today: professional week part three (the final)

Credit where it is due. These last three entries were inspired by a converstion with my colleague Ibrar over at Holistic Educator. We were bemoaning the fact that our work seems to be more and more based on targets and how it was eating up our time to develop areas of expertise. It got me thinking. I keep telling Ibrar that he should be more disciplined with his blog and write more. But he's a busy man with fingers in many pies. His comments on the topic of deprofessionalisation should appear sometime soon (or are already there - depending on when you read this, and them).

The last thing I wasnted to say about professionals is that they should stick together. Through blogs like the much-missed Michael Berube and other, mainly American, academic sources I have followed various arguments made between the intelligent people of the world.

Although it pretty much occurs anywhere, even in the most routine discussions there are those who wish to be aggressive towards people they more or less agree with, finding slivers of disagreement and often ending up pouring bile and hatred on each other. I have heard many tales of rampant politicking and confrontation within academic departments which would make WWE storylines appear like a gentle roll on some fluffy overstuffed cushions.

In the more low-falutin' world of the school teacher, the most annoying thing I heard thoughout my time was the constant use of the world unprofessional to describe the behaviour and appraoch of others. Much of the backstabbing and undermining I put down sheer stress. When people are overworked, underpaid and appreciated, harangued and daily face physical threat and verbal abuse, they are bound to get stressed out. Which is when people lash out at others. I count myself amongst the people who sometimes indulged in this, although in my defence I must say that when I recognised that stress was making me act this way I tried hard to change my rhetoric and become more understanding and supportive of others.

However, under attack from outside forces, it is pretty crucial that professional people (whom I am assuming are intelligent, pretty studious and above all reflective) reflect on how their behaviour towards each other impacts their profession as a whole. Here is an example of this.

In my last school I had a colleague who happened to be my boss. She was clearly a driven and 'complex' individual but her professional skills were admirable. In fact she worked hard enough in a very difficult environment that she became ill, suffering a stress breakdown. Whilst she was away we discovered that in the months leading up to the breakdown, she'd dropped the ball in many areas. Things were incomplete, judgements had clearly been made under duress and with a skewed sense of perspective. As colleagues we felt sympathy and fixed as many of the errors as we could whilst covering the rest up. Presenting a united front against possible criticism when she was in no state to defend herself. When she returned to work the support continued in more subtle ways. We shouldered some of the resposibilities, taking on work and commitments so that she didn't have to.

For me, the effort of this was the start of a road that would lead, a couple of years later, to my own stress breakdown. In the final year before I hit the wall I struggled. The extra I'd taken on was not passed back over. Warning signs of my impending implosion were ignored. I made a mess of lots of things. Work was incompleted, judgements were made under the duress of illness and clearly without a decent sense of perspective.

After I crashed and burned, my boss took about half a day to get the knives out. Rather than sticking by me, as I'd done with her, she skewered me in my absence, weaving a story around my illness-affected work that abdicated her (as my boss) of any oversight and responsibility. Rather than made incompetent by illness I was painted as connivingly and wilfully unprofessional.

It led to me leaving my chosen profession, disillusioned with my treatment on all sides. I was a competent creative and committed professional yet I have now gladly left the frontline where my skills and energy were able to make a real difference. I am one of the huge number of school teachers who quit out after less than ten years.

What does it do to my proud profession when we turn on and force each other away from it? We are replaced with 'cover supervisors' and other cheap robotic devices.

today : professionalism week part two

What I loved about The Trap was that it helped me crystallise the negative effect that target based cultures have on individuals within society. The issue is who decides the targets? Or more importantly, what are the things we target?

I don't object to improvement. For example, in my field - literacy teaching, there are clearly areas where institutions and individuals can improve. But what is 'improvement'? The fact is that pure statistical measurement in so many areas is a blunt and crude tool, and not the incisive analytical scalpel that it is portrayed to be by the Targetting Champions. If I am to measure the success of my teaching, then surely we must sit back and wait awhile. How far has my literacy teaching impacted on the students of mine who go on to become academics? Do some of them get a 2:1 instead of a first because I slightly failed to teach them to write succinctly and with clarity? Did some of them fail to get a crucial research grant that stopped them curing global warming and world hunger because their written arguments weren't put strongly enough?

What about those who go on to become dictators? Did my skillful coaching of them in the art of oratory contribute to their despotic rise? Was I Annabeth to their Toby: teaching them to address the podium, prescribing powder on their ever-expanding foreheads and thereby feeding their tyrrany?

The fact is that we don't know. The range and effect of my influence could be close to nil, or endlessly mutliplying logorhythmically even as we speak.

Yet as a school teacher I was measured by two pretty narrow and poorly framed sets of exams. Life success or my contribution to my students' over-all education didn't come into it. In a world where we are yet to explore and understand much of the infinite range of subtle influence on the development of people, how can we measure it?

As a professional, qualified and by implication, reflective worker I find that I am judged at every turn. The fundamental here is trust. My qualifications, experience and achievements are designed to inculcate this trust. We trust doctors on the basis that they need to be high achievers to even get into medical school and then study for years and years. Even then they go through a series of checks and finishing touches before we allow them to cut us open.

As a teacher, I imagined that my employers, students and other interested parties trust me to know my stuff and to deal with the education of my students in the way that I, having studied and qualified and reflected, am able to judge. Yet in my final couple of years in school teaching it became increasingly difficult to make choices, because my lessons were subject to pressures from all sides. The exam boards abolished my choice of appropriate exams because they've corporatised the matriculation process to the point where it is almost solely a profit making exercise for the boards themselves and a decreasing array of large publishers, whose books were invariably set for study. The DfES have reached a point where they pretty much send out detailed lesson plans, support materials and bullet-pointed lists of things that must be taught. This is the ultimate conclusion to the process whereby in order to set and measure the targets, everything must be inspected and checked and rechecked against lists of things to check. Then the checking is checked off against a list, and the checking of checking is checked. Oh what the hell, rather than give professionals professional freedom, why don't we just tell them what to do? It's simpler and cheaper and easier to check (which is why I now operate in the ever-expanding private sector of checking and moderating). Lessons were turned into government issued power-point presentations (and the most boring species of these - the ones where you are expected to simply read out what is up on screen). All these things robotised the process, replacing the broad and organic notion of education with the narrow 'learning'; and the broad and human concept of thinking with the robotic and narrow idea of 'skills'.

So where does that leave the 'professionals' - micromanaged and ordered exactly what to do from above by, often, non-professional people, working at the fear of their jobs, to targets that are so closely defined that they restrict choice, imagination and the risk-taking advancement of practice?

This robotisation of professional vocations is partly a way of depressing professional pay levels. An example of this is the way that the bottom has dropped out of the supply teacher trade. Unqualifed staff are now emplyed as classroom supervisors at a fraction of the traditional costs of qualified replacement teachers. It is an idea that, in some ways I support - if used wisely and with the best interests of the students at heart. However, many schools are consistently using unqualified supervisors for long periods of time, focussing the advantages on the saving of cash rather than the education of their students. Which is always the case with targets. They are sloppy, inexact things, and when they cross over with other priorities it is the shortcuts to budget cutting that always win out.

We may as well not have studied, sacrificed and specialised in the first place: a path that led away from excessive scrutiny and suspicion into areas of freedom and trust. Now the path leads the other way and the deprofessionalisation of professional vocations continues apace.

today : professionalism week part one

I could be a doctor y'know. All you have to do is stand around in A&E and when a patient comes in you rush around a bit and ask for a CBC, Chem7, Blood GAs, Tox Screen, Psych Consult, Echo or whatever, and when the patient goes into 'defib', you get the paddles, shout 'charge', followed by 'clear' and then zap them back to life. Easy. In fact, if they don't come back to life it's an even simpler job. You look at your watch and solemnly say: "Time of death - eleven twenty four".

I could also be a policeman, especially a detective or a scenes of crime officer. Profiling - a doddle. Psychologist, Lawyer: no problem. Prosecution or defence, just tell me which. In fact I could run for D.A., even though I live nowhere near America. Goddamit I could even be a Presidential advisor or even the Prez.

Perhaps I am overstating just a little, but the fact is that TV and film is jam packed full of professional people whose jobs seem quite easy and repetitive. We also have access to the internet and can find out information about pretty much anything. Surely being a doctor or a lawyer or a teacher of a criminal profiler can't be that hard?

The effect of all these professionals on telly is that they make people feel that being professional is pretty easy. Which is a good thing in some ways. Why not demystify these previous closed areas and open them up as possibilities for everyone? But the downside is that it has become easy, even derigeur, to question professionals at every turn (which up to a point is okay - even required in many ways).

Yet what the TV shows don't show is the years of slog and study, the time spent keeping up with professional development, the sheer lonely hours of reading journals and books, the years of debt and the fact that many professionals ARE their jobs rather than do their jobs. We rarely go home, put our feet up and watch portrayals of professionals on TV all night

Which means that a couple of stroppy parents can question the entire basis of a national vaccination programme (like the MMR) without any understanding of the nature of medical studies, and cause a wave of panic. The payback for the mass avoidance of MMR is that the fight to eradicate measles, mumps and rubella has been thrown back decades. The price of people forever questioning whatever doctors say to them, which at the very least drains resources from the collective medical budget and at the most causes the very basis of a doctor's professionalism to be questioned and attacked.

As a teacher I found that a small coterie of parents were only too delighted to question me and my colleagues at every turn. Whenever their children failed to do their homework, it was turned on the teachers. When their children broke the rules and misbehaved, it was blamed on the teachers. When their children failed exams because they didn't bother to listen or revise or were just not capable, it was the fault of the teachers, who were not working hard enough in their easy overpaid jobs.

Because teaching is easy. Any idiot can do it.

today : from Motty to Totty

It's quite fantastic to witness the hoo-ha surrounding Jacqui Oatley's appearance as the first ever female footie commentator on Match of The Day. The headlines are fantastic when women get involved in football. The best was when Karran Brady took over as Chief Exec of Birmingham City. The headline : "It's Bummingham Titty!"

The fact is that I called it several years ago when Oatley was beginning her career at my local radio station. In those days she would commentate on local non league matches and, as far as I can remember, on or two minor Rugby League games. Nobody flinched and Western Civilisation remained intact, and she was a good commentator.

I thought to myself that Oatley should be signed by Five Live. It was about time women were given the opportunity. Unfortunately I wasn't (and still am not) the head of commentator recruitment for the BBC, so had little influence on her appointment. Later, they saw the light and employed her. Now she's made the step into TV and it is a delight to see dinosaurs like Mike Newell and Dave Bassett get their quotes in a twist about it.

In case you forgot, football is a sport that is peopled exclusively by Men, who roll around in mud, kiss each other a lot, spend thousands on haircuts and personal grooming products, massage each other and bathe together, but aren't gay at all. All they know is that women don't understand it and can't even explain the off-side rule, never mind commentate.

today : hungry like the wolf

Personally, I think it's quite cute that Paul Wolfowitz and Shaha Ali Riza are apparently in love. Good for them - especially good for a neocon for not shying away from hooking up with someone with a Muslim name. One wonders if Ms Riza has the problems at Newark arrivals that many other people whose names contain the word Ali seem to suffer? I don't frankly care who he spends his evenings with, or what he does with them. In fact I am happy if they have found some kind of personal happiness. However, if you are the political appointee of the leader of the free world, sent in to head up and spread ideology through an important international institution, then perhaps it's not a good idea to get your girlfriend (in whatever roundabout way) a fifty thousand dollar pay rise and a surprise promotion.

In itself, PW's actions are not the worst crime in the world. They are not half as bad as, say, urging, planning and cheerleading a stupid, bloody and unwinnable war based on invented evidence, pre-school level strategy and a quite crazy ideolgical stance. There is quite a valid argument that Mr Wolfowitz pulled some strings for his 'bird' at State in order to avoid a conflict of interests at the World Bank. After all, they were both quite open about their relationship and if they were to be seen working together in the same NGOrganisation people would inevitably leap to conclusions that may very well be false. A little nepotism (or, if we are being kind, the softer charge of cronyism) was, in this case, the lesser of two evils.

But the fact is that Wolfowitz and his ilk don't give a shit. What we are seeing is a government - and perhaps an entire class of Americans - down to the last red reminder of its moral bankruptcy. Their entire system is peopled by politicians and their cronies who believe that propriety and fair play is for the little folks. The American dream is now a dream of knowing the right people. Cronyism is the lifeblood of these people. That's how the pony club captain became Head of Fema (one wonders if that was through 'ponyism'?). In fact it's how Bush became President at all.

Wolfowitz's pronouncements sound just like the ones made by any selfish and corrupt person who believes their position of power places them above everyone else. "Let's move on, draw a line under this, get past this," are the PR bon mots I am hearing more and more. They are the mantra of politicians when they are desperate to get their negative stories out of the news cycle. The belief is that if a story lasts less than a week then people will forget about it and it will go away.

As I said. I don't care what PW or anyone does in their private life. But sometimes that private life crosses over into the public arena. This is one of those cases. Ms Riza should find have found herself a job somewhere else by using her talents and experience like the rest of us mere mortals.

today : The bikini 'line'

My pal Ibrar sent me this link the other day, suggesting that I would like to comment on it. The thing is, I have no real comment. The story speaks for itself. Attacks on 'Muslim' dress are another way for people to be racist and generally anti-other-cultures and its time we all grew up. The very people who go on about freedom are very quick to curtail the freedom of others, even to the point of attacking their choice of clothes.

If this woman was, for example, a burns victim, with a body covered with scars, some people would clamour for her to wear a 'Muslim' style swimming costume because they were offended by her scars. Others would get upset if her bikini was too revealing, offended as much by an unclothed human body as they are by a clothed one.

Their world view and response is just childish. In fact, they don't know what they want and their opinions are a porridge made of the fickleness of appetite and self-seeking aggrandisement.

today : whilst eating chocolate, I watch a bad film

It's become tradition recently at Easter on British TV for someone to show 'The Passion of the Christ', which is a shame because it has unfortunately thrown all previous TV and film versions of the Easter story into the vaults with an echoey thud, and turned the key: becoming the popular 'Passion' of choice.

It's also a shame because TPoTC is just not very good.

This seems to be because when it came out it took masses at the box office, but then again so did The Nutty Professor 2 - The Klumps. We also know that even films that are deigned to be 'quality' and win loads of prizes are also often not very good, such as that snore-fest 'Babble'. The reason TPoTC took so much money was that it played directly to an easy audience. Let's face it, plenty of the Western world consider themselves Christians and plenty of people in the USA are more or less vocational Christians. Show these people a Hollywood film that tells a Bible story without crtiticising and questioning and they will rush to it, even as they rush away from Hollywood's usual ungodly, morally corrupting and liberal, commie-homo-lovin' fare.

The problem I have is that TPoTC is just too much of a film, too tricksy and, whilst trying so hard to show the depth of suffering of Jesus in his last hours, is suffused with a gloss of unreality that ultimately puts it on a par with any high budget brutal horror film of recent times. SAW and SAW 2 have gory and 'realistic' torture sequences that are as thrilling and scary as the flailing sequence in TPoTC. I am reminded of the so-called 'powerful' moment in Schindler's list when the girl in the red coat is singled out in a black and white world - forcing us to feel sentimental emotion when it's just not needed (and an example of a Hollywood film-maker using technology because he can, and a bad error of judgement on Spielberg's part). So Christ is hanging on the cross and about to die. From above we see Calvary from a cloud's eye view, through a distorted lens. The camera then watches, spinning slightly as the 'lens' is shown to be a single raindrop, that falls away from the camera and plunges to the earth, where we are gven a close up of it hitting rock and exploding in the finest detail. Christ is still about to die, we have a softly lit flashback of the last supper. Jesus, luxuriant of hair and beard, saying all those last supper things that have led to centuries of arguments about transubstantiation and then we are put back into the 'real' world of his bloody and torn body, dangling on the cross again with the two Marys emoting wildly. All of this 'reality' is backgrounded with an endless loop of 'atmospheric' middle eastern music in lovely 5.1.

In the last shot of the film, a resurrected Jesus climbs out of his shroud and walks to the tomb entrance. He passes through shot and with the use of digital matting, the camera sees through the hole in his hand. It reminds me of the scene in the porn cinema in American Werewolf where Griffin Dunne turns and talks, despite the fact that half his face has rotted away and we can see through it. Fercrissakes Mel, unplug the damned computer. Make a film goddamit, and, by our lady, not a cartoon!

There is a reason why Passion plays, even for a determined unbeliever like me, have a power and genuine mystery that TPoTC completely lacks. By playing off the traditions of theatre and setting themselves within each culture where they are performed, they behave as art should, seeing past literal reality and telling a story of imagination and reflective humanity. In a play Jesus is played by a human being. Jim Cavaziel nailed to a cross with viscous trickles of blood pouring from his wounds and his flailed ribs exposed is merely another special effect, and this actually de-humanises the character of Christ. The film replaces imagery and imagination with simple and literal screen violence and the obvious use of cinematic tricks and cliche. Pilate the fat corrupt gold dripped baddie. The Pharisees almost comical stone faced cartoon clones of Archbishop Mikarios. Mary Magdalen, smouldering and sexy-sad. Gibson could have learned a thing from Spielberg and the most perfect horrifying moment in Schindler's List: when the women are herded into the showers and we literally hold our breaths as we wait in terror for taps to go on. People gasped with relief and real emotion when the shower heads brought forth merely water and went away feeling real, resonant, sympathetic emotion..

TPoTC has nothing of the true power and passion of, for example, the Manchester Christ turning to his tormentors, and to the acoustic backing of a rag bag band of buskers, singing "How does it feel, to treat me like you do-oo?"

today : my Easter message to the world

bless you and bless me,
bless the bees,
and the birds

today's slightly unhinged and crackers people are...

Ron & Russell Mael

Today : Ten things that annoyed me this week.*

1. Parking. Why can't people park their cars? The worst crime - pulling in and parking eight feet away from the end of a painted parking bay. What is that about?
2. Parking. The person who noticed I was exiting a parking spot and stopped just in front of me, waiting for me to exit, but actually blocking my way out. This person then saw fit to shout and swear at me out of their window for not exiting as fast as they wanted. They then abandoned the spot and drove off because they couldn't parallel park into it even though it was plenty big enough.
3. Parking. The person who consistently abandons their car on my street in such a way as to actually block the street.
4. Parking. The idiot who abandoned his van in the middle of the service road to the post office whilst he sat in a cafe window eating and watching people unable to get past.
5. Parking. People in giant SUVs who park six inches away and then open their doors onto your car making great dents in the bodywork (often while they are leaning in loading shopping and children). I watched someone do this yesterday in a car park (not, thankfully to my car) and when I mentioned it to them, they became very aggressive. I was surprised she swore in front of her baby.
6. Drivers, the idiot who killed a motorcyclist near my house by crossing two lanes of traffic without looking at what was coming up the inside lane - a now ex-biker.
7. People who have no manners and will not say, for example, 'excuse me please,' allowing you to get out of their way before they barge into you. Prime culprits : not teenagers but old ladies.
8. The crossing warden, whom, when I was in a rush, stopped the traffic with a lollipop until the children finished crossing, and then continued standing there with the lollipop holding up the increasingly frustrated traffic until the children had walked about a hundred yards along the pavement. Newsflash. None of the children are going to suddenly turn and around sprint back out into the road, as they are holding their parents' hands. I though this was a one-off, but the next day I wasn't running late and the same thing happened.
9. Virgin media. Okay, I think they are probably right in their argument with Murdoch, but please stop spending my money sending me expensively produced letters explaining why you are right and what a valued customer I am. Just give me a damned price cut and sort out that picture freeeze.
10. Almost everything else.


*okay, so this is a pretty lazy entry, but I haven't been so well and couldn't be bothered with anything too heavy today.

today : Life among the diaspora

So here I am, sitting in a room full of people. Many of them have given up their lives and are trying to start again.

There's a guy who has come from Afghanistan, a woman from The Congo, a guy from Sudan, at least one Iraqi Kurd, someone else is from Sierra Leone and someone is from Rwanda. All are here for one reason: the perception is that life here is better than at home, or in St Gate.

The Iraqi tells me that he left Greece because he was attacked for being a foreigner. Now the kids in his area throw stones at his house because he's been given it for nothing just because he's foreign. One of the women has three kids with her and three left at home. The young girl from Sierra Leone was sent away by her family because they didn't want her to be killed.

At thend of today I'll pocket my money (almost twice for one day what each of these people get in a week) and go home in my fairly nice car, to my comfy house. Maybe I'll switch on cable and watch as CNN show faraway, unreal images of people being shot and blown up, starving and struggling and dying, interrupted by advertisments for computer systems and five-star conference hotels.

today : Vietnam, Iraq, Israel

How do you proceed when you have made a decision that is so obviously imbecilically wrong, yet pride, stubborness, self-delusion and stupidity make you follow it for long enough that it cannot be easily undone, and you are currently mired in an increasingly bad situation?

This is the burning question of our times. Powerful people made foolish and ideologically driven mistakes, following advisors who had too much to lose to not behave other than as fawning yes-men. A campaign was started based on narrow, blinkered criteria. It was poorly planned and shambolically managed: and now we are all paying the price.

Yet this has always been the way. Lack of vision has stymied any real progress internationally. The powerful people fall back and make useless choices, retrenched in their need to retain power and caught up in their own little worlds.

Which is why the FA refused to employ Brian Clough when he was clearly the best choice to manage the England team. It's why they settled for Ron Greenwood, Graham Taylor and now Steve McClaren. Each time they reached a position where it was too late to turn back, yet what lay in front of them was only more disaster.

But where do we go from here? Apparently the FA are still paying Sven thousands a week to not be the manager, as well as paying McClaren to be the manager. If they sack him all the other decent choices are contracted to jobs it would be difficult to prize them from.

The mistakes piled up prior to the new regime being appointed. Firstly, Sven (as was his right) was recorded having a conversation during which he showed interest in a job other than managing England. As a knee jerk response, the FA lengthened and hiked up his contract, knowing a World Cup was six months away. Secondly, after Sven decided he was leaving the FA offered his job to Phil Scolari, on the condition that he accept before the world cup. Like almost anyone in the world Scolari said no, as he didn't want to go into the tournament as a lame duck coach. Then Martin O Neill, who was a free agent came into the frame. The most respected manager of his generation, the FA dithered on O' Neill because he is Northern Irish. Sensing that he might be taken off the club scene, while the FA dithered, several clubs came in to offer O' Neill a job. Aston Villa won the race and then he was off the scene. Next in the frame was Sam Allardyce. Unproven but a passionate guy whose work at Bolton showed intelligence and a great depth of tactical nouse, it turns out that maybe the FA shied away from him because (although this wasn't public at the time) his name had cropped up in the bungs enquiry. Then came Alan Curbishley. He anounced he was leaving his club, Charlton, at the end of the season. I wonder if he did this to get the England job and not mess Charlton around. He too was overlooked. One by one the FA, either by prevaricating or being outright stupid, narrowed their feild of candididates.

Which left us with McClaren. No more proven than Allardyce, clearly about a tenth as clever as O Neill and the totally boring safe choice. One thing the FA knew: apart from screwing around on his wife, McClaren was already part of their little club and had no skeletons in his closet. The least worst option left. Only, in actuality, not. Because if you go for the safe option, and it doesn't work, you cannot fall back on the claim that you took a risk.

McCaren must have taken advice when he made the idiotic decision to end Beckham's international career. Okay, drop him on form, but to do it in such a way that you'd look like a fool if you recalled him is just moronic. What if you needed him? At the time it was applauded by some as a brave decision. But at the time people thought the Charge of The Light Brigade was a brave decision.

In this evening's match away to Israel, McClaren, apparently short of defenders, picked Phil Neville at right back. Because, clearly Phil Neville is more worthy of a place than Beckham. He took him off after an goal-less hour and replaced him with another right back. He played Jamie Carragher (central defender or right back) at left back. Aaron Lennon (right winger or advanced central midfielder) on the left wing. Then, with not long to go and the match at 0-0, he substituted him with Stewart Downing (a left winger) whilst playing apparently nobody on the right wing. He replaced Andy Johnson, speedy but diminutive forward, with Jermaine Defoe, speedy but diminutive forward. etc etc etc

Great coaches are brave, visionary and inspired. They don't play safe. They don't take the consensus, let's-not offend the establishment option. That's why the FA never seems to ermploy them.

Eventually McClaren will have to be sacked. The press'll get on his back and if there are no scandals, they will invent them. How did the powers that be not foresee this, when pretty much 100% of paying football fans could?

today's tormented philosophical question is...

...why, when I am passionately against firearms and their use in any circumstances, do I smile whenever I hear anecdotes about people who shoot their televisions?

today's rubbish but completely brilliant thing is...

Chip Shop Curry Sauce

Back in the seventies our palates couldn't handle hot spices. These were life-on-mars times when, in Britain, we were just beginning to experience a whiff of multiculturalism. The days before Indian food became the staple diet of the English. On the scene came anglicised versions of what then was called foreign and is now called ethnic food. Bowdlerised and constructed from mainly traditional English ingredients we had Vesta curry. It's flavour still lingers in the form of McDonalds individual portions of curry ketchup. In those days a Vesta would cause outbreaks ofeye-watering, mouth wafting and people pointlessly lining their stomachs with milk in order to counteract the hotness (which is a coinage that I adore - a deliberate childish regulation of an irregular word formation - hot/heat - in order to create a subtly different meaning with only one specific application i.e. reporting the fierceness of chilli-spiced food) and stave off instant death from perforated ulcers.

And then there was chip shop curry sauce. It's absolutely nothing like curry and, despite research I cannot find out where or why it began appearing in chip shops. I bought some tonight with some Fish and Chips and it was delicious. Basically the bastard offspring of Vesta and lumpy school-dinner gravy, Chip Shop Curry Sauce is somehow the perfect accompaniment to Fish and Chips. Previously, we made do with salt and vinegar, but now for me the traditional, simple condiments are not quite enough on their own. You can even buy packets of Chip Shop Curry mix and granules. I never buy them, because in order to taste perfect Chip Shop Curry should be ladled from a stainless steel vat and served in a flimsy-lidded styrofoam pot with lumpy dribbles down the side. Perhaps it is the cultural memory of the start of ethnic food taking over our menus. Some throwback to childhood, but I nominate Chip Shop Curry as something that in itself is rather rubbish but completely brilliant.

today's almost totally bonkers and slightly scary person is...

Hans Moretti

today : I watch less TV than usual

Odd, and slightly pervy

I am pretty bereft of decent long-form TV at the moment. My cable has started offering on-demand series. I thought I'd catch up and watch Alias Season 5. Alias was more fun than I expected. Only I gave up watching Season 5 in the first episode when it became obvious that each shot was planned to disguise the fact that Jennifer Garner was pregnant. How ridiculous. Why did they not postpone making it until she had given birth - or just gone with it. And anyway I got tired of all the false identities and Rennaissance sub-DaVinci Code, Name of the Rose crap.

I more or less predicted the demise of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. It was pretty clear from early on that it was an ill-conceived idea, and although it was interesting and almost very good - it ran it's course without reaching mid-season.

Spooks is returning in November and I am not optimistic. I think they've covered pretty much all the stories they could think of.

Gray's Anatomy seems to be getting more popular but also has kind of got repetitive. To have two main characters not speaking to each other for about ten episodes shows signs of a plot cul-de-sac. It's as if the writers are reluctant to follow the rules. You can't pair up main characters without having to split them up or there is no more drama. And when two (arguably three) of the five main characters start having their loved ones ill in the very hospital where they work then it just seems silly. And that's before I start on again about the increasingly annoying incidental music.

So what's left? Well, there's House, which actually needs more character stuff because the arcs move too slowly due to the formula of having a case to solve each week. Its still very watchable but needs to be unhooked a bit. More two parters are needed like last season's sweeps story - and the fabulous Lisa Edelstein needs to be used more.

Which leaves only Boston Legal, which here in Britain is starting season 3. Is there anyone more watchable on TV at the moment than James Spader? In BL he is still playing the slightly odd, pervy character that has served him well through an entire career only this time in a humorous and non-threatening incarnation. But nobody does likeable perv better than Spader.

Of course, BL just a wilfully politically incorrect, adolescent-minded remake of Ally MacBeal. Only this time they have cut out the itzy ditzy central character and killed the girly soppiness stone dead. Which helps, because Ally McBeal was one of the worst and most annoying shows of all time. BL is one of the few mainstream dramedies that actually makes me laugh, even when the jokes are pretty cheap and at the expense of dwarves, cross dressers, peeping toms, cannibalistic homeless people and other relatively easy targets. The skill in the show is that it does manage to balance the character comedy with the cases and treats the (usually taboo bending, bizarre and unsavoury) cases as comedy and the strange odious comedic behaviour of the lawyers as drama. Which is, all in all, rather satisfying. It's a shame about the 1980's style incdental music, though. But what can you expect from the same 'creatives' who gave, as their abiding gift to the world, the utterly memorable singing sensation that is Vonda Shepherd?

today : I do a lot of work for charidee

Well done to all the people who stage the Red Nose Day telethon. They are, apparently, sincere, giving people whose generosity cannot be called into question. I put what I could in a collection bucket to support the cause.

Just don't expect me to actually watch the show. The problem is that is Red Nose Day (and pretty much all) telethons are so predictable that there is no point wasting time actually watching them. The format never changes. And seeing newsreaders in sparkly costumes, sports presenters performing karaoke, pop stars doing videos with mugging comedians in the background, 'celebrity' guest stars appearing in sketch show sketches and all the other telethon staples is just not interesting or entertaining anymore. In the 20 years since Live Aid the power of watching celebs hugging aids babies in Africa ("this was the most life-changing thing I've ever done" - even more life changing than the Barclays Bank ad that paid off my mortgage), visiting well-digging projects and doling up porridge in homeless shelters to the backing of 'sensitive' acoustic music and sincere imploring voice-overs has diminished almost to zero. Not that these aren't supremely worthy causes, but I know what close up shots of undernourished African children with flies landing on their faces looks like. They've been on my TV screen for as long as I can remember. I know the world is a nasty, unfair place because it's on the news for 24 hours every day.

In total Comic Relief day raises roughly £1 for every person in the country. Defence spending per person per year from tax is £520. In fact, collectively in the UK we pay £70 per person per year on Overseas Aid anyway. This sum is pretty small compared to most countries but still three times more then the US gives (as a percentage of GDP - the UK gives about 0.3%, the US 0.1%, the Netherlands gives 0.8%). Anyone can look up these figures, and what they suggest is that, worthy as it is, a bi-yearly telethon is literally a drop in the ocean attached to a pretty unoriginal show. To make any real change needs a bigger and more attention grabbing gesture than Kate Moss saying three lines in a comedy sketch.

today; How to upset 'them'

One thing is certain. Adam Curtis's new documentary series The Trap, which aired on Sunday on the BBC will have 'them' up in arms. After all, 'they' hated The Power of Nightmares so much that, in the way that 'they' respond to these things, many unpleasant and downright abusive things were said about both Curtis and The Beeb. The attacks on Curtis in the past reminded me of the similar attacks on someone like Michael Moore, where even if people get to discussing the issues, it is always prefaced with a series of undermining and generally unproven accusations and smears.

The new series, rather than polemically examining the philosophical ideological seeds of the 'War on Terror', looks at the philosphical and ideological seeds of the modern Western economy. Curtis spends his time picking away at the interface between power elites, science, ideology and politics, and it is this that upsets 'them' so much. It doesn't even matter if he is wholly and proveably correct in all of his arguments, what Curtis does is make essays on the nature of the connection between high-falutin' thought and it's effect on everyday lives.The template for this could be James Burke's Connections, which introduced a wide-eyed TV audience to the nuances and sophistication behind ideas (although in 1979 at 12 years old I personally remember only being wide-eyed at the scene of naked Russian Peasant women bathing in large barrels and the arresting demonstration of what actually happens when a broadsword hits flesh. I can still picture it in my mind - the sheer violence of Burke hacking at a pig carcass).

The very simplest measure of how close to the bone people like Curtis get is in the response. If any of his hollering detractors had bothered to watch Century of the Self, they would have been introduced to some basic psychology. The loudest critics come at Curtis, Moore, Palast (who regularly reports for Newsnight), Amy Goodman or anyone who has a go at the status quo and tries to discuss topics with a measure of scepticism, with an edge of hysterical panic. Last week I heard a Neocon type on BBC radio trying desperately to peddle a line of defence for Cheney and Libby (Plame wasn't even in the CIA when she was named and therefore Libby shouldn't have been in front of a grand jury because the charges were bogus and wholly politically motivated and stoked up by the commie lovin' media and how dare the extreme left wing BBC reporter actually interrupt this rant to, God forbid, actually ask a question that is so loaded with bias that I'm not answering it and even if I do then you'll only edit it into syllables and put it into a sampler and make my synthetic voice say that I worship the devil because that's what you journalists do blah blah blah...yawn) that would've got the third substitute on the junior high debating team laughed out of the room. It's a simple equation: the more hysteria, the more insults and smears heaped upon journalist and film makers, the more outright lies told in response, then the closer to the bone the story/film/idea is. Have these impeccably educated elite people never read Shakespeare. Do they not undertand the concept of protesting too much? Methinks not.

So let's celebrateAdam Curtis. And even more let's celebrate the BBC. For all it's faults (Last of The Summer Wine series 117, Jim Davidson's Generation Game, not finding a settles slot for Seinfeld or CYE, Kombat Opera, buying the new series of 3lbs) at least it retains a measure of independence, having the guts to fund and show primetime TV that would be frightening and unpalatable in many other countries.

today : wearing complicity well

Ana Carolina Reston -dead at 21 from anorexia nervosa

The insanity of the recent and ongoing debate about 'size zero' models and actresses is quite stunning. The argument goes like this: the fashion industry is in no way to blame for the illnes and occassionally death that is brought upon its models because it is a model's job to fit into the clothes that the designers make.

Workplace laws in much of the world, as far as I know, are there to protect employers from damaging the health of their employees. If a coal mining company refused to change their health and safety policy on the grounds that 'sometimes miners get killed by falling roofs - that's what they get paid for' we would be rightly outraged.

The other claim that the fashionistas make is that is nothing to do with them that millions of people are neurotically obsessed with their body shape. I'm not just talking here about anorexic youngsters but the mass of people who spend their lives crash dieting, buying exercise equipment and whose worries about their bodies is perhaps not quite as out of control as those with clinical eating disorders, but verges on the obsessional nontheless.

What astounds me in the arguments bandied is that the representatives of the fashion and fashion media world really appear to be as shallow as their stereotype dictates. It is just not logical to deny responsibility for aspirant images whilst at the same time photoshopping photos to make people look smooth skinned and skinny. Perhaps nobody is prepared to break ranks but their self-delusion and self-justification comes across as monumental as someone like, for example, the Emperor Nero. Their logic is that of the driver who says : I drive better when I've had a few drinks, the rapist who just knows every woman is begging for it, or the person with their hand on the Auschwitz gas valve who was just following orders.

today : ...resentment takes hold

I was watching this catch-up episode of popular hospital dramedy Grays Anatomy. It's not, to be honest, my favourite show and recently there's something about it that has irritated me more than the normal things that irritate me - such as the endless pastel frocked and Birkenstocks pop-folk music and the way each scene's emotional direction is signposted by predictable music ('ironic' cartoonish pizzicato strings to tell us "this is a comedy scene!"). Anyway, I didn't set out to criticise the Sex and The City meets ER hospital drama which has a certain level of undeniable quality in its writing, acting and production. What I did set out to say was that some parts of popular culture transcend their popular status and make it all the way into a category that, for the purposes of this missive, we'll call 'art'. Art that kind stands outside of culture - sort of convincingly transcending history, context, nationality, that sort of thing.

Anyway, there was a very 'emotional' scene (signified by the abscence of cartoony pizzicato strings) in Gray's Anatomy where a family were having to make a decision. Do they switch off a life-support machine? In the show, romantic interludes are underpinned with that fairly jolly inoffensive pop that at one end of the market has Hilary Duff and at the other has someone like Kelly Clarkson. Medical dilemma scenes are underpinned with the aforementioned fragile female folky music (patron saint : Natalie Merchant). It's like all the artists and labels that supplied Dawson's Creek missed their old royalties and needed a new place for their songs to go.

The underpinning of the life-support machine switching scene was the usual Lillith Fair kind of thing. But this time it was a version of Love Will Tear Us Apart. I couldn't focus on the scene at all. In fact I became rather irritated by it. Why? Is it because I am just an ornery old grump? Perhaps. But the real reason was that I was thinking that a law should be passed banning anybody from doing a cover version of Love Will Tear Us Apart. In fact, it should be de-listed from popular culture. Nobody should ever be allowed to even think about a cover version of it, apart from maybe Johnny Cash. That's because the power of the song is so tied up in the sound of the original recording. Somehow, Joy Division, with their faltering, unskilled instrumentation and the stark production of the late Martin Hannett, created a thing that could neither be replicated or imitated.

Of course, I can't actually put my finger on it without sounding like a tossy musicologist, or worse, a serious music journalist. The fact is that Love Will Tear Us Apart is a whole package. Art that is untouchable and hermetically sealed unto itself. Some of its power is derived from Ian Curtis's suicide. Some of it is derived from the context in which it was first released, the time and even the geography from whence it was created. For me, some of its power is caught up in when I first heard it and my initial reaction (which was a kind of confusion). More pwer is derived from when I 'got' it and the context of my life at the time. The bottom line is that it is a devastating and magnificent sound. Using even a pastel version of it to underpin a soppy scene in a hospital soap is just wrong.