Month: July 2003

Oh dear. Over the weekend, E4 began showing the current US series of Big Brother. After spending an unhealthy proportion of yesterday glued to the story so far of the antics of these 12 unfeasibly good looking young people (and Jack), I believe Sally and myself are, for want of a better word, hooked. After the new depths of inanity plumbed by the UK version this year, the constant stream of Survivor-style challenges, contests for head of house, alliances and whispered nomination discussions (neither of which would be allowed in our version), makes a refreshing change. One of them has already been kicked out for throwing oversized chess pieces and plastic chairs around (well known dangerous weapons that they are); two of them got it on and then he voted her out the next day; all of which is not to mention the fact that 10 of the 13 original contestants are sharing the house with their ex-boyfriends or ex-girlfriends.

The only thing that might save us is the fact that it is only on E4, and we therefore have to be at my house to watch it.

Under normal circumstances, the only way you can visit The Houses of Parliament is by writing to your MP and asking them to arrange either for you to take a tour, or to sit in the strangers’ gallery during a debate. Now, I don’t know much about my MP, (the honourable member for Brentford & Isleworth, Mrs Ann Keen). I didn’t vote for her, for a start, and her career in government seems rather undistinguished: Judging from her voting history, she is happy to toe the party line (she voted for the war in Iraq, for example). Beyond that, all that I can determine from most of the questions she has asked in Parliament (which are all either about rubbish collection, recycling or the sewage works up the road) is that she thinks my home smells of shit.

However, during the summer recess, anybody can take a guided tour of the palace of Westminster. I was there on Saturday for the first day of this summer’s tours, and found it to be an absolutely fascinating experience. The tour offers a potted history of the buildings, the British monarchy, and the evolution of parliamentary democracy in this country, (one snippet I found amusing: when the monarchy was restored after the end of the republic that resulted from the civil war, the new King Charles had all those who had conspired against his father rounded up and tried for treason, including Cromwell, even though he had died some years earlier. The King had his body exhumed, taken to Westminster hall, tried for (and found guilty of) treason. Cromwell’s dead body was then hung, drawn and quartered).

The main attraction, for me, was the chance to visit the two houses, but you also get to see the Queen’s robing room, used when she arrives to open Parliament each year (where one of the doors leads, apparently, to a convenience – not part of the tour, sadly – for the exclusive use of the monarch), the central lobby (as seen on many an evening news report), and the gloomy Westminster hall (where many deceased monarchs have lain in state, as well as being the venue for trials involving dead bodies of revolutionaries).

I’d thoroughly recommend it, if you have an hour or so to spare over the next month. This tourist stuff’s great.

Very much enjoying listening to the Kings Of Leon album, which arrived from cd-wow yesterday. I was, once again, disappointed to see that I have received the “copy-control” version of the CD, but then reassured to find that, as with my copy of Radiohead’s Hail To The Thief, the copy protection doesn’t work. You just click “cancel” when you put the CD in your PC and it asks you if you’d like a copy-protected or non copy-protected version. I can then copy the CD onto my mp3 player as usual.

BMG offer some (not very) helpful information about their copy control policy on their website (www.bmg-copycontrol.info), but they fail to mention that they appear to be operating some kind of copy control honour system.

If you can overcome the feeling of being a tourist in your own home (although not literally in your own home, obviously, I mean that would be silly. Unless you’re the Queen or something), then I would thoroughly recommend the Jack The Ripper walking tour that I went on last night. The experience rather reminded me of one of those history programmes you see on BBC2 at about 7.30 in the evening, but without the reconstructions and Simon Schama. It wasn’t much of a walk, admittedly, probably covering less than half a mile over the course of the hour and a half tour, but the commentary provided a good overview of something I personally knew little about.

It was also interesting to see how the contrast between the City and the East End – just a few streets from each other – is still very much in evidence.

And while I’m on the subject of learning about London, this flash tube map, showing Harry Beck’s original 1933 design, the current map and the geographical location of the stations in zone 1, is well worth checking out. (Although I suspect that, even here, the geographical map is taking slight liberties with reality for the purposes of design – either that or the drivers on the circle line have to do a couple of nifty handbrake turns to get round those corners).

UPDATE: Pete Alerts me to this image, which shows the rest of the tube map as it really is. Look at how far Hounslow and Oakwood are from each other…

My ability to fall asleep at inopportune moments knows no bounds. Nightclubs, trains, hotels where construction work is taking place noisily outside, the flight path of the world’s largest airport – you name it, and I can probably fall asleep there. On Friday night, it was all I could do to struggle through 30 minutes of Punch Drunk Love before realising that I had spent a greater proportion of that time dozing than I had done awake, like some ageing narcoleptic, and crawled off to bed due to the fact that I probably wasn’t doing the film justice. Ah, such is the rock n’ roll lifestyle I lead these days.

Somehow, despite the early night, I spent most of Saturday feeling utterly exhausted. In fact, the only time over the weekend when my powers of sleep deserted me was Sunday night, which is rather disappointing and made Monday morning more than a little unpleasant, to say the least.

I spent Saturday afternoon at Kew Gardens with Sal. It’s the third time I’ve been there, but the first time it has been noticeably hotter outside the Palm house than inside. I was also surprised to discover that there’s a mini aquarium display thing underneath the Palm house showing various colourful tropical fish. It must have always been there and I’ve just never noticed it, but it did provide a diverting few minutes, as we watched a small fish chase one of the larger fish around while trying, unsuccessfully, to eat it.

On Sunday, Sal’s mum and her cousin returned from travelling in Europe, and after the not-being-around-when-their-initial-flight-arrived-due-to-Glastonbury debacle, we were sort of obliged to go and meet her off the coach and help with the bags. Now, I’d assumed that we’d be going somewhere logical, like Victoria coach station, or at least have arranged a meeting place that there’s only one of, but that would have been far too simple. Beforehand, though, we dropped in on Claire’s impromptu, “it’s a sunny day, let’s have a barbeque”, barbeque just down the road in Clapham south, for about 30 minutes, before we had to rush off (although we were there long enough to get the chance to see Claire’s excellent glasto photos, which included a classic picture of my head emerging, tortoise-like, blinking, through the tent flap one morning). Once it crept towards 3, we had to head over to Kensington, on the basis of what I now realise were the flimsiest of details: a text message indicating that their tour would drop them at the Hilton on “Holland Park Road”.

I now know rather more about the location of Hilton hotels in west London than I really need to, but the invaluable snippet of information that I will take from yesterday is that there are two Hilton hotels on either side of Holland Park. One is close to, but not on, the suspiciously small and residential Holland Park Road that we headed to; the other one is on Holland Park Avenue, over the other side of the park. I’m sure you can work out what happened for yourself, as events unfolded with a crushing inevitability not unlike they would in some shabby BBC sitcom. We met them in the end of course, some time later, (despite almost missing them again at our second meeting place, High Street Ken tube, after persuading them to get on the tube by themselves…).

Two things caught my eye this morning:

First, there’s this memo to staff at ebay. Must be a fun place to work.

Secondly, some of the ideas on this BBC news page about Ken Livingstone’s offer of £100,000 to anyone who can solve the problem of cooling the underground are fantastic. I vote for the gondolas!

Last night I went drinking and eating curry with my old colleagues. I’m still undecided about the whole issue of whether I made the right decision by taking the new job, but it’s slightly reassuring to realise that nothing ever changes; they’re still bitching about all the same stuff. I was surprisingly pissed afterwards, so much so that I fell asleep on the train and woke up in Feltham (again!) Luckily there was one more train back.

Some time this morning a water main burst up the road in enfield, this caused traffic chaos during the rush hour, but worse than that, the whole of EN2 has no water today, so we’ve got no means of making coffee in the building (we’ve also been asked not to flush the toilets unless it is absolutely necessary!) I’m struggling to stay awake after last night…

Say what you like about the state of London transport, at least it’s doing its best at keeping me fit. The more consistently unreliable the Victoria line, the more training I get for my twice-weekly evening 100 yard dash from the tube to the overground platform at Vauxhall. If you ever happen to be waiting for a train there just before 7, and spot a tall red-faced chap sprint up the last set of stairs, wheezing, and looking annoyed as he finds out that the train is actually delayed and he didn’t need to run after all, then that’s probably me.

If anyone’s ever thinking about livening up the olympics a bit, they could do worse than changing the events into something a bit more realistic (well, it’s probably the second thing you’d do, after just letting them take all the drugs they want to, and seeing what happens).

Yeah, sure, it’s pretty impressive that all those guys can run 100M in less than 10 seconds on a nice clear running track, but what about making it a bit closer to the real world? The hurdles is a step in the right direction, but they don’t go nearly far enough. It’d be much more interesting if they had to sprint up the escalator first (on the left, of course) taking the stairs two at a time, then dodge past the crowds fumbling for their tickets, run along the subway tunnel (on the wrong side, if necessary), apologise to the homeless people, sprint up the stairs to the outside world, dodge more people looking for their tickets, run past the kiosk without stopping to buy anything, and finally up onto the platform. Of course they would have to build wierd new stadia to house these courses. I imagine something a bit like Gladiators, but without Ulrika and Fash, obviously. Then again, they could just give London the 2012 games and have it in the actual tube stations; it’d certainly save on the cost of hosting the games and provide an excuse for our shoddy transport infrastructure at the same time.

This article from yesterday’s Independent makes interesting reading: 20 Lies About The War.

As has been widely reported, AS Byatt this week criticised the Harry Potter books, wondering why so many adults were fanatical about them.

Byatt said: “It is written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated (more exciting, not threatening) mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip.”

For me, one of the strongest indications that she may be correct in saying that would be the story I read in the copy of the Daily Star that the guy next to me on the train was reading this morning. The basic thrust of the article was something along the lines of “snobby author thinks you’re thick but she’s wrong”, backing this up with facts like a comparison between the sales of Possession and the Potter books, as if sales have anything to do with literary value.

Personally, I never really bought into the Potter thing, and reading some of the first book recently did nothing to change my mind; I find the whole thing rather depressing actually, but I don’t want to drag up the old “it’s just a children’s book” argument here. Not that there’s anything necessarily wrong with reading a children’s book; the problem is if that’s the only book you read, which somewhat negates the “but it gets people reading” argument, but I digress.

Anyway, I continue to be amazed by the sheer number of people reading the massive new book. Everytime I get on the train and think that no one is reading it, I look up the other end and sure enough someone is. I mean, I struggled to cart Underworld around for weeks, and that’s nothing compared to the Rowling’s huge hard-backed yellow opus.

So, in honour of Richard Herring’s number plate game (for he, too has seen through the Potter lies), I propose a new game: the Harry Potter game; it’s open to anyone making regular train or bus journeys across any major city in the UK (or further afield I suppose). The object of the game is to see how many people you can spot on any given carriage of a tube/train/bus reading the book at the same time. I think my best so far is 6. Can you do better? Answers on a guestbook or the back of a stuck down email…

Oh, and you’ll need a flask of weak lemon drink.

Wow. Six months after I started this thing, I have reached post #100. Not that there is anything particularly significant about that. It is not as significant, for example, as the point that I will eventually reach at some stage in the (distant) future where the database space allocated to Paste Magazine is all used up, and I have to stump up the cash for some more storage space (or find a different service provider).

It is a nice round number, however, and it’s rather like the fact that there’s nothing particularly significant about reaching, say, the year 2000, given the way the Gregorian Calendar came about, apart from the fact that all the numbers change, you have to get new chequebooks that don’t have 19 pre-printed on them, and the media spend months convincing impressionable Americans in the mid-west that they need to stock up on duct tape in case the computers all self-destruct the moment the clocks change. Anyway, to mark the occasion, I think it’s time for a good, old-fashioned, rant.

I have the vaguest memory, way back in the distant past that was the 1980s, of watching Ben Elton’s TV show (this when he was still “cool”, before Maybe Baby and all those shabby musicals). For some reason I remember only two of his routines, and they’re both about transport (I wonder if this reveals something deeply wrong with my psychological make-up; the inner trainspotter clambering to get out, perhaps).

One routine was the “double seat, double seat, got to get a double seat” running-for-the-train one (for some reason, thanks to this early childhood memory, I still think (adopt Ben Elton voice) “why do they put them on here, they are completely empty” every time I walk past the first class carriages at a mainline station to get to standard class).

The other routine I remember was a response to some new Tory road building initiative. It was quite a well thought out piece that used a metaphor that was something to do with rubbish bins that ultimately made the point that you can widen the roads all you like, but it doesn’t solve the problem. In the end, you just end up with a jammed 6-lane carriageway instead of a jammed 3-lane one.

Unsurprisingly, it looks like he might have been right, with the announcement of a £7BN road-widening scheme to tackle congestion. It’s all very well trying to appease the road lobby with this kind of stuff, but people have to understand that it’s never actually going to solve the transport problem. Like Ben said all those years ago, you just end up with a road twice as big that’s jammed with traffic. Alistair Darling even admits that it is “only a temporary solution”, although he seems quite happy to spend the money anyway, even though the roads are probably going to be totally congested again before they are even finished.

So why not put that £7BN towards improving the shocking state of the public transport network, and actually try to make some kind of long term difference to the underlying problems of the UK’s transport infrastructure? Perhaps if public transport actually represented a real alternative form of transport that was quick, comfortable and efficient, as well as being better for the environment, you might actually be able to convince people to leave their precious cars at home and use it. Maybe then we wouldn’t have to go throwing our weight around in the Middle East quite so much in an attempt to keep the oil going for a few more years. If we carry on like this, though, we are going to run out very soon.

And then we really will be going nowhere.