Fulham 3 Tottenham Hotspur 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oulipo evening

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I drew this yesterday lunchtime

El mondo no eschuara

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Air

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.