On the whole, Cornbury had more good than bad. The organisers can't be blamed for persistent rain and unseasonably low temperatures, or the fact that Jeremy Clarkson and David Cameron keep turning up. We saw enough good music (clearly we wouldn't have bought tickets if we'd thought this would be otherwise), there were no massive queues for anything, and the sanitation was as hygienic as could be expected*. However, I had three bugbears (hmmm, this makes me sound like some weird version of Goldilocks).
1) Beer. I know that it must be tricky gauging the level of demand for real ale at an event, and it's not like lager, you can't just chuck the unused stuff back on a lorry and sell it somewhere else, so there is a potential loss. But when you've run out of draught beer by Saturday afternoon, and the bottled replacement by Sunday lunchtime, you've screwed up. Especially when you employ loads of nineteen year old barstaff who appear to think that wanting proper beer is a weird affectation.
Note to organisers: You've got a folk stage and Morris Men by the dozen, for crying out loud, how did you imagine Hobgoblin was going to be a hard sell?
ii) Changes of Scheduling. We timed our Saturday arrival to catch The Beat at 1 o'clock, and had actually checked on the website before leaving; so what we didn't want to hear as we entered the grounds at half past twelve, still a mile away from the stage, was the distant strains of Hands Off She's Mine. As it turned out we got there for the second half of their set, and an impromptu encore which lasted nearly as long as the main body - I think someone was trying to correct for the early start there - then bought a programme which had them down as being on stage at 12:30.
Note to organisers: So knowing the time had changed weeks ago, you amended the printed programme - available only after punters had got inside the arena - but not the website (available to absolutely everybody, including those who were checking on Saturday morning. WTF?
iii) Umbrellas. Not to mention chairs, picnic baskets, coolboxes and tents. Tents! Cornbury has a particular village fete-like atmosphere which can be charming if you're patronising the marquee where the local school sell tea and home-made cake. However, there is a downside to the innocent "we don't normally go to gigs" vibe, mainly the people who set up something resembling Everest base camp ten feet from the main stage, thus taking up the space of fourteen people for the two of them, and appear bemused by the crowds gathering menacingly in their vicinity. You have a choice, set up your picnic area at a reasonable distance, or be prepared to stand.
And if you've come prepared like we had, i.e. wearing waterproofs and walking boots, and with the expectation that "Yes it's an English summer, it might rain", there is nothing more infuriating than the people who have thought "Well why on earth would I need waterproof clothing, I have an enormous umbrella bearing the name of my stockbroker", and use it to obscure the view of anyone standing behind them.
Note to organisers: The bad weather brought idiots out of the woodwork. This year there seemed to be a lot of people who were taken aback by the rain because it meant they got wet, and who would have preferred to be allowed to drive their Land Rover up to the stage and watch through the windscreen. Of course, if they'd been told they were allowed to do that, they'd then have tried to bend the rules by bringing a caravan as well; and been offended to be told that was breaking the rules, even though obviously they needed that caravan to make a proper cup of tea, actually.
*I've just remembered that at one point I found myself standing next to a Morris Man (one of the sinister Sith ones) in the gents, and, as he finished his business with a good shake, thinking to myself "So that's why they call it going for a tinkle".
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Thoughts, long and short, after attending Cornbury 2008
*It was wet. It wasn't Glastonbury 2005, or the Somme, so I'm not claiming to have suffered life-changing hardship, but it was terribly wet, and unpleasantly muddy. We left early on Sunday because we'd had freezing water thrown at us for six or seven hours, and KT Tunstall was singing. If the promoters did that at Guantanamo (Not Quite Torturebury? Unconstitutionfest?), they'd be in front of a war crimes tribunal, so we didn't feel we had to justify leaving early.
*We hadn't previously noticed, before driving past it, that the nearest station is Finstock. Isn't that a better Festival Name? I know Cornbury sounds a bit like Glastonbury, but Finstock? Come on, boffins! (Even if it's a one platform station on the worst line in Britain, and you wouldn't actually want to depend on it to transport more than half a dozen people to and from the festival on any given day).
*Top three bands:
i) The Beat - first act on the first day on the second stage and it made most of the rest of the weekend feel like the headline had already happened; I know they caught about the only proper sun of the weekend, so it may seem unnaturally sunny in the memory, but I have to say that's some poor scheduling (subsidiary major grump to follow)
ii) Lightnin' Willie & the Poorboys - looked like Kinky Friedman, played guitar like Santana, sang like Johnny Cash and had the best line from on stage all weekend (again, see below)
iii) Salsa Celtica - normally, advocating that a band which includes a banjo, bagpipes, accordion, tin whistle, upright bass and fiddle should also have a Spanish-speaking, gourd-beating, lead singer and play the rhythms of Latin America ought to be like the worst excesses of fusion food, just with music. However, like fusion food, in the hands of the right people it works.
*Best three lines from on stage
i) Lightnin' Willie (in the world's broadest Texas accent): It's nice to be playing Cornbury. As you may have guessed, I'm not from round here. I'm from Didcot.
ii) Graham Gouldman (during 10cc's set): Sorry about the rain, I'm from Manchester, so I know how you feel. Mind you, I'm actually quite dry up here, so fuck you.
iii) 13-year old Judy Luxmoore on the Riverside stage: If you'd like to hear my CD, please give me ten pounds after the set. As soon as I've recorded it, I'll let you have a copy.
This may only be Part I. I still need to vent about umbrellas, scheduling changes, and beer stocks.
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Ah, the joy of organising cricket matches. Two years ago, the groundsman rang me up to tell me the ground had lost its drinks licence a week before my 40th birthday game - no problem. This week? I get a phone call to tell me that the caterers have been involved in a car crash at the weekend and have baled out, five days before the match. In the circumstances it would be churlish, nay, somewhat unfeeling, to criticise them for lying around the John Radcliffe instead of cooking my food on Saturday just because the chef has a broken leg. Instead I have, surprisingly easily, found an alternative caterer at short notice, and one who clearly didn't detect the notes of panic in the enquiry, and quote us double the usual rate.
There are times when I wonder why I bother laying my plans a year in advance, as it seems that as long as you have the nerve, you can leave it all till literally a week before the event and save yourself all the work and worry.
Grrr.
Though I hope the person with the broken leg feels better soon. Which I must admit I didn't on Monday morning.
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| Date: | 2008-06-20 21:27 |
| Subject: | "Cut and Paste" |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: |  relaxed | | Music: | Radio 4 |
And so Doctor Raj Persaud is brought to book for what he has described as a "cut and paste" error, compounded by his "inability" to "use" quotation marks "correctly".
Again, the ability of an aparently intelligent man to fail to see the flaw in his cunning plans is mystifying. Did he think to himself "I'll never be found out: the only way that could happen is for all these newspaper articles and other writings to be seen by the people who originally wrote them. And what are the chances of that?"
When my student self was required to produce original work, the internet hadn't been invented enough, so we had to plagiarise the old-fashioned way. Given that the result of the Peloponnesian War hadn't changed, nor any of the major events, the topics for essays tended not to vary much from year to year. So if you didn't have time to read the relevant books and articles (and produce your precised version of what you read there) you found a sympathetic person from the year above, bought him a pint, and copied his essay.
Not word for word, obviously (and you also checked what he'd written, in case he claimed that the first reports of the disastrous Athenian expedition to Syracuse had been broken exclusively on Sky News) but what you ended up with, even with your own flourishes added, was essentially the same essay. A year later, it might happen that a younger classicist of your acquaintance would tap you on the shoulder, offer you a pint, and that essay would be revived for another outing in different clothes.
As it happened, one of my tutors was considered to be possibly the foremost expert in the field of textual transmission: looking across the 20 or 25 centuries since they were written, he had traced the manuscripts which had brought us the accepted version of all the ancient works we were reading, even in his own tutorials. For most of that time, these works survived in monasteries, when few people could write, and the only way to copy a text was to write it out by hand (presumably Raj Persaud would have blamed a "scriptorial error" when his version of the Odyssey seemed very similar to Homer's). I like to think that he amused himself tracing the history of one or two of my essays even while I was reading them, spotting the common bits of text which betrayed its roots.
Fortunately my tutor was not only a scholar but a true gentleman, and if he noted the similarity of my essay to the works of others, living or dead, he never mentioned it. Raj Persaud must be wishing the internet would do the same.
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| Date: | 2008-06-11 20:45 |
| Subject: | Travelling Hopefully |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: | peaceful | | Music: | Stuff played by Marc Riley |
If my French was better (which I suppose it could be - it's not as if it's frozen at its current level and I couldn't learn a few more of the words I don't already know, such as "monkey-wrench" or "rewritable DVD", if I needed to), I could see myself living there quite happily. In these days of the internet (or le internet, as they say in France - see how easy it is?), I could still access Radio 4, and most other things I couldn't live without. And I think it might suit me. They simply don't care about stuff.
My most recent visit was to attend a wedding near Toulouse, and it gave me ample time to reflect on the nature of France. For a start, as we were boarding the train, we quite literally heard whispers about a national strike from other passengers; to start with, I felt pleased at dragging up the correct French word from my memory (I am old enough to remember that the phrase "grève totale" featured in the opening titles of World In Action, in the 70s at least - the French going on strike is hardly a modern phenomemon). Our bonhomie continued, unsurprisingly, while we were bombarded with complimentary champagne and other treats; however, once we'd moved into the relaxed post-prandial mode, we thought it worth asking the train staff about our chances of catching an onward connection from Paris to Toulouse. It was probably fortunate that we asked the question after a good dinner and two bottles of wine each, because the answer was that Paris welcomed the English milords, so much so that they wouldn't be seeing Toulouse, or, for that matter, any other city but Paris that night, as there were no inter-city trains running because of la grève.
We were philosophical. And this is where I think the choice of train over plane, and the upgrade to first class, was justified; I suspect that if I'd had to queue for hours to get through airline security, having had to get to Stansted or Luton first, eaten a ham sandwich for dinner, fought for my baggage, and realised I was still thirty miles from the city after which my airport was named (memo to the owners, I know you're Spanish and not from Bedfordshire, but you can't just call an airport London-Luton - it's in Luton, and therefore not in London - the name itself is a giveaway) the news that half of France was on strike would have upset me. As it was, I had taken a direct route into the centre of London, I had been given food and drink (possibly even to excess), my Luggage was safely behind my seat, and I was now in the centre of Paris. What did I have to complain about?
Over our starter, we had agreed how admirable it was that the French were not stultified by modern representative democracy - if they thought they were being shafted, they needed no second invitation to take to the streets and let their government know about it. It would have been churlish to complain about that independence of spirit two hours later, even though it meant we were standing at the enquiries office at Gare du Nord looking for answers to important questions.
We had three, more or less:
1) Can we get replacement tickets to travel to Toulouse tomorrow morning?
Yes. (Fair play to SNCF, we were given first class tickets on the 0810 TGV without any argument).
2) As we'll be leaving from Gare Montparnasse, can you recommend a suitable hotel?
No. All Parisian hotels are of a high standard and comparisons would be invidious, you so-called Arthur King. Find one yourself.
3) Will you be paying for this hotel, having cancelled our overnight train?
No! Now go away, or I shall taunt you a second time. (Actually, he gave me a piece of paper on which to submit my comments to SNCF, though as we walked away, I think I heard the words "I told him we already got one").
The sensible thing seemed to be to find an hotel as close as possible to Montparnasse station; worryingly, the first two we tried were full, though I suppose it shouldn't have been a surprise, as presumably everyone else who had been planning to be on our train was also in need of a bed until the morning. There was, however, one room left in the appropriate Timhotel, while a nearby bar provided a pleasant enough way to spend an evening definitely not going south.
The bar was mostly populated by men, puting the world to rights; and a dog, which recognised my accent and bit my leg. We loitered at the counter while the patron added up our bill in leisurely fashion, and conversed about politics: they told us how awful Sarko was; we responded by throwing up our hands in Gallic style to indicate the utter futility of Gordon Brown. In this way the entente cordiale was satisfied by mutual grumbling about political leaders, and we slept soundly.
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On a global scale I didn't go away that long (4 days) or travel that far (1800 miles), but I certainly feel as if I have returned from a decent adventure.
Things whose reputation has been enhanced in my eyes: the Eurostar, the TGV (in fact, just rail travel in general) the vast majority of Parisians and Toulousains, French cuisine (with special reference to the glory that is confit duck) and Munster rugby.
Also Radio 4 (especially given that Test Match Special was on the air), proper tea (actually more to do with proper milk), and the Times crossword, because I had access to none of them and realised how much I couldn't live without more or less daily access to such things. Hmmm. For a man who spent a good part of the weekend wearing a provocative red rugby shirt, that makes me sound rather too much like John Major.
Things which have not impressed me: French trade unions, the selfish bastards. And small French dogs who bite you when the bastard French unions have compelled you to spend an unscheduled night in Montparnasse. That's about it, actually. I seem to be channelling John Major again, which is not really me, oh no.
Last week I went to the wedding of a college friend (to take place in the vicinity of Toulouse, which is unusual for men from Bolton), and another friend agreed with me that for men unrestricted by wives, children or time constraints, first class overnight rail was the only civilised option; I think I'd been reading Jerome K Jerome, and couldn't help feeling that it was the option he would have chosen. In time I may write a little more about trains, or just start planning the next journey instead.
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I am an inveterate capturer of BBC radio output, so that, having filled up my media player, I can be my own Programme Controller; and while I generally choose to listen to music on the way to and from work, I like to be able to spend my lunch hour immersed in drama and comedy. While I can't escape the work environment physically, I can at least do so internally, simply by putting in my headphones and daring anybody to disturb me.
This week I have been listening to The Nightrunners of Bengal, in turn part of a larger dramatisation of four novels by John Masters, which formed a Classic Serial in eighteen parts (back in the days when the idea of a Radio 4 Classic Serial that only ran for two weeks would have been considered too puny to deserve the name).
I have enjoyed it, but only after getting used to the cognitive dissonance caused by the main character, a British officer, being played by Oliver Sterling Michael Cochrane, the plucky English lady, with whom he falls in love, by Lynda Snell Carole Boyd, and the sultry, mysterious Rani of Kishanpur by Usha Gupta Souad Faress.
Mind you, it did leave me waiting for Captain Savage's faithful jemhadar to come upon him with the words "Grettings, sahib, me old pal, me old beauty" before saying he was unfit for service because of his farmer's lung.
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I was sorry to see that Bletchley Park is in trouble. One of the manifold fun things I've been doing in recent real life, and not writing about, was going there for a day out. Last month, after we'd come back from Paris, we had one more day of holiday, and might well have spent it loafing around the house, and doing nothing much in particular, if we hadn't been listening to Radio 4; but when The Reunion happened to have brought together a group of codebreakers who'd helped win the war, and then not mentioned it for thirty years, we listened to their reminiscences, had breakfast, and drove in the direction of Milton Keynes to look at their huts.
We did remark at the time that it felt like the sort of place which was clearly run with an enormous amount of enthusiasm and knowledge, but probably not very much money. Hopefully a larger institution (The National Trust? The Imperial War Museum? I don't know enough about museum funding to guess what might be a reasonable scenario...) will be able to absorb the site, or a benefactor will emerge with enough cash to keep it viable for a bit longer.
The trouble is that the wonder of Bletchley lies in the ideas that were conceived there, and the people who thought of them. There are, of course, real Enigma machines (including the one which was stolen and returned to Jeremy Paxman) and reconstructions of the bombes, and the rebuilt Colossus (no doubt everyone spots that the technician who monitors Colossus has a laptop, almost certainly with more processing capacity, and not taking up an entire room to do it - I suspect this is done deliberately), and these are all worth seeing; but it's the brilliance of the minds behind Bletchley which is the really impressive thing about what happened there, and the fact that you're right on the spot gives an insight into the circumstances in which they had to work. Unfortunately, I bet that sort of thing is quite fascinating enough for old men like me, but it must be a difficult sell to young people who like their 21st century museums to be interactive and shiny; and who are of a generation where even their grandparents aren't old enough to remember the war.
Personally, I liked being able to walk amongst the actual buildings where it all happened, with ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) white_hart, who had even dressed up in appropriate period style, and feel what day-to-day life in Station X in 1942 might have been like; so I'm extra glad I did it before economics dictates that the artefacts end up in an American university, and the house is sold to be an outpost of some multinational conglomerate. Fingers crossed.
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| Date: | 2008-05-16 00:26 |
| Subject: | Captain, oh my Captain |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: |  pissed off | | Music: | Messiah, Let us break their bonds asunder |
Two months to go till the cricket tour / college reunion, so I sent out the important e-mail (the one which points out that saying yes-what-a-good-idea-I'd-love-to-come is no longer enough, and to prove it, here are the details of the bank account I have set up to collect everyone's contributions)...
This is the point at which I have to remember to steer a middle course: not to get too excited by the fact that people have confirmed they're definitely coming from, say, Dubai and Singapore, and have planned their summer trip home around this weekend; and not to get too depressed when someone turns out to have been offered a new job starting next month in San Francisco and thus definitely can't make it. Most of all, I need to remember not to worry unduly because the majority (who don't live anything like as far away) haven't yet responded at all either way, and hope that this means they're coming and don't think it needs saying, rather than backing away now that they've been asked to make a commitment. I just need to remember that for the most part it's just in their nature to be forgetful, incompetent, procrastinating bastards, and they are not doing it to spite me.
The one person who has pissed me off is the cricketer who now tells me he can't make it because he's being somebody's best man, and has decided that the only weekend for the stag do is the one I first put forward for this event nearly a year ago. If it was just him, fair enough, but he's also taking three or four others from his team away with him, which feels like actual sabotage.
Being a captain at this level is not about being Michael Vaughan, who needs to have the respect of his peers for his own abilities, a gift for strategy in the field, and a winning way with the media and public. No, because Michael Vaughan has never been told by Kevin Pietersen that he can't play in the First Test because he forgot to put the date on the calendar and his wife's booked them a city break in Vienna that weekend. Ryan Sidebottom seems to be a nice bloke, but I reckon if his brother-in-law said he needed a hand moving house during the South Africa series, Ryan wouldn't say "Sure, I'll give Vaughany a ring and tell him I can't play till the one-dayers," he'd say "Sorry, I've been booked for something else for ten months," which is exactly what doesn't happen at the base of the cricketing pyramid.
I am now thinking of the man who was so organised he was able to tell me a year ago that he wouldn't be able to make it, and wished me luck with what he described as "herding the cats". He used to be a cricket captain as well.
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At first I thought this would be about some who'd really objected to Delia's latest series...
Fair play, though. If someone tried to put a layer of tomatoes on my shepherd's pie, I'd be reaching for a shovel.
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I haven't written much of anything lately because I've been too busy doing stuff to reflect on it, and as it has almost all been fun stuff, this is, on balance, good.
Part of my problem with starting anything of any length has been that I flit between PC at work (restricted interweb access), PC at home, and laptop; and thus worry about having documents in the wrong place, or editing multiple versions of things and over-writing the wrong one. Of course, this problem was supposed to be solved by my cunning plan, in which I acquired a memory stick large enough to hold all the files I might ever need, so that they would always be wherever I was.
It is a great technological achievement that this thing sits in the palm of my hand but can hold twice as much information as the hard drive on my first PC could; the downside is that I now regularly find myself searching all my pockets, thinking "I have, quite literally, lost my memory. Now where the hell did I last have it?"
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I took advantage of a one-day sale on Play.com to plug a gap in my film library and pick up the de luxe most-complete-till-the-next-one box set release of Blade Runner at a bargain price. This will enable me to watch one of four, count 'em, different versions of the film, depending on how I feel, and see how much I notice the changes, or indeed care about them. (I watched the original release so many times before Ridley Scott even suggested there was a Director's Cut that I can't help thinking of his favoured version as the interloper, not the other way round. Unicorns? We don't need no steenkin' unicorns.) There are also commentaries, and while there are no 'features', there appear to be several 'featurettes', which strikes a twee note that really doesn't sit well with this film...
Anyway, while I was contemplating featurettes I discussed the film with white_hart, who is that bit younger and knows only the version without a voice-over or happy ending (for some values of happy). Part of this discussion touched on why the different versions were made and whether Blade Runner was a (commercially) successful film, at least to start with. I realised that I had always thought of it as a runaway success, and hadn't realised this was just the impression I got because it was massively popular in my limited social circles, and actually the majority opinion was very different. Certainly when it came to paying to see it, anyway.
I was put in mind of the last time we watched Casablanca. We were watching it for our own enjoyment, and as part of the ongoing process of re-educating tinyjo who enjoys shocking us by the number of classic films she has missed out on.
I was looking something up about the film while we watched it, and learned that while it appears to be an urban myth that Ronald Reagan nearly played Rick, which would have changed the film somewhat radically, nobody involved expected it to be an enduring classic - or at least no more than any major studio-produced effort of the time. However, this makes it far more succesful than most of my current personal Top Five films (my Top Five obviously varies, but some of it has been constant for twenty years, though in no particular order)...
Blade Runner seems to have under-performed without being a real turkey; only the 27th highest gross of 1982 despite a director who'd just made Alien and the most bankable leading man in Hollywood. Doubtless Ridley Scott will say its failure was due to the studio refusing to allow him to realise his vision, and Warner Bros. will say they rescued it from utter ignominy by their judicious editing. Or removing the unicorn, or something.
Duck Soup also did not bomb, but was by no means a success, and helped the Marx Brothers out of the door of Paramount studios more quickly than had been intended. At the time, this was seen as a low point, from which they managed to recover with A Night at the Opera, and not a classic in its own right. There again, it also convinced Zeppo to retire from comedy (and help manufacture atomic bombs, making it something of a Pyrrhic victory).
Withnail and I finished a pitiful 162nd in the box office charts of 1987. Clearly it looms largest with me and other people who were students in that year and went to see the Camberwell Carrot, as I remember it as being wildly popular. Obviously I remember that the cinema was full, but failed to notice it was empty of any grown ups.
Defence of the Realm is even worse - 176th most commercially successful film of 1986. I guess it ought to be considered a miracle the producers got a political thriller made in the first place, when it was short on Americans, gunshots, sex, or car chases, and the money all got spent on British/Irish character actors, and an intelligent script. There is one explosion, to appease people with short attention spans, but there's a great deal of talking first.
It seems that if I like a film when it comes out, this is not necessarily good news for anyone who has mortgaged their house to get it made.
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Radio 4, led this evening's bulletin with the "news" that, it turns out, Diana, Princess of Wales, was not murdered as part of a murderous conspiracy led by Prince Philip, and what's more, Paul Burrell does turn out to be a big fat liar! Well I've lost those bets, then. I was waiting for the follow-up item, "Bogeyman found not to be in the wardrobe, after all - search to continue under bed".
At first I was annoyed that this was the lead item on the news, but I suppose the BBC can argue they are merely reporting something that should be of interest, the summing-up in a coroner's court of an inquest that has taken six months to reach this point (but hasn't actually revealed anything that wasn't already known - except the stuff about Frankenstein and crocodiles, of course). Actually what is annoying is that £7 million of public money has been spent rebutting arguments that are largely held by a) internet conspiracy theorists with tin foil hats, b) Express Newspapers and c) Mohammed Al Fayed.
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Excellent. Oxford's freakishly tall (and mostly foreign) postgraduates who happen to be international rowers have beaten Cambridge's freakishly tall (and mostly home-grown) postgraduates who happen to be international rowers.
The Boat Race is one of those things that I think Oxbridge people get excited about more because it's a good excuse for parties and drinking, often at inappropriately early times of day. The event itself, of course, is of minimal interest as a spectacle, even if you follow rowing, and is best watched on TV if you actually want to know what's happening. This explains how I have, on several occasions, gone to a Boat Race party, including at least two in Putney and failed to see any actual rowing.
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| Date: | 2008-03-29 00:22 |
| Subject: | Bicycle Race |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: | cheerful | | Music: | Bee Gees: First of May |
Unexpected side effect of BBC iPlayer - I have been entranced by the cycling World Championships, and have caught up on all the highlights of Team GB hoovering up the golds. I yield to few people in my capacity for watching sport (apparently people complained about the BBC showing three rugby matches in the same day recently - what's that all about?) but that usually means large quantities of cricket and rugby; a bit of football is good, even the American version; and perhaps a bit of boxing, rowing, tennis, or athletics; if it's late and I've had a drink, maybe even some darts or snooker. But rarely cycling.
However, some sports come into their own when there's a proper event going on (Olympics for choice) because the competitors are properly invested in it; and as I still can't be doing with rhythmic gymnastics, that often means that the best major championships to watch are the cycling and the swimming. There's something truly impressive about the sheer mechanical bloody-mindedness required to grind out the laps of the velodrome or the lengths of the pool (knowing that this is the one occasion on which you're going to be judged by the vast majority of the ignorant populace such as me) which I find very rewarding, possibly because it's clear that when someone puts in the sort of performance required to win the title, in a sport which is minority in terms of its coverage, but still demands that you train as hard as the human body will take, that they've had to work for it far more than some Premiership footballer show pony, and they deserve my applause.
This is what I want in my sporting heroes - don't just be flashy; be so far, far beyond me that I can be properly impressed.
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Cornbury is, of course, stereotyped as the festival for middle-aged, middle-class, white people, who won't be in the Glastonbury ballot because...well, their musical antennae may still be twitching but frankly they can't be doing with the mud, or the drugs, or anything which takes them away from their comfortable North Oxford lives, and might stunt little Sasha's development. Well, as Popeye was wont to remark, I yam what I yam. Too late now to pretend to be black, in my twenties, and an urban guerilla. I am none of these things, I am exactly Cornbury's market. Besides, even when I was young enough, I was too old for the trendy stuff; I prefer to see it as waiting for the acts to catch up with me, rather than the other way round. This'll do me.
Anyway, we've gone ahead and bought tickets for both days on the grounds that my highlight is likely to be Half Man Half Biscuit on the Saturday, and white_hart's will be Crowded House on the Sunday. In between, enough other stuff to make it worthwhile; strangely, many people on the festival's own forum seem to be carping because, as far as I can see, they don't know or like literally every act so far named on the bill. To which my response is a) get over yourself, b) if there isn't enough goodness spread across the whole line-up to attract you, then - hello, here's an idea, don't buy a ticket and shut the fuck up, c) isn't this the point of things like this, to turn up and explore, and as well as seeing the stuff you already know and like, sometimes be pleasantly surprised? Failing which, d) just go to the beer tent and be glad you haven't bumped into Jeremy Clarkson or Dave Cameron yet - things could be worse.
We booked without even waiting for the Saturday headliner to be announced (which still hasn't happened). I was happy enough with the prospect of the second stage, and The Beat (who I very much want to see but still think ought properly to be called A Beat), HMHB and Nick Lowe, so if the main act turns out to be as per the speculation it will be a bonus. Early rumours favoured Neil Young; the latest hot tip is Paul Simon.
However, it has now been some days since the announcement was supposed to come, and we have started to worry that instead of Neil Young or Paul Simon there's been a terrible mix-up with agents, so that Paul Young and Neil Simon are fighting over the gig. Scary.
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Having registered my Creative media player when I bought it a year or two ago, I get the occasional e-mail from the manufacturers, usually attempting to beguile me with an upgrade, but sometimes offering useful suggestions, such as the adapter which means I can now charge my player a) without the need for an actual computer and b) abroad, thanks to the cunning plug attachment.
However their latest mail draws my attention to their new range, whose big selling point is the built-in speaker. Just to make sure I realise exactly what this means, it has a background picture of a teenager (complete with off-centre baseball cap) dancing around a Creative Zen, from which waves of sound are depicted as emerging. For crying out loud, I love my player, but one of the things I like is that if I want to listen to something during my lunch break at work, or on some form of public transport, I can do so without making everyone else in the vicinity listen to it as well.
Unfortunately, the people who make and market media players, not to mention mobile phones and all other things digital, have decided that what we need is not just to be able to put our entire record collection into a tiny package, we need to be able to broadcast it to everyone around us. And based on personal experience I can't help picturing their baseball cap-wearing teen not, say, in his own bedroom, or in a skate park far away from me, but sitting behind me on the bus...
In order to be fair to this imaginary youth, whenever I think about inappropriate music in public spaces, I remember the evening I finished my finals. After extricating myself from the bits which involved flour and eggs, and changing, I joined two contemporaries + one girlfriend for an afternoon involving a punt, which moved ever more slowly and erratically as time passed and drink was taken. (We also brought our own music, which in the pre-digital era meant a ghetto blaster and cassettes, which weighed a great deal more than an iPod).
From the boathouse we walked to North Parade, where a table awaited at Luna Caprese, then as now a decent Italian restaurant, especially by student standards. We ate well (it seems superfluous to point out there was more drink also) although while we were digesting the tiramisu, we agreed that the background music was perhaps a bit obtrusive. Mind you, in typically British style, when the waiter said "The music...do you mind?", we politely shook our heads and gestured that it was no big deal. Clearly it wasn't, though, as five minutes later the manager himself appeared. "I'm sorry," he said, "but the music is simply too loud." We were trying to think of a polite way to say "Well it's your gaff, why don't you just turn it down then?" when he reached under our table, pulled out the ghetto blaster, and pressed the Stop button.
Once it stopped so abruptly, it became apparent just how horribly obtrusive the music had been, as did the dawning realisation that it was, of course, ours. It would seem that a stray foot must have accidentally engaged the Play button without any of us initially noticing. It also became clear that everyone else in the room was looking with displeasure, nay, barely concealed contempt, at the people who, to all intents and purposes had walked into a pleasant North Oxford trattoria and started their own disco.
We didn't linger over the coffees, and walked out feeling more than a little embarrassed; there may even have been some hissing as we exited. I still feel somewhat guilty about it nineteen years later. And this is why such devices should only come with a headphone socket and not speakers.
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| Date: | 2008-03-23 20:44 |
| Subject: | All aboard |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: | squiffy | | Music: | Test Match Special |
You don't expect a friend who hails from Bolton to end up getting married in a small village near Toulouse (or, in fact, having left the matrimonial plans till his forties, necessarily to do it at all) but this is what has happened. The wedding isn't till May, but I decided I'd left it late enough, and booked my passage. If you accept such a wedding invitation, you can't go in for it half-heartedly, so I am foregoing the dubious pleasure of modern air travel, no matter how cheap it is to fly cattle class these days, in expectation that going by train will make getting there very much part of the enjoyment.
Without being an evangelical eco-warrior, I put cheap flights to foreign parts in the same class as supermarket chickens that cost £3 - I don't wish to deny the right of the consumer to have access to such things, but they just feel wrong to me. Clearly the cheapness at the point of sale comes on the back of something I don't feel comfortable with, whether it's less than top class standards of animal welfare, or pollution paid for by tax breaks on aviation fuel, and without criticising those who go down that route, I reserve my own right not to touch them with a bargepole.
However, in case I should thus seem like some sort of Modern Puritan, I also think that if I have to go 800 miles south, and don't need to do it in a hurry, I'm quite happy to choose the mode of travel which involves travelling slowly enough to have a three-course dinner, a nice bottle of wine, and maybe even a nightcap in the bar, before a proper night's sleep, so I have booked the train. I even managed to find another wedding guest who fancies the slower and more civilised way, so I shall have English-speaking company all the way.
Our schedule is to leave the all new St Pancras International at 6pm on the Thursday, and change in Paris for the 10:30pm sleeper to Toulouse. This means a day of leisure before Saturday's ceremony, and the ensuing reception; and, I am guessing, a late start on the Sunday. Apparently these things go on extremely late in the French metier, and it's positively rude to retire before 4 am: which is another good reason to have not an early morning return flight, but the return overnight sleeper service on Sunday night, meaning I can be back across the Channel and home for lunch. What's more, I have booked early enough that the differential between First and Standard class made it an easy choice to upgrade, meaning there will be free food and drink, and enough legroom to make Easyjet seem an even less attractive option.
Setting aside the environmental aspect, while it may be good that budget airlines have opened up foreign travel and allowed people to broaden their horizons travel-wise, I can't help feel it has removed any glamour that remained in jumping on a plane. There's not much of that left in trains, of course, on this side of the Channel but examination of the invaluable The Man in Seat Sixty-One suggests that the Eurostar gives access to European networks which still have a slight connection with the Golden Age of the Railways. Besides the fact that the trains are faster and cheaper and better-maintained, there's just so much more distance to travel. This means the timetables are full of overnight sleepers, and that, of course, is what makes a simple trip to a wedding feel just a little like Murder on the Orient Express. Or possibly Minder on the Orient Express. Either way, I like the idea of boarding a train at Oxford station with my suitcase in hand and knowing that when I reach my final destination I will be deep in the heart of Foreign without leaving the ground.
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| Date: | 2008-03-14 22:44 |
| Subject: | Friends and Family |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: |  thoughtful | | Music: | The Classic Serial |
Two unrelated events for digestion, which may be of the same stable.
1) The doorbell rang on Thursday evening; S. answered it, as I was being quite the domestic god and whipping up some guacamole to serve with our chicken fajitas (possibly an unconscious reaction to the new Delia and her How Not to Cook persona). We rather assumed it would be A. the next-door neighbour, calling to see if we could do some cat-feeding, as he is pretty much the only person who calls unexpectedly at this time of an evening, and for this reason. However, this proved not to be so...
Years ago, before we were even married, we were surprised at the pub when a man of mature years turned up at the bar and announced he was - I can never remember how these things work - some degree of cousin to S. (2nd possibly, maybe even removed once or twice: certainly of her grandfather's generation) and having discovered that we'd moved into his locality, had come looking for us. We had a somewhat awkward evening of conversation (it improved with a fair few pints of social lubrication - one benefit of being the landlord is that you can make sure the drinks appear regularly and without the slightest delay - but all in all, we weren't unhappy when Last Orders came)...and then managed to be too busy to organise a return fixture for the next five years.
However, when we attended the funeral of S.'s grandfather recently, there he was again; we exchanged pleasantries, and given the circumstances, barely thought about it any further. One thing we didn't do was volunteer our new address; however, it would appear he has acquired it, doubtless from someone else at the wake, and that we are back on his radar, since the person on the doorstep was him.
2) Friends Reunited piped up last week. I have no strong opinions for or against the site per se; I've used it and found it fit for purpose, where my purpose has been reassembling people for a college reunion. What I've not expected of it is that it will resuscitate my social life by bringing back friendships I had when I was a teenager. In my experience, that doesn't happen, because you don't need a website to train you in how to keep your friends from years ago; if you lose touch with someone, it's generally because one or both of you didn't care enough to keep things alive, and that's an end of it. If you do get back together through FR, most likely the best you can hope for is another awkward evening of conversation whch improves in proportion to the number of drinks taken, after which you both remember only too well why it was you lost touch in the first place, and don't repeat the exercise.
So I was slightly surprised, to say the least, that I was being tracked down by someone who I last spoke to in about 1976, and who has sent an e-mail to ask how I am and to say it would be great to catch up. Obviously part of me would be happy to believe that I am so fascinating that people who haven't seen me in 30 years are desperate to find out about me and my life. The more measured part of my psyche tells me that this is clearly bollocks. I have not achieved high office, or published interesting works, or had my name named in a tabloid scandal: so why should I suddenly have become of such apparent interest to someone whose last memory of me is as a ten year old? Beats me. It even crossed my cynical mind that FR might have spotted that my subscription had lapsed, and had picked someone at random from my year group at school in order to tempt me back into the fold with a fictitious approach.
The two happening together made me consider that other people's ideas of kinship are sometimes strangely at odds with one's own. To be continued.
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I like it when England's cricketers have a winter tour in New Zealand. The games start in mid-to-late evening, and if, like me, you don't mind going to work feeling a little tired (I am honest enough to recognise that I work in accounts, not air traffic control - if I make a mistake, I'm fairly certain nobody dies), you can watch a good couple of sessions live before bed calls.
I feel a duty to watch these Test matches, mind, because the TV pictures reveal that no bastard in the Land of the Choking Rugby Player seems interested, and if we're not careful, there will be suggestions that the next time England tour no game should be longer than 20 overs. Hamilton looks like a pleasant English county ground in Festival week, not a Test venue, and I'd be pretty sure I've seen bigger mid-week crowds at Worcester for a championship game. And yet the reverse fixture, in about two months' time, will be another full house at Lord's.
Of course, by the time New Zealand are in England, every other nation's players will be in India earning silly money for four weeks' work in a made-up tournament, leaving the two teams still wearing whites to wonder why they're the only ones compelled to choose country above private enterprise. Not convinced that state of affairs will endure.
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tired
embarrassed