MEDIA CIRCUS

It must be difficult for the Security Services, in this era of 24 Hour Rolling News and Live Twitterfeeds, to plan any kind of a strategy when dealing with any sort of "incident" when it happens, and so it was "interesting" in the bloody mess that occurred in Sydney, how much obfuscation had to be done in order for them to get a "reasonably successful" outcome.

Not that anything that ended up so horrifically could really be called "successful" by any reasonable human being...

Of course that kind of bloody outcome almost always happens when anyone involves themselves in a situation involving guns, and you just know that, whenever the armed police, army units, or special tactical forces are going to attempt to "resolve" a situation, then blood will inevitably be shed, and it will not always just be the people holding the guns that will pay with that blood.

And so, whilst the news was telling us that the Security Forces were settling down for a "long siege", they were already "secretly" planning the forced entry which brought that sad day to its unhappy end, and, whilst it's difficult to imagine how else it might have been resolved, historically, the outcome that you get is obviously how it will be remembered as having turned out, and sometimes broadcasting the lie is the only answer, because that's usually far more easy to defend in hindsight, should your actions need defending.

But there probably isn't any other way to handle the media in this day and age, because the perpetrators and hostage-takers all have SmartPhones, too, and "helpful" people will be Tweeting about what's happening no matter how much you try to explain that this really isn't helping the situation one bit, not least because there will always be some people who are siding with the bloody gunman whilst everyone else is looking on in sheer horror and fear as whatever happens happens, and, sometimes, right before their terrified (or fascinated) eyes.

Because, no matter how much we may have played in the playgrounds and fairgrounds, most normal, well-adjusted people are - or at least ought to be - utterly terrified of guns because they are, basically (and this might be stating the bleeding obvious but some people do seem to forget this from time to time) lethal weapons.

Not only that, but the circling news helicopters and the phalanx of reporters awing "developments" all have their cameras trained onto the scene all of the time, which makes any kind of "stealth" approach or "secret" plan almost impossible to execute without everybody else, including the madman with the gun, knowing all about it almost before it happens.

But the "24 Hour Rolling News" Monster needs to be fed, and the food it likes most of all is "exciting" video footage, which is why so many channels went over "Live" to watch developments unfold as they were happening, because they've all grown up knowing the impact that those images of the SAS taking back the Iranian Embassy in London way back in 1980 had around the world, and they're all hoping for a slice of that sort of tragic pie, no matter how much they may try and deny it.

Otherwise they might just have been above making yet another story segment out of a genuine, human, emotional response from one of their own.

But, sadly, not.

After all, out of such sensationalist moments are careers made, even though somebody completely innocent usually has to suffer for those images to be created, and we all forget that at our peril as we share the "exciting" story amongst our peers, and the next, far worse story unfolds, as inevitably it must, to squeeze out the last tragedy, and that focus moves on to it next, and, even though you've convinced yourself that things can't get any worse (surely?), it inevitably seems that they will, and, indeed, actually - and almost unbelievably - did today.

Because these days, the whole world is just a Big Top for the Media Circus to perform in, and the rest of us are just potential acts just waiting behind the curtain for our moment to go on and amuse both the Ringmasters and the baying, howling crowds in the audience.

I hope for everyone's sake that you all manage to stay out of the Ring, my friends.

Keep safe.

MEDIA FOLK

A couple of times this week I've been watching the television and come to the inevitable conclusion that Media folk really are very odd people indeed.

One of the children playing in the park takes a nip at another of the children playing in the park, and they talk about it as if the world's coming to an end.

On TV, Gary Lineker gave the matter such importance and gravitas that I'd swear he'd just seen his grandmother shot before his very eyes.

Is it really that important…?

Really..?

He pulls that face and honestly you'd think that he was announcing that doomsday had come rather than, essentially, some of the antics that have occurred when some soon-to-be grown-ups have been playing out…

Then there are other matters, not least the ongoing "Yewtree" enquiries. We get it - these people did very bad things, but raking it all up again time and time again just to get your headline read smacks of compounding the problem when the rest of the world might want to try and put it all behind us and move on.

Meanwhile one journalist is found guilty of going too far, and the media folk talk about it as if it too is the most important thing that's ever happened anywhere, whilst we can all see the cold fear passes behind their eyes as they realise that "but for the grace of God…"

But then they do this a lot; give excessive significance to something that the rest of us really aren't all that fussed about, but which they've been fretting about over their Lattes in the office, and then stir everybody else up into such a lather that the story somehow becomes "important" simply because they say it is, and the rest of us are suddenly getting ourselves worked up into a frenzy over something that we really ought not to be giving a flying fig about…

After all, the vast majority of us are so very insignificant that it might come as something of a compliment that someone considered our lives interesting enough to hack into our phones, but somehow we're still supposed to give a damn that some public figures had this happen and then decided that they'd better bleat on about it and continue to up their profiles.

Not that they'd need to.

Meanwhile, for the rest of us, the herd of irrelevant scuzzbuckets, most of us are now putting that sort of information out there for free anyway, regardless of whether anyone cares about what we've been up to or not, so there would be little need to hack into our pointless little lives anyway.

But then we're all becoming very odd people in that regard, as the world is so full of social media now that we're all becoming so utterly convinced that we've all attained some kind of importance that we really don't have.

Which is a tactful way, perhaps, of suggesting that it's time for me to move on.

If the media continues to irritate me this much, and make me feel this bloody miserable all of the time, perhaps I ought to just quietly walk away and stop engaging with it.

It's probably for the best.

WASHED UP

Do you ever wake up in the morning and think that everything you thought you knew is wrong…?

You, of course, might not be that kind of person. You might be the kind of person who is just full to the brim with a kind of natural self-confidence that would never allow you to harbour such doubts and, if you are, well jolly good luck to you. The rest of us mere mortals are plagued with our own problems, of course, but why on earth should those concern you? You are, after all, perfect, and everything you do is done in the sure knowledge that you are right, so that must be simply great…

Meanwhile, back on planet earth, things are afoot. I was nearly going to say “great things” there, but they seldom are all that great to be honest. As I look about me bleary-eyed in the dark, harsh cold of another pre-dawn, I do wonder quite how it has come to pass that pretty much every decision I have made in my life has led to this moment.

Or this one… Despite everything, time will keep on ticking away, won’t it…?

Entropy increases, or so they say, and when it comes to my crumbling little abode they might very well be right, although, as we now have builders scurrying across the roof tiles from time to time, perhaps we have, at least, managed to check that, at least temporarily.

Although, almost as a direct reaction to that, and following the universal law that if you start to put one thing right, another will naturally start to go wrong (and if they’re now claiming that super-symmetry may be a lost cause, perhaps they should visit my little exception that proves the rule…), the plumbing is starting to show signs of falling apart.

Nowadays it seems to take a good fifteen minutes or so just to get enough tepid water to fill a bowl to do a little bit of washing up. If you run the tap long enough, the water will get hot, of course, but only for about the two seconds it takes to put the bowl underneath the flow. Then it will immediately revert to it’s normal ice-cold state and reduce the ambient temperature of the precious cupful of hot water you’ve just managed to collect. After all, why could I possibly ever need more than two seconds worth of hot water anyway...? Oh, yeah... Right...

And some people still doubt that the universe is getting colder…

At the same time, the bullet is bitten, and, whilst one lot of environmental wastage is happening at one side of the sink, the huge carbon footprint option of boiling a kettle of water to wash the pots with is taken at the cold tap which, to stop its incessant dribbling, is jammed so firmly into the “off” position, that I am unable to turn it and hold the kettle at the same time and many expletives erupt, especially as I’m still trying to keep one hand in the “hot” water flow just in case it makes a sudden decision to actually finally warm up.

The world, it seems, refuses to go quietly.

As I rubbed the sleepydust (or whatever that goo is really called) out of my eyes the other morning, I happened at the same time to boot up the television set in order to catch up on the overnight headlines, and I really couldn’t believe my eyes.

In fact I couldn’t believe them so much that I had to rub them all over again just to make sure.

Instead of any actual news, instead I got about two minutes of “Celebrity Up the Jungle” or whatever it’s called, and this was on a channel that wasn’t even broadcasting the wretched programme.

They had, of course, found a “newsy” angle to justify this inclusion, as one of our sitting MPs had opted to take part in this televisual feast rather than doing the job she was being paid for, which gave the wretched newsbies, in a week when they were already making so much of the news be about themselves, another excuse to dress up a bit of nonsense on the telly and treat it as if it was a “proper” news story, thus giving the media yet another opportunity to aggrandise itself and convince itself of how “important” it must really be…

But this is all rather symptomatic of the modern media and its obsession with itself. “We are important!” they always seem to be implying, whereas we all know that “The whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought” as George Orwell may very well have suggested.

When the Director General of the BBC resigned after his turbulent 54 days in office, it was, of course, “newsworthy” although whether it was as newsworthy as the journalists seemed to suggest is debatable. After all, it seemed that he was so unaware of his own channel’s news output that he didn’t seem to know that he was resigning just as his flagship news programme was going off air, but for the rest of us, we really don’t give much of a flying fig as to who is running the news, just so long as they can be trusted to run it with a certain amount of integrity and honesty.

After all, most of the time, we’d all apparently rather be watching people dancing in ballrooms or eating bugs in jungles so long as, every so often, they tell us who’s died and in what country the latest disaster is unfolding, because these days, schadenfreude seems to be what the news is really there for.

Which is why, when I’m having these musings of an early morning and whilst my eyes are still crusted over and my brain isn’t yet quite active enough to know when to keep my big mouth shut, I can dress it all up with my tales of woe about my taps. After all, how else could I get your attention, if I wasn’t giving you someone else’s misery to wallow in…?

That’s how it’s supposed to work, yes…?

PANDEMIC

I’ve rarely been one for “pulling my punches” when it comes to the so-called “news agenda” in this country. In fact there are few things more likely to raise my ire than a member of the “noble” journalistic profession basically doing their job, but doing it in a sloppy, sensationalistic and fundamentally stupid and thoughtless way.

So when I am driving my way to work, as I was a couple of weeks ago, and I hear that there’s another pandemic on the horizon (or so they said) then I will naturally get myself into a bit of a fluster and listen more intently to what they have to say. After all, a “pandemic” is a serious thing. The kind of thing that could eventually lead to the end of civilisation as we know it and, if not that, possibly the loss of at least some of those who are nearest and dearest to us.

Now obviously, I’ve done my best to shelter myself from the worst impact of that at least by making sure that those closest to me, my own “nearest and dearest” are very few in number, although that argument doesn’t really hold up, does it...? After all, if they are very few, the loss of even one of them would have a higher impact, but it’s far too late for me to deal with the consequences of that misreading of the rules of the game of life now, so I’m just going to have to live with that, if I am “lucky” enough to be one of the survivors, that is.

Someone very wise once observed that adult males don’t make new friends, but instead spend most of their adult life trying to get rid of the ones they’ve got, but once again I’m slipping away from what I was originally thinking about.

You see, when mentioning the possibility of there being this potential pandemic coming our way, the newscaster also managed to say that it’s “just like in a novel by Stephen King” just in case we were getting too worried that it might be some intrusion into actual reality… Of course, as I was in the car and therefore more concerned with the pinging of an actual engine instead of a search engine, I “Harrumphed” to myself and shouted to no-one in particular but chiefly at the radio “Which Stephen King novel, eh…?” but they could not hear me and so didn’t answer.

I chunnered on to myself about lazy journalists as I travelled along, and remembered the late Terry Nation being bothered enough by the prospect of what we didn’t yet call a pandemic (at least not where I grew up), to go off and write “Survivors” way back in the mid-1970s, and arrived at work still none the wiser as to which Stephen King novel (if any) that copywriter had been referring to.

It was “The Stand” by the way, although you would never have found that out from your radio, and, having gone and looked it up to check that I was right, I was distracted enough to pack away the short pithy TwitRant I had composed and decided to save it for another day, even though I still think that whilst trying to talk about “real world” events in a way that you think your audience might relate to isn’t the worst idea ever to come out of a news room (indeed it may very well be the only good one…), somehow equating what could be a devastating reality to a work of fiction seems extraordinarily sloppy to me.

But maybe I was just in that kind of mood that day. I posted a link for my e-friends to the new picture of the universe that was published courtesy of the Hubble Space Telescope (and which puts a few things into perspective, I can tell you...) and I came within a gnat’s crotchet of apologising to them (m’e-friends, that is) for the over-effusive and non-scientific use of the word “amazing” in the headline before I thought better of it. It is, of course, “amazing”, but, in my opinion, it’s not the journalist’s job to guide or shape my opinion on that. If I choose to come to that conclusion for myself, then that’s fair enough, but telling me up front that it is “amazing” smacks of this strange philosophy of “groupthink” which always bothers me. “WE think this, so you ought to as well. What do YOU think?” Well, I think that’s a tiny bit scary...

Nor did I post anything about 30 year old maths teachers running off with 15 year old schoolgirls and there being something wrong with his sums. I thought about it, and even composed it in my head, but thought better of it. I decided that I ought not to be flippant about something that a lot of other people were more than likely to get very hot under the collar about and stepped out of the way of that juggernaut, (only for another and far more dreadful juggernaut to roar into view of course), and decided to let it lie.

Until now, at least. Ha, bloody ha...!

You see I’m learning. I might not be learning all that well, but I am learning…

Once upon a long ago I considered a career in broadcasting, you know. Every so often I even think that I might have been quite good at it in so far as it goes, but that ship had long sailed and I chose another path through my life, one which I rarely regret unless one or other of the more idiotic broadcasters happens to cross my eyes and/or ears and then I start to wonder once again about whether interviews really are the best way to get the best people.

After all, it recently struck me that the most nervous ones are the ones most likely not to be offered the job, but perhaps they are the most nervous because it’s the most important thing in the world to them and the “cool, calm and collected” ones are feeling “cool, calm and collected” simply because they couldn’t care less.

Interestingly, and as a complete aside, I recently found out (from another of Horizon’s “We’re all doomed” documentaries) that “big business” and “psychopaths” seem to be made for each other as they provide an environment to which the psychopath is naturally drawn and in which they can thrive, so now I’m rather pleased that I’m rather rubbish at interviews... It probably means that I’m comparatively sane after all...

However, I cared a hell of a lot back I those days, although I don’t think that I’d have been cut out for such things, really. But then, every so often, when I take one of those sharp intakes of breath as I hear another crass comment, I do begin to wonder why I wasn’t more persistent.

Perhaps in the end it came down to my generation being far less savvy about careers than they are nowadays. I sometimes think that my school might as well have lined us up and pointed and said “Army… Bank… Teacher…” as they went along the line, and now, of course, I even wonder about that “noble” choice I once made about not wanting to go to the “fee paying” school because I knew that my parents really didn’t have the money might have shut the door to things like Oxford and Cambridge and, ultimately, any hope of a career in journalism.

Thankfully.

CUT IT BACK

There’s a lot going on in the world at the moment, not that you’d notice it if you were to rather foolishly only allow these pages to be your guide to what’s going on in the world. Only this very week there’s been the outcome of the Hillsborough investigation, a possible future queen has had topless pictures of her published in newspapers, the middle east has started to erupt into violence again, and an American presidential election campaign has got into gear.

Not that you’d have heard anything about any of those things I’ve you’d come a-calling upon these pages over the past few days. My focus has been focussed far more closely to home, on matters of shopping and work and holidays and my own ventures out into the big, wide and scary world of social media and the more important happenings of the world’s news have rather, as they often do, passed me by.

I even had to be told what the “Major Oak” tree was last week because I’d never heard of it. (And that’s not the half of it. Only this week, in an ultimately futile gesture to make me be merely four years behind the times, I had to have explained to me who or what – I’ve forgotten already - a “Lady Ga Ga” is…)

Ah well, I suppose I do sometimes forget to pay attention, but then I do also forget that these are supposed to be personal thoughts and might not touch upon the bigger events of the world because, quite frankly, neither do I. Not only that, but I would probably only embarrass myself if I did choose to comment upon such things. There are, after all, far wiser heads looking into these matters and simply (and without any real knowledge) adding what “I reckon” into the mix probably isn’t going to help all of that much, as I wish our news editors and advocates of “Have Your Say” news gathering would realise.

We are, after all, mostly ill-informed and ignorant about many things, and we used to turn to the people who were supposed to be “in the know” for their wise counsel, but that doesn’t seem to be the preferred way of things now and in our “democratic” wisdom we’re allowing every idiot to voice their opinion, no matter how idiotic that opinion might be. Nowadays it seems as if it’s the idiots that are running our asylum and they want us to tell them how to do it.

I recently heard a man trying to persuade his entire family about a “fact” he knew about a particular TV Chef which was unutterably wrong, but he sounded pretty convincing and they all looked pretty convinced by the end of the conversation.

The idiot!

In the end, perhaps that’s what it’s all going to come down to. The biggest idiot with the loudest voice will have the opinion which we all end up having to believe as we descend once more into tribalism as civilised society crumbles all around us and our culture sails off into history.

Meanwhile, on a lighter historical note, the bones of Richard III have quite possibly been found under a car park in Leicester and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop has been resurrected by a corporation that finally seems to understand that its previous policy of short-term thinking and opening contracts up to the highest bidder might not, after all, have been the shrewdest of moves.

I’ve always preferred the idea of “in-house” design departments of whichever type, by the way. Somehow I always feel that if you’re specifically focussed on promoting “your” company and products, you’ll hit a richer vein of creativity…

Instead there came along this idea that you had to “cut things back” and put them “out to tender” as if by going with the price which undercut another one by just a few percentage points, you would end up getting a “better” rather than a “cheaper” service. There is, of course, another old adage about “getting what you pay for” and anyone who’s ever had their local council change their recycling contractor because of getting a cheaper bid will know that “cheaper” really does not generally mean “better…”

But once more, I digress. That’s not what I wanted to write about today and, once again, I’ve allowed myself to get sidetracked and gone off chasing a particular train of thought like a will o’ the wisp instead of making my point, whatever that might turn out to have been. This is what happens when you allow amateur bloggers like me to compile their own “thought for the day” instead of going to the tried, trusted and occasionally truthful “big thinkers” of the world to guide you thoughtfully through their own well-thought out arguments.

Some mornings I get this sudden realisation that I’m just an ignorant idiot who doesn’t really know much about anything and hasn’t had a proper, well-judged opinion on anything very much for quite some considerable time, and sometimes that really bothers me.

Meanwhile, and rather surprisingly given my predilection for noticing significant numbers, blog posting number 700 came and went last week with little fanfare (not that even I seemed to notice), although it was, coincidentally I’m sure, also the most “popular” day these pages had had in quite some considerable time. Whilst they never quite make it to three figures, the page views topped out at 78 that day (or – perhaps less impressively - 19 if you read the other counter…) which is kind of a lot really, and, naturally, they plummeted to a far lower number the next day to keep things in balance. Even so, it’s still certainly far more people than I ever let read my stupid plays. Nevertheless, I am feeling the urge to cut back on these pieces, too, but then I’m always thinking that and usually something pops into my brain, no matter how ill-informed and ignorant it might turn out to be, and drags me back here.

And so, as we stagger on bewilderedly towards the second anniversary of me poking my head out into the great big cyberworld and saying “hi”, perhaps I can at least try and persuade myself that I must be doing something right, if only to have managed to get this far, even if I’m doing it all far too cheaply and have managed to spend the better part of two years actually not managing to say very much about anything at all.

I suppose that only proves I’m human if nothing else, although from the constant references to whether or not I am a robot from various websites, I sometimes wonder about that, too. Perhaps it’s time I took that Turing Test…?

LISTEN UP

I seldom manage to work myself up into a state of real anger about the news agenda any more. I may get miffed, I sometimes get irked, and I’m often irritated by it, of course, as anyone who has more than a passing familiarity with these pages could no doubt confirm, but I’m seldom made angry by it. After all, I just don’t seem have the energy any more. I’ve retired, defeated, from the ring in the realisation that it’s a hopeless cause, and come to the inevitable conclusion that for me to try and change the way things are in this vacuous modern world of ours is just a waste of time and effort.

On Tuesday the 6th of August this year, however, a sad event was announced which managed to annoy me in ways which I wouldn’t have been able to predict that morning when I got up to face the day.

I just happened to be sipping my mid-morning cup of coffee and idly kicked up Twitter to see what the world had been chatting about whilst I’d been tweaking and twiddling around with some design work.

Rather sadly, I chose the exact minute when Jodrell Bank made its sad announcement of the death of its founder, Sir Bernard Lovell, that rather brilliant pioneer of radio astronomy, and a bona fide British genius, at the age of 98, and I found that rather unsettling and upsetting.

What was more unsettling was how long it took the primary British news broadcaster to announce the story. ITN and Sky were fairly quick off the mark, and the University of Manchester, where he did much of his pioneering work, had an announcement up within minutes, but BBC News were, rather ironically, focussing their radar on a man not managing to jump far enough in a sand-pit and continued to fret about that for another two hours before they finally announced the “breaking news” of the passing of a truly great Briton, knighted more than fifty years ago for services to something far more fundamental than being able to go a bit faster than someone else.

He was, of course, a very old man, and, despite the great leaps and strides made in recent years, and the rip-roaring triumph of that remote landing on Mars the very same week, science still struggles to be considered “sexy” to the news media outlets, and it is very difficult to get the BBC to admit at the moment that there is anything other than the Olympic Games happening in the world, but there really was no excuse for their tardiness in announcing to the world the passing of someone of whom we could justifiably be very proud and who quite rightly deserved to be called a “legend”.

After all this was a man who helped develop the radar system that was part of what made our shores safer from invasion during the second world war and without whom… Oh, so very much really.

A man who built himself a static 60 metre parabolic dish just to prove a point, before raising the funds to build his masterpiece (only relatively recently renamed the Lovell Telescope), the radio telescope at the Jodrell Bank observatory, which is still at the forefront of astronomical research and one of the foremost astronomical radio telescopes in the world more than fifty years after it was first built with an expected lifespan of perhaps at best fifteen years.

Back when it was first completed in 1957, Jodrell Bank was able to prove its worth shortly afterwards by being able to track and confirm the orbit of the first Russian Sputnik at the start of the “Space Age” and Sir Bernard and his team (he was already well-known enough to give his first name to Professor Quatermass in 1953) were able to intercept the signals from the Soviet Luna probe and trump the Russians by being the first to show their pictures of the dark side of the moon, but since then, the work started in that field in Cheshire has taught us so much about the nature of the universe and our place within it that we should be grateful every single day that we had minds that were enquiring enough and fascinated enough to think beyond our little planet and make it possible for humanity to go out there and explore it.

I only hope that someone was able to tell him about the success of “Curiosity” and that he understood what had happened out there before he left us.

Sir Bernard Lovell, 31st August 1913 – 6th August 2012.

STAYING IN

I mentioned recently about how I had been running the risk of emerging from my chrysalis and threatening to go out rather than remaining in my safe little cocoon. Well, that may very well be the case and I’m sure that I’ll be reporting the horrors involved in that anxious little exercise on some other day once I’ve managed to process them.

Or not, obviously…

But, for the most part, “not going out” remains the default setting, even though the whole raft of thoughts that spring to mind when I’m merely sitting inside my little house and sensing the forces of entropy slowly ripping both it and myself to fragments probably mean that I really should NEVER be allowed to stay in at all.

However, because the written words are still trickling rather than flooding out of me, my mind has to go somewhere to get its fun and to keep its little grey cells from setting into stone, and so it tends to need to ever-so briefly spark off on all manner of topics in some kind of vague attempt at keeping me sane.

Sometimes it is so very pleased by the thoughts that it has triggered that it spends a good solid ten minutes persuading me back into the shady and sordid world of “microblogging” so that I can store the thought there being happily ignored for later use, which is why sometimes “random-seeming” and “seemingly pointless” thoughts suddenly pop up for no very good reason in my TwitWorld stream.

Just the same as everyone else, then…

Either that or I’ll end up “favourite-ing” something interesting sounding just so I can easily find it again later on when I don’t actually get around to reading it or when I mention to someone that I saw something “interesting” earlier but then struggle to find it when I need to and the moment gets lost.

I am actually naturally averse to “favourite-ing” (not least because of the ghastly word composite it creates) because it really only encourages them…

But random weekend thoughts (“I wonder whether Freddie Jones was ever tempted to utter the old actor’s joke “Toby or not Toby...?” when his son was born...?”) …or bizarre fragments of conversations about books that amuse me enough to want to write them down (“There can’t be a hand gesture for “smut” because it would be far too rude...”) …or couch-based responses to TV ads (“Is the answer to the SubWay question “By exploi...?” [PHONE RINGS] Sorry, that’s just my lawyer saving me from myself…” – Yep, I bottled out there, didn’t I…?) or even the programmes themselves (“Not convinced Geoff Boycott didn’t “play for the team”. I just don’t think that the team realised that his stickability was what was needed.”) sometimes get immortalised for no very good reason that I can think of afterwards.

That last remark reminds me at least that the cricket has returned to keep me distracted, even though my hopes of “my” team’s success on that score are unlikely to be satisfied after the drubbing that they received from South Africa at the Oval. Perhaps that’s where my admiration for “stickability” like Geoffrey’s came from…? Who knows? I am aware however that this generally soggy summer has not meant that I’ve been quite as “involved” with the cricket as I usually am. Some days it’s been a struggle to remember that there’s actually been a game scheduled which is, to say the least, unusual for me…

Perhaps it’s just been the proliferation of “other sports” this year that have pushed the game of cricket even further down the list of things that the nation shows any interest in.

This, of course, has led to a proliferation of reasons that I shouldn’t be allowed to stay at home with my mind unfettered by the babble of anything other than those fabled “media sources” because it just makes me ranty when I hear obvious madness like that spouted on Radio 4 by Kris Akabusi as he burbled on about the “Olympian Gods” for no very good reason or when the BBC News spouts some drivvle like a description of a family travelling “All the way from St Helens” to be “part of the National conversation”

“Eh…?” says my brain. “Did I hear that properly…?”

Meanwhile I did crack at the weekend and finally found myself  watching some rowing as I channel surfed looking for “5Live Sports Extra” on my television. I have been known to quite enjoy watching a bit of rowing and there seemed to be a race on so I saw the last minute or so of it and “Team GB” won a gold medal. A few minutes I was channel hopping again and did the same thing and got the same result.

“This getting gold medals lark seems easy” I thought, “I don’t know what everyone was complaining about. They’ve just got two of the things and I’ve only been watching for less than six minutes…”

I decided to quit whilst I was ahead and went back to Headingley for the rest of the day.

Other matters have come along to test my ire, however. Like the person on TwitWorld complaining that he’d witnessed two different parents on quite separate situations on the same day describing Northern Ireland as being part of Great Britain (Tssk! The things that rile people, eh…?) but then I did notice later on that the BBC website did change it to “Great Britain and Northern Ireland” on their “medals table” thing. Ah yes, the “medals table…” finally there’s something to get my statistician’s heart thumping. It’s all about the numbers, you know…

But then TwitWorld is a peculiar place. Something only has to be briefly “trending” for someone to go and snaffle a few thoughts and turn it into a news item. Similarly, there only has to be the slightest whiff of “outrage” (even misguided outrage) for a mighty organ like The Guardian to back down over its perfectly legitimate use of the word “niggardly…”

Back in the so-called “real world” even staying at home can cause me to risk first of apoplexy when it becomes readily apparent that I’m going to need a PhD in “Recycling” to successfully sort out our rubbish in future... but that kind of thing, I fear, is the kind of thing I should only really rant about in another place…

I really should try to get out more.

GOING OUT

Well, where are we…? Back deep inside enemy territory, I fear. Back in the dark place where the “enemy” is chiefly myself. Lurking in a strange world where I’m trying to think of new and novel things to tell you about and yet things in this humble little life are being very static, still and uneventful.

On the positive side, it is, however, a time of year when the “holiday season” means that, professionally at least, the unexpected can come along thankfully far less often than when everyone is available to make their demands upon your time and so you can actually get along with some of the things that you really need to be getting on with and have far fewer distractions. The working day therefore seems, from the point of view of external influences, remarkably quiet (although I’m sure that having said that, it won’t be now...) and so I am able to take some time to experiment in those shiny new software packages that I have remained unfamiliar with and take my time over my projects instead of blundering my way through a huge pile of the stuff in my “in” tray…

Which gives me time to think...

To think things like: Do people (real people, you know...? People who have “grown-up” jobs) even have things like in trays any more...?

Or have they gone the way of the briefcase...? That once ubiquitous prop of the “businessperson” that you seldom see nowadays and which seems to have been consigned to the bin of history alongside the bowler hat and the stripy trousers...

Which, rather naturally, brings me around to thinking about the successes and failures of my current everyday life…

In the “failures” column of life, I have failed to attend plays which I probably should have done in order to remain supportive of certain chums (although to be fair I was on holiday at the time…), and failed to unwrap and read my subscription magazines (so that’s money well spent), although I finally notice that one was overdue and rang my subscription service only to be told it had lapsed. Now, as the whole point of taking out subscription services is to “never miss a copy” I wasn’t best pleased to have not been sent a reminder and told them so in few uncertain terms before dashing off to the supermarket to get a copy.

Failure to communicate is still failure, is it not, but so is a failure to keep calm abut such things...

However, whilst perhaps not at first glance an obvious contender for the “successes” column, I have successfully managed to break one of my favourite mugs which I left at the top of the stairs in order not to forget to take it downstairs later. As I left the bathroom, my toe just clipped it enough to send it sailing in a perfect arc and I was able to watch the whole flight as it soared through the air and then plummeted towards the bottom of the stairs.

Now, I’ve never excelled at things like “footballing” but even I was able to admire the perfection of that perfectly timed arc that was the path my drinking vessel took as it flew towards its date with its own ultimate destiny. If I had purposely managed to be so deft with my right foot during my younger years, my life could, no doubt, have been very different, but, like the time I took one shot at a basketball hoop and the ball went into it first time without touching the sides, these things are sadly just flukes and one-offs and could never be repeated successfully.

Meanwhile, the mug itself did not shatter into pieces as I expected it to, and I thought I’d got away with it until I tried to make tea in it later and the liquid was dripping out through an almost invisible hairline crack that reluctantly consigned it to history.

Other “successes” include the fact that I have also successfully booked a restaurant for an evening out some time soon. I’d had one of those emails from a pub we once spent a pleasant enough evening eating in, and after which I foolishly filled in one of those “customer satisfaction” forms that ask for your email address. Ever since, I have, naturally enough, found myself on an “e-mailing list” which tells me about upcoming events which they think that I might “enjoy” because they know me so little.

Whilst all of the “Elvis” and “ABBA” nights generally fail to appeal, the “taster menu” nights from their rather high-quality restaurant always get my attention, so, when one promoting their “fish tasting night” popped in I dutifully ignored it. When it popped in again about a week and a half later, I felt that it was safe enough to mention it out loud at home now because it was likely to be fully booked.

In this way, the offer of a “night out” would have been made without any of that tricky nonsense of actually having to go anywhere. Cunning, eh...?

Unfortunately, the fates were conspiring against me because, not only was my suggestion greeted by alarming levels of enthusiasm, but my subsequent tentative enquiry of the venue itself discovered that not only were tables still available, but that they had provisionally booked one for us, and so now all that I had to do was drop in and pay the deposit sometime... That and, of course, attend the evening itself.

This all means, of course, that another evening of “going out” needs to be trickily anticipated and negotiated through which, for an unsociable git like I am, is always going to be a it of an ordeal, and not only that, but one that I will also have put my hand into my pocket and actually (knife and) fork out for…

Still, there’s no reason to stay in at the moment anyway.

There’s nothing at all on the telly because of the “Jumparunathon” thing that’s going on in Londinium, although that does mean that things like “The Bridge” and the shiny disc rentals are getting turned around far more frequently. I did sit down for some “news” the other night, but there was, it seemed, only “sports news” to be found in the world, and it seemed that they were mostly sports that wouldn’t have looked out of place on “Kid’s TV” or the grand old days of “It’s A Knockout” which might, at the very least, explain why my country seems to be better at them.

So there was no “real” news, not at least that is, until Huw turned on his “serious face” as the camera angle changed to an angle that did not include the big happy sports stadium as his background image. “Real” news, “serious” news, “proper” news, it seems, cannot have a great big bowl dedicated to “fun and games” as its backdrop, but it’s also strange how quickly the newscaster’s face can make that all important switch from levity to gravitas at the flick of a switch that jumps between between camera outputs.

A bit like me when I got that reply to my email.

MEDIAPEEL 0.2

I realised recently that I will never be a successful writer of anything in particular because I don’t really understand people. That, and I sometimes take things too literally. I’ve been watching “Wilfred” on BBC3 which is an interesting enough idea, although I find the concept and the topics rather too disturbing for my aging mind to process. If you’ve not seen the show, basically, a young man contemplates suicide and when he wakes up, his neighbours dog appears to him to be a man in a dog suit, and much hilarity ensues.

Sadly, I keep being taken outside the story by various little things about the structure that bother me, so, instead of being carried along by the journey, instead I find myself worrying about the details and generally getting bogged down in things that obviously don’t concern the excited Tweeters whose unique observations upon the “coolness” of the show are read out by the continuity announcer over the end credits. Such a blatant attempt to persuade or manipulate the viewers into thinking that what they are watching is somehow essential I haven’t seen in a long time, but I digress.

My problem comes with what the other people in the show are supposed to be seeing. In theory they act like they can just see an ordinary dog, but my mind can’t make the leap between storylines that involve that dog being seen playing a guitar, smoking dope and wearing a backpack in those scenes. Like I said, it is my problem, in the same way I couldn’t detach myself during an episode of “Hustle” which talked about Albert Stroller’s wartime love affair whilst serving as an American serviceman even though I know that Robert Vaughn wasn’t even old enough to be in the army when the war ended. I know that people can play “older” of course, but the sad thing is that in many of the surrounding episodes he plays “younger” and this kind of inconsistency bothers me, and, once again, removes me from the story, and, sadly, it is this inability to think “outside the box” that has finally convinced me that success as a “creative” writer will always escape me because I’m basically far too literal.

I did once start a novel, of course, way back in the day when I still had creative juices to tap. I think it still sits becalmed in an ancient hard-drive at somewhere around the 40,000 words mark. I believe it was an existentialist detective story from the days when existentialism was my current interest du jour, but it wasn’t ever likely to go anywhere. My team leader at the time once told me I’d never finish it and it turns out he was right, so... well done him for his foresight. I did once, in the dark days after I stopped writing my plays, once consider adapting one of them into novel form but then I never actually bothered to do it, so I suspect that my one novel that everyone is supposed to have in them has evaporated into nothingness and instead been transformed into daily random witterings about nothing much in particular. I did pass on details recently to keener, sharper minds about self-publishing their works, but I suspect that that is a joy that I will never personally manage to achieve, although I’m always interested in being involved with some kind of collaboration with someone. I always feel that somewhere along the line I missed out on having a good mentor.

Other things in the media have passed before my nose lately, too. I was rather impressed to see a television advert for something as quintessentially lo-tech as an “Oxford Notebook” (“For those who write on both sides of the page”) and which wasn’t referring to some kind of electronic device. I suppose it must be the time of year with the schools and universities starting up again, but it made me happy.

I tried very hard to stay awake during the opening part of Mark Cousin’s 15 part “love letter” to cinema “The Story of Film” which was on very late on Saturday night. A lovingly crafted documentary series about a fascinating subject only really marred by his soporific manner of delivering his commentary which really did cause the eyelids to flicker. One rather interesting issue that came out of his observations was of how, much like the traveling circuses and other sideshow amusements of old, the early days of cinema was a refuge for the outcasts and rebels of society. This meant, however, that during an era when there were otherwise fairly few opportunities for certain groups in society to rise to prominence, the early days of cinema provided great opportunities for women and those within otherwise badly put upon ethnic groups to shine. This open and tolerant way of working was only really shut down when the “suits” and marketing me became involved once cinema became a successful commodity to be exploited and should give us all something to think about.

Finally, I was listening to the audio commentaries on my DVDs of “The Thick of It” over the weekend. What can I say? This was a house of disease. Again. It was interesting to me that one of the writers seems to have been specifically employed to make the (bad) language being used more “colourful” for comic effect. A “swearing consultant” if you will. Nice work if you can get it, but it reminded me of a tale one of my former colleagues once told me about his previous life on a building site, when a cement mixer was allowed to set overnight and the foreman bellowed: “What f***ing f***er f***ed the f***ing f***er up?” A perfectly descriptive and understandable sentence that would make no sense if you removed the swearing (“What the up?”), and I hand it freely to Mr Iannucci, should he wish to use it.

Total Tucker!

ALWAYS THE LAST TO KNOW

Do you remember the day you heard that Princess Diana had died?  If you’re old enough, I bet you can. It’s now getting on for a decade and a half ago now since it happened, and it’s an idea which we’ve all kind of got used to and come to terms with. Well, everyone except the leader writers for the “Daily Express” of course who still seem to regard the whole sorry incident as an “outrage”. I suppose that’s fair enough, really. The accidental death (or whatever else you personally choose to believe) of anyone when they’re really too young to go should be something to be considered outrageous, especially when they spent those last few minutes in front of the intrusive lenses of the press pack being driven at high speed by a supposedly fairly drunken chauffeur.

I’m not quite old enough to have had the “unforgettable” memory of hearing about the assassination of President Kennedy, and the self-absorbed, musically illiterate teenager that I once was (did he ever really go away?) managed to be fairly unconcerned at the death of John Lennon, although I did at least have the good grace to feel brutally appalled at that loss when it became significant to me in later years. Elvis Presley shuffling off this mortal coil really only affected me because I was delivering newspapers back then, and the pictures of “The King” in his coffin were probably the first images of a real dead body that I’d ever been exposed to, although I only really knew him from the films they showed during the school holidays.

I do remember my first experience of that stomach-churning sensation that now seizes me when I hear of a world-shattering event that seems somehow significant to me when I got home from, of all things, a church membership induction meeting (I was young, and ever eager to please…) and heard about the shooting of President Ronald Reagan, which I suppose was a turning point of sorts, but I suppose that, for my generation, it was the shock of hearing about Diana on that summer Sunday morning that will be our own “Do you remember where you were when…?” moment.

In those days I was renting a room in a house belonging to another young woman destined for a tragic end, but, as yet, that was still some weeks away. On a Sunday I would usually surface and follow whatever normal routine it was that I had back then (although precious little could have been considered “normal” during that particular long summer), and struggle through whatever after-effects I might have had to suffer with from the Saturday night just passed. At some point I would leave the house and stroll the three miles or so to the house that my mother was then living in for our (then) weekly lunch date.

It was a bright enough summer’s morning and I remained oblivious to the huge events unfolding on the world’s bigger canvas, because I’d managed to stagger through the day that far without switching on a TV set or a radio, and no-one else seemed to have surfaced for conversation of any kind that morning when I left the house. No newspapers had been bought because all of us were too impoverished back then to waste money on unnecessary newsprint, so the world seemed utterly normal as I made that familiar journey. I wasn’t aware of seeing any shocked or sorrowful faces as I walked along. Nobody stopped me in the street to share any “Have you heard the terrible news...?” moments. Perhaps seeing my happy-go-lucky, jaunty self strolling along in my carefree way, going about my business offended some of those who saw me pass by, but if it did, nobody made me aware of it. Perhaps the scary hairy real me of those times was too intimidating, but I doubt it. I don’t really think I’ve ever been capable of intimidating anyone.

My mother’s house was opposite a small newsagent’s shop, which was usually pretty packed with people trying to buy their cigarettes and papers on a Sunday lunchtime. I remember popping in there for some reason, probably to buy a chocolate bar or some other hangover recovery aid, but I know it wasn’t to buy a paper because my mother would already have bought one. I did spot some vague reference to Dodi Fayed in one or two of the headlines of the stacks of papers under the magazine racks, and began to wonder what that was about, but nobody in the shop said anything about it that I was aware of, and I paid and went on my way.

I remember (because I’ve always been a bit of a “news junkie” when it comes to the bigger events) being intrigued enough by that headline to switch on the old Sony Trinitron when I got to my mother’s house to find out what had been going on, and, in those days before the curse of 24 hour rolling news, I was able to get the gist of the story in a five minute “infodump” which at least gave us something to talk about over that Sunday’s lunch once mother returned from her churchgoing.

Later on, I strolled back home. Sometimes it really is difficult to adjust to one of those cultural cornerstones of the country’s international identity being suddenly and unexpectedly snuffed out. I wasn’t (and still am not) a particularly interested observer in the various deeds and doings of our monarchy, but I am a bit of a fan of the nation’s traditions, so, even if I affected an air of nonchalant disinterest, it still seemed to be of some significance. I didn’t feel any personal desire to break down in tears or anything, nor, in fact, did I even watch the burial service the next week, but, just for a moment, my world wobbled a little and things didn’t seem quite so certain any more.

So I arrived home, and the rest of Sunday rolled along much as it usually did, but with less to watch on the telly in those four channel days. I was pretty convinced that, as was always fairly usual with such things, I had probably been the last person in the country to find out what had happened.

However, there was also a third adult living in that house in those days, renting another room, and, as I sat mulling things over in a quiet kitchen that afternoon, she surfaced at around 5.00 PM having had a particularly late Saturday night, and, rather weirdly, I found myself in the unique position of unexpectedly having to actually pass on the day’s rather strange news, which I inadvertently mentioned on the assumption that the early morning taxis, or maybe even the late night DJs might have been already talking about the story whilst I was still snoring away and she was still partying.

I always was such a lightweight.

It became a running gag for a few weeks: “I’m always the last to find out anything… and then I tell you!” I still use it from time-to-time, if I’m being honest, although, sadly, not in that company. It’s become another one of my “little phrases” that I dig out rather too frequently. I’m sure they were all once at least a little bit endearing, but I think that they now just irritate the hell out of everyone I talk to.

In the whole new information-hungry world in which we live these days, it’s pretty unlikely that anyone would be out of the loop so long any more, unless you’re actually on a technological holiday by some kind of personal choice, and even then it does depend on which country you’re in and what kind of place you’re staying.

My last one was bliss…

The world is getting ever smaller, and so many of us are so permanently “in touch” with everything, that you’d have to be almost completely off the beaten track not to be fully briefed about something like that if it ever happened again. News seems to spread around   TwitWorld (for example… Other networking… Ah! You know the routine…) like wildfire and you can always tell a big story has broken (or has just been made up) when an unlikely name pops up as “trending” and it’s very hard to resist having a peek, and before you know it, you’re in the loop again.

A few years ago I did get a message - via more conventional means - that my fellow lodger in that house had also succumbed to a tragic early death, but that’s a story for another day, I’m sure, although I’m pretty certain that in that particular case, I actually was the last to know. Still, there are too many people leaving us far too young at all levels of society. Some of them get headlines, national mourning and state funerals, whilst others are just missed by a broken few. It does, however, always surprise me that of the three of us who spent that year in each other’s company, I’m the only one still alive.

I’d never have put money on that.