Ian.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Ian, these last few weeks. It’s been more than 30 years since I last saw him, and we weren’t really friends, but he still keeps popping unbidden into my thoughts. 

I studied history for my undergraduate degree. Warwick University has quite a reputation in the subject, so it was (and I assume still is) a popular course with maybe a hundred students in total. My own particular specialism in Modern European and Renaissance History was a little more niche than the main course, but we all came together for lectures in the core subjects, and it was here that I met Ian. 

Ian was studying Modern History, I think, but he cut such a distinctive figure that he was hard to miss: he was tall and ungainly, wore aviator style glasses (before they came back into fashion) and a railwayman style cap. He wasn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, cool and would stride about the campus purposefully in practical looking shoes and an anorak. He also had funny little bald patches in his hair. At the time, it just helped underline how weird a kid he was, but thinking of it now, it looks like the kind of baldness you get when you constantly pull at your own hair until you start to pull it out. But yeah, he was the weird kid. 

At the age of eighteen, I was painfully aware of my own awkwardness, but you know what people are like, I found my own gang and Ian was firmly outside the boundaries of that gang and so we never really paid him any mind and certainly didn’t spend more time than absolutely necessary making small talk with him. In fact, now I think of it, he didn’t seem to have many friends on the course at all. This isolation was probably compounded by the fact that his hall of residence was International House, where all the students from overseas were housed. I have no idea how Ian ended up there, but compared to some of the other, big undergraduate Halls of Residence, he might as well have been on the moon. If there was a bright centre to the undergraduate universe, it definitely wasn’t to be found anywhere near International House. 

One night in my first year, I was knocking about around my own Halls of Residence when I became aware of a group of people sniggering about something. I wandered over to see what was up, and they were laughing at some poor guy who was hanging around the place, mooning after a girl called Sonia. 

It was Ian. 

I remember feeling slightly responsible for him, not because he was my friend, but because he was on my course and because I instinctively didn’t like this group of guys laughing at the poor sod in his anorak, sensible shoes and railwayman’s cap. Before I did anything else, I checked that Sonia was okay. She was not surprisingly uncomfortable that Ian was hanging around, following her about. I don’t think he meant any harm, but he clearly liked Sonia but didn’t really have the emotional toolkit to know what to do with those feelings other than to follow her around. At this point in my life, I don’t think I was anybody’s idea of a knight in shining armour, but I went up to Ian and suggested that I walked him back to International House. He recognised me, of course, and without too much persuasion, I took him out of my Halls and on the short walk across campus. On the way, we chatted. I explained to him that he was upsetting Sonia and he couldn’t just hang around her like that. He seemed to understand that, and we parted on good terms. 

I don’t like bullies, and I suppose I was just awkward enough around women that I recognised some of myself in Ian and wanted to do something other than just point and laugh at him. I didn’t really think anything more of it. 

A little while later, before the end of my first year, it was announced in one of our lectures that Ian was dead. He’d been cycling through Coventry when he had been hit by a bus and killed. A tragedy. His parents had arranged a memorial service for him in the campus chapel, and we were all invited to pay our respects. 

I walked past that chapel every single day on my way to the History Department or to the library. Did I go to the service? No, I did not. I can’t remember why I didn’t go, but I’m pretty certain it wasn’t because I had anything better to do. I was eighteen or nineteen years old, and I probably just wanted to be in the bar with my mates rather than attend a sad and awkward service with Ian’s bereaved parents. He was a bit of a strange kid, and he wasn’t my friend. Besides, other people would go, right? 

Wrong. 

Not a single student attended that memorial service. Not a single one of us had the decency to take 30 minutes out of our days to pay our respects. I remember feeling a bit bad when I heard that, but the feeling didn’t last and I got on with the serious business of completely taking for granted the privilege of a university education. 

Now, more than thirty years later, I find myself thinking about Ian quite often. What must his parents have felt when no one turned up? I think about that time when I walked him back to International House; did he have any friends, or did everyone just think he was weird and give him a wide berth? Was he lonely? God knows it’s hard enough just being a teenager. 

I know I can’t change the past, but I do wish that I could speak to my younger self and encourage him to be better; to do better. Of all the things that University did teach me, it seems that it took the passage of time to teach me empathy. 

RIP Ian. I can only remember the names of a handful of people on my course now, but I remember you and I’m sorry.

a time to every purpose...

I've been thinking a bit about getting older. 

One of the things they never tell you about growing up is that at no point in your life do you actually feel as though you've grown up.  I wouldn't go back to being seventeen again for any money in the world, but at the same time, I still find it a little difficult to believe that I'm apparently now a forty-three year old man. When did that happen?

I'm not really sure what I wanted to be when I grew up.  I suppose I still don't really know. At one point, as a very young child, I remember being dead-set on becoming a motorcycle policeman (which would have had to be over my father's dead body: as a doctor who attended more than his share of road traffic accidents, he naturally wasn't that keen to have any of his children on a motorbike.  A few years later, I completed one of those career advisory questionnaire things and it suggested that I should give serious consideration to a career as a zoo keeper. 

Frankly, I was as surprised and disappointed as anyone that I ended up in a career in IT.

Still, it does look like I've always quite liked hats and animals.

I think I'm really styling out that cowboy hat, to be honest.  I'd totally wear that outfit again.

And yes, that guitar is upside-down and no, I wasn't some kind of lost, teenage troubadour.  Yes, that comic is upside-down too.  It must just be how I roll.

On the train on the way home from London last night, we were joined in our carriage at Leicester by a teenager,  He took the opportunity of a sparsely populated train to park himself in first class to plug in his phone and make use of the free WiFi.  Rather than be amazed at the fact that he was able to charge his phone and connect to the internet on a train at all, he was more concerned and irritated by the fact that the connection wasn't quite reliable enough for him to have a Facetime chat with his friends.  Isn't it amazing how quickly things change and just as amazing how quickly they're taken for granted? The same youth also didn't seem to be able to afford a belt for his trousers.  I appreciate that it's the entire purpose of fashion to confuse and anger the older generation.... but really?

*looks again at the pictures above*

Yeah.  He's fine.

pretty vacant...

There's an episode in the most recent series of Curb Your Enthusiasm where Larry is introduced to the fiancee of his manager's daughter. This guy, we're told, has served in the US army in Afghanistan. As everyone before Larry is introduced to this guy, they each make a point of saying how nice it is to meet him and thanking him for his service. When it's Larry's turn, he just says "Hi, how are you doing?". Everyone stares at him in horror, and the ex-serviceman has to leave because he is so upset. Larry, of course, cannot and will not accept that he's done anything wrong. He's already been thanked for his service by all of you, why do I need to thank him too?

As the episode aired here in November, it was impossible not to draw the comparison with the increasing fuss people make about the poppy and making an ever-more-ostentatious show of "respect". Not wearing a poppy doesn't mean you don't care about the sacrifices others have made in time of war; not thanking someone for their service doesn't mean you aren't thankful for it, only that you don't feel the need to parrot out an automatic response... so automatic that it is stripped of any real feeling. Are you saying you're grateful because you are grateful or because that's just what you say.

I have a real bug bear about this in the office. Most of the people I work with are in their twenties. We knock along pretty well, in the main, but whenever I ask the simple question: "You okay?", I almost always get the response, "Yeah, you?"... except it comes out as "yeahyou", all one word.

I think it's a millennial thing.

What annoys me about this is not so much that they're asking me if I'm okay, but that their tone of voice and speech cadence changes slightly as they reply to indicate that they're neither really answering my question nor giving me a real answer. It's a totally automated response, and I'm none the wiser at the end as to whether they really are okay or if they're genuinely interested in knowing if I'm okay too.

Or perhaps it's just me and there's nothing at all wrong or unusual about that and maybe I'm just turning into Larry David.

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.

of when we were young...

Young People.

A conversation at work today:

"Oh, you know that guy who looks like that tennis player?"
"The guy that looks like that tennis player? Which tennis player?"
"You know, the one who wins everything"
"Novak Djokovic?  You mean Steve? Steve doesn't really look like Novak Djokovic does he?"
"I think he does"
[we google]
"Well, look - he's shorter and hairier.  If anything, he's a cross between Djokovic and Pete Sampras."
"Who's Pete Sampras?"

Needless to say, the person who brought tennis into the conversation also had no idea who Steffi Graf, Andre Agassi, Boris Becker or Martina Navratilova were either.  Being born in the 1990s isn't an excuse for being so amazingly ignorant, is it?  Becker is in Djokovic's coaching team, for goodness sake.

In an attempt to mount a defence, he said that there are undoubtedly loads of people he could name that I wouldn't know.  I didn't disagree:

"But if they're like Miley Cyrus, you can keep them"

....at this point he brought a framed picture of Justin Bieber out of his desk drawer, and I decided that all was probably lost, made my excuses and left.

daddy cool...

Apparently we’re in the middle of a vinyl revival. In 2015, it was the fastest growing musical format and accounted for 2% of all musical sales. Alright, so the numbers aren’t all that large, relatively speaking (Ed Sheeran has sold more copies of X on CD this year than the entire vinyl category put together), but they are growing and it was over a million units sold this year. Big enough for people other than specialist retailers to take notice, anyway. Tescos are about to start selling vinyl, for goodness sake.

There’s an official vinyl chart now too.

So who’s buying this stuff? Well, I think the chart for this week tells its own story:

Alright, so Adele tops the chart…. But ELO? New Order? Nirvana? The Pulp Fiction OST? The Clash? Led Zeppelin? the Stone Roses? The Smiths? NWA!

I’ll tell you who’s buying vinyl…people like me.

It doesn’t get much more contemporary as you go further down the top 40 either, Alongside albums by Taylor Swift, Sam Smith and the 1975, we have Dark Side of the Moon, Rush of Blood to the Head, Let it Bleed, Houses of the Holy, Nevermind, Rumours, Sgt Pepper, The Number of the Beast, AM and Whatever People Say I am That’s What I’m Not by Arctic Monkeys, Definitely Maybe, Bad, Abbey Road, Legend by Bob Marley, The Wall….

Let’s face it, this is a hipster chart, isn’t it? You can practically see the beards and smell the excellent artisanal, cold-filtered coffee.

As you do....

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Of course, I bought my record player, started buying vinyl and grew a beard way before it became a thing.

Way before.

I'm gonna keep my plunder underground...

Everything Everything @ Rock City, 11th November 2015

The last time I saw Everything Everything at Rock City, in October 2013, I can see that I was preoccupied by the sight of the town centre filled with drunk students in fancy dress being shepherded from venue to venue before ending up at Rock City at about 10:30. That was on a Monday night, but two years later, on a Wednesday night, I can see that things haven’t changed. I didn’t see any sober people with red clipboards ushering people around on an organised pub crawl this time around, but I did see lots of drunk students in fancy dress: from cowboys on the bus passing around a big bottle of Smirnoff (branded vodka please, darling) to a bunch of idiots in the cheapest looking lederhosen costumes you can imagine. The girls, to be fair, didn’t seem to so much be wearing a specific, bought-for-the-purpose costume as much as just wearing the shortest, tightest hot pants they could find and a vest. I know I’m getting old, but I felt cold just looking at them, even on a mild night. All of this leads me to the slightly uncomfortable realisation that students don’t just have one night of the week where they get into costume and go drinking, and that they just get into costume to go drinking every night.

I didn’t spot any fancy dress inside Rock City, but the venue was certainly packed full of the youth. Last time around, it was fairly clear that being on the 6 Music playlist had brought a small but significant portion of the audience. This time around, not so much and I was amongst the oldest people there. Damnit! People watching is always a pleasure, but tonight it was a beautiful thing to watch the youth at play. Rock City has started selling beer in two pint cups, and even the biggest guy is rendered a tiny hobbit as he clutches this ridiculous bucket full of piss-weak warm lager in both hands. I actually ordered two pints at the bar, and had to carefully explain by means of a dumb show that I meant “one pint and one pint. Two pints”.

Rock City wasn’t sold out, but it was pretty full, and the crowd was really pretty excited indeed to see the main event… which made it all the more baffling when most of them then spent the vast majority of the evening chatting to each other as the band played. To be fair, I felt the band paced their set appallingly badly, and that it sagged for a good twenty minutes in the middle, but even so…. They’re a good band and all of their albums are pretty strong, including the latest one, so I’m not quite sure why they dropped the pace so much halfway through the set. Still, the youth didn’t seem to mind, and often paused their conversations to pull out their phones to film 30 seconds of footage to load on the “My Story” bit of snapchat. Does anyone, anywhere spend their time looking through these crap video snippets of a gig? I probably sound about 100 years old, but I just don’t get it. Can’t you just enjoy what you’re watching with your eyes and ears? Be present in the room in the moment? I guess not.

The band sounded good. One of my friends has a problem with Jonathan Higgs’ falsetto live, but I think he makes it all sound pretty effortless (even if his peroxide flick hair-do is a tragic, tragic mistake). He also looks like he’s enjoying himself, which counts for a lot too. We’ve all been to too many gigs were the band look like they wish they were somewhere – anywhere – else….I’m looking at you Radiohead….. And, just as he did in 2013, Higgs told us as sincerely as he could manage that we were a great crowd, best on the tour so far… and I think he might actually have believed it to. The new album is good, and they played a lot of it, as you would expect. I’m not quite sure then why that meant the set was so uneven: the songs are good and the band sounded good, so what’s the problem? In a word: Pacing. They played the wrong songs at the wrong time and momentum gradually drifted away. They do have some glorious songs though: they tossed “Kemosabe” out early, but “Schoolin’”, “Regret”, “Don’t Try”, “Cough Cough”, “Photoshop Handsome”, “Distant Past”….. A good start and a good finish, I suppose, but the focus on the newer stuff meant that they have inevitably dropped a few of the quieter, slower-burning gems from their older albums. The new material is good, but apparently not quite as deep.

(incidentally, I want to have a dedicated button – as the keyboardist did here – that plays the phrase “distant past” every time it is pressed. Ideally accompanied by the sound of a classic Star Trek tricorder. Can you imagine how useful that would be in everyday conversation?)

So, in summary, a curate’s egg of an evening: a fascinating crowd and a band that I really like who sounded pretty good on the night, but a bumpy set. Oh, and I’ll leave you with some fashion thoughts: I’ve seen band’s wearing uniforms before, but the jackets that Everything Everything wore for the whole of the main set (grey with black trim , sort of like a Star Trek: the Next Generation jacket) just looked ill-fitting and a bit cheap. They then produced a coloured set of the same for the encore and looked even worse. Have a word with yourselves, lads! Either commit to wearing a band uniform like Django Django’s shirts and commit to it, or don’t bother! It doesn’t have to be expensive, but it shouldn’t look like it’s made from cheap fuzzy felt. They looked like they might have made them themselves, which I suppose would be charming….

Oh, hark at me. Coming on here and talking about almost anything but the actual band and generally sounding like I’m the oldest man alive. Oh wait…. I’ve always sounded like that, even when I wasn’t old. If you haven’t worked that out by now, then you’re probably in the wrong place.

Swisslet: hunting badgers by owl-light since 2004.

VERDICT: 6 / 10.
(If someone wants to explain snapchatting to me, they’ll find me somewhere in the mid-1990s....)

Setlist:

To The Blade
Blast Doors
Kemosabe
Get To Heaven
MY KZ, UR BF
Schoolin'
Regret
Fortune 500
The Wheel (Is Turning Now)
Riot on the Ward
Warm Healer
Radiant
Zero Pharaoh
Don't Try
Cough Cough
Photoshop Handsome
Spring / Sun / Winter / Dread

Encore:
No Reptiles
Distant Past

pictures of you....

My friend Tony is something of a photography buff, and he took many fantastic photos documenting our time in Scarborough (his wife is in the choir, Tony spent his time wandering around the town taking photos of whatever and whoever took his fancy). Because of his wife’s involvement as a singer, Tony has sort of become the choir’s unofficial photographer, snapping pictures of us as we sing at various concerts.

He took an excellent picture of me at our concert in Bolsover, just at the point in the Motown Medley where the basses and tenors have put on their sunglasses to sing “Heard it Through the Grapevine”.

A colleague of mine liked this so much that she bounded up to me when I was next in the office to show me that she had installed it at the background picture on her new phone. In fact, it was the only photo on her phone.

OK. Fair enough, I suppose. Apparently I lasted 24 hours, which with this girl’s attention span is probably something of a miracle.

Tony took another great picture of me in Scarborough this weekend, but when I got back to work, this same girl didn’t seem impressed:

“It doesn’t look like you”
“What do you mean it doesn’t look like me?”
“Your eyes look all black and you don’t have black eyes. You have blue eyes”
“Yes, but it’s a black and white photograph”
“It doesn’t look like you and I don’t like it”

Everyone's a critic.

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.

here comes the summer...

I take no pleasure in saying this, but the average British person has simply got no idea how to dress. Look around you, and wherever you are, I’m sure you’ll know it to be the truth: we just don’t seem to know what’s appropriate and neither do we seem to know what makes us look good. How else would you explain Frankenshoes, those appalling platformed high heels? I don’t think there’s a person on the Earth – supermodels included - who is able to wear them and to look graceful rather than like a bunch-backed clumping elephant.

Summer is a particularly bleak time. The first sign of the sun and the average British person breaks out their summer gear, pretty much whatever the actual temperature outside. I was in town the other week, and although it was sunny, it was pretty chilly and I was glad of my coat. Everyone else was apparently happy to slop about in short, t-shirt and flip-flops (the men brazenly displaying their horrible feet to the world). We also seem determined to dress to emphasise our negative points. I wonder if some of these people actually looked in a mirror before deciding to buy something, never mind before wearing it out in public. Don’t these people have friends in their lives? Friends don’t let friends wear jeggings stretched to the point of transparency out in public. Not even in Primark.

The office environment can be confusing too. My company instituted a “business casual” policy about ten years ago, with the only stipulation that you shouldn’t wear football shirts or crop tops (although the unspoken rules were many).  They haven’t subsequently revised the policy, but we have slowly drifted back towards suits through a process of gradual peer pressure. I tend to wear smart trousers and an open-collared shirt, and to be honest it’s a lot easier than worrying about which colour of chinos would be deemed the most smart casual. Not everyone thinks the same way, and you see some remarkable outfits in the workplace… many in conjunction with expansive tattooing. Now, I have tattoos. I don’t have a problem with tattoos…. But why would you get a fist-sized golden snitch tattooed on your breastbone and then wear a scooped t-shirt to work?

My current bug bear is the metrosexual male, many now sadly also blended with hipster, resulting in an eye-watering blend of beard, sharpened eyebrows, v-necked t-shirts, tattoo sleeves and tan brogues. There’s a guy who sits round the corner from me - a perfectly normal looking bloke: not skinny, not especially fat (if a bit fleshy)… but he likes to wear trousers that are styled slightly too short (deliberately, I think) with brown, Native American-style moccasins and no socks. I think he works in HR, so maybe that explains it.

Mind you, there’s another guy who stamps about near where I live with a beard, fedora and manbag, stamping about wearing a huge pair of builder boots when he doesn’t look like he could lift a bag of feathers, never mind a bag of sand.

Oh wait. That’s me.

respect....

We had a team away day today.  We were away from the office and in the genteel surroundings of the Trent Bridge Inn.  Wetherspoons pubs may be many things, but this one has the distinct advantage of at least being within short walking distance of my house.  In any case, since Wetherspoons took it over a few years ago, I think it's fair to say that it's never looked so good.

Anyway.  Amongst the things we did, we spent an hour or so either side of lunch walking along the Embankment in two teams devising (and then doing) a treasure hunt.  My team was wandering around the riverside looking for interesting things we could use as clues.  There's a war memorial here, and we paused to see what we could find.  I was transfixed and moved by a little wooden cross with a poppy on it that had clearly been fixed to the gates of the memorial on Remembrance Sunday.  It was only a humble little thing, but in faded writing on the wood of the cross was an inscription commemorating a 19 year old Able Seaman called Sidney who had lost his life at Omaha beach on D-Day.  The cross had been left by his sister, and I was touched at a devotion from an elderly lady who was remembering a brother who had died some seventy years ago.  I find things like this profoundly and quietly moving.

My contemplation was interrupted, however, by one of the members of my team coming up in front of me on the other side of the gates holding a poppy wreath.
"I found this on the floor over there"
"That's a memorial wreath.  Please put it back."
"It was over there.  Someone had just chucked it on the floor."
"It wasn't chucked on the floor, it was laid there during Remembrance Sunday last November.  Please put it back."

At this point, this 25 year old stropped off and hurled the wreath back in the general direction of where she had found it, muttering about how there was no need for me to make such a big deal about it and basically behaving like a stroppy teenager.  I could have chastised her to show some respect, but I simply explained what it was and asked her to put it back. Fair to say, I wasn't terribly impressed by her reaction.

I'm fifteen years older than this girl, but it seems to be a long fifteen years.  The Second World War ended only 29 years before I was born, but that means it was over for the best part of half a century by the time she was born, and was that much more faded from living memory.  I grew up around people who had experienced at least one World War first hand; people in my own family. This girl isn't an idiot, but the memory of the sacrifice of people like this nineteen year old sailor on D-Day and the quiet dignity of those remaining who remember them just seems somehow less relevant to her.

It's a shame.  Remembering is probably a vital part of making sure that it never happens again.  As Harry Patch said (about World War One) before he died in 2009, "It wasn’t worth it. No war is worth it. No war is worth the loss of a couple of lives let alone thousands."

As the last veterans of these wars die, we need to keep the memories of them and the sacrifices they made alive so that it never happens again. At the going down of the sun and in the morning. We will remember them.

That's not too much to ask is it?

don't get caught alone no, no.....

I got sucked into one of those "Top 100 countdown" things on TV last night... I would have quite happily watched to the end to discover what the Greatest 1980s Movie made was, but the realisation that the programme finished a little before 1am on a school night sent me packing to bed shortly after we had reached "Beverly Hills Cop" but before we'd got to Bill & Ted.  Eddie Murphy was 22 when they made that film.  Twenty-two!  I was also slightly disappointed to discover that Bronson Pinchot - who appeared to talk about filming his scenes with Murphy - isn't actually Eastern European at all and instead has a meat-and-two-potatoes American accent and was born in New York.  Huh. (and looking at his wikipedia page, I can see that he won an award for his performance in the talking book book of "Matterhorn" by Karl Marlantes.  Now that's an excellent book which would have been weird if he'd read it in either the accent of Balki Bartokomous or Serge.... but I digress).

Watching clips from films like St Elmo's Fire, Weird Science and Desperately Seeking Susan reminded me of a conversation I had at work the other day.  We'd been talking about being the gatekeepers for some process or other, and one of my colleagues piped up:

"Ah, what I want to know is who is the keymaster!"
Another colleague looked confused.
"What do you mean?"
"It's from Ghostbusters"
"The film?"
"Yes"
"When did that film even come out?"
"About 1984"
"What? 1984? That's the year I was born. Is it worth watching?"
"......"

It's not so much the ignorance that gets me, it's the lack of curiosity.

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.

shame....

I caught up with one of my friends last week.  She's got a two year old son and he's clearly the centre of her world, so naturally quite a lot of the conversation revolves around him....and that's fine by me.  It's nice to see her light up as she describes the joys of parenthood.  We worked very closely together for a number of years, and during her pregnancy, I seemed to spend an awful lot of time doing various bits of lifting and carrying for her as she stocked up before her maternity leave.  It's nice to catch up.

At the moment, her little boy is a proper little sponge and apparently developing so fast that you can almost see the change on a day-by-day basis as his brain grows and absorbs information from the world around him.  His latest thing, I learned, is to hold proper running conversations with himself about what he's seeing as he processes it and tries to describe it in terms that he understands.  Usually, this is charming.... but apparently, on occasion it can also be mortifyingly embarrassing.

Picture the scene: you are just finishing up at they gym, and you are standing at the counter in reception waiting to be served.  You have perched your little boy on the top of the counter so that he can see what's going on.  As you wait, a personal trainer wanders behind the counter and starts browsing through a filing cabinet or something.  Your little boy sees him and says:
"Oh look.  Big monkey"

The personal trainer is black.

You don't think anyone else apart from you and your husband heard this, but not quite knowing what else to do, you pick up your child and walk quickly out of the gym, all the while hoping that the ground will open up and swallow you.

My friend told me how horrified and embarrassed she was, but that she didn't want to make too big a deal of it with her son because all that would do would be to imprint the incident on him as being significant (another friend of mine backed this up by saying how he had once said "Oh, fuck off!" out loud in front of his toddler and then spent the next six months managing a child who would say that loudly, in public at every possible opportunity, knowing that he wasn't supposed to but delighting in the attention he got for saying it).

Being the supportive friend that I am, I simply told her that she seemed to be doing a bang-up job of raising her very own little racist.  Mind you, what this incident really shows is that the average racist has a mental age of approximately two.  At least this little boy will move past this; the average UKIP member apparently does not.

just rhythms and rhymes and melodies in time....

I was the victim of some inverse-snobbery at work yesterday. Some of my colleagues were off to go and watch The Inbetweeners 2 at the cinema, and another girl (who has been to see it twice) was telling them how much they’d laugh and telling them to “grow up” (which I understand is one of the catchphrases in the film). She asked if I had seen it. I said no. She asked if I was going to see it. I said no. Had I seen the first film. No. Had I watched any of the TV series. Well, yes, I’ve seen one episode – the one with the French exchange student – and it made me laugh, but I haven’t really gone out of my way to watch it.
“You’re just a snob”
“What? You think that I’m waiting for it to be dubbed into French so I can watch the subtitled version? I’m just not that bothered about going to see it when there are loads of other things I would want to watch instead”
She shook her head sadly.

I get this quite a lot, actually. People think that I’m highbrow and don’t have any interest in “normal” things. This seems to be because I sometimes use big and complicated sounding words (I used the word “vicissitudes” today, and this was apparently worthy of comment) and because I have a pretty broad interest in most things and have read a number of books and know a bit of stuff about lots of other books. I’m good in quizzes. In fact, the same girl actually volunteered me to write a quiz for a charity day she was helping to organise. She then spent the next couple of weeks worrying that I was going to make it too difficult, because the sample question I gave her, when she told me I had to do this, was to ask the name of the star in Lawrence of Arabia. She didn’t know, and immediately assumed that I was trying to be a smart arse and that literally no one would know the answers to any questions (I’ll maybe post the quiz up here and you can see how you would have done). We had a similar conversation about McDonalds. I haven't eaten at McDonalds for more than a decade, which this girl found incredible. What really blew her noodle was that I don't have a particular problem with McDonalds or with people who eat there; I just chose to go somewhere else instead. Each to their own, right? Or, if I was being pretentious, à chacun son goût

Using “big words”, in the heads of some people, seems to be all about showing off and trying to sound clever. In fact, when I use them, it’s because they’re just words that are in my vocabulary and I use them, in their appropriate context, assuming that people will understand – which is better than assuming people won’t, isn’t it? Why would you try to communicate using words people don’t understand? I can honestly say that I don’t think I’ve ever deliberately used a word to confuse someone.

I do like some subtitled films, it’s true. Crucially though, it’s not the subtitles that make me like them. I like lots of English language films too. Not all of them are award winners receiving high critical acclaim. I like Will Ferrell films. I watch superhero films too. I do read some classic literature, but it’s not to the exclusion of everything else and it’s not as though I sit on a lofty, ascetic perch enjoying only “difficult” books and sneering at everyone else reading Harry Potter or whatever. I’ve read Harry Potter and I mostly enjoyed them. I read a lot of fantasy books too. There’s not too many snob points to be claimed there.

Like everyone else, I like what I like.

Do I want to watch the Inbetweeners 2? No, it’s not my cup of tea really. Does that mean that I look down my nose at everyone who does watch and enjoy the Inbetweeners? No, of course not. Wee and poo jokes can be very funny. Be more secure in what you like and don’t like: it’s only your opinion and you shouldn’t feel so worried about what other people might think about what you like.

Honestly. It’s not hard, is it? Why don’t you just grow up.
(do you see what I did there? There’s probably a fancy literary term for that, isn’t there? No idea what it is, but I’m sure it’s clever)

the melting men....

I flicked the television on this evening when I sat down with my tea and saw that Raiders of the Lost Ark had just started on BBC3.  Obviously, I sat and watched it.  I've seen it hundreds of times, of course, but you can't flick past that, can you?

This film was made in 1981, and even though the special effects are positively Stone Age compared to what's possible today, I was watching the famous face-melting scene at the end and thinking that it's a far more effective special effect than any amount of million dollar CGI thrown at the latest Transformers movie.... because the film doesn't JUST hinge on the special effects, but has an actual plot and characters you care about and old fashioned things like that.

Then I remembered that half my team at work haven't seen this film.

Ever.

Imagine that.  They all know who Nicki Minaj is (and what her fragrance smells like), but they have no idea who Indiana Jones is, and in fact they probably couldn't name a single thing Harrison Ford has done in his career.

Young people, eh?

children of the future....

Overheard in the gents toilets at the Rescue Rooms quiz this evening:

"Women or beer?"

"Oh, that's an easy one.  Beer.  Every time"

"Oh, it's easy to say beer now, but what about at the end of the night?"

"Beer.  A quick shag is all well and good, but beer will be there forever...."

And people say that pandas are too stupid to breed.

The future of humanity couldn't be in better hands.

you don't care if it's wrong or if it's right...

Another day in the office and another story from my team.  

As we were sat at our desks this afternoon, I mentioned that I would be escorting three lovely ladies to Dublin for some meetings on Wednesday next week.  One of my younger colleagues, looked at me:

"What, like you're the pimp and they're the whores?"

There was a stunned silence followed by giggles all round.  My colleague looked confused, so I thought that perhaps I should help her out.  "You need to think about what you've just said"

"Why?"

"Well, think what you're calling your boss and your boss's boss"

She frowned.  "There's nothing wrong with what I said"

"Really?  You just called them whores!"

"Well, you said you were escorting them"

"Yes, but that's not quite the same thing as calling them Escorts, is it?"

"Yeah, but they'd be those really high class whores....."

Honestly.  Some people just don't know when to stop digging.  Everyone has their price, she tells me.

These guys really are the gift that keeps on giving. 

say my name....

Erm.  Who?

You might remember that I've been on a bit of a mission over the last few months to extend the cinematic horizons of some of my younger colleagues.  This has been somewhat harder than you might imagine as they don't appear to have seen anything at all, never mind any of the real classics.  Still, I like a challenge and have been lending out various DVDs and then asking for a score out of ten to force them to think - even a little bit - about what they really thought about the film.

I had a minor triumph when one colleague realised that she had given "The Shawshank Redemption"  exactly the same score as she had given "Brewster's Millions".  Both are good films, but at that moment, my colleague realised that she thought that the one film was simply better than the other, and promptly asked if she could revise her score for Shawshank to an eight.

It's been a bit quiet recently, but one of my other colleagues - 23 years old, ladies and gentlemen - finally returned the copy of "Raiders of the Lost Ark" she borrowed before Christmas (amazingly, she hadn't seen it).

"What did you think?"
"Pretty good. Loved that special effect with the melting Nazis"
"Well, it was 1981"
"I suppose so. What was the name of the guy in it?"
"The guy?"
"Yeah, the main guy"
"Er.... Harrison Ford?"
"Oh yeah. That's it"

Young people, eh?

Still, put yourself in her shoes: she hasn't seen Star Wars, Witness, Mosquito Coast, Blade Runner, Working Girl, and she's only just seen one of the Indiana Jones films.... why should I expect her to really know or to understand or care that Harrison Ford is one of the most successful movie stars who ever lived and has been in some of the biggest grossing films ever?  Not to put too fine a point on it, she was born in 1990 and his film record hasn't exactly been unimpeachable since then, has it?  You might wonder about her lack of curiosity or desire to view films from before she was born, but basically, he don't mean shit to her.

Maybe it's a reflection of my age that this seems so inconceivable.  I'm the Star Wars generation.  Ford's golden period coincides neatly with my discovery of films.

Still, what do I know?  My team have just named the whiteboard we gather around each morning "Zac Efron".  Apparently it amuses them.  How quickly they've forgotten their crush on Channing Tatum....

That is an awesome effect though, right? Still beautifully effective to this day!  Zac Efron wishes he could be in a scene as memorable.... and actually, who wouldn't want to him recreate this exact scene?

you and me babe, how about it?

As you know, thanks to my team at work, I've had something of a crash course in online dating over the last few months.  Because people apparently don't meet organically any more, several of the beautiful, intelligent women in my team are putting themselves through the wringer of dating websites.  One is very happy and several weeks into a promising relationship, but the other is still wading her way through hundreds of hopeful/hopeless profiles online.

Yesterday, I was introduced to Tinder.

Look, I've been happily loved up with C. for more than fifteen years now, so this is all pretty new and alien to me.... but I'll try to explain.  Basically, the way this works is that you load up a few pictures of yourself and a tiny bit of information, and you then select your preferences and how far a radius you're prepared to go for a date, and then you're off.  You flick through profiles, hitting yes or no.  Everyone else does the same.  If two people both like each other, then you get in touch and start exchanging messages.  Simple.  A little lacking in subtlety, perhaps, but it's a start.

My colleague handed me her phone and had me flicking through profiles on her behalf for a while.

No.  No.  No.  No. No.

After about ten minutes, I was in a state of despair at the future of humanity.  Pretty much every single guy on the system seems to have uploaded selfies that show one or all of the following things:

•  a gym shot, wearing a muscle vest and gazing lovingly into a mirror and flexing his guns
•  a topless shot, probably in a grubby bathroom, flexing his guns
•  several shots cheek-to-cheek with various females.  Ex-girlfriends?
•  bromance shots, up close and personal with your best buddies.  Drinking lager and probably topless.
• pictures of the amusing jape you get up to when pissed
• gangsta shot, perhaps in a fast car, wearing shades and an over-sized baseball cap.  Possibly topless.
• naked in a bathroom with a sock over your cock

Ugh.  Horrific.

I can't decide what's worse, that guys apparently think this is the kind of thing that girls are looking for in a man, or that these may actually be the things that girls are looking for in a guy.  Either way, we're doomed.

My colleague told me that she had a match the other day and the guy sent her a message.
"Do you want sex?"  That was it.
Who said romance was dead?

I think I was a lot more choosy than she generally is.  I basically clicked "No" to everybody.  I did click  "Yes" to the guy with long, wavy hair holding a cello, but that was because I was so busy laughing that  I was looking for more photos of him and I hit the wrong button.

This, my friends, is how young people find love.  Well, sex, anyway.

The bastards.