Gumball 3000

On my way into work yesterday I passed through the Covent Garden Paizza. And saw, well, this...

It was the pre-start show for the Gumball 3000 rally. The other day our managers did a thing called a "Mood Survey" to see how we felt about a) the day ahead when we arrived at work, b) the day we'd had when we left work, c) the future. We weren't too sure about the future, but the present got quite high marks. When they asked, I said that one reason I had voted NO to the future was the upcoming office move. It was a quality-of-life thing, I said. Because they don't hold pre-start shows for the Gumball Rally in the City.

Desert Island Discs: 1980's to Now

I have to tiptoe round the 80's. There was so much good music, a lot of which can be dated to within a couple of months. Who now remembers any of those British Jazz-Funk acts, every band given the Trevor Horn touch of magic, everyone who ever fronted for Stock, Aiken and Waterman, or Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis? And how quickly it was trampled on by the behemoth that was dance music? Hand Held In Black and White is the last record that reminds me of how I could feel a sense of possibility in a gust of wind, in the sun reflecting from a window, in the sight of a pretty girl.



After that, my world started to close in, slowly so that I didn't really notice it. The gap between the upbeat, club-oriented music I was listening to and the increasingly withdrawn life I was leading became greater and greater. I had terrible insomnia for two years in the mid-Eighties, changed jobs and choose my first property not wisely and, unknown to me, was heading for a fall. But the music was so bright and shiny.



The Fall was alcoholism. While everyone else was having the Second Sumer of Love, my liking of a tipple turned into an actual problem. I spent six years as a practising alcoholic, with a ghastly dry drunk in the summer of 1991, when I was crazier than when I was under the influence. I called AA one grey, damp October morning 1993, after I had been unemployed for fifteen months. A couple of years later, I heard Not An Addict on MTV and it knocked me out.



"It's over now, I'm cold, alone / I'm just a person on my own / Nothing means a thing to me / Oh, nothing means a thing to me". Underneath all my appearance of normal living, that is still how I feel. As for Fast Love, George Michael's hymn to casual sex and the sexiest video you will ever see, and that includes anything with Shakira in it.



Most of the recent music I like - from chillwave and progressive house to The Script - has a little touch of jazz, or blues or 80's soul. You might not think Bach has anything to do with blues or jazz, but you would be wrong. His compositions have the same sense of being snapshots of a endless flow of music that Coltrane's records do: a record of a constantly evolving flow of thoughts about melody, harmony and rhythm.



The record companies had a notorious cull of their catalogues and artists in the late 1980's - there's a line in a Missy Elliott track "since Elektra dropped Miss Anita Baker". But CD's, PC's and the internet allowed the musicians came back with a vengeance. There's so much music around today, and a lot of it is excellent. Fire up your iTunes and look at the radio.

Somewhere, a young man is walking down the road at three in the morning after a late-night session with friends. She was there, they exchanged a kiss in the kitchen. It's warm and the air smells of early summer. He doesn't have to be in college until eleven that morning. And this is playing on his phone's media player...

Desert Island Discs: 1960's - 1970's

Somewhere in the late 1960's, a young man is leaning out of his bedroom window. He's been reading, perhaps Dostoyevsky or Robert Heinlein. It's late, and the warm wind is blowing through the trees. He can hear each leaf rustle against the other. He might be anywhere but in the London suburbs, and in his heart he is. Anywhere but here, with this soundtrack...



I've been through at least four collections of music. The first two on black vinyl, the third on cassette, and the current one on CD. There is so much to choose from, I may as well pick from my favourites at random. Summer In The City brings back a memory of walking along St Martin's Lane at the age of twelve, Mustang Sally of swimming at Plumstead Baths and Sugar Sugar of slot car racing at the Richmond Vineyard.








In the summer of 1971 I was interning at the Isle of Grain Power Station as part of my OND in Electrical Engineering. Top of The Pops was Thursday Night Compulsory, and the men there used to greet Pan's People with remarks like "I've seen better in Rochdale" and made remarks about Curtis Mayfield that can't be repeated in these PC times. On came Carole King. I knew what she was going to sing and inwardly shuddered at what these men might say. To my utter surprise, they fell silent at a song that talks about the end of a relationship - perhaps they knew about "staying in bed all morning just to pass the time".



This next song was Hall and Oates' calling card. Wow. What can you do with lines like these: "think I'll spend eternity in the city / let the carbon and monoxide choke my thoughts away / and pretty bodies help dissolve the memories / but they can never be / what she was to me"? It's linked with the memory of a hot chestnut stand on Tottenham Court Road in the winter of 1974.

The Blog's Second Anniversary

This blog has now been going for two years, mostly three entries a week. According to Google Stats, since July 2010, when Stats became available, I have had 1,800 page views - which is exactly 1,800 more than I either thought I would get or intended to get. The most popular are about various recruitment scams - followed by a post about my holiday in the Algarve.

For almost all of that time I've maintained an output of three posts a week, most of them fairly lengthy thought-pieces. I haven't had the urge to change the name of the blog, or my profile, or its look, since I settled on the current look. It started as a place to rant about work, and I still do that, but it's developed. It's still about my life, and my life is mostly about what I'm reading and thinking.

It's nice that somebody has read something I've written, but it's not essential. So what if no-one reads me or you? Almost nobody reads almost everybody: there's a reason an editor can name all the top-selling writers in their field. At any time there will be only a few hundred people who can make a living from the speculative creation of art-works. George V Higgins remarked in his classic On Writing that statistically you have a better chance of being a Congressman than a fiction writer who makes a living from their craft.

The point is that the we write. As if we were being read. We practice a craft, we observe its disciplines. We produce, and courtesy of the Internet, we can publish. That makes us writers. Sales make us successful writers - or not. An un-successful writer is still a writer, they're just not going to get laid on the strength of it.

Keeping up three posts a week isn't as easy as it sounds, even with practice. I draft the text in Evernote whenever I get an idea and then edit and polish it on the Sunday before publication. Thanks to the way Blogger lets you specify a date when you want to publish and then does it for you, I usually stack three posts up on a Sunday for the coming week. So I don't have to worry that "I haven't posted today". If I really have run out of ideas, that's when I post some photographs in the Things I Saw Where I Lived and Walked series or put up a favourite piece of music from You Tube.

So another year of blogging beckons. I know that in it, we will be moving offices from heavenly West End to the Liverpool Street Industrial Estate, and very probably experiencing the first re-organisation and redundancies for just over two years. I will have to decide to renew my annual membership at the Third Space. I intend to get the front garden re-built and go on at least one more week-long foreign trip to the country. Then there's work, the gym, movies and occasionally just plain dossing around. I have no idea if I'll ever get into another relationship again, let alone this year.

What I Read and What's Missing

Nicholas Nassem Taleb, author of The Black Swan, does not read newspapers. Rightly he considers that most of them are full of junk press releases and what amounts, especially to a someone who used to be a trader, to very old news. I have finally reached the stage where I think that reading newspapers and even listening to the news on the radio leaves me feeling less informed than before I started. I don't even read the Sunday papers, the FT Weekend or The Economist - not since I realised they were being written about a parallel universe.

When I was a teenager, I read Motoring News for the reports of Grand Prix races - no multi-billion dollar Formula One TV coverage in those days - Model Cars and Model Car and Track both about slot car racing (yes really), and for a while I read Melody Maker until the NME became the only music paper anyone needed to read. The Financial Times was irrelevant and Private Eye was incomprehensible. (Try making sense of Le Canard Enchaine and you'll get the feeling.)

Now I read Private Eye and Art Monthly regularly and Vanity Fair, Tatler or Esquire or some other such life-style magazine every now and then. Put Kate Moss on the cover and I'm going to buy it. On some kind of whim, I've just taken out a subscription to the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, which at £39 including membership of the BSPS itself, is a pretty good deal. If you're into the philosophy of science. I gave up on Sight and Sound a long time ago: if I read any movie magazine at all, it's Little White Lies, the house magazine of the Curzon Cinemas. I don't read book reviews, I prefer to browse, and I can do that because my local bookshops are Foyles and Blackwells. Every now and then I sample a music magazine, but mostly I rely on Last FM or Amazon reviews to point me in an interesting direction. If I hear about a band, I'll look them up on You Tube first, then I might buy the CD or download. If I really need a movie review, I'll read Roger Ebert. There's a reason he's a millionaire. I buy 'zines to cover the fringe stuff, and I can do that because I have the newsagents of Soho on my doorstep.

It's all interesting but like the mainstream media, but it's the sparkle on the waves. It's not the currents and it's not the tides. The rubbish on the streets of Naples, to take a current story, isn't about trash bags not being collected, it's about the grip of the Camorra on the government of Campania. That story doesn't get covered, but Berlusconi's posturings do. On the other hand that story has been running for decades. The mainstream media doesn't describe the currents and tides that make the stories break on our beaches. Recent historians prefer froth to trend as well: the shelves are currently groaning under the weight of books about Britain in the twentieth century, each volume covering a decade in hundreds of pages of detail that make less sense that a Jackson Pollock.

The tides and currents are made by demographics, criminal organisations, industry and legislation, not by culture and certainly not by party political maeouverings. Businesses have a strong interest in keeping what they are doing quiet: if I was a doing to the British economy what a modern CEO does every month, I would hide behind commercial confidentiality and a harum of hard-faced blonde PR's too. I don't have the time or resources to investigate it. I don't know who is supposed to be: not journalists and judging by what gets circulated by The Bank's Economics department, not the research departments of large companies either. I don't know where you find the serious stuff. I have a suspicion that it isn't on the Internet and it costs fairly serious money. Actually I have a suspicion that it doesn't actually exist.

Junk Press Releases - and What GDP Is and Isn't

There's a thing called churnalism, and even a website that lets you see if a story is just churned, that consists of re-cyclying press releases and passing the result off as news. Almost everything you read about The Bank is churnalism - and what we the staff get to read is even less informative than the press releases. I don't know who does The Bank's PR, but she could get a job with Max Clifford keeping stuff hidden anytime. Anyway, on the Saturday after the Royal Wedding, the final straw just landed on my back.

The story was in the Daily Mail (it was on the table where I had breakfast) and was from an alleged professional services firm called RSM Tenon, to the effect that the two long weekends in April will cost the UK economy up to £6bn in GDP and up to £30bn in "lost productivity" - whatever that is (and it's a number so large it can only be related to turnover, not value-added or profits).

Which just proves that Messers Tenon and the others have no idea what GDP is. It's measured in two ways: expenditure and revenue. The two should balance - though not in a given period - and systematic differences are often taken as a measure of the size of the black economy if revenue is less than expenditure (and presumably cash flight if expenditure is less than revenue plus change in savings). The three components of revenue GDP are wages and salaries, corporate profits and a small fiddle-factor, excuse me, adjustment for notional incomes. When there's a public holiday, all full-time workers get paid anyway. Temps don't, but a lot of them are doing jobs that need doing on public holidays and carry on, so it's only those who are doing jobs that can be suspended for a day that miss a day's billing. But that money goes into the company's profits, so it has a net effect of zero. As for corporate profits, way more businesses are open for trading than you might imagine: what closes are their head and back offices, and that makes no difference to anything. The production is mostly offshored to places where the workers don't get days off for Royal Weddings, so that doesn't stop. As for the effect on sales, well, if you need to replace your washing machine (this is not autobiographical) you need to replace it and all that happens is that you order it on Tuesday 3rd May instead of Friday 29th April. It's deferred, not abandoned. This doesn't even effect GDP figures for the quarter, because both days are in the quarter. It all nets out at about zero.

This is basic first-year undergraduate economics (or if it isn't, it should be). A Business Editor should know it, just as they should know that any "story" about the "costs / benefits to industry" from the CBI or the NIESR is utter propaganda. (People don't get happier when they start earning more than the median salary (NIESR), and low-wage immigrants have contributed 0.5% of GDP over about four years (NIESR)? Well. Gee, who would have guessed the employer's tame "economists" would put out stories like that?) Twaddle like that should not be published. I am not going to speculate on the motives of an editor who puts trash like that on their pages.

That's it, I think. No more British newspapers. No more Today programme. As for the rest of the BBC - no. I'm not sure what I will use or read, but I will be giving it some thought.

The Original Muscle Car - Ford Mustang 289

I was visiting the lads under the bridge in Richmond one Wednesday evening recently (that's code for the Richmond Men's Meeting) and so had to play the game of Find-The-Last-Parking-Space-By-The-River. I found one, and I found this just across the road from where I parked.

I think it's the first model, and the badge said it was a 289, which translates to a hefty 4.7 litres. No more need be said.