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!

Sometimes I even impress myself

Been working on an official movie site for my mate, hot shot movie writer/director/producer Colleen Patrick recently. Well, I say "official." It's official at the moment. With the film in pre-production they needed a web presence. Initially a quick-and-dirty web presence just so that anyone paying a visit to the official URL wouldn't get one of those impersonal hosting pages.

Once the film was in the can and slated to have its premier at the Seattle International Film Festival, "quick and dirty" needed to become a little more polished.

Once the film finds a distributor, they'll swing into action with their army of Flash/PHP/Java programmers and dump all over my work, but for now I'm the official webmaster. Go take a look. We're at http://www.thewholetruththemovie.com.

Recently, to follow up the trailer on YouTube, Colleen and her fellow producers and tech crew have been releasing interviews from the EPK - the kind of thing that will eventually find its way onto the "extras" DVD. Now originally, The Whole Truth website featured just that one trailer, on its own page. About a week ago, Colleen emailed me asking if I could put up all the rest of the interviews.

Problem was, the website was conceived as a fixed space. The list of interviews from the EPK is already 14 long and increases by one a day. I have no idea where it will end. I needed a way of displaying YouTube videos in a kind of gallery, where you could pick from a list, and see the result in a "display area." A few minutes' research uncovered one way of doing this that YouTube themselves offer. A YouTube Custom Player. Associated with a playlist, this can be embedded in a site in exactly the same way as a single video file, but offers a selection panel containing all the videos on the playlist. It has the advantage that any additions to the playlist are immediately reflected in the custom player, so updating the site with each new day's interview would involve just a single operation on YouTube.

I tried it out, and it worked fine, but it wasn't exactly the image I wanted. What's more, the available colour schemes are quite limited and didn't match the livery of the site. I needed something more configurable.

As always when I'm stuck for a solution, I turned to Stu Nicholls' marvellous CSS Play site. Browsing through his list of inventive galleries, I came across this one, which was uncannily close to what I'd envisaged for the YouTube gallery. I downloaded the code and read through it quickly.

Obviously, the main difference between this and what I was trying to do is that Stu's gallery handles img tags, and the standard YouTube embedding code uses object tags. But the simple Javascript array handler seemed eminently editable to handle object instead of img, so I set about fiddling with it to see if I could make it work.

With remarkable ease, I proved the 80/20 rule. I got 80% of the way to what I wanted in the first half-hour. That last 20% proved a little more tricky. For a start, the left and right arrows, which remained as imgs, were not being picked up as part of the array. It looked certain this was screwing things up somewhere. If they weren't part of the list that could be "clicked" then they would remain dormant and there'd be no way to access videos beyond the visible elements of the list.

I reasoned that since images ARE objects of a sort (indeed the CSS/HTML standards body intended object to replace img, although most browsers still handle img tags better than objects and they have much wider currency) I could replace the left/right arrow img tags with object declarations. Immediately things started to work a little better. The main problem remaining at that point being that YouTube videos are considerably wider than Stu's original photos, which required some pixel-counting and adjustment of widths and array limits to get the main functionality working as intended.

It was then only a simple matter of positioning the whole gallery correctly on the page, and amending the text and background colours to match the site. In fact the hardest (well, most tedious) part of the whole exercise proved to be the creation of thumbnails for each of the 14 YouTube videos.

The final result can be seen here. And yes, as the title of this post implies, I impressed myself. You might think I'm easily impressed; I couldn't possibly comment.

The editing requirements for this version will be slightly more onerous than for the YouTube Custom Player, involving the creation of a new thumbnail for each new video, adding an entry to the array and adding a new item to the HTML list that forms the basis for the gallery. But that's all mechanical stuff. The gallery is unlimited in capacity and looks much more a part of the site than the nearest Custom Player livery - a rather dangerous looking cherry red.

It's true to say that if there were hundreds of entries it would become very tedious scrolling through them one at a time if you knew you wanted #93, for instance, but I doubt that will be a problem in this case and if it does turn out to be an issue I can always add extra left and right buttons to skip an entire section (8 entries) at a time.

Choked

Had hoped to finish the burning today in between showers. Unfortunately I ran into the same problem as last week - the incinerator became choked. The embers just weren't burning down fast enough to make space for any more fuel - only this time I'd only been going a couple of hours.

Maybe chopping the boards into four pieces instead of three wasn't such a good idea? Or maybe the wood was still damp from the rain. Whatever the reason I was left with about another hour or two's burning to do so I guess I'll be back out there tomorrow.

Found a load more bricks too, buried around the site. No idea what I'll do with 'em, but the stock now numbers around a hundred so there's easily enough to repair the wall and probably build a couple of gate pillars to close off what was the entrance to the garage.

The next conundrum is what to do with the four rusting poles that were lying under the floor. Look like they were once part of a garden swing. Now they're so flaky that every time I move them they shower me with rust. I won't be able to get them to the tip without wrapping them in something (or making a helluva mess inside the car!). Perhaps I should just bury them and let the rusting process continue!

We're on a roll

Second recording session last night went MUCH better than last week. Whether it's because we're back in the groove artistically, or I was better prepared having listened to the backing track on and off all day, or we chose a slightly more upbeat and easier song to sing, or a combination of all three I don't know, but we called it a rap at 9.30 and I was much happier with the end result even though there's still lots of "producing" to do on it.

We were keen to record this song early in the process but when we were firing on all cylinders, because it's very much of its time. Called 'Spin Doctor' and written, presciently, in March/April 2007, it tells the story of corrupt politicians and people's slavish sheep-like reaction to them before they realise the grim truth, so you can see why we wanted to record it soon and get it "out there" while all the political fall-out is still fresh.

Annie's going to work up a clever video montage of politician clips and out-takes as a back-drop. Expect to see it on a YouTube near you soon!

Waspy

Driving Blythe home on Sunday we passed a sleek, low sports car with the number plate W44 SPY. I don't think I would've realised this was intended to spell "WASPY" had it not been for the cool paint job. Similar to this classic Dodge EV it was yellow, with a twin black stripe. Waspy, indeed!

Clumps of conversion

Returning to my PC last night after taking Blythe home I was surprised to find the WMA->MP3 conversion process had finished. Well, when I say finished, I mean stopped. The program thought it had reached the end of the list, but it was clear that quite a few files had been skipped.

I sorted the list by file type and removed the successfully-converted MP3 files, which reduced the list size from 2670 to 899. It sounded about right. At the estimated rate of progress I'd expected completion around 8am this morning; that number of files should have taken around 15 hours; and the program had clearly terminated while I'd been out.

I set it running again last night on those 899 files and this morning the conversion had stopped again. This time 199 files had been skipped. I repeated the process and left it running while I took Nikki to work, only to find 49 files still doggedly unconverted on my return. What is this? Some kind of binary chop? No, it seems clear that the freeware conversion tool I'd found has a bug in its list processing code. No matter, I started it off again on the 49, which first reduced to 17 and then to 6 at the fifth attempt. I ran it manually against those, one at a time and finally, shortly after 9am, the whole job was done.

Remember I said WMAs were more space hungry than MP3s? Completing this conversion has freed up 16.4GB space on my hard drive.

Burn, baby, burn

It was too wet to continue the incineration of our erstwhile garage floor yesterday, but I made an early start this morning. Well, early for a Sunday. I had the fire going by 9.30. Took a while to get going - it required a great deal of wafting - but after a lifetime of barbecuing I'm an expert wafter, and pretty soon the fire was crackling and spitting nicely.

The remains of fire #1 had charred their way down to a two-inch layer of reddish brown ash inside the incinerator, so having thought I'd need to tip out a whole pile of ash in the end all I had to do was shake the bin around a bit until about half of it had fallen through.

What's left of the floor consists mainly of larger boards - some of them eight or ten feet long - which all need cutting down before burning. On the positive side, this makes them easier to fit inside the bin, reduces the number of dropouts and general sped the process up quite a bit. In between loading the fire and sawing more planks, I continued retrieving bricks from the sub-floor space and began deconstructing the footings which had been left behind by the demolition crew. It didn't take me long to discover that each wall had been supported by a double line of bricks, so I started a second brick stack with a slightly larger footprint than the first. By the end of today's burning session this new stack was 12 courses high, each course having 8 bricks. At this rate I'll be able to build another garden wall.

I had to call a halt to proceedings after a little over four hours. The glowing embers in the bin had reached handle level and made it almost impossible to add more wood without it falling out, or risking tipping the incinerator over. I let it burn down to the point where the chimney-lid would fit back on, and left it to do its thing. I reckon there's another day's burning left in the stack so I'll be sending off my request for good weather next weekend!

I've been converted

Or perhaps, I should say, I'm being converted.

Several years ago when my PC was young, I decided to rip my music collection to it. After all, I reasoned, I spent many of my waking hours in front of the PC, we have no means of playing music in the living room, and the "media centre" idea was beginning to be established as the way to go. Intoxicated by the vastness of the space available to me (I had an almost-empty 250GB disk - luxury!) I chose to rip my collection to the superior, but slightly more space hungry, Windows Media Audio (wma) format, rather than the, perhaps more traditional, MP3.

The more tech-savvy of you will have predicted what comes next, and long-standing readers of this blog will already know.

I bought an iPod.

iPods don't play WMA format music files.

The frustrations of grappling with iTunes, expressed in that blog post linked above, have stayed with me for so long that I've only ever synced it once. That first time. You might even say I'd been traumatised. It did change my behaviour though. As soon as I discovered the WMA restriction I changed my rip options, and have been ripping in MP3 ever since. But still, more than half of my original music collection remained inaccessible, and none of my newer albums, despite having been ripped in the right format, have been synced.

This has long been a source of disappointment to regular travellers, as they discover nothing new on the iPod, but recently came to a head with my purchase of the Best of Nightwish, which both Natalie and Blythe wanted to listen to almost continuously. We even had to resort to the CD player!

Finally reaching the end of Procrastination Road, I sought out a file converter and pointed it at my music collection early this morning. It initially found almost 6,000 files, but after running it for an hour or so I realised it was wasting time analysing the MP3 files to detect that they didn't need converting, so I stopped it and removed everything from the list except WMAs, thereby reducing the number to 2,670 files. A few minutes progress monitoring suggested the conversion process would take almost 48 hours to complete, and when I checked a few minutes ago, this was still true.

You'd have thought with all my experience I'd know better than to use proprietary formats for *anything*. Maybe this will be the final lesson on that subject.

Waving goodbye

I've always tried, with my daughters, to follow the example my own Dad set. Nothing was too much trouble for him. He'd always be there with the offer of a helping hand, or a lift to take me wherever I needed to go. So there I was, at 2.30am, knocking on Natalie's door telling her it was time to get up and go to the airport to catch the first leg of her three-flight journey to this year's field trip in Belize.

Belize? Flippin' 'eck! The most exotic educational trip I declined as a student (I never went on any school trips) was to northern France. Mind you, she has been through the mill a bit these past few months what with Hep-C, rabies and typhoid injections and anti-malaria pills she's felt pretty sick a lot of the time, so I hope the trip is worth it. I'm sure it will be. Trip of a lifetime, probably, but before the excitement comes many hours of flying. 6am flight to Amsterdam, then the 10.45 transatlantic leg to Houston (10 hours flying) and a final 90-minute flight to Belize. They're on Central Standard Time there, 7 hours behind the UK, so when she lands at 4.45pm local time her body will think it's 11.45pm, and she'll have been awake for 22 hours. I have no idea how much more journeying there is at the tropical end between the airport and the resort.

Check-in for the Amsterdam flight didn't open until 4am but the trip organiser had insisted everyone be at the airport by 3am. I know. What can you do? At least, when we walked into the departures hall at 3.05, a small group of her mates had already gathered near the desk. So we hugged, I waved goodbye, and left her in St. Christopher's (and KLM's) capable hands.

First song is in the bag!

Well, it's been a long time coming but at last, after an absence of more than three years, I once again find myself in Annie's bedroom.

Oo-err missus! No! Not like that. I was there to SING.

Yes, we've finally started recording for the second album. The songwriting process, interrupted as it has been by house moves, creative dry spells, changing jobs, other projects, and all the minutiae that life throws in the path of the struggling, part-time artist, has stretched from November 2005 - when we wrote the last of the songs for our first album - to now, when we decided it was about time to put voice to microphone and lay down some of the twelve new tracks we've been writing during those three-and-a-half years.

I had only the vaguest realisation somewhere in the back of my mind that it had been so long, but looking at the dates on some of the music and lyric files brought it home to me. The one we recorded tonight - Flight of the Raven - was written in April 2006!

And boy, am I rusty. It's been at least a year since I did any serious singing, so the first hour of tonight's recording session was spent trying to blow the cobwebs off my pipes and get back in the groove. But we got there in the end, and without THAT much help from Annie's clever pitch-correction software. I think she only needed to get that out of the kitbag once, although we did struggle to come up with a decent harmony line for the chorus.

The sense of achievement though, after two-and-a-half hours, when I sang the last line and we both nodded at each other in recognition of a good "take," was every bit as powerful as that first time back in 2005 when we recorded Broken Rules. We'll be doing this every Thursday for the next few weeks. I'll be impressed if we can maintain a rate of one song per night - we chose a relatively easy one to start with - but whatever the rate of progress, we've made a start. And as we all know, the journey of a thousand songs begins with a single note. Or something.

English as she is spoked

As you might expect, with being a writer, I love the English language. Not just the wealth of vocabulary or the beauty of a well-crafted sentence, but its fluidity. It's ability to change and grow, adopting new words from other cultures and adapting existing ones to meet new needs.

Sometimes, the invention of new words, which can sometimes appear to be a full-time job for the tabloids, works really well. One of the best examples that springs to mind is "squarial" - a type of satellite dish introduced by British Satellite Broadcasting in the late eighties which was, you guessed it, both square and an aerial. As with most things these days, there's a Wikipedia page on it if you're interested, but the point of mentioning it is that it was a newly-coined word that, for me, worked really well because it correctly and succinctly described exactly what it was. Sadly the word, like the thing it described, became defunct in 1990 with the demise of BSB.

And also sadly, the phrase "works really well" can't be applied to all new words. Especially words like the one I heard on the radio today: nanobreak.

Intended to mean a short break (holiday) - one shorter than a weekend break, i.e. one night - it fails at the most basic level. The level of naive use of a term that has a specific, scientific meaning. "Nano" is an SI prefix meaning one billionth of something, as in: nanometre - one billionth of a metre. It also has widespread usage in relation to things on a nanometre scale, such as nanoengineering, nanotechnology, etc, but unfortunately it is also entering the popular consciousness as a "cool" way of saying "very small."

But, see, the problem I have with it, and the thing that made me roll my eyes in exasperation at the kind of marketroid thinking that does this to English, is that a nanobreak would be WAY shorter than a one-night stay somewhere. A nanobreak would be a billionth of a break. So assuming the measure "break" relates to what most people take as their annual holiday - two weeks (in which case, incidentally, a one-week break could be referred to as a semi- or demi-break) - then taking a nanobreak would involve going on holiday for 0.0012096 seconds.

Mind you, a lot of my holidays feel as though they've been that short, on the day I go back to work.

Comestible confusion

As usual on my way to pick Nikki up from work today I was listening to Radio 4. The pundits were discussing research into links between diet and prostate cancer and when I joined the programme one guy was going on about how he has recognised that dairy foods carry an increased risk and that he's eliminated them from his diet completely.

Now I'm as worried about prostate cancer as the next man. Well, actually, it's probably the examination to check me out for prostate cancer that me and the next man are worried about, but anyway... a life without dairy? No butter? No ice-cream? No CHEESE? No thank you.

As the programme continued, the alternative viewpoint came from a lady researcher, who shot the guy's argument down in flames. That's my spin on her arguments anyway. "Dairy hater obliterated by gorgeous cream-loving temptress." Or something. Her counter-argument was beautifully executed as a pincer movement. From the North came the revelation that this "increased risk" to dairy-eating prostate owners was only 10%. So if 1 person in every 1,000 is at risk on average, among the dairy eaters the risk will be 1.1 people in 1,000. Or, to put it another way, 1 person in 900. (Presumably. Stats was never my strong point.) Wow. I'm so scared. But she wasn't done. Remember the pincer movement. From the South came marching the second offensive. That dairy foods have positive effects too. In particular their calcium-related compounds have been proven to reduce the chances of suffering from Alzheimer's disease.

So there we have it. In stark, tabloid terms: go mad and keep your man gland, or stay sane but lose the juice.

But of course it's not as simple as that. These things never are. Foods are remarkably complicated chemical and biological agents, which often have beneficial AND deleterious effects in combination. And as if that weren't hard enough to get your head around, those effects can be reduced or exacerbated by your individual susceptibilities, whether genetic, environmental, or behavioural. Research continues into the complex interplay of all these factors, but increasingly I find myself asking: what's the point?

I don't want to live in a world where I have to eat exactly this much of this and not more than that much of that, not more than once a week and certainly not after consuming the other. Where I'm instructed to have five-a-day, exercise three times a day for twenty minutes at something that elevates my heart rate by 50%, avoid dairy, saturated fat, barbecued food, strong alcohol, sugar, cholesterol, and on, and on, and on. Jeez I'd be so stressed with worrying whether I was doing the right thing at the right time, the very act of trying to stay healthy would make me ill!

No, the research is all very interesting an' all, but I'll carry on doing what I like, when I like, and avoiding what I don't like, when I don't like it. If that approach has consequences then that's no different from any other approach. There's more to life than how long it is. It may be an overused phrase in these days of multi-forwarded emails, but it's still true that life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.

We're baffled

As I mentioned yesterday, on our trip to the garden centre we had intended to buy a fat snax holder. These little balls of goodness come in their own nylon mesh bags, but with a warning that small birds' claws can become trapped. They shouldn't really be hung up in these bags, but rather in a specially-designed holder. Perhaps more frustrating for us was the constant attention of the squirrels, who found the bags altogether too easy to lift off their hooks. The sight of several fat snax balls being dragged away across the lawn had made up our minds that we needed to protect them behind a strong wire cage.

Imagine our delight then, while perusing the various fat snax holders on offer, along with other garden-bird-feeding equipment, to discover the existence of a specially-designed Squirrel Baffle. For only a fiver, this clear plastic dome is attached to the feeding station pole, preventing Tufty from ascending to the banquet above. A bargain! They've already cost us more than that in stolen fat snax!

The baffle, even easier to assemble than the incinerator, was in place in minutes, and so far today each of us - Nikki, Natalie and myself - has witnessed its efficacy in foiling Tufty's attempts at purloining our avian comestibles.

The squirrels still climb the pole. They can see the food, hanging temptingly, through the baffle. On reaching the underneath of the baffle they adopt a confused look, glance right and left hoping to find a way through, or past, or over. Finding none they slide dejectedly back down the pole and slink off across the garden in search of alternative aliment. Result!

Incinerate!

With several things on our garden-related shopping list today and Mr Weatherman promising heavy rain later, we made an early start and took breakfast at the garden centre this morning. The bacon baps and toasted teacakes were excellent, so this may become a semi-regular thing (constrained only by the slight ache in the wallet caused by paying £5.25 for a bacon bap).

No visit to Woodford is complete without a full tour of the grounds, so along with the planned purchases of an incinerator, a fat snax holder for the bird feeder, and some rooting compound, we ended up with a trolley full of goodies including this rather attractive dianthus which now graces the deck, and a compact patio clematis (down there on the right) whose colour might have been especially bred to match the tub vacated by our dogwood, which we planted out in the border the weekend before last.

I left all the planting and arranging to Nikki. My attention was focused on man things. Assembling the incinerator (a rather grand title for the simple task of screwing its three feet on) and getting started with the burning.

I've had a lifelong fascination with fire, almost to the point of pyromania. It explains the large, strangely shaped scar on my right hand, and manifested itself when I was a child in hours spent in the woods collecting fallen branches, building bonfires and watching them burn. And then returning to the embers the following Saturday to rake them back into life and begin the whole process over again.

Using a garden incinerator isn't quite as satisfying as that - having to wait until the wood has burned down before adding more slows the whole process down too much - but it comes a close second. In the end the promised rain didn't arrive and I was able to keep the fire going from noon until late afternoon, reducing the stack of oily floorboards by about a third and seeing off the various lengths of pruned tree completely.

In the intervals between loading wood into the bin, and picking up the odd smoking remnant that fell out, I busied myself collecting bricks from the site and stacking them by the wall, along with sorting the multitude of detritus that litters the area into piles of keepers and chuckers.

After four hours the air holes in our shiny new incinerator were totally blocked with ash, which had built up to more than half fill the bin. This slowed down the rate of burn considerably. It wasn't shiny any more either. The galvanising, or whatever had given it that shiny appearance, had all burned off within the first five minutes. I waited until the fuel level dropped below the rim, slotted the chimneyed lid into place, and left the rest of the burning for another day.

Floor found to be fire fodder

Weather forecast was good for today; not so good for tomorrow, so I was determined to make a start on lifting the garage floor.

Expecting at least some of it to be salvageable, I spent the first hour or so moving our collection of dried logs and tree stumps (which would be ideal for log fires, if we ever lit one in the dining room any more) from the shed to the wood store. Funny how a pile of wood looks fairly small until you try to move it. I adopted my usual mental approach to tasks of this kind: "each piece moved is one piece less to move" and sure enough when I surfaced from that self-imposed mental idle, the job was done and the shed looked considerably more capacious.

Nikki retrieved my crowbar and hammer from the study, and I set to lifting the boards, starting at the door end and working towards the house.

It soon became clear that not a single piece of floor could be rescued. Those two planks that had looked so promising were both too thin to support a man's weight (well, THIS man anyway) and too rotten underneath to be used for anything else. Indeed all the boards, including the ones that looked OK from above, hid a total mess underneath. Whether they'd been chewed up by the hundreds of woodlice living in the sub-floor space, or rotted with the damp, or been turned into dust by woodworm and mould, they were all only good for one thing: burning.

The main reason? None of the floor had been protected from damp. I don't know who built that garage, or when, but they had a pretty strange idea of construction technique. The boards were carried on joists that rested on... earth. Yep, directly on the soil. In many cases these joists had rotted away to nothing - as you can see from the photo. When I tried to pick them up, they would fall apart leaving a trail of dust in the soil. Or they'd split in half, leaving the rotten half behind and me holding the chewed-up top half of damp, spongy timber.

These central joists had transferred their moisture to the floorboards, which were also in various stages of rot. Only at the edges, where the joists rested on a couple of courses of brick, made level with small pieces of slate, had the wood remained dry, but this had only stopped the rot - not the ravages of worm, beetle, and louse.

The patched section, as predicted, had suffered years of oil damage and had in fact given way, the boards beneath split and crumbled. Putting a positive spin on all this - at least the job went quickly. Only the first five or six boards had been nailed down, the rest simply laid loosely on their joists. With the boards neatly stacked against the wall, and having uncovered a couple of 2x2 flagstones, we're all set to have a cracking good fire so we'll be off to the garden centre tomorrow to buy an incinerator. Those oil-soaked boards should burn a treat!

Flawed floor

We dodged the showers yesterday to take a quick peek at that mysterious garage floor. It's built more like a floor you'd find in a house rather than a garage. Every garage I've ever seen has a huge slab of concrete for a floor, not floorboards.

Most of it, I should say, is made of boards. In one small area - which looks in the right position to have been beneath the old MGC's sump for most of the time - the boards have been reinforced with additional timbers laid perpendicular to the run and screwed into place. Presumably the wood beneath had softened under the influence of countless oil drips. It certainly feels spongy to the tread.

Closer to where the door was, the boards give way to more substantial planking - pieces of timber stretching the whole width of the building but more than an inch thick and a good six inches wide or more. If these are in good condition when I lift them, they can supplant the rather too large and heavy planks which I originally bought for decorating. Even closer to the door the whole mess dissolves into small offcuts, bits of pine and whatnot which would make good kindling should we ever again have a fire in the dining room.

About three-quarters of the way across the floor, one of the boards is loose and gives a hint of What Lies Beneath: eight or so 2x4 joists supporting the boards and which themselves are resting on what looks like a mishmash of brick, concrete, and old tarmac. I don't think I can be entirely certain what it is until I start digging it up. At the moment it's covered in a film of white dust. I'll be ignoring discomfort and my long-time hatred of the damn things, and wearing a mask when I tackle this. There is a chance this dust is years of slough from the cement asbestos walls and I don't fancy keeling over with mesothelioma in twenty years.

This is turning into yet another example of how one job leads to another. The demolition was just the start!

BBQ 2009

Last year we missed the good barbecuing weather by a day. This year we missed it by an entire week. Yes last Saturday, as my UK-based readers will fondly recall, was a blisteringly hot and sunny 27° - perfect weather for a BBQ, garden games and sitting under the shade of a gazebo sipping Pimms, or your tipple of choice. Yesterday the only outdoor tippling was provided by the iron-grey clouds blanketing the city, which proceeded to dump their load on us from early morning until mid-afternoon.

Hardly the stuff to inspire thoughts of garden gallivanting, or to enthuse the weary salad-maker (me) as he chops his parsley and soaks his bulgur wheat for the tabouleh, or empties tins of assorted beans into a large stainless-steel bowl for the three-bean salad, especially when he'd been up since 5.30am to boil the potatoes and eggs for a classic potato salad.

Still, the late afternoon forecast was for the weather to dry up between 2-3pm and remain dry for the rest of the evening, so at least the day wasn't set to be a complete wash-out even if it didn't match the gloriousness of the previous weekend. Having sussed the weather, it was with some dismay we learned via neighbourhood runner that the BBQ - its early stages anyway - had been forcibly decamped to the local club for the hours of 3-6pm.

Our forlorn troop of salads wended its way down the road and around the corner shortly after 3pm to join the other cold food on a series of low tables, to be picked over while the kids were entertained with various games of musical chairs, bumps and egg & spoon races (Health-and-Safety-mandated plastic eggs, naturally).

After this brief exile we marched the remaining salads, quiches and trifles back down the road to their rightful home, alongside the soon-to-be grilled burgers, sausages, toasties, kebabs and an assortment of breads. At the urging of several neighbours I once again performed my erection in the garden - an impressive affair that can easily shelter 20 people - while other assorted male partners looked on with envy from their more traditional positions manning the barbecues.

It wasn't long before I'd put myself on the outside of three hot dogs, a burger, two toasties and two portions of tiramisu, at which point I realised I was almost incapable of sitting down so I'd better stop. Luckily it was time for the quiz, a marginally easier version of last year's organised into 26 questions whose answers began with successive letters of the alphabet. Our team - named Royal Jerseys in honour of the potato salad and other potato-related delights - won with 17/26. It would have been 18 if I'd been able to remember the Nikkei in time. Why is it when you need Nikkei all you can think of is Hang Seng?

All this tongue-in-cheek hilarity belies the fact that I was totally not in the mood for a social event yesterday. In fact all of us agreed we'd far rather be sat cosily in front of a good film than trying to find the other person in the room going "oink" (the Animal Game) or trying to pick up a rapidly-diminishing cereal carton using only our teeth, and without touching the floor with any part of our bodies other than feet (the Box Game). Looking on the bright side, we did manage to avoid any hint of Choo-Choo.

So for the second year running, we didn't stay until 3am. We didn't even stay until midnight. We left as soon as the Box Game had run its course (with five limber contortionists attempting to pick up a flat piece of cardboard from the floor), thereby relieving the remaining party-goers of our bah humbugnesses.

Garage Sale

Not so much a "sale", to be fair, more a giveaway.

Looking more like a Second World War Nissen hut, our "garage" has blighted the bottom of our garden since before it was our garden. Since the very first day we came to view, and sat at the picnic table enjoying a cup of tea with the previous owners.

I can't remember if we decided then and there it had to go, but if not it wasn't long after. Barely wide enough to accommodate the smallest car (it used to house an MGC GT) and accessible only down a lane that is itself barely wide enough for a car to pass (our neighbour used to drive a Reliant Robin, which was OK, but anything larger? Dicey.) it was a garage in name only as far as we were concerned.

Various options were discussed and discarded over the years. Its cement asbestos construction allegedly meant that extreme care had to be taken in any demolition. Panels were not to be broken, and afterward had supposedly to be wrapped in heavy-duty polythene sheet and taken to the councip tip, which required 24-hours notice. Although not mandatory, it was also recommended to wear protective clothing - a mask at least and preferably a disposable cover-all.

Imagine my surprise then, when our two-man demolition crew arrived in shorts/jeans and t-shirts and proceeded to take the erection apart piece by piece, apparently unconcerned as they broke panels in half and barrowed them out to the road (the lane having proven to be too narrow for their Transit tipper).

I had intended to take "progress" shots on-site, but having witnessed their method from the study window I decided it would be more prudent to remain out of range of the dustclouds surrounding them. Progress, unhampered by protective suits, masks, or the desire not to disturb the integrity of the panels, was impressively rapid. The crew arrived at 9am and within an hour had removed the asbestos sheet, membrane and wooden boards comprising the roof structure, completely exposing the trusses.

Half an hour later the entire roof had disappeared.

After a further half-hour the lane-side wall and door end were down, and the garden side wall can be seen here leaning drunkenly inwards. By noon, the final wall - the gable end nearest the house - had fallen and the garage was, effectively, no more. The men had been on-site less than three hours.

After a quick tea break and the first trip to the tip to dispose of all the timber, they returned to bag up the cement panels and sweep up.

Taken from the same position as the first photo above, this is how the garden looks now. A little less like a 1950's throwback and a little more like the 21st century suburban haven we want it to be. Admittedly the flowering currant stuck apparently haphazardly in the middle of the plot gives it a slightly bizarre aspect, but the plan is to take back-up cuttings from this before trying to transplant the mature tree to a more sensible location.

We have been left with one final interesting task. The disposal of the garage floor.

Not, as for modern constructs, a concrete float, but instead what appears to be a suspended wood floor made up of various gash pieces of timber, off-cuts of floorboard and whatnot, all resting on a low course of bricks. Some of this flooring timber can, I hope, be rescued and used to repair some of the more chewed-up boards inside the house (although they will need sanding and treating). The rest will have to be burned. Probably the first use of the new space, once we've purchased a traditional garden incinerator.

Back in the groove

What with one thing and another, the replaced tiling around the new shower tray wasn't grouted up until Saturday, which meant New Plumber had to call back yesterday to seal the tray and the door, which in turn meant we had to wait until today to try it out. But you can bet there was a queue for that bathroom once the sealant had dried.

Since the whole problem was caused by the tray being set too low and with insufficient support, I expected to have to step up into the new tray. As it turned out the extra couple of centimetres makes hardly any difference to the "entering experience" which has definitely got my subconscious confused. My "exiting experience" came with an in-built assumption of a step down with the result that I stubbed my foot on the bathroom floor. Kind of like when you're walking downstairs and there's one less step than you expected. I'm sure I'll get over it.

Sadly I must admit to being not entirely happy with the result. Compared with the old tray, this one doesn't have much of a fall, so the water runs away much more slowly and also pools in the tray and around the edges rather than disappearing completely. It's also significantly shallower, so we'll have to be ultra-diligent about keeping the trap clear or else we'll be flooding the bathroom floor. At its highest point, opposite the trap, the tray is less than one centimetre deep.

Still, if I was to accentuate the positive I'd have to say that after three consecutive showers (Nat's been staying with us on study leave for a few weeks) there's no sign of a leak, and as that was the whole point of the exercise I think we can tick that box.