open up my mouth, air comes rushing out...

Perhaps it's my age, but I find myself becoming irrationally angry when I see a child on a motorised scooter or mini-buggy or something. It's becoming increasingly common to see them on the paths and playing fields around the river near me. The council have recently built a lovely little mini-roadway around there, complete with pedestrian crossings and traffic signals, designed to help kids become more road aware on their bikes and things. Yesterday, seeing a little girl motoring around there on a scooter with an engine just made me feel cross and a bit sad.

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure I would have absolutely loved to have one of these when I was a kid... but not having one meant I was forced to get out on my pushbike under my own steam, and I'm pretty sure that didn't do me any harm in the long run.

That girl on the mini-roadway wasn't paying any attention to the traffic lights, either... and I hope she never takes that scooter out onto the roads.

Tsk.

Is it any wonder, I found myself chuntering to a friend as we were doing a warm-up before an interval session on the playing fields, watching a slightly tubby child driving around on a miniature four-wheeled, motorised truck, that type 2 diabetes is such a plague and that our kids are growing up fat?

**Pause for reflection**

.... rather than just growing up skinny and judgmental like me.

ski-bi dibby dib yo da dub dub...

This weekend, I'm off to Cambridge for a stag-do... which will likely consist of drinking, the races at Newmarket (which will mostly be drinking) and then some more drinking in Cambridge.  I'm a 43 year old man and I don't especially like being drunk, so I imagine I'll be able to avoid the peer-group pressure and avoid becoming a shambling mess.  Probably.

I suppose it doesn't really matter as long as I shake off the hangover in time for next week's wedding.

The groom is one of my oldest friends.  I first met him in around 1983 at school, and I've probably spent more time with him since than with almost anyone else in my life, probably including my parents.  He told my wife the other week that, on our first day at a new school together in 1987, I told him that he should stick with me and that I would look after him.  I have no recollection of this and it doesn't really sound like something I would say at a time when I was busy worrying about myself... but it's a lovely memory anyway.

We go back a really long way together.  Thirty-five years! Well, apart from anything else that might have happened in that time, we're both certainly older and have less hair now, anyway.

I couldn't be happier that he's getting hitched and I can't wait to see the daft sod tomorrow.

First wedding, too!  Amazing!  That's the emotional damage wrought by a boarding school education for you, eh?

we built this city on rock and roll...

I don't know what's more troubling: that I find myself completely ignorant of almost all contemporary music, or the fact that I don't seem to actually care all that much and don't have the least desire to rectify the issue.

Perhaps this is a symptom of my age (although I know a few people my age or older who have not lost their musical curiosity), but I seem content to listen to the bands that I've always listened to.  If I purchase some new music, it's likely to be by someone who already has a place in my record collection.  I suppose it could be worse: I did go through that cliche phase last year where I was re-buying on vinyl records that I already own in at least one other format... but I seem to have moved past that now.

Ed Sheeran is a case in point: I know it's fashionable amongst music fans of a certain ilk to dislike him.  Well, he's successful, isn't he... and if there's one thing that a music snob can't abide, it's mainstream success.  I didn't much care for his cameo in Game of Thrones because it seemed a bit forced, but I can't summon up the energy to dislike him because I simply don't know any of his music and can't be bothered to find out.  I have a vague assumption that I won't like him, but this is based on nothing more than a vague dislike of the very green tattoo sleeve he has on one arm (and I *like* tattoos) and on a fifteen second burst of "Galway Girl" that seemed a bit Riverdance to me.

It's all the more ironic then that I seem to have quite happily switched the way I consume music away from physical formats and even away from MP3s towards streaming on Amazon Music.  Never before have I had so much music at my fingertips; there's something ridiculous like 40 million songs available and the only limit to my listening pleasure is my imagination.

...and there's the problem.

If I keep asking Alexa to play me Toto's "Africa" whenever I'm in my kitchen, then I'm never going to hear anything new, am I?  There are dozens of curated playlists available and all I have to do to hear something new that might rock my world is to have a go, skipping past anything that doesn't take my fancy.  And have I done it? No.  To be honest, I'm just as likely to ask Alexa to play BBC Radio 5 as to listen to some music.. so I haven't even really had the time to listen to the new album by Lorde or the Fleet Foxes.

This will not stand.  I don't want to become that guy, do I? You know, the one who simply refuses to believe that any new music by a new artist could be as interesting as the old classics and therefore isn't worth the effort (unless it's already too late for me on that score).

Must. Try. Harder.

...Not least because the new season at choir starts in a month, and from then until Christmas it will likely be rehearsal tracks all the way. I think we're doing some Starship!

too old for Hamlet, too young for Lear....

Worst. Boyband. Ever

One of my oldest friends was over from Canada last week, so we headed down to Oxford to meet up with all the old gang in the pub for a reunion lunch. This kind of occasion has changed substantially now: in the old days we would basically just drink, talk about going to the Zodiac and then fall asleep on the sofa in front of a classic movie from the 1980s, most likely starring either Bruce Willis, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd or some combination of the three. Nowadays, there isn’t even any talk of the Zodiac (which doesn’t even exist any more) and the drinking is somewhat moderated by the presence of several delightful children of varying ages.

What remains true is that it’s nice to see everyone. There were about 20 of us this time around, and it was really nice to catch up with people who, I realise more with every passing year, are the best kind of people. Most I've known for twenty years, and one or two I've known for thirty years or more.  Man and Boy.

One thing that caught me a little off-guard this time around was that a number of people looked me up and down and asked me if I had grown. I’m 43 years old now. Surely, if anything, I’m likely to be getting shorter as the ravages of time increasingly make their presence felt and I’m beaten down a little more every day by the ongoing trials of life. Maybe the bar I was leaning on was slightly uphill of everyone else; perhaps the trainers I was wearing had a stacked heel; maybe the skinny black t-shirt and drainpipe jeans I was wearing had a slimming effect that just made me look a little taller than normal; maybe my monastic adherence to a life of self-inflicted hardships really has made me taller…. who can say? Perhaps they’ve all shrunk?

Well, it was nice to see them all anyway, the silly sods.. and I'll be doing it all again when my very oldest friend (on the left of that picture. We met in about 1983, we think) gets married in September.

Not to be morbid, but before too much longer we’ll be doing this sort of thing at funerals, and that won’t be quite as much fun, will it?

Had we but world enough, and time....

out my hair...

I didn’t really notice that I was losing my hair until I was already in my twenties and when my idea of a haircut was already clippers all over.

I think I might have been more upset by the whole thing if I had:
a) been younger, or
b) had been still trying to work any kind of a hairstyle.

I actually saw a middle-aged guy in Gare du Nord in Paris last month with a man-bun…. well, they’re quite the thing, aren’t they? Closer examination as he walked towards me revealed that this was a man-bun that was gathering together all the spare hair on the side of this guy’s head in an attempt to hide his bald spot.

I’m quite tall, so I tend to (literally) see through these little deceptions, but they often make me wonder about the state of someone’s mind to think that this was ever a good idea. I don’t go to my gym very much anymore, but it was a source of amusement to me to see younger men in front of the huge mirrors in the changing rooms, carefully and delicately and lovingly teasing their hair into position before they went up to the main gym for their workout. Often, I was tall enough to see that they were ultimately wasting their time and energy on what was likely to become a lost cause.  Bless them. I suppose you can't blame them for trying.

I was away from the office the other day, working in a store. Apparently, that lunchtime, they had a demonstration from a visiting company of a product that they shake onto a balding head that they then set with a blow-dryer to give you an incredibly full head of hair. The results, I’m told, were amazing and it was such a shame I wasn’t there to have this magical product demonstrated on me. I don’t get it: no matter how amazing this stuff might make you look, you’re still going bald, aren’t you? If your apparently full head of hair does magically attract a mate, then when you wake up the next morning, or when you have a shower, or when you go for a swim, or whatever, then you’re going to have some explaining to do, aren’t you?

That’s not to say that my hairloss doesn’t exert a kind of fascination for me too; I’m not completely indifferent to the rolling back of the tides. For many years, I had a little scar just clinging onto the shoreline above my right eyebrow. My hairline would retreat ever further backwards up my head, but this little scar seemed to cling on, offering me some small comfort that at least that boundary seemed secure from the ravages of time and tide. No more. That little island has been submerged in the high tide of my ever-growing forehead. I was also a little taken aback the other day to catch sight of a CCTV camera screen, showing the view from a camera located immediately above and behind me. 

Only now, at the end did I understood what my wife meant as we lay in bed one evening and she gazed lovingly at me for a while before whispering in my ear, “gosh, you really are going bald aren’t you?”

Who says romance is dead?

papa, don't preach...

I was slightly mortified last week to be referred to as someone's "work dad".

We were chatting away over the desks about a mutual colleague's new(-ish) boyfriend.  They've been going out for a few months now and seem very happy together, which is clearly very nice.  I was first introduced to this chap at a Twenty:20 game at Trent Bridge in the summer and I was saying to my colleague how nervous he seemed.

"Well, of course he seemed nervous.  It's quite a big deal meeting someone's work dad".

I'm sorry, what?

I'm about fifteen years older than these girls, who both used to be in my team a couple of years ago. To be honest, I don't tend to think all that deeply about our friendship: they're colleagues that I used to manage and with whom I get on pretty well. I certainly don't try and define our relationship in familial terms....Work dad, though?  REALLY?

...If I have to be a part of someone's work family, wouldn't I more naturally suggest the roles of cool older brother or groovy uncle?  Work dad?  COME ON!

I quickly changed the subject to conceal my outrage.

"I still haven't forgiven your boyfriend for standing you up before your first date"
"That was three years ago"
"I know."

Work dad.  I ask you!

I hate these blurred lines...

So, I went to the opticians in the end.  Of course I did.  No matter how much I kind of didn't really want to know if there was something wrong.... when it comes down to it, I'm logical enough to know that there wasn't any other choice but to go and to find out what was going on, and if the visual issues I was experiencing were anything to do with my MS. In my world, ignorance is not bliss.

... and I suppose there's good news and there's bad news.

The good news is that my optic nerve looks really healthy and my pupil dilation and things are in good shape.  Excellent.

The bad news?

Apparently, I'm getting old.

I don't need reading glasses, and my overall vision is pretty good.... but the optician gently suggested to me that I might benefit from a pair of glasses to sharpen things up a bit when I'm watching telly in the evening or working in bad light on my computer at work.  I knew he was right the moment he said it too.  In fact, deep down, I was pretty sure that this was going to be the outcome before I walked in.

And you know what?  That's okay by me.

I started wearing glasses when I was 5 years old and needed some pretty hefty correction from then until the day I had lenses implanted in 2008 (-ish).  Although the surgery was a cosmetic procedure, in the sense that I didn't need to have it done and my vision could be satisfactorily corrected using glasses or contact lenses... it was nothing short of life-changing.  If you've been blessed with good vision, you'll never understand, but any glasses wearer will probably know exactly what I mean: being able to wake up in the night and go to the loo without having to grope your way around; to be able to go running without needing to think about contact lenses; to be able to *see*.

But wearing glasses for an hour or so a day when I need a little boost is completely different to needing to wear them every waking moment.  It might seem like a little thing to you, but for the first time in my life, I've been able to choose any frame I wanted, knowing that my lenses aren't going to look like milk bottles.. or even to just be able to try a frame on and see what I look like wearing them.

I've discovered that, in the main, I quite liked the fuzzy edges.  Life looks mostly ok with slightly fuzzy edges.  I also feel a little drunk wearing these glasses.  I'm not sure that used to happen.  Maybe that's my age too.

... my colleagues tell me that they make me look intelligent.  Or like a geography teacher.

Well, it's early days.

golden, fallen heart

...and so it seems that I'm not bald enough already.

Some days, I wonder if it might not be kinder just to shoot me.

I was so pleased when that barber in Whangarei gave me a NZ $2 "half head discount" in 2010.  I should go back: I reckon I might qualify for a few more dollars off by now.

I used to wet my hair when I was at school to dampen it down.  I was told at the time that this would lead to baldness in later life, and I laughed in their faces because this was clearly nonsense.  Well, I'm not laughing now.  Just think, that might have been caused by a stray raindrop.

Learn from me and make sure you always -- ALWAYS -- wear a shower cap (or a hat, if you're outdoors and feel a bit self-conscious in a shower cap outside your home).  I'm not 100% sure it will protect you from blemishes that lead to bald spots (or, as I like to call it, my mange spot)... but you can't be too careful.

you watched yourself gavotte...

I don’t like Cristiano Ronaldo.

Whilst he’s clearly a talented footballer, there’s something about his oleaginous smile and the way he preens and poses on the pitch that really gets my goat. He might be the best player on the pitch, but surely even the very greatest player understands that football is a team game, and he needs his teammates to succeed in order to succeed himself. It’s often said that the difference between Ronaldo and Lionel Messi is that Messi would give up all his individual awards for team success, and that Ronaldo would do the opposite. There’s something delightful about the fact that Ronaldo is statistically one of the greatest players to grace the game, but that he isn’t even the greatest player in the Spanish league. Does Ronaldo think that this theatrics on the pitch, where he berates his team mates when they don’t pass the ball to HIM, help or hinder? Nani has over 100 caps for Portugal, but he always seems to look terrified of what Ronaldo will think if he decides to take a shot himself.

I sat down to watch yesterday’s final, eager to see the French wipe the smile off his smug face. Portugal barely deserved to be there anyway, and wouldn’t it be a great story if the French could win their own tournament (not to mention the fact that I have a French wife who was wearing her French t-shirt and bellowing out the French national anthem).

And you know what? Over the course of the game, Ronaldo changed my mind.

It was the injury that started it: I might have been happy to see Ronaldo beaten, but I wasn’t ready to see him crying real tears as he was forced to leave the pitch on a stretcher early in the game because of injury. He’d tried to carry on, but it was quickly clear that he couldn’t stay on the pitch. He tried to cover his face, but his absolute desolation was laid bare. I looked at him and, rather than a self-regarding idiot, I saw a man who had worked unbelievably hard to get to this point and had his dreams and hopes dashed. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t have a hard enough heart to feel anything other than sympathy for him at that moment.

In truth, my opinion on Cristiano Ronaldo began to shift earlier in the tournament. In many sports, the players often line up in the tunnel waiting to be brought out onto the pitch. They often have small children with them, mascots who are lucky enough to hold hands with the players and to walk out onto the pitch with them. I like to watch how the players respond to this: many are totally focused on the game ahead of them and are almost in another place as they visualise the game. These people barely notice the mascots at all, and it’s hard to blame them. Some players – and Chris Robshaw in the England rugby team is one of these – are able to step outside themselves and make an effort to ensure that these kids are okay and that they are having an amazing time. Robshaw will often crouch down with his escort and do his best to put them at ease. It’s lovely to watch. Whatever your preconceptions of the kind of person Ronaldo might be, he’s also in the Chris Robshaw camp with the player escorts, and will spend a couple of minutes chatting with them instead of staring, glassy-eyed down the tunnel waiting to be called out onto the pitch.

At some point during the game yesterday, Ronaldo came back pitch-side with his leg heavily strapped up, and he gave me more reasons to reconsider my view of him. As a player on the pitch, it always seems to be about CR7. The champions league final this season was a case in point: Ronaldo was barely fit and was a peripheral figure for the whole game, carried by his team mates to the penalty shoot-out. When Ronaldo scored the decisive penalty, he talked expansively about how he had a “vision” that he would score the winning goal… ignoring the fact that a penalty isn’t a winning goal, and that his team-mates had carried him for 120 minutes to put him into that position. On the sidelines of the game last night, Ronaldo could not influence the game on the pitch with his own skill, and so instead he threw himself wholeheartedly into supporting his teammates, willing them to success. When they won, he was crying tears of joy as the supposed one-man-team won the game without him. Yes he changed back into his playing kit, complete with captain’s armband, to pick up the trophy, but it was too late now… my view on him had shifted and I could no longer feel anything but pleased for him.

Sometimes we’re too quick to judge. Even if, for all this change of heart, I probably still won’t be rushing out any time soon to buy myself some CR7 underpants…

...tempting though it is.

But for last night at least, where before I had only seen an arrogant, entitled man-child, I was able to see the dreaming fan and the vulnerable human being in Cristiano Ronaldo.  It was a bit of a surprise to me to be honest, but there you go.  I must be gaining some empathy in my old age.

*opinion subject to sudden change when I next watch him preening around on a football pitch next season... 

so you go, and you stand on your own and you leave on your own...

When we went to see Brian Wilson performing Pet Sounds the other night, I was in the somewhat unusual position of being well into the younger end of the demographic. This is not something that happens to me very often anymore, unless it's one of those gigs where the kidz are accompanied by their parents (when I saw Jake Bugg playing at Rock City a couple of years ago, I was one of about four people in the audience who recognised "Folsom Prison Blues" when Bugg covered it.... all of the others were dads).  It seems that Brian Wilson (aged 73) is something of a draw for the grey pound, most of whom no doubt bought Pet Sounds the first time around and not, like me, when they started to get into music and heard it was one of the greatest albums ever recorded.

On the way to the Royal Concert Hall, we walked past Rock City. It was a Wednesday night... student night... and there was a huge crowd of kids in their late-teens and very early twenties queuing up outside the Rig.  It was quite a gathering of the tribes, and as we walked past, I had a good look and saw a real mixture of people.  Well, after all, everyone goes out for the big nights, don't they? The ones that really caught my eye though were the awkward ones; the ones who looked like they were trying a bit too hard to fit in and weren't quite managing.  They caught my eye because that was me.

As we walked on to the Concert Hall, I told my wife that I wouldn't go back to being that age for any money in the world.  I remember it far too well for that.  I might be twenty-odd years older, but I'm a lot more confident in who I am and in what I like to do these days; I don't feel much of a need anymore to pretend to be something I'm not.

If I could go back to being nineteen, then maybe I'd spend more time doing things I enjoyed with people that I liked. What I didn't know then is that if people don't like you for what you are, then they're probably not worth knowing.

Plus, if Brian Wilson is in town performing Pet Sounds, only an idiot would want to be anywhere else*.

Brian Wilson!

* admittedly, ticket price may prove prohibitive... although you could equally be at home listening to Pet Sounds instead, and I pretty much guarantee that's a better night than any you would be likely to have at the Rig. Certainly better than any night I had at the age of nineteen in anywhere like that.

sing me to sleep...

You know you’re getting old when you start remarking to your colleagues that you’ve just had two really good nights’ sleep in a row. They were good enough not to laugh in my face, but I could see what they were really thinking. It’s true though: I’ve had a stinking cold for the last week, with a couple of restless nights. It was brilliant to go to bed early on Tuesday night and on Wednesday night and to have 8 hours of almost unbroken rest before heading into work. How often does that happen? Not often enough that I didn’t feel the need to talk about it at work the next day, that’s for sure.

I like sleeping. I don’t do anywhere as near as much of it as I would like, but it’s one of life’s pleasures, isn’t it? A good, long sleep in a comfortable bed and with no particular place to be in the morning: bliss. How often does that happen in a year? I think that one of the saddest things about getting older and having a job is that, even when you don’t have to be in the office, your body is still conditioned to wake up at the crack of dawn and you just seem to lose the ability to lie in bed for hours on end. My teenage self is disgusted with me.

I don’t even really get to lie-in at the weekends any more, either. And the worst part about that is that it’s entirely self-inflicted: parkrun on a Saturday and a long run on a Sunday. What with marathon training and all, it’s small wonder that I now spend most of my weekend afternoons asleep on the sofa. I don’t even think I can blame my MS, dammit. Tiredness and fatigue are completely different things, and I’m lucky enough to only get the former very occasionally (and when I do, it’s like the power-switch has been pulled and my body just shuts down rather than gently drifts up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire).

I like to think that I’m a night-owl and will happily burn the midnight oil on any day of the week, just pottering about, reading a book or listening to some music. This is now plainly a fantasy. This might have been true once-upon-a-time, but it definitely isn’t true now. I usually make it to 10pm, but even that’s not guaranteed these days, as the eyes start to sag on the sofa almost the moment I’ve finished my tea.

Still, the one good thing about getting older is that I pretty much don’t give a shit what anyone else might think about this. So much for getting old disgracefully.

when autumn leaves start to fall...

I spent a decent portion of Sunday afternoon asleep in front of a fire with the television on. I’d like to think that this is because I’d been out for a twelve mile run that morning in the snow and was tired; I suspect that it was actually because I’m forty-one years old and because it was Sunday afternoon.

By the same token, there’s a chance that the increasing regularity with which I am completely forgetting people’s names is down the progression of my multiple sclerosis… but I also suspect that it’s more likely to be explained by the fact that I’m forty-one years old and this is just what happens.

I don’t hanker after a lost youth, In fact, I often tell people that I wouldn’t be seventeen again for all the money in the world. It’s easy to romanticise a time when you had your whole life in front of you and everything seemed possible, but let’s be honest, that was an awful, confusing time and it definitely didn't seem like a world of boundless possibilities when I was living it. I’d far rather be the age I am now, knowing the things that I know and being much, much more comfortable with who I am than to go through all that again. Although that’s not to say that I welcome the indignities of encroaching old age. They're just part of the package.  Swings and roundabouts, I suppose.

Anyway, I quite like snoozing in front of a good fire with my slippers on and nowhere in particular to be.

I think retirement will suit me.

“Life was no longer something to endure, but to live. ”
― Hubert Selby Jr

red squirrel in the morning....

Whatever happened to lie-ins?

I ask because I was having a conversation with someone this morning who has teenage sons, and she was saying that she finds it almost impossible to get them out of bed. Yesterday, her nineteen year-old didn’t actually surface before 7pm… which is a pretty heroic effort if you ask me. She was remarkably phlegmatic about it too, it has to be said. She just shrugged her shoulders and said they could do what they liked.  He'd been up all night on the internet, apparently.  I bet he had.

I’m not expecting to be able to go back to being a teenager and to just lounge around in bed until lunchtime and beyond… but I don’t really seem to get any kind of a lie-in anymore and that makes me feel a little sad for days gone by. Apart from anything else, those few extra hours sleep at the weekend just help you recharge your batteries for another week at work...and that mostly seems to have disappeared from my life.

It’s all my own fault too. You see, the thing is that I’ve picked up activities at the weekend that require actually getting out of bed and leaving the house. No one's making me get up to do this stuff: they're activities that I volunteered to do, so there's no one to blame but myself.  If you had suggested to the teenage me that I would voluntarily be getting up at 7:15 on a Saturday morning to get up and ready for a 5km run at 9am, then I would have laughed in your face. If you were to then add that I would be doing more or less the same thing on a Sunday morning too, only this time it was a ten mile run, then I probably told myself to get a grip and then burst into tears.

Whisper it quielty, but I suppose it’s actually quite nice to be up early and to have been for a run and still have the best part of the day in front of you…. It’s just that thinking like that is so old, isn’t it? You wouldn’t catch all that many young people thinking like that.

I’m old and I get up early in the morning. If you'll forgive me, I feel like I need to mourn the passing of my youth.

land of confusion....

Some of the younger members of my team had a board game night yesterday. They came into the office clutching bags filled with games like “Settlers of Catan”, “Dead of Winter” and “Would I Lie to You?” ready for the evening ahead of them (doesn’t anybody play “The Game of Life” anymore?).

Inevitably, they ended up playing “Cards Against Humanity”

They came back into the office this morning telling stories of their night. Amongst the guests were a bunch of guys who are on the graduate training scheme. It seems that Cards Against Humanity is a bit of a struggle for your average 23 year-old graduate: apparently one of the other players had absolutely no idea what “Auschwitz” might be, didn’t know what “dysentery” was (or how to pronounce it) and was also stumped by the word “solace”

Now, I know that this game isn’t everybody’s cup of tea, and you need to be a little careful who you play with in case anyone is easily offended (although, in my experience, the person you think would like the game the least is often the one who runs away with it)…. But you’d expect most reasonably intelligent people to at least be able to understand all of the words, wouldn’t you?

Apparently not.

How is it possible to come all the way through our higher education system without even a passing knowledge of the most infamous concentration camp of them all? Isn’t that exactly the kind of stuff we should be teaching our children? Aren't we supposed to be never forgetting that sort of thing? What exactly are we teaching them? Don’t they have any intellectual curiosity, damnit?

This, remember, is the carefully selected talent that will one day be running the business and perhaps the world.

We’re doomed. No really: we’re doomed.

Children are the future, my arse.

just litter on the breeze....

At the risk of sounding like a grumpy old man, one of the things that makes me most angry is when I cycle down the Victoria Embankment by the river Trent on my way to work and see all the litter left lying around there. This is a pleasant curve of quiet road that has the river on one side and a park on the other side. It has an adventure playground, a café and a paddling pool. It’s used for various festivals and fairs over the course of the year, and it’s a pretty nice public space (I use it every Wednesday for interval training, and I've probably run the loop around here more than anywhere else in the world).

..At least it would be nice if people didn’t park up their cars here to eat their drive-thru takeaways and then dump their rubbish out of their car windows. There are bins all the way down this road, but many people simply can’t be arsed and just toss their trash and drive off. As I cycle past it all, often within a few metres of a rubbish bin, it makes me so cross.

Grrr.

Things like this make my father-in-law cross too, and back in the day, if he saw someone dropping litter, he would pick it up and tap them on the shoulder with an “Excuse me, you’ve dropped something”. Apparently, most people were so shocked by this that they just meekly take the rubbish without a word. To be honest, I’d be worried that if you tried something like that now, the best you could hope for is to be jeered at, and the worst would probably be a smack in the face.

What’s wrong with people? Is it that they’re expecting someone else to pick it up, or that they genuinely don’t care what happens to it once they’ve discarded it? Apparently, the Highways Agency cleans up more than 180,000 sacks of litter from motorways and 'A' roads every year. Fly-tipping on land owned by Network Rail costs around £2.3 million a year to clean up and local authorities in England spend close to a billion pounds a year picking up litter. A billion pounds! To put that money into context, that money could fund 38,633 social care workers, pay the running costs of 4,400 libraries, or pay for 33,200 additional nurses (although, presumably if they did, the litter pickers would be out of work... so it's swings and roundabouts, eh?)

With Glastonbury in a couple of weeks, and before we make any social judgments about the kind of person who might dump their McDonalds drive through rubbish out of the window of their parked car, it’s probably also worth remembering that this is something that also blights something that generally prides itself on being a really green festival (and which generally has a very middle-class clientele, many of whom wouldn't dream of eating anything that came from a drive-thru).

 Festival goers at Glastonbury are constantly exhorted to “love the farm, leave no trace” and there’s a real focus on sustainability, with Green Police around to make sure you don't pee in the hedges and upset the water table. They're trying to eliminate plastic bottles from the site, and even the cutlery you get from the food outlets is made of wood rather than plastic. Clearly, the festival isn’t populated by the hippies of legend any more (far from it, it’s practically part of the social circuit now). Every year we go sees people embracing more and more culture of disposability: everything is so cheap, so why would you bother to bring it home? People dump their tents, their bags, their wellies, their clothes… pretty much anything you can think of… because they just can’t be arsed to take it home and have the hassle of washing it; it was cheap enough that they just leave it on the farm.

You can see this in the litter: there are (beautifully painted) bins everywhere, but even before the weekend has really started, the whole site is swimming in litter. Apparently, every single thing, down to the last butt end, is picked up before the cows are allowed back out onto their pasture, but some 2000 tonnes of rubbish are left behind when the festival-goers leave the site: condoms, beer cans, nitrous oxide canisters… you name it. In 2009, about 400 gazebos, 9,500 roll mats, 5,500 tents, 6,500 sleeping bags, 3,500 airbeds and 2,200 chairs were abandoned. 9,500 roll mats out of a total of around 135,000 people at the festival is a pretty damn big percentage of people leaving that stuff behind, wouldn't you say?  It makes for a sad and depressing sight on a Monday morning as you hike out to your car, That's for sure.  But, to be honest, wading through all that rubbish is depressing long before then too.

And don't get me started on all those plastic bottles that covered those remote Pacific desert islands in The Island with Bear Grylls either.... horrifying.

Ugh.  We don't deserve this planet.

---

I also found out today that our national forum reps at work, the guys who are elected in to represent employees across the country in front of the executive, decided to use their time with the leaders of the business to moan about the people who cycle to work.  Yes, because it's the bike users who cause all the damn problems in the business.  I'm sure that they're somehow responsible for the full car-parks, the congestion in and out of site and probably for global warming too.  It's because of the people who don't drive to work that car drivers are having to pay a bigger share of the workplace parking levy too.......  Honestly.  Really?  REALLY?  AND they sacked Jeremy Clarkson too.  Poor, persecuted lambs.  It must be very hard.

shaddap you face...

I got asked today if I ever did any modelling.

Um, no.  Why do you ask?

Because this:

*sigh*

HE LOOKS NOTHING LIKE ME.

He's about 50, apart from anything else.

Oh, I see.  You're so funny.

they do it over there but we don't do it here....

Last Friday, I went to watch some cricket at Trent Bridge. The timings of the 20:20 games this year mean that they are almost all on Friday evenings and start at 18:30, giving people a reasonable chance of getting in from work and spending the first three hours or so of their weekend having a few beers and watching a crash-bang game of hit-and-giggle cricket. Sitting immediately behind us was a group of lads in their mid-to-late twenties. There were about six of them, and they were enjoying the game and enjoying a bit of bantz over a few pints. They were mostly drinking Rekorderlig, but dubious taste in overly-sweet, coloured ciders aside, they were just like any other bunch of mates watching a game of cricket and shooting the breeze at the start of the weekend.

Except….except…. what has happened to men? Somewhere along the way, we seem to have hopelessly lost our way. I think it might be David Beckham’s fault. These guys were at a game of cricket with their mates; not, you would imagine, an occasion to get tarted up. These guys were wearing moccasins with no socks, close-fitting harem pants with the bottoms turned up over their ankles; they were wearing open collared shirts with blazers…and worst of all, they were all primped and preened to within an inch of their lives. They had neatly trimmed beards (as best as they could manage, anyway) and perfectly gelled hair. But oh my goodness, the eyebrows. The eyebrows! I understand that a thick mono-brow may not be ideal, but why on earth do men get them sharpened and plucked to the point where they look like Ken dolls from the planet Vulcan. It’s bizarre. Do guys look at other guys who have had this done and decide that this is the look they wanted? Do they think this is what women find desirable in a man? Is this what women find desirable in a man?

Perhaps I’m so old now that I’ll never understand… but what’s Andy Burnham’s excuse?

He’s 45 years old and his eyebrows are so hopelessly over-manicured that you can clearly see the natural brow line where they should be sitting; hell, you can practically see the 5 o’clock shadow. They look so fake that they might as well have been painted on. Never mind that he's an MP, he’s also from Liverpool, for goodness sake!

Is this something I should be looking into? Did I miss the man-memo? I’m not against a bit of manscaping per-se, but things are getting out of hand and SOMETHING MUST BE DONE.

older...

It's my birthday on Saturday, but I'm on holiday tomorrow and so I came back from a meeting at lunchtime today to discover that my team had decorated my desk.  Balloons. Lots of balloons.  Cake. Banners. A large package in Hello Kitty wrapping paper that turned out to contain a hamper of goodies from a fantastic deli in town: parkin biscuits, chutney, piccalilli, Gentlemen's Relish, artisinal popcorn, a chocolate cigar, snacking salami.... a pretty good haul by anyone's standards.  In addition, there was plenty of cake.

And they sang me Happy Birthday.

My team joke all the time about how I'm impossibly old. Well, they are mostly in their early twenties, and as far as they're concerned, I'm old and I'm only getting older and older.  But I love the fact that they went to so much trouble.  They made a real fuss of me when I turned 40 last year, and this year they've spent the last few weeks colluding with my wife to find out what to put in the hamper they were putting together for me.  It's kind of touching, don't you think? I love my team!

The balloons turned out to be controversial.  Apparently the building police came round whilst I was in a meeting and popped the helium balloons with a pair of scissors.  They say that it's something to do with the smoke detectors in the atriums that would trigger the sprinklers if an out-of-control balloon happened to float past them... but they're not fooling anyone.  They're just killjoys and we all know it.  To be honest, I'm surprised they're allowed to use scissors.  I came back to find the popped balloons still attached sadly to their strings, which was a bit of a downer.  You think they'd be more worried about the mouse infestation in the building, to be honest.

What times are these where we can't celebrate peoples' birthdays with balloons?

O tempora!  O mores!

like when a rag gets wet...

My new boss is slightly younger than me.  If I had to guess, I would say that she's a little older than thirty-five but younger than forty.  I have no problem being managed by someone younger than me, and certainly no issue with being managed by a woman - three of the best four managers I've ever had were women - but it's just that I have noticed that she has a certain tone of phrase that makes her sound a bit middle-aged.

I'll give you an example: whenever she says "last minute", my boss doesn't just say "last minute", she always says "last minute dot com".  Okay, I grant you.... that doesn't make her sound middle-aged as much as dating her very specifically to a period of time in the mid-1990s, but that basically amounts to the same thing, doesn't it?  It's as if her linguistic development froze when she was at some point in her twenties, and she's never felt the need to move on.  It's a bit like those hippies who persisted in saying things like "groovy" and "man" all the time, although I'm pretty certain involving a lot less marijuana.

There's nothing particularly wrong with it, and nor is it particularly strange that someone of that age might begin to sound a little middle-aged.... it's just that I'm not really ready to sound middle-aged myself just yet and I'm dismayed to watch it happening to people around me who are of around my age.  I might *be* middle-aged, but I'd like to think that I don't sound it.  At least not yet.

It's happening to some of my friends too (although I'm sure not you): when viewed through the prism of Facebook, some of my best friends suddenly seem very dull indeed.  It's not that they *are* dull, you understand, only that they have a grasp of the medium that is something akin to my father's, and they post update after update to which the only possible response is "cool story, bro....".

When did this happen?  When did these people move into middle-age?  Why did it happen? How did it happen so fast?

Please tell me that it hasn't happened to me.

Maybe it already has, and maybe worrying about something like this is the first sign of a mid-life crisis.

Damn.

I need to buy a flashier car.

but I won't take anything less...

There's a guy at work - and I'm sure you know someone just like him - who is absolutely obsessed with technology.  He's about fifty and has a wife and a couple of kids, but his real love is clearly the pursuit of technology.   If there's something new out, he wants to have it.  It's not just the obvious stuff like smartphones and tablets, which might cost a few hundred pounds each, it's the really high end stuff like home cinema systems, stereos... the kind of things that are likely to set you back thousands of pounds.  He doesn't only want new things, he wants the very best things.  He's a nice enough guy, but you never want to accidentally stray onto one of these subjects, because he will be able to go into miniscule, infinitely tedious detail about the important technical stats and the identity of the very best thing on the market that money can buy.

I accidentally got caught in a conversation with him about music players when I was passing by his desk the other day.  I can't even remember what got him started, but before I knew where I was, he was showing me the £900 lossless music player that he had personally imported from Korea.  He explained in great detail how he had shifted his whole music collection into a lossless format (which had taken weeks and weeks and required special storage) and then insisted on picking up his enormous headphones and getting me to have a listen to how good it sounded.

"Of course, it won't be quite as good as what I get through my £50,000 of stereo back home (!!!), but it isn't too bad.  What do you like to listen to?"
"Um.  Mostly heavy metal"
"Well, I've got some Iron Maiden, will that do?  Seventh Son of a Seventh Son?"
"Perfect".

He cued up "Moonchild"

Bruce Dickinson started to sing.  "Seven deadly sins.  Seven ways to win.  Seven holy paths to hell and your trip begins...."  And you know what it sounded like?  It sounded like a heavy metal album produced in the 1980s.  I'm sure it was a flawless reproduction stored in a lossless format, but really all that technology served to do was to reveal the limitations of the original source material.  Perhaps it's not the best demonstration.  We tried some jazz, which sounded absolutely amazing, but I couldn't help but wonder what the point was.

If you've ever listened to a CD alongside and MP3 of the same tune, you'll already know that the difference is incredible.  CD is not a famously warm sounding format, but through a decent stereo, it sounds streets better than the MP3 and you start to understand exactly what you lose in the compression.  But then again, I'm prepared to trade off a certain amount of quality for convenience.  I do like a good pair of headphones, but I can tolerate digital downloads from iTunes or Amazon just fine.

Not this guy.  You do wonder whether his ears are even really capable of picking up the differences at the very highest end, but perhaps he didn't spend his teenage years listening to heavy metal and that might just be me.....à chacun son goût.

As you might imagine, this guy is not a big fan of vinyl and really sees no attraction at all in the warmth of a 180g record.  All he hears is the imperfection.  For me personally, I'm learning that technical perfection is far from the most important thing when it comes to music.  And besides, as we were browsing for something to listen to on his very expensive and high-end device, I got a decent look at his record collection.  James Blunt in a lossless format is still James Blunt, right?  I mean, how good could that possibly be?

At completely the other end of the scale, I was telling my team the story about how I tried to buy "The Holy Bible" by Manic Street Preachers on the way home after seeing them at the Reading Festival, but it was a bank holiday Monday and all the shops were shut.

"Why were the shops shut?"
"Why would you need to go to a shop to buy music?"
"Who are the Manic Street Preachers?"
"How old are you?"

etc.