Go see the world…

Apologies for the lack of posts these last couple of days. It’s been a case of less typing, more clicking on links. But here’s some highlights of my travelling the world via my, somewhat annoyingly erratic, mouse:

I’ve always loved Vanilla Sky, partly for the Spielberg cameo but mostly for the scenes of Times Square with no traffic. For the film they had unprecidented permission to close it for three hours, but over at laughing squid there are some amazing shots of the place when it’s spookily quiet…

I’m getting quite annoyed with myself that I keep finding amusing stuff on YouTube. I really did expect it to be full of clips of cats falling unexpectedly off television sets worthy of Esther Rantzen and That’s Life circa 1983. Unless you’ve been a bit John Simm (stuck on Mars, not rhyming slang for dim), you can’t help but to have suffered the Mitchell and Webb Mac vs. PC ads. Here’s a pretty funny spoof of luddite vs. Mac.

Finally, I seem to be getting very nostalgic of the time I spent in America. I think it’s because I’ve not travelled for a few months now and I’m getting a little bored. When I was there the nearest proper town was called Bridgton and I loved this shop. Being in Maine and everything, it had to have Moose related merchandise – never did see one of the elusive chaps whilst walking around by the lake at night though…

Do not exceed stated dosage

For the last week or so I’ve been suffering from a sore throat. I say it’s a sore throat, but as is often the case with men it’s likely to be a sign that my tonsils are about to explode. Or maybe a problem with the muscles that make me swallow. Or acid reflux from some serious problem in my digestive system. Or cancer. Possibly a combination of all of the above. Whatever it is I’m almost certainly going to die from it, and soon.

As is also often the way with men, I have taken to self-prescribing alongside making my diagnosis. In fairness, I do suffer from tonsillitis a lot. So much in fact that my doctor started withholding treatment unless it got really bad, on which ocassion he’d declare ‘cor blimey, they are large’ – something I only like to hear in certain situations and definitely not from a medical professional.

That pretty much leaves me with the medication available over the counter. The blackcurrant-flavoured sweets are good for soothing, but all carry a warning that they’ll cause you to have bowel movements as frequently as low cost flights take off from Heathrow – something with comes with a whole different list of possible diagnoses, all resulting in death. Then there’s paracetamol or ibuprofen. Each work fine, but if I took them every time I had tonsillitis my stomach and intestines would start to resemble Alexander Fleming’s kitchen table during his early experiments with penicilin.

As is often the way, although my affliction is both unbearable and terrible and will almost certainly going to result in my departing this world, I’ve chosen to ignore it hope for the best.

You see, I’ve come to realise over the years that much of the medical world is simply trial and error. I had a few extra teeth removed at a hospital when I was in my teens and a nerve removed from another. In asking my current dentist what the future might hold for that tooth I’m told we’ll just have to wait and see. Shouldn’t his surgery be lined with leather-bound textbooks on dentistry and notable case histories? I could save myself time and money by ‘waiting and seeing’ at home. Myself. No need for years at dentist college for that one.

It’s the same in the world of optometry. Yes, they all have certificates on the wall, and yes you should really have a chart that lights up with revolving letters on it, but essentially all they’re doing is trying a lens in front of your eye and asking you if it’s better. Why not cut out the middle-man? You can in your local supermarket. Just put on a pair of specs and read the chart. If you can now read the letters that you couldn’t before, they’re the pair for you. Job’s a good’n. I’ve got a more complicated prescription that means I need contact lenses prescribed in a hospital, but even then I’m told to ‘try these’ for couple of months and see how they are. More trial and error.

It’s started in optometry, and with constipation tablets and creams for ladies’ sore bits, that we’ve dispensed with the dispensers and started self-diagnosing/prescribing in the supermarket aisles. I predict that it won’t be long until there’ll be do-it-yourself colonic irrigation units in Sainsburys and tonsillectomy stalls in Tescos. Maybe Asda, being part of the American WalMart chain, will start an aisle where you can perform your own liposuction, or more likely you’d perform it on a friend so that you had someone to hold the bucket.

Of course that will never happen. Partly because the powers that be will have to protect those of us with a hypochondriatic streak, but mostly because 50% of the population like myself will be at work, ignoring our symptoms writing our own eulogies in our lunchbreak.

Saving the world. One company at a time

He’s changed the way we use record shops, recording companies, internet providers, mobile telecommunications, media companies, perfumeries, transatlantic air travel and the trains. There are very few areas of life Richard Branson hasn’t set out on a crusade to revolutionise for us, ‘the people’. He’s still at it. He’s working on public transport in space, and is now saving the world via the Virgin Earth Challenge. He’s like a modern day Robin Hood, but without the tights and rather eccentric hat.

There are many people I’m sure who feel that he’s far from having won many of his battles. As a customer, the Virgin Internet’s Team’s service has plenty to improve on. I stopped travelling on trains as soon as a Virgin ‘train manager’ – whatever happened to conductors? – tried charging me for a ticket for my cello or threatened to hide it in the buffet car for storage. And to be honest, the concept of travelling Virgin Galactic fills me with dread. No doubt the journey to space will involve the latest gadgets in the rear of the seat in front of you, complete with the latest films, but what use is that when you arrive on the next planet light years late. Or worse still, you start to slow down at Stoke due to a mechanical problem.

The thing is, you have to admire him. Like the thinking man’s crumpet Stephen Fry, who was incarcerated just down the road from where I live now, he’s a reformed guy who’s actually done remarkably well for himself. He has remarkale resilience. I can’t think of any of his ventures that haven’t almost immediately come off the rails and had to be set back in motion, but every few years there he is on the news launching something new with that childish glint in his eye, smiling behind his little beard.

This time though he’s less Robin Hood more Sheriff of Nottingham, putting a bounty on the head of anthropogenic nasty gasses. Greenhouse gasses and $25m to be precise. He’s established an expert panel to act as judges, and you can even register as a competing team on his website. It’s a fantastic venture of Phileas Fogg proportions.

The thing is, I can’t help wondering why nobody has thought of this before? £12.5 million pounds isn’t very much. I would imagine there are a handful of MP’s claiming that as legitimate stationery expenses. In 2003 the government spent £88m investing in haemophilia treatments for example. £12m is petty cash. Just last summer his Tonyness spent £12m on two private jets for use of Prime Ministers and the cabinet, dubbed “Blair Force One”. Why hasn’t Tony been on the news putting a bounty on the head of global warming?

I suspect the answer is that people would say that’s just not a good use of public money. I’m sure millions of pounds more are being spent on students working in uni laboratories under strict Health and Safety supervision. That’s the problem though. Fleming didn’t discover Penicillin using a fully equipped lab and strict drug trials. It was an English chemist, Humphry Davy, who invented the very first lightbulb in 1809, not a physicist or researcher.

The truth is, in this country anyway, it’s blokes called Bill and Bob working in drafty sheds on Sunday afternoons drinking Earl Grey out of Thermos flasks who actually invent stuff and make the world a better place. Thankfully Sir Richard, who probably didn’t lend money to either the Conservatives or Labour befoer he was knighted, recognises that. He is, afterall, one of the Bobs and Bills. Well, he’s a Dicky.

I hope to see that prize taken. I really hope someone creates such a fantastic machine. It will prove that entrepreneurship is still alive and well, and that men in suits and smart M&S ties driving grey BMW 5 series cars don’t make all the decisions. I just bet that it won’t be a group of Tarquins and Amelias from a fine Educational institution at the finish line. There’ll be a picture of Al Gore and Richard Branson flanking two men in anoraks from the North East clutching a box held together by gaffer tape with a hoover nozzle hanging out the side.

Rostropovich in hospital

There are few people who would welcome a visit from a former Soviet officer at the moment, but arguably the world’s greatest cellist, Mstislav Rostropovich was visited in hospital by Vladimir Putin this week.

The cellist was hospitalised in Paris last week, one of the many countries he has gained residence, and has been moved to a hospital in Moscow (he was stripped of his Russian citizenship in 1974), noted for its Oncology department. The cellist will celebrate his 80th birthday later this year.

Let it snow, let it snow, etc.

It snowed this morning. You’d be forgiven for thinking that the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse had been sighted trotting over the snow covered horizon followed by a plague of locusts.

As I predicted yesterday chaos ensued. Roads were closed, schools were closed, runways were closed, trains were cancelled. A man called Malcolm from the Highways Agency also appeared on the news in a high-visibility jacket.

He wasn’t apologising though. In fact he looked almost smug. You see they got it right. A BBC news reporter showed us a computer simulation the agency was using to work out the exact time a road would freeze so they could send out a gritter just before. I’d have thought they could just watch the poor weather reporter forced to do broadcasts from television centre’s roof dressed only in a vest-top and heels, but there you go. It worked, so I won’t complain.

There’s been 24-hour coverage of the snow on the television, and it’s become a national event of similar importance to the coronation of a new monarch or the selection of a new Pope.

I think it was partly the timing. The country’s snowday came in the week when most people apparently ‘throw a sickie’. Parents stayed at home and played with children. Children stayed at home and played with parents. Families got on and had fun. The kind of stuff families are supposed to do at weekends but don’t because they become too complacent. Fathers cobbled together sledges out of baking trays and airfix glue whilst mums supervised artistic snowmen complete with hats and gloves to keep them warm. It was like national family day and national fun day rolled into one.

I’m even pleased to say the Health and Safety boffins stayed away too. They should have been preaching to motorists driving sales-rep cars far too fast and without ample lighting, but perhaps they were kept at home making sure snowballs were kept to regulation size and only thrown inside a half-mile exclusion zone. In fact, it’s probably one mile. Meanwhile one school I visited today sent everybody off to the field farthest from the school for an extended snowball fight. Oh to be a kid again…

The culture of over-reacting

I’ve just seen on the weather that it’s due to snow on Wednesday and Thursday this week, so I guess we can expect the country to grind to a complete halt by the end of the week.

No matter how much technical wizardry is employed, everything still seems to take everybody by suprise. This week we have opened the Diamond Light Source Synchrotron, a machine which covers the area of five football pitches and can probe matter down to a molecular and atomic scale. We have so many satellites in space monitoring weather and the thickness of the ozone layer that the area immediately around the planet must look like the M25 on a Monday morning. Yet on Thursday morning we will still have a man called Malcolm on BBC News 24 in a hi-visibility jacket saying there was no way the gritters could have been mobilised quickly enough to make sure we get to work on time, and that the Highways Agency did everything it could.

Rolling news channels across the country will be littered with superlatives about the weather. The snow will be ‘phenominal’. Disruption will be ‘severe’. Some poor weather reporter wil be dispatched to stand at a busy rural road junction so that we can see ‘intrepid commuters’ driving in ‘treacherous’ conditions. If they’re really lucky some burly chap in a rusty Ford Escort will slide across the road behind them as he tries to wave to the camera.

When did everything become newsworthy? It snows in this country, it always has and, if the climate change lobbies act swiftly, it always will. In the 1970’s people awoke to find their entire front doors were under snow. People got a shovel, did some digging, put on some wellies and a bobble hat and went off to work. Today we’re told to stay at home with all the curtains shut if the weather drops below freezing.

I’d love to say it’s because the HSE people have forced their paranoa on the public by some osmosis-like process, but I think it’s the media’s fault. 24hrs is a long time to fill with news. That’s why we have two presenters, and they have to walk around the studio every now and again. This isn’t to make the news more approachable and groovy, but because we may not notice it’s the same script from fifteen minutes ago if he says now sat nonchalantly by the weather-map. They can’t do in-depth analysis of things or debate the news like a broadsheet in case someone says something which may bring to lfe thousands of living-dead lawyers looking to earn a few bob in libel cases, so we have to make everything look an American action movie.
One day the world saw the 9/11 unfold on their screens, and now news agencies around the world want to recreate that hunger for news even when there’s nothing to be seen.

So by the end of the week we will be suffering ‘horrendous’ weather conditions. Last year one inch of snow meant we were alerted that Kent was ‘cut-off’. It must have been horrible. A whole county is cut-off and the only thing that seems able to get there is a convoy of news reporters and camera crews. And they’re not bringing blankets flasks of oxtail soup and Kendle-mint cake, just their unique brand of hyperbole.

In reality we will get a bit of snow. It will mean many people leaving a little earlier and travelling a little slower. Doubtless some trains will be cancelled because a small child’s snowball landed on one of the rails somewhere on the rail network. Some children may get the day off school because Health and Safety boffins will say that they are safer sledging down a large hill on a small greased baking tray than trying to walk across the playground to their heated classroom. Adults will throw snowballs in their lunch hours without wearing the prescribed goggles or bio-hazard suit, and as a result someone may get a nasty bruise get to knock-off early. Some old people may get to chat with a neighbour or relative who goes out of their way to check that they are okay and fed.

There will be no end to the world. Civilisation will not be brought down by a little snow. Politicians will still lie, the BBC will still show Diagnosis Murder, and global warming will still fill up half the Guardian. All that will happen is that we’ll all feel a bit embarassed because although we can build supercomputers and robots that can fly off across the galaxy, a man called Malcolm can’t watch the weather and send out the gritting lorries when it mentions snow.

More the A1307 than Route 66

They say you know you’re getting old when you start feeling out of touch with modern music and talking about the glory days of the music of your youth. In that case I must be well into triple figures.

Barely a day goes by at the moment when I don’t start shouting at the latest pop celebrity trying to slim Andy Warhol’s fifteen minutes down to ten whilst still earning multi-millions on download sales to 12 year olds. I bring it on myself. It’s got to the point now where Sarah is going to start burying the remote control in the shrubbery if I start flicking through the music channels on tv. I have to work hard not to throw anything heavy at the screen whilst shouting at the latest shiny, bryl-creemed starlet with whitened teeth whose life Hendrix would have lived in an hour and still had time to do four rounds of angel dust before going on stage.

They just don’t make music icons like they used to. They used to live fast die even faster in blazing car wrecks. They used to wear sunglasses because it was cool, not because they’d been given a back-hander by a manufacturer to keep the label hanging from the frames in a close-up tv shot. They used to eat animals and have wild post-concert parties, not throw civilised tea parties in aid of orphaned South American Chihuahuas.

There’s a great art of rock pilgrimages to visit those famous sites. When in Seattle I longed to see the Hendrix memorial. There’s something iconic about Battersea Power Station and Pink Floyd’s escapee pig, which no doubt would be shot down like a lost luftwaffe pilot for fear of pig flu were it to break loose over London today. There’s the same sense of history when you drive over the Hammersmith flyover on the A4 and look down on the venue which saw Bowie’s last performance as Ziggy, and the only venue Neil Young ever set fire to with a particularly vigorous rendition of Harvest Moon.

I know the Hammersmith Palais is being demolished and that the Hacienda is now truer to its meaning as a block of flats, but I was looking today at the England Rocks website, which aims to provide a tour of rocks landmarks, and you’d be forgiven for thinking the Labour Party had handed over everything to Barrett Homes.

Keen to see what gems I could claim to live near I was slightly disappointed. I have Aust Services where Richie Edwards parked his car before presumably going on a walk marked on his map by Jeff Buckley. I also have the Oasis Leisure Centre in Swindon, hometown of both Marc Lamaar and Billie Piper, although it is also claimed more plausibly by the Gallaghers that they took the name ‘Oasis’ from a cab company or restaurant in Manchester.

Having decided the Cotswolds are more in tune with men in white sporting bells on their ankles and waving handkerchiefs around, I set my eyes on Cambridge and Suffolk. Syd Barrett’s final home was on the same street that I went to Sixth Form College, but then he also went to school in the same building there in its previous incarnation as a boys school – the band had donated their entire catalogue of cd’s and books to the library. The Who’s Quadrophenia earns Brighton a mention, but the film would have been long consigned to petrol station bargain bins without Phil Daniels riding off Beachy Head at the end, but everyones favourite lemming playground doesn’t get a look-in.

The thing is, what great places are going to be added on the map by today’s Generation X? A plaque in George Michael’s favourite public lavatory? The restaurant where Kate Moss and Pete Doherty first kissed perhaps? Maybe Will Young’s dentist.

Today’s rock stars don’t live fast, they live carefully following strict prescribed diets named after 1970’s sit-com characters like Atkins and Perrin. Caution isn’t thrown to the wind, but everything undergoes a risk-assessment by an advisory body of former HSE workers. Drummers don’t explode in fireballs on stage anymore or dive into empty swimming pools, they drink Earl Grey with Mojo journalists over lunch meetings in vegan restaurants, and as a result I think the youth of tomorrow will be hard-pushed to find anything in Britain’s countryside to get them musically excited or connected. Except maybe some sheep droppings which have a faint likeness to Gareth Gates…

It’s in the Cannes…

Many people come to London to find fame, but I came here the other day and it found me in the form of an appearance in a film destined for Cannes. What’s more I didn’t have to spend years living on the bread-line sharing a shabby-chic flat with half-a-dozen other wannabes. No wearing fake Levi jeans and white t-shirts eating cornflakes in the afternoon. No auditioning whilst undertaking two part-time jobs, one canvassing shoppers on behalf of a perfume which would be put to better use as an air-freshener and the other one taste-testing anti-hallitosis dog food.

I’m a film star now. A true thespian. But I’m already thinking ahead. You have to constantly reinvent yourself in this kind of business. I’m already thinking I should start treading the boards in classical theatre with the works of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Stoppard, Richard Herring and Ben Elton. The true classics. Take a break from these contemporary roles.

My first role on camera was a topless one. I was young, and it was all treated artistically. The character required it. I was playing a boy who’d been plucked from drowning in the sea for an English project at school. Such fine acting performance would probably be banned these days by bearded men in tweed suits and plastic glasses who define what can and can’t be done at school for child-protection, but nevertheless it was to be my acting debut.
I’m not saying my latest performance was Oscar-winning. I mean, I’m no Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I’m not even George Peppard in that film, who later went on to play Colonel Hannibel in The A-Team. It’s not a role worthy of O’Toole or Guinness, but I wasn’t that bad either. I’ll probably get a Bafta.

There I was merrily minding my own business wandering Whitehall, avoiding the demonstrators in Parliament Square who were trying to show how civilised and environmentally-minded they were by damaging public property, littering and bashing each other around, when I was approached by a director. I always thought directors sat on chairs with their names on, smoked cigars and wore scarves that were heavily starched to make it look like they were taking part in a re-enactment of the Battle of Britain sitting in a Spitfire. Apparently I was wrong.

So I appeared in a film which is going to appear at the Cannes Film Festival. Probably. Standing on the Shoulders of Gants it was called. Apparently some of the £2 coins that are in circulation have the ‘i’ missing from their edging, and it centres around that. I’m playing an IT boffin. It’s clearly a typecast role, but I’ll let it pass. The lovely Sarah thinks it was because I was dressed smartly in a shirt, with a long dark coat, scarf and courier/laptop style bag. I think it was probably because I was trudging around the city with a sense of weariness and not fitting in with the world.

Warhol said that one day everybody would have their fifteen minutes of fame. We must have advanced considerably past that time because mine lasted about seven and a half. One minute I was taking pictures of Big Ben trying to avoid being caught in a human version of One man and his dog involving protestors and riot police, the next I have a camera and sound man giving me their undivided attention as Italian tourists and intrigued policeman look on.

I had to ad lib for my role, something I doubt Alec Guiness was encouraged to do in Star Wars, but then I’m very much a contemporary actor. I spoke about how I had heard of the ‘gant’ coins and had seen the websites. How I had always assumed it was a myth but yes it’s true they’re worth millions. Being part-geek, part method-actor, I had to come away and look it up on the interwebnet. There are sites about these coins, like this one. Or this one.

So there you have it ladies and gentleman of the Cannes jury. I hope you see fit to view my performance favourably. I have a merchandising contract in the pipeline that I’d like to buy me a penthouse apartment in Reykjavik if the film get worldwide distribution. Step aside Clooney, this is my year at Cannes…

Happy Groundhog Day!

Ahah! February 2nd, Groundhog Day. It’s a bit late in the day, so may I be the last to wish you a happy Groundhog Day. Or many happy returns for yesterday, or something.

So today we not only found out that the world is getting hotter according to some scientists in Paris, but Phil the Punxsatawney Groundhog has agreed that it is warmer and spring is here. For those of you unaware of the proceedings, the official Punxsatawney Groundhog Website explains that Phil the Groundhog has come out of his burrow on Gobbler’s Knob, seen that he has not cast a shadow on the ground and that it is therefore cloudy, so Spring is now here and it’s safe to come out (had he cast a shadow he’d have gone back indoors for another 6 weeks). It’s a bit like waking up with a hangover, walking to the bathroom, and if you can see you’re casting a shadow it’s okay to get up because you can now face looking at natural light again.
So there you go. Spring is here. No “66-90%” certainty there. The people of Pennsylvania have asked their furry friend and he is certain – spring is here early and it’s safe to go out and about.

He’s also pretty confident that although it would have very many varied hilarious consequences, tomorrow is unlikely to be exactly the same as today…

Watching the watchers

In the olden days driving used to be simple. You’d have a man walking at the front of the car with a bright red flag to warn pedestrians that a car was coming and they’d move out the way. Today you could strap half of Halford’s national stock of halogen lamps to the front and pedestrians would still walk out into the road in front of you. But it’s okay, because speed ‘safety’ cameras are making Britain’s roads a safer place.

Last year British motorists payed £121m in fixed penalty notices. You could bribe South African officials into buying your company’s jet aircraft for that kind of money. You could build two more Welsh parliaments. You could buy 2 Eurofighter jets and still have money left over for fuel and winegums. Or buy a house in the home counties.

Today the Avon and Somerset Safety Camera Partnership asked the government for £100k to pay for more cameras. Not the speeding variety, but CCTV cameras. It appears that they’re fed up of people vandalising their cameras, and now want to put up cameras to protect the cameras.

Can you see a problem with this?

Say you’ve gone out with your mates. You’ve got a balaclava on, or maybe uncle Fred’s motorcycle helmet, and you’re tooled up to wreck a speed camera. How likely is it that you’re going to be put off by the fact somebody’s gone and put up a second camera pointing at the first one? I think it’s more than likely that matey-boy’s going to see this as an amazing b.o.g.o.f vandalism treat from the tax-payer.

It’s amazing given the amount of effort put into catching beelzebub’s proteges speeding motorists, that there haven’t been more publicity campaigns. ROSPA’s website illustrates that out of 34 road safety campaigns between 1963 and 2003, only 7 have focussed on speed. That means that 27 have been about drink driving or wearing a seat belt. Speed wasn’t thought about until 1993.

The ironic thing is that speeding motorists are contributing to road safety, just not in the way you’d expect. Speeding fines are going to the treasury, not road safety campaigns. However, as a cyclist I will avoid going on roads where speeding motorists are. That means I’m less likely to get run over, and the whole thing has made the road statistically safer. It’s not just me. In slower traffic pedestrians seem to think they have Batfink’s wings that were ‘like a shield of steel’. They just walk out. Employ some 17 year old loon who’d otherwise be working in B&Q to drive up and down that road at 36mph all day and I promise you they’ll think twice about when they step off the curb.

I have no doubt speed kills. It kills outside schools, shopping centres, residential areas. But when was the last time you saw a camera or camera van in one of those places?

There’s a whole host of speed-killing measures talked about at the moment. London is installing cameras in pairs so that you get a picture both front and rear of the car – fantastic if you’re thinknig of selling you car in the Friday Ads or Autotrader. Other cities are thinking of taking away curbs so that pedestrians and cars are on the same level.

Here’s an idea. Take that money and spend it on road safety. Show children videos of people having near-misses by stepping off the curb without thinking. Put a plasma tv at accident blackspots to show pedestrians in technicolour glory what happens if they step out into the road assuming a car will stop for them. Put up signs along cycle routes saying “don’t even think about going down this road”. Employ a traffic policeman or two to pull over those Mondeo and Mercedes drivers who insist on driving in the middle lane of the motorway at 56mph just in case they manage to catch up with some slower car before they have to turn off in 79 miles. Deal with the cause of road accidents, not just trying to lessen the consequences of when they do happen.

The thing is, I think I’ve found the motivation behind all of this. What’s the worse Matey-boy is likely to get for defacing the safety camera? The prisons are full. I suspect he’ll get a second £60 fixed penalty for vandalism or criminal damage, doubling the revenue each camera can take.