notes from a newsroom

Drifting through the moribund backwaters that are newsdesk contributions accounts, I have time to wonder.

The chip-toothed imperfection of my fantasy dinner party languidly stretches across all possible visceral frames - especially when most unwelcome - and I tap out payments, shuffling between Dylan lyrics and publication dates. It’s all pretty average.

Isn’t it strange that concentration (especially cutting things out) comes with an exposed tip of the tongue and that things that are good for you (horrible MTBs, odd little G-Wiz cars) are so often deeply uncool?

Man bags are a grey area: saunter out of ubiquitous soho advertising hq wearing requisite structured japanese denim, locally designed t-shirt and converse with a man bag lazily crossing your chest and you might be able to fit in. Same scenario in Dalston, with tight substituted for structured. Try walking down Brixton Hill or Green Lanes wearing the same and things might not feel so hunkydorey, no matter how useful that bag is.

The thing is, my mates don’t carry cotton shopping bags with them because they don’t have anywhere to put them. They don’t wear man bags. My old 5 Deutsch Mark shoppers languish snuggled in the grubby fluff-ball grittiness of my bag corners and are always at the grimey ready. Boys clearly don’t not shop - food being key - so they use plastic bags. Could it be that women’s emancipation has been knocked back 80 odd years by the emergence of a green pay-for-your plastic-bag culture? Or was convenience the key to equality?

It’s tempting to slip into Carrie Bradshaw-esque ditherings, but I must collect myself: numbers to plug, phones to answer and huge but irrelevant questions to ponder. All in a day’s work…

There are more people alive on the planet than have ever lived and died.

Humans have been around for 100,000 years and the average period a species lasts on Earth is between eight and ten million years. We are but babies in nappies - a long, long, long way off from maturing as a species.

I think I might be experiencing some apparently deliciously positive existential angst. The great thing is, it makes all of the small things seem really very minute indeed. Don’t sweat the small stuff, eh?

It’s not helping. I still WISH I WAS AT GLASTONBURY.

No matter how unfairly treated, debased, belittled, mocked and knocked you sometimes feel, attempt - for just a moment - to find a small nugget of fuzzy warmth somewhere in your heart and once located, rest in it. For, as you may not realise at the time, there is always, and i mean ALWAYS someone who has it worse than you: they are wearing the battered, heavy crown of being unfairly treated, debased, belittled, mocked and knocked. Spare a moment and rest assured: they are officially more ridiculous than you.

Such is the fate of the gentlemen over at the Tyburn Angling Society. An organised, formal, professional sort of a place complete with headed paper and West End address to match, the Society HQ is home to the great River Tyburn Restoration Project - a plan dreamt up by the team of avid anglers who would like to see the 1000 year old ‘lost’ river Tyburn re-emerge and once again flow from north to south in place of some of central London’s most important buildings.

In fact, the proposed ‘demolition zone’ is a wide sash of red neatly etched over a good few £billions worth of real estate. The Tyburn’s course would neatly cut through Oxford Street (once called Tyburn Road), flowing parallel to Regent Street and through Berkeley Square before taking apart Buckingham Palace and gracefully confluencing with the Thames.

Fishing huts would punctuate the paths and parks sandwiching the river - though the provenance of an Oxford Street trout is enough to put me off my dinner. The Tyburn, as it currently stands is a large sewer, dealing with rather more London ‘wild’ life than we imagine.

Aiming a little high perhaps, chaps? Well, they surely must win the prize for unsubdued fantasy, if nothing else - their idea is to ’swap’ buildings for plaques placed ceremoniously along the proposed river. A nice bench, perhaps, Your Highness?

The men at the TAS may be ridiculed and they may be wearing that tatty crown, but I take my hat off to them - they wear it with pride and with not even a faint, seweragy wiff of irony.

I’m the proud new owner of a new bottom to my front right tooth.

The chip that went before was horribly sharp, pointy and really idiotic and I am feeling suitably worthy of my expensive new friend.

I haven’t been too active lately on the blog front - work has taken an unexpectadly all-consuming twist and both of our ibook chargers at home have been trodden on and obliterated, so not much in terms of down-time. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I have come to the conclusion that I can blame my chipped tooth on the boffs over at Apple Mac and their shoddy workmanship.

Had I devoted Saturday to online time, I may not have headed to Hackney in the evening for a drink or two. Had I not headed to Hackney, I may not have stayed up all night and had I not stayed up all night, I may not have unceremoniously walloped my front teeth into my beer bottle (helped, in no small part by a hefty accidental shove), at dawn.

Those chargers have always had a bad rap. Oh, the clarity of convoluted hindsight…

I’ve decided that that I’d like to invite Robinson Crusoe to my fantasy dinner, so that we can chat palm trees and Ray Mears techniques.

You’re allowed eleven guests, fictional, dead or alive.

I would also like to get Christian Bale along and maybe Stalin as a youngster because I have an old-fashioned, secret and guilty crush on him (I’m sure it’s wrong, I know, but check him out), which I’d very much like to get to the bottom of. Bale is more than welcome for his audacious smugness/misplaced self-deprecation alone: “I would like to say acting is a difficult job, but it’s actually damn easy and pretty pointless”. Although, equally worrying and ever so slightly obsessively, he has a rather large amount of brownie points in credit with me at the moment and therefore Can Do No Wrong. Other guests I am swilling around in the chipped-toothed imperfection of my gathering are Bob Dylan (predictable, but great), Mad King Ludwig (as long as he doesn’t scare me), JG Ballard and Alexandre Dumas (who I always maintain is an ancestor) as well as the Godmother from the book Marigold’s Godmother who has happily scarred my mind more than any other fictional character, ever.

I have also decided that this blog will be going through a NOTES AS FAR FROM THE NEWSROOM AS POSSIBLE hiatus. It may just turn out to be a brief stage or a fleeting sojourn or it may develop into an all-out era, just as long as it is inspired by my honourable dinner guests.

I’m looking for a job abroad. Anywhere but the UK. Preferably not Europe. Preferably somewhere with a hot climate. It would be nice to be doing something worthy, perhaps helping people out, too.

Can you or anyone you know help?

Reading Charlie Brooker’s column  the other day struck a chord with me - I have oft wondered whether the two-dimensional world we are glued to - via tellies, computers, phones and cameras - is making us all waft through life without ever actually seeing, hearing or speaking properly. I mean really properly: observing, listening and communing.

It’s a scary thought as I sit here, typing away, staring at a lit-up glass-fronted plastic box. But it’s more scary when there are whole generations in our own country that are being excluded in favour of remote, electronic communication - something I got stuck into in my Post Haste entry.

As technology swirls into other-worldy orbits and we are more able to work, play and live from the confines of our homes than ever before, let’s occasionally remember that, after all, we’re only animals. It’s just not natural to converse in sputters of staccatoed binary, rows of zeros and ones hiccoughing their way out of our mouths, zig-zagging babble punctuating white silences.

There are few in the UK who are not familiar with Ken Livingstone for all the wrong reasons. The newly relegated ex-Mayor of London has never found it hard to express himself candidly and, indeed, in a throughly un-PC way - an irony in itself given that he practically invented political correctness.

Ken has a penchant for offending whole swathes of humanity with one ill-conceived word: quite a feat, perhaps, but not really the done thing in the dipomatically charged political spotlight. At one point in his meandering political career Ken was called “the most odious man in politics” by The Sun, whilst he himself has variously described the US Ambassador as a “chiseling little crook” and a “car salesman”, hugged pro-Jihad Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, advocated dialogue with Sinn Fein, called Dubya Bush “corrupt” and caused (now characteristic) media furore after speculating the “concentration camp guard” background of a Jewish Evening Standard reporter. He’s a mouthy Robin Hood and many admire himfor it.

I recently came across a cutting detailing some of the Right Honourable Paul Keating’s colouful epithets. He makes Ken’s outbursts look like James Blunt lyrics. Absurdly un-PC, Keating knows how to enliven parliament in his own inimitable Aussie way. Here we go:

Stupid foul-mouthed grub, piece of criminal garbage, pig, sleazebag, scumbag, scum, sucker, perfumed gigolo, harlot, boxhead, alley cat, barnyard bully, stunned mullet, pansy, hare-brained hill-billy, corporate crook, loopy crim, half-baked crim, clown, bunyip aristocrat, mangy maggot, pissant, nong, vermin, dullard, clot, fop, rustbucket, thug, dimwit, gutless spiv, champion liar, fraud, cheat, ninny, dummy, dimwit liberal muck.

Surely, to the media’s chagrin, London got off lightly with Ken?

When I was little, my mother warned me never to wear socks with sandals. Not simply because it is a deeply uncool fashion statement akin to flouncing round in an ‘ich bin deutsch’ sandwich board, but because it was also a little piece of common-sense. By the age of five, I was sufficiently cocky and, i’m told, stupid, to don red sandals and white socks. Poetically, it ended in tears and four stitches. (Friction between cotton socks and sandal soles when running at high speeds can result in falls). To this day, I know that I tried the dastardly echt-deutsch combo because I was curious - it was, I suppose PRs might say, research.

We’ve just been sent a bag of stilton doughnuts at work.

One sordid bite and I was transported to a scratchy, dumpy, flabby, acrid, uncompromisng world of over-inflated PR accounts and ketchup-consistency hallowe’en make-up jam. It was one intrepid and way-too-gung-ho step too far: it tasted, at best, like a cross between horrible flabby dough warmed in a London traffic jam and battered and bruised snotty blue cheese, and, at worst, like a mouthful of genetic mutation.

I tried it in the name of research, but what a waste of cheap stilton cheese and bad doughnuts. The reason no-one’s done it before? It’s stupid.

My mother would be pleased to know what my research has confirmed: no amount of PR can prevail over common sense.

So, The Guardian’s charged with being so unapologetically pro-Ken that it helped Boris win the Mayoral election. Their coverage, I can only guess, was reaction to the Evening Standard’s unapologetically all-pervading pro-Boris stance. Who knows what - or who - finally tipped the scale, suffice to say it is these differences that made the outcome so hard to call. Can a single newspaper sway the electorate? Probably not. Leave it to Yes, Prime Minister’s Jim Hacker to neatly summise…

“I know exactly who reads the papers: The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country; The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country; The Times is read by people who actually do run the country; The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country; The Financial Times is read by people who own the country; The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country; and The Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is.”
Sir Humphrey: “Prime Minister, what about the people who read The Sun?”
Bernard Woolley: “Sun readers don’t care who runs the country, as long as she’s got big tits.”

Good luck to Boris - he needs it. In the meantime, we’ll wait and see how Gordon fares.