ANNOUNCER: And now on BBC Radio Four, we go over to Sue Lawley, who will be finding out about her latest castaway's Desert Island Discs.
MUSIC: The Sleepy Lagoon, by Charles Etherington
SUE LAWLEY: Hello. I have with me today a man who is perhaps not that well known to the public at large but has in recent months fostered a small reputation in an obsure corner of the popular badly-run internet site, MySpace. He was a member of two of Leicester's least successful bands and is currently working in a technical capacity for the city's slightly unreliable bus network. Douglas Burgess, hello.
ME: Hello, Sue.
SUE LAWLEY: Douglas, at 27 you are quite young for a guest on this programme.
ME: Yes, I suppose I am. I haven't had anything exhibited at the National Gallery or worked in the diplomatic service, either (laughs).
SUE LAWLEY: No. But let's pass on that and move back to the beginning of your life. You were born in quite a backwater, weren't you?
ME: Yes, Sue. I was born in May 1979 in Sheerness, in north Kent. It's a small town on the Isle of Sheppey, and it has always had quite a reputation for being a... rough sort of place. It still has a large docks and some heavy industry, but when I was a child these dominated the island. The steel mill made eveything smell of iron filings and the container ships woke everyone up every night. Of course, things are different now, sadly.
SUE LAWLEY: So you feel it has changed for the worse?
ME: Well, we all look back with rose tinted glasses. If I think about it, we were a working class family living in a working class town. Things were tight sometimes, but I was only a kid. I didn't think about it at the time. As long as the Island is still there, I suppose I don't mind. But it does feel sometimes like it's turning into a giant estate of Barratt Homes.
SUE LAWLEY: So what is your first selection?
ME: Well, at that age, and I'm talking no more than eight years of age, we all make a hero figure out of our Dads. Mine played cricket, football and took us on long bike rides. And so what Dad listened to, so did I. And at the time, it was Dire Straits.
MUSIC: Money For Nothing by Dire Straits
SUE LAWLEY: What is Sheppey like today?
ME: I have said that it seems like the local powers that be are trying to solve all of the South-East's housing problems by moving them all to Sheppey, but it's still very rural, really. I used to ride my bike all across the Island past the bird reserves, and the last time I looked, much of it was no different to then. It was very self-contained, and we didn't need to go anywhere else. Although it's been a long time since we lived there. I like to say that it's exactly the same size as Manhattan, but instead of a population of two million, it's got one of 35,000.
SUE LAWLEY: Tell me about your second choice.
ME: Well, this leaps forward a bit, but it is linked. Sheerness, as I said, has always been a port town, if a little obscure. A university friend refused to beleive that Sheppey even exisyted until I showed her on a map. Anyway, The Navy left in 1955 but it still has a huge cargo operation. The sea is inextricably bound up in anyone who lives there, and not just as something warm and blue to swim in. It can feed you, cool you, play with you, or it can kill you in a second. It is grey, forbidding and romantic. It is far more alive than we give it credit for these days. So, growing up with that, I have always had a great feeling towards the modern poetry of The Shipping Forecast. Now, I'm not going to take an edition of that with me, but I will take the following song. It was inspired by it, and to my ears, it sounds like the sea that I know. Powerful, scary and it will be here long, long after we are all gone.
MUSIC: This Is A Low by Blur
SUE LAWLEY: So tell us how you came to leave Kent?
ME: Well, it was 1991, and my Dad was in a bit of a rut at work and when the offer of a better position came up, he was going to be keen. And so we all moved down to Paignton, in Devon in the summer of 1991. Of course, in 1992 the economy collapsed.
SUE LAWLEY: So what happened?
ME: Well, the promises that had been made to us basically turned into nothing. We were in a house that needed masses of repairs, in a new town and living on dole money. It has given me the work ethic I have today - I am terrified of unemployment and I suppose this has made me a bit too cautious at times, but I do not want to be in that position again. Then again, Dad has said that it gave him the chance to watch all of the Olympics, which he hadn't done since 1968.
SUE LAWLEY: But you were on the move again soon after?
ME: Yes. Really we had no affection for Devon, and Torbay is no more than God's waiting room. So when a job came up that required a move to Market Harborough, we were straight there, even though none of us had ever heard of it. Dad had applied for anything he could, and we struck it very lucky. Dad was out of work for probably no more tha six months, which compared to a lot of people at that time was a very short time indeed.
SUE LAWLEY: And your third choice?
ME: Number three is a piece of music that I wish I had been able to hear at that time. It was a time of negative equity, redundancies, the whole Thatcherite Dream coming home to roost, so to speak. Very stressful, becasue we were a part of the casualties, and we really didn't know what could happen, because people were losing houses, moving to Australia, all of it. It was such a stressful time that it has taken my family many years to get fully over it. But I first heard this piece in an art gallery in Hamburg, so perhaps it isn't even music. But I find it very soothing, and it can bring me back to Earth from the most anxious states. I am a natural worrier, so that can be quite a lot.
MUSIC: Music For Airports 1:1 by Brian Eno
SUE LAWLEY: So you moved to the East Midlands, and another small town.
ME: Yes, another small town. Market Harborough. By this time it was 1993, and I was ready to discover girls. But of course, I was also far too shy and lacking in self-confidence to do anything about it. Still, I found a group of like-minded friends, and am still in touch with some today. We got heavily into cider and grunge music, perhaps, now I come to think about it, that was why we couldn't meet any women.
SUE LAWLEY: And your fourth slection?
ME: Well, this is one from the grunge phase. We really did it right - lumberjack shirts, black nail varnish and electric guitars, the whole thing. But at the same time I was aware of how some was better than the rest. With that in mind, I chose this.
MUSIC: Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge On Seattle by Nirvana
SUE LAWLEY: And then it was school. How did you find education?
ME: I was never happier than those days at school. My Mum tells me that I never left primary school in my head, and she may be right. I was very lucky, though, as I was never seriously bullied, never knew anyone who went off the rails, at least, noticably, never got into trouble myself. I kept my head down, worked as much as I had to and ended up going to university in fairly relaxed fashion. I was terribly, terribly lazy. I didn't feel that I had much of a turbulent adolesence. I knew the feeling of not quite being sure what my body was doing, not feeling like it fitted properly, but we all did at the time. I was awkward and clumsy long before puberty kicked in.
SUE LAWLEY: Do you have any especially treasured memories from that time?
ME: Well, I will always remember the summers. We would sneak into pubs, watch TV, listen to music, play Mega Drive games. It was an idyllic time. The summer of 1995 was, I suppose, the last time we were all so innocent, though we didn't know it at the time. We all got our exam results and suddenly half of my friends vanished. It's a cliche, but your life really does change then. It became a little bit more important to listen, to think, and try some new things.
SUE LAWLEY: Number five?
ME: Well, I struggled with this one. At the time I was learning to play the guitar, and was teaching myslef about music. We had shed the grunge regalia by then, and I was dilligently trying to teach myself the guitar solos from Oasis's debut album. I suppose to relive that time I couldn't be without those songs, although I went off Oasis themselves long ago.
MUSIC: Rock and Roll Star by Oasis.
SUE LAWLEY: Now, after school you went to university in Leicester. How did you find this change affected you?
ME: Well, I was quite happy, really. I quickly made some very good friends and then spent the next, well, two years in a happily drunken stupor. It's what Uni was for. I am aware, though, that we were the very last intake to think that way. It was 1997, and after three years courting the student vote, literally the first thing that Labour did on coming to power was introduce tuition fees. A lot of us were very angry about that.
SUE LAWLEY: How did that make you feel personally?
ME: Well, the first time I voted was in the 1997 election. We all absolutely hated the Tories. They were just so awful. I had special bile reserved for them due to our experience in the earlier 90's. But by then I had turned into a real lefty polemicist anyway. So when we all marched down to the polling station on that gloriously sunny morning, and we did all go in a group, we all felt we were going to make a difference. We did, too. We all stayed up until about six that morning, watching the governemnt that had ruled us all our lives, fall into the abyss. We were like zombies the next day of course, but it was worth it to see Michael Portillo's face when he lost. It remains the best night of television I have ever, ever seen.
SUE LAWLEY: So tell us about your sixth selection.
ME: Immediately after my A-Levels me and Paul and Aaron went to the Glastonbury Festival. 1997 was the muddiest year they'd had in a decade, and we were there. It was absolutely fantastic. We saw about thirty bands, slept for about three hours in total over four days and got so dirty we had to throw the tent and all our clothes away afterwards. It was impossible to sleep. 80,000 tents-worth of young idiots are not ever going to be quiet. It's like a city, and no city is quiet. Plus, about every twenty minutes, twenty-four hours a day, and you could hear it coming, the word "BOLLOCKS" would roll past, on a kind of shouted Mexican Wave. Fantastic. So anyway, we saw Radiohead on the Saturday, the legendary 1997 Glasto set. I was four rows from the front, delirious with joy. It was an emotional set - we were all still high from the election, we were high from our A-Levels, we were 18 and they were playing OK Computer, which had been released in the May and was the soundtrack to the summer. It was our summer and when the fireworks started, more than one of us were bawling our eyes out.
MUSIC: No Surprises by Radiohead (Live at the Glastonbury Festival, 28th July 1997)
SUE LAWLEY: And so we move on to your time in Germany. How come you went to Germany when your degree was in English Literature?
ME: It was all down to the wonder that is the EU. Each year, about a thousand students from Britain, and a similar number from all the other EU countries, get to spend a year abroad studying their subject. I applied on a whim one quiet afternnon and got in. I went to Saarbruecken, a fairly small and obscure place on the Franco-German border. It was hardly Berlin, but I have literally never been happier.
SUE LAWLEY: Why there in particular?
ME: It's the traditional No Good Reason. My GCSE German textbnook was set there.
SUE LAWLEY: And what made you so happy then? You describe this whole time with great affection and emotion.
ME: Well, I was twenty. I was living in a new country, surviving day by day in a language I could barely speak, I was in love for the first time, all the pressures of university in Leicester were, well, in Leicester. I needed four marks from the year to pass. I did all my work in the first two months and then did absolutely nothing for the next six. I really did live the undergraduate dream.
SUE LAWLEY: Six months? What did you do?
ME: We travelled extensively. Paris, Koblenz, Luxembourg. Anywhere you could go on a cheap Deutsche Bahn weekend pass. I went to Dresden as well. Otherwise, we just lounged about. The beer was cheap and delicious. The living was slow in the summer heat, and just as slow in the snow in the winter. We spent a lot of time at the outdoor swimming baths at Schwartzenberg. Really, it was the best year of my life.
SUE LAWLEY: So now we come onto your seventh choice.
ME: Yes, Sue. I have chosen a song which reminds me most of that time. It wasn't just Germany, I had been interrailing the summer before, so I was already immersed in Europe. I have so many stories of chasing trains and girls and traveller's cheques from that trip, I could fill the programme with those alone. But the song I have chosen is one that was everywhere in the summer of 1999. It will always take me back.
MUSIC: Narcotic by Liquido
SUE LAWLEY: And so we come up to the present day. You graduated in 2001 and began working at your present employer in the October. Your life continued through the usual financial and personal crises that university graduates have until you find yourself living in Leicester and as content as you have been.
ME: Well, that's about it. The Summer of 2001 was one I remember fondly. My good friend, my best friend, Louise and I spent what we called the Summer of UB40. We sat in her house reading job ads, watching the TV and eating biscuits. And just before it stopped being fun to do nothing, we got jobs and our lives moved on again. She lives in London now, with my other best friend James, and they are blissfully happy together. I miss them, but we still travel between London and Leicester frequently. And email is a godsend.
SUE LAWLEY: So tell us about your final choice.
ME: Well, this is an odd one. James and I spent three years living together in various places in Leicester as we waited for our lives to begin. And to kill the time after work but before we could reeasonably go to the pub we explored the world of classical music - we were in a band together, and were looking for cool bits to steal. And one of our favourite pieces from that time was this. Classical headbanging.
MUSIC: Adagio from Schubert's "Death And The Maiden", played by the Amadeus Quartet, 1981 recording.
SUE LAWLEY: And so to the final choice of song. You can nly take one, so which is is to be?
ME: Well, I suppose if I am to take something that will remind me of the times I have had and the people I knew as I fester on my island, I suppose it could only be the Radiohead. That is the song which has the most emotional connection to me, that which is the most real in that sense.
SUE LAWLEY: And your book? We have allowed you the Complete Works of Shakespeare and the King James Bible. What else would you take?
ME: I have thought quite hard about this, and was stuck between Catch-22, which I love. It was the first book I read that made me realise that a lot of what we are taught about war and heroism is in fact a lie. My first copy was stolen by a Norwegian in a youth hostel in Paris, which is quite interesting in its way. But in the end I decided on "How To Navigate A Boat For Dummies".
SUE LAWLEY: And your luxury item?
ME: A boat.
SUE LAWLEY: Douglas Burgess, thank you for sharing your Desert Island Discs
Sunday, July 30, 2006
Sunday, July 23, 2006
Commercial Breakdown
Screen
Right. I've been watching television. I have some things to say. I have, actually, a lot of things to say. And this being my forum, I am going to say them here and now.
I hate, right, hate adverts. I refuse to be advertised to, preferring to change channel and watch something else rather than absorb another exhortation to spend money I haven't got on things I neither want nor need. As a Sky subscriber, I need to keep the remote control in my hand at all times. Because if I have to see that fucking Frosties advert again, you know, the one where that shiny blond waste of oxygen of a "cheeky" teenage "character" leads a parade across what seems like all of time and space to sell breakfast cereal, if I have to see it again, someone will die. I mean it.
There are so many things to hate about it. The music (polka? Polka?), the words ("If you live in Oz, mate!" - if you live in Australia they aren't even called Frosties in the first place, or can't Kellogg's read their own website?), the shit-eating grin of a look on that wankstain kid's face, the idea that running an advert which sells a kids product to kids and which looks like kids TV at ten-thirty in the evening is a good one, everything about it is designed to enrage me. I take great, almost physical delight in knowing that as soon as that beast-child got back to school he had the shit beaten out of him by every single person there, teachers included, and will continue to have it beaten out of him, every day until he either graduates, or dies. He deserves every second of it.
The commercials for Yellow Pages with James Whatsisface as that uber-smug tosser with a Corvette he can't fit a child seat into so he has to buy a Renault Espace, or is cornered by a vicious dog in his flash batchelor shag-pad and wants a dog trainer who does home visits, or who has come to a fancy dress party as a gnome and needs a taxi to a theatrical outfitters, all those hee-fucking-larious situations that we find ourselves in all too often at home. My phone doesn't even work properly, so my sympathy with Whatsisname Nesbitt over him hurting his back doing yoga is going to be very limited indeed.
Prat-face jumping on bollards to sell Lacoste posh aftershave for twats, or cheap loans for the already destitute, or anything selling anything to do with Lynx, it can all just piss off. Really, I mean it. I am tired of the endless images of perfect teeth and tits which pass across my screen in an alomst ceaseless stream day in and day out. I am a simple man, and ask little other than to be allowed to watch Malcolm in the Middle in peace without another deeply patronising and ill-thought out pitch for whichever mobile phones, bleach or supermarkets are out for my cash today.
Really, what annoys me most is how bad so many of them are. I do not, on seeing the tossers walking through the streets of Barcelona (it is always Barcelona, seemingly for no reason) trying to convince me that Coke Zero is anything other than Diet Coke with a different colour label and so will by its very nature taste of pencils, find myself thinking, "My. What a finely crafted peice of advertising which did not patronise, denigrate, frustrate or bore me, which did not insult my intelligence in any way and did not intrude uninvited on whatever it was I was thinking about on order to sell me a product I already know I don't want." Instead, I thought "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH!"
And it's not just adverts. Many, many television programmes are just rubbish. Bargain Hunt, You Are What You Eat, Big Brother and Two Pints of Lager can all just fuck off. I don't want them anywhere near my TV. If they are on my TV there is a good chance I will be seeing them there and we don't want that. Pop videos are frequently even worse. Aside from the classics of annoyance - Motorcycle Emptiness, a six-and-a-half minute dirge of vague studenty post-existential alienation by the never-popular Manic Street Preachers with a stupefyingly awful video that solely consists of some random shots of the band stood about bits of Tokyo looking either disaffected or just bored; Today by the Smashing Pumpkins, where well-known megalomanicac and drunk Billy Corgan drives an ice cream van into the desert, covers it in paint and then walks off; literally anything by Oasis but especially the one set in a mental hospital which does not so much borrow from One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest as gets Liam Gallagher to re-write it whilst ripped on cocaine, set it in the generic North and fill it with football-as-freedom images, as if we haven't seen that a zillion zillion times before. They are shoddy and made with no thought for either the product nor the audience that is expected to watch it.
I am not of exceptional intelligence. I am not of overly discerning tastes. And when something is dome well, whatever it is, I like it. So I like the Honda ad with the choir doing an impression of a car, the old VW adverts where you never actually saw the car or, best of all, the bizarre Marmite ones that make a believable sales pitch out of the fact that half the population can't stand it. I like the videos for To The End by Blur, Trains to Brazil by Guillemots and especially A Million Ways by OK Go, which is on my profile and is staying there until YouTube remove it becasue I want to keep it forever.
What's the difference between these things I like and the fucker of a child hawking Frosties? Just that they were done with a little bit of thought, a little bit of care and I guarantee that the Coke ad which caused me so very much agony during the World Cup, cost more and sold less. This I why only I listen to Radio 4 on demand and basically nothing else.
Frankly they could sell more Coke by doing nothing. I'd much prefer it if they did, and immediately, please. Brands like that don't need to advertise. And the ones that do (such as low-cost loans, no-win-no-fee soliciting and Cillit Bang) don't deserve my money anyway. So don't let them advertise. Change the channel and watch something else for three minutes. The advertisers know all this, by the way, they know that the overwhelming majority of people would rather eat their own knees than watch advertising, but until they can think of a way to advertise to us in our dreams, they are stuck with telly and banners for singles dating agencies on well-known networking websites. And until then, fuck 'em.
Good Night, and Good Luck
Dougal
Right. I've been watching television. I have some things to say. I have, actually, a lot of things to say. And this being my forum, I am going to say them here and now.
I hate, right, hate adverts. I refuse to be advertised to, preferring to change channel and watch something else rather than absorb another exhortation to spend money I haven't got on things I neither want nor need. As a Sky subscriber, I need to keep the remote control in my hand at all times. Because if I have to see that fucking Frosties advert again, you know, the one where that shiny blond waste of oxygen of a "cheeky" teenage "character" leads a parade across what seems like all of time and space to sell breakfast cereal, if I have to see it again, someone will die. I mean it.
There are so many things to hate about it. The music (polka? Polka?), the words ("If you live in Oz, mate!" - if you live in Australia they aren't even called Frosties in the first place, or can't Kellogg's read their own website?), the shit-eating grin of a look on that wankstain kid's face, the idea that running an advert which sells a kids product to kids and which looks like kids TV at ten-thirty in the evening is a good one, everything about it is designed to enrage me. I take great, almost physical delight in knowing that as soon as that beast-child got back to school he had the shit beaten out of him by every single person there, teachers included, and will continue to have it beaten out of him, every day until he either graduates, or dies. He deserves every second of it.
The commercials for Yellow Pages with James Whatsisface as that uber-smug tosser with a Corvette he can't fit a child seat into so he has to buy a Renault Espace, or is cornered by a vicious dog in his flash batchelor shag-pad and wants a dog trainer who does home visits, or who has come to a fancy dress party as a gnome and needs a taxi to a theatrical outfitters, all those hee-fucking-larious situations that we find ourselves in all too often at home. My phone doesn't even work properly, so my sympathy with Whatsisname Nesbitt over him hurting his back doing yoga is going to be very limited indeed.
Prat-face jumping on bollards to sell Lacoste posh aftershave for twats, or cheap loans for the already destitute, or anything selling anything to do with Lynx, it can all just piss off. Really, I mean it. I am tired of the endless images of perfect teeth and tits which pass across my screen in an alomst ceaseless stream day in and day out. I am a simple man, and ask little other than to be allowed to watch Malcolm in the Middle in peace without another deeply patronising and ill-thought out pitch for whichever mobile phones, bleach or supermarkets are out for my cash today.
Really, what annoys me most is how bad so many of them are. I do not, on seeing the tossers walking through the streets of Barcelona (it is always Barcelona, seemingly for no reason) trying to convince me that Coke Zero is anything other than Diet Coke with a different colour label and so will by its very nature taste of pencils, find myself thinking, "My. What a finely crafted peice of advertising which did not patronise, denigrate, frustrate or bore me, which did not insult my intelligence in any way and did not intrude uninvited on whatever it was I was thinking about on order to sell me a product I already know I don't want." Instead, I thought "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH!"
And it's not just adverts. Many, many television programmes are just rubbish. Bargain Hunt, You Are What You Eat, Big Brother and Two Pints of Lager can all just fuck off. I don't want them anywhere near my TV. If they are on my TV there is a good chance I will be seeing them there and we don't want that. Pop videos are frequently even worse. Aside from the classics of annoyance - Motorcycle Emptiness, a six-and-a-half minute dirge of vague studenty post-existential alienation by the never-popular Manic Street Preachers with a stupefyingly awful video that solely consists of some random shots of the band stood about bits of Tokyo looking either disaffected or just bored; Today by the Smashing Pumpkins, where well-known megalomanicac and drunk Billy Corgan drives an ice cream van into the desert, covers it in paint and then walks off; literally anything by Oasis but especially the one set in a mental hospital which does not so much borrow from One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest as gets Liam Gallagher to re-write it whilst ripped on cocaine, set it in the generic North and fill it with football-as-freedom images, as if we haven't seen that a zillion zillion times before. They are shoddy and made with no thought for either the product nor the audience that is expected to watch it.
I am not of exceptional intelligence. I am not of overly discerning tastes. And when something is dome well, whatever it is, I like it. So I like the Honda ad with the choir doing an impression of a car, the old VW adverts where you never actually saw the car or, best of all, the bizarre Marmite ones that make a believable sales pitch out of the fact that half the population can't stand it. I like the videos for To The End by Blur, Trains to Brazil by Guillemots and especially A Million Ways by OK Go, which is on my profile and is staying there until YouTube remove it becasue I want to keep it forever.
What's the difference between these things I like and the fucker of a child hawking Frosties? Just that they were done with a little bit of thought, a little bit of care and I guarantee that the Coke ad which caused me so very much agony during the World Cup, cost more and sold less. This I why only I listen to Radio 4 on demand and basically nothing else.
Frankly they could sell more Coke by doing nothing. I'd much prefer it if they did, and immediately, please. Brands like that don't need to advertise. And the ones that do (such as low-cost loans, no-win-no-fee soliciting and Cillit Bang) don't deserve my money anyway. So don't let them advertise. Change the channel and watch something else for three minutes. The advertisers know all this, by the way, they know that the overwhelming majority of people would rather eat their own knees than watch advertising, but until they can think of a way to advertise to us in our dreams, they are stuck with telly and banners for singles dating agencies on well-known networking websites. And until then, fuck 'em.
Good Night, and Good Luck
Dougal
Thursday, July 20, 2006
Huckepack
Forgive me if I am alittle loose with the structure in the following. Today , you see, finds me in a state of some excitement. I am about to do something unprecedented in its sponteneity and general throw-caution-to-the-winds-ness. I am not saying what it is. If it's to come out in time it'll come out in time. I could add all sorts of intrigue, but I'm not going to. But I am getting nervous already. This is well cool and I'm not saying any more.
When I have said in the past that I am dull, this is what I mean. I know that we tend to think that other people are having a far more exciting time than us, although we really know that they are doing exactly what we are, and thinking the same thing about us. But I haven't done much. My life has been quite uneventful for quite a long time when I think about it. I have never been to Australia, for example.
This is a rite of passage for most middle-class British young people. My friend Guy went for three months, my cousin went for six and several people from school and university went at various times as well. One ended up as a steward at the 2000 Olympic Games. My ex-girlfriend's sister emigrated there. Perhaps it's an ex-colonial thing, but we have the odd idea that Australia is somehow not that far; this is unlike France which, despite our experience of thirty minute trips through the Channel Tunnel and the fact we can see it from the beach at Dover, is somehow unimaginably scary and distant. Similarly, Estonia is on Mars and Bahrain is actually mythical. The fact that I, a middle class university graduate, have never been is a point of some embarrasment to me.
Although I have travelled widely in Europe. This is some consolation. In fact, when at school I had to listen to the pseuds banging on about how "The East Is Calling" and so on, though I was sort of looked down on for planning an month of youth hostelling with an Interrail ticket, I at least had evidence I was actually going. This is unlike a certain person who will remain nameless, but whom we'll call Tom Reynolds just for argument's sake, who bought a Lonely Planet to India to conspicuously read in the common room for six months, but never actually went.
Poland is lovely. I went there when a Polish friend from work offered to drive me to his hometown of Lublin. Leicester has always had a large Polish population, and it has doubled since 2004 when Poland joined the EU. Half the houses in my 'hood are rented by groups of Polish migrant workers now. Every Monday we see the latest arrivals queueing outside the job agency across the road from my office, fresh off the coach from Warsaw with passports and application forms in hand and a hopeful look on their face. Leicester, which was international to begin with, is now like a small version of London, where fifty languages mix on the streets and you can eat at a different kind of restaurant every night and not repeat yourself in three months. It's marvellous.
500,000 Poles have come to work in Britain over the last two years. This is quite a lot, and the racists aren't happy. I can't see why - you'd have thought having half a million blonde haired, blue-eyed white people move in would have delighted them, but no. It is notable that most of the protesting about the influx of European workers has been done in the pages of local newspapers in places like Market Harborough where no Pole has ever set foot and they probably never will, prefering as they do to shuttle between Leicester, London and home, rather than perniciously undermine the ancient ways of life in small rural towns with a minority polulation that can be counted in single figures. I will never understand the mind of the racist, and I thank God that this is the case.
Anyway, Europe has been enough for me so far. I lived in Germany, I have been to ten European capitals, I have been to Barcelona twice and Paris three times. Berlin is fantastic, Amsterdam is very messy and Luxembourg is so obscure that most people can't tell you one single thing about it. I like all sorts of things about it. The feeling of going to sleep on a train in one country and waking up in another is unique. I remember sitting in the carriage of a train from Barcelona to San Sebasitan, listening to my MiniDisc player (it was 2003 and they were still quite hight-tech then) and grinning like an idiot as Maxine complained about the girl from New Zealand sat opposite who was taking all the legroom. In the morning after about three hours sleep, me and the French couple from our compartment (who we were certain were trying to have sex from the moment the guard put the lights out) spent an hour in happy silence watching the hills of the Basque Coutry pass by. I felt as close as I ever have to serene.
In fact, a lot of my travel was on the one Interrailing trip, but I think it still counts. We dealt with six languages we could not speak, ten currencies we could not work out the value of and I left my wallet in Bayeux and so spent the next eleven days living off traveller's cheques and loans from Guy. I still owe him a couple of hundred quid, I think. We had a huge argument in Ghent bus station. It was lots and lots of fun, and I suppose trying to travel a 10,000km circuit round Western Europe in thirty days was a bit mad after all. The only downside is that as we only left the EU once, I so far have only amassed one stamp in my passport. How dull. I have until April next to get more.
With this in mind perhaps I will still do all the things that the "100 Things To Do Before You Die!" say you should do after all. Well, some of them. I can never go cliff diving because I can't swim. I am scared of heights, so parachuting is out. I hate tequila, am far too scared of the police to get myself arrested in a foreign country and will never go bungee jumping because it's just stupid.
But perhaps the bar has fallen anyway. According to the adverts, merely giving yourself a running commentary as you undress or using the lavatory as your girlfriend uses the bath is enough to get you a WKD side. I would never do the second because it is extremely rude, but I could manage the first, as long as I was sure I was alone in the house. I'm not getting caught doing that. I have some standards
When I have said in the past that I am dull, this is what I mean. I know that we tend to think that other people are having a far more exciting time than us, although we really know that they are doing exactly what we are, and thinking the same thing about us. But I haven't done much. My life has been quite uneventful for quite a long time when I think about it. I have never been to Australia, for example.
This is a rite of passage for most middle-class British young people. My friend Guy went for three months, my cousin went for six and several people from school and university went at various times as well. One ended up as a steward at the 2000 Olympic Games. My ex-girlfriend's sister emigrated there. Perhaps it's an ex-colonial thing, but we have the odd idea that Australia is somehow not that far; this is unlike France which, despite our experience of thirty minute trips through the Channel Tunnel and the fact we can see it from the beach at Dover, is somehow unimaginably scary and distant. Similarly, Estonia is on Mars and Bahrain is actually mythical. The fact that I, a middle class university graduate, have never been is a point of some embarrasment to me.
Although I have travelled widely in Europe. This is some consolation. In fact, when at school I had to listen to the pseuds banging on about how "The East Is Calling" and so on, though I was sort of looked down on for planning an month of youth hostelling with an Interrail ticket, I at least had evidence I was actually going. This is unlike a certain person who will remain nameless, but whom we'll call Tom Reynolds just for argument's sake, who bought a Lonely Planet to India to conspicuously read in the common room for six months, but never actually went.
Poland is lovely. I went there when a Polish friend from work offered to drive me to his hometown of Lublin. Leicester has always had a large Polish population, and it has doubled since 2004 when Poland joined the EU. Half the houses in my 'hood are rented by groups of Polish migrant workers now. Every Monday we see the latest arrivals queueing outside the job agency across the road from my office, fresh off the coach from Warsaw with passports and application forms in hand and a hopeful look on their face. Leicester, which was international to begin with, is now like a small version of London, where fifty languages mix on the streets and you can eat at a different kind of restaurant every night and not repeat yourself in three months. It's marvellous.
500,000 Poles have come to work in Britain over the last two years. This is quite a lot, and the racists aren't happy. I can't see why - you'd have thought having half a million blonde haired, blue-eyed white people move in would have delighted them, but no. It is notable that most of the protesting about the influx of European workers has been done in the pages of local newspapers in places like Market Harborough where no Pole has ever set foot and they probably never will, prefering as they do to shuttle between Leicester, London and home, rather than perniciously undermine the ancient ways of life in small rural towns with a minority polulation that can be counted in single figures. I will never understand the mind of the racist, and I thank God that this is the case.
Anyway, Europe has been enough for me so far. I lived in Germany, I have been to ten European capitals, I have been to Barcelona twice and Paris three times. Berlin is fantastic, Amsterdam is very messy and Luxembourg is so obscure that most people can't tell you one single thing about it. I like all sorts of things about it. The feeling of going to sleep on a train in one country and waking up in another is unique. I remember sitting in the carriage of a train from Barcelona to San Sebasitan, listening to my MiniDisc player (it was 2003 and they were still quite hight-tech then) and grinning like an idiot as Maxine complained about the girl from New Zealand sat opposite who was taking all the legroom. In the morning after about three hours sleep, me and the French couple from our compartment (who we were certain were trying to have sex from the moment the guard put the lights out) spent an hour in happy silence watching the hills of the Basque Coutry pass by. I felt as close as I ever have to serene.
In fact, a lot of my travel was on the one Interrailing trip, but I think it still counts. We dealt with six languages we could not speak, ten currencies we could not work out the value of and I left my wallet in Bayeux and so spent the next eleven days living off traveller's cheques and loans from Guy. I still owe him a couple of hundred quid, I think. We had a huge argument in Ghent bus station. It was lots and lots of fun, and I suppose trying to travel a 10,000km circuit round Western Europe in thirty days was a bit mad after all. The only downside is that as we only left the EU once, I so far have only amassed one stamp in my passport. How dull. I have until April next to get more.
With this in mind perhaps I will still do all the things that the "100 Things To Do Before You Die!" say you should do after all. Well, some of them. I can never go cliff diving because I can't swim. I am scared of heights, so parachuting is out. I hate tequila, am far too scared of the police to get myself arrested in a foreign country and will never go bungee jumping because it's just stupid.
But perhaps the bar has fallen anyway. According to the adverts, merely giving yourself a running commentary as you undress or using the lavatory as your girlfriend uses the bath is enough to get you a WKD side. I would never do the second because it is extremely rude, but I could manage the first, as long as I was sure I was alone in the house. I'm not getting caught doing that. I have some standards
Suit
I don't know much. But I know one thing. It's a long and involved route to Reading. I know this becasue I went there on Saturday to attend the chirstenings of my little cousins Christopher and Gabriella. To do this involved me taking a series of decisions that lead to me being sat here, writing this blog, and not at the cinema at Meridian watching Superman Returns, even after Blake bought me a ticket and let me beat him at badminton. I will also try and get Welsh language television, Honda adverts and black-and-white cookies in, just to add interest.
The first decision was not mine. It was forced upon me by my Mum. My parents are remarkably cool people. I mentioned in a blog a while back that they had taken in their hugely depressed and homeless-through-his-own-inertia twenty-six-year-old son without a word, fed him for six months and then hired him a van and helped him move house. That man was me, and I am eternally greatful to them for it. Blood is supposed to be thicker than water, but I have the best blood anyone could ask for. However, my Mum still has a couple of blind spots - a maternal tendency to think the worst about what might happen to my sister and I and then prepare for it long before it doesn't happen, and my hair.
The first is easily dealt with - book ahead, ring home when you arrive and always bring back a fridge magnet. The second is an intractable mountain that faith simply cannot move, and she's a big girl. Mum has never been able to get round my belief that, as it is my hair, I should be the judge of when it needs to be cut. She thinks I look good with nice, short gelled hair and that when the ringlets in my hair start to appear it is time for a trip to the barber's. I think it makes my head look like a balloon, and that when the ringlets appear it is time to start looking in the mirror again. We will never, ever agree on this.
In fact, that which grows out of my body is apparently fair game to my family, like someone else's chips in a restaurant. My cousin Blue (who I could annoy immensely by calling her Lynda, which is actually her name, but I won't because otherwise she's very cool) will, whenever we meet, grab my ears and start making plans to wax my eyebrows. "You'd look hot, babes" she says. I respond, I think, with impeccable logic, "Wouldn't it hurt like nothing else?". She says "No pain, no gain, cuz" and I then ask her to let go of my ears. Every single time I see her. My sister is the same, but she tempers it because as my sister, I can hit her. My Dad tells me to stop biting my fingernails most days and even though I stopped doping it when I was about seven, any motion to touch my face in any way at all is met with a chorus of "Don't pick your nose!". This is especially trying during hayfever season.
However, it was a family do, and a three line whip had been given. Cut your hair and wear a suit, and don't even think about being late. So a trip to the barber's later, I laid out my clothes for the morning and went to bed very, very early. I was up at six-thirty am and out by seven fifteen. I drove to Stoughton, we all piled into Suzy's car and were off by eight, full of criossants and chocolate milk. Ha. Dad led the small convoy and as is traditional, we lost him within about ten minutes when he forgot we were follwing and was gone.
For Dad the open road is like the current Honda ad, where the man in a caravan travels across the world in a series of Hondas, from a tiny motorbike to a Formula 1 racing car to a huge speedboat which he drives (sails? pilots? I don't know) over a waterfall whilst singing "To Dream The Impossible Dream". I like this advert very much, despite my usual and well known feelings about all television advertising. I also like the one with the stamping choir doing an impression of a Honda Civic. But anyway. Whereas Dad likes nothing more than to speed along life's open highway, I go by my own experience of piloting a Renault 5 through Leicester's semi-permanent traffic jams and coping with traffic levels ten times what they were in the late sixties when Dad passed his test. Ours are not the same outlooks.
The practical upshot of all this is that we navigated ourselves to Cheivley services on the M4 where we then shouted at Dad for speeding off and I paid fifteen quid for five cups of coffee. Then to Arborfield Garrison and the do. My cousin James is an ASM in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, and so the ceremony was done by the regimental padre in the garrison church. There is something, I think, especially English about all this, a small church on a big base, where the walls are lined with plaques to the dead of many, many wars and a congregation of thirty sang "I Vow To The My Country". C of E is in many ways a very non-religious religion, being more about the Royal Family and lemon curd than anything else. The idea of a C of E zealot is a very unlikely one.
We hit the house for some post-church refreshments and I was forced to play the guitar for Gabs, who is ten and so full of energy. Christopher is fourteen and so is quite adept at hiding, even on his own Christening. We watched Gabs bounce on the trampoline, fling a frisbee about and do many cartwheels. I remember being that young and having, well, not that much energy, but certainly more than I have now. The other thing little cousins make you do is feel old. Christopher (who I can only really picture as a baby) is now as tall as me and has stubble. Christ. Was I really born in the seventies? Me, Suzy and Lynda sat on the swinging chair under the tree and took the piss out of eachother. Shadrach, Mishach and Abendigo.
It was very hot and blindingly sunny. I ate canapes until I felt ill, and then just as everyone was getting really drowsy from the warmth and the barbecued food, it was time to drive home. I got lost in Wokingham and again in Northampton. But by the time I reached Stoughton I was beyond tired. Suzy made some nachos and we watched TV, but my mind was elsewhere. Don't ask me where, though, as I was too tired to pay attention. I even watched ten minutes of the mutants on Big Brother, simply becasue I didn't have the energy to complain. I drove home and slept for twelve hours, giving quiet thanks to the C of E God (he's a low-key fellow, as I said before, and prefers not to have anyone make a fuss) that I had Sunday to recover.
This morning I played badminton, hurt my neck and here I am. I must admit to being on form for me, only losing four out of six sets of doubles, but then being hollowed out and filled with bees by James, who beat me 15-1 and then 15-0. But I enjoyed it, even if I have spent the rest of the day unable to turn my head by more than five degrees. I had to move the chair so I could watch the cricket without pain. And as for going to the cinema, well, I reckon that would have killed me. Craning at special-effect laden mayhem was not what I wanted to do. I want to see The Notorious Bettie Page instead. There is a picture of Gretchen Moll, who plays the eponymous nude heroine, covered in balloons in Total Film. I will not elucidate further.
I am not sure how I meant to work Welsh TV and fashionable confection into this, but for what it's worth, S4C is strange to watch at first, what with Wales looking almost exactly like England but having a population that speak Martian, but oddly addictive after a while. Today I saw a documentary about what I assume were non-conformist choirs in the Rhondda, and it was wonderful. And as for black-and-white cookies, all I can say is that the Americans must be easily impressed. Two flavours of icing? Stop the presses. Perhaps when I eat one I may be converted forever, but for now they just look like biscuits to me.
Good Night, and Good Luck
Dougal
The first decision was not mine. It was forced upon me by my Mum. My parents are remarkably cool people. I mentioned in a blog a while back that they had taken in their hugely depressed and homeless-through-his-own-inertia twenty-six-year-old son without a word, fed him for six months and then hired him a van and helped him move house. That man was me, and I am eternally greatful to them for it. Blood is supposed to be thicker than water, but I have the best blood anyone could ask for. However, my Mum still has a couple of blind spots - a maternal tendency to think the worst about what might happen to my sister and I and then prepare for it long before it doesn't happen, and my hair.
The first is easily dealt with - book ahead, ring home when you arrive and always bring back a fridge magnet. The second is an intractable mountain that faith simply cannot move, and she's a big girl. Mum has never been able to get round my belief that, as it is my hair, I should be the judge of when it needs to be cut. She thinks I look good with nice, short gelled hair and that when the ringlets in my hair start to appear it is time for a trip to the barber's. I think it makes my head look like a balloon, and that when the ringlets appear it is time to start looking in the mirror again. We will never, ever agree on this.
In fact, that which grows out of my body is apparently fair game to my family, like someone else's chips in a restaurant. My cousin Blue (who I could annoy immensely by calling her Lynda, which is actually her name, but I won't because otherwise she's very cool) will, whenever we meet, grab my ears and start making plans to wax my eyebrows. "You'd look hot, babes" she says. I respond, I think, with impeccable logic, "Wouldn't it hurt like nothing else?". She says "No pain, no gain, cuz" and I then ask her to let go of my ears. Every single time I see her. My sister is the same, but she tempers it because as my sister, I can hit her. My Dad tells me to stop biting my fingernails most days and even though I stopped doping it when I was about seven, any motion to touch my face in any way at all is met with a chorus of "Don't pick your nose!". This is especially trying during hayfever season.
However, it was a family do, and a three line whip had been given. Cut your hair and wear a suit, and don't even think about being late. So a trip to the barber's later, I laid out my clothes for the morning and went to bed very, very early. I was up at six-thirty am and out by seven fifteen. I drove to Stoughton, we all piled into Suzy's car and were off by eight, full of criossants and chocolate milk. Ha. Dad led the small convoy and as is traditional, we lost him within about ten minutes when he forgot we were follwing and was gone.
For Dad the open road is like the current Honda ad, where the man in a caravan travels across the world in a series of Hondas, from a tiny motorbike to a Formula 1 racing car to a huge speedboat which he drives (sails? pilots? I don't know) over a waterfall whilst singing "To Dream The Impossible Dream". I like this advert very much, despite my usual and well known feelings about all television advertising. I also like the one with the stamping choir doing an impression of a Honda Civic. But anyway. Whereas Dad likes nothing more than to speed along life's open highway, I go by my own experience of piloting a Renault 5 through Leicester's semi-permanent traffic jams and coping with traffic levels ten times what they were in the late sixties when Dad passed his test. Ours are not the same outlooks.
The practical upshot of all this is that we navigated ourselves to Cheivley services on the M4 where we then shouted at Dad for speeding off and I paid fifteen quid for five cups of coffee. Then to Arborfield Garrison and the do. My cousin James is an ASM in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, and so the ceremony was done by the regimental padre in the garrison church. There is something, I think, especially English about all this, a small church on a big base, where the walls are lined with plaques to the dead of many, many wars and a congregation of thirty sang "I Vow To The My Country". C of E is in many ways a very non-religious religion, being more about the Royal Family and lemon curd than anything else. The idea of a C of E zealot is a very unlikely one.
We hit the house for some post-church refreshments and I was forced to play the guitar for Gabs, who is ten and so full of energy. Christopher is fourteen and so is quite adept at hiding, even on his own Christening. We watched Gabs bounce on the trampoline, fling a frisbee about and do many cartwheels. I remember being that young and having, well, not that much energy, but certainly more than I have now. The other thing little cousins make you do is feel old. Christopher (who I can only really picture as a baby) is now as tall as me and has stubble. Christ. Was I really born in the seventies? Me, Suzy and Lynda sat on the swinging chair under the tree and took the piss out of eachother. Shadrach, Mishach and Abendigo.
It was very hot and blindingly sunny. I ate canapes until I felt ill, and then just as everyone was getting really drowsy from the warmth and the barbecued food, it was time to drive home. I got lost in Wokingham and again in Northampton. But by the time I reached Stoughton I was beyond tired. Suzy made some nachos and we watched TV, but my mind was elsewhere. Don't ask me where, though, as I was too tired to pay attention. I even watched ten minutes of the mutants on Big Brother, simply becasue I didn't have the energy to complain. I drove home and slept for twelve hours, giving quiet thanks to the C of E God (he's a low-key fellow, as I said before, and prefers not to have anyone make a fuss) that I had Sunday to recover.
This morning I played badminton, hurt my neck and here I am. I must admit to being on form for me, only losing four out of six sets of doubles, but then being hollowed out and filled with bees by James, who beat me 15-1 and then 15-0. But I enjoyed it, even if I have spent the rest of the day unable to turn my head by more than five degrees. I had to move the chair so I could watch the cricket without pain. And as for going to the cinema, well, I reckon that would have killed me. Craning at special-effect laden mayhem was not what I wanted to do. I want to see The Notorious Bettie Page instead. There is a picture of Gretchen Moll, who plays the eponymous nude heroine, covered in balloons in Total Film. I will not elucidate further.
I am not sure how I meant to work Welsh TV and fashionable confection into this, but for what it's worth, S4C is strange to watch at first, what with Wales looking almost exactly like England but having a population that speak Martian, but oddly addictive after a while. Today I saw a documentary about what I assume were non-conformist choirs in the Rhondda, and it was wonderful. And as for black-and-white cookies, all I can say is that the Americans must be easily impressed. Two flavours of icing? Stop the presses. Perhaps when I eat one I may be converted forever, but for now they just look like biscuits to me.
Good Night, and Good Luck
Dougal
Heat
I am hot. And not just in the Diet Coke sense, ladies, oh yes. It has been, apparently, the hottest day of the year so far. In fact, the Met Office will go further, it has been the hottest day in Britain ever. A whole 39C. That's a lot of centigrade for us, but perhaps we need some perspective on this. What is the effect of this unprecedented heat wave? How are we dealing with it? And most importantly, why is it so bastard hot in the first place?
One if the immediate effects is the annual appearence of the Bikini Three. Every time the sun comes out, the Sun sends photographers to Brighton and Bournemouth to find some girls in skimpy swimwear. We are then treated to a picture of them stood arms loosely around eachother's waists, their left hips relaxed into a luxurious and unselfconsciously seductive pose. Perhaps later they will run lotion into each other's glowing bodies, feeling the liberating effects of the heat as they loosen their bikini straps and their inhibitions with them.
I am sorry to bring ersatz fantasy lesbianism into the mix so early, but it really is a regular thing. There is, on the BBC News website, a picture of three bikini'd lovelies cooling their tootsies in the Diana Fountain in Hyde Park. Why this is neccessary to illustrate an article that is stating the extremely obvious - it is hot and people are going to the seaside - I don't know. I grew up by the sea. 99 percent of Britain's beaches are either flint, stone or shingle. A bikini is not idea clotihng for this, as some of the briefer examples as worn by the Bikini Three can lead to sand entering places you don't want sand to be. Most people at the beach wear sturdy swimsuits. Also, most people don't look like models shipped in especially to pose on Brighton Beach.
The other tale regularly told is that of Commuter Chaos. Commuting is uncomfortable at the best of times, and in the UK years and years of cheapskatery regarding trasnportation is now firmly home to roost. The trains, crap to begin with, are now being cancelled nationwide because it is too hot. The rails are buckling in the sun. Given that it the rails regularly become brittle in the cold we are now left wondering if there is any weather where the trains will run at all. And that's just the rails. If you have the good fortune to find a train that is working, it is a fair bet that the air conditioning will not be, if there is aircon at all. The London Underground is having to provide free cool drinks to stop people fainting on the platforms.
Given all this, perhaps we might decide to drive, but no, the roads are melting as well. Bits of the M25 and M1 have been shut because the surface has been sticking to lorry tyres and leaving holes. And we won't get far anyway because the queues to the beach are a thousand cars long, all keen to get a glimpse of the bikini clad lovelies the papers reliably tell us are there.
And this is only Wednesday. I will admit, the pictures of the office workers dancing in the fountains in Trafalgar Square do look fun - I did it once a couple of years back, and it was great. But really all it does is encourage fat men to take off their shirts. I haven't been outside without a shirt on since I was about eight years old. And we will get the ever cheery weatherman telling us that this "glorious" weather will continue for the next week when we will "sadly" see some showers.
By the weekend, of course, the guilt will have settled in. We will see anguished debates on Newsnight and in the Independent about how this freak heat, which has happened every summer as far back as I can remember, is due to global warming and should we consider nuclear power, lacking as it does the nasty carbon dioxide that will kill us all? There will be tales of how people are dying in their homes from exhaustion and sunstroke, and dire warnings of skin cancer if you step outside for more than a few seconds.
Bear in mind that I am anti-nuclear, well aware of the problems of climate change and depleted ozone. But it is the same every year - it gets hot in the summer and we are surprised. It's like snow - it snows in the winter and we are surprised. Every summer is the hottest on record now, every winter the coldest, and despite the experience of having last year's doom-laden warnings utterly fail to come about, we still seem to think that the world is about to end if it stays above 20C for three days in the week.
I think we just like to complain. It was 50C in Kuwait City today, and 40C in Denver. That's hot. That's surprisingly hot. And for a nation with so much weather, we seem utterly unable to cope with it. It can rain, shine, hail and fog here in the space of an hour. We are used to that. And of course, there was a time when temperatures of 20C would make the news. Bill Bryson once quoted a newspaper from 1977 which carried the headine "BRITAIN SIZZLES IN THE SEVENTIES" That's about 19 centigrade.
Well. Yest again in the course of my attempt at a dialectic on the weather and what it may say about British culture, I have managed to contradict myself just before the end. The inane spiel of the weatherman makes me think that the reason we are so affected by the heat is that we are constantly expecting it to end, whereas the Spanish, whose weather is less exciting in that it is generally hotter and drier, expect only to be hot between May and September. Besides, they are too busy dealing with the regular fires that burn down most of Europe's trees every August. And they have bikinis on the news, man. That's living.
Good Night, and Good Luck
Dougal
One if the immediate effects is the annual appearence of the Bikini Three. Every time the sun comes out, the Sun sends photographers to Brighton and Bournemouth to find some girls in skimpy swimwear. We are then treated to a picture of them stood arms loosely around eachother's waists, their left hips relaxed into a luxurious and unselfconsciously seductive pose. Perhaps later they will run lotion into each other's glowing bodies, feeling the liberating effects of the heat as they loosen their bikini straps and their inhibitions with them.
I am sorry to bring ersatz fantasy lesbianism into the mix so early, but it really is a regular thing. There is, on the BBC News website, a picture of three bikini'd lovelies cooling their tootsies in the Diana Fountain in Hyde Park. Why this is neccessary to illustrate an article that is stating the extremely obvious - it is hot and people are going to the seaside - I don't know. I grew up by the sea. 99 percent of Britain's beaches are either flint, stone or shingle. A bikini is not idea clotihng for this, as some of the briefer examples as worn by the Bikini Three can lead to sand entering places you don't want sand to be. Most people at the beach wear sturdy swimsuits. Also, most people don't look like models shipped in especially to pose on Brighton Beach.
The other tale regularly told is that of Commuter Chaos. Commuting is uncomfortable at the best of times, and in the UK years and years of cheapskatery regarding trasnportation is now firmly home to roost. The trains, crap to begin with, are now being cancelled nationwide because it is too hot. The rails are buckling in the sun. Given that it the rails regularly become brittle in the cold we are now left wondering if there is any weather where the trains will run at all. And that's just the rails. If you have the good fortune to find a train that is working, it is a fair bet that the air conditioning will not be, if there is aircon at all. The London Underground is having to provide free cool drinks to stop people fainting on the platforms.
Given all this, perhaps we might decide to drive, but no, the roads are melting as well. Bits of the M25 and M1 have been shut because the surface has been sticking to lorry tyres and leaving holes. And we won't get far anyway because the queues to the beach are a thousand cars long, all keen to get a glimpse of the bikini clad lovelies the papers reliably tell us are there.
And this is only Wednesday. I will admit, the pictures of the office workers dancing in the fountains in Trafalgar Square do look fun - I did it once a couple of years back, and it was great. But really all it does is encourage fat men to take off their shirts. I haven't been outside without a shirt on since I was about eight years old. And we will get the ever cheery weatherman telling us that this "glorious" weather will continue for the next week when we will "sadly" see some showers.
By the weekend, of course, the guilt will have settled in. We will see anguished debates on Newsnight and in the Independent about how this freak heat, which has happened every summer as far back as I can remember, is due to global warming and should we consider nuclear power, lacking as it does the nasty carbon dioxide that will kill us all? There will be tales of how people are dying in their homes from exhaustion and sunstroke, and dire warnings of skin cancer if you step outside for more than a few seconds.
Bear in mind that I am anti-nuclear, well aware of the problems of climate change and depleted ozone. But it is the same every year - it gets hot in the summer and we are surprised. It's like snow - it snows in the winter and we are surprised. Every summer is the hottest on record now, every winter the coldest, and despite the experience of having last year's doom-laden warnings utterly fail to come about, we still seem to think that the world is about to end if it stays above 20C for three days in the week.
I think we just like to complain. It was 50C in Kuwait City today, and 40C in Denver. That's hot. That's surprisingly hot. And for a nation with so much weather, we seem utterly unable to cope with it. It can rain, shine, hail and fog here in the space of an hour. We are used to that. And of course, there was a time when temperatures of 20C would make the news. Bill Bryson once quoted a newspaper from 1977 which carried the headine "BRITAIN SIZZLES IN THE SEVENTIES" That's about 19 centigrade.
Well. Yest again in the course of my attempt at a dialectic on the weather and what it may say about British culture, I have managed to contradict myself just before the end. The inane spiel of the weatherman makes me think that the reason we are so affected by the heat is that we are constantly expecting it to end, whereas the Spanish, whose weather is less exciting in that it is generally hotter and drier, expect only to be hot between May and September. Besides, they are too busy dealing with the regular fires that burn down most of Europe's trees every August. And they have bikinis on the news, man. That's living.
Good Night, and Good Luck
Dougal
Friday, July 07, 2006
The Attack Of The Killer Idiots
There really is a lot of dreadful tat on MySpace masquerading as content. I have just come back from an unwise excursion outside of my usual MS area and I am franky appalled. But it's kind of my own fault.
I was feeding my ego, you see. I am at a loose end, having managed to come and visit James and Louise in London on the weekend the entire paternal family are in town for a christening. I am home alone. As it is, several leisure opportunities are there to be had. I could watch TV, read a book or do what D H Lawrence used to do, which was throw his post out of the window rather than walk to the post box, and wait for the replies to arrive. He did this in the solid belief that no good Englishman would steal another chap's correspondance. He would instead, post it, possibly saluting the image of King George VI on the stamp as he did so, and he was nearly always right, too. He was only let down by the man who stole his revised draft of The Rainbow, which took out all the dross and replaced with exciting car chases and hot sex with green alien babes. Sadly this draft never reached his publishers, so we are left with the pile of shite we know and hate today.
But back to me. Lacking as I do either post to send, stamps to affix to said post, or to be living in the twenties before civilisation collapsed entirely, the answer was the same as it would be any other day - a session on MySpace. I re-did my last posting about the Pips gig, as I originally wrote it at 1:30am and could see floating shapes in front of my eyes as I typed. I demand blog perfection, and am not above a bit of Stalin-style revisionism to get it. This post will no doubt undergo some pretty heavy edits before it goes up.
But I also, and this is where I fell down, looked at the rankings page to see if I was anywhere near the top. I have taken to using Paulio's neat little trick, which is to enter my nonsense into the most obscure and pretentious category there is, namely Dreams and the Supernatural. I would have put it under poetry, as I did English Literature at university and would regularly amuse myself by pissing off as many poets as much as I could by refusing to take them seriously, or at least as seriously as they took themselves. However, after a while I started getting threatening odes through the door and blood-curdling haikus in my pidgeonhole, and so I abated a little. Sensitive souls are quite often one sonnet short of a portfolio, that's for certain. I didn't want to find any of my housemates pinioned to the porch of our shared house with a very tightly rolled-up volume of Donne by a short sighted but vengeful poet-assassin.
So I chose Dreams on the reasonable certainty that the most regular posters there would be asleep most of the time, and so a bit too muzzy to spot me interloping in their 'hood. And so it was. My last one about Germany winning against Argentina got to No.7. I was proud of myself, and quieted my suspicions that it only got so many comments because it was full of pictures. Of course, we all know where this is going. I had transgressed, and I had to pay.
Hubris is not pretty. And nor is the fall. My blog was not there any more, replaced by one that was actually about Dreams and the Supernatural. What was that doing there? I sagged. Like Icarus, I had got too cocky and flown too close to the sun, and my waxen wings had melted under the glare. I fell into the sea below and was enveloped, assailed even.
I was drowned. By the most popular blogs on MySpace. As we all know, "Popular" does not always, or even ever, directly correlate with "Good". For example, the most popular programme on TV in Britain is the final of Big Brother. In 2001 more people voted for Brian than voted for Labour. That's not a hopeful sign, no matter how you look at it. Tony Blair for one was so offended that he immediately lent our armed forces to our neighbours opposite, and they still haven't given them back, even after we pointed out that they have labels on them saying "Property of the United Kingdom". They'd better not break them.
Anyway, what is popular is not always worth it if you have an IQ of more than, say, sixty. The Sun, Carling Black Label, oven chips, Anthony Worral-Thopmson, Ricky Gervaise or Crazy Frog, I really would be happier to do without them. And we can add to that the blogs of Tila Tequila. I won't go into what's wrong with her specifically, because that kind of thing can get you into all sorts of exciting legal trouble, but I am not happy with what she represents. It is the idea that as log as you have a tight enough bum and funky-fresh enough attitude you will be successful. Well, I am unconvinced. I would urge you to listen to the music she provides and read some of her writing, but I think you can make a guess at what you'd find. A bright child of nine could do better. A stupid child of nine could, come to that.
Well, now I think about it, we can see that Tila herself isn't the problem, but she is certainly the most noticable symptom. MySpace is obviously a phenomenal way to sell things. It offers direct contact with artists that just wouldn't be possible before, and I am fine with that. If it weren't for MS I wouldn't know that Belle and Sebastian need a harp player (I sold mine to fund my badminton shor habit - if only I'd known sooner). And the fact that we can communicate directly with the artist means we are more inclined to buy their stuff. But the more people there are, the lower the Lowest Common Denominator falls, the more there is to sell the more blatant and therefore mindless your advertising becomes, and we pretty soon end up where we are now - the most popular person on MySpace is not a writer of note, or the personal page of a creative and acclaimed rock star, but a dim bulb Britney Spears wannabe who sells her shoddy products with pretend non-conformity and patently fake tits. And she's just the most visible of a million of them. It's all so... Rupert Murdoch, isn't it?
What I really don't like is the perpetration of yet another lie to make the male and stupid part with our cash. I am both male and stupid, but I learned long ago that a Lad Mag cannot be judged by its cover. Tila is currently gracing the cover of UK Maxim (seemingly unaware that she is only there because all of the cast of Hollyoaks are busy this month), surrounded by the usual excitable headlines - "The Hottest Girl On The Web!" and so on. There she is, covered in a thin film of engine oil, nearly pulling her knickers down and pouting at the camera with her blow-job lips. Call me jaded, but I may have seen that pose somewhere before. But as long as the kind of men who dig holes in roads and fifteen year old boys too scared to buy proper pornography part with their £3.50 every month, on it goes. It's her out of Corrie next month, then Jennifer Ellison again, as long as she hasn't put on any weight.
But anyway. We all know how dreadful and deadening to the soul 99.9 percent of the media is, and I shouldn't be too surprised that MySpace is basically the same. At least I still have the ability to pour scorn on it whilst slavishly checking to see if I have any messages every two to three hours. People of the towering cynicism of Tila and her ilk are only so annoying due to their dominance in MS's image. MySpace is the world, and as we know the world is full of the images of the heartless selling the unneccessary to the credulous with the untruthful. Most of the rest of the popular blogs were of the text-speak-heavy pink-goth teenage girl sort, and although their spelling and syntax can induce stomach ulcers in the pedantic, they are harmless enough. At least they are enjoying themselves I suppose. And accordingly, mst of the people in the world are nice people who think basically the same as me, but, crucially, don't type it all out in punishing detail and then expect people to read it. I am just bitter that I wasn't at no.7 any more.
All this is really doing is revealing myself to be not so much the master of the quirkily mundane as the kind of person who writes to Feedback on Radio 4 to complain about something I heard on Front Row (Mark Lawson, normally, the egg-shaped windbag). Plus I have just had a text message from nick asking me not to tell him what happens in the final episode of Doctor Who tomorrow night. So I'm off. I have a pizza, kindly supplied by mine fine hosts, to cook, and a choice of viewing - either a bizarre French comedy about dinner and briefcases, or Johnny Halliday's 50th anniversary concert in Paris, featuring topless dancers, terrible music and the man himself driving a tank down the Champs Elysees. Now that's what I mean by high-brow entertainment.
Good Night, and Good Luck
Dougal
I was feeding my ego, you see. I am at a loose end, having managed to come and visit James and Louise in London on the weekend the entire paternal family are in town for a christening. I am home alone. As it is, several leisure opportunities are there to be had. I could watch TV, read a book or do what D H Lawrence used to do, which was throw his post out of the window rather than walk to the post box, and wait for the replies to arrive. He did this in the solid belief that no good Englishman would steal another chap's correspondance. He would instead, post it, possibly saluting the image of King George VI on the stamp as he did so, and he was nearly always right, too. He was only let down by the man who stole his revised draft of The Rainbow, which took out all the dross and replaced with exciting car chases and hot sex with green alien babes. Sadly this draft never reached his publishers, so we are left with the pile of shite we know and hate today.
But back to me. Lacking as I do either post to send, stamps to affix to said post, or to be living in the twenties before civilisation collapsed entirely, the answer was the same as it would be any other day - a session on MySpace. I re-did my last posting about the Pips gig, as I originally wrote it at 1:30am and could see floating shapes in front of my eyes as I typed. I demand blog perfection, and am not above a bit of Stalin-style revisionism to get it. This post will no doubt undergo some pretty heavy edits before it goes up.
But I also, and this is where I fell down, looked at the rankings page to see if I was anywhere near the top. I have taken to using Paulio's neat little trick, which is to enter my nonsense into the most obscure and pretentious category there is, namely Dreams and the Supernatural. I would have put it under poetry, as I did English Literature at university and would regularly amuse myself by pissing off as many poets as much as I could by refusing to take them seriously, or at least as seriously as they took themselves. However, after a while I started getting threatening odes through the door and blood-curdling haikus in my pidgeonhole, and so I abated a little. Sensitive souls are quite often one sonnet short of a portfolio, that's for certain. I didn't want to find any of my housemates pinioned to the porch of our shared house with a very tightly rolled-up volume of Donne by a short sighted but vengeful poet-assassin.
So I chose Dreams on the reasonable certainty that the most regular posters there would be asleep most of the time, and so a bit too muzzy to spot me interloping in their 'hood. And so it was. My last one about Germany winning against Argentina got to No.7. I was proud of myself, and quieted my suspicions that it only got so many comments because it was full of pictures. Of course, we all know where this is going. I had transgressed, and I had to pay.
Hubris is not pretty. And nor is the fall. My blog was not there any more, replaced by one that was actually about Dreams and the Supernatural. What was that doing there? I sagged. Like Icarus, I had got too cocky and flown too close to the sun, and my waxen wings had melted under the glare. I fell into the sea below and was enveloped, assailed even.
I was drowned. By the most popular blogs on MySpace. As we all know, "Popular" does not always, or even ever, directly correlate with "Good". For example, the most popular programme on TV in Britain is the final of Big Brother. In 2001 more people voted for Brian than voted for Labour. That's not a hopeful sign, no matter how you look at it. Tony Blair for one was so offended that he immediately lent our armed forces to our neighbours opposite, and they still haven't given them back, even after we pointed out that they have labels on them saying "Property of the United Kingdom". They'd better not break them.
Anyway, what is popular is not always worth it if you have an IQ of more than, say, sixty. The Sun, Carling Black Label, oven chips, Anthony Worral-Thopmson, Ricky Gervaise or Crazy Frog, I really would be happier to do without them. And we can add to that the blogs of Tila Tequila. I won't go into what's wrong with her specifically, because that kind of thing can get you into all sorts of exciting legal trouble, but I am not happy with what she represents. It is the idea that as log as you have a tight enough bum and funky-fresh enough attitude you will be successful. Well, I am unconvinced. I would urge you to listen to the music she provides and read some of her writing, but I think you can make a guess at what you'd find. A bright child of nine could do better. A stupid child of nine could, come to that.
Well, now I think about it, we can see that Tila herself isn't the problem, but she is certainly the most noticable symptom. MySpace is obviously a phenomenal way to sell things. It offers direct contact with artists that just wouldn't be possible before, and I am fine with that. If it weren't for MS I wouldn't know that Belle and Sebastian need a harp player (I sold mine to fund my badminton shor habit - if only I'd known sooner). And the fact that we can communicate directly with the artist means we are more inclined to buy their stuff. But the more people there are, the lower the Lowest Common Denominator falls, the more there is to sell the more blatant and therefore mindless your advertising becomes, and we pretty soon end up where we are now - the most popular person on MySpace is not a writer of note, or the personal page of a creative and acclaimed rock star, but a dim bulb Britney Spears wannabe who sells her shoddy products with pretend non-conformity and patently fake tits. And she's just the most visible of a million of them. It's all so... Rupert Murdoch, isn't it?
What I really don't like is the perpetration of yet another lie to make the male and stupid part with our cash. I am both male and stupid, but I learned long ago that a Lad Mag cannot be judged by its cover. Tila is currently gracing the cover of UK Maxim (seemingly unaware that she is only there because all of the cast of Hollyoaks are busy this month), surrounded by the usual excitable headlines - "The Hottest Girl On The Web!" and so on. There she is, covered in a thin film of engine oil, nearly pulling her knickers down and pouting at the camera with her blow-job lips. Call me jaded, but I may have seen that pose somewhere before. But as long as the kind of men who dig holes in roads and fifteen year old boys too scared to buy proper pornography part with their £3.50 every month, on it goes. It's her out of Corrie next month, then Jennifer Ellison again, as long as she hasn't put on any weight.
But anyway. We all know how dreadful and deadening to the soul 99.9 percent of the media is, and I shouldn't be too surprised that MySpace is basically the same. At least I still have the ability to pour scorn on it whilst slavishly checking to see if I have any messages every two to three hours. People of the towering cynicism of Tila and her ilk are only so annoying due to their dominance in MS's image. MySpace is the world, and as we know the world is full of the images of the heartless selling the unneccessary to the credulous with the untruthful. Most of the rest of the popular blogs were of the text-speak-heavy pink-goth teenage girl sort, and although their spelling and syntax can induce stomach ulcers in the pedantic, they are harmless enough. At least they are enjoying themselves I suppose. And accordingly, mst of the people in the world are nice people who think basically the same as me, but, crucially, don't type it all out in punishing detail and then expect people to read it. I am just bitter that I wasn't at no.7 any more.
All this is really doing is revealing myself to be not so much the master of the quirkily mundane as the kind of person who writes to Feedback on Radio 4 to complain about something I heard on Front Row (Mark Lawson, normally, the egg-shaped windbag). Plus I have just had a text message from nick asking me not to tell him what happens in the final episode of Doctor Who tomorrow night. So I'm off. I have a pizza, kindly supplied by mine fine hosts, to cook, and a choice of viewing - either a bizarre French comedy about dinner and briefcases, or Johnny Halliday's 50th anniversary concert in Paris, featuring topless dancers, terrible music and the man himself driving a tank down the Champs Elysees. Now that's what I mean by high-brow entertainment.
Good Night, and Good Luck
Dougal
Tuesday, July 04, 2006
Germany
"Fussball Fieber herrscht in Deutschland!"
This is the measured opinion of the guy on ZDF last night, as he presented an article full of people with the colours of the German flag dyed in their hair and painted on their faces. Amateurs. Morons at home have been doing that for years, for all the good it's done. Even the fairly recent advent of flags for your car has done nothing for the fortunes of England, and many people's highlight of the tournament will be the sight of David Beckham throwing up before his free kick against Ecuador.
Anyway. I have been here on business for three days now, and am getting back into it. I am currently sat in an internet cafe in Karlsruhe in Germany, home of, well, not much really, but it is where the company we deal with at work live. I am here for a series of meetings and some actual work, too. That's fair enough - I'd be doing this kind of thing at home anyway, and it's a week where all my meals are paid for so I don't have to do any food shopping; this is becoming a serious imposition on my time, despite my earlier enthusiasm for cooking my own dinners. I am sick of my own cooking now, and want someone else to start doing it.
I had forgotten so much about living abroad. For example, the fine art of crossing the road. I spent a good two days after arriving , looking the wrong way every time I crossed a road. This kind of thing is hard-wired into our brains and is very difficult to change.
Similarly, saying "excuse me" when you walk into someone. It has happened a couple of times that, when bumbling into someone, my embarrased apology has been met with blank bewilderment. What should I be apologising for, they say. Well, in England we apologise when someone bumps into us, so I really can't help it. And for those English people reading (I say English because in my experience, Scots don't do it), who might be saying "Bollocks, I'm my own man and don't apologise to no-one for nuffink", I bet you do.
Queue jumping. I have seen it here before, but this is one of those things that is more percieved that true. Perceptions are powerful things, and tint our views in all sorts of odd ways. Germans are, I feel particularly ill-served by the Anglo-Saxon nations. We have several ready-made stereotypes which are far too tiresome and inaccurate to detail here, but I will say the one about them all being opium-wracked decadent Weimar-Republic throwbacks is my particular favourite.
In my experience, they simply do not listen to David Hasselhof, and find his belief that his concert at the Berlin Wall in 1988 was the main factor in the fall of the Wall a year later, mystifying. You can buy all sorts of foods that do not involve sausages. There is some truth in the idea that hey dress appalingly - socks with sandals are a regular sight, along with terrycloth trackie bottoms and orange short-sleeved shirts - but it must be remembered that, compared to the rest of North-Western Europe they are no worse than anyone else. The British, the Dutch and the Germans are the worst dressed societies in the world, and I can back this opinion up with as many fake statistics as you want. But having lived in Saarbruecken for nine months as a student surrounded by people who do nothing but work, and most recently spent a week in an office on an industrial estate with 200 of the quietest, most shy and retiring people you can ever imagine, the idea that they are all rude and loud and pushy is frankly laughable.
But it is, I think, easily the most durable. For example. I was at Stanstead Airport on Monday, and as usual, Ryanair's queueing system had broken down into anarchy. I found myself with a ticket to board first, but on the wrong side of the velvet rope between my batch of people and those who had to wait. And so, and I am ashamed of this, I slipped beneath the rope and basically cut the queue. I do feel I have some defence in this, as it was the queue I was supposed to be in, but this did not prepare me for what happened next. Anyone wanting a crash course in how the English deal with rule breakers, take note.
The person behind me started swearing, in lavish terms, about me. But not to me, to his girlfriend. I ignored it, as I already felt bad enough. But the it dawned on me - they thought that because I had pushed into the queu for a flight to Germany, I could only be German, and so genetically unable to queue. If I was German, the logic went, I would therefore be unable to understand English and they were free to swear at me. Swear at me to eachother, of course. This went on for some minutes as the ever-friendly and well-trained Ryanair ground staff ran about getting in eachother's way and doing everything bar let people onto the plane. Then, the piece de resistance.
The man turned to his girlfriend and said "You did German at school, how do you say 'Get out of the fucking queue, you German cunt?'"
"Erm..." she replied. There was a pause as she thought about it. I turned round and levelled a calm look at them, although inside I was alive with adrenaline at the thought that he could well hit me.
"Aus der Reihe, du detusches Foetze, " I began, "But you could have said it in English. I would have understood you perfectly well".
He looked terrified in a way that you only see on the face of someone who has been very rude about you in a language they are confident you cannot understand, but then finds out you can. And with that, he apologised to me as profusely as anyone has ever done, and we all boarded the plane.
All this is by way of coming round to my chosen subject for today, which is that some cultures are simply better at some things than others. This is not an original observation. Bill Bryson, not long after he'd moved back to the USA after twenty-odd years lving in Britain, was so taken with the idea of the post office holding an annual Customer Appreciation Day with free coffee and cakes that he wrote a three page article for the Mail on Sunday. And he has a point - the Royal Mail won't even provide you with a pen to fill in one of their many forms, let alone a free doughnut. However, he then told us how he made the dire oversight of posting a letter without a ZIP code only to have it come back three weeks later with an invoice for wasting USPS time. This wouldn't happen at home as I know from experience - when we moved from Devon to Leicestershire we told eveyone we knew our new address, but got the postcode wrong, and I mean really wrong. Wrong postal town, wrong district, eveything. Even now letters arrive with NN17 on them, despite the actual code being LE9. The point is, they arrive.
Anyway, I am not planning on talking about the post office for a whole blog posting (although I am determined to get maximum value out of my 2 of internet cafe time), but I am instead going to try and tackle at least one of those things which baffle us all, and that is understanding cultural difference. I am British. You may well have worked this out already, but I'm talking about more than just spelling colour with a U or driving on the left. What makes a culture is, in my opinion, a plethora of little things which point out the bigger things that, together, makes us into the English, Americans, Germans and so on. I can't speak for other European nations and I know absolutely nothing about the other Anglophone cultures of the world, so I won't try and make any incisive comments there. I'd end up making some baseless and sweeping statement and no-one would want to speak to me again. But I do know that as soon as it's not there, I start to miss the shipping forecast
The shipping forecast, for those who don't know, is a specialised weather forecast broadcast on Radio 4 first thing in the morning, just after lunch and last thing at night. It always begins the same way:
"There now follows the shipping forecast, issued at 1146 BST by the Met Office."
It then descends into what at first listen is a stream of abstract gibberish:
"Dogger, Malin Head, Fastnet fifteen to twenty, rising, medium to good. FitzRoy, Cromarty, Trafalgar, twenty to twenty-five, rising, good becoming meduim"
It goes on like this, through all twenty-six shipping areas around the British Isles, stretching from Norway to Iceland to Spain, in the same measured tones and sparse fashion. In fact, it is nothing but wind speeds, barometer readings and visibility. Anyone with a decent GPS guide could find all this out, and almost all ships do. Then it's the Archers. I'm sure if you look at www.bbc.co.uk/radio4 you'll find an example.
But it's not really for the seafaring. It's for us. Bizarrely, the shipping forecast is one of the most popular things on British radio. People tune in especially to listen to it, people who live many miles form the sea. Millions hear it every day. People write long, affectionate books about it, and Blur's This Is A Low is based on it. If it is even suggested that it be changed even slightly, there is uproar and questions are asked in Parliament. Really, I'm not making that up. People write in to Radio 4 and complain if the broadcaster reads it too fast, too slowly, too seriously, too lightly. The 0048 broadcast even has its own theme song, Sailing By. Anyone British will know the names of at least a few areas.
Why? There is absolutely no sensible reason why this tiny programme, irrelevant to almost everyone that listens to it and ignored by those that it's for, should be so important to so many. I can't really account for a lot of thise people. But for me it serves as a reminder. I was born by the sea, grew up by the sea. Sheerness had a huge container port, a ferry to Holland and a fishing fleet. We got an RNLI lifeboat off of Blue Peter one year, and it has since done thousands of rescues, manned entirely by volunteers. For me, and I suppose hundreds of thousands like me, the sea is not some water next to the land that you swim in when it's warm. It is something else, something powerful, something romantic, something deeply important and to be respected. It's alive. Sheerness flooded in 1953 and again in 1978. Half the town worked on the docks when I was a kid, although fewer do now it's all been automated. Thanks to the amount of fruit that comes in through Sheerness, it is the only place in Britain that has wild scorpoins. They arrived in a consignment of bananas in 1960 and took up home in a disused church. They are still there.
And to hear this list of places, most of them nothing but water in the busiest shipping lane in the world, recited in a calm voice just before I go to bed, brings all this back to me. Home. I don't make a claim to native marine wisdom, but I know I see it for what it is. Part of me, bound up in where I am from and the times that made me. The place that made me. My uncle was a lifeboatman. We know the fear that he wasn't coming back. The thought of thousands of men over hundreds of years, setting out from Sheerness over the storms of the North Sea to whatever fate awaits them. Who knows? It has left a hell of a lot of widows over the years. Do not, I repeat, do not fuck with the sea. A lot of people, I think, will feel the same way.
Good night, and Good Luck
Dougal.
This is the measured opinion of the guy on ZDF last night, as he presented an article full of people with the colours of the German flag dyed in their hair and painted on their faces. Amateurs. Morons at home have been doing that for years, for all the good it's done. Even the fairly recent advent of flags for your car has done nothing for the fortunes of England, and many people's highlight of the tournament will be the sight of David Beckham throwing up before his free kick against Ecuador.
Anyway. I have been here on business for three days now, and am getting back into it. I am currently sat in an internet cafe in Karlsruhe in Germany, home of, well, not much really, but it is where the company we deal with at work live. I am here for a series of meetings and some actual work, too. That's fair enough - I'd be doing this kind of thing at home anyway, and it's a week where all my meals are paid for so I don't have to do any food shopping; this is becoming a serious imposition on my time, despite my earlier enthusiasm for cooking my own dinners. I am sick of my own cooking now, and want someone else to start doing it.
I had forgotten so much about living abroad. For example, the fine art of crossing the road. I spent a good two days after arriving , looking the wrong way every time I crossed a road. This kind of thing is hard-wired into our brains and is very difficult to change.
Similarly, saying "excuse me" when you walk into someone. It has happened a couple of times that, when bumbling into someone, my embarrased apology has been met with blank bewilderment. What should I be apologising for, they say. Well, in England we apologise when someone bumps into us, so I really can't help it. And for those English people reading (I say English because in my experience, Scots don't do it), who might be saying "Bollocks, I'm my own man and don't apologise to no-one for nuffink", I bet you do.
Queue jumping. I have seen it here before, but this is one of those things that is more percieved that true. Perceptions are powerful things, and tint our views in all sorts of odd ways. Germans are, I feel particularly ill-served by the Anglo-Saxon nations. We have several ready-made stereotypes which are far too tiresome and inaccurate to detail here, but I will say the one about them all being opium-wracked decadent Weimar-Republic throwbacks is my particular favourite.
In my experience, they simply do not listen to David Hasselhof, and find his belief that his concert at the Berlin Wall in 1988 was the main factor in the fall of the Wall a year later, mystifying. You can buy all sorts of foods that do not involve sausages. There is some truth in the idea that hey dress appalingly - socks with sandals are a regular sight, along with terrycloth trackie bottoms and orange short-sleeved shirts - but it must be remembered that, compared to the rest of North-Western Europe they are no worse than anyone else. The British, the Dutch and the Germans are the worst dressed societies in the world, and I can back this opinion up with as many fake statistics as you want. But having lived in Saarbruecken for nine months as a student surrounded by people who do nothing but work, and most recently spent a week in an office on an industrial estate with 200 of the quietest, most shy and retiring people you can ever imagine, the idea that they are all rude and loud and pushy is frankly laughable.
But it is, I think, easily the most durable. For example. I was at Stanstead Airport on Monday, and as usual, Ryanair's queueing system had broken down into anarchy. I found myself with a ticket to board first, but on the wrong side of the velvet rope between my batch of people and those who had to wait. And so, and I am ashamed of this, I slipped beneath the rope and basically cut the queue. I do feel I have some defence in this, as it was the queue I was supposed to be in, but this did not prepare me for what happened next. Anyone wanting a crash course in how the English deal with rule breakers, take note.
The person behind me started swearing, in lavish terms, about me. But not to me, to his girlfriend. I ignored it, as I already felt bad enough. But the it dawned on me - they thought that because I had pushed into the queu for a flight to Germany, I could only be German, and so genetically unable to queue. If I was German, the logic went, I would therefore be unable to understand English and they were free to swear at me. Swear at me to eachother, of course. This went on for some minutes as the ever-friendly and well-trained Ryanair ground staff ran about getting in eachother's way and doing everything bar let people onto the plane. Then, the piece de resistance.
The man turned to his girlfriend and said "You did German at school, how do you say 'Get out of the fucking queue, you German cunt?'"
"Erm..." she replied. There was a pause as she thought about it. I turned round and levelled a calm look at them, although inside I was alive with adrenaline at the thought that he could well hit me.
"Aus der Reihe, du detusches Foetze, " I began, "But you could have said it in English. I would have understood you perfectly well".
He looked terrified in a way that you only see on the face of someone who has been very rude about you in a language they are confident you cannot understand, but then finds out you can. And with that, he apologised to me as profusely as anyone has ever done, and we all boarded the plane.
All this is by way of coming round to my chosen subject for today, which is that some cultures are simply better at some things than others. This is not an original observation. Bill Bryson, not long after he'd moved back to the USA after twenty-odd years lving in Britain, was so taken with the idea of the post office holding an annual Customer Appreciation Day with free coffee and cakes that he wrote a three page article for the Mail on Sunday. And he has a point - the Royal Mail won't even provide you with a pen to fill in one of their many forms, let alone a free doughnut. However, he then told us how he made the dire oversight of posting a letter without a ZIP code only to have it come back three weeks later with an invoice for wasting USPS time. This wouldn't happen at home as I know from experience - when we moved from Devon to Leicestershire we told eveyone we knew our new address, but got the postcode wrong, and I mean really wrong. Wrong postal town, wrong district, eveything. Even now letters arrive with NN17 on them, despite the actual code being LE9. The point is, they arrive.
Anyway, I am not planning on talking about the post office for a whole blog posting (although I am determined to get maximum value out of my 2 of internet cafe time), but I am instead going to try and tackle at least one of those things which baffle us all, and that is understanding cultural difference. I am British. You may well have worked this out already, but I'm talking about more than just spelling colour with a U or driving on the left. What makes a culture is, in my opinion, a plethora of little things which point out the bigger things that, together, makes us into the English, Americans, Germans and so on. I can't speak for other European nations and I know absolutely nothing about the other Anglophone cultures of the world, so I won't try and make any incisive comments there. I'd end up making some baseless and sweeping statement and no-one would want to speak to me again. But I do know that as soon as it's not there, I start to miss the shipping forecast
The shipping forecast, for those who don't know, is a specialised weather forecast broadcast on Radio 4 first thing in the morning, just after lunch and last thing at night. It always begins the same way:
"There now follows the shipping forecast, issued at 1146 BST by the Met Office."
It then descends into what at first listen is a stream of abstract gibberish:
"Dogger, Malin Head, Fastnet fifteen to twenty, rising, medium to good. FitzRoy, Cromarty, Trafalgar, twenty to twenty-five, rising, good becoming meduim"
It goes on like this, through all twenty-six shipping areas around the British Isles, stretching from Norway to Iceland to Spain, in the same measured tones and sparse fashion. In fact, it is nothing but wind speeds, barometer readings and visibility. Anyone with a decent GPS guide could find all this out, and almost all ships do. Then it's the Archers. I'm sure if you look at www.bbc.co.uk/radio4 you'll find an example.
But it's not really for the seafaring. It's for us. Bizarrely, the shipping forecast is one of the most popular things on British radio. People tune in especially to listen to it, people who live many miles form the sea. Millions hear it every day. People write long, affectionate books about it, and Blur's This Is A Low is based on it. If it is even suggested that it be changed even slightly, there is uproar and questions are asked in Parliament. Really, I'm not making that up. People write in to Radio 4 and complain if the broadcaster reads it too fast, too slowly, too seriously, too lightly. The 0048 broadcast even has its own theme song, Sailing By. Anyone British will know the names of at least a few areas.
Why? There is absolutely no sensible reason why this tiny programme, irrelevant to almost everyone that listens to it and ignored by those that it's for, should be so important to so many. I can't really account for a lot of thise people. But for me it serves as a reminder. I was born by the sea, grew up by the sea. Sheerness had a huge container port, a ferry to Holland and a fishing fleet. We got an RNLI lifeboat off of Blue Peter one year, and it has since done thousands of rescues, manned entirely by volunteers. For me, and I suppose hundreds of thousands like me, the sea is not some water next to the land that you swim in when it's warm. It is something else, something powerful, something romantic, something deeply important and to be respected. It's alive. Sheerness flooded in 1953 and again in 1978. Half the town worked on the docks when I was a kid, although fewer do now it's all been automated. Thanks to the amount of fruit that comes in through Sheerness, it is the only place in Britain that has wild scorpoins. They arrived in a consignment of bananas in 1960 and took up home in a disused church. They are still there.
And to hear this list of places, most of them nothing but water in the busiest shipping lane in the world, recited in a calm voice just before I go to bed, brings all this back to me. Home. I don't make a claim to native marine wisdom, but I know I see it for what it is. Part of me, bound up in where I am from and the times that made me. The place that made me. My uncle was a lifeboatman. We know the fear that he wasn't coming back. The thought of thousands of men over hundreds of years, setting out from Sheerness over the storms of the North Sea to whatever fate awaits them. Who knows? It has left a hell of a lot of widows over the years. Do not, I repeat, do not fuck with the sea. A lot of people, I think, will feel the same way.
Good night, and Good Luck
Dougal.
Holiday
Speaking as one of the five-and-three-quarter billion people who didn't get a day off today, happy 4th of July to all you Americans out there. I hope you are all having enjoyable barbecues, fireworks, football games etc. We in Britain are having Bitterness Day, where the lingering resentment of a 230 year old war is allowed to have its full run and we moan about the bloody Yanks all day long.
I in fact spent today with a work experience girl called Margot. She had just done her GCSEs and was taking a week to see what Leicester City Council do with her parent's money. Actually her family live in a huge house in a tiny village in the countryside and send her to boarding school in Oundle, so Council Tax in their house is not quite the issue it has been in mine recently. It also explains why she was called Margot. She was very 21st Century public school - a combination of BBC English, hockey sticks, clothes from Fat Face and the unbendable self-confidence that comes from having extremely rich parents.
She was actually very pleasant, and we spent most of the day talking about her choice of university. I warned her off Cambridge as it is in the middle of nowhere and full of unbearable tossers and Americans on holiday. Edinburgh, on the other hand, is lovely, as is Durham. Oxford was her choice as she wanted to be an Arabist, and the Foreign Office are well known for only opening letters from Oxbridge graduates, the me-rejecting bastards.
Anyway. I was thinking on the way home from the laundrette about the smart new Germany shirt in my clothes bag and the fact that despite England's timely exit from the World Cup being five days ago, a good two thirds of the flags on display for the team are still there. There will always be a general background number of them gracing the cars and the houses of the poor, but the levels of St George on my street at least are still abnormally high. As I walked past the Merry Monarch pub (a misleading name if ever there was one - it isn't regal and it certainly ain't merry) on Fosse Road I wondered how long I'd last if I were to don my lovely white DVB shirt and walk into the snug. About two minutes at the outside, I reckoned. The levels of cultural tolerance in Britain are varied to say the least. It is profoundly depressing to think that someone younger than me felt that World War Two was an acceptable reason to point at me and make aggressive mutterings when I went outside in my Germany shirt for about five minutes on Saturday afternoon. It was my own fault, of course. I really shold have known better. The fact that there is a better to know, I have a problem with. But this is not quite the subject for this particular day.
Now before we start, I want it understood that I lack all national feeling. At no time will you hear me trumpeting Britain as the fount of all that is good in the world, or that the people of some other nation are not as fabulous as we are. I live where I live, and that's it. I was just as happy to see Germany win their big game against Argentina on Friday as I would have been had England managed to beat a country with a population of less than that of Yorkshire the day after.
To crack that last snide remark I had to look at Wikipedia to find the population of Portugal. I am a thorough man, with not much to be doing, so I can only assume anyone reading this blog will be looking for factual errors as closely as I would to everyone else. I am not going to be caught out. Anyway, I was not surprised to see that the entry for that country is currently protected from editing due to vandalism. A deeper look found that the entries for Christiano Ronaldo and Big Phil Scolari are similarly protected. That's so depressing it makes me want to cry. But that's what English national feeling seems so often to be - the cream of English manhood trying to put the words "Cheating Cunts" into Wikipedia articles becasue we lost a football game. This is another reason why I am less than patriotic. Again, this is something for another day.
So. I am not coming at this from some percieved culturally superior standpoint. But there is little we like better in Britain to have a good old go at the Yanks, and today, on the day you celebrate a fringe of political outcasts making a declaration of independence that hardly anyone wanted from a country that had fewer individual freedoms than you did to begin with and was at best only nominally in charge anyway, that's what we shall do.
First of all, well, where to begin? I was going to say "being loud", but then I thought of "dreadful television programmes", "all the crap that surrounds hip-hop music" and "dimwitted politicians". There is also Christian Fundamentalism, a general lack of awareness of the rest of the world around them, their thing about guns, a tendency towards flag-waving, the death penalty, a nasty habit of invading countires with little thought as to what to do afterwards and finally Tom MySpace, whose omnipresent shit-eating grin and willingness to sell the contents of my blog to the highest bidder I can well be shot of.
But then I think, what do they think of us? I don't really know, but I do know that we must sometimes look odd. Cold, stand-offish, repressed, scruffy, deluded as to our own importance, stuck in the past, smug, arch and superior. The French call us their cousins. That means we're family, it doesn't mean they like us. The Germans call us partners. That means they sell us things with us, it doesn't mean they like us. No-one does really, if the results of this year's Eurovision Song Contest are anything to go by. So who am I to judge?
Frankly, no-one. I have never been outside the European Union and know full well that even after nine months of immersion in a culture, as I had when I lived in Germany, you still lack a lot of insight. I wouldn't presume to know how a German looks at the world. I just don't know. Also, falling madly in love with a girl from Cambridge may have limited the impulse to absorb more of Germany. However, that's by the by.
So yes, this culture thing. Basically I don't understand the Americans and I don't really expect them to understand me. I think the death penalty is barbaric and pointless, abortion is unpleasant but neccessary and, contrary to Charlton Heston's proclaimations, guns do in fact kill people. I know lots of Americans feel the same way. Similarly I find it ridiculous that the English are so self-important, embarrassing that we can't have a drink without also having a vicious punch-up and that we'd all be an awful lot happier if we could bring ourselves to just talk to people rather than rely on gossip, innuendo and baseless stereotyping. I know lots of Britons feel the same way as well.
But the next time you're in Europe, remember - chanting "USA! USA! USA!" in a bar will not endear you to anyone. And don't put a maple leaf flag on your backpack and try to pretend you're Canadian, either. The Canadians find it very annoying, plus we all caught on to that little trick pretty much straight away.
Good Night, and Good Luck
Dougal
I in fact spent today with a work experience girl called Margot. She had just done her GCSEs and was taking a week to see what Leicester City Council do with her parent's money. Actually her family live in a huge house in a tiny village in the countryside and send her to boarding school in Oundle, so Council Tax in their house is not quite the issue it has been in mine recently. It also explains why she was called Margot. She was very 21st Century public school - a combination of BBC English, hockey sticks, clothes from Fat Face and the unbendable self-confidence that comes from having extremely rich parents.
She was actually very pleasant, and we spent most of the day talking about her choice of university. I warned her off Cambridge as it is in the middle of nowhere and full of unbearable tossers and Americans on holiday. Edinburgh, on the other hand, is lovely, as is Durham. Oxford was her choice as she wanted to be an Arabist, and the Foreign Office are well known for only opening letters from Oxbridge graduates, the me-rejecting bastards.
Anyway. I was thinking on the way home from the laundrette about the smart new Germany shirt in my clothes bag and the fact that despite England's timely exit from the World Cup being five days ago, a good two thirds of the flags on display for the team are still there. There will always be a general background number of them gracing the cars and the houses of the poor, but the levels of St George on my street at least are still abnormally high. As I walked past the Merry Monarch pub (a misleading name if ever there was one - it isn't regal and it certainly ain't merry) on Fosse Road I wondered how long I'd last if I were to don my lovely white DVB shirt and walk into the snug. About two minutes at the outside, I reckoned. The levels of cultural tolerance in Britain are varied to say the least. It is profoundly depressing to think that someone younger than me felt that World War Two was an acceptable reason to point at me and make aggressive mutterings when I went outside in my Germany shirt for about five minutes on Saturday afternoon. It was my own fault, of course. I really shold have known better. The fact that there is a better to know, I have a problem with. But this is not quite the subject for this particular day.
Now before we start, I want it understood that I lack all national feeling. At no time will you hear me trumpeting Britain as the fount of all that is good in the world, or that the people of some other nation are not as fabulous as we are. I live where I live, and that's it. I was just as happy to see Germany win their big game against Argentina on Friday as I would have been had England managed to beat a country with a population of less than that of Yorkshire the day after.
To crack that last snide remark I had to look at Wikipedia to find the population of Portugal. I am a thorough man, with not much to be doing, so I can only assume anyone reading this blog will be looking for factual errors as closely as I would to everyone else. I am not going to be caught out. Anyway, I was not surprised to see that the entry for that country is currently protected from editing due to vandalism. A deeper look found that the entries for Christiano Ronaldo and Big Phil Scolari are similarly protected. That's so depressing it makes me want to cry. But that's what English national feeling seems so often to be - the cream of English manhood trying to put the words "Cheating Cunts" into Wikipedia articles becasue we lost a football game. This is another reason why I am less than patriotic. Again, this is something for another day.
So. I am not coming at this from some percieved culturally superior standpoint. But there is little we like better in Britain to have a good old go at the Yanks, and today, on the day you celebrate a fringe of political outcasts making a declaration of independence that hardly anyone wanted from a country that had fewer individual freedoms than you did to begin with and was at best only nominally in charge anyway, that's what we shall do.
First of all, well, where to begin? I was going to say "being loud", but then I thought of "dreadful television programmes", "all the crap that surrounds hip-hop music" and "dimwitted politicians". There is also Christian Fundamentalism, a general lack of awareness of the rest of the world around them, their thing about guns, a tendency towards flag-waving, the death penalty, a nasty habit of invading countires with little thought as to what to do afterwards and finally Tom MySpace, whose omnipresent shit-eating grin and willingness to sell the contents of my blog to the highest bidder I can well be shot of.
But then I think, what do they think of us? I don't really know, but I do know that we must sometimes look odd. Cold, stand-offish, repressed, scruffy, deluded as to our own importance, stuck in the past, smug, arch and superior. The French call us their cousins. That means we're family, it doesn't mean they like us. The Germans call us partners. That means they sell us things with us, it doesn't mean they like us. No-one does really, if the results of this year's Eurovision Song Contest are anything to go by. So who am I to judge?
Frankly, no-one. I have never been outside the European Union and know full well that even after nine months of immersion in a culture, as I had when I lived in Germany, you still lack a lot of insight. I wouldn't presume to know how a German looks at the world. I just don't know. Also, falling madly in love with a girl from Cambridge may have limited the impulse to absorb more of Germany. However, that's by the by.
So yes, this culture thing. Basically I don't understand the Americans and I don't really expect them to understand me. I think the death penalty is barbaric and pointless, abortion is unpleasant but neccessary and, contrary to Charlton Heston's proclaimations, guns do in fact kill people. I know lots of Americans feel the same way. Similarly I find it ridiculous that the English are so self-important, embarrassing that we can't have a drink without also having a vicious punch-up and that we'd all be an awful lot happier if we could bring ourselves to just talk to people rather than rely on gossip, innuendo and baseless stereotyping. I know lots of Britons feel the same way as well.
But the next time you're in Europe, remember - chanting "USA! USA! USA!" in a bar will not endear you to anyone. And don't put a maple leaf flag on your backpack and try to pretend you're Canadian, either. The Canadians find it very annoying, plus we all caught on to that little trick pretty much straight away.
Good Night, and Good Luck
Dougal
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