On the writing process

Sometimes it’s possible to sit down and start typing the beginning of an article, and just keep going until you reach the end, having discovered a satisfying middle about half-way through.

But not always.

This morning I sat down to write something fairly short (about 400 words) on a topic I know well. A few days previously, I’d written almost 200 words about it in outline form, for the benefit of the editor who was commissioning me to write it, so you’d think that conjuring up the rest wouldn’t be a problem.

It was, though. I tried the first approach - write from the beginning and see what comes out. Something reasonable emerged, but I was being far too wordy and faffy. I reached 380 words in no time at all and hadn’t covered half the subject. I needed to start again.

So I returned to the outline I’d submitted and actually used it. The freshly-produced copy was decent in places, so I could paste it down into the second, outline-inspired draft. Things were soon looking much more promising.

I write this post not in some misguided hope that anyone will learn anything from it, but more as a note-to-self. Sometimes I’m guilty of charging blindly into work without stopping to think first about what it really needs. Rather like mending dead household applicances, writing a decent article often benefits from having a cup of tea and a bit of a think beforehand.

Labels: work, writing

In the recording studio with the Cocteau Twins

ROBIN: Right, I think we’ve easily got an album’s worth there.

SIMON: (Shrugs)

ROBIN: We should do some final mixes. Which one first?

ELIZABETH: Fotzepolitic, I think.

ROBIN:

SIMON:

ELIZABETH: You know, it goes “See-en soo-bon sme bachtooyoo” in the chorus.

ROBIN: Ah, right. That one. Me and Simon call it “Jangle 3”.

ELIZABETH (Annoyed): Fine. That’s one track. What else?

SIMON: I -

ROBIN: How about that floaty hippy one?

SIMON:

ELIZABETH:

ROBIN: You know, it’s all sort of dreamy. Bit slow. Jangly.

SIMON: Is it -

ELIZABETH: Is it Oomingmak?

ROBIN:

SIMON:

ELIZABETH: You know, off Victorialand?

ROBIN: Nah, not that floaty.

ELIZABETH: From The Flagstones?

ROBIN:

SIMON:

ELIZABETH: Come on, From The bloody Flagstones? It goes “Sumtymes eye seeeioo ahhn tho flaaahagstohnes”. Bloody obvious, that one.

ROBIN: No, not that one. It’s the one where the chorus bit goes “Ooh la la”.

SIMON:

ELIZABETH:

ROBIN: You know. “Ooh la la”.

ELIZABETH:

SIMON:

ELIZABETH: Oh, hang on - you mean Calfskin Smack?

ROBIN: Dunno. Do I?

ELIZABETH: It goes “Ooooooooooh lalalalala, ooooooooooooh lalalalala”

ROBIN (Beaming): Yeah that’s it.

ELIZABETH: OK, so we’ll do that second. Shall we plan a third one while we’re at it?

SIMON: Well -

ROBIN: Yeah why not.

ELIZABETH: Any suggestions?

ROBIN: What do you think, Simon? Jangly 12? Jangly-Poppy 4?

SIMON: Jang -

ROBIN: I quite like the idea of doing Jangly Atmospheric 8 myself.

ELIZABETH:

ROBIN: It’s the one where the drums come in towards the end.

ELIZABETH:

ROBIN: You sing it, Si.

SIMON: It goes -

ELIZABETH: Oh wait, is it Blue Bell Knoll?

ROBIN (Shrugging): Not sure.

ELIZABETH: The one that starts with some jangly sounds, and me going: “Issss ish nacch no-long no-lorrrr, for-borrrr, ah-laah naowt, ah-laahsu-uuung nah boloh bo”.

ROBIN: Wavey sounds in the background? Drums at the end?

ELIZABETH: Yeah.

ROBIN: That’s Blue Bell Knoll?

ELIZABETH: Yeah.

ROBIN: Cool.

SIMON: (Goes to pub)

Labels: music, writing

The harsh virtual reality of home decorating

I spent much of this morning decorating, and because decorating is the most boring thing in the world, I entertained myself by trying to come up with some ideas for a science fiction story. Needless to say (though I’m going to say it anyway) this is the kind of idle thought that has drifted around my head for years now.

So far, no entertaining plot ideas have emerged, despite this being the third house I’ve co-owned and therefore been forced to decorate. Anyway.

I started out with this thought: “No galactic civilisations. No warp drives. No super zappy stuff. Let’s think realistically.” So I emulsioned the walls and imagined a future human history that remains stuck unhelpfully in the Solar System. Even 10,000 years from now. Which is a loooong time, plenty of time for people (the concept of person, even) to change, but pretty much nothing in celestial history terms. I ummed in my head about AI and Ganymede and half a dozen other ideas that Arthur C Clarke probably thought of half a century or more ago, then found I’d finished the painting and stopped for fried egg sandwich.

Then, this evening, Warren Ellis happened to mention something called “Mundane SF” and I sat up straight in front of my computer. He didn’t mean … surely not - someone had already written stuff like this? Gah! Of course they have. There’s a whole bloody genre full of it.

Now all the time I was hoping to spend writing my Mundane science fiction story will be taken up reading the backlog of stuff that’s gone before. At this rate, I shall have to decorate the living room and the downstairs loo before I have any chance of coming up with an original idea.

Labels: rant, writing

The unwritten rulebook

Overheard in the swimming pool changing rooms on a Sunday morning…

Little lad: “Dad, why are there so many dads in the pool today?”

Big daddy: “That’s the rule, son. Dads have to take kids swimming on Sunday. That’s what happens.”

“But why?”

“It’s what’s known as an unwritten rule.”

Beat.

“But who didn’t write it?”

Labels: writing

Types of dad spotted on the beach

• Miltary dad
• Super sandcastle dad
• Sport dad
• Fat slob dad
• Strange-shorts dad
• Trolley dad
• Adult-size spade dad
• New, nervous dad
• Grandad

Labels: writing

Overcoming word block

Things to try when the words stop flowing...

• Look around. How’s the lighting in the room? Make it brighter, dimmer.
• Dig something in the garden for 40 minutes. Get your fingers filthy. Think about soil, worms, seeds.
• Have a shower.
• Delete the last few paragraphs. Re-write them from memory.
• Start writing a different section/chapter/page.
• Leave these words for at least 12 hours; focus on something else instead. Return to the troublesome words with a fresh brain.
• Go running, swimming. Then have a shower.
• Go out and relax with friends.
• Make your favourite drink or snack but do not consume it while working; go and sit outside for a few minutes. Challenge yourself to identify trees, listen for birdsong, look at ants and study their movements. When your drink is finished, return to your work.
• Keep a ‘rants’ file somewhere on your computer, or get an anonymous “rants blog” somewhere; if something’s eating you up, go vent some bile there.
• If you have a portable computer, or can write on paper, move to a new location. Ideally, walk there.
• Draw a sketch of what you want to write.
• Find somewhere quiet with no distractions. Meditate on the work. Actually think about the task; don’t take notes, don’t use computers or whiteboards or flipcharts or any other tools. Break your task into tiny pieces, mentally. Look for some degree of clarity. Having reached it, remember it, then stop. You’ll only be able to remember one thing at a time.

Labels: writing

Eggs on bed

There was a storm late on the Saturday night, one of those endless storms that floats low over the town and broods for hours. The thunder woke everyone up, including Barney.

Most of us managed to get back to sleep again, but he couldn’t. He was wide awake and hungry and just wanted to get on with the day, even though it was still the early hours.

He came into our room several times:

“Can I have some breakfast now?”

We sleepily muttered that it was far too early, and that he should go back to bed.

After a few attempts at persuading us an early breakfast was a good idea, Barney must have decided that if the parents were too sleepy or too grumpy to provide it, he might as well go and get breakfast by himself.

So he quietly padded downstairs. Mummy and Daddy snoozed on, oblivious.

Barney knows his way around the kitchen very well now, so he did the sensible thing and aimed for the fridge. This meant dragging a stool across the room to stand on, and balancing precariously on it while opening the fridge door.

Having opened it and got himself positioned, he gazed inside. Hmmm … what to eat?

Ah! Eggs!

Impressively for a four-year-old, he somehow managed to extract the egg box, open it, remove two eggs without breaking them, put them down somewhere, close the box, put it back in the fridge, and shut the door.

Now armed with his eggs, he faced a problem. He doesn’t know how to make eggs into breakfast. Thankfully, he didn’t try operating the cooker, but instead wandered back up to his bedroom.

What to do with two eggs?

Put them in the bed of course!

Now what?

Hmmm.

Fancy a bit of jumping.

Boing. Boing boing boing.

A little while later, Kate woke up enough to wander into B’s room and ask him if he wanted to go downstairs for breakfast with her.

“Yes please,” he said.

Kate spied something suspicious.

“What’s that wet patch on your bed?”

Barney looked at her as though she was an idiot.

“The eggs,” he explained.

And there they were, mashed into a shelly, eggy, soggy mess all over the duvet and the sheets.

Labels: family, life, writing

Things I've given away on Freecycle

• Make-your-own will kit
• Pocket FM radio
• Single bed
• Authentic Moroccan tagine
• Dining table and four chairs
• Yellow Dog Linux 3.0
• Palm Pilot
• Large pile of wood chippings
• Collection of half-used paint pots
• Internal door (with hinges)
• Ubuntu Linux disks
• Barbecue (on wheels, rusty)
• Selection of electrical switches and sockets

Which just goes to show, people will take all sorts of crap off your hands if you're giving it away for free.

Labels: writing

Well done Tom Watson

It's bizarre to read through the comments under Tom Watson's resignation letter to Tony Blair.

Watson gets roughly equal shares of support and criticism, but what leaves me perplexed are those who criticise him for "starting a civil war" (their terms, not mine) in the Labour Party.

This is crazy. If there are already two sides (at least) in the party and they're ready to fight politically bloody battles to win control of Number 10, then why on earth should Watson be blamed for "starting" them? What's the sense in arguing that Watson should have kept quiet, only for the opposing sides to merely plot against, and keep secrets from each other?

Personally, I think Watson's done the sensible thing. Not in the sense of looking after the future of the party - I couldn't give a monkeys for Labour anymore - but in the sense that he has allowed himself to live by his conscience, rather than have it dictated to him by the Whips Office.

Like one or two of his supportive commenters, I don't know anyone who actually likes this Government any more. I can't forgive them for PFI, which looms over our schools like a death sentence, or for bending over for George W Bush.

I hate it when I come over all politically bitter. I should get out more.

Labels: writing

A Freecycle webapp

Freecycle is a great idea; giving away stuff you don't want to people happy to come and take it from you.

The problem is that Freecycle operates via mailing list, and isn't very well suited to it, especially when subscriber numbers increase beyond a hundred or so. Suddenly you're being swamped with messages and it's very hard to keep track of the status of any particular offer. People end up sending many unnecessary messages finding out if something's gone, is still available, and so on.

What Freecycle could benefit from is a neat little webapp to make the process simpler.

Let's say we start with a home page at freecycle.org - something nice and easy to remember, much better than the Yahoo! Groups URLs that members currently have to deal with.

Local Freecycle groups could all have a subdirectory of that, perhaps also subbed within a country dir, such as freecycle.org/uk/bradfordonavon.

On this page, logged-in members would see a list of current offers, colour-coded with the status. Pale green background means on offer to all; yellow background means reserved and awaiting collection. Red background means taken; these items will drop off the bottom of the list fairly soon after being snapped up.

Each item is controlled by its owner. When you log in, you have access to another page called "My items" which shows everything you are offering or have claimed.

Making a claim would work a bit like comments on a web page, but only the item owner would see all the claims. Other members would see only their own claim, along with the total number of claims made by others. Such as: "You have made a claim for this item. There are 5 other claims."

A successful claimant will be chosen by the item owner simply by ticking a checkbox next to their name; a message will appear in their "My items" page informing them that they've been successful, and perhaps they could optionally have an email sent to an address of their choosing with the same information.

Freecycle's ingenious concept is constrained inside mailing lists. I think that a well-designed webapp along these lines - almost an eBay without the payment involved - would go a long way to freeing it up and getting more people taking part.

Labels: tech, writing

Stupid Animated Characters; or, Your web page might not be the only one I have open right now

Web pages with stupid animated characters in them are annoying enough in their own right, but they get me all the more annoyed when the stupid animated characters start talking the moment the page is loaded.

Nokia's Park WiFi page, for example. (WARNING: Stupid Animated Characters.)

What bugs me so much is the assumption on the part of the site developers that just because the page has been loaded in my browser, I am looking at it immediately.

Tabs are not new in web browsers, no matter how new they might appear to IE users. A lot of us have been using tabs, and what's more, opening pages in background tabs for years now. That's how I do the vast majority of my browsing.

It follows that I'm rarely looking at a page while it loads; I'll open it in the background and devote my attention to it when it suits me, ta. To open a bunch of links in background tabs and then have to guess which bastard one is talking at me is hugely irritating.

Please, developers who insist on using Stupid Animated Characters: can you not at least give us web users the opportunity to load the Stupidness and play it when we like, perhaps with a large "Play" or "Talk" button? Please?

Grumph.

Labels: tech, writing

Yay and yay and humbug

X-ray: "Normal."

MRI brain scan: "Normal."

EEG electric activity scan: "The brain waves on the right side of your brain look slightly different to those on the left; the significance of this is uncertain."

Riiight.

When the doctors told me that I really shouldn't drive for a while, at least until the cause of my mysterious fainting episode had been established, I arrogantly and naively thought I'd be able to manage just fine without access to a car.

"I'm a relatively fit, active young man living in a small town that has easy access to everything essential for day-to-day life," I thought to myself. "I can get by."

And I did, for a while. But after a few weeks the frustration started to grow. The recycling piled up in the utility room, because I didn't do my monthly trip to the recycling centre to get rid of it. My newly-constructed office remained half-decorated because I couldn't, on a whim, drive to appropriate stores to get the paint, shelving and other bits and bobs I wanted to use. Our season ticket to Longleat sat unused on the microwave, because I wasn't able to take Barney there for day trips as I'd planned. And while the hot weather wilted everyone in sight, I failed to be organised enough to get on the train to the seaside for a day.

It turns out that I'm not nearly as radical as I thought I was, and every bit as lazy as I wanted to think I was not. Living without a car turned out to be time-consuming (endless hours waiting for buses), expensive (I pay about £5 for a return to Bath, nine miles away), and annoying. Sure, I could get to most shops for most things, I could get to a pub and a post office and visit most of my friends, but I couldn't transport any objects, I couldn't carry heavy bag loads of stuff. Despite my fondness for thinking myself environmentally friendly, I'm still a car-dependant consumer like everyone else, and found it very hard to change my ways.

Now I've been given the all-clear, and things are looking brighter. I have a long list of things I want to do in the car, and an enhanced admiration for people who really have taken the radical step of ditching cars completely.

That said, I've re-kindled my fondness for cycling, and the constant treks up and down the hill into town on the bike have, I'm sure, helped me get a little fitter than I might otherwise have been. I've no intention of using the car for short around-town journeys; indeed, I'm determined to make an effort to think harder than ever before about getting in the car in the first place - "Do I have to drive, or am I just being lazy?"

As for my funny episode back in April, no-one really knows what it was. I've been prodded and x-rayed and scanned and tested many times since, and everything has come back saying I am as normal and as healthy as a 35-year-old part-time freelance writer can be expected to be. So yay for me, yay for the NHS, yay for cycling, and yay for coming to terms with just how easy it is to be a lazy so-and-so when you've got a car key in your hand and a tank full of petrol. Brummmmm.

Labels: life, writing

Someone special

When she was about 19, Sally spent some time travelling around Ireland. She found herself in a village on a crossroads; on three corners were pubs, and on the the fourth corner a church.

She stayed with a friend in a room in one of the pubs, right above the bar. They tried to have an early night but the noise from downstairs was too much, so they got dressed again and went down to join in.

One of the local lads took a shine to Sally and asked her out. He was dressed up that night in a smart suit, looked very much the young gent - Sally said yes, and he promised to pick her up the following day.

Pick her up he did, in his van, to accompany him on his job delivering gas canisters to remote cottages. Sally sat on an upturned orange crate, which served as the passenger seat, with a small dog behind her panting in her ear. The young lad was now dressed in jeans and a scruffy T-shirt and didn't look nearly so gentlemanly. There were huge holes in the floor of the van through which Julie could watch the road whizzing by.

At every cottage they stopped at for deliveries, the young lad would jump out and carry a gas canister to the waiting housewife, who would nudge him, point at Sally waiting in the van, and ask him if he'd found someone special.

It turned out he hadn't, because when they returned to the town he disappeared very quickly and Sally was left to herself once more. Not that she minded - he wasn't great company anyway.

Labels: writing

In a muddle

I'm rather relieved that Steven Johnson gets as upset about AV equipment as I do.

I've spent the last few years assuming that I was a fairly clued-up sort of fella when it came to technology and gadgets. I hadn't met a device I couldn't get my head round, not until recently.

Now we've got a Freeview box and a VCR/DVD-R machine, I find the simple process of recording telly to be beyond me. Just trying to get an episode of Doctor Who on tape requires several minutes of serious concentration on my part, and the nagging feeling afterwards that I've done it wrong.

Telly is so complicated now. We have just the three remotes, which is bareable but pretty stupid when you stop to think about it. The mess of cables at the back, and the interconnections between Scart and AV and audio sockets leaves me more in a spin than any computer I've ever dealt with.

No wonder I spend increasing amounts of time in the kitchen with my radio.

Labels: writing

My Wikipedia contrail

Well, you did ask:

Category: Doctor Who companions
I was of the generation that sort of gave up watching half way through Colin Baker, and I realised I had no idea who any of the companions were from then until Rose Tyler. It was a quiet work day.

Blu-ray Disc
While writing an article, I wasn't sure if it was "BluRay" or "Blu-Ray" or "Bluray" or "Blu-ray"; turns out it's the latter.

Momus
Sorting out my record collection, deciding what to buy on CD when I finally get rid of all the vinyl (yes, it's going to happen, despite my recent thoughts to the contrary). Suddenly thought: Does Momus wear that eyepatch for a reason, or just because he's a pop star? There's a reason.

Strontium Dog
My mate Jaspre has written a book about Strontium Dog, but I had no idea who or what SD was.

The Housemartins
Couldn't remember Stan Cullimore's name.

Honey, We're Killing the Kids
I have no idea what this is doing in my Wikipedia contrail.

Labels: tech, writing

At the Sunflower cafe

Helen sat outside the Sunflower cafe, on one of those pavement chairs made of chrome steel. On the chrome steel table in front of her was a strong coffee and a small chocolate stick, half-eaten. It was too chilly to be sitting outside, if she was honest with herself, but the temptation to be a posing note-writer was too strong.

In her hands she held one of the small black notesbooks, purchased just ten minutes previously in the expensive stationers' shop a little further down the road; and a good quality ballpoint pen.

She held the pen over the blank first page of the notebook, and wondered what on earth she should write.

The reason those posing people looked so cool, she realised, was that their black notebooks were roughened after months of posing on outdoor pavement cafe chairs. Each page in their notebooks was a mess of tightly kerned black characters with a very rare doodled illustration; the pages were slightly curled with use and the notebooks capable of being laid flat without closing themselves shut like insect wings.

Helen recalls:

"I must have looked like a bit of an idiot, rather than some arty farty poseur. I say with my pen over than notebook for 20 minutes or more and couldn't think of anything to write. In the end I had to give up so I could drink the coffee before it went cold."

Helen looked out at the business people rushing past. The rush hour had not officially begun, but there are always a a few people who leave early and walk hurridly down to the mainline stations to catch the earlier, less packed, commuter trains to suburbia.

It felt odd to be sitting outside the Sunflower cafe at this time of day. For years, Helen had popped in two or three mornings a week to buy coffee and a filled roll for her breakfast. She knew the staff very well in the mornings, but when she'd turned up this afternoon their faces had not registered hers for a while; it was almost a minute before they realised she was one of their morning regulars, then switched on their smiles. Helen felt uncomfortable.

Not as uncomfortable as she'd felt the morning she'd come in here, already late for work, ordered a coffee and bacon butty, and endured an uncomfortable 10 minutes talking to Big Alan. He was just as embarrassed as her, but neither of them were brave enough to say aloud: "I don't want to have to talk to you; please go away."

If she'd been able to pretend she'd not seen him, she would have. But it had been a busy morning, wet outside, and the cafe was humming with people and chat. As Helen turned away from the counter, one of the smiley staff, trying to help, had said, loud enough for the whole cafe to hear: "There's one last seat left over there, love."

And as Helen had turned towards it, and seen it, she'd locked eyes with Big Alan, who'd been sitting opposite, forking sausage and eggs into his mouth. For just a second their eyes held a conversation:

"Please, don't sit here."

"I don't want to sit there."

"Let's pretend we've not seen eachother."

"Let's."

But that's not how you behave, even in a city like London where people care little for anyone but their closest friends, and work relationships are the delicate string that holds fabric together; no, even in London, when you make eye contact your boss in a cafe, you fake a smile and go and sit with him.

Neither of them bothered to mention the time, since they were both late. But Big Alan waved his fork at her in greeting, then started eating faster.

Helen slid into the gap between the wooden bench and the formica tabletop, wincing as her knees brushed past Big Alan's knees. She tried to angle her legs sideways to avoid any further physical contact. Consequently she sat twisted and uncomfortable for the length of their talk.

Big Alan asked her about progress on some major projects he thought she was working on. She opened her mouth to correct him on some things; such-and-such project was completed two weeks ago, and she'd emailed him telling him so; so-and-so client had complained about the materials supplied and threatened to go elsewhere; income was down because there'd been a rash of resignations, which left fewer people to do the actual work; but closed it again because there was no point telling him this stuff just for the sake of having something to say. Instead, she remarked on the rainy weather, then asked him how his work was progressing.

He gave her a brief, curious look, then the words flooded from him.

"No-one understands what my job is all about, Helen," he said. A mouthful of sausage, and he continued: "Most of the time, it's just about making people happy. I have the management in New York and Tokyo to keep happy, and you wouldn't believe how mad they get when we" -- he waved his fork, seemingly indicating the whole of London -- "don't live up to the financials."

Chew, swallow, eat.

"Financials which have been set by those same bastards. People. People in New York and Tokyo. Numbers on spreadsheets that we have to meet.

"So then I come back here and try to make the staff here happy too. Try to make them feel like they can live up to those numbers."

Helen wondered if simply deleting the offending spreadsheets would solve the problem, removing the insistent numbers and therefore the pressure.

Big Alan slurped tea from a mug. He shifted in his seat and Helen was forced to angle her legs further away to avoid being touched again. She shivered, and bit into her butty.

(Look down on this scene from above, and you can see Helen's body almost at right angles to the table. She looks withdrawn, almost nervous. A balding patch can be seen on Big Alan's crown, something most of his staff haven't seen because he towers over them.)

His breakfast finished, Big Alan got up quickly and slid out from his seat. He didn't look at Helen's face.

"See you at the office," he muttered and waddled out.

Labels: fiction, writing

Typewriter memories

I learned how to be a journalist using a typewriter I bought for £10 in a market in Essex.

Not in the 1970s, but in the 1990s, when I fully expected my journalism training course to be showing me the trade using the computers it was practised with. But both the college and the students were broke; there were no computers to learn journalism with, and we were told to go and buy our own typewriters.

So I picked one up as cheaply as I could (my finances were about as bad as they ever got - I entertained only fantasies about buying a computer of my own) and literally bashed out articles using the brute force in my fingertips.

The first time I used a computer to do any journalism was when I started doing day shifts (for about £40 a day, if I remember rightly) on the Cambridge Evening News. At the time the newspaper had a very old mainframe system in use, known to me as Press 11 but it might well have a more common commercial name.

The computers were dumb terminals that only ran a very specialised text editing and transfer system. Every element of data was a story - to send an electronic memo to another member of staff (the closest thing we had to email), you had to create a new story and send it directly to that person's 'basket', the term we used to refer to someone's electronic list of stories-in-progress.

The reporters used this simple text mail system to send one another jokes and wisecracks about the more senior editors. Official memos were circulated by someone on newsdesk and copied to everyone's basket - a primitive sort of mailing list.

The subeditors used Press 11 too, but several of them had two computers on their desks, the second being a Mac intended for use in the layout process. The Press 11 terminals were solely dedicated to the writing and editing of text, the Macs were essential for putting that text into a newspaper format.

Sometimes, on a night or weekend shift when I had little to do, I'd slink over to the subs desk and have a play with the Macs. One of them had an internet connection and I'd sometimes try to connect and have a play. But of course connecting itself took an age, and the dial-up was hardly very zippy even by the standards of the day. I never managed to play much before guilt, or perhaps a ringing telephone or the sound of someone approaching the newsroom door made me switch it off.

Labels: writing

Prologue

It began, for me, on the platform of London Bridge Tube station. Northbound, approximately twenty past eight in the morning. I can't remember if it was a Monday or not, and I suspect the cliche about Mondays being so awful was just created by employers to make you feel good about the rest of the week. Whatever day it was, the platform was packed. A mass of black-coated backs.

That's something you don't notice about commuting in London until you've been doing it long enough to raise your eyes from your trashy free newspaper and actually look at your hapless fellow commuters. Everyone wears dark colours. Even in summer, when their officewear might even be bright and gay, over the top they wear a dark jacket. In winter, it's even more pronounced. The platform in this case was entirely covered in black and grey coats. I could see hundreds, possibly thousands, of backs turned towards me. As though each of them was a desperately miserable message from its owner, saying: "See. See me, an intelligent, loved person. I am reduced to this. I am reduced to my animal instincts. I am so sad."

I wore a bright yellow hiking jacket.

It was that morning, standing behind the queues of sad commuters waiting for a train - no, waiting for dozens of trains, for that was how many would be needed to empty the platform of people - that I suddenly realised I was the sole speck of colour in the whole place. I almost blushed. Looking right and left, I could see more computers (commuters are, after all, just following a daily routine just as a computer does) rushing down the stairs and escalators into the hallway, as though those hurried steps would get them anywhere any faster, and they too were all in black and grey.

I was a bright spark of sunshine yellow, alone in my underground world of misery and despair, and I was afraid, probably without reason, that I was standing out. That, of course, is the fear of any London commuter. No-one wishes to stand out, to be the object of any kind of attention. Every single one of the millions who come into London every morning, and leave it every evening, wants to do it as quietly and unobtrusively as possible, as if perhaps doing so will make them feel like they are completely both journeys alone. Being noticed means you must acknowledge your own presence on the train to hell, and doing that forces you to acknowledge the presence of the 100 other people on the carriage around you.

It forces you to apologise to the woman whose bust you brushed past as you squeezed aboard, but there was no way around it because you had to duck under the be-newspapered arm of the City worker, pristine in his pin-stripe and obstinately standing in the doorway, arm aloft to hold on to one of the straps dangling from the ceiling. He couldn't move either, because the group of schoolchildren to his side were standing in a tight circle, quietly gossiping and breaking out into occasional cackles of delight. Theirs was the only human noise on the whole carriage, and you were glad of it because at least it disguised the deathly silence of all these people, all these human beings who were determined to stay quiet on a commuter train, because that's what everyone does. These same folk who would cheerfully become human again in a pub or even a McDonalds, could sit together, a hundred of them, and have not a single word to say.

It forces you to acknowledge that you are part of it, and that you hate yourself for being one of them.

That thought bounced around my brain as I waited near the platform. I couldn't get on the platform, because there were queues. London Bridge's Northern Line platforms are either side of a central hall, but instead of opening up the entire structure in the manner of modern station design on the Jubilee Line extension, the designers here had decided to make the place a homage to its past. They wanted the Underground to be more like ground. So they linked the central hallway to the platforms with a series of tiny, thin tunnels. Each one barely wide enough for two people to stand side-by-side.

With the platform completely full, and nowhere for anyone to go until the next train pulled in, queues had formed in these little tunnels. People stood there, silent, staring at the back of the person in front, possibly unaware of the millions of tonnes of soil and concrete curving over their heads above the tunnel roof. Behind them, in the hallway, the queues continued, losing their structural and moral integrity and becoming vague wanderings of newcomers, the pathetic finalists in this race for work. I considered the lucky ones at the front, the ones who must have arrived at London Bridge on overland trains from the south 10 minutes - 20? even 30? - before me. They must have stood at the very edge, their faces within centimetres of the side of the alleged train. One good push from here, at the back, could send them toppling, domino-style, onto the tracks.

In my bright yellow coat I shivered. A train pulled in, announcers told the crowd how to behave, and the queues shortened slightly. The train left, and the brief minute of activity gave way to the same endless, screaming silence there'd been before. Another train arrived soon afterward, and the cycle was repeated. Again, everyone moved forward. I found myself in the mouth of one of the little tunnels, and I gazed upward at its curved tiles. I looked around me, behind me, trying to see through the coat-covered forest with its shrubs of newspapers and paperbacks, its insect life of tsk-tsking personal stereos.

Something in my head clicked, turned, moved from one form to another.

I said, aloud, I think, but there was not enough surprised reaction from any of my fellow travellers for me to be sure: "That's it. I've had enough of this."

I turned, abandoned my place in the queue, walked past the living dead waiting for their trains, up the stairs to the exit.

This is the story of what happened next.

Labels: life, writing

Uncovering the hidden history of the BBC

Here's my internet column for this week. Note that the column is intended to be read by non-techy people, hence simplified explanations and a certain amount of glossing-over of detail.

Way back in 1937, a diligent group of BBC researchers began a project to catalogue everything the corporation had created.

Already creating a vast range of programmes, the BBC was in danger of losing track of its own output. Someone needed to make a searchable record of every broadcast, including notes on who appeared in it, what they said, when it was first shown and repeated, and so on.

Once set in motion, this enormous task never stopped. Sometime in the 1970s or 1980s, the first steps were made to computerise this huge database.

Thankfully the BBC's archivists had been extremely clever at organising their data sensibly. Over the decades they had stuck to the same categories, the same date formats, and used the right names for the right people. Once it was digital, this information was a fantastic web site, waiting to be made.

In 2005, members of the BBC's new media team re-discovered the database in the BBC archives. Stunned by its detail, they watched as one of the library staff flicked through pages and pages of data on an ancient 80s-era computer.

Their task was straightforward: make the web site a reality. The BBC Programme Catalogue is the result.

Note the prominent disclaimers on the front page: this is a work in progress, and still very much a prototype. It doesn't necessarily include everything, and certainly contains mistakes. But so what? There's so much to browse, so much to discover. It's addictive.

Take, for example, the archived comments about an episode of science fiction classic "Blake's 7":

Dreadful shot of two attacking spacecraft. They look cheap & nasty ... More shots of cheap, tacky spaceships.

These archivists didn't mince their words.

The database is presented as a hyperlinked "cloud" of information. You can search for just about anything you like, including the names of programmes and people. Once inside, it's easy to jump around from one subject to another by using the tags assigned to each broadcast.

You can also navigate by date, which means you can see all the shows broadcast on the day you were born, or on any other specific date. The archive goes right back to that earliest archive entry in 1937 (poetry by WB Yeats on the wireless).

Despite dealing with very old archived data, the modern web site was built using some of the most cutting edge internet technology.

It was built using a web programming language called Ruby on Rails, and includes all the latest web gizmos. There are RSS feeds all over the place, and all the data is available as RDF, a structured language for presenting data online.

The project is just one part of a much wider BBC initiative to open itself up to licence fee payers. Soon, the BBC web site will undergo a facelift and, a bit like MySpace.com in the US, start offering users the chance to create their own content. There will also be the launch of the new BBC iPlayer, a web-based system for viewing TV shows up to a week old. This is an extension of the existing Radio Player that offers the same service for radio.

Labels: writing

Biorhythmic

I struggle to get along with my biorhythms. My body likes to be awake and alert at times that really don't suit being a husband and a father. I'm rubbish first thing in the morning, when my son is bouncing off the walls, and at my best late in the evening, when he and my wife are fast asleep.

Maybe a graph or two might help:

                        .  .  .                             .  .  .  .
                        .  .  .  .                 .  .  .  .  .  .  .
.                       .  .  .  .  .  .        .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
.                    .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

The numbers are hours of the day; the dots indicate alertness, four dots being very alert, no dots indicating sleep time. As you can see, I have an alert spell mid-morning, then concentration plummets in the middle of the afternoon. Sometimes I'm practically nodding off on the sofa at this point, especially at weekends. Come the evening, I'm wide awake and feeling at my most creative.

Now compare this with the biorhythm of my three-year-old son:

                     .  .  .              .  .
                  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
                  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
                  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

And here's how I'd describe Kate's daily rhythm, although she might think otherwise:

                     .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
                  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  
                  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  
                  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

Kate works hard in the day and gets tired very quickly in the evening, especially after a large meal. Her concentration dips fairly rapidly and she's soon heading for bed - just at a time when I'm getting the urge to write, or tinker, or do household chores. It's not uncommon for me to start washing up, or hoovering, or moving furniture around at 11pm.

Labels: writing

Adventures in alternate realities

You've probably read one of those naff sci-fi/fantasy stories where the hero goes into a coma/ gets zapped by a raygun/ walks through a magic door, whatever, and spends an entire life in another world, being another person, before waking up back in the real world after just a few moments of "real" time have passed.

That happened to me last week.

My brother Stuart was visiting. It had been a completely normal day for me - some work, meeting up with Stuart, then down to nursery to pick up Barney. We had some playtime, then Kate came home and took B upstairs for his bathtime.

Stuart went out to his car to get a bottle of wine he'd brought. I walked to the fridge to see what ingredients we had.

I remember saying to Stuart as he walked out the door: "What have we got? Peppers, celery, courgettes - I feel something Chinese coming on."

Then it happened.

There was overwhelming feeling of deja-vu, combined with a weird sensation of time being stretched. In my mind, it felt like I'd been standing in front of the fridge for - I don't know how long. Hours. Weeks. My brain fizzed and my eyes struggled to focus. I gripped the front edge of the fridge with all my strength, and it took all the will power I had to walk over to the sink and get myself a glass of water. I drank some of it, then sat down at the table.

My brother walked back in the room - he'd only been gone a few seconds but it felt like weeks to me.

"I just had the weirdest feeling, like I was in a videogame," I said.

My brother looked at me, bemused.

"In fact, I think it's coming back," I mumbled, and the top of my head started to bubble and fizz like a pint of lager. My eyes closed and I remember losing control of my neck. My head tipped back off my shoulders and I passed out.

My brother caught me and slowly lifted me upright. He tells me that he had to use some persuasion to get me to stagger to the living room, where he forced me to sit on the armchair.

Kate came back downstairs.

"What's going on?" she asked.

"I think I just passed out," I said. I saw my brother's face, a very worried expression on it. Then I passed out again in the chair. I think I dribbled.

Half an hour later we were in the Emergency Unit at the local hospital. A nurse conducted various tests of my heart, blood pressure and blood sugar. All normal.

"Well all this says you're fit and healthy," he said.

The duty doctor was unable to shed much more light on things. He suggested I see my GP.

That's what I did this morning, and the only result so far is the need for more tests. I have to return in a week or so for some blood tests, and back to my GP after that for an examination.

In the meantime, he said, I should avoid driving.

"We can't have you passing out at the wheel and taking out a pedestrian," he said bluntly.

Well, quite.

Labels: writing

Finding Floyd

Ian and Steve were a couple of musical misfits, fixated on Pink Floyd, Hendrix, and oddly, Chris de Burgh.

They took me under their wing (I'm not sure why I needed to be taken under anyone's wing, nor why they thought it should be theirs) and we hung out at break times, talking music. There was a Pink Floyd lyrics game they played:

Q: "Fourth album, side 1, track 2, line 12, word 3."

A: "Rabbit" (or whatever the answer was)

They were surprisingly good at it. Whole lunch hours would pass by playing this, just hanging about and talking rubbish. The other two knew a lot more about music than I - they'd started exploring at an earlier age - and passed on their recommendations to me.

The two of them introduced me to progressive rock, power ballads, heavy metal and the concept of a "band practice", which involved driving out to a house on the edge of a village, wolfing down sandwiches made by someone's mum (we were only about 13 or 14 at this point), and mucking about in the garden for hours before spending the final hour randomly playing chords and bashing the drum kit about.

"You should play bass," they said. They needed a bassist. "It's piss easy, you'll pick it up in no time." I should've tried, but fear kept me back. They probably didn't mean it, anyway.

Thanks to Ian and Steve, I ventured away from the the first records I'd listened to, a bizarre combination of my brother's taste (Billy Bragg, David Bowie) and my mother's (Niel Diamond, ELO, folk and jazz). I began exploring other ideas and broadening my tastes.

I lost touch with both of them after leaving school. I've no idea what happened to Steve. Ian Betts is now a world class trance DJ, so I hope I'm not embarrassing him in public by mentioning his early interest in Pink Floyd. And I'm pretty sure the Chris de Burgh LPs were Steve's, not Ian's.

Labels: life, music, writing

The Biscuit Tree (a story for small children)

The biscuit tree grows at the end of our garden, just next to the compost heap.

When we moved in it was only this high, and I could jump right over it if I wanted to, though mummy kept telling me that if I did I'd bang my head on the fence. So I didn't. But I could've.

-

But look at the biscuit tree now! It's higher than the fence, it's higher than daddy! It's higher than Paul-next-door's big toy dumper truck!

In a few years, I'll be able to climb up the biscuit tree to play pirates, and I'll be able to look over the fence into Paul-next-door's garden.

-

None of my friends at school believe me when I tell them I've got a biscuit tree. They say things like

"Don't be so stupid!"

and

"Durr! You can't get biscuit trees!"

and once, Sarah Sarah said

"So? I've got a biscuit tree too, and it's bigger than yours."

But she must be telling fibs, because our biscuit tree is the Only Biscuit Tree in the whole wide world.

-

Some of my friends from school came round for tea. Tommy, Nicky, Sarah Bean and So-so Jo.

Mum made scrambled eggs, baked beans, and potato waffles. We had pink milk as a special treat.

It was warm and sunny so we all sat outside round the garden table.

My friends didn't talk about the biscuit tree, but they kept looking round the garden trying to find it. I knew they wanted to see it up close.

-

After tea we played hide-and-seek round the house, and it was great fun because So-so Jo hid behind the pipes in the cleaning cupboard, and no-one could find her for ages and ages. Tommy started to get a bit cross so mummy called her to come out.

Nicky said: "Let's hide in the garden this time! So-so's on it!"

So-so Jo started counting and we all ran off to hide.

I ran straight to the biscuit tree, but that was a silly thing to do. It's big now, but not big enough to hide behind.

I didn't know where to hide next.

-

Just then Paul-next-door poked his head over the fence.

"Need a hiding place?" he said. I said yes. "Climb up then!" he said.

I tried to climb over the fence but there was nothing to put my feet on. My trainers scraped on the wood. Paul-next-door was leaning over as far as he could, trying to grab my arms, but he couldn't quite reach me.

"Coming, ready or not!" So-so Jo had finished counting. Where could I hide?

-

She came running out the house and saw me straight away, but instead of shouting my name she slowed down and stopped next to me.

"Is this it? The biscuit tree?" she asked. She was looking at the branches.

Tommy and Sarah Bean came out from behind the holly tree. Nicky's head appeared behind the compost bin. Paul-next-door was still hanging over the fence.

They were all looking at the biscuit tree.

-

I didn't want to tell them. I wanted it to be my secret, forever.

But I did want to tell them at the same time. I wanted all my friends to know about the biscuit tree.

I couldn't decide what to say. I went all red.

Now everyone was looking at me.

I opened my mouth:

"It's -"

-

"It's time for a biscuit," said my mum's voice, right behind me.

She made everyone jump.

Then everyone spoke at once:

"Is this the biscuit tree?"

"Can we have a biscuit? Please?"

"Where are the biscuits? I can't see any."

"Can someone help me get down from this fence?"

Mum was smiling.

She told us all to help Paul-next-door to get down. So-so Jo and Tommy made a base, and Nicky and Sarah Bean climbed on top of them, and Paul-next-door reached down and grabbed their hands and -

WALLOP!

everyone fell down in a big pile at the foot of the biscuit tree. We all laughed. Even though Paul-next-door had some bruises and a cut on his knee, he was laughing too.

And when we stopped laughing, Sarah Bean pointed up and said

"Look!"

Hanging from the biscuit tree was a biscuit, attached to a tiny twig that twinkled like a piece of ribbon.

"Biscuits!"

There were 12 little biscuits dangling from a branch, all of them on shiny ribbon-twigs.

-

And before their mummies and daddies came to take them home, Tommy, Nicky, Sarah Bean, So-so Jo, Paul-next-door, and me all sat down and crunched the fresh biscuits from the biscuit tree.

Mum was there too, but she didn't have one.

She just watched us. She was smiling.

Labels: fiction, writing

Waiting for Mr Blair

Croydon; a grey day outside the public library. Myself and about 50 other journalists of various kinds were waiting for the arrival of the Prime Minister, one Mr Tony Blair, and I was shaking with nerves.

Not because I was star-struck. I've met my fair share of celebrities and famous names over the years, including Tony's predecessor John Major and Tony himself, once before, when he'd come to tour the offices of the news organisation for which I worked.

But this meeting was different because, for once, I was having to prove myself as a reporter to the bosses on the newsdesk back in the office, and I was terrified of getting something wrong.

There are plenty of reasons for my feelings of terror. I was never a good student, being fundamentally lazy for much of my life and prone to try and scrape through exams with the moderate pass and be happy with that, rather than aim to be the best I could be. The same thinking still applied years after school, when I was "learning" "journalism" and trying to find a job in the business. Ever since fluking my way into paid employment, I had been terrified of having to cover important events where it's vital to Get Things Right.

Thing is, in journalism, your mistakes are on display to the whole world, or at least your readers and your editors. The latter are more frightening, and can sack you if you get something wrong. The readers are less frightening but somehow much more powerful - they can take you to court, causing you to be fined or even imprisoned if the mistake is awful enough. I'm a tremulous person by nature; fear of getting things wrong, and the consequences thereof, affects almost everything I write.

So as I stood with the other journalists outside the library in Croydon, I was aware of something that chilled me: I didn't know what the story would be.

I was there to hear Mr Blair speak. He might say anything. But as I stood there trying to remember the shorthand for "politics", it occurred to me that whatever he said, I wouldn't know if it was new or old, important or trivial. I was the only person from my news organisation at that place, that time, and I had no sense of news.

This scared me a great deal. I wasn't that surprised, though. I'd been specialising in writing about the internet for years beforehand. I'd buried myself in browser wars and dotcom booms and cool software and even games I knew nothing about, because it was all safe to report on and there was very little danger of making serious mistakes that would annoy people. Sure, I made hundreds of mistakes, but at the time being a journalist whose role was to write about the internet was something quite new. Many of the sub-editors and newsdesk staff higher up the chain than me would read my stories and almost fall asleep with boredom; they didn't consider this geek stuff to be "news" at all, and they certainly didn't spot many of the stupid errors I made because they had no experience of the technologies I was talking about.

(The newsroom computers ran OS/2, for heaven's sake. They had Netscape Gold installed, but most reporters never used it.)

So there I stood in central Croydon, waiting for Mr Blair's official car and trying desperately to remember what political stories had been doing the rounds in recent days. I should have known. After all, I sat right next to two very experienced political reporters and had the opportunity to read everything they wrote via the office computer system. But I never did that, preferring to spend hours hunched over the little laptop I'd been given to use alongside the OS/2 desktop, browsing Haddock's directory and posting silly responses to mailing lists. I knew nothing about the real news of the day, the political headlines. Here I was, about to hear Tony Blair speak, and I didn't know what I wanted him to say.

Which was of course the worst possible situation to be in.

When Blair arrived, my hands were shaking so hard I could barely take any shorthand notes. All of us hacks crowded round him on the pavement, and I found myself shoved to the back of the pack, behind a camera crew from a national TV news programme. I huddled in close behind the cameraman, to make sure I could hear every word. Blair spoke for a couple of minutes and I desperately leaned forward, trying to catch every word and panicking as my woeful shorthand fell further and further behind what he was saying. I looked up at Mr Blair, only a few feet in front of me, silently pleading with him to slow down and repeat the last few lines.

But it was over. Blair swept away, followed by his hangers-on, leaving the hacks already whipping out their brick-sized mobile phones to call back to the office.

The TV cameraman, however, turned on me with a snarl.

"Couldn't you fucking keep still?" he roared, and for the tiniest second all heads flicked round to look at me. The traffic, which had been held up by the police while Blair's car arrived, started to move again.

"I - I was taking notes --" I clucked, feeling my cheeks turn red. I must have inadvertantly nudged his camera-holding arm.

"Well next time you wanna take some fucking notes in front of the Prime fucking Minister, don't stand up my arse," the cameraman said, turning away to follow the fast-disappearing Prime Ministerial backside into the library building.

I stood, still shaking, burning up with embarrassment and anger. Then I looked at my shorthand and the panic returned. Every other reporter around me was on the phone, dictating a story to their copytakers back at the office. Unless I filed some copy soon, my editors would be calling me and demanding angrily why the competition were carrying the story and we weren't. My shorthand looked like a work of modern art, and was equally baffling. I knew that I had to call my office and file something.

I didn't have the faintest idea what story to file. I dialed the number.

Labels: writing

Exploring London's place names

I've been having lots of fun flicking through the Oxford Dictionary of London Place Names by AD Mills. There's some wonderful things about it that I wanted to note.

The intricate links between place names and people names

Places are named after people; and vast numbers of personal names are a reflection of the place they came from. Many of London's place names are derived from the people who ruled over, or owned, or influenced that land as much as a thousand years ago. What a legacy!

So, Addiscombe and Addington near Croydon were both named after some person called Aeddi. Hackney may have been named after Hacca. Ponders End, where my father grew up, was land associated with the Ponder family. Sadler's Wells was where one Thomas Sadler found a spring in his garden. Duppas Hill, again in Croydon, was named after a family called Dubber or Double. Sydenham was once the "homestead or enclosure of a man named Cippa". Tulse Hill, named after a Tulse family.

Amusing and fascinating stories behind London place names

Isle of Dogs and Canary Wharf turn out to have a possible shared origin. The wharf was named, relatively recently in 1937, after a fruit importing company that traded with the Canary Islands. Oddly, the name Gran Canaria for the largest of the Islands is said to be derived from the Latin Canaria insula, which means, um, "Isle of Dogs". What's most interesting is that no-one really knows why the Isle of Dogs is so named; it might have been because wild dogs used to roam there, or because Royal hunting dogs were kenneled there. So the connection with Gran Canaria makes a more compelling tale.

Dulwich was named after "a marshy meadow where dill grows".

Anerley, where I lived a few years ago, was so named because the landowner at the time of the rail network construction was a Scot called William Sanderson; he spoke with a thick Scottish accent, and allowed the rail company to build a station on his land; it was to be the "only" one, though; now try saying "only" with a broad Highland twang ... it sounds like "anerley"...

Names whose origins are surprisingly obvious

• Shooter's Hill - "hill of the shooter/archer"
• Plumstead - "place where plum trees grow"
• Smithfield - "smooth or level field"
• Deptford - "deep ford" (the 't' was added much later)

Some other favourites from the book

• Tottenham Court Road - leading to the ancient manor of Thottanheale, or "nook of land belonging to a man called Totta"
• Wembley - "woodland clearing of a man called Wemba"
• Wormwood Scrubs - "snake-infested thicket of stunted trees"
• Aldgate - originally the Roman City's East Gate, it was known as "ale gate" presumably because travellers from Essex often stopped for a beer on their arrival; the 'd' is relatively new
• Seven Sisters - seven elm trees, legendarily planted by seven sisters before setting off on their travels
• Soho - named after a hunter's cry; this area was once wooded and used as a hunting ground by the local nobility
• Burnt Oak - named after a dead oak tree used as a boundary marker

Labels: writing

Are you sitting comfortably?

When I was a kid, I watched a BBC TV show called Jackanory. Each week, a celebrity would sit in a comfy chair and read a story aloud. That was it; cheap, entertaining kids TV.

Storynory is Jackanory for the iPod generation. The British team behind the web site have posted loads of children's stories, many of them old classics like the Three Little Pigs and Little Red Riding Hood. Each is available in plain old MP3 format, so you can listen direct in your browser, download for later, or (and this is the point of the site) download and stick on an iPod for the little ones to enjoy.

What I love about Storynory is the way they're putting established web tools to use. Many of the stories have been recorded using Odeo. Stories can be grabbed, podcast-stylee, with an RSS feed.

My three-year-old has not yet developed an understanding, nor a care in the world, about what format audio arrives in. He is just as happy choosing a tape from our ancient cassette collection (yes we still have them, and we still use them) as he is browsing though iTunes (with Daddy's help, I should point out) and picking out a song.

But as he gets older he's going to be one of the digital generation, and I'd be surprised if he ever buys a CD in his life. For him, sites like Storynory are going to be the norm; especially if I introduce him to them now.

Labels: writing

Hunting for wifi in Notting Hill Gate

I have a deep dislike of chain coffee shops, especially Starbucks, because of their outrageous prices, copy-and-paste interiors, and habit of killing off smaller competitors on the same street.

But while in London yesterday to cover the Apple keynote, I found myself in Notting Hill gate with just half an hour to spare and needing to file some copy. Reluctantly, I stepped into Starbucks, bought a cup of tea, and fired up the PowerBook.

I was automatically connected to the T-Mobile hotspot and fished out my wallet to pay for an hour's connectivity. Then disaster struck - I only had my Switch/Maestro card, no Visa or Mastercard. Guess what? You can't use Switch to pay for T-Mobile's service. Dammit.

Frustrated (not just that I couldn't do the work I'd planned, but also because I'd paid bloody Starbucks for a cup of tea just to find this out), I went to switch off the Airport card in order to save battery life (top tip, Mac laptop owners: when you're out and about and don't need to be online, switch off Airport in the Menu Bar and you'll get significantly more time from your batteries) and noticed another wireless network listed.

It turned out to be The Gate, a low-cost network run independently for people in the Notting Hill Gate area. And you can pay for it using your Paypal account.

Delighted at (a) sticking one up to T-Mobile, and (b) sticking one up to Starbucks, and (c) saving myself a few pennies, and (d) actually being able to do the work I needed to do, I grinned and started tapping away.

I've no doubt there's plenty of free wifi in decent cafes in London, if you have the time to look for it, or are organised enough to seek it out in advance. But this chance discovery made me feel good about supporting a local outfit, despite having to do so in bloody Starbucks.

Incidentally, Bristol's public wireless zone remains the most impressive I've used. Widespread and free to use from dozens of nice cafes, pubs and homes, it ought to be a model for other cities to copy. London local authorities, take note.

Labels: writing

How to get dirt-cheap insulation for your home

I'm pretty dismissive of most of this government's environmental policies, but there are one or two schemes in place that are very impressive indeed.

The government has initiated various funds for subsidising environmentally-positive things for homeowners; these funds appear to be distributed to local councils and other organisations. The customers (you and me) end up having to pay a very small fee for something that would otherwise be hugely expensive.

Last year I got a large compost bin for the garden, delivered to my front door, for £5. The same bin in the garden centre would have cost £50, and I'd have had to go and fetch it myself. This was possible because my local council has been given some money from Gordon Brown, and uses it to subsidise the cost (to the manufacturer) of supplying the bins.

Over the Christmas holidays, my father-in-law mentioned a scheme whereby he got his home comprehensively insulated for less than £200. This included cavity wall insulation and thick loft insulation. Again, this is possible because the government is subsidising the energy companies.

You get a better deal if your home has no insulation already, or if you're over 60 or on benefits - in these cases, you get your insulation for free.

Even if you're not in that position, you can still get a huge discount. Typically, a three-bedroom detached house (like mine) will cost me about £150-200 each for loft insulation and cavity wall insulation. That's all labour and materials for a bunch of professionals, with all the professional kit, to come and do the job. Cavity wall filling needs professionals anyway; loft insulation is a straightforward DIY job but is time-consuming and messy; I'd rather pay someone else to do it.

What irks me is that knowledge of discounts like this is not widespread. You have to go and hunt for it.

So, for anyone who finds this page after a Google search: go to the Energy Saving Trust site and click the big "Search for a grant" button. You'll be asked for your postcode, and some unintrusive personal questions, then given a list of companies that can do your insulation on the cheap. By all means ring around a few of them for a quote, but remember that because the funding is coming from central government, the prices from the different suppliers are broadly similar, and you'll only find differences of a few pounds here and there. If you live in Wiltshire, call the county energy efficiency advice line on 0800 512012, where a friendly person can guide you through the details, and get a surveyor round to inspect your property (the survey is free and there's no obligation to buy anything).

Labels: writing

Welcome, harassed journalists

I'm the first to admit I have a big ego, but the latest head-inflating mention of my name online has even my sense of self-importance spinning.

It turns out there's a book called The Newspapers Handbook by someone called Richard Keeble; I gather it's a resources-for-journalists sort of book, filled with useful advice on how not to libel people, and how to write words good.

What's really weird, though, is this mention of me on page 57.

Welcome, harassed journalists
Originally uploaded by gilest.

I've grabbed that image from the Google Books view of the page in question; you'll need to log in with a Google ID if you want to follow the link and see it for yourself.

If my name had been listed under a heading saying "Journalists who also have web sites," I wouldn't have been terribly surprised. I am a journalist. I have a web site. Figures.

But no, my name (and this domain) are listed under "Some useful sites for harassed hacks", right alongside considerably more important online resources such as The British Library catalogue, The Poynter Institute, and Willings Press Guide. My humble site is listed between The University of Tampere's ethics guide and, um, Roget's Thesaurus.

I'm flattered that Richard Keeble holds me and this site in such high esteem (and dying to know what made him include me in his list); I only hope that any harassed young journalists who come here looking for wisdom and advice aren't too disappointed when they find only pictures of children's parties and rants about foons.

Labels: writing

The why phase

Don't touch the sharp knives, Barney.

Why?

Because they've got sharp blades on them.

Why?

So they can cut things.

Why?

To make them smaller.

Why?

That makes things easier to cook.

Why?

Because small pieces of food cook faster.

Why?

It's something to do with conductivity, I think, but I can't remember all the details.

Why?

Because I'm getting old.

Why?

Everyone gets old.

Why?

That's what happens to people.

Why?

Something to do with entropy. And chemistry, I suspect.

Why?

Because bananas.

I want a sandwich.

Labels: family, writing

gilest x 3

If you've got a birthday in November or December, you'll know what it's like. Suddenly you get a rush of people asking you what gift you'd like; so you give them a suggestion; then they say "And what about Christmas too?" You have to start thinking fast.

It's been a long time since I looked at my Amazon wishlist but I'm really impressed at how much better it has got since the last time I looked. The Compact View is really useful, especially now it lets you make changes to multiple items at once (select a bunch of stuff you've decided you no longer want, remove them all in one go).

Of course I'd forgotten where my wishlist was, so I used the "Find a wishlist" feature and banged my name in.

And look - there are two other Giles Turnbulls with Amazon accounts! And one of them's not far away from me, in Marlborough. I'd heard of one other Giles Turnbull before, but the thought that there's potentially four of us in the UK is exciting indeed.

I wonder what stuff they want?

Giles Turnbull from Abergavenny has modest requests. Giles Turnbull in Marlborough only wants a Curtis Mayfield CD, and has wanted it since 2000. I'm almost tempted to get it for him.

Neither of them are anything like as greedy as me.

Labels: writing

Barney singing "Land of the silver birch"

Land of the silver birch (Odeo browser stream thing, or MP3 download)

His nursery class did a project about North America, and they were taught this song.

Labels: singing, tech, writing

Bartering airtime in Africa

Africans are experiencing astonishing, rapid growth in mobile telephony. Mobile handsets are selling even to the poorest of people because there is an enormous need for communication. For decades, people have wanted to communicate but have been prevented from doing so because fixed line connections were expensive and unreliable.

But most amazing of all is the move by Kenya's SafariCom service provider. It is offering users the chance to trade airtime with one another.

So I can buy airtime (with a scratchcard from any local shop), then send it to another account - either for free (as a gift), or in exchange for money, goods, or services.

The upshot is that the phone service has created, from nowhere, an alternative currency. A barter system that will allow people to exchange money (or value) across vast distances, with no need for banks or travel.

This is astonishing. The typical Western consumer thinks that our society is at the cutting edge of technology and its interface with society. But in Africa, people are using the same technology in radically different ways. Imagine the barter system being introduced here in the UK. Would you work, in whole or in part, for airtime? Especially if you had the opportunity to sell that airtime on to others, or exchange it for goods?

What will 'money' look like in fifty years from now? Twenty years?

These notes made during a recent broadcast of Global Business on the BBC World Service.

Labels: tech, writing

Sub-editors for weblogs

There's one thing that webloggers lack, one thing they could really benefit from, and that's sub-editing.

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, a sub-editor is there to read through a journalist's work, correct and re-write it where necessary, and prepare it for publication.

Here in the UK (I speak from my own direct experience), subs are usually in charge of writing headlines, standfirsts and boxouts. They will often re-write intro pars to make them more interesting. They are also usually in charge of the layout for printed publications, ensuring the copy physically fits on the page in the gaps between the adverts.

The best thing about subs from a writer's point of view is that when you've got three or four of them reading your work before it gets printed, mistakes get spotted. You get a chance to correct them before they are made public, thereby saving yourself from shame and your employer from the possibility of legal action.

One very irritating thing about a lot of the very best weblogs is that they have no subs. The writing may be wonderful, witty, informative and entertaining, but is ruined by simple errors that would get fixed by a good sub.

Here's an idea: a subbing service for webloggers.

People sign up for a service called blogsub. When you sign up as a blogsubber, you have to declare yourself willing to read through a certain number of posts from other people every week. Maybe just one, maybe several a day. When another blogsub user wants to post something to their weblog, it is randomly assigned to a blogsubber who checks it through, offers a re-write if they think necessary, and corrects basic errors. The original owner gets a chance to review the subbing (something that doesn't happen in professional newsrooms, but I think there'd be uproar without such a facility) and confirm the post as ready-to-go. Only now does it go live on the owner's weblog.

There might even be demand, in future, for a professional level of service. Some team weblogs, especially those partially or completely dependent on advertising income, might want to pay for subbing services to give their online publications an extra coating of sheer professionalism. Indeed, you could argue that some of the biggest-earning and best-known weblogs ought to start employing sub-editors of their own.

Labels: tech, writing

When beer was 10p a pint

In the pub, Gus and Phil tell me how it used to be.

"Back when we were students, you got a full grant and you could live on it," they say.

This is back in 69, 70, 71 or thereabouts.

Phil says: "I ended up with £12 a week. Three pound covered rent, three pound covered food, so I had six pound a week for booze. And beer was 10p a pint in those days."

Turns out that while they've only known each other here for a few months, Phil and Gus both frequented the same cider house in Exeter when they were students, years ago. They share names of old friends. They probably pissed side-by-side in the same stinking pub toilet, 30 years ago or more.

"If you could stand it, you drank 'Natch' - Taunton Natural Dry. Amazing stuff, it had a world-altering effect," says Phil wistfully.

"We called the Natch drinkers 'natch-heads'," adds Gus. "You knew who they were. They walked out of the pub at the end of the evening and just fell over - boom - like that." He slaps his hand on the table.

"It gave you godawful hangovers, terrible headaches," says Phil. "But then by about four or five in the afternoon you'd start to feel better, and by God you'd be back down the pub that night to do it all over again. Bloody madness."

Labels: writing

Notes on the new Grauniad

Caveats: I've always been a left-wing tree-hugging Guardian reader, even when buying the Independent instead. Overall, I'm very pleased with the new look. Most of what follows is nitpicking.

First impressions in the newsagent: it stands out, if only because of the new size. The use of colour works on the front page, in the sense that it pulls in the eye when scanning a row of folded newspapers on the shelf.

This newsagent doesn't have any problem displaying the new paper; all the papers are piled up on a shelf at floor level. I wonder how many newsagents will have any sort of problem with display? How will the big chains, like supermarkets and WH Smiths, display it?

As I pick up the paper, it feels nice and thick, a good weight. As though it will offer plenty to read. (Pick up a redtop tabloid at the same time and feel the difference.)

Today's front page: not as exciting as I'd hoped, perhaps because of a relatively slow news day.

I'm very pleased to see that the front page retains a mixture of news stories, rather than the single theme-story format the tabloid Independent keeps using, much to my annoyance. But notice, none of the front page stories are complete. To finish reading any of them, even the lead story, you're forced to turn to another page. Some of these pages are a long way inside - page 13, 15, 17, 26. The invitation to turn to page 2 at the bottom of Alan Rusbridger's welcome column is styled differently to the others. Is this an error, or an attempt to explain things as they go along?

I'm not keen on the choice of front page photo, and the decision to run it vertically down the centre of the front page. I think there were stronger images to be used (violence in Northern Ireland? imminent petrol supply chaos?).

Page 2: The "Today on the web" column is a nice touch, although it and the rest of the page seem very similar to London's Metro. Designed for Tube and bus commuters.

Internal news pages: There's no escaping this when you have smaller pages; the stories are generally shorter. This is a pity, but you can't have the smaller paper without cutting the word counts.

While photos have been used large and to maximum, "look at us, we're colour on every page" effect, other graphic elements like some maps (page 3, page 17) and charts (page 19) look squeezed and a little overwhelmed.

Adverts: It's worth remembering that a newspaper's articles have to fit around the adverts, not the other way round. Ad space is sold in advance, the news just gets to fill whatever space is left.

Mostly it works OK but I've noticed that intelligent tabloids (like The Times, the Indy and now the new Graun) end up with three-quarter page ads (see pages 8, 12 and 14 for examples) that force the news content to squidge up around the edges. I find this distracting and not so easy to read. The ad is very intrusive. If I were in charge, I'd give advertisers better rates on full-page or half-page ads, to discourage them from buying these annoying three-quarter page ones.

Fonts: I'm not as much of a font geek as some of my friends, so I won't go into any discussion of the merits of the new Guardian Egyptian font. I find all the text very readable and the headlines look nice to me. I might have preferred them to use "The Guardian" in the masthead, instead of "theguardian".

Media Guardian: Good stuff. Plenty to read, Kim Fletcher's opening column full of tidbits about forthcoming redesigns from almost every other paper on Fleet Street. If the Thursday technology pullout is as meaty as this, I shall be very surprised. But what's this "noticeboard" on the back page? A mishmash of ads, puffs and, err, a sort of adpuff thing for Guardian-sponsored seminar. This feature needs rethinking, it just looks like a desperate "What shall we put here?" space filler.

G2: Ohh, look, the marvellous Shortcuts page has been retained, now in pride of place at the front of G2. I'm very happy, I love the Shortcuts style and approach. Tim Dowling, on the new Berliner format:

As the nights draw in and conversation invariably turns to the average summer rainfall in Pembrokeshire, people are prone to the sort of wild exaggeration that unfairly portrays the country as a less-than-ideal holiday destination. In fact, the correct figure is 235mm. Illustrating this point was once a matter of holding your hands anywhere from six inches to two feet apart ... but now you may use the short side of your demi-Berliner G2 as a template, because it's exactly 235mm.

On page 4, "Theg2graphic", today on the arms trade. Is it me, or is this a series of ordinary graphs sitting on tank-shaped coloured blobs? I'm not very impressed. I thought the point of an infographic was to use the graphic elements to convey information in a way that a normal chart cannot. Still, the idea is nice and there's lots of scope for interesting future spreads.

The TV and radio listings are nicely presented, although shifted inwards from the back page. They do need a double spread for visual clarity and the new layout, with colour text for highlighted programmes, works well.

Notice there's no "Pick of the day" column on the TV listings page. Extending the listings to cover nine digital channels means there's no longer enough space.

Conclusions: I've spent all morning reading this paper, and I've enjoyed it. The new size does help, it will certainly help if you're reading it on the move. I like visual design and use of colour, and in the main my complaints are restricted to minor things. There's a lot of scope for tweaking and refinement of this design in coming months and years.

I'm looking forward to the Saturday paper next weekend, which I usually buy at the weekend instead of a Sunday paper. The only thing that might change that is a radically improved Independent on Sunday, which is relaunching as a tabloid soon.

Labels: work, writing

My lost albums

Inspired by Lars Mange Ingebrigtsen's Lost Albums list, I decided to make my own. These are albums I love, but rarely see in anyone else's CD collection.

Paul Haig, by Paul Haig
We found a bunch of LPs in a cupboard in one of our student houses. This was one of them. Spiky Scotpop with dark, deep bass vocals and stark, simple melodies.

Burger Habit, by Sensation
The bunch who were previously Soul Family Sensation shortened their name to release this fabulous pop gem, which is better than their previous album, New Wave. The "I don't wanna have to go in there" chant at the end of Splitting up wity your girlfriend is one of my favourite pop moments of all time.

Hawaii, by The High Llamas
Easily mistaken for one incredibly long song, this mesmerising album came into my hands from a bargain bin, and because I thought the title sounded interesting. I've often fallen asleep while listening to this, not because it's boring but because it's so amazingly relaxing.

Looking for a Day in the Night, by Lilac Time
Along with Astronauts, this is one of the Lilacs' greatest triumphs. Country-folk that cares not about guns and oil, but about London and taxis. All over again is a startling attack on the whole record company business, savage in its honesty and sarcasm. It also makes a delightfully singable tune.

Drop the Roof, by Out of my Hair
When I worked for the Cambridge Evening News, there'd be occasional CDs to review. This one was thrown on my desk one week, and I expected it to be awful. But after many listens I began to adore the harmonies and melodic style; this album is rich in both. Sounds great in headphones, or enormous speakers.

Food, Sex and Paranoia, by Furniture
If you don't know about my Furniture fixation then it's about time you did.

Enjoy the Melodic Sunshine, by Cosmic Rough Riders
Harmony-tastic, 60s-inspired, jangly-guitar-ridden sumptuousness for the ears. The second album, Too Close to See Far, is pretty amazing too.

Super Natural, by Bennet
Saw this bunch of likely lads play a gig in a tiny pub in Cambridge. They had such incredible energy and so many singable tunes that I couldn't resist buying the CD. Punkpop about daily life, much like I Should Coco by Supergrass, but released a year later about about a squillionth as successful.

Skellington I and II, by Julian Cope
The ArchDrude released these two albums as obscure vinyl-only collectors items. I heard one of them at a friend's house but never thought to buy my own. Then one day, years later, I found a CD with both albums on it in a second-hand record shop in Croydon. Includes the wonderful Robert Mitchum: "Robert, Robert Mitchum, I wrote a song for you / Robert, Robert Mitchum, I love yes I love yes I really do."

Labels: music, writing

I'll send you a deck

I read with interest an article (PowerPoint: Killer App?) discussing the problems of a presentation-fixated corporate culture.

Some years ago, I took on a copywriting project for a large multinational manufacturing and chemicals company. My task was to interview one of their senior staff, and distill into about 1500 words his views on a particular issue. It sounded straightforward enough.

But the chap I needed to speak to was a very busy man. He could barely spare the time to answer my emails, let alone talk to me on the phone.

"I'll send over a deck," he said, "and we can go through it on the phone while I'm on the way to the airport."

A deck? I wondered.

He sent me a deck - a PowerPoint file, each slide within it groaning with information, fonts squeezed tiny so it would all fit. How anyone could ever take anything from this while watching this guy make a presentation was beyond me.

We whizzed through the slides as his car whisked him to Heathrow. He treated the call much like a presentation; I could hear his voice adopting the same tones, the same pauses, the same "A-ha! And this is the clever bit!" revelations that you'd expect to hear as an audience.

Ultimately, my job became converting this chaotic, over-stuffed .ppt into something more like reasoned prose. It was very difficult, not least because when I asked for some additional help from one of the big guy's minions, I was told: "Sure, we can send you some useful information," and what they sent was more PowerPoint files.

I'm not totally against PowerPoint, or presentation software in general. I can see when it can be put to good use. But as the Washington Post article makes clear, there are many people who just don't understand what 'good use' means in this instance, and apparently treat PowerPoint as an all-purpose tool for sharing information - any kind of information, be it well-suited to slides or not - with other people.

On another occasion at about the same time in my career, I went with a colleague to give a presentation to a roomful of strangers. We had worked for days on our slides, but of course the laptop died at the crucial moment. We had nothing to present.

So I winged it. I remembered what I needed to say, and made much of it up as I went along. I used gestures and facial expressions to make my points; I used physical objects in the room to represent abstractions and analogues. And it worked. Afterwards, someone said to me it was the most interesting and enjoyable presentation they had ever been subjected to. I was quite proud of that.

Labels: tech, writing

Remembered gigs

When I was a student I started writing gig reviews for the college newspaper; as a result I wangled free tickets to dozens of gigs at The Junction and the Cambridge Corn Exchange. This was the days of Madchester, shoegazing and triphop. I can remember the atmosphere at some of those gigs to this day.

EMF, The Junction
A mad evening. EMF were very briefly huge, thanks to their hit single "Unbelieveable", which now sounds dated and frankly rubbish. But at the time it was very popular in the SU bar on a Friday night. A whole gang of us went to see them, and I've been to few sweatier and more frantic gigs. Everyone went mental when they played the hit. I can remember the whole room being a sea of bopping arms and heads.

Throwing Muses, The Junction
We stood near the front, and were mesmerised by Kristin Hersh. As she sang, her head moved from side to side but her eyes remained perfectly still, staring straight ahead over the heads of the crowd. The band were very professional and I left wondering if I would ever witness anything so amazing ever again.

Ride, Cambridge Corn Exchange
I was a huge Ride fan. I bought the album on the day of release so I could get the free T-shirt. I wore my T-shirt to the gig. I couldn't believe how loud a guitar band could be.

James, Cambridge Corn Exchange
It was my birthday, and a few of us went to town to see James. I'd been a fan since before "Gold Mother" and considered myself superior to all the teenies who'd picked up on them after the success of "Come home". But it was a super gig, we danced all night and I sang myself hoarse because I knew nearly all the words (and, if I'm honest, hero-worshipped Tim Booth somewhat). When they started playing "Sit Down", we all sat down and sang along. I bought a black "ja-m-es" T-shirt which I wore with pride for the rest of the term.

Cud, The Junction
My friend and regular gig companion Charlotte convinced me to go and see Cud. I'd heard "When in Rome, Kill Me" round at her house and hadn't really liked it much. But then "Leggy Mambo" came out and I was converted - it was a fantastic album (I still listen to it regularly). The gig was busier than I expected and dancier than I expected. We danced non-stop, the band were on top form and segued lots of songs into eachother like pro DJs. I loved it.

Happy Mondays, Cambridge Corn Exchange
Mayhem from the outset, but when the intro to "Step on" started, it was like someone had flicked the "go insane" switch. The floor bounced.

New Order, Reading Festival
I was so excited about seeing them play, I got cross with my friends for talking over the music. Then Bernard started singing and I was crestfallen; his voice was painfully, dreadfully out of tune and I couldn't bear to listen. I wandered off, disappointed.

Pop Will Eat Itself
We danced the dance of the mad bastards; we had a wonderful time.

The Fall
A shambolic mess. Mark E Smith looked bored beyond words. A terrible gig, but "The Frenz Experiment" remained one of my favourite albums for some time afterwards, regardless.

Labels: music, writing

Creative pressure

I was talking to my friend Lawrence about creativity.

We both felt that our shared interest in the internet, and the fact that it is of crucial importance to our professional lives, had turned us into simple consumers of creativity.

We track the memes, read the blogs, monitor the feeds; we take it all in. We're both creative people - we both earn a living from it, we're paid to be creative - but our dependence on taking everything in has stopped us from being creative in our own time, on our own terms.

Lawrence revealed that he'd taken on part-time rental of an art studio space, away from home. The plan was to force himself to focus on the act of being creative, to ensure there was the opportunity, as well as the motivation, to create new works. He's an artist but has spent years focusing his energy on work and enjoying life; but the artistic urge remains. It's wrong to ignore it.

I'm very lucky to be in the position I'm in, to be paid money to write, in some cases, whatever I like. Writers earn money by allowing their brains to leak out on to a computer keyboard, and even if we are writing factual content, there's still a strong element of creation and originality that's essential to producing good work.

But in recent years I don't feel I've been terribly creative. Lawrence and I agreed that the web was partially to blame; like TV, it has been sucking away our time as we browsed, and read, and browsed, and clicked, and blogged, and browsed, and linked, and read. Of course I can't ignore the web because it is an essential part of my professional life; I need to know what's happening online in order to earn a living.

The line between professional monitoring and personal entertainment got blurred some time ago, and that was the cause of the problem. I'd browse things of personal interest during work time, and end up browsing work-related stuff during personal entertainment time. It all merges, one thing into the other, but the merging is something I bring about myself. I could be, I ought to be, more self-disciplined about it all.

So I wrote "BE CREATIVE" at the top of my todo.txt, a file I spend much of my time in, and challenged myself to stick to it.

Some years ago, I made a promise to myself that I would no longer allow TV to determine my actions; now I'm trying to apply the same rule to the net.

Labels: writing

James who?

D & A were over from Canada for a few days; they stayed in Bath with D's dad, so we had a chance to catch up on old times.

D asked me: "What's new in music? What new stuff should we be buying while we're over here?"

I mumbled a useless reply. Years ago, when we were students, it made sense to ask me this question. In those days I bought NME every week, along with a ridiculous (given my income) amount of music. I was music-addicted and had to be on the cutting edge of all the new stuff. I knew what was hot, and what was not.

These days, I struggle to keep up with the times. Sitting on the loo this morning, reading through last week's Observer (because it takes me a week to read a Sunday paper nowadays), I noticed a raving profile of James Blunt. The former soldier is currently number one in the singles and albums charts, and I had no idea. I'd never even heard his name.

I sighed and made a mental note to look up some of his stuff, when I got a chance.

So this is middle age.

UPDATE: I checked out James Blunt and found his music was utter rubbish. So that's that settled then.

Labels: life, music, writing