today : self reflexion

Whenever I look at my blog I am always surprised that anyone else ever looks at it. But the numbers don't lie. Whatever the counter says, needs to have 5200 added, because I changed the counter and lost that number of recorded hits. Last time I looked closely I have had visitors from 90+ countries.

I started blogging as a way to discipline my writing. I was struggling with what I guess people call writers block and thought that some commitment would do me good. A friend of mine showed me the blog of a Professor of New Media. I was struck by how much of it was cross-posted from other blogs or even just plagiarised. It made me wonder if this particular Professor of New Media was actually an Emperor of New Clothes too.

But I could see the usefulness for myself. Publishing to the world - to a potential but basically imaginary audience, would instill a sense of responsibility in my writing. My initial plan was to write very extended pieces - maybe even book length, and post them as I wrote. But that Dickensian ideal fell by the wayside pretty quickly.

I was never under any illusions that I was adding anything original to the tide of noisy opinion that now sweeps the world via the Blogosphere, the Twittersphere and all the other spheres that seem to grow exponentially as each month goes by. That is why I have tended to shy away from the daily comment model, where I give my instant reactions to news events, politics and the like. But as a teacher I have a special interest in teaching issues and my experience gives me enough insight that I feel writing my thoughts is legitimate and useful. And as I grew increasingly disabled in the last few years I also felt it important to write about that. Partly, this was writing as therapy. It's pretty hard to come to terms with the onset of disability. Your entire relationship with the day-to-day world changes quite profoundly. For me, things like using a wheelchair also re-opened my eyes to the kind of prejudice that I didn't previously encounter, and thought was on the way out.

But mainly my blog has been an exercise in writing for writing's sake. As such I looked back over the (including this one) 452 posts and it also serves as a diary of sorts. There have been pieces contemporaneous with the events of the day. Sometimes I have posted in anger, frustration or excitement. You can't help but be influenced by current events, but I am happy to be more circumspect than most. So don't come here for my take on whatever happened today (today - 18th May 2010 was the 30th anniversary of the death of Ian Curtis and also Mt St Helens exploding).

One of the things that does surprise me is that I get so many hits even thought I have deliberately stayed anonymous and done nothing to advertise or monetize (Google's term, not mine) my blog. This is despite me advising other people on how to maximise their hit-rates (my main advice is to make your links section into an indispensable set of bookmarks on your chosen specialist subject - a place that other folk will bookmark instead of compiling their own links list). Of course, I have deliberately not taken my own advice. My links are pretty random, just stuff I like or have found interesting, which isn't really a specialist subject. A small circle of friends know where to find me, and the fact that it's me. But beyond that I've made no effort to gain a wider readership. Interestingly, my greatest hits - the posts that literally received the greatest number of hits - are mainly to do with religion. A comment on Islamic bathing costumes somehow was posted to a liberal Muslim discussion board and received almost a hundred hits in 2 days. My piece on the death of Baroness Nicky Chapman from a few weeks ago got forty in a day. I put that down to the fact that the newspaper obits were really rubbish and some people were looking to find info on her.

But many of my hits come from the fact that I always accompany each post with an image. I guess these pictures, which I generally harvest from the Web, retain their original hidden information and tagging stuff, and so appear on image-searches. It looks like at least 40% of hits on my blog are to do with the pictures.

As I have said, the international hits and the few regular readers who show up, when once in a while I do the Analytics thing, are a bonus. If someone is amused by something I posted, or diverted, or made to think, then that is excellent. But that is not why I am proud of my 'umble little blog. What gratifies me is the notion that I have followed through with my plan.

It's an odd feeling, but I feel responsible to it. When I have not posted anything for a while I feel a tad guilty. Sometimes I use a tried and tested stop-gap, like a one or two liner about something nostalgic, or a Youtube video of some groovy music. But even these are kind of planned. Music is something that I am deeply involved with and have been posting a lot of recently. But this reflects a recent surge in my own interest in new artists and songs.

Which is perfectly acceptable. My blog should reflect me. Which, in a selective way, it does.

Anyway, the reason that I ended up posting this tribute to myself comes down to a beautiful young woman whom I shall call Katrine. Katrine was one of those women who are so beautiful that they stay in your mind forever - frozen in time like Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not. I was simply driving down the road the other day and saw a sign that reminded me of a restaurant which reminded me of a meal I'd had there with Katrine; which reminded me of the fact that the meal developed into a surprise tryst. And because in the natural order of things, these things don't happen to me, or guys like me, or almost nobody outside of the letters page of Forum magazine in the 1970s in fact, the two nights spent in hotels with Katrine have - even though I've hardly ever thought about them - stayed with me for many years. But actually it wasn't the two nights, but a few seconds that must have been ingrained. Just a few seconds of her coming out of the bathroom. Initially, it amused me because I was with a woman-friend at the time I drove past the sign and seemingly went into a kind of reverie-induced shutdown to the point where she got a little upset, thinking she had done something wrong. But I couldn't explain to her that I was simply lost in the years-old pictorial memory of the sublimely beautiful Katrine in a state of deshabille. Now that would have cause some upset.

Which got me thinking about two things. The first, that of all the things that have the power to stop men in their tracks, the main one is the beauty of a woman. Whether in memory or current reality the power that beauty holds is pretty much immeasurable. Added to that was the idea that somehow these days it isn't the done thing for men to be seen appreciating the beauty of women. It's a tricky path.

The second thought I had was how difficult it is to have any kind of relationship with someone else, without sometimes finding yourself in a position where a lie is the best course of action.

Which got me writing on both topics. Except, what began as a short piece grew and grew. Frankly, to think that 'The Immeasurable Power of the Beauty of Women' is a topic which could be covered in four hundred words is at best very optimistic and at worst obviously insane. Given that a large percentage of the poetry and prose written throughout history is pretty much on that topic, as well as most art and many, many songs, and nobody seems to have managed to exhaust the seam yet.

And the one about relationships and honesty. Well Shakespeare had almost 40 goes at that one and still didn't run out of angles. So what hope do I have?

So of course, what started as blog post grew and grew. I'll let you know how it goes. But it's already heading towards 10,000 words. And with there being necessary erotic elements it could take forever, as they are almost impossible to write.

But I don't mind. It means that my initial impulse to use this blog to discipline my writing has worked. So far I have spun off 12 or 14 significant pieces of writing from blog ideas. Some of them (such as the piece on The Ripper Room - 14 hits in 3 days) appear here. Some, like this piece ,inspired by Katrine and the hotel room, don't really.

Maybe I'll find a way to put them up somewhere, sometime and see if they become hits.


Anyway, if I can write one tenth as well on my chosen topic as Billy Bragg does in The Saturday Boy, I'll be doing pretty well.

today: what happened last time...

the last time...The Tories were in charge.

today : Aaaaaaaaaaaaagh!

My question is: How the hell did the Tories not win the election with a resounding thump? Everything was in place. They were up against a 3rd term government and could exploit the natural boredom of the electorate. They had the solid backing of the press. The Tory papers (Express Mail Sun Times FT Telegraph) mounted a two year long mud-slinging attack on Gordon Brown, the non-Tory press were at best restless and generally frustrated with Labour and the 24 TV and radio news relies so much on the papers that all this was reflected throughout the 'media'. The country has gone through a hideous recession and is still teetering. Labour was responsible for a war that many many people disagreed with and this was then highlighted again with Blair and Brown up in front of hearings just weeks before the vote. The Tories had a huge amount of cash in their election war-chest and Labour didn't.

What's more, Cameron has steered the party well. He pretty much put the finishing touches to the rehabilitation that the Tories needed, building on the incremental progress made by Hague, IDS and Howard. Probably the most moderate Tory leader of all time, he managed to keep a lid on the anti-Europe wing, discuss immigration without unleashing an unreconstructed spasm of racism amongst his members and MPs, offered a New Labour style commitment to social justice and tempered and ignored the ideological dogmatism of the Thatcherite rump.

He even seems like a nice enough chap. Young and virile enough to impregnate his missus, touched with compassion and the tragedy of the loss of his son (these things are, I'm afraid, important for public sympathy although I imagine he would have sacrificed all of it to have his son live). People called him the new Tony Blair. But even then I think that's a bit unfair. Cameron doesn't seem quite as slick as Blair. In fact, he comes over as more honest, if anything.

So what went so wrong? It certainly points to one thing: that the press no longer possess the power they used to. Whether this is due to the increased embedding of 24 hour news in the culture or the increasing ubiquity of the internet as peoples' source of information. (Without researching this, and only using mine and my friends' habits as a model) the internet also seems to have changed the way we consume news and information - cherry picking individual articles and pages from here, there and everywhere. This negates the power of a newspaper's bias, as we are as likely to consume a story from one place as much as another, rather than read the Daily Mail or The Guardian each day and buy into their overarching narratives.

Perhaps the fact that media increasingly eats itself means that we are all, in a sense, media studies students who are aware that, for example, Murdoch owns The Sun, The Times and the NOTW, as well as Sky News. Maybe the papers have just lost their grip. How many people flick through the freesheets rather than spend on a 'real' paper. We can see this is in the tantrum-like behaviour of the Tory press since May 6th. They are like the hare, unable to believe that they didn't win the race. They just can't handle it. The response has been hysterical at best and actually more like a spoilt brat throwing a tantrum.

If they 'thqueam and thqueam' any more, like Violet Elizabeth Bott, they are in grave danger of being sick.

The apotheosis of this is the way Brown has been portrayed as some kind of Hitler figure, holed up in his bunker, desperately trying to maintain his grip on power whilst the world outside crumbles. They are either disingenuously ignoring that he is simply following constitutional convention, or they are too stupid to understand it. Who knows? If he had resigned on Friday, leaving the country leaderless and something like 7/7 happened on Saturday, he would have been held personally responsible. If the Greek deal had fallen through at the weekend and there'd have been a serious run on the pound, the same would have happened.

The Mail, Express, Sun and Telegraph seem to be so stunned by their impotent inability to claim victory (it was the Sun wot hung it, as some wag pointed out) that their only response it to howl and stamp in frustration at their own diminishing influence. They also seem to be so in the habit of portraying Gordon Brown as some venal, evil monster that even on his resignation - when usually even the most one-eyed of papers will offer sober reflection on a lifetime of public service and at least acknowledge the good intentions of a leader - they continued with their caricature. It seems seems the press believe the propaganda they've been printing every day for the past three years, even as the election result shows the public don't.

today : listen to this

In a totally figurative and entirely non-stalkerish way, if Paloma Faith wished it, I would, of course, gladly marry her.

Her first record was really excellent. And more, the more I heard her speak last year, the more I thought she was clearly an intelligent, naturally funny and extremely talented performer and personality.

If you get the chance, catch the performance she did with The Guy Barker Orchestra, broadcast on Radio2 this week. It was outstanding, and will have done a lot to promote her into a whole different stratosphere - not just another female pop-star, but an artist with rare depth and potential. A clever and knowledgeable choice of 'classic' tunes, interpreted with character, skill and charisma. At the end she says to the crowd "This is the best day of my life so far" and the performance was so good that I imagine it wasn't just a platitude.

The iplayer link is here

today : the weight

I found it very interesting that Peter Harvey, the teacher who attacked a pupil was treated so sympathetically by both a jury and a judge. I've only read the press reports but it appears like they understood his position.

At the time of the incident I speculated on three things: firstly that the teacher would have been hard-working, commited and long serving/suffering with a recent history of stress illness. Secondly, that the pupil would be the kind whose existence was dedicated to misbehaviour, disruption and disrespect (I actually surmised this from seeing a photo of him on the news. The kid had a look on his face that so many teachers would recognise - a mixture of gormless arrogance and superiority), and that thirdly the school management would be somewhat implicated in the incident.

Turns out I was right on all counts.

From what I read, after the incident Mr Harvey immediately confessed to clubbing the boy: willing to take whatever punishment was deemed necessary. Teachers suffer stress. I left the profession due to it, and I've written at some length about the sheer numbers of teachers who are suffering - the schools I've worked in where 20 percent of the staff are on sick leave at any time, the people who seem to cope at work but have devastated personal lives. Those who are no good, not because they are untalented or don't care, but because they've chosen survival, which means doing less at work in order to survive at home. Those whose alcohol and drug use is the only way they can cope.

I don't know the exact reasons why teacher stress happens at such a rate (and of course they are not the only ones who are overworked, under-resourced and subject to burnout). But I have a theory that for teachers it is something to do with the sheer volume of people you have interact with on a daily or weekly basis that provides a special kind of mental and emotional tiredness. I might be wrong, but I've worked long hours in both physical and non-physical jobs in my time and come nowhere close to to the stress levels I experienced as a teacher. I imagine medics and police might suffer the same kind of thing. Add this emotional drainage to overwork, constant changes in working practises and expectations and all the other stuff that teachers have to endure whilst performing their jobs and it can smash you apart.

I've noticed some of the black humour the Harvey case has inspired. Much of it is based around teachers taking violent revenge on misbehaving pupils. And I think it comes via a recognition from many school staff. When I was at my worst my temper outside school was constantly on a hair trigger and would explode quite violently over the smallest random thing. Thankfully I never quite lost control and caused any damage. Other people I know - placid, pleasant people - have reported the same symptoms. Peter Harvey gave into the frustration and countered the violence of intimidation and bullying with uncontrolled physical revenge. Many teachers will be thinking that it could easily have been them. How much further did they need to be pushed before they picked up a heavy object and used it to shut a taunting, arrogant, shit-eating teenager's gob? A millimetre? A mile?

You don't know your breaking point until you reach it. I could easily have been in his position. Again, it's something I've written lots about. The taunts, the physical attacks, the threats, the disruption, the bullying, the sexual harassment, vandalism of property, continuous undermining. It happens in all schools. In some it is the norm. But there's also the patronising and ineffectual management, the cowardly refusal of school managers to deal effectively (or at all) with pupil misbehaviour, the sheer ignorance of special and behavioural needs that leads to tokenistic sanctions and meaningless, pathetic behavioural support systems rather than real but difficult and resource-hungry solutions.

I've probably mentioned this before, but I worked in a school where one head of year - I shall call him Morton - seemed to believe that success in his job was measured by the lack of misbehaviour by the pupils under his charge. His way to achieve this was not to tackle and solve misbehaviour but to ignore it. If one of his year 8 students was cited for disruption he would quietly destroy the paperwork and tell everyone he'd counselled the child in question. Which he didn't, of course. The consequence was that the worst behaved pupils not only continued to cause mayhem and stress for everyone in the school, but did it with stated impunity. Teachers would try to go over his head to deal with problems, but then found themselves badmouthed and threatened with complaints to the union. If year eight students were referred to the isolation unit without his consultation they would go and complain to him and he would just pull them out and put them back into thei regular classes. He would also tend to blame either the teachers or the pupils themselves. One of his mantras was that Year 8s were the most difficult and disruptive in any school. It was well known.

When he moved to become head of year ten, year ten students suddenly became the most disruptive in the school.

There were two issues that arose. One I can understand; one that still baffles me.

The first one is that he himself was allowed to get away with not discharging the responsibilities of his job because the people above him were as paranoid and weak as he was. They did exactly the same for disruptive and lazy members of staff as he did for the pupils.

The second, which baffles me, is that he spent so much time and effort not dealing with misbehaviour properly (by properly I mean in line with the stated school policies that everyone else followed. The policies are never perfect but it's a decent start when the whole staff start to follow the same hymn sheet) that it would have been easier for him to simply deal with the issues. There must have been something else at play - something specific to him.

Notably, Morton was high up in a school department that consistently got the lowest grades in the school and never improved. Because here is the truth - classroom disruption takes the highest toll amongst the teachers who care most about their students. They are the ones who make up the time lost to disruptive lessons, they are the ones who empathise with the pupils in the class who turn up to school prepared to work and achieve but are themselves constantly scuppered by unruly classmates. They are the ones whom, above all, are driven by an altruistic impulse and invest personally in the achievement of their charges. This is fine when an institution collectively acts together, but when breaks in the chain are apparent and nobody addresses them, then caring teachers are left to fight the battles alone.

It becomes worse, because the more they fight back against those who are determined to disrupt and feel immune to sanctions across the school, the more those elements will try to 'win' in your classroom the way they have won elsewhere in the school (sometimes their winning against other teachers isn't about causing mayhem, but in being left alone. Sometimes the victory is to force a teacher into not putting any effort into trying to educate you, or address the special needs you are embarrassed about. Sometimes it is in succeeding in getting the teacher to turn a blind eye to non-classroom behaviour issues such as bullying or truancy. Many teachers are relieved when the potentially disruptive element fails to show up and it is always easier to let bullying happen on the periphary than to challenge it). The teachers in Morton's department would boast about not reporting truancy from their lessons. The pupils boasted about what they were allowed to get up to when they did attend. They loved those lessons because there was no work involved.

The weak managers in too many schools repeat the same behaviours. that allowed Morton to continue unquestioned Firstly they lock themselves in offices and actively don't engage with either pupils or teaching staff. The excuse for this is that they are dealing with budgets and meetings and the like. The second thing they do is turn a blind eye to difficult problems. The third thing they do is to is to turn everything back on the regular staff. More specifically they turn it onto the staff who work the hardest and commit the most, as they are the one who are wont to highlight problems and shine a light on weak management.

In no area is this more stark than in dealing with illness. Hard working teachers are more likely to eventually get exhausted and stressed and take time off ill. For many this signals the end of their career. Not because they don't recover, but because they are pushed out. Partly, this is heads finding an easy budget cut that looks good on their own CV. Force out a 10 or 20 year veteran and you can replace them with a newly qualified and much cheaper youngster. But partly this is also a good way to explain away failure. Push the blame onto someone who is ill with stress. It's easy. You can explain away league-table underachievement by putting it onto the member of staff. And it's not only heads. If someone in a department disappears for a few months other teachers can overstate the impact on their own performance in so many ways. 'We were carrying them for months before they were signed off. We had to cover their absence and work so much harder to plug the gap. It's unfair that on their return they get special treatment." And, oddly, there is still an attitude amongst many that stress illness is a sign of weakness or a pointer to incompetence. I have heard people who've been ill themselves espouse this point of view. Peter Harvey likely suffered this. There is also a cavalier attitude to confidentiality. Managers and other backstabbing staff often gleefully tell the students that someone is off with stress (in my experience these are people who will point the finger at anyone for any reason to deflect from their own insecurity or incompetence). Many's the time I've been supplying and been told in great detail about the medical history of the person I'm covering for, as well as which teacher revealed it to the pupils. It was given in evidence that Peter Harvey was being taunted by the pupils for having time off for stress. Who told them why he was off?

I remember when I was at school and we had a student teacher. Clearly a nice guy but not tough enough for our school (which was in an odd geographical position - it took about 60 percent of students from one of the poorest council estates in the country and the other 40 from the other side of the tracks: decent middle-class kids). The student was fine with my class - the decent middle class set one, but suffered the worst the others could dish out to him. Eventually he left, having been physically attacked a few times and gone through all the threats, intimidation etc. At the time even I believed that certain individuals had caused him to quit, rather than institutional failure or any other factors. They were the ones in my own school who perpetrated the violence, the disruption, the bullying, vandalism and chaos. These people are like Al Qaeda in that they will try to cause as much chaos as possible and, even if something is nothing to do with them, will claim the credit anyway. Two or three years later they continued perpetrating the myth that it was they who caused his demise, and wore it as a badge of honour. I am wondering if Peter Harvey's victim was maybe one of these types.

In some cases I know of, the returning teacher is simply punished by the management until they quit. Someone I know had three months off and was then put under an observation regime for six months. This meant, despite a decade of truly excellent performance, a requirement for them basically to prove their competence on a daily basis - turning in detailed lesson plans to management (thus even more workload), accounting for every moment of their time, having senior managers and even outside observers randomly placed at the back of their lessons. It was a campaign to make him resign.

It worked.

Which leads to paranoia. All that I've read suggests that Peter Harvey returned to work too early. I am willing to bet that he was also in fear of his job and maybe claimed to be coping when he wasn't. Show one chink in your armour and the self-serving vultures start circling. When I got really ill, I'd seen it coming a ways of and had already approached the school asking for help. I was ignored, of course. After I was signed off on the insistence of my doctor it quickly became clear that the local authority occupational health and the head of the school were acting in cahoots to offer the opposite of the support that I deserved and was expecting.

Others in my school suffered the same threats and ultimatums as I did. It was clearly policy to use illness as an excuse to 'weed' people out. One teacher I knew, John, was stalked and terrorised by a small gang of sixth formers. They had caused endless problems in all their classes and throughout the school but the school refused to kick them out because the head of sixth form didn't want the hassle and it cost a cut in grants to have them leave. Tacit instructions were issued to let them drift along until they voluntarily dropped out in the last few months of their course, after the grants deadline had passed and the school was therefore allowed to keep the money. John cared about his other students and grew sick of these wasters disrupting classes, distracting others and risking everyones' hard work. So he stuck his neck out and insisted they be thrown off his course. When this didn't happen they lorded it over him, causing deliberate disruption to punish him for standing up to them. They were really only in sixth form to get the weekly EMA grant as free spending money and couldn't have a teacher spoiling it for them. He refused to let them into his classroom. His car was vandalised. The school took no action of course. (we were all supposed to fill in 'violence to staff' reports which the head then sent to the LEA for recording. It was well know that these were always binned, so people just stopped filling them in) Continuing with his classroom ban he took the argument to his union and threatened to get the police involved over the vandalism. Somehow the students involved got wind of the union complaint and the threats of calling the police so he then found himself followed home and stones were thrown through his windows. The students and their gang would stand nightly outside his house shouting threats and insults, turning out his bin and throwing stones at the house. One night he set out to walk to the local shop and was jumped and beaten up.

On recovering and returning to school a couple of months later he was treated to the interrogation and given the blame for abandoning his pupils in the lead up to exams. The entire department's poor results were pinned on him and, as a 30 year veteran of the school, he was placed under a similar observation regime to the one I detailed above. It cracked him and his doctor signed him off again. An agreement for early retirement was reached and at 55 he was thrown on the scrapheap to be replaced by a cheaply paid 22 year old.

As I said when the Harvey case first came to light, it is a surprise that these kind of things don't happen more often. Maybe the positive is that there are plenty of schools that look after their staff and students and take everyones' welfare very seriously. Extremely poor behaviour by individual pupils is generally dealt with in some way or another. There is a cohort who simply get moved on every six months or so, bouncing in and out of Referral Units and into a neverending series of new schools. But I know there are plenty of schools who do not take staff and student welfare as seriously as they should. Maybe the sheer numbers of teachers who leave the profession after only a short time is a self-regulating safety valve. Most get out before they reach the position Peter Harvey got into.

today : a pretty good stop-gap

Haven't been able to finish anything recently - sleep pattern's gone and all that. I thought about breaking my election embargo but instead I'm posting Lissie's song 'In Sleep', which has got under my skin recently. Imagine if someone told you this was some long lost Stevie Nicks song from 1978 then you might believe them. In my opinion Lissie has a better voice than Stevie, and it would be a travesty if she didn't make it big time. It's nice to have so many excellent female artists around at the moment. But Lissie is a bit different: her voice and music doesn't sound like a girl, but like a proper woman (like Lucinda Williams next to Taylor Swift, for example. Or Lily Allen next to Kate Bush, or Jenny Lewis next to Harriet Wheeler).

today : A face in the misty light

One of the very few winners in the election campaign is, in my 'umble opinion, the BBCs Laura Kuenssberg. In the realm of political reporting recently she has really managed to shine.

I think her gender and age has something to do with it. You only have to look at the debates. Sky's debate featured four middle aged public schoolboys - two of whom, Clegg and Adam Boulton, are alumni of the same school, Westminster. I wonder if Laura presents politicians with a different prospect than the self-satisfied, clubby types who seem to dominate political reporting.

Boulton, Andrew Neil, Nick Robinson, Andrew Marr et al are all of a rather traditional type. White middle class Oxbridge boys with a background in newspapers. All members of the same self-perceived heavyweights club as many of the politicians they are dealing with. Watch Neil on The Daily Politics and he constantly plays alpha male to his always female sidekicks, despite their own credentials. Anita Anand and Shelagh Fogerty are no airheads yet Neil can never let them be anything other than subservient, as he chums along with his politician mates. It would not be too shocking if he asked them to go make a cup of tea luv. Like the others Neil seems to approach interviewees rather pugilistically.

But Laura is a different and welcome proposition. A smart and confident young woman. As the BBC trumpets the 'clarity' of its election coverage (would that they were focusing on brevity), it is she whom incisively and clearly explains the issues in a way that is neither patronising to her topic or the viewer, or flying off into those strange flights of metaphor that so many correspondents use to try and trumpet their own cleverness. It is she who interviews with subtlety and precision, never appearing to try and impose her opinion on the subject and utilising the lack of flying testosterone to her and the viewers' advantage.

Nobody should be surprised. The world is packed with intelligent and highly capable women both young and old. But news, like politics rarely reflects this. Both are way behind where they should be. News still generally treats its women as eye candy (even though, thankfully in Britain, we have not succumbed to the non-journalist bimbo presenter model) and leaves the 'important' stuff - such as anchoring elections - to the old boys. Laura is an example of why this is an outmoded notion. Who knows, maybe they'll even allow her on screen once she hits 45.


* I know I said I wouldn't write about the election but this isn't really about the election, I think.

today : I fall in love with a bag

As Howard Jones so succinctly and melodically. What is love (or in Howard's words, what is lo-o-o-o-o-o-o-ove anyway...?)?

I ask this question that has occupied the best efforts of countless philosophers, poets, songwriters, novelists, newspaper columnists and most everyone else for the whole of time because I am pretty sure that I have found an answer, at least, to what it isn't. And what love isn't, is the feelings we have for a green reinforced plastic shopping bag.

For reasons I shall not go into here, I was standing outside the 3rd Floor Cafeteria of the Huddersfield University Library the other day waiting for someone to get back from printing out some documents, and, over the course of about ten minutes I counted 4 people walking past, carrying identical green reinforced plastic bags, each bearing the statement. "I 'heart' my big green bag". It was clearly a fashion amongst some of the students. I am sure it denotes some kind of political allegiance to environmental issues. Maybe the bags were just cheap and sturdy and came from the local supermarket. But the fact that whoever produced them placed a logo and slogan on them reminds me of the fact that EVERYTHING, however workaday and prosaic, is logoed and marketed within an inch of its life.

Now I know that one of the functions of modern market capitalism is to encourage either real or fake emotional responses to objects (as such as I 'love' my new trainers, although, in spite of the marketeers best efforts, this is little to do with brand loyalty or modishness, rather the fact that their design allows me to walk comfortably. They are unique in this aspect, but I would switch brands in a flash if I found others that allowed me to walk even more comfortably. Also, within reason, supply and demand has little impact on the price I'm prepared to pay. Unless the cost of shoes is totally and ridiculously prohibitive I cannot afford to not buy shoes that are comfy, as my feet have extreme special needs and without the right shoes I just can't walk at all. I do have a couple of pairs of bespoke boots, the cost of which would make even a Sex and The City character recoil in some horror, but for everyday I want as close to everyday as I can get).

Now, even though it is pretty silly and not a little twisted to declare love for, for example, items of clothing, telephones or kitchen equipment (musical instruments are a whole different thing so I'm generally including them out, although there is more kudos attached to a Fender guitar, even though a cheaper Samick is often made by the same people or even much superior. Real musicians know this and find their instrument - like Brian May's guitar made from a fireplace, or Willy Nelson's guitar with a big hole in it - whatever the brand). I can accept that emotional projection does take place for a variety of reasons. Not least in the prestige that becomes attached, or is cynically attached pre-sale by advertising, product placement endorsements etc, to certain things in the name of fashion.

It's a powerful thing. Lucky for me that my comfy trainers are an expensive and specialised skateboard brand, as when I was teaching I noticed one of the main areas that young people will exploit to attack and undermine their teachers (and their peers) is to criticize their dress. But it's not really about how people look, as much as how their choice of labels fits in with what is acceptable. No-name trainers are a no-no, as they elicit the worst derision. Any budget brand the same. In the adult world there is much more chance of people flocking to an inexpensive, quality item. The Gap one pocket T shirt is an example from the 90s. Friends of mine brag about their 6 quid supermarket jeans (the irony here is that their children refuse to wear anything so vulgar and whilst the parents save on their own clothes, it is so they can spend premium amounts on their childrens' brand obsessions). For kids, who have no control over their own money and generally have a very vague idea of what cost and budgets mean, even a quality item that is inexpensive deserves contempt.

I noticed amongst kids who are under the defined 'poverty' level, the brand becomes more important. For them, it is about having one marquee item - a phone, trainers, shoes, a sweatshirt or T shirt, a bag or a hat that advertises its (and their) brand worthiness. This item is proudly displayed. So they don't mind contravening school dress codes if it means they can come along, even for a day, in their new trainers, or their new sweatshirt, or hat. They will take the punishment from adults, because it is a small price to pay to earn the brand respect of their peers. After all, all of their other clothing and accessories are as cheap as possible. Generic supermarket fare.

The brands that prevail are the ones that are most highly advertised, and also the ones that don't exceed a certain price. As well as bombarding kids with advertising I guess that companies like Nike very carefully price their trainers and other stuff just at the edge of what people can afford and justify. Any cheaper and they are selling their brand short; more expensive and they are cutting themselves out of the market, as parents just cannot afford them. The same principle applies to ghetto cars - usually cheap models pimped piece by piece, lower end sportier models that are cheap to run and get parts for. Hence the global popularity of Hondas and the like. I drove a 2 door Civic for a while and a guy I worked with, who'd grown up a Pakistani ghetto kid and become a teacher, was offended that I didn't festoon it with body kit and bass tubes. He himself drove a Mitsubishi that he spent weekends modifying.

Kids and teenagers also have a very narrow perception window of what is expensive and therefore worth having. Anything over £120 is deeply uncool, because it is just too expensive for most parents to afford or justify. Items priced higher than this are not really marketed to kids, so they have never really heard of them either. No mistake that that this upper price point roughly counts for most trainers, games consoles, phones, entry-level ipods and many other items. Higher-priced items risk narrowing their market too far. I have been laughed at for wearing Ralph Lauren, by people who are wearing Polo.

Many's the time, as an adult, I've experienced brand bullying from children. As I've mentioned above, the most important thing for me is to have comfortable shoes. I just cannot function without them, as due to my foot issues the pain level I experience is already close to intolerable. Without comfy shoes I just cannot work. As a teacher this was even more crucial, as most of my day was spent standing, walking and moving around. Which means that I never wear Nike. As well as a knee-jerk aversion to them, they just don't fit me and never have. Working in an inner city school with a mainly non-white student body I found that any brand other than Nike was seen as worthless by the kids. So my rather expensive DC shoes were used against me, even though I explained why I was wearing them. The black and asian kids don't do skate culture - for them it is all about Nike because it's all about rappers and American sports. The Asian kids did have a slightly different perspective and a fondness for 'New England' American outdoor gear like Timberland and Rockport boots and Paul and Shark Jackets. - specific, it seems to them in the local area.

A year later I taught in a different school in a middle class white area. My Globes were a source of excitement and respect amongst the white boys, as they were the kind of specialist, expensive, imported skate-shoes that they coveted. The irony was that I'd bought them for 10 quid in an outlet shop with no real idea whether they were cool or not (the replacement pair referred to above actually were expensive and imported - but that's just unlucky). The cool brands in the middle class areas are broader. The rules are also more relaxed. Many of the students are happy to wear mid-price uniform to school and keep their expensive clothes for their own time or non uniform days (which are like watching adverts for fashionable branded items). This is partly due to a stricter regimen of following the school rules, but also because the middle class kids have more than one expensive item, so don't feel the need to show it off.

In poorer white areas, Nike is king. But the models that are most cool are also the cheaper versions. Trainers above 50 quid are extremely rare - last years outlet mall Nikes are the standard, and as peer groups create their own notions of prestige the unaffordable models are ironically uncool. But the higher level stuff - the sweatshirts, knitwear, coats and bags are more in the department store range than the designer range. Basically, clothes that are not from the supermarket are generally badges of opulence, although I did once teach in a school where there seemed to be a local prestige attached to clothes from the newly opened Sainsbury's, ahead of the more established Asda and Tesco.

And it grips like a vice. I once witnessed a girl in my class showing off her new Nike top, whilst simultaneously selling the bag it came in to a classmate for a couple of quid. I assume it was so that the classmate could brandish the bag around school as proof that she she'd also got a Nike top, but just wasn't wearing it today.

Which is understandable. When you're poor almost everywhere you turn you are treated as a reject on a minute by minute basis. You'll do pretty much anything to try and fit in.

today : a topical musical interlude

As it looks like the Volcano Ash-Cloud Aeroplane Crisis (as Mark Radcliffe pointed out on his show yesterday - it MUST be a Fall song title) is fluttering back down to the ground of normality, I thought it was time to post my favourite Volcano themed song of all time...One Way ticket by Eruption. Just joking, it's Volcano Girls by Veruca Salt

today: the girl who sold gazillions of books

I'm usually immune to hyped books, as I am immune to hyped films, music, TV or anything really. But enough people whose opinions I respect seemed to like Stig Larrson's Millenium books that I bought and read the first one.

Then the second and the third.

I found them gripping reading. The reason I think that they work so well is that they operate successfully on many levels. As straightforward thrillers, they possess pace, action, mystery and all that stuff in bucketloads (despite the odd ponderous explicative sections). But they also have a number of critical agendas and political points to make, as well as educating the non-Swede about aspects of recent Swedish history.

Rightly, much of the critical focus has been on Larsson's main character - Lisbeth Salander. Invincible female characters are rare in non-romantic fiction. So rare, in fact, that many reviewers have lazily compared her to Lara Croft, as Lara is about the only other female heroine to speak of in recent years. But I see parallels between two other characters. Lisbeth has the tenacity and disarming looks of Veronica Mars (plus the computer skills of Veronica's sidekick Mack) and the skill-set of Modesty Blaise or Jason Bourne.

Whatever- it's clear that Salander is a pure fantasy figure. There is something somewhat unsettling about the fetishisation of her pubescent physique and childish aura matched with her rapacious sexual appetite. There is also something rather traditional about the way she has to rely on male father figures, even whilst denying that she needs them. The author spends a lot of time condemning mens' belittlement and mistreatment of women, but in the end Salander needs her heroes to survive. In book two especially, the lesbian sex scenes are just a smidgen too frequent and graphic than the plot requires and the descriptions of sexual assault are uncomfortably detailed and lingering. And as well as being a casual bisexual, Salander is in her early twenties, yet declares desire for both her father figures Blomquist the journalist and Dragansky, her boss at the security firm. Both are pretty much double her age.

And even without knowing too much about Larsson, it appears that Blomquist himself is a wish fulfilment fantasy too. In a book written by a middle aged campaigning journalist, a middle aged campaigning journalist ends up having sex with pretty much every woman he meets of any age, whilst exposing corporate and political corruption and escaping various assassination attempts with relative ease. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe that pornographic British stereotyping of the Swedish as the shag-bunnies of Europe is true. Maybe in Sweden the average campaigning journalist is not a beer-bellied, boozy, balding pencil wielder but James Bond.

One of the levels on which the novels succeed is in the absurdity of their plotting. They are on the very edge of believable, but somehow do not spin into the realm of the incredible. Convenient connected coincidences and conspiracies abound (Blomquist just happens to be walking past when Salander is attacked near her apartment, he just happens to be visiting his friends moments after they've been killed, Salander just happens to leave her fingerprints on both a gun and a coffee cup to make her prime suspect in a triple murder, whilst being Salander's guardian, Bjurmann, just happens to be also caught up in the sex-trafficking that Blomquist's colleagues are investigating and Salander's father and brother are also deep into, without trying Cortez uncovers dodgy business deals made by Berger's new boss, Berger just happens to start a new job with someone she went to school with but doesn't recognise, Blomquist happens to know someone who knows someone who works in the hospital in Gothenburg etc etc) and everyone is rather intimate in a way that is totally unrealistic. You come away from the books believing that Stockholm (a capital city of 750,000 people) is more like a tiny village with about 50 important inhabitants plus some other folk. But the complexity and gripping originality of the stories means that it's all pretty easy to forgive. Even the strange insertion of a heroic championship boxer in book three becomes acceptable. In fact the audacity to use things like coincidence to such a degree are signs of Larsson's burgeoning confidence as a writer the further the trilogy proceeds.

Despite mixing literary and film genres - police procedural, hi-tec thriller, international crime novel, chase movie, spy thriller, political thriller, Woodward and Bernstein conspiracy, existential Swedish art film, gangster saga, generation x nihilist slacker movie and soapy bonkbuster - just to name a few, the trilogy remains resolutely traditional. The goodies are pretty much all good, the baddies are badder than bad and everyone gets the comeuppance they deserve. Nothing wrong with that. It would be churlish to ask any reader to invest in 1700 pages without getting a deeply satisfying conclusion.

It's a trick that's extremely hard to pull off. Novels that pretty simple, but just beneath the surface are complex enough to exert fascination as well as pure entertainment. When I finished book three at 2.30 a.m., I immediately wanted to go onto book four to see where Larsson would take his characters. Then I remembered he was dead, and that book four was never finished.

today : all hail procreation

Parents. One of the things that one notices during an election campaign is that Parents are a really important voter block. Barely a minute goes buy without some policy giveaway or sympathetic plea is addressed to them. But nearly everyone is parents. The effect of this is actually to, by default or design, slap the face of those of us who aren't parents out of choice or maybe bad luck. A year or so ago I went to the supermarket. As all the disabled spots were taken up I still needed to park near the door, so I placed my car - complete with obvious disabled credentials - in a parent-and-child spot. There were several free. On returning to the car I was confronted by a woman who pulled into the next space. Seeing that I was without an accompanying child she started abusing me for ignoring the rules. I really wanted to explain to her the concept of the teleological suspension of the ethical, but didn't, because she was on a roll. I was even branded a 'typical man' - whatever that is. The other day I was talking to someone and relating to them a more recent parking incident, this time when I challenged someone who'd taken a disabled spot without a badge. My friend sympathised with me by saying how utterly frustrated he was when he found people stealing the parents' parking spaces at his local Tesco. It took me some time to explain the difference: that disabled parking exists to enable people to lead as close to a normal life as possible, that it is, for many disabled folks, the difference between, for example, shopping and not shopping. Parent and child spaces are merely a marketing tool for the supermarkets to try and entice parents to shop with them. He understood, but many people don't seem to. What has happened is that parents have been targeted as a marketing sub-group and flattered into believing they are somehow special. Now I don't want to decry parenthood. It seems to be a pretty difficult and quite necessary activity. I can also understand why it triggers a specific set of emotions. Not all parents are smug egotists. Even the ones who define themselves totally by their offspring. But there does seem to be a creeping number who are filled with boundless self-congratulation on the grounds that they've enacted a genetic necessity and joined the majority of adults in what remains a pretty normal thing. They demand special treatment as if somehow they are more heroic, overworked, caring and necessary than anyone else. They've bought into the marketing strategy that was designed to flatter them into parting with money.

today : the utter madness of salad

I don't have a garden. Just a little yard in the back of my house. Nevertheless I do my best. Come the height of Summer it's bright with flowers. It's a small pleasure that costs little in terms of time and money, but returns disproportionate joy.

Yesterday I was replanting some sunflower seedlings and planning to rejuvenate my herb pots with fresh compost and plants, ready for the Summer to arrive. I am pretty jealous of my good friend GM who actually has an allotment near his house, where he is planning to grow fresh vegetables for the family. Even though I'd be physically incapable of upkeeping an allotment of my own, I remember fondly from childhood the allotment that my parents had for several years. It always springs to mind when I listen to June Tabor's splendid version of the song 'A Place Called England':

"I rode out on a bright May morning
Like a hero in a song
Looking for a place called England
Trying to find where I belong
Couldn't find the old flood meadow
Or the house that I once knew
No trace of the little river
Or the garden where I grew

I saw town and I saw country
Motorway and sink estate
Rich man in his rolling acres
Poor man still outside the gate
Retail park and burger kingdom
Prairie field and factory farm
Run by men who think that England's
Only a place to park their car

But as the train pulled from the station
Through the wastelands of despair
From the corner of my eye
A brightness filled the filthy air
Someone's grown a patch of sunflowers
Though the soil is sooty black
Marigolds and a few tomatoes
Right beside the railway track

Down behind the terraced houses
In between the concrete towers
Compost heaps and scarlet runners
Secret gardens full of flowers
Meeta grows the scent of roses
Right beneath the big jet's path
Bid a fortune for her garden
Eileen turns away and laughs



The video is really just audio- sorry about that, couldn't find a performance one

The song is about someone who finds the old traditional ways of England, agriculture and folk customs hidden away in amongst the prosaic ugliness of the modern landscape and issues a call to arms for people to reclaim the land.

When it came to tea-time I had some lovely salad with a portion of new potatoes.

Later, I was watching the news on CNN. Of course, everything was all about the Apocalyptic Icelandic Volcano Ash Cloud. In amongst the various reports was one about how the lack of flights to and from Europe was putting people out of work in Nairobi. The reporter - Zane Vergee - interviewed people who packed and prepared fresh vegetables and cut flowers for the British and European supermarkets. Mange tout, chillies, sugar snap peas, avocados. But with no flights to transport the produce, there was no work to do. All the flowers and vegetables were being given away to farmers for cattle feed, or composted back into the soil.

Something made me check what I'd eaten earlier in the day. The potatoes, which were extremely cheap, had come from Israel, the salad from Spain.

Which, if you think about it for a second or less, is clearly insane on almost every level. The mint that garnished my spuds came from 12 inches outside my back door. All it took was to open the door, lean out and snip some fresh leaves. Yet the spuds themselves have been flown and driven thousands of rather pointless, carbon-packed miles to get to my plate.

My niece is currently one of the many English people stranded abroad, in Spain. The flimsy salad for my plate had travelled as far as she did to go on holiday.

Why do I get the feeling that we have become so ridiculous that the volcanic dust cloud is nature's way of reminding us who is really in charge?

today : let's bomb Iceland

After all, they took most of our Cod, then they accidentally lost most of our money, and now they've ruined everyone's holidays with their great big apocalyptic cloud of ash. That's before we get started on Sigur Ros's plinky-plonky talentless-children-playing-on-a-church-hall-piano dirges all over the X factor and every nature bloody programme not to mention the supremely annoying vocals, dancing and trumpet playing of Einar Orn and his tiresome pixie sidekick
also Magnus Magnusson, Eggert Magnusson and, perhaps worst of all, everyone involved in the TV show Lazytown. (actually, I quite like Bjork's songs Violently Happy and Isobel, but surely we cannot forgive her dressing up as a duck)

Anyway, a couple of Trident missiles should do the job, unless the engines get clogged up on the way and we end up eradicating Shetland.

today : too much of that snow white

A long time ago, I wrote about a mythical episode of Top of The Pops that introduced me to both Stevie Wonder and Bob Marley, which probably never happened. Another musical memory I have is of The Richard Skinner Show - on Radio 1 Saturday afternoon in the early to mid eighties. This one is definitely a mash up of two different editions, as the dates do not match at all - by 4 years. But on this one mythical afternoon Skinner played three records. First was Blood and Roses by the Smithereens (their first album, Especially for You is still great - kind of an American cousin to Lloyd Cole's Rattlesnakes in that it was traditional melodic guitar music with great lyrics and every track is excellent), second was Down to The Bone by Danny and Dusty (again, their one album The Lost Weekend is still great 25 years on). The third was Buffalo Gals by Malcolm McClaren and The World Famous Supreme Team.



It was one of those moments when a piece of music or sound hits you because it is just so original and fresh. In fact even today the sort of echoey scream and the 'waap...waap' voices sound fresh, even if the beatbox is a little outdated and McClaren's dance calls were absurd-sounding. Rap had been around for a while but this was the first time I'd ever heard 'scratching' and the collage-of-found/stolen-sound idea that has dominated pop music ever since. Clearly, it'd been going on for a while, but to a teenager like me who didn't live in the South Bronx or have the cash to buy rare imported vinyl (even if I'd been aware of it) it opened my ears to this new way of making records, as well as somehow putting on the radio something that had been going on in my head.

McClaren tributes in the past day or two have concentrated mainly on his Sex Pistols stunts. Perhaps rightly, but they kind of neglected the records he put out under his own name and his other non-Pistols stuff. Who knows how much real input he had in the actual music? But the quality was always higher than might be expected. Interestingly, for such an apparent cynic, he never really dealt in depression, and in Double Dutch and Something's Jumping in Your Shirt, McClaren gave us two of the most truly joyful singles of the past twenty years.



Did Duck Rock do more for 'World Music' than Graceland or Peter Gabriel's work with Real World? I don't know, but Double Dutch was the first time I'd ever heard high life guitar playing on a pop single.



And then there was Bow Wow Wow. People have forgotten the side of this project that expanded the underage singer concept into floating the idea of a very dodgy nudie mag called Chicken (which these days, even as a controversial suggestion would lead to lynchings in the press). But the music was exciting and packed with energy. I still return to C30C60C90 Go! as an example of the breathless rush that a youthful band can put on vinyl (or in this case especially, cassette). In my record collection it sort of acts as a companion piece to The Plastics brilliant Robot (lyrics: IBM, NSK, CIA, TDK...we are...Robot). Would that we had records today of such insane simplicity and ideas.



And of course Bow Wow Wow gave birth to Adam and The Ants, which shaved off the rough edges but still used the twangy guitar/Burundi drums combination. Then that kinda fused with New Romantic stuff and invaded America. Punk spawned indie, which in turn spawned a million self-starting bands and artists: ripples that arguably spread out and are now the tsunami that is sweeping away the traditional record companies. Which is kind of the point of McClaren. His talent seemed to be the ability to corral ideas, catalyse, make connections and presage trends, even if some of his schemes and enthusiasms were more about throwing enough stuff at the wall that some of it stuck. But when was that bad thing? The above mentioned Peter Gabriel does much the same, and at least half of what John Peel played was tripe.

My main thought about him is that he was a cultural thinker - possibly even, on reflection, more important than anyone realised. Someone well of worthy of an in-depth biography that strips away the self-publicising and gimmicks. A key player of ideas that have lasted longer and spread further than even he imagined. I always thought that McClaren's punk ideal was borne from ideology. Somehow he managed to make Situationist ideas relevant to the UK and slip it into popular culture. No mean feat. With his Waltz Darling concept album he was the first to really start co-opting fashion, vogueing and the sort of gay culture than surrounds haute couture into the mainstream. And look where it is now 20 years on - dominant.



Anyway, for me, in the end it is the records. The split channel mix of Buffalo Gals, the surprisingly beautiful and melancholy Madame Butterfly, the chaotic excitement of early Bow Wow Wow, the soaring voices singing "Hey Ebo - Ebo- Ebonettes."

today : My Easter message to the world

To be honest, it's pretty likely that God and Jesus didn't exist, and that the Easter story is some fable. That doesn't mean to say that it's worthless, and that people who believe in it are stupid. At the very worst, it's probably just their way of dealing with the nagging discomfort of the great unanswered questions. Any stupidity they possess and act out in the name of their belief belongs to them, and not their faith or their God.

But Happy Easter anyway, to believers of all faiths, agnostics and atheists alike. If you are one of the latter two, then use it as an excuse to pick daffodils and eat chocolate.

And if God (under the guise of whichever faith) doesn't exist, it can be profoundly depressing, as it means that meaning is something that we'll probably never understand. In the meantime, just to demonstrate that there are some things still worth giving a shit about, as well as daffodils and chocolate, I give you Artur Rubinstein playing Chopin's 2nd Nocturne in E flat major and Maria Callas's perfect version of the Schubert Ave Maria.

today : I started a blog by The Sprites

This song by The Sprites always amused me.

I started a blog which nobody read
When I went to work
I blogged there instead

I started a blog which nobody viewed
It might be in cache
The topics include:

"George Bush is an evil moron"
"What's the story with revolving doors?"
"I'm in love with a girl who doesn't notice me"
"Nobody hates preppies anymore"

I started a blog but nobody came
No issues were raised
No comments were made

I started a blog which nobody read
I'll admit it wasn't that great
But if you must know here's what it said:

"100 of my favorite albums"
"200 people I can't stand"
"400 movies you must see soon"
"10 celebrities (4 of whom I might assasinate)"

I started a blog, I sent you the link
I wanted the world (and you) to know what I think

I started a blog, but when I read yours
It made me forget
what I had started mine for