That old ‘Popes in a mini’ chestnut

Or, ‘what I did today by me, aged 31 and a half’.

*Clap**Clap**Clap* [in the manner of a school teacher leading a school trip]
Okay Gentlemen… GENTLEMEN. Thank you…
Okay Gentlemen, now we’re going to be lining up outside the Cathedral entrance in a few minutes. Cardinals first, then Bishops two-by-two… So, if you could all finish your teas and biscuits and make your way out. Thank you.

This was all I could hear in the basement of the cathedral. I wasn’t expecting to, but at the time we were attempting to take the world record for the most number of priests and musicians squashed into a loo which necessitated keeping the door open. To the room you understand, not the cubicle. They’re priests you know.

Joking aside, today was a really poignant performance. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve played concert performances of Requiems, but as a classical musician rather than an organist, you very rarely get the opportunity to perform them as they were intended: at a funeral. Performing the arpeggio rise and falls of Faure’s Agnus Dei take on an entirely new depth when you’re watching 80 Bishops paying their respects to a departed colleague, whose crook and gown are laid across his casket.

As musicians we take Requiems for granted. Yes, they’re nearly all amazing pieces, very moving. But they were written for an occasion like this, and we don’t get the opportunity to perform them in this setting very often.

What are they auto-tuning? A harp?

So, today we learnt that they use auto-tune technology on the X-factor. It must be a mighty important story, ranking as it did over the Pakistan floods. Hmm.

For those that don’t know, this is a computer algorithm that corrects dicky tuning in singers competing on the show. It can nudge their voice up or down if they just slightly miss the note they were aiming for, and give everything a more polished sound.

Is it wrong? Well, if you think you don’t want to hear auto-tuned voices you’re too late. Studio time is expensive, and this technology is cheap, so I’d imagine that there are a great many number of records out there that have been tweaked from cuckoo to songbird without everything sounding like Cher in ‘Life after love’. Simon and the entourage of lawyers/spin doctors/PR Gurus and alike were quick to point out that it is only added in post-production and that the stool pidgeons judges hear the real thing, and then it’s altered to make watching the programme more bearable. But hang on, I’m sorry, don’t these programmes make money getting people to vote in a quasi-democratic way for the one they think is the best. Isn’t this skewing the result a little. Why, that’d be like Sky News showing bias against Labour in an election or something.

The truth is though, you’d use it wouldn’t you? I mean, as a classical musician you spend every day of your life trying to make sure everything’s in tune. That your fingers fall in the right place, at the right angle, in the right way. Every time. But if the pressure was on you to make a studio record, with 4 big Texans smoking cigars outside the studio window pacing up and down and pointing at watches, you’d use it wouldn’t you?

The difference comes afterwards though, doesn’t it? I mean, you’re going to go away after the session and practice like you’ve never done before. You can’t mime a concerto with an orchestra, or mime the violin along to a piano trio. And I’m sure the X-factor winners do the same, hairbrush in hand.

Sorry for the abrupt ending – a pig appears to have got tangled in my washing line whilst flying passed my garden. That keeps happening…

Ernest gets lifetime achievement

An actor I’ve admired for many years is Ernest Borgnine.

So few actors keep their careers on a high for their entire lives. There are countless greats from that old ‘cowboy’ generation who try… Burt Reynolds, John Wayne are a few examples… who nearly make it (okay, maybe not post-moneyloss Reynolds), but it’s great to see Borgnine (after his recent greatly moving role in ER) getting this.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-11021875

A Goldie Moment in NYC

Wow! What a couple of weeks. A wedding, then a trip to the US which has seen me and the lovely Sarah: cycle around San Francisco, walk the Golden Gate bridge, hang from a speeding wooden cable car,  drive 1600 miles across 3 US states, see the sun set in Yosemite, drive a Dodge Charger very fast around the edge of the salt flats in Death Valley,  hit 100 on the California Highway, hike the south rim of the Grand Canyon, see Rob Thomas play poolside at the Red Rock in Vegas, row a boat amongst the turtles in Central Park, and catch the Broadway production of West Side Story. Like I said, wow!

More on most of those to come. Now we’ve seen Times Square a few times before, and our trip has been full of chance encounters and coincidences, but just as we were saying goodbye to Times Sqaure, promising not to leave it so long before we come back and heading into the subway we caught sight of this chap having his girlfriend take some pictures of him in amongst the crowds. Completely unrecognised by the crowds around him, it’s Goldie proving that everyone, without exception, is overwhelmed by the scale of Times Square and a sudden need to capture it on film in order to take it all in.

3-6 months

I have the utmost respect for anyone out there with small children. Seriously, well done.

And it’s not for the reasons you might think.

I know there are a million reasons why being a parent is hard, but having lunch with a 2 and 4 year old the other day, I thought the playing with beans, colouring-in part was okay.

But fast-forward 6 hours and there I was in the Early Learning Centre picking toys out as presents for a series of small humans. Now, I know the last time I went into one of these shops was 25 years previously, and I just sat in the window playing with the little wooden trains joined together with magnets, but my return visit was INCREDIBLY stressful.

How on Earth, in the name of Val Doonican, do you pick a toy for a small child. Seriously, I suspect I’d have more insight and chance of getting it right if I was trying to wire the safety and take-off circuits for a space shuttle carrying ickle baby giraffes to the moon.

You can’t just go in and try them out you know. Oh no. Press a button on a toy and the staff will furrow their brow and glare at you. You will be faced with a sea of parental faces sighing and pleading with you simultaneously for silence. If you’re 3 you can go in, throw the toys, run at them, play with them and generally dribble with them to your heart’s content. Try it at 31 and you see them reaching for the button on the desk marked ‘security’.

There are rattlers. Shakers. Electronic blippy things. Toys for 3-6 months. Toys for 5-8 months. Yes, I know what you’re thinking, but these are very different age groups. Apparently.

What if you see a toy marked 5-8 that seems perfect, but you’re buying it for a 4 year old? It says it right there on the packet. Even if the child doesn’t snub the toy completely, surely you’re committing the ultimate sin handing a completely inappropriate toy.

So on a Monday morning, when I see a parent delivering two small children to nursery, appropriately dressed, punctual, washed and punctual I’m even more impressed. Not because they’ve achieved all of that, but because they managed to get out of the Early Learning Centre with some appropriate toys for their children before they grew up and left college.

DIY Hopefuls

I know I might be being a bit presumptuous, but generally we all fall under one of two umbrella groups; men and women. I mean, statistically, 99% of us are going to be one or the other. And as a man, one of the jobs befalling my half of the human race is to do DIY.

At this point, I should point out that I thought carefully about my choice of words in that last sentence having originally typed ‘…is to be good at DIY’. I’m sorry, but generally us male-folk are not as a rule ‘good’ at DIY. ‘Lucky’ perhaps. But unless we’re approaching our 75th birthday, live on a diet of spam and Wurthers Originals, and have 2 grandsons, we’re not likely to be consistently ‘good’.

Think about it fellow men. It’s Saturday morning, and there’s something to fix. You’ve got to go to B&Q – you don’t want to do you? You wander around the shop with that swagger every man gets in there, which means they pretend that they don’t spend all week talking about Php, or MySQL, or the statistical quotents, or hot-desking, but that they’re one of the builders. The only thing is, it’s Saturday: There are no builders in B&Q, they’re all in the holiday homes on the Isle of Man they bought with the profits from last year’s call-out fees. Everyone in B&Q on Saturday is a DIY hopeful. Even the staff.

I say this, because the other day I found myself on a Sunday afternoon holding a toilet cistern above my head with my nose unusually close to a functional end of a toilet. Normally for this to happen there would have been some pleasurably event beforehand, over-indulgent eating or drinking. But no, here I am trying to fit some piece of foam which looks suspiciously like a cupholder from the 1980s between some pipework, to stop the filly thing from the toilet doohangle filling all the time.

You could tell the dice weren’t rolling in my favour because exactly 24 hours later I’m standing at the bathroom door whilst a plumber has his head down the works end of the toilet, and it using a special tool to fit the cupholder to my toilet, and he’s even managed to disconnect the pipes so he doesn’t have to hold the cistern over his head or anything.

I’d spent all day working out what to tell him. Clearly, being a male DIY hopeful, this was not going to be the truth. I’d concocted a clever tale of how I’d severed my arm halfway through the job, spent 20 hours in surgery throughout the night and the consultants had told me I must on no account hold a toilet cistern hence I’d needed to call him, but I thought he might want to see the stitches. I considered telling him we’d been burgled, but I didn’t have enough time to hide the TV and valuables before he arrived. I even considered hiring an actor to take a few pictures of beside my toilet in overalls, and show them to the plumber going, ‘look! this clown did this’.

In the end, he arrived before I did and Sarah had let him in. She’d told him we’d got stuck and so had called him.

The thing is, at this point my entire faith in the men was restored. The plumber turned to me and said, ‘the thing is, you did a really good job of changing the mechanism. I only need to do a small bit of work down here’.

So there you are. A plumber humouring a DIY hopeful before all sense of his masculinity is lost. He didn’t need to say it. He could have laughed. He could have asked further questions. But he didn’t. He complemented by DIY skills luck. If only I could believe it was an act of man-to-man kindness. But I suspect it was because I’d just paid for his new kitchen at his holiday pad in Douglas.

Tiling: a beginner’s guide

Having recently bought a new house, I have spent some considerable time in DIY stores lately, most notably Q&B. For those uninitiated in the ways of such places, if you picture the scenes from Shaun of the Dead where the zombified suburbanites wander around with a pale complexion, glazed eyes, fixed stare and a feeling of worldly inevitability about their fate similar to that of an elderly lemming at Beechy Head, and then make it a little more desperate, you’ll have some idea of what I’m talking about.

I’ve spent so long there, I was mistaken for a member of staff the other day.

One of the tasks I took on was re-tiling the kitchen. Luckily, the Q&B website and a number of other useful, if not entirely accurate, forums suggested this was an easy task. For those taking on a similar task, here’s my handy step-by-step guide.

Step One: Research
As a guide, there are probably more ‘how-to’ guides on tiling than there are scholarly texts on brain surgery. And more opinions on the best ways to do it than the national Womens’ Institute conference on the techniques of jam-making. To save time, I recommend the following: Do not read them. Any true male DIY-er will know best anyway. Trust your instinct.

Step Two: Preperation
Work out how many tiles you will need. You can do this by working out the surface area of each tile and the surface area of the wall, or you can guess. Whichever you do, you will be wrong. Take that number and mutiply it by four. Every manual in the world says ensure your work area is clean, and free of obstructions. Again, ignore this. My suggestion is to cover the entire area with as much of your unwanted tat and nik-naks as possible – this will save your kitchen work-top being cacooned in grout which can only be removed by a skilled team of JCB operatives.

Step Three: Cutting and sticking
Ensure you have a good tile-cutter. It may not give a superior finish, but when the tiles explode sending shrapnel into places very few dare to tread, you can at least feel that you tried to make the process go more smoothly by buying high quality tools.
Be careful using tiling adhesive. This is an unusual substance created by NASA scientists in the 1950’s working in Area 54 under the codename ‘non-sticky-stick’. Neither a solid, gas or liquid, this bizaare concoction is brittle and easily broken when attached to either a tile or a wall, but when left on hands, clothing or kitchen worktops even a diamand cuttter will have trouble removing it. I have email evidence that a one Frederick Smith still has on his left index finger, some tile adhesive he used in 1932 when he and his wife Mavis bought their house on Evingdale Crescent, Sidmouth. Doctors are baffled, and he’s not really up for amputation. Interestingly, the tiles fell off the wall after only 6 months. Mavis was not impressed.

Step Four: Grouting
Having got your tiles into place, you have only minutes to grout the entire room before tiles start falling from the wall like stars in a Beatle-esque hallucinagenic scene. Essentially, you will be covering the tiles in cake-icing. Regardless of what colour your chosen tiles are, you will end up with an off-white look. If you’ve prepared well, you will have a grouting tool to give the perfect finish to your tiling. Simply run this along the gaps between tiles, and hey presto you will have grout everywhere except in between the tiles where it’s supposed to be.

Step Five: Cleaning
Now, for this stage I recommend investing in the following: an axe, a JCB, an electric carving knife, bow-torch, a team of demolition experts, and goggles. This is by far the longest stage. No matter how clean your tiles were after grouting, the tiling fairies will have visited overnight and recovered everything with grout. This can only be removed from the surface of the tiles or worktops with intensive work. I recommend wearing a dust-mask however, as even the lightest of sneezes will apply enough force to the group between the tiles for it to fall out.

So, there you have it. An indespensible guide to tiling. But before I close, here’s an appeal: Scientists, if we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we invent something which can stick tiles?

Bum notes from a small island

So, Bill Bryson at the Hay Festival today:

“One thing that is different, and has changed here, is the self-absorption, not just greed. Everybody is in a hurry now and there is a ‘the rules don’t apply to me’ sort of thing. When I first came to Britain it really was all about fair play and queuing”

Is he right? Possibly.

Of course, mention ‘fair play and queuing’ in relation to the British, and the Times Roman Font almost starts to crack under the weight of it’s cultural baggage.

As quickly as a meerkat on fire you’re instantly in a scene from Dad’s Army with Mr Jones and his bayonet fighting off ol’ Jerry. Street after street of Victorian back to back houses with neighbours leaning over the wall to exchange their curiously shaped vegetables for a bit of shoe polish. Bankers going to work in Bowler hats, and cricket being interrupted for sandwiches.

Today, it’s the 13 year olds with the bayonets. The Victorian back to back houses all have Vauxhalls with bodykits on out the front, and the neighbours wouldn’t talk to each other to let them know their house was on fire. The government keeps telling us on the telly each evening that they don’t eat enough vegetables, curiously shaped or otherwise, and shoe polish doesn’t work on Nike and Adidas pumps. The bankers go to work in Porsches, paid for by the misfortune of others and bankrolled on the debt of an Eastern European country. The cricket still stops for sandwiches mind, so it’s not all changed.

I’m not sure I mind that everyone’s in a hurry. It’s the not looking where your going that saddens me. Afterall, there are people you want to hurry; paramedics, Olympic athletes, emergency plumbers, waiters in noodle bars. But when was the last time you did something that deliberately was time-consuming and thorough? I’ve been decorating a new house, and woodwork is something you have to do slowly and do you know something? My God it’s satisfying to have to work slowly, carefully and intricately to achieve something.

But as we all rush around in our go-faster cars, or our bikes with 15 squillion gears, or in our cushioned-soled Hush Puppies with traction-assist mouldings, we forget to look around us. Walking around Bristol yesterday, down a road I’ve been down hundreds of times, I noticed a historical plaque I’d never noticed before. I had no idea who the chap was who’d lived there, but it felt good that someone had taken the time to tell us about him.

I think he’s on the money with ‘the rules don’t apply to me’ thing though. ‘Please queue here’ means nothing to middle-aged women in shops. Motorists can park on top of little old ladies if they put on their hazards, let alone double yellows. No one has returned an item to a shop with a receipt since 1973, or thanked a Doctor for their time rather than assuming they’ve personally paid to put him through college to make him their personal physician for life. Authority isn’t there to be respected, we made them so we can break them. An Englishman’s home is his castle, but blimey has it got a big moat around it. And that’s not just the MPs.

Our consumerism has become all-consuming. It’s eating away at our communities and lifestyle like a snake eating it’s own tail. Keep on consuming and eventually, with a little pop, we’ll eat ourselves whole.

Everybody needs good neighbours

It’s a terrible thing. It can happen to anyone. It’s probably happened to you several times. It can get you on the bus, in school, at a conference, on a plane. It strikes you out of the blue. Without warning. And there’s nothing you can do to prevent this terrible affliction.

There’s nothing worse in life when you find yourself sitting beside an empty seat when the nutter walks into the room.

In school there’s nothing worse that spending a day (or possibly a year if you went to a school that assigned seats) when you’re at school sitting next to the class nubnut who spends his entire day trying to push pastel crayons up his nose. I suspect some bus companies employ the guys that smell faintly of lager and man-wee who roam the double deckers occasionally shouting ‘it’s Chriiiistmassss’ in a Noddy Holder fashion. In July. It ensures a good turnover of passengers.

The thing is, it’s not just on buses or at desks – what about when they live near you?

Over the years we’ve had our fair share of interesting close neighbours. There was the chocolate factory, which was scrummy. It had a railway station painted like chocolate wrappers and sold cheap chocolate for students. That house even had an elderly couple who took it upon themselves to cook apple pies for the 6 students sharing the house next door.

Then there were the Chinese students. They seemed to have not quite worked out how phones work. They’d assume that their mobile was in some way connected by string to China and that the best way was to shout into it at full volume. At 1am. That was when they weren’t practicing for the Olympic team for the world’s fastest copulation. Again, at full volume presumably so their friends in China could hear that they were otherwise engaged.

On the other side we had the Secret Agent. Obviously he never admitted this, he always claimed to be a ‘social worker’. But it’s what they say on Spooks. He was a camp divorcee with a wooden tribal fertility statue in his front window, who quickly changed his calender of semi-naked men for one of fluffy kittens every time his parents visited. To be fair, I always thought the kittens were more of a giveaway. He had the added bonus of going away on holiday and letting some recovering addicts stay in his house who decided to hold their own intimate performance of Green Day’s entire back catalogue 3 nights in a row before selling his telly and kicking a door in (from the inside – brilliant Sherlock!), and claiming there was a break-in (out).

You’d think that would be hard to top wouldn’t you?

And then today, I come home to find my house has been sealed off by the local police as we await the arrival of the army bomb disposal squad. It turns out I’ve been sleeping (not to mention eating, reading, gardening, washing my hair etc) within 10 metres of a World War II hand grenade for the last four years. Some people keep guppy fish. Some people grow bonsai. That’s not good enough for my neighbours, they keep pet explosives… Exciting, huh? I was just thinking the other day that I was living a very quiet life when it turns out I’ve been living like Verloc from Jasper Conrad’s Secret Agent – and as I recall, that didn’t end well.

Even Jack Bauer only has to live with the possibility of being blown into tiny pieces for 24 hours every season – my life’s way cooler…

Marmite man himself, Gordon Brown

So, 25 hours to go until polling time.

25 hours. 25 hours until we find out whether more people read tabloids or broadsheets. That is, afterall, what an election is about. 4 weeks of gaffes and political broadcasts to help newspaper owners decide which party to tell us inky-fingered print readers which party we’re going to vote for. The election isn’t decided on sofas, or in front of television debates, but by ragged journalists typing away all day for a paycheck from some media tycoon.

But just in case you’re thinking or excercising your democratic right of free-thinking, you have a choice to make.

Firstly there’s marmite man himself Gordon Brown. I don’t mean you either love him or hate him, I think every poll has made it clear that’s a one-sided thing, I just suspect he has a penchant for the brown sticky stuff. Biggotgate proved that. He rules with an economic fist of steel and a statesmanlike quality straight from the 1950’s. Approximately the same period as his hairstyle. He inhales mid-sentence like a premiership footballer buying time as he thumbs through The Penguin book of English Cliches: Spanish to English version. But it just shows a good old fashioned reliance on learning your lines.

The thing is, as each day of the election campaign has gone by with yet another disaster for Gordon, he’s started looking more and more like the shaggy-haired elderly homeless dogs they put at the end of the RSPCA adverts. You know, the one that gets overlooked for the younger dogs and will have to be put down if no one takes him in soon. It means you get the feeling that he’s a real person, and biggotgate just went to prove my suspicions that he must go home each day and remark that he’s surrounded by baffoons.

Yes he makes mistakes when he’s talking, but he has a strange uneasiness around cameras. Just look at him interacting with members of the public – he recently asked a child how old he was and responded with ‘that must be a nice age’. Bill Gates was no great public speaker, but he did a good job, and very few of the great inventors ot scientists were huge social animals. I don’t mind a Prime Minister not having a motormouth, so long as the brain is ticking-over nicely and he gets the job done.

There’s something rather grey about David Cameron if you ask me. Not in his photos obviously, as here he tends to go with a dark green and brown combo –  page 6 on the Dulux chart if you’re interested. I suspect if he wins tomorrow he’ll be outside Number 10 on Friday peeling off the fake skin on his face to reveal his Cyborg inner workings and asking if anyone knows where Sarah Connor lives. He’s a little too much like the office suck-up: Always at the front of the picture when things are going well, but his Teflon make-up means nothing sticks to him when something goes wrong. Everytime I see him on the telly I have an urge to punch him hard in the middle of his chubby little face, but I suspect I’d break my hand on the silver spoon he has inside his mouth.

Then you have Nick Clegg, currently with the Liberal Democrats as part of his school’s work placement scheme. I think he’s there because his elderly uncle, seen alongside him at all times, works there: Vince Cable I think his name is. We all know he’s posh, but I couldn’t help wondering if he was so surprised to end up on the telly debates with the two grown-ups that he’d had to send a runner out to TopMan to buy him a suit and tie.

I found a curious way of deciding between them today: I imagined them as double glazing salesman trying to sell to an elderly lady – I think it was something to do with them standing around in their various suits. Nick would knock on the door, tell her about the windows and their benefits at great length, but when he’d gone she’d forget what company he worked for or how much it was going to cost. Gordon would come round, and she’d invite him in for coffee – I think she’d see him much like the elderly dogs on RSPCA adverts too. 3 hours later, they’d have exchanged life histories, become friends on Facebook, and would be sending each other Christmas cards, but he’d have forgotten entirely to tell her about the windows. David Cameron would be the one to do the hard-sell. He’d have the elderly lady paying to re-glaze half the street, and he’d get her to put 50p in the meter to pay for the parking on his BWM outside whilst he fills in the paperwork. And when the daughter phones later to complain, he’d deny any responsibility. But he’d ask her if she knows the whereabouts of Sarah Connor, before hinting that he’ll be back.

25 hours.

25 hours to change the shape of Britain for the next 5 years. Or at least prove that James Murdoch and the various newspaper editors of this country aren’t in charge, and give Simon Cowell a bit of a bloody nose as a bonus.