The march of environmental fascism

For reasons I won't bore you with I was trawling through my posts in the Blogger window the other day when I came across the draft below. Somehow it had slipped unnoticed onto the second page without ever being published and, thus hidden, had languished there ever since. Which is a shame because (a) it was a finished post and (b) it's a rant, and everyone loves a good rant.

So I've bumped it and, although when it reads "yesterday" it actually means some time last year, I think the rest of it still holds. We've bought our own canvas bags for shopping now. Pass the hummus...


Hulme Asda were doling out warnings yesterday about their stopping supplying carrier bags from next week. This warning is accompanied by a relocation of the bag supplies under the till, thus making it more awkward to insist on using them. They've been replaced by "bag-for-life" type bags on sale for 5p, or 10p, or something.

Doubtless I'll get pilloried by the hummus-lovers, but (and pardon me for saying so) I think there are about a thousand environmental problems in need of more urgent attention than plastic bags. But sure enough, the "plastic bags" issue is the one this bankrupt government concentrate on, and the major supermarkets, with all their massed commercial might, are only too delighted to toady up to them and go along with it.

And why wouldn't they be? Supplying carrier bags for free has, until now, been seen as a cost of being in business. Here's a chance for them to pass that cost onto the hapless consumer, and LOOK GOOD IN THE PROCESS! Oh look at us, we're being environmentally conscientious. We're doing our bit for the planet. This is such utter b0ll0cks. How many billion pounds a year profit do these ba5tards make? I don't know, but almost certainly enough to swallow the entire cost of recycling every single plastic bag in the country. They could even afford to pay us a penny every time we reuse one, as an incentive. Oh look! Some of them HAVE been doing that already! Until the government let them off the hook by declaring the plastic carrier bag Public Enemy Number One. A nice, easy target. One whose destruction will only affect the poor old consumer, right at the bottom of the corporate food chain, who now has to cart around a dozen bags every trip, bags that will get dirtier and smellier as the weeks go by.

Meanwhile the number of 4x4s on the roads continues to climb, the icecaps keep on melting, China and India continue to pour millions of cubic metres of concrete, the rainforests are almost gone, fish are being caught at unsustainable levels and drug companies defy testing regimes and outright bans. But it's OK, the planet is safe. As long as you use a sustainable form of plastic bag. God.

July Wednesdays. Number 5: Book Club

With me "officially" in the chair - because it was my selection this month - rather than my normal "unofficial" chairing (i.e. supporting the official chairperson when they can't remember the running order).

Last time I chose the book - by some strange coincidence exactly two years ago in July 2007 - only 7 people turned up at the meeting to discuss it, so I guess on that basis you could say I did well to garner a turnout of 12. When compared to recent numbers though, it looked a bit sad. We've been having 20-25 people attending for months now. If I felt like being kind to myself I'd say something about it being holiday season, or the good weather keeping them away, but if I'm being honest I know there'll be a lot of the group who decided right off they wouldn't read the book this month because they hear the words "science fiction" and the shutters come down.

I can hardly blame them. There have been at least two months this year when I haven't read the book either, and another couple of occasions where I've either not finished it, or wished I hadn't. It seems that the idea of joining a book club to read books you wouldn't normally read is good in principle but too easy to avoid in practice.

Still, I was pleasantly surprised by the reaction. A few people enjoyed it. Kind of. Only one absolutely hated it (and didn't get past page 70). I wanted to point out that I'd made my eyes bleed reading through HIS selection, so maybe he owed me similar respect, but I didn't have the heart. This is supposed to be fun, after all. And having not really enjoyed the read myself this time around, I'd have been on shaky ground arguing with him really.

So that's the end of the July Wednesdays. A month of almost unheard of mid-week sociability and activity. I'm exhausted. I think I better have a lie down.

Book Review: Stranger in a Strange Land

For only the second time in three years, I chose the book club book for this month. I offered a choice of (what I thought were) three outstanding SF novels from different times, and this - Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land - won the vote.

Billed as "the most famous science fantasy novel of all time" (Heinlein was never known for his reticence) I've been trying to remember when I last read this. The obvious answer is "thirty years ago" but I don't think it's quite as long as that. What I *do* remember is a lasting impression of a book I enjoyed immensely, back then.

So... what book was that then? Because when I started rereading this, I thought it was the most pompous, inflated, self-important drivel I'd ever read, with stilted dialogue and unbelievable leaps of plot. The idea is great, the execution? Not so good.

Clearly, the book hasn't changed. But somewhere in the intervening 25-30 years, I have. And so have social mores. And on top of that, the landscape of acceptability, equality and political correctness has shifted radically, as if borne on sociopsychological tectonic plates. The end result is that Stranger has been left behind in the very early 60s and now reads like an anachronistic diatribe rather than a piece of cutting-edge science fiction.

There's a famous quote from the book (which I won't bother repeating here) on the subject of rape and my God! It leaps out at you as (now) totally incongruous and... well... just plain wrong-headed. Much of this conspired to dull the enjoyment of what I had expected to be a pleasant experience, refreshing my youthful memories of a damned good read. Instead I found whole swathes of text tedious in the extreme. Even the better parts were less than good. My self-created illusions about this author were severely dented and I regretfully concluded that I won't be able to bring myself to reread any of my (reasonably extensive) collection of Heinlein for fear of repeating this unhappy few weeks. Honestly, I couldn't wait for it to be over. What a disappointment.

Theatre night

We had another book club outing last night. Dinner at Chaophraya followed by theatre: Everyone's A Winner at the Royal Exchange.

It's so rare for us to spend any time in town - at all, let alone in the evening - that virtually every eatery or pubbery is a new experience. We'd certainly never visited Chaophraya before. The first to arrive, we busied ourselves drooling over their extensive menu and sipping on a couple of pints from the bar.

Imagine my disappointment then to learn, once everyone had arrived and we'd taken our seats upstairs (11 of us were dining) that the restaurant has a policy for "large parties" of not taking orders from the menu. Diners are expected to select from one of the five set menus, although these can be mixed. So it would be possible, for instance, for a party of ten to order every one of the set menus and then be faced with the near impossible task for each pair to chomp their way through a plate of starters and FOUR main courses.

Not to mention the fact that the cheapest set menu is twenty quid per person, whereas our preferred selections from the menu would have set us back only a little over half that amount.

Sadly, on that basis alone, it's clear where their "policy" is coming from, but it wasn't really the money that pissed me off so much. Part of it was the extreme waste of food, but most of it was my lifelong hatred of being arbitrarily told what to do. Ordering from the set menus was not going to make their life appreciably easier, was a needless imposition, prevented us from eating what we had already decided upon (*none* of the set menus included our preferred dishes), and on top of all that cost us more than we would otherwise have paid. I ended up having to bite down really hard to stop their attitude spoiling the whole evening.

The food, when it eventually arrived, was OK. I've had better. But frankly even if it had been the best Thai food the world has ever seen I would never go back, and I wouldn't recommend going there if there's more than four of you.

In contrast, the theatre was a delight. I won't spoil it for you - I realise it's unlikely any of you will get to see the show, but even so - except to say that the whole thing revolves around an urban bingo hall, the audience get to participate in the bingo, and in the second half someone really did win £200. Two hundred real pounds. How cool is that? It could have been me. Next time. Etc.

We don't go to the theatre half enough. In all the years (thirty, naturally) I've been going to the Royal Exchange I can count the bad shows I've seen on the fingers of one finger. Great entertainment, even if the second half did somewhat abandon the comedy in favour of some half-baked social commentary.

More iTunes madness

When Paul came to stay last year, I took the opportunity to dump his iPod onto my PC. That was 16 MONTHS ago and as yet none of that music has found its way onto mine. Not that I've been doing nothing. It takes a while to listen to 80GB of music and decide whether it's something you'll want to listen to again and, Paul would be the first to admit, he does listen to some weird shit.

Having jettisoned the weirdest of the weird, there's considerably less than 80GB of the original stuff left, but even so what I added to the pile virtually doubled my music collection, and along with the fact that I've bought quite a few new albums recently, I was coming in for some serious nagging (well, exasperated sighs anyway) from some quarters at the fact that *another* car journey was taking place and there was *still* nothing new on the iPod. I'd already ticked the WMA to MP3 conversion box, so I was running out of excuses.

It's been a while since I used iTunes and I soon remembered why. Sure, I'd had some pretty bad experiences with it when I first loaded up the iPod, and since then I've avoided it as much as possible. It didn't help that every time I opened it up it would tell me a newer version was available, and then pretend to download that newer version but never get anywhere.

I decided that upgrade had to be first on the agenda. A newer version *might* be more stable, and if the auto-upgrade wasn't working for some reason, I'd just have to go over there and drag it off the Apple site myself. Installation complete, I set version 8.2.1.6 off on its crawl through my hard drive again, to find all that lovely new stuff from Paul, and those purchases from the last sixteen months.

One of the things I really, really wanted to sort out was the lack of Album Art. I've always had a thing for album covers (I even bought Roger Dean's book ferchrissake), so it was a source of some irritation that almost none of the music I copied over that first time had any art associated with it. I'd done some research and discovered the iTunes Library album art fetching thingy, which looked like an obvious first step since it involved no effort on my part beyond a click or two.

Sadly - a common experience by all accounts - iTunes managed to find less than half the album art I needed. For one thing it's extremely sensitive to naming inconsistencies, and beyond that it simply doesn't have a very extensive collection. So here's where I trip over the first of today's stupid iTunes annoyances. See, being an Apple product, iTunes has to pretend it understands nothing about Windows, or how the Microsoft Media Player rips CDs to your PC. Most CDs come with their album art stored on the disk as JPEG files, and Media Player conveniently copies these to the same folder as the music, and calls the files "album art." That's too subtle for iTunes. It pretends it can't find them. OK, so they're hidden files. Don't get technical on me. If I can see them, so can iTunes.

I reverted to the manual method - dragging the (hidden) Album Art files into iTunes. But what about all those albums from Paul, that I didn't have files for, hidden or otherwise? Two words: Google Images. Just typing the artist and album name into Google Images, in most cases, resulted in several thousand copies of the right picture file being presented for my selection. Brilliant. Brilliant and tedious, but brilliant even so.

Did I say "the first" of the iTunes annoyances? Yes. There's at least one more. Track numbering. iTunes will interpret ID3 tags correctly, and list the tracks in the right order if they're there. If not, tracks are listed alphabetically. But once again iTunes deliberately ignores, or pretends to have no knowledge of, the standard Media Player method of naming the music files it has ripped. "01 First Track Name" "02 Second Track Name" and so on. So even in the absence of correct ID3 tags, there is the smallest CLUE there as to the correct order, and I REALLY didn't want to have to trawl through the majority of my music collection telling iTunes what it should already have been able to work out.

Still, you know, it's not like I've got anything else to do.

July Wednesdays. Number 4: A recording session

I didn't know when I arrived for our fourth recording session that the switch to Wednesdays was going to be a permanent thing. We'd moved it for this week on account of Annie's committee meeting tomorrow, but as of next week she's going to give aquaerobics a shot, and that's on Thursdays. Could be a good move, cos I'm pretty sure that's something Nikki would like to join in with, so Wednesdays it is from now on.

Apart from any Players dress rehearsals and book club nights, obviously.

Fourth song, and another one of Annie's vocals. When I recorded my first two, I found the second session went much more smoothly than the first, and the same thing happened with her. Almost as if that first session scraped the rust off one's pipes leaving them smooth and shiny for the second session. Whatever the reason, things rattled along much easier than last week and before we knew it another main vocal was wrapped.

Movie Review: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Took Natalie & Blythe to see this at the IMAX on Sunday. IMAX has somehow become our preferred venue for movie-going, probably on account of us being somewhat selective about what we see in the cinema and, having decided that something is worth watching on a big screen, it makes sense to go for the biggest screen around!

The first 12 minutes of HBP was presented in IMAX 3D. An entertaining and absorbing experience but ultimately I find it distracting. When I'm not trying to duck out of the way of the revolving Warner Brothers sign that's threatening to chop my head off, I'm thinking about how clever the effects are, and lifting the 3D glasses off to see what the film looks like without them (I've done this at every 3D presentation I've ever attended, going right back to Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone). So I was quite grateful when the little red heads flashed up to tell us it was time to remove the glasses and get on with the rest of the film.

And what a film it was. Easily the best of the Potters so far, screenwriter Steve Kloves did an admirable job of turning another overlong book into a watchable movie with many levels of interest. From what I've read opinion among HP fans is sharply divided. The ending was all wrong, too much was left out, scenes invented that weren't in the book yadda yadda yadda. I'm coming at it from the perspective of someone who's only read the book once. For me, the further you get through the HP series, the more long-winded and tedious the books become. I've long said that it's as if the publisher gave up any pretence of editing Rowling and decided the whole thing was just such an amazing money-generating machine they may as well roll over and publish whatever she came up with. As a result the books became ever more self-indulgent, flabby and overwritten.

That approach won't work for a movie. You only have so much time to play with. So what's important? To make an entertaining film that stands on its own merits, or one which is less entertaining for the masses, but ticks all the boxes for the few who like to steep themselves in Potter lore and know every nuance and motivation of every character backwards?

I know where I sit. HBP was entertaining from start to finish. Some great comic moments, many centred around the wonderful character of Luna Lovegood (played brilliantly by Evanna Lynch), some excellent character development, and overall a superbly fell and claustrophobic atmosphere pervading the entire 153 minutes. OK, maybe we could have spent a bit less time on the various teenage relationships, but for me this only added realism to the piece. With hormones raging, many teenagers DO think their relationships, real or imagined, are the most important things in the world, even when there's dark magic invading every corner of the world and threatening to destroy life as we know it.

One downside of the massive amount of story we had to get through in a (relatively) short time, was the number of characters effectively reduced to cameos. Hagrid, Professor McGonagall, most of the Weasley family, Tonks (more Natalia Tena please!), Lupin, Neville, Wormtail, even Crabbe and Goyle, have mere seconds on screen, although without exception they manage to make the most of their moments.

Conversely, those who enjoy the most screen time pull out performances that, each in their own way, are stronger than anything that's gone before. The three main characters get better with every outing, Michael Gambon's Dumbledore enjoys some of his best scenes ever, and Tom Felton finally has the chance to turn Draco Malfoy into more than a two-dimensional cipher of a baddie. He grabs that chance with both hands.

I guess the next instalment will be subtitled "the search for the Horcruxes" which will have a tightrope to walk to keep the interest up. Is there really enough material in the last book for two movies, or is it merely an excuse to wring every last drop of profit from the franchise? Time will tell.

Another 4x4 rant

Now that the schools have broken up and the roads around our house are mercifully free of the damned Chelsea tractors for at least 6 weeks, I can afford the slight rise in blood pressure to write about my reaction to a recent Mitsubishi advert.

Apparently one of their tanks has the lowest CO2 emissions of any 7-seater 4x4. Wow. Big deal. Still worse than a regular car though eh? How many of you really *need* 7 seats? How many of you benefit from (or even know how to engage) the 4-wheel drive?

Wankers.

Kabin Konundrum

Last Friday, Norris was heard to mutter something about how he wasn't aware that it was a nice day on account of it being "dark when I started work." Excuse me? Are the scriptwriters not aware that it's light by about 4.30am at this time of year in Manchester?

Even newsagents don't start work THAT early.

That wasn't the only gaffe in that Kabin scene either. Sloppy writing. (And yes, I take this stuff far too seriously)

Fun at IKEA

Bit of an oxymoron you might think, but the daft Swedalike names that IKEA use for all their products never fail to amuse me. I know, I'm a big kid. You have to do something to relieve the boredom during a trip to somewhere like IKEA.

So we dropped in there last night during the journey home on account of Natalie needing some new stuff for her latest student digs, and tickled ourselves helpless at the merchandise's expense.

Later, at the dinner table, we relived the hilarity of the visit for Nikki's benefit and recalled that the woman in front of us at the till had, among her other purchases, a toilet seat.

Not knowing what the actual name of this item is, I set everyone a challenge of inventing an IKEA-type name for it. Here's what we came up with:

POOJAR
POORING
CHET
BUMSIT
ÅRSRING
and, my personal favourite, DOKNUT

It's actual name? Online research reveals it to be almost funnier than anything we came up with. It's called RACKEN.

The awesome power of the government mind

We still get a surprising amount of mail for people who no longer live here. This coming October we'll have been here three years, but still it dribbles in. Mainly for the people we bought the house from but still, occasionally, for other names who must be long gone.

I address this issue with undiminished vigour, as I long for a day when the only mail to be delivered here is ours. To that end I always seek out the contact email or webform of the senders and send them a standard note requesting they desist.

With the most recent example, it was easy to find a contact. It was a government letter. Their response was almost immediate, and beautifully demonstrates the capacity of civil servants to behave as if they only have one brain between them, this being one of days when their head was empty. Names and addresses have been changed to protect their blushes:


Dear John

Thank you for your recent email.
Please provide us with the address that the mailing was sent to so we can remove it from our list.
Please also accept my apologies for the inconvenience this matter has caused.

Kind regards,
Brian Dead
The Government Information Team for Improper Mailings


-----Original Message-----
From: John Beresford [mailto:john@thingummyjig.com]
Sent: Thursday, July 16, 2009 1:13 PM
To:
Cc:
Subject: Ralf Previous-Owner

You are receiving this email because you have sent postal mail to Ralf Previous-Owner at 11 My Road, My Suburb, Manchester M11 1AA, specifically a notification of the change in the law following the introduction of the Improper Mailings Scheme.

Mr Previous-Owner has not lived at this address since October 2006. Your letter states that you will be in touch with him again to remind him of the November 2010 deadline. Please don't bother. He's not here. We would be grateful if you would send no further mail for him here.

Thanks in anticipation.

john beresford

Weird & Wonderful takes shape

We held our third recording session for the new album last night, and the first where Annie was doing the singing.

We've had a bit of a hiatus since the second session what with one thing and another, but Annie's been busy in the interim with overdubbing, mixing, and adding various other new elements to the music to make it REALLY sing. Those first two tracks now sound awesome, although the first still needs me to fill in the final chorus, which we originally thought we could cheat on, but realised later that it's in a different key to the first.

With two tracks in the can, we had to decide whether to release these or wait until the whole album is finished. In the end we plumped for the more traditional approach, so apologies to anyone who was hoping for a sneak preview of the new stuff, but by way of sweetening the pill we've both been doing some work on our joint venture song-writing website, and you can now stream any/all of the tracks from our first album there if you fancy a listen, as well as accessing the lyrics and reading something about how I came up with the ideas for them.

Last night though, was all about Annie, and we'd chosen what turned out to be a particularly difficult track for her to start with. A real test of the vocal gymnastics, and after what I went through on our first recording, having not done any serious singing for quite a while, I really empathised with her struggles to find *exactly* the right note. We stuck at it though. There was an element of jokey rivalry to it, sure, revealed by her terse reply to my observation that it's not written down anywhere we have to finish a song every night: "You did." So we kept going. Us against the song. And we won.

Well, Annie did. I just ran the desk. Thankfully, it has a "simpleton mode." So rather than getting to grips with the one-hundred-and-fifty-million menus, sub-menus, sub-sub-menus, normalising, compressing, envelope shaping, pitch correction and all the other magnificent gubbins this software is capable of, all I had to do was hit "R" to start recording, and "space bar" to stop. Oh, and scroll backwards and forwards a bit. Simples!

Three down; nine to go. Still more production work for Annie to do on tonight's recording. Adding reverb, six-part harmonies, effects, maybe rerecording the odd bit of backing track or adding another guitar line. She puts hours of effort into the production of each track, but the end result is worth it. Not only is the original material much stronger on this second album - both musically and lyrically - but the things she's learned about production, along with her much greater proficiency with drums and guitar, is promising to make Weird & Wonderful live up to at least half its name!

July Wednesdays. Number 3: A subdued stag do

Some people seem destined never to meet the right partner. If you're into "people watching" (like I am) you might gaze at them in a reflective moment and wonder what it is about them that is holding the world at bay. They're witty, clever, got a reasonable job, personable. They wash in all the right places and with the right frequency. But somehow, they're still on their own.

Sometimes it's through choice, obviously. Not every singleton is constantly on the search for someone to turn them into a couple. Other times it's simply that they've had other stuff to do. Stuff which, to them, is more important for now. Until the world turns, and Cupid catches up with them.

Well, Cupid finally caught up with an old colleague of mine. Someone who these days I only see about once a year, but for whom another old colleague organised a small get-together of similarly well-dispersed friends. I didn't know he was getting married until the email arrived to invite me to tonight's event which I guess we can call a stag do, even though it didn't involve strippers, or large quantities of alcohol, or being chained naked to anything. Thank God. But, you know, despite my somewhat jaded view of marriage, good luck to him. The statistics may be against him (1 in every 2 marriages in the UK now fail, apparently), but they're probably skewed by all those hotheaded youngsters rushing down the aisle before they really know who they are, never mind who each other is. Having left it this long before "settling down" I'm sure he'll be fine.

Anyway we started off at the Bollin Fee in Wilmslow, which can apparently get a little wild at weekends but which, at 7pm on a Wednesday night resembled a doctor's waiting room in the middle of a swine flu epidemic more than it did a shopping mall on the first day of sales. The six of us were - almost - their only custom. So the landlord must have been a little disappointed when we packed up after only two pints and headed off to Garlic Spice, a small Indian restaurant tucked away around the corner on Bank Square.

What a find this place is! "Summer Special" on the menu gets you a poppadum, a starter, a main, a side dish, rice and naan, all for £8.95. And a gut-busting £8.95s-worth it is too. I almost couldn't finish it. Almost. Once again, we were their only custom. Denizens of Wilmslow apparently don't venture out much in the week. Maybe that's why they go so mad on a weekend? Still, we weren't complaining. Having the place to ourselves just meant the service was excellent, as was the food, and we could relax and enjoy a whole load of catch-up conversation and wit, discuss the issues of the day, and offer Simon some handy tips on matrimony. Which, if he's any sense at all, he will totally ignore.

5th Annual Chorlton Beer Festival

Hard to believe tonight saw the opening night of the FIFTH annual Chorlton beer festival. Once known as "ZestQuest Beerfest" but now simply the "Chorlton" beer festival, this is a must-go entry on the annual social calendar and has grown every year since those innocent days back in 2004. Last year they ran out of beer halfway through Saturday and have ordered 50% more, but judging by the rapidity with which the signs were being turned around on the 30+ real ale barrels adorning the... um... bit of the church where they were racked, I still don't know whether that'll be enough.

Anyway it won't bother us. Friday was always going to be "our" night, not least because it's forecast to piss down tomorrow but mainly on account of experience telling us to get there early to be certain of securing our favourite tipples.

An innovation this year: branded glasses. Very nice. Previous years have suffered from the use of plastic glasses but this year we were treated to proper glass glasses with this rather attractive logo. £2 a pop and you could either keep them, or return them on your way out for a refund. There was never any question that ours would be coming home with us. A nice memento of the evening and the slow and gentle quaffing of Alchemist, Snowdonia and Kodiak Gold in the company of good friends and some traditional, live, music.

What I was really there for

My heart wasn't in that drinks reception at the awards ceremony last night. I'm not a huge one for small talk with strangers. I drained my Peroni as fast as I deemed polite, bid a professional farewell to Mr Commended with whom I'd struck up that brief conversation, and left.

As I walked out through reception, the real reason for me being there was made plain. The universal reason, I mean. The Serendipity.

For there at reception, a small wheeled travelling bag at her feet, stood a young lady holding a single sheet of A4 and wearing a worried expression. The security man at the reception desk called out, "does anyone know where Handforth is?"

And I, of course, do.

What's more, I know how hard it is to reach Handforth from Oxford Road by public transport. "How much would a taxi cost from here?" enquired plod. I reckoned on about thirty quid, given that my regular journey from home to Piccadilly was around a tenner. Young Lady turned her deepening worried expression on me. "I 'ave come from ze airport," she announced in a charming French accent. "Ze bus driver said it was ze right one for 'Andforth."

What choice did I have? Beyond seeking out the bus driver and beating him to a bloody pulp, I mean. I offered her a lift. It was the least I could do. Some small recompense for being dumped 11 miles north of her real destination by a bus driver who couldn't have given the faintest toss where she needed to be. A way of showing her that not all British men are ignorant oafs.

The young lady - I never did ask her name - put aside any worries she may have fleetingly had about accepting lifts from strangers and picked up her suitcase. The plod on reception tried to reassure her. "He's alright," he said, "he's come from the BBC." Which clearly is no reassurance whatsoever, as I was only visiting.

The journey to the Pinewood hotel in Handforth passed pleasantly enough, with me pointing out local landmarks en route and her explaining that she was from Lille, worked for Tate & Lyle, and was here inspecting food ingredients (or something). I thought it best not to make any quips about EU food regulations. You know. Cucumbers, bananas, that sort of thing. As we drove down the Kingsway a plane overflew us on its final approach and I pointed out how close she had been to Handforth while still at the airport. How we laughed. Who says the French have no sense of irony? No-one. That's the Americans.

"You 'ave no idea 'ow you 'ave 'elped me," she enthused as we pulled up at reception. The right one this time. I smiled. No worries, my dear. It's all good for my karma.

July Wednesdays. Number 2: The Alfred Bradley awards ceremony

As I mentioned last week, where Wednesdays are concerned July is a pretty hectic month. I did have one free, but not for long. Anyway here we are at number 2, and off I set to BBC Broadcasting House as one of the long-listed playwrights graciously invited to sit in the audience and watch those who beat us receive their prizes.

The ceremony itself was held in Studio 7. I'd never been in a studio before. Never been one of those who apply for tickets to watch shows being recorded, laugh on cue, or participate in... participation... events. As far as I could tell the main reasons for using a studio in this case were because they didn't have a meeting room large enough to accommodate the expected audience (of between 50 and 100 people) and because we were to be treated to a "script in hand" performance of selected scenes from the bursary winners' plays.

We were handed a programme as we arrived. For some reason, and completely out of character for me as someone pathologically early to events of all kinds, I'd interpreted the billed start time of 5.30 as the *earliest* I should turn up. In truth I couldn't have made it much earlier anyway, having not picked Nikki up from work until 5. Even so it was quite a shock to walk in at 5.33 and find the tiered seating already two-thirds full. A few even-later-comers drifted in after me, and we finally got underway a few minutes later.

A brief glance down the programme, which contained short synopses and bios of the finalists and their writers, revealed a truth which in my naivete I had not grasped until that very moment. The Alfred Bradley Bursary Award is open to first-time writers for radio. Writers who have not had a play produced for radio. Not, as I had assumed, writers who have never had anything produced at all. Here was my second shock of the evening. Reading passages such as

"X studied screenwriting as a post-graduate at the Northern Film & TV School..."
"Y holds... a MA in TV & Video. His first writing commission was from BBC Scotland and his sitcom won..."
"Z studied English at Oxford and his first play was produced earlier this year..."

brought home to me that this is very definitely a competition for serious professionals. Which meant two things.
1: I did well to be long-listed as an untrained, unlearned writer at my first attempt.
2: I never had any chance of winning.

Sorry if #2 sounds like sour grapes. It's not intended to be. I'm just trying to be realistic. Would any judging panel allow a complete novice to win over entrants with degrees in related arts and established track records of success in other media? Well, maybe. I guess if the writing was stellar they could claim "an amazing find." But the cynic in me says (loudly) that writing is turning out to be just one more of those cliques where success depends on ticking the right boxes and hanging out in the right crowds, and that part of the judging process would involve a close examination of previous achievements.

Six prizes were awarded in the end, out of the nine finalists. Two "Commended"s, who got a six-month mentorship with a BBC Radio producer to help develop their scripts; a Highly Commended (twelve months' mentorship); two Runners-Up (£1,000 bursary and a mentorship); and the Winner (£3,000 bursary, a mentorship, and a guaranteed production).

And here comes the third shock of the night. Because I well remember the clear directions we were given in the Christmas workshop, about how Radio 4's afternoon audience were sensitive little flowers to whom one wasn't even allowed to say "shit" let alone any of the edgier four-letter words we're all familiar with. And I remember the struggle I had trying to force dialogue to be dramatic, and violent, and powerful, without using those words.

And here's the winner. A monologue about, among other things, wanking.

"And we don't do wanking on Radio 4," says the commissioning editor (one of the judging panel), "so we're trying to get it commissioned by Radio 3, for The Wire. They do a lot of wanking over there. If that fails we'll do our damnedest to get it on Radio 4."

So the winner is someone who wrote what he bloody well wanted, bugger the rules and the guidelines, and the panel ignored their own rules as well and selected him the winner! I think there's a lesson there for all of us.

The runners-up and the winner each had a brief performance (looking like all those clips you've ever seen of radio drama in the making, with actors standing in front of microphones, their scripts in hand or on stand) and then it was time to head off to the bar, where the "drinks reception" proved to be a selection of wine or bottled beers (two varieties) and some bowls of nuts and crisps. As many of the attendees appeared to already know each other (long-term Alfred Bradley contestants, perhaps? Or all members of the same writing group?) I grabbed a beer and headed for the back of the room to people watch. Eventually I struck up a conversation with one of the Commendeds. One of the least qualified of the finalists, even he's had a play on at the Edinburgh Fringe, but he seemed a very nice chap. Also one for ignoring rules, I discovered, as he had brought his wife along when the invite had clearly stated "due to limited seating... there is no opportunity to bring a guest."

See, there's a pattern here. I'm just too rigid.

The fastest rejection on record

One of the six queries I sent out over the weekend was to a New York agency who promise to reply within a week, interested or not.

I emailed them on Sunday afternoon, got a robot reply that they were out of town for the holiday weekend and I should try again next week.

I came home from the office yesterday to a very politely worded rejection. Thanks, this sounds interesting, but it's not what we're looking for right now.

It's always nice to receive a personal note rather than a form letter, but it was the timestamp of the email that impressed me most. 13:36. That's 8:36am New York time. He can't have been in the office much more than half-an-hour. If I'm going to be rejected (and I am), I wish it could always be like this. Swift and painless, rather than hanging on for weeks wondering if the email got through. Brilliant.

Novel news

Calm down, it's not that kind of news. Trust me, if I'd found an agent or publisher the title would have been positively hyperventilatory. I can use words like that. I'm an author.

I remembered that yesterday; hence the title.

No, I hadn't really forgotten it, but the lack of any positive response to my early submissions had, if I'm honest, taken the wind out of my sails. I knew the beginning of The Novel needed reworking, and I had no enthusiasm for the task. So there it sat. Gathering dust on my hard drive. Going nowhere.

As is so often the way of things I had no conscious grasp of how much time had gone by since those first submissions. September LAST YEAR! God. And my last reply? November 12. That's not bad actually. Only about eight weeks after the query. All told I had 15 responses from 20 submissions. All negative, naturally. The five no-shows were all from agencies whose guidelines say "we'll only contact you if we're interested." I hate that. How do you know if they're still looking at it, or they haven't even started looking at it, or they've binned it, or they're passing it round inside their firm to find the right agent? Even a form rejection is better than listening to static.

Anyway, that was then and this is now. Over the past week or so I've been building up a head of steam to get that rework done and honestly? There wasn't that much to do. The first few pages were grossly over-written. A result of me knowing that they are the Really Important Pages and had to be Just Right, so of all the 100,000 words in the book those few hundred had been written and rewritten so many times there was no energy left in them whatever. They needed a fresh start.

I cut out the waffle. Always a good idea. Tell the story, the whole story and nothing but the story. Don't try to impress with flowery language and long words (like hyperventilatory, for example). Cut to the chase.

That was the second problem. The first three chapters waffled on endlessly about the personal life of the main character, but never got around to introducing the conflict. After reworking, the conflict parachutes into the story in the second scene. So with a few hundred words of self-indulgent waffle stripped out, and four key scenes of conflict distributed liberally around the first three chapters (agents often request chapters 1-3 in their submission guidelines) I was much happier with the start and felt ready to restart submitting.

So I did.

Just a quick job

In an attempt to beat the rain which had been forecast for 10am, I went out early today to cut the lawn. While I was out there I thought I'd finish trimming the edge of the grass. There was still a big "peninsula" of grass sticking out into the border where the pond had been, and in her marvellously non-nagging way, Nikki's been gently suggesting I get rid of it for the past few weekends.

An hour and a half later, sweating profusely and with my breath coming in huge panting gulps, I came in for breakfast having finally succeeded in removing that patch of grass, which couldn't have covered more than a couple of square feet.

Only it wasn't just grass, was it? It was full of bloody bamboo roots left behind from the patch beside the pond. Snaking their way inexorably along the edge of the grass, held in check only by the lethally sharp pieces of slate tile with which the previous owner had edged his lawn, and occasionally breaking through the slate and heading off across the grass for a new life on the other side of the lawn.

One patch of roots was easily as thick as my arm. A tangled mass of eight individual rhizomes travelling together for a foot or more and then taking off in different directions. I'm beginning to wonder if we'll ever be rid of this stuff!

Where the old rub shoulders with the young

One of the side-effects of growing older having spent your entire working life with the same company, is that you're invited to a rapidly increasing series of retirement parties for friends.

Tonight saw one such event, for a guy I've known on-and-off for 30+ years, and actively worked with for about a year of that. For some unknown reason he chose what must be one of the trendiest bars in Manchester to hold it in: Dukes.

"Do you hang out here often, Iain?" I asked him, astonished.
"No, I didn't even know it existed."

Turns out he picked it on recommendation from a (much younger) colleague.

The terrace was packed when I arrived, with easily two hundred bright young things occupying every chrome table and chair, lapping up the evening sunshine along with their vodka shots, Archers, or whatever it is twenty-somethings drink these days. I found Iain inside, sat at a tall table with three others, already half-way through their first drink of the evening. I ordered a drink for myself and joined the lively conversation.

Occasionally a full-breasted, short-skirted, tanned and lovely young lady would stroll past, dressed for the catwalk and, as if all the oxygen had temporarily been sucked from the room, conversation at the table would die. Apart from the occasional sotto voce delivery of an appreciative "fucking hell" or "Jesus" from one of the others, obviously. It must be very disconcerting - not to say irritating - when you're a full-breasted, short-skirted, tanned and lovely young lady, to be stared at by a small group of grey-haired, saggy-bellied, wrinkled old men dressed in something from south Manchester's finest charity shops. High fashion we ain't.

Evidence of the credit crunch would have been hard for even Sherlock Holmes to find. As I was driving I stayed on pints of cranberry and soda (£3 a pop) and the bar remained three deep from when I arrived shortly after 6 to when we sat down for a meal around 7.30.

For yes, much to my surprise, Iain had booked a table. In the end a dozen of us stayed for dinner. Dukes isn't exactly haute cuisine, but that's not what it's about, nor is it what we were after. Just a plate of pleasant chow, a few drinks, and an evening reminiscing. Retelling the war stories of a working life in the computer industry. Remembering those ridiculously huge 8 megabyte exchangeable disks, PIDs, green screens and early mobile solutions. And of course the inevitable polite inquiries about his plans for the future. Gardening and converting all the home PCs to Linux, apparently. Mad fool. Absolutely and emphatically no intention to come back next Monday as a consultant. Which is, as it happens, quite rare. There's something about the computer industry that makes it hard for some people to let go.

Not me. When my time comes, you won't see me for dust.

Special offer

If you've been reading regularly you may have picked up on the fact that we've paid a few visits recently to our not-so-local garden centre, principally to buy an incinerator and a bird feeder.

Whoever is in charge of marketing at this place - or at least, whoever came up with the "membership" scheme - is a genius. For a tenner a year gardeners can become "friends of the garden centre" which guarantees them 10% off all purchases, year round, two free coffees in the restaurant per month (you get one of those Café-Ritazza-esque stamp cards for this) and "privileged" access to a few events throughout the year, such as the summer special, where the discount is raised to 15%, and the Christmas event where, presumably on account of there being not much doing gardenwise, the discount reaches an eye-watering 20%.

Now even for a tightwad like me, the prospect of a couple of free coffees isn't going to provide sufficient incentive to make the 20-minute car journey to the other side of town, but it does sit there on your shoulder, whispering in your ear like the cartoon devil from Tom & Jerry. "If we're going to the garden centre we may as well stop for coffee," can easily turn, as it did on our last visit to "we could have breakfast there."

Which is where the marketing genius comes in. Because when "two free coffees" turns into "breakfast for three" the restaurant finds themselves almost twenty quid better off, and I'm left thinking something's not quite right. As I mentioned in the incinerator post, £5.25 for a bacon bap is taking the piss somewhat. Free coffee my arse.

So after that experience, why were we fooled into trekking over there tonight for their "Summer Special" event? 15% discount and the offer of a free drink and some nibbles aside, there was in fact nothing we needed for the garden. So why go to a garden centre? But we did. Exhibiting astonishingly lemming-like behaviour we drove over there after dinner, arriving 30 minutes after the posted start time of 6 o'clock. There, by the door, a low table was adorned with half-a-dozen plastic wine glasses, stacked near the front with their few remaining drops of wine clinging to their immaculately smooth surfaces, and a plate containing a few crumbs along with three pieces of french bread spread with sweet chilli hummus (or something).

They really pushed the boat out, huh? Oh... yeah... the counter held a few pots of olives too, along with a cocktail stick dispenser.

We wandered around the indoor part for a few minutes, marvelling at how similar it all looked to the last time we were there, picked up a couple of pieces of french bread spread with paté (the first plate had been replaced, but the wine hadn't) and... umm... left.

For the first of the July Wednesdays (*) we agreed it had been a total waste of time. But from a garden centre profit perspective? Genius.

(*) In a rare explosion of sociability, all my Wednesdays are occupied for the rest of July. Next week I've been invited to the Alfred Bradley Bursary Award ceremony at the BBC, the week after drinks and a curry in celebration of an ex-colleague's forthcoming wedding, followed by a week where our normal recording session has been brought forward a day on account of a diary clash, and the last Wednesday of the month is, as always, book club. Never mind "nearly famous" - I'm almost popular!