Always have a spare

Most musicians have a special bond with their chosen instrument. Afterall, if you play something larger than a piccolo, chances are you spent most of your younger years lugging the thing around, trying to play football with a cello on your back for example, or tobogganing down a steep hill of your housing estate. No? Just me then.

Most of us have that special bond but, like the characters of Australian soap operas, we secretly ogle those truly exquisite instruments owned by banks and hedge funds (which, incidentally, despite the best efforts of The Today Programme, I still couldn’t describe to someone else). To some the displays of Stradivarii at Bonhams instrumental auctions are like a trip through the more reddish tinted districts of Amsterdam after dark.

Imagine then, having the possibility of a spare one. That’s what International soloist and former child prodigy David Garrett now has at his disposal. Beares have had a £2.5m violin flown in from Milan to ‘stand-in’ for Garrett’s own £1.8m Stradivarius after he slipped backstage at the Barbican, causing £60,000 worth of damage to his violin which will be out of action for around 8 months. He slipped in his concert shoes whilst rushing down some steps on his way to dinner with family.

Imagine filling in that insurance form…

BBC News: Fall destroys rare Stradivarius

——————-Update—————————–

I particularly like the diargram explaining the damage on the http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7244441.stm

Wearing your sleeve on your…er…sleeve

I’ve been lamenting the death of the album over the last week or so. The mourning began whilst I was waiting for itunes to install on my computer, and thankfully took away an immense feeling of guilt that I was selling out part of my musical soul in a rather 1960’s style fashion to the… er… the man.

An just as I thought I’d found everything you lose by buying your isong and keeping it on your icomputer and ipod, (top of the list, by the way, is that everyone in the world seems to think anything can be made cool with the prefix ‘i-‘, so watch this space for the new ispoon or itoothbrush), some plucky guys and gals in Cardiff have invented another.

Sleeveface is a rather groovy idea. All you need is an old LP sleeve, a camera and a spark of imagination. The plan is simple: Pick an album, and fill in part of the picture with an album cover. And, is if to prove they really have thought of everything, there’s even a YouTube instructional video.

I recommend whiling away a while taking a trip down memory lane and reminding yourself of how great album covers used to be before they were reduced first to 4×4 cd inlays, and then 150×150 pixelations. Amongst my personal favouites are the Zappa, the Connolly and the Linda Ronstadt complete with knobbly knees.

There is of course a far greater positive from all this aside from being the perfect filling for the last 30 minutes of my life – it’s heartwarming to know so many people still listen to good old fashioned LP’s.

The key to sucess

Braving the early-morning cold, with its bitterly South-Westerly force 2 or 3, sometimes 1, ocassionally 4 (something there for fellow shipping forecast listeners) I sat glowing in my success at scraping Nature’s silver sheen from my car windscreen, stuck to it as it was like the silver guilding on the sleeves of pre-school jumpers.

I take my captain’s seat and tell Mr Sulu to fire up the engines. By which I mean I turn the key. And I’m greeted with a sound much akin to a 70 year old man who has spent his life working two jobs; one as a coal miner, and the second involving breathing in large quantities of asbestos, perhaps at n asbestos grating factory should such a thing exist.

It occurs to me that my shiny new car (nicknamed ‘The Enterprise’ for its unnecessarily large structure and a log book declaring its colour to be ‘Starship Silver’) may not want to go to work today. In a split second my mind races away like a Nasa supercomputer. In 0.3 of a second it has run through the process of phoning work and saying I won’t be in today. By 0.5 it has worked out what I’m going to say to the local garage and a useful bit of witty banter about why I haven’t been making my usual 5-weekly servicing appointments now I have a new-fangled Hdi engine. With the next 0.3 of a second I see a kaleidescope of activities flash before me, as I run through the options for planning, cycling, practicing and eating away my day while the car is fixed.

Then, at 0.9 seconds it occurs to it to maybe, just maybe, it might be wise to try the engine again.

The engine starts, and in just 1 second my day has gone from 100mph to 0 and back again.

The sands of time

I believe it was the great philosopher Dave Gilmour in the Journal Pink Floyd who wrote:

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the hours in an off hand way
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way

And such, you would believe, is life. The great marching on of time like ants towards a jam sandwich.

Time is one of the great givens, the fourth dimension and as Mr apple-on-the-noggin Newton would have us believe is a constantly forward-moving constant.

I remember sitting in front of Tomorrow’s World as a child as Maggie Philbin showed us invention after invention which was going to make the world a better place by the time I reached twenty. We’d live in spacesuits, fly to work with rocket packs, where our offices would be heated and powered by their own small-scale thermo-nuclear reactor.

Okay, so I may be exaggerating a little, but you get the gist – the world goes forward and forward equals better. And yes, with the exception of Friday night inner-city areas we no longer urinate in the street. We no longer have to eat rodents, or travel around on horseback and wear frilly shirts and speak in equally frillily constructed sentences.

The thing is, time seems to be going backwards. Everyone, according to my census of Channel 4’s Phil & Kirsty, wants a home with ‘period features’. Which, as far as I can tell means putting in drafty windows, bobbly ceilings and smokey fires in every room, and cooking your food 5 times as slowly on an coal-fired Arga. Fiat have just released a car they used to make in the 1960’s. Everyone’s given up on exciting supercomputers in favour of video games whih involve waving around a plastic stick until your arm falls off. I can’t even remember the last time I saw someone wearing a digital watch. Even bloody Gladiators is coming back on the TV.

So Immanuel Kant was right – Time must be a man-ascribed intellectual thing, which means we can alter it’s progression. And Time certainly isn’t going forwards anymore. I fully expect any time now we’ll have a new Henry VIII-style Monarch with a backstory of divorce and affairs. We’ll have a government that thinks it can deny accusations of corruption and the problem will go away. Oh hang on… I can only assume coal mines will reopen any day now, the pocket-watch will make a comeback, and every GP will be prescribing a good cauterisation and a course of leeches for everything from a slight cough to leprosy. You just have to look at the NHS, which has gone from dirty, to modern and clean, and back again to know I’m right.

But maybe that’s not right either, maybe we’ve reached the pinnacle of human development. Afterall, we have the twin-armed corkscrew, the Mouli cheese grater, the laptop, and phones which can select music to match your mood. How much better can life get?

There’s a great invention mentioned on the BBC Technology site today – the ‘hitech umbrella’. This is an umbrella which can show you the latest weather forecast.

For example, if there is a one hundred percent chance of rain, it will flash rapidly – and if the possibility is only around ten percent, it will flicker slowly.

Hang on, if there’s a 100% chance of rain, surely you’ve already got the umbrella up?

So that’s it. I am certain time has officially stopped. In a state of neither progression or regression. And, ladies and gentlemen, I have the proof – The Daily Mail’s had the same headlines about Princess Diana for the last 5 years.

Spam and Eggs (on faces)

Every day I sift through a mountain of spam of such a size that you could feed a small Eastern Bloc country on it for a year. If you held banquets for neighbouring countries. Every day. Perhaps twice a day.

Some are funny, and some are downright ingenious. Then there was today’s.

We’ve never really had proper Quartet Spam before. Sure there’s a whole who’s who of ‘famacies’ offering ‘the vary best’ of pills in a whole kaleidescope of colours. And there’s no end of ‘qualitie rollex’ watches and air-conditioning (really, that’s a spam top-seller is it?).

But today we had an offer from a Nigerian. Not of allowing our account to hold family fortunes, or the sad news of my far-distant aunt Mable’s car crash, and despite not having had relations in Nigeria for the last 15 generations at least I am her nearest relative.

Today we had a gig. Not just any gig, but a gig so special it had to be organised in secret. Only after payment had been made could it’s UK location be announced to us. The guests were secret too. But it was a to-dollar gig. Once the payment by cheque had been handed over to our bank we’d know all about it. And we could pull out too.

Brilliant. Lots of thought and energy went into that email. But are we free? What’s the date?

Ah, the 30.02.2008 .

Umm. I have nothing in my diary for February 30th. But then I suspect most people are free. If I were arranging a top-secret gig I’d hold it on a top-secret day too.

Another cunning plan Baldrick, once again fowled up by the arrival of Mr Cockup.

Those Magnificent Men

You know those people you see in television documentaries, wheeled on as ‘experts’. The ones who keep the navy-blue suit industry going. The ones who drive sensible, cheap and cheerful cars. The ones who live in cul de sacs and wash their cars at 10am every Sunday. The ones who have sensible names like Terry or Phillip. The ones who have a ginger cat called Henry, or a small but perky little dog called George.

Well, every now and again they snap. They throw down their marmalade-emblazoned toast and go out and wreak havoc on the world. After years of docile domesticity they take out 50 years of quiet disgruntledness on all on mankind. The history books and newspapers are full of them.

These are the people who design airports.

I travel quiet a bit, and actually have a bit of a soft spot for airports. They build the excitement and anticipation of the trip you’re about to take. They bring together people from every nature, every background as we struggle to contend with delays and slow security checks, and grumpy newsagents who slowly begin to realise that their chosen location really only has a market for small bottles of water and extra strong polo mints.

But the airport really is one of the greatest achievements of man. A 20th century pyramid standing tall just outside of just about every major metropolis of the world. Every single one has obstacles to overcome which makes them great.

Firstly, they manage to achieve a constant temperature inside that the furnace of Port Talbot’s Corus steel-works would be proud of. When you travel you have to, by necessity, wear every bulky item of clothing to avoid packing it in your suitcase and taking up valuable space. You arrive wearing you bulkiest shoes or boots, your scarf, your thick coat. You look like a walking wardrobe. All the things that you eyed-up putting in your suitcase, but figured it would be lighter to wear than to carry. By the time you leave you’ve probably taken in air containing the sweat of at least 20 other men.

Then there’s the sheer ingenuity of the walk from the plane to the baggage collection. Just take a second to get your bearings next time. Without fail, the little conveyor belt is directly below the jetty attached to the plane. It has to be – it’s the shortest and most efficient way to get the cases from the plane to the terminal. Anything else would be a waste of resources and man-power. Still, it makes you refreshed, and I’m sure all the staff huddle around CCTV screens to watch passengers do a massed reenactment of John Cleese’s Ministry of Silly Walks every time a long-haul flight lands.

Then there’s the idiocy of the little touches. The unnecessarily large quantity of automatic doors. The true bling of an airport can be measure by how many sets of these things they have. And every other one will be out of order. Then there’s the information screens, not hung on a wall but over every busy walkway where old ladies can be found fishing their reading glasses from handbags as busy suited Simons run their feet over with their camp little carry-on suitcases.

But today I found the ultimate in design. The Bauhaus of airport design in the form of electric walkways. I’ve always hated the things and opt to walk alongside them rather than on them. I do the same with escalators. They seem to have some magic aura which saps all life out of peoples limbs. They stop walking and try to cycle through every pose formed by the models of the Kays catalogue. But this was special. It had a voice. A stern voice. Informing you that you were near the end and would have to step carefully and ‘start walking’.

How stupid do you have to be? Are we expecting lawsuits from incoming travellers?

A strange rage and frustration came over me. I now realise what it is that makes these otherwise serene suburban warriors of airport design to suddenly snap, and it comes in the shape of an over-large supermarket conveyor belt.

My, that’s a tasty burger

In the words of Mr Q Tarantino. Or something.

There are, of course, moments when I think Big Vern’s Diner is the only reason I come to Jersey. But those moments are often those spent staring down at the freshly served 4oz with chips before me, when not even the intrusion of salad and coleslaw into the arena set forth before me for my taste bud tantalisation can upset the positive chi of the universe.

Not only fantastic local food served by Vern, a Geordie with, so he tells me, ‘the reactions of not only a gazelle, but a young gazelle, but also a fantastic view.

The song stays the same

Normally it’s Bristol. Sometime’s Heathrow. Today it’s Gatwick.

There’s that old saying that after a while all airports start to look the same. That certainly seems to be the case here, where somebody thought it necessary to put “you are in the South Terminal of Gatwick UK” permanently on the Departures Board. Which isn’t working.

The thing is, after a while, you begin to realise all airports act the same too. Every check-in takes 4 times longer when you have a cello. Every member of staff will act as if they’ve never seen a musical instrument before. Every cabin crew member will stop you and say “I’m not sure that’s small enough to be hand luggage”.

I know there are reasons for it all. That every building is as grey and uninspired as a Tory Minister’s Y-fronts. I know there’s a reason we still have to check-in 2 hours before international flights even though we’re just pressing a few keys on a computer screen to do so.

It’s because dull and tedious makes us calm. Familiar surroundings make us feel at ease, and therefore it’s less likely the plane will crash. Or something like that anyway.

It’s also certain I’ll be carrying a second boarding pass with ‘cello’ spelt wrong, or worse still called a banjo or guitar. This, though familiar and usual does not put me at ease, it just makes me feel a bit daft. Still, it’s becoming part of the grey routine.

A problem shared

On a recent trip I found myself in a dangerous position. I thought I’d asked the check-in lady for a window and aisle combo on the plane for myself and cello, but it appeared I’d been given the death seat.

More precisely I’d been given the infectious seat, as all around me the world coughed and sneezed. It was like everyone at a Prom of quiet music (let’s say Arvo Part) had been picked up and placed around me on my tiny little plane like SAS snipers. I tried to ignore the number of germs flying like Luftwaffe with red-mist syndrome towards my system as I took in lung after lung of recycled air. Then the lady in front sneezed into her in-flight magazine. No hand-to-mouth reaction or anything. Then the cheap, stripey-suited Malcolm sitting at 2 o’clock showed that he’d had too much business-funded sushi for lunch by not even having the will to cover his sneeze with his Financial Times. It was just thrown out there for everyone to share.

It got me thinking – Maybe by sharing the cold it helped them to get better. Like one of those emails people in Army-surplus baggy jumper send out that say ‘I’m sending this out to help save the fairies and to spread happiness. You must send it on to at least 101 friends or your dog will die.’ Afterall, they say a problem shared is a problem halved’.

Expect it isn’t, is it?

There are very few problems that are halved by being shared when you actually think about it. Sure, if I have a difficult Trivial Pursuit question I could share it with someone else but it’s only helpful if I share it with someone who actually knows the answer. Then it’s not halved – it’s gone.

Someone with halitosis or problems with body odour share their problem with people all day long. It’s not halved exponentially. If my dog only develops a limp rather than actually dying because I didn’t pass on hippy-girl’s chain-mail, it’s only helped if I share the problem by tying Fido onto a smaller dog to create a non-falling over, eight-legged super-dog.

And we’d all agree global warming’s a big problem, and Live Earth had Madonna and Chris Martin showing most of the Western world the problem, but in the next couple of days the weather through the square window is going to go from warm to snow then very quickly back to warm.

So that’s not halved it then.

There are solutions to global warming and limping dogs, but science hasn’t yet cured the common cold. So for now, cover your mouth when you sneeze people.

Drop the dead donkey

And this just in from our BBC correspondent. A highly trained, well-sourced news organisation. Publically funded and widely respected around the world. Except maybe Zimbabwe.

On a news day where Kenya is erupting into violence, Pakistan is expected to announce its plans for democratic elections, and rail commuters are stranded by Network Rail. Oh, and if that’s not enough a boat has run aground in one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes near Dover. BBC News gives ample air time to this report just in:

“Woman’s size 20 knickers save family from fire” – Video report link here.

Two things. The woman in question builds the tension by explaining, whilst standing in a perfectly serviceable kitchen with no noticeable marks, she found the kitchen ‘practically alight’. Secondly, I love the way she keeps on holding the knickers throughout the report.

BBC News 24 – Award-winning news.