Gone. In sixty seconds.

One evening last week, driving back home following a session of delectable mastication courtesy of ‘da Lucio’ (surely, the best little Italian restaurant in the South of England?), my wife and I decided to listen to The Stone Roses on the car stereo.  This in itself isn’t anything new – as people who know me will testify (and, as those keen-eyed readers who don’t may have guessed, given the appropriated title of my blog) – I am a little bit of a fan.

If the (albeit short-lived) jangling citrus-sucking genius of Manchester’s finest is never far from my ear, then why mention it?  Well, it struck me as we travelled up the M4 that evening that listening to music for music’s sake is something that – in this throwaway society – we don’t seem to do very much anymore.  As we pulled up outside the house, ‘Fools Gold’ (the full version, of course) had just started playing and, as I reached over to turn off the stereo and the exit the car, my wife stopped me and suggested that we ‘should really listen to the whole thing, don’t you think?’  So we did.  We turned up the volume and just listened. To 9 minutes and 53 seconds of baggy magic.  The wonderful thing about music, even when it’s a record you really know and love, is that it can still surprise you; still reveal more, if you only give it a chance.  Stop everything else and just listen.

When did music become associated with the word ‘background’?  How did we allow this to happen?!

A few years ago – in what now feels like a former life – I was presenting to a group of listless retail staff in a faceless conference room somewhere in the North-East of England.  In order to break the ice, and in an attempt to get these sluggish acne-ridden delegates showing just a little more life than the peeling paint on the walls that enclosed us, I went round the room asking each of them to name their ‘favourite movie’.  Now, I’m acutely aware, it’s probably impossible to pick just one – this was simply to give people a chance to open up a little and communicate with each other (incredible that you’d need to do this with customer-facing retail staff, I realise!)  As we moved round the room from person to person and as the usual suspects – ‘Star Wars’, ‘Taxi Driver’, ‘The Godfather’ etc. – were called out; by the time we’d reached the last row of bodies there was almost – almost, mind you – a small hubbub lingering above the pimply heads of those sat before me.

Communication without txt spk?  YFKM!

(By the way, the choices made by this group are something I’m bound to re-visit in a later blog.  In fact the whole ‘Top-Ten-this’ and ‘Top-Ten-that’, is something that deserves discussion.  One particularly pustular chap in the aforementioned group actually chose ‘Gone in 60 Seconds’ as their favourite film of all time. Yes – the Nicolas Cage version.  The mind boggles.  Then boggles some more.)

In addition to the issue of diminishing verbal communication skills, I can’t help but wonder whether or not, in this instant age of social networking – of tweeting, facebooking and yes, even blogging – are we also losing the ability to savour what is around us now, let alone show reverence to the past?  I used the phrase ‘throwaway’ earlier in this post when talking about our 21st century society.  It’s almost as though there’s some sort of underhand, hidden inculcation that has taken place and we’re all being pre-conditioned to needing everything – news, music, video; content of all kinds – immediately.  I think Ferris Bueller put things nicely in perspective when he said, ‘life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.’

Yet, everyday we are bombarded with more and more information... We hungrily snaffle this content up; we gorge ourselves on a never-ending stream of faceless fifteen-minutes-of-fame ‘celebrities’ and we assault our ears with manufactured soundalikes who allegedly have ‘the X factor’.
Quite frankly, the only ‘X’ I’d like to see on these delusional dunderheads is one that has been daubed with paint and serves as a target for a high-powered rifle.

They could show it on the BBC.  Now that really would be public service broadcasting.

(In a certain light) your face could launch a bare-knuckle fight

Since returning home from my travels, I find myself becoming increasingly bemused by the obsession with personal appearance here in the West and, more pointedly, our need to pluck, preen & paint ourselves, seemingly as society dictates.  Every day we are bombarded with a superfluity of seductive advertising within the media – whether television, print or online – all of it imploring us, cajoling us, pushing us to conform to a certain image.  What each individual ‘looks like’, down to the nth degree, should not – in my opinion – be this important (and certainly not the sole measure of a person)!  However, what we wear, what we plaster on our faces, fingers and toes, how we coif our hair – our social-skin, if you will – does (particularly if challenged) have the potential to become an incendiary topic for a lot of people.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m in no way saying that I stand smugly apart from the rest of you; that I alone am blessed with an awareness of the power and guile of advertising.  Nor am I immune to the almost religious fervour – the unshakeable belief-in-oneself – that can lead to some of the biggest appearance faux pas since David Guest firs–– well… since David Guest really.  As mentioned in an earlier blog, I once had an utterly ridiculous hairstyle.  What I didn’t mention is that, at various points in my life, I also thought it ‘cool’ to wear paisley-patterned braces hanging down around my arse, Pony ‘linebacker’ trainers with huge tongues flapping loose, black ‘waffle’ skin-tight trousers and electric-blue leather boating shoes with tassels…

One evening last week my senses were assaulted by this piece of utter nonsense:



I can’t understand why women (or any men, for that matter) would want to intentionally clog up their pores.  Why the hell would you want to do that?  Who decided that pores – visible or not – are bad?  Who actually wants an all-over plastic air-brushed face?  Who genuinely thinks that having your face all one colour or tone looks natural and/or attractive?!  I must walk past hundreds of women each week whose faces are covered in foundation; women who (I assume) hold a firm conviction that (for whatever reason) this is needed.  I could be wrong here – and please, if I am, let me know – but I’ve a sneaking suspicion that, if asked, if they dared speak the truth to their friends, girlfriends or wives, that most men would agree a face plastered in foundation is actually a bit of a turn-off.

What exactly is wrong with having ‘fine lines’, ‘crow’s feet’ or freckles?  It never did Jacqueline Bisset any harm.

You know, 20 years on, I may well have an even more ridiculous hairstyle than those awful curtains; it’s just I can’t see it and, if I have, no-one has had the decency to tell me about it.  Therein lies my point. Is it at all possible that we’re becoming 1) a little too scared of hurting the feelings of others by telling them that, say, their lipstick of choice looks ‘a bit naff’ and, conversely, 2) we’re becoming a little too sensitive to such comments; are we more likely to take offence and regard what could be sound advice as a personal attack?  Let’s, just for a moment, consider this from a different angle.  I think that you and I should talk about bogeys.  Oh, go on – we don’t do it enough!  If I had a huge wet green puggly, lazily clinging to the edge of my nostrils, swinging in the breeze like some salty pendulum, I’d really rather that someone pointed it out.

Wouldn’t you?

Roads? Where we’re going we don’t need roads...

I’ve been wondering lately just when it became socially acceptable – the norm even – for people who aren’t farmers, veterinary surgeons or military personnel to drive 4x4 vehicles on England’s roads?  The standard turn of phrase nowadays seems to be, ‘We’ve got children, so we really needed a bigger car’.  I’m sorry? Just how many children do these school-run Jackie O’ wannabes have running laps of the back seat?  14?  I’m surprised they manage to have just a couple, let alone the hoards that must be required to fill the behemoth-on-wheels that’s blocking exit/entry slip-roads every morning.  Surely they don’t have any time? Judging by their appearance, they obviously spend a fair amount of each day applying lashings of make-up (some of it with a trowel, by the looks of it) and adorning themselves with more gold jewellery than Eric B & Rakim.  Then there’s the fact that they must have to spend time removing all of this muck & bling come the end of the day?  Assuming, that is, they’re not all from the town of Stepford...

Earlier this week, as I and the rest of the morning commuter-cum-battery hens listlessly crawled along the A329, my enervated gaze settled upon a truly hilarious diamond-shaped sign suckered to the rear window of the shiny 4x4 in front of me.  You know the sort of thing, ‘Princess on Board’ or ‘Dad’s Taxi’ – the kind of witty comedic prose that causes your sides to split with laughter as you exclaim, ‘Good Lord! Why – just why – haven’t I got one of those in my vehicle?! I must get one immediately – they really are so droll!’ Incidentally, perhaps the worst of these plastic proclamations is the one that reads ‘Babe on Board’.  Because – and really, are we that surprised? – there never is a ‘babe’ behind the wheel; you’re lucky if it’s someone with all of their own tobacco-stained teeth most of the time.

This particular laminated gem read, ‘Mummy, are we there yet?’ in a font obviously designed to mimic that of a (probably spoilt) child (no doubt called ‘Tamara’, ‘Tequila’ or ‘Paris’) using crayons.  Well, sweetheart, no… we’re not there yet.  We’re not even near.  This is partly because of your Mummy straddling two lanes and impeding the flow of traffic.  Perhaps if Mummy were to take you off-road in her shiny BMW Audi Cruiser QX5 then you – and the rest of us who drive vehicles designed for on-roading – would get there a little bit quicker.  Go on, live a little!  At the very least you’d have the excitement of getting (gasp!) a bit of dirt on that white-elephant of a vehicle that you’re currently strapped into.  You might even get to inadvertently swallow a crayon or two.  Now there’s an incentive for you.

I grew up in a family of five.  As my parents, along with my two younger brothers and I, travelled the length and breadth of Britain – trundling along from one Little Chef to the next - in a succession of cars over the years, we never once thought, ‘ooh, you know I wish we had a 4x4!’  No.  We were happy in our little Triumph Dolomite with its stylish rusty roof-rack and over-excitable windscreen wipers that used to wag deliriously (if a little ineffectually) in the driving rain.  More than comfortable in the Morris Minor Traveller with cracked red-leather interior; smug in the knowledge that here was a car that wouldn’t just rust like all the other boring cars on the road.

No.  Here was a car that, thanks to the stylish exterior, could just as easily suffer from woodworm as well...

Head in the Clouds into the Acid Rain...

The other day (in a move that will confound some expectations, but more on that later) I purchased a copy of Tony Blair’s autobiography.  Whilst standing in the queue at Waterstone’s, a woman brushed past and – eyes falling upon the messianic tome I was clutching – stopped, frowned and booed at me with disgust. As she shook her head and walked away, I reflected that this wasn’t the first time someone had given me a look of genuine displeasure…

I recall that, with a similar grimace, my father once told me that my hair looked ‘bloody ridiculous.’  Come to think of it, I can remember him making this observation more than once.  In my defence, this was either 1989 or 1990 and I wasn’t the only one who thought that a centre-parting and the resulting floppy curtains where ‘a good idea’, and would probably increase my chance of having some sort of sexual encounter.  I was a lot younger then, and for some reason I chose to ignore my father’s protestations, regarding them simply as the grumpy ranting of someone who clearly didn’t have his finger on the pulse and wouldn’t know Northside’s ‘Shall We Take a Trip?’ if a copy spun off my faux-wooden turntable and smacked him in the face.

Of course – irresistibly baggy wah-wah guitar from 03:32 to 04:01 aside – the aforementioned song isn’t actually that good.  To be blunt, Northside weren’t that great at all really. Neither were Candy Flip, EMF or latter-day Jesus Jones for that matter.  But the wider-Madchester scene short-comings are another topic for another day.  My father on the other hand is, for the most part, a thoroughly decent kind of bloke and – whilst he can’t play guitar to save his life – he was spot-on about my hair looking more than just a bit crap.  I just couldn’t see it (or through it) at the time.

It’s a strange and wonderful thing, growing up; working out exactly who you are and where you fit in the world.  It’s even weirder to look back at those times in your life when you thought-you-knew-everything; when no-one over the age of 30 could possibly ‘understand you’ or know what you were ‘going through’, let alone have anything of any relevance to say to you.  It’s still largely unclear to me why, when growing up, we refuse to listen to the common sense or the wisdom of our parents. (I realise that this makes the rather sweeping assumption that all parents are wise; this may not always be the case, of course. Your dad could be a total idiot. Someone like Chris Moyles, for example.)

Maybe we’re all pre-disposed to having to learn things the hard way?

Case in point: Last month I offered to drop my younger brother and his fiancée at the airport, prior to them flying away to sunnier climes for a short holiday.  As we drove down the M3, heading towards Bournemouth International (actually a small shed in the middle of a field; a throwback to a bygone sepia-tinted age when people used the phrase ‘tally ho!’ with gusto – and without fear of being mocked or locked-up) I noticed that my brother's left hand looked decidedly… orange.

As it turned out, the reason for my brother suddenly gaining a fist like Dale Winton was he’d liberally applied himself with some ‘self-bronzing lotion’ the night before.  Apparently, he had felt he was a little ‘too pale for the poolside’ and had hoped to kick-start what the Mediterranean sun would do naturally over the coming week. Whilst – with the exception of a rather suspect henna-hairline – he didn’t look too much like he belonged in Heat magazine (or a Bollywood movie), his hand was a different matter entirely. It positively glowed in the early morning sun and no amount of hand-washing could help.  If it had been his right arm at least he could have used it as a kind of fleshy indicator whilst driving; intermittently waving it out of the drivers-side window like an Oompa Loompa on a state visit.

You know, underneath it all, I probably have more in common – politically at least - with the lady who booed me in Waterstone’s than she’ll ever know.  Unless she’s a subscriber to The Militant of course.  Although – penchant for public admonishment aside – she seemed fairly well-to-do and I don’t actually recall too many readers of that particular publication carrying Prada hand-bags or wearing gold bangles…

Maybe I’m getting older (well, there’s actually no maybe, I am getting older; but, you know what I mean).  Perhaps it’s because I’m now married to a truly wonderful woman who keeps me in check and causes me to stop and think about things a little more - I’m sure that travelling and experiencing different cultures have had an impact too – but, I feel a little more inclined to hear ‘the other side of the argument’ nowadays.  Give the other fella a chance to speak for a change.  Lord knows, I’ve a big enough gob on me to get a word in edgeways if I still feel inclined.

This slightly altered take on life is one of the reasons for buying Tony Blair’s autobiography.  Because it’s not the sort of thing that I’d normally do – let’s do the opposite for the change. What’s the worse that can happen?  Yes, I may well find it dull, shallow or sycophantic – my brain may indeed enter a state of all-encompassing torpor – but at least I can say I gave it a go.  It’d be nice to find out why we invaded Iraq too.

Besides, it was half-price.