World flapjack day

shoe 001

2011-10-23T21:16:00.012+01:00

We were on the Isle of Wight this weekend and Andrew and I went to see Brading Town v Alton Town in the 1st round of the FA Vase. Both teams are in the Wessex league (which feeds into the Southern League which feeds into the Conference which feeds into the football league). Alton are a bit higher in the table.

There were about 60 people there (Andrew said he counted them). The Peter Henry Ground is on a pronounced slope. At the top of the slope is the clubhouse and teabar. Slightly further down the slope is a changing room block. Then the goal that Alton defended in the first half. Behind the opposite goal, at the bottom of the slope, is the railway line running between Ryde and Shanklin.

Every five minutes or so one of the old London Underground trains that run on the line comes rumbling past. Behind that Brading marsh, drained by the Victorians, stretches on, flat and empty, all the way to Bembridge Harbour.

There are two small stands on each side of the pitch, each covering the little bit of touchline either side of the half way line. We were in the one on the right hand side if you look down the slope. It had 63 seats in it (Andrew worked it out).

There were 5 people in it apart from us two. Three men behind us were talking about non-league football, and the plight of Newport Town, the Island's biggest club, now sunk down to the Wessex league, no longer able to pay its players.

Then they mentioned Gillingham Town (the Dorset club, not the Kent one) - another club with a great view of railway line (this time the Waterloo to Exeter line). I mentioned I had been to Gillingham Town's ground. One of the men said that he had gone there to see their changing rooms. Turned out he used to be chair of Brading and under his watch he got the funding to build the changing block and the stand we were sitting in (which cost £11,000).

Later in the conversation he said he came from Chessington and supported Fulham. Turns out he comes to watch Fulham once a season, just like we watch Brading once a season. The last two times he had come to watch Fulham Bobby Zamora had scored last minute winners (against Blackburn and Birmingham). He told us that when Brading play Newport, usually on a boxing day, they get 250 people in the ground.

Brading do not pay their players - some of the bigger sides in the Wessex league do. Almost all the side live on the east side of the Isle of Wight, within 3 miles of the ground (mainly Ryde and Sandown).

Brading were 1-0 down at half time. Alton were slightly quicker and slicker. In the second half, kicking down the slope, Brading scored four great goals. After the first two Alton game back up the pitch and won a penalty straight away to restore their lead. The third met with no response from Alton. The fourth came with two minutes to go to put Brading 4-3 up. Alton chucked the kitchen sink at Brading, forced corner after corner, one shot was saved on the line by a Brading defender using what appeared to be an elbow. The people in front of us who had come to sit in the stand at half time complained that the ref had played 8 minutes injury time. Alton's goalkeeper came up. Brading scrambled the ball away for another corner. This one came to the far post where an Alton player 5 yards out was able to head in unchallenged.

4-4. Extra time to be played.

The only other 4-4 game I have ever seen was 27 years ago, just a few miles away, at Fratton Park when Fulham came from being 4-0 down at half time to draw 4-4 at Portsmouth, with Kevin Lock putting away a penalty in the last minute of injury time.

The ex-chaiman told us that the team that won through to the next round got £1,000 from the FA which would mean a lot to Brading. It would pay for four away trips for the team. He seemed resigned to Brading going out with Alton getting the psychological boost from the last gasp equaliser. He wondered off to the clubhouse. By the time he'd come back Alton were 5-4 up. Brading had some near misses but seemed to run out of legs by the end.

A zen way of learning photography

2011-04-30T23:03:00.008+01:00

I went to collect my first set of prints from Boots the Chemist yesterday. When the young lady picked the envelope out of the drawer it seemed awfully thin. The reason it was thin was because there were no prints in it. The negatives were blank.

I asked her whether I'd exposed the film by opening the back of the camera too early.
''No, if you'd done that the negatives would be black. The negatives are clear, no light has been on them. You've either brought us in a film that you never used or the film never went through the camera''

I went to a friends' sons 1st birthday party. Philip was there, he's a professional photographer. He explained what must have happened.
''You'll have put the film in wrong, it won't have wound on''
''But I was taking pictures and it was winding on''
"The camera will have let you press the shutter-release button and pull the film advance leaver, but if the film wasn't engaged in the sprocket then it won't actually have moved your film on at all. The film will have stayed rolled in the cannister.''

I asked Philip how I could make sure I don't do it again.

''Load the new film. Put the end in the sprocket, wind it on. Then take a couple of pictures with the back open. Even though you might waste some film, its worth it. When you are satisfied that it has wound on properly close the back, take a few blank shots and away you go'

So of the 7 films I have shot since my friend lent me the OM 10 camera:
- film 1 is at a photographic studio that always seems to be shut whenever I go walk down the High Street
- film 2 was blank
- film 3 I exposed by opening the camera back too early
- films 4 and 5 are at Boots the Chemist (coming back a week on Tuesday)
- film 6 is in my cupboard waiting to go to Boots the Chemist

The feedback loop is getting really long now. It is a zen way of learning photography.

The zen teacher gives the student a camera. Student goes through all the motions - focusing the picture, setting the aperture, checking the shutter speed, pressing the shutter release, winding the film on. But they are never shown the prints. Not until the student is ready will they be shown the prints.

My first steps in photography

2011-04-24T20:37:00.011+01:00

It seems odd creating a blogpost about my photography without posting any photos. But I haven't seen any yet. I borrowed an Olympus OM10 analogue camera from a friend on April 7. I have shot four rolls of film since that date:

the first (a black and white film) is at our local photographic shop waiting for me to pick up the prints
the second (a colour film) is with Boots the chemist
the third is in the bin because I didn't rewind it properly and exposed it when I opened the back of the camera
the fourth one is in the cupboard waiting to go the developers

In theory we learn through feedback loops - planning something, doing something, looking at the results and comparing them with what we planned. There is no feedback loop here. In practice this may be an advantage. I haven't had to look at any duff pictures to discourage me. Instead I can fondly imagine that all the shots will be delightful.

I can feel I have made some progress even without being able to see any output. I have taken 132 photographs in 17 days, and seem to be taking more and more each day. I've been getting used to the dials, to looking out for what might make a good shot, to thinking about how much exposure (light) the picture needs and whether to try and narrow the depth of field to throw less interesting parts of the picture out of focus.

Waiting is a fundamental part of the analogue world. Having to wait for the prints to come back from the developers reminds me of buying a vinyl LP when I am working away in Brussels, and knowing I won't be able to hear it until I get back home to the UK and can stick it on my turntable.

With the waiting lives hope and anticipation. I plan to get to Boots to pick up the films this Saturday April 30.

The Wedding Present at Camden Koko

2010-12-14T07:05:00.006Z

I am too old for mosh pits now. I am over forty. They weren't even called mosh pits in my day. But last night, when everyone else in the mosh pit was over forty, I made an exception.

We were pogoing to an album called Bizarro, by The Wedding Present. It didn't make a huge stir when it was released in 1989. It isn't even The Wedding Present's most famous album (more people know 'George Best'). But on it David Gedge brought together a clutch of bittersweet songs about relationships.

Gedge writes songs that are snatches of dialogue. Things said or thought at key stages of a relationship, when it is still up for grabs, when hope is still alive or when the wounds are still fresh.

The frail hope of the start of relationship:
'I spent all day trying to decide, about the words that you said last night - did they mean nothing? or were they filled with hidden clues?'

The frustration:
'Why don't you pick up the telephone. I know that you're at home'

The paranoia:
'Is that a letter you're hiding from me? I feel like I'm being used again, can we open it and see?'

The killer detail:
"Its that razor he left upon your shelf, I'll throw it away myself'

The mixed feelings:
In the song 'Thanks' a man knows his ex has shown all his love letters to her new partner. It contains the line 'his head's been on the pillow that we bought'. But it ends with the line 'I just can't get mad at you no matter how I try'

You could compare Gedge with Morrissey, his contemporary from just across the Pennine hills. But Morrissey doesn't write about relationships, he writes about existence. Morrissey writes as a man who has given up on the prospect of relationships making him happy. When Morrissey addresses a song to another human being they are so far distant, the words could never be actually said to them. Think of 'Back to the Old house': The words 'When you cycled by, there began all my dreams' sung to a person irrevocably lost years and years ago.

The band started the evening with a few warm up songs. Then they played a tape that collected all the words that John Peel used to introduce a Wedding Present song on air. It felt like he was speaking yesterday. You could see how moved people were. Most of them, like me, would never have heard of this band if it wasn't for John Peel. My introduction was Peel playing 'My Favourite Dress' back in 1987. The end of the tape had John Peel saying 'and this is from their new album, Bizarro'.

The band kicked straight into playing the album. The word 'Brassneck' is spat out, twice, followed by the gentle, self-deceiving 'I have just decided I don' t love you anymore' (as if you decide something like that!)

Gedge pauses. Asks us if we have any questions?
"where is Peter?'
'' He got kicked out of the band for being a knobhead like you''

Why are Leeds so shit?' (Gedge comes from Leeds)
'How should I know, I support Man United'
Mocking chorus of 'we all hate red scum' from some sections of the crowd. Amazing how a Leeds band in the 80s got away with calling their first album after a Man Utd legend.

Lots of requests. Mainly for 'My Favourite Dress'.

With two songs of the album to go Gedge tells us the band never ever does encores.

The penultimate song was nine minutes long. The chorus 'Why don't you put that down and take me I am yours?' is barked by Gedge. I used to play that song a lot in my twenties. I used to imagine someone saying 'oh allright then'. Tonight was my opportunity to bounce up and down and sing it in company. But the company was a lot of forty-something blokes like me.

The last song was very short and very quiet. It finishes with 'And there is a thousand things I wish I'd said and done, but the moment's gone'.

The thing I love about Gedge's songs is the way a stray phrase will sum everything up. You can just imagine the man, at the end of the relationship, shaking his head and saying maybe to himself, maybe to her 'That was my favourite dress you know'.

Fulham 2 Hamburg 1

2010-04-30T07:43:00.009+01:00

Big game. I wanted to get there early.

We were in the River Cafe opposite Putney Bridge station at 6. The guy at the table behind us was saying how nervous he felt, how he'd felt nervous all week.

Kick off not till 8.05.

The boys (my son Andrew and his friend Fred) start asking me about the posters above the counter at the River Cafe. There are four of them. One of the Juventus team that won the 1985 European Cup. One of the Juventus team that won the European Cup early in the 1990's. One of the Italian team that won the 1982 World cup. One of the Italian team that won the 2006 world cup.

Underneath is a more recent addition, a half and half Fulham and Juventus scarf.

Fred asked me whether Fulham would have beaten the 1985 Juventus team.

No I said, and explain about Michel Platini. How he would stand in his own half and play balls over the defence into the path of the Juve striker Boniek, and how he would put back-spin on the ball so that when the ball landed it wouldn't run off into touch, it would sit up and beg to be hit in the back of the net.

He asked if we could I could find a Platini video in You Tube on the iPhone. We did, but it just showed Platini's goals. I said we were probably better off typing 'Boniek' into You Tube because then we would see Platini's passes.

We walked round the corner. Lots of Hamburg fans around in blue T-shirts saying 'Operation Rathausmarkt Mai 13 2010'. I asked one of them what it meant. He said that the day after the Europa League final, they were going to have a massive celebration of their Europa League win in Rathausmarkt in Hamburg.

We get to the ground by 7. Very early for us, we normally get there 10 minutes before kick off.

I go over to chat to Roman and his son, we used to have a season ticket in the row in front of him. Like me he hadn't dared check the internet today to see whether or not Bobby Zamora was fit to play. Roman says we have to believe today, its all about belief. He hadn't made his mind up whether he would fly or drive to the final.

I o back to Fred and Andrew. Andrew tells me Zamora is playing.

Its like the old days at a football match, everyone in their positions half an hour before kick off (in the days when people stood up you had to get their early to get your favourite position on the terrace). Atmosphere building, all the songs coming out.

Four big Hamburg fans are sitting six rows in front of us. In Hamburg shirts and scarves. There were Juve fans and Shaktar fans in our block in previous rounds but they hadn't worn their club colours.

Game kicks off, Zamora has a good chance, massive noise. Even game, very fast tempo, Fulham have a good spell, Hamburg have a good spell. They get a free kick thirty five yards out and their fellow bends a phenomenal free kick into the top corner like a rocket. The Hamburg fans celebrate. Some of the Fulham fans get angry with them. One guy in front of me starts saying ' come on then' to them. Wanting a fight. I lean forward and tap him on the arm, 'its Fulham not Chelsea I say, and there are kids around' Give him his due the fellow stops. The Hamburg fans shrug their shoulders and walk out of the ground.

Rest of the half slides by. Fulham playing well enough, decent passing, but not making their keeper do much.

Half time. TV monitor below the stand shows lots of clips of Bobby Zamora in obvious discomfort from his injury, Andy Townsend speculates whether or not he will play second half.

Andrew asks me, 'are we going to win this dad?' 'well son, we aren't out of it, and we will have a surge kicking towards the Hammersmith End, but Hamburg are probably favourites now, they seem a better side than Wolfsburg and Juventus'. In my heart I don't think that we will do it.

We go back to our seats. The guy who sits at the end of our row says to me and the boys. 'We will do this, trust me, we will get these two goals'

I eat the bit of bread pudding that I bought from the River Cafe for half time. Its proper home made grandma baked bread pudding. Please be magic bread pudding, please get us these two goals.

The game restarts, Zamora chases a ball down the flanks, does well but he is limping afterwards. He is obviously not fit.

I keep looking at the clock, 50 minutes gone, 60 minutes gone. I can't pretend I am enjoying the experience. The game and time seem to be draining away.

A chant starts up. 'Stand up if you still believe' I stand up (even though I didn't believe). Everyone stands up. Everyone sings it. It lifts the players. Now I do believe. The power of self-fulfilling prophecy. Zamora comes off (to a massive ovation). Dempsey comes on. Fresh legs, fit legs.

There is a Fulham surge now, a tide. High tempo passing, intensity.

Murphy gets the ball in his own half. Plays a wonderful pass through their defence, Davies turns the defender one way, then the other and pokes it in. When the delirium had died down Fred asked me 'was that a Platini pass?'

Yes I said, that is exactly what it was!

Murphy gets the ball again in the centre circle. He drifts it diagonally over the full back to Konchesky (or it might have been Davies) running down that flank.

'Was that a Platini pass?'

Yep.

Two minutes later Murphy takes a corner that leads to a promising situation.

'Was that a Platini corner?'

The ball comes into the box again. It goes into the back of the net. Writing this the morning after I still cannot picture that second goal.

I said to a bloke after the game that the celebrations after the goal must have been so intensive that it punctured something in my brain and I forgot what the goal was like. He said that Dempsey's chip against Juve had fractured a hole in the fabric of the universe and we have been living in an alternative reality ever since. Yes I said, Dr Who will meet Rose at the final.

15 minutes left. I am still looking at the clock all the time but this time to will it on. Not wishing my life away, just the next 14 minutes.

All of the songs come out, the defiant ones and triumphant ones and the encouraging ones. But the one that gets the goosebumps going was the plaintive one, to the sound of Country Roads 'Craven Cottage, by the river, take me home' heard it a hundred times before but just at that moment.....

It gets closer and closer to the end of time. Hamburg resort to hoofing the ball up long. Fulham keep 2 men up front. Everyone in the ground is standing up. Bouncing up and down with 20 thousand other people singing 'Roy, Roy, Roy'' to the tune of '1 bannana 2 bannana 3 bannana 4'.

I don't know how to whistle, so I can't join in the whistling before the final whistle.

The final whistle goes. What do you do? I hug my son and tell him I love him.

The players are cavorting on the pitch. If you look at someone they hug you.

Andrew realises he's lost his watch

'F*** the watch' I say, with a smile

What he said, surprised (I never swear)

Don't worry about the watch I say.

Whenever Fulham win at home, John Pantsil, if he is playing, sprints round the pitch in a lap of honour. He did two laps last night. No-one had left the ground, everyone still in there ten minutes later.

Got the train home. Saw a guy wearing a 'Dempsey's chip' T shirt, with his son. What a great idea for a t-shirt. In ten years time he will wear it and people will try and figure out what it is referring to, was someone remembering the last mouthful of a particularly savouresome portion of fish and chips?

He said the tickets for the final would go on sale at 7 in the morning. Only 12,000 of them. Only to season tickets holders. 'Are you going' I said. 'I will have to pursuade the wife first because I want to take the boy' he replied. 'You'll have to wake her up at 5:30 in the morning with a cup of tea' I said.

When I woke up this morning it felt like I had just walked out of the ground. Ears still ringing from the noise, throat hoarse. Great night.

Fulham 2 Bolton Wanderers 1

2008-09-13T21:03:00.010+01:00

It was all optimism in the River Cafe before the game. The talk was of whether Andy Johnson could emulate ex Fulham heroes Geoff Horsfield and Brian McBride and score on his debut. The father and son I met before the Arsenal game were in there: the father told us that it makes a big difference if a striker scores on their debut, they've won the crowd over from the start, and are forgiven anything after that. Jimmy Bullard scored on his home debut I said. Doesn't count he said, Jimmy's not a striker.

In contrast the Bolton fans walking behind us through Bishop's Park were pessimistic. They told me that knowing Gary Megson he would probably play with Kevin Davies up front and everyone else back in their own penalty area. At the time I thought they were joking.

I can't remember a game like it at Fulham for years. I renewed my season ticket three years ago (having let it lie fallow for 20 years) and they have been three years of toil and struggle. But today the sun shone and Fulham played like Brazil. We could have had five in the first half and four in the second. Zamora span a defender on the edge of the area and cracked it in to put us two up. 'Goal of the month' said the bloke next to me. Gera was intelligent on the left flank. Johnson chased everything and looked a right handful. We were totally in control.

Bolton did what their fans said they would. One up front: Kevin Davies. Five in midfield. Gardner sometimes drifted wide on their left, but opposite him O'Brien always stayed narrow so they had no width on the right. They looked devoid of inspiration and only threatened from set pieces.

The crowd were cheering Fulham touches with Oles from early in the second half. We were strolling. The man behind me said that Bolton looked as bad as Fulham had been under Sanchez. His neighbour asked him to refrain from mentioning that man's name. I was reminded me of a moment before one of those crucial relegation battles late last season. We were sitting in the River Cafe. A man turned to his wife and said to her 'you're worse than Lawrie Sanchez you are'. The whole cafe suddenly fell silent, wondering what this poor lady had done to deserve the slur (put sugar on his chips?).

I couldn't help thinking of Sanchez while Fulham were stroking it around today, and about the transformation Hodgson has wrought. We've gone from the ridiculous to the sublime, from the sluggishness of Chris Baird to the athleticism of John Pantsil, from Kamara and Healy to Zamora and Johnson, from hoofing to passing, losing to winning, scowling to smiling, dreading to dreaming. But like Yin and Yang, black and white, good and evil, there would have been no Hodgson without Sanchez.

Kevin Nolan clattered into Bullard three quarters of the way through the game, Bullard was down long enough to recall the horrible injury that took him away from us for 18 months, prompting the crowd to run through the whole of the repertoire of Jimmy Bullard songs for most of the rest of the game. Johnson and Zamora got thunderous standing ovations when they were substituted. Bolton got a goal back near the end, but the feared travesty of justice didn't materialise.

In the crush of people waiting to be let into Putney Bridge station I heard a man talking hungarian. I guessed they had come to see Zoltan Gera. Turns out they are Ferencvaros fans. Ferencvaros, Gera's old club, are by far the largest team in Hungary. Their ground is on Ulloi Ut, the main road into Budapest from the east, and a road famous in Hungarian history for the pitch battles fought there when Soviet tanks entered the city from the east in 1956. I didn't realise what bad times they had fallen on, the guy told me that they had been relegated out of the Hungarian top flight, and stuck down there for a few years now. And to cap it all they have been bought as a feeder club for Sheff United. No disrespect for Sheff Utd but.... He told me that Sheff United have sent their second team coach, Bobby Davison to manage them. Again no disrespect, I remember him as a decent enough striker for Derby in the 80s, and I guess the mighty magyars of 53 are too old or too dead, but....

I asked a Bolton fan what he thought of the game. He speculated on how long Megson might have left as Bolton boss. 'Some of our fans were shouting Megson out at the end but others where defending him by singing that stupid ginger mourinho song - he is no way a Mourinho.' He spoke about the money they wasted on Heider Helgueson, how all their three strikers were clones of each other, big strong and slow, and how the most of expensive of them, Elmander, is out for six weeks. No pace and no creativity. He said he would take Allardyce back tomorrow, and reminisced about the days of Okocha, Jourkieff and Anelka.

Finally, waiting outside the turnstiles to the toilets at Wimbledon station I met the guy who used to sit behind me at Fulham, and whose 'this is toilet' comments somehow helped make the Sanchez months bearable.

Me (gushing) Weren't we brilliant
Him (not cracking a smile): 'Shouldn't have let them have that goal. Should have had the game out of reach well before that
Me: We had loads of chances though, we hit the bar, had a goal disallowed, penalty appeal turn down
Him: No use having chances if you don't take them'.
Me: It takes a lot to please you
Him: Yeah he said. Don't forget I've been watching Fulham season after season he said.

A hard bitten fans can spot a fair weather one when he sees one. Which reminds me, I forgot to tell the Ferencvaros fan I was a teenage armchair Honved fan.

Fulham 1 Arsenal 0

2008-08-24T06:33:00.021+01:00

First home game of the new season. Like going back to school. Checking out old haunts, seeing familiar faces.

First stop the River Cafe, straight opposite Putney Bridge station. A great place for pre-match gossip. The gossip whets your appetite for the game at the same time as the pie and two veg satisfies the inner man. The gossip doesn't have to be true, it just has to be interesting.

There are a couple of fellas, father and son who I often see in there before home games. Here is how our conversation went:

The father: I don't rate Roy Hodgson
Me (suprised): He did an amazing job last season, I don't think Jose Mourinho could have kept the dross Sanchez left us with in the premier league
Father: It wasn't Hodgson. He'd lost it, he was crying after we lost to Sunderland. For the last three games Murphy and McBride took over the dressing room. At half time in the Man City game Danny Murphy gave the team talk. I've heard it from within the club. He told them they were going down that afternoon if they didn't pull their finger out. Thats why when Kamara got the winner he ran straight over to Murphy. And that is why Murphy is captain now.

At the ground we have moved seats. Not by far, up a bit and along a bit, block CL to block B, but we have crossed the great divide from Johnny Haynes lower to Johnny Haynes upper. Johnny Haynes lower was the old enclosure terrace, it has a shallow slope, and the new seats were put over the terracing four years ago. Johnny Haynes upper is much steeper, you get a great perspective on the game. The wooden seats are the original ones that were put in when the stand was built in 1905, and are the oldest in the premier league. My son admired the way these seats don't flip back when you stand up, they just stay there. I guess they wouldn't have lasted 103 years if they flipped up every time a Fulham fan stood up in anger (or joy).

Last season Arsenal came and wove pretty patterns all around Fulham. The game was over after half an hour, Adebayor had risen twice around the penalty spot to crack two identikit headers into the lower bottom corner, both after twenty seven pass moves.

Arsenal's midfield four that day were Hleb, Fabergas, Flamini and Rossicky. Two of them left over the summer, the other two of them were injured so this time they had to play Walcott, Denilson, Eboue and Nasri. No comparison. Walcott is still a kid. Nasri has only played one premiership game. Denilson isn't the finished article and Dave (a colleague with an Arsenal season ticket) describes Eboue as 'a traffic cone of a player who can't pass properly'. It was a good day to play them.

Before the game I wondered if Fulham would go back to five in midfield, as most teams do against top four sides. In last week's defeat against Hull reports said that we were outmuscled in midfield, and that Bullard and Murphy in the middle weren't able to offer any protection for the defence. But no, Hodgson stuck to his guns, we played 4-4-2 same as they did.

Fulham started well, with some nice interpassing.

Early on Van Persie missed a good chance (I missed it too, my son needed a wee). On our way back we stood at the top of the stairs to see a Fulham corner which someone bundled in. After the match a TV replay showed that it was all 6 foot five of Brede Hangeland, flying at the ball feet first like Eric Cantona flew into that Palace fan all those years back.

Adebayor, just like last season, rose at the penalty spot and got power and direction into a header, but this time it came back of the post.

Arsenal's big players drifted in and out of the game, there were twenty minute periods when I forgot Nasri was playing, forgot Adebayor was playing, forgot Walcott was playing. It was Walcott that the Arsenal fans I spoke to afterwards were most disappointed with- he was up against debutant Fulham left back Tony Kallio who was standing in for Paul Konchesky, but Walcott didn't seem to want to test Kallio out.

When Wenger brought a third striker on, Nicholas Bendtner, with twenty minutes left Robin Van Persie looked around at his team mates and shrugged his shoulders, wondering where he was going to play. A sign that all wasn't well (they stuck him out on the right side of midfield).

Fulham retained a good share of possession until the last ten minutes, when it became backs to the wall time.

Murphy, as well as his usual precision passing, was a tiger in midfield, making lots of key challenges and interceptions. Bullard seemed to play a more disciplined game than at times last season, not straying too far, and hardly misplacing a pass all day.

Zamora did a great job in his home debut as centre-forward playing with his back to goal, staying central, holding the ball up, bringing the midfield into it. Soeul Ki-Hyun drifted off him and had a decent game, he got a nice ovation at the end which will help him: he was a Sanchez signing and the crowd have got at him, which is hard on someone like him who needs confidence to play. True neither Soeul or Zamora looked like scoring on their own account, but once Andy Johnson's pace and finishing power are added to Zamora's hold up play we will have a side worth watching.

At the end the Fulham players all stood in the centre circle and waved at the crowd, and pointed bemused at our new full back John Pantsil, who was sprinting round the touchline, as fresh as a daisy, a solo high speed lap of honour to milk the applause.

Hodgson has been with Fulham for eight months now, and the club have got better every month. Whether it is him or Danny Murphy, someone is doing a good job.

Cut off your hands

2008-08-22T06:49:00.009+01:00

I went to a gig in my lunch break yesterday (a career first). Cut off your hands played a twenty minute set at Pure Groove record shop in Smithfield.

I got there five minutes before the gig started. The shop was open as normal, it was just busier than usual. (I'm often the only person in there at lunchtime).

I stood at the front and looked at the speakers, amps and drumkits. A person behind me said that with all that equipment the gig would be deafening in the small record shop. He was right, my ears are still aching 30 hours later.

There were about 30 people there, swelling to about forty by the time the gig started.

As you can see from the pic they are a four piece indie guitar band. Young fellas from New Zealand. Nice to listen to, quite melodic, check it out on My Space, there is nothing not to like about it. The singer was energetic and had a couple of drums of his own to bang away at various points.

They were the politest band you could ever see. The singer thanked the audience for sharing their lunchtime with him. After the gig I spoked to their bass guitarist, who was browsing Pure Groove's wall of the 100 CDs and records they have selected to sell. He said they have come over to live in London because they have signed to a UK record label. I naively asked whether they had thought of signing to a New Zealand label. He said that there wasn't any decent labels in NZ and they always knew they would have to move to the US or the UK (they weren't bothered which one of the two).

The band haven't had a day off for 2 months. They have been either playing a gig or travelling to one. I asked him how he coped with that. He said that when they had a similar workload on their Australian tour they all ended up really sick (but that was partly because people wanted to party with them after the gigs).

Then he had to go and pack up his stuff because they were playing a gig in Portsmouth in the evening. I've looked at their tour schedule: it seems like they are playing every University in Britain over the next month.

Lunchtime just got better (but more expensive)

2008-07-24T06:28:00.013+01:00

Smithfield is within the jurisdiction of the City of London, but outside of the old City walls. It is the furthest that Wat Tylor and the Peasants Revolt reached in 1381 and the furthest that the Great Fire of London got in 1666. And now it plays host to what is probably the City's first and only independent/alternative record shop.

Its called Pure Groove. I got a very pleasant suprise when I walked through Smithfield this Monday luncthime and saw it.

It is a big shop but it only sells 100 titles at any one time. They pick the 100 CDs that they are really into and display them over on one wall. They change the selection every week. It is a great idea: less is more. I will end up going in the store just to find out is in their 100.

They used to be in Archway (North London) but moved to Smithfield in June this year because they could have extra space for instore gigs. The benefit of only selling 100 titles is that it leaves the rest of the store clear for gigs, art exhibitions and installations.

I've been there every lunchtime since I found it. I've bought We'll drive home backwards by Cocosuma and Love, ire and song by Frank Turner. Very happy with both. I felt my age when I read Pure Groove's description of Frank Turner as 'a modern Billy Bragg'.

Here is a video of one of their instore shows: the Virgins. My favourite bit is 5 minutes into the video when they take the band over to the 100 wall and the band comment on the selection and on the other bands represented in it

And here is Frank Turner's instore there:

Fulham 3 Celtic 1 (friendly)

2008-07-19T23:01:00.005+01:00

In Bishop's Park there is a monument to the men and women from Hammersmith and Fulham who voluntarily went to Spain in 1936 and died in the fight against fascism. I took my son to read the inscription the first time I took him to a Fulham game, but it is usually ignored by home and away fans alike as they stroll to and from matches. So it made a pleasant change today to see a group of Celtic fans pay their homage by standing at the monument after the match and singing some freedom songs from the Irish folk tradition. It made me think how nice it would be to have a friendly against Barcelona (or a Champions League tie, whatever).

Most of Fulham's new signings played at least a half: Bobby Zamora scored with a volley, Zoltan Gera played out on the right wing and showed some subtle touches, John Pantsil played at right back and impressed my daughter with his pink football boots. David Stockdale played in goal and did OK apart from a bizarre moment when he carried the ball out of the penalty area and the referee Steve Bennett kindly waived play on. Tony Kallio came on at left back in the second half and looked tall, lanky, awkward, rangy and difficult to play against - I liked him.

There were patches when Celtic played the ball about well but Fulham were comfortable. Jimmy Bullard looked sunburned and his famous shaggy hair has received some serious attention from a hairdresser with a peroxide look. He was his typical positive, creative but imprecise self. His passing was all awry today but he still seemed to be at the heart of our best stuff in the first half. The Celtic fans jeered him when he fell over the ball in their box and when he put a free kick into orbit over their goal. I'm not used to him getting that sort of treatment - he's one of those rare players even opposition supporters normally like (apart from Bolton fans who don't like his old club Wigan).

Danny Murphy came on with his precise passing, a cut above anyone else's. The best moment of the match was when he chipped a corner direct to Leon Andraeson, unmarked at the edge of the box who smashed a volley into the net.

The Celtic fans were the star of the show, there must have been 12 or 13 thousand of them, they had three quarters of the ground, they made a fearsome noise, and were very friendly.

On the way back I got chatting with a guy who lives in Dover, and belongs to the Folkestone branch of the Celtic Supporters club . He told me they wanted to paint green hoops across the white cliffs of Dover but they couldn't do it because of health and safety considerations.

Anna gives her horse a name

2008-06-25T14:34:00.003+01:00

Anna (age 6): holds up her Nintendo DS to show a gleaming white horse : What jewel does this horse looks like mummy?
Tania (age 39): I think it looks like a pearl
Anna: I am going to call it pearly. How do you spell it mummy?
Tania: p-e-a-r-l-y
Andrew : (age 9) No, you don't spell it like that! (runs and gets his London A-Z. Points to a train station in South London.) Look! This is how you spell it!
Anna: typing the name of the horse into her DS : p-u-r-l-e-y

The DFC

2008-06-23T21:48:00.004+01:00

The first issue of the DFC arrived on our doorstep last week. I can't believe how good it is. 36 pages long with no adverts. The drawing is beautiful, the comic looks and feels special, the stories are funny, suprising and different from each other.

My wife, my nine year old son and me have read it cover to cover . My 6 year old has had half of it read to her and wanted the other half read to.

It is the first weekly comic launched in Britain for 25 years. All the other comics for the 6-12 age group have played safe, made themselves monthly and based themselves around a big TV or film tie-in. But monthly serials don't work because you forget the cliff-hanger by the time the next issue comes round. The only tie-in DFC has is with the family section of the Guardian on a Saturday.

If you haven't seen it yet it is because it not available in the shops: it costs £3 per issue, available only from the DFC website.

Forbidden Planet have given the DFC a gracious review, even though they must be disappointed that they can't sell the comic themselves. In a perfect world it would be available in newsagents, so that kids could stumble upon it by chance. This way they are dependent on their parents to buy it. But Rome wasn't built in a day, this model allows DFC to start up with a relatively small audience. Who knows where they will be in a years time?

Besides I like the print on demand model they operate where it doesn't get printed until someone orders it (it contrasts with the print-without-demand of all those free newspapers they give out at London stations).

Me on TV talking about Graffiti

2008-05-26T12:13:00.003+01:00

Friction TV used a chunk of their interview with me in their piece about the graffiti on the side of the Tate Modern.

I'm right at the end of the video. For background to it see my post on Blu (unfortunately they didn't use the bit where I went on about the numskulls!)

Fulham 2 Birmingham City 0

2008-05-24T08:12:00.010+01:00

Ten to three, Saturday May 3 2008. Block CL, Johnny Haynes Stand. Me and Andrew are eating strawberries from a punnet as the rest of Craven Cottage bellows their support for Fulham before the vital relegation crunch against Birmingham.

Somehow it felt right, the day was hot, the mood was of nervous expectancy and the strawberries were delicious. I offered one to the people on our row and the one behind us: people whose black humour with occasional glimmers of cheer have mirrored Fulham's season. I did think of offering them to the folks in the row in front of me, who have suffered this season not just from Lawrie Sanchez's long ball football and second rate signings, but also from having their chairs kicked by my Andrew in his more fidgety moments. But I ducked out of that one.

This wasn't just another in the long string of must-win games we have had at Craven Cottage this year (most of which Fulham lost!). If we lost this one we were relegated. The fact that Birmingham were in just as serious a predicament added spice to the encounter. Do or die today.

Fulham were all over Birmingham for the first ten minutes with high tempo passing football. The atmosphere was unrecognisable from your normal laid back Craven Cottage. Every chant from the Hammersmith End was echoed and amplified by the whole of the Johnny Haynes stand.

The game plateaud out. Birmingham's defence looked strong. Jimmy Bullard gave the ball away in his own half a couple of times which led to Birmingham's best chances. Breda Hangeland used his strength to dominate Birmingham's striker James McFadden.

Half time. General impression we had done allright but hadn't really looked like scoring. A man in his fifties washing his hands in the gents said that he hadn't slept the previous night for thinking about this game.

Second half. Not long gone. Free kick half way in Birmingham's half, Jimmy Bullard floats in a diagonal ball and Brian McBride heads in. One-nil to us and I expected that Birmingham would come at us with all guns blazing. But no, Fulham kept on swarming forward. Birmingham seem to have crumbled . When they brought on an extra striker virtually every outfield player ran over to him, asking for instructions on where their boss wanted them to play - a sure sign of disarray.

Fulham's forward momentum subsided, Birmingham started to get back into it. You couldn't take your eyes off it, it was frenetic. Fulham playing with huge commitment and intensity : flying into tackles and blocks. The guy behind me asked whether Brum's left back had an injury: whenever we broke down the right Simon Davies seemed to have oceans of space. There was nothing Birmingham could do about it, they had used all their subs.

Five minutes to go, Birmingham have a chance at one end. Then a hopeful ball somehow gets through the Birmingham defence and Eric Nevland finds himself alone with only the keeper to beat. Calmness personified, never looking like missing, he rolled the ball into the net.

Delirium. I leap on the man in front of me (to mitigate or compound the sin of not offering a strawberry?) I looked round at Andrew: he was being embraced by the person behind me. I hugged John the nice fella to the left of me, then Andrew. High fives with the fella behind me and the fella next to him. It seemed to last for ages but when I looked at the pitch again the Fulham players were still in a heap in front of the Hammersmith end. Murphy and Bullard on top of Eric Nevland.

We only ever see Eric Nevland for 15 minutes at the end of a game but this was the second time in three weeks that he has slotted away a vital clinching goal.

Eventually the game resumed, the Johnny Haynes stand all standing up now. And for the first time this season a new chant is heard: not the plaintive yearning of 'come on Fulham' but the deep voiced certainty of 'we are staying up'.

Stoppage time. The fellas behind me started hugging and doing their own special dance: we turn around and they explain 'the final whistle has gone at Reading: they've lost one-nil'.

The final whistle goes, everyone stays behind to witness a joyous lap of honour. After being being second from bottom for four months, Fulham had now pulled themselves out of the bottom three, and would stay up if they won their last game of the season away at Portsmouth.

Blu

2008-05-23T21:59:00.006+01:00

It was Friday lunchtime, and I was standing looking at this huge work of graffitti art painted on the front of the Tate Modern:(photo from http://www.blublu.org/blog/ )

I started to sketch the big face(s). Four people came along. From their conversation it was clear that one of them knew the artist. He told me the artist was from Bologna in Italy and was called Blu. He advised me to look on YouTube for Blu's amazing animated works of grafitti. If like me you wonder how you can have animated graffiti then take a look at this stunning video:

I went back to my sketching. A lady from Friction TV came along with a film camera.

She asked a man next to me whether she could film him answering the question

'will galleries and companies kill graffiti art by commercialising it and sanitising it?'

The man said that these graftti artists had devoted lots of time and care honing a skill and were entitled to take some money for it. Then she filmed me. I wanted to say that galleries, record companies, fashion companies and the like need new movements and ideas from time to time, but can't generate them themselves. They're forced to take ideas from the street because that is where new movements come from. But I actually went on a bit of a ramble comparing the work we were looking at to the numskulls mixed in with a Guantanomo bay critique.

She told us both that our contributions would be put up on the Friction TV website within hours, but as I write they are not up there: maybe we didn't get through quality control.

Anthem for Jimmy Bullard

2008-04-30T22:29:00.005+01:00

Its Fulham's big game this Saturday: at home to Birmingham City.

So I've written this song about Jimmy Bullard, to the tune of 'the animals marched in two by two hurrah' (with a nod to the Liverpool fans who use the tune for their Torres song.)

That Sanchez he was such a clown, Bullard, Bullard
It looked like he would take us down, Bullard, Bullard
But you came back and saved the day, and now we even win away
Cos you're super Jimmy, super Jim Bullard

They said your knee would never mend, Bullard, Bullard
But now we watch your free-kicks bend, Bullard, Bullard
Past the keeper like a dart, to warm the cockles of our hearts
Cos you're super Jimmy, super Jim Bullard

You were Chris Coleman's greatest buy Bullard, Bullard
You've said you'll stay until you die Bullard, Bullard
We'll sing this song throughout the land, and we'll put your name on one of our stands
Cos we love you Jimmy, super Jim Bullard

Our second greyhound: Becks

2008-04-17T11:40:00.002+01:00

Becks has come to live with us. Like our first dog (Alexa), Becks is an ex-racing greyhound. He raced under the name of Lethal Becks and retired about a year ago. Apparently he is named after the bottled beer rather than the footballer.

After retirement Becks stayed for a year at a very good home in South East London, so he is used to being a family pet.

He is a nice calm dog, he hasn't been any trouble, and seems to get on fine with Alexa. I think she is pulling rank on him a bit now though: she wanted his bed this morning, so Becks had to go and sleep on hers. Then a bit later Alexa changed her mind and got her bed back

St Helens Green

2008-04-16T16:24:00.007+01:00

This is the view from the cottage in St Helens, on the Isle of Wight, where we spent the first week of the Easter holidays.

It was the first time we had taken our dog on holiday. We didn't want to leave it on its own in a cottage it wasn't used to, but luckily we managed to get into a dog friendly routine.

Most mornings we booked the kids in for a pony walk from Sally's stables at Bembridge. The ponies walked for an hour along Bembridge beach while Tania and I followed behind with the dog. It is an interesting beach, the most easterly point of the Isle of Wight, with a vast limestone ledge jutting out from underneath a cliff. The ledge gets covered up at high water and is a notorious hazard to boats and yachts.

After the walks we would go to the Crab and Lobster pub in Bembridge, our favourite pub: it is dog friendly and does great prawns and chips.

Instant narrative by Dora Garcia

2008-03-28T08:14:00.003Z

The 'Double Agent' exhibition currently running at the ICA, is a collection of works where an artist uses other people (performers, the audience) as the medium for their work. It includes Dora Garcia's work 'Instant Narrative.'

You enter an empty room. On the wall is a projection of a computer screen, displaying some text. From time to time a new sentence appears. If you look through the doorway into the next room you can see a person seated at a desk with a Mac laptop, typing.

I approached the typist. She had typed the words displayed on the wall. She told me she writes down what she sees in the room. I went back into the room and waved my arms about. After a delay the words 'man stands in the middle of the room flapping arms frantically' appeared on the wall.

I went back there on Monday lunchtime. I sat in the room with my little Asus eee laptop, and typed the narrative that I saw displayed on the wall. There was a different typist at the desk this time.

Some people walked straight through the room and hardly paused to look at the dull text on the wall. But when people realised that the text was about them they tended to linger, waiting to see what thought would appear next and giggling at descriptions of themselves.

It is the usual gallery scenario of people looking at a wall, but the difference here is that the wall is looking back at you, commenting on you, and commenting on your reaction to it.

There were times when the people in the room were motionless. The wall had nothing to comment on, so it didn't comment. There would be minutes with no addition to the narrative. The wall's silence echoing our silence, its lack of reaction to us mirroring our lack of reaction to it.

The set up adds to the tension. The typist is obscured, seated in the dark of the next room (where a Barbara Visser film is showing). The words don't appear as she types them: when she has finished a line she presses a button and then the whole line appears at once. We cannot be sure she hasn't already typed something that will appear any second.

The pauses don't go on for ever: one side would crack: someone would leave the room, or the wall would make a comment. At one point the wall that ended a prolonged pause with the sentence 'The man stands motionless. like a statue, his face hiding any expression.'

What would happen if no-one visited the ICA on one day of the exhibition? Would there be a narrative? Would there be an artwork? Would the wall periodically say 'there is still no-one in the room?' What happens when the typist goes to lunch? Does someone else take over, or is the wall silent until she comes back?

It becomes hard to leave the room, you want the person to say something about you. When you do leave you want to come back to see whether the wall has described you leaving.

I would like to go there for a whole day. From the moment the exhibition opens until chucking out time in the evening. I'd bring sandwiches, a flask of tea, and my little laptop. The wall would tell the narrrative of my day, the people I came into contact with, the times I got up and stretched to avoid getting cramp from sitting cross-legged on the floor, the times when I left the room to go to the toilet.

Below is the complete narrative from the twenty minutes I sat in the room on Monday lunchtime. There are only four sentences about me, I have put them in bold.

a man steps in behind them, hands rummaging in his coat.
he takes a crossed leg seat.
the girls giggle in unison.
reading, embarrassed.
another slips in behind them, obscured.
A woman, shadowing the blonde girl in front
she steps out into the light smiling
heels tap across the floor into the dark
the two friends retrace their steps
three women huddle in the dark

still reading these words from its black safety
the woman behind them swings her heavy leather bag as she walks
a metronome in motion
a smiling face of the invigilator at the letterbox doorway.
two girls sit closely.
watching the film in comfortable silence
unconsciously distracted

they twist heads back to read glimpses

a woman shuffles into the space.
red and tartan, her coat keeping her hands warm
she crosses the floor and takes a heavy seat.
the blonde friend shifts in her seat.

the pair raise and exit together.

hesitating at the door.

an obscured person appears from the corner
two more enter to take his place
supported by the back wall.
a man and woman read in silence
white pages held in hands.
the man stands motionless.
like a statue, his face hiding any expression.
his female counterpart moves to the side.
the woman in red and tartan interupts the space
long dreadlocks and red jeans

she steps across the projection
barbara visser printed onto her clothes
she peers out into the light

polyester rusling
still he stands reading.
balanced by his right hand on shoulder strap.
he glances round the ceiling corners suspiciously.

the woman loiters in the doorway before she leaves

idle fingers twist in her hair.

the statuesque man gives way to a smile.

two more men step inside the room.
they stand transfixed their eyes glued to the screen
the tapping of a keyboard echoes around the space
the two friends look into each others faces talking.

they shift positions slowly.

minor movements. feet crossed at ankles.
a nod of a head.
eyes cross the room into the dark.
watching and waiting
time to move on
the male couple step into the dark
caught looking

Painting on the train

2008-03-15T21:27:00.004Z

I had a couple of long train trips this week (to Leeds and back). On the way up I painted the food I'd bought for the journey with my jar of painting water. On the way back I painted the pringles tube that I use as my paintbrush holder.

watercolour classes

2008-03-10T12:25:00.003Z

The Creative License is my favourite book on drawing. In it Danny Gregory tells us to

'sign up for art classes, and even if the class sucks keep going to it until you've found another one to go to'.

Tania got me a term's worth of watercolour classes at our local community centre (the Malden Centre) for christmas.

The classes dont' suck. The teacher simply comes up with a theme, sits down at the start of the class, talks through how he is going to draw/paint it, and then lets us get on with our own pictures. Its great fun, and playing around mixing colours is a whole new world for me.

How to manage Fulham

2008-03-05T21:46:00.010Z

Motivate the team........

Get the tactics right......

Marshall the troops from the bench.........

Trudge back down the touchline after another defeat.......

Retired Greyhound social walk

2008-03-01T07:17:00.007Z

Tania organised a walk for owners and walkers of retired greyhounds in Richmond Park a couple of Sundays ago.

Nick and Liz took some beautiful photos (see their whole set here). This is the one they took of Alexa sitting patiently hoping Anna gives her a biscuit. Alexa is quite unusual, most greyhounds never sit (hence it is not worth taking a greyhound to dog training classes).

And here is one they took of everyone outside Isabella plantations.

Alexa loves meeting other greyhounds, and the sun shone, we all really enjoyed it.

At any one time their are about 60 retired greyhounds at the Wimbledon Greyhound Welfare kennels in Hersham, waiting for adoption. The nice thing about the walk is that it brings together greyhounds who have been adopted (and their owners) with hounds who are at the kennels waiting to be adopted (and the kind folks who picked them up and took them out for the day).

Once a year a big event is held called Reach the Beach, where owners and walkers take the hounds down to the beach at West Witterings near Chichester.

Tania and I (in conjunction with Nick and Liz who organise Reach the Beach) have set up a blog called Friends of Hersham Hounds to give news about future events.

The state of the nation

2008-02-06T10:38:00.001Z

Scene: A stream of workers going into a City office block, opposite Blackfriars station in London

Time: 08:55am Wednesday 6 February 2008

A lady in her early 60s, nicely dressed and coiffured is talking to a younger female companion.

Lady: I think this country started going to the dogs when they got rid of Margaret Thatcher

Man, turning aroung quickly, aged 38, blue jeans, berghaus mac and black rucksack: I'm sorry but I couldn't possibly agree with that

Lady: I wasn't talking to you

Man: I know, but I heard what you said and it went through me like a knife

Lady: Tough

Lady's companion: (in a reassuring voice, as they move away from the man in jeans towards the lift): 'It is obviously a topic that people have strong views about'

Star Wars and Fulham

2008-02-04T16:28:00.000Z

I saw this post on the Fulham Independent Forum today:

Star Wars: Part VII: The battle for the soul of Fulham Football Club -- George Lucas, Monday, February 04, 11:49:09am (79.66.120.163)

Glad this battle is now beginning to be won by Roy "Obi-Wan Kenobi" Hodgson and Jimmy "Luke Skywalker" Bullard rather than Lawrie "Darth Vader" Sanchez and the horrendous Death Star he was building at Craven Cottage.

I've got a feeling that, for the rest of the season, the force will be with us...

'Daddy I think you secretly play for Fulham...

2008-02-04T10:50:00.001Z

...and you don't tell anyone because you don't want to be transfered to another club'

Anna (age 5) to James (aged 38) an hour before Fulham beat Aston Villa 2-1.

Should you be reading this?

2008-01-24T20:39:00.000Z

I haven't read anything since Sunday evening.

OK, I have read things for work, seen a few headlines over people's shoulders and read the kids a chapter from a star wars book. But I haven't read a book on the train, looked at any blogs, or searched for anything interesting on the internet.

I first did this five years ago, when I read Julie Cameron's great book The Artist's way. Half way through the book Cameron tells us to not to read anything for a whole week. The purpose of the exercise being to stop smothering your own creativity under the weight of other people's writings.

I decided to do the reading break again this week because I was becoming addicted to checking the Independent Fulham Forum to see whether Fulham had signed the human goal machine who is going to help Jimmy Bullard keep us in the premiership.

Abstinence shines a harsh torch on your habits. Each day I would check the forum ten times, read any Fulham report in all the newspapers at work, check the official FFC website, and look at my favourite Fulham blog. I was even picking up both of the crappy free papers that they give away on London streets (and that I had boycotted on environmental grounds) just for the little sentence they give on Fulham every night.

I like Cameron's book because it is direct and stark. She doesn't think creativity is optional, or a hobby. Her book isn't a guide to drawing pretty pictures or writing charming stories. For her the existence of the universe was due to a bold creative act, and we as valued creations of that universe are here to create too.

Our main excuse for not expressing our creativity is that we think we don't have time. As soon as we turn off the dripping tap of things that we do to entertain ourselves, (reading that novel, watching the telly, doing that google search), we are faced with empty chunks of time, staring at us, waiting to be put to use.

our kitchen table

2008-01-14T10:13:00.000Z

Police hand olive branch to Smith

2008-01-02T11:12:00.000Z

Location: Entrance to 'The world as a stage' exhibition, 3rd floor Tate Modern
Date: Midday, New Year's eve, 2007

Gallery guard (whilst handing me a brochure to the exhibition): Police hand olive branch to Smith
Me: what did you say?
Gallery guard: Police hand olive branch to Smith. This is new, Tino Sehgal, 2003
Me: why did you say that?
Guard: It is Tino Sehgal's work for this exhibition. I choose a headline from a newspaper. I say the headline to the visitor when I hand them their exhibition brochure. If they they something in reply I repeat the headline and add
the words 'This is new, Tino Sehgal, 2003'. If they ask any other questions I can explain the work in any way I like. But mostly people don't say anything, they look at me as if I was mad, or they just walk in.
Me: Why did you chose 'Police hand olive branch to Smith'?
Guard: I was in a rush today so I just picked the first headline I saw. I can pick any headline I like but it has to come from todays paper.
Me: So the headline changes every day then?
Guard: Yes, and if I want to I can change it during the day too. One day I chose the headline 'Bad shoes can cost you your leg' and I had to change it because a lady took offence and asked me whether I thought she was wearing bad shoes. When I used the headline 'free sex parties for tourists' people's ears would always prick up whenever I said the word 'sex', that got a reaction from everyone.
Me: (stepping backwards as I saw a middle-aged lady coming towards the exhibition entrance): thank you for explaining that, have a nice new year.

Guard: (handing an exhibition brochure to the lady): Police hand olive branch to Smith.
Lady: thank you

Two young ladies approach
Guard (handing them each an exhibition brochure): Police hand olive branch to Smith
1st Young lady: sorry, what did you say?
Guard: Police hand olive branch to Smith. This is new, Tino Sehgal.2003
1st young lady: Ahh, right. Thank you

You are the ref

2007-12-28T16:36:00.000Z

Question submitted by Anna aged 5:

It is the start of the game. The ball is on the ground in the middle of the pitch. A player kicks it but the ball doesn't move. All the players try to kick it and it still doesn't move. What would you do if you were the referee?

You might ask a ball boy to throw another ball on. But what if that ball didn't move when the players tried to kick it? How many new footballs would you try before you abandoned the game?

What if this form of paralysis became widespread? Striking league fixtures at random. One premier league fixture per week, no telling which. An expectant crowd of 36,000 people, waiting for kick off, all eyes on the centre circle and the ball just freezes, can't move. The replacement balls are similarly stricken, the game gets called off. How long would fans, sponsors, health and safety inspectors and TV companies stay patient with football?

Dreams can come true (especially in dreams)

2007-12-21T14:19:00.000Z

I dreamt that Fulham won 5-1 away at West Ham. I woke up, it was saturday. We went to the cinema in the afternoon. They read out the football results over the tannoy. West Ham Utd 1 Fulham 5. I told Andrew that it proved that dreams did occasionally come true. I felt the elation of a supporter of a team on a winning streak.

Then I woke up and finished off this picture of our kitchen.

what do you sink?

2007-12-17T11:10:00.001Z

Room 508, Hotel Villa Royale, Brussels (nearest metro: Botannique/Kruidtuin)

Fleet street

2007-12-11T09:23:00.000Z

Drawn from the gap between a couple of pedestrian barriers on Ludgate Hill

Watling Street

2007-11-10T06:51:00.000Z

Until half an hour ago I believed that the little Watling Street in the City of London (where I occasionaly buy a sandwich from a nice Italian bakery) was a component part of the very long Watling Street, the great Roman road which ran from Dover, through London, up towards St Albans and then north westards towards Shropshire and Wales.

Now thanks to Wikipedia I learn that it probably wasn't on the route of the Roman Road, because the Roman road would have crossed the Thames near the site of the present London Bridge, and this little Watling Street is too far to the west of the City to be part of its progress north.

Still it's name is a nice reminder that London was the Roman capital of Britain, and hence an appropriate place for an Italian bakery.

Will Belgium split?

2007-11-02T06:29:00.000Z

I've made a lot of trips to Brussels this past year, to deliver training courses for the European Commission. Its been an interesting time to be visiting Belgium:
the country hasn't had a Government for four months.

There is widespread talk that the country may split, with the Dutch speaking Flemish Region (Flanders) in the north of Belgium seperating from French speaking Wallonia in the South.

The Belgium general election took place in June 2007, but the Dutch speaking and French speaking parties haven't been able to come to any agreement so a government has not been formed. The Dutch speaking parties want more powers for Flanders, the French speaking parties want more rights for French speakers in Flanders.

The guy who sat next to me on the Eurostar on Wednesday said he thought that Belgium would have split already if it wasn't for the fact that people don't know what to do with Brussels.

Brussels is a region in its own right, situated as a little enclave inside Flanders. Officialy it is a dual language city. All the signs and services are in both languages. But 80% of its inhabitants are French speaking, and as you walk round it you rarely hear Dutch spoken. The litmus test is the shops: a Dutch speaker said that most of the shop staff in Brussels don't understand or speak Dutch, so you have to use French.

A Flemish man told me that Flemish people resent the fact that Brussels has become a French speaking City. Historically most of the inhabitants spoke a dialect of Dutch until the Napoleonic occupation of Belgium in 1793 to 1815. My friend Will tells me that most natives of Brussels have Flemish sounding surnames but are French speakers.

All the small towns and villages around Brussels are Dutch speaking, but are attracting Franch speakers wanting to commute into Brussels. There have been complaints that some of the shops in Flemish villages around Brussels now have shop assistants who only speak French. Once a year the Flemish community holds the Gordel, a cycle ride around the periphery of the city of Brussels to symbolise the encirclement of Brussels by Dutch speaking towns and villages. (Gordel is a Dutch word for belt).

Here are some snippets that people have told me over the past weeks:

A Dutch speaker living in Antwerp (the biggest town in the Flemish Region): people in Antwerp are saying that we have gone 100 days without a Federal government and managed perfectly well, so maybe we don't need one at all. The Belgian royal family don't speak Dutch very often or very well, yet the Flemish have to pay for them'

A French speaker living in Brussels: When they put the piles of free papers out at the Metro stations they make equal piles of Dutch and French language newspapers. The French language newspapers get taken but loads of the Dutch language ones are left, I don't know why they bother'

A Dutch speaker brought up in Brussels: I felt more kinship with French speaking people in Brussels than with Dutch speaking people in Holland. I speak French as well, and we have a common religion (Catholicism) whereas Holland is Protestant.

A French speaker from Louvain-la-neuve in Wallonia told me the history of his town: The Catholic University of Leuven/Louvain is the oldest university in Belgium, dating back to 1425. It was a French speaking university, but located in Leuven inside Flanders. In 1968 the Flemish people decided that they didn't want the main university in Flanders to be French speaking, so they turned it into a Dutch speaking University. It was a very emotive issue, with demonstrations and protests. The French speaking staff went to a green field site 30 km to the south, in Wallonia. On it they founded the French Catholic University of Louvain, and built the town of Louvain-la-Neuve around it. The town has been a success, with the University and all the students in the centre, and residents and lots of new industry and commerce around the periphery. The centre is entirely pedestrian with the roads tunneling underneath it: you ought to come and see it.

Second doorstep drawing

2007-10-17T12:34:00.000+01:00

Goal celebrations

2007-10-06T07:33:00.000+01:00

8 o'clock Friday morning

Dad (aged 38): Come on son, time to get up

Son (aged 8): I hate poopid Fridays, I don't want to go to school

Dad: Did you know son, there are some very small people who live on a different planet on the other side of the universe and are called iggle people. They see everything that happens on our planet but they don't interfere, like the Watcher in the Fantastic Four. Each iggle person picks a human being on our planet to support. And fifty of them support Andrew Lappin. When you open your eyes they say 'hooray Andrew's woken up'. When you start getting dressed they say 'hooray Andrew's getting dressed' and everytime you put on a sock they shout and wave their arms in the air with joy. And when you score a goal they are so happy they dance around their little rooms

Son: I haven't scored a goal in the playground for ages. There are two really good goalies Jake and Arthur and it doesn't matter what I do I can't score.

7:30 Friday evening, picking up from boys brigade time

Son: (playing football in the church hall, sees dad and runs over to him) Dad, dad, I scored a goal in the playground, and I scored a hat-trick at Boys Brigade!

Dad:(high fives with son): The iggle people are going mad, they are having street parties!

9 o'clock Friday evening

Son (lying in bed holding his Star Wars book): Are there really iggle people dad, or is it just a story to make me happy?

Dad: Funny you should ask that, because, somewhere on the other side of the universe, a little tiny iggle boy is lying in his iggle bed saying 'dad, is there really an Andrew Lappin who scored lots of goals today, or have you just made it up to make me happy?'

View from our front door

2007-09-12T14:42:00.000+01:00

I stood on our doorstep drawing for twenty minutes every morning for three weeks.

Fulham 3 Tottenham Hotspur 3

2007-09-03T17:18:00.000+01:00

One thing I really enjoy about sport is when an individual or a team cut loose and freely expressing their talent, at the expense of less gifted opponents.

From my childhood I think of Viv Richards walking down the wicket while Bob Willis was running in to bowl at him, then flicking him into the Lords' executive boxes. Or the crowd shouting 'ole' as the great Brazilian teams play keep ball and deny the opposition a kick.

Sportsmen so in tune with their ability that they turn a high pressure professional encounter into an effortless stroll in the park.

Even when my team are on the receiving end I can't help admiring it.

Berbatov and Malbranque strolled round Craven Cottage on Saturday, coming off their markers, playing little angled passes. Revelling in the space they created for themselves.

It had started to go wrong when we gifted them an early goal. Spurs took control. Then Robbie Keane put Berbatov through one on one against Niemi. From where I sat it looked as though he had enough space to drive a bus between Niemi and the near post and that is were the ball went, at a rate of knots.

At 2-0 Spurs were cruising. All around me was silent, apart from the bloke behind me turning the air blue with his expasperation. Fulham have a new team, almost all the players have been brought in by Sanchez this summer. Not only does it take the players a while to get used to each other, it takes the fans a while to get used to the new team, to identify players who can lift the team, who can lift the crowd. We couldn't see where any inspiration could come to turn back the tide.

Andrew was fidgeting in his seat next to me. I tried to keep his mind on the game.
'We need a goal before half time'- I told him.
'We need a miracle' - said the man behind me.
We got a corner straight away and scored from it. 2-1.

I imagined Sanchez hyping the team up at half time and Fulham mounting a second half surge towards the home fans in the Hammersmith End. It didn't happen. You can't mount a surge if you haven't got the ball. Spurs played exhibition football. Keane played Gareth Bale in through on the left behind the defence. I could see space for another bus between Niemi and the near post, so could Bale. 3-1.

Fulham fans are quiet, hardly got the spirit to boo the returning Malbranque. He hit the post with Niemi beaten. Tottenham fans were serenading their team, enjoying an easy win. But the trouble with exhibition football is it needs to have a ruthless streak to it, a killer punch.

Spurs took off their captain Keane and replaced him with Defoe after 75 minutes. I told Andrew they were doing it because they know they have the game won and want to give Defoe some match practice. A sign of complacency

Fulham went for broke and put three central strikers on. Spurs got worried and took Malbranque off from the right side of midfielder, replacng him with a third central defender, Dawson. When he came on you could see the midfielders and attackers looking at Dawson, waiting for instructions, wondering where they were going to go. Their captain Keane wasn't on the pitch to sort it out.

If you are on top in a game and want to make sure you win it, you have two options, you can either bang away your chances on the break to kill of the other team, or you can play keep-ball to deny them any possession. Spurs had missed their chances, and once they had gone down to three in midfield they couldn't play possession football. Fulham could just pile on the pressure for the last ten minutes.

Fulham's second was a lucky deflection. The third goal was an unusual overhead kick/lob from Joe Kamara. Its funny how time stops when your team scores an important goal. When you come down from whatever height you have jumped up to, you find yourselve face to face with someone whose been just behind / beside/in front of you for ninety minutes, but whose existence you were never aware of. You forget all about the players and the pitch.

The spurs fans on the way home looked like they had lost a pound and found a redundancy notice with their name on it.

I hope Jol doesn't get the sack. I like watching his teams. They entertained us thoroughly and had the decency not to leave with all the points.

Return to Downhouse Farm

2007-08-22T13:36:00.000+01:00

We went back to Downhouse farm near Bridport in West Dorset for our two weeks holiday.

Here are some views of the cottage, outside and in:

Sleeper

2007-08-01T12:32:00.001+01:00

I really enjoyed getting the sleeper to Edinburgh last week.

It meant I could pop home from work, have something to eat, read the kids their bedtime story, go back to London and have a nice six hour sleep on the train.

Then wake up, get the bus to my favourite cafe in the Scottish capital (Marvid's cafe round the corner from Heart's Tynecastle stadium). One round of tea and toast, one chat with the cafe-owner about Kurdish-Turkish relations, then its back on the no 25 bus to start work.

Our kitchen

2007-07-24T12:36:00.000+01:00

I'm running out of rooms to draw in the house now.

I'm going on the sleeper train to Edinburgh tonight, so if I wake up early enough I'll draw the carriage

mum and dad's house

2007-06-25T13:43:00.000+01:00

We went up to Dalgety Bay in Fife for the weekend, my first stay in my mum and dad's new house. I enjoyed waking up before everybody else and having a choice of different rooms to sit and draw in.

Yesterday I sat on an armchair in dad's study (above). The day before I sat on the landing, at the top of the stairs, looking down to the hall below.

Warm sunny days, indoors

2007-06-19T16:47:00.000+01:00

Room 6, Hotel Chatelet, Luxembourg, Thursday June 14, 6 am

Luxembourg: the smallest nation ever to be immortalised in a Smiths song.

I could find no discernable trace of those frightening verses which may or may not have been sent to a buck toothed girl in the Duchy. It was a long shot....

From the bottom step

2007-06-11T15:05:00.001+01:00

Another view of our hall.

I drew the door too narrow. Good job I'm not an architect, and good job we don't have to get prams and buggies in and out.

our hall

2007-06-05T13:39:00.000+01:00

I sat on the ninth step of our stairs every morning last week to draw this picture.

Oulipo evening

2007-06-03T07:44:00.000+01:00

On June 5 I'll be going to Rational Rec's OULIPO evening at Bethnal Green Working Mens Club. Below is Russell Martin's blurb for the event (I've added a few links):

The OuLiPo - an acronym that translates as "workshop of potential literature" - was a post-war French literary movement that included Georges Perec, Italo Calvino and Raymond Queneau. The tenet of the OuLiPo is to create literature via constraints such as palindromes and lipograms.

The event Features:

-- An OuTraPo performance (Workshop for Potential Tragi-comedy)

-- Interview with Stanley Chapman, the first exponent of OuLiPo in the UK in the 1960's

-- OuLiPo like music pieces by Tom Johnson and Damien Ricketson

-- Oulipean activities and games for the audience

-- "Documentary Saga of the OuLiPo" - a new multimedia work by Rees Archibald, Andrew Infanti and Matthew Shlomwowitz that promises to explain everything you need to know about OuLiPo.

-- Book stalls by Bookworks, Artwords Bookshop and Strange Attractor.

Stanley Chapman (b. 1925) was a British architect, designer, translator and writer. He became a member of Oulipo in 1960, founded the Outrapo, and is also a member of the French Collège de 'Pataphysique, and the London Institute of 'Pataphysics and the Lewis Carroll Society. His English translation of Hundred Thousand Billion Poems was received with "admiring stupefaction" by Raymond Queneau.

Groundhog day picture

2007-05-19T07:24:00.000+01:00

I sat on the same armchair for fifteen minutes every day for a week to draw this picture of our living room at 6.55 am.

Alexa is in typical pose in her corner after her morning stroll. The sofa cushions are still up from the previous night - our ploy to keep Alexa off it.

Alexa

2007-05-06T07:17:00.000+01:00

This is Alexa, she is an ex-racing greyhound that we have adopted from Hersham Hounds.

Our first dog, and she seems to be settling well. She's very placid (but we have had to hold on tight to the lead on occassions when she has spotted a cat or a squirrel or a toy electric car). She doesn't waste energy so when she's not out for a walk she's usually spread out in her corner like you see in the picture.

Hersham Hounds gave us lots of good advice about looking after greyhounds. We knew needed a greyhound that is friendly with other dogs and happy to be around children, and Alexa fits the bill on both of those.

Four things I like about football

2007-05-05T18:39:00.000+01:00

1: the routines
Fulham v Liverpool. A 3pm kick off means a 2pm stop off at the River Cafe outside Putney Bridge station. The fact that Andrew had already had his lunch didn't stop him ordering his usual bacon chips and beans.

This was't a routine game. A loss today would mean Fulham would probably have to beat Middlesboro on the last day to stay up.

2: the gossip.
The guy next to us on the long thin elbow-to-elbow River Cafe tables has been told by a reliable Fulham source that Alan Shearer has agreed to be the next Fulham manager if we stay up. And that Chris Coleman's sacking was partly due to the frequency of his womanising and drinking and with his assistant Steve Keane in the Weatherspoons next to the Motspur Park training ground.

We got some more gossip on the way back: Zat Knight's broken jaw in December wasn't done larking about with brother, it was a training room brawl with Louis Boa Morte. Thats why we had to sell him to West Ham.

3: the interplay between crowd and players.
Seventy minutes gone, in what has been hyped as the biggest game in Fulham's history. West Ham are winning, so we need to win too. The game is flat. Fulham had been as threatening as a bowl of blancmange (does blancmange still exist?). Crowd quiet, aware that elsewhere West Ham were 3-0 up. Throw to Fulham right underneath where we sit. Liam Rosenior has the ball in his hand. He looks at us. Gestures to us. We start singing. He points to the badge on his shirt,we sing louder . Come on he says. We are on our feet now, he's got us going, the whole place is lifted, transformed. A few minutes later Simon Davies wins the ball in midfield, an exchange of passes, Liam Rosenior is behind the Liverpool defence and does the right thing, low and hard across the box, all Dempsey has to do is to make contact. 1-0

4: the feeling you get when your team wins.

A friend in need

2007-04-28T07:31:00.000+01:00

Anna was sick into her lunchbox at school on Wednesday (and over the table, her cardigan and the new dinner lady).

She was in the school office waiting to be picked up. A girl came up to her, selflessly offered Anna their lunchbox and said

'here Anna, you might like these sandwiches better'

Drawing in restaurants

2007-03-22T14:27:00.000Z

As a consultant you get used to sitting in a restaurant on your own. You arrive in a town/city at 8:30pm. You are hungry, so you find a place to eat. The food is nice, but I used to feel like Norman Nomates until I started taking a sketchbook along.

Restaurants are great places to sit and draw for an hour. You don't have to move, its warm and dry, no-one is going to chase you out the door, and if you want anything else to eat or drink you just have to nod to one of the waiters.

On Monday I ate in aa kebab shop in Brussels (Le Botannique Snack)

Last week I was staying on Anglesey and ate at The Bridge Inn in Menai Bridge.

Travel broadens the mind

2007-02-23T22:34:00.000Z

Brussels, Villa Royale, Room 205. 6 February 2007, 6:40 AM: ,

Brussels, Villa Royale, Room 206. 13 February 2007, 6:40 AM

Brussels, Villa Royale, Room 206. 14 February 2007, 6:40 AM

Anglesey, Wales, Gwesty Victoria Hotel, Room 24. 22 February 6:40 AM

Volgan war

2007-02-20T12:52:00.000Z

We are in 2079. Joe Pineapples goes to Russia, to destroy Volkhan their head of state. As with all incoming robots, his satellite navigation is removed on entry to the country. His rockets are useless without it.

He takes a taxi to a cemetry. Once there he knocks the driver out, cannabalises the taxi and uses its satnav to fire his rockets at Vulkhan. He just misses. Joe is now running towards the Kremlin, armed to the teeth. Blackblood, defending Volkhan, isn't worried. He knows that all robots entering the country have been fitted with a bomb tag. And he has just given the order to detonate every single tag. It is unfortunate that a lot of innocent robots will be killed. The detonations will happen in three seconds time.

I've been waiting three days for the explosions: the next issue of 2000AD is out tomorrow. And I've discovered the fun of comics as opposed to graphic novels: the difference between watching a football match live and seeing the highlights later. Blogs, football teams, comics: all at their best when you track one or several over time, as you flow through time with them.

Adam Crabtree and Gavin Hanley can give you a more sophisticated reading of Joe's adventure

Dylan Dog

2007-02-08T06:58:00.000Z

I went to Italy a couple of weeks ago. I was working in Ispra, a tiny town on Lake Maggiore that has a European Commission research centre. I arrived at 10 at night. The hotel was virtually empty and its kitchen had closed. The receptionist offered to make me a sandwich. I was sitting in the bar eating it when I saw a small comic book on the bar.

I sat and read it. Set in London, a young detective, Dylan Dog, living with someone else called Groucho who looks and acts like Groucho Marx. Investigating some sort of curse on a building site. I only got half way through it. I didn't pluck up courage to ask if I could borrow it for the night, and the next morning it was gone (I think it belonged to the hotelkeepers daughter).

Next lunchtime I was in a newsagent with my colleague Paolo. I asked him what the Italian word was for 'bandes dessinees' (the French phrase that covers everthing from comics to graphic novels). 'Fumetti' he said and took me to a huge long shelf of comics, all the same size (A5/pocket book)and length (100 ish pages) as the Dylan Dog story I had read in the bar.

Turns out there are a number of popular comic book characters in Italy and every month they bring out a complete new story for the character. Paolo described all the characters. Tex the cowboy, who has been going for sixty years and is Paolo's dad's favourite. Dylan Dog, who I'd already met. Other characters whose names I have forgotten: one set in the future like Blade runner, a crime one. They didn't just have the current months story for them, they had back issues too. Spoilt for choice. The only comic on sale in UK newsagents is 2000AD.

I chose one of the back issues of Dylan Dog, Mystero di Venezi. It was brilliant: an ill-intentioned couple trying to get a Film Director and a tour guide to hallucinate into existence demons that would destroy Venice. I chose it because it was set in Italy. I later read on Wikipedia that Dylan hardly leaves London because he gets motion sickness (in my story he travelled by train). That it is the largest selling comic in Italy. And that Umberto Eco has said that he never gets bored reading the Bible, Homer or Dylan Dog.

My lack of knowledge of Italian didn't prevent me enjoying the story and the drawing. If you want to dip your toe into the waters of learning Italian you could do a lot worse than grab hold of a few Dylan Dog stories.

Fulham 2 Newcastle Utd 1

2007-02-04T07:11:00.000Z

One of the nice things about watching football is admiring skill from opposition players.

Last November Arsenal came down to Craven Cottage. Early in the second half, a long ball over the Fulham defence from the half way line. Thierry Henry controls it with his left and curls into the top corner with his right foot before we could blink. The referee disallows it for offside. I told the bloke next to us that this was perfect, you see a world class player score a world class goal and it doesn't even count against your team.

Our seat is only 15 rows back, so we can see the whites of the players eyes when the action is near us. Newcastle had a throw right in front us yesterday. Nicky Butt received the ball at his feet. I paid special attention. Nicky Butt, a neat passer of the ball, growing up in all those succesful Man U sides. Man of the match in that England v Argentina game in the 2002 world cup that Tania and I somehow managed to watch on a hospital tv an hour before Anna was born.

Butt turned and rolled the ball square, towards were he thought his defenders where. But they weren't. Heider Helgueson was though, and he cracked the ball over the suprised goalkeeper into the net.

That is two nice memories I have stored up from Nicky Butt now.

Fulham 1 Tottenham 1

2007-01-21T08:03:00.000Z

You have to think on your feet when you take your impressionable seven year old to a football match.

Son:What are they singing at Steed Malbranque Dad?
Dad: They are calling him a greedy custard son.
Son: Why?
Dad: Because he used to be a favourite player here, and now he has gone to Tottenham for more money, and he eats too many puddings.

Vincenzo's Montella came on. his fourth outing as a sub for Fulham. His sophisticated Italian touches have made him a folk hero here already. A few minutes later he has stuck away a penalty that looks like winning Fulham three points.

A new song goes up around the ground. Only one thing for it, sing an edited version in Andrew's ear as loud as I can.

Montella oh oh oh , Montella oh oh oh
He comes from Italy
He doesn't like Chelsea
Montella etc.

(the crowd claimed that Vicenzo harbours a much stronger resentment towards Fulham's nearest neighbours)

07:47 New Malden to Waterloo

2007-01-16T14:38:00.000Z

Two further proofs of the existence of God, to add to those discovered by St Thomas Aquinas

2007-01-15T13:39:00.000Z

Breakfast time, one Saturday in November 2006. Anna is asking her parents about the time God made the world.
Andrew (aged 7, feeling antagonistic towards younger sister): There isn't a God Anna.
Anna (aged 4, shocked): yes there is
Andrew: No there isn't. My science book says the Universe is made of particles. It doesn't mention God.
Anna: But there must be a God Andrew, because there is a Jesus.

Dinner time. Same day, same family.
Tania (aged 37): What places shall we visit when we go back to the Isle of Wight? Do you remember the places you liked last time?
James (37), Andrew, Anna: The Crab and Lobster, St Helens beach, the Steam Railway, the Dinosaur museum
Tania: What is the name of that place with the model village?
James: Godshill
Anna ( turning triumphantly towards her brother): see Andrew, there must be a God! Because there is a hill!

How is work?

2007-01-10T10:55:00.000Z

If you catch yourself talking negatively about your work today, have a read of this great blogpost from the Chief Happiness Officer.

Do dogs eat mashed potato?

2007-01-08T15:40:00.000Z

Scully, from the Retired Greyhound Trust, came to spend sunday afternoon with us.

His visit prompted lots of questions from Anna about dogs.

Ffawd, Cywilydd a Chelwyddau

2007-01-06T06:20:00.000Z

I've found a novel that I want to read in a language that I don't know.

It is called Ffawd, Cywilydd a Chelwyddau (Fate, shame and lies) by a Cardiff writer called Lloyd Owen.

The novel almost won the Daniel Owen Memorial Prize for best unpublished novel in the Welsh Language at the 2005 Eisteddfodd. The judges said it showed 'the boldest thinking and the closest to genius" of all the competition's entrants. But they didn't give it the prize because it pushed the boundaries of acceptable publishing.

It is described as cross between Catcher in the Rye and Trainspotting, a dark journey of the soul aimed at teenagers. There is a lot of swearing in it, but the swearing is in English because their isn't much swearing in the welsh language.

Lloyd Owen says that he is influenced by the Coen brothers films: (Fargo and Big Lebowski are two of my favourite films too).

Waterstones at Ludgate Circus have ordered the book for me. They say it will be in within 7 to 10 working days.

That gives me a week or so to learn the sounds of the letters in Welsh. Then I will read the first chapter at normal reading speed.

It will be a good test for the ideas on language learning I put forward yesterday. I hope that reading it, even without comprehension, will encourage rather than discourage me from learning the language. I hope that I will be able to tell you something about the chapter. Not much, but something.

I'll let you know how I get on! I am going to visit Bangor later this month for a consultancy assignment so it would be nice to have even a smidgeon of Welsh before I go.

Anna's horse

2007-01-05T14:33:00.000Z

We bought Anna a horse for christmas.

She is a bit weak, she has no strength in her legs so we have to carry her anywhere she wants to go. She still spends most of the day sleeping. We call her 'floppy'.

When I came downstairs early yesterday morning floppy was asleep on the sofa, so I sketched her for you

Reading a novel in a language you don't know yet

2007-01-05T11:01:00.000Z

Lucy posted a great question in response to yesterday's post on learning languages.

Would you get discouraged if you read the first page of a novel in the language you wanted to learn, and couldn't understand a word of it?

I would normally advise you to firstly read that little bit of your language text book that tells you what noise each letter makes ( I get a bit discouraged if I don't know how to pronounce the words to myself in my head).

Then start to read your novel. Don't be discouraged if you don't understand a word of the first page. Carry on reading the first chapter at the same pace you read in english, without looking up anywords in a dictionary, and without re-reading anything. When you have finished the chapter note to yourself anything at all that you picked up about that first chapter. I am sure you will be suprised at what you can say about it.

Now read the next bit of your language text book. Don't bother with their exercises, don't try to memorise any of the vocabulary, just read what they are teaching you.

Then read chapter two of your novel.

Does anyone want to try it? Or nominate a language that you would like me to demonstrate this on?

Learning to draw/ learning a language

2007-01-04T13:19:00.000Z

Check out this brilliant blogpost by Danny Gregory on drawing.

I love Danny's book 'The creative license'.

A couple of years ago I tried to teach myself to draw from two standard texts on drawing. They covered the major aspects of drawing. The authors had drawn pictures to illustrate the points they were making about perspective, proportion and tone. But I gave up fairly soon.

I believe that for an adult, learning from a text book often doesn't work. The strength of text books is that they are comprehensive, and explain all the complexities of something. This is necessary for students, who will have to defend themselves against exam questions. But it is a weakness for adults, who tend to be more prone to giving up. If you are put off starting to draw by a concern that drawing might be a very complex skill, then a book that explains all the complexities is just going to feed that concern.

The challenges facing the author of a book for adult learners are:

how do you help the learner find the inspiration they need to keep learning, and to keep enjoying it?
how do you help them to keep in mind the real reason that they wanted to learn the skill in the place?
how do you help them to suspend judgement on themselves long enough so that the thought 'I can't learn a language/draw/cook' doesn't prompt them to give up?

This autumn I stumbled across 'The Creative License' by Danny Gregory. It looks different from the standard books about drawing. For a start there isn't a type written word in the whole book. He has drawn and lettered the whole thing, even the copyright details in the front page (everything except the barcode and his publishers logo). Everypage has drawings on it, simple drawings of things in his life: bagels, meetings in an office, motorbikes, bookshelves, a homeless guy he met, spoke to and drew. They are not there to illustrate technical points. They are there to show you what you can do with drawing. The book is bursting with life (Danny's life).

Gregory isn't interested in telling us all there is to know about drawing. He isn't interested in getting us to any particular standard. He is interested in getting us to pick up a pen and paper and draw. Just draw the outlines of things, he says. Maybe after a few months you'll want to start to concern yourself with colour and the effect of light, or maybe never. But for the moment just draw the outlines.

I'd love to write a book on learning languages that persuades people first of all to find something that they want to do with that language (say, read a particular novel in the original) and then to get hold of that novel and spend a bit of time each day reading it. (Reading is easy, it just involves scanning your eye over a page of words. Comprehension comes a bit later). I'd ask readers to spend as much time with that novel as they do with their language text book.

They would be staying close to their reason for starting to learn. If they give up after three months they will still have read that novel in the original. And the novel will provide them with a means of gauging their progress, and a means of seeing what aspects of the language text book are useful to them and what aspects they don't need to bother their head about.

Another way of stubbornly refusing to be miserable about anything

2007-01-02T12:44:00.000Z

Yesterday we went to see Fulham play Watford, the bottom team in the league. Fulham had two goals disallowed, missed a hatful of chances including an open goal, and had our goalie stretchered off. It finished 0-0.

On the way out I passed a man who declared:

'I can not feel down on a day when West Ham lose 6-0 at Reading'.

It sounded incredibly profound and true at the time.

There is no particular animosity (as far as I am aware) between Fulham and West Ham United.

This man may well have found a foolproof way a way of fending off any existential regrets, misgivings, worries you may be experiencing. On the day of your unhappiness simply scan any football results to find a team in some league, somewhere who has suffered an incongorously large and unlikely defeat, and laugh.

Today is a bank holiday in Scotland, with a full programme of league games. For those of you feeling the blues today I will try to find a result that will give you a confortable feeling of schadenfreude to dispel them (for 24 hours at least).

If you haven't got time to search through football results simply stretch the statement out a bit:

I cannot feel down in the month/year/solar system in which West Ham lose 6-0 at Reading

Update: I've just checked those Scottish results. Dundee United lost 5-1 at home to Falkirk. I can not feel down this week.

conversation between daughter and father

2006-12-26T06:53:00.000Z

daughter (Anna, aged 4): Your name is James, isn't it daddy
father (James, aged 37): Yes Anna
daughter: When I'm a grown up, if I have a little boy, I will call it James too
father: (bursting with pride): thats nice Anna
daughter (thinking hard): ......or I might call it James and the Giant peach

Wordsmiths

2006-12-22T07:39:00.000Z

Wordie is a terrific new site that lets you collect and share your favourite words.

It also lets you make lists of particular types of words.
Like these:
more than human by Lampbane
tales from another world by squareintheteeth
scripted apathy by uselessness
the horizontal hula by nkocharh
Joycean vocab by inkhorn

I've listed some of the words Morrissey used on Hatful of Hollow. Slackagogo has made listings of words from XTC and The Ramones

Drawing for Cosmos

2006-12-18T17:42:00.000Z

This lunchtime I went and sat on the metal seats that are thoughtfully provided on the City of London side of the Millenium Bridge and drew the view over the Thames to the Tate Modern, for my blog friend Cosmos.

I gave B her drawing too, she has put in on her blog.

stars reflected in the reservoirs

2006-12-18T17:04:00.000Z

I got a nice seat on the train this morning, snuggled in the far back corner of the carriage. I was singing Morrissey's 'First of the Gang to die' to myself while I drew the picture.

I tried to keep in time to the music (but some of it may be a little of tune).

Ireland Yard, City of London

2006-11-28T06:59:00.000Z

I drew this yesterday lunchtime

El mondo no eschuara

2006-11-12T07:47:00.000Z

I am kicking myself for missing 'El mondo no eschuara': the film Phil Collins made of Columbian people singing songs by The Smiths. It toured British art galleries in 2005.

He had kicked off the project by going to Bogata and inviting:

“the shy, the dissatisfied, the narcissistic, the shower super-stars and anyone wanting to be someone else for a night”

to come and record a karaoke version of a song from the album 'The world won't listen'.

He ended up getting a version of all 17 songs on the album, each sung by a different person. I managed to find a two minute sample of different parts of it, on You Tube: here it is:

As is usual with Phil Collins work it works as conceptual art: you can think about the ideas behind it, and why he chose to execute the ideas in the way he did. A project possible because of the globalisation of pop music and the English language, but worthwhile becasue of people's individual reaction to Morrissey's songs and appropriation of them as their own . But it also works without being art too, its moving and interesting to watch.

The Pretty Pretty thieves blog have a good review of a review of el mondo no eschuara/ the world won't listen, written by a Smiths fan.

Phil Collins and the Turner Prize

2006-10-21T15:24:00.000+01:00

Phil Collins says that he uses his camera as an excuse to meet people, that he has made his art in places like Bogata, Baghdad, Ramallah and Belgrade because he doesn't trust the images that the global media shows us of these cities, of the people in those cities.

Collins poses a question or a challenge to people in the city:

Come and tell us how appearing on a TV chat show has ruined your life (Istanbul)

Come and dance for eight hours non-stop at a disco (Ramallah)

Come and do a karaoke version of a song by The Smiths (Bogata)

Come to a hotel and remove articles of your clothing (Baghdad)

The trivial nature of the challenges could appear insulting given the serious predicament of some of those cities. But Collins gives people the time and space to talk/sing/dance/pose for themselves. The challenge may come from a globalised nowhere, but the work itself reflects the people who stepped forward to answer it.

I've got tickets to see him talk about his Turner Prize entry on November 22.

The Turner Prize exhibition at Tate Britain has four artists exhibiting side by side for three months, then on December 4 one gets chosen to win the prize. I'm sure Collins will win. The opening hours of the exhibion are from 10am to 6pm each day. Collins is showing an eight hour long film (Return to the real), that starts at 10am each morning and finishes at 6pm. He hasn't left time for you to look at the work of the other artists.

The film consists of eight one hour long interviews with people talking about how appearing on a chat show ruined their life. You watch it in a room that is like a cinema, except you don't sit facing a screen. There are two screens : the one on the front wall shows the interviewee, the one on the back wall shows the interviewer. You sit on a side wall, and you have to turn your head from one screen to the other to follow the conversation, like watching a tennis match.

The interviewee has a single colour backdrop behind him or her, as though packaged for future television broadcast. The interviewer has no backdrop, you can see the studio monitors and equipment behind him, and the odd colleague wondering past to adjust a setting.

As you listen you realise that the tone of the conversation is intimate, undermining the gulf between the two roles, the two backdrops and the two screens . They may be on seperate screens now but when it was recorded they were sat facing each other, near each other. The conversations make no acknowledgement of the fact that they are destined to be viewed by people arriving half way through the interview. There is no summary of what has gone on before, no hype, no razzmattazz, no attempts to package the story or the person as being more interesting or more sensational than they come across in their own words.

Collins started with the chat show formula, with a sensational question about an intimate part of someone's life. He took the formula so far and then dropped it to leave us with a normal unsensationalised conversation. Just as the interviewees had, after appearing on the chat show, been left back with an unpackaged, unsensationalised life to lead.

If you do arrive half way through an interview and want to catch up on what you miss then you have to return to 'Return to the real' on a different day, but this time arrive a little earlier (or spend a bit less time looking at the work of the other artists).

When you leave the little cinema you pass by the second half of Colllins entry: a working office for Shady Lane Productions. You can look through the windows of the office and see Collins and his team working on his next project which is a challenge to the people of Britain, similar to that issued to the people of Turkey, to come and tell him how appearing on a chat show has adversly affected their life. You can open the window to the office if you want to chat to them, or want to volunteer your story to them.

A great idea by Collins, using the Turner Prize to repackage his last project (he did the work for Return to the Real for the Istanbul biennale in 2005) and to get free office space, heat, light and publicity for his next project. It works for me: its as though he is projecting his project forward in time and space. And projects are meant to be projected. Especially projects by film makers.

iLiKETRAiNS

2006-10-18T11:11:00.000+01:00

I went to see iLiKETRAiNS last night, in the brick arches of Cargo, just behind Old Street.

They came on stage wearing shirt and tie, jeans, and old British Rail drivers' jackets. Most of them had beards. They played a brooding, intense, indie guitar music.

The first lines of their songs hook you straight away:

'I discharged myself today'
'Don't go into the kitchen, that's where the knives are'

No-one danced. You can't dance and brood at the same time.

A guitar broke just before they were going to start playing their song about chess. Whilst we were waiting the singer invited members of the audience to describe any chess matches that they had played recently. Sounded promising, but a flat headed screwdriver was found and the gig resumed.

I bought a t-shirt: a map of Britain with lots of squiggles on, each squiggle marking a railway line that Dr Beeching closed down in the 1960s: isobars linking places of equal marginalisation.

The highlight of the gig was their encore when they invited the support bands on stage to be the Greek chorus in their tragic dirge of venom 'The Beeching Report' : you can here the track on their myspace site

Celt

2006-10-16T21:34:00.000+01:00

Yesterday we went to Hersham where the Wimbledon branch of the Retired Greyhound Trust have their kennels.

We took one of their greyhounds (Celt) for a twenty minute walk. It was a really nice thing to do, I would heartily recommend it.

Tania and Anna wanted to take Celt home with us (we couldn't because we haven't got a six foot fence all the way round our garden).

Gravitas

2006-10-12T06:33:00.000+01:00

The flying steamroller: a big yellow diesel roller linked by wires and a beam to a counterweight. It was very grounded when I walked between the Tate Britain and the Chelsea Parade Ground at five to five on Monday.

I assumed it was some arty joke: that we the audience had to imagine it flying in our heads, just like Mark Titchner's Tuner prize entry asks us to use our psychic powers to lift his sculpture off the ground.

I confess to failing to lift Titchner's statue. I am aware that this failure of mine is one factor contributing to the likelehood that Titchner will not get the Turner prize (another being that Phil Collins's reality TV work has blown everyhting else away). I really did not feel confident about levitating that steamroller.

They didn't need me. At five o'clock an announcement was made, stewards went to the four corners of the parade ground and a driver in blue overalls walked over to the roller. She turned its engines on and drove it noisily round the parade ground a few times. Then all of a sudden it lifted up. She switched the engine off, and her and roller very quietly rotated round the counterweight for a few spins of the parade ground.

She closed her eyes, and driver and steamroller looked as serene and weightless as human being and machine have ever looked.

I felt as light as air, as though it was me flying above the ground, not the steamroller.

We don't have to let gravity keep us down

Technorati tags:
[Flying Steamroller]
[Chris Burden]

Peace trail

2006-10-09T06:26:00.000+01:00

Yesterday New Malden woodcraft folk did the four mile London peace trail from Tavistock square (with its monument to concientious objectors, statue of Ghandi, and cherry tree for the victims of Hiroshima) to the Tibetan peace Garden at the Imperial War Museum.

It was organised by the movement for the abolition of war: the kids got quiz questions and a passport that they had to get stamped at each point.

New Malden woodcraft folk were the first group to reach Trafalgar square, we were greeted by Bruce Kent who whisked us over to the South African embassy where Cyril Ndaba, South Africa's deputy high commissioner spoke to us about his country's journey from Apartheid. The kids listened enraptured even though they were really hungry.

Mr Ndaba reminded the kids that some of their parents generation had stood outside the South African embassy in the continous picket of the embassy that went on round the clock for years and years during the Apartheid era. I told him of my happy teenage memories of going up to London for a night out and stopping off in Trafalgar square on the way back to Waterloo to sign the petition and maybe stand around for a few minutes. Bruce Kent rightly pointed out to the kids that it took a lot more dedication than that to keep the picket going all those years.

Something simple to start with

2006-10-07T07:13:00.000+01:00

The Institute for the Future of the Book are encouraging authors who are in the course of writing books to blog as they go along, before the book is published.

Its a great idea. Potential readers get to see the the book emerging and to influence and enrich the book with their comments . The author has a means of generating interest in the book and anticipation of its arrival.

Psychologically writing a book must seem like a long, lonely haul. Writing a blog, with the immediate feedback you get from your readers, would keep your motivation up, and keep you turning up at your writing desk/laptop each morning.

Mitchell Stephens is blogging about the writing of his book, Without Gods, a history of atheism.

One of his posts posed the following question:

how should an atheist reply to a request by a dying friend that they see the light and start believing in god so that they can be re-united as friends in heaven?

This promoted some great debate by both atheists and theists in the comment thread. Todd Sayre turned the question on its head and asked:

what should an atheists' last request be to a friend who believed in God?

Todd thought that the best request the atheist could make would be:

feed my cats

Mitchell writes a really good blog, its thought provoking and I've learned plenty from it. My only quibble is that a number of his posts seem to be concerned with the question 'are the types of statement made by religions true?' I don't think there is such a thing in the entire universe as 'truth'.

Even if there was a such a thing as truth, we would not be able to express it using words. As Jorge Luis Borges is said to have said

everything put into words is fiction.

Neither science nor religion can escape this limitation.

Any abandonment of the belief in universal truths must also involve an abandonment of attempts to demolish certain beliefs as universally untrue. Borges is useful again. An interviewer asked him whether he believed in angels. He replied:

Its a possiblility, after all it requires no more of a miracle than the fact that we are sitting here talking like this

I'm more interested in seeing whether religious discourse can be useful, than whether it could be true. For me religions would be just as useful if they dropped their claims that they convey the word of the creator(s).

I imagine the creator as a being that didn't use words at all, that has never had any use for them. I think the creator did something incredibly simple to bring the universe into being. Lifted a metaphorical finger, or breathed out or just thought 'what if'.

I believe this because it fits nicely with my other beliefs that anyone can do anything and that simple actions/events can have profound results, provided they resonate through enough things or people, over enought time.

The purpose of life? To explore some of the many possible consequences of that first breath/thought/lifting of a finger, and to set up a new universe of consequences and possibilities every time we breath, think or lift a finger.

songs for life

2006-09-23T07:19:00.000+01:00

One of the advantages of being 37 over, say, 24 is that I am the right age to have see The Smiths live. When I tell a fellow smiths fan that i saw them six times it is normally met with a deep heartfelt sigh. I dont like engendering regret in others, not after i have devoted all that time reading self help books on how to banish it from my own life (time i sometimes think could have been better spent.....)

Now i have an answer: If you loved the smiths and never saw them live, then go and see the Smyths. They do the songs justice. What more can we ask?

It is like when you support a big football team that all of a sudden goes bust.
A new team starts up, adapting the name slightly, in a much lower league. The devotees turn up, the spirit is the same, you can get much closer to the pitch and you can speak to the players after the game.

They played at the The Grey horse in kingston which is just down the road from us. Some fans of theirs had come from Edgware, another from Epping (I didnt envy their journeys back across town).

I was paranoid that we would be locked out from the surge of smiths fans descending to see them (as far as i know mozzer and the boys never came this way). So we got there at half eight. Tania and lynn got fed up standing around waiting and watching the new order tribute (who weren't bad) so they went off to see Tom do his stuff at the Willoughby, where they could sit down in comfort. I'd waited ninteteen years, ten months and twenty seven days to hear these songs performed live, another hour wasn't going to make any difference.

While i was waiting for them to come on i met natalie and lee who said the first song they danced to at their wedding was a smiths song (There is a light). Apparently the other guests had stood around a bit bemused. They run the Old Kings Head in hampton wick. They have tribute bands on at their pub too, they will have a tribute band to the Clash on soon (the Trash)

The Smyths came on and they started off with a barrage of songs from Hatful of Hollow which is the heart and soul of the The Smiths canon. Hand in glove, What difference does it make?. Singer says ''i think some of you might know this song': This charming man: everyone goes bolly.(What is bolly short for? I hope its nothing offensive).

They had flowers at the front, Natalie sniffed at them 'there not gladioli, I made my mum get gladioli for our wedding'. Oh what the hell. They were on the front of the stage, we passed them to each other, waved them around, danced with them, threw them over our shoulders. All of us at the front danced to every song, sang ever word, ended up arm in arm swaying to There is a light and then going bolly again to Big mouth strikes again. A great night.

[The Smiths]
[The Smyths]

If only

2006-09-22T13:46:00.000+01:00

I've told my colleagues that I am going to see the The Smyths tonight (it sounded more impressive than it reads).

Air

2006-09-14T07:17:00.000+01:00

Tania got the personal development books that I've accumulated over the years, and put them together in one shelf, asking jokingly 'what does this say about you James?'

I like the way personal development books talk to me. You are human they say, you are uniquely valuable, it has taken the universe billions of years to create you, your body contains elements forged in the furnaces of distant and long gone stars, you are a part of the universe looking out at the universe, your ancestors, whovever they were, have survived and sometimes prospered in many different landscapes and circumstances. So long as you are striving towards your dreams you are not a failure. The universe that made you is on your side.

Recently I read 'A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius' by Dave Eggers. It is not a personal development book. It is Dave Eggers writing his autobiograhy, but writing it as though it was a novel. It relates how both his parents died within a month of each other when Eggers was 21, leaving him with his kid brother (Toph, aged 7) to bring up.

His response to the cloying gravity of the double tragedy was to sell the suburban Chicago house and rocket off with Toph to sunny San Francisco. He describes bringing Toph up, how he read him John Hersey's 'Hiroshima' as his bed time story, how they evaluated flats to live in by how long an area of hall way they had for sliding along on their socks, how Eggers hoped to strike lucky with single mums at parents evenings at Toph's school.

He reaplays the thoughts that streamed through his heads at the momentous moments like when his mums nose wouldn't stop bleeding in the advanced stages of her cancer or when he is scattering her ashes into a local lake. His thoughts try to match the gravity of the situation but keep getting pulled back to prosaic matters like whether or not to switch the telly off or whether his feet are going to slip into the lake.

At the unmomentous moments his thoughts get pulled in the other direction. He is on the beech playing frisbee with Toph. Toph has perfected some show off moves, like lying on his tummy just as the frisbee is coming down and then jumping up and catching it. Eggers proudly describing how dumb these moves are, and the writing/thoughts flick from the frisbee throwing to the last breaths of his mother and back again.

Eggers expresses the same thoughts as the personal development books, but harshly, with the gloves off.

A TV company employee interviewed him after he applied to appear on her reality TV programme. She questioned whether he was an exhibitionist, willing to live in a televised house for two months, talking on tv about the tragedy of his family. Eggers replied:

''Someone wants to celebrate their existence and you call it exhibitionism. Its niggardly. If you don't want anyone to know about your existence you might as well kill yourself, your taking up space, air.''

Festive logic

2006-09-06T06:46:00.000+01:00

Last December Andrew (then aged 6) was round at Tania's mums house.

He was misbehaving.

The following exchange took place:

Gran (annoyed): "stop that, or I'll get the elves and the fairies to tell santa not to bring you what you want for christmas"

Andrew (puzzled): "but how could they grandma? I don't know what I want for christmas."

Is the universe telling us where to go?

2006-09-01T07:02:00.000+01:00

Whilst on holiday in the Isle of Wight this Easter we went to Tescos, and could not find any local produce in the store. It was almost identical to Tescos in New Malden (which, fortunately, does not stock local produce either: my father in law's allotment couldn't cope). Inside Tescos the differences between an agricultural island and a concrete south west london suburb are flattened.

Globalisation offers a total disregard for where we are on earth and cuts all connections with place and with history. Is this subliminaly preparing us to make the break with earth? Preparing us for a day when humanity packs its Tesco bags with a few momentoes of our birth planet and takes itself off to a different home somewhere else in the solar system or the galaxy?

John Gray doesn't think we will ever get off the planet. He does not believe that we inexorably make progress towards higher and better knowledge. In Straw Dogs: thoughts on humans and other animals he tells us technology is not something that human beings control. Human beings will never be able to use their knowledge and technology to become master of their fate.

Human beings bring technology into the world, but once it is in the world it becomes another thing we interact with. And our interactions with it are shaped by the same power sruggles, economic forces, big business interests, organised crime interests, emotions and desires as is human interaction with anything else.

Gray talks about the folly of those plants set up to freeze people until such time as the technology comes along to bring humans back to life and to extend human life. The freezing plants will fall victim to economic collapse, revolution or war long before the life restoring/extending technology comes on stream.

Gray believes that the surge in human population is unsustainable for the earth's ecostystem. Human beings will live for a time in a distorted envrionment, geared to sustaining the unstustainable as long as possible, with less and less animal and plant species keeping us company. The rise in human numbers will start to plateau off, and then reverse as a result of war,disease, resource scarcity and/or climate change. The progress in knowledge and technology will become a double edged sword as weapons of mass destruction become more easily replicable. Wars of resources (for water, for oil, for land) become more virulent as the resources become scarcer.

His message is not entirely pessimistic. Human beings are not stronger than the earth's ecostystem and whatever we do we will not be able to destroy life on earth. The earth will survive us, and then forget about us. The growth of human numbers is a plague that earth will deal with and climate change may just be the method that the earth will use to shrug off its human burden.

Gray's work has helped me come up with an answer to that rather tricky question:

If there are is intelligent life on other planets near other stars, why haven't they come and found us on earth?

Maybe those life-forms that have survived long enough to contemplate space travel have lived in balance with their eco-system and not felt the need to indulge in any inter-stellar tourism or colonialism.

On earth those parts of the human race that have lived in balance with the environment have tended to be wiped out by more rapacious colonists who have developed powerful weapons to support their aggressive inclinations. So how could the universe ptotect planets with diverse and sustainable eco-systems from attack by an aggressive species who have used their own eco-system as a springboard to conquer others?

The best way for the universe to protect sustainable eco-systems would be to get the home planet of the aggressive species to reject them before they developed the power to pollute other parts of the universe.

Sixteen again

2006-08-28T07:35:00.000+01:00

This year is the twentieth-first anniversary of me being 16.

To celebrate I have renewed the Fulham season ticket I last had for the 1984/85 season, and started to wear my old Smiths T-shirts again.

On Friday Tania and I went to see Tom who plays his guitar under the name Boss Hog every Friday night in the Willoughby Arms in Kingston. Its a friendly old style pub, where the landlord has been there for exactly twelve years and says goodbye to you as you leave.

Tom played old songs by Billy Bragg, Jam, the Clash, The Cure. He sings them well, you can hear the words and he does them justice. At his best with 'Thats Entertainment', 'Say hello wave goodbye', 'Boys don't Cry' and 'Fairy tale from New York'.

Tom is a big Billy Bragg (and Fulham) fan. I told him at the interval that when I was sixteen I had done a deal with my sister: she could play Billy Bragg and I would play the Smiths. Like Spain and Portugal in the Renaissance dividing up the New World with the blessing of the Pope. I was the older brother, so like Spain I think I got the best of the deal (though history tells us that the Portugese part of the new world has won more world cups than the Spanish parts). In the gig Tom played the intro to 'Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now' then stopped and told me I should have chosen Billy Bragg, because its easier to play on guitar.

In 184-85 I sat with my dad in Block C, row C of the Stevenage Road stand at Craven Cottage. The oldest football stand in London. A listed building. I dont think there were many other season ticket holders that year, I dont remember anyone who sat round us, they must have changed every game. Block C was great, half way towards the Hammersmith End, the goal Fulham usually shoot to in the second half. Row C was three rows back from the Enclosure, where people stood up. You could hear the banter from the Enclosure while enjoying the view from the seat. If you went with some friends you just forgot about the seat and went to stand up on the Enclosure. Average home gate that season must have been 6,500.

A lot has happened to Fulham since 1985. First the chairman Ernie Clay sold off the first team as part of his plan to kill the club and chuck the carcass to a property developer. He made his millions, and Craven Cottage was saved only by a collapse in the UK property market. Then ten years of slowly sinking down the divisions. By 1994 Fulham were in the bottom division, under the chairmanship of the cringeworthy Jimmy Hill. No money. The players had to eat sandwiches on the way home from away games as an economy measure, the coach wouldn't even stop at a fish and chip shop shop for them. The ground looking a bit dilapidated. The top of the Eric Miller stand spelt out a message to the world 'F LHA ' in big letters (wouldn't have liked to have been standing on the touchline when the U and the M fell off).

Then the wheel started to turn, Mickey Adams cobbled a team together out of nothing, on nothing, wins an unlikely promotion and the club attracted the friendly interest of Mohammed Al Fayed. Inexorable rise to the top division with plenty of good football with a gallic twist played along the way, some of it seen by me, an occassional visitor popping back to an old friend.

So here we are at the start of 2006/07. Not all that much cash compared to many in the rest of the Premiership (would have been nice to have had enough to have bought Emile Heskey). Our star midfielder Malbranque won't play for us again. Needing to work hard to keep the wheel rolling forward, to stop it rolling back.

You hear lots of conversations when you go to a football match. When people talked about our first game of the season (away at Man Utd) you always heard the word 'shambles'. When people spoke of Wednesday's game with Bolton you heard the word 'poor'. True you would have come across the same words if you had read a newspaper, but the journalists added another word, not to be spoken of, beginning with 'r' and ending in you being sent to Coventry and Southend and loosing millions of pounds.

You pass a second hand bookshop as you start walking from Putney Bridge station to Craven Cottage. In 1984/85 it was always shut on matchdays cos the owner coached a team on a Saturday. For the last ten years it has been open on matchdays: the bookseller got disullusioned with coaching 'couldnt stop my players from cheating' he said. On Saturday we met a Sheff United fan, Jim, looking at the books outside it. He had a thoughtful air, which could have been induced by the weighty tomes he was looking at, or by the fact that as he later told me, he was meeting his priest at the match, who in turn was going to work in Peru for three years.

I put the thoughtfulness down to the fact that Sheff United were, like us, facing a real test. Their first two games in the premiership had been against Liverpool and Tottenham, games they would expect to lose. This was the type of game they needed to get something from if they are going to avoid that 'r' word.

I told Jim, as I always tell every person I have met from Sheffield, that my sister lives in that City. He asked me whether Chris Coleman will still be manager of Fulham by Christmas, and told me that Fulham have not yet seen the best of Micheal Brown, who had been brilliant for Sheff U.

At the ground. We are in block CL, in the seats they have put over the old Enclosure, just underneath Block C where I used to sit. And on our seats is a T-shirt each with a picture of Jonny Haynes on it, a black and white picture ofthe black and white hero of the 1960s, to celebrate the fact that the Stevenage Road stand has been renamed after him. It is only us in the Johnny Haynes stand that get the T-shirt, we feel special, we know the rest of the ground wants one too. (The one on Andrew's seat is a junior size T-shirt, they must have put junior ones on the seats with kids season tickets)

So our second game in a week, our second game in our seats. All the people around us are the same people from Wednesday, we are safely cocooned within loyal season ticket holders. United start off better than Fulham: they are behind our defence in the first minute but our keeper Niemi catches it off the head of that big handful of a striker Rob Hulse.

Later the ball got booted into our block of the stand. A big bloke leaps up like David Seamen in his pomp to parry the ball and squashes his neighbour as he lands. The lady next to us turns to me and said 'not your turn this time'(referring to my catch of the ball on Wednesday) and asks whether I saw myself on telly . I had to confess that nobody had stopped me in the street.

Fulham start playing a bit after twenty minutes. Collins John (young, big, fast, still with a lot to learn) spun and hit the post. Jimmy Bullard had some shots. The sun came out after half an hour, it was shining right at us, and was being reflected from the floodlights. Two bright for Andrew, he couldnt look at the game. So we left our cocoon and went down behind the stand to buy a Fulham cap. While we were away Fulham scored. When we got back a fellow behind us tapped me on the shoulder to tell us how good Bullard's free kick was.

Second half. Fulham take a stanglehold on the midfield. we are down fairly low down, close to the action, Liam Rosenior rampages down the touchline near us. In 1985 we were watching his dad, Leroy, a great header of the ball, strong and powerful centre forward with a mild temprement. He later went to West Ham and famously scored a hat trick that got Chelsea relegated one year.

Tomas Radzinski comes on, looks like he is carrying a bit of weight. He was through on goal, he could see the whites of the goalkeeper's eyes but choses to pass instead. He is obviously short of confidence, Bullard almost saves his embarrasment by picking up the loose ball and cracking it against the post. Later Brian McBride surged through, underneath us again,this time their keeper managed to get a foot on it.

The three minutes of added time were a bit nervy, because all of a sudden Fulham pulled everyone back surrendering the ball to United. They had a couple of situations but we got the three points we deserved.

So the gloom has been lifted, at least for now, The midfield was solid and dominant, Bouba Diop was winning balls and playing neat passes, Jimmy Bullard was everywhere and did everything, Michael Brown passed well. Louis Boa Morte still hasnt found his touch yet though. Our central defence was solid, Philipe Christianval read things well and kept it simple. Lots of our threat came down the right from Liam Rosenior's forward runs. Just need one of our strikers to pick up confidence and start scoring goals.

So the walk back to Bishops Park, next to the Thames, tidal at Putney. One lad commented with suprise how much water there was in the Thames when there was virtually nothing there on Wednesday: could have been a metaphor for Fulham's week.

Talking of metaphors I read this joke in John T Barrow's book on infinity:
Question: what did the mystic say to the hamburger salesman?
Answer: 'make me one with everything'

At the end of the park we saw Jim from Sheffield again. He looked disappointed. He said we deserved our win, I wished him luck for their next home game (with Blackburn). Our next home game isn't till September 23, against our local rivals.

Will Chris Coleman still be Fulham manager at Christmas? I hope so.

Lowering the stakes

2006-08-25T07:02:00.000+01:00

Amos Oz, the Isreali novelist and peace campaigner, is quoted by Wikipedia as saying that

the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a war of religion or cultures or
traditions, but rather a real estate dispute--one that will be resolved not by
greater understanding, but by painful compromise.

When you boil that conflict down to a dispute over specific land and resources it loses its ability to fracture and destabilise the world.

Those promoting a war will always badge it as being a war for principles and values. A war for democracy, freedom, civilisation, the motherland, islam, national security: a war against terror, dictatorship, fundamentalism, zionism, genocide.

By appealing to these principles the conflicts becomes harder to resolve, more likely to spread, and more likely to lead to additional cruelty and racism.

Why do those promoting wars always appeal to principles? So that they can win the support of those who may not care about the particular resources being fought for, but do care for the values and principles being espoused.

Great first touch

2006-08-24T06:42:00.000+01:00

I took Andrew to Fulham v Bolton yesterday evening.

Half way through the first half Ian Pearce (Fulham's ageing centre-half) sliced a clearance into the crowd above were we sat. Someone in C block knocked it back down and I caught it as clean as a whistle.

In all the hundreds of football matches I have been to it was the first time I have touched the ball. Their were no stewards near. El Hadj Douf of Bolton down on the touchline was waiting patiently. I could do what I liked with it. I could have drawn a cartoon on it, given it a huge boot, pretended to eat it like it was an apple........

Or I could have tried to fulfill my childhood ambition: When I was six and my dad used to take me to East End Park to see Dunfermline Athletic I had a plan that the ball would come to me sitting in the stand and I would throw it into the other teams net to score a goal for Dunfermline.

I didn't do any of those things. I went to throw it back then remembered andrew sitting next to me and handed it to him. He delayed a bit then threw it forward.

It got to Diouf eventually. Bolton created a kerfufle in the penalty area from the throw but nothing much came of it.

The most suprising thing about the ball was that it felt cold. Its at the centre of the white heat of a premiership encounter and it feels cold.

Empathy

2006-08-21T06:12:00.000+01:00

David Grossman is an Isreali novelist. Just 2 days after he and fellow novelists called for a ceasefire to halt his country's offensive in Lebanon, his son Uri, a tank commander in the Isreali army, died in the fighting. On Sunday the Observer printed his article Uri, my dear son. It is a beautiful piece of writing.

Uri was known as the lefty of his batallion. Grossman praises his son for sticking to his values even in the heart of the Isreali army. He writes:

'In our crazy, cruel and cynical world, it's not 'cool' to have values, or to be a humanist, or to be truly sensitive to the suffering of the other, even if that other is your enemy on the battlefield.'

The first casualty of war is not the truth: the first casualty of war is empathy for people who are defined as being on the other side of the conflict.

This asymmetry of empathy is encouraged by the way many media outlets report incidents of killing. The reporting gives out strong signals to us as to whether our basic emotional responses such as sympathy, fear and anger should be engaged.

Look out for the following signals in any report of deaths , on either side of any conflict:

Do we get to hear about the lives of the people who died and the impact on the relatives and friends left behind?
Do we get the impression that the victims are people like us, or different from us?
Is the incident reported in a 'matter of fact' manner, or are expressions of shock and outrage added to the report?
Is the action described as a 'military' action or a 'terrorist' action?
Do we get the impression that a similar incident could put our lives under threat, or is this the type of thing that only happens to people unlike us?

Politics and cream teas

2006-08-12T08:09:00.000+01:00

We have had a wonderful fortnight on Downhouse Farm, on the National Trust’s Golden Cap estate in Dorset.

We stayed in a National Trust cottage just off the South West Coastal footpath, in Higher Eype.

Six memorable things about the holiday were:

• The view from the cottage garden over the fields sloping down to the sea. We could see chesil beach sweeping round and the whole of the Isle of Portland stuck on the end of it like a big football boot

• Looking out of the window at night and seeing the lighthouse light twenty miles away on Portland Bill appear, disappear then re-appear half a minute later. Just like in Edward Ardizzone's Ginger and Tim book, where the children make friends with the lighthouse keeper. One stormy night Tim couldn’t sleep, so he lay awake watching the lighthouse light come and go. Then he noticed a long gap without the light coming back. He knew something was up so he woke up his dad (who told him to get back to bed) and then put on his rainmac and secretly crept outside and went to the boatman's house. Together they rowed over to the lighthouse just in time to surprise some robbers who had kidnapped the lighthouse keeper and switched the light off so they could steal its cargo when it crashed into the rocks. I had my waterproof at the ready, but the light kept coming back.

• Playing epic games of football in the garden with Dougie the farm sheepdog. We gave ourselves a point everytime we scored a goal against the little wall in front of the front door. Dougie got a point every time he intercepted a pass or blocked a shot. First to ten won. Once Dougie learned to read our tactics he won every single game. When I went out wide he would come out to block the cross, if I chipped it over him he would leap like a salmon to catch it, if I pulled it back behind him to Andrew he would turn quickly to get in front of his goal to block the shot. Even with the help of star players like Jack, Charlie and Kotalo (campers in the field opposite) we couldn’t beat Dougs. We got to 9-9 one game and Andrew’s shot agonisingly hit the post. From the restart Andrew tried to pass me, Dougie was there, business as usual, the chance had gone.

• Having bats fly so close to the house after dusk that we could make out the brown of their bodies as they rushed past.

• Going to Leakers the bakers in Bridport which does three varieties of flapjack (pecan and maple, cherry and coconut, almond and apricot.) Unless any of my readers can nominate an alternative these three will sweep the board at this years World flapjack award ceremony. If there was a world bread pudding award they would surely win that too, for their innovative Bread pudding cube, the size of half a housebrick. The other distinctive thing about Leaker’s is its social conscience. It had made a mural on the wall opposite the serving counter: someone had written Peace in big green letters with a dove next to it, and there was a chubby marker for you to sign your name on the wall. The lady behind the counter was bemoaning to me that their hadn’t been a 'Ceasefire now' demonstration in Bridport. (they had a notice up for the national march in London). It was heartening to see that this bakery was bravely going against the advice given to me by my friend James’s dad Don, when I started working at La Boulangerie bakers in Guildford in 1990. His tip for me on dealing with the customers was:
‘remember they want bread. Not Lenin, not Marx, just bread’

• Having the farm café next door to our cottage. Downhouse Farm is run as an organic farm by Nikki and Dean, and between mid march and mid October they open up the garden of their house as a café (it has plenty of shelter and shade). They do sublime ploughmans lunches and cream teas. Many was the time we popped next door for two big slabs of dorset apple cake to share between us while we watched Anna and Andrew’s favourite programme: the very wonderful Raven (set in the Scottish Highlands, combinoing celtic mythology with a kind of Krypton factor for kids). Disclosure: When I was eight I played football, in Guildford, with the son (or it might have been the nephew) of George Burns, who presented the Krypton Factor.

Silence

2006-08-01T15:57:00.000+01:00

I was sitting in a fish and chip shop in Lyme Regis when I heard on the radio that George Bush had refused to condemn the Qana massacre.

Qana: a massacre of 50 people, a similar number to the July 7 bombings in London, except more of them this time were children. People sheltering at the bottom of their apartment block. People who had been faced with the choice of either staying in a village that the Isreali air force was liable to bomb, or fleeing along roads that the Isreali air force was liable to bomb.

In Britain over the last ten years we have observed more and more one or two minute silences. They are based on the assumption that our society is united in valuing human life and mourning the passing of whichever public figure or group of innocent victims is being commemorated.

I will not observe any more such silences this year. If George Bush won't condemn the slaughter at Qana, and if there is still only an insultingly thin wafer between UK foreign policy and that of the US, then how can we pretend that we all value human life, and that we value all human life?

This morning

2006-07-20T09:23:00.000+01:00

Our one year celebration kicks off with the suggestion of Marine Hugonnier that we rejoice in the knowledge that human beings have walked on the moon.

I am celebrating by singing the REM tune 'do you believe they put a man on the moon' but changing the lyrics to suit whatever I am doing at the time.

At the breakfast table I sang 'do you believe, I've got some egg on my spoon, egg on my spoon'

On the 08:07 New Malden to Waterloo train I am writing these words and singing 'do you believe, I can type without much room, without much room'

Contradictions

2006-07-16T07:25:00.000+01:00

In the space of a Friday lunchtime, a visit to the Tate Modern got me thinking about what we human beings try to do with time and space:

We divide up time and space because time and space are both indivisible
We find ways of visualising time and space because time and space are invisible
We fight for time and fight for space because time and space are infinite and unlimited.

My first stop was the fourth floor: back to Pierre Huyghe's One Year Celebration inside his Celebration Park. Huyghe's premise was that our calendar is a map, a map of the year, and the map has some uncolonised territory in the form of days which don't have a holiday attached to them.

At Hugyhe's invitation several artists and critics have come up with suggestions for colonising these days with celebrations.

Two of these proposed celebrations are attempts to resist the mapping of time, in order to escape the constraints that our mappings of time place on the way we live our lives and on the way we think about the universe.

Joe Scanlan suggested having an 'open day': a day slotted in somewhere between Sunday and Monday. Nothing can be scheduled for this day (because no-one knows when it is) and we can instead enjoy things in life that don’t need to be scheduled (Scanlon suggests that coffee, newspapers and cigarettes should be half price).

Another artist suggested a day out of the year, a revival of the Mayan practice of having one day in the year that wasn't included in the calendar, to remind everyone that time is greater than the calendar, that time is impervious to attempts to measure it.

I popped into the bookshop to flick through the book accompanying Celebration Park and noted Hughye' s comment (in an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist) that he regarded time as a corollary of space. He talked about how a television programme exist mainly in time, but also in space, and differently from objects.

All this talk about the relationship between space persuaded me to pop upstairs to the fifth floor to revisit my favourite thing in the Tate Modern: 1,000 millimetres by Stanley Brouwn.

It consists of a card index box, containing 1,000 pieces of card. Each card has the words '1mm' written on it, above a horizontal line, in pencil, one millimetre long. So you have a thousand millimetres in the box.

There are no more or less millimetres in that card index box than there would have been if Brouwn had left the cards blank and saved himself the effort of drawing all those lines.

We have no way of adding a millimetre or a second to the universe.

As I was coming down the escalator from the fifth floor of the Tate Modern I had a Eureka moment. I solved the mystery of time and space: they don’t exist!

Genius is still genius

2006-07-10T09:36:00.000+01:00

Photo by choudoudou

When I opened my eyes this morning, my first thought was of how Zinedine Zidane must be feeling, opening his eyes this morning.

I listened to French radio after the world cup final last night. I was impressed by the loyalty to Zidane of all those who reported or were interviewed. In the whole hour that I listened not person blamed him for the defeat, not one person used any words like shame or disgrace. Some expressed their thanks to Zidane for what he had done for France in this world cup and over the years.

One correspondent described the moment Zidane got sent off as like moving from 'le chaleur' of a Rio de Janeiro beach to ‘la froideur’ of a cold bath in the space of a split second.

Another correspondent described an empty café, with a lone man in a Zidane top clearing up the clutter left by the fans who had gone home. The correspondent imagined that some of the fans who had left the café were parents who had gone home to kids wearing Zidane tops too.

A convincing case could still be made for Zidane being the player of that tournament. He was pulling the strings again last night, throughout the second half and extra time. As a 34 year old, to be still bombing into the penalty area half way through extra time is a phenomenal achievement: compare with his fellow 34 year old Luis Figo who never seemed to last past the seventy-fifth minute of matches.

Does one lapse in self control wipe out fifteen marvellous years? it depends what you want to remember people for, and what you want to see in people.

I’m reminded of the Nottingham Forest fans on at the end of the 1992/93 season, defiantly singing ‘Brian Clough is a football genius’ as they watched their team get relegated. They will have suspected that Clough was by then an alcoholic, and that his drinking had contributed to the relegation, but they also knew that he had preformed football miracles for them.

Today we celebrate unlikely but uplifting combinations

2006-07-08T07:06:00.000+01:00

Pierre Hugyhe wants ever day to be a celebration, so he asked some of his artist friends to come up with a reason to celebrate on days that we don’t have a holiday at the moment.

Pierre has used his exhibition at the Tate Modern to display the new holidays to the public for the first time.

The day I am most looking forward to is the day celebrating our sense of anticipation. But no date has been set for that yet.

The most enlightening holiday will be the day of rational certainty. On that day we will be enjoined not to cross our fingers or worry about stepping on the cracks in the pavement. The horoscopes won’t be published. Temples, churches and mosques will shut their doors for the day.

The results of the day will be interesting. Can we base our lives solely on things that can be rationally proven? We don’t know what time is, or how many dimensions there are in the universe, or why the universe was created, or why a table feels solid when the atoms that it is made of consist mainly of empty space. We need metaphors, assumptions, beliefs, and maybe even faith, to bridge these gaps.

The day will necessitate a temporary laying aside of the existing public explanations of the nature, purpose, and destiny of the universe. It will thus provide you with a bit of space to come up with your own answers to these questions, whichever answers help you pursue whichever type of life you most want to live.

Julia Cameron in her book The Artist's Way urges anyone wanting to make more use of their own creativity to come up with their own view of why the creator of the universe created it and what that creator is like.

I like to think of the creator of the universe as a being that is not all-knowing, but is instead all-learning: learning from the new things that are happening all over the universe all the time. That learning isn't stored by the creator seperately from the universe, the learning is stored in the universe itself. The universe works to both use some of that learning and to keep on creating new situations for new learning.

The creator of the universe created it because no universe had been created before, and the happiness and beauty it could potentially generate might well be worth the inevitable pain.

Later in the year another Hugyhe holiday will celebrate the future. The curator Hans Ulrich Obrist asked his artist friends to tell him what they think the future is. It is a nice twist, a curator asked to produce a work of art by an artist and doing so by curating the comments of other artists to create an exhibition within an exhibition within an exhibition. All the artists have come up with different little straplines for the future, thus confirming that not only do we not know what the future holds, we don’t even know what the future is.

We at World Flapjack day are a little disappointed that that this French led endeavour has not come up with a day to celebrate any of the wonderful things found in patisseries.

To make up for this omission we are proposing to make July 8 the celebration of ‘unlikely but uplifting combinations’.

On this day evey year people will be enjoined to take the day off to combine different things that they like but don’t normally do at the same time. This is so often a sure fire recipe for happiness in life.

The inspriration for this day came from the Banauchoc: a pain au chocalat with banana in. (you can get them from the Panos bakery on the concourse of Brussels Gare du Midi station).

Some of the things I like doing are: playing chess, having a bath, meeting new people, learning new languages, getting fresh air. In Budapest at the Szechenyi Baths you can stand for hours in an open air thermal bath, play chess with a waterproof chess set and improve your Hungarian.

We at World Flapjack Day support Pierre’s endeavour. and will be celebrating each of these new holidays as they come through the year.

Photos of Szechenyi baths by phnk

Kick

2006-07-02T19:44:00.000+01:00

So England’s world cup quarter final went to a penalty shoot out. The commentators said they wouldn’t wish the experience on anyone. You can tell which players are going to miss by the fear written on their face.

Andrew (aged 7) switched the telly off and ran out of the room when Jamie Carragher missed his retaken penalty. The miss gave Christian Ronaldo the chance to knock England out of the tournament if he scored his penalty for Portugal.

I switched the telly back on in time to see something that impressed me. Ronaldo picked the ball up and kissed it. He was taking time to say that whatever the level of pressure on the moment, he loved playing football. He put the ball down on the spot and then chipped it into a part of the net that no goalkeeper could ever reach.

A triumph of love over fear.

Looking back on it it was inevitable that England would lose. They had played poorly all tournament, the manager had run out of ideas four years ago and only stayed in his job becase it would cost the FA to much money to end his contract. He didn’t seem to be able to adjust to injuries to his first choice strikers.

The only thing keeping England going was the superstitions of fans but even they seemed to have run out by the Quarter final.

Andrew had worn his England wristband, given to him by one of his teachers at school, continuously from the start of the tournament, and told us how it made England win, because his teacher had made it magic. The wristband fell down the toilet three days before the Portugal game.

Permanent marker

2006-06-25T06:40:00.000+01:00

Drawing by Dan Perjovschi, This photo was taken by Blinkybee

Tate Modern commissioned Dan Perjovschi to draw with permanent marker all over the member's room. I went to see the drawings before, like all permanent markings, they got scrubbed off.

My favourite was the one showing the bus driver and passengers looking glum but the advert on the side of the bus showing someone looking as happy as Larry.

There will come a time when the panels on the side of public transport are simply screens , connected to the internet, which could display any combination of image and message.

But will there come a time when the people on the bus will be able to influence what is expressed on the side of the bus? Or will the image/message always be determined at a distance in time and space from the driver and passengers?

Reduced to almost nothing

2006-06-22T06:36:00.000+01:00

I went to the Big London Brainstorm in Lindsey Street, Smithfield yesterday, where lots of architects have had put forward their ideas for improving our city.

My favourite was the one suggesting that instead of building Renzo Piano's shard of glass, we should build a massive grain of sand. This would serve as a tribute to William Blake, and as a reminder to people that we are present in the universe.

Here is the quote from Blake's Auguries of Innocence:

''To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.''

Let’s be

2006-06-17T21:26:00.000+01:00

Jorge Luis Borges died 20 years ago this week, aged 87.

At the age of 79 Borges had made the following brave and honest statement in a lecture entitled Immortality:

‘’I don’t want to continue being Jorge Luis Borges: I want to be someone else. I hope that my death will be total: I hope to die in body and soul.’’

Borges does not claim to know what will happen after his death. He does not deny that there is a possibility that he might find himself re-incarnated as another being, or that he might find eternal life in heaven. But he is saying that he does not desire either re-incarnation or eternal life.

Later in his lecture Borges describes how some of the things that he has said and done will live on in the words and deeds of people to come. This is the way that Borges does want to live on in the universe: in the same way that Borges himself has kept alive Shakespeare,Dante, his own parents, neighbours and acquaintances by using and remembering their words and deeds.

I hope Borges got his wish. I am not convinced that eternal reincarnation or eternal life for one individual entity is in accordance with the spirit of the universe. The universe seems to be more interested in re-using and re-combining things than in ring- fencing and preserving things. The greatest gift of the creator to this universe is evolution: the fact that life can learn and adapt and new life forms can develop which are novel and different.

Why would the universe need a James Lappin in a million years time? What possible use would ‘I’ be to anything?

Jeff Barry, who lives in Borges’ home city of Buenos Aires, blogged last Wednesday about this same quote, as part of his wonderful series of blog posts called ‘30 days with Borges’. I’ve posted each of the 30 days to a del.icio.us page if you want a quick way of accessing all thirty of them.

Uncertainty now

2006-06-15T06:58:00.000+01:00

Photo of me in Blackfriars yesterday. The photographer (Seize the Dave) must have taken it from the top of St Paul's Cathedral.

Jorge Luis Borges came up with a comprehensive classification of all living creatures. He attributed the classification to Dr Franz Kuhn and it was the organisational basis of a Chinese Encyclopedia called the Heavenly Emporium of Benevolant Knowledge.

It has often been held up as an example of the potential absurdities of classification, but I have learned something quite profound about my appearance from it: I look like a fly from a distance

Here is the classification in full:

a) those [animals] that belong to the emporer
b) embalmed ones
c) those that are trained
d) suckling pigs
e) mermaids
f) fabulous ones
g) stray dogs
h) those that are included in the classification
i) those that tremble as if they were mad
j) innumerable ones
k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s hair brush
l) etcetera
m) those that have just broken the flower vase
n) those that at a distance resemble flies

I must look like a fly from a distance, it is the only category I fit into. Continually breaking flower vases is not a viable option socially or financially.

Most people seem not to notice, either because they are standing to close, or because their eye is tricked by a curious effect of an uncertainty principle which is caused by the following:

When I look like a fly from a distance I am included in the classification, and therefore must move from category n) to category h).
As soon as I join category h) there is no necessity for me to look like a fly from a distance
As soon as I stop looking like a fly from a distance I am no longer in the scope and therefore, need to look like a fly again (from a distance).

This Uncertainty principle can be stated something like:

You can determine precisely the position of a living creature within Borges’s classification, and you can determine whether or not it looks like a fly from a distance, but you can not determine both things at the same moment in time.

It just shows how much effort is required to fit into someone else's world view

Possibilities

2006-06-11T07:06:00.000+01:00

Photo: Forth bridge by Aesop

There are an infinite number of parallel lines on the same plane. They reach backwards to infinity and forwards to infinity and are destined never to touch each other.

Along the path of each infinite line there are an infinite number of points. At each of these points the line is crossed by an infinite number of other lines, coming from different angles on the same plane; or from different planes; or from the past or the future.

Each one of these lines has something in common with the creator of the universe (as described in many of the great spiritual traditions): it has no beginning and no end in either space or time.

Thus the creator of the universe was never lonely, never bored with the emptiness. There always was an infinite number of infinite lines, but a creative spark was needed to make something finite out of them, something that wouldn’t last for ever, and could grow into anything.

After 29 years in Weybridge (Surrey, England) my mum and dad are settled back in Dalgety Bay (Fife, Scotland), where they spent their first decade of married life, and where me and my sister were born. I was so pleased to hear both of them sound so happy when they rang me on Friday.

Hats off to my mum for masterminded the move. Douglas Adams said that it was a good idea to redefine yourself at least once after you reached the age of 50. He did it by moving from England to Los Angeles. My mum has done it twice.

After retiring from teaching twelve years ago she took up embroidery. She found a creative streak noone knew she had and produced really lovely work based on patterns in things that inspired her, the gradual decay of old walls, the canal, rooftops of a Japanese town.

Then she started producing work based on motifs from the Forth bidge: everything from wall hangings to a toilet roll holder.

That is the great thing about doing anything creative, and about expressing your creativity: it’s such a good way of honing in on what you really love in life, like diving rods for water.

They can see the Forth bridge from their new home.

One zag

2006-06-09T06:50:00.000+01:00

Can you have a zag without a zig?

Is there a word for a word which sounds like the letter that the concept it represents looks like?

Do geometry professors use the word zigzag? Or is it just a lay term?

Does the zig zag count as a shape or is it just a pattern? What if someone drew a zig zag line that went round in a circle and joined up with the start of the zig zag line again. Would that count as a shape? Would it be a zigzag shape or a circle?

Did Euclid have anything to say about zig ags?

What do languages without the letter ‘z’ in their script call zigzags?

Does the word ‘zigzag’ have anything to do with the word ‘ziggurat’ or do they just sound the same.

Good luck to people leaving England on great adventures today:

Val heading south to the world cup in a van
Mum and dad heading north to their new home in Dalgety Bay