find myself getting annoyed like I would normally – and changed the track. Her brown eyes then started to moisten and her lip began to tremble, so this song obviously meant something to her. She stayed on the train when I alighted at Liverpool Street and I'll never know whether she properly burst into tears, but it touched me to see someone so emotional in a city so often, and so necessarily, devoid of feeling.

***

One is a guy eking out an existence asking for people to give him their used travel cards, he claims, to enable him to get to work. I have no issue with this – it facilitates a redistribution of a 24-hour permit where more than one person could use a travel card without lining the pockets of TFL. It’s a bit like the generous individuals who hand you their all-day parking permit when leaving the car park before it’s due to run out. TFL and NCP only advise you not to pass these permits only in a draconian attempt to make more money, someone once said to me and I have to say that I agree. Someone also said it funds drug abuse as they then sell the tickets they’ve just got for free to someone else. Drugs must be cheap these days.

The other is a Malcolm McLaren look-alike who travels first class, dresses in jackets from Aquascutum in large, exploded check in the manner of a Teddy Boy / Dandy mutation, who pronounces the 'th' correctly in the name of his friend, Anthony, and who insists on slamming the slide door to the first class carriage whenever the guard leaves it slightly ajar.

***

Am I the only one who gets annoyed with pedestrians who walk at a slower pace than me? I've just followed a woman down the stairs at Euston Square who seemed to have no idea whatsoever that there was a queue of people like me behind her who don't want to meander their way to the Tube during the rush-hour. I attribute this to one thing – ridiculous heels that mean their wearers can only move at the slowest possible speeds.

***

There's a potentially pretty petite girl – blonde, freckled and lightly tanned – sat opposite me on the train home. She's wearing her hair half up, half down and is wearing a long royal blue knitted top with button down shoulder straps and flecks of glitter over a black T-shirt with leggings tucked into dark brown fur-lined boots, one leg folded neatly over the other. At her feet sits a huge bronze-coloured handbag. She seems, to me in my naivety, exquisitely fashionable. But, really, what do I know? Is she wearing this Autumn's colours and textures, last year's or even next year's? Does this flatter her figure or is this a huge faux pas on her part? These are things I ponder to myself, pointlessly I have to admit.

She's reading a copy of today's The London Paper and folding each page back crisply and meticulously. None of this is particularly new or original; you see trendy young things absorbed in that rag day in, day out on this journey, although her obsessively neat folding is somewhat and uncharacteristically neurotic perhaps. Tidy paper, tidy mind I guess. What surprises me is that we're currently twenty minutes into this train journey and yet she's only made it to page five and even allowing for reading every single word, the cereal bar she ate after completing page three and the brief call she made to someone from her BlackBerry Pearl, that's an incredible amount of time to spend reading the largely empty pages of this free paper when I read it nearly in its entirety earlier between Liverpool Street and Farringdon (three stops or six minutes). What did I miss, I wonder, that has captivated this girl's attention and is causing her to furrow her brow at every article?

***

I couldn't get out of bed early enough this morning to catch my usual 06.43 train and so left the house later than normal, chided by a crow on the roof of the house opposite that seemed determined to wake the rest of the street at this ungodly hour. At the station I bumped into my friends Paul and Matthew but as they both travel on first class tickets whereas I, a mere pauper, can barely afford standard, I elected to take a different train which was by then pulling onto the opposite platform prompting me to leg it back up the stairs, over the bridge and down onto platform two with seconds to spare.

On the packed, but otherwise silent train, seats were few and far between. At Bletchley, two young, arrogant well-groomed City boys jumped on. One sat behind me, the other next to me across the aisle. In a complete absence of spatial awareness, the two struck up a conversation about girls, sport and so on, which although not especially loud, was audible over my iPod even at a moderate volume. Because of the stillness elsewhere in the carriage the conversation seemed frustratingly louder than it actually was, and any second I expected someone to berate these two for not realising that their conversation was distracting for those around me – readers, sleepers, BlackBerry addicts – but no-one does; one of the guys gets off at Watford Junction and peace once again descends on the carriage as we head on toward London.

2008-01-20T07:52:00.000Z

Second Babies

In anywhere between three and seven weeks' time, my wife will give birth to our second child, who, if the sonographer at Milton Keynes Hospital's view is to be believed, will be another little girl to complement our daughter Seren. This will round off our family in the way we always wanted, in other words to have two children reasonably early on (at least by today's standards - my mother was 25 when she had me), quite close together (there will be a 21-month gap between the two kids). Will there be a third? ‘Never say never’ they say; I say 'never'. But we reserve the right to deny that we ever said this should there be an accidental ('surprise') third child.

I haven't been a good father to my unborn daughter (we shall assume she was right). At least, I don't feel like I have been so far. With Seren I'd read her stories through my wife's tummy, I'd talk to her to acquaint her with her daddy's voice, and generally felt like I'd done a reasonable job of bonding with her unborn form. The books say this is a good thing to do, but I've done very little of that this time. I'd reason that our new baby has heard me talking to Seren and reading her stories, so I'd hope that my voice should by now be pretty familiar. But that hasn't stopped me feeling regretful of not providing her with a similar level of pre-birth bonding.

Depressingly, our second little girl has probably heard far too much from the hot-headed, argumentative sonofabitch that I seem to have spent much of her gestation being. This I regret immensely. My wife and I have spent far too long in the past eight months rowing, and we've had some of the most spectacular blow-outs we’ve had since the early, volatile days of our relationship's youth. For anyone who knows me that doesn't belong to my family, this might be a surprise as I'm considered a calm and measured individual. But that ability to dig a trench and fire volley after volley exists in me, and Michelle also. If I was especially mean, and if I wanted to have another blazing row, I'd blame the unstable hormone cocktail which someone hands to all newly-pregnant women in the early weeks after discovering they're having a child.

The real issue at the heart of these arguments has been my inability to effectively manage any sort of meaningful work / life balance. This has meant I've missed the majority of appointments Michelle's had at the doctors and midwife, whereas when she was carrying Seren I made as much effort as possible to get along to those important appointments to show my support to my wife; in my life I've tried to avoid settling for what I consider outdated male / female responsibilities, and so I considered it my duty as a husband and parent to show that commitment. Plus you get to hear your baby's heartbeat, which even through a Doppler that makes that noise more like an Aphex Twin track, is entirely wonderful. But I've barely been to any of these appointments because of work commitments, and naturally I regret that also.

Quite rightly, my wife has asserted that I haven't been as committed this time around, and that I have assumed, on account of her coping admirably whilst pregnant with Seren, that she doesn't actually require my support. Arguably, second time around, and with a toddler in tow, she probably needs more support, and for the record I'd like to blame it on circumstance rather than it being seen as some form of deliberate reticence on my part.

One of our nuclear disagreements last autumn was sparked by me saying that I hadn't got my head around the idea of having a second baby; I'd go further than that and say that I've had my head in the sand about it. It's come to a head in recent days as I've ploughed into decorating and furnishing baby's room as to just what's about to happen. There’s nothing quite like a baby due in a few weeks to give you a firm kick up the backside to get things ready for her arrival. In spite of insisting that we wouldn’t, we decided that we’d get Christmas and New Year out of the way before really getting stuck into preparations, giving us just eight weeks to turn a room from an office and treasure trove of horded clutter into a baby’s bedroom, which, bearing in mind that I don’t operate at speed when it comes to decorating (or anything, come to think of it) presented something of a brief timescale. We did the same before Seren was born, except there we had five months post New Year before her arrival.

Michelle asked me for assurances in the past few days that I wasn't going to have a massive freak-out like I did last time, referencing the tearful outburst I had in the car whilst chasing the ambulance to the hospital. Something about the way she looked at me and the tone in her voice adequately conveyed to me that she was actually telling me, in no uncertain terms, that I was not going to be doing that. Sadly, unbeknown to her I have the stirrings of a panic right now, exacerbated by the folder she produced a few days ago containing the notes from our National Childbirth Trust attendance two years back. I can't remember anything about labour positions, breathing methods or any of the helpful things I can do as the supportive birth partner. This scares me. I don’t like being unprepared.

'Having a second baby's easy,' said a wizened work colleague, 'and it'll be over before you know it.' Far from reassuring, this didn't help the rising nervousness at all. On a clear run I can get from work to home in an hour and a half, and that's at best! What if it all happens very quickly while I'm at work and I don't get back home in time for the birth, an event I promised I wouldn't miss. On top of already feeling like I haven't done enough for my wife or unborn daughter during this pregnancy, I think if I missed the birth the guilt would just about finish me off. Either that or my wife would.

I don't associate it with my slow acceptance of having a second baby, but I haven't told as many people at work about Michelle being pregnant again. Part of me, I suppose, has a natural tendency toward not making a fuss or drawing attention to myself, and perhaps I'd have been the same with Seren if people around me hadn't chosen to make a big song and dance about it. Part of me just assumes that people wouldn't be anywhere near as interested this time, and so there are still people sitting close to me who still don't know. It doesn't mean I'm not proud of becoming a dad for the second time, because I really am; I just don't expect them to have the same level of enthusiasm as I do, or indeed they had the last time.

An inevitable consequence of this being the second baby, and having the benefit of a modicum more experience, means that you tend to make decisions far quicker. Not this time have we compared the prices and quality of muslin cloths and other minute details; instead you realise they’re all pretty much the same and that they’re only going to get covered in sick or other similarly delightful substances, and grab the first one that comes along. In the same vein, we haven’t spent as long mulling over names for this child, and have decided pretty quickly. Maybe it’s just that we don’t have the time, with Seren to look after these days, to deliberate as much as we could last time.

Time has not been kind this pregnancy. I wouldn't say that time was especially forgiving last time, but I seem to recollect feeling that the experience seemed to go on forever, rendering us desperate at the very end for the baby to arrive. That isn't the case this time. It doesn't seem like five minutes ago that we took the test and found out what we'd suspected for a couple of weeks. Now, with a room half finished, all sorts of things left to purchase or claim back from Seren's cousin, and a whole lot of mental preparation besides, we feel like we could do with another couple of months to prepare. Actually, perhaps that's just me, as Michelle's rapidly getting to the point where she just wants it over, to get her figure back and to start seeing the fruits, literally, of her labours.

2008-01-13T07:32:00.000Z

An Almost Entirely Pointless Piece On The Weather

There was something about the girl at the station's legs that caught my eye. It wasn't that they were a particularly nice pair of legs, in fact I'd go so far as to say that they were positively among the worst legs I've ever seen. The reason I noticed them is simply because it was precisely that: a pair of legs, and at this cold time of year you don't tend to see the female of the species baring their pins to the world. But that's precisely what this young woman was doing, in a tiny skirt that certainly looked professional (albeit most definitely not in the business sense of that word), the effect worsened considerably by not wearing any tights. Being very pale, it was the combination of the two that made her stand out as she walked through the ticket hall toward the bitterly cold Milton Keynes weather outside. Seeing her dressed the way she was made me shiver, in spite of seemingly being prepared for a blizzard.

I can't begin to imagine what possesses someone to dress in such an inappropriate manner – in the sense of it not being the appropriate weather for such an outfit (but also in the sense of not being able to carry it off). Everyone knows it's cold in January, so I can't fathom why someone like this woman, when planning what to wear that day, would pick out something suited to a mere handful of days, and that's if we're blessed enough here in Britain to actually get a summer, but even if the forecast in January was for mild weather, surely something inside would tell you that a skirt that short isn't sensible. To then think that you'll wear it sans hosiery is surely beyond stupid.

There's a guy who parks his car next to mine during the week whose wardrobe barely changes all year. He wears a short-sleeved shirt every single day, and right up until late November was wearing one without a coat; as the temperature dropped, his sole concession has been to stick on a very thin jacket, of the variety worn by a tennis player from about 1985 after a match. He takes the same walk as me down to the station, and normally has a head-start on me, leaving me trailing woefully behind and wondering how it's possible for him to be so impervious to the cold.

Don't even get me started on the guys who bring their bikes onto the train and wear those tiny lycra cycling shorts and t-shirts. While I admire their commitment to fitness, such clobber practically induces hypothermia in me just thinking about it.

We have a South African family living opposite us. We call the patriarch No Shoes because in the summer he very rarely wears anything on his feet. He also wears shorts for the most part of the year and only in the last few weeks has he started wearing long trousers. He's one of those alpha male types, so it's probably the case that he's too proud to admit to being cold. I don't understand it though; when I was at university, we had a high Greek student population, and it was always the case that during even the balmiest British summer term, they’d be wearing thick North Face puffer jackets. When I asked one of the more approachable chaps in one of my classes as to why this was the case, he explained that compared to their own weather, this was actually cold. Accordingly, during winter the puffer jacket was augmented by enormous Thinsulated gloves and scarves that were more like blankets. The effect was to swell the ordinarily trim guys into clones of the Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters.

So, given that No Shoes has moved from similarly sunny climes to Britain, surely he is similarly acutely sensitive to drops in temperature. But still he persists in wearing the barest minimum when stepping outside his front door, whatever the weather. I can only assume that during the winter his heating is fired up to maximum and that this distorts his ability to discern the correct temperature. All I know is that when I see him wearing a t-shirt outside during the winter it makes me feel really cold.

Writing about No Shoes reminded me of a boy I went to primary school with, Anthony Sutton. I recall one day being in the toilets before the school day started when an awful kafuffle started coming from one of the stalls, from a wailing boy and what sounded like an adult female. Said boy was the aforementioned Anthony and the adult was his mother. I think it was a day during late autumn, and a note had come around to parents advising that the summer uniform had come to an end and that girls needed to switch from their summer dresses to a blouse and skirt, whereas boys needed to stop wearing those horrid little grey shorts they made us wear in favour of long trousers.

I couldn’t wait for that memo to come round and I was in my long trousers faster than you could say Jack Frost, but Anthony was far less enthusiastic. In fact, he seemed pretty opposed to the idea, as the fracas in the toilet stall was his mother trying to get him to put on his long trousers rather than the shorts she’d put him in evidently just to coerce him as far as the school gate. According to my own mother, who spoke to Anthony’s at the school gate later that day, the only way she managed to get him to wear the long trousers was by taking a pair and cutting them down into shorts so that he’d see there was nothing to be afraid of. Fancy being scared of a pair of long trousers! I’m not really one to comment, I was afraid of wellington boots and would beg my mum to let me stay at home when the snow started falling as I didn’t want to have to put them on to go to school. I was also scared of whoopee cushions. I had a few issues as a child.

A few years ago the company I work for recruited two new copywriters. One, Nick I think his name was, was a really nice chap who I had a lot of time for. As these were not client-facing roles, there was no requirement for anyone in our team to wear especially formal work attire, so in the department none of us – barring one guy who felt it was his esteemed duty to ensure he was sartorially well-represented in expensive Richard James suits and equally pricey ties – wore a necktie, for example. If I had to go along with a client director to a face to face meeting with his client, I’d dig out a tie from my abysmal collection, but only ever wear it for the duration of that meeting, and wouldn’t be able to get it off fast enough afterwards (I’m still like this today actually, despite being in a client-facing role now).

All through Nick’s tenure with us, which I think started early summer that year, he never wore a tie, for the reasons mentioned above. One day during that winter he came in wearing full suit and tie, making all of us speculate that he was probably off for an interview as it was so out of character. And yet, for the rest of that week he wore the same get-up so I asked him one day why the sea change in dress, to which he responded that the tie was merely a way of stopping his neck getting cold. Why a scarf wouldn’t have sufficed I don’t know. He was a bit quirky like that. I think he went off to write books about marginal cricket stars from bygone years or something.

I had a friend from school, Luke, who went to Newcastle University. By email one day he commented on how little the girls in Newcastle wore on an average winter evening out. I saw a picture on the front cover of one of the tabloids just after New Year which made me think about this; the photo was supposed to be highlighting how bad British binge-drinking had become, the picture being of five or six scantily-clad young women falling about all over the pavements swigging from bottles of alcopops during a New Year night out. The first thing I thought when I saw the picture was not ‘terrible state of affairs all this binge drinking ain’t it?’ but ‘why on earth aren’t they cold?’, the answer to which probably lies in the advanced state of inebriation they were clearly in.

Suffice to say, it’s cold, I’m cold and I can’t wait for the spring to arrive. And whilst I of course don’t support the rape and pillage of our planet which is giving rise to hotter summers and melting ice-caps, at least these days the temperatures don’t seem to drop as far as they did in the seemingly glacial years of my boyhood where you used to get thick layers of snow every year, people used to regularly have snowball fights and go sledging, and you used to see foot-long icicles hanging from overflowing gutters.

2007-12-21T07:35:00.000Z

An Untravelled Man

I would readily admit that I'm not well-travelled. Family holidays were not spent in what could be described in any way, shape or form as adventurous or exotic destinations, and since moving out from living with my parents nearly fifteen years ago travel and holidaying has not been a major priority.

This in itself is ironic perhaps since for almost ten years I've lived on the doorstep of London Luton Airport, thus providing access to a whole host of interesting European destinations; however, despite this relative ease with which we could take ourselves off to any manner of up and coming city destinations pretty much anywhere in Europe, I've probably used that airport more in the past twelve months for travelling up to Glasgow with work than in the last ten years overall.

My job does require me to do a fair bit of travelling, but unlike some of my colleagues who are regularly jetting off to Malta, or at the very least some slightly different places within the UK, I seem to travel to or through the same places over and over again – typically Bristol, Glasgow, Leeds, Birmingham and London (where the office is). Generally any places I do travel to will be for one day only and so I never really get a perspective on the town or city itself, which is quite sad. Tourists can of course be extremely annoying, but perhaps it’s more disrespectful to not be in a position to take an interest whatsoever.

Take Bristol, for example. I've probably been to this South West city maybe fifty times since I started working in this role, and yet all I seem to do is arrive by train, walk to my client’s offices or the neighbouring Marriott hotel, and then head back to the station. I know very little about the city or its history and yet I'm there probably once per week. During the summer last year I was lucky enough to take a taxi from Bristol Temple Meads station up to Clifton, which opened my eyes to the very beautiful architecture that I had no idea existed, whereas another taxi ride took me from Temple Meads to Clevedon where this time it was the surrounding countryside that caught my attention; previously I'd considered Bristol a dirty, soulless place with no appealing features, which I now concede was extremely naïve, and I feel compelled to apologise.

A colleague with whom I travelled to Exeter last year observed how much of a nice city this was, but then made a very obvious but no less important assertion – any city will appear more beautiful on a sunny day, which indeed it was when we were departing. When we arrived the weather was far from pleasant, and my initial feelings toward this place that I'd never been to before were not exactly positive, particularly the area at the end of the high street where unsympathetically-designed post-War concrete abominations nestled uncomfortably next to other, no doubt listed buildings.

I was reminded of my colleague’s astute observation when I travelled to Harrogate earlier in the year; many people have remarked to me how beautiful this Yorkshire town is, and so it was with a sense of keenness that I accepted the invitation to visit a client here. However, the weather was as it seems to always be whenever I head up to Yorkshire – cold, wet and damp – and thus Harrogate, for all its beautiful buildings and stored-up wealth, initially disappointed. I must learn to approach things less superficially in the future.

Birmingham I have known for many years owing to having been born and having lived in the area, but only recently has my interest in a location changed from being about the quality of its shopping complexes to the quality of its public spaces and retention and restoration of original buildings. And Birmingham, much to my delight, doesn’t disappoint. Of course there are ugly post-War concrete constructions in the city centre, but head along Corporation Street from New Street Station toward Centenary Square and the grandeur of the surrounding buildings is truly breathtaking. Then again, at the other end of Corporation Street, the new Bull Ring shopping centre is a master stroke of modern construction; give me a preference though and I'd prefer to have a coffee outside one of the cafes on the approach to Centenary Square and bask in the imposing glory thereof rather than struggle to find a seat among the shoppers at the Bull Ring.

Glasgow for me follows the same theme as Bristol – my only knowledge of Glasgow is the taxi ride from the airport to my client’s offices on West George Street. I've done this journey perhaps six times in the last two years. Taking a taxi is often the best way to see a city, but in the case of Glasgow there is very little of interest on the motorway that takes you from the airport and which essentially drops you right into the centre of Glasgow with nary a glance of any of the beautiful architecture that Scotland’s second city is renowned for. Again, two occasions more recently – one where I stayed at a city centre hotel and one where I was driven between meetings in Glasgow, Aberdeen, Dundee and Edinburgh over the course of two days – have enabled me to see and appreciate much more of the city and its surroundings.

As for London, as I've said here several times, working in the City has given me the freedom to get to know a place which has fired my imagination from my earliest years. With London the balance between hugely impressive, grandiose buildings from various points in the city’s history, balanced alongside exciting and innovative modern constructions does not irk me at all. There are offices in the Holborn area, for example, which cast a shameful shadow over London’s eloquence and majesty, and I'm all for tearing these atrocities down and making our capital a shining example of how old and new can nestle comfortably together. Am I traditional enough to suggest that they shouldn’t be constructing buildings that have the potential to obscure certain views of St Paul’s Cathedral? Not especially, so long as the views I do cherish, such as from the South Bank next to the Tate Modern or the way the great dome seems to rest atop the neighbouring buildings of Paternoster Square until you get up close; as long as these are retained I’m pretty comfortable.

The freedom to explore London gives you a very clear exposure to its history, which is writ large throughout the roads, alleyways and landmarks. The investment in London’s heritage is evident wherever you turn, and one cannot help but feel an intense sense of pride in our great Capital; the tourists who flock here every year are truly spoilt if they are following a historic trail, and even if they come to London for the shopping alone then they cannot help but be exposed to a sense of London’s splendour and grandeur just by sticking to well-trodden retail walkways.

If I'm rather under-travelled in this country then I am even less so abroad. Faced with the choice between a ‘beach’ holiday or a ‘city’ break, I'd prefer the latter, but I've been on far more of the former. Of the European cities I've been to – Bonn, Barcelona and Prague – I can recall little of Barcelona, a sense of awe but little else of Bonn and a blend of fascination and disappointment when it comes to Prague. When we went there back in 2003, our friend commented on how beautiful the city would look in the snow. In direct contrast to my colleague’s observation about how anywhere looks nice in good weather, Prague is indeed a place which one could imagine as much more romantic in the snow. Sadly, my views on this are rather tainted by the fact that it didn’t snow while we were there, but rather started just before the taxi came to pick us up from our hotel, leaving my wife and I to spend a night in the airport waiting for it to reopen the following morning. Let me tell you, there is nothing worse than queuing at a transfer desk all night, only to end up in a fracas with a Lithuanian when you finally get to the front of the line. Consequently, the notion of heading back to Prague to soak up any sort of Christmas-y atmosphere is likely to fill me more with dread than wistful romantic longing.

My major disappointment with Prague was the way the city completely changed as nightfall descended. In the daytime, the Czech capital is an architectural delight, glorious, ambitious and decadent in equal measure; its bridges, palaces and cathedrals are second to none. By night however, doors that are shut during the daytime reveal themselves to be adult-oriented clubs, and the city’s attraction to hen and stag parties becomes evident. It’s a sad state of affairs when such an incredible location becomes marred by the sort of lax sex tourism which reverses much of the good work establishing the Czech Republic as a worthy destination for international business and commerce.

The destination that has had by far the biggest impact on my interest in travelling is definitely New York. This is no surprise – most people are captivated by the Big Apple when they first arrive and so they should be. Perhaps it’s the way that Manhattan’s unfeasibly vertical landscape reveals itself so dramatically, almost theatrically – one imagines the orchestra pit sounding a grand, rousing crescendo as the first glimpse of the Empire State Building fills your eyes – on the approach from JFK or the sense of bizarre familiarity from seeing NYC in so many movies and television shows. In any case, New York is a topic for another day, but suffice to say that nothing about New York City disappointed, and I have no doubts that when our daughters are old enough we will be making many, many more trips there.

The planning and research that my wife and I (though she did far more than I) did before heading out to New York, and our appetite for soaking up Manhattan’s many landmarks, both obvious and hidden, has fundamentally changed my attitude to travelling, whether it be with work or as a leisure traveller. I am now much more keen to soak up a destination’s history, architecture and culture, much more keen to make that effort rather than breezing in and out again. No longer will I write off a place on either first glance or reputation, which was my previous inclination, and which was evident in the comment from the train guard on the Birmingham to Bristol service I was on and which prompted me to start tapping this piece out; as we approached Cheltenham – a fine, regal Spa town – the guard commented ‘We are now approaching Fred West land. Sorry, I mean Cheltenham.’

This is the kind of crass generalisation which I myself would have been guilty of in even the recent past. It’s the kind of narrow-mindedness which means people still think of a majestic city like Manchester – a modern, thriving and above all progressive city – as being filled with gun-toting drug barons; or Liverpool being populated by scallies with curly hair and tracksuits in the manner of Harry Enfield’s comic creations; or of Glasgow being filled with Trainspotting-esque characters belting down the streets to Iggy Pop tracks while high on smack. Besides, anyone with a modicum of general knowledge would know that the serial killer the announcer was mentioning lived in Gloucester, not Cheltenham.

2007-09-14T08:28:00.000+01:00

Hotels : Part 3

Last year, Channel 5 ran a series called The Hotel Inspector, in which respected hotelier Ruth Watson (who you will presumably only have ever heard of if you work in the industry) stays at a hotel, tells them it’s crap and suggests ways of changing the hotel to make it more modern / affordable / profitable depending on the issue that particular hotel is facing. It’s essentially a copycat of Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares with less swearing but similarly obstinate and blinkered business owners. Whilst mildly amusing – one episode focussed on Sparkles Hotel in Blackpool which was an ill-conceived children’s hotel that looked at best like a child’s bad dream and at worst a child-snatcher’s paradise – The Hotel Inspector has forced me to come to the conclusion that I have long-suspected – that non-chain hotels in the UK are basically shit.

Like most things these days, we are made to believe that choosing something anti-corporate – farmer’s markets rather than Tesco, a small café rather than Starbucks – is preferable. So it is with hotels; if it’s a Marriott, by implication it must be generic and overpriced and when you wake up in the morning you’ll forget which global city you’re staying in; if it’s a small, family run hotel with a few rooms and personal service, you’ve picked a winner. On paper this looks fine, and certainly very compelling. You have a romantic vision of character properties with about five rooms, each individually decorated, with attentive service and handmade food made with local, organic ingredients. The reality is that this applies to a tiny, tiny proportion of hotels in this country. The vast majority are seedy, dirty little places which by rights aren’t deserving of any customers. Blackpool, according to The Hotel Inspector, has 1800 hotels charging an average of £20 per night. £20 per night! If we work on the principle that the higher the price of something is the better its perceived quality is, then you can’t help but know that you’re not going to get very much for £20 per night. I’d be surprised if you even got a bed for that price. Unless of course that sum is a per-hour rate, which is perhaps more likely.

I used to live in Colchester while studying, and always used to look lovingly at the Peveril Hotel on North Hill. It seemed to exude an old-worldly character with its half-timbered exterior and imposing arched doorway. Whenever I walked past it I wondered what it would be like to stay there. A few years after graduating, my ex-girlfriend and I went back to Colchester for the university summer ball, and stayed at the Peveril. What a mistake. The place may have looked antediluvian from the outside, but from the inside it resembled the kind of place that the council put Eastern European migrants and those on benefits until suitable social housing is available. It was dirty, the bed sagged and the TV didn't work. I was violently sick after the ball in the dismal little bathroom (separated from the main room by, I kid you not, a garden gate) and I swear it was because of the lack of cleanliness in the hotel. Okay, perhaps it was from the alcohol. It was a stinker, as was the place we also stayed at that year in Kingston-upon-Thames which was equally ramshackle and dilapidated. This does rather colour one’s impression of small, non-chain hotels, and it was with some relief that I started to stay in larger, cleaner and better equipped places as my career began.

There are of course some exceptions to the ‘small hotel equals bad hotel’ rule. Strattons, for example, is a family-run hotel in Swaffham, Norfolk with a handful of exquisite suites designed for couples looking for a romantic getaway. It is also a socially-responsible hotel with a real focus on recycling and composting waste, growing their own vegetables and conserving energy. They have cats in the lobby and lounge, chickens in the front garden, and one of the best menus in the whole of Norfolk, although the dinner arrangements (waiting in the lounge to peruse the menu with a glass of wine and whoever else is also waiting for their table) left a little to be desired. Their kedgeree on the breakfast menu is however probably the single best breakfast you will ever eat in any eatery in the world, period. But it’s not cheap; it’s more expensive than most Norfolk hotels, but it is truly worth the price. Moving from the east to the west, Mount Haven Hotel in Marazion, near Penzance is also a shining example of a well-run independent hotel benefiting from well-designed contemporary rooms, bespoke artwork (which can be purchased) and an excellent raised, decked patio which overlooks St Michael’s Mount. Again, it’s not cheap; but again it’s worth it. The owner (Orange Trevillion) is as mad as the aforementioned Mrs Sparkles, but well-meaning, although attempts to create a relaxing paradise with statues of Buddha and incense sticks was rather lost on me.

Okay, so views on big chains and the odd example of good independents aside, the hard and indisputable facts are that hotels from the large or even moderately-sized chains are going to be better. I defy you to disagree.

At the most basic level, the profits that these hotel companies make mean that they continually invest in and enhance their facilities, and their financiers and corporate backers are always going to lend them money. By being broadly oligopolistic in competition terms, the big chains basically determine what the smaller hotels need to offer in order to survive. I stayed at a hotel, which I believe was three star, in Earl’s Court about ten years ago. This hotel only had three rooms which were en suite; now everyone expects a hotel to have all rooms to have en suite facilities. The large chains can renovate their rooms efficiently and quickly to respond to enhanced customer expectation, whereas something like this customer-led demand could force a small hotel out of business, either through not having the funds to complete the work or through guests choosing a hotel with such facilities over theirs. By offering something that another large chain doesn’t offer – complimentary bottled water in the room, as an example – that chain basically creates a precedent that the other hotels must follow; they essentially create that heightened customer expectation, simply because they can.

The Smith Family recently took a trip to Cornwall. This is more or less an annual ritual since my sister moved there a few years back, and a combination of genuine interest in the area as well as familial duty means that going to Cornwall has become a feature of each subsequent year’s holiday plans. However, the fact remains that Cornwall is A Long Way Away. No matter how you cut it, travelling from anywhere north west of Bristol to Cornwall is a bitch of a journey, not helped any by the fact that my sister and her husband have decided to make their home in Penzance, which is about as far west as you can go in this country without running out of land. So, after a particularly difficult journey last time, we resolved this time that we’d try to make the journey work for us rather than against us.

In so doing we experienced the best and perhaps worst of independent hotels; nothing quite so distasteful as Sparkles (as I write this I am now actually on my way, like a condemned man, to Blackpool; thankfully toward the Hilton rather than aforementioned fleapit, but actually it could be quite amusing to see that place for real), but poor nonetheless. In an effort to make the journey from Milton Keynes to Cornwall more enjoyable (not that I find long car journeys in any way enjoyable anyway), we decided to stay in Bath for a night. Bath’s a place I've been through many times on the train before but I've never stopped there. The closest I've got to stopping there was a few months back when the train I was on got stopped outside the station, the reason being that a man on the train in front, Wild (South) West style, was holding up the train with a pistol. But, that aside, Bath is about halfway along the journey from home to Penzance, and it just seemed like a good place to spend a night.

We stayed at a B&B called Oldfields, on Wells Road. Oldfields is a Victorian villa built from (what else) Cotswold stone and was one of the best places we’ve ever stayed. The staff were really friendly and helpful, telling you about the local area and where to go, and they couldn’t have done more for us in terms of making sure that our daughter had everything she needed. The room itself was perfect for what we wanted – nice and spacious, traditional without looking old-fashioned with views across their beautifully-maintained garden. We even had a four-poster bed which rather made me think that I was a visiting dignitary. We also managed to find a creative way of avoiding the same thing that happened in Manchester a few months back where Seren slept in the same room as us leaving us with no choice but to sit very still and talk very quietly in the dark; the en suite bathroom was enormous, and so we put her travel cot in there, affording us a modicum of normality.

Contrast this with Driftwood, where we stayed whilst in Cornwall. Driftwood sits atop a cliff in North West Cornwall and was recommended to us by a friend and her husband, and also the sleek Mr & Mrs Smith hotel directory, from which the aforementioned Strattons was also chosen. We specifically booked Driftwood because of those recommendations, and also because we secured the ‘cabin’ which was separate from the hotel and included a second bedroom for Seren, plus a lounge, kitchenette etc. It just seemed to suit our needs perfectly. The hotel is a top scorer on the TripAdvisor website, and so we were prepared to be blown away.

First, the positives. The view from the cabin was, without question, breathtaking. On the first night, we sat in our lounge eating a meal and barely spoke – we just sat transfixed by the sea and the sun slowly setting over the English Channel. And we did indeed benefit from having a second bedroom, although on the second and indeed final night Seren was too unsettled to sleep in that room and slept in our room, so it was ultimately pointless, but the idea was there. That’s about all the positives I can find, and one of those only turned out to be half positive but it was hardly the hotel’s fault, so we shall now quickly move on to the negatives.

The biggest negative was the apparently positive positioning of the cabin away from the hotel. It was certainly away from the hotel, there’s no denying that. It was across a small field which sloped down toward the cliff top, through a gate, down a series of moss-covered steps, and through another gate. The steps ran past the gate to the cabin and on to a private beach and the cabin was out of view of the main hotel. The first night I was too worn out by the journey to think about it, plus a bottle of red wine certainly helped, but on the (sober) second night I began to feel distinctly uneasy. If we’d collectively slipped on the moss or if anyone had come to the cabin in the middle of the night and murdered or us or snatched Seren (a real parental concern in June, post Madeleine McCann’s disappearance), no-one would have ever known until we were supposed to check out as there was no CCTV. And on that second night I kept imagining just how chilling it would be to hear the sound of footsteps in the gravel outside the cabin. It’s been a while since I read a Stephen King novel but it wouldn’t have been a bad setting for that kind of tale.

Then there was the unevenness of the floor. It really felt like the whole structure was a gust of wind away from blowing off the cliff top into the sea, but mostly it was the fact that the cabin felt like an afterthought, an opportunity by the proprietors (well-spoken ex-Londoners) to make a bit more cash, since whereas the main hotel appeared to have been repainted and rebuilt, the cabin felt like it was decaying and crumbling away and had merely been painted; the only thing connecting it to the main hotel was the colour scheme and the trinkets and objects in the rooms. It reminded me of a chalet my parents, sister and I stayed in during a rainy Whitsun holiday in Weston-Super-Mare. I suspect the effect they were going for was ‘quaint’ or ‘New England’. I just thought ‘potential death trap’. Oh, and did I mention the spiders and woodlice?

It cost us a small fortune and I'd never go back. I envied the well-to-do couples arriving in their Mercedes with matching Louis Vuitton luggage knowing that they were staying in the main hotel, where you were entitled to a tray of tea in the morning as a wake-up call. Alarm bells did ring when the receptionist on the night we arrived (a gormless kitchen porter) went through the motions of explaining about the tea tray and then rapidly back-pedalled when he saw where we were staying.

So, where do I stand now? Give me a large chain any day of the week.

2007-08-14T08:03:00.000+01:00

Approaching Again

There are journeys which can be so long and arduous that the mere thought of getting in the car can fill you with a weighty dread. The first time that you make the journey you approach it with optimism and relish the prospect of seeing new things along the way; it doesn't faze you the first time simply because you don't know what to expect. Equally, when someone tells you it's going to take a certain length of time, your first reaction wouldn't ordinarily be 'my that's a long way' and in fact you'd find ways of convincing yourself that it would actually be manageable, shorter, not tiring or tedious, exciting, thrilling.

What happens when you meet roadworks, when your directions are out of date and you find yourself being taken on a diversion which doesn't reconcile with your map? What happens if it's not a clear run but a hard slog; isn't exciting at all but instead dangerous, dull or depressingly longer than you thought? How can you then approach the same journey again with a positive outlook when you've seen that it wasn't as straightforward or as breezily fun as you thought it might be?

It is here that I find myself, about to make a journey that I've made before but one which wasn't quite what I thought it would be; good, great and amazing on the one hand; long, painful and unpredictable on the other. A vast unknown stands before me – will the route be the same as last time? Will we meet the same obstructions? Will we remember all the things we said we'd remember last time? What if we lose our way when we've got to the end of the road? What if one of us is unable to drive or our car breaks down and we need emergency repairs at the roadside? Worse, what happens if we have some sort of accident and simply can't make it to the end of the road? We had fun on the way last time – what if this time it's not the same?

These are not the glass-half-empty concerns of a man about to make a drive from Lands End to John O'Groats. These are the fears of a man who will become a father again next Spring, less than two years after making that journey before, a man who loves his daughter with every thought, deed and breath but who worries that he just might not be able to cope quite so well next time; a man who worries that it might put his relationship with his wife under all sorts of stresses and strains; a man who fears daily about the security of his employment almost as frequently as he worries about his daughter's future and suddenly fears that he might not be able to provide for his expanding family anywhere near as well as he has done so far. The fears of a man who worries that his first born may grow up resenting her brother or sister or that the brother or sister may grow up in the shadow of an older sibling; a man whose home may suddenly become too small and too cluttered but because of that fear of financial failing may have to suffice to avoid the risk of further gearing.

I worry that our next child may not be quite the happy, undemanding soul that Seren has always been; what if he or she is sickly, doesn't feed well or needs much more attention? And what if the rudimentary parenting skills I've evidenced so far, and which I'm really proud of, don't work next time? What if we have a boy and he gets frustrated that I'm not able to teach him about sport, war games, games consoles or any other 'boy stuff' because I've never been any good at those things? What if Seren and her sibling aren't friends like we hope they might be? And what if it's twins?

When we were first asked when we'd be having another child – gosh, that question must have been posed perhaps 30 seconds after Seren was delivered, I'm sure – my initial reaction was one of unrestrained panic, and my principal concern was that I wouldn't know how to love a second child; do I grow another heart to love that child or must I split my love for Seren further? It sounds like a terribly bleak question, as of course, like everyone else facing this situation, I will love that child implicitly; I just don’t know how to do this without upsetting Seren, who is not spoilt as such, but is certainly benefiting from our total focus on her for the past year. I still don't know how to remove this concern, but I'm hoping it will resolve itself over the next six months. I just don't want either Seren or her brother or sister to feel that we don't love them individually less than 100%. Equally, I don't want Seren to resent us for bringing another child into her world, in much the same way that a cat reacts aggressively to an invasion of their territory by another feline.

Seren has the benefit of a cousin just a year younger than herself which will hopefully get her used to the idea of another child in the Smith household. So far, there has been a pronounced uneasiness on Seren’s behalf toward Mia. She gets very upset when she sees her mother feeding or cuddling this other baby in front of her. We can only hope that by increasing Seren’s exposure to another small child in the time until her brother or sister arrives, this will make her less perturbed at not having the monopoly on all the attention.

I am torn in two – elated, truly over the moon about becoming a dad again so soon after Seren. I know that pregnancy, although fraught at times, had some incredible high points, and I can't wait to feel that rush of joyous emotion when we first hear that heartbeat or see the crude outline of our child at the first scan, that intense feeling of pride when that child is handed to me, the rush of love and respect for my wife after going through labour. There is so much to look forward to, so many things to enjoy and not endure. And the thought of our family growing again and becoming complete swells my heart with longing. These are the glass-half-full thoughts that make the journey totally worthwhile and which flow easily when I let them. I trust that you will forgive me for my apprehension and put this down to parental concern and husbandly worry. Just because I have experienced an earlier pregnancy, labour and parenthood already does not necessarily bring expertise and I'm sure that my worries and shared by many a second-time parent. Let’s just call it cautious optimism.

Having started this series of articles back when my wife was still pregnant with Seren, I can see how I was feeling then, and also sitting here today know that the fears I had back then were largely unfounded. Back then I remarked on how fundamentally underprepared I felt. The advantage of having experienced this all before does happily mean that I'm approaching this next child in a less panicked state of mind, although it is clearly early days right now and I do expect a familiar sense of panic and urgency to set in, probably after Christmas if it’s anything at all like last time. The period up to Christmas always seems to drag; it’s a little like climbing a massive rollercoaster, only to find yourself trying to apply an imaginary brake once you’re at the top to stop yourself careering headlong downward faster and faster. At least with this particular ride I know where the twists and turns generally lie now.

Much of my concern this time around is to do with logistics, really. How will we manage to feed and tend to a demanding newborn baby with a child who will still be a bit unsteady on her feet when her sibling is born, and who will herself still need constant looking after? We won’t need a new car (unless we are having twins of course), but we do need to create a second bedroom for the second baby to live in; at the moment that room is an office cum storage room cum general waste bin, and in order to return this to being a bedroom we will need to convert our garage (also a dumping ground) into a kitchen to free up the old kitchen to become an office. The only question around this is of course when am I going to get the time to clear out both rooms, flog a load of unwanted rubbish on eBay, get builders around and then decorate given that it’s already hard enough, with a one year old and a time-intensive career, to get even small things done? I still haven’t finished the decorating in our house, and we’ve lived there for four years.

So many questions, so many new challenges to think about. But underpinning all of this is a wonderful, fantastic and totally wanted event and I don’t much care if it does feel a bit tough at times; it will all be absolutely the most amazing journey to take, and even if occasionally we lose our way or we get diverted or if any one or combination of those things above happen, that journey is going be totally worth it.

2007-07-24T08:19:00.000+01:00

Rufus Wainwright

In my more experimentally-minded younger days, and actually right up until my wife fell pregnant with our first child, I used to read an excellent music magazine called The Wire. The Wire is the benchmark for esoteric music, broadly covering everything from jazz to electronica, and tends to steer clear of anything that might feasibly count as 'chart bothering', although they have courted controversy among their readership by featuring artists like Radiohead who are only loosely experimental (but which help an independent publication shift a few extra copies and reach a wider audience; not a bad thing really). Anyway, the final page used to be given over to either a music journalist or artist to describe their own personal musical epiphany. I think I've had my own, and his name is Rufus Wainwright.

I first heard Wainwright's name in a review of Hal Wilner's Leonard Cohen tribute concert, where Rufus performed alongside Nick Cave, who happens to be one of my favourite singers, and other cult and uncompromising artists. I first heard Wainwright's voice on an intentionally-negative Christmas album given away free with Mojo magazine (the track 'Blue Christmas'). I was interested, but not committed. The next time Wainwright reached these ears was on a duet with (groan) Dido on the Bridget Jones : Edge Of Reason soundtrack, which was uneasy listening since I can't stand Dido.

A year or so later, one bank holiday in 2006, we bought some CDs in an HMV sale and Michelle bought a double CD collection of Wainwright's Want albums, which she stuck in the CD player on the way home from town. I say this from the perspective of someone whose ears have been pricked by many sounds over the years, but I had never heard anything like Want One's opener 'Oh What A World' in my life before. More specifically, I had never before had a singer's voice captivate me so completely before. I can imagine that I must have sat there with my mouth slack-jawed, unable to focus on anything but that voice.

That I even listened beyond the first bar is indicative of how different my music taste is these days. Wainwright's music, while by turns plangent and strident, introverted and extroverted, includes a heavy dose of theatre and drama, as if he was schooled in the vaudevillian musicals of Broadway in his adopted home of Manhattan. As children, my sister and I were dragged along to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in our native Stratford-upon-Avon for a performance of a musical (usually My Fair Lady or Oklahoma or some such) by the local amateur dramatics society, and I hated absolutely everything about musicals. To find myself suddenly attracted to Wainwright's songs given my early disregard for many of those 'stage' elements was therefore rather surprising.

But attracted I was and hooked on Wainwright's distinctive approach to songs I became. Wainwright's songs are filled with a beauty and grace, a downtrodden wretchedness and sudden flashes of humour, occasionally all at once. I can't quite fathom precisely what it is that so appeals; the voice and arrangements are a given, while the rest I attribute to Wainwright's status as a resident of New York. For some reason, I got it into my head while reading The Catcher In The Rye that the well-to-do but reckless Holden Caufield was Rufus Wainwright; I'm not sure what he'd make of that, but there was something in JD Sallis' depiction of a Park Avenue prince wandering freely around Manhattan that songs like '14th Street', 'I Don't Know What It Is' and 'Millbrook' and so many other songs brought to life. Certainly, given his residency of Gramercy Park and the Wainwright lineage back to first Governor of New Amsterdam Peter Stuyvesant, he isn’t so far from a prince after all. They couldn't be further apart, but between Interpol, whose music my wife also got me into around the same time and who are also based in New York, these two very different musical propositions vividly colour my aural recollections of a visit to Manhattan.

In spite of how incredible this voice was to me, some part of me, jaded by the music industry's constant digital tampering with vocals made me think somewhat negatively that the voice I was hearing had somehow been staged or embellished. My mouth went dry again after listening to the cover of Leonard Cohen's 'Chelsea Hotel No 2' from Hal Wilner's tribute (available as a bonus track on Want Two) when, after enjoying the song to its conclusion, an audience struck up with rapturous applause and I realised that Wainwright was simply a wonderfully gifted singer whose performances are undiminished outside a studio setting. If I was hooked before 'Chelsea Hotel No 2', after listening to that I was well and truly smitten.

Quite rightly, Wainwright's clear sexuality – he claims he was never in the closet but was born in the living room – doesn't affect my enjoyment of his music at all. Just as well, as after seeing him lip-sync his way through his own version of the Judy Garland song 'Get Happy', replete with lippy, hat and high heels, a more narrow-minded individual might have balked at the prospect. But it is who he is and it informs the music he makes and I love the music. Sexual preference doesn't even come into it, as it quite rightly shouldn’t.

We caught Wainwright live in concert on 25th June at Oxford's New Theatre, a setting far more suited to his particular brand of music than Glastonbury was a few days before. I have, I fear used the term 'incredible' rather too freely in relation to previous concerts since this particular, perfect performance knocked any preceding – and I'm sure future – concert into sharp relief. I have never in my life been so rapt nor I have applauded so rapturously as I did on that night, and unless I'm privileged enough to see him perform again, I can't think of any other artist or concert that could top it.

Wainwright is a great showman with a sense of humour (like his cross-dressing lip-synching above or donning lederhosen for the entire duration of the concert's second half) and doesn't take himself too seriously, even when he ballses up one of his own songs like he did on Oxford’s 'Nobody's Off The Hook' or his and sister Martha's spine-tingling cover of Cohen's 'Hallelujah' from the weekend's Glastonbury set. He’s also refreshingly self-deprecating but at the same time brimming with confident energy. Switching between guitars and piano, Wainwright is a clear front man, but his band of seven musicians are all talented in their own right, lending his songs the appropriate gravity and colour.

Another surprising aspect of the concert was the length – they came on at about 8.15 and didn't leave the stage until nearly 11.00, although in true theatrical style they did have an interlude, and in that time crammed in almost 25 songs. The set included every track from the latest album Release The Stars (which is itself refreshing, implying that the artist firmly believes in the validity of his most recent work, rather than throwing in a couple of new tracks into a set of mostly old material), selections from the Rufus back catalogue, three Judy Garland covers and a mic-less take on 'Mackushla' made famous at the start of the last century by John McCormack. Highlights were many, as were surprises such as the performance of 'Complainte De La Butte' from the soundtrack to Moulin Rouge delivered in perfect French. (Well, I assume perfect French as I can’t personally recall much from my GCSE days apart from ‘Je voudrais un sandwich au jambon’; ironic, since I don’t eat meat any more. A trip to France today would be a hungry one.)

During a conversation around my sister's kitchen table, I found myself gushing about how excellent Rufus Wainwright is. I don’t tend to try and force my musical tastes onto anyone, and most people know better than to try and foist theirs on me. But I truly think that a voice this incredible deserves to be heard by more people (although my contribution to the ‘Listen to Rufus’ campaign pales into insignificance compared to a recent performance of lead single from Release The Stars, ‘Going To A Town’ on Friday Night With Jonathan Ross’).

My sister said that they’d been discussing music in their local pub with some friends one evening, and that as a group they were trying to decide whether they thought Rufus was any good. One of their friends asserted that for her Wainwright was a bit like Marmite – you either love it or hate it. What can I say? I hated that brown gloopy yeast spread as a kid (I once picked up what I thought was a jam sandwich at a party when I was four only to discover it was actually Marmite, prompting me to very nearly be sick) and despite people saying that it is not possible to switch from hating the stuff to loving it I learned to love it in my mid-twenties. If Rufus Wainwright is at all like Marmite then I can only suggest you listen to 'Chelsea Hotel No 2' on Want Two, and see if you aren't converted yourself.

2007-07-15T07:25:00.000+01:00

Taste and Decency

Should I perhaps be concerned that my wife is reading a book called The Adulterer's Club? Should she in fact be more concerned that I have just finished reading Lolita, a book that made my stomach turn with disgust and one that I feared my fellow commuters would consider me a shameful pervert for reading? (To clarify, I was reading this as part of The Independent's 'Banned Books' series which also includes A Clockwork Orange and Kafka's Metamorphosis.)

Reading is the great past-time of the commuting public, second only to sleeping and reading a newspaper. Not sleeping and reading a newspaper at the same time (although many a commuter can be seen dozing off while reading the news), as that is surely beyond even the most talented multi-tasking female, but I'd say that the order would be reading a book, then reading a newspaper and finally soundly sleeping. One of those distasteful free London newspapers recently said that the favourite distraction of commuters was gazing at an attractive fellow commuter, but that seems impossible when people’s eyes are either buried in some reading material or tightly shut.

People's reading habits - if the literary preferences of the people on the trains I take can be considered a fair representation of the general public – broadly mirrors people's listening habits. It's the usual pedestrian, big-name rubbish that you see time after time. I'm pleased that people take an interest in reading (and listening to music for that matter), but it does concern me that people gravitate time after time to the kind of books that you see increasingly advertised on posters and billboards – bankable authors capable of shifting many a thousand copy for the publishers. The synergies and similarities between publishing houses and record companies are now so entwined that it makes complete sense for a company like HMV to own Waterstone's; hence, given my opinions on the increased commoditisation by the publishers and record companies of our tastes via the outlets that force it further into our eyes and ears, it may not surprise you to hear that the recent announcement from HMV that its profits for the year to end April had halved actually brought a wry smile to this face.

I was, however, bitterly disappointed to hear that small music retailer Fopp had gone bust. Aside from Other Music in Manhattan, to me Fopp was the best music retailer in the world. Over the past ten years I have probably bought 50 CDs and books from various branches of this innovative retailer, but spent hardly any money because you could pick up back catalogue CDs for a fiver. Even though it was a chain (albeit a small one), branches of Fopp had the feel of a small independent music shop, like Rough Trade in Covent Garden, and it felt like it was a secret only known to absolute music connoisseurs. Unfortunately that was probably its undoing in the end because not enough people knew about it. Fopp RIP.

I don't feel superior by reading classic, confrontational, risqué or indeed just plain unusual literature on the train; I just feel like an individual with a predilection for variety and the obscure. I don't feel smug by listening to leftfield music on my iPod; I just feel like this is the only tangible way I can express a sense of individuality in a world that increasingly respects convenient homogeneity over the interesting. Still there's no escape from corporate branding here either – our tastes are branded 'alternative' and my fellow individualists and I are herded together under this convenient descriptor. But give me Bret Easton Ellis over Harlan Coben or Vince Flynn any day; Nick Cave over James Morrison and you'll make me happy.

Further observation of commuting behaviour would actually reveal that the next most popular habit among the proportion of the populace who either by choice or necessity are forced to take a train from home to work, would not be reading or sleeping, but acting self-centred and obnoxious. I'm a considerate and polite commuter myself; I'll let people off the tube before I try to board, and I'll graciously allow others to alight before me rather than leaving them sat in their seats waiting for a break in the queue of people heading through the doors and onto the platform.

Oh how beatific my life would be if only people offered me the same level of courtesy and respect!

Even in spite of an expanding waistline, I am of slight build. This isn't a problem for me, in fact I actually quite like the way I was made. However, this slim frame tends to mean that fat men tend to gravitate to the vacant seat next to me. It's the only way I can explain the way such rotund individuals will take up a quarter of my seat or hog the arm rest as if it's their God-given right to more space on account of their sizeable backsides. It seems I am not alone in this as my travelling friend Paul (who I'm sure would not mind me saying that he's a bit larger than I) was yesterday recounting a situation where a huge fatty took the window seat next to his and wedged his large bulk into the seat, and in so doing displaced Paul so that he was left clinging on to his own seat by one solitary buttock. When Paul then wedged an elbow into his tubby chair sharer's ribs – both to anchor his precarious body to the chair and to make the point that the other chap was taking up too much room – the fatty looked at Paul as if to say 'What's your problem pal?'

As if sharing your seat with another person larger that yourself wasn't bad enough, the experience can be rendered far worse if, for example, it's a blazing hot summer's day and said individual cannot control their sweating or body odour. That's happened to me once or twice and each time I've felt physically sick. The other day on the tube I sat next to someone who had this really overpowering sweet odour which, after a few minutes of plundering the olfactory memory banks in order to identify what the smell reminded me of, turned out to be the smell of McDonald's BBQ sauce for McNuggets. Lovin' it indeed, but perhaps a touch too much.

The other day a guy sidled up to my seated self, gestured at the vacant seat and emitted a small grunt. This virtually non-existent communication was intended as an enquiry over whether the seat was in fact taken. I shook my head and returned to my musings. I just knew he was going to be an arrogant bastard. Everything about his manner up to that point suggested it. So, he flopped himself down, immediately knocked my elbow off the arm rest, dumped his Costa sandwich on the tray, pulled out his mobile and proceeded to have the loudest, expletive- and sexual reference-filled conversation I've probably ever heard on a midday train. He signed off with a 'ciao' as if the nineties never happened and then ploughed into his sandwich with the table manners of a hog in the woods.

This being one of Mr Branson's always clean trains, a woman came along the train asking if anyone had any rubbish. The man next to me, now sated, picked up his empty sandwich carton and thrust it toward the woman without such a thing as a word of thanks. I really don’t think a bit of politeness would have gone amiss here, but this was clearly a man with a huge arrogance problem.

I recently happened to be catching a later train than my regular evening one. I think it was during half-term because the train was quite empty at first. It still got busy, but five minutes before the train departed there were still empty seats, which never happens during term time. I was sat by the rear doors of the carriage and the seat next to me was empty. Sitting there reading my book idly, waiting for the doors to close and the trip home to commence (I never seem able to relax fully until those doors close and we're on our way) I became dimly aware of the smell of cigarette smoke drifting into the train. I looked out of the window and there on the platform was a guy of about my age smoking. This was clearly before the smoking ban made station platforms marginally more bearable, and whilst it was annoying, it happened quite a lot before July 1 so I didn't think anything of it. The guy stubbed out his fag and walked onto the train behind where I was sitting.

As soon as he boarded I realised this guy was a really heavy smoker. I've never been able to describe it very well, but you know when you go into the house of a family where everyone smokes and has done for generations? The way that everything has that saturated smell? Well, this guy smelt like that and the odour was so strong that I could smell it even from where I was sitting. The smell of old smoke was threaded through his clothes as if the tailor making his suit had poured the contents of an ashtray between the actual suit fabric and the lining before sewing it up. As he got on, and I looked around at the empty seats around me I said to myself 'Please don't sit next to me,' and so of course he did. It took all my willpower not to gag when he sat down, taking the arm rest, naturally, and enveloped me with his nicotine reek. It wouldn't have been so bad, but he then fell asleep and as the train wobbled along his head, facing me, mouth open and snoring away, kept edging ever closer to my shoulder; simultaneously his knee kept moving across to touch mine, prompting me to smack it back onto his side of the seat with my own which then prompted him to snap his head back upright, giving me approximately a minute of comfort before his head started to loll sideward and his knees parted again.

In order to get from Milton Keynes to Wimbledon, like I needed to last week for what was supposed to be the men’s quarter finals, the train traveller has several options. You could, for example, drive down the M1 to Luton Airport Parkway and pick up a direct First Capital Connect service direct to Wimbledon. However, that line is exceptionally busy and unless you’re very lucky a seat is hard to come by even on an early train. Another option would be to go all the way into London, cross the city by tube and pick up a train from Waterloo to Wimbledon. Except that the Northern Line is my least favourite deep line and I never feel totally safe down there since July 7 2005. The third option only seems to come up occasionally, which is to take a train from Milton Keynes to Watford Junction, change there for a train to Clapham Junction, and from there pick up a train to Wimbledon. (An aside on Clapham Junction before we proceed if I may. On the outside edges of one of the platforms as you come in, there is a sign proclaiming the station to be the busiest in Britain. Whilst this may be true, it does feel somewhat disingenuous to advertise commotion and congestion so proudly. Bigger may indeed be better according to the Americans, but spend ten minutes fighting your way off one of the scores of platforms at Clapham Junction and that signage would perhaps serve better as a warning rather than a boast.)

In any case, with the prospect of not having to take the tube and instead gracefully cutting out most of central London overground, the Watford / Clapham route was the one I settled on that day. In many ways, after taking a seat on the train at Watford I wish I had just stayed on the Euston-bound train from Milton Keynes and taken the tube after all. Not because it was delayed or anything like that, but once again because of annoying fellow passengers. Specifically, an English man and his Spanish wife who boarded at the same time as me and were evidently on their way to Gatwick. I have deduced their respective nationalities on account of them talking so loudly.

She was one of life’s panickers, he one of life’s laid back sloths. She was sat next to me, across the aisle from the luggage rack onto which they’d dumped a couple of suitcases, and he was across the aisle in a seat in front of the luggage racks. This seating arrangement was arrived at after a couple of minutes of faffing about because she was worried that someone would try and steal their bags. He wasn’t bothered about it, but she was, and this was the first of many occasions on such a brief journey where her panicking prevailed over his sloth-like ways. They were both about ten years older than I and it dismays me when I see people with considerably more life experience than I just fall to pieces when faced with a slightly out-of-the-ordinary experience.

She then proceeded to worry that the suitcases would be over the weight limits the airline had put in place, so she made her husband stand at the luggage rack and re-distribute their clothes and shoes between the two bags, then test them by holding one in each hand to see if he’d been able to even them up any. She then dived into one of the bags and pulled out loads of magazines which she then thrust into a shopping bag so as to further reduce the weight of one of the bags. It would have been funny if it hadn’t been so sad. She was practically biting her nails with worry.

The next panic came in the form of the price of the tickets. The bag repacking incident now thankfully behind them, she enquired of her husband how much they’d paid for the tickets. He looked at the tickets and responded that it had cost them £13, and they both made little sounds that conveyed they were quite impressed with that price. However, she being inclined to worry, she asked if he’d got a receipt, and she asked to see it. He produced this from his pocket and she once again started to get all fidgety. It turned out that the tickets had in fact cost £16. Honestly, you’d have thought that someone had surreptitiously overcharged them by about a million pounds rather than just £3 by the way she went into a spiral of nervousness, urging her husband to phone the bank or find a guard and ask him what they’d actually paid. I started to feel quite panicked myself by the whole thing and was relieved when a guard came down the train and advised them not to worry, they had indeed paid £13. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the whole carriage (‘This is carriage 2 of 4’, the computerised female announcer kept needlessly pointing out to us all) hadn’t let out a collective cheer at the prospect of the nervous woman calming down at last.

But it still wasn’t over, for she realised that she needed to make a payment to her recently applied-for store card (clearly sold at point of sale by an eager cashier offering her 10% off if she took an account card), but that she hadn’t activated it. Panic levels rose once again into the red. She pulled out the paperwork, drummed agitatedly on the tray while she sat in a call queue and then at last! she got through and within seconds had activated the card. However, in so doing she advised the entire carriage of every single one of her personal details – date of birth, name, address, mobile number, even PIN, even the fact that she always used the same PIN – revealing finally that she wasn’t just one of life’s panicky sorts, but also one of the most stupid.

If you are fond of observing human tastes and behaviour, as I have discovered since writing these pieces that I am, travelling by train allows you to see all sorts of interesting things. That said, when people like the Spanish woman above, the heavy smoker, the arrogant chauvinist, or Paul’s fat friend are sat anywhere near you it does rather amaze you that such exaggerated personalities actually exist in this world. And when it really starts to irritate you, in spite of feeling good about using public transport and doing your bit for the environment, the solitude of sitting in traffic does present a certain appeal. Then again, I'd have nothing to write about then.

2007-06-25T08:28:00.000+01:00

Wired For Punk

I've just finished reading an absolutely outstanding book – England’s Dreaming by Jon Savage. England’s Dreaming is generally regarded as the definitive account of the Sex Pistols and the rapid rise and collapse of British punk rock. It’s one of the few books I've read where the comments on the sleeve heaping plaudits and praise on the author and the book are totally spot on. Well, apart from one that described the book as ‘achingly funny’. That I couldn’t agree with. Unless you liken the Sex Pistols – as the unpopular face of this once-controversial musical strain – to the kind of farce that Spinal Tap so cleverly conveyed, there was very little humour to be found in this book. Certainly there was something delightfully shambolic in Malcolm McLaren’s ultimately unsuccessful bolting together of Machiavellian political meddling and pseudo-Dada agit-art, but as far as I know it was never intended to be funny.

Prior to England’s Dreaming, I’d been reading I Swear I Was There, which recounts the story – in a much less sophisticated manner than Savage’s eloquent discourse – of the two Sex Pistol’s concerts at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall, and the impact that the first concert had on the Manchester music scene, spawning the likes of Buzzcocks and Joy Division. Up next in my reading list is Fashion Is A Passion, which is Pat Gilbert’s equally-definitive story of the Clash.

I find the whole concept of punk so incredibly alluring, perhaps because I was born in 1976, punk’s Year Zero, and was therefore far too young to have been able to participate in this incredible period of music. I have no doubts, however, that if I’d been born a decade and a half before I'd have embraced the sound of punk wholeheartedly. I may have even formed a band. Who knows? Perhaps it’s the disappointment at not having been there the first time around that makes me so intrigued by firstly the music, but secondly the reaction that straight-laced conservative folk had to the aggressive sound of a genuine teenage riot; perhaps it’s because punk is the closest we’ve got in the past thirty years to the creation of rock ‘n roll back in the fifties with its similar effects on the youth (excitement) and adults (fear). Nothing in music subsequently has had anything like this impact.

This all said, I can’t stand the Sex Pistols. Perhaps it’s because their entire genesis and portrayal was handled by McLaren, described in Savage’s tome as a failed artist desperately seeking to make a reactionary mark on culture in some – any – way, and so I can’t help but think of the Pistols as a contrived, constructed entity in much the same way as any of the manufactured pop boy and girl bands which are a recurring theme in the last thirty years of music’s chequered history. Aside from a couple of genuinely outstanding songs, the Pistols should have received virtually no attention whatsoever, but McLaren made damn sure that his puppets received the lion’s share of punk’s dim limelight. Aside from cultivated controversy and a confrontational attitude, musically the Pistols were worthy of less acclaim than some of the worst bands to be heard on the seminal punk compilation of the time, The Roxy, London WC2.

In actual fact, aside from a fondness for Buzzcocks, which has more to do with their pioneering independent aesthetic, the musical output of much of UK punk fails to move me. What is far more appealing is the New York punk scene which developed around iconic clubs like CBGBs on the now rapidly-gentrifying Lower East Side. The Ramones, while at first listen a loud, moronic and childlike band, were in their own formulaic way deconstructing classic rock ‘n roll in a disciplined, Calvanist, manner which is every bit as ‘arty’ as the NYC bands that those art-rock plaudits are more generally heaped upon – Television, Patti Smith and so on. New York punk had genuine connections into the city’s reactionary art scene which leant their punk credibility and conviction. In comparison to UK punk, NYC punk had a sense of purpose and self-belief which UK punk lacked, explaining why New York’s protégés have endured whereas UK punk’s forerunners rapidly shuffled away from their aggressive stance with a veritable sense of near-embarrassment. This lack of longevity can be attributed directly to McLaren whose vision of a punk aesthetic was driven by a brief period of interaction with the New York Dolls who, though important, were the goofball model for the Pistols.

I mentioned above that my attraction to punk was driven by missing out the first time. The issue I had growing up was that my ears could not tolerate loud, guitar-fuelled music. In fact, my route to punk arose from an interest in techno music and electronica which itself grew out of a love of synthpop from my earliest music purchases. Techno, in particular the minimalist techno generated by the likes of Richie ‘Plastikman’ Hawtin was for me a natural distillation of the synthetic sounds which excited me in electronic pop. I used to think that my ship-jumping from the nagging sounds of the dancefloor to punk was unusual, but I've since come across many people who made the same journey.

It happened during my first year at university; I’d spent more money than ever on records by the tail end of that year and my appetite for dance music, from a listening perspective alone and not a club-going one, was at an all-time high. My friends worried that I was spending too much on records that I was only buying on the strength of vaguely knowing the label, and they were probably right. I was in the Our Price store in Colchester’s town centre with my friend Kit when I came across a copy of Pink Flag by Wire in the racks. Wire had come to my attention before, during their eighties electronically-augmented era when they were signed to Mute Records (then, as now, my favourite label), and I’d read in Vox or Select or some other now-redundant rag that Pink Flag was an excellent album; perhaps I was hung over or just looking for an excuse to spend yet more money that I didn’t have, but despite Kit’s cautionary attempts to curb my spending that day, Pink Flag was bought, bagged and on my stereo within a couple of hours.

In the straight-ahead, mechanistic curt little punk tracks like ‘Field Day For The Sundays’ I found similarities between punk rock’s rhythmic repetition and techno’s endless cycles of regular beats and hooks. In Colin Newman’s vocals I found similarities to Underworld’s Karl Hyde; Newman, too, was and still is heading up the Swim~ label which explored his own interest in electronica and the techno of the likes of Gez ‘LFO’ Varley’s solo works. Pink Flag opened my eyes and ears and gradually my interest in electronic music was replaced by more and more guitar-based music. I even recorded a copy of the album for my younger sister, then enjoying her own musical epiphany thanks to Pink Floyd and The Beatles. I wrote in the accompanying note that I thought it was one of the best albums I’d ever heard and that Menswe@r’s ‘Daydreamer’ wouldn’t have existed without Wire’s ‘Lowdown’. Natalie thought it was too heavy for her, whereas I just found it thrilling.

The attraction for me of Wire as an entry-point into punk rock was that they were actually anything but punk; while Pink Flag nods to the nascent punk scene, Wire were much more informed by artistic sensibilities; Newman had built a relationship with Brian Eno, whereas Graham Lewis remarked that the band were principally influenced by Marcel Duchamp. This was refuted by other members of the band, but you don’t have to listen to Pink Flag for long to hear tracks that leant toward experimentalism and delineated structures which would bait and goad the punks when delivered live. The following two Harvest albums, Chairs Missing and 154 further moved the quartet away from their contextually convenient punk routes toward more extreme aesthetic gestures, culminating in a series of shows at Holborn’s Cochrane theatre wherein they wore their art colours defiantly on their sleeves.

Wire, unlike some of their more well-known punk contemporaries, have endured. Their most recent album, Send, was a thrilling and uncompromising record and Newman’s Githead project has further blended his love of oblique lyrics with art-rock backdrops. Githead’s second album, Art Pop, could not be more appropriately named. Wire’s continued existence owes much to the reasons explored above for NYC punk rock’s longevity – artistic, rather than rebellious, roots and an ‘attitude’ or ‘way of life’ informed more by musicality than confrontational opposition. UK punk could never survive while the bands’ only offering was to challenge the old guard. It’s satisfyingly ironic that Johnny Rotten’s reaction against the dinosaur rock and experimentation of Pink Floyd via a defaced T-shirt should have been suppressed so quickly as punk lurched effortlessly and uncontrollably into art’s embrace.

2007-06-19T13:19:00.000+01:00

Hotels : Part 2

A while ago I booked a weekend at the Hilton Manchester Deansgate Hotel, and in an earlier missive explained how difficult the booking process was, and naturally how little confidence I had that the weekend would be a success after those experiences. Well, the weekend was last weekend, and I'm pleased to say that it passed without major mishap and was a great weekend all told.

Well, kind of.

The hotel itself, situated at the south end of Deansgate is certainly impressive, or rather the building in which it is housed – the 47-storey, 171m Beetham Tower – is impressive. As we drove into Manchester on the M60, we saw a huge structure rising majestically on the horizon with a curious jutting addition on one side, rather evoking memories of a certain upended Tetris tile. At first I assumed it wasn't as tall as it looked and that as we approached it would appear far smaller. Not used to seeing skyscapers like the Beetham Tower in isolation – it's far and away the tallest structure in Manchester after the CIS Building on Balloon Street, and stands out more so due to the comparatively low concentration of tall buildings in Manchester compared to, say, Canary Wharf. It's sleek, modern and both one of the tallest mixed-use buildings in the UK (the upper twenty-odd stories are residential) and one of the tallest buildings outside London. It's also one of the thinnest skyscrapers in the world (from the side), measured by the proportion of height to width. And so, generally being the kind of person to get excited about tall buildings, when we got a little closer and saw the Hilton logo emblazoned half-way up, I was quite excited.

Problem number one came in the shape of the parking at the hotel – there isn't any, but there is an NCP next door. Except that unless you arrive with the workers at the start of the day (coincidentally when the check-in staff would laugh at you and tell you to come back later), you've a cat in a hot place's chance of getting a space. We found ourselves in another car park adjacent to this one in a converted railway shed, then realised just how far away from the hotel we actually were, quickly worked out how many trips we would have to make from car to hotel room along a not inconsiderable stretch of Deansgate just to move into our room, and emitted a loud groan. The receptionist, when we finally got to the desk, suggested that concierge might be happy to help us with our bags from the car, except that the thought of trying to make idle chit-chat with a stranger, plus the requisite tip he would no doubt expect, really didn't appeal. I enquired why it was that the hotel didn't have a drop-off point, at which the receptionist gestured at the building workers toiling away in the warm Manchester sun outside, on what would become the drop-off point. Not helpful. I reckon the parking / luggage lugging cost me about an hour of my stay. What perhaps irked me more than the absence of a convenient drop-off area was the insouciant ignorance of the receptionist, who, when I asked whether there was a quick way from the car park to the hotel shrugged his shoulders and said 'I'm sorry, I'm not familiar with the parking around here – I don't drive.' Not what you'd expect.

Aside from room that afforded views out of the city rather than over it, the room was fine, but not what one could describe as outstanding. There was a distinct feeling of style over substance, as if Hilton had attempted to load a heap of contemporary features you'd expect to see in smaller, more modish hotels, into the Deansgate Hotel. To the uninitiated, the inclusion of Villeroy & Boch white ware or an LCD TV could be seen as the height of hotel eloquence, but when placed in one of the pokiest bathrooms I've ever seen it just smacked of trying to be clever. For practical illustration, it was impossible to get to the toilet without fully opening the door, walking into the room, then closing the door behind you, as the toilet was situated behind the door; the door would then swing shut of its own accord, neatly boxing you in – tidy, I grant you, but also rather claustrophobic if so afflicted.

A point, not of the hotel’s doing but worth pausing over nonetheless, would be the comedic and frustrating art of trying to participate in any sort of evening activity – watching the television, eating a meal, listening to music – without waking a child who goes to sleep at 7.00 and who is in their cot in the corner of the room. Well, that point became a rather unfunny joke as our young daughter took an absolute age to settle into a deep slumber, requiring us to stay resolutely out of view and immobile so as not to catch the attention of a creature suddenly more inclined to wanting to play at all hours of the night rather than be her usual soporific self. We resorted to eating dinner in the room, in the dark no less, with me slumped halfway down in a large chair with its back to her travel cot so as to become as close to invisible as possible with Seren trying to find any conceivable way of getting our attention; this may sound funny, but it put paid to any audible conversation I can tell you, and thus we had two very early trips to bed faced with the impracticalities of trying to do anything else. For the (topical) record, at no point would we have considered leaving Seren in her cot while we escaped to the bar or restaurant. Never have, never would.

I have long been of the opinion that the quality of a hotel may be judged solely on one factor – not the attentiveness of the staff, not the amenities or proximity to a city centre, but the quality of room service meals. We enjoyed two beautifully-presented meals on our second night that tasted as good as they looked in their bone-white square bowls on night-black trays. However, my specific room-service measure is a simple one, but one which hotels I've stayed in consistently fail on – the warmth of toast served with a room service breakfast. Whether it was because of the height of the building and therefore the vast distance from kitchen to room, but the toast was stone cold by the time it reached our table; similarly, the butter was practically frozen, leaving you trying to forcibly spread this onto toast which is breaking up and turning to crumbs as your knife presses down aggressively upon it. So zero points for that I'm afraid.

And then there was check-out. Having moved the car closer to the hotel I was not at all concerned about the distance from room to car which plagued our first day, but we decided to extend our stay and requested a late checkout, which we were duly granted without charge. Pleased that we could enjoy the city for a little longer in the knowledge that we'd be able to get back into the room, freshen up, change Seren's nappy and not have to leave bags either unsafely in our car or with concierge, we wandered around a very quiet Manchester, making a beeline for various sites of significance to Factory Records and took ourselves to a Pizza Express next to the old Free Trade Hall (mental note – do not take a child to a cavernous, echo-y building if other diners are to enjoy a peaceful prandium).

When we tried to get back into our room, we discovered that our keys had been cancelled. A maid quite innocently let us back into the room, prompting us to wonder whether she'd have done that irrespective of whether it was actually our room or not. When we came to check out properly, the receptionist advised us that we'd in fact settled and checked out already. 'Bonus!' I thought to myself. 'We've got ourselves a free stay.' And then they swiped my card again, leaving me with a somewhat queasy feeling that I'd take a look at my next credit card statement and discover that I'd have been charged twice.

Our weekend in Manchester provided a number of learning points for us about trying to combine parts of our old, largely responsibility-free former lives, with parental duties. More importantly than that, however, it has reminded of just how wrong large hotels can be in so many disparate areas. Manchester Deansgate was a classic mistake of judging a book by its cover – great from the outside, but lacking in some basic areas when you open the cover.

2007-06-11T23:29:00.000+01:00

Art

Like sport, I hardly excelled at art when I was at school. This, I fear, may be of some disappointment to my father, who had himself attended art school, and perhaps also to my mother who was very good at drawing. This lack of proficiency rather coloured my later views toward art, and I’m sure at some point I must have regaled my ex-girlfriend (herself something of a dab hand with a paint brush) about the inherent subjectivity involved in appreciating art, and the pretentiousness of some artists and their work. I probably also tried valiantly to argue the case for music as art, and probably failed.

I enjoyed drawing as a child; I was particularly good at creating line-drawn pictures involving very small, very detailed objects and characters, but as soon as I was no longer drawing for pleasure, I disliked the skill terribly. Painting was a messy chore, and hampered still further by my colour blindness. I remember one Friday afternoon at High School where our teacher, the spelling of whose name I can no longer recall but it was similar to Fraggle, asked us to mix paints and come up with a spectrum in the form of a pie chart. Despite the difficulty of me being able to identify the differences between shades of red and green (the result being a sludgy flat brown mess), she kept me behind after class until it was complete. On a Friday. I think I had a dentist appointment that evening too, which I only got to by running hell for leather out of the school gates.

And thus my early experiences of art left me feeling somewhat negative on the subject. However art has a certain pull and over the years I have found myself drawn to this area more and more. One of the things that awoke in me an interest was the 1994 Underworld album Dubnobasswithmyheadman; Underworld are part of the Tomato design collective, and the sleeve featured what seemed like random fragments of sentences repeated and overlaid so as to obscure parts of the words and create jagged shapes. It seemed so simple and yet so intriguing, and so in very poor imitation I created some similar images using one of our university PCs. Around the same time I found myself drawn to M.C. Escher’s geometrically-warped pieces, but in general any interest in art I possessed was very much leaning toward modern works rather than traditional oil portraits or watercolour landscapes.

Working in London arguably affords anyone with an interest in art of whatever form the perfect opportunity to see excellent works of historic and cultural significance. We are awash with galleries of every shape or size covering any area of the artistic spectrum. In the Tate Modern we have gained a populist masterpiece housing all sorts of unusual works that works as a place for kids to visit right through to the connoisseur, those seemingly polar opposite groups that should mix as well as oil and water (colours). But there is no snootiness here. No surprise to find therefore that this is the most visited art gallery in the world. If I’m feeling pretty energetic, it’s possible for me to leave my company’s offices on Old Broad Street and walk across London Bridge and along the South Bank to the Tate Modern, pitch up for some reflection in the Rothko room (anyone who’s ever listened to the second Joy Division album would find a certain resonance therein), hop over the river on the Millennium Bridge and be back at the office all within an hour’s lunch break. But, hey, what it all means I have no idea.

There was a work being ‘exhibited’ in Milton Keynes in September which I think I do understand. Artist Wolfgang Weileder, along with construction engineers R. Bau and students from a local college were involved in Transfer Project, which ran in the plaza outside Milton Keynes station. Transfer Project saw the group constructing an exactly-sized replica of the boxy Milton Keynes Gallery’s external structure by constructing one wall after the other, and deconstructing the previous wall so that the entire structure was never complete at any one time. As my only passage through the plaza was early morning and early evening, I never saw anyone actually working on the project, and so it was quite enthralling to notice the changes that had been made on any given day.

And therefore for once I am prepared to offer an interpretation of a piece of art. For me, with its constant construction and deconstruction, Transfer Project is the embodiment of ‘impermanence’, a subject I’ve been mulling over for much of my adult life. Nothing in this life is permanent; even the apparently most enduring things are, in the grand scheme of things, over in but an instant, and this is what Weileder’s project represents for me. It also echoes the current trend in architecture toward buildings with a defined lifespan. Gone are the days of projects being built to last; instead buildings are erected with the explicit intention to raze them to the ground and start again some two or three decades later. A friend who works as a property fund manager once told me on a journey on foot through the City that there are office buildings in the Square Mile being pulled down and replaced only twenty years after they were first constructed, that the current elaborate schemes under construction may only exist for a maximum of twenty years until city planning decides that more space is needed and that buildings should reach higher than the current limits dictate.

Impermanence is a frightening subject when considered, morbidly reinforcing one’s mortality and all-too-brief existence upon this earth, and there is a further echo of this in the flat, largely featureless and blank structures of Weilder’s walls when they are constructed; hollow, lifeless, silent. The walls are sheer with the exception of holes where the windows and doors of the actual Gallery would go; whereas the actual MKG is painted a lively, lurid pink and has a roof structure evoking a buoyant wave, Transfer Project is sheer greyness. Perhaps it is also a reaction against the flat concrete, glass and steel buildings evident elsewhere in Milton Keynes.

But then again, maybe it’s just a pile of adult-sized Lego bricks in an otherwise empty space normally utilised as a rudimentary skate park by local youths.

Frustratingly, just before the project ended in mid-October, I walked past the security fence slowly enough to read the description of the installation posted by the Gallery. Apparently Weileder is chiefly interested in the relationship between the temporary and the permanent. At first I thought to myself that for once I had correctly interpreted a piece of art, and I was momentarily elated; this elation rapidly turned to disappointment some seconds later when I realised that my interpretation of the piece above was actually informed by a cursory trip to the artist’s website earlier in the month.

Therefore, my dear friends, you have just read an article that is frankly pointless, banal and irrelevant.

But I guess if you wanted to be highly subjective you could actually call that art.

Fast forward a few months to June, and you would find me being escorted around the Royal Academy of Art on Piccadilly for this year’s Summer Exhibition, which the company I work for has sponsored for the past two years. There is, of course, much here that I do not understand whatsoever, much that I find pointless, but also much that my eye lingers over. The architecture area in Gallery IV is fascinating, and David Hockney’s enormous Bigger Trees Near Water painted on no less than fifty canvases is breathtaking but to these unappreciative eye is so awe-inspiring simply because of its scale.

In Gallery IX there is a piece which once again prompted me to ponder the briefness of our existence, I Just Have To Have You Here A Little Longer, an encased dresser made entirely of cake, sugar, colouring and a tiny bit of wood by artist (patisserie?) Rachel Mount. For the odd sum of £16,320 this piece can be yours, but it will presumably at some point rot away into nothingness.

For me, I’ll stick with my purchase of item 269, The Artists’ Gate by Neil Woodall, not because it is trying to say something to me, but because I happen to think it looks nice. It’s also cheap, tasteful, pastoral and unchallenging, proving that art from this most renowned and esoteric of exhibitions – 239 years and still going strong – can also be appreciated by art dunces like myself.

2007-05-28T22:20:00.000+01:00

Youth And Old Manhood

As you will observe from the title of these articles, in September 2006 I turned thirty. This was, of course, a significant age to have reached, and one could argue that I have reached a level of maturity one would expect when you factor in my years of marriage, length of time as a homeowner and recent inauguration into the world of parenthood. I couldn't honestly say that I feel old, because - despite the jibes of my wife - I am not. True, there are a few lines around the eyes, and my red hair has a few strands of grey, but I think they make me look rather good. Plus, despite my expanding waistline, I'm still of a good weight for my height. So all told, I feel mature in myself, but definitely still youthful.

At least I did until this very evening. I began writing this at 7.30 from the tearoom of Stowe Landscape Gardens, which astute readers will know to be probably my most favourite place in the admittedly small part of the world that I've seen. My wife and I joined the National Trust, which owns Stowe Gardens, last year after a fateful visit to the gardens the September before. After our third visit we decided that this was going to be a place that we would likely be visiting time after time, especially after our daughter was born when family picnics begin to beckon. I have fallen for Stowe's intricate formalism and rich history in a major way.

But even if I am smitten with Stowe, why was I sat there two and a half hours after the park officially closed? And why is it that I am beginning to question whether I could class myself as still being considered youthful? Earlier today I finished reading the Spring edition of the National Trust magazine, which is sent to we members as part of our subscription. Now, I'll admit that I found it an interesting read and certainly enjoyed finding more about some of the properties that I may suggest we visit in the future. But I was rather taken aback at how obviously geared up to the over fifties the National Trust is from the adverts for senior pursuits and those coaching holidays around Europe.

Back to the tearoom. The reason I was there was to listen to a talk given by a gentleman called Arthur Davidson, who is a National Trust volunteer, guide, keen photographer. and evident Stowe enthusiast. I'm here to find out more about the Gardens and its rich history, the temples and the design. My wife, knowing how important Stowe has become to me, suggested I go along to the talk, even though my natural inclination would be not to bother. I questioned my youthful credentials because, with the exception of two young female volunteers, I was the youngest person in the tearooms by about thirty years. You know how old people get wary of groups of teenagers? Well, I felt like that at the talk, only it was me that felt disconnected and out of place. Furthermore, it made me think that I am getting too old for my age, that I shouldn't have been there, that I should be at home playing a mature console wartime shoot ‘em up, saying 'like' and 'innit' a lot, and generally doing something more befitting of a person of thirty.

But then, why the hell shouldn't I have been there? I'm interested in history, I paid my entry ticket the same as everyone else and surely they should think it's commendable that someone so comparatively young is taking an avid interest in history these days. Once I'd got over this feeling of being uncomfortably out of time and place, I had a great time, and I found myself soaking up facts and stories - from the figurative symbolism of the Elysian Fields, through the Palladian Bridge which was once screened off on one side so as to prevent nearby villagers from seeing the rich folk crossing in their carriages, on past temples and formally-structured views back to the starting point, the majestic Temple of Concorde and Victory, seven of whose columns were disgracefully removed by Stowe School for their chapel in the 1920s but which thankfully have been replaced - frantically trying to store them in my head so as not to forget them, before bombarding my wife with said facts when I walked through the door of our house an hour and a half after Arthur's talk started and pleasantly went on well past its supposed hour length.

Fast forward to the following evening, an evening of a very different nature and one perhaps more expected of someone of my age. My wife and I went to the Carling Academy in Birmingham to watch Kings Of Leon in concert, supported by an excellent band called The Stills.

A few years ago, you wouldn't have caught me at a rock concert. I fell in love with guitar-based music quite late, and even when I did it was of the often perceived inaccessible angle worked by bands like Sonic Youth or guitarists like Robert Fripp. Back in those very opinionated days, the idea of listening to straight-up rock would have been abhorrent to me, and if you'd have said that I'd have spent a sweaty evening enjoying the peculiar country rock hybrid that Kings Of Leon have made their own, I'd have scoffed. Back then, you'd have found me at the back of Colchester's Art Centre watching ‘arty’ bands like Labradford noodle around marvellously on stage whilst stroking my chin and nodding knowingly.

Kings Of Leon were as tight a band as they ever have been, delivering songs in a form identical to those on their three excellent albums. It was almost mechanistic or mechanical how precise and perfect they were. The last band I saw that were so honed was Wire back in 2000. The last gig we went to before last night was Dirty Pretty Things, Carl Barat's post-Libertines group (I exclude Razorlight at the NEC as this was a polished stadium concert, not a gig). They were exciting in a very different way - rough around the edges, Arcadian and loose.

Did I feel more suited to this environment? Less uncomfortable, certainly, more like I belonged there. But with my tidy haircut and Joy Division T-shirt, I actually felt a little too old, and certainly too sensible to be amongst teenagers getting drunk and dancing wildly to the assembled Followills up on stage. Despite this feeling once again of being out of time and place like the night before, seeing people older than me made me feel slightly better. They just happened to be there chaperoning their teenage children.

The Sunday after Thursday’s Kings Of Leon gig, and after some obligations to friends whereupon we reflected in a very middle class manner on our lot as parents, my wife and I found ourselves watching Dirty Pretty Things again at Shepherd’s Bush Empire. There was a palpable sense of expectation on media-courted junkie / Kate Moss beau / former Libertine Pete Doherty putting in an appearance after he and Carl were reunited on stage earlier in the week. They were all over the place and from my lofty perch at the back of the very top tier of seating it was thrilling but quite scary to see the pit of people in front of the stage expanding and contracting like some giant amorphous creature as people crushed their way to the front and back out again.

Did I feel any more comfortable here? Not exactly. At this gig I definitely felt too old. When The Libertines first hit the music scene rock music was fairly anathema to my wife and I, and consequently I've always considered them to be a part of a youth music movement which I am far too old for. And judging by the omnipresent teenagers hanging onto every word sung by Barat, my perception is not far wrong. It wasn’t that I found myself not enjoying the music – far from it – but I just didn’t understand the idolatry of the fans and I craved the steadfast commitment to structure that Kings Of Leon showed earlier in the week. Also, sitting in the top tier meant that we felt like we were somehow disconnected from the concert taking place way below us, as if this is where slightly older fans were to be seated to be away from the kids on the floor. Certainly throughout the often painful duration of the support slot from Hot Club de Paris, I found myself ruminating on the actual building in which we were seated, with its early twentieth century gilded balconies and statues, more interested in the story of this building rather than the joyful noise both bands were dispensing within it.

Which brings us neatly back to history again.

One shouldn't feel age-restricted in taking an interest in history, and if that's true then it's truer still when it comes to music and art in general. These things should be regarded as accessible to absolutely everyone, and society shouldn't make us feel that one is accessible only to more mature individuals and the other only to younger people. However, while I think everyone should take an interest in both history and music or whatever it is that fires your imagination, there is simply no excuse for bad taste, which I specifically direct at the women joining the train home at Birmingham International from that Thursday's Davids Essex and Cassidy extravaganza at the NEC. You should be ashamed.

2007-05-01T22:03:00.000+01:00

Cigarettes, Alcohol and Emigration

'Do you know what I hate?' said Paul as we alighted from the train at Euston one morning. 'People who get off the train and immediately have to light up a cigarette.' Sure enough, among the hundreds of fellow commuters who'd just got off the train, a few of those were lighting up their cigarettes.

I've never smoked. Well, apart from a very drunken packet of cigarettes smoked in Corfu about four years ago which just made me look effeminate and not sophisticated like I thought I did - not that I would condone smoking as a vehicle for appearing cool, kids; it was a mistake, take it from me, as I'd always prided myself on never having even tried smoking whereas all of my school friends had. Anyway, as a non-smoker, I can't hope to understand the cravings a committed smoker must have that mean they have to have a cigarette in their mouth ready to be lit before they've even got off the train. I hated the taste of cigarettes and I can't even begin to imagine how disgusting that must be first thing in the morning. But I just can't understand the desperation that a smoker must evidently feel if they've been cooped up on a train journey with no facility at all to smoke, can't even contemplate such a dependency.

However, Paul's observation did get me thinking – this furore over the future smoking ban in London's pubs and clubs seems to ignore the other public places in which people are able to smoke. I've not been to many railway stations where people cannot smoke, whereas if it was an airport you'd be restricted to a very small, dingy area of the terminus in which smokers can feed their addiction prior to boarding a plane. Why is it that stations have historically been considered somehow more socially acceptable places for people to smoke? Furthermore if you factor in the fact that stations are not age-restricted like pubs, you may well find children travelling with parents waiting at stations. With the risks of passive smoking abundantly evident and the effects that these risks can have on children, it seems illogical to have focussed so much conjecture and hot air about pubs and largely ignore other areas where people congregate.

As for that small minority who choose to smoke cigars first thing in the morning, while in a way I am in awe of their ability to chuff away on something that looks and smells like dog excreta, I'd really appreciate it if they wouldn't blow out their acrid smoke into my face when I pass them in the street. I was offered a cigar at my good friend Matt's wedding on Saturday. 'They're really good ones,' he said keenly, and I'm sure that they were, although I couldn't honestly say what the measure of a 'good' cigar actually is. I shook my head profusely, gestured to where Seren was lying in her pushchair and said that I shouldn't have one because I didn't want to teach her bad habits. I didn't want to admit – that peer pressure thing again – that I'd never in my life smoked a cigar and didn't want to look stupid while coughing and spluttering.

If I am at a loss to understand the cravings of a smoker, I am even less able to comprehend why any individual (individuals such as the besuited and sweaty gentleman I am currently seated next to) would want to drain cans of cheap lager on the train on the way home. Said gentleman has just finished his third can. It's Monday evening and we're half an hour into a forty-five minute train journey. Is this his normal evening ritual? Or is Monday the day where he drinks the least and builds up to Friday where he really kicks back, buys a couple of bottles of scotch and glugs away while the train rattles through Betjeman's metro-land onward to Northamptonshire?

True enough, the warmer weather which has carried through from the weekend does give a beer after work a certain appeal. But a couple of warm cans obtained at no doubt over the odds prices from a station shop has no such appeal to me. When the signs on the trains and Underground appear in the summer urging commuters to stay hydrated, I'm not sure that this is what they mean.

It is with a degree of timely irony, actually, that I find myself analysing the gentleman next to me. A couple that my wife and I know through the National Childbirth Trust are considering emigrating to New Zealand. The principal reason is that the job market is apparently more favourable for graphic designers over there whereas over here there are too many designers chasing too few commissions. The secondary reason is that they don't want their son to grow up in England drinking cans of Special Brew on street corners, the state of our nation having got so bad that there is an inevitability attached to our essentially wayward impulses that we cannot hope to control.

True enough, crime levels – irrespective of what the government has you believe – are rising, and worse still, violent crime is on the increase too; crime by young teenagers is now an almost daily recurrence in the media, and so to a certain extent I share this couple's concerns about the poor health of our society. However, and I also feel this a somewhat obvious point to make, environment alone does not dictate how a child is going to turn out. And certainly within the context of society generally, it certainly isn't the case that every teenager is a lawless bandit knifing and shooting and snorting their way through life. The biggest influence on a child is the attitude and actions of their parents, unless I'm very much mistaken, and that's going to be the same whether they're in England, New Zealand, Los Angeles or Timbuk-effing-tu. Society provides a context, but parental actions in those formative years determine the path that you're going to take. And these parents – unless we don't know them very well – don't strike me as being the sorts to engage in anti-social behaviour and so the chances of their son ending up that way would be slim; and if they were, then they'd be exporting that attitude to the supposedly crime-free New Zealand along with the rest of their possessions and bigotry anyway.

The guy next to me on the phone made me think about this, because everything about him – the cut of his suit, his mannerisms and his diction when he answered his mobile – certainly didn't imply a rebellious or reckless soul, yet here he was drinking in an arguably anti-social environment just like the kid this couple believe who, upon being prevented from leaving this once green and pleasant land behind, has no choice but to turn to underage drinking on the street. Moreover, he was about forty-five. Now, I know that this is somewhat different from a group of lads congregating on a street corner downing illegally purloined cans of lager, sharing happy-slapping clips and comparing flick knives. This was just a guy knocking back a few drinks after a hard Monday in the capital. He was clearly reasonably affluent, well-mannered and fundamentally unthreatening. Sure, it was incomprehensible as to why he was boozing on a Monday evening but it wasn't anything to worry about. A teenager sat next to me necking Special Brew would un-nerve me, of course it would.

The poor boy whose country of residence is being decided by parents with a rather gloomy outlook on British society and vague aspirations of success despite low wage inflation is only a year old. All his grandparents, aunts and uncles live in this country, and all of the parents' friends do too. This notion of societal woe degradation seems a rather flimsy reason to up sticks and chase a dream on the other side of the world, and I simply don't believe or understand any of it.

Just like I don't understand sparking up at 7.30 in the morning or drinking warm lager at 5.00 on a Monday afternoon. Perhaps some things are outside of rational comprehension.

2007-04-16T08:40:00.000+01:00

Watch Your Language

When I was a young boy, I remember having weekly spelling tests every Monday with one of our junior school teachers, Mr Strangwood. In order to prep for this weekly test, each Friday we would be issued with a list of five words which we needed to both learn how to spell, and also how to use these words within a sentence. I seem to remember that my dad, when giving me a bath on a Sunday, would test me to make sure I was ready for the Monday morning test.

One Sunday, one of the words was ‘reservoir’. While I could spell it no problem, I struggled to come up with a sentence using the word. Looking back I can’t quite believe that as it would seem so obvious to go for something like ‘the reservoir is filled with water’ or ‘they sail their boats on the reservoir at the weekends’, but at the time it seemed really tough. My dad, bless him, came up with something which I can’t quite remember, but it was a really abstract little sentence – something like ‘the brain is a reservoir of intellect’. You know when you look up a word in the dictionary and find it has several meanings, with the last being the least commonly used? Well whatever the sentence he came up with actually was, it would have been making use of the word’s least-obvious definition, and quite rightly instead of looking very intelligent for my age, Mr Strangwood gave me a very quizzical look the next morning when he saw my sentence.

My dad isn’t the best speller, but this piece wasn’t intended to knock his grasp of English. However, one lesson that my dad taught me was that if you’re unsure of how to spell a word, or what a word means, you look it up. Whenever he was writing reports for his job, he would always have his dictionary to hand. The advent of spell checkers on word processing software has made it easier to avoid terrible literary faux pas, which is why I find it even more unbelievable when I see awful spelling in very public media.

I decided to collect a few examples of poor spelling or grammar in adverts that really irked me with their carelessness, and I’m sure that if you wanted you could append many other examples. In so doing, please note that this is definitely not a ‘flog’, a covert attempt to encourage people to purchase goods or services from the following companies, and hopefully after reading some of them it may encourage you not to. It is merely an attempt to highlight how careless people can be with language; a cultural indictment on our modern, lackadaisical age if you will.

The first was a leaflet dropped through our door advertising a new local pizza delivery company called Pizza Village. It was quite a well-laid out flyer, good imagery and clear. But the spelling was awful. Among the usual suspects, Pizza Village – whose name suggests of course that a hut just doesn’t represent enough pizza anymore – offer some varieties I’ve never seen before. For example, they offer a Hawain, which in losing the extra ‘i’ turns this badly concocted fruit / meat juxtaposition into something that evokes a Constable painting, a pastoral take on the pizza genre but which probably still tastes like a badly concocted fruit / meat culinary juxtaposition. They also offer a Vegetarian Itliano, which really made me laugh – if you’re going to make an attempt to bastardise regional cuisine, at least make an attempt to spell the country of origin correctly. Not happy with the choice of toppings? Well, you can choose from tune, perppers and jelapeno. And if you’re a healthy eater, the salad bar includes crutons. Want to go large? Under meal deals you can have any 2 canned drinks and 2 colslaw. On the same page, just a few centimetres away, you can have colsalw. Tempted?

In fairness to Pizza Village or their graphic designers Hashim Designs, some of these words are a little tough, especially two that are essentially foreign. And at the end of the day, we should encourage local businesses shouldn’t we? Even those ones that peddle cheap stodgy crap.

I had the pleasure of having an estate agent drop a very boring leaflet through my door, advising me that Alan Francis, the agent, had recently sold a house on our estate. ‘Wow,’ I inwardly exclaimed. ‘What an achievement in a buoyant housing market.’ Then, whereas I would normally throw such litter in my recycling bag, I decided to have a read. Alan, bless him, seems to have a bit of a penchant for inverted commas, except that like Joey in one episode of Friends, seems to have a bit of difficulty understanding how best to use them. Poor lamb: under the advantages section, which is supposed to make you immediately ring Alan up and beg him to sell your house for you, he has stated that his company makes use of ’24-hour “internet” advertising’. Now, when I read this, ignoring the obvious fact that the internet doesn’t have a period between 5.30PM and 9.00AM where you simply can’t get hold of anybody, it being essentially an ‘always on’ service, his use of inverted commas to highlight the word internet actually makes me think that he doesn’t have an internet presence at all, and that in fact, when he uses the expression ‘internet’ he means sticking pictures of your house in newsagents’ windows (the tenuous connection to the internet being that the newsagent stocks computer magazines). Further on Alan claims to have a ‘Mayfair office’, which being again similarly picked out in inverted commas implies that he has probably never even been to London but that he knows naïve punters might see this and think his tinpot firm a much larger concern than it clearly is. But most of you, thankfully, won’t have heard of Alan Francis.

So let’s pick a slightly larger concern – Morrisons Cornish Pasty Company, which has a counter in my local town centre, and, if my research serves me well, branches across the country. Every Saturday when we go into town it amazes me how long the queues are at this store, and I feel quite pleased that people are shunning Burger King which is only a few units down in favour of arguably better food. But pleased though I am by this small culinary revolution, I can’t forgive Morrisons for their signage.

My wife, knowing that I am a fickle bastard when it comes to English, mentioned to me about a ‘Save The Apostrophe’ society, which I heartily embrace and it’s companies like Morrisons that should be at the top of this society’s hitlist if it ever decides to set up a militant wing. For above the queues of slavish consumers runs the legend ‘Morrisons Cornish Parties – Makers Of The Worlds Finest Cornish Pasties’. Subtle, I know, but wrong, wrong, wrong not to include the possessive apostrophe when stating – and who can prove or disprove the assertion? – that the best pasties in the world are made by Morrisons. The sign picks out the letters in a bright yellow colour on a royal blue background, and I’m often sorely tempted to buy a sheet of yellow paper, cut out a small apostrophe-shaped piece and glue it between the ‘d’ and ‘s’ of ‘worlds’ and smugly reflect on my small contribution to the correct use of our fine language..

Still, it remains quite a small error and one that will probably have escaped widespread attention. So let’s find a more high profile one.

Britney Spears. Hardly a name that one would associate with outstanding spelling or grammatical abilities, at least not since she sloughed off the wholesome Disney image and opted instead for risqué outfits. But then again, I wouldn’t associate her with perfume either, but release a perfume she has. It’s such an obvious move that I haven’t even bothered to remember the name of this no doubt acrid smell; it’s so clichéd to do this these days, and I’m sure that celebrities aren’t really involved in deciding on topnotes and bottle design, but it has that celebrity’s name and image attached, and therefore it is she who can take the flak for the terrible spelling exhibited on the advertising spots that frame ITV2’s new flagship US import, the highly enjoyable if brattish Entourage.

Whatever this perfume is called, the spots are filled with garish swathes of pink and green with scrolling statements loosely tied to the word ‘entourage’, with a few words whispered over the top, presumably by Britney herself. One of the scrolling statements, which I am pleased to say has been removed from the sponsorship of the new series said ‘Capitvate your entourage’. Capitvate? Surely sponsors of high-profile advertising campaigns for flagship imported programmes aren’t this careless with their spelling? Doesn’t anybody check these things over? And anyway, what does ‘captivate your entourage’ actually really mean?

The aforementioned Mr Strangwood, on his first day as our teacher, stood up in front of us and said ‘Occasionally I will make mistakes with my spelling deliberately, just to see if you’re paying attention,’ which was of course nonsense; people do make mistakes, that’s human nature. But if you believe that adverts are golden opportunities to sell your wares, then at least take a bit of care and pride over your advert and spell things correctly. Surely it’s not much to ask.

2007-04-12T07:48:00.000+01:00

Wonderment

When they boarded the train at Bletchley, I was preparing myself to be annoyed - four adults, four kids, London-bound no doubt as part of their Easter holiday. The adult in front of me reeked of smoke, the kind of smoke that's been absorbed over many days and months into clothing and which barely even smells like cigarettes any longer. The kids were noisy and the adults were too engaged in their conversation to make any effort at calming the kids down or reminding them that there were other passengers around them. Other passengers such as me, sat behind one of the kids trying to keep my head down and work. My Blackberry was the source of considerable intrigue to this child, who kept turning around and poking his head between the seat backs to see what I was doing, evidently believing that I was using some sort of handheld gaming device (if only). And so, all in all, I was expecting this to be one of those really lengthy, uncomfortable and unproductive journeys to work.

As the journey progressed, my frustration mellowed. After all, it's the school holidays and actually it was me - not this family - that was out of place on this post-rush hour train, which during any school break is packed with families taking advantage of cheap day return tickets into London (a bargain at £12.90 for an adult compared to £30.90 at peak times), and this was the first train of the day where you can use such tickets. When I alighted at London I was certainly in the minority given the paucity of fellow besuited commuters. Everywhere I looked were parents holding the hands of small children or trying to get a baby-filled pushchair from train to platform or trying to restrain their child in their yearning to get through the barriers and on with their day out. And actually, this entire scene at the platform was extremely heart-warming to see. Our great capital is perfect for days out, and any alternative to kids sitting at home watching DVDs or playing PlayStation / Wii / Xbox is always going to make me more optimistic about children and the modern world in which my own daughter is growing up in.

I remember badgering my parents for many years to take my sister and I to London for a day out. They finally yielded one damp Easter Sunday - I wish frequently that I could recall the year - and drove my sister and I to the capital, parked up on Edgware Road and the four of us trekked our way across London (no tubes for us as mum was, post the Kings Cross fire, wary of them), the glee and excitement of a day spent on our feet seeing the places we'd only ever previously seen on TV overriding the tiredness which my sister and I must have felt. Whenever the drudgery of working in London begins to take over, I remind myself of that Easter Sunday and of how exciting it was to be there and how vast and impressive the city turned out to be in reality.

But back to the double family sat in front of me on the train. What finally made my initially frosty attitude thaw was the sheer wonderment of the boy in front of me. It was an enthusiasm that was contagious, filled with the kind of questions and enquiries of his dad that only the innocent child can ask. He reflected the positive lack of self-awareness that kids have and which over time can be cruelly stamped out of them by education and society. He didn't worry that his enquiries may have seemed pointless or ridiculous to an adult, nor did he seem to be suspect that his father was not in fact an expert in all of the areas he wanted to know about.

The boy seemed genuinely thrilled to be on a train, and wanted to know everything from the number of tracks, to the types of train they might see and even a subject so apparently banal (to an adult) as the frequency of fast trains into Euston. He'd shout the name of every station we stopped at and act confused when we'd pass through certain ones at speed without stopping. Likewise he could barely conceal his excitement at the prospect of being on board an Underground train. The mystique of your first train or Tube journey as a child are lost on people like me who do this most days of the week, but seeing this boy's genuine joy made me recall that yes, once upon a time, this was exciting to me, long before it induced a crushing ennui in me.

If my memory serves me, my first rail journey would have been from Birmingham New Street to Glasgow when I was about four, travelling to see my now sorely-depleted Scottish relatives with my mother. I can remember distinctly how exciting it was on board that train, even though it seemed to take an age, marvelling out the window at the interesting things there were to see as we wended our way northward. My mother pointed out a heron in a lake somewhere in the countryside, but at the time I didn't even know what that was and couldn't fathom what I was supposed to be looking at, and wouldn't see another until I saw one in the park at St Albans nearly twenty years later. I also remember dropping dolly mixtures all over the floor and doing lots of colouring in. But most of all I remember, after seeing this boy's alacrity, just how thrilling that train journey was, from waving goodbye to my dad at New Street to being collected by my now departed Uncle Harvey at the other end.

My first Underground journey wasn't until much, much later. My fellow second year university student and housemate Craig and I took the train from Colchester to London one wintry Saturday afternoon, and then took the tube from Liverpool Street to the West End where Craig wanted to buy some history books from Foyle’s, whereas all I wanted was CDs from the HMV on Oxford Street. By this time I was twenty and well beyond being able to gush all the way to London about how overjoyed I was at finally getting to ride a Tube, but I felt it inside. Craig had lived in London all his life, and for him it was second nature like it is to me today, but for me, just being in London, going Underground and witnessing Oxford Street in the run-up to Christmas was incredibly and pleasingly overwhelming to the senses.

Prior to this my mum had always said that the pavements along Oxford Street at Christmas were so clogged with pedestrians that you were swept along as if by a tide, and this had always made me somewhat nervous - but intrigued - about wanting to shop in London before Christmas. True, I'd never seen policemen standing at crossings with megaphones barking out when people should wait or cross, but beyond that I could have been mugged at gunpoint and it wouldn't have dampened my enthusiasm one jot.

And this innocent boy, himself no older than four or five, reminded me of all those things and made the effort of commuting all the more worthwhile. It also reminded me of how fantastic it's going to be when Seren, my little angel, is able to approach life with that same wide-eyed awe, that quest to know the why's and wherefores of absolutely everything, and no matter how tiring it might be to be on the receiving end of a barrage of Paxman-esque enquiries, I can't wait.

2007-04-02T12:55:00.000+01:00

Spring

Spring is undoubtedly in the air. The clocks went forward last weekend and, as if by some meteorological magic, the first day of British Summer Time was a glorious bright and sunny day, with just a hint of coldness to remind you that we’re not quite out of the woods yet and that those jumpers need to stay on the top of the pile in your wardrobe. To misquote Charles Dickens, a man must be a misanthrope indeed in whose breast something like jovial feeling is not roused by the recurrence of spring. I am that man.

One of my neighbours, a burly South African, is impervious to cold weather and has been wearing shorts throughout the winter; his sole change to his wardrobe in the spring months is to switch to flip-flops rather than trainers, and then in the height of summer loses even the flip-flops to walk from house to garage barefoot. Everyone in our street, aside from our immediate neighbours – with whom we do actually talk from time to time – has their own, made-up, identity – his is No Shoes, his wife rather cruelly is Lilo Lil after the character in Bread; further up their terrace lives Paul O’Grady just because he has a passing resemblance to said TV personality, and next to him live Dane Bowers and his girlfriend Jordan. Except that Dane is in fact from Yorkshire rather than Essex and Jordan is anything but the surgically enhanced creation who previously dated the real Mr Bowers. There are many others, but you get the gist.

No Shoes’ dad visits him frequently, and leaves breakfast hanging from their door handle on a Sunday morning in a Tesco carrier bag. He has one of those Hamish / Germanic beards that clings to the underside of his chin and neck with very little hair on his cheeks, and so we have dubbed him Hans. It passes the time. Hans and No Shoes are keen gardeners and have set about transforming the garden area around the communal parking area they share with Dane & Jordan, Paul and the other residents of the terrace and their activities at rejuvenating an otherwise staid area of block-paved car parking over the past week have thoroughly depressed me.

Spring of course heralds the onset of the gardening season, and once again I find myself being torn between excitement and misery at another year of failed seedlings, slug-ridden borders and wonky lawn edges. My parents have decided to rid themselves of their lawn this year and instead have opted for a mostly paved series of staggered patios with large pots filled with exotic plants, which seems like an eminently sensible idea as I embark once again on a no-doubt futile attempt to create a cottage style garden with lots of colour all year long whilst trying desperately to undertake as little actual hard work as possible.

After last year’s debacles, including the infamous mini-greenhouse / high wind setback, the army of slugs that left my meadow border devoid of anything except poppies, and the sweet peas that refused to climb the canes I lovingly and competently lashed together despite never having been to Scouts, my gardening confidence is at an all-time low, and therefore the onset of spring provides little cheer for me. What does bring some cheer is the birdoir that I have created in a tree at the bottom of the garden consisting of various food-dispensing items which are proving popular with a family of blue tits, sparrows and a pair of blackbirds, thus ensuring that our mostly house-bound cat sits at the lounge window going nearly out of her mind. At least I feel like I'm doing my bit for the disappearing avian population.

Similarly, I was reminded yesterday as I boarded the train home of how uncomfortable train journeys in the summer can be, and even now a commute can be rendered hellish as the temperatures subtly rise (as they seem to be at the moment) while the train companies react slowly to switching off the heating – heating which has just one setting, ‘oven’ – leaving you needing a coat outside the train because it’s just a little bit too cold to go without, but shedding layer upon layer of clothing once you get inside the train for fear of passing out through heat exhaustion. The heat inside the carriage means that everyone pulls open the paltry windows to allow cooler air to circulate around the carriage, rendering effective use of headphones useless unless you want to cause permanent ear damage by spinning your iPod’s volume ever clockwise to counteract the increased noise generated by wind swirling through the windows and around the carriage.

Last year I commented on the simple joy afforded by the early morning sun rising over the old Pearl Assurance building on High Holborn as you turn into that road from Southampton Row. Reflecting on that inspirational morning ritual, as well as the way the City’s few tall office buildings reveal themselves to you as you walk further down High Holborn to roughly Chancery Lane, has also depressed me since the clocks went forward. In order to see those remarkable sights, I'd need to be walking into the City from Euston, as I was for much of last year. This year, unfortunately, hasn’t got off to the best start and I've probably schlepped into work on foot probably no more than once, and so I've missed out on all the things I used to cherish on my way into work, and all the new things that one can see by just varying the regular journey to work. I can, however, confirm that there is nothing new or of interest on the Underground line between Euston Square and Liverpool Street.

That’s not to say that I haven’t got great intentions of exploring the area around our London base this year. I have made a firm promise to myself to go and visit some of the capital’s landmarks during lunchbreaks and obtain a better understanding and perspective on the history and geography of London. Call it a late New Year’s Resolution, but for the last eighteen months I've been obsessing over New York City after a fateful trip there in 2005 and have devoured endless nuggets of information about that most beautiful city, and have largely ignored the City on my own doorstep. The pleasant introduction of clearer, sunnier days provides an impetus and a drive to get out into London whenever I can, but this will be a struggle while I continue to choose sitting on my backside eating my lunch at my desk to plough through more work over going out at lunch for a stroll. Might as well have another biscuit, eh? That Damien Hirst exhibition round the corner on London Wall runs until the middle of next week after all.

The acknowledgement that my life seems to be an unhealthy blend of too little sleep, early rises, sitting on trains for long periods (with the attendant breakfast and snacks offered by travelling first class), bouts of stressful energy, followed by an hour on my feet delivering a presentation, followed by the train journey home, provides yet another reason to be uncharacteristically pessimistic as we enter spring. My weight is presently hovering at or around 11.5 stones, which is the heaviest I've been since sixth form, I have lost the definition to my leg muscles and in all I've started to feel like turning thirty last year has brought with it an appropriate middle-age spread.

I have therefore been shanghaied into joining a local gym, ostensibly so that we can take Seren swimming, but more likely because my wife can’t conceal the giggles when I remove my clothes to change into pyjamas at night. I've been here before – this is the fifth gym induction I’ll have been on in almost ten years – but this time it feels like it’s driven out of necessity rather than some vague opportunity to partake in a leisurely pursuit than I never found particularly leisurely. I therefore feel surprisingly motivated today, despite contemplating a no doubt humiliating tour around the gym this evening by some toned beefcake who thinks the route to all human happiness lies in the intimidating area of the gym known as ‘The Free Weights Area’.

In spite of all of this, the recent pleasant weather holds forth the promise of days out, picnics with our daughter and generally a more optimistic outlook after the cruel and punishing winter months. I find this time of year a much more opportune time to start making those big plans, rather than just after Christmas where everything feels a little strained and miserable. My head is buzzing with the things that I want to achieve for the rest of the year, the decorating jobs I've been avoiding all winter, the garage that I've been trying to clean out for over a year, the unused things that need to get put on eBay, the savings that we’ve not made and the things we always said we’d buy but never got around to. Oh, and that book I said I'd write but didn’t and all those things I promised my wife I'd get done but was too lazy in the winter to be bothered with.

2007-03-19T18:22:00.000Z

Hotels : Part 1

In our pre-baby lives, my wife and I spent many a weekend away in hotels. A few decades ago the idea of a couple checking into a hotel under the names Mr and Mrs Smith would have prompted a little snigger from the receptionist, as this was the favoured pseudonym for couples to carry on an affair. For a couple who genuinely are Mr and Mrs Smith, I'm glad that times have moved on as I embarrass easily.

To move off my point for just a moment, and to illustrate just how possible it is for me to get embarrassed, we bought the hotel guide called - ho ho - Mr & Mrs Smith and from it, booked the Strattons hotel in Swaffham (which truly is one of the best places you will ever find to spend a night; the hotel, that is, definitely not Swaffham, and you must like cats and poultry if you do decide to stay). Anyway, for saying that we'd booked it through Mr & Mrs Smith, you got a 'romance kit' which included a feather and some sensual massage oil. My face went the same colour as the Victorian red paint on the walls in their reading room when the kit was handed to me (as did Oliver, the son of the owners who was on reception that day). I'm clearly embarrassed by sex, and I apologise for being so classically English.

But, after that somewhat humiliating and perhaps unnecessary detour, back to my main point: we used to stay in hotels quite often. Probably every other month, sometimes more frequently than that. Now I should point out that this lifestyle equates to a not insignificant amount of disposable income, and for the record I'd like to point out that I don't have a not insignificant disposable income, at least not one that could sustain that many hotel stays in a year.

No, the reason was that Mrs Smith ran a small business called Search For Venues until our daughter was born. Search For Venues was, as its name would hopefully suggest, a venue finding company, specifically for corporate meetings and events. With running this type of business, hotels tend to fall over themselves to offer companies like Search For Venues either free nights in one of their properties, or rooms at a hugely-reduced rate, all of which we as directors of Search For Venues dutifully took up in the valid name of research.

Sometimes this would mean taking a tour around the hotel's meeting room suite, or having a drink with Michelle's point of contact at the hotel to discuss potential bookings, or in a couple of cases sitting through a dinner thrown for agents like Search For Venues and competitors to show off the hotel's party capability, in order to encourage you to book your client's Christmas party at that venue. I truly hope I never have the displeasure of enduring another Bee Gees or Blues Brothers tribute act as long as I shall live. In most cases though, the sacrifice was worth it just to be able to stay in a location you're perhaps not overly familiar with or have always wanted to go to, and in most cases you didn't have to endure anything at all. And it definitely bred a familiarity with a hotel which Michelle could relay onto clients.

But all good things must come to an end, and so it was for Search For Venues, which has been closed since March last year when Michelle started her maternity leave, and which puts an end to three years of hard work and effort, most of which was not rewarded. But we did get to stay in lots of hotels and we were only saying this weekend about how much we miss it. Irrespective of whether Search For Venues was put to rest or not, after having our baby we concede that staying in hotels is going to be less easy now, and certainly much more of a luxury than we'd previously regarded it.

Only this past weekend, Michelle and I were rueing the fact that we no longer have this flexibility in our lives any longer. To say that shouldn't imply that we regret having a baby, far from it, but it was just a big part of our lives before, and in a way - impracticalities and new financial restrictions aside - I wanted it to continue in order to encourage Seren to take an interest in perhaps the history and geography of this country. She's far too young to appreciate it right now, but as someone reminded us on Saturday, life is the sum of experiences, and like that person, I want our child to have memorable experiences too. We certainly don't want to offload Seren on to relatives and go away without her like some people do; she's the centre of our lives and she should be there in whatever we do.

And so we decided to book a few weekends away. We recently traded in some Tesco Clubcard vouchers for Hilton vouchers, which we hoped would make a difference to the price of the hotel stay, and we picked the shiny new Deansgate Hotel in Manchester. Having not paid full price for a hotel for ages, the cost of even a modest room was staggering, the rate no doubt loaded by the hotel's proximity to the city's shopping quarters.

A love of seminal Manc bands like Magazine, Smiths and Joy Division / New Order has always attracted me to the city, and I'd love to stay at the Radisson on the site of the Free Trade Hall - a significant Manchester location that witnessed the infamous Bob Dylan-turns-electic Judas concert, and, upstairs, the site of the first Sex Pistols concert in Manchester, organised by future Buzzcocks members Pete Shelley and Howard Devoto - but whenever we've been before we've stayed at the Lowry, a swish and modern property popular with celebrities (plus Tony Blair - he was in residence the last time we were) in Salford Quays. But previously we've stayed there either for free or for a paltry sum compared to the usual room rate, and this time couldn't really stretch that far. That said, the rooms there would have been excellent for Seren as there would be plenty room for a travel cot.

Space is the principal issue with taking a baby away. Seren's used to having her own room, which is instantly out of the question when you book a hotel room unless you pay double and take interconnecting rooms, or a suite where there is a lounge area. For the nights we were looking at, a suite would have set us back £360 per night, which is just out of the question. And so we just plumped for a Queen room and Seren will just have to sleep in the travel cot next to our own bed. Not ideal, and it'll probably mean an early night for us otherwise she'll get woken up.

It seemed like a straightforward enough process - find your hotel on the Hilton website, decide on the type of room, call a dedicated helpline, book it, then send on the Tesco vouchers so that they could apply the discount. Except that first of all it's weird in this day and age to book anything over the telephone, and secondly it proved anything but simple.

We knew that a Queen room could accommodate a double bed and a bed for a child, and therefore it could easily be surmised that this would also accommodate a travel cot as this is of course smaller than a single bed. When I spoke to the reservations department, they asked me how many adults were staying and how many children. When I said that we were bringing a child under one, and would be bringing our own travel cot, and that we'd settled on a Queen room, there was the silence from the call operator that is synonymous with 'my computer is telling me there's a problem'.

We knew they had availability as I'd checked online already. The problem was that the system was telling the guy that a child could not be accommodated in a Queen room, which we knew to be incorrect. He said it would 'probably' be fine, but that he couldn't guarantee it. At this I laughed sarcastically and said that I was hardly going to drive all the way there, baby in tow, to find out that she couldn't fit in the room. He responded cooly again with the fact that he couldn't guarantee it. I insisted that the room was definitely big enough, and he became quite flustered; he decided to put me on hold while he spoke to the hotel.

Fine, I thought, at least we'll know for sure. After a couple of minutes listening to a holding advertisement for Hilton Conventions ('Hilton Conventions...anything but conventional' was the sickening strapline), the guy came back on the phone and said 'I've spoken to the hotel and they want to speak to you directly,' which I thought was a bit odd. 'Is that okay?' I consented, confident then that I'd have it sewn up within a few minutes.

When he transferred me, it became obvious that they didn't want or need to speak to me, and he was just looking for a way to offload the call, as I was put through to the hotel reception and they didn't have a clue who I was or why he'd put me through. The receptionist transferred me to the hotel's group reservations team, who very helpfully confirmed that yes, a Queen room would be plenty big enough. I sighed with relief and asked if I could go ahead and book in that case; of course she couldn't - because I had Tesco vouchers I'd need to go back to the central booking line, and I was transferred again.

I had to explain the situation again which was frustrating and I also explained what I'd just been told by the hotel themselves; the very abrupt woman on the other end of the phone once again plugged all the information into the computer and again said that there was a problem – the room didn’t say it would accommodate a travel cot. I said again that the hotel had told me it could, and she very forcefully asked me if I had a name of the person I'd spoken to. Of course, I was so confident that the answer I had been given by the woman at the hotel was enough to enable me to get this booked that I'd neglected to take down a name. I was wrong. I said it was quite embarrassing that they didn’t seem to be able to co-ordinate things – I didn’t say it aggressively, but I said it with enough sentiment to indicate that I was pretty cheesed off with the whole thing.

This was 10.30, and I had a meeting at 11.00. The woman didn’t empathise with my criticism of the disorganisation at all, and just blurted that she’d have to call the hotel back, reminding me again at the chagrin of not taking a name. I resigned myself that this would at least get us the booking, but stated that I needed to be able to book it by 11.00. She murmured that it should be no problem, and that was it – she was gone. That was Monday. Today’s Wednesday and they still haven’t called me back.

Perhaps it’s because later the same afternoon I spoke to someone else, who was much more helpful and understanding and booked it smartly and promptly in about five minutes flat. Interestingly, when I explained that the hotel had confirmed that the room would be big enough for a travel cot he just matter-of-factly said ‘Okay, I’ll just make a note of that on the booking.’ This guy appeared to be American or Canadian, but I don’t know whether that means this time I was speaking to a US-based call centre (the previous lady had been Scottish, the previous guy Indian) but if I'm correct in my belief that Hilton have numerous call centres around the world, I'm appalled at the lack of consistency between them. Just a hunch.

My line manager, the fountain of knowledge and experience that he is, would liken this to the ‘Big Mac’ approach – no matter where you are in the world, a Big Mac will be made the same. It may taste slightly different, but you wouldn’t expect that in Milan they rest the patty on top of the bun whereas in Long Island it would be inside – it’s the same structure each and every time. Hilton don’t appear to have heard this wise nugget of corporate common sense.

Am I looking forward to our first hotel stay in almost a year? Not particularly. The booking process has left a sour taste in my mouth and the rigmarole of booking over the telephone rather than online has ensured I’ll never order Tesco Clubcard vouchers for a hotel stay again. I’m also not entirely confident, despite the firm confirmation of the person working in the hotel, that there’s not going to be enough room for a travel cot. Leisure events like this are supposed to be hassle-free; this wasn’t.

I could begin another moan here about the difference in service between large chains of hotels like Hilton or Marriott versus the warmth and attention to customer needs of independent hotels, but I’ll save that one for another day.

2007-02-10T07:36:00.000Z

Snow (Hey Oh)

With all this talk of global warming, I rather expected never to see snow again. Yesterday's impressive settling of snow took me right back to my childhood, back to when we used to get winters like this every year.

As a child, like so many things - whoopee cushions, Marmite sandwiches, dogs - I dreaded snow, for a multitude of pathetic little reasons. Notwithstanding being cold, which as a comparatively sickly child of poor constitution, I never particularly embraced, I detested being the favoured target among my school peers for getting pelted with snowballs; my principal reason for disliking the snow, however implausible and risible looking back, was having to trek to school in wellies, then changing out of them when I got there to leave you with wet socks all day. I was a funny child.

One fateful time, I pleaded with my mum not to make me wear the offensive black Dunlop plastic boots, and no doubt after a tearful standoff she allowed me to wear my normal shoes. If I recall correctly, it was the day of our school play and we'd just moved into the house my parents still live in, so it was 1984 and I was seven. Wearing shoes rather than boots meant that I couldn't go out to play at lunchtime - no bad thing, as it enabled me to dodge the aforementioned snowballs - and so I sat in a classroom with the other children who were either ill or who had likewise forgotten their wellies. One of these kids was called Adam, and he lived a short distance from the school in a road dominated by council houses and which was, for one reason or another, where many of the 'rough' kids lived. Leon, Michael, Tony, Shaun - all kids who routinely took it in terms to terrorise me throughout my school career - all lived in the same road. On this lunchtime, Adam, a small and insouciant boy, was being unusually nice to me.

I recall he said 'Oi, Smiffo,' for that was my nickname (occasionally altered to Wiffo depending on the individual). 'You like learning new words, don't you?' This rather casts me as a bit of a bookworm, but he wasn't far off the mark. I replied affirmatively, and he proceeded to spell out several words to add to my vocabulary, and which he advised me to go home and say to my dad. Which I did. I didn't know, until my dad quietly told me that he never, under any circumstances, wanted to hear me use those words in front of him again, that I had sworn for the first time. None of this would have happened were it not for my aversion to snow.

One time at school, we small children were invited to participate in an odd ritual whereby the older children lined up against a brick wall, and us small children pelted them with snowballs. Perhaps this was an attempt to restore balance, or perhaps yet another excuse for the bigger kids to exact revenge on us, since they stood above us by about three feet in a walled flowerbed and were therefore able to bear down with a conveniently stored supply of snowballs. I remember being a useless shot when it came to snowballs, but one throw in particular was perfect and hit the brother of a friend squarely in the eye. I found out about three years later that he’d subsequently gone blind in that eye, and I have harboured a sense of responsibility ever since. Pesky snow.

Aside from everyone’s favourite reminiscence of the halcyon days of snow from our childhoods – being sent home from school because the pipes had frozen – I have few fond memories of snow, with the exception of one time while I was studying for my A levels. As a group, we were bussed out to the Warwickshire countryside to stay at an old manor house, receive presentations and undertake ‘team building’ exercises. I could think of nothing worse than this at the time, and when the snow started to come down I mistakenly thought that they would abandon the whole pointless exercise and send us home. Of course, for the rugged outdoor trainer types that enjoy sadistically watching from the sidelines as you fruitlessly try to get your entire team through the smallest hole in a fence while being bound together by rope, they just think it adds to the enjoyment of team building exercises. It doesn’t.

After a day of such activity, we had some dinner and then some leisure time. Quite what we would have done if it hadn’t been snowing, I don’t know as we were absolutely in the middle of nowhere. Some bright spark decided to have a huge snowball fight, and once again I was reluctant to get involved. A girl that I had a huge crush on at the time insisted that I join in. I liked her so much that she could have asked me to do absolutely anything and I would have slavishly done it. It didn’t matter that she was the girlfriend of my best mate. It was a lot of fun, aided by what I felt to be a good deal of flirting by said female. The vision of her in the snow was, to a lovesick schoolboy, breathtaking, and perhaps compensated for the severe pelting I endured. I even named a song after that image of her in the snow. But hey, I probably shouldn’t dwell on this given that I’m now married, but at the time it was hugely significant.

In more recent times, the odd day of snow bothers me less and less as invariably it means I can get away with not taking the train to work, claiming the excuse of the trains not running because of the poor weather – no-one bothers checking, and besides, they’re probably all bunking off using the same excuse too. There’s nothing better than being in the warmth of your own home and enjoying how pretty snow can be, safe in the knowledge that you don’t have to go out in it. Sadly, in yesterday’s case, I was booked to deliver a presentation – a five-minute presentation; go figure – in Preston, which isn’t the warmth of my own home. It’s a two-hour train ride away.

Awaking to a perfect settling of three inches of snow, my first hope was ‘Virgin will have cancelled the trains to Preston’. My second hope was that the snow would have put off the guests at the presentation, thus causing the meeting to be cancelled. My third hope was that the fanbelt in my heap of a car would have snapped, thus preventing me from even reaching the station. But my hopes were dashed on all three counts, and instead I found myself slipping and sliding both in the car and on foot down to the station to get to the station; I even found myself, just 200 yards from the station asking a passing woman whether she’d come from the station to see if the trains were cancelled. Desperate, desperate, desperate.

It turned out that it wasn’t even snowing in Preston. I figure that the snow petered out on the fields by about Crewe, but prior to that the image of a snow-covered landscape as the train hurtled effortlessly through the Midlands was absolutely breathtaking. The sun was barely up and the snow was perfectly undisturbed, bar the tracks of some barely-visible sheep. It was a perfect, tranquil and calming, but the most profound aspect of it was the complete absence of colour. It was as if I had become completely colour blind overnight and all I could see was black and white. Far from being dull and grey, the monochrome vista was every bit as powerful as that vision of that girl I never stood a chance with all those years ago.

Coming home, once I got over the intrusion of a yellow number plate from a car in front of me which ruined the black and white movie I was thinking I was a part of, I saw some children sledging at our local park; driving onto our estate I saw that the population had been increased via some surreptitious snowmen standing guard like sentries outside houses and on pavements.

Between the wonder of the Christmas-card vision of a snowy landscape and the innocent, simple joy of children playing, I suddenly came to understand the wonder and excitement of what seems to be our most rare of weather events. I just hope that when Seren is old enough to get excited about snow we still get the occasional flurry and that we can build a snowman in our own garden. I might even let her pelt her old man with snowballs, just for old times’ sake.

2007-01-05T16:13:00.000Z

Of Paint And Coats

A helpful train announcer - I probably should call him a conductor, but these days they hardly ever come and check tickets or indeed anything that might be classed as 'conducting' whatsoever - comes on the train’s tannoy to advise passengers in the first four carriages of the 5.55 PM train to Milton Keynes that there was some graffiti sprayed on the outside of the train, and advising passengers boarding the train to be careful not to brush against the paint since it was still wet. What use is that given that the only people who could hear this otherwise helpful warning would already be on the train?

It did get me thinking about graffiti, however. I don't have a major issue with it, but I'm sure if it were to be sprayed onto my own car or wall, for example, or indeed if my coat was now inadvertently painted from brushing along the train this evening, I probably wouldn't like it. It's a form of expressionism like any other art form, and that's fine by me. Perhaps it grieves me slightly to see Victorian brickwork along the side of train tracks dirtied by white sprayed slogans, but the alternative would be a boring, black expanse of oil-filthy wall pock marked by inexplicable clumps of buddleia (how they grow out of 1cm wide strips of mortar but not in my garden, I will never know). I was actually quite disappointed when I visited New York not to see a subway train emblazoned with huge, elaborate tags. In fact, while I was there one of the top news stories was about Mark Ecko and disapproval at his tactical use of graffiti to promote his latest collection.

I watched an excellent documentary on television recently written and presented by Adam Gopnik, which was a history of both New York City and personal account of Gopnik’s life in the city. In it, graffiti featured quite prominently, from its rise in the lawless New York of the 1970s, to its indiscriminate cleansing from subways, trains and public places by Rudy Giuliani during his tenure as Mayor of the City, finally showing selections of graffiti hanging as canvasses in a Brooklyn museum – out of context, weakened and anything but reactionary. I noticed this morning that the political and flamboyant graffiti previously visible on the walls near Euston’s main approach had been painted over by solid black paint. Perhaps the bitter comments about Bush and Blair were considered offensive or potentially influential.

Specifically, with reference to tagging, I'd like to know, purely for information purposes, if anyone knows who is the owner of the 'TOX' tag, which anyone using the London Underground may well be familiar with. The tag is hardly elaborate - the three letters of 'TOX' in inchoate white spray followed by two digits, representing an abbreviation of the year in which it was sprayed. If you haven't noticed one of these tags before, I would hope you will suddenly realise them to be all over the network after reading this.

Were I to be a sad - not controversial, they are - trainspotter type, I would get a tatty notebook and record every time I spotted a TOX sprayed onto a tunnel wall or platform end, specifically highlighting the year in which it was sprayed. However, I'm not and I won't be. That said, some cursory investigation would seem to suggest that 2001 was a bumper harvest of opportunities for this artist, as most of the time the tags are suffixed by 01; but you will definitely see 02s, 03s, 04s and 05s around the network. To my complete lack of surprise, in a photo of the wreckage of one of the three bombed Underground trains from July 7th 2005, you could clearly see one of these graffitid marks through the blown out window. For the tagger, this must be the ultimate coup de grace, finding your tag resplendent in a much more visible place, but clearly not in the most savoury of circumstances here.

And sad though it may be, I found myself at the start of last year excited at the prospect of seeing some 06s starting to appear on the network. But six months into the year I realised I'd not seen a single one. Being so used to seeing these springing up in new and innovative, perhaps hitherto hard-to-reach areas of a wall, I began to wonder if something ill had befallen the mysterious individual spraying these by night: had he (I'm sure it's a male) been arrested after five full years and goodness knows how many cans of white spray paint? Had he decided to hang up his can forever? Or had he perhaps died after getting hit by a tube while attempting to spray a tag deep inside a tunnel?

If in the unlikely event that any of you have shared this concern, I bring glad tidings - our man is safe and well and appears to be living in Bristol, as on the way into Temple Meads station one sunny summer 2006 morning I spotted a proliferation of TOX06s clumped at the edge of a tunnel. I cannot put into words how delighted and surprised I was at this chance spotting, but I should imagine a train spotter afforded a rare sighting of an early 1960s locomotive might appreciate it.

(The train I'm on has just called at its first destination, and the announcer has pleaded with alighting passengers to take care because the paint was still wet when he checked at Euston. Slightly more helpful, granted, but not to anyone whose garment was by then already ruined. And who but a drunk gets that close to the side of a train anyway?)

Will we see TOX07s this year? Does he still live in Bristol? Or was it a copycat tagger? If you are the artist or if you know the identity of this graffiti artist, I would love to know. Please get in touch with me at mjasmith@documentaryevidence.co.uk so that I know you're safe and well and busy spraying.

***

I would have been terribly miffed if my coat had been the unfortunate recipient of transferred spray paint, had I been staggering haphazardly along the side of the train. I'm very happy with my coat, which was described in the shop from whence it was purchased as a ‘trench coat’.

Buying a coat has always proven a difficult task for me. Wearing a suit for the majority of the week requires a coat that can be worn over normal work attire, and therefore needs to be appropriately smart as it’s likely that I’ll be wearing the coat when getting to and from client meetings. However, I'm too tight to buy two coats, and so any coats I've bought need to be multi-functional, and work as a casual coat also. Add to this dilemma the fact that I invariably chose a coat that’s too thin, resulting in many a cold walk to work in the morning as the temperatures begin to drop. It is with a palpable sense of defeat that I approach coat purchasing each year.

But my trench coat has, I think, been my best clothing purchase to date; and, for once, it seems that other people like it too, as I've had many comments about how nice it is and how much it suits me. It straddles the gulf between formalwear and casual wear very well and I feel very confident wearing it.

However, in my head, when I saw the words ‘trench coat’ on the label, I had visions that I would look like Ian Curtis of Joy Division infamy in some of those famous Kevin Cummings photos before Curtis’ untimely death – you know, moody, pensive and sleek. Instead, to my immense chagrin, I suspect the result is more like Rodney from the episode of Only Fools & Horses where Del obtains Rodders a raincoat which makes him look, as is often the case, like a ‘plonker’. Or like a guy on work experience wearing his dad’s coat on his first day.

2006-12-12T17:13:00.000Z

It Shouldn’t Happen In First Class

So I’m sitting there on the train this morning, in first class, on a journey from Milton Keynes to London for a connection on to Bristol. I don’t highlight the fact that I was travelling first class because I want to appear snooty, or even draw attention to the fact that I was sat in first class, more because I feel it is absolutely, fundamentally, crucial to the story I am about to recount.

Usually first class carriages aren’t particularly busy down to London, and on trains that are considered ‘slow’ (because they stop at more than just two intermediate stations), you hardly get anyone travelling first class. But today was very different: it was packed. This is because an earlier, faster, train had cancelled and so naturally everyone spilled onto the slower train I was on, resulting in not just people standing in standard class, but first class too.

Anyway, the train pulls away, stops at the next station and more people pile on, and gradually the spare seats that there were in first class begin to disappear. In front of where I was sitting was a row of two seats, with a chap sitting on the aisle side with no-one next to him in the window seat. At the next station, Leighton Buzzard, a couple get on and futilely try to find two seats in the first class carriage together. Of course there was absolutely no chance, but they tried to find the next best thing – two seats adjacent to one another across the aisle.

Except that in order to achieve their desired seating arrangement, with a free aisle seat across the aisle from the chap in front of me, he would need to move across to be beside the window. So the lady, a black woman with a fur-collared coat, politely asked the man if he wouldn’t mind moving across to be by the window so that she are her travelling companion could continue their conversation across the aisle; I think this was a perfectly reasonable request and furthermore one that was very polite and hardly brusque.

The chap refused in a very impolite, and very brusque manner. The black lady with the fur-collared coat was clearly taken aback by what had genuinely been a very polite and hardly brusque enquiry, and asked the man why it was that he could not – or would not – move across to the window seat. He responded tersely that it was none of her business. And so, with a theatrical sigh, the woman conceded that she was not going to be able to continue her conversation with her travelling companion, and asked if the gentleman wouldn’t mind – if it wasn’t too much trouble – standing up so that she could slide into the window seat. Begrudgingly, the man stood up and allowed her to take the seat next to him, however his body language would hardly suggest a compliant attitude.

The black woman with the fur-collared coat could obviously detect the chap’s body language and proceeded to adopt the tried-and-tested behaviour of the defeated traveller – mutterings and harrumphs under her breath, just loud enough for those around, including the obstructive chap, to hear her annoyance. Seconds after departing Leighton Buzzard, the black lady with the fur-collared coat’s travelling companion asked, across the aisle, whether she wouldn’t mind passing him his paperback novel that she was carrying in her handbag. She obliged, making another theatrical gesture by leaning over, into the obstructive chap, and snapping her arm across him, within centimetres of the end of his nose to hand the book across the aisle. This, the black woman with the fur-collared coat clearly felt, was a small victory over the obstructive chap.

Something of a lull settled over the warring travellers, and we continued our steady journey through the Chiltern Hills and down toward London. A sense of calm and order was once again restored to the normally dignified and respectful first class carriage, and I very nearly forgot that there had ever been a dispute between the black woman with the fur-collared coat and the obstructive chap sitting in front of me.

Until, that is, we arrived at Euston. The train pulled in, the ticket inspector reminded us to make extra sure that we all had our bags and other belongings with us when departing the train, and we all shuffled to our feet, collected our bags and other belongings and readied ourselves for the next parts of our respective journeys. And it was at the point where the doors were opened and we started filing out, that the conflict sparked off once again.

The obstructive chap slid out from under his tray table, stood up and grabbed his bag and herringbone overcoat from the luggage rack above the black woman with the fur-collared coat’s head; he made his way to the door dividing the carriage between the upper and ‘lower’ classes, and was about to set off to wherever it was he was going; the black woman with the fur-collared coat’s companion called him back angrily – ‘Take your rubbish with you so that she can get out of her seat will you?’. I looked between the seats and the obstructive chap had indeed left his tray table down, upon which was an empty Costa Coffee paper cup and Daily Mirror preventing the black woman with the fur-collared coat from extracting herself easily from her seat by the window.

‘No! I won’t!’ sneered back the obstructive chap. (I had just been reading a book on the Sex Pistols, and the obstructive chap’s nihilistic remark had much in keeping with the erstwhile Johnny Rotten’s attitude about it.) But the black woman with the fur-collared coat’s companion insisted that he come back and remove his rubbish. Clearly a little shamed by this public reprimand in front of his fellow travellers, the obstructive chap did indeed oblige, but it was clear that he did this not out of common decency toward the black woman with the fur-collared coat, but because in fact he wasn’t done with the argument. I’d like to say, for effect alone, that he swept the rubbish onto the floor and cried ‘There! Happy now?’ but he didn’t; he just collected up the litter and put it into a litter bin; but as he did so, he offered what he thought was the final word on the argument.

‘By the way, the reason that I wouldn’t move is because I have a bad leg and need to stretch it out! And for you to ask why I wouldn’t move was private and none of your bloody business!’ He then turned on his heels, and with legs that hardly looked sore at all from where I was standing, strode purposefully off the train.

I couldn’t help but chuckle. But it wasn’t actually even over yet.

The train being over-busy, there was something of a queue at the ticket barriers, which took about ten minutes to fully get through to the other side and which very nearly caused me to miss my connection to Bristol. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the layout of Euston Station – sadly I am over-familiar with it – but when you come up from the suburban lines on platforms 8 – 11, there’s a ramp which heads down to the Northern and Victoria underground lines.

For some reason, despite sitting halfway along the train, I ended up being one of the last passengers to get through the exit barriers, by which time the ramp down to the Northern and Victoria lines was virtually empty. To my surprise, on the ramp were the obstructive chap with the gammy leg, the black woman with the fur-collared coat and her companion. And they were still rowing. I couldn’t pick up everything they were saying, mainly because by this time I was running up the ramp to try and make my connection from Paddington to Bristol. But the last thing I heard was the obstructive chap with the gammy leg pointing an angry digit at the black woman with the fur-collared coat while addressing her travelling companion thus : ‘You want to keep her under control!’.

Quite what happened next I have no idea, as by then I would have been pegging it along Euston Road, but I would rather hope that the black woman with the fur-collared coat’s travelling companion smacked the obstructive chap with the gammy leg squarely in the chops to valiantly defend the black woman with the fur-collared coat’s honour, and would perhaps be completely justified in doing so.

Honestly, this sort of thing just shouldn’t happen among first class travellers, should it?

2006-11-26T08:31:00.000Z

Musique Non Stop

I, somewhat depressingly I admit, regard myself as being the classic jack of all trades and master of none. I take an avid interest in many things - cooking, gardening, environmental issues, history, architecture, film, art among many others - but not to any great depth. I skim the surface, gleaning nuggets of information but never delving down into significant detail. Consequently I am able to hold a conversation with many people about many esoteric things, but if someone I am talking to happens to be an enthusiast in any of these areas then quite rapidly my knowledge is exposed as nothing more than cheap guide book highlights.

The one exception would be music; this would be my major passion in life. With everything else I've sort of dabbled up to a certain point, wavered and finally given up completely. Any of the various interests and hobbies I tried in my earlier years would fall into this category, but music is the only constant. Anyone who knows me would know that music is my major love, and therefore it may come as a surprise that it's taken me this long to write about it, given that it has been a major part of my life for such a long time.

My early music exposure was hardly spectacular. In the Smith family home, music was not a major feature, and what there was would hardly be described as having a major bearing on my life. Mum had her ABBA LPs, which may or may not have led to my later love of 'camp' eighties electro pop (I use inverted commas around the word camp as I actually don't think my favourite band, Erasure - there, I've said it - are necessarily camp, but most people would probably tend to disagree); my dad had some Elvis tapes, which I'd probably love today, but at the time didn't set my world alight. Apparently my parents used to have a much larger record collection including an allegedly valuable psychedelic LP picked up from a Hare Krishna monk in Trafalgar Square in the 1970s, but any gems that may or may not have existed were sold to a collector early in my childhood. I have subsequently appropriated for myself a couple of records from the parental collection which nestle comfortably in one of my many vinyl boxes, including the seminal 'Magic Fly' by Space (not the 1990s Scouse reprobates) and a Booker T And The MGs LP whose cover is stuck together by weathered tape.

Thus my early music exposure was to Barbara Dixon LPs and the chart, wherein the music I liked was pedestrian, middle of the road pop. Aside from two Smurfs 7"s, which I will never dispose of, the first official 7" I owned was 'The Riddle' by Nik Kershaw, a doyen of everything eighties, but who I will vehemently defend as a quality song-writer to this day. Chesney Hawkes' 'I Am The One And Only', if you ignore the singer, is actually a perfect example of Kershaw's lyrical expertise. Trust me. After Nik, there was an extended gap until I had enough money to buy records myself, whereupon my small but burgeoning record collection became filled with some atrocious releases, and some others which I look back on and think 'Wow' even now - MARRS' 'Pump Up The Volume' for example would be the latter, Technotronik feat. Ya Kid K would probably fall into the former. I even reserve a special place in my heart for the first Kylie Minogue album (the one where she's wearing essentially the brim of a hat through which her permed hair protrudes), which I received for my 11th birthday.

By the end of the 1980s my favourite band was Erasure. They still are my favourite band, and I don't care whether you like them or not. I think of Erasure as producing clever pop, even to this day. The 'camp' thing stems chiefly from Andy Bell's homosexuality and tawdry on-stage antics, but the lyrics and synth backdrops are actually very evocative and emotional. But don't just take it from me - the NME or Melody Maker upon the release of the duo's 'Always' in 1994 (ah, 1994 - that was a good year) remarked that everyone, whether they liked it or not, loved at least one Erasure song. So even if you think you don't, you do.

I have Erasure to thank for getting me into some seriously experimental music. You may find this a hilarious notion, but an avid music lover's journey to the underbelly of popular song often arises out of unexpected places. Erasure are still to this day signed to the Mute record label. Mute, until very recently were the UK largest independent (indie) record label until they were snaffled up by EMI earlier this decade; set up by an innovative, visionary chap called Daniel Miller, Mute's roster includes exceptionally mainstream acts - Depeche Mode, Moby and Erasure - some cult acts - Nick Cave, Neubauten, pre-Geffen Sonic Youth, Wire - and some niche, experimental and uncompromising folk - Boyd Rice / Non, most of the Blast First sub-roster. An indie label arguably shouldn't take such a financially-risky scattergun approach to their ‘sound’, but Mute have Depeche Mode, Erasure and Moby to thank for effectively bankrolling the label and allowing them to invest into arguably more risky areas.

What happened was that I bought my first Erasure 12” in the summer of 1991 and it included a large square brochure detailing all of Mute’s releases up to that point, right from The Normal’s ‘Warm Leatherette / TVOD’ up to 1991. There they all were, in catalogue number order, all these albums and singles, mostly by bands I’d never even heard of. I just couldn’t fathom why it was that these acts had not become known to me even though I listened to the full Top 40 on Radio 1 every week. It didn’t even occur to me that there was a music scene outside of pop. I mistakenly, but quite prophetically, believed that all acts on the Mute label would all sound the same.

So, to cut a long story short, I ended up getting into all sorts of esoteric artists and groups simply from getting that 12” single with those rostered artists within it. My love of Mute extended to developing the Documentary Evidence website – www.documentaryevidence.co.uk – in homage to the square pamphlet, also titled Documentary Evidence, that I found in that Erasure 12” fifteen years ago. From Mute I got into underground techno which then, quite logically at least to me saw me getting into monochord punk rock, guitar soundscapes and all sorts of unusual bands. Call it a passion or a way of life but it was basically an all-encompassing addiction that has cost me an arm and a leg over the years to fund. But it’s still Erasure, and also Depeche Mode (from whence Erasure were born, fact fans), that are the principal loves within my music collection, and always will be.

I’ve always said, put me on Mastermind and my chosen specialised subject would be 'Depeche Mode 1981 - 2006, including offshoots and collaborations'. That is, I always thought of myself as being expert in this subject. Despite my avid following of the Mode, even this specialist knowledge was challenged earlier this year when a new colleague started working alongside me, who was also mad about Depeche. All those hundreds and hundreds of pounds spent collecting every Depeche Mode release on every conceivable format became effectively worthless when it became more and more apparent that John knew more than I ever did.

‘”Life in the so-called space age” – know what that’s from?’ He enquired one day. Depressed, I shook my head as I mentally ran through assorted Depeche Mode lyrics in vain, trying desperately to identify the song where John had lifted this wry social, sub-Futurist comment from.

‘Black Celebration, rear sleeve, centre, bottom,’ he said, referring to the tiny quote tucked away at the very bottom of the sleeve. And with that brief conversation, I realised that my knowledge of this band that I’ve loved for years and years was far from exemplary, and so going back to very first point, even with something where I do consider myself an expert I realise I am a mere novice.

Changes in priorities and a sudden curtailing of disposable income has put paid to my ability to spend vast sums of money following all the disparate bands that I’ve followed over the years, and accordingly my music taste seems to have moved away from the more radical elements to a sort of middle-aged musical conservatism; a need to create some space has seen me start the painful process of selling records I can no longer justify keeping.

I just hope that one day my daughter finds herself looking through our combined music collection and is able to say ‘Wow dad! Throbbing Gristle? Who were they?’ and having her eyes opened to the diverse world of music like her father did when he was fifteen, rather than shackling herself only to crass pop commercialism.

2006-11-13T13:26:00.000Z

Male, 30 (just), seeks low-risk thrills and new experiences

Having just turned thirty, I have been reflecting on preceding birthdays and have come to the conclusion that my last two birthdays rank, without question, as my two best birthdays so far. Forget those ones you had as a child where you’d have friends round and party bags – those supposedly golden, halcyon days don’t stack up next to my 29th and 30th birthdays.

Partly this is down to not actually being able to remember many of my young birthdays, barring a couple – one where I had a fight with my friend James Valcomo over a Spiderman helicopter that he wanted to play with, despite it being a present to me that I hadn’t even played with yet; the obligatory keeping-up-with-the-Jones’ McDonalds party where they gave you a tour of the kitchen and, the piece de resistance, took you in the freezers. Wow. There was another where my mum rented us the first Star Trek movie as my friends and I were all into sci-fi films (see notes on Star Wars above) but no-one was interested; another time I got given some Learning Tree books by a girl – Kathryn, I seem to recall – who was a couple of years older than me, and thinking about it, despite being no older than 6, was probably my first crush. That is, after Anna Louise Field and Claire Powell, both of whom I apparently ‘married’ during my first year at primary school. Actually, now that I’ve started to write about this, I can remember quite a few, but none are as memorable as the last two.

My 16th was quite good. It was a school day, but I woke up early to see my dad before he went to work. I got a Philips electric razor for my main present and a Depeche Mode black Violator T-shirt. As a class, we English Literature students went on a field trip that day, to the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon to meet set designers and do an acting workshop, and then we watched All’s Well That Ends Well at the RSC in the afternoon. I’m not a thespian, nor was I particularly interested in the theatre at all (when you live in a town you want to rally against all that arty nonsense, until you move away and then you miss it), but it was a day out of school so that was good. The weekend after, however, was not – I was visited by my then-girlfriend, Hayley, and it should have been the evening of my first kiss (I was a late developer, okay?), but instead it became an awkward affair of clashing teeth and extreme embarrassment and we split up the following week.

My 18th was a disaster of far greater magnitude, seeing me end the evening being very sick into my lap in the main bar of Stratford’s Falcon Hotel, without having even got remotely drunk. It ranks among the most embarrassing moments in my life. As for my 21st, I would have happy memories of the meal attended by my mum and dad, sister and her boyfriend, and friends Steve and Tina, were it not for the fact that I was with my ex-girlfriend, leaving me not wishing to remember something that would otherwise have been one of the most memorable days of my life.

I should say that the first birthday I shared with my wife was a fantastic birthday. She laid on a buffet of epic proportions; proper party food like you’d have at the parties above, insisting that I spend the afternoon shut away in the spare room while she not only made the food but decorated the lounge with balloons and banners, and tried to repair an otherwise perfectly-iced cake that the cat had knocked off the kitchen table a couple of days before. But even that doesn’t compare to the last two birthdays.

My 29th was so good because Michelle and I had only a few weeks before discovered that we were expecting our first child, and that whole period now seems like such a magical, exciting time filled with hope, promise and nervous excitement. We went to a National Trust property not too far from where we live called Stowe Landscape Gardens, somewhere on our doorstep but not a place we’d previously been to. It has since become one of my favourite places on earth, a dramatic blend of the wild and natural and the man-made, and was the principal reason that Michelle and I became National Trust members (much to the amusement of some of my friends). It was a perfect setting for our deep and meaningful conversations about the changes that were about to take place in our lives. We made our own pizzas for tea, which turned out somewhat disastrous, and watched the fantastic Al Pacino movie Serpico as the evening drew to a close.

And of course upon turning 30 we were now a family unit, blessed by the addition of a beautiful baby girl in May. That alone made my 30th birthday a memorable event rather than the miserable affair I had initially expected it to be a few years back. The second factor that made the day so good was that it was the first birthday I’ve ever spent out of the country, for we were on holiday in Portugal; far away, perhaps, from jibes and sarcastic comments from my younger colleagues about becoming an old man, but more importantly just being away from drudging domesticity made for a far more enjoyable birthday than I would have had at home.

It was certainly a far cry from some friends who organised elaborate parties and celebrations – we hired a car, drove to the beach, had lunch out and had a really nice pasta dish in the evening. But having a simple, relaxing day with my immediate family was perfect for me.

However, I was determined not to underestimate the significance of the conclusion of my first three decades. I decided that it was high time that I started to challenge myself a little more or more precisely be slightly less conservative and shy in my actions; an unusual point in the year to start talking about resolutions, but appropriate nonetheless in light of my advancing years. However, in the context of what might be considered a challenge to other people, the new experiences I am actively going to seek out over the next twelve months – by way of a rule that I must do one new thing each week over the next year – may look pretty tiny. But nonetheless they are an attempt to feel more fulfilled as an individual.

I’ve tried to do this before. Eighteen months ago, at one of those dreadful off-site corporate team-building events, we all had to say what we were going to do differently over the next twelve months. Much to the amusement of my colleagues, I said I was going to take more risks in my life. I recall that one colleague laughed heartily at this and wondered whether I might be about to have some sort of mid-life crisis and start bungee jumping at the weekend and start pursuing all sorts of crazy sports. How they laughed. I’m a pretty conservative guy really, and don’t really take any risks. It is, however, ironic when you work for a fund manager.

My response was that risk is relative, and as someone who doesn’t actually take much risk to start with, these new risks could be as simple as trying something on a menu in a restaurant that you’ve always been too scared to try. Using this as a very valid example, I started that very evening by eating calamari for the first time – I know, I know, it’s hardly naked ironing on a remote mountain top, but I’ve always been apprehensive about eating calamari and it seemed like a reasonable enough place to start. Looking back I suspect that this was in fact the only thing I did that could broadly be considered as more adventurous, and my conservative life continued much as before.

That’s why the rule – of needing to achieve something new each week – is so important; setting myself a rule means I have to be disciplined. The week runs from Sunday to Sunday, I can’t miss a week and I can’t complete two in one week for example and carry one forward to the next. The result will be a list, which if I am committed enough to complete it, may form one of these blogs this time next year, under the title of ’52 Personally Significant But Actually Pretty Meaningless (To You) Achievements’.

Then again, given how hard it’s been to find one new thing to do this week – just a few weeks into this challenge – it might not.

2006-11-03T11:14:00.000Z

Teenage Illogic And Stadium Tedium

I went to a fantastic concert at Wembley Arena last night that I just have to tell you about. It was this great contradiction of a band – a vocalist with a perfect voice but instead of playing with the type of band that would perhaps complement his vocal style, he was singing his intelligent, passionate songs over a bed of pure, strangled noise. Imagine Antony Heggarty singing his tortured blues over the soundtrack to David Lynch’s Eraserhead, Rufus Wainwright singing with Neubauten or Jeff Buckley duelling with Throbbing Gristle and you’d be close to the mark.

Except that this wasn’t at all how it should have sounded. The singer is one Johnny Borrell and the band are Razorlight, who have recently jumped a few gears in the indie crossover stakes and celebrated their first number one single – ‘America’ – this past fortnight. As even the most cursory listen to the pastoral ‘America’ would inform you, Razorlight’s sound is hardly one of feedback, pounded leaden rhythms or pure unadulterated noise; but that is how it sounded at Wembley last night. You could hear every cadence in Borrell’s voice – a bonus compared to some concerts I’ve been to there – but the music was just a muddy, distorted, sludgy mess. Noise like the imaginary collaborations described above can be a thrilling, if punishing, event, but when it’s not intentional it’s just unacceptable. Take drummer Andy Burrows for example – his drumming style is both impressive to watch and intricate in its approach, but he may as well have been pounding dustbin lids for all you could make out.

In part I was expecting to be quite negative about this concert. Razorlight have joined the big league with a carefully-crafted form and profile that belies their release of just two albums and a loyal following that two years would have trekked to any manner of dingy North London pubs to catch a concert by them. It’s not their success that bothers me, because I think the band represent a shot in the arm for the British music scene, and I truly believe that Borrell will go on to become either a cult or legendary figure in British music, if only because his focus, drive and ambition will ensure that he doesn’t sit anywhere less than the very top within rock’s hierarchy. I don’t have a problem with the band’s fame, in fact I think it well-deserved.

I remember seeing Razorlight on the now-defunct Top Of The Pops just prior to the release of their breakthrough single ‘Golden Touch’. I recall remarking to my wife, who was by now already smitten by both the music and Borrell’s image, that these guys were a proper rock ‘n roll band. They just had that attitude and arrogance, I suppose, that has served them so well.

Neither do I have a problem with their second, eponymously-titled album, which seems to lack the consistent energy of their debut; it’s just a less direct, upbeat album, a bit more subdued and thoughtful, the sound of a band keen not to restrict themselves to a certain milieu and plough rock’s furrows in pursuit of no particular rock style. That’s actually quite brave for what would be regarded as that ‘difficult’ second album that music rags like to blow on about. It also shows how confident this band are that they could move so quickly from the near-punk nihilism of ‘Rock ‘n Roll Lies’ to the ethereal ‘America’ or the skiffle of next single ‘Before I Fall To Pieces’, or the country hybrid evident in ‘Kirby’s House’. Impressively, last night they played every single song from their second album – this was a far cry from the last concert we went to, Red Hot Chili Peppers at Earl’s Court, where the band, just fresh from releasing a 28-track double album, played about five songs from that new album in their entire set. That says a lot to me about how much Razorlight believe in their new material.

I don’t have a problem with the political sloganeering which has seen Razorlight aligning themselves fully with the Live 8 / Make Poverty History / Curtis / Geldof / Bono thing. Passionate about certain subjects Mr Borrell may well be, but not in the irritating way that Bono likes to drone on about all these disparate causes trying to alleviate misery and suffering. He could probably achieve this far better if he shelled out a bit more money on these charities and stopped singing; that would certainly put an end to my suffering. Last night the screens prior to Razorlight taking to the stage were not filled with the usual commercial advertising that you normally see at stadium concerts, but instead long clips advertising The Big Ask which seeks to address and halt climate change, and a film detailing the collapse of our environment with harrowing imagery of Hurricane Katrina and the New Orleans disaster. Admittedly this was then replaced by an opportunity for audience members to pay £1.50 by SMS for a video download of one of the songs performed on stage live that very evening; whether you like it or not, despite bands’ frequent protestations to the contrary, making music professionally is all about making money.

The main thing I have a problem with is a jarring disappointment at having to watch this incredible band in a venue like Wembley. Fair enough it may well be expected by a band that have now become a much more successful act, but the last time we saw them was in the intimate North London venue The Garage in Islington, where we were among around 500 committed fans. Standing there last night avoiding aggressively-slung half-empty plastic beer glasses, watching the clowning casual fans stadium-chanting their way through the choruses of only the most obvious tracks, I realised just how disappointing it was seeing this band in such a large, cold venue compared to the warmth and intimacy of The Garage where the audience consisted only of the most die-hard fans. We were spoilt with getting to see them at The Garage, much as we were spoilt last year by being in the audience at a 1000 ticket concert at Atlantic City’s Borgata Hotel by the Chili Peppers – one of the biggest bands in the world in intimate surroundings where you could almost touch them.

And then of course there’s the sound at Wembley. I’ve been to concerts at this flagship London venue several times before and every time have come away saying I’d never go back again. Now that the venue has been refurbished inside and out, my hopes that the sound would have similarly improved were proved to be mere pipe dreams, as the sound, as described above was just as abysmal as ever. We had a similar thing with the Red Hot Chili Peppers after hearing a superior mix at The Borgata only to get horrendous stadium sound at both Coventry’s Ricoh Stadium and Earl’s Court. But whilst Wembley might now look much more modern, the sound still sounds appalling. I cannot vituperate enough about the short-changing you get from shelling out not insignificant sums on concert tickets only to be greeted by a sound that disappoints.

I found myself observing the audience more than the band itself, wondering how it was that such casual non-fans even bothered to buy tickets if all they were going to do was shout at one another and decide who was going to head to the bar for the next round. Judging by their dancing, I can only assume that most of these individuals were big club-goers in the late 1990s and early 2000s who suddenly realised that music tastes had changed away from dance music in favour of live rock music, and that all the sexy girls were heading out to gigs rather than nightclubs. This would explain their housey ‘hands in the air’ attempts at dancing to rock music. It would be quite amusing were it not so bloody irritating.

I know music is supposed to be a populist affair accessible by everyone, but when concerts start attracting the type of individuals who go along to festivals to get wasted while listening to music rather than listening to the music in the first instance, there is a bit of a problem. Not just for committed fans such as my wife and I, but also for the band whom I can’t imagine find it particularly gratifying to play to an admittedly packed venue but one where less than half are really there for your band.
There is, however, the possibility that the concert sound was actually fantastic, that the band thought the audience were really behind them and that casual and die-hard fans locked arms in an ell-embracing solidarity, and that I’ve just become too old for concerts like this one.

2006-10-24T14:10:00.000+01:00

Observations From A Mid-Morning Train

Today I caught a train back home just before 11.00. It hardly seemed worth going into work for little more than an hour and a half, but sometimes you just have to. Travelling outside the peak period is something of a luxury, and it's nice to be able to board a fairly empty train and get the pick of the seats. This train admittedly was busier than other off-peak journeys I've made recently, but it was still reasonably quiet.

As it was still 'work time', my trusty mobile and BlackBerry were within easy reach, and I needed to return a couple of calls that had come through when I was on the Underground. One of these was from my manager, a huge personality with an even larger voice, and I proceeded to call him back. It was just a general catch up on a few things and a bit of a natter about our respective home lives. He's one of those rare managers I've only had the privilege of working with twice in my career that you can talk to as a mate and also as more of a colleague than employee.

Anyway, he and I were talking when a middle-aged couple boarded the still-empty train, and, just inside the sliding doors, stood there prevaricating - quite rambunctiously - as to whether they should take a seat in the carriage I was in, or whether they should head through the train to another carriage toward the rear of the train; such indecision would result in a serious castigation from we impatient commuters, but with it being so quiet there was no-one uptight enough to administer such a reprimand. I wish someone had though.

So, after about 600 years they chose the seats in front of mine, and proceeded to attempt a resolution to their next Big Dilemma - who was going to sit next to the window? As if it matters! They weren't kids, who I can imagine would probably fight to the death over who should have the marginally greater honour of a window seat, or passengers on an airline where the windows are so small that the passenger next to the window is the only one who gets the view (of what? Clouds? Don't see many of those generally, do you?); these are big glass train windows and everyone can see the things whizzing by, so quite why I had to listen to their indecisive pondering I don't know.

After an eternity, the lady of the couple elected to take the window while the man scratched his head wondering whether their miniscule suitcase a) would fit on the glass luggage rack above the seats and b) whether the rack would be strong enough. Honestly, naïve tourist travellers with their cheap day return tickets, they are a funny bunch. Of course the bag did fit and of course the glass didn't smash under the unsubstantial weight of the gentleman's case.

Now all settled, the man flopped down into his aisle seat, and the couple proceeded to have the very commonly-heard exchange of near-simultaneous sighs and expressions along the lines of 'Phew, glad we made it,' and 'I thought we weren't going to make it in time,' even though the train wasn't due to depart for a further ten minutes; with such novice traveller behaviour abounding, I was sorely tempted to point out that rushing for a train can be avoided by simply leaving earlier, but instead I sat there smugly reflecting on my comparative superiority as a regular train user.

So there they both are, comfortable in their seats, when the lady turns to her husband and asks whether he wouldn't mind reaching up and grabbing the day's newspapers from the front pocket of the case. And so, up he goes again, his head glancing off the luggage rack as he does so, even though he has spent the last few minutes fixedly staring up at the shelf with his neck craned to see if the glass is likely to shatter, down comes the bag, out come the papers - one is not surprised to see the Daily Mail - and up goes the bag again.

Now, though I am a mere male, I'm pretty adept at multitasking while talking on the phone, and so I was quite competently chatting to Sean whilst observing the couple run through their comedic inept traveller routine. I'm a quietly spoken individual, often to the frustration of others, and whilst I may naturally talk a little louder than usual on a mobile, it's hardly megaphone-esque. 'I'll drop you an email about the November conference,' I said, referring to the outputs from the morning's meeting. And with that, the woman whipped her head around and literally spat out a sharp retort.

'Looks like we're having a business meeting then!'

I was genuinely dumbstruck by this. Nothing like that has ever happened to me before. Time seemed to slow down to a treacle-esque pace, my paralysed mouth hanging open like Munch's Scream with fear replaced by befuddlement.

'You still there?' said Sean into my ear, suddenly shaking me out of my frozen state. As I responded and the conversation continued, the woman, who had by this time snapped her head forward again and began coughing - and it was a fraudulent cough of the most transparent variety, mark my words - intermittently so as to put me off talking. I very quickly hung up, fully intending to point out that this was not one of the mobile-free carriages one often has on longer-distance trains, that I wasn't talking exceptionally loudly and most of all that they could see I was on the phone when they boarded the train, so they could easily have found somewhere else to sit.

But of course, Britishness prevailed and I elected to say nothing, noting that the husband was wearing a gold stud in his left earlobe, thereby subtly conveying that he was a hard bastard who shouldn't be crossed. Even though he was about sixty. Something about her comment just made me want to do a very cartoon-esque thing and retract my head into my chest to prevent my extreme embarrassment from being made public.

With my phone set to silent and resolutely ignored for the remainder of the journey, I began to ruminate on what had just happened; meanwhile, the lady and her husband began a conversation chiefly centred around what they were reading in the papers - the McCartney divorce, immigration ('Look at this picture,' she said, stabbing the Mail with a garishly-painted red fingertip. 'They're all bloody African!') and other anthropological delights. Occasionally one of the three other suits around them would begin a business conversation, and the couple would begin a ridiculous, co-ordinated routine that went a bit like this: the two would look at one another, shrug and laugh the kind of laugh that a Bond villain would be proud of if he'd been raised in suburban Northamptonshire instead of some inner-city gangland drama, then they would take turns to cough in the manner I have already described above in order to not-too-subtly point out that they were both listening and unimpressed by the business conversation being held in adjacent seats.

Which, in a round about sort of way, leads me to my thought-provoking enquiry; why is it that a conversation on a mobile is considered more annoying than a conversation where both parties are actually present? The couple were talking at precisely the same level as the guys on their phones, in fact I would suggest at an even louder volume, and yet they deemed themselves to be behaving with a more acceptable etiquette despite holding a conversation which would have offended anyone within earshot that didn't hold court to such right-wing opinions. Would I therefore be within my rights to ask them to pipe the hell down, or would this in fact be considered an unfair infringement on their civil rights?

At least I can take some comfort in the fact that they were at least as much the embarrassed Brits - content to moan but too scared to actually do anything - as I was, preferring to make half-whispered swipes and fairly innocuous coughing noises than actually saying something. Much as I did later the same day on a train to Wales where someone was sat in my allocated seat - my name and destination clearly labelled for all, including the fat old bird who thought it was clearly free, to see - and instead of saying something (goodness, no) had to find a spare seat elsewhere, muttering under my breath in case she should hear.

Apparently, according to today's papers as a nation we are scared of teenagers, presumably because we are scared of getting stabbed - I read elsewhere that something like a third of all kids have taken a knife to school - or mugged, or in some parts of Britain, actually taking a bullet; put up or shot up, indeed. Not that the dizzy old cow in front of me with her Mrs Bucket-style barnet would have been the type to pack a pistol. That might be some way off yet.

This wasn't intended to come off like a social commentary, and so before we get too bogged-down in politics and the state of the nation, I will leave you with this more lightweight dilemma - how are you supposed to pee on a tilting train without compromising your masculinity and resorting to sitting down, something the average bloke hasn't done since potty training?

2006-09-15T10:07:00.000+01:00

A piece on Star Wars not intended to cast me as a sci-fi geek

Tomorrow night will be, for me, quite a memorable occasion. It will be my first night of babysitting our daughter, while my wife heads out with her fellow mums for a richly-deserved night of letting their collective hairs down. Aside from the obligatory baby-related activities, my myriad (but likely to be unfulfilled) plans for the evening include trying to write a few more pages of my first novel, and watching Star Wars.

Kids today, and those geekish purists, will point out that in fact there is no such film called Star Wars, that in fact there never was – it is, as the iconic scrolling intro does point out, entitled Star Wars Episode IV : A New Hope. However, if you were a kid in the 1970s watching this film, you knew it as simply Star Wars. The fact that roman numerals weren’t taught in state schools until you were about ten perhaps also had something to do with it. So, as a child of the 1970s, this film will always be Star Wars to me.

Star Wars is one of those film that only really comes around once in a generation; something that fires your imagination and dominates your youth. It’s a simple story well known to most people that was so successful because it combined an unending passion for war films (there is a huge Nazi Germany overtone to everything about George Lucas’s evil Galactic Empire), sci-fi and adventure. And for kids like me, Star Wars was everywhere during our youthful years. I was born in 1976, so far too young to appreciate the first film (okay, the fourth film) when it hit the cinemas in ’77, but by the time Empire Strikes Back was released in 1980, was just the right age to get really excited about the film and all its spin-off merchandise, quickly replacing Lego as my toy of choice.

One of my earliest, and fondest, memories was going to Stratford-upon-Avon’s now-closed cinema (it became a Safeway, then council offices, then the Chicago Rock Café where Michelle and I drunkenly held our joint hen and stag do in 2001) on a Sunday to watch a double bill of Star Wars with Empire Strikes Back. It was one of only two occasions that my dad took me to the cinema (the other time was to Leamington Spa to watch the second Indiana Jones flick). Apart from being totally thrilled by the experience of actually going to the pictures and of being able to watch the latest Star Wars film, my other over-riding memory is of my dad falling asleep as the first film started, only waking up again at the very end of Empire Strikes Back.

Crikey, there are so many memories from childhood that are connected to Star Wars. The first time I watched Return Of The Jedi was on a pirate VHS on our first (top-loading, natch) video recorder, a Hitachi if my memory serves me. My dad had repossessed the equipment during the course of his work for a local electricals store, and it came with a poorly photocopied set of instructions and a ‘remote’ control which was attached to the recorder by a wire. How things have changed. The pirate film (it was my second pirate film – the first was ET at my friend Jono’s birthday party) was awful, awful quality, barely more than a guy with a primitive camcorder recording it from the back of a cinema. With my youthful imagination, I didn’t even know that pirates were illegal, and instead thought that people took their own video recorders into the cinema, plugged them into a panel underneath the screen and returned at the end of the picture to collect their equipment. How innocent. Boy, did I have a crush on Princess Leia in that bikini.

In one of the more odd merchandising angles from ROTJ, my mum bought me a duvet and pillow set which would have probably cost a fair bit back then, and would likely be worth a small fortune today. However, little boy Smith found the sight of a bloated Jabba The Hutt prominently printed at the centre of his duvet rather too distressing, and thus the bedspread was never to be seen again.

And then there was the day I met Darth Vader. That day, a very hot and sticky Stratford summer’s day, has left an indelible mark on my memory of childhood. There is a shopping centre in Stratford called Bell Court. It used to have a fake, weathered bell hanging above one of the entrances, and wooden benches ran next to a toyshop called Derek Lamb’s. Lamb was something of a Stratford toy magnate, running no less than three stores. There are no toy shops in Stratford anymore. In his store on Wood Street, my dad and I bought a small grey mouse to give to my newborn little sister, and in the store on High Street I was bought my first Dungeons and Dragons and Transformer toys. But it was in the Bell Court store that David Prowse, in full Darth Vader regalia, shook my hand and signed my copy of the book of ROTJ. (There were two editions of this book – a junior one in a light blue jacket, which he signed, and a presumably more grown-up version in a darker blue jacket). He signed it ‘Darth Vader’ with a black marker pen, and most people rightly don’t believe it was the real Vader signing the book; well, Prowse lived just outside Stratford, so it was, okay? I was petrified of the huge man standing in front of me, and was convinced that he was going to lift me off the floor by the neck like he does with that Rebel chap in the first few minutes of Star Wars. I distinctly remember that the black glove which he extended to me, which prompted me to burst into tears, was weathered and torn. I guess even evil Jedis find it hard to go to update their wardrobes.

After my fearful encounter with Vader, my mum and dad said that because I’d been so brave (I presume this was because I hadn’t wet myself perhaps as I’d hardly in my eyes shown myself to be what you could possibly consider ‘brave’), they said that I could choose a Star Wars action figure. I chose Princess Leia dressed as Bounty Hunter Bousch from Return Of The Jedi, which had a removable rubber helmet.

I maintain that as a child I was not spoilt, although the paragraph above may prompt you to disagree with me. In terms of Star Wars figures and vehicles, I had a pretty substantial collection, had an X-Wing, had a Snowspeeder and ST-AT. But I never had the Millennium Falcon or an AT-AT. These were reserved for the kids from more affluent families. In those days you could tell how well off a family was by the size of the Star Wars vehicle they had. If you had the Falcon you were rich, if you had the crappy little ‘mini-pods’ that didn’t even appear in the films then you were poor. I started selling my figures and vehicles a few years ago via the wonder of eBay and was amazed at the prices you could fetch; I now consider them my emergency fund for whenever I need to raise some extra cash, although it is with a pang of regret that I mail them off, hopefully to a good home.

***

Thus it was with a palpable sense of excitement that I put Seren down to bed, located the Star Wars DVD boxset that my parents gave me for Christmas and sat down in front of the TV. Now, to my chagrin, the versions on the boxset are the remastered editions from the 1990s which included extra CGI footage, but I hadn’t seen them before and was amazed that I could tell, with perhaps ten years having passed since I last saw the first (fourth!) film, when something looked different. (I thought the addition of a sound effect and ‘grunt’ in the much-fabled scene where the Stormtrooper hits his head on the door frame rather unnecessary, but at least they didn’t cut it out).

To be honest, I was prepared to be disappointed in a way. Recently I’ve been watching some of the films that I used to watch in my younger days, and have found them to be far from the classic movies that I previously thought them to be. Last weekend we watched Brewster’s Millions, which I absolutely loved as a child, but which now – with the exception of some great shots of New York (we call it New York Porn in our house) – seems truly rubbish. Ghostbusters was the same. Only Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Back To The Future have retained any sort of greatness now that I am an adult.

But Star Wars was just as incredible as I remembered it to be. Aside from the comforting familiarity and warm fuzzy childhood feelings it evoked, it truly is a classic film. I have suggested to my wife that she should perhaps go out with her friends more frequently, ostensibly so that I can babysit Seren and get closer to my daughter; really it’s so that I can watch Empire and Return Of The Jedi and get all nostalgic once again. I can then decide whether I agree with the dialogue in Clerks that asserts, of the three movies, that Empire has the strongest – if darkest – ending.

2006-09-12T13:46:00.000+01:00

Nothing to say but plenty to moan about

Faced with 1500 words and an empty page, for the first time since I started writing this each week, I am without anything specific to write about. I could write about the anniversary of September 11, my five-year wedding anniversary and my impending thirtieth birthday, and in fact I have already started a piece on this very subject but I can’t find it on my hard-drive right now. I could write about how so many things seem to be changing around me, but I’m saving that miserable topic for the week of my thirtieth birthday. For the record, on that week I will only be listening to Joy Division and Depeche Mode records, will be drowning my sorrows in copious amounts of cheap booze, and sobbing onto my wife’s shoulder.

So what I’ll do instead is have a general moan about things that have been bothering me lately. I’ve been saving up a number of these gripes and here seems like as good a juncture as any to put them all together and get them off my expanding chest.

‘Expanding?’ you exclaim. ‘How can he possibly be getting into shape when they’ve just had a baby? How does he have the time?’ Well, expanding does come off rather macho, doesn’t it? Like I’ve been working out and beefing up despite the squeeze on time just from having a dependent little madam around the place. But alas, my chest – and gut, and waist – are expanding through a complete lack of exercise and a new diet that seems to consist principally of late-night eating and convenience food.

Chez Smith we’ve always been pretty health conscious when it comes to food – no red meat, we gave up chicken a long time ago, we eat oily fish and plenty of vegetables – and we’ve been very healthy for it. We also used to go out for evening walks, Michelle was a member of a gym and I would walk to work. Well, I’d walk the part of the route from car to station and at the other end from Euston to the City – walking from Milton Keynes to London is not really do-able, although I did once think about walking home that way, but it’s a long story. Since Seren arrived each and every one of those things have gone out the window – we eat pizza probably once a week (we even started getting Domino’s delivered which I have previously considered a cardinal sin), throw a jar of sauce into a pan instead of making it ourselves, and the effort of preparing some fresh fish is just too much effort; Michelle simply can’t go to the gym and the crèche there is apparently a death trap for kiddies, and despite my nervous anxiety over catching the tube since July 7 I have found myself reluctantly riding the underground because I’m too knackered to do anything else, or working from home more often where I don’t benefit from any exercise other than the occasional walk along the landing in the house to the toilet.

At the moment I’m reading Morgan Super Size Me Spurlock’s Don’t Eat This Book which outlines just why it is that fast food is so bad for you. This book is practically a horror novel rather than a discursive factual work – you should feel sickened by the fast food companies and the crap they serve up as ‘food’ and make you never want to eat anything again. Except, for the first five chapters or so it actually made me want to eat crap food! What’s that all about? I have destroyed my svelte frame and now just want to eat like an obese hog. Anyone who heard me say in my earlier years that I never put any weight on is now laughing at my burgeoning middle-age spread. On Saturday I ate around 250% of my daily recommended saturated fat intake via a combination of pastry, breadsticks, crisps and an Indian takeaway. If I live to see 40 eating like this I should count myself lucky. (Whilst writing this very paragraph I was contacted by a colleague who said he was overjoyed that he’d managed to get his sat nav device to display the location of all local McDonald’s and KFCs and ping whenever he got close to one; on the one hand I am amazed at this, on the other appalled that someone could get so enthusiastic about being able to precisely pinpoint a source of such unhealthy food. He said that it was a ‘saviour’. A saviour that clogs up your arteries and sends you to an early grave, presumably.)

To fast food I would append the abundance of hydrogenated vegetable oil – a common trans fat which is supposedly lethal – in foods. It’s hard to avoid, and is in pretty much every biscuit or cake you can buy. I recently found it in raisins. Raisins! Aren’t they just dried grapes? Why do they need to be coated in margarine for God’s sake? Even when you try to eat healthily you end up eating processed muck.

What else? I know – travelling to Cornwall or anywhere in the South-West if you don’t live on or near the M5 or M4. That’s a bitch. I do love it in Cornwall, but the journey is a pain in the arse. The last time we did it the journey took us thirteen hours. Thirteen hours! I could fly to New York twice in that time.

The disposable nature of society, that’s something that bugs me. The development of cheap materials and therefore even cheaper garments from places like Tesco, H&M and Gap encourages you to re-buy your entire wardrobe with each and every new season, thus leaving you with the problem of what to do with the stuff you bought that you no longer wear. What a waste. And then there’s the fact that you buy something from these places, it looks great the first time you wear it, but then you wash it and it looks like you’ve owned it for about ten years. Oh, and iTunes downloads. You download that killer, must-have track, listen to it, go off it, delete it. Next!

Crap cars that their owners think could pass as sports cars if they stick on a new exhaust and ‘chav’ it up. Wrong. They’re still crap cars. In Birmingham the other day I saw an old 1980s Astra that had been customised into some boy racer Frankencar; in the front (blacked-out) window he’d added a huge sticker with ‘Astra’ in italics. Astras have never been cool – why do you think that advertising it is going to make it any cooler? Next!

Fat blokes reading lads’ mags. It looks desperate.

Girls who think that wearing ‘quirky’ fashion, uncomfortable shoes and carrying a Vuitton handbag will instantly reward them with the life of Carrie Bradshaw. It doesn’t. You look desperate too. And don’t pretend that High Holborn is like Fifth Avenue while you’re at it.

Applying for a passport and trying to get an authorised signatory from a list that the average person wouldn’t have a cat in hell’s chance of knowing someone from. Do they simply not want you to travel?

Olympic-sized trampolines in small residential gardens, thus affording the trampolinee the perfect view of my wife breastfeeding in the lounge when bouncing skyward. This I could write a whole piece on, but I may be pursuing legal advice on this in the next few weeks and therefore don’t want to weaken my case in case my neighbour reads this. But while we’re at it – balls being thrown wantonly from said trampoline, into my garden, and destroying the few plants that have made it from seed to seedling. That sucks too.

Waiters and waitresses who have the cheek to expect a tip when all they’ve done is served you a drink. And a 12.5% tip at that.

The cost of train tickets in the UK. Are they not aware of low cost airlines undercutting their train fares for the same route by around 75%?

The way that baristas in places like Starbucks or Pret seem completely unable to produce the same drink twice. Is there some great skill to making generic coffee variations that I am unaware of? There must be, as this is the only thing that could explain why it is that you’ll get served a perfect latte one day followed by another that is too strong, or too weak, or too frothy, or too creamy. ‘A bit frothy today my love, sorry about that,’ said the barista in the Starbucks I was in today. Too bloody right it was too frothy. It might as well have been topped with shaving foam.

And finally, those people who just moan about anything and everything. Don’t they hack you off? They’re never happy, always finding something to be miserable about. I mean, how can anyone live their life like that? If I ever get like that you can shoot me.

2006-09-04T09:10:00.000+01:00

Fear and loathing and a moment of clarity

Like so many others, I found the disruption caused by the emergency changes to hand luggage on Thursday 10 August highly frustrating, but more importantly highly unnerving. Along with my wife and daughter, I was intending to make a short flight from Luton to Newquay for my sister's wedding, and arrived at Luton to be greeted at 6.00 AM by security staff handing out leaflets detailing what could and couldn't be taken on board as hand luggage.

Wisely - perhaps - the leaflet made no mention of why these emergency measures had been put in place, but whether they described it or not, in today's tense climate it was obviously linked to terrorism. And, gradually news spread like Chinese whispers from others in the sluggish check-in queues about the arrests, and what do you know? It was linked to terrorism.

I'm not intending to turn my blog into some sort of political soapbox, but I feel incredibly strongly about terrorism because I feel like I have spent the last five years living in abject fear that at any second someone could blow up the train I take to work each day, the bus I'm walking past or the building I work in. And now, once again, planes appear to be the target, just like it was five years ago when Al Qaeda terribly and ferociously embedded themselves in the wider public consciousness.

I am a stone's throw away from turning thirty, but the continual threat of terrorism hangs heavy around my neck and I feel far older through this heightened state of stress. There are days where I feel I just can't take it anymore. Days where I can't face getting on a train, hate the very act of being in close proximity to some of the City of London's landmarks; days where you need to take a deep breath before boarding a tube and feel like you're holding it until you get off again fifteen minutes later.

Cornwall is arguably more at risk of sinking into the sea than being a target for international political and religious (where does one draw that line?) terrorism, but the security clampdown affected all flights, not just international transit. Thus the act of flying to one of the most serene, untouched places on earth also becomes absorbed into this terrifying situation. I wish they'd closed the airports instead of restricting luggage and striking fear into the very heart of you as you board a plane. I have only been that terrified once before - when flying back from Orlando on the first day US airports were open after 9/11.

Only this time, in a way, the fear of flying was worse. While a part of you was relieved and reassured that our police and intelligence service seemed to have successfully prevented an atrocity, there remained the lingering fear that they'd have missed someone and that someone might decide to act quickly to cause devastation amid the chaos. But for me the situation was worse because, unlike September 11, we now have a daughter. It was, at just three months, her first flight, and we are naturally very protective and concerned about her well-being. That the news seems to suggest that babies were to be used as distractions and decoys sickens me to the pit of my stomach.

Now I know anyone reading this will probably think it irrational to worry about a tiny, insignificant little flight to Newquay containing no more than forty people, but if terrorists can contemplate bringing kids into this pathetic fight then nothing is off limits. In a way I'm glad she was not older as the sight of police at Luton Airport patrolling the queues with machine guns must be unnerving for children, let alone rational adults.

If there can be a positive outcome from this round of terror plotting – aside from supposedly averting what people are calling the single most devastating Al Qaeda attack to date – for me it is that it has forced me to reassess my priorities and make significant changes to my life to try and minimise the risk of something happening to me, thereby leaving my daughter fatherless. July 7 2005 was an event that made me think twice about my life and the amount of risk I was exposed to – even though nothing happened, August 10 2006 was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

I decided that on the one hand I just couldn’t face working in London anymore. This was quite an uncomfortable decision to make seeing as I love London as a place and have always yearned to work here; but without a doubt, London is likely to be a focus of terrorist activity for as long as it remains our capital, the site of our parliament and the most densely-packed financial hub in the UK. And therefore so long as I work there, I am exposing myself to that risk. Whilst I should perhaps follow my colleagues’ example and simply shrug my shoulders and carry on, knowing that the odds of something specifically happening to me are slim, becoming a parent nearly four months ago has made me think very differently. It’s made me realise that this isn’t a risk that I'm prepared to take.

But, on the other hand, there is an economic justification for working in London. Being blunt, we could not have the lifestyle that we have if I didn’t work in London. I couldn’t command the salary that I earn elsewhere for the simple reason that I work in a segment of the financial services industry which is City-focussed. So, putting my daughter at the heart of my decision making going forward, I simply can’t dump the idea of working in London completely – if I were to take that route, I’d feel like I was not providing for her in the way that I want to.

For a few days after that chaotic Thursday, I agonised over what to do, and the stress was more unbearable than ever before. In fact when I started writing this piece, I was so unnerved by the whole experience that I honestly thought I was heading for a nervous breakdown. As so often happens, when you think there’s absolutely no way out at all, a solution presents itself and clarity is suddenly restored.

My job, I began to realise, did not actually – when I came to seriously think about it – require me to be in London every single day of the week. I took a look at my diary and realised that the days when I came to London were actually fairly pointless – apart from the odd meeting, I realised that I could be just as productive working remotely instead of trekking to London every day. I have the means, motivation and technology to work from home, and have built up enough trust with my manager whereby he knows that if I'm not in the office, it doesn’t mean I’m not working just as hard. And thus I find myself taking the brave step of basing myself outside of London and committing to only travelling into the capital when absolutely necessary, which may be twice a week or sometimes just once.

A while ago a friend and I were talking about how both companies and employers seem reluctant to fully commit to the idea of working remotely, despite the existence of enabling technology, and even though there are cost and productivity benefits to facilitating remote working. And I can see the logic in this. I enjoy working from home, for example, because I can get up, roll into the home office and be close to my wife and daughter; but at the same time I feel like I have to work twice as hard because I feel like I will come under closer scrutiny by not showing my face in the office every day. I also find working from home somewhat distracting because I want to natter to my wife and play with my daughter, which really aren’t acceptable work activities.

The compromise for me is to base myself at one of the three sites my parent company has in Milton Keynes, allowing me to escape the need to travel into London every day (and associated cost) but also giving me the chance to do something I never thought I'd be able to have again after accepting life as a commuter – the chance to work in the same town as you live, finish at 5.00, and be home by 5.30. To be able to achieve more time with my family, with significantly less stress and to maintain a certain financial standing, is a blessing that I never thought attainable, but which was staring me in the face all along. A shame it takes something as huge as terrorism to make you realise this.

2006-08-21T16:52:00.000+01:00

Mercenaries (Ready For War)

As I'm sure any regular reader will have established, I live in Milton Keynes, a new city in North Buckinghamshire generally described in disparaging terms and often to be heard in conversation alongside roundabouts and the famous concrete black and white cows created by Liz Leyh that live in a field just outside the City centre.

What happens to be one of my favourite films, the über-sentimental Brit flick Love Actually includes a scene where Colin Firth is learning Portuguese in a language school. He and his colleagues are reciting various sentences whilst wearing headphones, whereupon one student says 'Milton Keynes has lots of roundabouts'. At first you laugh, and then you feel embarrassed. Despite some incredible facilities, Milton Keynes is something of a laughing stock. 'Someone's got to,' is the usual response when you say you live in Milton Keynes.

The butt of jokes it may well be, but I'm laughing after seeing my house price rise over 25% in just over three years, for despite being looked down-upon, Milton Keynes is a property hot spot that appears to make a nonsense of the notions of supply and demand that were drummed into me while studying economics. Under John Prescott's chubby direction, Milton Keynes is expanding rapidly, new houses are being crammed into hitherto undeveloped areas of the City, and yet despite this huge creation of supply, demand remains unmet and prices continue to storm ahead.

We only came to live here because we couldn't afford to move farther south, even though that would make much more sense for my commute into London. I'm glad we did move here though, not least because when I say I live in Buckinghamshire it sounds quite posh, but most importantly because the facilities in Milton Keynes are top notch. You want shops? You have a massive shopping centre with all you major names plus higher end outlets from Jaegar, Boss, Karen Millen and now Austin Reed. Shops that you'd normally associate with London (such as Krispy Kreme or Pret) tend to branch out in MK after other major cities. You want leisure? You have gyms a plenty and the huge Xscape area with its indoor ski slope. You want to eat? Xscape again has loads of smart eateries, the Centre:MK has the likes of Wagamama and out of town there are two noted gastro pubs. You want culture? You've got a fantastic modern theatre and an art gallery specialising in offbeat contemporary and often installation-based art. You want somewhere peaceful to walk? You've got the Grand Union Canal toepath and three man-made but beautifully-landscaped lakes. You want good transport links? You've got the M1 about 5 minutes from the City centre and a train service into London that could be as quick as 30 minutes, and you can get to London Luton or Birmingham International in next to no time. You want a spirit of modern enterprise? You've got businesses like Easy Group or Domino's that will try new products and ideas in Milton Keynes before rolling them out elsewhere. You want offices? You've got modern office space with good light and facilities at a fraction of the rent per square foot of London.

In short, you've got everything you could possibly need in Milton Keynes, plus you can get to the villages or countryside, or historic towns like Buckingham and Woburn in no time.

However, I think the people in Milton Keynes are among the most mercenary individuals I've ever come across. Much more so than London, much more so in fact than the Spanish guys who've come over to work at Abbey's HQ since Santander took them over. People are always in a hurry, everyone's rude, no-one will hold a door open for you (even with a buggy), people spend their money like it's going out of fashion (especially on cars – the drivers of those Porsches and Maseratis think it must be Chelsea, I swear) and no-one gives two hoots about anyone else.

I think I may know the reason. Notwithstanding the fact that lots of people have made a lot of money from their houses, which has given residents huge spending power, the main reason lies in the construction of the City itself.

To illustrate this, I shall use an example. Terry Pratchett (of Discworld fame) and Neil Gaiman (of comic book fame) once collaborated on a book together in which a theory of why the M25 was so hellish was proposed - if I remember correctly, one of the Devil's staff moved the markings for the London Orbital so that it was formed in the shape of an occult symbol, thus ensuring users would be subjected to nightmarish journeys because of the powerful black energy coursing around the motorway.

Now, I'm not suggesting that the planners of Milton Keynes' visionary new town project were working in legion with the underworld, because the basic premise of Milton Keynes - built as it is as a series of interconnected grids - is sublime. Take New York as the best example of a city built as grid. So long as you know your east from west, so long as you know that your avenues run from north to south and your streets run east to west; so long as you know this you can't get lost. Now it's hard, I admit, to compare a small City in Buckinghamshire with NYC, but in many respects the premise should be easier in MK - east to west roads are marked by Hs, north to south roads are marked by Vs - horizontal and vertical. Non-residents find it so confusing, but it's so easy. I maintain that if you were tasked with building a new city today, you'd do it in a grid. It makes so much sense.

However, it does have a downside, which is where the mercenary spirit has evolved from. Milton Keynes was built for car users first and foremost. Public transport is worse here than anywhere I've ever lived before and if you don't have a car your life is going to be pretty hellish here. Most of the H and V artery roads are dual carriageways, and carry a 70mph speed limit or 60 in the case of single-lane roads. This obliges people to drive fast, which has instilled an unwelcome culture of needing to get from A to B in the quickest possible time, which then spills over to create the rudeness and selfishness that is endemic in this city. The fact that signalling left or right, or parking straight in a space at a car park is beyond the grasp of these drivers is neither here nor there. This city is thus built on very 1980s Thatcherite foundations of speed, greed and wealth where all semblance of community spirit has been replaced by one of chronic individualism.

A few months ago I witnessed one of the worst acts of bloody-mindedness that I've ever seen in this city. Alighting from the train I joined the jostling throng of people climbing the steps up to street level. This is always my least favourite part of my commute, just because it reminds me of how totally self-important Milton Keynes commuters are. Amid the clamour to get up the stairs before anyone else, people push - sometimes discretely using a bag, sometimes more obviously using elbows - to get themselves ahead of their fellow commuters. Eventually you are corralled into two columns, two people abreast. But pity anyone needing to get down the stairs to the train you've just departed. My fellow commuters wouldn't dream of making it easy for them, and so I wonder how many people have had to ring a loved one from the station to explain that they would be late because no-one would let them down the stairs?On this one occasion, someone trying to get down the stairs proved himself to be every bit as mercenary as those coming up. Rather than edging his way down the steps one by one hoping that the twin columns would break slightly for him to get down a step or two more, he took it upon himself to charge down the stairs, violently knocking one woman out of the way in the process. He didn't turn around to apologise even though she had been clearly hurt and shook up by his shoving; as long as he was on that train he was fine, others’ feelings didn't matter. The clear symbolism of this self-centredness is obvious to me.

***

At the weekend Michelle and I had our first barbecue of 2006. It was a clear, still day, but as soon as the coals were lit the wind picked up and smoke billowed in random directions, including over the fence into my neighbours' garden, where the washing had just been pegged out and the windows were open. It was an accident - I couldn't control the wind, nor should I necessarily have popped around to their house to inform them in advance of my intention to cook up some burgers. But the lady of the house next door, who must be pushing fifty, was sufficiently unimpressed to mutter to herself angrily over the fence as she gathered up her washing in a huff and slammed all the windows shut and then stuck on the radio at stadium volumes, thus waking our baby and giving us an afternoon’s worth of Robbie Williams, Kaiser Chiefs and other chart-bothering acts. All for two burgers and a bit of harmless smoke. Such is the selfishness of the residents of Milton Keynes.

2006-08-15T13:14:00.000+01:00

Gardening

It is quite remarkable how your attitudes to certain things evolve over the course of your life. My taste in music, for example, has developed over the years from my early nineties standpoint of militantly avoiding anything that featured guitars, to my eclectic later years where the majority of the music to be found on my iPod is now guitar-based. I once remarked, to the amusement of my guitar-playing girlfriend of the time, that the sonic potential within the guitar was limited to the point that the instrument was ‘linear and boring’. If she were to glance at my music collection some ten years on, she would be quite smug to see my collection includes pieces by Robert Fripp, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and Wire’s Bruce Gilbert – artists that have built their career on exploiting the guitar’s limitless potential and rendering my ‘linear and boring’ argument null and void.

There are countless other examples where I have revised my view of things with the passing of time (despite being adamant that I’d never change my mind), but this one is about gardening. If you have yet to be swayed by gardening’s charms, than I don’t expect to convert you, and I won’t mind if you decide not to carry on reading.

Like cooking, gardening is something that I never partook of as a child. Deciding where to put bedding plants and shrubs was chiefly my mother’s role; hoeing the beds, cutting down trees and mowing the lawn my father’s. The garden, for much of my childhood, was simply a place to knock tennis balls about in, and in my teenage years somewhere to sit in the summer. But now, as with cooking, I consider tending for our garden among my passions.

While I never helped out in the garden, I never took the garden for granted; I never wantonly destroyed plants with footballs or sat there pulling the petals off pansies, and remember feeling justly sorry when my Spacehopper flattened one of my mum’s roses. Part of my respect for the garden at our house came from the fact that prior to moving there, we lived in flats and therefore had no garden of our own.

In the first few years of living at the house my parents still live in to this day, they set about transforming the rear garden, inserting rockeries and feature beds and cutting down trees to produce what is today a largely shrub-filled mature garden with plenty of colour in the summer, and a patio filled with exotic tropical plants which my sister’s move to Cornwall has informed. The grass is always neatly mowed, weeds are a rarity and the whole garden has a well-kept order to it.

At the time, though I loved having a garden, it was more for recreational reasons and not because I had any interest in plants, trees or nature in general. And therefore the trips to various local garden centres were about as boring as watching grass grow, and my mother’s avid studying of the Dr Hessayon guides about the most tedious activity I could comprehend at the time. I was probably a complete brat while being escorted around the local nurseries, and if I know myself half as well as I think I do I no doubt complained about it being dull and that it was too hot in the greenhouses, and all the other things that little boys who prefer Star Wars figures and Lego generally do.

Fast-forward if you will to when my wife and I bought our first house. The house was a two-bedroom modern terrace with a small garden to the rear and a lawn to the front. I’d lived there for a couple of years already before we bought from the landlord, and had barely even been into the garden during that time. The conditions of the tenancy agreement were such that I was obliged to keep the garden tidy at all times, and – being the law-abiding, good citizen that I am – I bought a strimmer on the grounds that it was cheap, and arduously hacked away at the lawn every fortnight to keep it tidy. I did take one trip to a garden centre nearby while living as a tenant, and came away with some shrubs, which forced me to also buy some tools in order to create a border into which I planted the shrubs. To my amazement, they all survived, and in so doing the seeds of my future gardening passion began to germinate.

That said, as soon as my then-future wife and I bought the house, my inner sloth was awakened, and the garden rapidly became overgrown; we were in those first throes of love and tending to the garden was not at the top of our priorities. My father-in-law-to-be gifted me an old Flymo but I never touched it. I recall letting the grass grow so long that it looked more like a field of corn than a lawn, and was so dense that we once lost our cat among it. After a while I became suitably ashamed and set about mowing it using the Flymo, only to find all too late that using a lawnmower on two foot grass is not at all advisable, resulting in the gifted Flymo spitting flames as it burned itself to an electrical grave at the centre of our garden. Before putting that house on the market, we finally tackled both the front and rear gardens and in very short order produced something that we were both justifiably proud of, but which wasn’t really for our benefit at all.

Moving to our current house gave us a much larger canvas to play with, and crucially it was already an established, if unimaginatively laid out garden. The previous owner had grouped together several different types of plants, only instead of spreading these around the garden, they were kept together. So we had camellias in a line down the right hand side, hebes grouped together in one corner, rhododendrons in another and so on. Now into our third year of living in this house, with the exception of the general shape of the beds, the garden is fundamentally changed from when we moved in.

With each passing year my interest in the garden grows, as does my confidence as an amateur gardener. I now love going to the garden centre, myself peruse those Dr Hessayon books which are reassuring unchanged from when my mother read them in the 1980s, and every year get a little bit more adventurous in what I attempt to achieve.

However, despite all this enthusiasm, I must concede that I am a terrible, awful gardener. Whether by soil type, pest, overwatering or more likely sheer ineptitude, my success rate with buying plants from a nursery is nearly zero, with plants often withering and dying within days of being introduced to our borders. Bedding plants have proven a complete waste of time unless planted into containers on the patio, and the garden is filled with lots of shrubs that provide attractive greenery all year round but hardly any colour during the summer.

This year we decided that we wanted, like so many others, to introduce a meadow-like quality into our garden, and therefore we meticulously cleared out some of the shrubbery, prepared the soil and planted some wildflower seeds that we’d bought at the Eden Project. Our vision was to have dense borders filled with colours and butterflies, swaying gently in the summer breeze. The slugs in the garden had other ideas. After leaving the seeds to grow in the beds for a few days, to my dismay I inspected the beds only to discover the tiny shoots uniformly munched away by hungry insects. Thus, once again, our borders will remain characterless this year, only in some ways more so since we cleared out many of the existing plants to make room for our desired garden.

After a few years of leaning on my father-in-law to grow plants from seed, I decided that a degree of independence was required as I approached thirty, and therefore invested in a propagator and mini-greenhouse. I started to get very enthusiastic and protective about the progress of my tiny seedlings – cosmos, Korean mint, sweet peas, sunflowers, asters, and after a degree of success, tomatoes and runner beans – and watched them get stronger in the greenhouse. As of last week, owing to two separate incidents of high winds in Milton Keynes which caused the greenhouse to collapse, I was left with nine sweat peas, seven cosmos (of the original 24), no asters, two Korean mint and some shameful-looking tomatoes. The sunflowers survived best, and one specimen reached a grand three feet before another windy day this week snapped it neatly in half. Cue a complete switch back to my pre-teenage ways, in other words a big old toys-out-of-the-pram strop and a genuine exclamation along the lines of ‘that’s it; the bloody garden can go to hell for all I care.’

Despite another largely unsuccessful bout of gardening I find my passion once again undiminished. A haphazard sowing of forget-me-nots and some unscathed wildflowers that appear to be avoiding the attention of the slugs has given my confidence something of a boost and it may be that we in fact do get some colour in the garden this year. Already my mind is filled with new plants to grow and features to weave into the garden, books on plants and flowers that I want to buy…and a growing realisation that as I get older the more motivated I become by the things that I hated as a child.

2006-08-07T19:02:00.000+01:00

Sibling tribalry

In a couple of days, my not-so-little-anymore (but still little to me) sister will be getting married. There can be no clearer indication that you are getting older than when your sibling gets married off. While I'm clearly overjoyed for Natalie and her fiancé, it does dismay me somewhat to think that it's possible that she - and I - have grown up so incredibly fast.

While undoubtedly from the same familial stock, my sister and I are as similar as we are different. She is much less motivated by materialism and much more creative than me, and in many senses much less risk averse than I am. She is outgoing and gregarious whereas I am very introverted and prefer my own company to that of others. She prefers the comparatively sedate pace of life afforded by living in Cornwall and by being close to areas of outstanding natural beauty whereas I love the thrill of big cities and the man-made landscapes that for me can be just as breathtaking.

But we are also very similar. Both of us are very sensitive, don't handle criticism well and dwell on events far too much. We also hold family values in very high regard, coming from a small but tight family unit surrounded on either side by feuds and rifts that we have repeatedly sworn never to let come between us.

There are four and a half years between Natalie and I, but she's always been more mature than her years. Given that boys mature far slower than girls, this meant that we were the same emotional age for much of our lives. But that's not to say that we were always on the same wavelength, far from it. When we were really young we never liked each other. Perhaps I had a case of older child resentment toward a younger sibling, where I'd enjoyed a good few years getting all the attention. Whether that justifies me biting my sister when she was really small is debatable, but she more than made up for it later on when she used to lock me in the utility room every Saturday morning, jabbing me under the door with a brass toasting fork. Kids can be cruel to one another can't they?

We became friends in the summer of 1992 after meeting two sisters on a holiday. They didn't argue and always got on with each other really well, and I think that had a huge influence on our relationship with one another. We've stayed friends ever since, but as you get older and you get your own immediate family you begin to se less of each other. Living over 300 miles away from one another does rather curtail regular meet-ups, but we still see each other every six months or so.

Natalie's fiancé will be the perfect husband for her. I was in the same school year as Neil, but only really got to know him through Natalie; he is one of the calmest, most well-balanced and driven individuals I know. He has done much for my sister's confidence, and has nurtured her creative tendencies. He is a talented graphic designer, artist and photographer, which has led my sister to become more interested in these things and also has encouraged her to develop her interest in textiles from a mere hobby to a potentially successful business.

They are essentially perfectly matched, stronger together than they would be apart, and I've never once seen them argue. I also have an incredible amount of respect for them; they have pursued their own unique path through life and have never done things simply because that's what is expected of them. Two years ago they traded their comfortable jobs and house for a renovation project and significantly lower-paid jobs in Cornwall, driven predominantly by a desire for a particular lifestyle. At the time, being motivated as I am by money, wealth and advancement, I couldn't see the logic behind such a move. It felt like they were moving backwards; instead they have moved forward in leaps and bounds, taking the kind of calculated risk that only the shrewdest couples are capable of. They have an amazing, original house with a view from the rear windows that never ceases to calm, and a comparatively sedate lifestyle thanks to a better pace and quality of life. And in this positive environment they have flourished - not only is Natalie's textiles hobby rapidly proving that she could soon rely on this as her main source of income, but Neil is successfully building up his own design business after his earlier years of working for others. You could have all the money in the world and not have half as much of an enriched life as these two.

Which is why I'm so pleased that, after ten years of being a couple, they have decided to tie the knot. Fair enough it makes me feel old, makes me rue the passing of time, but I am so happy that they are furthering their commitment to one another. Their lives are not led conventionally and their wedding is shaping up to be just as contrarian. But fair play to them – they have shown that you don’t necessarily have to heed the advice that society supposedly insists you follow, therefore I’m sure it will be a great success.

* * *

My wife, Michelle, is very close to her own sister, Lisa; they too are friends as well as sisters, except that they’ve always been this way whereas Natalie and I had to have that epiphany while on holiday before we started to like one another. Because Michelle is one of two girls, she’s always wanted two daughters. Simply because of how my family was, I always thought we’d have a son, and then a daughter. Instead we were blessed with a perfect, beautiful little girl.

She now denies ever saying this, but during her epic labour, Michelle groaned to me that there was no way on earth that she would consider doing that all again to have a second child. The experience of labour, just as a mere male, was bad enough, and I found it really painful to watch as a mere observer. With the benefit of the passing of time, and of certain hormones that suppress the memory of birth pain, and despite only being twelve weeks into being parents, Michelle has retracted her earlier statement (which she insists she never would have said but I tell you categorically that she did), and now says she would like another child.

Her argument is based on the very fact that we both got on so well with our sisters and that it isn’t good for a child to grow up without a brother or sister. Moreover, she espouses something I've heard a lot lately, which is that parents will tend to spoil an only child, to the detriment of that child’s independence (and presumably the parents’ wallets).

I'm loathed to put this into print, but right now I really don’t want another child. I'm not ruling it out completely, to be clear (especially if my future son / daughter ever comes across this; you weren’t an accident, okay?), but I just don’t want to have to make any decisions about this at this precise moment in time. Within a couple of weeks of all having their babies, the new mums from our National Childbirth Trust group got together and were discussing whether any of them would have another baby. One of the mums said that she and her husband were definitely not just content with one, and wanted ‘a whole tribe’, a concept which I've just never been able to get my head around. Having one right now seems like a handful – a household filled to bursting point with kids just sounds incredibly stressful, but each to their own. One of the other mums has a friend who became pregnant just three months after having her first child; that’s either very good planning, or very careless.

Part of my reservation about making firm plans about this right now is that it feels like I'm diluting my love for Seren by starting to consider adding another child to the family. I’m sure that sounds completely ridiculous, but she’s my complete focus, and talking about having another baby sounds to me like – in some small way – we’re not completely satisfied. Which of course we are. I’m still coming to terms with my new responsibilities as a father, and whilst having another baby wouldn’t be for another couple of years I just can’t even think about it right now.

But, going back to my little sister’s wedding in the next few days, it would be a shame to see little Seren miss out on the company of a sibling, and I’m going to be so proud of my sister when she ties the knot. Just let me get used to being a parent for a bit first.

2006-07-31T08:46:00.000+01:00

God, etc

Yesterday, Michelle and I took Seren along to a Christening for one of our friends' babies. Gillian and Matthew were the first of our National Childbirth Trust friends to have their baby, and so Grace's Christening in many ways signals the start of a series of such events over the next few months; if we followed the order that the babies were born in then Seren's would be the second to last of five.

Chez Smith we've debated for a little while as to whether we'd want to hold a Christening or civil naming ceremony for Seren - something for family predominantly to participate in, a chance to bring people together to celebrate the birth of our little treasure with us. Originally the debate was around whether we wanted to do anything at all, but more recently it shifted toward which we would go for - a religious or non-religious ceremony.

Both Michelle and I were Christened, but neither of us - bar Michelle spending some time at Sunday school - are practicing Christians, we don't go and have never been to church, and neither are our respective parents actively religious. My father suspects he may be Jewish (it's a long story), and has actively researched the faith, but certainly isn't active in his worship. Well, as far as I know anyway. I guess it would explain why he's so hard to get hold of on a Saturday. But the idea of holding a traditional church Christening did hold some appeal perhaps for the formality and grandeur, and while we hadn't done anything about it, we seemed to be erring toward this over the civil ceremony.

A sequence of three things served to make us very quickly change our minds. The first was when Michelle mentioned to her parents that we were considering a Christening, which met with some strong opposition from her dad - who is almost an atheist. I say 'almost an atheist' because of course he had both Michelle and her sister Christened, making me slightly unsure over which bit of a Christening is appropriate to someone who doesn’t believe in either God or Christ. The second was when Michelle opened the door last week to two Jehovah's Witnesses who attempted to chew her ear off about God, etc; quite wisely, she used the excuse that Seren needed feeding and shut the door on them. (This is more successful than my last run-in with them many years ago when a combination of being hungover, being in the midst of, ahem, some 'amorous activity' upstairs with a coincidentally very religious girl and hot weather meant that I opened the door to the callers - thinking that it was the postman delivering an overdue parcel of records - in a state of embarrassing undress and for some reason decided that this would be the perfect time to engage in some challenging banter before slamming the door on them; fifteen minutes later I managed to remove one of the guys' feet from holding the door open, had taken a leaflet and didn't really feel that amorous anymore).

The third event to change our minds was, ironically, the Christening itself. We've come to know Gillian and Matthew quite well since the NCT meetings kicked off earlier this year, and knew that they were active in their local church. What we didn't know was that they were Catholic, and it really only became apparent to me about half an hour into the service, although I should have realised because all the obvious signs were there. I don't have a problem with their faith, far from it, but the Catholic service perhaps crystallised in our minds the decision to pursue a civil ceremony, simply because it is slightly more ‘full on’ than Church of England ceremonies.

Notwithstanding the heavy undertones of sin 'n salvation in the service, the main reason that we have changed our minds is that we feel we would be complete hypocrites to hold a Church service. We felt totally out of place at Grace's Christening by not holding strong religious beliefs, almost fraudulent by taking part. On the other hand neither did we want to fit in and repeat the lines in the prayer book when prompted, didn't want to take part when we didn't agree with what we were saying.

It's not that we don't have elements of religious belief - having witnessed the mystery and miracle of childbirth it's hard to believe in natural evolution wholeheartedly - it's more that we're not interested in actively practising, and are Christians not through our own choice but our parents'. We feel it would frankly be hypocritical for us to insist on this for our daughter when we don't believe in it fully ourselves. We didn't get married in church for pretty much the same reason.

I'm pretty comfortable with where I am in terms of religion at the moment. I find it hard to believe that there couldn't be a higher power responsible for kick-starting creation because things are too perfect, but I also see the link that extends back from mankind through apes and onto fish. Perhaps this looks like I am sitting on the fence and not taking a committed view, but this is where I've settled and I'm pretty comfortable there, thank you very much. One of my favourite Nick Cave songs sums up the contradiction quite well - 'I don't believe in the existence of angels / But looking at you I wonder if that's true.' It’s not through doubt that I arrive at this point of view, just where I feel most comfortable.

It wasn't always so. My former girlfriend was a fairly devout Christian. She once said to me that she was disappointed that I couldn't find the capacity to believe completely, saying that she was upset that we wouldn't be together in Heaven, since unless I believed I wouldn't be admitted. Talk about emotional blackmail! Given that we didn't exactly end on the best terms, it's probably now of considerable relief to her that I won't be bumping into her in Heaven. But at the time it did rather shock me into edging closer toward some sort of defined belief structure. I bought a bible and started reading it reasonably avidly, started routinely praying etc, but I stopped short of committing to going to church. She held very firm views about certain things such as sex before marriage, but she still got drunk, wanted to take drugs and went to church just once in all the time I knew her (and she was hung over then); despite being for all intents and purposes a fair-weather Christian she was certainly quick to tell me I wasn't following a path of righteousness and telling me I'd go to hell for it. That holier-than-thou attitude I can well do without.

Despite being a non-believer, while together we were my ex dragged me along to one of her Christian buddies' weddings in Kingston-upon-Thames. Surrounded by very passionate religious types, mostly of around my own age group, was really uncomfortable. While the bride and groom were almost duty-bound to be pleasant toward me, someone must have spread the word that I wasn't Christian and therefore I was at best a target for conversion and at worst completely ostracised. Given that my girlfriend was a bridesmaid I spent much of the day on my own, drinking; I lost track of who was giving me disapproving looks as my stupor deepened. A previous trip to visit the happy couple - possibly for their joint stag / hen party - required my ex and I to stay in separate houses because sharing a bed was frowned-upon. (This despite the fact that the bride and groom regularly slept together). My ex went along to church with them somewhere near Chessington on the Sunday morning, whereas I refused (which met with some degree of disapproval). I was an outsider (aren't Christians supposed to be quite forgiving and accepting?), a non-believing square peg in a Christian round hole.

So, all told, I'm pretty happy that we've gone down the route of a civil ceremony. It’ll be a relaxed day with only the most important people to us attending, some good food and a chance to celebrate Seren’s arrival properly. I'd certainly prefer that to living like my ex's friends in some sort of secular religious cult down in Waco, Surrey.

2006-07-24T08:36:00.000+01:00

Remote possibilities

On the T-Mobile website they proudly claim that their coverage reaches 99% of the UK population. I think I know where the 1% of the country that can't get reception is – it is seat 17 in coach A of the 16.10 Virgin Voyager train from Leeds to Coventry, a journey which takes just over two hours and passes through large towns and cities such as Sheffield, Derby and Birmingham.

The signal from T-Mobile is appalling on this stretch of the country, rendering effective use of my Blackberry damn near impossible. Blessing or curse? You decide.

Much more so than any other device since the mobile phone, the Blackberry has revolutionised how we work, providing the user with the ability to check, send and receive emails without needing a comparatively cumbersome laptop and 3G card. However it's not colloquially known among users as the Crackberry for nothing – these things are addictive like nothing else. I found myself getting really angry on the train today when I couldn't send any messages because the little bars in the right hand corner kept disappearing, first counting down bar by bar to be replaced, like a dying man's final breaths, with a feeble 'SOS', and then a cross implying said man had faded away. None of the messages were urgent, and yet the fact that I couldn't send these damn messages was getting me really stressed.

I've fallen for the charms of the Blackberry like most users. I've found myself getting woken up in the middle of the night to change our daughter's nappy and thinking on the way back to bed 'Might as well check to see if there are any new messages', or taking a look at the weekend – just in case. I once came back from a social event with some other guys from work and decided to check my emails before bed; in my inbox was a message from a stroppy client which I needed to raise with two other colleagues, so I forwarded it on. A minute later both replied. It was half past midnight. That's just not right.

Like most users, I swore I'd be able to resist the temptations of the Blackberry, but within a few days of taking delivery of my shiny blue handheld I was hooked. I have to check my emails every thirty seconds or so, and by compulsion more than anything feel a need to respond to the emails that come in within seconds of them landing. On the one hand this is a more efficient way of working, but it also makes it more pressured, particularly if you're communicating with another Blackberry user also compelled to respond as quickly. The result is the kind of clipped, rapid-fire exchange of gibberish employed involuntarily by chemically-altered individuals. A client of mine mentioned that he'd put in a request for a Blackberry; I counselled him, like some wizened old washed-up veteran addict, not to fall into the trap of checking it too frequently or outside of working hours. He said he'd be disciplined, but he'll realise how futile such resistance will prove to be. We all start with the best intentions, we all say we won't fall for its charms, and we all succumb to the temptations of that keypad and LCD screen, all try and type as quickly and frantically as possible. In a few years thousands of people will develop knackered thumbs and they'll have to respond with a Blackberry derivative for the thumbless masses which allows you to communicate telepathically.

And when that battery goes flat, you'll experience an intense withdrawal and a cold sweat as you suddenly find yourself disconnected from the world. You can't go cold turkey with this, man. You gotta withdraw slowly. There aren't clinics for this. Yet.

The Blackberry can also be used as a conventional mobile phone although you do feel pretty bloody stupid putting what looks like a pocket calculator to your ear, and God knows what the radiation would do to your brain over time. And thus, because of its limitations as a permanent phone, I leave the house not just with my Blackberry, but also a conventional mobile too. Addictive qualities aside, the Blackberry does fix some of my pet hates about mobiles. For example, while I couldn't send the emails above straight away, at least they sat there patiently waiting for the signal to tick up again and then sent themselves automatically. Why they can't do that with good old SMS messages is quite beyond me, and unless they've fixed it with newer phones than my trusty Nokia then there's no outbox where messages sit until the signal's strong enough to allow the SMS to go. Instead you watch the screen tell you for several seconds that it's trying to send the message, it then fails and then YOU have to hit send again and potentially go through the same rigmarole again - which would have been quite painful on that train, I can tell you.

I read an article in The Times Saturday Magazine recently regarding mobile phones, and the way that they have become so complicated to use.

I was reminded of this when trying to make a call this morning. I rang a work colleague back in the office and was greeted by his voicemail which advised me he was out of the office and gave me the number of his PA. I frantically scrabbled around in my pockets to find a piece of paper and pen to get her number in order to phone her instead.

With fingers crossed that the number I had written down quite unintelligibly was indeed her number, I plugged the numbers into my Nokia and hit connect. Thankfully she was there, we spoke, and finally I took the phone away from my ear and looked fleetingly at the screen before pressing disconnect. There, in simple black text was her name. It seemed this had happened once before and I had already added her number into my phone's memory.

I'm sure I detected a hint of smug satisfaction as her name disappeared off the screen with the pressing of the disconnect button, as if my phone were saying to me 'Hah! I knew you were dialling her number, but instead of reminding you halfway through so that you didn't have to finish pressing the numbers in, I let you type in the whole number...and then let you know that you'd already stored that number, thus wasting you precious time!'

Phones have become more complicated with the advent of 3G facilities, cameras and the like, and I daresay I know how 1% of my comparatively basic phone actually works, but in some respects the basic nuts and bolts of a phone – you dial a number, you speak, you hang up – haven't changed at all. I was always pretty technologically switched-on as a teenager but these days I feel as technically limited as my parents (who haven't worked out how to watch DVDs on their DVD player yet). Who knows what technology will be like when our daughter is old enough, but I can guarantee she'll be showing me how it works.

I don't suppose that your Nokias, Motorolas and Sony Ericssons of this world really think that there is much left to do with the actual phone process itself, instead focussing more on style and the number of features they can cram onto a phone template that needs to be smaller than the previous model. They have succeeded in pimping the phonebox into a high-tech entertainment system when at the day it's just a phone. TV on a phone must look pretty small, while why would you store 100 MP3s when you could get a basic iPod for the same price?

Yet, despite such advances, something as simple as predicting which number you want to dial based on the first few numbers you've typed - given that phones have been able to offer predictive text for yonks - hasn't been added. Or maybe it has and I just need to trawl through fifteen menus and thirty submenus just to switch it on.

So, frustrations aside, you can give me a hit of that sweet Blackberry any day. One more go can't hurt, can it? I'll tackle that addiction another day.

2006-07-18T12:53:00.000+01:00

Too darn hot

According to yesterday's newspapers, this week temperatures are expected to be higher than in the Canary Islands and Ibiza. For someone who really struggles in the hot weather, this is rather dismaying news. In fact, it wasn't actually that hot when I read the paper, but this forecast was enough to bring me out in a sweat. Today's headlines state that temperatures could reach 38 degrees, while the late edition Evening Standard reported that tube trains were reaching temperatures of a staggering 47 degrees.

Travelling in the heat is one of my least favourite things. Not only is it really uncomfortable to sit in a non-air conditioned train surrounded by people sweating profusely as the sun beats down relentlessly on the metal outer skins of the carriages with the heat magnified through the windows, but the expected attire for office working just exacerbates the heat. I have wisely started leaving my suit jacket at home, ditched the tie and roll my shirt sleeves up, but it's still not enough. I witnessed some European businessmen on the train last night fully suited and booted, who didn't appear fazed by the heat at all and who didn't even take off their jackets or loosen their ties.

The other week I was invited to an awards ceremony at the Royal Albert Hall, which is of course a prestigious and visually awe-inspiring example of Victorian architecture, and a highly impressive venue in which to entertain clients. The only snag was that the dress code, as always with these stuffy events, called for dinner suits. I caught the train from my hotel on Tottenham Court Road and must have looked like an absolute buffoon with a bow tie and jacket on. All around me were tourists wearing next to nothing while I was completely conspicuous in evening attire. Add to this comic image the glaze of sweat on my brow and you’ll appreciate I’m sure how uncomfortable and embarrassed I felt. Needless to say I shelled out for a cab on the way back. Our company had sponsored the awards and therefore we were entitled to - as in we’d paid for - a drinks reception on the Gallery level. In theory, this was a very good way to impress clients, only the Gallery is of course practically in the roof of the Royal Albert Hall and air conditioning wasn’t even invented when they built the place; and from your science days you will remember that heat rises. Thus we would have probably been cooler partaking of drinks inside hell's own Aga oven.

Part of me wishes that I could have been born of Italian or Spanish stock, mainly because I would then be able to walk around in the hottest weather wearing dark suits and yet staying and looking cool, rather than melting like Wallace and Gromit in an Aardman Animation warehouse fire. I was doomed from the start - my genes are English, French and Danish, which basically means I struggle in the heat but cruelly also find the cold weather unbearable too. There are probably two months per year where I feel completely at ease with the temperature. Mid-July in a heatwave is not one of these.

I love bright, clear days for their sense of optimism and positivity like most people, but when I leave the house at 6.30 AM and it's already too hot, part of me wants to buy a summer house in Iceland, or maybe just head to Iceland (the store) and lie in one of their chest freezers until we get a thunderstorm and cooler weather returns.

I become an absolute nightmare to be with when the temperature soars, as my wife will testify. When I came in from work last night Michelle wasn't having the best of times since our ten-week old daughter - who also doesn't like the heat, that's my girl! - had been screaming for 45 minutes relentlessly. She tried to hug me and I pushed her away because I was so clammy. I just can't help getting moody in the heat; it just makes me so miserable. I can't get comfortable, I can't sleep, I don't want to eat and I don't want to do anything. It's undoubtedly the same for everyone, but I think my fiery temperament - courtesy of having ginger hair, another gift from Denmark - is stoked by high temperatures. I've always been this way in the hot weather, although I think I was blissfully unaffected when I was really small where it was fun to go out and play in the sun. I recall one family holiday where we took a daytrip to Monaco. I completely ruined the experience for everyone, refusing to come out of the shade and not letting my parents take my picture. I skulked around the streets of Monaco with a face like a smacked arse, and generally made it awkward for my parents and sister.

Then there's the other things about the hot weather - sun tan lotion, which I hate with a passion (especially if combined with sand from a beach), wasps, ants, ineffective deodorants, sunburn, plants dying from lack of water, not being able to sleep at night and not being able to stay awake in the day and so on. But travelling by train is still the worst thing. Not only is it unpleasant, particularly if you end up sat next to a fat man (I don't wish to offend anyone, therefore if you are uncomfortable with me using this description, please feel free to read this as 'fat woman') who both cannot stop sweating and also needs to lean against me because he is too large for one train seat, but it is also bloody frustrating for one very clear reason: melting train tracks.

On top of all the other excuses that rail companies trot out to explain poor services – the old chestnuts like ‘leaves on the line’, ‘wrong type of snow’ and all those other classics – it scarcely seems possible that train tracks could soften, melt and buckle in the heat, but it happens whenever the temperature ticks over 30 degrees; temperatures which aren't out of the ordinary for the UK during summer anymore. At great effort, disruption and expense, Network Rail relaid the entire track on the West Coast Mainline (which I have the displeasure of using every day). One would have perhaps assumed that ‘modernising’ would have included laying tracks capable of withstanding intense temperatures, just like the ones they must have in other parts of the world; but no, within weeks of completing one section of track and enduring coaches for parts of the journey, trains were subject to delay and speed restriction because of the heat. Marvellous! Does this make you think that the investment into relaying the tracks on the West Coast Mainline was perhaps done on the cheap? Only the other week I was at a lunch in Bristol where I mentioned that the train tracks might melt in the heat; my fellow diners laughed at me like I was mad (they drive everywhere, hence could be regarded as train novices). That very day my journey back from Bristol to home was marred by several speed restrictions from Bristol to Paddington, a complete collapse of the tube network because of softened rails, and then further speed restrictions on the West Coast Mainline.

Iceland is looking more and more tempting every day.

2006-07-11T09:01:00.000+01:00

Recycled soapbox

In my final year at University, I rented a room in a house owned by a couple, one of whom worked as a manager at a care home and one who worked as a park ranger. Jan, the ranger, was also an artist specialising in 'folk art', and while I lived with them had her work exhibited at the local library. The house was stuffed to bursting point with Jan's various creations, most of which either by accident or design, reminded me of Native American imagery. Dave, on the other hand was a complete contradiction to Jan - a Lou Reed fan, very political, and often to be heard rubbishing Jan's attempts at producing art from natural sources.

That year was a great one, and that house was exactly what I needed in order to completely focus my energies on successfully passing my degree. Living with non-students meant that I could sidestep the distractions of being in close proximity to other students, and they were the sort of people who just let me be - I didn't intrude on their life and they didn't intrude on mine. For an individual hardly renowned for their gregariousness, it was perfect.

Jan and Dave were, despite being complete opposites, highly principled individuals. They would only ever eat organic meat - a choice that at the time was nowhere near as common or achievable as it is now - they used Ecover washing up liquid and they were ruthless with turning off appliances rather than leaving them on standby. Compared to the lackadaisical attitude that breeds like mould in student accommodation, that household was a paragon of virtue, a shining beacon of conservation and consideration for our planet. One of the most strongly-held principles Jan and Dave held was over recycling, and it is chiefly from them that I have become so committed to this.

Our collective wastefulness appals me. It appals me to the point that instead of fruitlessly moaning to anyone who would listen, I actually wrote to my MP. That sounds very grand, like I sat down in my study, opened the lefthand drawer, pulled out a sheaf of Smith-crested notepaper, unlocked the leather box where my fountain pen resides, and methodically put pen to paper; in actual fact I emailed him, but saying I emailed my MP doesn't quite sound so impressive.

I recall my German lessons at school wherein Herr Wydall, the most enthusiastic of all my teachers, educated us about Germany's firm approach to recycling, leaving me terribly impressed by their usage of different-coloured Mülltonne for the different types of waste, with black – the smallest bin – specifically designated for non-recylable waste. Germany have really stolen the march from the rest of Europe in terms of their hardline approach to recycling, and it still amazes me fifteen years on from this that we are not following their lead. Recycling schemes vary from council to council, and there is no mechanism to penalise those who elect not to recycle at all. In Germany, failure to recycle would probably see you handcuffed and forced to pick up litter in public places with your teeth.

How's this for irony – Milton Keynes, where I live, apparently has a very good recycling scheme. We have pink bags for recyclable waste, which sadly is not as comprehensive as it could be (you can't recycle all the different types of plastics that can now be recycled, for example), but it's much better than other places. We also get a blue box for glass jars and bottles. Sorting your rubbish takes no time at all, but there is nothing to stop you simply dumping everything into the black sacks and watch everything get needlessly poured into the landfill site. Yes, there are posters and leaflets occasionally encouraging Milton Keynes residents to recycle more, but a look out of my front window on refuse collection day reveals that middle-class Milton Keynes society is as apathethic as anywhere else when it comes to making the effort to recycle. The irony is that if you put something in your pink sack that can't be recycled, your rubbish will not be collected and you will receive a fine. But the lazy bastard who chucks everything into the black bag doesn't get penalised, thus we potentially punish those who make the effort and politely encourage those who don't to continue their environmentally-damaging actions. How very British.

A couple of years ago we spent some time at Brussels airport on the way back from Prague. In the departure lounge at Brussels airport there are different-coloured bins for cans, bottles, paper etc. Each is clearly labelled in many languages, including English, so even if you don't know which colour corresponds to which type of waste, reading the labels will certainly make it clear. I was dismayed at the way my fellow British travellers ignored the labels and threw rubbish into any of the receptacles. It's sheer bloody ignorance that only reinforces how we are perceived by our neighbours. I can only imagine how poor the English supporters travelling to Germany for this year's World Cup were at dividing and separating their waste.

I work for a large FTSE company with a very clearly defined and promoted environmental policy. At corporate sites there are large posters and signs encouraging colleagues to recycle their cans, plastic cups, paper and newspapers. I work in a subsidiary of the parent, which somehow seems to have been able to follow a policy of ignoring everything the parent has done to promote basic environmentally-friendly behaviours. I asked for a bin like those in other corporate sites in which to place used plastic cups; I was told it was too expensive, yet we were quite comfortable to sponsor an awards ceremony where we didn't even get nominated. To my dismay, I found out only a few days ago that the bins in the office for recycling paper just get mixed in with the non-recyclable waste, again because this is too expensive.

When my MP emailed me back, he did the usual MP thing of saying thanks for bringing it to his attention, that recycling was at the very heart of his beliefs yada yada yada. He said that the council were going to get more ruthless, but we're two years on from that and nothing's changed round our way. He also said that they were going to do more work with schools to influence parents via their kids. Intuitively this makes a great deal of sense to me. When there was a big campaign to switch to aerosols without CFCs back in the late 1980s, we spent ages talking about this in class and we in turn made our parents more aware of it. However, given the things that are getting dropped from school curriculums, it is hard to see how they will inject social responsibility into the lessons effectively.

I have considered becoming more active and vocal about this whole issue, considered joining Greenpeace; I considered writing to large companies such as McDonalds's or the large hotel chains to find out what their recycling policies are. I find it hard to believe that there are no policies at such companies where thousands of tonnes of potentially recyclable material is simply thrown away into landfills by companies each year. If I think about it too much it dismays me, and I can't help but think about what kind of world is going to be left for our daughter when she is approaching thirty. The government announces great initiatives to clean up companies and save resources, but they have yet to do anything about individual apathy, and like so many of their boneheaded policies have actually allowed us to make a choice over whether we participate in saving our planet or not. The latest TV adverts, voiced by Eddie Izzard and others, show how quickly a newspaper put out for recycling could be back on your breakfast table as another newspaper, the various things that can be created from a used tin can etc; on my way in to work I saw a refuse collection lorry that proudly carried the message on its side that recycling one bottle will conserve the equivalent energy of powering a computer for 25 minutes. That's just science, the kind of interesting but pointless information that makes people do diddly squat. Where's the message of duty and responsibility? The figures on how overcrowded our landfills are? If this is the government's PR campaign for individual responsibility then it has once again been dumbed down into irrelevance.

Tesco are not by any measure my favourite company. However, their packaging is consistently informative about what it is made of and how it can be recycled. For a company with such an arguably important role in terms of direct interaction with the consumer, this is the kind of smart move which might just see it sidestep the kind of criticisms levied at other large organisations such as McDonald’s. However, what becomes evident after seeing Tesco packaging that says ‘Recyclable where facilities exist’, is just how few of these facilities actually exist. Take their bread packaging, manufactured by Amcor. In order to recycle this plastic derivative, you have to collect together several tonnes of this very light material, bundle it all up and send it direct to Amcor. In Australia. Boots, that bastion of British high street charm, advises on its plastic bags that these can be recycled, and to throw these in with your usual plastics. I can't speak for every local scheme, but our supposedly advanced scheme in Milton Keynes will fine you if you chuck a carrier bag or two in with the tin cans.

I considered a local campaign of imploring with my neighbours to recycle more, and in some cases to just recycle full stop. I suspect it will be fruitless. Jan and Dave, seasoned recyclers for many years, were just doing their bit, and I think that's all you can do. As long as we continue to put out more waste in the pink sacks than black, compost all our kitchen waste and use proper nappies instead of disposables then I know we’ll have made a difference. More importantly, if I can instil in our daughter a spirit of wanting to do what she can to help the environment then I will have succeeded. But if I think about it too much I’ll still come round to the view that if everyone ‘did their bit’, this world would be a whole lot healthier than it is now.

2006-07-07T21:52:00.000+01:00

Panic on the streets of London : how July 7 changed my world

Like many of the two million people who work in London, the tragic events of July 7 2005 had a massive bearing on my life. I’m one of the lucky ones only tangentially (but still deeply) affected by the Al Qaeda bombings that left 52 innocent people – and four guilty ones – dead and scores of others injured. On this first anniversary of that day, both the ‘official’ media – TV, newspapers, radio – and the ‘unofficial’ media – blogs such as this – are once again filled with reflections and accounts of that day. I don’t intend to add my story of that day to that mass public library, and instead want to focus on the impact that July 7 had upon me.

By July 7 2005, I was in my fourth year of working in London’s Square Mile. Working in London was something that I'd always hankered after, and like so many others – despite the international terrorist landscape that was developed after September 11 and the Madrid train bombings – innocently believed that I would never in a million years be affected personally by an event of the magnitude of something like July 7. This wasn’t from some aloof, cocky arrogance, but because no-one really wants to give any great credence to the notion that they would be involved in this kind of thing. I've read that, just like September 11 2001 did for America, July 7 2005 took away some of London’s innocence, despite those earlier years of enduring IRA bombings; and it’s certainly true that I lost some of my innocence too. After September 11, which was two weeks into me working in London, I'd reassured my wife that I would be vigilant; that I wouldn’t take risks. The tube bombings of July 7 took away that naïveté. Mere vigilance while travelling into and around London would not be enough in the face of such determination to wreak havoc. My life was sufficiently turned upside-down on July 7 without being in one of the three trains or on the number 30 bus to have made me intensely wary while working in the City, and it’s really only on the days that I work from home that I feel completely at ease. I know this kind of ‘white noise’ stress constantly sounding in the back of my mind is not at all healthy, and certainly unsustainable in the long-term. It’s no coincidence that I now have more grey hairs than I would otherwise have had as I approach thirty.

In four years, I'd become quietly confident about getting around London; in one day that confidence was wrecked. My journey from Milton Keynes to the City involved taking the Underground from Euston Square to Liverpool Street. All of a sudden this journey, which I'd taken countless numbers of times, and which was as far as I could see my only means of reaching the office, was suddenly for me completely out of the question. The thought of getting back on a tube again filled me with a gut-churning fear that I could see no way of overcoming. The bombing of the bus took that option away from me as well. Everyone in our office worked from home on Friday July 8, which gave me a comfortable distance away from the following Monday when I would next have to contemplate using the Underground again. As Monday got closer my fears became more pronounced. My wife was a rock of support, even though I knew she too was as worried as I was.

I decided to change my route into work to go from Luton directly into the City, which would avoid the need to use the tube completely. I reasoned that life is all about accepting the risk that you are most comfortable taking. For me I was more comfortable getting in the car early in the morning and driving down the M1 to Luton, despite the fact that the probability of getting hurt in a car accident far outweighs the risk of being hurt in an Underground bombing; this was just something I had to do to feel comfortable with going back to work, but it wasn’t by any means easy. When I first changed over my season ticket I felt a wave of immense relief wash over me. My fear was of being trapped in a tunnel, of being in a place I couldn’t escape from. I'd forgotten that the route from Luton to City Thameslink involved passing through a long tunnel between Kentish Town and Kings Cross Thameslink. Entering that tunnel on that Monday was frankly terrifying, and looking around the carriage that morning I wasn’t alone in feeling this way. I saw a girl bury her head in her hands all the way between those stations; I felt like screaming and felt my pulse race uncontrollably until I left the train at City Thameslink. In the aftermath of July 7 the Government, the Mayor and the media praised the commitment of people to pick up the pieces and get on with their lives; I wonder how many people there were just like me who had no choice but to soldier on but who were inwardly scared to death.

Altering my route was a good way of getting more comfortable with getting on with working in London, but it wasn’t financially sustainable, and so when my season ticket was up for renewal in August I switched back to travelling from Milton Keynes to Euston. I’d been forced to use the tube once between July 7 and renewing my ticket, but I still wasn’t comfortable with getting back on the Underground, and so I decided to walk into the City from Euston station each morning. It takes about 45 minutes, is exhausting and in the hot weather pretty unbearable. The walk takes me past BMA House, outside which the packed bus was destroyed last year, and the entrance to Russell Square Underground station. I still do it one year on, and have only caught the tube from Euston Square to Liverpool Street in the mornings when it’s been raining too heavily or if I've got to bring luggage with me for an overnight stay in London. The most ridiculous thing of all is that I’m almost completely comfortable with catching the tube in the evenings on my way home from work, just because the bombings of July 7 happened in the morning peak, and because they say Al Qaeda prefer to stage an attack at the start of a day. Not only that, but if I have to catch a tube really early in the morning, I also feel completely at ease. Perhaps that innocence and naïveté hasn’t disappeared completely.

July 7 had two other major impacts on my life. The first was that it intensified my love and pride for London. My wife and I had stayed in London for Live 8 the weekend before July 7, and we had both started to really get interested in our capital city. It was perhaps because we stayed in Canary Wharf, which has about the most exciting landscape of anywhere in London. I’d been through a bit of a negative period at work and was starting to doubt whether I should carry on working in London or seek employment closer to home; that trip to London, along with one in May, made me realise that I’d miss London too much. July 7 dented that love for London; I resented those four bombers for taking my London away from me, but London’s charms were soon to tempt me once more; since then my love for the capital has doubled and become much more pronounced.

The more surprising effect on me was with regard to my love of music. On July 7 I spent an hour trapped underground between Kings Cross and Farringdon, blissfully unaware of what was happening elsewhere so close to me, listening to Possessed by the Balanescu Quartet on my iPod. The guilt of innocently enjoying music while people nearby on other trains were dying created a guilt in me that prevented me from wanting to listen to music. For years music has been my major passion; to have it suddenly taken away from me was painful but I just couldn’t face it. It took several months before I was completely comfortable with listening to music while travelling again. Since then my appetite has come back, but I haven’t pursued this passion with anywhere near as much enthusiasm as I did previously.

Tragic though July 7 was, I honestly believe that if it wasn’t for that day we wouldn’t have conceived our baby. We had been trying for a baby for a couple of months with no sign of success. The events of July 7 made the bond between my wife and I much stronger, drew us much closer together. Just two weeks later by our calculations Seren was conceived, reaffirming my faith that truly great things can rise out of the most painful of events.

2006-06-29T08:51:00.000+01:00

‘Very superstitious, writing’s on the wall…’

With the hot weather now upon us, chez Smith we have started sleeping with the windows open. Not too wide, because our mischievous cat has a tendency to try and climb out, but wide enough to convince ourselves that the paltry breeze will cool us and our house down in the evening. The other morning, with bleary eyes I staggered to our bathroom to ready myself for work, and discovered that the eggs a spider had laid in the casings of the window had hatched, and because the window had been left open all night, the little spiderlings had found their way into our bathroom, leaving us with an infestation of money spiders not only in every corner, but in the toothbrush pot, medicine cabinet and on the shower head; not only did I find several hanging from my shaving mirror, but one clever chap had made a little web inside the head of my razor. One of the window panes alone was home to around one hundred of the tiny black arachnids.

Without thinking I swept a few handfuls into a tissue and flushed them down the toilet, before suddenly remembering the superstitions that my mother had instilled in me about killing spiders, and money spiders in particular. She always told me not to kill spiders because of the bad luck that such killing would bring, especially if these were money spiders. Money spiders, she informed me, should be allowed to crawl on you to see if they moved toward your heart – if they did, you’d be rich. By my reckoning, my spider killing spree early that morning will have put me in chronic debt for the rest of not only my life, but my daughter’s and likely the next three generations to follow her.

I’d like to think of myself as someone who is not superstitious, but like the next person will find myself sucked into believing such things just in case they are in fact totally true. When especially confident, I do walk under ladders, but find myself wondering anxiously afterwards whether something bad will become of me; such a preoccupation with what might happen could easily force me into falling under a bus for all I know, in which case the old superstition would have become true.

My mother has given me plenty of novel superstitions, most of which I no longer heed, at least not consciously. One that I do recall is that you should never tell anyone about a dream you’ve had on a Friday night until after lunch on a Saturday. I have my doubts about this one, I have to say. A suspicious part of me thinks that this one was invented, perhaps by my mother, to make sure I didn’t spend ages on a Saturday morning explaining the dream I’d had on a Friday, thus making us late for our weekly trip into town. The frustrating thing is that I used to have my most vivid dreams on a Friday night, and by lunchtime would have completely forgotten them. But to this day I consciously stop myself discussing a really weird, nonsensical dream on a Saturday morning, just in case.

It wasn’t just my mother that handed down slightly dubious things to avoid if you wanted good fortune. My friend Steve is perhaps the most superstitious individual I've ever met, and the two superstitions I recall most vividly from him were both bird-related. The first was that if you see a hearse you need to hold your collar until you see a bird flying overhead. I don’t know who invented such claptrap but nevertheless, because it’s connected to death I do find myself obeying this one on the rare occasion that I see a hearse on the road.

The other of Steve’s was regarding magpies. Seeing a solitary magpie was, according to wherever Steve inherited this one from, terrible luck, unless you saluted it. This one never really bothered me too much, because the three previous towns I've lived in evidently had very small magpie populations. However after moving to Milton Keynes three years ago I think we must have moved to the UK’s largest concentration of the black and white scavengers. They’re absolutely everywhere. It does occur to me that they should – rather than the concrete cows MK is infamous for – become our town’s mascot; or perhaps they are like the ravens of the Tower of London – if the magpies leave then the town will collapse in on itself. Nevertheless, despite claiming not to be superstitious, if you ever should come across me in Milton Keynes and find me saluting quite involuntarily like some war veteran who can’t acclimatise back into civilian life, you’ll know why.

From someone else – possibly Steve, possibly some other superstitious individual – I learned a rhyme about magpies. It goes like this

One for sorrow
Two for joy
Three for a girl
Four for a boy

Now, this has to be complete nonsense, of course it does: unless magpies are the ultimate deciders of fate or the purest essence of God on earth, how can the simple act of seeing a certain combination of magpies determine whether you’re going to be happy, or decide the sex of your baby? More importantly, what happens if you see three but a fourth is just slightly out of your view? What happens then? You’ll merrily enjoy the childless years thinking that fate has already decided that you’ll be blessed with a girl only to discover, after painting the nursery pink that in fact you’re being handed a boy in the hospital. And what if you see five or six or more than that? I’ve seen twelve at one time in Milton Keynes – are there other lines in this rhyme that further decide your fate? Does seeing a dozen magpies mean perchance that you will win the lottery this Saturday?

While I await the answers to these questions, I don’t entertain this one for a second. Well, maybe I do a little. Okay, every time I see a magpie I’ll either salute or recite said poem to myself. And actually, after having paid for a private scan to determine whether my wife was expecting a girl or a boy, I did find myself paying more attention that usual to the combination of magpies I would happen across on a normal day. We’d come away from the scan feeling of course elated that the consultant had confirmed we were expecting a daughter, but a niggling doubt remained that – despite his assertions that he’d not got one wrong yet – we were going to fall into the 1% of the claim that these scans are 99% accurate; the small print that if the scan confirms the foetus to be a girl, there is a greater degree of probability that the result could be inaccurate didn’t exactly put our minds at ease either. So we found ourselves turning ever more to the traditional means of determining whether a baby is going to be a boy or girl by the position of the bump, the cravings etc. And the number of magpies.

Perhaps I am more superstitious than I claim not to be. For example, faced with a difficult client meeting today, I chose a red patterned tie – ostensibly because I thought it went best with my suit, but deep down because a tiny part of me considers it to be a lucky tie, because when I was previously faced with a tricky client I handled it well while wearing that tie. Back further, when revising for my GCSEs I found that I worked best with music on, specifically Depeche Mode’s double live album 101, which was the perfect length for a good session of concentration. After getting above-average GCSE results, when it came to A-levels, and later still with my degree, I found that I still needed to listen to this album when revising, just in case it was this – and not my hard work and memory – that gave me the grades I’d achieved.

In a way a part of me is quite drawn to the simplistic means of making sense of natural and sad events, just by avoiding certain actions. Superstition is borne out of a need to rationalise things that cannot be rationalised, sitting between Darwinism and religion, and to this day I still don’t know which side of that controversial fence I belong on. Having a baby has made me question my beliefs about creation, because I can’t see how life could have been created out of nothing; but neither can I believe that some ethereal being implanted another being inside my wife’s womb. Therefore, until I can resolve my own beliefs I’ll continue to salute magpies, keep my Friday dreams to myself and hope that my single-handed spider extinction programme from the other morning has not ruined my chances of being able to provide for my daughter and has at least blessed us with a modicum of good fortune (fingers crossed).

2006-06-16T08:02:00.000+01:00

Lasagne Soup

Gordon Ramsay and I have something in common, but it's certainly not that I'm a Michelin-starred chef with a chain of smart restaurants and a successful TV career. No, we both went to Stratford-upon-Avon High School. I can only assume that he was significantly more successful at Home Economics than me. And I might be wrong, but I suspect that Ramsay would not entertain the idea of looking at, let alone eating, a toasted cheese and raspberry jam sandwich, which - courtesy of my mother - is one of my favourite, if frowned-upon, lunches.

I got to thinking about food recently after Big Brother contestant Glyn revealed – on national TV, like an idiot – that, at the ripe old age of eighteen, he hadn't ever cooked anything, and hadn't even made a sandwich.

Since our daughter was born a month ago, I have cooked the evening meals in the Smith household. I don't say this from a 'look at me, the New Man' standpoint, nor am I frustrated by the additional domestic chore which typically means we won't sit down to eat until past 8.00. I've never really had any old fashioned views on the respective roles of men and women, and so I've always done my fair share of things around the house. Moreover, I actually really like cooking, so maybe Gordon Ramsay and I have more in common than I thought.

It wasn't always so; when I lived at home with my parents I can't think of a single time that I cooked, either for myself or my family. That's just the way things were in our house, the way we were used to things; the norm. My sister went through a phase of being... a vegetarian, whereas the rest of the house wasn't, so for a while she would make her own meals - generally pasta with tomato sauce and chopped onions. By dint of shiftwork alone, my father cooked his own meals every other week, and once made me McCain's cheese and tomato pizzas and chips while my sister was in hospital having her tonsils out - when he served them, he'd burnt them so badly that a piece of barbecue charcoal would have been nutrionally superior.

So perhaps it wasn't so much that I didn't like cooking as I didn't know how. Certainly my experience of Home Economics at High School validates this. I recall being quite good at simple things like fruit salad (ingredients : one carton orange juice, one can mixed fruit in juice), fruit flan (ingredients : one readymade flan case, one can orange segments, and the really hard part - some jelly), and once made some really good beef burgers; but on the whole my culinary qualifications peaked with some cheese scones - all simple things that would unlikely be served in anything other than the most amateur restaurant.

Once Home Economics became an optional rather than compulsory subject, I enhanced my rudimentary cooking skills by customising Pot Noodles, or 'pimping my noodle' as those crazy MTV kids would probably say. To do this, simply make up your Pot Noodle as normal, but - and here's the genius - before giving it that final all-important-but-easy-to-forget final stir, add herbs and spices; anything will do, really just anything you fancy. If you're lucky, your added ingredients may just tip the potted snack closer to being real food; get it wrong and you'll be left with Pot Ruination.

Knowing that university and self-sufficiency beckoned, I decided that drastic corrective action was required. As if by magic, there among the random General Studies options was a term-long course entitled 'Bedsit Cookery', and begrudgingly - despite all manner of really random General Studies options that would have been much more of a doss - realised that I needed to take this course. Part of my reluctance possibly stemmed from the Soft Cell song 'Bedsitter', which hardly painted the rosiest portrait of life away from home.

At the start of the class, the overbearing and highly intimidating teacher, Miss Hawkins, asked each of us A-level students why we thought we were there, Alcoholics Anonymous style. The course consisted of students from Stratford-upon-Avon's three local schools, the comprehensive (my school, and the location of the course), and the separate girls and boys grammar schools. Cynically, despite their assertions that it was because they were off to Oxford / Cambridge / LSE and needed to know how to jolly well cook, I knew it was because courses at our school finished 25 minutes before the ones at either of the grammar schools. Me, I replied that I wanted to complete the course because I kept burning soup. This is totally true - I still don't understand how, but burning tinned soup had become my then-latest cookery disaster. It did get a laugh, though, even if it was perhaps slightly condescending.

The course was to provide me with many useful tips, such as how to correctly chop an onion, but also yielded two notable trainwrecks of dishes from me. The first was a lasagne which looked, smelt and tasted perfect, except that I'd only included one layer of pasta; thus I invented lasagne soup, but at least I didn't burn it. The other was designed to be a meal for a loved one, wherein I made chicken in a white wine and cream sauce and mixed three times as much water into the sauce which required cornflour to thicken, thus yielding a sauce that tasted of flour. At the time I didn't have a girlfriend, so no-one was offended.

For the first time in the history of my school's General Studies programme, I requested that I sit the course again when it finished, and I did much better. That summer, my last before university, I cooked for myself for a whole week while my parents were on holiday and coped well. At university I ate pretty well, but did consume a lot of cheap doughy pizza. But I generally cooked either a pasta or rice dish with proper vegetables three times a week, and I never once - nor since - ate a kebab. In my first year I also became a vegetarian, though not on grounds of principle; it just meant I had more money available to spend on records. I did lose three stone in my first term, and have only ever gained half a stone since, but these are mere details. By the end of university I was pretty competent at cooking, and I'd even started eating a really well-balanced diet; if you'd said to me on day one, term one, year one, that by my final day I'd be eating loads of fruit and veg, I'd have laughed in your face. But it was true.

Since then, with many trips to expensive hotel restaurants courtesy of my wife's conferencing business and the advent of entertaining clients at lunches, my interest in food - and therefore cooking - has flourished; on a Saturday my first port of call in The Times is Giles Coren's witty restaurants column, followed by Ramsay's recipe section.

I'm not an expert; I still overseason things and as an overhang from my Pot Noodle pimping days, still throw in too many conflicting flavours. But I can follow a recipe and present it well. I find it a really relaxing and enjoyable past-time and never find it a chore. But from time to time, when I'm not paying attention, I'll still burn soup. Only now I'll have made it from scratch, not just opened a tin. And if anyone tells you that grated cheese and raspberry jam toasted sandwiches aren't the tastiest damn sandwiches in this world - you detractors, you non-believers, you know who you are - then you've never tasted perfection...

2006-06-13T08:39:00.000+01:00

London Loves and Oxford Street Blues

I have written here previously about my love for London; it is, if you will, a muse that I believe I have inherited from my father, himself the son of a true East-ender. London never ceases to amaze and intrigue me, but I appreciate that I’ll never know everything there is to know about this most intricate of cities, yet I seek out and absorb masses of information on London’s history, architecture and geography in much the same way as I have collected various things over the years.

One of the things I find most intriguing is that I can take a gentle stroll around the City at lunchtime and literally will never need to follow the same path twice; there will always be a hitherto undiscovered alleyway or lane, invariably leading to a hoary old boozer tucked away from all but the most learned City worker. Even treading my regular walk into work can yield surprises; even though you think you know every single footfall, metre and mile, a glance above a familiar shopfront could introduce you to fascinating, beautiful buildings that you feel you could not have failed to notice before.

A few months ago I met a colleague at Paternoster Square, a beautiful open space adjacent to St. Paul’s Cathedral with modern offices butting up against this familiar London landmark; the landmark which had for centuries – until very recently – dictated the maximum height of City buildings so as not to obstruct views of Sir Christopher Wren’s magnificent construction. The current Paternoster Square was completed in September 2003 after 17 years of planning, revision, numerous architects and delays due to the recession. The square, built on the site of Paternoster Row, a medieval street along which the clergy of St. Paul's would walk whilst reciting the Paternoster prayer, has been redeveloped many times over and was bombed during the Second World War, in destructive Blitz activity that mercifully missed St. Paul's itself. The design of the square is in many respects sympathetic to the cathedral and, via the straight alleyways dividing the outer offices, actually creates stunning views of Wren’s cathedral, albeit of a ‘peepshow’ variety – looking straight ahead you will see the familiar white stone profiles between the buildings, prompting you involuntarily to raise your eyes skyward where the immense lead dome renders all of Paternoster Square’s architectural success instantly subservient.

My colleague and I chose Paternoster Square because it was en route to work for both of us, he in Holborn and me in the City; a convenient halfway house. I pass the entrance to the square on my way into work every morning, and would have to cross Newgate Street to reach it. However instead of doing this I crossed High Holborn well before the viaduct and walked the rest of the way on an unfamiliar side of the road. This may sound dull as dishwater to you, but just the act of walking part of the way on the other side of the road revealed new buildings, views and vistas that I’d never even seen before, even though I walked next to these same things every day. The way the capital reveals itself to you in these ways is one of the reasons that I enjoy working and walking in London so much.

By pure chance, on a lunchtime wander I found myself unintentionally forced overground after taking a wrong turn out of one of Liverpool Street station’s arcades. Not sure where I was headed, I followed the path to the end, which opened out into Exchange Square, another of the City’s ‘green lungs’ incorporating a cascading courtyard, green areas, fountains and several bars and cafes, surrounded by modern office structures. I had worked in nearby Old Broad Street for the best part of four years and yet had never stumbled across this hidden treasure of a location before. Judging by the lack of other people in the square, it seems I am not alone in not coming across this. Even during the recent heatwave, Exchange Square is far less busy of a lunchtime than nearby Broadgate Circle with its many sun worshipers perched on its central stairs, or the comparatively austere Finsbury Circle.

Only after a good ten minutes or so of wide-eyed wonderment did I realise that the old-fashioned cantilever-roof structures on the south side of the square were in fact above the platforms of Liverpool Street, that Exchange Square in its entirety is built on a platform built across the tracks running into this London terminus.

The City alone is full of such gems, adjacent to but also hidden by buildings. Previous to Old Broad Street, my company’s offices were in Eastcheap. At either end of Eastcheap are great tourist structures and historic locations – Wren’s Monument and Pudding Lane are at the western end, while the Tower of London and Tower Bridge can be reached by following Eastcheap to its easternmost end, where it flows into Great Tower Street. Yet near as damn it equidistant between these two ends lies one of the City’s serenest spots – the bombed-out church St. Dunstan's In The East, wherein the cloisters and roof hollowed out during the Second World War have been replaced by sympathetic greenery and benches arranged in a circular, inward-looking and reverential fashion. If you are ever in need of quiet solitude among one of the busiest financial centres in the world, you should seek out this easy-to-miss location. There is something so beautiful, breathtaking but also sorrowful about the way the sun plays through the glass-less stone windows onto the lawn, creating shadows in a space which once was shielded from the sun’s rays; the outside, via a direct hit, allowed to reclaim the inside once more.

This evening I checked into a hotel on Oxford Street for an event my company was hosting at the Royal Academy of Arts on Piccadilly. Herein lie two totally contradictory sides of London, pratically within the same postal code. On the one hand you have the opulence, riches and distinguished face of the West End; Fortnum & Mason, The Ritz (one hundred years old this year), tailors, shirt-makers and generations-old tobacconists. On the other you have the crass face of commercialism, the average provincial town high street magnified, a totally characterless shadow of its former self with splendid buildings put to poor use at ridiculous rents. And yet Oxford Street is still the busiest of London’s thoroughfares, a mecca for visiting tourists; remove a flagship store like Selfridges or Niketown and what exactly is Oxford Street? Nothing at all special, that’s what, especially compared to some of the streets which intersect and peel off from either side of its wide carriageway.

Mayor of London Ken Livingstone has indicated plans for a total overhaul of this shopping haven, which appears long overdue and should hopefully smarten up frontages and clear out the incomprehensible array of small, tacky shops wedged uncomfortably next to ugly department stores. I discovered a takeaway bar on Oxford Street that I’d never seen before – all of Britain’s favourite junkfoods (burgers, kebabs, fish and chips) available from one multi-cultural hole at the very centre of this ridiculously tacky road.

Every year of my childhood I would badger my mother into taking us Christmas shopping on Oxford Street. Each year she would tell me of how horrible it would be, detailing horror stories of shoppers forced into tight rivers of forward walking motion unable to get from one side of the pavement to the other, either to cross the road or walk into a shop. Whilst that may have been a slight exaggeration, there is no denying that Oxford Street, at pretty much any time of year, is hellish. Today was the hottest day of the year so far, and the brief walk from Oxford Circus to the Radisson Edwardian Berkshire – tucked away like a guilty secret next to Debenham’s – which should have taken no more than five minutes at the most proved no less nightmarish than any other time I've been there. Tourists plus intense heat plus a trolleycase do not make for an enjoyable walk on Oxford Street.

Returning from the corporate bash at the Royal Academy just before 10.00, with the tourists petering out but still meandering past the now-closed shops, revealed Oxford Street in its true colours. Like some aged courtesan, Oxford Street’s makeup is removed at nightfall as the shutters are pulled down, cleaners begin the thankless task of removing chewing gum trodden into doormats and rubbish bags are thrown haphazardly to the pavement’s edge for the enjoyment of vermin; Oxford Street may be a tough, ugly place during the daytime but by night this potentially majestic street is nothing but a withered old hag with a cracked voice begging for love and tenderness, a pitiful, sorry black sheep in London’s family.

2006-05-31T13:10:00.000+01:00

Didn't we have a lovely time the day we went to... Anywhere that RyanAir fly to?

A couple of weekends ago, I read an article in the Sunday Times Magazine about the decline of the British seaside resort, specifically highlighting Southend-on-Sea as a town woefully decaying as tourist numbers dwindle. The author painted a wonderfully bleak vision of Southend's signature landmark, its 1.4 mile Victorian pier, occupied on that day by the author alone.

As a child, Southend was where we spent the mandatory two week summer holiday my father was forced to take when the factory he worked for shut down. I feel no embarassment in admitting this at all - at the time, all of my friends' fathers worked as engineers, and our collective summer holidays were spent in either Southend, Weymouth, Poole or Bournemouth. I did have one comparatively affluent friend whose parents were both teachers, and they summered in France, but I don't recall being jealous. We were all pretty happy about spending two weeks at an English coastal resort, and I don't recall any of us or our siblings bemoaning our poor fortune at not being able to go abroad. And yet I have already felt the need to stress that it was not of embarrassment to us, indicating that this is precisely how the English resort is viewed, almost as a 'last resort', the kind of second-class destination someone would choose if, for example, they could not afford to travel abroad.

We settled on Southend because my father used to go there each year with his mother and father. My grandmother was a true Londoner, an Eastender born within the sound of Bow Bells. Even after being evacuated to rural Warwickshire, Southend - along with Margate, where we went once too - was still their favourite holiday destination after the war. In a way I felt proud to be carrying on a Smith family tradition; on the other hand, I didn't really know any different either.

I have some fantastic memories of Southend, of the journey there, of days spent indoors and hours spent in doorways because the weather had turned stormy. If I think back to the fond memories of my childhood, teenage years and early adulthood, it doesn't take too long before I come across one linked to Southend. It's just an embedded part of my history, webbed in and around some of the personally significant events of my life. Strangely, despite its obvious tourist appeal, despite literally dozens of visits to this most beloved Victorian town, I think I've only been along the pier twice. Then again, I lived in Stratford-upon-Avon for 19 years and never visited Shakespeare's Birthplace either.

But fond though I am of my memory of Southend, would I honestly consider this - or Margate, or Clacton - a destination that my newly-extended family should choose for a weeks' holiday? Or even for a long weekend? With the advent of budget airlines and the opening up of far more destinations reachable by plane in about the same time as a drive to the nearest English coastal town, it's hard to justify making the trip. This is before you consider the fact that a location like Southend, with former attractions like the Kursal or the pier bowling alley eroded away either by changing tastes and carelessness, or the decaying grandeur of the Palace Hotel (which was a squatters' paradise the last time I was there) and the boarded-up gift shops - this combination of underinvestment and cultural ruination makes Southend a pretty gloomy place for all but the most optimistic individual, i.e. very small children.

I might consider taking our daughter to coastal Essex simply to let her see what it's like and try and explain how it was when I was younger - like my father did with me - before this slice of Victorian tradition (like industry, imperialism and innovation) disappears into the sea for good. But unless our finances take a turn for the worse, we won't be spending a week there every year.

In fact, right now we are planning our first family holiday. The locations that we're considering include Portugal, Prague or New York - destinations which are recognised as affordable and effortless to reach, much as my parents considered Southend when my sister and I were born or the Victorians intended such a location with mass populace appeal to be. And oddly, on the cusp of turning thirty and taking the opportunity to look back through my memories, one of my strongest memories of Southend is not of fish and chips purchased from a chippy by Chalkwell Park, disorienting visits to the Crooked House in Peter Pan's Playground, walking out to the Crowstone Monument (the point where the Thames meets the sea) or Scampi Fries consumed in a concrete beer garden outside The Crooked Billet pub in Old Leigh - it is none of these things that I recall most fondly. Instead it's the no doubt deceased record shop (Golden Disc) that my friend Barry made me aware of where I picked up a stack of rare records, all of which I treasure as Southend souvenirs to this day.

2006-05-30T09:19:00.000+01:00

Of work and parenthood

Our daughter is now three weeks old, and I really can't believe that the time has passed so quickly. In such a very short space of time, not only have our lives and routines gone out of the window, but Seren - our precious little girl - has changed so much. She already seems stronger, longer and more settled, and is fascinated by the light passing through windows or through banisters. She's also started smiling genuine smiles rather than indicating that daddy needs to get ready to change my nappy soon, and seems to be getting interested in her activity mat and other toys.

Everyone who's ever had kids will tell you that it changes your life forever, but a naïve part of you really believes that this is just poppycock, that you'll be more capable than them, able to assert some sort of upper hand over your child. You genuinely think that you'll be able to sit down of an evening, for example, and enjoy your evening meal - baby, after all, is such a small thing; how can she possibly rule the roost? But of course, no sooner has fork touched plate than baby also wants feeding. Oh, and that old adage about letting babies cry until you're ready to attend to them? Nice (if slightly cruel) idea, but totally impractical.

The first couple of weeks, with the benefit of two weeks of paternity leave, was really good. I'd get up at 7.00 or 7.30 and get the house organised, while my wife Michelle and Seren would generally sleep in until around nine when the latter, suddenly cognisant that she was starving would scream into life, the stomach and vocal chords seemingly awake earlier than the eyes, which seemed to stay resolutely closed.

Fast forward to my first day back at work. Few of the variables had changed - Seren still didn't sleep through the night without two or three feeds and nappy changes, we still didn't get to bed until midnight - but I suddenly had to balance the night's disruption with getting up two hours earlier and therefore experiencing two hours' less 'sleep'. And not only that, but with this start, I then actually had to work. Work which is, of course, less strenuous than 24 hour childcare or breastfeeding, I hasten to add before inadvertently offending my own wife and other mothers, but is pretty tough to do on bugger all sleep.

Worse still (from a work perspective) is that having a child really re-focusses your priorities, built up over many child-less years. Work is no longer the most important ruling influence in your life, thus you feel resentful of this all-consuming daily event that cruelly separates you from your newly-expanded family. Work, you realise, is that necessary thing that you need to do to support your loved ones, and you can't help but approach it in a different way.

But work doesn't quite see it that way. There's no concessions simply from having a baby. You are not able to work any less hard, you still have to show 150% commitment and there is no allowance for tiredness or lateness after your poor, defenseless, unknowing baby has been sick all down the back of your suit. You can't afford to coast, no matter how much you want to. And for those people who say you need to separate your work and home lives? Well, tell me how to do that and I'll give it a try, but right now I can't see the appeal.

Aside from the financial means to provide for your loved ones, the grey cloud of work does provide but one silver lining - holidays. I've never been so keen in all my life to book all my holidays in, to know when I can next spend more than just the all-too-brief weekend with my family. And finally, after nearly five years of working in the City, with its compelling financial attractiveness and my intense pride and love for our capital, the hour and a half commute now feels like a further factor separating me from my baby, a further thing to be resentful for. But I'm not about to go jacking in work just yet - my daughter looks like she is going to have expensive tastes.

Despite tieing myself up in great big bloody reef knots about going back to work, as it happened my first day back was fine. The hour-long train journey each way turned out to be a perfect means of catching up on sleep, while when I actually arrived at work all people wanted to do was talk about Seren (my specialist subject), her birth, how Michelle was and how I was coping. So I didn't get much done anyway. But that excitement of rushing out the door at 5.00 to get home has never been so welcome, and that first night coming in to see my wife and baby was one of the nicest evenings of my life.

2006-05-23T15:52:00.000+01:00

Parenthood

At about five o'clock on the morning of 6th May - which would eventually turn out to be the day my daughter was ushered forth into the world - with my wife Michelle in intense pain from an already lengthy labour and entonox canisters rapidly being connected to breathing apparatus; with our lounge, as the intended scene of birth, appearing to be something of a cross between a medical triage and child's waterpark; with my wife moaning and groaning and the midwife telling me I'd made her perhaps the best cup of tea she'd ever had; in among this chaotic scene, I experienced an epiphany, perhaps the strongest in my life to date - we were about to have a baby, and I was about to become a father.

Now, our baby was, on the 6th May, as she wended her way oh so slowly out of the womb, precisely two weeks overdue. Therefore I'd had nearly ten months to get used to the concept of what was imminently about to happen in our lives. But somehow the true gravity of the coming change in my life had not yet fully hit me. I thought it had, after all earlier on this very page I have remarked that nine months of pregnancy repreents the perfect amount of time for you to adjust to becoming parents, and therefore felt pretty confident about the whole thing. But, in the early hours of that morning just over two weeks ago, I suddenly felt a massive wave of realisation, trepidation and abject fear wash over me. My wife didn't appear to notice - after all her focus was on the pain and on the immediate task of getting our baby out of her body come hell or high water - but I sobbed a little. Partly for suddenly feeling out of my depth, and partly because it was awful to see the one I love so much suffering such pain.

Of course, my fears were unfounded, and we've both adapted to parenthood very well. As I write this, our daughter is asleep on my left arm, so I've even discovered how to multi-task too. But at the time, in that moment and throughout the day until Seren Elyse was born at 17.35, it felt like I was standing on a precipice. I don't think my wife would have noticed; in fact, I rather hoped she wouldn't as my sole focus needed to be on supporting her. Then again, with the amount of gas and air that she'd consumed I don't suppose she'd have noticed anything.

The progress of Michelle's labour seemed like an eternity, and to a certain extent that's not far off the truth. Before my paternity leave started, my manager at work joked that we should have a sweepstake in the team on how long Michelle's labour would last for - he joked that it would be around 68 hours, which we all guffawed profusely at. He wasn't far wrong - contractions started at about 19.00 on Wednesday and Seren was finally born some 70 hours later.

By the time our beautiful daughter- after all we are her parents, and therefore fully entitled to think she is the most beautiful girl in the world, which she genuinely is - was born, we had certainly made the best use of the NHS. Michelle desperately wanted a home water birth, which requires a midwife (and later a second midwife) to be present for the majority of the established labour. As labour took so long because, we later learned, of the position of Seren's head, and as midwives' shifts don't last forever, we went through five midwives in all. Michelle got something of a taste for entonox, and used up six whole canisters of the stuff, depleting the entire supply that Milton Keynes General Hospital had that day. And to cap it all, because things had taken so long, it was decided that enough was enough and the hospital should take over. Whereupon an ambulance was called, a spinal anaesthetic was administered and Seren was born, in an operating theatre, by ventouse. You can't say that we didn't get our money's worth, but it was pretty distressing at the time. I never thought I'd find myself chasing an ambulance whilst wiping tears from my eyes and mouthing apologies to my wife under my breath, but there you go. Everyone says you can't plan a birth down to the finest detail, and now I know why.

So it turned out not to be the birth that Michelle had planned for, but the result was the same - a healthy, slightly distressed but perfect baby girl. And we were of course overjoyed.

Seren and Michelle unexpectedly stayed in Milton Keynes hospital until the following Tuesday, which was for me one of the hardest and most surreal experiences of the whole thing. Here I was, someone who had become a father, someone who had graduated to this new level of maturity and pumped up with pride, forced to return to our house, alone. Our house which was still set up for a home birth with a lounge that could only be described as carnage, all towels and water and used tea cups; our house where to me it seemed I could still hear the anguished moans and groans of my wife still echoing around the now-silent rooms. By the time I returned from hospital on that Saturday evening it was so late that I could not bring myself to make dinner, despite the fact that my last meal had been a solitary slice of cold toast at the precise moment that my epiphany had washed over me; thus, after making the obligatory family phonecalls, I found myself nursing a beer and eating unhealthy snacks amid the mess and devastation of our house.

Everything in my life had completely changed, for the better of course, and that epiphany seemed so irrelevant now that Seren had finally arrived and my responsibilities had kicked in. And yet there I was at home living like a student batchelor.

2006-05-09T00:03:00.000+01:00

Vinyl Whores

An earlier version of this article previously appeared on the website www.nominalmusics.co.uk in 2000.

When I first started publishing pages to the web in 1995 (as Red Elvis Central through the University of Essex), I ran a weekly review of between ten and twenty seven inch singles picked up at various charity stores around Colchester. This stack of vinyl, of various shades of degradation, was mostly culled from the late seventies and early eighties - commercial electronic pop, classic and obscure. My religious binge-purchasing of seven inch releases from bands such as Tears For Fears or OMD rose to near addiction levels, and by the summer of 1998 I was unable to visit a town or village without first checking out the second hand vinyl in the thrift stores - the Cat Rescue shop in Lexden, Colchester seemed an unlikely place to spend a lunch hour from work, but when it meant that I could get a rare seven by 808 State, I didn't really mind. Financial limitations (and various other lead weights around my neck, the details of which would not make pleasant reading) meant that record purchasing near enough ceased completely. After moving from Colchester to Luton in August 1998, my turntable remained disassembled for many months, leaving the burgeoning boxes of neatly-ordered vinyl to slumber in their filthy sleeves. With the exception of a few isolated forays into Luton and Dunstable's almost infinite reservoir of charity outlets, my consumption of vinyl was limited to picking up the odd battered album from the Oxfam next to my workplace. Hence, although quantity was reduced, the quality of my purchases would rise - so, instead of grasping for the Gary Numan single that I knew I wouldn't like, I would be a bit more measured. This has meant that I have instead picked up a rare promo copy of Miles' Birth Of The Cool and Lee Hazlewood's ' The Very Special World Of…'. Until about two weeks ago, I had not connected the turntable for about six months, although I still had managed to build up a neat stack of new vinyl singles and albums. My wife had also raided her parents' house and found an old record box containing all of her old sevens and twelves, so, in a moment of retro abandonment, we decided to play some.

I had completely forgotten the feeling and emotion attached to playing records compared to the neat convenience of CDs or MP3s. To today's youth, at least those not influenced by dance music or into indie (where the 7” is once again fashionable), vinyl must seem so old-fashioned and inconvenient compared to the minimal effort required with digital media.

But that's exactly what makes playing records so exciting - the effort involved by the listener through dusting the grooves or calibrating the tone arm means that he or she is actually somehow overseeing and participating in the act of letting the music play through the amplifier. There is also the feeling of holding something delicate and precious - whilst a CD can play through a misplaced fingerprint, a vinyl record can be terminally damaged by a slight scratch or from the transfer of oil from the fingertip. Add this to the fact that a vinyl single or album is housed in a very flimsy cardboard sleeve (as opposed to the immaculate sheen of a plastic CD case) and one begins to comprehend why avid vinyl consumptives want to treat each individual piece as carefully as an antique dealer would handle a Queen Anne table. Vinyl is physical, music made through contact, whilst digital media are somehow more precise due to the technologically-advanced nature of their recording and playback hardware. One imagines vinyl as having a finite lifespan, whereas CDs seem to be built to last forever. Also, the sonic manipulation of digital media is essentially flawed to the point of impossibility, despite the intervention of new mixing consoles and certain avant-garde elecroacoustic composers - where are the CD compositional equivalents of works by Steve Reich, John Cage, Pierre Schaeffer, Christian Marclay, or even the scratching dexterity of hip hop’s finest? Put simply, it can't be done. In two of music's most forward-looking genres, vinyl is still at the very heart - where would rap or any one of dance's viral tranches be without the use of turntable and vinyl record?

Listening to old vinyl relics such as my first seven, Nik Kershaw's 'The Riddle' or Michelle's pile of late eighties pop dance singles rekindled the old feelings of youth and teenage experimentation that the purchasing of CDs actually prohibit. This prompted us to remember trivial things like 'I was doing this on the day that I bought this,' or 'I was going out with so-and-so when I bought this,' or 'I remember what else I bought that day.' These pieces of plastic are like points along a continuum, events separated by days and weeks of saving for the next single or album. Perhaps I'm reading it wrong, perhaps it's music in general that we use to measure the passing of time, but I don't think CDs or MP3s can or will have the nostalgic impact that vinyl has. Is anyone, after all, likely to recall the first MP3 they ever downloaded? (For the record, my first was the free album Bovine Life II : Social Electrics, a collection of obscure electronica created using filesharing.)

Recording to CD is now a cheap and cost-effective way of mastering that can be done from home, a by-product of the bedroom-based self-build ethics that punk facilitated. Ironic then that punk's teenage snarl and 'fuck you' attitude has lead to the decline of vinyl, replaced instead by the mature, tamed spirit encapsulated as the zeroes and ones of digital recording media. Listening to The Stooges' debut album on remastered CD feels so clean and pure, yet the sleeve and potential within the songs tells you that this should be dirty and ragged - perfect for the filthy grooves of a vinyl album and battered cardboard sleeve. Inevitably, it is difficult not to accept that CDs - in all but sound quality - are superior and more convenient than vinyl records, no matter how much audiophiles will try to convince you. We want simple lives, no matter how complex our listening ear, but vinyl will always remain a quintessential part of music's development. We could not have anticipated MP3s or hard-drive recording, so what's next? You can be assured that vinyl will still be there in some shape or form, even if it's reduced to the mere ghost of a sampled scratch on a future digital hip hop opus.

2006-05-04T11:59:00.000+01:00

How To Give Up Your Obsession With Self-Help

Last night on the train home I sat opposite a large woman, not necessarily fat, but one of those very tall women whose weight is in proportion with their frame. She was wearing a dowdy grey woolen suit of the variety that no-one sells anymore, nor indeed have they done so for the last half a century, and the kind of brown flat-soled shoes worn by ageing members of the church. Her entire appearance suggested a frumpy, late-middle-aged civil servant, but far be it from me to judge a person on their appearances. She also reminded me, oddly, of Christopher Biggins. In fact, if Biggins had been a woman, went shopping for a suit and shoes - in the Second World War - and then worked ceaselessly as a lowly civil servant for fifty years, then he basically would have been sat opposite me last night.

(Incidentally, I do tend to assume that the majority of my fellow commuters are civil servants. I don't know why. After all I've never even met a civil servant. Do they even exist?)

The woman was reading a book entitled 'Now, Discover Your Hidden Strengths'. It makes a change to see someone reading something other than 'The Da Vinci Code' or Harry Potter, I'll admit. (Surely someone must by now have seen the potential for 'The Harry Potter Code' with a foreword by John Grisham and Tom Clancy. That way no-one would need to buy another book again. It would be like a new bible for commuting civil servants. Or what about inventing a piece of software that auto-writes Chick Lit? You'd just load in which great job the central character has (but hates), the name of the good-looking but unreliable ex-boyfriend-slash-love of her life, some amusing scenes where the main character, despite working in PR or marketing and clearly being in possession of a not unsubstantial intellect, shows how ditsy she is. Throw in some pre-programmed mini-break locations and a pivotal one night stand and I think you've got yourself a reliable formula to produce a lifetime's supply of similar but subtly different trash fiction.)

I think self-help texts have their own formula too. You just have to take a look at their covers to see that. They generally have a lot of white, with the title emblazoned in red or blue boldly at the centre. They're not very exciting covers, as if making these books look like medical journals will somehow subtly enhance the book's accuracy; but then, just like the latest Dan Brown, they go and stick a load of praise on the front and back covers from some doctor or society that you've never heard of and suspect may not actually exist but is designed to make you think that This Book Really Knows Its Stuff. Sometimes you might even get praise from individual readers of the sweetly sycophantic 'This book changed my life' variety, usually attributed to things like 'Mr A, Sheffield'. Another formulaic feature would be their titles, which editors and publishers and marketing types must spend ages deliberating over, perhaps even longer than some of the books took to cobble together. The titles all have bold aspirations encapsulated within them, usually including phrases starting with 'beat', 'banish' or 'say goodbye to', or they try to appear practical with things like 'how to' at the start. Using a word like 'understand' or 'discover' makes the reader think they're on a road to self-discovery. Other formulaic inclusions may appear as black and white cartoon illustrations (trivialising a problem always helps), an abundance of exercises designed to encourage inward-looking thinking (and the ultimate conclusion that even if your parents didn't directly screw you up, they certainly wanted to) and a higher price than a similarly-sized work of fiction, perhaps to make you think the author knows his subject and thus commands a higher fee.

Here are my observations:

1. No-one reads them all the way through

Ask anyone whether they've read each of their no doubt large collection of self-help manuals all the way to the end and they'll look sheepish and admit they haven't. Not one. You'll see them look uncomfortable as they mentally assess just how much they've spent over the years. (For irony alone, surely, their collection will include Alvin Hall's 'What Not To Spend'). I swear no-one gets past chapter three. They give up, frustrated that they're not instantly healed after reading fifty pages of cognitive behavioural clap-trap that hasn't told them anything beyond it actually being socially acceptable to be overweight / shy / in debt etc, and those exercises which take time and are often quite painful. Thus they give up. Take a look at chapters four onward - there's nothing there but blank pages. They know you'll give up.

2. There's never just one book

Like oxygen molecules, these books have to come in pairs. The author will typically have written another book, curiously published at precisely the same time, on a subject so similar to the book you're reading that he feels it justifies a text and title all of its own. And yet 90% of the content will be the same as the one you're currently reading, and it will still try and tell you that it's okay to be flawed and that your parents are to blame. You know that they are just trying to sell more books by seizing on your insecurities. You know this. But you'll buy the other book too. And read neither.

Take this no doubt seminal text that my fellow rail traveller was reading - 'Now, Discover Your Hidden Strengths'. Doesn't that title sound a little like it's an isolated tome from a much larger series of books? It's full title is actually 'Now You Have Unsuccessfully Read The Three Previous Books In This Series, And If You Have Any Self-Worth Left At All, Let's Discover Your Hidden Strengths And Give Up On This Halfway Through Too, Before Tackling The Next Three Books In My Lucrative Series, Concluding With "Now, Learn How To Swindle Cash Out Of People With Low Self-Esteem".

3. You can't get rid of them

You'll never, ever give one of these books away to a charity shop or sell it on eBay. You can't : what if you were to go through the same problem again? You'll keep it, just in case (even though you never finished it). And secondly, you've written all over it in the sections they leave blank in the exercises. What if the old volunteer in the charity shop or the purchaser on eBay could read what you've written, even when you wrote in pencil and then were really careful to thoroughly rub it out? They'll think you're messed up won't they? Strange that you didn't feel this way when you boldly handed your cash to the spotty student cashier in Books Etc to buy it in the first place.

4. They don't work

This is the saddest thing of all. They promise so much but don't do anything. But that's because they rely on your self-discipline and your commitment. When you cast the book aside and claim it's just not working, it's never your fault though is it? At the very least you will attempt to blame the author, while those who have read far enough will have learned enough to realise that their dear parents, who spent so long tirelessly providing for them during the reader's formative years, are in fact to blame. Yes, they are to blame for your lack of commitment to really making a serious effort at looking inside yourself. That said, a self-help text is no substitute for a counsellor, which is the real reason they don't work.

My companion's book sounds to me like the book equivalent of those careers advice chats you have at school where you complete a questionnaire with your qualities, and end up being told you're perfectly suited to a) working in a shop or b) being on the dole. And how does this book expect to teach me, for example, that my great hidden strength might be a natural excellence in skydiving or singing lead in a Norweigan Death Metal band?

This has all gone far enough. Too many innocent individuals are buying book after book in the misguided belief that it will genuinely cure them of their various insecurities. There is only one solution, and that is my new book 'How To Give Up Your Obsession With Self-Help', which esteemed professor types are already claiming to be the definitive work on the subject, and 'The best tenner I ever spent!' by a Mrs C Biggins (Civil Servant).

2006-05-02T13:22:00.000+01:00

Thou shalt not laugh whilst travelling on the tube

In the often mind-numbing drudgery of commuting, one of the more unexpected things one finds oneself doing is bursting out laughing in a tightly-packed tube carriage during the morning rush hour. People look at you first with annoyance and then with a degree of concern, as if to suggest that they think the rat race may just have got to you. Clearly you have lost the plot, yet another victim of the modern condition who's buckling under the pressure of the City. They put railings at the top of the Monument to stop people like you throwing yourself to your death, you know. People stiffen, clutch at their possessions as if any second the chortling psychopath they perceive you to be is going to rob you (or worse). Laughter, at least the last time I checked, is a natural human behaviour. Clearly this is not the case on public transport. One should be seen and not heard, it would appear.

But laugh out loud is exactly what I did several mornings ago upon chancing upon a short letter in this morning's Metro, the free paper for commuters, each copy circulating between God knows how many travellers on an average morning - you wouldn't pick a paper out of the bin (unless you were homeless which is an entirely different scenario), but it is socially acceptable to retrieve a copy of the Metro from the grubby floor of a tube train. It is not socially acceptable to laugh, however. Double standards, anyone?

The letter was written by Steve Ainger, and concerned the title of The Darkness' last effort, One Way Ticket To Hell And Back. Steve's sharp-witted comment suggested that this in fact meant they needed to purchase a return, not a single. It couldn't have been more than twenty words, but was so precise and so instant that I almost fell off my seat laughing. As it happened I didn't have a seat, so more accurately I almost fell over. Well, in fact I wouldn't haven fallen anywhere so sardine-packed was I on said morning, but I think you get the gist.

As it happens, I know Steve, and worked with him for nearly three years. Steve is perhaps the funniest chap I've ever had the good fortune to work with. He and I also shared a love for the least celebrated nineties indie bands and all things Morrissey, and his dry office rhetoric was both infuriating and infectious. One of Steve's methods of passing time in the office was to play a game of verbal 'either / or' with his immediate colleagues - he'd find two totally unrelated things connected only loosely by alliteration, and ask his colleagues which they would prefer. Simple, funny and invariably straight out of left field, normally delivered just when the office had quietened down and was earnestly beavering away. The same is also true of his regular Metro letters, which are usually shoe-horned in between serious gripes and comments from the public and catch you completely off-guard; his curt little observations on culture, politics and life in general are something of a regular feature in the letters pages, and are always guaranteed to make you guffaw quite unexpectedly.

Steve has also dabbled in stand-up comedy at open-mic nights, which to my chagrin I have yet to experience. But, from what I know of Steve, and if his Metro letters are anything to go by, his wry brand of comedic wit and observation would go down a storm, and I believe he has a number of Michael Stipe gags in his repertoire. If things don’t work out for Steve in PR then I think he’ll have plenty of options for alternative careers.

In his own inimitable – but subtle – manner through his series of regular Metro letters, Steve has become part of the fabric of a commuter's life, as much as, say, rainy Monday mornings, delayed trains and the Waterloo & City Line being closed, only in a way guaranteed to make you smile rather than wince in pain. Long may it continue.

2006-04-27T10:20:00.000+01:00

PSP - PlayStation Private? Or Public?

At any given moment in time I will generally have one or two things that really wind me up about commuting. My previous gripes have included eating fast food on public transport (which you can read about here), and taking up more than one space on a train either through a) a larger than average coat or b) through sheer ignorance (though tempted, I exclude the size of the individual, as I don't want to appear 'weightist'). One that crops up from time to time is people walking down the stairs at tube stations on the wrong side, even though there are prominent signs saying 'Keep left'. Often, without again wishing to appear prejudiced, these people tend to be foreign tourists, and therefore I tend to be fairly forgiving about such folk. After all, it's not like when you come off the ferries at Dover and you get multi-lingual signs advising which side of the road to drive on. (I tend to be less forgiving when they've physically knocked me over, of course.)

Today, however my spleen overfloweth - and therefore venting requireth it - with two issues. One is a consistent bugbear of mine, the other is a brand new contender for the top spot.

The first is not restricted to commuting per se, but I'm most acutely aware of it when trying to get to work: people who cannot walk in straight lines, thus preventing easy overtaking and hence hindering my smooth passage to work, whilst also raising my risk of limb entanglement or even death under a passing vehicle as a stroller's random zig-zagging manoeuvres force me to step off the pavement into the road. Here I have little patience - high heels and heavy luggage aren't valid excuses as far as my zero tolerance policy is concerned. Mobile phones appear to exacerbate the situation, and that feminist nonsense about men being unable to multi-task really doesn't wash here - male or female, if you are walking 'n talking you'll be all over the pavement, guaranteed. Short of putting overtaking lanes on pavements, I can't think of a solution, so this one's here to stay.

Not so with the second - people playing Sony PSPs on public transport with volume up and no headphones. I have endured this no less than three times and am suitably perplexed and frustrated. The first occasion was on a shuttle bus between JFK and downtown Manhattan. The noise pollutant here was a small child, and while it was annoying to be stuck in traffic in Queens after an early start listening to the between-stage music and explosions and gunshots (from the PSP, not from the general ambience of Queens), one glare at the child's parent did the trick and the offending machine was placed in mother's handbag; peace and quiet prevailed for at least ten seconds until the comparatively cacophanous wails and tears of said child made the PSP seem like mere background noise. The other two occasions were both on underground trains.

I really don't understand it. We've lived with people listening to the Walkman and it's many offspring for almost thirty years, and I assumed rightly or wrongly that people had cottoned on to the idea that everyone around you doesn't necessarily wish to enjoy your music along with you. Hell, people even got rid of annoying key tones on mobile phones a few years ago. So is it wrong for me to assume that PSP gamers would realise that that small socket at the back is designed for headphones?

I suspect it may have something to do with the level of absorption and concentration required by gamers. Despite many youthful years of trying, I have always been rubbish at computer games, but from those heady days I do recall many a time being called down to dinner by my mum and never actually hearing her yelling up the stairs, so absorbed was I. One of the two guys on the underground was so pre-occupied with his game that he missed his station. And, yes, recalling my nerdy game-playing days, games were better with the sound turned way up. The fact remains, undeniably, that PSPs are designed specifically for solitary enjoyment - you can even buy porn DVDs for them (which has the potential for all sorts of RSI combinations. But we digress).

Playing with volume up and no headphones makes whatever the player is doing a public event, therefore I'd suggest that if you are ever faced with this situation to try the following - wander over to the offending noise pollutant, get very, very close and watch the screen intently. After a while, ask for a go, or better still gloat vividly when (s)he makes a mistake. If that doesn't get a result, turn up your iPod and sing along as loud as you can. And if that doesn't work, you won't be able to hear anyway.

2006-04-19T21:26:00.000+01:00

A day of two halves

In order to put pen to paper (or rather stylus to Palm), my inspirations are fairly transparent - it's either going to be something that has annoyed me or vexed me to the point of frustration, or it's going to be something that fills me with a degree of joy. Nothing particularly innovative or original there I agree, but this isn't intended to be prize-winning journalism.

Today started off very well - it was a nice, clear and crisp Spring morning, still cold enough for gloves, but bright enough to wake the serotonin from hibernation. I strolled to work filled with a renewed sense of purpose, my chest puffed up in valiant confidence (thinking about it, that may have been to make myself fractionally taller to prevent my slightly overlong trousers from dragging on the floor). My usual route to work sees me turning left from Southampton Row into High Holborn. At this time of year, and at that particular time in the morning, the sun - rising steadily above the architectural spleandour of the old Marconi headquarters - is at the height that momentarily blinds you, gently warming you even on a fresh morning such as today.

Walking down High Holborn in the rising sun is a great start to any day as far as I'm concerned, but for me the highlight of my morning walk is the view you get of the City's tallest buildings - Tower 42 on Old Broad Street and the Swiss Re 'gherkin' on St Mary Axe - from the junction with Chancery Lane. That view never fails to stir something within me. It reminds me, perversely, of how much I love New York - it feels like those brief glimpses of the Financial District you are greeted with when schlepping around Midtown, the way the dramatic horizon can disappear behind buildings as fast as you've noticed it. High Holborn veers softly right onto the concrete-lined Viaduct, causing the office blocks, with that rising sun playing off the shiny surfaces and dispersing the morning haze, to slowly disappear from view. It's a beautiful sight that I never tire of seeing day in, day out.

By the time of my journey home, my familiar funk had returned, and such romantic notions were long behind me. The weather, which this morning looked so promising, took a turn for the worse at lunchtime bringing rain and high winds to the City. In such conditions, my mind wanders to less optimistic matters, and one's grievances with the world come to the fore. (I'm not sure whether this was prompted by the rapid change in the weather or the fact that, over fifty miles away, my mini greenhouse was spectacularly blown over, wiping out an entire afternoon's foray into seedling transplanting.) These are today's gripes:

Umbrellas

Be very clear on this - using an umbrella during windy weather will not make you dry. It will give you a stiff arm from futilely attempting to keep your brolly aloft by gripping as hard as you can, naïvely believing that you, a mere mortal, can hold back Mother Nature simply by pointing your brolly into the wind and holding it really, really tight. Idiots. You spend so long wrestling with your umbrella, which if we're honest has the same basic component construction as a ship's sail and in windy weather wants to behave exactly like one, that you fail to notice that you're getting soaking bloody wet. Oh, and golf umbrellas? Don't get me started. Golf umbrellas are for fat people or - now here's an idea - playing golf in the rain. They're not for clogging up our pavements. They are the SUVs of waterproofs.

School holiday train travellers

'Hurrah! School holidays have arrived. Trains will run with about half as many passengers as normal with all the commuters who've taken time off to holiday with their kids. Praise be! I'm such a lucky commuter!'

I genuinely have this conversation with myself at the start of any school holiday. What I never do is think of those three words that fill the average commuter with abject fear - Family Saver Tickets.

During the holidays, it must seem like such a good idea to take your partner and both kids down to London for the day. I wish my parents had. But during evening rush hour? Really? Doesn't that seem a bit mad? Surely you must think to yourself 'Oh, those trains will be packed! Let's leave before / after the peak period.'

But no, that conversation doesn't happen, and they take up four seats on the train, rendering your average holiday commuter train significantly busier than usual.

Evening Standard boards

On the day my greenhouse re-enacted the scene in The Wizard Of Oz where the house is picked up in the storm, the final Evening Standard billboards ran with 'Milton Keynes Hotel Collapse Drama'.

Crikey, that sounds nasty doesn't it? Although of significant interest to me, what with being a Milton Keynes resident and all, I didn't buy the Standard. Firstly because I don't see the point when you can normally read it over someone's shoulder for free but also because - as always - the billboard totally exaggerated what had in fact happened.

If we break the sentence down, I suspect that one is left with an impression rather along the lines of the following:

'A hotel in Milton Keynes has collapsed, causing considerable distress and disruption.'

However, that wasn't what happened Mr Evening Standard now, was it?

Yes, something happened in Milton Keynes. Yes, it had something to do with a hotel. Yes, something collapsed. And I daresay it was pretty dramatic. But it wasn't a hotel that collapsed, but more accurately a fifteen-storey corner of scaffold surrounding a new hotel, burying three construction workers, one of whom later died. They closed off the surrounding roads, but generally no-one was too inconvenienced. Which doesn't quite have the same newspaper-shifting edge, I suspect. Terrible thing that accuracy concept.

Besides, does anyone actually ever buy the Standard on the basis of the ridiculous sensationalist headlines anyway? Are they that stupid? Or are people basically paying 40p for a sudoku puzzle wrapped in the news you can read tomorrow in the Metro for free?