Radiohead review

We went to the first of Radiohead's two nights at the O2 the other day. Well you have to, don't you? There's a law (it reads "all people of sound mind must use best endeavours to purchase Radiohead tickets whenever available") Or does that only apply in our household?

 

Have you been to the O2? I hate it - it's like Disneyland but without the fun. There are ranged against you large numbers of commercial terrorists armed with neon signs and other means of extracting vast amounts of money from you: £8 for parking - ouch! £4.80 for  a beer- oof! And that's not to mention the ticket prices which were a staggering £65 or so (OK I know that's now been made to seem a bargain by the Rolling Stones prices but that aside...)

 

Then you get into the arena itself (after queueing for ages to get a wrist band and then to go through security, during which our spirits were lowered still further by being accosted by some female trying to get us to sign something to help save polar bears or some such boll*cks) and discover that your tickets give you a view of the action similar to the chap who leaped to earth from 20 odd miles up the other day. The booking site even warns those with vertigo - it's true! Now we were wise to this so this time had bought standing tickets which was a smart move, even for those of us with dodgy backs for whom the beer proved to be a successful, if expensive, anaesthetic.

 

Mind you, Radiohead have got a bit of form when it comes to annoying us fans. Some years ago, we went to see them in Victoria Park in sunny East London. The PR was very vague about starting times so we left home pretty early. We had to eat something some time, especially having two hungry teenagers in tow, so I got organised with the baguettes and cheese, etc. Imagine my fury when my lovingly made picnic had to be binned at the turnstile due to a "no food and drink" policy. Waaaa! Not sure how forcing people to throw away perfectly good food fits with Radiohead's planet-saving ethos. Some day I may reach a level of consciousness high enough to understand.

 

So what of the performance then, I hear you clamour? Well Radiohead are a pig-headed bunch. Not content to part you from your money and food, they are then likely to decide not to play any of the songs you want them to. So nearly all the older stuff, which had featured on the set-list at the Manchester gig a couple of days before, was ditched and replaced by more of the weird electronic stuff that Thom Yorke knocks up on his lap-top on wet afternoons. But then guess what? The following night, the older stuff was reinstated!! Double waaaaa!! A very similar thing happened at their Earls Court gigs a few years back. Do they know when Mr and Mrs Marshside are coming or am I, like the android in the Radiohead song, just paranoid?

 

 

 

Never mind, they were of course still brilliant. Not for nothing are they held in such high esteem. Go to a Radiohead gig and truly, you will know that you are in the presence of greatness. And when confronted by all this confounded electronic wangling, just remember Old Marshside's adage: there's no such thing as a bad Radiohead song, only a Radiohead song you haven't listened to enough.

 

 

 

So who's the best band in the world? Radiohead, of course (there's a law about it.)

Interactive white boards suceeded by ipads!

With brilliantly apposite timing, our local paper today carries the headline "school spends £125k on ipads". Following the logic of yesterday's post, I would conclude that economic woes are just around the corner. Except that we've already got economic woes. But things can get worse, as the Deputy Governor of the Bank of England warned the other day and this ipad frenzy just confirms it.

 

The obsession with high tech gadgets is usually something which affects the people who know least about them. If you think back to your own school days, what aspect of your education would have been improved by the use of an ipad? None whatsoever in my case. The kids will use them for anything except school work; they'll break; they'll get stolen; they'll get left on the bus. But don't worry because we read that the school has an "ipad project manager" to sort these things out. Heaven help us.

 

This idea that we're living through times of austerity is a nonsense isn't it? The public sector continues to throw money around with gay abandon and as a result, the government is spending and borrowing more than ever. If you want real austerity, you need to go somewhere like Greece and if the UK carries on like this, we'll end up the in the same mess. The only reason we don't is because the Bank of England can merrily print money (which the Greeks can't).

 

Let's hope the kids' ipads come with a "how to save the economy" app.

What we did on our holidays

Apologies for lengthy lack of blogging. I have no good excuse but as a partial explanation, we have been on hols, this year to Turkey. I'd never been before but I can recommend it: good food, good weather, good people and it feels a bit more "foreign" than the likes of Spain and Greece whilst not being much further away. As an example of this is the call to prayer, which happens 5 times a day, including at dawn so if you're near a built up area with a mosque, you'd best be a good sleeper...unless you're a Muslim of course, in which case it's no doubt a positive advantage.

 

 

 

The most spectacular thing we did in Turkey was to visit Ephesus. I'll leave you to Google up the details but it is a huge site of remarkably well preserved archaeological remains. Mostly Roman although the history of the city goes back well before that.

 

Not much else to report (well there's only so much you can say about sunbathing and drinking beer) but I thought I'd post a photo or two of Ephesus. Do go.

 

 

 

Plus outside Ephesus was evidence that the world's economic recovery could be driven by sound Turkish business models:

 

 

 

 

Fashion: the devil's secret weapon

Ah yes, fashion. I've mentioned this several times in previous scribblings but have yet to get round to giving it a proper looking at. So here goes.

 

Now when I say "fashion" I am not simply referring to the latest dress length or this season's must-wear colour (it's purple, by the way. Or is it mauve? Is there a difference?) No, I'm referring to human behaviour generally, that need we seem to have to conform to what everyone else is doing or, if not everyone, that section of society with which we wish to be associated. My hypotheses are that it's a bit weird that we are so influenced by what other people do and that this can lead to bad outcomes all round. I'm not a psychologist and I'm aware that many books and learned papers will have been written on this subject so any psychologists reading this can gang up and start a fashion trend for denouncing my amateur scribblings as boll*cks!

 

Where to start? How about tattoos? A few years ago, only sailors had such things, plus perhaps a few other horny-handed sons of toil but certainly no women. But now, it seems that if you're a woman without a tattoo, you will be pointed at in the street and thought "odd" (or maybe it seems that way to me because I shop at ASDA.) This is bizarre. Why do so many people, otherwise apparently sane, want to pay someone to do something painful to their bodies, in the knowledge that one day they will probably regret it? Because it's the fashion. It didn't use to be but fashions change. What happens when the tattoo fashion ends though? But the force of fashion is a remarkably powerful thing.

 

You may ask why this matters. If I don't want a tattoo (and I don't, thanks all the same), I am perfectly at liberty not to have one so why should I resent others having them? Well in the case of tattoos, it doesn't much matter (although having to look at the things does rather offend my aesthetic sensibilities, especially when it comes to footballers and especially bloody David Beckham, who's probably to blame for the whole thing.) Well it matters a lot in other areas. Here's a couple of examples.

 

Take the euro. There was no economic imperative for this thing, it was a political fashion. Indeed, there were well-known economic reasons for not doing it but the desire to sign up to this trendy new thing was so strong that that the economists were ignored. Well done Gordon Brown, much maligned elsewhere in this blog, for keeping the UK out of this mess.

 

Then there's climate change. The science behind this is very complicated and hardly likely to be well-understood by politicians who have more stuff to worry about than their struggling brains can cope with. But despite this, huge numbers of them worldwide are signed up to the idea that they can save the planet by sticking up windmills. There are so many reasons why this is bonkers that it's hard to know where to start: the cost, the inefficiency, the increase in carbon emissions in developing countries which dwarfs anything any other country can do, etc., etc. And never mind the fact that there's no proof that man-made carbon emissions are damaging the planet. Crazy! But the force of fashion is so strong that you will look hard to find politicians prepared to speak out against the ineluctable spread of "renewables". One day, I believe we are going to wake up and the likelihood is that in say 20 years' time, the fashion will have changed as dramatically as it did for the humble tattoo. Get into the windmill recycling business now!

 

Finally, the bankers. Nowhere is the force of fashion so powerful and so likely to lead to disaster. Here's a little bit of history for you youngsters. When I took out my first mortgage (in 1981 I think) the interest rate you paid went up proportionately to the size of your mortgage. This meant that even on my small flat I was paying more than the normal rate, which was about 15% (hard to believe eh? It'll happen again.) Not only that, but getting a mortgage at all was not straightforward (see what I mean?) Roll on a few years and bankers everywhere were desperate to lend money to anyone at lower rates and rates which would come down for large loans, rather than go up.Why? Fashion. If one bank was doing it, then every other one had to.

 

So it came to pass that the desire (or should that be the pressure of the herd instinct) to lend was so strong that bankers lent money to people who just a few years before, they wouldn't have touched with the proverbial. Of course not only was it fashionable to lend money but that goes hand in hand with it being fashionable to borrow money. And so it was that banks (and governments and individuals of course) borrowed vast amounts, in a way that would have horrified their predecessors. Sadly, Gordon Brown had not vanquished "boom and bust" (not even in the UK, never mind the rest of the world which he seemed to think he controlled too) and we all know what happened next.

 

The problem is that people, particularly bankers, are benchmarked against their competitors rather than against some more objective and absolute measure of performance. So when your pension fund goes down in value, the fund manager tells you that's OK because so have all the others. Great! Of course he still gets paid a healthy salary in return for losing your money.

 

But the main problem is that if people are constrained by the force of fashion, they will not think or act or say anything "outside the box". Without such free thinkers, we might still be thinking the earth is flat and is the centre of the universe. There are no doubt many other examples of human progress which would not have happened without some pig-headed scientist being determined to kick against fashion and to pursue what he believed to be right. Some of these people are struggling now to shake off the tag of "flat earthers" (how appropriate) that applies to those prepared to question the prevailing climate change fashion.

 

If everyone else is falling off a cliff, it is not clever to join in simply because it's the in thing to do (watch out for those who appear to espouse the "eat sh*t, a billion flies can't be wrong!" school of thought). Be an individual: don't follow the herd if you can see it's heading for a cliff; don't feel you have to wear purple and for God's sake don't get a tattoo!

Interactive white boards - or how I forecast the recession

Here we are then, still in the midst of the worst economic mess since the bottom dropped out of the gold market during King Midas' reign and no end in sight. I think we've established that the twin causes were democracy and "fashion" (or the herd instinct if you like) with many governments keen to buy votes and many others copying them ("if it's good enough for the USA it must be good enough for Greece", etc). But one unanswered question is, how come none of these planet-brained economists saw it coming? Well I did and let me tell you how. 

 

During the late nineties and early noughties, the UK government was spending money it didn't have on goodness knows what. Old one-eye Gordie Brown was very good at coming out with all sorts of bon mots to impress the electorate that he knew what he was doing. He was aided in this by Ed "neo-classical endogenous growth theory" Balls: when people come out with impressive phrases like this, it's hard for your average bloke like you or me to argue - surely these people know what they're doing?

 

Well of course Gordie did rather give the game away by claiming to have ended the cycle of "boom and bust". Whoops. Not since King Canute tried to turn back the waves had one of our leaders succumbed to such a serious dose of delusions of grandeur. But before this, you could just see how things were going pear-shaped if you looked around you.

 

One of the many areas on which the government lavished oodles of other people's cash was schools. When I was a lad, teachers wrote on blackboards with chalk. This seemed to work pretty well as a means of communication and had the added benefits (for the teachers) of giving them ammunition, in the form of chalk and blackboard erasers, to throw at unruly pupils. All good fun. But Gordie and his mates decided that this was very old-fashioned (note that word "fashion" again) and decided that the good old low-tech blackboard should be replaced by shiny high-tech interactive whiteboards. Oh dear.

 

This kind of thing is expensive. Not only do they cost a lot to buy in the first place but you have to train the poor old teachers to use them and then you have to have a maintenance contract so a spotty lad can come round and turn it off and then on again when it goes wrong. Plus you will no doubt want to subscribe to software updates and then fork out for hardware updates when an even shinier version of your new teaching aid comes along. And as you're a school and don't know much about money, the whole kit and caboodle will probably have been bought on some sexy finance deal which sounds cheap until you see in the small print that you're paying an effective APR of 83% (on this last point, recent press reports refer.)

 

The response to this is not to be seduced by wordy justifications of the "neo-classical endogenous growth theory" variety but to go with your gut instinct, viz it's a waste of money. I remember hearing tales daily of this kind of malarkey, typified by interactive whiteboards. There were many other examples of course, some much less susceptible to the common sense rebuttal: how about PFI schemes, AKA government off-balance sheet financial smoke and mirrors (the results of which are now coming home to roost) or "Agenda for Change" which amounted to paying NHS staff more to do less (NHS foundation trusts are now seeing who has the balls to be the first to tear this up.)

 

I said to myself (and anyone else unlucky enough to be in the vicinity), how can we afford all this? Is the country really that much richer than a few years ago? My conclusion: we were not richer and therefore we couldn't afford it and, at some point, it would all end in tears. Sure enough, aided by the catalyst of sub-prime lending and other banking stupidity, it did.

 

So don't let yourself be fooled by fancy words from people who are supposed to know more than you do. Look at the euro for goodness sake (don't get me started.) If something looks stupid, it almost certainly is. Let common sense prevail. Stop sniggering at the back or I'll throw my interactive whiteboard user manual at you, it's even more deadly than a blackboard eraser!