A Man Needs A Shed May 3, 2012
Posted by markswill in About me, Cars and Bikes, Politics, Schmolitics.31 comments
As per my last outing, this scrawl owes much to other, more original authors in other, more original media. Much, but not everything, so let’s get the trite and personal out of the way first, and what could be more apt in both regards than a man and his hobbies?
I, for example, spend far too much money and time than is sensible for a man of my means futzing around with old cars and, periodically, old motorcycles. And in anticipation of a balmy summer and, more pragmatically, to cling onto the column I’ve scribbled these past couple of years for a classic bike mag whilst not actually owning a classic bike, now is one of those periods. And of course as I rode this 27 year-old, yet scarily fast Honda back from the very nice man in Evesham who’s hobby it had long been, it started raining. As it has done virtually ever since: so much for summer larks on two wheels.
But as is the way with such pastimes, inability to use the bugger in the manner intended – or more disparagingly, being a fair-weather biker – hasn’t prevented me from making plans to upgrade the suspension, re-jet the carburetors and maybe buy some panniers so I can pop over to Southern France and visit my biker pal David as I’ve been threatening to do for years now. Same goes for my aged Lancia and Citroen, although the latter is less of a hobby and more of a ‘daily driver’ (pause for hoots of laughter in North London), but all of them are to varying extents, strictly an indulgence.
This was brought home to me once again when I came to tax the Lancia this week – I only use it during the Summer which as mentioned, we still live in hope of – and figure out whether I can trust my patchy mechanical ability (and patchier patience) to adjust the valve clearances, replace the brake pads and torque-down the cylinder heads or pay for someone who knows what they’re doing to, well, do it. Or should I forgot all this expensive mechanical nonsense and concentrate instead on more cerebral pursuits like the R. Crumb and Degas exhibitions that are tempting me to Paris this month, or maybe go and visit a couple of seriously ailing friends in foreign climes whilst they’re still clinging on, or buy a few hundred quids-worth of all the hardback books I keep meaning to read before they become so much digital Kindling, or acquire all that unowned Frank Zappa and Bruce Springsteen vinyl whilst it’s still – just – affordable… you can perhaps see where this is going? (And BTW, Bruce’s new ‘Wrecking Ball’ album is a cracker).
Yes, I’m sure you know people with much more useful or more intellectually, spiritually, hey, even morally worthwhile ‘hobbies’. But when there’s so much crap going on around us, and even when, as I’m sure most of us are, we’re having trouble maintaining certain standards of creature comfort, physical health or moral self-respect, should an oil-pressure warning switch for a long obsolete Italian car or a first edition of Thomas McGuane’s ‘Panama’ take precedence over keeping the radiators on an extra hour or two of a sodden, chilly May evening? In other words, are ‘hobbies’ a useless waste of time?
SHREDDING THE COMPETITION Beats me, and the same might be said of John Naughton’s piece in last Sunday’s Observer which refreshingly (for him) asked “Has the internet run out of ideas…?” Naughton, one of those infuriatingly uncritical middle-aged champions of virtually everything electronic and new, argued that like other “gloriously creative, anarchic technologies” before it, e.g. telephony, t.v., film, the interweb is now governed by a few massive corporations whose initial geeky enthusiasms and certainly ideals have been subverted by the dubious codes of “shareholder value”.
“But perhaps,” he argues, “the biggest curb on innovation is that the technologies that might serve as the springboards for next-generation surprises are increasingly closed and controlled.” He cites Facebook – the Wal-Mart of the interweb – “busily creating a walled garden in which the only innovations that can arise from it are ones allowed by (its) proprietors. The same applies to the tethered devices we know as smartphones and tablets.”
Naughton is right, and as I occasionally delve into divisive, self-serving ‘conversations’ about the future of print vs. digital publishing on the arguably pointless business forum that is Linked-In, it’s clear that whilst the former may be dying out fast, the latter is disappearing up its own fragmenting commercial rectum because FarceBerk, Google, Apple (yes, Apple) and the rest damn well aren’t going to let anyone else into their playground.
The other likely eventuality, which admittedly Naughton also mentioned, was darkly posited by Andreas Whittam-Smith in a piece I clipped from The Independent back in February 2011. Hurling the much-lauded baton of ‘digital democracy’ then being heralded as empowering the so-called (and with hindsight, rather hollow) ‘Arab spring’ back into the black hole where it had long resided, Whittam-Smith noted the formation of Iran’s cyber-police and China’s hundreds of thousands of cyber-snitchers (the latter of course with Google’s acquiescence). Surveillance of websites and increasingly, mobile phone and tablet traffic is relatively easily mounted and, as he notes, “In Saudi Arabia, citizens are encouraged to report ‘immoral’ sites for blocking. The beauty of this approach for repressive regimes is that they can claim they are merely responding to public opinion.”
Well of course we Brits don’t inhabit such a regime, at least not unless the civic glue that binds us is washed away by the economic strictures of the posh boys and their banker pals who currently rule us, but I think I’ll slope off to my metaphoric shed, stick my head in a metaphoric bucket of sand, and see if I can get a few more horsepower out of the Honda.
Make a comment, check out previous blogs, or subscribe to get ‘em automatically, via the right-hand panel
Read All About It… While You Still Can April 17, 2012
Posted by markswill in Media, Politics, Schmolitics.12 comments
“There is no such thing as an original thought,” is a quotation I can’t find attributed in any reference book, nor even on the interweb. But just to confirm the wisdom of its author, this latest scribble is lifted almost entirely from newspapers and magazines. Which in a sense is a Good Thing, because according to an item in last Saturday’s Guardian, news media in printed form is definitely buggered.
Reporter Mark Sweeney revealed that the Yorkshire Post, once the jewel in the crown of regional newspaper conglomerate, Johnston Press, is replacing its editor with a ‘director’. The same fate recently befell the stewardship of the Lancashire Evening Post, whilst up at The Scotsman the editor-in-chief’s role was eradicated. Perhaps needless to say, the new CEO at Johnstons is a man with no prior experience in print media, Ashley Highfield, whose career thus far embraced senior roles at Microsoft and BBC Digital. And in the same story, Sweeney listed woeful circulation and job losses right across the regional newspaper landscape.
As it happens, I have friends who work elsewhere in the Johnston empire and know anecdotally that they are cruel masters who, like Trinity-Mirror and many other newspaper owners try to maintain profitability – or at least manage decline – in an industry hemorrhaging both advertising and circulation revenue in an internet age, by simply if ruthlessly cutting costs, and that means jobs.
This is happening nationally too, of course: The Guardian incomprehensibly slashes its print media resources in favour of free online content (currently costing it £90,000 a day), whilst the Telegraph pursues a similar strategy by sacking many of its reporters and (very obviously) most of its sub-editors in an effort to keep its owners, the weird old Barclay brothers, in private islands and fancy hotels.
And yet in a masterpiece of mistiming, the very next day the Sunday Times magazine’s cover story offered a lengthy, well-researched tale of how local newspapers are fighting back, if not always weathering the storm. Tim Rayment reported on several ‘papers who by assiduously understanding and covering their local patch still rock political boats and vested interests and in so doing keep their readerships, albeit often in concert with paid-for apps delivering content to tablets and smartphones. But looking to America where apparently almost a quarter of consumers use mobile devices to get their news, Rayment asked, “Who will pay for the journalism… when for every $1 won from online advertising last year, (newspapers) lost $10 in print ads?”
Trinity-Mirror’s brutal CEO, Sly Bailey, the Barclay Brothers and Guardian editor (and evident print-hater) Alan Rusbridger seems to think that this doesn’t matter, but as Rayment explained – and as I know from my own editorship of the local ‘paper here in Wales – the newsgathering abilities of national newspapers, never mind broadcast media such as “the BBC’s Today programme – every politician’s morning listening – would stop” if the regional and local newspaper hacks weren’t around to feed them stories. What would they do instead – rely on lazy, ill-informed and above all opinionated bloggers? Perish the thought, and if nothing else this article offered significant evidence that those newspaper owners who do invest in their reporting activities are the ones in the best health.
Still with the Guardian and the Sunday Times, and still on print’n’paper, the tax affairs of dear old Amazon.com were recently digested from both titles in its unique if not always entirely dispassionate manner by The Week. It seems that on a stonking £3.3bn of UK sales last year, the Luxembourg-based Amazon paid no corporation tax here, and of course it also uses the low-tax Channel Islands as a conduit for its mail-order sales to Britain. Furthermore, because unlike the printed variety, VAT at 20% is applied to eBooks – “which now account for a lucrative one-fifth of the £1.9bn UK book market,” whereas in the Channel Islands it’s a piffling 3.5%. We are told that our millionaire chancellor is looking into the tax avoidance schemes employed by many big retailers such as Amazon, and The Week asks if “Amazon’s tax avoidance (could) kill off Britain’s bookshops?”
With local bookshops closing at the rate of almost two a week, the total down 26% since 2006, the answer may well be ‘yes’. Of course I know that some of my friends won’t give a fig if they’re all gone in a couple of years, along with daily deliveries by the Royal Mail who, with supreme irony and commercial myopia, didn’t get the original delivery contract with Amazon because they couldn’t match the prices of the same private companies who use Royal Mail posties to walk their packages to our doors! Which signals a segue into the Royal Mail raising its prices by 39% as a prelude to being partially priviaised next year, as recently announced by its new boss, Moya Green. (The £500,000 a year Ms Green was parachuted in from the Canadian Post Office where she managed to sack a third of its workforce, reduced delivery services by 27% and increased charges by 34% – mail volumes subsequently dropping by 20-30%).
Which is where I’ll haul this juggernaut to a halt. Clearly we are seeing the not-so-slow death of print media. I hope it won’t be in my lifetime, but in saying so I don’t believe that I’m a Luddite just because I won’t spend a few hundred quid on an iPad and further degrade my eyesight doing all my reading via the internet. If, or rather when humans are finally unable to buy and read printed newspapers, magazines and books, I hope I’ll be long dead but if the crude economic imperatives are ultimately the only ones that matter, does anyone – industrialist, economist or politician really know what impact it will have on jobs, democracy and consequently the material and cultural well-being of countries where they once held sway?
Please leave a comment, read previous or sign up to get future blogs automatically, via the righthand panel.
My Award-Winning Blog Joy April 3, 2012
Posted by markswill in Media, Politics, Schmolitics, That's Entertainment.21 comments
For my sins, once a month I physically distribute to shops, libraries, pubs and cafes the free local listings magazine for which I am, ahem, film critic. I used to kid myself that the few quid I get paid for this were adequate compensation for the brilliant (if unpaid) reviews of movies I pay good money to go and see, but with unleaded at 150p a litre and my big, fat Citruin proving just about the thirstiest car I’ve ever owned, that’s become a bit of a joke. Still, when the weather’s nice it’s a joy to swoop through the Marches and drop off bundles of mags to folk who are generally pleased to see it and have a brief chat, even if my day’s work yields about tuppence profit. And of course I can boast to any of my industry peers who’ll listen that unlike them with their media studies degree and secretaries called Felicity, I’m experienced in every part of the publishing process.
Last month on my rounds I was striding through one small town when I saw in its sole remaining butchers a handwritten sign proclaiming its ‘Award Winning Sausages’. Now me, I like a nice sausage from time to time so I went in, bought half a pound of pork’n’leek bangers, then idly enquired as to who’d made the award. “Local chamber of trade,” came the guileless answer. But having left the shop, I reflected on the implausible nature of a local honour given to an enterprise that essentially had no competition. And then as I blew a few hundred thousand hydrocarbons into the air firing up the mighty Citruin, on the more general absurdity of what I shall christen the ‘awards culture’.
You can’t have escaped noticing that every other company these days trumpets their wares with some kind of award. Waste a few minutes of your precious life with Mr Google and you’ll find dozens if not hundreds of portentously bestowed Texas chili recipes, metric socket sets, computer monitoring software, continental lagers, lingerie shops and, for all I know bomb-making kits and DIY pornstar manuals, any real value they obtain from such accolades surely debased by their sheer numbers?
So personally I pay little or no attention to such trumped-up trifles – unless sausages are involved of course – so I wonder if anyone else does? Years ago, when I was editing and publishing magazines, I did in fact inaugurate a trio of fatuous accolades handed out by the motorcycle magazines I then helmed. With the exception of the International Bike of the Year which genuinely sought the opinions of bike hacks across the globe, the others were determined by my colleagues and staff and geared very much to the manufacturer who the advertising staff reckoned would pay the most for double page spread celebrating their triumph. Or even their Triumph.
I can only assume such cynical maneuvering lies behind most or all of the fatuous honours granted to estate agents, call centre operators and tyre fitters, and also assume that you, too, will regard them with appropriate scepticism. Except of course the Teresa May Digital Halfwits’ Award for Blog of the Month which, by an extraordinary coincidence was most recently won by Mark’s Sparks Will Fly. Let’s see if my numbers, if not my number will be up as a result of this… and the vagaries of Search Engine optimisation?
Meantime some addenda to a few of my much beaten drums.
PADDY – 2 , TESCO – 0 Although the Scottish parliament jettisoned a similar proposal in back in January, Northern Ireland is to increase business rates for retail properties valued at £500,000 or more by 15% which will apparently raise £5million which will be used to reduce rates on struggling smaller shops. Naturally Tesco, Sainsburys et al whined furiously about this, and naturally I think it’s a topping wheeze which, given that NI is part of the UK, might be seen as a more hopeful sign that our wonderful government is finally willing to consider rebalancing the retail landscape than any gimmicky posturing by the likes of Mary ‘Big Knickers’ Portas.
A TOWN WITHOUT MALICE ? If so, it might just possibly have some benefits for our own little town. My regular reader may recall that we recently lost our major employer, a specialist foundry that put too many eggs in an automotive industry basket and hadn’t used their profits to re-tool for when the car makers inevitably adopted new designs and left them with nowhere else to go. Not uncoincidentally, the local HSBC bank followed soon after and I recently spent a few hours at a public ‘Town Regeneration Meeting’ designed to try and stop the rot. But I’m afraid needless to say it was largely a talking shop in which local councilors, our two MPs (UK and Welsh) and lots of consultants in Next casualwear talked shop and made worthily vacuous appeals for we citizens to “regain a sense of local pride” and “get involved”. Quite in what wasn’t made clear, except perhaps in mastering PowerPoint presentations and manning charity shops, but I rather rashly put my name down as a potential volunteer and shall keep you posted.
CHANNELING TAX AVOIDANCE And then there was George Osborne announcing in his recent budget that he’s plugging the VAT loophole exploited by major online retailers like Amazon, Dixons and fleaBay whereby they can avoid or severely reduce VAT on goods posted from subsidiaries in the Channel Islands. This will level the playing field for smaller and even some large online and mail-order outfits that can’t afford or aren’t inclined to cheat the exchequer to the tune of some £140million a year which, although I found almost everything else in the Chancellor’s latest tax grab punitive and socially divisive, is basically a good thing. Except for the outfit I buy my award winning re-cycled ink jet cartridges from.
Make a comment, check out previous blogs or sign up to get ‘em automatically via the right hand column
My Book, But Their Back Pages March 15, 2012
Posted by markswill in About me, Media, That's Entertainment.14 comments
I am obviously failing to post my scrawls more frequently than, well, erratically which makes me wonder how those who scribble ‘em weekly, never mind daily, manage it. Money is probably the motive, and if I could find a way to monetise my meanderings – and gawd knows I’ve tried – then I might do it oftener, too. Which of course prompts a return to a favourite hobby horse, namely that free, unregulated (and usually un-edited) digital discourse is what’s killing print media, a prompt I will however resist because you’re bored witless by such obvious statements.
However, Luddite that I am, my increasingly perverse attachment to print journalism found me updating my scrap-book this week and I wonder in this respect if I’m a dying breed? I maintain of course that my pile of bright red 9½ x 14½ inch ‘Silvine’ scrapbooks (a paltry £1.75 from most remaining newsagents) with their reassuringly furry pages are a source of information worth keeping which no website can match.
All Inhuamn Life Is Here
True, I could probably scan and store newspaper and magazine articles in some onscreen file, but that would only complicate the storage process, and with only an A4 scanner, it would make it more awkward than merely folding over a part of a broadsheet feature to fit into my physical book.
The personalised selection of material glued onto its pages obviously reflects my own narrow and arguably facile interests and certainly doesn’t constitute a ‘journal of record’, but it’s both interesting and sometimes useful to trawl backwards through these tomes and read, say, Ed Miliband as Labour’s last Climate Change Secretary telling us that “Opposing windfarms should be socially taboo” (Guardian of March 9th 2009), or about the Telford schoolboys who “almost won” an international competition with a car built from hardboard and scrap metal (Shropshire Star, Oct 9th 1992), or learn in the Telegraph of April 30th 2009 that “The average Briton has only three true friends” – my response to which was, ‘Wow, that many?’
And so unlike my friend Dick Pountain who posts less frequently but with far greater gravitas and perspicacity (www.dickpountain.co.uk), in a desperate effort to maintain a blogging presence I shall tell you what I glued into my book this week. After The Times’ wistful piece on the demise of cinema projectionists in the digital age (March 12th), and since I was just moaning about lack of income, a piece in the E. Standard’s Londoner’s Diary (also March 12th) caught my eye. It noted that under the Freedom of Info. Act a Mr Asif Khan had asked BBC1tv why they’d hired Claudia Winkleman, who in his opinion had no “particular qualifications, knowledge or love of cinema”, to present Film 2012. Was there, he asked, any specific quality she possesses over and above an experienced film critic? The Beeb’s clearly rattled response was that by law they weren’t obliged to answer Mr Khan, but Londoner’s Diary waspishly noted that La Winkleperson is married to sometime film producer, Kris Thykier.
Now Asif Khan isn’t the only one exasperated by La Winkleperson’s performance on Film 2012. She tries to mask her filmic ignorance with an abundance of gush and a rotating coterie of movie buffs who she obsessively turns to for opinions and factoids that she can’t muster. At least her immediate predecessor, Jonathon Ross’s carefully scripted presentation was clearly underpinned by a lifetime of celluloid worship, and of course before him we had the greatest living hairpiece that is encyclopedic movie punmeister, Barry Norman. However if Winkleperson was hired because she’s wedded to a producer of just three rather bad films, I think they should replace her with Yrs. Trly., if only because her husband didn’t even make it into the Top 100 of World Cinema’s Power 100 (Guardian, Sept 24th 2010) whereas my sister, Clare Binns, was number 70, quickly elevated to #30 in The Times’ list of movie biz luminaries (February 11th 2012).
Sister Clare, who programmes the films shown in her 18-string Picturehouse chain as well as most other British indie cinemas, of course relies heavily on my advice and recommendations (as film critic for the hugely prestigious Welsh listings rag, Broad Sheep… talking of poor puns). But although Claudia may look nice, have very shiny hair and a husband who bankrolls crap films, I have the advantage of being willing to sleep with any influential BBC executive who might hire me, and without incurring spousal wrath.
Talking of nepotism, which obviously I fully embrace, when recently trawling for scrapbook fodder through a so-called ‘quality press’ increasingly reliant on vacuous opinion and celebrity pap masquerading as feature material (because they don’t have the budgets for newsgathering anymore and it’s all online anyway), I suddenly realised why I’ve never been welcomed aboard the national newspaper gravy train: I’m just not related to the right people. There’s Andrei Harmsworth, Metro’s gossip shill and a scion of the Northcliffe publishing dynasty, the S. Times’ Daisy Waugh, daughter of the late contrarian columnist, Auberon – to name but two – who got hired because of their ancestry, not their merit. And even in my own wee world of automotive hackery, Richard Heseltine has a lovely gig on Classic & Sportscar: surely not unconnected with his father Tarzan’s ownership of its publishers, Haymarket?
So given their current parlous circumstances and my total lack of moral fibre, I am thinking of applying for a top job at News International, on the basis that I am actually just about young enough to be the hitherto secret bastard son of Ripper Murdoch. After all, somewhere in my scrapbook I’m sure I have a clipping from The Sydney Morning Herald concerning young Rupe’s fixation with a flame-haired temptress of ill-repute circa 1950…
Please make a comment, check out past blogs or sign up to get ‘em automatically via the righthand column
A Climate of Indifference, An Economic Drought, An Abundance of Punctuation February 25, 2012
Posted by markswill in Links, Media, Politics, Schmolitics.24 comments
I just read ‘Eagles and Angels’, the debut novel by Juli Zeh, a writer new to me but who’s written several since, which even though it makes little sense and is rather long, I found utterly mesmeric. Guess I recognised the coke psychosis elemental to its time-slipping narrative form. Reminiscent of the early work of my all time favourite author, Thomas McGuane, in fact. Or perhaps second favourite. Or third. Anyway, I wish I could write like that, especially without the drugs. But its staccato phraseology caught the mood of a strangely trance-like week and as it seems a good way of cramming a lot into little space, I’m going to give it a crack myself.
So I was on a train leaving the damp gloom of a Paddington morning, comfortingly bloated by a ‘Half-Monty’ Soho breakfast (or so it said on the menu), my sister’s stressful life still ringing in my ears. How could she have watched 87 movies since January 1st ? And she calls it work!
All around me people mouthing importantly into mobile phones louder than necessary and fat mothers feeding fat children fat. And the bog didn’t work. Possibly a reflection of the headline announcing the impending drought buried on page five. First Great Western saving water, hurrah for them. Better get the winter crud washed off my finally working car before the hosepipe ban. Appearances are all when you live your life through consumer durables. Environment secretary Caroline ‘Not-In-My-Cotswold-Backyard’ Spellman is circling the bowsers, the farmers are already whining and soon we’ll all be eating Aldi’s baked beans because East Anglia’s gone Sahara and Waitrose’s spinach is fifty quid a kilo.
Meanwhile Rick Santorum, our great white hope now that our great black hope couldn’t in fact right the world says he doesn’t buy climate change because “God didn’t mention it in the bible.” To which I can only respond, will that same god help us if he really buys his way into the White House? Mind, Mitt Romney, who thinks poor people don’t matter, won’t be any better: they’re both deluded nincompoops. Be afraid, be very afraid.
It’s a good train journey, inasmuch as it’s not 20 minutes late so I manage to connect with the smelly, jam-packed two coacher at Newport which, unusually, doesn’t break down, although the bog has (Arriva Trains Wales also having bought the drought thing). More fat mums feeding more fat kids, more mobile phone pollution, this mainly from a young person expressing delight at Cindy’s karaoke of ‘I Will Always Love You’ last night. Good to know that kids today still respect the recently departed.
Also passed away is any chance of our ship building industry rising off its knees. Although Robert Wyatt and Elvis Costello might’ve applauded, precious little public outcry accompanied the contract for four naval tankers going to South Korea last week. Govt. apologist Peter Luff trotted out the usual platitudes about taxpayer value, these being the same taxpayers who contributed £200m to Emma Harrison’s welfare-to-work contractors, messrs. A4e, from which she paid herself a modest £8.6m in dividends. Still, according to Harrison, now resigned as allegations of fraud swirl around her outfit, “tens of thousands of people across the UK look to this company for hope of finding employment.” Which isn’t actually the same as finding them tens of thousands of jobs, Emma. But I suppose it’s better than tens of thousands of unemployed youngsters stacking shelves at Poundland for no money at all in the ‘slave labour’ scandal that Tory ministers now try to dismiss as scaremongering by the Socialist Workers Party. This cheered me: I didn’t know the SWP still existed!
But if the government abandoned their obsession with retail employment, real or bogus, in favour of manufacturing which might then generate incomes that could be spent in a retail sector that is instead actually hemorrhaging jobs, then we might get somewhere. Meantime, let’s get Korea to build our ships… and China everything else.
Have I mentioned that the only cash machine in our town is disappearing, along with the HSBC branch that houses it? Some joker taped a note to it saying ‘Will the last person leaving town please switch off the lights?’ Behind this cynical termination almost certainly lies the closure of our last major employer, a specialist aluminium foundry, as mentioned here last year. A notice on the factory gates says that its motley collection of buildings are about to be demolished, no-one knows what to be replaced by. But it’ll be a summer of fun for those who live in its immediate vicinity, e.g. yrs. trly., when the jack-hammers and the 30 ton waste trucks move in and we’re not allowed to wash the brick and asbestos dust out of our hair.
Still, it’s not all bad. Good piece in last week’s S. Times on when the economy tanks, art galleries flourish, as the big Freud, Hockney and most recently the Picasso shows in London amply prove. Certainly lifted my spirits. Talking of which, I recently got given, well loaned actually, a pair of delicately hand-wrought cocktail glasses. So with a bottle of Glen’s finest Scottish paint-stripper, sorry, vodka retailing at just £10.15 in Costcutter – still on our High Street, or at least until Tesco open a superstore where the foundry used to be – as Eddie Mair’s PM programme opens for more bad business every day on Radio 4 it’s vodka martinis all round and pleasantly downhill from thereon in.
Oh, and Wales beat England in the Six Nations this afternoon, so I’m staggering off to the pub to push the reverie to its limits. And thanks Juli for all your inspiration.
Please make a smarty-pants comment, check out previous blogs or sign up to get ‘em automatically by checking the right hand column (but ignore my website link ’cause it was proving an expensive waste of money, so I’ve pulled it off air)
CABBAGE PATCH DROLL February 17, 2012
Posted by markswill in About me, Media, Navel Gazing.17 comments
Ages since I scribbled anything, so although I haven’t got much in the way of pent-up bile that blogging seems to purge, with that promising preface, here come a few random thoughts.
Regular readers, such as there are, will know that I am no fan of the vacuous nonsense that fills the glossy mags which accompany the weekend ‘papers, especially the Observer’s whose 16 year-old editors willfully force upon us the opinions of Z-list celebs we should all be in thrall of. A recent example was the ‘This Much I Know’ spread devoted to artist Gavin Turk (which of course I only read because I am a self-appointed know-all on a woefully narrow skein of modern daubing). But having learnt such important stuff as “I was gutted when I failed my MA” (poor darling) and “I am a happy person and don’t get depressed” (how spiritually uplifting), he actually uttered something rather interesting: “The fact that we can access things very quickly means that they don’t get much time to be tried and tested. We are living in a prototype world and we are the guinea pigs.”
Which having thought about it for a nanosecond before logging onto my FarceBerk account, tweeting to my millions of followers, putting an ad. on fleaBay for my old Lancia and ordering a copy of Katie Price’s latest masterpiece from Amazombie, is crushingly true. And where will it all end? This has actually been the (unrealised) subtext of many of my interweb spewings, and I suppose it’s also why I pay sporadic attention to discussions on LinkedIn fora about the future of newspapers (the consensus being, ‘There isn’t one’) and whether or not tablets and smartphones will render desktop and laptop ‘pooters redundant (‘Not sure, but my contribution is to show off how many state-of-the-hour gadgets I own’).
Anyway, I don’t think subscribing to LinkedIn, a networking site for middle class media professionals – ho-ho-ho – that I misguidedly thought might get me some, er, work, is ever likely to yield any revelations that will dispel Mr Turk’s or indeed my own concerns about the digital endgame, but I do invite my loyal and evidently expanding band of blogees to add their two penn’orth on how society is being and will ultimately be changed by having little time to test the veracity of the things we can now access very quickly digitally.
SOMEONE I DO HAVE MORE TIME FOR THE OPINIONS OF is writer and musician Terence Blacker, who has a twice weekly column in the Indie and its cut-price sibling, the i (the latter of course is my daily read). I should declare an interest here because I know him slightly and very amusing he is too, but his most recent column addresses the effects that slang and what I (but not he) call “digi-speak” – you know, the “LoLs” and the “OMG this is well interesting”. In an unusually muddled, by his usually crisp and perceptive standard, he seems unsure whether this is a good thing because, perhaps in an unintended nod in Gavin Turk’s direction, it shows how language organically develops, or a bad one because, “In a slang-filled world there will be a narrower choice in employment and a lot less social mobility”. Discuss.
I have emailed young Terence demanding his actual position on this, but as a committed contrarian, and also a little tardy in the emailing dept., he hasn’t yet replied and I must finish this scribbling before I change my cabbage leaves. Yes, you read that right. The only way I can actually type this tripe is because I have two large cabbage leaves strapped to my right elbow and forearm where until yesterday I had painful and disabilitating RSI. This was after ten days of endless pain on several fronts: toothache (which turned out to be a nasty abscess), back-ache (occasioned trying to remove some switchgear for my still-immobile Citruin XM from a dead one at the local scrapyard) and the aforementioned RSI. Industrial strength antibiotics and painkillers prescribed by ‘caring professionals’ eventually relieved the first two maladies, but only after five days of feeling utterly spaced-out, lethargic and miserable, but after the drugs ran out, the RSI returned.
AND THEN BY CHANCE I learnt that strapping cabbage leaves to the affected area would relieve the symptoms and eventually the cause of RSI and desperate, though of course sceptical, I gave them a try. And amazingly, they work! Within a few minutes they had a cooling, calming effect, and this lasts several hours until they’re changed for fresh veg, but after 36 hours they also rid my elbow of the stiffness that prevented me from pounding away at the keyboard. Further research revealed that this is down to the large amounts of sulphur they contain – as only cabbage leaves do, apparently – which oozes into the skin and does the biz.
ALTHOUGH OFTEN ACCUSED OF HYPOCHONDRIA, I mention all this because that period of ailment coincided with my birthday, and a monumental birthday inasmuch that I can now claim the state pension, and so was inevitably one of the most depressing I’ve ever spent for that and all the aforementioned medical reasons. The pension sitch forced me to realise that after eleven years of failing to recover my once glittering publishing career following my nosedive from grace (some of you will know about this, the rest will have to heed Mr Turk’s caution), it is now too late and I must unwillingly submit to the life of a typical retiree: golf, grandchildren-coddling and gradually getting more and more physically feeble. But since I’d rather have needles stuck into my eyeballs that play golf, have no cheap hobbies and certainly no offspring, am I to be reduced to escalating infirmity unrelieved by doing anything useful or satisfying whilst most around me, are? Perhaps Gavin Turk will tell me, or should I just strap cabbage leaves permanently to my head and not worry about it?
Please comment, check out previous blogs or subscribe to get ‘em automatically by checking out the righthand column
Heroes and Villains January 23, 2012
Posted by markswill in Cars and Bikes, Politics, Schmolitics.35 comments
Back in August last year, in my feckless petrol-headed way I celebrated the acquisition of a hugely complicated, willfully eccentric yet utterly gorgeous Citroën XM as my, ahem, daily driver. Until a couple of weeks ago the car had proved to be the unique and delightful, if ruinously thirsty driving experience that I’d anticipated and returning to Leominster railway station where it’d sat during my seasonal hiatus points east I looked forward to it raising my spirits along with its clever hydropneumatic suspension at the turn of a key. Instead what I found was that some malevolent wretches had broken a window and in trying to drive it away, completely wrecked the ignition barrel, wiring and part of the dashboard. They’d also etched a particularly unpleasant term for part of the female anatomy into the rear window, presumably because as its owner, I had the temerity to immobilise the car when I’d parked it.
Why they – and having been caught on CCTV later that evening wrecking then stealing another car I now know that there were three of them – would choose such a rare vehicle that would’ve been impossible to sell without raising suspicion, I neither know nor care, but the consequences have been considerable and in some respects, illuminating.
Needless to say although ‘only’ 14 years-old, the XM was never a big seller for Citroën largely due to a reputation quickly tarnished by the unreliability of its complex electrics and hydraulics which, typical of its makers, had not been fully trouble-shot before its launch. Parts are therefore hard to source, very expensive and for that reason my insurance company initially threatened to write it off obliging me ultimately to withdraw my claim. But then via something called the Club-XM online forum I came across a retired engineer who has been collecting and breaking these cars with the noble intention of “keeping them going” until he himself no longer is. Not only did this prince amongst men offer to supply me with all the bits I needed, refused to take any payment for them, and delivered them to me on Waterloo Station where I spent a very agreeable hour being advised how they should be correctly fitted and certain infamous problems with these cars, remedied.
Recounting this to a friend, he correctly pointed out that this wonderful gentleman was of a dying breed and as with the grandly named Lancia Gamma Consortium, a rather more formal conflagration of chaps (and indeed, chapesses) of which I am a paid-up member, long may he and they continue their selfless efforts to ensure that these automotive eccentricities avoid extinction. One could argue that regardless of legal obligations, major manufacturers should actually want to see their cars running around decades after they’ve stopped building them, but that would be commercially naïve – although it hasn’t harmed Porsche and Mercedes-Benz that you can still get most parts for cars they made 40, even 50 years ago.
The Gamma being laid-up, un-taxed for the winter (one sniff of a salted road and it’d dissolve into a pile of rust), I have unwillingly discovered the realities of rural public transport. So journeys that took me 30 or 40 minutes at the wheel have tripled or quadrupled in duration, often hanging around for hours in freezing termini to change buses, journeys tailored to timetables that seemed exultant in their lack of integration twixt buses, operating companies and railways or, indeed, my sleeping and eating habits. Perhaps no wonder then that despite being subsidised by public taxes, ticket prices were generally higher than comparative private transport costs, and most buses traveled virtually empty. So should anyone excoriate me for justifying my need for a car here in the sticks, even one that I actually enjoy driving, then they can expect the shortest of shrifts.
And whilst I’m harrumphing, the nice lady cop who dealt with my case admitted that there’s no point claiming compensation from the culprits involved because they’re unemployed teenagers from what she coyly, if accurately described as “disadvantaged backgrounds”, who’ll probably just be fined… before going off and doing some more crimes, possibly some more of the archly acronymed TWOCs (Taking Without Owners Consent). Although I may be straying into Daily Mail territory here, I’d much prefer divine retribution: having something they loved and or needed rubbished, but that would probably involve slashing a pair of trainers or kicking an X-Box to bits which I doubt a judge would sanction. Nevertheless I intend to go to court and see what happens to them, if only to have my cynical prejudices confirmed. In the meantime I’m still without a working car, hugely out of pocket and pretty bloody angry.
But onto happier matters. Recent blogs bemoaning the grim fate of civilisation as we, or at least I know it prompted the same friend behind the ‘dying breed’ comment, to generously furnish me with a copy of The Rational Optimist by that well-known controversialist, Matt Ridley. Despite the occasional impression of reveling his own smartness, Ridley torpedoes many assumptions about what ails society and economic conventions and replaces them with some unassailable facts and well argued, if not always personally observed empiricisms. I must salute his thought-provoking alternatives to my own gloomy views of the future, although despite the munificence of my heroic engineer friend, I’m not entirely convinced of the innate goodness of mankind which underpins Ridley’s contention that optimism will triumph over pessimism.
Nevertheless I’ll try and give him the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the verdict handed out by the magistrates presiding over the case of my buggered-up car… if there’s a bus that’ll get me to the court on time.
Make a comment, check out previous blogs or sign up to get ‘em automatically by checking the right hand column
My World According to Apple January 4, 2012
Posted by markswill in Media, Navel Gazing, Uncategorized.52 comments
If you’re computer-phobic, abhor digi-jargon and have zero interest in the different declensions of Intel processors, then maybe stop reading here. Ditto if you’re a committed geek to whom over-clocking and CPU architecture are meat and drink. Because I fall somewhere in between… but nearer the former than the latter, obviously.
Unfortunately however, I rather urgently need a new computer. And my inadequate grasp of what’s new and necessary to maintain the minimum standards of technological capability that my life demands, means that I’m panicking. I know, I know, I know – given my regular tirades against the digital enslavement we’ve quietly acquiesced to this past decade, and especially my brief interlude bereft of both my internet connection and mobile phone, I should bravely respond to the fast dwindling efficiency of my battered old laptop by abandoning such devices for good. But no. I am instead grudgingly acknowledging that most people only want to communicate with me by email, and that some of them are actually essential to what I grandiosely call my employment… never mind my reliance on Google as the encyclopedia of the airwaves. So I am once again at the computer crossroads, wondering whether to continue down Macintosh Boulevard or turn left along PC Pathway.
It’s an intersection I’ve stood at every five years or so since I acquired my first computer – a Ferranti Advance 86 – in 1985. Having recently launched my own magazine outfit, Advanced Publishing, my choice seemed literally appropriate, if not willfully cute, but the Ferranti was a hopeless mistake to someone so utterly un-nerdy. After a month of mounting frustration, which occasionally included smacking it smartly on its casing, rather as my dad did our first t.v. set when it went on the blink, I got rid of it and bought a Macintosh Plus. Which I loved, and on which I literally ran the company for a few years. As such, it and I were even featured in MacUser magazine, both vindicating my choice and initiating an enduring smugness over my addiction to Apples.
Sure, everyone knows that Macs are more user-friendly than PCs, but watching the BBC’s morbidly fascinating Steve Jobs documentary recently I discovered that Bill Gates’ had actually beaten him to the punch with an icon-based design. Except that the Microsoft version is really just a memory-hungry lash-up that prods an antediluvian MS-DOS system, whereas Mac’s OS was designed to be seamlessly icon-driven from the get-go.
So far, so commonly known, but it wasn’t until 2003 when my iBook’s broke down and had to be driven to the nearest dealer some 50 bloody miles away in Tewkesbury, that I learnt how clunky Windows really is. At the time I lived with a gal who very kindly let me use her PC for the ten days it took for the diffident-bordering-on-rude kids – and they were of course kids – to repair my Mac, and fortunately Karen was away most of that time running her company in London (exclusively on PCs, of course) so she couldn’t witness me swearing at, crashing and constantly re-booting her PC… I may’ve hit it a couple of times, too. The reason, obvious to die-hard Maccas, was that Windows isn’t intuitive in the way that the Mac OS is, and one has to go through various alien rigmaroles to get it to do anything. And of course having a crap short-term memory, I instantly fortgot those rigmaroles.
However, and it’s a big ‘however’, the price you pay for the superior and more stable Mac set-up is, well, over twice the price of a PC. No wonder Apple, at $346billion, has a value higher than the GDP of many developed countries, because a MacBook Pro with a 15” screen has an RRP of £1549, whilst a Dell Latitude PC laptop with, as far as I can work out, roughly the same stable of gee-gaws, costs £649. Go do the math.
My current machine is the Pro’s immediate predecessor, a PowerBook G4 which thanks to something called its PowerPC processor isn’t up to an increasing amount of software, in particular BBC’s iPlayer, which means I can no longer catch up with CBeebies, boo-hoo. Being perennially budget-conscious, or skint if you want to put it that way, I’m therefore having to seriously consider a PC-based laptop and learning a whole new way of digital life. Or buying secondhand… just like my current machine, bought in 2006 from an Australian publishing company that was going bankrupt. Needless to say this involved many late night screaming contests with an IT manager in Sydney who couldn’t understand why its casing was damaged in transit and its screen bisected by a thin orange stripe. Secondhand? Never again, then.
As miserable fate would have it, I also need a new mobile phone if I’m going to keep up with the techno-groovers. Because after my last one cracked under the pressure (quite literally, screen-wise), I bought another by then obsolete Motorola Razr on eBay last year, and now that’s knackered, too. Yes, I’d like a nice, sprauncey iPhone like all my posh pals, thus making Apple richer still since they cost lots more than the Android-based smartphones that ape them, but I’m scared witless of trying to ‘migrate’ (see how hip I am to the jargon?) the vital address and diary data from my Palm Pilot digital organiser (circa 2003) which is also worn out… but long since obsolete.
Yes of course I’ve trawled the web forums trying to glean how to bung my Palm data onto an HTC Wildfire or Samsung Galaxy, but you’ve got to be an über-geek to understand the process, much less actually execute it, although it does seem to be rather easier with an iPhone. So it looks as if not only are we all prisoners of technology, but those of us who’re idiot technophobes are also in permanent hock to Apple.
Please make a comment/ease my pain, read previous blogs, subscribe to get ‘em regularly or check out my website via the right-hand panel
Where Do We Go From Hair? December 23, 2011
Posted by markswill in Media, Navel Gazing, Politics, Schmolitics.35 comments
Good evening, and following the melancholic portents expressed in my last scrawl, now we can really get down to it! But first of all, looking back on two years of ill-tempered criticism of the cultural, political and economic status quo, perhaps some over-arching justification is due? Whilst I have no wish to align myself with the Canute-like denials of progress generally associated with my parents’ generation, I nonetheless increasingly find myself at odds with so much of Life As We Know It. Is this because I’m getting older and the secure certainties assumed over five decades have eroded and, thanks to the speed and pervasiveness of technology in our lives, done so at an increasingly rapid rate? Or is it because as we get older, we become more fearful of a future over which, for reasons of failing health, economic impotence and/or intellectual confusion, we have less and less control?
Well search me matey, but what I do know, or at least observe with some assurance, is that however sophisticated their evolutionary state, lack of familiarity breeds fear in animals, and to maintain familiarity for homo sapiens bedeviled by rampant, escalating change, money is the only answer, and lots of it. You’ve probably gathered by now that I do not have lots of it, but I know a few people who do and as they age they generally buttress themselves against change by acquiring the cultural trappings of their past.
So when I whine on about the disappearance of print media (in which I’ve spent my entire working life), or the consolidation of retailing into a few mega-corporations who have power to affect our lives way beyond that of governments (which have too much of it anyway), or the joys of driving powerful, noisy vehicles in a world running out of oil (which bleeding heart environmentalists, often in the thrall of rich landowners, myopically believe can be replaced by windpower) etc., etc., etc., what I am really doing is yearning for the certainties of my past. And, of course, tacitly bemoaning my lack of financial foresight because like so many of my peers who grew up during the late ‘60s and early ‘70s when the possibilities seemed endless and optimism boundless, pension planning wasn’t even on our radar, and I’ll have to keep working until I croak.
Now that we approach our mid-sixties with only a hundred-odd quid a week of state support to see us through, such adolescent naivety seems reprehensible and those fears become colossal. Time therefore to rail against an ever more incomprehensible world where the people in charge are half our age and we are off their radar except, of course, where the burdens on their tax revenues occasioned by our escalating welfare costs threaten their status quo. So slashing public sector pensions, health service provision and local govt. funding is so, so preferable to frittering away many tens of billions on scandalously fruitless computer projects, military procurement, state-owned banker’s bonuses, oh and let’s not forget the Olympics.
As an aside, I do not wish to become such a burden, but as I see sad-eyed folk only a few years my senior shuffling round with their walking sticks in their charity shop wardrobes or anxiously examining the own brand options in the local mini-mart, as I find myself having to take yet another drug on an indefinite basis to counteract yet another age-related ailment, as my hair and teeth fall out at an alarming rate, and as I notice with dismay in a recent Observer Review the roster of notables of roughly my age who have died this past year, then I realise that like it or not, I will inevitably become an encumbrance to our greater society.
However as I was discussing with better informed friends at supper last night, there is a very real possibility that along with everything else that the less affluent members of my generation have long taken for granted, the welfare system may fall prey to the coming economic holocaust. Even since my blog earlier this week, the European banking system has exhibited further fissures in its carapace of confidence, and as one friend pointed out, the system is now so dependent on inter-bank credit that if one major institution implodes, then the likelihood is that it will take the rest of them down the crapper. Ditto if Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal or Ireland are forced into terminal deficit and out of the Eurozone, then the consequences for Britain and indeed, the West generally, could be catastrophic. And I haven’t even touched on the growing threats posed by (nuclear?) war, religious fundamentalism, climate change and the next pig-ignorant right wing lunatic to enter the White House, all of which have massive economic and social implications.
Far be it for me to be the harbinger of doom – or there again, maybe not – but we are already seeing libraries closing, museums and universities charging for cultural and educational nourishment that was once free, the apparently critical retail sector in imminent meltdown and no-one giving anything more of a shit about it all than a ‘change is inevitable’ shrug. That this is also the response to the yawning disparities between the circumstances of the very rich 1% and the variously impoverished 99%, that the same credit rating agencies who gave Lehman Bros an AAA rating days before it went bust are now apparently determining the fate of nations with little political question, and that the great god of growth is seen as our only salvation but without any coherent or even feasible plans to restore it… well all that does I’m afraid speak to me of civilisation’s collapse.
I’m also not afraid to say that for me personally, change is not inevitable. I won’t join my iPad-proselytizing, online shopping addicted pals anytime soon and so provided I can still afford to, I’ll keep reading printed media ‘til it’s no longer available and even if it no longer earns me a living (sob). I will also carry on shopping at independent butchers, greengrocers and newsagents until they’ve completely disappeared. And I’ll continue to listen to live music and watch movies on the big screen until the last pub and cinema that I can still access on my zimmer frame has closed down.
What about you? But whilst you ponder that, or sniff derisorily at my gloom-mongery, it’s traditional at this time to wish everyone a fabulous Xmas and topping New Year. So as a bleeding-heart traditionalist, I’d better do exactly that.
Please make a comment, read previous blogs or sign up to get ‘em automatically, by checking out the right hand panel
Yuletide Cheer December 19, 2011
Posted by markswill in Media, Politics, Schmolitics.29 comments
I don’t know about you, but during the past few months I’ve felt a sense of mounting if indefinable dread, cloaking not just my sordid personal life – which, regrettably, we may come to later – but universally. Railing, as they do, at the greed and irresponsibility of the financial sector which precipitated the recession-going-on-depression that engulfs most Western democracies, the transatlantic Occupy movements are but one symptom of this. I read in a recent New Yorker the tale of Ray Kachel, an apparently secure computer programmer who finding himself unemployed and broke as a result of America’s economic downturn (a/k/a collapse), decided to join the Wall Street squatters only to end up a penniless vagrant, but there also are other bad signs and evident consequences of our unquestioning reliance on capitalism and its feckless political governance.
The EU’s over-arching response to the Euro crisis, for example, is to compel governments to make swingeing public spending cuts which will, if they haven’t already, reduce the living standards to which we’ve become accustomed for decades. Cameron’s recent hissy-fit at the umpteenth crisis summit was, we are told, to ensure British sovereignty over the financial services sector which threw our economy down the toilet and ignores the reality that 50% of our trade is with a Euro-zone that’s almost surely bound to follow it. Smart move, young Dave.
Correctly, it’s been pointed out that unfettered reliance on credit has done for both society and the political apparati that was supposed to secure its finances, but when the spending has to stop, then the consequences must be faced. That said, I disavow lefty apologists who contend that this summer’s riots were due to social inequality and deprivation, but it seems clear to me that a population brought up to expect a welfare safety-net, if not certain levels of affluence, is not going to quietly buckle down and metaphorically dig for victory when they abruptly disappear. At least not when the trappings of prosperity and instant, unearned celebrity are rubbed in their faces by the media 24/7. So when the cuts really start to bite, as they already have in Greece, I would expect there to be far more civil unrest – a euphemism for fightin’ an’a lootin’ – on our streets, too.
Proof? Well although we don’t of course live under a dictatorship, on the evidence of the so-called Arab spring, and what we are now seeing in Russia and the US, regardless of the painful personal costs depressed and/or deceived citizenry are becoming emboldened to rebel against their oppressors like never before in my lifetime. What, for example, are millions of longterm unemployed youngsters, many of whom who’ve been forced to pay heavily for a further education that no longer guarantees them work, supposed to do with themselves and their accumulated debts? Sit quietly at home and play computer wargames that espouse mindless violence?
I also find it extraordinary that despite a groundswell of respected economic polemic, our government fails to acknowledge, much less exercise, the need to revive Britain’s manufacturing base which successive administrations have willfully run down in the dumb belief that north sea gas and financial services would be our balance of payments salvation, ho-ho-ho. Instead we hear daily wailing about the beleaguered retail sector which is supposed not just to be a barometer of the nation’s economic health, but the engine that will drive up employment and tax revenues. For chrissake get real guys: with massively escalating unemployment, energy prices and constant warnings about our dire economic state, who on earth is going to go out on a sustained shopping spree… on imported goods which enrich only remote eastern economies?
And Mary Portas, whose smug hypocrisy I have previously excoriated, has now unveiled her plan to revive Britain’s high streets which basically boils down to easing local taxes (which councils strapped by government cuts clearly won’t), tighten lucrative planning regimes (ditto) and cut restrictions that deter market traders (irrelevant). Tellingly, when one of the few reporters who raised her conflict of interest in also advising shopping mall developers who are in large part responsible for the decimation of the high street, Portas said she “didn’t want to go there”. I bet.
Anyway, with 200 outlets closing every day and Amazon offering an app that allows you to compare its inevitably lower prices as you walk round your local shops, town and city centres are basically screwed. And so as my oft-bemoaned consolidation of retailing into the hands of just a few online and supermarket giants moves ever closer, with all the disadvantages and dangers that holds, I’ll get personal.
I learnt last week that the site of the aluminum foundry that finally threw in the towel earlier this year is likely to house my hometown’s first supermarket. And this on top of the recently announced closure of one of the town’s two banks, HSBC, with the likelihood that following its recently announced ‘rationalisation’, the other one, Lloyds TSB (which operates just three days a week) will follow suit. This, allied to the increasing incidence of home delivery trucks from Hereford’s Tesco and Asda some 24 miles away, would seem to sound the commercial death knell for the high street of what was, at least before the recession hit, a fiercely independent little town.
Much of this you’ve heard from me before, although repeated tornadoes and flocks of dead birds falling from the skies aren’t driving this writer into a psychotic bunker mentality as they did the hero of Jeff Nichols’ gripping, if overlooked recent movie, Take Shelter… But as I began this little rant by claiming, there is I think something rather more ominous than wintry gloom in the air. And having taxed your patience with some 950 words today, if you can handle a little more pre-Xmas cheer, watch this space on December 23rd.
Make a comment, check out previous blogs, sign up to get ‘em automatically, or visit my website by checking the right hand panel
