Pete Brown's Other Blog

Kiss and Make Up

2010-08-31T17:45:00.000+01:00

It's late, and we're very drunk, and I'm gazing around the walls of a beer bar somewhere near Wenceslas Square, Prague.

It’s kind of incongruous, a reminder of the two worlds this country has known over the last fifty years.

Standing on tables behind us, a birthday party or works outing is bellowing out songs at the top of their voices, some of which, our guide tells us, are old revolutionary communist fighting songs.

But the walls are laden with framed pictures of that greatest example of Western decadence - the rock and roll band.

Here's one of Johnny Cash, backstage at Hammersmith Odeon in 1966, looking disturbingly like The Fall's Mark E Smith.

There's one of an indie rock band who were huge globally in the mid-nineties, their flame haired singer crawling towards us on all fours, burning the world with the flash of her eyes. This band always make me wistful because I met the singer a few times and she definitely fancied me, and I did nothing to reciprocate. No one believes me when I tell them, but this was back when she was a lot less famous and quite a bit less attractive than she is on this poster, and, it has to be said, when I was an entirely different shape.

But over here is a poster of Kiss, and it pulls me up short and stops me feeling sorry for myself, because I feel loads sorrier for one of Kiss.

I've noticed it before, but never really processed it till now. Sure Kiss were camp and larger than life and ROCK in a way that now only a fully-fledged novelty act could get away with, but look at them.

Let's play Kiss! Baggsy not being the one on the bottom left - oh, why do I always have to be the cat one?

Three have face make-up that makes them look very cool, very rock and roll. One's demonic, one's got a star, and one has some kind of explosion or lightning flash. All guaranteed to make the seventies groupie swoon.

And then... one of them looks like a cute little pussycat.

His face paint is not glam rock face paint; it's the kind of thing children get painted on their faces at village fetes. The poor bastard looks like he's lost a bet, or was a regular target for being bullied by the rest of the band. Surely he can’t have chosen that design himself, in contrast to his band-so-called-mates?

Did no one think this unusual at the time?

Did Kiss fans cold shoulder him, or was there a special enclave of sensitive Kiss fan who instead of shagging his brains out put him on a cushion and fed him bread and milk?

Either way – poor bastard. No wonder he was one of the first to leave the band.

When I got back from Prague I read Kiss’ Wikipedia page and found out some more about what each band member’s face paint was meant to represent, and why. But it wasn’t half as interesting as the drunken mental story I’d created for myself, so I won’t repeat it here.

Hurrah Mummy, it's the F*** Buttons!

2010-08-23T19:40:00.000+01:00

nnnnnnnggggggggggrrrrrrrrrrrreeeeeeeeeannggggggg

You know you could only be at a festival when…

… it’s after 11pm, and you’re watching a band called Fuck Buttons play the kind of nosebleeding, earblasting noise you occasionally enjoy because it acts as a reset switch in your head, scrubbing out your brainpan like wire wool and making all the bad people go away, the kind of noise that actually scares some of your friends, and…

…your view of the stage is obscured by a toddler on his father’s shoulders.

As we reach the outer edges of the Far Out Tent at the Green Man Festival, the aforementioned Fuck Buttons are playing the first song off their latest album. Well, I say ‘song’. This is just a noise. But that makes it sound like a bad thing. It’s a noise that goes squeeeeee and ranggggggggg and zzzzzzzzz in the most satisfying way.

Fuck Buttons are what Mogwai would have been like if they’d picked up synths instead of guitars.

They’re what would have happened if the Chemical Brothers had been a couple of Orcs.

This is static electricity translated into English. It’s sounds that belong to another kind of life form, made listenable. (Well, I say listenable.)

Fuck Buttons music is what happens after you go to bed and your telly and your laptop come to life, go to a cathode ray disco and start fucking on the dance floor, shooting ultramarine and indigo pixel sperm.

I do love Fuck Buttons. But – and maybe it’s something to do with a nagging worry that until little Jasper decides he’s ready for bed we’re perhaps expected to pretend they’re called Flip Buttons – after thirty minutes I feel I’ve seen and heard all I need to. I could stay to the end quite happily, but I don’t have to.

As we leave the Far Out Tent, while the neon strips of lights are still pulsing and throbbing, we have to reacquaint ourselves with mud that’s as filthy as the noise at our backs. I worked out earlier that I’ve been to ten festivals in the last fifteen years, and five of them have been mud baths. There isn’t a mud bath festival in the last decade that I’ve missed.

“It’s the same kind of mud as Glastonbury now,” says the Beer Widow, now on her third mud bath out of six festivals.

“Yes,” I reply, “It’s obviously the same soil type.”

And it’s only as these words leave my mouth, thankfully unheard by the masses around us getting drunk, baked, stoned and bombed, contemplating what for many of them is a mere curtain raiser to a whole night of bleeps and squawks – it’s only then that I think, ‘Maybe I am getting too old for this shit’.

Jumpers for goalposts? Not quite, but....

2010-06-14T10:54:00.000+01:00

We were watching one of these endless 'Best World Cup Moments' spacefillers last night and I became really nostalgic.

Twenty four hours earlier, notwithstanding the complete fuck up of ITV's HD coverage (they lost the goal!!!!), at the start of the England game I'd been marvelling at the pin-perfect picture and sound being broadcast live from the other side of the planet.

And then I decided I didn't like it. Not just because of the bleedin' vuvuzelas, but because in adding something (digital quality), broadcasters and the technology they use have taken away something far more emotionally powerful.

The clips from past tournaments on the programme last night showed us what we now miss. Back in the seventies, eighties and early nineties, when the World Cup came from a different continent, you knew about it. The picture was grainy and slightly bleached, and the commentary sounded like it was coming to you down a phone line, sibilant and shushy and tinny and flat.

And I'm not just being nostalgic here - even at the time, I adored it for that. It underlined that this was coming to you from thousands of miles away, that Our Lads were out there, on a world stage. It reminded you how big the world is, and how important that stage. You were keenly aware that you only got this kind of coverage every four years. It created a Pavlovian anticipation that you were about to see something special.

If I see a miraculous goal from Brazil in any higher quality broadcast, counter-intuitively it feels less real. If a World Cup final 12,000 miles away has the same immediacy and presence as a third round FA Cup tie on a January Sunday, how can it not feel more ordinary than it did when the compromises we had to endure underlined the enormity of the planet, and the significance of its coming together to play football?

Stokey Lit Fest

2010-06-13T09:27:00.001+01:00

So, my wife just organized Stoke Newington’s first ever literary festival, and it was a phenomenal success, written up here by The Times (which you may now have to register to see).

I did two events at it myself, but these were almost an afterthought compared to the work we had to do organizing volunteers, the bar, crib notes for all event hosts, the sugar for A C Grayling’s tea… pretty much everything you can think of.

We’ll do it again next year, when we’ll hopefully have funding and the opportunity to hire staff. But what a blast it was. You can see some fab photos here. To give a flavour of a whirlwind three days that feels like it lasted both a hundred years and half an hour, here are the images and sensations that stick in my mind a few days later:

Stewart Lee magicking the weather. Stewart was reading a spooky short story by Arthur Macken, set in Stoke Newington. It was a glorious afternoon as a sell-out crowd converged on Stoke Newington International Airport. As the room was hushed by Machen's subtle, uneasy creepiness the sky went dark, and fat, heavy rain drops began hammering on the roof.

Our volunteers just turning up and getting on with it after I promised a briefing and allocation of duties and then found myself stuck organising a billion other things as the briefing time came and went and we got closer to the doors opening for the first event. And them turning up day after day, and remaining cheerful and proactive, and just doing the biz again and again. All while wearing bright pink festival crew T-shirts.

Stoke Newington's librarian, Richard Boon, meeting Edwyn Collins. Edwyn is the former lead singer of Orange Juice, the band that pretty much invented the sound of Indie, who had a massive stroke in 2005 and is, incredibly, now playing gigs again. The short set he and his band played after the readings from Grace Maxwell (Edwyn's wife, whose book documents his miraculous recovery) brought a standing ovation from the crowd. Richard Boon is the former manager of Buzzcocks and Magazine (that's how cool Stoke Newington is, and how cool Richard Boon is - a librarian who was a key figure in the post punk movement!) Richard first met Edwyn when Buzzcocks were touring Scotland in 1978, and Orange Juice hung around after the gig and offered to help move the equipment back to the van. Now, 32 years later, I'm escorting Edwyn to the table where his wife is signing books, and Richard is coming the other way. Richard: "Edwyn!" Edwyn: "Richard!" and they fall into the most passionate embrace two straight men can, and my eyes fill with tears, not for the first time in the last hour.

The shivers that ran down my spine as I read Orwell's The Moon Under Water to a packed room of 50-odd pub fans.

Hearing about Tony Benn being taken to our green room in the basement of Oishiii, Stokey's Japanese restaurant, being asked by a star-struck proprietor what he would like to eat, and replying, "A cheese sandwich". Volunteers finding him a cheese sandwich. Our wonderful artist liaison coordinator, Camilla, then taking Tony Benn across the road to Abney Park cemetery to eat his sandwich because he wanted to smoke his pipe. A crowd of people walking past thinking "Blimey, is that Tony Benn eating a cheese sandwich and smoking a pipe in our cemetery?" and gathering round. In the commotion, a passing dog nicking half of Tony Benn's cheese sandwich and running away with it.

Seeing Liz up on stage after the final event and close the festival, and a capacity crowd cheering her because they knew who she was and what she'd done, and me then keeping her on stage while we presented her with a huge bunch of flowers, and getting to say to two hundred people, "I'm so proud of my wife right now."

Phill Jupitus, after his event closed the festival, walking round the hall with a black bin bag collecting rubbish and depositing glasses on the bar, because (a) he loves small events and getting back to intimate, shabby venues, and (b) I'd just made a speech saying we had to clear the hall and help set it up for play group the following morning before we could have our staff wrap party, for which he stayed.

See you next year.

The Chutney Conversation

2010-04-01T17:19:00.003+01:00

A random chutney stall off of the internet, earlier today.

In the wake of this year's tax bill, I've taken a three month contract back in an advertising agency. The gaps between my agency stints get longer and longer as my writing career actually starts to make money, and every time I leave an agency I hope it's for the last time.

This one will be. I know it will. It has to be.

Because after only five weeks in the job, I'm having The Chutney Conversation with my new colleagues. And that wont do at all.

The Chutney Conversation is in one way uplifting - it points the way to a better world. The problem with it is that in doing so, it points out the flaws with the world we're in - particularly inside ad agencies. So while it's fine to have The Chutney Conversation with old friends, who know what I'm like, it can actually be invasive and dispiriting - even quite upsetting - for new people, and I think that's rude. And if they don't get upset by it, they probably think I'm a bit mad - and that's even worse.

The Chutney Conversation - or my side of it I should say - perhaps it's the chutney monologue - goes like this:

These days, I spend my summers doing book readings and beer tastings at a variety of food and drink festivals up and down the country. I enjoy doing these events a great deal.

After I've signed a few books and tasted a few beers, I can relax and wander around the festival. And it feels like Christmas. Everyone there is a small producer keen to promote their wares. There are organic butchers, gifted pie makers, adventurous cheesemongers, bubbly Indian housewives hoping to turn their curry sauces into something a supermarket might discover and stock. And most of all, there are chutney makers.

I talk to all these artisans and try a few samples of their food, and I usually buy a curry sauce or a marinade or a bit of cheese even if I don't need any. But I ALWAYS buy chutney. We have cupboards full of it at home.

The range of chutneys, their ingredients and flavours, is always astonishingly diverse. They have little bits of cracker for you to try some, and the flavours set your mouth alight. And the chutney makers talk with such passion about how they started this as a hobby, and then realised, you know what? I'm good at this, and I'm going to make more of these chutneys and I'm going to sell them, and while I hope to make enough money to live on, if I don't make as much as I did in an office, so what? I'm happier than I ever was during a PowerPoint presentation or conference call.

After two or three of these conversations, you end up walking around a food festival on a natural high, walking on air. Everyone is so positive. Everyone is so friendly. Everyone is so keen and passionate about what they do, and in tiny, tiny ways, each of them is making the world a better place.

And then I come into an advertising agency and I see young, attractive, intelligent, energetic, motivated people, voluntarily tying themselves inside their personal hamster wheels and running for all they're worth, expending energy on pointless conversations and arguments, spending nine months at a time, seventy hours a week, working on something that will eventually be a thirty second TV ad that people will forget, or sneer at, or feel patronised by. Very, very occasionally, one of these ads might make them laugh, or inspire them - maybe one or two a year do this, and the last one that truly added anything to our collective lives was Compare the Meerkat.

While some of these ads might create wealth for the companies who pay for them, it's hard to see who's reaping the benefit - advertising has lost its shiny allure and agencies work on wafer-thin budgets. TV stations face plummeting revenue as budget is increasingly moved to invasive, in-yer-face internet ads. And punters face a relentless barrage of messages that - if they're successful - make you feel slightly more discontent with your life than you did - because only if you create need, desire and unhappiness in a country where most of us already have too much, can you persuade us that we need to buy more.

For every tiny, microscopic atom of happiness that a jar of chutney brings into the world, every showing of an advert creates an atom of negativity that blows it away. And there are more adverts around than jars of chutney, and more people making them.

People in advertising would not only be adding to rather than reducing the sum of human happiness if they switched from making adverts to making chutney, they would feel happier and more fulfilled in themselves, knowing they were not wasting their considerable and inarguable talents on something that is at best worthless, at worst damaging.

If you don't believe me, go and talk to a man behind a chutney stall at a food festival.

That's the chutney conversation. You can see how it might upset people in ad agencies if I've only been working with them for a few weeks.

Welcome to Mega City One

2010-01-23T10:18:00.005Z

Your friendly local Bobby, tomorrow. Or maybe the day after.

For a large chunk of my life my favourite reading material of any description was 2000AD. It grew from being a simple Sci-Fi action comic to do what the very best Sci-Fi does: satirise modern society. Judge Dredd did this better than anything else - a lawman with absolute power in a futuristic mega-city, there's a brilliant tension between rooting for Dredd in his battles against proper baddies and then feeling guiltily appalled when his jackboot comes down with equal force on campaigners for democracy.

Dredd has many tools in his armoury, and over the 34 years of his existence several of these have made the transition from science fiction to fact.

Today, it seems the UK police are learning some tricks from Dredd, with the proposal to introduce airborne surveillance drones to monitor the British population. These were developed by BAe for use in war zones. Their critics claim that they are unreliable and have resulted directly in needless civilian deaths. But the government is considering spending a considerable some bringing them into use in Britain.

Where do you start with this?

How about the principle of a government taking hardware developed for warfare against foreign terrorists in the world's most hostile war zones and using it against its own population?

How about the fact that we already have more CCTV cameras per head of population than any other country in the world?

How about the fact that these drones will be able to operate from heights that make them invisible from the ground, so you will have no idea whether you are under surveillance or not?

How about the fact that the police are already talking about selling the technology to private companies?

How about the fact that these drastic measures are being proposed not to catch murderers, but to help with "routine" police work including monitoring fly tippers, waste management, "anti-social" motorists and protesters against - ooh - things like the creeping totalitarianism that both main political parties seem so keen on?

If Hitler or Saddam Hussein had had the technology for such a scheme, we would have cited it as yet another example of their evil. One of the worst things I hate most about measures like this is that they make me say things that sound like a Jeremy Clarkson reading, UKIP-voting wanker, but I woke up this morning feeling a little more frightened at the prospect of living in my own country.

Just another day in Britain PLC

2009-12-20T19:24:00.003Z

Enough.

I've always hated that term - "Britain PLC". I think the people who use it think they're being cool, like it's a hip way to refer to the country. Business and branding are sexier than dull old concepts like statehood and nationality.

That's one reason I hate it. The other is that it strips us of something very important. PLCs have stakeholders, workers and customers. Whichever one you are, the relationship you have is purely a financial one. If you're a shareholder, you can buy or sell your shares and your influence in the company is directly proportional to how much money you've spent on those shares. If you're an employee you get paid for the work you do. You can leave the company if you wish, or you could be fired. And if you're a customer, you have a choice of companies from which to buy.

When we talk about "Britain PLC", I'm not sure which of these relationships is meant to be the parallel of being a citizen, but none of them are suitable. A PLC answers only to its shareholders. A country has other responsibilities that go way beyond the financial. Citizens have rights that are nothing to do with financial clout. And I worry that we forget that by trying to sex the whole thing up.

The trouble is, we see everything in financial terms. I just received a press release that talks about how it's all very well chilling out over Christmas, but if we're not careful it could take as long as a week to get back up to speed in January, and this would of course be a bad thing for the economy.

I wonder how many surveys there are each year that warn of days lost due to hangovers, or long lunches, or duvet days? When it snowed in February all we heard was how much it was costing the economy because people couldn't get in to work. I've seen surveys of how much nicking post-it notes and paper clips costs the economy, how much using personal e-mail or twittering or booking your holiday at work costs the economy. And every few weeks there's a new calculation of how much drinking alcohol costs the economy.

You know the calculation I've never seen? Anywhere? How much profit the economy makes from people having a sandwich at their desk instead of taking a lunch hour. How much profit we make from people with Blackberries and mobile phones taking work calls and answering work emails 24/7. How much Britain PLC has profited this year from people working unpaid overtime because they fear for their job security.

I once did a job where I had a contract that said my working hours were 9am to 5pm. Most people rolled in about 9.30 but worked till 7. I got in at 8 and left at 6, so I was working longer hours than most people, who were in turn working longer than the stated hours on the contract. But most people weren't there to see the work I did in the morning. I was called in for a chat in which I was told if I continued to leave a mere one hour later than my stated working hours, I'd be given more work to do. Clearly, I was expected to do this extra work for free.

I think it's fascinating that when an industrial dispute escalates, one of the measures unions sometimes take is 'work to rule' - that is, workers stop doing all the work they do for free, make sure they take all their benefits, coffee breaks, full lunch breaks and so on, and follow health and safety rules to the letter. Employers consider this - only doing the work you are paid to do - as being almost as bad as a strike.

So what is our generosity towards Britain PLC worth then, eh? Come on, let's have a figure for that.

I'm no economist, but I imagine it more than pays for the time we take off when we're hungover or when we twitter from work.

This atheist's guide to Christmas - abridged

2009-12-14T07:57:00.005Z

For people who just want to read some blogs - here's the short version of my very long essay below.

Just got home with a six-foot Christmas tree carried across my broad, manly shoulders. I feel like Man the Hunter, returning from the cold fog with vital supplies, and it gives The Beer Widow a bit of a thrill.

I walked past a man in the street who stared, and shook his head at me sadly as if to say, "A Christmas tree. God, how pathetic." And it reminded me how fashionable it is these days to be miserable about Christmas, to go all Grumpy Old Men but to actually mean it. Or to dismiss it with "It's just for the kids really". Or alternatively, to be Christian and moan about how we've lost the true meaning of Christmas. Or to be the Daily Mail and make up some bullshit about Luton town council banning Christmas as part of political correctness having gone mad.

The Beer Widow and I do not have kids. We are both devout atheists. We are - most of the time - what the Mail would refer to as 'politically correct'. But we bloody love Christmas, love it in a way that starts today and continues till the first Monday of the New Year (which is best when it falls around the 4th or 5th of Jan). It's the one time of year when we all feel we can put aside the stress and cynicism of modern life and simply be sentimental and happy. If you watched the same telly, listened to the same music and said the same things you watch, listen to and say at Christmas, people would think you were gauche and simple. But we get away with it because whatever our beliefs, Christmas is the one time of year when we understand that everyone is feeling and behaving the same way. And it feels good. If we allow cynicism and fundamentalism to shatter this consensus, we won't feel safe celebrating any more, and Christmas as we know it could disappear, as it has done in history before. That would be a terrible tragedy for humanity.

Wherever we are in the world, and whatever religion we follow, midwinter has always been celebrated, and these celebrations hold many things remarkably in common: the giving of gifts, festive lights in the dark, rebirth and renewal, a celebration of love. When fundamentalist Christians tell us we are forgetting the true meaning of Christmas, they're showing remarkable nerve, given that most parts of it bar the nativity were lifted from previous celebrations in order to help Christianity become the dominant religion.

Personally, I simply don't believe that Christ was the son of God. In fact, I don’t believe that there is a god of any description. But to me Christmas is still a magical time of year.

Christmas is a pluralist festival, a festival of consensus and tolerance, a time to come together and celebrate peace and goodwill to all men.

Crass commercialism is not the only alternative to a Christian celebration. My main beef with many Christians has always been that many seem to think they have a monopoly on human virtues such as compassion and generosity of spirit. You don't have to be Christian to think that these qualities are important, or that they should be celebrated ritualistically - as humans we have a need for ritual whatever our spiritual beliefs.

And what better time to celebrate the best in our character than the middle of winter? The beauty of Christmas is that, once you set aside religion, it is devastatingly simple. It’s dark and cold outside. The trees are bare. Everything looks dead. Many other mammals hibernate, getting their heads down in the hopes of surviving the worst. And what do we do? We stick two fingers up to winter, yell “FUCK YOU!” to it at the tops of our voices. We eat and drink more heartily than at any other time of the year. We go to endless parties.We throw open our doors to friends and family, and send greetings to people, some of whom we haven’t seen for years. We find any tree or plant that is still green, still alive, and drag it into our homes, which we make as gaudy and colourful and full of light as we can, creating beacons against the dark that are laughably over-specced for the purpose they ostensibly serve. We party, and that’s what we have always done. Christmas is a celebration of everything that is best about humanity, a celebration of our extraordinary spirit in the face of adversity. And that is why I get emotional and sentimental about it.

What I could do is forget Christmas. Instead, I could join the New Jersey humanists who celebrate HumanLight, the humanist winter solstice festival created in 2001. It’s celebrated on 23rd December, so it doesn’t interfere or conflict with anyone else’s ritual, and celebrates “humanity, reason and hope”. But there’s something about this that makes even the most timid person want to find the organisers, steal their dinner money, throw their school bag into a hedge and flush their heads down the toilet. My point is that Christmas has always been a broad collection of meanings. I don’t want to have to call it something else, to say “Happy Holidays” in order to mark out a secular celebration distinct from Christmas.

Christmas is the name we hold in common for our multilayered festival; the Christians nicked an awful lot of it from the Pagans. Surely they can share the name with us in return.

This atheist's guide to Christmas

2009-12-11T11:15:00.005Z

Being miserable about Christmas? Humbug!

I walked past a man in the street who looked at me and shook his head at me sadly as if to say, "A Christmas tree. God, how pathetic." And it reminded me how fashionable it is these days to be miserable about Christmas, to go all Grumpy Old Men but to actually mean it. Or to dismiss it with "It's just for the kids really". Or alternatively, to be Christian and moan about how we've lost the true meaning of Christmas. Or to be the Daily Mail and make up some bullshit about Luton town council banning Christmas.

A few years ago I pitched a book idea on 'the true meaning of Christmas' but agent and publisher agreed that there was an insufficient market for it. So I thought I'd pick the bones out of my proposal for that book and offer them here.

It’s awfully long – far too long for a blog post really – so if you’re pushed for time but want the gist of it, skip to subhead 8 below. But if you want some Christmas trivia, read on…

1: T’was the night before Christmas…

John-Boy Walton, resplendent in garish, Mom-knitted festive jumper, has managed to crash his aeroplane near the North Pole, but it’s OK because Santa and his elves have rescued him. Santa, Mrs Claus and their English (natch) butler are trying to persuade John-Boy to join the staff, but he’s having a bit of trouble believing that this really is Santa. Who else he believes might be living at the North Pole with a bunch of elves is unclear.

Wandering around the huge house-cum-toy workshop (I mean, come on John-Boy. Have they built all this just to play an elaborate joke on you?[1] At the North Pole?) he discovers a room stacked with a bank of high-tech computer screens, from which Santa (if it is him) obviously watches the children of the world to check if they’re being naughty or nice. On one screen there’s his daughter, handling the disappearance of her father with the quiet dignity that five-year-olds seem able to manage in Hollywood. She’s being asked by a department store Santa what she would like for Christmas. She wants her Daddy back. Anything else? Any toys or dolls? No, just her Daddy. Mrs John-Boy is fighting back tears, and even Department Store Santa seems a little choked. He looks at the little girl for a while, then says gently, “I’ll see what I can do.”

Back at the North Pole, the real Santa walks in on a guilty-looking John-Boy. Look, he says, your daughter believes in Santa. Is it really so hard for you to believe too?

Now, I like to think of myself as the kind of person who, after watching five seconds of this kind of thing, would immediately realise that they were five seconds I will later remember on my death bed as time wasted, time that could have been spent doing something more worthwhile, such as picking lint out of my navel. But that’s not what’s happening here. I’m rooted to the spot in the middle of the living room, the remote, which was until recently zapping through a channel a second, now hangs limply from my fingers. I have a marble in my throat. My bottom lip is vibrating.

I’m quite a cynical person, most of the time. And I’m a real man. I don’t cry. I just get something in my eye every mid-December when we ritualistically watch It’s a Wonderful Life. The reason I’m turning my face away from my wife is that I need to check to see if those strangled mewling noises that seem to be coming from me are in fact coming from a kitten trapped under the cushion.

And any version of A Christmas Carol – be it low budget or epic; badly acted or the one with the sublime Alistair Sim; live action, Muppetized or even poorly animated – strips me utterly and reduces me to a childlike state of delight. It’s the bit where Scrooge wakes up… and it’s not too late… and he… he throws open the window and he tells the boy to go and… the intelligent boy, the remarkable fellow… to go and find the big… the big prize turkey in the Poulterers[2] …and… and… sorry. Just give me a minute. I’ve got something in my eye again.

I believe that Christmas is a time when normal rules should be suspended. Across the board. I want Christmas to be sentimental and cheesy. I want it gaudy. I want excess. I want my pubs densely clad in shiny metallic foil and flashing lights. I want my tree big and flashing. I want my music fizzing with sleigh bells. I want people smiling at each other in the street, blowing their credit limits, and snogging each other after too much cheap wine at office parties. The truth is that every year, I’m choking back sobs from the first prayer to help George Bailey in his hour of need to the last chorus of Auld Lang Syne. So what?

So I’m finding it disturbing that, with every year that passes, Christmas seems to be turning into a negatively exposed image of itself. The season of goodwill is mutating into the season of stress and boredom, even the season of anger and recrimination.

2: The argument in a (chest)nut (roasting on an open fire) shell

Christmas is the greatest festival in the world, because it really does bring people together and provides a necessary break at the end of a hard year. But Christmas is not guaranteed: over time, its fortunes have risen and fallen, and we’re in danger of losing its magic again.

Why?

Because to work, Christmas needs a base level of universal consensus – we can only get away with being dippy and dewy-eyed because we know that everyone else is doing and feeling similar things at the same time. That’s what makes it so special. Whether we are religious or not, we put aside cynicism and celebrate the most noble human virtues: generosity, friendship, laughter, togetherness, and a lusty appetite for life.

But that comfortable consensus is now under attack on several fronts. And if we let the consensus evaporate, we’ll lose the social ‘permission’ we need to celebrate.

3: “It’s all gone too commercial”

This is probably the most predictable statement that anyone can make about Christmas, and yet we say it every year. But Christmas has always been a highlight of the commercial year – the newly developing capitalist class were already urging us to buy brightly coloured toys back in the ‘golden age’ of Victorian Christmases. And in her book The First Christmas in New England – published in 1850 – Harriet Beecher Stowe has a character complaining that the true meaning of Christmas was being lost in a shopping spree.

The average child now receives £250 worth of presents at Christmas from their parents. That figure is no lower for single parents on benefits than it is for anyone else.

Some argue that Christmas is really just for the children, but even the kids see Christmas as a source of anxiety: a 2006 poll for BBC’s Newsround showed that one in six children felt sad, nervous or left out during the festive season.

Clearly then, Christmas anxiety is not just about spending money…

Every year, The Beer Widow and I have a bet: which weekly phone call to my Mum will elicit the inevitable, “I don’t know where t’time’s going Pete, I mean it’s only n weeks till Christmas.”

The record so far was early August a couple of years ago, when n was equal to twenty weeks. It’s never been less than twelve.

n signifies the time when my Mum needs to start thinking about getting her nets down to wash, clean the oven, put a lick of paint on the walls, defrost the freezer, put the dog on a diet and generally get her house up to match fitness ready for the festive season.

My Mum is of course far from unique. We start worrying earlier every year because this year, Christmas simply must be perfect. The earlier episodes of Delia Smith’s Christmas programme are filmed when the trees are still in bloom in her garden. And we’ve all heard the old joke that, when n equals eight, anyone over fifty knows that it’s time to put the sprouts on to cook. Delia leads by example, personally spending every waking moment of the last ten weeks of every single year preparing Christmas dinner, cakes, hams, pies, and edible tree decorations. And cooking is just the start of it. Delia, Martha Stewart and women’s magazine features editors have convinced us that now, we have to make our own table decorations, have the best costume for the kid’s nativity play, the right little black dress for the Christmas party, the right diet so we can fit into the little black dress, the right invites to the right parties to make the dress and the diet worth all the effort.

You don’t need to have children to feel the weight of expectation building throughout the Autumn until it hits breaking point on Christmas Eve, when you come home and burst into tears recounting to your spouse the fight you had with a stupid woman over the last packet of Marks and Spencer’s not-just-cheesy-breadsticks after a final, forlorn search for a Cabbage Patch Doll.[3] And when Christmas gets this stressful, you can understand why many of us might fall out of love with it, why the festive season does not automatically create that frisson of joy come mid-October when you finally allow yourself to catch up with my Mum’s keen sense of anticipation.

But that’s only the start of the problem.

4: The PC Phoney War and the Rise of Religious Fundamentalism

Stories about how the politically correct brigade are banning Christmas began appearing in certain types of newspapers about ten years ago, and have multiplied every year since. The usual story is that councils are banning reference to Christmas, or banning Christmas decorations, with the excuse that they could be offensive to people of other religions. Increasingly, prominent Muslims and Jews are then wheeled out by the newspapers to say that they are not offended by Christmas, that most of them enjoy it, and that they can’t see what all the fuss is about.

This apparent good nature and sensible behaviour can however be interpreted as having an ulterior agenda: arguably, we are seeing religious groups agreeing to set aside their differences and take the fight to a common enemy: the secular society.

There’s just one small flaw in their logic: the PC war against Christmas isn’t really happening.

Last December, one article buried deep on the Guardian website challenged the prevailing story. Oliver Burkeman phoned up the guilty councils and asked for their version of events. Where he differed from other journalists is that he reported their responses fully and accurately. He started with Birmingham Council, accused by the Daily Mail of rebranding Christmas as ‘Winterval’. It turns out that Winterval was a promotional campaign to help rejuvenate the city centre, lasting from November to January. During the period where Christmas would normally have been celebrated, the “Happy Winterval” banners were joined by Christmas trees, Christmas lights – on the front of the council offices – carol services and Christmas cards from the mayor. Winterval ran in 1997 and 1998, and never since (let’s be honest: the name may be as clever as it thinks it is, but that doesn’t mean it’s likeable). Nevertheless, BIRMINGHAM BANS CHRISTMAS is taken down from the tabloid loft along with the baubles every December.

It’s not just Birmingham: last Christmas, spurred on not just by the tabloids but also by former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey, leaders of three religious faiths in Luton warned the council of the "anger within religious communities" that might erupt if the council went ahead with its determination to rename “the Christmas festival using another (non-religious) name". Trouble is, Luton has never attempted to do anything of the sort. Five years ago the town held a festival called Luminos on one weekend in late November. The event did not replace the council’s own Christmas celebrations, nor did it forbid anyone else from doing anything.

A close reading of a typical story about the government or a council banning Christmas cards reveals that on the majority of occasions, what has actually happened is that someone has sent out a card reading “Season’s Greetings,” rather than “Merry Christmas”. They haven’t banned anyone else from sending out cards reading “Merry Christmas”. “Season’s Greetings” cards are nothing new. In any mixed pack of cards, they’ve always been there. What is new is the accusation that these cards – complete with mail coaches in the snow or Victorian children dancing around a Christmas tree – are somehow un-Christian, even anti-Christmas, a deliberate ply to secularise the festival.

Ironically, the only man who has ever really wanted to ban Christmas was deeply religious, and wanted rid of it on religious grounds. Oliver Cromwell managed to convince himself that the birth of the Saviour of Mankind was not something that should be celebrated. In 1644 he forced through an Act of Parliament instructing people to think about Jesus instead of eating and drinking too much, enforcing it by sending soldiers through the streets looking for sprigs of holly and sniffing to detect roasting goose. More than 350 years later, it’s no coincidence that the phoney war over Christmas is happening at the same time as educational establishments are being pressured to teach creationism alongside the theory of evolution in schools – in science lessons rather than religious studies. Just like Cromwell, the people who really want us to change how we mark Christmas are those who want less distraction from the serious business of praising God.[4]

The truth about Christmas is that it has never, in its entire history, been solely about celebrating the birth of Christ. Even in the Victorian heyday to which many fundamentalists seek a return, pagan and humanist elements were just as prevalent as they are today, if not moreso. In the Middle Ages, when church attendance was a hundred per cent, Christmas was overseen by a Lord of Misrule, a peasant appointed to be in charge of Christmas revelries, which often included drunkenness and wild partying, in the pre-Christian tradition of Saturnalia.

“Ah!” cry the fundamentalists. “But!” they add. “You are obviously wrong. It’s very simple: Christmas is one hundred per cent about the Christian nativity, and nothing else. And anyway, you can tell because it’s called CHRIST-mas.”

This is an interesting line of argument and one I’m grateful to the Daily Mail-reading Christian for sending my way. Because using that same logic, I can go to their house, steal their dog, rename it “Pete’s Dog” and say, “See? It must by my dog because it’s called Pete’s Dog!”

Christmas was similarly appropriated from previous owners and rebranded. To steal your biggest festival from someone else is one thing. To then insist that your version of the festival is the only allowable interpretation of it is, to put it mildly, a bit of a cheek. Anyway, to a real Christian, Easter has always been a much more important celebration.[5]

5: The Loss of Consensus

If Christmas becomes a choice between maxing out your credit cards and being stressed for two months, or devoting yourself, Puritan-like, to a superstition celebrating an admittedly inspiring bloke from ancient Judea, it’s hardly surprising that the fashionable response to the whole festival is, increasingly, a cool “Oh must we? I really can’t be bothered”.

“It’s just for the children, isn’t it, really.”

“We’re just having a quiet one on our own.”

“I’d like to just go on holiday somewhere warm and forget all about it.”

We can see this attitude growing wherever we look. When they’re not raising the bar and drilling us on how to have the perfect Christmas, magazines and newspapers are running features on “how to survive Christmas”. Survive it? The Christmas episode of Grumpy Old Men, where we get to see Will Self destroying any vestige of goodwill towards men, is on heavier rotation in the second half of December than adverts for crap leather sofas fronted by former New Romantics with fear in their eyes. And Will’s counterparts on Grumpy Old Women had so much to get off their chests this year, they had to devote not just one programme, but an entire series to telling us just how grim Christmas can be for the blameless D-list lady celebrity.

This is why I’m worried.

There’s a loathsome phrase in advertising about brand’s “giving permission” to people to do something. Cool ads for Magners “give people permission” to drink cider again and still be cool. It’s a phrase I would grudgingly concede is appropriate for Christmas. “Giving permission” is not really about the advertiser or another authority telling you that you can do something. It’s saying that, because this message has been distributed through mass media to millions of people, everyone else who’s a bit like you has also seen it. So that means that you have social permission to buy that brand, or say that thing, or wear that colour. In this sense, Christmas gives us permission to drop our guard. Everyone knows that people get a bit dippy at this time of year. It feels nice, and you can do and feel things that, any other time of year, people would think were just a bit crap. At Christmas, I have social permission to be sentimental, to smile at people, to cry at soppy films, because the rest of society, if they’re not joining in, at least expect it and accept it as the norm for this period.

If the battle for Christmas does fully shatter our consensus of what the festival is all about, then we would no longer have social permission to celebrate it like we do. Christmas as we know it could actually disappear within as little as a generation.

6: The Origins and Evolution of Christmas

You can tell that the Nativity is a magical story. It is the absolute embodiment of the rule that makes any story great: it entrances generation after generation, and we never get tired of hearing it just one more time. It’s not just that it’s the birth of Christ: there’s something more to it that makes it work so well.

The nativity supplanted (but never eradicated) the earlier celebrations at that time of year. We all vaguely know that Jesus wasn’t really born on 25^th December. We’re sort of aware that there was a Pagan festival in the middle of winter long before Christ was born.

The Roman Empire celebrated Saturnalia, a time when they ate and drank heavily and gave each other presents. It was a festival celebrating the winter solstice, for about a week up to 23^rd December. The there was the celebration of Sol Invictus, “the birthday of the unconquered sun”, on 25^th December. Christians appropriated these festivals as a way of converting pagans to their religion, and by the fourth century Christmas was celebrated on 25^th December.

Separate from the Romans, Yule was a winter solstice festival celebrated across northern Europe long before Christianity, and featured burning logs, Christmas trees, holly, ivy and the eating of ham.

Diwali comes a little earlier in the year, in October or November, but it is a “festival of light”, the triumph of light over darkness and good over evil, and is regarded by Hindus and Sikhs alike as a celebration of life and an opportunity to strengthen family and social relationships.

Hannukkah is another “festival of lights” that just happens to fall in midwinter. While it is bound by strict religious observances, it too is full of candlelight, songs, games and the giving of gifts.

The Iroquois Indians celebrate the midwinter solstice as a time of renewal and thanksgiving. Dongzhi is a festival celebrating the winter solstice across East Asia. It’s called Daygan in Persia, and Goru among the Dogon tribe of Mali. It was Inti Raymi to the Inca Empire, Lenaea in Ancient Greece, and the Festival of Osiris in Ancient Egypt. Themes of reflection and rebirth are universal. Themes of celebration, eating and drinking to excess are not, but are still widespread. Celebrate the birth of Christ if you want. But there are no grounds whatsoever for arguing that this is the ‘true’ meaning of Christmas.

Christmas itself has enjoyed several “golden ages”. In the Middle Ages anticipation was built up with the Forty Days of St Martin beforehand, and the festival itself lasted for the full twelve days. The celebrations featuring the Lord of Misrule, the inversion of traditional authority and the mocking of important figures survive today in pantomime.

When Cromwell came to loggerheads with the Catholic Church, Christmas fell into decline. It wasn’t actually banned in Britain for that long, but with protestants dubbing Christmas “the trappings of popery” and even “the rags of the Beast,” and Catholics responding by urging ever stricter observance of highly ritualised religious worship, people lost their enthusiasm for the festival. This is why I’m not exaggerating the threat that exists now.

By the 1820s sectarian division had largely disappeared, and we started to get things like The Night before Christmas and the appearance of St. Nick on the scene. And then Dickens invented the modern Christmas, and the imagery and sentiment to which we still hark back. Of course, Dickens has been attacked by our churchgoing friends, some of whom see the attempt to create a festival based on the family, and on the spirit of kindness and generosity, as a deliberate attempt to divert attention from the pulpit, and therefore a wholly bad thing.

From our modern standpoint, the last golden age of Christmas seems to be the mid-twentieth century American Christmas – Bing Crosby with his cosy jumper and pipe, Rudolph making his first appearance in a department store ad, Miracle on 34^th Street, the emergence of mass, advertising funded consumer capitalism, and of course, well whaddya know, George Bailey’s crazy old buildings and loan.

A couple of things from this period fascinate me. Firstly, we all know that it used to snow at Christmas when our parents were young, but it doesn’t any more. What’s the first line Bing sings, back in 1954? “I’m dreaming of a White Christmas – just like the ones we used to know.” Have we ever really had a white Christmas, or do we just think we have?

Secondly, looking at It’s a Wonderful Life: the bit where George runs up the street, gripped by madness, reeling in horror from the neon signs advertising drink and dancing girls, the world as it would have been had he not been born… well, It’s a Wonderful Life is a work of fiction. In reality, George Bailey never was born. Does that mean his dystopian version/vision of his hometown is in reality a window from the fictional world of Bedford Falls into our own? Is the film’s enduring appeal the fact that it portrays a world that could exist if we behaved a bit more like we do at Christmas all the year round?

7: The layering on of tradition

On the first weekend of December last year, I went with a large group of friends to the ice rink at Somerset House. As I was waiting my turn, a family came out of the changing room after handing in their skates, and headed off for some hot chocolate. “This should be a tradition for our family from now on,” said the ten year old girl trailing delightedly after her mother. Immediately I felt a familiar tightness in my throat, but I wasn’t surprised: this is the third year we’ve been to Somerset House on the first Sunday in December. It’s organised by my friend Debs, who then invites the whole gang back to her flat for mulled wine and canapés. “This is when Christmas starts for me now,” she beams, rosy cheeked from the ice (or maybe the wine), “this is our tradition”.

On the last day my mate Chris, my wife Liz and I are in London before we retreat for Christmas proper, we meet up and go for a Japanese meal in Soho, and then on to a pub where we exchange presents. The first year we did it, it just happened. The second year, we’d enjoyed Japanese the previous year so we saw no reason not to do it again. By the third year, it was a tradition.

And what’s the first line of the first review of It’s a Wonderful Life on Internet Movie Database? “This film has become a Christmas tradition in my family. We watch it every year and never tire of it.”

Christmas is a folk festival, a humanist festival, a template upon which generation after generation lay down their own traditions. We don’t just follow what Delia or Nigella do, or the neighbours or the toy manufacturers. We take what we like, and we revive old traditions, and create brand new ones.

We use Christmas as a link to the past, a source of continuity and reassurance. We need ritual, no matter what our spiritual beliefs, and Christmas is when it all comes out: everything becomes part of tradition. Whether it’s kissing under the mistletoe in remembrance of Frigga, the Pagan Goddess of fertility (yes, really), or stirring the Christmas pudding mix clockwise (i.e. east to west) in honour of the journey of the Magi, there’s not a single aspect of Christmas that does not come overloaded with meaning, and still we create new layers.

The layering of tradition and ritual does of course create new headaches for the modern family. It can make for an uncomfortable morning the first Christmas two parents remarry, and two previously harmonious families celebrate together for the first time: what do you mean you open one present just after midnight and then the rest as soon as you get up on Christmas morning? Are you mad? Are you animals? Everybody knows that on Christmas morning you get dressed first and have smoked salmon and Bucks Fizz for breakfast and sing a carol holding hands around the trussed-up turkey before you open presents. You have a prawn cocktail starter with Christmas lunch? Not Yorkshire pudding? That’s worse than those freaks and perverts who don’t have a starter at all!

This has been happening for the entire history of midwinter festivals. We can criticise the first Roman Christians for stealing someone else’s festival if we like, but if we’re feeling charitable, we could argue that they were only doing what me, Chris, Debs, Liz and all the rest of us do, taking the template and customising it to their own ends. There’s only a problem when you start claiming that your customised version is the only correct one. As the new family above demonstrates, that’s just bad manners. Hardly very Christmassy.

That’s the power of Christmas. It takes on characteristics down the centuries, from every society that celebrates it. This is where the real magic comes from.

8: The True Meaning of Christmas

Personally, I simply don't believe that Christ was the son of God. In fact, I don’t believe that there is a god of any description. But to me Christmas is still a magical time of year.

Christmas is a pluralist festival, a festival of consensus and tolerance, which ties in very nicely with the imperative to come together and celebrate peace and goodwill to all men.

Crass commercialism is not the only alternative to a Christian celebration. My main beef with many Christians has always been that they seem to think they have a monopoly on human virtues such as compassion and generosity of spirit. You don't have to be Christian to think that these qualities are important, or that they should be celebrated ritualistically. As humans we have a need for ritual whatever our spiritual beliefs.

And what better time to celebrate the best in our character than the middle of winter? The beauty of Christmas is that, once you set aside religion, it is devastatingly simple. It’s dark and cold outside. The trees are bare. Everything looks dead. Many other mammals hibernate, getting their heads down in the hopes of surviving the worst. And what do we do? We stick two fingers up to winter, yell “FUCK YOU!” to it at the tops of our voices. We eat and drink more heartily than at any other time of the year. We go to endless parties. We throw open our doors to friends and family, and send greetings to people, some of whom we haven’t seen for years. We find any tree or plant that is still green, still alive, and drag it into our homes, which we make as gaudy and colourful and full of light as we can, creating beacons against the dark that are laughably over-specced for the purpose they ostensibly serve. We party, and that’s what we have always done. Christmas is a celebration of everything that is best about humanity, a celebration of our extraordinary spirit in the face of adversity. And that is why I get emotional and sentimental about it.

What I could do is forget Christmas. Instead, I could join the New Jersey humanists and celebrate HumanLight, the humanist winter solstice festival created in 2001. It’s celebrated on 23^rd December, so it doesn’t interfere or conflict with anyone else’s ritual, and celebrates “humanity, reason and hope”. But there’s something about this that makes even the most timid person want to find the organisers, steal their dinner money, throw their school bag into a hedge and flush their heads down the toilet. My point is that Christmas has always been a broad collection of meanings. I don’t want to have to call it something else, to say “Happy Holidays” in order to mark out a secular celebration distinct from Christmas.

Christmas is the name we hold in common for our multilayered festival; the Christians nicked an awful lot of it from the Pagans. Surely they can share the name with us in return.

[1] It’s possible that, in this made-for-TV movie, the character may not actually be called John-Boy. But to everyone he meets, to everyone who ever sees him in anything from the 1970s until the day he dies, this actor (I forget his real name, if he indeed has one) will always be John-Boy. If he went on a UN mission to Somalia, as actors increasingly do, people who have only ever watched the African Nation’s Cup Final on the one TV in the village bar will somehow know to call him John-Boy.

[2] We usually assume that goose was the more common bird in the Victorian Christmas. But turkey was more expensive than goose, and therefore more popular among the rich, while goose was the standard for those less well off. It just goes to show you that Scrooge really wasn’t messing about.

[3] You may think this comment shows a willing admission of being hopelessly out of touch with trends in children’s toys, written as it is in the X-Box age. Far from it. At the recent London Toy Fair, the big hits were revivals of eighties staple such as Rubik’s Cube and Monopoly. I’m writing this on the day that the BMX bike was names the best toy of all time. Cabbage Patch Dolls for Christmas 10. Mark my words.

[4] You may worry that I’m throwing around terms like “religious fundamentalist” and “religious right” a little too easily. So just for the record: the first recorded use of the term “War against Christmas” was in 1999, by Peter Brimelow, a British-American “paleoconservative” (they came up with that term themselves – obviously unaware or unconcerned that it immediately suggests ‘dinosaur’ to the rest of us). The same year, English publications like the Mail began pestering our councils. Brimelow refers to an area called “the Anglosphere”, and feels it is important to stress how the English-speaking world will run the planet in the 21^st century. With my non-Christmassy cynical head on, when I see “English speaking” in this context I’m also assuming white, straight, male and religious, but I may be mistaken. Brimelow’s books include: Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster, The Wall Street Gurus: How You Can Profit from Investment Newsletters, and The Worm In The Apple: How The Teacher Unions Are Destroying American Education. One of the first people to take up his cause was Fox’s talk radio host Sean Hannity, whose last book is called Deliver Us From Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism. (My guess is Sean doesn’t see an odd-one-out in that short list of –isms.)

[5] “Last Trumpet Ministries International” in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin USA, freely admits that most of the tradition and ritual surrounding Christmas pre-dates the birth of Christ. It also helpfully points out that, according to the best guess we can take from the Gospels, Christ wasn’t born any time near Christmas. This is the kind of modern, forward-thinking open-mindedness that would be so refreshing to hear a little closer to home. Or rather… you think it is, until you get to the concluding section of their analysis and the lid comes off: “We are now seeing ever-increasing celebrating of Christmas or Yule, its true name, as we draw closer to the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ! In both witchcraft circles and contemporary Christian churches, the same things are going on… So, what is wrong with Christmas? 1. To say that Jesus was born on December 25th is a lie! The true date is sometime in September according to the Scriptures. 2. Trees, wreaths, holly, mistletoe and the like are strictly forbidden as pagan and heathen! To say that these are Christian or that they can be made Christian is a lie! 3. The Lord never spoke of commemorating his birth but rather commanded us to remember the sacrifice of His suffering and death, which purchased our salvation. Think about it! Can we worship and honor God by involving ourselves with customs and traditions, which God Himself forbade as idolatry? Can we convince God to somehow "Christianize" these customs and the whole pretence and lie of Christmas, so we can enjoy ourselves? Can we obey through disobedience? So what is right about Christmas? 1. Nothing!” Come Judgement Day, I think you’ll find Cromwell just over there, mate.

Terminal Terminal

2009-11-10T13:34:00.002Z

I don't want to trivialise the horrors of inner cities blighted by lack of investment and the intentional abandonment of a newly created underclass.

I don't want to make light of the despair endured by those who live in communities blighted by misguided sixties modernist ideals of town planning.

And I certainly don't want to let Pontins in Prestatyn of the good burghers of fucking Rhyll off any kind of hook. But in its own way, Terminal Five at Heathrow is the ghastliest, most hateful part of the UK in which I’ve ever had the misfortune to endure a couple of hours.

This is my second visit. So I can confirm that the harsh rudeness of the security staff was no one-off. They bark and shout a constant stream of commands at you, seemingly for their own amusement. The official at the front of my queue roared every ten seconds that we had to take off our belts and shoes. The people in the next queue were allowed to keep their belts and shoes on unless said items were a bit silly. So clearly this is not a hard and fast regulation, but something to be imposed at random, possibly for the sake of humiliating passengers. I kept expecting our man to scream, "Now dance magic monkey. I said DANCE!"

Once you're through security, you can laugh at the signs lining the conveyor from the x-ray machine which read "Trays will stop automatically" while straining with all your might to hold your tray as the conveyor attempts to shoot it out into the central concourse.

The first thing it would hit if you let go is one of the luxury cars, slowly rotating. You could win one of these. You don't have time to get your bearings before being assaulted by commodity fetishism, aspiration, longing.

When this place opened a lot was made of the designer shops here. As with St Pancras International, what was once a diversion if you had a few minutes to spare before embarking on your journey is now an obligation - you WILL shop. That is why you are here.

There's no pub here: we're too posh for pubs. The first thing you see looks like a pub, but it's not; it's a dreaded 'bar and kitchen' where you have to wait to be seated. Here and at the tapas cafe on the first floor (£5 upwards for the smallest tapas dishes) Inbev have a depressing monopoly on the beers on offer: Stella, Staropramen, Becks Vier, Murphys instead of Guinness, and a smoothflow abomination of Bass ale. At the tapas bar they don't even list the beers on the menu - even each brand of soft drinks and mineral water gets its own listing alongside the wine, but there's one line advising you that 'a range of beers, lagers and ciders are also available at the bar' (if you're that pikey).

Even the Wetherspoons – when I eventually find it – calls itself a bar and restaurant, not a pub, as evidenced by the fact that the beer is almost a quid a pint dearer in this branch than in my high street.

WHSmith, Dixons, Wagamama compete with Tiffany Prada and Paul Smith.

Gordon Ramsay’s ‘Plane Food’ sells a bacon and egg roll for £7.

A Christmas tree seemingly designed by cybermen, a horrid, silver skeleton of a tree, dominates the main atrium.

And if you don’t want to buy things, there are fewer places to just sit than I’ve seen in any other terminal.

In the first terminal built after we all started carrying laptops and mobile phones that need charging, there are fewer plug sockets visible than I’ve seen in any other terminal.

This is a nightmare vision of what the more upmarket British high street will look like when large chains and greedy landlords have succeeded in squeezing out every last drop of individuality, charm and character, when everything has been reduced to basic prerogative of consumption for its own sake and when we no longer even blink at paying five quid for a cardboard panini, three quid for a coffee, and four fifty for a shit beer dispensed like slop. When local influences are suffocated and stamped on in the drive to global homogeneity of aspiration.

I’ve seen the future. And it fucking sucks.

Pop Music's Natural Life Cycle

2009-10-14T08:13:00.002+01:00

It may not be the most noteworthy death in the history of rock and pop, but today Al Martino, the American crooner who had the first ever number one hit in the UK, has died aged 82.

What struck me about this is that rock and pop were founded on young rebellion. The NME may have first published its chart in 1952, before Elvis, Bill Haley and Jerry Lee Lewis torched the musical script, but the introduction of the chart recognised the growing cultural role that popular music had among young people.

The 1950s was the decade when the word 'teenager' first came into popular use. With growing affluence and material prosperity, those hormonal surges everyone feels at that age were set free in a broader cultural context, and the idea of young rebellion, symbolised by music, drugs and fashion coming together in youth subcultures, became something to scare adults with and help people create their own identities, horizontal generational identities rather than vertical family identities, en masse for the first time. Subsequent generations terrorised their parents with the Beatles, the Sex Pistols, Acid House and... well, maybe it got a bit tame after that as it became corporatised.

The point is, the first generation of teenagers is now dying old, of natural causes. Pop culture has, in some ways, reached the end of its natural life span.

Where will it go from here? Is there life after X Factor? When the drummer from Coldplay talks excitedly of how the new album is going down in focus groups among key demographics, and the NME increasingly resembles Heat magazine with added black eyeliner (on the blokes), can music ever be dangerous and exciting again? In a society increasingly obsessed by youth and scared of its children, is there anything left for teenagers to rebel against? When X Factor has a special category for "over 25s", has teen rebellion won the cultural war or been suffocated?

And should I still even care now I'm in my 40s?

Oh dear

2009-09-30T09:49:00.004+01:00

May 2009 - feeling abandoned by the Labour Party, swathes of its traditional working class support vote for the BNP and England elects fascists to the European parliament.

29th September 2009 - Gordon Brown sets out his stall for a last desperate bid to remain in power - fighting on behalf of the 'squeezed middle classes'.

June 2010 - Britain elects Nazi MPS?

I know Europe was proportional representation and the election is first past the post - making it harder for minority parties to be heard - but seriously. Brown has learned nothing. He's prioritising people worrying about their house prices over people who will never have a house, or a job; over child poverty and appalling living conditions for the poorest in society. Labour has abandoned the people it was supposed to represent, and now the only politicians who will even talk to those people are the fascists. Can we be surprised if they get in?

Brown learned nothing from the shame of the euro elections.

So now lets all look forward to a generation of Tory rule with nasty racists as the only real dissenting voice.

Cheers.

Can I have a large tea please?

2009-07-22T10:44:00.002+01:00

More tales of consumer madness...

While promoting my new book I've been up and down the country quite a lot, spending more time than I would like in coffee shops and service stations. And I've noticed something quite odd.

Increasingly, when you look at the drinks menus in these places, you can order a variety of coffees in small, medium and large sizes, but if you want tea, there is only one size available. Why? The cups are there. It's simply a matter of choosing this cup, not that cup, and putting a little more hit water in. I'd even be prepared to pay more for those 200 extra milliliters of hot water, but it doesn't seem to be an option any more. Every single time I ask for a large tea, and I get a medium one. A couple of times I've pointed out that I asked for a large one, and the staff have looked at me with complete incomprehension:

"I asked for a large tea."

"Tea. Yes. There it is."

"No, but I ordered a large one."

"Large?"

"Yes."

"You wanted tea. There is tea."

Anyone have any idea why tea drinkers are suddenly being coralled to medium sized cups?

Look on the Bright Side

2009-06-16T13:30:00.001+01:00

A reminder, courtesy of The Daily Mash, that when the Tories get back in next year for a generation, at least the comedy will get funnier.

THATCHER TRIES TO CLOSE HER OWN WARD

BARONESS Thatcher was under sedation last night after trying to close the ward where she is being treated.

The claw has injured four nurses

The former prime minister threatened to sack medical staff at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital after they refused to give her a choice of dressings for her broken claw.

Consultant Denys Finch-Hatton said: "She was initially amused by the karmic forces that brought her under the care of an organisation she fucked sideways with a melon for over a decade.

"But then she became very agitated, got on the phone to Norman Tebbit and told him to sell the hospital to some Chinese gangsters."

He added: "We've made her as comfortable as possible which means, thanks to the enduring effects of her 11 years in power, she's currently propped up outside the gents."

Although Lady Thatcher is in a stable condition, her accident and her advanced age has created a dilemma for the New Labour politicians who have continued her work while simultaneously begging the trade unions for money.

A Downing Street source said: "In the event of her popping off, we'll have to say something that is statesman-like but does not alienate traditional Labour voters. Then again there is only about four of them.

"What about a full state funeral with a 21-gun salute, but at the end we drop her down a disused coal shaft?"

Meanwhile Martin Bishop, a former Liverpool dock worker, said he remained in a permanent state of readiness, adding: "I've got my fireworks, my bunting and two crates of Stella. It's going to be fucking mint."

Ashamed to be British. Ashamed to be from Barnsley

2009-06-08T06:45:00.004+01:00

The Hitler-Loving Nazi elected to represent Yorkshire in Europe. I want to die.

We used to call it the People's Republic of South Yorkshire. It was so Labour, so socialist, there was hardly any point anyone else campaigning.

And now we see for ourselves, in our lifetimes, how fascism can take hold. Even with twenty-first century communications, we see how lies and distortion can be allowed to stand, if faced by total incompetence and a sense that voters are being ignored by those in power.

16% of voters in Barnsley voted BNP.

One in six of the people I grew up with, had a pint with, went to school with, voted for a fucking Nazi.

This cunt used to be the leader of the British National Front. He's an 'academic' who has attempted to develop a 'scientific' rationale for racism. He led marches where people shouted "we've got to get the blacks out" and was once arrested and convicted of behaviour likely to cause a breach of the peace after being heard chanting "death to jews".

If you call your party the National Front, it kind of suggests you agree with everything Hitler said and did. If there's any doubt, the party was founded on Hitler's birthday, for fuck's sake.

And this is who the former socialists of Yorkshire have elected as their ambassador to Europe, while Hitler's actions are still well within living memory.

Shame on the people of Barnsley. Shame on a supposedly Labour government - this happened not because of "mass immigration", which doesn't exist, but because you've spent so fucking long licking the arse of Daily Mail-reading 'middle England' you've completely forgotten about the people who were once the backbone of your support. Hang your head in shame Brown - and you Blair. I want to throw up.

Once you pop a revolting mixture of corn starch, flour and fat you can't stop!

2009-05-21T11:30:00.006+01:00

Delighted to read this morning that Pringles lost a court case in which they were trying to avoid paying VAT, and in the process revealed what we suspected all along: they're fucking revolting.

After years of marketing, you may have been under the impressions that Pringles were a particularly moreish type of potato crisp. Well now the makers have strenuously argued that they're not - because they're only 42% potato. 33% of a Pringle is flour and fat.

They lost, and the court thinks they are a potato crisp (how did they reach that conclusion)? So Pringles now face paying back £100m in VAT. But after these revelations, they may not have this problem in future - would YOU buy them again knowing what you know now? No sales = no VAT. Everyone's happy.

Oh no. The shadow culture secretary is called Jeremy Hunt

2009-05-20T07:35:00.009+01:00

Even a blind man at the bottom of a mineshaft at 3am can see the Labour Government is screwed, and I've come to accept with great sadness that the best thing that can possibly happen to Labour now is a period in opposition, where they can spend time trying to rediscover their morals, common sense, humility and political beliefs.

Yes, it means we'll get the Tories back, but that's OK because at least we'll know where we stand, and we won't need to feel confused and conflicted about hating the government again.

But one thing that distresses me is that I just found out the Shadow Culture Secretary is called Jeremy Hunt. This is disastrous.

The current culture secretary, Andy Burnham, is the most convincing of Labour ministers. He tries to get people to call him Andy which shows he's down with the kids, and by pretending to like 'the footie' and having once been the drummer in Shed Seven, he shows he is more in touch with the culture of mainstream Britain than any other MP.

One of these men is currently the MP for Leigh. OK, I made that bit up.

But a culture secretary called Jeremy will be disastrous. You can imagine the cabinet meeting.

"OK chaps, now Jeremy's going to update us on the latest in our - ahem - extracurricular activities."

"Thanks Dave. OK, yeah, so as of tonight the Light Programme will play back-to-back albums by Sky, cos they were bloody good, yeah, they played classical music but with rock instruments and they were a proper band no matter what the oiks who used to flush my satchel down the toilet say. And we're introducing mandatory after-school stamp clubs, and I've set up a sub-committee, chaired by Miles and co-opting Animal - heh! - to look into rolling that out to a choice between stamps and chess by 2013. The ban in all physical sports comes in to affect in November, and we'll be using the stadia as playgrounds where people can play tig, and Knock Knock Ginger Run Away. And Mr Murdoch has bought the televised rights for the national Dungeons and Dragons tournament till 2015."

New Labour Breaks My Heart

2009-05-09T10:21:00.004+01:00

How can we ever vote for them again?

News today that in the light of the dreadful, cynical abuse of expenses, rather than apologise or hang their heads in shame, they are instead calling in the police and trying to work out how to sue the Torygraph for printing the details. I used to imagine that the Tories used to abuse power because they were Tories. Now it seems you abuse power simply because you have it, whoever you are.

The double irony is that this has happened in the same week they've announced the introduction of ID cards in Manchester. What makes me laugh is that the party line on the threat posed to civil liberties by ID cards is, "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear". The antics over expenses show that cabinet ministers are seemingly exempt from this argument.

It's such a facile concept anyway - it ignores the whole concept of privacy. There may be things I"m not scared about, but I'd rather people didn't know.

So next time a cabinet minister trots out "If you've got nothing to hide you've got nothing to fear," I suggest we all write to them asking questions from the following list:

What was the last thing you claimed for on expenses?
Have you ever told a lie to your children?
Have you ever picked your nose and eaten it?
What colour underwear are you wearing today?
Do you have any birthmarks on your private parts?
Have you had a shit yet today?
When was the last time you masturbated?
In your view, what's your partner's biggest fault?
And what do they think yours is?

If you asked me any of these questions I'd be offended, and I'd tell you to fuck off and mind your own business. But none of them touch on anything illegal - if you truly believe "nothing to hide, nothing to fear", you won't mind answering them.

Chicken

2009-05-05T18:51:00.003+01:00

A little vignette of consumer Britain this afternoon - I went out on foot into Stoke Newington to buy a chicken to roast tonight and came back empty-handed.

The two shops that sold them within walking distance were Whole Foods Direct and Tesco Metro. I baulked at paying over £12 for a tiny specimen in WFD ("What Fucking Daylightrobbery"?). And then in Tesco, the price tag of £2.90 for a chicken that was, if anything, slightly bigger, was just as off-putting.

According to the label, the chicken meets "all the production standards that Tesco requires." What an insulting, patronising, meaningless statement. Of course it meets Tesco's standards, otherwise it wouldn't be on the shelf in fucking Tesco would it? But there is not one shred of information on what those standards might be. It would be a true statement if Tesco insisted chickens were played chamber music and allowed to sleep on soft cushions every day of their lives. And it would be equally true if Tesco insisted that every chicken was pumped full of toxins and subjected to waterboarding for three days before being killed by having its intestines ripped out through its little beak. Ridiculous.

The chicken was, of course, in their value range. Stokie Tesco only stocks value range chickens because their stock seems to be dictated on a demographic profiling of Stokie that probably uses census data, which is now almost a decade out of date. If you notice, Tescos in nice middle class areas stock lots of lovely fresh fruit and veg and fresh herbs. In poorer areas they fill the shame self space with nasty cheap shit and food they know is unhealthy for people, because that's what the plebs will buy.

Stokie is gentrifying, so the stocking policy is wrong. But what's particularly insulting is that the working class population round here has a high proportion of Turks - go into one of the Turkish groceries across the road and it's bursting with bunches of fresh herbs and lots of exotic veg (the problem being they display it outside in the traffic and it's all droopy and grey) . But Tesco has no room for these ethnic idiosyncrasies and so does a disservice to both its posher and poorer catchment area.

It's great being British

2009-03-14T18:51:00.002Z

So Comic Relief raised £54 million - the highest total in its history, in the middle of the worst recession in living memory.

It sums up what I love about this country. As a nation, we're self-hating at times - "doing something funny for money" is a very David Brent thing to do, and when he got fired in the second series of The Office while wearing a 'humorous' ostrich and rider costume, it was a brilliant moment of pathos. When you see someone wearing a red nose and thinking that's the same thing as having a sense of humour, when you roll your eyes as someone gets sponsored to sit in a bath of beans (why does it always HAVE to be beans?) you sort of cringe a bit.

But we just go out and we fucking do it, and the collective result is inspirational. We do it in a way that says 'I know this is crap, but come on...', we give money in a way which says 'oh go on then, this is all a bit embarrassing but here you go' and we achieve something.

What did I do? I sat and watched telly all night, drinking beer. And at one point, after one tearjerking short film, I went online and bought ten mosquito nets, which might save ten lives. And I feel fucking good about it. And I feel that every now and then, you can stick turn a blind eye to the relentless cynicism and societal unease that normally holds sway over our thoughts, and smile.

Some of Comic relief was shit. Some of it was hilarious. But that's hardly the point. We can debate the ethics of charity versus the developed world's obligation to drop Third World debt, and whether aid really gets to where it's supposed to rather than going into Robert Mugabe's birthday bar tab. Yeah, but do that next week. Giving is good for the soul.

And the main point when I started this - if I had one - is that this is one of those rare occasions - like Christmas, perfect summer days and the Strictly Come Dancing final - when we feel that we're all doing the same thing, participating, being together as a nation. And if you can just shut the cynical voice up long enough, it feels rather nice.

Why I'm forming a political party

2009-03-14T17:54:00.002Z

The Christian Party are currently running a bus-side ad campaign in London with the headline 'there definitely is a god', so I complained to the advertising standards authority.

Today I got a reply. The Christian Party 'is a political party' and therefore the advert is classed as 'electioneering material' (even though there are no elections of any kind imminent) and that means it's 'exempt from our Code'. So there's proof that politicians are allowed to lie in ads but no-one else is.

In my time working in advertising, I've tried to get ads passed that pointed out that films were available on video six months before they were available on satellite. We were not allowed to say this, because even though it was true at the time, it was 'denigratory' to Sky.

Alcohol brands are not allowed in any way to suggest that drinking makes you more socially successful, even though the main reason people drink is because they know it enhances sociability.

But if you're a political party, and you can say what you like, even when you KNOW it's not true ('definitely' implies proof, and even devout Christians believe in faith without requiring proof - it's the whole POINT of the entire religion).

So I'm writing back to the ASA - if I form the 'Alcohol Liberation Party' and register it as a political party, under their code, if I'm governed by the same rules as the Christian Party, surely that means I can create ads that say 'Drink beer and you'll be the funniest, most popular guy in the room and you are GUARANTEED to pull'.

I'll let you know how I get on.

The perils of shopping in WHSmith

2009-03-08T15:24:00.002Z

A long silence from me, thanks to the very sad and unexpected death of my father-in-law, which kind of wiped us out for a month.

He lived in South Wales, and for the last three weeks so was I. Abergavenny is a beautiful place and I'm really missing it since being back.

Anyway, one day last week I had to go from Wales up to Leicester for a meeting, and changed at Birmingham New Street. It was the day after the funeral and I was hungover, and went into Smith's to buy a bottle of water. As I walked up to the counter, before I got there, the assistant scanned a copy of the Daily Telegraph, ringing it up on the till, and held it out to me.

Me: I don't want a Daily Telegraph.

Her: You get the water free with the paper.

Me: But I don't want the paper. I just want the water.

Her: But you'll save 60p!

Me: No, the paper's 90p, so it would cost me 30p more.

Her: But you get the water for free!

Me: I don't want a copy of the Daily Telegraph. I just want to buy a bottle of water.

Her: But I've already rung it through the till now.

Me: Well, I didn't ask you to.

There was a queue by this time. Clearly thinking I was insane, she cancelled the Daily Telegraph and rang up the water. Then:

Her: Big bar of Aero for just a pound with any purchase?

And off we went again...

Who'd be Gordon Brown?

2009-02-05T09:37:00.003Z

So to seems the dispute over hiring foreign contractors in the midst of rising unemployment will reach a resolution today. The whole thing shone a fascinating light on the depressing nature of political discourse in Britain.

Apart from allowing Xenophobes to raise their racist heads above the parapet with less fear of condemnation than usual, it showed just how little people understand about the way things work, and the knee-jerk reactions on which people base their decisions.

I'm hardly Gordon Brown's biggest fan - I believe he and Blair have betrayed 80% of what Labour ever stood for and their kowtowing to big business makes me want to vomit.

But you've got to feel for the guy. He makes a speech about British jobs for British people, and when a private corporation hires foreign labour, he gets the blame. Sure, it's embarrassing for him, but to read both tabloid news coverage and pubic reaction alike, millions of people seem to think Gordon himself interviewed and hired each one of these greasy foreigners personally.

The Lindsey refinery is owned by Total UK, part of a giant French oil company. Gordon Brown is not the HR director or even the CEO of this company. He's the Prime Minister. He had nothing to so with hiring these people. In fact, it was Peter Mandelson's intervention which helped solved the dispute.

It's hilarious that the kind of people who believe government should stay out of business and let it do what it wants are the ones most outraged at the government when big business did what the hell it wanted, and will give the government no credit whatsoever for stepping in to help solve a problem they didn't create.

My favourite part of the whole thing though has to be the daily headlines in the Mail and the Express showing complete solidarity with the trades union movement - something they've spent decades trying to destroy. "We might hate proletarian leftie scum, but not as much as we hate dagos and wops. How dare they come over here and destroy the livelihoods, hopes and dreams of the unskilled British working class? That's OUR job!"

Fancy apologising to hundreds of thousands of former miners, steel workers and shipbuilders now, Mr Dacre?

Thought not.

Back to normal

2009-02-05T09:35:00.004Z

Woke up this morning to find the rest of the country faces a day sledging and building snowmen while London bathes in grey, pissy rain, the snow having all-but disappeared. Anyone outside London who thought we were making too much of it on Monday: this is why.

Let it snow, goddammit!

2009-02-02T21:50:00.004Z

The snow in London was wonderful today. People living outside London have been a bit irked by the media coverage of it, because they get snow all the time. Well we don't. It's the first time we've had snow like this since I've been living here, and that makes it exceptional.

The media have actually been excelling themselves in looking for the negative side of things. Of course these days any concept or material thing is deemed only to have meaning if it has a financial value attached, so all we're hearing now is that the lost days at work have lost the economy £1.2 billion.

Then there's how shit we are at coping with it - the BBC actually sent someone to Moscow to show us how, there, they have tire chains on cars and special machines and thousands of people to keep the roads clear in weather like this. We don't. Let's face it - the sudden drop in temperature and the weather front moving in from the Steppes or wherever is probably Gordon Brown's fault.

What a load of fucking crap. How stupid and soulless do they think we are? Britain - and especially London - rarely has snow like this. Spending millions on something the Russians need because for them, it's a weekly occurrence, would be like spending millions on prevention of forest fires or meteor strikes in the middle of London. Of course we weren't prepared for it, because it hardly ever happens!

And as for the economy, FUCK the economy. Just for once. For one magical, rare day. Because everyone - every normal person - I spoke to or e-mailed today who was affected by the snow thought it was magical. People smiled at each other and chatted in the street - this is London we're talking about, remember! Overnight it was quiet as the countryside. People went out and played, or stayed in and curled up under blankets and watched black and white films. People from Africa and children under eighteen, alike in the fact that they had never touched snow before, posed for photos as the flakes fell on their shoulders. It was a day for snuggling up by the fire or getting wet-through from snowball fights, whatever your pick. A lost day, a treasured day, an unforgettable day. And we'll be lucky to have another one like it in this neck of the woods in my lifetime.

So can we please, just for two minutes, forget about finding the negative angle, forget about finding someone to blame, forget about the gut-instinct reaction to continually piss on the country's chips ever single day of the fucking year?

Everyone I spoke to today seems to think that would be a great idea.

Remind me what 'FA' stands for again?

2009-01-30T10:47:00.003Z

Today Barnsley's manager, Simon Davey, was fined £500 and warned about his conduct for remarks he made to the fourth official during Barnsley's 2-1 defeat to Sheffield United in November.

In the same game, Utd's Chris Morgan inflicted a tackle on Barnsley's Chris Hume that was so severe it fractured Hume's skull. Hume almost died, and for a while it looked like he may never play football again. Morgan was given a yellow card in the game. He hasn't apologised to Barnsley or Hume for the horrific tackle - which is really unpleasant to watch - and neither has his club. The FA quickly confirmed that no further action would be taken against Morgan or Sheff Utd.

So as far as the FA is concerned, it's a more serious offence to have harsh words with an official than it is to almost murder an opposing player.

The Fucking Arseholes.

Mediterranean flair comes to the Tuscany of the North

2009-01-30T09:37:00.002Z

Things are looking up at Barnsley. The other week we failed to sign Chesterfield's best striker because we couldn't afford his wage demands, and he went to the press and effectively said he didn't want to play for a bunch of failures - and that's why he signed to Sheff United instead.

But this week, Barnsley triumphed where Man City failed, bringing an international striker, the star of his national team, from Italy to the north of England. All hail Daniel Bogdanovich, the star player of... Malta.

January is panto month...

2009-01-30T09:12:00.005Z

... and the thing about pantomime is the comfort of repetition, the safety of a story we already know inside out, having fun with storytelling cliches. It's perfect recession fodder - it takes us back to childhood, makes us feel wrapped up and warm in the bleak mid-winter, puts us in a place where the world makes sense.

So combine panto with something as heartwarming and life-affirming as a good meal, and you're really onto a winner.

Which must be why the BBC has decided to schedule Masterchef four nights a week through January and February. Every night you can get in from work, close the curtains, have your tea and snuggle on the sofa to watch the same story being played out again and again with minor variations, the same lines in a slightly different order. There are even bits where you can join in and shout along with the shouty, larger than life, panto-perfect characters. "COOKING DOESN'T GET ANY TOUGHER THAN THIS!!!" we yell along with Panto Greg, the tragi-comic Widow Twanky of the piece. We stage whisper "It's good, simple food, but is it good enough to win a place in the quarter-final? Everything on that plate has to be perfect," with John 'Prince Charming' Torode each time someone cooks something you think you might be able to do at home. We hoot with derision every time lazy-voiced India Knight tells us in the drawling voiceover that's now compulsory in everything from documentaries to hair conditioner ads that someone is an 'experimental cook', wondering how we can work this phrase into conversation as a euphemistic insult, or maybe even sneak it into the Viz Profanisaurus.

My only regret about finally finishing my new book over the last few weeks is that I've only been able to watch about half the episodes, but with the book now done I'm delighted that we've got two weeks of heats left. I've had to rely on my mate BLTP for a daily update - it's the first thing I read each morning. Through his eyes, there's not just panto here, but a microcosm of social and class relationships within British society. His blog only makes the programme itself more compulsive, if that's even possible.

I don't want the winter to end - I'll be heartbroken when this series finishes - but in the meantime, the flavours are good, the meat's cooked wonderfully. Yeah, I like it.

Turning Ploughshares into Swords

2009-01-13T14:53:00.004Z

The extraordinary TV ad for careers in the RAF is back on TV. Can't remember when it was first out, but they clearly think it's successful as they're rerunning it.

In the ad, the ghost of a fighter jet flies across an urban landscape. As it passes factories and offices, it attracts various metallic objects from them as if by powerful magnetism, and these objects all fly up to join the plane and form its body.

It's meant to be a visual metaphor for the number of different skills and disciplines within the air force, and the voiceover talks about there being fifty different skills to choose from. But watched without the voiceover, it's actually a straightforward dramatisation of how the armed forces takes resources that would otherwise be more useful elsewhere. I'm not just being right-on about this - one scene actually shows surgical implements being stolen from a hospital in the middle of an operation, to form part of machine that's built for blowing stuff up and killing people!

To my mind, this makes the ad a catastrophic case of 'friendly fire' as far as the image of the RAF is concerned.

National Anthems

2009-01-13T07:07:00.002Z

Billy Connolly once did a sketch about how crap our national anthem is. He pointed out that new countries in Africa have fast, jaunty national anthems that get people going, while ours has the slow trudge of a funeral march.

I remembered this over Christmas when, by chance, I caught the start of an episode of Thunderbirds.

The Thunderbirds theme tune almost makes me cry. It makes me want to stand to attention and salute. If the Thunderbirds theme tune was our national anthem, which it should be, Britain would be a proud nation. It would still have an empire on which the sun never sets. I'm not saying that's a good thing. I'm just saying.

On being the fan of a shit football team

2009-01-04T10:47:00.003Z

Went yesterday to Upton Park, to watch Barnsley being thrashed 3-0 by a mediocre West Ham in the third round of the FA Cup.

Last year saw a brief spell of glory for Barnsley - every year, the cup provides the spectacle of a lowly club doing a David and Goliath on one of the game's giants. Someone from League One might scrap for a reply against Man United, or even beat them. But lightning never strikes twice - except last year it did. In last season's FA Cup, Barnsley knocked out two of the big four on the bounce: beating Liverpool 2-1 at Anfield, then going on to dominate Chelsea at home and win 1-0. Then, we went to Wembley for the semi-final, looked utterly incapable of scoring, and lost 1-0 to bloody Cardiff.

Yesterday too we never looked like scoring. Kayo Odejayi, a striker who scored a total of five goals last season and has managed one - ONE - so far this season after seven starts and fifteen appearances as a sub, missed a header that my 61 year-old mum would have been able to score, proving that his ability in the air matches the excellent footwork that saw him roll a chance wide in the Cardiff semi-final when he had only the keeper to beat. The ball rolled so perfectly he may be useless as a football player, but he has a great future in crown green bowling.

My wife laughs at the plight of supporting a football team that can't score goals. It's a strange relationship - you can't change your team the same way you can't change your family. In fact it's very like a family - you can slag off your siblings and parents on a daily basis, but as soon as anyone else offers uninvited criticism of them, the atmosphere can become very chilly indeed.

But there are consolations.

I had to take a client to a Chelsea game once - the agency I was working for had seats there - and it was a dispiriting experience. After fifteen minutes of football I felt privileged to see after a lifetime watching Barnsley toil, the home crowd started booing their own team because they hadn't yet scored a goal. Chelsea went on to win 2-1, but the home crowd was still unhappy: it was only Coventry. It should have been more. Imagine being so bloated on success that anything less than perfection simply isn't good enough, when you expect to win by right. Imagine how rare the opportunities for genuine delight. Many Chelsea fans are no happier with a 1-0 that sees them secure a place in Europe than Barnsley fans are with a 0-0 draw against Blackpool. Whereas we lowly intimates of failure - we'll remember the look on John Terry's face when the final whistle went at Oakwell last season until the day we die.

New Blog

2009-01-03T11:08:00.001Z

Is anyone interested in reading my thoughts on stuff other than beer? I don't really care. But occasionally I want to write about something else.

The thing about my beer blog is it's there for professional reasons - to promote my career as an author and beer pundit.

But every now and then there are other things I want to write about - things I feel strongly about, ideas I maybe want to work up a bit, or stuff to just get off my chest. Just an ordinary blog then, like millions of others. But having it as a blog rather than just a diary provides a bit of motivation to write it, craft it, think about it rather than just forgetting it. If anyone else wants to read it, I'm flattered.

But if you fancy a chat about Barnsley FC, music, cool books, life in London, love-hate (mostly hate) relationships with advertising and marketing, then please drop by!