Matthew Moggridge

Eulogy for Dad...

2011-05-26T11:08:00.000-07:00

Dad with a Moggridge piano, March 2010.

Funerals can be gloomy occasions, but the word ‘gloomy’ is not an adjective I would use to describe the man whose life we are celebrating and whose passing we mourn today. Dad was full of positive energy and optimism for life. He possessed an immense enthusiasm for everything and, while he probably wouldn’t admit to it himself, he was a true perfectionist.

Even his initials spell out the nature of the man: Gerald Eldred Moggridge can be shortened to GEM and for all of us, dad was a real gem of a husband, a father, a grandfather and, of course, a great grandfather.

Mum will tell you what a great husband dad has been; they were married for 56 years, had three great kids, including me, and there was never a cross word – well, one or two, perhaps. Dad loved being at home with mum and was fortunate to enjoy 22 happy years of retirement, tending to their amazing and inspiring garden and researching and writing a history of the Moggridge family – available in all good bookshops soon.

As a father, dad was second to none. He probably wasn’t that good with dollies and teddies – that’s why Criss was forced to squeeze one of her dolls into Action Man fatigues – but our early years were characterised by cap guns, forts, train sets and toy soldiers and the biggest kid of all was dad. He taught us how to make log cabins out of sticks and blow them up with bangers and he was definitely behind the legendary Battle of Kiln Castle, which I’ll explain later to anyone who wants to listen.

Our childhoods were defined by two key events: summer holidays on the South Coast at Middleton-on-Sea and Felpham where dad played King Canute in a sandcastle; and, of course, Christmas time. Dad made both occasions truly magical – so much so that we’d be walking around the block, counting the days to our summer holiday, months before boarding the train to Bognor; and we probably believed in Father Christmas for longer than most kids – thanks to a bell and a ball of string.

Dad rigged up a bell outside of our bedroom window. It was attached to a ball of string, which he threw into the garden and then back through the bathroom window. On Christmas Eve, we would be tucked up in bed and dad would stand by the door clasping and pulling the string, ringing the bell outside the window. For years, we were believers – until I found the bell.

Dad also shone outside of the home. He enjoyed a highly successful career in the Government Information Service where he worked in Number 10 Downing Street alongside two great British Prime Ministers – Harold Wilson and Ted Heath – as well as one legendary Prime Minister-in-waiting, Margaret Thatcher (when she was Minister for Education). He set up the press office at the Lord Chancellor’s Department and was a regional director of the COI, in charge of co-ordinating media activity surrounding Royal Visits. He worked with the late and equally legendary Princess Diana and other members of the Royal Family.

Dad has met some of the world’s greats, including former American president Richard Nixon, in Bermuda with Ted Heath, and the diplomat’s diplomat, Henry Kissinger.

Which brings me to dad’s other enduring qualities – his strong moral code and his ethical approach to life. Dad was a fair man with a strong sense of right from wrong. Over the years, he provided us all with what I can only describe as expert guidance on how to live our lives – standing here today, I can confirm that he did a brilliant job and we will all miss him.

What a drag it is getting old...

2011-04-06T02:14:00.000-07:00

Last night Panorama screened a programme about ageism in the workplace. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black! The BBC is renowned for being ageist as the recent case concerning Miriam O'Reilly, a Countryfile presenter, proved; and let's not forget countless other people who have been told they're too old to be on the beeb – Moira Stewart was one and then there was Arlene Phillips, who was replaced by Alesha Dixon.

Arlene Phillips knows more about dancing than Alesha Dixon, but because Dixon is younger than Philips, the beeb thinks that people sitting at home in front of the TV would rather stare at Dixon than Phillips. We're not THAT shallow, are we?

Phillips must have been inwardly fuming over that scandal, but surely Dixon is secretly thinking, "I'll be next" as she stares pensively into her bathroom mirror, checking for any early wrinkles.

The problem with the BBC's ageism policy is that it's sexist. Strictly Come Dancing's Len Goodman and Bruce Forsyth, for instance, are both really old men – Brucie is in his 80s – but they are still going strong and if you take a look at Newsnight, good old Paxo, now white-haired, is as stroppy as ever. Mind you, I'd rather have Paxo presenting a heavyweight current affairs programme than Adrian Chiles or Dominic Littlewood.

Fortunately, Panorama chose Fiona Phillips to present its ageism programme, probably because she's no spring chicken, although she scrubs up well, to coin a phrase. Philips turns 50 this year and I guess she was chosen to quieten down the beeb's critics who would have been in uproar had Fearne Cotton been the chosen presenter – and rightly so.

The programme focused on a real problem: the fact that employers in the UK don't want people in their 50s working in their companies.

When you're in your 50s you just want to do your job to the best of your ability and get paid for it; you're not going to suck up to the boss, not only because he or she will probably be younger than you are, but because you know that it's not the way to conduct yourself and you've realised that you work to live, not live to work.

Panorama focused on four people: three men and one woman, all of whom were out of work and having real problems finding a job. Why? Because they're considered to be past it. All four of them have been trying to get work for a very long time, but they've failed despite being well qualified for the roles in question.

What I found really annoying – alright, I found it really irksome – was the absolutely useless presence of Digby Jones. That man failed to grasp the problem and spent any airtime he was given patronising four decent people who already felt bad enough about their lot and certainly didn't need Baron Jones of Birmingham telling them what do.

Jones got it completely wrong. If you're reading this, 'Baron', the point of the programme was this: people in their 50s – qualified people who might have studied hard to become professionals in some sphere or other – are being turned away from jobs that they want to do and for which they are more than qualified. They want to do the job but one thing stands in their way – their age.

But did Jones grasp it? No, he didn't. "Why don't you re-train, become a plumber?" he said as the hapless individuals were given a patronising one-by-one audience with the Baron, who resembled a poor man's Wizard of Oz, after the curtain had been pulled back, and our four 50-somethings were, perhaps, Dorothy, The Tin Man, The Lion and the Scarecrow.

That's not the point, Mr Jones, they don't want to become minicab drivers, driving instructors or plumbers. Why would they? They want to remain as accountants or teachers and they're perfectly capable but they are being stopped by employers who are more concerned about saving money or, in the case of the Beeb, with cosmetic issues.

What I also found rather amusing about the Panorama programme was the occasional input from Age UK, a charity that is obviously anti the whole ageism thing. Sadly, though, the charity's representative was a young bloke who was definitely not in his 50s – they missed a big trick there.

There was no happy ending to the programme either. I was expecting written announcements prior to or during the end credits, stating that the programme's subjects had all found work in their chosen fields, but no, they hadn't. One resorted to voluntary work, the other considered turning a hobby (picture framing) into a job and another – who was sent to work in a bar – gave it up because he felt it was below him. The female former teacher had started her own business, but it all went wrong for her when she lost a contract.

The big problem for the UK and its growing population of over-50s, is that while we're all being expected to work longer before we pick up our state pensions, there are people, like Digby Jones, who expect professional people to simply down tools at 50 (largely for cosmetic reasons) and accept jobs that aren't so important in a 'people-facing' sense. It's as if the general public as a whole – and employers and their workforces in particular – have some kind of aversion to people with a bit of white hair or a more wrinkled face and shouldn't have to endure looking at them for fear of being offended.

I was going to finish this article with the phrase 'grow up', but then I realised that growing up and getting older was the nub of the problem when it shouldn't be.

Napoleon once referred to the United Kingdom as a 'a nation of shopkeepers', but if things keep going the way they are, we'll be a nation of driving instructors and 'white van men' and newsagents windows will be inundated with 'man and van' cards.

Such a fate awaits us all and there must be thousands of people in college today wondering whether it's worth studying hard if they're going to end up stacking shelves in a supermarket or a DIY superstore. Why not simply leave college and go there now? That way you'll avoid disappointment later in life.

The Prestige, by Christopher Priest

2010-12-27T03:51:00.000-08:00

Borden and Angier as portrayed by Christian Bale (left) and
Hugh Jackman.

Well, first of all, let's start with the fact that I bought Priest's The Prestige a long time ago, probably not long after it published in 1995; but, for whatever reason, I didn't read it – or rather I started and then put it down. It remained on my bookshelf for many years and is still there now, the difference being that, as of 26 December 2010, it has been read and, I must say, it's up there with the very best of all the books I've read. Why? Because of the way it was written, the fact that it was well-researched – or at least I assume it was – and because the characterisation is so rich and the story so authentically told. For a book set in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but written in the late twentieth century, it manages the conceal its youthful nature through the style of the writing, a lot of which is in diary form and conveys the thoughts of the two main characters – that of Alfred Borden and Rupert Angier – both of whom are magicians, one who calls himself the Professor de Magie and the other, The Great Danton.

In essence, the book documents the rivalry between the two men and how they each attempt, on numerous occasions, to sabotage the other's act. In fact, that word 'attempt' is misleading as Borden, more so than Angier, manages successfully to sabotage Angier's act and, in the process, causes him great harm. One of Borden's early attempts results in the loss of Angier's unborn child, although later he inadvertently saves Angier from drowning when one of his illusions goes wrong.

The main theme of the book, however, is the quest of both men to discover the secrets of each other's main illusion, that of teleportation from one location to another. In Borden's case we discover that body doubles are involved in his New Transported Man, something Angier finds hard to believe (although it turns out to be true). Subterfuge is involved when Angier's wife defects to the 'other side' by working for Borden, initially to find out his secrets, but ultimately she falls in love with him and sends Angier a false lead after admitting her original intentions to Borden.

Angier receives a note from his wife informing him that the secret of Borden's act lies in the work of a Professor Tesla who is experimenting with alternating current in Colorado. Angier travels to the USA and asks Tesla to manufacture a machine that will enable him to transport himself from one place to another – in other words, not an illusion but a reality: a machine that literally transports matter from one location to another. Angier pays a hefty sum for the equipment and, for a while, appears to have been ripped off until he discovers that the paid-for equipment had been shipped and was probably languishing in a dockyard somewhere in the UK.

Once retrieved and assembled, the equipment does its job and Angier discovers that, without the aid of a body double – a method he does employ prior to meeting Tesla – he can transport himself from the stage to the circle seats of any theatre as long as it has electrical power. He manages to wow audiences the length and breadth of the country and becomes very rich in the process, but his great nemesis, Borden, is always lurking in the audience, trying to sabotage the act.

On one occasion he manages to somehow switch off the power of Tesla's appartus at a crucial moment in the act when Angier has passed the point of no return. The end result is that two Angiers spring into existence, one being his original self and the other his part-transported self – a ghost-like wraith who decides that enough is enough and that he must kill Borden. But when push comes to shove, he can't do it. The 'other' Angier, the one that initially entered the Tesla machine, becomes ill and eventually dies.

It is important to remember, however, that Angier is also part of the aristocracy and so has two identities: one being Rupert Angier (The Great Danton) and the other Lord Colderdale of Derbyshire. With the Great Danton dead – and so, by default, Lord Colderdale, only the wraith-like Angier is left and he decides to end it all by using the Tesla equipment once more to re-unite himself with the other Angier who is now in the Colderdale mausoleum.

While most of the book is set in the mid-18th Century and early twentieth, the first and last parts are set in modern times. The book starts with a reporter – an unknowing descendant of Borden – visiting a descendant of Angier and explaining how he always feels he has an identical twin somewhere in the world. These feelings are strongest during his time in the Colderdale stately home and it is not until the end of the book, when the reader is back in the present day, that story reaches its rather eerie and frightening conclusion.

I loved this book and was elated to discover that my son Max had a DVD of the movie, which I sat down and watched last night (Boxing Day 2010) having finished the novel that morning. Sadly, although understandably, considering the novel's intricacies, the movie was considerably different from the book and nowhere near as good. Borden is portrayed as some kind of plucky cockney magician – not how I imagined him at all – and he and Angier see a darn sight more of one another than they do in the book (where most of their encounters are during acts of sabotage). The movie has Borden accidentally killing Angier's wife, when in the book he kills their unborn child. Unless I missed it, Borden is not shot by Angier and Borden is never in prison awaiting hanging. What's more the modern-day element of the story is completely ignored as is the eerie climax to the novel. All in all, while the book was one of the most impressive I've read in a long time, it was let down by the movie – but only, I'd imagine, for those, like me, who had read the book. Coming to the movie in isolation, it's a good film.

Cycling and running boom shows appetite for sports participation

2010-12-16T04:02:00.000-08:00

New participation figures published by Sport England paint a mixed picture of progress in grassroots sport, with strong growth in running and cycling but a decline in other major sports, including football and swimming.

Cycling has experienced strong growth in terms of participation,
claims Sport England

Overall, the slow but steady increase in participation numbers seen over the past five years continues, with 6,938,000 people now taking part in sport at least three times a week. Today’s Active People Survey results show that regular participation is now 123,000 closer to the Government’s aim to get one million people playing more sport by 2012/13.

Weekly participation in athletics (including running) has swelled by over 263,000 over the past two years, buoyed by a growing network of informal running groups across the country. Over the same period, cycling’s numbers are up by almost 100,000. British Cycling’s Chief Executive, Ian Drake, said:

“We put great stock on trying to ensure our participation initiatives truly meet the needs of those we’re hoping to get involved in our sport. Indeed, we can partly put the continued success of Sky Ride down to the fact that we listen to participants and adapt our offerings based on the feedback we receive. We’re committed to getting more people on their bikes and importantly, keeping them cycling. What is particularly exciting for us is that we’re confident there’s plenty more to come and throughout 2011 we will be launching more new initiatives to help get more people cycling more regularly.”

Netball’s participant numbers are up by over 26,000, an increase of a fifth in the size of the sport in two years. Much of this success comes from the Back to Netball programme, which tempts women to return to the sport with a fun and flexible offer.

This is just one of the initiatives that have contributed to a recovery in women’s participation in 2010, but the gender gap in sport remains a challenge.

Of real concern, however, is the continued under-performance of five of the top seven participation sports, including the only sports with more than two million weekly participants - swimming and football. Their size means that this decline has a major impact on the overall growth of grassroots sport.

For these two – and other sports such as cricket and rugby – the challenge is to arrest the drop in participation outside the club structures where they have traditionally focused most of their attention.

The past 12 months have also been a tough period for sports that are costly and time-consuming such as golf, sailing and skiing. There has been a marked drop in participation in these activities among men aged between 35 and 44, a key period of economic productivity in most people’s lives.

Sport England ’s Chief Executive, Jennie Price, said:

“It would be fair to describe today’s results as a mixed bag. It’s good to see a wide range of sports – from individual pursuits like running to small team sports like lacrosse - demonstrating that, with the right approach, increasing grassroots participation is a realistic ambition.

“What is concerning, however, is that a number of major sports have yet to deliver, despite significant levels of investment. They now urgently need to demonstrate their ability to grow participation in their sport and prove they can make a significant contribution to sport at the grassroots level.”

The Minister for Sport and the Olympics, Hugh Robertson MP, said:

“During the comprehensive spending review we fought hard to get a good settlement for sport, keeping the Whole Sport plans in place. Now it is vital to see a return from the investment sports get from the public purse. I want every pound that national governing bodies spend on the grassroots to count.

“Our recently launched ‘Places People Play’ strategy will help get more people participating but we also need sports governing bodies to step up to the plate and deliver. Some sports are making progress such as athletics and netball and we need to learn lessons from them to get growth across the board.”

Me and Martin 'Wolfie' Adams, the darts player...

2010-12-16T03:08:00.000-08:00

Martin 'Wolfie' Adams and yours truly, Evesham, December 14th 2010.

Alright, I know, I'm a friend of the stars. Here I am in Evesham at a social club with darts legend, Martin 'Wolfie' Adams. I had a really tiring day as I journeyed down to Evesham by train, getting in at around 7.15pm, then I hiked over to the club, interviewed Wolfie and a few others, got back to the hotel, checked in around 10.30pm, had dinner (it was a great hotel, the Riverside, Evesham, right on the Avon and great staff, clean rooms etc) and then, up to the room to start writing the feature. Finished it at 0130hrs, emailed it to David, the designer, then went to bed. Got up at 0630, had a Full English at 0700hrs, went back to the room, wrote the products pages (this is Club Mirror magazine, by the way) then jumped in a cab to Evesham station, discovered that a bridge had collapsed so spent £40 on a taxi to Warwick Parkway and then over £30 on a ticket to Marylebone. Got home, had a Marmite sarnie, drove over to David's, passed the issue and got back home again at 6pm. Then, at 10.30pm went out to pick up Max from Gipsy Hill, not a very salubrious place to be on foot at night. Got to bed around 11.30pm.

The great thing about Martin Adams was that he, like me, was born and bred in Sutton, Surrey. We had a good old chinwag about Sutton pubs, what a great bloke!

Smithy, the John Smith's No Nonsense racehorse – and me!!!

2010-10-18T06:57:00.000-07:00

Here I am, yours truly, with Smithy, the John Smith's No Nonsense racehorse.
I was at the stables of Ginger and Donald McCain, both accomplished racehorse
trainers. Ginger, who turned 80 recently, trained the famous Red Rum. This shot
was taken on the first day of the Ryder Cup at Celtic Manor, which was rained off.
What a great-looking racehorse – and, come to think of it, I don't look too bad either!

Leprosy, lager and psychics

2010-04-26T08:01:00.000-07:00

I appear to have the knack of attracting some extraordinary people whenever I’m out and about. Once, on a train to London from Manchester, I sat opposite a woman who was reading, not Elle or Cosmopolitan but Leprosy Review. With two cans of Stella inside of me, and nothing like a book or newspaper to occupy my time, (that’s why I bought the lager) I found myself in fits of laughter – as a lone traveller, it never looks good – as I considered asking her if I could borrow her copy. It was the whole idea of being that desperate for something to do on the train journey that I was prepared to resort to reading a magazine about leprosy.

The woman noticed my shoulders shaking uncontrollably and, looking distastefully at the two crushed cans of Stella on the table in front of me, she asked me what I found so funny. With great difficulty, I told her and she let me read her magazine. It turned out that she was a doctor, but no ordinary GP. She was – and probably still is – the foremost authority on leprosy in the United Kingdom.

This week, I was in Northampton, of all places, on business, and I decided to walk back to the station rather than order a taxi from the office block I had been sitting in for the past hour. The walk was uninspiring and, as it was lunchtime, I thought I would find a tearoom or restaurant for a bite to eat.

Near the station there is a pub called The Black Lion, which, as a blackboard outside announced, was under new management. Having been editor of Pub Food magazine for six years, I can sniff out ‘pub grub’ from 100 yards and this was the sort of place, I figured, with a menu based around frozen chips and bar snacks and where ham, egg and chips was considered a delicacy. I played safe and ordered a ham sandwich.

I ended up in the pub because of Bruce’s Coffee Shop next door, which I hadn’t associated with the boozer. They were, I discovered, one and the same, which, in itself, was slightly odd: a coffee shop, a kind of independent version of Starbuck’s or Caffe Nero, inside a pub.

I stopped for a cappuccino and then walked through to the pub where I stayed for a beer because I liked the licensee. He was a decent sort of chap, ex-services, had been in the first Gulf War and was now the pub’s licensee. My sandwich was fine and I considered ordering another, but the crisps and salad accompanying my order sufficed and I survived on three pints of St Austell Tribute, one of three real ales available, the others being Spitfire and London Pride.

A man walked in and ordered a pint of Guinness. I had been chatting to the licensee about this and that and it transpired that his girlfriend worked in the local hospital, which I assumed was something like ‘Northampton General’. The man with the Guinness made a deliberate noise of disgruntlement at hearing this, and it turned out that he had spent six months there being treated for serious brain damage. He had been thrown off a nearby railway bridge by a group of Asian men in what the licensee described as a racist attack. Had a passer-by not spotted the man, he would have died.

The man was now on medication as a result of the attack and was only permitted a maximum of two pints of Guinness by the licensee. He only stayed for one. Apparently, the unprovoked attack had stirred up ill feeling among local hard men and revenge attacks had taken place.

The pub had recently been re-opened and the licensee told me that it dated back hundreds of years and had close associations with the impressive St Peter’s church next door.

The three pints of Tribute inspired me to take a closer look at the church. Prior to leaving my rather comfortable position at the bar, where I had been quietly writing an article about the Wye Valley Brewery on my laptop, I had noticed a man talking to the licensee. When I reached the church, there he was again taking photographs.

“I’ve got over 600 photographs of churches on my computer,” he told me, proudly, as we stood together in the churchyard while he continued to snap away. He produced his business card and, to my surprise, he was a paranormal investigator doing a bit of footwork for a psychic and medium called Susan Mock.

That surname bothered me. Mock. Mock not, but he said she was good and told me about a forthcoming meeting somewhere in Northampton. I loitered around the church for a while, admiring its inner beauty before boarding a train back to London.

Birthday cake for my daughter, aged 11

2010-01-17T05:03:00.000-08:00

I must take after my mum, a dab hand at making cakes ever since I can remember. Perhaps it's because I've stood in the kitchen watching her, waiting to lick the bowl, or it might be that I have the cake gene, which means I can always make a decent sponge or whatever. I should have been a baker.

Anyway, I'm rambling. My daughter was 11 on the 7th January 2010 and because I simply wasn't prepared to fork out loads of cash for a ready-made Waitrose cake, which, to be honest isn't the same as baking one at home, I decided to do just that. Here's the recipe:-

Matthew's Birthday Cake

Ingredients

8oz self raising flour

8oz butter or margarine

8oz sugar

4 eggs

Butter icing

4oz butter or margarine

8oz icing sugar

A drop of vanilla essence

Method:

1. Mix all of the ingredients together until a smooth mix is achieved and then spoon the mixture into two sponge tins, making sure that both tins are lined with grease-proof paper.

2. Bake in the oven for approximately 20 minutes until both sponges rise. You'll know when it's ready, but keep an eye on the oven.

3. When ready, leave to stand for around 30 minutes and then prepare the sponges to be joined together. This might mean slicing a piece off the top of one of the sponges to make it flat. Then spread jam over the flat surface of one of the sponges and butter icing over the other one. Sandwich them both together and hey presto, a sponge cake!

Tip: I sprinkled the top of my cake with icing sugar. Put a small amount into something like a tea strainer and then just tap gently over the surface of the cake.

Walking from Sanderstead to Caterham in the snow

2010-01-17T03:24:00.000-08:00

Pix from the top: the top of Tithepit Shaw Lane, Warlingham; Sir William Jones park in Warlingham; the gates of Sir William Jones park; more shots of people sledging in Sir William Jones park; and a shot of Kenley airfield. All very bleak, but I enjoyed a nice pint or two in the Wattenden Arms.

"Don't venture out unless it's absolutely necessary!" And what did I do? I ventured out! In fact, I walked 12 miles from Sanderstead to Caterham and back to see David Foster and hand over some copy for a magazine entitled Club Report 2010. On Tithepit Shaw Lane, a very steep downward descent towards Whyteleafe from Warlingham, I slipped over twice, once in front of a couple of girls – how humiliating! Two hours later I reached my destination, had a cup of tea and a chocolate biscuit and then headed home via Kenley and a pub called the Wattenden Arms where I met Geoff Althoff, the illustrious illustrator.

Tell us another one...

2010-01-11T04:24:00.000-08:00

As gritters lay rock salt on our roads, Matthew Moggridge wonders whether the nation as a whole should be taking large pinches of the stuff whenever it reads the newspapers or listens to the politicians.

Let me start by saying that I’m not a psychic, I don’t have a third sense and I can’t see dead people. I am a normal person with, it has to be said, a rightly suspicious mind.

Way back at the beginning of 2003 when plans were afoot to invade Iraq, my brow was furrowed as I listened to media reports about resolution 1441, the so-called ‘dodgy dossier’ – which WAS dodgy – and all that stuff about how we, the citizens of the UK, were just 45 minutes away from being blown to bits by Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

I remember all the trips Hans Blix and a gaggle of IAEA inspectors made to Iraq to try and find nuclear weapons that simply weren’t there and, of course, I recall the very suspicious (and, in my opinion, still unresolved) David Kelly affair. In short, it didn’t add up, but the impression we, the public, were being given was that everybody was trying their level best to avoid military intervention. This, of course, was a huge lie.

I remember saying to people at the time when military action was first being mooted that it was a foregone conclusion. I just had a hunch that everything else was mere posturing to make it look as if we really tried our best to avoid an invasion of Iraq but in the end we simply had to go in to protect the UK. And then, to add insult to injury, to double-bluff the public, we heard afterwards that our intelligence services were simply not very intelligent and that was why we accidentally invaded sovereign territory. But, oh dear, it was too late to go back by then so we’d better get on with it.

I’m still amazed at how people actually believe it. I won’t mention names, but people very close to me have what can only be called blind faith in Government.

And now, of course, the truth is coming out, thanks to the Chilcott investigation, and we hear that Blair really was Bush’s poodle. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here: Blair is not going to be punished in anyway for his role in what amounted to an illegal invasion of another country. If I recall correctly, Blair has been appointed Middle East Envoy. But hold on a minute, isn't that like giving Nick Griffin a job with the Commission for Racial Equality?

In fact, judging by the way things work in this country, he’ll probably be rewarded for his role in creating a climate of fear in the UK that had a knock-on effect elsewhere and, of course, lead to other people being given awards when, perhaps, they should have been overlooked. Cresida Dick, the woman in charge of the police investigation that led to an innocent Brazilian being mistaken for a terrorist and shot dead on Stockwell tube station was recently awarded the Queen’s Medal.

Sadly, the message here is that you simply cannot trust anybody in this world, certainly not the Government, whether it’s Labour, Conservative or Liberal. Never trust or believe in what you read in the newspapers or hear on the television and always bear in mind that somewhere there’s a hidden agenda – especially where the bigger, longer running stories are concerned. Invariably, somewhere along the line, you will find that your suspicions were, to some degree, right.

The reason I have decided to put pen to paper is a newspaper report on the so-called swine flu pandemic that, at one stage, was going to be infecting a ridiculously large number of people in the UK. I think it was supposed to be something like 100,000 people per day! I remember thinking that this would mean that I was definitely going to be infected at some stage. I bought zinc from my local health food shop, started eating loads of navel oranges and making a point of keeping well away from anybody with the slightest sniffle. I began envisaging days off work, Lemsips and everything else one associates with the flu – like the Jeremy Kyle Show – and, secretly, I hoped that if I was struck down I would not be one of those who died from the disease.

The Government was predicting 64,000 deaths. The climate of fear created and fuelled by the media had, to a degree, worked – until I started thinking, hold on, 100,000 people per day, surely I will know somebody with swine flu? Oddly, nobody I know has caught the disease – absolutely nobody.

The so-called ‘swine flu’ pandemic was great for the work shy. All they had to do was call a helpline and spell out, to an indifferent telephonist,a few symptoms and they would be sent some Tamiflu and signed off of work for a week – job done (or not in this case). Anybody could do it and nobody was going to ask any questions.

In the same way that the credit crunch gave businesses carte blanche to sack people without a decent reason, swine flu provided skivers with the equivalent of a Get Out of Jail Free card.

And now the truth might be floating to the surface. I use the word ‘might’ because the report I read this morning was in a tabloid newspaper, an area of the media where the phrase ‘economical with the truth’ is definitely an understatement – although hats off to the Sun for a great headline when swine flu was welcomed into the UK; it led with ‘Pig’s ‘ere’.

It is being claimed, not in the Sun, that the head of health at the Council of Europe, Mr Wolfgang Wodarg (there’s probably an anagram there somewhere) believes that the World Health Organisation’s swine flu pandemic was, in fact, completely false and driven by the drug companies who stood to make billions out of convincing us that it was for real. Surely not!

The Council of Europe has passed a resolution, proposed by Mr Wodarg, calling for an investigation into the role of the drug companies involved in the scandal and this at a time when it has emerged that the British government is trying to offload a huge consignment of Tamiflu that it ordered at the height of the scare. Not another case of faulty intelligence, surely?

But there is a big problem here. If we stormed into Iraq for no reason, if swine flu was a sham, then what about climate change? We’re all busy trying to reduce our carbon footprint while putting up with the fact that China and America are producing more greenhouse gasses than the lot of us put together – it all begs the question, what the hell is going on?

It’s all a matter of trust and I for one will continue to take everything I’m told with an extremely large bag of salt – even if it is true that the UK diet contains more salt than any other country in the world. Perhaps that’s not true either.

I wrote a novel in 30 days. Is it any good? I don't know.

2009-12-01T07:04:00.000-08:00

Okay, it's nothing to be proud of, I've tried it before and either run out of time or just got plain bored, but this year, I went for it: November is always National Novel Writing Month, key that into Google and you'll be directed to a website where the deal is this: you sign up and commit to writing a 50,000-word novel in 30 days, starting November 1st and finishing by midnight on November 30th. As I said, I've tried this before and either lost time or lost interest.

The problem, of course, is if you miss a day, you've got to double your workload the following day, which can get stressful and, ultimately, lead to you abandoning the project; this happened to me a year or two ago. I was determined to finish this year. I did pretty well, writing something on most days of the month and then, as the event drew to a close I found myself dividing the number of days left with the number of words still to write and I always getting something like 2,500 words per day. It was fine.

I found that early in the morning was the best time to write, so I often got up at the crack of dawn, around 0530hrs to 0600hrs, to write the first 1,000 words and then polish off the final 1,500 at night while watching the television – or rather having the television on but not really watching it. One night I sat watching a scary movie, The Grudge, while writing the story and noticed afterwards how the chapter concerned turned out to be pretty spooky.

Is it any good? I don't know to be honest. It was a children's story based on characters I dreamt up for my daughter. The bedtime process for my daughter has always involved me making up stories about three characters. I decided to use the characters for National Novel Writing Month. I had no real plan or plot and basically just started writing, making it up as I went along. Not ideal, but there you have it. It's odd because I never knew what was going to happen or how the story was going to pan out at the end, it all happened as it happened.

I am glad it's over because I was getting to bed late and I did find myself pre-occupied with the whole venture during the day.

"Winning", if that's what completing the novel on the finish date means, is an odd affair. You log on to the National Novel Writing Month website and submit your finished document to the word-counter and then, that's it, you get told you've won, you get asked to donate some money and then you can, if you wish, download a certificate, in PDF form, stating that you completed the task – all a bit of an anti-climax, although later on, an email from the organiser informed me that I could get the story produced as a book and possibly get it on Amazon too. It needs a rewrite before I do that, but I've got until July 2010 so it's got to be done.

I doubt if I'll get a call from Hodder & Stoughton, although I do admit to having the odd fantasy about getting a £1.5 million four-book deal and moving to a house on the beach somewhere near Aldeburgh in Suffolk where I can indulge a horribly twee, Sunday supplement existence. It won't happen.

Now it's completed, of course, I have to spend time in the evening reading it to my daughter. There are 18 chapters in total including a kind of epilogue entitled Boxing Day. I didn't want a Chapter 19 as my father-in-law died on the 19th and I didn't want the book to have any kind of jinx attached to it.

Now that I'm considering doing a rewrite, who knows? I might be suitably impressed by the end result to submit it to a publisher – but then again, perhaps I won't be, I've never been very self-confident. I'll probably just read it to my daughter and then put it in the attic where, in many years to come, it might be unearthed, turned in a multi-million dollar movie and I won't be around to rake in or enjoy the cash.

There are four months in the year with 30 rather than 31 days and we all know them: April, June, September and November. Perhaps I'll write stories during those months, sequels to the one I've already written. Talk about practice makes perfect. Anyway, gotta go.

The OK Cafe, 77 Piccadilly, Manchester City Centre

2009-11-27T02:29:00.000-08:00

"I know you're not going to do a runner," said the man behind the counter as I paid my £4.64 for cottage pie, boiled potatoes, greens and peas. The comment said a lot for the OK Café's clientele, most of whom, it had to be said, sported shell suits, tattoos and an unshaven complexion – and that was just the women!

I liked the idea that I didn't look like the sort of person that 'did a runner' although secretly it has been an ambition of mine for some time. A few years ago I used to be the editor of a magazine in the hotels and fine dining industry and I remember reading a review of one of Gordon Ramsay's restaurants in the Saturday Times magazine (penned by Giles Coren) where the bill for his meal was something like £383. Now that's a lot of money and I have often questioned whether such an amount is right, in an ethical and moral sense, when I consider that the OK Café would have cost me under a tenner for two. Alright, I'm sure that Restaurant Gordon Ramsay is not the sort of place that attracts those who like to do runners, but when a restaurant meal for two costs nearly £400 – the price of desirable 'consumer durables' like washing machines and DVD players – one has to question what kind of security measures are in place to prevent people from doing a runner.

It's been a while since I was the editor of that magazine, but I remember that Locanda Locatelli, an excellent restaurant run by an excellent chef (down-to-earth and not pretentious) was located inside a hotel. On one visit I asked where I might find the restrooms and I was directed through a door and found myself in the middle of a bustling hotel reception area. Had I finished my meal I could have just walked out of the hotel front entrance never to be seen again; and this got me thinking. Perhaps we should run a feature where we try to 'do runners' from expensive restaurants just to see how protected they are. The idea was, of course, ruled out by the publisher (far too exciting, far too good, far too controversial and we don't want people actually READING the magazine, do we?) but there were issues surrounding breaking the law that I hadn't really considered.

Having said that, my plan was to work out a 'winning point', a place where we could say we had successfully achieved 'doing a runner' from the restaurants in question. It might have been a distance of 500 yards from the table at which we had been sitting; there were various ideas on the table about that. Anyway, the plan was to reach the winning point and then return and pay the bill – assuming we hadn't already been stopped and carted off to the local nick.

I knew that I couldn't operate alone and would need an accomplice and chose as my partner in crime a PR girl, who will remain nameless. She was definitely up for it (doing a runner!) and we worked out that we would need props – a fake mobile phone and a replica Fendi handbag, perhaps, to leave on the table and give the waiting staff the impression that we had to come back when, in reality, we had scarpered.

With meals costing so much, ie the price of a DVD player – the sort of thing burglars nick from houses – I felt, somewhere deep down that there was almost a moral obligation to have a go at 'doing a runner'. Food should never cost £400, that's plain greed on the part of the restaurateur, no matter what their excuse might be – food is never THAT good – and I should know as I have eaten in some of the best and most expensive restaurants in the UK and the world (but never paid for it, journalists tend not to). In fact if I had to pay for it, I wouldn't, in the same way that I would never buy a Bugatti Veyron, even if I had the money: at the end of the day it's only a car and I'm not going to pay the best part of a million quid just to pose and be poncy.

Anyway, back to doing a runner: it never happened. I even put the idea to the features editor of a well-known lads' mag – they think they're hard, or so I thought: they never returned my call, the cowards. So it never happened and probably never will. I did, however, case a few joints and can offer this advice to anybody who wants to have a go: hotel-based restaurants are the best bet, especially if they don't have their own dedicated entrance. Remember the fake mobile phone and the imitation Fendi bag, go there well turned out with a beautiful woman on your arm, order the lot: starter, main course, a good bottle of wine, dessert and then ask for directions to the restrooms. You can't both get up at the same time, that might arouse suspicions, but then I never got as far as actually organising a caper – just eating one!

Now that was an almighty digression, let's get back to the OK Café in Manchester – it was your typical caff – a mixture of Formica and plastic Gingham tablecloths, there were many copies of The Sun there for customers to read for free and the food was plain and honest. My cottage pie was one of the chef's specials and it only cost £4.65 with a mug of tea thrown in. As I left, leaving the change from a fiver as a tip, I started to wonder how desperate you would have to be to do a runner from the OK Café. According to the chef, it happens a lot.

I'm a big kid and I don't care...

2009-11-09T11:14:00.000-08:00

I'm a big kid. I've been one ever since I was a little kid, when it was legit to act like a child, but it wasn't long before I discovered that people were constantly telling me to grow up and act my age, even when I was 'allowed' to be silly and irresponsible.

When I was eighteen I think my mum had a vision of what a student should look like: to her it was a cross between Dirk Bogarde and Richard O'Sullivan and it involved tweed jackets and yellow roll-neck jumpers, suede shoes and a scarf, with, of course, a neat haircut. My idea was totally different: unkempt hair, jeans full of holes and misshapen 'fisherman' jumpers from Millets. It goes without saying that I was told to grow up.

My problem is that, try as I might, I can't seem to grow up. Perhaps it's a lot to do with my profession. I write for a living and have been relatively successful as a magazine editor working on a variety of titles, largely within the field of hospitality, where everybody is having a good time all of the time. Perhaps that's it. While other people work for a living, I spend my time writing about what people could be doing in their leisure time, when they're not being boring and working. Result? Life is one big party!

But of course it's not just work and I'm not going to kid myself that I'm constantly looning around behind people who are trying to work, pulling faces and being silly while wearing a barber pole suit and a chromium top hat. No, that's not it. But it is all to do with being sensible, wearing sensible clothes, riding a sensible bike, reading sensible books and stuff like that.

I'm not going to tell you my age, that would be foolish, and it's tough enough out there in the job market at the moment without making life even more difficult, but it would be fair to assume that I'm old enough to know better about a lot of things, some of which I can't even mention. Equally, I don't want to come across as 'totally zany' and 'crazy', I'm not one of those 'you don't have to be mad to work here, but it helps' kind of guys either, I'm not the office wag, but I'd go as far as to say that I've made an arse of myself here and there on many occasions, normally in some way alcohol related.

And there have been plenty of times when I've thought I might have made an arse of myself when I hadn't. Like the time when I borrowed my dad's dress suit to attend a black tie dinner and then somehow mislaid the trousers. How? Why did I hand the suit back minus the trousers? Alcohol-induced paranoia set in and I started to wonder if I'd left the venue, a top London hotel in Park Lane, minus my trousers. I went back through my memory banks, started calling people who were there and saying, "So, what did you think of last night?" waiting for one of them, just one of them, to say, "Well, it was alright until you took your trousers off and started bragging about the size of your penis." Nobody said anything even remotely uncomplimentary about my behaviour, or my penis, and I realised that when I went round to dad's to hand back the dress suit, the trousers must have quietly slipped off the hanger and landed in the street somewhere. It was dark and I wouldn't have noticed. But even now, I wait with bated breath for the call and somebody reminiscing on past events. "Hey, Matthew, remember the time when you..?"

But what about that inappropriate bike of mine? Well, it is, for heaven's sake: it's a dirt jumper with no mudguards and it has a bit of attitude, a bit of cred. I should have bought something sensible with mudguards and a basket on the front, possibly a rack on the back, but I went out and bought a very expensive, slightly juvenile-looking Kona Scrap. I probably look a little out of place on it, to be honest, but nobody says anything, I like it and yes, I get a buzz everytime I go out on it. But why?

Why do I still get excited about things I got excited about as a kid? I still love the smell of a bike shop, the thrill of the new bikes lined up in rows, it's ridiculous. I should have packed up the bike ages ago, I should be much more interested in pension plans, the state of the economy, and other boring stuff, like my neighbour, who can't be that much older than I am, but he's one of those people who knows a helluva lot about car insurance and what it all means, he probably worries about his no claims bonus, he probably knows how much a gallon of petrol costs. I don't.

But then there is something irresponsible about my general outlook. I have two children but sometimes I'm a bigger kid than my ten-year-old daughter and while my 18-year-old is much cooler than I'll ever be – that's one thing I've never been, cool and I don't want to be – I view myself as younger than he perceives me to be: but I'm 'dad' for heaven's sake and it worries me. I hate the idea of growing up or being grown up.

There's nothing worse than going to parents's evenings at school where I find myself mixing with people that LOOK like dads. I find myself a little uncomfortable in their company because I view them as the grown ups and consider myself to be still not there, not quite in that ballpark. And yet I am in that ballpark I guess and it only hits home when I see photographs of myself and realise that I'm not getting any younger.

Look, I'm not that bad, but there's grey hair. Grey hair! And I start to wonder whether I should dye it or let it go grey and I start thinking about proper cool people who are older than I am: Pete Townshend; Roger Daltry; John Lydon (well, only just older) and I feel better about things. I'm not saying that Townshend and Daltry are big kids, but Lydon still has the spark.

In fact, that reminds me of something else that can be classified as 'big kid' behaviour: my current desire to buy and learn how to play the bass guitar. To be fair, it's something I've always wanted to do, along with owning a replica gun and an air pistol (I've had both), but I've just got to have one and will shortly be buying one. Right now I keep finding music shops and sitting there, Fender plugged in, trying to pick out bass lines. My excuse, by the way, is that I used to play the violin, the bass has the same strings but the other way around and, well, that's it. And I'm not going to deny that I still have rock star fantasies too and dreams that one day I'll pen the definitive 21st Century novel and make a fortune and go live on the beach somewhere in Northern California.

Perhaps it is healthy to be this way. Perhaps it's best to live in a world of unrealistic dreams rather than getting bogged down with being overly responsible and knowing too much about grown up things like tax and pensions and insurance and whether or not fully comprehensive insurance is a better bet than third party, fire and theft. I don't know.

But then I realise that in other aspects of life I have grown up, although I've never been a great 'car' person. I watch Top Gear with a sneer aimed at those Genesis-loving, real ale drinking, car nuts that populate the audience of the show. If I won the lottery I'd never go out and buy a Ferrari, they just don't appeal to me. I'd rather buy a house by the sea. I have no desire for large sums of money because wealth is not, for some reason, a key motivator in my life. So that might be construed as being a grown-up, although I hope not.

I don't like current popular music and would never pretend that I do. I want John and Edward to win the X Factor, but only because them winning would reveal the show for what it is: a load of old poppycock. Now there's a grown up, 'mum and dad' sort of phrase: poppycock.

Both of my parents are still alive, which is great. They're both 80, but it got me thinking that you don't really grow up until your parents die and you've no longer got anybody to call mum or dad, nobody ahead of you to meet the Grim Reaper. Perhaps I'll sober up when the ratchet clicks round one and I'm next on the conveyor belt of death. Perhaps then I'll start forgetting about playing the bass guitar, having rock star fantasies and riding off in to the sunset on my Kona dirtjumper. Perhaps not.

Mind you, a Kona dirtjumper; it's not exactly a Harley Davidson, that true sign of having a mid-life crisis. But I've been there, had that fantasy and managed to kick it. I didn't want to die young – and still don't. I worry about death because my big kid attitude is a sign of constant immaturity that will probably stretch to believing that my time should never be up, that I'm miles too young to die and have miles too much to do, even when I'm in my eighties.

Weirdly, make that luckily, all of my friends are big kids too, otherwise I'd have nobody to play with or go out cycling (although cycling isn't a pastime for big kids alone it's a great way to keep fit too). I've got another friend with an electric guitar, so perhaps him and I will form a garageband and make it big and....

I better go before I incriminate myself even more.

Please, make the missable, missable

2009-10-29T14:42:00.000-07:00

'Making the unmissable, unmissable'. A nice catchy little phrase if ever there was one and it relates to the BBC's iPlayer technology that allows you to watch stuff on television that you might have missed first time round – because you were (ahem) busy watching something else on the other side or, perhaps, stuffing you fat face with doughnuts and chocolate while watching something on the other side.

You might, for instance, have been sitting moronically in front of the box while all those sad Z list celebrities and past it sportsmen and women try to kickstart their uninspiring careers by dancing for you in front of a bunch of judges. Then you thought you'd better find out whether John and Edward were still in for a chance in the decidedly tacky X Factor over on ITV – where non-celebrities who want to be Z list celebrities sing and dance for you and then make phone signs at you in a desperate attempt to get you, yes you, off your fat arse to vote for them. Lucky you've got your mobile phone with you, don't want to miss out on some sarcastic comment from Simon Cowell, and who can be arsed to get up to vote? Not you, eh? Just sit there with a huge bag of Doritos and a large plastic bottle of Coca Cola, getting fatter and fatter.

Making the unmissable, unmissable. Well, yes, if the programmes genuinely were unmissable, but the fact is, of course, they are all totally missable – or should be. Ironically, this week the iPlayer was screening a programme entitled Who Made Me Fat? A good question. Perhaps it has something to do with making the unmissable, unmissable. When you should be out getting some exercise, the BBC is trying its level best to stop you at a time when obesity has reached crisis levels in this country.

There was a time when fat people – I mean really fat people – were, not rare, but rarely seen. I remember at school we had a few fatties around who used to hold their 'man boobs' or 'moobs' as they are affectionately known today, during PE lessons, but at least they were indulging in PE! These days, thanks to fast food and lazy lifestyles, fat people are everywhere and a lot of them make it on to television game shows for some reason; women with 'bingo wings' can often be seen on tacky panel games like Family Fortunes, a programme that has become a parody of itself and its genre.

But I digress. We all know about lazy lifestyles and how eating too much fast food has led to the development of a nation of fatsos. We all know about how much they are costing us in terms of healthcare and we all know that being fat can be rectified with a little exercise and a healthy diet. But if the media starts 'making the unmissable, unmissable' then there is no hope for us.

Why have we become a nation obsessed with information?

The other day, while waiting for a train late at night, I watched a small television screen playing inside an estate agency on the station concourse. It was Sky television and the channel was advertising its text news service, claiming to offer up-to-the-minute breaking news for just 25p per text. It might seem cheap, but it soon adds up, believe me, and I wonder how many text messages Sky sends you every day. If it's four that's a quid. The point is, nobody, bar the Prime Minister or the President of the United States, needs to be constantly informed about world affairs. Perhaps if you work in the newsroom at the BBC, yes, but if you're Joe Scroggins who works in a supermarket or in an office anywhere in the UK, why the hell would you want to be THAT well informed.

Have you ever sat down and watched Breakfast television? You have? Oh, that's good because it means you will know that the news simply repeats itself throughout the programme; there is nothing new, news is not that fast moving so why the hell would anybody want to be updated with up-to-minute news texts? Similarly, why watch breakfast television anyway? It is designed to make you late for work or not eat your breakfast properly because you're too busy watching the television.

For the sake of good health, let's make the missable, missable and then we might take a little bit of the burden off of the NHS.

Are you real? I mean I'm not imagining you am I?

2009-10-03T00:09:00.000-07:00

I was around in the early nineties, during that awful recession. I was made redundant three times in a row, everything was uncertain, nobody had jobs and I found myself scrabbling around for work, freelance writing, then getting a job only to lose it again and so on, until things levelled off a little and everything went back to normal.

It's weird, isn't it? Nowadays, whenever the word 'recession' is mentioned, I worry. I don't want to go through all that again. I hate it when I hear people wheel out the old familiar phrases about 'battening down the hatches', 'any port in a storm' and all that making do rubbish. I start to get angry and wonder who's to blame.

I used to remember in the early nineties hearing phrases like, 'we've reached the bottom' and it always conjured up images of those infra red cameras on the sea bed lurking around the wreck of the titanic. It's bottomed out, we're scraping the bottom, all the imagery that suggests the only way is up. And then, of course, that was the mantra, 'the only way is up', Yazz and New Labour, images of Prescott and Mandelson and Blair jigging around self-consciously as 'New Labour' swept to power in 1997 and a new dawn beckoned. Cool Brittannia, Noel Gallagher in Number Ten, the whole thing.

For a while I remember thinking, nothing more to worry about, no more recession and so on and so forth, but of course, peace and tranquillity was never to be. The Twin Towers followed, then there was Dubya to contend with, Blair being the poodle, the deceit that was the Gulf War and that whole Jack Straw syndrome. I don't know, but I don't trust Straw one bit and the whole Iraq thing cemented him in particular as a key villian of the piece. Even recently, he was a key figure in vetoing disclosure of the minutes of the meeting about Britain's involvement in the decision to invade Iraq. Where there's smoke, there's friendly fire.

But while Iraq trundles on and Afghanistan continues apace, the last thing I wanted was another recession. Rumours started, there were occasional comments in the press, but a lot of the time they were brushed off until suddenly we started hearing the media talk us into it. People started talking about Fanny May and Freddie Mac, two people I'd never ever heard of before, but apparently they had always been larger than life characters in the American financial markets. Odd, when I consider how, throughout the nineties I was reading the Economist and the FT and never once heard mention of these two crucial financial institutions that, apparently, the world economies rely upon.

Sure enough, though, they were responsible for the current major recession or 'downturn' that we now, as a world, are confronting. They lent loads of money to people who couldn't afford to pay it back and suddenly the world faced an economic meltdown largely based on the greed of the banking community.

I find myself wondering many things. When did the world turn from being a largely safe place to the uncertain place it is now? How come I used to work in a variety of jobs (all within the world of publishing) but never once did the commercial realities of life gatecrash my world. I used to go to work, do my job, come home and that was it; the fact that the advertising sales team was either incompetent and not up to the job or that 'market conditions' were forcing their hands never really bothered me. Market conditions never bothered me, they were resigned to the financial pages and were always slightly boring.

Now, of course, market forces are all that seem to matter. Everything is about cost and budgets. We're all in the hands of salesman, sadly, and they determine whether or not we have jobs or not.

But that aside, I now find myself more in tune with conspiracy theorists than ever before. Why? Because things just don't add up. Take the twin towers in NYC, why did they come down like a controlled demolition explosion? How come they then gave Dubya the perfect excuse to flex the military might of the USA in just the countries he wanted to invade? Why did we believe all that rubbish about 45-minute warnings and weapons of mass destruction that have since been proved to be complete and utter rubbish? Who the hell are Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac and why did they suddenly emerge as the key protagonists in the current global economic downturn when we'd never heard of them before?

I read Orwell's 1984 recently, it was one of those books that, of course, everybody must read at some stage in their lives and I hadn't gotten round to it until just a few years ago. What struck me about the book was the similarity between our current situation in Afghanistan and the conflicts that take place in the novel, they're just ongoing and all the people 'at home' hear are the news reports: yet another British soldier dies due to a roadside bomb, constant mentions of Helmand Province and at home everybody wondering why, what's the point? It's almost exactly like Orwell's masterpiece with a mythical enemy and media machine pumping us full of propaganda to keep us on-side, as it were.

It's the same with the recession and the so-called 'credit crunch'. We're all being told to 'batten down the hatches', there are programmes on the television and articles in newspapers showing us how to use our leftovers and be frugal, and the feeling is that 'they', whoever they are, are making deliberate parallels between now and war time rationing and trying to get us all thinking, perhaps, that we're a country at war – we are not, by the way; nobody is trying to invade us and haven't done for 70 years.

And then, of course, there's the great mythical villan that nobody can catch, that former employee of the USA, Osama Bin Laden. How come they can't catch him? They can catch virtually everybody else, they can put men on the moon, imprison dangerous criminals but they can't catch a man with a towel on his head whose picture is everywhere. Once again, perhaps it's all a scam, perhaps that's the deal with Osama, who knows? Where is he? Does he really exist? Is he really in cahoots with the ruling elite and is the whole 'culture of fear' and the so-called 'War on Terror' merely designed to keep us all in our place, like a kind of religion. Is it all another 'Opium for the People'? We occasionally hear about the status of the current terror alert – it's either low, moderate, substantial, severe or critical. Well, I don't know what it is right now, but what's the betting it's not low or moderate? Got to keep everybody on tenterhooks, eh?

Why is it that the recession is supposedly a big, full-on thing, much bigger than in the early nineties, that we should all be concerned about, but people are still going on foreign holidays, there are still ads on the TV for cars – a Golf for only £14,000? Fourteen grand is a lot of money in a cash-starved country with a recession of the size an enormity our respective Governments and media organisations are talking about. Who CAN afford a Golf for just £14,000 in these troubled economic times we're being told about?

And what about the crowded cafés and restaurants in London. I pass them daily and inside there are loads of people eating and drinking, there are bottles of wine on the table, the food is ridiculously expensive for what it is but even now, as I sit here in an upbeat sandwich bar on Holborn Circus at 4pm looking around me there are people sipping tea, munching on almond croissants and the like. Why? Haven't they got jobs to go? They certainly don't look unemployed and if they are, why are they here when they should be out looking for a job?

And how come that everywhere I look there are houses being extended, drives being done – I know somebody who has just spent £12,000 on a new driveway – and why has everybody got a new car and expensive iPhones?

For some reason, nothing seems to ring true to me, although I'm sure I'll be told that it is all very true, very real. Unemployment lurches towards three million, the 'war' in Afghanistan continues apace, news reports of casualties in a far off land, just like in 1984.

And then, of course, there's the UK's horrible 'celeb' culture. How come we're all prepared to 'cut our cloth accordingly, 'batten down the hatches' and so on but are quite content to watch various celebs, like Jordan, on shopping sprees with, supposedly, not a care in the world? Why the hell do we accept it? Why the hell has there not been some kind of revolution or uprising, why has nobody appeared as a people's champion, why has there been little in the way of rioting in the streets, why is there no militant group (or groups) attacking the icons of wealth and big business?

No, everything simply carries on. Perhaps nothing has really happened at all. Perhaps it is just a lot of posturing, a lot of political manipulation, creating a climate of fear through terrorist alerts and 'economic downturns' that might be all wildly exagerrated.

How come, for example, that we occasionally hear of how a major terrorist ring has been busted by the security forces that could have been responsible for untold atrocities, but it's all kept at arm's length and we all sit back with our espressos and cappuccinos and just accept it as gospel?

Recessions encourage apathy and give businesses an excuse to do nothing. Terrorism, or the threat of it, gives the authorities the excuse to clamp down on the man in the street. Local councils abuse anti-terrorist laws purely because they can and we all sit back and let it happen.

The harsh reality of life

2009-09-17T05:51:00.000-07:00

Death worries me. It always has done, ever since I was 19 when I realised, or rather twigged on to the fact, that I wasn't going to live forever and that one day I will die. It's best not to think about it too much, I guess, otherwise what is the point of living? And that, of course, is the big question that philosophers and theologians have been trying to answer ever since they were born. As yet, nobody really has an answer to the meaning of life, prompting the question: does there have to be a meaning?

The Earth is a tiny ball in the middle of nowhere and it doesn't look as if there is any sign of life elsewhere, certainly not in our solar system, but arguably not anywhere else either. That said, I hope that the human race is not THAT arrogant to assume that it is alone and that nowhere else in the galaxy there are other living beings. I used to think that somewhere else, somewhere millions of light years away, there were other 'humans', the same as us, either more or less advanced than we are; in other words, humans living in, say, the 16th Century or the 34th Century but on another Earth, millions of light years from our Earth. Even now, as I write this, there are other beings working in offices or whatever, doing the same mundane things that we are doing and equally as unaware of our existence and we are of their's.

But whether there are alien life forms on other planets light years from earth is one thing, whether there is life after death is another and while I would like to think that there is such as thing as Heaven, science and Darwinism says no: we live, we die, that's the end of it. But in the same way that I am constantly wondering what contains space, ie does it have an end and if something does contain space, what contains the container and so on, I wonder about life after death and the whole notion of eternity.

Eternity and infinity run along on parallel tracks, the former to do with time and the latter to do with distance. In many ways, time and distance are good bedfellows and cannot live without one another. When you think about it, a road, say, is merely a measurement of how long it takes to get from one end of it to the other; if there was no such thing as time there would be no road.

Both eternity and infinity are hard concepts to grasp. The whole notion of there being no end so that when you die you're dead, you're not coming back, not tomorrow, not next week and not next year is very hard. Think about it too much and it will drive you mad. Similarly infinity.

I used to comfort myself by imagining that life was really a big reality TV show where, when you die, you 'wake up' in the Green Room of some television studio, having your make-up put on ready for a chat with Davina and a VT run-through of your 'best bits'. Where you go after the show I don't know, perhaps then you die and it's all just as scary as it was anyway. Years ago, I remember watching the original Star Trek just for the end credits when they showed stills of the episode you had been watching and I started thinking that life after death was a bit like that, still scenes of your life from birth the the Star Trek theme music playing in the background. Again, I never dealt with the bit after the credits had ended.

Why am I writing this rather morbid article? A week ago today (September 12 2009) by father-in-law woke up as normal, got dressed and went for his walk to pick up the Saturday papers. He'd been walking early in the morning regularly since a heart bypass operation in 1988 and, all things considered, he's been doing very well, no real set-backs and if you met him in the street you wouldn't guess that he'd even had a heart problem. Life went on and we all generally forgot about the operation apart from reminding him here and there not to eat fatty foods.

Earlier this year he had an operation, which, at 76, was a little risky and after a few complications, things levelled out, he resumed his morning walks again and things got back on a relatively even keel. Until last Saturday when he returned from his walk, took his blood pressure, found it was dangerously high and then collapsed upstairs in his bedroom. It was later confirmed that he suffered a heart attack. He lost valuable minutes of oxygen and when he was finally resuscitated in the ambulance on the way to the hospital he had what doctors later confirmed to be significant brain damage.

Last Sunday the doctors said there was no hope. He was given the last rites. My wife, her brother and her mother stayed overnight at the hospital expecting the worst but nothing happened, the machines that had been keeping him going had been switched off and he was battling for his life on his own steam. The doctors said it was unprecedented, that somebody with significant brain damage and in his condition should still be alive, but he was, albeit in an unconscious state. He even attempted to open his eyes when his wife called his name.

I had been down to the hospital to see him on that Sunday night. The image has remained with me as has the general sadness surrounding the situation: a man literally on the edge of time itself with his family by his side, tubes running in to his mouth and a range of machines behind him keeping him alive. Everyone thought it would be all over that night, but it wasn't; he was still going strong the next morning without the support of most of the machines behind him and that was how things remained all week.

For a while there was hope. Perhaps he could come out of this, but what sort of life would he have? Brain damage meant he would not recognise anybody or anything, he would be deaf, dumb and blind to the outside world. On Friday – yesterday afternoon – my wife was told that there was little else the hospital could do. It had become a waiting game and they would call when it was time.

As I write this, at 1653hrs on Saturday 19 September, my wife, her mother and brother are back at the hospital, waiting. Doubtless when I next see them he will be gone, he would have left this world never to return again. Whether or not he's gone to that Green Room and whether or not he's sitting there watching a re-run of his 'best bits', I don't know. Nobody has ever returned to explain what happens next.

The whole experience of bereavment is something a lot of people go through every day. We are not unique, I am not unique in my feelings.

As I sit here now, awaiting some news, I look around me at everyday objects: table lamps, printers, tea cups, books, the garden, the telephone. Mundane, everyday objects which no longer apply, no longer have any meaning to my father-in-law and it doesn't make sense how one minute all these mundane objects have meaning – lawn mowers, cars, lottery tickets, televisions – and then they don't, they mean nothing. Nothing has any meaning, leading me and, I'm sure, many other people to ponder the point. What is the point? Everything seems so futile and pointless and yet it is all we know, there is no alternative.

I've always been of the belief that we don't really grow up until both of our parents are dead and we no longer have anybody to call mum or dad, we are no longer somebody's kid but we've probably got kids of our own. Once both parents gone, I guess we do 'grow up' and that huge, rusty old rachet in the sky cranks round into the next notch, signalling that we are the next in line.

There probably isn't any point to living and dying, it just happens, it's the way of the world and we just have to get used to it; as I say, there is nothing else. Religion keeps some of us on the straight and narrow and believing that there is more; the atheists among us brave it out but probably secretly hope there is more too. There's no point in even being cowardly about all this because it's inevitable, God given, the truth, the final reality. And then there is Pascal's Wager – that you might as well believe in God because if there is a heaven you won't be going there if you're a disbeliever, something like that. Why take the risk?

I'm always amazed at how everybody goes about their lives seemingly without a care, watching sitcoms, going to work, surfing the net, buying groceries. I'm often stunned that we accept it all so calmly, but how the hell should we behave?

Today I've learned two things: one, that there is absolutely no point in fretting about anything as life literally is too short; two, that the best way to live your life is to be calm and go out of your way to make others calm too, just like my wife's father did. He was special, everyone is special, but he had an extra special quality. He died around a quarter past six this evening, his immediate family all present. In that sense he was a very lucky man.

There's no disguising it, I really don't like football

2009-08-28T04:45:00.000-07:00

‘Thugs return to drag soccer back into the gutter’ screamed a headline on the back page of The Sun following the West Ham versus Millwall match at Upton Park this week.

Hold on a minute, let’s go back on that headline. ‘…drag soccer BACK into the gutter’. It’s never left the gutter!

I speak from the perspective of somebody who has never really enjoyed football. Ever since I can remember, ‘footy’ has been the sport of the numpty, the racist and the hooligan. Football is all about tattoos and cheap lager and it has the audacity to call itself, rather self-consciously, ‘the beautiful game’. What’s beautiful about football?

Football is such an unattractive sport, that it’s almost hard to work out where to begin in this tirade against it. Well, how about the stereotype? That awful thing about all men liking football and all women rolling their eyes affectionately as ‘their men’ – yes, we’re talking about women with lower back tattoos, or ‘slag tags’ – go down the pub to watch the match on the plasma. Needless to say, they return later, having missed their dinner (it’s in the f**kin’ dog! – and he’s a pitbull called Tyson) and their ‘slag tag’ women are still rolling their eyes.

Men who like footy are often called Gary or Kevin – alright, we’re sticking with the stereotype, but bear with me – and they wear football shirts and knee-length shorts, exposing a calf muscle tattoo which only sees the light of day in the summer or down at the local authority leisure centre on a Sunday afternoon along with all their other tattoos. Look at any photograph of football violence and you can be guaranteed to see a tattoo somewhere. It goes with the territory.

And what about the ‘professional supporters’ who reinforce the stereotype? There are high profile people who want other people to know that they are staunch supporters of some team or other just so that they can be seen as ‘down with the plebs’ when it comes to getting a vote at the next general election.

There’s nothing worse than politicians who ram their support of a football club down our necks. I’m thinking David Mellor, the late Tony Banks and, of course, the original ‘spin doctor’, Alastair Campbell. Oops, I almost forgot Adrian Chiles, co-presenter of The One Show, and his very public obsession with West Bromwich Albion, cue eye-rolling from Christine Bleakley and any other women in his vicinity.

The worst thing about all of this is that men are sort of expected to like football from an early age. There is that great stereotypical ‘man and boy’ nonsense that involves father taking his son to the ‘footy’ and then his son becoming a diehard supporter until the day he dies. Yuk! We hear people talk about their ‘beloved Burnley’. Give it a rest!

Football is a bad-tempered game for strops, which, ironically is ‘sports’ spelt backwards. Is it just me or is the word ‘football’ the only sport one can add the word ‘violence’ to without flinching? Somehow they go together quite nicely and there are countless examples of football violence, including the recent West Ham/Millwall incident, which prove that football is a yob’s game. You never hear of tennis hooligans or cricket hooligans.

Personally, I dislike the assumption that all men like football and the fact that men feel obliged to engage other men in conversation about the ‘beautiful game’. I would go as far as to say that it used to make me feel inadequate, the fact that I knew very little about the game, but now I am quite proud of my ignorance towards it. I’ve noticed that, armed with just a few miniscule facts, one can keep a football conversation going all afternoon if need be – it’s that shallow.

“You watch the game last night?”

“Er….” “Chelsea Man U?” “

Oh, no, I missed it, but Chelsea won didn’t they?”

“Yeah, 4-1, a good match. Felt sorry for Giggsy, though”

“Who?”

But if you swear a bit, bring in a little of history and then swear again, you can go on throughout the night if need be and even convince the person you’re talking to that you know a bit about about ‘the beautiful game’.

“You watch the game last night?”

“Yeah, f**king shit. Ooh you support?”

“Chelsea.”

“Ah right, the f**king blues, yeah? Well, yeah, like, I’m with Man U. Never been to f**kin’ Manchester, though, but nor have half of their f**king supporters, have they?”

“Nah, right. Felt sorry for Giggsy, though.”

“The f**king Giggsmeister? Star f**king player, Giggsy. Could do with a f**king shave, though.”

“4-1, though, you were thrashed.”

“Yeah, well, if we’d had star players like Sir Bobby or Bryan Kidd on the field, we’d have won hands down.”

“Nah, your team’s f**king useless, mate; you should support a decent team like Chelsea, you c**t.”

“Yeah, yer c**t, we’ll beat you in the next round, you wait an’ see.”

And on and on and on it goes, the play-acting, but now, thanks to a few choice expletives, you can carry on the chat, even if your level of football knowledge is virtually nil. Throw in a pint of gassy, cheap lager, go and get a tattoo on your calf and you’re one of the lads.

And don’t you hate all that ‘Giggsy’ rubbish? Everybody’s name gets an ‘eee’ at the end: ‘Giggsy’, ‘Crouchie’, ‘Wrighty’, ‘Colesey’.

While I use to be concerned about my lack of knowledge of the beautiful game, I no longer care. In fact, I make a point of intensifying my ignorance of the game by bringing in players long retired if ever the conversation arises. If, for example, Chelsea is about to play a big match, I might ask if Ron ‘Chopper’ Harris or Peter Osgood is still playing. Such a remark is normally met with a sigh of impatience as football people hate it when they converse with somebody who doesn’t understand the sport or who might be taking the Michael. I wallow in the fact that I am completely in the dark as to who is playing who, which teams have made it to the FA Cup Final or who is where in the Premiership or the Champions League.

I was on a foreign business trip once when the people I was with – both Arsenal supporters – spent the entire dinner time watching their mobile phones as friends back in the UK kept them updated on the score of a crucial match. To watch these two grown men glued to their handsets was both disappointing and irritating in the extreme and I almost found myself wondering, is this just put on? Have they reached a point in their lives where even they believe they like the game so much that they have to exclude themselves from any form of human interaction just to keep up with the score of some match back in the UK? It was pathetic to watch.

Within my own family there are idiots who quite happily plunge themselves and the rest of their immediate family into a state of depression if their team loses a match. They don’t stop to think that it’s only a game.

But for me the worse thing about football is the uncalled for hatred it generates among the supporters – especially in the case of so-called ‘arch rivals’, which are normally those involved in what is called, for some reason, a local ‘Derby’. What the Derbyshire town or the Epsom horse race has in common with football I don’t know – apart from Brian Clough once being manager of Derby County. So if Arsenal is playing Spurs, or West Ham is playing Millwall or Brighton is playing Crystal Palace, Everton playing Liverpool and so on, there’s always a heightened sense of trouble on the horizon.

Brighton and Crystal Palace fans refer to one another as ‘scum’ – which sums up the level of ignorance among their football supporters; and we all know what happened at Upton Park the other night.

The level of ignorance is turned up a notch or two when you consider that supporters at a football match are not allowed to watch a game of football and drink alcohol at the same time. It doesn’t happen in any other sport: people drink solidly all day at cricket and rugby matches but you rarely hear of there being any trouble. At a football match, however, as soon as the players run on to the pitch, the shutters go down on anybody in corporate hospitality drinking a can of lager. Why? Because that’s the law and your average football supporter is such an idiot that he cannot be trusted to watch the game and drink at the same time for fear that he might go on the rampage.

Racism – or being racist – is a sign of ignorance anyway, but in football, it often goes with the territory. Many white football supporters think it is acceptable to call a black player certain names if he scores a goal for the rival team and again there are countless examples of this in press reports dating back years. Hell, even the players and managers have been accused of making racist remarks.

When there is ‘violence on the terraces’ it tends to reinforce my argument that the game is its own worst enemy. Try as they might to stop the trouble, the football authorities are fighting a losing battle because that is the way it is with football and its supporters and nothing will change it. If football supporters are so volatile that they cannot be trusted to watch a match and drink a pint of lager at the same time, then what hope is there?

A novel idea...

2009-08-26T00:00:00.001-07:00

If you have difficulty deciding what book to read when you next wander around a bookshop, worry no more as I might have the solution. For years, the thought processes behind my choice of novel were based on the recommendation of others, a book review in the Sunday papers or simply an impulse purchase based, perhaps, on the dodgy practice of judging a book by its cover.

I was getting frustrated. I needed some kind of structure to my reading life. I wanted a goal, something I could achieve. I was having problems knowing what to read next. Chick lit was always a no-go zone and so were bestsellers. I have always been a bit leftfield where literature is concerned. I don't want to follow the pack. I veer towards the sort of books you tend not to see people reading on the tube: Patrick Hamilton, Philip K Dick, Richard Wright, Saul Bellow to name but four authors whose work I have enjoyed.

A novel idea sprung to mind. What if I read an author for every letter of the alphabet starting with A and finishing with Z? I set about working out the ground rules, the main one being that I could not read any author whose work I had read before. The idea was to find new authors and tread new ground.

This would be an exercise in purity, so translations were out of the question. I had to follow the alphabet and I couldn't stray from A to T to Y to F. The challenge lay ahead and there was nothing else to do other than get started. What I didn't realise until I reached the letter F was that I needed a guide, something to keep me on the right path and provide scope, depth and enlightenment. I wanted to remain outside of the mainstream, but not having a guide meant that I fell at the first fence.

I chose Jake Arnott's The Long Firm, a bestseller recommended to me some time ago. Crime fiction is not my bag. Another rule sprung to mind: I would only read books that I bought personally. No outside influences. Everything had to be my decision. Next up was David Baldacci's The Christmas Train, a rather schmaltzy tale of a journalist who meets his ex-girlfriend on a train from Chicago to LA. It was like reading the screenplay of an American 'rom-com' – the sort of thing you might expect to watch in the afternoon on Christmas Eve.

JJ Connolly's Layer Cake followed. This and Arnott's The Long Firm were what I call 'shut it you muppet' books, the sort of novels Guy Ritchie might adapt into feature films with Vinny Jones and Bill Nighy in leading roles. Not my cup of tea, but the gauntlet had been thrown down and another rule too: I had to finish every book as, to the best of my knowledge, the police had no intention of announcing an amnesty on unread novels.

A lot of people find it hard to believe that I have never read any Roald Dahl. Even I wondered whether or not I had broken my golden rule unknowingly as I sat down to read Kiss Kiss, a collection of Dahl's excellent short stories, especially Parson's Pleasure. Dahl proved to be the best so far and in many ways acted as a kind of bridge to better things ahead, starting with the letter E.

Dave Eggers' first novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity, drew me into the realm of 'cult' fiction. It is the story of Will and Hand and their decision to journey around the world in a random fashion giving away inherited money in obscure countries. "Everything within takes place after Jack died and before my mom and I drowned in a burning ferry in the cool tannin-tinted Guaviare River, in East Central Columbia, with forty-two locals we hadn't yet met." That is the novel's opening sentence. I expected great things and found them.

My guardian angel appeared in the shape of the Rough Guide to Cult Fiction, an excellent directory of cult novelists billed as 'genre benders, beats, gurus, drunks, junkies, sinners and surrealists'. I didn't have to follow the guide, but it steered me away from the junk and into the path of some interesting writers like John Fante whose Ask the Dust, one of four novels collectively known as the 'Bandini Quartet' was next on my list.

Fante, an American born in 1909 went largely unnoticed as a writer until novelist Charles Bukowski, who listed Fante as a key influence, mentioned him in one of his novels. Both men were key exponents of what became known as the hard-boiled style of writing: unpretentious and to the point. I stuck with the hard-boiled style for my letter G and a novel by another American writer, David Goodis, billed as 'the dark prince of paperback pulp'. I chose The Moon in the Gutter, the story of docker William Kerrigan looking for a way out of his sorry existence in scrag-end Philadelphia. Not bad, but I needed something a little heavier and found it when I chose my next book, Michel Houellebecq's Atomised.

I had to break one of my rules. My copy of Atomised was translated by Frank Wynne which meant that I was not reading the original text. I decided to go ahead based on the theory that rules were there to be broken. Atomised proved to be emotionally moving for me and I can't figure out why. It is the story of two brothers who share the same mother but live completely different lives. One is a libertine, the other a thinker and idealist. The book was tinged with sadness and tragedy which, I admit, brought a tear to my eye.

The letter i proved problematical as I had decided, thanks to the Rough Guide to Cult Fiction, to read something by the American author Gary Indiana. I considered and rejected Guillermo Cabrera Infante, the only other author listed under i, because I had already broken my rule on translations with Atomised. The bookshops had proved uninspiring where the letter i was concerned and this sorry state of affairs meant breaking another rule – that I should not jump out of alphabetical sequence – as I had to move on to the letter L and my first non-fiction title, Richard Lomax's The Railway Man which I picked up in a charity shop for 99p. Lomax was one of many prisoners of war tortured by the Japanese while constructing the Burma Siam Railway.

Getting hold of a copy of anything by Gary Indiana in the UK was proving a big problem so I had to abandon my quest and carry on with the task in hand. I chose BS Johnson's Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry as my letter J. Johnson, much to his own dislike, was billed as an experimental novelist. He didn't believe in beginnings, middles and ends and produced one of his novels in 27 different pamphlets so that readers could shuffle and read it in any order. Christie Malry is the story of a man who gets even with society using the principles of double-entry bookkeeping.

Johnson was one of two novelists on my list who committed suicide, the other being another so-called experimental novelist, Ann Quin, who walked into the sea at Brighton and drowned. Like Gary Indiana, however, I never found copies of her work in any bookshop in the UK. It took a trip to Portland, Oregon, and a visit to the world famous Powell's Books to finally pick up Horse Crazy by Gary Indiana; Ann Quin's Three; and Will Self's How the Dead Live. By this stage in my challenge I had moved along to the letter R and was reading Derek Raymond's How the Dead Live. The reason I bought Self's novel was because I was intrigued to read two completely different books sharing the same title. Self openly admits in the foreword to Raymond's book that he blatantly ripped off the title, quoting Auden who said 'Bad writers borrow. Good ones steal.'

Raymond, born Robert Cook in 1931, died in 1994. According to the Rough Guide to Cult Fiction, drink had taken its toll. He was billed as the 'Godfather of English noir fiction' and used the pseudonym of Derek Raymond in homage to detective novelist Raymond Chandler. Raymond's How the Dead Live concerns the investigation of a previously unexplained death. The novel's central character – a nameless detective – features in Raymond's so-called Factory novels of which this is one.

Self's novel is all about Lily Bloom, a former PR executive who dies of cancer and moves to Dulston, a part of London where the dead live alongside their spiritual guides. Bloom spends her dead life watching over the calamitous lives of her two daughters and is eventually 'reborn' as her own granddaughter. It is a good novel and while there are those who criticise Self for his use of 'big words', Self, like Henry Miller and JG Ballard, is a technically brilliant writer in my opinion.

But what about the letters J through to P? Jim Giraffe by Daren King was the ludicrous story of Scott Spectrum, a man haunted by a ghost giraffe. Perhaps I missed the point, but I found King's book too silly for words and a little bit tiresome as a result. I chose Patrick McGrath's Asylum for my letter M. The Rough Guide to Cult Fiction had good things to say about McGrath, the son of a medical superintendent at Broadmoor. Asylum is the story of a doctor's wife who falls in love with a violent mental patient at an institution not dissimilar to Broadmoor. The letter N gave me the chance to read Nabokov's controversial Lolita, the story of Humbert Humbert and his obession with a 12-year-old girl. Looking back through my copy, I note that I have underlined interesting words throughout the text such as 'favonian' , 'acrosonic' and 'phocine', none of which can be found in my Concise Oxford Dictionary.

For the letter O I had plenty to choose from: Patrick O'Brian and Edna O'Brien being two novelists I could have chosen. Instead, I opted for somebody less well known and with a less conventional O' name. Stewart O'Nan's Night Country was the story of the aftermath of a car crash and the story of the victims' ghosts who come back from the dead to visit those they believe are responsible for their deaths. O'Nan, an American writer, has seven other novels to his name.

There were so many Ps I could have chosen, but I foolishly started judging books by covers and opted for Chuck Palanuik's Haunted, a novel of different stories told by people imprisoned in an artists' retreat. It was alright in parts but it dragged and I was glad when I finished it.

Ann Quin's Three was another book I was unable to find in the UK and bought at Powell's Books in Portland, Oregon. I was hesitant about Quin because I was uncomfortable with 'experimental' novelists. I didn't want to read a book written, say, with no consonants, or a novel that could be read backwards. Quin's novel, I am pleased to say, was not thatexperimental. In Three, she experiments with different kinds of narrative. The book centres on the lives of three people living together in a house on the south coast (Quin lived and died in Brighton). Ruth and Leonard are middle-aged and married and S is a young woman who comes to live with them. The novel starts with the girl's suicide and then becomes a haunting snapshot of their lives together, their suspicions of one another, told through the different narratives. The thoughts of S are expressed through a diary she kept while living at the house. I approached Three with trepidation and under the impression it would be a hard slog, but I was pleasantly surprised and like all good novels, it haunts me now.

Derek Raymond's and Will Self's How the Dead Live were next and then another non-fiction book, this time Mark Thomas' Belching Out the Devil, the story of how Coca Cola has exploited work forces and ruined water systems in Turkey, Mexico and El Salvador. Thomas' book was good but it was ruined by a staggering number of literals. Here's just one, "They did not asked us to come."

The letter U was absent from the Rough Guide to Cult Fiction and nothing really inspired me in the bookshops. Fortunately, I owned a dog-eared copy of John Updike's Rabbit, Run, the first in a series of stories about Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, his doomed marriage to Janice and his pointless affair with Ruth.

I checked out my Rough Guide for the letter V and found only Kurt Vonnegut and Jules Verne, two authors I had read before so they were out of bounds. At the bookshop I found Willy Vlautin's Northline, the story of Allison, a young woman who escapes an abusive boyfriend and moves to Reno where she meets a succession of people who renew her faith in human nature. I loved this book for its clarity and atmosphere, its vivid characters and, ultimately, its hope. Vlautin has been labelled the 'Dylan of the dislocated' and I look forward to reading his other novel, This Motel Life. Vlautin also fronts the band Richmond Fontaine who will be playing in London in the autumn.

The letter W offered plenty of authors including Evelyn Waugh and PG Wodehouse, novelists I haven't read, but again I wanted something more leftfield and opted for Christopher Wilson's The Ballad of Lee Cotton, the story of a 'white' 'black' man with psyhic powers who wakes up after an accident to discover he's a white black man that has changed sex. For some reason, I read this book with a Chris Rock accent.

I thought the letter X would prove problematical but it was no problem at all. I found a copy of Village of Stone by Xiaolu Guo, which I bought, but then I found myself breaking out into a cold sweat. Guo, that's G, not X, so I rushed back to Waterstones and opened up another book by another Chinese author beginning with an X. I forget the name of the author, but in the preface it is pointed out that Chinese people put their surnames first, hence Xiaolu Guo. Guo is her first name.

I am half way through Village of Stone, the story of a young Chinese girl living in Beijing remembering her life in the Village of Stone, a coastal fishing village seemingly miles from anywhere.

The end of the project is nigh and I can already see the light at the end of the tunnel, which says I can read something else soon. And I really do want to read something else, something not in alphabetical sequence. There are other novels by the authors I have been reading for this task that I want to read, like Michel Houellebecq's Platform, like the rest of John Updike's Rabbit novels and, of course, This Motel Life by Willy Vlautin.

There are also novels that I simply have to read, like Joseph Heller's Catch 22, the red spine of which has been staring me out for years as I sit at my desk, mildy fretting that I have yet to pick it up and go further than just flicking through the pages. I've tried to read it before but have always given up and read something else.

I know what comes next. Metaphorically, right this minute, I have skipped a few chapters of my task and checked out the ending. For my letter Y it will definitely be something by Richard Yates, probably Revolutionary Road, but I'm not absolutely sure yet; and then, with Z, I'm not sure – possibly Richard Zimler – but I'm going to scour the bookshop shelves thoroughly before I reach for his The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon.

Has all this been worth it? Yes it has. I have introduced myself to novelists I would never have read, I have brought structure into my reading life and an element of randomness that has been exciting. Twenty six books – well, almost – and I will continue to the end and then, in true John Fowles fashion, come back and write another ending for this mammoth article.

How have I rated the books I've read? Well, to be honest, there are only a few of the chosen novelists who I would consider reading again. Definitely Dave Eggers, John Fante and Michel Houellebecq and I enjoyed Stewart O'Nan, Ann Quin and Derek Raymond. I will return to John Updike definitely and Willy Vlautin is on my list too. The rest were okay, but I wouldn't bust a gut to read more of them.

The problem with ‘quiet’ coaches on trains

2009-08-20T09:20:00.000-07:00

If you are a regular user of Inter City train services in the UK, you have, no doubt, noticed the trend towards ‘quiet’ coaches. I know why they exist: to protect travellers from those boringinly loud bastards on mobile phones who either make hundreds of excessive calls – I was on a train recently with a woman conducting a conference call on her mobile phone – and those who don’t know the meaning of the word ‘quiet’, ie you don’t shout, you talk.

‘Quiet’ coaches are, however, bloody irritating and, of late, I have noticed that they are being accorded the same status as smoking carriages in the days before smoking was banned, first unofficially and then for real back in July of 2007.

There was a time when, on a crowded train, if you were looking for somewhere to sit you would invariably be amazed to see ahead of you, as you clambered over suitcases and brushed gingerly past morbidly obese American tourists, that there was an empty carriage. Okay, it was at the very front of the train, but hey, beggars can’t be choosers, you might have thought until, that is, you realise that the reason the carriage is empty is because it’s a ‘smoker’, it stinks of fag ash and there’s enough people in there to make your journey splutteringly unpleasant.

Well, the ‘quiet’ carriage is now in the same position – except that there are no plans to abolish silence in public places.

Now, don’t get me wrong here. I’m all for silence, I would love a bit of peace and quiet, but the ‘quiet’ carriage is taking the piss. Not only does it catch you unawares: you find your seat, you sit down, unpack your laptop and reach for your mobile phone…and then you see the notice on the window: ‘Quiet Coach’. This is your cue to shut the fuck up, even if you’re not making any noise. And it sucks. Big time! What’s more, it’s unfair.

In the ‘quiet’ coach, you’re not banned from talking. If there was a group of you travelling together, you could still engage in an animated conversation, you could still laugh and cry and interact with your fellow human beings, but as soon as you picked up a mobile phone and started talking, evenly quietly, you would be contravening the number one rule, that mobile telephones – the very reason behind the quiet coaches – are taboo. You would be frowned upon by those who believe that your telephone conversation is far more intrusive and offensive than the group of office workers drinking Stella and guffawing loudly about last night’s office outing.

Train companies should employ somebody to stand at the entrance of all quiet coaches – now relegated to the far end of most trains – to say ‘Shhhhhhhhhhhhh!’ at everybody who enters, just by way of warning of what awaits them should they decide to take a seat. ‘Shhhhhhhhhhhhhh!’

‘Quiet’ coaches are full of inhuman, nosey neighbour types, the sort of people who peer at your from behind net curtains, the sort of people who have spent far too long in insurance and the sort of people who just want to moan at somebody, anybody, just as long as they can get their word in, which, of course, they can, because it’s a quiet carriage and, therefore, no risk of being interrupted.

I write this on the 1545hrs Paddington to Swansea train. I have just inadvertently walked into the ‘quiet’ coach, reached for my mobile phone and then spotted the words ‘quiet coach’ spread across the windows. But only AFTER I had dialled home to call my wife. Looking around, I noticed I was getting distasteful looks, but I still proceeded with the call. Hanging up would have been to admit defeat. I spoke quietly, finished my call and then made my way out of the coach.

I am now sitting in the noisy coach. You know the sort of thing, babies crying, phones ringing, but I don’t care. I like the hubbub and I hate feeling restricted. What I wish I had done while I was seated in the quiet coach was press the ringtone and then, in Dom Joly fashion, shout, "HELLOOOOOOOW! YES, IT’S ME!!!!! PARDON!!!!! NO! I’M IN THE QUIET COACH!!!!

Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!

Ends.

In case anybody was wondering....

2009-08-13T23:55:00.001-07:00

...the reason behind my lack of posts lately has been my other blog (http://teashopandcaff.blogspot.com). I've been posting quite a bit about teashops and caffs around the UK and, indeed, the world. I will be posting here again shortly, though.

The Royal Scotsman – what an experience!

2009-07-26T15:38:00.001-07:00

Photographs from the top: the observation car; the dining car; a table set for dinner; and one of the luxurious cabins.

"One thing about trains: it doesn't matter where they're going; what matters is deciding to get on." Tom Hanks, The Polar Express

When I was a child and my dad didn't have a car, we used to go everywhere by train. Visits to my nan in Wandsworth meant a train from Carshalton, change at Balham and alight at Wandsworth Common for a shortish walk down Burntwood Lane to Fieldview where my dad spent his childhood during the Second World War. The house is still there, but somebody has ruined my grandfather's prize-winning front garden by concreting it over. What a travesty. My dad says he can't pass by anymore because it looks such a mess.

That's another story. This one is all about a train. A luxury train. I loved trains when I was a kid, still do, but I was never a trainspotter. It's something about gazing out of the window at passing landscapes from the warmth of a train carriage. I always get slightly miffed when I hear people moaning about the trains because I use them a lot and I reckon I could count on just one hand the number of times I've been inconvenienced by signal failures or other problems. Most of the time, the train is there and is rarely late.

I'm a writer and journalist. In the mid-nineties I was editor of Pub Food magazine. The job took me all over the UK where I interviewed many pub chefs. It was a great job and I went to some seriously remote parts of the UK, all by train. And you know what? Even in the remotest part of the country, there was always a railway station that was never more than half an hour away from my final destination – a decent British pub serving top quality, homemade, locally produced food. I moved on to become editor of Hotel & Restaurant magazine and spent a further four years travelling the UK (and the world) writing about fine dining, top chefs and quality hotels. Again, I reached most places in the UK by train and rarely had a problem.

But this isn't a story about the punctuality or otherwise of the train network. This is a story about The Royal Scotsman, a train that is a cut above average. A train that will make you weep when you have to get off and go home, on a scheduled service, back to your mundane life.

The Royal Scotsman is a mode of transport that is not only romantic in the extreme but a time machine that will take you back, way back, to when movies were filmed in black and white and Margaret Rutherford was Miss Marple. You will find yourself in a spy movie, looking tensely at your watch as you make your way along the varnished corridors towards the dining car. Putting it bluntly, you will have the time of your life.

I mentioned earlier that I was a writer and journalist. Well, my chance to ride the Royal Scotsman – for free – came about when I decided to write about moving hotels: hotels with wheels or keels; and that was when I stumbled across what turned out to be one of the most amazing experiences of my life, which I still think about today and that I continue to rave about whenever the opportunity arises.

I often find myself involved in conversations about what to do for special occasions, fortieth birthdays, anniversaries, that sort of thing, and I always suggest a trip on the Royal Scotsman. It's not cheap. In fact, its damned expensive, but I would argue that all good experiences come at a cost unless, like me, you're a journalist writing about hotels and restaurants for a living.

Anyway, let's cut to the chase. I was up early and waiting for Rob Wilkinson, my photographer, at King's Cross. We travelled on the East Coast line using a normal scheduled service: any train that isn't the Royal Scotsman is a normal train in my book. When we reached Edinburgh Waverley we made our way to the Royal Scotsman and were piped aboard by a man in a kilt, a real Scottish piper no less!

Once on the train, we were shown to our cabins, but not ordinary cabins. These were the height of luxury with polished wood-panelled walls and ornate period furniture. As soon as I stepped aboard I went back in time to England in the 1930s. Suddenly I was a character in Graham Greene's Stamboul Train, I expected to bump into Peter Ustinov or David Niven at any moment.

The train jolted and was on its way north towards the Scottish Highlands, first stop Glamis Castle, but we were so taken aback by the train that we stayed aboard. There were plenty of other excursions away from the Royal Scotsman to come and besides, Rob and I had the train to ourselves. We wandered the corridors to the empty observation car with its sumptious furniture and exposed rear end where passengers could watch the tracks behind them disappear or could simply sit and enjoy the ride with a drink of their choice brought to them by one of the train's waiting staff.

Dinner was a high point of every day on board the Royal Scotsman. It was a chance to mix with the other passengers on board: a Harley Street dentist, a Florida car dealer and former baseball player, an Italian millionaire and his new wife on their honeymoon, a printer from Birmingham, a fairly ordinary couple from Cheam and, of course, us. The best conversation took place in the observation car after dinner when people were at their most animated after a decent meal and some fine wine.

The food was a serious cut above anything found on scheduled services in the UK, or, indeed, anywhere else. It was cooked to order by an accomplished chef and served with some amazing wines – while we were aboard the highlight was Francis Ford Coppola Merlot.

I was always reluctant to leave the train, but decided to take advantage of the excursions to wonderful places like the Falls of Bruar and to Gleneagles on our final evening where we were all invited to take part in a traditional Kayleigh before returning to the train.

The traditional dancing at Gleneagles prefaced our last night aboard the Royal Scotsman. In the minibus back to the train after the dance, there was silence: everybody knew that tomorrow they would have to wave goodbye to the train and the staff and the good times had by all. Nobody wanted to talk about going home so everybody remained silent.

The last time I felt remotely unhappy about going home was when I was a kid on holiday on the South Coast. Now, in my forties, married with two children, that feeling had come racing back to me and I was genuinely depressed about the prospect of having to disembark from this wonderful train.

Feeling pleasantly sozzled, as we all were most nights, it was time for us all to wind our way back to our respective cabins for the last time and that pleasant sensation of being rocked asleep by the motion of the train. Oddly, while on the train, I felt as if I had gone back in time. The only way to break the spell was to peer out of the window at the wrong moment, only to spy, say, a parked Somerfield lorry or something equally mundane from the 21st century.

By the next morning there were only minutes to go before the train arrived at Waverley and we would all go our separate ways, back to our normal lives in the new millennium. For Rob and I, reality meant a scheduled service to King's Cross, tea from a paper cup and sitting in Standard Class next to somebody eating fast food. You get the picture.

The trip has remained with us both and I think it always will.

If you would like to experience the Royal Scotsman, log on to www.royalscotsman.com or if you want to see more of Robert Wilkinson's photography, go to www.robertwilkinson.co.uk

Mum and Dad's back garden

2009-07-26T00:24:00.000-07:00

Here's a few shots of my parent's back garden. It was always a nice-looking garden, even when we, as kids, once dug up the back lawn and turned it into a 'golf course'. Actually, it was mum who did it, probably to get some peace and quiet. Dad wasn't too happy that night when he returned from work.

The garden has gone through many transformations over the years and these photographs represent its current state, although that big, round conifer is not there anymore, it had to be cut down.

The garden used to be mainly lawn with paving slabs lining the sides, top and bottom. Before that, I remember an apple and a pear tree in the centre of the lawn; in those days it was very shady. Both trees had to come down and I remember the months leading up to their demise when Dad painted their trunks with a black, gooey mixture of some kind. Then there were two tree stumps standing about 2ft high and surrounded by concrete until such time as the stumps and the concrete were dug up and covered with grass.

Mum and Dad have always been keen gardeners. They love it and that's why the garden is always so pleasant – no weeds in those beds, I can assure you.

A Samsung Omnia morning

2009-07-20T02:38:00.000-07:00

Last month I blogged about my Samsung Omnia phone and how diabolical it is; well, now I'm ranting about it again because it really is the sort of phone you don't want around you in any kind of emergency.

If, God forbid, I was involved in an air crash and was, for whatever reason, the sole survivor, clinging to the tailplane as it is gently washed ashore on a desert island, I would, no doubt, be overwhelmed with joy to discover that I still had my mobile phone on my person. I would be elated if I then discovered that I had a signal and more elated still if there was power left in the battery.

On wading ashore and finding a shaded spot under a palm tree, I would reach for my mobile, dial home or the office, tell them what had happened and get them to organise a rescue party.

"Hello? Yes, it's me. I've been involved in an air disaster, looks like I'm the sole survivor and I'll be late home tonight. Actually, I won't be home at all unless you can organise some kind of rescue party as I'm stuck on a desert island, just me and the tailplane."

Well, yes, if I had a Nokia or a Sony Ericsson, maybe, but not if my phone just happened to be a Samsung Omnia. In fact, the realisation that I was a Samsung Omnia owner would, quite literally, induce suicidal tendencies I didn't know I had as I realised I would be stuck on the island for all eternity and would have to resort to remembering what Bear Grylls had taught me from his programme, Born Survivor.

Touch wood, I haven't been involved in an air crash or any other kind of disaster. All that happened to me this morning was that I discovered I didn't have my debit card in my wallet when I went to buy a ticket. This, of course, is worrying as I started to wonder whether I had lost it, dropped it or just left it in another pair of trousers or the breast pocket of yesterday's shirt.

Fortunately, I was still able to buy a ticket because I had my trusty credit card with me, but I thought I'd better call my wife and let her know the situation before she put yesterday's clothes in the wash. Not a problem, I would simply whip out the mobile, press the speed dial button and hey presto! My wife would answer the phone. All would be well with the world.

But no. I'm a Samsung Omnia owner, which means that life is anything but simple. Get this: my phone is on, it had been on all through the night and there was still enough of a charge on the phone to be able to make calls. I hadn't received the usual warnings about power being low and please charge your phone. Everything was fine. When I depressed the keys they made a noise, the home page was before me, I could access my stored numbers. There was nothing to suggest that anything was wrong, so I pressed speed dial, found 'home' and pressed the button.

Hold on a minute! What's that? The phone is switched off? Eh? How? If it's switched off, how can it tell me it's switched off? If the phone is not on, how come I can dial the number, how come I can see the ****ing home page, how come? Ah! Of course, the Samsung Omnia does a really good impressions of being on, when it's off! I should have known!

A speech bubble has appeared. It says that the phone is switched off and would I like to switch it on? Just press the yes or no button. Well, that's easier said than done. I press Yes. Or rather I try to press yes using the Samsung's pen. Nothing happens. I know, I'll press the No button as the Omnia is like that, you press the key NEXT to the key you want and you might get the key you want. Good idea. But it doesn't work. The phone is on but it is telling me that it is off and would I like to turn it on. I press the yes button but it doesn't work. I press the no button and it still doesn't work.

I know! Take the battery out of the phone and effectively re-boot it, like pulling the plug on a frozen computer. That'll work! So I dismantle the phone and take out the battery. Now the phone is DEFINITELY off as there's no power. Phew! That was easy, I think to myself. Now, put the battery back in, turn the phone on in the normal manner and all will be well with the world.

I switch the phone on, the words Samsung Omnia appear followed by the dainty oriental sounding greeting tone as if a Geisha girl is standing in front of me, bowing politely, and handing me a working phone. Within about 15 seconds I'm back at the home page, I press the speed dial button and then I press 'home' and guess what? "This phone is switched off. Would you like to turn it on?" Off course I want to ****ing well turn it on. I want to call my wife to tell her to have a look around for my debit card before some bastard tries to use it and nick all our money!

I dismantle the phone half a dozen times but the same thing happens. The phone is switched off, despite the fact that it is clearly very much on. By now I'm getting flustered. I look for and find a pay phone, which doesn't work, and then I get on the train and fret about the situation. There's nothing I can do. I am completely powerless. I can't do anything until I reach Richmond station and then I can use a call box on the platform. This is what I do and then things are fine, but no thanks at all to the Samsung bloody Omnia.

Over the years I have had many different gadgets: mobile phones, Walkmans, radios, hifi systems, Tama-fucking-Gotchis, you name it, and none of them, none of them at all, even the Tamagotchi (my son's) that often woke me up in the middle of the night because it needed a shit, even that was not as infuriating as the Samsung Omnia. I'm so annoyed with it that I'm now going to write to Samsung in the UK, tell them what a useless lump of plastic their Omnia is and well, that's not the end of it. I might even direct Nokia and Sony to this blog and tell them that their phones are a million, trillion times better.

Postscript...

I had an idea! The phone was getting a little low on juice. Perhaps it needed to be charged. I plugged it in to the mains. Surely then it won't insist that its off when its on? Well, yes it does still insist its off. There's nothing else for it, I'll have to dust off the old Sony Ericsson and insert my simcard into it.

Excerpt from an unfinished story...

2009-07-16T23:46:00.000-07:00

Part Three, Chapter Two

‘You can be a murderer. You can be a serial murderer, but the lowest dawg on the street is a snitch.’

The ghost train hurtled through the darkness. Willard found himself gripping hard to the safety rail as the small engine picked up speed and swung him and the helicopter pilot from side to side. The train jolted violently at every kink in the track. It had followed a steep, downwards path away from the fun and frolics of the traditional fairground ride which had characterised the earlier part of the ride. Willard and his companion had smiled at the unconvincing ghouls and the luminous green severed heads made of papier maché. Now there was only darkness and a frightening sense of speed. Willard could smell the dampness in the cold air as it blew his hair away from his forehead, numbing his skin. Neither man spoke.

Willard’s terror only began to subside when the small train showed signs of slowing down. The helicopter pilot remained silent, his hands still gripping the safety rail as the train followed the track along an incline steep enough to slow the train to virtually walking pace. Darkness surrounded them, but not for long; all of a sudden, the train burst through two wooden doors with a huge and unexpected bang.

Both men stared at the small, brightly-lit marshalling yard that now surrounded them. Here and there they could see empty trains, some without wheels, others missing their red upholstered seating. Some were intact but were lacking the bright colors and ornate paintwork one might associate with a ghost train. Instead, there was a coat of grey primer. The damp air was mixed with the synthetic smell of paint and sealant, and the higher reaches of the cavernous space was peppered with bare light bulbs, artificial stars which unevenly illuminated the area.

The train slowed and they prepared themselves for the imminent moment of impact against an old and rotting set of buffers which had once been painted red. Under his breath, Willard heard himself whispering ‘brace, brace...’ and strangely thanking God for the fact that he was not onboard an airliner but on solid ground.

At the point of impact, the buffers gave just a little bit, absorbing the energy of impact and propelling the small engine back along the tracks until it slowed to a halt. They sat motionless for what seemed like ages but was, in reality, only a few seconds. Willard came to his senses first and jumped out of the train and on to solid ground. The helicopter pilot followed and then they were both standing on opposite sides of the small car which looked remarkably unscathed after its ordeal.

They gazed around at their surroundings with astonishment. The artificial stars twinkled, or seemed to, and there was silence. The distant noises that had attracted them to this cold and dismal place had ceased and there was no telling in which direction they should travel to find the source of the racket. It was, however, certain in both men’s minds that the disturbance had something to do with the Minister for Population and Resources: of that they were certain.

“What now?” Willard said, surveying the tomb-like enclosure. “Can we get out the way we got in?”

“I’m not sure,” the helicopter pilot said, quietly. “I knew about the ghost train but not here, not this place,” he added matter-of-factly.

“I don’t see any of these trains making it up that incline,” said Willard, pointing back along the track. “Something tells me we’ve gotta walk.”

“But we must find the source of the noise. That is important,” the helicopter pilot advised.

“This place looks pretty empty to me and we’re some distance from the house. Those noises were much closer-by than this and I can’t see any secret passageways, it’s solid rock.”

“I say we take a look around, just to make sure,” said the helicopter pilot, wandering off and picking up train parts here and there, as if he might find the Minister under an old wheel. The silence was disturbed when he picked up and then threw down a sheet of colourful metal bearing the word ‘Daisy’; it was the name of one of the ghost trains.

At that moment, there rang out a drunken voice, singing. “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do. I’m have crazy over my love for you...”

They both looked around for the source and saw, high up, sitting on some kind of fairground throne, the Minister. He was wearing a disheveled-looking suit, a shirt, un-tucked and at places unbuttoned and his tie was pulled and twisted and hanging limply from his neck.

“Remember that one, Willard? Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do. I’m half crazy over my love for you. La la-lah, la-lah, la-lah-lah. Istanbul airport. How we all laughed. And the fog! Remember the fog?”

Willard and the helicopter fixed their gaze on what could have been some strange apparition; but there, as large as life, was the Minister, on a throne of sorts that must have risen from below the ground as it had not been there before.

“La, la, la, horse and carriage....and you’d look sweet, out on the street on a bicycle made for two...”, the Minister continued to sing in a drunken fashion while Willard and the Helicopter Pilot stood there, looking bemused and not really knowing what to do or say next.

“He’s out of it,” said Willard. “We’re not going to get much sense out of him.”

“But we must stop this, he will hurt himself if we don’t stop this,” said the Helicopter Pilot.

“If we make a move to stop him doing anything, he’ll press whatever button made him appear and vanish into the rocks, never to be seen again. I suggest we get the hell out of here...”

At that moment, the Minister piped up, “What’s that, Bill? You scheming again, are you? Think you’ve made a new friend out of my pilot, do you? Don’t forget you’re under house arrest...” He laughed. “House arrest! You get that? You’re under arrest. In MY house!” His laughter turned to coughing and spluttering and he gripped both arms of the throne. “You’re under house arrest, do you hear me?”

The Helicopter pilot looked at Willard. Willard returned his gaze. “What shall we do?” asked the pilot.

“There’s no point rushing him,” said Willard.

“Then what?

“I wish I knew. I say let’s get out of here,” said Willard, looking around for vacant train.

“Going so soon, Bill? You don’t want a chat about the tunnels, the Malthus Project or, well, I don’t know, a chat about anything or nothing in particular....?”

Willard stopped surveying his surroundings for a minute or two. “There’s no point in talking to you, Minister. You’re drunk. What good would it do? Talking? You know what needs to be done. You’ve got to stop the madness before it stops you...”

“Me? Stop the madness? And how do you expect me to do that? I can’t just stop the madness. Madness has a life of its own, you know, it’s not something that can be stopped. Not by me at any rate. Perhaps it’s a job for you. Perhaps it’s a job for Superman, but it’s not a job for me!”

“Stop being a bell-end, Minister, it doesn’t become you.” Willard was in no mood for a meaningless conversation, even though that was what he was getting.

“You’re the bell-end, Bill, and don’t you forget it. Did you really think you could get away with setting up your own terrorist organisation? You didn’t think we’d get on to you?”

“I was perfectly placed to run the show. I had access. Access to secret files. I was the perfect choice and if I must say so, I think I do a good job,” Willard said with a sense of pride.

The Helicopter Pilot rummaged around amongst the stationary ghost trains, trying to find one they could use to make an escape. The train they had arrived on was too heavy to turnaround and there was no sign of any kind of turntable on which to change the engine’s direction of travel. He had to find one that was already pointing in the opposite direction.

“Mandy will do you,” shouted the Minister, pointing in the direction of a train, with one hand fumbling on the ground. He picked up a quarter-full bottle of Jim Beam, unscrewed the top and threw it towards Willard. It bounced a few times on the uneven, rocky surface of the cave and fell into one of the many mossy crevices never to be seen again.

The Helicopter pilot acknowledged the Minister and strode towards the waiting engine that, as the Minister had said, had the name Mandy written in ornate fairground lettering on it sides. But how, he wondered, would they gather together enough momentum to take them back up the steep incline to Longwood’s living room? These engines relied entirely upon push power and a minor electric current; there was no way that the power at their disposable was going to help.

“I know what you’re thinking,” said the Minister, taking another swig from his whisky bottle and looking around for the top before realising he had thrown it away. “You’re thinking how the hell do we get out of here, aren’t you?”

The helicopter pilot shrugged.

“You don’t have to go back the way you came,” the Minister said, pointing toward a distance set of double wooden doors up to which a solitary track, the track on which Mandy was resting, disappeared underneath.

“It’s thatta way!”

Willard turned around and looked at the Helicopter Pilot whose expression seemed to say ‘what are we waiting for?’

“Let’s go,” said Willard. “There’s nothing more we can do here.” He made to walk away from the Minister who still sat on his throne, the bottle of Jim Beam in hand, his head gently lolling from side to side.

“Nothing more to do, Bill? Even a drunken fool like me knows that there’s plenty for you to do. Haven’t you got to figure out a way of calling a halt to the Malthus Project? That’s your job, isn’t it, Bill?”

Willard stopped dead in his tracks and turned around to face the Minister.

“If you won’t help me, what hope in hell’s chance do I stand of ridding the world of the Malthus Project? You’re the only one who can help and you know it, but you prefer to wallow in your own self-pity rather than do something meaningful.”

“You mean my legacy, don’t you, Bill? My legacy! Well, this is my legacy, this bottle of bourbon and this,” he said, placing the whisky in his lap and reaching down and retrieving a large bowl of white powder. “Cocaine, Bill. Fancy a line? It’s a bad habit, but one I can’t seem to put aside. The papers were right. I am a disaster. I should never have considered politics as a career; it doesn’t suit me. It doesn’t suit my way of life, the life I have chosen for myself.”

“You’re the only one who can help,” said Willard. “You must know everything there is to know about the Malthus Project, where the hub of the operation is based, which buttons to press to stop and destroy it, but you’re not going to say a word, are you, Minister? You’re going to die, down here in this murky old dungeon, you’re going to be found with a bottle of whisky in one hand and a line of coke up your nose and they’re all gonna think that they were right about you, that you’re nothing more than a skunk, the man responsible for nothing but misery. And you know what? The weird thing is you could change things, you could talk now and let us sort out the mess,” Willard said.

“Sort out the mess? So it’s all about your legacy, is it Bill? How you’re going to be remembered.,” said the Minister, making up a fresh line and snorting it down.

“You think this is all about image and saving face? How misguided can you get?” said Willard, watching the Minister’s facial expressions contort as the drugs and drink continued to work their magic. “I suppose you feel better now, more able to cope with what you’ve created?,” he said, looking round to check on the Helicopter Pilot who had now organised Mandy and was ready for departure.

The Minister had put down his bowl of cocaine but still balanced the bottle of Jim Beam in his lap. Now, he reached down for something else. Willard waited to see what else was concealed behind the throne and was shocked when the Minister produced a revolver.

“Minister, no......”

“Time to go. Bye bye, Bill....”

The world went into slow motion as the Minister placed the barrel of the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger, splattering his brains and fragments of his skull on the back of the throne.

Willard, powerless to do anything, simply closed his eyes. From behind him, a voice.

“We must go too,” said the Helicopter Pilot, seemingly unperturbed by the atrocious spectacle.

Willard opened his eyes and turned around. The Helicopter Pilot was standing by Mandy. “It is time to go,” he said, sombrely.

Willard walked towards Mandy and took his seat, the noise of the gun still ringing in his ears and the smell of cordite reaching his nose.

“We need both to push,” said the Helicopter Pilot, preferring to say nothing about the Minister’s suicide.

Willard, realising his mistake, apologised. “Sorry, I, of course,” he said, jumping from the car and grabbing the chromium safety rail which ran across the cockpit. “Let’s go,” he added, and started to push Mandy along the short track towards the awaiting double doors.

Both men jumped aboard Mandy as she rolled towards the wooden doors; the whole thing reminded Willard of bob sleigh teams running and then jumping aboard the small sleigh and then experiencing the exhilaration of the ride. Remembering the hair-raising nature of the journey to the cave, both men held tight to the safety rail as the train crashed into the darkness and the bizarre spectacle of another spooky fairground attraction. Neither spoke. They sat in silence as ghouls rose up and screamed and moaned before retreating into the darkness.

Mandy shuddered and jolted from left to right. Both men waited for her to slow down and begin the grueling uphill journey, but it never came. The train seemed to be running along a level railway track that neither inclined nor declined. After a about 100 yards, the ghouls and the screams stopped and there was nothing but the dark breeze and the clickety-clack of the train on the tracks.

Their way was poorly illuminated by low Wattage clear light bulbs that had been rigged up on either side of the track. Blown bulbs lent a melancholy gloom to their surroundings. The relative silence and the hypnotic sound of train on the tracks caused both men to lose themselves in their own thoughts. They were thinking about the Minister and his final moments. If there were an after-life, thought Willard, he would know by now.

“This is all pretty flat,” Willard eventually commented. “It must be taking a different route.”

“I wish I knew,” said the Helicopter Pilot. “The Minister didn’t tell me everything.”

“I think we’re going away from Longwood,” said Willard, as Mandy pushed on in the dark. He was feeling nauseous after witnessing the Minister’s suicide, even though he had seen worse during his time in the tunnels.

“Look! Ahead. A door,” the Helicopter Pilot said, taking a hand off the safety rail and pointing.

His excitement made Willard jump, but the outburst proved truthful, not that he had any reason to doubt the integrity of the Helicopter Pilot. So far, despite the fact that he was effectively Willard and the girl’s captor, he had been nothing but civil: just what Willard needed. He planned to broach the subject of his freedom later and try to assess the Helicopter Pilot’s allegiances in respect of the Malthus Project.

There was indeed another set of double doors but there didn’t appear to be any sign of light or life on the other side. Both men braced themselves for the impact and soon they felt the night air on their faces. Darkness still reigned but they were out in the open air. Looking around, Willard saw light from between the trees. “Look, that must be the house,” he said. The Helicopter Pilot turned around. “Yes, that is Longwood,” he confirmed. “We must stop the train.”

“Hold on, it’s making a turn. It’s heading back towards the house,” said Willard as he noticed the train pulling hard to the right. Both men ducked to avoid the branches of un-pruned trees and shrubs in a small wood. As the train emerged into open fields, they could see the Minister’s country retreat in all its illuminated glory. Electricity bills and green issues obviously meant nothing to the wayward politician.

With the shrubs and trees behind them and open ground on either side, both men relaxed their grip on the safety rail. It was like that moment in an airliner when the plane touches down and the passengers release their seat belts as the aircraft weaved it way towards the terminal building.

The train veered left and ran parallel to a gravel driveway before disappearing behind a high mossy brick wall. Willard caught a brief glimpse of the helicopter that had brought him and the girl to Longwood and he began to wonder what the hell to do next. Another set of wooden double doors appeared ahead of them. They had reached the end of the line. Once through the doors, they found themselves back in the living room from whence they had departed. Mandy slowed and stopped and for a second or two they both men just sat there, gathering their thoughts and wondering what to do next.

Check out other blogs by Matthew Moggridge...

2009-07-14T12:01:00.001-07:00

visityourclub.blogspot.com is all about sports and social clubs in the UK. They all sell very cheap beer and some go out of their way to offer a wide selection of real ales. Rick (above) is in charge of the ale at the Guiseley Factory Workers Club near Leeds. The club recently won the CAMRA Club of the Year. If you go there, you'll know why.

All the features on visityourclub.blogspot.com have already been published this year in Club Mirror magazine and all have been written by yours truly. Club Mirror is a national magazine that is all about sports and social clubs, private members' clubs, working men's clubs and political clubs.

Clubs in the UK are viewed as places where old men go to get drunk. Not true. Clubs are the focal point for many local communities in the UK and while some of them are performing well, even in recession, others are closing. I know of clubs that are turning over £1 million per year, mainly through bar sales. I also know of clubs that are so badly managed they have no right to survive.

The problem is that a lot of clubs are run by volunteers or people who work in other jobs during the day and don't really have the time run the place properly. Many clubs lack marketing know-how and that is why most people have no idea about the clubs in their locality.

It wasn't until I took on the editorship of the magazine that I started to notice clubs in my own locality. They are normally anonymous-looking and not particularly attractive buildings, but once across the threshold, it's a completely different kettle of fish. In fact, most clubs are huge and boast enormous concert halls and bars that nobody can see from the road. A lot of club managers talk about the 'Tardis effect' and the fact that while they look small and unassuming on the outside, inside they are anything but.

Clubs offer live entertainment and a variety of sports. You will normally find at least one full-size snooker table in a club and more often than not there will be more, plus pool and darts and dominoes. In the South West of England a lot of clubs offer skittles alleys.

In short, a club offers its members a great night out in a safe environment – only members are allowed in and most clubs won't let any old Tom, Dick or Harry join. In other words, no nutters, which means you can enjoy a drink with family or friends without the threat of violence. The best thing, of course, is the cheap ale. Okay, it's not as cheap as the supermarkets, but who in their right mind wants to sit in front of the telly at home drinking beer. Once in a while, maybe, but there's nothing better than going out and being part of your local community down at the club.

As for that old man image, well, yes, it's there, but most clubs are trying their level best to attract younger members. They have to in order to survive. To this end, many clubs – the clubs with money in the bank – are refurbishing their bars and their concert halls and are offering the beer and lager brands of the moment. Drinks prices are cheaper than pubs. I went to a club recently where a pint of beer was only £1.40!

Cask ale is big in some clubs too. Take the Guiseley Factory Workers Club near Leeds or the Egham United Services Club in Surrey or, for that matter, the King's Heath Cricket & Sports Club in Birmingham. In addition to offering a range of lagers and keg ales (like Tetley Smooth or John Smith's) these clubs (and many others) are offering some weird and wonderful brews from the UK's growing number of microbreweries.

Remember, cask ale is only available in the on-trade, not the off-trade. The nearest you'll get to a pint of cask ale in the supermarket is bottled-conditioned beers, of which there are plenty, but again, there's nothing better than a good real ale on draught and clubs should be taking advantage of the UK's growing micro brewery culture.

I could warble on about clubs all day and all night, but let me just say that they're great places to be and we should all get out more and pay a visit to our local club. Next time you go out, look around and see if you can find a club. If you do, go through the doors, enquire about membership and join up. You won't believe how cheap it is to join and you'll be amazed at the price of a pint of beer.

Check out other blogs by Matthew Moggridge...

2009-07-14T11:48:00.000-07:00

teashopandcaff.blogspot.com is, as its title suggests, all about teashops and caffs.

Purple Haze...

2009-07-04T03:39:00.000-07:00

Carshalton in Surrey used to have many acres of lavender fields, but now, to the best of my knowledge, this is the only one. What a tremendous sight – and an amazing aroma too. For further details, visit www.mayfieldlavender.com

Who are the defining rock performers?

2009-06-28T03:22:00.001-07:00

I'm not going to pretend that I'm a great Michael Jackson fan because I'm not. Although I do like Smooth Criminal and would really like to moonwalk. That aside, his death was very depressing and, like a lot of people, I guess I find myself talking about it with friends and family at the moment. Conversations normally start with, "So, what about Jackson then, bit of a surprise," and the whole thing shifts in to gear from there.

Today I found myself on Woodmansterne Green in Surrey in the UK, having cycled there early in the morning with a pal. We've been cycling out into the sticks like this every weekend for the best part of three years, and our exercise has always been accompanied by chit chat about virtually anything. Today, flask of tea in hand, I started the conversation. "So, what about Jackson then, bit of a surprise," and for a while we chatted about the great man, his music and his untimely departure from the world.

And then we started thinking that, like a lot of things, there are only really a few defining rock acts and how the rest are all derivative. But who were the great defining rock performers and are there really only a handful of albums needed for any of us to lay claim to owning the ultimate 'all you need' collection? This is not about choosing your top ten albums, that would be easy, this is about naming mainstream acts (bands or solo performers) that define rock.

I would guess that the list would have to include Elvis Presley, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, The Sex Pistols (and possibly the New York Dolls too) but who would you choose as the defining heavy metal band? Who started it? Deep Purple, Black Sabbath? For the grunge period, I would choose Kurt Cobain and Nirvana.

And then, of course, there is the late, great Michael Jackson: his Thriller album would have to be part of your collection. But what about Morrissey and The Smiths? What about The Clash, The Jam, Roxy Music, Dire Straits and Thin Lizzy? What about U2, what about all those bands in the 80s like Duran Duran, ABC and Spandau Ballet? What about Blur and Oasis? What about the Stone Roses? They've all had their defining moments, but would they be on your list of bands who defined an era or pioneered a style of music?

People say that the Stone Roses missed a trick by splitting up and that their first album was a defining piece of work – as opposed to their second which was widely regarded as a bit of an anti-climax. But should Ian Brown and John Squire be lauded as rock gods? I love Squire's jangly guitar on She Bangs the Drum and one day I will get round to buying that first Stone Roses album, but are they leaders or followers?

I know that, ultimately, every band and performer out there is influenced by somebody or something, but the thinking behind this blogpost is this: who, out of our current run of bands from the mid-20th century to the present day, have been responsible for starting something? Were the Rolling Stones and the Beatles the original guitar bands? Was Black Sabbath the defining heavy metal band? Did Led Zeppelin pioneer heavy rock? Which bands, in other words, were first out of the traps?

If you had to choose a particular album from Presley, Dylan, The Beatles and so on, which one would it be – or would you go for 'greatest hits'? What, for instance, is the defining Beatles album: is it Rubber Soul, Revolver or Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band?

I think The Beatles are overrated. I would have to pick individual hits, avoiding howlers like Yellow Submarine – talk about The Emperor's New Clothes.

With the Sex Pistols, it would have to be Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols, because it defines the punk movement and was, I think, their only proper album. I've already mentioned Nevermind by Nirvana: every track is good, which is saying something as a lot of albums carry one or two good tracks and then a load of mediocre stuff that, in the old days of vinyl, required plenty of 'stylus lifting'.

Take Who's Next, for example. I loved that album, but felt it was ruined by My Wife. When I was at college, myself and a friend used to rave about Who's Next and then pretend we thought My Wife was the best track on the album. We were suspicious of people who thought that Money was the best track on Dark Side of the Moon, by Pink Floyd, when it was clearly Time.

My Zeppelin album would be Presence; my Floyd album would be Dark Side of the Moon and I'm not sure about the Rolling Stones – they have so many albums and so many recognisable hits that I would be foolish to choose just one. As for Black Sabbath, it would have to be their first album, the one with The Wizard on it, and if I had to choose a Deep Purple album, it would be Deep Purple in Rock – for Speed King.

Right now, though, proof that pop, rather than eating itself, just rolls on regardless. I am listening and watching Blur performing an excellent set to an excited, sing-a-long crowd at Glastonbury. No, I'm not there, I'm sitting at home watching it on television. Hardly very rock and roll. It's gone 11.30pm and I need to sleep. All that cycling, fresh air and sunshine – and three bottles of Stella – mean it is time for bed. But I'm not going anywhere until Blur leave the stage, they're brilliant. Or is that the Stella talking?

"Take care. Goodnight!"

The Ace Hotel, Portland and Seattle.

2009-06-20T03:23:00.000-07:00

The top photograph is an outside shot of the Ace Hotel in Portland, Oregon. The shot below is the sign of the Joyce hotel across the road. Apparently, the Ace Hotel used to be as run-down as the Joyce and was, in fact, used in the filming of Drugstore Cowboy. Perhaps one day the Joyce will get a facelift too.

I travel a fair bit in my job and there are many places that, to this day, stick in my mind simply because they were so fantastic. I thought I'd share a few of these with whoever reads this blog of mine.

Back in January 2008 I travelled to Portland, Oregon, for a convention. Alright, a potato processing convention. I decided to stay downtown rather than at the dreary hotel across from the convention centre. Just prior to flying off from Heathrow, I checked out an article in the Travel section of the Saturday Guardian and there I found Beth Ditto talking about Portland and why she loves it so much. She singled out the Ace Hotel in Portland as a place to stay so I took her up on her suggestion and booked myself in.

I've never met Beth Ditto, the singer in a band called Gossip, but if ever I do I'll thank her for pointing me in the direction of this great American city and such a fantastic hotel. For a start the hotel has an amazing website (just key Ace Hotel, Portland into Google and you will see what I mean). The hotel is arty and a bit leftfield, the rooms are a joy to behold with murals on the walls and low beds. It's a bit like the hotels you might expect to find in an episode of The X Files – a kind of safe, clean and tidy version of the slightly ill-at-ease Joyce across the street. Key 'Joyce Hotel, Portland' into Google and check out the comments on a website called Hostelz.com.

My room on the third floor of the Ace, afforded me a view of the Joyce and some of the strange people populating the rooms. Directly opposite from me was a man living in a room with walls and furniture covered by red graffiti. It didn't matter what time of day it was, the television and a light, were always on. It's more of a hostel than a hotel, according to those who have supposedly risked life and limb and stayed there; and, from the comfort and safety of my hotel room, I often considered nipping over there and spending just one night among the pimps, prostitutes and drug addicts who, apparently, occupy the place. There have been reports of fighting in the corridors, while others have said its fine if you keep yourself to yourself. Best, it has been argued, to get your own room as there is an option of dormitory accommodation. One comment on the Hostelz.com website said it was fine if you wanted to live out your Jack Kerouac On the Road fantasy, but otherwise stay well clear. Fortunately, my better judgement won through in the end, but there's an experience I guess I didn't have.

As for the Ace, well, what can I say? The food and beverage operations downstairs are not run by the hotel but are franchised out – or that's what I was told. There's a restaurant and bar with its own microbrewery and there's an excellent coffee shop, ideal for breakfast as, thankfully, the Ace doesn't have the traditional hotel restaurant that doubles as a breakfast room in the mornings.

The hotel is ideally located on First and Stark and is literally a stone's throw from Powell's, the biggest bookshop in the world. I recommend you go there and check out not just the books but the seemingly hand-made magazines that must be produced in students' front rooms in and around the Portland area. Alternatively, there is Portland itself. First and Stark is no more than a ten-minute walk from anywhere and there's an excellent tram system too.

I loved Portland and I loved the Ace Hotel. In fact, I booked in to the Ace in Seattle on my way home and that was just as good but a little smaller. The staff are friendly too and, dare I say it, the place is considerably 'hip'. It's a cool hotel, put it that way. My only regret is that I didn't take the train from Seattle to Portland on my inward journey; or, for that matter, my return trip. Instead I flew Horizon Air on a particularly stormy evening and I hate turbulence more than anything, bar a soft pickled onion. The train, I was told, follows the Pacific coastline for a while before veering inland to Portland. If I get the chance to go there again, I'll take the train and perhaps I'll check in to the Joyce for a night too, but I'll make sure I have my reservation at the Ace, that's for sure.

Check out the entire Ace hotel estate at www.acehotel.com

"Emergency! Paging Doctor Beatt!"

2009-06-14T03:18:00.000-07:00

In situations of uncertainty, it's amazing how there are still little pockets of humour to be found. My father-in-law is in hospital at the moment and I wish him a speedy recovery. I am spending a little bit of time ferrying my wife to and from the hospital and, occasionally, normally two to three times a week, I drop in and say hello to the patient.

Last week, while sitting by the bedside of my father-in-law, I noticed on the wipe-clean board next to the bed of another patient, the name of a Doctor Beatt. Surely not! I thought Doctor Beatt was a fictional character to be found only in the lyrics of a funky song by the Miami Sound Machine. Who could forget, "Emergency, paging Doctor Beat..."? "Doc, Doc, Doc, Doc, Doctor Beat".

Anyway, to cut along story short it made me laugh. And then I got to thinking how much fun one could have working at the hospital (May Day in Croydon) knowing that the hospital employed a Dr Beatt. I don't know about you, but if I was in charge of the Tannoy and Dr Beatt ever needed paging, well, "Emergency! Paging Dr Beatt...". I think I would even go as far as recording an American ambulance siren to accompany any messages sent to the good Doctor.

While I was in the hospital, nobody did page Doctor Beatt as I would imagine there would be plenty of smirks from both staff and patients of a certain age: those who were around when the Miami Sound Machine had its hit in the charts way back when.

On the drive home from the hospital, however, I began thinking, hold on, Doctor Beatt's name had been scrawled on one of those wipe-clean boards using a marker pen and I reckon somebody accidentally wiped off the Y of Beatty. Somehow, "Emergency! Paging Dr. Beatty" doesn't have the same ring and nor does, "Doc, Doc, Doc, Doc, Doctor Beatty". Still it was good while it lasted.

The Samsung Omnia – never again, put it that way.

2009-06-03T07:14:00.000-07:00

Most of the mobile phones I have owned have been pretty good in terms of reliability and usability. I've owned a basic Nokia and two Sony Ericssons and none of them have caused me any problems. My latest phone is a different story.

The Samsung Omnia is, in my opinion, 'a poor man's iphone' at best, and an infuriating piece of useless plastic at worst.

Unlike a conventional mobile, the Omnia relies upon a touch sensitive, computer-generated representation of a keyboard. In other words, the keys aren't really there at all. 'Dialling' any number requires thought and I don't want to think too much about such a mundane task; I never had to with my other phones. With the Omnia, it's a case of 'dialling' carefully and slowly, using a pen, watching all the time in case, as often happens, the machine inputs, say, half a dozen 3s or 4s – it's that sensitive. Dialling 0208 could easily become 02000008. You get the picture. Not ideal if you're in a hurry.

I know what you're thinking: use the phone's speed dialling function. Under normal circumstances I'd say fine, but not with the Omnia. Problems lurk on every corner for Omnia users. I have stored around a dozen pre-set telephone numbers, but first I have to access them by pressing a small blue keyhole symbol at the top right of the screen. Pre-set numbers are supposed to pop up, but they don't. Instead, I am given a page of icons offering me the web, the camera, media player, alarms, everything but my pre-set numbers. If I press 'exit' to try again, the same thing happens. Then, to add insult to injury, the phone locks itself, meaning that I have to press 'unlock', which is more difficult than you might think. It's virtually impossible to unlock the phone using the pen (of which, more later) so I have to thump the phone hard with my index finger and then start again, but I get greeted with all the unwanted icons for a second time. Arrrggghh!!! The solution is to press another icon at the top of the screen, like 'settings', and then, as the icons shuffle to the left, press the speed dial icon when it has moved to the far left of the screen – that way the pre-set numbers pop up.

Finally I get to my speed dial numbers. Now I've got another problem. If I press the icon for my home number, it accesses the number represented by the icon to its left and I find myself dialling somebody I don't want to talk to; then the problem of stopping the phone dialling a wrong number, which involves a frantic thumping of the black button below the screen to cancel the call. I have numerous calls from one particular work colleague who thinks I am trying to reach him when I'm not.

The Omnia likes to keep me on my toes by constantly inventing new problems. For example, when I press 3 it's 2 so once again I can't simply dial a phone number on the move, I have to stop, concentrate hard, use the pen to tap the 3 key at its far edge in order to key in a 3 and not a 2. This often takes more than one attempt and is further thwarted by the fact that the cancel key (the orange arrow at the top right of the keypad) then types a 3, the key to its immediate left. Try to keep up: the 3 key is really a 2 and the cancel key is really a 3, but there is no way I can cancel the wrong number so I have to quit the keyboard entirely and start again. But then, the phone locks again and I have to thump it hard again with my index finger to unlock it as using the pen, for some inexplicable reason, won't unlock it.

Writing a text message is a nightmare too. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. Invariably, the latter. A big problem with texting is that the keys do not represent the right letters. If I try to write 'Good morning' I need to be aware that G is F and that O is U and that P is really i, D is S and so on. In short, it's impossible so I am forced to give up.

If I try to exit the messaging function, another problem arises: I can't. The pen simply won't work if I use it to depress the 'ok' in the screen's top right hand corner which should close the window. More often than not, a text bubble will appear saying 'contract WAP (GPRS) which I don't understand, but can't delete however hard I try.

The scrolling function on Call Log, Phonebook and Messaging is temperamental, only working effectively when it so chooses. With messaging in particular, it is very hard to move the scroll bar up or down to review messages received or sent, and to exit a message and return to the main list of messages is nigh on impossible, even using the pen, which is supposed to make life easier for Omnia users. It is best to depress the phone icon on the bottom right of the phone and then re-open the function from the phone's 'home' page.

As for the pen, well, it's there to be lost. Miraculously, I still have mine, although it has spent a few days under the car seat during which time I have relied upon assorted ballpoints and my chipolata fingers. The pen is supposed to make things easier, especially dialling and messaging, but it is just another irritation, especially when the P key is O, the G is F and so forth. And I can hit that 'ok' at the top right of the screen as many times as I like but it won't remove the page I'm on for love nor money: all I get is annoying speech bubbles that refuse to go away.

If somebody calls me I have to call them back as, by the time the phone is out of my breast pocket and in my hand, the right way around and without the pen swinging about uncontrollably, they've gone. Even if the phone comes out of my pocket easily enough, I've got to hit the word 'answer' and that's harder than it sounds, believe me; forget using the pen, by the time you've unleashed it from its housing, your caller has hung up. If I call back I'm confronted with the aforementioned call log problems. If I use the speed dial function, I end up calling somebody else. Trying to stop a mis-dialled number is very hard and usually involves a lot of thumping on the screen to avoid a call from somebody else which, if they get through, results in, "Sorry, I dialled you accidentally, new phone," I might lie, ignoring the fact that I've had the Omnia for months.

Knowing what I know about the Samsung Omnia, I would never buy or recommend one to friends. Enemies, maybe. I am seriously considering transferring the SIM card to my old Sony Ericsson and using that instead. Mind you, the Omnia does have a decent 5 mega pixels camera, but that is the phone's only redeeming feature.

The Footpath to Dunton Green

2009-05-27T00:49:00.000-07:00

January 10 2007 was a memorable day for me. Memorable in the sense that I can't for the life of me work out how I found myself, not a million miles from anywhere but, surprisingly, in the middle of nowhere and in real danger of having to spend the night sleeping rough. The whole situation was almost too ridiculous for words but at least it inspired me to write a poem, of which more later, and now, of course, this blogpost.

It was a typical day at work. The new year was only 10 days old and all morning I had been writing about potatoes. Yes, potatoes. I was, at the time, the editor of the great Potato Processing International magazine, a title which took me around the world talking mainly to Americans in baseball caps and checked shirts about potato processing machines. It was a great job, but back in the office, which was in Dunton Green near Sevenoaks in Kent, there was little to do at lunchtime.

In fact, the main lunch time activity was going for a walk to a huge Tesco in nearby Riverhead, a shortish walk from the office. There were a few pubs but it wasn't a very sociable office and lunchtime drinks were rare. People brought food in and heated it in a microwave oven. As for me, well, having been the editor of a number of hotel and restaurant magazines, I liked to get out at lunchtime and sit in the pub or, as I did on January 10, take a wander around.

"I'm just nipping out to Tesco," I told Jennie, the receptionist. "Do you want a newspaper?" She said no and off I went. It's about a 10-minute walk to the supermarket, enough time to change my mind, which is what I did: I'll go for a walk instead, I thought, heading past the pub beyond the Tesco, the Bullfinch, and then right. The road took me along a pleasant street of large houses and leafy front gardens and soon I found myself in Chipstead village. There are two Chipsteads, one in Kent and one in Surrey. I was in Chipstead in Kent where there is a very pleasant pub with an open fire.

I had enough time for a pint of Timothy Taylor's and then it was back to the office. Nobody of any importance was in, there was little to do bar a bit of issue planning, so 10 minutes either side of my alloted hour would go largely unnoticed. The big question was how to get back: do I retrace my steps along the pleasant road with the large houses or walk on and find an alternative route?

As I stepped outside the pub I saw a sign: 'Footpath to Dunton Green'. Perfect, a short cut to the office, I thought, as I plodded along the alley and eventually came out on a road near a lake where I found a woman walking her dog. "Dunton Green?" I asked and she told me to follow the footpath. I figured it would be a simple route back to my desk but I was to be severely mistaken.

It started off fine, a dirt path running alongside the back gardens of a few houses, but then it opened out and I found myself in fields, near a huge lake, trudging along on muddy ground, the sort of mud in which I could lose my shoes. Remember that I had on a navy blue suit, shirt and tie and the shoes I was wearing were Polish, purchased the previous June when I attended (and chaired) the International Potato Convention in Warsaw.

The mud gave way to mud and water and for a while I managed to skirt around the outside of the water-logged fields, taking smaller paths that ran alongside the lake and eventually turned out to be dead ends. Along the way there were many occasions when I did get my shoes stuck in the mud and had to hold on to a nearby branch and pull hard until a squelching noise announced that I had freed myself. There were three or four dead ends and soon I realised that I was lost. Fortunately, I had my mobile phone so I called the office and told a colleague that I had nipped out for a paper, decided to take a walk and now found myself, quite literally, in the middle of nowhere. I took a few photographs of my surroundings as I couldn't believe that, while I knew I was not that far away from civilisation, I was in some kind of wilderness. There were no houses in sight, nothing, just green fields bordered by trees and shrubs.

My colleague was no help but I told him I would be back just as soon I worked out where the hell I was. He said he would pass the message on. My shoes were now covered in mud and letting in water and my trousers were ruined and would need dry cleaning. My socks were like two wet flannels. There was no question about it, I would have to push on. The time was now approaching 3pm, it was still the winter and within an hour or so it would be dark. I trudged across fields up to my knees in water and then had to climb a muddy incline to reach a higher level field. Unfortunately, it wasn't easy and I slipped numerous times, covering my entire suit and face in a light brown mud, until I realised I would have to clasp a thorny branch to haul myself up.

By now the whole situation was beginning to resemble that scene in the Shawshank Redemption when Tim Robbins, having crawled through the prison sewage pipe, fell out into the stream and then waded his way to freedom. Except that I wasn't free at all. Darkness was falling, I was covered from head to toe in mud and drenched through. All I did was nip out for a walk at lunch time, I kept saying to myself, wondering whether I would ever free myself from this watery hell.

In the distance, I could see houses so I headed towards them and eventually, after falling flat on my face a dozen or so times, I found myself on a road, not far from the local curry house and about 15 minutes' walk from the office. Another half an hour and darkness would have forced me to consider sleeping rough. I started to imagine myself calling home and explaining the ridiculous position I found myself in and how, even if I tried to explain where they might find me, it would be nigh on impossible. Fortunately, I had found the road and began the mildly embarassing process of squelching my way back to the office some three hours after I had left.

My arrival was met with laughter which grew louder as I explained my predicament to my colleagues. I sat at my desk, covered in mud, smelling a little rank and I was completely soaked. I managed to take a photograph of my Polish shoes, just for the record, and then decided I ought to get home. The whole, silly situation was, I suppose, of my own making, like most things in life, but when I reached home and explained all to my wife and children (who laughed uncontrollably) I sat down and penned the following poem.

Footpath to Dunton Green

I’ll nip out for a paper

I’ll be back in half an hour

A walk to Riverhead Tesco

But it all turned rather sour

I need a walk, I’m feeling fat

I’ve eaten too much candy

I’ll stroll around the block today

And then I’ll feel quite dandy

Chipstead village, very quaint

I stop and have a beer

A pint of Taylors by the fire

I really like it here

Soon it’s time to leave the pub

And walk straight back to work

Along the footpath to Dunton Green

Where many problems lurk

It started fine with little bridges

Old ladies walking dogs

But things turned dark and murky

And soon I’m water-logged

Walk around the lake she said

It shouldn’t take too long

So off I went in Polish shoes

But things went badly wrong

Laughter almost turned to tears

The pathway disappeared

Desolation everywhere

It really was quite weird

I saw some houses far away

Warmth and civilization

Mud and water round my ankles

I longed for sweet salvation

A dead end path, a padlocked gate

Is there another way?

I slip and fall flat on my face

And land in dirty hay

But soon a metal gate appears

I’m back in Dunton Green

A short walk up a muddy path

I’m home at last I scream

I squelch back to the office

I’m looking pretty cheesed

Wet shoes and muddy trousers

But I’m feeling pretty pleased

Pleased, that is, to be at work

And not in dire straits

Walking round and round in circles

And climbing over gates

Snapshot: The Magic of Christmas Eve

2009-04-30T09:01:00.000-07:00

We all have early childhood memories and mine was when my younger brother arrived home from the maternity ward wrapped in a shawl concealing a toy train for me. My brother, three years my junior, and my younger sister, will have their own special moments, but for all three of us, the most magical of times was Christmas Eve.

For us, the festive season began after my birthday on 10 December. I was fortunate to be born just far enough away from Christmas Day to warrant separate presents. My father, always acutely aware of the importance of not letting any of us ‘miss out’, would always buy ‘a little toy’ for the two children not celebrating a birthday. One notable ‘little toy’ was a battery-powered Dalek from the days when Doctor Who had long white hair and was played by William Hartnell and then Patrick Troughton.

Most of the festive build-up in our house revolved around mum putting up the decorations and icing the Christmas cake. We were not allowed paper chains, like those decorating our classrooms, because Mum thought them to be ‘common’. Real Christmas trees were far too messy. Instead it was small tinsel trees, scented candles and collections of baubles (or ‘bobbles’ as we called them) surrounded by holly on a plate. The rich smell of fruit cake from the kitchen invaded our nostrils at this time of year and there was always a warm red glow courtesy of two radiant gas fires, many a red light bulb and the reflective nature of the horse brasses dotted around our ‘through-lounge’ recently knocked through by Mr Pratt, the local builder.

We were an average family. Dad was a civil servant working in Whitehall, mum a housewife at home. We lived in a semi-detached house in Carshalton that backed on to the railway line. Mum and Dad still live there today. It was the late sixties/early seventies. The Morecambe & Wise Show graced our Rediffusion television, Benny Hill was deemed politically correct and either Ted Heath or Harold Wilson was Prime Minister.

We still believed in Santa Claus and on Christmas Eve, wary that he was on his way – and a little scared of his imminent arrival – we would all sleep in one room with empty stockings neatly arranged at the end of the bed, having spent the evening watching Disney Time or Tom Thumb on television.

Mum and Dad kissed us goodnight and then the sound of bells outside the window. If we made to get out of bed, Dad would advise us to stay put. “He won’t stop if he sees you,” he would say. The ringing continued for five or six minutes and we were enthralled by the magic, safe in the knowledge that Santa really did exist.

In the morning, our stockings full, we crept downstairs to see what Santa had left us. New toys glinted in the dark, the full spectacle of which would be revealed when a light was switched on.

Dad displayed our toys in separate corners. Train sets would be laid out and ready to use simply by turning a red dial on a grey transformer. Books (a hard-backed Rupert or Beano annual) would be standing up on end with, perhaps, a small teddy bear reclining on the cover. Unfortunately, it was 4am and soon Dad would herd us back to bed until 7am when Mum would put the turkey in the oven and Christmas proper would begin.

The bells would ring outside our bedroom window for years to come and I recall dismissing the idea that ‘Father Christmas is yer Dad’ when the subject raised its ugly head in the playground. “It has to be true, I’ve heard the bells outside my window and my Dad was in the room at the time,” I would counter any disbelievers.

One year, sometime in the late afternoon on Christmas Eve when I was 10 or 11, I peered out of the bedroom window for no other reason than to look out into the garden and there it was: one of Mum’s brass bells fitted outside the house and almost touchable through the louvre windows. It was a sad moment as I had discovered the awful truth: Dad and Santa Claus were one and the same.

As we all lay in bed that night, Dad warned us to remain there if we heard the bells. This time I noticed him tugging at something behind his back as the bells rang out. He later told me how he had tied the bell to a ball of string and had thrown the ball through the bathroom window from the garden – some feat as the house was peppered with the aforementioned louvre windows – a seventies thing along with ‘Spanish gold’ walls and mum’s Ercol furniture which is still there today.

Fortunately, so is Christmas at Mum and Dad’s. We all have kids of our own now and through the years since their birth, they have been entertained by Dad’s treasure hunts and his homemade puppet theatre. We still enjoy Mum’s legendary cake at what has become known as the Boxing Day bash.

Ends.

A novel idea...

2009-04-17T14:29:00.000-07:00

Ann Quin's Three was another book I was unable to find in the UK and bought at Powell's Books in Portland, Oregon. I was hesitant about Quin because I was uncomfortable with 'experimental' novelists. I didn't want to read a book written, say, with no consonants, or a novel that could be read backwards. Quin's novel, I am pleased to say, was not that experimental. In Three, she experiments with different kinds of narrative. The book centres on the lives of three people living together in a house on the south coast (Quin lived and died in Brighton). Ruth and Leonard are middle-aged and married and S is a young woman who comes to live with them. The novel starts with the girl's suicide and then becomes a haunting snapshot of their lives together, their suspicions of one another, told through the different narratives. The thoughts of S are expressed through a diary she kept while living at the house. I approached Three with trepidation and under the impression it would be a hard slog, but I was pleasantly surprised and like all good novels, it haunts me now.

I am half way through Village of Stone, the story of a young Chinese girl living in Beijing remembering her life in the Village of Stone, a coastal fishing village seemingly miles from anywhere.

The end of the project is nigh and I can already see the light at the end of the tunnel, which says I can read something else soon. And I really do want to read something else. There are other novels by the authors I have been reading for this task that I want to read, like Michel Houellebecq's Platform, like the rest of John Updike's Rabbit novels and, of course, This Motel Life by Willy Vlautin – and not forgetting Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy, which I started reading a hotel in Italy.

I know what comes next. Metaphorically, I have skipped a few chapters of my task and checked out the ending. For my letter Y it will definitely be something by Richard Yates, probably Revolutionary Road, but I'm not sure yet; and then, with Z, I'm not sure – possibly Richard Zimler – but I'm going to scour the bookshop shelves before I reach for his The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon.

Has all this been worth it? Yes it has. I have introduced myself to novelists I would never have read, I have brought structure into my reading life and an element of randomness that has been exciting. Twenty six books – well, almost – and I will continue to the end, in true and then, in true John Fowles fashion, come back and write another ending for this mammoth article.

The Internet Revolution

2009-04-09T23:38:00.000-07:00

Don't get me wrong. I am not a technophobe. Never have been. In fact, I love computers. I use them daily in my job. I'm always on the internet. I use it to check train times, book flights and buy odds and ends, even car insurance! It's a useful tool, make no mistake, but, being a magazine journalist, I have to admit that I'm, well, a little scared – okay, not scared, but concerned – about the general vibe that 'journalism as we know it' is all but over. It is a view put across by those who, like born again Christians, suddenly decide that the internet is the big cure-all for everything and they feel they have to then 'spread the word' to the uninitiated.

The trouble is, while there is more than just an element of truth about what they are saying, I cannot believe that writers like myself who, over the years, have penned various articles on different subjects are, for want of a better expression, ready for the scrapheap and a job, perhaps, as a driving instructor or minicab driver. The worst thing is, I can hear myself talking to a bored passenger, "Yeah, mate, I used to be a journalist, innit, but the world wide web put paid to that," I might say as I drive an affluent baker-turned-webmaster to Gatwick Airport.

The sad irony there, of course, is that it is best, these days, to look for a profession that cannot be harmed by the internet. Sadder still is that the professions in question are, among others, minicab driver and driving instructor as you cannot learn to drive 'virtually' – yet. Who knows, the future might involve doing most of the test virtually using on-line simulators and then hopping in to a real car for 10 minutes to prove you have the hang of it in the real world – which means less in the way of driving lessons and yet another profession going to the wall. With minicab drivers it all rests on whether the technology behind the phrase 'beam me up, Scotty' will ever become reality. Either way, I am amazed at how many times I hear the phrase 'but sadly the industry is in long-term decline'. What, I wonder, will everybody be doing in this brave new world? Don't tell me, blogging for a tiny bit of on-line fame or wasting their time telling those on Twitter that they are eating a Twix for breakfast before doing the evening shift for a local minicab firm.

The web is a new force to be reckoned with and it might do for traditional journalism what Quark Express did for typesetters. Some magazines are folding but retaining 'an online presence' and now it is being suggested that journalists themselves are no longer what matters and how the general public have, so to speak, taken over the asylum. By general public I mean the 'readers' and they could be farmers or doctors, publicans or hoteliers, people who traditionally make up the circulation lists for many a 'business-to-business' publication.

This has always been the great paradox of trade publishing: that the readers of the magazines know more about the subject than the journalists – the difference being that the journalists can write. It is true, of course, in all aspects of journalism. Political correspondents on national newspapers are undoubtedly not as clued up as the politicians themselves, they don't have all the answers, nobody does. However, it is argued that the days when journalists simply applied 'their craft' to a subject are gone. Nowadays, it is all about information in its purest form: a comment on a blog, a thread on a forum site, a throwaway sentence on Twitter. Journalists are becoming facilitators overseeing, perhaps, a forum site or they might resort to 'blogging', which is basically writing their own thoughts and comments on their own or somebody else's weblog. Somebody once told me that blogging was an electronic form of vanity publishing. Maybe, but I think it has a lot more to offer.

Business-to-business magazines, as opposed to consumer titles, will be one of the most affected area of publishing in the face of the internet revolution. Mainstream consumer publications, like GQ and the recently launched UK edition of Wired, don't appear to be suffering commercially as a result of the internet. My copies of both magazines were choc-a-bloc with advertising and something tells me that readers of GQ, Wired and other quality consumer titles probably enjoy their magazines, printed as they are on high quality glossy paper and jam-packed full of decent photography and interesting, informative and entertaining features. There is something tactile about a quality magazine which beats sitting in front of a computer screen any day.

In trade publishing, however, quality has suffered as saving money has become the buzz phrase and, for some, the only way forward in the light of falling advertising revenue. Declining ad revenues are a concern for all forms of print-based publishing these days, but the business-to-business sector is suffering more for many reasons surrounding existing quality and circulation issues. Many trade magazines are printed on low quality paper stock because the publishers believe that a nice glossy, appealing magazine full of decent photography is not what their readers want, begging the question, have they asked them? Probably not. There is a view that trade publishing is inferior to newstand publications, that quality is not as important, perhaps, and that investment (in contributors and photography) is not such a pressing issue.

With a lot of 'CC' or controlled circulation titles, it has been argued, a little jokingly perhaps, that the readers receive the magazine whether they like it or not as, in commercial terms, trade journalism is all about proving to advertisers – or convincing them – that the magazine 'reaches' a certain audience. Some observers argue that the notion of doing anything to make the reading experience pleasurable for the 'reader' is often not even considered because it doesn't have to be; it is, after all, only trade publishing.

To get an idea of the way the mass media views trade publishing you just have to watch an edition of the BBC's topical news quiz, Have I Got News For You. Every week there is a 'guest publication', mainly from the trade sector, and its title always gets a laugh from the audience. In short, a lot of trade publishing is not taken very seriously and while, of course, there are many titles that are worthy of a titter or two – I've worked on one or two – there are some excellent publications which can get tarred with the same brush.

With some controlled circulation titles, phrases like 'captive audience' and 'hospital food' often spring to mind where the readers are concerned. Ironically, in a lot of cases, unscrupulous and often fly-by-night trade publishers cheat their advertisers by not sending the magazine out to those they claim to reach on their media packs. This, I would guess, is a widespread practice. More often than not the discrepancy can involve thousands of 'readers'. Secretly reducing the circulation is, of course, another way of saving money on print bills, especially in an economic downturn, but it amounts to fraud and advertisers are only protected by checking if the magazine's circulation is ABC certified – even then there are probably loopholes. Journalists beware if you hear a reader say, "I haven't seen a copy for some time".

Fortunately, this sorry state of affairs has been turned on its face by the internet, and while the future role of the business-to-business journalist is changing, the world wide web has certainly tipped the scales back in favour of editorial. Countless ad teams on trade magazines over the years have often remarked that they pay the wages of the journalists, a comment normally reserved for when the journalist questions a request to mention an advertiser editorially. While there was a time when the ad men ruled the universe in the eyes of some publishers, the onus has now switched and that well-worn phrase, 'content is king' rules supreme. The web, quite simply, has and will continue to sort the wheat from the chaff.

Logistically, the web means a move away from the aforementioned captive audience scenario of some controlled circulation titles to access for all – meaning that a quality editorial product is the only real driver of traffic. Business-to-business journalists, therefore, have a real opportunity to make their mark and possibly turn the tables and start to 'pay the wages' of the ad sales team.

The problem with the worldwide web and the digital age, of course, is that revenue streams have to be 're-calibrated'. With print costs eliminated, there is little to hide behind in terms of bumping up costs. I have noticed that photographers, no longer able to charge for laboratory processing, have started to charge for 'burning to CD', a phrase which conjures up images of the photographer donning a welding mask and asbestos suit and retreating to a garden shed but is, in reality, simply a case of dragging images from their computer's hard drive or USB stick to the CD icon on their 'desktops'.

Photographers are already feeling the pinch of the digital age. For some years now journalists have been turning up at press conferences clasping small, brushed aluminium cameras. Digital technology has almost made professional photographers obselete in the rush to save money. Editors, deputy editors, staff writers and editorial assistants are now 'photographers' as well as journalists, thanks to the digital age.

Journalists are 'doing it for themselves' clearly under the illusion that they can do it just as well as a professional photographer, thanks to digital technology. The truth is they can't and the result is that quality goes down another notch. Overnight, a trade magazine already printed on a low quality paper stock, now has below average, poorly composed, low resolution photography too. A vicious circle develops. The advertisers don't like what they see and reduce (or eliminate) their advertising. The downwards spiral continues.

Gone – or soon to be obselete, it is argued – is the traditional feature article. In its place we will have an interactive series of comments and pointers from a mix of individuals which, collectively, give others, including journalists, leads or an idea about what might be going on in a particular industry sector. All very interesting, but nobody seems to be getting paid for their efforts. Good news for publishers, perhaps, but not for the journalist.

Where or how does a journalist make money in the brave new world of the internet if his or her magazine closes and an uncertain freelance career full of 'bad payers' beckons? It's all very well setting up a blog, like I have, and writing little pieces like this, but how does one survive and pay a mortgage and school fees? A friend suggested to me recently that I need to have a 'web presence'. I need to put myself about electronically and 'have my say' on whatever it might be and then, just maybe, I might get picked up, noticed even, by somebody, and given a proper writing assignment. It's a big 'maybe', though, considering all the geeks and anoraks who tend to rule the internet and are prepared to work for nothing.

When do the bloggers get time to blog? If they blog all day, how do they earn a living? If they blog at night, for how long? Do they come home, gulp down their dinner and then spend until gone midnight in front of a computer screen blogging away? Do they have any kind of human interaction of a face-to-face nature or are they, like many teenagers, who spend from 4pm until gone 11pm 'chatting' on social networking sites, doing nothing but sitting at a screen 'blogging'. I write for a living during the day and while I enjoy what I do, I need some down time watching the television or reading a book. Why the hell would I want to 'blog' just for the hell of it? Although that is exactly what I am doing now.

When CDs took the place of vinyl, I managed to resist change for a while, preferring the record deck and the album cover. It used to be pleasurable buying a vinyl album not only because of the music but also the packaging. Albums that folded out and offered decent artwork and text were all part of the experience which, like a quality magazine, was tactile in nature. Eventually I succumbed to the CD revolution and now all my vinyl has either been sold off to secondhand record stores or is in the attic in boxes.

I have steered clear of music downloads and MP3 players because they offer nothing but the music, arguably leaving the artist exposed and no longer able to hide behind the work of commercial artists and photographers, but I sincerely hope that the digital revolution does not mark the end of books. Recently I saw somebody reading a digital book using some kind of hand-held electronic gadget. I began to wonder how many books she had stored on the device and whether she had taken the step of removing any books and bookcases from her house or apartment. Why would she need them, I figured. Again, it's that tactile quality of books that appeals.

Which brings us back to the internet and publishing. Ultimately, it is all about information. Trade magazines are supposed to be there to help people run their businesses more effectively, so perhaps that whole tactile thing is irrelevant. Fine in the consumer press, but not in the trade. Knowledge, after all, is power and the power base has shifted. It has moved away from the publishers and into the hands of the people. But a lot depends on the people too. Not everybody is 'web savvy' and not everybody enjoys sitting in front of a computer screen. They want to be relaxing in an armchair, on a plane or train, reading, say, their copy of Farmer's Weekly. So perhaps, for a while at least, magazines will co-exist with the on-line world.

There is, of course, no room for complacency. Journalists in all sectors cannot sit still. They should be familiarising themselves with the web and taking whatever courses they feel necessary in order to be on top of the situation. That, at any rate, is what I intend to do.