Bear With!

There are some people I take an instant dislike to. I know I shouldn't and many times actually verbal discourse with someone about whom I have made such a hasty judgement reveals them to be perfectly normal or indeed actually quite likeable. However, there are some people who build up a catalogue of misdemeanours which over time render them unlikeable. Unfortunately the Internet is rife with both types of people which is why I never really comment on anything. The keyboard, various wires and the amorphous collection of servers that separate your average casual browser of news and blogs seems to give them courage to troll and flame without any of the consideration that even the most ribald of conversationalists would give for someone they met face-to-face yet who they disagreed with. A sensitive soul like me would be reduced to jelly by just one of the milder ripostes that punctuate cyberspace discourse.

Ad hominem attacks just to destroy the character of an online commenter are rife - it seems a badge of honour to use the most horrible slander (I suppose technically it is libel) giving the impression that that the author is some sort of shaven-headed football goon or a slathering red militant with a badge saying "This Keyboard Kills Fascists!". (As you can tell I live in a small hut perched a-top Vince Cable's fence). However, thinking about it and matching up some of these tools with videos, I have determined that in reality the worst of them are actually the quiet kids from school who have grown up seething with years of abuse about their haircuts, their funny voices, their obsessions and everything else that makes us different from one another, until they have found the safe medium with its remote bunkers from where they can lob stones and mud at the bullies without fear of being beaten up in return. If you want to be Freudian about it you might determine that a lot of their abuse casts light on their own fears about themselves as well, though I'm not sure how much that would stand up to scrutiny.

I would link to some of the muddy cyberswamps which are populated by these squeaky-voiced children but I think it would be more fun for you to have a guess at who I mean. It is possible to be quite right or left wing without being childish. The trouble is that these guys are well aware of the specific criticisms which can be held against them and spit them back in the face of any disagreement. Any dissent is straight away labelled as one of the usual phrases - ad-hominem - useful idiot - straw man argument and others. There is no debate, only offence. I suppose it gels with the ever-increasing drive towards facelessness in society - the fact that interaction is now almost all through technology - outwardly society in developed countries looks like a lot of electronics talking to itself with a few organic microbes floating around inside it. It smacks of a collective autism, the removal of social clues. The future is antisocial.

Backwards I assume

Written On The Forehead by pjharvey

As one of the commenters says, if only all my idols surprised me like this. I did think that at last I might have found a Peej track that wouldn't make my wife say it was all just noise but unfortunately instead the response was that it sounded like Bjork who is another of the unacceptable face of the alternative in our house. Maybe it will sound better on the album which with this as the avant garde should be pretty damn excellent. Roll on Valentine's Day.

This is playing in a loop in my head - a haunting mess of a war-reporter's story of a devastated city - a place we've all seen on the news and put to the back of minds to stop ourselves going mad and now here it is in a catchy downbeat tune, cementing the right of this tragedy to be brought back in front of our eyes. This is The Human League's The Lebanon but done better - a song for The Killing Fields - a minor key for a major issue - and yet I'm still not sure what the issue is. It is perhaps a generic story of suffering and how we are all at fault for ignoring it. After the homely angst of White Chalk, this is the shout of despair at the rest of the world, the depression of states, the failed governments, the self-interest of those who claim to help.

From the backing samples on this and the first song we heard on The Andrew Marr Show all those months ago, I am wondering if Polly has been using old vinyl as a sort of Obliquely Strategic hook to start the writing process.

Mine Has the Blue Cover

I suppose I've been away but not really. Work has meant that days are seriously long yet very boring. So a walk in the drizzle to the local fireworks display was most welcome and while the recession and various regulations overs the size and volume of various pyrotechnics available to all but the most serious display runners made it less thrilling than normal, the general atmosphere of darkness, burger vans and small children wrapped up like spherical multicoloured sheep was enjoyable in the extreme. We all came home to the gentle glow of an autumn house very happy if a little damp.

I am annoyed that so many things I wanted to comment on have been missed because of the lack of blogging. However hopefully I can fall back into it. Things are still busy but the difference is that now I am in control.

First up for mention is what might be the ultimate geeks' book - Just My Type by Simon Garfield, a book about fonts. I'm not sure I should enthuse about this too much. I love it - I just can't see the difference between the a font that is lauded and the ones that are supposedly less attractive. Just as I can tell the difference between white and red wine, I can distinguish between Sans and Serif fonts - I can even happily side with the hatred of Comic Sans - but Helvetica and Univers, Garamond and Times New Roman? That's impossible. However from reading the book this is the whole point. As some high-up in the business said, if you remember the shape of the spoon you used at lunchtime, then the spoon is designed badly. This is not a technical volume - there are plenty of type encyclopaedias if you want to ward off insomnia - it just tells you the history and reasoning behind the names we all know but ignore the moment the drop-down has vanished. Another book to make you feel clever without giving you brain fatigue.

While finding the links for this I saw this :

The Rock Drill

Mutability

I spent a quiet couple of hours (quiet in the sense that I did nothing rather than it being literally quiet) at a table by the side of a Wacky Warehouse climbing frame reading about The Fourth Dimension and How to Get There again. Somehow I fell into a strange state where the 3 dimensional frames around me became the shadows of complex collections of hypercubes and hyperspheres and I was for a few instants able to see perpendicularly to this world and into the 4th dimension. I was woken from this reverie by the sound of one of the parent whooping as he came down the tube slide all the way from the top of said complex and I realised that all the children were eating leaving the play stuff free for us adults. I have been waiting to come down this slide for years. There have been rumours that on Wednesdays parents were allowed in but never having had one of the children invited to a party midweek I was never able to confirm this. But today I was allowed to squeeze through the various holes all the way to the top and into the completely dark hole that was the top of the slide. It was great fun but like Arthur Dent I bruised my upper arm (actually got a plastic burn) because I only just got down without getting jammed - damn those doughnuts.


The second half brought me the accompanying doodle of which I am rather proud - easily pleased that;s me. Och a Vay.

SauerKrautRock

... or on being very disappointed. A few days ago I wrote about being excited that Probe Records was moving from its boring industrial unit to a unit within The Bluecoat. It should have stayed where it was. It's a box - a bloody box. The place has no soul - well there is some soul but only on record. All the records are there and the CDs and the vinyl on the walls but it has no shape - no atmosphere - it is a machine for selling music and nothing else. I don't want to be around when Julian Cope or Pete Burns find out. I can't bring myself to post the phot I took - I hope they do some decoration.

Well I still bought something rather than just waltzing in to swipe a free copy of The Stool Pigeon, which incidentally has shrunk from NME size to fanzine size and is all the better for it except that I can't quite read it now all the text has shrunk - maybe I'm in the wrong demographic. (Get on with it - what did you buy? Ed.). Thanks to a recommendation from Scaryduck I bought Neu! 75 - note careful positioning of The Pling there - and beautiful it is. From Motorik drone to distant and plaintive distorted guitars. Unless you count Kraftwerk as Krautrock, this is my first in the genre and how could I miss it? It's been round a few times now and it is wonderful.

However I have more music to report on from Radio Two's Swing Time slot this morning which was Light Flight by Pentangle - the theme to Take Three Girls - which I am sure I remember watching despite only being five when it came out.

Eighth Blackbird Wonder

I have of course been waiting sometime for this recording of something which won the Pulitzer Prize for Steve Reich and Eighth Blackbird so long ago and more annoyingly was performed in a local venue without me hearing a peep of publicity. While Double Sextet itself does not disappoint one bit, the accompanying 2x5 performed by Bang on a Can is slightly weedy in comparison - some feedback and room simulation might have been useful just to give it a bit more drive. However, the third movement contains some trademark Reichian interlocks which make up for this a bit. But the obvious star of the release is the three-movement Double Sextet which I suppose is the definitive Reich piece. It moves at just the correct speed in all places and the interlocks here are myriad - jittery mixtures of time signatures just to keep anyone thinking of using the piece as dance music well and truly on their toes. It is amazing that there are only two of every instrument - the conceit being Reich's favourite device of having an artist or artists play against a tape of themselves (though the premier had two live sextets) - the texture is rich and deep. A slight technical niggle which may be my player, is that the Piano recording level seems to be too high meaning that it distorts a little; it was not audible when I played it through speakers last night but it is occasionally jarring in earphones.

Despite the slight negativity about Bang on a Can above, I am interested to see that they are performing a new opera by Evan Ziporyn with Gamelan Salukat called A House in Bali which is based on the book by Colin McPhee. I read the book years ago and it is a gentle story of nothing much other than composing and playing music in Bali. So there is that to look forward to as well.

The Möbius Strippers Union

I have reason to be visiting someone in hospital at the moment - nothing desperately worrying - and I was struck by how typical this hospital actually was. The view from the windows was of nice, clean buildings, the atmosphere and ambience suggested calm efficiency and the technology was visible, reassuring and unobtrusive. I half expected Jim Dale to come round the corner as I negotiated the air-conditioned bridge from the car park to the main hospital. It was comforting when all we usually hear is that the NHS fails at this and that. I know that there are arguments about cost, red-tape, mistakes, cleanliness but this hospital suggests that things are going in the right direction. The NHS should be outside party politics.

Don't You Touch My Lorna Doones

For years I have been confused by the lyrics of You're Moving Out Today a strange record that my sister played over and over until both the needle and the record were worn out. I always wondered what sort of weird guy this bloke was and why an obviously intelligent woman had taken up with him in the first place. However yesterday, I was reading the Daily WTF, a place populated by many stories of geeks, nerds and other (probably self-declared) associated sociopaths when it clarified that Lorna Doones are actually biscuits which made the line in the song about leaving the narrator's Lorna Doones a lot more understandable. Unless of course she was a collector of rare editions of said book. All this is of course just wibbling and I have to say that the discussion currently in progress on this office is about the teaching of evolution - we are all for it I have to add.

Sporadic Dorado Implosions

Oh doesn't he look grainy over there? Anywhere somewhere in this audio you will find RD talking to David Attenborough about all sorts of things. What is it that makes Dawkins so divisive compared to David Attenborough - they both seem equally calm so I suppose it is just the militant atheism isn't it. The fact is he doesn't advocate anything violent - and while I am sure he has remained silent on the recent Koranic Libricide, I am sure he thinks that the whole episode was just a provocative stand by a well-known idiot. I suppose there haven't yet been worldwide demonstrations against Dawkins but there are probably a few nutters out there who would happily kill him for peanuts judging by the anger that he receives via email.

Oh dear - I shouldn't be bothered by such idiocy should I? It should be filed and forgotten under "people are stupid".

On Getting More Than You Expected

Admittedly most of this excess of Smoke Fairies freebies consists of postcards but it is always nice to get stuff like this. I am a wibbling fool for limited edition CDs/7" Singles/Picture Disks/Sumptuous booklets but purchase of these has been reduced in proportion to my trips to Probe Records and other such byways of alternative music. Stop Press - I see from this link that Probe have just moved to The Bluecoat which is excellent news. My first trips to Probe were when it was at its second location right in the centre of Liverpool - it was the standard alternative record store - vinyl on the walls - sticky carpets - exotic aromas and everything else. It was sad when it moved from there to an anonymous looking boxy building well out of the centre. Marriage and Children mean I rarely go except to pick up my free copy of The Stool Pigeon. The last things I bought there were a second-hand copy of Surfer Rosa and by coincidence a double-A side 7 inch of Gastown and River Song  by The Smoke Fairies (produced by Jack White). I will be at The Bluecoat as soon as possible. Well back to the Freebies. This is The Smoke Fairies first album proper - Through Low Light and Trees, a beautiful collection of modern folk from two smooth-voiced women from Chichester (rather than some prairie train halt as suggested by some of the music and some of the titles). They harmonise at a weirdly low-level which is so beautiful that it is difficult to say how much so. This album deserves a proper review but the several times I have listened to it so far have been in the car ... with children ... and so have not been entirely uninterrupted. For anyone desperately interested there is what I thought was an album called Strange the Things which must be a collection of singles.

Not By a Long Chalk

It is an inexact world. Nothing conforms to the spec and that means we spend lots of time accommodating this fuzziness rather than getting on with the real business of life which as we all know is to enjoy ourselves. Bearing in mind the current debacle over PAYE (not that I've received a letter yet and I do not anticipate receiving one but there is still time) and the fact that there is at least a page of instruction for the amount of tax due on biscuits and cakes, it is time to raise my idea of simplifying the tax system. However when you realise that the distinction between cakes and biscuits when applied to just one particular item means the difference between The Government receiving £3.5 and not receiving it from just one retailer then the whole issue becomes a bit more difficult to call. Only it doesn't. The system just shows that the people who are responsible for working it out are not at all clever ... or bothered  ... or both. There is a requirement for tax and as long as some amount of money flows out of the Government end of the black box no one gets sacked. I think this should change. Only trouble is, the system cannot cope with even small change.

Axis of Even

The Interior of David Mitchell's Car Yesterday.

My wife tells me that I rant like David Mitchell does. She also tells me that there is a compilation clip of Would I Lie To You - the panel show where he is a team captain and that this show is composed mostly of these rants. So if you want an idea about what my day is like it might be useful to watch this. I do have something to rant about today - but I'm only giving you the title so you must make up your own mind about what my view is from this. People who won't use public transport because they hate other people. Rant Over!

On Libricide

So we still burn books do we? Sad isn't it? Of course these are just nutters - minor sects who under the cover of making a point are actually trying to recruit. This inevitably triggers severe cognitive dissonance in a lot of people. Liberals will be saying that certain building work going on within sight of Ground Zero should be allowed to go ahead because it indicates that The US is a bastion of free speech. However, burning books raises both sides of the question doesn't it? We should allow people to do what they want, but burning books is a thuggish censorship of what the thugs themselves do not agree with. I of course subscribe to the meta view that any book burning is wrong full stop but I am sure that there are many books I would happily toss into a fire based on my dislike of their contents. Obviously the actual specifics of the reasons for burning religious books are simply boys games as far as I'm concerned but I'm happy for any books to exist - even those by Piers Morgan.

On the subject of books, I'm tempted by this wheeze, though maybe more because it seems a less risky adventure for someone as nervous of authority as me than for any feelings of outrage about TB's stance on the Iraq war, though I do have that as well. Only days after 7/7 I watched as he denied that this atrocity was in anyway related to the Invasion of Iraq only to see that being the very reason put forward by the bombers themselves on their pre-martyrdom videos. The really annoying thing is that this hubris is seen as statesmanlike by many people - most abroad I would reckon, - I hope to see the history of Tony Blair record him in the list of failed politicians. But hey, history is not written by the bereaved of either Iraq or of British Soldiers or even by any relatives of the victims of 7/7. I am ashamed to share a country with him.

I Canna Hold Her Cap'n!

It's back and Monday evenings are interesting again. Well I suppose Paxman has been back for weeks hectoring various juveniles on Junvenal and other such esoterica but only Only Connect can supply meta-questions - pure intelligence that tests the intellect as well as the memory and all without any dramatic unresolved chord to ramp up the tension.

But what happens at the start - that nice Victoria Coren suggests that they have been receiving letters on the subject of the symbols used by the contestants to select each bank of things to connect. They are seen as elitist and pretentious and so they are going to change them. Horror! I don't know about anyone else but the show being pretentious and elitist is among the finest reasons for watching it. We are disappointed - the Chavs have breached the walls of BBC4 and are battering at the citadel of our intelligence. We are doomed to be overrun by the hordes of know-nothings who can just about deal with the first six letters of our normal boring alphabet. And so with heavy heart and weary countenance we sink back down in our chairs, resigned to this outrage. Victoria looks at us dryly (as always) then glances to her side - "Contestants" she says "pick your ......" (we pause, our hearts still beating harder at the moral failure of the BBC.) ".... Egyptian Hieroglyph". For a moment the world stops turning as we take this in. ...... Then we punch the air - all is right with the world - the barbarians have been repelled. Pretension level of 100 has been restored - elitism readings normal. Move on please - nothing to see here.

If color != pink then me.status = statuses.happy

My New Old Mobile Phone - Pictured on a Wooden Table

I think the pink fascia of my inherited mobile phone was from the Sony-Ericcson "Geekette" line which didn't go well my devil-may-care, heuristic programming image so I sent off for a new one from the "Dark Destroyer Warcraft" range. Frankly I'm not sure that moves me from Geek to Hero at all but hey - it's not pink so I'm happy.

Current reading is Musicophilia by Doctor Oliver Sacks (the man who mistook his patients as a literary career) and very interesting it is too - once you get over the feeling of voyeurism. The chapters range from a general view of earworms (which Sacks prefers to call Brainworms), to complex and very real Musical Hallucinations which prompt sufferers to question who has a radio on in the vicinity. I am envious of people (Sacks included) who can replay entire orchestra performances in their heads) because my musical reduxes are simple loops of the catchier melodies I know.

Deep Friday

Go on - who does this remind you of? Oh darn that html!

(exclamation marks in tribute to TB's memoirs).

So does God exist? As I said yesterday, as usual this has polarised the nutters - er web commenters - out there, into those who cannot follow an argument and those who will not follow an argument. I think that the most measured response to this is that Physics simply cannot talk about God and Religion similarly cannot talk about Physics. Hawking made a mistake the first time by evoking God as an explanation for what we cannot know about and at the time it was generally thought that the other side of the Big Bang was unknowable - I think he just used the G-word to cover what he thought was unreachable. By now removing his idea of God from the process that defines the physical world he has just inflamed both sides. In reality I suspect that this whole thing has been brought up and magnified by the publishers of the new book just to raise its profile.

Oh go on - what I really mean is that "knowing the mind of God" is over portentous tosh that deserves to be in Pseuds' Corner. On the other hand, there isn't anything in our experience of reality which is larger or more significant than The Big Bang - physics does its best to describe the event and I suppose that you could say it is accepted by a lot of clever people as the starting point (literally a point) of all this universe. So maybe such a significant event deserves correspondingly significant language to describe it - it's just that God is the wrong word to use - it brings in too much of the wrong part of humanity for describing physical things. I apologise if this is a truism but God is the leader of the Spiritual Side not the head of a team of research scientists. Using the proper terms in the field will result in a much better understanding of the situation even if it does remove some of the romance. Tough I say!

Braney Man

I suppose this photo is in the spirit of these images from David Sylvian but his just seem so much better - so much more mundane and yet so much more interesting. It might be of course that there are just so many of them and the continuous flow of similar subjects makes them better than a single image of something "boring".

Anyway, enough of my failings and desire to copy someone else's brilliance. Stephen Hawking has dismissed God from his view of the Universe. I do remember in A Brief History of Time that Hawking left room on the "other side" of The Big Bang for God to have started things off. Having seen mention of various theories regarding possible scenarios for the trigger for TBBT, I was already aware that this view had been challenged quite strongly already. In fact I would imagine that many if not most scientists in the field would already have taken the mention of God to have been a convenient placeholder until something more scientific came along - sort of God of the Prefix rather than the Gaps I suppose. If this depressed you, then for a laugh I suppose you could read the comments attached to The Daily Mail article about this. I'm certainly not linking to it.

Years ago I might have descended into a long pseudo-philosophical discussion and while I might still want to, I think that my gradual realisation that I know nothing compared to some people has made me think twice about posting such rants. The proliferation of comments against articles that always appear to polarise the opionions suggests that there are many people who would hold views somewhere in between and who do not post because they realise the futility of any argument. I don't consider myself a good critic of anything but I could quite happily put together a decent and cogent argument for many of these things. It would of course only reflect my opinion but at least it would be more intellectually rigorous than most posted comments. There has been a spoof message board section in Private Eye in recent issues, which satirises the worst of the rabid commenters. I'm not sure if the letter to this esteemed organ recently, enquiring whether this message board was real, was ... err ... real. I suspect not as there is too much consistency in the punchlines but the spirit and level of bile is perfectly believable apart from the fact that it never seems to adhere to Godwin's law.

Again I return to the view that most people have no idea how big the world actually is - or more accurately how many people there are in it- it is a collective lack of self-awareness you might say. However, thinking about this makes me wonder that if everyone had perfect self-awareness, the human world would stagnate because we could never get anything done for worrying about who it would upset. I therefore do NOT apologise if anything in this post upsets you.

Julie Doesn't Know What She's Been Missing

To The Philharmonic again this Sunday for In My Life - Mark McGann doing a brilliant job of being John Lennon in both words and music along with Pepperland - a Swedish Beatles Tribute Band. My wife saw MMG do this some time ago and has pictures to prove it so this was a bit of a nostalgic trip for her and while I like the Beatles, I'm not that much of a fan. However, I was rewarded with the support band, a couple of Brazilians, a guitar and a tea chest. Well they had effects pedals as well but the entire band that came out of the speakers came from just them. At one point, the guitarist kicked the jack plug out of his pedals and in putting it back in made a wince-making electronic crack which he immediately looped in the digital delay and turned into an awesome percussion loop for the backing of a trace-like jam. Occasionally he would throw in some out-of-context Beatles Lyrics just to keep up with the spirit of things. I'm not sure the now-little-old-ladies who once stood on the seats screaming at J,P,G and R were that impressed but I was.

And Mr McGann himself sold me - the encore of Help, Twist and Shout and Give Peace a Chance had a good proportion of the audience up on their feet and I imagine gave a good impression of what concerts were like in those heady days. And as a bonus, almost next to us in the audience was Jilted John himself - Graham Fellows - now sadly (or maybe not) needing far less make up to turn himself into John Shuttleworth. I was going to shout something but I bottled it as usual.

Comma Chameleon

My daughter has just upgraded her 18-month-old Mobile Phone to something without any buttons at all. This means that there has been a mass passing down of phones through the family meaning that I have her old, very-pink yet feature-rich Sony Ericsson (I am contractually obliged to plug SE because I have a friend who works for them). It is lucky that they still do alternative fascia for this particular model as people are beginning to look at me strangely - like they did when I had a white briefcase; that ended up going under a car but that is an alternative in the many-worlds isn't it.

It's very quiet in the office at the moment - my pod is down to about 20 % occupancy with the rest of this wonderful new space running about the same. With the windows that runaround three sides there is a slight feel of a Goldfish Bowl around but that may be down to my head being full with the first cold I've had in ages. Anyway - a long weekend to look forward to I suppose.

Bah - Humber!

Before he retired to concentrate on his Bill Oddie impression, my dad was a bridge engineer though I suspect that in later years this meant dealing with the inordinate amount of paperwork it must take just to grease the gears of Local Government if you want to construct anything higher than a raised flower bed. Despite this he did work on bridges a few notches up from the beam bridges that carry cows from one side of a Motorway to the other, including several across the River Severn. I'm not sure he worked on anything as big as this monster but I still get quite a tingle going over them. However, this has not passed on to my children who both gotan> rather scared just walking out to the first tower of the Humber Bridge at the Weekend so bang went my mile-long walk into Lincolnshire. The photo above is from as far as I got while the rest of the family tiptoed gingerly back into Yorkshire.

Some years ago before being toddler-or-spouse-bound, on one Bank Holiday I went to the supermarket to get some rice to go with my bachelor curry and decided to keep on driving - with the next stop (next change down in gear actually) being at the Humber Bridge Toll. After a short jaunt down to see the big skies of the coast south of the river, I came back to the Humber Bridge Park (surely an overestimate of the number of vistors there I think) and walked across the bridge taking loads of Black-and-White photos, bracketing them so I had three exposures of every one. I got through three rolls of film I think and they came out quite nicely. This one is from Saturday and of course was in colour to start with. None of them show exactly how big the structure actually is. Looking up from the base of the first tower is so strange - the slight movement of the clouds above it suggests that the tower is falling. The length of the deck is just outside understanding - it is difficult to place the road that it carries into the normal context of the countryside that leads to it from each side - you just drive off one bit of standard, green, British landscape and end up in another bit a few minutes later. It is like flying. I used to ride out to cross the Severn Bridge (which actually seems quite homely in comparision to it's northern sister) and cycling across the side walkway is the nearest you can get to having a jet pack. I'm afraid that some of my children's fears has rubbed off on me and I'm not sure I'd be able to do that again without some shakiness.

I've just realised that th bridge would have been ideal for some stereoscopic experiments - maybe next time hey?

Yoghurt Wars

As you can see we are fresh from our trip to Stalingrad and raring to start writing again. All is well apart from the obscure Russian illness that has struck me down but we will ignore that just in case it has been imported illegally. Oh - and who'd have thought that Anne Bronte was buried there? OK - so you can guess where I've really been. Answers on a post card - usual boiled sweet to first drawn but I want the location of the Tank as well as the grave.

I took a few books and read none of them - just browsed magazines and maps instead. And now it's like I've never been away.

Don't Tell Him Schmeike!

Again courtesy of Sefton Library Services, I have saved some money. I have started on The Closed Circle which is the follow-up to The Rotters' Club. It begins with a long and passionate missive from Claire to her missing sister Miriam, which does a great job of filling in the years between the end of TRC and the beginning of TCC, though timelines are slightly flaky in any properly constructed modern novel. I am slightly concerned that Paul, one of the minor characters from the first book seems from reviews to have turned into something like Harry Enfield's Tory Boy - surely he can't be that cartoonish. Pandora from The Adrian Mole Diaries was always very believable as an MP for me but maybe I was blinded by the early adoration which Adrian professed for her.

Herbie Tony Hancock

There are not many bits of music that come with a leaflet describing a good walk these days but of course Hergest Ridge is different from most pieces of music. HR is the immediate successor to the phenomenally successful Tubular Bells and is a complete change of direction. It's mellower feel is due to its composer rushing off to escape the pressures of being a hit maker and living in a leaky hut in Herefordshire/Wales - maybe it wasn't a leaky hut but it was long way from Chelsea. Of course I have been manipulated into buying yet another version of something I already had several copies of - tape - vinyl - low-level CD first issue etc but even to my increasingly poor ears, these new copies of Hergest Ridge and Ommadawn have a sparkly quality that overrides anything that went before.

I listened to the new Hergest Ridge Remix last night and was having trouble recognising it as the same recording that I knew - there were instruments that were not just low in the mix in the original that were now bashing away over the top but some that I am sure were not there at all first time around. There was a nicely modern-sounding bit of discordant echo over the top of the ethereal tin-whistles and drones that starts the piece which had me reeling with the unfamiliarity of it all. I was in the chaotic cusp between loving it and dismissing it as an imposter. However, in the end its wonderful clarity was beautiful and I was sold.

So next there I was ripping it to mp3, studying the wealth of extra material and deciding to give the included "Original Mix" a go. Strange - it seemed the same as the new mix - maybe a little less strident but all those strange echoes and things were there at various levels. What's up here. To cut out a lot of Googling, it turns out that the familiar mix I was comparing it to is not the original but instead the version from Boxed which Mike Oldfield had decreed was the definitive mix to use on all releases subsequently. He has only bowed to the bootleg pressure on this release and given us back what was on the original vinyl all those years ago. And now I have a three way - split - the new mix is sparkling (with some glaring over-emphasised elements) - the boxed mix is ambient - everything way down in a strange ocean of sound - and the original mix is new to me - a completely new take that was sitting around on Internet bootlegs for years already.

Oh - and there is Ommadawn as well.

Overload!

It's all gone a bit cultural here. For the first time ever (probably) I have finished all three of a 342 from Waterstones, Having read The Lovely Bones and Life Class in quick succession I finally got around to The Rotters' Club which I whistled through in a week. I watched the BBC adaptation of this a few years ago so I was slightly worried that this reading would be redundant but I was wrong - the show managed to keep enough detail to be a good try but the book contains levels of thought and description that show why books will always better visual drama no matter what doodads and gee-whizzery they put out. The novel has varied elements of narrative - diaries - uncategorisable creative writing, articles from the school magazine all of which reminds me of the various style changes in David Lodge books, but without the self-conscious cleverness. I did at times think this made the whole thing a bit scrappy but at the end you realise that instead of lessening the believability, it instead suggests reality far better than any mess of colloquialism or street-lingo. It is noticeable in a book about Birmingham which mentions that fact a lot - indeed dwells on it - that there is no descent into "Depressed Brummy". It manages to cover the ludicrous acts that teenage boys are forced into through love and lust, the more grown-up behaviour that adults display because of same and deadly-serious games that people play when power is at stake. And despite these wild variations in mood it never seems inappropriate because it reflects what we all go through, the sudden lurch from bereavement to love, from betrayal to loyalty and all the other emotions that humans are capable of displaying.

And on top of this we have the unmissable, breathtaking switchback ride of Sherlock, which brings together many pillars of British dramatic ability and creates a delicate, finely-balanced 90 minutes of brilliance. It manages to maintain not only the structure of the original ACD stories but many of the details as well. Its high point yesterday - a dramatic and strangely-soundtracked fight in a planetarium, underpinned one of the more famous factoids about Sherlock Holmes; that he does not know or care that the Earth Travels around the sun. Not remembering this from the original story, I cannot say whether this confession by Holmes is meant in reality or just as an illustration of how he manages to keep focused. The implication yesterday was that it was the latter. We are all now of course in limbo far more delicate that that between penultimate and final episodes of Doctor Who in that we do not know a) how the cliff-hanger ends or indeed b) that the series will be recommissioned. As some of the reviewers have suggested, it might be a brave step to not produce any more episodes and leave us all with this delicious pleasure at something so right and beautiful. However, I am not sure that commercial pressures will allow that. We can only hope that Moffat and Gatiss have a long game in their heads and that the running start can be maintained.

It Died!

My rewards this week for being at work while the rest of the family gallivants around the country have been many, including the above Dalek Ironside and a 100g of Army and Navy sweets which have now vanished mysteriously - probably eaten by the Dalek I think. There are many geeky reviews of this figure out in Youtubeland so I'd better not add much to them just in case I give you the impression that I am 13 or something. Instead I just need to say that the general appearance of all Daleks is one of "rightness". The Dalek Ironside is a return to the utilitarian style of some of the early Daleks - like something cobbled together from the battered metal junction box casings in the basement of the BBC. Making it Olive Drab just adds to that feel of a combination of dusty Civil-Service corridors and various obscure military establishments. Much as I was enthralled by the return of the single Dalek in the first series of the revival, the finish of that particular machine was a bit too shiny - showing the plastic of which it was made. The green paint of the Ironside covers up all that and returns us to the rough and ready feel of the originals.

And that is maybe where it should have stopped for now we have the sudden regeneration into the Duplo Daleks. While I am not that bothered, the primary coloured replacements do not seem to be quite in the right proportion. They have various lumps and changes in contour that make them a bit brutish. I know that seems silly, but the Daleks as they were in the past, were the evil geeks of the Doctor Who World, an enemy with no need of overpowering bulk because their whole attitude, voice and movements were threatening, the epitome of the scary short dictator - the Napoleons of the Galaxy.

This is just a poster but I would be quite pleased if someone decided to write the whole thing. I'd certainly buy it.

Gimme Six!

At last I've got onto the one John Wyndham book which my wife has read and raves about. This one takes us beyond the usual JW Cosy Catastrophe and projects us hundreds or thousands of years into the future after some sort of apocalypse where mutations are seen as being against the will of God. People are made is His exact image and any deviation is treated ruthlessly with banishment to badlands. In this Amish-like setting, comes the ultimate in mutations - telepathy - which Wyndham was fascinated with.

Now this has me thinking. I don't believe in any of the usual new-age tosh and was rooting for Dawkins all the way in his Enemies of Reason World Tour. However, I suppose because telepathy relates directly to the organ which I use to think about it, I have a slight anti-reason view that there is possibly a perfectly acceptable real-world vector for it. If an eye can evolve to detect light and a firefly can evolve to give it off then why not imagine a creature which emits and receives other electromagnetic radiation? To our ancestors, communication by writing and reading would seem like telepathy - and better still it is telepathy that spans not only space but time as well. All human radio communication is, for all but the few centimetres between the mouth and the microphone and the speaker and the ear, telepathy. We only need to work on a direct link between the black boxes and the brain and the link is complete.

I suppose there must be a reason why organisms have evolved to use only certain parts of the electromagnetic spectrum to communicate - it probably is to do with wavelength in relation to the size of the cells capable of reacting to it - but I cannot see why we could not evolve (or even re-design ourselves) to broadcast and receive radio waves. The brain after all is an electrical device and we can read some of its output already by direct contact. Maybe two heads close together could already each get an idea of the general field state put out by the other. I am sure that devices to extend the range of this are not far away.

White Sails

It rains! It rains again and the rivers flood and wash away all the hose-pipe inspectors. I love this weather even if it does flood the garden and mean we have to think about lifting the drain covers to let it flow away. Even in the winter a good shower makes me happy which might seem odd but just think about all the negative ions that go with it. They make the air fresh and keep the dust down. Think of the sound a raindrops staging their way down through the different levels of a thick summer wood. You can walk surrounded by spheres of sound from the crashing white noise of the indistinguishable multitude that hit the outer leaves to the chaotic bass of the conglomerated monsters that make it to the forest floor.

From the window here I have a view over green lawns towards trees that hide a few cars, not like the car park that surrounded the previous office. And right now the rains falls, straight down in the windless air. This sealed building steals all the sound, giving us just the muffled murmur of various conversations and a mid-range hum of blowers and air-conditioners. I look forward to the short walk to my car in the rain this evening; it makes the thought of the longer journey home more bearable. I think of all the unpopulated places around - the empty forests with their unheard rainstorms, the undulating grass of moorland taking the deluge unhindered by the protection of trees - the beaches with the sound of wave and tide. These places have been here all the time, long before there was any mind capable of remembering them. Like existence defined by the last memory of the last person you knew, they will fade from our notes and yet they will still go one until we have ceased to be either through destruction or our own evolution into something more worthy of the custodianship of this planet.

I'll make it into Pseuds' Corner one day.

Life After Archie

Apparently there will be Noctilucent Clouds visible over Britain all this week which I suppose is quite exciting though obviously I have to stay awake long enough to see them and hope that the permanent greyness disperses as well. None of which is as wonderful as seeing the Horseshoe Vortex cloud that was in the sky as I drove home the other week.



It was indeed fleeting and because I did not have my camera (and couldn't have used it anyway officer) I am sure that bagging it in my Cloud Collector's Handbook would not be allowed.

We have been enjoying Rev on BBC2, a sitcom that has the basic premise of The Vicar of Dibley only not with a woman vicar and not in a charming country parish. And yet for all that lack of cosy teatime goodness it leaves a much warmer feeling. It seems that the struggle to do the right thing in the face of real urban issues makes for better people than the bucolic glow of Dibley. I'm not sure it's gone down too well with the standard C of E old-guard but we like it.

The Base White Mug of the Universe

(From BestSub Technologies Co., Ltd.)

And the big news is we have moved offices - rather a long way in fact - but to a place with a much nicer view. The entire contents of the previous place have been transported to here - sinks and everything. My entire working life is summed up in a couple of crates and a mobile cabinet. The main reception has New Scientist in the magazine racks and the view is of green - trees and grass which is a huge improvement on the brick wall that I looked out on from my first office at Plessey in 1986. Actually I lie about that because before that I did a placement year in the IT department of The Bristol and West Building Society which looked out over the very centre of Bristol - a spectacular view of theatres, docksides and art galleries - all within staggering distance of at least 100 bars/pubs/clubs/strip joints/kebab shops etc. However, at my age (noticing the first grey hairs) a nice bit of calm greenery is all I want. And so thoughts of the simple view out of a generic office window turn to meditation on getting old.

Until the free vending machines arrive we have liberated some catering-sized cans of coffee and a number of white mugs unusually not bearing the log of various suppliers/clients which, to extend the deep and pretentious theme of today, could almost be Plato's Universal Idea of a cup, though reading that Wiki article I got as far as "category error" before I realised I was out of my depth and gave up. Be thankful that the office is light and airy or I might have mentioned Plato's Cave and then where would we be?

Trust the Plastic

So - reading logs

I read a very short book called Doctor in the Navy which did exactly what it says on the dust jacket being a James-Herriot-style account of a .. err ... Doctor in the Navy in what I think is the late fifties. I'm not sure why I took it out of the library - it just seemed to fall off the shelf. It was OK as a palate-cleanser after the Kate Bush book. I'm also not sure whether it's true - I mean was the Wrens' accommodation in Portsmouth really called HMS Impregnable

Next up was A Gate at the Stairs - by Lorrie Moore who is better known for her short stories - this fact is the biggest complaint in the Amazon reviews; there is too much descriptive stuff in the novel for a lot of her fans and indeed the actual story is not that substantial being padded out with long and often unconnected musings by the narrator. This must not put you off because it turns a sentimental pulp story into a deep reflection on one's own existence. Never do these diversions seem anything other than entirely pertinent to the atmosphere and ambiance which is the real reason for the book - the real meat. This makes the events so much more affecting. The narrator is supposed to be only twenty but has the wisdom of a woman twice her age which upset another subset of the reviewers. Again do not be put off by this. I can think of plenty of twenty-year olds I have known with the sophistication of people twice their age. Maybe at that age, we just lack the eloquence to voice the feelings we have. A novel is always a triumph of remembered detail over the fuzziness of any reality on which it based and therefore making a narrator analyse the situations in which they are placed is no more than detailing a conversation to make a point. The only true capturing of reality comes from recording devices with a far higher veracity than that of the human memory. As one reviewer said this book can stand a whole raft of spoilers for it is not the story that matters - it is the writing and with writing this good, the details of the plot matter only when you get to them.

And for Fathers' Day we have The Wavewatcher's Companion from the Idler Gavin Pretor-Pinney - he of the Cloud Appreciation Society. I'm still only on the second chapter of this but the initial dipping I did shows it to be a deep and funny investigation into all-things wavy.

Come on Ponds!

The Doctor Yesterday.

And we're back! Amy has managed to conjure up the entire universe down to every detail - Andy Murray is still fourth seed and currently looking likely to go through so looks like she got everything right. Take that Mr Stephen Fry and your new-fangled adventures. Here was the ultimate Deus Ex Machina or as Richard Adams would say Dea Ex Machina 'cos of course it all comes out of Amy's head. And also here was a Dalek begging for mercy - three times - that River Song is some woman. The youngest is now dancing The Doctor's wedding dance and looking very unlikely to go to sleep before we do.

Where have I been? Working mostly - not away from home but for more of the day than is usual. Can't talk about it any more - it's not secret - just very, very boring. So no blogging. Maybe a bit more in the next few weeks.

Charm a Llama Farmer

Listening to auto-generated Gamelan.

As usual I am torn between many different books and have at last re-started Michael Palin's second set of Diaries from 1980 to 1988. The problem is they don't seem as interesting as the first volume. Have I been conned? Has he been editing them after complaints? Is he turning into Alastair Campbell? The pile of books by the bed has begun to show up on radar and has therefore been classified as an official hazard which means I have to do something with it at the weekend. Life is such a whirl!

The Life and Times of Sigmund Turing

I did not want Under the Ivy to end - I read the acknowledgements, the bibliography, the discography and was considering the index before I let it go. It was almost as if this was not only the end of the biography but of the meaningful, music-releasing career of its subject. I do hope that is not true and to Kate Bush herself I am sure that either way matters not a jot. Anyway, what about the meat of the thing rather than just the vaguely empty feeling it leaves on completion. Graeme Thomson is not afraid to say bad things where he thinks it's due but I seem to disagree on some small points. I have listened to all her official releases over the last few days and while I agree on the general greatness of The Hounds of Love and the measured genius of Aerial, I actually like The Dreaming rather a lot - it rocks and far from being over produced just seems the product of a extraordinarily active mind.

I've just switched the Media Player to it and here it is bouncing in my ears, clear and powerful, a misty and dirty window on a strange outlook. But regardless of my petty fan-boy quibbles with the opinions of the music, the book itself is a must read for any real KB fan and a brilliantly written diversion for anyone, even those who do not like the music. I know that Kate Bush divides opinion like Marmite but even an intellectual loather would find much to satisfy them in this book. I am amazed that Thomson has managed to get such detail about the recording process and more so that he manages to weave this information in a chronological layout so that it does not appear like anal fan-boy notes.

After the first few chapters it dedicates about a chapter to each album as far as I can recall and this chimes with the recent view of Bush popping up every few years with some new album and then vanishing again. However, this view of a mad recluse is pretty much debunked by the book. She values her privacy and it just happens that fame means that everyone wants information. She wants her music to be the statement of intent and because a lot of that music is so unreadable, the papers and the music magazines are not satisfied. This book does a great job of the detail and has a laudable stab at understanding without going into the pretentious territory of Vermorel's Secret History of Kate Bush. And better than all this, it is a great read filled with a spirit like that of a good piece of fiction. All of which resulted in my desire for it not to end and my slight sense of sadness that the end of the book might actually be the end of the story. There was a nugget of hope in that Del Palmer reports progress on new music. Can we hope for something with the greatness of Hounds of Love?

In other news, we have mostly been enjoying the new series of Horrible Histories which is as on-form as it ever was with skits about everyone from the Stone Age to The Second World War. I especially liked the Viking Heavy Metal Rock video which was pitch-perfect. It looks like as much fun to make as it is to watch.

Disasters by Choice

It rains again today. It is stronger than previous days, making gentle noises on the windows of the day room and yet Kate has left the outer door open again. The rain has a partner in the spinning eddies of wind that stir the indoor plants and sprinkle them with water. A butterfly has sought shelter in here and I must paint it. It seems to move slightly like it breathes more rapidly at my approach, its tiny edges and legs and protuberances like the edge of a person in love and leaving their beloved for home. I sit down with the drawing book on my knees and using the finest brush I have outline the image of the delicate creature. It stays for a time, letting me capture it. It amazes me that my eyes can capture this detail, the furry ends to its legs, the twisted whorl of its whiskers, like a narwhal's horn, that which we used to believe was the horn of a unicorn.

Then as if it knows I have it down save for the colours, it leaps away towards the skylight and settles higher up the tree. But it is still visible and slowly I mix the almost-white that defines its majority. This colour is just not that of the paper, a shade out from the bright white of the expensive parchment of the book and yet after going on, it leaps out of the page, turning my flat draughtsmanship to real-life under my hand.

And then my fatigue catches me and the butterfly is gone and not gone. In my mind it is hard to determine which of the creatures left me. Was it the model that came in out of the rain or my creation which came to life on the page, their places switched?

The Fire-Pigeons of Peterborough

To the ancestral homeland at the weekend, where various relatives showed us equally various artifacts originally belonging to my many-greats grandmother - Eliza Payne - including a notebook containing diary entries from 1835 to 1837 and a battered notebook containing many exquisite watercolours of butterflies an example of which is above. The writing in the diary, although beautiful, is very small and unreadable to my suddenly-ancient eyes. Daughter was happily able to read it and described the untaxing life of a lady of leisure based somewhere near Colchester we think. It is begging to be scanned, blown-up and pushed to make it readable. I will keep you posted.

Modern art in the deWeyden family this weekend has consisted mostly of me taking pictures of clouds with this IR one being the best. Dig those three-dee clouds hey?

Anyway - short one today. Back on heads.

Ran Wan Tan

Under the Ivy hits the spot indeed, written in a manner which suggests the emotion and motion of each stage in the life it describes. The hiatus between Bush signing her deal and the start of recording is slow and magical - describing the life of a young woman left to mature artistically and emotionally in a comfortable environment and yet still results in a strange and worldly-wise music. The recording is different from this being a description of the meeting of the strange and spiritual singer with the workmanlike process of making a record. It is strange that such a free-spirit should create tight little pieces with no room for improvisation. I would suggest that any live performance today (some chance of that hey?) would produce versions almost identical to those late-seventies recordings. And yet they are beautiful songs - oddly traditional in their use of instruments but taken out of the ordinary by the extraordinary voice and exceptional lyrical innovation of their creator.

For the few days I have been reading this book I have thought I really should listen to the albums as they are reached in the book and so last night I started with The Kick Inside, which from the start with its whale song to the ending of the title track, both draws you back to the optimism of the late seventies after the refreshing cleanse out of punk and seems strangely futuristic. It is still not dated because despite the novel use of sound and voice it uses a basically traditional set of instruments. Not until the later albums do we get the crazy, non-real explosions of noise that made me reboot my appreciation. And since the Hounds of Love every album has been a must-have. It culminates in the masterpiece of Aerial which actually reigns in the excesses with a return to more traditional styles of compositions. But never the subjects - the lyrics suggest that Kate's imagination is fuelled by the normality of her family life.

Act Gaga - Gag a Cat

While trying to finish the second book above, the first one arrived. I struggled to avoid rushing the end of Mr. Maconie's surprisingly deep and not-twee-at-all volume and just about managed it. The new Kate Bush biography is just about the best rock biog I have read - well-researched, well written and packed with detail without being train-spotterish. After the previous biog of Kate Bush and the travesty that was Siren Rising, I was slightly wary but this is excellent. I did of course lap up the mysterious Kate Bush book by Fred Vermorel which was very good on creating a sort of very English atmosphere of thunder and green (from the cover onwards) but was I now realise very pretentious. This is the antidote to that. Read and digest with wonder.

And in the news as well this week, the revelation of the meaning of the Life on Mars/Ashes to Ashes universe. And while it was quite obvious when all was made plain, it was still satisfying and needed no point-by-point analogy to remain consistent. Questioning details would be like asking why The Meerkat speaks with a Russian accent conveniently ignoring the fact that Meerkats don't ever speak at all in the real world. There are plenty of words elsewhere about the detail of LoM and A2A and you can read them if you like. It is probably more rewarding to sit back and muse on the atmosphere and the drama without bothering too much about detail. It is enough to say that the world is created in the head of a human being and if you can say that your view of the world is consistent with reality then congratulations and here's your list of locomotives to tick off.

Take Your Picasso!

I should have been at work today but instead we snuck off to the first day of the new Picasso Exhibition at Tate Liverpool. Quite disappointed that we weren't greeted with white whine and nibbles - not even a pigeon sandwich to go with the theme of the show but of course what really mattered was the art and this was truly art - and so so much of it. The Picasso Event Horizon occurred about two thirds through when the paintings started to be Picasso's versions of previous famous works - Le dejeuner sur l'herbe, Las Meninas etc. and while obviously in his style (at risk of sounding pretentious should we say metastyle) they smacked of mass-production and loss of inspiration.

Not like The Charnel House, one of the first paintings in the exhibition, a painting similar in style to Guernica and outwardly a depiction of a specific, ruthless atrocity in Spain but of course a marker for the greater tragedy of the whole of Spain. This is a grey work - it apes a newspaper picture - and despite being the visual record of death, of the unmoving victims of some small war crime, perhaps like all Picasso's work, it moves within itself, suggesting the post-mortem accusations of the murdered family, blaming those who carried out the terrible acts and indirectly us for being part of the wider world which allows this. The whole black time from the early skirmishes in the mud of Flanders to the ultimate atrocities of the concentration camps (and beyond into our own time) are channelled out in this picture. A little event given meaning with a scream directed from the artist into canvas. It gives no solutions other than being a reminder to moderate one's own behaviour for fear that the smallest break in your vigilance will let in the evil that men do.

[Paragraph removed due to being overtly Bathetic].

A News Sandwich

Driving home yesterday sound tracked by a talk between the two people in the picture above yesterday's post - Kim Phuc - the Girl in the Picture - and the ITN reporter who filmed the event - Christopher Wain. As first from the gentle and measured voice, I thought that Kim's voice had been overdubbed by an actor but the fact that she was in conversation with Wain proved that is was her. It was humbling that having suffered the horrors of that explosion, she was so calm and measured. I would still be ranting and screaming as the injustices of it all. Despite this, after years of being a prisoner of "that photo" Kim has taken control and used her fame to do good works. She was instrumental in getting treatment for Ali Abbas, the Iraqi boy who lost his arms in a missile strike on his house. You can hear the whole programme here.

This was followed by Brian Cox talking to Matthew Parris after choosing Carl Sagan for the Great Lives programme. But in between was a trailer for a radio version of what must be the most sentimental story ever written and yet one which gives me a lump in the throat that matches that from "Daddy! My Daddy" in The Railway Children. This is The Snow Goose by Paul Gallico which will be on Radio 4 this Sunday at 15:00. My headmaster at Middle School once played the whole school a recording of this story read by Spike Milligan and it was excellent.

Meanwhile we wait for the details of the biggest shake-up in British Politics since 1832 and shame on you if you don't know what that was.

Thirty Eight (and Thirty) Years Ago Today

I thought I should put this happier picture up instead of the one that everyone remembers. I remember it but I don't remember when I first saw it - it just seems to have been there all the time like the associated pictures of B52s dropping tumbling sticks of bombs into the Vietnamese jungle. At this point I have to state that the Napalm which burnt Kim Phuc was actually dropped by South Vietnamese aircraft rather than US planes but it really does not matter whether it was the South Vietnamese, the North Vietnamese or whoever. What DOES matter is that apparently Richard Nixon doubted the authenticity of the photograph which I suppose means he thought it was a fake for propaganda purposes. Now in a war where the abomination that is Napalm is used did he not think that there might be some collateral damage. There was simply no need for either side to fake atrocities because so many real ones existed. Was Nixon simply making a statement knowing that a good percentage of anyone who heard of his comments would believe them.

I sometimes wonder if large numbers of people wander about with a very sketchy view of the world (in some cases of the next street) but I have had to adjust this recently to wonder how many politicians actually have similar incomplete pictures of the situations they are nominally in control of. My line of work is generally proscribed, planned, regulated and tested to the highest level and yet sometimes an unforeseen issue can mean that risks have to be taken to get things to work. This means that occasionally I find myself changing things on the fly which little planning and this bugs me. The funny thing is that most times thse flailing attempts succeed and all settles down to normality. I suspect that most Government works like this. Government is not a joke or a game for children to play: it is a serious thing with consequences for real people's lives.

Drone Poem Sequence

Listening to ... er .... this.

If you can, set to HD. I did and it was like having little people playing music on my lap. This has not yet been released as a commercial recording so this is the only way to hear it all. I would hope that it comes out with the latest SR mallet composition and the new rock-based piece - 2 x 5. There is a clip of a rehearsal of the latter but the sound is very weedy.

Free the Chiltern Hundreds! Nick - Nick - I have to go.

Luft Wellen von Kraftwerk Hören

Don't they all look so professional up there and so they should. Can't help feeling a little buoyed-up simply because of the newness of all this sudden change in the way things are done. It will do us all good to be little less cynical than normal and to just give 'em a chance. Having said that they seem to have the ground running with the cancellation of the third runway for Heathrow though (breaking my own rule from a few seconds ago) it does seem that that might mean the creation of a small airport out in sensitive estuary areas which cannot be good.

Politics has not been this exciting since my Economics and Public Affairs O-Level class was dragged along a leafy, green country road to a single-room village school to see how voting actually worked. At that time I could probably name the entire cabinet and reel off the various stages that a bill passes through in the correct order and I can't help feeling that at least some small subset of this knowledge should be part of the compulsory curriculum. I feel this because of my wife telling me how many times she has had to explain a hung parliament over the last week. This lack of understanding together with an obvious ignorance of the procedure at change of Governments seems to have resulted in some quite nasty comments regarding the outgoing PM. It's not only the notoriously vicious message boards of The Daily Mail but also those of Comment is Free over at the Guardian which seem to have sparked a large-scale resurrection of the dripping corpses of political extremism. It seems that a Government which is by default leaning from both sides towards the centre, is destined to provoke anger and bile from those prepared to shout and scream for what they believe in, all of which probably tags me as a middle wet of the highest order.

I return to an analogy which serves well in a lot of cases, that of the driver seething in a traffic jam and blaming it all on the presence on the road of the other drivers around him. You can carry out integral calculus on an election, so the result is the result and no amount of analysis changes it or shed any useful light on how you should behave afterwards. In our current system, the contact with the voters is once every few years and the only parameters are those that are made public by the party in their manifestos in one direction and the wishes of the voters to vote in a single member. Short of holding referendums on all important policies there is no other way for it to be done. We can only suggest trying to make the election process as fair as possible so that as many possible views are taken into account. For any voting system, including a mythical "fairest of them all" one, there will be flaws and no way for everyone to be satisfied all of them time. The current coalition is a perfectly legitimate end-result for the current process within the parameters of our constitution and anyone who shouts "I didn't vote for this!", although technically correct should understand that "we" did vote for it. If you do not accept it - go out and campaign for reform. But remember, the only way to keep the possibility of one of the two big parties getting an absolute majority and therefore the supposed "strong government" that so many seem to want is to keep the current system. It just happens that this time it produced a country-wide "No Overall Control". Make the best of it.

Personally I feel that as in general the Western World has become more centrist over the years, that we are more likely to get such parliaments more often in the future even without electoral reform. I also feel it will do us good. The fact that it did come out as it did shows, despite the outrageous bile about Gordon Brown which poured out, that a good number of people didn't think that. Politics should be about policies and not personalities - which is probably for the best bearing in mind that huge numbers of politicians haven't got any - personalities I mean. Though I'm not sure about policies either.