I am a mountain....

Gone skiing.

We're going to Austria: nevermind the mountains and the wine and the coffee and the goulash, this is a culture that has embraced the concept of breakfast cake. 

Breakfast cake!

What's not to love about that?  If that's not society perfected, then I'm damned if I know what is.

Don't worry about the cold.  I've got a beard to protect me now....

See you on the other side.

but now and then we wonder who the real men are....

I reckon there's a gap in the market for a proper handbook for men; a MANual, if you will....

I'm 37 years old and you would imagine that I would be getting the hang of things by now, but this simply isn't true.  Apart from anything else, growing this beard has been a voyage of discovery for me pretty much right from the start.

- Why does no one tell you the point at which stubble stops and a beard starts?
- Why has it come out less grey than the rest of the hair on my head?
- To trim or not to trim?
- What do you trim with? How short? How often?
- How far down your throat should you let it grow?
- What about the stubble that grows high up on your cheek bones?
- How long should I expect it to be itchy for?
- What strategies are there to avoid stroking or pulling it all the time?
- Why should growing one be so fascinating to other people?
- What's the etiquette around letting people touch it?
- Beard envy from other guys.  What's that all about?
- Should people not be forewarned about how weird it feels on your pillow?
- Is this actually going to keep my face warmer on the ski slopes?

...and so on.

Every day that I keep this thing, new questions keep popping into my head.  I'm hardly the first man to go through this, and I surely can't be the only one to wonder about these and other important questions of beard etiquette.

Can I?

Or does this handbook for men already exist and I've just missed it?

Or is it passed down, word-of-mouth, from generation to generation?  Did my father neglect to pass this information down to me, or is the knowledge slowly being lost to us men as we lead ever more urban and metrosexual lives where more attention is paid to styling mousse than to basic beard growth and maintenance?

O Tempora, O Mores!

Where did all the real men go?

remedy for me, please....

I think I’ve made a breakthrough in mankind’s age-old battle against the common cold: immuno-suppressant drugs.

I realise that it sounds counter-intuitive, but bear with me. I spent most of the day yesterday sniffling, snorting, coughing and snuffling my way through the fog of a cold – not an especially bothersome cold, perhaps, but a cold nonetheless and an irritant for that. Mornings are usually the worst, when you have a whole night’s worth of accumulated fug sat in and around your brain, before you’ve had a chance to counter the effects with a hefty dose of something powerful and decongestant. With that in mind, at about 11pm last night, I approached the ritual of my weekly injection with some trepidation. I’m no doctor, but I’m pretty sure that injecting yourself with something designed to suppress your immune system isn’t likely to help your body recover from a cold.

On a normal week, I take about 1000mg of paracetamol and 400mg of ibuprofen to stave off the headaches and flu-like symptoms that are the side-effects of injecting myself with beta-interferon 1a. Even so, I often wake up with a fuzzy head and somewhat less than 100% control over my own body. Well, it has to be done, so I stabbed myself in the left thigh, injected the drug and then went to bed, pretty convinced that I would feel somewhat less than in tip-top condition come the morning.

…and you know what? I woke up feeling as fresh as I have done all week. Not better, but heading in the right direction.  The cure for the common cold? I’ve got it nailed: just chemically shut your immune response down (it's surely either that or the pie I had for my tea.... hmmm, maybe I should explore the second option more thoroughly.  You know... in the interests of science)

At this rate, I might have shaken the damn thing off entirely by the time we go on holiday on Saturday… but even if the immuno-suppressants (and/or pies) don’t completely kill the cold, then I’m confident that several days of standing on a snowy mountain in sub-zero temperatures will be just the thing to kick it completely into touch.

No?

and he carries the reminders of every glove that layed him down....

I’ve dived with sharks.
I’ve petted a lion.
I’ve thrown myself out of an aeroplane 10,000ft above the Namibian desert.
I’ve stood 10ft away from an adult male grizzly bear.
I’ve gone down an Olympic bobsleigh run.
I’ve skied (slowly) down double-diamond black runs.
I’ve stood on the side of an erupting volcano.
Hell, I've even eaten a tarantula.

None of these things – not a damn one – has prepared me in any way for attempting to put drops into my cat’s left eye.

Muhammed Ali turned 70 today.

As the great man once said: “I done wrestled with an alligator, I done tussled with a whale; handcuffed lightning, thrown thunder in jail; only last week, I murdered a rock, injured a stone, hospitalised a brick; I'm so mean I make medicine sick”

He’s a pretty amazing guy and has lived an incredible life…..but I’d still like to see him try it and take on my little cat twice a day armed only with a tube of Fucithalmic ointment.

There's only one winner.

silence is golden....

"ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE is scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of Eleventh and First and is in print large enough to be seen from the backseat of the cab as it lurches forward in the traffic leaving Wall Street and just as Timothy Price notices the words a bus pulls up, the advertisement for Les Miserables on its side blocking his view, but Price who is with Pierce & Pierce and twenty-six doesn't seem to care because he tells the driver he will give him five dollars to turn up the radio, "Be My Baby" on WYNN, and the driver, black, not American, does so."

Odd though it might sound, watching a screening of "The Artist" over the weekend brought the opening lines from "American Psycho" by Brett Easton Ellis to mind.

Why? Well, those words foreshadow much of what is to happen in the book that follows. Similarly, the opening scene of "The Artist" shows Jean Dujardin's silent movie star, George Valentin, at the premiere of his latest film, and we watch as his character undergoes torture on the screen. A caption pops up as our hero is having bolts of electricity shot into his head by the dastardly villains... and the first "line" of the movie is "I will not talk!"

Given that the film deals with the silent star's gradual slide towards oblivion with the arrival of talking pictures, it's clear that the symbolism is entirely intentional.

It's somehow very satisfying, in an era when CGI heavy blockbusters seem to be the norm, that cinemas are currently filling out to watch an almost entirely silent, black and white film. Never mind entirely CGI characters, one of my favourite scenes in this film involves nothing more technical than a hatstand, a coat and top hat, but the end result is touching in a way that all the special effects in the world never can be. At the screening I saw, the screen actually narrowed after the trailers instead of widening... to the old, 1.33:1 "Academy ratio" originally used to shoot silent films.. rather than the more normal cinema ratio of 1.85:1 to 2.35:1.  Sometimes less really is more.

It's broadly a story that's been told before, of course, in many different ways, but there's still something wonderfully refreshing watching it being told in this way; never mind the absence of special effects and the other Maguffins of modern cinema, there isn't any actual dialogue here either. Instead, director Michel Hazanavicius is obliged to tell his story the old-fashioned way: through music, dialogue cards and the sheer skill and screen presence of his actors. Jean Dujardin is a delight, but so too is Bérénice Bejo as Peppy Miller, and if there are any acting awards to be given out, then might I suggest that the Academy recognises the work of Uggie the dog?

The last words of "American Psycho" are "THIS IS NOT AN EXIT", something that makes the reader pause, even as they put the book down, to reassess the meaning of everything they have just read. With "The Artist" too, the last words... no spoilers here... give the viewer pause for thought and to reflect on everything they have just seen.

It's a wonderful film. Go see.

sup up your beer and collect your fags, There's a row going on down near Slough....

Earworms of the Week

Guest edited by..... Ali a.k.a. Fiery Little Sod

It's been a while since we had any guest curators in this slot, hasn't it?  I don't know: what's the world coming to when a personal weblog is all me, me, me?  Tsk. Well, variety is the spice of life and earworms are, after all, something that everyone can share... even if only via some hideous cross-infection of some noxious weapons grade tune from off of the telly.

None of that noxious stuff here tonight.... even that last one sparks some very fond memories.... It's pretty much quality all the way.  I've come to expect nothing less from this particular gentleman.

Anyway, without further ado, it's over to Ali.....

---

So here we are again. My good friend has graciously allowed me to have another crack at this earworms trick, presuambly on the premise that if I keep getting a chance I might get it right eventually. Probably not this week though...

Video Games - Lana del Rey
So she's ovehyped, overlipped and over here. She's not using her real name and comes from moneyed upstate New York, so not exactly fought her way from the streets. Right, now that's all out the way. This is a belter of tune, well-written, clever lyrics and is a welcome earworm anytime. She is actually pretty damn good. End of story.

Dock of the Bay - Otis Redding
Memories of San Francisco and (more disturbingly) Top Gun. Epitome of smooth. Tells a story. Gives all you could ask for of a song and it is a reminder that running away to somewhere better is a two-edged sword.

Hammer to Fall / Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy - Queen
Love 'em or hate 'em, they are quite hard to ignore. 70s long hair melodies to 80s stadium rock they crossed a lot of boundaries. Can't believe it's 20 years since Freddie Mercury's death (which means I am getting properly old) and having passed them over for very different music the occasional blast of something like this does me a lot of good. Have to say the love song is good but not one of their best, however Hammer to Fall, although dated is still a fine tune and one to make me play a bit of air guitar if given the opportunity (and no-one is looking)

Eton Rifles - The Jam
Proper band, with some proper tunes. Class war, old-school tie, railing against the establishment, all that good stuff . It took me some time to grasp the message behind this and just thought it was a great song, but surely with the return of cuts, recession and even Thatcher (on screen at least), it is about time for this kind of music to make a comeback. It does have some fairly hard-hitting lyrics - "I'd prefer the plague - to the Eton Rifles" - and was a marker to Mr Welller's social commentary and ongoing references to little bits of Englishness that has sustained his remarkable career.

LA Woman - The Doors
Mr Mojo Risin' got me to work one particularly tough day this week. Good throaty, shouty, long tune to lift me away from the drudgery of a cold commute at stupid o'clock in the morning. Definitely more accessible than An American Prayer anyway, and still somehow almost sounds fresh now. Fantastic bassline, and as you might expect some killer keyboards which may (or not) have inspired some others to use them too

which brings me to...

No More Heroes - The Stranglers
More political grown-up punk, namechecks for Russian revolutionaries and fictional Spanish squires, a general 'up yours' to the state of the system and wishing upon us the heroes (or lack of) that we deserve. Also one of the best middle eights of any tune I know,

Your Time Will Come - Amy MacDonald
For the number of times I play this album when I am driving round the country it may as well be stuck in the CD player. She has a lovely voice, and obviously thinks a great deal about the songs she writes. Saw her by chance at Glasto just when she getting famous and having seen her since I am pleased to say she got better and more confident. Very much the antidote to cheap plastic pop and it is quite helpful to have someone lilting this in your ear whilst heading home in the sheeting rain

So soon your time will come
Get out while you're still young
May all your dreams come true
So happy for you

The Blower's Daughter - Damien Rice
Well conceived, well constructed and well performed. Failed to see him ten years ago when I had tickets and was required elsewhere at short notice. Still my biggest live miss I reckon. This song hurts just enough to make you not listen to it too often, which therefore provides greater pleasure when you do.

Rock Me Amadeus - Falco
I'll get me coat

[ST's note: the link above is to the version we all remember, but check out the original single version too: very Paul Hardcastle.... we danced to this at our wedding in Vienna, and I can confirm that all Austrians of a certain age know every single word]

Enjoy your weekends people and I'll no doubt be back (though after that last effort, who knows)
Hasta luego

---

Nice work Ali: a good thoughtful selection.  Welcome around here anytime.  For that matter, if anyone else fancies a(nother) crack at this slot, then drop me a line and we'll see what we can do.

Have a good weekend, y'all.

caught a light sneeze, caught a light breeze...

Until recently, I thought that I had a super-efficient immune system: I was very rarely affected by the coughs and sniffles and sore throats that seemed to lay everyone else low several times a year, and if I was, then it was only for a day or two before everything was back to normal.  What's the big deal?

I was right of course.  I do.

Unfortunately, my super-efficient immune was nothing to do with the amount of exercise I took or the quantity of fruit and vegetables I ate, as I rather smugly assumed, but instead had everything to do with my Multiple Sclerosis.

I'm not very tolerant of ill people; at least of those people who seem to make an absolute song and dance out of every little sniffle (*really* ill people are okay, naturally.  Sample conversation in our house: C: "I've got a headache".  Me: "Taken anything for it?" Subtext: don't come whining to me for sympathy until you have.  I'm a catch, ladies.  Really, I am).  This attitude might partly be to do with the rather gruff bedside manner of my doctor father, but I suspect it has rather a lot more to do with the fact that I simply wasn't ill very often, and when I was, I wasn't really very ill for very long.  Still, in my usual smug and superior way, I simply assumed that because I was able to go to work with a bit of a cold, anyone who had to take time off was WEAK.

Still, as it turns out, my amazing resilience to coughs and sneezes is nothing to do with anything I've done and is instead most likely a happy by-product of the army of rogue white blood cells that otherwise spend their time marauding around my body picking fights with anything and everything, regardless of whose side they're on, specifically focusing their attacks on my brain and spinal cord.

Well, I might have pins and needles in my hands, numb feet, numb legs, weakened and wasting muscles across my arms and shoulders, sporadic problems focusing my right eye, occasional jolts of electricity rushing up and down my spinal cord, fatigue, a possibly failing memory (although, to be fair, that could also be my age....) and I have to stab myself in the thigh with a two inch needle every week, but at least I don't get colds that often.

For the win!

....and then I woke up this morning with that feeling in the back of my throat and in the tops of my lungs, and I've been coughing and spluttering my way through the day.  It looks like I might have a damn cold, just before I go on holiday too.

Well, let me tell you this: if MS doesn't even have that upside, then you can damn well keep it.

say my name...

Cross-posted with Cheer Up Alan Shearer.  The best English presenter of coverage of the Premier League that you've probably never even heard of: meet Canal +'s Darren Tulett.

I spent much of the Christmas period in France, and I was delighted to see that there is plenty of TV coverage of the English Premier League. Not only was I able to watch more a less the full round of fixtures on Boxing Day, but also the rescheduled Arsenal v Wolves game the following day. Coverage was pretty good too. Canal+ has this thing they call a “multiplex”, where they show you live coverage from a game, and then if something starts to happen elsewhere, they flick their coverage to one of the other games. On Boxing Day, with a pretty full fixture list all kicking off at the same time, this worked pretty well.

I suppose it’s a little annoying when they flick games just as you’re getting your bearings or if you are interested in one game in particular, but given that we spend our time in England on days like this watching a TV programme that consists entirely of Jeff Stelling flicking between coverage of a bunch of blokes watching the games, whilst we get no live footage of matches at all, it’s a relatively good way to absorb the afternoon’s drama.

Canal+’s studio coverage is actually fronted by an Englishman; he speaks impeccable French, of course, but his accent is clearly English and he also – unusually for French TV – pronounces all of the English club names correctly and could actually tell you what Wigan or Norwich are like. Darren Tulett has apparently been working in the media in France since 1998 (when he asked Bloomburg, his employers at the time, to transfer him to Paris so he could catch some of the World Cup) and has ended up anchoring TV coverage of the football almost by accident… and he’s clearly a bit of a character. For the Boxing Day coverage, he was dressed up in black tie (the concept of Boxing Day is alien to your average Frenchman and in 2011 was a normal working day), but for the Arsenal v Wolves game he was wearing what looked like a velvet smoking jacket in burgundy. Apparently he’s always a snappy dresser, my father-in-law tells me, and has been called “the Austin Powers of French television". His studio guests for the afternoon’s coverage were the distinctly unpromising Gerrard Houllier and Jean Alain Boumsong.  Actually, from what I could gather, Boumsong is an excellent pundit and Tulett is a good enough presenter to know not to let Gerrard Houllier speak too often....

He was funny too: often, at the end of a game, we would get a pitchside interview with one of the French-speaking players – Florent Malouda at the Chelsea game, for instance – but Canal+ also took the live feeds of interviews with some of the managers. When Alex Ferguson came on, Tullet informed the viewers that he would do his best to do an off-the-cuff translation as Ferguson spoke, but did warn us that he was Scottish so….. Sure enough, although the translation initially went well, before long, as Sir Alex became more and more impenetrable, so Tullet’s translation became a bit slower until he eventually started laughing.

I thought he was great fun. He’s got a really light touch and he knew how to bring the best out of his pundits and the coverage that was flicking around games. Apparently he’s known as Darren d’Angleterre and presents other football programmes on French tv that are inspired by the likes of Fantasy Football – one is even called “Match of ze Day”. He once (so I read) persuaded David Ginola to re-live the error that cost France World Cup qualification in 1993. In the sketch, Ginola ends up trying to hitch a ride out of the stadium with his France shirt over his shoulder to the "Lonely Man" theme tune from the Incredible Hulk. Brilliant.

Until I saw him on Boxing Day, I'd never even heard of him and he could probably walk unrecognised through the Sky Sports studios.  When you think of some of the idiots we have presenting football coverage in this country, that seems remarkable.

Darren Tulett might not have scored 48 goals for England or anything like that, but he is possessed of charm, wit, a lightness of touch and the ability to competently present coverage of the English Premier League.... all of which is more than can be said for some people we might mention.

Can we send Gary Lineker to France on an exchange deal in the January transfer window?  Please?

Although, to be fair, why would Tulett want to come back?

He's a legend, and you can follow him on Twitter too - @DarrenCanalPlus

Our loss is French television's gain. 

France 1 - 0 England.

worth the pain....

Justgiving sent me an email the other day saying that they were closing down my site for donations.  I know the little widget showing showing the total we raised has been on the right hand side of this page for at least six months, but before I clear it all down and move on, I thought it was worth taking a moment to pause and reflect on what we've achieved:

On September 11th last year, LB, C and I ran the Robin Hood Half Marathon to raise money for the MS Society.  I won't lie to you, it was a bit of a slog.... but between us, thanks to the generous donations of people like you, we raised (including gift aid) the amazing total of.....

[drum roll]

£3,417.50

That's a lot of money.

More money, in fact, than we raised than running the same race in 2009.  Given the imminent collapse of the global economy and the way that most people are feeling the financial squeeze in one form or another, I want to thank everyone who made a donation from the bottom of my heart.

This is obviously a cause that is very close to me, and it makes me feel so proud that together we were able to make such a big contribution.  This money will help to fund the research to find the cause and cure for this devastating condition and to support and inform those whose lives are touched by it.

Thank you.  You guys rock.

I'm struggling to run much more than about 4 miles at the moment for various reasons (including basic laziness), but I'm toying with the idea of a triathlon at some point in the not-too-distant future (you remember the suits, right? both of 'em?), and have a mind to work my way up to the Olympic distance (1500m open water swim, 40km cycle, 10km run).  The first symptoms of what was eventually diagnosed as multiple sclerosis forced me to withdraw from the 2005 London Triathlon with all the training done and about a week to go before the off.  My name is quite literally on the damn event t-shirt.  It feels like unfinished business....

2013, maybe?

Who's with me?

Anyone?  Bueller?

smell my beard....

As I’ve mentioned a couple of times, I appear to be growing a beard.

My last proper shave was (I think) on the morning of Wednesday 22nd December. The inevitable consequence of this is that, over the course of the last 20 days, I’ve now got an honest-to-goodness beard.

(when Peter Jackson filmed Lord of the Rings, he needed to give Ian McKellan a false nose to make sure that his face didn't disappear into his Gandalf beard.... not a problem I think he'd have with me.)

It started out of laziness, of course. I don’t particularly enjoy shaving, and when I have a few days off work, I tend to let my stubble grow. Like lots of blokes, I reckon I look better with a hint of stubble… maybe two or three days worth. After that, it starts getting a bit itchy and/or I have to go back to work, so I have a shave. This time, I had a clear ten days off work and I just didn’t bother shaving at all. By the time I was due to go back to work on 3rd January, I had enough of a beard that I was prepared to run the inevitable gauntlet of banter and give it another couple of weeks. We’re going skiing towards the end of January, I thought, so why not go with a beard? Every time we go skiing, I come back with what looks like an identical set of photos of us wearing the same skiing gear standing with the same friends on a snowy mountain somewhere. Why not shake that up a bit by going with a beard?

Alright. It’s not much of a reason, I grant you, but there you go.

So I went to work with a beard.

Apparently, bearded men tend to get passed over for promotion more frequently than the clean-shaven. Well, that’s hardly likely to make much of a difference to the glacial rate of progression of my brilliant career, is it? Plus I decided that I simply didn’t care what people thought.

As it turned out, I received nothing but positive comments – almost to the extent that I began to wonder what was wrong with my face before. I’d sort of assumed that a beard would be a guy thing and that most ladies would be generally disapproving. As it turns out, I’ve had a surprising number of compliments from my female colleagues. Most are concerned that I keep it trimmed and don’t allow it to become a free-range, ZZ Top-style affair, but otherwise they seem to like it. Even my wife – who hated my 2008 Movember moustache – seems to have surprised herself by how much she likes it. Well, tolerates it.

I keep surprising myself too; I keep walking past mirrors, catching sight of myself, and thinking “Ooooh! You’ve got a beard!” as though this was a remarkable thing for a man of my age to be able to do. In my own head, I’m still about 16 years old, like most men, and the ability to grow hair on my face still seems an astonishing thing to be able to do. Tina asked me here over the weekend if I’d been out running on Trent Bridge at about noon on Sunday as she’d seen a tall, bearded man jogging as she drove into town. It was me, of course, but it still took a few seconds for the novelty of being described as a “bearded man” to sink in.

Ridiculous. I’m 37 years old. Why should my ability to grow a beard be remarkable to anyone, myself included?

And then, just when I thought I’d done all the hard bits of growing a beard, a colleague of mine returned from holiday today and paused for a moment as he tried to remember who he thought I now looked like.

“Oh. I know…” said the Weapon of the Zombie Apocalypse after some consideration, “…you look like Sir Clive Sinclair”.

Reader, I nearly shaved on the spot… but then another colleague (separately, but also today) came up and told me that, with a trim and a black polo-neck, I’d be a dead-ringer for Steve Jobs. Now that’s a bit more like it. An improvement, anyway. Unless he meant Steve Jobs now…

To be honest, I was really going for a Leonidas…..maybe the beard just needs a little more time and then - what with my physique and all - everyone will be making that comparison.

I think I’ll keep it until we’re back from Austria on 28th January, but after that I reckon it will go. Still, it’s something every guy should do at least once in their lives, eh? If for no other reason than because we can.

It’s a man thing.

Obviously.

Besides, as Kristen Wiig shows here with Zach Galifianiakis, beards are sexy.....

[GJ thinks I look like this guy.  I'm not having it.  I think I'd rather look like Sir Clive Sinclair]