This Is This

I’ve been very busy this week, doing it all, burning bridges, fighting fires - that kind of thing. Running with scissors. Across broken glass. On a polished floor. And I’m wearing socks. And there are train tracks. A bell rings.

None of which should stop you going about your business in the course of your daily lives. It hasn’t with me.

I’ve been looking after myself OK. I’ve been eating a bit healthier. Today for lunch I had a falafel sandwich and couscous (so good they named it twice) and I’ve been getting to bed at a decent time to deal with the early starts up walking the dog. It’s been beautiful this week though. The mornings. Clear, sharp, beautiful mornings.

I’ve been drinking better, too. I bought an ice crusher after discovering I make a killer margarita. I drink mainly to counter the early starts, but I’m no slouch in the cocktail department.

Then again I’m no cock in the slouchtail department, but that’s for another post.

Take care of yourself too and come back tomorrow for the Weekend Song, if you like. If you don’t, though, I’ll leave it up on the blog for you to find when you’re back on Monday. That’s Monday, 23 June on This Is This, online at http://www.thisisthis.org.

OK, have a great weekend! Love you!! Bye!!!!!!

A growing number adults ride bikes now because of environmental concerns, lack of parking in the city and general economic downturn.

I think this is cool, because bikes are fun, clean and quick, plus they keep you healthy and that improves your mood which affects other people. I’m sure that in small, immeasurable ways, my life has been affected by good bicycle karma.

These commuter cyclists care not for fixing their own bikes, and why should they? There was a time when every motorcyclist had to be a weekend grease monkey, but I’d bet that most bikers now wouldn’t know an impact wrench from a pair of tyre spoons.

What they do instead is get people to service their bikes for them. This sounds a little fanciful, but I respect that their bikes cost hundreds of pounds and might need a tune-up every now and then. My own bicycle maintenance stretches little further than doing the thing where you get the front wheel between your legs and twist the handlebars so they line up a bit straight.

It is, however, a symptom of our skills being in decline. Maybe I’m being a little wistful for a time that never existed, where adults would know the exact knot to tie together two chords of different thicknesses to pull someone from a well, but do people really need to pay to have their bikes serviced?

It’s outsourcing all over again. I saw an interview where one guy was boasting about his outsourced guy in Bangalore who read the client’s kids a bedtime story because daddy had to work late.

He said this proudly, like he had been resourceful. Well done mate, you’ve got someone to do your living for you while you work to pay them.

Tell you what, you stay on, let me make a few calls and I’ll see if can get someone to schtup your wife. Save you the trouble.

Go home, read to your kids, fix your bike and tell your wife you love her. Please.

Do what you must. Work if you have to, then do what you can. Always. And when you’ve done that, take a step back and do what you should.

Chinese people right? We’ve got these chaps running the Olympics in a few weeks, and if no one’s going to have the balls to say something, I’m just going to come right out with it. The difference between the hurdles and the sprint is that the latter is a superior race.

These events are all about speed, and the 100 metres is as speedy as it gets. I don’t mind the other ones, the 3,000 metres, the 1,500 – those are all perfectly good disciplines. Some of my best friends do them. Lovely fellas. And there’s nothing wrong with a steeple chase. I persued a few myself for a couple of terms at university.

Don’t get me started on the relays, though. You have to draw the line somewhere, and that’s just sick. And the marathon? That’s not even a race and should be wiped off the fucking face of the fucking earth.

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Regular readers of this site (and by regular I means one that were here two days ago but I’ll take what I can get) will remember me picking out the line in These Days by Jackson Browne where he wrote: “Don’t confront me with my failures – I had not forgotten them.”

I thought this was pretty clever, and if I’d written it, I’d be pleased, but then I don’t have two last names like Jackson Browne. Or Woodrow Wilson. Newton Faulkner. Rudyard Kipling. Powers Boothe. There’s something in that, isn’t there? Gladstone Small. Harrison Ford.

F. Scott Fitzgerald. Man. Two last names and an initial. That’s even better than two initials, sported by many literary greats like H H Monro, E E Cummings and C C Peniston. Then there’s three initials – JRR Tolkien, AJP Taylor. You want to carry that off, you better write your weight in gold.

Jackson Browne, anyway. The line in question was picked up by reader who said, with considerable cause, that it was pretentious on the grounds of his age. Well, Chairwomen from The Internet in Cyberspace, I’d argue that it’s precocious, sure, but where do you stand on young talented kids?

Comedy answer: Back of the neck. Keep the fuckers down.

Seriously though, it’s a valid point. Arthur Rimbaud, Yo Yo Ma, that one off the Antiques Roadshow, these guys had talent. What do you do? It makes you want to do something.

It is a little pretentious, but it’s damn annoying when they go right ahead and fulfil that talent like they’re the next fucking generation or something.

Let me tell you something kids. One day I’ll be dead and you’ll still be going to work every day. Ha. How do you like that?

No, hang on.

I guess talent is subjective and it depends as much what you do with it as how people perceive it. There’s no “I” in genius.

No, hang on.

There’s no “us” in genius.

Fuck.

I’m thirty six, by the way. Thirty six and a half exactly this week.

Jackson Browne stayed relatively unknown in the UK, perhaps ending up as a footnote in the Great Folk Explosion of 1972. You had Neil Young, Crosby Stills and Nash, Carol King, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor and everyone. A lot of good came from it, but often one side of a penny is invariably shitty and this came in the shape of Jethro Tull and The Eagles.

You could do worse that to buy the For Everyman album on which this song appears, ending with Sing My Songs To Me and the title tune For Everyman, but on my CD there is a track split between them even though there is no break, so it’s a pain to post them both up together without a break.

But this one’s a good tune, and my god there’s a line in this that is so heartwrenchingly honest, it’s more staggering to know he wrote it when he was sixteen:

Don’t confront me with my failures,
I had not forgotten them.

Listen: These Days

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Related pages
Weekend Song archive

That’s what the kids call it, but I can’t leave the Friday go bye day without chipping in, if only to invade the privacy of my new colleagues with a tour of wit, quips, and (dare I say? Fuck it, yeah:) repartee.

Colleague 1: Has anyone heard of this band? Scooter?

Me: Nope.

Colleague 2: Me neither.

Colleague 3: What? Seriously? I know them. When I was at Uni they played there and everybody thought they were the dog’s bollocks.

Me: Now them I’ve heard of.

Also I have a childish pride in a comment I left on this post this week but other than that I have nothing to declare but declarations itself. I have no retorts, let alone torts, so I’ll just say it now and we’ll move on.

Have a great weekend.

What’s Mr T’s favourite snack?

“A petit filous.”

Do the voice, yeah? Brilliant.

That’s what I’m talking about. Three days without a sausage, then straight back in with a gem.

Ok, that’s an exaggeration, there may have been some sausage.

So I’ve been very busy. Like stupid busy. Job-wise, mainly, but tolls have been taken, pipers paid and you know - stuff. My new dog doesn’t allow me any time in the evening for much blogging because he requires a lot of attention. I am out the door at 6:30 walking him and up until he wants to go to bed. I had no idea it would be such a big job being owned by one.

Saying that, it’s rewarding, because there’s something to be said for going out for a walk at 6:30am when no one else is around. This week by the river I saw a stork sunning itself with its wings apart, warming itself up to go fishing I guess, but it stood there with its feathers splayed out like a hood ornament on a fancy automobile.

And another time I saw a bird of prey – a kite, I think – with its head perfectly still while the rest of its body was blown around by the wind, and its tail fanned out to catch every gust and volley.

I’ve also been reading a lot. A lot for me anyway, which is about thirty pages a day. I finished Lake Wobegon Days by Garrison Keillor and I’ve started Joan Of Arc by Mark Twain. Not a lot of people know Mark Twain wrote a biography of Joan of Arc, but he did. It was published under the name of a translator who put his talent towards the fictional recollections of a childhood friend and lifelong companion of Joan. All his own work, of course, and meticulously researched over many years but not written in his typical style.

Podcasts? I’ve been listening to Adam and Joe’s 6 Music podcasts. Adam Buxton and Joe Cornish are colleagues of mine at the BBC, though it flatters me somewhat to call them that because I have 28,000 colleagues. I don’t know them or anything, but you could you could do a lot worse with half of one of your hours than listen to this. I keep meaning to put them into the Recommended section of this site.

Which brings me nicely round to this. Traffic’s been healthy since the Post Of The Week thing which is always a challenge. Although I should technically be stripped of my title, because I’ve been nominated enough times to put me into the Hall Of Fame, a bridesmaid Hall Of Famer, but a Hall Of Famer none the less. I wonder how many times I can say Hall Of Fame in this paragraph? Four, apparently. No, I stand corrected: Hall Of Fame, you see.

Seriously, though. What is the past tense of bake? Shouldn’t we revise it? 

Baken? Book? Bade?

I was awarded Post Of The Week here for this, which was very flattering. I wasn’t going to get time to write today, but if early forecasts are correct (”a light flurry of new readers with a dusting of comments perhaps later”), I thought I’d say hello.

If you’re an old reader, then hello too yourself, you old fucking horse thief, you - I’m just kidding.

New or old, there is a book out this week which captures the internet’s spirit of intimacy, honesty and hope, with proceeds going to War Child.

War Child works with children affected by war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda. They work with children who have been hit hardest by the joint forces of poverty, conflict and social exclusion and their groundbreaking work with former child soldiers, street children and children in prison has supported and helped thousands who would otherwise not have been able to reintegrate with their community, gain access to education or enjoy sustainable livelihood support.

Buy: You’re Not The Only One 

I listen to this song and I don’t know where to start. I marvel. I reel. I gaup. I go back to reeling before thinking maybe I should stuck with marvelling.

I normally pick the Weekend Song early on in the week, and sometimes have the words written about the same time. Until yesterday, this review read simply: “Fucking hell.” And I was happy to leave it there until Friday night.

There’s so much space in this song – it’s so loose and slow but relaxed and still has you hanging on to every word. How else can you explain a song that starts so slow and sweet and shuffles up with:

“Mmmmmmm LA.”
“Proved.”
“Too much for the man.”

Even after you’ve heard this a dozen times, it’s like a gentle reminder, like being woken up on your birthday. 

Thing is, this one’s all about the performance for me. The backing vocals are great because of the tight arrangement and the lead vocals are great because it’s left so open and Gladys Knight nails it. I mean fucking nails it.

I like a good backing vocal. Good backing vocalists are to music what a saucier can be to cooking. Get it right and you’ve no idea what makes it so good, get it wrong and you’ve no idea it could be so bad.

I have written about this before, but it really makes it.
Good Backing Vocals
Bad Backing Vocals
V. B. B. Vox

I use vox to host these songs because:

1) It is very easy to use and you can upload directly from itunes,

2) It doesn’t have a copyright policy so I can share songs (and also)

3) Listeners can not download the songs, so if people want the tune themselves they have to buy it so the artist doesn’t get ripped off.

But once I put a song on a different site so I could count the number of plays it got. You know how many people played the song? Nine. And I knew who four of them were, and I’m pretty sure I played it twice myself. Without blowing my own trumpet, that’s low compared to the number of people who read this site, so please if you normally skip this segment, you should give this a spin this one time.

Said he’s leaving on that midnight train to Georgia
Said he’s going back to find the simpler place and time.

Listen: Midnight Train To Georgia

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Related pages
Weekend Song archive

Oh man. If I invented a time machine, you know what I’d do?

I wouldn’t go back to last week and buy lottery tickets or anything – no way.

What I’d do is go back to the 1400s or something and show as many people as possible how to build their own time machine using locally-available materials. “Out of flux capacitors? Wait there. Er. Staye thou hither. I returneth, um… anon.” WHOOOOSH!!!

And then when all the people knew how to build their time machines, I’d come back to present day and see how much the world had changed.

I bet there would be a lot of schools named after me.

Imagine what 500 years of time travel would have done to now.

Imagine how the Weekend Songs would sound then, hey?

Of course I could have changed the course of history and possibly I would cease to exist. Or could have killed everyone, like if the future would have arrived much earlier, and the Battle Of Waterloo would have gone nuclear. Or people like me would have been genetically ruled out by sympathetic parents, or people would have realised the internet would never make any money and that time travel now meant that news had no value, so I’d be out of a job for starters.

Or maybe current affairs would have become like history and repeated itself so much that if you didn’t like the story, anyone could just go to the tipping point and change the course of events at any time, so you could be watching the news and the newsreader would go:

“Good afternoon, Nik Kershaw has died. One second. No he hasn’t. In fact, I don’t know why I said that, because nothing had happened to him in the first place anyway. No wait. Yes, he’s definitely died now. But quite some time ago.”

Then the newsreader would disappear and the other one would go: “I’m sorry, our previous newsreader never existed. And no one just read that last report, because it’s just me on the show and I don’t know why I’m telling you this. Now over to Nik Kershaw with the weather. Nik.”

“Thank vous, Francine, et maintenant tous le monde parle en francais parce ce que Napoleon a utiliser les bombes atomiques.”

Have a great weekend.