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.