Not A Blog Archive 2006

Date: 08/12/06

Not Cliff Richard's Christmas Single!

http://eclectech.co.uk/notcliff.php

Warning! Contains footage of (not) Cliff with no pants!

Date: 04/12/06

Goodbye, Our 4-Track Hero

Logan Whitehurst, musician, songwriter and artist

b. 15/11/77 - d. 3/12/06

Logan Whitehurst was a drummer and keyboard player for a number of Californian groups in the late 1990s and beyond, but his outstanding contribution was his solo material, which combined gloriously quirky ideas with a shrewd ear for a good sound and, above all else, a child-like delight in creating. Be it the inspired rap of "Robot Cat", the slightly dark undertones of "Ice Cream Man", or the wonderful oddness of the "Very Tiny Songs" project (his final work), they made the world a bit more fun for a while.

Having twice fought off cancer of the brain and spine, the wretched disease returned for a third time, and took him and his joyfulness from the world yesterday at the age of just 29.

It may seem in poor taste in the light of that fact, but my favourite Logan Whitehurst track really is called "Your Brain Fell Out" (from his 2003 album "Goodbye My 4-Track". Click here to hear a clip from it). It combines modern ideas of how to put a recording together (and Logan's own off-beat soundscapes) with a respect for melody and harmony which reminds me of the best of the late 1960s.

Goodbye, Logan, and thanks for all the fun.

Date: 30/11/06

Turned Off

It's quite a significant evening here at Mental Towers. Tonight marks the night that I stop watching television, at least at home.

Now, for the benefit of all the exotic foreigners who may be passing through, I'll give a brief explanation of why tonight is the night:

In what is still called (in spite of increasing evidence to the contrary) the United Kingdom, if you use any television receiving equipment, you have to pay a licence fee to the State. This currently stands at £131.50 per year. Using the equipment (i.e., TV sets, VCR or DVD recorders, PCs with broadcast cards, digital receiving box) without a licence will land you with a fine of up to £1000 and a criminal record.

The licence fee goes to the BBC as its primary source of income.

Now, I should make it clear that I have no objection to the licence fee in principle: on the whole, I think it's the least unfair way of funding the BBC. The mad marketeers have made their suggestions down the years, but they are all deeply unsatisfactory: subscriptions would freeze out those too poor to pay them; getting the BBC to take advertising would be a disaster, especially in a time of reduced income in that sector (look at the mess ITV has become for the direst of warnings); and direct funding out of general taxation would place the BBC at even greater risk of political interference than it is at present.

I've thought about getting rid of my television in previous years, but have always chickened out at the last moment. This was partly because Christmas was on the horizon (my licence runs from December to November, you see), partly because I might be seen as party to some of the loony campaigns to get rid of the licence fee altogether (the most vocal of which has featured an extreme right-wing columnist from the Daily Telegraph, a Russian emigré ex-mental patient and Norris McWhirter), and partly because I renewed my licence at our village Post Office, and I liked the thought that I was putting business the way of a much-needed community resource.

It is this last-named factor which has now changed. Earlier this year, the BBC did a nasty little back-door deal with a private company which meant that people could no longer buy their licences (or buy saving stamps towards the full amount) from their local Post Office. Instead, this captive and highly-lucrative cash-stream was handed over (without, of course, so much as a squeak from that cartel of clowns known collectively as 'The Government') to a company called PayPoint, who run various services through grocers' and newsagents' shops.

It was this which finally tipped me over the edge. Well, that and the fact that television has become increasingly unwatchable for anyone with a modicum of taste. In any case, the analogue transmitters are going to be switched off over the next five years or so, and everyone is going to have to go digital if they want to watch television at all after that point. I had no intention of paying for new equipment simply so that I could watch an increasing number a channels full of under-resourced and under-talented crap, so this is simply a case of now rather than later.

Lest I should be accused of being snobbish or snooty about television, let me say that I have, in my time, loved television. If you look around this site, you will see ample evidence of my affection for it and what it has meant to me in my life. However, that loyalty has been strained to breaking point in recent times and, but for the news services on CEEFAX/Teletext, I would hardly ever have the set switched on of late.

So, at about 20:00 this evening, I started my own closedown sequence. First off, I switched the VCR to its output channel. This meant that I would be able to tune every channel on my TV to that, so that no channel could receive a signal from outside. Then I disconnected the aerial, and discovered that a certain amount of signal was still getting through.

I then went through each of the forty channels on my TV, setting them to the VCR's RF output channel. This was not as easy as it seemed, because the set (a Bush, about twelve years old) has one of those auto-tuning things on it which only runs one way! This means that if its starting point was, say, Channel 39, it would have to work its way all the way up Channel 68, jump back down to Channel 21 and then go up to where I wanted it.

As a result of all this, I got faint glimpses of the channels as they went by. It was a bit like a delirium dream, in that everything was rather fuzzy and disparate images followed hot upon one another. I saw (only saw, because I had the sound off) what appeared to be a scene with a comedy vicar; an advert for ear-wax remover, quickly followed by another one where a girl with full lips, big teeth and (one suspects) no knickers seemed to be eating something from a can of dog-food with almost orgasmic relish. Then there was a scene with a good-looking young couple sitting on a sofa talking. I suspect this was American, because it was set in one of those living-rooms where the staircase runs up the back wall. Then there was a woman trying (and failing) to be as sexy as Jenny Agutter (that's the "American Werewolf In London" Jenny Agutter, NOT the "Railway Children" one: whadya think I yam, some kinda poivoit?), followed by a brief glimpse of some men of limited articulacy kicking a ball around a field in Frankfurt.

All these images taken together seemed to sum up all that is television today, and much of what is wrong with it. They all passed, like the images I imagine flash across the inner eye of a dying man.

Finally, all forty channels were detuned. Then it was the turn of the VCR(a Sony, about nine years old) itself to get decommissioned. This was far easier, because I could select each VCR channel and simply type in the RF channel number and that was it.

Finally then, shortly after 22:00, the sets were switched off, disconnected, and manhandled into the corner of an upstairs room, there to sit unregarded.

There are some things I will miss, of course:

I will miss QI, for example, the only genuinely funny and intelligent quiz show on the box.

I will miss watching Major League Baseball via five's relay of ESPN's Sunday night games (although I could only ever watch that off tape anyway due to the time difference).

I will miss having CEEFAX and Teletext on first thing in the morning to make me well-informed before going to work.

Time Team

On the other hand, I will not miss:

The letters pages on the aforementioned text services, which are full of people complaining about "nasty foreigners doing us down", "the dictatorial EU superstate!" and "political correctness GAWN MA-A-A-A-D!".

Programmes which start four minutes later than scheduled due to commercials/trailers, and then go to another commercial break after the programme has run just eight minutes.

Ant and Dec, Ainsley Harriott, Paul O'Grady and endless series of "I'm A Has-Been, Get Me On Television". (Just a few minutes ago, I read that Channel 4 have bought the UK rights for "Big Bore" for another three years. I think I'm bailing out just in time).

I don't know whether I'll be able to keep up this spirit of noble detachment for long. I hope so, because I can think of many more interesting things to do than watching television (like learning how to play that acoustic guitar I bought nearly four years ago), and I now may have the time to do them. Life is, after all, too short.

Date: 24/11/06

Count The Days...

Most years, I design a calendar for myself using MS Publisher™.

I've done a 2007 one, and this time I thought I'd share it with my loyal readers (both of you).

I can do this because of a neat little program I've found, which will convert a wide variety of file formats into .pdf files. It's called CutePDF™ Writer, and you can get it here.

You can download the calendar from here. It's a file of 596KB. To view it, you'll need Adobe Acrobat. If you don't have it, you can download the free version from here (make sure you get the right version for your Operating System).

All you then have to do is print it out and bind it.

Date: 22/11/06

Recipe Corner

I'm not going to make a habit of this: I hardly ever cook 'from scratch', as it were. I simply don't have the time or the patience nowadays.

Still and all, you might find this recipe useful. I make it most Sundays during the winter months. As there's just me to eat it, one big panful can be split between my main meal on Sunday and when I get home from work on a Monday. This means I don't have to wait long to eat: I just re-heat what's left from the day before. It's filling and warming on a winter's evening.

Disclaimer! The Judge accepts no responsibility for any debility or destruction caused by this recipe!

OK. Here we go...

Lobscouse Au Juge

(Serves one person twice, serves two persons once, and serves anyone else right)

Ingredients:

2 medium-sized potatoes
1 large carrot
¼ a large onion
2 vegetable stock cubes
1 medium-sized tin of corned beef
Mixed herbs
Worcestershire sauce
Gravy browning
Suet dumplings (optional)

Method:

Peel the potatoes, and cut them into medium sized chunks (about 4 cms is a good size).

Slice the carrot, trying as much as possible to make the slices at the narrow end a bit thicker than the ones at the broad end (this will equalise the cooking time a bit).

Slice or dice the quarter onion according to preference.

Carefully (because you don't want unnamed meat in this dish) extract the corned beef from the tin, and cut into cubes. Don't make the cubes too small, as the corned beef will tend to 'disintegrate' during cooking anyway, and if you cut it too small you'll make this worse. About 1½ - 2 cms is a good size.

(You can use other meat if you wish, cut similarly into smallish cubes. If you're vegetarian, you can leave the meat out altogether. The result, however, is then called 'blind scouse', and I deny all responsibility for it)

Put all of the above into a large saucepan. Put the lid on, hold it firmly in place, and shake the saucepan vigorously. This will make sure that all the ingredients are well mixed together.

Take the lid off. This is important for what comes next...

Dissolve two vegetable stock cubes in ½ a pint of boiling water. Pour this over the contents of the pan. If necessary, top the liquid level up with cold water until the level reaches about 2 cms from the top of the other ingredients.

(You can use meat stock if you wish - but I find that beef stock is too strong in taste and colour. If you do decide to use it, you can probably leave out the gravy browning)

Sprinkle the mixed herbs over the top.

Pour about one tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce into this. This is to pep it up a little.

(I have used soy sauce in the past, just because I had it in the cupboard and didn't know what the hell else to do with it. You could use chilli or tabasco sauce if you're really daring, but on your own head be it)

Add about 1 teaspoonful of gravy browning. Don't add too much! This is only there to deepen the colour. Too much = too dark, and it also means that you can taste the stuff, which isn't the point of its being there.

Stir all of this with a large spoon to distribute the colour evenly.

Cook over a very low light. The idea is for it to cook slowly so that the vegetables can soften up, and the flavours can mingle into the stock properly. Depending on the amount you have in there, this can take between 50 and 75 minutes to cook. Give it a little stir every 15 minutes or so during this time.

If you're adding suet dumplings to the recipe, put these into the pan after about 35-40 minutes.

You'll be able to tell when it's ready by seeing if you can cut one of the potato chunks with the edge of a soup spoon. If you can, it's ready. The fact that the thing is bubbling like a jacuzzi is a clue, too.

Serve in bowls.

Bon appetit!

Date: 08/11/06

Kerr-UNNCCCH!!!

It's nice to see idiot motorists get some come-uppence. See this clip, for example (Macrom...erm...I mean Adobe Flash required).

Date: 07/11/06

Is This An Instruction Or A Description?

My money's on the latter...

Thanks to Kyle Thompson.

Date: 19/10/06

Your Country Fears You!

Another superb piece by Henry Porter in today's Independent about how, piece by piece, the criminal regime in London is removing our fundamental freedoms and rights.

The article is here for now. However, as the Indy has a habit of shoving things into its subscription-only section after a day or so, I reproduce it below.

**********

The limits of liberty: We're all suspects now

On new year's day 1990, three days after becoming president of Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel looked his people in the eye and spoke to them as no one had done before. It is difficult to read his words without feeling the vibration of history of both the liberation and the horrors of the regime that had just expired, leaving the Czech people blinking in the cold sunlight of that extraordinary winter.

This is what he said. "The previous regime, armed with its arrogance and intolerant ideology, reduced man to a force of production. It reduced gifted and autonomous people to nuts and bolts of some monstrously huge, noisy, stinking machine whose real meaning was not clear to anyone. It could do no more but slowly and inexorably wear itself out, and all the nuts and bolts too."

That perfectly defines the true tyranny, where the state takes all liberty and bends each individual will to its own purpose. And here is the interesting thing that Havel put his finger on: no matter how brutal or ruthless the regime, the act of depriving people of their freedom starts the stopwatch on that regime's inevitable demise. What he was saying was that in modern times a state can only thrive in the fullest sense when individuals are accorded maximum freedom.

I agree. Individual liberty is not just the precondition for civilisation, not just morally right, not just the only way people can reach their full potential, live responsibly and have fun; it is also a necessity for the health of government. Ten years ago I would have felt silly speaking about liberty and rights in Britain with the very real concern that I have today. But I am worried. And it's not just me. Last month Le Monde asked "Is Democracy Dying in the West?". In the spring of this year Lord Steyn, the distinguished former law lord, made a speech despairing at this Government's neglect for the Rule of Law, which was followed by Baroness (Helena) Kennedy's alarm call in the James Cameron Lecture.

The inescapable fact is that we have a Prime Minister who repeatedly makes the point that civil liberties arguments are not so much wrong as made for another age [my italics]. We have a Government that has ignored the Rule of Law, reduced rights and has steadily moved to increase the centralised power of the state at the expense of the individual.

So I don't feel quite as silly or as alarmist as I might.

The relationship between the state and individual is really at the heart of any discussion about democracy and rights. In Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union it was the state's mission not just to prevent people from expressing themselves, from moving about freely and unobserved, from pursuing their chosen careers and acting upon their religious and political convictions, but to stop them from thinking freely. It needed to occupy people's thoughts - to take up a kind of permanent residency in the mind of the average citizen. And as the many psychological studies published in the Nineties make clear, this led to psychic disrepair on a massive scale - paranoia, clinical depression, chronic internalised anger and learned helplessness.

We fell morally ill, Havel said in that speech, because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore one another, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimensions, and for many of us represented only psychological peculiarities.

Why am I harping on about communism? It died and was buried 17 years ago, at least in Europe and Russia. We're into another century. We've got Google and speed-dating and globalisation and melting ice caps and reality TV and al-Qa'ida and al-Jazeera and Al Gore. We've moved on.

As a character in Alan Bennett's The History Boys says, there is no period more remote in history than the recent past. Indeed, but we need to remember that recent past a little more than we do. For one thing, our knowledge of what existed on the other side of the Iron Curtain meant we valued and looked after our own freedoms much more than we do today.

It is perhaps the absence of an obvious confrontation between freedom and tyranny that allows Tony Blair to say that civil liberties arguments are made for another age. I profoundly disagree with this. It is dangerous arrogance to say that the past has nothing to teach us and that all the problems we face now are unique to our time.

During his speech to the Labour Party conference, Tony Blair said: "I don't want to live in a police state, or a Big Brother society or put any of our essential freedoms in jeopardy. But because our idea of liberty is not keeping pace with change in reality, those freedoms are in jeopardy."

What in heaven's name did he mean by that? Liberty is liberty. You can't update it. You can't divide it. You are either free, or you're not. A society is either just, or it isn't. People have rights or they don't. The rule of law is upheld, or it isn't.

But Blair believes there is nothing that can't be modernised, updated, pared down or streamlined to keep pace with change. And liberty is no exception to the modernising fury which serves as New Labour's only ideological foundation. What the Prime Minister is saying in this cute little Orwellian paradox is that in the particular circumstances of the war on terror and the rash of crime and anti-social behaviour, we must give up freedom to be free.

What an odd idea! Who is to decide which freedoms are essential and which can be sacrificed to make us secure? Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Lord Falconer or the former Stalinist and now Home Secretary John Reid?

"Those who would give up essential liberty," observed Benjamin Franklin, "to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither freedom or safety." That's exactly right because you can't barter one for the other even though that has been the tempting deal on offer from the British and American governments since 9/11. The truth of the matter is that relinquishing our rights in exchange for illusory security harms each one of us, and our children and grandchildren. Because once gone, these rights hardly ever return.

But let's just return to the first part of that statement by Tony Blair - the bit about him not wanting to live in a police state, or a Big Brother society. Don't get me wrong, we do not live in either a police state or a Big Brother society - yet. But there is no Englishman alive or dead who has done more to bring them about.

The trouble is that it's happening so very quietly, so very discreetly that few really see it. You have to concentrate very hard to understand what's going on and put the whole picture together because so much has been buried in obscure corners of legislation.

We used to believe in innocence until guilt was proved by a court. Not any longer. That distinction disappeared when the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act came into force and police started taking innocent people's DNA and fingerprints and treating them as a convicted criminals.

We used to believe in Habeas Corpus. Not any longer. Under terrorism laws, suspects may be held for 28 days without being charged. Now the Home Secretary wants to make that 90 days, and Gordon Brown seems to share that view.

We used to believe that there should be no punishment without a court deciding the law had been broken, and that every defendant had the right to know the evidence against him. Not any longer. Control orders effectively remove both those rights and John Reid said recently that he wanted stronger powers to detain and control, and stronger powers to deport, which would clearly require the UK to derogate from the European Convention on Human Rights.

We used to believe that an Englishman's home was his castle. Not any longer. A pincer movement by the Courts Act 2003 and the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act 2004 put paid to the 400-year-old principle that entry into your home could not be forced in civil cases.

We used to believe in the right to be tried by jury. Not any longer. The Government plans to remove trial by jury in complicated fraud cases and where there is a likelihood of jury tampering. It would like to go further.

We used to believe there was a good reason not to allow hearsay evidence in court. Not any longer. The anti-social behaviour order legislation introduced hearsay evidence. The maximum penalty for breaking an Asbo can be up to five years in jail. Hearsay can send someone to jail.

We used to believe in free speech, but not any longer. People have been detained under terrorism laws for wearing anti-Blair T-shirts. Walter Wolfgang was removed from the Labour Conference for heckling Jack Straw about the Iraq war. A woman was charged under the Harassment Act for sending two e-mails to a company politely asking them not to conduct animal experiments. Her offence was to send two e-mails, for in that lies the repeated action that is now illegal. A man named Stephen Jago was arrested for displaying a placard quoting Orwell near Downing Street. It read: "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." And a mime artist named Neil Goodwin appeared in court recently charged under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act for what? Well, doing an impersonation of Charlie Chaplin outside Parliament. His hearing was a grim comedy. Mr Goodwin's statement to the court concluded: "In truth, one of the first things to go under a dictatorship is a good sense of humour."

We used to believe that our private communications were sacrosanct. Not any longer. The Regulatory Investigatory Powers Act 2000 and its subsequent amendments provide such wide terms for the legitimate tapping of phones, the interception of e-mails and monitoring of internet connections that they amount to general warrants, last used in the 18th century under George III.

I could go on because there is much more, but I worry about boring you and I know I am beginning to seem obsessed. There will be many reasonable people among you who will argue that the fight against terrorism or some other compelling problem makes the removal of a fragment of liberty the best option available to us. A little bit here, a little bit there doesn't really matter, particularly when it involves somebody else's rights. Without thinking very deeply, we say to ourselves "if you've done nothing wrong you've got nothing to fear from these new laws". Not true. There is something to fear - because someone else's liberty is also your liberty. When it's removed from them, it's taken from you even though you may not be able to conceive of the circumstances when you might need it. A system of rights must apply to bank managers, illegal immigrant cockle pickers and every type of defendant otherwise it doesn't count.

Cumulatively, these small, barely noticed reductions in our rights add up to the greatest attack on liberty in the last hundred years. No wonder the Prime Minister dismisses traditional civil liberties arguments as being made for another age. With his record he can do nothing else.

In an e-mail exchange between him and me in the spring, he suggested a kind of super Asbo for major criminals. This is what the unmediated Blair sounds like. "I would go further. I would widen the powers of police to seize cash of suspected [my italics] drug dealers, the cars they drive round in and require them to prove that they came by them lawfully. I would impose restrictions on those suspected of being involved in organised crime. In fact I would harry, hassle and hound them until they give up or leave the country."

I'm sure that echoes many people's desire just to be rid of these awful people. But think about it for a moment: Tony Blair is a lawyer, yet nowhere is there any mention of due process or the courts. Apparently it will be enough for the authorities merely to suspect someone of wrongdoing for them to act. And the police won't be troubled by the tiresome business of courts, defence lawyers or defendants' rights. I wonder what Vaclav Havel would think of such a suggestion. Certainly, he would be all too familiar with the system of arbitrary arrest and state persecution that Blair seems to be suggesting.

Blair dresses up his views in a vocabulary of modernisation and inclusivity. Yet when he talks about rebalancing the criminal justice system in favour of the victim, it takes just a few moments to see that this will be achieved by doing away with the priority in our legal system of protecting the accused from miscarriages of justice. He simply wants to reduce defendants' rights in order to satisfy public demand for more prosecutions.

It is now plain that he intends nothing less than to open the ancient charters of British rights in order to tip acid into them.

The way cabinet ministers think of themselves today and what they do are at odds. They think of themselves as reasonable, tolerant, humane and liberal people, but their actions tell an altogether different story. This brings me to the Big Brother state that Tony Blair says he doesn't want to live in, but which has nevertheless rapidly come into being during his premiership.

Most people have very little understanding of what the ID card scheme will actually mean for them. They think that it just involves a little plastic identifier. But it is much more than that. Every adult will be required to provide 49 pieces of information about themselves which will include biometric measurements - probably an iris scan and fingerprinting. If you refuse to submit to what is called, without irony, enrolment, you will face repeated fines of up £2,500. The Government is deadly serious about this thing because of a simple truth. They want to know pretty much everything there is to know about you.

Personally, I find the idea of having a card repugnant and I cannot believe it will be long before policemen are stopping us on the street and asking for our papers. But this is by no means the most sinister aspect. Every time your card is swiped when you identify yourself, the National Identity Register will silently make a record of the time and date, your location and the purpose of the ID check. Gradually, a unique picture of your life will be built, to which nearly half-a-million civil servants are apparently going to have access.

But of course you will never be told who is looking at your file, or why. And nor will you be able to find out.

MPs must take responsibility for passing this invasive law but they cannot be blamed for the other half of the Big Brother society that is upon us. I refer to the total surveillance of our roads in a linked-up system of Automatic Number Plate Recognition cameras. These cameras cover every motorway, major dual carriageway, town and city centre and will feed information from billions of journeys into one computer, where the data will remain for two years.

The decision to put British motorists under blanket, round- the-clock surveillance was never taken by Parliament. It just happened. As the cost of processing enormous quantities of data came down, the police and Home Office just simply decided to go ahead. Traffic cameras became surveillance cameras. This, I gather, is known as function creep, and, as always, half the pressure comes from technological innovation.

We are about to become the most observed population in the world outside North Korea, and absolutely no work has been done on how this will affect each one of us and what it will do to our society and political institutions.

I worry that we are not alert to the possibilities of social control. No matter how discreet this surveillance, it increases the spectral presence of the state in the everyday consciousness of each individual. I grant that it is a slow process and that it is nothing like the leaden omnipresence of the Stasi in the GDR. But I think we're heading for a place from which we will not be able to return: the surveillance society where the state will crowd in on the individual human experience and threaten the unguarded freedoms of privacy, solitude, seclusion and anonymity. We may continue to attest to the feeling of freedom but in reality we will suffer more and more restrictions. Inexorably we are becoming subjects not citizens, units on a database that may be observed and classified by a Government which is taking control in areas where it has never dared in democratic times to trespass before.

Where this will all lead I cannot say, but I do know that it is neither good for us nor for the state. Humans work best when they have the maximum freedom, and so does government. As our Government gains more power in relation to us, confusing itself on the way with the entity and interests of the state, it will become less responsive to our needs and opinions, less transparent and less accountable.

Havel said of the Communist tyranny in that glorious but sombre new year's day speech: "None of us is just its victim. We are its co-creators." That is true of any society. And I believe we all need now to acknowledge what has happened to British rights and do something about it.

Firstly, there needs to be some kind of formal audit made of the rights which have been already compromised. An exact account. Linked to this should be a commission looking into the effects of mass surveillance. Second, we need a constitution which enshrines a bill of rights and places our rights beyond the reach of an ambitious Executive and Parliament. Third, we should be writing to our constituency MPs or clogging up their surgeries - asking what they are doing about the attack on liberty. And fourth, all schoolchildren should be taught about British rights and freedoms, what they mean and how they were won. History, as the National Trust is fond of saying, matters. Rights and liberties are as much a part of our heritage as St Paul's Cathedral and Shakespeare's plays.

This may all sound rather prescriptive but I have become certain over the last two years that we need to do something to save us from our Government and the Government from itself.

Date: 17/09/06

New Photographs!

Following on from yesterday's item, I've now added some further photographs from my trek on Friday, and they're on view now in the Gallery.

Date: 16/09/06

Taking A Hike...

...or, "wot i did on mi holidays" by Baby Grumplin' (aged 44¼).

Taking a much-needed two weeks away from the increasingly sour vat of horse-piss which is the office, I decided it was time for one of my Walks.

Now, just in case anyone thinks this means that I get the rucksack out and go for a ten-day tour of the Cairngorms, forget it. I stay local: if I can't get there and back in a day, it's out of the question.

I realised that it must have been twenty five years since I'd last gone up Hope Mountain. I was a mere teenager then, and going up there and back in an afternoon was no big deal. Indeed, I seem to remember that the last time had been on that day in 1981 when Prince Big-Ears married Lady Diana Brood-Mare, and I'd wanted to get away from all that sycophantic shite (I took my radio with me, but it remained tuned to a rather good rock show on the Hungarian service of Radio Free Europe throughout).

As middle age asserts itself ever more strongly, I knew that this time was going to have to be a whole-day job. So, I reasoned, why not push myself a little bit further and visit Lake Horeb? When my mother was a girl in the 1920s and 30s, she and her family would walk there for picnics in the summer. I'd never been there at all.

I decided to go for it.

Setting off from home at about 9.50 on a bright morning, I went down past the old vicarage to...oh, hold on, you'll need a map. Here:

(The red dots mark the outward route, the blue the return journey).

Where was I? Ah yes. I crossed the Minera Road, clambered over the stile and down the field to Lower Lodge and the ford. Then came the long drag up the lane on the other side. Parts of it are about 1 in 4, and much of it is enclosed by hedges and banks, so it felt quite claustrophobic and made any sense of visible progress difficult. In fact, a couple of times I thought to myself, "Sod this for the Duke of Edinburgh", and nearly turned back.

I reached the village of Cymau, relieved to get a flat stretch for a while, and made my way to a seat which stands (or should that be 'sits'?) at the crossroads opposite the Olde Talbot Inn. Back in 1980, I'd stopped off for a quick drink there, but I knew this wasn't an option this time. I simply can't drink during the day anymore.

After a rest of about ten minutes, I turned left up yet another steep, narrow, tree-canopied lane which led up the mountain side. This led shortly to a junction where I took a sharp right turn up another slope. After about fifty yards or so, this forked into two options. On all previous occasions, I'd taken the left-hand one, as this leads close by the summit of the mountain, and that had been my target then. This time, though, I had thought a bit further ahead, and knew that the right-hand road would hug the contour line a bit more, and would therefore be far less steep.

As I stood there at the fork, a saw an elderly lady walking towards me, accompanied by a small dog. We exchanged greetings, and she said that she had come to end of the road to meet the postman, who was on his way up from Cymau in his van. We chatted for a few minutes, until the red van appeared around the corner. I started off again, watching the lady and her dog walk down the driveway to the farmhouse which nestled below the road.

I went along, bemoaning the fact that the trees and hedges largely obscured the view eastwards, allowing me nothing much more than tantalising glimpses of the panorama. Certainly nothing to be able to point a camera through and get a shot unhindered by branches.

The road went on...and on...and...who keeps adding bits on to the back of this mountain?

Finally, the road curved around to the left a bit and the vegetation thinned out, allowing the scenery its chance. And what scenery it was! I'd been wondering about visibility, because it had been a bit hazy when I'd set off, but it had cleared nicely by now, and I had an untrammelled view across east Flintshire and Cheshire. Certainly, I had a great view of the cement works at Padeswood, rising stark and white in the middle of the landscape and looking from that distance a bit like Ceausescu's palace (only I don't think the old thug had sand hoppers on his):

I also had a clear view of the Aerospace factory at Broughton. As I was walking along, one of these little beasties came in to land at the airfield next to it:

The road seemed to drop down a bit, which made me wonder if I was on the right one, as I knew that my destination was on top of the ridge to my left. Finally, I came to a left turn, which led up a predictably steep hill. As I climbed, I happened to meet a member of Wrexham Council's planning committee:

I reached the top of Horeb village and turned right. There was Waun Y Llyn Country Park.

(Told you...)

I wandered up the path to a viewing point, where I saw that I still had a couple of hundred yards to go before I got to the lake itself. I clambered painfully over a stile, and trudged on until I was sitting beside the lake.

It had taken me three hours to get there.

I stopped for lunch at this point. I can't say that there was an awful lot to see apart from landscape, and there was a rather biting northerly breeze which didn't help. Anyway, I was only up there for half an hour, as I wanted to get back home for about 4 pm.

I had originally thought about following one of the paths down to Llanfynydd, and going home via Ffrith, but I realised that, for reasons of both time and energy, this was a non-starter - at least this time.

Off I set, but this time I followed the road on the western side of the mountain. This climbed a bit to start with, but once the summit had been passed on my left, there was only one way left - downwards. People who don't walk much seem to think that walking downhill is easier. It isn't, if only because (especially on the more dramatic gradients) you have to keep the anchors on at all times to prevent your legs getting out of control and throwing you off the road altogether.

After another brief rest on the seat by the Talbot, I headed off back down towards the ford.

This is where the hard work began. It was all uphill from here. When I got to the stile at the bottom of the field which led back on to Minera Road, I found that I could no longer lift my leg high enough to get over it, so I had to walk an extra hundred yards or so to where the lane met the main road, then back to the junction opposite the top stile. Still, I paced myself, and arrived back home shortly before 4 pm. Just over 2½ hours to get home.

Was it worth it? Well, yes it was. I got out of the house for the day, it didn't cost me anything and I felt that I'd achieved something. It can't be bad to be out in the fresh air in good weather.

I also got quite a lot of good photographs (in addition to the ones here), which I'll be adding to the Gallery before very long.

Date: 14/09/06

Hop It!

In town this morning, I walked past a shop whose windows were plastered with signs saying:

BUY ONE - GET ONE FREE!

Nothing odd there....except that this was a shoe shop.

Date: 12/09/06

The Master Blaster

Derek McIntosh ("Blaster") Bates
Demolition expert and raconteur

b. 05/02/23, d. 01/09/06

It's perhaps difficult for the younger generation to understand what effect 'Blaster' Bates had when he first came to a wider audience in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Here was a man who had been an engineer at Rolls Royce, a World War II bomber pilot, and an expert in demolition by explosives, who had found himself gaining wider recognition from going around Round Table societies and Rotary Clubs ("I never knew there were so many secret societies in Great Britain", he once said), talking about his work and the things that happened to him.

But, 'Blaster' Bates was a born entertainer. Rather than give the bald facts about his job, he spun anecdotes into picaresque tales which would reduce his hearers to near incontinence as he would imitate the tones and accents of the well-bred Cheshire Life ladies, artsy-fartsy TV producers and gormless farmers he would meet along the way. He was as much a professional in that as he was in the demolition trade.

Such was his success that he released no fewer than eight LPs in seventeen years, in which his tales could be heard at length and in their natural environment - in front of an audience. His humour was down-to-earth, bawdy, but never obscene: his was the humour of the English tradesman of his day.

Here are three clips of the man in his element:

First (recorded from a BBC television programme in 1976), he describes how he started in the blasting business:

Next, perhaps his most famous story, "The Shower Of ____ Over Cheshire", taken from his first album "Laughter With A Bang" (1967):

And, finally, my own favourite story. "Geronimo" (from the 1969 LP "T.N.T. For Two") tells of what happened when he took a young photographer along to film a chimney stack coming down (this is quite a long story, but it's worth it just for the punchline):

Apart from being very good at his job, 'Blaster' Bates brought a lot of laughter to a lot of people. I, for one, am most grateful to him for that.

Date: 07/09/06

The Passing Of A Cultured Man

Joseph Hill, singer.

b. Jamaica 22/01/49, d. Berlin 19/08/06.

Click here for the announcement, and here for a brief clip of the man in action.

Date: 27/08/06

Favourite Things?

Right! Now where did I put those whiskery kittens...?

Date: 21/08/06

A Ministerial Statement

The following is a message from the English Secretary of State for Health, Patricia Hewitt, to bowel cancer sufferers in Wales:

(Click on the picture for the link to the story)

Date: 04/08/06

Love Forever...

Arthur Lee (1945 - 2006)

Date: 24/07/06

Thanks For Telling Us...

Seen by a colleague of mine in the window of a shop in Shrewsbury:

Date: 21/07/06

Meeow!

I suspected as much:

You Are: 20% Dog, 80% Cat

You are are almost exactly like a cat. You're intelligent, independent, and set on getting your way. And there's no way you're going to fetch a paper for anyone!

Are You More Cat or Dog?

(Thanks to Michel Klimij-van der Laan (aka Sanity for the link)

Date: 19/07/06

Oh...F-f-f-four-Oh-Four!!

http://www.pierceitshop.co.uk/errror

Date: 16/07/06

Remembering The Short-Story Man

On July 16 1981, there was a traffic accident on Long Island, New York. A collision between a small car and a truck.

There was one fatality: the car driver.

Harry Chapin was a songwriter, singer and political campaigner.

In an all-too-short recording career (his first solo LP, "Heads And Tales", had come out in 1972), he had nonetheless fitted a remarkable amount into the last decade of his life: eleven albums (including two live double LPs), a Broadway musical based on one of his own songs, endless concerts (the proceeds of which were given, more often than not, to the causes he supported), and endless, tireless campaigning on land reform, hunger and more.

There were artists who sold far more records. There were artists who made far more money. There were certainly artists who won more critical acclaim than Harry Chapin. The snobs of Rolling Stone and other organs of the self-important thought his work 'overwrought', 'sentimental', 'preachy'. As ever, they spectacularly missed the point. For what Harry Chapin did was not sing songs so much as tell stories. He was, in the words of the journalist Tony Kornheiser, a novelist. So many of his songs were short stories: about taxi drivers having a chance encounter with a lost love ("Taxi", and its sequel called...erm..."Sequel"); about the gap between the generations (the famous "Cat's In The Cradle", subject many years later to a most dreadful cover version); about the downcast, the disregarded, the marginalised, the outsider (pick a number - any number!).

Consider one of his most remarkable songs, "Sniper" (1972). Based on the true story of a young man running beserk with a shotgun at a Texas school, Chapin tells the story largely from the gunman's point of view. What motivated him to carry out such a slaughter? An upbringing without affection; shunned and considered 'strange' by his classmates; unable to articulate his feelings...except by making people answer his questions by his last, despairing act:

"Listen you people, I've got a question.
You won't pay attention, but I'll ask anyhow.
I've got a way that will get me an answer,
I've been waiting to ask you 'til now,
Right now!

Am I?
I am a lover who's never been kissed.
Am I?
I am a fighter who's not made a fist.
Am I?
If I'm alive then there's so much I've missed.
How do I know I exist?

Are you listening to me?
Are you listening to me?
Am I?"

He gets his answer when the SWAT team arrive at the clock tower he has holed up in, and in all of the attention his actions have garnered. His story will go on after him, because there will be more whose disaffection and estrangement from 'normal' society will lead them to follow suit:

"Am I?
There is no way that you can hide me.
Am I?
Though you have put your fire inside me.
You've given me my answer, can't you see?

I was.

I am.

And now, I WILL BE."

The stories Harry Chapin told were so often about those on the outside. But there were many others which dealt with the standard themes of love, life and loss. Many of these were written in the first person, and there is little doubt that a great many of those were at least semi-autobiographical, since his personal life was often, shall we say, complicated. Indeed, the male protagonists in the songs are often shown to be emotionally unlearned to the point of outright klutzhood (think of the ageing DJ in another of his most famous stories, "W.O.L.D."), rescued only by the strength and forbearance of the women in the stories.

This is not to say that, for all the emotional power in his songs, he lacked a sense of humour even in songs about relationships: "Dirt Gets Under The Fingernails" is a delight, telling of what happens when, completely by chance, both husband and wife decide to be what they really want to be. Similarly, "30000 Pound Of Bananas", although telling another true story about a fruit truck crashing (a savage irony in retrospect), is enlivened by the way in which the tale is told:

"And he sideswiped nineteen neat parked cars,
clipped off thirteen telephone poles,
hit two houses, bruised eight trees,
and Blue-Crossed seven people.
It was then he lost his head,
not to mention an arm or two, before he stopped.
And he smeared for four hundred yards
along the hill that leads into Scranton, Pennsylvania
all those thirty thousand pounds of bananas."

Harry Chapin was at his very best in live performance. I envy those who had the chance to see him in concert, gigs which could last up to three hours as he performed with his customary power and commitment, and where he would spend the whole of the interval and some considerable time afterwards talking with his fans.

Those of us not fortunate to have been of an age or at a location to have witnessed him first-hand have the consolation of two live double albums, the earlier of which, "Greatest Stories Live", is probably the closest we are ever likely to get to experiencing the real thing.

Objectively, Harry Chapin was not a great singer from a technical standpoint (rather like the character in another of his classics, "Mr. Tanner"). The arrangements (many by his brother Stephen) are sometimes over-egged. Such a prolific output over a short period time was always likely to be of uneven quality. But what shines through always is his passion, his humanity and his ability to go straight to the heart of the listener.

Like many, I'd known about Chapin from his 'hits' in the mid-seventies. It was only about seven or eight years ago, at a record fair in Chester, that I started collecting the LPs. I still don't have them all: 1978's "Living Room Suite" and the ultra-rare effort from 1966 with his father (a noted drummer) and his brothers (under the title "Chapin Music") still elude me. I'll get there some day.

I've been listening to the ones I do have while putting this piece together (which may explain a certain disjointedness: I keep having to break off to turn the records over), and the songs (even on the umpteenth listening) still have the power to move. There are so many which I start singing along with, but have to stop because I start to fill up. No-one else has ever had the ability to do that to me. Harry Chapin connects, in a way no-one else can match.

Twenty-five years after he was grabbed from us on the Long Island Expressway at the obscenely young age of 38, he still moves and inspires. Few have that talent during their lifetimes, let alone a generation after their passing.

Harry, it sucks that you've not been here to entertain and energise us through these strange, confusing, exasperating years. But we're still grateful for what you gave us while you were here, and the inspiration you still provide.

Date: 01/07/06

It's Meme, Meme, Meme All The Time With Some People...

I don't usually do these, but I'm bored. I got it from Joe Gordon at The Woolamaloo Gazette, who got it from...well, let's just say that it's been around the houses a bit.

1. Have you ever been searched by the cops?

No, but I nearly got arrested once during a demo against Prince Big-Ears and Princess Clothes-Horse in Swansea in 1981. An acquaintance got arrested, and I nearly joined him in the van for pointing out that South Wales Police contained an unusually high proportion of petty-minded twits. I think the Official Secrets Act came in to play here.

2. Do you close your eyes on roller coasters?

I've never been on one. If I ever did, I hope that I'd been concentrating on keeping various other parts of me closed rather than my eyes.

3. When's the last time you've been sledding?

If you mean on snow, then probably about 35 years ago ("We 'ad proper winters in them days!"). Do you count sliding down a long, grassy slope on a sheet of cardboard? If so, I would think it would have been about 34 years ago...

4. Would you rather sleep with someone else, or alone?

This is a loaded question, isn't it? You're not doing some sort of social research, are you? Well, OK. Alone. This means I don't have to worry about kicking A.N. Other, and I can fart when I please.

5. Do you believe in ghosts?

No. I have a theory, though. It's that apparitions like that are manifestations of those places where the boundary between this universe and the next one are particularly thin. That's why we see them. I wonder what they take us for.

6. Do you consider yourself creative?

Of course! Why shouldn't I flatter myself occasionally? Trouble is, I have no stamina and a very short attention span. This makes writing a blog the ideal format.

7. Do you think O.J. killed his wife?

His actions seem bizarre looked at in any other way, but then he mustn't have. After all, he was acquitted by the best justice system that money and celebrity can buy.

8. Jennifer Aniston or Angelina Jolie?

I don't watch movies. So, although I've heard of these ladies, I have no clear idea of what they look like.

9. Do you stay friends with your ex's?

Yes, although Qs and Zs are worth more. By the way, you don't apostrophise a plural, dickhead!

10. Do you know how to play poker?

No. Existence is a gamble: why waste time with card games?

11. Have you ever been awake for 48 hours straight?

I think the nearest I got to this was 40 hours. It was when I was going out to the far west of Ireland for a language course in 1984. I woke up at home at 9.00am on the Thursday, got ready, went for the train to Holyhead, got on the boat there, had breakfast in Dublin with the family of a man I'd met on the boat, went for the train to Galway, then caught the bus to An Cheathrú Rua, and spent the evening with the family I was staying with. I got to sleep about 1.00am on Saturday morning.

12. What's your favourite commercial?

I dislike commercial television, the more so with each passing day. I regard the advertising industry and all those in it with only slightly more compassion than I regard infanticides. It wouldn't be so bad if they all didn't try to come across as being so creative. They're just prostitutes.

Having said that, there was a commercial in the late 80s for a brand of cassette tape, which played with the idea of mishearing the lyrics of Desmond Dekker's "Israelites". For many, that song will always be known as "Me Ears Are Alight" as a result. OK, that's prostituting of another sort, but amusing nonetheless.

13. What are you allergic to?

I've had bad reactions to ibuprofen, and am a bit wary of seafood. Other than that, nothing. Oh, hang on a mo': yes, aerosols ("Well! I only asked!"). To be precise, perfumes. If I'm anywhere near someone who has a strong perfume, I get symptoms akin to hay fever. Which is odd, because I don't suffer from hay fever...

14. If you're driving in the middle of the night, and no one is around, do you run red lights?

I don't drive, but I'd be unhappy being a passenger of someone who would do this. You never know...

15. Do you have a secret that no-one knows but you?

Hang on! How could I know this? It would be a bit silly to go around asking people, "Do you know this about me?" I mean, if I told them, it wouldn't be a secret anymore, would it? It certainly wouldn't be the sort you're talking about, anyway.

16. Boston Red Sox or New York Yankees?

Red Sox, every time. I hate the powerful, the arrogant and the overweening. The Yankees are the Manchester United of baseball. No more need be said.

17. Have you ever been Ice Skating?

No. There are almost certainly more interesting ways of ending up in traction.

18. How often do you remember your dreams?

Not as often as I'd like. Even the most interesting or striking of them go from my memory by lunchtime.

19. When was the last time you laughed so hard you cried?

Probably listening to "I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue".

20. Can you name 5 songs by The Beatles?

Yes thanks.

21. What's the one thing on your mind right now?

Can I finish this post and have a bath before the thunderstorms that they've promised us arrive?

22. Do you know who Ghetto-ass barbie is?

Are they making plastic rappers now?

23. Do you always wear your seat belt?

Not when I'm in bed, no: that would be silly. Or even kinky.

24. What cell service do you use?

Group 4.

Actually, I detest mobile phones (see this Rant).

25. Do you like sushi?

Never tried it. I tend to distrust food which looks too much how it started out (see Q.35).

26. Have you ever narrowly avoided a fatal accident?

I hope so.

27. What do you wear to bed?

Skin and a tired expression.

28. Been caught stealing?

No: I've always made sure of getting away with it.

29. What shoe size do you have?

8 (broad fitting).

30. Do you truly hate anyone?

Life's too short. Doesn't stop me actively disliking some people, though. Why take the fun out of it?

31. Classic Rock or Rap?

If this is your idea of a choice...well, OK, classic rock. But no poodle perms, please.

32. If you could sleep with one famous person, who would it be?

Winston Churchill. (Note: I may be lying with some of these answers)

33. Favourite song?

Look, I have enough trouble selecting 100 tracks every six months. Don't ask me something like that. Ask me in an hour's time and you'll get a different answer anyway.

34. Have you ever sang in front of the mirror?

Yes. It's easier than singing behind it.

35. What food do you find disgusting?

I can't eat steak-and-kidney pudding. The kidneys look too much like what they are. Gherkins look too much like something else entirely (and my tastes don't run that way in either sense). My father liked piccalilli. It always turns my stomach just thinking about that, because the stuff looks far too much like someone has already eaten it.

36. Do you sing in the shower?

No, because I don't have a shower. I sing in the bath, though. Great acoustics, but it's difficult to sustain long notes in a recumbent position.

37. Did you ever play, "I'll show you mine, if you show me yours"?

Sorry, which government department did you say you were from?

38. Have you ever made fun of your friends behind their back?

Of course! That's what they're there for. I'm confident that they do exactly the same to me, and good luck to us all, I say.

39. Have you ever stood up for someone you hardly know?

Yes, and it's often easier, because you don't carry the sort of emotional or psychic baggage you have with someone you know well. On top of which, there are things you have to stand up about irrespective of who's copping it.

40. Have you ever been punched in the face?

Yes. D'ya wanna start somethin', pal!!?

Date: 28/06/06

Unfit

I hereby declare the phrase 'fit for purpose' to be unfit for purpose.

Date: 10/06/06

How To Ride Off Into The Sunset

Sometimes, you just have to smile. This, all things considered, is not a bad way to go.

Date: 06/06/06

"Life.exe has caused an invalid page fault at 016f:0515nafud..."

Eric Jarvis on alt.fan.pratchett has, I think, found the reason:

"Though I'm not sure who programmed it, it [life] has all the hallmarks of a Microsoft product. It takes nine months to boot up properly. It crashes for around 8 hours every day. The warranty is worthless, and there's nowhere to get decent technical support other than discussing the issues with other users. Most of the time is spent waiting around for something to happen, and when it does happen it generally does so in a completely unpredictable manner. Most people appear to use it for sex, drugs, politics, and advertising crap to each other."

**********

(Well, I just had to post something today with a date like that...This web page will now spontaneously combust and cause a flow of lava and sewage over the whole of the civilised world - and parts of Liverpool)

Date: 18/05/06

May The...erm...Eighteenth Be With You!

(Damn! A fortnight late!)

Your results:
You are Obi-Wan Kenobi

Obi-Wan Kenobi 72% Qui-Gon Jinn 70% Chewbacca 65% Yoda 62% Luke Skywalker 59% C-3PO 58% Boba Fett 56% R2-D2 56% Han Solo 55% Jabba the Hutt 54%

You are civilized, calm, and have a good sense of humor, even when those around you don't. You can hold your own in a fight, but prefer it when things don't get too exciting.

(This list displays the top 10 results out of a possible 21 characters)
Click here to take the Star Wars Personality Test

(Thanks to Badger for the link)

Date: 12/05/06

Add A Letter...

The trouble with being a pedant, I suppose, is that it gets in the way of one's being able to cruise through life blissfully unaware of anything very much.

Coming home on the bus the other day, my eye was drawn by the glass panel which held the fire-fighting equipment. Stencilled on the glass, in red letters, was the word:

EXSTINGUISHER

I didn't want to know that it had, apparently, once been a 'stinguisher'. I wanted to know what the hell it had become.

...Take A Letter

I was reading the sports pages of our local weekly rag this afternoon, in my usual mood of semi-attention, when I came upon this somewhat surreal headline:

Miners on course for tripe trophy triumph

I thought it was a bit odd that a football competition was obviously being sponsored by a local butcher (although oldsters will remember cricket's Giblet Cup). Or was the reporter merely implying that the contest was not going to be much cop?

It was only on reading the story beneath the headline that I realised that there was an 'l' missing from the fifth word...

Date: 04/05/06

Better To Travel Hopefully...?

I had an...interesting... journey home today.

It had been a particularly hectic day at work, not helped by the fact that it was very warm, so I wanted to get home even more than usual.

Caught the bus across the road from the office. About a third of the way up, we met another bus coming down, whose driver motioned ours to stop. We saw the other driver gesticulating extravagantly, and then our driver pulled in to the kerb and switched the engine off.

Our driver (a young bloke, one of those from the Greater Europe who have come here to steal our jobs - you know, the jobs that fine, upstanding, hard-working master-race Brits can't be arsed to get of bed to do) climbed out of the cab. "I'm on fire!", he said, quite calmly. It turned out that the smoke was coming out of the back of the bus, rather than himself.

So we trooped off the bus while he activated the fire extinguisher in the engine compartment, then opened the...erm...can you still call it a 'bonnet' if it's where the 'boot' should be? A lot of water on the road at this point, as we stood waiting for the next bus, which would be due in about ten minutes. Much grumbling from the assorted Nathans and Kellys, but after a few minutes a relief bus turned up and we piled on. Our driver sorted out his ticket machine and the destination board, and off we went (having just been passed by the next scheduled bus, which we then overtook at the next bus stop).

Another mile or so further on, and we stopped unexpectedly in a narrow lane. "Oh, no!", said the driver. "This one's the same! Can anyone smell smoke?"

"No", we said.

"Better check, anyway", he said, clambered out of the cab and went round the back of the bus. This held up the later bus, which was now right behind us.

Our driver got back on. "Looks OK", he said, "But I'll keep the doors open."

Anyway, I got off the bus at my usual stop and walked the hundred yards home.

About fifteen minutes later, I happened to come into the living room for something and saw the replacement bus going past...

...attached to the business end of a tow-truck.

Some people do have bad days, don't they?

Footnote (05/05/06): I came out of the house this morning to catch the 07:30 bus as usual. We saw it go up the road into the estate, and waited...and waited...and after a while saw another bus going up. A few minutes later, a bus reached us. Someone asked, "Are you late?", to which the driver replied, "No, I'm on time. The bus before me broke down..."

Date: 03/05/06

Blown Up Out Of All Proportion

From The Times (via The Daily Quirk):

"A young girl, who was blown out to sea on a set of inflatable teeth, was rescued by a man on an inflatable lobster. A coast-guard spokesman commented: "This sort of thing is all too common these days.""

Tick...Tick...Tick...

In a letter to The Independent, someone comments on the fact that, in a few hours time from when I'm typing this, it will be 01:02:03 04/05/06.

I can remember quite clearly where I was at 12:34 on 5/6/78 (none of this leading-zeros nonsense in our day). I was somewhere towards the north end of First Avenue, Gwersyllt. I can remember who I was with, too: two very interesting girls from my class at school, called Annette Batty (a noted folk singer today) and Jacqueline Matthias.

We had had one of our O-Level exams that morning (which one, I don't remember - I'm not quite as sad as that), and were walking the 2½ miles home (no bus at that time of day).

And no, I haven't got anything better to do this evening...

Date: 29/04/06

Compare And Contrast

Take a close look:

One of these pathetic wretches:

• Is in constant trouble with the law
• Has got himself into a total mess because of his attitude to drugs
• Insists on pushing his wares on a public which has clearly shown it doesn't want them
• Has shown himself to be devoid of any competence
• Has an appetite for self-destruction which has left him on the edge of oblivion
• Blames the media for all of his troubles

Oh, and the other one is Pete Doherty, the pop artiste.

Date: 14/04/06

Take Your Pics

I've added a few more pictures to the Gallery. I'm pondering how to improve the navigation, and perhaps even to add a map.

Date: 05/04/06

A Year Without Pity

Oh look, this is getting ridiculous! There'll be no-one I admire left at this rate...

Gene Pitney died at a hotel in Cardiff at the age of 65. He was in the middle of a UK tour.

He was a remarkable songwriter and singer, with a career spanning over forty years. His vocal style and choice of material were very distinctive, he sang with range, power and emotion, and he toured incessantly, especially over here.

He was one of the greats of pop music. Goodbye to the Rockville Rocket.

Date: 03/04/06

No-No's

I'm sure some of you think I make these signs up.

This was parked across the road half an hour ago:

I am now convinced that there is a shadowy group at work called the Party of Ilitterite Scribe's And Signwriter's (PISS). We have to take them...

Footnote: I've just realised what is particularly bizarre about this example: they've got it right in the top part, but completely wrong in the bottom bit. Did they outsource that part?

Date: 02/04/06

Staying Put

Well, I decided not to jump in the end.

Actually, I'd all but made my decision about a week before, but hung on until the last minute. There were two reasons for this:

1) I wanted to see what (if anything) would change in the last week before I had to decide; and

2) I wanted to leave it as late as possible so as to f#&k up their figures.

Not that 2) needed any assistance from me. They were looking for 165 volunteers to outsource themselves. In the end, they've ended up with about 130-odd. If that. About fifty or so pulled out in the last four or five days.

My colleague Chris decided to transfer. It must have been a difficult decision. He's only slightly younger than me, with a wife, daughter, car, mortgage and dog to support, so the pressure on him must have been huge.

And then he finds out that, because he's no longer an employee of the Depratment, he's no longer entitled to a staff parking space...

In the short term, nothing will change in any practical sense, as the move across to a centralised Help Desk is being phased in, and Chris and me (and our other colleague Derek in Bangor, who's also staying put) will keep on working together as we always have done.

So, you might say, why bother to change things? Your guess is as good as mine, of course, but it's all politics when you come to the point: outsourcing is the quack nostrum of our time, a sort of feng shui for the upper management classes.

(Someone of my on-line acquaintance recently went in to his local branch of Waterstones, walked up to the counter, casually informed the assistant that all their books on feng shui were lined up wrongly, then walked out again).

So, I'm still a civil servant, destined to continue working for an ungrateful public for not-very-good wages. I suppose safety has its price.

Date: 28/03/06

Die?...Lem?...Aaah!

(I know, I should be hung, drawn and quoted for that, but you try to think of a headline...)

(By the way, I'm thinking of merging this page with Obits'R'Us...)

News reached me this afternoon of the death of Stanisław Lem, one of the masters of thinking science fiction. He was 84.

I only recently re-read all the Lem books I have in my collection (about eight or nine - a mere fraction of his output), and once again marvelled at the author's invention, his comedic touches and his moral shrewdness.

The invention occurred not only in his 'straight' SF, but in other forms, too; although he didn't invent the genre by any means, his volumes of reviews of books which didn't exist, or existed only in potentia, allowed him to wax philosophical about humanity and its strangeness.

His comedy was often compellingly funny; like the Twentieth Voyage of his hapless cosmonaut Ijon Tichy (featured in "The Star Diaries"), in which an attempt to tidy up history leads to time ending up not so much out of joint as up the spout. This piece also contains some of the most wonderfully groanful puns I've ever come across in fiction. That's in the English translation - goodness only knows how it was in the original Polish.

His moral sense - never hectoring, but always firm - allowed Lem to use the Universe of his imagination to hold up a mirror to ourselves. This was particularly useful when dealing with the apparatchiks of Stalinist and post-Stalinist Poland, whose neutered imaginations could be cleverly by-passed, but he never shirked from a critique of what we delude ourselves is 'freedom'.

In short, Stanisław Lem was a very fine writer indeed, and I mourn the passing of his talent from a world which needs it about as much as it ever did.

Dziękuję, Stanisław.

Date: 26/03/06

Not To Good...

I saw this on a builder's van the other day. On both the driver's and passenger's doors:

I don't suppose the employees will mind having permanently to advertise the fact that they work for an illiterate...

Date: 25/03/06

Should I Stay Or Should I Go?

I've a big decision to take in the next few days.

I'm not used to big decisions. One of the reasons I joined the civil service fifteen years ago was to avoid the terrible job-jumping most people have to go through. I don't like that uncertainty; I like to know where my next pay cheque is coming from (and when). I've been unemployed: I don't like it at all. The poverty is bad enough, but when you're treated like something that you might tread in by the very people who are allegedly there to help you, it makes things much, much worse. So, I don't ever want to go there again.

I've always tried to avoid talking about my job here, partly out of fear of the reactions of my employer and colleagues, and partly because other people's work-talk simply isn't interesting to others: too many in-jokes or contexts which take so long to explain that your audience has long lost the plot (along with its will to live).

Sometimes, though, I feel I must. If this is my blog, and if this website is vanity publishing on a planetary scale, then I might as well avail myself of the facility.

OK, here's the story so far: for about twelve years, the Depratment's IT services have been partially outsourced to the private sector. This has comprised the development of new systems and the second- and third-line IT support arrangements.

The original holders of the contract were the lamentable EDS, but their performance was so bad that even the current Government of poltroons recognised that, when the contract came up for renewal in 2004, there was no way they could be allowed to hold on to it. So, in June 2004, the new contract was awarded to a consortium which comprised, among others, a firm of accountants. Not that it made a great deal of difference: most of the staff transferred from the one contract to the other. At times, it has seemed that only the letterhead changed.

Part of the new contract (one which we weren't told about at the time) included an expansion of the contractors' role into front-line IT support as well.

This is where I come in. Having started off as a lowly clerk, eventually scrabbling up to the next (Officer) grade after about seven years, I gradually moved sideways into IT, becoming a fully-trained IT Support Officer (or 'Local Administrator', as they were then called) in the Spring of 1999. And there, with minor excursions into other additional duties, I've been ever since.

Until now. The expansion of the contractor into first-line support has now been arranged; if one can use such an orderly expression as 'arranged' for the utter balls-up the Depratment has made of it. Having had nearly two years to get it sorted, they've tried to shove the whole thing through in a matter of about six months. The whole shooting match is due to come into effect from April 3.

Here's how it works at present: if any of our people have a problem, they e-mail or phone us to report it. In two-thirds of cases, me and my three colleagues can resolve the problem within a short time-scale, and the Help Desk doesn't get involved at all. If we can't resolve it, we then report it to them via a web interface. They then either resolve it without any further involement from us, or ask us to do something, or say "this is a known problem, and it'll all be sorted out when we switch from Windows NT to XP later this year" (yeah, right!).

Under the new system, users will have to call a Local Rate number and speak to someone at the Support Desk (which could be 150 miles or more distant) and try to explain to them what the problem is. We've all had experience of something like this in our private lives, haven't we? And it works superbly, doesn't it? Doesn't it!? I can't hear you!!

If the Support Desk can't resolve it themselves, they will either pass it on to specialist teams or pass it back down to what are termed 'User Support Teams' (USTs). These will be based through the office network, and will basically be dogsbodies; the foot-soldiers, if you like. In a way, they will do some of the jobs we do now, except that they will not be allowed to do anything other than what they are told to do by the Support Desk.

These USTs will no longer be employed directly by the Department; instead, they will be employees of the contractor. And herein lies my dilemma, dear reader.

Those of us who currently do the job have been given the opportunity of transferring to the contractor from April 1. Most of our terms and conditions of employment will, supposedly, be protected under law (the so-called TUPE ('Transfer of Undertakings to the Private Sector') provisions). But, as I say, we would no longer be able to resolve problems ourselves, doing only as we are directed to do.

There will be some IT-related work staying within the Department. But here's where the picture gets well and truly vandalised. Back at the end of 2005, we were required to state our preference: stay or go. At that time, the understanding was that the whole of the IT work would be outsourced. On that basis, one of my colleagues ruled himself out of transferring at that early stage (another colleague is about to retire, so didn't give a shit anyway). Me and one other expressed a preference to transfer, but only because we understood the whole job was going, and that doing so was the only way we were going to find out any further details about what transferring would actually involve.

The contractor called us all to 'roadshows' in December, and then to one-to-one meetings in early February so that we could ask any questions we had. Note, this was the contractor's idea, not our current employer's.

My initial reaction was not to transfer, but after these discussions I moved the other way, thinking at the time that it was my only chance of not being shoved back into the mainstream of the Department's day-to-day work.

Then, in the second half of February, scarcely six weeks before we had to make a final, irrevocably-binding decision, the whole situation changed. Here's the main reason why:

The people in charge of the outsourcing project in the Department had kept as much information as possible from other interested parties, even from the contractors themselves. The reasons? I can only surmise, but knowing their modus operandi from past experience, I suspect a combination of internal politics and empire-building. When other, equally important, sections of the organisation managed to find out what was being planned, the sewage farm hit the windmill. This was particuarly true in the case of the proposed handing over to the contractor of near-total control of secure access to the Department's systems. In this case, the people responsible for the security of our IT systems hit the bloody roof. You see, the web interface we use for allowing and denying access, for allocating and removing services, for general user administration, has no audit trail on it! The Audit section went ape-shit; their message could best be summed up in the words, "Over our dead bodies; or, for preference, over yours!".

The thing is, this is a substantial proportion of the work which we have been doing, and if it were to remain in-house, that meant there would still be IT-related work in the Department. Of a somewhat different nature, in that the problem-solving elements would no longer feature, but there all the same.

There are other considerations linked in with this. As the plans had to be changed at the last minute, it still hasn't been made clear exactly how much of this work is staying in-house, who will do it, where, and for how long. High-level meetings are taking place on a daily basis to try to thrash this all out. All the same, I and similarly-placed colleagues throughout this Empire Of The Senseless have to make a far-reaching, career-affecting, irreversible decision by the end of next Friday (March 31)!

How the hell are we supposed to be able to do this when important decisions have yet to be made at the very top; when important information is withheld not only from us but from our managers; and when we've been treated with such contempt?

This is why it's so difficult. You see, I am against outsourcing not only on the basis of bitter experience of having to deal with the consequent disruption and falling quality of service which inevitably results (and our end-users are really in for a bad case of culture shock once it all kicks in), but also on the grounds of principle. But the cavalier way in which the top echelons of the Department have behaved towards us in recent months is enough to push me into the private sector. Even more galling is this; the senior management of the organisation apparently issued a message saying that they valued us too much to want to lose us. The message never reached us.

And yet...I've grown too fond of stability of employment, having suffered the opposite in those years when I was supposed to have been making my way in the world. Although I would retain most of my terms and conditions on transfer, I would also retain the disadvantages of it, e.g. a shit salary. I could, should I choose, transfer over fully into the company itself; but, for all the prospect of better pay, that would also mean that they could, to a large extent, do what they liked with me, e.g. make me redundant. And there we are again.

So, in the next five days, I face having to choose, on the basis of partial information, whether to move to the comparative uncertainty of a new employer in the private sector, although with a job which in my view is of lower status than what I do now; or to stay in the Depratment, carry on doing the more administrative aspects of the job (which I quite enjoy), but face the possibility of redeployment into front-line services in either a few months or a couple of years.

I'm not ambitious. I never really have been. I'm not thrusting, dynamic, go-getting, and all the other clichés of this piratical age. Those of you who embody one or other of these alleged virtues will say that my decision is what (in another awful modern barbarism) is termed a 'no-brainer'. Go! But, it's not so simple when you're sitting inside it.

Decisions. I hate them. And yet, decide I must.

I will. I just don't know which way yet.

Can I come back to you on this?

Date: 17/03/06

Petrified

I'm sure I could make some satirical comment about the old home town being full of fossilised vegetables 300 million years old, but I can't quite come up with one at the moment...

Date: 12/03/06

"When Airwaves Swing..."

When my father received his Long Service Award from Brymbo Steelworks in the early 1970s, he was given the princely sum of £35. With that, he decided to buy a second-hand Grundig radiogram from Bert Evans, who owned one of the newsagents' shops in the village.

This was a mighty and stylish beast, built in the good, old-fashioned 'brick shithouse' style. The robustness didn't quite extend to the electrics, however, and it had to be repaired. Indeed, at one point, Mr Evans gave my father his money back, and he instead bought a brand new Ferguson radiogram from Telefusion in Wrexham. This also went wrong in short order, as did the Ultra set which replaced it. They were both manufactured by Thorn ('Ferguson' and 'Ultra' being much like 'Austin' and 'Morris' of the automotive world - mere 'badge engineering'). In the end, the Ultra too went back to the shop (after much involvement from the local Trading Standards office after Telefusion decided to get stroppy with my mother - not the best idea any company has ever had), and the deal with Bert Evans was on a second time.

And so the Grundig became my father's pride and joy, and he would often spend his evenings feeding LPs on to its turntable - brass bands, military bands, light music of all sorts. I vividly remember one evening his playing my "Geoff Love And His Orchestra Play Your Top TV Themes" album, which included an arrangement of the theme from "Match Of The Day". Suddenly, there was a timid knock on the living-room door, and there stood our next-door neighbour Mr Roberts ('Uncle Hubert' to me, although the relationship was a very tenuous one - his brother had married my auntie Florrie). "Is there football on the telly, Bill?", he asked.

(Just in case you were wondering; yes, these were the days when you could still leave your back door unlocked for your next-door neighbours to come in as they pleased. It's not a myth; indeed, it was considered quite rude and standoffish if you didn't).

I also remember well one evening giving Dad my 7" single of "Autobahn" by Kraftwerk. He put on the B-side, "Kometenmelodie I", and listened intently for the full six-minutes-plus of tones and effects. When it finished, he frowned in puzzlement and said, "I was waiting for it to start". He was sixty-four years old, so I thought it really rather sporting of him even to listen to the whole thing.

There was much more to this powerful creature than the turntable, of course. There was a four-band radio. This is where my story really starts. But first, a lot of personal history...

My fascination with radio had started at a very young age. I'm sure that I heard early broadcasts from the pirate station Caroline North, anchored off the Isle Of Man, standing in our back kitchen at about 6 am one morning while my brother was getting ready for work. I would have been no more than three years of age. We had only mains-operated valve radios at the time. There was one big oblong one, the make of which I don't remember, but a little later there was a squat Bush model (possibly the AC91). I would listen to Vincent Kane presenting Good Morning, Wales on the old Welsh Region (sic) of BBC Home Service (later Radio 4) before scooting off to school. It was almost like a bereavement when this finally gave up the ghost, failing to come on one morning.

So it was time to embrace the future. My mother bought a Marconiphone transistor portable from our local Curry's. This was, in strict factual terms, a four-band receiver, but two of the bands were short-wave, so no VHF/FM band. The set was powered off a great big PP9 battery (which effectively doubled the weight of the thing). It wasn't entirely reliable, either, the rotary volume control being prone to bad contacts. And the red pointers on the dial broke off quite early on, too, leaving mere stumps to navigate by.

This, though, was where the magic of radio started to kick in. I was allowed, if I had been a good boy, to take it up to bed with me! I was six or seven, so my bedtime would have been sometime shortly after 8 pm at that time. If I hadn't whined too much, or hadn't cheeked my elders, or had done well at school, or hadn't pissed the bed the night before (I was a very nervous child and also afraid of the dark, which made getting out of bed in the middle of the night and crossing the landing to the lavatory an insurmountable problem), I got to take the radio upstairs at bedtime. There, the Marconiphone would sit, tuned usually to Radio Luxembourg, although BBC Radio 2 often got a look in as well. I would listen for about an hour to Barry Alldis or Jimmy Savile, until I was ordered off to sleep, and the radio was removed to its usual place in the living room.

This went on for a couple of years or so, until the Marconiphone packed up. Someone, it may have been my Uncle Harry (I had two, this was my mother's brother), gave me a little two-band job (long wave & medium wave). I don't remember the make, but it was enclosed in a mock-leather case which gave off a most peculiar smell. It had its problems, however, namely that the band selector switch was temperamental and usually wouldn't stay on the medium wave setting. This ruled out Radio Luxembourg, but was OK for Radio 2, which broadcast on long wave in those days. So it was that I would listen, sometimes illicitly, to Humphrey Lyttleton's Jazz Club, On The Latin Beat (I think that's what it was called) with Leopoldo Mahler (I think that's what he was called, but Google isn't my friend on either point), even to Wally Whyton's Country Club. On Friday nights, I would stay awake until way after ten pm to try to catch Radio 4's topical comedy show Week Ending, or Ronnie Barker's Lines From My Grandfather's Forehead (currently being repeated as a tribute).

A year or so later, I got a replacement set. I cringe now at my acquisitiveness as I recall how I wheedled out of my Uncle Harry the three-band Philips set he'd himself only just been given. This was a fine little set and, for the first time, included a VHF band! Admittedly, VHF signals weren't all that good at the time round our way, especially not on a set with nothing more than a smallish telescopic aerial. Nevertheless, for the next four years or so, this was my way of hearing programmes such as I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue, and indeed most of Radio 4's output at that time.

Which brings me, by a commodius vicus of recirculation, to the Grundig radiogram. This was usually off-limits to me simply from the practical consideration of its being in the living room, and therefore in competition with the television. Except when my father was spinning an Eddie Calvert LP or something. But my opportunity came eventually. By the age of about thirteen, I was considered sufficiently grown up to be left at home on my own on a Saturday afternoon while Dad went out to the football and Mum went to see Nain (grandmother). Now, at that age, there were two ways in which a boy could have spent the afternoon. However, I had been giving the Grundig lascivious glances for some time, and was desperate to get my hands on it, much as I had gazed longingly at the centre-page spread of the Grundig catalogue which had featured the Satellit radio with its dozens of short-wave bands.

You see, the Grundig had what my radio didn't, and that was a short-wave band! I had had the occasional dalliance with this, and had listened to the whistling and popping and the strange tongues emanating from the big old speakers as I spun the counterbalanced tuning knob from one end of the dial to the other. Now was my chance to go all the way! I plugged it in and pressed the key marked SW. On came the lights behind the tuning dial, followed by the green glow of the EM87 'magic eye' valve. After a few seconds, this settled down to show bright green at each end with a gap in the middle to show that there was no strong signal coming in. Slowly, gently, lovingly, I turned the knob. Once more, the strange noises and voices started to emerge. Unlike the tuning scales for medium wave and long wave, there were none of those names which were the radio equivalents of Chimborazo and Cotapaxi: Kalundborg, Saarlouis, Lahti, even Athlone! Here, on the short-wave band, there were no directions like that, only roughly-drawn maps of the broadcast bands: 49m, 41m, 31m, and so on. Here was adventure.

The voices kept on coming as I edged my way along the dial, in languages strange to me. Suddenly, I was stopped in my tracks by...yodelling? Intrigued, I stayed with it. It turned into that sort of alpine polka music which has given the accordion its deserved reputation. Then I heard, "This is Swiss Radio International in Bern". Ah! Something I understood! I sat in my father's armchair and waited.

Then, at quarter past the hour came a fourteen-note sting, followed by an English-speaking voice. I listened on, fascinated by the notion that from hundreds of miles away, someone was telling me about their country. This was a form of magic! Out of nothing, invisibly warping the molecules in the air to bring these sounds to me. To me, sitting in a draughty council house in an industrial village in Wales, where just to go across the border to Chester was an expedition! I sat still and silent, scarcely daring to breathe in case this enchantment was scared away.

After a news programme came another announcement, saying that it was time for Swiss Short Wave Merry-Go-Round. Goodness, I thought, that sounds rather jolly! So there I sat, and heard a short burst of brass music interspersed with imitation Morse code, and then a rather reedy voice said "Hello again, friends and neighbours, and a hearty welcome..." (although for a long time I thought he was saying "a howdy welcome"; the Schweizdeutsch accent, I suppose...) "...here aboard the Merry-Go-Round, with yours truly Bob Thomann..." (and I admit that I didn't know until about three days ago that that was the way to spell his surname - for ages I thought it was something like 'Taumen'. Oh well...) "and next to me, as usual..."; at which point a younger, stentorian voice which was clearly American came in, and said: "...Bob Zanotti."

And off they went, talking about things I simply didn't understand: propagation, ionospheric disturbances, and much more. I sat there, captured and captivated. This was a whole new world (plus ionosphere, of course) opening up before me. They even signed off in what seemed to me to be an enigmatic fashion: "Goodbye...", "...Good DX-ing...", "...And the very best of 73s." (*)

(*) Not a dish in a Chinese restaurant, nor yet an advanced sexual position: merely radio ham code for "Best Wishes".

I listened as often as I could after that, although I couldn't always get to stay home on Saturday and sometimes, for reasons I didn't really understand, there were times when it was impossible to find SRI where I expected it to be. Or anywhere else for that matter. Or any other station, come to that. And that was another part of the charm, of course: with the sort of equipment I had access to, even tracking down your favourite, high-powered European station was akin to a hunting expedition in the jungle. Sometimes you found your leopard, sometimes you never even saw its droppings no matter how hard you looked.

I became promiscuous. From Switzerland, I groped around the bands for other stations. At the time, I never really found one which took my fancy, and eventually other interests took me away from short wave for a few years. I came back to it when I was about nineteen, when I finally got a cheap portable which had short wave on it. I would tune around at all hours, hoping for something which would open my mind to another country; or which would, at least, have an interesting interval signal.

I became quite obsessed by interval signals, in the same way as I was obsessed (and still am, I suppose) with the idents of television stations. Back in the radiogram days, I found the most peculiar tune being repeated in a loop. It sounded as if it was being played on the strings of a piano with a series of rubber mallets. It turned out to be the interval signal of Radio Norway International.

I gathered them up like others collected flowers or leaves: that guitar tune for Spanish Foreign Radio; that slow and gloomy tune of Radio Kyiv; the ten-note fanfare of Radio Prague; that slightly eerie glockenspiel of Deutsche Welle, and the rather jauntier Radio Sweden effort. And the clashing carillon which identified Radio Netherlands, which sounded even more bizarre when reception conditions were a bit goofy.

There were the progammes themselves, of course, and although my lifestyle (if such it could be called) mostly prevented me from revisiting The Two Bobs in Bern, I did find interesting programmes on the subject of broadcasting elsewhere. Two of my regular listening pleasures were Sweden Calling DX-ers, hosted from Stockholm by George Wood, and Media Network, Radio Netherlands' round-up of news and reviews presented, with a sharp wit and a dry sense of humour, by Jonathan Marks. Indeed, Marks once made an hilarious spoof series called "The Hitchhiker's Guide to DXing" and played it on the show.

I became a little bit of what now would be called geeky. I clearly remember one fine summer's afternoon going off on a long walk up Hope Mountain listening to the rock programme on the Hungarian service of Radio Free Europe, for example.

During my University days, I would often be up late at night, pretending to be interpreting early Welsh poetry, whilst in fact listening to Radio Moscow's World Service. The names and voices of Joe Adamov and Vladimir Posner still resound. A lot of it was tosh, of course, but a necessary counterbalance to what I would get from the strictly-impartial-and-not-funded-and-controlled-by-the-Foreign-Office-and-MI5-oh-goodness-me-no BBC World Service.

My friends thought me odd. They did anyway, but I'm sure I helped the impression along by doing things like tuning my house-mate Danny's Toshiba to the Voice of the Islamic Republic of Iran while we were in our communal room playing Scrabble® or Risk.

And then, The Wall came down, and along came satellites and, eventually, the internet. Broadcasting organisations suddenly decided that they couldn't 'afford' short-wave services anymore, and that there was no need for them in the digital age, and at a time when 'our' values had become all but universal. So, short wave transmissions were, like vinyl records, consigned to the history of obsolete technology.

Tune through the short-wave bands today. Even from the most cursory inspection, it seems that the high-frequency radio spectrum is the preserve of American christian fundamentalists, except for those few countries or cultures whose territory extends so widely that only short wave will do (Russia, the Arab world). There seem to be fewer alternative perspectives (however potty - I often listened to Radio Tirana more for a cheap laugh than anything else) to the 'givens' of the New World Order.

All this would have been left slumbering in the back of my mind until a few nights ago when, in an idle moment, I did a Google search for Bob Zanotti (not being able to search for his broadcasting partner because, as I've said, I had no idea how his surname was spelt).

I came up trumps with a site called Switzerland In Sound, which included a special downloadable programme recorded by The Two Bobs early in 2004 (nearly a decade after the Merry-Go-Round had been yanked from the schedules). I downloaded it, hit the 'Play' button in Winamp, and wallowed for an hour as Thomann (by that time in his mid-70s) and Zanotti (scarcely sounding a day older than when I'd last heard him some twenty-five years earlier) reminisced about their programme, and tried to put the world to rights in respect of the way that short-wave broadcasting has been scandalously disregarded in recent years. As it has been: it's all-but impossible to get a radio for standard domestic use which includes a short-wave band nowadays.

It brought it all back, hence this extended reminiscence. Blame it on the ether - it's a mind-expanding substance.

Date: 07/03/06

Too Many Goodbyes

It's not been a good couple of hours.

I get home after a day spent wrestling with software that won't work because of what I call 'The Curse Of XP', i.e. permissions issues.

I turn the television on while I'm waiting for my chicken chow mein to cook.

The first thing I see on CEEFAX is news of the death of John Junkin.

The name probably won't mean a lot to youngsters, but in the 1960s and 70s, John Junkin was a regular sight and sound on radio and television, where he was a noted actor and scriptwriter. My own best memories of him come from the 1970s BBC radio sketch show Hello Cheeky, a quick-fire scattergun of mad situations and groanful puns concocted by Junkin, Barry Cryer, Tim Brooke-Taylor and musician Denis King. A couple of favourite moments:

"Home Hints for the Handyman, Number...Please Yourself: How To Entertain A Party Of Forty. Buy her two large gins and a packet of crisps."

"Red sky at night, shepherd's delight.
Red sky in the morning, Hendon's on fire."

**********

I had no sooner got past this, when I saw another headline marking the passing of Ivor Cutler.

To describe Ivor Cutler as a poet would be to narrow the man. Of course, to describe him as a 'cult poet' (see link) is merely to insult him, being another way of saying "Who? What? I don't understand". His off-beat songs and monologues (often accompanied by a clanky old harmonium) weren't 'odd'; they were simply the wanderings of a rich imagination, further fuelled by a happy (or, given his often mournful countenance, a lugubrious) knack for a memorable phrase.

An example: in one of the "Glasgow Dreamer" pieces that he did in session for John Peel, he describes staying with his grandparents when he was about three. Early in the morning, he saw his grandfather walking around their tenement flat naked from the waist down. Ivor describes the old man's 'fluted scrotum'. Not just a vivid image, this: only last night I recalled this phrase and thought that Fluted Scrotum would make a great name for a band.

**********

Having been brought further down by this, I nearly choked on my noodles when I then read of the death of the great Malian musician Ali Farka Touré.

Most people who have heard of him will probably only remember his "Talking Timbuktu" album, made with Ry Cooder, but my encounter with his music pre-dates that by nearly half a decade.

I'd been listening to John Peel (how often his name crops up still!) for a few years, but had never quite 'got' his enthusiasm for African music. His taste was mostly for southern African music (The Bhundu Boys, for example), but one sticky summer's evening in 1990, he played a track from Touré's latest album "The River". I lay there on my bed transfixed as this combination of Malian guitar and jazz saxophone weaved its way around my head. A couple of years later, I went out and bought the album (the first I'd ever bought by an African musician). The track that Peelie played that night, "Ai Bine", remains one of my all-time favourites of any genre. You can here an all-too-brief clip from it here.

**********

It must be said in all fairness that Junkin, Cutler and Touré had all reached a ripe old age. The same could hardly be said of the man news of whose death reached me via e-mail from my friend Susan in Minneapolis just an hour or so ago.

Kirby Puckett was a legend in modern baseball. A kid from the housing projects of Chicago, he was drafted by the Minnesota Twins in 1982, and became a regular in the team within two years. He played for no other team in a twelve-year career which was shortened by becoming blind in one eye through glaucoma in 1996.

During that time, he became one of the greatest ever Twins, and still leads the club for hits, doubles, total bases, at-bats and runs. He helped the Twins to two World Series and they won them both, in 1987 and 1991.

I'd got into baseball in the summer of 1987, through lying awake at night listening to broadcasts of the game via the Armed Forces Network broadcasting out of (West) Germany. After a few weeks of this, which had started out as simply a case of wanting something to listen to at that hour, I became hooked on the game. When I felt that I had to pick a team to follow, because of Susan (although we'd lost touch at that point), it really couldn't be any other than the Twins. Not bad timing, as the Twins went all the way to The Big Show that year, and took the title in a thrilling seven-game series against St . Louis.

Four years later, and there they were again. And there was Kirby Puckett again. In a World Series for the ages against Atlanta, the Twins came into Game 6 trailing. Before the game, Puckett said to his team, "Get on my back - I'll carry you".

In the bottom of the eleventh inning, with the score tied 3-3, Kirby came to the plate. After taking a few pitches (unusual for a man who said of himself, "I never saw a pitch I didn't like"), the Braves' pitcher hung one up. Seconds later, the ball was flying over the wall in left center field. Yes, there would be a Game Seven. In a series for the ages, there would be a game for the ages; a nail-biting, nerve-shredding pitching duel, with Jack Morris pitching ten shut-out innings before Gene Larkin's single to left brought the winning run home. But, as I lay there in my bed, at about 4.30 on a chilly October morning, weeping for joy, I knew it was Kirby who had got them there. And as I sit here now, trying hard not to weep for a different reason (and not entirely succeeding), I recall that it was Kirby Puckett, the enthusiastic, the stylish, the committed, who helped make me a baseball fan.

And I'm grateful, Kirby. Very grateful. Thanks for the good times.

Date: 04/03/06

Cold Snaps

As threatened, I've added some of the photographs I took on Thursday to the Gallery.

Date: 02/03/06

In Like A Lion...

This morning, I opened my front door to this merry sight:

"Aha!", I thought. "Pete Doherty must have sneezed again!" But no, 'tis but our usual March surprise. Second day of Spring, my arse!

Well, it stopped the buses getting here (or anywhere very much), so in the absence of work, I tooled up with my trusty BenQ C51 and walked abroad. Or rather, I trudged, a word which might have been invented specifically for snowy conditions.

I'd no sooner got to the end of the road, than it really started coming down again:

Visibility dropped:

Not surprisingly, the village school was closed:

(Those sparkly effects aren't a pathetic attempt on my part to appear artistic, by the way. The light level was so poor by this time that the automatic flash kicked in. Still, it looks good, doesn't it?).

(PS. Hey, teach! 'Today' is one word, not two!)

There was no possibility of taking any photographs on the way back home; the damn snow was in my face all the way, it was getting into my coat pockets, and I'd accumulated an inch or so on my hood by the time I got in the house.

It was about 8.45 by this time, and I whiled away the morning watching a group of about twenty Nathans and Kellys (*) standing around on the corner waiting for vehicles to throw snowballs at.

After lunch, with the weather having brightened up considerably, I thought I'd take another walk. Besides, I needed stamps from the Post Office.

I ended up taking some quite good pictures, some of which may well end up in the Gallery at some stage.

********

(* my shorthand for the types of teenagers usually found hanging around on street corners in places like this. It stems from the stereotypical conversations you overhear from teenage girls at bus stops. It usually goes like this:

"Keeley, 'ave yer seen Kayleigh?"

"Saw Kayleigh over by the shop. She were talkin' to Kylie."

"What were Kylie doin' by the shop?"

"She were waitin' for Kelly."

"Oh......Is Kelly still goin' out wiv Nathan?"

"Nah, she dumped Nathan las' week. Now she's goin' out with Kyle."

"What did she dump Nathan for?"

"Oh, she said 'e wasn't normal."

"In what way?"

"'Is name didn't start with a K....")

Date: 21/02/06

"First They Came For The Actors..." (*)

This is scary. Who's next?

* In case anyone doesn't get this reference:

"When Hitler attacked the Jews, I was not a Jew, therefore, I was not concerned. And when Hitler attacked the Catholics, I was not a Catholic, and therefore, I was not concerned. And when Hitler attacked the unions and the industrialists, I was not a member of the unions and I was not concerned. Then, Hitler attacked me and the Protestant church - and there was nobody left to be concerned."

(Pastor Martin Niemõller, German theologian)

Date: 10/01/06

An Ouncement...

Apologies to viewers who were trying to access this site between about 1535 and 1700 UTC on Wednesday.

I took advantage of a week off work (I worked the three days the office was open over Christmas and New Year so as to have the happy experience of being on leave while my colleagues were back with various bits of themselves pressed to the grindstone and realising that it's a long way to Easter); as I say, I took advantage of the break to reconfigure the site altogether.

What with one thing and another, it took about two days to do, and about an hour to upload the rejigged site to my webspace.

The changes consisted mainly of removing one whole level of folders from the URLs, and of putting image and sound files in their own folders. Tidy, innit?

For this reason, if you've bookmarked a particular page, the bookmark may no longer work. If you have difficulty in finding something you had bookmarked or linked here, please let me know and I'll try and give you the new URL. Similarly, if you find any broken links, I'd like to know because I'm sure I've cocked something up somewhere: this has gone altogether too smoothly for my liking.

The Judge

Date: 07/01/06

Let It....

We once again avoided having a white Christmas, but you can always depend on January I reckon:

Date: 01/01/06

Perish(er)ed

Dammit! I'm tired of writing obituaries of my heroes! Could Terry Pratchett, Stephen Fry and the members of Kraftwerk please make sure they look after themselves in 2006? I'm running out of solemnity here, chaps.

As 2005 departed, so too did someone who brought smiles to me and so many others over a period of many years.

New Year's Eve saw the death of Maurice Dodd, who wrote the strip cartoon The Perishers for the Daily Mirror for over forty years, first in collaboration with Dennis Collins, then for some years on his own, and latterly with Bill Mevins.

To me, the Dodd/Collins era was a golden one, one which was a key to the development of my own sense of humour and my own love of playing with language. On our 1968 summer holidays to Towyn near Rhyl, at the age of six, I begged my parents to buy me The Perishers Back Britain, in preference to the Andy Capp book they thought I should have (interesting to speculate as to what they thought I could possibly gain in life from reading about the days of a beer-swilling Tyneside chauvinist). I still have that book (or, rather, what's left of it). After the slightly left-of-centre Daily Sketch morphed into the hideous sub-animal Sun, my father switched to the Daily Mirror, so I was able to read the adventures of The Perishers for years thereafter.

Maurice Dodd's 'scripts' always had a logic, but not one which would find house-room with the po-faced. For example, here's the boy Wellington musing to his dog, Boot, under a full moon:

"There she is again - regular as clockwork. Month after month - right on the dot - right when my ole diary says."

"They certainly go to a lot of trouble for a two-and-sixpenny diary."

The interaction between the characters gave almost endless scope. Wellington, the world-weary, erudite wheeler-dealer; Boot, his dog (although Boot had a different view of the relationship), remembering his previous existence as a Regency rake-hell cursed by a wronged Gypsy wench; Maisie, the predatory schoolgirl with her crush (in more than one sense of that word) on the dim naïf Marlon; the eternally infant Baby Grumplin' with his slash-and-burn outlook on the whole world.

Throw in side characters such as the anosmic bloodhound B.H. (Calcutta) failed, Tatty Oldbitt (the sailor's friend) the lewd dachshund, and the crabs in the rock-pool, and you had a complete, self-contained universe which was a constant source of misunderstandings, escapades and surreal reasoning.

For over forty years, The Perishers provided laughter and an insight into the minds of children liberated from all imposed adult 'logic'.

R.I.P. Maurice Dodd (1932 - 2005)