Conspiracy Theory

There’s a conspiracy afoot and it is happening right under our noses. A dastardly plot to undermine this nation’s building trade and its going on right there on our television screens, one night a week (more if you have one of those channels which is solely devoted to home improvement shows). The perpetrator? None other than the doyenne of such shows, the one and only Sarah Beeny.

Now, I am saying nothing new when I observe that Ms Beeny appears to be in a permanent state of pregnancy. The fact that the size of her stomach oscillates wildly during the course of any given programme has been commented on many times before. What always puzzled me was why this happened. (Note, I said ‘why’, not ‘how’. I know how babies are made. Man inserts appendage, gives woman massively disappointing time, withdraws and then goes down the pub for the next 19 years.)

The thing is, you see, that Beeny made her name – and presumably a shedload of money – as a property developer before she became a television presenter. Building sites not generally being regarded as a location conducive to child rearing, I assume that during this time she was in sufficient control of her fertility to avoid squeezing out sprogs mid-project. In which case, why does it keep happening now that she is on television?

My initial theory was that it was a gimmick dreamed up by the show’s producers to keep interest in her show alive now that there is so much competition: “Great series, Sarah. Give us a ring as soon as you’re up the duff again and we’ll set up another one.”

The problem with this approach is that it does give the impression that the poor woman is pregnant 365 days of the year. Every year. Except that, of course, it might not actually be a problem. Suppose that it isn’t really an impression at all. Suppose that La Beeny actually is pregnant almost all of the time, that no sooner has her cervix slammed shut after one baby than she is dragging her poor husband into the bedroom and demanding that he impregnate her again. And again. And again. Until there is a whole army of Beeny babies growing up and ready to wreak havoc on the world of property renovation.

At the time of writing Sarah Beeny is 35 years old. With the aid of modern science, that gives her another 30-odd years of breeding. Even at one baby a year, by the end of those 30 years there will not be a builder left in the UK who isn’t related to her in some way. By the end of the century the whole world could be hers, or at least her grandchildren’s. No path will be laid, not a floor tiled or a bath masticked, without it being done by a Beeny descendent. And if you are not carrying the Beeny gene, well, you’ll never work in the building trade again. You won’t convince me that this is a good thing.

Fade Outs Fading Out

About three months ago, I decided to try an experiment. Having had an mp3 player for all of ten months, I discovered that I actually had so much stuff on there that I now couldn’t remember what I actually had on there. This isn’t because I am some sort of profligate nitwit who buys music, loads it onto his mp3 player and then forgets it is there (I confess to being a profligate nitwit, just not that sort of profligate nitwit). The problem is more that my brother in law very kindly loaded huge chunks of his very extensive collection onto it when I bought it and I’ve never quite worked out what he did put there, other than that it used up 90% of the 30GB memory.

My experiment, therefore, was to see how long it would take to play every album that is on there, in alphabetical order. On average, I get about 30 minutes of listening time a day, Monday to Friday. That’s about 7 songs a day, or 2/3 of an album. Three months in and I’ve not even got to the end of ‘B’ yet – although I have listened to all of the albums whose titles begin with brackets and numbers, before you start getting worried about how much I have on there. It has been a voyage of discovery, with some forgotten gems, some utter rubbish (which I deleted) and some interesting juxtapositions; for example, I’ve recently listened to Nirvana’s ‘Bleach’, followed by 10,000 Maniacs’ ‘Blind Man’s Zoo’ and then The Cure’s ‘Bloodflowers’.

It was whilst listening to the first of those albums that I made an interesting – at least to me – discovery. As ‘Negative Creep’ faded out, it suddenly dawned on me that album tracks simply don’t do that any more. The fade out has, literally, been faded out. Nowadays, every track on every album either has a neat, crisp ending, or runs directly into the next song.

I always thought that the fade out was a bit of a cop out anyway. If a band plays a song live, you don’t expect them to end it by getting quieter and quieter until you can’t hear it any more. You expect songs to have clearly defined endings. OK, every now and then the band might segue one into another, but you can’t do that for a whole show. Not unless you’re Tangerine Dream, anyway.

Despite this, I’m kind of sad that the fade out is no more. It guess this is how I would feel if politicians became extinct, in that I don’t much like them and would take a while to notice they had gone, but at the same time it feels vaguely wrong not to have them there any more.

The Modern Cloak of Invisibility

Fads and crazes. They come, they go, people buy a ton of crap and never use it again. Swingball? Rollerblading? Who still has a Rubik's Cube? Faster, faster, get this, buy that, quick, quick, before it goes out of fashion. So why, then, has the iPod not gone the same way as all the other pieces of must-have gadgetry. It can't be that it gives you your own choice of music wherever you want it. I already had that, just by remembering the songs and, in many ways, it was better, cos you still can't download Animal Magnet's 'Welcome to the Monkey House'. And the chance to listen to radio? Wow, the portable radio has only been around for 50+ years.

What, then, could be the reason for it? Simple. Headphones. The modern cloak of invisibility. Or, if you prefer, a very modern take on evolution. With headphoes on, no-one can make you hear. And if you can't hear the beggars, they can't pester you.

More importantly, you can't hear the excrement of society, the modern day leper, the chugger. Quite what right these idiots think they have to try and guilt me into giving money to charity I do not know, but being able to wander past them, unable to hear their vile imprecations to hand over cash to their favourite home for rabid barren lesbians, is wonderful. Don't they know that we know that only about 1p in every pound actually goes to the charity, the rest going into their exquisitly designed pockets? Almost exclusively made up of out of work actors, the chugger really is the most loathsome, hateful, lying speciment of pavement blocker known to man. And frankly, if wearing headphones means that just one out of work actor curls up with hunger and is forced to get a real job, then I can't believe I'm a bad person

Watching the Watchmen

Modern art is, by and large, rubbish. Utter crap. It seems to me that the real talent lies not in being able to do these things, but in being able to pass it off as art. A sliced sheep in a tank of formaldahyde is great art? Please. It's pickled mutton. People have been doing it for centuries. Show Damon Hirst's most famous work to someone from the 16th century and the only response you'll get will be "What the fuck have you done to my lunch?".

That said, I have always had a lot of time for the work of Antony Gormley. You might not think that the Angel of the North is all that special - it is the size that strikes me as impressive, not the idea - but some of the things he has produced are amazing. His sculpture in the crypt of Winchester Cathedral is, quite simply, the most beautiful and moving work of art I have ever seen. I can't begin to explain why, you have to go and see it for yourself.

Now, in London, we have Event Horizon, a series of casts of Gormley's own body which pepper the skyline, each of them facing towards the Hayward Gallery, where another Gormley exhibition - Blind Light - is taking place. You can see them on Waterloo Bridge, on the Royal Festival Hall, the National Theatre and indeed on most tall buildings around that area. Except for the Palace of Westminster, who wouldn't allow it for some arcane and soulless reason.

The sad thing is that no-one knows how long Event Horizon will be there. Yet there is something strangely reassuring about having them there, patrolling the city rooftops, watching over us. Watchmen for the modern age. I hope they stay.

The Point of Pantomime

What two things do Charlotte Church, Myleene Klass, Selma Hayek and Emma Bunton have in common with my wife? Well, neither Selma nor my wife have had a hideous and painful pop music career. Only Charlotte is Welsh. And, obviously, only one of them is stunningly beautiful and incredibly talented. But enough about my wife.

The first thing is that they are all about five months pregnant. Which is wonderful, of course, but which also proves that they were all at a bit of a loose end in December of last year. For the four of them I have actually named, this clearly means that they were not busy enough at the time. This is not surprising. They are all, nominally (as anyone who has seen The Charlotte Church Show will testify, very nominally) in the entertainment business. But if you are working in that world, there isn't a lot to do come December. All of the Christmas stuff is recorded months in advance. Christmas concerts are similarly booked far ahead. There's nothing for a D list celebrity to do but sit at home, twiddle her thumbs and - so it would seem - open her legs.

Unless, of course, she can get a job in pantomime.

Let us get one thing straight from the start, I have nothing at all against pantomime. It is a fine British institution which, like cricket, has the added virtue of being completely incomprehensible to most Americans. It can trace its history back for hundreds of years (no, I'm not going to explain it, don't you know how to use Google yet?). It also, very helpfully, keeps talented but cringemakingly dull comedians off our television screens. In fact, I doubt that the likes of Russ Abbott or Bobby Davro have done any other work for at least a decade, whilst I'll bet that it is only the prospect of playing the Good Fairy each December that keeps June Whitfield alive.

The second thing that all of these ladies have in common, then, is that none of them appeared in pantomime last Christmas. Which leads me to the last good thing about panto: It stops minor celebrities breeding.

The world's most prescient teacher

Mornings. Who needs 'em? They only exist to ruin a perfectly good night's sleep. The world would be a better place if the working day started at 1pm and ended at about 4pm.

Or, at least, that's my opinion. There are some strange, perverted, souls out there who actually relish getting up early in the morning. They go running (ick), swimming (double ick) and even get into the office early (triple ick with carrot lumps in it). Who are these people and why do they want to torture themselves like this?

Even more puzzling is what these people get up to when they are doing all these bizarre acts. Clearly, entertainment is a bit thin on the ground at that time in the morning, largely due to the fact that all of the talented people are still in bed. Which leaves them a choice of children's TV (being up with the kids doesn't count as perverse, because you have so little choice in the matter, you might as well be a slave) or breakfast TV, or morning radio. So far as the latter is concerned, how anyone can listen to Nicky Campbell at 7am without wanting to throttle the smug Scottish scrote I don't kn... actually, that's a bad example, you want to throttle Nicky Campbell at any time of the day or night. Which leaves the huge stinking pile of excrement that is breakfast television.

Breakfast television. A concept as wrong as having Coco Pops for supper, only not as much fun. The worst thing about it is the presenters, all fakely cheerful, smiling away like they wouldn't rather be tucked up in bed, enjoying a spot of gentle self abuse. The uber-turd among these turds has to be Fiona Phillips, a woman who has made an entire career out of being a simpering nitwit. Seemingly unencumbered by anything remotely approaching a braincell, the mornings of millions have been ruined by the sight of this woman drooling over some minor celebrity, giggling as if their every utterance was the funniest thing she ever heard. Fair play to her, it is something of an achievement to be more irritating than the supremely smug Eammon Holmes, but it's not one you would want to put on your cv.

Fiona Phillips has been in the news a lot recently. Apparently, she was regularly spanked as a schoolgirl, despite - according to her - never doing anything wrong. [There are links to this story, but the sites carrying it are not necessarily the best for innocent eyes, so I'm not going to post those links here. If you want to find them, just google the name and the word 'slipper'. On your own head - or indeed rear - be it.]

La Phillips' claim to be entirely innocent in this rings especially hollow. For one thing, no teenager ever thinks they did anything wrong. But more importantly, perhaps this teacher had the gift of foresight. Maybe, just maybe, she was being spanked for her crimes yet to come.

A new way to read

My brother in law, Pat, has a blog of his own. I'd give you the url but, frankly, it's incomprehensible to anyone with an ordinary IQ. You see, Pat works for one of the world's biggest IT companies and the whole blog is written in some strange language understood only by higher beings and - possibly - the socially dyslexic.

(Actually, that's not quite true. I understood the post about coming home from holiday and deleting the contents of your inbox rather than read 1800 new messages - though you would think that an IT company would have a better spam filter)

You'll understand, then, why it was something of a surprise to discover that Pat had been reading one of my blogs. And I was even more surprised to discover that he kept reading it. Then I found out how he did it. Google have this thing called Google Reader, which I had never heard of. I don't understand how it works or anything like that, but if you go to www.google.com/reader you can set it up to automatically download your favourite sites every time they are updated. You can also get news and sports news, jokes and - though God knows why you would want this - an ice hockey blog.

All of which means that the truly masochistic can now get The Velvet Bear, Skiver's Gigs and You Called Your Kid WHAT? straight to their desktop every time I update them. And that my sister married a masochist.