Please hold the line

I think it was either Sooty or Karl Marx who said that Science and Democracy were the equal halves of the move from the world of necessity to freedom. Now I think about it, Sooty wasn’t much of a talker so it was almost certainly Marx. Or Oprah… I knew that year of Uni Philosophy would come in handy.

Putting democracy to one side for a moment, as appears to be the order of the day around the world, you can certainly see his point when it comes to science and technology.

Anyone who writes a blog probably feels they are excercising their freedom of thoughts. If you log on to Facebook or Twitter every tech-savvy boy and girl in the land gives a 24/7 live-update of their status in concise, 12-word packages the likes of which haven’t been seen since the CIA and Watergate.

Now, I’m no luddite and I’ve embraced all of the above, but please forgive me if you ever try and contact me on the telephone.

There are few things in life that strike a great fear into me. A programme narrated by Janet Street Porter. The thought of watching an episode of Big Brother. Wallpapering. Leek and potato soup. All of these make me weak at the knees and more scared than someone who’s just found out their nextdoor neighbour is a nuclear physicist trialling a new work-at-home scheme.

But for me it’s like finding out Janet Street Porter’s moving in next door with a move to Def Com 3 if my phone rings. Yes I need the latest shiny black gadget-fest phone. Yes it must have a camera capable of taking pictures of Mars, video of braodcast quality, the computing abilities of Nasa and a walkman capable of holding the entire Dylan catalogue. But to be honest I’d be happier if it was incapable of ringing.

It’s not that I don’t want to talk to people, it’s just that very few people contact you out of the blue for good reasons. My email inbox is full everyday of emails telling me of the millions I’ve won in the outer Kazakhstan State lottery, and how many milions of pounds can be put in my account before I finish my bowl of Shreddies courtesy of a crumbling republic just south of North Carolina, but very rarely do these people phone me. Out of the blue phone calls tend to begin, ‘You probably won’t be able to help me, but…’, or ‘Hi, I was given your number by…’.

Of course, I don’t need to answer my phone. And I don’t. I’ve perfected the fine art of how soon to press the button to send people to voicemail. 2 rings is too soon, but 5 is too long to wait. My friends and colleagues must now be completely used to barely finishing recording their messages on my voicemail before I call them back.

It’s not that I don’t want to talk to people, it’s just that I want to be able to answer quickly and helpfully, and this requires a moment’s thought. You remember that awkwardness four year olds have when they are handed the phone to talk to their, slightly deaf and batty Aunty Margaret? That’s me at 29. The caller could be asking me something as simple as, ‘is the sky really blue?’ and it’s like I’m being quized on a Weakest Link Special by Anne Robinson, and if I get this one wrong Janet Street Bloody Porter is going to get all the money.

The lovely Sarah of course finds this hilarious. I say ‘hilarious’. What I actually mean is she finds it incredibly irritating. She tries to calm me with her gentle shouting of ‘WHO IS IT?!?!? ANSWER IT! ANS…’, but I’ve already pressed the ‘reject’ button. And I feel guilty. I feel guilty because I’ve rejected someone who wants to talk to me. And as Carrie Bradshaw says so often, rejection is a bad thing. What I really want is a ’sorry, I’ll get back to you in a minute button’. Or a ‘just hang on a minute’ button.

But maybe I’m worrying over nothing. Maybe Marx was right, and science is giving me my freedom. If Marx had had a mobile he wouldn’t have answered it. He’d have been thinking…

Left so cold, I’d rather play in the US of A

I’m not an overly fussy person, but let’s get two things straight - I like my latte with a vanilla twist, and I like my rock stars to live fast and die in a massive fireball.

This week one of rocks biggest name caused a stir. Did they throw a tv set out of a hotel window? Pitch up a tent in reception having driven their limo into the swimming pool, in the basement? Did they arrive at a 5 Michelin-starred restaurant after taking a coctail of antihistamines, scotch and enough Valium to subdue a cow for a week?

No they walked out of an interview. A Radio 4 interview. Arguably one of the biggest stars of the moment, Chris Martin stormed out of an interview presumably tucked away in the schedules between Womans’ Hour and some Sandy Toksvig panel show. I say ’stormed out’, but what he actually did was ask politely if he could leave, because he was bored.

Don’t get me wrong, but in a haunting echo of my reaction to hearing their songs I was found remarking, ‘hasn’t somebody done this before?’. The world was gripped as Sid Vicious and pals descended into a musket of four-letter words on the Bill Grundy show. Even the BeeGees managed to walk out of an inteview without needing to ask permission first.

The thing is, whilst rock stars may have sauntered gently into middle-class seating my view of the US hasn’t.

I still want to live there, but because of everything rock music has put in my head. I want to experience the quiet sleepy town with only a garage and a gun shop. Bruce Springsteen has put it in my head that the US is a nation of ‘Nam Vets being turned down at Oil refineries but overcoming the odds to become ‘rocking daddies’.

Music can be a powerful thing. Whilst men in flat caps try to create the next concorde, whilst men in shiny-white lab coats watch StarTrek reruns to get tips on teleporters, music already has the power to take us across the Atlantic. I’ve been listening to Matchbox Twenty on pretty much a continuous loop since last months’ gig whilst I’m in the car, and the problem is that my car probably now counts as American territory.

I spent 3 months living there, and experienced a traditional summer camp. I’m not sure how much of it is a genuine desire to be there, right now, rather than just hankering after a simpler time. A time when I’d just left university (we held a mock-graduation on the camp’s lawn) and you could travel to America without having to take your eyeballs out of their sockets, fingerprint them and create a papier-mache model just for the records. I want to drive the Route 66 in a big gas-gussling convertible, but 8 years on that’s a) expensive, and 2) sixty polar bears will die and then their polluted carcasses will cause Wales to be submerged under rising sea-levels.

It’s not just the sun and the culture though. It was a time of hard-working bands like Dave Matthews. The world was still feeling the ripples of the Seattle implosion. And, according to the Coldplay Timeline, Chris Martin and Co. were only big enough to headline the Pilton Village Fete, and in their own words, ‘were not too shit’.

Picture: Hold on Tight

I do like to eat beside the Seaside

It started off well. A nice saunter along a beach, a spot of kite flying, then a spot of lunch. Well, in the immortal words of the poet Meatloaf, two out of three ain’t bad.

A pub lunch on a Sunday afternoon beside the seaside is a fantastic thing. Unless, that is, you forget momentarily that this is the British seaside and that means sharing your space with certain sections of society. Firstly, there’s the hardcore of women who, clearly inspired by a late-night viewing of This is Spinal Tap, had their home sunbed turned up to eleven and now have skin the colour and temperature of molten lava spewing forth from Vesuvius. At the other end of the Dulux spectrum are the brilliant whites. These come in two forms; flashes of white just below the trousers before the sock and sandal combo, or great swathes of chalk-white topless men whose numerous rolls of stomach could well have swallowed entire Poodles if not Labradors to their blubbery deaths. Seriously, I’m sure I heard barking from one of them.

Things didn’t bode much better inside the eatery. It should have been a clear indicator when we were seen but ignored by two waitresses beside a sign clearly reading, in letters 8 inches high, ‘Please wait Here to be Seated’ that service would be slow, but the menu was just too inviting. Clearly asking the waitress for a minute extra to decide was a mistake, as she disappeared for the next 20 as if she were a cameo in an episode of the X-Files. Where she went was a mystery, but clearly it wasn’t to serve others as one man who looked in his sixties but who could quite feasibly have been 50 when he began his dining experience, held a cash card hopefully whilst muttering about the possibility of having his bill.

Clearly we had the amnesiac waitress employed through pity. First she forgot to deliver chips instead of mash and at one point it took so long to clear the plates I began to wonder if she was expecting us to eat them too. Some, and I’m being distinctly British and polite as I want to write ‘Plenty of’, time later she took our desert and coffee order. Where she took it I have no idea as the coffee didn’t materialise, and getting the bill seemed a mountainous task akin to applying for an educational Visa to study joint honours dynamite skills and piloting at an Ivy League University. Our waitress was so forgetful that it’s quite possible she was never actually a waitress, but perhaps a businesswoman with a family in Stoke who’d forgotten where she was going on the morning commute and ended up waiting tables on the South West coast.

I mean, how hard can the restaurant business be? The basic premise of making money should be that the more people you get through their meals the more money you make. Do that politely and efficiently and they’ll come back which means more people through the door and, I refer the honourable gentlemen to the initial hypothesis, that means more profits.

There are a multitude of self-help books on the topic. They all begin with great lines like ‘everyone likes the idea of owning a restaurant’, which is odd as I can’t think of a single friend who’s spoken up about wanting one. The Upstart Guide to Owning and Running a Restaurant opens, whilst using the most liberal use of ‘relatively’ I have ever seen, with the premise, ‘The concept of a restaurant, as we know it, is a relatively recent one’. I’m sorry? Relative to the wheel, maybe. Fire, definitely. But what else?

The great work Is owning a restaurant right for you? says all restaurant owners “thrive on stress. If you can’t handle stress, then don’t even think about opening your own restaurant!”. Whilst I agree it’s no lazy Sunday reading The Guardian’s latest editorial on Mongolian cheese innovation, it’s not taking on The Red Baron in a dogfight over Munich or climbing Everest after heart surgery. An article entitled Five Myths of Owning a Restaurant manages to inadvertently slip a sixth under the door to Mr ill-informed by opening with ”I own a restaurant’: Nothing will conjure up looks of awe and envy faster than those four words’. I can’t help thinking ‘I patented the toaster’, or ‘I’m marrying Penelope Cruz’ would require some kind of official photo-finish with that one.

So perhaps I shouldn’t be so hard on the restaurant. It’s like that final round of Children’s TV favourite Knightmare researching the restaurant business with so many books about, teetering on a knife edge of soufflés success or flambes failure as you try to earn your bread and butter. So I’m not bitter about my dining experience, and I’d like to take this opportunity to thank the hardworking ladies and gentlemen of the restaurant business. As Roy S Alonzo writes in the Upstart Guide, ‘To those of you who may someday become restaurant owners, we [I] wish you a full plate of success and an overflowing cup of happiness as you pursue your goals’.

Bon appetite.

I don’t need knowledge, cos I’ve got fortune and fame

Perhaps it’s a world filled with grande skinny double shot vanilla lattes or a world inspired by technology, but we certainly seem to like everything to be instantaneous these days. Anyone who shops online knows that they choose a store that delivers by next day courier over one that use standard post. Okay, some may argue that there’s an added benefit to not using a service where staff are unlikely to either steal the contents or jump on them like porcelain at a greek wedding, but the fastest route will always win. If you live within the M25 you can even order your book on Amazon before 5 and receive it the same evening.

Yet there’s still a great satisfaction to the wait. I’ve recently treated myself to a nice, shiny-black Sony camera. I could have bought it at any time, but decided to earn it. Just like as a child I’d save up my pocket money by putting it to one side and watching it grow, I set aside certain units of work that were worth varying amounts to reach my goal. At one point I even had one of those thermometer-type thingies you see outside churches at the back of my mind to keep me focusing on the task. And then, one Sunday morning, I arrived at the shop clutching my money and pointing at my chosen toy to the shop assistant.

But in today’s world everything has to come quickly and easily. Turn on the TV and you’ll be greeted by adverts for loans so easily obtained you can apply whilst simultaneously chatting to your spouse and to the operator about the weather in between squash with Mr Jones at number 42 and dinner with the Smythes at number 12. If that sound’s a little bit too wordy, you can change the channel and be greeted with a multitude of ways to fall of rickety ladders or trip over paper-weights at work to get that new conservatory now.

But then it’s not just monetary gain that has to come quickly. If you’ve got a hard luck story or strange hair you can get yourself onto Britain’s got (not so much) Talent, bypassing years of working the clubs and perfecting your skills. You can go on game shows to prove you can beat sports celebrities and avoid years of working your way up through the ranks. Or you can avoid all those screen tests by vomiting outside nightclubs in front of tabloid photographers on a weekly basis and be front page news on Heat until you’re given a chat show on Channel 6.

The contestants on The Apprentice aren’t actually going to be ‘apprentices’. They’re going to go into middle-management with a healthy salary or, if they’re really lucky, be fired and described as ‘zany’ or some other colourful and unusual looking word and end up a celebrity. Sir Alan’s looking to recreate himself, but it’s a far cry from working your way up from being a tailor, then a civil servant just so you can save £100 to buy a van and start your own sales business.

And what, exactly, will all these fast-track wannabes bring to the world? Something as great as the television? The telephone? A toaster which doesn’t just burn toast?

And will they really be proud of their accomplishments, or will they barely hold any value when they’re mopping the floors of their local supermarket six months later?

I’ve just recently found out that one of my neighbours is James Dyson. He first visited the 50-bedroomed 500 acre estate in which he now resides as a child and casually remarked that one day it would be his, something which must have stayed with him as he studied art and then furniture building before starting in engineering. He once remarked that he enjoyed running as a child as he ‘learned determination from it’, and that certainly must have been the case as he worked tirelessly on his inventions. And I daresay as he handed over the £20 million to pay for it, he got a great deal more satisfaction knowing his hard work had been worthwhile than someone who’d just won a recording contract by singing a short ditty to a record producer who got lucky, a sometime actress and sacked newspaper editor on the fast slide to success.

In England’s green, pleasant and noisy land

Nostalgia can be a great thing, particularly when it’s your own. Harking back to a time when a finger of Fudge really was a treat rather than a thing of evil which might bring a visit from the TV diet-doctor police. A time when a bicycle was a passport to freedom and independence instead of a necessary tool to stop the inevitable onset of age.

Children see things very simply. Ask a child to draw a portrait and they’ll concentrate on the necessities: two legs, two arms and a smiley face. Ask a child to draw a house and you’ll get a square box with a triangular roof, four windows and a door. Ask them to draw a countryside scene and you’ll get a couple of hills, a hedgerow, a gate and maybe a tree or two.

Whilst many of these images gain details over the years, for most people that image of the countryside doesn’t change much. Constable added a cart and stream, and Yeats adds a lake or two, but those hills, hedgerows and trees are still there. We all like to think we can climb a hill somewhere and sit in peaceful solitude at the top with a Thermos of weak coffee. English literature is littered with examples, but sadly the real England is a little more polluted. Not with the physical, but something much more audible. So I’ve written a user’s guide.

The first thing you’ll notice when entering the countryside if the constant chatter of birdsong. Whilst this may appeal to Bill Oddie, gifted as he is to spot a warbling chaffinch from a soprano robin in just 2 seconds, to the untrained ear most of this ornithological treat sounds much more like a car alarm. Or rather a carpark full of paranoid cars with one finger constantly hovering on the panic button and another on a klaxon. Or worse still that Nokia ringtone.

Once you’ve got passed the squeaky gate, you’ll notice the rollings hills are awash with man’s woolly friends. Ask someone to describe what sheep ‘do’, and they’ll be pretty much stumped. In this kind of situation I find myself asking ‘what would Sandy Toksvig do as her mime on ‘What’s my line‘?’ and I could only imagine them munching grass. Except, as anyone who regularly spends time in the countryside will tell you, they seem to be constantly taking some kind of class register. Seriously. There’ll be a menacing bleat, not a cute baa, every 4 seconds from alternating corners of the field. This will then set the cows off mooing and poohing and the birds will sing louder to drown them out.

And all this is before humans get involved. Inevitably farmer Giles will be tearing around on a tractor kitted-out with an engine large enough to run an ocean liner. Ramblers, stomping around in steel-soled boots worthy of any Eastern European army, earn their name filling the landscape with meaningless chatter about garden centres and Mrs Jones’ athlete’s foot, and every person over 40 rides a bicycle which hasn’t seen a drop of oil since Mr Beeching did such a good job of modernising the railways.

Get yourself far above sea-level and you’ll find your ears being bombarded with the trappings of life in a small village. Some part of the locale will have a fete complete with a megaphone powerful enough to send messages to the Hubble telescope giving important messages about found children and lost keys, and as dusk settles you’ll be treated to the local bell-ringers practicing some strange off-key off-tempo creation.

The Campaign for the Protection of Rural England is campaigning tirelessly for the protection of “Its tranquillity – from the remotest, highest hilltop to a woodland walk next to a big town”, but how do you protect something that doesn’t really exist? This great village green preservation society, led by Sir Bill of Bryson is littered with gently undulating sentences about open fells to patchwork copses, but the problem is if the locals from the country houses have been out, it’ll more likely to be a patchwork of corpses - pheasants, rabbits and, one can hope, ramblers most probably.

And that’s just the problem. Nostalgia is great, but it’s only great because we don’t pretend things are still the same. My house has one door and two windows on the front, but my image also has an electricity meter and some weeds intruding from nextdoor’s garden. My portrait still has its legs and arms, but I’d spend a long time agonising over the size of the waistline and the cut of the trousers. And that finger of Fudge has a calorie count, an instruction to only consume as part of a balanced diet and a warning for nut allergists.

Maybe it’s time to admit the countryside’s noisy, muddy and full of moo-pooh so we can all start to enjoy it again.