Packaging wot talks

For a while now I’ve been intrigued by the way that packaging has started talking to us, addressing the consumer like a friend in the cause of a very modern business phenomenon: the brand that isn’t a brand, that can accumulate its millions by remaining cool and cuddly and non-corporate. Here are a few examples I’ve collected over the last few years:

‘A big hello from Jonty and Nick and all the Fryers at Burts. Do you like our new packs? We love them! They were inspired by the beautiful shoes of our friend Kate Cordle! But why animal prints? We wanted to highlight the awful business that is Palm Oil Cultivation in Borneo and the harm it is doing to Orangutans.’ (Burts crisps)

‘We’re delighted you’ve decided to treat yourself to the natural, healthy goodness of goats’ milk.’ (Delamere Dairy goats’ milk)

‘We developed this grease-proof pouch after a customer complained their Danish stuck to the napkin!’ (Pret a Manger Danish pastry)

‘It takes a steady hand to make a really good cappuccino. Just to be sure we weigh about one in three.’ (Pret a Manger coffee cup)

‘What is an innocent smoothie? Well, since you ask …’

‘Once opened consume within 4 days or we’ll come round and get you.’

‘We like talking: If you’re passing and you fancy a chat, we’re here at Fruit Towers …’

‘One portion of this smoothie will provide you with the same amount of antioxidants as your average 5 fruit and vegetables a day. But this doesn’t mean you’re excused from eating some nice veggies with your dinner tonight.’ (All the above seen on Innocent Smoothie bottles)

Mundane quote for the day: ‘The noblest prospect in the world, it has been well said, is London viewed from the suburbs on a clear winter’s evening. The stars are shining in the heavens, but there is another firmament spread out below, with its millions of bright lights glittering at our feet. Line after line sparkles, like the trails left by meteors, cutting and crossing one another till they are lost in the haze of the distance. Over the whole there hangs a livid cloud, bright as the monster city were in flames, and looking afar off like the sea by night, made phosphorescent by the million creatures dwelling within it.’ (Henry Mayhew, 1849)

Decoding the decade

This piece by me appeared in the Guardian last Saturday:

I am pleased to announce that, after many years spent at the cutting edge of scientific discovery, I have finally mastered the art of time travel. I am not at liberty to say exactly how, but I managed to scramble through one of those wormholes in the space-time continuum and I’m actually writing this column in November 2039. We’ve got it all here in the future, you know: teleporting, thinking robots, space elevators. The only slightly disconcerting thing about the 2030s is seeing the decade I have just left behind being recycled as part of the nostalgia industry.

For instance, there is a chain of “noughties” theme pubs here, called Strictlys, where all the bar staff have to wear stick-on goatee beards and they play Coldplay on a loop. Then there are the digital retro parties, where everyone has a good laugh at those primitive iPhones we put up with in the 2000s, and we all wonder how on earth we got through the long winter evenings with only 200 TV channels. And you only have to see people getting wistful about when the whole family used to watch The X Factor on a Saturday night to realise what a strange and omnivorous human urge nostalgia is.

Not that remembering the 2000s is all about wallowing pleasurably in kitsch. The New-New Labour politicians of the 2030s have been falling over each other to distance themselves from their New Labour predecessors by constantly reciting the mantra, “We must never go back to the failed policies of the noughties.” Strangely, though, they don’t mean the unregulated financial system which caused the money markets to crash and turned the bankers into folk devils at the end of 2008. Instead, one moment of ignominy gets mentioned ad nauseam: the winter of discontent of 2009, when the intransigence of all those public sector workers who resisted market “modernisation” caused the worst recession in living memory. Everyone here remembers the noughties as the dark ages to which we must never return – rather like the 1970s in your day, in fact.

In short, we in 2039 are suffering from a nasty bout of what Ferdinand Mount, way back in 2006, called “decaditis”. This tendency to package decades as unified entities is a relatively recent phenomenon, and it takes a while for each decade to accumulate its own set of historical cliches. At the end of 2009, for instance, no one really knew what the noughties stood for. There were a few brave efforts at instant retrospectives, but people’s hearts weren’t really in it. Every one could see that the decade was just a series of contingent moments held together arbitrarily by the Gregorian calendar.

You may remember a similar thing happened with the 1970s, which took some time to become crystallised in popular mythology. In a book about the decade published in 1980, Christopher Booker referred to it as “a kind of long, rather dispiriting interlude”, a merely transitional era with no distinctive characteristics. We had to wait a few years before the 1970s assumed such symbolic importance in the now familiar Thatcherite narrative of postwar national decline and our failed experiment in social-democratic politics. The problem with this kind of decadology is that it treats the past as a cautionary tale in which the ending seems inevitable, and thus views our forebears as stupid or naïve for not seeing the writing on the wall. The 1970s, or the noughties, come to seem as distant and alien as Pompeii, with nothing to teach us except how much more enlightened we are today.

It isn’t read much in 2039 but there is a novel called 1984, in which the hero, Winston Smith, works at the Ministry of Truth rewriting old editions of The Times, casting the previous versions into the “memory hole”, a chute leading to an incinerator. What the author, George Orwell, failed to realise is that in the future there would be no need for such censorship, because of our insatiable appetite for decadology and its infinite capacity for inducing selective memory.

Every so often here, an older person might dimly recall something about “bankers’ bonuses” or “sub-prime mortgages”, and for a brief moment it acts like a Proustian madeleine, a secret corridor into a forgotten past, just like snatches of the song “Oranges and Lemons” do for Winston Smith in 1984. But mention these phrases to anyone under 40 and you might as well be speaking in Latin.

Admittedly, one or two maverick historians are starting to put together an alternative history of the noughties. They point out that the economic crisis at the end of the decade led to a brief questioning of market fundamentalism and its relentless pursuit of growth, consumption and speculation at all costs. But then the market fundamentalists fought back and managed to present their version of the future as the only form of progress, so that everyone who disagreed with them came to seem like a dinosaur. Personally, I don’t think this alternative version of the noughties will ever catch on. As some people were pointing out even back in 2009, decadology has very little to do with history.

We have recommendations for you

As someone who regularly buys presents for children on Amazon, I am familiar with the vague feelings of 21st-century anomie attendant on receiving emails beginning ‘as someone who has expressed an interest in the Harry Potter interactive wand, we thought you would like to know …’ or ‘as someone who has enjoyed the High School Musical Annual 2009, you may also be interested in purchasing …’ Recently this email marketing campaign has taken a more troubling turn. I received today an email from the online retailer identifying me as ‘someone who has expressed an interest in male grooming’ and inviting me to purchase a number of items including the BaByliss for Men Automatic Stubble Rechargeable Grooming Tool and the David Beckham Intimately for Men Gift Set containing Eau de Toilette and Body Wash, at the allegedly tempting discounted price of £17.99.

Reader, if you could see me as I type this you would immediately realise what has thus far escaped the Amazonians, which is that I have absolutely no interest in male grooming. There may be a small number of things in this world I am less interested in than male grooming – the properties of belly-button lint, the insides of an internal combustion engine, the love lives of the cast members of Hollyoaks etc. – but suffice it to say that the list is not long. I cannot imagine why Amazon thinks otherwise. I think I did once buy a replacement foil for an electric razor from them, but I hardly think this qualifies me as a Beau Brummell for the noughties. Perhaps they are confusing me with the Joe Moran who is the Brad Pitt of the Cornish Coast (see elsewhere on this blog, passim).

Mundane quote for the day: ‘The post is fat with appeals and bargains. Too much to support, too multitudinous to purchase, their computerized headings address me intimately. But I am not to be bought by their matiness. Soon their oral squeals will be on the telephone. “Good morning, Mr Blythe, my name is Joanne and I want to interest you in our Windows and Doors.” The young voice quakes momentarily as it braces itself for rudeness. No thank you, Joanne. Politeness costs nothing, as mother said, though it isn’t quite true when it comes to Windows and Doors.’ – Ronald Blythe

Toast to a pint-sized polymorph

Another one from the bottom drawer. I wrote this little cultural history of the beer glass for one of those two-part supplements they have in the Saturday Guardian and Observer (this one was on summer pubs).

Most drinkers probably think of their beer glass as a fairly functional object, designed mainly to convey the liquid on its important journey from the pub table to their mouths. But you can’t separate the history of beer from the history of the beer glass.

Until the end of the Victorian era, pub-goers mostly drank out of pewter tankards, which hid the bits of sediment that used to float around in their beer. Then two things happened: dingy pubs began to be better lit, and modern filtration methods started to produce a clearer drink. As newly enlightened drinkers took more notice of the clarity of their pint, the modern beer glass was born.

The first mass-produced beer glass – the 10-sided, handled pint mug – arrived with the consolidation of the brewing industry in the 1920s, and became famous when the Brewers’ Society used it in its “beer is best” adverts in the 1930s. But after the war, it was nudged out by the dimpled beer mug, made of thick glass patterned with indentations, resembling a hand grenade. This design change fitted in with changing drinking habits: dark mild had acquired an unfashionable image as an old working-class man’s drink, and its substitute, amber bitter, looks lovely in the refracted light of a dimpled glass.

Then, in the 1960s, the dimpled mug went into a long, terminal decline because (or so the brewers told us) drinkers preferred a lighter, straighter glass. The invention of a new type of glass, with a bulge about an inch from the top, also solved the perennial problem of straight glasses – their propensity to chip near the rim when being washed together. This was the Nonik (no nick) glass.

The straight/dimpled glass distinction is shrouded in mythology. I have heard northerners claim the dimpled glass as a southern affectation – southerners presumably being too soft to get their whole hand round a glass – and I have heard southerners claim it is quirkily northern, perhaps unconsciously influenced by the scene in the 1971 film Get Carter, when London hard man Michael Caine asks for a pint of bitter in a Newcastle pub “in a thin glass”.

A more interesting question is why there have been so few beer glass types in Britain, when the Germans and Belgians, for instance, have countless branded glasses for every type of drink. In George Orwell’s (non-existent) ideal pub, The Moon Under Water, he noted approvingly that they “never make the mistake of serving a pint of beer in a handleless glass”. Along with glass and pewter mugs, they had some of the strawberry-pink china pots that practically died out after the first world war. While grudgingly acknowledging that this was because most people like to see their drink, Orwell declared that “beer tastes better out of china”.

Beer glass innovations have generally been propelled by the brewing industry. In the 1960s, for example, there were various proprietary moulds used by keg beer manufacturers such as Worthington E and Watneys Red Barrel in an effort to create a national brand image. Oddly shaped glasses thus came to be linked, in the minds of real ale purists, with the theme pubs and fizzy pap that brewers were trying to foist on them. Another factor is that the British drinker likes be served a full pint, and this is easier to calibrate in a no-frills glass. Only in Britain, one feels, would you have the slightly bigger “pint to line” glasses so popular at beer festivals and in cask ale pubs.

But no one can agree about how the shape of the glass impacts on the most important thing: taste. Some say a thin glass is better because the temperature of the beer rises more slowly in it; others say a thick glass and handle are preferable because the hand doesn’t warm the beer. And Orwell swore that beer tasted better out of china. But good luck with finding a pub that will still serve you a pint of bitter in a china mug.

Family Britain

I was delighted to be sent an advance copy of David Kynaston’s Family Britain 1951-1957, the latest volume of his magisterial survey of Britain in the post-war, pre-Thatcher years – although I would have bought it anyway, because the first volume, Austerity Britain, was my favourite book of 2007. Like its predecessor, Family Britain offers some beautifully thick and humane descriptions of everyday life from our recent past. How can you not like a book that manages to turn the memoirs of Noddy Holder into a rich historical archive? Every so often Kynaston interrupts the narrative with these wonderfully evocative lists:

Dabitoff, Windolene, Dura-glit, Brasso, Brillo, Rinso, Lifebuoy, Silvikrin, Amm-i-dent, Delrosa Rose Hip Syrup, Mr Therm, Put-U-Up, Toni Perms, hair-nets, head-scarves, Jaeger, Ladybird T-shirts, rompers, knicker elastic, cycle clips, brogues, Clark's sandals, Start-rite (that haunting rear view of two small children setting out on life's path, Moss Bros, tweed jackets, crests on blazers, ties as ID, saluting AA patrolmen, driving gloves, Austin Cambridge, Morris Oxford, Sunbeam Talbot, starting handles, indicator wings, Triumph, Norton, sidecars, Raleigh, Sturmey-Archer, trolley-buses, Green Line, I-Spy, Hornby Dublo, Tri-ang, Dinky, Meccano, Scalextric, Subbuteo, Sarah Jane dolls, Plasticine, Magic Robot, jumping jacks, cap guns, Capstans, Player’s Navy Cut, Senior Service, Passing Clouds, cigarette boxes, Dagenham Girl Pipers, Saturday-morning cinema, Uncle Mac, Nellie the Elephant, The Laughing Policeman, fountain pens, Quink, napkin rings, butter knives, vol-au-vents, Brown Windsor soup, sponge cakes, Welgar Shredded Wheat, Garibaldis (squashed flies), Carnation, Edam, eat up your greens, Sun-Pat, Marmite sandwiches, hard-boiled eggs, semolina, shape, sucking oranges through sugar cubes, Tizer, Quosh, Kia-ora Suncrush, dandelion and burdock, Tom Thumb drops, Sherbert Fountains, Spangles, Trebor Chews, barley twists, blackjacks, fruit salads, aniseed balls, pineapple chunks, Big Chief Dream Pipe, flying saucers, traffic-light lollipops, gobstoppers …

I wonder what a similar list from the noughties would look like:

Activia single pots, Jamie Oliver, Strictly Come Dancing, The X Factor, Kettle Chips, Innocent Smoothies, KFC Bargain Buckets, goatee beards, low-slung jeans, Ugg boots, peasant skirts, iTunes, Amazon, Boden clothes, beanie hats, Who Do You Think You Are, iPlayer, Twitter, wristbands, full-zip hoodies, Caffe Nero, farmers’ markets, 3 for 2s at Waterstone’s, Radio 2, Cath Kidston tents, VW Kombi camper vans, Nintendo Wii, Doctor Who, High School Musical, Festivals, carveries, Top Gear, Ant and Dec, misery memoirs …

No, it doesn’t really work.

Mundane quote for the day:
‘May you be dull –
If that is what a skilled,
Vigilant, flexible,
Unemphasised, enthralled
Catching of happiness is called.’ – Philip Larkin, ‘Born Yesterday’

English roundabout

Here is a little piece I did for the FT about the British reinvention of the roundabout. Limitations of space prevented me from mentioning the classic song by XTC, 'English Roundabout', allegedly inspired by the magic roundabout in the band’s hometown of Swindon: ‘And all the horns go “beep! beep!” / All the people follow like sheep … I have had enough, / I just want to get out / Let me off o’ this English roundabout’.

The traffic roundabout first arrived in Paris and New York in the 1900s. Britain was a late developer, only getting round to building its first one at Hyde Park Corner in 1926. But these early “traffic circles” were fairly anarchic. The constant weaving of cars caused frequent hold-ups and accidents, and in heavy traffic they would clog up completely.

Then, in 1966, the British unleashed the full potential of the roundabout: a new law stipulated that vehicles approaching the roundabout had to give way to traffic already on it. The Road Research Laboratory near Slough conducted a series of studies of traffic flow at roundabouts in the late 1960s and early 1970s that made the British the leading authorities in the field. One of the fruits of this research was a uniquely British invention: the mini-roundabout, which began to appear on roads in 1967, and which greatly increased traffic capacity at smaller junctions.

The case for roundabouts soon became compelling. They cut out unnecessary delays and so were less congested than junctions with traffic lights, and they eliminated one of the most dangerous turning movements: right or left into oncoming traffic, with the potential for lethal side-on impacts. The roundabout with offside priority became one of Britain’s most successful international exports – at one point in the 1990s, France was building them at a rate of about a thousand a year.

It seems odd, then, that the roundabout has become the bête noire of the British motorist in a way that traffic lights have not. Perhaps this is because it is the landscape feature most associated with new towns such as Milton Keynes, which are often unfairly dismissed as boring and soulless. There is even an urban myth that car tyres wear out quicker in Milton Keynes than anywhere else in the country because locals drive round the roundabouts too fast. New towns are a traffic engineer’s dream: they can start from scratch without worrying about property lines or existing road layouts. So naturally the traffic engineer with a blank canvas builds the safest form of traffic junction: the roundabout.

ARGLETON: A SPANISH PERSPECTIVE

The Argleton story is moving fast. My dad found this in an old Francoist newspaper, ABC, which he reads to improve his Spanish:

La principal teoría al respecto es que Argleton fue añadida deliberadamente al mapa para rastrear con mayor eficiencia a compañías que copian los datos de los mapas violando los términos de copyright. "Puede ser un error deliberado para que la gente no copie los mapas. A veces se colocan calles ficticias en los mapas para que no sean robados, pero nunca lo había visto en Google Maps", concluyó Joe Moran, académico de la Universidad John Moores.

I didn’t realise I was so fluent.

I remember Argleton

Argleton, the place not far from here that exists on Google maps and nowhere else and on which I have blogged before, has now come to the attention of the national media:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/6474746/Mystery-of-Argleton-the-Google-town-that-only-exists-online.html

I did explain to the nice reporter from the Telegraph that all I knew about Argleton I had gleaned from Roy Bayfield’s intrepid explorations in the badlands north of Liverpool on his blog (http://walkinghometo50.wordpress.com/2009/02/22/destination-argleton-visiting-an-imaginary-place/). Still she managed to spatchcock my inane musings on the matter into an uninformative but not too embarrassing quote. Strangely, my more esoteric references to Alberto Manguel’s classic Dictionary of Imaginary Places failed to make the cut. I note that I am described as a ‘map expert’, which I am sure will delight real map experts everywhere.

Apparently there is now a ‘Save Argleton’ campaign gathering pace on the net. Tell me where the barricades are and I’m there …

Martin Wainwright, who already gets maximum respect from this blog’s posse for writing a biography of the Morris Minor, has just published a book about my neck of the woods, True North: In Praise of England’s Better Half, which I’m enjoying. There is no mention of Argleton but plenty of good stuff about beef dripping and fish’n’chip shops. I liked the account of his Uncle Chris, a vicar in Bradford who explains why people there never take their overcoats off: ‘If it isn’t raining, it soon will be,’ he says. Wainwright also has a blog on the book (http://martinwainwright-truenorth.blogspot.com/) which is well worth a look, as is his intriguingly titled partner blog Martin’s Moths (http://martinsmoths.blogspot.com/), which sadly now seems to be hibernating.

Hole in the wall

Another one of our occasional posts from this blog’s television critic. I have just been watching a programme on BBC1 called Hole in the Wall. The premise is easily explained. Celebrities take it in turns to face an oncoming wall in which there is a hole in the shape of a contorted human. Before the wall arrives, the celebrity has to contort him/herself into the shape. If s/he succeeds, s/he goes through the hole and the audience cheers. If s/he doesn’t, s/he crashes into the wall and it knocks him/her into a pool of water.

The interesting, or arguably uninteresting, thing about this programme is that it is completely lacking in any sort of narrative arc. All the other programmes on Saturday night are a gift for a narratologist: with their judges’ scores, audience votes and dance-offs/sing-offs, they are all crisis, crescendo and narrative resolution. But Hole in the Wall is different. It’s just celebrities going through these differently-shaped holes in the wall, again and again and again. Of course, they try and dress it up as a half-hour programme by splitting the celebrities into teams, awarding them points and employing minor variations on the same theme, like having two people go through the hole at the same time. But they’re not fooling me. Hole in the Wall is the groundhog day of Saturday evening light entertainment.

It’s apparently the second series, so someone must like it.

Mundane quote for the day: ‘There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person. Nothing is more keenly required than a defence of bores. When Byron divided humanity into the bores and bored, he omitted to notice that the higher qualities exist entirely in the bores, the lower qualities in the bored, among whom he counted himself. The bore, by his starry enthusiasm, his solemn happiness, may, in some sense, have proved himself poetical. The bored has certainly proved himself prosaic … The bore is stronger and more joyous than we are; he is a demi-god – nay, he is a god. For it is the gods who do not tire of the iteration of things; to them the nightfall is always new, and the last rose as red as the first.’ – G.K. Chesterton

Happy birthday M1

In spite of everything … happy birthday M1. Wishing you 50 giant candles lit along the crash barriers, light jams and pleasant widenings (or unwidenings, if any road protestors are reading this). I have a cough and a spit in this documentary, M1 Magic, which was on Radio 4 earlier today:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00nfqz6/M1_Magic/

Not that I will be listening myself. Lord Reith once said that only those with ‘a claim to be heard above their fellows’ were worthy of appearing on the BBC. God knows what he would have made of me.

Here is an ode to the M1, inspired partly (I think) by my book:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Po0WzF7PL8o

And a postscript to my earlier post about Richard Hoggart. Penguin has just republished The Uses of Literacy, with an excellent introduction by Lynsey Hanley. There is also a foreword by Simon Hoggart in which he refers to his father’s appearance for Penguin in the famous obscenity trial over Lady Chatterley’s Lover:

‘Penguin asked Dad to write the introduction to the first “legal” edition, and his name is still preserved on the Penguin tea mug of the title. He was paid a flat £50 fee, a fact which rankled slightly when sales rose to £3 million – though as we pointed out to him, not one person bought it for the introduction.’

Hoggart Jr. offers no hard evidence for this assertion. It might even be what Karl Popper would have called ‘unfalsifiable’. But I think he’s on pretty safe ground.

And here are the first few lines of David Hendy’s Life on Air: A History of Radio Four, which I’m currently reading:

‘In May 1988 an elderly woman caught a bus from Blackpool to London, marched into Broadcasting House, pulled a revolver from her handbag, and shot at a BBC commissionaire standing in the reception. Her gun turned out to be a replica and her bullets turned out to be blanks. No one was hurt. But it was the cause of her complaint that struck many observers as most worthy of comment: she had been driven to violence, so she said, by her inability to receive Radio Four.’

Needless to say, I’m already hooked.

Great bus journeys of the world

They’ve been resurfacing the road outside my place of work this week, which means that no one can get in the car park. Everyone has been asking me, presumably because they think I am the oracle on all things asphalt-related, how long it takes to tarmac a road. To which the only sensible answers are a) how the hell should I know, and b) please feel free to read my book, which more than exhausts my expertise on this topic. So I have been getting the bus to work this week – the famous no. 82 taken by George Harrison and Paul McCartney when they went to school at the Liverpool Institute, the remains of which are across the road from our building.

In Harold Evans’s new book, My Paper Chase, there is a memorable image of him as a young cub reporter, reading Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War on the top deck of a bus from Oldham to Ashton-under-Lyne, quite near to where I was brought up. It made me wonder how much autodidacticism has occurred on buses throughout human history, how many great deeds and works have been conceived and perhaps even written on them. This is a piece I wrote a while ago for the Guardian about buses:

No change please: Bus routes matter far beyond the timetables. They capture a kind of invisible social evolution

According to a rather cheering statistic in the latest edition of Social Trends, 96% of Britons live within 13 minutes' walk of a bus stop. When the 1985 Transport Act deregulated services outside London, many predicted that the privatised companies would simply abandon unprofitable routes. In fact, this hasn't happened.

The service may be terrible; bus use may be static or falling everywhere apart from London; and two-thirds of respondents to a recent British Social Attitudes survey may have agreed with the statement: "I would only travel somewhere by bus if I had no other way of getting there"; but whether through local authority intervention or the inertia of habit, the old routes largely remain as an invisible constant in local life.

In the 70s, Milton Keynes came up with the perfect solution to the dispersed layout of the new city: a "dial-a-bus" service that would allow people to divert bus drivers to pick them up. But it never really worked. A bus route needs to be unchanging. Buses are the poor relations of urban transport partly because of this necessary communality, which is an affront to the ideal of individual consumer freedom that has dominated public life since the 50s, when bus use began to decline. A bus forces passengers into fixed timetables and designated routes. That is their point.

Of course, it's easy for me to say that. I can smugly point out that my journey to work is along an illustrious bus route - the 82 from Speke to Liverpool city centre, the number and itinerary of which has not changed since George Harrison and Paul McCartney met on it in the early 50s. McCartney later claimed that this daily bus ride formed the inspiration for part of the Beatles' song A Day in the Life, the bit where he makes the bus in seconds flat and goes upstairs to have a smoke - which still happens occasionally on the 82, despite the no-smoking signs.

Unlike McCartney's childhood home, the 82 is unlikely to be preserved for the nation by the National Trust. But it has found a modern-day Pevsner in the form of the photographer Tom Wood, who has been pointing his camera out of Liverpool bus windows since 1979. The project, inspired by his daily commute, consists of more than 100,000 photos. What I like about his work is the contrast between all these unnamed people, absent-mindedly following their routines day after day, and the tiny changes in the urban environment. Undying bus routes are perfect for capturing this kind of invisible social evolution.

Bus routes are no respecters of the boosterism of urban regeneration, with its talk of "flagship developments" and "strategic gateways". The routes simply go where the passengers are, connecting the tarted-up areas of city centres with more marginal, insalubrious spaces. It is no coincidence that rioters in Lille and Strasbourg in the late 90s targeted buses that linked the banlieues to the city centre. A social worker observed: "If you live at the end of the bus route, the bus becomes a symbol of the life and wealth of the city you can't afford to enjoy."

But the bus route is also an intangible network that is a source of continuity and connection for its initiates. In the 90s, the sociologists Ian Taylor, Karen Evans and Penny Fraser encountered an extraordinarily sophisticated "local bus knowledge" in Manchester and Sheffield - not just about timetables and routes but "a more abstract, aesthetic assessment of the city as a set of places seen from the bus and now connected up in the memory". The lesson of the bus route is that history is uneven. With our eyes on the zeitgeist, we forget that historical change can also be slow and incremental. Headlines come and go; the bus route meanders on.

A belated but nice piece about my book from the Sunday Herald:

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4156/is_20091004/ai_n39182699/

How to spend it

A Grohe chrome Rainshower Icon shower head, £113. A Linley silk chenille Mynah cushion, £175. A sparrow and finch Claridges bird house with cedar roof, £249.95. A mid-nineteenth-century terrestrial library globe by John Cary, £75,000. A violin by Antonio Stradivari (price withheld).

All these tempting offers are contained in a colour supplement that comes with the Financial Times on Saturdays, called ‘How To Spend It’. It made me feel a bit like a street urchin with my face pressed up against the window of a cake shop – except I don’t actually want any of these things,* and I do want cake. Anyway, it makes edifying reading for those naive souls, like myself, who were labouring under the misapprehension that we’re in the middle of a recession.

How to spend it? How to spend what? If someone would like to give me it, I’d be delighted to spend it – and I wouldn’t need a magazine to tell me how.

The BBC has just launched a brilliant online archive of old programmes, where I was slightly discombobulated to discover a programme I appeared on, called White Van Man Speaks (http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/working/5037.shtml?all=1&id=5037). Not sure what I think about being in an archive, especially as it feels like I did it a few months back and it turns out it was four years ago. Ah, those long, lost days of 2005, when you could buy a Linley silk chenille Mynah cushion with £170, and still have change for your bus fare and a bag of chips on the way home …

*Oh go on then, I’ll have the Stradivarius if you insist.

Suburbia: the list

To coincide with a new exhibition at the London Transport Museum (http://www.ltmuseum.co.uk/whatson/128.aspx), the Financial Times asked me to come up with the five best things to come out of suburbia for a feature it runs on Saturdays called “The List”. I’m not sure if these are really the best things, but they are five really good things I could come up with when a next-day deadline was looming.

1. The semi-detached house

Few people had a good word to say about mock Tudor houses when they were built in the inter-war years. George Orwell called them “semi-detached torture chambers” and cartoonist Osbert Lancaster christened their style “bypass variegated” because so many of them were built along new arterial roads. But nowadays the suburban semi is one of the most prized houses in the market. Despite their reputation for uniformity, these early suburban homes are much more varied than today’s identikit versions. In 1930, four-fifths of housebuilders had fewer than ten employees and each firm built only a few houses each year, ensuring idiosyncratic designs.

2. John Betjeman

Brought up in Highgate, Betjeman is the poet laureate of suburbia – especially of “Metroland”, the area of northwest London served by the Metropolitan line, and the subject of his celebrated 1973 television documentary. Perhaps his loveliest poem about suburbia is “A Subaltern’s Love Song”, a paean to a young Surrey woman called Joan Hunter Dunn and her world of “the six-o'clock news and a lime-juice and gin” and golf club dances in leafy Camberley with its “mushroomy, pine-woody, evergreen smells”.

3. The great British sitcom

Suburbia is the natural home of the British sitcom, offering endless scope for its theme of being trapped in a mundane environment. In The Good Life (1975-78), Tom and Barbara Good dig up their back garden to become self-sufficient in Surbiton; in Butterflies (1978-83) housewife Ria (Wendy Craig) is stuck in what she calls “a hut in a suburban jungle with dust delivered daily”. For a darker view, Ever Decreasing Circles is a much underrated sitcom (1984-89), with Richard Briers as a man driven demented by his responsibilities on the residents’ committee.

4. Pop music

Suburbia, according to cultural critic Michael Bracewell, is “the spiritual home of English pop”. It is something to kick against, subjected to the punkish derision of The Members (“The Sound of the Suburbs”, 1979) or Hard-Fi’s current songs about dead-end life in Staines. But youth boredom turns satellite towns into hubs of creativity: to make sense of the surrealism of David Bowie, the social anger of the Jam or the anthemic sound of Suede it helps to know where they came from: Bromley, Woking and Haywards Heath.

5. J.G. Ballard

From 1960 until his death this year, J.G. Ballard lived in the west London suburb of Shepperton. A few years after he moved there, it began to be hemmed in by the M3 and Heathrow airport. “The twentieth century at last arrived,” Ballard wrote approvingly, “and began to transform the Thames Valley into a pleasing replica of Los Angeles, with all the ambiguous but heady charms of alienation and anonymity.” In his fiction, he depicted this new world as an antidote to the British obsession with nostalgia and preservation.

Feel free to add to the list …

Mundane quote for the day: ‘One day perhaps a Dickens of the suburbs will arise, to immortalize the life and language of suburbia. His task will be to portray individual character and idiosyncrasy similarly emerging from today’s most typical setting; and also, like Dickens, to publicize abuses: the exploitation of the innocent suburban householder by Building Societies and speculative builders, and the loneliness of the housewife marooned at the end of the newest road in the spreadeagled building estate. But, as Dickens proves so well, only someone who first discovers for himself, through his own affection for it, the peculiar virtues of the world in which he is interested, can fairly isolate its vices … These elusive territories – now the heart of England – past which we unobservantly speed in motor cars and trains and over whose roof-dappled greenery we may all soon be cruising in aeroplanes, will no longer be a strange unknown country.’ - J.M. Richards, The Castles on the Ground, 1946

The Society for Unread Authors, continued

I have written before on these pages about the Society for Unread Authors. I published this article in the Guardian yesterday, with the aim of raising public awareness of this shamefully overlooked social problem. Hopefully it will give much needed publicity to SUA and the important work it does – assuming anyone read the article, of course.

DAN BROWN NEED NOT APPLY

My Society for Unread Authors aims to help all those whose books are destined to be ignored

This is a column with a mission. I am here to tell you about the vital philanthropic work I do as chief executive of the registered charity SUA: the Society for Unread Authors. SUA offers support to all those writers who are left impoverished and traumatised by failing to acquire a readership.

The statistics make depressing reading. According to Unesco, about 200,000 books are published in the UK each year, more per capita than any other country. Perversely, Unesco seems to regard the quantity of books produced by a country as a sign of literacy and general cultural enlightenment. But the sad fact is that there are too many authors and not enough readers. Most of these books will be read by no one at all before they are shredded or disappear into library vaults, never to be recalled again.

This is a particularly difficult time for unread authors as more books than ever are being published in the run-up to Christmas: 800 appeared on a single day, 1 October, or "Super Thursday". Our unread books are being buried under a cacophonous pile of discounted Dan Browns and autobiographies by Ant & Dec. The situation is now so dire that even books by bona fide celebrities are remaining unread. We count many of them among our members.

At the moment our work consists mainly of getting our members to read each other's books, so they will no longer be unread. I am currently ploughing through a history of steam traction engines in Rutland. It's a bit of a chore, but if I can struggle through to the end it will be worth it just to see the poor author's face light up as he learns that he has at last acquired a reader. The trouble is that this is all a drop in the ocean. We just do not have the resources at SUA to read even a fraction of all the unread books in the world.

That is why the society is applying for lottery funding to expand its operations in two ways. Our first strategy is to incentivise the non-readers, those absent-minded creatures who buy lots of books, with every good intention, and never get round to reading them. Of course, these are not bad people; they just have other things on their minds. Some of them are busy writing their own, soon to be unread books. Certain members of my organisation think we should pay these people an hourly rate to read our books. But I think this is just throwing money at the problem without tackling the underlying causes. Instead we need to employ a team of fulltime reader enforcers, who would go into people's homes, point out the unread books on their shelves, set daily reading targets and ensure they are being met.

Our second proposal is more radical. What we clearly have is a word mountain, a pile of unread verbiage every bit as shamefully wasteful as that EU grain mountain we heard so much about in the bad old days of the unreformed common agricultural policy. So we propose a similar solution to the one the EU used to tackle the grain mountain: set aside. Just as many farmers have to set aside a proportion of their land and leave it fallow, certain books would have to remain unpublished for a few years to give the unread books a chance.

To make things fair, SUA has developed a computer program which has generated a random list of books that would have to be set aside. The list includes any book in which the following words appear on the cover: The Little Book Of, Loose Women, Cosmic Ordering, Angels, High School Musical, Jeremy Kyle. I know many people will be dismayed that this list will deprive us of so many fine books that would enrich our cultural life. But in the interests of the mental wellbeing of our members, we at the society regard this high price as just about worth paying.

Time and the trivial

Last week, because I couldn’t face doing anything else and my mum said she enjoyed watching it while she was ironing, I watched a programme on Channel 4 called Come Dine with Me. In this programme, five strangers take it in turns to host a dinner party for each other, and then award each other marks out of ten for their efforts. I will leave any discussion of the programme’s content to the professionals. I would simply like to point out that this show was TWO AND A HALF HOURS LONG. That is longer than The Seventh Seal, any one of Kiesloswki’s Three Colours films, Citizen Kane, Jean de Florette, It’s a Wonderful Life etc. Even with that self-indulgent ending, Apocalypse Now is only three minutes longer. That evening, I decided to skip Strictly Come Dancing, because I didn’t feel I could commit a whole TWO AND A QUARTER HOURS of the time I have left on this earth to it. I do not believe, like RH Tawney, that ‘triviality is more dangerous to the soul than wickedness’. But it does seem to me that the trivial is making increasingly unreasonable demands on our time and attention.

To pad out this meagre post, here are a few more silly pomes for assorted sprogs:

An especially helpful anteater
Would supply you with beer by the litre.
Or glasses of stout
Which he poured through his snout -
He really could not have been sweeter.

A lucky old hamster called Neil
Would trundle all day on his wheel,
And get crumpets and tea
And lettuce for free
Which he thought was a brilliant deal.

A fussy young tortoise called Rita
Would only eat cheese on Ryvita,
A diet so bizarre
She became a big star
And was given a badge on Blue Peter.

There was a headteacher from Stroud,
Whose voice was incredibly loud.
So her morning assembly
Was delivered at Wembley
To a not-quite-fanatical crowd.

MUNDANE QUOTE FOR THE DAY: ‘Another heavy snowfall – the third already this winter and the papers are full of articles about The New Ice Age’ (Michael Palin’s diary, 8 January 1982).

Plus ca change ...

From the Daily Mirror, 7 July 1962:

ALL READY FOR SPACE TV: NHS ‘PLUG’ MAY START ROW

The first transatlantic TV picture – bounced off a Space satellite – may be seen by viewers in Britain on Tuesday night.

But Britain’s contribution to this “International TV Spectacular” may spark off a king-sized rumpus.

For the joint BBC-ITV planners of the British end of the programme – to be transmitted via the American satellite Telstar, due to be launched from Cape Canaveral on Tuesday – hope to show our National Health Service in action.

But many American organisations are violently opposed to any form of national health service. The powerful American Medical Association, for one, is not likely to take kindly to a “plug” for Britain’s health service on such a historic occasion.

A rainbow on the bypass

As you may have gathered by now, I like stories that reveal the exotic in the mundane.

Like this one about the Kingston bypass, opened in the mid-1920s as Britain’s first dual carriageway. For a time it basked in the reflected glamour of the jazz age. ‘Give me the Kingston By-Pass on a Saturday afternoon’, sang Noel Coward in one of his less sparkling lyrics. Travelling on these fast new roads seemed like a new way of seeing the world. Driving on the Kingston bypass in the 1920s, the writer Wickham Steed was convinced he had driven under a rainbow spanning the road in a perfect semicircle: ‘I ran slowly through it, in a strange greenish-yellow light with a ruddy tinge, for about 100 yards, and left it behind.’ Another writer, C.J.P. Cave, pointed out that driving through a rainbow was as impossible as jumping over one’s shadow: ‘Most unfortunately a rainbow is an affair of refraction and reflection from raindrops, and its centre must always be opposite to the sun’. Despite all the scientific evidence that a rainbow simply runs away from us when we approach it, Steed was insistent. He had driven through a rainbow in the manner of Shelley’s cloud marching through the ‘triumphal arch’ of the ‘million-coloured bow’ along with ‘hurricane, fire and snow’.

A couple more pieces by me from the FT:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/c6b7ca00-a0f9-11de-a88d-00144feabdc0.html

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/0ed98fdc-ad5a-11de-9caf-00144feabdc0.html

Mundane quote for the day: ‘Each time the doors sighed open at a lighted station they let in a gust of subterranean wind. It tasted metallic, of burned carbons and newsprint – a warm, industrial mistral, as particular to the city as Big Ben or red buses, quite different from the rotting vegetable odour of the New York subway or the reek of Gauloises in the Paris Metro. Everyone aboard the carriage had mastered the trick of looking as if they were alone in an empty room. Everyone was travelling under sealed orders to a separate destination. In a fleeting conceit, I saw us all as members of the Underground, moving in secret through Occupied London, and for the first time on the trip, the city felt like home again.’ (Jonathan Raban, Coasting)

The dullest map square in Britain

According to Mike Parker, author of the recent book Map Addict, the most boring 1x1km map square out of the 320,000 on the 1:50,000 Landranger series is SE 8322, just south of Ousefleet, between Goole and Hull. Here it is on the OS website:

http://explore.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/search?routeEditor_search_location=ousefleet

‘On the map,’ Parker writes, ‘it contains absolutely nothing, save for a pylon line grazing one corner. In the flesh, it is one of those big-sky wildernesses that leave you feeling inches high, a land of ploughed black clods, mist and crows.’

I read quite a lot about maps for the book on roads, and ended up using hardly any of it. All maps betray the prejudices and blind spots of their creators. Early maps of uncharted territories were works of art and imagination as much as science, with drawings of monsters, dragons and pygmies substituting for topographical detail. Or as Jonathan Swift put: ‘So Geographers in Afric' maps / With savage pictures fill their gaps / And o’er uninhabitable downs / Place elephants for want of towns.’ Francis Galton (the man who devised the first weather map in The Times in 1875) also drew a beauty map of Britain which claimed to map the attractiveness of its female inhabitants. London contained the prettiest, Aberdeen the ugliest.

This has also put me in mind of the artist Richard Dedomenici’s work, ‘Nail Salon Belt’, which ‘discovers’ a nail salon belt surrounding London which is protecting its satellite towns from metropolitan encroachment:

http://www.daytodaydata.com/richard.html

And I also liked this visit to an imaginary place, Argleton, which you can find on Google maps but nowhere else:

http://walkinghometo50.wordpress.com/2009/02/22/destination-argleton-visiting-an-imaginary-place/

No need to reply

I wrote this article, ‘Today's cultish interactivity is a poor substitute for a proper public sphere’, for the Guardian earlier this month:

When historians draw a line around the first decade of this century, they will measure the traffic in text messages, wade through the “have your say” sections on online newspapers, and count the membership of social networking sites - and they will surely conclude that this has been the dawning of the age of interactivity. Never before have those with media and political power professed themselves to be so interested in our opinions; never before have we been able to pass on our thoughts so instantly to “friends” and “followers”, who may of course be total strangers. This isn’t simply a technological revolution. It is a cultural and emotional one, underpinned by a belief that constantly interacting with others is an inherently worthwhile activity. The owner of this year’s steepest adoption curve, Twitter, is interactivity in its purest form - “what I am doing now” condensed into a text message.

Ten years ago, when the internet was virtually steam-powered, the American academic John Durham Peters wrote a prophetic book called Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Peters argued that the ideal of interactivity, the search for instantaneous contact with others, had a long and fraught history in western culture. He traced it back to St Augustine, for whom the epitome of perfect communication was the angel, a word derived from the Greek for “messenger”. Unlike us flawed mortals, who might be prone to heretical interpretations of the Bible if left to read it on our own and use our unreliable brains, angels could intuit the will of God directly and communicate it to others instantly.

The aim of modern media, Peters argued, has been to “mimic the angels by mechanical or electronic means”. In the 19th century new inventions like telegraphy, the telephone and the phonograph had a near-mystical aura. They were linked in the public mind with the Victorian vogue for mesmerism and telepathy, because they too seemed to fulfil the dream of angelic contact, of pure and direct communication, of breaking down the painful distance between self and other. “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas,” cautioned Henry Thoreau in Walden, “but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing to communicate.” We behaved, Thoreau wrote, “as if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly”. Today’s frantically texting, micro-blogging culture seems to be part of this long and futile search for shared consciousness. The boast of the social networking sites is that they will allow us to “stay connected” wherever we are, to defeat our tiresome physical and psychological distance from each other through technology.

It isn’t only in cyberspace. In real public spaces the people who run our lives are forever trying to converse with us, in a highly colloquial, intimate tone which has none of the formality we used to associate with official communications. The writer and humorist Paul Jennings once wrote about how angry his father used to get at the words printed on his ration book: “Your ration book”. “Whose do they suppose I think it is if it’s got my name on it?” he would say. These days he would be angry all the time - at those nagging dot-matrix display boards on motorways (“Have you got enough fuel?”), the sign at the head of the queue in my local bank that says “Nearly there: thanks for waiting”, and the faux-matey copy printed on crisp packets and smoothie bottles, saying things like “We think this flavour rocks” or “Once opened consume within four days or we’ll come round and get you”.

As someone who makes a living out of teaching and writing, I do find the idea of interactivity appealing. If only I could commune with others instantly, I would never again endure the pain of being unread, ignored or misunderstood. How I would love to be one of Star Trek’s Vulcans, those modern versions of Augustine’s angels who can meld their minds with others; then, instead of struggling over this article, I could simply tip the contents of my brain into yours.

But part of me also feels that there is something control-freakish about the desire for perfectly reciprocal communication. It takes too little account of human individuality and uniqueness. “Billions of consciousnesses silt history full, and every one of them the centre of the universe,” wrote the late John Updike in his memoirs. “What can we do in the face of this unthinkable truth but scream or take refuge in God?” We could spend our whole lives texting but there will always be part of us that is infinitely remote.

I wonder if one reason that so much discussion on the blogosphere deteriorates into the humourless taking and giving of offence is that people assume the words printed on the screen are aimed at them personally. In a culture which values interactivity, it makes a sort of sense to treat every form of communication like a text message. But not every public statement requires, or merits, a response. All language is a leap into the dark, with no certainty that we will ever be understood or even heard. Books get remaindered, blogs remain unread, and tweets fall on deaf ears. If it were easy to interact with others, no great literature would ever be written. Shakespeare’s sonnets are unsent letters, addressed to unnamed and shadowy people, or simply spoken into the air and to eternity.

I am not denying that online interaction brings pleasure and convenience to millions, and occasionally to me. What makes me uneasy is the cult of interactivity as an end in itself, the pursuit of better bandwidth as the route to a more liberated, democratic public sphere in which everyone will be instantly available to everyone else. In reality, as Peters argued, we only want that kind of intimate contact with family and friends. In more public contexts, such as the marketplace or the workplace, we often just want to be treated fairly and justly, the same as everyone else - which means impersonally and anonymously.

A proper public sphere is collectively owned and more than the sum total of lots of individual interactions. Why do so many of us love the strange poetry of the shipping forecast? Perhaps because it adheres to the literal sense of the word “broadcast”, which radio borrowed from the farmer’s term for scattering seeds over a wide surface. The shipping forecast is broadcast to millions of people who, since they are not on ships, are not its intended audience. For them it has become a comforting, collective ritual which simply forms part of what Ralph Waldo Emerson called the “cumulative intelligence of the universe”. It does not invite us to email or text our feedback; it does not care what any of us think as individuals. And so it belongs to us all.

A single oak tree

Everyday hats off to the artist Stephen Taylor, who spent two whole years in a wheat field in East Anglia painting the same oak tree in different lights and weathers. You can see some of his work at:

http://www.stephentaylorpaintings.com/paintings/oaks.aspx

I was introduced to Taylor’s work by Alain de Botton’s book The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, which has this to say about it:

‘Our exertions generally find no enduring physical correlatives. We are diluted in gigantic intangible collective projects, which leave us wondering what we did last year and, more profoundly, where we have gone and quite what we have amounted to. We confront our lost energies in the pathos of the retirement party.

‘How different everything is for the craftsman who transforms a part of the world with his own hands, who can see his work as emanating from his being and can step back at the end of a day or lifetime and point to an object – whether a square of canvas, a chair or a clay jug – and see it as a stable repository of his skills and an accurate record of his years, and hence feel collected together in one place, rather than strung out across projects which long ago evaporated into nothing one could hold or see.’

I am filled with the desire to drive all the way down to East Anglia and buy one of these beautiful paintings. But given that there are no prices on any of them, I suspect my bank balance would violently disagree with me.

De Botton’s book, btw, is wise and funny. It ends with this persuasive defence of the meaninglessness of work:

‘The impulse to exaggerate the significance of what we are doing, far from being an intellectual error, is really life itself through coursing through us … To see ourselves as the centre of the universe and the present time as the summit of history, to view our upcoming meetings as being of overwhelming significance, to neglect the lessons of cemeteries, to read only sparingly, to feel the pressure of deadlines, to snap at colleagues, to make our way through conference agendas marked “11:00 a.m. to 11:15 a.m.: coffee break”, to behave heedlessly and then greedily and then to combust in battle – maybe all of this, in the end, is working wisdom. It is paying death too much respect to prepare for it with sage prescriptions … let death find us as we are building up our matchstick protests against its waves.’

This is another matchstick protest written to deadline, a short piece about the Birmingham Bull Ring:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/6a461b8e-95fd-11de-84d1-00144feabdc0.html

Mundane quote for the day: ‘All great civilisations are based on parochialism. To know fully even one field or one land is a lifetime’s experience. In the world of poetic experience it is depth that counts, not width. A gap in a hedge, a smooth rock surfacing a narrow lane, a view of a woody meadow, the stream at the junction of four small fields - these are as much as a man can fully experience.’ – Patrick Kavanagh

History by numbers

A little piece I wrote for The Times last week (on 9.9.09) about the 999 number - a subject about which, before writing this piece, I knew only slightly more than sod all ...

The Times played a key role in the birth of 999. The emergency number owes its existence to a fire on November 10, 1935, which swept through a house in Wimpole Street, in the West End of London, killing five women. Norman Macdonald, a dentist living in the house opposite, tried to ring the fire brigade and was so outraged at being held in a queue by the telephone exchange that he wrote to The Times.

In response to Macdonald's letter and the ensuing public outcry, the Government set up a committee to establish a dedicated emergency service. The 999 number was chosen because, at a time when there were only three million home telephones, most people would be calling from coin-operated red telephone boxes. It was easy to customise these to allow free use of the number 9 on the rotary dial.

On June 30, 1937 the Assistant Postmaster General, Sir Walter Womersley, told the House of Commons that the new emergency service would be trialled in London. For reasons now lost to history, MPs burst out laughing at the announcement that the number would be 999 (perhaps because, amid the gathering storm of war, it sounded like a German saying "no" three times).
The Times, however, approved of the number. "Being one third as big again as the Number of the Beast, it has its sinister significance," it declared. "All cannot be well with him who dials 999. Moreover, the figure 9 would be pretty easy for the quaking finger to find on the dial in the dark room where the householder, shivering in his pyjamas, is hoping that the exchange will hear him before the burglar does." The trial was extended to Glasgow a year later and by 1948 the whole country was covered. By 1950 the number of 999 calls had reached 80,000 a year.

Over the years, 999 has had its detractors. In recent years the number of accidental calls to the emergency services has risen sharply because 999 is easily dialled by mistake on a mobile phone - unlike numbers that use more than one digit, such as the EU standard emergency number, 112, or the American 911.

Like the Qwerty arrangement of letters on a keyboard, the 999 number is an example of what historians of technology call "path dependence" - which means that, although the initial reasons why it was adopted no longer apply (coin-operated telephones being virtually extinct), it carries on being used through the forces of habit and inertia. Unlike the MPs in 1937 who found the number so hilarious, we think of 999 instinctively - exactly what is needed in an emergency.

The magical power of rain

It’s an Indian summer outside and, professional contrarion that I am, I thought I would write a post about rain. Ever since Tacitus called Britain the land of continual rain, the wet stuff has formed part of our national imagination. There was something phlegmatic about this association of rain and the British: it was the small price we paid for our temperate climate, which was used to explain everything from our placid national character to our moderate political system. The great philosopher of rain, however, was the German critic Walter Benjamin. In one of the many gnomic statements of the Convolutes, Benjamin suggests that a characteristic feature of modernity is the ‘diminishing magical power of the rain’. The great promise of the arcades, the nineteenth-century Parisian version of a shopping mall, was that they would allow humankind at last to escape from the tyranny of the rain. Benjamin even unearths an obscure late-nineteenth-century text by Léo Claretie which imagines a Paris of the future entirely enclosed within a ‘crystal canopy’ to protect it from the rain. But this quote about a rainy day in the city hints at the overlooked utopian possibilities of rain: ‘Rain makes everything more hidden, makes days not only grey but uniform. From morning until evening, one can do the same thing – play chess, read, engage in argument – whereas sunshine, by contrast, shades the hours and discountenances the dreamer.’

What blissful hours I spent as a child examining raindrops! Now life seems too short to waste time looking at the rain.

Mundane quote for the day: ‘And why should I not choose that raindrop sliding down the windowpane? I could write a whole page, ten pages, on that raindrop; for me it will become the symbol of everyday life whilst avoiding everyday life; it will stand for time and space, or space within time; it will be the world and still only a vanishing raindrop.’ – Henri Lefebvre

Boring people doing boring things

Since it’s Beatles week on the BBC, I thought you might like to be reminded of this enchanting sequence from the film Yellow Submarine, a psychedelic take on Liverpool and the quotidian:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZSFnqo19Bw

John Lennon, by the way, poured scorn on Paul McCartney’s ‘novelist’ songs: ‘These stories about boring people doing boring things – being postmen and secretaries and writing home. I’m not interested in third-party songs. I like to write about me, ‘cos I know me.’

Needless to say, this blog is happy to join Ian MacDonald, author of the definitive Beatles book Revolution in the Head, in the militant pro-McCartney wing of the Beatles fan club.

Did you know that Edward Heath once praised the Beatles as ‘the salvation of the corduroy industry’? (see Dominic Sandbrook, White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties, p. 101)

And this is a piece I wrote recently for the FT weekend magazine about spending a weekend at Newport Pagnell service station. It was inspired by the genre of quotidian travel writing which emerged in France in the 1980s and 1990s and which treated routine journeys as intrepid adventures: Julio Cortazar and Carol Dunlop’s journey from Paris to Marseilles in a Volkswagen camper van, Jean Rolin’s adventures in the Parisian banlieues, Jacques Réda’s attempt to walk the line of the Paris meridian, and François Bon’s and François Maspero’s journeys on commuter trains. You can find my own humble effort at

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/6d81965c-74ec-11de-9ed5-00144feabdc0,dwp_uuid=a712eb94-dc2b-11da-890d-0000779e2340.html

An Edwardian petrolhead

I’m off to the Shrewsbury folk festival tomorrow so I thought I would post something for everyone else stuck in a Bank Holiday traffic jam. It’s from a book, The Complete Motorist, first published in 1904 by an Edwardian petrolhead called Alexander Bell Filsom Young. People don’t tend to get quite so excited about tyres on tarmac today.

‘The miles, once the tyrants of the road, the oppressors of the travellers, are now humbly subject to the automobile’s triumphant empire, falling away before it, ranking themselves behind it. The wand of its power has touched the winds to a greater energy, so that the very air it consumes is crushed upon it with a prodigal bounty, sweetened with all the mingled perfumes of the fields and the seasons. It flattens out the world, enlarges the horizon, loosens a little the bonds of time, sets back a little the barriers of space. And man, who created and endowed it, who sits and rides upon it as upon a whirlwind, moving a lever here, turning a wheel there, receives in his person the revenues of the vast kingdom it has conquered. He lives more quickly, drawing virtue and energy from its ardent heart. Even if it should threaten to rob us of a few of the melancholy days of old age, this new slave or ours has won back for us the roads …

The motor car restores to our journeys their true value and importance, making them not a matter merely of departure and arrival, but of deliberate and conscious progress, in which every mile, every yard, is of equal importance with the beginning and the end …

The driver never overtakes the road; it is always before him, just round the next corner, wriggling away like a snake from his pursuing wheels, always cheating, always beckoning, always eluding him, always going on …

I doubt not that when some of us who have fallen into this bondage lie a-dying, the last image of the world present to our minds will be the picture that thousands of miles have photographed on our memory; of the road stretched white and narrowing, of the trees hurrying to meet us, of the snug homesteads left behind in the dusk, of the eternal Unknown that lies just beyond the turn of the road.’

On the slow train

This song by Flanders and Swann about the Beeching cuts never fails to make my eyes moist:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6OHD2uCpfU

It has the same effect on my favourite radio DJ, Stuart Maconie, who in his recent book Adventures on the High Teas says it ‘will have anyone with a heart dabbing at their eyes within a verse’. How strange that it should make us both cry when:

1. Neither of us has any memory of the pre-Beeching era, so we might as well be getting nostalgic about a dream.

2. Many of the railway stations that Michael Flanders incants, with their beautifully evocative names, actually escaped the Beeching axe. I heard the song being played on Alan Titchmarsh’s show on radio 2 last Sunday and he blamed these discrepancies on Flanders getting the list of doomed stations from the Guardian. Dunno if that’s true …

3. As Matthew Engel points out in his new book, Eleven Minutes Late, the branch lines have only been loved posthumously. ‘The elite expresses sped past thousands of slow, dirty trains carrying disgruntled commuters dreaming of a new motor car,’ he writes of the pre-Beeching era. ‘To use an old Lancastrianism, what Britain had was a fur-coat-and-no-knickers railway, the opulence of the show disguising the threadbare reality underneath.’

What is sentimentality? In his book Dog Years, the American poet Mark Doty describes it thus:

‘That’s how sentimentality works, replacing particularity with a warm fog of acceptable feeling, the difficult exact stuff of individual character with the vagueness of convention. Sentimental assertions are always a form of detachment; they confront the acute, terrible awareness of individual pain, the sharp particularity of loss or the fierce individuality of passion with the dulling, “universal” certainty of platitude.

'The oversweetened surface of the sentimental exists in order to protect its maker, as well as the audience, from anger. At the beautiful image refusing to hold, at the tenderness we bring to the objects of the world – our eagerness to love, make a home, build connection, trust the other – how all of that’s so readily swept away. Sentimental images of children and of animals, soppy representations of love - they are fuelled, in truth, by their opposites, by a terrible human rage that nothing stays. The greeting card verse, the airbrushed rainbow, the sweet puppy face on the fleecy pink sweatshirt – these images do not honor the world as it is, in its complexity and individuality, but distort things in apparent service of a warm embrace … in this way, the sentimental represents a rage against individuality, the singular, the irreplaceable.’

As an English, male academic I suppose I am meant to be suspicious of sentimentality and this passage by Doty is the most eloquent example I have seen of the case against. But I just don’t have the heart to be unsentimental. I think in this case it has a lot to do with the softly sonorous quality of Michael Flanders’s voice, like being gently lowered into a warm bath of deep Englishness. What a powerful and omnivorous human urge nostalgia is.

PS Not my usual bolthole but I had a couple of pieces in The Times this week that you can read at:

http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/the_way_we_live/article6801066.ece
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/driving/article6802471.ece

Really rather impressive

In Michael McCarthy’s new book Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo I found this account of his introduction to the culture of civil servants when, as environment correspondent for the Times in the late 1980s, he shadowed the Department of the Environment:

‘It was the language of the officials which really fascinated me. It was in effect a private code, which I thought of as “dynamic understatement”. It seemed to have arisen as a means of expressing strong disagreement between gentlemen without lapsing into incivility, so certain words which might appear anodyne became charged with sharper meaning. A good example would be “unhelpful”. This expressed dissatisfaction, irritation, even real anger, in the guise of a sort of rueful acceptance. I once left a senior official momentarily lost for words when he said to me, “That piece you wrote was unhelpful,” and I replied, “It wasn’t meant to be unhelpful. It was meant to be true.” It was as if, by being literal, I had switched languages.

This drawing the sting of expression extended to both praise and blame. I marvelled at the form of words used for the highest acclaim, which in the outside world would be “fantastic”, “tremendous”, “sensational”, “wonderful”, “world-beating”, whatever. In Whitehall it was: “rather impressive”. Once, and only once, I had “rather impressive” used of something I had written; I glowed for weeks afterwards. Conversely, the means of expressing the harshest criticism was similarly defanged: an action which the world at large might consider “catastrophic”, “terrible”, “appalling”, “disgusting”, “the pits”, would in Whitehall be termed “unfortunate”, or on very rare occasions indeed, “most unfortunate”. Again, once and only once, I saw “most unfortunate” used directly to an individual about his conduct, and it sent a chill down my spine: I never wanted it used of me.’

I must say I found McCarthy’s book quite impressive, if not indeed rather impressive. Something else I found rather impressive recently was Andrew Martin’s piece on pipesmoking in Granta: http://www.granta.com/Magazine/105/Among-the-Pipemen/Page-1. I’m not a great fan of jokes on the page. I like humour that is tinder dry and elegant and that emerges organically out of the style and tone. As anyone who used to read Martin’s column in the New Statesman will know, he is the master at this.

And while we’re on the same riff, it’s raining here and the summer is nearly over. It’s all rather … unhelpful.

Mundane quote for the day: ‘When we were young … his poetry was the poetry of everyday life, of shop-windows, traffic policemen, ice-cream soda, lawn mowers, and an uneasy awareness of what the newsboys were shouting. In addition he displayed a sophisticated sentimentality about falling leaves and cigarette stubs: he could have written the words of “These Foolish Things”. We were grateful to him for having found a place in poetry for these properties.’ – Philip Larkin on Louis MacNeice

Townscape with figures

I don’t suppose this blog will ever have a zillionth of the clout of the Richard and Judy Book Club, but just in case my recommendations don’t fall on entirely stony ground … Richard Hoggart is mainly known for The Uses of Literacy (and perhaps being played by David Tennant in a TV dramatisation of the Lady Chatterley trial) and he’s not a particularly fashionable figure in academic cultural studies at the moment, probably because he writes a form of English that people might actually want to read even if they weren’t professionally obliged to. But I have got so much out of his books, particularly the three-part autobiography he published in the early 1990s and Townscape with Figures (1994), a portrait of his hometown of Farnham in Surrey. With ‘a bundle of literary, intellectual and social impulses’ he sets out to describe ‘the typical, the unique, the humdrum and the strange life of this small English town towards the end of the century’. Stefan Collini aptly called Townscape with Figures ‘a kind of Uses of Literacy for the garden-centre age’. There are some memorable descriptions of Argos, supermarkets and tribes of commuters waiting for the train into London. I liked the account of the young female office workers on a railway platform ‘stroking or turning their engagement rings like one-bead rosaries’, and the description of the easy listening LPs at Woolworth’s as ‘a concentrated musical soup-cube’.

Here are some selections from the later works of Hoggart.

On Margaret Thatcher: ‘She is in many ways my Aunt Ethel come back to life. I was brought up with, precisely, hauntingly, that shrill, nagging, over-insistent way of speaking, that bossy-pants way of walking, that remorseless insistence on always being right.’ (An Imagined Life, 1993)

A description of those video screens they used to have in post offices for advertising postal services: ‘While thus penned [in queuing channels] you are treated to a VDU display with running commentary on the virtues of this or that new Post Office service, or of someone’s photo-processing, or someone else’s cure for a few common ailments – backache in bed, say. Formerly nationalised services which have now been privatised, or made into executive agencies which have been ordered to act as if privatised and to develop aggressive commercial habits, drop their old sobriety and do promotional high-kicks – like a teetotaller who has been urged to take to the bottle for therapeutic purposes. By comparison, some of the shrewder large commercial concerns begin to look like church wardens.’ (Townscape with Figures, 1994)

On the phrase ‘a close-knit community’: ‘This is jargon-hiccup-speak. The word is now entirely threshed clear of substance, is a substitute for thought, a hidden assertion doing duty for direct examination and so a way of avoiding difficulties of definition and unwelcome perceptions.’ (Townscape with Figures)

On the phrase, ‘the chattering classes’: ‘It suggests rooks, magpies, starlings – chattering in the eaves – nattering away endlessly but weightlessly, very much for its own sake and for self-display. The phrase makes a harsh and philistine judgment but one sufficiently well aimed to be embarrassing. Not power without commitment, but talk – opinions, views, attitudes, postures – without commitment’ (The Way We Live Now, 1995)

I also liked the story he tells in The Way We Live Now to illustrate the casual class assumptions we make. A Glasgow comprehensive-school teacher asked her working-class pupils to write down the job they hoped to do. She misheard one boy’s ambition to be a ‘carpet layer’ – he actually said ‘corporate lawyer’.

PS There was a belated but belovely review of my book by Craig Brown in the Mail on Sunday but frustratingly I can’t seem to find it on t’internet. I feel a bit like a fisherman who caught a twenty-pound carp and forgot to take his camera. You’ll just have to take my word for it …

Paean to the pigeon

In case you didn’t read my piece ‘In defence of the everybird’ in the Guardian last week, here is a slightly longer version. And I don’t mean to get heavy or anything, but anyone who has any interest in the mundane – which I guess includes you if you’re reading this – is obliged, according to the bylaws of this blog, to like pigeons. Them’s the rules, I’m afraid. I don’t make them up.

IN DEFENCE OF THE EVERYBIRD

Now that two mayors of London have successfully rid Trafalgar Square of its pigeons, their policy is being rolled out across Britain. Hawks and falcons, in the employ of pest control firms, are scaring away pigeons in the Scottish Parliament Building, at Wimbledon, and in other city centres. These firms have a “no-kill” policy, but how this works in practice I am not sure. Training birds of prey not to kill pigeons sounds a bit like training crocodiles to tickle fish.

There is no doubt that overbreeding pigeons can be a nuisance en masse, and cleaning up their droppings is a costly chore. But there is a lot of hyperbole in anti-pigeon propaganda. They are blamed for carrying diseases like encephalitis, tuberculosis and psittacosis, but no one ever cites statistical probabilities: how many people have actually died from excessive contact with a pigeon? I suspect the war on pigeons is mainly to do with the trend for turning city centres into continental-style outdoor spaces with pavement cafes, piazzas and staged outdoor events. The messiness of nature must not be allowed to intrude into this well-managed, tourist-friendly urbanism.

The feral pigeon has long been maligned - even by birders, who prefer to trek to Cornwall or the Hebrides in search of rare, exotic breeds. Sadly, the great scholar and defender of the pigeon, the BBC wildlife presenter Eric Simms, died earlier this year. In his book The Public Life of the Street Pigeon, Simms painstakingly deciphered all the different pigeon coos, from distress calls to territorial signals, and showed how these savvy birds survived by scavenging on the tarmac and intuitively identifying soft-hearted humans to scrounge off. Simms won the Distinguished Flying Cross in the second world war, and his admiration for pigeons stemmed from their own distinguished flying record as part of the crew of Lancaster bombers, their job being to send word back to base if the plane was shot down.

All the great naturalists have been suspicious of the anthropomorphic pecking orders we impose on animals, and have found ecological worth in the ugliest of creatures. Darwin’s love of the unlovely earthworm is well-known; fewer people are aware that he also bred pigeons and crossed the Victorian social divide to fraternise with their largely working-class fanciers. To the untrained eye every pigeon is alike, but Darwin identified 228 varieties, many of them created by pigeon fanciers artificially selecting desirable traits and breeding from them – a speeded-up version of natural selection. Strangely, the crucial role of pigeons in developing the theory of evolution was written out of the Darwin bicentenary TV documentaries I saw earlier this year; for some reason, their producers preferred to send their presenters to look at the rare creatures on South Sea islands.

A lot of recent nature writing has followed Darwin’s lead in dealing with the mundane aspects of the natural world and has focused on tribal, unglamorous animals – Mark Cocker on crows, Laurent Keller and Elisabeth Gordon on ants and Bee Wilson on bees, for example. If there was a wildlife equivalent of Celebdaq, that virtual stock exchange in celebrity reputations, I would now be frantically buying shares in rooks. But I wouldn’t waste my money on pigeons. They will always be bottom of the bird FTSE, a perennially toxic brand.

Aside from pets, we seem to look down on animals that live cheek-by-jowl with us, or that remind us too much of ourselves. But that’s what I like about pigeons: they are the tamest wild animals in the world, the most comfortable with human routines. They fly around the tables in railway station cafes and loiter in the middle of roads, responding only sluggishly to car horns. They have even been known to make journeys on London Underground trains, and, according to a New Scientist article published in 1995, they are “travelling with intent” in a way that is “not necessarily motivated by hunger or ignorance” – which, strictly speaking, makes them fare dodgers. I think of them as the avian version of that 21st-century everyman, Homer Simpson. Like him, they are bird-brained, docile and not much to look at, but basically benign. Can’t we learn to live with them?

My back pages

I haven’t really got time to blog today so I’m afraid this is going to be like one of those episodes of Friends where they show old clips and pretend it’s a new episode. All I can find trawling though my D: drive is this little amuse-bouche. I wrote it in my second year at university, when I was wading through careers guides and getting ever so slightly browned off by their relentless cheeriness. It was published in a magazine called Poetry and Audience, alongside someone called Carol Ann Duffy. Whatever happened to her? This piece was written at the beginning of the last recession and it is sadly topical again, with new graduates likely to be the main victims of the credit crunch.

CAREERS: A GUIDE FOR STUDENTS

For those students who are still unsure about what to do in the world outside, we are asking recent graduates to talk about the career paths they have followed. Doug Robinson graduated from Manchester University last summer with a 2:1 in Economics and Accountancy. Here he tells of his adventures in the job market.

‘Even in my last year at University I still had no idea what I wanted to do when I graduated. Most of my friends seemed to be going into safe careers in banking, law or the public sector. But I knew somehow that this gentle 9 to 5 existence was not for me. In many ways I felt that University had failed me. My dynamic mind had been stifled by three years of vertical thinking. Now I wanted to do something different, something exhilarating, challenging and rewarding. But I read through piles of careers guides and could find nothing that really interested me. Then my tutor made a suggestion which really set me thinking. He asked me: had I considered taking to a life of crime? The answer of course was no, I hadn't. But he put me in touch with a London gang and I found I liked the way they worked. I saw the gang for what it was - a group of highly motivated individuals with a common aim. I signed up straight away.

I suppose this might be regarded as a somewhat odd career choice. My formal education had not prepared me for a life of crime at all. The simple fact is that, like most professions these days, crime is hungry for graduates. Many gangs are even arranging day-release for university courses for those who joined them straight from school. The good news is that most gang-leaders will consider graduates from any discipline, although they will be looking for a good 2:2 or above.

I find it impossible to describe to my friends what my job involves. ‘Crime’ is such a broad term that it is very difficult to define. But the OED defines it as ‘an act or acts punishable by law, as being forbidden by statute or injurious to the public welfare,’ and I often think how apt this is!

At first I found the results-oriented atmosphere of the firm a little daunting, but I was very impressed by the way new bugs like me were made to feel at home. I also found the social side of the job very rewarding. Our motto here is ‘Work hard, play hard!’ Recent social events organised by the gang have included cheese and wine evenings, buffet suppers, beetle drives and even a trip to Alton Towers.

Being a hardened criminal, I simply do not know what each day will bring. Armed robbery, illicit gambling, loansharking, phonetapping. I could be doing literally anything. So it's very difficult to describe a typical day - but let me try anyway. My alarm goes off at precisely 6:30 a.m. (no lie-ins in this job) and I catch the Morning Prayer and Today on Radio 4 before I have to sprint for the 7:19 train to London. I skim through The Times on the train (financial pages first) and I normally arrive in the office at 8:30 a.m. I remember being told in my first week here, ‘It's not all swag-bags and striped jerseys, you know.’ In fact, about 80% of my work is office-based. I'm firmly implanted behind my desk at 8:32. Two cups of coffee and I feel human again. The next thing I do is sort out my in-tray. It's always crammed full of papers, which means things to do and people to see. In this job they don't waste time with years of training - they give you projects to deal with as soon as possible.

At 9:30 a.m. Marcus (my senior) and I have a meeting with some shopkeepers from Fulham. Marcus leads and I take notes. We have to persuade these people to accept our ‘protection’ and they're none too keen. Our interpersonal skills are stretched to the limit here, and the meeting is a long one which lasts the entire morning. My lunch break has to fit round my work schedule. Sometimes we’ll have a big meal in Soho with some colleagues from Manchester, catching up on all the gossip from our northern office. Or else I just have time to snatch a sandwich from the canteen and eat it at my desk.

In the afternoon, Marcus and I have to phone various people in the world of crime (or ‘the underworld’, as us old lags call it). We're hoping to do a raid on a building society in Knightsbridge and we're looking for five people to underwrite the scheme. We get straight rejections for two hours and then – bingo. Marcus comes up trumps with three successful calls in succession. This gets the old adrenalin flowing and suddenly we know we're on to a winner. It gives me a real kick to see our hard graft bringing in tangible results (in this case, £80,000 in used notes).

Of course, the job does have its negative side. There is no pension scheme as such, and failure to meet a deadline can mean instant death. And, of course, it's bloody hard work, but if you can't take a bit of that I don't suppose we’d want you any way! If you like what you hear though, why not join us? The underworld takes in about 6500 of Britain's best graduates every year and the number is still rising. Gangs advertise in the nationals, but the unsolicited letter can often be the best way of getting your foot in the door. (And do check the spelling on your CVs, as gang-leaders are such sticklers for good English.) With a fully paid-up mortgage and a salary five times as high as the richest of my friends, I certainly feel that my career up to now has been very worthwhile. I would strongly urge all new graduates to get into crime in a big way.

Well, it’s 5.35 on my typical day and I finally leave the office. Normally I join my colleagues now for a glass of dry white wine in Berwick Street. But today I've got to rush home to see how my Boeuf Flamande is doing in the Slow Cooker. I'm holding an end-of-job dinner party for two or three of our clients. This should be a fun evening and will take my mind off work for a while, so that by tomorrow morning I'll be fresh for the chase yet again. Heigh ho, the glamorous life!’

Mundane quote for the day: ‘Reading through such CVs now I see that in no way did they reflect my real existence or document my life. They spoke only of things unimportant to me, news from a grey world. A true chronicle of key events would be quite different, for the great cluster of formative discoveries and unconscious insights occurs in early childhood and is only repeated with variations in later life. Important shifts of awareness become less and less frequent as one goes on: this is the opposite pattern to one’s perceived career, a story of ever increasing achievements and higher honours.’ - Tom Phillips

The great swine flu disaster

I’m not sure if I mentioned it before on this blog, but I’ve recently mastered the art of time travel. I’ve invented my own Wellsian time machine with bits of piano wire, a Halfords car battery and an old Nokia phone and I’m actually writing this post in the summer of 2010. There’s not much to report from the future, to be honest. Things are pretty much ticking along as normal – except for Gordon Brown winning that unexpected landslide election victory, obviously, after he single-handedly saved the world from being destroyed by an asteroid. Oh, and the Tories were routed and have been replaced as the main opposition by the Top Gear party, led by Jeremy Clarkson. Anyway, I was at a bit of a loose end so I thought I would sort through some of my yellowing copies of old newspapers from the summer of 2009, when everyone was getting very worried about that dreadful swine flu pandemic. Here is a selection of the headlines from that period:

SCHOOLS MAY SHUT TO BEAT SWINE FLU: CALLS FOR PANDEMIC TSAR (THE MIRROR)

PIG IGNORANT: NEW SWINE FLU ADVICE LINES ARE MANNED BY MIGRANTS WHO BARELY SPEAK ENGLISH (DAILY STAR)

HE'S ONLY DOING THIS TO ESCAPE SWINE FLU IN MEXICO: WHAT LEAGUE 2 CLUBS THINK OF SVEN (THE SUN)

SWINE FLU IS ‘BIGGEST CHALLENGE IN A GENERATION FOR THE NHS’ (THE TIMES)

SWINE FLU THREATENS DEFLATION SLUMP: GDP COULD PLUNGE BY 7.5PC (DAILY TELEGRAPH)

IF YOU GET SWINE FLU ON HOLS: BRITS COULD BE STRANDED FOR WEEKS BY BUG (DAILY STAR)

£90BN SWINE FLU ADDS TO RECESSION: SICK WORKERS COULD TIP BRITAIN INTO DEFLATION (THE SUN)

AIRLINES TO TURN AWAY ‘SWINE FLU’ PASSENGERS: SNEEZING TOURISTS WILL NEED A DOCTOR'S NOTE TO FLY (THE TIMES)

CLUES FROM 1918 GRAVES WHICH MAY SAVE US ALL: RACE FOR SWINE FLU CURE AS PUPILS TRAPPED ABROAD (THE PEOPLE)

CHURCHGOERS ARE URGED NOT TO SHAKE HANDS IN SWINE FLU ALERT (THE MIRROR)

20,000 CASES OF SWINE FLU - AND ON TARGET FOR A MILLION (SUNDAY EXPRESS)

HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY SWINE FLU (MAIL ON SUNDAY)

BECKHAM NIECE IN SWINE FLU SHOCK (THE MIRROR)

DON'T SEND CHILDREN TO SWINE FLU PARTIES, PARENTS WARNED (DAILY MAIL)

WIMBLEDON: FOUR BALL BOYS SENT HOME WITH SWINE FLU (DAILY TELEGRAPH)

CELEBS’ JUNGLE FEVER: SWINE FLU MAY WIPE OUT HIT REALITY SHOW (DAILY STAR)

SWINE FLU DOES WHAT THE NAZIS COULDN'T: CLOSE ETON (INDEPENDENT)

Some people here have been saying that, in retrospect, we all got a bit overexcited about something that, in the vast majority of cases, was best treated with some Lemsip and a bit of shuteye. But I say phooey. You can’t be too careful these days, and without the vigilance of the Fourth Estate who knows what havoc this potentially deadly virus could have wreaked.

Last week I also used my time machine to return briefly to 2009 so I could park it outside Broadcasting House and appear on Thinking Allowed on Radio 4, which (unless you’re reading this in 2010, like me) is still available for a few days on iPlayer at:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00lpc8f/Thinking_Allowed_22_07_2009/

Mundane quote for the day: ‘There is something very English in the marriage of boredom and catastrophe, and the England that existed immediately after the Second World War appears to have carried that manner rather well, as if looking over its shoulder to notice that lightning had just struck a teacup. Reading the work of V.S. Pritchett or the absconded Auden, you pick up the notion that Europe had just come through a spell of bad weather, as though the only important question emerging from the war was about how it might have affected the course of English normality.’ - Andrew O’Hagan

Moon dust

The sixteenth-century poet Edmund Spenser wondered, ‘what if within the moon's fair shining sphere, what if in every other star unseen, of other worlds he happily should hear?’ His near-contemporary Robert Burton shared this interest in ‘infinite habitable worlds’, but thought we could only ‘calculate their motions’ or visit them ‘in a poetical fiction, or a dream’.

My first memory is looking up at the moon with the little girl who used to live next door to us in Overton Crescent, Sale. That must have been in 1972 (I am now the same age as Neil Armstrong was in 1969) and so I suppose it’s possible that I was looking for the last man to walk on the moon (Gene Cernan), who left in December that year. But maybe that is a case of the wish being father to the thought.

I’ve been enjoying Andrew Smith’s book Moon Dust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth, having watching his charming BBC4 documentary, Being Neil Armstrong, a couple of weeks ago. Lots of pages marked with post-its but here is my favourite:

There was also the joy of finding that the eye was so much more powerful without an atmosphere to cloud it … this was one of the reasons why lunar astronauts found the return journey so moving, with the Earth in their sights. Only twenty-four people have ever left Earth orbit and seen her from the perspective of Deep Space – all American and all between the Christmases of 1968 and 1972. The difference between near and far is enormous: the orbital astronaut experiences the planet as huge and majestic, while from afar it is tiny, beautiful, and shockingly alone.

It’s a cliché to say that the astronauts went to the moon and discovered the earth. But for the purposes of this blog on the everyday I loved the account of the post-lunar life of Alan Bean, the one who became a moon artist. He says he just sat in a shopping mall for hours when he returned to earth, eating ice-cream and watching the shoppers walk by, ‘enraptured’ by the simple fact of being human and alive.

PS I liked this email to the Guardian cricket blog after the first test (you need to be familiar with the rantings of a Norwegian commentator after a famous victory over the England football team in 1981): ‘Paul Hogan, Paul Keating, Skippy, Ned Kelly, Harold Bishop! Can you hear me Harold Bishop? Your boys took one hell of a draw!’

Mundane quote for the day: ‘There is nothing they won’t do to raise the standard of boredom.’ – Guy Debord

In search of middle England

Halfway through my interview with Robert Elms on BBC Radio London last week, something strange happened – a little piece of broadcasting history. I actually started to ENJOY it, mainly because he seemed really interested in my book. You can listen to it here (about 15 minutes in):

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p003lm11/Robert_Elms_07_07_2009/

But then what do I know? The last radio interview I even vaguely enjoyed I don’t think they even used. It was a pre-record in which I went off on one (as I believe they say at the high table at Queen’s) about ‘Middle England’ being a political and media invention – momentarily forgetting that I was being interviewed for a three-part series called In Search of Middle England. So I can’t really blame them for leaving me on the cutting-room floor. I wasn’t really entering into the spirit of things.

And in case anyone doesn’t believe me that service stations once used to be the go-to places for the jeunesse doree (see ‘22 Years in a Travelodge’, Chapter 5 in On Roads), I found this in Brian Viner’s new book about 1970s telly, a memory of the car journeys his wife used to make as a teenager: ‘A visit to the restaurant at the New Trust House Forte service station on the M1 was considered a rather special family outing. Once or twice, when they went for a Sunday-afternoon drive to Clumber Park in Nottinghamshire, both girls had to take a change of clothing in case they stopped to eat at Woodall services on the way home.’

BRAVER MEN THAN ME

While I’ve been consorting with the meejer, real men have been busy with maps and rucksacks. Three generations of the Moran family – my dad, brother and 11-year-old nephew - are walking the Tour du Mont Blanc this August, in aid of Peak District Mountain Rescue. You can find out more at this site (http://www.justgiving.com/walkingthetmb/) and even donate if you like …

Mundane quote for the day: ‘I seem to have spent half the time in denouncing the capitalist system and the other half in raging over the insolence of bus-conductors.’ – George Orwell

Under one small star

Why are politicians so slow to say sorry? They say they can apologise and they have apologised but they don’t actually say sorry in the present tense, or they express a ‘level of regret that can be equated with an apology’, or they apologise for things that aren’t their fault, like the slave trade or section 28. What are they afraid of? Apologies can be beautiful, as the Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska shows in her poem ‘Under one small star’:

My apologies to chance for calling it necessity.

My apologies to necessity if I’m mistaken, after all.

Please don’t be angry, happiness, that I take you as my due.

May my dead be patient with the way my memories fade.

My apologies to time for all the world I overlook each second.

My apologies to past loves for thinking that the latest is the first.

Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home.

Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger.

I apologise for my record of minuets to those who cry from the depths.

I apologise to those who wait in railway stations for being asleep today at five a.m.

Pardon me, hounded hope, for laughing from time to time.

Pardon me, deserts, that I don’t rush to you bearing a spoonful of water.

And you, falcon, unchanging year after year, always in the same cage,

your gaze always fixed on the same point in space,

forgive me, even if it turns out you were stuffed.

My apologies to the felled tree for the table’s four legs.

My apologies to great questions for small answers.

Truth, please don’t pay me much attention.

Dignity, please be magnanimous.

Bear with me, O mystery of existence, as I pluck the occasional thread from your train.

Soul, don’t take offense that I’ve only got you now and then.

My apologies to everyone that I can’t be everywhere at once.

My apologies to everyone that I can’t be each woman and each man.

I know that I won’t be justified as long as I live,

since I myself stand in my own way.

Don’t bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words,

then labor heavily so that they may seem light.

On behalf of the world, Ms Szymborksa, I am very happy to accept your beautiful apology.

Another review of my book from the FT:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/365664c0-61df-11de-9e03-00144feabdc0.html

There were also a couple in the Literary Review and the Herald, but they're not on the internet.

Mundane quote for the day: ‘Don’t you think there is a certain resemblance between the mystery of the Mass and what I am trying to do? I mean that I am trying … to give people some kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of everyday life into something that has a permanent artistic life of its own … It is my idea of the significance of trivial things that I want to give the two or three unfortunate wretches who may eventually read me.’ – James Joyce

Diary of a genius

Geniuses aren’t just cleverer and more creative than the rest of us; they also seem to have more time. I’ve just spent the better part of the last few months writing an academic article which, even if it is accepted by the journal I send it to, will probably be read by about six people -and to say it was like getting blood out of a stone would be to underestimate the haematological content of stones. Then I came across this description in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography of how John Maynard Keynes completed his two-volume Treatise on Money in a couple of months while also turning his hand to a few other things:

Much of it was written in August and September at Charleston, Vanessa Bell's farmhouse on the Sussex downs, but he found time for a whirlwind ten days in London in July: Diaghilev's ballet, an end of ballet season dinner party of thirty-three which he hosted at 46 Gordon Square … business appointments, a speech, evidence to a government committee on Indian exchange and currency, a discussion at the Tuesday Club … lunching and dining out day after day. Although normally a late riser who got to the Treasury a little before noon, he spent his mornings at Charleston writing from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. and averaged 1000 words a day fit for the printer.

The words ‘jammy’ and ‘sod’ spring inexorably to mind …

Two more reviews of my book:

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/on-roads-by-joe-moran-1719369.html

http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13855183

Mundane quote for the day: ‘I put a picture up on a wall. Then I forgot there is a wall. I no longer know what there is behind this wall, I no longer know there is a wall, I no longer know this wall is a wall, I no longer know what a wall is. I no longer know that in my apartment there are walls, and that if there weren’t any walls, there would be no apartment. The wall is no longer what delimits and defines the place where I live, it is nothing more than a support for the picture. But I also forget the picture, I no longer look at it, I no longer know how to look at it. I have put the picture on the wall so as to forget there was a wall, but in forgetting the wall, I forget the picture, too.’ – Georges Perec

People unite

I was at the Oyé African music festival in Liverpool’s Sefton Park at the weekend. A little boy called Leo got separated from his parents and found his way to the side of the stage. A tense few minutes followed as the music stopped until the tearful boy’s parents came to claim him. Then the MC gave the good news to the assembled crowd: ‘Leo has been reunited with his people’. An elegant phrase and a lovely sentiment. Let’s all reunite with our people, people.

And since I guess I’m still on road duty I found this eloquent hymn to the asphalt by a late-learning driver, Andrew O’Hagan, in the London Review of Books:

The motorways don’t offer a solution: they offer a welcome straitjacket. Your car will get all the credit for bringing you home to yourself, for showing you the only person you can truly depend on is not merely yourself, but yourself-in-your-car, a somatic unity. Those who spend most of their lives being alert to the demands of others – and that’s most employees, most husbands, wives, parents, most believers – will know the rhythmic, sedative pull of the motorways as the road performs its magic, pulling you back by degrees to some forgotten individualism that the joys and vexations of community always threatened to turn into an upholstered void. Virginia Woolf was almost right: all one really needs is a car of one’s own, the funds to keep it on the road and the will to encounter oneself within.

A couple more reviews of my book:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/5567443/On-Roads-by-Joe-Moran-review.html

http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-magazine/columnists/3702868/the-wiki-man.thtml

Cool stuff

I know this blog is supposed to be about ‘the everyday, the banal and other important matters,’ but to be honest I’m a bit everydayed out at the moment. Maybe it’s just doing a lot of radio interviews where I’m expected to do a PR job on the everyday, to rebrand it and show people why it’s worth bothering with, like a geek with academic credentials. Sometimes I feel a bit like that French chap from EuroDisney brought in to talk up the Millennium Dome. But I’m not a door-to-door salesman for the mundane; I’m not a cold caller for the quotidian. ‘Hello, my name is Joe and our salespeople are in your area and we’d like to interest you in a defamiliarisation of your daily life, with absolutely no obligation … ’

The thing is, it’s not a zero sum game. Just because you’re interested in the everyday (and even this blog sometimes finds it a bit boring) doesn’t mean you’re not interested in the extraordinary. Just because you’re into the endotic doesn’t mean you don’t like the exotic. Occasionally even this blog likes to hang on the coat-tails of cool. So, as a little palate-cleansing sorbet before we hopefully return to matters mundane, here are a few things that I think are cool/romantic/moving/funny and are definitely not things you meet every day:

Kate Rusby singing ‘The Wild Goose’, beautifully: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VofQoO6qtJU

Very clever sketch with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqRxAPG6WDA

Sufjan Stevens singing ‘Romulus’: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnYUOYNqCqY

A silly song by the Flight of the Conchords: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cGoDns8wTA

And a couple more reviews of my book from the Guardian and the Times:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jun/13/on-roads-joe-moran-review

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/non-fiction/article6477929.ece

A view from Delft

I finally got round to reading Anthony Bailey’s A View from Delft, about Jan Vermeer, and I’m glad I did. If you’re interested in the everyday you tend to be drawn to Dutch seventeenth-century painting, and Vermeer in particular. X-rays and infra-red equipment now show that Vermeer erased anything that might seem allegorical or symbolic from his paintings of mundane bourgeois life. Bailey writes about the beautiful light in Vermeer’s paintings, speculating that his relatively small body of work may be due to the fact that he waited until the summer to paint because of the light: ‘It is a light that never hardens but slowly moves, shadows moving with it, and indicates both time passing and warmth of life: the power of creation making itself felt in humdrum human circumstances.’

And I loved this description of the way that Vermeer repeatedly frustrates the viewer’s desire to turn a painting into narrative:

The painter thwarts our incessant demands for a story-line by freezing the action, by bringing time to a stop for an instant or two while contemplation exercises its power. The passivity or stillness he creates, reflecting his own nature, is in its way more dramatic, more active, than any action. So the young woman with a metal water jug pauses, one hand on the jug, one hand on the frame of the casement window which she seems about to open further, and the earth for a moment ceases to spin on its axis. So the woman in blue’s downcast gaze travels along the lines of the letter she has received, word by word by word, over and over. Vermeer seizes the moment and it repeats itself indefinitely. And in the same way his milkmaid, his figure of Fortitude, tips her jug and the milk falls from it in a silent stream for ever.

A couple more reviews of my book from the New Statesman and the Telegraph:

http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2009/06/roads-moran-motorway-strange

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/5517166/On-Roads-by-Joe-Moran-review.html

And here is the last word on MPs’ expenses from Garrison Keillor’s terrific weekly newspaper column in the US:

http://www.publicradio.org/columns/prairiehome/the_old_scout/archives/2009/05/19/stop_the_trouser_presses.shtml

Mundane quote for the day:

The daily things we do
For money or for fun
Can disappear like dew
Or harden and live on.
Strange reciprocity:
The circumstance we cause
In time gives rise to us,
Becomes our memory.

- Philip Larkin

My virtual book launch

Since you can’t bribe, bully or blackmail people into reading your books (unfortunately – I’ve tried all three and none of them work), God created book publicity. I’ve had a very scary, frazzly few days talking about my new book, On Roads. This doesn’t come naturally to me but I will put up with almost any agony if it means deferring membership of the Society for Unread Authors (see my post for 8 April). In fact, having negotiated the Simon Mayo show, BBC Breakfast TV and the Today programme and just about got away with them all, I think I deserve a double gold star, which I haven’t had since I wrote a long poem about a giant jam butty at primary school. And now I need to go and lie down in a darkened room for a bit, if you don’t mind.

But first, to reward myself I am holding a virtual book launch, on my blog – right here right now – to which everyone is cordially invited. Please help yourself to the virtual canapés and the virtual premier cru at the imaginary free bar. Thank you all for coming, too many people to thank etc. etc. Since I can’t do the reading that I believe is customary on these occasions, this is a little reworked extract from my book: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/e76ce4fc-4e5a-11de-a0a1-00144feabdc0.html

For some reason, the one thing almost all my interviewers asked about was the fact that the M6 toll road is made up of two and a half million copies of old Mills and Boon novels. I hope this isn’t a prophetic anticipation of my own book’s future as part of the M1 widening project. Being shredded up into bitumen modifier is the modern equivalent of writing your words on sand and having them washed away by the tide. But enough of the miserableness already. This is just a roundabout way of saying that, if by any chance you are not just here for the free virtual canapés and have actually read my book or are planning to, I really am more touched and grateful than words can say. And any feedback is gratefully received …

If you want to listen to my interview on the Simon Mayo show (I think it’s about an hour and 50 minutes in), it’s at:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00l1ztc/Simon_Mayo_10_06_2009/

And this is the link to my interview on Today (lots of cool points from my nephew for being on with James May from Top Gear). It should be about 2 hours and 25 minutes in:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00krzby/Today_08_06_2009/

BBC Breakfast TV isn’t available on iPlayer – which is probably just as well because, as someone kindly pointed out to me last week, I look better on the radio.

A nice review in the Sunday Times:

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article6430265.ece

Mundane quote for the day:

Last night in London Airport
I saw a wooden bin
labelled UNWANTED LITERATURE
IS TO BE PLACED HEREIN.
So I wrote a poem
and popped it in.

- Christopher Logue

Roads: my part in their downfall

Since my book on roads is coming out this week, I thought I would tell everyone what I did in the tarmac wars. On Valentine’s Day in 1996, I accidentally joined a roads protest. I was walking up North Road, one of the main shopping streets in Brighton, when I saw something that made me wonder if I was dreaming: a well-built man dressed in a glittery silver ball gown and pink bubble wrap. He was standing by the clock tower roundabout and seemed to be trying (not very successfully, obviously) to look inconspicuous. A few seconds after I clocked the police van, several hundred people, all dressed in pink, dashed out from the narrow warren of streets known as the Lanes. All of a sudden they were dancing in North Road, banging drums and blowing whistles. A young woman dressed in a pink ra-ra skirt gave me some candy floss and a fluffy heart.

The police lined up two cordons to sandwich the protestors, about 30 feet apart, which included the bit of road I was standing in. Some brave souls scaled the shop buildings and hung home-made banners from the upper-floor balconies, proclaiming ‘Snog Not Smog’. As more protestors arrived, another party got going outside the police cordon. Eventually the police admitted defeat and moved the cordon back so that the whole of North Road was under occupation. The protestors now had enough space to blow up a bouncy castle, which they leaped around in with the gleeful abandon of children.

I left after about two hours as the party wound down, the bouncy castle deflated and the drummers made their way to the seafront like a marching military band. I had enjoyed my few hours reclaiming the road – although in my non-pink attire I must have looked like a police ringer. After negotiating my way through the cordon I walked away along Western Road towards Churchill Square and, glancing behind me I saw that North Road had disappeared, the whole of the asphalt hidden beneath a blanket of pink.

And that was the end of my brief life as Swampy’s mini-me.

Mundane quote for the day: ‘And sometimes the veil becomes lifted and I see it all as a circulatory system, a body. The Ocado depot or Milton Keynes or Spaghetti junction are like swirls in the flow, vortexes, tiny chakras in a vast sublime hole.’ – Michael Smith on Drivetime (BBC4)

On sport

I’ve been reading Barthes on Sport, a little book written years ago by Roland Barthes but only just published in English. It’s the usual Barthesian mix of brilliant perceptions and lapidary statements that brook no argument. This passage, on English football, is typical:

In sport, man does not confront man directly. There enters between them an intermediary, a stake, a machine, a puck, or a ball. And this thing is the very symbol of things: it is in order to possess it, to master it, that one is strong, adroit, courageous … Ultimately man knows certain forces, certain conflicts, joys and agonies; sport expresses them, liberates them, consumes them without ever letting anything be destroyed … In sport, man experiences life’s fatal combat, but this combat is distanced by the spectacle, reduced to its forms, cleared of its effects, of its dangers, and of its shames: it loses its noxiousness, not its brilliance or its meaning … What is sport? Sport answers this question by another question: who is best? But to this question of the ancient duels, sport gives a new meaning: for man’s excellence is sought here only in relation to things. Who is the best man to overcome the resistance of things, the immobility of nature? Who is the best to work the world, to give it to men … to all men? That is what sport says.

OK, I’ll bear this in mind the next time I see a premiership footballer throwing the ball away petulantly, or a manager going red on the touchline and pointing at his watch, or Chelsea players screaming at the referee and claiming that the whole of UEFA is corrupt because they have been denied a couple of penalty appeals. Or perhaps I will give the last word to George Orwell who said that ‘sport is war minus the shooting’.

PS Here are a couple of early reviews of my new book, On Roads, from the monthlies:

http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=10799

http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/node/1241

There was also a nice one by Giles Foden in Conde Nast Traveller but that doesn’t seem to be on the internet.

Revolting students

Two historical images of student life today.

I found this description of eighteenth-century Oxford in Richard Mabey’s biography of Gilbert White: ‘Lectures were rarities. The university library (the Bodleian) was open for only six hours a day. Some of the books were even chained to the shelves. Tutorials, and even examinations, were often little more than exchanges of stock questions and responses, or disputations upon a few standard problems in grammar or logic. Sometimes, if a tutor failed to turn up, debates were carried out with a blank stone wall.’

I think I read somewhere else that some Oxford courses around this time did not even bother with exams. They had a residency requirement: you just had to be in Oxford for three years and they gave you a degree. One occasionally encounters students today who would benefit from a similar arrangement.

I also found this revealing comment about the revolutionary ferment of 1968 in a near-contemporary account: ‘Plateglass universities hardly rate as centres of radicalism. Debating societies have not flourished … committed politicians on the staffs, and there are many at local and national level, say that apathy, not activity, characterises their students both at election time and between elections. There have of course been protest marches at all the new universities, focusing on Vietnam and Rhodesia. But equally there have been protests at East Anglia over war toys, at York over the censorship of The War Game, and at Kent over the banning of Radio Caroline. The coinage is a little devalued when the activity of protest seems more important than its object.’ (Source: Michael Beloff, The Plateglass Universities (1970))

If there are any revolting students reading this, may I suggest that they organise a union sit-in about the disgraceful defenestration of the lovely Mo Dutta from Radio 2? Saturday mornings won’t be the same again.

Mundane quote for the day: ‘Many objects remain unnoticed simply because it never occurs to us to look their way. Most people turn their backs on garbage cans, the dirt underfoot, the waste they leave behind. Films have no such inhibitions; on the contrary, what we ordinarily prefer to ignore proves attractive to them precisely because of this common neglect.’ – Siegfried Kracauer