Mon, Feb 15th 2010, 11:57
Has anyone else noticed lately that most of our news is happening 'On the ground'. "So what's happening on the ground?" "On the ground things look different." "We've been hearing from our man on the ground."
As opposed to what?
Our man in the clouds? Our woman in a tunnel? Our soldier hovering a few feet above the ground?
These words or phrases seem to crop up from time to time. During the floods of 2007/8 hundreds of houses had no water, and soon every other word on the news was 'Bowser'. And after the tragedy of 9/11 (or 11/9 as surely it must be) it was all anyone to do to stop themselves from saying 'Ground Zero' over and over and over again.
But now it's "On The Ground". There are people On The Ground in Afghanistan. There are civil servants On The Ground in Westminster. There were quite a lot of people On The Ground at the Copenhagen Screw-The-Earth Summit. They are probably also On The Ground in the International Space Station. There's stuff happening On The Ground on ships, in submarines and possibly even on some ground somewhere.
What's so special about being On The Ground? Surely most human activities apart from a few hinted at already qualify as being On The Ground? Walking. Eating. Sleeping. Having a poo. And most of these aren't that exciting enough to report on. But of course I'm being facetious (again) and On The Ground really means the place where something is actually happening as opposed to the place where it isn't (i.e. everywhere else... which may or may not be places with some 'ground' as well).
On the plus side it makes a change from being At The Coalface, On the Frontline or On The Shop Floor (presumably after an accident with a rogue tin of baked beans). And of course the ground is very useful for keeping one's feet on, and for hitting it in a running type way. Apparently.
In future rants... the BBC phrase 'Are you ACROSS this?' that is leaking out into public usage and the infuriating 'step up to the plate' which is used all over the UK when surely we should be 'stepping up to the crease' or maybe the non-metaphorical but perfectly functional 'taking responsibility'. Grrrrr!
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Tue, Oct 6th 2009, 11:25
Okay. Time for another rant!
Every industry has its uniform. In the TV media it’s the banal and bland combination of jeans with a blue suit jacket… usually with a chequered blue and white shirt. Sheesh. There are no doubt some of you reading this saying right now saying, well, at least I don’t have unruly hair, a stupid curly beard and those fashion victim Converse shoes eh, eh! Perhaps you’re right? But no. You’re not.
Jeans and a Jacket. No. The Media Outfit, or “Moutfit” as I call it says absolutely nothing. And that’s why it’s a uniform. Uniforms are a way of conforming, not standing out and not saying anything to offend anyone. Boo hiss!
But hang on… uniforms have a purpose. After all without uniforms the police would seem to be a bunch of patronising but frightening uncles with chiselled knuckles, nurses would be arrested for obscene activities involving surgical gloves and the Olympics would get really confusing in the relay races. But surely this rules don’t apply here! If you’re in broadcast media, surely you should be all about standing out and saying something special about who you are and what you do and what makes you different. No?
It’s not that I don’t think jeans and jacket can work. I have seen it work, possibly once out of about ten thousand times. I think the main problem comes in two places… firstly the jeans… and secondly… you guessed it… the jacket. The jeans are often those straight up and down jobs which make people’s legs look like blue tubes. The jackets seem often to be culled from a whole suit – the poor suit trousers discarded in favour of tough casual pantalons de Nîmes.
It’s like combining a main course and a dessert in the same meal. Beef and custard. Ice cream soup. Blackberry lasagne. Yuk.
But no I hear you cry. This is the outfit for the execs, the business leaders, the management of the media world. But no. I disagree. Even this lot need to think it out again. Get out those suit trousers. Reintroduce them to the suit jacket - yes - one made to work with the other. You’ll look much more high flying, cool, chic, and handsome. Just look at this picture of Daniel "Bond" Craig who is almost getting away with jeans et jacquet combo and then realise how much better he'd look if the jeans were matching suit trousers. I rest my case.
Oh... and buy some more interesting shoes for God’s sake.
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Thu, Sep 10th 2009, 09:18
It's time to break free of the constraints of the modern world. Leave your home behind and go anywhere. Live anywhere. Sleep anywhere. Yes, camping is a world of freedom where the only boundaries to unconfined joy are your imagination.
Except for the rain of course. And the paltry washing facilities on site. And the fact that it's impossible to gets your clothes dry once they're wet. And the snoring from the next tent. And the forty lads having a party just along the way. Not to mention the toilet block where you can have a shower in a cubicle next to someone having a poo.
I really do try to like camping. There are times when I almost convince myself it's fun. It feels a bit like hiding. The bouncy blow up mattress seems cosy at first. The gadgets are appealing - special fork spoon knife things, gas burners, torches, Swiss Army knives. I tried to like it when I camped my way around New Zealand with my wife in the southern hemisphere summer of 2004 (which was the same temperature as our northern hemisphere winter). I tried to like it again this summer when we went to Cornwall. Sometimes I succeeded in liking it. But mostly... I failed.
Camping is rubbish for the simple logic in my mind that going on a holiday should be more luxurious than the place you call home. If I leave my home for a week or two weeks to pamper myself I shouldn't have to downsize my living accomodation by a factor of 500 so that I can barely stand up, have to share my living space with a legion of spiders, and be caught between temperature extremes so pernicious that I need to bring half of my wardrobe to cope.
Camping might be made more inviting if it wasn't for campsites themselves. I will say that Sennen Cove campsite was very nice on this most recent trip, but even there they only had one washing machine for an entire campsite which required a dawn raid by my wife and I at opening time to secure our slot. There they had also recognised that showers and toilets should not be housed in the same room. It's fine in your own house to have a room where the shower and the toilet are together, but that's because you don't expect someone to come in and relieve themselves while you're working up a lather (or maybe you do, you filthy grotesque).
The other problem with camping is rain. I am a fair weather camper. It's not that I mind rain particularly. I used to like walking in the rain when I was a teenager, mooning about feeling moody. I enjoyed the rain when I sat in some hot springs pools in Hamner Springs. I remember being quite excited about the lashings of rain that accompanied a spectacular storm in France. However, rain + tent = misery. It's a simple and fixed equation.
There's no roaring fire to warm yourself by. There's no central heating to flush the water from your clothes. There's no escape from the dreary, dreary pitter patter that is amplified into a incesant motorised thudding on the canvas. In New Zealand they did at least have the decency to admit that their weather was as bad as ours, and so many campsites have drying rooms where you can hang up your clothes and expect them to dry out in reasonable time. In the UK campsites are generally very basic in my experience, begrudging any optional extra they can provide. They would rather the wet clothes clung to your skin until you are converted by some strange osmosis into part human, part salamander.
So what's the first thing we did on returning from our camping holiday this year? We went to Thomson and booked a holiday to Kefalonia for next year. And no, we won't be camping... although I did camp in Greece many moons ago. Now they have the weather for camping!
Here's a poem I wrote on hoilday all about camping which I think demonstrates my conflicted views on the matter...
CAMPSITE
Regimented tents
Relaxed
Flap
Pitter patter rain
Inside a cloud
Hot-water-bottle dog
Swelter sun stifle
Warm beer
Barbecues
Pegs poles zip ziiiip
Guy ropes (why Guy?)
Caravans
Sharabangs
Multiroom, caterpillar, dome,
Even mushroom-shaped sometime homes
Motorhome
Soft air-filled blow up bed refilled with a whine
Coleman equipped
Sunloungers Superfluous
Moving on
Hot cell showers
Chemical unpleasant stench
Big skies
(Un)Satisfied
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Sun, Mar 15th 2009, 15:55
This weekend I attended a football match. This is only the second match I've ever been to in person. The first was Aston Villa versus Sunderland one miserable, cold rainy day about ten years ago (Villa won one nil with a goal from England defender Gareth Southgate, but it was a big yawn). This second was Wolves versus Charlton at Molynewinewinewinew stadium.
It is an interesting experience, from a culturally objective perspective. I'm not really that fussed about football. The only team I really 'support' is England. I can't get excited about league games. It all seems rather pointless. But hey 26,000 other people disagreed with me and turned up to watch top-of-the-Championship Wolves shakily beat off Charlton 2 - 1.
Or in the parlance of the fanatic who stood in front of me... they "F*#ked Them Off". The fan fanatic was every inch the classic image of a football nut. He was mid to late twenties, skinny and wiry, sported a dark blue nylon tracksuit, had close cropped hair with wet look gel and wore a signet ring that was large enough to blot out the sun.
He was compelling to watch. More compelling than the game in fact. We were in and amongst a relatively quiet bunch of spectators (who by the way were about 90% male), but he made up for it. Any chants within a five mile radius were immediately picked up by this guy. This would be accompanied by a new dangerous martial art, which I can only describe as the Wayward Fist of Dangerous Clapping. There's a lot of elbow action in this martial art.
It is almost as dangerous as another arm technique, which I hereby name the Flying V. The Flying V is only to be used in moments of extreme fan-based-stress or support. The ref cards one of your players. An opposition player falls badly to the ground. You get the picture. At this moment, you must leap in the air, or if seated, leap from your seat, throw your arms up and out into a V. This technique is guaranteed to ward off any evil spirits and possibly result in your nearest neighbours developing broken noses.
Another intriguing feature of the game is the 'advice' given by the fans to the players. Things like 'get it in the box' and 'get it in the middle'. Perhaps for variation they could have tried other helpful nuggets such as 'kick the ball' and 'score a goal'.
I'm reasonably sure that the professional footballers probably know more about tactics than John Bull stood in the stand. But who knows, perhaps this will start happening in other professions? Perhaps very soon I'll have David Beckham round at my house giving me useful hints on writing such as 'type some words' and 'make up a story'.
This wasn't the extent of the 'advice' though. Other helpful hints included 'skin him', 'cripple him', the unspecified 'get him' and the worrying 'kill him'. Fortunately the footballers decided, on balance, to just play football.
Then there's the language. For the most part I thought the language at the Wolves game was much more tame than the one I attended at Villa Park some years ago. However, this time I learned a great new phrase which was 'F*#k 'em off!' occasionally clarified by 'F*#k 'em off the pitch!'
Our fan fanatic loved this one, and would repeat it over and over, standing in full Flying V stance, while swaying his whole torso back and forth like some fundamentalist zealot. 'F*#k 'em off! F*#k 'em off! F*#k 'em off the pitch!'
Part of me couldn't help but wonder if this was an instruction meant in the same vein as 'get it in the middle' - an instruction to be taken literally. Surely this fine young gentlemen wasn't asking his squad to literally bugger the Charlton eleven until they were outside the boundaries of the pitch? Maybe. Maybe not.
Even more intriguing was the fact that the fanatic had brought his girlfriend with him. She was actually rather pretty, in itself rather surprising considering the look he was working. Even more confounding was the way she looked at him after one of his blue bouts of rant-chant, body-swaying... as if to say, 'Yes. This is the man for me.'
All in all, it was an entertaining experience. There's more I could write about the problems of freezing feet, pretending to be enthusiastic about a team you don't give two hoots about, and chants meant to bully fellow supporters into standing up, but let's just let those lie.
I have to say my favourtie thing of the whole match was the pre-match and half-time entertainment which was about 30 kids from a primary school playing Taiko drums. It was both simultaneously cute and threatening. Imagine the urchins in Oliver suddenly coming together to do the haka and you have the correct mental picture.
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