Another new year's eve...oh dear...

So here we are at New Year's eve again. The scene for this is as usual: mounds of turkey still in the fridge, fighting for space with ham, cheese, brandy butter, etc., etc. The house still littered with Christmas detritus including half-eaten boxes of chocs, bowls of peanuts, dates, satsumas and about 80% of the Christmas cake which stares at us threateningly. We haven't even touched the Christmas pudding yet. In our house, it's a custom around this time of year to ask ourselves why we buy so much stuff at Christmas and to swear never to do it again but of course the following year, we do exactly that.

So we all suffer from a bit of what the Catalans might call post nadal depression. And then along comes New Year's eve to jolly us all up again or not, as the case may be. I've never been much of a fan of New Year's eve myself. It amounts to celebrating the fact that you're one more year closer to death and it's hard to see what's so great about that. Of course it's compulsory to go out and drink a great deal but you can't get a taxi, or if you can you need to part with a sizable part of your life savings; and if you've got kids, you can't get a babysitter so going out at all is something of a nightmare. That's why we have developed the cunning ploy of staying in and having people come to our place, thus avoiding all the problems associated with going out, which includes the fact that we've eaten so much over the festive period that it's hard to move anywhere without mechanical assistance anyway.

So we slave all day, cooking up a load of exotic curries and our friends do likewise, bring them all round to ours and we pig out (as if we haven't done this enough already). There's always way too much curry and in a kind of loaves and fishes scenario, by the time we've finished, there appears to be just as much left as when we started. Then, digestive systems screaming for mercy, we collapse in front of Jools Holland's programme on the box. Cue mutterings about the line-up not being as good as previous years. And then we're left with mountains of uneaten curry to add to the turkey, ham, Christmas cake, etc., etc.

But it's all change this year. Someone round the corner is having a party which ticks all the boxes about not wanting to travel and means our uneaten food pile will not increase exponentially as in previous years. Of course it still means having to sing some bizarre old Scottish song and wish everyone a happy new year, which as I've said, I can never quite see is something to get excited about.

Still, by that time, the alcohol will have numbed the pain of the whole thing and we can stumble a few yards back home to catch the end of what really does look like a mediocre list of acts on Jools' annual knees-up.

And then it's back to more cold turkey and stilton for breakfast. Have a good one won't you and try not to drink too sensibly.

At Christmas time, there'a no need to be afraid...

...at Christmas time, we let in light and we banish hate...." So sang Paul Young at the beginning of Bob Geldof's mega charity smash hit, "Feed the World". Hard to argue with the sentiments and the objective although some cynics have noted that the Bandaid/Liveaid project seems to have done far more to enhance His Bobness's well-being than that of the average Ethiopian. Ah well, a bit of collateral benefit is no reason for not trying to help.

 

It's hard to know what to say about Christmas that hasn't already been said. I love it myself, even though I may moan with the best of them about the commercialising of the whole thing, nothing good on TV, turkeys don't taste like they used to, etc., etc. We might not be able to raise millions like Bob G but we all feel a bit more charitable at this time of year I think and chuck a few bob in the direction of the Sally Army band. Or even that dodgy busker we've been avoiding all year. Wouldn't it be good if you could somehow capture this mood and extend it over the rest of the year? But that never seems to happen.

 

The same sort of problem applies to the Olympics. During the summer, everyone marvelled at the change of attitude in London and indeed, the whole country, helped along by some great British sporting achievements. There was constant talk of "legacy" and how we had to ensure that this sporting fervour penetrated to the further reaches of the population and transformed us into a nation of finely-honed athletes, instead of the pizza-munching fatties that we are. Well some of us. Not me and you, obviously. We also wanted to make sure that the vast amount of money lavished on the new facilities was not wasted on a few weeks of sporting endeavour but would provide the means for our crop of newly-enthused youngsters to reach new sporting heights. Well this is where I do put on my cynical trousers and express serious doubts.

 

You see people have short memories. In a week or two, we'll have forgotten about Christmas, apart from the reminder provided by the expanded waistline, and already the Olympics are fading from memory. The issue here is "cultural change". This is rarely talked about in the context of national culture but is a term often bandied about in companies and other corporate bodies, where the practical application of this often involves some dreaded team-building "awayday". You've probably been on one of these: you have a series of group exercises where you have to be nice to everyone, including those people from the sixth floor who make your life a misery the rest of the year, and you all pretend to love each other and subscribe to whatever new corporate ethos is flavour of that particular month. Does the corporate culture change as a result? Rarely.

 

So how do you effect cultural change? Well of course it happens naturally over time in any case but if you want to do it quickly and steer it in the direction you want it to go, you need to do something pretty big and you need to be the head honcho. You need to be a Hitler or a Mao Tse Tung or a Stalin. My word these people shook things up. Only problem was the millions of dead bodies left in their wake.  So a few drawbacks here.

 

Or you need to be Jesus. Or Buddha, or Mohamed. Which, in the case of the first, brings us back to Christmas. No mean achievement to have a large proportion of the world's population celebrate your birth some 2,000 years after your death, even if most of them tend to forget about your ideas for most of the year. So you must have been quite a guy and that's what it takes to change the world: a big man with big ideas, who hangs around longer than most elected politicians and who doesn't have to worry about buying votes. And one who doesn't have a gun in his hand.

Speaking of guns brings us to the awful event in the USA the other day. Obama said all the right things but will he be able to change the US's gun-toting culture? Not a chance. Unlike the people listed above, he doesn't have the power and he won't be around long enough. If Jesus really does pop up in Utah then you might see some movement in the right direction but until then...

 

Only 3 more days until that Mayan calendar runs out. So get back to your Christmas shopping and don't get me any more bloody socks!

 

Too busy watching chefs on TV to cook?

There's an incredible number of cookery programmes on TV these days, with everything from Jamie "pukka grub innit?" Oliver to Raymond "ooh la la" Blanc and Heston "brain the size of a chest freezer" Blumenthal. The last one is particularly good for chips as long as you don't mind waiting three days for them. Then you've got the amateurs having a bash on Masterchef and that Come Dine With Me programme where you invite people in to be rude about your cooking and cast disapproving glances at your kitchen ("distressed MDF in pale green...very 1980s"). Or at least I think that's what it's all about - I've only ever seen the trailers.

 

 

A potato peeler. Apparently some of you are not familiar with one of these.

 

 

So given all this televisual outpouring of tips on how to fatten yourselves up, not to mention the zillions of books by the above celeb chefs which jostle for space at the top of the bestsellers lists, you'd imagine that we'd all be slaving away over our hot stoves, producing endless exotic culinary creations, no?

 

No. A survey today (yes another bloody survey - where would the media be without them?) says that large numbers of us think that "cooking" amounts to heating up a pizza or nuking something gooey in a plastic pot in the microwave. Of course as usual, we don't need a survey to tell us this. We know it must be true from the vast volume of frozen gunk in brightly coloured packaging clogging up the supermarkets along with "easy cook" versions of everything, even things like roast potatoes. (If you really can't prepare your own roast potatoes then I expect you can't tie your own shoelaces either or dress yourself. How do you get through the day?) It seems that the more cookery programmes there are, the less inclined we are to actually do any cooking. It must be some kind of vicarious exercise of cooking by proxy: once we've finished watching Nigella getting all saucy with lashings of butter, fromage frais, chocolate and some weird Slovakian confection from that super little deli round the corner from her place in Belgravia, we feel we've done it all ourselves and can just give that frozen lasagne 800 watts of particle physics.

 

So if, as it appears, there's an inverse relationship between the amount of cooking on TV and the amount done by the (wo)man in the kitchen, could it be that this can be extended to more useful behavioural effects? Let's have a go at putting on lots of programmes featuring mugging, rape and murder and watch as crime rates plummet. Maybe a few more war films on the telly would reduce the incidence of the real thing. I don't know if this would work but I'm sure that wall-to-wall documentaries on Eds Miliband and Balls would cure people of socialism.

 

Although this sounds like a brilliant idea, I can't help thinking there's a flaw in it somewhere. You don't think that the reason people buy ever increasing volumes of pre-prepared this and microwavable that is something to do with the profits to be made by the food companies? Surely not. Pass me a Pot Noodle.

Wake up and smell the tax law

I can't resist saying something about this tax business that's dominated the news recently although the whole thing is so bonkers it's hard to know where to start. It's also hard to know where to finish but the main conclusion has got to be about the sound-bite culture we live in these days rather than anything to do with tax.

 

First off, why has everyone picked on Starbucks, Amazon and Google? There are goodness knows how many multinationals operating in the UK and all of them will be using similar techniques to minimise their tax bills. At least they will be if they're doing their jobs right. Companies have a duty to their shareholders to make as much money as possible and this means paying as little tax as possible. Just like the rest of us: do you pay more tax than you need to? Only because of laziness, ignorance or incompetence.

 

The difference between you and I and multinationals is that the latter have more weapons in their anti-tax armoury. They obviously want to make a profit but they want that profit to appear in the accounts of their companies which operate in the countries with the lowest tax rates. To achieve this, they can buy and sell stuff to each other and lend and borrow money between group companies. That's how the world works and has done for ages.

 

Other ruses are possible, as I well know. I was once employed by a very large multinational and worked on a deal which involved a subsidiary in one country investing a vast amount of money in a new one set up in Ireland (because they had a very generous tax regime if you made sure you ticked the right boxes), which then lent it back to the first company. This meant the first company paid tax-deductible interest to the Irish one which paid tax on it but at a much lower rate than that being saved by the first company. Result? Tax savings running into the tens of millions. So did I get a vast bonus for administering this lucrative wheeze? Unfortunately not - that wasn't really the done thing in those days. How times change eh?

 

Another thing I worked on was moving an operation out of London and into Holland. You'll have noticed that Holland has been mentioned in Starbucks' intra-group shenanigans so I guess those friendly Dutch chaps still have some helpful tax laws on their statute book.

 

So why all the excitement, when this kind of thing is very old news? It must be because of the massive appetite of our massively enlarged news media to gorge itself on tasty news titbits and spew out half-eaten remains of poorly digested (read: poorly understood) stories. So to major on Starbucks is great because we've heard of them. If it had been Mega Widgets plc (who may be even sharper on tax avoidance than the coffee people) it's boring and not news.

 

The main story here is not Starbucks and co but HMRC and the way they're held to account, or not. That and the EU.  As you might expect, HMRC have all sorts of rules to stop companies getting too cheeky with their tax-reducing ploys. Unfortunately, some of these rules have been challenged recently as being contrary to EU rules. The EU take the view that it doesn't matter which EU country you pay your tax in as we're all jolly good friends together in the EU and never mind that some of our "friends" have much lower tax rates than we do. You may think it's a bit lopsided to have rules making us all conform in certain ways but not in others, like tax rates but there you go, and the hands of our tax collectors are, to at least some extent, tied.

 

But don't think that HMRC are blameless. In recent years they seem to have developed a strategy that involves doing deals with companies rather than getting legal. In fact in the last few years they have hardly taken any companies to court at all. Most spectacular was the deal they did with Vodafone which, depending on who you believe, let Vodafone off a potential tax bill of anything up to £6 billion. That's an awful lot more than anything Starbucks may have dodged.

 

Then there's the other guilty party, the MPs. The recent goings on in parliament have seen some extraordinary rubbish being spoken which has simply served to highlight the ignorance of those who are in charge of making laws. How on earth can they have a go at a company which has simply played by the rules which the interrogators are responsible for making? Bonkers. If you don't like the rules, change them. Do you seriously expect companies to pay tax voluntarily?

 

But ironically, and just to increase the bonkers-ness angle further, that's exactly what Starbucks have said they're going to do. Happily, I am not a Starbucks shareholder, or else I'd be pretty cross at this large increase in what amounts to the PR budget. But now Starbucks are being criticised for doing this so they just can't win. These Starbucks knockers should be directing their anger at HMRC, the Government or the EU, rather than an outfit that, despite doing nothing wrong, has offered to chuck many millions into the UK's depleted coffers.

 

Finally, another bit of drivel has been the dumb suggestion by some MPs that we need a sales tax to recoup the profits tax that is apparently so easily avoided. Er...hello? We already have one...it's called VAT and it's currently set at a very stonking 20%. Not only that, we also have a hefty tax on jobs called employers' national insurance and then the employees have to hand over a not insignificant amount of their wages in tax and (employees') national insurance. Add all this up and you'll find that a very sizable chunk of Starbucks' turnover already finds its way into the UK government's bank account. Not to mention all the other economic activity generated by Starbucks' UK operation.

 

Of course this is a good thing for the UK and is why we, like all other countries, are very keen to attract multinationals to our shores. This is why places like Holland and Ireland have juicy tax arrangements and why George Osborne has just reduced the UK corporation tax rate.

 

So what do we make of all this? We can conclude that the job of the multinational is to make money for its shareholders; MPs are stupid; tax law is complicated; HMRC needs to be more accountable and, while we remain in the EU, there's an awful lot of stuff that the UK government can't do much about anyway. But mainly, in the age of the 140 character Twitteresque headline, you need to go out of your way if you want to understand what's really going on.

 

Phew, I'm exhausted. Double espresso please!

 

 

What we did on our holidays - part II

My early new year's resolution: update the blog daily. The old blogging has become rather intermittent recently and I hold my hands up - it's just not good enough.

 

 

Work continues on the Sagrada Familia: any chance of being finished by the end of the world chaps?

 

 

Anyway, we've just come back from a visit to Barcelona, which the locals will tell you is in Catalonia, not Spain. As usual, we did a lot of walking and managed to tick off most of the places in our I Spy book. I recommend the Sagrada Familia, the extraordinary church designed by Gaudi which they're still working on, about 100 years after they started. Now I know the Spanish are famous for their manana attitude to work but that's really pushing it. If you've got the builders in, for goodness sake don't let on about this Spanish job or they'll slow to a crawl.

 

We also did the Picasso museum but I'm afraid I was more impressed with the building than the artworks within although the stuff from his teenage years was pretty impressive. I guess when you're that good you get bored after a while and start doing the weird cubist stuff he's most famous for. Well it's either the boredom or the absinthe that inspired it.

 

 

Any time is shopping time in glitzy downtown Barcelona

 

We messed up a bit on the food front. We had a number of tapas type meals, noting an incredible variation in prices between the tourist spots and those just a few yards away but we didn't have a decent meal at a decent restaurant and Barca must be full of them. We also noted that although there are places selling food absolutely everywhere, you don't see too many overweight Spaniards. They must have a different metabolism because we were only there for a few days, didn't eat that much (or so we thought) but still put on weight.

 

But the two things that will stay in the memory more than anything are (1) the Christmas lights, which were down almost every street and put the West End of London to shame and (2) the shops, both in terms of their sheer number and their tendency to be positioned right at the top of the price scale. The brand names seemed to go on forever, like someone had taken Bond Street or Fifth Avenue and cloned it twenty times over. Either Barcelona must be a very rich city or attract a large number of very rich visitors. Mind you, no one seemed to be buying anything, perhaps because all these posh shops had threatening looking doormen which rather puts one off entering.

 

 

Bonkers Gaudi buildings in Park Guell: what was he smoking?

 

 

Well anyway, we're back in Blighty now, just in time for the Christmas shopping season. Luckily our local shops are more Matalan and Sports Direct than Gucci and Prada.

More pop reviews: Grizzly Bear and Everything Everything

We really are "down with the kids" round at Marshside Acres you know. We recently spent a couple of days up in London to do a bit of gig-going. Just to prove what all-round culture-vultures we are, we took in the Pre Raphaelite exhibition at the Tate too. I knew you'd be impressed.

 

Grizzly Bear were on at the Brixton Academy. This is an old cinema and is a great venue. Although it's one of the biggest around, excluding the enormodome places like the horrid O2 (Marshside blogs passim), it somehow has an intimate vibe about it. You can choose to stand or opt for unreserved seating - we went for the latter this time round: our legs and backs were still recovering from the Radiohead gig.

 

Grizzly Bear at Brixton: Chinese lanterns ahoy

 

Grizzly Bear are like a louder Fleet Foxes, i.e. it's still gentle stuff. This is a bit surprising given that they come from the urban jungle of Brooklyn. I guess New York has a different feel about it these days, compared to that which influenced bands like the Velvet Underground and the Ramones. The Bears had a great light show which utilised remote controlled Chinese lanterns which could be moved around into interesting patterns: a bit like a lower cost version of Radiohead's moving video screens. Speaking of which, another lower cost thing here compared to Radiohead was the ticket price which was less than half what we paid to see Thom and the boys. Weird, eh? They are much better than half as good. And the Brixton Academy is much better than twice as good as the O2.

 

Anyway, do check out the Bears from Brooklyn - they are excellent.

 

The following night, we ventured into what New Yorkers might call the "funky" neighbourhood of Shoreditch to see one of our great fave raves, Everything Everything. Now, Shoreditch is a fascinating place. Very much a part of the true East End of London, being adjacent to the City, it's not an area that you, gentle reader, would have wanted to dally in after dark a few years ago. I used to regularly drive through it sharpish en route between London and Kent. But now the blessing (or curse, depending on your point of view) of gentrification has spread here and it's getting very trendy. Somewhat bizarrely, a few yards up the old Roman road of which Shoreditch High Street forms a part, a kind of Little Saigon has been born, with Vietnamese restaurants everywhere. We had our dinner at one such. Our verdict: good but a bit too much like your common or garden Chinese.

The Village Undergound in funky downtown Shoreditch

 

 

So trendy has Shoreditch become that someone has created a new music venue under the railway arches. It's called the Village Underground and I recommend it, apart from the beer prices: £4 for a can of lager is too much and brings back unpleasant O2 memories. Mind you, at around £13, the ticket prices for this gig were such a bargain that we were able to drink the beer without choking.

 

We half expected to see Shaun Keavney, the host of the very wonderful BBC Radio 6 breakfast prog there as he's a well-known EE fan. Sure enough, I turned round and there he was right next to me. I am of course far too shy and retiring to dare speak to him but Mrs Marshside, fuelled by too many rash purchases of that overpriced beer, had no such inhibitions. Not sure if he ever gave us the "shout out" (as I believe you young people call it) on the radio the next morning: couldn't get BBC 6 Music in our hotel room (why not? It's on Freeview. Wake up Travelodge!)

The Everything Everything boys do their stuff: Chinese lanterns as yet unaffordable

 

The band were great. They've got a new album out in the new year and will be touring more extensively to promote it. Do go and see them.

 

One final observation from our visit to the Smoke. The transport system in London now is truly remarkable. Get this: we got a river boat from the Tate (that's near the Houses of Parliament) all the way to Greenwich. After a stroll round Greenwich, we walked through the pedestrian tunnel (a new one on me) under the river to the Isle of Dogs. We then got a Docklands Light Railway train from Island Gardens to Shadwell, where we changed to a London Overground train to Hoxton, right next to our Vietnamese restaurant and a short walk from the gig venue. After the gig, a brief train journey from Shoreditch High Street would have brought us to Whitechapel where a change to the metropolitan tube line would have whisked us back to our hotel near King's Cross. (But we pampered ourselves with a taxi for the home leg.) All of these journeys can be paid for with one of these Oyster card things. I don't know quite why I should be so impressed with this as London has always had a pretty good transport network but it's the way it's now integrated that makes it so easy to use. That and the Oyster card.

 

So there you have it. Plugs for Grizzly Bear, Everything Everything, the Brixton Academy, the Village Underground, BBC Radio 6 Music and Transport for London. If these search engines are any good, the visitor numbers to this blog will go through the roof!

 

Updates: gadgets, fashion and (shock) private sector pay

Morning all. A few stories by way of confirmation that your favourite blogger is ahead of the times...and, a first for this blog, a bit of balance. This latter may be a disappointment and you may infer that I'm losing my touch but it relates also to my piece on fashion. Quite clearly, I have no time for balance for its own sake - perish the thought!

 

As we've started on this balance business let's continue. I write in response to the revelation that FTSE 100 head honcho salaries are up by 27%. Now in one or two cases, this might be justified but only one or two, as most shareholders will know only too painfully. These people are now paid spectacular amounts of money and like wages generally, as we have previously observed, their salaries are "sticky downwards"...i.e. they go up when times are good but rarely seem to fall when times are bad. And times have been very bad recently.

 

So how come? Well it's our old friend fashion. It's also the "what happens in the USA will one day happen in the UK" syndrome. It used to be the case that the grands frommages amongst our US cousins got paid way more than their UK equivalents whose salaries, whilst being much higher than those of their minions, were at least within the realms of the same universe. No longer. Sure enough, the massive US salary package phenomenon crossed the Atlantic (just like hallowe'en celebrations amongst other wacky ideas), some time in the late 1980s I would estimate and now our own fat cats are having to spend as much time worrying about their own finances (the tax must be terrible) as they do running their companies. And now it's the fashion to pay people so much, who wants to be out of fashion by trying to cut things down to size?

 

Before you think I've changed sides, this is nothing like so serious as the over inflated pay in the public sector for two obvious reasons. First, there's very few of these uber-salaried types in the private sector and second, you and I don't have to write the cheques. Let their shareholders worry about it.

 

In other news...I see that some council somewhere has spent zillions on laptops for the kiddies to play with but because of some administrative cock-up, they've never been used. Actually this is probably a good thing as getting the kids to use them just compounds the problem and it won't bring the money back.

 

There are still loads of people of my sort of age who don't know one end of a computer from another. The members of this group who hold the purse strings are so terrified by their own skills shortage that they have been determined to throw money at gadgets to atone for this. Chief among these was Tony Blair who was PM when this fashion (there's that word again) started. By all accounts, old Tone never went near a computer: he even had a minion print out emails for him to read. Thus started the trend for those who know least about IT to be the ones who spend the most on the stuff. Sadly there seems to be no sign of this fashion going away. The blind leading the partially-sighted.

 

Speaking of printing out emails and the consequent planet-damage that might ensue, I read that the organisation which kind of runs the climate change agenda (the ICCC or something, you know the ones) has said that they won't know for sure that man-made carbon emissions are harming the planet for about another 30 years. Great! So for a lot of us, we will be long gone before we can have any warm glow (metaphorically of course - don't turn up the heating) from our years of sorting rubbish into different coloured bins and for you younger readers, there's something for you to look forward to: by the time you are far too old to care, someone may announce that, surprise surprise, the sun is a lot more powerful than any of us and buying that shiny electric car, installing your own windmill, or voting for the Green Party (you wouldn't, would you?) made no difference to anything.

 

Alternatively, they may decide that, yes - it was our disgusting profligacy with the earth's resources that has caused the ice caps to thin out a bit but never mind, because the carbon savings made by us enlightened westerners have been cancelled out many hundreds of times over by the increase in emissions from places like China and India. (If you do still believe that your tiny actions can have a bearing on anything, just take a peek at the historical and predicted increases in emissions from these developing countries and your mind will be changed in a trice.)

 

Of course well before the 30 years are up, some nutter in Iran or Israel (there's more balance for you) will have pushed the button and blown us all into our very own little piles of carbon.

 

Please think of the planet before you print out this blog.

 

 

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! 

Strip billiards for the Olympics!

So Prince Harry's been "letting off steam" again. Given the number of times he does this, he must have the steam-filled constitution of an old Mallard locomotive. But the intriguing thing this time is that apparently he was engaging in something called "strip billiards".

 

Now in my previous post I was advocating sports like billiards for the Olympics and also suggesting we include variants of these to enhance the GB medal prospects. So I am indebted to HRH for coming up with one such variant that in my wildest dreams I never would have thought of. Well done sir!

 

Billiards itself is a game rarely played these days. It's like snooker but both far more sophisticated and, for the spectator at least, far more boring. For the uninitiated, there are only 3 balls involved, a red, a white and a white with a spot. One player has the plain white as "his" ball and the other the spotted one. You score points by potting, or  going in off, one of the other 2 balls, or by a cannon, which is hitting one of the balls with yours followed by the other. You can see there is no natural conclusion to this so you play the first to a certain score or put a time limit on it. Or last man still awake wins.

 

So far so good, but how on earth do you get the disrobing angle into the game? I reckon what you do is to divide the game into 50 point chunks, or less if you are (a) rubbish at the game or (b) keen to get naked ASAP. The first person to 50 wins and demands a garment discard by the other. Then the first person to get to a hundred wins and...etc, etc. You could have some kind of extra special forfeit at a particular score. In fact, looking at those pics of the Prince, I reckon that's exactly what they've done in this instance.

 

But here's the interesting bit though. Back in the real world, I'm quite sure that whatever game they were playing, it wasn't billiards. But the fact that it was described specifically as "strip billiards" implies that this variant of the game must exist. So I now feel very naive that I have never been involved in such a game and clearly my life must be very sheltered. I must get out more and check out a different snooker/billiards club as I've never seen any stripping at the one I frequent.

 

Already, with Zara Phillips,  we have one Olympic royal. I look forward to being able to cheer on a second in 4 years' time in Rio!

Pop festival economics revisited

I was musing in a previous post about how the money goes around when it comes to running a festival. I was, and still am, puzzled by the number of these things (which must be in the hundreds, just in the UK) and the huge number of acts that promoters book at each.

Well here's a couple of things, partly prompted by out recent return from Cropredy and also by an item in the press. (Oh and thank you for your prayers: the weather at Cropredy was fantastic).

The famous Cropedy Fringe in action: who needs Edinburgh?

At Cropredy there is just one stage. This means that all the acts have a captive audience and all will perform in front of the best part of 20,000 people (allowing for the fact that a few will be pottering around in their caravans, or having a late breakfast at the rowing club, or visiting the "Cropredy Fringe" at one of the two village pubs). This means big exposure and surely allows for a bit of bargaining power on behalf of the promoters. Speaking of which, the promoters of Cropredy are folk-rock leviathans Fairport Convention. They always play a 3 hour headline spot to close the whole thing on Saturday night but this year it was stretched to 3.5 hours plus, they now do a short set to open proceedings on the Thursday. You will have spotted that the longer Fairport play, the fewer other acts they have to pay and the more money they make. And Fairport make no apologies for seeking to supplement their annual income by making a profit out of Cropredy.

I believe other festival promoters could learn from this. Take the Hop Farm Festival (Marshside blog passim). I read over the weekend that it lost money this year. I'm not surprised. Too many acts and stages and not enough big names to encourage people to part with large amounts of money and put up with yucky loos for 3 days.

Anyway, Glasto's back next year and we've never been. On the basis that surely it's time for Radiohead to headline again, I might well be joining the queue for tickets this time round. Plenty to time to book a nice B&B in the Somerset area!

You say Olympics I say Ol*mp*cs

On me 'ead son...now that's what I call sport

Well here we are in a brief respite twixt fit people's games and those for the less so. And what excitement we've had so far, eh? Especially so for those of us with Sky TV (and the time to enjoy it) who have got through several remote control batteries as we flicked between a bewildering number of channels showing every sport you could think of plus a few you couldn't. Strange how one always seemed to end up back on the beach volleyball...

Elsewhere we had a glimpse into the usually invisible-to-the-naked-eye infra red end of the sports spectrum with things like Greco-Roman wrestling, dressage and taikwando. This peek into the sporting twilight zone was best summed up by a BBC radio commentator who, when dealing with the transfer of the coverage between the last two of these activities, said "this is what the Olympics is all about: dancing horses and girls trying to kick each other's heads off!" Excellent.

The one exception was Korfball which was notable by its absence. Please join my campaign to have this intriguing sport included next time round. This will then enable us to sing regular choruses of the excellent Half Man Half Biscuit song "Joy in Leeuwarden (we are ready)". Do check this out (it's on their latest album "90 Bisodol") and you'll become a paid up member of the UK Korfball Association in a trice (assuming there is one - if not we'll form one.)

In a similar vein, but for entirely different reasons, let's see things like snooker, billiards and darts included. Then we might have a chance of overtaking the USA and China in the medals table. Especially when we create several variants of each.

So were there any negatives then or was it "all good", to use one of the favourite expressions from the "2012" sitcom (I do hope you've seen it?) Well there were some bizarre acts at the closing ceremony: Russell Brand singing "I am the walrus"? Ed Sheeran with some motley prog rock supergroup?  And who on earth allowed Georgie Michael to plug his new single? You could almost hear the whole country shouting "Wake me up before you go go!" at the TV. Well you could in our house.

But the one thing that irked me was this embargo on the use of any words or symbols associated with the Olympics (if I'm allowed to call them that) or any item emblazoned with a brand name being on view inside the venues. This meant people having umbrellas confiscated; having to remove labels from bottles of water; radio DJs on non-Olympics programmes not being able to say "Olympics" etc., etc.  An inadvertent display of the M&S tag on your knickers and you'd be frogmarched to the strip search area...

This sort of thing is just not on. I've droned on about freedom of speech before and no doubt I will again. It's important for goodness sake! If there was ever a just cause for civil disobedience then this is it. If you're off to the Paralympics then ensure you and all your accessories are fully adorned with every conceivable logo. I'd like to see them take away someone's wheel chair just because it's got "John Lewis" on it.

I'm not sure if they have wheel chair beach volleyball but I believe they have wheel chair rugby and that it's the most vicious sport you ever saw. Time to buy some more batteries for the TV remote.

  

Tax and morals: we're all spared!

Phew! If you've paid someone in cash, it looks like you have a respite from eternal damnation. Apparently, even big Dave Cameron has done it...so it must be OK.

What a lot of nonsense, eh? Of course what the poor bloke who made this latest "morally wrong" pronouncement was saying was not that it's wrong to pay someone in cash, but that it is wrong if you are knowingly conniving in tax evasion by so doing. Trouble is, we all live in a world of sound-bites and headlines and anything requiring any kind of cerebral effort is wasted on us, so the nuance of his statement has wafted away on the breeze and he is left, like a bloke who thought the party was fancy dress with a Nazi theme, looking silly and alone.

It's an increasingly common occurrence that people are misunderstood, not because they have failed to express themselves clearly but because we have failed to look beyond the headline. This isn't really a new phenomenon: Thomas Beckett became a martyr because of a small conversational misunderstanding. What's the answer to this? It's probably to not say anything of any subtlety at all - just go for the spin without the substance.

Which reminds me of the fabulous "2012" TV show which finished last night (if you missed them, get onto the iplayer or the DVD store now). The star is the wonderfully vacuous Siobhan from the PR firm. Although her conversation consists mainly of "totally", "cool" and "the thing with this is..." she actually saves the "Olympics Deliverance Team" from disaster repeatedly as hard-wired into her otherwise empty head is the notion that all that matters is the TV image and the headline. So using a chocolate-covered nut instead of an acorn, or computer-generated fireworks instead of real ones is fine as no one will know the difference. She's right, of course.

And speaking of the Olympics, it all kicks off today - quite literally in fact, with women's football. Now, you may find it odd that women's football exists at all and astounding that it's an Olympic sport but get with it guys...the thing with this is, it's totally about inclusivity and the legacy angle is, like, really cool...plus, it's chicks in shorts fighting each other...totally...

Festival time again!

Elbow's stage set. Pink Floyd eat your heart out!

Doesn't time fly? Already the 2012 festival season is in full swing with campers huddled in muddy fields all over the place. Our tent hasn't seen the light of day yet this year but we've dipped our toes in the festival waters and here's my observations so far...

A few weeks back we headed to Jodrell Bank, a few miles south of Manchester and site of the Lovell radio telescope. They first put on a bit of a musical do here last year, in the shadow of the Lovell and my what a shadow it casts. It is a bloody huge thing and makes for a spectacular setting. Day 1 of this year's event was headlined by local lads (well, Bury anyway) Elbow. The weather forecast was not great but the rain restrained itself to a bit of a drizzle until shortly after Elbow hit the stage and then...splosh. We got wet. So did Elbow. They had a set piece where they sang grouped round a keyboard set up on a catwalk running out into the crowd. "Electronic equipment and rain" observed Elbow front man Guy Garvey "what could possibly go wrong?" Luckily there were no fatalities.

But the rain kept coming. Just prior to the encores, we made our excuses and left, fearing a waterlogged car park and a delay of several hours to get out. We were either clever or lucky as (a) we found the car right away, a feat in itself and (b) drove straight out, delay-free and got back to the hotel in Wilmslow in time for a pint. But those heading for day 2, featuring Paul Weller, were not so lucky: the car park did indeed become waterlogged (and probably the rest of the site too) and the thing was cancelled.

Elbow were excellent of course but what I really wanted to talk about was the supporting line-up. This featured two of my fave raves who I hadn't seen live before, namely Cherry Ghost and Field Music. If you're not familiar with these acts - do check them out - then you're not alone. Obviously neither of them is a household name and it became pretty clear that a large proportion of the crowd weren't familiar with them which means you have a rather weird vibe, with many thousands of people staring up at these acts but not knowing what to make of them. That's OK unless said crowd members have had a few drinks, are young and with a group of mates, in which case they are likely to talk/shout/vomit very noisily right through their sets. Call me naive but why do people do this?

Just like us, these anti-social types have paid a lot of money to be there, so why waste it by talking all the time? Or why not slope off to the bar and get even more drunk? I am being mainly rhetorical but there are several genuine questions begged here: why are bands so quiet these days? Why do people go to festivals? Why do festivals book so many acts?

Field Music wonder whether they can afford the petrol to get back to Sunderland

This last question doesn't apply to the Jodrell Bank do as there was only one stage with about 5 acts altogether but let's move swiftly down closer to home in Kent for the Hop Farm bash, where we attended for the first and third days (thereby missing Dylan which was probably no bad thing.) Now, like so many other festivals, the line-up is as long as your arm, with dozens of acts spread over about 5 stages. Unless, like big G, you are omnipresent, this means that you are going to miss at least 80% of the acts. It also means you have to be on your toes to work out where you need to be at any given time but then, having constructed a cunning algorithm to plan your day, you fall asleep, or get drunk, or stuck in the mud, or simply can't be arsed and you miss even more.

So why do they book so many bands in the first place? Our old friends Field Music were playing again but stuck in some tent with dodgy acoustics and down wind of the main stage (on the Sunday, Gruff Rhys found himself competing with Kool and the Gang.) The whole site didn't seem that busy and Field Music's audience can't have amounted to many more than they might have got in the local Palais de Danse in their home town of Sunderland, which is a hell of a long way from Kent. So Field Music (and the same must go for plenty of the other acts) have trekked the length of the country to gain very limited exposure and the organisers have forked out to book a load of acts that most people aren't going to see. It sounds like a lose:lose. I must be missing something here but I'm not sure what.

Gruff Rhys battles on bravely against Mr Kool and his gang

Given that you're not going to see most of the bands on the bill (plus I expect your algorithm crashed when the two bands you most wanted to see were scheduled on different stages at the same time); given the British weather; given the price of the beer; given the state of the toilets; given those noisy bastards next to you talking all the way through Lianne la Havas' quiets bits...why do you want to go to one of these bashes when you probably could have had a week in some hot foreign country for the same price? It's a mystery. (Before you point at me, let me tell you we did not pay anything like the full price for the Hop Farm! And Jodrell Bank was just one day and not our sole reason for venturing north of the Watford Gap, so...)

And finally...why are all the bands so quiet these days? When I was a lad, everyone was so loud it was quite impossible to talk over them. Those were the days! Crank it up to 11 I say and force the talkers to leg it for some more rip-off beer and overpriced/undercooked burgers.

Anyway, onwards and upwards. Next up, in a few weeks, is Cropredy: only one stage so no rushing about in the mud, two pubs just a short walk down the canal and ticket prices that don't make you wince. Plus this year Cropredy features just about the best live band in the known universe: Bellowhead. Please kneel with me as we pray the current excellent weather holds... 

Some tickets still available...dig out the tent and we'll see you there!

People at the bar, let me hear you say "how much?!"